You would have been forgiven for experiencing some ideological whiplash earlier this month when, after listening to two days of speeches emphasizing the profound threat that rights for gay people, legal abortion, and the freedom of religion pose to our society, the attendees of the far-right Values Voter Summit handed a resounding straw poll victory to self-proclaimed libertarian Ron Paul.
Paul’s particular brand of libertarianism has taken hold in the imagination of the Tea Party, allowing its leaders and activists to claim a patriotic devotion to absolute freedom while simultaneously supporting policies that curtail the freedom of women, gay people, and religious minorities.
Who wants to be called a Right-Winger, Neocon or a Neanderthal these days? Welcome to Cafeteria Libertarianism.
“Libertarianism” has become the new code word to cover all that conservative Republican politicians love. They love to invoke a libertarian philosophy when they cut taxes for corporations and the rich, rail against health care reform, take the ax to the social safety net, deregulate Wall Street and block clean elections laws. It’s about freedom, they say. Come on, let’s get the government off of our backs!
The trouble is, the current GOP’s newfound embrace of libertarianism is a hoax. What today’s GOP practices is what I call “cafeteria libertarianism”: picking some freedoms to champion and others to actively work against. It’s an attempt to make the same old policies sound more palatable by twisting a much misunderstood ideology — with a uniquely marketable name — to help make the sale.
Take California Rep. David Dreier who is anti-choice and ironically, to say the least, anti-gay. When asked by a local news station this summer how he could appeal to Tea Party voters, Dreier responded, “I describe myself as a small-‘l’, libertarian-leaning Republican. I want less government and lower taxes. I believe in a free economy, limited government, a strong defense and personal freedom, that’s why I’m a Republican.” Dreier’s supposed embrace of libertarianism came as a surprise to those of us who have been following his life and politics for years. But Dreier’s not snacking alone at the Libertarian cafeteria — “libertarianism” has become a code word for GOP politicians hoping to appeal to Tea Party voters and corporate funders without the rest of the country taking notice.
When Republican politicians call themselves libertarians they, with very few exceptions, mean they want a small government when it comes to corporate accountability and a big government when it comes to people’s private lives. They don’t want Congress to regulate mine safety, but they do want to penalize small businesses that offer abortion coverage for employees. They don’t want to get in the way of Wall Street bankers fleecing consumers, but they’ll spend endless resources throwing up any and all possible barriers to gay people who want to marry whom they love.
It’s this cafeteria libertarianism, actively pushed by the corporate Right and wholeheartedly embraced by the Tea Party, that has allowed Congress and state legislatures to launch an all-out assault on corporate regulation, workers’ rights, and campaign finance restrictions — all while simultaneously conducting an energetic campaign to intervene in women’s health care, throw up bureaucratic hurdles to the right to vote, harangue practitioners of religions they don’t like and decide who can and cannot get married. Of course you need some powerful intellectual trickery to pull this off — how else can you say that you’re all for states’ rights and at the same time support amending the Constitution to prohibit states to define marriage?
The expert at this kind of trickery is libertarian poster boy and perennial presidential candidate Ron Paul, who enjoys an admiring following in the Tea Party movement and among some liberals who like some of the items that Paul has selected from the libertarian menu. Paul, despite his reputation as a hard-line maverick, picks and chooses the liberties he supports just as much as the rest of the GOP: sure, he famously defied his party to oppose the PATRIOT Act and the War on Drugs, but he also called Roe v. Wade a “big mistake” and supports the federal “Defense of Marriage Act.” And he’s far from alone: the oxymoronic anti-choice, anti-gay libertarians are now legion.
Paul has also ably demonstrated why the GOP’s actual libertarian beliefs are misguided at best and dangerous at worst: when Hurricane Irene hit the east coast this summer, taking dozens of lives and causing billions of dollars in damage, Paul reacted by calling for the end of FEMA and saying disasters should be dealt with “like 1900.” 1900, of course, was the year of the infamous Galveston hurricane, the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. And at a Republican debate this summer, Paul was met with cheers from the crowd when he said that an uninsured man suffering a life threatening illness is an example of “what freedom is all about.” This is the new standard of freedom?
True liberty is the freedom to live our lives the fullest, care for our families in comfort and make our own decisions about life’s fundamental personal issues. That’s something we can’t do if our government isn’t there to ensure public safety, a healthy environment and a basic safety net when things go wrong… or if our government is dedicated to meddling in our personal lives.
