chlamor
01-06-2008, 08:41 PM
My Ron Paul rant…
4th January 2008, 07:25 pm by Stan
This morning, between getting ready for work and cooking breakfast, I dashed off a quick piece for Counterpunch, floating the idea that the anitwar movement — that has once again been sidelined by the Democratic Party and the media — could cross over during the Presidential primaries and vote as Republicans… casting a Republican primary vote for Ron Paul.
CP ran the piece, typos and all, and my email box has summarily filled up.
Damn.
Once I weed out the deeply weird stuff, like one that claimed Ron Paul is a closet communist in the pay of Jewish bankers, the rest either applauded my suggestion, or reviled it in ways that I had predicted in the rant, and a few wanted to “correct” me on my allusion to Ron Paul as a “passive racist.” Several did not seem to get the tactical gist of my proposal.
I take responsibility for any and all lack of clarity; and I’ll try to correct that now.
Let me start with the suggestion of “passive racism.” This is an offense for which about 90 percent of white people are guilty… hey, we live in a white supremacist society. It’s in the air. I won’t engage in extensive polemical arguments about the difference between white supremacy (a system that is reflected in the minds of the peope in that system). Every liberal who ever said we can’t leave Iraq because without the Americans there the place would descend into chaos… is a passive racist. This is a white supremacist assumption.
My main point was that the biggest social catastrophe for Black and Brown folk in the US today is the criminal justice system and the American gulag that goes with it.
Bill Clinton might be more comfortable drinking wine with boozhie African Americans than Ron Paul; and Bill Clinton might have somehow convinced a lot of Black folk that he is “the first Black President.” But Bill Clinton is the reason there are well over 2 milliion human beings languishing in hell-hole prisons in the US right now, with people of color shockingly over-represented among them. Clinton’s crime bill did that; and the main method for locking up all these people has been for non-violent drug offenses on their first incarceration.
One candidate has quoted the figures on how this has unfairly impacted African Americans. Ron Paul. He opposes the criminalization of drugs. The issue of blanket pardons — within the President’s authority, and the de-prioritization of federal drug enforcement, are both within the Prez’s purview.
One point I emphasized in my rant is the difference between agreeing with someone’s expressed views and the net effect of someone’s likely actions.
In this case, I pose a hypothetical question. If Ron Paul were elected, what would the net effect of his policies be on the American Gulag, given the capabilities and limitations of the office?
That’s all.
My main point was that the war is my issue. Let me flesh that out. This war has caused the deaths of over a million human beings. Iraq and Afghanistan have become abattoirs. Stopping this war is an urgent and immediate moral imperative.
Let me add something to this. As an anti-imperialist, who believes US hegemony in the world is the most destructive and dangerous political force in our world, and as someone who wants to see that political power broken, for good, there is no single action that would underline an immediate and decisive loss of some of that power than US withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is exactly why whichever DLC-anointed candidate is nominated, the Democratic Party leadership has not the least intention of reversing what is going on in Southwest Asia: the permanent post-Cold War re-disposition of the imperial armed forces of the United States of America. The leadership of the Democrtatic Party is committed to American imperialism.
Any leftist who is more interested in seeing the net practical effect of a US withdrawal from Southwest Asia (Paul proposes that all US troops return to the US!) than promoting the all-or-nothing, comprehensive program of some toy International, should give this some thought.
Let’s back away from the most unlikely scenario — that Paul would actually be elected. What if he were to get the Republican nomination? If he were to campaign solely on the issue of the war, a Democratic candidate could be forced into adopting an out-now posiiton to fend off this challenge. The majority of the people in the United States want out of this war.
Let’s back further away from improbability. Ron Paul gets a massive crossover vote from antiwar folks that is pulled from the left. Whomever comes in second among the Democrats — along with the Democratic Party leadership — will see the tangible threat that can be posed by independent coalition politics… even on a relatively small scale.
We must become spoilers; and quit being so terrified. Spoilers today; rebels tomorrow. Hey, you only live once.
Now for one of the more polemical reactions (based on Ron Paul’s personal opposition to abortion):
Hi. Saw your Counterpunch article. Guess you’ve abandoned women for the Gold Standard, huh?
My reply (which includes a paste-in from another emailer):
More than half of Iraqis are women. Half of the billions who are immiserated by dollar hegemony are women.
