Marginalizing Ron Paul

Robert ScheerTruthdig / Truthdig Op-EdPublished: Thursday 29 December 2011
“It is hypocritical that Paul is now depicted as the archenemy of non-white minorities when it was his nemesis, the Federal Reserve, that enabled the banking swindle that wiped out 53 percent of the median wealth of African-Americans and 66 percent for Latinos, according to the Pew Research Center.”
SHARE Email It is of­fi­cial now. The Ron Paul cam­paign, de­spite surg­ing in the Iowa polls, is not wor­thy of se­ri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion, ac­cord­ing to a New York Times ed­i­to­r­ial; “Ron Paul long ago dis­qual­i­fied him­self for the pres­i­dency by ped­dling clap­trap pro­pos­als like abol­ish­ing the Fed­eral Re­serve, re­turn­ing to the gold stan­dard, cut­ting a third of the fed­eral bud­get and all for­eign aid and op­pos­ing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

That last item, along with the decade-old racist com­ments in the newslet­ters Paul pub­lished, is cer­tainly wor­thy of crit­i­cism. But not as an al­ter­na­tive to se­ri­ously en­gag­ing the sub­stance of Paul’s cur­rent cam­paign—his dev­as­tat­ing cri­tique of crony cap­i­tal­ism and his equally tren­chant chal­lenge to im­pe­r­ial wars and the as­sault on our civil lib­er­ties that they en­gen­der.

Paul is being den­i­grated as a pres­i­den­tial con­tender even though on the vital is­sues of the econ­omy, war and peace, and civil lib­er­ties, he has made the most sense of the Re­pub­li­can can­di­dates. And by what stan­dard of logic is it “clap­trap” for Paul to at­tempt to hold the Fed ac­count­able for its de­struc­tive poli­cies? That’s the give­away ref­er­ence to the raw nerve that his fa­vor­able prospects in the Iowa cau­cuses have ex­posed. Too much anti-Wall Street pop­ulism in the heart­land can be a truly scary thing to the in­tel­lec­tual par­a­sites re­sid­ing in the belly of the beast that con­trols Amer­i­can cap­i­tal­ism.

It is hyp­o­crit­i­cal that Paul is now de­picted as the arch­en­emy of non-white mi­nori­ties when it was his neme­sis, the Fed­eral Re­serve, that en­abled the bank­ing swin­dle that wiped out 53 per­cent of the me­dian wealth of African-Amer­i­cans and 66 per­cent for Lati­nos, ac­cord­ing to the Pew Re­search Cen­ter.

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The Fed sits at the cen­ter of the rot and bears the major re­spon­si­bil­ity for tol­er­at­ing the run­away mort­gage-backed se­cu­ri­ties scam that is at the core of our eco­nomic cri­sis. After the melt­down it was the Fed that led ul­tra-se­cret machi­na­tions to bail out the banks while ig­nor­ing the plight of their ex­ploited cus­tomers.


To his credit, Paul mar­shaled bi­par­ti­san sup­port to pass a bill re­quir­ing the first-ever pub­lic audit of the Fed­eral Re­serve. That audit is how read­ers of the Times first learned of the Fed’s tril­lions of dol­lars in se­cret loans and aid given to the banks as a re­ward for screw­ing over the pub­lic.

As for the Times’ com­plaint that Paul seeks to un­rea­son­ably cut the fed­eral bud­get by one-third, it should be noted that his is a rare voice in chal­leng­ing ir­ra­tionally high mil­i­tary spend­ing. At a time when the pres­i­dent has signed off on a Cold War-level de­fense bud­get and his po­ten­tial op­po­nents in the Re­pub­li­can field want to waste even more on high-tech weapons to fight a so­phis­ti­cated enemy that doesn’t exist, Paul has emerged as the only se­ri­ous peace can­di­date. As The Wall Street Jour­nal re­ported, Paul last week warned an Iowa au­di­ence, “Watch out for the mil­i­tary-in­dus­trial com­plex—they al­ways have an enemy. No­body is going to in­vade us. We don’t need any more [weapons sys­tems].”

As an­other re­cent ex­am­ple of Paul’s san­ity on the na­tional se­cu­rity is­sues that have led to a flight from rea­son on the part of politi­cians since the 9/11 at­tacks, I offer the Texan’s crit­i­cism this week of the Na­tional De­fense Au­tho­riza­tion Act (NDAA). The act would allow the pres­i­dent to order in­de­ter­mi­nate mil­i­tary im­pris­on­ment with­out trial of those ac­cused of sup­port­ing ter­ror­ism, a pol­icy that Obama signed into law and Paul op­poses, as the con­gress­man did George W. Bush’s Pa­triot Act. Paul said:

“Lit­tle by lit­tle, in the name of fight­ing ter­ror­ism, our Bill of Rights is being re­pealed. ... The Pa­triot Act, as bad as its vi­o­la­tion of the 4th Amend­ment, was just one step down the slip­pery slope. The re­cently passed (NDAA) con­tin­ues that slip to­ward tyranny and in fact ac­cel­er­ates it sig­nif­i­cantly ... The Bill of Rights has no ex­emp­tion for ‘re­ally bad peo­ple’ or ter­ror­ists or even non-cit­i­zens. It is a key check on gov­ern­ment power against any per­son. This is not a weak­ness in our legal sys­tem; it is the very strength of our legal sys­tem.”

That was ex­actly the ob­jec­tion raised by The New York Times in its own ex­cel­lent ed­i­to­r­ial chal­leng­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al­ity of the NDAA. It should not be dif­fi­cult for those same ed­i­to­r­ial writ­ers to treat Ron Paul as a pro­found and prin­ci­pled con­trib­u­tor to a much-needed na­tional de­bate on the lim­its of fed­eral power in­stead of at­tempt­ing to mar­gin­al­ize his views be­yond recog­ni­tion.