The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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America: The Last Ideological Empire

Saturday July 9, 2022

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What explains America’s hyper-ideological response to the Ukraine crisis? Less than a year before Vladimir Putin launched his invasion, Washington had wrapped up two decades of lousy regime-change wars, waged in the name of planting “freedom” in that region’s inhospitable soil. There was, or seemed to be, broad agreement that liberal moralism in foreign policy stood discredited: It had destabilized whole swaths of the Middle East and North Africa and bogged down America and its allies in the region’s bloody and intricate enmities—and to what end?
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Joe Biden and Other Politicians, not Coronavirus, Caused Children’s Educations to Suffer

Thursday July 7, 2022

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President Joe Biden declared Tuesday at Twitter: “Due to the pandemic, kids are behind in math and reading.” This is yet another example of politicians’ blame shifting we have seen throughout the coronavirus scare. Kids in America have fallen behind in their educations during the coronavirus scare, but not because of coronavirus. They have fallen behind because of coronavirus crackdown actions supported by Biden and many other politicians in the name of protecting students, teachers, and staff at schools from coronavirus that did not improve safety but did interfere with students’ ability to learn.

Since early on in the coronavirus scare it was known that children tended to be in miniscule danger from serious sickness or death from coronavirus. It was also known that, at schools, teachers and other adults tended not to get coronavirus from students. Yet, most American politicians with control over education policy did not say that “for the children” schools would be kept open and continue operating normally, something that was done in other countries and a few places in America without problems. Instead, as politicians are apt to do, they used the “for the children” plea as an excuse to wreak havoc. They shut down schools, then replaced them to some extent with dysfunctional attempts at virtual education, and ultimately reopened the schools in an absurd and menacing manner.
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NATO Has Become the Very Thing It Was Created to Fight

Thursday July 7, 2022

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After more than a decade, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) updated its Strategic Concept to name China as a chief global security threat to our "values." In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian accused the alliance of promoting "conflict and confrontation."

"It is filled with the Cold War mentality and ideological prejudices," Lijian said. He's right, and NATO's prejudices extend to the very people who NATO claims to represent: China is a threat to the US-led alliance—but so is everyone, everywhere, who does not share its ideology. And contrary to what NATO claims, its ideology is little more than a universalist commitment to subordinating nations to international bodies and reducing people to mere populations to be managed and controlled.

The US originally spearheaded NATO against the global hegemony sought by the Soviet Union, which, much like NATO, promoted "conflict and confrontation" with every government that did not share its ideology. The historical irony is that the US emerged from the ashes of the Cold War as an ideological nation itself with the same zeal to remake the world.
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Ukraine’s Endemic Corruption Problems are Suddenly Forgotten as Hungry Western Investors Smell ‘Reconstruction’ Profits

Wednesday July 6, 2022

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The annual Ukraine Reform Conference has, since 2017, brought together Western officials and their local 'civil society' foot soldiers to discuss ways that Ukraine can reduce its rampant corruption. But this year, before getting underway this week in Lugano, Switzerland, it underwent a name change to the Ukraine Recovery Conference. 

Perhaps drawing attention to the existence of the country’s endemic corruption isn’t convenient for those looking to avoid heavy criminal penalties set up to explicitly prevent investment that fuels corruption?

Simply changing the marketing of the conference does nothing to alter the reality. If anything, it’s counterproductive for Ukraine itself and serves to enable and perpetuate serious systemic problems that prevent the country from progressing.

“The authorities are delaying the fulfillment of many important anti-corruption promises,” according to Andrey Borovik, executive director of the Ukraine office of Transparency International, an organization funded by Western governments and multinationals. As for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, “corruption just doesn’t seem to worry Mr. Zelensky much – at least when those implicated are close to him,” claimed Kyiv Independent (another Western funded outfit) editor Olga Rudenko in a guest piece for the New York Times in February, right before the Russian military operation started. 

