Lew Rockwell Institute

Graham Dugas wrote:

Before in 2023

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/08/argentina-election-javier-milei-economists-warning

In between

https://x.com/laderechadiario/status/1941317561167249624

2025 reality

https://x.com/Bangershell11/status/1941388193070448878

The post Keynesian predictions and Misean realities appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer.

Interesting Engineering

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Writes, Ryan McMaken:

Dan Bongino is exactly who you’d expect him to be: A Ted Cruz level Israel worshipper and servant of the warfare state: 

When recently asked what political issue is “near and dear to your heart” he states: “Israel and the defense of Israel”.

Bongino has now also totally reversed himself on the Epstein “client list” and says the official government position has always been true. 

The post Dan Bongino’s top political issue is “the defense of Israel” appeared first on LewRockwell.

After attorney general Pam Bondi claimed that she had Jeffrey Epstein’s client list on her desk, her FBI leaked a memo to Axios that says no such client list exists (and that Epstein did not commit suicide in prison).  I wonder what the Vegas odds are that the exact opposite is true?

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Thanks.  John Frahm.

The Gateway Pundit

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Tim McGraw wrote:

Hi Lew,

Great article! My Mom is 93. My Dad would be 93 as well, but he died at the age of 89. Yes, they had tough childhoods, but they sure were optimistic, hard workers. Mom still is. My parents came from nothing. Dad had to borrow a neighbor’s car in a snowstorm in Minneapolis to take Mom to the hospital when I was born. They worked hard and became millionaires. But they never lost their roots and common touch. They never got arrogant.

People like my parents won’t come again for a long time if ever.

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Thanks, Maureen McKerracher.   

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States Rights has been a dominant theme in American history. We all know about the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, the Tariff of Abominations, the War Between the States, the battle over the civil rights movement, and so on. But I’m not going to rehash American history in this week’s column. Instead, I’m going to ask a more fundamental question. What should Rothbardians think about states rights?

For Rothbard, the key question in all political issues is  how to promote freedom. As he says in The Ethics of Liberty, “Libertarianism, then, is a philosophy seeking a policy. But what else can a libertarian philosophy say about strategy, about ‘policy’? In the first place, surely-again in Acton’s words-it must say that liberty is the ‘highest political end,’ the overriding goal of libertarian philosophy. Highest political end, of course, does not mean ‘highest end’ for man in general. Indeed, every individual has a variety of personal ends and differing hierarchies of importance for these goals on his personal scale of values. Political philosophy is that subset of ethical philosophy which deals specifically with politics, that is, the proper role of violence in human life (and hence the explication of such concepts as crime and property). Indeed, a libertarian world would be one in which every individual would at last be free to seek and pursue his own ends-to ‘pursue happiness,’ in the felicitous Jeffersonian phrase.”

Keeping this basic principle in mind, we should then ask, what is the greatest enemy of liberty? The answer is clear. It is an all-powerful government, In the words of the great libertarian theorist Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy the State.

At this point, you might raise an obvious question. If our enemy is the state, how can there be any question about Rothbard’s position on states rights? Wouldn’t he have to be against them? But thinking about the issue this way is wrong. It rests on an ambiguity. When we talk about states rights in American history, we mean limits to an all-powerful central government. We aren’t talking about increasing the power of the central government but decreasing it.

With that in mind, let’s look at what Rothbard said about a powerful central government: “But, above all, the crucial monopoly is the State’s control of the use of violence: of the police and armed services, and of the courts—the locus of ultimate decision-making power in disputes over crimes and contracts. Control of the police and the army is particularly important in enforcing and assuring all of the State’s other powers, including the all-important power to extract its revenue by coercion. For there is one crucially important power inherent in the nature of the State apparatus. All other persons and groups in society (except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and bank robbers) obtain their income voluntarily: either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift (e.g., membership in a club or association, bequest, or inheritance). Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as ‘taxation,’ although in less regularized epochs it was often known as ‘tribute.’ Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects. It would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition of taxation which does not also include theft. Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist.”

The United States Constitution is far from ideal. But the system of government it set up was not at all a powerful central state. It was a loose confederation with a very weak central government. As Mises Institute President Thomas DiLorenzo notes, discussing an important book by the historian Paul C. Graham, “‘Declaration of Independence’ is actually slang for the actual title of the document, ‘The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen united States of America.’  As in all the founding documents, “united States” is in the plural, signifying that the thirteen free and independent states were united in their desire to secede from the British empire.  That is why, at the end of the Revolution, King George III signed a peace treaty with each individual state, not something called ‘the United States government.’

Di Lorenzo goes on: “The first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, declared that each state ‘retained its sovereignty, freedom, and independence.’ They retained, not gained, their sovereignty as ‘free and independent states,’ as they are called in the Declaration.  States rights, state sovereignty, the right of secession, and the states delegating a few powers to the central government as their agent were the ideas of the founders, not creating ‘a new nation.’  There was no pledge of allegiance to ‘one nation, indivisible’; that was an invention of late nineteenth-century socialist and Lincoln worshipper Francis Bellamy. Graham describes the second Constitution as an attempted and failed coup by the nationalists in American politics to destroy state sovereignty and consolidate all political power in the national capitol.  At the constitutional convention Alexander Hamilton, for example, proposed a permanent president (aka a king) who would appoint all governors, with the central state having the right to veto any and all state legislation.  His plan for a centralized dictatorship of course failed, but the nationalists, including Lincoln, would never give up.”

Because of the importance of limiting the central government by means of states rights, Rothbard thought that as much as possible should be left to state and local control. Of course, he was an anarchist, who thought there should be no government at all; but if we did have a government, it should be limited in every way possible.

Here is an example of the way he applied this view. Rothbard says something few other people would think of. Even if you are “pro-choice,” you should still favor overturning Roe v. Wade. “But even apart from the funding issue, there are other arguments for a rapprochement with pro-lifers. There is a prudential consideration: a ban on something as murder is not going to be enforceable if only a minority considers it as murder. A national prohibition is simply not going to work, in addition to being politically impossible to get through in the first place. Pro-choice paleo-libertarians can tell the pro-lifers: ‘Look, a national prohibition is hopeless. Stop trying to pass a human life amendment to the Constitution. Instead, for this and many other reasons, we should radically decentralize political and judicial decisions in this country; we must end the despotism of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, and return political decisions to state and local levels.’ Pro-choice paleos should therefore hope that Roe v. Wade is someday overthrown, and abortion questions go back to the state and local levels—the more decentralized the better. Let Oklahoma and Missouri restrict or outlaw abortions, while California and New York retain abortion rights. Hopefully, some day we will have localities within each state making such decisions. Conflict will then be largely defused. Those who want to have, or to practice, abortions can move or travel to California (or Marin County) or New York (or the West Side of Manhattan.)”

Let’s do everything we can to promote states rights, in order to limit the Leviathan, “that coldest of all cold monsters.” That is what Murray Rothbard would want us to do.

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As a result of recent conversations, my life-long closest friend Diego wrote the following. If you’re lucky as we are, you have such a friend whose interests and thoughts match yours so closely that it seems that you were separated at birth in a dream. We both felt from the days of our youth when chance brought us together that, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, it was not he, she, them, or it that we belonged to, or that we would ever gargle in the rat race choir for those who make the rules to terrorize humanity.

By Diego Sandoval

“Does anybody ever say anything?”

