Author: James Pasley

Inflation. We are seeing it every day.

All of a sudden, we are spending a lot more for a pound of hamburger, a gallon of milk, and new school clothes for our kids.

Not to mention that when we headed to the store we had to stop and get gas which has now gone up by nearly double in the last 6 months.

So, we can see it, but what is causing it?

The federal government doesn’t seem concerned. In fact, they are wanting to spend trillions of dollars more for new programs. How can they afford that when we are just barely making ends meet?

Well, it’s really quite simple. We give them our money, and they decide where it is spent.

The first big trigger for inflation was the Progressive Era, which was a period of intense social and political reform aimed at making progress toward a better society.

Progressive Era reformers sought to harness the power of the federal government to eliminate unethical and unfair business practices, reduce corruption, and counteract the negative social effects of industrialization.

In other words, the idea of Social Darwinism, survival of the fittest, was attacked by the progressives who felt the role of the federal government was to provide a better life for the masses.

All of the programs they have initiated over the years cost money. A lot of money.

The Progressive Era was interrupted by World War I, during which federal power expanded even more.

The railroads were nationalized, shipping was regulated, and the United States Food Administration, created in 1917, controlled all aspects of the food industry, from agriculture to distribution to sales.

Similar regulation was applied to fuels, and eventually to the whole economy.When the federal income tax was introduced in 1913 (16^th amendment), the highest tax bracket was 7 percent for all income above $20,000. Bear in mind, in 1913 the average yearly salary was $687.

Because of the demand for war-related spending, by 1918 the highest rate rose to 77 percent beginning at $4,000.

So, the federal government now had our money, but they ran into a problem with how to collect it.

The answer, withholding tax.

Before World War II, when income tax rates were far lower than now, there was no withholding system; everyone paid his annual bill in one lump sum, on March 15.

The problem with that system was that the federal government had to wait till March 15th every year to refill its coffers.

So, the government came up with a plan to use every employer as an unpaid tax collector, extracting the tax quietly and silently from each paycheck.

So, rather than paying a huge sum at the end of the year, taxpayers were slowly bled to death week by week.

This also made increasing taxes much easier since many people didn’t really notice an extra nickel or dime deducted from their check when taxes were increased for federal programs.

Now, back to inflation. Once the Feds had your money, and had also come up with a way to make sure they got it, all that was left was to determine a way to use it to control the economy. The answer?

The Federal Reserve System.

The Progressives in Congress, under President Woodrow Wilson, now passed the Federal Reserve Act on December 23rd, 1913.

1. They set up 12 regional banking districts, each with a federal reserve bank.

2. The federal reserve banks were owned by the member banks of the federal reserve system. (All national banks were required to join)

3. Member banks had to subscribe 6% of their capital to the federal reserve bank in their region.

4. Federal reserve banks would the use this capital to back federal reserve notes (Dollars. Take a look at one, it says “Federal Reserve Note”)

Now this is over simplified, but here is how the system works.

Article by Peter Jacobsen

Foundation for Economic Education

Peter Jacobsen is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Ottawa University He received his PhD in economics from George Mason University and obtained his BS from Southeast Missouri State University. His website can be found here.

One way the government keeps track of inflation is by using the consumer price index (CPI). The CPI uses some of the common goods consumers buy, and they keep track of the prices of these goods each year.

A CPI growth of 4.2% means this “basket” of goods the average consumer buys has gotten 4.2% more expensive. Economists call this measure inflation.

The CPI is by no means a perfect measure of inflation, nor could any measure be, but it provides some kind of benchmark to compare how much prices are changing over time.

So,why is inflation increasing now? It’s all about the money. Imagine tomorrow that suddenly all US money becomes a 10x larger number. Ten dollar bills become 100 dollar bills, bank accounts with $10,000 turn into accounts with $100,000, and the four quarters in your cup holder transform into a 10 dollar bill.

This might sound nice at first, but consider what happens next. If prices stay the same, suddenly people rush out to buy new things. Suddenly, a student with a $7000 student loan can buy a Porsche. Someone can afford a down payment on a house who was months away before. A kid with a generous allowance buys a flat-screen TV.

But now the problems appear. All cars for sale are being driven off the lot. TV shelves are empty. House offers pour in only minutes after listing. There is more money, but the exact same amount of goods exist. With so many customers demanding new goods, sellers have 10 customers fighting over one product. So, what happens? The price is goes up.

In fact, prices in this world will make, on average, the same change as bank accounts. One dollar candy bars become $10, average quality TVs cost thousands of dollars, and the $100,000 two-bedroom house in Missouri becomes a million-dollar purchase.

If more dollars chase the exact same goods, prices will rise.

Although the above example is simplified, the general idea holds in the real world. Unfortunately, not everyone has gotten 10x more money, but new money has been introduced to the economy.

The quantity of money has increased more than 32.9% since January 2020.

That means nearly one-quarter of the money in circulation has been created since then. A change like this is unprecedented in recent history.

The newly printed money helped fund the slew of trillion-dollar coronavirus spending which benefitted massive corporations. It also was an attempt to satisfy consumers’ demand to hold money so they would be comfortable spending again. And spending they are.

As lockdowns end and finally allow consumers to return to normal economic activity, the new money begins to move through the economy more quickly. Banks have more money to lend out and people are building new homes. As more homes are built, the demand for wood increases. As the demand for wood increases, the price of wood goes up. Sound familiar?

Although the new money didn’t hit all markets at the same time, and it may take some time for demand to return to pre-lockdown levels, the inflation numbers indicate this process has begun.

In order for inflation to slow down, either spending would have to slow down, or the government would have to lower the money supply.

Given all the new money floating around, it shouldn’t surprise anyone if this rate of inflation were to last for a while or even increase.

The Federal Reserve members aren’t worried, and, in fact, they claim to not be considering contractionary monetary policy until inflation is this level for some time. Many economists argue inflation would need to be much higher to be worth worrying about. But inflation need not be hyperinflation to be harmful to many. Inflation’s effects are not equal.

After a year of lockdowns leading to job losses and pay cuts, many Americans aren’t in a position to pay higher prices. It’s easy for someone with a comfortable job or nest egg to scoff at these price increases, but retirees, working-class, and poor Americans feel the difference.

The government prints money. It distributes it thru the federal reserve banks. The government basically loans the money to the federal reserve bank and charges them interest. Let’s say 2%. This is what is referred to as the prime rate.

The federal reserve bank then has cash to loan to the member bank (your local banks). The Federal reserve bank tacks on their percentage. Let say another 2%. We are now at 4%.

So now you want to buy a car. You go to the local back to get a loan. Your local bank needs to make a profit, so they tack on another 2%. So, you get a loan and pay 6%.

Now, I am not an economist, and like I said, this is an oversimplification, but it basically shows how the feds control the economy.

If the interest rate is low, more people buy stuff. Cars, houses, etc. Businesses now raise their prices because people have money to spend. In other words, inflation. This is how the feds can pump money into the economy.

If interest rates are high, people tighten their belts and don’t buy new cars and houses. Businesses now have to lower their prices to get people to buy their stuff. Deflation.

Now bear in mind. you took out a loan for that new car when interest rates were low. Now they are high, but you are still paying on that 5 year loan.

Where does that money go? To your local bank who then has to pay back the federal reserve bank. This is how the feds can pull money out of the system.

See how this works? By setting the prime rate, The Federal Reserve can control the economy and basically decide if they want to set prices for everything you buy, either higher or lower. Money in, money out.

Who runs this mess? The Federal Reserve Board.

The Secretary of the Treasury, and 7 people appointed by the President.

Think about that folks, 8 people determine what price you pay for virtually everything you buy.

It is up to them to manage our economy and keep inflation under control.

Bet you will pay attention, next time they talk about the prime rate.

How did the Federal Government get so powerful?

Simple. They took your money, decided how it would be spent, and then took control of your buying power.

So, if they screw up just how bad can inflation get?

Now most of us are familiar with the horror stories of hyper-inflation in Germany following WWI.

After the war, Germany was forced to pay the allies for all of the damages caused during the conflict. Germany, having lost the war, had no money to pay these bills. So, what did they do?

They printed money.

• This flood of money led to hyperinflation as the more money was printed, the more prices rose.
• Prices ran out of control, for example, a loaf of bread, which cost 250 marks in January 1923, had risen to 200,000 million marks in November 1923.
• By autumn 1923 it cost more to print a note than the note was worth.
• During the crisis, workers were often paid twice per day because prices rose so fast their wages were virtually worthless by lunchtime.

Can this happen in modern times? You bet.

The Bottom Line

Hyperinflation has severe consequences, for the stability of a nation’s economy, its government, and its people.

It is often a symptom of crises that are already present, and it reveals the true nature of money. Rather than being just an economic object used as a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account, money is a symbol of underlying social realities.

Its stability and value depend upon the stability of a country’s social and political institutions.

So, folks, as we look at spending trillions of dollars on the infrastructure bill and creating even more costly federal programs, we really should stop and take a look at what history tells us about the effects of inflation.

Prices going up at the grocery store, the gas pump, and your local department stores, along with supply shortages, while the government continues to print money and then spend it like a drunken sailor, is a sure recipe for disaster.

Roe v. Wade

HISTORY.COM EDITORS

Roe v. Wade was a landmark legal decision issued on January 22, 1973, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas statute banning abortion, effectively legalizing the procedure across the United States.

The court held that a woman’s right to an abortion was implicit in the right to privacy protected by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

Prior to Roe v. Wade, abortion had been illegal throughout much of the country since the late 19th century. Since the 1973 ruling, many states have imposed restrictions on abortion rights.

Until the late 19th century, abortion was legal in the United States before “quickening,” the point at which a woman could first feel movements of the fetus, typically around the fourth month of pregnancy.

Some of the early regulations related to abortion were enacted in the 1820s and 1830s and dealt with the sale of dangerous drugs that women used to induce abortions.

Despite these regulations and the fact that the drugs sometimes proved fatal to women, they continued to be advertised and sold.

In the late 1850s, the newly established American Medical Association began calling for the criminalization of abortion, partly in an effort to eliminate doctors’ competitors such as midwives and homeopaths.

Additionally, some people, alarmed by the country’s growing population of immigrants, were anti-abortion because they feared declining birth rates among white, American-born, Protestant women.

In 1869, the Catholic Church banned abortion at any stage of pregnancy, while in 1873, Congress passed the Comstock law, which made it illegal to distribute contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs through the U.S. mail.

By the 1880s, abortion was outlawed across most of the country.

During the 1960s, during the women’s rights movement, court cases involving contraceptives laid the groundwork for Roe v. Wade.

In 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a law banning the distribution of birth control to married couples, ruling that the law violated their implied right to privacy under the U.S. Constitution. And in 1972, the Supreme Court struck down a law prohibiting the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried adults.

Meanwhile, in 1970, Hawaii became the first state to legalize abortion, although the law only applied to the state’s residents.

That same year, New York legalized abortion, with no residency requirement. By the time of Roe v. Wade in 1973, abortion was also legally available in Alaska and Washington.

Jane Roe

In 1969, Norma McCorvey, a Texas woman in her early 20s, sought to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. McCorvey, who had grown up in difficult, impoverished circumstances, previously had given birth twice and given up both children for adoption. At the time of McCorvey’s pregnancy in 1969 abortion was legal in Texas—but only for the purpose of saving a woman’s life.

While American women with the financial means could obtain abortions by traveling to other countries where the procedure was safe and legal or pay a large fee to a U.S. doctor willing to secretly perform an abortion, those options were out of reach to McCorvey and many other women.

As a result, some women resorted to illegal, dangerous, “back-alley” abortions or self-induced abortions.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the estimated number of illegal abortions in the United States ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

After trying unsuccessfully to get an illegal abortion, McCorvey was referred to Texas attorneys Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington, who were interested in challenging anti-abortion laws.

In court documents, McCorvey became known as “Jane Roe.”

In 1970, the attorneys filed a lawsuit on behalf of McCorvey and all the other women “who were or might become pregnant and want to consider all options,” against Henry Wade, the district attorney of Dallas County, where McCorvey lived.

Earlier, in 1964, Wade was in the national spotlight when he prosecuted Jack Ruby, who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy.

In June 1970, a Texas district court ruled that the state’s abortion ban was illegal because it violated a constitutional right to privacy. Afterward, Wade declared he’d continue to prosecute doctors who performed abortions.

The case eventually was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, McCovey gave birth and put the child up for adoption.

On Jan 22, 1973, the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, struck down the Texas law banning abortion, effectively legalizing the procedure nationwide.

In a majority opinion written by Justice Harry Blackmun, the court declared that a woman’s right to an abortion was implicit in the right to privacy protected by the 14th Amendment.

The court divided pregnancy into three trimesters and declared that the choice to end a pregnancy in the first trimester was solely up to the woman. In the second trimester, the government could regulate abortion, although not ban it, in order to protect the mother’s health.

In the third trimester, the state could prohibit abortion to protect a fetus that could survive on its own outside the womb, except when a woman’s health was in danger.

Norma McCorvey maintained a low profile following the court’s decision, but in the 1980s she was active in the abortion rights movement.

However, in the mid-1990s, after becoming friends with the head of an anti-abortion group and converting to Catholicism, she turned into a vocal opponent of the procedure.

Since Roe v. Wade, many states have imposed restrictions that weaken abortion rights, and Americans remain divided over support for a woman’s right to choose an abortion.

