The Republic of Texas, Part Two

Texas was its own nation independent of any other for ten years between gaining its independence from Mexico in 1836 and joining the United States in 1846. Nearly 180 years later, could Texas be on the verge of becoming an independent republic again? Last week, at the Texas Republican Party state convention, a call for the state legislature to place a referendum on the statewide general election ballot in 2023 concerning Texas seceding from the US was included in the state party’s platform....

Read the full report by clicking the title, below...

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2022/june/21/the-republic-of-texas-part-two/

Sen. Cornyn's 'Red Flag' Gun Compromise...Is A Red Flag!

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and nine other Republicans in the Senate have crossed over to support "compromise" legislation to move the US further toward "red flag" gun laws, where a Constitutional right can be taken without due process. Texans told Cornyn what they think of him and his compromise at the TX GOP state convention last week. The legislation may make it to the Floor this week. Also today: Did Lithuania just spark WWIII? Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Sen. Cornyn's 'Red Flag' Gun Compromise...Is A Red Flag!

Assange Should Put the Pentagon and the CIA on Trial

With the recent decision by British Home Secretary Priti Patel to approve the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States, it is now a virtual certainty that Assange will soon be brought to the US for trial.

Let’s hope that he uses the opportunity to put the Pentagon and the CIA on trial. Yes, I know that whichever federal judge is appointed to preside over the trial will do his best to not permit that to happen, but what’s wrong with a little civil disobedience in what will inevitably be a rigged kangaroo court whose outcome of guilt will be preordained?

Let’s not forget, after all, that Assange isn’t the criminal here. He’s the guy who disclosed the criminal conduct to the world through his organization WikiLeaks. That criminal conduct was committed by the Pentagon and the CIA, supported by their enablers in the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. 

In a just society, the people who disclose criminal conduct would be hailed as heroes and the people who engage in criminal conduct would be going to jail. But in the Bizarro world of a national-security state, it’s the exact opposite — the criminals are the accusers and jailers and the opponents of their criminal conduct are the ones who are punished, tortured, and sent to jail.

One of the big things that Assange’s attorneys could do during the trial is to restate and reemphasize every dark-side action in which US personnel engaged that WikiLeaks disclosed, plus ones that WikiLeaks did not disclose. While that wouldn’t necessarily change the outcome of the kangaroo proceeding, at least it would show the world why they are going after Assange. 

When the US government was converted from its founding structure of a limited-government republic to a national-security state to fight the Cold War against “godless communism” and the Soviet Union as part of the extreme anti-Russia animus of that era, there was an implicit bargain struck between the national-security establishment and American people: the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA would be empowered to engage in totalitarian-like dark-side powers but they would keep their unsavory actions secret from the American people so that people’s consciences wouldn’t be bothered.

Assange interfered with that pact by disclosing to the world some of those dark-side practices. For that matter, so did Edward Snowden. For that, they both needed to be punished, if for no other reason than to send a message to everyone else: This is what will happen to you if you reveal our dark-side criminal practices to the world.

Be prepared for a judicial spectacle when Assange, who is an Australian citizen, is forcibly brought to the United States for trial for disclosing the criminal conduct of the US government. Just don’t expect anything remotely resembling justice in the process.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

from Assange Should Put the Pentagon and the CIA on Trial

Some Hard Thoughts About Post Ukraine

The war in Ukraine has dragged on long enough now to reveal certain clear trajectories. First, two fundamental realities:

1) Putin is to be condemned for launching this war– as is virtually any leader who launches any war. Putin can be termed a war criminal–in good company with George W. Bush who has killed vastly greater numbers than Putin.

2) secondary condemnation belongs to the US (NATO) in deliberately provoking a war with Russia by implacably pushing its hostile military organization, despite Moscow’s repeated notifications about crossing red lines, right up to the gates of Russia. This war did not have to be if Ukranian neutrality, á la Finland and Austria, had been accepted. Instead Washington has called for clear Russian defeat.

As the war grinds to a close, where will things go?

Contrary to Washington’s triumphalist pronouncements, Russia is winning the war, Ukraine has lost the war. Any longer-term damage to Russia is open to debate.

American sanctions against Russia have turned out to be far more devastating to Europe than to Russia. The global economy has slowed and many developing nations face serious food shortages and risk of broad starvation.

There are already deep cracks in the European façade of so-called “NATO unity.” Western Europe will increasingly rue the day that it blindly followed the American Pied Piper to war against Russia. Indeed, this is not a Ukrainian-Russian war but an American-Russian war fought by proxy to the last Ukrainian.

