Read the rest of the story by clicking on the Title link, below...
Joe Biden’s Political Future in Europe
Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute
President Joe Biden’s popularity among American voters has been in descent since he took the oath of office in January of 2021. Indeed, by May 25 of this year, Biden’s approval rating, as related by Paul Bedard in a Washington Examiner editorial, had fallen below that of every president back through Harry Truman at that point in their presidencies. And Biden’s approval rating has continued to drop since then. What is Biden to do? From within his Democratic Party, the message is increasingly... Read the rest of the story by clicking on the Title link, below... Joe Biden’s Political Future in Europe Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute
0 Comments
President Biden is set to announce a temporary suspension of the federal gasoline tax in the face of record gas prices in the US. However, with gas prices around five dollars per gallon, the 18 cents per gallon savings equals about two dollars per tank savings. Is this a band-aid on a gushing wound? Also today, only 11 percent of Americans buy the "Putin price hike" rhetoric. And...Congress expands US economic war on China with new import ban. Today on the Liberty Report: Biden's Gas Tax Holiday - Spitting In The Wind? Click on the headline to read the full story from As we wait for the release of the most significant Second Amendment case in over a decade from the Supreme Court (as early as tomorrow), CBS featured Ibram X. Kendi on Face the Nation on gun rights. Host Margaret Brennan discussed with the Boston University professor the “freedom to enslave” was linked to the “freedom to have guns.” There was no push back on that controversial claim or the underlying suggestion that gun ownership is largely a white impulse or practice. Kendi is the director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. He has a history of controversial statements like his claim that Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s adoption of two Haitian children raised the image of a “white colonizer” and she appears to use the children as little more than props. He has also declared that terms like “legal vote” are racist. He was recently in the news after explaining why he took a white doll away from this daughter to prevent her from breathing in “the ‘smog’ of white superiority.” However, this is a historical and constitutional claim that should not go without some factual discussion or response. Kendi portrayed gun ownership in strictly racial terms: Enslaved people were fighting for freedom from slavery, and enslavers were fighting for the freedom to enslave, and in many ways, that sort of contrast still exists today. There are people who are fighting for freedom from assault rifles, freedom from poverty, freedom from exploitation, and there are others who are fighting for freedom to exploit, freedom to have guns, freedom to maintain inequality,.The portrayal of gun owners are “fighting for freedom to exploit, freedom to have guns, freedom to maintain inequality” received no follow up question or challenge in the interview. Other academics have made this same historical claim. Historian Carol Anderson claims that... ...the Second Amendment 'provided the cover, the assurances that Patrick Henry and George Mason needed, that the militias would not be controlled by the federal government, but that they would be controlled by the states and at the beck and call of the states to be able to put down these uprisings.'The ACLU has echoed such views. NPR breathlessly billed its interview as “Historian Carol Anderson Uncovers The Racist Roots Of The Second Amendment.” However, the history of the Second Amendment contradicts these claims. States opposed to slavery, like Vermont, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, New York and Rhode Island, had precursor state constitutional provisions recognizing the right to bear arms. In his famous 1770 defense of Capt. Thomas Preston in the Boston Massacre trial, John Adams declared that British soldiers had a right to defend themselves since “here every private person is authorized to arm himself.” His second cousin and co-Founding Father, Samuel Adams, was vehemently anti-slavery and equally supportive of the right to bear arms. Samuel Adams proclaimed “the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of The United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms…” Guns were viewed as essential in much of America, which was then a frontier nation, needed for food — but also to protect a free people from tyranny and other threats. (The Minutemen at Concord, after all, were not running to a Klan meeting in 1775.) Law enforcement was relatively scarce at the time, even in the more populous states. This argument is maintained despite the fact that a quarter of African Americans are gun owners (compared with 36 percent of whites) and gun sales have been increasing in the African American community. Some African Americans have long viewed guns as an equalizer, including escaped slave and famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who, in an