Wir Sind Nicht Alle Österreicher
by MARC SALOMON
Throughout the global north governments are falling to technocratic coups d’etat in service of finance capital. In the United States, there was no need for such unpleasantries as both state political parties are clients of Wall Street and their counterparties and offered up no significant resistance to popular austerity and debt hysteria to keep the banks flush and the wars going.
The Occupy movement gives the left of center a hope of breaking out of that trap, but offers up no indication that we will see near or mid term achievements. Then again, nobody thought in 1988 that the Soviet Union and Berlin Wall would crumble within a year Anything can happen but often doesn’t.
To hedge our bets, moderates, liberals and progressives should consider thinking outside the box and supporting Ron Paul for President. Ron Paul would advance more of our values further than most of our self-proclaimed allies. Paul would end the military and drug wars, end malevolent interventionism as foreign and military policy, end special treatment for Israeli crimes and reclaim control of the currency within the Congress. These are big-ticket items that Paul and a majority of Americans support but which the elites strongly oppose and invariably veto.
Ron Paul, for his part, must realize that his electoral prospects are currently slim to none, even with any latent appeal. While critically important planks in his platform broaden his appeal widely, other aspects of his program are very unpopular and drive folks away. With the majority of Americans who are not libertarian capitalists of the Austrian School cool to Pauls’ laissez-faire economic sharia, Paul should consider focusing his campaign on those big issues where the American people are with him.
American domestic electoral politics has been a metronome spectacle of cartoonish caricatures, scary shibboleths trotted out by each side like clockwork, to make us fear “The Other” so that the elites can continue to rule unimpeded. The spooks generally arise from the culture wars and from extreme misrepresentations of left and right economics. Together they effectively scare and tribally divide Americans to our mutual detriment but to the benefit of banksters and those who benefit from the military industrial complex that drains resources from the productive economy and distributes death on an industrial scale.
The only way that Paul has a hope of replacing the American Empire with a constitutional democratic republic is for both him and folks left of center to put aside, for the time being, our hot button, wedge issues, those hobby horses that we all trot out on cue every election cycle to demonize and unify ourselves which only deflect our attention from the political heist.
If both the left and right can declare a cease-fire on contested issues, social, women’s, immigrant and gay rights, economic, entitlements and government regulation and most importantly, the environment—all held at the status quo for four years, then the basis for unity to challenge Empire can be established.
We have all been trained throughout the past 30 years to instinctively and ritualistically hate the other tribe. MSNBC and FoxNEWS both prefer segments that are little more than Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate,” in the form of “Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad.”
But as Americans we’ve all seen how this kind of politics only further empowers our mutual opponents, those who are driving us all down. And as folks to the left of center, we know that we must take responsibility for the consequences of the criminal military and economic actions of our government, prosecuted with our tax dollars that hold billions of global southerners in brutal squalor for our mere relative comfort and convenience.
We must take some risks ourselves to absolve ourselves of complicity to ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity. Civil rights at home are important, but the right to life for people with the temerity to be living between global northerners and cheap raw materials in the global south are frankly more important to me than being denied access to a job or a home for being a gay man in the US.
A grand populist coalition to restore the democratic republic is just what the US and by consequence of interventionist military empire, the world, needs right now. Ron Paul is the only candidate for the presidency who is with us on these crucial issues and has successfully deployed presidential campaign level organizing skills. That makes him a contender worth consideration.
What Paul lacks, though is enough support to put him over the top even though dismantling the US Empire in favor of a democratic republic unites left, center and much of the populist right.
What is needed to solve that is not for anyone to compromise their principles or values. No, instead of compromise, we must all take stock of our predicament and prioritize what problems we’re going to tackle first to chart a path out. Then we must identify the best, most practical way to accomplish this given immutable constraints. How about left and right agree to identify where the American people are on key issues and to work their way down the list starting from those with highest levels of support that the elites oppose?
That is a worthy enough cause with enough of a chance of success that we should all consider putting aside for the time being our important yet relatively minor priorities in favor of reclaiming America from the manipulative financial, Zionist and military oligarchs who spread death and destruction in their wake, antagonize populations into resentment and thus instigate violent retaliation against American civilians, suck the US dry of all surplus and run roughshod over the environment.
Only with some semblance of popular sovereignty restored can left and right contest the hot button issues with any degree of democratic legitimacy. Until then, we’re being played, shadow boxing against one another for the benefit of the elites who are able to ignore popular opinion when it clashes with their rent seeking. Didn’t you ever wonder why for all the hue and cry, the parties don’t really deliver anything of substance on those eternally smoldering hot button wedge issues? It is time to break that deceptive and manipulative cycle, and an opportunity is presenting itself. Aren’t you tired of this sick game?
Can the left of center put aside our own immediate best interests, social and economic justice, in favor of ending the wars? Are any of us willing to put our ill-gotten comfort and convenience on the line, to sacrifice ourselves so that innocent others in far-off resource rich-lands might not be killed in our name, with our money, ultimately for our pleasure?
Can Paul put aside his libertarian capitalist economics in favor of restoring honest and accountable constitutional government? What do you say, Congressman?
Marc Salomon can be reached at: marcsalomon@gmail.com.
