Let me state up front that I am not a Ron Paul supporter. This article is not about picking a candidate for the 2012 election. This article is not about explaining or arguing my philosophy or attacking libertarianism either. This is an article about a group that just got a major 'Fuck You' from the establishment.

By now everybody knows that the RNC has designated Mitt Romney as the actor to play the role of "Barack Obama's opponent" in the 2012 stage version of "This American Election". Many have been aware of the Ron Paul delegate strategy. But have you all seen this?

Really, you need to watch it. If you just skipped over it, stop and go back and watch it and don't read any more until you do.

Paul delegates were not allowed to be seated, some were replaced, establishment RNC operatives declared voice votes in favor the Yea contingent despite the overwhelming calls of No, and ignored the subsequent calls to Point of Order. When states called their delegate counts, on at least one occasion the mic was cut before the Paul count could be stated. Savvy state delegations became aware of what was going on and declared Paul's count first and punted Romney's count, only to be met with repetition from the podium of only Romney's count. Paul signs were actively blocked and ripped from the hands of his supporters. C-Span cut audio of the protests in their feeds. The distance between this sham that is called the American System of Governance and actual popular representation became a lot more fucking real to many people who couldn't until now begin to wrap their heads around the meaning of the word disenfranchisement.

As one who has had to watch with disgust as some Paul supporters have used terms that I hold dear like Marxist and Socialist to ignorantly describe the pro-corporate policies of the Obama administration, I'll admit I've got a huge case of schadenfreude. I recognize it and am trying to process it and move beyond it. When I can subsume my spiteful feelings, I recognize an opportunity for those who are interested in stopping the death of this country and building a popular movement against the state of perpetual for profit war against human rights and civil liberties to come together. The Paul crowd has a fire and a passion that is still fresh. And the Paul crowd has numbers. If we can put aside attempts to convert each other to a common vision of what the future ought to look like and just agree that it ain't this mockery of democracy, we can all benefit. If we can all recognize that we need to fight the system that doesn't give a shit what we want before we worry about building consensus about where it's going, we might have a chance. The 0.01% who are raping the world love it when we stage virtual Trotsky versus Friedman cage matches on facebook, because they can spend more time plotting and less time constructing distractions for us.

I don't know what Paul supporters plan to do for the election now that Paul's party has snubbed them all, and frankly I don't give a fuck. The election is a scam. Take the vowels out of the RNC chairperson's name and see what abbreviation you get. It's all theater, and the entire charade has been engineered so that both the RNC and DNC designees are well insulated from giving anything more than superficial face time to the topics of civil liberty erosions and an expanding war on terror.

Let this be a lesson to leftists who still hold out hope that the Democratic party can be fixed from the inside. It can't. The Paul contingency just gave us empirical proof of how brazenly the establishment will discard any reform movement that gets too much steam.

Fuck the election. Come together and take action. Support occupy. Start an alternative to occupy if you can't work within occupy. Support each other. Support people. Agitate. Muck up the system. Piss off the power structure. Learn that in the absence of your own back-pocket congressweasel, the only power you have is community and solidarity. Don't worry about agreeing about what comes after. We have to keep the possibility of an after alive first, and that takes masses and it takes action outside the booth. Let's build some bridges.