Russian President Putin's surprise announcement that Russia would recognize two breakaway republics in eastern Ukraine as independent has left the Biden Administration and NATO - as well as the EU - at a loss for how to respond. Is it a war? Limited incursion? Will more sanctions do the trick? Also today: Why is Scotland no longer publishing vax info? And Canada's peaceful protest organizer denied bail, faces years in prison. Watch today's Liberty Report... read on...
One can frequently disagree with government policies without necessarily regarding them with disgust, but the Joe Biden Administration has turned that corner, first with its senseless promotion of a new Cold War that could turn hot with Russia and, more recently, with its actions undertaken to undermine and punish Afghanistan. The fact that the White House wraps itself in the sanctimonious, self-righteous twaddle that is so much the hallmark of the political left is bad enough, but when the government goes out of its way to harm and even kill people around the world in pursuit of an elusive global dominance it is time for the American people to rise up and say “Stop!” read on...
Foreign policy hawks in the United States habitually equate a noncommunist Russia with the totalitarian Soviet Union. An especially graphic example is a recent article in 19FortyFive by Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. The title, "Russia Was a Rogue State Long before Ukraine and Georgia," accurately conveys the extent of Rubin’s Russophobia. Predictably, he blames Moscow entirely for the 2008 Georgia war, even though a European Union investigation concluded that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s forces initiated the fighting. Likewise, he studiously ignores the assistance that the United States and some of its European allies gave demonstrators who unseated Ukraine’s elected, pro-Russian president as a trigger for Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea.
No, according to Rubin, such episodes are indicative of Vladimir Putin’s strategy to "recreate the Soviet Union in all but name." He then condemns the administrations of Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden for insufficient resolve in the face of such malignant, imperial ambitions. However, Rubin asserts that the "real problem is deeper. Russia’s aggression and sense of impunity did not begin with Georgia, but rather with Japan. In the tail end of World War II, Russia seized southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands from Japan."
There’s just one problem with his thesis: The seizure of territory from Japan was made by the Soviet Union. There was no independent "Russia" in 1945, and it reflects extreme intellectual laziness to use the terms interchangeably, as Rubin and some other analysts do. During the Soviet era, Russia was just one component of the USSR, albeit the largest one. Moreover, it is incorrect to assume that ethnic Russians always ran the communist state. The longest-tenured Soviet dictator (who ruled for nearly 3 decades) was Joseph Stalin – a Georgian, not a Russian. Nikita Khrushchev, who led the USSR for more than a decade, was ethnically Russian but grew up in Ukraine and was culturally Ukrainian. Indeed, according to his great-granddaughter, Nina Khrushcheva, he was exceptionally fond of Ukraine. It probably was not a coincidence that Khrushchev was the person who made the decision to transfer Crimea, which had been part of Russia since 1782, to Ukraine. read on...
Recent developments in eastern Ukraine are increasingly pointing to the direction of a more direct conflict between Ukrainian and Russian forces. The two breakaway eastern regions have evacuated civilians amid OSCE reports of massively increasing mortar and other military attacks over the line of demarcation. Most according to OSCE maps are coming from the Kiev side into the breakaway region. Russia today will according to press reports decide today whether to recognize the breakaway regions as independent. Fasten your seatbelts. And watch the Liberty Report... read on...
On President’s Day weekend, let us commemorate the record of the best president in US history: John Tyler.
A random poll of Americans would draw mostly puzzled looks at the name, but according to Independent Institute Senior Fellow Ivan Eland, in his 2009 ranking of the presidents, Recarving Rushmore, this 10th US president has the strongest record upholding Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty.
On the prosperity front, Tyler vetoed both the attempt to revive the national bank, and a bill to raise tariffs. His efforts for peace included ending “the longest and bloodiest Indian war in US history,” and cutting the number of troops in the US Army by 33%. He also chose not to respond militarily to both an internal rebellion in Rhode Island, and to a border dispute with Canada, both of which were instead resolved peacefully.
But what of those presidents whose birthdays morphed in “Presidents Day”—Washington and Lincoln—or these two plus one usually ranked as “Greats:” Washington, Lincoln, and FDR? read on...
According to numbers released by the US government, consumer prices have increased by 7.5 percent in the past year, the steepest increase since 1982. The actual price increases are even worse than the government numbers suggest, given that the “official” statistics are manipulated to understate the real rate of price increases. According to John Williams of ShadowStats, prices have actually increased by around 15 percent over the past year. read on...
Well you'll be shocked to learn that, while the Ukraine invasion we've been told for weeks was happening any day now still has not occurred, the US and UK have declared that Russia attacked Ukraine in an invisible and unverifiable way for which the evidence is secret.
"The White House blamed Russia on Friday for this week’s cyberattacks targeting Ukraine’s defense ministry and major banks and warned of the potential for more significant disruptions in the days ahead," AP reports. "Anne Neuberger, the Biden administration’s deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies, said the US had rapidly linked Tuesday’s attacks to Russian military intelligence officers."
"Technical information analysis shows the GRU was almost certainly involved in disruptive DDoS attacks," adds a statement from the UK Foreign Office.
No evidence for this claim has been provided beyond the assertive tone with which American and British officials have uttered it, but that likely won't stop arguments from western narrative managers that this "attack" justifies immediate economic sanctions. read on...
Amid soaring tensions with Russia, the United States is spending a fortune on foreign interference campaigns in Ukraine. Washington’s regime-change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), has spent $22.4 million on operations inside the country since 2014, when democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown and replaced by a successor government handpicked by the US Those operations included propping up and training pro-Western political parties, funding pliant media organizations, and subsidizing massive privatization drives that benefit foreign multinational corporations, all in an effort to secure US control over the country that NED President Carl Gershman called “the biggest prize” in Europe. read on...
It has become something of a habit in both the American and Canadian media to insist that the Canadian trucker protest against vaccine mandates is an "illegal protest." They are "illegal border protests," one American news affiliate proclaims. Canada's National Post dutifully refers to the protests in its headlines as illegal acts. The term "illegal" has been used a multitude of times by Liberal Party politicians in the House of Commons. The premier of Ontario—one of Canada's most hysterical politicians—not only paints the protests as illegal but as a "siege." Other opponents of the protests refer to them as an "occupation" and as an "insurrection."
"Lawbreaker" as a Political Slur
So why the obsession with labeling the protests illegal? The idea, of course, is to cast suspicion on them and portray them as harmful and morally illegitimate. We could contrast the rhetoric surrounding the trucker protest with that of the Black Lives Matter protests. In the case of the BLM protests, illegal acts were downplayed and ignored, with one obvious riot labeled a "mostly peaceful" protest. when it comes to protests and other acts of which the regime approves, legality is never an issue.
The regimes of the world, of course, like to use legality as a standard for judging human behavior because the regimes make the laws. Whether or not the laws actually have anything to do with human rights, private property, or just basic common sense is another matter entirely. Thus history is replete with pointless, immoral, and destructive laws. Slavery has been lawful throughout much of human history. Temporary slavery—known as military conscription—is still employed by many regimes. In the US, the imprisonment of peaceful American citizens of Japanese descent was perfectly lawful under the US regime during World War II. Today, employers can face ruinous sanctions for hiring a worker who lacks the proper immigration paperwork. Worldwide, people can be jailed in many jurisdictions for years for the "crime" of possessing an illegal plant. read on...
Daniel McAdams returns to discuss the Ukraine crisis. Media coverage of the situation is absolutely abysmal and cartoonish, taking the role of stenographers for the intelligence community. The current crisis was precipitated by U.S. interventionism in the form of the 2014 Orange color revolution. Russia has a right to be concerned about existential issues and having Ukraine in NATO would objectively raise a serious concern for Moscow, especially in light of an openly hostile West. Blinken did his best Colin Powell presentation at the UN (e.g. Iraq WMDs) and there is a huge danger a false flag could lead to hostilities. This could be the beginning of the end for NATO. We're seeing the tail end of the US Empire. read on...
