In his comment on Sherry Wolf’s response above, Joshua Frank replies:
“to me it’s not about Paul’s so-called “revolution”, it is about making the war issue the central issue in the campaign. Without a stickler in there, the two-headed monster won’t be pressured to address the issue in the debates or along the campaign trail.”

What is wrong about this assesment is that it is not the absence of Ron Paul, but the absence of an antiwar movement, that will fail to pressure the “two-headed monster” to debate the war. A movement that bird dogs candidates along the campaign trail, that organizes marches and rallies across the country, that helps support the growing numbers of active duty GIs, vets and military families speaking out against the war is what will pressure politicians to raise the issue of the war, not Ron Paul.

As far as I know our antiwar coalition in Portland, Oregon is one of the few cities outside of D.C. planning a large mobilization against the war for the 5th anniversary. Unfortunately, I think this says more about the dismal state of the antiwar movement than anything tremendous about Portland.

Yet we have spent the last year slowly and carefully putting together a coalition of progressive-left groups that have a solid understanding of how to stop a war. And I can tell you very few of our 60 members/member groups would seriously consider supporting Ron Paul. The reason is simple: our coalition has successfully put together antiwar groups with other organizations that have traditionally fought mainly against all the things that Ron Paul is crappy on. These groups do incredible work against racism, for immigrants rights, for women and GLBTQ rights, and for other leftists in the coalition to all of a sudden support Ron Paul would be a huge slap in their face. The idea that our coalition should abandon planning protests and expanding our efforts to make Portland a Sanctuary City for GI Resisters to go campaign for Ron Paul is just absurd in this context. Like Portland has and is continuing to do, leftists across the nation need to expand the movement by showing the connections between being against the war and being for immigrant’s rights, against racism, against the occupation of palestine, for women’s rights, etc., and bring activists who care about those issues into the antiwar movement.

Anyone who thinks the war is going to end either by getting Ron Paul elected or by having Ron Paul bring up the issue along the campaign trail, is far removed from reality. We’re going to end this war just like we ended the Vietnam War, by creating a massive INDEPENDENT antiwar movement that pressures all politicians to bring the troops home immediately, and supports military families, vets, active duty GIs who choose to resist (who by the way tend to be a multiracial, predominantly working class group) AS WELL AS Arabs who are being scapegoated in the US, and the millions of Iraqi refugees and citizens. The might of this group is much more powerful than any shout in the dark from Ron Paul. Supporting Ron Paul would be a huge step backward for an antiwar movement and a Left that has taken way too many already.

- The contention that a movement must be built from the ground up, outside of the institutions that currently exist, is if anything an argument in favor of Ron Pauls candidacy. Paul has shown the willingness to run third party before, draws support from traditional third party or non-voters (Ron Paul is the only candidate I know of to get any sort of support from self-identified anarchists), and has clearly stated that he will not support his parties nominee if they run an imperalist, pro-war plank (they will). Paul is a Republican only for reasons of perceived political neccesity..something Trotskyites should be entirely farmilar with.

-The implication that decentralized communities will do less to curb enviornmental destruction and terrorism, than will massive statist policies and agencies has been refuted by the history of Eastern European Communism, and the advanced stages of enviornmental decay that line up rather nicely with the advent of EPA in this country. I agree that industrialization is decadent and must be combatted (oddly enough an idea, that is never seriously addressed by socialist, and has traction only with enviornmentalist anarchists and old right traditionalists conservatives like Russ Kirk and Richard Weaver), but decentralism is far more likely to usher in the destruction of corporate capitalism and the industrial monolith, than blind faith in state regulatory agencies that usually work as the “invisible hand” of tyrrany.

-McKinney is a worthwhile candidate, we shall see how her campaign develops..for now Paul is clearly the best option for anti-war, anti-imperial, anti-big activists and advocates.

-In Sherry Wolfs initial article she seems to suggest that a distrust and contempt for the UN is evidence of a wishy-washy views on imperalism. This is obviously false and naive marxist fundamentalism at its worst. The UN is a fraud, that all leftists should oppose for many reasons, not the least of which is its creation of the state of Israel and its open ended resolutions regarding Iraq. If anything leftists should be adovacting immediate withdrawl..that it takes a libertarian to do so is disconcerting.

-A central theme in this thread has been Pauls allegedly restrictionist stance on immigration being grounds to consider him a racist and unworthy of a vote. The reality is that Pauls position on immigration is literally to the left of the position expoused by Ralph Nader during the 2004 election cycle. Nader called for a huge reduction in legal immigration, via suspesion of major visa programs for example. Paul has never done this..yet Nader was endorsed by the Sherry Wolfs of the world in spite of this.

