Ron Paul: Neither Republicans nor Democrats Want to Hear the Real Lesson of Benghazi

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By RonPaul.com on May 13, 2013




by Ron Paul

Congressional hearings, White House damage control, endless op-eds, accusations, and defensive denials. Controversy over the events in Benghazi last September took center stage in Washington and elsewhere last week. However, the whole discussion is again more of a sideshow. Each side seeks to score political points instead of asking the real questions about the attack on the US facility, which resulted in the death of US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Republicans smell a political opportunity over evidence that the Administration heavily edited initial intelligence community talking points about the attack to remove or soften anything that might reflect badly on the president or the State Department.

Are we are supposed to be shocked by such behavior? Are we supposed to forget that this kind of whitewashing of facts is standard operating procedure when it comes to the US government?

Democrats in Congress have offered the even less convincing explanation for Benghazi, that somehow the attack occurred due to Republican sponsored cuts in the security budget at facilities overseas. With a one trillion dollar military budget, it is hard to take this seriously.

It appears that the Administration scrubbed initial intelligence reports of references to extremist Islamist involvement in the attacks, preferring to craft a lie that the demonstrations were a spontaneous response to an anti-Islamic video that developed into a full-out attack on the US outpost.

Who can blame the administration for wanting to shift the focus? The Islamic radicals who attacked Benghazi were the same people let loose by the US-led attack on Libya. They were the rebels on whose behalf the US overthrew the Libyan government. Ambassador Stevens was slain by the same Islamic radicals he personally assisted just over one year earlier.

But the Republicans in Congress also want to shift the blame. They supported the Obama Administration’s policy of bombing Libya and overthrowing its government. They also repeated the same manufactured claims that Gaddafi was “killing his own people” and was about to commit mass genocide if he were not stopped. Republicans want to draw attention to the President’s editing talking points in hopes no one will notice that if the attack on Libya they supported had not taken place, Ambassador Stevens would be alive today.

Neither side wants to talk about the real lesson of Benghazi: interventionism always carries with it unintended consequences. The US attack on Libya led to the unleashing of Islamist radicals in Libya. These radicals have destroyed the country, murdered thousands, and killed the US ambassador. Some of these then turned their attention to Mali which required another intervention by the US and France.

Previously secure weapons in Libya flooded the region after the US attack, with many of them going to Islamist radicals who make up the majority of those fighting to overthrow the government in Syria. The US government has intervened in the Syrian conflict on behalf of the same rebels it assisted in the Libya conflict, likely helping with the weapons transfers. With word out that these rebels are mostly affiliated with al Qaeda, the US is now intervening to persuade some factions of the Syrian rebels to kill other factions before completing the task of ousting the Syrian government. It is the dizzying cycle of interventionism.

The real lesson of Benghazi will not be learned because neither Republicans nor Democrats want to hear it. But it is our interventionist foreign policy and its unintended consequences that have created these problems, including the attack and murder of Ambassador Stevens. The disputed talking points and White House whitewashing are just a sideshow.

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Ron Paul: End the IRS & Abolish the Income Tax

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By RonPaul.com on April 15, 2012




Enjoy Ron Paul’s classic Tax Day Speech from April 15, 2010.

Transcript

Ron Paul: Hey, thank you. End the Fed, hey! Along with the IRS. Let’s repeal 1913 and we’d all be better off. Now, it’s great to be here. You know, sometimes I give speeches on the House floor and there’s nobody there. I like to leave the House floor and I like to go to America. I like to go to Texas and other states because people actually cheer what I say, and I like that.

You know, I’m sure everybody here has talked a lot about taxes and this is tax day. But taxes, in many ways, are nothing more than a symptom. The taxes that we pay are a symptom of runaway government. And that is the problem. It is the fact that we have allowed our government to be so big and out of control – the Congress doesn’t control it, the executive branch has more control than they deserve and the courts have more control than they deserve. What wee need is a strong Congress to rein in the executive branch and the courts to get back to a constitutional government.

