Omnibus shows Congress’s Priorities: Authoritarianism and War

Those hoping for a Christmastime government shutdown were once again disappointed when Congress passed a 4,000-page, $1.7 trillion omnibus appropriations bill that few, if any, Representatives and Senators read before voting on. The Republican leadership celebrated this bloated monstrosity because it spends $858 billion on warfare while “only” spending $772.5 billion on welfare.

No one should think Republican insistence on more warfare than welfare spending means Democrats oppose the warfare state. Under President Biden and a Democrat-controlled Congress, “defense” spending has increased by 4.3 percent over the last two years. Similarly, every Republican President in recent years—including two who had a Republican-controlled Congress for at least part of their term—supported huge increases in welfare state spending. Most Democrats only pretend to oppose warfare and most Republicans only pretend to oppose welfare to appease their parties’ respective bases.

The Omnibus appropriates a $44.5 billion giveaway to Ukraine. This brings the total US spending on Ukraine’s military to over $100 billion - approximately 50 percent more than Russia’s entire military budget! This money is spent in a conflict that does not affect US security, yet one that would likely have not occurred were it not for prior US meddling in the region.

The Omnibus bill provides $11.3 billion for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a $569.6 million increase and $524 billion above the President’s request. According to the Democratic leadership, the funding increase is so the FBI can better fight “extremist violence and domestic terrorists.”

The public recently learned what the FBI considers an appropriate way to fight “extremism,” with the release of emails between Twitter officials and the FBI. These memos show the Bureau was working with Twitter—and almost certainly other social media companies—to suppress certain stories, such as Hunter Biden’s laptop, and points of view, such as skepticism regarding masks, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates. The bureau even used taxpayer funds to reimburse Twitter for the costs of implementing these “requests.” Government officials working with private companies to silence American citizens is a clear violation of the First Amendment.

This is hardly the first time the FBI has violated the constitutional rights of American citizens. In fact, since its founding the Bureau has targeted political activists and leaders such as Martin Luther King, whose agenda was considered “extreme” or “dangerous” by the Bureau’s corrupt leadership. The idea of a national police force with the power to target Americans because of their political beliefs would have horrified the drafters of the Constitution. The federal government has no constitutional authority over criminal law except for cases of piracy, counterfeiting, and treason. Libertarians, constitutional conservatives, and progressives who still care about civil liberties should join together to defund the FBI.

The fiscal year 2022 omnibus appropriations bill expands government, reduces liberty, and increases government debt, forcing the Federal Reserve to monetize more debt leading to more price inflation. Our political elites prioritize militarism abroad and authoritarianism at home over addressing the problems facing the American people like the Federal Reserve’s destructive monetary policy. This will fuel growing discontent with the political system. As the economy continues to worsen and the attempt to run the world continues to result in failures, the discontent will grow until the welfare warfare system collapses and, hopefully, a new error of liberty peace and prosperity dawns.

from Omnibus shows Congress’s Priorities: Authoritarianism and War

Lindsey Graham, the Ugly American

Lindsey Graham, the neocon senator for South Carolina, wants to murder Vladimir Putin.

Lindsey Graham says the only way the war in Ukraine will end is if Russia "breaks" and someone "takes Putin out" pic.twitter.com/M5do9Oj06q

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) December 23, 2022

Many members of the political class are unapologetic psychopaths who are eager to resolve geopolitical issues with murder, torture, and rape. The “indispensable nation” believes it can murder anybody it wants after appropriate propaganda and demonization.

Let’s turn the tables. Imagine, if you will, a top-level Russian politician declaring Joe Biden must be liquidated, maybe like Kennedy. What do you think the response would be in the US?

When it comes to pushing back against Russia, we need to be all-in using every tool in the toolbox.

State sponsor of terrorism designation is the appropriate label for Putin’s Russia.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) December 21, 2022

In neocon Bizarro World, black is white, and white is black. Graham wants to label Russia a terrorist state. In fact, Graham, as a vocal and irrational neocon advocate of mass murder, is a terrorist representing a terrorist government.

Consider the long list of countries bombed, their populations murdered, and terrorized, by the USG neoliberal war machine.

It does get tiresome to list all the nations the USG has messed with, undermined, occupied, and terrorized. This is not something one can write about if he or she is a corporate war propaganda journalist. It’s verboten, an assured career killer.

