The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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‘Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death’: The Loss of Our Freedoms in the Wake of 9/11

Tuesday September 8, 2015

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What began with the passage of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001 has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse. Since then, we have been terrorized, traumatized, and acclimated to life in the American Surveillance State.

The bogeyman’s names and faces change over time, but the end result remains the same: our unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has transitioned us to life in a society where government agents routinely practice violence on the citizens while, in conjunction with the Corporate State, spying on the most intimate details of our personal lives.

Ironically, the 14th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks occurs just days before the 228th anniversary of the ratification of our Constitution. Yet while there is much to mourn about the loss of our freedoms in the years since 9/11, there is virtually nothing to celebrate.

The Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded to such an extent that what we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—which has historically served as the bulwark from government abuse.
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Turning the Cradle of Civilization Into its Graveyard

Monday September 7, 2015

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This Monday, September 7, seven Syrian citizens go to court in Paris to pursue their civil suit against French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. The five men and two women all lost family members and close friends in massacres by armed rebels supported by Fabius in word and deed. They are asking for one euro of symbolic damages.

In the end the suit will almost surely be thrown out. The September 7 hearing is on an appeal against an earlier ruling that the courts cannot judge acts of the government in this case, even if the complaint is founded. And yet this futile lawsuit makes a crucial point that Western politicians and media would much prefer to ignore.

Western leaders share major responsibility for making much of the world unfit for normal human habitation. And so far, they are getting away with it. The massive refugee crisis swamping Europe is just the beginning of the troubles that these unscrupulous leaders have brought on their own countries.

Laurent Fabius can fairly be called a French neoconservative. His alignment with Israeli policies is seen in the fact that he was the most reluctant of the foreign ministers involved in the Iranian nuclear negotiations to agree to the final settlement.
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Color Revolution 2.0 in Lebanon: From Piles of Trash to Piles of Rubble

Monday September 7, 2015

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“Spontaneous.” “Genuine.” Defiant.” The US State Department’s marketeers have used these labels in attempts to differentiate its latest wave of global “color revolutions” from the now tired, ineffective, and familiar formulas used everywhere from the US-engineered “Arab Spring,” to the Euromaidan in Ukraine, to Bersih 4.0 in Malaysia.

The latest target is Lebanon where protests have begun in the streets of the capital, Beirut. Branded the “YouStink!” marches, the alleged provocation was dysfunctional municipal garbage collection services. However, very predictably, the protests have shifted quickly from what could have been perceived as legitimate demands to outright calls for regime change.

Color Revolutions 2.0

Just recently in Armenia, the US conducted what appeared to be a test run of its new and improved “color revolution” system of regime change. It attempted to create a movement with little if any initial political affiliation and with deeply hidden ties between protest organizers and their US State Department affiliations. Ultimately the so-called “Electric Yerevan” protests, whose alleged grievances were rising electric bills, spent so much time trying to convince Armenians and people around the world that they weren’t a US-backed mob, they never succeeded in building up sufficient momentum to move on to the next step.
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The Real Refugee Problem – And How To Solve It

Sunday September 6, 2015

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Last week Europe saw one of its worst crises in decades. Tens of thousands of migrants entered the European Union via Hungary, demanding passage to their hoped-for final destination, Germany.

While the media focuses on the human tragedy of so many people uprooted and traveling in dangerous circumstances, there is very little attention given to the events that led them to leave their countries. Certainly we all feel for the displaced people, especially the children, but let’s not forget that this is a man-made crisis and it is a government-made crisis.
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'Refugees' Arrive in Munich, Hungary Demonized: What's The Endgame?

Saturday September 5, 2015

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Watching live footage of the "refugees" arriving in Munich, it is difficult not to be struck by how non refugee-like they look. Many are well shod in expensive-looking western sneakers, wearing Adidas and other western name-brand clothing, fingering their smart phones. Mostly men of, as they say, fighting age. What few women we do see appear mostly fashionably dressed with healthy and happy looking babies.

It is de rigueur at the moment to express unconditional sympathy for those currently streaming in to Europe from, we are told, mostly Syria, to the point where it is probably risky to even entertain questions about the "rest of the story." Indeed, I have been among the first to write sympathetically about their plight and to lay the blame on the disastrous US-and-allies foreign policy of regime change. But it is hard to avoid this strange feeling that on many fronts this story is not exactly as it is being covered in the western mainstream media. 

When one thinks of desperate refugees seeking a safe exit from a war zone, pictures like this and this and this generally come to mind. This is not to say that those landing in Germany are not legitimately fleeing a disaster area, but that there is something that seems odd about the whole thing. But of course to suggest such is to tip-toe into the dangerous waters of "conspiracy." Nevertheless, let's delve into several of the narratives... 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is risking a shoulder injury so vigorously is she patting herself on the back over accepting limitless numbers of these people.
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False Flag Alert on Refugee 'Crisis'?