Brietbart News Website

Wendell Husebø

President Joe Biden opposed the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize abortion one year after Roe v Wade.

“I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body,” he told the Washingtonian in 1974, one year after the court legalized abortion.

“I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far,” he added.

Biden doubled down years later in 1982 when he voted to approve a constitutional amendment that would have allowed abortion to become a state issue instead of a federal one.

Then-Senator Biden “was the only Democrat singled out by the New York Times at the time as supporting the amendment that the National Abortion Rights Action League called “the most devastating attack yet on abortion rights,’” the New York Post reported.

On Tuesday of last week, however, President Biden flip-flopped and supported the Court’s 1973 decision. “Roe has been the law of the land for almost 50 years, and basic fairness and the stability of our law demand that it not be overturned,” he said. “I believe that a woman’s right to choose is fundamental.”

“But even more, equally profound is the rationale used. It would mean that every other decision relating to the notion of privacy is thrown into question,” Biden claimed.

Biden’s 180-degree change is a result of how radical the Democrat Party has become. In the last 20 years, the Democrat Party has begun championing critical race theory, glorifying abortion, lifting public safety measures through soft-on-crime initiatives, and professing transgenderism to be a protected class.

Nolte — FYI: Overturning Roe v. Wade Does *Not* Outlaw Abortion

Brietbart News

By JOHN NOLTE

If the Supreme Court does end up overturning Roe v. Wade this does not mean abortion will be outlawed.

The corporate media, Hollywood, and Democrats will work overtime to convince you of this, but like everything else that comes from the media, Hollywood, and Democrats, it will be a total lie.

Overturning Roe v. Wade merely does the right thing in putting an end to the insane idea that a woman has a constitutional right to have an abortion.

That’s it.

That’s all overturning Roe v. Wade does.

Unlike the clearly stated Constitutional right to own a firearm, nowhere in the Constitution does the right to abortion exist. It is a fabricated right invented more than 50 years by a left-leaning Court.

So, if that’s the case and Roe v. Wade is overturned, what happens? What will it mean?

Well, if you look at it from 30,000 feet, it means very good things for democracy.

Instead of a handful of unelected judges deciding what should and should not be legal, it will be up to We the People to decide through our elected representatives. According to the Constitution, that’s how it is supposed to work.

And so, the issue of abortion will land where it has always belonged: in the lap of state or local governments.

In other words, elected representatives accountable to voters will decide if abortion should be legal or not.

Conservatives are not calling for the Supreme Court to outlaw abortion. What they want is the issue to be decided where it belongs: in the political rather than legal arena.

They want state and local governments to decide. They want The People to decide through those they elect.

American Thinker

By Jack Hellner

For decades, scholars on both sides of the issue have said Roe v Wade was wrongly decided by the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court is supposed to determine if laws are constitutional, and Roe v. Wade created law instead of interpreting law. 

Now that it looks as if the Supreme Court may correct the wrong, and send the issue back to the states or Congress, the media and other Democrats are having a collective cow and colluding to just make things up to scare the public.  In other words, they are intentionally spreading misinformation to influence and interfere in the upcoming midterm election.

The L.A. Times recently stated in an article:

Republicans hope the justices will keep rolling back rights after striking down Roe vs. Wade: 

The right to contraception is a ripe target. Also, same-sex marriage. And even interracial marriage.

Is there any likelihood that Clarence Thomas will vote to block interracial marriage, since he is married to a white woman?  There is not. 

The collusion among the media and other Democrats has been going on for a long time.

Isn’t it fascinating when these same people, force women to wear masks and get vaccines or get fired or lose other rights, now claim they believe that women can do whatever they want with their body?  

Freedom of choice to these folks is only when you choose to do what they want.  They wouldn’t even let women or anyone else choose their own doctor or own policy when they forced Obamacare on the public.

Democrats claim that Roe v. Wade and abortion are extremely popular, so why haven’t they ordered it through Congress in 49 years?  

They had complete control of Congress and the White House in 2009 and 2010. If it is so popular, why didn’t they pass a law?  Because they didn’t want to take a vote.  Biden and others opposed Roe v. Wade in the past.

It was a new era in Washington in 1981, and abortion rights activists were terrified.

With an anti-abortion president, Ronald Reagan, in power and Republicans controlling the Senate for the first time in decades, social conservatives pushed for a constitutional amendment to allow individual states to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that had made abortion legal nationwide several years earlier.

The amendment — which the National Abortion Rights Action League called “the most devastating attack yet on abortion rights” — cleared a key hurdle in the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 1982. Support came not only from Republicans but, as I stated earlier, from a 39-year-old, second-term Democrat: Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The reason the media and Democrats are colluding to scare the public is that their policies are so unpopular. 

They sure don’t want to talk about inflation, crime, the border, foreign policy, the Durham investigation, or the Biden family corruption, so they change the subject. 

So, folks, as you can see, this goes way beyond the issue of being pro life or pro-abortion. It cuts straight to the idea if being a true democracy controlled by mob rule or being a Constitutional Republic, with a system of checks and balances shared power with the states.

Once again, I think it would do us all a service if those we send to Washington would take the time to actually read the Constitution and know a little history.

What do you think folks? Should Roe Vs, Wade stand or be struck down and be decided by the states?

By KATELYN CARALLE, U.S. POLITICAL REPORTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM 

President Biden has set up a ‘disinformation’ board headed-up by a woke so-called expert who’s against free speech and tried to pour cold water on the Hunter laptop scandal. 

Nina Jankowicz will head The Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board as executive director, Politico Playbook reported Wednesday morning.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did not disclose any powers that would be granted to the dystopian-sounding board while addressing lawmakers on Wednesday.

He explained that the board would work to tackle disinformation ahead of the November midterms, particularly in Hispanic communities. 

But Mayorkas did say that the new board would come under the Biden-era Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3), meaning it would have no powers to crack down on disinformation and will instead try to combat it by throwing money at what it sees as problems. 

The (CP3) program provides communities with resources and tools to help prevent individuals from radicalizing to violence. Last year, CP3 awarded about $20 million in grants through its Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant Program. It is unclear how much cash will be spent on the Disinformation Board. 

Mayokras noted that the focus of the new board would be to stop the spread of misinformation in minority communities, including election misinformation ahead of the 2022 midterms. 

He added that it would focus on the latest trend of misinformation allegedly targeting Spanish-speaking voters. No further details on the exact misinformation being deployed against these communities was shared. 

Jankowicz, who revealed she was the head of the department following Mayorkas’ meeting with lawmakers, tweeted: ‘Cat’s out of the bag: here’s what I’ve been up to the past two months, and why I’ve been a bit quiet on here. 

Senator Josh Hawley pointed out that Jankowicz told NPR last week that she ‘shudders to think about’ more free speech on social media platforms after Elon Musk made a bid for Twitter

She added that ‘a HUGE focus of our work, and indeed, one of the key reasons the Board was established, is to maintain the Dept’s commitment (sic) to protecting free speech, privacy, civil rights, & civil liberties.’

As the Russia disinformation expert, she previously called the laptop of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter a ‘Trump campaign product’.

This is causing questions over Jankowicz’s ability to accurately judge disinformation now that several sources have come out confirming the validity of Hunter’s laptop.

Jankowicz also suggested last week that she opposes the The First Amendment because she thinks it is bad for ‘marginalized communities’ and called Elon Musk a ‘free speech absolutist’ because he wants to make Twitter more open to all voices. 

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to DailyMail.com’s request for comment. 

Jankowicz is a fellow at the Wilson Center where she studies the ‘intersection of democracy and technology in Central and Eastern Europe’. She is also the author of How To Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict. 

When stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop started emerging, several outlets, social media sites and left-leaning disinformation experts claimed that it was just misinformation coming from Trump and others on the right.

In an October 2020 report, Jankowicz shared her skepticism of the contents of the laptop and the claims it belonged to Hunter.

‘We should view it as a Trump campaign product,’ she told the New York Daily News at the time.

Twitter repeatedly took down the Hunter Biden laptop story and prevented it from being spread on the platform.

Billionaire Elon Musk, who just purchased Twitter, said that his aim is to make the social media platform a more open ‘digital town square.’

‘Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,’ Musk wrote in a statement upon the purchase approval.

Jankowicz spoke with NPR last week and questioned Musk’s purchase of the platform and

‘I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities,’ she said.

She said these groups are ‘already shouldering…disproportionate amounts of this abuse’ and said free speech and lack of censoring on social media would make it worse.

So folks, is the disinformation governance board a good idea?

Regulators should think carefully about the fallout from well-intentioned new rules and avoid the mistakes of the past.

Censorship was rampant throughout Nazi Germany. Censorship ensured that Germans could only see what the Nazi hierarchy wanted people to see, hear what they wanted them to hear and read only what the Nazis deemed acceptable.

The Nazi police dealt with anyone who went outside of these boundaries. Censorship dominated the lives of the ordinary citizen in Nazi Germany.

The prime mover in censorship was the Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

It was his responsibility to see that the German people were fed with material acceptable to the Nazi state. Newspapers, radio, and all forms of media were put under the control of the Nazis.

Even the film and music industries were controlled by the Nazis.

Music by Gustav Mahler and Felix Mendelssohn was banned since they were both Jews. Jazz was also banned.

Even telling jokes about Hitler became a serious offence – one that could send you to the concentration camps and potentially death (think Saturday Night Live).

Censorship was enforced by a number of methods. First, the secret police or the local police ensured that the rules were kept to.

Secondly, anyone who wanted to go outside of the desired party norm faced the most serious of consequences.

Third, people in general were expected to report anything unacceptable to their local party chief. Those who knew something but did not report it were deemed as guilty as those who went against the system. This was key to enforcement.

Censorship ensured that the Nazis had the German public in their grip as they bombarded them on a daily basis on how their lives had been improved from the day Hitler became Germany’s leader.

The chief function of propaganda is to convince the masses, whose slowness of understanding needs to be given time in order that they may absorb information; and only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on their mind………the slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula. One will be rewarded by the surprising and almost incredible results that such a personal policy secures.”      Adolf Hitler from “Mein Kampf”

“Our way of taking power and using it would have been inconceivable without the radio and the airplane,”

Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels claimed in August 1933.

Such statements are often cited—the former head of Disney, Bob Iger, recently said that Adolf Hitler would have loved social media.

Goebbels was not saying that the Nazis had used both new technologies, the airplane and the radio, to come to power. Rather, the airplane helped the Nazis take power. Radio helped them keep it.

The history of radio, and in particular how it was regulated in interwar Germany, is more relevant than ever: Five years ago, the question was whether we would regulate social media. Now the questions are how and when we will regulate them.

As politicians and regulators in places as different as Berlin, Singapore, and Washington and even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg consider how best to do so, we should think carefully about the fallout from well-intentioned new rules and avoid the mistakes of the past.

Radio only became central to Nazi aims after Hitler was elected chancellor in January 1933, but Goebbels quickly exercised power over the medium, because the state already controlled its infrastructure and content.

State control over radio had been intended to defend democracy. It unintentionally laid the groundwork for the Nazi propaganda machine.

Radio emerged as a new technology in the early 1920s, and the bureaucrat tasked with developing regulations for it in the Weimar Republic, Hans Bredow, (bree doh) initially had high hopes.

He thought that radio could broadcast education and entertainment to bring the German population together after the divisive loss of World War I, and believed that radio should not broadcast political content, fearing it might exacerbate an already hostile environment.

Initially, Bredow  allowed private companies to broadcast, and only from the mid-1920s on did stations start to air some news.

This seemed dangerous to Bredow and other officials, who worried that news could stoke uprisings or anti-democratic sentiment.

Weimar bureaucrats began exerting ever greater state supervision over radio content to try to depoliticize it. As the Weimar Republic became more and more politically unstable, Bredow and others pushed through reforms in 1926 and 1932 that mandated direct state supervision of radio content.

Bredow believed that increased state direction would prevent Weimar democracy from failing.

Ironically, this effort played right into the Nazis’ hands, and meant that the Nazis could seize immediate control over radio content when they came to power.

Bredow was imprisoned for trying to stand up for democratic values. (After World War II, he helped to reestablish radio in democratic West Germany. There is now even a media institute in Hamburg named after him.)

The Nazi example, though extreme, reminds us that well-intentioned laws can have tragic unintended consequences.

We need to be wary of the long-term consequences of state control over content.

The actual history of Nazi Germany can help us think more critically about current policy suggestions and move beyond mud-slinging comparisons with the fascist past.

Now let’s turn to another great example of government-controlled media. The Soviet Union.

The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917 while championing freedom, yet one of their first decisions was to limit free speech through harsh censorship.

In early November 1917, the Soviet government signed the Decree on Press which prohibited publishing any “bourgeois” (affluent, middle class) articles criticizing the Bolsheviks’ authority. (sound familiar?)

As the years passed political censorship grew stronger, reaching its peak under Joseph Stalin’s reign. After his death the state relaxed its stance, but censorship remained until Mikhail Gorbachev declared glasnost (openness)  in the late 1980s.

Lenin and Stalin claimedSoviet censorship had “a different character than the one existing in bourgeois states and aimed only at protecting the interests of the working class.”

This is a bold statement, especially given the fact the Soviet elite employed censorship for its own bloody gain, most notably during Stalin’s Great Purge.  

