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Does it seem like we've seen this movie before? Populist Latin American leader on the outs with Washington finds himself facing a coup? This time it's Bolivia's Evo Morales, who resigned the presidency on Sunday and was granted asylum by Mexico. Is Washington involved? And why bother with relatively unimportant Bolivia?
By Ron Paul
When the New York Federal Reserve began pumping billions of dollars a day into the repurchasing (repo) markets (the market banks use to make short-term loans to each other) in September, they said this would only be necessary for a few weeks. Yet, last Wednesday, almost two months after the Fed’s initial intervention, the New York Federal Reserve pumped 62.5 billion dollars into the repo market. The New York Fed continues these emergency interventions to ensure “cash shortages” among banks don’t ever again cause interest rates for overnight loans to rise to over 10 percent, well above the Fed’s target rate. The Federal Reserve’s bailout operations have increased its balance sheet by over 200 billion dollars since September. Investment advisor Michael Pento describes the Fed’s recent actions as Quantitative Easing (QE) “on steroids.” One cause of the repo market’s sudden cash shortage was the large amount of debt instruments issued by the Treasury Department in late summer and early fall. Banks used resources they would normally devote to private sector lending and overnight loans to purchase these Treasury securities. This scenario will likely keep recurring as the Treasury Department will have to continue issuing new debt instruments to finance continuing increases in in government spending. Even though the federal deficit is already over one trillion dollars (and growing), President Trump and Congress have no interest in cutting spending, especially in an election year. Should he win reelection, President Trump is unlikely to reverse course and champion fiscal restraint. Instead, he will likely take his victory as a sign that the people support big federal budgets and huge deficits. None of the leading Democratic candidates are even pretending to care about the deficit. Instead they are proposing increasing spending by trillions on new government programs. Joseph Zidle, a strategist with the Blackstone investment firm, has called the government — or “sovereign” — debt bubble the “mother of all bubbles.” When the sovereign debt bubble inevitably busts, it will cause a meltdown bigger than the 2008 crash. US consumer debt — which includes credit cards, student loans, auto loans, and mortgages — now totals over 14 trillion dollars. This massive government and private debts put tremendous pressure on the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low or even to “experiment” with negative rates. But, the Fed can only keep interest rates, which are the price of money, artificially low for so long without serious economic consequences. According to Michael Pento, the Fed is panicking in an effort to prevent economic trouble much worse than occurred in 2008. “It’s not just QE,” says Pento, “it’s QE on steroids because everybody knows that this QE is permanent just like any banana republic would do, or has done in the past.” Congress will not cut spending until either a critical mass of Americans demand they do so, or there is a major economic crisis. In the event of a crisis, Congress will try to avoid directly cutting spending, instead letting the Federal Reserve do its dirty work via currency depreciation. This will deepen the crisis and increase support for authoritarian demagogues. The only way to avoid this is for those of us who know the truth to spread the message of, and grow the movement for, peace, free markets, limited government, and sound money. 
