Voluntary Association and Non-Aggression
Washington’s Blog writes about a “reporter” who clears his stories with the CIA.
James Bovard comments on the Afghan election thief who promises to be accountable.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe has a thing or two to say about libertarian leftists.
Tony Cartalucci says the U.S. government openly approves the Hong Kong chaos it created.
Gary Galles has some things to say about government regulation vs. voluntary markets.
And Jon Rappoport asks, Are vaccines really that safe?
Murray Rothbard asks, Is the U.K. a “Nation by Consent”?
Michael Rozeff asks, Where’s the warming in Portland, Maine?
The Daily Bell interviews Wendy McElroy on the aftermath of the Galt’s Gulch Chile firestorm.
Glenn Greenwald discusses the fake terror threat to justify bombing Syria.
And, regarding that fake terror threat, Justin Raimondo says they’re just making up stuff. (When are government bureaucrats not making up stuff?)
Jacob Hornberger distinguishes between the real patriots and the faux patriots.
Laurence Vance writes that lowering taxes is the only decent tax reform. Very extensive article making good use of points by Murray Rothbard and Frank Chodorov.
Jon Rappoport asks regarding Ebola, What op is being planned for Western nations?
The FBI director James Comey is concerned that the new Apple and Google phones are too secure, so secure that they may actually make customers “beyond the law.” He says that such security measures will make it difficult for police and FBI goons to access people’s private data. Noooo. Really? But Comey says that a phone user trying to protect one’s security and private data is “beyond the law,” like the user is trying to hide evidence of criminality from the law by using a product with such advanced security measures.
Well, call me crazy, but supposedly We the People have this thing called a “right to be secure” — it actually says so in that little document that Comey allegedly swore an oath to obey! And what the hell is in his job description and the jobs of all those others of his government ilk anyway? “Security”? All you have to do is read the many articles by Glenn Greenwald regarding the Snowden documents, and by Will Grigg and John W. Whitehead and you can see quite clearly that the biggest threats to our privacy and security are those very government bureaucrats and their enforcers, whether Comey understands that or not. Perhaps we should be calling him “J. Edgar Comey” from now on?
I wrote this on LewRockwell.com in April 2011 in response to Obama’s then-criminal war in Libya, and I believe this applies to the current situation with Obama bombing Syria. (Barack Obomber, that is.)
April 15, 2011
With Peace Prize Laureate Barack Obama’s new war of Orwellian peaceful violence in Libya, this is yet another reminder of why socialism and central planning in security is a bad idea. The conservatives who are the most outspoken opponents of “socialism” are the true socialists: It is they who cherish national security socialism, the public or State ownership of the means of production in national security, a central-planning monopoly in territorial protection.
Americans and foreign peoples have suffered time and again because of the moral hazard of any form of socialism, from what Ludwig von Mises would call socialism’s “planned chaos,” in this case the planned chaos of socialized national security. The State’s inherently immoral and counter-productive scheme of usurping a people’s right of self-defense has allowed the State to be responsible for the most egregious crimes against humanity, especially in the American “Civil War,” in two World Wars, in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and other parts of the world.
And now Libya. Some are already predicting that Obama’s war in Libya will backfire, with a possible Gaddafi revenge attack similar to the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. Given that socialists and central planners tend to not learn from history, this Obama Libya war looks like another textbook study of planned chaos, similar to George W. Bush’s Iraq.
Former President Bush’s planned chaos in Iraq had effected in the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, widespread destruction of the country, and the establishment of a repressive, pro-Iranian Islamic Sharia Law in Iraq.
Even further than merely a Gaddafi revenge attack against the U.S., Obama may possibly be arming Libyan rebels including members of al Qaeda, a stated enemy of the United States especially since 9/11.
And Syria and Mexico may be next on the list for the inept security socialists.
One only needs to step back and view the history of America’s security blunders in a broad sense. For example, if America did not have a centralized national security monopoly in Washington, and instead allowed open competition in the field of security and required that all individuals follow the rule of law, would President Wilson have risked entering the U.S. into World War I, especially knowing that the War was already ending with treaties already in the works? Would President Lincoln have waged war against the Southern States, targeted thousands of innocent civilians and destroyed entire cities, had there been actual legal and market-based financial consequences applied to Lincoln for such aggressions?
Government bureaucrats, holding a monopoly in territorial protection and lacking incentives to improve performance, do not tend to pay attention to past mistakes and are not held accountable for their transgressions.
