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The Trumpian attack on immigrants is about as anti-supply side, pro-statist and inimical to free market prosperity as it gets. As we have seen in Parts 1 & 2, immigrant labor accounted for 42% of the thundering 3.62% annual real GDP growth during the golden age of American industrial expansion between 1870 and 1920, but that wasn’t the end of the story.

During the most recent 50-year interval between 1970 and 2020, fully 35% of the far more tepid real GDP growth rate of 2.52% per annum was due to the increase in immigrant labor. Stated differently, without the added work force derived from the 83 million gain in new immigrant arrivals and their off-spring during 1970 to 2020 (middle column, line d of the table below), real GDP growth would have slowed even further to just 1.94% per annum (see below).

Needless to say, the downward arcing march of demographic history shows no sign of reversing when we look at current fertility rates of the native-born population. In the third column of the table below, therefore, we display the standard Census Bureau/CBO baseline case for the 50-year interval from 2025 to 2075. It shows that the current 350 million US population is expected to grow by only 55 million during the next half-century, resulting in a continued sharp trend-line decline in the overall population growth rate.

Per Annum Population Growth Rate:

• 1870-1920 actual: 2.04%.
• 1970-2020 actual: 0.99%.
• 2025-2075 CBO projected: 0.29%.

Alas, the above isn’t the half of it. As it turns out, the current US population as of 2025 will actually shrink by about 15 million during the next 50 years because the sub-replacement fertility rate of just 1.61 (and still falling) will mean that by the mid-2030s deaths among the current population will exceed births. Accordingly, the entire 55 million population gain projected in the CBO base case for 2025 to 2075 is entirely due to immigration and then some.

That’s right. Embedded in the mainstream Census Bureau population projections and CBO’s longer term economic outlook is an assumption that immigration will add an average of 1.4 million persons per year to population growth. In whole numbers that would amount to the following over the next 50 years:

• 45 million new immigrant arrivals or 900,000 per year.
• 25 million children of these new immigrant arrivals or 500,000 per year.

Of course, these figures are not remotely consistent with the Stephen Miller/Trump/MAGA anti-immigrant howling that continuously emanates from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Their policies include deporting millions of illegals that are already here; sharply curtailing the H1-B program for tech workers and PhDs; eliminating the 50,000 per year Diversity Visa program; cutting refugee admission from 125,000 per year to 7,500; and shutting-off virtually all of the unskilled labor that enters through the backdoor of asylum-seeking at the southern border.

In short, the Trumpified GOP’s policy amounts to a zero net immigration strategy for the long haul. To place the potential long-term impact of this radical departure from past policy in historical perspective, we have summed in line (d) of the table below the figures for new arrivals plus their offspring during each of these half-century periods, as follows:

Total New Immigrants Arrivals and Their Offspring—History and Base Case

• 1870-1920 actual: 35.3 million.
• 1970-2020 actual: 83.1 million.
• 2025-2075 base case: 70.0 million.

Based on these immigration totals, a counterfactual is shown in the Memo line, which represents the end year population excluding the line(d) new immigrant population for each of the 50-year intervals. The effect is to isolate the underlying growth rate of the starting year population. Needless to say, the US population, absent new immigration has been and will continue to be on a slippery slope toward contraction.

Counterfactual: Per Annum Population Growth Rate Absent New Immigration

• 1870-1920: +1.22%.
• 1970-2020: +0.40%.
• 2025-2075: -0.09%

The three figures above are dispositive. They show that America’s robust population growth over the last 150 years has been heavily dependent upon new waves of immigrants decade after decade. The graph below shows that this heavy immigrant inflow—driven by the magnet of economic opportunity—has been continuous, and broke below the zero line only during the economic collapse of the Great Depression.

Going forward, however, organic population change and its impact on economic growth will be negative as far as the eye can see for the first time in American history. That’s because the 2.1 fertility barrier was broken to the downside decades ago, meaning that the only possible source of stabilization for the future US population—to say nothing of a return to robust historic growth—is a continuation of large-scale immigration.

Needless to say, negative total US population growth under the Trumpian ZIPG (Zero Immigrant Population Growth) has dramatic implications for both overall economic growth and most especially for the fiscal burden of America’s unfunded social insurance and retirement programs. We address the economic growth barriers in the section below, but here is it worth looking at the last five lines of the table which show the working age population with and without new immigration during the period, the projected retirement population at the end of each period and the ratio of working age population to the retired population in 1920, 2020 and 2075.

These figures reduce to a nightmare in a single ratio. To wit, as of 1920 (before Social Security was enacted) the actual ratio of working age population to the retired population was 13.3:1 and even without new immigration during the previous 50 years the ratio would have been a robust 10.6:1.

In other words, even prior to the modern liberal invention of social insurance there were more than enough workers to help support the old folks, albeit under the historic norms of extended family obligation.

Of course, in 1920 there were only 4.9 million persons 65 and older in America—-so the burden of support was moderate. Fast forward a century to 2020, however, and the retired population had soared to 52.5 million, bringing the worker/retiree ratio down dramatically just as Social Security reached full swing.

Still, immigration during the 1970-2020 period made a considerable difference. The working age population of 207.3 million was +29.3 million higher due to immigration during the prior 50 years than it would have been based on growth of the 1970 population alone. Accordingly, the working age-to-retirement population ratio in 2020 was down sharply, but still computed to 4.0:1, and was also well above the 3.4:1 ratio that would have prevailed based on the 1970 population growth alone.

Alas, the slide towards virtually impossible retirement support burdens will continue unabated during the next 50 years. The retired population will double again to 120 million by 2075, while the working age population under Trumpian ZIPG will total only 182 million or 48 million less than would be the case with status quo policy, which results in baseline immigrant growth of the aforementioned 1.4 million per year.

Either way, the burden of 120 million retirement age persons will be excruciating. The ratio would be 1.9:1 under baseline (i.e. status quo policy) immigration levels, but barely 1.5:1 under Trumpian ZIPG.

Needless to say, the latter is not merely a scary sounding number. The projected average wage replacement rate under current benefit law is 41% by 2075. Accordingly, under Trumpian ZIPG one way or another 27% of every worker’s paycheck would need to be taxed just to pay OASI benefits!

Back in the day during the late 1970s when Jimmy Carter was attempting to raise the payroll tax to keep Social Security solvent for the long haul, we used to joke that annexing Mexico, with an average population age of just 32 years, would be an easier alternative. But the figures below suggest that this was not actually a joke at all.

Decomposition of U.S. Population Change: 1870→1920 vs. 1970→2020 vs. 2025→2075 (50-year periods in millions)

Back in the day, the supply-side model was all about optimizing policy in order to foster higher economic growth. The irony, of course, was that the most potent tool available to actually move the needle big time was the enhancement of labor force growth via immigrant workers. Yet now the once and former supply-side GOP has abandoned this growth tool entirely.

Thus, in the heyday of America’s industrial expansion during 1870 to 1920, the robust average real GDP growth of 3.62% per annum reflected a 28% gain over the2.83% annual growth that was attributable to the labor force increase from the 1870 population and its offspring alone. That is, the actual contribution to real GDP growth from labor hour increases of 2.01% per annum would have been only 1.22% per year without the immigrant arrivals and their off-spring during the 50 years after 1870.

Likewise, during the most recent 50-year period, the more modest 2.52% per annum growth during 1970 to 2020 was fully 30% higher than would have been the case without new immigrant workers. In that case, the already weakened labor force growth of0.98% per annum would have been reduced by more than half to just 0.40% per year without new immigration.

And that gets us to the folly of Trumpian ZIPG. As it is, the CBO base case over the next 50 years is already punk with real GDP growth of just 1.62% per annum. But of the 90 basis points reduction in the growth rate of the CBO baseline relative to the 1970-2020 CAGR, nearly two-thirds of the drop is due to sharply reduced labor force growth of just 0.40% per year. Yet even that is due to the aforementioned 1.4 million per year growth of the immigrant population per the CBO base case.

In fact, however, if you overlay Trumpian ZIPG on the CBO baseline, the labor force growth rate drops to -0.09% per year, as previously explained. This means that even with CBO’s assumption of 1.22% per annum productivity growth, real GDP would rise by only 1.13% per year.

In other words, the real GDP growth rates during the much maligned “open borders” period of 1870 to 1920 (3.62%) would stand at 3.2X the 1.13% per annum rate we have projected under the closed borders of ZIPG. And there is no mistaking that conclusion because a shrinking homegrown labor force is already baked into the cake by the crash of fertility rates.

Of course, the GOP politicians noisily repeat the Laffer Chorus—-namely, cut taxes, close your eyes and wait for 4% growth to shrink the nation’s massive deficits and soaring public debt. But the cold truth is that with a closed border and radically capped labor supply the only way you could get 4.0% real GDP growth is with 4% per annum productivity growth.

And that’s barking madness. During the next decades rising real interest rates from the crowding out effect of soaring Treasury borrowing and the diversion of available capital into speculation-fueled malinvestment in bubble-ridden sectors like AI will make even the 1.22% per annum productivity growth assumption in the CBO baseline case exceedingly difficult to reach.

At the end of the day, that’s the real downside of ZIPG. A disastrous baseline fiscal outlook that is already taking the public debt to $185 trillion and 168% of GDP by mid-century under the current CBO baseline could be turned into a veritable financial nightmare.

That is to say, ZIPG is likely to foster a scenario where real economic growth easily drops below 1% per annum under the weight of debt, soaring interest rates, chronic labor shortages, stubbornly high inflation, rising payroll taxes (to fund Social Security after trust fund insolvency in the early 2030s) and rampant Wall Street speculation owing to easy money.

U.S. Real Economic Growth And Its Components By 50-Year Intervals (trillion $)

Part 4

Needless to say, all of the above is likely to come as a shock to MAGA Hat followers who have been fed the false line that immigration amounts to an “invasion” and that its all just plain bad. Undoubtedly, the crime horror story anecdotes that are attached to this canard makes tribal politics and the Trumpian weaponization of the immigration control machinery of the state seem plausible.

In fact, the GOP’s wholehearted embrace of Trumpian immigrant bashing is not surprising. In recent decades while foraging for defining issues to mobilize the electorate, Washington Republicans have pretty much given up on the GOP’s true calling in American governance, which is to be the Opposition Party in the contest for power with the Government Party controlled by the Dems.

In turn, that boils down to functioning as the Watch Dog of the Treasury in the unending battle against spending, borrowing, money printing and socialist redistribution of societal resources and wealth, whether through fiscal, regulatory or tax policy channels. This is logically the GOP’s job because America surely doesn’t need another pro-state Big Government party to compete with the endless follies of the Dems.

Yet for whatever reason, the careerists who manage the Washington GOP’s campaign and fund-raising machinery concluded long ago that the old time Republican fiscal religion symbolized by balanced budgets had become passe at best and an outright electoral looser, at worst.

So for decades they have been persistently hunting for non-fiscal issues capable of materially moving the electoral needle. And frequently they have found such opportunities in the “culture wars” arena. They learned, for instance, that the “right to life” cause—which should not be a Federal government matter at all— was far more potent with some segments of the electorate than, say, the traditional GOP causes of welfare reform or stanching the growth of the public debt.

To be sure, there are some culture wars issues that involve the machinery of the state encroaching upon economic freedoms and personal liberties that very much needed to be resisted. The battle against state-enforced and encouraged DEI was self-evidently one of these, as was resisting the secular religion of Climate Change and its lethal threat to free market prosperity anchored in the efficiency and superiority of fossil fuels.

But mainly, separation of Culture & State is simply a modern day extension of the Founders’ insistence on the separation of Church & State: Religion and culture alike are not the appropriate business of government. Full stop.

Yet violation of that axiom is essentially the entrepot by which the GOP stumbled into its destructive embrace of the anti-immigration cause. That is to say, a polity predicated upon maximum personal liberty, free markets, constitutionally-shackled government and autonomous social life unencumbered by the state can’t be in the business of regulating the ethnic, racial and cultural composition of civil society—to say nothing of actively promoting or legislating bigotry.

This is especially the case because America is, was and likely always should be a Melting Pot of the world’s pre-existing nationalities, races, ethnicities and cultural heritages. And, as we have seen in the economic brilliance of the 1870-1920 growth explosion, it is that Melting Pot and the associated “open borders” that fostered that great outpouring of capitalist prosperity, a resilient civil order and constitutional liberty that eventually spread across the North American continent from sea-to-shining sea.

The historical evolution of the American Melting Pot, of course, had its episodic spasms of nativist reaction, frequently originating within the second to most recent wave of immigrants. Thus, the English settlers resisted the Irish, even as the latter assumed less than a welcoming posture toward the newer arrivals from Italy—who, in due course, afforded the Poles the same courtesy.

In the process, there was more than a little racial and religious bigotry that welled up as the 19th century immigration waves flowed into the 20th century peak before WWI. Thereafter, of course, the open gates for free immigration were officially closed in 1924 and replaced by a state-regulated immigration management enterprise via the national quota-based act of 1924. Trumpian ZIPG is only its extreme logical extension.

Needless to say, this new regulatory enterprise was grounded in a kind of rolling nativist bigotry that had emerged during the prior century or so. The tip off is that the quotas in the 1924 Act were set at 2% of the foreign-born population of each nationality living in the U.S. based on the 1890 Census. In effect, the older arrivals used the border control powers of the state to restrict the newer arrivals from Southern and Eastern European (e.g., Italians, Poles, Jews), which were seen as less desirable by nativists compared to Northern and Western Europeans.

By the next big Immigration reform act of 1965, however, the country-based quota system had become at once too rigid, but also too permissive by the lights of some nativists—-since the 1920s legislation had generally not restricted Western Hemisphere based immigrants at all. So the new post-1965 quota system covered the entire world including the brownish peoples of Latin America, Africa and Asia. This bias, in turn, was compounded by the heavy role for family reunification in the 1965 act’s quotas—which favored immigrant groups already here, as well as a cold war era focus on slots for scientists and highly educated workers.

The 1965 act was allegedly “progressive” because it didn’t arbitrarily favor German or Irish green card applicants, but it inadvertently suffered a worse disability. Namely, it put an aggregate cap on total immigration at at time when the US birth rate was plummeting, meaning that growth of the native born labor force 20-40 years hence would follow the same plunging curve downward.

So while on the surface the 1965 act stabilized the immigration rate in the 2-4 per 1,000 population range, this was far below the 5-10 immigrants per 1,000 annual rate which had prevailed during the open borders era prior to the 1920s; and, more importantly, it was also far below what would be needed to even stabilize the growth rate of the US labor force, given the collapse of native born births after the Baby Boom ended in 1962.

As is evident in the chart below, during the post-war Baby Boom, the fertility rate—as measured by births per 1,000 women—soared from the depressed levels of the Great Depression years back toward its historic peak of 120 per 1,000 in the late 1950s.

But then it plunged during the 1960s and never looked back. Today’s rate of just 54.5 per 1,000 is literally in the sub-basement of history, as shown in the graph below.

What this means, of course, is that the US labor force tracks the pink line in the chart with a lag of 20 to 40 years. As we have seen, therefore, by mid-century the native born work force will be shrinking and will continue to do so as far as the eye can see, meaning that the nation’s capacity for historical levels of economic growth will be deeply impaired without large scale immigration, as we have also seen.

Consequently, this baked-into-the cake shriveling of the homegrown labor force has already unleashed forces that powerfully debunk the “immigrant invasion” story peddled by the Trumpified GOP.

To wit, the baby crash and the subsequently unfolding collapse of native-born labor force growth is actually what has brought tens of millions of immigrants to the US borders in recent decades. They were mainly economic migrants, sucked into the US economy by a labor market that is literally parched for supply. That is, they weren’t invaders and raiders sent by enemies abroad; they were job-seekers lured across the southern borders by what amounted to a giant and continuous Help Wanted Ad wafting up from the US labor market.

So for crying out loud. The 28 million “encounters” at the US border over the last decade as ballyhooed by the Trumpites did not constitute a foreign-sourced “invasion”. Foreign governments in this hemisphere or elsewhere were not plotting to empty their jails, mental institutions or military battalions of undesirables intent upon harming American citizens and undermining American society.

To the contrary, the border has been flooded by work-seeking immigrants earnestly searching for a better life for themselves and their families—just as has been the case with wave after wave of immigrants to the US since the very beginning of the Republic. And the current intensity of these immigrant flows is driven by plain old market economics: that is, a severe shortage of entry level labor owing to native babies that have never been born—plus a mushrooming Welfare State that has removed potential native born labor hours from active commerce by the tens of billions each year.

The latter includes the removal of billions of potential labor hours from the US economy via early retirements, ballooning disability rolls, an ever expanding potpourri of food, housing, medical and cash welfare programs and the giant scam of student loans and grants that removes millions of potential workers from the labor force on an extended basis.

At the same time, anecdotes about horrific crimes which happen to have been committed by immigrants is not the same thing as factual analysis. Thus, among the illegal alien population of 20 million, as recently claimed by Homeland Secy Noem, dangerous criminals account for less than0.3% of the total, and most of those are already incarcerated in state and Federal prisons.

That’s right. Contrary to ICE Barbie’s exaggerated statistic there are by all reliable estimates currently between 12 million and 16 million undocumented aliens in the US. And the overwhelming share of these immigrants came here looking for jobs in the guise of seeking “asylum” from alleged political and criminal threats in their home countries. So call the number of illegals around 15 million at the outside.

But according to the widely cited letter from ICE to Congressman Gonzales in mid-2024, there are about 425,000 names of undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions on ICE’s so-called “non-detained docket”. That is, persons not currently under ICE detention.

