“Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. All things fall apart. The center cannot hold.”  --  W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

As of May 2024, the United States has committed over $175 (borrowed) billion to escalating the proxy war against Russia, and, as in the case of the Iraq and Afghan wars, with little regard for accountability pertaining to tracking military hardware,  equipment, funding, or  fraud prevention.

One of the most grotesque moments in this bloody global Punch and Judy show preliminary to nuclear war, was the recent arrival of Vladimir Zelenskyy, former president of Ukraine, making a campaign stop at an ammunition factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where some of the three million 155mm artillery shells the US has given Ukraine are produced.   

Alongside Zelenskyy, in an incitement-op photo promising further escalation of war, the Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania autographed one of the high-velocity artillery shells which will be aimed at Russia. Pennsylvania, which is home to the City of Brotherly Love, was unwitting re-Christened by its top official, with a cursive flair, as the state of brotherly hate.  

The fervor of warmongering, fueled by machismo and high bravado illustrates the failure of leadership and a fatal ignorance of the diplomatic process. We should be exercising the science of human relations, not propelling a hubristic  and ego-driven brinkmanship which accelerates the dialectic of war. 

For decades I have led opposition to war and advocated for the transformation of America’s prevailing policy of “Peace through Strength” to a forward-looking  policy of “Strength through Peace.” 

I challenged the Bush II Administration’s foreign policies, and introduced Articles of Impeachment against President George W. Bush  and Vice President Dick Cheney over Iraq and the lies which led us into war. Illegal and unnecessary, the Iraq war (debt-funded and authorized by both Democrats and Republicans) has cost our nation over $3 trillion, and the loss of 5,000 of our brave men and women who serve and injuries to countless more troops.

The war caused the deaths of over one million Iraqis.  Let that sink in. One million Iraqis perished in a war based on lies. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. The war further damaged America’s global reputation and set us upon a path where, since 9/11, America has borrowed $8 trillion to keep the war machine in tune as our own nation’s pressing domestic needs for housing, health care, education, child care, and retirement security have been set aside.

When I heard Vice President Harris brag about former Vice President Dick Cheney endorsing her candidacy, that put the exclamation point on the fact that the leaders of the Democratic party are for war.  I am not.    

Why else would Vice President Harris become the front person for such virulent bravado, invoking lethality abroad?

A paradox of this campaign is that the much-villainized former President Trump, (representing a party that has also taken us into unnecessary wars) is the one who speaks to the need to negotiate and to talk directly with potential foes in order to avoid war, or to end it.   

I ran for President twice, in 2004 and 2008, to bring a halt to endless wars,  to stop the hemorrhaging of our nation’s wealth and to redirect our attention to our needs at home. During the Obama Administration, I fought against his expansion of war, against attacks on Libya, and Syria. That Administration’s surveillance and state-sponsored black-ops reached new heights, drawing America  further into the depths of a murky military abyss. 

All believers in the Judeo-Christian ethic are taught the equivalency of thought, word and deed. . A sin is a sin is a sin. Words create worlds and actions, and, well, they also create reactions. 

Whether a missile arrives in Russia is separate from the fact that the news of the Pennsylvania governor signing a warhead reached the Kremlin instantaneously.  Congratulations Governor, you just made your state a target. 

It is a faulty military strategy which is based upon baiting one’s targets to have an excuse to attack preemptively. This type of thinking isn’t about taking care of and protecting our allies. I would call it lunacy but it happens far more frequently than once every full moon!  We need level-headed leadership, not political actors mindlessly playing in the flash of WWIII, pandering for votes or for cash from the military industrial complex.

The U.S. government’s endless quest to instigate, fulminate or otherwise set our nation on a path of either participating in or of funding endless war has become an inconscient force which is now sweeping up nations in its maw and, if left unchecked, with soon draw in American troops and inevitably a world war will come home in ways that no one in the continental United States has ever experienced, far exceeding the horrors of 9/11.

W.B. Yeats’ poem, written over one hundred years ago, also pertains to the present moment, the breakdown of international law, the slaughter of innocents, open genocide, mocking humanity for its primal human instincts and instead preferring a descent into the maelstrom of kill or be killed, of “do unto others before they do unto you.”  Our nation’s leaders have lost their capacity for diplomacy.  And we have lost many chances for peace.

Ronan Farrow, in his brilliant book “War on Peace, the End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence,”  traced the catastrophe of substituting militarism for statecraft.

So we arrive at a point where we fully fund war in the Middle East, and, astonishingly stand helpless, vainly begging the recipients of our billions of dollars, our weapons, “intelligence,” and of our strategic advice – not to expand the war we are paying for, not to visit death upon innocents.  

We call for cease fire, to come to terms, to end the conflict, while the bodies pile up, and tensions escalate with all nations. Our collective voice is muted.  We confess futility to effect events which we have set in motion, as a Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and when tidal forces break loose, no thought is given to an end game which could lead not only to the destruction of our closest allies but to the undoing of our own nation.

Like pre-programmed robots from a 1950s B-movie, blind to our own extinction drive, immune to the signs of failing empire, and with notions of exceptionalism justifying colonization, Democratic bosses proudly  escalate war against Russia, the country with 5,580 nuclear warheads, about 1/3 of which are “launch ready.”  

