#OWS Update: Oakland Police Denied Medications To Arrested Protesters & GOP Contenders Scape Goating The Poor & Unemployed For US Financial Crisis???

#OWS Feb. 2, 2012- Short Documentary



#OWS Update: Citizens who protest with the Occupy Movement are depicted as being not real Americans and so they have no legal redress for their basic rights being violated.

Is it the policy of all police forces in the United States to deny those in custody of needed medications . Isn't this somewhat criminal behavior on the part of the police or at least reckless endangerment. Becuse refusing medications may cause severe physical or neiurological or psychological stress and pain -can this be considered a form of abuse akin to torture.

Occupy Oakland protesters denied medication in jail
Detainees say medical treatment was conditioned on remaining in jail by Natasha Lennard at Salon.com, Feb. 2, 2012

The Alameda County Sheriff’s Department in California has earned itself a reputation for heavy-handed responses to Occupy Oakland. Since Tuesday, allegations of abusive treatment by officers have escalated as arrestees detained during Saturday’s mass Occupy actions in Oakland were released after up to three-day stints in holding cells at the department’s Santa Rita Jail.

Salon has received three firsthand accounts, corroborated by reports from Occupy Oakland’s media team and the National Lawyers Guild, that ill and injured inmates were denied medication including anti-retroviral treatments for HIV-positive detainees.

...“It felt like we had disappeared. Deputies often didn’t know where individuals were and wandered from cell block to cell block looking for individuals to process,” the man said. “On multiple occasions, my cell block mic checked the guards and led chants, demanding in one voice medicine, food, and other necessities like toilet paper and maxi pads.”


...The denial of medication appears to be the most common complaint. According to a release from the Occupy Oakland media team, “detained protesters were kept in painful zip tie handcuffs — some for 8 to 12 hours — were not allowed to access bathrooms and were not given medical treatment for injuries or illness.”

Claire, 28, a special education teacher for the Oakland Unified School District, was another such detainee. She arrived at Santa Rita a little after midnight Saturday, following her arrest as a part of the previous day’s Occupy actions. She suffers from severe depression and anxiety disorders, for which she takes a medication called Celexa twice a day.

“The first person I notified about my need for medication was my arresting officer (Hazelwood),” Claire told Salon, via email. “I believe he noted it somewhere in my paperwork. He told me that I would be able to see a nurse at Santa Rita, and that they have several antidepressants available there,”

On being seen by a nurse, Claire mentioned her condition again and that she had gone 24 hours without medication. “The nurse signed the form to indicate that I was cleared to be put into a holding cell. Several times over the course of the night and next day, I and a few others in my cell told guards outside that we needed medication, but were ignored,” she added. During her detainment, Claire suffered from a mild but prolonged panic attack, during which she had difficulty breathing and controlling her muscles. She told Salon:

Around five p.m. on Sunday, a guard asked for the women who needed medication to come out of the holding cell, and said we would be processed and seen by a nurse. We were then fingerprinted and had mug shots taken. I again asked if I could see a nurse and explained my condition. I was told that I would not be able to see a nurse unless I wanted to stay in jail. The officer also stated that I would be getting out the following morning (Monday). Around midnight, we were released.

Alyssa Eisenberg, a 44-year-old Occupy activist and single mother, was also not given access to medication for 12 hours during her 18-hour detainment at Santa Rita. Eisenberg suffers from multiple sclerosis and retired early from social services work due to disability. She told Salon that she takes medication at least twice a day for pain and to aid with concentration, as her M.S. has led to cognitive dysfunction and memory loss.

“I was particularly concerned about the cognitive condition, about not understanding quickly what was going on in jail and struggling to process what guards were saying to me,” she said. Like others, Eisenberg informed a nurse of her medical condition and said that she saw at least two other people also express a need for medication. Eisenberg says she was detained for over 12 hours before being told that if she wanted to take pain medication, she would have to remain in jail for at least four more hours for observation. She told Salon that, based on comments from a number of officers, she believed she was soon to be released and so declined the medication, but was then held for six more hours.

“It was more than dehumanizing,” said Eisenberg, noting how lucky she felt that her detainment was so brief compared to long-term inmates.