 “The physical eradication of Stalin’s political opponents was followed by their obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence,” British historian David King wrote in his book The Commissar Vanishes.

Retouchers worked hard erasing traces of fallen leaders from all photographs and images. (Trotsky)

In 1921, the Soviet government created the Glavlit (General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press) which for decades remained the main instrument of controlling literature. Glavlit’s censors decided if a book was published in the USSR, or if it was banned.

As a result, Soviet citizens could not read many books, some of which are now regarded as classics – including Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, not to mention most works by Alexander Solzhenitsyn that criticized the Soviet regime.

The circulation of books written by immigrant writers who had fled Soviet Russia were, of course, prohibited.

Nevertheless, the Soviet government couldn’t completely eradicate literature it deemed “dangerous.”

Through the ages, people opposing censorship have circulated handmade copies of banned literature. In the Soviet Union, this was called samizdat (self-published) and scores of illegal books were enjoyed by readers as a result.

Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the USSR from 1953 to 1964, was more liberal than Stalin, whose repressive policies he condemned in a secret speech in 1956. According to the Russian historian Leonid Katsva, Khrushchev even thought of abolishing ideological censorship in art, but changed his mind.

Under the rule of Leonid Brezhnev (1964 to 1982) the state continued to oppress artists working outside the realm of social realism. For example, in 1974 the government demolished an unofficial avant-garde exhibition in the suburbs of Moscow using bulldozers and water cannons. The event became known as the “Bulldozer Exhibition.”

Throughout the Cold War both the West and the USSR were trying to influence each other’s population by providing “alternative points of view.”

In 1946, the BBC started broadcasting radio services for Soviet citizens. Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and Deutsche Welle all followed suit a couple of years later.

Not surprisingly, the Kremlin was not happy with Western media trying to meddle with Soviet citizens so it started blocking radio frequencies used by foreign stations.

According to Rimantas Pleikis, (plee kis) a radio journalist from Lithuania, the USSR possessed the most powerful and wide scale “anti-radio” system in the world.

But even that system had cracks. Those who wanted to continue tuning in to the “foreign voices” and alternative opinions – along with jazz and rock music – found a way. Finally, in 1988 Mikhail Gorbachev officially stopped blocking Western radio stations.

Now I know what a lot of you are thinking. “It will never happen here.”

You are dead wrong.

Old, querulous, bald, blind, crippled, toothless Adams,” one supporter of challenger Thomas Jefferson called the incumbent president. But Adams got the last laugh, signing a bill in 1798 that made it illegal to criticize a government official without backing up one’s criticisms in court. Twenty-five people were arrested under the law, though Jefferson pardoned its victims after he defeated Adams in the 1800 election.

How about this one.

The bawdy novel ​”Fanny Hill” (1748), written by John Cleland as an exercise in what he imagined a prostitute’s memoirs might sound like, was no doubt familiar to the Founding Fathers; we know that Benjamin Franklin, who himself wrote some fairly risqué material, had a copy.

The book holds the record for being banned longer than any other literary work in the United States–prohibited in 1821, and not legally published until the US Supreme Court overturned the ban in Memoirs v. Massachusetts (1966). Of course, once it was legal it lost much of its appeal: by 1966 standards, nothing written in 1748 was liable to shock anybody.

And finally, here is one more great example:

During the Civil War, the battle for public opinion was almost as important as the battles fought with bullets and bayonets. President Abraham Lincoln was a master tactician when it came to using public opinion as both a political weapon as well as a military aid.

He used the press not only to get his message out in an era before electronic mass communication, but also to prevent his opponents from having similar access to the hearts and minds of the people. He did this through the use of military censorship, control of the post office and telegraphs, and through the use of patronage (giving certain papers exclusive rights).

At that time, New York City was the media capital of the western world. The big three papers in New York City were the Tribune, the Herald, and the Times.

There were also many other influential newspapers in other parts of the country, including in Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and in Lincoln’s home state of Illinois, where Lincoln purchased a newspaper printed in German to bolster his electoral chances in that state.

Lincoln used censorship of those journalists and newspapers whose views did not fit with the administration or its prosecution of the war, justifying the practice as being one which saved lives by shortening the war.

Many newspapers that were critical of the Union cause were censored or shut down.

Some editors were jailed for their anti-administration views. Freedom of the press was a casualty of the Civil War, and the real debate is whether or not this was justified under the circumstances of the time.

Lincoln also used the press as a means of getting his message to the people in a era before the ability to speak directly to the masses existed (i.e. at a time before radio and television.)

For example, when emancipation became an issue, Lincoln wrote his famous response to Horace Greeley’s “Prayer of Twenty Millions” editorial, which accused Lincoln of using his abolitionist leanings as the reason for the death of so many young men in the war.

In response, Lincoln famously wrote “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that”.

In mid-August 1861, four newspapers in New York City: the New York Daily News, the Journal of Commerce, Day Book, and Freeman’s Journal were all given indictments by a Grand Jury of the United States Circuit Court for “frequently encouraging the rebels by expressions of sympathy and agreement”.

A series of federal prosecutions of newspapers throughout the northern United States followed. The target was any newspaper that printed expressions of sympathy for Southern causes or criticisms of the Lincoln Administration.

Lincoln was able to effect control of press censorship because in those days, stories were filed by telegraph and Lincoln controlled telegraph usage.

Censorship of news dispatches filed in Washington began in April in 1861, a time when the government assumed control of the telegraph wires to & from the city.

This type of censorship became necessary because Northern papers quickly found their way into hands of Confederate generals.

 When Missouri Radicals complained about General John M. Schofield “muzzling the press” in September 1863, Lincoln responded: “I think when an office in any department finds that a newspaper is pursuing a course calculated to embarrass his operations and stir up sedition and tumult, he has the right to lay hands upon it and suppress it.

Drastic measures were sometimes taken where it was seen necessary for military purposes. There were repeated civil and military actions to shut down newspapers for supposedly seditious behavior. This was common early in the war in the border states of Maryland and Missouri.

So, folks, don’t believe that it cannot happen here.

Let’s go back to our first question now that you have had a little history lesson.

Is the disinformation governance board a good idea?

https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/the-role-of-government

The Role of Government

Imagine for a moment living under a government that possessed unlimited and undefined powers, such as Communist China or Nazi Germany.

What rights do you have now that you think you would lose? To whom, or to what, would you turn if you thought the government were treating you unfairly? How many of your own choices in life—what college to attend, what career options to pursue, whether to marry or have children—do you feel you would be free to make?

If contemplating life under such a government seems depressing, that is because it is. Individual liberty and personal happiness cannot coexist with unlimited government.

At the same time, there would be little security for our rights without government or under a government that does not possess sufficient power to effectively promote the public good.

Striking this delicate balance has been a centuries-long endeavor in Anglo-American history.

Initial strides towards limited government came in the Magna Carta (1215), which embodied the principle that the king’s powers were limited and subject to English law.

Nearly five hundred years later, the Petition of Right (1689), citing the Magna Carta, reminded the king that it was the law, not a king, that protected the rights of Englishmen.

For most of human history it was accepted that the political legitimacy of a king was derived from God, not from man, and that both law and liberty were subject to God’s will. Divine Right Monarchs.

Focusing on the king’s violation of a half-century of accepted British common law and the traditionally respected rights of Englishmen, the Petition of Right supported the conviction that liberty required that government be limited. Furthermore, liberty interests might supersede kingly authority.

It also inspired the English Bill of Rights (1689) which contained strict limits to the power of the monarchy and identified certain inalienable political and civil liberties enjoyed by all Englishmen, regardless of royal power.

Together, these three British documents, Magna Carta, Petition of Right, and the English Bill of Rights, contained the basic tenets of limited government that would come to influence the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights.

A philosophical shift in thinking about the proper role and source of government itself was also underway in the late 1600s, and was given effective voice in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690).

Locke argued that governmental legitimacy was based on the consent of the governed and on a responsibility to protect natural rights. While the Petition of Right accepted the notion of the divine right of kings and merely reminded the king that previous monarchs had respected traditionally accepted liberties, Locke’s argument was radically different: people not only voluntarily agree to be governed, but possess rights that flow from nature itself, not from kingly decree. Further, the very purpose of government is not to rule but to protect those rights.

“The great and chief end, therefore, of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their [lives, liberties and property]” (John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, 1690).

Locke also argued that when a government no longer had the consent of the people, or did not adhere to its proper role of protecting fundamental liberties, then the people have the right to change or overthrow it. 

Thomas Jefferson would echo these arguments in the Declaration of Independence (1776), asserting that “the history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations [wrongful seizure of power].” Therefore, according to Jefferson, the king was “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

In the Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), John Locke argued that governmental legitimacy was based on the consent of the governed and on a responsibility to protect natural rights.

Once free of Great Britain and wary of living under a government that possessed too much authority, Americans set out to form a new nation.

The first attempt came in the Articles of Confederation (1781), which adhered very closely to the principle of limited government; perhaps too closely. The Articles established a “firm league of friendship,” and was little more than a loose association of sovereign nation-states with a weak central government.  It was a government run by congress with no president!

It could not tax or regulate foreign and interstate commerce. It had neither an executive nor judicial branch to enforce its laws or mediate disputes. Further, any alterations to the Articles that might address these weaknesses had to be unanimously approved by the states, making changes nearly impossible. Can you imagine today’s Congress having to come to unanimous approval to pass any Bill in the House and Senate??

By 1787, it became obvious to many that the Confederation government was too limited in its scope and authority, and a convention was called in Philadelphia to address its deficiencies.

What emerged from the Constitutional Convention elevated limited government from mere theory to a practical governing philosophy. Through a series of complex structures, innovations, and mechanisms, the U.S. Constitution both empowers and limits government, while providing the framework for each successive generation to regulate that balance.

One feature of the Constitution that both empowers and limits the national government’s reach is the enumeration of powers. Article 1, Section 8 sets out the specific and finite powers that the national government may exercise.

Although Article 1, Section 8 only specifically addresses the legislative (or law-making) branch of the national government, its enumeration of powers also provides limits on the president (who enforces the law) and on judicial officials (who interpret and apply the law) as well.

What emerged from the Constitutional Convention elevated limited government from mere theory to a practical governing philosophy.

The Constitution’s deliberate separation of powers, enforced through a system of checks and balances, is another feature that serves to limit our government.

Liberty is most threatened when any person or group accumulates too much power. The Founders, therefore, divided our national government into three distinct branches and gave to each not only specific powers, roles, and modes of election, but ways to prevent the other two branches from taking or accumulating power for themselves.

The president, for example, is commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces. However, it is the legislative branch that can declare war, and raises and maintains the armed forces through funding. Congress may impeach the president if it believes he is abusing authority as his commander in chief. Likewise, the president may refuse attempts by Congress to micro-manage wartime decisions on the basis of his role as commander in chief.

This system serves to limit government by first lodging the various powers of government in different branches, then pitting those branches against one another in a jealous quest to preserve their power.

Perhaps the most definitive limitations on government are found in the Bill of Rights. A firewall protects a computer from outside attempts to harm it, so too does the Bill of Rights guard fundamental rights, natural and civil.

In fact, far from most Americans’ popular understanding of the Bill of Rights as a “giver” of rights, it is actually the “limiter” of government authority.

The First Amendment’s words, for example, that “Congress shall make no law…,” significantly constrain governmental action in the areas of speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition. In similar fashion, the Fourth Amendment limits the executive branch’s ability to invade one’s home without probable cause and a warrant.

Liberty and anarchy are incompatible. Liberty and unlimited government are, too. The Constitution, through its unique approaches to balanced government, was designed to harmonize these positions by protecting rights while promoting competent government.

https://www.ushistory.org/gov/1a.asp

Why do governments exist? One major reason is that they create rules. But what rules are necessary or desirable? That is open to question, and different types of governments have certainly created a wide variety of rules.

GOVERNMENTs almost certainly originated with the need to protect people from conflicts and to provide law and order. Why have conflicts among people happened throughout history? Many people, both famous and ordinary, have tried to answer that question.

 Perhaps human nature dictates selfishness, and people inevitably will come to blows over who gets what property or privilege. Or maybe, as KARL MARX explains, it is because the very idea of “PROPERTY” makes people selfish and greedy.

Whatever the reasons, governments first evolved as people discovered that protection was easier if they stayed together in groups and if they all agreed that one (or some) in the group should have more power than others. This recognition is the basis of SOVEREIGNTY, or the right of a group (later a country) to be free of outside interference.

Part of a government’s function is to protect its citizens from outside attack. Ancient Chinese emperors constructed a “Great Wall” to defend the borders of their empire.

A country, then, needs to not only protect its citizens from one another, but it needs to organize to prevent outside attack.

 Sometimes they have built Great Walls and guarded them carefully from invaders. Other times they have led their followers to safe areas protected by high mountains, wide rivers, or vast deserts.

Historically, they have raised armies, and the most successful ones have trained and armed special groups to defend the rest. Indeed in the twentieth century, governments have formed alliances and fought great world wars in the name of protection and order.

In more recent years, government responsibilities have extended to the economy and public service. This, in my opinion is where the train jumped off the tracks.

An early principle of capitalism dictates that markets should be free from government control. But when economies spun out of control during the 1930s, and countries sank into great depressions and governments stepped in.

The United States Congress created the FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM in the early twentieth century to ward off inflation and monitor the value of the dollar. FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT and his “BRAIN TRUST” devised New Deal programs to shock the country into prosperity.

