Tag Archives: The Washington Post

Mike Maharrey: While You Were Obsessing Over Impeachment 0 (0)

by Mike Maharrey

Well, they did it!

The House impeachment hearings were little more than political theater — a partisan fistfight with the majority party coming out the “winner.” In the process, it created the illusion of deep division and disagreement. Devoted Democrats and Republicans are both convinced that their team is fighting for their interests against a determined foe on the other side of the aisle.

But while everybody obsessed over the political theater playing out on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, they completely missed the sideshow that could actually impact their lives. Even as Democrats and Republicans engaged in a contentious public spectacle in the media spotlight, they worked in concert behind the scenes to steal your liberty and your wealth.

While you argued over the gory details of impeachment with your friends on Facebook, Congress passed the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. The nearly 3,500-page bill authorizes $738 billion in defense spending in Fiscal Year 2020. It creates a “Space Force,” so the U.S. can expand its empire into the cosmos. And Congress rejected a provision that would have made it just slightly harder for the president to unilaterally send American troops into combat. In other words, Congress agreed that it would not bother to do its job and declare war before sending the U.S. military to conduct offensive combat operations as required by the Constitution. It will continue to let the president make that call on his own. You know – the president the House just impeached.

Even worse, the current iteration of the NDAA extended provisions written into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that effectively authorize government kidnapping. The vaguely worded sections purport to authorize the arrest and “indefinite detention” of anybody the president decides might be associated with “terrorism” and subject them to the law of war. In effect, the government can deem you a terrorist and lock you away without due process. Government kidnapping may sound like hyperbole, but that’s exactly what the NDAA authorizes in effect.

Speaking of war, while all eyes were glued to the three-ring circus in D.C., the Washington Post released documents revealing that the U.S. government has been lying to us about the war in Afghanistan for decades.

“A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

As one three-star general put it, “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking. If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction .?.?. 2,400 lives lost.”

This seems, maybe, just a tiny bit, significant. But the news barely saw the light of day. It was completely buried under an avalanche of impeachment reporting.

The sad truth is that these papers that have been mostly ignored provide legitimate grounds for impeachment – not just of Donald Trump, but Barack Obama and George W. Bush to boot. But when it comes to war, Congress maintains a bipartisan consensus supporting the endless, unconstitutional foreign interventions and the presidents who run them. And the media is complicit, focusing on the fake wrestling matches on Capitol Hill instead of reporting on real wars

And while we’re on the subject of bipartisan consensus, let me remind you that Congress reauthorized sections of the Patriot Act in the latest stopgap spending bill. This means the federal government will be able to continue to spy on you without a warrant and in complete disregard of the Fourth Amendment. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) predicted it would happen.

Today, while everyone is distracted by the impeachment drama, Congress will vote to extend warrantless data collection provisions of the #PatriotAct, by hiding this language on page 25 of the Continuing Resolution (CR) that temporarily funds the government. To sneak this through, Congress will first vote to suspend the rule which otherwise gives us (and the people) 72 hours to consider a bill. The scam here is that Democrats are alleging abuse of Presidential power, while simultaneously reauthorizing warrantless power to spy on citizens that no President should have… in a bill that continues to fund EVERYTHING the President does… and waiving their own rules to do it. I predict Democrats will vote on a party line to suspend the 72 hour rule. But after the rule is suspended, I suspect many Republicans will join most Democrats to pass the CR with the Patriot Act extension embedded in it.

And indeed they did.

And finally, while Congress-critters battled it out on the House floor, behind the scenes, congressional leaders worked with the Trump administration to hammer out a $1.4 trillion spending agreement. According to an Associated Press report, the deal “fills in the details of a bipartisan framework from July that delivered about $100 billion in agency spending increases over the coming two years instead of automatic spending cuts that would have sharply slashed both the Pentagon and domestic agencies.”

So, let’s review. While America was mesmerized by the pro-wrestling event on Capitol Hill, Congress agreed to maintain the government’s “authority” to kidnap you, to keep spying on you without a warrant, to continue unconstitutional wars, and to spend you deeper into debt.

Political theater makes for splashy headlines and heated debates, but it really has very little impact on your life. The political class, including the mainstream media, would prefer you pay attention to the fluff, not to the things that really matter. Perhaps instead of obsessing over impeachment or the latest debate over a Trump tweet, you would be better served to pay attention to what they don’t want you to pay attention to.

TAC: https://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2019/12/20/while-you-were-obsessing-over-impeachment/


Michael Maharrey [send him email] is the Communications Director for the Tenth Amendment Center. He is from the original home of the Principles of ’98 – Kentucky and currently resides in northern Florida. See his blog archive here and his article archive here. He is the author of the book, Our Last Hope: Rediscovering the Lost Path to Liberty. You can visit his personal website at MichaelMaharrey.com and like him on Facebook HERE

William F. Jasper: Socialists Stop Spread of Success 0 (0)

by William F. Jasper

The United Nations and the Socialist International are waging war against Chile and its conservative president, Sebastián Piñera. Since mid-October, Chile’s capital, Santiago, and other cities across the country have been wracked by violent riots, with dozens of people killed, thousands injured (including hundreds of police and military personnel), thousands arrested, and an enormous amount of destruction of public infrastructure and private property, including train stations, businesses, shops, and supermarkets.

