The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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'The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime!' - Does It Really Matter?

Tuesday November 6, 2018

There was plenty of noise in the run up to today's mid-term election in the US, but were there any real differences when it comes to substantive issues? Or was it all about manufactured outrages designed to motivate people to support this or that tribe with no real thought? Was there any real debate on war? Privacy? NSA spying? None at all! The most important election in our lifetime? Ha! Tune in to today's Liberty Report...
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US Doublespeak Hinders Afghan Peace

Tuesday November 6, 2018

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Within hours of the announcement on Saturday by the Russian Foreign Ministry that the second meeting of the Moscow format of consultations on Afghanistan will take place on November 9, the US government-funded Radio Free Europe and Liberty has announced that the Afghan government will not participate in the forthcoming meeting.

The text of the Russian Foreign Ministry statement is reproduced below:
On November 9, Moscow will host the second meeting of the Moscow format of consultations on Afghanistan at the level of deputy foreign ministers and specialized special representatives. Invitations to participate in the event were sent to the participating countries – Afghanistan, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, as well as the United States. The President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, A. Gani, decided to send a delegation of the High Peace Council of this country to the meeting. For the first time, a delegation of the Political Office of the Taliban Movement in Doha will participate in an international meeting of this level. The agreement of the final document is not provided.
The meeting will be opened by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Sergey V. Lavrov.

The Russian side reaffirms its position that there is no alternative to a political settlement in the IRA and the need for active coordinated work of the neighboring countries and regional partners of Afghanistan in this direction.
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America Goes to War: Fighting Russia, China and al-Qaeda Simultaneously Requires More Money

Tuesday November 6, 2018

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Some believe that the Cold War ended in 1991, when the Soviet Union fell apart. In retrospect, many observers also believe that a golden opportunity was missed to heal the wounds inflicted by over 45 years to hostility between the Washington and Moscow. Rather than encouraging development of a Russia that would adhere to Western European norms for elections, transparency and individual liberties, some in Europe and America instead sought to steal the country’s natural resources and other assets, a process that went on for some years under President Boris Yeltsin. The looting went hand-in-hand with particularly inept political moves on the part of President Bill Clinton, who ignored end of Cold War agreements to not use the break-up of the Soviet Union as an excuse to bring its former member states in Eastern Europe into NATO or any other military alliance hostile to Russia. The process of NATO expansion continues to this day, together with military maneuvers and the placement of new missile systems right along the Russian border, increasing Moscow’s justifiable paranoia about its security. 

The military moves have been accompanied by a political deep freeze, particularly ironic as President Donald Trump during his campaign for office pledged to improve relations with Russia. They are now at their lowest ebb since the hottest days of the Cold War, including as they do the totally bogus sanctioning of Russian government officials under the maliciously conceived Magnitsky Act and the ongoing saga of Russiagate, which blames Moscow for interference in America’s 2016 election, so far without any real evidence being provided. 

For those who think all of this is theater, think again. Some critics are beginning to recognize that the United States has become a country addicted to war and one need look no farther than the federal budget, where everything is being cut except military spending, which is set to increase even though there is no country or group of countries in the world that genuinely threaten the US.
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Iran Sanctions Back On! Is War On The Way?

Monday November 5, 2018

The Trump Administration is determined to bring Iran to its knees. With a new round of "crippling" sanctions targeting any country doing business with Iran, is the US just isolating itself from the rest of the world? Is it hastening the end of "dollar hegemony" that US foreign policy has to this point sought to prop up? Is the law of unintended consequences about to bite hard? Today's Liberty Report was recorded before a live audience at Brazosport College in Lake Jackson, TX...
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The US 'Cannot Win Militarily' In Afghanistan, Says Top Commander In Shocking Interview

Monday November 5, 2018

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Historians of the now seventeen-year old US war in Afghanistan will take note of this past week when the newly-appointed American general in charge of US and NATO operations in the country made a bombshell, historic admission. He conceded that the United States cannot win in Afghanistan.

Speaking to NBC News last week, Gen. Austin Scott Miller made his first public statements after taking charge of American operations, and shocked with his frank assessment that that the Afghan war cannot be won militarily and peace will only be achieved through direct engagement and negotiations with the Taliban — the very terror group which US forces sought to defeat when it first invaded in 2001. 

"This is not going to be won militarily," Gen. Miller said. "This is going to a political solution."

