By Liberty Report Staff
In 1967, LBJ said,“What happens in Vietnam is extremely important to the nation’s freedom and it is extremely important to the United States’ security.” It wasn't. What happened in Vietnam had nothing to do with security in America. Just as what happened in Korea, and Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Serbia, and Syria, and Libya, and Venezuela, and Cuba, and now Iran. Yet the same exact script is used. They most likely assume that if the propaganda works, just keep using it. In 1968, the great libertarian Murray Rothbard wrote: “A lot of people throughout the country are beginning to realize that getting into the Vietnam war was a disastrous mistake. In fact, hardly anyone makes so bold as to justify America’s entrance into, and generation of, that perpetual war. And so the last line of defense for the war’s proponents is: Well, maybe it was a mistake to get into the war, but now that we’re there, we’re committed, so we have to carry on.
Today, it's common knowledge that the Iraq invasion was a "mistake" and the destruction of Libya was a "mistake."
But are these really "mistakes" in the eyes of the people perpetrating them? Apparently not, because they keep doing the same thing without the slightest pause. The talking points from Vietnam, that once the "mistake" is made you have to keep throwing money and lives at it is still standard procedure today. President Trump has continued a cornucopia of "mistakes" and even brags about how he has transferred more taxpayer money to the "mistake"-machine than any other president before him! The "mistake"-machine consumes well over $1 TRILLION per year. This is what has bankrupted America. This is why America runs on fumes. The Soviets ran on fumes too. You can run on fumes for a little while. And then you can't.
The last time negotiations were planned between Venezuelan government and opposition forces, opposition leader (and US puppet) Guaido launched his ill-fated coup and the talks were scuttled. Today a new effort, brokered by Norway, is being launched to solve the conflict without further bloodshed. What kind of monkey wrench will the neocons throw into the mix this time?
The ducks are lining up for the warhawks aiming for Iran. Today the State Department announced that all non-essential personnel should leave the US Embassy in Baghdad. US allies are wondering where are these "increased threats"? Are the neocons about to get their Iran war?
By Chris Rossini
In societies where governments and collectivist ideas dominate, most people succumb to having their individuality drilled out of them. The pressure from all angles is just too great to withstand. This is job number one for those who lust after power. If you want to rule (or pretend to rule) over others, then the others must be stripped of their individual independence. They must be brainwashed into believing that they are dependent. You can't rule a bunch of individuals who firmly believe in their individual Liberty. Others must believe that they are dependent on you. As time goes on and those who have been granted power relentlessly squeeze their iron firsts, the dependent individuals can't help but dream about a white knight who will gallop in to save the day. The dependent individuals never even consider that they themselves are the only way out of their misery. In their conditioned minds, they can only be saved by someone else --- the white knight. They complain, and scream, and form "movements" ... and yet the white knight never comes. They vote --- and vote --- and vote --- and still the white knight never comes. Why doesn't he come? Is he afraid? Does he think that the "swamp" will destroy him? Can't he see that "the people" need him? If you're one of "the people" who have been dreaming of a white knight to come and save you, it may be a good time to reconsider. Here's the hard truth --- No one is coming. Here's another hard truth --- YOU are the white knight that you've been waiting for. Most people steeped in the ideas of collectivism will immediately discard such a notion. "That's preposterous! We must be saved by someone else! We must make our voices heard, we need better 'community organizers,' .... We need better 'representatives' ... We ... We .... We ..." There is no "We" ... There is only YOU. YOU live on planet with perpetual, unbreakable and indestructible natural laws. Go back to the time of Christ, and even thousands of years before Him and 2+2 has always equaled 4. The laws of physics are constant. Economic laws are always in place. Supply and Demand has applied to all people at all times. The natural laws are numerous, and no one knows how many are still waiting to be discovered. But they always have been, and always will be, whether we know about them or not. YOU have the freedom to decide whether you're going to live in rapport with all of these natural laws or not. No one can decide this for you. A white knight cannot gallop in and make you to believe that 2+2=4. You always have the freedom to not believe what he says. If you need proof that this freedom exists, just look at man-made governments and their dependents. They reject natural laws every single day! In their collectivist-dominated thinking, they believe that there is strength in numbers against the truth. If enough people believe that 2+2=5, and if enough people hold up