Given President Biden’s decision to send 31 of its top-ranked M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, it is clear that the Pentagon has decided to escalate its war against Russia. Biden’s decision was followed by Germany’s decision to deliver 14 Leopard 2 A6 tanks to Ukraine.

Today, federal officials stumble over themselves to show how much they revere Martin Luther King. They’ve even created a federal holiday to honor him. Not so back when King was alive, however. During that time, U.S. officials were convinced that King was a Red, and they were also convinced that the Reds, especially the Russian Reds, were coming to get us. 

Given that the debt-ceiling debate is likely to continue for a few months, examining the Constitution provides us with the reasons our nation has been plunged into this monetary morass. Federal officials have now run up the federal government’s debt to more than $31.5 trillion. That’s a lot of money. And it’s also a lot of interest payments. 

Given the U.S. government’s increasing financial difficulties, we can expect extremely vicious behavior on the part of federal officials to bring money into the regime. What U.S. officials are currently doing to Russian billionaires provides a clue as to what they are likely to do Americans as the federal government’s financial situation worsens.
The federal government is spending more than $1 trillion per year than it is bringing in with taxes.

In response to the U.S. government’s weaponization of the dollar through such measures as sanctions and trade wars, China, along with Russia and other nations, are making efforts to dethrone the dollar as the world’s international reserve currency. For example, Russia and China are now using the Chinese yuan, rather than the dollar, for payment for Russian oil. Saudi Arabia is now talking about doing the same thing. 

Immigration-control advocates are ecstatic over President Biden’s visit to El Paso. Maybe — just maybe — Biden’s trip will be what finally — finally! — brings victory in the decades-long U.S. war on immigrants. Except that it won’t. The hope of the immigration-control advocates will be dashed once again.

Yesterday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appeared before a joint session of Congress to plead for more billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to help Ukraine in its war with Russia. 
One particular sentence in Zelensky’s address caught my attention: “We Ukrainians will also go through our war of independence and freedom with dignity and success.”

As expected, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by half a point yesterday. It was a drop from the .75 point rate increases that the Fed has been implementing for the past several months.  A big reason the Fed is going slower is the longstanding fear among Fed officials of bringing about another Great Depression by raising interest rates too high and too fast.

The mainstream media is celebrating big time over a recent ruling by the Supreme Court that forces the Treasury Department to deliver President Trump’s income-tax returns to Congress. A good example is the Washington Post, which published an editorial last week praising the ruling.

This is our end-of-year fundraising drive. Your support today will help us advance liberty in the year head. We could never do our work without those of you who help us out in a bigger way. If you are already an FFF donor, we hope you will renew your support with a generous end-of-year donation.

One of the interesting aspects of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act was the allocation of $80 billion in increased funding for the Internal Revenue Service, one of the most powerful and tyrannical agencies in U.S. history.

I fully realize that when it comes to Ukraine, one is supposed to focus exclusively on Russia’s invasion and not on what the Pentagon did to gin up the crisis, a crisis that has gotten us perilously close to a world-destroying nuclear war with Russia. 

There are five additional points that have been made about the Alex Jones case that I wish to address, four of which were expressed in emails to me and one of which was expressed in an article published today by Judge Andrew Napolitano.

New Jersey Congressman Albio Sires is complaining about financial aid that international agencies are providing Nicaragua under what he says is “the pretext of poverty reduction, disaster relief and small business support.”

Reminder: Our online conference “End Inflation and at the Fed,” continues this evening at 7 p.m. (Eastern time) with the third talk of our series. Our speaker will be Kevin Dowd, professor of finance and economics at Durham University, much of whose work revolves Austrian and Public Choice economics.

As most everyone knows, Republicans have been celebrating the clownish antic of Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis for using hundreds of thousands of Florida taxpayer dollars to ship 50 immigrants from Texas and dump them in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

NOTE: Our upcoming online Zoom conference “End Inflation and the Fed” kicks off on next Monday, October 3, at 7 p.m. Eastern Time with Richard Ebeling. Richard teaches economics at the Citadel and is co-host of FFF’s weekly Internet show, the Libertarian Angle.

Right-wingers are making a big deal out of the decision by people in Martha’s Vineyard not to take into their homes the immigrants that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis shipped to them a few days ago. The right-wingers are saying that feeding the immigrants and caring for them was not sufficient.

Several former U.S. defense secretaries and retired generals recently published an open letter about the current political environment in America. The letter stated, among other things: “Military officers swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not an oath of fealty to an individual or to an office.”