While this is just 2.8% of the 15 million illegal aliens and in itself debunks the Trumpian refrain about the borders being overrun by criminals released from Latin American jails, that’s not even the half of it. Actually, the list sent to Rep. Gonzales spans 40 years and also includes upwards of 300,000 persons mostly convicted of traffic violations, drug possession, minor misdemeanors and also breaking immigration laws, which they have to do in order to apply for asylum—thereby making for a catch 22 of no mean aspect.

So what might be called actual “dangerous” criminals on the ICE list amount to 130,000 or about 0.9% of the undocumented population. However, even on this list the total of convicted violent criminals is small indeed.

According to ICE, 13,099 of these persons have been convicted of homicide or just 0.1% of the undocumented population. But, alas, virtually all of these individuals are already in Federal, state or local prisons. The don’t have to be deported to protect the safety of the American public because they have already been apprehended, convicted and incarcerated!

Likewise, there are another 15,800 on the list who have been convicted of sexual assault. Again, however, according to GROK 4 upwards of half of these are also serving their justly deserved time behind bars.

In short, the streets of America are not crawling with illegal aliens who are convicted violent criminals. There have obviously been some horrific murders by illegal aliens, just as there unfortunately are year-in-and-year- out by native-born criminals, too. But when it comes to eliminating the undesirable elements of the immigrant population, deporting a few thousands real criminals is all that’s actually required.

So we return to the real dynamic at work—the giant magnet for economic migrants formed by America’s still growing labor-short economy. For want of doubt as to the latter truth, here is the change in employment as between native-born (red line) and foreign-born (blue line) workers since early 2020.

The former is up by a mere 2% while foreign-born employment has risen by 14%. Needless to say, the current sweeping Trumpian deportation campaign will actually cause millions of “no shows” in the blue line segment of the labor market owing to midnight ICE raids or fear-driven self-deportations. Either way, the downward pressure on the blue line and the resulting labor market turmoil and disruption is sure to become a supply-side barrier to US economic growth.

Foreign-Born Versus Native-Born Employment Since January 2020

Indeed, when looked at on a longer term basis, the foreign-born source of America’s current labor force growth is even more dramatic. Since the pre-crisis peak in Q4 2007 the number of foreign-born workers ( blue line) employed in the US has increased by 7.6 million thru September 2025, while the far larger population of native born workers has grown by only 9.2 million (red line).

In relative terms, however, the data leave nothing to the imagination. Foreign-born employment is up by +33% since Q4 2007, while native-born job holders have grown by only +10%. And due to demographics that are already baked into the cake, the red line will be falling for the next several decades or, actually, for as far as the eye can see.

Index of Change In Foreign Born Versus Native Born Workers Since Q4 2007

Needless to say, these facts as to scant few criminals among the undocumented population and vast labor market shortages in the US economy point to a modern-day supply-side solution. That is, a constructive policy remedy that goes in the very opposite direction of the restrictive Trumpian anti-immigrant and deportation campaign.

We are speaking, of course, of the need for a large expansion of the current tiny 10,000 per year EB-3 quota for entry level workers. Uncapping that quota entirely for fully-vetted low skill workers would essentially eliminate the so-called flood at the border, and do so without adding a single Border Patrol or ICE agent, and likely enabling an actual shrinkage of Washington’s costly border regulation operations.

This virtual clearance of the so-called “invasion” would happen because with no quota on new immigrant worker visas, willing, law-abiding job-seekers would go to the US embassies and consulates in their home countries to fill out their visa applications and be vetted by State Department professionals. There would simply be no need to cross the US border seeking “asylum”, and to then be arrested, herded and man-handled by the Border Patrol and eventually wait-listed for years in the hideous immigration court system while out on “parole”— free to wonder around in the wild anywhere in the US.

The proof for this proposition is in the pudding. Again, here are GROK 4’s best estimates of the number of undocumented workers employed in the US by industry. Essentially, 8.85 million of the 15 million illegal alien population is employed in basic US industries, and the rest are mostly their kids and stay-at-home spouses. In the case of the first three low-skill BLS categories listed in the table below, undocumented workers account for a double-digit share of the employed workforce.

That is to say, they got here not thru the current tiny 10,000 per year EB-3 pinhole for unskilled visas, but through the rough and tumble, unvetted expedient of backdoor entry as asylees and refugees.

So here’s the thing. There are probably 10,000 or fewer violent undocumented criminals actually at large in the US versus a proven 9 million undocumented law-abiding, tax-paying, family-supporting workers accounting for 5% of the entire US labor force. That’s a 900:1 ratio of people we need versus those we don’t.

Yet the supply shock from the disappearance of millions of workers that the Trump Administration is deporting each and every day and the millions more who are likely self-deporting for fear of being sent to the Donald’s Gulag in El Salvador is going to rip through the labor market like the proverbial neutron bomb. Businesses will be left standing, but they will be stripped clean of the workers they need to function, to say nothing of thrive and march toward the Donald’s ballyhooed Golden Age.

So Trump-O-Nomics has the policy framework upside down. The only thing that is needed is to excise a few pages of statute and regulations and thereby uncap the low skill quota for vetted migrant workers.

That is to say, a pro-supply side, anti-statist initiative to relieve the regulatory straight jacket foisted upon the US economy by an idiotic immigration quota system that rooted in the bigotry of the 1920s and the progressive delusions of the 1960s would solve the border problem and boost the American economy and tax base in one fell swoop.

Estimated Undocumented Workers in U.S. Industries (2025)

Ordered by Highest to Lowest % Undocumented

Accordingly, almost anyone abroad who has a legitimate reason to come to the US under a supply-side immigration policy would not need to wade through the Rio Grande or cross the Arizona deserts in the dead of night. Instead, they would go—possibly in suit and tie—to one of the 38 embassies and consulates that the US operates in Mexico and Latin America and hundreds more elsewhere around the world.

As it happens, the infrastructure is already there to handle a resumed inflow of work-seeking migrants. Currently, the State Department processes and effectively vets about 11 million visas per year at its worldwide diplomatic outposts depicted below. The overwhelming share or 10.5 millionof these are nonimmigrant visas for tourists/business (7.8 million), temporary work (900,000), students/exchange (800,000) and others (300,000).

Moreover, in the immigrant visa category of 550,000 per year, the overwhelming share of visas issued is according to the updated provisions of the 1965 act. That is, for immediate family and relatives reunification (340,000), skilled and technical employees (120,000), the diversity lottery by country (55,000) and last and, unfortunately, least is a mere 10,000 for entry level and unskilled workers.

Our point here is two-fold. First, all of these applications are processed through an orderly, computerized and professionally conducted process at hundreds of State Department locations—backed-up by Washington based infrastructure and systems. That is to say, the well-oiled machinery to re-channel and decentralize what had been the massive flow of migrants to the Mexican/US border is already in place, and would need only modest incremental personnel and budget resources.

Map of US Embassies and Consulates Around the World

But secondly, and crucially, this logical solution doesn’t happen now because the overwhelming share of the 28 million border-crashers were young workers and their families who entered the US illegally in order to get arrested and thereby placed in the queue for asylum. They didn’t go to the embassies and consulates like the 11 million other worldwide visa seekers because in their case it would have been futile: Again, there is only 10,000 slots in the quota system per year for unskilled workers who can do a job with less than two-years of training.

In short, the US immigration quota structure is consciously and stupidly designed to force these tens of millions of entry level job-seekers, which the US economy desperately needs, through a tiny pin-hole of 10,000 slots per year under the Employment-Based Third Preference (EB-3) “Other Workers”category.

To be sure, there are currently about 140,000 employment-based immigrant visas allocated yearly, but politically powerful lobbies for Silicon Valley and and the Fortune 500 typically scarf up 130,000 of these, including—

• 40,000 for EB-1 professors, researchers, multinational executives and STEM workers.
• 40,000 for EB-2 advanced degree holders with exceptional abilities in science and tech.
• 30,000 for EB-3 skilled workers requiring more than 2 years of training.
• 9,900 for EB-5 immigrant investors.
• Subtotal, high skill employment based visas: 130,000

Needless to say, Goggle doesn’t send its EB-1 recruits from Taiwan to wade across the Rio Grande in order to enter the USA. Some smart immigration lawyer in Taipei handles all the paperwork and arranges the office based interviews at the US consulate.

No muss, no fuss. NO INVASION.

To the contrary, the whole “invasion” is owing to the fact that unions and Silicon Valley lobbies make sure that the hideously tiny 10,000 cap for entry level workers stays in place, and that therefore there is no other route for unskilled workers to get a permanent visa except to invade the border, break the law and get in the queue for asylum.

Once this fundamental dynamic is understood, then it is evident that the Donald’s whole INVASION motif is upside down. The hordes at the border were not due to foreign evil doers and criminal cartels sending them north, but were owing to the economic magnet effect of today’s native-born baby dearth.

At the end of the day, the ZIPG essence of Trump-O-Nomics surely has Ronald Reagan rolling in his grave. He properly championed the notion that economic growth and rising prosperity are everywhere and always a function of supply-side energy and enterprise. So the Donald’s anti-supply side immigrant bashing is truly a recipe for economic disaster, not a Golden Era of Prosperity.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post The Nightmare of Trumpian ZIPG appeared first on LewRockwell.

Whitney Webb is right. America is One Nation Under Blackmail. From the White House to Congress to state governors and legislators to the mainstream media to mega churches and televangelists, they are on the take. And the godfather with the money—our money (and the enforcers to make sure they take the bribes)—is Israel.

From Bill Clinton to Donald Trump and every U.S. president in between (with slight hesitation from Bush Sr.), each of these men has been but a mere pawn and puppet of the Israel lobby. For all intents and purposes, the U.S. president is not Donald Trump (or Joe Biden or Barack Obama or G.W. Bush or Bill Clinton); he is Benjamin Netanyahu—or whoever else might be Israel’s Prime Minister.

It has been common knowledge for decades that many of our major cities’ police officers have been and are being trained in Israel or by Israelis here in the U.S.

Back in 2020, I wrote a column entitled Prelude To Martial Law. I quote:

Minnesota cops receive training from the Israelis.

Officers from the US police force responsible for the killing of George Floyd received training in restraint techniques and anti-terror tactics from Israeli law-enforcement officers.

Mr. Floyd’s death in custody last Monday, the latest in a succession of police killings of African Americans, has sparked continuing protests and rioting in US cities.

At least 100 Minnesota police officers attended a 2012 conference hosted by the Israeli consulate in Chicago, the second time such an event had been held.

There they learned the violent techniques used by Israeli forces as they terrorize the occupied Palestinian territories under the guise of security operations.

The so-called counterterrorism training conference in Minneapolis was jointly hosted by the FBI.

I have documented several times in this column how U.S. law enforcement personnel are increasingly receiving training from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Our police officers are being trained by the terrorists of Tel Aviv in the terrible art of torture and death.

This knee-on-neck technique is straight out of the Israeli handbook. This technique is often known to slowly break the necks of the victims. And this training is widespread throughout the United States. Hundreds—maybe thousands—of American law enforcement officers from Minnesota, New Jersey, Florida, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington State and Washington, D.C. (and doubtless many other states), have been flown to Israel for training.

On a recent podcast, retired Green Beret Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar and Army Captain Josephine Guilbeau again noted that American police personnel and federal police agencies such as ICE and US Department of Homeland Security train with the Israelis.

They provided this quote:

So, these National Guard soldiers that will soon be in or are in Chicago have trained with  Israel habitually for years. So, when you look at all of these pieces of “who do we have operating on the streets of Portland and the streets of New York and in DC, and who’s going into Chicago?” All of these components and elements have trained hand-in-hand with the IDF or the Israeli Ministry of the Interior, gendarmerie, paramilitary police.

Last month, The Jerusalem Post ran a major story on how the U.S. has secured a contract with an Israeli drone manufacturer for AI one-way attack drones.

Israeli drone start-up XTEND has secured a multi-million-dollar contract from the US Department of Defense (DoD) to develop and deliver AI-enabled, modular, one-way attack drones designed for close-quarter combat.

The award was announced by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of War (OASW) for Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC), and highlights Israel’s growing leadership in the drone market as the US military boosts its drone procurement.

The Affordable Close Quarter Modular Effects FPV Drone Kits (ACQME-DK) program will provide the US military with small, lethal automated aerial systems (UAS) optimized for irregular warfare in dense urban terrain and confined rural environments. They will feature XTEND’s ESAD high-voltage fuse, the only US-approved high-voltage fuse in the category.

The drones form a Modular VTOL + munitions kit. This reloadable, reusable distraction device allows for rapid reconfiguration in the field, day or night reconnaissance and surveillance operations, lethal inert training payloads, and lethal payloads.

XTEND will deliver training, spares, maintenance, and production from its Tampa headquarters, ensuring a domestic supply chain for the US Department of War. [Emphasis added]

The use of the U.S. military for domestic policing, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s murder on the high seas under the pretext of fighting a “war on drugs” (where have we heard that before?), calling the victims “narco-terrorists” (where is the evidence?), President Trump’s (and state governors such as Ron DeSantis’) fanatical attempt to curtail the freedom of speech to criticize Israel (the First Amendment be damned) and now an American partnership with Israelis to bring millions of drones into the government’s arsenal (to be used against whom?) form a reliable track record of a maniacal and perpetual political and military collaboration that exists between Washington, D.C., and Tel Aviv.

As I said in my message last Sunday entitled The Biblical Remedy For Warmongers:

Our parents cautioned us that we tend to behave like the people we befriend, so choose your friends wisely.

Well, the American government has befriended the murderous State of Israel for so long that it is now behaving like Israel.

So, exactly whom will uber-Zionist, uber-war Pete Hegseth use these Israeli drones against? The answer is: It could be anybody—including you and me.

Again, Whitney Webb is right: We ARE one nation under blackmail.

But it is actually worse than that. Not only are our politicians under Israeli blackmail but more and more frequently, our military and police are under Israeli training and direction.

It is no hyperbole to suggest that virtually every U.S. military operation (including the ones in Venezuela and Ukraine—and obviously the ones all over the Middle East) is conducted in cooperation with and under the guidance of the Israeli government.

Come on, folks! If the Israelis are embedded in our federal police agencies inside the U.S., you know they are embedded inside our U.S. military establishments.

The United States of America has not been an independent nation since the Zionist State of Israel came into existence. And it will not be an independent nation as long as the Zionist State of Israel stays in existence—or perhaps until the Boomers die out and the Millennials and Generation Z permanently cut the umbilical cord between us and the genocidal Zionist state.

All I know is: It cannot happen soon enough.

Reprinted with permission from Chuck Baldwin Live.

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The people of Honduras had not yet made up their minds. So, Donald Trump intervened to help them.

The major candidates in Sunday’s election were Rixi Moncada, the former defense minister of the ruling left-wing LIBRE party, who had promised to continue President Xiomara Castro’s agenda; Nasry “Tito” Asfura, a construction magnate who is running for the right-wing National Party on a free market platform; and Salvador Nasralla, formerly of the LIBRE party, who broke with them and moved to a centrist anticorruption platform.

In the lead-up to the election, the polls suggested a three-way race with no clear favorite. But Trump had a favorite.

Firing off two Truth Social posts within 18 minutes of each other, Trump dramatically intervened in the election.

With Venezuela under threat of U.S. military intervention, Trump’s posts widened the focus of the threat to encompass Honduras. “Will Maduro and his Narcoterrorists take over another country like they have taken over Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela?” Trump asked. The only way to remove themselves from America’s gun sights was, apparently, to vote for Asfura, the right-wing candidate. “The man who is standing up for Democracy, and fighting against Maduro,” Trump said, “is Tito Asfura, the Presidential Candidate of the National Party.” The threat was clear: a vote for Moncada is a vote for Venezuela that puts Honduras at risk of war; a vote for Asfura is a vote for America to fight against Maduro. “Tito and I can work together to fight the Narcocommunists…. I cannot work with Moncada and the Communists,” Trump told the voters of Honduras.

And the threat was not only military but also economic. Right after hitting “post” on his first message, another thought struck Trump that Hondurans needed to hear: “If Tito Asfura wins for President of Honduras, because the United States has so much confidence in him, his Policies, and what he will do for the Great People of Honduras, we will be very supportive. If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad.”

With the threat of military and economic intervention now clear, Trump declared, “Democracy is on trial in the coming Elections,” and he left it to the people of “the beautiful country of Honduras” to decide.

Moncada was not guilty of hyperbole or sensationalism when she complained that Trump’s posts, “three days before the election,” were “totally interventionist.”

This is not the first time the U.S. has lacked the patience to wait for an election before undertaking an intervention or a coup. The preemptive soft coup, whether by endorsement, diplomatic support, removal from the ballot, threat of sanctions, or smearing the vote as illegitimate ahead of its taking place, has recently been a popular page in the American interventionist handbook. Such interventions have been undertaken in several recent elections, including Venezuela, Haiti, Ecuador, and Argentina.

One of the key congresspeople keeping tabs on the Honduran election is Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL). She is hardly averse to non-democratic transfers of power in Honduras. When Honduras’s President Manuel Zelaya, the founder of the LIBRE party, was ousted in a 2009 coup, Salazar said “thank God… Mr. Zelaya was out of office.”

The U.S. role in the 2009 coup has not given America a good résumé in Honduras. On June 28, 2009, Manuel Zelaya was seized at gunpoint and whisked away in a plane that, unsubtly, refueled at a U.S. military base. The U.S. knew it was a coup. A July 24, 2009 cable sent from the U.S. embassy in Honduras says, “There is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup….” As an exclamation point, it adds, “none of the . . . arguments [of the coup defenders] has any substantive validity under the Honduran constitution.”

Nonetheless, when the UN and the Organization of American States (OAS) called for the return of the elected president, the U.S. did not. And when the UN and the OAS refused to recognize the coup president, the U.S. did. Then-Secretary of State Clinton has admitted that she aided the coup government by shoring it up and blocking the return of the elected government: “In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa in Mexico. We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.”

