"See this room? Two-thirds of us laid off when Ron Paul is president." ~ A hot microphone picked up a reporter attacking Ron Paul before a Pentagon briefing began
We are currently in the middle of the long war of the Internet Reformation although the press will never mention this. Effectively there has been an ongoing war between the non-controlled alternative media and the establishment media starting with LewRockwell.com back in 1999.
Since then many quality alternative media websites have been added to the competition while the elite media’s credibility, reach and ability to manipulate debate and public opinion has been declining. The Internet Reformation is slowly winning and this has been most clearly shown to date with the 2012 Ron Paul Campaign.
The GOP Neocon puppet masters are terrified especially when Republican crowds at televised debates cheer the Ron Paul non-interventionist foreign policy remarks because this threatens their control over US foreign policy in what was formerly their secure home turf. Try as they might the media has not been able to destroy the Ron Paul Campaign.
Is The Great Establishment Media Purge Beginning?
"They can't be afraid of me…I’m not going to be President of the United States. They are afraid of the ideas we express because they're afraid of the people." ~ Pat Buchanan
Back in the old Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin created the "Great Purge" of political repression and persecution during 1936 to 1938. Stalin was paranoid and very fearful of individuals he considered enemies of the people and counter-revolutionary because these dissenters threatened his dictatorial control and authority over the nation.
It appears the mainstream media elites in the US may also worry about their future ability to control public opinion and elections in America. In the last week we have seen MSNBC on the left purge Pat Buchanan from the network and Fox News on the right eliminate Judge Andrew Napolitano and Freedom Watch for expressing opinions and views that threaten the political institutions, control and goals of the power elite. The first question asked must be why now rather than later as after all both men have expressed their anti-establishment views for years without repercussions?
I believe the answer is the growing power of alternative media and the successful educational effort of the Ron Paul Campaign both of which use the internet to get their freedom message out. The establishment media primarily exists to defend the establishment and the growing readership of alternative news and opinion sites are making their job increasingly difficult. When you add in the growing numbers of Paul campaign supporters that appear to now be effectively immune to the power elite propaganda, the media elites have a real problem.
Today’s Media Establishment Is An Anachronism & Relic of the Past
The job of the press was to manipulate and control public opinion as well as voting blocks during the heyday of print media, radio and recently even cable news. The elites bought and controlled most media outlets, developed and promoted a controlled political opposition on the left and the right that allowed them to set the parameters for discussion and debate. America has effectively been a one party state for 100 years with power elites controlling the major political parties using the American style democracy both as their cover and to convey legitimacy on their behind the scenes manipulation.
The real battle today is not the ongoing GOP presidential primary but rather the media elites against the Ron Paul Campaign and the alternative internet based media where growing numbers of Americans are getting news and forming their opinions.
If you watch the run of the mill campaigns by all of the GOP presidential candidates except for Ron Paul and listen to the rhetoric it is the same old story and false paradigm waged every four years for almost 100 years. Our legitimate government and rule by the people was actually overthrown in 1913 by banking interests who created the Federal Reserve and the graduated income tax.
Ron Paul Has Brilliantly Turned the Tables On the Political Establishment
His campaign is using the closed two-party control structure and their media gatekeepers previously utilized to control public opinion and elections against them. For example the state presidential primary and caucus system, televised debates and related campaign news coverage formerly was a GOP establishment monopoly. Today thanks to the Internet, it has become the Trojan horse used by Paul’s campaign and liberty supporters to get inside the closed walls of the GOP to educate millions of Americans about freedom and free-market ideas.
The establishment news media has been powerless to stop this infiltration so the real battle in 2012, isn’t the visible political campaign but rather the hidden impotence of the media elites to protect the establishment control. This is why the media so hates and fears Ron Paul. His campaign is the new road map for how pro-liberty candidates and forces together with the alternative media can and will eventually defeat the power elites main protectors and gatekeepers, which is the media establishment.
The Wednesday night GOP Presidential debate could well be the last in this campaign cycle. In fact, it could be the last GOP presidential debate in your lifetime if future freedom candidates follow the Ron Paul model of turning a major campaign into an educational effort against the GOP establishment.
The existing closed political system will not survive another GOP presidential nomination campaign in which the truths and views of a major candidate like Ron Paul
are repeated in numerous debates night after night to a voting public armed with Google search and the alternative media. Traditional campaigns and managed elections with predetermined outcomes are over as the media establishment can no longer control the debate, limit information flow and defend the political establishment.
This 2012 GOP presidential nomination campaign ritual that actually began in early 2011 is coming to a close. Historically presidential campaigns and the pre-approved chosen ones battle in the arena of democracy and candidate finally chosen by the false holy sacrament of democracy through a controlled electoral process is designed to convey a measure of legitimacy on those who rule over us and nothing more. It is pure entertainment just like the old Roman circuses, coliseum diversions and free bread during the latter-days of the Roman Empire to calm the public while their empire fell and their wealth and liberties were destroyed.
Contrary to the lies from rightwing radio, leftwing experts and most political party hacks and leaders most elections are fraudulent and a waste of time for voters. I suggest you research campaign promises from Wilson and Roosevelt on keeping us out of war to modern-day presidents like Bush II, Obama etc. and you’ll see their campaign promises are literally never kept. Yet after each election, the press almost never mentions this fact of modern-day political life. It is an inside establishment joke and the job of the establishment press is to protect, defend and advance the interests of the establishment.
Voting & Campaigns Have Been An Exercise In Futility Since 1913
What has passed, as majority rule is nothing more than a deception forced on manipulated voters, fraud filled voting, caucuses and primaries and run by insider party elites. This deception has worked historically because the media establishment has always controlled, commented on and manufactured public opinion so the power elite candidates backed financially by big banks, Wall Street and a few extremely wealthy families could maintain the false illusion of government by the people.
Yes the front men and political parties will change places from time to time so we the people can direct our support or disgust in the following elections but policies change little and the real power elite and special interests who determine foreign and domestic polices, bailout their banking friends continue as before.
This is just an every four year ritual and false deception designed to convince the citizens that they somehow govern themselves and their nation. The truth about representative democracy is this form of government at a national level when compared to decentralized confederation government and or direct democracy is the easiest way for elites to fool voters. This allows politicians to act and legislate always in their best interests rather than for the good of the nation or the people.
The 2012 Election Really Is Different
This is not because the defeat of Barack Obama or the election of a Romney, Santorum or Gingrich will change the direction of the nation. The banks will still get bailed out, the federal budget will not be balanced and our national debt will continue to grow. Also the neocons will still determine foreign policy and the Federal Reserve will continue to create money out of nothing for a few special interests and industries.
I believe the 2012 presidential election will be the final death rattle for the American political, financial and media establishment and their ability to control the voting public or the news and opinions used to create public opinion. This is what really makes the 2012 election different.
The growth in alternative media readership as well as independent political and economic thought from the Ron Paul Campaign educational effort have almost reached the tipping point thus making the past public control function of the media establishment a lost cause. Adding up the alternative media readership numbers and Paul’s GOP vote percentages primarily from younger voters spells disaster for the establishment.
They may hold back the freedom forces for one more national election but in four more years of Obama or GOP establishment leadership I forecast the flood gates of political and economic change will burst open and the liberty revolution will advance on Washington, Wall Street and the central bank cartel.
The outcome of the 2012 election is difficult to forecast but it is clear eventually the media establishment will lose the war! Not withstanding the results of the 2012 election and how many free-market commentators are repressed, banned, blacklisted or fired, the media elites will lose because of the internet.
Even if those who rule over us use a false flag operation like in the past to create a war or national emergency to control the internet, curtail opposition viewpoints and end our liberties and access to alternative views and news – this will only work for a very short time.
The internet has become a necessity for business and commerce and today’s global market means real history and the truth about financial manipulation, central banking cartels, free market solutions and political controls will get through their restraints and continue to challenge the establishment propaganda outlets.
They cannot kill the Internet without destroying the American economy in a very competitive world. The US is the most important economic host to these power elite parasites as they benefit from both confiscating our wealth and enslaving our children as cannon fodder for their wars.
The truth about our history, political system and our own enslavement has been best shown by Judge Andrew Napolitano in his questions every American should demand answers to in his recent editorial What If Democracy Is Bunk?
The search for answers to his 33 questions about American style democracy may well set the stage for the restoration of legitimate government and a free society in the United States. He has given us the questions to ask and all we need to do is to research, discover and publicize the answers.
Yes the establishment will counter-attack and use any means to remain in power and control but their days are numbered. Like Goebbels and the Berlin propaganda in early 1945, they can still issue proclamations, enact decrees and frighten the citizens but soon a large enough percentage of the electorate will know the truth. The emperor has no clothes and the rulers as well as the power elites hiding behind the scenes are frightened.
In 2013, the United States will have been occupied, ruled and looted by an elite that claimed to know what was best for them, the nation and the American people. They weren’t evil like the Nazis or violent like the Stalin and the communists but in the end they destroyed our liberties and have looted most of our property and wealth. Personally I think one hundred years is long enough. What do you think?
When a plurality of Americans can understand Judge Napolitano’s 33 questions and the answers, then the game is up and the truth just might yet set us free.
Tuesday
Monday
WHAT I THINK........JAMES OSTROWSKI
Note: Ron Paul won the straw poll with 30 votes. Santorum had 25, Romney – 21 and Gingrich – 18.
Opening Statement. I want to thank the Amherst Republican Party for hosting this event and inviting me to participate and present Ron Paul’s views on the issues. I am proud to support Dr. Paul who is the only candidate to visit this area during the campaign. In August, he took time off from a family reunion to speak to 700 people who came to see him on just three days notice.
Before we get into the issues, I want to urge you to put aside the media propaganda and consider supporting Dr. Ron Paul. Contrary to what the media says, he can win the nomination and he can beat Obama. Ron is only 8 delegates behind the current frontrunner Rick Santorum. The other two candidates are fading. And not only can Ron beat Obama, he’s the only one who can unite the broad coalition necessary to do so.
Ron polls particularly well among young people, independents, working class people and people in the Northeast. He is strong where Obama is strong. Obama’s people won’t say so but they are terrified of Ron Paul. In the Rasmussen poll, Ron Paul holds Obama to just 44%, his lowest number against any Republican candidate. Finally, Ron Paul is the only Republican who will not face a serious libertarian third party challenge.
So, not only has Ron Paul been right for a long time about the interrelated key issues facing the nation: war and peace, the economy, spending, taxes and inflation, but he is the best chance, really the only chance we have to make Barack Obama the next resident of the United States.
Closing Statement. The American nation is in a state of great crisis. It’s the crisis of liberalism, the notion that government force could create a Great Society. Liberalism failed and it’s bankrupt and continuing on the current path will lead to disaster.
Of the five remaining men who could be the next president, Ron Paul is the only one promising to take a different path, the path of limited government and individual liberty. All of the others have been part of the problem we need to solve. Regardless of what they call themselves – watch the hands not the mouth – they have all supported big government policies and still do. At the end of the day, they trust government to solve our problems. Ron Paul knows that the government has created most of our problems and he will trust you and your liberty to solve them. Only Ron Paul has proposed any real spending cuts. Ron Paul’s commitment to cut one trillion and five federal departments is a good start.
Let me ask the young people here today. Do you want Democratic and Republican politicians like Obama and Santorum to make you pay for the mistakes of the past by piling up more federal debt? And to their parents and grandparents – do you really want to bequeath to your children and grandchildren a bankrupt, depressed and declining nation?
Big government causes problems and divides people. Only Ron Paul’s platform of liberty can solve these problems and bring our three generations together and guarantee a bright future for America.
Opening Statement. I want to thank the Amherst Republican Party for hosting this event and inviting me to participate and present Ron Paul’s views on the issues. I am proud to support Dr. Paul who is the only candidate to visit this area during the campaign. In August, he took time off from a family reunion to speak to 700 people who came to see him on just three days notice.
Before we get into the issues, I want to urge you to put aside the media propaganda and consider supporting Dr. Ron Paul. Contrary to what the media says, he can win the nomination and he can beat Obama. Ron is only 8 delegates behind the current frontrunner Rick Santorum. The other two candidates are fading. And not only can Ron beat Obama, he’s the only one who can unite the broad coalition necessary to do so.
Ron polls particularly well among young people, independents, working class people and people in the Northeast. He is strong where Obama is strong. Obama’s people won’t say so but they are terrified of Ron Paul. In the Rasmussen poll, Ron Paul holds Obama to just 44%, his lowest number against any Republican candidate. Finally, Ron Paul is the only Republican who will not face a serious libertarian third party challenge.
So, not only has Ron Paul been right for a long time about the interrelated key issues facing the nation: war and peace, the economy, spending, taxes and inflation, but he is the best chance, really the only chance we have to make Barack Obama the next resident of the United States.
Closing Statement. The American nation is in a state of great crisis. It’s the crisis of liberalism, the notion that government force could create a Great Society. Liberalism failed and it’s bankrupt and continuing on the current path will lead to disaster.
Of the five remaining men who could be the next president, Ron Paul is the only one promising to take a different path, the path of limited government and individual liberty. All of the others have been part of the problem we need to solve. Regardless of what they call themselves – watch the hands not the mouth – they have all supported big government policies and still do. At the end of the day, they trust government to solve our problems. Ron Paul knows that the government has created most of our problems and he will trust you and your liberty to solve them. Only Ron Paul has proposed any real spending cuts. Ron Paul’s commitment to cut one trillion and five federal departments is a good start.
Let me ask the young people here today. Do you want Democratic and Republican politicians like Obama and Santorum to make you pay for the mistakes of the past by piling up more federal debt? And to their parents and grandparents – do you really want to bequeath to your children and grandchildren a bankrupt, depressed and declining nation?
Big government causes problems and divides people. Only Ron Paul’s platform of liberty can solve these problems and bring our three generations together and guarantee a bright future for America.
WHAT I THINK........WALTER BLOCK
According to Gandhi "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." How does this apply to Ron Paul? Well, it is a bit more complicated than that in this case. Here, the "ignoring" certainly fits. The mainstream media talks about everyone else under the sun except for You Know Who. And who can forget the "laughing": he is a crazy old uncle, his suits don’t fit, his eyebrows aren’t "presidential" enough, etc. The "fighting" is clear: he has been smeared with everything in the book they could throw at him, and with lots of stuff that isn’t in the book too. But in the Gandhi case, each of these things occurred pretty much one at a time. First¸ they did this, then they did that. The implication is that after they finished the first thing, they stopped it, and then went on to the second; ditto for the third and fourth. Not so in the case of the Congressman from Texas. Even now, amidst all the laughing and the sneering, they are still ignoring Dr. Paul. How many stories about the presidential campaigns of Romney, Gingrich and Santorum (notice who is missing?) must we read from the New York Times and the Washington Post? How many times must we be reminded that Dr. Paul has not yet won any state election outright? (Maine doesn’t count. Vote fraud is yet another issue that did not beset Gandhi.) Why is it that the major media almost entirely ignored that magnificent and unprecedented march of his supporters in the military on Washington D.C. on February 20, 2012? Don’t ask me how these people can at one and the same time ignore Ron, smear him and laugh at him. To the uninitiated, this sounds like a logical contradiction. But, it would appear, our Powers That Be are even capable of ignoring the laws of logic.
But there are at present two more altogether different deviations from the Gandhi scenario now in play.
The first is that Ron Paul has "elevated" to the status of "power broker." Nonsense. No, nonsense on stilts. This is just another attempt on the part of the ruling class in our society to deflect Mr. Paul from his goal. First, to win the Republican nomination for President, then to gain a landslide victory over Mr. Obama in the fall, and finally to turn the U.S. and the world too into a free, peaceful, prosperous place where there is liberty for all. And, he will do it too. Yes, the Texas Congressman will have a difficult time attaining the first of these goals. But when and if he does, it will be all downhill after that, as he cashes in on his additional support of first Independents, and second, disaffected Democrats too. The status of "power broker" implies that the next president of the U.S. will take Paul’s calls; that he will have some input into the party platform (which is almost totally ignored in any case); that, perhaps, there will indeed be some sort of luke-warm oversight placed on the Fed; that there will be yet another blue-ribbon commission instituted to study whether marijuana shall be legalized (which will also be ignored). No. "Power broker" is a mere booby prize. Ron is in this for the long haul. For him it is "President or bust." "Power broker," along with ignoring, laughing at, smearing, are just attempts to deflect him from his this magnificent goal of his.
The second non-Gandhian scenario being experienced by Ron Paul is that he is now in cahoots with Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney? Bost and tosh. Yes, there is a lack of personal antipathy between the two men; indeed, there is some sort of grudging respect between them. Their wives are friendly. Yes, Ron sees in Mitt a person who is less of a loose cannon in many ways than either Scam or Noot. So what? When it comes to matters of substance, in terms of foreign policy, economic principles, personal liberties as Ron never tires of telling anyone who will listen, there is as much of a unbridgeable a gap between Ron and Mitt as there is between Ron and either of the two others (notice, I’m not mentioning their names? Hah! Take that). This collusion scenario too is an attempt to deflect the Congressman from his goal of bringing liberty to the world. For surely Dr. Paul would be the junior partner in any such amalgamation, at least in the eyes of the mainstream media and the real power brokers in the Republican Party. Maybe, possibly, he or his son Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky will be offered the Vice Presidential spot on the ticket.
Well, maybe, who knows, the future is uncertain. But at this point in time, there is no doubt about it. Ron Paul is in this game for all the marbles. And power broker, along with junior partner, are only obstacles in his path, along with ignoring, laughing at, smearing, and other such impediments.
But there are at present two more altogether different deviations from the Gandhi scenario now in play.