While some conservatives are criticizing President Biden for hiring 87,000 new well-armed IRS agents under the guise of fighting inflation, I’ve got a better idea: Let’s just abolish the IRS and, at the same time, end the federal income tax. 
The idea is actually not as radical as it sounds.

REMINDER: I will be speaking at the Ron Paul Institute’s annual conference, which this year is being held at the The Westin Washington Dulles Airport. The theme of the conference is “Anatomy of a Police State.” See my blog post of yesterday. If you can make it, I am sure you’ll be happy you did. If you do attend, please come up and say hello. Register here. — Jacob

The Ron Paul Institute is holding its annual conference at the Westin Washington Dulles Airport this Saturday, September 3. It stands to be another outstanding one. I have the honor and pleasure of again speaking at it. I will also be speaking at the conference’s program for young scholars the day before.

Ever since the federal government was converted from a limited-government republic to a national-security state after World War II, America has lived under a system of ongoing, never-ending, perpetual foreign-policy crises. That’s not a coincidence. The national-security establishment — i.e. the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — need such crises to justify their continued existence and their ever-growing taxpayer-funded largess. 

One of the benefits to the U.S. national-security establishment of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that it has enabled the U.S. mainstream press to focus on the evils of the Russian regime rather than on the evils of the U.S. regime. 

By now, most everyone knows about President Biden’s famous “fist bump” with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi dictator who has been accused of orchestrating the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi when he visited a Saudi consulate in Turkey.

Republicans are licking their chops over the Federal Reserve’s ostensible plans to raise interest rates aggressively in the months ahead to combat soaring prices. They view a coming big recession as a grand opportunity to win control over Congress in the upcoming November elections. 

In my blog post of May 18, 2022, I raised the possibility that the $40 billion aid package that Congress quickly approved for Ukraine was going to be used, at least in part, to pay multimillion dollar bribes to Ukrainian officials.

Let’s engage in a thought experiment. Suppose that Ukraine was headed by a pro-Russia regime. After repeated failed attempts at assassination by the CIA, the Pentagon finally decides to invade Ukraine for the purpose of bringing about regime change — i.e., ousting the pro-Russia regime from power and replacing it with a pro-U.S. regime.

According to commentators in the mainstream press and various federal officials, inflation is like the coronavirus. It spreads around the world, hitting different countries in different ways. Sometimes a country will  experience only mild symptoms and sometimes more severe symptoms, like what happens with Covid.

Pope Francis is taking the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church to task for supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Francis told Patriarch Kirill not to be “Putin’s altar boy.” If only that same message had been received and understood by Catholic priests here in the United States when it was the Pentagon and the CIA that were the invaders of Afghanistan and Iraq.

For the past 25 years, the Pentagon has moved inexorably toward admitting Ukraine into NATO, which would then permit the Pentagon to install its nuclear missiles in Ukraine — that is, on Russia’s border.

Last week, I received an email from a conservative-oriented libertarian who suggested to me that it is disloyal to “side with Russia” because Ukraine was “just sitting there” when it was invaded by Russia.

On the surface of things, it appears that Russia is at war with Ukraine. But Russian president Vladimir Putin is saying that in actuality it is the United States that is warring against Russia and is simply using Ukraine as a proxy to conduct that war. Putin, therefore, is also saying that given that the United States is waging war against Russia, the possibility of nuclear war continues to rise with each passing day.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought to the forefront the NATO treaty to which the United States is a party. President Biden and the Pentagon have steadfastly maintained that a Russian attack on any NATO member automatically obligates the United States to go to war against Russia.

Let’s have a thought experiment. Suppose that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Cuban president Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel Bermúdez issued a joint announcement stating that North Korea had accepted an invitation to install some of its nuclear missiles in Cuba. The announcement made it clear that although the missiles could reach any American city, they would be entirely for the defense of Cuba, not for the purpose of attacking the United States. 

There are some important things to note about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Our rights do not come from the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. As the Declaration of Independence states, our rights come from nature and God, not from the federal government, not from the Constitution, and not from the Bill of Rights.

I’m fascinated by the mainstream media’s overwhelming focus on Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine while, at the same time, remaining steadfastly silent about the horrific and disgraceful mistreatment and imminent extradition of Julian Assange to the United States. After all, one of the big reasons that U.S. officials have targeted Assange is his disclosure of war crimes by the U.S. military in Iraq.

If there is one thing the whole world knows, U.S. officials will not permit anyone to maintain a friendly or even a neutral relationship with respect to Russia and Russian president Vladimir Putin. If some foreign regime doesn’t stand squarely with the United States with respect to the Ukrainian conflict, it is considered an enemy and will likely be hit with a strong case of economic sanctions. Just ask China.