Contrary to optimistic declarations, NATO may in fact ultimately emerge weakened. Western Europeans will think long and hard about the wisdom and deep costs of provoking deeper long term confrontations with Russia or other “competitors”of the US.

Europe will sooner or later return to the purchase of inexpensive Russian energy. Russia lies on the doorstep and a natural economic relationship with Russia will possess overwhelming logic in the end. 

Europe already perceives the US as a declining power with an erratic and hypocritical foreign policy “vision” premised upon the desperate need to preserve “American leadership” in the world. America’s willingness to go to war to this end is increasingly dangerous to others.

Washington has also made it clear that Europe must sign on to an “ideological” struggle against China as well in some kind of protean struggle of “democracy against authoritarianism”. Yet, if anything this is a classic struggle for power across the globe. And Europe can even less afford to blunder into confrontation with China–a “threat” perceived primarily by Washington yet unconvincing to many European states and much of the world..

China’s Belt and Road initiative is perhaps the most ambitious economic and geopolitical project in world history. It is already linking China with Europe by rail and sea. European exclusion from the Belt and Road project will cost it dearly. Note that the Belt and Road runs right through Russia. It is impossible for Europe to close its doors to Russia while maintaining access to this Eurasian mega project. Thus a Europe that perceives the US already in decline has a little incentive to join the bandwagon against China. The end of the Ukraine war will bring serious reconsideration in Europe about the benefits of propping up Washington’s desperate bid to maintain its global hegemony.

Europe will undergo increasing identity crisis in determining its future global role. Western Europeans will tire of subservience to the 75 year American domination of European foreign policy. Right now NATO is European foreign policy and Europe remains inexplicably timid in asserting any independent voice. How long will that prevail?

We now see how massive US sanctions against Russia, including confiscation of Russian funds in western banks, is causing most of the world to reconsider the wisdom of banking entirely on the US dollar into the future. Diversification of international economic instruments is already in the cards and will only act to weaken Washington’s once dominant economic position and its unilateral weaponisation of the dollar.

One of the most disturbing features of this US-Russian struggle in Ukraine has been the utter corruption of independent media. Indeed Washington has won the information and propaganda war hands down, orchestrating all Western media to sing from the same hymnbook in characterizing the Ukraine war. The West has never before witnessed such a blanket imposition by one country’s ideologically-driven geopolitical perspective at home. Nor, of course, is the Russian press to be trusted either. In the midst of a virulent anti-Russian propaganda barrage whose likes I have never seen during my Cold Warrior days, serious analysts must dig deep these days to gain some objective understanding of what is actually taking place in Ukraine.

Would that this American media dominance that denies nearly all alternative voices were merely a blip occasioned by Ukraine events. But European elites are perhaps slowly coming to the realization that they have been stampeded into this position of total “unanimity”; cracks are already beginning to appear in the façade of “EU and NATO unity.” But the more dangerous implication is that as we head into future global crises, a genuine independent free press is largely disappearing, falling into the hands of corporate-dominated media close to policy circles , and now bolstered by electronic social media, all manipulating the narrative to its own ends. As we move into a predictably greater and more dangerous crises of instability through global warming, refugee flows, natural disasters, and likely new pandemics, rigorous state and corporate domination of the western media becomes very dangerous indeed to the future of democracy. We no longer hear alternative voices on Ukraine today.

Finally, Russia’s geopolitical character has very likely now decisively tilted towards Eurasia. Russians have sought for centuries to be accepted within Europe but have been consistently held at arms length. The West will not discuss a new strategic and security architecture. Ukraine has simply intensified this trend. Russian elites now no longer possess an alternative to accepting that its economic future lies in the Pacific where Vladivostok lies only one or two hours away by air from the vast economies of Beijing, Tokyo, and Seoul. China and Russia have now been decisively pushed ever more closely together specifically out of common concern to block unfettered US freedom of unilateral military and economic intervention around the world. That the US can split US-induced Russian and Chinese cooperation is a fantasy. Russia has scientific brilliance, abundant energy, rich rare minerals and metals, while global warming will increase the agricultural potential of Siberia. China has the capital, the markets, and the manpower to contribute to what becomes a natural partnership across Eurasia.

Sadly for Washington, nearly every single one of its expectations about this war are turning out to be incorrect. Indeed the West may come to look back at this moment as the final argument against following Washington’s quest for global dominance into ever newer and more dangerous and damaging confrontations with Eurasia. And most of the rest of the world–Latin America, India, the Middle East and Africa– find few national interests in this fundamentally American war against Russia.

