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Dec. 28, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

09:44

2063 Ron Paul Is Not A Racist!

I am no fan of political action, but these attacks are utterly unjust -- from Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio --

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	So now Ron Paul is supposed to be, what, some kind of racist?
	By God, it is astounding, annoying, frustrating and enraging to hear the number of empty-headed media-based ass-clown chatboxes who study nothing other than the circular winds of their own rhetoric without doing a damn thing to learn about how to actually solve problems in society.
	Ron Paul is against imperialism.
	Ron Paul is against the drug war.
	Ron Paul is against government welfare.
	Ron Paul is against government education.
	And Ron Paul is against government inflation and debt.
	Let's just see how these positions affect minorities in America.
	Imperialism. Foreign wars are fought by minorities, disproportionate to the population.
	Blacks, a little over 12% of the U.S. population, 24% of the military in 2000.
	From September 11, 2001 through 2005, the percentage of Hispanics enlisting in the army rose by 26%.
	So if you have a policy of ending imperialism, then you have a policy of shipping home masses of minorities from their existing sun-baked murder fests of foreign imperialistic wars.
	That scarcely seems racist to me.
	Being against the drug war.
	Look, almost every major survey of marijuana usage has shown that white people, particularly white young people, say that they use marijuana far more than blacks.
	But the rate of arrest for marijuana use is seven times higher for young black people than it is for whites.
	So, here's an example in New York City.
	It's just a misdemeanor to have some pot, but it is a crime to show it.
	And so the officer will walk up to a black kid and say, because they've got these frisk, right?
	The officer will walk up to a black kid and say, listen, if you've got it on you, you need to show it to me, because if I have to frisk you and find it, it's going to be much worse for you.
	So the kid shows the officer, and boom, no longer a misdemeanor, now it's a crime.
	This is the kind of racism that goes on in the war against drugs.
	There's all of this entrapment, of course.
	Once you've been arrested for a drug, you're a felony dude, right?
	I mean, that's what you have to check off for the rest of your life on every single job application.
	Bill Clinton signed a law, and he was in office, said, you don't get any financial aid if you've ever been arrested for a drug charge or on a drug-related charge.
	That means no college for a lot of these poor kids.
	And it's just astounding.
	One in 15 black adults is in prison.
	One in nine young black men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars.
	Some statistics say that one in three blacks is currently being processed at some level through what is laughingly called the justice system.
	Where do all these arrests come from?
	Drug offenses alone accounted for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population and more than half of the increase in the state population between 85 and 2000.
	And there are horrible incentives for boosting drug-related arrests, and thus the minority population, particularly the black population, in prison.
	There's an Edward Byrne Memorial grant program.
	It's a federal grant program. It gives financial incentives worth millions of dollars to state and local law enforcement agencies that agree to dramatically boost the volume of drug arrests.
	Among black dropouts in their late twenties, on any given day, more of them are in prison, 34%, than are working, 30%.
	Here's a quote from a report on California.
	Compared to non-blacks, California's African-American population, four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana, twelve times more likely to be imprisoned for a marijuana felony arrest, and three times more likely to be imprisoned for marijuana possession arrest.
	Overall, these disparities accumulate to ten times greater odds of an African-American being imprisoned for marijuana than any other racial or ethnic group.
	So the reality is that to oppose the war on drugs is to be the exact opposite of a racist.
	Drug prohibitionists are racists, statistically and factually.
	Let's look at the Federal Reserve, Ron Paul's arch-nemesis for many decades.
	First of all, of course, the Federal Reserve, as a semi-private institution, rips off, at an astounding level, the American population by producing and charging interest on money that the government could as easily do itself.
	And massive amounts of the GDP get swallowed up into these fat, cat, three-piece-suited, red-cheeked, white guys' pockets.
	The Federal Reserve prints money.
	It drives up borrowing costs, which then it has to artificially depress by keeping interest rates low.
	This provides really crazy, crazy signals to entrepreneurs and investors, which means that it's very hard to create jobs, which means that there are fewer jobs, particularly for people who want to come out of the poor classes.
	Inflation Robs the poor, in particular, of the purchasing power of their dollar.
	Inflation is driven by the Federal Reserve and its creation of fiat currency.
	The Federal Reserve is the enemy of the poor and the enemy of the minorities who make up a disproportionate amount of the poor.
	Federal Reserve enabled the recent banking swindle, wiped out 53% of the median wealth of African Americans and 66% of the median wealth of Latinos, according to the Pew Research Center.
	After that monstrous meltdown starting in 08, it was the Federal Reserve that led all of these ultra-secret, complex machinations to bail out the banks.
	What about the exploited customers?
	What about the loan scandals, the robo-signing scandals?
	What about the fact that no one has gone to jail for any of this stuff?
	Did you take a look at all the people testifying before Congress about the banking scandals?
	Did you see a lot of minorities up there?
	To oppose the Fed is to oppose the exploitation and destruction of minority culture throughout the US. To be pro-Federal Reserve is to be a racist, factually and statistically.
	What about the welfare state?
	Welfare state was brought in, in the 1960s, to supposedly deal with the problem of poverty, which was, to a large degree, a minority and black phenomenon.
	Two basic facts have come out of that over the past 50 years.
	Entrenched multi-generational poverty is largely a black phenomenon, and it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.
	You have massive amounts, the vast majority, of black kids being poured into single-parent families, often young, often uneducated.
	And so if you are for the welfare state, then you are for the policies that have largely destroyed black families and destroyed or undercut or set in flames the ladder that leads out of poverty into the middle class for blacks.
	There was no massive disparity in out-of-wedlock births for black families prior to the 1960s, prior to Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty, to the Great Society programs of the 1960s.
	Moynihan, Charles Murray, lots of people have written about this.
	There is a catastrophic destruction of the nuclear family in the black culture, in the black ghettos, in the inner cities, and you combine that with something else that is absolutely catastrophic for minorities, and that is government-run education.
	Up to half of blacks do not graduate from high school, and those who do not graduate from high school face absolutely catastrophic odds when it comes to staying out of prison and becoming productive in their lives and not repeating the cycle of abuse.
	So when you have 70% of black kids being born out of wedlock, largely to single parent to single mom, families, it's a catastrophe, it's a disaster.
	And you add to that the fact that a lot of the employment opportunities for the poor, again, disproportionately black and minority populations, have been eviscerated through government power, control, taxation, hyper-regulation, and manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas, and there's been a net loss of millions of manufacturing jobs in the US over the past decade.
	The fact that the real wages have stagnated or declined, the fact that there's no way out through the miasma and collapse and catastrophe of the drug culture that results from the anti-drug prohibition war.
	When you look at the collapse of educational standards, when you look at the collapse of infrastructure within the inner cities, when you look at the collapse of the family, you are looking all at policies that are driven by the state, that are imposed and inflicted by the state, and which Ron Paul opposes.
	If you have any brains whatsoever, imagining that somebody who opposes all of these programs which are so catastrophic to minorities is in any way, shape, or form a racist, you need to pull your head out of your ass.
	It's nowhere dark but in your own innards.
	Ron Paul is, ideologically, an anti-statist, which means that he is, practically, an anti-racist, because the use of the violence of the state to solve complex social problems results in endless catastrophes for those with the least power, the least influence, and the least capacity to affect their will in the political process.
	That is the poor, that is minorities, that is gays, that is the excluded.

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