Naughty Chuck Hagel, saying that Sarah Palin has no foreign policy credentials.
But his near-namesake springs to mind when I consider what might become of the Ron Paul vote, larger than that for either Thompson or Giuliani in the primaries. For Paul's apparent antithesis, Ralph Nader, is more conservative - in the old, true, sense of the word - on the major anti-globalist issues (immigration, war, sovereignty) than pretty much any Republican except Ron Paul.
He even wants to return to a regulated system of public credit controlled by Congress, with currency issued by the Treasury through a National and Public Bank, without interest and as a form of social credit. Which is a lot more conservative than the international banking cartels of the global "free" market. It is, of course, based on property and on the self-determination of nation states. Marx himself attacked such systems as "tending to conserve". For so they do.
I remember thinking way back in 2000 how much common ground there was between Nader and Buchanan, and how beautiful and fertile that ground was. Nader may yet determine another Presidential Election, though this time in the right direction. And if he doesn't, then the combined Paulian vote for Bob Barr and Chuck Baldwin might very well, instead. Whether either party would get the message is, of course, an entirely different matter.
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Why then does Marx propose, as item five in the Communist Manifesto, the "[c]entralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly"? Perhaps Engels wrote this one ;-)
ReplyDeleteThe smaller parties, Green, Libertarian, Constitution, etc. have signed up to a statement of basic principles, I hear, on the economy and foreign policy. Myself, I think that Mike Gavel's candidacy - solely based on the idea of the national initiative - posed an most important question.