GOP candidates blame those receiving aid from entitlement programs for much of the economic crisis now facing America. So rather than admitting that the economic crisis was brought on by deregulation and the greedy 1% Republicans and the presidential candidates are Scape-goating the poor , the unemployed and others struggling at a subsistence level just trying to get by.
The reason someone has no job the Republicans argue is because these citizens are lazy -and not because there are no jobs to be had.

Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney believe in deregulated unfettered capitalism and so are not going to blame the current economic crisis on the greed , recklessness and irresponsibility of the banks and other financial institutions and the corporations who claim to be too big to fail.


The GOP’s “entitlement society” myth by Robert Rech at Salon.com., Feb.2, 2012

Newt and Mitt blame our economic woes on the use of food stamps and unemployment insurance. They have it backwards

...They argue our economic problems stem from this sharp rise in “dependency.” Get rid of these benefits and people will work harder.

But they have cause and effect backwards. The reason for the rise in food stamps, unemployment insurance and other safety-net programs is Americans got clobbered in 2008 with the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. They and their families have needed whatever helping hands they could get.

If anything, America’s safety nets have been too small and shot through with holes. That’s why the number and percentage of Americans in poverty has increased dramatically over the past three years. According to a study by Northeastern University, a third of families with young children are now in poverty.

This is the real scandal. For example, only 40 percent of the unemployed qualify for unemployment benefits because they weren’t working full time or long enough on a single job before they were canned. The unemployment system doesn’t take account of the fact that a large portion of the workforce typically works part time on several jobs, and moves from job to job.

Republicans also object to Obama’s health care law, which covers 30 million more Americans than were covered before. That law still leaves over 20 million without health insurance. They’ll get emergency care when they’re in dire straights — hospitals won’t refuse them — but we all end up paying indirectly.

Regressive Republicans pretend they’re about opportunity. In reality they’re back at what they’ve been doing for years — promoting Social Darwinism.

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People on various forms of government assistance it is claimed are spending their money in strip clubs and the GOP wants laws to stop this waste while defending the excessive salaries and bonuses of the super wealthy and arguing that this top 1% should be getting more tax breaks .

"I would add that “no one thinks welfare money should be spent at strip clubs” but if we don’t care how bankers spend bonus money received following billions in direct bailouts and loans from the discount window, I don’t give a rat’s ass if poor people spend some portion of their meager benefits at the package store."

Some Republicans are very concerned about the poor
They're mostly concerned that the poor are getting away with something by Alex Pareene at Salon.com, feb. 1, 2012

...One Republican who truly cares about the very poor is Rep. Charles Boustany Jr.

Boustany...read somewhere that poor people were spending welfare money at strip clubs, and so he has introduced legislation banning the practice.

...Boustany, whose district includes St. Landry Parish, where 29 percent of the population is below the poverty line, introduced the “no welfare funds in strip clubs” legislation “as part of a package of bills [Republicans] want included in a final agreement extending the payroll tax cut and other measures through 2012,” according to the Hill.


The problem is that the TANF benefit cards are able to withdraw money from ATMs that are sometimes located in places where people on government assistance should not be, like liquor stores and casinos. The EBT cards work like debit cards, and most states have lax rules governing where money can be withdrawn and there is no way of monitoring what poor people are actually spending cash on, because we have not yet microchipped each individual recipient of government anti-poverty spending, a plan I am sure Newt Gingrich has at some point proposed.

I would add that “no one thinks welfare money should be spent at strip clubs” but if we don’t care how bankers spend bonus money received following billions in direct bailouts and loans from the discount window, I don’t give a rat’s ass if poor people spend some portion of their meager benefits at the package store.

Boustaney is by no means alone in his concern for the very poor! In fact, Romney is something of an outlier in his party, with his blithe lack of concern that poor people might have it too easy. The Republican Party is so concerned with the very poor, in fact, that they have dedicated themselves to destroying various organizations that provide the very poor with assistance and services. ACORN and Planned Parenthood, to name two examples, have come under attack for using money the government stole from rich people on helping the very poor vote and receive cancer screenings.