I have a belief about taxes and I believe that taxes, indeed, are theft; stealing from the people. You may have seen this on the Internet, I have a bumper sticker on my desk that everybody that comes to my offices sees, that says, “Don’t steal, the government hates competition”. But the government taxes us in many ways. I think of spending as the culprit, because think of spending as being the tax. And then it’s paid for in many different ways; they do tax us and it’s way too high. But they never tax enough to pay the bills. So what do they do? They endlessly borrow, and they borrow so much and then interest rates go up and that doesn’t work. So then what do they do? They resort to the printing press, and the Federal Reserve is the culprit that finances big government.

And that’s exactly right. Eventually, if we’re going to have a republic, we’re going to have sound money. The Constitution is very clear: only gold and silver can be legal tender, not paper money.

Now why is it that even the Federal Reserve is involved in taxation? When they print money, they devalue your currency. Anytime you complain about a high price, you’re paying a tax. So it is a tax, and the big sin, of course, is the big spending. Politicians, up until just recently, were always rewarded by spending money and telling their constituents back home, “I’m going to get you whatever you want”. Well, those days are over, and you’ve helped end those days.

Now, the Federal Reserve serves two special interests in Congress. There are two types of spending that we have to be concerned about. One is the liberal spending; we know all about that. They like to take over your lives because they consider you too stupid to take care of your lives yourself. So they have to take care of you from cradle to grave, so they justify that.

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Ron Paul: The Federal Reserve Blows More Bubbles

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By RonPaul.com on May 5, 2013




by Ron Paul

Last week at its regular policy-setting meeting, the Federal Reserve announced it would double down on the policies that have failed to produce anything but a stagnant economy. It was a disappointing, but not surprising, move.

The Fed affirmed that it is prepared to increase its monthly purchases of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities if things don’t start looking up. But actually the Fed has already been buying more than the announced $85 billion per month. Between February and March, the Fed’s securities holdings increased $95 billion. From March to April, they increased $100 billion. In all, the Fed has pumped more than a half trillion dollars into the economy since announcing its latest round of “quantitative easing” (QE3) in September 2012.

Although many were up in arms when the Fed said it would buy $600 billion in government debt outright for the previous round, QE2, all seems quiet about the magnitude of QE3 because it doesn’t come with huge up-front total price tag. But by year’s end the Fed’s balance sheet could hit $4 trillion.

With no recovery in sight, where’s all this money going? It is creating bubbles. Bubbles in the housing sector, the stock market, and government debt. The national debt is fast approaching $17 trillion, with the Fed monetizing most of the newly issued debt. The stock market has been hitting record highs for the past two months as investors seek to capitalize on the Fed’s easy money. After all, as long as the Fed keeps the spigot open, nominal profits are there for the taking. But this is a house of cards. Eventually, just like in 2008-2009, the market will discipline the bad actions of the Fed and seek to find the real normal.

In the meantime, real families are suffering. While Wall Street and the government take advantage of access to the Fed’s new “free” money, the Fed claims there is no inflation. But who hasn’t paid higher prices at the grocery store, the gas pump, for tuition, for insurance? It’s bad enough that household incomes have stagnated, but real purchasing power has declined so much that one in seven Americans, 47.3 million people, are on food stamps. Five million are collecting unemployment insurance with 21.5 million afflicted by unemployment according to the government’s own figures. That’s 13.9 percent — close to double the 7.5 percent unemployment number reported last week.

We are certainly not in a recovery. We don’t see the long unemployment and soup kitchen lines like in the Great Depression, but that’s just because the lines are electronic now.

It is not surprising the Fed has decided to hand the American people more of the same failed policies. But it is disappointing. We know what the real solution is: allow the marketplace to work. Allow entrepreneurs the chance to create instead of stifling innovation with arbitrary regulations. Allow interest rates to rise to equal the risks in the economy. Allow bad debts to be liquidated so we can build on a firm foundation. Stop printing money to benefit the government and big banks. Restore sound money to the economy and the American people. Sound money is the bedrock for prosperity and the best check on big government and crony capitalism.