The first is that Ron Paul has "elevated" to the status of "power broker." Nonsense. No, nonsense on stilts. This is just another attempt on the part of the ruling class in our society to deflect Mr. Paul from his goal. First, to win the Republican nomination for President, then to gain a landslide victory over Mr. Obama in the fall, and finally to turn the U.S. and the world too into a free, peaceful, prosperous place where there is liberty for all. And, he will do it too. Yes, the Texas Congressman will have a difficult time attaining the first of these goals. But when and if he does, it will be all downhill after that, as he cashes in on his additional support of first Independents, and second, disaffected Democrats too. The status of "power broker" implies that the next president of the U.S. will take Paul’s calls; that he will have some input into the party platform (which is almost totally ignored in any case); that, perhaps, there will indeed be some sort of luke-warm oversight placed on the Fed; that there will be yet another blue-ribbon commission instituted to study whether marijuana shall be legalized (which will also be ignored). No. "Power broker" is a mere booby prize. Ron is in this for the long haul. For him it is "President or bust." "Power broker," along with ignoring, laughing at, smearing, are just attempts to deflect him from his this magnificent goal of his.
The second non-Gandhian scenario being experienced by Ron Paul is that he is now in cahoots with Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney? Bost and tosh. Yes, there is a lack of personal antipathy between the two men; indeed, there is some sort of grudging respect between them. Their wives are friendly. Yes, Ron sees in Mitt a person who is less of a loose cannon in many ways than either Scam or Noot. So what? When it comes to matters of substance, in terms of foreign policy, economic principles, personal liberties as Ron never tires of telling anyone who will listen, there is as much of a unbridgeable a gap between Ron and Mitt as there is between Ron and either of the two others (notice, I’m not mentioning their names? Hah! Take that). This collusion scenario too is an attempt to deflect the Congressman from his goal of bringing liberty to the world. For surely Dr. Paul would be the junior partner in any such amalgamation, at least in the eyes of the mainstream media and the real power brokers in the Republican Party. Maybe, possibly, he or his son Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky will be offered the Vice Presidential spot on the ticket.
Well, maybe, who knows, the future is uncertain. But at this point in time, there is no doubt about it. Ron Paul is in this game for all the marbles. And power broker, along with junior partner, are only obstacles in his path, along with ignoring, laughing at, smearing, and other such impediments.
Saturday
WHAT I THINK.........THE ARAB AMERICAN NEWS
It was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., perhaps America's greatest civil rights leader and one of its most trusted moral compasses, who once spoke out against America's penchant for dictating the affairs of other nations through military and other interventions.
“Don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world...,” he said in his landmark speech, 'Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam' in 1967.
More than four decades later, longtime Texas Congressman Ron Paul, 76, has gained a loyal following, even among scores of youth voters, in large part because of his own interpretation of that philosophy. Paul has gained notoriety by cautioning against the consequences of the United States' role as “policeman of the world” several times on the Republican campaign circuit while emphasizing the need for military spending and foreign aid cuts at a time when our money is needed at home more than ever.
A return to true diplomacy with the likes of Iran and other nations deemed to be threats is the answer, the Air Force veteran Paul defiantly persists as he has for years in Congressional hearings, not continued policies of sanctions and interventions that cripple civilian populations along with hostile rhetoric and condemnations that often only serve as the pretext to more wars serving financial elites, part of the 'Military Industrial Complex' former president Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against.
Despite these noble stances, Paul is often cast aside by the mainstream media and many staunch conservative voters in large part because of his foreign policy positions.
The Arab American News, however, sees Dr. Paul's refreshing, forthright foreign policy philosophy as one of his greatest strengths at a time when the specter of a potentially catastrophic war looms over festering, misunderstood and misreported conflicts in the Middle East. His positions are perhaps the best hope for even a remotely balanced policy in the troubled region that we've seen in decades.
Paul has also been the only major Republican candidate to resist the type of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant demonization, fear-mongering and pandering to ultra-conservative voters in his party that has become pervasive in the post-9/11 climate, despite continued studies showing that terror threats posed by such groups have been greatly exaggerated coming to light along with polls reaffirming the groups’ affinity for American ideals and patriotism.
Speaking of American ideals, Paul is the candidate with the most appreciation for the Constitution in matters such as the requirement for Congress to authorize war, the protection from illegal searches by the TSA, which he believes is a rogue agency that should be abolished, and the power and right of the government to issue its own currency instead of relying on the private, interest-charging Federal Reserve banking corporation.
Paul introduced a bill to audit the Fed in 2009 and also has courageously fought and spoke out against the nefarious National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was passed under the cover of near-secrecy from the mainstream media on New Year's Eve and authorizes the indefinite detention of American citizens without trial. He introduced a bill to repeal those provisions and has spoken out against other violations of civil liberties such as the myriad proposed Internet censorship bills and the extension of the PATRIOT Act, in line with the positions of major civil rights organizations like the ACLU.
Other candidates vying for the Republican Party nomination including Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich continue to use the rallying cry of “American exceptionalism” to score cheap political points at debates that have been described by many as shallow, divisive and at times cringe-worthy, all the while turning their backs on the values of liberty and justice for all that made America so exceptional in the first place.
In an interview with The Arab American News this past November prior to a debate about the economy at Oakland University, Paul reaffirmed his positions on many of the above issues while reiterating his plans to make significant, honest and much-needed cuts in military overspending later that evening.
That's not to say there aren't concerns surrounding Paul, ranging from his age to the hypothetical difficulties of making major policy transitions to the potentially Earth-shaking proposed eliminations of five government departments including the Department of Education and Department of Housing.
But Paul's consistent voice and unwavering commitment to restoring American ideals at a time when telling the truth to power has indeed become a revolutionary act makes him a voice worthy of our support in this Tuesday's Michigan primary election. With so few dynamic, true public servants in Washington like Paul in this increasingly fascist era of corporations-as-people, we must support those that remain with all of our political fervor going forward.
On Tuesday, February 28th we recommend that you give your vote to Ron Paul.
“Don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world...,” he said in his landmark speech, 'Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam' in 1967.
More than four decades later, longtime Texas Congressman Ron Paul, 76, has gained a loyal following, even among scores of youth voters, in large part because of his own interpretation of that philosophy. Paul has gained notoriety by cautioning against the consequences of the United States' role as “policeman of the world” several times on the Republican campaign circuit while emphasizing the need for military spending and foreign aid cuts at a time when our money is needed at home more than ever.
A return to true diplomacy with the likes of Iran and other nations deemed to be threats is the answer, the Air Force veteran Paul defiantly persists as he has for years in Congressional hearings, not continued policies of sanctions and interventions that cripple civilian populations along with hostile rhetoric and condemnations that often only serve as the pretext to more wars serving financial elites, part of the 'Military Industrial Complex' former president Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against.
Despite these noble stances, Paul is often cast aside by the mainstream media and many staunch conservative voters in large part because of his foreign policy positions.
The Arab American News, however, sees Dr. Paul's refreshing, forthright foreign policy philosophy as one of his greatest strengths at a time when the specter of a potentially catastrophic war looms over festering, misunderstood and misreported conflicts in the Middle East. His positions are perhaps the best hope for even a remotely balanced policy in the troubled region that we've seen in decades.
Paul has also been the only major Republican candidate to resist the type of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant demonization, fear-mongering and pandering to ultra-conservative voters in his party that has become pervasive in the post-9/11 climate, despite continued studies showing that terror threats posed by such groups have been greatly exaggerated coming to light along with polls reaffirming the groups’ affinity for American ideals and patriotism.
Speaking of American ideals, Paul is the candidate with the most appreciation for the Constitution in matters such as the requirement for Congress to authorize war, the protection from illegal searches by the TSA, which he believes is a rogue agency that should be abolished, and the power and right of the government to issue its own currency instead of relying on the private, interest-charging Federal Reserve banking corporation.
Paul introduced a bill to audit the Fed in 2009 and also has courageously fought and spoke out against the nefarious National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was passed under the cover of near-secrecy from the mainstream media on New Year's Eve and authorizes the indefinite detention of American citizens without trial. He introduced a bill to repeal those provisions and has spoken out against other violations of civil liberties such as the myriad proposed Internet censorship bills and the extension of the PATRIOT Act, in line with the positions of major civil rights organizations like the ACLU.
Other candidates vying for the Republican Party nomination including Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich continue to use the rallying cry of “American exceptionalism” to score cheap political points at debates that have been described by many as shallow, divisive and at times cringe-worthy, all the while turning their backs on the values of liberty and justice for all that made America so exceptional in the first place.
In an interview with The Arab American News this past November prior to a debate about the economy at Oakland University, Paul reaffirmed his positions on many of the above issues while reiterating his plans to make significant, honest and much-needed cuts in military overspending later that evening.
That's not to say there aren't concerns surrounding Paul, ranging from his age to the hypothetical difficulties of making major policy transitions to the potentially Earth-shaking proposed eliminations of five government departments including the Department of Education and Department of Housing.
But Paul's consistent voice and unwavering commitment to restoring American ideals at a time when telling the truth to power has indeed become a revolutionary act makes him a voice worthy of our support in this Tuesday's Michigan primary election. With so few dynamic, true public servants in Washington like Paul in this increasingly fascist era of corporations-as-people, we must support those that remain with all of our political fervor going forward.
On Tuesday, February 28th we recommend that you give your vote to Ron Paul.
WHAT I THINK.......ALLAN STEVO
America is a place where neighbors rarely speak openly about politics, and when they do, it is usually only to repeat media sound bites. An Obama / Paul race will change that. Two differing ideologies will Clash. One for greater individual freedom. The other for more government. This competition of ideas will not occur with other Republican candidates, since they are ideologically aligned with President Obama when it comes to the power of the individual over the power of the state. Inevitably, debates will take place between the two candidates. Discussions in the new media will take place on the candidates. And most importantly, neighbors will discuss these two ideologies with each other. Because the differences between them are so significant these two candidates will compel us to move beyond the media sound bites and really examine our beliefs about the idea of America and the direction we should take as a nation. We can make that debate happen.
Many proponents of the statist ideology will work hard to see to it that the champions of freedom are denied a candidate in the general election who expresses those viewpoints. As usual, America’s political class will try to limit debate so that only statist viewpoints are widely expressed and only candidates with statist viewpoints are included on the ballot in November. This year is very different. It is possible and likely that Ron Paul will win the Republican nomination and that great contest of ideas will take place. Instead of Americans being forced to choose between two statists of different flavors ("the lesser of two evils"), they will be able to decide between an advocate of statism and an advocate of freedom.
President Obama is very charismatic and energizes large groups of people with his charm. Congressman Paul, too, energizes large groups of people, but with his relentless pursuit of the truth and his insistence on communicating that truth. These two men will face off and provide America with two different choices for what the future holds. America will have the opportunity to decisively choose which of those paths take. Never in my life have I been able to experience America the way America will look come autumn of 2012 as economic conditions worsen and Americans look to two very different philosophies to explain the cause and correction of the nation’s problems.
It’s the Intellectual Revolution that Matters Most
Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul informs us that election day is but a punctuation mark on the debates of society, a punctuation mark on the active participation of the citizenry. Historian Murray Rothbard points out that the American Revolution took place at least a decade prior to 1776. The shooting war from 1776 onward was but a bloody rebellion that came about because the British government refused to recognize that the colonies had forged a new society. What happens in the hearts and minds is what matters. While winning the election will be the goal of these two political campaigns, what all of us Americans should want above all else is to see this "Great Debate" when Paul and Obama run against each other. I fully expect that Paul will win the nomination, will go on to win the presidency, will make important policy changes, and will lead necessary legislative changes while in office, but it will be that discussion that will change history. However much he changes the face of government, inspiring this Great Debate will be Paul’s most significant impact on America.
When I speak of this Great Debate, I refer not to any specific debate or series of debates between the candidates. I refer instead to the necessary discussion of ideas that takes place between the two campaigns in this election, and especially to the discussion of ideas that will take place in the new media, among neighbors, and in many other forums when these two very different candidates square off.
Ron Paul and Barrack Obama are the Ideal Candidates
There are few people as qualified to represent the sides of the debate. Obama is the charismatic figurehead of the political establishment that calls for greater statism and corporatism. This establishment crosses party lines and includes the vast majority of federal politicians. He is the figurehead of what pollster Scott Rasmussen identifies as the American political class – a group of less than 10% of Americans who identify with the government on at least two of the following three questions:
Whose judgment do you trust more: that of the American people or American political leaders?
Has the federal government become its own special interest group?
Do government and big business often work together in ways that hurt consumers?
President Obama, a man whose time in office has aptly demonstrated his belief that the federal government can solve life’s problems by force of mandate, is qualified to represent the American political class in an election.
Ron Paul has spent approximately 40 years establishing himself as the most qualified person to represent freedom – he is well mannered, well read, knowledgeable of the workings of the halls of power, and an adherent to constitutional and pro-freedom values. He regularly finds himself in direct opposition to the ideas of the political class. He is unique among the Republican candidates in flatly speaking out against the statism and corporatism of the political establishment. It is imperative to that establishment that Paul not be allowed to win the presidency and nearly as important that his voice not even be heard. The political establishment does not want the American people to examine their beliefs, forced to think, forced to choose, forced to be exposed to a debate that is so powerful and expansive that neighbors and strangers will reach out to each other to discuss the issues of the day. The establishment is terrified by the potential of that debate. They realize that merely opening the channels of communication between friends and neighbors is enough to bring drastic and lasting change.
I know that debate will happen.
Both you and I know how important that debate is. After all, it’s the debates – the shifting intellectual environment – that made the American Revolution what it was. The act of taking up arms wasn’t the important part. Some piece of each one of us understands how important that debate is; that’s why we are active in the freedom movement. Let’s face it – both you and I have more relaxing and more comfortable things to do than win the day for Ron Paul. For example, instead of spending my time with the people I love the most, I am writing this to you. I am writing this book because I know that the small percentage of Americans who make up the political establishment can be overcome by the rest of the population. I write this because I know that you personally can so successfully appeal to the sense of reason of so many other Americans. Are we not better served by an Obama / Paul race in November than by another contest of Statist vs. Statist? Isn’t it good for the nation to debate the questions that will arise from these two very different candidates meeting? I’m suspect of anyone who doesn’t think that debate is a good idea.
‘Freedom Isn’t Free’ Gets Misused Often
I am active in the liberty movement, and I write this because I know the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. I imagine the reason that you are reading this right now is because you know the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. "Freedom isn’t free" is popularly used to explain why America should start wars around the world, and why those wars should be unquestioningly supported by the citizenry. However, "freedom isn’t free" more accurately is just a more concise way to say "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance." "Freedom isn’t free" means that we should always question, we should always challenge anyone who would limit our freedom. "Freedom isn’t free" comes down to a basic reality – only those who will force others to allow them to be free will actually be allowed to be free. Some may dislike the fact that freedom requires constant vigilance and struggle, but dislike of the truth does not make the truth any less true.
I believe, dear reader, you realize that freedom is costly; otherwise it’s unlikely that you’d spend your time reading about the arduous work of bringing greater freedom to America.
You are sacrificing by reading this. Instead of spending your time with the people you love most or engaging in a host of other more relaxing activities, you are giving me the chance to share my plan for making the Great Debate happen. Maybe better than referring to it as "sacrificing," is pointing out that it is more of an investment. The work you and I put in today in the freedom movement may pay dividends today and may pay dividends for many years to come. Do the wrong work and there will be no dividends. Do the right work for freedom and the dividends will be clear.
We are communicating through this writing because we want to invest in the future of America. We can invest time and effort today to reap benefits in the future. We want to work efficiently, because we all know that our personal resources (time, money, and energy) are limited. Many of us probably also know the feeling of ineffective work. Some who read this may even know the disappointment of what may feel like decades of ineffective work on behalf of freedom.
The Liberty Movement Is Succeeding
If we zoom the camera out, we see that America is in the midst of a great change; the false claims for change from the 2008 election have been rejected; it is the liberty movement that has created a foundation for the change that is taking place. The calls for freedom are loud and widespread. No matter how high the establishment media raises its volume, it can’t talk over those voices. As strong and secure as the established voices may seem, the American political class is terrified at the change it sees taking place in America, which is precisely why they ignore us. Our challenge to them is formidable, and we have everything in order to see the first great political victory of our movement. We overestimate their strength when we think otherwise. Now is the time to push even harder, because our efforts are so close to bearing fruit.
My book How to Win America for Ron Paul and the Cause of Freedom in 2012 is my call to the freedom movement – how to be as effective as possible, both personally and as a movement. If we agree on common goals – getting Ron Paul the Republican nomination, getting Ron Paul into the Oval Office, and severely limiting the power of the federal government once he is in the Oval Office, then this is the most effective, publicly available road map to that goal. We must work quickly. So many opportunities are available today that will be gone in a few months. Today is the day to begin this important work. Wait three months and the road map becomes obsolete. Get to work on this plan today and the road map becomes effective, the road map becomes true, the road map becomes our way to make the Great Debate happen, and the road map becomes the path to the White House on inauguration day, January 20, 2013.
Many proponents of the statist ideology will work hard to see to it that the champions of freedom are denied a candidate in the general election who expresses those viewpoints. As usual, America’s political class will try to limit debate so that only statist viewpoints are widely expressed and only candidates with statist viewpoints are included on the ballot in November. This year is very different. It is possible and likely that Ron Paul will win the Republican nomination and that great contest of ideas will take place. Instead of Americans being forced to choose between two statists of different flavors ("the lesser of two evils"), they will be able to decide between an advocate of statism and an advocate of freedom.
President Obama is very charismatic and energizes large groups of people with his charm. Congressman Paul, too, energizes large groups of people, but with his relentless pursuit of the truth and his insistence on communicating that truth. These two men will face off and provide America with two different choices for what the future holds. America will have the opportunity to decisively choose which of those paths take. Never in my life have I been able to experience America the way America will look come autumn of 2012 as economic conditions worsen and Americans look to two very different philosophies to explain the cause and correction of the nation’s problems.