editorial, heralded the power of “a good revolver, a steady hand.” Gun ownership has a long, fiercely defended tradition in the Black community. Indeed, Ida B. Wells, one of the most prominent anti-lynching activists, declared: “The Winchester Rifle deserves a place of honor in every Black home.” Here is the interview: Boston University Professor: Second Amendment is Based on 'Freedom to Enslave' Click on the headline to read the full story from At the recent Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, President Biden refused to permit Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua to attend because they aren’t democracies. As everyone knows, for the past several decades, the US government has made democracy its shibboleth. It’s as if democracy is something sacred. Yet, what’s so great about democracy? It’s really nothing more than people selecting their rulers by votes rather than rulers selecting themselves. What’s so sacred about voters? US officials promote the notion that voters select the best people to public office, as if they always elect saints. Given that this is the 50th anniversary of the Watergate scandal, why not apply the democracy test to Richard Nixon, a president who was forced to leave office because of his criminal activity? And then there was Lyndon Johnson, the president that Nixon succeeded. Many years after he had died, it was determined that LBJ cheated his way to victory in his 1948 race for US Senate. If he hadn’t had his political cronies illegally stuff the ballot box in a county in South Texas, he would have lost that race and undoubtedly would never have become president. Supporters of Donald Trump point to Biden as another example of how voters can make serious mistakes in who they elect to office. Biden supporters say the same thing about Donald Trump. In fact, Biden supporters are doing everything they can to use legislation to ban Trump from running again so that voters won’t have the chance to vote him back into office. Democracy is often confused with the concept of freedom. If a system is democratic, the argument goes, that shows that people are free. That’s ludicrous. Freedom has nothing to do with how people elect their rulers. Consider Latin America, for example, the part of the world that was the focus of that recent Summit of the Americas. It’s often said, with validity, that people in Latin America have the freedom to elect their dictators every four or six years. That’s because their rulers wield and exercise dictatorial powers. So, whoever gets the most votes is the one who gets to be the dictator. Democracy is not even mentioned in the Constitution. That’s because the Framers knew better. They understood that democracy was not only not freedom, it actually poses a grave threat to freedom. That’s why they severely limited the powers of the federal government. It’s also why our ancestors demanded the enactment of the Bill of Rights — to protect the people from democracy. For the first hundred years of American history, the US had a mixed record with respect to liberty. There were the bad things, such as slavery and women’s rights. But there was also the good things, such as: No Social Security, income taxation, Medicare, public schooling, drug war, immigration controls, Pentagon, CIA, NSA, FBI, foreign wars, coups, and interventions, and the countless bureaucratic agencies and departments that now pervade the federal government. With the conversion of the federal government to a welfare state, with the adoption of a paper-money system, which replaced the nation’s gold-coin, silver-coin system, and with the enactment of a federal income tax, everything changed. Democratically elected public officials now wielded and exercised the power to destroy the economic prosperity of the nation. The conversion of the federal government to a national-security state changed everything in a much more dramatic way. The national-security branch of the government — i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — was given omnipotent powers — the same types of powers that are wielded and exercised by totalitarian, dictatorial regimes, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, the three Latin Americans countries excluded from the recent Summit of the Americas. Such powers include assassination, torture, and indefinite detention. Thus, America ended up with a system in which the powers of some public officials are still fairly limited but where an entire section of the federal government wields omnipotent, totalitarian-like, dark-side powers. And that section of the government — the national-security section — consists entirely of people who have not been voted into office. Finally, there is something else to note about America’s democratic system: the power of the president to rule by executive decree. Consider President Biden, for example. He wields the power to send US taxpayer money and US-funded weaponry to Ukraine on his own initiative. For his part, President Trump used executive decrees to start a destructive trade war with China, without congressional authorization. As Ludwig von Mises pointed out, the only real advantage of democracy is that it enables people to change their rulers and even their systems without a violent revolution. But it certainly does not guarantee freedom and, in fact, oftentimes ends up destroying freedom. Genuine freedom turns on the limitation of power of those in public office, not on how people end up in public office. Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation. What’s So Great About Democracy? Click on the headline to read the full story from
