On today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:
Sen. Lindsey Graham traveled (again) to Ukraine to try and whip up more war fever. This time he scolded the Ukrainian government for not conscripting younger kids to die in the US proxy war with Russia. Also today: Europeans are quitting the military in high numbers. A return to the draft is in the works in many countries. Finally: Israel has a new plan to steal more Gaza land.
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
“No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted.” –Mark Twain
Lindsay Graham is a modern day John McCain. He says Ukraine is not sending enough kids to fight and die for a worthless cause.
It’s good Europeans are quitting the military in higher numbers. I wish the same thing would happen in the USA. Members of the military and civilians opposed to wars should protest outside the White House and Capitol Buildings.
South Carolina should call on Graham to resign but they won’t. He’ll spend the rest of his life in the Senate.
There used to be solid contenders against Graham, but that’s no longer true. There was a really good Dem one time, and a good GOP too. Most recently, the Dem candidate was possibly worse than Graham.
Graham is most dangerous as a Trump supporter. Trump likes him, and he at least publicly speaks well of Trump.
Who cares? Everyone knows he’s a lunatic war-monger. So are 99% of the rest of Congress as long as the MIC pays them. The question is: what are you going to do about it? Answer: nothing. As long as the US electorate is composed of morons, nothing will change. And nothing will change the fact that the US electorate is composed of morons. Q.E.D.
AIPAC and the MIC are the real government in the U.S. of Atrocities. The FBI and the CIA are backups. Our vote is meaningless. Citizens United opened the floodgates of money to buy off congress and the presidency.
Money would probably get in even without Citizens United, but I would like that overturned.
Now that Dems rule in the US, maybe it will be overturned.
Money would probably get in even without Citizens United, but I would like that overturned.
Now that Dems rule in the US, maybe it will be overturned.
Democracy: An oligarchic system where voters are blamed though voters are limited in the following: information, motive to desire information, education to understand information, and time to gather information.
Graham does not know the meaning of the word “PEACE”. Does not know what a “Republic” is. Does not understand “The Rule of Law” and how it applies to his so called job in Congress. Everything, anything he does in Congress has to be backed by our Constitution and the “Rule of Law”, which he has FAILED at. He is a coward, a blood thirsty genocidal maniac, whose loyalty is NOT to Americans, but to GREED, Demonic Values. We know Genocidal Maniacs stick together, so his support of Zelensky/Netanyahu should surprise no one. The only buffer zone needed is for the Zionist to return to Europe, for all illegally occupied land in Palestine, returned to the Palestinians and War Criminals arrested.
Just end the war. If the war continues, Russia will take Odessa. Ukraine will be landlocked. If the US boosts military production to surpass Russia’s, Russia will use nukes to defend Crimea.
Why play this game? China might enter the fray.
And so many dead, for what? One lesson, people fight hard for nationalism, even if it’s fake.
Of course it is hard to really know the Russian plans at this point that possibly go beyond the stated objectives, but to me it seems, based on a couple of hints from even Putin himself, that they are planning to take Odessa too. The French also seem to have decided on the likelihood of that trajectory.
As for the US boosting it’s military production to surpass Russia’s that’s not going to happen for any foreseeable future. Some pretty unrealistically optimistic projections are counting on the Americans and Europeans to militarize their civil societies and dismantle their democracies, to throw them into the smallest memoryhole possible for their media to drown the last trace of life out of it while the Russians decide from then on to sit on their hands. Not going to happen.
The US economy is in many ways greater than Russia’s. The US has the potential to produce more, but US corruption and mismanagement (probably due to corruption and career interests which I’d label as corruption/special interests) prevent that. I’d say the problem is more complicated, and you probably understand it better; but there is the potential for the US to outperform Russia.
It is probably achievable if the US becomes a (centrally, government commanded) planned economy outright. But even then it would take a great effort (the increased demand it would take on the US education system to produce the numbers of skilled workers needed probably deserves a mention) and a long time. And you’d still need the Russians in those several years meantime of industrial buildup and investments (that do not then go to other sectors) to not notice and/or do nothing at all.
This is not a workable proposition, not to say unrealistic.
It’s unlikely that the US will need to increase production to surpass Russia’s. The longer the war drags out and the more the Kremlin savages its non-military economy to keep up military production, the quicker both non-military and military production collapse.
Agreed, the US doesn’t need to surpass Russia’s military production. They shouldn’t aspire to. Other things they better aspire to if we at least can agree that we want to continue to have a planet on which to aspire to things.
If it would be true that the Russians are so self-defeatingly stupid as you say, a repeat of the Cold War arms race spending spree trap, then they would probably deserve it. I doubt however that there is much cause for such optimism.
Much of this sort of optimism has been killed dead by reality already. Russia would quickly be thrown into abject poverty by Western Sanctions. Then their military would quickly break down, killed, disillusioned, demoralized in their old, worn and broken down military equipment. Then the Russian military would not be able to recruit Russian youth who of course were all secretely Navalny supporters and fleeing Russia in massive and probably unrecoverable numbers, braindraining the place to a degree that would equally destroy Russia shortly. All the while the Russians would be pummeled and beaten by the mighty Ukrainians, the superb and immaculate NATO stormtroopers in all but name, until it dawns on the Russians what the US and EU public also already were assured by their respective media, that their role in this whole thing, and what is minimally expected of them is to rise up against Putin and install a US friendly strongman. Puzzlement, bewilderment, perplexity, apoplexy among the army of Western approved Russia experts as to why this has not yet happened.
Or of course these optimistic predictions might just need a little more time to materialize n’est-ce pas?
For a prediction to be “optimistic” or “pessimistic,” the person making it would need to have to desire that it be true or false.
I have no stake in which side produces more or fewer munitions, because I don’t care how either side fares in the outcome of the war.
If I did have a stake, it would be the opposite of what you seem to think. I live in the US, and every dime of military spending in the US comes out of productive capacity that could be used to make life better here. As Eisenhower put it:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
I do encounter a more varying set of opinions among ordinary folk, like me, lets say. But what is optimism and what is pessimism and what the political elite and the media want to be true, I mean desperately want to be true, and what they keep saying is true leaves no room for doubt.
What also leaves no room for doubt is that what they have been saying and what they still are saying is completely false.
What we all should do with our money, time, talent and dedication is exactly what you’re saying, what Eisenhower so eloquently summarized. No argument there. But alas that is not the way it is at all, and it looks definitely not at all the way it is going. And none of it is the fault of the Russians.
“And none of it is the fault of the Russians.”
Are the Russians adult rational actors? If so, they’re as responsible for their decisions, and the consequences of their decisions, as anyone else.
The Russians are not responsible for our decisions. We are. Are we adult rational actors? That is the question to answer. And it doesn’t seem so. At least not if Eisenhower was on to something there, as you at least seemed to imply just a minute ago.
Everyone’s responsible for what THEY do.
Making bullshit excuses for what one does doesn’t relieve one of responsibility for doing it.
Please read more of Scott Ritter, a virtual expert on Russia. He would completely refute your claims.
I tend to discount the opinions of “experts” who have openly announced that they have a preferred side in a war and aren’t interested in peace.
Cut the overseas spending. Retrain US soldiers. It’s possible. But it would take time.
Most US soldiers wouldn’t need to be retrained. Only 15% of the US armed forces are in combat arms MOSes. The skills of most of the rest are already skills for which there’s civilian demand. Cooks. Truck drivers. Mechanics. Various computer skills. Etc.
Deep Sea Mining is probably soon a thing.
This guy is not even worth commenting on…!