This is how the process works.

It was outlined by John Perkins, a “hitman” for the neoliberal financial elite. In his 2004 book, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,” he writes

Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign "aid" organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. I should know; I was an EHM.

Let’s call it a Neoliberal Mafia partnered with a USG enforcer and executioner.

If bribery of autocrats and sadistic dictators does not work, if rigged elections are not possible and if a population resists the dictates of an imposed neoliberal financial order, that’s when the military steps in, cheered on by the likes of the pathocrat Sen. Lindsey Graham and other neocons.

Graham is not calling for the assassination of Vladimir Putin due to Putin’s imagined “New Hitler” personality and behavior. He is calling for the murder of Putin and the destruction of Russia because the USG client state on Russia’s border is losing the war big time. Graham wants Putin double-tapped, or maybe sadistically carved up like Moammar Gadaffi by CIA mercenaries. It appears it is the only solution his pathological mind may conceive.

Few condemned Graham for his remarks. Few, it would seem, find his threats immoral, brutal, and medieval. It is, however, the new normal in America for the state to deal with problems through the naked application of violence, murder, trauma, misery, and the wholesale destruction of property. From a militarized domestic police to trained killers sent abroad, the rulers are constructing, piece by piece, the edifice of a total, global control system. The current objective is to get rid of the competition.

The neoliberal normal now does away with obfuscation and doing dirty deeds in secret. It now tells us what it will do, almost exclusively based on lies, fabrications, or contrived rationale stripped of context and injected with manipulative emotional appeal. Millions are conned, like children.

Prior to Bush and Iraq, I cannot recall hearing an American politician publicly call for the assassination of a foreign leader. It just didn’t happen, although behind the scenes bloody acts were routinely committed.

How things change. Now Senate fixtures stand up like Mafia thugs, calling for war and ruthless murder of designated enemies, most urgently competitors. This is now politically normal, perhaps in part due to the decadence and moral turpitude of the nation, much of it culturally induced.

We are told about murders, they are right out in the open, and we yawn. Moammar Gaddafi. Saddam Hussein. A multitude of unknowns is killed sans trial or conviction by way of sophisticated drones bristling with Hellfire missiles.

If a politician has regrets about the largely Democrat march to nuclear annihilation, he or she is moronically linked to Putin, without a shred of evidence, of course.

Consider Kurt Eichenwald, a rather combative Democrat propagandist wedded to the drive to end life on the planet, although he does not see it that way. He clings to the repeatedly discredited idiocy that opposition to war makes one a Putin stooge (and for far too many, by extension within that warped mindset, a domestic terrorist).

New on my substack: MAGA maniacs like Hawley, Boebert, Gaetz, & Greene, arent just useful idiots. They are Putin’s coconspirators in mass murder & will go down in history with the same contempt once reserved for Americans in the 1930s/40s who loved Nazis https://t.co/g2noP6fFfs

— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) December 23, 2022

I could go on, but there is little use. Point is that the USG, its bureaucrats, “stakeholders,” associated death merchants, and NYT Twitter blue-checked apologists, are free range, peddling a demented mantra, a passel of lies insisting, without evidence, that Putin and Russia want to take over Europe, maybe the entire world, just like Hitler supposedly want to do.

It’s manipulative blather.

The bottom line, Lindsey Graham is a long-time warmonger. I don’t believe there is a USG invasion or staged coup he has not supported during his overdue time in Congress. I find it outrageous Graham is not censured for making such threatening and violent remarks. His belligerent threat will add fuel to the propaganda operation now underway to demonize Putin and Russia to such a degree that ignorant Americans will go along with a possible war, as they did at the beginning of the Bush clan’s destruction of Iraq and later Afghanistan.

Reprinted with permission from Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.
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from Lindsey Graham, the Ugly American

Dennis Kucinich Discusses the Pressure on Congress Members to Support War

Dennis Kucinich proved his antiwar bona fides over 16 years in the United States House of Representatives as a Democrat from Ohio and two campaigns for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. In a new interview with host Chris Hedges at The Chris Hedges Report, Kucinich discusses some of the pressure members of Congress are under that helps ensure that few members speak out against war like he did.

