MAGNIFICENT. Last time, New Hampshire was such a bitter defeat, this time, an incredible vindication;
Watch Ron Pauls Speech After New Hampshire Primary – YouTube.
Archive for the '2008 Presidential Race' Category
“…capitalism has been hijacked, and I’m infuriated. For capitalism to work, people who assume risk should reap the rewards of success, but they also must suffer when losses occur.” ~Leland H. Faust
In the 2008 implosion, the banks that were bailed out should have been left to go under – their assets stripped and sold, their officers indicted for fraud or driven out into the street, their profits disgorged, they and their children made outcasts, leaving them in the outer darkness,wailing and gnashing their teeth.
This, after all, is the basic moral logic of capitalism – success is rewarded, failure mercilessly punished. And this is EXACTLY what the politicians prevented from happening – all of them, except Ron Paul, who warned about it, and tried to stop it.
He was strong. He was himself. As Leaonard Read used to say, he didn’t “leak”. And ABC re-ran his best lines coming out of the breaks! MAGNIFICENT;
(5/10/2004)
Ugh! Where do I start on this one? The US Congress officially “deplored” Iraqi atrocities by a vote of 365 to 50. Am I to believe that they didn’t feel a need to actually declare war on Iraq but now feel justified in officially feeling bad over the consequences?
Ron Paul (R-TX), by the way, voted against the resolution on the grounds that it is not one of Congress’ enumerated duties so I guess he’ll be ridiculed by his democratic challenger this fall for “condoning” Iraqi atrocities!
http://capwiz.com/liberty/issues/votes/?votenum=150&chamber=H&congress=1082&tally=1
I, myself, would like to officially register “disgust” at the whole matter.
A guy named Lloyd J. Hart proposes a list of DEMANDS the Occupy Wall St. protestors might make, assuming they succeed at, well, I’m not exactly sure what they are trying to accomplish, though I sympathize with the impulse. The demands are listed here. Iam going to take the bait and critique each demand;
Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending “Freetrade” by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.
This is actually two or three demands, as far as I can tell. The first demand, a high, protectionist tarriff, has an easy answer – Mr. Smoot, meet Mr. Hawley ( from the US State Department website); “U.S. exports to Europe fell from $2,341 million in 1929 to $784 million in 1932. Overall, world trade declined by some 66% between 1929 and 1934.” Also a $20 minimum wage, which will have the immediate effect of rendering everyone whose marginal revenue product is less than $20 unemployed and unemployable forever, or at least as long as it takes for the stupidity of said law to become grotesquely apparent.
Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.
Actually, the only effect medical insurance would have in a completely free market for medical care is that people who have uncertainty about the likelihood of future major medical medical expenses purchase inexpensive catastrophic coverage, and the provider of said coverage makes a profit. Otherwise, everyone else enjoys cheap, freely-available healthcare, unburdened by the awful AMA and FDA.
Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.
Extends demand 1A to people who cannot or will not produce a marginal revenue product at all. As if subsidizing unemployment has ever done anything but create more of it.
Demand four: Free college education.
Already done. You can get the very best college education imaginable completely free ,well, almost. You have to have a computer and an internet connection to access MIT’s entire curriculum for free, on line. Beats the hell out of spending $250,000, and six years at a shitty state school, drinking beer and hooking up, doesn’t it?
Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.
Already well underway. The rise in price of fossil fuels (when you tease out Fed inflation) is moving slowly and steadily upward. Or, at least it would be without massive government subsidies to fossil fuel industries such as pollution permits, tax policy, and direct military intervention. Nuclear power has an even worse government subsidy regime. And as for current alternative energy policies, they only serve to subsidize old tech, are economically dubious at best, or, as in the case of Solyndra, ethanol, and other boondoggles cross the line into criminality and fraud.
Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.
Again, mostly done. the Obama Stimulus spent, what, $750 billion on exactly that. And as you can see, all of our pressing infrastructure needs are completely resolved.
Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America’s nuclear power plants.
7a) Give all federal lands back to nature and allow anyone to homestead them. 7b) End the TVA and BPA, here and all other monstrous Federal Dam authorities. 7c) End Price-Anderson, The Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and all state Public Utility Commissions, and make the contractors who built them and the companies that run them fully liable for any damage to persons or property.
Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.
8a) Done, see the 13th amendment. 8b) Tried that, almost passed until women realized what a raw deal it was for them.
Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.
Easy enough. End the Drug War and the Welfare state, or at least put a time threshold on collecting benefits, say 5 years. Then an open border would be welfare-neutral. Small side-effect though – immigrants will work you out of a job, kinda neutralizes Demand 1A.
Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.
Not sure how this helps, when there is no real choice in US elections, but OK, I’ll give you that one.
Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the “Books.” World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the “Books.” And I don’t mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.
11a) Forgiveness of sovereign debt – Well, finally a demand we wholeheartedly agree with! I didn’t consent to any politician running up a debt, I damn sure don’t want me, my children, or my great-great-great-great grandchildren held responsible to pay for Bush’s and Obama’s wars; 11b)Commercial loans already have a forgivenness provision, it’s called BANKRUPTCY; 11c) Ditto for individuals; 11d) I told you you can get a college education for free, why the hell did you take out crushing loans?; 11e) See 11a); 11f) Are you sh!tting me? Letting the BANKS out of their obligations? They have already been bailed out tho the tune of $TRILLIONS. You sound like a corporatist! I assume this was an oversight.
Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.
Tough to do, we do have a thing called the First Amendment.
Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.
DONE. Any worker can sign any paper at any time now. Oh, you mean then that an employer has to recognize said paper as a legal binding obligation on him under penalty of law! Um, that’s going to be difficult to do. There are a lot of unemployed people already who will not likely favor this idea once it becomes apparent that this will make unemployment worse.
These demands will create so many jobs it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy.
A complete non-sequitur, but OK, let’s see how it pans out.
But come on, people, where is the radicalism? Where are the demands to End the Wars, End the Drug War, and End the Federal Reserve? Too busy grabbing socialist loot I guess.
That’s OK – Ron Paul has got you covered.
Sheldon Richman points out in The Freeman today that Elizabeth Warren, late of presidential advising, and snubbed for a prime sinecure is running for Senate from Massachussetts. Her ads mar all my Facebook pages, and as Sheldon points out, her entire schtick is that rich corporations benefitted from taxpayer largesse, so they should pay more, a lot more. Left out of this equation are the other 100 – 200 million taxpayers, and what THEY would rather have done with the money. But that’s life in the Left Lane, isn’t it? Full of sleight-of-hand and rhetorical tricks.
I commute in southern New Jersey on either I-295 (taxpayer-paid) or the New Jersey Turnpike (user-fee paid with some taxpayer subsidy) – they run roughly parallel along this stretch, so they “compete” for users. Because the NJTPK is tolled, while I-295 is not, you would think that a business using this route, say Bolt Bus or one of the Chinatown buses would use I-295 exclusively. In fact, while there is some of both, most of them appear to prefer the Turnpike. Why is that so? After all, they are already paying corporate tax, payroll tax, fuel tax, and apportioned highway taxes, but on TOP of that, to use the Turnpike, they ALSO have to pay a (presumably significant) TOLL. Why, exactly, IS that?
This guy couldn’t reason his way out of a wet paper bag. And his subhead quote, intended of course to frighten principled anti-war people away from Dr. Paul, is dead-on;
“Welcome to Dr. Ron Paul’s (R.-Tx) prescription for America. If he ever becomes President, you won’t recognize the place.”
via Andrew Reinbach: President Ron Paul? Ron Paul and the John Birch Society.
“…libertarians have the reputation of being hardhearted. It’s not true, and Ron Paul–in so many ways–shows that. He is the Compassionate Libertarian.” – Lew Rockwell
via Lew Rockwell’s Political Theatre | The Comedy and Tragedy of the Political World.
The (insurgent) Campaign for Liberty (2008)
The term ‘insurgent’ has been used (and misused) a whole lot since about ten minutes after the officially announced ‘end’ of the Iraq War.
Lucky for us, the US Army Special Forces Counterinsurgency Field Manual
(the book that ‘Surgin’ General’ Petraeus is said to have ‘written’ on the subject)
contains, along with tips on how to win friends, subvert democracy and destroy due process in an occupied country, a handy field guide to three main types of insurgency.
One of these, in light of the end of Ron Paul’s Republican presidential bid, and the beginning of his new vehicle for change, The Campaign For Liberty, is pretty interesting;
“Foco Insurgency.
A foco (Spanish word meaning focus or focal point) is a single, armed cell that emerges from hidden strongholds in an atmosphere of disintegrating legitimacy. In theory, this cell is the nucleus around which mass popular support rallies. The insurgents build new institutions and establish control on the basis of that support.”
Except for the “armed” part (The Revolution has always been explicitly peaceful and anti-war) and the “establish control” bit, this essentially describes the new strategy – to establish a core group of liberty-loving people and to have them (democratically) infiltrate the current system so that they will be ready to liberate the masses when the corrupt, incompetent Empire falls flat on its face.
“The insurgents build new institutions and establish control on the basis of that support. For a foco insurgency to succeed, government legitimacy must be near total collapse. Timing is critical. The foco must mature at the same time the government loses legitimacy and before any alternative appears. The most famous foco insurgencies were those led by Castro and Che Guevara.”
Bad role models from a philosophical perspective, for sure, but in terms of strategy pretty relevant.
“The distinguishing characteristics of a foco insurgency are The deliberate avoidance of preparatory organizational work. The rationale is based on the premise that most peasants are intimidated by the authorities and will betray any group that cannot defend itself. ”
This part doesn’t apply, because this revolution is peaceful, democratic, and overt, the ‘counter-insurgency’ strategies to this will be completely ineffective. Unfortunately, many other CI strategies are already in place and are well-advanced;
“Restrictions. Rights on the legality of detention or imprisonment of personnel (for example, habeas corpus) may be temporarily suspended. This measure must be taken as a last resort, since it may provide the insurgents with an effective propaganda theme. PRC [Population & Resources Control] measures can also include curfews or blackouts, travel restrictions, and restricted residential areas such as protected villages or resettlement areas. Registration and pass systems and control of … critical supplies such as weapons, food, and fuel are other PRC measures. Checkpoints, searches, roadblocks; surveillance, censorship, and press control…”
You get the picture.
Apparently ‘Counter-Insurgency’ has become ‘Pre-emptive Counter-Insurgency’.
We have our work cut out for us.