Raimondo and Kissinger- What a minute. Back up....
Foley Hearts Chuck
behind Obama for totally logical reasons. The issue is not what team
you're on, but how is the country going to win against all odds-
exaggerated odds thanks to the brilliant NeoCons (who, yes, flattered
the dumb Democrat Scoop Jackson, first). Now all of these "party" or
ideology terms are merely perceptual frameworks that somewhat overlap
but do not entirely frame the national/international issue: The
economy, which is based on Energy. That is, for all the Nobels for
Economics, the only one that ever should have been awarded should have
gone to Albert Einstein and Related for the Universal Equation, E=
mc(squared).
This happens to be the only way we can logically think of all actions,
not just war for oil, or Clinton and healthcare, or Obama and ending
the Iraq war, or Pratt and Boeing their old-fashioned engines, or
Buchanan and Isolationism. These are partial equations.
THE ONLY QUESTION (improperly framed by the parties) is "How are we
going to get Energy?" We get Energy from matter (since that's the
equation), and we manufacture products with energy (since that is the
equation), and if we had Energy to sell, we could get matter (raw
materials), but we no longer have Energy of our own, at least, at the
present time. There has been no Energy Infrastructure in Development
as there would have been with Al Gore.
Now, take for example, a system. Let's pick Earth.
Look at the proportion of land masses to water.
Look at what is available for supplies (energy and raw materials ie
minerals).
Look at populations and stuff we can't re-create like all the animals
in their natural niches (very important word).
Then you say, "Okay, How can we deliver nutrient essentials to all the
people."
The Universal Equation applies across all of these questions and
dynamics and is how to solve these problems.
Now, whoever loses focus of our obligation due to our alleged
education and alleged intellect, needs to not have a forum. There is
no more time for partial frameworks or hysterical human males
inventing monsters in the Middle East or Russia or elsewhere as an
excuse to act like cornered cats.
Think about it:
Henry Kissinger, the man who everyone somehow thinks is the world's
scholar and conflict resolutionist said:
http://www.actionlyme.org/DURHAM_BUSH_CRIME.htm
"We were in the middle of the energy crisis, totally unforeseen by us.
The last study that had been made in our government said the oil price
might reach $5 by 1980; it had reached $12 at that point. All the
industrialized democracies needed to find some method of concerted
action, a common approach."
How could such a proud Jew not have understand Einstein's equation?
These are the people thinking up all the ideas and the policies and
the parties?
Someone who seems to still not understand Einstein's observations?
Someone who developed Detente as the policy as the result of nuclear
weapons - which were Einstein's equation's application to what holds
the atom together?
There were already nuclear power plants all over this nation by 1973.
How could Kissinger and the related self-alleged "Smarter-than-
Democrats" Republicans not have understood why?
How in the world would Wolfowitz, supposedly a Math and Chemistry
undergraduate, not have understood Einstein?
I think Wolfowitz and Kissinger should be asked this question.
How did they think up all this nonsense as foreign policy for the
United States?
Raimondo does not need to defend his choice for Obama. The first
order of business is to try to reign in our expenses by leaving the
Middle East, and start applying all this war technology back to from
whence it came. Supplying energy and food.
Kathleen M. Dickson
==============
March 10, 2008
A Strategy for Peace - and Survival
What do Ron Paul, Barack Obama, and Adlai Stevenson have in common?
by Justin Raimondo
The response to my "confession" of admiration for Barack Obama is
instructive on several levels, the first being the amount of sheer
emotion generated. Here, for example, is a response from some of Ron
Paul's more hard-core supporters: to hear them tell it, I'm an
"opportunist," a "Benedict Arnold," and a "male Naomi Wolf"! My good
friend Lew Rockwell avers that I'm "the first casualty of the post-
Paul era." This note from Third Party Watch is more charitable (and
here's someone who's supportive), but take a look at the comments.
This one is typical: "How 'libertarian' of Raimondo to support a guy
who has a 100 percent approval rating from the Americans for
Democratic Action."
I would advise my critics to apply a cold compress to the forehead,
and if that doesn't work, then pop a chill pill. Simmer down, guys!
Partisan and organizational loyalties are built on emotional
attachments as much as ideological convictions, and these often get in
the way of political clarity and strategic judgment. In any case, the
objections to my "Confession" underscore a number of misconceptions
about electoral politics, libertarianism, and the antiwar movement,
all of which need to be cleared up.
