The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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Some Hard Thoughts About Post Ukraine

Monday June 20, 2022

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The war in Ukraine has dragged on long enough now to reveal certain clear trajectories. First, two fundamental realities:

1) Putin is to be condemned for launching this war– as is virtually any leader who launches any war. Putin can be termed a war criminal–in good company with George W. Bush who has killed vastly greater numbers than Putin.

2) secondary condemnation belongs to the US (NATO) in deliberately provoking a war with Russia by implacably pushing its hostile military organization, despite Moscow’s repeated notifications about crossing red lines, right up to the gates of Russia. This war did not have to be if Ukranian neutrality, á la Finland and Austria, had been accepted. Instead Washington has called for clear Russian defeat.

As the war grinds to a close, where will things go?

Contrary to Washington’s triumphalist pronouncements, Russia is winning the war, Ukraine has lost the war. Any longer-term damage to Russia is open to debate.

American sanctions against Russia have turned out to be far more devastating to Europe than to Russia. The global economy has slowed and many developing nations face serious food shortages and risk of broad starvation.
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Federal Reserve’s Rate Increases: Too Little Too Late?

Monday June 20, 2022

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The Federal Reserve’s recent 0.75 percent increase in its “benchmark” interest rate is the Fed’s highest rate increase since 1994. This increase is a sign that the Fed has finally realized that price inflation is more persistent and widespread than the Fed initially believed.
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The UK's Decision to Extradite Assange Shows Why The US/UK's Freedom Lectures Are a Farce

Saturday June 18, 2022

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The eleven-year persecution of Julian Assange was extended and escalated on Friday morning. The British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, approved the US's extradition request to send Julian Assange to Virginia to stand trial on eighteen felony charges under the 1917 Espionage Act and other statutes in connection with the 2010 publication by WikiLeaks of thousands of documents showing widespread corruption, deceit, and war crimes by American and British authorities along with their close dictatorial allies in the Middle East.

This decision is unsurprising — it has been obvious for years that the US and UK are determined to destroy Assange as punishment for his journalism exposing their crimes — yet it nonetheless further highlights the utter sham of American and British sermons about freedom, democracy and a free press. Those performative self-glorifying spectacles are constantly deployed to justify these two countries’ interference in and attacks on other nations, and to allow their citizens to feel a sense of superiority about the nature of their governments. After all, if the US and UK stand for freedom and against tyranny, who could possibly oppose their wars and interventions in the name of advancing such lofty goals and noble values?

Having reported on the Assange case for years, on countless occasions I've laid out the detailed background that led Assange and the US to this point. There is thus no need to recount all of that again; those interested can read the granular trajectory of this persecution here or here. Suffice to say, Assange — without having been convicted of any crime other than bail jumping, for which he long ago served out his fifty-week sentence — has been in effective imprisonment for more than a decade.
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When The Lies Come Home

Saturday June 18, 2022

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Diogenes, one of the ancient world’s illustrious philosophers, believed that lies were the currency of politics, and those lies were the ones he sought to expose and debase. To make his point, Diogenes occasionally carried a lit lantern through the streets of Athens in the daylight. If asked why, Diogenes would say he was searching for an honest man.
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The Ukraine Walk-Back?

Friday June 17, 2022

Just what exactly is the West’s policy approach to Ukraine? Should Kiev negotiate a peace or should it fight on indefinitely? And what is NATO’s end game? What does winning mean? Meanwhile, despite sanctions, Russia is creating political facts on the ground. CrossTalking with Nebojsa Malic, Daniel McAdams, and Pierre-Emmanuel Thomann...
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An Endless Stream of Scary Official Enemies

Friday June 17, 2022

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Any government that is a national-security state needs big official enemies — scary ones, ones that will cause the citizenry to continue supporting not only the continued existence of a national-security state form of government but also ever-growing budgets for it and its army of voracious “defense” contractors.

That’s, of course, what the current brouhaha about Russia is all about. It’s really a replay of the Cold War decades, when Americans were made to believe that the Reds were coming to get them, take over the federal government and the public schools, and indoctrinate everyone into loving communism and socialism. 

