The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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Can We Afford Ukraine?

Sunday March 9, 2014

Officially, US debt stands at more than $17 trillion. In reality, it is many times more. The cost of the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq may be more than six trillion dollars. President Obama’s illegal invasion of Libya cost at least a billion dollars and left that country devastated. The costs of US regime change efforts in Syria are likely thus far enormous, both in dollars and lives. That’s still a secret.

So who in his right mind would think it is a good time to start a war with Russia over Ukraine? And worse, who would commit the United States to bail out a Ukraine that will need at least $35 billion to survive the year?

Who? The president and Congress, backed by the neocons and the so-called humanitarian interventionists!
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Gen. Dempsey Pushes Back Against War Fever

Sunday March 9, 2014

Dempsey

General Martin Dempsey, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a lengthy interview to Judy Woodruff on Friday night's PBS News Hour and delivered a carefully balanced picture of how the U.S. military is managing the unfolding Ukraine crisis, both reassuring European NATO allies that treaty obligations will be honored, while maintaining constant communications with Russian counterparts, to assure there are no miscalculations leading to conflict. Gen. Dempsey, clearly aware of the boundaries between military advice and political decision-making, did not attempt to under-play the danger of conflict, particularly given the occupant of the White House.

Asked by an aggressive Woodruff what kind of message the US is trying to send to Russia, Gen. Dempsey calmly replied that “We're clearly trying to send a message to Russia, almost exclusively through diplomatic channels, so that I do have an open line with my Russian counterpart that I have used twice the last two days.

“But we're trying to tell them not to escalate this thing further into Eastern Ukraine and allow the conditions to be set for some kind of resolution in the Crimea. But the message we are sending militarily is to our NATO allies.
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'Vlad the Bad' Moves His Chess Pieces

Saturday March 8, 2014

Putinobama

Soviet leader Josef Stalin used to shrug off critics by his favorite Central Asian saying:  “The dogs bark; the caravan moves on.”

Russia’s hard-eyed president, Vladimir Putin, is following the same strategy over Ukraine and Crimea.

Putin swiftly moved his knight into the empty chess square of Crimea, thereby regaining full control of one of Russia’s four strategic port regions: Sevastopol, Murmansk, St Petersburg and Vladivostok.

Sevastopol, now firmly in Moscow’s hands, is Russia’s sole gateway to the Black Sea, Mediterranean, and Mideast.  The vast,  co-shared Russian-Ukrainian Sevastopol naval base was a shaky, awkward arrangement doomed to eventual failure.
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Forgetting His Own History: William Hague Once Understood a Black Sea Crisis

Friday March 7, 2014

Haguekerry

The current imbroglio over Crimea may be America’s first crisis with Russia in the Black Sea, but it is not Britain’s. Even the Crimean War (1854-56) was not Britain’s first face-off with Russia. More than two hundred years ago as the French Revolution convulsed Western Europe (rather as the Arab Spring has sent shock waves across the Mediterranean), Catherine the Great expanded her hold on the Black Sea coast by seizing Ochakov, not far from the new city of Odessa.

Under the supervision of the exiled French Duc de Richelieu who acted as governor, the Tsarina’s architects would soon erect as a naval base to match Sebastopol across the Black Sea in the Crimea which she had already annexed in 1783.

With her major rival, France, apparently rendered impotent by revolution since 1789, William Pitt’s Britain seemed the only superpower – at least to itself.  Whitehall was as convinced in 1791 as the White House seems to be today that a combination of global reach via the Royal Navy with the City of London’s financial hegemony would both cause the Tsarina to back off and the other European states to fall into line behind Britain’s demand that Russia retreat from its southern Ukrainian conquests from the waning Ottoman Empire.
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Ukraine and The US National Security State

Thursday March 6, 2014

American Sector

At the end of the Cold War, the American people had a grand opportunity, one that entailed the dismantling of the national-security state apparatus that had been grafted onto our governmental system after the end of World War II. It would have made sense, given that the justification for making the national-security state apparatus a permanent feature of American life was the Cold War itself. No more Cold War should have meant no more national-security state.

Unfortunately, however, that was the last thing the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA were going to permit. Having become essentially the fourth branch of the US government — and the most powerful branch at that — they weren’t about to permit themselves to be dismantled despite the fact that the justification for their existence — the Cold War — had suddenly and unexpectedly come to an end.

Instead, the national-security state apparatus went on what seemed to be a desperate campaign to convince Americans that it was still needed. The drug war. The war on immigrants. An unsafe world. The possibility of a resurgent communist threat. We’ll do anything; just don’t dismantle us, they said.
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Ron Paul: No US Bailout for Ukraine

Thursday March 6, 2014

RPI Chairman and Founder, interviewed on RT, explains that the United States should not bail out Ukraine, either directly or indirectly through the European Union or International Monetary Fund. “The whole thing makes no sense whatsoever from an economic viewpoint, from a political viewpoint,” says Paul, “It’s always vying for controls, and I think that is what’s going on.”
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Regime Change Blueprint: The NED At Work

Thursday March 6, 2014

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a Washington D.C-based quasi-governmental organization funded by the U.S. which boasts that it is "supporting freedom around the world."[1]

Alan Weinstein, one of the founders of the NED, explained in 1991:
A lot of what we [NED] do was done 25 years ago covertly by the CIA [2]
Most of the NED, and its affiliated organizations, deals with influencing political processes abroad. The means employed range from influencing civil society, media, fostering business groups, lending support to preferred politicians/political parties, election monitoring, and fostering human rights groups.
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Ukraine Uprising: A Western Conspiracy?

Wednesday March 5, 2014

On Crosstalk today, RPI Advisor John Laughland stands up for the principle of non-interventionism and sovereignty and opposes the "responsibility to protect" doctrine that is used by the West to justify military incursions overseas. In Ukraine, he said, the situation is more akin to that of Mali, where the legal government requested outside assistance against an armed incursion.
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Ukraine: Ron Paul Could be America’s Solzhenitsyn

Wednesday March 5, 2014

Ron Paul Happy Presidential Flag 2 Gage

Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz appeared on Fox News's "Your World with Neil Cavuto" last week and was asked about the rising security situation. He answered with a long pause: “Ronald Reagan ...” he said, and it just hung there, for a provocative moment before he started up again. It seemed just briefly that Shultz’s worshipful intoning of The Gipper’s name alone would be an "enough said" answer.

But many in the mainstream media first turned to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) Time had him right out of the bullpen with “We are all Ukrainians.” He tweeted “#Ukraine - straight out of the Soviet playbook.” And Sarah Palin, not one to say I told you so, was there within seconds to say, “I told you so.”

And again, here and everywhere, especially on Fox, we would hear the old mantra: Ronald Reagan won the Cold War; it was the war that was no war.

But then this shocker came from former Rep. Ron Ron Paul (R-Texas): “The Ukrainian people should do this.”
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Russia Reminds Us of Us

Tuesday March 4, 2014

Saddamstatue

US officials and the mainstream press are aflame with outrage and indignation over Russia’s invasion of Crimea. If only they would feel the same degree of outrage and indignation over what the US national security state, which was grafted onto our governmental system without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment, has done to our American republic.

Isn’t it fascinating how US officials and the mainstream media are able to quickly arrive at a moral judgment condemning foreign interventionism on the part of Russia while, at the same time, blocking out of their minds all the foreign interventionism on the part of the US government for the past many decades?

Have they really forgotten US aggression against Honduras, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, Cuba, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam? Or do they simply consider those acts of aggression to be good and honorable because they were done in the name of the Cold War and with the fervor of anti-communism?
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