Poking China: Biden Asks Congress to Approve $1.1 Billion in Weapons for Taiwan
Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute
As Congressional delegations line up to be more provocative toward China while visiting Taiwan, President Biden has announced that he would like to sell $1.1 billion in new weapons to Taiwan. China is not amused. What could go wrong? Also today: the Pentagon has sent all its toys to Ukraine, leaving US troops with "reduced readiness" to defend this country. Look for bigger military budgets in our future! Watch today's Liberty Report: Poking China: Biden Asks Congress to Approve $1.1 Billion in Weapons for Taiwan Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute
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Ukraine is consistently ranked as one of the most corrupt governments in all of Europe. Given that reality, it might not come as much of a surprise that Kiev has no functioning mechanism to track the massive amount of inflows of American weapons and aid into the country. With tens of billions of dollars aid money allocated to Ukraine, and untold billions in military equipment shipped across the border, when US arms and aid enter Ukraine, it enters into a black hole. Given the notorious corruption in Kiev, perhaps that’s all by design. Where do all of the weapons and aid end up, exactly? Nobody knows, not even the inspector general who is supposed to be America’s watchdog on this effort. In a Bloomberg article from the weekend titled, “Torrent of Cash for Ukraine Arms Puts Pentagon Watchdog on Alert,” an amazing bombshell comes via a quote in the story that seems to imply the opposite of the piece’s accountability theme. A Pentagon official, Inspector General Sean O’Donnell, is quoted as saying that Ukrainian officials do their accounting of American equipment and aid with “hand receipts, it’s all paper.” O’Donnell added that he doesn’t “think they have much fidelity” as to where the arms end up. The Bloomberg piece continues: O’Donnell said his office 'learned that maintaining comprehensive contract, grant, and project records is crucial to efficient operations and effective oversight' because a “lack of effective record-keeping had a detrimental effect on many of our Afghanistan and Iraq investigations.' He said his personnel are using 'this lesson when projecting and conducting our extensive body of work on Ukraine.'It’s worth recalling that CBS News recently caved to a pressure campaign & pulled its documentary examining the flow of arms and aid to Ukraine. In the original documentary, CBS News found that only 30% of arms shipped to Ukraine made it to the front lines, and a large chunk of inventory ended up in black markets around the world. The news comes amid reports that active duty American service members are being relinquished of vital munitions — including high-tech weapons that are not easily replaced — so that these arms and ammo can be sent to Ukraine. Ignoring the troublesome supply chain issues, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has insisted upon draining American military stockpiles by a very significant percentage of overall inventory, rendering the US military in a more vulnerable position. The American military is being comprehensively disarmed to prop up the Biden Administration’s proxy war against Russia, and in the process of their pursuit of this skirmish, billions of dollars of weapons and aid are moving into a country with zero accounting or transparency mechanisms. Reprinted with permission from The Dossier. Subscribe to The Dossier here. Black Hole: as billions in American arms and aid enter Ukraine, US officials receive hand written receipts Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute The Ron Paul Institute is holding its annual conference at the Westin Washington Dulles Airport this Saturday, September 3. It stands to be another outstanding one. I have the honor and pleasure of again speaking at it. I will also be speaking at the conference’s program for young scholars the day before. The theme of this year’s conference is “Anatomy of a Police State.” As the conference’s web page states, “Authoritarianism on the march. The police state advances. In near-darkness we find the greatest opportunity to make the case for liberty!” The conference will feature several speakers with whom FFF readers are familiar. John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, is one of them. Practically very week, we feature John’s article in our FFF Daily. Chris Coyne is professor of economics at George Mason University, which has the best overall free-market, Austrian-oriented economics program in the country. Chris has a new book coming out this year entitled, In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace. Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute will be talking about inflation. Plus Dan McAdams, Gary Heavin, Cheryl Chumley, Doug Macgregor, and, of course, Ron Paul, who is a real-life hero for me. Every day, I see countless commentators in the mainstream press focusing on Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and other authoritarian, totalitarian, or communist regimes. (I often wonder why they don’t spend any time on Vietnam.) How much time do I spend focusing on the tyranny of foreign regimes? About 2 percent of my time. Why so little time on them? Because none of them has ever taken away my rights and freedoms. The regime that has taken away my rights and freedoms is the US government. I would rather spend 98 percent of my time focusing on the regime that has taken away my rights and freedoms rather than get distracted by foreign regimes that have taken away the rights and freedoms of their