Read the Whole Article

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The Trump administration’s killings of scores of Venezuelans are justifiably provoking outrage. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently proclaimed, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.” Donald Trump and Hegseth are cashing a blank check for carnage that was written years earlier by President Barack Obama.

In his 2017 farewell address, Obama boasted, “We have taken out tens of thousands of terrorists.” Drone strikes increased tenfold under Obama, helping fuel anti–U.S. backlashes in several nations.

As he campaigned for the presidency in 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama declared, “We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers.” Many Americans who voted for Obama in 2008 expected a seachange in Washington. However, from his first weeks in office, Obama authorized widespread secret attacks against foreign suspects, some of which spurred headlines when drones slaughtered wedding parties or other innocents.

On February 3, 2010, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair stunned Washington by announcing that the administration was also targeting Americans for killing. Blair revealed to a congressional committee the new standard for extrajudicial killings:

“Whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American has—is a threat to other Americans. We don’t target people for free speech. We target them for taking action that threatens Americans.”

But “involved” is a vague standard—as is “action that threatens Americans.” Blair stated that “if we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.” Permission from who?

Obama’s first high-profile American target was Anwar Awlaki, a cleric born in New Mexico. After the 9/11 attacks, Awlaki was showcased as a model moderate Muslim. The New York Times noted that Awlaki “gave interviews to the national news media, preached at the Capitol in Washington and attended a breakfast with Pentagon officials.” He became more radical after he concluded that the Geoge W. Bush administration’s Global War on Terror was actually a war on Islam. After the FBI sought to squeeze him into becoming an informant against other Muslims, Awlaki fled the country. He arrived in Yemen and was arrested and reportedly tortured at the behest of the U.S. government. After he was released from prison eighteen months later, his attitude had worsened and his sermons became more bloodthirsty.

After the Obama administration announced plans to kill Awlaki, his father hired a lawyer to file a challenge in federal court. The ACLU joined the lawsuit, seeking to compel the government “to disclose the legal standard it uses to place U.S. citizens on government kill lists.” The Obama administration labeled the entire case a “State Secret.” This meant that the administration did not even have to explain why federal law no longer constrained its killings. The administration could have indicted Awlaki on numerous charges but it did not want to provide him any traction in federal court.

In September 2010, The New York Times reported that “there is widespread agreement among the administration’s legal team that it is lawful for President Obama to authorize the killing of someone like Mr. Awlaki.” It was comforting to know that top political appointees concurred that Obama could justifiably kill Americans. But that was the same “legal standard” the Bush team used to justify torture.   

The Obama administration asserted a right to kill U.S. citizens without trial, without notice, and without any chance for the marked men to legally object. In November 2010, Justice Department attorney Douglas Letter announced in federal court that no judge had legal authority to be “looking over the shoulder” of Obama’s targeted killing. Letter declared that the program involves “the very core powers of the president as commander in chief.”

The following month, federal judge John Bates dismissed the ACLU’s lawsuit because “there are circumstances in which the Executive’s unilateral decision to kill a U.S. citizen overseas” is “judicially unreviewable.” Bates declared that targeted killing was a “political question” outside the court’s jurisdiction. His deference was stunning: no judge had ever presumed that killing Americans was simply another “political question.” The Obama administration’s position “would allow the executive unreviewable authority to target and kill any U.S. citizen it deems a suspect of terrorism anywhere,” according to Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Pardiss Kebriae.

On September 30, 2011, a U.S. drone attack killed Awlaki along with another American citizen, Samir Khan, who was editing an online Al Qaeda magazine. Obama bragged about the lethal operation at a military base later that day. A few days later, administration officials gave a New York Times reporter extracts a peek at the fifty-page secret Justice Department memo. The Times noted, “The secret document provided the justification for [killing Awlaki] despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis.” The legal case for killing Awlaki was so airtight that it did not even need to be disclosed to the American public.

Two weeks after killing Awlaki, Obama authorized a drone attack that killed his son and six other people as they sat at an outdoor café in Yemen. Anonymous administration officials quickly assured the media that Abdulrahman Awlaki was a 21-year-old Al Qaeda fighter and thus fair game. Four days later, The Washington Post published a birth certificate proving that Awlaki’s son was only 16-years old and had been born in Denver. Nor did the boy have any connection with Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group. Robert Gibbs, Obama’s former White House press secretary and a top advisor for Obama’s reelection campaign, later shrugged that the 16-year-old should have had “a far more responsible father.”

Regardless of that boy’s killing, the media often portrayed Obama and his drones as infallible. A Washington Post poll a few months later revealed that 83% of Americans approved of Obama’s drone killing policy. It made almost no difference whether the suspected terrorists were American citizens; 79% of respondents approved of preemptively killing their fellow countrymen, no judicial niceties required. The Post noted that “77 percent of liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones, meaning that Obama is unlikely to suffer any political consequences as a result of his policy in this election year.” The poll results were largely an echo of official propaganda. Most folks “knew” only what the government wanted them to hear regarding drones. Thanks to pervasive secrecy, top government officials could kill who they chose and say what they pleased. The fact that the federal government had failed to substantiate more than 90% of its terrorist accusations since 9/11 was irrelevant since the president was omniscient.

On March 6, 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder, in a speech on targeted killings to a college audience, declared, “Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, it does not guarantee judicial process.” TV comedian Stephen Colbert mocked Holder, quipping “Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do.” One purpose of due process is to allow evidence to be critically examined. But there was no opportunity to debunk statements from anonymous White House officials. For the Obama administration, “due process” meant little more than reciting certain phrases in secret memos prior to executions.

Holder declared that the drone attacks “are not [assassinations], and the use of that loaded term is misplaced; assassinations are unlawful killings. Here, for the reasons I have given, the U.S. government’s use of lethal force in self-defense.” Any termination secretly approved by the president or his top advisers was automatically a “lawful killing.” Holder reassured Americans that Congress was overseeing the targeted killing program. But no one on Capitol Hill demanded a hearing or investigation after U.S. drones killed American citizens in Yemen. The prevailing attitude was exemplified by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King (R-NY): 

“Drones aren’t evil, people are evil. We are a force of good and we are using those drones to carry out the policy of righteousness and goodness.”

Obama told White House aides that it “turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.” In April 2012, The New York Times was granted access for a laudatory inside look at “Terror Tuesday” meetings in the White House:

“Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.”

It was a PowerPoint death parade. The Times stressed that Obama personally selected who to kill next:

“The control he exercises also appears to reflect Mr. Obama’s striking self-confidence: he believes, according to several people who have worked closely with him, that his own judgment should be brought to bear on strikes.”

Commenting on the Times’ revelations, author Tom Engelhardt observed, “We are surely at a new stage in the history of the imperial presidency when a president (or his election team) assembles his aides, advisors and associates to foster a story that’s meant to broadcast the group’s collective pride in the new position of assassin-in-chief.”

On May 23, 2013, Obama, in a speech on his targeted killing program at the National Defense University in Washington, told his fellow Americans that “we know a price must be paid for freedom”—such as permitting the president untrammeled authority to kill threats to freedom. The president declared that “before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured—the highest standard we can set.”

Since almost all the data on victims was confidential, it was tricky to prove otherwise. But NBC News acquired classified documents revealing that the CIA was often clueless about who it was killing. NBC noted, “Even while admitting that the identities of many killed by drones were not known, the CIA documents asserted that all those dead were enemy combatants. The logic is twisted: If we kill you, then you were an enemy combatant.” Killings are also exonerated by counting “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants…unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” And U.S. bureaucrats have no incentive to track down evidence exposing their fatal errors. The New York Times revealed that U.S. “counterterrorism officials insist…people in an area of known terrorist activity…are probably up to no good.” The “probably up to no good” standard absolved almost any drone killing within thousands of square miles in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Daniel Hale, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, leaked information revealing that nearly 90% of people who were killed in drone strikes were not the intended targets. Joe Biden’s Justice Department responded by coercing Hale into pleading guilty to “retention and transmission of national security information,” and he was sent to prison in 2021.

Sovereign immunity entitles presidents to kill with impunity. Or at least that is what presidents have presumed for most of the past century. If the Trump administration can establish a prerogative to preemptively kill anyone suspected of transporting illicit narcotics, millions of Americans could be in the federal cross-hairs. But the Trump administration is already having trouble preserving total secrecy thanks to controversies over who ordered alleged war crimes. Will Trump’s anti-drug carnage end up torpedoing his beloved Secretary of War Hegseth and his own credibility with Congress, the judiciary, and hundreds of millions of Americans who do not view White House statements as divine revelations handed down from Mt. Sinai?

This article was originally published on The Libertarian Institute and was reprinted with the author’s permission.

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Since our society is conditioned to believe all vaccines are “safe and effective” many do not realize the risk and benefits of each vaccine vary greatly. One of the most controversial vaccines has been the Hepatitis B vaccine, which is given to every newborn in the country at their most fragile moment of life despite their risk of contracting hepatitis B being negligible.

Bonnie Dunbar PhD has also been in contact with numerous physicians and research scientists from several countries who have independently described thousands of identical severe reactions occurring in Caucasian recipients of the hepatitis vaccine.

Since entering the market, the hepatitis B vaccine has been marred with safety concerns:

• As early as 1976, one researcher cautioned that since autoimmunity is involved in the pathogenesis of hepatitis B infections, it they might also be provoked by molecularly similar hepatitis B vaccines. Numerous papers and major news articles since have shown that vaccine provokes a wide range of autoimmune disorders.1,2,3,4,5,6

• In 1998 Scientist highlighted growing concerns threatening to derail the hepatitis B vaccine program, such as more and more people claiming it caused serious autoimmune diseases (e.g., rheumatoid arthritis [RA], optic neuritis, and multiple sclerosis [MS]), that one doctor had collected over 600 cases of this happening, and that in July, attorneys representing 15,000 people sued France’s government for exaggerating the vaccine’s benefits and downplaying its risks (after which France suspended the vaccine in schools—a move widely condemned by health authorities).

• In January 1999 ABC News aired a scathing criticism of the Hepatitis B vaccine.

Note: 55 other news programs criticizing vaccines they would never air today can be read here.

•A May 1999 Congressional hearing on the vaccine highlighted that:

• Serious side effects included infant death, seizures, autism, dysautonomia, MS, RA diabetes, and rare cases of liver cancer in children post-vaccination, with (vastly underreported) VAERS data showing over 8,000 reactions, including 43 deaths in children under 2 in 1997. In contrast, there were only 95 (or less) annual hepatitis B cases and no infant deaths, indicating the risks of newborn vaccination vastly outweighed any possible benefit.
• There was massive underreporting of injuries (e.g., 4-5 day trials were too short to identify them, and physicians denied they’d occurred when parents reported them) and no effort had been made to identify injury susceptibility.
• All long-term research into the safety of the vaccine was being stonewalled, yet the medical community argued the lack of robust long-term safety studies actually proved the vaccines were “safe” but promised to do future research to determine if the vaccines were safe (which 25 years later still has not happened—but again was repeatedly promised this year as a way to dismiss proposals to stop giving the vaccine to newborns).
• Vaccinating low-risk newborns for an adult-associated disease is inappropriate, particularly since immunity can wane before adolescence and 10–30% of individuals fail to produce antibodies, questioning efficacy.
• The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program denied most claims, leaving debilitated victims unsupported despite a $1 billion trust fund, with restrictions limiting filings for hepatitis B vaccine injuries.
• There was no informed consent as parents were not provided with information on the vaccine’s risks, newborns were vaccinated without parental consent, and parents faced coercion, including threats of social services intervention if they did not vaccine.
  Note: this is still an issue. Consider what these readers reported.

Vaccine Autoimmune Disorders

One of the Congressional witnesses produced a report highlighting the dangers of the hepatitis B vaccine including cases of encephalomyelitis he’d observed (resulting in a two week coma for one, a four week coma for the other, along with optic neuritis and significant neurological disability for both). He and others1,2,3 ultimately identified hundreds of publications linking that vaccine to a wide degree of autoimmune disorders:

• MS,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14 myelitis,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14 encephalitis,1 encephalomyelitis,1 optic neuritis,1,2,3,4,5 Guillain–Barré syndrome,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 neuropathy,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 myopathy,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 Myasthenia Gravis,1,2,3 APMPPE (an eye disease)1 uveitis1,
• Arthritis,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13 Lupus,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22 juvenile dermatomyositis,1,2,3,4,5 macrophagic myofasciitis,1 polyarthralgia-myalgia,1 Still’s disease1
• Vasculitis (general,1,2,3,4 pulmonary and cutaneous,1,2 Churg-Strauss,1,2 Henoch–Schonlein purpura,1 Kawasaki’s disease1 polyarteritis nodosa1), hemolytic anemia,1 thrombocytopenia,1,2,3,4,5,6,7 antiphospholipid syndrome1,2
• Lichen planus,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19 lichen striatus,1 bullous pemphigoid,1,2 erythema multiforme,1,2,3 erythema nodosum1 Gianotti–Crosti syndrome,1,2 alopecia,1,2 buchal aphthosis1
• Chronic Fatigue Syndrome,1,2,3,4,5 Fibromyalgia,1 Graves’ disease,1,2 Sjogren’s syndrome1
• Hepatitis,1,2,3,4 glomerulonephritis,1 pancreatitis1 pneumonitits1

Note: this vaccine has also been linked to a variety of other disorders not classically classified as autoimmune disorders such seizures,1,2 Bell’s palsy,1,2 cerebellar ataxia,1 tic disorders,1 anorexia,1 tufted angioma1 and to increase common childhood illnesses (e.g., one study found a 1.6X increase in acute ear infections and a 1.41X increase in pharyngitis and nasopharyngitis). Worse still, one study found an 81% increase in death.

Molecular Mimicry

If an immune provoking substance (e.g., an infection or antigen co-administered with an adjuvant like aluminum) overlaps with human tissue, it can cause the immune system to target human tissue and hence cause autoimmunity. From the start, many believed the Hepatitis B vaccine’s issues resulted from it overlapping with myelin (what coats nerves).

This link was vociferously denied by the medical community (yet never researched) but in 2005, proven by a study which showed until the hepatitis B vaccine had a significant overlap with myelin and that 60% of its recipients also developed immune reactivity to the myelin coasting their nerves (which in the majority of cases persisted for over 6 months).

Furthermore:

• A 2005 VAERS study found the hepatitis B vaccine, in adults, (compared to a tetanus vaccine) was more likely to be followed by a variety of autoimmune disorders (5.2X for MS, 18X for rheumatoid arthritis, 14X for optic neuritis, 9.1X for lupus, 7.2X for alopecia, 2.6X for vasculitis, and 2.3X for thrombocytopenia). A similar 2002 study found a 6.1X increase for chronic arthritis (persisting for at least one year), which affected women 3.5X as much as men, and on average occurred 16 days after vaccination.

• A 2002 study found individuals who received a hepatitis B vaccine, within the next two months, were 1.8 times as likely to experience a demyelinating event.

• A 2015 study found cases of MS in France rose by 65% in the years following an aggressive national campaign to increase hepatitis B vaccination rates, and that a statistically significant correlation existed between the number of hepatitis B vaccine doses given and the number of MS cases 1-2 years later.

• A 2004 English study compare 163 MS patients with 1,604 randomly selected matched controls without MS. It found that MS patients were three times more likely to have received the hepatitis B vaccine within three years of symptom onset (which was not seen from tetanus or influenza vaccination).

• A 2009 study in children found that the GSK’s hepatitis B vaccine, which contains five times more yeast protein antigen than other brands, was associated with a 2.77X increased risk of developing MS. A smaller increase (1.5X) was observed for other CNS inflammatory demyelinating disorders.

The hepatitis B vaccine has also been repeatedly linked to autism and other developmental disabilities:

• Secretary Kennedy revealed that in 1999, the CDC conducted a study which found that receiving a hepatitis B vaccine in the first 30 days of life caused a 12.35X increase in autism—after which the study was buried.
Note: Kennedy likely referred to this (unpublished) study, which, via the CDC’s private database, found the highest doses of mercury containing vaccines caused a 1.8X increase in neurologic development disorders, a 7.6X increase in autism, a 5.0X increase in nonorganic sleep disorders and a 2.1X increase in nonorganic sleep disorders.

• A 2007 study of 1824 children found boys who received the hepatitis B vaccine were 9 times as likely to have a developmental disability.

• A follow-up 2010 study found giving the hepatitis B vaccine at birth increased autism 3X, while a 2017 study found newborn (mercury containing) hepatitis B vaccines increased the risk of autism by 4.6-6.7X.
Note: a 2015 study found they increased the risk of developmental delays by 1.6X-1.7X (which a 2016 study estimated equated to over a trillion in healthcare costs).

Similar results were also seen in animals:

• A 2010 monkey study determined that the vaccine caused a significant delay in the acquisition of root, snout, and suck reflexes (critical processes for development).

• A 2016 mouse study found the vaccine impaired neurogenesis, behavioral performances and hippocampal long-term potentiation which simultaneously increased brain inflammation (that was proportional to the neurologic damage which occurred), later determined to largely result from elevated IL-4.
Note: a 2013 study found that hepatitis B vaccination spiked their inflammatory CRP levels, and in 22 out of 70 infants, this increase was large enough to pass the diagnostic threshold for sepsis.

