The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
Subscribe to the Institute View Us on YouTube Follow Us On Twitter Join Us on Facebook Join Us at Google Plus

Search Results

for:

Jacob G. Hornberger

America’s Perpetual Foreign-Policy Crises

undefined

Ever since the federal government was converted from a limited-government republic to a national-security state after World War II, America has lived under a system of ongoing, never-ending, perpetual foreign-policy crises. That’s not a coincidence. The national-security establishment — i.e. the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — need such crises to justify their continued existence and their ever-growing taxpayer-funded largess. 

An interesting aspect of this phenomenon is that oftentimes the crises are ginned up by the national-security establishment itself. Once the crisis materializes, the Pentagon and the CIA play the innocent. “We had nothing to do with ginning up this crisis,” they cry. “We are totally innocent.” 

After the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon and the CIA were desperately in need of a crisis that could replace the Cold War crisis, which they were convinced would last forever. That’s when they began going into the Middle East and killing people. When that massive killing spree, which included killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, ended up producing terrorist blowback, the national-security establishment had its new crisis — terrorism, which replaced communism as America’s big official enemy. 

The “war on terrorism” replaced the Cold War’s “war on communism.” Americans began fearing the terrorists (and the Muslims) almost as much as they feared the Reds. With the new crisis, the national-security establishment, including its army of “defense” contractors, was assured of continued existence and ever-expanding taxpayer-funded largess.
read on...

US Audacity on Brittney Griner

undefined

Only a person who is willfully blind cannot see that the US position on the Brittney Griner case is driven not by some compassionate concern for her welfare but rather by the extreme anti-Russia animus that has afflicted US officials for more than 75 years.
read on...

What’s So Great About Democracy?

undefined

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.
read on...

Assange Should Put the Pentagon and the CIA on Trial

undefined

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.
read on...

An Endless Stream of Scary Official Enemies

undefined

Any government that is a national-security state needs big official enemies — scary ones, ones that will cause the citizenry to continue supporting not only the continued existence of a national-security state form of government but also ever-growing budgets for it and its army of voracious “defense” contractors.

That’s, of course, what the current brouhaha about Russia is all about. It’s really a replay of the Cold War decades, when Americans were made to believe that the Reds were coming to get them, take over the federal government and the public schools, and indoctrinate everyone into loving communism and socialism. 

In those Cold War years, Americans citizens were so scared of the Reds that they were willing to ignore — or even support — the dark-side powers that were being wielded and exercised by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, which are the three principal components of the national-security establishment. The idea was that if the U..S. government failed to adopt the same dark-side totalitarian-type powers, such as assassination and torture, that the Soviet Union and Red China were wielding and exercising, the United States would end up falling to the Reds and becoming communist.
read on...

Bribe Money for Ukrainian Officials?

undefined

In my blog post of May 18, 2022, I raised the possibility that the $40 billion aid package that Congress quickly approved for Ukraine was going to be used, at least in part, to pay multimillion dollar bribes to Ukrainian officials. After all, why else would the members of Congress, as well as the Pentagon’s assets within the mainstream press, react so vociferously against the idea of having the Inspector General monitor how the money is being used? And what better way to ensure that Ukrainian officials remain on board for perpetual war than the payment of bribes to officials serving in what is perhaps the most corrupt regime on the planet?

For skeptics, I refer to an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal whose title pretty much tells it all: “High-Ranking Afghan Officials Escaped to Luxury Homes Abroad.” The opening paragraph states, “Some senior Afghan officials and their families spent millions purchasing expensive homes in the US and abroad in the final years of the war, which became luxurious landings when they escaped the escalating violence in Afghanistan.” The article then goes on to detail some of those “luxurious landings.”

Okay, yes, it is conceivable that those Afghan officials are all honest politicians and bureaucrats in an impoverished nation who became millionaires by dutifully saving portions of their government salaries. 

But there is another possibility, a much more likely one in my opinion. Do you remember those planeloads of US-taxpayer-provided hundred-dollar bills that Pentagon officials were shipping into Afghanistan? Do you recall how there wasn’t any Inspector General monitoring how all that moolah was being disbursed? I think there is a very good chance that it was being handed out to Afghan officials as bribes to bring them on board in support of the US invasion and occupation of their country.
read on...

What If the US Had Invaded Ukraine?

undefined

Let’s engage in a thought experiment. Suppose that Ukraine was headed by a pro-Russia regime. After repeated failed attempts at assassination by the CIA, the Pentagon finally decides to invade Ukraine for the purpose of bringing about regime change — i.e., ousting the pro-Russia regime from power and replacing it with a pro-US regime.