citizenry, After all, I want to be free. I want to live in a free society. Given that that is one of my principal goals in life, why should I spend my time focusing on the lack of freedom in Russia, China, North Korea, and elsewhere? How does that bring me closer to a free society here at home? In fact, it’s definitely in the interests of US officials to have Americans focusing their attention on the tyranny and wrongdoing of foreign regimes, especially Russia and China. The more that Americans focus on those foreign regimes, the less they will focus on the destruction and restoration of their rights and freedoms here at home. The mainstream media, of course, feed into this mindset by devoting 98 percent of their time to foreign regimes, such as Russia and China, and 2 percent (or less) of their time on the tyranny here at home. That’s because (1) they have a blind spot when it comes to US-imposed tyranny; (2) many of them consider themselves to be loyal and patriotic assets of the US national-security establishment; and (3) they are scared to death to expose and criticize US governmental wrongdoing for fear that US officials will do to them what they have done to Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. The Ron Paul Institute gets all this. That’s why the focus of its conference is not on the police states in Russia, China, and North Korea but rather on the police state under which we Americans suffer here at home — and on what we need to do to rid our nation of their terrible scourge and restore liberty to our land. I hope you can attend this important conference. Not only will you watch some great talks, you will also have the opportunity to hang out with people who are as concerned about the plight of our country as you are and who are as committed as you are to getting it back on the right track. You can register here. If you do make it, please come up and say hello. Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation. Are You Attending the RPI Conference This Saturday? Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute At first glance, there would appear to be something wrong with the title of this essay. Surely, the Muslim fatwa against Salman Rushdie (death sentence in his case) for writing The Satanic Verses, a book widely deemed offensive in this community, can have little or nothing to do with Charles Murray in particular and the wokester cancel culture in general? Not so fast. Au contraire, there are indeed similarities between the two, and important ones at that. Both Salman Rushdie and Charles Murray were physically attacked upon the occasion of them giving public speeches on intellectual/artistic matters. Yes, it cannot be denied that no one, at least of yet, has been murdered by the progressives for articulating viewpoints they regard as invasive. But, then, the same can be said of Salman Rushdie. He was recently subjected to a violent attack on him in Chautauqua, near Lake Erie in western New York, at the Chautauqua Institution, a community that offers arts and literary programming; despite that, he is still alive. Moreover, a fatwa is merely a finding emanating from a recognized Islamic authority on a point of Muslim law. By no means do all fatwas call for the death of those judged in this manner. On the other hand victims of the so-called “progressives” have indeed also suffered from violence. Consider the case of Charles Murray. Conservative and libertarian Middlebury College students invited him to speak on his latest book Coming Apart, which subjects the plight of the white working class to the same type of rigorous analysis for which he most famous for, which appeared in his co authored book The Bell Curve. Leftist students at that institution of higher learning found his views odious, and tried to physically intimidate him. He escaped bodily unscathed, but the same cannot be said for Allison Stanger, a Middlebury professor who accompanied him; she had to be hospitalized with a concussion. Not as bad as being knifed in the neck? True enough. But we’re getting there. Here is a very famous statement by New York State Senator Chuck Schumer addressed to two U. S. supreme court judges: "I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions,” concerning Roe v. Wade. Those words were a clear criminal threat, and should have been punished. I want to now use similar words, not as a threat, but as a prediction: if the liberal – left continues down its present path of quelling free speech, they, too, will be “releasing the whirlwind.” The chickens will come home to roost; no, they are already doing so. As we have just seen in the case of one of their own favorites, Salman Rushdie, both sides can victimized by this evil, vicious game. I implore the left, socialist, liberals to cease and desist from this barking mad behavior of theirs. That would include, in addition to cancelling speakers, requiring McCarthyism-type loyalty oaths for hiring, tenure and promotion in academia, safe spaces, microaggressions, promoting the view that all whites are racists and the claim that all racial or sexual diversity is due to racism or sexism to elementary school children and all the other panoply of these modern-day totalitarians. Salman Rushdie, Charles Murray, Fatwa and Cancel Culture Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute
First Afghanistan imploded and now it appears Iraq and Libya are about to follow suit. Syria simmers. The fruits of US interventionism are everywhere the same: chaos and death, not the promised "triumph of peace and democracy." Also today: Facebook exec admits FBI pushed the company to censor "the laptop from hell." Watch today's Liberty Report: Iraq and Libya Imploding - Another 'Successful' US Intervention! Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute I’ve been reading The New Jacobinism: America as Revolutionary State by Claes G. Ryn, first published in 1991. It’s a short but insightful polemic about the pernicious influence of neoconservatism—the “New Jacobinism”—on American affairs. Here is a brief overview: This strongly and lucidly argued book gave early warning of a political-intellectual movement that was spreading in the universities, media, think-tanks, and foreign-policy and national security establishment of the United States. That movement claims that America represents universal principles and should establish armed global hegemony. Claes G. Ryn demonstrates that, although this ideology is often called “conservative” or “neoconservative,” it has more in common with the radical Jacobin ideology of the French Revolution of 1789. The French Jacobins selected France as savior of the world. The new Jacobins have anointed the United States. The author explains that the new Jacobinism manifests a precipitous decline of American civilization and that it poses a serious threat to traditional American constitutionalism and liberty. The book’s analyses and predictions have proved almost eerily prophetic.“Prophetic,” indeed, for two reasons. First, it was published a decade before “President George W. Bush made neo-Jacobin ideology the basis of US foreign policy,” transforming America into the spearhead of the “global democratic revolution” with all the blood and tears that has entailed. Second, Ryn’s close encounter with neoconservatism helps to make sense of certain intellectual trends today. The first wave of neoconservatives were liberals and anti-Stalinist leftists who defected to the camp of American conservatism in the 1960s and 1970s. In time, they would exert tremendous influence over the movement, most notably—or notoriously—by championing a hawkish foreign policy, which Ryn describes as neo-Jacobin. Key figures in the early days included Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, both of whose waddling spawn might be their most heinous crimes. Another important, albeit adjacent figure, is Allan Bloom, author of the 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. As a critique of the academic left, it impressed conservatives then and remains a key text today. Ryn, however, immediately noticed serious red flags. To be sure, Bloom insisted he was “not a conservative—neo or paleo.” Nevertheless, his polemic against left-wing intellectual trends was essentially an early articulation of neoconservatism, its pages being marked with the discrediting of tradition and history that characterizes the movement. Ryn was one of the few people who understood its real meaning. A sign of the great and growing influence of the intellectual and political movement of concern to me was the enormous attention paid to The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (1930-1992). . . . . To many, Bloom’s book appeared to offer a conservative philosophy of education, but, to me, it seemed to require no special powers of discernment to recognize that, on the whole, the book was really a defense of the Enlightenment mind, which Bloom rather loosely and arbitrarily identified with the American mind. This was the mind whose “closing” he bemoaned. His book exhibited just the intellectual pattern of discrediting history and tradition that has been discussed. . . . Bloom sought to detach Americans from their distinctive historically evolved heritage, formed by classical, Christian, and British tradition. America was great not because of what that history had made it, but because America was founded on universally valid principles that belonged to all humanity.For Bloom, as with the neoconservatives, America is chiefly an idea rather than a real place and product of a unique history and particular people. And it is this abstraction that provides the theoretical basis for “exporting” the “American idea” by force to the world—at the expense of flesh and blood Americans. This view reaches its apogee in Bill Kristol’s suggestion that “lazy” pockets of the white working class should be replaced with “new Americans.” To be an American, after all, is merely to subscribe to an idea composed of a vague set of principles simple enough to stuff in a Happy Meal and distribute to illegal aliens as they cross the border. With these points in mind, Ryn was invited to contribute to a symposium in Modern Age on Bloom’s bestseller the year it was published. I did not consider the book philosophically weighty or otherwise impressive; the huge attention that it was receiving was not due to its intrinsic merit but to its appealing to a large and growing part of the opinion-molding establishment. The celebration of Bloom was symptomatic of the intellectual trends of the time. Bloom did not escape criticism, but he had a large and extensive cheering section. . . . [Bloom’s book] contained ideas that were hard to reconcile with central features of the Western heritage, including the American political tradition. Many read it carelessly and selectively, paying attention primarily to its criticism of intellectually placid students addicted to drugs and bad music, of sycophantic, trendy professors, and of cowardly academic administrators. But only in these limited ways and only as compared to the extreme radicalism that the book criticized might the book appear to have a conservative aspect.To Bloom, “the essence of philosophy was the rejection of historically formed beliefs and the abolition of all authority in favor of reason.” That kind of thinking tended in the direction of ideological uniformity, toward a