In contrast, the licensing studies for the vaccines only monitored for side effects during a short window long before these side effects would emerge (typically 4-5 days), and did not use actual placebos.1,2 This limited data shows:

• 17%-22% of adults reported injection site reactions.1,2

• 5%-14% of adults and 10.4% of children reported systemic adverse reactions (e.g., fatigue/weakness, dizziness, headache, fevers above 100°F, malaise, nausea, diarrhea, pharyngitis, upper respiratory infection).1,2

• Around 1% (or 3.8% of diabetics) had significant systemic reactions (e.g., anorexia, somnolence, hypotension, a wide range of gastrointestinal conditions, hives, irritability, and weakness).1

• In newborns, within 48 hours of vaccination, the following were reported: pain (9%), erythema (20%), swelling (4%), irritability (20%), vomiting (23%), diarrhea (12%), feeding difficulties (17%), drowsiness (28-32%), restlessness (31%), and fever ≥38°C (0.7%).1,2,3
Note: many of these symptoms can be immensely consequential in infants (e.g., fevers trigger invasive sepsis workups).

• The only long-term study of these vaccines found that after 7 months, 5.8-6.2% of recipients reported a serious adverse event.1,2,3

Note: a definitive 1994 report by the Institute of Medicine noted that preliminary data existed for many of the injuries attributed to the hepatitis B vaccine, no further research had ever been done (and still has not been), so there was insufficient evidence to prove or disprove a link between these conditions. Remarkably, that was taken as proof the vaccines did not cause harm.

Read the Whole Article

The post Why Is Every Newborn Forced To Get a Hepatitis B Vaccine? appeared first on LewRockwell.

International Man: A recent BHG Financial survey found that 62% of Americans earning over $300,000 a year still struggle with credit card debt.

What’s your take on this?

Doug Casey: BHG is basically a Shylock for the upper middle class. They loan mainly to doctors and successful small businessmen, typically at around 12%. They’re in a position to know when their demographic is in trouble. But why are they in trouble? I suspect it’s because middle-class borrowers have assumed lower-class time preferences. In other words, instead of saving for something you want— a house, a car, or whatever—people want it now and are willing to mortgage their futures to get it.

The average person’s psychological mindset is “I want it all, and I want it now!” I guess you can get it now—but only by borrowing. If you think like a consumer rather than a producer, you likely won’t have savings. And if you live even more imprudently, not only won’t you have savings, but you’ll have lots of debt. We famously live in a “Consumer Society”—a ridiculous and degrading concept. Once upon a time, America identified as a country of producers, not consumers.

It’s hard for a middle-class person to get by when a new car, one that you feel suits your station in life, costs $50,000 or even $100,000. And it’s financed over seven years. Or leased, so there’s zero chance you’ll ever own it. So I don’t doubt that what BHG says is true: almost everybody is in debt, and few have any savings.

It makes for a very unstable financial, economic, political, and social situation.

International Man: Is the erosion of the upper-middle class deliberate or an unintended consequence of inflation?

Doug Casey: Socialists—in fact, all stripes of statists, elitists, and authoritarians—despise the middle class. That’s because the bourgeois tend to be independent and entrepreneurial. Lenin famously wanted to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation. It’s a question of eroding values. It is not just a deteriorating economic situation we’re dealing with; the culture and public psyche are on a slippery slope as well.

In other words, it seems that society has adopted a hand-to-mouth approach to living. That’s the antithesis of the American Dream. The BFG people found that the average person has little or no savings. An article by an investor named Michael W. Green has gone viral because he calculates that a family of four needs about $130,000 per year in earnings to stay out of poverty. That’s pretty shocking, in that the official poverty line is $31,200, and the median income is $80,000.

The argument is that if the Joe Sixpack family earns $130,000, both parents need to work, which necessitates childcare (about $32,000), which is their largest single expense. Then comes housing ($23,000—seems low), food ($15,000), transport ($15,000), healthcare ($12,000—very low, in that average medical insurance alone is twice that), and other essentials ($21,000). Taxes are about $18,500. There’s no room for either bad luck or saving for the future. This large subset of the population doesn’t get any welfare benefits from the government—food stamps, Medicaid, or a myriad of other freebies.

The above calculation doesn’t include debt service, which almost everybody in what passes for the middle class has lots of. The numbers just don’t work.

Trump’s promised fraudulent so-called “dividend” of $2,000 from import duties is trivial by comparison if it’s even paid, which I doubt.

International Man: If even relatively high earners are now pushed into survival mode—a sign the system has drained almost everyone—does this point to an approaching collapse or a fundamental change of the political and economic system?

Doug Casey: I’ve been saying, for about 10 years, that we’re headed not only for the Greater Depression, but something like a civil war.

One thing that’s for sure is that people close to Washington, D.C., and New York, who are wired to the current political and financial systems, are making much, much more than the median. And they benefit from the newly created money early on before it loses value as it “trickles down.” Again, this has created an unstable system. So yeah, we’re headed for a serious political, economic, and social upset. That’s been predictable for decades. But it would seem we’re now at the edge of the precipice.

What makes it worse is that stocks, bonds, and housing are at close to all-time highs. There’s reason to expect a lot more stress is about to be added to the system as they revert to the mean, or go further, to the opposite extreme. That’s not a prediction, so much as an inevitability.

International Man: If income no longer maps onto wealth, mobility, or destiny, what does that do to the cultural mythology of the American Dream?

Doug Casey: Sweeping away a country’s founding principles—it doesn’t matter if they’re essentially myths—is very dangerous. But it’s happening.

The next generation is being born into serfdom because of the national debt—about $38 trillion officially, but over $100 trillion in reality, if you count the many contingent and deferred liabilities. US citizens, especially the young and unborn, will have to pay it, one way or the other.

Why? Because the prime directive of all living things, from amoebas to governments, is: “Survive!” And if the US government’s going to survive, it must service its debt, which means its subjects must pay for it. Kids born today are being born behind the eight-ball. Meanwhile, Trump comes up with ridiculous palliative solutions, such as the 50-year mortgage. It’s odd to take a 50-year mortgage on your house. Most houses built today won’t last 50 years. Nor will the average buyer, who’s about 40. That’s apart from the fact that houses aren’t investments—things that produce more wealth. They’re just long-lived consumer goods.

Most kids go to school, financed by $1.9 trillion of loans. They need a car, which accounts for the $1.7 trillion of auto debt. Add on about $1.3 trillion of credit card debt, which is financed at around 20%. It seems that everybody is living on debt today. The American Dream didn’t used to be about being buried in debt. As George Carlin liked to say, you have to be asleep to believe in the American Dream.

International Man: What practical steps should individuals take to avoid going down with the ship?

Doug Casey: Debt does not have to be a bad thing. The other side of debt is savings. They’re loaned, paying savers interest. But, historically, and in a sound baking system, savings were loaned for production, not consumption. In other words, debt was incurred to build factories and farms. The factory’s and field’s production made the debt self-liquidating. But consumer debt is never self-liquidating, and the average American doesn’t borrow for production purposes. He borrows to increase his current standard of living. It’s a dead-end road for the borrower, as well as the banks. But the banks are another story…

In a sound economy, you produce more than you consume, and you save the difference. But when the currency is inflated, how can you save? You’re saving something that’s losing value almost as fast as you can save it. This is a real problem for Americans.

Inflation is forcing the average American to speculate in stocks, real estate, or cryptos, in the hope of staying ahead of currency debasement. But the average person is not qualified to do that.

It can only end badly.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Why Making $300,000 No Longer Means You’re Secure appeared first on LewRockwell.

Six political prisoners who targeted factories arming Israel’s genocide are weeks into a hunger strike. But in contrast to the IRA’s 1980s hunger strike, this one is being blanked by the media

If we truly had a free media in the UK, rather than one serving the interests only of the state and billionaire class, this would be a front-page news story:

Six political prisoners – held unlawfully for a year or more on remand, and retroactively deemed to be “terrorists” for trying to stop the Gaza genocide – have been on hunger strike for many weeks in prison. At least one is already seriously ill.

There has been blanket silence from the media on these developments, and barely any coverage of the appalling conditions these political prisoners are being subjected to since Palestine Action was reclassified by Sir Keir Starmer’s government as a terrorist organisation – after their arrests.

Notably, it is the first time a direct-action group, one that directs its violence against property – that is, factories making weapons to kill civilians in Gaza – rather than people, has been declared a terrorist organisation and put on the same footing as al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

Under Britain’s draconian Terrorism Act, anyone expressing an opinion, even inadvertently, that might “encourage support” for a proscribed organisation – now including Palestine Action – can be arrested for supporting terrorism and faces a terrorism conviction.

With at least 2,500 people arrested for holding placards stating “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”, Britain’s jails could soon be flooded with many more such political prisoners.

A judicial review of the government’s decision was heard in the past few days at the High Court, though again you are unlikely to know this, given the lack of interest from the British media. The judges’ ruling on the lawfulness of the government’s decision is expected in mid-January.

But a related ruling this week from a judge in Jersey, hearing a terrorism case against peace activist Natalie Strecker, opens the door even more widely to political prosecutions. Despite freeing Strecker, Judge Saunders appeared to accept the British government’s argument that it is unlawful to advocate for international law, which expressly states that occupied peoples such as the Palestinians have a right to resist their illegal occupation.

For anyone with a long memory, the current silence from our media should be shocking. The last major hunger strike by political prisoners in the UK occurred in the early 1980s. It was then that the Provisional IRA – an organisation that expressly claimed responsibility for bombing pubs, hotels, and public parks, in acts that killed many hundreds of civilians – organised a hunger strike in the Maze Prison, near Belfast, demanding improved prison conditions.

One of the hunger strikers, Bobby Sands, became a household name in Britain. His story dominated headlines for weeks, and led to a major confrontation, through the media, with the Thatcher government. His death reverberated long afterwards, and ultimately ushered in the Northern Ireland peace process.

Contrast that with our current moment. Imprisoned members of Palestine Action, an organisation that expressly eschews violence against people, and which is trying to stop a slaughter in Gaza that major human groups and genocide scholars are agreed amounts to a genocide, are on hunger strike because their rights are being grossly and systematically violated – as political prisoners. And there’s barely a peep from the media.

Notably, there was similarly minimal media coverage of the prison conditions and legal abuses of another recent political prisoner. Journalist and publisher Julian Assange spent five years in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison, on trumped-up charges to justify extradition to the US for publishing details of British and US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The media gave his case the most cursory coverage and avoided detailing what he was accused of – because those details would have painted a damning picture the British and US governments. Without a trace of irony, the press paid more attention to speeches from the very politicians jailing Assange in which they condemned the suffering of political prisoners, including journalists, in Russia and China.

None of this should be normal. The Palestine Action hunger strike is very obviously a major news story. The fact that it is getting almost no coverage is evidence of active government suppression, and active media collusion in that suppression.

Even hunger strikes by Palestinian political prisoners held illegally in Israeli jails receive more coverage from the Israeli press than the British media are giving a hunger strike by the political prisoners of Palestine Action.

Francesca Nadin, a former Palestine Action political prisoner, has told the Electronic Intifada that “mainstream” journalists who show interest in the hunger strike cannot get their stories past editors. She observes that there has been “almost a complete blackout in the mainstream media about this story”.

Editors, it seems, are often using legal concerns as cover for refusing to report the strike. This is a pretext, not a reason.

Britain has a voluntary system of military censorship, called the D-Notice Committee. By joining the committee, British editors effectively agree to avoid reporting on anything the government declares to be a “national security” matter. In practice, that often concerns issues that might embarrass the government.

For editors, the system offers plausible deniability as they collude in censorship. For readers, it makes the media more than useless on the most urgent and serious matters of our time.

In contrast to the 1980s, when the British media was reporting – even if rarely sympathetically – IRA hunger strikes, the media is now even more under the thumb of the British state. As evidence, note the Guardian’s U-turn on the D-Notice Committee in 2014, when it faced harsh pushback from the security services over its Edward Snowden revelations into illegal mass surveillance by western states of their own populations.

For the first time the paper agreed to join the D-Notice Committee, becoming fully absorbed into the architecture of the national security state. It was rewarded with front-page “exclusive” interviews with the heads of MI5 and MI6. The Guardian revelled in what should have been the ultimate mark of shame for a newspaper that claimed to be a watchdog on power.

The truth is the assault on basic freedoms in Britain is now well advanced. Political dissent is under siege. The hunger strikes are not being televised, nor will the last gasps of our dying freedoms.

This article was originally published on JonathanCook.net.

The post The Hunger Strike Is Not Being Televised – Nor Will the Last Gasps of Our Dying Freedoms appeared first on LewRockwell.

The American contract, a combination of Constitution and myth, is unraveling like the marriage of an unimaginative yet loyal wife who wakes up to find the money gone, eviction imminent, and he loves another.  Further, in a battle for the kids, or any remaining resources, our lying spendthrift plays cards with the judge and drinks with the sheriff, while we are friendless.

This is late stage American empire.  Some citizens still refuse to acknowledge the empire, much less our dead broke, meddling, force-driven and corruption-wracked empire led by fools and grifters.  But a growing number do.

At this time of year, winter brings a mental and physical rest, introspection, a time to connect, heal, dream and plan for a better spring, summer and fall. Yet how many of us really feel rested, connected, healed or able to dream?  The gifts of the season have been stolen by the Krampus state, and even the good children will not be spared.

Weak and weaker generations of men warped a tiny idealist republic into sick, hollow empire.  Generations of serfs more enslaved and impoverished than their European namesakes have been cultivated in town and country alike. The quality of material life has increased slightly, but the quality of rebellion, of courage, and of character and community has been obliterated.  There is no vague thought of bringing pitchforks and tar to a government meeting, no possibility of a Robin Hood to take on state theft and arrogance, no possibility of revolution beyond spasmodic rage, something the empire leverages, and even welcomes.

We are unable to put down our existent empire like an aged pet, to fond memories, with peace preserved, liberty regained, and prosperity nurtured.  Instead, we may have to treat the terrorist state as it treats those it calls terrorist –  with roughness, disrespect for law, using the language of pain rather than persuasion.  The US empire has killed 20 million, and destroyed the livelihoods of many more in the past 70 years. It has created modern fairy tales that allow it to shoot survivors on the high seas, and it views the world through the eyes of the mad, the thieving, and the paranoid.  This empire overwhelmingly funds, fuels, and supports obscene mass murder in Gaza and obscenities in the West Bank, and allocated billions to a destructive and deadly war in Ukraine, both for no reason that it can articulate, other than hatred.  The United States has fully earned the label of terrorist state, and relishes it.

Washington, under any president, will unhesitatingly launch violence at home and abroad.  Today, the coarse bold language of threat emanates from every Washington podium.  The threats are aggressively aimed, trigger-ready, at those who seek to question it. DC treats Venezuelans who resist the empire the same as it does Americans who simply ask questions about it.

We the people have been reduced to the abused spouse of a corrupt and overbearing state.  As such, we may come to be grateful for the unexpected slap that jars us awake, quickens our pulse, and sharpens our gaze and our instincts.  Just as the key to a bad dream is suddenly waking up, the key to ending war and empire is a new and unsettling recognition of reality.  We must not be afraid to measure Washington’s words and actions against mathematical and natural facts, evidence, and common sense.

Our masters – as well educated as they are – cannot do math in their heads, and lack ability to apply even basic theorems or formulas.  As Glen Greenwald points out, they cannot even add, and quite possibly cannot read.  It goes without saying they cannot hear, and most cannot see.  Congress, with a handful of exceptions, do not understand how the Federal Reserve works, believing it both moral and effective to inflate their debt away, shift it to the unborn, and make war to steal from their creditors.  They believe they are not only authorized, but honor-bound to steal from the people.

The Trump administration plans a war or controlled coup for oil and leverage of Caracas – having learned nothing about the impacts and results of their previous dozen attempts to do the same thing around the world.  Their “this time it will be different” claim indicates that these the elite corporate banker imperialists do not live in our world, but they do intend to milk and ultimately sacrifice it.  They will claim in their memoirs it was all an innocent mistake or “they were misinformed.”

We cannot vote to get a “better” president, and the facts bear this out. This reality should not encourage us to vote harder but instead make Americans quietly angry, confidently disobedient, and newly clear-eyed as to the future of this country. Instead of hoping against hope that every election is the most important one, and “our” sorry candidate better than the sorry opposition, let us join the over 100 million Americans who do not vote, and therefore do not consent.

MAGA voters were shocked when Trump endorsed liberal COVIDiot Cuomo in the NYC mayoral race, protected a foreign spy-controlled elite pedophilia operation, and said there was no inflation.  They were mystified at his pardon of a convicted Honduran drug dealer while ginning up their support for a new narco-terror war.  It didn’t make sense to them that a politician was given grace, while unknown Venezuelan and other Caribbean fishermen were served machine gun fire without trial.

In further strange news, Trump received the first ever FIFA World Peace Prize this week.  Trump’s government mandated untested genetic therapies killed hundreds of soccer players, some dropping dead during games and practices, and he fueled and funded wars around the world that killed hundreds of soccer players in Gaza and Ukraine, as well as destroying their schools and playing fields.  A day in the life of empire, I guess.

It shouldn’t be difficult for anyone at this point to decide where they stand, but it does have consequences.  Massie and MTG are ridiculed by the state, and targeted for elimination, as the most exceptional public servants like RFK, Jr and Gabbard are sidelined and internally plotted against.  Rising awareness of assassinations and plots to kill enemies of this state or another is undeniable.  It is clear cause for a dissolution, the right reason to seek and claim liberty, and yet like the divorcing spouse, a cause for some caution.

Is doing basic math a form of violence?  Is refusing to follow the unconstitutional and unwarranted commands of our utterly contemptuous and spineless ruling class violent?   Is pointing out the bankrupt nature of imperial war an act of violence?  Is living our lives in such a way that the state is ancillary or even optional an act of violence? Is pointing our finger at the ridiculousness of the empire an act of violence?