It’s the Intellectual Revolution that Matters Most
Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul informs us that election day is but a punctuation mark on the debates of society, a punctuation mark on the active participation of the citizenry. Historian Murray Rothbard points out that the American Revolution took place at least a decade prior to 1776. The shooting war from 1776 onward was but a bloody rebellion that came about because the British government refused to recognize that the colonies had forged a new society. What happens in the hearts and minds is what matters. While winning the election will be the goal of these two political campaigns, what all of us Americans should want above all else is to see this "Great Debate" when Paul and Obama run against each other. I fully expect that Paul will win the nomination, will go on to win the presidency, will make important policy changes, and will lead necessary legislative changes while in office, but it will be that discussion that will change history. However much he changes the face of government, inspiring this Great Debate will be Paul’s most significant impact on America.
When I speak of this Great Debate, I refer not to any specific debate or series of debates between the candidates. I refer instead to the necessary discussion of ideas that takes place between the two campaigns in this election, and especially to the discussion of ideas that will take place in the new media, among neighbors, and in many other forums when these two very different candidates square off.
Ron Paul and Barrack Obama are the Ideal Candidates
There are few people as qualified to represent the sides of the debate. Obama is the charismatic figurehead of the political establishment that calls for greater statism and corporatism. This establishment crosses party lines and includes the vast majority of federal politicians. He is the figurehead of what pollster Scott Rasmussen identifies as the American political class – a group of less than 10% of Americans who identify with the government on at least two of the following three questions:
Whose judgment do you trust more: that of the American people or American political leaders?
Has the federal government become its own special interest group?
Do government and big business often work together in ways that hurt consumers?
President Obama, a man whose time in office has aptly demonstrated his belief that the federal government can solve life’s problems by force of mandate, is qualified to represent the American political class in an election.
Ron Paul has spent approximately 40 years establishing himself as the most qualified person to represent freedom – he is well mannered, well read, knowledgeable of the workings of the halls of power, and an adherent to constitutional and pro-freedom values. He regularly finds himself in direct opposition to the ideas of the political class. He is unique among the Republican candidates in flatly speaking out against the statism and corporatism of the political establishment. It is imperative to that establishment that Paul not be allowed to win the presidency and nearly as important that his voice not even be heard. The political establishment does not want the American people to examine their beliefs, forced to think, forced to choose, forced to be exposed to a debate that is so powerful and expansive that neighbors and strangers will reach out to each other to discuss the issues of the day. The establishment is terrified by the potential of that debate. They realize that merely opening the channels of communication between friends and neighbors is enough to bring drastic and lasting change.
I know that debate will happen.
Both you and I know how important that debate is. After all, it’s the debates – the shifting intellectual environment – that made the American Revolution what it was. The act of taking up arms wasn’t the important part. Some piece of each one of us understands how important that debate is; that’s why we are active in the freedom movement. Let’s face it – both you and I have more relaxing and more comfortable things to do than win the day for Ron Paul. For example, instead of spending my time with the people I love the most, I am writing this to you. I am writing this book because I know that the small percentage of Americans who make up the political establishment can be overcome by the rest of the population. I write this because I know that you personally can so successfully appeal to the sense of reason of so many other Americans. Are we not better served by an Obama / Paul race in November than by another contest of Statist vs. Statist? Isn’t it good for the nation to debate the questions that will arise from these two very different candidates meeting? I’m suspect of anyone who doesn’t think that debate is a good idea.
‘Freedom Isn’t Free’ Gets Misused Often
I am active in the liberty movement, and I write this because I know the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. I imagine the reason that you are reading this right now is because you know the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. "Freedom isn’t free" is popularly used to explain why America should start wars around the world, and why those wars should be unquestioningly supported by the citizenry. However, "freedom isn’t free" more accurately is just a more concise way to say "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance." "Freedom isn’t free" means that we should always question, we should always challenge anyone who would limit our freedom. "Freedom isn’t free" comes down to a basic reality – only those who will force others to allow them to be free will actually be allowed to be free. Some may dislike the fact that freedom requires constant vigilance and struggle, but dislike of the truth does not make the truth any less true.
I believe, dear reader, you realize that freedom is costly; otherwise it’s unlikely that you’d spend your time reading about the arduous work of bringing greater freedom to America.
You are sacrificing by reading this. Instead of spending your time with the people you love most or engaging in a host of other more relaxing activities, you are giving me the chance to share my plan for making the Great Debate happen. Maybe better than referring to it as "sacrificing," is pointing out that it is more of an investment. The work you and I put in today in the freedom movement may pay dividends today and may pay dividends for many years to come. Do the wrong work and there will be no dividends. Do the right work for freedom and the dividends will be clear.
We are communicating through this writing because we want to invest in the future of America. We can invest time and effort today to reap benefits in the future. We want to work efficiently, because we all know that our personal resources (time, money, and energy) are limited. Many of us probably also know the feeling of ineffective work. Some who read this may even know the disappointment of what may feel like decades of ineffective work on behalf of freedom.
The Liberty Movement Is Succeeding
If we zoom the camera out, we see that America is in the midst of a great change; the false claims for change from the 2008 election have been rejected; it is the liberty movement that has created a foundation for the change that is taking place. The calls for freedom are loud and widespread. No matter how high the establishment media raises its volume, it can’t talk over those voices. As strong and secure as the established voices may seem, the American political class is terrified at the change it sees taking place in America, which is precisely why they ignore us. Our challenge to them is formidable, and we have everything in order to see the first great political victory of our movement. We overestimate their strength when we think otherwise. Now is the time to push even harder, because our efforts are so close to bearing fruit.
My book How to Win America for Ron Paul and the Cause of Freedom in 2012 is my call to the freedom movement – how to be as effective as possible, both personally and as a movement. If we agree on common goals – getting Ron Paul the Republican nomination, getting Ron Paul into the Oval Office, and severely limiting the power of the federal government once he is in the Oval Office, then this is the most effective, publicly available road map to that goal. We must work quickly. So many opportunities are available today that will be gone in a few months. Today is the day to begin this important work. Wait three months and the road map becomes obsolete. Get to work on this plan today and the road map becomes effective, the road map becomes true, the road map becomes our way to make the Great Debate happen, and the road map becomes the path to the White House on inauguration day, January 20, 2013.
Thursday
Tuesday
WHAT I THINK........KATERINA AZAROVA
Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul slammed America's system of governance at a rally in Kansas City, saying businesses and government are pushing the country into twenty-first century fascism.
But before you start picturing fair-skinned, blue-eyed CEOs and bureaucrats running amok and with their right arms held high, calm down. What the outspoken Texas Republican meant was fascist corporatism – an economic model most prominently seen in Mussolini’s Italy of the 1920s to the 1940s. Fascist economic corporatism involved government and private management of full sectors of the economy – which Paul says is par for the course in today's America.
“We’ve slipped away from a true republic,” Paul told thousands of his supporters at the rally. “Now we’re slipping into a fascist system where it’s a combination of government, big business and authoritarian rule, and the suppression of the individual rights of each and every American citizen.”
His words, which a few years ago might have been dismissed by most, rang loud and clear in Kansas. Paul’s rally coincided with long-established Missouri and Kansas GOP events – from which many attendees actually slipped away to hear Paul deliver his speech. Drawn out and bled dry by ongoing and expensive overseas military campaigns, Americans are more and more receptive to a foreign policy of peace, which is what Paul promises to deliver.
The presidential hopeful echoed words already once delivered to the American people – by their president. Dwight Eisenhower said, in his farewell address to the nation, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
The disastrous rise, it seems, has happened. In 2009 alone, the United States was responsible for almost half of the world’s total military spending – 46 per cent, or 712 billion US dollars. Since then, the figures have only grown, to the point that American military spending now exceeds that of China, Russia, Japan, India, and the rest of NATO combined. The US has more than 700 military bases in 130 countries around the world.
But, one might ask, can’t the American government – which oversees the world's highest gross domestic product – afford some extra military spending?
The simple answer is: no.
The wealthiest nation also happens to have the biggest national debt in world history. With the dollar acting as a global reserve currency, the Federal Reserve leaving the printing press running around the clock, and manufacturing and production being outsourced to cheap foreign labor markets, the US economy looks more like a Ponzi scheme. And as former president George W. Bush told his Argentine counterpart Nestor Kirchner, "The best way to revitalize the economy is war, and the US has grown stronger with war."
But Americans are tired of war – and are tired of waiting for the magical day when war will magically revive the economy. Which is why Ron Paul may have found the perfect note to strike with voters as he continues to fight in the Republican primaries.
But before you start picturing fair-skinned, blue-eyed CEOs and bureaucrats running amok and with their right arms held high, calm down. What the outspoken Texas Republican meant was fascist corporatism – an economic model most prominently seen in Mussolini’s Italy of the 1920s to the 1940s. Fascist economic corporatism involved government and private management of full sectors of the economy – which Paul says is par for the course in today's America.
“We’ve slipped away from a true republic,” Paul told thousands of his supporters at the rally. “Now we’re slipping into a fascist system where it’s a combination of government, big business and authoritarian rule, and the suppression of the individual rights of each and every American citizen.”
His words, which a few years ago might have been dismissed by most, rang loud and clear in Kansas. Paul’s rally coincided with long-established Missouri and Kansas GOP events – from which many attendees actually slipped away to hear Paul deliver his speech. Drawn out and bled dry by ongoing and expensive overseas military campaigns, Americans are more and more receptive to a foreign policy of peace, which is what Paul promises to deliver.
The presidential hopeful echoed words already once delivered to the American people – by their president. Dwight Eisenhower said, in his farewell address to the nation, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
The disastrous rise, it seems, has happened. In 2009 alone, the United States was responsible for almost half of the world’s total military spending – 46 per cent, or 712 billion US dollars. Since then, the figures have only grown, to the point that American military spending now exceeds that of China, Russia, Japan, India, and the rest of NATO combined. The US has more than 700 military bases in 130 countries around the world.
But, one might ask, can’t the American government – which oversees the world's highest gross domestic product – afford some extra military spending?
The simple answer is: no.
The wealthiest nation also happens to have the biggest national debt in world history. With the dollar acting as a global reserve currency, the Federal Reserve leaving the printing press running around the clock, and manufacturing and production being outsourced to cheap foreign labor markets, the US economy looks more like a Ponzi scheme. And as former president George W. Bush told his Argentine counterpart Nestor Kirchner, "The best way to revitalize the economy is war, and the US has grown stronger with war."
But Americans are tired of war – and are tired of waiting for the magical day when war will magically revive the economy. Which is why Ron Paul may have found the perfect note to strike with voters as he continues to fight in the Republican primaries.
Thursday
WHAT I THINK........JUSTIN RAIMONDO
At this point it is clear that Rep. Ron Paul is not going to be the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. Yet it seems likely that he will outlast all his rivals but for Romney, and that he will have a substantial bloc of delegates at the convention. Paul has the money, and the grassroots support, to make it all the way to Tampa—and beyond.
It’s when we get to the “beyond,” however, that things get interesting.
What, exactly, is Paul’s endgame? What does he want? This is the question the pundits are asking, and the answer is maddeningly elusive.
On the one hand, Republican primary voters are increasingly open to his message of real free markets (as opposed to the crony capitalism championed by most Republicans), the defense of civil liberties (against largely Republican antagonists), and a noninterventionist foreign policy (an idea opposed by the leadership of both parties). He is regularly getting around 20 percent of the vote in GOP primaries, and his supporters are mostly (albeit not exclusively) young, independents inclined to vote Republican, and not that well off (under $50,000 per year).
His support grew by the day, in spite of a media blackout—and when simply refusing to report on his campaign didn’t put a dent in his support, the mainstream media turned to smear tactics. That hasn’t worked, either.
On the other hand, Paul’s support within the GOP has a definite ceiling: I’d be surprised if his poll numbers exceeded 25 percent in any state’s primary. This is a commentary not on Paul, but on the evolution of the Republicans, whose brand has been sullied by eight years of George W. Bush’s big-government conservatism. Since many Republican presidential primaries are closed, Paul’s political fortunes are left in the hands of those who are registered members of a party committed to eternal war, corporate subsidies, and the cult of the presidency. The political independents and disaffected Democrats who make up half his base are prevented from voting for him in closed GOP primaries, which is why we see polls showing him in a dead heat with Barack Obama in the general election juxtaposed against other polls showing him in the upper teens in the GOP primary pack.
GOP leaders are living in fear of a Paul third-party candidacy in the general election: Polls show Paul would garner 18 percent of the vote as an independent, and as the election draws nearer and scrutiny of Romney gets more intense, I fully expect that number to rise.
Provocatively, Paul hasn’t ruled out a third-party run, but he says he isn’t planning on it, and doesn’t want to do it. Of course he doesn’t want to do it: Who would? After all, even getting on the ballot is a Herculean task; and besides, he’s having too much fun right now running in the major leagues to be sent down prematurely to play third-party “gadfly,” which he did in 1988 with negligible success. So he’s likely to keep them guessing until the very last moment.
If the GOP bigwigs are hoping Paul will eventually endorse the nominee, and bring his supporters into the Romney camp, they don’t know anything about the Texas congressman, who has spent his whole political career fighting the very forces represented by Romney and his backers. Take it from me: It isn’t going to happen. And even if it did—if Ron Paul were suddenly possessed by an evil spirit—he wouldn’t bring very many of his supporters with him. His followers are just like him: principled, cantankerous, and uninterested in merging with the “mainstream.”
The GOP hierarchy thinks it has Paul over a barrel. By holding his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), hostage, the wags inform us that Paul is unlikely to launch a third-party campaign, because it would supposedly end Rand’s career.
Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it. This isn’t just a political campaign—it’s a cause. The many followers who have been recruited to his banner are expecting something more than a fizzle-out in Tampa. They have put their hearts and souls—and, more significantly (for libertarians), their cash—into this effort, and they aren’t going to be happy with some anticlimactic end to the Ron Paul story. They want closure. They want to know they at least did everything they could to avoid the apocalypse Paul has spent the last 30 years or so warning us about: an economic downturn that will make the crash of ’08 look like child’s play, and the end of liberty in America.
In my view, a third-party campaign by Paul is the logical outcome of his entire career: After being rejected by a GOP mutated beyond recognition, he and his brigades of fervent followers will not be content until they’ve stormed the gates of the federal Leviathan and made a good-faith attempt at bringing the monster down. It will be Paul’s last hurrah—and, perhaps, the last hurrah of our Old Republic.
It’s when we get to the “beyond,” however, that things get interesting.
What, exactly, is Paul’s endgame? What does he want? This is the question the pundits are asking, and the answer is maddeningly elusive.
On the one hand, Republican primary voters are increasingly open to his message of real free markets (as opposed to the crony capitalism championed by most Republicans), the defense of civil liberties (against largely Republican antagonists), and a noninterventionist foreign policy (an idea opposed by the leadership of both parties). He is regularly getting around 20 percent of the vote in GOP primaries, and his supporters are mostly (albeit not exclusively) young, independents inclined to vote Republican, and not that well off (under $50,000 per year).
His support grew by the day, in spite of a media blackout—and when simply refusing to report on his campaign didn’t put a dent in his support, the mainstream media turned to smear tactics. That hasn’t worked, either.
On the other hand, Paul’s support within the GOP has a definite ceiling: I’d be surprised if his poll numbers exceeded 25 percent in any state’s primary. This is a commentary not on Paul, but on the evolution of the Republicans, whose brand has been sullied by eight years of George W. Bush’s big-government conservatism. Since many Republican presidential primaries are closed, Paul’s political fortunes are left in the hands of those who are registered members of a party committed to eternal war, corporate subsidies, and the cult of the presidency. The political independents and disaffected Democrats who make up half his base are prevented from voting for him in closed GOP primaries, which is why we see polls showing him in a dead heat with Barack Obama in the general election juxtaposed against other polls showing him in the upper teens in the GOP primary pack.
GOP leaders are living in fear of a Paul third-party candidacy in the general election: Polls show Paul would garner 18 percent of the vote as an independent, and as the election draws nearer and scrutiny of Romney gets more intense, I fully expect that number to rise.
Provocatively, Paul hasn’t ruled out a third-party run, but he says he isn’t planning on it, and doesn’t want to do it. Of course he doesn’t want to do it: Who would? After all, even getting on the ballot is a Herculean task; and besides, he’s having too much fun right now running in the major leagues to be sent down prematurely to play third-party “gadfly,” which he did in 1988 with negligible success. So he’s likely to keep them guessing until the very last moment.
If the GOP bigwigs are hoping Paul will eventually endorse the nominee, and bring his supporters into the Romney camp, they don’t know anything about the Texas congressman, who has spent his whole political career fighting the very forces represented by Romney and his backers. Take it from me: It isn’t going to happen. And even if it did—if Ron Paul were suddenly possessed by an evil spirit—he wouldn’t bring very many of his supporters with him. His followers are just like him: principled, cantankerous, and uninterested in merging with the “mainstream.”
The GOP hierarchy thinks it has Paul over a barrel. By holding his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), hostage, the wags inform us that Paul is unlikely to launch a third-party campaign, because it would supposedly end Rand’s career.
Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it. This isn’t just a political campaign—it’s a cause. The many followers who have been recruited to his banner are expecting something more than a fizzle-out in Tampa. They have put their hearts and souls—and, more significantly (for libertarians), their cash—into this effort, and they aren’t going to be happy with some anticlimactic end to the Ron Paul story. They want closure. They want to know they at least did everything they could to avoid the apocalypse Paul has spent the last 30 years or so warning us about: an economic downturn that will make the crash of ’08 look like child’s play, and the end of liberty in America.
In my view, a third-party campaign by Paul is the logical outcome of his entire career: After being rejected by a GOP mutated beyond recognition, he and his brigades of fervent followers will not be content until they’ve stormed the gates of the federal Leviathan and made a good-faith attempt at bringing the monster down. It will be Paul’s last hurrah—and, perhaps, the last hurrah of our Old Republic.
Tuesday
WHAT I THINK.......KAL KOTECHA
There is still a chance for Americans to stem the inexorable push “To Narnia!”, as exhorted by fake Presidential candidate and comedian, Stephen Colbert. As humourous as it may be that Colbert trumped a candidate in a GOP Presidential nomination poll in South Carolina (nailing 5% of the votes to Jon Huntsman’s 4%), it’s a sobering footnote in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.
