Apartheid Australia: Hell On Earth
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Although the Australian government has reluctantly abandoned it's "zero-Covid" policy, which they admit did not work, the same authoritarian mindset dominates its new strategy. If you don't take the health policy steps demanded by the government, you will be essentially under house arrest "indefinitely." If police brutality we have seen in Australia recently were taking place in any country on the US "enemies" list, there would be sanctions and even threats of a "liberation." Watch today's Liberty Report: Apartheid Australia: Hell On Earth Click on the headline to read the full story from
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The New York Times recently reported that the FBI had an undercover informant amid the protestors that entered the US Capitol on Jan. 6 who had related to them his knowledge of the demonstrators’ plans beforehand and his observations of events in the building in real time. The informant was a genuine member of the Proud Boys, one of the groups the feds are trying to charge with conspiracy to overthrow the government. According to the Times, the informant told the FBI in advance that there was no plan by his colleagues to disrupt the government. He also reported violence and destruction in the Capitol to his FBI handler as it was happening, and the FBI did nothing timely to stop it. The presence of the informant as a de facto federal agent at the scene before, during and after the commission of what the government considers to be serious felonies raises serious constitutional questions about the FBI’s behavior. The feds have not revealed the existence or identity of this informant; rather, the Times’ reporters found out about him and found another person to corroborate what they learned that he did. Can the government insert a person into a group under criminal investigation — or “flip” a person who is already in the group — and use him for surveillance without a search warrant? And, when they do this, must prosecutors tell defense attorneys about their informant, particularly if his knowledge and observations are inconsistent with the government’s version of events? Here is the backstory. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution was written to protect the quintessentially American right to be left alone. It was enacted in the aftermath of egregious violations of colonial privacy by British soldiers and agents. The typical violation of privacy came in the form of British soldiers knocking on the door of a colonial home — or breaking it down — bearing a general warrant. A general warrant, issued by a secret court in London or by colonial courts here whose judges were loyal to the king, permitted the bearer to search wherever he wished and seize whatever he found. Fair use excerpt. Read the whole article here. What Did the FBI Know? Click on the headline to read the full story from After three years seeking the extradition from Canada of Chinese business executive Meng Wanzhou, the Justice Department has thrown in the towel by agreeing to a deal that enabled Meng to return freely to China. Meng had been under three years of house arrest in Canada, as the Justice Department ferociously sought her extradition. Upon her return to China, Meng was given a hero’s welcome. According to CNN, “tens of millions of people tuned in to watch state media’s online livestream of her arrival.” The Communist Party’s People’s Daily hailed Meng’s return as “a major victory of the Chinese people.” And there is no question but that Meng and China ended up victorious in this fight. Meng’s release without a guilty plea and a conviction constitutes an implicit acknowledgement that US officials should never have brought the prosecution in the first place. They took three years out of this person’s life, not to mention saddling American taxpayers with an idiotic and ultimately failed extradition attempt. Meng’s purported crime? That she and her company Huawei had violated US sanctions on Iran! Yes, you read that right. The US government has imposed sanctions on Iran, which target the Iranian people with death and suffering as a way to force their governmental officials to comply with the dictates of US officials. What do US sanctions on Iran have to do with China? Or to put it another way, why should China or any other country have to comply with deadly sanctions that the US government has imposed on the Iranian people? Exactly! But in the minds of US officials, every country in the world is required to obey any sanctions that the US Empire decides to impose on foreigners. If a citizen of any country dares to violate such sanctions, he will be taken captive and held for extradition back to the United States to stand trial for this heinous offense. In his July 1821 address to Congress extolling America’s founding foreign policy of non-interventionism, John Quincy Adams said that if America were ever to abandon its founding foreign policy, the US government would begin behaving like the dictator of the