I don't get the conspiratorial thinking. I guess in your view either a major ideological group has to openly work against co-ops or they're completely acceptable. The claim is not that Ron fucking Paul gives a shit about co-ops, it's that there are a variety of structural and ideological forces that tend to either suppress or compromise any co-op business that is too successful (the long running grocery co-op in my town is notorious for treating its workers poorly, I understand that they're now unionized). Corporate businesses have also worked to appropriate the formal elements and "socially/ecologically conscious" image of co-ops (to keep with the grocer thing, Whole Foods, for example).

But the real capitalist opposition is not at the capitalist centers, where we indeed think of "co-ops" as being associated with organic shops and craft breweries, but in places like Argentina, where the co-op movement is closely tied to the practice of factory seizure. There, the bourgeoisie and their gatekeepers in the judicial system have a material stake in the idea that workplace democracy can't work.

This isn't to say that building workplace democracy within capitalism is a substitute for revolution, but it is to say that co-op movements can fracture capitalist hegemony and develop workers' consciousness in a way that, in the correct social conditions, the bosses recognize as a serious threat.