“Not really. Everybody talks all his life, and many write for many years, but nobody really says anything. It’s all right, though.”
– William Saroyan, Not Dying: A Memoir

Because I have nothing to say, I am writing this. It’s all right. I have nothing to say because I am disgusted by all the words I have written for deaf ears and by the news that just repeats itself like an endless Greek tragedy to the chorus of commentators of all persuasions echoing each other as if their words made a difference in the butcher’s bench world of ruthless actors with their motto: acta non verba. I’m just sighing, Ma, like another man of many words, Bob Dylan:

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only

Life? Yes, Dylan is right: “If you’re not busy being born you’re busy dying.”

But what difference can words make? I don’t know. Quén sabe?

William Saroyan was a witty man, a Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award winner, very famous in his day, and he didn’t know either. He claimed he wrote to ward off death and said he expected an exception to death would be made in his case. He was a man hiding in a house of words, always ready to bolt when death came knocking. But he never grasped the contradictory meanings of bolting, a common neurosis and a necrophiliac’s dilemma. He wanted to escape death’s clutches but wasn’t sure whether to run or hide. To bolt or bolt, that is the question he couldn’t answer unequivocally. He decided to obsessively accumulate stuff to barricade the entrance to his soul while writing the opposite. His monitory words insinuated the ineluctable nature of his rat packing.

I have spent my life shedding possessions – call it rat unpacking – having seen too many people possessed by them, and the nothingness of death that they represent. I always sensed that nothing is more real than nothing. Having grown up in Mexico – the country that Octavio Paz referred to as the land of the labyrinth of solitude, the country where death lays heavy on every heart, faithful or doubting, I became a poet, writer, and singer to somehow create a language that would lead me into the realm of silence where true language lives and death is exorcised. I took the stage name Mr. Z  to honor my heroes, Zapata and Zarathustra. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. Few who come to hear me perform know my name’s origins and I never explain. Explain to whom? Why?

I was drawn to William Saroyan’s writing at an early age, probably because of his early efforts to write musically and exorcise the death-themed experiences of his childhood with Armenian immigrant parents, his father being a preacher who died when William was three years-old and he was sent to an orphanage along with his sister and brother. When I was about seventeen years-old I read his first book, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and was mesmerized, especially by his story, “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8” – its free form musicality with its gaps of silence that tore out my heart. I identified with the story’s protagonist, who was lonely Saroyan at 19 years of age, and how a few chords in a piece of music, even bad music, transported him into ecstatic reveries, even during moments of silence when he wasn’t listening to the record. I memorized this sentence: “He stood over his phonograph, thinking of its silence, and his own silence, the fear in himself to make a noise, to declare his existence.” And then a string of few words came to me – “the music of forgetting” – which have haunted me ever since.

I too hear some secret music and don’t know why I am writing this.  I’m only sighing as I move to the music of forgetting.

For his part, Saroyan, in his abodes of death, eventually wrote many millions of words in maybe seventy-five published and unpublished books, saying nothing about something for someone. It was all right, though, I guess he too was only sighing. A kind of sighing that was a haunting.

Aren’t we all sighing? Isn’t the world news enough to haunt anyone with a heart?

Then he died in 1982 at the age of seventy-two. No exception was made for Billy Boy. He either was or wasn’t surprised, depending on what happens when one dies. He said that in everyone’s secret religion “the idea is to keep death at a distance by means of junk of all kinds, and this junk makes a shambles.” Money, possessions in general, the more junk one can surround oneself with the safer one feels, so that death will have a tough time getting through the clutter to reach you, and in a writer’s case, his most treasured junk – his writing – may be useful in buying death off. This Saroyan said.

When he died, he left two houses in Fresno, California stuffed with shambles. Possessions so junky that they rattle the mind: envelopes of his old mustache clippings, pebbles, rocks, used typewriter ribbons, broken clocks, boxes of junk mail, every piece of ephemera that passed through his grasping hands. He let go of nothing while writing words warning of its futility despite its seeming necessity. He created a foundation in his own name, devoted to the study of himself, to which he left all his junk and to which he bequeathed all future earnings, despite having two children. He thought he was immortalizing himself under the illusion that his shambling rambling words and ratty belongings would free him from the labyrinth of solitude he was leaving. It was not a fit ending for a man who was once the daring young man on the flying trapeze.

Without faith, daring ends in desperate measures. I think Saroyan lost faith in the living.

He forgot his own wise words in the preface to the first edition of his first book:

If you will remember that living people are as good as dead, you will be able to perceive much that is very funny in their conduct that you perhaps might never have thought of perceiving if you did not believe that they were as good as dead.

Isn’t it funny that he left a shambles at home?

Madre, I’m running out of words. Please take my sighs and make them prayers of resistance to the ruthless actors who make this earth our home a bloody shambles.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Nothing to Say, Ma appeared first on LewRockwell.

Donald Trump has claimed that American banks are not allowed to do business in Canada, which isn’t true, but the US banks would love to have a bigger piece of the financial pie in Canada, since commercial banks are some of the most profitable businesses in Canada.

And banks have an obvious advantage: it’s easier to be profitable when you can make money by making money.

As Mark Carney stated in his book Value(s), “In the modern financial system, the private sector creates most of the money in circulation. The principal way banks create money is by making loans. When the bank decides a borrower is creditworthy (that they are likely to pay the loan back), it credits their deposit account for the amount of the loan and new money enters circulation.”

The Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, the Swiss National Bank, the Deutsche Bundesbank, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund have also pointed out that banks create money when they make loans.

Banks create state-sanctioned money with the click of a keyboard by allocating credit. Legal tender banknotes and coins are merely tangible tokens of credit.

There is a systemic shortage and artificial scarcity of state-sanctioned money because banks lend it into existence on the basis of interest-bearing debt. They create the principal amount of every so-called loan, but not the interest. Total aggregate debt, including principal and interest, is always more than the total amount of money in existence. And compound interest causes debt to grow exponentially.

Banks also misallocate credit by creating loans for unproductive and downright destructive purposes, which inflates the amount of money in circulation. Monetary inflation leads to price inflation, which erodes the value of savings and reduces the domestic purchasing power of the currency.

War is an obvious example of senseless destruction—but banks profit from the destruction and eventual reconstruction by collecting interest on loans that they create by allocating some of our collective credit for wars that most people probably oppose.

Banks essentially control the creation of so-called loans and decide who gets credit and who doesn’t. They can also expand and contract the allocation of credit, causing cycles of booms and busts.

In a conveniently collusive arrangement, governments allow banks to issue money so governments can receive credit to run deficits and spend more than they collect in taxes. It’s a win-win for banks and governments—at our expense. For them, money is power, and the monetary system is an instrument of control.

Unsurprisingly, the banks are raking in billions of dollars in interest every year from so-called loans that they create by making digital accounting entries (so-called deposits). The US banks can’t be blamed for wanting to do more business in Canada—and perhaps this is another reason why Trump has repeatedly suggested that Canada should become the 51st state (and the US banks might also be interested in accessing and liberalizing China’s financial markets).

It doesn’t really matter that some banks are “Canadian” and some are “American.” They are all part of the problem: a monetary system that is designed to extract value and wealth by keeping us in a collective state of perpetual debt servitude. And it certainly appears to be a global problem: every country (except perhaps Macau) has a national debt. In Canada, the federal government is in debt, the provincial governments are in debt, and the average Canadian household has a debt-to-income ratio of more than 170%.

But money does not need to be issued on the basis of interest-bearing debt, and credit does not need to be misallocated for unproductive and destructive purposes.