world. The US prosecution of Meng is a perfect example of what Adams was talking about. The US Empire expects everyone in the world to comply with its immoral and evil policy of sanctions, which, like terrorism, targets innocent people with death and suffering as a way to achieve a political goal. US officials and the US mainstream press are making a big deal out of a statement that Meng made as part of the plea bargain in which she acknowledged that her company violated the US sanctions on Iran. Big deal! Why should Huawei, Meng, or any other foreign person or entity be forced to comply with an evil and immoral policy of the US government? Indeed, why should any American citizen have to comply with an evil and immoral policy of their own government? Immediately after Canada’s arrest of Meng, China arrested two Canadian men and kept them incarcerated while the Meng extradition proceedings were pending. While China steadfastly maintained that these arrests and incarcerations were unrelated to Meng’s arrest, as soon as Meng was released so were the two Canadian men. The US mainstream press is condemning China’s “hostage diplomacy.” But in their unswerving allegiance to the US national-security state, they are unable to see that it is the US government’s evil and immoral system of sanctions that is the root of the problem. Moreover, they cannot see how foreign interventionism actually makes American citizens less safe. After all, China is a communist regime — a brutal communist regime. There is no such thing as due process of law in China. If officials wish to take someone into custody, torture him, and incarcerate him indefinitely, they can do it. The entire country is run on the same principles that the Pentagon and the CIA run their torture and prison center in Cuba. So, why should anyone be surprised when the Chinese communists conduct themselves like communists? When a foreign regime takes a prominent Chinese citizen into custody on ludicrous criminal charges, it is as certain as thunder following lightning that China will do the same to citizens of that country. In fact, if Canada had ultimately shipped Meng to the United States, you can bet your bottom dollar that there would have been some American businessmen taken into custody in China on bogus charges and kept in jail for as long as Meng was kept in jail. It’s just the way life works. It’s a perfect example of how the US Empire makes American travelers unsafe with its policy of foreign interventionism. In the wake of the Afghanistan debacle and, now, the implicit acknowledgement of the wrongful prosecution of Meng Wanzhou, it’s time for Americans to do some serious soul-searching about US foreign policy. Is interventionism worth it? Do Americans really want to risk being incarcerated in foreign countries because US officials have imposed a worldwide prohibition against violating sanctions on other countries? More important, should our government be targeting innocent people with death and suffering as a way to achieve a political goal? I say: Let’s restore our nation’s founding system of non-interventionism. And let’s do it now, not later. Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation. US Officials Free Meng Wanzhou Click on the headline to read the full story from
Former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo has responded to a recent Yahoo News investigation detailing Trump Administration plans to kidnap or kill Wikileaks founder Julian Assange that he makes "no apologies" for whatever measure his agency planned to take to safeguard "sensitive information." Also today: new public opinion data carries some bad news for President Biden. Watch today's Liberty Report: Pompeo: 'No Apologies' For Alleged Plan To Kill Assange Click on the headline to read the full story from
New York Governor Kathy Hochul went into a bizarre rant in front of a church congregation, shifting a public health problem into one of religious significance. Is this starting to look like a cult instead of science? Also, Gov. Hochul signs executive order to fire thousands of nurses - amidst a critical shortage of nurses in NY. Make sense? Watch today's Liberty Report: NY Gov Unhinged: 'Vaccines Are From God...Be My Apostles!" Click on the headline to read the full story from US interventions abroad in the postwar period have created nothing but problems, problems regularly made worse by later attempts to solve the problems created by those previous interventions. While one can find innumerable instances of these failures in South and Central America, Europe, Africa, or Southeast Asia, the US interventions in Central Asia and the Middle East over the past forty years stand among the most illuminating case studies of this phenomenon. They illustrate the full folly, arrogance, and immorality of the US foreign policy establishment in a way perhaps unparalleled since its involvement in Indochina (approximately 1950–73), and should dissuade anyone from believing that the foreign policy, security, and military establishment ever learn any lessons or will “get it right