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A US Federal Judge in Florida yesterday ruled the transportation mask mandate illegal, ending two years of mask tyranny in the US. While passengers cheered the news, we must pause to reflect on how the tyrants were able to force it. Also today: Florida rejects CRT-infested math textbooks and Treasury Secretary Yellen joins the war party.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said on the weekend talk shows that it's time to start talking about sending US troops to directly fight Russia in Ukraine. Thus to defend Ukraine's borders, this member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee openly calls for that launch of what would be WWIII. Coons is joined by plenty of Republican Members calling for direct conflict with Russia, including disgraced neocon Rep. Adam Kinzinger. Also today: Fauci spills the beans on lockdowns and MSNBC spills the beans on its view of the role of media in a "free" society...
By Ron Paul
The Biden administration and its allies continue to use Russian President Vladimir Putin as the convenient excuse for their economic failures. The most recent falsehood is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused March’s 8.5 percent year-over-year increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Prices were surging long before Russian troops entered Ukraine. Furthermore, Putin did not stop exporting food and gas; it was the Biden administration and Congress that imposed sanctions, making US consumers suffer additional price increases. The blame for the economic effects lies with the US government, not Russia. The United States has for years been meddling in Ukraine’s affairs with the explicit goal of moving US and NATO military forces ever closer to Russia. The most notorious example was the 2014 US-orchestrated coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected government. Russia has a legitimate grievance over the US supporting expanding NATO to include Ukraine, despite the US having promised not to support expanding NATO beyond Germany’s borders during negotiations over how to end the Cold War. Foreign policy experts, including George Kennan, the architect of the Cold war “containment” strategy, warned that Russia would respond adversely to NATO expansion near Russia. Before the Ukraine conflict, Biden and his fellow Democrats blamed price increases on “greedy” corporations, going so far as to claim that increasing antitrust prosecutions would somehow bring down prices. Then Putin became the new excuse. The main culprit behind rising prices is neither Putin nor “greedy” corporations. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues are to blame. Starting in September 2019, when the Fed panicked over a spike in interest rates in the “repurchasing” market that banks use to give each other overnight loans, the Fed has engaged in an unprecedented spree of money creation. The Fed further stepped up its easy money and low, and even zero, interest rate policies in response to the lockdowns. Increasing prices are the direct result of the Fed’s policies. The Fed is planning to try to tame prices by increasing interest rates and reducing its balance sheet. This will likely tip the economy into a recession. Increasing interest rates will also cause the federal government’s debt payments to increase, which is a reason the Fed will not increase rates to anywhere near where they would be in a free market. The best-case scenario may be a return to 70s-style “stagflation.” The worst-case scenario is that the Fed’s failure to rein in inflation, fueled by Congress’s failure to stop spending, combined with the continued resentment over the US’s hyper-interventionist foreign policy, will cause a rejection of the dollar's reserve currency status and lead to a major financial crisis. Such a crisis could result in widespread poverty, as well as violence, crackdowns on liberties, and even the rise of a totalitarian government. The crisis could still be avoided, but only if Congress becomes serious about cutting spending, starting with the military industrial complex. Congress should also start to reform monetary policy by auditing the Fed, legalizing alternative currencies, and exempting precious metals and cryptocurrencies from all capital gains taxes. The welfare-warfare-fiat money system will end. What is not known is when it will end and whether it will be replaced by an even more authoritarian government or by a return to limited, constitutional government.
Government is not a problem solver, but a problem multiplier; the reaction to Covid being just the latest example. Government actions piled a host of new and devastating problems on top of Covid itself! We now have an inflation problem created by government spending and Fed counterfeiting. Will government's reaction to inflation create new problems on top? Yes.
According to Politico, the Biden Administration is considering sending a cabinet-level official - and possibly even Biden or Harris - to Ukraine as a show of solidarity with Kiev. As such a move would include a sizeable US military guard, there is incredible risk with near-zero gain in such a symbolic move. Also today: Enjoying that inflation? Biden's sending ANOTHER near-billion dollars to Ukraine! Finally, US increasing targeting intel sharing with Ukraine - including in Crimea! Escalation on top of escalation.