To begin with, Ron Paul and his supporters were never going to put
even so much as a dent in the War Party's plans to conquer the Middle
East, take on the Russians, and target China. We all doubted he was
going to win the nomination of his party, smash the military-
industrial complex, and bring the neocons to their knees, but that
wasn't the point, now was it?
Paul's campaign was an admirable attempt to educate conservative
Republicans on the relationshipbetween domestic and foreign policy and
establish an anti-interventionist beachhead in the GOP. That he has
done, and with a lot more success than I ever imagined. My hat is off
to him, and we are all in his debt: after all, the man is 72 years
old, has a safe Republican district in rural Texas, the establishment
is out to get him anyway - and he didn't have to put himself directly
in the line of fire by launching a bid for the White House. Yet he
did. Why did he do it?
I don't pretend to have any special insight into his motivation, but I
think it is fairly safe to say that Ron takes the long view. Sure, he
probably gave his campaign the same odds everybody else did - a long-
shot, to say the least - but since he's interested in building a
movement, not necessarily winning office, that probably didn't bother
him too much - especially as it became clear that he was making an
impact in terms of educating the public. At the Republican debates,
Ron struck a mighty blow for the cause of peace and a rational foreign
policy each time he denounced the war and the entire militarist
system. The looks on the faces of the other candidates alone made it
all worth it.
Ron spoke truth to power, and his campaign will go down in history as
an intellectual if not an electoral victory. If the conservative-
libertarian milieu is to have a political future, then the new
Republican politics of Ron Paul and his supporters will play a pivotal
role. If John McCain goes down to ignominious defeat this November,
the Paul campaign, in retrospect, will exert the predictive power of
the ostensibly "failed" Goldwater campaign - and the Ron Paul
Revolution will turn out to have been a harbinger of things to come.
Paul's achievement is undeniable. Yet the danger posed by our foreign
policy of relentless aggression has not passed. Indeed, it only looms
larger, what with American warships positioned off the coast of
Lebanon and the blowback from our invasion of Iraq still reverberating
throughout the region and the world.
Our foreign policy has put us in mortal danger, and not only because
it empowers the worldwide Islamist insurgency that aims to attack the
American homeland, but also because the "Iraq recession" is fast
threatening to become the Iraq depression. The U.S. is teetering on
the edge of bankruptcy, and the $3 trillion war is going to sink us if
it isn't stopped.
Libertarians who believe their program of less government, more
freedom, and a return to the principles embodied in the Constitution
can survive another four years of constant warfare are deluding
themselves. Unless the post-9/11 War Party juggernaut is stopped, our
old Republic is doomed. Not only that, but libertarianism as a
credible alternative to the statist ideologies of Left and Right will
be swept away in a tide of economic and political tumult, rendered
ineffective and irrelevant by much larger forces. In short, we are
facing a crisis, and this is where the ethics of emergencies kick in.
In an emergency, it is necessary to focus on the immediate issue at
hand: if your car is parked on the railroad tracks, and the train is
barreling toward you, everything else must be put aside in the
interest of survival. There's no time to think of the fate of the car,
which you still owe money on, or whether your insurance will cover the
damage. There's certainly no time to make a phone call, or to finish
listening to your favorite song on the car radio. You must instead
focus on the immediate priority, which is hightailing it to safety.
That is the situation we face today.
The War Party is rocketing toward catastrophe in the Middle East,
escalating and extending the Iraq war to envelope Iran, Lebanon,
Syria, and even Pakistan. The regional destabilization predicted by
war opponents is coming to pass, and with a vengeance. Not only that,
but the warmongers are active on other fronts, notably targeting
Vladimir Putin's Russia as the latest looming threat, to be met with
the same swaggering bluster and unmitigated hubris the U.S. government
brings to its foreign policy pronouncements as a matter of course. We
are faced with all sorts of potentially deadly "blowback" as a direct
consequence of our deranged foreign policy, of which economic meltdown
and another 9/11 are only the first two in a long list of lethal
possibilities.
So what do we do about it? I don't have all the answers, or even most
of them, and I don't pretend to. But I do know where to look for
answers, and the place I would start is the history of the modern
libertarian movement.
In 1960, the founder of that movement, Murray N. Rothbard, trod a
political landscape very similar, in many respects, to our own. The
conservative movement was a morass of warmongering, with the legions
of National Review agitating for a military showdown with the Soviet
Union, even if it meant a nuclear war. Rothbard, who until that point
had been writing for National Review and considered himself to be a
man of the Right, was isolated politically and ideologically. Unlike
his fellow Rightists, he was a staunch anti-interventionist of the Old
Right variety. He knew there would be no rolling back of State power
unless we first rolled back - and dismantled - the rising American
empire. In his recently published memoir, The Betrayal of the American
Right, he cites a 1952 article by a young William F. Buckley Jr. to
illustrate how the conservative movement came to sell out its small
government principles. "We have got to accept Big Government for the
duration," averred Buckley,
"For neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our
present government skills, except through the instrument of a
totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. ... And if they deem Soviet
power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to
support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central
intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization
of power in Washington - even with Truman at the reins of it all."