Paul’s position on choice is exactly that of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Reid was put in that position by a unanimous vote of the other D senators!
This kind of polemeic always comes from a leftist sect posing as The One and Only True and Everlasting Revolutionary Party (TOOTER Party). It intentionally distorts one’s position, then sneers at the distortion.
My beliefs on the issues related to gender are well-known, and they stand for themselves. I will restate my position.
IF Ron Paul were President, and if he followed a foreign policy that ended US military intervention, ended US political meddling abroad, and ended dollar hegemony (the net effect of a return to the gold standard), this would end the most signficant causative agent of human misery in the world… and half of humanity are women. That is over 3 billion people.
Net effect. Give a damn what sort of sexist drivel he utters among his friends. We can’t even get lefty-boys to give up their own woman-bashing, their cluelessness about rape culture, or their intractible and tedious defenses of the porn industry.
While supposed populists like Johnny Edwards claim to be seeking a better wage for the workers in agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, and defense industries, the net effect of a libertarian policy of cutting off all government subsidies to these industries would be to crash these industries altogether. They need to be crashed.
The liberal regulation regime in agriculture paved the way for the monopolization of farming by large corporations. Read Joel Salatin. Wanna know why we can’t get good, local, organic food when we want it? It’s because it mostly against the law to grow and sell it.
Stopping the tax-funded subisidization of business through highway construction would stop suburban sprawl in its tracks.
Creating and maintaining jobs that are dirty, dangerous, and destructive is not a Good Thing.
For that matter, I don’t know why I should support bureaucratic public schooling that is — by practice and curricula — permanently damaging our kids. I say this knowing that there are heroic teachers out there who swim against this tide; and who are pushed back every time they actually try to teach kids that learning how to think for themselves is more important than being “well adjusted.” Well-adjusted to what!? Global warming and Guantanamo?
We are entering a period of imperial decline, stagflation, and international exterminism. The problem is that we are gaining altitude. The sooner we crash, the less damage we’ll suffer.
Practical, tactical, revolutionary politics beats the shit out of all-inclusive “programs” any day. Leftists and libertarians can and should form tactical alliances. That doesn’t mean we have to hang out together in a jacuzzi. It means we pursue some goals together; and leave the rest to pursue apart.
http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index. ... paul-rant/ (http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2008/01/04/my-ron-paul-rant/)
Comments galore and then see the link here:
Open Thread: libertarianism
6th January 2008, 07:17 pm by Stan
BE WARNED that this thread is basically a philosophical chicken-fighting ring. It will get fairly wild and wooly, and there may be more-than-usual tolerance for trolls. Allusions, however, to sexual revenge/violence (you need to be someone’s prison bitch, etc), gendered epithets (bitch, ho, sissy, girly-man, I-can-see-your-adams-apple), gendered patronizing, racial epithets (ANY and all), personal threats, male posturing (about how tough you are, or how un-tough someone else is), etc etc etc, are still off limits. If you can’t make your point without this stuff, you didn’t have a very strong point.
<snip>
http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index. ... tarianism/ (http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2008/01/06/open-thread-libertarianism/)
The New Republic
Angry White Man
The bigoted past of Ron Paul.
by James Kirchick
Post Date Tuesday, January 08, 2008
If you are a critic of the Bush administration, chances are that, at some point over the past six months, Ron Paul has said something that appealed to you. Paul describes himself as a libertarian, but, since his presidential campaign took off earlier this year, the Republican congressman has attracted donations and plaudits from across the ideological spectrum. Antiwar conservatives, disaffected centrists, even young liberal activists have all flocked to Paul, hailing him as a throwback to an earlier age, when politicians were less mealy-mouthed and American government was more modest in its ambitions, both at home and abroad. In The New York Times Magazine, conservative writer Christopher Caldwell gushed that Paul is a "formidable stander on constitutional principle," while The Nation praised "his full-throated rejection of the imperial project in Iraq." Former TNR editor Andrew Sullivan endorsed Paul for the GOP nomination, and ABC's Jake Tapper described the candidate as "the one true straight-talker in this race." Even The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper of the elite bankers whom Paul detests, recently advised other Republican presidential contenders not to "dismiss the passion he's tapped."