Perhaps government responsibility to provide social programs to its citizens is the most controversial of all. In the United States the tradition began with the New Deal programs, many of which provided people with relief through jobs, payments, and food.

During the 1960s PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON unveiled his “GREAT SOCIETY” programs aimed at eliminating poverty in the entire country.

Many European countries today provide national medical insurance and extensive welfare benefits. Many Americans criticize these programs as expensive ventures that destroy the individual’s sense of responsibility for his/her own well being. So, the debate over the proper role of government in providing for its people’s general welfare is still alive and well today.

Though the rules and responsibilities vary greatly through time and place, governments must create them. Governments provide the boundaries for everyday behavior for citizens, protect them from outside interference, and often provide for their well-being and happiness.

https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/the-role-of-government

The American Founders were careful students of history. Thomas Jefferson, in his influential A Summary View of the Rights of British America, prepared in 1774, noted that “history has informed us that bodies of men as well as individuals are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny.”

Patrick Henry summed up the importance of history thus: “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.” History — the lamp of experience — is indispensable to understanding and defending the liberty of the individual under constitutionally limited, representative government.

Through the study of history, the Founders learned about the division of power among judicial, legislative, and executive branches; about federalism; about checks and balances among divided powers; about redress and representation; and about the right of resistance, made effective by the legal right to bear arms, an ancient right of free persons.

Liberty and limited government were not invented in 1776; they were reaffirmed and strengthened. The American Revolution set the stage for extending the benefits of liberty and limited government to all. As John Figgis, professor of modern history at Cambridge University, noted at the beginning of the 20th century:

The resounding phrases of the Declaration of Independence … are not an original discovery, they are the heirs of all the ages, the depository of the emotions and the thoughts of seventy generations of culture.

The roots of limited government stretch far back, to the establishment of the principle of the higher law by the ancient Hebrews and by the Greek philosophers. The story of the golden calf in the Book of Exodus and the investigations of nature by Aristotle both established — in very different ways — the principle of the higher law. Law is not merely an expression of will or power; it is based on divine principles. The legislator is as bound by law as is the subject or citizen; no one is above the law.

So, what we need now, in order to bring government back under control, is the courage to place the health of the constitutional order and the future of the American system above short‐​term political gain.

The original American Founders were willing “to mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” Nothing even remotely approaching that would be necessary for today’s members of Congress to renew and restore the American system of constitutionally limited government.

In defending the separation of powers established by the Constitution, James Madison clearly tied the arrangement to the goal of limiting government power:

“It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next instance oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

For limited government to survive, we need a renewal of both of the forces described by Madison as controls on government: dependence on the people, in the form of an informed citizenry jealous of its rights and ever vigilant against unconstitutional or otherwise unwarranted exercises of power, and officeholders who take seriously their oaths of office and accept the responsibilities they entail.

So, what do you think folks? Do we simply need to know our history and go back to the teachings of our founding fathers when it comes to the role of government?

Leaders spoke for nearly two hours, but Biden did not make any direct requests to Xi to persuade Putin to end the attack

Julian Borger  The Guardian

Joe Biden spoke for nearly two hours with Xi Jinping as the US sought to dissuade China from backing Russia’s war on Ukraine.

A White House account of the call on Friday said that the US president “described the implications and consequences if China provides material support to Russia as it conducts brutal attacks against Ukrainian cities and civilians”.

A senior administration official said there would be consequences “not just for China’s relationship with the United States, but for the wider world”, but would not give more details on whether Biden had gone into specifics on possible sanctions, other than to point out what had happened to Russia as an example.

“The president really laid out in a lot of detail the unified response from not only governments around the world, but also the private sector to Russia’s brutal aggression in Ukraine,” the official said. “The president made clear that there would likely be consequences for those who would step in to support Russia at this time.”

Biden did not make any direct requests to Xi to persuade Putin to end the attack.

“The president really wasn’t making specific requests of China. He was laying out his assessment of the situation … and the implications of certain actions,” the official said. “Our view is that China will make its own decisions.”

The Chinese account of the conversation in the state news agency, Xinhua, said it was “candid and in-depth” but gave little detail about Ukraine. The report said that Xi expressed the wish that the war was not happening, but gave no sign of what the Chinese leader’s intentions were towards support for Moscow.

Xi said the situation in Ukraine had developed to such a point “that China does not want to see” according to the report, which stuck to Beijing’s policy of avoiding the words “war” or “invasion”.

Beijing’s readout of the call did not suggest any Chinese role in ending the war. It quoted Xi as referring to a favorite adage, “Let he who tied the bell on the tiger’s neck take it off”, a seeming reference to China’s position that the US and NATO are ultimately to blame for Vladimir Putin’s actions.

Beijing blames the war on NATO’s refusal to rule out future Ukrainian membership of the alliance, and western supplies of weapons to the country. Xi also expressed concern about the impact on Taiwan, which he has vowed to restore to rule from Beijing.

Xi claimed “some people in the United States are sending the wrong signals to the ‘Taiwan independence’ forces, which is very dangerous”.

“If the Taiwan issue is not handled properly, it will have a subversive impact on the relationship between the two countries,” Xi added. The US “One China” policy acknowledges that Taiwan is part of China, but Washington does not recognize Beijing has sovereignty over the island.

Fox News Article

Robert Maginnis is a retired U.S. Army officer and an experienced military analyst with on-the-ground experience inside Russia and Ukraine and the author of a number of books that address the Russia and China threat, including “Give Me Liberty, Not Marxism” (2021).  

The war in Ukraine is another indicator of our new cold war, which pits the U.S. and its allies against what he labels the alliance of evil, Russia and China, which will create levels of anxiety not experienced since the end of the old Cold War.

This new cold war is different from the old war which was mostly about ideology, communism versus democracy, pitting the U.S. and the former Soviet Union in a death struggle. Today’s conflict is between opposing world views, liberty versus authoritarianism.

The old Cold War rose from the ashes of World War II. Recall that President Franklin Roosevelt aligned us with Soviet Russia only because Adolf Hitler attacked Russia, which temporarily put aside our concerns about the communist regime. However, tensions quickly rose after the war when Russia seized much of Eastern Europe and detonated a nuclear bomb.

Cold War paranoia of a Soviet invasion and nuclear annihilation impacted our lives at school and work with mandated duck-and-cover drills, evacuations, and the sound of air raid sirens.

Families built backyard fallout shelters, communities designated air raid facilities and the government proliferated educational films on how to survive a nuclear blast. There were warnings about communists in government which fed suspicions even about our neighbors’ sympathies.

Tension increased as the nuclear arms race reached a pinnacle in 1962 when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sent nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba. President John F. Kennedy responded by blockading Russian ships heading to Cuba. That confrontation was the closest the Cold War came to escalating to a full-scale Armageddon.

Fortunately, the U.S. and Russia never directly fought each other. However, the period was marked by proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Cambodia and Congo.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan came to office just in time to demonstrate unflinching fortitude and clarity of aim to lead the West to end the Cold War, by addressing the fight on many fronts. Most importantly Reagan knew that any appeasement to Moscow was as good as aiding a ruthless enemy.

Today, a new conflict is threatening the world thanks to the alignment of the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation. Last month, China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin met in Beijing, where they released a joint communiqué, which former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) labeled “… a declaration of ideological and geopolitical war against the US….”

There are at least 6 indicators of that new cold war, which Mr. McGinnis addresses in his 2018 book, “Alliance of Evil.”

Diplomatic indicator

Relations between the U.S. and both Russia and China are in the toilet. For example, on Feb. 26, 2022, Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president, said Moscow may react to Western sanctions imposed for the Ukraine invasion by severing all diplomatic ties.

World order indicator

Many Western leaders indicate that China and Russia are seeking to “replace the existing international rules” with their own. European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen accused Moscow of a “blatant attempt” to revamp global order.

She said that Russia and China want to “replace the existing international rules – they prefer the rule of the strongest to the rule of law, intimidation instead of self-determination.”

Economic indicator

Both Russia and China are persistent violators of economic and trade agreements. China seeks ascendancy as the world’s dominant producer of industrial goods and is doing that by violating many World Trade Organization rules, cornering global markets on key commodities, conducting financial warfare using mercantilist behaviors and manipulating its currency.

President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative, that touches many countries, is a “debt trap,” according to British MI6 chief, Richard Moore. It leaves behind half-built bridges, overbudget railways and mountains of debt, Moore said.

Defense budget indicator

Both Russia and China spend more of their gross domestic product on defense than the global average, and much of their security investment is hidden, which makes comparisons with the U.S. meaningless.

Chinese defense spending has dramatically increased by more than 250% over the past decade, according to Janes Military Information Group.

Large, sophisticated military indicator

Thanks to heavy investment, both Russia and China are building large and sophisticated militaries to contest the US on an equal basis. The Pentagon’s 2021 report on China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) indicates it fields the largest force in the world and seeks “complete PLA modernization by 2035.”

Further, as evidence of its global ambitions, the “Chinese military is developing capabilities to conduct joint long-range precision strikes across domains, increasingly sophisticated space, counterspace, and cyber capabilities, and accelerating the large-scale expansion of its nuclear forces.”

Nuclear forces indicator

Although Russia has a giant nuclear arsenal (6,800 warheads) and threatens to abandon the New START treaty which limits each country, China is creating a serious new threat.

The Chinese military is modernizing and rapidly expanding its nuclear forces – land, sea and air delivery platforms. It has also increased its capacity to produce plutonium-239, necessary to build nuclear weapons. Further, the 2021 Pentagon report indicates the regime is expected to accelerate weapons production to at least 1,000 warheads by 2030.

Let there be no doubt, the China-Russia authoritarian alliance is very real, and threatens our world. Both Xi and Putin intend to dominate our future no matter the cost, and Ukraine and perhaps a coming attack on Taiwan are just the beginning.

Author Gordon G. Chang , Fox News interview:

Author Gordon G. Chang, who recently spoke at the Conservative Political Action Committee Conference in Florida, warned that President Biden’s lack of significant action against Russia will help China’s efforts to “marginalize the United States” as Beijing is closely monitoring the administration’s ineffective response to the invasion of Ukraine.  

“China wants to destabilize the world. It certainly wants to marginalize the United States and Russia is doing Beijing’s bidding,”

“That’s why Beijing has announced all of these no-limits partnerships, and we’ve heard all of these commodities deals recently such as $117.5 billion of new oil and gas arrangements that was announced February 4,” he continued. “Just a couple of days ago they cut a deal for 100 million metric tons of coal to China.

Basically, Beijing is financing Russian expansionism because it’s good for China because it makes sure that the United States is preoccupied in Europe.”

Last week, Sergey Mochalnikov, the head of the Russian Energy Ministry, announced a pact that will add to an already lucrative deal Russia signed with India in Nov. 2021 to supply 40 million tons of coal. Russian news outlet TASS, which is owned by the government, reported on the deal. 

Chang also warned that China “likes to see the United States humbled” and the current administration is making things easy for them. 

“Biden is not defending Ukraine and Europe the way he should be,” Chang said. “Beijing is watching very closely what the United States does.”

In addition to all of this, Chinese President Xi Jinping has sent a message to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un emphasizing cooperation between the two countries, according to state media in North Korea.

Xi said that China was ready to work with North Korea to realize the two sides’ “common understanding” and promote friendly and supportive relations under “a new situation,” state media outlet KCNA reported Saturday.

The report didn’t provide details on the “new situation,” according to Reuters, which first reported on Xi’s message but I think we all know what he was referring to.

Xi’s remarks came in response to Kim’s message of congratulations following the close of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, state media reported.

The messages of support between the two countries also came a day after Xi offered his “support” for Russian President Vladimir Putin as Russian forces bombarded Ukraine in a full-scale invasion.

According to a readout of a call held between the two allies, Xi expressed the importance of rejecting a “Cold War mentality” and said he takes “seriously and respect[s] the reasonable security concerns of all countries.” 

China has remained tight-lipped in condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, merely repeating talking points and claiming it respects “all countries’ sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Chang noted that there was an onslaught or propaganda coming from Beijing last summer following Biden’s botched withdraw from Afghanistan. 

“How the United States couldn’t win wars anymore, how when China invaded Taiwan that the island would fall within hours and the U.S. military would not come to help,” he said. “So, clearly they’re watching U.S. responses to Ukraine.”

Xi Jinping has suggested the nation would take control of Taiwan in the near future.

“This does create an opportunity for Xi Jinping, who otherwise might have been deterred by the United States. Now, he sees the United States not using its power, so therefore, there is this opening that Xi Jinping is starting to perceive,” Chang said. 

Meanwhile, there have been reports that Biden recently shared intelligence with China, which quickly shared it with Russia. 

“I can’t understand why the Biden administration thought that China would keep U.S. intelligence from Russia. They just announced their no-limits partnership,” Chang said.

“This is something where we believe China should calculate its interests in one way and therefore, we believe Beijing, in fact, does. But, no, it’s clear that Beijing believes that its interests are with Russia, not with the United States, so this is a failure of the Biden administration to understand Beijing’s foreign policy.”

Chang said Moscow and Beijing have a “solid, stable” relationship, at least for the time being.

“They’re closer than allies,” he said. “It is something that is directed against the United States…. At this moment, China and Russia are working very closely together to destabilize the world and to move against the United States.”