next time.” In 1990, just months after intervening in Panama to remove former CIA asset Manuel Noriega from power, on the other side of the world another former instrument of US power, Saddam Hussein, caught Washington’s attention when he invaded Kuwait. Saddam had been cultivated by the CIA through the 1960s and '70s, and when he took power in Iraq launched a war against the recently liberated Iranians with US backing—the Iranians having finally thrown off the despotic US puppet regime installed following the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup against Mohammad Mossadegh. The war, which killed over a million and lasted a decade, left Iraq in serious debt to the Sunni kingdoms of the Arabian Peninsula. The Kuwaitis, not being repaid fast enough, subsequently began slant drilling Iraqi oil fields. Saddam, of course, called Washington to complain. However, with events in Europe preoccupying his attention, George H.W. Bush had initially signaled Saddam to deal with the issue. After making more complaints and the Kuwaitis refusing to pick up the phone, Saddam invaded. Whether Bush had been playing a game with Saddam or just hadn’t thought things through, Saddam’s invasion was totally unacceptable to the Saudis. Hurriedly assembling his forces and marshalling his international backers, Bush launched the first Iraq war just months later. With Saddam easily driven back into Iraq, the elder Bush initially encouraged the majority Iraqi Shia and Kurds to rise up against the Iraqi dictator. But, belatedly realizing that such a move would serve only to empower Iran, he betrayed them. Leaving intact crucial military assets, US forces stood down as Saddam killed an estimated hundred thousand Iraqi Shia and Kurds. Under Bill Clinton, Iraq was left to descend further into poverty and death under a crippling regime of sanctions put in place by the US that resulted in the deaths of over a half million children under the age of five. Even though the sanctions accomplished nothing else, then secretary of state Madeleine Albright was proud to declare later that she would do the same thing again if presented the chance. Critically, US troops and bases established during the first Iraq war, also known as Desert Storm, were left in place despite Dick Cheney, then Bush Sr.’s secretary of defense, declaring in the run-up to the war that the bases would be removed once Saddam had been driven out. Over the next decade, until they finally succeeded in slamming a pair of planes into New York City skyscrapers, the presence of US troops and bases in the Islamic holy land served as a magnet for repeated Sunni extremist attacks, including a car bombing and the Khobar Tower attacks, which killed over two dozen Americans. Elsewhere, in an attempt to give the Soviets their own Vietnam, a series of US administrations, beginning with Jimmy Carter, funded and aided the mujahideen in Afghanistan. When the war ended, with the Soviets defeated and the US establishment no longer interested, the already poor country, which had suffered over 2 million civilian deaths, was further reduced to poverty and misery as the factions the US had variously supported descended into a fractious civil war that killed further tens of thousands, created a half million refugees, and opened up space for terrorist organizations to set up shop. The Pashtun Taliban, a creation of long-standing US “allies” in the Pakistani intelligence services, eventually succeeded in taking control of most of the country, and were still trying to dislodge former US-backed warlords in the northeast of the country when 9/11 happened. Though there was no evidence linking the Taliban to al-Qaeda’s attacks (and in fact the strongest evidence for outside support has long pointed to the Saudis, specifically Prince Bandar bin Sultan), the second Bush administration conflated the two in order to justify its 2001 invasion. Even more egregious lies were propagated in an attempt to legitimize the later invasion of Iraq. As early as 1998, key figures in the second Bush administration, such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, were planning for Iraq war 2. As part of their Project for the New American Century, they plotted to invade not only Iraq and Afghanistan, but also Syria—all in order to encircle Iran, the one country in the region that had successfully thrown off the US imperial yoke, and whose real sin, despite decades of propaganda, was thinking that Iranian natural resources were for Iranian enrichment, not Western oil interests. In both cases, these manufactured wars of choice were utterly bungled—resulting in the construction of a US taxpayer-funded kleptocracy in Kabul hated by virtually everyone in the country and a Shia-dominated Iraq aligned with Iran. In the first case, the war in Afghanistan was essentially decided in favor of the Taliban’s return no later than 2006, while in the latter, it led directly to the rise of ISIS. For having made a horrible mess of things, empowering Iran, the very country that was ultimately to be reabsorbed into the American