http://a123.g.akamai.net/f/123/12465/1d/media.canada.com/e028eb9a-84d6-4def-93db-73f7261fb08f/ronpaulcover1.jpg
Congressman Ron Paul.Credit: Getty Images
RELATED CONTENT
Read selections from Ron Paul's newsletters (http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html)
Most voters had never heard of Paul before he launched his quixotic bid for the Republican nomination. But the Texan has been active in politics for decades. And, long before he was the darling of antiwar activists on the left and right, Paul was in the newsletter business. In the age before blogs, newsletters occupied a prominent place in right-wing political discourse. With the pages of mainstream political magazines typically off-limits to their views (National Review editor William F. Buckley having famously denounced the John Birch Society), hardline conservatives resorted to putting out their own, less glossy publications. These were often paranoid and rambling--dominated by talk of international banking conspiracies, the Trilateral Commission's plans for world government, and warnings about coming Armageddon--but some of them had wide and devoted audiences. And a few of the most prominent bore the name of Ron Paul.
Paul's newsletters have carried different titles over the years--Ron Paul's Freedom Report, Ron Paul Political Report, The Ron Paul Survival Report--but they generally seem to have been published on a monthly basis since at least 1978. (Paul, an OB-GYN and former U.S. Air Force surgeon, was first elected to Congress in 1976.) During some periods, the newsletters were published by the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, a nonprofit Paul founded in 1976; at other times, they were published by Ron Paul & Associates, a now-defunct entity in which Paul owned a minority stake, according to his campaign spokesman. The Freedom Report claimed to have over 100,000 readers in 1984. At one point, Ron Paul & Associates also put out a monthly publication called The Ron Paul Investment Letter.
The Freedom Report's online archives only go back to 1999, but I was curious to see older editions of Paul's newsletters, in part because of a controversy dating to 1996, when Charles "Lefty" Morris, a Democrat running against Paul for a House seat, released excerpts stating that "opinion polls consistently show only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions," that "if you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be," and that black representative Barbara Jordan is "the archetypical half-educated victimologist" whose "race and sex protect her from criticism." At the time, Paul's campaign said that Morris had quoted the newsletter out of context. Later, in 2001, Paul would claim that someone else had written the controversial passages. (Few of the newsletters contain actual bylines.) Caldwell, writing in the Times Magazine last year, said he found Paul's explanation believable, "since the style diverges widely from his own."
Finding the pre-1999 newsletters was no easy task, but I was able to track many of them down at the libraries of the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Of course, with few bylines, it is difficult to know whether any particular article was written by Paul himself. Some of the earlier newsletters are signed by him, though the vast majority of the editions I saw contain no bylines at all. Complicating matters, many of the unbylined newsletters were written in the first person, implying that Paul was the author.
But, whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul's name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him--and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing--but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.
To understand Paul's philosophy, the best place to start is probably the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Auburn, Alabama. The institute is named for a libertarian Austrian economist, but it was founded by a man named Lew Rockwell, who also served as Paul's congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982. Paul has had a long and prominent association with the institute, teaching at its seminars and serving as a "distinguished counselor." The institute has also published his books.
The politics of the organization are complicated--its philosophy derives largely from the work of the late Murray Rothbard, a Bronx-born son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and a self-described "anarcho-capitalist" who viewed the state as nothing more than "a criminal gang"--but one aspect of the institute's worldview stands out as particularly disturbing: its attachment to the Confederacy. Thomas E. Woods Jr., a member of the institute's senior faculty, is a founder of the League of the South, a secessionist group, and the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, a pro-Confederate, revisionist tract published in 2004. Paul enthusiastically blurbed Woods's book, saying that it "heroically rescues real history from the politically correct memory hole." Thomas DiLorenzo, another senior faculty member and author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, refers to the Civil War as the "War for Southern Independence" and attacks "Lincoln cultists"; Paul endorsed the book on MSNBC last month in a debate over whether the Civil War was necessary (Paul thinks it was not). In April 1995, the institute hosted a conference on secession at which Paul spoke; previewing the event, Rockwell wrote to supporters, "We'll explore what causes [secession] and how to promote it." Paul's newsletters have themselves repeatedly expressed sympathy for the general concept of secession. In 1992, for instance, the Survival Report argued that "the right of secession should be ingrained in a free society" and that "there is nothing wrong with loosely banding together small units of government. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, we too should consider it."