While Chang is concerned about Russia’s relationship with China, he suspects that the United States will prevail – but only if Biden steps up to the plate. 

“The problem is that the Biden administration is not willing to use U.S. power to protect not only the international system but also to protect the United States.”

The Washington Examiner

by Rep. Mark Walker

Bear in mind, it was Biden who stated, “China is not our enemy. We want to see China rise.” During his campaign for the presidency.

For the many people who have lost their jobs, financial stability, or even their loved one’s lives at the hands of China’s malpractice, Joe Biden’s uninformed and ignorant rhetoric should rightly cause them to shudder.

After all, the Democratic president Biden has time and time again gone out of his way to downplay China’s role in causing global hardships, in the end proving he was incorrect.

But the larger issue is how many times he is wrong on foreign policy. Take it from former Obama Defense Secretary Bob Gates: Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

So, with the stakes at their highest levels in decades, we find ourselves being led by a federal government that is not only weak and indecisive, but under the leadership of a man with a long history of being wrong on foreign policy.

Harris, Buttigieg criticized for being tone-deaf on energy

By Seth McLaughlin – The Washington Times
Tuesday, March 8, 2022

Republican and conservative commentators are accusing Vice President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg of being tone-deaf, given their recent focus on electric vehicles and not on soaring gas prices.

Ms. Harris and Mr. Buttigieg faced blowback following an event last Monday in which they promoted new spending included in the bipartisan infrastructure law and the American Rescue Plan directed toward transitioning the nation toward zero-emission vehicles, including electric buses, and creating a national network of electric vehicle chargers.

 “The Biden Administration could not be more tone deaf,” given the way soaring gas prices are hitting people at the pump, Rep. Markwayne Mullin, Oklahoma Republican and a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a statement.

“Vice President Kamala Harris and DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg spent the afternoon promoting electric vehicles and Green New Deal policies,” Mr. Mullin tweeted Monday. “Are you kidding me?”

Republicans say the Biden administration has embraced disastrous policies that have made the nation less energy independent.

They say the nation must be focused on doing whatever it can to lower gasoline prices at home, which have been surging following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, putting added financial pressure on individuals and families across the United States.

The United States has been a key importer of Russian energy and has imported tens of millions of barrels of crude oil from Russia every month.

The war in Ukraine also has sent the cost of nickel skyrocketing to the point where the London Metal Exchange suspended trading on it.

Nickel is used in stainless steel and is one of the most widely used ingredients for electric vehicle batteries.

Conservative commentator Tomi Lahren said Tuesday on Fox Nation that Ms. Harris and Mr. Buttigieg are “both tone-deaf, and they both don’t want to face the music.”

“They think this repeated talking point of green jobs and green energy is going to do the trick, but it simply will not,” Ms. Lahren said. “Right now the world is in crisis, we have an energy crisis, and if we can make it here at home, which we can, that is absolutely what we should be doing.”

I couldn’t agree more with Ms. Lahren’s comments.

Recent article in  Newsweek by BOBBY JINDAL , FORMER GOVERNOR, LOUISIANA
ON 2/28/22 AT 6:30 AM EST

President Joe Biden‘s administration defends rising gasoline costs as the cost Americans must pay for standing up for our values.

It is a neat trick to cite Russian sanctions for price increases that predate the sanctions. 

Democrats blame Russian strongman Vladimir Putin for Hillary Clinton‘s loss in 2016 and record-breaking inflation rates, but Hillary was a flawed candidate and Biden has long been waging war on affordable energy.

Biden’s first actions as president included re-entering the Paris Climate Accord, canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline, halting a leasing program in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), issuing a 60-day halt on new oil and gas leases and drilling permits on federal lands and waters (which account for nearly 25% of U.S. production), directing federal agencies to eliminate fossil fuel “subsidies,” imposing tougher regulations on oil and gas methane emissions (which were first broadcast under President Barack Obama and had been eased under President Donald Trump), and hiring SEC regulators to prepare climate and ESG disclosure mandates.

I had to do a little research on this ESG thing. Here is what I found.

Environmental, social, and corporate governance is an approach to evaluating the extent to which a corporation works on behalf of social goals that go beyond the role of a corporation to maximize profits on behalf of the  shareholders. 

ESG’s three central factors are:

Environmental criteria, which examines how a business performs as a steward of our natural environment, focusing on:

• waste and pollution
• resource depletion
• greenhouse gas emission
• deforestation
• climate change

Social criteria, which looks at how the company treats people, and concentrates on:

• employee relations & diversity
• working conditions, including child labor and slavery
• local communities; seeks explicitly to fund projects or institutions that will serve poor and underserved communities globally
• health and safety
• conflict

Governance criteria, which examines how a corporation polices itself – how the company is governed, and focuses on:

• tax strategy
• executive remuneration
• donations and political lobbying
• corruption and bribery
• board diversity and structure

The Biden administration’s push to require all publically-traded firms to report their greenhouse gas emissions as a component of new public disclosure requirements is a step toward making ESG investing mandatory.

In this new twist, the government will decide which firms deserve access to investment capital. Mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas emissions will lead to government regulations that will curtail new capital investments in companies that produce or consume fossil fuels.       

With a United Nations endorsement, the socially responsible investment fashion of the late 20th century transitioned into the Environmental, Social and Governance movement or ESG.

Once a voluntary movement that prioritized investment in companies that adopt policies and practices that promote the progressive left’s environment, labor and human rights causes, ESG investing is about to become a regulatory tool they will use to achieve specific objectives.

So back to Biden’s first actions as President.

The Keystone pipeline’s cancelation denies America cheaper and environmentally safer access to Canadian oil for Gulf Coast refineries.

Biden’s other policies will do even more damage, make America weaker and more dependent on foreign countries, and drive up energy prices.

Even New Mexico’s Democratic governor criticized Biden’s suspension of oil and gas leases, asked for an exemption to protect her economy and education funding, and argued that shifting production elsewhere would increase carbon emissions.

Biden’s Interior Department has proposed policies to increase the cost of domestically produced energy. Secretary Debra Haaland has recommended that we hike the federal royalty rate for oil and gas drilling on federal lands, consider raising the bond payments companies must set aside for future cleanups, and focus leasing in areas close to existing oil and gas infrastructure.

House Democrats would like to go even further and ban drilling in ANWR and along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

Biden extended his 60-day moratorium on new oil and gas leases indefinitely, until the administration could complete a comprehensive review on “climate change impacts.” (again, ESG)

Republican attorneys general successfully sued the administration to resume oil and gas lease sales, generating $192 million in bids for drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico.

Though companies have stockpiled leases and drilling permits, anticipating a hostile Biden administration, such moves offer only temporary respite.

Biden’s moves to limit drilling activity and increase the costs of that activity will especially harm the economies of states like New Mexico, Wyoming, North Dakota and Colorado.

Biden increased the “social cost of carbon,” a measure first used by Obama, from $7 to $51 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions.

The administration cites modeled impacts of rising sea levels, droughts and other consequences of climate change to justify more expensive regulations on the oil and gas industry.

Republican attorneys general sued, arguing Biden does not have the authority to unilaterally raise the estimate. A federal judge agreed the higher cost would “artificially increase the cost estimates of lease sales” and harm energy-producing states. Biden responded by again halting new oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters.

Biden’s progressive financial regulators are poised to do even more damage to America’s economy by discouraging energy investment and politicizing capital allocation.

They have promised to scrutinize loans to oil and gas companies, imposing tests on how investments could be threatened by climate change, rather than allowing the banks to assess their risks themselves.

Biden has nominated Sarah Raskin, who has called fossil fuels “a terrible investment” and wants to use the regulatory system to move away from “high-emission” investments, to the position of vice chair for supervision at the Federal Reserve System.

SEC chairman Gary Gensler will require public companies to make more climate disclosures, signaling to investors to be wary.

Secretary Yellen and other officials have warned climate change could endanger both banks and the broader financial system.

Democrats have previously wanted to use regulatory agencies to go beyond ensuring financial stability to attack industries like payday lenders and gun sellers. Letting financial regulators expand their mandate to include picking winners and losers will make it harder and more expensive for oil and gas companies to obtain financing.

During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Biden portrayed himself as a moderate, but he subsequently moved to the left of even Obama to catch up with his party.

Whereas Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren promised to end all fracking, Biden confusingly promised to end new fracking—which his staff clarified meant stopping new oil and gas permitting on federal lands and waters.

In his final general election debate with Trump, Biden shifted again and promised to “transition [away] from the oil industry.”

Democrats reject an all-of-the-above market-driven energy strategy and want to use subsidies and taxes to favor certain types of renewable energy.

 Liberal activists reject zero-emissions nuclear power, even as Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania all saw their carbon emissions increase after they closed nuclear plants.

Some activists welcome the higher costs caused by this radical energy transition as causing decreased consumption.

America has worked across multiple administrations to achieve energy independence and to build a reliable and affordable energy system, aided by technological breakthroughs like fracking, deepwater production, increasing efficiency and the falling costs of solar and wind power.

Democrats seem determined to seize defeat from the jaws of victory, resulting in higher prices and brownouts.

Biden is asking Qatar to help replace Russian natural gas supplies to Europe, but he was already asking OPEC to produce more oil last summer in response to increasing prices. He is asking other nations to do what he is not willing to allow American energy companies and workers themselves to do. Biden needs to reverse course.

American oil and gas producers should be the ones helping to lower prices by increasing production and exports to Europe.

@BobbyJindal was governor of Louisiana, 2008-16, and a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Jindal serves on the board of a company that supplies offshore energy companies.

Now folks, in keeping with this ESG mess, I found another article that I found fascinating.

Yellen Urges Development Banks To Stop Fossil Fuel Funding

By Julianne Geiger – Jul 13, 2021, 9:31 AM CDT, Oilprice.com

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is prepared to gather together the heads of development banks to persuade them to stop fossil fuel project funding, according to Bloomberg.

The Treasury Secretary intends to “articulate our expectations that the banks align their portfolios with the Paris Agreement and net-zero goals as urgently as possible,” according to a written speech she is set to deliver at a climate conference in Italy.

The speech, soon to be delivered, follows just days behind a similar message that the financial community received at the G20, where financial leaders for the first time every acknowledged that carbon pricing was at least a potential tool in addressing climate change.

While Bloomberg notes that while development banks have never been responsible for the big bucks behind most fossil fuel projects, those funds are largely seen as a stepping stone for the projects to secure hefty commercial funding.

Since the pandemic began, development banks have thrown just $3 billion into oil and natural gas, with $0 going towards coal projects for the first time ever.

Meanwhile, development banks have funded $12 billion in clean energy projects.

But it is precisely these natural gas projects that will allow many countries to quickly and efficiently transition away from coal.

Prior to her appointment as Treasury Secretary, Yellen was criticized for her fossil fuel stock holdings. The Secretary vowed to divest her holdings in all fossil fuel companies as well as any companies that support fossil fuels.

Nevertheless, even before her time as Treasury Secretary and the chairman of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), Yellen has been a staunch supporter of the environment and highly critical of the role fossil fuels have played in greenhouse gas emissions.

The FSOC, Financial Stability Oversight Council, is tasked with identifying risks to the financial stability of the United States, among other things. In May, Yellen said that the FSOC will work to improve climate-related financial disclosures and other sources of data to better measure potential exposures to climate-related financial risks, adding that it is her primary tool in assessing climate change risks and coming up with policies that will promote the transition to a low-carbon economy.

So there you have it folks. As gas prices soar, Biden continues to blame Putin and the war in Ukraine. With what I have shared with you this morning, do you believe him? I don’t.

March 1, 2022 

Press Release from Congressman Cohen’s website.

WASHINGTON – Representatives Steve Cohen (TN-09), Co-Chairman of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki Commission, and the Commission’s Ranking Member, Joe Wilson (R-SC), along with Liz Cheney (R-WY), Tom Malinowski (D-NJ), Mike Waltz (R-FL) and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) have introduced the bipartisan Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022.

This proposed legislation would enhance the President’s current lend and lease authority to simplify bureaucratic barriers with regard to military equipment for Ukraine.

The scope of this bill would be limited to materials for use in protecting civilians during the current Russian military invasion, and the broader national security concerns of the United States. 

This bicameral bill is a companion to the Senate version introduced by Senator John Cornyn (R-TX).

“President Franklin Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program, enacted in 1941, very likely permitted Britain to keep fighting the Nazis in World War II, and ultimately helped roll back tyranny across Europe. This similarly necessary Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act will, I hope, allow the brave people of Ukraine to defend themselves against unwarranted Russian aggression without obligating U.S. troops,” said Representative Steve Cohen.

“I am grateful to introduce this bipartisan bill to ensure that red tape does not stand in the way of the courageous people of Ukraine as they fight for their families and the sovereignty of their country.

There is historical precedent for lend-lease dating back to World War II, which was instrumental in defeating Hitler’s Nazi Germany. This war perpetrated by Vladimir Putin against Ukraine has united the world in its resolve against corrupt authoritarians and in admiration for the Ukrainian people.

The US, along with our valued allies, must continue to supply Ukraine with the military equipment they need to repel this attack, and this legislation expedites and expands that process,” said Representative Joe Wilson.

“The United States must take aggressive and decisive action to aid Ukraine as they fight Putin’s brutal invasion. I’m proud to join Senator Cornyn and Representative Wilson in introducing legislation that will ensure the United States can continue to provide equipment and armaments without delay,” said Representative Liz Cheney.