Miller explained to NBC:
My assessment is the Taliban also realizes they cannot win militarily. So if you realize you can't win militarily at some point, fighting is just, people start asking why. So you do not necessarily wait us out, but I think now is the time to start working through the political piece of this conflict.
He gave the interview from the Resolute Support headquarters building in Kabul. "We are more in an offensive mindset and don't wait for the Taliban to come and hit [us]," he said. "So that was an adjustment that we made early on. We needed to because of the amount of casualties that were being absorbed."
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Whatever Happened to the Russia-gate ‘Scandal’?

Monday November 5, 2018

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After all the screaming headlines and hysterical talk of “treason,” the Russia-gate hoax was almost entirely absent from the midterms. One would think that the other party being in the hands of a ruthless foreign dictator who has it in for America would be a major campaign issue – that is, if the Democrats actually believed their own propaganda. However, we’ve seen neither hide nor hair of Putin in all those campaign ads, or at least hardly a glance: that’s because Russia-gate has always been a fraud, a setup, and really a criminal conspiracy to take down a sitting US President on the basis of a gigantic lie.

As the promulgators of that lie are exposed – the Deep State amalgam that includes foreign intelligence agencies as well as Trump’s domestic opponents – Democrats are backing away from what has suddenly become, for them, a very messy narrative. For what has happened is that the narrative has turned on them, and now implicates them in a massive scheme to embroil the Trump campaign in a web of foreign influencers.

The campaign to penetrate the Trump campaign appears to have been initiated abroad as much as it was started by the Clinton campaign – who inherited the operation from a very mysterious Republican donor after the GOP primaries. The “former” MI6 agent Christopher Steele, now working for an ostensibly independent spy network, didn’t consider the job of digging up dirt on Trump just a normal job: he was passionately dedicated to stopping Trump from ever reaching the White House. One can easily impute the same motivations to the little group that took it upon themselves to break into the Trump campaign and put it under surveillance, all of them attached to British intelligence...
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Censorship and Gun Control Will Not Make Us Safe

Monday November 5, 2018

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Sadly, but not unexpectedly, the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh is being used to justify new infringements on liberty. Of course, opponents of gun rights are claiming this shooting proves America needs more gun control. Even some who normally oppose gun control say the government needs to do more to keep guns out of the hands of the “mentally ill.”
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We Need a #MeToo Movement for Political Consent

Thursday November 1, 2018

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The #MeToo movement is spurring millions of Americans to reconsider the meaning of consent in sexual relations. But there is another realm where far too much has been presumed because of often token gestures. Political consent is defined radically differently than the consent that people freely give in their daily lives.

The Declaration of Independence enshrined the notion that government must possess “the consent of the governed.” Unfortunately, winning politicians often claim blank checks to define the hidden meaning behind citizens’ ballots. “Consenting” on Election Day is portrayed as pre-approving anything politicians dictate in the following years.

Regardless if your candidate campaigned on a peace platform, you “consented” to any wars he might subsequently start or support . Regardless if your candidate promised to end federal crackdowns on marijuana, you “consented” to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s raids on medical cannibis cooperatives. Regardless if your candidate promised to end deficit spending, you “consented” to trillions of dollars of additional federal debt. Regardless if your candidate promised transparency and honesty, you consented to the government keeping millions of secrets and shrouding its worst abuses.

Government agencies structure their policies to make even more absurd presumptions of “consent” in daily life.
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Why Do We Need a National Security State?

Thursday November 1, 2018

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Given President Trump’s impulsive decision to suddenly send 5,200 armed US soldiers to the US-Mexico border to prevent a few thousand women and children and others from seeking refugee status in the United States, which foreign citizens are entitled to do under US law, a question naturally arises with respect to those troops: What were they doing before they were sent to the border?

The answer is: Nothing, at least nothing productive.

Oh sure, one can say that they were training to kill more people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Africa, or other parts of the world. Or they might have been preparing an invasion of some other country in the world. Or they might be figuring out how to best enforce the embargoes and sanctions against the people of Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and elsewhere.

But how can any of that possibly be considered productive? None of the people they are killing are attacking and invading the United States. Neither are the governments in the countries in which the victims are citizens. Moreover, the constant, never-ending killing brings the constant, never-ending danger of terrorist blowback against the United States, which US officials then use as an excuse to destroy further our own freedom and privacy here at home.

How is that productive?
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