The people surrounding the von Mises Institute--including Paul--may describe themselves as libertarians, but they are nothing like the urbane libertarians who staff the Cato Institute or the libertines at Reason magazine. Instead, they represent a strain of right-wing libertarianism that views the Civil War as a catastrophic turning point in American history--the moment when a tyrannical federal government established its supremacy over the states. As one prominent Washington libertarian told me, "There are too many libertarians in this country ... who, because they are attracted to the great books of Mises, ... find their way to the Mises Institute and then are told that a defense of the Confederacy is part of libertarian thought."
Paul's alliance with neo-Confederates helps explain the views his newsletters have long espoused on race. Take, for instance, a special issue of the Ron Paul Political Report, published in June 1992, dedicated to explaining the Los Angeles riots of that year. "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began," read one typical passage. According to the newsletter, the looting was a natural byproduct of government indulging the black community with "'civil rights,' quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black tv shows, black tv anchors, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda." It also denounced "the media" for believing that "America's number one need is an unlimited white checking account for underclass blacks." To be fair, the newsletter did praise Asian merchants in Los Angeles, but only because they had the gumption to resist political correctness and fight back. Koreans were "the only people to act like real Americans," it explained, "mainly because they have not yet been assimilated into our rotten liberal culture, which admonishes whites faced by raging blacks to lie back and think of England."
This "Special Issue on Racial Terrorism" was hardly the first time one of Paul's publications had raised these topics. As early as December 1989, a section of his Investment Letter, titled "What To Expect for the 1990s," predicted that "Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities" because "mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white 'haves.'" Two months later, a newsletter warned of "The Coming Race War," and, in November 1990, an item advised readers, "If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it." In June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC's Adams Morgan neighborhood was titled, "Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo." "This is only the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s," the newsletter predicted. In an October 1992 item about urban crime, the newsletter's author--presumably Paul--wrote, "I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming." That same year, a newsletter described the aftermath of a basketball game in which "blacks poured into the streets of Chicago in celebration. How to celebrate? How else? They broke the windows of stores to loot." The newsletter inveighed against liberals who "want to keep white America from taking action against black crime and welfare," adding, "Jury verdicts, basketball games, and even music are enough to set off black rage, it seems."
Such views on race also inflected the newsletters' commentary on foreign affairs. South Africa's transition to multiracial democracy was portrayed as a "destruction of civilization" that was "the most tragic [to] ever occur on that continent, at least below the Sahara"; and, in March 1994, a month before Nelson Mandela was elected president, one item warned of an impending "South African Holocaust."
Martin Luther King Jr. earned special ire from Paul's newsletters, which attacked the civil rights leader frequently, often to justify opposition to the federal holiday named after him. ("What an infamy Ronald Reagan approved it!" one newsletter complained in 1990. "We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.") In the early 1990s, a newsletter attacked the "X-Rated Martin Luther King" as a "world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours," "seduced underage girls and boys," and "made a pass at" fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy. One newsletter ridiculed black activists who wanted to rename New York City after King, suggesting that "Welfaria," "Zooville," "Rapetown," "Dirtburg," and "Lazyopolis" were better alternatives. The same year, King was described as "a comsymp, if not an actual party member, and the man who replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration."
While bashing King, the newsletters had kind words for the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke. In a passage titled "The Duke's Victory," a newsletter celebrated Duke's 44 percent showing in the 1990 Louisiana Senate primary. "Duke lost the election," it said, "but he scared the blazes out of the Establishment." In 1991, a newsletter asked, "Is David Duke's new prominence, despite his losing the gubernatorial election, good for anti-big government forces?" The conclusion was that "our priority should be to take the anti-government, anti-tax, anti-crime, anti-welfare loafers, anti-race privilege, anti-foreign meddling message of Duke, and enclose it in a more consistent package of freedom." Duke is now returning the favor, telling me that, while he will not formally endorse any candidate, he has made information about Ron Paul available on his website.
Like blacks, gays earn plenty of animus in Paul's newsletters. They frequently quoted Paul's "old colleague," Representative William Dannemeyer--who advocated quarantining people with AIDS--praising him for "speak[ing] out fearlessly despite the organized power of the gay lobby." In 1990, one newsletter mentioned a reporter from a gay magazine "who certainly had an axe to grind, and that's not easy with a limp wrist." In an item titled, "The Pink House?" the author of a newsletter--again, presumably Paul--complained about President George H.W. Bush's decision to sign a hate crimes bill and invite "the heads of homosexual lobbying groups to the White House for the ceremony," adding, "I miss the closet." "Homosexuals," it said, "not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities." When Marvin Liebman, a founder of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom and a longtime political activist, announced that he was gay in the pages of National Review, a Paul newsletter implored, "Bring Back the Closet!" Surprisingly, one item expressed ambivalence about the contentious issue of gays in the military, but ultimately concluded, "Homosexuals, if admitted, should be put in a special category and not allowed in close physical contact with heterosexuals."