#OWS Voodoo Economics From Reagan to Obama : Free Market Place A Ponzi Scam To Enrich The Top 1%

Inside Job Criminal 1% Screwing the 99% PT.1.

Uploaded by gothgod on Feb 1, 2012
Clips of documentary Inside Job which details how de-regulation of the finance and securities industry led to the current economic crisis. From the Reagan Era to Bill Clinton ,George Bush and President Obama those in power have abused that power by making the 1% wealthier than ever at the expense of the average American citizen. They get richer and are bailed out while everyone else loses or to put it crudely everyone else gets screwed or shafted as it were.





Inside Job Criminal 1% Screwing the 99% PT. 2



This crisis was not inevitable if regulators the government the media and politicians had their job which is to protect the average citizen from the predatory greed of the criminal class of the 1%.
This crisis began with the Reagan deregulation era which was built upon by Bill Clinton and  George W. Bush Under the George W. Bush the bail outs began to protect the criminals of the Investment Banking Industry and Obama jumped in with more money for these crooks rather than criminal investigations and massive fines and criminal charges leading to imprisonment.
So Obama goes after whistleblowers such as Julian Assange, Wikileaks and Bradley Manning and vigorously expands upon the War on Drugs arresting tens of thousands of Americans while rewarding the Wall Street Criminals .
Obama also managed to expand on the Global War On Terror and is now planning to attack Syria and /or Iran based upon lies and half-truths and an on going feeding frenzy of propaganda dating back to at least 2003 when Iran was included in the Bush/Cheney Regime's bogus Trinity of / or Axis  of Evil.
America has had a chip on its shoulder about Iran since 1980 when the Iranian people united to over throw the corrupt and brutal Shah of Iran . The shah like America's other notorious friends such as Pinochet, Saddam and others had led a ruthless dictatorial regime supported by the U.S.
The Shah of Iran was supported by the United States since he was put in power by a military coup engineered by the CIA and British government which ousted the popular and legally elected President Mossadeq of Iran because Mossadeq wanted better terms for Iran's oil  so that workers would receive better pay and the country could prosper as a whole rather than just a tiny elite.
American corporations and the corrupt political establishment and government are only for free trade and the freedom of the market place when it is in their favor otherwise they use whatever means necessary to get at another countries natural resources or its labor force.


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CEOs, Business Schools, economic conservatives argue that the inflated salaries and bonuses for CEOs is not a matter of human greed but are somehow the natural result of primeval or darker underlying forces of the market place . Does this mean that CEOs given theses undelying mystical forces at work can not turn down these over inflated salariesa and bonuses because it will upset the Universes natural forces and then there would be hell to pay???

These elitist economic gurus and experts have been telling the public and the mainstream media and politicians that the economic system under which we serve is beyond their comprehension and is therefore preposterous and impudent of them or the average citizen to attempt to analyse or criticize the present economic system.

But those of us who are not part of this economic elite can in fact make judgments about the system based upon unemployment statistics or by observing real wages being reduced in general or by observing hard fought for benefits for workers being gutted by corporations or by governments we can also take note of the statistics on citizens applying for bankruptcy and noting the number of foreclosures on the homes of average citizens . In the united States most citizens can see the results of this upheaval on a daily bases in their own lives and those of their family, friends and co-workers that in the end they are getting shafted while the top 1% rakes in even higher incomes with each passing year. It does not take someone with a PHD in Economics to see the growing disparity between the top 1% and the rest of us in the 99%. President Obama can try to dress it up as if the crisis were over but the reality where most other people have to function things are not that rosy. And besides the government has already spent trillions bailing out those corporations, banks and investment firms because they supposedly were too big to fail. These bail-outs are a prime example of the corruption within the current economic model in which the individual citizen is allowed to fail but not the Big corporations so we wonder in what sense is this all a matter of the free market place unfettered . Shouldn't those corporations and banks be allowed to fail to discharge itself of the economic dead wood .

