WHAT I THINK........DALE SINNER

A few days ago, US Senator Ron Paul announced he would stop campaigning in Republican primaries in states that had not yet voted. The campaign simply doesn't have the millions of dollars it takes to compete any further. The announcement comes as a giant "I told you so" for swaths of American media pundits, Democratic and Republican party stalwarts and others who wrote Paul off long ago - like he was just some kind of footnote. I doubt he'll be considered a footnote in the future. I'm not sure I ever really thought he could win -- I'm far too cynical for that. But the notion still made me feel a twinge of optimism for the country that it could grow up, take the pain for its colossal bad choices and set itself on course towards a future that doesn't include destroying itself. Now I know I shouldn't have given even that slight optimism the tiniest consideration. Paul's announcement made me feel a nagging dread, like something horrible has just taken place but we don't really know it yet. For most people, Paul's quiet announcement probably came like the gentle puff of air you feel when a door is closed. You may not have even noticed it. I have the awful feeling that Ron Paul may have been America's Ernst Röhm. For those of you unfamiliar with German history, Ernst Röhm was the last man with enough political power to thwart Adolf Hitler. That's why Hitler had him arrested on June 30, 1934 and shot dead in his jail cell a few days later. Röhm's death enabled Hitler to pursue the colossal public/private partnership with big business we now call fascism. German corporate giants then had a hugely profitable ten-year run manufacturing the wares of war - at the ultimate price of their own nation's sovereignty, inestimable suffering and the deaths of millions. The state-sponsored socialism Röhm had intended to benefit German workers Hitler instead diverted to Germany's wealthiest businessmen in a political compromise that cemented Hitler's grip over the nation and birthed a short-lived bacchanal of profit and perversion in the service of death. Nearly 80 years later, we may have just seen Ron Paul occupying a role similar to Röhm's. Senator Paul may have been the last political leader with any chance of slowing America's seemingly inexorable march into corporate statism. Don't get me wrong. I don't mean to suggest Paul is a national savior. Even if he won the nomination, the presidency and had a congress that cooperated with him, America's problems would still be huge. His plans for shrinking the government (isn't that what Republicans used to stand for?), ending the Federal Reserve and re-directing America's military would cause a lot of economic disruption, upheaval and pain. Ron Paul does not have all the answers. No one does. I also do not mean to suggest any link whatsoever between the politics of Röhm - a 1930s German Nazi - and Paul, a dedicated, American Republican, Libertarian and Constitutionalist. What I do suggest is that Paul is perhaps the only voice left on the national stage who speaks to Americans like an adult - and he has done so his entire career. Ron Paul knows that if President Obama is returned to office or if Mitt Romney wins the White House, America's trajectory toward a 21st Century version of elite corporate fascism will continue apace - laying waste to any hope for the vast majority of Americans to ever improve their economic lot in life. Here's what I mean. Both Obama and Romney are committed to the same policy of war-without-end, deficit spending, financial sector bail-out largesse and security state oppression that made the Bush presidency the historically unprecedented disaster for America that it was - and the Obama presidency an equally, perhaps even more disastrous, sequel. Both administrations have doomed most Americans living now, their children, and perhaps even their children's children to serfdom, ever-rising levels of taxation and debt without end. And that could be the best fate we could hope for with Obama in a second term, or Romney occupying the White House. The worst fate is war. Not the war of expedience that had the world's one remaining military colossus raining fire on an already beaten, pathetic tin pot dictatorship or the invasion and occupation of an impoverished, stricken land still trapped in the 12th Century, but War with a capital W. Perhaps even World War III. President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other representatives of the elite insist "everything is on the table" vis-à-vis preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, while at the same time conceding that there is no evidence it is actually doing so. Romney, who even supported the Vietnam war draft as a 19-year-old in 1966 (though exempt due to his status as a "Mormon missionary"), has promised that if elected he would do anything to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. The rest of the world isn't having it. Russia and China have both warned that an attack on Iran would result in "devastating" consequences. At the BRICS forum in New Delhi this past March, member nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) issued a joint statement condemning American military threats against Iran. Those nations and others have ignored US-imposed economic sanctions and bought Iranian oil using creative barter and alternative currency deals - including paying for oil in rice, rupees and gold instead of dollars. War - to people like Obama, Romney and the people they serve - doesn't mean death or misery or lost limbs and minds. It doesn't mean a soldier's life, a mother or a father's life, or a child's life blasted to liquid or left wasting away toward death. It means something altogether different. It means the creation of artificial demand for certain favored sectors and a jump-start to a languishing economy. It means teaching the world that it will continue to pay for oil in US dollars or else. It means distracting a restless populace from the meaninglessness of their decaying lives into a rally around a flag and the cause of patriotism to justify even more sacrifice. It means a rising stock market and arms company stock price windfalls - like the millions of taxpayer funded war largesse the Bush family clan reaped out of their Carlyle Group holdings along with their Saudi counterparts the bin Ladens. And with concentrated effort and a bit of luck, war means the wholesale capture of human and mineral resources at a non-negotiated, discounted price - arguably its ultimate aim. Alternatively, it can even mean demand destruction - providing the means to regroup and reallocate resources according to the dictates of the executive in a planned economy or a command economy. For many in the privileged class, war presents a cornucopia of enticements that woo and intoxicate them into a delirium of self-righteous rigidity, of arrogance and exceptionalism, of paranoid rationalization, of lust for power and control, of hunger for violence and, ultimately, into a delirium of insanity. Not that they recognize the steps they take into their internal, self-reinforcing worlds of delusion. Bush didn't. Both Obama and Romney appear to believe the money supply can be expanded indefinitely, even infinitely until "growth" - whatever that means in the world of inflation and international conflict they create - enables the pay down of government debt. And this at the same time that Obama expands entitlement spending while ever so gently trimming the rate of growth in military spending... or that Romney extends the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans, while simultaneously tying military spending to a fixed percentage of GDP - guaranteeing ever rising, crushing tax burdens for the rest of Americans. Both are insane fantasies --- the dreams of fascists. They may not look it, but many Americans believe President Barack Obama and Republican candidate for president Mitt Romney are brothers --- comrades in arms, if you like. Some even refer to the two men as one --- "Obamney," or sometimes, "Robama." The abject lack of choice is the last straw for an increasing numbers of Americans who are voting with their feet and simply leaving the country. Some leave for better opportunities abroad. Some are even renouncing their citizenship because the United States is one of the few countries in the world that taxes its citizens living abroad for even moderate incomes earned abroad and is making banking, tax filing and other tax compliance rules so complicated, so burdensome that many non-US banks now simply refuse to let Americans open accounts with them. It just isn't worth the hassle. Some simply hate the direction America has taken in recent years and refuse on moral grounds to take any further part in it. Ron Paul's announcement makes me feel like I should play my old Al Stewart record one last time and say goodbye. I'll close the door gently.