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Oct. 24, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
18:46
Flashback: Julian Assange Joins Ron Paul Institute Conference 2017

The Liberty Report will be back LIVE on Thursday. Please enjoy this flashback of Julian Assange joining Ron Paul Institute Conference 2017.

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Time Text
US Defense Budget Boom 00:07:16
Thanks guys.
Did I see John Kiriakou sneaking around there somewhere?
I'm comfortably seated.
Oh, there you are.
Well, thank you very much for joining us, Julian.
The floor is yours.
Thank you.
First of all, I'd like to pay a kind of tribute, I suppose, to Ron Paul and his institute and the people that have supported him over the years.
And what I know from personal experience is a very courageous position and principal position in relation to...
to the war racket.
I think it's much better to describe it like that rather than saying US foreign policy because there are some parts of US foreign policy which are good.
But the war racket which dominates, unfortunately, the decisions that are made in US foreign policy is something that is not good.
And I think we can see this basically from first principles that there are types of human interactions which are not zero-sum, which as a result of the interaction and work.
Everyone is left better off.
But when you're building bombs and dropping them on people, with some very rare exceptions, everyone is worse off.
The resources that have gone into the construction are wasted and you've destroyed the productive capacities of those who have their systems or industry destroyed.
But it does make a profit for some people involved.
One of the difficulties I have in speaking to this audience is that I think you all know that.
In some ways, not a lot has changed from when Smedley Butler described this phenomenon, the war racket in the 1930s.
There's, of course, an internal dimension to it and an external dimension, which externally can also be a protection racket.
But if you understand that nearly, sorry, just over $7 trillion has been spent since 2001 on the various wars that the United States has been involved in, pulling in some of its allies, but that expenditure is from the US Treasury, together with the interest that will be paid on the loans that were borrowed to conduct that activity.
You can see that the extent of the wealth transfer into these destructive war industries.
And if you see that a US election, let's look at the last one, last federal election, it costs about $2 billion to run, and you compare that to $7 trillion, even just compared, let's say, to Saudi arms contracts of some $400 billion, that even if you just take half a percent on the value of the Saudi arms contracts alone,
you can fund both sides of US politics in a national election campaign.
So that's the size of the industry that people are up against.
I have a question that I'd like someone to answer because the answer is not clear to me, but I think it's very interesting, which is the US defense budget has increased by about $100 billion this year, from $600 to $700 billion.
And that's very serious.
That's a nearly 20% increase in the military and intelligence budget.
Now, Trump in his election campaign promised an increase in the budget and he threw down one of his ambitious opening negotiation positions of the increase of $50 billion.
And the Congress, including two-thirds of, sorry, the House, including two-thirds of Democrats, increased that by another $50 billion.
Now, $50 billion is the size of the entire Russian military budget.
So Trump not only receives all of his ambit claim of an increase of $50 billion, but the Congress has now increased that by another $50 billion.
So an increase of double the entire Russian military budget just this year.
And I really am very curious as to where that's coming from.
So you can perhaps look at some political dimensions of a fight for loyalties.
That the only element really of hard power that Trump has is perhaps the military and his White House has been infested by generals.
So perhaps there's a desire by the Congress also to bid for those loyalties.
Or does it reflect a much more concerning trend?
And I rather think that it does, which is the contraction in the ability of the US Empire to rule itself, or rather rule others, which is of course inevitable as US GDP has declined from some 50% of world GDP to some 20% of world GDP today.
Obviously the United States can't hang on to its 500 to 1300 military bases, depending on how you count them, across the world when its proportion of global GDP has diminished so much.
So are we seeing what is perhaps the beginnings of the death throes of the war racket in its attempt to hold on to that, which it cannot hold on to?
Because there is an equivalent, which was towards the end of the Soviet Union.
And as its ability to hold on to its territories and regions of influence diminished, its military budget started to skyrocket as well.
Non-State Intelligence Agencies' Impact 00:11:18
And if so, I think that's a very unfortunate trajectory for the United States and its people to have their productive industry diverted into wealth-destroying and dangerous military-industrial complex.
And perhaps, I don't know if we have time for a couple of questions.
How are we going?
Okay, that's good.
I'll just mention one other thing.
I'm sure others will mention it as well, but it's of personal interest and a bit of amusement, that the US Senate Intelligence Committee, which has 14 senators, just Friday, the week before last, added an addendum to the proposed yearly intelligence bill, section 623.
And section 623 is the WikiLeaks bill, nakedly stated, which tries to define me and my staff as a non-state intelligence agency.
And so when I first saw this, I thought, well, that's kind of cool, having your own Senate bill with your own number on it.
There was one dissenter out of the 14, which is Ron Wyden.
I want to congratulate him for his principled dissent.
He has over a number of similar issues dissented in the past.
But it will go to the House and it will go to the Senate.
And when you track where this comes from, non-state intelligence agency, it's kind of, it's incoherent.