Unfortunately president Obama and other leaders and notables are at the end of the day working for the top 1% and not the 99% let alone those at the bottom of the economy . Their rhetoric does not match their actions as they continue to support a corrupted economic system which owes its existence and endurance not to the free market place but to the largesse of governments who use the taxes received from the average citizen to bail-out these corporations, banks and investment firms . And what is galling is that the CEOs of even companies bailed out by the government receive increases in the millions in their salaries and bonuses while telling the rest of us to tighten our belts and stop whining .


The problem with this pro-capitalist pro-free market place is that firstly the ideology is not based upon free market place principles but is really just a rationalization for Greed.
This greedy and self-interest of rapacious capitalism may have benefits for those at the top of the pyramid but has little or no benefit for the 99% and nor is it beneficial to the various nations as such. The notion of the Trickle Down economic theory may sound good and reasonable but it just does not work in the way its proponents claim.
It is this form of rapacious unfettered de-regulated capitalism which has been adhered to over the last 30 years from Reagan era to the present which has led to a financial crisis in the the United States and the West.

When self-interest and greed are the guiding principles of the economic system the result has been disastrous as is evident in the current crisis largely in part because those engaged in Wall Street and the markets in general and in complicated investment schemes which are no different in the end from Ponzi Schemes or scams their trading and investments etc. are not tethered to economic reality. So what we get is a recurrence of various bubbles which tend to burst and come crashing down when reality comes a knocking.

UK Panel: Executive Compensation Is a "Market Failure"
Monday 30 January 2012 by: Salvatore Babones, Truthout January 30,2012

Rising inequality is in the news. Occupiers from Wall Street to Winnipeg have made rising inequality a cornerstone of their campaign. Labels like "the 1 percent" and "the other 99 percent" are in the news and on politicians' agendas.

This new attention to inequality goes all the way to the top. In his State of the Union address, President Obama warned that America was becoming "a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by.

...Business executives and business school economists are fond of tracing rising inequality to deep historical trends. If you believe that markets are always rational, then high pay merely reflects a person's true economic value.

Historical trends, so the story goes, are making highly intelligent, highly skilled people more valuable - and thus more highly paid - than ever before. Resistance is futile. Inequality is rising due to deep forces beyond human control.

Economists call this line of reasoning the "skills premium" argument. Economists and executives, of course, tend to be highly intelligent and highly skilled. It's just a coincidence that they believe that their own high salaries are the inevitable result.

The main problem with the skills premium argument is that it is wrong.

The skills premium argument implies that inequality should be rising everywhere in the world. In fact, major increases in income inequality have only occurred in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

It's a strange global historical trend that only shows up in three English-speaking countries and nowhere else.

While an economic commission studying the issue released its results which undermine the skills premium explanation:


The UK High Pay Commission concluded that "top pay is a symptom of market failure based on a misunderstanding of how markets work at their best."

The commission traced rapidly escalating income inequality back to a way of thinking that views "human nature, aspiration and endeavour ... through a prism of self interest."

"It is through looking at executive remuneration that we see the classic problems of corporate governance laid bare," the commission said. In other words, the commission found that people - not deep historical forces - are responsible for rising income inequality.

British politicians from all shades of the political spectrum have rushed to endorse the report's conclusions. In fact, the Conservative-led British government announced on Monday, January 23, that it would propose legislation to rein in executive pay.

Meanwhile as the economic crisis and meltdown is a disaster for millions of average citizens President Obama attempts to co-opt the Occupy Wall Street Movement while ignoring the part he himself played in this Capitalist Ponzi Scheme redistributing the wealth even further into the hands of the 1% while his empty rhetoric claims otherwise.
Out of the trillions spent to give aid to the 1% why couldn't he put aside a trillion or so to help out the average American citizen.
And as we see since President Obama's State of the Union Address there is even a greater effort on the part of municipalities possibly aided in some fashion by federal agencies such as the FBI, CIA, the US military and Homeland security to crush the Occupy Movement in America and also in Canada and Great Britain Greece and other European nations and in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and Egypt.

What is somewhat encouraging in these crack downs is that it illustrates to what extent the ruling class/ the 1% fears the Occupy Movement across the globe.

Who REALLY Pays Taxes by: Richard D Wolff, Truthout, january 30, 2012

As US capitalism suffers from a crisis now in its fifth year with no end in sight, the Republican presidential candidates and Obama endlessly repeat cheerleading for the system as if it were, as usual, beyond question or criticism. Obama's State of the Union Speech at least found campaign fodder in referring to income inequality.