Graham E. Fuller is a former Vice Chair of the National Intelligence Council at CIA with responsibility for global intelligence estimates. 

Reprinted with permission from GrahamFuller.com.



from Some Hard Thoughts About Post Ukraine

Federal Reserve’s Rate Increases: Too Little Too Late?

The Federal Reserve’s recent 0.75 percent increase in its “benchmark” interest rate is the Fed’s highest rate increase since 1994. This increase is a sign that the Fed has finally realized that price inflation is more persistent and widespread than the Fed initially believed.

Stocks have fallen much lately. This is in part because of fears rate hikes will push the economy into recession. The Fed itself seems to believe that the economy is going to slow down in the near future, as it has reduced its projection of 2.2 percent economic growth in 2022 to 1.7 percent. Even more ominously, the Atlanta Fed’s GDP tracker fell to zero for the second quarter of 2022, due in part to May’s weak retail sales.

The Fed claims it will reduce inflation without significantly increasing unemployment or causing a recession. This is likely to be as accurate as the Fed’s prediction that inflation was “transitory.”

This latest rate increase will only raise rates to where they were before the lockdowns led the Fed to embark on a historic money-creating spree. The Federal Reserve cannot increase rates to anywhere near the level they would be in a free market because doing so would increase interest payments to unsustainable levels for debt-ridden consumers, businesses, and the federal government.

Increases of a couple percent or less in interest rates can cause big increases in federal debt payments. The resulting new spending puts pressure on the supposedly “independent” Fed to maintain low rates, making it more likely the Fed will fail to tame inflation but succeed in resurrecting stagflation, combining price inflation with a recession. This new stagflation will make the 1970s look like a golden era.

Despite the skyrocketing debt and the Fed’s role in creating inflation, there are few in Washington committed to spending cuts. Congress is currently getting ready to authorize an across-the-board spending increase for next year. Meanwhile, the US government is spending tens of billions of dollars this year related to Ukraine, and the Biden administration is still pushing for massive new domestic programs.

The return of stagflation will increase the growing movement to replace the dollar as the world reserve currency. This will be the final nail in the welfare-warfare-fiat money regime’s coffin. History shows that such a crisis usually results in people embracing some form of authoritarianism. However, if those of us who know the truth are effective in spreading the ideas of liberty, this crisis can result in a turning to the principles of minimal government and maximum liberty.

from Federal Reserve’s Rate Increases: Too Little Too Late?

The UK's Decision to Extradite Assange Shows Why The US/UK's Freedom Lectures Are a Farce

The eleven-year persecution of Julian Assange was extended and escalated on Friday morning. The British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, approved the US's extradition request to send Julian Assange to Virginia to stand trial on eighteen felony charges under the 1917 Espionage Act and other statutes in connection with the 2010 publication by WikiLeaks of thousands of documents showing widespread corruption, deceit, and war crimes by American and British authorities along with their close dictatorial allies in the Middle East.

This decision is unsurprising — it has been obvious for years that the US and UK are determined to destroy Assange as punishment for his journalism exposing their crimes — yet it nonetheless further highlights the utter sham of American and British sermons about freedom, democracy and a free press. Those performative self-glorifying spectacles are constantly deployed to justify these two countries’ interference in and attacks on other nations, and to allow their citizens to feel a sense of superiority about the nature of their governments. After all, if the US and UK stand for freedom and against tyranny, who could possibly oppose their wars and interventions in the name of advancing such lofty goals and noble values?

Having reported on the Assange case for years, on countless occasions I've laid out the detailed background that led Assange and the US to this point. There is thus no need to recount all of that again; those interested can read the granular trajectory of this persecution here or here. Suffice to say, Assange — without having been convicted of any crime other than bail jumping, for which he long ago served out his fifty-week sentence — has been in effective imprisonment for more than a decade.

In 2012, Ecuador granted Assange legal asylum from political persecution. It did so after the Swedish government refused to pledge that it would not exploit the WikiLeaks founder's travel to Sweden to answer sex assault accusations as a pretext to turn him over to the US Fearing what of course ended up happening — that the US was determined to do everything possible to drag Assange back to US soil despite his not being a US citizen and never having spent more than a few days on US soil, and intending to pressure their long-time-submissive Swedish allies to turn him over once he was on Swedish soil — the government of Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa concluded Assange's core civic rights were being denied and thus gave him refuge in the tiny Ecuadorian Embassy in London: the classic reason political asylum exists.