Rousseauian totalitarianism. But it was the next part of Ryn’s account that really caught my eye, because it gets at the “why” that helps explain the warm reception Bloom’s otherwise radical book received among conservatives. To the extent that my article [in Modern Age] was noticed, purported conservatives seemed merely puzzled or to regard me as a spoilsport. Why question this celebrated critic of leftist trends in education? In one way I was not surprised by this reaction. Intellectuals are much like other people: most are followers who find reasons to assent at the moment. It was also obvious that the forces lionizing Bloom were capable of rewarding sympathizers.In short, the right was willing to overlook Bloom’s radicalism because it had been easily wooed by celebrity—by the cachet of a prominent someone who had said some of what they had been saying about the left, despite fundamental and, indeed, irreconcilable differences. Ryn took it as a sign of neoconservatism’s ideological ascendancy, propelled by striving social climbers and sympathizers. Ironically, praise for his critique came from what was at the time developing into the “premier neoconservative think tank,” the American Enterprise Institute. AEI had sought to boost its academic reputation by attracting distinguished scholars. Perhaps most prominent was Robert Nisbet, formerly the Schweitzer Professor at Columbia. But Nisbet obviously did not fit in very well. He called my article on Bloom “a superb indictment” and wrote me twice about it. He said, “Your review of Bloom is by far the best I have seen.” Later he added, “It pins [Bloom’s] Rousseauism/totalitarianism right to the wall. . . . Thank you!”Still, the neoconservative force with which Bloom has been associated would influence the right profoundly. I see the same tendency alive and well today among many conservatives who are eager to celebrate “disruptors” they perceive as having social capital or access to new social scenes, like Bari Weiss and others. Every quasi-dissenter is embraced with open arms by conservatives who are eager to compromise to accommodate their new friends—a relationship that is rarely reciprocal. Too many conservatives are never happier than when garbled variations of right-wing points are mouthed on “Real Time with Bill Maher” by those who consider genuine conservatism the refuge of rubes and reprobates. Never mind that they often attack these positions before embracing qualified and sanitized versions of them. But what else might explain this curious weakness on the right? Perhaps it is a confusion that arises from the fracas, a cloudy distortion of where and what the center is today. If the left has effectively achieved cultural hegemony in this country, which it has, then the cultural “center” is not midway between right and left but left of center. Take Weiss, who facilitated an attack on yours truly by British neoconservative Douglas Murray. Like her anti-Stalinist predecessors, Weiss has broken with the “woke” left. But does that make her an ally to the right? Peruse National Review’s coverage of Weiss, and you’ll get that impression. Indeed, a recent piece in the magazine lionized her and boosted Senator Tim Scott—one of the worst Republicans on issues like law and order—against the New York Times. There is one sure loser in a fight between Weiss-Scott and the Times: the right. A week before that article in National Review, Weiss’ publication ran a story by Peter Meijer, a moderate Republican, complaining about the Democratic Party’s funding of his “far-right” opponent. Democrats supported John Gibbs, who is to Meijer’s right, because they hoped Gibbs might be easier to defeat come midterms. Gibbs ultimately beat Meijer. But more to the point: Weiss has wasted no time since “leaving the left” to start policing the boundaries of the right. Because Weiss has not fundamentally moved, she simply pines for a stage in the revolution that suits her comfort level better. As Trotskyites, those who would become the first neoconservatives wanted to spread “socialism.” After their transformation, the missionary impulse remained and switched to promoting “capitalism” and “democracy,” but as Ryn notes: “Capitalism, though cruel, was, in Marx’s view, a highly progressive force” because it undermines old traditions and social structures all the same. Similarly, people like Weiss yearn merely for a liberalism that served as the precursor to the woke ideology they now condemn. Here is an illustrative lament from a typical Weiss reader commenting “on the ideological takeover of Hollywood” by wokeness: I have been running the Oscar website AwardsDaily.com since 1999. I was one of the leaders pushing for inclusion and diversity starting back in 2001 when Halle Berry became the first black actress (and since, only black actress) to win in the category. It is hard to overstate just how hard it it [sic] was for actors, writers and directors to penetrate the white wall. I felt it was my moral duty to change that. But then Trump was elected. Then the community and the left became locked in a kind of mass hysteria.The author goes on to decry the Democratic Party for exploiting identity politics and blasts “outrage culture” for stifling the arts. Utterly absent, however, is any reflection on the role people like her and Weiss played in bringing us to this point—on their making the “explosion of woke” a certainty when they fashioned dynamite out of “inclusion and diversity” to knock down the “white wall.” Don’t they see that they helped set the stage for this moment? Woke ideology is not an aberration born of hysteria as these people pretend; it is the violent resolution of liberalism’s contradictions, the