En Passant

Google closed down for a day to protest proposed US legislation – SOPA and PIPA – aimed at stopping the free flow of information on the internet and making them and other sites liable for what their users do.

Why don’t they move their business to the Cayman Islands? After all, if it is good enough for Mitt Romney…

The Australian government is a human rights abuser, argues Liz Walsh in Socialist Alternative. It presides over a refugee policy that condemns around 5,000 asylum seekers to rot in Australia’s ever-expanding immigration detention system.

I went to the annual Australasian Tax Teachers Conference at Sydney University this week and gave a talk called Reason in revolt now thunders: an end to the age of neoliberal tax cant?

I explained that the reason for looking at profit rates, strike levels, and understanding neoliberalism from the wider debates about wealth, power and inequity and the decades’ long shift of wealth to capital from labour was to understand tax and tax policy over that same period. Tax is part of that wider capitalist totality.

Neoliberalism is the idea that the state can and will intervene to save capital (‘to big to fail’ for example), that it will impose market imperatives on society and that it will curb the power of workers and unions. It privatises, cuts public services and attacks its own staff.

The last 3 decades in Australia have been the years of neoliberalism, lead by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments. They laid the groundwork for the Howard conservatives which in turn led to the current version of neoliberalism, the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments.

This was and is a global phenomenon. The end of the post war boom in the late 60s and early 70s – a crisis of profitability and falling profit rates as a consequence of increasing capital investment and the decline in arms expenditure – destroyed Keynesianism as the official lie of capitalist exploitation.  It looks as if profit rates in many developed countries are about half what they were at the height of the boom

Keynesianism’s seeming bête noire, neoliberalism, became its successor. Thatcher and Reagan swept to power in the UK and US, and in Australia Hawke came to power in 1983 implementing the Accord, the agreement with the trade union leadership that was based on the neoliberal idea that what is good for the bosses is good for workers.

The defining action of Australian governments (and others in the developed world) has been to shift wealth from labour to capital. According to the ACTU the level of national income going to labour is at its lowest since records began to be kept in 1964 and that to capital at its highest or thereabouts.

Tax policy and tax law have not been immune from this process. They have aided and abetted it.

The OECD’s recent report on the global increase in  inequality shows that the Australian tax system has become less progressive and so only slows down the trends to inequality rather than address it. 

According to the ACTU the top 20% pay 34.5% in tax. For the lowest 20% it is 26.8%.  Now remember, the top 20% own more than 60% of the wealth in the country and for the bottom 20% it is 1%. So much for a progressive tax system.

Tax is part of the problem.

Why? Because tax policy and tax law are like all the other institutions and actions of capitalism – captured by the one percent and their ideology, neoliberalism. 

The carbon tax for example reflects the idea that the market - a price on carbon – can fix the problems of the market. This is a classic example of neoliberalism.

The Minerals Resource Rent Tax is a watered down version of a fairly mild rent tax anyway, the Resource Super Profits Tax. Labor capitulated to one sectional interest of Australian capital and dumped a Prime Minsiter to do so. It did not perform one function of social democracy – imposing solutions on capitalists for the benefit of capital.

Further, the government proposed using the money from both the RSPT and the MRRT to cut company tax rates. This is a redistributive measure from a very profitable sector to less profitable sectors.

Rent taxes tax economic rent. This is the extra profit that arises from monopoly or oligopoly situations or private property monopoly over finite resources.

It is competition which leads to monopoly. Rent taxes act as some sort of surrogate for competition by reducing the return on the activity much as a flood of new investment into a super profitable industry or sector would do.

 The other factor in resource rent taxes is that it is transfer of the wealth Chinese and Australian workers create to Australian mining bosses.

Essentially the state is one fo the band of hostile brothers along with productive captial, finance capital and rentiers fighting over a share of the surplus value workers create. However the state is ultimately dependent on the success of that exploitative process and so taxation cannot ‘threaten’ captial accumulation.

A look at the Henry Tax Review released in 2010 shows the same sort of neoliberal thinking. Henry was searching for a set of taxes that would remove both the legal and, if there is any, economic tax burden on capital (especially mobile capital) and that would tax less mobile factors such as labour, land and resources.

As I explained above the rent taxes are themselves neoliberal and redistributive adventures within capitalism, acting as a substitute for competition. Land taxes extract the surplus in another form, but hit the working class and tax the wealth they create through the urban centres they build and have built.