The newsletters were particularly obsessed with AIDS, "a politically protected disease thanks to payola and the influence of the homosexual lobby," and used it as a rhetorical club to beat gay people in general. In 1990, one newsletter approvingly quoted "a well-known Libertarian editor" as saying, "The ACT-UP slogan, on stickers plastered all over Manhattan, is 'Silence = Death.' But shouldn't it be 'Sodomy = Death'?" Readers were warned to avoid blood transfusions because gays were trying to "poison the blood supply." "Am I the only one sick of hearing about the 'rights' of AIDS carriers?" a newsletter asked in 1990. That same year, citing a Christian-right fringe publication, an item suggested that "the AIDS patient" should not be allowed to eat in restaurants and that "AIDS can be transmitted by saliva," which is false. Paul's newsletters advertised a book, Surviving the AIDS Plague--also based upon the casual-transmission thesis--and defended "parents who worry about sending their healthy kids to school with AIDS victims." Commenting on a rise in AIDS infections, one newsletter said that "gays in San Francisco do not obey the dictates of good sense," adding: "[T]hese men don't really see a reason to live past their fifties. They are not married, they have no children, and their lives are centered on new sexual partners." Also, "they enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick."
The rhetoric when it came to Jews was little better. The newsletters display an obsession with Israel; no other country is mentioned more often in the editions I saw, or with more vitriol. A 1987 issue of Paul's Investment Letter called Israel "an aggressive, national socialist state," and a 1990 newsletter discussed the "tens of thousands of well-placed friends of Israel in all countries who are willing to wok [sic] for the Mossad in their area of expertise." Of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a newsletter said, "Whether it was a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little."
Paul's newsletters didn't just contain bigotry. They also contained paranoia--specifically, the brand of anti-government paranoia that festered among right-wing militia groups during the 1980s and '90s. Indeed, the newsletters seemed to hint that armed revolution against the federal government would be justified. In January 1995, three months before right-wing militants bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, a newsletter listed "Ten Militia Commandments," describing "the 1,500 local militias now training to defend liberty" as "one of the most encouraging developments in America." It warned militia members that they were "possibly under BATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] or other totalitarian federal surveillance" and printed bits of advice from the Sons of Liberty, an anti-government militia based in Alabama--among them, "You can't kill a Hydra by cutting off its head," "Keep the group size down," "Keep quiet and you're harder to find," "Leave no clues," "Avoid the phone as much as possible," and "Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here."
The newsletters are chock-full of shopworn conspiracies, reflecting Paul's obsession with the "industrial-banking-political elite" and promoting his distrust of a federally regulated monetary system utilizing paper bills. They contain frequent and bristling references to the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations--organizations that conspiracy theorists have long accused of seeking world domination. In 1978, a newsletter blamed David Rockefeller, the Trilateral Commission, and "fascist-oriented, international banking and business interests" for the Panama Canal Treaty, which it called "one of the saddest events in the history of the United States." A 1988 newsletter cited a doctor who believed that AIDS was created in a World Health Organization laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland. In addition, Ron Paul & Associates sold a video about Waco produced by "patriotic Indiana lawyer Linda Thompson"--as one of the newsletters called her--who maintained that Waco was a conspiracy to kill ATF agents who had previously worked for President Clinton as bodyguards. As with many of the more outlandish theories the newsletters cited over the years, the video received a qualified endorsement: "I can't vouch for every single judgment by the narrator, but the film does show the depths of government perfidy, and the national police's tricks and crimes," the newsletter said, adding, "Send your check for $24.95 to our Houston office, or charge the tape to your credit card at 1-800-RON-PAUL."
When I asked Jesse Benton, Paul's campaign spokesman, about the newsletters, he said that, over the years, Paul had granted "various levels of approval" to what appeared in his publications--ranging from "no approval" to instances where he "actually wrote it himself." After I read Benton some of the more offensive passages, he said, "A lot of [the newsletters] he did not see. Most of the incendiary stuff, no." He added that he was surprised to hear about the insults hurled at Martin Luther King, because "Ron thinks Martin Luther King is a hero."
