War

by Ron Paul

Judging by his prime-time speech last week, the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency will be marked by increased militarism abroad and authoritarianism at home. The centerpiece of the president’s speech was his demand for a new law forbidding anyone on the federal government’s terrorist watch list from purchasing a firearm. There has never been a mass shooter who was on the terrorist watch list, so this proposal will not increase security. However, it will decrease liberty.

The 21 international climate summits that have been held over the decades have produced nothing but empty rhetoric, false promises and rising carbon emissions. Paris was no different. We must physically obstruct the extraction, transportation and refining of fossil fuels or face extinction. This is a war waged between the forces of life and the forces of death. It is a war we must not lose.

In what is possibly the most inane political statement ever, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer and Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced a push to prevent known or suspected terrorists from purchasing guns in New York State. Schumer and Cuomo areasking the federal government to officially add the U.S. Terror Watch List to the criteria it uses for federal background checks in New York State, exclaiming "we need to move to close the Terror Gap once and for all."

The Statement...

Kiriakou served two years in prison for exposing President Bush's "lie" about the U.S. torture program. He tells Scheer how the CIA -- an organization created to recruit spies to steal secrets -- evolved into a "paramilitary force," how the U.S. drone program "creates terrorists" by killing innocent civilians, and how the Obama administration uses the Espionage Act as a political tool to threaten whistleblowers.

Boundless American greed, warlike hubris and imperial muscle flexing are at the bottom of the wave of regfugees fleeing sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, at the roots of genocidal wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen, and behind the simmering crisis in Ukraine. For the world's only superpower there seem to be no limits, no counting of costs or consequences