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Ron Paul: We’re Already Very Much Involved in Syria

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By RonPaul.com on April 29, 2013





Transcript

Neil Cavuto: This is Neil Cavuto, and whether President Obama ends up sending troops or just some well-placed tomahawks, the President is in a very tough placed now. He’s already warned Syria that if he ever got proof it used chemical weapons on its people, there would be hell to pay, even if we can’t pay for that hell. Dr. Ron Paul says, the truth is, consequences costs, so quit offering ultimatums we can’t pay for, even if we did have the money to pay for them. The Congressman and former presidential candidate joins us right now. Congressman, you would just say, “Don’t even get involved, let the Syrians do whatever they want”?

Ron Paul: Yes, pretty much that way, because it’s not our business, our national security isn’t threatened, and it smells a little bit like the argument going into Iraq: weapons of mass destruction, poisonous gasses, and all that. He drew the line in the sand, or whatever he called it, but for him to worry about going over that line, I don’t know where the evidence is. No, they don’t have evidence, I think he overstated that in the first place, and he shouldn’t be in a dilemma, he should just stay out of it.

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Ron Paul: Liberty Was Also Attacked in Boston

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By RonPaul.com on April 29, 2013





Forced lockdown of a city. Militarized police riding tanks in the streets. Door-to-door armed searches without warrant. Families thrown out of their homes at gunpoint to be searched without probable cause. Businesses forced to close. Transport shut down.

These were not the scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic, but rather the scenes just over a week ago in Boston as the United States got a taste of martial law. The ostensible reason for the military-style takeover of parts of Boston was that the accused perpetrator of a horrific crime was on the loose. The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city. This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.

What has been sadly forgotten in all the celebration of the capture of one suspect and the killing of his older brother is that the police state tactics in Boston did absolutely nothing to catch them. While the media crowed that the apprehension of the suspects was a triumph of the new surveillance state – and, predictably, many talking heads and Members of Congress called for even more government cameras pointed at the rest of us – the fact is none of this caught the suspect. Actually, it very nearly gave the suspect a chance to make a getaway.

The “shelter in place” command imposed by the governor of Massachusetts was lifted before the suspect was caught. Only after this police state move was ended did the owner of the boat go outside to check on his property, and in so doing discover the suspect.

No, the suspect was not discovered by the paramilitary troops terrorizing the public. He was discovered by a private citizen, who then placed a call to the police. And he was identified not by government surveillance cameras, but by private citizens who willingly shared their photographs with the police.

As journalist Tim Carney wrote last week:

“Law enforcement in Boston used cameras to ID the bombing suspects, but not police cameras. Instead, authorities asked the public to submit all photos and videos of the finish-line area to the FBI, just in case any of them had relevant images. The surveillance videos the FBI posted online of the suspects came from private businesses that use surveillance to punish and deter crime on their property.”

Sadly, we have been conditioned to believe that the job of the government is to keep us safe, but in reality the job of the government is to protect our liberties. Once the government decides that its role is to keep us safe, whether economically or physically, they can only do so by taking away our liberties. That is what happened in Boston.

Three people were killed in Boston and that is tragic. But what of the fact that over 40 persons are killed in the United States each day, and sometimes ten persons can be killed in one city on any given weekend? These cities are not locked-down by paramilitary police riding in tanks and pointing automatic weapons at innocent citizens.

This is unprecedented and is very dangerous. We must educate ourselves and others about our precious civil liberties to ensure that we never accept demands that we give up our Constitution so that the government can pretend to protect us.

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Ron Paul to Liberals: If You Really Care about People You Must Protect Liberty

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By RonPaul.com on April 27, 2013





Transcript

Alex Jones: Alright, ladies and gentlemen, it’s Friday, I’m in “Big D” on a short family get-together. I just happen to be in the same building as Dick Cheney right now, I’ll tell you that story briefly later. We’ve got 5 presidents here in town now. Speaking of who I wish would be our President right now, Ron Paul is scheduled to be calling in any minute now and spend half-an-hour with us today, and I’m going to bring up a cornucopia of issues. And I have the guys come in and co-host even when I’m there, because I enjoy their ideas and banter and it’s thought-provoking, but Jakari Jackson and David Knight are riding shotgun out there also, in case we have any technical difficulties, as we are coming to you via the internet right now. The wonders of the internet. And we do have Congressman Ron Paul joining us today again. I’m on the road, so I have a couple of my infowars nightly news reporters riding shotgun with us over the next 30 minutes, so in case anything cuts out, they’ll be able to ask the former Congressman questions. It’s great to have you on with us today, sir.

