How My Liberal and Independent Facebook Friends Gave Me Hope

Politics and voting are brutal endeavors for ordinary Americans because it's so drenched in raw emotion and anger. As a Libertarian Ron Paul supporter, I've observed the mess first hand on my Facebook wall.  While I definitely lean anarcho-capitalist, I  also realize that I'll never bear witness to living without government oppression.  Still, I remain hopeful that the more egregious components of statism and government tyranny can successfully be weakened and eventually eradicated, like wars, Banksters Gone Wild and perpetual cannibal crony capitalism, otherwise known as corporatism, fascism, oligarchy and plutocracy.

Admittedly, I hardly have any hardcore neocon Facebook friends because these folks are very annoying as well as the least likely group of folks to embrace reason and rationality. However, I do have a fair amount of Facebook friends who are self-described liberals/progressives and/or independent voters. My Facebook wall is a place where liberals, independents, Paulites, liberty activists and Libertarians meet.

While there are indeed disagreements on the role of government, entitlements and taxes, there are core areas of total agreement:

1. The all despise the wars and US foreign policy which they consider evil.
2. They all oppose bankster bailouts and understand that it plunders the people.
3. They all oppose corporate welfare and understand that it exclusively benefits big powerful corporations.

The above 3 items alone constitute a powerful starting point for unity and empowerment of We the People.

Many liberals and Libertarians are refusing to vote Republican or Democrat because of the endless wars, bankster bailouts and corporate welfare. This is very significant because it strikes at the core of the corruption in the DC District of Crime, namely that the RNC and DNC machines are really nothing but money laundering operations as well as wholly owned subsidiaries of the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, banksters and rent seeking corporatists.

For the first time in my life, there truly is a movement in progress and an actual revolution to directly challenge government powers that we once took for granted as necessary and inviolate. Even more inspiring is that folks of a variety of political inclinations are working together to understand each other and the concerns of everybody as the phony baloney left-right paradigm that feeds the RNC and the DNC fear based talking points is being shattered.  I've learned a lot more about liberals/progressives because I've listened to them and I don't doubt that they've learned a lot about Libertarians by listening to us.  Frankly, we have a lot more in common than we think as most Libertarians would label themselves classical liberals (before totalitarian warmongering statists hijacked liberalism).

On October 23, 2012, C-Span carried a live broadcast of the Independent Presidential Debate, as did Youtube. The Independent candidates were:

Gary Johnson, Libertarian Party
Virgil Goode, Constitution Party
Dr. Jill Stein, Green Party
Rocky Anderson, Justice Party

Johnson and Goode are considered conservatives while Stein and Anderson are ideologically progressive. Yet, they all support ending unconstitutional wars, ending bankster bailouts and ending corporate welfare. With the exception of Virgil Goode, an admitted prohibitionist, they all support legalizing marijuana and ending the War on Drugs.  Moreover, all the independent candidates talked about the war on civil liberties, NDAA and their concerns about the US morphing into a police state, something that has already commenced.

In my not so humble opinion, the Republican and Democrat parties are so far gone and so detached from average Americans that they are not only beyond redemption but so utterly embedded in cronyism, oligarchy and the Nazified Police State that whatever "we the people" attributes our political system once exemplified are now long gone. We the People do not nominate candidates; the candidates are chosen by party elites for the exclusive benefit of corporate contributors.

While the Independent Debate did elicit specific candidate support for Johnson, Goode, Stein or Anderson according to political preferences, it also resulted in the profound message and belief that any of these candidates would in fact be a vast improvement over Obama or Romney or any Republican or Democrat.

To end the wars, bankster bailouts and corporate welfare queens, I do believe that Americans are finally ready and willing to negotiate in the spirit of compromise to achieve the higher goal of peace, liberty and prosperity for all Americans.  Yes, liberals will have to agree to rollback entitlement spending, accept reductions in federal powers and even affirm state rights but at the end of the day they should be euphoric that they finally succeeded in killing the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, the civil liberties crushing police state, the thieving banksters and the crony capitalists.

Heck, if we worked together to accomplish the above, America could easily be well on the road back to prosperity, sanity and liberty because knocking out the biggest and nastiest impediments to liberty and prosperity would be one heck of a We the People coup.

Therefore, my advice to all political activists regardless of political ideology is this:  focus on the damn enemies because they are big and bad and they need to go.

We can do this!  I know we can because Facebook is loaded with folks who understand who the real enemies are.

How Ron Paul Deconstructed the Phony Baloney Left-Right Paradigm

 

The Republican primary season was a hoot with its seedy cast of characters that included Bat Shit Crazy Bachmann, Sanitorium the Sanctimonious, Slick Rick ‘the Oops candidate’, the Angry Little Lunar Attack Muffin and a dude named Mittens whose claim to fame is that he had the holding power to just wait for his crazy competitors to self-destruct.

 The only sane guy in the Republican sea of insanity was Ron Paul, a guy who campaigned on peace, liberty and prosperity but he was rejected and got booed by a psychopathic Republican debate audience for suggesting that America invoke the Golden Rule when it comes to foreign policy. Republicans don’t like sane and their affinity for the psychopathic is truly mindboggling. But in the end Republican voters quit bickering about who is the craziest candidate and just hold their noses and vote for the most boring candidate that praises Jesus, promises more wars and commits to advancing Republican socialism and crony capitalism. 