Some further questions to ask include these: Would the U.S. government’s agents of the Pentagon or CIA have deliberately radicalized Muslims in Afghanistan during Afghanistan’s 1980s war with Russia, had the U.S. government actually paid attention to the consequences of its CIA-led coup in Iran in 1953? Those consequences were the decades of Iranian anti-Americanism, the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution and the taking of American hostages in Iran.
Also, would the U.S. government have initiated wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s had its monopolists learned from the consequences, throughout the 1990s, of their first war in Iraq of 1991?
Why do the Washington security monopolists repeatedly make Americans less safe with schemes of intrusions and provocations abroad? One possible explanation is the inherently flawed nature of any central planning monopoly.
The comparison of government provision of national security to a hypothetical private security provision may sound absurd to some people. However, it is necessary to point out that, instead of being an economically sound system, the current government monopoly is a political system, in which congressmen and senators’ reelection campaigns (and campaign finances and contributions) are a part of the equation, along with the federal government’s uncoordinated defense bureaucracy and the politically-connected private-sector military contractors.
The current centralized national security monopoly is without competition and profit/loss motives to genuinely provide the most efficient, high quality service at the lowest cost to the consumers. Under the current socialism, the real motive turns into a “breaking windows” scheme to justify an ever-increasing bureaucracy combined with its corporatist colluders.
To illustrate those points, one can study economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s comparison of America’s democratic public ownership of a centralized government to the monarchies of the past. Unlike a monarchy in which the king owns the country’s territory and has a long-term interest in its capital value, in democracies the rulers are “temporary caretakers”:
(The) temporary and interchangeable democratic caretaker does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his advantage. He owns its current use but not its capital stock. This does not eliminate exploitation. Instead, it makes exploitation shortsighted (present-oriented) and uncalculated, i.e., carried out without regard for the value of the capital stock.
Hoppe further notes:
…a private government owner (a monarch) will want to avoid exploiting his subjects so heavily, for instance, as to reduce his future earnings potential to such an extent that the present value of his estate actually falls. Instead, in order to preserve or possibly even enhance the value of his personal property, he will systematically restrain himself in his exploitation policies….. In distinct contrast…. public government ownership will result in continual capital consumption. Instead of maintaining or even enhancing the value of the government estate, as a private owner would tend to do, a government’s temporary caretaker will quickly use up as much of the government resources as possible….
The system of government monopolies, funded largely by coercive taxation and a central bank’s creation of money without genuine value, inherently encourages the irresponsibility of deficit-spending and public debt. The scheme also does not impose punishments for the temporary caretakers’ domestic or foreign aggressions with their misuse of governmental apparatus.
In economic terms, because of government bureaucrats’ lack of competitive incentives and profit/loss motive, government’s central planners cannot take individual market factors into account, making economic calculations impossible. Government monopolists engage in political calculations rather than economic ones. And government’s central planners seem as incapable of understanding the morals and ethics of civil liberties and property rights in foreign relations as they do in domestic policy. Hence, the “planned chaos” and blowback of each and every fiasco of the U.S. government’s national security socialism scheme.
Because of this socialist government monopoly in territorial security and armed force, the bureaucrats act more in their own political self-interests and have tended to act more aggressively, because there are no punishments of their aggressions and short-sightedness. In contrast, there would be punishments, economic and legal, applied to private industries who engage in acts of fraud or deceit (e.g. going to war based on lies, fabricated information and propaganda), trespass on the property of others (e.g. placing military bases and stationing troops on other countries’ territories despite the objections of those territories’ populations), or cause deaths of civilians and destruction of property.
Last year’s Washington Post series, Top Secret America (Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4) on this scheme informed Americans about how the current national security socialism has turned into a tax-redistributive racket. (And it did so by the turn of the 20th Century, no less.) As more private industries became connected with the State, their profiting from other Americans’ labor and productivity via the redistributive apparatus of taxation has replaced the principles of private property rights, economic freedom and the rule of law. The U.S. government’s provocations abroad have become justifications for the continued expansion of the parasitic military-industrial-complex.
And in the past several decades especially, Washington’s “security experts” have repeatedly demonstrated that their schemes have more to do with the expansion of the State than with the protection of 300 million Americans. The central planners have turned to extremes – such as, in their TSA, their PATRIOT Act and other policies that have grossly damaged individuals’ rights to due process and presumption of innocence – rather than face the truth that it is the U.S. government’s intrusive and violent foreign policy that has provoked terrorism against the U.S.
