[Peace-discussion] Must read.

[David Strand]

Ron Paul does not deserve the support of any Green in
my opinion.

To begin with, he opposes every consumer and
environmental protection that Nader has ever worked
for as he feels all those government regulations are
unduly burdensome on business.

He opposes carbon cap and trade and most all
government regulations of pollution.

He opposes all forms of public education.  In fact his
chief campaign organizer in Iowa is a guy who is paid
for by a conservative think tank that believes public
education undermines parents religious rights by it's
mere existence and at least since he is tied up with
the Ron Paul campaign he not touring the country
trying to defeat public schools systems funding
referenda.

He opposes civil rights laws and regulations as an
undue monitoring of what he sees as personal morality
by the government.

He is part of the southern Milesian tradition of
libertarianism which often draws white supremacists
and those sentimental for the days of the confederacy
and which tend to be far more socially conservative
than their Cato Institute related brethren.  For
example, Ron Paul, for all his libertarian
credentials, believes the government SHOULD use it's
force to restrict abortion and other post
fertilization forms of birth control so he is
decisively anti-abortion and even opposed to numerous
forms of birth control.

He doesn't support government protection of the right
to unionize either.

He doesn't support current social safety net programs
such as welfare, medicare, medicaid let alone fully
opposing Green objectives such as universal single
payer healthcare.

And his immigration policies are as backward from
Green positions as those of the infamously rascist and
anti-immigrant candidate Tom Tancredo.

Is it allright to work with him together on the
singular issues we do agree with him on such as
opposing the war though from very different reasonings
and frames?


You betch ya!

However, this should not translate into a campaign in
favor of so so many things which we heartily oppose
and opposed to so so many things we support.

If that's a "sling or arrow", I hope it's hit it's
mark.