Let’s all agree that we love liberty. But the pick-and-choose liberty and libertarianism that Tea Party Republicans espouse is not only intellectually dishonest, it’s monumentally bad for America.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President-People For The American Way, Published in Huff Post, October 19, 2011
October 20, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Class Warfare, Constitution, Democracy, Elections, Ideologues, Ideology, Right Wing, Women's Health, Womens Rights | David Dreier, Freedom, GOP, Libertarian, Libertarianism, Liberty, Politics, Ron Paul, Teaparty, Value Voters Summit |
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Gary North was nearly impossible to track down. He did not return multiple e-mails, and when finally reached by phone, he refused to talk and hung up.
But if you know where to look, he is everywhere.
Mr. North, a onetime aide to Representative Ron Paul of Texas, a possible 2012 Republican presidential candidate, is the leading proponent of “Christian economics,” which applies biblical principles to economic issues and the free market.
Largely unknown to the broader public, Mr. North is an influential figure on the American far right. He has written dozens of books, blogs prolifically and is on the curriculum of Christian home-schoolers across America.
He may even have turned up among the antiunion protesters in Madison, Wis., this year.
Not literally, of course (and who would have recognized him if he had been there?). But Christian conservatism and free-market conservatism meet in Mr. North’s writings. A small but vigorous part of the conservative movement has absorbed his view that the Bible is opposed to organized labor, and especially to organized public employees.
“Not only do Reconstructionists believe that public employees should not have the right to organize, they believe that almost all of them should not be public employees,” writes Julie Ingersoll, of the University of North Florida, in the Web magazine Religion Dispatches. “Most of the tasks performed by those protesting the Wisconsin state budget would, in the biblical economics of North,” be privatized.
These “Reconstructionists” are believers in Christian Reconstructionism, the philosophy of R. J. Rushdoony, who died in 2001. According to Reconstructionism, a Christian theocracy under Old Testament law is the best form of government, and a radically libertarian one. Biblical law, they believe, presupposes total government decentralization, with the family and church providing order. Until that day comes, Reconstructionists believe the rights to home-school and to worship freely at least provide the barest conditions of liberty.
Mr. North, who is Mr. Rushdoony’s son-in-law but was not on speaking terms with him from 1981 until Mr. Rushdoony’s death, focuses on how that biblical libertarianism applies to economics. He concluded that the Bible forbids any welfare programs, is opposed to all inflation, and requires a gold-coin standard for money.
“God has cursed the earth,” Mr. North writes, alluding to the Book of Genesis in his 1973 book “Introduction to Christian Economics.” “This is the starting point for all economic analysis. The earth no longer gives up her fruits automatically. Man must sweat to eat.” Mr. North writes that no form of government assistance “will escape the ethical limits” of the Apostle Paul’s dictum, in II Thessalonians, that “if any would not work, neither should he eat.”
And evidence that God would prefer gold money to paper can be found throughout the Old Testament, according to Mr. North. There are more than 350 references to gold in Strong’s famous Bible concordance, he writes. Gold is used in worship, godly wisdom is compared to gold and the Hebrew prophets used the debasement of metals as a metaphor for immorality.
Home-schoolers can download Mr. North’s economics textbook free from his Web site. And his thinking may have influenced Representative Paul, who briefly employed Mr. North as a speechwriter, working on monetary policy, in 1976.
Michael J. McVicar, who teaches at Ohio State and wrote a doctoral dissertation on Mr. Rushdoony, said Mr. North discovered Mr. Rushdoony’s writing as a young man in Southern California, shortly after he became, along with his parents, an evangelical Christian.
“He corresponded with Rushdoony and made this his livelihood: to generate some synthesis between biblical law and libertarian economics,” Mr. McVicar said. “Eventually Rushdoony took him under his wing and became a sort of surrogate father for North, who married one of Rushdoony’s daughters.”
The two men’s “spectacular break,” as Mr. McVicar calls it, split Reconstructionism into two camps. The break was partly over the kind of theological minutiae that would impress even a rabbinical scholar. In fact, one issue might pique the interest of real rabbinical scholars.
“It was about North’s interpretation of, of all things, Passover and the Israelites’ marking the doorposts with the blood of the lamb,” Mr. McVicar said. “North made this argument, that because of the doorpost’s structure, that this was an indication of hymenal blood from the marriage bed, and tied it into what Rushdoony called this ‘fertility cult’ mentality. And Rushdoony took a much more common-sense approach to the blood.