Two years ago, the US, with the back door machinations of Britain’s Boris Johnson, rejected a peace agreement which would have kept Ukraine neutral, restored the peace and spared the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians. 

Instead, we now trot out muddle-headed EU politicians and our NATO sock puppets to support advancing the war deeper and deeper into Russia, sending missiles with more and more destructive power, hyping the fantasy of capsizing the government of a country which remembers losing nearly 30,000,000 people in World War II, during which Russia was on our side.  

To create an enemy is to provoke fear everywhere.  To misjudge an “enemy” is to court disaster and destruction.  As we give freedom and fortune to the egocentric war mongers, the military industrial complex and those naive enough to think that war equals peace for Ukraine - - life and liberty are ebbing at home.

We help our “friends” aggress, and cynically celebrate their victimhood, actively preventing diplomatic resolution, putting our avowed friends at great risk of destruction. 

Do you remember how back in October 2022, thirty Members of the U.S. Congress’ Democratic Progressive Caucus signed a letter calling for President Biden to consider diplomacy, and then in a matter of hours were pressured to retract the letter? The Members were reprimanded by the Administration and the Democratic leadership for their advocacy of peace.

In that withdrawn, forbidden letter, the Progressive Members stated,

 “The risk of nuclear weapons being used has been estimated to be higher now than at any time since the height of the Cold War. Given the catastrophic possibilities of nuclear escalation and miscalculation, which only increase the longer this war continues, we agree with your goal of avoiding direct military conflict as an overriding national-security priority. Given the destruction created by this war for Ukraine and the world, as well as the risk of catastrophic escalation, we also believe it is in the interests of Ukraine, the United States, and the world to avoid a prolonged conflict. For this reason, we urge you to pair the military and economic support the United States has provided to Ukraine with a proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire.”

Later in April 2023, nineteen Conservative Republicans, including now VP candidate Senator J.D. Vance, similarly communicated to the Administration the perils of escalating the war without diplomatic strategy, stating in their letter: 

“Our military assistance goes beyond tangible assets to include military training and intelligence support. The extent of our aid makes it increasingly difficult to deny Russian accusations of U.S. complicity in a proxy war. Vladimir Putin’s advisors are already framing the conflict as “a military confrontation between Russia and NATO, and above all the United States and Britain.” Russian tolerance for fighting a proxy war with NATO could run out at any point. The decision to invade Ukraine should be evidence enough of Putin’s willingness to use military force and should give us pause in continuing to push the limits at the risk of catastrophe.”

Ukraine is a pawn, politicized for Democratic presidential electoral gain, blood for ballots. Ukraine should have been free to choose its own destiny, its own government, protect its own agriculture and precious resources, free to live without fear of an invasion and control from Russia or any other country. Instead, denied the promise of true sovereignty, it has been forced to sacrificed the flower of its youth to war.

While the people of the US are being played by politicians who are giddy with the notion of stuffing the November ballot box with bombs rockets, missiles, artillery shells and national debt, our government is also being played by the equally unstable and craven leaders of foreign countries.

And so, the U.S. forks over endless rivers of U.S. taxpayers’ cash for endless wars, without any thought of how this all ends, or how or who ultimately pays. Red or blue, there are no winners in a war devouring our lives, our blood and our national wealth.

There is madness to all of this.  Our so-called leaders are whistling merry tunes through the graveyard of history, mocking the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because it happened to THEM, not us. Because something like that could never happen to us. Because we are smarter and stronger and have God on our side.

It is time to wake up, America. It is time to stop this madness which presents as legitimate governance, and to think, to speak and to stand for peace, diplomacy and the continuation of life on our small planet.

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A sense of urgency requires me to speak out for the common good, with common sense, to illuminate the truth, to show a better way as a response to those who would lead America, and the world, further down a path towards destruction. 

I am running for Congress as an Independent, with allegiance to America, not one political party, in OH-7.

Generations of political leaders have eroded America’s prosperity. They've exported jobs, supported casino capitalism, funded wars. Now it's not just our tax dollars they’re after. It’s our children.

The coming wars are not patriotic. They are the result of the abject failure of political leadership and a long trail of lies stretching back decades. 

Those who control the narrative and push for ever-increasing war as a solution to all ills are leading America, and America’s future generations, into an abyss from which we may never be able to recover. 

Generations of political leaders have destroyed America’s economic largess through the signing of trade agreements which exported jobs and industry abroad. They have removed consumer protections and supported massive bailouts of casino capitalism, and now - again - predators are circling to extract every cent possible from the public purse through the forever war machine. 

This time, however, it’s not just our tax dollars they’re after. It’s our children. 

The military industrial complex, which President Eisenhower so presciently described, today has a death grip  on America’s budget, politics, media narrative and foreign policy. 

We hear a brassy marching band and chowder society beating the war drum. In its wake is an infernal sucking sound as resources are pulled away from America’s domestic economy, into destructive posturing which leads to tragic hot wars and bankruptcy. 

What follows is the hemorraging of our nation’s wealth. Instead of  building things of domestic value, we blow things up around the world.  Instead of investing money into things which help our domestic economy thrive, America borrows and spends for war,  creating a mechanism for rampant inflation.    