Sobering footnotes riddle America. America’s national debt increases an average of $3.96 billion per day. And, as economic Armageddon ravages America, the Presidential race is rife with candidates completely clueless about basic economics.
Who will staunch the bleeding of America – and how?
The lone GOP candidate to grasp the immensity and complexity of monetary policy is the 11-term Congressman from The Lone Star state – Dr. Ron Paul. He’s seen blood before – first as a flight surgeon in the U.S. air force; then as a Texas obstetrician delivering 4,000 babies; and, more recently, as a politician.
Paul supports an audit - then a cut - of the Federal Reserve System, believing it should be abolished. Typifying The Fed as counterfeiters, he has been vociferous about the “power and authority by Congress to create money out of thin air”. In February 2009, he introduced a bill to audit the Federal Reserve, opining that the “financial system is very friable, very vulnerable….and that it was the Fed that was creating the bubbles”. Believing that Americans have long been boondoggled by an increasingly corrupt Congress (the chicken that laid The Fed egg), Paul admitted that, as a Congressman, he can find out more about the CIA than the Federal Reserve System. Smell that rotten egg.
It’s time to cut the cozy “symbiosis between Congress and the Fed”. While speaking about the Federal Reserve, Paul noted that “not a lot of American people understand it and not a lot of people here in Congress understand it either” and “even members of the banking committee have come up to me and said you mean our dollar isn’t backed by gold anymore”?
Long advocating that gold is “the surest path back to sound money”, Paul eschews the fiat monetary system of money, staunchly supporting the gold standard which will tighten up the printing of ridiculous sums of currency and keep in check the powers that are responsible in doing so. This would also be bullish for gold as the reserve would have to back at least part of the currency with gold sending the price of the precious metal northward.
In his 1981 book (re-released in 2007) “Gold, Peace and Prosperity: The Birth of a New Currency”, Paul wrote “The gold coin standard, although imperfectly adhered to, permitted startling economic growth combined with falling prices in the 19th century. In the 67 years since the abolition of the gold standard, the Consumer Price Index has gone up 625 percent. In the previous 67 years, under an imperfect gold coin standard, the CPI increased 10 percent”.
But, does Ron Paul put his money where his mouth is?
As reported in the Wall Street Journal on December 21, 2011:
According to data available through his 2010 “Form A” financial disclosure statement, filed last May, Rep. Paul’s portfolio is valued between $2.44 million and $5.46 million. (Congressional disclosures are given in ranges, not precise amounts.)
Most members of Congress, like many Americans, hold some real estate, a few bonds or bond mutual funds, some individual stocks and a bundle of stock funds. Give or take a few percentage points, a typical Congressional portfolio might have 10% in cash, 10% in bonds or bond funds, 20% in real estate, and 60% in stocks or stock funds.
But Ron Paul’s portfolio isn’t merely different. It’s shockingly different.
Yes, about 21% of Rep. Paul’s holdings are in real estate and roughly 14% in cash. But he owns no bonds or bond funds and has only 0.1% in stock funds. Furthermore, the stock funds that Rep. Paul does own are all “short,” or make bets against, U.S. stocks. One is a “double inverse” fund that, on a daily basis, goes up twice as much as its stock benchmark goes down.
The remainder of Rep. Paul’s portfolio – fully 64% of his assets – is entirely in gold and silver mining stocks. He owns no Apple, no ExxonMobil, no Procter & Gamble, no General Electric, no Johnson & Johnson, not even a diversified mutual fund that holds a broad basket of stocks. Rep. Paul doesn’t own stock in any major companies at all except big precious-metals stocks like Barrick Gold, Goldcorp and Newmont Mining.
Rep. Paul also owns 23 other miners – many of them smaller, Canadian-based “juniors” whose stocks are highly risky. Ten of these stocks have total market valuations of less than $500 million, a common definition of a “microcap” stock. Mr. Paul has between $100,010 and $326,000 (roughly 5% of his assets) invested in these tiny, extremely volatile stocks.
Rep. Paul appears to be a strict buy-and-hold investor who rarely trades; he has held many of his mining stocks since at least 2002.
If there was ever a time to raise the (gold) standard in American political history, this is it. Our support goes to the lone golden candidate – Ron Paul.
Sobering footnotes riddle America. America’s national debt increases an average of $3.96 billion per day. And, as economic Armageddon ravages America, the Presidential race is rife with candidates completely clueless about basic economics.
Who will staunch the bleeding of America – and how?
The lone GOP candidate to grasp the immensity and complexity of monetary policy is the 11-term Congressman from The Lone Star state – Dr. Ron Paul. He’s seen blood before – first as a flight surgeon in the U.S. air force; then as a Texas obstetrician delivering 4,000 babies; and, more recently, as a politician.
Paul supports an audit - then a cut - of the Federal Reserve System, believing it should be abolished. Typifying The Fed as counterfeiters, he has been vociferous about the “power and authority by Congress to create money out of thin air”. In February 2009, he introduced a bill to audit the Federal Reserve, opining that the “financial system is very friable, very vulnerable….and that it was the Fed that was creating the bubbles”. Believing that Americans have long been boondoggled by an increasingly corrupt Congress (the chicken that laid The Fed egg), Paul admitted that, as a Congressman, he can find out more about the CIA than the Federal Reserve System. Smell that rotten egg.
It’s time to cut the cozy “symbiosis between Congress and the Fed”. While speaking about the Federal Reserve, Paul noted that “not a lot of American people understand it and not a lot of people here in Congress understand it either” and “even members of the banking committee have come up to me and said you mean our dollar isn’t backed by gold anymore”?
Long advocating that gold is “the surest path back to sound money”, Paul eschews the fiat monetary system of money, staunchly supporting the gold standard which will tighten up the printing of ridiculous sums of currency and keep in check the powers that are responsible in doing so. This would also be bullish for gold as the reserve would have to back at least part of the currency with gold sending the price of the precious metal northward.
In his 1981 book (re-released in 2007) “Gold, Peace and Prosperity: The Birth of a New Currency”, Paul wrote “The gold coin standard, although imperfectly adhered to, permitted startling economic growth combined with falling prices in the 19th century. In the 67 years since the abolition of the gold standard, the Consumer Price Index has gone up 625 percent. In the previous 67 years, under an imperfect gold coin standard, the CPI increased 10 percent”.
But, does Ron Paul put his money where his mouth is?
As reported in the Wall Street Journal on December 21, 2011:
According to data available through his 2010 “Form A” financial disclosure statement, filed last May, Rep. Paul’s portfolio is valued between $2.44 million and $5.46 million. (Congressional disclosures are given in ranges, not precise amounts.)
Most members of Congress, like many Americans, hold some real estate, a few bonds or bond mutual funds, some individual stocks and a bundle of stock funds. Give or take a few percentage points, a typical Congressional portfolio might have 10% in cash, 10% in bonds or bond funds, 20% in real estate, and 60% in stocks or stock funds.
But Ron Paul’s portfolio isn’t merely different. It’s shockingly different.
Yes, about 21% of Rep. Paul’s holdings are in real estate and roughly 14% in cash. But he owns no bonds or bond funds and has only 0.1% in stock funds. Furthermore, the stock funds that Rep. Paul does own are all “short,” or make bets against, U.S. stocks. One is a “double inverse” fund that, on a daily basis, goes up twice as much as its stock benchmark goes down.
The remainder of Rep. Paul’s portfolio – fully 64% of his assets – is entirely in gold and silver mining stocks. He owns no Apple, no ExxonMobil, no Procter & Gamble, no General Electric, no Johnson & Johnson, not even a diversified mutual fund that holds a broad basket of stocks. Rep. Paul doesn’t own stock in any major companies at all except big precious-metals stocks like Barrick Gold, Goldcorp and Newmont Mining.
Rep. Paul also owns 23 other miners – many of them smaller, Canadian-based “juniors” whose stocks are highly risky. Ten of these stocks have total market valuations of less than $500 million, a common definition of a “microcap” stock. Mr. Paul has between $100,010 and $326,000 (roughly 5% of his assets) invested in these tiny, extremely volatile stocks.
Rep. Paul appears to be a strict buy-and-hold investor who rarely trades; he has held many of his mining stocks since at least 2002.
If there was ever a time to raise the (gold) standard in American political history, this is it. Our support goes to the lone golden candidate – Ron Paul.
THE LATEST OBAMACARE OVERREACH
Many religious conservatives understandably are upset with the latest Obamacare mandate, which will require religious employers (including Catholic employers) to provide birth control to workers receiving healthcare benefits. This mandate includes certain birth control devices that are considered abortifacients, like IUDs and the "morning after" pill.
Of course Catholic teachings forbid the use of any sort of contraceptive devices, so this rule is anathema to the religious beliefs of Catholic employers. Religious freedom always has been considered sacrosanct in this country. However, our federal bureaucracy increasingly forces Americans to subsidize behaviors they find personally abhorrent, either through agency mandates or direct transfer payments funded by tax dollars.
Proponents of this mandate do not understand the gravity of forcing employers to subsidize activities that deeply conflict with their religious convictions. Proponents also do not understand that a refusal to subsidize those activities does not mean the employer is "denying access" to healthcare. If employers don't provide free food to employees, do we accuse them of starving their workers?
In truth this mandate has nothing to do with healthcare, and everything to do with the abortion industry and a hatred for traditional religious values. Obamacare apologists cannot abide any religious philosophy that promotes large, two parent, nuclear, heterosexual families and frowns on divorce and abortion. Because the political class hates these values, it feels compelled to impose—by force of law—its preferred vision of society: single parents are noble; birth control should be encouraged at an early age; and abortion must be upheld as an absolute moral right.
So the political class simply tells the American people and American industry what values must prevail, and what costs much be borne to implement those values. This time, however, the political class has been shocked by the uproar to the new mandate that it did not anticipate or understand.
But Catholic hospitals face the existential choice of obeying their conscience and engaging in civil disobedience, or closing their doors because government claims the power to force them to violate the teachings of their faith. This terrible imposition has resonated with many Americans, and now the Obama administration finds itself having to defend the terrible cultural baggage of the anti-religious left.
Of course many Catholic leaders originally supported Obamacare because they naively believe against all evidence that benign angels in government will improve medical care for the poor. And many religious leaders support federal welfare programs generally without understanding that recipients of those dollars can use them for abortions, contraceptives, or any number of activities that conflict deeply with religious teachings. This is why private charity is so vitally important and morally superior to a government-run medical system.
The First Amendment guarantee of religious liberty is intended to ensure that Americans never have to put the demands of the federal government ahead of the their own conscience or religious beliefs. This new policy turns that guarantee on its head. The benefits or drawbacks of birth control are not the issue. The issue is whether government may force private employers and private citizens to violate their moral codes simply by operating their businesses or paying their taxes.
Of course Catholic teachings forbid the use of any sort of contraceptive devices, so this rule is anathema to the religious beliefs of Catholic employers. Religious freedom always has been considered sacrosanct in this country. However, our federal bureaucracy increasingly forces Americans to subsidize behaviors they find personally abhorrent, either through agency mandates or direct transfer payments funded by tax dollars.
Proponents of this mandate do not understand the gravity of forcing employers to subsidize activities that deeply conflict with their religious convictions. Proponents also do not understand that a refusal to subsidize those activities does not mean the employer is "denying access" to healthcare. If employers don't provide free food to employees, do we accuse them of starving their workers?
In truth this mandate has nothing to do with healthcare, and everything to do with the abortion industry and a hatred for traditional religious values. Obamacare apologists cannot abide any religious philosophy that promotes large, two parent, nuclear, heterosexual families and frowns on divorce and abortion. Because the political class hates these values, it feels compelled to impose—by force of law—its preferred vision of society: single parents are noble; birth control should be encouraged at an early age; and abortion must be upheld as an absolute moral right.
So the political class simply tells the American people and American industry what values must prevail, and what costs much be borne to implement those values. This time, however, the political class has been shocked by the uproar to the new mandate that it did not anticipate or understand.
But Catholic hospitals face the existential choice of obeying their conscience and engaging in civil disobedience, or closing their doors because government claims the power to force them to violate the teachings of their faith. This terrible imposition has resonated with many Americans, and now the Obama administration finds itself having to defend the terrible cultural baggage of the anti-religious left.
Of course many Catholic leaders originally supported Obamacare because they naively believe against all evidence that benign angels in government will improve medical care for the poor. And many religious leaders support federal welfare programs generally without understanding that recipients of those dollars can use them for abortions, contraceptives, or any number of activities that conflict deeply with religious teachings. This is why private charity is so vitally important and morally superior to a government-run medical system.
The First Amendment guarantee of religious liberty is intended to ensure that Americans never have to put the demands of the federal government ahead of the their own conscience or religious beliefs. This new policy turns that guarantee on its head. The benefits or drawbacks of birth control are not the issue. The issue is whether government may force private employers and private citizens to violate their moral codes simply by operating their businesses or paying their taxes.
Monday
WHAT I THINK........WALTER BLOCK
Here is a letter sent to me by one of my readers. I quote it in full (very slightly edited for clarity, and to fill in abbreviations).
"I am curious about all this ‘veterans’ support for Ron Paul. I am a 63-year-old veteran and belong to many vet organizations including one from the unit I served with. The unit I was with,1st Infantry, Black Lions, has a Yahoo-based site that we communicate with each other by common e-mails sent through that site. The flood of outrage that was expressed by Ron Paul's statement that one of the ‘American citizens’ who was recently killed by a drone was denied his right to a trial flooded my e-mail box. Honestly I have to agree with that outrage. Does Ron suggest that we should have risked our troops by sending them in to capture this terrorist so we could give him his Miranda rights and a ‘fair’ trial? I just don't see the support for Ron from any of the organizations I belong to. I can say this much, those organizations are by far mostly Republican supporters and I like some of Ron Paul's ideas in other realms however I cannot support his mind set of the ‘Golden Rule’ in combat situations. In war there is no sense of fair play. On ambush patrols we would ideally wait for the enemy to pass our ambush site and shoot them in the back wherein, if in their death throes they squeezed their triggers, it would not be in our direction. Do you have any statistics regarding support for Ron from other generations of veterans?"
I disagree with this reader almost entirely. To take the last point first, there is no doubt that active servicemen overwhelmingly support the Ron Paul candidacy. Whether this is due to the fact that he is the only one of the five candidates presently running who is not a chicken hawk (Gingrich, Obama, Romney, Santorum), or because active duty soldiers like his policies, I cannot say. But of that fact there can be no doubt. All you need do is google "military donations by candidate" or "military donations Ron Paul" or any other such combinations of words and you will see this for yourself. See, for example, the following: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
As to their "right to a trial" I don’t see why you place scare quotes around "American citizens." Does not that phrase mean something to members of the military such as yourself? According to our constitution, which you and the president are sworn to uphold, American citizens are not to be executed without a fair trial. Do you really oppose this?
Former Captain of the Air Force Ron Paul was widely denounced for his criticism of the way Obama handled the demise of Osama bin Laden. Yes, the Congressman from Texas wanted this murderer of the innocents to have a trial. We accorded this aspect of a civilized order to Nazis at the end of World War II. The Israelis dealt with Eichmann in that manner. Is Osama so much worse than these folk that he did not deserve to be heard in a court of law? We are presumably fighting for a civilized order, among other things. Well, laws, courts, trials, the presumption of innocence are all aspects of countries that are not out and out barbarians. Do you favor barbarism? As they say in the western movies, first we give Osama a fair trial, and then we hang him.
The whole defense about water boarding is that it will help us get information about our enemies. I don’t necessarily advocate this practice for bin Laden, but, why oh why was he summarily executed, before what he knows could be wrung out of him? Does that strike you as somewhat anomalous? That Captain Paul (I like that title) could wonder out loud about this does not make him the wuss and sissy you imply that he is. You don’t wonder about this?
You are totally confused about Ron Paul’s position on terrorists such as Osama bin Laden. A constitutionalist (have you ever heard of that document? look up article I, Section 8, paragraph 11), Dr. Paul advocated the use of Letters of Marque and Reprisal. These are permissions or warrants or commissions for private individuals to engage in acts that would otherwise be considered murder, or piracy or theft (see on this here, here and especially here.) Does this sound to you as if the next president of the U.S. was advocating the use of Miranda rights abroad?
As to "fair play" in war, have you ever heard of the Geneva Conventions? This does not mean that the U.S. allows the enemy to win; that we do not shoot enemy soldiers in the back, contrary to the Marques of Queensbury rules. Mr. Paul’s view on war is that we should rarely engage in it, only then in self defense, that such an act should be declared by Congress as stipulated in the Constitution, and that we should win it quickly.
Last but far from least, let us consider the "Golden Rule." According to it, one must do unto others as one would have them do unto us. If we rule out masochists who want you to beat them and therefore feel justified in beating you in accordance with this rule, this is a pretty good regulation for a civilized order. Of course, Ron Paul never ever in a million years meant this to be applied to warfare conditions as you more than imply. It would be grotesque for Ron Paul when he becomes Commander in Chief of the U.S. military, to order his soldiers to obey this rule during wartime when faced with the enemy. But, when not applied to wartime conditions, it is a very, very good rule. Since we would not want the Iranians to kill our women and children, we shouldn’t kill theirs. Since we wouldn’t want the Iraquis to set up military bases on our territory, we shouldn’t set up any in theirs. Since we wouldn’t want our citizens assassinated, we should not engage in such despicable acts ourselves. Since we wouldn’t want foreign drones killing our residents, we shouldn’t fly them over places like Pakistan.
I hope and trust you now see the candidacy of Ron Paul in at least a slightly different light. He is not at all "giving away the store." His is a counsel of peace, commercial relations with the rest of the world and prosperity. But, if anyone dare attack us, or even credibly threaten to do so, he will make every effort to protect us. He favors defense not offense. He offers the very common sense notion that the best way to protect us is not to send our soldiers all over the world, but rather to stay at home where they can engage in defense.