gunshot that ends the tension between individualism on the one hand and social justice on the other. The real enemy, moreover, is still the reactionary, who reaches the height of his villainy in holding woke “McCarthy trials,” as the commentor puts it. But McCarthy was the good guy, as any genuine rightist knows. The conservative insists that an alliance and compromise with these neo-Jacobins is necessary to win the culture war. Access to their audiences justifies the cost because we can “red pill” them. But that, of course, is incorrect. People who thought the main problem with Hollywood until recently was white racism are never going to come around to the right’s point of view, no matter how uncomfortable they are with the left for the moment. And while the conservative is willing to be amenable to change, these castaways are not. Instead, they become more tribal and territorial, convinced that holding the (left-of-) “center” places them on the right side of history. My takeaway from Ryn’s gloss on the rise of neoconservatism is that the right should strive to be more jealous of its camp. It should want to be as ruthless as neoconservatives in exerting their influence and as willful as the left in asserting its vision. What it shouldn’t be is a refuge for yesterday’s radicals who are frightened by the monsters and maladies they helped create. Reprinted with permission from Contra. Subscribe to Contra here. Keeping Out the Jacobins Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute Last week, President Biden announced he is creating a new program forgiving 10,000 dollars of student loan debt for those with income under 125,000 dollars a year. The amount rises to 20,000 dollars for borrowers who are Pell Grant recipients. Biden flip-flopped on the issue as he previously denied that the president has the authority to create a new student loan debt forgiveness program. He now claims a 2003 law allowing the Education Department to waive or modify provisions of federal student financial assistance programs to help students affected by war, other military operations, or a national emergency gives him the authority. Biden says debt forgiveness is necessary because of a continuing covid national emergency. It seems odd that Biden would claim covid is a national emergency when even the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has stopped recommending lockdowns, masks, and “social distancing.” A broad student loan forgiveness program also does not seem to fit the purpose of this statute, which was to provide student loan forgiveness for military personal, first responders, and others engaged in fighting the “war on terror.” Another basis offered for the president having the power to cancel the loans is a provision in the 1965 Higher Education Act that gives the Education Department limited authority to modify or forgive student loan debt. Given the Supreme Court’s recent decision narrowing the scope of a federal agency’s ability to unilaterally enact major new policies based on limited grants of authority, it is a definite possibility that the courts will overturn the student loan forgiveness program. If the courts uphold the president’s action, then as many of 43 million Americans could have significant amounts, or even all, of their student debt forgiven. Of course, the debt does not go away; instead, the “forgiven” debt will simply be added to the national debt to be paid by the taxpayers either in the form of direct taxes or the hidden inflation tax. Thus, these loans will be paid off in part by taxpayers who did not go to college, paid their own way through school, or have already paid off their student loans. Since those with college degrees tend to earn more over time than those without them, this program redistributes wealth from lower to higher income Americans. The student loan forgiveness will add between 300 and 500 billion dollars to the national debt. This is a greater increase in debt than the supposed “deficit reduction,” which consists of tax increase and expanding the IRS, contained in the phony Inflation Reduction Act. President Biden also announced he is extending the student loans payment moratorium through the end of the year. “Temporary” federal benefits are rarely, if ever, truly temporary. When the time comes for the moratorium to expire, Congress will almost certainly extend it in response to pressure from constituents who benefit from the program, which includes colleges and universities in Congress members’ states and districts. The expectation that more student loan debt will be forgiven will also encourage more students to take out loans and will give colleges a new incentive to raise their tuition. This will raise the cost of the student loan and loan forgiveness programs. Increasing debt caused by expanding student loans and loan forgiveness will increase pressure on the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low, leading to continued price inflation and an eventual major economic crisis. A step in avoiding this and reversing course is convincing a critical mass of people to understand that the welfare-warfare state and the fiat money system that underlies it are impractical and immoral. Biden’s Student Debt Forgiveness Scheme is Unforgivable Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute The US government recently disclosed its latest strategy toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The document, while not showing surprises or changes from previous policy permutations, is eloquent on the US real priorities in the continent. For the US, its geopolitical agenda based on unipolar world hegemony is far more important that the issues that really matter Africa and