UN World Food Program head David Beasley announced yesterday that global food rations for refugees will need to be cut in half due to the unprecedented food crisis. How much of this crisis is man-made as the elites use food as a weapon in what has turned out to be a futile effort to punish Russia? How much of the food and energy crisis is actually being cheered by those pushing the "green" agenda? Watch today's Liberty Report: Global Elites Starve Africa To 'Punish' Russia Click on the headline to read the full story from For more than two years, the world has been swept up in covid mania. Ordinary people of almost every nationality have accepted the covid ‘story’, applauding as strong men and women have assumed dictatorial powers, suspended normal human rights and political processes, pretended that covid deaths were the only ones that mattered, closed schools, closed businesses, prevented people from earning livelihoods, and caused mass misery, poverty, and starvation. The more these strong men and women did these things, the louder the applause, and the greater the disapprobation and abuse levelled at those who decried such actions. Police bullying of those speaking out against the covid story was cheered on by populations keen to see the naysayers brought to justice. The past two years have proved that the Germans of the National Socialist period were really nothing special. Lest we forget The West refused to learn, or by now has forgotten, the central lesson of the Nazi period (1930-1945) despite the plethora of eyewitness voices in post-WWII art and science that made it abundantly clear what had happened – from Hannah Arendt to the Milgram experiments to the fabulous play, ‘Rhinoceros’. The key point made by the top intellectuals writing about the Nazi period was that anyone could become a Nazi: there was absolutely nothing odd about the Germans who became Nazis. They did not become Nazis because their mothers did not love them enough, or because they had rejected God in their life, or because of something inherent in German culture. They simply got seduced by a story and swept off their feet and out of their minds by the herd, making up their reasons as they went along. The brutal lesson that the intellectuals of that era wanted to pass on was that pretty much everyone would have done the same under the circumstances. Evil, in a word, is banal. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, the most committed Nazis were the ‘Gutmensch’: Germans who genuinely saw themselves as good people. They had been loved by their mothers, were dutiful followers of the local faith, paid their taxes, had ancestors who died for Germany, and were in loving family relationships. They thought they were doing the right thing, and were roundly validated and supported in that belief by friends, family, the church, and the media. The intellectual class had come face to face with this truth in the 1950s, but the relentless wish of humanity to look away from uncomfortable truths made societies, and over time even scholarly circles, forget. We told lies about the Nazis to feel good about ourselves. This self-rejecting cowardice grew over time and fed into today’s debilitated, self-hating woke culture in which you can hardly reference the Nazi period at all in polite company, much less try to open people’s minds to its lessons, without being accused of being a Nazi deep down yourself. The Germans forgot not because the information about the Nazi period was hidden. On the contrary, young German schoolchildren were forced to read books and watch documentaries almost constantly. They forgot the central lesson because they could not live with the idea that the behaviour they were told about was normal. So, like everyone else, they pretended that the Nazi period was totally abnormal, led and supported by people who were innately more evil than others. Yet since nearly everyone succumbed to the Nazi madness, this lie created a problem across the generations. Within families, the young would ask their grandparents how they could possibly not have seen, how they could possibly have abided, how they could possibly have participated. These are the questions of someone who refuses to engage with the radical and awful truth that they would very probably have done the same. They did not want to think that way about themselves, and their parents didn’t want that burden on them either, which is understandable. Who doesn’t want their children to believe they will forever be as pure as snow? What a young German should have asked was, “what do we need to change about our society today to prevent me from facing the same pressures, to which I recognise that I too would succumb?” This question is very hard and very unpleasant. It also is a response of