The apparatus of the State’s socialization and monopoly of territorial protection has provided a structure of power over others. Unfortunately, that power seems to attract those with less moral character but with more desire for that power, and with a lack of inhibition to exercise that power. The system has encouraged the agents of the State to become increasingly aggressive in their use of governmental apparatus to wield that power, as they have zealously seized on opportunities to expand the size and power of the State especially through their demagogic manipulations of the public’s fears and anxieties. Private security firms could not do that, for they must act under the rule of law.
For example, in 1990, former President George H.W. Bush used the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as a means to further expand the U.S. government’s military and other government apparatus in the Middle East. There were also questionable corporate special interests, such as Henry Kissinger’s Kuwait connection, involved in Bush’s 1991 Persian Gulf War against Iraq, a country that was of no threat to the U.S. The propaganda campaign that was used to persuade the American people to support the war was extensive. 12 Years later, Bush’s son George W. Bush also employed a major propaganda campaign to convince the American people to start another war against Iraq.
Governments, with a monopoly over territorial security, have also employed false flag operations as a means of manipulating the fears and anxieties of their countries’ inhabitants, for the purpose of further expanding their State apparatus and power.
Even now, with President Obama’s continuation and expansion of the Bush wars overseas, the U.S. military bureaucrats have become even more zealous in their attempts to justify further expansions of the U.S. government abroad, despite their constant failures and ineptitude. Now, they have been illegally employing the use of psy-ops, or “psychological operations,” on U.S. senators to get congressional support to increase troops and funding for the failing wars.
Psy-ops are generally used on foreign government agents or diplomats to influence their emotions and decisions to become favorable to one’s own ends. Psy-ops are often used on the enemy during times of war; given that the senators being targeted in those operations represent the American people, it gives the appearance that the U.S. government perceives Americans as the enemy. This is usually what happens when a government – through its monopolistic power – grows in its size and power, and its existence becomes more self-serving.
The zeal of U.S. government officials has been exposed now in broad daylight, in their treatment of PFC Bradley Manning, the Army soldier accused of leaking thousands of classified documents exposing alleged U.S. war crimes and U.S. diplomatic incompetence and buffoonery. None of the leaks are said to have posed a threat to any U.S. soldier overseas or to Americans in the U.S. The military has been holding Manning for months in isolation, employing extreme psychological distress, as well as forced prolonged nudity. As I have mentioned, only sick degenerates would treat another human being that way. The officials are really using Manning as an example, a means of threatening others who may consider heroic whistleblowing acts.
Throughout the past century we have seen one example after another, one senseless war after another, millions of deaths and ruined lives, of how the socialist monopoly of national security and its planned chaos have gone against our security, as well as against our freedom and prosperity.
In 19th Century economist Gustave de Molinari’s comparison of government-monopolized security and the private production of security, Molinari noted,
Under the rule of free competition, war between the producers of security entirely loses its justification. Why would they make war? To conquer consumers? But the consumers would not allow themselves to be conquered. They would be careful not to allow themselves to be protected by men who would unscrupulously attack the persons and property of their rivals.
If private security firms used their armaments, coercion against others and deceit for the purpose of acting aggressively against neighbors or foreigners (for reasons other than “defense” of their clients or fellow territorial inhabitants), that would land them in jail. In fact, because of the invasiveness, enslavements and trespasses inherent in all forms of socialism – not just national security socialism – there logically could not be actual rule of law. Can anyone seriously claim that the U.S. government has been acting under the rule of law?
In fact, we have seen, time and again, how the central planning monopolists of the State are continuously rewarded for their failures, and for their crimes as well.
There need to be legal and competitive incentives to ensure the efficiency and productivity of any service to others. Why? Because of human nature. There need to be market-oriented punishments for failure to achieve, such as bankruptcy and termination of employment or contracts. And there need to be legal punishments applied to those who criminally misuse armed forces. Otherwise, if failures and crimes are allowed to continue without punishments, that is ipso-facto rewarding those failures and crimes, a consequence inherent in a compulsory monopoly in which the citizenry are forced to patronize the one provider of a service – in this case, that of territorial protection, or national security.