that would allow a viable strategic partnership, namely economic prosperity and political stability. The pecking order of US goals is self-evident while reading the paper, with the fostering of “open societies” and delivering “democratic and security dividends” taking priority over mundane matters such as health, economic recovery, and environmental protection. To understand what promoting open societies and democracy really means for the US, and notwithstanding the passage of time, NATO’s origins and its former support of the Portuguese colonial wars in Africa is a valid starting point. NATO’s 1949 treaty preamble expressed its member states’ intention to ‘safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law’. With US backing Portugal, a NATO founding member, successfully blocked efforts of some Nordic member countries to confront its repressive colonial policies in the early 1970s. Under US leadership, NATO had no qualms dismissing its idealistic preamble by supporting the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, a straight residue of Europe’s fascist era. In the context of the Cold War, the Nixon administration did not shy away from considering Portuguese dominance of its colonies as a stabilising force in the region. Back to 2022, it is ominous how the new US strategy document quotes Freedom House - a Washington based US government funded organization – on its assertion that only eight Sub-Saharan Africa countries are nowadays to be considered free. If this is the case and given that “fostering freer societies” is the main US goal in Africa, it then perhaps appears inevitable that the US will need to confront or even subvert the remaining 42 African governments to honour its commitment, which inevitably brings back memories of recent US actions in Iraq and Libya. Relative to Russia and China, the US has a hard act to follow in Africa. Beyond NATO’s supportive role in the suppression of African liberation movements, the US delayed response in the fight against South African apartheid is still remembered in the continent. Contemporary racism, discrimination and police brutality against African Americans, a fact surprisingly acknowledged in the strategy paper, is a sad reminder of the realities of US society which do not go unnoticed in Africa. Russia and China have a cleaner slate in the continent by not having been part of the scramble for Africa at the end of the XIX century. Both also played a crucial role in support of the African liberation movements in the 1970s. Nowadays, Russia and China seem to approach their relationships with Africa with more pragmatism and respect than the US. It is revealing for instance how the next Russia-Africa Union summit is scheduled to take place in Ethiopia, while the similar US-Africa gathering will happen in Washington D.C. Africa’s pressing matters are political stability and economic development and both Russia and China can play a key role in helping achieve these objectives. Given its demographics in terms of fast population growth and urbanization, political stability is critical for Africa’s sustained economic prosperity. As Africa’s largest arm dealer, Russia’s role has been demonized in the West, but any criticism needs to be placed in the context of the US ongoing push for an African political architecture tailored to its own geopolitical needs. Concerning China, it is by far Africa’s leading financial and trading partner and will continue as such as the US economic role in world affairs erodes. The Ukraine war is a showcase on where US priorities stand. Food insecurity is the most troubling matter in Africa as the UN recently confirmed that 18 out of 23 hotspot countries suffering famine are in this continent. The war has contributed to disrupt food access primarily because of early export restrictions on Russian agricultural exports – by far Africa’s largest grain provider – and also due to the blockade of Ukrainian exports and its mining in the Black Sea, a situation that improved since July as Russia agreed to allow Ukrainian exports of agricultural products from Black Sea ports in exchange of the easing of US-led export sanctions on Russian similar items, the latter a major U turn on US policy. Since the beginning of the war the US has used propaganda and intimidation in its efforts to align African countries behind its pro-Ukraine policy to ensure Russian sanctions have a bite. The US ambassador to the UN recently warned in Uganda against buying Russian oil and natural gas mentioning that African countries were “only allowed” to buy their agricultural products, prompting the South African Minister of International Relations Pandor, in front of US Secretary of State Blinken, to accuse the West of taking a patronizing and bullying attitude toward Africa. Unsurprisingly, most African countries have been unenthusiastic to US attempts to condemn Russia at the UN in connection with the war. US bombastic support of Ukraine has also had a distorting impact on humanitarian and emergency relief for Africa, which according to the UN has dwindled while there is excess of money for programs helping Ukrainians. A US perennial mantra has been that democracy leads to stability and peaceful societies while so-called weaker democracies make countries vulnerable to extremism and foreign interference. Paradoxically, the US traditional tools of statecraft include regime change, subversion and instability. Due to naivety, relative statehood inexperience vis-à-vis Russia and China, or perhaps just because of sheer imperial ambition, the US has historically been incapable to understand that each society has its own path towards progress, often different from the one followed in