David Strand
--- John Walsh <jvwalshmd@gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12053
> 
> December 14, 2007
> Ron Paul: Slings and Arrows, Left and Right
> The Trots and the neo-Trots gang up on Ron
> BY JUSTIN RAIMONDO
> 
> Ron Paul's simultaneous reenactment of the Goldwater
> and McCarthy
> (Eugene, not Joe) campaigns has excited a wave of
> enthusiasm on both
> sides of the political spectrum – and also a much
> less enthusiastic
> reaction from committed ideologues, left and right.
> While they come at
> the Paul campaign from different angles, both wind
> up with
> surprisingly similar negative analyses of the
> Paulian phenomenon, more
> so than you might imagine.
> 
> Let's take the lefties first, starting with one
> Sherry Wolf, whom, we
> are told, is an editor of the International
> Socialist Review. Writing
> in Counterpunch, she starts out her polemic by
> acknowledging the utter
> lack of any alternative to the object of her intense
> irritation:
> 
> "'Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum,' goes the
> revamped aphorism.
> Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul's
> surprising stature among
> a small but vocal layer of antiwar activists and
> leftist bloggers
> appears to bear this out."
> 
> By way of understanding the full implications of
> this statement,
> perhaps you ought to know that the International
> Socialist Review,
> where Ms. Wolf serves on the editorial board, is the
> quarterly
> theoretical journal of the International Socialist
> Organization (ISO),
> the largest Trotskyist organization in the US,
> associated with the
> "Third Camp" views of the late Tony Cliff. Last time
> around the ISO
> supported Ralph Nader for President, attracting much
> criticism from
> its more orthodox Trotskyist competitors: I remember
> going to a Nader
> rally at Mission High School in San Francisco at
> which Nader attacked
> the idea of state socialism, much to the
> embarrassment of the ISO,
> which provided the organizational muscle for the
> Nader campaign in
> Northern California – and their embarrassment must
> be even greater
> this time around, when there is no "progressive"
> candidate on the
> ballot or likely to appear on any ballot, and Nader
> is saying good
> things about … Ron Paul! (at around 4:40 minutes
> into this Youtubed
> "Hardball"clip).
> 
> Panic! What to do?! Well, Ms. Wolf complains, at
> length, that Ron
> isn't a socialist, which seems to me a rather
> useless pursuit. After
> all, neither is Nader. If they want a socialist,
> then why not run
> their own candidate, like the Socialist Workers
> Party used to do? Oh,
> no, they can't be bothered. Instead, they recycle
> the smears initially
> hurled at Paul by the neocons: he's a "racist,"
> albeit Wolf's
> rationale is even loopier than that dreamt up by
> Ron's opponents on
> the Right. Paul is a racist, you see, because he
> "imagines a
> colorblind world" – as did Martin Luther King, and
> the entire
> integrationist tradition of the civil rights
> movement, oh, but never
> mind. Aside from citing quotes that were not written
> by Rep. Paul, and
> were instead authored by a fired aide, Wolf can't do
> any better than
> that. This is a lot like the Clintonians implying
> that Barack Obama
> may have been a drug dealer. One can't help
> wondering, if, perhaps,
> the ISO is secretly supporting Hillary – or else,
> why the effort to
> wall off the left from Paul with this ridiculous
> smear of "racism"?
> Who benefits from that? Clearly, the Democrats ….
> 
> Wolf decries Paul's opposition to a policy of open
> borders, and yet
> Nader took almost the same position as Paul: he
> opposes illegal
> immigration, and pledged to reduce it last time
> around. In an
> interview with Pat Buchanan published in The
> American Conservative,
> when asked about the growth of the US population to
> 400 million in the
> near future, Nader said
> 
> "We don't have the absorptive capacity for that many
> people. Over 32
> million came in, in the '90s, which is the highest
> in American
> history. We have to control our immigration. We have
> to limit the
> number of people who come into this country
> illegally. First of all,
> we have to say what is the impact on
> African-Americans and Hispanic
> Americans in this country in terms of wages of our
> present stance on
> immigration? It is a wage-depressing policy."
> 
> The hypocrisy of the ISO attack on Paul is
> breathtaking.
> 
> Like the neocons, Wolf attacks Paul for supposedly
> being one of those
> dreaded "isolationists." Does she realize that this
> is a code-word for
> anti-war and anti-imperialist? Of course she does,
> yet she cynically
> avers: "In the isolationist fashion of the nation's
> Pat Buchanans, he
> decries intervention in foreign nation's affairs and
> believes
> membership in the United Nations undermines U.S.
> sovereignty." Such a
> sentence, dripping with contempt for Paul's "no
> entangling alliances"
> keep-us-out-of-war stance, might easily have
> appeared in the Weekly
> Standard, or National Review. Out of the United
> Nations?! Oh,
> heavens-to-Betsy, then how would the Security
> Council enforce all
> those delightful sanctions against Iran, and
> threaten to unleash the
> armed might of the West if Tehran doesn't bow to the
> Council's
> demands? Of course, this is par for the course for
> the ISO, whose
> British predecessors, the Cliff-ite Socialist Review
> faction, refused
> to condemn the US invasion of Korea, which was
> sanctioned, you'll
> recall, by the UN and fought under "international"
> auspices.
> 
> The ISO is so f*cking clueless, that I have a hard
> time taking Wolf's
> polemic seriously: it is so obviously the result of
> pure political
> calculation, and sheer panic, that one has to wonder
> if they take it
> seriously. I have to say, however, that they just
> don't get it. They
> don't understand Ron's appeal to the left, aside and
> apart from his
> unrelenting opposition to US intervention abroad.
> They think they can
> gull the left if they bring up his economic views:
> 
> "Complaints against 'big government' and
> 'over-regulation,' though
> often justified, also issue from the privileged who
> are frustrated at
> finding that their quest for still greater
> privileges at the expense
> of their community are curtailed by a government
> which, ideally,
> represents that community. Pure food and drug laws
> curtail profits and
> mandate tests as they protect the general public."
> 
> Yet Paul's critique of state capitalism takes on the
> commanding
> heights of the system: the Federal Reserve.
> Inflation, he says, is the
> means by which the plutocratic elite gets the
> freshly-created assets
> first and gets to spend them at full value – while
> the currency is
> debauched and the poor and the middle class suffer.
> His 
=== message truncated ===



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