In the coming divorce court, the prosecution and many witnesses will be state fiduciaries, beneficiaries, and criminals.  Justice will be nothing less than the end of our contract with DC, and our collective refusal to fund their crimes or tolerate them ever again.  Americans must repudiate the empire before it literally beats them to death and burns down the house.

The post Divorcing the Empire appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Trump had a very clear choice in front of him starting in January — Try to save America, or try to save the bankrupt Empire that lives at the expense of the American people. The time had finally come, after 100 years of almost non-stop wars, to make the choice. It has to be one or the other. The American people overwhelmingly voted to “Make America Great Again” as it was before the Empire’s endless wars — drastically cut the government and free the American people. But President Trump chose to do the exact opposite, and the results throughout the economy and American society reflect his choice; in just less than a year.

The post The “Golden Age” of Job Layoffs? appeared first on LewRockwell.

di Francesco Simoncelli

(Versione audio dell'articolo disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/il-drenaggio-della-lbma-e-la-ricapitalizzazione)

La “eco chamber” della propaganda europea/inglese è andata in modalità “berserk” nell'ultima settimana sventolando una crisi della liquidità negli USA a causa dell'impennata del SOFR e dell'uso del Repo facility da parte della FED. Come fare a non finire vittime del rumore di fondo? Leggete Il Grande Default. In questo modo vi sarà più facile capire la fondamentale differenza tra mondo finanziario pre-LIBOR e post-LIBOR, l'intervento della FED nell'esclusivo caso in cui il mercato dei titoli del Tesoro americani diventi bidless e che il malato per eccellenza è il sistema bancario europeo. Gli stress attuali nel SOFR possono essere sfruttati al rialzo solo direttamente (vendita di titoli del Tesoro americani di cui inglesi ed europei sono gonfi, ma sanno che è una misura temporanea dato che rappresentano la principale garanzia collaterale credibile attualmente); quelli al ribasso indirettamente, tramite “l'effetto fionda” e la scommessa che la leva finanziaria verrà di nuovo abusata.

Il caso specifico della prima settimana di novembre è stato un attacco esterno agli USA solo a livello mediatico. Infatti il mercato dei pronti contro termine è stato in subbuglio poiché le pressioni sulla liquidità di fine mese si sono scontrate con lo shutdown, che ha causato l'accumulo di liquidità non erogata sul Treasury General Account presso la FED. Nel giro di un paio di settimane ha assorbito $200 miliardi di liquidità dai mercati monetari e i rendimenti del mercato dei pronti contro termine hanno iniziato a salire. Le banche sono intervenute prendendo in prestito fondi dal Repo facility e prestandoli per trarre profitto dallo spread. Si trattava di pronti contro termine overnight che si estinguono il giorno lavorativo successivo, quando la FED recupera i suoi fondi e le banche recuperano le loro garanzie.

Il lunedì suddetti fondi sono stati liquidati e le banche hanno incassato gli interessi. Il mercoledì non sono stati effettuati nuovi pronti contro termine e il saldo era pari a zero, poiché a quel punto i tassi del mercato dei pronti contro termine erano scesi ben al di sotto di quello del Repo facility e ieri il saldo era pari a zero. E il mercato dei pronti contro termine si è calmato; il Repo facility della FED ha fatto il suo lavoro. Quindi prima di seguire gli “starnazzamenti” sui social e diventare “utili idioti” della propaganda europea/inglese, è bene sapere quali sono le nuove basi su cui operano gli Stati Uniti e chi sono i loro avversari. “Stranamente”, però, nessuno si è chiesto a quanto fossero arrivati invece quelli inglesi.

Ma non mancano anche altri gli attacchi da parte della cricca di Davos: sintomi di stress nei mercati del credito, SOFR che schizza in alto, dichiarazioni di gente come Bailey e Carney che parlano di crisi finanziaria negli USA. E la grancassa di utili idioti sui social amplifica questo messaggio fraudolento. Questa è una guerra e si usano i mezzi della guerra per combattere. Affinché Trump possa avere successo deve confondere gli avversari e mostrare al mondo chi sono. Powell sta mostrando al mondo che uno dei nemici è Blackrock. Semmai la FED dovesse tornare al QE, il mercato immobiliare andrebbe su di giri e Blackrock guadagnerebbe senza doverlo manipolare, perché l'offerta di case è esigua. I prezzi schizzerebbero alle stelle e nessuno vuole questo esito. Blackrock, sin dal Build Back Better, non ha fatto altro che acquistare proprietà immobiliari e venderle a un tasso manipolato per intascare dalle tasse sugli immobili e uccidere la classe media americana. Se però Powell tiene i tassi laddove sono adesso o li abbassa per un'altra volta ancora, il mercato immobiliare rimane dove è adesso, le espulsioni continuano e il mercato del lavoro continua a migliorare (come sta accadendo già adesso), l'offerta di case verrà ampliata tramite lo stimolo del settore delle costruzioni. Il valore delle case esistenti calerà, e sarà un bene, e cambierà il tipo di casa (e il prezzo) a cui possono accedere le nuove famiglie. Istituti come Blackrock subiranno un haircut pesante e finalmente finirà il mito della finanziarizzazione del settore immobiliare. Questo circolo virtuoso, coadiuvato dalla IPO di Fannie/Freddie, darà slancio e sostenibilità ai mutui a 30 anni.

La formula “tutte le strade conducono a Londra” rappresenta il modo in cui i vecchi interessi bancari hanno gestito il loro impero mercantilista per centinaia di anni. Oltremanica, ovviamente, perché erano in competizione con gli olandesi. Nel corso del tempo hanno costruito una immensa rete di persone e relazioni finanziarie in tutto il mondo. C'è un intero universo di persone che non è coperto da Wikipedia e di cui non sappiamo niente, ma ai fini della comprensione di come funzionano le meccaniche è più importante la rete e le relazioni piuttosto che le singole persone o i singoli gruppi. Questa rete/relazioni si manifesta attraverso le linee di politica: arrivano le proverbiali telefonate dall'alto e vengono prese da chi deve mettere in atto gli ordini... e così ci ritroviamo roba come lo Steele Dossier, l'MI6 infiltrato nella CIA, conflitti settari che scoppiano improvvisamente (es. India-Pakistan, Azerbaijan-Armenia, ecc.).

Alla domanda perché l'abbiano fatto e lo facciano tuttora, la risposta è: non hanno collaterale. L'Europa ha da sempre costruito imperi coloniali perché non ha abbastanza risorse naturali da poter restare nel cosiddetto “Primo mondo” e quindi le deve prendere da qualcun altro. In un certo senso questa è la sua storia degli ultimi 500 anni. In quest'ottica Londra ha sparso “gaslighting” cucendo addosso agli USA l'etichetta di “impero del male”: gli americani hanno adottato la politica estera inglese, il sistema bancario centrale inglese, policy di tasse e spese inglesi, un maggiore centralizzazione della società in stile inglese. Va bene essere critici del passato degli Stati Uniti, anche del presente sotto certi aspetti, ma quest'ultimo è di certo tutt'altra cosa rispetto a quando c'erano Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney.

“Tutte le strade portano a Londra” perché adesso l'Europa è il giocatore più debole al tavolo della geopolitica (inclusa la City di Londra ed escluso il Vaticano). Qual è un ulteriore elemento di “gaslighting” sparso dagli inglesi? Il mito dell'onnipotenza degli ebrei. Mettere gli uni contro gli altri serve solo al miglior interessi della City di Londra in modo da disinnescare eventuali minacce.

The Great Dragon or London Money Power, è uno dei tanti libri dimenticati dalla storia (o volutamente fatti sparire dal radar pubblico) che disegnano meglio la mappa di come “tutte le strade conducono a Londra”. Uno degli aspetti principali discussi è la nascita dei cosiddetti Board of Trade negli Stati Uniti, quelli che oggi sono i mercati dei futures. Quando ne veniva creato uno, ad esempio sul mais, sul frumento, sul grano, ecc., finivano sempre per distruggere gli agricoltori. Inizialmente avrebbero emesso un sacco di credito nei confronti degli agricoltori, questi ultimi avrebbero creato fattorie sulle loro terre, coltivato i campi, curato i raccolti e infine avrebbero portato i prodotti risultanti nei mercati diretti dai Board of Trade. Essi si sarebbero arrogati il diritto di regolamentare i mercati, saldare  gli scambi, stipulare i termini dei contratti. Il libro ci mostra come questo “diritto” di regolamentazione si sarebbe sempre concluso con la depressione dei prezzi agricoli, la bancarotta degli agricoltori e l'acquisizione di tutti gli asset liquidati per saldare i loro debiti. La fonte dei capitali dati in prestito? La City di Londra. L'evoluzione dei futures altro non è che la finanziarizzazione selvaggia delle commodity che negli ultimi 50 anni non hanno fatto altro che scendere rispetto a una valuta fiat che invece s'è deprezzata costantemente. Il ciclo di manipolazione unidirezionale è stato interrotto 3 anni fa con l'emancipazione della FED dalla cosiddetta “coordinated central banks policy”. Ecco perché, ad esempio, la LBMA viene drenata di oro dai suoi caveau. La cavalcata dei prezzi dei metalli preziosi segna una nuova era per le commodity, sostituendo la mano onnipresente dalla City di Londra con qualcosa di più sostenibile e in linea con la realtà.

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L'elefante nella stanza: il drenaggio delle riserve della LBMA. Questo campo di battaglia fa parte della strategia dei NY Boys di ridimensionare la leva nel mercato degli eurodollari e l'influenza degli inglesi sugli USA. pic.twitter.com/lyuBM1Pvk1

Prima di passare a trattare il tema dell'articolo di oggi, però, ecco un promemoria di come funziona la geopolitica inglese. Prima dello scoppio della Prima guerra mondiale Kuwait e Iraq erano un solo stato. Poi sono arrivati gli inglesi e “hanno separato” il Kuwait dall'Iraq, affinché quest'ultimo non avesse più uno sbocco sul mare. Come hanno fatto “ad arrivare”? Si sono inseriti all'interno delle linee etniche stressando una fazione affinché ne attaccasse un'altra, in modo da tenere in perenne divisione l'intera nazione ed esercitando così con estrema facilità il potere. Saddam Hussein aveva lo scopo di riunificare ciò che era stato diviso tramite trame sotterranee inglesi nel sottobosco della società. I neocon americani, trotskisti fino al midollo, sono stati facilmente raggirati dagli inglesi affinché facessero il “lavoro sporco” al posto loro. Stesso discorso si può farlo per India e Pakistan.

Lo schema è sempre lo stesso. C'è una maggioranza al controllo di un Paese, e se prendiamo un Paese musulmano ad esempio, diciamo che siano gli sciiti. Un 80% sciita, quindi, e un 20% sunnita. Allora gli inglesi prendono contatti con la minoranza del 20% e la armano, creando i presupposti affinché ci sia una guerra civile. L'obiettivo di armare la minoranza affinché sfidi la maggioranza è quello di alimentare il malumore. La stessa cosa l'hanno fatta al Sud degli Stati Uniti: hanno nutrito l'odio del Sud nei confronti del Nord, quest'ultimo ha imposto dazi al primo, hanno amplificato il movimento abolizionista e, in sostanza, hanno agitato entrambi gli animi affinché arrivassero allo scontro.

E la stessa cosa l'hanno fatta tra Stati Uniti e Canada all'indomani della Guerra d'indipendenza. I lealisti del Nord-est si spostarono più a Nord e presero l'area di Toronto. Trent'anni dopo ci fu la guerra del 1812. I canadesi si credono una potenza militare solo perché sono un'appendice dell'Impero britannico ed ecco perché ancora oggi obbediscono ai dettami del “padrone”.

NOW - Canada PM Carney says AI data centres must be carbon neutral, by paying carbon credits, "We need a price on carbon, I salute my neighbor, the European Union, in pricing carbon and putting in place a CBAM." pic.twitter.com/u8Sja2deT9

Ma quella spiegata qui altro non è che la filosofia del “divide et impera”. Se ci spostiamo poi a livello finanziario, vediamo le stesse impronte digitali: sono le succursali della Banca d'Inghilterra, inclusa la Banca del Canada, e la BoE stessa che stanno cercando di manipolare il mercato obbligazionario americano per scatenare una crisi tale da spingere la FED a inondare i mercati di dollari. Non essendoci più il LIBOR un tale compito non è più semplice come una volta. Per avere un indizio che punta in questa direzione basta guardare le relazioni del TIC: Banca d' Inghilterra e Banca del Canada si avvicendano nel ruolo di posizionamento short e long dei titoli del Tesoro americani. Stanno giocando nello spazio dei decennali e trentennali, fingendo un'inversione nel front-end della curva dei rendimenti; solo che a questo giro non c'è una Janet Yellen che vende il front-end e compra il back-end per semplificare la vita a gente come la Lagarde e Bailey: ci sono i capitali della BCE e della BoE in prima linea adesso. Infatti Bessent non sta amplificando l'inversione della curva dei rendimenti americani tra i 6 mesi e i 3 anni. Ma, soprattutto, non c'è fuga di capitali dagli Stati Uniti, anzi...

Attenzione, però, perché non si tratta solo del mercato obbligazionario americano: tramite rehypothecation e leva finanziaria gli inglesi e le relative succursali hanno gonfiato l'importanza delle cosiddette MAG7 rispetto alle 493 voci restanti nell'indice S&P. Questo significa che quando vogliono ingegnerizzare il panico finanziario, come hanno fatto la penultima settimana di novembre, basta solo vendere un po' di azioni MAG7, vendere un po' di trentennali, vendere un po' di Bitcoin e usare i proventi per soffocare l'ascesa dell'oro. Quest'ultima è una variante dell'attacco al SOFR della scorsa primavera, quando tutti sventolavano il feticcio del “basis trade” senza capire che gli spike violenti che si vedevano lungo la curva dei tassi SOFR era un preciso assalto alla sua tenuta. Powell sta facendo esattamente quello che deve fare, ovvero, drenare liquidità dal mercato dell'eurodollaro. Uno degli “effetti collaterali” dello shutwodn era che il Dipartimento del Tesoro ha riempito il suo conto presso la FED (TGA) e la cosa ha fatto schizzare in alto il SOFR. Nessuna crisi di liquidità nei pronti contro termine, ma semplicemente denaro che non scorreva nel sistema. Ma chi è che è stato danneggiato e ha ottenuto un “free ride” sui social e sui canali d'informazione principali? La Banca d'Inghilterra, l'uso del proprio Repo facility è stato 3 volte superiore a quello della FED. La BoE, insieme alla Banca del Canada, ha attaccato il SOFR all'indomani del termine dell'ultimo contratto saldato col LIBOR lo scorso marzo. Migliaia di miliardi di (euro)dollari a leva gettati per attaccare le curve dei futures del SOFR, ma il tentativo è fallito soprattutto perché Bessent, tramite il sopraccitato TGA, ha iniziato a drenare d'oro fisico la LBMA e successivamente s'è spostato sul rame. Un lasso di tempo di 6 mesi.

Quali altri eventi hanno mostrato lo stesso lasso temporale? Crisi nei pronti contro termine nel settembre 2019 e il successivo intervento della FED a marzo 2020, crisi nei pronti contro termine nel settembre 2007 e successivo crollo di Bear Sterns a marzo 2008. La FED doveva sempre intervenire per stabilizzare i mercati, giocare in difesa. Il gigantesco cambiamento che ancora pochi riescono a percepire è questo: mentre la FED gioca in difesa, il Dipartimento del Tesoro va all'attacco. Sono coordinati adesso nell'intenzione di difendere gli Stati Uniti, mentre invece in passato il coordinamento verteva sulla loro spoliazione. Lo shutdown (ricordiamolo, voluto dai Dem) doveva spingere il drenaggio di liquidità dai pronti contro termine e creare lo stesso tipo di crisi vista nel passato. Cosa ha fatto desistere Londra dal perseguire questo tentativo? Il Dipartimento del Tesoro americano (aiutato dai cinesi tra l'altro) all'assalto del mercato dell'argento fisico, di gran lunga più importante per gli inglesi, e la FED che ha fatto uscire una relazione in cui smascherava le Isole Cayman per le succursali della BoE che sono e le minacciava indirettamente.

La ciliegina sulla torta di tutta questa storia è che se ci sarà un nuovo giro di stimoli fiscali agli americani, non avverrà allo stesso modo di quello del 2021 causando un boom al consumo. Stavolta ci sarà un boom del ripagamento di debiti ed ecco perché le grandi aziende continuano a sfoltire personale. Sarà un problema? No. Facciamo una digressione su questo tema. Lo shutdown voluto dai Dem aveva lo scopo di frenare l'uscita dalla conservatorship da parte di Fannie/Freddie, frenare l'approvazione del Clarity Act e frenare la ripartenza dei mutui a 30 anni (potenzialmente a 50 adesso). La FED è ancora stracolma di titoli garantiti da ipoteca, ma se si cambia il modo in cui funziona il mercato dei mutui negli Stati Uniti allora i titoli sopraccitati potrebbero avere di nuovo un mercato. La FED potrebbe vendere questi titoli, contrarre con decisione il proprio bilancio e non avrebbe più bisogno del quantitative tightening. A spese di chi? Private equity.