compassion rather than of rejection of the grandparents. It is much easier and simpler instead to blame the grandparents, to put their evil in a box and condemn it, to grandstand and appear highly ethical, while dismissing one’s grandparents as not really human but some kind of monster. Which is worse for humanity in the long run: the Nazi sympathiser, or the observer of the Nazi sympathiser who condemns him as a monster? Externalising evil Outside of Germany, people forgot the lesson much sooner. A young German wanting to look away from the awful truth that anyone can be a Nazi at least needs to pay the price for her cowardice of condemning her own family as monsters. A typical young French, Thai, or American person need make no such sacrifice. For them it is far easier still to blame the Nazi episode on something alien to them. The further away the actual memory, the more books emerged about how unique Germans had been for centuries when it came to Jews, or about how Hitler was a one-off marketing genius whose siren call was too rare to emerge ever again, or about how the brutality of the Nazi period was something uniquely Western. The most valuable lesson was quickly forgotten for very understandable reasons. It really is a horrible thought. The same desire to look away from the awful truth is evident today, even among the minority that has seen the vast majority of their own neighbours and family go berserk. The desire to find a new Hitler who can be blamed, in the form of Klaus Schwab or in the form of a cleverly conniving Chinese leadership. The desire to blame a lack of God in society, or a lack of intelligence, or the apathy of a generation addicted to social media, for the stampeding herd all around us. “If only they had read my book!” “If only they had not brushed with fluoride!” “If only they had not lost their faith!” Every personal desire is pushed into an explanation for today’s horror that boils down to the fantasy that “they can be fixed if they become more like me,” or said another way, “a snake wormed its way into paradise and we will be fine if we cut off its head.” One of the basic messages of our book, The Great Covid Panic, is that this is not true – and that we cannot learn the lessons of this period if we indulge in the weakness of thinking that way. There is no snake whose head we can cut off. There is no other quick fix. If we are serious about preventing a recurrence, we must proceed on the basic understanding that the mad herd we see stampeding in front of us is made up of normal people. The future will have people just like them, who will also stampede madly in similar circumstances. We must think hard about how to prevent similar circumstances, rather than about the attributes of this or that leader or the initial state of mind of populations. Progress starts with sober self-awareness What is then our explanation for why strong religious groups and maverick personalities within our countries were less affected by the madness? Our explanation is that those most strongly immune to the madness from the very start were already somewhat disconnected from the mainstream, often not even having a television or social media connection to mainstream society. Being outliers at the start protected them from being swept up in the madness of the mainstream crowd. Yet this is no recipe for the future, because a society of outliers is no society at all. Any social group has a core constituency of those who truly belong. The strong religious groups standing outside of the social mainstream may be inoculated from the madness of the mainstream, but they are just as prone to follow a wave of madness within their own group. Ditto for any other ‘maverick’ group. Within whatever group they belong to – and all humans belong to groups – humans get swept along when that group goes mad. Hope lies not in a society of outliers, but in a society with better ways of recognising and countering emerging madness, or at least more quickly snapping out of madness when it inevitably emerges. For young Germans, the covid period has a bittersweet silver lining. It has become clear, again, that the Nazis of the 1930s were entirely normal people, and that everyone else in the world can be a Nazi too. The Germans can release themselves from the belief that there is anything abnormally evil about being German. There is a potential Nazi in all of us. Reprinted with permission from Brownstone Institute. We Can All Be Evil and the Germans Were Nothing Special Click on the headline to read the full story from So Honest Joe Biden is now going to give another $1.2 billion to the Ukrainians on top of the sixty or so billion that is already in the pipeline, but who’s counting, particularly as Congress refused to approve having an inspector general to monitor whose pockets will be lined. The money will be printed up without any collateral or “borrowed” and the American taxpayer will somehow have to bear the burden of this latest folly that is ipso facto driving much of the world into recession. And it will no doubt be blamed on Vladimir Putin, a process that is already well under way from president mumbles. But you have to wonder why no one has told Joe