88-89? i think either you had a typo or your facts wrongs, considering the hostages were released the day Reagan took office, in 80. but besides that, you have your facts right and much of what goes on is due to our need to interfere in our nation's goings on. but regardless of the facts, which is all you seem to want to do, recite pointless history notes. Iran has proven many times to be an enemy of the people of our nation and anyone who believes that they should be allowed to have the most deadly weapon this planet has known is not fit for the role of president .
Occupy's stance on Ron Paul?
(18 posts) (8 voices)-
mozie
MemberSince this is a site about getting educated, may I suggest reading some of Ron Paul's written works? They more fully explain his positions in a way no debate or short campagin speech ever could. A full bibliography can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Paul_bibliography . His books are:
Ron Paul. (2007). A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship.
Ron Paul. (2008). The Revolution: A Manifesto.
Ron Paul. (2009). End the Fed
Ron Paul. (2011). Liberty Defined.I have read "End the Fed," have just begun "The Revolution: A Manifesto," and am third (!) on the wait list at my local library for "Liberty Defined." I think these will answer many people's questions about why he thinks the way he does. Enjoy reading!
Posted 1 year ago # -
The invisible hand of the market got us into this mess.
Why do people support this man? I mean I get the whole "end the drug war and bring our troops home" thing, but the stuff about eliminating the Department of Education and the EPA and all that "government regulation is what created our recession" nonsense...
I mean sure, blame the government for the recession, after all, government is a convenient boogeyman if you don't like to look too deeply into history. After all, it was the elimination of Glass-Steagall (a government regulation) that allowed bankers to undercut previously take high risk investments like those sub-prime mortgages that they were eagerly giving out to everyone and their mother at no money down, bc it drove up property values, packaging them with safe investments like government bonds, selling the whole thing as a safe investment in what is known as a "collateralized debt obligation" to other banks, pension funds, etc., which led to banks stopping giving out loans when, inevitably, people began defaulting on their mortgages, which caused businesses and of course, the banks to fail, and in the end caused this recession....So I guess, in a sense, the government is to blame, but not the way Ron Paul says.
Often, Ron Paul and his supporters point to the Community Reinvestment Act, charging that it created the incentive for these high risk loans. Often times, conservatives point to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. However, they were not responsible for the real estate collapse. Frannie Mae's purpose is to expand the secondary mortgage market through mortgage-backed securities. The Community Reinvestment Act only applies to depository banks. The CRA actually clearly states that an institution's CRA activities should be undertaken in a safe and sound manner. The CRA penalizes banks for reckless, irresponsible, and otherwise predatory lending and a testament to this is the fact that sub-prime lending grew faster in institutions that did not have to meet the conditions of the CRA. (National Community Reinvestment Coalition). (I'm kinda borrowing here from another blogger's commentary.)
See, there's a myth in America that the private sector can do no wrong. Ron Paul and others forget that the market didn't on its own eliminate segregation, get women the right to vote, eliminate Jim Crow or slavery, establish a minimum wage, do away with sweat shop working conditions in the US or child labor or work place discrimination, set a 40 hour work week, or set quality standards for our food, medical, and other products....No it was government that did all that.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Ron Paul's ideology is appealing because people are afraid. Many have lost faith in the system, and that understandable. However, the thing you've got to realize is that he's not saying anything new. His policies are the same failed policies that got us into this recession.
The necessity of regulation cannot be better made clear than with this example:
Remember trick-or-treating when you were a kid? Remember walking by the house with the bowl of candy with the "please take 1" sign? Well, that bowl usually only had licorice in it. That's because the first kid that got there cherry picked all the good candy and left the bad stuff for everyone else to fight over. That's what happens when there's no regulation. A few take the best for themselves and the rest are left to fight over the scraps. The 1% and the 99%.