When Trump officials led by CIA Director Mike Pompeo bullied Correa's meek successor, ex-President Lenin Moreno, to withdraw that asylum in 2019, the London Police entered the embassy, arrested Assange, and put him in the high-security Belmarsh prison (which the BBC in 2004 dubbed “the British Guantanamo”), where he has remained ever since.

After the lowest-level British court in early 2021 rejected the US extradition request on the ground that Assange's physical and mental health could not endure the US prison system, Assange has lost every subsequent appeal. Last year, he was permitted to marry his long-time girlfriend, the British human rights lawyer Stella Morris Assange, who is also the mother of their two young children. An extremely unusual unanimity among press freedom and civil liberties groups was formed in early 2021 to urge the Biden administration to cease its prosecution of Assange, but Biden officials — despite spending the Trump years masquerading as press freedom advocates — ignored them (an interview conducted last week with Stella Assange by my husband, the Brazilian Congressman David Miranda, on Brazil's Press Freedom Day, regarding the latest developments and toll this has taken on the Assange family, can be seen here).

The Home Secretary's decision this morning — characteristically subservient and obedient of the British when it comes to the demands of the US — does not mean that Assange's presence on US soil is imminent. Under British law, Assange has the right to pursue a series of appeals contesting the Home Secretary's decision, and will likely do so. Given that the British judiciary has more or less announced in advance their determination to follow the orders of their American masters, it is difficult to see how these further proceedings will have any effect other than to delay the inevitable.

Read the whole article here.

from The UK's Decision to Extradite Assange Shows Why The US/UK's Freedom Lectures Are a Farce

When The Lies Come Home

Diogenes, one of the ancient world’s illustrious philosophers, believed that lies were the currency of politics, and those lies were the ones he sought to expose and debase. To make his point, Diogenes occasionally carried a lit lantern through the streets of Athens in the daylight. If asked why, Diogenes would say he was searching for an honest man.

Finding an honest man today in Washington, D.C., is equally challenging. Diogenes would need a Xenon Searchlight in each hand.

Still, there are brief moments of clarity inside the Washington establishment. Having lied prolifically for months to the American public about the origins and conduct of the war in Ukraine, the media are now preparing the American, British, and other Western publics for Ukraine’s military collapse. It is long overdue.

The Western media did everything in its power to give the Ukrainian defense the appearance of far greater strength than it really possessed. Careful observers noted that the same video clips of Russian tanks under attack were shown repeatedly. Local counterattacks were reported as though they were operational maneuvers.

Russian errors were exaggerated out of all proportion to their significance. Russian losses and the true extent of Ukraine’s own losses were distorted, fabricated, or simply ignored. But conditions on the battlefield changed little over time. Once Ukrainian forces immobilized themselves in static defensive positions inside urban areas and the central Donbas, the Ukrainian position was hopeless. But this development was portrayed as failure by the Russians to gain “their objectives.”

Ground-combat forces that immobilize soldiers in prepared defenses will be identified, targeted, and destroyed from a distance. When persistent overhead intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets, whether manned or unmanned, are linked to precision guided-strike weapons or modern artillery systems informed by accurate targeting data, “holding ground” is fatal to any ground force. This is all the more true in Ukraine, because it was apparent from the first action that Moscow focused on the destruction of Ukrainian forces, not on the occupation of cities or the capture of Ukrainian territory west of the Dnieper River.

The result has been the piecemeal annihilation of Ukrainian forces. Only the episodic infusion of US and allied weapons kept Kiev’s battered legions in the field; legions that are now dying in great numbers thanks to Washington’s proxy war.

Kiev’s war with Moscow is lost. Ukrainian forces are being bled white. Trained replacements do not exist in sufficient numbers to influence the battle, and the situation grows more desperate by the hour. No amount of US and allied military aid or assistance short of direct military intervention by US and NATO ground forces can change this harsh reality.

The problem today is not ceding territory and population to Moscow in Eastern Ukraine that Moscow already controls. The future of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions along with the Donbas is decided. Moscow is also likely to secure Kharkov and Odessa, two cities that are historically Russian and Russian-speaking, as well as the territory that adjoins them. These operations will extend the conflict through the summer. The problem now is how to stop the fighting.

Whether the fighting stops in the early fall will depend on two key factors. The first involves the leadership in Kiev. Will the Zelensky government consent to the Biden program for perpetual conflict with Russia?

If the Biden administration has its way, Kiev will continue to operate as a base for the buildup of new forces poised to threaten Moscow. In practice, this means Kiev must commit national suicide by exposing the Ukrainian heartland west of the Dnieper River to massive, devastating strikes by Russia’s long-range missile and rocket forces.

Read the whole article here.

from When The Lies Come Home