that the whole exercise in pushing much of the world towards a catastrophic war is a fool’s errand. But then again, the clowns that the president has surrounded himself with might not be very big on speaking the truth even if they know what that means. Having followed the Ukraine problem since the United States and its poodles refused to negotiate seriously with Vladimir Putin in the real world, I have had to wonder what is wrong with Washington. We have had the ignorant and impulsive Donald Trump supported by a cast of characters that included the mentally unstable Mike Pompeo and John Bolton followed by Biden with the usual bunch of Democratic Party rejects. By that I mean deep thinkers about social issues who would not be able to run a hot dog stand if that were what they were forced to do to make a living. But they are real good at shouting “freedom” and “democracy” whenever questioned concerning their motives. Indeed, opinion polls suggest that there is a great deal of unrest among middle and working class Americans who see a reversion to Jimmy Carter era financial instability, at that time caused by the oil embargo. Well, there is a new energy embargo in place brought about by the Biden Administration’s desire to wage proxy war to “weaken” Russia. Analysts predict that the costs for all forms of energy will double in the next several months and surging energy costs will impact the prices of other essentials, including food. Given all that, the fundamental issue plaguing both Democrats and Republicans is their inability to actually explain to the American people why the country’s foreign and national security policy always seems to be on the boil, searching for enemies and also creating them when they do not exist, even when the results are damaging to the interests of actual Americans. That a serious discussion of why the United States needs to have a military that costs as much as the next nine nations in that ranking combined is long overdue and rarely addressed outside the alternative media. The 2023 military budget has been increased from this year’s, totaling $858 billion, and, if one includes the constantly growing largesse to Ukraine, approaching a hitherto unimaginable trillion dollars. The military budget has become a major driver of the country’s unsustainable deficits. The deaths of millions of people directly and indirectly in the wars started in 9/11 aside, the wars of choice have cost an estimated $8 trillion. The Constitution of the United States makes it clear that a national army was only acceptable to the Founders when it was dedicated to defending the country from foreign threats. Do Americans really believe that bearing the burden of having something like 1,000 military bases scattered around the world really makes them safer? The recent rapid collapse of the security situation in Afghanistan suggests that having such bases turns soldiers and bureaucrats into potential hostages and is therefore a liability. One might also suggest that the insecurity currently prevailing in the country can in large part be attributed to the government’s depiction of numerous “threats” in order to justify both the commitment and the expense. So where does all the money go? And what are the threats? Starting with a war that the United States is de facto though not de jure involved in, Ukraine, what was the Russian threat that demanded Washington’s intervention? Well, if one discards the nonsense of a “rules based international order” or a plucky little democracy Ukraine fighting valiantly against the Russian bear, Moscow did not threaten the United States in any way before the missiles starting flying. Putin sought to negotiate a settlement with Ukraine based on a number of perceived existential Russian national security interests, all of which were negotiable, but the US and its friends were uninterested in compromise while also plying the corrupt Zelensky regime with weapons, money and political support. The final result is a conflict that will likely only end when the last Ukrainian is dead and it includes the possibility that a misstep by the United States and Russia could lead to a nuclear holocaust. To put it succinctly, what is going on does not enhance US national security, nor does it benefit Americans economically. And then there is China. Biden let the cat out of the bag on his recent trip to the Far East. He stated that the United States would defend Taiwan if China were to attempt to annex it. In saying that, Biden demonstrated that he does not understand the strategic ambiguity that the US and the Chinese have preferred over the past fifty years as an alternative to war. The White House for its part quickly issued a correction to the Biden statement, explaining that it was not true that Washington is obligated to defend Taiwan. Some uber hawkish congressmen have apparently found the Biden gaffe appealing and are promoting a firm US commitment to defend Taiwan, coupled with a $4.5 billion military assistance package, of course. At the same time, some officials in the Pentagon and the usual gaggle of congressmen also keep warning about the over the horizon threat from China as an excuse to boost defense spending. Most