Author: Adam Dick

Have you secured your ticket to the April 29 “Non-Intervention: America’s Original Foreign Policy” conference in Charleston, South Carolina? You can watch a new video conversation of two of the people who will speak at the event — Jacob G. Hornberger, who is president of the Future of Freedom Foundation (FFF), and Richard M. Ebeling, who is a professor at The Citadel military college — for a preview of some of the discussion that will take place at the conference. Hornberger and Ebeling also provide reasons — from historical sites to beautiful beaches — why it may be wise to expand a trip to Charleston for the conference into a great vacation.

The conference, sponsored by FFF and the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity (RPI), will take place from 1:00pm to 5:00pm on Sunday, April 29 at the Mills House, a Wyndham Grand Hotel in Charleston’s historic district.

Along with Hornberger and Ebeling, RPI Chairman Ron Paul and RPI Executive Director Daniel McAdams will speak at the conference.

Interviewed Monday at The Real News, College of William & Mary Professor and retired United States Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson strongly criticized arguments Secretary of Defense James Mattis presented, in a letter to congressional leaders last week, in opposition to there being a vote on S.J.Res. 54 or other congressional measures to end or restrain the US government’s support for the Saudi Arabia–led war on Yemen.

Wilkerson was asked by host Sharmini Peries about what she termed “three main arguments” in Mattis’ letter: that Saudi Arabia is acting in self-defense, that absent US support Saudi Arabia would kill more civilians, and that the US must support an ally such as Saudi Arabia. “All three of them are nonsense, and I am really ashamed of Jim Mattis for making them,” Wilkerson replied.

Ron Paul and Jocob G. Hornberger — two of the premier voices for peace in America — will speak at a foreign policy conference next month hosted jointly by Paul and Hornberger’s respective educational organizations — the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity (RPI) and the Future of Freedom Foundation (FFF). The Sunday, April 29 conference titled “Non-intervention: America’s Original Foreign Policy” will take place from 1:00pm to 5:00pm in Charleston, South Carolina.

In addition to Paul and Hornberger, speakers at the conference will include RPI Executive Director and Ron Paul Liberty Report co-host Daniel McAdams, as well as Richard M. Ebeling, a professor at The Citadel military college. Ebeling, together with Hornberger, hosts FFF’s The Libertarian Angle show.

A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues posted on Saturday. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud.

Listen to the new episode here:

Read a transcript of the new episode, including links to further information regarding the topics discussed, here:

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity welcomes you to Five Minutes Five Issues.

Starting in five four three two one.

“We’ve been here before,” College of William & Mary Professor Lawrence Wilkerson declared in a Monday The Real News interview in which he relates his less-than-optimistic take on an anticipated meeting between North Korea leader Kim Jong-un and United States President Donald Trump. The meeting’s purposes would apparently include reducing tensions between the two nations and preventing a major military conflict from arising in the Korean region.

Wilkerson, in making this comment, is referring to talks in North Korea capital Pyongyang in the latter months of the Bill Clinton administration between then-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Kim Jong-Un’s predecessor and father Kim Jong-il. The expected follow-up visit by Clinton to Pyongyang never materialized. Further, the prior progress was lost in the succeeding George W Bush administration, in which Wilkerson explains that Bush had gathered around him “people like Dick Cheney and John Bolton and others who had made it a point of life to eliminate the agreed framework that Bill Clinton had negotiated with North Korea.” Wilkerson saw much of this firsthand as he notes he was “more or less the right-hand man” of Secretary of State Colin Powell “for actions vis-à-vis North Korea and South Korea” at the State Department, where Wilkerson was Powell’s chief of staff.

Again, Wilkerson expects peace will not be secured due to failures on the US side. In fact, Wilkerson says in the interview that he believes the meeting between the US and North Korea leaders will most likely not happen and that — if it does happen — he does not expect the discussions will result in a peace treaty to truly end the Korean War, which has merely been on a decades-long pause with a cease-fire and demilitarized zone, or in ending the US-South Korea alliance and the presence of US military forces in South Korea.

A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues posted on Saturday. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud.

Listen to the new episode here:

Read a transcript of the new episode, including links to further information regarding the topics discussed, here:

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity welcomes you to Five Minutes Five Issues.

Starting in five four three two one.

Questioned, in a Wednesday RT interview, about North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s recent comment that there is no intention to stay in Iraq “longer than necessary,” libertarian communicator Ron Paul quipped that “their definition of ‘necessary’ is a lot different than a lot of other peoples’.” In contrast to the foreign intervention proponents, including those in the United States government, Paul notes that the Iraq parliament has voted that the US military should leave Iraq — something Paul wrote about in an editorial earlier this week.

While Paul says in the interview that he wishes the American people would say “enough is enough” and demand an end to the US military intervention, he concludes regarding the US foreign intervention in Iraq and beyond that “I guess we’re gonna continue to do this until we go bankrupt, and then we’ll have to leave.”

When Texas Democratic Party primary voters filled out their ballots on Tuesday, they encountered two propositions, on which they were invited to vote “for” or “against,” that mentioned the Federal Reserve. One proposition said the party should promote a “national jobs program” for infrastructure projects financed through the Federal Reserve. The other proposition proclaimed that Texans should “have the right to refinance student loan debt with the Federal Reserve at a 0% interest rate.” The voters approved both propositions, as they did the other ten propositions on the ballot, with over 90 percent support.

A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues posted on Saturday. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud.

Listen to the new episode here:

Read a transcript of the new episode, including links to further information regarding the topics discussed, here:

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity welcomes you to Five Minutes Five Issues.

Starting in five four three two one.

In the days following the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed into law a 60-word sentence that set the stage for perpetual war. This 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) contains no time limits, no geographic constraints, and no exit strategy. It has effectively become a blank check for any president, at any time, to wage war without congressional consent or oversight.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the 2001 AUMF has been cited as statutory authority for unclassified military or related actions at least 41 times in 18 countries. Both President George W. Bush and President Obama used it, and now President Trump is following the same path.

That is a portion of the cogent analysis Reps Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Justin Amash (R-MI) offer in their Wednesday The Hill editorial explaining why they support repealing the AUMF that has facilitated members of the United States Congress abdicating their authority over US wars and three presidents exercising unrestrained use of military force abroad. The editorial came the day after Lee and Amash hosted a joint hearing of the United States House of Representatives Progressive Caucus and Liberty Caucus focused on exploring repealing the AUMF.