In other words, Paul's campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naïve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically--or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point--over the course of decades--he would have done something about it.
What's more, Paul's connections to extremism go beyond the newsletters. He has given extensive interviews to the magazine of the John Birch Society, and has frequently been a guest of Alex Jones, a radio host and perhaps the most famous conspiracy theorist in America. Jones--whose recent documentary, Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement, details the plans of George Pataki, David Rockefeller, and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, among others, to exterminate most of humanity and develop themselves into "superhuman" computer hybrids able to "travel throughout the cosmos"--estimates that Paul has appeared on his radio program about 40 times over the past twelve years.
Then there is Gary North, who has worked on Paul's congressional staff. North is a central figure in Christian Reconstructionism, which advocates the implementation of Biblical law in modern society. Christian Reconstructionists share common ground with libertarians, since both groups dislike the central government. North has advocated the execution of women who have abortions and people who curse their parents. In a 1986 book, North argued for stoning as a form of capital punishment--because "the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost." North is perhaps best known for Gary North's Remnant Review, a "Christian and pro free-market" newsletter. In a 1983 letter Paul wrote on behalf of an organization called the Committee to Stop the Bail-Out of Multinational Banks (known by the acronym CSBOMB), he bragged, "Perhaps you already read in Gary North's Remnant Review about my exposes of government abuse."
Ron Paul is not going to be president. But, as his campaign has gathered steam, he has found himself increasingly permitted inside the boundaries of respectable debate. He sat for an extensive interview with Tim Russert recently. He has raised almost $20 million in just three months, much of it online. And he received nearly three times as many votes as erstwhile front-runner Rudy Giuliani in last week's Iowa caucus. All the while he has generally been portrayed by the media as principled and serious, while garnering praise for being a "straight-talker."
From his newsletters, however, a different picture of Paul emerges--that of someone who is either himself deeply embittered or, for a long time, allowed others to write bitterly on his behalf. His adversaries are often described in harsh terms: Barbara Jordan is called "Barbara Morondon," Eleanor Holmes Norton is a "black pinko," Donna Shalala is a "short lesbian," Ron Brown is a "racial victimologist," and Roberta Achtenberg, the first openly gay public official confirmed by the United States Senate, is a "far-left, normal-hating lesbian activist." Maybe such outbursts mean Ron Paul really is a straight-talker. Or maybe they just mean he is a man filled with hate.
Corrections: This article originally misidentified ABC's Jake Tapper as Jack. In addition, Paul was a surgeon in the Air Force, not the Army, as the piece originally stated. It also stated that David Duke competed in the 1990 Louisiana Republican Senate primary. In fact, he was a Republican candidate in an open primary. The article has been corrected.
James Kirchick is an assistant editor at The New Republic.
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html
© The New Republic 2008
eattherich
01-08-2008, 10:29 PM
OK ya beat me to the TNR piece,but have hou seen this? I no longer see anything redeeming about libertarianism,it should have gone out with bell bottoms.That said,Ron Paul,has created an all out war in "the libertarian movement".I say good.I hope he causes it to be ripped to pieces.Here is a well written,Wendy's always are,libertarian-feminist veiwpoint,on why Ron Paul sucks,and his supporters are delusional,brainwashed zealots.
Why Pick on Paul?
I've been asked a few times, on our forum, why I "bash" Ron Paul, when all the other candidates are so much worse. The short answer is, my comments are not addressed to Paul, or to Paul's Republican supporters, I'm speaking to Paul's libertarian supporters. Specifically, to those who have abandoned their principled stand against government of any kind, who offer the explanation that, in Paul's hands, government will be a force for good.
What follows is a compilation of remarks I've made on the forum:
To the extent that I am disappointed, I am not disappointed in Ron Paul. He is a politician, and I would (and do) expect him to act like a politician.
Nor am I disappointed in the newcomers to the Libertarian Party. After years of public-school and mass-media indoctrination, it takes a long time to come to the realizations that (a) for liberty, voting doesn't work, and (b) voting is fundamentally wrong.