Money’s primary function is to facilitate exchange. Mutual credit clearing can serve that purpose and utilize the positive aspects of a credit system. It is essentially a bookkeeping system that keeps an ongoing record of members’ transactions (sales and purchases) and account balances (credits and debits). Membership within a network is entirely voluntary, and every member is both a producer and a consumer, a seller and a buyer. Members can receive short-term interest-free credit, which can reduce their expenses, and allows them to temporarily obtain more than they have provided if they are ready, willing and able to deliver an equal value of their own goods and services within a specified period of time. Goods and services simply pay for other goods and services. The allocation of credit for productive purposes preserves the value of the accounting unit within the network and prevents inflation. Longer-term financing can be provided from actual savings and saved credits, using equity financing or debt financing.

Precious metals and distributed ledger technology can still potentially play a role in a credit system. As Thomas Greco has suggested, a market basket of commodities (including gold and silver) can be used as a benchmark standard for defining an accounting unit to provide a more stable measure of value. He has mentioned that blockchain technology may have a useful role in a credit clearing network or private credit currency as a way to create exchangeable “token” vouchers that represent a claim upon goods and services that the issuer has promised to deliver.

Credit has been severely misused and abused by governments and banks, but the problem isn’t credit in itself. And mutual credit clearing might not change the entire monetary system, but it does provide an opportunity for the allocation of interest-free credit for productive purposes to facilitate the exchange of goods and services, which is a step in the right direction.

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So, then, what is Christian Culture? What does it look like? Are there certain defining features that distinguish it from what passes for culture these days? And if so, how are we to recognize them?

What it is, at the deepest level, is an answer to the question raised by the Hebrew psalmist in a time of unprecedented anguish and desolation, when the People of the Promise are forced to endure exile and captivity. They have lost their land, their freedom; the temple where they worship the living God is in ruins, while they, God’s beloved children, remain utterly prostrate beneath the Babylonian boot. “There by the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion” (Psalm 137).

And as they hang their harps in sorrow upon the willows that mark the water’s edge, their captors demand of them yet another humiliation—that they should make music:

They that carried us away captive required of us a song; 
and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying;
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion.” 

To which the voice of Israel, in the words of the Jewish psalmist, replies:

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?  

Now, to be sure, in the context of the Old Testament, amid the unhappy circumstances of a people held captive, it is unmistakably a cry of lamentation, of heartrending sorrow. A people in bondage are very likely to be candidates for despair. But since the coming of Christ, the Glory of the Lord, who brought eternity into time, grace into nature, Heaven into history, the world is no longer strange or menacing.

It has become, instead, a place of redeemed actuality, a setting made radiant by the presence of the One who vanquished all the darkness. The world has become a wedding, a sacrament, confected for the sanctification of men. And everywhere you turn, there stands the sign of our salvation, looming beneath the bright shadow of the Cross and Resurrection.

Here is the birthplace of Christian Culture, of the true marriage of Heaven and earth, of the happy convergence of vertical and horizontal perspectives. An incarnational humanism, no less, in which the world is accepted and affirmed as a good place to be. Why would God stoop to enter a world He felt so little affection for? How different this is from an eschatological humanism so fixated upon dreams of flight from a world steeped in corruption and death that immediate escape from its coils becomes the only imperative.

So, what then is Christian Culture? It is what happens when enough men and women wedded to Christ, spousal recipients of His love, undertake in a decisive and public way to profess their common faith and devotion by soaking everything in the grace of the Gospel. All that they are and know and do—including their institutions, civil arrangements, arts, education, family life, work and play—immersed in the Blood of the Lamb.

The question, therefore, is not How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? But rather, it is how shall we render our experience of a land that, owing to Christ’s sudden appearance among us, ought no longer to be strange, and thus sing the Lord’s song with ease and felicity, with joy and delight?

Why not make a world where it is easier for men and women to be good? Even to try and do so, never mind the numbers of good men falling short, is enough to sound the great theme of fraternal love and solidarity amid an otherwise rampant and atomized individualism. Not the cry of the self-centered self, the solipsistic self, but the self both steeped in God and solicitous of neighbor. The self for whom solidarity with others becomes the informing principle of the public life.

“Let us,” as Eric Gill used to say, “create a cell of good living amid the chaos of our world.” A world whose prototype ought not to be the ant hill or the rat race but the Mystical Body. Not the beehive, where everyone is a drone, but the Blessed Trinity, where the logic of the gift prevails and people discover themselves precisely in giving themselves away.

Let me put it this way. In order for the life of faith to succeed in a more than haphazard or private way, it really has got to penetrate the public life, which is that larger space where culture puts down its roots. Otherwise, the generality of men may find it well-nigh impossible, amid so many secular and profane distractions, to find genuine and palpable evidence of the sacred.

Not the least rumor of God could survive in a world where no one ever spoke of God. And the reason they don’t is because—educated opinion having convinced men of His irrelevance—they no longer turn to Him for counsel or consolation. Not to mention those primordial reasons men have lifted their eyes on high, to give praise and adoration to the God who made them and the universe.

We have lost, as a dear friend and mentor used to say, “the poetry of the transcendent.” And when a people live in a world made suddenly flat as a map, they no longer look up at the stars.

This is not what the architects of Christian Culture had in mind when they sought to configure all things to Christ. They did not aim to leave anything out of account, free to shape itself without reference to Him. Why should we not build a society in such a way as to heighten and augment the natural tendency we have for the true and the good and the beautiful? To allow our natural gravitation for God, who remains the deepest longing of all, to be shored up by a society whose institutions conspire to draw all things to God? Isn’t that the most logical and obvious outcome of a society for whom most members are already Christian?

And doesn’t this happen when, at the very least, impediments are not put in the way of the search for God, the delight one feels in the discovery of God? Why must it be such a great trial and tribulation to get to Heaven? Or even to get to Mass in the morning? Why must there be roadblocks thrown up to challenge and frustrate the effort simply to practice the virtue of piety? It is a matter of justice that God be given His due, to which end the two orders of the sacred and the profane, society and the Church, need not cross swords but rather harmonize their efforts in helping man fulfill himself both in this world and the world to come.

If the meaning of life is that it becomes “a vale of soul-making,” as the poet Keats liked to say, then statecraft becomes nothing other than a matter of soulcraft—of helping to shape the soul—not just for time but for eternity as well.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

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A typical example is the Politico article, on July 3rd, “Three reasons why Republicans cut Medicaid”, which at its opening asks and answers the question: “why did the GOP slash deeply into the health insurance program in its megabill? Three reasons: [1] Republicans desperately needed money to avoid a big tax increase next year, [2] they wanted to claw back Biden-era policies GOP lawmakers say led to lax eligibility checks and more fraudulent benefit claims and [3] they wanted to curb the Medicaid expansion enacted by then-President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats in the Affordable Care Act.”

Here’s the far-more-basic and decisive truth, which all of the ‘news’-media — both of Democratic Party billionaires, and of Republican Party billionaires — hide:

Almost all of the “waste, fraud and abuse” in the U.S. federal Government is in the U.S. military, which consumes over half of all of the funds that the Presdent and Congress each year authorize to and do spend — and even only the Defense Department’s portion of that, which constitutes around two-thirds of America’s annual military spending, wastes (by means of fraud and abuse but especially corruption, which enormusly inflates the costs of America’s weaponry), the vast majority of the waste in the U.S. Government’s annually allocated funds. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency DOGE virtually ignored it, though the U.S. Defense Department is the ONLY federal Department that is SO corrupt that it has NEVER BEEN AUDITED. Instead of Musk (and Trump) focusing on that, they just ignored it and concentrated instead upon ‘waste, fraud and abuse’ in the spending that DOES serve the public (instead of serve merely the investors in firms such as Lockheed Martin, which sell only to the U.S. Government and its allied Governments (such as in NATO and in the Gulf Arab kingdoms and Israel). Those firms know that in order to control their markets they need to control their own Government, the U.S. Government — which they DO control, which is why over half of U.S. federal discretionary spending now is for the military. Only this way can their sales-volumes and the prices of their goods and services continue soaring far higher than for the firms in the rest of the stock market — as they have been doing ever since the Soviet Union ended in 1991 and ‘terrorism’ and other propaganda points became the new focus so as to produce the constant and forever-war American economy that we have had ever since 1991 — the military-industrial complex (MIC) unleashed and running wild and eating up the America that serves the other people, the ones who DON’t own and control those firms (the firms that PROFIT from wars).

