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2012 Elections

Tuesday, Jan 3, 2012 2:00 PM UTC

Race, liberty and Ron Paul

The libertarian standard bearer trashes the Civil Rights Act

By Republican presidential candidate U.S Representative Ron Paul (Credit: Joshua Lott / Reuters)

 Did the Civil Rights Act of 1964 put America on the path to a police state?  The answer is yes, according to Ron Paul, the Texas Republican Congressman and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Paul explained that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “destroyed the principle of private property and private choices” and “undermine[d] the concept of liberty.”  The candidate drew a direct line from the Civil Rights Act to illiberal legislation passed in the panic that followed the 9/11 attacks:  “Look at what’s happened with the PATRIOT Act. They can come into our houses, our bedrooms our businesses … And it was started back then.”

 By equating the Civil Rights Act, which expanded American civil liberty, with the Patriot Act, which reduced it, on the grounds that both are federal laws with sanctions, Ron Paul displays the moral idiocy of someone who declares that a person who pushes a little old lady out of the path of a bus is just as bad as a person who pushes a little old lady into the path of a bus, because both are equally guilty of pushing little old ladies around.

Like other libertarians, Ron Paul does not understand American values.  The American experiment is an experiment in creating and maintaining a democratic republic, not a minimal state.  American political culture is founded not on the theories of Ayn Rand or Ludwig von Mises but on the reasoning of natural rights theorists like John Locke, for whom coercion in the service of communal self-defense is perfectly legitimate.  In Lockean social contract theory, in order to protect themselves from human predators, people form a community and then transfer the pooled power of self-defense to the community’s trustee, the state, the better to resist invasion and crime.  While abuses of military and police power are to be guarded against, the idea that the military and police and government as such are inherently tyrannical, a familiar theme in libertarian and anarchist thought, is utterly alien to America’s Lockean republican tradition.

Libertarians typically argue that only government, backed by military and police power, can be tyrannical.  Lockean republicans in contrast believe that private power located in the for-profit or non-profit sectors can be tyrannical, as well.  By means of their agent, the state, the sovereign people legitimately can protect themselves from predation by private sector tyrants as well as public sector tyrants.

Libertarians are not the brightest lights in the candelabra, a fact that is evident from the alternatives they tend to offer to public prevention of private abuses.  For example:  if you don’t like working a hundred hours a week for twenty-five cents a day, then find another employer!  It is obvious to intelligent people, if not libertarians, that more generous employers will price themselves out of a market whose standards are set by the most rapacious.

The other popular libertarian remedy for exploitation is to move somewhere else where you will be treated better.  But what if you can’t emigrate?  Well, it seems, you must suffer your exploitation in silence, rather than enlist the aid of the law in restraining your thuggish employer, your predatory landlord, your exploitative banker or the vendors who sell you toxic food and dangerous products.

Some libertarians concede the legitimacy of government coercion in protecting property rights.  But in doing so, these libertarians, like Ron Paul, give up any principled objection to government coercion.  They simply want government coercion to be used for some purposes—protecting property rights—and not others—enforcing civil rights.

The Civil Rights Act did not mark an intrusion of government into a realm previously governed purely by what Paul calls “private choices.”  Until the federal Civil Rights Act was passed, the coercive power of state and local governments was routinely used to enforce the “private choices” and “property rights” of racists.  If a diner owner banned blacks from his diner, and blacks sat down at the counter and insisted on being served, then the diner owner could call the police, who, protecting the property rights of the owner, would drag the would-be black patrons of the restaurant off to jail.

The straightforward way to interpret Paul’s remarks on CNN is to read him as saying that bigoted property owners, like owners of restaurants, should to this day have the right to call on the coercive power of the police department to enforce their decisions to refuse to serve certain categories of customers on their property.  Anti-semitic store owners, for example, should have the right not merely to put up a “No Jews” sign, but also to summon the police, at the taxpayer’s expense, to arrest any Jew who insisted on entering the store.

Perhaps I am misreading Paul.  Perhaps he does not think that business owners should have retained the right, abolished by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to have the government, in the form of the police, use coercion to enforce their racist “private choices” to exclude certain classes of clients.  Perhaps he thinks that the police should not be involved in the effort to expel the Jew from the Judenrein store.  Perhaps true libertarianism means that the anti-semitic store owner should try to persuade the unwanted Jew in the store to leave by noncoercive means—“Shoo, Jew!”  Or perhaps authentic libertarianism would sanction private not public coercion, so the Jew-hating store owner should be allowed to hire Slow-Eye Pete and Philadelphia Jack to enforce the store’s No-Jew policy.