Suppose that John, in an act of pure political gamesmanship, threatens to corner Peter. In response, Peter says to John, “If you corner me as part of your political game, I will shoot and kill Mary. So don’t corner me.” John has no doubt whatsoever that Peter is telling him the truth and that he’s not bluffing. John knows as an absolute certainty that if he corners Peter as part of his political game, Peter will shoot and kill Mary.

While American statists are cheering the U.S. government’s sanctions on Russia, 71-year-old John Hanick shows us how the cheers are also for the destruction of the rights and liberties of the American people. That’s because U.S. officials have just charged Hanick, who is an American citizen who once worked at Fox News as a director, with a federal criminal offense for violating U.S. sanctions on Russia.
Hanick now faces up to 20 years in a federal penitentiary, not to mention of course, that he will have to incur tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawyer fees to defend himself against this malevolent criminal prosecution.
What did Hanick do to earn the wrath of the U.S. Justice Department? He was working for a Russian oligarch named Konstantin Malofeyev to

According to Yahoo! News, “More than two dozen foreign policy experts have called for the United States and NATO to institute a partial no-fly zone over Ukraine, which would serve as an escalation of the conflict with Russia.” Joining them is Illinois Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who also happens to be a former Air Force combat officer. That would mean the U.S. military would be shooting down Russian planes containing Russian soldiers. 
So far, the idea is being resisted by President Biden and the military-intelligence establishment. However, given the extreme anti-Putin mentality that characterizes Biden, the Pentagon, and the CIA, their position could easily change on a moment’s notice.
The matter brings to mind what happened during the John Kennedy administration, the

Let’s examine winners and losers in the Ukraine crisis. Let’s start with the losers. The biggest loser are the people of Ukraine. They are being killed, injured, and maimed by the Russian invasion of their country. The invasion is also destroying their homes, businesses, and, well, their entire country. 

There is something important to recognize about the Cold War: It was not ended by the U.S. government. Instead, it was ended by the Soviet Union. If it had been up to the U.S. national-security establishment, the Cold War would have gone on forever because it is the best racket in U.S. history, one that continually expanded the tax-funded largess, power, and influence of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.

No one can deny that we Americans live crisis-filled lives. Right now, there is a major crisis in Ukraine with Russia. There is also an ongoing crisis with China. Other foreign-policy crises, such as with Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan, Cuba, Iraq, and North Korea. There is a terrorism crisis. Healthcare crisis. Social Security crisis. Drug-war crisis. Immigration crisis. Debt crisis. Inflation crisis. Fiscal crisis. Monetary crisis. 

As the Omicron variation of COVID-19 continues to spread, the American people need to be asking themselves an important question: Do they want healthcare freedom or not? 

The New York Times published an article yesterday that denied that U.S. officials promised Russia at the end of the Cold War that NATO would not expand membership to Warsaw Pact countries. 

In 1969, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison brought a criminal prosecution against a man named Clay Shaw. In the trial, Garrison rejected the lone-nut theory of the assassination of President Kennedy. He alleged instead that Kennedy was assassinated in a highly sophisticated regime-change operation spearheaded by the U.S. national-security establishment. Garrison alleged that Shaw had played a role in that operation.

My immediate reaction to the National Archives’ very limited release of a few of the CIA’s JFK-assassination records is this: I’m not interested in seeing what they’re releasing. I’m interested in seeing what they’re still hiding. 

Not surprisingly, both houses of Congress approved another increase in the debt ceiling and have sent the bill to President Biden, who will most assuredly sign it. The bill raises the debt ceiling to $31.5 trillion. This debt ceiling is expected to last through the upcoming mid-term elections so that incumbent elected officials don’t have to deal with it in their campaigns for reelection.

I never thought I would find myself saying this but President Biden has just instituted a great boycott. It’s against China, which U.S. officials have been trying their best to reconvert into a Cold War enemy, opponent, rival, or adversary. 
What’s so good about this boycott? It purports to punish China by prohibiting U.S. government officials from attending the Winter Olympics in China.

No matter how you feel about the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, you can’t help but be impressed at how they are able to successfully plunder and loot American taxpayers, no matter how much needless death, suffering, and destruction they wreak on people around the world.

Given the seemingly intractable welfare-warfare system that characterizes the United States, it might be tempting for some people to despair and simply give up and surrender to what might appear to be the inevitable — the permanent continuation of our lives as serfs on the welfare-warfare state plantation.

With President Biden succumbing to the CIA’s demand to continue keeping the CIA’s records relating to the Kennedy assassination secret, the question naturally arises: What is the CIA still hiding? (See my blog post of yesterday entitled “Surprise! Biden Continues the CIA’s JFK Assassination Cover-Up.”)