Not exactly the kind of guy you’d want overseeing massive investment projects, one would think.
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Crime and Punishment

Tuesday July 5, 2022

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Quite likely a majority of Americans would agree that it is wrong for the government or police to torture someone, though some would surely accept the “ticking time bomb” exemption, where a detainee is withholding information that could save many lives. It is in fact illegal to torture someone as well as it being morally wrong. Indeed, it could constitute a crime against humanity or a war crime depending on circumstances. The United States, which has signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture and is bound by it, has thereby accepted legal sanctions to back up the view that torture is never permissible. 

Under US law, torture committed by “government officials and their collaborators upon a person restrained by the government is a felony punishable by up to 20 years in federal prison, and its fruits are inadmissible in all courts.” Given that background, one is astonished to learn that some in the government have not taken the obligation seriously. To be sure, the US has been quick to react when lower ranking officials, contractors and ordinary soldiers have reportedly been involved in torturing prisoners, as occurred with Abu Ghraib prior to 2004, but the higher one goes up the ladder of power the less do laws apply to even the most egregious misbehavior.

It has long been known that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in the wake of 9/11, resorted to torture in its overseas “black” prisons, but details of what took place and anything that would stand up in court as evidence has been difficult to discern as it has been easy for the Agency to shroud its more nefarious deeds through claims of protecting “states secrets.” But now some more details have emerged. The news that former Donald Trump appointed CIA Director Gina Haspel during her tour overseeing a prison in Thailand in 2002 personally observed at least one terrorist suspect being tortured by waterboarding, which simulates being drowned repeatedly until a confession is obtained. Waterboarding was used by the Japanese on prisoners of war in the Second World War and was subsequently considered to be torture, a war crime.
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American Secession

Monday July 4, 2022

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On Independence Day, many Americans think about, at least briefly, the American Revolution. One important thing they should consider in this reflection is that the American Revolution is misnamed. A more appropriate name would be the American Secession.

And an appropriate question for now, when the power of the United States government and Americans’ dissatisfaction have become immense, is whether the time is right for another American Secession.

The misnamed American revolutionaries were not seeking to replace the king or parliament in Great Britain. That is what revolutionaries would seek. Instead, they wanted their respective colonies to become independent of the control of Great Britain — to secede.

Indeed, this American Secession could even be thought of as the Thirteen Secessions, pursued at the same time by thirteen separate colonies of Great Britain. There was coordination among colonies, and people from different colonies did at times fight together against Great Britain’s military. But, the secessions were pursued for individual colonies, not some overarching American government.
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Foreign Policy Fail: Biden's Sanctions are a Windfall For Russia!

Monday July 4, 2022

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It’s easy to see why, according to a new Harris poll, 71 percent of Americans said they do not want Joe Biden to run for re-election. As Americans face record gas prices and the highest inflation in 40 years, President Biden admits he could not care less. His Administration is committed to fight a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine and Americans just need to suck it up.
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Polish Dissident Anti-War Voices on the Rise

Sunday July 3, 2022

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There is no doubt that Poland is and has been the leading voice in NATO and in the European Union advocating for a more aggressive approach to Russia in the context of the war in Ukraine. Apart from the daily reproaches of the Polish government and president against Moscow and in its perversely subservient line of support for Kiev, two recent developments are a clear testimony that Warsaw’s Eastern policy is becoming more and more of an aberration.

On May 9th, the ambassador of the Russian Federation in Poland, Sergey Andreev, was doused with red paint while on a visit to a Soviet war cemetery in Warsaw by Ukrainian activists. Iryna Zemlana, who was personally responsible for the attack, was not apprehended by the police, and what is more, was able to escape Warsaw.

This egregious act, which should have been prosecuted, was even mildly praised by the Polish Minister of the Interior, Mariusz Kamiński, on Twitter. Worth mentioning here is that active assault or insult of a representative of a foreign state is regulated in Article 136 of the Polish Criminal Code. This provision states in the first paragraph that “whoever, on the territory of the Republic of Poland, commits an active assault on a head of a foreign state or an accredited head of diplomatic representation of such a state or a person enjoying similar protection under laws, agreements or generally recognized international customs, shall be subject to the penalty of deprivation of liberty for a term of between 3 months and 5 years.”
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