America is already saddled with staggering war debts to the tune of trillions of dollars, with daily expanding interest payments, while  our economy weakens, our nation’s cities  crumble and the Middle Class fades.   

America is imploding from the inside while our leaders take us on an insane around-the-world journey of destruction.

We are constantly being fed a false narrative to condition us to take positions in support of U.S. taxpayer dollars and materiel shipped to other lands for fabricated wars which leave us insecure, financially weak and morally bankrupt.

We saw this with Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now with wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East. 

Our  anxiety-dispensing 24-hour news cycle demands constant glutting like Seymour Krelboyne’s human flesh-and-blood-eating plant in the Little Shop of Horrors crying:  “Feed Me!”  

The government feeds the news beast.  Fear-based clicks follow.  Fear paralyzes judgment, inhibits action and empowers corrupt leaders.  Those in journalism who raise questions about the veracity of reports from world capitals are given orders from headquarters, which if not followed, lead to being cashiered.  

Make no mistake, this current system is set up for wider wars. The kleptocratic war machine is in hyperdrive and, in the words of a political hack who was about to get a windfall of taxpayers’ cash for his favorite enterprise, with an expectation of reciprocity:“I can smell the bacon cooking!”  Except now they are roasting a whole hog..

Enter the draft!

The scaffold for a large military draft infrastructure is being constructed to prepare to sacrifice young Americans to global war. 

The first step is automatic registration for Selective Service, at a time when military recruitment is lagging, badly.  According to USA Facts, “There were 1.3 million active duty military in 2023, 41% fewer than in 1987 - - the recent peak.”  Forever wars have outstripped recruiting.  The voracious war machine needs to be fed new blood.

The House of Representatives, on June 14, 2024, passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a military spending authorization bill, which quietly included a Democratic-sponsored provision for automatic registration for the draft for 18-26 yr. old males.  The U.S. Senate Armed Forces committee released its proposal for women to be subject to the same draft registration requirements.  

All eyes on the Senate to see if they will put 18-26 year olds into the Selective Service’s automatic draft registration scheme. Unless this process is brought to a halt in the US Senate, all young U.S. men and women, fully 32 million Americans, will be subject to a draft.

Recent news reports indicate that several Republican senators are balking at drafting women and it could delay the passage of the NDAA into which the conscriptive language is folded.

All young men 18 years old are currently required to register for Selective Service, which manages the draft.  This system currently operates with a light touch. However, automatic registration for the draft  is an altogether different animal.  It will allow the Selective Service System to use the most sophisticated databases to track young Americans. This creates a surveillance system for one purpose, and one purpose only, to make sure young people can’t escape going to war.  This raises several constitutional questions, regarding the Fourth and Fifth Amendment.

Women are currently free to enlist, but are not subject to the same Selective Service requirements.  Women are already prominent in the nation’s defense, as volunteers.  According to the MilitaryOne 2022 Demographic Profile of service members, 17.5% of the active duty enlistees are women. 

The average age of both men and women in active duty is 28.5 years.

Those who see automatic registration of women for the draft as a step in the direction of equal rights are missing something essential.  This is not a case of  “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,”  or  vice versa.  

Here both goose and gander are being led to slaughter, based on…. what?  Politics?  Profits? Hegemony, Lies?  

It is up to all of us, as the current generation of parents stewarding America, to protect our future, our country, our children from such corrupt thinking..

Those who pooh-pooh automatic registration as an homage to government efficiency and not a harbinger of a full-blown draft, need to consider the following scenarios:

First the Draft, Then the War

Historically Americans have not been eager for war. In 1939, an estimated 94% of Americans professed a desire for neutrality at the start of WWII, absent any direct attack on America.   

The first and last peace-time draft was in September of 1940, and affected men were ages 21 to 45. The  government, in anticipation of entering a state of war, instituted that draft, more than a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.  The US then declared war against Japan (December 8, 1941) in the Pacific and in Europe against Germany and Italy (December 11, 1941).  

Women were not drafted during WWII,  but served critical roles in a range of national defense positions

VIETNAM: The Lie, the War, the Draft

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, passed by Congress on August 7^th, 1964 became the legal basis for the US escalation of the War in Vietnam.  War was pursued due to a fictitious intelligence report of a North Vietnamese attack, in the Gulf of Tonkin, upon US Naval assets on August 4^th 1964.   

The August 4^th Gulf of Tonkin incident was the whole-cloth fabrication of  the U.S. National Security Agency.  Congress was rushed into a war against Vietnam based on entirely false premises,  murderous lies, for which no one in the government has ever been held accountable. 

Fifty-eight thousand, two hundred and twenty courageous and dedicated U.S. soldiers sacrificed their lives to this cause, almost one third of them draftees.   At least two million and as many as six million civilians lost their lives in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the war, which was accelerated under the Johnson Administration. 

Automatic registration for the Vietnam-era draft went into effect in 1972.  Nearly two million men were drafted. 

Iraq:  The Lie, the War

On September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked by several hijacked airliners, more than 3,000 individuals died.  In response, on September 18, 2001, Congress authorized the Use of Military Force to pursue those responsible. 