But I don’t think this is what Paul meant to say.  From his statement that the Civil Rights act “destroyed the principle of private property and private choices,” I think his meaning is quite clear:  civil rights legislation at any level—federal, state or local—should never have been passed.  To this day, store owners should be free to call on the public police at public expense to drag blacks, Jews, or members of other groups that the owners do not like from their business establishments, in the name of property rights.

Should we be impressed if Paul says that as a personal matter he would oppose such things, while defending their legality?  It is hard to see any daylight between an overt racist and someone who claims to oppose racism or anti-semitism, but also denounces the only effective ways to put a stop to them—that is, civil rights laws.  If you argue that private racism is bad but anti-racist laws are worse, and if you have no problem with the state’s coercive power when it enforces racism but object to coercive state power only in the service of anti-racism, then you cannot complain when others draw their own conclusions about your motives (even if, unlike Ron Paul, you did not publish white supremacist newsletters for years under your own name).

Abraham Lincoln dissected the sophistical rhetoric of people like Ron Paul, long before the noble word “liberty” was tortured into “libertarianism.”  In 1864, during the Civil War, he told an audience:

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name———liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names———liberty and tyranny.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty…

Michael Lind’s new book, "Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States", will be published in April and can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com. More Michael Lind.

Friday, May 18, 2012 4:06 PM UTC

Obama: Born in Kenya? (No)

Updated: Right-wing hacks are again insisting that the president was born overseas, but say they aren't birthers

By President Obama (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

[Correction Appended] One of the Breitbart dopes has a SCOOP: Some sort of ancient press release says Barack Obama was born … in Kenya. IMPEACH. Retroactively install John McCain, we have so much Iran bombing to make up for.

This particular dope — Ben Shapiro, former boy-pundit Joel Pollak, some guy — says he is totally not a birther, at all, whatever gave you that idea, but it is very important that this forgotten old publicity pamphlet from a literary agent for a book project that never happened be unearthed and heavily hyped now, because the president was not properly “vetted” in 2008. (The idea that the president is a secret radical whose secret radicalism was not properly explored by the mainstream media is a stupid conspiracy theory that is almost as ridiculous as birtherism, by the way. We have proof that the president is not a secret radical leftist, and it is “his entire political career including his first term as president of the United States.”)

But what does producing this old booklet (that Obama did not write) with a factual error have to do with “vetting,” exactly? Well, Pollak explains that it fits a “pattern in which Obama — or the people representing and supporting him — manipulate his public persona,” by which he means “this is pointless bullshit that we’re publishing to stir up the birthers and look it worked plus we got a big Drudge link.”

Regardless of the reason for Obama’s odd biography, the Acton & Dystel booklet raises new questions as part of ongoing efforts to understand Barack Obama–who, despite four years in office remains a mystery to many Americans, thanks to the mainstream media.

IMPORTANT NEW QUESTIONS ARE BEING RAISED. This editing error that Obama had nothing, personally, to do with is part of a pattern of Obama deceiving people by allowing them to believe insane things about him.

Now, coincidentally, the Arizona secretary of state is playing the “I’m not a birther but on the other hand let’s indulge the birthers” game. The president might not be eligible to be on the Arizona ballot, because of a petition, according to Ken Bennett, an American state’s No. 2 elected official. Vetting is so fun!

So, on the one hand, we have Barack Obama’s birth certificate(s), two newspaper announcements, a couple of witnesses, and nearly every single other newspaper and media account up to the point at which the birther conspiracy was invented circa late 2007. On the other hand, we have an author’s bio he didn’t write from 1991, and a petition. Obviously there is much more “vetting” to do, before we finally find the one piece of secret buried evidence that proves that it was a horrible accident that a majority of voters picked the socialist Muslim in 2008. Wake up, sheeple, etc.

[Correction: I mistakenly attributed the Big Government story to Ben Shapiro, but it was written by Joel B. Pollak. I apologize to Ben.]

