Booman wrote in his recent article Smug In Our Self-Rightousness:
What we need to do is to come up with a plan to stop the violence in our cities. Because everything flows from that.
No, Booman. You are mistaken. What we really “need to do” is to stop the violence of our military. Stop that, bring the troops home, apply the trillions of dollars now spent on useless, self-perpetuating wars to the rebuilding of our social and physical infrastructures and the violence in our inner cities would disappear within a generation. These violent youths of whom you speak? They have been driven insane by despair. They wake up one day at around 10 years of age and see no future for themselves. Their schools are mostly nothing but holding cells for potential shitworkers until they get old enough to work. Why do you think that kids of all races who are not living in poverty or have been otherwise shielded to some appreciable degree from utter despair are not so violent? Who would write these sentences?
What we need to do is to come up with a plan to stop the violence in our suburbs. Because everything flows from that.
What we need to do is to come up with a plan to stop the violence in our rural areas. Because everything flows from that.
No one would write them. There is certainly “violence” in our non-urban areas…there are always people who are genetically hard-wired towards violence…but it is only highly compacted, concentrated poverty that produces the kind of “Clockwork Orange” level of violence that we are seeing now. Once one gives up all hope of a moderately good life a kind of insanity sets in, and after that it’s all downhill. How to change this? Give people some hope. Some real hope. Give them a good education. Start rebuilding our manufacturing capabilities so that there is work for relatively ungifted people. Rebuilding our own physical infrastructure on an FDR/Works Project level would mean employment for millions and millions of people. Real work, not clerking in a chain drugstore somewhere. Necessary and valuable work as well. I mean…when the U.S. was functioning fairly efficiently, when the twin curses of unemployment and inflation were not so rampant as they are now, all of the people working and providing for their families were not necessarily geniuses, to say the least. They were just average folks. For a “just average” middle class kid in a fairly well functioning suburban or rural school system…again, of any race…the chances of getting an education that will allow him or her to work and have a moderately successful life are still quite high. Not as high as they were when this country was at its peak(s) of prosperity, but still pretty good. Now look at “just average” inner city ghetto kids. What are their chances of living a life that could rationally be called successful? Much, much lower. Add to that the undeniable fact that this society has generally used darker skin color as a marker for people to be condemned to the worst kinds of jobs if they do manage to survive relatively sane through adolescence and you have a recipe for violence. When is this situation going to end, Booman? When? Is your “peace president” ending the economic imperialist wars that have been fought in the name of American exceptionalism for a century or more? No, he isn’t; he is just making the war machine more technologically efficient. Is the huge financial drain on the country that is caused by a military/intelligence system that is quite obviously out of control lessening in any way? No, it is not. Instead, effective whistle blowers are hounded into surrender, exile or death and the media machine continues to paint its very successful picture of the necessity for continued military/intelligence buildup in the name of “security.”
Do you know who said these words?
Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.
Hermann Goering said them.
Do the massive, technologically enabled surveillance state and its fevered defense by your president and his cohorts differ in any way from what was going on in Goering’s Nazi Germany? Only in the means that are used to wage the desired wars, Booman. Terror is terror whether it’s brought by V2 rockets or Predator drones, and surveillance is surveillance whether it is done by jackbooted Gestapo or glasses-wearing techies. Bet on it.
This situation has to stop before any improvement in inner city violence will be seen. Ban the guns that enable that violence? How’s that worked out over the preceding 50 years or so? Banning guns doesn’t work. Why? There are already millions and millions of them out there, and short of rounding up every American, confining them all to camps of some sort and then methodically searching the entire country for weapons…ludicrous on the face of it…guns will still be easily available to anyone who really wants one. But change the way the system works for the people who are engaging in that violence? One generation of real change would be all that was needed. And your president is not doing what is needed to produce that kind of change. What’s that you say? His hands are tied because the bad guys still hold a great deal of power? I say bullshit. He is owned by the forces that got him elected…the same forces who own “the bad guys,” Booman. Deal wid it.
Is it possible for someone…or better, some group of people…to be elected here who refuse to be owned by the Permanent War Government? I don’t know, but it certainly isn’t going to happen if well-meaning people like most of those on this site continue to buy into the line of political guff presently being handed out by the media. We must break the fix, Booman, and it ain’t gonna happen by rooting for the home teams. They are both in on it.
There is only one way out of this, and that is to oppose the aggressive military stance that has dominated this nation since the early 1950s. We are still fighting the Dulles’s wars only on other fronts, and we are losing. Supporting a faux “Peace President” isn’t going to get it done, it’s just going to paint another pretty picture over the awful horror of what we are rapidly becoming…the true face of terror for most of the world. Can opposition to this system win here? I don’t know, but not opposing it is a sure loss. Gotta start somewhere.