recently, there was alarm over Chinese participation in a meeting in May in Fiji to consider a China-Pacific Islands free trade pact! In reality, the only serious current threat from China is as an economic competitor. A trade war with China would be a disaster for the US economy, which is heavily dependent on Chinese manufactured goods, but Beijing, with its relatively small military budget, does not pose a physical threat to the United States. And let’s not ignore Iran which has been hammered by economic sanctions and also through the covert killing of its officials and scientists. The US/Israeli war on Iran has also spilled over into neighboring Syria, where Washington actually has troops on the ground occupying the country’s oil producing region and stealing the oil. Iran’s possible expansion of its nuclear program to produce a weapon was effectively impeded through monitoring connected to a multilateral 2015 agreement called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) but Donald Trump, unwisely and acting against actual American interests, withdrew from it. Joe Biden has been warned by Israel not to re-enter the agreement, so he will no doubt comply with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s determination to have Washington continue to apply “extreme pressure” on the Islamic Republic. Does either Iran or its ally Syria threaten the United States in any way? No. Their crime is that they are in the same neighborhood as the Jewish state, which finds the US government easy to manipulate into acting against its own interests. Finally, in America’s own hemisphere there is Venezuela, which has been elevated to the status of Washington’s most hated nation in the region. Venezuelans have been subjected to increasingly punitive US sanctions, including some new ones just last week, which hurt the poorer citizens disproportionately but have not brought about regime change. Why the animosity? Because the country’s leader Nicolas Maduro is still in power in spite of a US assertion that the country’s opposition leader Juan Guaido should rightfully and legitimately be in charge after a possibly fraudulent election in 2018. The latest therapy applied by the United States on Caracas consisted of blocking the country as well as Nicaragua and Cuba from participating in the recent meeting of the Ninth Summit of the Americas which was held in Los Angeles. A State Department spokesman explained that the move was due to the three countries “lacking democratic governances.” Mexican President Lopez Obrador protested against the move and removed himself from his country’s delegation, saying “There can’t be a Summit of the Americas if not all countries of the American continent are taking part.” The despicable US Senator Robert Menendez of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee then felt compelled to add his two cents, criticizing the Mexican president and warning that his “decision to stand with dictators and despots” would hurt US-Mexico relations. So where was the threat from Venezuela (and Cuba and Nicaragua) and why is the US involved at all? Beats me. What all of this means is that there is absolutely no standard of genuine national security that motivates the US’s completely illegal aggression in many parts of the world. What occurs may be linked to a desire to dominate or a madness sometimes described as “exceptionalism” and/or “leadership of the free world,” neither of which has anything to do with actual security. And the American people are paying the price both in terms of decline in standards of living due to the upheaval created in Ukraine and elsewhere as well as a completely understandable loss of faith in the US system of government. By all means, let us shrink the US military until it is responsive to actual identifiable threats. Let’s elect a president who will follow the sage advice of President John Quincy Adams, who declared that “Americans should not go abroad to slay dragons they do not understand in the name of spreading democracy.” At this point, one can only imagine an America that is at peace with itself and with what it represents while also being considered a friend to the rest of the world. Reprinted with permission from Unz Review. Explain It to Me, Please Click on the headline to read the full story from
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and nine other Republicans in the Senate have crossed over to support "compromise" legislation to move the US further toward "red flag" gun laws, where a Constitutional right can be taken without due process. Texans told Cornyn what they think of him and his compromise at the TX GOP state convention last week. The legislation may make it to the Floor this week. Also today: Did Lithuania just spark WWIII? Watch today's Liberty Report: Sen. Cornyn's 'Red Flag' Gun Compromise...Is A Red Flag! Click on the headline to read the full story from With the recent decision by British Home Secretary Priti Patel to approve the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States, it is now a virtual certainty that Assange will soon be brought to the US for trial. Let’s hope that he uses the opportunity to put the Pentagon and the CIA