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White House Email Archiving Office Exempts Self from FOIA Disclosures

Wednesday March 18, 2015

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Hot on the high heels of the Clinton email atrocity, where one individual determined for her own campaign and indeed for all of history which parts of her work as a taxpayer-paid government official would be forever sent down the Memory Hole, the White House announced it is deleting a federal regulation that subjects its Office of Administration to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), making official an unofficial policy under Presidents Bush and Obama to simply reject requests for records to that office.

And in case you proles still have not got it, the White House announcement comes in the middle of “Sunshine Week,” an annual nationwide celebration of access to public information.

And in case you proles really still have not gotten the message, the White House made the announcement on March 17, National Freedom of Information Day.
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Republican 'Balanced' Budget Boosts Military Spending

Tuesday March 17, 2015


The Republican House Budget Committee just released its plan for how to balance the budget. One little catch is that the proposal talks only of the possibility of this happening in 10 years. The Democrats, they complain, don’t even try to balance the budget. Well, at least they’re more honest about it. It used to be that we looked at five-year plans in the socialist systems, but here we are facing a conservative proposal to “maybe” balance the budget in 10 years.

This achievement will occur, they claim, without raising taxes. But everybody knows Republicans are just as capable of raising taxes as are the Democrats. They are certainly not bashful about increasing spending. However this budget report claims that they can cut $5.5 trillion in spending — a more aggressive goal than they have ever before proposed. They emphasize a fairer and a simpler tax system to promote job creation and a healthy economy, which I think is nothing more than wishful thinking. 

The claim is also made that the country will be put on a path to “paying off the debt by growing the economy and making government more efficient, effective, and accountable.” The claim that has been made by conservatives over many decades has always been that all we need to do is lower the rate of taxes and get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse and the economy will thrive and the debt will go down. There’s never a suggestion that it is necessary to achieve limited government or that policies have to change, such as our attitude toward the welfare state and certainly the warfare state.
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The Wolf Is Guarding the Hen House: The Government’s War on Cyberterrorism

Tuesday March 17, 2015

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Nothing you write, say, text, tweet or share via phone or computer is private anymore. As constitutional law professor Garrett Epps points out, “Big Brother is watching…. Big Brother may be watching you right now, and you may never know. Since 9/11, our national life has changed forever. Surveillance is the new normal.”

This is the reality of the internet-dependent, plugged-in life of most Americans today.

A process which started shortly after 9/11 with programs such as Total Information Awareness (the predecessor to the government’s present surveillance programs) has grown into a full-fledged campaign of warrantless surveillance, electronic tracking and data mining, thanks to federal agents who have been given carte blanche access to the vast majority of electronic communications in America. Their methods completely undermine constitution safeguards, and yet no federal agency, president, court or legislature has stepped up to halt this assault on our rights.

For the most part, surveillance, data mining, etc., is a technological, jargon-laden swamp through which the average American would prefer not to wander. Consequently, most Americans remain relatively oblivious to the government’s ever-expanding surveillance powers, appear unconcerned about the fact that the government is spying on them, and seem untroubled that there is no way of opting out of this system. This state of delirium lasts only until those same individuals find themselves arrested or detained for something they did, said or bought that runs afoul of the government’s lowering threshold for what constitutes criminal activity.
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US Intel Stands Pat on MH-17 Shoot-down

Monday March 16, 2015

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Despite the high stakes involved in the confrontation between nuclear-armed Russia and the United States over Ukraine, the US intelligence community has not updated its assessment on a critical turning point of the crisis – the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 – since five days after the crash last July 17, according to the office of the Director of National Intelligence.

On Thursday, when I inquired about arranging a possible briefing on where that US intelligence assessment stands, DNI spokesperson Kathleen Butler sent me the same report that was distributed by the DNI on July 22, 2014, which relied heavily on claims being made about the incident on social media.

So, I sent a follow-up e-mail to Butler saying: “are you telling me that US intelligence has not refined its assessment of what happened to MH-17 since July 22, 2014?”

Her response: “Yes. The assessment is the same.”

I then wrote back: “I don’t mean to be difficult but that’s just not credible. US intelligence has surely refined its assessment of this important event since July 22.”

When she didn’t respond, I sent her some more detailed questions describing leaks that I had received about what some US intelligence analysts have since concluded, as well as what the German intelligence agency, the BND, reported to a parliamentary committee last October, according to Der Spiegel.
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Iran Fighting ISIS – Is it Really a Problem?

Sunday March 15, 2015

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As Iran continues to take an active role in helping Iraq fight ISIS, many US neocons are upset that the US military is not over there on the ground doing the fighting. They want Americans to believe that only another US invasion of Iraq – and of Syria as well – can defeat ISIS. But what is wrong with the countries of the region getting together and deciding to cooperate on a common problem?
 
While the entry of Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias into ISIS-occupied areas may not be ideal – there is bound to be revenge killings and sectarian fighting – it is far more likely that the ISIS problem will be solved by the countries in the region than by US bombs and ground troops. Our bombs will continue to make the problem worse because it was our bombs that helped create the problem in the first place. What the neocons who lied us into the Iraq war don’t like to admit is that there was no ISIS problem and no al-Qaeda problem in Iraq and Syria before we invaded Iraq.
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CNN is Beating the Drums of War

Sunday March 15, 2015

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President George W. Bush’s national security advisor, Condi Rice, warned Americans that Saddam Hussein’s (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction could result in a mushroom cloud going up over an American city. No such threat existed. But today a very real threat exists over all American cities, and the national security advisor does not notice.

The threat issues from Washington and arises from the demonization of Russia and its leadership.

Wolf Blitzer (CNN, March 13) used the cover of a news program to broadcast a propaganda performance straight out of the Third Reich or perhaps from George Orwell’s 1984. The orchestration presented Russia as a massive, aggressive military threat. The screen was filled with missiles firing and an assortment of American General Strangeloves urging provocative measures to be deployed against the Russian Threat. Blitzer’s program is part of the orchestrated propaganda campaign whose purpose is to prepare Americans for conflict with Russia.

It was such irresponsible propaganda and so many blatant lies for a media organization to sponsor that it was obvious that CNN and Wolf Blitzer had no fear of being called on the carpet for spreading war fever. The so-called “mainstream media” has been transformed into a Ministry of Propaganda.
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Ron Paul on the 'Green Light for American Empire'

Saturday March 14, 2015

RPI Chairman discusses his new essay on United States' 25 year war in the Middle East, starting with the green light US Ambassador April Glaspie gave Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, then the first US attack on Iraq in 1990, and up to today with the war in ISIS in Iraq and Syria...
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A Green Light for the American Empire

Saturday March 14, 2015

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The American Empire has been long in the making. A green light was given in 1990 to finalize that goal. Dramatic events occurred that year that allowed the promoters of the American Empire to cheer. It also ushered in the current 25-year war to solidify the power necessary to manage a world empire. Most people in the world now recognize this fact and assume that the empire is here to stay for a long time. That remains to be seen.

Empires come and go. Some pop up quickly and disappear in the same manner. Others take many years to develop and sometimes many years to totally disintegrate. The old empires, like the Greek, Roman, Spanish and many others took many years to build and many years to disappear. The Soviet Empire was one that came rather quickly and dissipated swiftly after a relatively short period of time. The communist ideology took many decades to foment the agitation necessary for the people to tolerate that system.

Since 1990 the United States has had to fight many battles to convince the world that it was the only military and economic force to contend with. Most people are now convinced and are easily intimidated by our domination worldwide with the use of military force and economic sanctions on which we generously rely. Though on the short term this seems to many, and especially for the neoconservatives, that our power cannot be challenged. What is so often forgotten is that while most countries will yield to our threats and intimidation, along the way many enemies were created.
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Get Out Peacefully: The Libertarian Principle of Secession

Friday March 13, 2015

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For a century and a half, the idea of secession has been systematically demonized among the American public. The government’s schools spin fairy tales about the “indivisible Union” and the wise statesmen who fought to preserve it. Decentralization is portrayed as unsophisticated and backward, while nationalism and centralization are made to seem progressive and inevitable. When a smaller political unit wishes to withdraw from a larger one, its motives must be disreputable and base, while the motivations of the central power seeking to keep that unit in an arrangement it does not want are portrayed as selfless and patriotic, if they are considered at all.

As usual, disinformation campaigns are meant to make potentially liberating ideas appear toxic and dangerous, and conveying the message that anyone who seeks acceptance and popularity ought to steer clear of whatever it is — in this case, secession — the regime has condemned. But when we set the propaganda aside, we discover that support for secession means simply this: it is morally illegitimate to employ state violence against individuals who choose to group themselves differently from how the existing regime chooses to group them. They prefer to live under a different jurisdiction. Libertarians consider it unacceptable to aggress against them for this.

The libertarian principle of secession is not exactly embraced with enthusiasm by the people and institutions I call “regime libertarians.” Although these people tend to be located in and around the Beltway, regime libertarianism transcends geographical location, which is why I coined this special term to describe it.
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Will the US and Israel Send a 'Thank You' Note to Iran?

Thursday March 12, 2015

One would think news this week that the Iranians are helping defeat ISIS in Iraq would be greeted enthusiastically by those who insist we must fight the Islamist extremists. However, neocons like John McCain are furious that the US is not on the ground doing the fighting. Tune in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report to see what Ron Paul and RPI's Daniel McAdams have to say about it.
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