“Ukrainians have proven they’re willing to stand and fight for democracy against one of the largest armies in the world,” said Representative Tom Malinowski. “They deserve a fair shot to protect their country, and this legislation will give President Biden even greater flexibility to deliver to them the weapons they need.” 

“The United States must provide all available military assistance to the Ukrainian people in their fight for freedom and sovereignty. This program will provide Ukraine with additional flexibility and resources to continue their fight against Russian invaders and further bolster European security,” said Representative Mike Waltz.

“When it comes to key national security issues, partisanship should stop at the water’s edge. The Ukrainian people have shown incredible bravery in the last few days to protect their country, and I’m pleased that Republicans and Democrats are working together to make sure we have their backs.

 This bill will give the President the authority to lend and lease military equipment directly to the Ukrainian government to protect civilians and to give the Ukrainian Armed Forces the tools they need to continue to fight back against Russia’s unwarranted aggression,” said Representative Elissa Slotkin.

Background:

As part of the President’s Arms Export Control Act authority, he can currently lend and lease defense articles to U.S. partners and allies when it is in the United States’ national security interest. However, bureaucratic barriers and other limitations make these authorities impractical for the current crisis facing Ukraine. 

So what is this Lend Lease idea?

Lend-Lease Act

HISTORY.COM EDITORS, NOV 4, 2019

The Lend-Lease Act of 1941 stated that the U.S. government could lend or lease (rather than sell) war supplies to any nation deemed “vital to the defense of the United States.”

Under this policy, the United States was able to supply military aid to its foreign allies during World War II while still remaining officially neutral in the conflict.

Most importantly, passage of the Lend-Lease Act enabled a struggling Great Britain to continue fighting against Germany virtually on its own until the United States entered World War II late in 1941.

In the decades following World War I, many Americans remained extremely wary of becoming involved in another costly international conflict. (40 million casualties in WWI)

Even as fascist regimes like Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler took aggressive action in Europe the 1930s, isolationist members of Congress pushed through a series of laws limiting how the United States could respond.

But after Germany invaded Poland in 1939, and full-scale war broke out again in Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that while the United States would remain neutral by law, it was impossible “that every American remain neutral in thought as well.”

Before passage of the Neutrality Act of 1939, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to allow the sale of military supplies to allies like France and Britain on a “cash-and-carry” basis: They had to pay cash for American-made supplies, and then transport the supplies on their own ships.

By the summer of 1940, France had fallen to the Nazis, and Britain was fighting virtually alone against Germany on land, at sea and in the air.

After the new British prime minister, Winston Churchill, appealed personally to Roosevelt for help, the U.S. president agreed to exchange more than 50 outdated American destroyers for 99-year leases on British bases in the Caribbean and Newfoundland, which would be used as U.S. air and naval bases.

That December, with Britain’s currency and gold reserves dwindling, Churchill warned Roosevelt that his country would not be able to pay cash for military supplies or shipping much longer.

Though he had recently been re-elected on a platform promising to keep America out of World War II, Roosevelt wanted to support Great Britain against Germany. After hearing Churchill’s appeal, he began working to convince Congress (and the American public) that providing more direct aid to Britain was in the nation’s own interest. 

In mid-December 1940, Roosevelt introduced a new policy initiative whereby the United States would lend, rather than sell, military supplies to Great Britain for use in the fight against Germany.

Payment for the supplies would be deferred, and could come in any form Roosevelt deemed satisfactory.

 “We must be the great arsenal of democracy,” Roosevelt declared in one of his signature “fireside chats” on December 29, 1940.

“For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war.” 

Lend-Lease, as Roosevelt’s plan became known, ran into strong opposition among isolationist members of Congress, as well as those who believed the policy gave the president himself too much power.

During the debate over the bill, which continued for two months, Roosevelt’s administration and supporters in Congress argued convincingly that providing aid to allies like Great Britain was a military necessity for the United States.

“We are buying…not lending. We are buying our own security while we prepare,” Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“By our delay during the past six years, while Germany was preparing, we find ourselves unprepared and unarmed, facing a thoroughly prepared and armed potential enemy.”

In March 1941, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act (subtitled “An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States”) and Roosevelt signed it into law.

Roosevelt soon took advantage of his authority under the new law, ordering large quantities of U.S. food and war materials to be shipped to Britain from U.S. ports through the new Office of Lend-Lease Administration. The supplies dispersed under the Lend-Lease Act ranged from tanks, aircraft, ships, weapons and road building supplies to clothing, chemicals and food.

By the end of 1941, the lend-lease policy was extended to include other U.S. allies, including China and the Soviet Union. (Isn’t that interesting?)

By the end of World War II the United States would use it to provide a total of some $50 billion in aid to more than 30 nations around the globe, from the Free French movement led by Charles de Gaulle and the governments-in-exile of Poland, the Netherlands and Norway to Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Paraguay and Peru.

For Roosevelt, Lend-Lease was not motivated primarily by altruism or generosity, but was intended to serve the interest of the United States by helping to defeat Nazi Germany without entering the war outright—at least not until the nation was prepared for it, both militarily and in terms of public opinion.

Through Lend-Lease, the United States also succeeded in becoming the “arsenal of democracy” during World War II, thus securing its preeminent place in the international economic and political order once the war drew to a close. 

So whay are we not moving ahead with Lend Lease 2022?

rollcall.com

By John M. Donnelly

Posted March 2, 2022 at 7:25pm

During President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night, his remarks on Ukraine drew perhaps the most bipartisan applause from representatives and senators. But the unity was deceptive.

Republicans pressed the case Wednesday that they are more interested than Democrats in quickly providing new weapons to Ukraine and in imposing punishing new sanctions on Russia.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., offered legislation that would provide the $6.4 billion supplemental spending that the Biden administration says it wants for responding to the Ukraine crisis. Rubio’s proposal appears to spend more on new weapons than the administration has privately told lawmakers it wants in the package. 

Republicans are calling for such a bill to move forward promptly, but Democrats instead want to include it in the fiscal 2022 omnibus spending package that Congress hopes to send to the White House before a stopgap federal spending law expires March 11. 

That’s right folks, while people are dying in Ukraine, our federal government is playing party politics and delaying the aid that Ukraine desperately needs.

Republicans have also accused the White House of wanting the Pentagon’s share of the aid package subtracted from the total amount for defense in the forthcoming omnibus, though Democrats insist they want no such thing.  

Biden on Wednesday announced new sanctions against Russia, including on Russian military and defense entities. But, except for restrictions on commerce involving oil extraction equipment, the list did not include a ban on U.S. purchases of Russian oil and gas. 

A large group of GOP senators said at a news conference last Wednesday that it is time for America to stop buying energy from Russia, and they also called for requiring in law that any bank that does business with Russia cannot do business with America, among other ideas for sanctions.

“We should do everything we can to tighten the noose on the Putin economy,” said Rob Portman, R-Ohio.

Biden said in his State of the Union address that the U.S. is committed to helping Ukraine. 

“We are giving more than $1 billion in direct assistance to Ukraine,” Biden said. “And we will continue to aid the Ukrainian people as they defend their country and to help ease their suffering.”

But it is not yet known what new weaponry might be going to Ukraine beyond that already announced.

Rubio’s bill appears to be the first detailed legislative proposal made public that spells out how to allocate the $6.4 billion the administration has said Ukraine needs now to address its many pressing requirements.

Some lawmakers want upward of $10 billion for Ukraine, but almost all are behind spending at least $6.4 billion.

Rubio’s bill would provide $2 billion of that total to the State Department for Ukraine’s humanitarian and infrastructure issues, he said in a statement. Another $4.4 billion of it would go to the Pentagon. 

Of the defense money, $1 billion would replace defense assets that the U.S. military has transferred to Ukraine or NATO allies. 

But most of the bill’s funds would be for new initiatives. These include $1 billion to give Ukraine weapons it has sought: “small arms, grenade launchers, and ammunition, man-portable missiles and rockets in a ready-to-fire configuration, night vision goggles, drones, communication equipment, bullet-proof armor, rations and medical kits,” Rubio’s statement said.

Also, in the package would be $1 billion to supply NATO allies — such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — “replacement planes, tanks, munitions, anti-air and anti-tank weaponry” for themselves and to replace assets they sent to Ukraine. 

Another $1 billion would go toward Defense Department cyber defenses to protect critical infrastructure and nuclear command and control systems. 

Last, $400 million would help the Defense Department to deliver humanitarian assistance to Ukraine. Rubio said his measure “encourages the administration to consider the efficacy of using the military” to deliver the humanitarian supplies, his statement said.

By contrast, top Defense Department officials have said, in essence, that the billions of dollars they are asking Congress for is to repay the Pentagon for money it has already spent or already announced it will spend. 

Neither the administration nor congressional Democrats have provided much detail about what is in the White House’s $6.4 billion request for Ukraine aid, except to tell reporters it includes $3.5 billion for the Pentagon, $2.9 billion in security assistance for NATO allies, as well as money for humanitarian supplies.

But on Tuesday, Mara Karlin, the assistant secretary of Defense for strategy, plans and capabilities, told the House Armed Services Committee that “most of” the administration’s request focuses on the cost of sending thousands of additional U.S. troops to Eastern European NATO allies and a substantial portion of the rest would be to replenish Defense Department inventories that were tapped to send weapons and ammunition to Ukraine. Karlin did not cite any new weaponry as part of the package.

U.S. officials were more precise behind closed doors about how much of the request is forward-looking and how much is not, according to Michael Waltz of Florida, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee’s Readiness panel.

Waltz said Wednesday that all of the administration’s proposal is aimed at paying back the Pentagon, not buying additional supplies for Ukraine. 

“Just briefed that 100% of the Defense Dept portion of the $6.4B aid package the Biden admin is requesting from Congress is to pay for the U.S. troops deploying to Europe and to replenish U.S. war stocks NOT new lethal aide for Ukraine,” Waltz tweeted. “Zelensky needs more ammo NOW!”

So, there you have it folks. History has once again given us a possible solution to a current problem.

Unfortunately, our federal government, bogged down in party politics and bureaucracy is once again showing us what we all know, Washington is broken.

NSC-68 and the Korean War

Office of the Historian, Foreign Service Institute
United States Department of State

The events of 1949 made foreign policy the nation’s top priority. NATO became a working alliance, the United States provided military assistance to Europe, the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb, and the Mao Zedong’s communist party took control of mainland China.

The Department of State ordered a complete review of American strategic and military policy, and, in April 1950, the Department sent a paper calling for a broad-based and reinvigorated containment policy toward the Soviet Union, directly to the President, Harry Truman.

The paper later became known as NSC-68. After the outbreak of fighting on the Korean peninsula, NSC-68 was accepted throughout the government as the foundation of American foreign policy.

NSC-68, 1950

National Security Council Paper NSC-68 (entitled “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security” and frequently referred to as NSC-68) was a Top-Secret report completed by the U.S. Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff on April 7, 1950.

The 58-page memorandum is among the most influential documents composed by the U.S. Government during the Cold War and was not declassified until 1975. Its authors argued that one of the most pressing threats confronting the United States was the “hostile design” of the Soviet Union.

The authors concluded that the Soviet threat would soon be greatly augmented by the addition of more weapons, including nuclear weapons, to the Soviet arsenal. They argued that the best course of action was to respond in kind with a massive build-up of the U.S. military and its weaponry.

Reeling from the recent victory of Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War and the successful detonation of an atomic weapon by the Soviet Union, Secretary of State Dean Acheson asked the Policy Planning Staff, led by Paul Nitze (pronounced NITS-uh), to undertake a comprehensive review of U.S. national security strategy.

Building upon the conclusions of an earlier National Security Council paper (NSC-20/4), the authors of NSC-68 based their conclusions on the theory that the decline of the Western European powers and Japan following World War II had left the United States and the Soviet Union as the two dominant powers.

Nitze’s group argued that the Soviet Union was “animated by a new fanatic faith” antithetical to that of the United States and was driven “to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” Furthermore, they concluded that “violent and non-violent” conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union had become “endemic.”

NSC-68 outlined a variety of possible courses of action, including a return to isolationism; war; continued diplomatic efforts to negotiate with the Soviets; or “the rapid building up of the political, economic, and military strength of the free world.”

This last approach would allow the United States to attain sufficient strength to deter Soviet aggression. In the event that an armed conflict with the Communist bloc did arise, the United States could then successfully defend its territory and overseas interests.

The authors of NSC-68 rejected a renewal of U.S. isolationism, fearing that this would lead to the Soviet domination of Europe and Asia, and leave the United States marooned on the Western Hemisphere, cut off from the allies and resources it needed to fend off further Soviet encroachments.

The report also ruled out a preventive strike against the Soviet Union, because its authors reckoned that such action would not destroy the Soviet military’s offensive capacities and would instead invite retaliatory strikes that would devastate Western Europe. Moreover, U.S. experts did not believe that American public opinion would support measures that might lead to a full-scale war.

NSC-68 did not rule out the prospect of negotiating with the Soviet Union when it suited the objectives of the United States and its allies; however, the report’s authors argued that such an approach would only succeed if the United States could create “political and economic conditions in the free world” sufficient to deter the Soviet Union from pursuing a military solution to the Cold War rivalry. This is what Trump was trying to do.