Ron Paul: Thank you, it’s good to be with you.

Alex Jones: So much is happening, I want to get into your home-schooling curriculum, I hope to actually promote it later when you start that affiliate program, I think everybody should get involved in that. But, before we go there, what do you make of Boston and that whole martial law spectacle that we saw?

Ron Paul: Well, it’s rather scary. You know me, I always try to look on the positive side of things and think things can’t be quite as bad, but those pictures really concern me. That is such a visual image when you see these thousands and thousands of troops, and they weren’t your local friendly policemen that were involved. And it was accepted too easily. Can you imagine all these people being locked, they became prisoners. And the military police were allowed to march into any house at any time without a search warrant. It was martial law, so I think it was very, very scary. Let’s just hope it wakes up some people, but, unfortunately, we still hear comments like, “Well, the government has to do something to make us safe”. And I think that’s where the big disconnect is: about what is the purpose of government. Is it to give us perfect safety and perfect economic security, or is it there to allow us to run our own lives and protect our liberties?

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Ron Paul: Rand Paul and I Are about 99% the Same

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By RonPaul.com on April 26, 2013





Transcript

Geraldo Rivera: I’m very delighted to welcome back to the program the former Congressman from Texas, the former candidate for president of the United States, the father of someone who is talked about as a future candidate for president of the United States. The son is Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, the father is Ron Paul. How are you doing, Congressman, how’s life?

Ron Paul: Geraldo, I’m doing well, thank you.

Geraldo Rivera: I’ve read, with great interest, a couple of hours ago, that you have endorsed the candidacy of Mark Sanford, the former Governor of South Carolina, who is embattled in his race for the congressional seat in Charleston, South Carolina. What’s up?

Ron Paul: Well, he’s a good friend, I’ve known him for years, he was a good voter, and I thought he was the best candidate, so I decided to help him out while everybody else is piling on him.

Geraldo Rivera: So do you think he’s personal transgressions are irrelevant?

Ron Paul: No, I think they’re very relevant, I think some people will vote against him for that, and that’s okay. But if we always look for perfection in our candidates, we’d have a tough time finding them. I think he’s obviously the best candidate, and he certainly has his shortcomings, but I imagine all of us have some shortcomings somewhere along the way.

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Ron Paul: Washington Will Keep Spending until there’s a True Economic Crisis

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By RonPaul.com on April 23, 2013





Transcript

Neil Cavuto: With the threat rising almost as fast as the deficit itself: two guys in Boston accused of bombing the marathon, two guys in Canada accused of trying to bomb a train headed for New York, so those are two huge issues. The government is nearly 17 trillion dollars into collective debt hole, and there’s a new push to spend more to protect us despite that hole. So how do we deal with that? Former Texas Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul is on the phone. Congressman, they’re already saying we need to spend more to stop this, what do you say?

Ron Paul: Oh, keep doing it, bring it on, until we have to force ourselves into reality. It’s tragic, because we’re addicted. It is like a drug addiction, you can’t get off drugs, and the economy can’t get off spending. Just look at what they’re doing at the airports now with the pretending, they’re making little cuts, and then they emphasis it and amplify it by playing politics with it. So they’ll never cut spending, the Fed is there to monetize the debt, we’re going to continue to do this until there is a true economic crisis. So I don’t think what we had in 2008 and 2009 was very much, I think it’s going to get much worse, because we’re never lived in times quite like this when the whole world was inflating their currency and everybody had a paper currency and nobody is living within their means.

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Ron Paul: I’m Concerned about the Erraticness of the Dollar

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By RonPaul.com on April 23, 2013





Transcript

News Anchor: Are you concerned about this drop that we’ve seen in gold?