What the hell does that mean?
Non-state.
Non-state intelligence agency.
That's very odd.
Well, it comes from Mike Pompeo, the new Trump director of the CIA.
I hear he was a pick by Mike Pence.
So he's pushed that as some kind of Pompeo doctrine.
I do know where it's come from, which I will leave for a different time, where it actually originated within the machine.
But yeah, I don't know.
Should we say have t-shirts all the way to the top with 623?
Or there should be some campaign to absolutely mock this absurd construction.
When it first came out, I said, look, look, the CIA, it was actually the maiden speech of Pompeo, is calling us a non-state intelligence agency.
This is absurd to be called this phrase by a state non-intelligence agency.
But seriously, that I think is also a very interesting question on the...
Is there any similarity to what media organizations do and what intelligence agencies do?
Well, media organizations develop sources, protect them, take their information, analyze it.
And the analytical part of intelligence agencies also develop sources, take the information, and analyze it.
But the key difference is what happens at the end, or rather, what should happen at the end, which is a media organization publishes.
An intelligence organization doesn't publish.
And on this spectrum between intelligence organization and pure publisher, Wikileaks is famously, obsessively pure in its publishing.
That is, what we obtain, provided it fits our editorial criteria being significant and suppressed, then we publish all of it, sometimes to much criticism.
Whereas organizations like the New York Times, these are very much closer to the intelligence agency behavior because they suppress information prior to the elections.
They also publish fake information leading to war.
In fact, as someone who's involved in the media business and who's been the subject of a lot of media, I can't tell you the degree of contempt and frankly revulsion I feel for most of the media industry.
There are some fine exceptions, but these are exceptional people in part because they are such an exception and have to nonetheless deal in that environment.
If you think about the Iraq war, what is the, we all know the culpability of the CIA and the Bush administration, but what is the culpability of journalists in the Iraq war and in other wars?
Well, look at the numbers.
If you look at the number of political journalists in the United States, but equally serious problems here in the United Kingdom, actually it's something like 5,000 active political journalists, but not talking about sport or cooking or something.
So the failure of these political journalists, national security journalists, their failure to do what they claim is their job resulted in how many deaths?
Easily over a million, maybe pushing up to two million if you include the knock-on effects in Syria and Libya.
So what is the death count per journalist?
It is several hundred people killed by your average political journalist as a result of their incompetence and their failure to do the job that they promised to do, which is to hold power to account, to not censor information and withhold it from the public if they know about it, and to be ever questioning, and I would say also to fight for the rights to continue that activity.
In the United States, that's the First Amendment internationally, Article 19.
So how are we going?
Okay.
So just one more thought.
It's, I think, dangerous in this business to run into the trap of securitizing what we perceive to be a dangerous phenomenon.
Because if you look at essentially what the war racket is, yes, it's essentially a way to launder tax dollars using some excuse.
But what is the excuse?
Well, the excuse is that there's some threat.
And so they're always involved in hyping up threats in order to increase their share of the tax take.
And internationally, of course, it's more of a protection racket, which is you pay us and we won't bomb you.
But I think we should be careful about Overstating the competence of these organizations.
Once you understand that they're basically just in it for the money, the tremendous incompetence starts to be something that you would expect to manifest.
For example, I'm fond of saying that at one level, the CIA is perhaps the most incompetent organization that has ever existed.
Let's look at what it professes its competence to be.
It professes its competence as protecting the security interests of the American people and to a degree its allies.
But this is the organization whose actions gave us a theocracy in Iran, who gave us Pinochet in Chile, who gave us the Iraq war and all the terrorism and squalor and death that emerged from that, who gave us Libya and turbocharged ISIS and jihadist groups across the Middle East.
This is an agency that can't even keep its secrets from WikiLeaks, a small investigative publisher.
I just find that absolute madness.
Look at our rescue of Edward Snowden from Hong Kong, why I was trapped in this embassy.
That's absolutely ridiculous.
I have a cool staff, they're bright people, but we're a small investigative publisher.
How can it be that in a well-defined toss-up to get Edward Snowden asylum somewhere or have him be arrested, where it's just us lot and a few friends and lawyers against these titanic organizations, and we're successful?
It doesn't make any sense.
So the answer is that, you know, I'd like the answer to be that, you know, me and my staff now, lawyers, we're all geniuses.
But I'm afraid the reality is that these are just totally incompetent organizations with a Stalinist bureaucratic structure who don't really believe in half the work that they do,
who are always looking about how to get, you know, to get some money, enter into the contractor sphere, and so on.
So I think in some ways we should be quite hopeful about those examples of just how incompetent these organizations are.
And while at the kind of physical level, installing mass surveillance and producing bombs and dropping them, they are competent and they have good logistics.
At the dynamic political level, they're very incompetent.
And I think we have to show people that incompetence So people are not scared to resist their activities, which are very destructive,
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