reignofevil posted:
He is actually not proposing any leftist policies

well i mostly agree but his constantly restated position on taxes is that he wants the top rate to go from 35% to 39.6%, for there to be a modest estate tax, for a small tax on bank assets, for expanded cap-and-trade permit auctioning and so on. like, none of those things change the fundamental balance of power in the country, and aren't really "leftist" at all (which would directly confront corporate power), but they are positive changes.

discipline posted:
lmao 39.99%

well plus state and local taxes, which add like 10 points in some states. that's pretty standard around the world.

The 'progressive' sites are starting to attack Paul with a fury. He scares the shit out of them, as he is the only Republican candidate that can hand Obama a big loss. A coalition of Republicans, independents, and anti-war/anti-Israel (anti-war and anti-Israel are exactly the same thing, and much, much, much more popular than the Jew-controlled media would have you believe, but have never had anyone to vote for!) Democrats would flatten Barry like a steam roller.

On issues outside of war, the war on drugs, and Israel, Paul's views are appalling. However, as President, his nutty ideas are just ideas. He can do little or nothing about them. He can and would block all Wars For The Jews, the wars that are killing so many people and wrecking the United States. For that reason alone, he is the obvious - and only - progressive choice.

It is telling that the 'progressives for carpet-bombing' and the Republican establishment both oppose Paul because he might win. Perhaps they should just form a united front and call themselves the War Party.

The professional left - those who make a salary by pretending to be progressive - will keep telling us that Ron Paul is unacceptable as he sorta hangs out with white supremacists, yet the clear racial supremacism of the Jews - you know, the supremacism with violent, horribly destructive effects in the real world today - is fine. Why the distinction? Ah, but they'll say, white supremacism is a whole nother thing, as the white supremacists control all the institutions of power. Are they perhaps living in 1964? Look around you. It is not the hillbillies who are running the banks, the universities, the media, the governments. The real problem isn't the violent supremacism, it is our complete insensitivity to real power relations.

Ron Paul is a terrible embarrassment to American 'progressives' as their opposition to his campaign demonstrates how deeply reactionary they really are. In particular, Paul highlights the the dominant neo-liberal strain in American progressivism of supporting the financing of war. War financing is the heart of the modern American apparatus of state, and the state is what creates social programs and enforces modern progressive social order. This is particularly true as the business base of the country is hollowed out, leaving the business of war - and the printing of money - as the only financial basis left to support social programs.

http://xymphora.blogspot.com/

And as I’ve drilled into Paul’s ideas, his ideas forced me to acknowledge some deep contradictions in American liberalism (pointed out years ago by Christopher Laesch) and what is a long-standing, disturbing, and unacknowledged affinity liberals have with centralized war financing. So while I have my views of Ron Paul, I believe that the anger he inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.

...

Paul is deeply conservative, of course, and there are reasons he believes in those end goals that have nothing to do with creating a more socially just and equitable society. But then, when considering questions about Ron Paul, you have to ask yourself whether you prefer a libertarian who will tell you upfront about his opposition to civil rights statutes, or authoritarian Democratic leaders who will expand healthcare to children and then aggressively enforce a racist war on drugs and shield multi-trillion dollar transactions from public scrutiny. I can see merits in both approaches, and of course, neither is ideal. Perhaps it’s worthy to argue that lives saved by presumed expanded health care coverage in 2013 are worth the lives lost in the drug war. It is potentially a tough calculation (depending on whether you think coverage will in fact expand in 2013). When I worked with Paul’s staff, they pursued our joint end goals with vigor and principle, and because of their work, we got to force central banking practices into a more public and democratic light.

