This ad has started showing up all over Huffington Post lately. Click it and you’ll visit Ron Paul’s Campaign For Liberty, otherwise known as C4L, where a set of Frank Luntz and Paulite talking points contains the following call to action:
Call Senator Shelby at (202) 224-5744 and insist he support Ron Paul’s Audit the Fed Bill and demand he oppose empowering the Fed.
You would think there was little daylight between Paul and Shelby, but you’d be wrong. Paul, you see, would do away with the Fed altogether; Shelby only wants to strip the Federal Reserve of oversight authority:
“We agree that the Federal Reserve should have a limited range of responsibilities and that its main focus should be on conducting monetary policy,” Shelby said in November.
Alabama’s senior senator blames the Fed for the 2008 financial crisis. While the Fed had a role inflating the housing bubble, its biggest contribution was an institutional failure to regulate. Rather than fix the mismanagement or question the deregulatory zeal that led to the AIG debacle, Shelby would like to engage in disaster capitalism by disestablishing the regulator.
It’s no secret why. His number-one patron from 2005 to 2010 has been the Securities & Investment industry. At $554,888 in contributions, banks and financiers are way ahead of the insurance industry, which only gave him $325,749. They would like a world free of constraints, and Shelby would be happy to give it to them.
Ron Paul, on the other hand, is an ideologue. He actually wants to bring back the gold standard. So what you have here are two ideologically similar Republicans, one holding an extreme position and the other totally owned by banks. It reflects a deeper split between the activist GOP base and Republicans in office — the very place that Democrats are inserting a wedge by forcing the financial reform vote.
If this reminds you of when the firebagging Jane Hamsher tried to pressure Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders to vote “no” on a health insurance reform bill with no public option, then congratulations — you’ve got it.
As to why Ron Paul and C4L would advertise on Huffington Post, your guess is as good as mine. With extremists, triangulation often becomes trigonometry; trying to figure them out can make your head hurt.