For further information on the private alternative to national security socialism, please read No More Military Socialism by Murray Rothbard, Foreign Aggression by Morris and Linda Tannehill, The Private Production of Defense (pdf) by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Myth of National Defense (pdf) also by Hoppe, and The Myth of Efficient Government Service by Rothbard.
But for those who are still skeptical of the notion of privatization of security, and who are not as concerned as I am regarding the growing intrusiveness of the State and its hired guns into our lives and liberty, perhaps an acceptable alternative could be decentralization. Eliminate the U.S. federal government’s centralized monopoly in territorial security and allow each U.S. state to control its own self-protection. Doing so would reduce the possibility that any one state would aggress against others, or against foreigners, for such aggressions would be met with harsh punishments from surrounding states. Additionally, with renewed independence and sovereignty, each state’s inhabitants would be better able to “vote with their feet,” which, given the one monopolistic choice we currently have with Washington, most Americans are not able to do.
Finally, there are those who are concerned that without a centralized National Security monopoly in Washington, that it would be easier for foreign governments to invade the U.S. But those are unfounded fears. If, for example, China were to invade the U.S. with the goal of occupying and taking over America, a likely scenario given how indebted the U.S. is to China and increasingly less likely to pay what is owed, most Americans would readily take up arms to protect themselves, their families and their properties. This situation, however, can be easily avoided by ending the Federal Reserve’s compulsory monopoly in the production of money and allowing for competing currencies, and outlawing Congressional deficit-spending and public debts.
I am very surprised that the usually suspicious-of-government-assertions Alex Jones is being taken in by this Ebola panic hysteria going on now as pushed by the CDC and its corporate vaccine merchants. On Infowars today is this article by Dave Hodges, who begins the article with a call for not just the U.S. government to do something, but the military of all things! The article cries, “the government should be deploying the military at all border entry points and in airports for the purpose of establishing quarantine zones for passengers suspected of exposure to the Ebola virus.” Are you serious? So, some old lady sneezes and we should get military soldiers after her? And these Infowars people are usually the ones who criticize government overkill, militarization and overreaction.
In fact, Jon Rappoport has another post on this Ebola panic, and he brings up the “swine flu” panic of 2009. Remember that? Rappoport recounts that then-CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson exposed the CDC’s hysterically fraudulent claims of an H1N1 flu epidemic, in which actual test results of those suspected of having the H1N1 virus showed that most of the results were negative for the virus. But at that time, the CDC still pushed the then-untested “swine flu” vaccine!
In a previous post on the current Ebola outbreak, Rappoport notes that the conditions in Africa are those which cause vulnerability in many people’s immune systems, and it should be no surprise that they can get sick more easily than others living in better conditions.
Remember this: when people are drinking contaminated water (sometimes pumped directly from sewage into the drinking supply), when they are profoundly deficient in all vitamins and minerals, when they are starving, when they are subjected to very toxic chemicals spewed from industrial factories, when they are living far, far below the poverty line, when they are driven from their homes and even their countries during war, the “symptoms” these people present are going to be quite horrific and shocking and strange and unpredictable.
Of course many people will have more illness in those parts of Africa than those in more developed countries. And Rappoprt makes a comparison:
Take 100 people from Scarsdale or Beverly Hills, who are living very comfortable lives, and fly them to some distant location, put them all in a six-room apartment with rats and lice, feed them a tiny portion of rice and melon every day, give them water to drink that’s polluted with industrial waste and human waste . . .
Test them all for the presence of germs, and you’ll find as many viruses and bacteria as you want to.
And in another earlier post Rappoport explains why some health care workers have become ill with Ebola. They had been “boiling hot” in these hazmat suits, losing a lot of sweat and dehydrating themselves, and on top of that having to go through decontamination treatments including the use of chlorine, and he quotes one doctor who stated that the smell of the chlorine while he was wearing the hazmat suit was “intense.”
“But of course,” Jon Rappoport writes, “this has absolutely nothing to do with why you might fall ill. No. If you fall ill, or collapse, or suddenly die, it’s Ebola.”
I’m sure that some nice U.S. Big Pharma vaccine maker will get rich from the latest panic.
But it’s a surprise to see some of the panic and calls for more militarization and “quarantining” people “suspected” of having the Ebola virus coming from Infowars, of all places.
Wendy McElroy has this terrific article on libertarianism and racism. If you are libertarian in your thinking and you have friends or associates who are ignorant of what libertarianism is and they accuse the libertarian philosophy or libertarians of being “racist,” then you should send them this article. McElroy really clarifies many important aspects of these issues.