He tried to make political use of what the Occupy movement inserted onto the mass public consciousness so powerfully last autumn.

Obama even suggested a 30 percent minimum tax on those earning $1 million or more annually.The details of that suggestion remain murky with little chance that the kinds of Congresses recently elected would pass it. In any case, Obama's suggested 30 percent minimum tax would still remain far, far below the much higher individual income tax rates that the richest Americans had to pay in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

#OWS Update 400 Arrested in Oakland Democracy Now! & Ron Paul's Mean Spirited "Libertarian Ideology "

Ron Paul's Libertarian Ideology is not benign and should not be confused with the values of liberals and Progressives but rather supports a bully mentality and not justice for all. In Paul's view even the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 represented government intrusion by forcing desegregation on the American people depriving them in Paul's view of having the freedom and the right to discriminate in any way they saw fit.

As Paul Rosenberg senior editor of Random Lenghts News argues in his article( quoted below )exposing the darker side of Ron Paul's Bullying Libertarianism that Ron Paul believes any change in society is to be determined by the market place and not by government even in cases where the government is trying to defend the rights of all Americans including minorities against the Tyranny of The Majority. After being freed from slavery African-Americans were subjected in the South to the brutal and humiliating Jim Crow laws and the KKK and other White Supremacists in the South and in the North. Ron Paul even tries to co-opt the Civil Rights Movement and leaders such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. but his views do not fit with the beliefs of Martin Luther King Jr. as Rosenberg says:

When King was assassinated, he was in Memphis to support a public employee's strike - a strike by municipal sanitation workers, who under Paul's libertarian philosophy would have no right to even organise. And he was there taking time out from his larger project of organising the multi-racial Poor People's March, a concerted attempt to vastly increase federal assistance to the poor - yet another activity that Paul would have bitterly opposed as not just wrong-headed, but unconstitutional.
To the sanitation workers in Memphis, King said:

All labour has dignity. You are … reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. We know that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?

But as far as Paul's libertarian philosophy is concerned, the Memphis sanitation workers were receiving a market wage and that was all they were entitled to. If their children starved, that was just too bad. Any attempt they made outside the marketplace to try to raise themselves up from poverty was an act of bullying on their part. That's just the way the world looks when the liberty of bullies is the highest value that you know.

King, however, knew that all the libertarian talk about free markets was just so much rubbish: "We all too often have socialism for the rich," he once said, "and rugged free market capitalism for the poor."

Above quote from : Ron Paul and the liberty of bullies: Ron Paul's libertarian ideal is a far cry for the idea of 'freedom for all'.Paul Rosenberg at AlJazeera, January 23, 2012



There is a controversy over who started the violence during this past weekend in Oakland .
The police and those in authority claim the violence was started by the protesters.
The protesters say they were non-violent and the police once again over-reacted.
There is also the case to be made that members of the Anarchist group Black Bloc may have deliberately instigated violent clashes with the police.
And some have argued the Black Bloc are being used or have been infiltrated by police or others who are acting as "agents provocateurs" who are working with the police or other agencies ie FBI, CIA who knows.
So the issue here is if there is a group of agitators whether acting on their own or guided by police who are doing all they can to disrupt the peaceful protests they should be isolated by not just the police but also by the Occupy Movement and make it be known that these Black Bloc agitators do not represent the Occupy Movement.

Uploaded by gothgod/gordspoetryfactory.com on Jan 31, 2012

Democracy Now! Amy Goodman discusses the latest clashes in Oakland between the police and the OccupyOakland movement .

Ron Paul's stand on various issues appear to many as reasonable and so they champion his policies without critically examining the impact of his Libertarian ideology on other issues . Ron Paul's libertarian ideology is one that I believe will not benefit but in fact have a negative impact on the average American citizen and would be disastrous for those who already feel marginalized in America including a large portion of the so-called 99% such as the homeless, the poor, the working poor, minorities and so on.