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Thursday, May 17, 2012 9:15 PM UTC

Obama’s broken immigration promise

ICE said it would target dangerous immigrants, but it's actually deporting a higher percentage of non-criminals

By A man in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, stands next to the border fence as two U.S. law enforcement officers look on from the U.S. side of the fence. (Credit: AP/Raymundo Ruiz)

The Obama administration claims that it is deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants while focusing on those with criminal records. But new data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement shows that the number of deportation orders has declined dramatically since last summer and non-criminals comprise a growing percentage of those expelled from the country.

That wasn’t supposed to happen under a policy of “prosecutorial discretion” announced by ICE director John Morton last June. The goal of the policy, announced with much fanfare in the Spanish language media, was to spare “longtime lawful residents” from deportation and to focus on criminals.

Since then, the adminstration has deported many fewer non-criminal aliens. But non-criminals remain the vast majority of those deported. And those with no criminal record now actually comprise a slightly larger percentage of those forced to leave the country than they did before Morton’s announcement.

In the three months before the policy was announced last summer ICE filed for deportation proceedings against 61,192 people of whom 15 percent had criminal records. In the first three months of 2012, ICE sought 37,659 deportations orders, 14 percent of which involved people with criminal records.

“The agency continues to be headed in the opposite direction of its stated goals,” said Susan Long, co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which collected the data from ICE via a Freedom of Information Act request.

The goal of prosecutorial discretion, Long said in a conference call with reporters, “was to target and bring before the court those with more serious criminal history. As yet we’re not seeing any change. They have not turned the ship around.”

The administration implemented prosecutorial discretion in response to complaints that young people with no criminal records continue to face deportation. But the new data will come as no surprise to student groups such as United We Dream, National Immigrant Youth Alliance and DreamActivist, which continue to highlight the cases of law-abiding young people facing deportation.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., has championed the case of a South Carolina man, Gabino Sánchez, a married father of two, who was arrested for driving without a license last year and now faces deportation.

“Gabino Sánchez has lived and worked and raised a family here for more than a decade and it is not in anyone’s interest to have him deported,” Rep. Gutierrez told Fox News Latino on Tuesday after a deportation hearing in North Carolina.  ”I do not understand why ICE has not followed President Obama’s guidelines and decided to move on from this case to go after someone else, someone who is a threat to his community or a serious criminal.”

In response to the TRAC findings, Gutierrez  said, “The president should make sure the Department of Homeland Security is actually following its own rules and he should proclaim proudly and loudly that he will not deport another DREAMer or anyone else who fits the prosecutorial discretion criteria.”

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Jefferson Morley

Jefferson Morley is a staff writer for Salon in Washington and author of the forthcoming book, Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 (Nan Talese/Doubleday). More Jefferson Morley.

Thursday, May 17, 2012 7:15 PM UTC

Colorado congressman: “Obama’s not an American”

A congressman renews the GOP's big lie, and reveals the party's true ideal: Male, rich, straight, white

By Mike Coffman (Credit: AP/Ed Andrieski)

Twenty-four hour news cycles are messy and chaotic, almost never fully summarizing the zeitgeist of the moment. But today is one of those rare days where the news cycle perfectly embodies the tectonic shifts in American politics — and the friction that comes from such shifts.

In the last day, we’ve learned that America has reached a demographic tipping point. For the first time in history, there are more minority births than white births in the United States, meaning we’re closer than ever to becoming a majority minority nation.

At almost exactly the same time these numbers were being released, a top Republican lawmaker, U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., was making national headlines with a leaked audio recording of him publicly declaring that the first African-American president is “not an American.” Here’s the audio and full quote from Coffman’s remarks at a Republican fundraiser:

“I don’t know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America. I don’t know that. But I do know this, that in his heart, he’s not an American. He’s just not an American.”

Coffman has since issued a non-apology apology, saying that while he misspoke in questioning Obama’s birth certificate, he stands by his “not an American” declaration because Obama doesn’t “share my belief in American Exceptionalism — his policies reflect a philosophy that America is but one nation among many equals.”

It’s a deft misdirect — caught on tape making a nakedly demagogic play to White America’s reflexive fears of the “other” (in this case, denigrating a minority president as literally the “other” — i.e., a non-American), Coffman is pretending he was merely voicing his disagreement with Obama’s foreign policy. But don’t be fooled: The nation’s shifting demographics, as epitomized by today’s census numbers, is exactly what this is all about.