signs stating that 2+2=5, this will make it so. It doesn't make it so! And that's why so many needlessly suffer. They fight a fight that they cannot win. YOU, as the white knight of your own life, can avoid the suffering if you desire to do so. Just accept that 2+2=4 and you will flourish as a result. But, alas, something so simple is much easier said than done. The truth is very hard for many people to accept. They may have grown up in a family that has always believed that 2+2=5. They don't want to upset their relatives, or be different. They may live in a blue state or red state, where 2+2=5 is sacrosanct. Their job might consist of propagandizing that 2+2=5. What are they supposed to do? Quit their job? That's a hard decision for most people to make. Media blares 2+2=5 around the clock. The schools do the same. As do the politicians. A white knight cannot come in and change this. Where does he start? Only individuals (on their own) must decide whether or not they will live in rapport with the natural laws that govern this world. That's what freedom is. YOU choose whether you will stick with the truth, no matter what it happens to be. YOU choose whether to use the laws of electricity to light up your life, or burn it down. It can do either one, and it will dutifully follow whichever choice YOU make. YOU choose whether you believe the collectivist mantras, or not. Since humanity is made up of individuals, YOU choose your own "foreign policy." Do you use force and violence when dealing with other individuals, or do you interact with them peacefully and voluntarily? Will you respect their Life, Liberty & Property, or not? If YOU consistently choose to live in rapport with all the natural laws of this world, and YOU consistently deal with others in a peaceful and voluntary manner, the idea of needing a white knight to gallop in on his white horse vanishes! The thought becomes ridiculous to even consider. Why would you need anyone else to come and save you? YOU saved yourself!
US warships and B-52s moved to Iran's borders to counter an "unspecified threat" to US interests. President Trump warns of massive destruction should Iran make a wrong move. Are neocons about to get their war on Iran? Former CIA officer and political analyst Phil Giraldi joins to discuss.
By Ron Paul
Last week the New York Times published some of President Trump’s 1980s and 1990s tax returns information. The information detailed President Trump’s financial difficulties during that time. While you would not know it from reading some media reports, this is old news. In fact, President Trump openly discussed his financial difficulties on his popular reality television show. What should be of great concern is the possibility that the person who leaked the returns — who the paper says has legal access to President Trump’s tax records — is an IRS employee seeking to undermine the president. This would hardly be the first time an IRS employee has leaked confidential information because he disagreed with the taxpayer’s politics. In 2014 the agency had to pay the National Organization for Marriage 50,000 dollars after an IRS employee gave names of the group’s donors to the group’s opponents. In 2014-2017, my Campaign for Liberty group was repeatedly threatened by the IRS because it refused to give the agency the names of and other information about its top supporters. Fortunately, the IRS rescinded the regulation forcing groups like Campaign for Liberty to violate supporters’ privacy or face legal penalties. However, campaign finance reform legislation that recently passed in the House of Representatives would require the IRS to resume collecting this information, and the New York attorney general is suing the IRS to force the agency to reinstate the regulation. The right of groups like Campaign for Liberty to protect their supporters’ privacy was upheld by the Supreme Court in NAACP v. Alabama. As Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote, “Inviolability of privacy in group association may in many circumstances be indispensable to preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs.” Traditionally, presidents have used the IRS to harass their political opponents instead of presidents’ opponents using the IRS against them. Franklin Roosevelt audited people critical of the New Deal and supportive of the America First movement. Lyndon Johnson ordered audits of opponents, and John Kennedy shared tax return information with Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. During the Obama administration, the IRS targeted groups opposing Obamacare. The agency went after anti-Iraq War groups during the George W. Bush years. If the Times did obtain Trump’s tax returns information from an IRS employee, that employee is not in the same category as whistleblowers like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning who exposed government wrongdoing. The leaker or leakers of President Trump’s information are releasing private tax information. The IRS regularly violates the civil liberties of taxpayers generally. In fact, the income tax system forcing taxpayers to reveal potentially incriminating information on their tax returns violates the principles of a free society. Americans’ liberty and prosperity will never be secure until Congress repeals two great mistakes of 1913: the income tax and the Federal Reserve. 
