10 years later …

"Federal Reserve policy will continue at an expanding rate with massive credit expansion, which will make the dollar crisis worse. Gold will be seen as an alternative to paper money as it returns to its historic role as money. Erosion of civil liberties here at home will continue as our government responds to political fear in dealing with the terrorist threat by making generous use of the powers obtained with the Patriot Act. … The Congress and the president will shift radically, expanding the size and scope of the federal government. This will satisfy both the liberals and the conservatives. Military and police power will grow, satisfying the conservatives. The welfare state, both domestic and international, will expand, satisfying the liberals. Both sides will endorse military interventionism overseas. … During the next decade, the American people will become poorer and less free while they become more dependent upon the government for economic security. … I have no timetable for these predictions, but keep them around and look at them in five to ten years. I hope and pray that I am wrong on all accounts."

– Rep. Ron Paul, April 24, 2002

Let me be blunt. If you do not actively support Ron Paul's campaign to be the next president of the United States of America – if you do not pray on a daily basis for his success – then you are a fool. You are a complete, unadulterated and unmitigated fool. It doesn't matter if you are a liberal Democrat who bought into Barack Obama's fraudulent hope and change propaganda or a conservative Republican who is still reeling with the shock from eight years of ceaseless ideological treachery by George W. Bush. If you have even a modicum of concern for the survival of America, either as a nation or as a constitutional ideal, there is demonstrably only one candidate who has any understanding of the size and scope of the challenges presently facing the American people.

Consider what the other alternatives to the man were doing back in 2002. The present occupant of the White House was an Illinois state senator representing the 13th district. Based on his legislative priorities, his primary concerns at the time were to mandate the monitoring racial profiling and the recording of police interrogations. Laudable causes, no doubt, but hardly indicative of a man who was aware of the global crisis that was already obvious to those who were paying attention.

The current frontrunner for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney, was the president and CEO of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games Organizing Committee. He successfully turned around the money-losing committee, and, remarkably, actually managed to make the games profitable to the tune of more than $100 million. The financial company that he had similarly salvaged, Bain Capital, continued to be successful as well. As a retired partner, Romney received tens of millions of dollars every year from its activities. For these actions, he is to be congratulated, not condemned.

And yet, it will not escape the astute reader's attention that Romney showed no signs of being aware that there were massive problems on the horizon or that he was doing anything more than taking advantage of the tremendous credit expansion that was one of the primary causes of the present crisis. While Romney cannot possibly be blamed for the short-sighted government policies that permitted him to assemble his vast fortune, the fact of the matter is that when the situation presented itself, Mitt Romney elected to personally profit from it rather than warn anyone of the problems it would inevitably cause, due to either ignorance or indifference.

Newt Gingrich's actions in 2002 were even worse. He was consulting for the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, better known as Freddie Mac, which was one of the primary mechanisms by which the Federal Reserve and the federal government created the 2002-2007 housing bubble. Despite having the "historian" Gingrich on its payroll as a highly paid consultant, Freddie Mac was placed under federal conservatorship on Sept. 7, 2008 – or to put it in more pedestrian terms, it went bankrupt and is presently surviving on a lifeline of financial infusions from the American taxpayer.

While I don't regard Rick Santorum as a serious candidate, what passes for the conservative media is desperately talking him up to prevent his campaign from collapsing completely in South Carolina. What was he doing in 2002, when Ron Paul was standing in the House of Representatives warning Americans about the travails they presently face? He was in the U.S. Senate, representing Pennsylvania. And what were his legislative priorities? Providing Third World debt relief and home ownership tax credits. In other words, he was involved in actively helping lay the foundation of the present crisis by exacerbating the amount of public and private debt.

The benefit of 10 years of hindsight since Paul's predictions were made is that we can see how perspicacious the five candidates were concerning the coming problems of the future. These problems were not only inevitable, they were eminently predictable, as I can state with some authority, being one of the individuals publicly recognized as having predicted the financial crisis myself. And it was not a coincidence that Ron Paul was making his predictions in 2002, as that was precisely when I independently reached many of the same conclusions, as did a number of other observers.

Neither Obama nor Romney appears to have had any notion of what was right around the corner, although Romney was able to capitalize on the financial bubbles. Gingrich and Santorum both contributed, in their small ways, to exacerbate the problem. Only Ron Paul both saw the problem and spoke out against it, for which he has, like Cassandra before the fall of Troy, reaped the reward of being ignored, disbelieved and even insulted.

I encourage you to watch the video embedded below. If you can watch it and still come away with the conclusion that the United States of America would be better served in this time of global crisis by a clueless charlatan, an callous profiteer, a corrupt courtier or a culpable party than by Ron Paul, then there is clearly no hope for you.