sphere, Barack Obama continued George W. Bush’s policy of backing Sunni extremist group elsewhere in the Middle East in order to satisfy Riyadh’s fury over Bush’s almost unfathomable hubris and stupidity. So it happened that at the same time the Saudis were backing the Sunni terrorists in Iraq, the same ones killing US soldiers, the US began backing those terrorists’ allies in Iran, Libya, and Syria—in the last case including Jabhat al-Nusra, literally al-Qaeda by another name. Who benefitted from these policies is obvious: the pillars of the military-industrial complex, Raytheon, Lockheed, General Dynamics, and General Atomics; the major US banks, who own the majority of their shares as well as buy and service the US debt; and the various outlets and think tanks of the foreign policy establishment—Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, the Rand Corporation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the American Enterprise Institute, to name just a few—all of which make a living selling the lie that the US isn’t safe and that threats to our freedom lurk everywhere. Who doesn’t benefit from these policies and institutional arrangements is equally obvious: the American people, the ordinary enlisted men and women of our armed forces, and those unlucky enough to be living in countries deemed “core American interests,” to use the favorite vacuous phrase of the intellectual establishment, who legitimate the continuation of these immoral and intellectually deficient policies to the detriment of ordinary people everywhere. In truth, there is no state on earth powerful enough to affect real core US interests: the US homeland. These wars cost $7.8 trillion by the government’s own admission, tens of thousands of American lives, and have resulted in the creation of a domestic surveillance and police state, all while making the world less safe—terrorist groups and terrorist attacks have risen by orders of magnitude since 9/11 precisely because of US actions overseas. So while the foreign policy and military establishment try to turn China into the next bogeyman in order to justify continued foreign meddling and domestic indebtedness, and the partisan media of both sides try to pin the blame for the debacle of the Afghanistan pullout on Joe Biden or Donald Trump, respectively, the American people should understand that the outcome of the war in Afghanistan was decided many years, many lives, and many dollars ago. And as US military interventions continue in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, they should recognize that the best way to avoid debacles like Afghanistan is by not allowing their government to create them in the first place. Reprinted with permission from Mises.org. The Loss in Afghanistan Is Only the Latest Chapter in a Long Story of Intervention Click on the headline to read the full story from Afghanistan’s US-run government was the world’s largest producer and exporter of opium, morphine, and the end-product, heroin. As it did after first seizing power in the mid-1990’s, Taliban, the Islamic anti-drug and anti-communist movement, is shutting down the Afghan drug trade. Billions worth of heroin, opium and morphine that had been flowing into Central Asia, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Southeast Asia will be sharply reduced. Afghanistan’s drug-based economy is now in dire jeopardy. But you would not know this if you follow the biased western press, notably the big US TV networks, social media and the BBC which thinks it’s Britain’s old colonial office. Western media has focused almost exclusively on the supposed plight of well-off westernized Afghan women in Kabul. That’s all you see on TV. That these pampered ladies can’t easily get their nails done is not Afghanistan’s biggest problem. Nor is the closing of dance studios or fashion boutiques. What really matters is that Afghan wedding parties and villages are no longer being savaged by US warplanes or B-1 and B-52 heavy bombers, or that wide scale torture by the Communist-run secret police, whose head, Amrullah Saleh, was a key US ally and the nation’s real strongmen, has been ended by Taliban. Meanwhile, western media simply ignores the plight of women in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. I well recall being twice arrested in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia by religious police for walking with an attractive lady (an Estee Lauder beauty consultant). I was arrested in Kuwait under similar suspicion. I was whipped by Saudi airport security police. And yet all we hear about or see are films of wicked Taliban soldiers maltreating Afghan women. What I really want to know is what happened to all the billions in drug money reaped by the US-backed regime in Kabul and its allied warlords? Where are the pallets of fresh US $100 bills flown in from Washington to finance the Kabul regime? We saw the same phenomena in US-occupied Iraq. These mountains of cash just went ‘walkabout,’ as the Aussies say. Americans and US Arab allies grabbed the majority of these missing