No, my disappointment is reserved for the people who should know better -- who have failed, or witnessed failure, time and time again, and yet think that this time will be different. I've been rather surprised at the alacrity with which many former anarchists have seized upon Paul as the Great White Hope for liberty. Some of them are conversant with the moral case against voting, but are willing to set that aside Just This Once.
It is to these people that I speak.
In most other circumstances I would not care. If you want to waste your time and money -- and others' -- pursuing a perpetual motion machine, well, it's your (and their) time and money, and not my business to tell you how not to waste it. But when you are talking about investing your time and money in placing someone in a position of political power over me, and selling this as an advancement of liberty, then it becomes my business to object -- both to the promotion of political power, and to the fraud that this will somehow help liberty.
It is not (as one poster suggested) that I think "Paul deserves a special place in the hypocrites penalty box". All politicians are hypocrites and liars, and will say whatever it takes to get elected. There was a time when I thought Ron Paul was different, but watching him pander to the anti-gay, anti-abortion, and anti-immigration elements of the Republican "base" -- and learning more about the measures he has promoted, and chosen not to promote -- makes me realize that with Paul, too, words and actions bear no relation. Paul is just another politician.
It's not that he deserves a special place in the penalty box. It's that he does not deserve the special place in the "angels" box, into which many libertarians are so uncritically willing to place him.
I'm inclined to believe that Paul would be less objectionable than any of the other presidential contenders. That doesn't mean he deserves fawning sycophancy. His "minarchist" libertarian supporters should be skeptical, and hold him to a high standard. They could start by demanding from him an explanation of his failure to vote against S.1927, the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping bill, instead of just chanting "Ron Paul Revolution!" morning, noon, and night.
He's a politician. Start treating him like any other politician, and not like (as Sunni Maravillosa sardonically phrased it) the "One Man Fit to Rule Us All."
But since I don't think Paul could win, why do I waste time criticizing him? Why not just wait for his campaign to fail?
Since I have come to reject political action on moral grounds, I have spent a lot of time working to build the world in which I would like to live. This involves devising ways to reduce the impact of government, building alternatives to government, and -- crucially -- convincing others not to turn to government for solutions to their problems. This is a big bite to digest in one lump; usually someone must come to accept the non-aggression principle as a first step. Then comes the recognition that government is aggression, and that it is wrong to turn to government to solve their problems...whether those problems be global warming, lack of a job, or too much interference with their freedom. Since I have become a principled non-voter I have actually seen some progress in this area.
Now comes Ron Paul. To those who have finally rejected government-as-a-solution he says, Vote for Me and I'll Fix Your Problems. And many self-described anarchists and non-politicals forget everything they have learned about the institution of government -- that government is an institution of force and robbery, that government exists to perpetuate itself, that the incentives of government are for deal-making and not principle, that anything Ron Paul accomplishes as president can (and will) be erased by his successor with a stroke of a pen. Those who would never for a moment be seduced by Clinton or Romney or McCain, listen to Paul and declaim Yes, Of Course, Politics Can Save Us, This Man is Fit to Rule Us.
This is why I address my remarks to libertarians. In their newfound zealotry (or should I say seduction?) they have forgotten what they have slowly and painfully learned about the nature of government. It is a lesson that they will need to learn all over again.
Ironically, they'd learn it faster if Paul were elected, and started breaking his promises and cutting deals with Republicrats that curtailed even more of their freedoms. But I expect many would still find rationalizations for his behavior. ("He's really pro-freedom, see, but he simply couldn't restore habeas corpus and still get support for a wall on the border. Next term will be different.") http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.1294
eattherich
01-16-2008, 11:19 PM
Who Wrote Ron Paul's Newsletters?
By JULIAN SANCHEZ and DAVID WEIGEL
Ron Paul doesn't seem to know much about his own newsletters. The libertarian-leaning presidential candidate says he was unaware, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, of the bigoted rhetoric about African Americans and gays that was appearing under his name. He told CNN last week that he still has "no idea" who might have written inflammatory comments such as "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks--statements he now repudiates. Yet in interviews with reason, a half-dozen longtime libertarian activists--including some still close to Paul--all named the same man as Paul's chief ghostwriter: Ludwig von Mises Institute founder Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr.