The Piñera government declared a state of emergency and imposed curfews. President Piñera faces a National Congress that is stacked against him, as well as a hostile media, and leftist-controlled universities that serve as hotbeds for revolution.

The United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, has responded to the turmoil by sending a team of UN investigators to Chile to examine allegations of human rights abuse by the Chilean government. This move by the UN should have caused suspicion from the get-go. Why? Well, for one thing, Michelle Bachelet is herself a former president of Chile (two terms, 2006-2010 and 2014-2018) and a virulent opponent of President Piñera. That alone should lead any reasonable observer to suspect, at the very least, that her UN “investigation” is likely to be politically motivated.

However, it goes much deeper than that. Bachelet, a hardcore Marxist, is an ardent admirer of the late communist dictator Fidel Castro, and, as one of her last acts as president of Chile, made a pilgrimage to Cuba to praise Fidel and meet with his designated successor and brother, Raúl Castro, the current communist dictator of Cuba. She is also a supporter of the Marxist regimes in Nicaragua and Venezuela.

In the 1970s, Bachelet left Chile and moved to communist East Germany, then one of the most oppressive dictatorships in the Soviet bloc. Moreover, Bachelet is a longtime member of, and was elected president while the leader of, Chile’s ultra-left Socialist Party, which is a member of the Socialist International, the global cabal of more than 135 national political parties from all continents, including former communist parties that have rebranded themselves as socialist or social democrat.  The secretary-general of the Socialist International is Luis Ayala, a radical Chilean who is a close comrade of Bachelet in the Socialist Party. Bachelet was selected for the UN high commissioner post by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, a former president of the Socialist International. Although barely known in the United States (because it is seldom mentioned by our controlled “mainstream” media — and is even largely ignored by our alternative media), the Socialist International (SI) virtually runs the United Nations and many of its agencies, with Guterres being only the most obvious example of its influence.

Another SI/UN alum is former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, a former member of Chile’s Socialist Party and one of the Chileans often quoted in recent stories undermining President Piñera. He is also one of the few SI members named to the “Committee of Twelve Distinguished Members of the Socialist International.” In 2007, he was named as a UN special envoy on climate change, along with former SI vice president and UN functionary Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former prime minister of Norway.

Bachelet, Guterres, Lagos, Brundtland, and other SI/UN comrades are welcomed as honored guests at the CFR and other globalist gatherings. Bachelet and Lagos are both members of the elite Club of Madrid, as well as Inter-American Dialogue, where both have served as co-chairs.

The cause of Chile’s current “unrest,” according to the lords of the Fake News Media, was the government’s subway fare hike of 30 pesos, the equivalent of four U.S. cents. Anger over the fare increases, goes the standard line from media commentators, caused spontaneous, “student-led” flash mobs of hundreds of youths to jump the Metro turnstiles in protest, which then escalated to “youth-led” mobs setting buses and Metro stations on fire and looting stores, and then escalated still further and broadened into massive protests, supposedly motivated by “income inequality.”

This is the story we get from the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, CNN, PBS, and the rest of the Deep State media cartel. Most of these “news” reports take their cues on the issue from so-called experts at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Council of the Americas, Inter-American Dialogue, and similar globalist propaganda founts that posture as objective think tanks.

According to Amelia Cheatham, a “Special Assistant” at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), “The turmoil began on October 18 with student-led protests over a metro fare increase.” Her CFR blog post entitled “What’s Behind the Chile Protests?” states that “Political unrest is sweeping Chile, as impatience with inequality grows in what has been one of Latin America’s most prosperous and stable countries.”

President Piñera and other Latin American leaders paint a different picture. “We are at war against a powerful enemy, who is willing to use violence without any limits,” Piñera declared in a late-night televised statement on October 29. “We are very aware that [the perpetrators of riots] have a degree of organization, logistics, typical of a criminal organization,” he said. According to news reports from Chile, Cuban and Venezuelan nationals were arrested as instigators of the rioting. And Chile is not alone in this regard.

On October 22, Argentina’s National Security Council met to consider the wave of violent protest that is sweeping across Latin America. Following the meeting, Argentine Foreign Minister Jorge Faurie pointed to Cuba and the Marxist dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela as the source of the orchestrated upheavals. “They intend to intervene in the political, institutional and social lives of our countries, threatening us like a Bolivarian hurricane that brings in its winds hunger, poverty, dictatorship, the loss of liberty and a prison sentence,” Faurie charged. “Bolivarian” refers to the political philosophy of Venezuela’s founding father, Simón Bolívar, which has been expropriated and hybridized by Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, and others of the communist-Left to advance their socialist agendas.

TNA: https://www.thenewamerican.com/print-magazine/item/34153-socialists-stop-spread-of-success


William F. Jasper is an American journalist and author, and a senior editor of The New American, and long-time member of the John Birch Society.