The Empire is playing a "look at this hand....and not this hand" game again.
Headline after headline tells us that 'Obama is ending the wars'...'Obama is weak'...'Obama is worse than Jimmy Carter'...'America is retreating from the world'...'The Army has been reduced to 1940 levels'...and on, and on...
Give me a break!
The very same fog machine was used when Eisenhower was elected. He ended the Korean war, and slashed the military budget from $515 billion in 1953 to $370 billion by 1956.
Here's the rub....the Empire never sleeps. While it has you looking one way, and thinking one thing, it's off causing trouble in countless other ways. Eisenhower, with John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State, and Allen Dulles as Director of the CIA
, would take the Empire's mischief into the covert world.While the American public was fed lines of a declining military budget, the trio would overthrow Iran's democratically elected leader Mohammed Mossadegh; would overthrow the democratically elected leader Arbenz in Guatemala; would attempt to overthrow Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam; would succeed in overthrowing Sukarno in Indonesia; and would put plans together that would be passed on to Kennedy known as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
Smaller military budget? Yes.
Peace? No way!
Yet isn't peace the most important thing? The number juggling is a sideshow.
Let's now look at "weak" Obama who's shrinking the Army to "1940 levels".
The source for everything foreign policy is The Ron Paul Institute and its director Daniel McAdams. One look, and you'll notice that Daniel is not sitting on his hands, but cranking out content feverishly. There's been Libya, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, China, and let's not forget all the drone warfare.
Peace? No way!
The Empire and its media are playing everyone for fools (again). We libertarians don't care about the number juggling. We care about peace!
When something happens around the world that does not constitute a direct attack on the United States, the response from the U.S. government should be: "We have no opinion. We do not take sides. We do not hand out money to anyone. We do not hand out arms to anyone. We do not defend any other nation besides our own. We do not place sanctions on anyone. We do not spy on anyone. We have no bases or troops outside of our own country. We are about diplomacy and trade with everyone in the world."
The rest of the world would then treat the U.S. like lobbyists used to treat Ron Paul: they won't even bother to knock on the door!
As hard as it may be for many Americans to believe, this is not some kind of fantasy policy. There are many countries out there that do just that, and it was the policy of the U.S. back before the year 1900 hit; back when Americans were much (much) freer.
Chris Rossini is on Twitter
Edward Snowden is no hero: Bill Gates
ReplyDeleteSan Francisco, March 14:
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates criticised NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in an interview published Thursday, saying that his leaking of confidential documents had gone too far.
“I think he broke the law, so I certainly wouldn’t characterise him as a hero,” Gates said in Rolling Stone magazine.
“You won’t find much admiration from me,” Gates said, adding he thinks there should be some Government surveillance powers on the internet, and that Snowden’s actions had compromised those capabilities.
“The debate needs to be about the general notion of under what circumstances should they be allowed to do things,” he said. “The people who say that sometimes having this information is valuable — they’re not being very articulate right now.”
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/international/edward-snowden-is-no-hero-bill-gates/article5783838.ece
neither are you, Bill.