The Bush Administration blamed Iraq.  It was a lie.  Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. However, in March 2003, the Administration prosecuted a war against Iraq as retribution for 9/11, with the additional horrifying, and additionally false, tale that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction it was preparing to use against America.   

Once again, Americans were led into war based upon an intricately constructed false narrative.   Four thousand, four hundred and thirty-one  Americans lost their lives in the Iraq war. With this lie, America was responsible for the deaths of one million Iraqis. 

We learned nothing from Vietnam and even less from Iraq.  It is a condition aptly described by the brilliant historian, Gore Vidal, as the “United States of Amnesia.”  The narrative of those wars has receded into the mists of confabulation. In a state of constant conflict, one war bleeds into another.  When a lie is a predicate, and the scope of the war global and the adversaries formidable, hold onto your children..

The Wars in Our Face

America’s global role should be peacemaker, bridge builder, using diplomacy to settle differences and avert conflict.  But, America doesn’t do that.  It chooses to fan and fuel the flames of war around the world.  

So, US naval assets are under attack in the Red Sea by Yemen’s Houthis opposing US support of Israel in Gaza.  The Biden Administration has kept Israel in supply of weapons and bombs.  The Gazan death toll is now approaching 38,000.  

The US has also affirmed support for Israel at war with Hezbollah in Lebanon.  At the same time National Guard units from Ohio and Illinois have being activated and sent to the Middle East.  Israel will not be able to expand war in the Middle East without the United States.

Ukraine has been a pawn in the Western effort to draw Russia into a wider war.  The people of Ukraine have paid a horrible price for the war, destruction of homes, families, farms, and businesses.   But, as they say, about the healthcare system, the money is in maintaining sickness in people, not health.  For the military industrial complex, the money is in war, not in peace. 

If the U.S. truly cared about Ukraine it would not have usurped its neutrality, overthrown its government, coaxed it to attack Donetsk and Luhansk, observe the sacrifice of 600,000 Ukrainians,  blocked a peace agreement two years ago, and facilitated the privatization of land. This is not in any way to excuse Russia for its actions in causing death and destruction, but the causal chain cannot go unexamined.

The escalation of the war between Ukraine and Russia is morphing into open conflict between the United States and Russia.  Highly sophisticated missiles, with cluster munitions, made in the U.S., programmed by the U.S. military and launched from Ukraine under U.S. supervision, are now attacking and killing Russian civilians.  The U.S. has promised to send additional  US military assistance to Ukraine for another DECADE.  

It’s time for our country to awaken to the real impetus here, and the dynamics at play, which are now about to draw a new generation into harm's way. The powers that be know that when young Americans start to die in battle, the country will rally to dive headlong into the abyss. 

Given our recent history, it will not take much for those who benefit from war to manufacture an incident to take America’s youth on a conscripted ride into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. 

CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION TO CONGRESS TO END AUTOMATIC DRAFT REGISTRATION

As US widens presence in foreign wars, new law registers all 18-26 yr olds for draft

Vietnam War was last time all of America’s youth were automatically registered

A nation does not plan a big draft unless it is preparing for a big war.  Two days ago, Congress passed legislation which mandates automatic Selective Service registration for a potential call-up of millions of young Americans, ages 18-26.

If you are a parent or grandparent, your loved ones could be directly affected.

Currently, all 18 yr old males must register with Selective Service for a potential draft.  In the past few years, such registration was uneventful.  Today, however, with the drumbeat of war sounding louder, it is worth asking the question WHY our nation is turning to automatic registration for the draft for the first time since the Vietnam war.

There are serious Constitutional issues with automatic registration for Selective Service leading to conscription, including violation of 4th Amendment privacy rights and 5th Amendment due process rights.

This goes against the spirit of individual liberty which the Founders of our country established.

Thomas Jefferson on conscription: "Our people . . . had learnt to consider it as the last of all oppressions."

If our country was under attack, I have no doubt that most Americans would rise to the occasion and participate in our nation’s defense, voluntarily.   

Our homeland is not under attack, but current US policy spends hundreds of billions of dollars globally to finance wars.  War fatigue and casualty rates have caused war-torn countries, including US allies, to resort to conscription, involuntary military service.   They need more people to fight their battles.

We must not send our young men into battle for any purpose other than to defend the United States of America, our country and no other.

Also, the US Senate has before it a proposal to extend Selective Service registration to all young women between the ages of 18-26.  When you add it all up, a stunning 32 million young Americans could be forced into the draft registration system.

Now is the time for you to be heard.  Please join with me in signing the petition to Congress to say NO to automatic registration and NO to sending our young men and women into battle on foreign soil.

The propaganda machine is hard at work in support of fueling the $$$ military industrial complex as Biden conflates Russia with Nazis. Russia lost 27 million people fighting against the Nazis!

In loving memory of Daniel Kelley who dedicated his life to creating peaceful relations between the US and Russia.

Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of D-Day. While rightly praising the few surviving soldiers of that decisive day of battle, bravery and sacrifice in 1944, President Biden went on to conflate the hallowed D-Day counter-offensive against the Nazis, with the current U.S.-backed proxy war with Russia.

This is a total mischaracterization of the current conflict.