"I am curious about all this ‘veterans’ support for Ron Paul. I am a 63-year-old veteran and belong to many vet organizations including one from the unit I served with. The unit I was with,1st Infantry, Black Lions, has a Yahoo-based site that we communicate with each other by common e-mails sent through that site. The flood of outrage that was expressed by Ron Paul's statement that one of the ‘American citizens’ who was recently killed by a drone was denied his right to a trial flooded my e-mail box. Honestly I have to agree with that outrage. Does Ron suggest that we should have risked our troops by sending them in to capture this terrorist so we could give him his Miranda rights and a ‘fair’ trial? I just don't see the support for Ron from any of the organizations I belong to. I can say this much, those organizations are by far mostly Republican supporters and I like some of Ron Paul's ideas in other realms however I cannot support his mind set of the ‘Golden Rule’ in combat situations. In war there is no sense of fair play. On ambush patrols we would ideally wait for the enemy to pass our ambush site and shoot them in the back wherein, if in their death throes they squeezed their triggers, it would not be in our direction. Do you have any statistics regarding support for Ron from other generations of veterans?"
I disagree with this reader almost entirely. To take the last point first, there is no doubt that active servicemen overwhelmingly support the Ron Paul candidacy. Whether this is due to the fact that he is the only one of the five candidates presently running who is not a chicken hawk (Gingrich, Obama, Romney, Santorum), or because active duty soldiers like his policies, I cannot say. But of that fact there can be no doubt. All you need do is google "military donations by candidate" or "military donations Ron Paul" or any other such combinations of words and you will see this for yourself. See, for example, the following: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
As to their "right to a trial" I don’t see why you place scare quotes around "American citizens." Does not that phrase mean something to members of the military such as yourself? According to our constitution, which you and the president are sworn to uphold, American citizens are not to be executed without a fair trial. Do you really oppose this?
Former Captain of the Air Force Ron Paul was widely denounced for his criticism of the way Obama handled the demise of Osama bin Laden. Yes, the Congressman from Texas wanted this murderer of the innocents to have a trial. We accorded this aspect of a civilized order to Nazis at the end of World War II. The Israelis dealt with Eichmann in that manner. Is Osama so much worse than these folk that he did not deserve to be heard in a court of law? We are presumably fighting for a civilized order, among other things. Well, laws, courts, trials, the presumption of innocence are all aspects of countries that are not out and out barbarians. Do you favor barbarism? As they say in the western movies, first we give Osama a fair trial, and then we hang him.
The whole defense about water boarding is that it will help us get information about our enemies. I don’t necessarily advocate this practice for bin Laden, but, why oh why was he summarily executed, before what he knows could be wrung out of him? Does that strike you as somewhat anomalous? That Captain Paul (I like that title) could wonder out loud about this does not make him the wuss and sissy you imply that he is. You don’t wonder about this?
You are totally confused about Ron Paul’s position on terrorists such as Osama bin Laden. A constitutionalist (have you ever heard of that document? look up article I, Section 8, paragraph 11), Dr. Paul advocated the use of Letters of Marque and Reprisal. These are permissions or warrants or commissions for private individuals to engage in acts that would otherwise be considered murder, or piracy or theft (see on this here, here and especially here.) Does this sound to you as if the next president of the U.S. was advocating the use of Miranda rights abroad?
As to "fair play" in war, have you ever heard of the Geneva Conventions? This does not mean that the U.S. allows the enemy to win; that we do not shoot enemy soldiers in the back, contrary to the Marques of Queensbury rules. Mr. Paul’s view on war is that we should rarely engage in it, only then in self defense, that such an act should be declared by Congress as stipulated in the Constitution, and that we should win it quickly.
Last but far from least, let us consider the "Golden Rule." According to it, one must do unto others as one would have them do unto us. If we rule out masochists who want you to beat them and therefore feel justified in beating you in accordance with this rule, this is a pretty good regulation for a civilized order. Of course, Ron Paul never ever in a million years meant this to be applied to warfare conditions as you more than imply. It would be grotesque for Ron Paul when he becomes Commander in Chief of the U.S. military, to order his soldiers to obey this rule during wartime when faced with the enemy. But, when not applied to wartime conditions, it is a very, very good rule. Since we would not want the Iranians to kill our women and children, we shouldn’t kill theirs. Since we wouldn’t want the Iraquis to set up military bases on our territory, we shouldn’t set up any in theirs. Since we wouldn’t want our citizens assassinated, we should not engage in such despicable acts ourselves. Since we wouldn’t want foreign drones killing our residents, we shouldn’t fly them over places like Pakistan.
I hope and trust you now see the candidacy of Ron Paul in at least a slightly different light. He is not at all "giving away the store." His is a counsel of peace, commercial relations with the rest of the world and prosperity. But, if anyone dare attack us, or even credibly threaten to do so, he will make every effort to protect us. He favors defense not offense. He offers the very common sense notion that the best way to protect us is not to send our soldiers all over the world, but rather to stay at home where they can engage in defense.
WHAT I THINK........THOMAS EDDLEM
The mass media have repeated the official results for the Maine GOP presidential caucuses that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney narrowly beat Texas Congressman Ron Paul by a 39 percent to 36 percent margin. But the official results are incomplete. And postponement of the results from one of Ron Paul's strongest counties, Washington County, because of a forecasted snowstorm may alone have tipped the balance in Romney's favor.
Ron Paul's campaign confidently predicted victory when the final votes are tallied. "Only 194 votes [statewide] stand between Paul and a first place victory," RonPaul 2012 blogger Jack Hunter pointed out in a post after the media declared Romney the winner. "Washington County is a stronghold for Paul and has yet to report. It might be a week before we know the final outcome there and Washington County is expected to yield 200 votes or more." Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum placed third with 18 percent of the vote in the official Maine caucus statewide vote tally, while former House Speaker Newt Gingrich placed fourth with six percent of the vote.
Hunter's prediction is not braggadocio. In south Washington County, Maine, Paul beat Romney by 132 votes in a February 7 Cottage Grove precinct-level caucus preceding the county "super-caucus" that was supposed to be held February 11 but will now be held February 18. Maine's South Washington County Bulletin reported February 8: "In District 57 ... Texas Congressman Ron Paul was the favorite among Republicans. Paul earned 237 votes in the non-binding poll, followed by Santorum’s 209 votes. Mitt Romney had 105 votes in the district, Newt Gingrich 61 votes." The February 7 south Washington precinct-level caucus results, which were not reflected in the official statewide total, were alone sufficient to offset two-thirds of the difference between Romney and Paul in the official statewide totals.
The cancellation of the Washington County super-caucus alone among Maine caucuses scheduled for February 11 has led many Paul supporters to suspect electoral shenanigans by the Republican establishment to deny Paul a state victory. That Washington County would vote heavily in favor of Paul was well-known, and Paul was widely seen as the only credible threat to Romney.
Maine state GOP Chairman Charlie Webster vowed that later caucuses would not be counted in the vote totals. "Some caucuses decided not to participate in this poll and will caucus after this announcement," Webster told the Associated Press February 11. "Their results will not be factored in. The absent votes will not be factored into this announcement after the fact."
The Washington County super-caucus was the only one to have been postponed because of an anticipated snowstorm. But while some media forecast six or more inches of snow, the Washington County forecast from the National Weather Service for February 11 was for a total of 3-5 inches of accumulation during the day, hardly out-of-the-ordinary for the Maine climate in February. Moreover, the Portland area was forecast to have almost as much snow, 1-3 inches, while nearby Hancock County had an identical forecast as Washington County. Yet caucuses were not cancelled in those areas.
Ron Paul 2012 national campaign chairman Jesse Benton predicted victory when the delegate process is completed in a website statement. “We are confident that we will control the Maine delegation for the convention in August. Our campaign is so thankful to all of our supporters in Maine, and all over the nation, and we want them to know that we plan to take this message all the way to the White House.”
Rep. Paul's campaign has stressed that the establishment is desperate to get Romney a couple of state wins after losing Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri to former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum earlier last week. "Maine is a state in Romney’s backyard that he should’ve been able to walk away with easily. That Mitt almost lost to Ron tonight — and that Mitt still may lose to Ron in the days to come — does not bode well for the establishment candidate," Ron Paul campaign blogger Jack Hunter argued as the caucus results emerged.
Romney did win the CPAC presidential preference poll in Washington, D.C., this weekend with 38 percent of the vote. Other presidential candidates earned the following percent: Rick Santorum 31 percent, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich 15 percent, and Ron Paul 12 percent. The CPAC poll carries no delegates toward the presidential race, but it measures a mixture of movement conservative opinion, campaign organization, and energy in the campaigns. Ron Paul had won the CPAC poll the previous two years, but did not make an effort to bring his young supporters to the conference again this year.
Romney announced in his Maine victory speech that "I am the only candidate in the race who has never served a day in our broken federal government. The voters of Maine have sent a clear message that it is past time to send an outsider to the White House, a conservative with a lifetime of experience in the private sector, who can uproot Washington's culture of taxing and spending and borrowing and endless bureaucracy." Of course, Romney helped to grow Massachusetts state spending and increase taxes and has been marinated in the tax-and-spend culture during his government service. As Governor of Massachusetts, Romney asked the state legislature for 88 "fees" to be increased in order to propose a balanced budget he was required by state law to submit. Many of these fees — such as increases on firearms permit applications and automobile licenses — were just tax increases disguised as "fee" increases.
Ron Paul's campaign confidently predicted victory when the final votes are tallied. "Only 194 votes [statewide] stand between Paul and a first place victory," RonPaul 2012 blogger Jack Hunter pointed out in a post after the media declared Romney the winner. "Washington County is a stronghold for Paul and has yet to report. It might be a week before we know the final outcome there and Washington County is expected to yield 200 votes or more." Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum placed third with 18 percent of the vote in the official Maine caucus statewide vote tally, while former House Speaker Newt Gingrich placed fourth with six percent of the vote.
Hunter's prediction is not braggadocio. In south Washington County, Maine, Paul beat Romney by 132 votes in a February 7 Cottage Grove precinct-level caucus preceding the county "super-caucus" that was supposed to be held February 11 but will now be held February 18. Maine's South Washington County Bulletin reported February 8: "In District 57 ... Texas Congressman Ron Paul was the favorite among Republicans. Paul earned 237 votes in the non-binding poll, followed by Santorum’s 209 votes. Mitt Romney had 105 votes in the district, Newt Gingrich 61 votes." The February 7 south Washington precinct-level caucus results, which were not reflected in the official statewide total, were alone sufficient to offset two-thirds of the difference between Romney and Paul in the official statewide totals.
The cancellation of the Washington County super-caucus alone among Maine caucuses scheduled for February 11 has led many Paul supporters to suspect electoral shenanigans by the Republican establishment to deny Paul a state victory. That Washington County would vote heavily in favor of Paul was well-known, and Paul was widely seen as the only credible threat to Romney.
Maine state GOP Chairman Charlie Webster vowed that later caucuses would not be counted in the vote totals. "Some caucuses decided not to participate in this poll and will caucus after this announcement," Webster told the Associated Press February 11. "Their results will not be factored in. The absent votes will not be factored into this announcement after the fact."
The Washington County super-caucus was the only one to have been postponed because of an anticipated snowstorm. But while some media forecast six or more inches of snow, the Washington County forecast from the National Weather Service for February 11 was for a total of 3-5 inches of accumulation during the day, hardly out-of-the-ordinary for the Maine climate in February. Moreover, the Portland area was forecast to have almost as much snow, 1-3 inches, while nearby Hancock County had an identical forecast as Washington County. Yet caucuses were not cancelled in those areas.
Ron Paul 2012 national campaign chairman Jesse Benton predicted victory when the delegate process is completed in a website statement. “We are confident that we will control the Maine delegation for the convention in August. Our campaign is so thankful to all of our supporters in Maine, and all over the nation, and we want them to know that we plan to take this message all the way to the White House.”
Rep. Paul's campaign has stressed that the establishment is desperate to get Romney a couple of state wins after losing Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri to former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum earlier last week. "Maine is a state in Romney’s backyard that he should’ve been able to walk away with easily. That Mitt almost lost to Ron tonight — and that Mitt still may lose to Ron in the days to come — does not bode well for the establishment candidate," Ron Paul campaign blogger Jack Hunter argued as the caucus results emerged.
Romney did win the CPAC presidential preference poll in Washington, D.C., this weekend with 38 percent of the vote. Other presidential candidates earned the following percent: Rick Santorum 31 percent, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich 15 percent, and Ron Paul 12 percent. The CPAC poll carries no delegates toward the presidential race, but it measures a mixture of movement conservative opinion, campaign organization, and energy in the campaigns. Ron Paul had won the CPAC poll the previous two years, but did not make an effort to bring his young supporters to the conference again this year.
Romney announced in his Maine victory speech that "I am the only candidate in the race who has never served a day in our broken federal government. The voters of Maine have sent a clear message that it is past time to send an outsider to the White House, a conservative with a lifetime of experience in the private sector, who can uproot Washington's culture of taxing and spending and borrowing and endless bureaucracy." Of course, Romney helped to grow Massachusetts state spending and increase taxes and has been marinated in the tax-and-spend culture during his government service. As Governor of Massachusetts, Romney asked the state legislature for 88 "fees" to be increased in order to propose a balanced budget he was required by state law to submit. Many of these fees — such as increases on firearms permit applications and automobile licenses — were just tax increases disguised as "fee" increases.
WHAT I THINK........LAWRENCE VANCE
"We don’t need to pay all this money to keep troops all over the country, 130 countries, 900 bases. But also, just think, bringing all the troops home rather rapidly, they would be spending their money here at home and not in Germany and Japan and South Korea, tremendous boost to the economy." ~ Ron Paul, February 7, 2012
In a post on February 9th at the Washington Post’s The Fact Checker blog, which claims to give "the truth behind the rhetoric," Glenn Kessler writes about "Ron Paul’s Strange Claim about Bases and Troops Overseas":
This comment by GOP presidential aspirant Ron Paul after Tuesday night’s caucuses caught the ear of our editor. Paul’s phrasing could have left the impression that he thinks there are 900 bases in 130 countries, but normally he makes it clear he is talking about two different things.
For instance, in the GOP debate Sept. 12, Paul said: "We’re under great threat, because we occupy so many countries. We’re in 130 countries. We have 900 bases around the world."
We will lay aside Paul’s loose definition of "occupy" – which denotes taking away a country’s sovereignty. You could also quibble with the concept of a "base," but we’ll accept that he’s talking about any military facility.
Are there any facts to back up these eye-popping figures?
I never read anything by Kessler until this piece on Ron Paul. The Fact Checker blog says that he "has covered foreign policy, economic policy, the White House, Congress, politics, airline safety and Wall Street."
In giving us the facts to evaluate the truth of Dr. Paul’s assertions, Kessler refers, but not by name, to two Department of Defense documents: the annual "Base Structure Report" dated September 30, 2011, and the quarterly "Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths by Regional Area and by Country," most recently issued on September 30, 2011.
Regarding the number of foreign bases, Kessler correctly notes that "the DOD list shows a list of 611 military facilities around the world (not counting war zones)." However, he discounts that figure because "only 20 are listed as ‘large sites,’ which means a replacement value of more than $1.74 billion." He also notes that most (549) of the DOD foreign sites are listed as being small sites.
Regarding the numbers and locations of U.S. troops in foreign countries, Kessler correctly notes that the "Personal Strengths" document lists "53,766 military personnel in Germany, 39,222 in Japan, 10,801 in Italy and 9,382 in the United Kingdom. That makes sense." "But wait," he says, "most of the countries on the list, in fact, have puny military representation." He points out that the U.S. has only nine troops in Mali, eight in Barbados, seven in Laos, six in Lithuania, five in Lebanon, four in Moldova, three in Mongolia, two in Suriname and one in Gabon." Then he says that he counts "153 countries with U.S. military personnel, actually higher than the 130 cited by Paul." But he dismisses both numbers by saying that "the list essentially tracks with places where the United States has a substantial diplomatic presence. (The United States has diplomatic relations with about 190 countries.)." He charges Paul with "counting Marine guards and military attaches as part of a vast expanse of U.S. military power around the globe." And after all, "this document indicates that only 11 countries actually house more than 1,000 U.S. military personnel."
Kessler concludes that "Paul’s statistics barely pass the laugh test. He has managed to turn small contingents of Marine guards into occupying armies and waste dumps into military bases. A more accurate way to treat this data would be to say that the United States has 20 major bases around the world, not counting the war in Afghanistan, with major concentrations of troops in 11 countries."
As one who is very familiar with both of the aforementioned DOD documents and has written about these things long before Ron Paul even ran for the Republican presidential nomination the first time, I can say with confidence that it is Glenn Kessler and the Washington Post that need some fact checking.
First of all, according to the Base Structure Report, the Defense Department "manages a global real property portfolio consisting of more than 542,000 facilities (buildings, structures, and linear structures) located on nearly 5,000 sites worldwide covering more than 28 million acres." Officially, as Kessler reports, there are 611 of these facilities in 39 foreign countries (excluding war zones). But why dismiss sites that are not "large sites"? Even small sites can have a replacement value of up to $929 million. True, some of the sites are not technically bases, but what about all the foreign bases that are not on the official list?
I recently wrote in "The Real Reason Guantánamo Should Be Closed":
The late Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis, and one of the foremost authorities on the subject, always maintained that the official Defense Department figures regarding overseas military bases were too low because they "omit espionage bases, those located in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and miscellaneous facilities in places considered too sensitive to discuss or which the Pentagon for its own reasons chooses to exclude – e.g., Israel, Kosovo, or Jordan." Johnson estimated the number to be closer to 1,000. We know now that he was right about the Defense Department’s figures, for Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, has recently confirmed that Johnson’s figure of 1,000 foreign bases is actually too low. The number is really closer to 1,100.
Nick Turse’s work painstaking work on the number of foreign U.S. military bases can be seen here, here, and here. Although Kessler acknowledges the existence of "106 U.S. military facilities in Afghanistan," Turse has reason to believe that the number is much greater and concludes that the military doesn’t even know the true number:
Last January, Colonel Wayne Shanks, a spokesman for the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), told me that there were nearly 400 U.S. and coalition bases in Afghanistan, including camps, forward operating bases, and combat outposts. He expected that number to increase by 12 or more, he added, over the course of 2010.