Here we have dug up the roots of the betrayal of conservatism - a
brazen call to throw caution and principle to the winds that echoes
down through the years as a lesson for today. Buckley's response to
the alleged threat from the Soviets was to throw the Right's time-
honored program of constitutional, limited government overboard - a
near perfect match for what the Fox News-Weekly Standard-National
Review axis of conservative anomie proposes in the present day. The
neoconservative response to 9/11 was to revive Buckley's totalitarian
bureaucracy and empower it a thousand-fold with the PATRIOT Act, the
Military Commissions Act, and the rise of the surveillance state. In
place of the traditional conservative foreign policy based on prudence
and the national interest, narrowly defined, the neocons in the
administration embarked on a world crusade - which they compared to
the struggle against Communism - and subordinated everything to their
policy of perpetual war.
In 1960, Rothbard faced a very similar political scene. His reaction
was dictated by strict adherence to libertarian principle, greatly
aided by a creative strategic mindset that enabled him to adapt to
changing circumstances without compromising his core beliefs. In
Betrayal, he recalls:
"It was time to act; and politically, my total break with the Right
came with the Stevenson movement of 1960. In 1956 I had been for
Stevenson over Eisenhower, but only partly for his superior peace
position; another reason was to try to depose the Republican 'left' so
as to allow the Old Right to recapture the party. Emotionally, I was
then still a right-winger who yearned for a rightist third party. But
now the third party lure was dead; the Right was massively
Goldwaterite. And besides, Stevenson's courageous stand on the U-2
incident - his outrage that Eisenhower had wrecked the summit
conference by refusing to make not only a routine, but a morally
required apology for the U-2 spy incursion over Russia - made me a
Stevensonian. Politically, I had ceased being a right-winger. I had
determined that the crucial issue was peace or war; and that on that
question the only viable political movement was the 'left' wing of the
Democratic Party. By consistently following an antiwar and
isolationist star, I had shifted - or rather been shifted - from right-
wing Republican to left-wing Democrat."
My confession of Obama-mania no more makes me a "casualty of the post-
Paul era" than Rothbard's entry into the League of Stevensonian
Democrats (LSD) made him a casualty of the post-Taft era.
Yes, there really was such a League, and Rothbard tells us the whole
fascinating story in Betrayal, but it is worth pointing out that,
while I am in no way endorsing Obama - or any candidate for office -
and certainly am not serving in any official capacity in his
organization, Rothbard did serve as an official of the LSD - as chief
of its national and international affairs department, a perfect perch
from which to insert libertarian anti-interventionist and pro-civil
liberties planks into the group's platform.
The Rothbardian strategy of aligning with the most pro-peace of the
presidential candidates, regardless of their domestic policies, was
correct back then, and it is correct today.
John McCain can mouth tepid free-market, low-tax bromides until the
cows come home, but objectively his warmongering mania will make free
markets and low taxes impossible. On the other hand, Barack Obama may
be very far from a libertarian on economic issues, yet his program of
getting us out of Iraq will avoid a turn in the road where tax cuts
and free markets are entirely precluded. If we're lucky, this drawback
will drag us back from the brink of economic disaster and prevent the
Iraq recession from becoming a full-fledged Iraq depression.
From a libertarian perspective, Hillary Clinton represents the worst
of all possible worlds: a combination of warmongering abroad and
coercive maternalism at home. In Hillary's World, the Internet will be
reined in and 23-year-olds will be forced to buy health insurance or
face fines - and, if they persist, perhaps reeducation in a guarded
facility.
Obama is often compared to John F. Kennedy, but the comparison is not
just stylistic. Kennedy was a tax-cutter, unlike the heirs of his
party today. His tax cuts, enacted in 1964, surpassed those of Reagan
and Bush II. As the Tax Foundation points out:
"The Kennedy tax cut, representing 1.9 percent of income, was the
single largest first-year tax-cut of the post-WW II era. The Reagan
tax cuts represented 1.4 percent of income while none of the Bush tax
cut even breaks 1 percent of income. The Kennedy tax cuts would only
have been surpassed in size by combining all three Bush tax cuts into
a single package."