The Ukraine war is a wholly unnecessary conflict ignited by NATO expansionism and a $5.2 billion, US-led coup against a democratically elected government a decade ago. The conflict is now fueled by hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons and cash from NATO countries, spurred by the U.S.

The slaughter continues because the American people are being lied to, daily.

A proposed peace agreement was sabotaged on April 9, 2022, by the U.S. and the U.K.  According to Davyd Arakhamia, the leader of Ukraine’s ruling party, Russia would have withdrawn its troops merely in exchange for Ukraine’s neutrality.  Now Ukraine is likely to lose territory in any peace agreement.

The UK’s Boris Johnson carried the message to Ukraine, which scuttled an end to the war:  Fight to the last Ukrainian.

We are told that victory is just around the corner, when almost all objective military analysts have concluded that Ukraine’s military is about to crumble.

Ukraine is being used as an innocent pawn, advanced for slaughter, to justify a long-planned  strategy to weaken and fragment Russia no matter the losses to Ukraine and Europe.

Ukrainians are losing seven to nine soldiers to every Russian on the battlefield, because they have lost control of the air.

It is likely that at least 450,000 Ukrainians have died. Russian deaths are in the 60,000 range, according to respected observers.

The Ukrainian people, lovers of freedom to their core, were given no other alternative but to grimly push forward, and an entire society and a generation of Ukrainian youth have been destroyed.

As the military options for success have receded, Americans are told that sanctions have crippled the Russian economy. But the Russian economy has rebounded dramatically from sanctions. Sanctions fail “when applied to a large resource-rich technically proficient economy,” explained noted economist, James K. Galbraith in an April 2023 article, “The Gift of Sanctions: An Analysis of Assessments of the Russian Economy 2022-2023.”

Sanctions allowed the Russian government to impose “trade protections, industrial policy and capital controls” which it could never have done in their absence. The West’s unwillingness to engage in diplomacy has placed Russia on a war footing, kept it there and forced it to be more self-sufficient.

In short, the US/NATO strategy to weaken Russia militarily, economically and, consequently, politically, has fallen apart.

So, to keep the propaganda-cash machine churning we have the US State Department’s confabulated narrative, Russia = Nazis.  This is a dangerous equation which requires not just historical amnesia, but a willful, wholly corrupt distortion of gargantuan proportions which can only incite hatred of America.

Alliances can shift, but when the narrative shifts, and history is reshaped and edited and retold to fit the political convenience of the moment, when Lies = Truth, we have arrived not at Election Day 2024, but the eve of our own destruction.

During WW II over three dozen nations sent their best to stand up to the Nazi’s designs for world conquest. The United States paid a heavy price. At least 416,800 American soldiers perished in the fight for freedom, with 4, 414 Allied troops falling at Normandy on D-Day.

The Soviet Union, suffered over 27 million deaths in WW II, including military and civilians.  In defense of Stalingrad, over one million Russians died.

No other country fighting the Nazis had this level of casualties. Russians were outnumbered two to one on the eastern front,  yet prevailed. 

It took Russia almost a generation to recover from the compounding effects of the loss of lives, health, housing, infrastructure, and industry.

The Russians, for a brief period after WWII was won, were our friends, until the Truman Doctrine of 1947. Designed by George F. Kennan, it was structured to contain the political, economic and military growth of the USSR, and initiated a period of “Cold War.”

NATO, and a multi-trillion-dollar arms race, which sapped the vitality of both the USA and the USSR, are the progeny of the Truman Doctrine.

Preparation for more war took precedence over social necessities like schools.

The war in Ukraine proclaims freedom while delivering death to Ukrainians, debt bondage to the rest of us-- and massive profits for the corporate war machine.

The war between Ukraine and Russia was provoked by western interests. It did not have to happen. Once it did, it could have and should have been ended quickly. It continues today, not to free Ukraine, but to cover-up the cupidity and the failure of western interventionism.

“Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it,” said the Philosopher George Santayana.

And what of those who mangle history, who dice it through the shredder of self -interest, political ambition and fantasies of conquest, while erasing historic commonalities which should be invoked for friendship, rather than enmity?

What do they get?

Re-Elected?

What do We The People get? More debt and more war, now openly risking nuclear escalation and annihilation.

State-ordered Purge of Truth-Tellers in Time of War. Scott Ritter Passport Seized, WaPo Smears Indy Journalists

Scott Ritter was pulled off a NY-to-Istanbul flight yesterday by US officials and his passport confiscated in a startling new development in the government’s open drive to censor and silence critics of the Administration’s foreign policies at a time when the United States is supplying billions of dollars in arms to foment wider war in Russia, accelerate the attacks on Gazans and set the stage for war with China over Taiwan.

A Marine veteran and true American patriot, Mr. Ritter is also a noted former Chief UN weapons inspector, author and journalist.  He was enroute to Russia to attend an international conference in St. Petersburg.  

Mr. Ritter first came to my attention when he testified at a Capitol hearing I sponsored to inquire into the Bush Administration’s plans to attack Iraq. Ritter warned in August of 2002 that a case had not been made for attacking Iraq.  

Had Congress listened to Mr. Ritter, the US would have been spared the loss of thousands of our soldiers and the waste of trillions of tax dollars. Over one million Iraqis died as a result of the US attack on their country. America’s financial and moral debt will never be able to be repaid, but would not exist if we had simply looked at the evidence he presented.