“The subtext is, it’s a father-son spat,” Mr. McVicar concluded.
The deeper one looks into the obsessions of Mr. North — who was born in 1942 and who as of 2007 lived in Horn Lake, Miss. — the harder it is to spot his influence in Wisconsin. The main themes of the Wisconsin budget battles were union influence, the distribution of wealth and the public fisc; Mr. North, by contrast, is associated with his own brand of far-right Presbyterianism, gun-owners’ rights, home-schooling and the gold standard for money.
Mr. McVicar believes that Professor Ingersoll’s attempted connection between Christian economics and the rallies in Madison is a bit tenuous. “Her insight has to be in my mind so heavily qualified as to make it almost nothing,” he said. But he concedes that it “has the most basic essence of truth,” given how widely Mr. North’s teachings have been disseminated on the Christian right.
Professor Ingersoll concedes it is difficult to prove direct connections between Mr. North’s writings and Wisconsin antiunion conservatism. On the other hand, Mr. North might like to think he has influenced the Wisconsin debate, and he has written in vociferous support of Gov. Scott Walker.
And, as Professor Ingersoll cautions, influence does not always announce itself:
“I like to say, ‘How many Christians know who is Augustine is, and how he influenced them?’ ”
By: Mark Oppenheimer, The New York Times, April 29, 2011
May 1, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Democracy, Government, Ideologues, Ideology, Liberatarians, Politics, Religion, Right Wing, Union Busting, Unions, Wisconsin | Anti-Union, Bible, Christian Economics, Christians, Economics, Free Market, Gold Standard, Gov Scott Walker, Home Schooling, Liberty, Organized Labor, Public Employees, R. J. Rushdoony, Reconstructionists, Rep Ron Paul, Safety Nets, Theocracy |
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When I was a young man in Cairo, we voiced our political views in whispers, if at all, and only to friends we could trust. We lived in an atmosphere of fear and repression. As far back as I can remember, I felt outrage as I witnessed the misery of Egyptians struggling to put food on the table, keep a roof over their heads and get medical care. I saw firsthand how poverty and repression can destroy values and crush dignity, self-worth and hope.
Half a century later, the freedoms of the Egyptian people remain largely denied. Egypt, the land of the Library of Alexandria, of a culture that contributed groundbreaking advances in mathematics, medicine and science, has fallen far behind. More than 40 percent of our people live on less than $2 per day. Nearly 30 percent are illiterate, and Egypt is on the list of failed states.
Under the three decades of Hosni Mubarak’s rule, Egyptian society has lived under a draconian “emergency law” that strips people of their most basic rights, including freedom of association and of assembly, and has imprisoned tens of thousands of political dissidents. While this Orwellian regime has been valued by some of Egypt’s Western allies as “stable,” providing, among other assets, a convenient location for rendition, it has been in reality a ticking bomb and a vehicle for radicalism.
But one aspect of Egyptian society has changed in recent years. Young Egyptians, gazing through the windows of the Internet, have gained a keener sense than many of their elders of the freedoms and opportunities they lack. They have found in social media a way to interact and share ideas, bypassing, in virtual space, the restrictions placed on physical freedom of assembly.
The world has witnessed their courage and determination in recent weeks, but democracy is not a cause that first occurred to them on Jan. 25. Propelled by a passionate belief in democratic ideals and the yearning for a better future, they have long been mobilizing and laying the groundwork for change that they view as inevitable.
The tipping point came with the Tunisian revolution, which sent a powerful psychological message: “Yes, we can.” These young leaders are the future of Egypt. They are too intelligent, too aware of what is at stake, too weary of promises long unfulfilled, to settle for anything less than the departure of the old regime. I am humbled by their bravery and resolve.
Many, particularly in the West, have bought the Mubarak regime’s fiction that a democratic Egypt will turn into chaos or a religious state, abrogate the fragile peace with Israel and become hostile to the West. But the people of Egypt — the grandmothers in veils who have dared to share Tahrir Square with army tanks, the jubilant young people who have risked their lives for their first taste of these new freedoms — are not so easily fooled.
The United States and its allies have spent the better part of the last decade, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and countless lives, fighting wars to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now that the youth of Cairo, armed with nothing but Facebook and the power of their convictions, have drawn millions into the street to demand a true Egyptian democracy, it would be absurd to continue to tacitly endorse the rule of a regime that has lost its own people’s trust.