Ron Paul discusses various matters regarding liberty here with Tom Woods. They discuss liberty advocates’ critics who are on the defensive, which is because the establishment pols and their minions in the media are really afraid to hear anyone with a non-statist point of view. They also mention the evaporating of the anti-interventionists in Congress.
I am sorry about all the reruns lately. But regarding the vote in Scotland to not secede from U.K. rule, I wrote this article on secession in 2010. I know, some prefer “unalienable,” rather than “inalienable,” but really they mean the same thing. This article originally appeared on LewRockwell.com.
The Inalienable Right to Secede
February 1, 2010
During the time of President Obama’s State of the Union address, it was noted that HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan was Obama’s “Designated Survivor.” This is a perfect example of how a government-monopolized defense system is actually a threat to the security of all Americans. If a catastrophe occurs in Washington, panic and vulnerability would spread across America, a result of an entire population compelled by force to be dependent on a centralized authority for their protection. Another catastrophe is the economic one that Americans have been suffering, due to the federal government’s monopoly in the production and distribution of money, thanks to President Abraham Lincoln and his War on Independence.
Within the inalienable rights to life and liberty, as recognized in the Declaration of Independence, is the right to independence. People have a right not to be compelled to be dependent on the federal government’s monopoly of territorial protection and jurisdiction. If people within a particular territory have a right of independence and a right of self-determination, then they have a right to secede from the federal “union.” This is reinforced by the Declaration of Independence, which states that “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” And Thomas Jefferson later noted, “…If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation….to a continuance in the union….I have no hesitation in saying, ‘let us separate’…”
While some say there is no such constitutional right to secede or nullify federal law, and others argue that the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the US Constitution protect such states’ and individuals’ rights, there is a higher law that takes precedence over Constitutional law, namely Natural Law, which governs our natural, inherent rights as human beings, as noted in the Declaration of Independence.
Further, given that the US Constitution is a “contract,” its terms are legally binding to all who reside within the US territories whether or not they voluntarily consented to participate in such a contract. 19th-century entrepreneur Lysander Spooner observed that the Constitution’s contractual obligations are to those who signed such a document, and applied to the people living at the time, and cannot possibly apply to people living in future generations. And, Spooner notes,
…. only a small portion even of the people then existing were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express either their consent or dissent in any formal manner. Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now…. It is not only plainly impossible…. that they Could bind their posterity, but they did not even attempt to bind them…. the language neither expresses nor implies that they had any right or power, to bind their “posterity” to live under it. It does not say that their “posterity” will, shall, or must live under it. It only says, in effect, that their hopes and motives in adopting it were that it might prove useful to their posterity….
The mid-19th-century war waged by President Abraham Lincoln against the peacefully seceding Southern States was an important time. However, it is necessary to rectify the myths associated with that war, such as Lincoln’s purpose being to “end slavery.” In fact, an important motivation behind the Southern States’ peaceful secession was Lincoln’s tariffs against the South that protected Northern industries, and Lincoln’s main concerns were not freeing slaves, but his protectionist tariffs and, more importantly, to force the Southern States back into the “union.” Further, Lincoln expanded the government’s monopolies upon which all Americans were compelled to be dependent, such as replacing hard money with fiat paper money, something against which Thomas Jefferson and others had warned, and driving a stake into the heart of banking competition.
Much of America’s current economic slavery and depression are tied to Lincoln’s actions. To Lincoln, expanding the size and power of the federal government and further handcuffing the masses was worth the clinging US government’s campaign of violence and barbarism against civilians that contradicted internationally recognized mores. While the Founding Fathers were forced to use war to secede from tyrannical British rule, Lincoln used war for the opposite purpose.
Besides his oppressive use of taxation, Lincoln’s other economic achievement–and it’s also not a good one–initiated the monetary bondage of the citizens by the federal government, violating the people’s right of free exchange and trade, which includes the right to choose one’s means of exchange that isn’t monopolistically produced and distributed by the government. Not only should Americans secede from the federal government, but they should secede from invasive, dictatorial federal monetary policy. (US Rep. Ron Paul’s bill to repeal the legal tender laws and allow for competing currencies begins to correct this.)