The problem with Ron Paul is that he is not a liberal or progressive but rather a "libertarian" which is the bases of his policies some of which sound reasonable even to liberals and progressives but there are other policies which Ron Paul supports which are also based upon his "Libertarian "Ideology which are at odds with liberal or progressive values and policies.

Liberals and Progressives believe that government has a role to play in insuring equal rights and opportunity of all citizens. Liberals are in favor of programs such as a national education policy and programs in order to provide all American children with a basic eduation no matter what their income level or race or religion etc. Ron Paul would in fact gut the department of education at the federal level and leave this issue to the states and individual parents. As far as he is concerned as a libertarian there is not a "Right to education" and therefore the government has no obligation to insure that all American children are given the same high quality of education.

So we see that his Libertarian ideology regarding policy on education would lead to a patchwork of educational policies with each state deciding on how to fund public education or to simply put an end to any form of government financed public schools.

Ron paul insists as a libertarian that the US must stop or redefine its war on terrorism and stop American military interventionism or expanding its Empire. Those who agree with this policy champion Ron Paul without examining Ron paul's other policies on foreign affairs and domestic policies.

But he is also against any form of foreign aid to other nations. Ron Paul as a libertarian is also against America's participation in the United Nations or other international organizations. His reasoning is that belonging to such international organizations the United States is giving over some of its sovereignty to these organizations . America having become a member of the UN for example must abide by rulings from the UN which may or may not be in America's best interests . His view is that the US must decide upon its own policies without interference from other nations or international organizations.So according to Ron Paul the US cannot be dictated to by the UN or the International Criminal Court which means the US could not be prosecuted for war crimes by the international Court because it has no juridiction over US citizens or its government or military.
So Ron Paul, George W. Bush and president Obama agree that no other nation or international body has any say over America's policies and actions.

There are those who support Ron Paul because he says he will put an end to the "War on Drugs" and is therefore in favor of decriminalizing all prohibited recreational drugs. But there is a catch in his proposals of which many are not aware.

But and this is a big but Ron Paul as a libertarian believes in state's rights over the rights of the federal government and so he would as president decriminalize drugs at the federal level while allowing each state in the union to develop its own policies on prohibited drugs such as Marijuana, cocaine etc. But further the states' legilature's do not all agree on decriminalizing Marijuana or other drugs. Some states want stiffer penalties for drug offenses while others would allow marijuana for medical purposes to be dispensed while still others would simply decriminalize marijuana and make it legal to sell.

As a libertarian Ron Paul is against big government and is against any federal financed programs from education to the department of the environment and any so called entitlement programs from food stamps and welfare or unemployment benefits to social security.
Ron Paul believes that the Civil TRights bills of the mid 1960s are he believes an infringement on the rights of individuals and businesses and corporations and so he would overturn or nullify such laws which he believes are unnecessary government intrusions.

Ron Paul's Libertarian Ideology is not a liberal or progressive ideology and nor is it so benign . Paul Rosenberg in an article at AlJazeera argues Ron Paul's libertarian ideology is that of permitting bullies to write the laws and call the shots. Libertarian is based in the assumtion that the smartest most entreperneual and successful should be given complete freedom to achieve their goals while the rest of society if need be does without the basics of life from education to Unemployment benefits, welfare, food stamps , environmental and consumer protection to medicaire and medicais social security and so forth.

It can be argued that Ron Paul's views are elitists and racists . He may claim that this is not true but whatever their motivations libertarian ideology can only lead to rewarding the haves even more and taking more away from the have nots especially when it comes to various social programs which are seen by others as improvents in our society on the road to a more just society or as Obama argued "A More Perfect Union".

Ron Paul and the liberty of bullies Ron Paul's libertarian ideal is a far cry for the idea of 'freedom for all'.by Paul Rosenberg at AlJazeera ,January 23, 2012

San Pedro, California - On January 12, a great blow was struck against freedom, if you subscribe to the philosophy of Ron Paul. The Ohio Civil Rights Commission voted 4-0 to uphold its earlier finding that a Cincinnati landlord, Jamie Hein, had discriminated against a ten-year-old biracial girl by posting a "White Only" sign in June 2011, aimed at keeping her out of a swimming pool. According to Paul's worldview, this was a grave and terrible blow to the white landlord's liberty.