Where are you going to start, Booman?
And…when?
The clock’s a’ticking and the chickens are already in flight.
When, Booman?
When?
AG
Supporting the War Parties?
Please.
PLEASE!!!
AG
Wow, AG. Nailing the underlying culture of violence is exactly on target. Life is war in the US and war ends in the death penalty in the US. Killing is A-OK; it just depends on who you are as to whether you are deemed a hero or a criminal.
Our symbols are steeped in violence. Our stories are steeped in violence. Our rituals, sanitized as they are, are steeped in violence. We are a nation that worships violence. Sacrifices for violence.
And we are surprised at what we get.
But we have only one solution to violence in the US. More violence.
When cops are beating on ladies because they do not want to lose their right to choose, even in so limited as was as in Texas, and no one cares, you know where we are culturally.
When folks are gratuitiously assaulted with tasers and then arrested for assaulting an officer, you know where we are.
When a 72-year-old woman protesting to preserve her right to vote is ziptied by police so tight that her hands become numb and forced to sit on her hands on a prison bus for 20 minutes before being released for a citeable offense, you know where we are.
When standard operation procedure with protesters is to slam them to the pavement with force before making an arrest, you know where we are.
We are wasting resources trying to snuff out the canaries in the coal mine.
Thanks for this lucid diary, AG.
You are welcome, TD. I only wish that more people would listen.
AG
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US Congress is disfunctional, if there is a way to break-up the Union into 7 or so provinces/regions with their own legislature. Let the red states be the red states, keep hands of the blue or liberal states. While you are at it, make sure to build in real democracies without the corporate power. Limit the terms for members of Congress to 12 years period! People will have a choice where to live, now they would have to emigrate to Canada, Europe or else. This would break the powerful nation so it will never participate in another war of choice overseas. A divided union will never allocate the money for such a fool’s adventure. The world has changed since 1945 and the US shouldn’t be involved in breaking and making sovereign states on other continents.
Listen to President Monroe, the United States and the continental sovereignty of the Americas. Hands off other nations except through the UN which also needs a thorough makeover due to might of the 5 veto powers. Don’t forget to adjust the World Bank and the IMF economic policy in accordance with the global changes.
Don’t hold your breath for more of our labor rights are sold-out in the Nafta on steroids trade negotiations by the global corporations as we speak.
The only reason there are red states and blue states is the original sin of slavery.
And, yet, you still have a love affair with the Pauls.
They may be as close as you can get to a serious anti-military complex political movement, but they don’t want to reinvest a dime of that money into helping raise people out of poverty.
Reinvent the American educational system and the cream of the crop would rise to the top on every level.
“…helping raise people out of poverty?” People do not need “help” to escape poverty, Booman. They simply need “poverty” to not be imposed on them from above by a massive, rigid and almost totally dysfunctional system. I have a close friend who has been going through the rigamarole necessary to get a teacher’s license in NYC and environs and let me tell you…what she has encountered during her trip through the NYU Master’s program and the whole student teaching thing is nothing short of horrifying. There are so many tasks and rules imposed on teachers now that they no longer can do much teaching. Instead they are forced to walk a tightrope of dos and don’ts that has been imposed upon them from above. Far above, most often, in the ivory tower academia and think tanks where…as almost any sane denizen of this system now knows…the career hustle is on 24/7 and the concomitant results are usually totally divorced from any sort of reality in any field.
The Pauls are absolutely correct in the larger sense. We need to downsize and localize our entire social system so that people have a greater say in what is being imposed upon them by government.
Here is some of what Ron Paul wants to do with the educational system.
When you say something like “…they don’t want to reinvest a dime of that money into helping raise people out of poverty,” all you are really doing is repeating a line that has already proven itself to be a failure, the “Help From Above” line. I am sorry, Booman, but the rapidly rising domestic violence that you so abhor is being committed by 3rd, 4th and even 5th generations of people who have been “helped from above” right into permanent poverty. It doesn’t work. A new paradigm is needed, and the Paulist take on things is now the only new paradigm in town.
Take the power away from big government government as much as is possible; return the trillions that are used to fund big government projects like Blood For Oil wars, constant surveillance of the people and empty “programs” that don’t work because they are totally removed from the needs of the people who they are supposed to help and see what happens. This way isn’t working, that is for sure, and I see no new thought coming out of the DemRat/RatPub UniParty on the matter. Same old same old is what I am hearing from both sides. “We know what is best for you. Surrender to our dictates and everything’s gonna work out just fine.” Yeah, right. The only real differences between the two parties lie in who’s doing the dictating and who’s collecting the swag.