In September, I contacted ISAF’s Joint Command Public Affairs Office to follow up. To my surprise, I was told that "there are approximately 350 forward operating bases with two major military installations, Bagram and Kandahar airfields." Perplexed by the loss of 50 bases instead of a gain of 12, I contacted Gary Younger, a Public Affairs Officer with the International Security Assistance Force. "There are less than 10 NATO bases in Afghanistan," he wrote in an October 2010 email. "There are over 250 U.S. bases in Afghanistan."
By then, it seemed, the U.S. had lost up to 150 bases and I was thoroughly confused. When I contacted the military to sort out the discrepancies and listed the numbers I had been given – from Shanks’ 400 base tally to the count of around 250 by Younger – I was handed off again and again until I landed with Sergeant First Class Eric Brown at ISAF Joint Command’s Public Affairs. "The number of bases in Afghanistan is roughly 411," Brown wrote in a November email, "which is a figure comprised of large base[s], all the way down to the Combat Out Post-level." Even this, he cautioned, wasn’t actually a full list, because "temporary positions occupied by platoon-sized elements or less" were not counted.
Along the way to this "final" tally, I was offered a number of explanations – from different methods of accounting to the failure of units in the field to provide accurate information – for the conflicting numbers I had been given. After months of exchanging emails and seeing the numbers swing wildly, ending up with roughly the same count in November as I began with in January suggests that the U.S. command isn’t keeping careful track of the number of bases in Afghanistan. Apparently, the military simply does not know how many bases it has in its primary theater of operations.
Turse specifically mentions the countries of Qatar, Pakistan, and Kuwait. Qatar is not listed on the Base Structure Report, but contains Al-Udeid Air Base, a billion-dollar facility where the U.S. Air Force secretly oversees its on-going unmanned drone wars. Pakistan is also not listed on the Base Structure Report, but U.S. drone aircraft, operating under the auspices of both the CIA and the Air Force take off from one or more bases in that country. And then there are the other sites like the "covert forward operating base run by the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi," and "one or more airfields run by employees of the private security contractor Blackwater (now renamed Xe Services)." And Kuwait, which has one nameless site on the Base Structure Report, has a number of U.S. military facilities.
Suppose that each of the 39 "official" countries with U.S. military bases decided to build the same number of military bases in the United States that the United States maintained in its country? The DOD claims 194 "sites" in Germany. Would the United States government object if Germany insisted on occupying 194 "sites" in the United States? How about just 94? Would the U.S. military not object because they were just "sites" and not technically bases?
Secondly, Kessler is wrong about U.S. troops being in 153 countries. The United States actually has troops in 148 countries and 11 territories. The last time I gave a complete list of all the countries and territories where the United States had troops was in my article of February 11, 2010, titled "Same Empire, Different Emperor." If you add to the list there the countries of Antigua, Congo (Brazzaville), and Suriname, and subtract from the list the countries of Eritrea, Iran, and Somalia, you will have an updated list. The current eleven territories where U.S. are stationed are: American Samoa, Diego Garcia, Gibralter, Greenland, Guam, Hong Kong, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, St. Helena, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Wake Island.
But why does Kessler use the arbitrary number of 1,000 in saying: "This document indicates that only 11 countries actually house more than 1,000 U.S. military personnel." Does this mean that it is okay if the United States has military personnel in a country that number 1,000 or less? And why, after giving the figures of "53,766 military personnel in Germany, 39,222 in Japan, 10,801 in Italy and 9,382 in the United Kingdom," does Kessler remark: "That makes sense"? What makes any sense about the United States stationing all of these troops in Germany, Japan, Italy, and the UK when World War II ended in 1945? What makes any sense about the United States stationing 723 troops in Portugal, 1,205 in Belgium, 163 in Singapore, and 335 in Djibouti? How many Americans have ever even heard of Djibouti? What makes any sense about the United States stationing troops in 75 percent of the world’s countries? Kessler makes much of the low figures of "nine troops in Mali, eight in Barbados, seven in Laos, six in Lithuania, five in Lebanon, four in Moldova, three in Mongolia, two in Suriname and one in Gabon." But what makes any sense about any U.S. troops being in those countries? And what makes any sense about the United States sending twenty-two of its military personnel to Ecuador, fourteen to Guatemala, seven to Mozambique, and six to Togo? What makes any sense about U.S. troops being stationed anywhere overseas?
Suppose that each of the 148 countries with a contingent of U.S. military personnel decided to send an equal number of their troops to the United States? Would the United States government and its military tolerate 1,491 troops from Turkey, 2,142 from Bahrain, and 354 from Honduras since those are the numbers of troops the United States has in those countries?
And third, Kessler is just plain wrong in dismissing the U.S. troop presence in foreign countries as "places where the United States has a substantial diplomatic presence" or "Marine guards and military attaches." I did a major study of this back in October 2004 called "Guarding the Empire." It has been online ever since, but rather than doing a little research, Kessler was content to just accuse Dr. Paul of turning "small contingents of Marine guards into occupying armies."
In my article I showed beyond any doubt that the U.S. troop presence in foreign countries cannot be blamed on Marines guarding embassies. Read the article. I can’t tell you how many people have written me after I wrote something negative about the U.S. empire of troops and bases that encircles the globe and dismissed my research as a waste of time since, so they said, most of the U.S. troops stationed abroad were just Marine embassy guards. That is simply not true. I did the research and provided a link to the research, but they were just too lazy to click on the link. Don’t be lazy; read "Guarding the Empire." Yes, I know it was written in 2004. Yes, I know that some of the figures have now changed. Yes, I know that some of the links no longer work. But my conclusions still stand:
The United States has an embassy in some countries, but does not have any troops.
The United States has an embassy in some countries along with Army, Navy, and/or Air Force troops, but there are no Marines listed as being in the country.
The United States has an embassy in some countries with troops including Marines, but not the minimum number of six Marines necessary for embassy security guard duty.
The United States has Marines in some countries, but no embassy to guard.
And if the United States has "diplomatic relations with about 190 countries," then how can Kessler say that the list of 148 countries with U.S. troops "essentially tracks with places where the United States has a substantial diplomatic presence"? That is a difference of 42 countries.
Kessler never gets to the real issue. The real issue has nothing to do with the exact number of foreign bases the United States has or the exact number of countries the United States has troops in or the exact number of troops the United States has stationed abroad or the exact number of foreign sites that are really bases.
The real issue is why the United States has troops and military bases in foreign countries in the first place. Especially since the United States doesn’t afford other countries the same privilege.
When I first wrote about U.S. troop presence around the globe in March 2004 in "The U.S. Global Empire," I documented that the U.S. had troops in 135 countries and 14 territories. Both numbers have only changed slightly since then. There was no change in U.S. foreign policy from Bush to Clinton to Bush to Obama. Just like there would have been no change in U.S. foreign policy if John Kerry or John McCain had been elected. Both parties are committed to a foreign policy of aggression, intervention, and meddling. Both parties are committed to a foreign policy of policing the world. Both parties are committed to a foreign policy of bombing and war. Both parties are committed to a foreign policy of empire.
The Washington Post ought to be writing about Ron Paul’s sane claim about bases and troops overseas.
In a post on February 9th at the Washington Post’s The Fact Checker blog, which claims to give "the truth behind the rhetoric," Glenn Kessler writes about "Ron Paul’s Strange Claim about Bases and Troops Overseas":
This comment by GOP presidential aspirant Ron Paul after Tuesday night’s caucuses caught the ear of our editor. Paul’s phrasing could have left the impression that he thinks there are 900 bases in 130 countries, but normally he makes it clear he is talking about two different things.
For instance, in the GOP debate Sept. 12, Paul said: "We’re under great threat, because we occupy so many countries. We’re in 130 countries. We have 900 bases around the world."
We will lay aside Paul’s loose definition of "occupy" – which denotes taking away a country’s sovereignty. You could also quibble with the concept of a "base," but we’ll accept that he’s talking about any military facility.
Are there any facts to back up these eye-popping figures?
I never read anything by Kessler until this piece on Ron Paul. The Fact Checker blog says that he "has covered foreign policy, economic policy, the White House, Congress, politics, airline safety and Wall Street."
In giving us the facts to evaluate the truth of Dr. Paul’s assertions, Kessler refers, but not by name, to two Department of Defense documents: the annual "Base Structure Report" dated September 30, 2011, and the quarterly "Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths by Regional Area and by Country," most recently issued on September 30, 2011.
Regarding the number of foreign bases, Kessler correctly notes that "the DOD list shows a list of 611 military facilities around the world (not counting war zones)." However, he discounts that figure because "only 20 are listed as ‘large sites,’ which means a replacement value of more than $1.74 billion." He also notes that most (549) of the DOD foreign sites are listed as being small sites.
Regarding the numbers and locations of U.S. troops in foreign countries, Kessler correctly notes that the "Personal Strengths" document lists "53,766 military personnel in Germany, 39,222 in Japan, 10,801 in Italy and 9,382 in the United Kingdom. That makes sense." "But wait," he says, "most of the countries on the list, in fact, have puny military representation." He points out that the U.S. has only nine troops in Mali, eight in Barbados, seven in Laos, six in Lithuania, five in Lebanon, four in Moldova, three in Mongolia, two in Suriname and one in Gabon." Then he says that he counts "153 countries with U.S. military personnel, actually higher than the 130 cited by Paul." But he dismisses both numbers by saying that "the list essentially tracks with places where the United States has a substantial diplomatic presence. (The United States has diplomatic relations with about 190 countries.)." He charges Paul with "counting Marine guards and military attaches as part of a vast expanse of U.S. military power around the globe." And after all, "this document indicates that only 11 countries actually house more than 1,000 U.S. military personnel."
Kessler concludes that "Paul’s statistics barely pass the laugh test. He has managed to turn small contingents of Marine guards into occupying armies and waste dumps into military bases. A more accurate way to treat this data would be to say that the United States has 20 major bases around the world, not counting the war in Afghanistan, with major concentrations of troops in 11 countries."
As one who is very familiar with both of the aforementioned DOD documents and has written about these things long before Ron Paul even ran for the Republican presidential nomination the first time, I can say with confidence that it is Glenn Kessler and the Washington Post that need some fact checking.
First of all, according to the Base Structure Report, the Defense Department "manages a global real property portfolio consisting of more than 542,000 facilities (buildings, structures, and linear structures) located on nearly 5,000 sites worldwide covering more than 28 million acres." Officially, as Kessler reports, there are 611 of these facilities in 39 foreign countries (excluding war zones). But why dismiss sites that are not "large sites"? Even small sites can have a replacement value of up to $929 million. True, some of the sites are not technically bases, but what about all the foreign bases that are not on the official list?
I recently wrote in "The Real Reason Guantánamo Should Be Closed":
The late Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis, and one of the foremost authorities on the subject, always maintained that the official Defense Department figures regarding overseas military bases were too low because they "omit espionage bases, those located in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and miscellaneous facilities in places considered too sensitive to discuss or which the Pentagon for its own reasons chooses to exclude – e.g., Israel, Kosovo, or Jordan." Johnson estimated the number to be closer to 1,000. We know now that he was right about the Defense Department’s figures, for Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, has recently confirmed that Johnson’s figure of 1,000 foreign bases is actually too low. The number is really closer to 1,100.
Nick Turse’s work painstaking work on the number of foreign U.S. military bases can be seen here, here, and here. Although Kessler acknowledges the existence of "106 U.S. military facilities in Afghanistan," Turse has reason to believe that the number is much greater and concludes that the military doesn’t even know the true number:
Last January, Colonel Wayne Shanks, a spokesman for the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), told me that there were nearly 400 U.S. and coalition bases in Afghanistan, including camps, forward operating bases, and combat outposts. He expected that number to increase by 12 or more, he added, over the course of 2010.
In September, I contacted ISAF’s Joint Command Public Affairs Office to follow up. To my surprise, I was told that "there are approximately 350 forward operating bases with two major military installations, Bagram and Kandahar airfields." Perplexed by the loss of 50 bases instead of a gain of 12, I contacted Gary Younger, a Public Affairs Officer with the International Security Assistance Force. "There are less than 10 NATO bases in Afghanistan," he wrote in an October 2010 email. "There are over 250 U.S. bases in Afghanistan."
By then, it seemed, the U.S. had lost up to 150 bases and I was thoroughly confused. When I contacted the military to sort out the discrepancies and listed the numbers I had been given – from Shanks’ 400 base tally to the count of around 250 by Younger – I was handed off again and again until I landed with Sergeant First Class Eric Brown at ISAF Joint Command’s Public Affairs. "The number of bases in Afghanistan is roughly 411," Brown wrote in a November email, "which is a figure comprised of large base[s], all the way down to the Combat Out Post-level." Even this, he cautioned, wasn’t actually a full list, because "temporary positions occupied by platoon-sized elements or less" were not counted.
Along the way to this "final" tally, I was offered a number of explanations – from different methods of accounting to the failure of units in the field to provide accurate information – for the conflicting numbers I had been given. After months of exchanging emails and seeing the numbers swing wildly, ending up with roughly the same count in November as I began with in January suggests that the U.S. command isn’t keeping careful track of the number of bases in Afghanistan. Apparently, the military simply does not know how many bases it has in its primary theater of operations.
Turse specifically mentions the countries of Qatar, Pakistan, and Kuwait. Qatar is not listed on the Base Structure Report, but contains Al-Udeid Air Base, a billion-dollar facility where the U.S. Air Force secretly oversees its on-going unmanned drone wars. Pakistan is also not listed on the Base Structure Report, but U.S. drone aircraft, operating under the auspices of both the CIA and the Air Force take off from one or more bases in that country. And then there are the other sites like the "covert forward operating base run by the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi," and "one or more airfields run by employees of the private security contractor Blackwater (now renamed Xe Services)." And Kuwait, which has one nameless site on the Base Structure Report, has a number of U.S. military facilities.
Suppose that each of the 39 "official" countries with U.S. military bases decided to build the same number of military bases in the United States that the United States maintained in its country? The DOD claims 194 "sites" in Germany. Would the United States government object if Germany insisted on occupying 194 "sites" in the United States? How about just 94? Would the U.S. military not object because they were just "sites" and not technically bases?
Secondly, Kessler is wrong about U.S. troops being in 153 countries. The United States actually has troops in 148 countries and 11 territories. The last time I gave a complete list of all the countries and territories where the United States had troops was in my article of February 11, 2010, titled "Same Empire, Different Emperor." If you add to the list there the countries of Antigua, Congo (Brazzaville), and Suriname, and subtract from the list the countries of Eritrea, Iran, and Somalia, you will have an updated list. The current eleven territories where U.S. are stationed are: American Samoa, Diego Garcia, Gibralter, Greenland, Guam, Hong Kong, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, St. Helena, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Wake Island.
But why does Kessler use the arbitrary number of 1,000 in saying: "This document indicates that only 11 countries actually house more than 1,000 U.S. military personnel." Does this mean that it is okay if the United States has military personnel in a country that number 1,000 or less? And why, after giving the figures of "53,766 military personnel in Germany, 39,222 in Japan, 10,801 in Italy and 9,382 in the United Kingdom," does Kessler remark: "That makes sense"? What makes any sense about the United States stationing all of these troops in Germany, Japan, Italy, and the UK when World War II ended in 1945? What makes any sense about the United States stationing 723 troops in Portugal, 1,205 in Belgium, 163 in Singapore, and 335 in Djibouti? How many Americans have ever even heard of Djibouti? What makes any sense about the United States stationing troops in 75 percent of the world’s countries? Kessler makes much of the low figures of "nine troops in Mali, eight in Barbados, seven in Laos, six in Lithuania, five in Lebanon, four in Moldova, three in Mongolia, two in Suriname and one in Gabon." But what makes any sense about any U.S. troops being in those countries? And what makes any sense about the United States sending twenty-two of its military personnel to Ecuador, fourteen to Guatemala, seven to Mozambique, and six to Togo? What makes any sense about U.S. troops being stationed anywhere overseas?
Suppose that each of the 148 countries with a contingent of U.S. military personnel decided to send an equal number of their troops to the United States? Would the United States government and its military tolerate 1,491 troops from Turkey, 2,142 from Bahrain, and 354 from Honduras since those are the numbers of troops the United States has in those countries?
And third, Kessler is just plain wrong in dismissing the U.S. troop presence in foreign countries as "places where the United States has a substantial diplomatic presence" or "Marine guards and military attaches." I did a major study of this back in October 2004 called "Guarding the Empire." It has been online ever since, but rather than doing a little research, Kessler was content to just accuse Dr. Paul of turning "small contingents of Marine guards into occupying armies."
In my article I showed beyond any doubt that the U.S. troop presence in foreign countries cannot be blamed on Marines guarding embassies. Read the article. I can’t tell you how many people have written me after I wrote something negative about the U.S. empire of troops and bases that encircles the globe and dismissed my research as a waste of time since, so they said, most of the U.S. troops stationed abroad were just Marine embassy guards. That is simply not true. I did the research and provided a link to the research, but they were just too lazy to click on the link. Don’t be lazy; read "Guarding the Empire." Yes, I know it was written in 2004. Yes, I know that some of the figures have now changed. Yes, I know that some of the links no longer work. But my conclusions still stand:
The United States has an embassy in some countries, but does not have any troops.
The United States has an embassy in some countries along with Army, Navy, and/or Air Force troops, but there are no Marines listed as being in the country.
The United States has an embassy in some countries with troops including Marines, but not the minimum number of six Marines necessary for embassy security guard duty.
The United States has Marines in some countries, but no embassy to guard.
And if the United States has "diplomatic relations with about 190 countries," then how can Kessler say that the list of 148 countries with U.S. troops "essentially tracks with places where the United States has a substantial diplomatic presence"? That is a difference of 42 countries.
