TithonusSyndrome wrote:
Given that Paul himself is not viable, I don't know where you get off making such demands of the Greens. Ooooh, he got the booby prize in a piddling tiny state, ain't that grand. At least the Greens, being an entire party and not a single defied man, have the option of gradually taking districts over time and consolidating their holdings, rather than being an all-or-nothing deal whose time is running out. If Ron Paul is indeed the Great White Hope of All Things Good in America, and you're not so blinkered as to believe that he's realistically going to become president in 2012, then what's your backup plan when this man who is older than Reagan was when he took office can no longer physically meet the challenges of campaigning for office? Does his Essence of Libertopia return to the mortal plane, sensing work undone, and invest itself in Rand Paul?
Have the option? Either the Greens can do it or they can't, and they have far less credibility in the popular mind than Ron Paul, who at least registers. I am not making 'demands' of the Greens. If they have a more rational strategy for popular victory then by all means, they should apply it.
The Greens can only become viable, under the present first-past-the-post voting system, if it commands the wealth in cash and people presently committed to the two main political parties. That is what makes Democrats or Republicans the only viable alternatives compared to the Green Party or Libertarian party. Ron Paul decided to hijack the GOP machine instead, not an impossible feat since his message resonates with many Republicans in the first place.
I'm not sure that there is any real replacement for Ron Paul, so am convinced he probably is America's last chance. Maybe he'll succeed, maybe he won't, but writing him off outright only invites failure.
When you campaign on an image of rhadamanthine consistency, it certainly is a problem. Like I said though, he still has his millions from his book sales, racist newsletters, gold holdings that he helped drum up in value and plain old donations from hapless Paultards to console him in the event of a loss.
Yes, Paul is personally well-positioned to survive the disruptions created by the status quo. His concern is for those who are not.
Congressman Ron Paul makes a lot of unfounded statements about the nature and effectiveness of foreign aid that are motivated by his dogmatic, ideological reliance on the anti-empirical Austrian School, enabling his base desire to justify neglecting his moral obligation to make reparations towards people who have suffered tremendously in order to make his life of privilege possible.
Usually true reparations are defined by the victim, not the victimizer. Charity is not by definition reparation.
For a self-proclaimed economics supergenius, I'd think he ought to know better about economy of language.
Somewhere in your post there is a solution to fixing every budget shortfall other than with a round of Fed money printing, but somehow despite my wild imagination and credulity it eludes me.
Some of Paul's objections are priceless in their hubris, though:
Constitutionally, Congressman Paul notes that the document that created our country does not grant permission to Congress or the President to authorize funds to be taken from the national treasure and given to foreign countries.
"Everything that is not expressly permitted is forbidden!"
So, everything that is not expressly forbidden is allowed without question into perpetuity? Nawww.
Congressman Paul notes that the morality of taking money from people of the United States to be given to those in other countries is not moral or benevolent, especially when the US does not have enough money to pay for it's own needs.
I guess that's why it was so utterly, utterly vital to vote against the Darfur Divestment Act of 2007, right? America was just one lucrative janjaweed deal shy of getting those payments in the bank so the repo man wouldn't come and take the Peterbilt away? Oh, if only there were another 2/5 of a percent of the federal budget free, then Congress would be able to take that money and spend it in other places where it's sorely needed like the EPA or the DoT or... oh, wait...
Ron Paul doesn't think highly of spending on the EPA and there is no room in the budget for the items that have been over-borrowed for anyway.
Congressman Paul says a lot of things but was instructed by Ludwig Von Mises not to demonstrate any of them beyond an anecdotal level. Congressman Paul would chop off the nose of charity to spite a few third-world despots. Congressman Paul feels an ugly swell of satisfaction when he can mutter "fuck you got mine" to himself away from cameras and media.
Nope, sorry, still don't give a fuck what this halfwit gnome asserts emphatically while stamping his feet.
So who is the candidate promoting the economic policy from a better economic school, and what is this school? American fiscal problems are in need of a solution.
I doubt that Paul has anything against private persons and organizations donating to the causes they support and believe in, even if it screws the cozy relationship between government, corporations, and foreign aid. Individual public support of private charities is a more genuinely fair and charitable than rich politicians giving the taxpayer's money to only those causes that can lobby them to advantage.
