[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [smygo] Occupy Ron Paul

Sun Dec 16 11:39:03 UTC 2012

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Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dan Clore <clore at columbia-center.org>
> Date: December 15, 2012, 10:31:24 PM CST
> To: <smygo at yahoogroups.com>, <secularhumanist at yahoogroups.com>
> Subject: [smygo] Occupy Ron Paul
> Reply-To: <smygo at yahoogroups.com>
> 
> News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
> 
> http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/occupy-ron-paul/
> Occupy Ron Paul
> The retiring congressman's revolution wasn't just about the Republican 
> Party.
> By Michael Tracey • December 13, 2012
> 
> Every four years, the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, New Hampshire serves 
> as a hub for national media activity ahead of the state’s presidential 
> primary. On January 8, 2012, journalists milling about the hotel could 
> occasionally be overheard snickering at the strange melange of street 
> protesters that had flooded Manchester’s downtown area: Ron Paul people, 
> Occupy people, and assorted miscreants. These categories were not 
> mutually exclusive.
> 
> Across the street from the hotel, at Veterans Park, the loosely-knit 
> Occupy New Hampshire collective had established their encampment–a kind 
> of outdoor public festival. The first person I encountered there was 21 
> year-old Manchester resident John Cullen, who wore a green armband 
> signaling affiliation with OccupyNH (though of course there was no 
> formal “membership”). Cullen told me he’d recently been pepper-sprayed 
> by police at the Port of Oakland during a nationwide day of 
> demonstrations. “I was actually trying to get out of there at that 
> point,” he said; by coincidence, his family had been visiting members of 
> their church in the Oakland area, and while Cullen supported Occupy, he 
> wasn’t particularly eager to get doused with painful chemicals for the 
> cause.
> 
> When I mentioned I’d be attending a Ron Paul campaign event at the 
> University of New Hampshire in Durham later that evening, Cullen smiled 
> and unzipped his jacket to reveal a classic “Ron Paul reEVOLution” 
> T-shirt. In fact, he announced, it was only several hours prior that 
> he’d participated in a group “sign-wave” outside Murphy’s Taproom, a 
> major gathering point for Ron Paul people in the area. “When Ron Paul 
> gets the Occupiers on his side,” he beamed, “Ron Paul is not going to be 
> stopped. You can’t stop him.”
> 
> Cullen had wanted to go to the UNH rally but lacked transportation. So I 
> offered to give him a ride. Traffic that night was surprisingly 
> horrendous; we missed the first bit of Paul’s speech, barely making it 
> in time to hear the congressman remark on Iran sanctions and ask the 
> crowd how they would like it if one day Chinese drones started bombing 
> American targets. Afterwards, hundreds of people waited in line for the 
> candidate, who seemed perfectly happy to oblige all those who desired 
> photos. Cullen waited in this queue and later relayed his interaction 
> with Ron Paul. “You’re a beautiful man,” he reported telling him as they 
> posed for the camera. Ron Paul then inquired about the green armband, 
> and Cullen replied that it stood for Occupy New Hampshire. “Thank you 
> for participating in the democratic process,” Paul commented, cheerfully.
> 
> —
> 
> On the very first night of the Zuccotti Park occupation in September 
> 2011, when participants had scant conception of what Occupy would soon 
> become, Ron Paul people showed up and argued with Marxists about whether 
> they were entitled to stay. They stayed. One might say Ron Paul people 
> played a more integral role to the inception of Occupy than conventional 
> Democrats or liberals, many of whom scorned the inscrutable 
> demonstration in its first weeks. The journalist Arun Gupta, who 
> co-founded the Occupied Wall Street Journal in New York City and later 
> embarked on a tour of Occupy sites across America, told me he’d see 
> clusters of Ron Paul supporters and various libertarians virtually 
> everywhere he went. Such folks “tended to be better represented and 
> integrated in red states,” Gupta said–Cheyenne, Boise, Tulsa, Little 
> Rock, Louisville, Charleston, etc.–while in “blue states” they typically 
> formed enclaves that were “tolerated” by the wider group.
> 
> A fair number of Occupy people in those days either had no opinion of or 
> actively disliked Ron Paul, but the undercurrents of support were 
> nonetheless noticeable, ranging from individuals who would wield 
> official campaign paraphernalia to others who would concede private 
> support only for narrow aspects of Ron Paul’s platform upon intense 
> questioning. One would more reliably come across vocal Ron Paul 
> supporters at Occupy events than vocal Obama supporters. It was not lost 
> on the Zuccotti Park crowd, for instance, that Ron Paul personally 
> expressed a measure of support for the movement earlier than most any 
> other national U.S. politician–aside from Sen. Bernie Sanders or Rep. 
> Dennis Kucinich. (Gary Johnson, then seeking the GOP nomination, made an 
> appearance at Zuccotti Park and had a generally positive impression.)
