The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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Teen Sues US Over Cavity Drug Search for Which She was Billed $575

Thursday June 23, 2016

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Ashley Cervantes, a then 18-year-old American citizen, was stopped at the Mexico border and, for some unspecified reason, perhaps related to her being young and of Hispanic ethnicity, accused by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) of smuggling drugs.

What Drugs?

A search of her person and belongings proved fruitless, which often is a strong indicator that there are no drugs. The process involved being locked into a detention room for several hours, handcuffed to a chair, while several dogs were brought in to sniff at her. A request to call her mother was denied.

But bullying is the best law enforcement tactic, so they gave her a body cavity search, which means a CBP agent put on some rubber gloves and shoved a finger up her vagina and butt. She was also made to squat pantless so female investigators could visually inspect her privates. Still no drugs.
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Fifty-One Foreign Service Officers Can't be Wrong…Or Can They? More bombs and Less Talk on Syria

Tuesday June 21, 2016


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It is ironic that fifty-one US State Department employees, perhaps overly-generously dignified in the media with the title of “diplomats,” have come out in favor of removing a foreign head of state by force. Detailing their opposition to the status quo, the signatories submitted a dissent memo through established Foreign Service channels. The document itself is classified, even though the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal clearly have obtained copies, presumably leaked to them by some of the dissident officers.

The signatories have reportedly demanded “targeted air strikes” and the “judicious use of stand-off and air weapons which would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed US-led diplomatic process” to bring down the al-Assad government. They justify their dissent by arguing that “The moral rationale for taking steps to end the deaths and suffering in Syria, after five years of brutal war, is evident and unquestionable. The status quo in Syria will continue to present increasingly dire, if not disastrous, humanitarian, diplomatic and terrorism-related challenges.”

The memo describes the Syrian government’s alleged barrel bomb attacks on civilians “the root cause of the instability that continues to grip Syria and the broader region. Crucially, Syria’s Sunni population continues to view the Assad regime as the primary enemy in the conflict. Failure to stem Assad’s flagrant abuses will only bolster the ideological appeal of groups such as (IS), even as they endure tactical setbacks on the battlefield.”
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'Hello, Lenin!' Three Components of America’s Misguided Foreign Policy

Tuesday June 21, 2016

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Since the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy could almost have been designed to undermine our national interests. Whether under Republican George W. Bush or Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, we have seen “regime changes” and “color revolutions,” facilitation of global jihadism while claiming to combat it, and gratuitous confrontation with post-communist Russia which was going out of its way to become our reliable ally.

For those familiar with the operational code of the late Soviet Union, the counterproductive skew of American policy has a familiar ring. The Bolsheviks sacrificed the interests of the Russian people in pursuit of their Marxist-Leninist vision. In his famous work, “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, described the roots of his ruling ideology in 19th century German philosophy, British political economy, and French utopian socialism.

It’s time to ask why, under GOP and Democrat administrations alike, American foreign policy is so dysfunctional. Also, one could notice that this policy has three components as well.

First, consider the power of money centered in the Washington establishment, sometimes summarized as the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC). This huge network of institutions, both public and private, whose bread and butter depend on global adventurism, today extends well beyond the MIC that outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower described in 1960.
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Orlando: Islam or Blowback?

Monday June 20, 2016

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According to the Telegraph newspaper, “Omar Mateen, the Orlando gunman, told his victims the attack was revenge for American bombing of Afghanistan, but allowed black Americans to be released because ‘they have suffered enough.’”

The person who recounted what Mateen said is 20-year-old Patience Carter. According to theTelegraph article, she heard Mateen telling police on the phone that he was pledging allegiance to Isil and saying the attacks were in retaliation for America’s bombing of Afghanistan.”

So, why do so many Americans, especially the US mainstream press, do everything they can to avoid confronting that simple fact — that Mateen killed those people in retaliation for America’s bombing of Afghanistan?

Indeed, why have they done the same thing with respect to every other anti-American terrorist attack since 1993?

Beginning with the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and continuing with the attack on the USS Cole, the attack on the US Embassies in East Africa, the 9/11 attacks, the Boston Marathon attack, the Ft. Hood attack, the San Bernardino attack, and others, the terrorists have made it clear that they are retaliating for the death and destruction that the US government has wreaked on people in the Middle East or Afghanistan, including countless people of the Muslim faith.
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Nazis Have Rights Too

Monday June 20, 2016

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Suffolk County, New York police arrested Edward Perkowski on Thursday after the police allegedly found in a raid of his home items including tens of thousands of dollars in cash, several guns and knives, ammunition, a bit of marijuana and illegal mushrooms, and some bomb-making instructions. Oh yeah, the town of Brookhaven condemned Perkowski’s house to boot. This appears to be yet another example of a government cracking down on people for nonviolent actions. In this case we have a convergence of the wars on cash, guns, and drugs, as well as government’s intolerance of free speech.

Here is another important aspect of this story: Suffolk County Police Commissioner Tim Sini is stirring up fear that Perkowski and his brother Sean, who was also arrested, are dangerous because they are Nazis. The brothers might even have been planning a mass killing like we saw in Orlando, Florida last week, Sini suggests.

The evidence for the brothers’ supposed Nazism is apparently that a Nazi flag, framed photo of Adolph Hitler, and other materials related to Nazi ideas were found in the house. Of course, the presence of such items in a house does not establish that any of the house’s occupants subscribe to any particular ideology.
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Orlando: The New 9/11?

Monday June 20, 2016

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Last week America was rocked by the cold-blooded murder of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Unlike the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Orlando shooter appears to be a lone gunman who, while claiming allegiance to ISIS, was not actually working with a terrorist group. About the only thing Orlando has in common with 9/11 is the way power-hungry politicians and federal officials wasted no time using it to justify expanding government and restricting liberty.

Immediately following the shooting, we began to hear renewed calls for increased government surveillance of Muslims, including spying on Muslim religious services. Although the Orlando shooter was born in the US, some are using the shooting to renew the debate over Muslim immigration. While the government certainly should prevent terrorists from entering the country, singling out individuals for government surveillance and other violations of their rights because of religious faith violates the First Amendment and establishes a dangerous precedent that will be used against other groups. In addition, scapegoating all Muslims because of the act of one deranged individual strengthens groups like ISIS by making it appear that the US government is at war with Islam.
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Huge Scandal Erupts Inside NATO: Alliance Member Germany Slams NATO ‘Warmongering’ Against Russia

Sunday June 19, 2016

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As we reported in just the past week, not only has NATO accelerated its encirclement of Russia, with British soldiers deployed in Estonia, US soldiers operating in Latvia and Canadians in Poland, while combat units are being increased in the Mediterranean, but even more troubling, was NATO's assessment that it may now have grounds to attack Russia when it announced that if a NATO member country becomes the victim of a cyber attack by persons in a non-NATO country such as Russia or China, then NATO’s Article V “collective defense” provision requires each NATO member country to join that NATO member country if it decides to strike back against the attacking country.

Specifically, NATO is alleging that because Russian hackers had copied the emails on Hillary Clinton’s home computer, this action of someone in Russia taking advantage of her having privatized her U.S. State Department communications to her unsecured home computer and of such a Russian’s then snooping into the U.S. State Department business that was stored on it, might constitute a Russian attack against the United States of America, and would, if the U.S. President declares it to be a Russian invasion of the U.S., trigger NATO’s mutual-defense clause and so require all NATO nations to join with the U.S. government in going to war against Russia, if the U.S. government so decides.
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Why Are Defense Policy Wonks So Ineffectual?

Saturday June 18, 2016

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Today, America’s foreign policy is a shambles. Its primary features are (1) a perpetual war on terror, and (2) the seemingly inevitable march into a new and unnecessary cold war against Russia and China. At the same time, President Obama is leaving his successor with a budget plan containing a front loaded and political engineered* procurement bow wave that guarantees steeply rising defense expenditures well into the next decade and possibly beyond. Such long term increases in the defense budget can only be justified by a new cold war. Yet the United States now spends far more on the military than any other country. Add in the expenditures of our allies, and the spending advantage over any conceivable combination of adversaries becomes overwhelming. Nevertheless, US citizens are more fearful than they were during the Cold War, and politicians and the yellow journalism of the mainstream media are hyping those fears to a greater extent than they did during the Cold War.

What is going on? 

Most pundits and policy makers who debate this dismal state of affairs subscribe to the view that fixing foreign policy is the first step toward getting control of the Pentagon and ultimately reducing defense budgets.
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Interventionism is a Rotten Tree With Rotten Fruit

Friday June 17, 2016

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Fifty-one State Department officials are calling on President Obama to expand US interventionism in Syria by initiating a bombing campaign against the Syrian government. Apparently they’re not satisfied with the great “success” that their philosophy of interventionism has brought to Iraq, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and the rest of the Middle East. They want the US national-security state’s death machine to bring even more death and destruction than it has already brought to that part of the world for the past 25 years.

It would be difficult to find anything more incredible and audacious than that. The Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, and the rest of the military-industrial complex, whose financial well-being necessarily depend on making interventionism in the Middle East a permanent part of American society, must be ecstatic. The fact that the demand is coming from State Department officials, rather than assets of the CIA, makes it look even better.
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US Senate Votes to Legalize Kidnapping of Women (AKA: Military Draft)

Thursday June 16, 2016

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Here’s a joke for you: How many US Senators does it take to kidnap your daughter? Answer: I don’t know, but 85 of them would like to. On Tuesday the United States Senate voted overwhelmingly to allow the federal government to kidnap women against their will and force them into military service, beginning January 1, 2018. This legalized kidnapping, also known as a military draft, was approved with an 85-13 vote as a part of a broad sweeping 600-billion-dollar military spending bill.

The general consensus among the “conservative” Republicans who supported the bill was that anyone who opposed to having their daughters seized by the government must be “un-patriotic” and “un-American.” While the “liberal” Democrats who supported the bill claimed that the right to be kidnapped by the government should be extended to women, rather than men alone. Feminists ballyhooed the measure as a sign of gender equality. I, on the other hand, bemoan it as a sign of national insanity.

While the above paragraph sounds like a joke, unfortunately it is not. And while many see the measure as nothing more than political haggling, the fact that 85 of 100 senators would vote in favor of it should be extraordinarily disturbing to Americans. Sadly, most don’t care and actually favor the idea of a potential military draft; which shows the extent to which the average American has been brain washed by decades of government propaganda. Most people see no problem whatsoever with requiring young people to register for the draft, since as of now, no draft exists. Nevertheless, the government wishes to keep accurate tabs on the young people of America, just in case they want to kidnap them in the future. And this is OK? To most Americans, it apparently is.
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