Our government system can be fixed with campaign finance reform and tighter restrictions on banking and wall street. Contrary to Ron Paul's beliefs, the wealth does not trickle down when the rich get tax cuts and no regulation...it pools up top. The way to fix an economy is bottom up through education, reforms, and progressivism.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Mr_Rager22
Member@politicalsentry - You failed the mention the alternative to Dr. Paul? What about our failed foreign policy; every candidate including Obama wants to continue interventionism? What about our national debt? None of the candidates are serious about our 15 trillion dollar debt that my kids are going to inherit. What about the Federal Reserve? We all know they are a shady organization - well Paul has been the only one talking about the FED for the last 30 years. I'm guessing you are a liberal - so what about taxing the rich? When corporations like G.E. paid ZERO dollars in taxes, what's a small increase going to do. Nothing, it's the loopholes that get you. And you mentioned the Department of Education... look at the quality of education since the federal government has been involved - It has dropped significantly. That is the general rule of thumb when the federal government gets involved, cost goes up, quality goes down. The Federal government has proven themselves too inefficient for too long.
What I'm getting at, is we both recognize the issues and we both have solutions. I think adopting non-interventionism, auditing the FED, getting rid of loopholes, breaking up the corporate owned media, campaign finance reform, and many other solutions need to be implemented.
And I am quite offended that you stated for 30 years no one has listened to him because his policies are failure... I blame no one listening to him on the corporate owned media. If you are a supporter of Occupy, you should feel the same way considering much of the media attention is negative. Ron Paul got 89 seconds to speak during a 90 minute CBS debate. Enough said. They are censoring him.
John Stewart discusses last Saturdays debate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uQl0mmi0NVQ#!
A lesson in foreign policy
This is a REAL interview with Dr. Paul
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Z6pnSHyOG-Y
Posted 1 year ago # -
I will support RonPaul when he retracts these statements:
1. “The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders’ political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs.”
~Ron Paul, claiming that there is no separation of church and state, despite these writings by Founding Fathers Jefferson and Madison:“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.”
~Thomas Jefferson, as President, in a letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802“The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.”
~James Madison2. The Founding Fathers envisioned a robustly Christian yet religiously tolerant America, with churches serving as vital institutions that would eclipse the state in importance.
~Ron Paul, claiming that churches are more important than government. Here’s what the Founding Fathers really thought about churches.“A Firehouse is more useful than a church.”
~Benjamin Franklin“In no instance have the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.”
~James Madison3. “Having federal officials, whether judges, bureaucrats, or congressmen, impose a new definition of marriage on the people is an act of social engineering profoundly hostile to liberty.”
~Ron Paul, criticizing the LGBT community for seeking the same rights straight couples have.4. “You don’t have a right to a house, you don’t have a right to a job, you don’t have a right to medical care.”
~Ron Paul, saying that Americans have no right to have jobs and health care.5. “It would help the poor people who need jobs. Minimum wage is a mandate. We’re against mandates so why should we have it? It would be very beneficial.”
~Ron Paul, saying that abolishing the minimum wage would help poor people.6. “Technically, they [Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid] are. . . . there’s no authority [in the Constitution]. Article I, Section 8 doesn’t say I can set up an insurance program for people. What part of the Constitution are you getting it from? The liberals are the ones who use this General Welfare Clause. . . . That is such an extreme liberal viewpoint that has been mistaught in our schools for so long and that’s what we have to reverse—that very notion that you’re presenting. And the Constitution and the courts said slavery was legal to, and we had to reverse that.”
~Ron Paul, saying he would get rid of Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid during a GOP Presidential Debate.7. “All rights are individuals. We do not get our rights because we belong to a group. Whether it’s homosexuals, women, minorities, it leads us astray. You don’t get your rights belonging to your group. A group can’t force themselves on anybody else. So there should be no affirmative action for any group.”
~Ron Paul, saying he’s against affirmative action.8. “The concept of equal pay for equal work is not only an impossible task, it can only be accomplished with the total rejection of the idea of the voluntary contract. The idea that a businessman must hire anyone and is prevented from firing anyone for any reason he chooses, and in the name of rights, is a clear indication that the basic concept of a free society has been lost.”
~Ron Paul, opposing equal pay for women.9. “I think the current policy is a decent policy.”
~Ron Paul, supporting DADT10. “If it were written the same way, where the federal government’s taken over property–it has nothing to do with race relations. It has nothing to do with racism, it has to do with the Constitution and private property rights.”
~Ron Paul, saying that he would vote against the Civil Rights Act if it were to come before Congress today.11. “I call it “nationalism without a whimper,” and the corporate business community is begging for it. The nationalization of industry, while retaining private ownership in name only, is just another word for fascism.”