By Liberty Report Staff
[The following has been excerpted from International Man] International Man: Last year, President Trump took the unusual step of bypassing his advisors to announce his intention to withdraw all US troops from Syria quickly. The decision rattled Washington and the mainstream media. It caused former Defense Secretary Mattis to resign. Almost a year later, the US has withdrawn only a token number of soldiers. It still has thousands of troops occupying the part of the country where oil fields are located. What is going on here? David Stockman: Well, that’s the Deep State at work. Donald Trump is all by his lonesome. He’s home alone in the Oval Office. Now, half of it, he can blame himself. If he hires someone, a known idiot like John Bolton, what does he expect is going to happen except that everything he wanted to do is going to be undermined. Nevertheless, he can’t seem to find anybody who can articulate on a day-to-day basis a pathway to the more restrained America First posture that he had in mind. He’s surrounded by people who constantly countermand his orders. You have James Jeffery, the US Ambassador and special envoy to Syria saying, “Well, Trump didn’t mean that when he said he wanted the troops out of Syria.” We have the same thing with North Korea. Trump finally said, here we are, 66 years after the armistice and we still don’t have a peace treaty, and we’re still occupying the Korean peninsula, which is of no interest to our national security one way or the other. You have to do what I would call “contrafactual history.” In other words, if you understand what could have happened the other way, then maybe you’re not going to be so impressed with all this threat inflation. I go back to why the Korean War happened, because I think it’s important to this whole thing going on now, with Trump trying to make a deal with Kim Jong-un. In the late ’40s, Washington officials said that Korea is outside our sphere of influence, the line between North and South hastily drawn at the Potsdam war conference in July 1945. Dean Acheson, the US secretary of state in the late 1940s, said it was a mere surveyor’s line; it’s of no strategic influence. What if common sense had prevailed, instead of the hot-headed advice that President Truman got? What if Truman had said, “Okay, we’re vacating this damn peninsula”? Well, it would have become a quasi-province of China, just like all the rest of them. They’d probably be making all kinds of stuff, sending it to Walmart today, and nobody would know the difference. Instead, we had a war. If I remember right, 54,000 servicemen were killed. The whole peninsula was pummeled, carpet bombed, and literally destroyed. It was like a wasteland in the north. There are reasons why the Kim family has survived all these years, because they hate us for what happened. People remember. It was really scorched earth. I mean, it was in some sense genocide, even then. So, all of that happened, and Eisenhower comes in and is astute enough to say that we don’t really have national security on the line. He negotiated an armistice, and yet the War Party kept tension on the DMZ for all those years because it had to be in the playbook of threats. I remember well when I was fighting the big Reagan defense build-up, back when I was budget director. It was always, we need all these different new tanks and attack aircraft and resupply logistics capabilities, because we have to have the ability to fight two and a half wars. Well, where was the half war? I knew where the other ones were. The half war was in Korea. Well, why did we have to have a half war in Korea? But nevertheless, that was part of the rationalization—justification—for this massive military force that really is a tool of empire and not a tool of homeland defense. Today, we have Trump finally saying, let’s let the Koreans decide how to run the future of Korea—and back off this long-running, 65-year confrontation. And yet as courageous in some ways as he has been, he’s constantly being undermined by his own people, who as soon as he’s not looking send real nasty messages to the North Koreans—that will only set Kim back on his heels—and therefore nothing gets done. Even though it could very easily be done. When you have a regime change policy—and this was the one real positive thing Trump brought to the table. He said regime change has failed; we’re not going to do it under my policy. Why do you think the North Koreans are quasi-starving? And I know the Communist elite and Kim’s family and so forth live a pretty fat life, but nevertheless they’re in dire straits economically. Why do they invest all this money in developing nuclear capability and missile capability? Because they don’t want to be regime changed. Kim is a young man, he’s in his mid-30s, and he doesn’t want to be another Muammar Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein. He knows what happens. You get hung on national TV if you’re a Hussein, or you get tortured and drugged behind a Jeep if you’re a Gaddafi. Obviously, this stuff has consequences. These idiots in Washington and all these think tanks that talk about regime change and bringing democracy to the world and so forth—never even think about the consequence—the message that these violent episodes send—and the unfortunate reaction that people take in order to defend themselves. International Man: With John Bolton out of the picture, do you see US talks with North Korea bearing fruit for Trump? David Stockman: I think it’s touch and go. The problem is there’s lasting damage when you engage in all this regime change over so many years and episodes. They don’t trust you. Trump has worked very hard, using an odd, idiosyncratic personal diplomacy to build up trust with Kim. It seems to be working, but there are just so many forces at work behind the scenes that are aiming to undermine that trust-building so that nothing happens. They want to keep 29,000 troops in South Korea, in harm’s way, as a tripwire, so that the North Koreans obey us as we tell them to behave. It’s crazy. I would give it a 50/50 chance. I know he wants a big victory, a foreign policy win. He’s desperate for one, because not much is happening elsewhere and what he intended to do is being totally undermined. Maybe there’s a chance that something could happen here, but I am so distrusting of the Deep State machinery and their need for perennial threats. If you take away the Korean threat, if you recognize the Iranians aren’t a threat, if you see that Russia is a tiny little country that’s not going to invade Western Europe and crash through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, and so forth-- All of a sudden somebody is going to do the math as we get into the coming fiscal crisis and say, “We can’t afford all this defense that we don’t need. Let’s cut it back dramatically.” They don’t want this to happen. And so, they have to keep these hot spots burning and these threats maintained or inflated, because they know if the real truth of the world were considered by Congress, the defense budget would be slashed dramatically. [Read the rest at International Man]
From Serbia to Syria to Nikki Haley's explosive new book, the war party is still firmly in control in Washington. Wars and threats of wars keep increasing, ensuring a steady of wounded and broken veterans to "thank" for their "service."