Mr. Ritter’s  passport was confiscated yesterday by U.S. authorities without explanation.

There are several Constitutional issues at stake here:

1. The taking of his passport was  an illegal seizure, prohibited by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Mr. Ritter asked for, but did not receive a receipt, for the seized passport.  

2. The seizure represents a punitive attempt to censor his views, a violation of his First Amendment right to free speech and freedom of the press.

3. His Fifth Amendment rights to due process were violated. Someone in the State Department made an administrative decision to prevent his travel and to take away his passport.  Since there was no stated reason for the seizure, there was no open court hearing, no evidence to justify the confiscation of Mr. Ritter’s passport was presented publicly.  The whole process has a Kafka-like Trial feeling, where Mr. Ritter cannot find out what he is accused of. 

The State Department was aware of Mr. Ritter’s travel three weeks before his planned departure, giving rise to the likelihood that the interception was designed to humiliate Mr. Ritter, in addition to the blatant disregard of his Constitutional rights.

Mr. Ritter has been critical of U.S. foreign policy, and has repeatedly stated his objections to widening war clearly and cogently in his podcasts.  

While the State Department has jurisdiction over travel, it has no ability to cancel the rights accorded all Americans under the U.S. Constitution, including freedom of movement.

There needs to be an inquiry into the State Department’s actions here.  Many serious questions arise, all of Constitutional import:

Was Mr. Ritter’s passport seized based on secret evidence, and authorized under President Bush’s Executive Order 13224, which established a national emergency, (now 23 years old!) and reauthorized last year by President Biden?

Was the passport seized under the Patriot Act?  The public has a right to know the reasons why.

Were the expanded powers given the government in the recent reauthorization of Section 702 of the Patriot Act in play here?  

Has Scott Ritter been under federal surveillance because of the exercise of his First Amendment rights?

Was Ritter intercepted because of his attempt to build a bridge of peace toward Russia?

This is not only about Scott Ritter.  

Any American, journalist or not, who challenges the state in the current climate may find themselves subject to arbitrary procedures and even politically-inspired prosecution.  That is the real state of emergency.  

Chris Hedges, a man of impeccable journalist credentials, was canceled after he and I engaged in a discussion criticizing US foreign policy, on his show The Real News. 

Julian Assange’s arrest and imprisonment at the instance of the US government gave fair warning to every journalist of the price which may be paid for exposing official acts of the murder of innocent civilians in Iraq.

When the Constitutional rights of any of us are under attack, the Constitutional rights of all of us are under attack.  Who else will have their travel restricted because the government does not like what one is saying?  Who else will be surveilled?  Who else will be prosecuted?  Who else will have their Constitutional rights denied?

Of equal concern was the simultaneous publication yesterday by the Washington Post which casts as disinformation the work of journalists, including several Americans, who have challenged the State Department’s narrative with regard to Russia and Iran. 

It would seem the Washington Post has taken seriously the sardonic dictum of A.J. Leibling:  “Freedom of the Press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”   The corporatization of the First Amendment, and the concentration of media into fewer and fewer hands, are major reasons why America is under constant threat of war and why our Constitutional freedoms are in trouble.   

Independent authors and journalists are struggling to provide a response which protects our freedom of speech.  They also have access to the same Constitutional protection of Freedom of the Press as the Washington Post, the New York Times and other large corporate publishers. 

Governments’ fear of being challenged is as old as the case of John Peter Zenger, who 1734 printed the New York Weekly Journal.  Zenger’s persistent prodding of the Crown’s provincial governor resulted in him being charged with libel.  He won the case, establishing truth as a defense.

Today the well understood truth is as deeply offensive to liars as freedom is offensive to tyrants.  “Our liberty,” wrote Thomas Jefferson ten years after The Declaration of Independence, “depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”

Today’s independent American journalists are fighting for their freedom, and ours! 

Perpetual Presidential Emergency Powers and the Undermining of the Constitutional Balance of Power

More than 23 years ago, George W. Bush, Jr. signed  Presidential Proclamation 7463 declaring that a “national emergency exists by reason of the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, New York, New York, and the Pentagon, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.”  

The White House has demonstrated, in several administrations, both Democrat and Republican, “threat inflation” for the sake of spending endless money on wars, and manipulating fears to hold on to power to continue to spend endless money on even more wars in the ultimate protection racket.

As a result, the constitutional system of checks and balances is being obliterated in favor of an Imperial Presidency, and, as the Constitution is eroded, so too, are our liberties.  

The recent chipping away at our First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights can be traced directly to the psychology of a "State of Emergency," which licenses shredding of freedom. 

Presidents no longer ask Congress for explicit permission to go to war, as the Constitution requires, under Article 1, Section 8.  Courts have held that once Congress appropriates money for wars, that is  tantamount to congressional approval.

The increased spending for war has militarized our culture, proliferates enemies, creates violence at home and abroad.

We must break this cycle of fear, the endless wars and the emergency powers for Presidents who are not accountable to the Congress, which is directly elected by the people.