La ricapitalizzazione della classe media e la re-industrializzazione del Paese passa dalla capacità degli americani di accendere un mutuo a tassi sostenibili e in un ambiente economico che permetta loro di abbassare l'incertezza. I colletti blu, quindi, devono essere in grado di potersi permettere una casa da $200.000 a un tasso del 3% da estinguere in 50 anni. Questo tasso sarebbe fisso e al di sotto dell'ottimale di mercato, la cui sostenibilità verrebbe scaricata sul private equity che invece si vedrebbe aumentare le proprie commissioni. Il denaro rubato durante la demolizione controllata degli Stati Uniti, sponsorizzata dalle amministrazioni Obama, verrebbe re-investito nella crescita delle industrie manifatturiere e nel sostentamento finanziario di giovani famiglie. Realtà come Blacorock e Blackstone vedrebbero invertiti quei privilegi finanziari che hanno caratterizzato i loro affari immobiliari a spese della classe media americana: si vedrebbero caricato un costo del capitale più alto per le loro proprietà in affitto e i loro spazi immobiliari nella sfera commerciale, pagherebbero più tasse che verrebbero canalizzate per finanziare l'industria dei mutui per la classe media, gli agenti ICE che buttano fuori dal Paese tutti gli H1-B farlocchi potrebbero accendere un mutuo a tasso agevolato e... sentite questa, perché è grossa e la sentirete dapprima qui... esportare un tale modello a livello internazionale tramite Tether.

Vediamo di spiegare ancora meglio la questione immobiliare e mutui. Siamo d'accordo che l'idea di un mutuo a 50 anni, sulla carta, sia tutt'altro che l'inizio di un processo di deleveraging, anzi probabilmente un modo per calciare ulteriormente il barattolo lungo la strada. La questione rimane: come si fa a ricostruire la classe media? Dando loro una possibilità. E non è tanto diverso da quanto fece Roosevelt coi mutui a 30 anni. Durante la Grande depressione non c'erano mutui, permettersi una casa era un lusso per pochi e la povertà dilagava. Il governo federale avviò il programma dei mutui iniziando da quelli a 1 e 2 anni, passando poi a 5 e infine a 30. L'idea dei titoli garantiti da ipoteca nacque allora: venne creato un mercato dei mutui per aiutare la classe media, permettergli di trovare un lavoro, dargli la capacità di poter avere accesso a tutta una serie di beni  che avrebbe agevolato la loro vita. E la cosa funzionò abbastanza rapidamente. Quale fu il meccanismo di base: togliere il denaro dagli “oligarchi” e darlo alla classe media, creando la “proprietà sulla casa” e altresì il motore di un'economia.

Oggi ci si lamenta che passare dai mutui a 30 a quelli a 50 anni fa risparmiare molto poco, i dati sono pessimisti, ecc. Ma se lo si fa mettendo in prima linea il denaro del private equity, “persuadendolo” che adesso deve pagare per il salvataggio ottenuto sulla scia della crisi del 2008, allora le cose cambiano: subirà un haircut sugli MBS esistenti e in questo modo il denaro “risparmiato” sarà dirottato sulla classe media che usufruirà di tassi per i mutui al di sotto di quelli di mercato.

Il sistema fiscale americano è stato costruito dagli inglesi per estrarre quanta più ricchezza possibile dalla loro colonia, soprattutto dalle generazioni più giovani. Circa il 12% delle tasse pagate dai contribuenti va a finire in uno dei peggiori veicoli d'investimento possibili: la previdenza sociale. Senza contare poi i premi dell'assicurazione schizzati in alto a causa dell'Obamacare e i mutui trentennali ibridi (5 anni di tasso fisso, 25 anni di tasso variabile che richiedono giocoforza un rifinanziamento lungo il percorso e rata finale cospicua; in alternativa c'è il mutuo a 30 anni classico a tasso fisso che richiede però un anticipo del 20% della somma totale) che sono una trappola per aragoste piuttosto che la possibilità di comprarsi una casa. Guarda il caso, poi, allo scadere esatto di ogni 5 anni abbiamo assistito a una crisi importante che ha inevitabilmente ritoccato i tassi variabili a livelli più alti. Uno, quindi, parte all'1% e si ritrova dopo 5 anni all'8%. C'è stata letteralmente una flessione economica ogni 4.7 anni sin dal 1971 a causa dell'instabilità crescente del mercato degli eurodollari. E questo spiega anche perché le banche sono reticenti a prestare denaro oltre l'arco temporale dei 5 anni.

Ecco perché, in base all'assetto qui descritto, i mutui a 30 anni con tasse agevolate dal governo federale sono un compromesso pratico percorribile: il mutuatario pone un piccolo anticipo e il rischio viene diluito attraverso i titoli garantiti da ipoteca. Si passa quindi da un modello bancario 3-9-3, a uno 3-6-3 o 3-5-3. La necessità di mutui a 50 anni rappresenta quanto gli Stati Uniti siano stati devastati dagli infiltrati nelle precedenti amministrazioni e quanto siano sbilanciati salari e prezzi degli asset. Certo, si può lasciare che questi ultimi calino del 50% e poi vedere quanto indietro regrediamo all'era della pietra, oppure invece di perorare l'ulteriore implosione della società si può cercare una certa stabilizzazione della stessa e ripartire da lì. Sì, il livello dei prezzi fa schifo, ma due delle principali caratteristiche dell'azione umana sono l'inventiva e l'ingegno... soprattutto in un ambiente che permette la loro piena espressione.

Ripartire dal settore immobiliare, conosciuto molto bene da Trump, ha i suoi vantaggi per ricostituire comunità solide che rimangono in un posto e lo fanno prosperare. Pensate alla Florida dove le tasse sulla proprietà sono state fortemente abbattute e potrebbero addirittura essere portate a 0. Chi avvierà un progetto edilizio avrà la possibilità di incanalare tutte le risorse in quello che sta costruendo, senza dover pensare a mettere una parte dei suoi fondi per pagare burocrati e roba del genere. L'incentivo sarà quello di costruire qualcosa che dura, col tempo necessario e anche bello; non più qualcosa di rassomigliante a una casa nel minor tempo possibile. I materiali saranno più longevi perché l'incentivo è quello di costruire qualcosa di bello e che dura piuttosto che funzionale e conveniente. È questa distinzione che ha permesso di far entrare nell'immaginario collettivo il semplice fatto che le case erano un investimento per le generazioni, facendone aumentare il valore nel tempo. Adesso quest'ultimo cala e la casa si deprezza. Con la IPO di Fannie/Freddie e un mutuo a 50 anni, con una rata inferiore a quello di 30 anni e tassi meglio definiti/prevedibili, le cose cambierebbero. Ma non è finita qui, perché togliere le tasse sulla proprietà oltre ad agevolare la vita a chi costruisce e a chi compra, e avere più asset il cui valore è dettato da materiali solidi alla base, renderebbe più credibili strumenti finanziari come i titoli garantiti da ipoteca (MBS). Un circolo virtuoso tra Fannie/Freddie, compagnie d'assicurazione/fondi pensione e classe media: listare gli MBS costerà una commissione (anche dello 0.1% e Fannie/Freddie passeranno dall'essere una compagnia da $600 miliardi a $3.000 miliardi con utile netto raddoppiato rispetto a quello attuale), ciò permetterà di finanziare i mutui degli americani, gli investitori istituzionali opereranno con derivati coperti dalla solvibilità dei mutuatari e di solidi immobili.

Ciò che davvero conta qui è la prevedibilità, a differenza dell'incertezza seminata dagli inglesi. Infatti anche se le persone si muovessero da un posto all'altro, e vendessero casa, i termini precedenti se li porterebbero dietro attraverso la cosiddetta “portabilità dei mutui”. Infatti qual è il super potere degli inglesi? Manipolare il costo del denaro attraverso l'arbitraggio delle valute e manipolazione del mercato obbligazionario. Se si permette agli americani di impostare un mutuo a 50 anni a tasso fisso e portabile vengono schermati da tali manipolazioni. Niente più finanziarizzazione della classe media: essa ha un flusso di cassa stabile, le compagnie d'assicurazione hanno flussi di cassa stabili e il modello delle agenzie di credito per impostare i tassi dei mutui può essere mandato al diavolo perché non ce n'è più bisogno. E perché Bessent parla di Bitcoin? Perché l'amministrazione Trump ha aperto a Bitcoin? Perché potrà essere usato come collaterale per i prestiti, così come oro e argento (cosa che non si poteva fare prima). Il Dodd-Frank Act precludeva anche questo, soprattutto per le piccole-medie imprese, impedendo di porre flussi di cassa e margini di profitto come base per ottenere prestiti.

Questo è ciò su cui sta lavorando l'amministrazione Trump.

Supporta Francesco Simoncelli's Freedonia lasciando una mancia in satoshi di bitcoin scannerizzando il QR seguente.

???? Qui il link alla Seconda Parte: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/2025/12/il-drenaggio-della-lbma-e-la_01527781360.html

When I first wrote (“Murderers for Trump”) about President Trump ordering air strikes against “narco-terrorists” on boats in international waters in the Caribbean Sea, there had been three “lethal kinetic strikes.” The last time I checked, there have now been 21 such air strikes in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, with 83 people killed.

The Pentagon has not acknowledged what aircraft the military is using to conduct the strikes, but it is supposed to include MQ-9 Reaper drones armed with Hellfire missiles, AC-130J gunships, and F-35 fighter jets.

Because there was no search, seizure, arrest, indictment, arraignment, prosecution, trial, conviction, or sentencing; no proof of what exactly was on these ships; no threat to the United States by the boats or their occupants; no death-penalty offenses (although Trump and some Republicans would like there to be a death penalty for drug offenses); no boats were near American territory; and because Trump took it upon himself to be judge, jury, and executioner; I concluded then, and conclude now, that all of the air strikes are simply extrajudicial murder.

Many of those in the miliary who participated in this extrajudicial murder are no doubt professing Christians. According to the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of Americans identify as Christian. The percentage of military personnel who identify as Christian is higher than the general population. This has been estimated to be between 65 and 75 percent. The percentage of veterans who identify as Christian has been estimated to be 91 percent. That number seems a little high, but the point is simply that a majority of military personnel identify as Christian.

We can be certain, then that professing Christians were involved in the extrajudicial murder of the people on these boats. Just like we can be certain that professing Christians help to carry out the death and destruction meted out by the U.S. military in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Korea, and all the minor military operations that the U.S. military has been involved in since World War II: Bosnia, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Panama, Somalia.

So, my question is a simple one: Why do Christians kill for their government?

Christians are told to “obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29), to “recompense to no man evil for evil” (Romans 12:17), to “live peaceably with all men” (Romans 12:18), to not kill (Romans 13:9), to not “render evil for evil unto any man; but ever follow that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:15), and that “the weapons of our warfare are not carnal” (2 Corinthians 10:4).

So, why do Christians join the military and so easily and callously kill for their government?

There is no draft. There is no universal military service. No American is forced to join the military and kill on command. The fact that the Bible admonishes Christians to “submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake” (1 Peter 2:13) and to “let every soul be subject unto the higher powers” (Romans 13:1) has nothing to do with anything.

If the government were to come to a Christian and say: “Put on this uniform, take this gun, go to such and such address across town, and start shooting people,” I can’t imagine any Christian not being horrified and refusing to do it. But if the government comes to a Christian and says: “If you voluntarily, of your own freewill, join the military, you will be required to put on a uniform, take a gun, go to such and such country, and start shooting people,” then Christians line up at their local military recruiter’s office and say “sign me up.” Why is it that Christians will defend the foreign military action by saying “I was just following orders,” but not the domestic one?

Isn’t it strange that Americans only object to the “I was just following orders” defense—a defense that was used to no avail by Nazis at Nuremberg—when soldiers from other countries attempt to use it?

Christian soldiers who kill for their government are guilty of idolatry. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3), the Bible says. They have made a god out of the state. They think the state can sanctify murder.

The U.S. military is a giant killing machine. Christians who join the military will be expected to unconditionally follow orders and kill on command to help carry out the U.S. government’s reckless, belligerent, and interventionist U.S. foreign policy. They will not be defending America or its freedoms.

No Christian should kill for his government. No matter how loud the government screams “narco-terrorist.”

The post Why Do Christians Kill for Their Government? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Back in March of 2014, I wrote about how the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) operates an extortion racket-style scheme via its PreCheck program that gives travelers who pay a fee and jump through a bunch of hoops including submitting to fingerprinting and a background check a chance, though no guarantee, that they can evade some harassment from the TSA itself. In the same vein, starting in February, TSA is planning to roll out a new tax and other demands, termed Confirm.ID, that will be required of individuals who do not have REAL ID compliant identification documentation in order for them to travel from point A or point B.

As reported Monday in an Associated Press article, a new 45 dollars fee (really a tax since it is charged by government) will be imposed by TSA on travelers who do not have REAL ID compliant identification documentation. The rollout of the United Sates government’s REAL ID mandate, authorized by congressional legislation 20 years ago, was delayed until last year due largely to opposition from people concerned about REAL ID’s threats to liberty. By paying the fee and complying with other TSA demands in its Confirm.ID process, the AP article relates, a person will be able to seek travel permission from TSA via an alternative method that may take up to half an hour to complete and, if successful, will result in approval for traveling for just 10 days. People have been concerned about the collection of biometric information coming with REAL ID. Confirm.ID may not provide a way around such requirements given that it has the collection of biometric information built into its process.

Americans already fund TSA with their tax dollars, including a “Passenger Fee” or “September 11 Security Fee” included in the total price of each airline flight ticket. But, the TSA, like many of its agents pilfering from travelers’ bags put in jeopardy by the TSA enforced “security” procedures, keeps gaining new means to separate Americans from their money.

The new tax and other demands on people traveling without REAL ID is adding insult to injury given that the push for people to obtain and use REAL ID was itself fueled by rejection of each individual’s right to travel. The new tax is also piled on top of already significant harassment that TSA routinely dispenses. I listed off some aspects of this harassment in a July article regarding Homeland Security Department Secretary Kristi Noem trying to gain some support from people fed up with TSA through announcing a minimal rollback of TSA bullying related to if people may keep their shoes on at checkpoints. I wrote:

Additionally, the TSA demanding passengers take off shoes has been just one small part of the harassment it metes out on travelers. Noem is leaving in place the rest — waits in line, demanded production of identification documentation in violation of the right to travel anonymously, zero privacy in regard to what is in bags or pockets, confiscation of nonthreatening though verboten items, subjection to potential harm from never properly safety tested “full-body scanners,” “pat downs” that are pretty much the same as friskings by police and that without special governmental protection would be regarded as assaults or sexual assaults, etc.

While the TSA’s new tax and demands on travelers who lack REAL ID compliant identification documentation is repugnant, so too is REAL ID, as was explained by then-United States House of Representatives Member Ron Paul (R-TX) on the House floor when REAL ID legislation passed twenty years ago. You can watch Paul’s speech here.

Neither REAL ID nor Confirm.ID is compatible with respect for liberty. They should be thrown away along with the TSA’s long list of harassment activities.

This article was originally published on The Ron Paul Institute.

The post TSA’s New Confirm.ID Tax appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Trump said on Tuesday that in addition to the airstrikes on Venezuelan boats suspected of trafficking drugs to the United States, the U.S. military would begin hitting targets on land. Not only are all these strikes unconstitutional by any construction, but they are also unprovoked acts of war against a country that poses no threat to the United States.

Since September, the administration has carried out at least twenty-one attacks on civilian vessels in the Caribbean, resulting in eighty-three deaths. Not one of those killed by American forces was charged with a crime in any court, much less convicted at trial. This behavior wouldn’t pass muster under Magna Carta, written by barbarians by our standards today, much less the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

This doesn’t require any fanciful 20th-century reading of the Bill of Rights, like the one that produced Roe v. Wade. That this is impermissible is firmly rooted in constitutional interpretation dating to the man who wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights himself.

There were several reasons for the War of 1812, not all of them legitimate. A certain faction among the war hawks of the day just wanted to steal Canada from the British empire. But foremost among the legitimate grievances cited by James Madison in asking Congress for a declaration of war, and frankly the only one most people remember, was the impressment of sailors on American ships into service in the British Navy.

It is important to understand the complaint was not against returning true deserters from the British Navy to Great Britain. As Madison said in his address, “And that no proof might be wanting of their conciliatory dispositions, and no pretext left for a continuance of the practice, the British Government was formally assured of the readiness of the United States to enter into arrangements, such as could not be rejected, if the recovery of British subjects were real and sole object.”

The problem the Madison administration had was that, in addition to disrespectfully boarding American ships by force, the British “so far from affecting British subjects alone, that under the pretext of searching for these, thousands of American Citizens, under the safeguard of public law, and of their national flag, have been torn from their country and from everything dear to them.”

That’s the whole point of due process. The government not only has to prove a crime was committed, but that they have indeed arrested the right person, which they frequently haven’t. This is why the mobbish retort, “narco-terrorists don’t deserve due process” is so counterintuitive. Without it, we don’t even know if the government has arrested the person they believe they have, much less whether this person committed a crime.

The founders risked surrendering their independence from Great Britain over this principle. Now, Trump supporters dismiss it with the wave of a hand.

This is not the only time when due process loomed large in a national issue. Nullification of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 by northern states was firmly rooted in the same principle. Like the impressment issue, the northern states did not deny the constitutionality of returning escaped slaves to their masters. They objected to alleged escaped slaves being summarily seized without due process.

First, you must prove John Doe was a slave who escaped, and also that this is indeed John Doe and not someone you’ve mistaken for him – which, again, the government does all the time to this day.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has cited statistics on this in opposing the administration from a letter written to him by the Acting Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) indicating that 21% of all ships boarded by USCG between September 2024 and October 2025 contained no drugs.

All were boarded because the government thought they were carrying drugs, but one out of every five were not. On what basis are we to believe a similar percentage of those summarily blown to bits on Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s orders weren’t similarly innocent?

As with many of Trump’s abuses, there is precedent to which he can point. Thirteen years ago, President Obama killed an American citizen he unilaterally deemed a terrorist without a trial or any formal charges. He made the ridiculous claim he had satisfied the Fifth Amendment’s due process requirements by a panel of his own self-appointed czars and cronies reviewing the case. But judicial power is delegated exclusively to the judicial branch in the Constitution.