Unlike in countries such as Russia and China, which refused to privatise their armaments-manufacturers (the Government owns them by more than 50%), our armaments firms are PRIVATELY owned and controlled — for profit, NOT for the public; for the billionaires, and not to protect the nation against actual enemies.

For a typical example of how this works, a study published in 2022 by Bernstein Research found (as reported on its page 75) that, for one typical ‘defense’ corporation, Northrop Grumman, its “stock has outperformed the S&P 500 by 451% over the last 10 years.” Furthermore, “Defense stocks … also tend to outperform through recessions and are uncorrelated with inflation.” That’s the type of extraordinary profitability that a corporation which controls its own market normally achieves; and, in the U.S., ‘defense’ stocks started taking off like a rocket in 1991 and have been continuing that astounding growth ever since. The less necessary that a capitalist nation’s military is for protecting the nation, like in the U.S. since 1991 when the Soviet Union ended, the more profitable its military manufacturers are, because the corruption then becomes virtually unlimited (see this and this for the evidence). Right now, the U.S. Government spends 65% — almost two-thirds — of the entire world’s military expenditures — almost twice what all of the world’s 200 other nations together spend. Now, THAT’S corruption, on a massive scale! It’s shown right there, in those numbers.

Right now, the Trump Administration (just like Biden’s had done) has been and is pressuring their colonies (‘allies’) to increase their military expenditures, in order to keep this soaring wealth for their billionaires going. On June 25th, Reuters headlined “NATO commits to spending hike sought by Trump” and reported: “NATO leaders on Wednesday backed the big increase in defence spending that U.S. President Donald Trump had demanded, and restated their commitment to defend each other from attack after a brief summit in the Netherlands.” Continuation of the current U.S.-backed wars and perhaps starting some new ones, will be needed in order to make this happen; and, so, as the U.S. Government has been doing ever since 1945 and especially after 1991 (when the Soviet Union ended), what’s needed is creating international chaos, civil wars, and failed states. But this also means that existing wars must be continued as long as possible. Furthermore, on 8 January 2025, the President-elect Donald Trump indicated that if his previously announced intention for the U.S. to buy Greenland, and the Panama Canal, gets rejected in the negotiations, then he will seize them militarily, because “We need them for economic security.” This means that he uses the military not ONLY for national security (which is the defensive use of it) but ALSO for “economic security” (which is the aggressive use of it — as being an additional tool in order to gain economic advantage against other countries — to use the military in order to acquire new colonies or else to cement one’s rule over existing colonies). And he said there that the same thing might apply also to Canada. So: Denmark, Greenland, Canada, and America’s other colonies, could soon find themselves at war against America — no longer is it only such countries as Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea, that the U.S. regime targets. It would mean the utter destruction of international law.

How evil is this? On 22 October 2024, I headlined “How the U.S. Government Became Plain Evil in 1980”, and said of an early U.S. advocate for replacing the purely defensive geostrategy of America’s nuclear weapons (“M.A.D.” to prevent a WW3) by instead an aggressive global-supremacist strategy to ‘win’ such a nuclear war by destroying ‘the enemy’ even more than the U.S. would be destroyed, such as now is the U.S. plan, for its nukes (“Nuclear Primacy” to ‘win’ WW3) — actually for the U.S. Government to take over the entire world:

Advocates of the view that nuclear weapons exist only in order to prevent any need to use them were consequently presented, by him, implicitly, as being now either fools or traitors. He said that MAD simply “ignores the intensely ideological nature of modern international relations. In a world dominated by two such ideological foes as the United States and Soviet Union,” winning is the only moral option. In other words: his neoconservative (purely zero-sum or win-lose no win-win — it’s instead a supremacist) view took seriously ONLY win-lose games, no win-win ones. He was assuming that this was a war between communism versus capitalism, and not a war by the United States rulers in order to win control over the entire planet (as has actually been the case ever since President Truman started the Cold War on 25 July 1945). Then, after the end of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1991 and America’s refusal to end its NATO anti-Soviet military alliance but instead to expand that alliance right up to Russia’s border and to take up again Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa aim to conquer Russia, something extremely heinous became blatantly apparent about prior U.S. allegations that America’s rulers weren’t, in fact, insanely imperialistic (the ‘anti-communist’ excuse for the Cold War had now clearly been shown to have been just that: an excuse), but no U.S.-and-allied newsmedia called attention to this by-now-(after-1991)-amply-proven fact of the lying U.S. regime’s heinous character; and, so, this nation is, by now, definitely a dictatorship that has effectively controlled all of its newsmedia, too, in order to hide from the public what it was actually trying to achieve — the global dictatorship that America’s rulers have, in fact, been aiming to achieve. Other than in a few small-audience far-outside-the-mainstream newsmedia (such as this one), nobody at all was calling attention to the fact that (and why) NATO is intensely evil and must be abolished immediately. Neoconservatism — advocacy for an all-encompassing U.S. global empire — has virtually 100% control in The West. Western publics have been so surrounded by neoconservative media, they cannot think outside that box, of hatred against ’the enemy’ that America’s billionaires have targeted to ‘regime-change’, whatever that might happen to be at the given moment — but ESPECIALLY now concerning both Russia and China (though capitalism now predominates in both of those U.S.-targeted countries). The evil is, and has always been, imperialism (never really capitalism or communism), but no one in Western media is allowed to call attention to this brute fact, that imperialism is always the enemy, which fact explains international relations today.

All recent American Presidents and Congresses have been purely win-lose, zero-sum, not at all win-win, leaders. It’s now clearly the character of the U.S. Government. Short of there being a Second American Revolution (a domestic U.S. uprising to overthrow and replace it with a win-win one), it will remain America’s Government until its end. It certainly is that way today.

On January 1st, I headlined “UK, Germany, Italy, France, Japan — Likeliest for Economic Crash This Year”, and documented that the 2023 average electricity prices for industrial users ($ per MWh) was $266 in Germany, $63 in Russia, and $60 in China. In U.S., it was $85. The highest price of all was in UK: $420. Germany’s $266 price was the second-highest. In terms of economic competitiveness, China and Russia are the best, and UK and Germany are the worst, of all major countries. How can a country such as Germany compete economically against China, Russia, and U.S.? It can’t. Why? Is it because Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022? Definitely not! It is because the U.S. Government (followed by its obedient colonies in Europe) placed sanctions against Russian energy imports, which were by far the least expensive energy-sources for Europe, because pipelined-in from Russia instead of containerized and then sent by ship (such as from across the Atlantic in America) and rail and truck. In addition, the U.S. Government blew up the Nord Stream pipelines that were to expand gas-imports to Germany from Russia (and that were partially owned by Germany — a supposed ‘ally’ of Germany).

On January 6th, I headlined “The Hidden Lies Behind America’s Destruction of Europe” and described how the U.S. regime had forced its colonies to do this — to commit economic suicide.

And now the American people, with Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (which the American public loathe), the American people OURSELVES will be swallowed-up by this voracious monster, our billionaires, which is actually bipartisan in America, BOTH of its political Parties. This is the opposite of democracy: Polling proves that vast majorities of the U.S. public detest Trump’s budget-and-tax priorities. Furthermore, an extraordinarily extensive Yale poll of nearly 5,000 Americans, published on June 27th, found that when respondents are informed of what is in Trump’s budget-and-tax bill, only 11% approve, 78% disapprove of it. Would it become law in a democracy? Of course not! This recent polling simply confirms what prior polling has already shown.