I could go on and on, but will stop there. There is ample reason for serious leftist, espcially non-dogmatic, decentralist to campaign, support and vote for Ron Paul.

Personally, I think CINDY SHEEHAN will be an historic Speaker Of The House, and I’m ready to roll out to CA to be able to vote for her! (But I ain’t moovin’ down ta deliverance (all due respect Ms. McKinney, we’re not all so brave~).

This is a difficult time and to embrace libertarianism no way out. On issues, YES. Supporting candidates, no.

I wish people on this list would get as enthusiastic over Cynthia McKinney and Jared Ball. It’s time to make the Democrats pay dearly for their giving Bush all that he wants. That means confronting them, protesting them, and telling them with our signs and voices that it is time to pay. Make them lose their seats. Put their asses right back into the minority. Vote Green.

Yet the last time Amerigoons revolved around anything, it was pat robertson and the Christian coalition dismantling the counter-culture, and so far they still seem perfectly happy inbreeding brain-dead ‘believers’ right across the red-state bible belt.

Therein lies the reason for Bushco and his botched war: They just ‘believed’.

It seems some have found a new preacher in st. paul, who they similarly seem to ‘believe’ without apparently questioning his platform.

There’s a lot of ‘isms & schisms’ in the comments above, but all party politics and presidential posturing aside, this preposterous Paulian proposal that the market ‘polices itself’, is obviously utterly disproved.

Anyone espousing such opprobrium in light of the disastrous destruction and heart-rending record of personal and corporate wanton waste that this young land has already suffered via the ‘greed imperative’, has subscribed to some religious devotion to a cut-throat culture of vicious, self-righteous pioneer pillagers.

That corrupting cultural addictive dogma which was rail-roaded out to the rednecks on Carnegie’s cattle-cars (fueled by Standard Oil no doubt) looked for a while almost old-fashioned. But that’s until it got reamed up the right-brains of red-states from a televangelist’s lectern by Paul’s ultra-free-market predecessors, Ron Reagan and Maggie Thatcher.

Read Paul’s platform:
It’s got nothing to do with ‘liberalism’ nor ‘revolution’. No grass-roots citizens uniting to reject the megalomaniacal overlords of industry and this failed ‘trickle-down’ free-trade.

Rather the entire Paulian position perches on a precarious pedestal directly atop a farce of free-market fundamentalism, an ethic more likely to fuel a feeding frenzy by right-wing religious greed-fanatics then free us from tyranny of taxation.

His concept of commerce and capitalism is not only extreme, it borders on the lunatic fringe. But conveniently for the Paul campaign, society already seems not at all shy of the corruptions fueled by free markets, conflating ‘free enterprise’ with ‘freedom’. (sounds sorta similar, I suppose english is funny that way sometimes).

I suspect the real reason people support Paul is for the same reasons they walked the ultra-capitalist plank when last lured by Reagan’s tricky “Trickle-down” triumph. If they don’t realize that, then they’ve piled into a bandwagon of anti-fed friends for the fraternity.

The Paulian program cancels all oversight and regulation from any thing higher than the village parking-ticket appeals court. ALL environmental policy is then dogmatically entrusted to the local level, gambling that people will come to their personal senses and hold industry in check all by themselves.

If this public’s past performance is any forecast of future returns, Paul-people could only have constructed this stage-set with the full knowledge that under his program industry would win, the people and wildlife would lose, and absolutely nothing would be done to stop it. It’s almost such an obvious economic farce that the words ’seriously sinister’ come to mind.

Nobody claims the fed laws are not flawed, nor that States do not, on occasion, sue business for their folly. But fact is whatever combination we have now is all we have, and if it fails, the people’s quasi-elected leaders are bent on dismantling protections long before Paul ever got his band of web-based ‘rebels’ to believe his ‘liberublican’ preacher’s pitch.

If you actually read what paul says and writes, he’s categorically OPPOSED to ANY federal oversight of this pathology of amerigun frontier-style amerigoon abuse of nature.

Again, Paul’s position ONLY provides for individuals to sue if damaged by neighbors. That’s the entire extent of his position on “environment” per his campaign.

As alluded above, the typical red-state paradigm promotes a cavalier, carnivorous culture of hunting, logging, herding and believing, like some sort of swaggering, church-goin’ cowboy cult.

If left to locals and their local or state government, PCB’s would have extinguished shore birds and raptors, murrelets would have been wiped out in the lower 48, and dozens of other species would have gone the way of the red wolf, passenger pigeon, and Carolina Parakeet.