Egypt will not wait forever on this caricature of a leader we witnessed on television yesterday evening, deaf to the voice of the people, hanging on obsessively to power that is no longer his to keep.
What needs to happen instead is a peaceful and orderly transition of power, to channel the revolutionary fervor into concrete steps for a new Egypt based on freedom and social justice. The new leaders will have to guarantee the rights of all Egyptians. They will need to dissolve the current Parliament, no longer remotely representative of the people. They will also need to abolish the Constitution, which has become an instrument of repression, and replace it with a provisional Constitution, a three-person presidential council and a transitional government of national unity.
The presidential council should include a representative of the military, embodying the sharing of power needed to ensure continuity and stability during this critical transition. The job of the presidential council and the interim government during this period should be to set in motion the process that will turn Egypt into a free and democratic society. This includes drafting a democratic Constitution to be put to a referendum, and preparing for free and fair presidential and parliamentary elections within one year.
We are at the dawn of a new Egypt. A free and democratic society, at peace with itself and with its neighbors, will be a bulwark of stability in the Middle East and a worthy partner in the international community. The rebirth of Egypt represents the hope of a new era in which Arab society, Muslim culture and the Middle East are no longer viewed through the lens of war and radicalism, but as contributors to the forward march of humanity, modernized by advanced science and technology, enriched by our diversity of art and culture and united by shared universal values.
We have nothing to fear but the shadow of a repressive past.
By: Mohamed ElBaradei, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times-February 11, 2011
February 11, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Egypt, Liberty, Revolution | Democracy, Egypt, Egyptian Parliament, Egyptians, Freedom, Justice, Liberty, Mubarak, Repression, Tahrir Square, Transition of Power |
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Circulating through the streets of Cairo tonight, with families packed into cars honking their horns in celebration and everyone strolling to Tahrir Square, I heard so many celebratory chants, but none more accurate and powerful in its simplicity than this one: “The people of Egypt made the regime step down.’’
The overwhelming sense of personal empowerment here, by a people so long kept down and underestimated by their own government was a sight to behold.
Tomorrow we can all talk about how hard this transition will be, how many pitfalls and uncertainties lie ahead for Egypt, but to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege. As a group of men who had commandeered a horse and buggy bellowed as they crossed the Nile Bridge: “Hold your head up high. You are Egyptians.’’
My guess right now is that there are a lot of worried kings and autocrats tonight – from North Africa to Burma to Beijing. And it is not simply because a dictator has been brought down by his people. That has happened before. It is because the way it was done is so easy to emulate. What made this Egyptian democracy movement so powerful is its legitimacy.
It was started by youth and enabled by Facebook and Twitter. It was completely non-violent and only resorted to stone-throwing when faced with attacks by regime thugs. It drew on every segment of the Egyptian population. There was a huge flag in Tahrir Square today with a Muslim crescent moon and a Christian cross inside it. And most of all, it had no outside help.
In some ways, President Barack Obama did the Egyptian revolution a great favor by never fully endorsing it and never even getting his act together for how to deal with it. This meant in the end that Egyptians know they did this for themselves by themselves – with nothing but their own willpower, unity and creativity.
This was a total do-it-yourself revolution. This means that anyone in the neighborhood can copy it by dialing 1-800-Tahrir Square. And that is why my favorite chant of all that I heard coming back from Tahrir tonight was directed at the leader next door, Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya. It said, “We don’t leave Tahrir until Qadaffi leaves office.’’ Hello Tripoli, Cairo calling.
In many ways, what we have witnessed in Egypt today is the real decolonization of this country. That is, after the British left Egypt, the country was ruled by an incompetent king and then, since 1952, by a stifling, top-down military dictatorship. For the first time in modern history, “Egypt is truly in the hands of its own people,’’ remarked Egyptian political scientist Maamoun Fandy.
And the sense of liberation is profound, or as another sign in Tahrir said: “Mubarak, if you are Pharaoh, we are all Moses.’’
Egypt has always been the center of gravity of the Arab world and because it drifted these past 30 years, so too did the whole Arab world. One can only hope with this liberation that Egypt can now start to catch up with history and become a leading model for Arab development. If it does, others will follow. If it does, the Arab world will have two emotional hearts, not just one.
There will always be Mecca in Saudi Arabia, where Muslims will make the pilgrimage to be closer to God. And there will be Tahrir Square, where people will come to touch freedom. For that to happen, though, Egypt will have to take this freedom it just earned and run with it – to show that it really can improve the lives of an entire nation. That will not be easy, and it will not happen overnight.