On February 14th, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling”, and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (those latter five being the functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut — but those 5 were the most-favored by the American public). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds. Furthermore, the U.S. Defense Department is the only Department of the federal Government so corrupt, so intensely corrupt, that it has never been audited.

Trump is increasing the military and border security, and decreasing education, assistance to the poor, Medicaid, federal law enforcement, and even Social Security and Medicare (the latter two by laying off many of the people who staff those bureaucracies). This Government’s policy-priorities are like the public’s turned upside-down — in other words: are the REVERSE of the public’s — and therefore the U.S. Government right now is a perfect example of a dictatorship. One might say that this is so in only the Executive branch, but it’s not necessarily true: Trump’s bill passed in BOTH houses of the U.S. Congress.

Every national Government that includes public elections between competing politicians has degenerated into control by the richest, because the richest donate more than half of all of the money that is donated to political campaigns, and they can and do aways spend enough on politics to deceive enough voters to vote against any candidate who refuses to be bought, so that only the candidates who are willing to do what their megadonors say — obedient candidates (obedient to the billionaires especially) — will have any real chance to win a major public office. So, if a democracy is to be defined as ONLY a system that includes public elections between competing politicians, then it will always degenerate into an aristocracy of the super-rich, which is a type of dictatorship (sometimes called by such names as “aristocracy,” “oligarchy,” “plutocracy,” etc.), NOT a democracy.

So, that is a phony definition of “democracy” (though it’s the normal way that “democracy” is defined), because a democracy is instead a Government by representatives of each citizen equally, without regard for wealth, religion, ethnicity, or any other attribute — it is (and the term “democracy” can realistically be applied ONLY to) “Equal Justice Under Law” — and it CAN exist but never yet HAS existed (because of that false common definition for it*). A TRUE definition of “democracy” is instead: A democracy is a Government whose policy-priorities are the same as its public’s policy-priorities are. On June 6th, I headlined “How to Create an Authentic Democracy” and described the only type of way that it can even possibly be achieved. I welcome any inputs regarding my proposal, and you can reach me about this definition and associated system via email by clicking here.

——

* Documentation of the falsity of the common definition of “democracy” can be found here. Given that the common definition (the one that necessitates public elections by competing politicians) for it is empirically false, the need exists for a true definition of democracy. I have provided in this article what I believe that to be: a Government whose policy-priorities are the same as the public’s policy-priorities are. And I have described here how that could be instituted.

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post How the ‘News’ Media Distort About the Cuts to Medicaid appeared first on LewRockwell.

From 2024 into 2025, over roughly 9-10 months, I worked with journalist Margaret Roberts on her upcoming book, titled Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing. My role was that of a research consultant—a friendly resource available to help with a project that I viewed as significant and a righteous undertaking. It was both a pleasure and an honor to collaborate on this project.

Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue connected me with Roberts, whom he knew for years (read all about that in the book), to help with the book: reading, fact-checking, providing sources and documents, answering questions—I’d be her “foxhole buddy” in what we saw as a mammoth battle not unlike David versus Goliath: after all, the full power of the federal government has been used, over the years, to stop and silence investigation into Kenneth Trentadue’s murder and any probing of America’s deadliest domestic terror attack.

Over the years, investigations that were supposed to be conducted went by the wayside—the Senate Judiciary Committee’s proposed hearings on Kenneth’s murder were sabotaged; Bombing-related stories set to air on ABC News 20/20 were canceled after DOJ pressure, and witnesses in the case suddenly went missing or became reluctant to speak after visits from the FBI.

We knew it would be an uphill battle. Knowing this to be true, I had no reservations: from the moment Jesse called me in February 2024 and told me about the project, I said “count me in.”

After that phone call, I was introduced to the author, and we started having weekly discussions. I went into it excited, having just finished serving in a similar capacity for HBO/Max’s Emmy-nominated documentary film “An American Bombing: the Road to April 19th” where I was a research consultant—providing documents, questions to ask witnesses, and detailed information that the documentary filmmakers needed to tell the story right.

I was eager to jump right into the fray and do it again, because if anything, I’m all about collaboration and sharing material if it will advance the mutual struggle to bring truth to the forefront.

America’s Most Wanted Alumnus Tackles The Story

Margaret Roberts is an award-winning journalist. One of her early stories for the Chicago Lawyer detailed the case of a man wrongly convicted of abducting and murdering a couple, along with three other men. They were called the ‘Ford Heights Four,’ and Roberts’ initial story focused on one of them, Dennis Williams, who was sentenced to death.

Roberts and editor Rob Warden’s reporting on the case uncovered the truth and helped ensure justice was achieved — a challenging feat, especially after a man is condemned to death by the justice system. With the stakes as high as they were—a man’s life in the balance—the man’s only recourse turned out to be not our judicial system, but the combined efforts of dedicated investigative journalists.

Roberts’ story, co-bylined with editor Rob Warden, “Will We Execute an Innocent Man?” won journalism awards in Chicago, and later Newsweek featured it as a cover story on the death penalty. Thanks to Margaret Roberts’s reporting, an innocent man was exonerated along with his three co-defendants. Cook County, Illinois, ended up paying $36 million to the four wrongfully imprisoned men, the highest settlement ever paid at that time for such a case.

Following her time in print media, Roberts went on to become News Director for America’s Most Wanted — a TV show all about capturing the bad guys. As a reporter, and a news junkie, it was a perfect fit for Roberts. The very first episode of the show led to the apprehension of a violent criminal, and she knew a thing or two about broadcasting leads to the public—and covering the facts to help pursue the guilty.

By 1995, Roberts had moved on from America’s Most Wanted and was working on other projects, but the bombing story caught her attention as an avid news junkie—especially the unknown and unidentified suspect “John Doe #2,” something that she and I both shared a fascination with. We had both independently investigated this case for over 15 years when we were introduced, diligently following it with determination.

Working on The Book

I would like to share some of my thoughts about the process of writing the book, working with Margaret Roberts, and how our successful partnership was personally fulfilling for me. I did not see it as ‘work’—to me, it was ‘fun’!

Like the fictional characters from TV’s ‘The X-Files’ called “The Lone Gunmen” (pictured below), I saw this as an opportunity to bring a really “out there” truth into the mainstream, even though the odds were against us, just like the fictional muckrakers. Margaret Roberts was exactly what we needed to bring the truth to a new audience.

One of my tasks during the writing process was to keep track of the endnotes for the book. Margaret (or ‘Mars’ as I’d call her) would identify passages she wanted citations for, and I would add and keep track of our sources. Many times, she knew the source for the citation, and other times, I would go look it up in my archive (consisting of thousands of news clippings, magazine articles, transcripts, FBI documents, etc.) The Archive proved to be useful when working on the book both by making it easy to locate source materials, but also in allowing us to incorporate previously unknown (or forgotten) details found in related clippings.

As we worked on the book, I came across instances where I believed we could document a little-known or underreported fact that was directly related to the text. To that end, some items in the book are there because I brought them to Mars’s attention, and we worked together to capture the essence: after informing Mars of one thing or another, I would explain why I thought certain details were relevant and essential—and, doing her due diligence, Roberts required me to prove the authenticity of whatever I was saying.

I’d provide the background documentation and my overview, but basically, I needed to ‘prove’ my case to her, which shows just how careful and analytical she was being. Everything I introduced had to be solid and provable—no theories. As Roberts wrote on X, our collaboration involved “the careful process of weighing the evidence” — and getting it right.