Kessler never gets to the real issue. The real issue has nothing to do with the exact number of foreign bases the United States has or the exact number of countries the United States has troops in or the exact number of troops the United States has stationed abroad or the exact number of foreign sites that are really bases.
The real issue is why the United States has troops and military bases in foreign countries in the first place. Especially since the United States doesn’t afford other countries the same privilege.
When I first wrote about U.S. troop presence around the globe in March 2004 in "The U.S. Global Empire," I documented that the U.S. had troops in 135 countries and 14 territories. Both numbers have only changed slightly since then. There was no change in U.S. foreign policy from Bush to Clinton to Bush to Obama. Just like there would have been no change in U.S. foreign policy if John Kerry or John McCain had been elected. Both parties are committed to a foreign policy of aggression, intervention, and meddling. Both parties are committed to a foreign policy of policing the world. Both parties are committed to a foreign policy of bombing and war. Both parties are committed to a foreign policy of empire.
The Washington Post ought to be writing about Ron Paul’s sane claim about bases and troops overseas.
Thursday
WHAT I THINK........DONALD MILLER
Members of Generation X, born 1962 to 1981, and Generation Y, 1982-2004, are rallying behind Ron Paul in his run for president. Media commentators find it odd that people under the age of 40 in the X Generation and especially voters under age 30 in the Y Generation are so taken with this unassuming, soft-spoken 76-year-old candidate. Ron Paul is in the Silent Generation, whose members are now 70 to 87 years of age (born 1925-1942).
Exit polls show that Ron Paul won the majority of voters under age 40 in the Iowa caucus and in the New Hampshire primary. He received 21.4 percent of the votes in Iowa (first-place Rick Santorum got 24.6 percent) and came in second in New Hampshire with 22.9 percent of the votes (first-place Mitt Romney got 39.3 percent). More voters under age 30 chose Ron Paul over the other candidates in the South Carolina primary and Nevada caucus. He garnered 41 percent of the under 30 vote in Nevada – Mitt Romney got 36 percent; Newt Gingrich, 16 percent; and Rick Santorum, 7 percent. But only a small minority of older people has voted for him, as was especially evident in the Florida Republican primary.
In Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584-2069 (1991) and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997), William Strauss and Neil Howe examine the four main generations alive today, including the Boom ("Baby Boomer") Generation, born 1943-1961. They show how these generations mirror ones in the past. They note that a "Young Hero and Elder Prophet" pairing occurs repeatedly in history, myth, and art, as with Joshua and Moses in the Old Testament, the Gray Champion in Colonial America, King Arthur and Merlin in Celtic myth, Tolkien’s Frodo and Gandalf, and Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. In Star Wars, Episode IV, Obi-Wan Kenobi instructs Luke in the ways of the Force and in Episode VI tells him that killing Darth Vader (his father) is the only way to destroy the evil Galactic Empire. And as Joseph Campbell, the American mythologist, notes, the young hero’s close bond with a wise elder is essential to his ultimate success.
The "Gray Champion" precipitated the Boston Revolt of April 1689, mounted to protest King James II’s increasingly autocratic rule of the British-American colonies. As Nathaniel Hawthorne describes it in his Twice-Told Tales, the King-appointed governor of New England marched British troops through Boston to intimidate the public and quell any thoughts of colonial self-rule. Hawthorne writes:
"Suddenly, there was seen the figure of an ancient man, who seemed to have emerged from among the people, and was walking by himself along the center of the street, to confront the armed band. He wore the old Puritan dress, a dark cloak and a steeple-crowned hat, in the fashion of at least fifty years before..."
This elderly champion with a manner "combining the leader and saint" commanded the soldiers to stop; and "at the old man’s word and outstretched arm, the roll of the drum was hushed at once, and the advancing line stood still." Then, "inspired by this single act of defiance, the people of Boston roused their courage and acted. Within the day, Andros [the governor] was deposed and jailed, the liberty of Boston saved, and the corner turned on the colonial Glorious Revolution." This revolt led to the American Revolution 85 years later.
Ron Paul is the Obi-Wan Kenobi and Gray Champion of our time, and the Darth Vader of our U.S. Empire is the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve System, with its network of twelve regional private banks, was established in 1913. The Fed is the country’s third central bank (the first two, established in 1791 and 1816, each lasted for 20 years). The Fed issues token coins and paper dollars, and creates and transfers unlimited amounts of computer-generated digital money. Manufacturing money this way, during its 99-year existence the Fed has destroyed 98.8 percent of the value of the dollar, as calculated by the Shadow Government Statistics (SGS)-Alternate-Consumer Price Index (CPI). Using this measure of inflation, a basket of goods and services that cost $100 in 1913 now costs $8,204! (Even the Bureau of Labor Statistics admits that the dollar has lost 96 percent of its value since 1913, with that $100 basket of goods and services now said to cost $2303.) Using the more accurate SGS-Alternate-CPI, the greatest drop in the dollar’s value, 95.1 percent, has occurred since 1971, when president Nixon severed the dollar’s last remaining link with gold, turning it into an effortlessly issued fiat currency. (A fiat currency is one that has no hard asset backing it such as gold and derives its value from government edict.) Like a virulent virus, the Fed has infected the U.S. dollar and made it grow like a cancer.
The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1921 killed somewhere between 20 to 40 million people (including my 22-year-old grandmother and my wife’s 23-year-old grandmother). What the Fed is could result in an equally dire hyperinflationary economic collapse, similar to what happened in the Weimar Republic, Austria, and Hungary in the 1920s, Argentina in 1989, and Zimbabwe. (A practical definition for hyperinflation is that the country’s largest pre-inflation bank note – for the U.S., the $100 bill. – becomes worth more as toilet paper, or for stoking a fire, than as a currency. The currency remains "current" but no longer serves as a medium of exchange.)
Dr. Paul prescribes an Austrian cure for our country’s economic problems (see below). A professor at the University of Vienna, Carl Menger (1840-1921), founded the Austrian School of Economics, which is named for its country of origin. (Government officials and economists in Austria do not follow or endorse "Austrian Economics.") This branch of economics studies the action of individuals in the marketplace and puts forward a subjective theory of value. It explores important subjects like marginal utility (the amount of benefit derived from consuming one additional unit of a product or service, a concept that debunks the labor theory of value), moral hazard (where being covered against loss increases risk taking – executives at the leading investment banking and securities firm, Goldman Sachs, make a bad, multibillion dollar investment in AIG, and the government, i.e., U.S. taxpayers, bails them out), and malinvestments (making the wrong kind of investments, like building too many shopping malls, encouraged by Fed-set artificially low interest rates). Austrian economists don’t spin their wheels constructing mathematical models of the economy on a large, "macroeconomic" scale, something that Keynesian economists like to do and which have little bearing on the real world of human action. In contrast to pump-priming, big government Keynesianism, Austrian economics stresses the importance of free markets and a stable currency for economic calculation and setting prices.
Starting at a young age, Americans need to learn the basics of Austrian Economics and appreciate how it restores economic health. But government schools do not teach Austrian economics or the concomitant Jeffersonian vision of individual liberty. These subjects make a compelling case for limited government and are thus politically incorrect.
The primary role of government schools, where 90 percent of U.S. children are educated, is to inculcate, in the words of John Calvin, "the duty of obedience to rulers." Government-employed bureaucratic officials determine what political and economic ideas children are to be taught. Compulsory government schooling has become a zero-tolerance, one-size-fits-all, dumbed-down operation that focuses on social engineering rather than on learning and individual achievement. James Ostrowski, in Government Schools Are Bad for Your Kids, puts it this way: "[The government school] produces barely literate, historically ignorant, uncultured lovers of big government." Sadly, public schools have evolved into prison-like indoctrination centers that children and adolescents in the Y Generation currently endure – six and seven hours a day for thirteen years. For a sobering assessment of what our nation’s public schools have turned into, watch the online documentary on tagtele.com titled "War on Kids," available HERE.
Nevertheless, there is reason for hope.
The outpouring of support by young people for Ron Paul is truly heartening. In Texas, for example, students at the Hudson Middle School in Hudson overwhelmingly cast ballots for Ron Paul in the school's mock GOP primary, "after spending weeks studying the candidates' views on the issues and watching debates among the hopefuls" according to a newspaper account, which reported: "They liked Paul's anti-war stance, as well as his willingness to talk straight and not attack his opponents to make a point. ‘He's just like this down-to-earth dude who just seems like he knows what he's doing,’ seventh-grader Danielle Heidkamp said."
Generation Y members like Danielle will carry the Ron Paul banner forward. The Y Generation is also named the "Millennial Generation," coming of age as it is at the beginning of a new millennium. This generation must cope as young adults with the unfolding global financial crisis. When the Baby Boomer generation was growing up in the 1950s and 60s U.S. government debt increased $2.5 Billion a year. Life was good. Today, with the Millennial Generation coming of age, U.S. government debt increases by $2.5 Billion every 16 hours.
After the housing boom peaked in 2006 and foreclosures began to mount, the so-named "Millennial Crisis" began in February, 2007 when the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) announced that it would no longer buy subprime mortgages or mortgage-related securities (collateralized debt obligations). The Y Generation facing this crisis today bears some likeness to the GI Generation, born at the beginning of the last century (1901-1924), who became young adults during the last big crisis in U.S. history, the Great Depression and World War II. Strauss and Howe see the GI and Y generations as both manifesting a "Hero" archetype – can-do heroes and competent pragmatic managers who possess confidence and optimism.
Strauss and Howe name Generation X the "13th Generation" because it is the thirteenth one to call itself "American," beginning with the Awakening Generation born 1701-1723. The Glorious Revolution (Revolution of 1688) brought this about, which dethroned King James II and led Parliament to pass the 1869 English Bill of Rights, called "An Act declareing the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Setleing the Succession of the Crowne." This Act enabled people in the American colonies, emboldened by the Boston Revolt and this Bill of Rights, to see themselves as distinctly American and not servile British subjects.
Progressives view human history as a linear process. Beginning with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson early in the last century, progressives have sought to expand government power and use it to effect what they consider to be beneficial social, political, and economic change. They are notable for launching the FED, an income tax, World War I, Prohibition, and the New Deal. Linear thinkers, which include politicians, the mainstream media, and CEOs of big corporations, work to maintain the status quo and their power and wealth. Rather than progress in a linear fashion, however, human history has a more seasonal, cyclical nature. As Mark Twain observed, "It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible." Twain is also alleged to have said something like, "Although history doesn’t repeat itself, it often rhymes" (source unknown). Whatever "rhyme" or "repetition" that might have helped bring about the Millennial Crisis, having a linear-thinking progressive president will only serve to make things worse. That includes President Obama and all the Republican presidential candidates except Ron Paul. He alone knows what is really going on, understands it, predicted it, and knows how best to deal with it.
Not counting the earlier crisis that caused the colonial Glorious Revolution and its Boston Revolt (1675-1704), there have been four crises in American history: the American Revolution (1773-1704), followed 66 years later by the Civil War (1860-1865), 64 years later by the Great Depression and World War II (1929-1946), and 61 years later by the current Millennial Crisis (2007-?). Each crisis has been worse than the previous one. There were 25,000 deaths in the American Revolution. Some 600,000 to 800,000 people died in the Civil War. And in World War II 50 to 70 million people died (civilian and military). In the American Revolution hyperinflation of the Continental Dollar rendered it worthless, and in the Civil War the Confederate Dollar suffered the same fate.
In The Fourth Turning, William Strauss and Neil Howe predicted, in 1997 when the book was published, that the next period of crisis in our country’s history, the "Fourth Turning" (following the first three crises) which they named the Millennial Crisis, would begin in 8 to 10 years. They were spot-on predicting when it would begin, 10 years later (in 2007), and this is what they say about its course:
"The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. Thus might the next Fourth Turning end in apocalypse – or glory. The nation could be ruined, its democracy destroyed, and millions of people scattered or killed. Or America could enter a new golden age, triumphantly applying shared values to improve the human condition. The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis [the one we are experiencing now]; all they suggest is the timing and dimension."
One thing is certain. This crisis, now in its 6th year, will not be over anytime soon. How bad it becomes will depend on whether or not our country heeds the teachings of Ron Paul and his advocates.
Unfortunately, the establishment media tries to ignore Ron Paul and pretend he doesn't exist. Jon Stewart, on The Daily Show, skewers the media's talking heads on this score, asking "How did Ron Paul become the 13th floor in a hotel?" in "John Stewart Shows How Ron Paul Is Feared By The NWO Mafia Controlled Mainstream Media," which can be seen on YouTube HERE. But other wiser heads can see and appreciate his true worth.
Bill Buckler, Captain of the financial newsletter The Privateer, published in Australia, has this to say about Ron Paul:
"Dr. Paul’s great and merited attractiveness to a growing number of admirers has a very simple source. He is that rarest of creatures – a FREE man. He is beholden to nobody. He has developed his ideas and his convictions over a long and fruitful life of independent thinking. He does not compromise. He homes in on the fundamental issue and principle of any political issue and serves it up without salt or other ‘seasoning.’ He says what he means and he means what he says. He is the living embodiment of the ‘dream’ that most Americans have long since given up on as they saw it slip further and further beyond their grasp. He is the only prominent person who is doing everything he can to turn the non-debate which masquerades as the ‘mainstream’ in the US and global political economy into something of substance. That, far more than presidency, is his goal."
Ron Paul wants to legalize freedom and have the government stop punishing people for using the freedom that is rightfully theirs (as long as you, of course, do not encroach on other persons and their property). All the other leading candidates who want to be elected president are pro-big government and seek power. Mitt Romney is Wall Street’s Republican candidate, with the investment banking and securities firm Goldman Sachs being his biggest contributor. There is little difference between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, except perhaps that Romney is even more pro-war than is Obama. I highly recommend Andrew Napolitano’s YouTube video "Judge Napolitano What if the Government Has Been Lying to You" where he portrays Republicans (excluding Ron Paul) and Democrats as "two wings of the same bird of prey."
Ron Paul is different. As the YouTube video What Is It About Ron Paul? affirms,
"Once you get hooked on Ron Paul you can no longer bear listen to a man who wants power. You become instantly disgusted whenever they begin to speak. Before they were just boring, but now they’re revolting. Listening to a Romney, or a Gingrich, or a Bush, or Obama makes you sick; and you just don’t understand how Ron Paul can get through those debates without getting nauseous. You see a political veneer in these politicians that is so transparent, like a ghost flapping its ethereal tongue at you."
A poster shown in the video states, "Once you get hooked on Ron Paul you can no longer bear to listen to a man who wants power."
People all over the world are getting hooked on Ron Paul. A Canadian citizen, Terry Neudorf, for example, writes this in a blog titled "Ron Paul Shakes the World":
"When the name Ron Paul is mentioned to my grandchildren, a smile will creep across their faces, and they will recall, and speak with excited tones about a time where an idea was born, a message was spread, and a revolution took hold that shook the world. That's the time I'm living in right now. I will treasure every moment. Thanks for all you do."
Young Americans are joining The Ron Paul Movement, like those manning phone banks to promote and raise funds for his campaign. (Don’t expect Goldman Sachs to contribute any money to Ron Paul’s campaign.) Leaders of the X and Y Generations allied with Ron Paul are our best hope for the future – and for coming through the Millennial Crisis without war. A third world war, with nuclear weapons in play, could well prove to be even more devastating than was World War II. But even if he is not elected president, all is not lost. Like Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ron Paul’s spirit and teachings will live on and guide a new generation of Luke Skywalkers, including his son, X-Generation Rand Paul, to lead our country safely through this time of economic and social peril.
The Austrian Cure for Economic Illness
Dr. Paul’s Austrian treatment for the Millennial Crisis comprises six parts:
1) End the Fed – close down the central bank. "Unplug the machinery of the Fed," as Ron Paul puts it in his book End the Fed (see also the other three books he has written on government and liberty in "Suggested Reading" below). The market must be free to set interest rates without a central bank artificially lowering them and inflating the money supply. Banks should once again exist as free-enterprise institutions without privileges or bailouts from the state. ATMs, Web-based systems of funds transfer like PayPal, and online trading can function perfectly well without a Fed.
2) Restore sound money to the economy – privatize the country’s monetary system, abolish legal tender laws, and allow the free market to determine the forms of money it prefers.
3) Lower taxes and cut government spending – close military bases that the U.S. maintains in more than 130 countries around the world and bring the troops home; defund unconstitutional departments like Education, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, etc.; abolish the personal income tax.
4) No bailouts – the economy needs to liquidate all the malinvestments and mistakes made during the boom in order to be able to move on and recover from the bust.
5) Allow prices and wages to fall to levels the market sets – propping up prices stifles recovery, as the Great Depression proved.
6) Regulate the government, not private property and markets – entrepreneurs and investors will only make long-term investments that spur recovery and boost employment if they feel that their property is secure. (Fifteen cabinet-level departments control different parts of the economy, along with 100 federal regulatory agencies that have produced more than 81,000 pages of regulations, not including those set by state and local governments.)
Disclosure:
Like Ron Paul, I am a member of the Silent Generation.
Suggested Reading:
Articles
Ron Paul. "Mises and Austrian Economics: A Personal View" (1984. 23 pages. Ludwig von Mises Institute)
Murray N. Rothbard. "To Save Our Economy From Destruction" (The Freeman, 1995. Reprinted on LewRockwell.com)
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. "Why Austrian Economics Matters" (1995. Ludwig von Mises Institute)
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. "Money and Our Future" (2009. LewRockwell.com)
Donald W. Miller, Jr. "A Fourteen Point Plan for a Post-Wilsonian America" (September 28, 2001. LewRockwell.com)
Donald W. Miller, Jr. "The Austrian Cure for Economic Illness" (June 2, 2008. LewRockwell.com)
Books
By Ron Paul
Pillars of Prosperity: Free Markets, Honest Money, Private Property (2008, Ludwig von Mises Institute)
The Revolution: A Manifesto (2008. Grand Central Publishing)
End the Fed (2009. Grand Central Publishing)
Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (2012. Grand Central Publishing)
Others
F.A. Hayek. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2) (1944, Reprinted 2007. University of Chicago Press)
Ludwig von Mises. Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944, Reprinted 2011. Liberty Fund, Inc.)