Monetary contributions to the Democratic Party, Kucinich suggests in the interview, are a key reason why antiwar voices are now absent among Democrats in the House who he notes have, in contrast with Republican members, voted unanimously for funding the Ukraine War. Kucinich states that he thinks the Democratic Party’s determination 35 or 40 years ago to take corporate donations contributed much to quashing antiwar action by Democratic members because, “in Washington, he or she who pays the piper, you know, plays the tune, and that’s what’s happened.”

A ”new benchmark” in “slavish obedience to the status quo within the party” in support of war was reached in October, Kucinich asserts, when a group of Democratic House members, after encountering some pushback, quickly retracted their letter to President Joe Biden in which they had requested that Biden consider seeking a diplomatic resolution of the Ukraine War.

Kucinich also notes in the interview the funding of congressional campaigns by the “arms industry” that is “making money hand over fist with the expansion of war” contributes to the limiting of antiwar advocacy in Congress. But, Kucinich adds that such funding is “not all it’s about.” Also important is the influence on Congress members’ constituents of a “heavily mediated environment which supports war.” Kucinich explains:

The request to fund a war goes into the larger, heavily mediated environment which supports a war, and, if you stand against the funding, then your constituents who may be great Americans look at that and they say, “Well, why aren’t you supporting America?”. And I think that members of Congress are always concerned about being caught betwixt and between on what their constituents think as opposed to the doubts that they have.

Another factor Kucinich explains puts pressure on Congress members to support war fueling spending is advocacy from businesses in their districts that profit from such. States Kucinich: “So, what happens is, when the Pentagon budget comes up, there are a parade of various businesses — small and large — who will make appointments with the congressperson or staff and lay out how many jobs are in the district and how important it is to a district business to have this budget passed.”

Further, notes Kucinich in the interview, “peer pressure” and “herd instinct” affect Congress members looking up at the vote board and seeing all the pro military spending and prowar votes coming in from fellow members. This encourages wavering members to fall in line and vote the same way.

Summing up the situation Congress members are in, Kucinich states that “it’s a rare individual” who will risk his political career by acting counter to the “enormous pressure.”

Watch Kucinich’s interview here:

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2022/december/21/dennis-kucinich-discusses-the-pressure-on-congress-members-to-support-war/

'Gimme Some More!' - Zelensky In Washington, Slams New $47 Billion As 'Not Enough!'

Ukraine's president, Vladimir Zelensky, made a surprise visit to Washington, DC, today, where he is expected to "discuss strategy" with President Biden and to address the US Congress. While Congress has just topped up Biden's latest Ukraine request to $47 billion, the AP is reporting that Zelensky's message is going to be "that's not enough!" Both Party leaders whole-heartedly support giving Ukraine "whatever it takes" as Americans face runaway inflation and recession. Watch today's Liberty Report:



from 'Gimme Some More!' - Zelensky In Washington, Slams New $47 Billion As 'Not Enough!'

Washington Is Prolonging Ukraine's Suffering

During a speech given on November 29, Polish Vice-Minister of National Defense (MON) Marcin Ociepa said: "The probability of a war in which we will be involved is very high. Too high for us to treat this scenario only hypothetically." The Polish MON is allegedly planning to call up 200,000 reservists in 2023 for a few weeks’ training, but observers in Warsaw suspect this action could easily lead to a national mobilization.

Meanwhile, inside the Biden administration, there is growing concern that the Ukrainian war effort will collapse under the weight of a Russian offensive. And as the ground in Southern Ukraine finally freezes, the administration’s fears are justified. In an interview published in the Economist, head of Ukraine’s armed forces General Valery Zaluzhny admitted that Russian mobilization and tactics are working. He even hinted that Ukrainian forces might be unable to withstand the coming Russian onslaught.

Yet, Zaluzhny rejected any notion of a negotiated settlement and instead pleaded for more equipment and support. He went on to insist that with 300 new tanks, 600 to 700 new infantry fighting vehicles, and 500 new Howitzers, he could still win the war with Russia. Truthfully, General Zaluzhny is not asking for assistance, he’s asking for a new army. Therein lies the greatest danger for Washington and its NATO allies. 

When things go badly for Washington’s foreign policy, the true believers in the great cause always draw deeply from the well of ideological self-delusion to steel themselves for the final battle. Blinken, Klain, Austin, and the rest of the war party continue to pledge eternal support for Kiev regardless of the cost. Like the “best and the brightest” of the 1960s they are eager to sacrifice realism to wishful thinking, to wallow in the splash of publicity and self-promotion in one public visit to Ukraine after another.