NSC-68 concluded that the only plausible way to deter the Soviet Union was for President Harry Truman to support a massive build-up of both conventional and nuclear arms.

More specifically, such a program should seek to protect the United States and its allies from Soviet land and air attacks, maintain lines of communications, and enhance the technical superiority of the United States through “an accelerated exploitation of [its] scientific potential.”

In order to fund the substantial increase in military spending this conclusion demanded, the report suggested that the Government increase taxes and reduce other expenditures.

Initially, a number of U.S. officials strongly opposed NSC-68’s recommendations. Critics such as Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and senior diplomats such as Soviet experts and former ambassadors to the Soviet Union George Kennan and Charles Bohlen, argued that the United States already had a substantial military advantage over the Soviet Union.

Kennan, in particular, disagreed with Nitze’s assertion that the Soviet Union was bent on achieving domination through force of arms, and argued that the United States could contain the Soviet Union through political and economic measures, rather than purely military ones.

However, the invasion of South Korea by Soviet and Chinese-backed North Korean forces in June 1950, and continuing charges by Congressional critics that the Administration was soft on Communism, quickly settled matters in favor of the report’s recommendations.

NSC 68’s recommendations thereby became policy, and the United States Government began a massive military build-up. While NSC-68 did not make any specific recommendations regarding the proposed increase in defense expenditures, the Truman Administration almost tripled defense spending between 1950 and 1953.

When North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, the United States sponsored a “police action”—a war in all but name—under the auspices of the United Nations.

The Department of State coordinated U.S. strategic decisions with the other 16 countries contributing troops to the fighting.

In addition, the Department worked closely with the government of Syngman Rhee, encouraging him to implement reform so that the UN claim of defending democracy in Korea would be accurate.

The Korean War was difficult to fight and unpopular domestically. In late 1951, the two sides bogged down on the 38th parallel, and the conflict seemed reminiscent of trench warfare in World War I.

The American public tired of a war without victory, especially when negotiation stalled as well. The stalemate eroded Truman’s public support and helped to elect the Republican presidential candidate, popular military hero General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as the next President.

history@state.gov

This column by American studies professor Ben Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present.

As I stated earlier, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed in the aftermath of World War II, as an attempt to establish collective defenses against emerging Cold War threats from the Soviet Union and its allies.

Five Northern European nations (Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and the UK) began the process with the March 1948 Treaty of Brussels, and then brought their alliance to the United States and its Secretary of State George C. Marshall.

With Marshall’s guidance those six nations, joined by Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland, signed the April 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, officially forming NATO.

However, the Cold War extended far beyond the North Atlantic worlds, and NATO likewise was not limited to that sphere of influence. Indeed, it was in response to the Korean War, that NATO truly began to develop its international military forces and strategies, reflecting interconnections between these regions and issues that remain vital to this day.

When the Korean War broke out on  June 25^th, 1950,  the United Nations Security Council unanimously condemned the invasion on that same day, and two days later President Truman ordered U.S. air and sea support for South Korean forces.

By July 5^th U.S. armed forces were on the ground and taking part in the Battle of Osan alongside South Korean troops, a military alliance that would continue for the remaining three years of the war.

While Truman and new Secretary of State Dean Acheson focused their initial public statements on the specific need to defend South Korea from the North’s aggressions, Truman very much believed that the war was part of larger Cold War conflicts as well.

As he later argued in his memoir, Years of Trial and Hope (1956), “Communism was acting in Korea, just as Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese had ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier. I felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to fall, Communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores. If the Communists were permitted to force their way into the Republic of Korea without opposition from the free world, no small nation would have the courage to resist threat and aggression by stronger Communist neighbors.”

NATO saw the Korean conflict and its ramifications in the same way and responded accordingly. In September 1950 the NATO Military Committee called for a buildup of military forces to counter potential Soviet and allied aggressions around the world, and shortly thereafter the organization formed the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), appointing Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower as its first leader.

These efforts culminated in the February 1952 North Atlantic Council meeting in Lisbon, at which a number of key steps were taken: the creation of a Long-Term Defence Plan; the proposed expansion of combat-ready forces to 96 divisions (reduced to 35 the following year, which was still a significant increase); and the creation of a new Secretary General position, with the UK’s Lord Ismay appointed as the first NATO Secretary General.

NATO followed these efforts by undertaking its first major maritime exercise, Exercise Mainbrace, in September 1952.

Although Eisenhower had by then resigned his position to run for the presidency, two American military officers and NATO leaders coordinated the exercise: General Matthew B. Ridgway, who had succeeded Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander Europe after commanding all U.S. and United Nations troops in Korea from 1951 to 1952; and Admiral Lynde D. McCormick, the Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic and himself a veteran of World War II’s Pacific Theater.

Under their lead, more than 200 ships and 80,000 men participated in twelve days of military exercises, what New York Times reporter Hanson Baldwin called “the largest and most powerful fleet that has cruised in the North Sea since World War I.”

The headline of Baldwin’s article linked the exercises to NATO’s “Important Role in Defense of Europe.”

By the July 1953 final armistice that ended the Korean War, NATO had largely become the sizeable, vital international military and diplomatic organization it would remain for the Cold War’s subsequent decades, one that, while centered in the North Atlantic, reflects a world in which Russia, Southeast Asia, and every region and nation are interconnected in the era’s issues and conflicts.

This brings us to the present conflict in Ukraine.

The western alliance is sending extra troops to Eastern Europe, but they have no plans to get involved in the current conflict.

In 1955 Soviet Russia responded to NATO by creating its own military alliance of eastern European communist countries, called the Warsaw Pact.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a number of former Warsaw Pact countries switched sides and became Nato members. The alliance now has 30 members.

Ukraine is not a member of Nato, so the alliance is not obliged to come to its defense. Ukraine has wanted to join for several years. However, one of Russia’s demands before the invasion was that Ukraine should never be allowed to join – something the alliance refused to agree to.

Russia fears NATO has been encroaching on its territory by taking on new members in eastern Europe and that admitting Ukraine would bring NATO forces into its backyard. NATO says it is a purely defensive alliance.

Nato already has troops stretching from the Baltic republics in the north to Romania in the south.They were stationed there in 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and are designed to act as a “tripwire” in case of a Russian attack.

NATO is now deploying elements of its 40,000-strong Response Force to Eastern European countries bordering Russia and Ukraine.

It has 100 fighter jets on high alert and has 120 ships, including three carrier groups, patrolling the seas from the far north to the eastern Mediterranean.

The US has also committed to sending more troops to Europe, but President Biden said they will not be fighting in Ukraine itself.

The extra troops will join the four multinational battlegroups NATO has in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, and its multinational brigade in Romania.

So folks, there is your history of NATO and where the conflict currently stands. Should we go back to the original National Security Council Paper NSC-68 of 1950 and review our options?

Here they are:

1. A return to isolationism
2. Full scale war
3. Continued diplomatic efforts to negotiate with the Soviets
4. The rapid building up of the political, economic, and military strength of the free world

Nebraska Becomes 17th State To Call For Article V Convention Of States

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD

JANUARY 28, 2022

The Nebraska legislature passed a resolution on Friday, January 28^th 2022, calling for an Article V convention of states, making it the 17th state to do so.

After considering it for the past year, the Nebraska Legislature approved the measure in a 32-11 vote, with six senators abstaining or absent. According to the resolution, the legislature seeks to call a convention

 “limited to proposing amendments to the Constitution of the United States that impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, and limit the terms of office for its officials and for members of Congress.”

The application also comes with a five-year sunset clause, which notes that the legislature will rescind the measure by Feb. 1, 2027 if efforts to call a convention before then fail.

Under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, state legislatures are permitted to call a convention to propose amendments to the nation’s founding document without the approval of Congress. Two-thirds of states (34) are required for a convention to be called, with three-fourths of states (38) necessary for any amendment proposed to be ratified.

The alternative method, and the only one used thus far, is for Congress to propose amendments. Any amendment successfully passed by two-thirds of the House of Representatives and Senate are then sent to the states, where three-fourths are necessary to ratify.

State Sen. Steve Halloran, who introduced the resolution, celebrated its passage as “encouraging,” noting the bill’s success shows “that we respect the Constitution and the intent of the founding fathers when it comes to states having equal footing with the federal government.”

Nebraska was the second state to call for an Article V convention that week, after the Wisconsin legislature successfully passed a resolution on the matter on Tuesday, January 25^th.

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Shawn Fleetwood is an intern at The Federalist and a student at the University of Mary Washington, where he plans to major in Political Science and minor in Journalism. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

Convention of states push hits halfway mark with Nebraska

The Associated Press

January 28, 2022, 2:52 PM

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Nebraska on Friday became the 17th state to call for a convention of states to consider making changes to the U.S. Constitution, putting supporters halfway to their goal of getting the 34 states needed to trigger a convention.

The 17 states that have passed them so far are generally Republican-led and heavily concentrated in the South. In eight other states, the measure has advanced through at least one legislative chamber.

Opponents have raised concerns about a runaway convention that could lead to in drastic changes to the nation’s founding document and the freedoms it protects.

Some lawmakers argued that the convention would widen the nation’s political divisions and could ultimately backfire on Nebraska, leading to changes that hurt the state.

“How will they balance the budget? Will they go after farm programs first?” asked Sen. Steve Lathrop, of Omaha.

Sen. Megan Hunt, of Omaha, said she was concerned that special interest groups would try to influence the process, and argued that lawmakers should focus more on protecting voting rights.

Our Founders anticipated the federal government might get out of control at some point, and they gave us a constitutional mechanism to rein it in. It’s called a Convention of the States, outlined in Article V of the Constitution.

Article V reads in part,

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution….

Now again, some legal experts say that unless a Constitutional Convention is called to deal with a specific issue,  a “runaway” convention could create chaos.

“Let’s assume that we get Congress to call for a convention, and we are deliberating about one item. Maybe that would stick. But how can you be confident that once you open the door to a constitutional convention, even if for one narrow amendment, that it won’t just become a runaway convention?” said Steve Hayward, a visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

“It seems to me that our Constitution may have problems these days, but I think most conservatives would be very nervous about opening it up to a new convention,” Hayward told Newsmax.

Columnist George Will, outlines an Article 5 convention focused on writing a narrowly drawn balanced-budget amendment.
“State legislatures can form a cooperative agreement — to call a convention for a one-item agenda of ratifying the balanced-budget amendment precisely stipulated in advance,” Will said.

Will notes that in calling for a convention, Congress has no discretion, meaning it is clear that if two-thirds of state legislatures ask, it must happen.”

Conservative radio talk-show host and author Mark Levin also has been out front in pushing for such a convention. In his best-selling book “The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic,” he proposes 11 constitutional amendments that he believes should be considered by the gathering including such things as a balanced budget, term limits for Congress and the Supreme Court, and the ability for states to nullify federal laws with a 2/3 majority.

Another group, Citizens for Self-Governance (CSG), headed by Tea Party Patriots co-founder and former spokesman Mark Meckler, is promoting a convention.

 Meckler states, “A Convention of States needs to be called to ensure that we are able to debate and impose a complete package of restraints on the misuse of power by all branches of the federal government.”

So, Where do we stand on the possibility of calling for a Constitutional Convention?

States With a Standing Call for a Constitutional Convention: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming So we have 29 states so far. Although 32 states had initially passed resolutions calling for a Constitutional Convention (for the alleged purpose of adding a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution), 3 states — Alabama, Florida and Louisiana — rescinded their calls. The remaining 18 states have not called for a convention. Understand that most states joined the movement years ago pushing for the balanced budget amendment and when the initiative failed to gain momentum, most states just left a standing commitment to join if someone else picked up the ball. According to Article V of the Constitution, Congress must call a convention when 2/3rds of the states apply. That magic number is 34 states. With Nebraska and Wisconsin recently passing resolutions, we now stand at 17 states.

While such an assembly has never been called, the convention route is seeing a new push under the current administration and its increase in federal control over the states.

You can find both liberals and conservatives who think it is a terrible idea. You can also find people on both sides who see it as the best solution to fix our broken government.

However, there are some huge problems with it.

The document itself gives no indication about how to call for or run a Constitutional Convention.

Congress has periodically tried to fill in those details, but it couldn’t agree on how it would work: Forty-one such bills were introduced in the Congress between 1973 and 1992, according to the Congressional Research Service, and none passed.

What does that mean? It means there are a ton of questions here to which no one knows the answer.

Can the state’s convention calls expire? Some are decades old. How similar does their wording have to be? Should applications that call for limiting the federal budget and setting term limits be counted with ones that call for a balanced budget? We don’t know.

What would the composition of a convention be? Would every state get a single representative? Would votes be apportioned according to population with larger states getting more votes? We don’t know.

And how would delegates be chosen? Election? Appointment? Lottery? We don’t know.

Would the convention be obliged to produce an amendment on a single issue or a set of issues (only a balanced budget amendment, for example)? Or would it be free to rewrite the country’s Constitution as it saw fit (single-sex marriage, clarifying the Second Amendment, vaccine mandates, immigration control, crime control, CRT in schools?

And do the states or the Congress even have the power to tell a convention what it can or can’t do? We don’t know.

And who gets to answer these questions and set these rules? Judging by the 41 times its members have tried to do so, Congress thinks it does; but state legislators think they dictate the terms. Who’s right? We don’t know.

What about lobbying? Imagine the huge amounts of money that would be spent trying to influence proposed amendments to the Constitution.

When Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) retired, he joined the Convention of States Project as a senior adviser.

Senator Coburn stated that, “I have joined the Convention of States Project because I believe it is our last, best hope for restoring our republic. I cannot sit idly by as my grandchildren’s future is bankrupted by an irresponsible, unaccountable and unrestrained government that was originally — and brilliantly — designed to protect their liberty.”

Coburn claimed that, “Although I am a proud conservative, this is not a partisan issue.”

 The Founding Fathers distrusted government, but they came to realize that the absence of a strong central government was the greater threat to the new nation, and as a result, they gave us the United States Constitution and a strong central government. With the ability to tax. And to regulate. And to raise the standing army they had always feared.

As Coburn said, the Founding Fathers were brilliant. They learned from their mistakes.

Coburn claims that, “If there is one thing Americans have always agreed on it’s that government functions best when decisions are made closest to the people. Only through a Convention of States may the clear, unfettered voice of the people be heard, and overreaching government be reined in.”

He went on to say, “This is a movement whose time has come.

Personally, I am a big fan of the Constitutional Convention movement. Will it open up a can of worms? You bet. But maybe that is just what we need to do in order to let the people be heard and put the fear of God into our out of control federal bureaucrats.

It is time we took this country back and re-establish the founding  principles our forefathers put in place back in 1789.

The Munich Pact and the Ukraine

Looking at the current situation concerning Russia and Ukraine, it is easy to make the comparison to the Munich Pact of 1938 between Hitler and the Western Powers.

The Pact is a classic example of appeasement that destroyed Czechoslovakia, backfired on France and Britain, and led to World War II.

But there was much more that caused the Munich mess than simple Western stupidity.

On September 30th, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the deal with Adolf Hitler that was supposed to mean “peace in our time.”

The agreement allowed Hitler to keep the so called “Sudetenland”, Basically all of Western Czechoslovakia, in hopes that giving such a concession would lower tensions and prevent war.

As everyone knows, the agreement failed to secure a lasting peace. Two weeks after the agreement was signed, Hitler rolled tanks into the country and took the rest of Czechoslovakia.

While all of this was going on, Hitler was rearming Germany building his war machine.

That is the danger of a bad deal with a bad regime. If the Britain, France, and the other western powers had simply gone to war earlier, World War II would have likely ended sooner, with fewer casualties.

Also, Hitler’s final solution of eradicating the Jewish people would not have stretched as wide as it did, and millions of lives would have been saved.

The Munich Pact should serve as a warning to us as to just how bad things can get if the US and our NATO allies back down and let Putin take Ukraine.

Europeans knew that Hitler had never once told the truth and was already murdering German citizens who were Jews, communists and all political opponents. But Europeans did not care all that much.

Instead, the Western world was thrilled with the idea of appeasing Hitler.

Having seen 38 million casualties in World War I, Europeans would do anything to avoid even a small confrontation — even if such appeasement all but ensured a far greater bloodbath than the one that began in 1914.

Many people think that Hitler‘s military was strong and the democracies were weak.

However, at the time of the Munich Pact, the combined French and British militaries were far larger than Hitler‘s.

French tanks and British Spitfire fighters were as good as, or superior to, their German counterparts.

Also, Czechoslovakia had formidable defenses and an impressive arms industry. Poland and even the Soviet Union were ready to join a coalition to stop Hitler from dissolving the Czech state and allowing the Nazi’s to occupy eastern Europe.

Likewise today, the combined forces of the US and our NATO allies are far stronger than the Russian military.

Another factor of the Munich Pact is that many of Hitler’s top generals did not want war. One has to wonder if Putin has the backing within his own regime to willing risk a world conflict.

Still, each time Hitler successfully called the Allies’ bluff, the west folded.

Hitler had already withdrawn from the League of Nations, denounced the Treaty of Versailles, re-armed, and re-occupied the Rhineland.  The Allies did nothing.

The Munich Pact immediately doomed millions of Czechs to Nazi control  and put Poland next on the target list of the Third Reich.

It is interesting to note that France had signed a secret agreement with the Czechs that they would come to the aid of Czechoslovakia if Germany invaded them. The Czechs agreed to do the same for France.

But guess who besides the British signed the deal with Hitler? Yep, France, who gladly threw Czechoslovakia under the bus.

Today, France will once again play a key role in the decision of whether or not Putin is allowed to take Ukraine.

Do you see now the parallels between the Munich Pact and the current Russia/Ukraine situation?

Munich was directly tied to the personal ego of Neville Chamberlain. In the first few weeks after Munich, Chamberlain loved being in the media limelight, posing as the humane savior of Western civilization.

President Biden would love to tell the world that he has saved western Europe from the evil Russian Empire.

For months prior to the Munich pact, Winston Churchill, warned everyone about Hitler, yet he was dismissed by the media and public as an old warmonger.

Hitler later called his Munich diplomatic partners “worms.” Hitler said of   Chamberlain, “I’ll kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach in front of the photographers.”

Is this what Putin thinks when he looks at talks with Biden?

The current negotiations with Russia have all the similarities of the Munich negotiations.

Will the threat of economic sanctions be enough to force Putin to back down?

As I said earlier, the United States and its NATO partners, just like the western powers prior to WWII, are far stronger than Russia in every measure of military and economic strength.

The Russian economy is struggling, its government is corrupt, and its conventional military is outdated.

Russia’s only chance of gaining strength is to show both its own population and the world, just like Hitler did, that the stronger Western powers will back down in fear when threatened.

Our recent Afghanistan withdrawal did nothing to help our cause.

Putin, like Nazi Germany, wants influence, power, and land, a new Soviet Union, just like the Third Reich.

The Munich Pact gave Hitler strategic territory and assets that allowed him to launch a war for world conquest a year later.

I don’t think Putin wants world conquest. I think he wants to set the clock back. He wants to put the band back together.

He wants to recreate the Soviet Union of old, with 15 member states, all subject to an all-powerful communist central government based in Moscow.

He wants a seat at the table when it comes to world power.

If Putin takes Ukraine, his next target will not be western Europe. Instead, he will go after Eastern Europe [Ukraine, Poland, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.

The former soviet state will be the biggest losers if the US and NATO back down.

The big question is. Do we care? No one cared as Hitler rose to power. The US considered it Europe’s problem.

Bear in mind, we didn’t enter WWII until 2 years after it started and that was brought on by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

By then, Hitler had become a force to reckon with.

The Washington Post

Ukraine carries the echoes of Sudetenland

By Richard Cohen

March 10, 2014

Once again, we can look to our history to learn about our current situation. I am referring to the crisis in Ukraine and what it teaches us, not just about the future but also about the past. Vladimir Putin has turned us all into Neville Chamberlain.

Chamberlain is famous for the Munich Agreement of September 29^th, 1938, and his statement that, by giving in to Hitler’s demands, he had brought Britain and Europe “peace for our time.”

He and the French gave Hitler the Sudetenland, which was the name applied to the substantially German areas of what was then Czechoslovakia.

The comparisons between then and what is happening now between Russia and Ukraine are amazing.

Hitler was a monster, but in this case his argument was Germans, ought to be in Germany.

Putin, is making the same argument that the Ukraine, having been a former state in the USSR, should be a part of Russia.

What complicates matters is that we now know that for Hitler the Sudetenland represented mere batting practice. He was soon to invade Poland and much of the rest of Europe, faltering only when he disregarded the bitter lesson Napoleon learned and plunged into Russia.

Putin is demanding for Crimea more or less what Hitler wanted for the Sudetenland: Russians ought to be in Russia.

The big problem today is that, as with Chamberlain in 1938, we are not sure with whom we are dealing. We soon found out who Hitler was. But what of Putin? Will he be happy with the eastern half of Ukraine, or does he have bigger plans that involve taking the entire country and establishing a puppet government?

If we agree with his argument that Russians should be part of Russia, where does it stop?

Almost 25 percent of Estonia is ethnic Russian. How about Latvia, which is about 27 percent Russian?

Hitler made things easy. We knew what we were dealing with. By 1938, he had already murdered the hierarchy of his brown shirts (The SA), instituted the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws, and, a bit more than a month after he signed the Munich Agreement, launched the purge known as Kristallnacht.

By then, too, he had ruthlessly suppressed all dissent, created the first of many concentration camps and lit the German night with bonfires of unacceptable books.

Putin is no angel, but he has concentrated power without widespread violence or murder. While the gulag remains mostly a memory, he has sent his opponents to labor camps, such as YaG-14, 3100 miles from Moscow in eastern Siberia where the winter drops to minus 40 degrees.

Putin is an autocrat, but he is not Hitler or Stalin. He follows the world news and sees the current political turmoil in the US. He sees Biden and his administration as weak.

So, we now have to ask, what will Putin do next?

To this respect, 1930s statesmen proved much more naïve than their 21st century colleagues.

At the time of the Munich agreement, the French prime minister Édouard Daladier privately admitted: “We cannot sacrifice ten million men in order to prevent three and a half million Sudetens from joining the Reich”.

Similarly, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain wrote to Hitler: “I can’t believe you will take responsibility to start a European war for just a few days’ wait in the solution of this long-standing problem.”

They both completely missed the point, since Hitler’s objectives of course went far beyond reuniting all the German-speaking peoples under Berlin’s rule.

And while history will never be able to prove it, Germany was in all likelihood not yet ready for a global conflict, and Hitler might well have backed down if Britain and France had shown real firmness.

Putting it bluntly, Chamberlain and Daladier were simply outwitted by Hitler.

The central mistake of Munich was Neville Chamberlain’s apparent conviction that the scrap of paper signed by Hitler actually meant something.

Today, the Western dilemma is of a rather different nature: some people have argued that diplomatic and economic means are not enough to deter Putin over Ukraine, so Western diplomacy should include the threat of military action.

This clash of opinions exposes a fundamental paradox of international relations in the nuclear era. Nowadays, the threat of military retaliation has lost credibility, and diplomatic arm wrestling can only rely on the threat of economic warfare.

This can only be effective if a strong common front is built up internationally – but with so many private interests involved, that might be even more difficult to achieve than military action.

Bottom line, Germany is dependent on Russia for its oil and France does not want to enter into an armed conflict with Russia.

So this bring us to another item we keep hearing about the Nord Stream pipeline.

What is Nord Stream 2, and why does it matter?

The project, nearly complete, is a natural gas line from Russian fields to the German coast, spanning 764 miles under the Baltic Sea. The $11 billion line will double the capacity of the original 2011 Nord Stream, which runs parallel to the new project.

The line will supply gas to Germany — a nation heavily dependent on gas and oil imports — at a relatively low cost as the continent’s production capacity decreases.

The new pipeline is entirely owned by Russian energy company Gazprom, which is majority government-owned.

The company also owns 51 percent of the original Nord Stream pipeline. A group of European energy companies, including Shell and Wintershall, are paying half the $11 billion in construction costs.

Though proponents of the pipeline, including Germany and Russia, see it as a great business deal providing cheaper, cleaner energy, Nord Stream 2 has drawn outrage from many opponents.

U.S. leaders and lawmakers — both Democratic and Republican — fear that the Baltic pipeline would give Russia too much power over European gas supplies, handing Russian President Vladimir Putin a wider market and geopolitical power at a politically precarious time.

During his term, President Donald Trump unsuccessfully tried to torpedo the project, claiming that Nord Stream 2 would make Germany “a captive to Russia.”

President Biden has also shared these fears that Europe would become overly dependent on Russian energy supplies.

Ukraine and Poland vehemently oppose the pipeline. Ukraine has long been an energy middleman nation, with Russian companies feeding much of Europe’s gas supply through Ukrainian soil and paying it transit fees in the process.

Russia, in bypassing Ukraine with the new pipeline, can now isolate the nation.

Biden discussed the pipeline with German Chancellor Angela Merkel — a vigorous pipeline supporter — during her visit to Washington recently.

State Department spokesman Ned Price said at a news briefing that Biden “couldn’t have been any clearer” with Merkel on his continuous opposition to the pipeline.

“We view it as a Kremlin geopolitical project that is intended to expand Russia’s influence over Europe’s energy resources and to circumvent Ukraine,” Price said. “We have made no bones about the fact that it is a bad deal for Germany, it is a bad deal for Ukraine and for Europe more broadly.”

Now here is the current problem.

The United States previously imposed sanctions on entities and vessels connected with the pipeline, including on the Fortuna pipe-laying vessel, which was set to build one line of the link, in January.

But in a move that angered nations and lawmakers opposing the pipeline, the Biden administration waived those sanctions in May.

That’s right, Biden waived the sanctions. This allowed the construction of the pipeline to continue. Nordstream 2 is now finished and all they need to do is open the valves and set the oil flowing.

US sanctions now, will do nothing. The State Department  explained that it was nonsensical to impose sanctions on allies for a nearly completed project.

In addition, the sanction waivers align with Biden’s commitment to rebuild relations with European allies, the spokesman said.

The waivers “created space for diplomacy” for the United States to address potential energy security risks with Germany, Ukraine and other European partners, he said.

I vaguely remember this waiver of sanctions on the pipeline making the news last May.

Like most national news today, it didn’t get hardly any attention.

Yet, here we are. A decision made last May, appeasing Russia and Germany, has now set the stage for Russia to take Ukraine and begin the reconstruction of the Soviet Empire.

Are we witnessing a modern day Munich Pact?