What then would be the response of American statists, especially those within the US mainstream press?

There is no doubt about the answer. Everything would be different than it is today with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The media would be proudly embedding itself within the US military’s invading forces. Mainstream papers would be reporting and commenting on the courage of US troops. There would be no sympathetic pictures or videos of Ukrainian civilians killed; they would all be labeled as “collateral damage.” Church ministers across the land would be exhorting their congregations to pray for the troops. Every statist across the land would be tripping over himself to find some soldier to thank for his service. Airlines would be inviting soldiers to board planes first as a way to honor them. Statists would be condemning the “bad guys” — that is, those Ukrainians who were shooting at American soldiers. Every statist would be praising and glorifying the Pentagon for bringing freedom to Ukraine. 

How do we know that American statists would react in this way to a Pentagon invasion of Ukraine?
read on...

Seven Days in May

undefined

Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed entitled, “Why Does the Pentagon Give a Helping Hand to Films Like ‘Top Gun’?” by Roger Stahl, a communication studies professor at the University of Georgia and director of the documentary film “Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood.”

The op-ed pointed out that if a proposed film does not meet with the approval of the Pentagon and the CIA, it will probably not get made. Moreover, according to 30,000 documents from the Department of Defense that Stahl and his team of researchers secured under the Freedom of Information Act, “the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have exercised direct editorial control over more than 2,500 films and television shows.”

There is one film from the early 1960s that did not meet with the approval of the Pentagon and the CIA that was nevertheless put into production. That film was entitled Seven Days in May and starred Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, and Frederic March. You can watch a trailer for the movie here.

The movie is based on the overwhelming power of the US national-security establishment within America’s federal governmental structure. America’s military generals decide that the president is leading America to doom and decide that they have no choice but to remove him from office in order to save the country. The president gets wind of the scheme and moves to foil it.
read on...

Biden’s Regime-Change Lie

undefined

President Biden’s denial that the US government is committed to regime-change in Russia is a lie. Ever since its inception, the core mission of the US national-security establishment, specifically the Pentagon and the CIA, has been regime change. The goal has always been to oust from power political leaders who operate independently of the Pentagon and the CIA and replace them with local stooges who obey the orders of the US national-security establishment, oftentimes on payment of large sums of cash in the form of “foreign aid.”

In fact, Russia, which was the principal member of the Soviet Union, was used as the principal justification for many of the early regime-change operations. 

In 1953, for example, the CIA regime-changed the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, because the CIA perceived that he was leaning toward Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union. That was considered verboten by US officials. The CIA engineered a coup that succeeded in ousting Mosaddegh from power and replacing him with the unelected Shah of Iran, one of the most brutal US-supported tyrants in the world. 

The following year, the CIA regime-changed the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, because he established friendly relations with Russia and the rest of the communist world. By this time, the CIA had adopted assassination as a regime-change tool. Fortunately for Arbenz, he was able to escape the country before the CIA could assassinate him. The CIA replaced him with a favorite Guatemalan general, who, not surprisingly, turned out to be one of the world’s most brutal US-supported tyrants.
read on...

Sanctions Kill Innocent People and Also Destroy Our Liberty

undefined

While American statists are cheering the US government’s sanctions on Russia, 71-year-old John Hanick shows us how the cheers are also for the destruction of the rights and liberties of the American people. That’s because US officials have just charged Hanick, who is an American citizen who once worked at Fox News as a director, with a federal criminal offense for violating US sanctions on Russia.

Hanick now faces up to 20 years in a federal penitentiary, not to mention of course, that he will have to incur tens of thousands or hundreds of dollars in lawyer fees to defend himself against this malevolent criminal prosecution.

What did Hanick do to earn the wrath of the US Justice Department? He was working for a Russian oligarch named Konstantin Malofeyev to establish a Russian cable news network as well as other media outlets in Europe. It turns out that Malofeyev was made one of the specific targets of US sanctions on Russia several years ago as part of the US government’s longtime anti-Russia crusade.

In other words, Hanick didn’t rob, kill, rape, assault, or initiate force or fraud against anyone. His conduct was entirely peaceful and economic in nature. All he did was enter into an economic transaction in which one person paid him money in return for services rendered. That’s why the feds are now going after him with a vengeance.
read on...


Authors

Tags