Thursday, April 28, 2011

Refuting Ron Paul: Social Programs and Militarism Equally Wrong, huh?



Ron Paul is a circus clown. He has successfully been utilized by the capitalists to convince millions of angry youth who oppose the wars, poverty, and unemployment to think that all these things are "socialist" and that the answer is to return to a "free market economy."

Paul's mission is to re-brand capitalism as "revolutionary" and to repeat over and over again that the U.S. is not capitalist. His job, with funny money, conspiracies, and Adam Smith and Von Mises textbooks, is to transform legitimate anger against this system into support for the Tea Party movement, the John Birch Society, and other fascist groups he associates with.

Paul's thunder has been stolen by the Republican Party in recent years, and now, desperately trying to stand out among conservatives all screaming Libertarian non-sense, he continues to emphasize his "America First" style anti-Militarism.

It's the only things that seperates him from the Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Ludwig Von Mises, "revolutionary capitalists" of the Republican Party.

As an election season gears up, the Circus Clown is at it again. He's running for President to make sure that people who oppose Obama's horrendous crimes in Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, don't vote for a strong leftist alternative to the Democrats.

Instead they go to the far right. William Dudley Pelley and Charles Lindbergh couldn't be prouder.

Ron Paul is an old, angry man. His confused, isolationist mantra is basically this:

"War is Wrong Because It Helps People Too Much! When I was growing up if somebody bombed my house, we paid for it. We didn't just expect the government to just give us free cruise missiles raining on our heads and killing our families. If we wanted to get our heads blown off by the U.S. military, we worked hard for it! No more handouts to poor people in the rest of the world. Bullets, bombs and tanks are expensive, darn it! We need them to shoot down workers in our own when they demand the right to form unions."


Point by Point Refutation of the Video

1. "Sticking With His Positions" -

Ron Paul's positions don't change, but he is very good as concealing them. Ron Paul talks a populist, anti-militarist line when speaking to general audiences. But behind his lefty sounding pacifist cover he wants ban abortion, protect "state's rights" to ban homosexuality, repeal the Civil Rights Act, abolish all social programs. He brags about his close relationship with the John Birch Society. His goal is to "restore the republic" by smashing all social programs.

Yes, his positions don't change, but he cover them up. His purpose is to confuse young people into defending capitalism, the very system responsible for the things he rails against.

2. "It Didn't Cut Anything..." -

The Republican Budget has massive cuts in social security, medicare, etc. It's designed to destroy the marginal U.S. welfare state. Republicans defend it on the basis that such social programs are "wealth redistribution" and "socialism." Democrats oppose it because they argue that the welfare state is a better way to run capitalism. Both sides admit the plan includes massive cuts.

3. "Democrats spend all this on welfare programs..." -


The Democratic Party imposed the 1996 Welfare Reform Laws which stripped welfare down to nothing. Since 1948 the Democrats have never advocated a National Health-care System, as exists in every industrialized country on earth. Obama dropped the "public option", and his "healthcare reform" law was simply a mandate that workers buy insurance from capitalists.

There is no welfare state in the U.S. Asside from Food Stamps which keep agriculture in business, and the very small amounts of money that are given to low-income mothers, often for less than two years total in their entire lives, very little "hand outs" are given, despite Reagan era propaganda invoking "Cadillac welfare queens."

Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment Insurance, Student Loans, are all programs that workers pay into before or after receiving services.

There is no welfare state in the U.S.

4. "Middle Class Gets Wiped Out When You Destroy The Dollar"
-

The "middle class", a propagandist euphemism for the high paid sectors of the working class, is not being destroyed by inflation. It is being destroyed because the high wages of autoworkers, nurses, and others who historically made up this sector are being slashed, as capitalism has destroyed unions and forces worldwide competition between workers.

"Funny Money" and "Gold Standard" conspiracies have nothing to do with why auto-plants close, and why less 10% of workers are unionized.

5. "Auditing the Fed" -


Ron Paul wants to audit the Federal Reserve, because he believes that it is "The Creature From Jekyll Island", the enactment of the fifth plank of the Communist Manifesto for a "central bank." Ron Paul claims that the Federal Reserve is nationalization of banking, and a plot by the Bolsheviks, despite the Federal Reserve being PRIVATELY OWNED and staffed by UNACCOUNTABLE CAPITALISTS.

Somehow, its Communist. This helps Paul rally youth into the Tea Party and other groups which think the U.S. is a "socialist country" despite not even having a marginal welfare state.

6. "There's an agreement in Washington, you vote for welfare, we vote for military..."


Obama proposed a moderate plan of adding a public option to compete with private companies in health insurance. The result was associates from Ron Paul's John Birch Society being bussed in to disrupt town hall meetings. People marched outside of Obama's speeches with AK-47s. Others carried guns into town hall meetings and provocatively dropped them on the floor.

National mailings were sent out claiming that the modest bill would bar the right to pick one's own doctor.

Yet, the military budget passes almost unanimously every time it is proposed. Its dubbed "defense" and even speaking against it is political suicide.

This is a consensus? Ron Paul's attempt to morally equate militarism with social programs is bad enough.

Now he is convinced that both are treated with the same respect by the banker-owned congress? Is he delusional?

7. "Just get out the program. Opt out. Declare your right to take care of yourself." -


Millions and millions of youth cannot find work. They desperately need a life to live, but they cannot find one because of this system. I doubt they wish to abolish any form of aid that is already there in the name of a free market fantasy. Its hard enough to get by with this so-called "welfare state" he bemoans.

8. "The riots will come... because we have a reserve currency..." -


The revolutions that are erupting around the world in Britain, Greece, Egypt, Wisconsin, etc. are not based on the demand for returning to the Gold Standard. They are led by Marxist-Leninists and Communists. Their demand is a socialist future in which the people democratically own and operate the means of production, and are no longer subject to chaos of the market. Wrong again.

1 comment:

Julia Riber Pitt said...

Ron Paul is obviously a propagandist for the pro-capitalist right-wing. Even though his supporters like to label him as an "outsider" with "integrity" his overall views aren't much different from the mainstream right. He serves the purpose of legitimizing the capitalist system.

With that said, I'm no fan of the welfare state. The whole purpose of state welfare was to de-radicalize the working class, put a human face on the state (remember that even Marx saw the state as an instrument of the capitalist class to preserve the class structure and oppress the workers), and to get the working class dependent on the state. The welfare system needs to go, but what needs to happen before that is for like-minded people to create community-based organizations/institutions that would provide solidarity to the poor. Simply cutting everything at once (which is what RP wants to do) won't solve the problem.

I even think centralized currency is a war on the poor, because it prevents the working class from creating their own means of exchange (i.e. labor notes that they could barter for commodities of equal value). However, I'm no fan of gold as a currency for several reasons.