By Jacob G. Hornberger
In his Fourth of July address to Congress in 1821, U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams stated that if America were ever to abandon its founding foreign policy of non-interventionism, she would inevitably become the world’s “dictatress” and begin behaving accordingly. No can can deny that Adams’ prediction has come true. America has truly become the world’s dictatress — an arrogant, ruthless, brutal dictatress that brooks no dissent from anyone in the world. Now, I use the term “America” because that’s the term Adams used. In actuality, however, it’s not America that has become the world’s dictatress. It is the U.S. government that has become the world’s dictatress. A good example of this phenomenon involves Meng Wanzhou, a Chinese citizen who serves as chief financial officer of the giant Chinese technology firm Huawei. Having been arrested by Canadian authorities and placed under house arrest, Meng is suffering the wrath of the world’s dictatress. What is her purported crime? That she violated U.S. sanctions against Iran. What do U.S. sanctions on Iran have to do with her? Exactly! She’s a Chinese citizen, not an American citizen. So, why is she being prosecuted by the U.S. government? Sanctions have become a standard tool of U.S. foreign policy. With the exception of libertarians, hardly anyone raises an eyebrow over their imposition and enforcement. Their objective is to target foreign citizens with death, suffering, and economic privation as a way to bend their regime to the will of the U.S. dictratress and her brutal and ruthless agents. After all, what could be more brutal and ruthless than to target innocent people with death and impoverishment as a way to get to their government? Most foreign citizens have as little control over the actions of their government as individual American citizens have over the actions of their government. Where is the morality in targeting innocent people, especially as a way to achieve a political goal? Isn’t that why people condemn terrorism? It’s bad enough to target innocent foreign citizens with death and impoverishment to achieve a political goal. But it’s also important to keep in mind that sanctions are an attack on the economic liberty of the American people. Sanctions impose criminal penalties on U.S. citizens who trade with Iranians. If an American trades with Iranians, the dictatress goes after him with a vengeance, either with criminal prosecution or civil fines or both. A good example of this phenomenon took place when the dictatress was enforcing its system of sanctions against Iraq during the 1990s. The sanctions were killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. That’s didn’t bother the dictatress, at least not enough to bring an end to the sanctions. The idea was that if a sufficiently large number of children could be killed, Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein would abdicate in favor of a U.S.-approved dictator, or that there would be a coup or a violent revolution that would accomplish the same thing. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright expressed the official view of the dictatress when she announced that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were “worth it.” An American citizen named Bert Sacks, who was stricken by a crisis of conscience, traveled to Iraq with medicines to help out the Iraqi people. The dictatress went after him with a vengeance, hitting him with a fine and then pursuing its collection for around a decade. See here and here.) That is bad enough. But here is where Adams’ point comes into play. The federal government is not satisfied with just requiring its own citizens to comply with its evil system. In its role as worldwide dictatress, the federal government requires everyone in the world to comply with its evil system. The dictatress claims worldwide jurisdiction for its evil system of sanctions. That’s why Meng Wanzhou was arrested and placed under house arrest in Canada. Yes, Canada! She wasn’t even in the United States when she was arrested. The dictatress announced that she had violated its Iran sanctions in some dealings that she supposedly had with some bank located thousands of miles away from American shores. The dictatress then prevailed on Canada to arrest her while she was in that country so that she could be extradited to the United States to stand trial for her purported violation of U.S. sanctions on Iran. Why are innocent foreign citizens be targeted for death and economic suffering simply because U.S. officials don’t like their government? Why are American citizens have their freedoms destroyed for the same reason? And why are foreign citizens around the world be targeted with criminal prosecution for violating the federal government’s evil system of sanctions? It’s all because of what John Quincy Adams observed almost 200 years ago: If the United States were ever to abandon its founding foreign policy of non-interventionism, the federal government would inevitably become the world’s dictatress, and a brutal, ruthless one at that.