It’s too late, Booman. The fix is already broken. It doesn’t work, and now it’s just a matter of time before this country collapses under the current fixers.
You run the mainstream leftiness media line about Ron Paul. He is a Neoconfederate racist and a tool of the money mongers. I do not believe it. No one who wrote the following statement is any sort of racist.
“Neoconfederate? He wants some other “Neo” than a return to a racist country. He is proposing a new New Deal. The old New Deal done broke down in a maze of upsizing and it has turned into The Big Deal. Too big to fail? No, too big to succeed. Time for something else. I am open to all suggestions. I’m just not hearing many.
AG
You are probably sympathetic to this guy’s defense of himself.
I am not.
Most bloggers whom I encounter seem to like to treat racism as an individual, overt phenomenon. It is considerably more complex. The overt, individual sort is rather blatantly obvious (the Southern Avenger might be a good examplar). However, there is more. Racism may be overt or it may be covert. If it is covert, it may be intentional or unintentional. And it can be institutional as well as individual. The above comes from a lot of sources whom I vaguely remember from my college days – James Jones (a social psychologist), Derald Wing Sue (a counseling psychologist), among others. Bottom line is that it is quite conceivable to still be involved in racism even if one is not overtly so as an individual, to the extent that the individual continues to enjoy privilege conferred upon him/her based on his/her racial status.
Even if we were to accept that Pauls were not overt individual racists (a notion I find entirely ludicrous), it is clear that the policies they advocate – including tearing down what few safeguards we have in place for the most vulnerable among us – would disproportionately benefit whites, and especially white males – so we could start talking about a perpetuation of institutional racism (and sexism, for that matter).
I found this book chapter on the Internet that laid it all out far better than I could ever hope to. It might make for a handy reference when interpreting the claims of libertarians of various flavors on matters of racism.
wtf up Arthur. “Free market” = privatized, non-public, education. Parents already have the freedom to select faith-based education just not on the public’s dime. And as for “local control” — the fundamentalist religious (and racist) right took over school boards long ago — all that separates their children from growing up to total ignoramuses and some level of basic education is the meager larger bureaucratic control.
And of course we have local control. It is called the school board. They are elected by the people, and guard the public purse.
Every libertarian education terrorist wants to eliminate school boards, to allow the theft to take place at an incredible rate. Religious schools with public money? No school board. Charters? Private schools in everything by name, no school board oversight. CORRUPTION and THEFT.
http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/plank/110355/its-easy-fleece-charter-schools#
From the article: “Board members and administrators from more than a dozen state-funded charter schools are profiting from their affiliations by doing business with schools they oversee.
The deals, worth more than $70 million over the last five years, are legal, but critics of the arrangements say they can lead to conflicts of interest. Charter executives, on the other hand, say they are able to help the schools get better deals on services and goods ranging from air-conditioners to textbooks and thus save taxpayers money.
The Arizona Republic reviewed thousands of pages of federal tax returns, audits, corporate filings, and records filed with the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools. The analysis looked at the 50 largest non-profit charter schools in the state as well as schools with assets of more than $10 million. For-profit schools were not analyzed because their tax records are not public.
The Republic’s analysis found at least 17 contracts or arrangements, totaling more than $70 million over five years and involving about 40 school sites, in which money from the non-profit charter school went to for-profit or non-profit companies run by board members, executives or their relatives.”
Corruption. Theft. Charter schools, and alternative education.
Morons want to blow up the education system. They are too stupid to realize that years and years and years of corruption and bad practices occurred over time. The current school system is not perfect, but corruption is not a huge part.
Paul knows nothing about education. I doubt that you know anything. People who are ignorant believe all kinds of rancid shit put out by the educational monetization mafia, people like Neil Bush who makes millions by getting morons to doubt the education system.
The education system is not perfect. It can be improved in many ways. But the libertarian idea of parental choice? Idiotic, top to bottom. Parents don’t know SHIT about what and what is not effective.
If this happened, you would see a SHITSTORM of corrupt practices like nothing in the history of mankind.
What we have today is the school board, an unpaid group of citizens, who guard the public purse and make sure that public funds are appropriately expended. That is democracy. The idiotic libertarians want to ELIMINATE the school boards, allowing corruption and theft. That is already what you find in a huge proportion of charters. Plus you have the islamic charters of the Gulin schools, who bring in teachers from Turkey to teach American kids how to speak English. Moronic.
