October 27, antiwar march- civic center

FUCK RON PAUL AND HIS SUPPORTERS!
Ron Paul on Immigration
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwZsBiZYocg

yeah, Ron Paul and the "libertarian" party talk a lot about liberty and freedom, but freedom and liberty for who to do what. Freedom and liberty for the rich and the white to buy and sell and protect their property and freedom for the poor and people of color to stay poor and without unions and no federally mandated civil rights. Social liberal? Hahaha.

"Every politician has earned their place on the gallows a thousand times over."

For Ron Paul, make that 100,000,000 times over.

No doubt about that, but this is who was there.

A subtle change in the organization of this protest was that they removed the ANSWER degree of control, and instead the regional demos all had a medley of local groups organizing the stage and permit.
Because this is was an antiwar rather than a progressive march, they had Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com on at Civic Center. He is a libertarian conservative, and I respect that he puts in so much effort and work. Perhaps they don't realize that the libertarian-conservative or 'capitalist' economy provides incentives for companies to militarily intervene in outside nations to get cheap materials for their business, and thus an incentive to encourage their national government to corruptly create a false 'defense' pretext for conducting empirical raids. This would require that individuals act against their interests in the economy to not favor imperialism. It is the same type of systematic flaw as communism, which requires that people keep working hard out of a patriotic work ethic. http://antiwar.com/justin/

Libertarian capitalism, which is the kind of libertarianmism to which Ron Paul subscribes, is precisely what this war is about. One of the master mouthpieces of this unfettered-capitalism-solves-everything movement is Thomas Friedman. He famously remarks in his horrendously under-researched best-seller _The Lexis and the Olive Tree_,

"The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist—McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

Friedman is referring to military intervention to force open what libertarian capitalists refer to as 'closed economies, 'which include countries that respect autonomous indigenous communities within their borders (e.g., Mexico's ejidos pre-NAFTA and the 60,000 Mexican troops sent to Chiapas post-NAFTA).

If Ron Paul and his followers are under the mistaken impression that libertarian capitalism will magically spread to the rest of the world peacefully, they clearly have never reviewed the history of free trade and privatization which has always followed in the wake of U.S. military intervention, from Guatemala in the 1950s to Chile in the 1970s, from the former Yugolslavia in the 1990s to the Middle East presently. One need only point to the massive regional free trade project now underway in the Middle East which can be found on the U.S. Trade Representative's website: http://www.ustr.gov/Trade_Agreements/Regional/MEFTA/Section_Index.html. Notice that the only countries without a significant U.S. military presence and a free trade agreement with the U.S. are those countries that our military is now targeting: Syria, Iran, and Iraq.

Ron Paul is far from revolutionary and the unfettered-capitalism-solves-everything movement is hardly different than the present U.S. regime's agenda. The only difference is that Ron Paul happens to be against an unpopular war while still advocating for unpopular pro-corporate neoliberal policies.

It's so trite, it's boring.

There's certainly no shortage of reasons to criticize and reject the positions/policies of Ron Paul and the Libertarian Party, but I don't think it's fair to blame them specifically for the war in Iraq.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq was long a goal of the Neo-Conservatives as outlined in the Project For a New American Century.

The Libertarians suck... but they're not Neo-Conservatives.

And Thomas Friedman is neither a Libertarian nor a Neo-Conservative, he's definitely a Neo-Liberal.

Perhaps you were thinking of economist Milton Friedman, whose theories on laissez-faire capitalism were celebrated by Libertarians and US conservatives alike.

Yes, often these different groups all agree on and support issues that you and I fundamentally reject. But that doesn't mean that they're all the same.

We should take the time to know the differences.