Both Obama and Hillary are fairly characterized as modern liberals,
yet the former is no ideologue. Obama opposes Hillary's coercive
national health insurance scheme, because he knows it will penalize
poor and lower middle class people on the margins - who can't afford
to purchase insurance of any sort. Unlike Hillary, Obama has also been
good on civil liberties issues. As Jeffrey Rosen put it in the New
York Times:
"In the Senate, Mr. Obama distinguished himself by making civil
liberties one of his legislative priorities. He co-sponsored a
bipartisan reform bill that would have cured the worst excesses of the
Patriot Act by meaningfully tightening the standards for warrantless
surveillance. Once again, he helped encourage a coalition of civil-
libertarian liberals and libertarian conservatives. The effort failed
when Hillary Clinton joined 13 other Democrats in supporting a
Republican motion to cut off debate on amendments to the PATRIOT Act."
Obama is no Ron Paul. But one has to ask: among the candidates
currently running, who is? Absent a third-party run by Paul - or
unless Bob Barr takes up the Paulian banner, as rumored - principled
anti-interventionists, not to mention libertarians, have few choices,
apart from staying home on election day.
Obama's theme of "change" is often derided as bromidic, proof of his
vapidity and that of his supporters, but this misses the point and the
real source of his appeal: things really are so bad that any sort of
change is bound to be an improvement. I don't think the ordinary
American realizes just how close to the abyss we are, economically -
but that conclusion is slowly dawning on them. Our present course is
unsustainable, and, unless there's a change in direction, or some sort
of divine intervention, we're looking at an economic train-wreck in
pretty short order. As the train hurtles toward our car, still stalled
on the tracks, we have to take some sort of action to avert utter
annihilation - it's a matter of life and death.
Turning back to Rothbard's Betrayal of the American Right, and the
political landscape circa 1960, I would note that Rothbard's entry
into the Stevensonian movement was not narrowly based on foreign
policy grounds. It also involved the pursuit of an important strategic
goal: "Another reason [for supporting Stevenson] was to try to depose
the Republican 'left' so as to allow the Old Right to recapture the
party." If ever anyone represented the Republican Left, it is McCain.
His defeat would cancel out the power of the neoconservatives who
surround him and are rallying around the banner of his Hundred-Year
War - and provide an opening for Ron Paul Republicans to take their
message to the party and the people.
In the context of the challenges advocates of peace and liberty face,
these days, a 100-percent rating from Americans for Democratic Action
is hardly the worst one might say about a presidential candidate. One
could get a 100-percent rating from, say, the American Conservative
Union or the Club for Growth and still be the most dangerous and anti-
libertarian candidate imaginable. As for me, I'll take a dyed-in-the-
wool, old-fashioned liberal over a red-state fascist any day of the
week.
I understand, however, that many antiwar conservatives and
libertarians - myself among them - could never bring themselves to
actually vote for Obama, never mind recommend that others do so. Yet
that doesn't mean I can't root for him, which is quite a different
matter. In rooting for Obama, I'm rooting for the growth and
development of a political insurgency against the Powers That Be, a
phenomenon that goes beyond Obama and signifies a new era of political
tumult centered around foreign policy issues.
Obama's promise of "change," in the abstract, really comes down to a
fundamental break with the defining characteristic of the Bush II
years: our foreign policy of perpetual war. That is the first thing
Americans want to change, and if Obama is nominated they will get to
vote on the matter at a crucial point in our history, the historical
moment when we come to a crossroads, with one signpost marked "empire"
and the other "republic." The choice is imminent, unavoidable, and
perhaps irreversible.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
I'll be speaking on March 16 at an event headlined "Iraq: 5 Years Too
Many" to mark the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Come
join me; Sean Penn; Cindy Sheehan; the Rev. Gregory Stewart, senior
minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church; and Matt Gonzalez,
former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and
putative Green Party candidate for vice president.
The program will begin at 5 p.m. on Sunday at the Unitarian
Universalist Church, 1187 Franklin Street (near Geary) in San
Francisco. The suggested donation for the event is $5-$10, but no one
will be turned away for lack of funds. The program is sponsored by the
Iraq Moratorium-SF Bay Area and other local peace groups.
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, publishers of the forthcoming
new edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost
Legacy of the Conservative Movement, have set up a special Web site to
promote the book. They have recently added an interview with me, which
elucidates how the book came to be written and its relevance for
today. Go here and scroll down.
~ Justin Raimondo
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12491