By Liberty Report Staff Ron Paul's segment begins at the 1m 10s mark: Central banking can only exist at the expense of Liberty. The longer that it exists, the more Liberty it destroys. Ultimately, one of the two must give.
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) took to the Senate floor this week to make the case that, yes, whistleblowers should have better protection whether government employees or contractors, but, he said, legislation and statutes cannot supersede the US Constitution, which gives everyone the right to face their accuser. So, should the CIA "whistleblower" be forced to appear before the Congressional impeachment committees?
Former CIA officer Phil Giraldi joins today's Liberty Report to discuss the breaking scandal over the Obama Administration's intelligence leaders and the plot against candidate Trump. Then-CIA Director John Brennan reportedly set up a CIA task force early in 2016 to surveil and even conduct covert actions against candidate and then President Trump. Are we witnessing a "deep state" coup against the president? Will heads roll? Was Obama at the center of the operation?
 By Chris Rossini
The fruitless quest for some men to enslave all other men is as old as the hills. It's an impossible endeavor, because man is not a slave, but is by nature, free. But, despite this fact, there are always those few who believe they can change nature and make the world over to match their imaginations. All attempts are usually wrapped in the word "New" -- like, "New Deal," or "New World Order," or "New Economy" or "New Financial Paradigm," or "Green New Deal." But there's nothing "New" about tyranny. It's extremely old. Tyranny is forever spinning its wheels and chasing the mirage of total control. But, as the saying goes, 'There's nothing new under the Sun.' There has always been a single "World Order," and it's known as the Truth. Not what people think is true, but what is actually true. Obviously, one can think lots of things that aren't true. Thinking doesn't create truth, for man does not create, but simply re-arranges. Thinking is a tool to identify that which is true, and that which is false. We are then free to pick which road to choose. If we want to live, we must choose that which is true. Try building a house while thinking that 2+2=5 and that house will eventually crash on your head. Yet this is what authoritarians have been doing since the beginning. They are forever attempting to make that which is false, true. They're always trying to "regime change" the Truth. What a complete waste. But a major part of being free is the freedom to waste your life away chasing illusions. We're not forced to follow the truth. There's a silver lining to this dog-chases-tail scenario that mankind has been in. There is something that is actually New -- and that's the ever-increasing number of individuals who are coming to understand that they are free. That really is a new phenomenon. In the grand scheme of things, this understanding is still in its early years. This is to be expected, of course. You can't take thousands of years of tyrannical ideas, habits, and beliefs, and expect everyone to flip like a switch to Liberty. That they should is without question, but people tend to fear change, even if that change means liberation. People get comfortable with tyranny. The Declaration of Independence pointed this out, when it said: "all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable." Since people will suffer until it becomes unbearable to do so, the New idea of individual Liberty must climb the wall of worry. When tyrannical schemes ultimately fall apart (as they must) the ideas of Liberty become more attractive and get a better hearing. People are all of a sudden shaken out of their homeostasis and purposefully seek new answers. The many millions who understand liberty need to provide those answers to those in their personal spheres of influence. Liberty's climb up the wall of worry takes time. Ups and downs ... Two steps forward and one step back. But always forward. Homeschooling may not work for everybody, but the remarkable Ron Paul Homeschool Curriculum, explained here by Dr. Gary North, has amassed an incredible track record guiding young people to academic success in just a few short years. Feeling that something is really wrong with the state school system? You won't want to miss this edition of the Ron Paul Liberty Report!  |
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