The legacy of the 2012 primary season should worry the Dems because it spawned a liberty movement consisting of disgruntled Republicans, disgruntled Democrats, independents and other disaffected voting blocks. The Ron Paul Revolution crossed party lines because it focused on how the damn wars have bankrupted the nation and destroyed the economic but the defining characteristic of the Ron Paul Campaign is that it raised public awareness about the thieving banksters who operate the biggest ongoing crime syndicate in human history through the Federal Reserve.

The Occupy Movement jumped into the political fray with added sparks by emphasizing the difference between the 99% and the 1%.

The Democrat enthusiastically supported Obama in 2008 because he was perceived as anti-war and in opposition to all the things that progressives despise about governance. At least, that’s how Obama waged his magical campaign. But at the end of the day, the Dems just got Obushma, just another elitist bought and paid for New World Order hack that is clearly a wholly owned subsidiary of the banksters, military industrial complex and rent seeking crony capitalists.

Glenn Greenwald, a progressive I greatly admire on many issues, wrote about Ron Paul and his campaign:

The benefits of his candidacy are widely ignored, as are the Democrats' own evils.

Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception...

The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations withdrones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has soughtto overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional voteagainst it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. assubservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’smost repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

Read the rest here

Salon

The words of Glenn Greenwald are indeed a scathing indictment of Obama and the Democratic administration and conclusively prove that there really isn't a spit of difference between the Republican and the Democratic parties, despite the pathetic but vociferous rants at election time that attempt to highlight the differences between the parties.  The only differences lie with the Republican and Democratic voting bases.  The Republicans want things to remain the same - big wars, big bankster bailouts,  big government, big assaults on civil liberties, big entitlements and big government powers.  The Dems generally oppose the wars, the crushing of civil liberties and the big bankster bailouts.  The Dems really do want change but Republicans are totally averse to change.

In the Romney candidacy, Republicans reluctantly agreed that he would continue in the footsteps of Bush/Cheney and while Republicans don't exactly trust Romney they decided to trust him more than they trust Obama.

Another progressive, Matt Stoller, wrote one of the best pieces on Ron Paul from the progressive prospective as Stoller delves into Libertarianism to reconcile prevailing progressive ideology with the Ron Paul movement. Stoller isn't a guy who haphazardly tosses out words nor does he fall into the typical liberal trap of justifying Obama's actions. Stoller has been on a soul searching mission to understand the Ron Paul movement and its vast appeal to frustrated Americans. Stoller actually accomplishes something that few progressives can comprehend, namely, that the American Empire and the wars that they so despise are indeed a direct result of the Federal Reserve that they tend to worship because it facilitates a monstrous nanny state federal government and its social entitlements.

The most perplexing character in Congress, ideologically speaking, is Ron Paul....

And as I’ve drilled into Paul’s ideas, his ideas forced me to acknowledge some deep contradictions in American liberalism (pointed out years ago by Christopher Laesch) and what is a long-standing, disturbing, and unacknowledged affinity liberals have with centralized war financing. So while I have my views of Ron Paul, I believe that the anger he inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.....

Now, if you’re a libertarian, and you believe that centralized power is dangerous, then it’s obvious that state control over finance and mass mobilization of social resources for warfare or other ends are two sides of the same coin....

Modern liberalism is a mixture of two elements. One is a support of Federal power – what came out of the late 1930s, World War II, and the civil rights era where a social safety net and warfare were financed by Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the RFC, and human rights were enforced by a Federal government, unions, and a cadre of corporate, journalistic and technocratic experts (and cheap oil made the whole system run.) America mobilized militarily for national priorities, be they war-like or social in nature....

This is why Ron Paul can critique the Federal Reserve and American empire, and why liberals have essentially no answer to his ideas, arguing instead over Paul having character defects. Ron Paul’s stance should be seen as a challenge to better create a coherent structural critique of the American political order. It’s quite obvious that there isn’t one coming from the left, otherwise the figure challenging the war on drugs and American empire wouldn’t be in the Republican primary as the libertarian candidate. To get there, liberals must grapple with big finance and war, two topics that are difficult to handle in any but a glib manner that separates us from our actual traditional and problematic affinity for both. War financing has a specific tradition in American culture, but there is no guarantee war financing must continue the way it has.

Read the rest here

Naked Capitalism

It's abundantly clear that while thinking progressives are perplexed by Ron Paul, they also deeply respect him on many levels because there's a lot about Ron Paul that is hugely appealing to progressives.

As a libertarian, I don't share progressive views on most issues but I most assuredly do sympathize with their frustration on big issues like foreign policy and how the Federal Reserve actually expanded and consolidated raw and absolute power into the hands of the 1%. Furthermore, I cling to the hope that if we can achieve sound money that isn't manipulated by Wall Street and end the perpetual wars by slaying the military industrial complex, then America will definitely be a far more prosperous and freer place. We'd solve about 75% of our problems and we could fight about the rest of the stuff later.

Progressives definitely have a vested interest in listening to and learning from Ron Paul and his supporters. If the Democratic Party can be forced into the same ideological battle that liberty activists within the Republican party advanced with courage and conviction, then the Democratic Party will be the big winner, along with the American people.