~Ron Paul, saying that the auto industry shouldn’t have been saved, even though it worked and saved millions of jobs.12. “Yes, but not overnight. As a matter of fact, my program’s the only one that is going to be able to take care of the elderly. I’d like to get the young people out of it, just the younger generation.”
~Ron Paul, after being asked if he favors abolishing Social Security.13. “As a Congressman, I’ve never voted for any budget that includes funding for Planned Parenthood. Instead, I’ve introduced the Taxpayers’ Freedom of Conscience Act to cut off all taxpayer funding of abortions, so-called “family planning” services and international abortionists.”
~Ron Paul, saying he would abolish Planned Parenthood this ending vital medical services provided to women.14. “A state can decide. We don’t need somebody in Washington. I live on the gulf coast, we deal with hurricanes all the time. The local people rebuild the city. Built a sea wall and they survived without FEMA. We should be like 1900, we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960.”
~Ron Paul, advocating the abolition of FEMA just before Hurricane Irene struck the east coast and caused major damage, requiring FEMA to help out.15. “Yes, because there’s no authority to do this, and just think of all this willingness to want to help every student get a college education. So they’re a trillion dollars in debt, we don’t have any jobs for them, the quality of education has gone down, so it’s a failed program. I went to school when we had none of those. I could work my way through college and medical school because it wasn’t so expensive. So when you run up debt, you print money, costs go up in the areas that the government gets involved in: education, medical care, and housing. So it’s artificial and distorts the economy.”
~Ron Paul, admitting that he wants to abolish federal student loans that millions of students wouldn’t be able to go to college without.16. “The freer the market is and the more respect you have for private property, the better the environment is protected.”
~Ron Paul, stating that we should allow people and corporations to pollute all they want, any way they want to and somehow, the free market will stop it.and when he stops taking money from JP Morgan Chase:
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=N00005906Posted 1 year ago # -
@Mr_Rager22 unfortunately the only candidate worth voting for is Obama. It all comes down to regulation of businesses. Obama had regulated business, he believes Yeah the war is a problem but Obama has narrowed its focus. He's also proposed new taxes on the rich. That's something. You mention the Federal Reserve but that's not what got us into this mess (as I said above):Unregulated capitalism did. You mention taxes, Ron Paul is against taxing the rich and corporations. His ideas are essentially those of a mainstream Republican these days minus the whole "end the war and legalize drugs" thing. Yes, it is unfortunate that we Americans have no other options, but Ron Paul's policies of small government and state's power (similar to the Articles of Confederation) would be disastrous. I hear you though, there are definitely a lot of problems with the status quo.
The solutions you pose are good ones (though I have to say the Federal Reserve is not the daemon Ron Paul makes it out to be..it actually does not print money; that's not how the US conducts its monetary policy.) However, none of your solutions would be Ron Paul's solutions. He's against all kinds of active government which includes campaign finance reform,breaking up of big media companies, etc.
Obama has come out in favor of raising the taxes on the rich and super rich. He's instituted new regulations on banking, and he's been pretty good internationally....not great though..Honestly, Obama's biggest problem is his compulsive need to compromise with Congressional Republicans. That has resulted in him losing some of his best ideas like the public option.
Posted 1 year ago # -
gliftor
MemberI used to be a right-libertarian, so I've been through most of the Ron Paul thought process. I mean, who can be against freedom, right? I could stand up for his foreign policy views and some other things, but that's not the point. Neither is the fact that replacing the Fed with a 19th century hard money policy is simply another step toward rule by the rich.
The big issue is that the right-libertarian ideology includes an incredibly naive (or disingenuous) view of private power, which demands the existence of some source of public power that defends property rights to the exclusion of all else. By the time you get to the Ayn Rand level of confusion, you're saying that government must somehow defend private property without having the power to collect taxes. It makes no sense. The absence of government, as we see in various countries today, isn't freedom, it's warlordism. Ron Paul isn't that radical, but in today's world his ideology can only give more power to corporations and other concentrations of private power. An RP government would effectively be a central enforcer and referee for corporate fiefdoms. Whatever "Occupy" is about, it can't be that.
Posted 1 year ago #