This article was originally published at The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Retired New York Police Department undercover drug detective John Baeza spent years in the drug war trenches. He tells the Liberty Report how he came to believe that the drug war was doing more harm than good. Baeza will be a featured speaker at the Ron Paul Institute's May 18th Conference, Winning the War on the War on Drugs. For info: RonPaulInstitute.org/conference
By Ron Paul
Is President Trump about to invade Venezuela? His advisors keep telling us in ever-stronger terms that “all options are on the table” and that US military intervention to restore Venezuela’s constitution “may be necessary.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was on the Sunday news programs to claim that President Trump could launch a military attack against Venezuela without Congress’s approval. Pompeo said that, "[t]he president has his full range of Article II authorities and I'm very confident that any action we took in Venezuela would be lawful." The man who bragged recently about his lying, cheating, and stealing, is giving plenty of evidence to back his claim. The president has no Constitutional authority to start a war with Venezuela or any other country that has not attacked or credibly threatened the United States without Congressional approval. It is that simple. How ironic that Pompeo and the rest of the neocons in the Trump Administration are ready to attack Venezuela to “restore their constitution” but they could not care less about our own Constitution! While Washington has been paralyzed for two years over disproven claims that the Russians meddled in our elections to elect Trump, how hypocritical that Washington does not even hesitate to endorse the actual overturning of elections overseas! Without Congressional authority, US military action of any kind against Venezuela would be an illegal and likely an impeachable offense. Of course those Democrats who talk endlessly of impeaching Trump would never dream of impeaching him over starting an illegal war. Democrats and Republicans both love illegal US wars. Unfortunately, Washington is so addicted to war that President Trump would likely have little difficulty getting authority from Congress to invade Venezuela if he bothered to ask. Just as with the disastrous US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the mainstream media is nothing but non-stop war propaganda. Even so-called progressives like Rachel Maddow are attacking the Trump Administration not for its reckless saber-rattling toward Venezuela but for not being aggressive enough! The real lesson is that even a “Constitutional” war against Venezuela would not be a just war. It would be a war of aggression for which Americans should be angry and ashamed. But the mainstream media is pumping out the same old pro-war lies, while the independent media is under attack from social media companies that have partnered with US government entities to decide what is “fake news.” The latest outrage in the mainstream media is over the most sensible thing President Trump has done in some time: last week he spent an hour on the telephone with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss, among other things, the dangerous situation in Venezuela. While President Trump’s neocon advisors are purposely trying to position him so that war is the only option, we can only hope that President Putin was able to explain that the Venezuela problem must be solved by the Venezuelans themselves. Certainly the US, perhaps together with the Russians, could help facilitate discussions between the government and the opposition, but the neocon road to war will surely end up like all the other neocon wars: total disaster. The media is furious that Trump dared to speak to Putin as the two countries increasingly face-off over Venezuela. The Democrats and neocons are pushing for a direct confrontation that may even involve Russia. Republicans agree. Do they really prefer thermonuclear war? Over Venezuela?
Authoritarians are forever trying to surveil and manipulate humanity to their desired ends. Advances in technology have surely made it easier in many respects. A very big goal, from the point of view of any true authoritarian, would be the abolition of cash. All economic transactions monitored. No privacy whatsoever. The accomplishment of such a goal is far from a done deal. We should stand against it at every turn.
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