the XVIII century by thirteen small and homogeneous English colonies in North America. There is no pre-conceived road to reach prosperity and justice and countries that respect themselves will always abhor the imposition of Western templates to achieve this worthy goals. The Emperor has no Clothes: US Strategy for Africa Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute The US Army reports it is having some serious problems when it comes to recruiting new soldiers. Last month, according to the AP: “Army officials … said the service will fall about 10,000 soldiers short of its planned end strength for this fiscal year, and prospects for next year are grimmer.” The army is not alone in missing recruitment goals: Senior Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps leaders have said they are hopeful they will meet or just slightly miss their recruiting goals for this year. But they said they will have to dip into their pool of delayed entry applicants, which will put them behind as they begin the next recruiting year.In fact, recruitment prospects are so grim that 2022 is looking to be the worst recruiting year for the army since 1973, when the US military transitioned to an all-volunteer—i.e., nonconscripted—force. The days of the post-9/11 surge in enlistments are long gone, and noted for two lost wars in recent years, the US military now faces a new environment of declining public support. Moreover, with its recent drive to showcase its commitment to so-called woke policy goals, the military may be alienating conservatives—a group that has long been a reliable source of recruits and political support. Ultimately, of course, the military can always get more troops by raising pay and lowering standards. The latter requires only a policy change. And, given the federal government’s ability to essentially print money, the former is unlikely to be an insurmountable problem for the Pentagon either. The good news, however, is that the military’s recruiting woes are likely yet another signal of declining support for the federal government and its institutions. The federal government has benefited immensely from the fact that the military has long been one of the most popular institutions within the central government. Even as many Americans claim they distrust the government or oppose “the bureaucracy,” widespread support for the government military bureaucracy has long helped to prop up the legitimacy of federal institutions. If falling enlistments are an indication of declining faith in the military overall, that would be a positive development, indeed. The Economics of Recruitment As has often been the case in the past, the military is now struggling to find enough willing recruits in an environment of low unemployment. After all, many recruits are motivated at least in part by promises of steady income, veterans’ benefits, and tuition reimbursement. These benefits look relatively less attractive when private-sector jobs are easy to find. As a result, the military has been “throwing cash” at the problem. All the services are now “leaning on record-level enlistment and retention bonuses” to attract recruits, with higher bonuses for riskier or more skill-intensive work. Military recruiting efforts, however, have long sought to “subsidize” salaries by promising psychic profits in the form of positive emotions obtained by fulfilling one’s supposed patriotic duty. Another benefit suggested by recruiters has been an alleged opportunity for “adventure.” Historically, recruitment efforts have relied on promising a variety of nonmonetary forms of “payment.” In their analysis of military recruitment efforts, Peter Padilla and Mary Riege Laner identified at least four different types of benefits promised to potential recruits. These include patriotism, adventure/challenge, job/career/education, social status, and money. Emphasis has differed based on social trends (such as the prevalence of antiwar sentiment) and, of course, on the personal preferences of individual recruits. The military, in any case, has recognized the need to appeal to all these aspects to meet recruitment goals. Even when military pay is generous, it is still necessary to get potential recruits to accept a job in which one cannot legally quit. Moreover, if a large number of potential recruits view the military as pursuing values and goals contrary to their own, monetary rewards would have to be raised quite high to overcome nonmonetary concerns. Another strategy that can increase recruitment is to lower (or change) standards for new recruits. This has been done in various ways. For example, as tattoos have become more fashionable among middle-class youth, the military has granted many more waivers. The Air Force is now considering allowing members to grow beards. These changes, however, are based largely on appearance. Broader changes that would qualify as truly lowering standards include efforts to lower physical fitness requirements for women, older members, and marijuana users. For more than a decade now, the army has also been accepting more and more recruits with lower scores on aptitude tests and with no high school diploma. Of course, there is no “correct” number of employees for the armed forces, and there is no functioning marketplace in the provision of “defense.” The size of the US military is arbitrarily determined by Congress and the White House based on political interests and goals. The military is nonetheless partly constrained by market realities, and by the subjective values of potential workers. Support for the Military Is Falling All else being equal, however, falling enlistment is evidence that workers are less interested in serving in the