Murray N. Rothbard. What Has Government Done to Our Money? and The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar (1963, 1962, Reprinted 2005. Ludwig von Mises Institute)
William Strauss and Neil Howe. The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997, Broadway Books)
Adam Ferguson. When Money Dies: The Nightmare of Deficit Spending, Devaluation, and Hyperinflation in Weimar Germany (1975, Reprinted 2010. Public Affairs. Also available for free download from the Ludwig von Mises Institute)
Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse 2009, Regnery Publishing)
Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse (2011, Regnery Publishing)
Exit polls show that Ron Paul won the majority of voters under age 40 in the Iowa caucus and in the New Hampshire primary. He received 21.4 percent of the votes in Iowa (first-place Rick Santorum got 24.6 percent) and came in second in New Hampshire with 22.9 percent of the votes (first-place Mitt Romney got 39.3 percent). More voters under age 30 chose Ron Paul over the other candidates in the South Carolina primary and Nevada caucus. He garnered 41 percent of the under 30 vote in Nevada – Mitt Romney got 36 percent; Newt Gingrich, 16 percent; and Rick Santorum, 7 percent. But only a small minority of older people has voted for him, as was especially evident in the Florida Republican primary.
In Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584-2069 (1991) and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997), William Strauss and Neil Howe examine the four main generations alive today, including the Boom ("Baby Boomer") Generation, born 1943-1961. They show how these generations mirror ones in the past. They note that a "Young Hero and Elder Prophet" pairing occurs repeatedly in history, myth, and art, as with Joshua and Moses in the Old Testament, the Gray Champion in Colonial America, King Arthur and Merlin in Celtic myth, Tolkien’s Frodo and Gandalf, and Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. In Star Wars, Episode IV, Obi-Wan Kenobi instructs Luke in the ways of the Force and in Episode VI tells him that killing Darth Vader (his father) is the only way to destroy the evil Galactic Empire. And as Joseph Campbell, the American mythologist, notes, the young hero’s close bond with a wise elder is essential to his ultimate success.
The "Gray Champion" precipitated the Boston Revolt of April 1689, mounted to protest King James II’s increasingly autocratic rule of the British-American colonies. As Nathaniel Hawthorne describes it in his Twice-Told Tales, the King-appointed governor of New England marched British troops through Boston to intimidate the public and quell any thoughts of colonial self-rule. Hawthorne writes:
"Suddenly, there was seen the figure of an ancient man, who seemed to have emerged from among the people, and was walking by himself along the center of the street, to confront the armed band. He wore the old Puritan dress, a dark cloak and a steeple-crowned hat, in the fashion of at least fifty years before..."
This elderly champion with a manner "combining the leader and saint" commanded the soldiers to stop; and "at the old man’s word and outstretched arm, the roll of the drum was hushed at once, and the advancing line stood still." Then, "inspired by this single act of defiance, the people of Boston roused their courage and acted. Within the day, Andros [the governor] was deposed and jailed, the liberty of Boston saved, and the corner turned on the colonial Glorious Revolution." This revolt led to the American Revolution 85 years later.
Ron Paul is the Obi-Wan Kenobi and Gray Champion of our time, and the Darth Vader of our U.S. Empire is the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve System, with its network of twelve regional private banks, was established in 1913. The Fed is the country’s third central bank (the first two, established in 1791 and 1816, each lasted for 20 years). The Fed issues token coins and paper dollars, and creates and transfers unlimited amounts of computer-generated digital money. Manufacturing money this way, during its 99-year existence the Fed has destroyed 98.8 percent of the value of the dollar, as calculated by the Shadow Government Statistics (SGS)-Alternate-Consumer Price Index (CPI). Using this measure of inflation, a basket of goods and services that cost $100 in 1913 now costs $8,204! (Even the Bureau of Labor Statistics admits that the dollar has lost 96 percent of its value since 1913, with that $100 basket of goods and services now said to cost $2303.) Using the more accurate SGS-Alternate-CPI, the greatest drop in the dollar’s value, 95.1 percent, has occurred since 1971, when president Nixon severed the dollar’s last remaining link with gold, turning it into an effortlessly issued fiat currency. (A fiat currency is one that has no hard asset backing it such as gold and derives its value from government edict.) Like a virulent virus, the Fed has infected the U.S. dollar and made it grow like a cancer.
The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1921 killed somewhere between 20 to 40 million people (including my 22-year-old grandmother and my wife’s 23-year-old grandmother). What the Fed is could result in an equally dire hyperinflationary economic collapse, similar to what happened in the Weimar Republic, Austria, and Hungary in the 1920s, Argentina in 1989, and Zimbabwe. (A practical definition for hyperinflation is that the country’s largest pre-inflation bank note – for the U.S., the $100 bill. – becomes worth more as toilet paper, or for stoking a fire, than as a currency. The currency remains "current" but no longer serves as a medium of exchange.)
Dr. Paul prescribes an Austrian cure for our country’s economic problems (see below). A professor at the University of Vienna, Carl Menger (1840-1921), founded the Austrian School of Economics, which is named for its country of origin. (Government officials and economists in Austria do not follow or endorse "Austrian Economics.") This branch of economics studies the action of individuals in the marketplace and puts forward a subjective theory of value. It explores important subjects like marginal utility (the amount of benefit derived from consuming one additional unit of a product or service, a concept that debunks the labor theory of value), moral hazard (where being covered against loss increases risk taking – executives at the leading investment banking and securities firm, Goldman Sachs, make a bad, multibillion dollar investment in AIG, and the government, i.e., U.S. taxpayers, bails them out), and malinvestments (making the wrong kind of investments, like building too many shopping malls, encouraged by Fed-set artificially low interest rates). Austrian economists don’t spin their wheels constructing mathematical models of the economy on a large, "macroeconomic" scale, something that Keynesian economists like to do and which have little bearing on the real world of human action. In contrast to pump-priming, big government Keynesianism, Austrian economics stresses the importance of free markets and a stable currency for economic calculation and setting prices.
Starting at a young age, Americans need to learn the basics of Austrian Economics and appreciate how it restores economic health. But government schools do not teach Austrian economics or the concomitant Jeffersonian vision of individual liberty. These subjects make a compelling case for limited government and are thus politically incorrect.
The primary role of government schools, where 90 percent of U.S. children are educated, is to inculcate, in the words of John Calvin, "the duty of obedience to rulers." Government-employed bureaucratic officials determine what political and economic ideas children are to be taught. Compulsory government schooling has become a zero-tolerance, one-size-fits-all, dumbed-down operation that focuses on social engineering rather than on learning and individual achievement. James Ostrowski, in Government Schools Are Bad for Your Kids, puts it this way: "[The government school] produces barely literate, historically ignorant, uncultured lovers of big government." Sadly, public schools have evolved into prison-like indoctrination centers that children and adolescents in the Y Generation currently endure – six and seven hours a day for thirteen years. For a sobering assessment of what our nation’s public schools have turned into, watch the online documentary on tagtele.com titled "War on Kids," available HERE.
Nevertheless, there is reason for hope.
The outpouring of support by young people for Ron Paul is truly heartening. In Texas, for example, students at the Hudson Middle School in Hudson overwhelmingly cast ballots for Ron Paul in the school's mock GOP primary, "after spending weeks studying the candidates' views on the issues and watching debates among the hopefuls" according to a newspaper account, which reported: "They liked Paul's anti-war stance, as well as his willingness to talk straight and not attack his opponents to make a point. ‘He's just like this down-to-earth dude who just seems like he knows what he's doing,’ seventh-grader Danielle Heidkamp said."
Generation Y members like Danielle will carry the Ron Paul banner forward. The Y Generation is also named the "Millennial Generation," coming of age as it is at the beginning of a new millennium. This generation must cope as young adults with the unfolding global financial crisis. When the Baby Boomer generation was growing up in the 1950s and 60s U.S. government debt increased $2.5 Billion a year. Life was good. Today, with the Millennial Generation coming of age, U.S. government debt increases by $2.5 Billion every 16 hours.
After the housing boom peaked in 2006 and foreclosures began to mount, the so-named "Millennial Crisis" began in February, 2007 when the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) announced that it would no longer buy subprime mortgages or mortgage-related securities (collateralized debt obligations). The Y Generation facing this crisis today bears some likeness to the GI Generation, born at the beginning of the last century (1901-1924), who became young adults during the last big crisis in U.S. history, the Great Depression and World War II. Strauss and Howe see the GI and Y generations as both manifesting a "Hero" archetype – can-do heroes and competent pragmatic managers who possess confidence and optimism.
Strauss and Howe name Generation X the "13th Generation" because it is the thirteenth one to call itself "American," beginning with the Awakening Generation born 1701-1723. The Glorious Revolution (Revolution of 1688) brought this about, which dethroned King James II and led Parliament to pass the 1869 English Bill of Rights, called "An Act declareing the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Setleing the Succession of the Crowne." This Act enabled people in the American colonies, emboldened by the Boston Revolt and this Bill of Rights, to see themselves as distinctly American and not servile British subjects.
Progressives view human history as a linear process. Beginning with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson early in the last century, progressives have sought to expand government power and use it to effect what they consider to be beneficial social, political, and economic change. They are notable for launching the FED, an income tax, World War I, Prohibition, and the New Deal. Linear thinkers, which include politicians, the mainstream media, and CEOs of big corporations, work to maintain the status quo and their power and wealth. Rather than progress in a linear fashion, however, human history has a more seasonal, cyclical nature. As Mark Twain observed, "It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible." Twain is also alleged to have said something like, "Although history doesn’t repeat itself, it often rhymes" (source unknown). Whatever "rhyme" or "repetition" that might have helped bring about the Millennial Crisis, having a linear-thinking progressive president will only serve to make things worse. That includes President Obama and all the Republican presidential candidates except Ron Paul. He alone knows what is really going on, understands it, predicted it, and knows how best to deal with it.
Not counting the earlier crisis that caused the colonial Glorious Revolution and its Boston Revolt (1675-1704), there have been four crises in American history: the American Revolution (1773-1704), followed 66 years later by the Civil War (1860-1865), 64 years later by the Great Depression and World War II (1929-1946), and 61 years later by the current Millennial Crisis (2007-?). Each crisis has been worse than the previous one. There were 25,000 deaths in the American Revolution. Some 600,000 to 800,000 people died in the Civil War. And in World War II 50 to 70 million people died (civilian and military). In the American Revolution hyperinflation of the Continental Dollar rendered it worthless, and in the Civil War the Confederate Dollar suffered the same fate.
In The Fourth Turning, William Strauss and Neil Howe predicted, in 1997 when the book was published, that the next period of crisis in our country’s history, the "Fourth Turning" (following the first three crises) which they named the Millennial Crisis, would begin in 8 to 10 years. They were spot-on predicting when it would begin, 10 years later (in 2007), and this is what they say about its course:
"The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. Thus might the next Fourth Turning end in apocalypse – or glory. The nation could be ruined, its democracy destroyed, and millions of people scattered or killed. Or America could enter a new golden age, triumphantly applying shared values to improve the human condition. The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis [the one we are experiencing now]; all they suggest is the timing and dimension."
One thing is certain. This crisis, now in its 6th year, will not be over anytime soon. How bad it becomes will depend on whether or not our country heeds the teachings of Ron Paul and his advocates.
Unfortunately, the establishment media tries to ignore Ron Paul and pretend he doesn't exist. Jon Stewart, on The Daily Show, skewers the media's talking heads on this score, asking "How did Ron Paul become the 13th floor in a hotel?" in "John Stewart Shows How Ron Paul Is Feared By The NWO Mafia Controlled Mainstream Media," which can be seen on YouTube HERE. But other wiser heads can see and appreciate his true worth.
Bill Buckler, Captain of the financial newsletter The Privateer, published in Australia, has this to say about Ron Paul:
"Dr. Paul’s great and merited attractiveness to a growing number of admirers has a very simple source. He is that rarest of creatures – a FREE man. He is beholden to nobody. He has developed his ideas and his convictions over a long and fruitful life of independent thinking. He does not compromise. He homes in on the fundamental issue and principle of any political issue and serves it up without salt or other ‘seasoning.’ He says what he means and he means what he says. He is the living embodiment of the ‘dream’ that most Americans have long since given up on as they saw it slip further and further beyond their grasp. He is the only prominent person who is doing everything he can to turn the non-debate which masquerades as the ‘mainstream’ in the US and global political economy into something of substance. That, far more than presidency, is his goal."
Ron Paul wants to legalize freedom and have the government stop punishing people for using the freedom that is rightfully theirs (as long as you, of course, do not encroach on other persons and their property). All the other leading candidates who want to be elected president are pro-big government and seek power. Mitt Romney is Wall Street’s Republican candidate, with the investment banking and securities firm Goldman Sachs being his biggest contributor. There is little difference between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, except perhaps that Romney is even more pro-war than is Obama. I highly recommend Andrew Napolitano’s YouTube video "Judge Napolitano What if the Government Has Been Lying to You" where he portrays Republicans (excluding Ron Paul) and Democrats as "two wings of the same bird of prey."
Ron Paul is different. As the YouTube video What Is It About Ron Paul? affirms,
"Once you get hooked on Ron Paul you can no longer bear listen to a man who wants power. You become instantly disgusted whenever they begin to speak. Before they were just boring, but now they’re revolting. Listening to a Romney, or a Gingrich, or a Bush, or Obama makes you sick; and you just don’t understand how Ron Paul can get through those debates without getting nauseous. You see a political veneer in these politicians that is so transparent, like a ghost flapping its ethereal tongue at you."
A poster shown in the video states, "Once you get hooked on Ron Paul you can no longer bear to listen to a man who wants power."
People all over the world are getting hooked on Ron Paul. A Canadian citizen, Terry Neudorf, for example, writes this in a blog titled "Ron Paul Shakes the World":
"When the name Ron Paul is mentioned to my grandchildren, a smile will creep across their faces, and they will recall, and speak with excited tones about a time where an idea was born, a message was spread, and a revolution took hold that shook the world. That's the time I'm living in right now. I will treasure every moment. Thanks for all you do."
Young Americans are joining The Ron Paul Movement, like those manning phone banks to promote and raise funds for his campaign. (Don’t expect Goldman Sachs to contribute any money to Ron Paul’s campaign.) Leaders of the X and Y Generations allied with Ron Paul are our best hope for the future – and for coming through the Millennial Crisis without war. A third world war, with nuclear weapons in play, could well prove to be even more devastating than was World War II. But even if he is not elected president, all is not lost. Like Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ron Paul’s spirit and teachings will live on and guide a new generation of Luke Skywalkers, including his son, X-Generation Rand Paul, to lead our country safely through this time of economic and social peril.
The Austrian Cure for Economic Illness
Dr. Paul’s Austrian treatment for the Millennial Crisis comprises six parts:
1) End the Fed – close down the central bank. "Unplug the machinery of the Fed," as Ron Paul puts it in his book End the Fed (see also the other three books he has written on government and liberty in "Suggested Reading" below). The market must be free to set interest rates without a central bank artificially lowering them and inflating the money supply. Banks should once again exist as free-enterprise institutions without privileges or bailouts from the state. ATMs, Web-based systems of funds transfer like PayPal, and online trading can function perfectly well without a Fed.
2) Restore sound money to the economy – privatize the country’s monetary system, abolish legal tender laws, and allow the free market to determine the forms of money it prefers.
3) Lower taxes and cut government spending – close military bases that the U.S. maintains in more than 130 countries around the world and bring the troops home; defund unconstitutional departments like Education, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, etc.; abolish the personal income tax.
4) No bailouts – the economy needs to liquidate all the malinvestments and mistakes made during the boom in order to be able to move on and recover from the bust.
5) Allow prices and wages to fall to levels the market sets – propping up prices stifles recovery, as the Great Depression proved.
6) Regulate the government, not private property and markets – entrepreneurs and investors will only make long-term investments that spur recovery and boost employment if they feel that their property is secure. (Fifteen cabinet-level departments control different parts of the economy, along with 100 federal regulatory agencies that have produced more than 81,000 pages of regulations, not including those set by state and local governments.)
Disclosure:
Like Ron Paul, I am a member of the Silent Generation.
Suggested Reading:
Articles
Ron Paul. "Mises and Austrian Economics: A Personal View" (1984. 23 pages. Ludwig von Mises Institute)
Murray N. Rothbard. "To Save Our Economy From Destruction" (The Freeman, 1995. Reprinted on LewRockwell.com)
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. "Why Austrian Economics Matters" (1995. Ludwig von Mises Institute)
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. "Money and Our Future" (2009. LewRockwell.com)
Donald W. Miller, Jr. "A Fourteen Point Plan for a Post-Wilsonian America" (September 28, 2001. LewRockwell.com)
Donald W. Miller, Jr. "The Austrian Cure for Economic Illness" (June 2, 2008. LewRockwell.com)
Books
By Ron Paul
Pillars of Prosperity: Free Markets, Honest Money, Private Property (2008, Ludwig von Mises Institute)
The Revolution: A Manifesto (2008. Grand Central Publishing)
End the Fed (2009. Grand Central Publishing)
Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (2012. Grand Central Publishing)
Others
F.A. Hayek. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2) (1944, Reprinted 2007. University of Chicago Press)
Ludwig von Mises. Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944, Reprinted 2011. Liberty Fund, Inc.)
Murray N. Rothbard. What Has Government Done to Our Money? and The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar (1963, 1962, Reprinted 2005. Ludwig von Mises Institute)
William Strauss and Neil Howe. The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997, Broadway Books)
Adam Ferguson. When Money Dies: The Nightmare of Deficit Spending, Devaluation, and Hyperinflation in Weimar Germany (1975, Reprinted 2010. Public Affairs. Also available for free download from the Ludwig von Mises Institute)
Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse 2009, Regnery Publishing)
Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse (2011, Regnery Publishing)
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