The girl's white father, however, sees things a bit differently.

"My initial reaction to seeing the sign was of shock, disgust and outrage," the girl's father, Michael Gunn, said in brief comments the day the final decision was announced. The family quickly moved away, in order to protect their daughter from exposure to such humiliating bigotry - but they also filed the lawsuit.

According to Ron Paul's view of "liberty", they were right to move, but wrong to sue. Both Ron Paul and his son, Rand, oppose the 1964 Civil Rights Act, because it outlaws private acts of discrimination. This is an "infringement of liberty", they argue. And they're right: just like laws against murder, it infringes the liberty of bullies. And that's precisely what justice is: the triumph of right over might.

The same logic also applies to the Civil War. It resulted in the abolition of slavery - infringing the liberty of hundreds of thousands of slaveholders. And Ron Paul thinks that was wrong, too.

In June 2004, the House of Representatives voted to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Paul was a lone voice in opposition. On the House floor, he said:

"I rise to explain my objection to H.Res. 676. I certainly join my colleagues in urging Americans to celebrate the progress this country has made in race relations. However, contrary to the claims of the supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the sponsors of H.Res. 676, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty."

One is tempted to ask, how, exactly, Ron Paul thinks we made such progress, if not in large measure because of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and other similar legislations? But that would only distract attention from the truly odious and absurd central claim that the act diminished individual liberty. Who, but a die-hard racist, thinks that way? Only one who thinks of die-hard racists' "rights" first, and the rights of everyone else a distant second, if at all

Just to take one commonplace example, at the time of the Freedom Rides, preceding the Civil Rights Act by a few years, when the national consensus was still asleep to the evils of racism, any form of interstate travel for black people - at least in the South, where most lived - was an ordeal not simply bereft of freedom, but filled with potential danger.

The interstate bus service, desegregated by Federal Court ruling, but segregated in fact - reinforced by mob violence - was the well-chosen target of the Freedom Riders. The wretched truth of this situation was exposed forever by brave young students, white and black, who took their lives in their hands to change the course of history.

But this target was only the weak link in the chains that shackled black people's freedom to travel. Private car trips were anything but a freedom-filled alternative. Blacks travelling cross-country by car - whether crossing state lines or not - faced denial of individual liberty at every turn: segregated gas stations with segregated water fountains and segregated restrooms (if they were lucky), segregated restaurants with segregated restrooms (if they were lucky), segregated motels with segregated water fountains and segregated restrooms (if they were lucky). And God help any black family travelling thus, if some emergency should arise. They would be lucky, indeed, to reach their destination unharmed. A mere flat tyre could put life and limb at risk. But thank God that white bigots, white bullies were free.

Because in Ron Paul's eyes, things looked exactly the opposite: Each of these experiences of black humiliation, subjugation and unfreedom was actually a triumph of individual white property-owning freedom. And the 1964 Civil Rights Act swept all that precious freedom away. All that liberty for bullies, gone in a single "tyrannical" stroke of the pen.

...Thus, Paul's benign world-historical generalisation has no relationship at all to the actual history of the bloody and protracted struggle to rid the world of legal slavery. But Paul's grasp of US history is no better. Historically, Lincoln did not initiate the Civil War, the South did. Nor was the North originally fighting to abolish slavery - its aim was simply to preserve the Union against Southern secession.

Indeed, Southern states began to secede, and form themselves into the Confederacy, even before Lincoln took office. Lincoln was elected on November 6, 1860, and was to be inaugurated almost exactly four months later, but the Southern states were not about to wait around for that.

South Carolina seceded in December 1860, with six other states following shortly afterward. The Confederacy was formed in February 1861, the month before Lincoln's inauguration, on March 4, 1861. The act of secession was rejected by outgoing President Buchanan, who still officially held office, as well as by Lincoln as incoming president.

also see Paul Rosenberg article
Racism 'happens': Inexplicable events haunt GOP primary
Although several Republican presidential candidates have made racist remarks, none will admit or condemn the statements.by Paul Rosenberg at AlJazzeera,January 16, 2012