Coffman is running in a newly redrawn suburban Denver congressional district — one that is expected to be among the most contested in the 2012 election. Following the larger Republican strategy of racial fear-mongering, he’s spent the last year following in the footsteps of his anti-immigrant predecessor, U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, championing legislation to repeal parts of the Voting Rights Act and prevent non-English ballots and end birthright citizenship for immigrants.

Put Coffman’s record together with his attack on Obama (an attack that has become all too common among top GOP leaders), add in the fact that his GOP neighbor U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn recently made headlines calling the president a “tar baby,” and remember the GOP’s successful opposition last week to a high-profile civil unions bill. It becomes clear that even in the swingiest of swing states, the national Republican Party sees its path to victory as one that eschews inclusiveness and equal rights, and instead stirs fears and resentment over the quickly changing definition of Americanness.

Ultimately, that’s what all the debates over almost every policy really comes down to. We can tell ourselves we’re fighting over taxes or contraception or abortion or gay rights or immigration or food stamps — and at one level, we most certainly are. But when policy disagreements become a justification for Republicans to claim an opponent isn’t a fellow countryman, it’s clear what we’re really fighting over is the root idea of “American.” Looked at this way, almost every policy battle has been transformed into a proxy in a Republican war to define “American” as white, straight, male and wealthy — an us-versus-them war being waged ever more intensely in 2012 because changing demographics threaten to define the term on far different terms.

We can thank today’s news cycle for making that war so crystal clear; at least it’s now painfully obvious what this moment’s political conflict is truly all about.

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David Sirota

David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota.

Thursday, May 17, 2012 6:32 PM UTC

More Rev. Wright hate porn!

"The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama" was designed to turn on one wealthy right-winger – and even he rejected it

By Jeremiah Wright (Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

On the one hand, it’s almost funny. Fred Davis, the man who created hilariously bad ads for losing 2010 Republicans — Carly Fiorina’s “Demon Sheep” and Christine O’Donnell’s “I am not a witch” — now wants cranky conservative billionaire Joe Ricketts to spend $10 million on an advertising campaign to take down Barack Obama. He’s teamed up with Whit Ayers, one of his collaborators on Jon Huntsman’s spectacularly terrible presidential run. Halfway through their description of “the Ricketts plan,” they describe themselves as “pirates.” Ay, matey, but are they after Obama’s booty – or Ricketts’?

Davis, Ayers and friends should remember that Obama sent in special ops to take out Somali pirates in 2010. These pirates’ fate might be similar. Politically, of course. I’m not suggesting anyone use violence against them. And they’re not suggesting anyone use violence against Obama, of course — although their pitch is chock-full of eliminationist rhetoric. From its title, which promises to “stop [Obama's] spending for good,” to its description of being “locked, loaded and ready” to “hit Barack right between the eyes” and bring about “his demise,” the memo the New York Times released today is right-wing hate porn, designed for maximum titillation to Ricketts, its intended audience. It may not have worked on Ricketts, whose PAC disavowed the plan Thursday afternoon after a day of negative publicity. But will it work on anyone else?

I doubt it. The 54-page PowerPoint is certainly a quick, fun read, a guide to the profiteering right-wing id. I loved the idea that they wanted to unveil the whole campaign in Charlotte during the Democratic convention: I can’t think of anything that would get the oft-divided Democratic Party fired up better than right-wingers with flyover Rev. Wright hate porn. Although the plan is supposedly designed to demonstrate Obama’s “incompetence,” it’s hard to see what Wright’s views have to do with Obama’s competence – unless you’re of the opinion that nothing says “incompetence” like a black man having something to do with another black man. The writers reassure Ricketts they’ve minimized the risk of being charged with racism by lining up a “highly literate” (that must have been hard) black spokesman, Larry Elder, whom they’re paying $25,000 to serve as frontman. (If I were Larry, I’d talk to an employment discrimination lawyer: I think a white guy would get more than $25,000 to front a $10 million ad campaign. Not to mention to sell his soul.)

Can the Wright fear-mongering work? I think it mainly plays with people who wouldn’t vote for the president, anyway. I’m one of the few liberals who wrote with concern about the Wright revelations back in 2008. I didn’t want to believe that Obama looked the other way as Wright preached the unredeemable evil of the United States (and most white people), along with self-defeating theories of black difference and downright lies about genocide. But I never believed Obama shared those opinions. I assumed he admired Trinity’s social work and political connections. I didn’t think he spent a whole lot of time in its pews or listening to Wright’s views. Still, I thought it was fair to look at what Obama’s ties to Wright told us about his politics – and like most people, I quickly decided: not much.