military outside mere economic considerations. This is reflected in the survey data suggesting that the military’s reputation among members of the general public has declined significantly. For example, as the Military Times reported last year, “About 56 percent of Americans surveyed said they have ‘a great deal of trust and confidence’ in the military, down from 70 percent in 2018.” Moreover, according to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who believe that military officers “have high ethics” dropped 10 percent from 2017 to 2021. As has long been the case, the military remains among the more trusted institutions in the US, but, as even the relentless pro-military Heritage Foundation admits: A more candid appraisal, however, would see this for what it is: a vote of declining confidence by America in its oldest and heretofore most trusted institution.More worrisome still—from the Pentagon’s perspective—is that much of this decline is coming from a drop in conservative and Republican support. Gallup reports that in its survey, military officers’ “image among the GOP is now the lowest Gallup has recorded since the first reading, in 2002, a period spanning Republican and Democratic presidencies.” Moreover, political rhetoric among many conservatives has decidedly turned against the Pentagon. This was noted last year in Foreign Policy: The long Republican romance with the military appears to have finally come to an end. And as conservative politicians and pundits have put the US military—and especially the top brass—in their cross hairs, their supporters and listeners have taken note. The consequences for the US military could be dire.Part of this is apparently due to the growing feeling among conservatives that military bureaucracy has committed itself to so-called woke politics. From Tucker Carlson to Ted Cruz to Sabastian Gorka, conservatives apparently are not nearly as enamored with the US military establishment as they once were. As Tucker Carlson complained back in May: Most of the generals we see quoted in the press seem more committed to meeting some counterproductive diversity goal—hiring more pregnant Air Force pilots, assembling the world’s first transgender SEAL team—than on defending the United States.The Effect on Enlistments These trends among historical supporters of the military may be finally showing up in recruitment realities. It’s difficult to directly measure the ideological leanings of new recruits. After all, enlistment forms don’t ask for one’s political and ideological beliefs. But we can indirectly make some guesses about who is joining the military based on where most of the recruits are coming from. For example, as the New York Times reported in 2018, military recruiters rely heavily on new recruits from the nation’s most politically conservative region—the South—to meet recruiting goals: In 2019, Fayetteville, N.C., which is home to Fort Bragg, provided more than twice as many military enlistment contracts as Manhattan, even though Manhattan has eight times as many people. Many of the new contracts in Fayetteville were soldiers signing up for second and third enlistments…. Military service was once spread fairly evenly—at least geographically—throughout the nation because of the draft. But after the draft ended in 1973, enlistments shifted steadily south of the Mason-Dixon line. The military’s decision to close many bases in Northern states where long winters limited training only hastened the trend.The significance of geography for new recruits can also be seen in the fact that politically conservative regions also tend to grant military recruiters better access to local schools. As school districts in many left-leaning urban areas restricted recruiters' access to high school students in recent years, this has further increased the reliance on recruits from promilitary suburbs, exurbs, and rural towns. These are areas that tend to be more politically conservative. Moreover, new recruits lopsidedly come from families with a history of military service. While the extent to which military personnel support Republicans has been overstated, the military does nonetheless lean conservative. All this would suggest that new recruits come both from households and regions that lean conservative themselves. In other words, the military has becoming increasingly reliant on a dwindling number of communities and families. The military brass admits this model is not sustainable. The larger issue here is not whether or not the military can meet recruitment goals without big changes to current standards and pay. After all, if the economy continues to weaken and unemployment rises, this could bail out recruiters in a big way. Rather, the enlistment situation helps to illustrate what may be a developing and hopeful trend in which many conservatives are finally abandoning their long love affair with the US regime through its military institutions. Reprinted with permission from Mises.org. Falling Military Recruitment Is Another Sign of Waning Faith in the Regime Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute
In a blatantly unconstitutional move, President Biden yesterday announced that his Administration would be obligating upwards of half a trillion dollars - or more - to "forgive" student loans in households making $125K per year or less. Good thing the Inflation Reduction Act was passed or we might be in real trouble! Also today: Did you know the US was still occupying and bombing Syria? Watch today's Liberty Report: Lawless! Biden Side-steps Constitution In Promise To Write Off Student Loans Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute |
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