Before I address President Biden’s decision last Friday to continue the national-security establishment’s cover-up of its November 22, 1963, regime-change operation in Dallas, I wish to make one thing perfectly clear: I am not Nostradamus.

In my blog post yesterday entitled “Mainstream Press Silence on the JFK Deadline, I took the mainstream media to task for remaining steadfastly silent about the upcoming October 26 deadline for the release of the CIA’s long-secret JFK assassination-related records.

An op-ed in the Los Angeles Times makes me feel sorry for many college students, at least many of those who take economics courses in their respective schools. In fact, the op-ed even causes me to feel sorry for the people at mainstream newspapers who decide which op-eds to publish in their papers.

For some unknown reason, there seems to be some secrecy on the part of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) over the still-secret 58-year-old records of the CIA and other federal agencies relating to the Kennedy assassination.

When the Federal Reserve inflates the money supply, the resulting debasement of people’s money is reflected in the higher prices that people are paying for things they need or want. Already, everyone is seeing, for example, significantly higher prices for gasoline at the pump. The price jump is high enough to cause people to realize that all that “free” stimulus money wasn’t as free as the government said it was. 

Conservatives and progressives are at it again. They are attacking each other big time over whether Critical Race Theory should be taught in secondary schools and colleges and universities. The fundraising appeals are flying, as each side exhorts people to send in their donations to support whichever side is sending out the fundraising appeal.

Whenever a government program or policy produces deaths of innocent people, the way I figure it is that that makes it incumbent on libertarians to take a firm stand against such programs and policies. We all know that there are all sorts of government regulations that deprive people of liberty that we libertarians need to oppose.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently permitted the eviction moratorium established by the Centers for Disease Control to continue, at least until July 31, when the CDC plans to lift it. The Court wrongly decided the matter. It should have immediately lifted the moratorium.

Recently the U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider a challenge to the all-male draft. The plaintiffs in the case argued that excluding women from the draft was unconstitutional. Apparently the Court is simply letting Congress decide the issue. 

Vice-President Kamala Harris got jeered in Guatemala, and deservedly so, after telling the Guatemalan people, “Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border.”  At the same time, the Biden administration is promising $4 billion in foreign aid to the Guatemalan government.

U.S. officials are shocked and outraged over the forced landing of a passenger airliner in Belarus. The airliner contained a passenger named Roman Protasevich, a 26-year-old man who was traveling from Greece to Lithuania.

What is it about paternalists that prevents them from minding their own business? They are obsessed with minding everyone else’s business and, even worse, using the power of government to force people to live their lives the way paternalists want them to live them.

There is a battle currently going on over whether the CIA should be woke or not. The battle was  apparently incited by a recent segment of a social media series issued by the CIA entitled “Humans of CIA.” According to an article in yesterday’s Washington Post, Susan Gordon, deputy director of national intelligence from 2017-2019, says that the aim of the series is to “connect to America, and if they’re lucky, attract new talent.”

REMINDER: Our zoom conference “The National Security State and the JFK Assassination” continues this Wednesday at 7 pm Eastern. To attend the conference, just register at our conference page. A zoom link will be sent to you. We are now moving into the medical-evidence portion of the conference.

Reminder: Our online conference “The National Security State and the Kennedy Assassination” continues today, Wednesday, March 10, at 7 pm Eastern time. We now have 650 registrations. This week’s speaker is Michael Swanson, author of the book The War State: The Cold War Origins Of The Military-Industrial Complex And The Power Elite, 1945-1963 and his newly released book Why the Vietnam War?

Last night, we had the first presentation in our online conference “The National Security State and the Kennedy Assassination.” Our first speaker was James DiEugenio, who has been the leading figure in the JFK assassination research community  highlighting how President Kennedy’s policy toward independence movements in Third World countries was contrary to the policy held by the U.S. national-security establishment, namely the Pentagon and the CIA.

Unfortunately, Joe Biden is your prime example of a standard Washington, D.C., politician. As such, as president he will just accept the status quo, defer to the national-security establishment, and do his best to make the welfare-warfare state function efficiently.

This week conservatives are celebrating national “School Choice Week.” According to the website of this celebration, “School choice means giving parents access to the best K-12 education options for their children. These options include traditional public schools, public charter schools, magnet schools, private schools, online academies, and homeschooling.”

In an August editorial, the New York Times called for an investigation into the attack on Russian dissident Aleksei Navalny, who was recently transported to Germany in a coma after apparently being poisoned.