Henry also suggested a flatter tax system with workers on between $37000 and $94000 actually paying more tax.  Labor rejected that version but is looking for other variants ofd a flatter (and more regressive personal income tax system.)

Can we escape this neoliberal wasteland?

If I am correct, that the infection that is neoliberalism is a response to falling profit rates and wealth shifting as a consequence, then it is only through real fightbacks for better wages and conditions, to defend jobs and for tax justice that stopping the shift and as a part of that, taxing the rich, can be implemented.

There is hope. 2011 was the year of resistance to neoliberalism.

 The Global Financial Crisis Mark II last year and this year and the austerity programs of the ruling class and its politicians (of both ‘left’ and right) have provoked fight backs. Resistance broke out across Europe.  The number of general strikes in Greece is approaching 20. In Portugal there was a general strike a few months ago. In the UK on 30 November  2 million workers struck.

In Nigeria the general strike against a doubling in petrol prices continues into its eighth day. In India on 7 September 100 million workers went on strike., the biggest general strike in history. Another general strike across India is planned for 28 February and could be even bigger.

Strikes played an important part of the downfall of the dictators in Tunisia and Egypt. The masses swept on to the streets and swept out the architects of neoliberalism and repressive rule. The struggle continues in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and other countries across the region.

The Occupy movement took to the streets and there were over 800 demonstrations and occupations in more than 80 countries.

Clealry something is going on – we may be approaching an epochal 2012, like 1848, 1917 and 1968.

In Australia, since the class collaborationist Accord in 1983, strikes have fallen markedly. In fact in the 70s strike days lost per thousand workers were between 600 and 1200. For the last five years the figure has been around five strike days lost per thousand workers.

This collapse of strikes explains both the shift in wealth to the rich and the neoliberalism that has infected the Labor Party, including its tax policies and laws.

A return to the strike levels of the late 60s and early 70s over wages, jobs and taxes can reverse the wealth shift to capital from labour and the increasing inequality arising from that shift.

I finished off my talk with the first four lines of the Internationale.

Arise, ye workers from your slumber,
Arise, ye prisoners of want.
For reason in revolt now thunders,
and at last ends the age of cant!

Here is a link to my comrade, Alistair Hulett, singing the Internationale.

THEORY MATTERS. Such is the mantra of so many socialists–and it is when cults of personality build up around individuals, such as the racist, sexist, classist Ron Paul, that we see why, argues Paul Guild in Socialist Worker.

Ron Paul, the ideological grandfather of the Tea Party movement, has become a political enigma by garnering support not just from disgruntled right wingers, free-market enthusiasts, neo-Nazis and Klansmen, but also from individuals claiming to be on the left of the political spectrum, including those who believe they are on the radical left.

What reasons could self-proclaimed leftists have for supporting a man who has had incredibly racist articles, at the very least, printed in his name, if he was not the author himself? A man who has come out against abortion rights? A man who holds a completely unrestrained market at the center of his ideology?

“Well, at least he wants to bring all the troops home” or “He’s against the war on drugs” are the common refrains his blindly dedicated devotees on the left have stuck to. “Not even Obama will do these things.”

Of course, such arguments are almost instantly revealed as a belief in the politics of “lesser evilism” as soon Paul is portrayed as being “better than Obama,” even if he still has “a lot of positions I disagree with.”

But this is not the key problem. In a two-party, capitalist political system, there will always be those who argue that we have to resort to lesser evilism in order to prevent things from getting really bad.

The dangerous problem that self-proclaimed leftists create when they support Paul is that they disregard theory and begin to rank individual policy points as more or less important than others.

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WHEN PEOPLE support Paul because he wants to shut down all U.S. military bases abroad and bring the troops home, they ignore why he has this motivation. Unlike activists on the left who have been campaigning for decades to end U.S. imperialism, Paul is a staunch isolationist–he still wants American hegemonic dominance in the world, he just doesn’t want to waste precious U.S. resources to act as world police.

All one needs to do is look where he wants to put the returning troops to see where his priorities lie; the military in Ron Paul’s America would be used to create a border with Mexico that makes the Korean DMZ look like Disney World.