Economist Murray Rothbard is quite blunt about the true nature of taxation and the government’s constitutionally assigned compulsory territorial monopoly:
Taxation is theft, purely and simply….and is therefore indistinguishable from theft, it follows that the State, which subsists on taxation, is a vast criminal organization far more formidable and successful than any “private” Mafia in history…. (the State) prohibits the free competition of defense and decision-making agencies within a given territorial area – prohibiting the voluntary purchase and sale of defense and judicial services… the State is an inherently illegitimate institution of organized aggression, of organized and regularized crime against the persons and properties of its subjects. Rather than necessary to society, it is a profoundly antisocial institution which lives parasitically off of the productive activities of private citizens…
Within our inalienable rights to life and liberty is the God-given right of self-defense. However, a centralized federal government which monopolizes territorial defense is a violation of the peoples’ right of self-defense. People have a right of self-defense and a right to not be held in bondage by the state for their protection or for any reason.
Besides the states seceding and providing their own defenses, another alternative is a privatized, free market in defense that would allow competition among defense agencies, especially in the context of totally repealed weapons laws. The quality and efficiency in defense services would go up and the price would come down, as in any endeavor in any free, civilized society. For example, after 9/11, the people of Manhattan or indeed the owners of the World Trade Center would exercise their right to contract private agencies and private warriors to investigate, retaliate against and eliminate Al Qaeda at its roots, including involving specialized risks in foreign territories. Assuming there would be no invasive, dictatorial US governmental restrictions interfering with such efforts, the private contractors would probably have done the job more quickly and efficiently than the government, which not only still hasn’t done the job, but has only made things worse. Had the government been a private agency, its contract would have been terminated years ago, and many of its authorities would now be in jail.
As economist Gustave de Molinari noted,
…(the consumers of competitive protection agencies) “would be careful not to allow themselves to be protected by men who would unscrupulously attack the persons and property of their rivals…. Just as war is the natural consequence of monopoly, peace is the natural consequence of liberty.”
The nation states of the Soviet Union learned their lesson, that central planning and government monopolies violate individual rights and cause dysfunction, economic stagnation and corruption. Either the US states ought to secede from the federal government’s control, or we ought to consider eliminating the federal government altogether and let the people have their freedom and independence. It is the people’s inalienable right to secede, just as it was the Founders’ inalienable right to secede from British rule.
Copyright © 2010 by LewRockwell.com
I hope not. But that’s what Brandon Smith suggests.
Jacob Hornberger and Sheldon Richman of the Future of Freedom Foundation discuss what causes wealth in a society. They provide good rebuttals to the progressives’ suggestions for ending poverty.
William Grigg says to call the anti-police and end the State’s “security” monopoly.
Nick Giambruno writes about property taxes vs. property rights.
David D’Amato writes about the vampire of practical politics.
Flex Your Rights discusses search and seizure in government schools.
Laurence Vance says, legalize heroin.
James Bovard says that AmeriCorps is a wasteful flop.
Sheldon Richman on ownership and ideas.
Robert Wenzel writes about governments and killing.
Jacob Hornberger discusses perpetual fear under empire.
Donald Miller, MD on World War Redux and the Fourth Turning.
Gary North says that American conservatism is Keynesian to the core.
George Leef says it’s time for civil asset forfeiture laws to meet the same fate as Jim Crow.
And Bryan Caplan is interviewed on open borders.
Jacob Hornberger reviews the whole controversy of the JFK assassination and discusses his FFF video project by Douglas Horne, who has written extensively on the JFK Assassination Records Review Board.
As I have noted here recently, I have been very busy trying to deal with personal matters. I hope to return to regular blog writing soon. I hope. But in the meantime, there are other good articles and posts I have seen that I can link to, for those who are interested.
John Whitehead discusses life in the Amerikan prison state.
Lew Rockwell interviews Sibel Edmonds on the secret crimes of the U.S. empire.
Mikael Thalen discusses 3 high-level intelligence operatives who exposed 9/11 foreknowledge.
Washington’s Blog describes the real masterminds behind 9/11.
WND with an article on what’s behind naming “ISIS” and/or “ISIL”.
Tony Cartalucci describes the Washington-created ISIS menace.
James Bovard discusses the “food insecurity” hoax.
Jon Rappoport writes about Ebola propaganda and questions the official Ebola narrative.
And Adan Salazar writes about the goofy Today Show‘s recommendation of using car keys and wasp spray to ward off a home invader, and treat him “like royalty.”