on trial. Yes, I know that whichever federal judge is appointed to preside over the trial will do his best to not permit that to happen, but what’s wrong with a little civil disobedience in what will inevitably be a rigged kangaroo court whose outcome of guilt will be preordained? Let’s not forget, after all, that Assange isn’t the criminal here. He’s the guy who disclosed the criminal conduct to the world through his organization WikiLeaks. That criminal conduct was committed by the Pentagon and the CIA, supported by their enablers in the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. In a just society, the people who disclose criminal conduct would be hailed as heroes and the people who engage in criminal conduct would be going to jail. But in the Bizarro world of a national-security state, it’s the exact opposite — the criminals are the accusers and jailers and the opponents of their criminal conduct are the ones who are punished, tortured, and sent to jail. One of the big things that Assange’s attorneys could do during the trial is to restate and reemphasize every dark-side action in which US personnel engaged that WikiLeaks disclosed, plus ones that WikiLeaks did not disclose. While that wouldn’t necessarily change the outcome of the kangaroo proceeding, at least it would show the world why they are going after Assange. When the US government was converted from its founding structure of a limited-government republic to a national-security state to fight the Cold War against “godless communism” and the Soviet Union as part of the extreme anti-Russia animus of that era, there was an implicit bargain struck between the national-security establishment and American people: the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA would be empowered to engage in totalitarian-like dark-side powers but they would keep their unsavory actions secret from the American people so that people’s consciences wouldn’t be bothered. Assange interfered with that pact by disclosing to the world some of those dark-side practices. For that matter, so did Edward Snowden. For that, they both needed to be punished, if for no other reason than to send a message to everyone else: This is what will happen to you if you reveal our dark-side criminal practices to the world. Be prepared for a judicial spectacle when Assange, who is an Australian citizen, is forcibly brought to the United States for trial for disclosing the criminal conduct of the US government. Just don’t expect anything remotely resembling justice in the process. Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation. Assange Should Put the Pentagon and the CIA on Trial Click on the headline to read the full story from Peace and Prosperity The war in Ukraine has dragged on long enough now to reveal certain clear trajectories. First, two fundamental realities: 1) Putin is to be condemned for launching this war– as is virtually any leader who launches any war. Putin can be termed a war criminal–in good company with George W. Bush who has killed vastly greater numbers than Putin. 2) secondary condemnation belongs to the US (NATO) in deliberately provoking a war with Russia by implacably pushing its hostile military organization, despite Moscow’s repeated notifications about crossing red lines, right up to the gates of Russia. This war did not have to be if Ukranian neutrality, á la Finland and Austria, had been accepted. Instead Washington has called for clear Russian defeat. As the war grinds to a close, where will things go? Contrary to Washington’s triumphalist pronouncements, Russia is winning the war, Ukraine has lost the war. Any longer-term damage to Russia is open to debate. American sanctions against Russia have turned out to be far more devastating to Europe than to Russia. The global economy has slowed and many developing nations face serious food shortages and risk of broad starvation. There are already deep cracks in the European façade of so-called “NATO unity.” Western Europe will increasingly rue the day that it blindly followed the American Pied Piper to war against Russia. Indeed, this is not a Ukrainian-Russian war but an American-Russian war fought by proxy to the last Ukrainian. Contrary to optimistic declarations, NATO may in fact ultimately emerge weakened. Western Europeans will think long and hard about the wisdom and deep costs of provoking deeper long term confrontations with Russia or other “competitors”of the US. Europe will sooner or later return to the purchase of inexpensive Russian energy. Russia lies on the doorstep and a natural economic relationship with Russia will possess overwhelming logic in the end. Europe already perceives the US as a declining power with an erratic and hypocritical foreign policy “vision” premised upon the desperate need to preserve “American leadership” in the world. America’s willingness to go to war to this end is increasingly dangerous to others. Washington has also made it clear that Europe must sign on to an “ideological” struggle against China as well in some kind of protean struggle of “democracy against authoritarianism”. Yet, if anything this is a classic struggle for power across the globe. And Europe can even less