funds. Iraq and Afghanistan account for one of the biggest thefts of money in modern history. Much of this sordid story has been documented by the US government’s own anti-corruption agency, SIGAR, which has waged a valiant battle to combat crime in Afghanistan during the $2 trillion, two-decade war. Many of the drug-dealing criminals have already bailed out of Afghanistan via a US/British/French airlift. Others, Taliban opponents, mostly Tajik and Uzbek gang bosses, have managed to gain refuge in neighboring Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The most formidable opposition to Taliban came from the Tajik Northern Alliance in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. This US-allied group dominated the drug trade until run out of business by Taliban. Now it’s trying to rally with secret backing from France, India and the US. China is playing a cautious game in Afghanistan. I was invited by Chinese military intelligence to Beijing in 1981 to ask me if Beijing should begin supplying arms to the Afghan Islamic anti-Soviet resistance, aka ‘mujahidin.’ This was the most momentous act in the growing China-Soviet split. No one in Washington seemed to see or understand it. Forty years later, China is still wrestling with this problem. Beijing wants good relations with Taliban but is seriously scared by the notion of Islamic wild men who support freedom and independence for the Chinese-ruled Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang (Eastern Turkestan). Meanwhile, the great American-Afghan money machine has ground to a halt as its produce is secreted away in US real estate and Swiss banks. Reprinted with permission from EricMargolis.com. Afghanistan: Where's The Cash? Click on the headline to read the full story from There’s something about human nature that causes people in power to want to “do something” when faced with an unknown problem. Yet sometimes, doing nothing is better than “doing something.” When it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more evidence is emerging that the laissez-faire approach to the issue — at least on a governmental/”public health” level — was the solution all along. The path chosen by Sweden, Belarus and a select few nations — which put the power in the hands of individuals to make their own health choices, instead of imposing draconian government edicts — appears to have won the day. With almost two years of data now in our hands, it sure seems that the ruling class has a lot to answer for. Since the first COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China, in early 2020, the supposed expert class has told us that their forcible “mitigation and suppression” tools, such as lockdowns, masks, and social distancing via government edicts, were absolutely necessary to prevent incredible potential damage that would have been caused by the apparent unchecked circulation of this virus. The “experts” overwhelmingly endorsed these Chinese Communist Party-endorsed “health” measures, declaring them scientific overnight, despite many of these tools never being utilized in the event of a global pandemic. Far from looking back to reassess the premise of their grand plans, these leaders continued to plow forward with further and further restrictions on our liberties. They then pivoted to using these instruments of power in combination with compulsory therapy regimes, all under the guise of keeping us simple-minded plebs safe from the virus. Sure, all of our unalienable rights were seemingly stripped away without due process, but governments assured us that these supposedly scientifically proven measures would shield us from COVID-19. At the very least, we were told that these restrictions would be worth it because they are “keeping us safe.” Now, almost two years have passed, and there is simply no evidence to date that these measures helped with our virus problem. In fact, given the excess death data of laissez-faire Sweden, you can now make the case that these “public health” solutions actually caused far more health problems than COVID-19 ever could by itself. Excess deaths data tell us an incredible tale. Sweden has been largely open and free from any restrictions for 15 months and counting, and Stockholm has seen virtually *zero* excess deaths from the “deadly pandemic.”
As of 9/25/2021, non-intervention countries Sweden and Belarus rank 43rd and 111th respectfully among nations in terms of COVID deaths per/100k population. Again, this begs the question: If Sweden and Belarus were able to outperform other nations by simply doing nothing, what exactly have all of these “public health expert” interventions accomplished? The “experts” told us that their approach would certainly result in human catastrophe, with bodies lining every city block. Yet the opposite is true. Life has moved on from COVID in these nations, where the illness is being treated comparable to seasonal influenza. Moreover, there appears to be declining confidence that the latest promised “cure” to the disease (mRNA injections) are acting as a cure in any way, shape, or form.