> 
> Signage bearing the Paul-derived “End the Fed” slogan was common around 
> Lower Manhattan during those frenzied weeks. Stories of Paul-Occupy 
> fusion emerged from around the country: in Los Angeles, a Ron Paul 
> activist successfully added an anti-Federal Reserve amendment to 
> OccupyLA’s working manifesto; an ultimately ill-fated “Ron Paul Tent” 
> was established for a time at OccupyPhilly. Ryan Hirsch, one of the lead 
> Occupy New Hampshire organizers I met last January, described himself 
> more-or-less as a disaffected progressive and was unsure if he’d bother 
> voting in the GOP primary. (Hirsch was the individual pictured here who 
> at a November 2011 campaign event in New Hampshire handed Barack Obama a 
> typewritten note. “Mr. President,” it read, “Over 4,000 peaceful 
> protesters have been arrested…”) But Hirsch ultimately did vote, for Ron 
> Paul. Not because he agreed with everything Ron Paul has ever said, but 
> because Paul spoke on so many critical issues that other candidates 
> systematically neglected: civil liberties, drug prohibition, the 
> military-industrial complex, criminal justice/police problems, 
> Wikileaks, internet freedom.
> 
> In October 2011, Paul told journalist Brian Doherty that he viewed the 
> nascent Occupy Wall Street movement as a “tremendous opportunity,” while 
> adding that “it is not necessarily advantageous to overemphasize 
> alliance with people the conservative voters don’t really want to talk 
> about.” Indeed, at the time Occupy was the subject of much derision in 
> right-wing media, with outlets such as Breitbart.com and the Daily 
> Caller propagating endless incendiary anti-Occupy memes, often involving 
> sexual exploitation or human excrement. These were widely circulated on 
> the web and picked up by the talk-radio/Fox News nexus. Republican 
> presidential candidates eagerly piled on: Mitt Romney declared the 
> movement “dangerous,” while Newt Gingrich sneered–to the biggest 
> applause of the night at a Frank Luntz presidential forum–that Occupiers 
> ought to “Go get a job, right after you take a bath.” Ron Paul indicated 
> he was put off by that remark. “I’m not likely to be the one to say, 
> well, ‘Why don’t you get a bath and go get a job and quit crybabying.’ 
> No, I don’t like that at all.”
> 
> Paul was probably correct insofar as public outreach to Occupy at the 
> time would have been disadvantageous if his aim was to court registered 
> Iowa Republicans. But Ron Paul’s “affinity” with the movement, as he 
> described it, manifested from the outset. In September 2011 we spoke 
> after a campaign event at a New Hampshire old folks’ home. Some 
> supporters of his, I mentioned, had shown up to Zuccotti Park and were 
> spreading the message of liberty, so to say. “If they were demonstrating 
> peacefully,” Paul reacted, “and making a point, and arguing our case, 
> and drawing attention to the Fed–I would say, good!” Paul drew out his 
> inflection on the word “good,” as if to add–“and it’s about darn time!” 
> In subsequent weeks, he’d go on to speak favorably about Occupy in a 
> variety of venues: rebutting Herman Cain’s criticism during televised 
> debates, extolling the principle of civil disobedience at the National 
> Press Club and elsewhere. As the 2012 campaign dwindled, he started 
> invoking the problem of “police violence” more regularly–of intimate 
> concern to Occupiers–and emphasizing his commitment to “non-coercion,” 
> which is a central tenet of Occupy’s operational ethos.
> 
> That a candidate who routinely inveighed against the military-industrial 
> complex, “corporate fascism,” civil liberties infringements, and the 
> George W. Bush administration’s lies about Iraq while championing 
> Wikileaks, Bradley Manning, and the Occupy movement wound up attracting 
> support from elements of the American left is not terribly surprising. 
> But idiosyncratic right-wing elements of the Ron Paul coalition were 
> often quite exercised about those same subjects. What this crossover 
> dynamic suggests about the modern American political landscape remains 
> largely unexplored.
> 
> All of these unorthodox elements may be forsaken in coming months, 
> however, as the “Liberty Movement” orients itself to an existence 
> without Ron Paul as its congressional standard-bearer. He retires from 
> office on January 3. Those within the Ron Paul apparatus who insist on 
> merging into the Republican Party infrastructure risk abandoning the 
> legions of young people whose political consciousnesses were enlivened 
> by Ron Paul but who refuse to countenance the machinations and 
> deceptions associated with party politicking. They may have once been 
> willing to work with Republicans to help Ron Paul, but those volunteers 
> were always more “in” the GOP as a matter of practical necessity than 
> “of” it.
> 
> During his farewell address to Congress last month, Paul asked, “Why did 
> the big banks, the large corporations, and foreign banks and foreign 
> central banks get bailed out in 2008, and the middle class lost their 
> jobs and their homes?” He then cited the “gross discrepancy in wealth 
> distribution going from the middle class to the rich” as among “the 
> greatest dangers that the American people face today and impede the goal 
> of a free society,” echoing one of Occupy’s central themes–income equality.
> 
> Ever the adept politician, Ron Paul understands where public opinion is 
> heading, and he knows how to tailor an argument. He thus wisely plans to 
> continue focusing on youth outreach in post-congressional life. Perhaps 
> the preponderance of eccentric characters in Ron Paul’s own flock made 
> him more inclined to show the maligned Occupy movement a modicum of 
> respect, back when doing so was not an especially advisable tactic. This 
> may not have thrilled members of his campaign operation, but long-term, 
> the goodwill Ron Paul engendered among some unlikely constituencies may 
> prove worth the price.
> 
> Michael Tracey is a writer based in New York. His work has appeared in 
> The Nation, Reason, Mother Jones, and other publications. Follow him on 
> Twitter.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Dan Clore
> 
> New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
> http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
> My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
> http://tinyurl.com/8puuzuc
> Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
> http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
> News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
> 
> Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
> in charge on this island?
> Professor: Why, no one.
> Skipper: No one?
> Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
> -- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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