While there is no doubt that we have far too many military bases and personnel in too many countries, the answer should be withdrawals accompanied with disbanding, rather than withdrawals only to re-station our military along our southern border.

As for Paul wanting to end the war on drugs and legalize just about every kind of drug; while this might be the first step in beginning to treat a societal and public health issue for what it is, rather than criminalizing the people who need help the most, it is important to remember that Paul also wants to get rid of any and all public funding for health care.

While some may be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for not saying that we should let the uninsured die in the street (it was a fanatical Tea Partier who shouted “Yeah!” when Paul tried to respond “No” during that debate), his policy speaks volumes more than an answer he gave to sound like more of an nice guy than he actually is.

Ron Paul may be crazy, but he is not stupid.

He realized, when answering Wolf Blitzer during that debate, that only the cruelest human being would actually say they wanted people to just die in the street, or boo veterans, or applaud the idea of well over 200 executions. But that does not change what his stated positions would actually result in: no health care, except for what private companies are willing to provide, and no publicly funded emergency rooms or health clinics.

As a result, Paul’s end to the war on drugs would only mean private companies could enter into the heroin- and meth-dealing business, while those facing addiction problems would be left to die in the not-so-proverbial streets.

Ron Paul is the prime example of why theory is important and why individual issues alone are not enough. The “how” and “why” are just as important as the “what.”

If members of the left begin to forget this, we face a growing danger of reactionary, right-wing politicians like Paul being elected; probably not in 2012, but with greater possibility each year that Paul and his son Rand (named for the most famous egoist of all time, Ayn Rand) grow in popularity.

This is why those on the left who combine their politics with theory must object to support for Paul every time it appears.

It must be made clear that Paul is not some savior, delivered from on high to “restore America” or make America “proper.” The only people who benefit from Paul’s popularity are those who truly wish to see us cast back into the Gilded Age jungle, where robber barons rule and the rest of us are left to live or die by mercy or luck.
Craig Guild, from the Internet

Readers might also like to read Ron Paul: a bigot through and through

It has been over three years since Israel’s massacre in Gaza, which saw over 1400 people murdered, but those who lived through the experience recall it as though it was yesterday writes Vashti Kenway in Socialist Alternative.

Blogger Rafat Abushaban gives a sense of the terror and impotence felt by the Palestinians living in the Strip at the time:

Some of the blasts were so powerful that rocks and bricks flew for hundreds of meters, hitting all the houses close by. It was a shocking experience witnessing the huge explosions, while seeing and hearing the metal, bricks and wooden parts of your house falling apart all around you. Here I believe is the very basic rule of life in Gaza: the place that was thought to be safer than others is dangerous after all. You are never safe.

To “never feel safe” is a way of life for the Palestinians. Whether it is the threat of air bombardments over Gaza, which continue almost daily, or the threat of having their home bulldozed by the Israeli state in East Jerusalem; whether it is the prospect of being arbitrarily stopped at one of the many Israeli military checkpoints that dot the Occupied West Bank, or being harassed for speaking Arabic inside the 1948 borders of Israel; whether it is seeing a younger brother or sister tortured in Israeli jails for years for the “crime” of throwing a rock at a passing Israeli soldier, or knowing that if a family member in Gaza gets sick there are no medicines to treat them, the threats are constant.

Last year could have been declared one of the most unsafe years for Palestinians. Human Rights organisation Peace Now found that Israeli settlement building had increased by 20 percent. In November over 700 Palestinians were made homeless by demolitions. Hundreds reported that they were woken in the middle of the night, told they had hour to gather their most prized possessions, and forced to leave.

They were then forced to watch as their homes were bulldozed into rubble. And to rub salt into the wounds the Israeli Knesset passed a law mandating that Palestinians whose homes are bulldozed will have to pay for the cost of the bulldozing.

The apartheid wall – called by African American novelist Alice Walker “an insult to the soul of humanity” – continues to snake through Palestinian communities, dividing them, and stealing their land. This wall is twice as high and three times as long as the Berlin wall, and is a constant visual reminder to the Palestinians that they do not control their own territory, that they are monitored 24 hours a day.

In Gaza the brutal blockade continues. Medical supplies and equipment are running dangerously low. Basics like baby formulas, antibiotics and MRI and X-ray machine are still banned. Most homes have still not been rebuilt after they were bombed in the war, and many suburbs look like a post-apocalyptic film set: all rubble and detritus. There is little to no industry and unemployment and restrictions on freedom of movement lead to extremely high levels of mental illness.