Additionally, I also learned many new facts from Roberts’ investigation—in no small part because she is the only journalist to have ever interviewed Terry Nichols—one of McVeigh’s co-conspirators in the bombing—and possessed many letters, writings, and documents given to her by Terry Nichols’s attorney, Jesse Trentadue.

I had not seen this material before, and reviewing it added significant context to information that was, in some cases, entirely new for me. We called this material “The Nichols Dossier.” It was a sizable collection of Terry Nichols’s writings, where he details various aspects of the bombing plot, and the material is central to one of the book’s chapters.

Through Terry Nichols’s writings, Roberts uncovered a wealth of material that sheds new light on the case — at least to the public — and for the first time in print.

Roberts also interviewed Aryan Republican Army founder Peter Langan in prison, as well as McVeigh’s death row cellmate, David Paul Hammer.

This collection of exclusive prison interviews is just one component among several compelling pieces that are woven together to reveal a bigger picture, one that has largely remained untold until now.

Read the Whole Article

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We’re one year away from the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It remains one of the most impactful and revolutionary documents ever written. While our horrific leaders still pay infrequent lip service to it, they obviously don’t remotely believe in the sentiments expressed by Thomas Jefferson.

The delineation of God-given rights, as opposed to any granted by a government, was a literary nuclear bomb. This resonated with the American colonists, who almost all believed strongly in God. Now, of course, since probably half of present day Americans at least doubt the existence of God, it becomes a much harder proposition to sell. God-given rights mean nothing to those who don’t believe in God. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would eventually translate into the Bill of Rights, which made the Constitution palatable to anti-statists like Jefferson. I still don’t know why two of my other revolutionary era heroes, Patrick Henry and George Mason, didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence. Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights greatly influenced Jefferson. Mason would lose his friendship with George Washington later when he refused to sign the Constitution, because it hadn’t added the Bill of Rights.

I’ve detailed a lot of hidden history about the Founding of this republic in my books Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963 and American Memory Hole. Thomas Paine stoked the sentiments of the average colonist with his remarkable little fifty page pamphlet Common Sense. He would be jailed during the French Revolution for opposing the violence of the revolutionaries, and grew bitter at Washington when he refused to ask for his release. Paine eventually became so obscure that only six people attended his funeral, and it is still unknown where his human remains are. James Otis, who came up with that whole “no taxation without representation” thing, was struck dead by lightning as he stood in a doorway. Remarkably, he had expressed a desire to exit the world in such an unlikely manner. The list of hardships those who signed the Declaration experienced makes their vow to sacrifice their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor all the more chillingly impressive.

These were the One Percenters of their day. No revolution could ever be possible without some great power behind it. In this case, it was the immense wealth of those like Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and John Hancock, which made it possible. Much as we’d like to believe it, the common people simply are never going to overthrow their masters, no matter how tyrannical they become, unless they are ordered to. Crumbling, Third World shithole America 2.0 proves that. They’ve demonstrated quite clearly that they have no tipping point. Just picture Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and the like, meeting surreptitiously in dimly lit taverns, discussing how to devise a government that grants liberty to its people. A nation without a king or queen, with an armed citizenry. Where you’re free to express your opinion, and have the right to peaceably assemble in protest.

The language in the Declaration of Independence is such that those who misrule us must consider it “hate speech.” This passage, for example: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” How does that equate to what happened to the Confederates, who no longer consented in 1860? Or to the January 6 Stop the Steal Rally protesters, who even if they had been “insurrectionists,” had the right to be, according to Thomas Jefferson? The fact is, our government is so powerful that it’s never going to let anyone “alter or abolish” it.

Consider what the Founders would think, if they could see the embarrassing mess we’ve made of their bright and shining republic. If Patrick Henry refused to go to the Constitutional Convention because he “smelled a rat,” then what would he be smelling today as he walked through the crumbling streets of America 2.0? The human excrement from illegal migrants and homeless U.S. citizens? I don’t know, maybe they shit in the streets in Colonial times. I wasn’t there, and there were no rest rooms. George Mason was most responsible for writing what became the Bill of Rights. What would his response be to Orwellian terms like “hate speech?” I’m sure he, Thomas Jefferson, and other liberty-minded patriots would have been outraged over the asterisk that Oliver Wendell Holmes’s WWI admonition that “you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater” represented. What would any of them think of transgender reassignment surgery? They sacrificed their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor for that?

I doubt if Donald Trump, or any other politician, mentions George Washington’s Farewell Address today. You know, the one that stands in start contrast to our official foreign policy for over a century now? Whether or not the legend about him trying to ban Jews from America is true, Ben Franklin would certainly not look favorably on our intense “entangling alliance” with Israel. But then, if they were alive today, no one in power would care what they had to say about anything. They surely wouldn’t be able to attain any power themselves. They’d be relegated to alt media podcasts, where half of the hosts would claim they were disinformation agents or limited hangouts. I’d be happy to welcome them on “I Protest.” Even Alexander Hamilton. The dead White banker’s favorite, not the hip Black Broadway star. I’d like his thoughts on the Federal Reserve, and if he had any reservations now about creating the national debt.

It’s understandable why our culture pays such little attention to the Founding Fathers. As I’ve pointed out, not a single biopic was made during the Golden Age of Hollywood, about Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Henry, Mason, or even an overview of the War for Independence itself. Cary Grant in The Howards of Virginia was about the best you got. The last thing absolute tyrants want to do is to remind their docile sheeple about how their country was formed by overthrowing tyranny. And given the oppressive taxation we face today, and the failure of our political representatives to act on behalf of their constituents, “no taxation without representation” is not an issue they want to focus on. The entire Declaration of Independence, which is our founding document after all, is subversive by today’s standards. Our political leaders don’t agree with any of it.

Our Founders are denigrated, like the founders of no other nation on earth have ever been. Without a Revolution taking place, that is. You’d expect the Casanovas and Cagliostros to depict the French monarchy in the worst possible light. But we have had no second Revolution here. You saw what the response was to a bunch of angry voters protesting what they believed was electoral fraud on January 6, 2021. So any potential new Sons of Liberty must plan on meeting in even dimmer lit places, with no smart devices or security cameras around. What other country has its leaders regularly violate the Constitution they swear allegiance to? Even the most lecherous adulterer has a bit more respect for oaths than that. As George W. Bush said, it is just a piece of paper, after all. Even Ilhan Omar, who clearly favors Somalia over the U.S., and Rep. Brian Mast, who wore his IDF uniform to congress, swore the oath.

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For Macron and all the NATO states to do that would be to admit their culpability for creating the biggest war in Europe since the Second World War.

NATO started the conflict in Ukraine, but Russia will end it on its terms, Russian President Vladimir Putin told his French counterpart this week in a wake-up call.

It’s always refreshing and necessary to bring reality into a conversation, assuming, of course, that the purpose of the dialogue is genuinely to resolve a problem.

France’s Emmanuel Macron requested the phone call with Putin this week. It was the first time the two leaders had spoken in nearly three years. The long absence was due to Moscow claiming that Macron breached diplomatic protocol after the last phone call in 2022 by leaking details to the media.

In any case, Putin showed magnanimity and a willingness to engage diplomatically by taking the call this week from Macron. The two leaders talked for over two hours.

Apart from Ukraine, another topic discussed was the outbreak of war between Israel and Iran, and the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites. Macron agreed with Putin that Iran has the right to pursue civilian nuclear energy production, and both appealed for diplomacy to prevent escalation, according to the Kremlin’s statement on the phone conversation.