The great thing about a public school system is that its board meetings are open to the public, and there are opportunities for public comment – depending on the district and community, those rules may vary somewhat, but the basic song remains the same. And of course, board members ultimately serve at the pleasure of the voters. It is not a perfect system, but I can say that I have been a local gadfly for ages at school board meetings wherever I have lived, and have had nothing but respect for the men and women who dedicate their time to serve on school boards. Once we privatize, that modicum of accountability is gone – yet another libertarian “solution” that would be a deal breaker.
Absolutely. You run for school board, and it is not easy to win. I tried once, and was not successful. You need to be a people person, and know a lot of locals, and be a politician.
As to the dedication, you are 100% correct. They meet at least monthly. In many cases, there are other meetings. You supervise huge budgets. You have to fire people. You have to make controversial decisions. It is a hard job, and it is unpaid. It often costs a lot of money to run.
I’ve made a couple runs myself. Yes – it is not easy to mount a campaign, and given what is involved in being a board member, a friend (and now former board member) once asked me if I was crazy when I announced that I was a candidate. 🙂
What the Pauls do not understand is that we need to check the power of transnational corporations. Downsizing and devolving government power and function without that means corporate feudalism.
And a lot of their localism is aimed at neo-confederate aims.
If they ever move out of both those positions, let us know.
The libertarian ideology seems little more than thinly disguised shilling for corporate interests; that neo-confederates would feel welcome to climb aboard just illustrates what a lot of smoke and mirrors it all is.
All of the above?
Unison leftiness kneejerk.
Why am I not surprised?
Turn off your media and step away with your brains in the air. I did, years ago, and now I see things differently. You can too, if you have the courage to cold turkey your media jones.
If not?
Business as usual.
Your “Peace President” and you deserve each other.
Would that I live to see the day that a President of the United States rejects multi-mlillion dollar dinners and tours of the empire for a moderately used car and a simple…if well guarded…house.
Until then? DemRat or RatPub, it’s the same scam.
Give me a break!!!
AG
AG:
I have never heard you play. But I know more about music than you do. So, what I want you to do is turn all your charts upside down, use nothing but left-handed instruments, and change your instruments every 10 minutes. Plus transpose everything to the key of G#.
Stupid? Of course. Why should I, a person who sings in choruses, tell you, a professional musician, how to play?
So why are are telling educators how to run schools? Why is Ron Paul, who is a fucking moron, telling educators and parents how to run schools? He is a stupid person, who isn’t even a physician anymore.
And as to GHW Bush, it is called courtesy, and it is called neighborliness, and it is called being a fucking adult.
Some people need to learn how to be adults.
A human being who has played such a large part in making sure that millions of people did not live long enough or well to have what we in the U.S. laughingly call an adult life deserves no courtesies and no neighborliness whatsoever. The U.S. regularly supports the killing of people upon whose hands appears only a fraction of the blood that the Bush regime(s) spilled in its Blood For Oil wars.
Please.
Some people need to learn how to be adults?
You’re right. They do. grow the fuck up.
AG
Is there anyone else of national stature offering alternatives to the awful situation in which we find ourselves.
Anyone?
Please. I’d love to know.
Gradualism?
I don’t think so.
It’s just another part of the scam. In order to get from point A to point B you have to pass midpoint C. To get from point A to point C you have to get through midpoint D. And so on. You never get there. That’s where we are not getting.
So who’s got a better idea? A better set of ideas. Anybody? I’m all ears.
AG
Why the (bleep) do the Pauls pitching the warmed over Pat Buchanan schtick even have “national stature?”
I’m guessing that they appeal to at least a faction of our CEO class. As long as that faction’s profit margins are safe, they’ll get all the national exposure they want.
True but that’s the covert side of their little family industry. It’s the CPAC and “leftie” “libertarians” that have elevated the Pauls with no clue as to the roots of what they’re buying which is essentially the same as what the “cheap labor” capitalists and authoritarians like the Koch boys want including control of women’s wombs. A version of what Pat Buchanan less successfully was selling for decades and of whom Molly Ivins said, “It sounded better in the original German.”
In the original German? I got “the original German” right here as far as what is happening in this country is concerned.
This is happening right at the top of the U.S. control system and it is happening pretty much agreed upon by about 98% of both parties. The only disagreements are in regard to tactics, not to the basic control strategy. Solve this problem and the rest of the system will heal itself.
Bet on it.
I am.