But this obscures the real question, of why Paul disdains the Fed (and implicitly, why liberals do not), and the relationship between the Federal Reserve and American empire. If you go back and look at some of libertarian allies, like Fox News’s Judge Napolitano, they will answer that question for you. Napolitano hates, absolutely hates, Abraham Lincoln. He sometimes slyly refers to Lincoln as America’s first dictator. Libertarians also detest Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

What connects all three of these Presidents is one thing – big ass wars, and specifically, war financing. If you think today’s deficits are bad, well, Abraham Lincoln financed the Civil War pretty much entirely by money printing and debt creation, taking America off the gold standard. He oversaw the founding of the nation’s first national financial regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which chartered national banks and forced them to hold government debt to back currency they issued. The dollar then became the national currency, and Lincoln didn’t even back those dollars by gold (and gold is written into the Constitution). This financing of the Civil War was upheld in a series of cases over the Legal Tender Act of 1862. Prior to Lincoln, it was these United States. Afterwards, it was the United States. Lincoln fought the Civil War and centralized authority in the Federal government to do it, freeing slaves and transforming America into one nation.

Libertarians claim that they dislike Lincoln because he centralized authority in the Federal government. Of course, there is a long reconstructed white supremacist strain that hates Lincoln because he was an explicitly anti-racist President, and they hate the centralized authority and financing power that freed the slaves and turned America increasingly into more racially equitable society. This strain can be exploited by the creditor class, who also disliked how slavery – which they saw as a property right rather than a labor and human rights issue – was destroyed by state power. History, of course, has a nasty way of mocking us about long-held fights we thought were over. The conflict between labor/human rights and property rights continues today. Or as Carl Fox said in the movie Wall Street, “The only difference between the Pyramids and the Empire State Building is the Egyptians didn’t allow unions.” Without even getting into globalization, prison labor legally makes body armor, as well as products for victoria’s Secret, Starbucks, and Microsoft. State centralized power can prioritize labor rights over property rights, and for this reason, creditors are wary of it.

On to Woodrow Wilson. Wilson signed the highly controversial Federal Reserve Act in 1913; originally, the Federal Reserve system was supposed to discount commercial and agricultural paper. Government bonds were not really considered part of the system’s mandate. But what happened the next year? Yes, World War I. And Wilson, who ran on the slogan “he kept us out of war” in 1916, started a long tradition of antiwar Democratic Presidents who took America to war (drawing the ire of among others Helen Keller, but garnering the support of union leader Sam Gompers who argued it was a “people’s war”). Wilson also implemented a wide variety of highly repressive authoritarian measures, including the Palmer Raids, the Espionage Act of 1917, and the use of modern PR techniques by government agencies. For good measure, Wilson was an unreconstructed white supremacist (even a bit out there for the time) and sent many antiwar opponents to jail. In the monetary arena, Wilson’s new Federal Reserve system began discounting government bonds. Like Lincoln, he had set up a tremendous war financing vehicle to centralize capital flows and therefore, political authority. In many ways, Wilson set up the rudiments of America’s police state, and did so arguably to help a transatlantic Anglo-American banking elite. Here, one can argue that libertarians are wary of centralized financing and political authority for liberal reasons – the ACLU was founded after the Palmer raids.

And finally, we come to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s Fed is a bit more complex, because he did centralize monetary authority using wartime emergency powers, but he did so in peacetime. FDR abrogated gold clause contracts, seized the domestic supply of gold, and devalued the currency. He constrained banks with aggressive regulation and seizures of insolvent banks, saving depositors with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He also used the RFC to set up much of what we know today as the Federal government, including early versions of disaster relief, small business lending, massive bridge and railroad building, the FHA, Fannie Mae, and state and local aid. Eventually, the government used this mechanism to finance college and housing for veterans with the GI Bill. Since veterans were much of the population right after World War II, effectively this was the first ever near-national safety net. FDR also fused the liberal and union establishments with the corporate world, creating the hybrid “military-industrial” complex that is with us to this day (see Alan Brinkley’s “End of Reform” for a good treatment of this process).

Later, this New Deal financing apparatus was used to finance the munitions industry and America’s role in World War II. At one point, the RFC owned eight war material producing subsidiaries, including the synthetic rubber industry. Importantly, FDR had the Fed working for him. The Fed kept interest rates pegged at an interest rate set by Treasury, and used reserve requirements to manage inflation. This led to a dramatic drop in inequality, and unemployment sank to 1% during World War II. In 1951, the Fed, buttressed by what Tom Ferguson calls “conservative Keynesian” corporate leaders, broke free of this arrangement, under the Treasury-Fed Accord, leading to the postwar monetary order. That accord is where the vaunted “Federal Reserve Independence” came from.