This spectacle is frighteningly reminiscent of events more than 50 years ago, when Washington’s proxy war in Vietnam was failing. Doubters within the Johnson administration about the wisdom of intervening on the ground to rescue Saigon from certain destruction went into hiding. In 1963, Washington already had 16,000 military advisors in Vietnam. The idea that Washington was supporting a government in South Vietnam that might not win against North Vietnam was dismissed out of hand. Secretary of State Dean Rusk said, “We will not pull out until the war is won.”

By the spring of 1965, American military advisors were already dying. General Westmoreland, then commander of Military Assistance Command Vietnam, reported to LBJ: “It is increasingly apparent that the existing levels of United States aid cannot prevent the collapse of South Vietnam... North Vietnam is moving in for the kill... Acting on the request of the South Vietnamese government, the decision must be made to commit as soon as possible 125,000 United States troops to prevent the Communist takeover.”

The Biden administration’s unconditional support for the Zelensky regime in Kiev is reaching a strategic inflection point not unlike the one LBJ reached in 1965. Just as LBJ suddenly determined in 1964 that peace and security in Southeast Asia was a vital US strategic interest, the Biden administration is making a similar argument now for Ukraine. Like South Vietnam in the 1960s, Ukraine is losing its war with Russia.

Ukraine’s hospitals and morgues are filled to capacity with wounded and dying Ukrainian soldiers. Washington’s proxy in Kiev has squandered its human capital and considerable Western aid in a series of self-defeating counter-offensives. Ukrainian soldiers manning the defensive lines facing Russian soldiers in Southern Ukraine are brave men, but they are not fools. The Spartans at Thermopylae were brave, and they still died.

Read the whole article here.

from Washington Is Prolonging Ukraine's Suffering

Happy Holidays: 4,000+ Page, $2 Trillion, Dog's Breakfast Budget Dropped At Last Minute

The "must pass" omnibus bill ramps spending to the outer limits as Democrats face loss of power in the House in January. Packed full of warfare-welfare state spending, the disgusting mess is symbolic of the decline of the US Congress as a legitimate legislative body. Also today: US missiles striking Russian territory...what could go wrong? Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Happy Holidays: 4,000+ Page, $2 Trillion, Dog's Breakfast Budget Dropped At Last Minute

We Are Still Locked Down

Consider just how fortunate we are to have the Twitter Files. Every few days, we are seeing dumps of documents from the operations of Twitter before Elon Musk took over. This weekend’s release was especially shocking. It revealed a close and symbiotic relationship between the company’s management and the FBI, which employs 80 people to police social networks and flag posts. They aren’t looking for crime. They were focused on wrongthink on matters of politics. 

In other words, all our worst suspicions have been confirmed. We still await the Covid files but let there be no doubt about what they will show in grim detail. Twitter worked with government to throttle the reach and searchability of accounts that took issue with the main messaging of the CDC/HHS from early in lockdowns to the present. We already knew that Facebook had deleted 7 million posts in the second quarter of 2020. Twitter pulled some 10,000 accounts down. 

Twitter is now mostly open, for now. The rest of the venues remain wholly controlled. Brownstone has posts tagged, throttled, and sometimes deleted from LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and it is a constant struggle to avoid Google’s own push against our content. Even ridiculous sites with no credibility or reach appear high in search engines when our content is searched. This is not an algorithm at work. 

On this basis alone, it is fair to say that we are still in lockdown nearly three years later. The point of such top-down censorship is not only to control the public mind. It is also to keep all of us from finding each other. It truly did work for a very long time. It took nearly a year for the group that we now know as the anti-lockdown movement to form. Even when Brownstone was founded, I had not known about Justin Hart’s Rational Ground. Now of course we work closely together. 

The impact of all this work to keep us apart has been huge. It’s why those of us who resisted from the very beginning felt so very alone, and we could not understand why. Were we going crazy? What is wrong with people that they seem not to be objecting to having their schools and churches closed? Why was the media demonizing people for wanting to get haircuts? Whatever happened to the Bill of Rights and why does no one seem even to be complaining about what was happening?