As the Russian deputy foreign minister warns that US and NATO weapons sent to Ukraine to target the Russian military will be attacked, the Biden Administration has called a meeting with the eight largest US weapons manufacturers to see how they can ramp up production for Ukraine. The Biden Administration is moving the US toward direct conflict even as it says it won't put US boots on the ground. Also today, why are media pundits who also work for military contractors not forced to reveal who is paying them?
As Ted Carpenter writes on Antiwar.com, it sure seems like the Biden Administration is doing all it can to prolong the war in Ukraine. Sending weapons that have little chance of making a big difference in the outcome only keeps the fighting and killing going strong, and the Administration has shown no interest in pushing a quick diplomatic end to the war. On the contrary, Biden openly calling for regime change and a war crimes trial makes diplomacy nearly impossible. Why prolong the fighting? US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan gave us a hint, when he told NBC News over the weekend that the US wants " a weakened and isolated Russia."
A new study looking in to Covid policy in various states with regard to mortality, GDP loss, and other factors found that the strongest lockdown states like California and New York managed the crisis the worst with the worst outcomes. And - Fauci gives us permission to manage our own risk. Also today, Bloomberg reports that we could be having another Covid surge...without even knowing it! Finally, why is the US government encouraging central European countries to transfer Soviet-era weapons to Ukraine in exchange for new, Washington-provided replacements? Boondoggle?
By Ron Paul Late last year, a Gallup poll showed that Americans’ trust in the mainstream media has fallen to its second lowest level on record. Only seven percent of Americans responded that they have a “great deal” of trust in the media. That loss of trust has been well-earned by the mainstream media, and it explains the massive growth of independent media and alternative voices on social media. The response to the rise of independent media voices has been a rush to “cancel” any voice outside the accepted mainstream narrative. Citizens of the Soviet Union would read manipulated media like Pravda not because the regime reported facts, but because truth was hidden between the lines of what was reported and what was not reported. That seems to be where we are in the US today. Last week an extraordinary article appeared in, of all places, NBC News, reporting that the US intelligence community is knowingly feeding information it does not believe accurate to the US mainstream media for the American audience to consume. In other words, the article reports that the US “deep state” admits to being actively engaged in lying to the American people in the hopes that it can manipulate public opinion According to the NBC News article, “multiple US officials acknowledged that the US has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it has used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect…” Readers will recall the shocking headlines that Russia was prepared to use chemical weapons in Ukraine, that China would be providing military equipment to Russia, that Russian President Putin was being fed misinformation by his advisors, and more. All of these were churned out by the CIA to be repeated in the American media even though they were known to be false. It was all about, as one intelligence officer said in the article, “trying to get inside Putin’s head.” That may have been the goal, but what the CIA actually did was get inside America’s head with false information meant to shape public perception of the conflict. They lied to propagandize us in favor of the Biden Administration’s narrative. Those pushing the “Russiagate” hoax through the Trump years claimed that the goal of “Russian disinformation” was to undermine Americans’ trust in our government, media, and other institutions. Isn’t it ironic that the CIA itself has done more than the Russians to undermine Americans’ faith in the media by feeding false stories to establish a particular narrative among the American people? After the Bay of Pigs disaster, President Kennedy has been quoted as wanting “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” That didn’t work out too well for him. As Senate Majority Chuck Schumer famously told Rachel Maddow in 2020, responding to the-President Trump’s criticism of the CIA, “let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” As more information about the activities of the US Intelligence Community in trying to bring down Trump come out, it appears that, for once, Schumer was right. It’s time to revisit President Kennedy’s post-Bay of Pigs wish. The CIA using lies to propagandize the American people toward war with Russia is just one of thousands of reasons to scatter a million pieces of that agency to the wind. 
Government forbids competition in currencies. Why is that? Is it because The Fed's dollar would quickly lose the competition with gold, silver, and perhaps even Bitcoin? Government can't create gold out-of-thin-air (like it does with dollars) to fund its expansion into every aspect of our lives. But change is in the air.
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