Critics might note, however, that France, Britain, Germany, and the other European states have played a double game with Iran, undermining Iran’s legitimate rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and giving political cover for the unlawful Israeli and US aggression against Tehran. Therefore, Macron’s concern for peace in the Middle East sounds hollow, if not hypocritical.

The Ukraine conflict was also discussed. But here, there was no pretense of diplomatic accord.

Macron urged Putin to “call a ceasefire as soon as possible” and to proceed with peace talks, said the Elysee Palace, as reported by French media.

For his part, Putin rebuffed the trite talk. He reminded Macron of some necessary reality.

According to the Kremlin’s statement: “When discussing the situation surrounding Ukraine, Vladimir Putin reiterated that the conflict was a direct consequence of the policies pursued by the Western countries, which had for years been ignoring Russia’s security interests, creating an anti-Russia staging ground in the country, and condoning violations of rights of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking citizens, and at present were pursuing a policy of prolonging hostilities by supplying the Kiev regime with a variety of modern weaponry. Speaking about the prospects of a peaceful settlement, the president of Russia has confirmed Moscow’s stance on possible agreements: they are to be comprehensive and long-term, provide for the elimination of the root causes of the Ukraine crisis, and be based on the new territorial realities.”

In other words, Russia will end the conflict that Macron and other NATO powers started illegally, and the ending of it will be on Russia’s terms.

Who does Macron think he is? Telling Russia to call a ceasefire as soon as possible? Earlier this year, in March, Macron gave a televised nationwide address declaring Russia to be an existential threat to Europe. He even made the madcap suggestion of France using its nuclear weapons to protect all of Europe. Such crazed talk by Macron is irresponsible and reprehensible.

Macron, along with Britain’s Starmer and Germany’s Merz, are prolonging the more-than-three-year war in Ukraine by pledging more military aid to the NeoNazi Kiev regime.

That regime owes its existence to an illegal coup d’état that the Americans and Europeans orchestrated in 2014. The ongoing conflict, which has slaughtered more than one million Ukrainian soldiers and burdened Europe with huge immigration costs, is the responsibility of Macron and other NATO states. They are the instigators, not Russia.

If Macron genuinely wants peace in Ukraine, there is a straightforward solution. Stop arming the NeoNazi regime and stop telling lies about “defending democracy in Ukraine” from alleged “Russian aggression.” Macron and his gang of NATO war criminals could end the bloodshed promptly if they dropped the evil charade.

U.S. President Donald Trump also had a phone call with Putin this week. That was on Thursday, two days after Macron’s.

As with the French leader, Putin told his American counterpart that Russia was insisting on achieving its aims in Ukraine: removing the root causes of the conflict and retaining all territories. Like Macron, Trump sounded impatient for a quick peace deal and later complained to the American media, “he had made no progress” with Putin in his phone call this week.

What Trump, Macron, and other Western leaders need to understand is that Russia wants a permanent peace based on its legitimate strategic security interests. This conflict is not a localized one between two parties. It is a proxy war between Russia and NATO, engendered by NATO. Pretending otherwise, as Macron is doing by conceitedly calling for a quick ceasefire, is a deception.

At least Trump seems to recognize that the supply of weapons to Ukraine has to stop if there is any chance of ending the conflict. This week, the Pentagon announced it was halting the flow of munitions. A big part of the reason is practical reality: the U.S. has depleted its arsenal after three years of weaponizing the Kiev regime.

The European leaders need to come to their senses too, and stop fueling the war machine that is the Kiev regime. It is a lost cause. Russia is winning the war and will eventually eradicate the regime and NATO’s threat to its national security. Europe does not have the capability or the resources. The grand deception projected by Macron and others, including EU top officials Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas, and NATO’s Mark Rutte, is destroying Europe.

Therein lies the fatal dilemma. What Putin said to Macron is the truth. If the conflict has any chance of being resolved peacefully, then the starting place is to recognize the historic causes of the conflict, not the delusional stuff that Macron is peddling.

But for Macron and all the NATO states to do that would be to admit their culpability for creating the biggest war in Europe since the Second World War. The political and legal repercussions would be explosive for Macron and the entire Western leadership. They are caught in the web of a Big Lie that they have spun.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

The post Oh la la… Putin Drops Truth Bomb on Macron appeared first on LewRockwell.

Our status quo is so thoroughly corrupt that it’s no longer even seen as corruption, it’s just BAU–business as usual.

It’s a big ask, but let’s depoliticize the phrase “make America great again” and consider what this would actually entail, not as a lobbyists’ grab-bag of tax breaks for the wealthy and arcane giveaways in 500-page Congressional bills, but as a restoration of the fundamental foundations of greatness.

In the conventional contexts of the current era, this boils down to ideology and finance. If we dial back culture-war over-reach and free up “market forces,” for example, this will restore America’s greatness.

The problem with all this kind of thinking is it’s superficial and banal, for it ignores the real source of America’s decline: the moral rot that has eroded every institution and every nook and cranny of our society. Whenever I mention this moral rot, I get immediate push-back of this sort: corruption has always been around, so today is no different from previous eras.

While it’s self-evident that self-interest and greed manifest as corruption, it’s not true that the systemic corruption of the present is no different from previous eras–it’s worse, much worse because it’s now normalized, and so we accept the most outrageous forms of corruption as “normal.”

So private equity buys a company, loads it with debt, transfers all the borrowed cash to the private equity “owners,” and then leaves the company a sinking hulk that soon declares bankruptcy. Or when private equity snaps up hospitals and healthcare clinics and prices rise not for better service but to “reward the owners,” this plundering of “healthcare” is just good solid MBA-school maximization of shareholder value.

What few seem to notice is the barriers that limited the pillage and plundering of the private and public-sectors have all eroded or been hollowed out. The legal framework is now a mirror-image of the financial sector, a series of facades that mask the pillage and plundering: of course it’s profitable, but it’s also legal.

The social barriers have also been dismantled. There are no taboos left, as “anything goes” is the modern zeitgeist. The notion that corporations have a social responsibility to the community they’re embedded in is now a quaint whiff of nostalgia, along with the notion that corporations have an implicit responsibility to serve the larger national interests as well as “shareholder value.”

Every institution has been hollowed out by self-service. Is it any wonder than younger generations have near-zero trust in institutions, given that their PR veneer of “public service” is just a cover for milking the system for private gain?

If you read histories of capitalism–for example, Fernand Braudel’s three-volume Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century ( Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3) you discover that “capitalism” only functions as advertised if it is embedded in a moral order, something Adam Smith understood.

In early European capitalism, Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) provided this moral order. In China, Confucianism provided the moral foundation of the society and the economic – political structures.

Consider Xi Jinping’s campaign to unify Confucianism and Marxism. This is not an anachronism, it reflects Xi’s understanding that Marxism does not provide the moral foundation needed to limit the corruption undermining China. Only restoring a Confucian moral order can do that.

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In a totalitarian or authoritarian dictatorship, government officials do not need the support of the citizenry to exterminate freedom of speech. That’s because there are no elections to worry about. The regime simply starts having its military and paramilitary goons start arresting critics, disappearing them in terrorist confinement facilities, torturing them, and then killing them. Everyone else understands. No more criticism of the regime.

In a democratic system, suppressing criticism is much more difficult owing to the problem of elections. If the goons of some democratically elected president begin rounding up critics, incarcerating them, torturing them, and killing them, the ruler runs the risk of being kicked out of office in the next election. There is also the risk of impeachment.

Thus, in a democracy rulers must figure out sophisticated and oftentimes devious ways to seduce or induce people to go along with the destruction of freedom of speech.

