April 2, 2014
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Republican Senator Rand Paul has been making a big play
for millennials lately, most notably by taking his civil liberties pitch
to colleges around the country. Paul has got the right idea when he
says his party must “evolve, adapt or die” (although I think the first
two are virtually the same thing).
Katie Glueck
of Politico wrote that “The Kentucky senator drew a largely friendly
reception at the University of California-Berkeley as he skewered the
intelligence community."
Sen. Paul spoke of “dystopian
nightmares” and added that “your rights, especially your right to
privacy, are under assault.” Paul
also said he perceives “fear of an intelligence community that’s drunk with power, unrepentant and uninclined to relinquish power.”
Virtually
all of the other politicians taking that stand come from the left side
of the political spectrum. They include figures like independent
socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and Democratic senators Ron Wyden and Mark
Udall. Rand Paul is not like these other defenders of civil liberties.
Rand
Paul, like his father, prefers to package his fairly old-school brand
of economic conservatism under the trendier name of “libertarianism.”
That’s not just a labeling change. It also means Paul has paired his
retrograde economic ideas with a very outspoken stance against
militarism and the espionage state. It’s a mixture that Paul hopes can
make inroads with groups that are not traditionally Republican voters.
Paul’s play for millennials was almost inevitable. As a recent Pew study
reported,
that generation’s disaffection with the two-party system appears to be
at record levels. Fifty percent of millennials polled said that they do
not associate themselves with either party, which is the highest
percentage recorded thus far. It’s also a 10 point jump from their
equivalent age group’s level of political affiliation only seven years
ago.
But Rand Paul gravely misunderstands the nature of
that political disaffection. Yes, millennials feel alienated toward
political and other institutions. They have a right to feel that way. As
Joshua Holland says, millennials didn’t abandon these institutions. The institutions abandoned them.
But
Rand Paul and libertarianism are not the answer. His economic strategy
can be summed up in a quota used for one of his bills: “remove the
shackles of big government by reducing taxes, regulations, and
burdensome union work requirements.”
In other words,
more of the same conservative philosophy that got us in this mess in the
first place. Here are 10 reasons why millennials should be extremely
wary of the senator from Kentucky.
1. His philosophy of deregulation created your jobs problem.
Rand
Paul loved to preach the gospel of deregulation. He went so far as to
proclaim that Obama was putting his “boot heel” on the neck of—get
this—British Petroleum. Why? Because BP was being asked to bear part of
the cost for the oil spill it created.
That’s right.
Rand Paul believes “regulation” is evil, even when it’s only asking a
reckless private corporation to clean up its own messes.
Wall
Street deregulation crashed the economy in 2008. As a result, the
millennial generation is entering the job market at the worst time in
modern history. Millennials are facing record levels of unemployment and
under-employment. What’s Rand Paul’s solution? More of the same.
2. He doesn’t believe in jobs programs.
Those
of us who are fighting for jobs programs and infrastructure
investment—two things that would help the millennial generation
significantly—have a fierce opponent in Rand Paul. Paul believes
government spending is inherently bad, and tax cuts are inherently good.
There are jobs proposals that target millennials for assistance. Rand
Paul is against them.
3. He thinks “tax cuts” create jobs.
There’s
a simple answer to that, once we remember that the wealthy and
corporations are paying lower taxes than at any time in modern history.
So where are the jobs?
Rand
Paul’s solution is to eliminate the income tax altogether. That would
be a red letter day for billionaires, millionaires and corporations. It
would spell the end of vital services for the rest of us, in everything
from public health to military defense.
Create jobs? Not so much.
4. Those “burdensome union work requirements” gave us Saturdays and Sundays off.
Without
unions we would still be working six or seven days a week with no
overtime pay. The weekend as we know it wouldn’t exist if we lived in
Rand’s world.
Neither would paid vacations, the minimum
wage, health and disability benefits, and quite a few other things a lot
of working people count on to help them get by.
5. Civil rights for African Americans and other minorities wouldn’t exist.
Rand
Paul believes businesses have the right to discriminate against
minorities, or against pretty much anybody, because he thinks that’s
part of their First Amendment rights.
The First
Amendment, as most of you may know, reads as follows: “Congress shall
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the
free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the
press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition
the Government for a redress of grievances.”
There’s
nothing in there about “businesses that want to force women like Rosa
Parks to stand at the back of the bus when there are empty seats in the
front of the bus,” or “lunch counters that won’t serve black folks.”
No,
the First Amendment doesn’t say that. But Rand Paul thinks it does. He
also says he would’ve voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Here’s
a newsflash for Sen. Paul: Millennials come in all races, religions,
genders and sexual orientations. They value their rights just as much as
Americans of other generations do.
6. He wants to eliminate Social Security.
Because,
you know, the “free market” has done so well in protecting Americans’
financial security when they’re disabled or elderly.