Those of us who witnessed the events of 9/11, up close, or from a distance, will never forget the imminent danger, the fear, the grief, the loss, the uncertainty that gripped us in those days. Nor will we forget those whose lives were sacrificed, or those who gave their lives in service to humanity on that day, or those who died following long-term illnesses which began during and after the attacks 23 years ago.

That is why it may surprise some that on September 7, 2023, President Joe Biden proclaimed, “I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency previously declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.”  

23 years later and trillions upon trillions of dollars spent to “make us safer” and we are still in a “State of Emergency,”  facing the same terror threats?  

America has been in and continues to be in a State of Emergency which has endowed the Presidency with broad powers and undermined the Constitutional role of Congress, while placing presidential emergency declarations on par with congressional declarations of war, under Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.  Presidents from Bush, Jr., to Biden have all capitalized on declarations of a state of emergency.

Congress is a co-equal branch of government. America’s Founders did not design the Congress to be subordinate to the Presidency, but strong presidents and weak Congresses have created that condition.

According to Congressional Research Service (CRS), there are 106 laws which further empower the executive branch following a presidential declaration of a “National Emergency.”  The Brennan Center for Justice has identified a total of 136 expanded executive powers.  

The emergency powers may not have been used explicitly but their use is authorized once a “National Emergency” is declared.  Among the emergency powers of the President, (as cited by CRS) without a need for congressional permission:

• Executive ability to detail members of the armed forces to foreign countries, without congressional approval.

• Undertake military construction.

• Carry out military construction with NATO funds.

• Order “Ready Reserve” to active duty for two years, without their consent.

• Additional penalties for “gathering, transmitting or losing defense information.”

• Lift prohibition on infectious medical waste being dumped in the ocean.

• Seize, shutdown or appropriate broadcast stations.

• Suspend laws concerning production and transportation of chemical, biological  and “warfare agents.”

We live in a forever state of emergency, with forever wars, forever fears, forever siphoning off our tax dollars.

Remember:

-    The Bush Administration lied when it claimed that Iraq was behind 9/11,  but proceeded to characterize Iraqis as terrorists in an attempt to justify killing one million Iraqi citizens.

-    Since 9/11, over $8 trillion dollars of our $34 trillion dollar national debt is attributable to wars which never had to be fought, wars which put the lives of America’s brave sons and daughters on the line.

-    The United States shelved diplomacy in favor of weaponry as a means of international relations.

-    At present the USA spends close to one trillion dollars a year for supporting a war machine and that nearly 60% of all discretionary spending goes for preparation for war.

-    The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, (NIE) which was the (closely held) product of all US intelligence agencies, did not identify Iraq as a major threat, because it was not. The publicly available 2024 Annual Threat Assessment (ATA) of the U.S. Intelligence Community brings forth two paragraphs, out of a 41 page report, regarding “global terrorism.”  

There was no discussion in the ATA of the basis for President Biden's most recent declaration of a national emergency and the "continuing and immediate threats" even though the ATA report was being drafted at about the time that the President  continued the “National Emergency” in the name of a 23-year fight against “terrorism.”

The CATO Institute, whose pocket Constitution I carried with me during my years in Congress, suggests amending the National Emergencies Act to rein in Executive power by requiring congressional approval, and putting expiration dates on emergency powers.

Does the US have enemies?  Yes.  Should we be on our guard?  Yes. 

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”  

We should also be vigilant against government manipulating our love of country, playing with our fears, in order to control us, or to use us to support the continued erosion of our US Constitution and advance the malevolent ambitions of the military industrial complex, of which President Eisenhower warned in 1961.  

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”--The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified Dec., 15, 1791.

An open assault on the First Amendment is occurring across America, as college students who are peacefully exercising their Constitutional right to freedom of speech, challenging government policies, are being arrested in droves.

The self-appointed Congressional Overseers of Higher Education, who hauled politically naïve university presidents into their star chambers and publicly castigated the savants for not admonishing their students to be sufficiently sympathetic to genocide, essentially demanded loyalty, not to America, but to the deadly agenda of a country not our own. 

Leading government officials have expressed dismay at the furor which has erupted on campuses and have encouraged the use of repressive tactics. 

What is happening on campuses?  Did the students not get the message? - -   Obey!

Obey, or there will be no graduation. Obey! Or you cannot be valedictorian. Obey! Or be suspended, expelled, even denied employment opportunities. Obey! Or you will be marked for life as a troublemaker, a disrupter. Obey! If you want to get ahead in society.  Obey!  Don’t make demands. Don’t even ask questions. Obey! You are students.  Your lot is to listen, and Obey.

The relative quiescence on campuses in the past few decades has been misread as students being interested in their inner world and not the outer world.  Social media had become a soporific and a grand distraction. Campuses were generally the last places expected to ignite political movements.

Oh, how dangerously wrong America’s leaders are about the energy that issues  spontaneously on campuses, demanding an end to mass violence sanctioned and financed by our government.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, campuses were the flash points from which the Vietnam-era anti-war movement grew. I remember student rallies at Cleveland State University (CSU).  Then, instead of threatening students with arrest, CSU President Harold Enarson created a space for them to gather, spoke to students, encouraged peaceful protest and, as a result, Cleveland State University, still in its infancy, was a catalyst for social and political change. 