Four years later, independents are able to see that Obama has in fact been a fairly hawkish president, whose foreign policy certainly didn’t come from the Jeremiah Wright hymnal. In fact, his expansion of drone warfare, with its inevitable civilian casualties, is precisely the kind of thing Wright and other foreign policy critics think can result in “chickens coming home to roost.” And it’s not like the media ignored Wright, either. Remember that whole race speech candidate Obama had to make in March 2008 – against the advice of strategists who worried it would backfire?

The notion that the Wright mess didn’t get adequate attention comes down to one fact: that John McCain wouldn’t greenlight a lurid strategy to blacken Obama (literally and figuratively) with scary ads about Wright. For that, McCain earns derision from his former campaign advisors: They call him “a crusty old politician who often seemed confused, burdened with a campaign just as confused.”

What is Mitt Romney saying about the so-called Ricketts plan? He told reporters this morning he hadn’t had time to read the papers (typical Romney bravery), although he’d already done his own Wright-baiting in a February interview with Sean Hannity. By this afternoon, the Romney campaign released a statement disavowing the proposal (and Romney himself then told the conservative Townhall site that he would “repudiate” the Super PAC’s ad strategy). Even Ricketts did the same, in a statement from his PAC saying “he is neither the author nor the funder of the so-called Ricketts Plan to defeat Mr. Obama that The New York Times wrote about this morning…. [I]t reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion for a direction to take.” (Jeff Zeleny of the Times later Tweeted that a reference on page 46 of the plan suggests that it had received tentative approval at a meeting in New York.)

You can decide whether or not you believe that. I think it’s good news that even Joe Ricketts can be shamed out of such a crude and racialized appeal. That doesn’t mean we won’t see such appeals in the months to come, just that they probably won’t come with a prominent billionaire’s name on them.

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Joan Walsh

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh.

Thursday, May 17, 2012 5:36 PM UTC

Jon Huntsman for New York City mayor?

Yes, please. It would be very funny to see him lose

By

Yes, Jon Huntsman should definitely run for mayor of New York, because I never tire of watching Jon Huntsman get rejected by voters. The best part of a Jon Huntsman campaign is when his well-heeled supporters very sincerely and tragically argue that the fact that no one wants to vote for Jon Huntsman is a sign that the Republic itself is in peril. They would get so sad and melodramatic when he got 10 percent of the vote.

Now, there is no evidence that Jon Huntsman is planning for run for mayor of New York City, but one of his annoying daughters tossed this one out there last night:

Why not? I mean sure he has never lived in New York and has no connection to the city, but why not?

Of course, now that this idea is floating around, very rich and well-connected morons just might set about trying very hard to make it a reality. Jon Huntsman is a creature of the sort of oblivious center-right rich folk who bankrolled the hilarious failed New York campaigns of Harold Ford Jr. and Reshma Saujani. They would like very much to see another one of their class be the mayor of their city, after Bloomberg ends his term (if he ends his term). The Republicans have essentially no candidate. (I still wouldn’t put it past Police Commissioner and professional harasser-of-minorities Ray Kelly to mount a run, but at the moment he’s sounding disinclined to.) And Jon Huntsman is the sort of nationally prominent “independent” candidate all three major New York newspapers would love (the Daily News would love him the most, obviously, but the Post would love him because he is secretly not actually that moderate).

Jon Huntsman — whose tax plan called for the complete elimination of taxes on capital gains and dividends, as well as the elimination of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Reagan-era tax benefit for poor people that used to be the sole form of welfare that conservatives supported, and who also wholeheartedly supported the Paul Ryan plan to fix the deficit by eliminating Medicare and not making rich people pay taxes — was of course beloved by the press and labeled a reasonable moderate when he ran for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He was mistaken for a political moderate primarily because he does not believe that God created cavemen and dinosaurs at the same time, roughly 4,000 years ago. Huntsman, who supports the complete repeal of Dodd-Frank and is strictly antiabortion and anti-gay marriage and anti-healthcare reform and pro-gun, is now essentially a symbol of the dignity and sagacity of the “radical center,” even though he is a conservative Republican.

So obviously New Yorkers would be thrilled to vote for this guy. I endorse this.

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

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