Now, if you’re a libertarian, and you believe that centralized power is dangerous, then it’s obvious that state control over finance and mass mobilization of social resources for warfare or other ends are two sides of the same coin. If you fear social spending, you could also be persuaded to believe that any financing mechanism for mass social spending is problematic. Creditors might just dislike the possibility of any state power centers that could challenge their hegemony and privilege labor/human rights over their property rights, though they do support captive state systems they control. If you are a white supremacist, centralized power can easily be viewed as a threat to racial homogeny, since historically it has acted as such in the past. But if you are against war, or you believe that a centralized state is likely to act in an unjust or repressive manner (as it also has in the past), then war financing is a reasonable target.

Modern liberalism is a mixture of two elements. One is a support of Federal power – what came out of the late 1930s, World War II, and the civil rights era where a social safety net and warfare were financed by Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the RFC, and human rights were enforced by a Federal government, unions, and a cadre of corporate, journalistic and technocratic experts (and cheap oil made the whole system run.) America mobilized militarily for national priorities, be they war-like or social in nature. And two, it originates from the anti-war sentiment of the Vietnam era, with its distrust of centralized authority mobilizing national resources for what were perceived to be immoral priorities. When you throw in the recent financial crisis, the corruption of big finance, the increasing militarization of society, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the collapse of the moral authority of the technocrats, you have a big problem. Liberalism doesn’t really exist much within the Democratic Party so much anymore, but it also has a profound challenge insofar as the rudiments of liberalism going back to the 1930s don’t work.

This is why Ron Paul can critique the Federal Reserve and American empire, and why liberals have essentially no answer to his ideas, arguing instead over Paul having character defects. Ron Paul’s stance should be seen as a challenge to better create a coherent structural critique of the American political order. It’s quite obvious that there isn’t one coming from the left, otherwise the figure challenging the war on drugs and American empire wouldn’t be in the Republican primary as the libertarian candidate. To get there, liberals must grapple with big finance and war, two topics that are difficult to handle in any but a glib manner that separates us from our actual traditional and problematic affinity for both. War financing has a specific tradition in American culture, but there is no guarantee war financing must continue the way it has. And there’s no reason to assume that centralized power will act in a more just manner these days, that we will see continuity with the historical experience of the New Deal and Civil Rights Era. The liberal alliance with the mechanics of mass mobilizing warfare, which should be pretty obvious when seen in this light, is deep-rooted.

What we’re seeing on the left is this conflict played out, whether it is big slow centralized unions supporting problematic policies, protest movements that cannot be institutionalized in any useful structure, or a completely hollow liberal intellectual apparatus arguing for increasing the power of corporations through the Federal government to enact their agenda. Now of course, Ron Paul pandered to racists, and there is no doubt that this is a legitimate political issue in the Presidential race. But the intellectual challenge that Ron Paul presents ultimately has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with contradictions within modern liberalism.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/matt-stoller-why-ron-paul-challenges-liberals.html

The thing I loathe most about election season is reflected in the central fallacy that drives progressive discussion the minute “Ron Paul” is mentioned. As soon as his candidacy is discussed, progressives will reflexively point to a slew of positions he holds that are anathema to liberalism and odious in their own right and then say: how can you support someone who holds this awful, destructive position? The premise here — the game that’s being played — is that if you can identify some heinous views that a certain candidate holds, then it means they are beyond the pale, that no Decent Person should even consider praising any part of their candidacy.

The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before. The nation suffers from what National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed a vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to what Dana Priest and William Arkin called “Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.

The simple fact is that progressives are supporting a candidate for President who has done all of that — things liberalism has long held to be pernicious. I know it’s annoying and miserable to hear. Progressives like to think of themselves as the faction that stands for peace, opposes wars, believes in due process and civil liberties, distrusts the military-industrial complex, supports candidates who are devoted to individual rights, transparency and economic equality. All of these facts — like the history laid out by Stoller in that essay — negate that desired self-perception. These facts demonstrate that the leader progressives have empowered and will empower again has worked in direct opposition to those values and engaged in conduct that is nothing short of horrific. So there is an eagerness to avoid hearing about them, to pretend they don’t exist. And there’s a corresponding hostility toward those who point them out, who insist that they not be ignored.