Let us pause to explore the meaning of lockdown. We often hear now that the US never did lock down, as ridiculous as that sounds. Epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya grew so tired of hearing this claim that he formulated a definition: any government policy that seeks to keep people physically separate under the excuse that doing so mitigates against some crisis. This would include claims, for example, that other people are biohazards, and would include fear-mongering propaganda, and much else.

Think back to March 16, 2020 in the White House press conference when Deborah Birx summed up the whole theme of the day. “We really want people to be separated at this time, to be able to address this virus,” she said. If you think about it, that is surely among the most draconian demands ever made by any government against its people. It means the abolition of freedom and society too. It’s utterly astonishing, and yet the media gathered there just nodded heads as if this were completely normal. 

Part of the mandatory separation – part of the lockdown – was information control to keep people who opposed what was happening from finding each other. This trick truly did work because all our usual methods for digital socializing came to be nationalized overnight. We did not know this because there was no real announcement but it was nonetheless real. We had come to rely on social media to give us a sense of the public mind but that came to an end during the most shocking policies ever imposed on so many Americans. And the policy happened all over the world except for one state and about 5 nations. 

The lockdown included information control and that was crucial. As for the possibility of hearing the opinions of others, we also faced egregious stay-at-home orders and limits on the numbers of people who could even enter our own homes. I’ve not seen a complete study on what happened but in Western Massachusetts where I was at the time, no more than 10 people were allowed to meet in one setting. Thus no weddings, funerals, or large house parties. Private citizens became so zealous in their enforcement of this that they would fly drones over communities to look for cars bunched up and rat out the address to the local media. This truly did happen. 

Only now do we see the larger point. It was to prohibit an opposition from forming and to gaslight the whole population into thinking that everyone was going along with this, since this was nothing but “common sense public health measures.” Anthony Fauci told us this many times. This might also have contributed to the huge decline in the health of the population. People lost a sense of hope and turned to substance abuse and overeating. Gyms were closed and so were all in-person AA meetings. The lockdowns contributed as much as 40 percent to the overall excess deaths in that year alone.

Eventually of course many things opened up but unvaccinated visitors from other countries are still not allowed in, which is an outrage. I have a conductor friend from the UK who has constant invitations to conduct in the US but he is simply not allowed into the country. For three years now! 

Question: have we really ever left lockdowns? We are far less free today and far more censored. Twitter is an aberration among the major tech platforms. Media is controlled too. But for Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and few others, plus the mighty Epoch Times, where would we even get our news? And thank goodness for Substack, which has allowed so many writers and researchers to have an outlet. The point is that these are all lights peeking through a darkness that is still being imposed from above. Which is to say: the emergency for human liberty is still with us. 

They wanted to keep us separate, and the excuse was a virus. The rule of separation (and the stickers are still everywhere in this country) was truly to keep us apart. One of the most powerful books to come out of our era is Naomi Wolf’s The Bodies of Others. The core theory was that separating humans from other humans was the whole point: to take away our social connection and the possibility of living a dignified life of our own choosing. The only beneficiaries to the policy were tech, media, and government. Her book is a classic for the ages. 

Part of this separation included the attack on small business and traditional commerce. The word commerce comes from commercium in Latin, a word that figured prominently in a composed verse from medieval Christianity that became a much-loved motet: O Admirabile Commercium. The point is to draw attention to the exchange between time and eternity as instantiated in the incarnation that Christmas celebrates. 

Commerce has long been the meeting place for humans to form social order. Trade means mutual benefit, finding value in each other. That it came under such severe attack makes sense from the point of view of a ruling class that was attacking human association at its root. 

Even today, we are having difficulty finding each other and are relieved when we do so. I was struck by this during the Brownstone holiday party a few days ago. There we were all together, the room filled with incredibly energy, everyone toasting friendship and connection, smiles everywhere, a profound sense of gratitude for the physical space that allowed us to meet and eat, all of us knowing full well that we went months and even a year and longer when we could not do this by order of government edict. Just discovering each other, and sharing tales and ideas, amounts to an act of defiance. 

Two Christmases came and went when we were told that meeting and celebrating the season was a biohazard and not recommended. In some places, it was forbidden. It’s hard to imagine a more grim policy and it still shocks us to think back and realize that it was all deliberate. One means to reverse this horror is simple: find friends, celebrate together, share stories and ideals, promote peace and love, and work to rebuild what we have lost.

Reprinted with permission from Brownstone Institute.

from We Are Still Locked Down