In Sweden, children remained in school. Businesses remained open. People were allowed to live their lives as they saw fit. And yet, Sweden and others demonstrated excess mortality that was lower than average when compared to nations that had the most restrictions. In America, due to government edicts, our overall health declined, we got sicker, we saw an unprecedented obesity increase, among other issues caused by “public health” interventions. Far from solving the virus issue at hand, it’s become clear that all of these mandates and restrictions just added additional problems on top of the issue of an endemic seasonal virus. Indeed, sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something, especially when you’re trying to fight a war against an endemic, submicroscopic infectious particle. Reprinted with author's permission from The Dossier. Support the author here. Freedom prevails: COVID data shows ‘public health’ mandates only harm people Click on the headline to read the full story from
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has chosen to ignore the recommendation of her own panel of medical professional experts that booster shots were not necessary for the vast majority of the population. Walensky has sided with the vax manufacturers and endorsed boosters, promising even more astronomical profits for Big Pharma. Science...or politics? Also today: Norway dumps all existing coronavirus restrictions while Netherlands adopts Soviet-style internal digital passports, allowing only vaxxed to take part in daily life? Science and science? Watch today's Liberty Report: Follow The Science? CDC Director Throws Expert Committee Under The Bus Click on the headline to read the full story from Following revelations that Federal Reserve officials made trades in financial assets while the Fed was taking extraordinary efforts to “stimulate” the economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell ordered a review of the Fed’s ethics rules. While these trades appear problematic, they pale in comparison to the biggest Fed scandal — the Fed’s impoverishment of ordinary Americans, enrichment of the elites, and facilitation of government debt and deficits. The depression induced by coronavirus, though really caused by so-called public health actions government took in response, was the official reason for the Fed’s increased asset purchases last year. However, the Fed actually started ramping up its money creating activities in September of 2019, when it began pouring billions a day into the repo markets, which banks use to make short-term loans to each other, in order to keep repo market interest rates low. Coronavirus was just a convenient excuse for the Fed to do more of what it was already doing. Now, the Fed is using the limited reopening as a scapegoat for rising prices. Of course, anyone who understands Austrian economics understands that rising prices are a symptom, not a cause, of inflation. Inflation is the very act of money creation by the Fed. Rising prices that diminish the average American’s standard of living are not the only result of the Fed’s manipulation of the money supply. The manipulation distorts economic signals, producing results including booms, bubbles, and busts. Inflation has always benefited the well-connected elites who receive the Fed’s newly created money before the new money causes widespread price increases. The true motivation behind Fed policies was revealed by former Fed official Andrew Huszar in 2013. Huszar, writing for the Wall Street Journal, confirmed that quantitative easing kept stock prices high, instead of helping Americans struggling with the aftereffects of the 2008 meltdown. Other beneficiaries of the Fed are big-spending politicians. The Federal Reserve's purchase of federal debt instruments keeps the federal government's debt servicing costs manageable. This is why, despite Chairman Powell's recent suggestion that the Fed will soon begin “tapering” its purchases of Treasuries, the Fed is unlikely to significantly reduce its purchase of Treasuries or allow interest rates to significantly increase. Powell is also unlikely to upset President Biden and Biden’s congressional allies as long as progressives are urging Biden not to reappoint Powell. Progressives want to replace Powell with someone more committed to fighting climate change and systemic racism, two boogeymen routinely bought out as excuses for vast expansions in government spending and power. Another major scandal involving the Fed is Congress’ refusal to pass the Audit the Fed bill and let the American people know the truth about the Fed’s operations. Audit the Fed authorizes a Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit of the Fed’s dealing with foreign governments and central banks, the Fed’s discount window operations, reserves of member banks, securities credit, interest on deposits, and open market transactions. Audit the Fed would finally reveal the truth about the Fed’s operations. A limited audit authorized by the Dodd-Frank Act found that between 2007 and 2010, the Federal Reserve committed over 16 trillion dollars to foreign central banks and politically influential private companies. Imagine what a full audit would find. It is time to end the scandal of allowing a secretive central bank to have so much power over the economy and our liberty. It is time to audit, and end, the Fed. The Biggest Federal Reserve Scandal Click on the headline to read the full story from Peace and Prosperity |
Ron Paul
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