The parallel reality — the undeniable fact — is that all of these listed heinous views and actions from Barack Obama have been vehemently opposed and condemned by Ron Paul: and among the major GOP candidates, only by Ron Paul. For that reason, Paul’s candidacy forces progressives to face the hideous positions and actions of their candidate, of the person they want to empower for another four years. If Paul were not in the race or were not receiving attention, none of these issues would receive any attention because all the other major GOP candidates either agree with Obama on these matters or hold even worse views.

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/31/progressives_and_the_ron_paul_fallacies/singleton/

babyfinland posted:

getfiscal posted:

babyfinland posted:
the presidential office is primarily a foreign policy position anyways and thats where hes good

i think it is more likely that a ron paul president would just devastate domestic policy. he could just start doing things like refusing to sign over medicaid money because it is unconstitutional or something. the majority of the republican caucus would have to defect to get through a budget that didn't basically eliminate the entire social welfare system. also it is vastly more easy for paul to get republicans to agree to deep welfare cuts than it would be to fast-track deep military cuts.

i also think paul is more likely to get a "you can't do that" speech from the joint chiefs or something. like scaling down a global military is a huge task that would take like a decade to do, but paul wants huge savings day one. so if he ever came close to winning they'd sit him down and be like baby ron can't always get what he wants. this is a real world with bad people in it. sure we can go lean for you but we can't change fundamentally within a few years. and your homeland defence doctrine doesn't make any sense to us. let's talk realistically, rumsfeld wanted to move from two-front to one-front-plus, let's do that. and we can shut down a few more bases and cut support staff and scale down in afghanistan. but that's it.

which is fine i guess but it doesn't like change anything of note other than costs, at the expense of the remnants of social welfare.

yeah i know but its worth a shot innit

Ron Paul was opposed to the War in Afghanistan, and to any military reaction to the attacks of 9/11.

He did not want to vote for the resolution. He immediately stated to us staffers, me in particular, that Bush/Cheney were going to use the attacks as a precursor for “invading” Iraq. He engaged in conspiracy theories including perhaps the attacks were coordinated with the CIA, and that the Bush administration might have known about the attacks ahead of time. He expressed no sympathies whatsoever for those who died on 9/11, and pretty much forbade us staffers from engaging in any sort of memorial expressions, or openly asserting pro-military statements in support of the Bush administration.

On the eve of the vote, Ron Paul was still telling us staffers that he was planning to vote “No,” on the resolution, and to be prepared for a seriously negative reaction in the District. Jackie Gloor and I, along with quiet nods of agreement from the other staffers in the District, declared our intentions to Tom Lizardo, our Chief of Staff, and to each other, that if Ron voted No, we would immediately resign.

Ron was “under the spell” of left-anarchist and Lew Rockwell associate Joe Becker at the time, who was our legislative director. Norm Singleton, another Lew Rockwell fanatic agreed with Joe. All other staffers were against Ron, Joe and Norm on this, including Lizardo. At the very last minute Ron switched his stance and voted “Yay,” much to the great relief of Jackie and I. He never explained why, but I strongly suspected that he realized it would have been political suicide; that staunchly conservative Victoria would revolt, and the Republicans there would ensure that he would not receive the nomination for the seat in 2002. Also, as much as I like to think that it was my yelling and screaming at Ron, that I would publicly resign if he voted “No,” I suspect it had a lot more to do with Jackie’s threat, for she WAS Victoria. And if Jackie bolted, all of the Victoria conservatives would immediately turn on Ron, and it wouldn’t be pretty.

http://rightwingnews.com/election-2012/statement-from-fmr-ron-paul-staffer-on-newsletters-anti-semitism/

he's gonna decimate the domestic programs and probably devastate the few opportunities still afforded to minorities, imo

getfiscal posted:
i think "governments don't change" is a very american-centric because like in canada elections can change things a bit.

applies in europe too, especially in modern EU where governments have to be fundamentally identical and actual change leads to sanctions

Impper posted:

the impperial imppertus comes from... the Heart