This country has a lot of catching up to do. But if Egyptians show just half the creativity, solidarity and determination in the next year of nation-building that they showed in Tahrir Square these last 18 days, they just might pull this off.
By: Thomas L. Friedman, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, February 11, 2011
February 11, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Egypt, Revolution | Egyptians, Freedom, Liberty, Mecca, Middle East, Mubarak, Muslims, Obama, Tahrir Square |
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Whatever the legal argument about the individual mandate is about, it’s not, as some of its detractors would have it, a question of liberty. Charles Fried, Ronald Reagan’s former solicitor general, put this well at Wednesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
“As I recall,” he said, “the great debate was between this device and the government option. And the government option was described as being akin to socialism, and there was a point to that. But what’s striking is that nobody in the world could’ve argued that the government option or single-payer could’ve been unconstitutional. It could’ve been deplorable. It could’ve been regrettable. It could’ve been Eastern rather than Western European. But it would’ve been constitutional.”
I’d disagree slightly with Fried’s characterization of the policy debate — the individual mandate and the public option do very different things, and a bill with a public option would still have had an individual mandate — but on the law, even the panel’s anti-mandate witnesses agreed with his characterization of the single payer’s legality. So, too, does Daniel Foster, a conservative at the National Review, who wrote, “All conservatives, I’d imagine, think single-payer is unwise, but I’m sure plenty of them think it’s also constitutional (I’m probably one of them, as well).”
There is little doubt that the individual mandate, which preserves a private insurance market and the right to opt out of purchasing coverage, accords more closely with most conservative definitions of liberty than a single-payer system, which wipes out private insurers and coerces every American to pay for the government’s coverage. That doesn’t make it more constitutional, of course. But it does suggest that the dividing point isn’t liberty.
When it comes to the legislation itself, the key question actually comes down to semantics. It’s broadly agreed that tax breaks are constitutional. The individual mandate could’ve been called the “personal responsibility tax.” If you can show the IRS proof of insurance coverage, you then get a “personal responsibility tax credit” for exactly the same amount. This implies that what makes the mandate unconstitutional in the eyes of some conservatives is its wording: It’s called a “penalty” rather than a “tax.” As Judge Henry Hudson put it in his ruling, “In the final version of the [Affordable Care Act] enacted by the Senate on December 24th, 2009, the term ‘penalty’ was substituted for the term ‘tax’ in Section 1501(b)(1). A logical inference can be drawn that the substitution of this critical language was a conscious and deliberate act on the part of Congress.” And it was: Taxes are more politically toxic than penalties, or so the authors of the bill thought. But they’re not more damaging to liberty than taxes.
Despite the overheated rhetoric that’s been tossed around in this debate, I don’t believe our forefathers risked their lives to make sure the word “penalty” was eschewed in favor of the word “tax.” This is not a country built upon semantics. And I don’t think semantics underly the principle conservatives are fighting for here, either. After all, before Barack Obama adopted the individual mandate — and I mean mere months before — Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said there was “bipartisan consensus” around the need for an individual mandate. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) voted for the individual mandate in the Senate Finance Committee. Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) had his name on a bill that included an individual mandate. Sen. Bob Dole (Kan.), back when he led the Senate’s Republicans, co-sponsored a bill that included an individual mandate. None of these legislators takes the Constitution lightly. They didn’t see the individual mandate as a threat to liberty, and they weren’t constantly emphasizing that it was a tax rather than a penalty.
The principle conservatives are fighting for is that they don’t like the Affordable Care Act. And having failed to win that fight in Congress, they’ve moved it to the courts in the hopes that their allies on the bench will accomplish what their members in the Senate couldn’t. That’s fair enough, of course. But they didn’t see the individual mandate as a question of liberty or constitutionality until Democrats passed it into law in a bill Republicans opposed, and they have no interest in changing its name to the “personal responsibility tax,” nor would they be mollified if it was called the “personal responsibility tax.” The hope here is that they’ll get the bill overturned on a technicality. And perhaps they will. But no one should be confused by what’s going on.
By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post, Posted February 2, 2011
February 8, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Affordable Care Act, Individual Mandate | Congress, Conservatives, Constitution, Democrats, Health Law, Health Reform, Health Repeal, insurance, Law, Liberty, Republicans, Senator Grassley, Senator Snowe, Taxes, Unconstitutional |
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