The protests focused public attention on the Vietnam War. The  political became personal.  President Lyndon Baines Johnson became the target.

“LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today,” was a chant heard on campuses and on streets where masses gathered to demand an end to the war. 

The protests drove Johnson from the presidency.  He announced on March 31, 1968:

“I have concluded that I should not permit the presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year….Accordingly, I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

Then came Kent State University, and four dead in Ohio on May 4, 1970.

Years later, as chairman of a congressional oversight subcommittee, I quietly probed the Kent State shootings and learned (as had others before me) that a suspected FBI asset on campus, taking pictures of protestors, found himself suddenly surrounded by students who believed him to be an informant, and he drew a gun.    

He may have fired shots in the air which were mistaken as an attack on the Ohio National Guard,  (which unfortunately had been ordered to campus by the Governor), and the Guard returned fire, setting off a national tragedy. 

Unfortunately, the FBI did not cooperate with my request for a further search of records to determine the precise role of its informant and my term in Congress came to a close.  Who fired the first shot?  Was it someone acting as an agent of the government?   

Government at all levels must tread lightly in using force against peaceful protestors who are exercising their constitutional right to freedom of speech. 

Agencies and counter-parties to the debate over U.S. foreign policy must avoid sending informants, or worse, agents provocateurs into a campus fray. 

One only needs to be aware of the execrable COINTELPRO gambit of US intelligence agencies which infiltrated, disrupted and derailed protests and causes which challenged the status quo, during the Vietnam era.

 We should view campus protests as one of the few healthy signs in a nation where government spying, support for a genocidal war, abandonment of Constitutional liberties and media complicity has constructed not only an alternate politics, but an alternate reality.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.  It was their final, most essential command,” wrote George Orwell in 1984.

College students are not rejecting the evidence of their eyes and ears.  Thirty-Four thousand dead Palestinians, most of them women and children.  The students know the horrific violence going on thousands of miles away, and they know their government is licensing it.  They are demanding the war cease.  

They are standing on more than two centuries of citizen action challenging the government. Those who misuse their authority to suppress legitimate dissent are undermining foundational Constitutional freedoms, the Freedom of Speech and the Right to Protest. The First Amendment is the cornerstone of the American Republic.

Our Constitution; Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness... Economic Security, Being Sacrificed to Endless Wars

Dwight David Eisenhower, the Prophet-President of the United States, sixty-four years ago warned of the ascension of the military-industrial state, presently morphed into the military-industrial-intelligence complex, which, fully in control of our government, induces and manipulates our fears, creating serial enemies, justifying endless war for profit, openly canceling long-cherished constitutional rights, within  the hoary rubric of “National Security,” read: Plunder of the American taxpayer.  

Congress, as an Article One creation is in the thrall of  murderous interest groups which  are actively driving mass killings, assassinations, famine and ethnic cleansing, the progeny of genocide, in plain sight, recycling  U.S. taxpayers’ hard-earned money to tighten its grip on American politics, all the while using its media influence to deny any of this is happening, denying even the existence of a people, or how they died,  as  bodies pile up by the tens of thousands in Gaza.

The extent to which patriotic Americans are being cynically manipulated is exemplified by events of the past week.  Congress forfeited, by single votes in the House and Senate, our Fourth Amendment right to from unreasonable search and seizure, passing the FISA extension and setting the stage for an official police state.   

Next, Congress cheered as members wildly waved the flag of another  nation inside the chamber of the House, (!) ignoring a $34 trillion deficit, adding  another reality-defying $95 billion for “foreign aid,” (war) on top of the nearly one trillion dollars which now goes ANNUALLY to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to wage, on the national credit card, unrelenting war against countless innocents, while across this land anyone who dares exercise our Constitutionally-guaranteed  First Amendment right to speak out in protest on campus, at work, or  in the media,  is condemned, suspended, expelled, or fired.    

Our President and the leaders of foreign nations are in a deadly gandy-dance of denial and mass death, one theatrically begging the other to stop the bombing while providing bombs, not to escalate, while paying for escalation, thus enabling an ever more heartbreaking level of carnage, and collective punishment in open betrayal of our sacred quest for “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of. Happiness.”  Our government stands ready to defend almost any  country’s borders, but our own.

In our country, Americans are smothered in debt, having difficulty keeping up with inflation, seeing a middle class destroyed while trade agreements drove down wages and benefits, eliminated jobs, putting housing, education and health opportunities increasing out of the reach of more and more Americans, making a mockery of the America Dream.

We must break this deadly fealty to shadow-nations and corrupt and corrupting interest groups whose own leaders have without conscience enacted the worst example of man’s inhumanity to man in dark service of an ethno-religious project which is antithetical to every moral principle articulated in America’s founding documents. 

It is urgent that 2024 be the year when we, the American people, make a new beginning.

We must take up our Constitution as a shield and insist upon the Freedoms it guarantees.

We must align with those essentially spiritual values which support life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

We must stop licensing and financing genocide.

We must stop funding and fueling wars around the world.

We must stop building up the freedom- extinguising national debt.

We must take care of our own people here at home.

We must begin to pay attention to the one nation whose affairs should matter most to us:

The United States of America.