afford to blunder into confrontation with China–a “threat” perceived primarily by Washington yet unconvincing to many European states and much of the world.. China’s Belt and Road initiative is perhaps the most ambitious economic and geopolitical project in world history. It is already linking China with Europe by rail and sea. European exclusion from the Belt and Road project will cost it dearly. Note that the Belt and Road runs right through Russia. It is impossible for Europe to close its doors to Russia while maintaining access to this Eurasian mega project. Thus a Europe that perceives the US already in decline has a little incentive to join the bandwagon against China. The end of the Ukraine war will bring serious reconsideration in Europe about the benefits of propping up Washington’s desperate bid to maintain its global hegemony. Europe will undergo increasing identity crisis in determining its future global role. Western Europeans will tire of subservience to the 75 year American domination of European foreign policy. Right now NATO is European foreign policy and Europe remains inexplicably timid in asserting any independent voice. How long will that prevail? We now see how massive US sanctions against Russia, including confiscation of Russian funds in western banks, is causing most of the world to reconsider the wisdom of banking entirely on the US dollar into the future. Diversification of international economic instruments is already in the cards and will only act to weaken Washington’s once dominant economic position and its unilateral weaponisation of the dollar. One of the most disturbing features of this US-Russian struggle in Ukraine has been the utter corruption of independent media. Indeed Washington has won the information and propaganda war hands down, orchestrating all Western media to sing from the same hymnbook in characterizing the Ukraine war. The West has never before witnessed such a blanket imposition by one country’s ideologically-driven geopolitical perspective at home. Nor, of course, is the Russian press to be trusted either. In the midst of a virulent anti-Russian propaganda barrage whose likes I have never seen during my Cold Warrior days, serious analysts must dig deep these days to gain some objective understanding of what is actually taking place in Ukraine. Would that this American media dominance that denies nearly all alternative voices were merely a blip occasioned by Ukraine events. But European elites are perhaps slowly coming to the realization that they have been stampeded into this position of total “unanimity”; cracks are already beginning to appear in the façade of “EU and NATO unity.” But the more dangerous implication is that as we head into future global crises, a genuine independent free press is largely disappearing, falling into the hands of corporate-dominated media close to policy circles , and now bolstered by electronic social media, all manipulating the narrative to its own ends. As we move into a predictably greater and more dangerous crises of instability through global warming, refugee flows, natural disasters, and likely new pandemics, rigorous state and corporate domination of the western media becomes very dangerous indeed to the future of democracy. We no longer hear alternative voices on Ukraine today. Finally, Russia’s geopolitical character has very likely now decisively tilted towards Eurasia. Russians have sought for centuries to be accepted within Europe but have been consistently held at arms length. The West will not discuss a new strategic and security architecture. Ukraine has simply intensified this trend. Russian elites now no longer possess an alternative to accepting that its economic future lies in the Pacific where Vladivostok lies only one or two hours away by air from the vast economies of Beijing, Tokyo, and Seoul. China and Russia have now been decisively pushed ever more closely together specifically out of common concern to block unfettered US freedom of unilateral military and economic intervention around the world. That the US can split US-induced Russian and Chinese cooperation is a fantasy. Russia has scientific brilliance, abundant energy, rich rare minerals and metals, while global warming will increase the agricultural potential of Siberia. China has the capital, the markets, and the manpower to contribute to what becomes a natural partnership across Eurasia. Sadly for Washington, nearly every single one of its expectations about this war are turning out to be incorrect. Indeed the West may come to look back at this moment as the final argument against following Washington’s quest for global dominance into ever newer and more dangerous and damaging confrontations with Eurasia. And most of the rest of the world–Latin America, India, the Middle East and Africa– find few national interests in this fundamentally American war against Russia. Graham E. Fuller is a former Vice Chair of the National Intelligence Council at CIA with responsibility for global intelligence estimates. Reprinted with permission from GrahamFuller.com. Some Hard Thoughts About Post Ukraine Click on the headline to read the full story from Peace and Prosperity |
Ron Paul
|