That’s not to say the feds don’t do horrific things, like subsidize the corrupt logging of national forests at a net loss to the tax payer (which Paul indeed opposes, not because vast publicly owned irreplaceable virgin forests are needlessly decimated for tinder and toilet paper. but because it defies his free-market model).

Who better to trust, he says, than the person who owns and makes his living off the land? Well I might point the good Dr. Paul to his friendly chemical-spraying farmers out there in the heartland who might be the subject of that psalm.

Indeed those who should be caring more than anyone instead got swept off in the agri-tech scam sold them by the very business Paul want’s to further deregulate, so instead of ‘care’ you get cancer.

Pesticides, factory farms, bovine hormones are present hazards brought on by lax regulation, just as big tobacco, DDT and PCB’s were before. Those were all also horrific crimes of unchecked business, though often implemented by individuals. If you don’t regulate it, they don’t stop doing it if there’s an extra nickle to be made, despite the decades of compelling science of the dangers.

No local neighbor suffering lung cancer can successfully litigate such a powerful force of Ferenghi greed addicts.

So let me then understand: These corporate and private citizens are the people you want to now entrust to organize their state legislature to take on the big business interests in protection of our common forests, air and water, when they’ve shown no capacity to even take on Bochco for lying us into Vietnam once again (as if the first one didn’t just end a generation ago)?

Apparently red state rednecks just want to shoot things and be left alone to drain their wetlands, pump dioxin and PCB’s into streams, cut down anything they can call a saw-log, and sell the rest for firewood (See Montana, for example)

This whole charade of trusting the local municipalities and states to enact laws effectively protecting the ‘common’ good (as if states were a bunch of islands sharing not the same landmass, water, woods and species), is absurd.

This country is if anything far smaller than Paul’s old man notion of individual nation-states floating in a sea of endlessly expendable wilderness. It’s like something from back in Daniel Boone days, patriots pickin’ off redcoats and complaining about the price of tea. In that scenario you can forget saving habitat or endangered ‘varmints’ who will all (as in each and every to the very last one) just end up barbequed on some trailer-dwelling polycarbonate fiesta-ware platter

And what about the old problem of slave-states vs. normal humanity? Isn’t Paul here proposing we allow the reversing a few of the more fortuitous federal functions, like the Emancipation Proclamation? Sounds far-fetched, but one wonders if Paul feels the feds were ‘treading’ on ’state’s rights’ or the constitution by freeing the slaves.

Absurd you say, “Paul would never allow it” (and hopefully not). But from my reading there’s absolutely nothing in his platform preventing Alabama from voting to re-enact segregation (remember, he’s against the Civil Rights Act).

It would be up to the victims to sue in local courts— (Hullo?… anyone still remember the Jena Six, yet only 6 months on?? So much for local red-neck kangaroo courts upholding human rights).

Based on the paulian program as it’s presented to his public, supporters had better be ready for more ’strange fruit’ hangin’ from poplar trees if you give those hooded heretics reason to ‘vote’ for local southern ‘policy’.

And we’re not even mentioning labor laws, minimum wage, women’s suffrage– the list of hard-won worker and human rights against the single-minded. male dominated profit-motive of business is long, and still oozing life. These federal protections were hard won with the blood of those who fought just such a corporatocratic regime as Paul apparently proposes.

But my concern is less for those who can file lawsuits (and the burgeoning pro-bono army of sleazy lawyers filing fpr this windfall of likely lucrative litigation), when courts can’t handle the legions of opportunistic ambulance-chasers we already have haunting the halls of ‘justice’).

My concern is for those who have no voice, who can’t file complaints nor take up firearms to defend themselves against the ‘revolutionary’ patriots of Ruby Ridge or Wacko, TX.

In the fine words of Gerald Durell: “Remember that the animals and plants have no Member of Parliament they can write to; they can’t perform sit-down strikes…they have nobody to speak for them except us, the human beings who share the world with them, but do not own it.”

Leaving life on earth up to locals to litigate is preposterous. You would need a full time fleet of Erin Brokoviches in every town to take on industry’s criminal antics pro-bono on behalf of the local inbred, illiterate electorate, who could care less if Big Coal levels the whole state of WV and makes it into a toxic parking lot (as we now see), as long as they’re gettin’ their minimum wage for their efforts and black-lung in the pits. And even then the plaintiffs would need evidence of illness or damage, so that sort of de-regulated hazard is barely retroactive at best.

I agree ‘revolution’ sounds all well and good, considering the frustration we all feel with the status quo, but the ‘Paul Revolution’ is, once again the sort of thing one wants to avoid, not espouse. If one is so passionate about a presidential platform as the paulies seem to be, then one should be very careful about actually reading the positions, especially when they already clearly carry some very controversial clauses.