Support for the Palestinians and condemnation of the Israelis has to go deeper than moral outrage. It has to be built on an understanding that what is happening today is built upon a foundation of what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe calls “a project of ethnic cleansing”.

In other words the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israeli state is deeply racist, even genocidal in intent. Pappe’s research has revealed that the final plan for Zionist colonisation of Palestinian territory in 1948 involved mass expulsions, using tactics that included

large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties, and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning.

In short, the plan was “an initiative to ethnically cleanse the country as a whole”. With the order to begin the operation, “each brigade commander received a list of the villages or neighbourhoods that had to be occupied, destroyed, and their inhabitants expelled”. The establishment of Israel saw over a million Palestinians flee from their homeland and forced into neighbouring countries where they have often lived as second class citizens in permanent refugee camps. The relationship between Israel and the Palestinians is a relationship between colonisers and the colonised.

If you are against colonisation then you must be on the side of the Palestinians.

Since the beginnings of Zionist colonisation, Israelis and their supporters have attempted to deny Palestinians not just a right to land, but the right to an identity, an existence. In a move similar to the declarations of “terra nullius” in Australia, the Zionist movement declared Palestine ideal for Zionist migration as it was “A land without a people for a people without a land”.

These sentiments are widely accepted even today. US Republican Newt Gingrich recently took to the airwaves to declare Palestinians an “invented people”. Rick Santorum, another leading US politician, stated in November that “all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis, they’re not Palestinians”.

If you support rights of Indigenous populations to their land, you should support the Palestinians.

If you are against racism and apartheid, you should support the Palestinians.

Last year prominent African American activists and writers went on a tour of the Occupied Territories and Gaza. Many of them had grown up in the South of the USA under the racist Jim Crow laws and were shocked by the similarities. They were gob smacked by the “Israeli only roads”, by the differences between Palestinian schools and Israeli schools, and by the many thousands of subtle and not so subtle ways in which the Palestinians are persecuted.

Many comparisons have also been drawn with apartheid South Africa. Indeed one of the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has made stark comparisons with the history of his own country:

I visited the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinians at Israeli military checkpoints. The inhumanity that won’t let ambulances reach the injured, farmers tend their land, or children attend schools. This treatment is familiar to me as it was to many Black South Africans who were corralled and harassed by the security forces of the apartheid government

Palestinian writer Linah Alsaafin said in a recent article, “Apartheid is very much alive in occupied Palestine. It is our reality that we breathe through our congested lungs every minute of our waking lives.”

If you are against the domination of the US as the world’s biggest superpower, then you should be on the side of the Palestinians.

The Israeli state acts as one of the outposts of US power in the oil rich Middle East. The Bush and Obama administrations have offered unprecedented levels of military aid to Israel since 2007. There is also joint research, development and field testing of anti-missile projects financed separately by the Pentagon.

According to the terms of a memorandum of understanding signed by the two countries in 2007, the US is scheduled to provide Israel with $US30 billion in tax payer funded weapons between 2009 and 2018 – a 25 percent average annual increase over previous levels.

While many previous dictatorial allies of the US are being swept away by the Arab revolutions, Israel maintains its firm commitment to US regional dominance. Indeed 2012 has already seen one of the biggest ever joint military exercises between Israel and the USA.

Obama has given a rubber stamp to Israel, despite its various atrocities. The US vetoed a motion in the UN which condemned Israel’s settlement expansion, and has threatened reduced aid to the Palestinians if they try again to become a member of the UN. In return Israel acts as a loyal ally of the West in the region.

Finally if you support the struggles of the oppressed against their oppression then you should be on the side of the Palestinians

Ever since the initial mass expulsions, the Palestinian movement has been engaged in a struggle for justice. They have suffered immense privation, many have lost their lives, but they have not given up. From the young children who express their frustration by throwing rocks, to the weekly demonstrations in towns like Bi’lin and Ni’lin against the apartheid wall, they remain steadfast.

One activist wrote of the struggle:

In the 1960s in the US, the saying was “We shall overcome.” In Palestine, we say “Samidoon” or “We are steadfast.” There is courage, perseverance, strength and a deep sense of justice that binds rights struggles around the world. The mantra of sumoud, or steadfastness, that Palestinians hold dear, is difficult to adequately convey in translation, but it is not unique to them. It is a common root from which the oppressed draw inspiration and build solidarity.