The United States was founded on the principle of freedom of speech. The Constitution, which called into existence a government of limited powers, did not delegate to the federal government the power to suppress criticism or to infringe on the natural, God-given right of freedom of speech. Thus, even without the First Amendment, freedom of speech would have still be legally immune from any attempt to suppress or destroy it.

But just to make the matter clear, our ancestors demanded the enactment of the First Amendment. It prohibits the federal government from doing anything to infringe on, regulate, or destroy freedom of speech.

Why did our ancestors deem it wise and even necessary to enact the First Amendment? Because they were smart people. They knew that all rulers hate criticism and love praise. They also knew that rulers would inevitably adopt measures intended to infringe, control, or destroy free speech.

Now, it’s true that no one in the United States is being jailed for speaking out against the government. Indeed, there are plenty of libertarian educational foundations and libertarian think tanks that regularly speak out against federal government wrongdoing. None of us is in jail. But does that mean that there is freedom of speech in this nation?

Actually not. Federal officials have long designed sophisticated ways to suppress speech in wide sectors of American society, such as the business, educational, banking, medical, and even the mainstream-media sectors. These sophisticated ways involve the regulated economy and the dole society that the Franklin Roosevelt administration brought into existence in the 1930s.

President Trump’s rhetoric and actions are perhaps bringing some of these sophisticated suppression devices into the light of the day. Consider, for example, his former ally Elon Musk. Musk has come out publicly against Trump’s “big beautiful bill,” which Musk points out is continuing the out-of-control federal spending and debt that is threatening to take down our country from within. Musk called the bill a “massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill” and “a disgusting abomination.”

That’s a classic exercise of freedom of speech. But what is Trump’s reaction? He is threatening Musk with a cut-off of federal contracts. His “big beautiful bill” also eliminates some tax benefits for Musk’s Tesla automobiles. He also saying that he might have to “put DOGE on Musk… DOGE is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon.” He has even suggested the possibility of deporting Musk.

In other words, Trump is threatening to employ the power of the federal government to destroy or severely harm an American citizen. And for what? For simply speaking out against Trump’s spending and debt bill.

And make no mistake about it. Every business person in the country knows that every president wields the power to destroy him. For one thing, many businesses are so dependent on the federal dole, either through subsidies or federal contracts, that they cannot imagine losing the dole. The last thing they are going to do is publicly take on what the president does, as Musk is doing. Watching Trump’s threats against Musk, they know what awaits them if they do the same. Most of them will remain silent on anything any president does, especially in foreign affairs.

Consider those big, powerful law firms that have capitulated to Trump’s demands. Why did they do that? One big reason may have been the fear of losing contracts or other business that they have with the federal government.

Consider all the universities that are agreeing to run their schools in accordance with Trump’s demands. Why are they doing that? Because long ago, U.S. officials induced them to go on dole. They are now so dependent on the dole that they will do anything to avoid losing it.

It’s not just the dole system though. It’s also the regulated-economy system that FDR foisted on American economic system. The federal government wields the power to destroy businesses simply through the power of regulation.

A perfect example of this phenomenon is the banking sector. Every bank president in America knows that federal inspectors wield the power to shut down banks by easily finding violations of minute banking regulations. That’s why one never finds one single bank president anywhere in the country ever taking on any president in a public way, in the manner that Musk is doing.

Consider the $16 million settlement that Paramount is entering into with Trump over an edited interview video that its subsidiary CBS did with Kamala Harris. Why is Paramount agreeing to make that payment to Trump? One possibility is that Paramount is in merger talks with another company. Under America’s regulated-economy system, the federal government has to approve the merger. Thus, it’s entirely possible that Paramount is agreeing to settle the case with Trump to ensure that the feds don’t block its merger.

It’s this way all across the board. This is why one rarely sees the CEOs of universities, big corporations, banks, medical companies, and other establishments criticizing the policies of the federal government. The dole system and the regulated-economy system are very sophisticated devices that have succeeded in silencing them. They don’t dare to exercise freedom of speech, no matter what the First Amendment says.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post What Freedom of Speech? appeared first on LewRockwell.

British police have been arresting anti-genocide protesters for holding signs expressing support for activist group Palestine Action, which London has now officially designated a terrorist group for putting red paint on war planes that were being used in the Gaza holocaust.

That’s right, welcome to the empire, where peace activists are called terrorists, where hospitals are called military bases, where facts are called blood libel, where people opposing genocide are called hateful Nazis, where genocidal soldiers are a protected group and chanting for their death is a hate crime.

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Israeli outlet Haaretz has published an article titled “Now I Understand Why Israel Is Denying Journalists Access to the Appalling Scene in Gaza” by a French historian named Jean-Pierre Filiu, who spent a month in the killing fields of the ruined Palestinian territory after entering with a busload of French physicians.

Israel has banned journalists from Gaza in order to hide its war crimes, making doctors and other specialists the de facto western reporters on the ground. And they’re all reporting the same thing about what they are seeing.

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Part of the problem is how normies who don’t follow this stuff closely cannot believe Israel could be as evil as we’re saying it is. They’re often like “Oh yeah right, they’re just killing civilians because they’re evil and want Palestinians to die.” Which would make sense as an objection if you hadn’t been following Israel’s pattern of behavior from day to day and weren’t familiar with the way Israelis talk about Palestinians whenever they’re speaking to each other in Hebrew instead of addressing the western press.

Israel’s public image is somewhat protected by the fact that its behavior is so profoundly evil that simply talking about it strains credulity among the uninformed, in the same way you sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist if you talk about some of the things the CIA has openly admitted to doing in the past. Many people literally cannot believe anyone could be as evil as Israel is, so the true extent of their crimes go unseen.

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I’ve decided I’m never going to click on another Piers Morgan Uncensored video. He’s just a shitty western empire stooge playing Jerry Springer with people’s outrage over the worst things in the world and pretending to be impartial while generating viral online video clips fueled by rage and partisan echo chamber amplification.

It occasionally looks edifying, but it’s really a symptom of some of the most diseased aspects of this civilization, like Mr Beast. The man is a parasite feasting on the vitriolic energy of these dark and troubling times, directly profiting from the immense suffering caused by the empire he serves.

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The western public has stopped viewing Palestine as an intimidating issue to speak out about, and it’s causing a major problem for the Israel PR machine.

One of the biggest obstacles for the pro-Palestine movement used to be the way Israel-Palestine was incorrectly regarded as a super complex issue that the average busy member of the public can’t hope to understand. That’s changing now because a live-streamed genocide is straightforward enough to override the “No you don’t understand what’s happening because words, words, words” schtick that Israel apologists always use to shut people down, but for a long time the hasbarists were able to intimidate people into silence just by knowing a bunch of clever talking points that the average casual observer would struggle to come up with answers for.

One of my favorite clips from the Glastonbury Festival came from Australian band Amyl and the Sniffers, whose vocalist Amy Taylor gave an off-the-cuff speech about Palestine and colonialism and the parallels between what white colonizers did to Indigenous Australians and what’s happening to the Palestinians today.

It wasn’t a perfect or super eloquent speech by Taylor’s own admission, but it was passionate and it got the point across. At the end she said, “That’s the truth and I thought I’d share that today. It was gonna be something way more poetic but that’s just what I said; it’s not perfect but I think it’s better to say anything than to say nothing at all right now.”

More and more people are seeing this when it comes to Gaza — that it’s better to say anything than to say nothing at all right now. You don’t have to be an expert. You don’t have to know everything there is to know about about the apartheid state of Israel and the history of the Zionist project. You know what you’re seeing and you know it’s wrong, and that’s enough. Don’t let anyone intimidate you into being silent on the defining issue of our times.

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