I would also perk up my ears at any presidential preacher whose main sponsors are among the military. Paul is very proud of his pandemic, lock-kneed support among the enlisted militarists of our nationalistic mass-murdering government goon-squad (all federal employees, mind you).

The military is a dubious constituency, and certainly not any group to be taking political advice from. Despite the compelling case that what enlisted service-personnel are doing to Iraq is illegal and in violation of Geneva accords prohibiting individual soldiers from acting on illegal or immoral orders. This would render each enlisted man choosing to be deployed and kill in Iraq complicit in war crimes, and no amount of evidence of fraud or treason prompts them to question their commanders.

That failure violates all moral, ethical and religious doctrine and bars any ‘just war’ excuse, rendering these cold blooded killers a liability to any platform they flock to, not, in this day and age, a cause for patriotic political pride.

Why all these uniforms fall for Paul is a mystery to me, but if the service personnel of the armed forces seek to support principles of trust, liberty and law, they should look first to their own behavior and the illegal atrocities they comit in the name of their patriotic pose.

(Now don’t go sayin’ yer fightin’ fer my right to say that, soldier, nobody’s invading the USA).

Let’s not have any of this Libertarian smokescreen behind an anti-war position.

Aligning with Libs on issues is one thing. Promoting them electorally is a threat to a progressive agenda.

To someone who was afraid Paul’s coattails would bring down good Democrats… Good Democrats? If they’re in Congress and they haven’t bolted from the Democratic Party yet, what’s good about them?

Myles

Funny, you want to fight “institutionalized racism” by instituting racism?

BRILLIANT!

“Let’s not pander to petty bosses’ ideology”

You are a communist. You are a slave in your own mind. I wouldn’t have a problem with that if you didn’t think it was right and moral and legal for you to try to enslave myself and everyone else in the world.

Socialism is Evil, it is a Crime, it is Wrong, it is Illegal.

I won’t pick the lesser of two evils, I’m picking good and hoping it catches on quick - Ron Paul 2008

http://img43.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=54208_20071220RonPaulDonBlack_122_702lo.jpg

http://img184.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=54214_20071220RonPaulStormfront02_122_121lo.jpg

Values Voters Presidential Debate in Fort Lauderdale on September 17, 2007. Immediately to Ron Paul’s left: Don Black, the owner of neo-Nazi hate site Stormfront. Fellow with the hat is his son Derek Black.

via http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/

Video Link

Ron Paul: I’ll take campaign money from anyone

—————-

http://www.vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=63682

Both Congressman Paul and his aides regularly meet with members of the Stormfront set, American Renaissance, the Institute for Historic Review, and others at the Tara Thai restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, usually on Wednesdays. This is part of a dinner that was originally organized by Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis and Joe Sobran, and has since been mostly taken over by the Council of Conservative Citizens.

I have attended these dinners, seen Paul and his aides there, and been invited to his offices in Washington to discuss policy.

For his spokesman to call white racialism a “small ideology” and claim white activists are “wasting their money” trying to influence Paul is ridiculous. Paul is a white nationalist of the Stormfront type who has always kept his racial views and his views about world Judaism quiet because of his political position.

I don’t know that it is necessarily good for Paul to “expose” this. However, he really is someone with extensive ties to white nationalism and for him to deny that in the belief he will be more respectable by denying it is outrageous — and I hate seeing people in the press who denounce racialism merely because they think it is not fashionable.

Bill White, Commander
American National Socialist Workers Party

———–

Click Here

By BRIAN SKOLOFF, Associated Press WriterWed Dec 19, 4:27 PM ET

Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul has received a $500 campaign donation from a white supremacist, and the Texas congressman doesn’t plan to return it, an aide said Wednesday.

Don Black, of West Palm Beach, recently made the donation, according to campaign filings. He runs a Web site called Stormfront with the motto, “White Pride World Wide.” The site welcomes postings to the “Stormfront White Nationalist Community.”

“Dr. Paul stands for freedom, peace, prosperity and inalienable rights. If someone with small ideologies happens to contribute money to Ron, thinking he can influence Ron in any way, he’s wasted his money,” Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said. “Ron is going to take the money and try to spread the message of freedom.”

“And that’s $500 less that this guy has to do whatever it is that he does,” Benton added.

Black said he supports Paul’s stance on ending the war in Iraq, securing U.S. borders and his opposition to amnesty for illegal immigrants.

“We know that he’s not a white nationalist. He says he isn’t and we believe him, but on the issues, there’s only one choice,” Black said Wednesday.