Tax filings from 1985 and 2001 show that Rockwell, Paul's congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982, was a vice president of Ron Paul & Associates, the corporation that published the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report. The company was dissolved in 2001. During the period when the most incendiary items appeared--roughly 1989 to 1994--Rockwell and the prominent libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist "paleoconservatives," producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters recently unearthed by The New Republic. To this day Rockwell remains a friend and advisor to Paul"accompanying him to major media appearances; promoting his candidacy on the LewRockwell.com blog; publishing his books; and peddling an array of the avuncular Texas congressman's recent writings and audio recordings.
Rockwell has denied responsibility for the newsletters' contents to The New Republic's Jamie Kirchick. Rockwell twice declined to discuss the matter with reason, maintaining this week that he had "nothing to say." He has characterized discussion of the newsletters as "hysterical smears aimed at political enemies" of The New Republic. Paul himself called the controversy "old news," and "ancient history" when we reached him last week, and he has not responded to further request for comment.
But a source close to the Paul presidential campaign told Reason that Rockwell authored much of the content of the Political Report and Survival Report. "If Rockwell had any honor he'd come out and I say, I wrote this stuff,'" said the source, who asked not to be named because Paul remains friendly with Rockwell and is reluctant to assign responsibility for the letters. "He should have done it 10 years ago."
Rockwell was publicly named as Paul's ghostwriter as far back as a 1988 issue of the now-defunct movement monthly American Libertarian. "This was based on my understanding at the time that Lew would write things that appeared in Ron's various newsletters," former AL editor Mike Holmes told reason. "Neither Ron nor Lew ever told me that, but other people close to them such as Murray Rothbard suggested that Lew was involved, and it was a common belief in libertarian circles."
Individualist-feminist Wendy McElroy, who on her blog characterized the author as an associate of hers for many years, called the ghostwriter's identity "an open secret within the circles in which I run." Though she declined to name names either on her blog or when contacted by reason, she later approvingly cited a post naming Rockwell at the anonymous blog RightWatch. Timothy Wirkman Virkkala, formerly the managing editor of the libertarian magazine Liberty, told Reason that the names behind the Political Report were widely known in his magazine's offices as well, because Liberty's late editor-in-chief, Bill Bradford, had discussed the newsletters with the principals, and then with his staff.
"I understood that Burton S. Blumert was the moneybags that got all this started, that he was the publisher," Virkkala said. "Lew Rockwell, editor and chief writer; Jeff Tucker, assistant, probably a writer; Murray Rothbard, cheering from the sidelines, probably ghosting now and then." (Virkkala has offered his own reaction to the controversy at his Web site.) Blumert, Paul's 1988 campaign chairman and a private supporter this year, did not respond to a request for an interview; Rothbard died in 1995. We reached Tucker, now editorial vice president of Rockwell's Mises.org, at his office, and were told: "I just really am not going to make a statement, I'm sorry. I'll take all responsibility for being the editor of Mises.org, OK?"
The early 1990s writings became liabilities for Paul long before last week's New Republic story. Back in 1996, Paul narrowly eked out a congressional victory over Democrat Lefty Morris, who made the newsletters one of his main campaign issues, damning them both for their racial content and for their advocacy of drug legalization. At the time, Paul defended the statements that appeared under his name, claiming that they expressed his "philosophical differences" with Democrats and had been "taken out of context." He finally disavowed them in a 2001 interview with Texas Monthly, explaining that his campaign staff had convinced him at the time that it would be too "confusing" to attribute them to a ghostwriter.
Besides Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell, the officers of Ron Paul & Associates included Paul's wife Carol, Paul's daughter Lori Pyeatt, Paul staffer Penny Langford-Freeman, and longtime campaign manager Mark Elam (who has managed every Paul congressional campaign since 1996 and is currently the Texas coordinator for the presidential run), according to tax records from 1993 and 2001. Langford-Freeman did not respond to interview requests as of press time. Elam, president of M&M Graphics and Advertising, confirmed to reason that his company printed the newsletters, but said that the texts reached him as finished products.
The publishing operation was lucrative. A tax document from June 1993"wrapping up the year in which the Political Report had published the "welfare checks" comment on the L.A. riots--reported an annual income of $940,000 for Ron Paul & Associates, listing four employees in Texas (Paul's family and Rockwell) and seven more employees around the country. If Paul didn't know who was writing his newsletters, he knew they were a crucial source of income and a successful tool for building his fundraising base for a political comeback.
http://www.counterpunch.org/sanchez01162008.html
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.1.10 Copyright © 2017 vBulletin Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved.