The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
The Ron Paul Peace and Prosperity Institute
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If Greece Defaults, Will the Fed Bailout Europe?

Saturday June 20, 2015

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The Greek crisis is dominating headlines this week, and promises to be the most important economic and financial topic of conversation through the weekend and into Monday. Neither the Greek government nor the European Central Bank (ECB) seem to be prepared to give an inch, and there’s every indication that things could come to head next week. If Greece does default, and if there is a resulting crisis in European markets, will the Federal Reserve get involved? To quote Sarah Palin, “You betcha!” How would the Fed do this? Read on to find out.

Although the euro is the dominant currency in Europe, a lot of debt in Europe is still denominated in dollars. The dollar being the world’s reserve currency and dollar markets being incredibly liquid, it just makes sense for a lot of companies to do business in dollars. But when a crisis hits and those businesses need dollars, they have to get a hold of dollars somehow. Banks in Europe have a limited supply, and once those dollars are gone, there is no dollar-printing central bank in Europe that can step in. Enter the Federal Reserve.
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Why The US Military Opposed New Combat Roles in Iraq

Saturday June 20, 2015

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The story published in the Washington Post on 13 June shows how the US military service chiefs - who make decisions on war policy in light of their own institutional interests - prefer an inconclusive war with IS and existing constraints on US involvement, to one with even the most US limited combat role.

The resistance of top US military officials to deepening US military involvement in the war against IS came in the wake of a major policy debate within the Obama administration following the collapse of Iraqi military resistance in Ramadi.

In that debate, senior State Department officials reportedly supported the option of putting US advisers into Iraqi combat units to direct airstrikes on IS positions and sending US Apache attack helicopters into urban combat situations. But the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, joined top military commanders in opposing that option, the Post story recounted. Dempsey was said to have concluded that the potential gains from such an escalation were not worth the costs in terms of possible US combat losses.
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National Endowment for Democracy? Hardly!

Friday June 19, 2015

After covert CIA backing of Radio Free Europe and other organizations was exposed in the 1970s, a group of neoconservatives decided to create a new kind of CIA to do in the open that which had been done in secret: the National Endowment for Democracy. More than 30 years later, even though the Cold War is a distant memory, the NED is still a $100 million per year, taxpayer-funded worldwide "regime change" operation. Yesterday's death of one of the masterminds of the NED should perhaps prompt Americans to again wonder why they are being forced to finance such dangerous and counterproductive government-funded bureaucracies.
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Road Pirates: Assemble! 'Desert Snow' is Coming to Idaho

Friday June 19, 2015

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It isn’t often that honest people receive detailed intelligence about a planned gathering of violent men who steal for a living and kill with impunity. An event of that kind will occur from August 10-12th here in Idaho. In fact, I can provide the specific address of the armed robbers’ summit — 700 South Stratford Drive in Meridian. The location is conspicuously marked and easy to find: It is the Idaho Peace Officers Standards and Training (POST) Academy, which will host a two-day session of Desert Snow’s “Phase 2015” asset forfeiture workshop.

“Civil asset forfeiture,” for the mercifully uninitiated, is a procedure in which police officers and the agencies that employ them steal money and property from people who have never been convicted of a crime, and quite often never face criminal charges. The agency designates the desired property as “proceeds” of illicit activity and then files an “in rem” civil lawsuit against it – not the owner of the property, but the property itself. In this process, the burden of proof is placed on the victim, rather than the perpetrator.

Fighting an act of state-licensed larceny of this kind is prohibitively expensive and frequently futile, which means that the privileged plunderers generally make out like the bandits they unfailingly prove themselves to be.
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House Refuses to Curb Obama's Middle East War

Thursday June 18, 2015

Yesterday the House voted down H. Con. Res. 55, which would have forced President Obama to withdraw US troops from Iraq and Syria by year's end without Congressional authorization. Congressional leaders clearly have no interest in asserting their Constitutional prerogatives. Meanwhile on the same day, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter was telling the House Armed Services Committee that plans to train fighters in Iraq and Syria are failing because no one is signing up. Is this not an argument for an end to US involvement in the region?
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Policing and Defending Then and Now

Wednesday June 17, 2015

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Inevitably the debate over issues that relate to both national security and domestic law enforcement often become mired down in wrangling over legal or constitutional niceties, which the public has difficulty in following as it fixates instead on the latest twist in the Bruce Jenner saga. That means that the punditry and media concentrate on easily digestible issues like potential bureaucratic fixes, budgeting, equipment and training, which presumably are both simpler to understand and also more susceptible to possible remedies. But they ignore some basic questions regarding the nature and viability of the actual threat and the actual effectiveness of the response even as the dividing line between military and law enforcement functions becomes less and less evident.