Ron Paul: I’m concerned about the erraticness of the dollar. The dollar goes up, the dollar goes down, we print a lot of dollar and the dollar gets devalued, that’s really the concern. If people think that the gold price going up and down is a reflection of something wrong with gold, then I say no, it’s something wrong with the dollar. Because people have been expressing a concern here in these last couple of month about gold, but compared to what? Compared to where gold went from when the Fed took over when it was $20/ounce, compared to what has happened in the past?

News Anchor: We have to talk about the stability here, to see the sharpest drop of gold in 30 years actually makes the dollar’s price activity recently look a little bit stable?

Ron Paul: Well, in a relative sense, that might be the case, but that’s the way markets work. I remember in the 1970s, when they finally allowed people to own gold, it went from $35/ounce up to $200/ounce rather rapidly, and then it lost 50%, and then it went up to $800/ounce. So to compare a couple of months or a couple of weeks and forget about a bull-market in the gold prices in relation to the dollar for 12 years, I would say the comparison is not an authentic comparison. What you have to look at is the inflation, inflation is when they increase the supply of money. And since 2008, they have quadrupled the supply of Federal Reserve credit, and they’re buying 85 billion dollars a month of treasury bills. And at the same time last week, they bought 60 billion dollars, that’s the inflation, that’s the distortion of the market, and that’s why we’re not getting economic growth.

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Ron Paul: Congress Exploits Our Fears to Take Our Liberty

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By RonPaul.com on April 22, 2013





by Ron Paul

This week, as Americans were horrified by the attacks in Boston, both houses of Congress considered legislation undermining our liberty in the name of “safety.” Gun control continued to be the focus of the Senate, where an amendment expanding federal “background checks” to gun show sales and other private transfers dominated the debate. While the background check amendment failed to pass, proponents of gun control have made it clear they will continue their efforts to enact new restrictions on gun ownership into law.

While it did not receive nearly as much attention as the debate on gun control, the House of Representatives passed legislation with significant implications for individual liberty: the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). CISPA proponents claim that the legislation is necessary to protect Americans from foreign “cyber terrorists,” but the real effect of this bill will be to further erode Americans’ online privacy.

Under CISPA, Internet corporations are authorized to hand over the private information of American citizens to federal agents, as long as they can justify the violation of your privacy in the name of protecting “cyber security”. Among the items that may be shared are your e-mails, browsing history, and online transactions.

Like the PATRIOT Act, CISPA violates the fourth amendment by allowing federal agencies to obtain private information without first seeking a warrant from a federal judge. The law also allows federal agencies to pass your information along to other federal bureaucrats — again without obtaining a warrant. And the bill provides private companies with immunity from lawsuits regardless of the damage done to anyone whose personal information is shared with the government.

CISPA represents a troubling form of corporatism, where large companies cede their responsibility to protect their property to the federal government, at the expense of their customers’ privacy and liberty. In this respect, CISPA can be thought of as an electronic version of the Transportation Security Administration, which has usurped the authority over airline security from private airlines. However, CISPA will prove to be far more invasive than even the most robust TSA screening.

CISPA and the gun control bill are only the most recent examples of politicians manipulating fear to con the people into giving up their liberties. Of course, the people are told the legislation is for “limited purposes,” but authority granted to government is rarely, if ever, used solely for the purpose for which it is granted. For example, the American people were promised that the extraordinary powers granted the government by the PATRIOT Act would only be used against terrorism. Yet soon after the bill became law, reports surfaced that it was being used for non-terrorism purposes. In fact, according to data compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union, 76 percent of the uses of the controversial “sneak-and-peak” warrants where related to the war on drugs!

Sadly, I expect this week’s tragic attacks in Boston to be used to justify new restrictions on liberty. Within 48 hours of the attack in Boston, at least one Congressman was calling for increased use of surveillance cameras to expand the government’s ability to monitor our actions, while another Senator called for a federal law mandating background checks before Americans can buy “explosive powder.”

I would not be surprised if the Transportation Security Administration uses this tragedy to claim new authority to “screen” Americans before they can attend sporting or other public events. The Boston attack may also be used as another justification for creating a National ID Card tied to a federal database with “biometric” information. The only thing that will stop them is if the American people rediscover the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin that you cannot achieve security by allowing government to take their liberties.

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