Friday September 4, 2015

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In the past week, the flood of undocumented and unregistered Middle Eastern and African migrants into the EU has become an inundation. The high water mark of the human tide is located in Hungary, which is not a logical outcome despite the country’s geographical position at the center of Europe. Understanding why is the key to understanding what is happening not in but to Europe.

After allowing unregistered migrants to board eastbound trains to Vienna and Munich, Hungary suddenly closed Budapest’s grand Keleti Train Station on Tuesday to migrants seeking transport to Germany via Austria and the Czech Republic. Thousands are now encamped outside the station surrounded by Hungarian police officers and the agents of smugglers’ networks. Until registered and approved for a Schengen visa, the immigrants are stranded and will most likely in time be sent back from whence they came. (Germany’s earlier relaxation of its national immigration rules was the source of Hungary’s confusion on Monday.)

The displaced crowd grows by the hour as waves of migrants continue arriving from the country’s southern border with Serbia after having first transited Macedonia at whose southern border the Greeks deliver busloads of successful migrants, an alarming number of whom have been plucked from the sea by European rescue ships before being deposited onto the Greek mainland.

But why tiny Macedonia, which is neither an EU or a NATO member? Why not equally accessible Albania or Bulgaria? What are EU instructions to its chattel state, Greece? Or, as Oriental Review contributor Andrew Korybko asks, “…why don’t the migrants just use mainland Greece as a stepping stone for a final boat ride to Italy?”
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War Drums Beating - Real Or Imagined?

Thursday September 3, 2015

Chinese ships are near Alaska, US Predator drones are near Russia in Latvia. Are the Russians going into Syria or is that just disinformation? Everywhere it seems little brushfires threaten to become conflagrations. Are we in great danger of a major war, or might things cool down? Tune in to today's Liberty Report...
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Ron Paul and Lost Lessons of War

Thursday September 3, 2015

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Former US Rep. Ron Paul lays out a national security strategy for the United States in his book, Swords into Plowshares, which Carl von Clausewitz , the author of On War, would have approved. Clausewitz, a Prussian general in the early Nineteenth Century, is considered perhaps the West’s most insightful strategist, and On War is his classic work on the inter-relationship between politics and war.

A close reading of On War reveals a book far more on the strategy of statecraft, that is Grand Strategy, than it is on the mere strategy of warfare. Unfortunately, very few readers have understood that. Indeed, Clausewitz’s target audience may have been principally civilian policy makers with his view that the political perspective must remain dominant over the military point of view in the conduct of war.

Whether or not Ron Paul ever read Clausewitz, Swords into Plowshares restores a proper understanding of statecraft as Clausewitz understood it and today’s American leaders fail to.
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Buy the Rights-Abusing Cops Lunch Says Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick

Thursday September 3, 2015

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Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick issued a statement Wednesday that says that, to counter “America’s negative attitude toward our law enforcement officers,” people should all-but grovel at the feet of any police they come across. Patrick even suggests that “financially able” individuals (who presumably are already paying cops’ salaries via taxes) pay for the lunches of any cops they may see in a restaurant.

Here is Patrick’s complete list of groveling suggestions:
Join me in changing this negative attitude toward those that protect us, by practicing the following:

Start calling our officers sir and ma’am all of the time. It’s a show of respect they deserve.

Every time you see an officer anywhere, let them know you appreciate their service to our community and you stand with them.

If you are financially able, when you see them in a restaurant on duty pick up their lunch check, send over a dessert, or simply stop by their table briefly and say thank you for their service.

Put their charities on your giving list.

If your local law enforcement has volunteer-citizen job opportunities, sign up.

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Abusing Dead Syrian Children

Thursday September 3, 2015

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Images are a powerful tool in the hands of propagandists. A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes. If a powerful image can be manipulated to tell a tale even if false, it can persuade more viscerally than can a thousand reasoned arguments.

So it is with the tragic photograph making the mainstream media rounds yesterday of a lone Syrian child drowned on a Turkish shore. Reams of articles can be written about the current refugee crisis but particularly in the US they will go relatively unnoticed by those not directly affected. There may be some video clips on the nightly news but overall the story -- and particularly the context -- will go unexplained.

But the powerful image of a dead child, abandoned by the world on the capricious sway of the tide, is putty in the hands of propagandists.

And proponents of the four-year US policy of Syrian destabilization and regime change are lining up to make their case that the current refuge crisis -- now swamping Europe with Syrians desperate for something approaching a normal life -- is one hundred percent the fault of both Syrian president Assad and the western non-interventionists who objected to plans in 2013 for the US and UK to begin bombing Syria.
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