For all these reasons, the Palestinians should be supported.

The annual Marxism Conference will be hosting a guest speaker from the West Bank town of Ni’lin.

Kim Carr has been in the US offering bribes to Ford and Holden in an attempt to keep them producing cars in Australia. For Ford it was $34 million. For Holden it might have to be $100 million.

Ford has agreed to stay till 2016.

Over the last decade the cost of subsidising the car industry is estimated at over $6 billion. 

The car production model in Australia is in the long term not viable. The market is too small, and the Australian industry is not competitive enough to be geared up for general global production in competition against low cost manufacturing sites in Asia and elsewhere.

The high Australian dollar, courtesy of the mining industry and our high interest rates, means it is cheaper to import small cars than pay big bucks for the dinosaurs Holden and Ford until recently favoured.

Neoliberalism presents two options. Intervene to save the car  industry, or let it collapse.

Those debates are playing out among the politicians of profit in the ALP and Opposition. Some are prepared to let the industry go to the wall by winding back support. Others want to support it.

It looks like Labor will take the latter route, not least because it can then paint itself as the friend of blue collar workers.

There is an alternative.

Climate change is real, and presents an existential threat. Rather than imagining (or should that be dreaming?) that the market will solve the problems of the market, maybe it is time to go on an economic war footing against global warming.

Certainly the UK Campaign Against Climate Change thinks so. It says

In some ways, the model for what we want to do is what happened in World War Two. Then all the great powers of the world took control of their economies and directed industry to make as many weapons as possible, as fast as possible, to kill as many people as possible and win the war.

One example will give the scale of this. When the US entered World War Two in December 1941, government expenditure exploded. GDP had doubled in three years. The car factories in America closed in January and they made no more cars for the rest of the war. By the end of March, the car factories reopened, making tanks, weapons and, by the end of the war, 66,000 bomber aircraft.

The Soviet Union, Germany and Britain all did the same. This rearmament boom did not bankrupt the governments. Instead, it created jobs and lifted the whole world out of the Great Depression. We need to do the same thing now, but in order to save lives.[1]

Imagine the car plants in Australia being geared up for production to address climate change. They could produce buses for mass public transport, light rail vehicles, high speed rail and trains, electric cars, solar and wind farms…

Of course it would cost money. But when faced with an existential threat shouldn’t the State be prepared to pay for ways to address that threat?

Taxing the rich would easily cover the cost anyway. It is their system. Make them pay for it.

It is not as if we don’t already have subsidies locked in – over $6 billion in the last decade just to the car manufacturers alone. Add in the billions each year in fuel subsidies and there is a shit load of money for addressing global warming.

There just isn’t the vision or the will.

Imagine using that money for socially useful purposes.

This would not only save car workers’ jobs; it would create many more manufacturing jobs. 

The government would most likely have to take over the manufacturers to do this. So be it. The threat is great. Better still would be the workers taking over the factories and running them to produce these socially useful products.

And to make working in this industry even more attractive, there could be a 30 hour week without any loss of pay.

None of this will happen. Short term profit making (either of the free market or state supported variety) is what dominates capitalism and its thinking.

Nero lives in a Parliament and board room near you.

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[1] Jonathan Neale, ‘One million climate change jobs: Solving the economic and environmental crises’ (London, 2010) 9, available online at <http://www.climate-change-jobs.org/sites/default/files/1MillionClimateJobs_2010.PDF>.

A general strike for 4 days so far in Nigeria. US soldiers pissing on the dead. A possible attack on Iran. France losing its AAA rating from Standard and Poor’s and 8 other European countries having theirs downgraded. Mitt Romney being tagged by Ron Paul in the Republican primaries with even bourgeois common sense a long last.

Bill Shorten attacking the unemployed. Teresa Gambaro attacking the underarms of immigrants. Environmental destruction and global warming continuing apace.

To have your say on these or any other issues, or to see what others are saying, hit the comments button.

Note that comments close after 7 days.

Of course urinating on dead Taliban fighters is barbaric. What else can you expect from Empire, especially one that cloaks its real and bloody intentions in fine sounding words like democracy and rights?