Obama admitted to having a whole list of people he reserved the right to kill at his sole discretion, which his 2012 opponent Mitt Romney fully endorsed.

While no less unconstitutional or un-American, Obama’s crime was at least committed against someone he claimed had incited murder of American citizens. This made him a terrorist, by presidential pronouncement, and therefore subject to extrajudicial homicide as part of the Orwellian “War on Terror.”

The Venezuelans vaporized by the Trump administration, aren’t accused of blowing up, shooting, stabbing, or otherwise committing violence against Americans. They are called terrorists for selling willing American buyers drugs. Yes, the drugs are illegal in the United States, but there is no drug law prescribing the death penalty for violating it, much less without a trial or even a formal charge.

As with most of the other enormities committed by the U.S. government during this century, this one is easy to dismiss because it happens in some other country, to a foreign people most Americans know nothing about. Imagine if Americans walking on the sidewalks of American cities and towns saw people vaporized before their eyes by government drones without any attempt to arrest them or even verify their identity. No American would stand for it.

But what the Trump administration is doing now is even worse because it adds to trampling American liberty the crime of committing acts of war against a nation we are not at war with, which has not attacked us. The United States declared war on Great Britain on precisely the same principle, for acts less egregious than those being committed by the U.S. government against Venezuela.

The United States was once rightly considered an inspiration to the entire world. The “land of the free” achieved a society where the inalienable rights of the individual were more sacred and more protected than in any society in history. Today, it stumbles around the world stage like a drunk, shouting accusations in every direction, mumbling slurred pronouncements about “democracy,” and beating up on weaklings, while the world stands by and waits for it to pass out.

Will we ever sober up?

This article was originally published on Tom Mullen Talks Freedom.

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On October 23, the Trump administration announced to Congress that it is planning “land attacks” within Venezuelan territory. Such attacks, of course, would be acts of war, and there are no plans for Congress to declare war on any foreign state.

Moreover, on Tuesday, Trump declared that any country deemed by the administration to be making drugs for US markets is a possible target for US military attack. Trump also stated that military strikes on Venezuela territory would “start very soon.”

Meanwhile, the administration has been using the US military to engage in extrajudicial killings of persons in the Caribbean alleged to be “narco-terrorists.” The administration admits it doesn’t actually know who these people are. The US military is simply killing people without any evidence of actual crimes or of a military threat. Nor has the administration attempted to offer any evidence. The justification for the killings is simply—to use a phrase from meme culture—”trust me, bro.”

The attacks are also meant to serve as a provocation and a threat to the Venezuelan regime, and to serve as an “example” of what will be done on Venezuelan territory if the current Venezuelan president does not go into exile.

So much for the president who, while a candidate, claimed he would oppose any new wars and end existing ones.

Instead, what we have now is a president who advocates for a new war in South America—in addition to his proxy wars in Palestine and Ukraine—and has no intention of adhering to any sort of rule of law in doing so.

So, this is yet another case of “here we go again.” Every few years, no matter who is president, the US regime—i.e., the “foreign policy blob“—comes up with yet another country that we’re told requires “regime change.” And, as with all drives to war, the result is more runaway federal spending, more disregard for the rule of law, and more unmitigated power for the American executive state.

Forget about the US Constitution

By now it’s very quaint to protest the American warfare state by suggesting that presidents should adhere to the US constitution. No president has taken the US constitution seriously in decades, and Congress has done precious little about it.

Nonetheless, whatever opposition can be mustered to the untrammeled bellicosity of US presidents is a good thing. This week, a handful of members of Congress introduced legislation prohibiting Trump from launching “hostilities within or against Venezuela” without congressional approval.

Only a very small handful of Republicans have spoken out against the president on the administration’s accelerating threats and on the killings of  supposed “narco-terrorists” in boats outside US territory. Unsurprisingly, Thomas Massie of Kentucky supports the war-powers legislation. Senator Rand Paul, meanwhile, has condemned the killings of passengers and operators on “drug” boats. And rightly so. As Judge Andrew Napolitano noted this week, one of the most recent “drug-boat” attacks clearly violated international law when the US disabled one boat, and then, rather than arrest the survivors, simply killed them. Napolitano correctly described this as a war crime.

Of course, even if Congress does pass legislation reining in the President’s power to commit acts of war against Venezuela, it’s unclear the legislation would have any effect. The US regime is far beyond accepting any legal limits on warmaking imposed by the US constitution—a document that is obviously defunct except in the minds of those clinging to a romantic fantasy about the state of modern American politics.

A Threat to Actual Americans?

It’s a given that the rule of law will be ignored in this conflict, just as it has been ignored for many decades. But an important political question is this: does the Venezuelan regime pose any threat to actual Americans?

With questions like these, the burden of proof is always on those who want a new war and are demanding tax dollars to do it. So where is the evidence of a Venezuelan threat? If there were one posed by the actual regime, we’d be sure to hear about it, since it would greatly help the warmongers. But, it seems the best the administration can do is deem the Venezuelan regime as a “terrorist” organization. But here they don’t even make the case for any real terrorism—such as the bombing of buildings. No, the administration has been clinging to the idea that Venezuela is sponsoring “narco terrorism.” This term is extremely flexible, and could include anything from cartel activity to the mere selling of drugs within the United States.

(The GOP, the party of “personal responsibility,” now tells us that when Americans voluntarily buy drugs, then it’s the drug dealer’s fault. I wonder if these people also think that gun crime is the fault of gun merchants.)

In any case, all of this is a very long way from “weapons of mass destruction” or “dirty bombs” or even anthrax in your mail—the sort of things that could plausibly be called terrorism. No, the new “terrorism” requiring a US bombing campaign against Venezuela is apparently some people on small boats that the regime swears—cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die—are totally “drug boats.”

In the end, the “narco-terrorism” angle is simply political cover for helping carry out the longtime plans of neoconservatives who have dreamed for many years of installing a US puppet in Venezuela. The fact that Trump recently pardoned Honduran drug lord Juan Orlando Hernandez, who served only one year of a 45-year sentence, illustrates that the administration is not actually concerned about drug trafficking.

Trump’s neoconservative bona fides are now firmly in place, after all. This is a president who vehemently supports Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the most committed warmongering neoconservatives in Congress. The administration also has resurrected the career of Elliott Abrams who was appointed during the first Trump term as a “Special Representative” for both Iran and Venezuela. Abrams—a die-hard Zionist, of course—has been working for many years for regime change in Venezuela, and Trump may be the one to get it for him. Abram’s most recent column at Foreign Affairs shows he isn’t giving up.

Headed Toward another Regime Change “Success”?

It’s always difficult to guess any politician’s true intentions, and this is certainly true of Trump. Regime change, in any case, remains one of the worst options going forward. After all, what success has the US had with regime change in recent decades? The US spent twenty years replacing the Taliban with the Taliban in Afghanistan. After years of allying with terrorists in Syria to effect regime change, al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists are now the dictators of Syria. Trump now invites Syrian terrorists to the White House. In Iraq, the country’s ancient Christian community was decimated in the wake of the US invasion. The standard of living there utterly collapsed, and the Iraqi regime is now far more friendly toward Iran that it was under Saddam Hussein. Libya is now a hotbed for terrorism with slave markets and a ruined economy. These are the American regime’s “success” stories.

What horrors await the people of Venezuela if the US carries out regime change there? I hope we don’t find out. But one likely outcome is this: an enormous wave of Venezuelan refugees moving north.

Nonetheless, perennial calls for regime change somewhere are now standard operating procedure in Washington, with or without Trump in the White House. Every minute of every day, the American empire is dreaming up new wars and new excuses for new wars. Trump apparently has no problem with playing along so long as it helps him spend more money on key constituents, especially his Zionist funders and the corporate welfare queens at organizations like Raytheon.

Some “MAGA” supporters have expressed disappointment in the administration’s refusal to do much to change course on this. But, as Tom Mullen recently noted:

Part of the problem is that Trump’s anti-war platform was never as radical as the true American First crowd would like to believe. He talks a good game about ending “forever wars,” but he doesn’t question the core of the empire—the global standing army, the 800-plus bases warehousing hundreds of thousands of troops overseas, and the non-defensive use of them, as long as the war isn’t a “forever war.”

Indeed, Trump’s posture reminds one of Madeleine Albright’s famous complaint to Colin Powell during the Clinton Years: “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

An empire with a huge offensive military is likely to use it. And Donald Trump clearly likes the idea.

The post Stop the Drive to War With Venezuela appeared first on LewRockwell.

A columnist for the N.Y. Old Bag asks why is a guy who’s been dead for six years a top issue in American life? The man who is asking writes with forked pen. He should know, as it’s his rag that’s putting a nonissue on its front page every day. The nonissue covers for the total breakdown of civil behavior in large American cities, a breakdown due to mostly young black and Hispanic thugs. Lefty politicians opposed to Trump’s illegal-immigration crackdown are openly encouraging assaults on cops, ICE agents, and other government officers. Law enforcement agents are now seen as Nazis and the Gestapo after months of Democrat politicians calling them such names. Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles seem at times to be war zones, with once-beautiful residential neighborhoods now taken over by homeless tents and drugs.

I’ve been thinking about how wonderful American cities used to be when I was young. The first time I went to Los Angeles at 20 years of age, I thought I had landed in paradise: glistening streets, beautiful buildings, mom-and-pop stores, quiet beaches, no crowds, and virtually no crime, along with blue skies and greenery. Today El-Lay is skid row, with open drug markets, tent cities where the homeless lay down the rules, private homes of the rich turned into forts defended by armed guards, and gang violence an everyday happening. Enforced diversity has yet to save a city. Chicago violence, I am told, is even worse.

“Totally different value systems from your own do not make for a peaceful country.”

When I first laid eyes on New York as I was landing aged 11, I thought that it must be a dream. After years of war, Europe lay in ruins, whereas the Big Bagel seemed to have burst out of the sea in its splendor and magnificence. Fifth Avenue, Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, Broadway—all were a long way from the blown-up buildings and ruined city of Athens.

So what happened? Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration law limiting white European influx, and encouraging unlimited third-world immigration, is what happened. Need I say more? In the Big Bagel, the 300,000 public employees compete for who among them will bark the loudest and be the rudest where the public is concerned. I would say 99 percent are minorities. Once upon a time American informality was welcome; now it’s a bruising everyday experience.

Oh, for the days when tradition rather than reform was the best influence on the quality of citizenship. A common identity is all-important in a society of strangers, a concept that is rejected by liberals and lefties in the name of globalism. Man is free but also bound by moral standards. When the black family imploded sometime in the ’60s, egged on by the liberals and the left, few realized the damage it would do to blacks. I remember some know-it-all football commentator laughing and praising some black player for having twelve or thirteen children, most of whose names he didn’t even know. Well, young blacks without fathers do have a tendency to get into drugs and do bad things to others and to themselves, but our lefty know-it-alls thought otherwise. This is why blacks make up almost 14 percent of the population but constitute more than 55 percent of the prison population.

The great Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas and other such American blacks—dismissed by the usual suspects as Uncle Toms—were among the first to see this but were shouted down by the media and the left, who appreciated con-men phonies like Al Sharpton and praised gangsters like the recently departed Rap Brown as black heroes. The latter just had his obituary covering a whole page in the Old Bag, his murder of a policeman mentioned as an aside.

The American public is now so stupefied by those contraptions everyone holds and looks at nonstop every minute of the day and night, their ability to pay attention or focus on anything not trivial is astounding. Technology has made humans stupider by the minute, and no one has become more stupid than American youths. And it gets worse.

Like Sweden, once the most civilized country of Europe, now among the most violent due to open borders for Middle Easterners and Africans, the U.S. has welcomed all sorts of foreign criminals, the latest an Afghan who murdered a 20-year-old National Guardswoman in cold blood. Totally different value systems from your own do not make for a peaceful country. Minnesota is now littered with unruly Somalis breaking the law but being protected by laws that state one is innocent until proved guilty. Go figure, as they used to say in Brooklyn.

This article was originally published on Taki’s Magazine.

The post A Common Identity appeared first on LewRockwell.

“The United States boldly broke with the ancient military custom of swearing loyalty to a leader. Article VI required that American Officers thereafter swear loyalty to our basic law, the Constitution… Our American Code of Military Obedience requires that, should orders and the law ever conflict, our officers must obey the law… This nation must have military leaders of principle and integrity so strong that their oaths to support and defend the Constitution will unfailingly govern their actions.”—“Loyalty to the Constitution” plaque located on the grounds of the United States Military Academy

Every military servicemember’s oath is a pledge to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

It is not an oath to a politician. It is not an oath to a party. And it is not an oath to the police state.

Yet what happens when those same men and women are being told—by their own government—that obedience to power and loyalty to a political leader come before allegiance to the Constitution they swore to uphold?

That question isn’t hypothetical.

It is the moral line now being tested in real time, and it goes to the heart of what kind of country we are: do we live in a constitutional republic governed by the rule of law, or in a militarized police state where “legality” is whatever the person with the most power and the biggest army say it is?

The answer becomes painfully clear when you look at what our troops are being ordered to do—and what “we the people” are tacitly allowing them to be ordered to do—in the so-called name of national security.

Members of the military are now being deployed domestically to police their fellow American citizens in ways that trample the spirit, if not the letter, of the Posse Comitatus Act.

It’s legally dubious enough that the military is being used to enforce immigration crackdowns and police protests in American cities. But now they’re being tasked with killing civilians far from any declared battlefield in the absence of an imminent threat—all while being told that questioning the legality of those missions is itself a form of disloyalty.

So, which is it: obedience to the Constitution or the Commander-in-Chief?

At the center of this latest maelstrom is a report that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a verbal order to “kill everybody” on a maritime vessel in the Caribbean that was suspected of transporting drugs.

According to multiple accounts, after an initial “lethal, kinetic” strike disabled the vessel and killed nine men on board, a second strike was carried out to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage—an alleged “double tap strike” that legal experts warn could constitute murder or a war crime if the survivors no longer posed a threat.

In all, the boat was reportedly hit four times: twice to kill the eleven occupants on board and twice more to sink the boat.

Intentionally killing survivors clinging to the remains of a boat in the middle of the ocean, in the absence of an imminent threat, whether or not the U.S. is engaged in “armed conflict” with drug cartels, is unlawful.

Murder on the high seas is a crime.

Even the Pentagon’s manual on the law of war says combatants who are “wounded, sick, or shipwrecked” no longer pose a threat and should not be attacked.

Some Republicans who have, until now, turned a blind eye to the Trump administration’s most egregious offenses against the Constitution appear reluctant to let this one slide.

Not surprisingly, the Trump administration has done an about-face.

Hegseth—who bragged about watching the September 2 strike live—now claims he wasn’t in the room when the second strike happened.

Suddenly, the White House—which had been gleefully chest-thumping over its power to kill extrajudicially—is signaling its willingness to scapegoat subordinates in the chain of command.

The man with his head on the chopping block is Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley.

Clearly, it’s a lesson learned too late: when you’re dealing with power-hungry authoritarians, loyalty is no guarantee of protection. It’s always the men and women who carry out the unlawful orders—not the ones who give them—who end up paying the price.

Here’s the problem, though. While the media fixates on who will bear the blame for ordering the double-tap strike, the government war machine is moving forward, full steam ahead.

The Sept. 2 boat strike was part of a broader Trump administration campaign of maritime attacks that has already killed at least 80 people at sea, all without a formal declaration of war or due process—evidence of who they were or what they had done—to warrant an extrajudicial execution.

This is yet another of Trump’s everywhere, endless wars—this time at sea—sold as toughness on “narco-terrorists” at a moment when his poll numbers are slipping, economic promises have failed to manifest, and new Epstein-related revelations continue to surface.

When presidents manufacture new fronts in a forever war whenever they need a distraction, we should all beware.

The Trump administration has tried to frame this preemptive maritime war on suspected “narco-terrorists” as a “non-international armed conflict” with designated terrorist organizations.

Yet what it amounts to is an undeclared war, launched in international waters, without just cause and without congressional authorization.

The legal landscape is not murky—it is clear.

Most of the public debate has revolved around those technical legalities—what kind of conflict this is, which statutes apply, which court might have jurisdiction—yet what is really at stake is whether we are training a generation of American troops to believe that loyalty to a leader can excuse disobedience to, or even override, the Constitution.

Three bodies of law converge here: the Constitution’s allocation of war powers, the international law of armed conflict, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

First, there has been no declaration of war by Congress. Under the Constitution, only Congress can declare war. The president cannot start wars based solely on his own authority.

Second, the law of armed conflict and the law of the sea forbid killing shipwrecked survivors who pose no immediate threat.

Third, the Uniform Code of Military Justice requires every servicemember to refuse manifestly unlawful orders.

A command to “kill everybody” is precisely the kind of order these guardrails were written to forbid.

The rationale that “I was just following orders” is not a defense to war crimes. That is the core lesson of the Nuremberg Trials and the modern law of armed conflict.

Of course, the police state wants mindless automatons who obey unquestioningly.

Reporting on the trial of Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker in 1963, Hannah Arendt explained, “The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.”

Arendt, a Holocaust survivor, denounced Eichmann, a senior officer who organized Hitler’s death camps, for being a bureaucrat who unquestioningly carried out orders that were immoral, inhumane and evil. This, Arendt concluded, was the banality of evil, the ability to engage in wrongdoing or turn a blind eye to it, without taking any responsibility for your actions or inactions.

Coincidentally, the same year that Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was published, Martin Luther King Jr. penned his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which he points out “that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”

In other words, there comes a time when law and order are in direct opposition to justice.

Every military recruit is supposed to learn in basic training that there is a duty to obey lawful orders, and an equal duty to disobey manifestly unlawful orders.