AG
I am reasonably sure that anything I would suggest would be casually dismissed without so much as a second thought. That said, I loved the energy in Occupy a couple years ago – we’ll see something like that again sooner rather than later, as there is a void in our political discourse that no one else who has been allowed a national bully pulpit has been able to fill. Apparently vast swaths of Americans (just like their comrades across the globe) are not too keen on any of the flavors of neoliberalism that are pushed upon them. All that said, I loved Gloria La Riva’s stances and energy during her 2008 campaign. She is still affiliated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation. The ISO is another organization with a number of locals scattered throughout the US, including a few parts of the US that are unlikely ones to find socialists of any stripe. They tend to hit the right notes when it comes to war, civil rights, and economic equality. Most of the action with these organizations is extraparliamentary, rather than with regard to electoral politics. At the moment, that might be the best that can be hoped for. The right-wing in this country is far better at uniting its diverse and divergent factors than the left. That could change, but it will take a good decade or so to make that happen, and that is assuming that we can find a set of young activists who can look past the factions long enough to do the necessary legwork.
Beyond that, our particular situation was not created overnight, nor will it be solved overnight. Anyone promising to do so is pulling one over on you. The good news is that the world is not in any danger of ending overnight either, even if the situation is far less than ideal.
.
US sharing the same moral values: Israel and its “lust for conquest” of the Palestinian territories. Rendition, imprisonment, torture and unlawful assassinations by drones with some collateral damage. Sounds all familiar now, doesn’t it?
.
And there it is. All except the “phony wars” part. They can’t pull that off, so they make war upon guaranteed losers. Even that doesn’t work sometimes but…hey, there’s always another little country on which to pick. Why the absolute panic when a few denizens of the picked-upon countries bring a little taste of the fire back to the motherland? It’s useful. It allows the controllers to tighten the bonds of domestic control even further.
I might add here that the same general act goes on inside the country as well. Think of minorities as the equivalent of guaranteed losers in a war. “They” are the enemy in a domestic permanent war system. It’s always “the other” that is targeted. “They’re not like us. They hate us for what we have accomplished, for what we own.” This is useful too. It creates a permanent cheap labor force while simultaneously placing fear in the hearts of all who are not “the other.”
To me, the most amazing thing regarding all of this is the following. Not many of the controllers actually know what they are doing. They are true believers, most of them. Occasionally someone like Kissinger comes along, but most of them operate on the simple internal belief that this is the way things work. This is the way it should be. This is the way it must be.
What’s that you say? Obama is smart enough to understand how the system works? I wonder. I wrote in one of the above comments:
If Obama is so smart, why does he not see the love and devotion that would flow from the middle, working and poverty classes of America if he and his family backed off of the feeding trough of pomp and circumstance upon which they now quite obviously…and quite self-satisfiedly as well…gorge. I am tired of seeing the leaders of this country in $1000+ suits and dresses. Tired of the breathless reporting of their vacations, their state dinners and appearances at high-level gatherings of the controller classes. I do not envy what they have…in fact I would be profoundly uncomfortable if I was forced to live that way…but as a simple matter of political common sense, do you not think that a presidential movement towards personal rectitude in the spending area would resonate very strongly with the American people? I do. Not everyone reads “People” magazine or breathlessly follows the antics of various media-created celebrities. People here scream on me because I am a supporter of the Ron Paul movement, but the very first thing that struck me about him in a positive sense was that he didn’t live ostentatiously. He didn’t act or speak ostentatiously, either. Plain-spoken and direct on every level from his cheap shoes to his campaign speeches. Nothing extra, no glitz, just what he believes is needed. We have had enough glitz. Time for some meat and potatoes. Shuck the glitz and we would be well on our way to shucking the controllers. Bet on it.
Shuck the glitz.
You be bettah off.
Bet on that as well.
Later…
AG
At the moment, all I can do is take the Pauls at their word. If I am to believe them, I can only conclude that the Pauls’ economic policies would amount to an imposition of the sort of “shock therapy” that would make similar forms of “shock therapy” (e.g., Yeltsin’s Russia in the early 1990s) look like child’s play. In essence, we would experience a form of class warfare unlike anything we are currently experiencing in the US (and yeah, we are experiencing class warfare already), and would perhaps rival and surpass that of the last Gilded Age. I have to wonder what the Pauls would do with the inevitable riots and other forms of unrest that would inevitably ensue once our society’s most vulnerable and oppressed – and even those somewhat less vulnerable and oppressed – were entirely thrown to the proverbial wolves. I somehow doubt that a lot of “freedom of speech” or “freedom of press” or “freedom to organize” would be tolerated, if the history of previous experiments with “shock therapy” are any indicator.