This appeared on LewRockwell.com on March 23 of 2013, and I believe it is relevant now:
The 22-Year Bush War of Aggression on Iraq
Several commentators have been observing the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, but really the U.S. government’s war on Iraq began over 22 years ago.
In January 1991, then-President George H.W. Bush started the war on Iraq, and imposed sanctions and no-fly zones, which were continued by President Bill Clinton throughout the 1990s. By 2001, hundreds of thousands of civilian Iraqi deaths were wrought by the U.S. government and the UN, and there was widespread anti-American anger felt by many in the Middle East.
Here is a brief review of what led up to the elder President Bush’s 1991 war on Iraq:
In 1990, Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, were engaged in disputes with Kuwait. Iraq believed that Kuwait was siphoning Iraq’s oil via horizontal drilling, and Iraq also believed that Kuwait’s own oil production was above OPEC quotas which allegedly effected in lower oil profits for Iraq.
Saddam Hussein had been the U.S. government’s favorite during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, which Saddam had started with his invasion of Iran. The U.S. government’s arming and providing tactical battle planning to Iraq, despite U.S. officials knowing that Iraq was using chemical weapons during that conflict, were well documented.
When Saddam considered invading Kuwait, he met with then-U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, and asked her what kind of response the U.S. would have to such an invasion.
In their discussion, according to the New York Times, Glaspie stated, “…we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60′s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. (Sec. of State) James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.” (More here.)
Apparently, Saddam Hussein took those words as a green light to invade Kuwait.
However, George Bush the elder then did a bait-and-switch, and began preparing for his war on Iraq. But the biggest task for Bush was to convince the American people that the war on behalf of Kuwait, an extremely anti-democratic, authoritarian monarchy, was not for oil but for “liberating” Kuwait from Saddam.
To sell this war to the American people, the government of Kuwait hired as many as 20 PR and lobbying firms. One PR firm in particular, Hill and Knowlton, was apparently the “mastermind” of the PR campaign, according to PR industry experts John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, whose book Toxic Sludge Is Good for You provides the details of the Bush-Kuwait PR campaign, as excerpted by PR Watch.
Both Bush presidents were skilled salesmen in their demonizing those who would be on the receiving end of their own wars of aggression. Philip Knightley, author of the book, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq, in an October 2001 article described the repeated stratagem of warmongers’ use of propaganda to demonize the enemy to rationalize a new war for the warmongers’ own people to support it.
The most effective PR ploy was the congressional testimony of a teenage Kuwaiti girl who stated, emotionally, that she witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of hospital incubators and leaving them “on the cold floor to die.” The girl later turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. And not only was that fact suppressed until after Bush’s war began, but the information she gave was false, and the girl had been coached by an executive of Hill and Knowlton. (Video)
Murray Rothbard gives quite a few further details regarding the whole 1990-91 Bush-Iraq-Kuwait wheeling-and-dealing here and here.
During the elder President Bush’s 1991 Gulf War, one of the most egregious acts that the U.S. military committed against the Iraqis was to intentionally destroy civilian water and sewage treatment centers and electrical facilities.
According to researcher James Bovard, U.S. Air Force Col. John Warden published an article in Airpower Journal, titled, “The Enemy as a System,” in which Warden told of the U.S. military’s intentional targeting of the civilian infrastructure as a means to undermine Iraqi “civilian morale.” Bovard also cites a June 23, 1991 Washington Post analysis, which quoted a Pentagon official as stating, “People say, ‘You didn’t recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage.’ Well, what were we trying to do with sanctions — help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions.”
By the mid-1990s, diseases such as cholera, measles, and typhoid had led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, and a skyrocketing infant mortality rate, with many more deaths by the year 2000. This campaign of cruelty was advanced further by the U.S. government and the UN through sanctions and no-fly zones, which prevented medical treatments and the means of repairing damaged infrastructure from being imported into Iraq. Clearly, such a controversial campaign of bombing civilian water and sewage treatment centers must have been approved beforehand by then-President George H.W. Bush and his Sec. of Defense Dick Cheney.
Justifiably, there was widespread anger amongst the inhabitants of the Middle East by 2001. In fact, one of the main motivations of the 9/11 terrorists was the Gulf War’s subsequent sanctions against the Iraqi civilian population.
Besides the sanctions throughout the 1990s as continued by President Bill Clinton, Clinton himself inflicted more bombing of Iraq.