“We like his stand on tight borders and opposition to a police state,” Black told The Palm Beach Post earlier.

On his Web site, Black says he has been involved in “the White patriot movement for 30 years.”

Ron Paul, might be anti-war but, is not anti-imperialist! He wants more Capitalism!…

State-worshiping propagandists of “the left” and “the right” are really getting desperate now.

More power to the Ron Paul campaign.

To start with, arguing about the validity of the campaigns of Ron Paul or any other candidates for governmental positions in this country or elsewhere means you aren’t a leftist. Given the egregious failings of the militaristic, corporate, capitalistic civilization in which we live, including its arguments for retention of the status quo — such as politics-as-practiced and campaigns for public office and policy-making — places the advocate squarely inside the collapsing box of this “civilization.” The political campaign and electoral system in this country is completely under corporate control, so choosing to continue to play along with a proposition that will only prolong the condemnation of over 98% of the world’s population to poverty and injustice lacks any imagination or vision whatsoever. We don’t need any more stinking elections, we need to gas the fascists, destroy capitalism, and dissolve this government. Progress, as in progressive, means moving ahead, not resorting to the same old tried and true failures.

Only community-based political actions hold any promise for individual pursuits of happiness, except that corporations and their governmental and media proxies continually usurp our perceived array of choice through advertising, mass consumerism, popular culture, financial racketeering, and political repression. Supporting the current electoral system and its infinitely small slice of political choices that would be available in a true democracy fulfills the definition of insanity.

As a biologist, one either learns (or ignores, as many have) the basic fact about carrying capacity for any population of organisms. Humans aren’t exempt from the physical laws of the universe. When was the last time you heard anyone publicly advocate reducing the human population? How can anyone believe that the continual growth foundation for modern capitalism can be sustained with finite “resources” and limited energy (only plants have the capabilities for moderately efficient solar energy capture, and no other energy source other than solar and its non-carbon derivatives is available to humans indefinitely)?

Arguing for retention of the political status quo, based as it is on a capitalistic culture and consumeristic economy, is ostrich-thinking. NONE of the political candidates has the guts or creativity to advocate a shift in the economic paradigm that is ruining this planet, because, of course, if any of them did, they would have to be killed. Yet anyone who maintains that retention of the status quo capitalistic system - free trade, globalism, neoliberal jive and hucksterism - increasingly suckled on the monstrous cock of militaristic imperialism, is any part of a solution to global injustice and inequity, is stark naked in a cesspool of delusion.

I really cannot believe, with all the educational opportunities available, that anyone can fail to see that any system that exploits the environment, its organisms, its physical wealth, and its physical health (paying for drinking water — just how insane and inhumane is that????), for the accumulation of capital, is doomed, and it will take our species and many others with it. (Hey, Congress just approved more tax funding for an industry that has continually demonstrated its wastefulness and lack of compatibility with environmental sustainability - go nuclear! go blow your brains out! I guess I’m not the only fool who’ll be paying to piss into the wind.) Yet the goodness of greed and god and manifest destiny and the glory of the dollar and all that crap I was raised to believe in continue to be gospel for most Americans, so I guess my thinking for myself must be wrong (or should Ron Paul be thinking for myself?).

Only 7 days left until my next chip implant.

I was extremely clear in my response to Joshua Frank and your response does NOT address the issue I raised and have been raising here on DV.

As I stated, I learned a great deal about Zionism from the ISO. The ISO, in my judgment, had a more radical analysis against Zionism 15 years ago or so than they do today. I think they moderated their position due to their involvement in electoral .

The ISO does an excellent job analyzing Zionism within the framework of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its affects within the Middle East region. However Zionism is an UNBOUNDED ideology. Where the ISO falters is their lack of analysis of Zionism’s effect on U.S. political economy and culture especially as it relates to the war in Iraq.

The ISO, like Mr. Frank, obscures Zionism influence on U.S. Policy by promoting the “War For Oil” myth. Here’s an article from the ISO own website that confirms my analysis: Blood For Oil

It is dubious to say the least that for many years the ISO could provided clear-cut radical analysis about Zionism are now myopic about its influence in the destruction of Iraq, that the United States have not achieve any oil from this war, that the oil companies were against this war, and most importantly that the Zionist goals of the destroying Iraq has been achieved.

My premise still stands. The left has UTTERLY failed to CONFRONT Zionism in the United States. Clearly the ISO have moderated their radicalism on this issue. For Ms. Wolf to recognize white racism but to exhibit myopia regarding Zionism in her analysis is sheer duplicity. IT IS this duplicity that has divided and weaken the left and help to created the political vacuum being filled by Ron Paul.