They are anti-foreign military adventures — or at least those of recent vintage — not anti-military. They are authoritarians in addition to being austerians, they’d be down with sending in the NG to quell riots and the US military if in their view it were necessary.
Isn’t it interesting how this thread got derailed by a discussion of the Pauls (and yes, I got sucked in too) instead of what was in the diary.
With Arthur, the Pauls are simply always going to be part of the mix. In this case, there is nothing wrong with the content of the diary, per se – just that the ideals discussed in that diary (rebuilding our infrastructure, or seriously dealing with the grinding poverty that way too many Americans experience) would be entirely unachievable if one is going to take the Austrian school of economics as a starting point (as the Pauls and their followers evidently do).
You have absolutely no idea whether “Austrian school economics” or whatever else the Paulites might be proposing would work or not work because…as Ron Paul so accurately stated many years ago regarding free-market capitalism…the have never yet been put to the test. Not really. I don’t know either. But I do know this…if the U.S. continues the economic imperialist path upon which it has been headed for 50+ years and the equally ridiculous Big Brotherism of the welfare and surveillance states, it is going to go down. Sooner rather than later, it looks like to me. We are already only a few steps away from the nightmare presented in the classic 1985 Terry Gilliam film “Brazil.” A précis of the film follows:
How far away from what is happening in the U.S. today is this comedy of bureaucratic errors?
Uncomfortably close, in my opinion.
Very uncomfortably close.
Whatchoo gonna do about it, podnas?
I know what I am doing about it.
Stepping out of the fix.
By any means necessary, including Paulism.
Remember the old warrior culture idea.
Bet on it.
AG
My point still stands. The content of your diary in and of itself is largely admirable, and there are probably plenty here who would connect with quite a bit of it.
The problem comes down to how to get there – how do we rebuild an infrastructure? How do we deal with poverty? How do we further reduce violence? You offer a solution that requires we accept a warmed-over version of whatever Pat Buchanan and any of a number of retrograde pundits were pushing back in the day. I doubt there will be many takers, no matter how apocalyptic your rhetoric.
So it goes.
Once again, Don…name someone or some group of people in a position of real political clout in the U.S. who have a better approach to the problem. Any approach to the problem other than more of the same thing(s) from the so-called left or right.
One can certainly attempt to drop out of the system, although the surveillance state makes even that option extraordinarily difficult. But dropping out only denies the state some of the benefit of your cooperation, and the number of people who could actually manage to do so…whether it might be by simply leaving the country for good or whether (by-hook-or-by-crooking it) finding some way to live outside of the surveillance state’s purview while still remaining inside of its borders…would be a drop in the state’s bucket (out of its bucket, to be precise) compared to the 315+ million who would remain trapped in that bucket.
I notice that you have a tiny hammer and sickle as a sig on your comments. Very tiny. Are you a communist of some sort? If you are, using the term “a warmed-over version” of something is fairly ironic, isn’t it? The hammer and sickle version of “communism” failed mightily wherever it was tried. You want to try it again? In the U.S.? Fat chance.
Is Ron Paul a “warmed-over” version of Pat Buchanan? I dunno. Buchanan made some sense and he also made some nonsense. The same might be said of Ron Paul, but both the sense and the nonsense differ between them. Buchanan’s Roman Catholicism…the Irish brand, believe it (Been there as a boy myself. I recognize the odor.)…informed a great deal of what he was saying. I see none of that jesuitical approach from Ron Paul He appears to be quite a free thinker, and his free thought (Not a slavish following of “Austrian school economics,” Ayn Rand or anybody else.) looks to me to have led him to his stances on society, politics, foreign relations and economics. Spend a day reading his speeches and papers. Look at vids of him talking. It’s a worthwhile endeavor if you yourself have a fairly free mind. I did, and the experience radically changed the media-promoted view that had second and third-handed itself into my mind. (I consume very little mass media directly, and certainly not in video or radio form, only in print where I can stop and consider instead of being pulled through something without a chance to be critical of what is happening. Works for me…)
Check it out.
There’s more there than meets the (media-led) eye and ear.
Bet on it.
AG
P.S. I present this “go to the source” challenge to anyone here who has been critical of my admiration for Ron Paul. I will bet money that most of the critical posters have never read more than a minute or two of what he has to say, and that only to prove their own preconceptions. It’d be a good bet, too.
P.P.S. I chalenge all of the spouters of that “Austrian School of Economics” bullshit to go to those sources as well. I dare ya. Heavy going. Try it. Judging from the syntax of many of the critics, I doubt whether they could even get through the first 6 paragraphs of much of it. Too much “Duh!!!” going on in what passes for their little brains after decades of media force-feeding.