And the janjaweed militias were just "entrepreneurs" who've been unfairly maligned by the bleeding-heart liberal media, I gather? You didn't even acknowledge that American multinationals are readily capable of buying the loyalty and the guns of foreign armies or private mercenaries so long as laws like the Darfur Divestment Act of 2007 don't exist, you just immediately launched into more sacred texts from dear leader and hoped I wouldn't notice that you left the question hanging. I wager this has something to do with the fact that Paul himself has no response for this argument and the limits of your knowledge are defined by Paul's. At least government foreign aid is structured with the end goal of helping make restitution for colonialism from the ground up, and has to observe this function to a significant extent even when being turned to other ends. American corporate blood-harvesters, on the other hand, barely even have to pretend to care about who they hurt in Africa as they ply favored candidates with money, request the use of their armed forces to put down dissenters and make a smouldering ruin of their homelands. Ron Paul's response? Magic market voodoo because Mises said so, basically. I'm sure this will come as a great comfort to everyone who needs help NOW that eventually the free market will transform their country into a libertopia, er, somehow.
If janjaweed militias are Ron Paul's idea of partners for "honest business", then Ron Paul's notion of "honest business" is so sick and perverted that it isn't worth considering.
Its not much of a question. As far as I can tell,
Ron Paul supports free trade and non-intervention, and the DDA 2007 set the precedent of a U.S. President being able to tell private companies who they can do business with based on that President's foreign policy. The U.S. was not at war with Sudan, nor did Sudan pick a fight with the U.S.., and Shrub was picking sides in a 39-year civil war he knew nothing about, that has its roots in problems exacerbated from being a French colonial territory.
However couched in humanitarian rubric, that choice shouldn't be infringed upon at the legislative level since by that point, its never really about humanitarian concerns. The U.N. had not classified the conflict in Sudan as genocide, because it does not meet its definition of genocide. The
DDA 2007 was seen as an attempt by the Shrub government to foist responsibility to the U.N..
In the meantime, the U.S. focused on geostrategic placement. South Sudan gained full independence in 2011 and allied itself with Uganda and the U.S., against the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). The United States has placed itself in a position of influence of South Sudan, home to 80% of formerly united Sudan's oil wealth, complete with a small troop presence in the region justified by the LRA.
The 2011
UN Human Development Index places Sudan in the lowest category of development at 35, and South Sudan, where much of Sudanese oil is, isn't even documentable. In fact few Third World countries really hold a torch to the West. Sudan's rate of improvement is marginal but positive.
Interestingly enough, Libya was the African continent's leader in human development under Gaddafi, an indigenous leader who for the most part kept the country independent and was instrumental in making multinationals deal fair with Africa and the Middle East. Apparently he was on the verge of introducing the
gold dinar. Libya was on par with Russia and ahead of China on the U.N. 'Index.
Thanks to neoconned NATO, the leading African nation in development was knocked off for the benefit of oil multinationals and a little geopolitical swipe at China and Russia, with no obvious plans to compensate for, or replace what was destroyed. Sudan appears to have been partitioned with the warring middle and north separated from the oil rich south. Interesting and expensive gamesmanship at the taxpayer's expense.
Reprehensibly unfounded horseshit. Foreign aid has, among other things:
- Increased life expectancy in the third world by 1/3
- Reduced chronic malnourishment by 1/2
- Reduced infant mortality rates in the developing world by 10% in the last eight years
- Improved literacy in the third world by 30%
- Supplied 1.3 billion people with safe drinking water
- Made sanitation available to 750 million people
- Saved three million lives a year from certain death by disease through inoculation
You want to reform foreign aid, change the way it's distributed? Fine by me, I welcome the opportunity. Pointing to the flaws and saying "AID IS BROKED GO BYE BYE NOW" is wasteful, simple-minded, and ghoulishly suspect of being a pretext for ideological leanings towards "fuck you got mine."
That's it? Gosh, 1.3 billion with safe drinking water, only
1 billion to go. Your figures come from where? How much comes from the countries in question improving despite government foreign aid interfering with domestic development?
How much better could these numbers be if programs were indigenous, self-sustaining, and not reliant upon foreign aid? How reliant are these numbers on continued government foreign aid? What is the breakdown between the numbers generated by government aid compared to private foreign aid, in addition to indigenous development of the country?
Remember, that government foreign aid money comes from taxpayers, who are left with just that much less cash to donate to charities they would willingly donate to after taxes, let alone put back into the economy to distribute and create more real wealth.
Who's saying bye-bye to private aid efforts?