Many
millennials are collecting Social Security survivor benefits, like Rand
Paul compatriot Paul Ryan did. Or disability benefits. Or they have
parents and grandparents who are collecting retirement benefits.
Most millennials will live to collect those benefits themselves—if Rand Paul doesn’t get to them first.
7. He wants to eliminate Medicare, Obamacare, and even the private insurance you get through your employer.
“The fundamental reason why Medicare is failing is why the Soviet Union failed,” said Sen. Paul. “Socialism doesn't work.”
Unfortunately
for Paul, Medicare is not failing. It has lower overhead than private
insurance, lower cost than private insurance, and a lower rate of
inflation than private insurance. It is the most successful, and the
most popular insurance program in the country.
But as
flawed as it is, private health insurance is critical to a lot of
people’s physical and financial health. Rand Paul’s so right wing he
doesn’t even like that. “We need to get insurance out of the way and let
the consumer interact with their doctor the way they did basically
before World War II," said Paul. (A lot of people didn’t interact with
doctors at all before World War II; the morbidity and mortality
statistics show it.)
Speaking as an ophthalmologist,
which he is, Paul also said this: “If you think you have the right to
healthcare, you are saying basically that I am your slave.” Sen. Paul is
not just a conservative, he someone with a poor grasp of concepts like
slavery. Healthcare providers are in fact paid under all systems of
public and private insurance. They are also free to change professions,
take a day off, set their own schedules, and do any number of things
that are not associated with the practice of slavery.
Millennials
need to know that medical care will be available when they need it.
That’s not just something they want. It’s a right.
8. He wants to eliminate Roe v. Wade and have a woman’s right to choose decided by politicians at the state level.
Said Paul, “I would introduce and support legislation to send
Roe v. Wade back to the states.”
Why?
So that decisions about what a woman does with her body can be made by
politicians like that guy in Virginia wanted mandatory transvaginal
ultrasounds for any woman who wanted to terminate a pregnancy?
It may come as a surprise to Sen. Paul to learn that a great many millennials are, in fact, women.
The
Supreme Court has established that a woman’s right to choose is
constitutionally protected. Since then that right has been eroded in a
thousand different ways at the state level. Rand Paul would remove this
right forever, turning this fundamental principle of autonomy into a
campaign issue to be decided by right-wing career politicians.
Way to go, “Mr. Civil Liberties.” And about that …
9. He’s not as strong and advocate for civil liberties as he seems.
At least Rand Paul is uncompromising in his defense of civil liberties, right? Well, not so much. Consider this quote:
“I'm
not for profiling people on the color of their skin, or on their
religion, but I would take into account where they've been traveling and
perhaps, you might have to indirectly take into account whether or not
they've been going to radical political speeches by religious leaders.
It wouldn't be that they are Islamic. But if someone is attending
speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our
government, that's really an offense that we should be going after— they
should be deported or put in prison.”
“It
wouldn’t be that they are Islamic,” says Rand Paul. But it’s clear that
he’s only talking about a certain kind of terrorism. A lot of Tea Party
leaders have “threatened the violent overthrow of the government.” Does
Rand Paul think “they should be deported or put in prison”? Or are his
brand of civil liberties only for white conservatives?
10. He’s picked the wrong oppressor.
Rand
Paul’s brand of libertarian believes that “liberty” is freedom from an
oppressive government. But in a democracy the government is us. The real
oppressors in today’s economic and political system are the
corporations which increasingly dominate all aspects of our public and
private lives.
Rand Paul doesn’t have much to say about
that. We applaud his stand against drone murders by the US government,
but where is his stand against the kind of espionage Amazon and other
corporations could use through the use of unregulated drones in the
United States? We admire his stand against the NSA, but where is an
equally courageous stand against invasions of privacy by corporations
like Google? (For more on that topic, see our
interview with Yasha Levine.)
Rand
Paul would have us turned against the “oppression” of the Democratic
process, while turning us over to the real oppression of the Corporate
State. That’s not fighting for liberty. It’s fighting for corporations.
Underneath
all the freedom jargon, Rand Paul’s pushing the same kind of economic
conservatism that has increasingly dominated our political discourse
over the last 40 years. He’s resolutely opposed to all of the civil
rights advances of the last 50 years, and to any of the government
interventions that could make things better for millennials and other
Americans now.
Rand Paul wants more of the same tax cuts
we’ve already given to him billionaires and corporations. He wants more
of the deregulation that ruined the economy in 2008 and has caused so
much harm to the environment.
How’s that working out for you?
Feel
free to admire Rand Paul’s stands on civil liberties and military
action, as selective as those stands may be. Then look for politicians
who represent the full spectrum of your moral and economic beliefs.
Better yet, become those politicians. We need your talents and your
energy, to make right what previous generations (in the Paul family and
elsewhere) have gotten so tragically wrong.
RJ Eskow is a senior fellow with the Campaign for America's Future.
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