Duh.
I already went to the source long ago. I have read enough of the Pauls’ own words and seen enough of their speeches in the course of the last few years. That was enough to thoroughly disgust me for a lifetime. End of story.
It’s also been a minute, but at one point I would have had the chance to read some Hayek, including his rather impassioned defense of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. The guy can write. Too bad the ideology behind the writing is so vile.
There is substantial evidence that free markets, that is markets with no government at all, would in fact not work. There would be not validation of weights and measures, and if a private firm (and there is the first place of departure from free market capitalism-creation of multi-person enterprises) decided to standardize weights and measures, that firm would be tempted by bribery to validate that non-standard weights or measures conformed to the standard when in fact they didn’t. One only has to look a the credit ratings firms and the use of credit default swaps and the auditing firms and the Enron debacle to see how that plays out. Finally over time, random events will create concentration in markets as an equal number of winners and losers in transactions only occurs over a very, very long time.
Without government, there would be no one to enforce contracts. And private firms set up to enforce contracts would behave like repo companies.
In fact free markets have been tried and like web sites with totally unmoderated free speech, they soon fail and resources are concentrated in the hands of dimwits who drive the whole economy into the ground.
Anarchic communism has a better go than free markets just because that thought comes with a recognition of the relationship between politics and economies. But those likely gravitate toward leader-commanded economies and dimwits who drive the whole economy into the ground.
But then, our current system of free market, state-assisted capitalism has produced an oligarchy so greedy that the bunch of dimwits there have driven the economy into the ground and are preventing it from recovery as they strip-mine all the natural, human, and financial asset.
C’mon, Tarheel. This is a reductio ad absurdum argument. Ron Paul is not suggesting some form of anarchy, and no matter how radically he might want to change things the sheer mass of the establishment would make it difficult to go so far as to cease the “validation of weights and measures.”
Please. I mean…let’s get real here.
The dollar itself is a sort of “weight and measure,” is it not? A dollar is supposed to be able to buy a certain amount of something. However, within the current system that particular “weight and measure” has been totally co-opted by a giant Federal organization that is owned and operated by the banks.
Co-opted for their own profit. Bet on it.
You write “In fact free markets have been tried…”.
‘Scuse me?
Where?
When?
Not in my lifetime, and not in the Information Age either.
You present three alternatives and within each of them you say that “dimwits” will eventually prevail and failure ensue.
Hmmm…
Does that mean that you give up?
Hmmm…
I know the feeling.
But I do not give up.
I keep on trying, but I do not “keep on trying” the same damned things. Doing that is a fairly good definition of one form of insanity. You have encountered it, right? “The definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result.”
Ron Paul has come up with a plan that does not keep repeating the same mistakes. Is his own approach a “mistake?” Could be, but until something is really put to the test no one knows how well it will work. Further, until something is really put to the test no one knows if it can be adjusted to eliminate its badly working parts. Will Paulism be “put to the test?” It’s closer to that position than it was 25+ years ago when he first started effectively promoting it. We shall see.
We shall soon see.
My bet?
No.
The corporate media bogswarming will succeed in electing another set of Permanent Government representatives both in 2014 and again in 2016.
So it goes, but with every Federal misstep…with every clown act from the Federal legislatures and every baring by whistle blowers of Federal mistakes, overreaches and flat-out criminality…the likelihood of a Paulist revolution grows greater.
I do keep trying, myself.
You?
Those aren’t just dog whistles the whistle blowers are sounding, TD. They’re fire warnings. Bet on that as well.
Later…
AG
I know. So what exactly does “free market” mean for Ron Paul.
It means no regulations by government on businesses, privatized powers of arbitration to enforce contracts, and government responsibility for military, police, criminal courts, and prisons — all of which may be contracted to private entities.
Those, AG, are the foundation stones of corporate feudalism.
It takes regulations with teeth to ensure a sanitary food supply, fair dealing by merchants, redress of abuse by employers, and a lot of the things that we take for granted will still be there after de-regulation occurs. We did that experiment starting with Jimmy Carter and it did not work. Plane fares did not get cheaper except through airlines breaking unions and cutting services. Savings and loans imploded with risky investments. Investment bankers nearly took down the global economy (and the jury is not out on the “nearly”) through the phoney money of credit default swaps.