Some people have now been comparing George Bush Jr.’s 2003 revival of the long war on Iraq with the extended war in Vietnam of the 1960s and 1970s, especially combined with the younger Bush’s war of aggression in Afghanistan and Obama’s continuation of those wars and starting new ones.
The younger George Bush’s 2003 war on Iraq was really a continuation of what his father had started in 1991. Investigative journalist Russ Baker, author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years, asserts that Bush Jr. was planning to invade Iraq as early as 1999 to take advantage of the “political capital” his father had built up earlier in Iraq.
(Can you imagine a President Jeb Bush in 2016? But I digress.)
In the elder President George Bush’s January 16, 1991 speech from the Oval Office, when he claimed that his 1991 war “will not be another Vietnam” (approx. 6:45), he also spoke of the “New World Order” (7:30).
The neoconservatives and progressive interventionists have been implementing their plans for global hegemony for decades, and using the force of the U.S. government to do it. But there is a frightening love of government that connects these interventionists, far outweighing any actual love for freedom and peace they could possibly have.
And now, after all these 22 years of Bush war quagmires and trillions of dollars in debt, and with warnings regarding the warmongers’ plans for Iran (which was part of the neocons’ plans all along), can the American people ever wake up to the truth about all this?
Now, the elder George Bush was elected President in 1988. But given how entrenched the Establishment’s interventionist policies were by that time, when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s it wouldn’t have mattered whether Bush or Democrat Michael Dukakis was elected in 1988. Given the myth of the “progressive peacenik,” a hypothetical Dukakis administration of 1989-1993 would most probably have been similar to the current one of Barack Obama. And with similar militarist reactions to Iraq as Bush in the name of furthering the obsession for hegemony that statists of both left and right have (and to keep the military-industrial-complex happy, too).
However, during the 1988 presidential campaign, had the media given Libertarian Party nominee Ron Paul the same free advertising they gave both Bush and Dukakis, the American people would have seen the clear alternative from the Bush-Dukakis statist quo.
And how would a President Ron Paul have handled the collapse of the Soviet Union? Given that any threats or perceived threats from overseas had vanished overnight, Ron Paul would have closed all the overseas U.S. military bases that existed then, including all the European and Asian bases and other foreign U.S. governmental apparatus. He would have brought all U.S. troops home, and many of them would have gone into the private sector to become productive workers, business owners and employers.
A President Paul would have shrunk the federal government by eliminating many useless departments, bureaus and programs, which Ronald Reagan promised to do but didn’t. And Paul would have abolished the fascist income tax. The economic boom of the 1990s would have been magnified by many times, for sure.
And a President Ron Paul would have educated the American people on the actual ideas of liberty. He would have informed the people of what a real free market is – something that the Heritage Foundation, Glenn Beck, and, ugh, Willard Romney wouldn’t know if they fell over it.
There also wouldn’t have been a U.S. government invasion of Iraq in 1991, bombing of civilian infrastructure, sanctions and no-fly zones, and provocations of foreigners becoming determined to retaliate. There may not (or probably not) have been a 9/11, and the police state in America that was already growing by the early 1990s would have been put to a stop. (And the younger George W. Bush probably wouldn’t have even been elected governor of Texas, let alone President of the U.S.) And there wouldn’t have been any U.S.-initiated wars in Afghanistan and other countries as well.
But, “woulda, coulda, shoulda” is just not realistic, and what happened, happened. The misery, destruction, collapse of the American economy in addition to all these wars – it happened, thanks to neocons and progressive interventionists.
The central planners in charge must have very serious clinically pathological delusions of grandeur and a hunger for power and control in their attempts to “remake the Middle East in America’s image” or “make the world safe for democracy” (but not freedom and peace), while coveting those foreign territories’ natural resources and slaughtering innocents.
So, call me old-fashioned, but it takes a really sick, criminal mind to intentionally destroy the water and sewage treatments of an entire civilian population, and forcibly withhold their medical treatments and repairs. And it takes a very demented person to view entire populations and cultures in other parts of the world as sub-human and whose lives are not worthy of any “inalienable rights” to life, liberty, and peace.
As I have stated in the past, America’s culture has declined over the past century. The greater power we have allowed governments to usurp, the further “third world” America has become.
The Bush wars of the past 22 years have not been helpful to human progress, that’s for sure.
Copyright © 2013 by LewRockwell.com.
Scott Lazarowitz's Blog 