In those Cold War years, Americans citizens were so scared of the Reds that they were willing to ignore — or even support — the dark-side powers that were being wielded and exercised by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, which are the three principal components of the national-security establishment. The idea was that if the U..S. government failed to adopt the same dark-side totalitarian-type powers, such as assassination and torture, that the Soviet Union and Red China were wielding and exercising, the United States would end up falling to the Reds and becoming communist.
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NATO Summit Demands: More Weapons For Ukraine!

Thursday June 16, 2022

The rhetoric at the NATO summit this week is predictable: we must send more weapons to Ukraine! But behind the rehearsed facade, there are increasing cracks in the alliance...and among the peoples of Europe. Even Blinken is changing his tune a bit. Watch today's Liberty Report...
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The Road to Nuclear Armageddon

Thursday June 16, 2022

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Ladies and gentlemen, we face a grave danger. The leader of a major European power wants to make territorial revisions. He is surrounded by hostile powers who threaten him. He does not seek war with other countries but if the hostile powers continue to encircle him, he will fight. A European war looms.

You probably think I’m talking about the current crisis between Russia and the Ukraine, but I’m not. I’m talking about Europe just before World War II began in September 1939. At that time, Hitler wanted small territorial revisions with its Polish neighbor. East Prussia was cut off from the rest of Poland by a band of territory called the Polish Corridor.

As the great British historian A.J. P. Taylor explains, “The losses of territory to Poland were, for most Germans, the indelible grievance against Versailles. Hitler undertook a daring operation over this grievance when he planned co-operation with Poland. But there was a way out. The actual Germans under Polish rule might be forgotten—or withdrawn; what could not be forgiven was the ‘Polish corridor’ which divided East Prussia from the Reich. Here, too, there was a possible compromise. Germany might be satisfied with a corridor across the corridor—a complicated idea for which there were however many precedents in German history. German feeling could be appeased by the recovery of Danzig. This seemed easy.
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Green Reversal? Biden Screams At Oil Companies For NOT Drilling!

Wednesday June 15, 2022

With the country crippled by record gas prices, President Biden has taken to yelling at oil companies for NOT drilling. But didn't he promise to end drilling and fossil fuels? Also today: horrific cost of covid lockdowns revealed. And - "Inflation? Ha! We're sending another $650 million for weapons to Ukraine!" Don't miss today's Liberty Report...
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Bribe Money for Ukrainian Officials?

Wednesday June 15, 2022

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In my blog post of May 18, 2022, I raised the possibility that the $40 billion aid package that Congress quickly approved for Ukraine was going to be used, at least in part, to pay multimillion dollar bribes to Ukrainian officials. After all, why else would the members of Congress, as well as the Pentagon’s assets within the mainstream press, react so vociferously against the idea of having the Inspector General monitor how the money is being used? And what better way to ensure that Ukrainian officials remain on board for perpetual war than the payment of bribes to officials serving in what is perhaps the most corrupt regime on the planet?

For skeptics, I refer to an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal whose title pretty much tells it all: “High-Ranking Afghan Officials Escaped to Luxury Homes Abroad.” The opening paragraph states, “Some senior Afghan officials and their families spent millions purchasing expensive homes in the US and abroad in the final years of the war, which became luxurious landings when they escaped the escalating violence in Afghanistan.” The article then goes on to detail some of those “luxurious landings.”

Okay, yes, it is conceivable that those Afghan officials are all honest politicians and bureaucrats in an impoverished nation who became millionaires by dutifully saving portions of their government salaries. 

But there is another possibility, a much more likely one in my opinion. Do you remember those planeloads of US-taxpayer-provided hundred-dollar bills that Pentagon officials were shipping into Afghanistan? Do you recall how there wasn’t any Inspector General monitoring how all that moolah was being disbursed? I think there is a very good chance that it was being handed out to Afghan officials as bribes to bring them on board in support of the US invasion and occupation of their country.
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