No president—Republican or Democrat—can override that principle.

The Commander-in-Chief may issue orders, but he does not get to erase the Constitution or rewrite the laws of war by fiat.

The White House rationale—that a preemptive “kill everybody” attack “was conducted in self-defense to protect U.S. interests”—should terrify every American.

If the government can redefine “self-defense” to justify killing incapacitated survivors on a sinking boat, then it can justify killing anyone—at home or abroad, in uniform or out of it.

No matter how the White House spins it, however, these are crimes and those involved—from Hegseth on down—could find themselves in legal jeopardy and should be held accountable.

The pressure on the military is mounting.

The Orders Project, a nonpartisan initiative that helps connect servicemembers with outside legal counsel, reports a spike in calls from military personnel concerned that they could be asked to carry out an illegal order or pressured to take part in missions that violate their training in the laws of war.

Given Hegseth’s much-publicized approach to waging war without constraints—he has openly derided the military’s Judge Advocate General corps and championed a more “unshackled” approach to lethal force—these concerns are reasonable.

Indeed, there has been enough cause for concern that six members of Congress, all with military or national security backgrounds, recorded a message reminding servicemembers what the law requires: “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders…you must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our constitution.”

For re-stating what every recruit is taught in basic training, these lawmakers have been accused by President Trump of “sedition” and branded as “traitors” who should be arrested and punished by death. The FBI has reportedly opened an investigation. Hegseth has even threatened to recall one of the lawmakers—Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain—to active duty in order to court-martial him for his remarks.

The message from the top could not be clearer: allegiance to the Constitution is a crime.

Every person like myself who has served in uniform has experienced the tension between following orders and honoring that oath. Discipline requires obedience, but a constitutional republic requires lawful obedience.

That is why the oath matters.

It is not an oath to a man, a party, or a policy agenda. It is an oath to a charter of law: the Constitution.

At West Point, a 1943 “Loyalty to the Constitution” plaque proclaims: “should orders and the law ever conflict, our officers must obey the law.”

That principle is not antiquated. It is the foundation of American civil-military relations. Remove it, and what remains is not a republic but a personality cult with weapons.

The danger becomes even clearer when you examine the rhetoric now shaping national policy.

For instance, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recently urged the president to impose “a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”

A harsher irony is hard to find.

A good case could be made that it is, in fact, the U.S. government that is flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies. Just consider Trump’s steady spate of presidential pardons, the latest to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring with drug traffickers to move cocaine into the U.S.

According to U.S. prosecutors, Hernández—quoted as saying he wanted to “shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos by flooding the United States with cocaine”—took bribes from drug traffickers and had the country’s armed forces protect a cocaine laboratory and shipments to the U.S.

So the president is blowing up boats in the Caribbean he claims—without proof—are ferrying drugs all the while pardoning someone who was convicted of conspiring to transport hundreds of tons of cocaine into the U.S.

This corrupt double standard has become business as usual for the Trump administration.

Now Trump wants to launch land attacks on Venezuela, a country that is conveniently richer in oil reserves than Iraq—all in the so-called name of fighting the war on drugs.

The rapid buildup of U.S. military forces in the Caribbean—which according to news reports includes a range of aircraft carriers, guided-missile destroyers, and amphibious assault ships capable of landing thousands of troops, as well as a nuclear-powered submarine and spy planes—far exceeds what would be needed for a supposed counternarcotics operation and is worrisome enough on its own.

Yet conscripting the military to do the dirty work of the police state—and then throwing them under the bus for doing so—takes us into even darker territory.

The U.S. government’s weaponization of the armed forces for political power is a betrayal of the Constitution, but it is also a betrayal of the very men and women who swore to give their lives for it.

This has never been about public safety.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this has always been about power—who wields it, who is protected by it, and who is crushed under it.

And once a government shows a willingness to break faith with its defenders, it will break faith with anyone.

A government that can discard its military service members can discard its whistleblowers and truth-tellers who expose corruption.

A government that can discard its military service members can discard its journalists, judges, and watchdogs in the press and the courts who insist on transparency and limits to power.

A government that can discard its military service members can discard its political opponents and dissidents, its religious and racial minorities, its immigrants and asylum seekers, its small business owners and workers who organize, its parents and community members who speak up locally, and any citizen who dares to say “no” when the state demands “yes.”

This betrayal of those who swore an oath to the Constitution is not an accident—it is a warning.

Be warned.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

The post The Constitution vs. the Commander-in-Chief: The Duty To Disobey Unlawful Orders appeared first on LewRockwell.

In this essay, I will take on the Putin Hero Worship that is all too common among Russian cheerleaders in Alternative Media. Their misreading of the man and his conduct of the war will multiply 10 times over when a peace is concluded that meets many, though not all of Russia’s objectives.   Yes, we told you so, they will be crowing: peace has come because Putin has made all the right moves and trashed the West.

However, there is a strong argument to make for exactly the opposite interpretation of what has been going on for the nearly four years of this war, namely that it got off to a very bad start and has been drawn out needlessly because of the peculiar strategy that Team Putin put in place and has stuck with notwithstanding mounting fatalities and a worsening international environment that threatens to escalate from the present proxy war against Russia into a Europe wide kinetic war that will devastate the Continent

. If indeed the war ends in the next couple of months, it will be largely due to the efforts of Donald Trump, who is determined to reach a geopolitical settlement with Russia for his own Realpolitik reasons, namely to break up the Russia-China alliance. Regrettably, I agree with Trump that Putin would fight on for years to come in the flawed belief that he is sparing lives by his war of attrition approach and that a total military victory is achievable.  It is not, given the go-for-broke irrational commitment to continuing the war by the EU Member States.

As I have been saying for some time, this war will end and there will likely be Ukrainian capitulation thanks to the political collapse of the Kiev regime, not because the Ukrainian army has been driven from the field of battle. And Kiev is being pushed towards political collapse today by Team Trump more than by anyone else.

****

If we may go back to the very start of the Special Military Operation, I maintain that Team Putin had not done due diligence regarding the likely Ukrainian army response to an invasion and had not fielded an invasion force in the numbers essential for it to succeed.

In my chat with Peter Lavelle on the podcast The Gaggle a couple of weeks ago, Peter reminded me that in the weeks before the start of the Special Military Operation, when I was still a regular guest on the RT show ‘CrossTalk,’ I had been one of the very few analysts in Alternative Media to have predicted the Russian invasion. I do not remember that, but it could well have been so because I am no military expert and would not have seen that the 150,000 troops that the Russians amassed across the Belarus border from Ukraine were only one third the number that normal military doctrine tells you are needed to perform such an operation as crossing into enemy territory to capture the capital and force regime change.

Just a few months into the SMO, I heard from a taxi driver during the hour-long trip from my apartment in an outlying borough of St Petersburg to the city center how Team Putin has stunned his own military intelligence people by not consulting with them before staging the invasion.  And what would a taxi driver know about such things, you may ask.  Well, this driver just happened to be a retired military intelligence officer who remained in touch with his former colleagues and heard the story from them.

Yes, in Russia at various times taxi drivers have been exceptional sources of information. Just remember that Vladimir Putin himself admitted in a public Q&A a year or so ago, that at the start of the 90s he, too, had been a taxi driver for a while just to put bread on the table, given the general economic collapse.

It is fairly obvious that Team Putin expected the Ukrainian military to raise the white flag at the first sign of Russian troops invading, just as they had done in 2014 on Crimea.  One might guess that Putin and his close advisers did not appreciate how effectively British and other NATO trainers had been during the intervening 8 years in reshaping the Ukrainian army. The Russian appeals to the Ukrainian officers to rebel against the extremist nationalist government in Kiev and against the Nazi battalions in their own midst fell on deaf ears.

Indeed, you may go on to ask whether a good people manager like Putin could really ignore the protocol of government administration and not consult with the agency responsible for providing military intelligence.  But this very behavior has in the past two weeks been repeated in a manner for us all to see when Putin completely sidelined Sergei Lavrov and the entire Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the peace negotiations with the USA and Ukraine, relying instead on a relative outsider and neophyte in such matters, Kirill Dmitriev.

Indeed, if the Russian command had poor military and political intelligence on the enemy at the start, it has not become better informed ever since. I point to the ‘surprise’ Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk oblast of the Russian Federation that it took more than six months of fierce fighting to uproot and expel. It is hard to understand why his Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov was not sacked over this disgraceful failure to secure the Russian Federation borders, why no one had checked the fortifications that were supposed to have been built with federal money in Belgorod and Kursk, but never were, or were built with inferior concrete because of local government corruption.

The whole strategy of waging war ‘the Russian way’ brought in by Vladimir Putin  in February 2022, in contrast to the U.S. style ‘shock and awe’ to overwhelm the enemy, has dragged out the war vastly longer than was necessary, has created more killed and severely maimed Russian and Ukrainian soldiers, and has invited Western intervention which all could have been avoided had Putin followed Soviet practice in such matters and used a hammer to crush the fly instead of a napkin.

The lessons of the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968 were precisely that massive troop presence must be brought to bear for successful regime change by force of arms. In both cases, the Soviet invasions were cruel, but in the end relatively few people died and the whole exercise was over in a matter of days, at most weeks, not years as is the case today.

These lessons have not been absorbed by Team Putin to this day. For inexplicable reasons the Boss in the Kremlin refuses to make a decapitating strike in Kiev to end the fighting at once without further loss of life.

As I say above, it is the intervention of Donald Trump that is bringing down the Kiev regime. The United States stands behind the anti-corruption investigations that already have greatly weakened Zelensky’s position following the forced resignation of his head of the Presidential Administration and power behind the throne, Andrii Yermak.  It is Team Trump who have been sidelining Europe, letting the air out of the balloon of the Coalition of the Willing, and preparing the way for capitulation by Kiev before anyone in Brussels can raise a finger.

Don’t get me wrong. I have the greatest respect for Vladimir Putin as the man who put Russia back on its feet economically, socially and in military might after the collapse and disgrace of the 1990s. For these achievements, he may be honored for decades to come with monuments all around the Federation. But as we say in the business world: ‘horses for courses.’  And Putin, the nation builder in peacetime has been making too many wrong moves as Commander in Chief of a nation at war.

This article was originally published on GilbertDoctorow.com.

The post Putin Has Been Wrong About This War From the Beginning appeared first on LewRockwell.

The knives are out for the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The leaks from the Pentagon about him will continue until Hegseth is gone.

The officers do not want a boss who is giving illegal orders while scapegoating the generals and soldiers who follow them:

At the White House on Monday, Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, read a statement that said Mr. Hegseth had authorized the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, “to conduct these kinetic strikes.”

She said that Admiral Bradley had “worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.”

Bradly gets pushed forward to take the beating while Hegseth and Trump claim innocence:

Bradley will have the chance to address outstanding issues about the strikes when he speaks with lawmakers Thursday behind closed doors. Some lawmakers have said the Trump administration appears to be making Bradley into something of a scapegoat.

“Looks like they’re throwing him under the bus,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), often a critic of the administration, “but these kinds of decisions go all the way to the top.”

Adm. Bradley had the poor choice of following an illegal order or getting fired.

In my recent piece abut U.S. strikes on boats in the Caribbean I suggested that the head of Southern Command, Adm. Alvin Holsey, was made to retire because he rejected orders to kill survivors of U.S attacks:

On the very same day those survivors were rescued, October 16, the DoD announced that the head of its Southern Command was ‘stepping down’: ..
…
It now seems clear that Admiral Holsey got fired for not following Hegseth’s illegal order and for ordering the rescue of the survivors of the strike.

A piece in today’s Wall Street Journal confirms this impression:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shocked official Washington in mid-October when he announced that the four-star head of U.S. military operations in the Caribbean was retiring less than a year into his tenure.

But according to two Pentagon officials, Hegseth asked Adm. Alvin Holsey to step down, a de facto ouster that was the culmination of months of discord between Hegseth and the officer. It began days after President Trump’s inauguration in January and intensified months later when Holsey had initial concerns about the legality of lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, according to former officials aware of the discussions.

Hegseth has now claimed (archived) to have not seen no survivors when he was in the room watching the stream of a second strike happening that killed survivors of an allegedly smuggling boat:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday that “a couple of hours” passed before he was made aware that a September military strike he authorized and “watched live” required an additional attack to kill two survivors, further distancing himself from an incident now facing congressional inquiry.
…
“I did not personally see survivors,” he said in response to a reporter’s question, “… because that thing was on fire and was exploded, and fire, smoke, you can’t see anything. You got digital, there’s — this is called the fog of war.”

That, however, contradicts the original reporting of the issue. The Washington Post wrote (archived) that Hegseth was watching the video stream when survivors of a strike were clearly visible and was aware of the order to kill them:

The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

The NY Times reports further details (archived):

Before the Trump administration began attacking people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved contingency plans for what to do if an initial strike left survivors, according to multiple U.S. officials.

The military would attempt to rescue survivors who appeared to be helpless, shipwrecked and out of what the administration considered a fight. But it would try again to kill them if they took what the United States deemed to be a hostile action, like communicating with suspected cartel members, the officials said.

After the smoke cleared from a first strike on Sept. 2, there were two survivors, and one of them radioed for help, the U.S. officials said. Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who commanded the operation, ordered a follow-up strike and both were killed.

The reasoning is ludicrous. Survivors of a murderous strike are to be rescued. But survivors who call for help to be rescued have to be killed:

Under the plans Mr. Hegseth had approved, Admiral Bradley interpreted the purported communications between the initial survivors and colleagues as meaning that the survivors were still in the fight, rather than shipwrecked and helpless people whom it would be a war crime to target.

The whole legal construct behind these strikes is obviously nonsense:

The Pentagon’s defense of its actions rests heavily on the premise that there was a “fight” in the first place. In defending the campaign of summary killings at sea as lawful, the administration has relied on Mr. Trump’s disputed determination that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and that people suspected of smuggling drugs for them are “combatants.”

A still-secret memo by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel accepts Mr. Trump’s claims about the nature of drug cartels and that there is an armed conflict. Based on that premise, it concludes that the boat strikes are lawful.

One of its key related conclusions, according to people who have read it, is that suspected cargos of drugs aboard boats are lawful military targets because cartels could otherwise sell them and use the profits to buy military equipment to sustain their alleged war efforts.

The Pentagon’s emphasis on the purported radio communications appears to rely on that logic. The idea appears to be that without a second strike, another boat could have come to retrieve not only the survivors but also any of the alleged shipment of cocaine that the first blast did not burn up, so calling for help was a hostile act.

The OLC memo is intentionally confusing cause and effect.

People and cartels are greedy. They sell drugs to make money. Whatever arms they may have are used in support of that primary aim. They are in business, not in an ‘armed conflict’. They do not to fight wars for lebensraum or ideologically reasons:

A broad range of legal experts reject the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s claim that this is an armed conflict. They say that there is no armed conflict, that crews of boats suspected of smuggling drugs are civilians, not combatants, and that Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have been giving illegal orders to commit murder.

Hegseth has given orders to murder civilians. If this were an ‘armed conflict’ Hegseth would have committed a war crime.

Or, as conservative commentator George Will scathingly remarks (archived:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.

Pete Hegseth has long argued for more brutal wars, for more unfair fights to satisfy his inner psychopath:

In books and on television, Hegseth argued for years that U.S. military leaders should relax rules for American forces, allowing them to fight unburdened by concerns of future courts-martial. More freedom to operate, he insisted, and less regulation by military lawyers would make troops more lethal and effective, and could be justified under the laws of war.
…
Hegseth’s views were shaped by his own experience in the Army. He was deployed to Iraq in 2005, in the northern city of Samarra, which was a counterinsurgency hotbed. The regiment’s Charlie Company, which included Hegseth, employed such aggressive tactics that it was referred to by some soldiers as the Kill Company [archived]. Four of its soldiers were later court-martialed on charges of killing unarmed Iraqis. Three of them were convicted; one case was thrown out on appeal.

Hegseth has cited a JAG briefing on “legal and proper engagement” that he says he and fellow troops received when they deployed. Hegseth says his soldiers were told they couldn’t fire on an armed man unless it was clear he posed a threat.

Hegseth pulled his platoon aside and told them to ignore the legal advice. “I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains,” he says he told them, according to his 2024 book “The War on Warriors.” “Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat.”

Hegseth brought such convictions to the Pentagon. In February, when he fired the top JAGs, he said they could be potential “roadblocks” to lawful orders “given by a commander in chief.”

Defense Secretary Hegseth’s inherent brutality is likely the reason why he got hired for his position:

Trump selected Hegseth as defense secretary partly because of his views on loosening the rules of engagement, two people familiar with the presidential transition said.

It is high time for Congress to rein both men in.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post The Knives Are Out for Hegseth appeared first on LewRockwell.

European NATO allies have called a NATO Emergency Summit to discuss NATO’s continued existence and whether the US key partner could still be trusted.

Every American signal of US withdrawal brings Russia closer to her target – defeating NATO, not with bullets but with time. This is being recognized gradually by European “leaders”, NATO members which today – 1 December 2025 — came to a climax that called this Emergency NATO Summit in Brussels.

Alliances are not marriages. They can and do gradually fall apart. This seems to be the case NOW. It is no longer a question whether NATO will follow its Washington leadership – or break apart – or continue as a European alliance. The latter is unlikely as European-NATO leadership is today divided to the point where no long term strategy can be expected to lead a NATO military force, let alone bring together a unified budget for a military force – which calls itself a defense force, but in reality, is and has been since 1991 an aggressor, an international war machine.

Professor John J. Mearsheimer explains in detail the challenges faced by NATO, its European leaders and the likelihood that NATO may break apart.

Listen to Professor Mearsheimer’s assessment on this 15-min video:

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post Is NATO Breaking Up? appeared first on LewRockwell.