But something is missing from all this fake ruling class outrage, amid the inevitable lies about a few rotten apples.

The real outrage is killing the Taliban in the first place. The American Empire invaded Afghanistan and has killed tens of thousands of civilians and turned innocents into resistance fighters.

The real brutality is in the belief that the world is your plaything and the barbarous actions you take to impose your rule on the rest of the globe.  

Actions like invading Afghanistan; invading Iraq; having troops stationed in 134 countries around the globe; encircling and containing China (which is what the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are partly about).

The war in Afghanistan is unwinnable. That’s why the US is talking to the ‘enemy’.  A negotiated settlement is something the Taliban might agree to if they think they cannot drive the Americans out.

They might sit tight till 2014 and see what happens once the handover to Afghanistan forces happens.  I’d bet on Taliban control about 3 months after the US pulls out.

The actions of the US soldiers in urinating on dead Taliban fighters are not out of the ordinary. They are the normal reaction of trained killers whose indoctrination involves dehumanising them to kill other human beings and belittling and demeaning the enemy, the ‘terrorists’ in the Taliban. 

Arguably many of those resisting the West are fighting against foreign invaders, not for Taliban rule, at least not as a first order priority. Given that the Taliban is the resistance force it is not surprising it is the organisation most Afghan patriots, at least in Pashtun areas, turn to.

The symbolism of the US soldiers pissing on the dead is not lost on the Taliban, or indeed many on the left. This is what the US Empire does to the rest of the world every day, writ large.

There isn’t any reason good enough to support Ron Paul, Elizabeth Schulte explains in the US Socialist Worker.

IT’S HARDLY a revelation, but here’s the plain truth: Take a good look at Ron Paul, and you’ll see a candidate who is racist, sexist, anti-gay and anti-worker.

The right-wing libertarian’s long record is packed with conservative ravings and support for policies that make the lives of working-class people much, much worse when they’re implemented. Yet there’s still debate, including among some liberal commentators, about whether Paul is bringing something important to Election 2012.

For example, in a column for Truthdig, Robert Scheer argued that neither Paul’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act nor the revelations of racism in newsletters he published in the past should stop progressives from:

seriously engaging the substance of Paul’s current campaign–his devastating critique of crony capitalism and his equally trenchant challenge to imperial wars and the assault on our civil liberties that they engender.

Paul is being denigrated as a presidential contender even though on the vital issues of the economy, war and peace, and civil liberties, he has made the most sense of the Republican candidates.

While Paul might score points with liberal commentators for his criticism of wars abroad and attacks on civil liberties at home, these positions don’t make up for the racism and scapegoating that he stands for in the rest of his platform.

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IN THE run-up to Iowa caucuses, several newsletters that Paul published in the 1980s and 1990s came under the media scrutiny, revealing pages chockfull of racist, far-right garbage. Here’s a small sampling:

– December 1990: Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was “a world-class adulterer” who “seduced underage girls and boys” and “replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration.”

– October 1990: “A mob of black demonstrators, led by the ‘Rev.’ Al Sharpton, occupied and closed the Statue of Liberty recently, demanding that New York be renamed Martin Luther King City ‘to reclaim it for our people.’ Hmmm. I hate to agree with the Rev. Al, but maybe a name change is in order. Welfaria? Zooville? Rapetown? Dirtburg? Lazyopolis? But Al, the Statue of Liberty? Next time, hold that demonstration at a food stamp bureau or a crack house.”

– October 1992: “If you live in a major city, you’ve probably heard about the newest threat to your life and limb, and your family: carjacking. It’s the hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos…What can you do? More and more Americans are carrying a gun in the car. An ex-cop I know advises that if you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped-off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example.)”

– January 1993: The newsletter bemoans “the disappearing white majority.”

Paul claimed he didn’t write the comments nor know anything about them. So…just to clarify, Ron Paul knew nothing about what was in newsletters titled Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, the Ron Paul Survival Report, the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Investment Letter.

Paul’s claim about not knowing the contents of the newsletters is a lie, pure and simple. After all, in 1996, Paul was facing similar criticisms, and defended a comment in a 1992 newsletter that read, “[W]e can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in [Washington, D.C.] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.”

And the direct-mail solicitation for Paul’s newsletters that warned of the “coming race war in our big cities” and a “federal-homosexual cover-up” probably should have been on Paul’s radar–since it had his signature at the bottom.