The singular good thing that Ron Paul did relative to the economy is join with Bernie Sanders to audit the Fed. And what we learned was how much in dollar terms it acted in the bankers’ interest during the bailout. Now it is clear that the main economic policy job of the fed is to trigger a recession when wages start getting too high. So insulating bankers from the effects of triggering a recession was well in scope of its unofficial function.
But don’t get a halo effect about Ron Paul for the few things on which you agree with him.
It’s as if Arthur has no knowledge of the “gay nineties” and doesn’t understand the core mechanisms of capitalism which always drives an unregulated and unfettered system towards monopolies.
Equally bad and socially repulsive is that overt discrimination against those of the wrong color, national origin, etc. is a welcome feature in the Paul’s vision of “free markets.”
Ah, but those two frauds would gleefully mandate state ownership of the “lady parts” of women’s bodies right along with all those other retrograde Republican creeps currently destroying women’s right to privacy and control of our own bodies.
AG also seems to lack an understanding of the history of socialism. It would be false to say that socialism failed wherever it was tried. It might be more accurate to state that success has been decidedly mixed. Hobsbawm was probably right when he stated in one of his last interviews that there would never be another Soviet Union, and it’s also pretty much a given that there will never be another period like the early to mid 20th century where there was a sort of Marxist “orthodoxy”.
I ask again, DD…what’s with the hammer and sickle thing? As far as I know it is not a symbol of “socialism”…the countries that I currently most admire in the world are all very strongly socialist in their approach to government and society (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Holland and France first among them, w/Canada showing fairly well too.) but of communism, and there is hardly a hammer and sickle symbol left to be found in any of them.
Here is what Wikipedia says regarding the symbol:
Now…if my several working jaunts through communist and recently communist countries has taught me anything, it is that communism (as it has been practiced) not only does not work very well, it leaves the countries in a terrible shambles even after the practice has been stopped for years. And yet here you are, displaying the communist symbol (while of course backtracking into the whole “I’m not a communist, I’m a socialist” spiel) and simultaneously accusing me of advocating “warmed-over” ideas. Hmmmmmm. You write in the comment above:
I did not write “socialism failed wherever it was tried.” I quite clearly stated:
Communism is not socialism, DD…except in the fevered minds if the right wing and their centrist/neo-liberal allies, of course. Is that really what you are? If it is, you have tipped your hand.
Your right hand.
You write:
Please. You use the words “socialism” and “communism” as replacements for one another and then you say that I lack some sort of understanding of what has gone down over the past couple of centuries?
Please.
If there were a true “socialist” movement in potentially effective place in this country that was also anti-economic imperialist war and pro-legalizing immigrants I would be on it like white on rice. But there is not. There are only neo-liberal short-cutters and mediocrats like Obama who seek to pacify the working and middle classes with their little gifts (Named after themselves, natch.) while maintaining the same corporatist rule of law and economic imperialist foreign policy that has been in place in the U.S. for much, much too long.
Talk about “washed-up” ideas?
What could be more washed-up than yet another re-named “Great Society” farce.
I got the results of yer “Great Societies,” “It Takes a Villages” “No Child Left Behinds” and “Just Say Nos,” etc. etc. etc.
Right here!!!
How well is your neo-liberal “Yes We Can” society working, DD. How’s that one working out?
Ask a Palestinian or Afghani.
Or just ask Bradley Manning.
From where is the change going to come?
That is all I am asking here.
They used to say “Give peace a chance.” Remember?
Well, it will take radical change to gain a modicum of peace in this country and thus in the rest of the occupied world as well.
Give change a chance.
Please.
AG
Whatever.
That is long for “Meh,” right?
As in “who cares?”
Nice.
AG
As in nothing I or practically anyone else here says really matters because in your own mind you are always right – based upon the body of your output here. So, fuck it. Why bother?
Why bother?
Bother to learn the differences between communism and socialism, first of all. Then come back and talk.
AG
Yep…you just can’t help yourself – condescending to the end. I’ve often said that Ron Paul supporters probably did their candidate more damage than he could do to himself – and old Ron (and his son, Rand by extension) seems to do well enough on his own.
But for future reference for anyone who wishes to deal with you or any Ron Paul supporter who might darken any blog or message board, here’s a nice compendium of info about your hero:
The Ron Paul Megapost
The cool thing is that it includes plenty of links to Ron Paul’s original words. Nothing like going to the source.
Durito out!
Not only towards monopolies but also to toward financial panics and collapse. They get money unregulated, create phoney money like the credit default swaps of the last boom, and then it goes bust taking lots of innocent people into deeper poverty, while the tyros who invented the concepts declare bankruptcy, walk away and start to do the same thing all over again. Except this time those tyros got bailed out.