There has been a fundamental transformation of the roles of both police and the armed services in the United States, a redirection that has become increasingly evident since the 1990s when the conjoined issues of national security and crime rates became political footballs. Response to terrorism and “tough on crime” attitudes frequently employ the same rhetoric, incorporating both political and social elements that place police forces and the military on the same side in what might plausibly be described as a version of the often cited clash of civilizations.

A nation’s army traditionally exists to use maximum force to find and destroy enemies that threaten the homeland. A police force instead serves to protect the community against criminal elements using the minimum force necessary to do the job. Those roles would appear to be distinct but one might reasonably argue that the armed forces and the police in today’s America have become the two major constituents of the same organism more-or-less connected by a revolving door, dedicated to combating a new type of insurgency that comprises both global and domestic battlefields and is no respecter of borders.
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Samantha Power: Liberal War Hawk

Tuesday June 16, 2015

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Propaganda and genocide almost always go hand in hand, with the would-be aggressor stirring up resentment often by assuming the pose of a victim simply acting in self-defense and then righteously inflicting violence on the targeted group.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power understands this dynamic having written about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda where talk radio played a key role in getting Hutus to kill Tutsis. Yet, Power is now leading propaganda campaigns laying the groundwork for two potential ethnic slaughters: against the Alawites, Shiites, Christians and other minorities in Syria and against the ethnic Russians of eastern Ukraine.

Though Power is a big promoter of the “responsibility to protect” – or “R2P” – she operates with glaring selectivity in deciding who deserves protection as she advances a neocon/liberal interventionist agenda. She is turning “human rights” into an excuse not to resolve conflicts but rather to make them bloodier.
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Congress Blocks Nazi Training in Ukraine

Tuesday June 16, 2015

Not long ago anyone who suggested that neo-Nazis were involved in the US-backed government in Ukraine would be ridiculed as a conspiracy theorist. Then last week the US House voted to prohibit funding to the Azov Battalion because of its neo-Nazi ideology. As NATO makes plans to station thousands of troops and tons of heavy military equipment right on Russia's border, the Ron Paul Liberty Report takes a look at who exactly is escalating tensions in eastern Europe...
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The Magna Carta at 800 Years: Is it Still Alive?

Monday June 15, 2015

Born 800 years ago today, the magna carta was in essence the result of a rebellion against the unchecked power of the executive to take a country to war and then stick the citizens with the bill. What can we learn from that rebellion and how can we put it to use to preserve and defend our own liberty against a modern unchecked executive power? Today's Ron Paul Liberty Report takes a look...
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Dangers of a Declining Global Power

Monday June 15, 2015

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Much has been written about the dangers and challenges posed by China as a rising global power. Indeed, historians speak of generic tensions between rising powers and status quo powers that have often led to war.

But instability takes at least two players to create it: the rising power and the resistance of the once-reigning power. Today the US is that once-reigning power, now in a state of relative international decline. If the US itself, and the international order including rising powers, do not acknowledge and handle this transition wisely a dangerous confrontation awaits.

The reasons for US decline across the boards are well known and well described in many statistics. They are not, however, regularly acknowledged by large segments of the US population including Washington. Here I would like to look primarily at the foreign policy aspects of this decline and its implications.

The decline of US power abroad cannot be separated from many domestic failings: deadlocked governance, bloated military budgets and their huge opportunity costs, the rise of the military-industrial-security state and its massive cash infusions into Congress; an impoverished political spectrum that begins on the moderate right of center (Obama) and caroms on over into various degrees of crazy right.
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