No matter what he says today, Paul profited from the newsletter, financially and politically, gaining supporters from the hysteria whipped up in the pages of these publications.

Supporters like Don Black, founder of the white supremacist group Stormfront, who in December told Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks Internet news show, “[W]e agree with his stand on the issues, which we believe are heartfelt, coincide with ours.”

Oddly enough, Black distanced himself from comments in the Paul newsletter, pointing out that claims that the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion ended “when it came time for the Blacks to pick up their welfare checks” were “over the top” and “typical hyperbole, cutesy little things that somebody came up with, whoever it was, trying to appeal to Ron Paul’s paleo-conservative base.”

When a Nazi like Don Black thinks your newsletters’ racist rants are “over the top,” it’s time to stop claiming you just don’t know anything about them.

If he was serious about not being associated with racism, Paul’s responsibility isn’t just to disavow these racist comments, but to challenge them. If he really thought the comments in the newsletters were a mistake, then he should stop far-right organizations whose members support him because of the newsletters from contributing to his campaign.

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PAUL ALSO ought to answer for the things we can be confident he does believe–because he actually said them.

In 2004, he was the only member of Congress to vote against a bill honoring the 40th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, arguing that the result of the act “was a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of a free society.” You know the “right” he’s talking about? The right to discriminate on the basis of race.

Paul’s rotten libertarianism extends to laws that “violate” the right to discriminate against women, too. Paul lays out his thoughts on laws concerning sexual harassment in the workplace in the pamphlet Freedom Under Siege, which he put out in 1987–and thought enough of to reprint in 2008:

Employee rights are said to be valid when employers pressure employees into sexual activity. Why don’t they quit once the so-called harassment starts? Obviously the morals of the harasser cannot be defended, but how can the harassee escape some responsibility for the problem? Seeking protection under civil rights legislation is hardly acceptable.

Paul clarified his position on Fox News Sunday, adding, “Because people are insulted by, you know, rude behavior, I don’t think we should make a federal case out of it.”

Paul’s Freedom Under Siege also has some choice words about people who have AIDS and dare to consider using the public health care system: “The individual suffering from AIDS certainly is a victim–frequently, a victim of his own lifestyle–but this same individual victimizes innocent citizens by forcing them to pay for his care.”

The political establishment, the media and his fellow Republicans may scoff at Ron Paul and his kooky rhetoric, but his presence in the primaries has lent credibility to far-right ideas. Many Republicans roll their eyes at Paul when he talks about the Federal Reserve or the gold standard (or ending the war in Afghanistan), but they agree with Paul on key issues like scapegoating undocumented immigrants, abolishing women’s right to choose abortion, banning gay marriage and shredding the social safety net.

For example, Paul supports ending birthright citizenship granted to children born in the U.S. who may have undocumented parents. He also believes that there should be no mandate on hospitals to treat undocumented immigrants who need care.

And evidently, while Paul is known for opposing U.S. wars abroad, he sings a different tune when it comes to a war on Mexican immigrants. During the CNN debate on national security issues in November, he said:

[W]e do have a national responsibility for our borders. What I’m, sort of, tired of is all the money spent and lives lost worrying about the borders between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and forgetting about our borders between the U.S. and Mexico. We should think more about, you know, what we do at home.

For the Iowa caucuses, Paul’s campaign ran ads touting his opposition to women’s right to choose abortion and his belief that “life begins at conception.”

Paul is for getting rid of the Medicare and Medicaid health care programs, as well as Social Security. His enduring faith in the free market dictates that every American should get the same opportunity–and no one should be shown “favoritism” with things like government-subsidized health care or unemployment insurance.

While Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney might not say that he wants to get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Education, as Paul does, the two men do agree on axing government agencies and social programs that make a real difference in workers’ lives.

The fact that Ron Paul gets even fleeting attention from progressive activists says less about his supposed merits and more about the miserable choices on offer in Election 2012. Every day the media spends chronicling the sick priorities of the creeps running for the Republican nomination, it becomes more obvious how out of touch Washington politics is with the concerns of working people.

The Occupy movement has shown us that this is the time to demand what we want, and to aim high–not to tolerate the likes of Ron Paul and his racist, sexist and anti-worker policies.