How much of the above figures you mentioned were accomplished by private aid efforts and how much by government and how much by indigenous enterprise? Government foreign aid has always been about buying influence and markets more than helping people in need, and if a people desired to be intruded upon doesn't need help, need can be arranged.
50 years and two trillion dollars later, one might have expected more advanced no-longer-third-world countries in the HDI yellow zone, with able governments and strong private sectors, not ongoing charity cases to no forseeable end.
Like how the
bankster bailouts really didn't help American entrepreneurship only a little worse and more violent. Surely some Americans know how to run banks and businesses properly. Surely some American businesses know how to deal square abroad without having to go neocon on the natives. Yet those better, smarter, more skilled people are not rewarded under the status quo; rather they are penalized by taxpayer-subsidized crony capitalism by the unlevel playing field this creates.
Explain what bailouts were responsible for making Shell and Standard provoke a war between Bolivia and Paraguay in 1932. Please resist your all-consuming urge to blame the US armed forces, as casual examination of this war will reveal they were, in fact, entirely uninvolved.
I don't recall blaming the U.S. armed forces for the Chaco war or connecting it to the 2008 bailouts. That the U.S. Army was uninvolved does serve to validate non-intervention, as America did not have to spend blood and treasure on an independent
Chaco state for Standard Oil's Wall Street backers.
The U.S. Army School of the Americas was only formed in 1963 from pre-existing U.S. Army Carribean Training Center, which before that was the 1946 Latin American training Centre. Noam Chomsky made his career documenting the antihumanitarian dirty-war escapades of its alumini when the American government chose to support right-wing factions in various civil wars, some of which it all-but instigated. The Chaco War was at least an open one with legal formalities observed.
Also, I don't blame the U.S. armed forces; they follow the orders of American politicians. Ron Paul's plans to end global interventions would enable the U.S. military to stay out of being placed in lose-lose scenarios, where even winning only means winning quagmires or escalations and the general contempt of locals towards Americans.
Please explain why the American middle class will fare any better in the face of unrestricted corporate predation than the people of Honduras have, given that they were structured into a even more corporate-friendly state such like Paul prefers through the bribery of the textile industry.
Link: Ron Paul Town Hall Meeting University of New Hampshire in Durham, Corporate Personhood, 21:03, question on corporate personhood. The entire segment is well worth the watch as the good doctor explains he does not plan on cutting everything at once, but hopes to start America back down the road to self reliance and health.
At some point the American middle class, reminded of it roots and heritage, will have to consider
tossing the whole 'corporations are persons under the law' scam, as it was after the original 1776 Revolution. That is the main source of corporate power; its immortality and ability to shield corporate apparatchiks from responsibility for their actions.
Which a Ron Paul Revolution might allow for, individual liberty and all that, while the status quo considers corporate personhood sacrosanct and unquestionable. Well, actually, its not even on the radar of the status quo.
Convenient or not for you and the torch you carry, it is no charade;
it is a cold, hard fact that three million lives a year are directly saved through efforts conducted by aid programs run by the US government. It is imperfect, easily; but there is no third worlder or conscientious first worlder with a working brain who thinks it is a worse deal than a Paulodomor and the repeal of all legislation akin to the Darfur Divestment Act.
In exchange for millions more lost to war and displacement to accommodate the multinational corporate machine and its wars and dirty dealing, while diverting taxpayer's money from the domestic uses those taxes were once originally intended.
No deal, let private charities and discerning private donors take over and save those 3 million and as many more, while the local economies these people live in are revitalized to serve those populations first. This would enable them to look after themselves as well as look out for others in turn.
Sudan had been Africa's third largest oil producer in 2009, 90% of which had been controlled by
Asian interests led by China, but also India, Malaysia, and Japan. I'm not sure that divestment by the U.S. is disinvestment was anything more than a ruse; South Sudan is the prize and China and the rest of Asia may not appreciate being displaced.
Your cited example includes CARE in Afghanistan. According to this
Huffington Post article, most traditional aid groups are indifferent to U.S. withdrawal plans, never liked having the military around, and look forward to its departure. CARE, on the other hand, expressed concerns that the U.S./NATO absence "would be felt". Most of the international aid workers killed in Afghanistan were government contractors working for NATO countries. This suggests that aid agencies with stronger connections to the U.S. government and foreign governments in general don't fare as well locally as apolitical aid groups, at least in this particular third world country.
