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Disgraced and fired former FBI director Jim Comey is finally facing his day in court for having lied while under oath.  Unethical New York Attorney General Letitia James has been indicted on bank fraud charges.  Warmonger and former national security advisor John Bolton might soon be indicted for illegally retaining classified documents.  Russia Collusion Hoax co-conspirator, anti-American communist, and former director of the CIA John Brennan might similarly find himself in the dock.  Notoriously dumb “yes-man,” Russia Collusion Hoax co-conspirator, and former director of national intelligence James Clapper is under criminal investigation.  Former FBI director Chris Wray has been accused of lying to Congress regarding the number of plainclothes agents operating during the January 6, 2021, protest for fair elections.  Other well-known names are being scrutinized for criminal prosecution.

As each shoe drops, the corporate news media shriek about President Trump going after his “political enemies” and directly involving himself in Department of Justice charging decisions.  A reasonable journalist might wonder how former chiefs within the Intelligence Community could be considered “political enemies” if they weren’t performing their duties in a political manner.  But such an obvious follow-up question is never asked, and instead Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Wray, and other former, powerful officers within the administrative state are described as if they acted, at all times, selflessly and for the good of the country.

The propaganda press is very concerned about portraying members of the permanent government as being above politics because if the American people understood them to be just as political as members of Congress, then voters might start to wonder why such a vast, unelected administrative state is allowed to exist.  The financial and media elites who control the mainstream press constantly convey to the public the unconstitutional idea that the heads of important departments and agencies act unilaterally and independently.  They pretend that the director of the FBI and the attorney general of the United States do not answer to the president.  They pretend that the CIA and U.S. military operate autonomously from the White House.  Mainstream media “reporters” desperately work to convince Americans that unelected bureaucrats are entitled to wield tremendous power all on their own.  They are not.

Article II of the Constitution lays the foundations for the Executive Branch, and the first sentence of the first section is specific and clear: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”  The first sentence of the second section defines the president’s authority over the military: “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.”  When it comes to executive authority, all power resides with the president.  Likewise, every Executive employee — from cabinet secretary to parking attendant — acts as a delegated beneficiary of the president’s Executive power.

It is the president of the United States — not the attorney general — who is the chief law enforcement officer of the federal government.  If President Trump decided to exercise his vested prosecutorial powers, he could try cases in federal courts.  When federal prosecutors enforce the law in courtrooms across the country, they are empowered to do so only because they are acting on the president’s behalf.  When corporate news publications pretend that federal prosecutors are entitled to act independently from the White House, they are willfully disregarding the U.S. Constitution and foisting an illegitimate form of government upon the American people.

As a simple thought experiment, consider what it would mean if senior officials in the Department of Justice were exclusively empowered to decide how to enforce the law.  It would mean that an unethical attorney such as Andrew Weissmann would be in a position to tell the president of the United States what he can and cannot do.  It would give government lawyers — whose Executive authority comes directly from the Office of the President — more authority than the president.  It would effectively rewrite the first sentence of the first section of Article II of the Constitution into some variant of this: The executive Power shall be vested in Andrew Weissmann or other unethical attorneys who have weaseled their way into becoming career bureaucrats within the Department of Justice.

We saw this illegitimate form of government play out in President Trump’s first term.  During the run-up to the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had conspired with Intelligence Community officers and White House officials to frame candidate Trump as a Russian spy.  Even though then-FBI director Jim Comey knew these allegations were false, the corrupt law enforcement officer used this frame-up job as leverage against President Trump the following year.

Conniving career bureaucrats in the Justice Department convinced Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from all investigations involving the manufactured Russia Collusion Hoax.  President Trump eventually fired serial-liar Comey, and career bureaucrat and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (in his capacity as acting attorney general) appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller as a special counsel responsible for investigating the Democrat-constructed Russia Collusion Hoax.

Unbeknownst to the American people, Special Counsel Mueller was suffering from some form of dementia, so unethical government prosecutor Andrew Weissmann effectively ran a two-year harassment campaign whose ultimate purpose was to impeach President Trump and remove him from office.  During this time, dishonorable lawyer Andrew Weissmann effectively held more power than the president of the United States.

At any time, President Trump could have put an end to this nonsense.  He could have fired his attorney general and deputy attorney general.  He could have fired Mueller and Weissmann.  He could have concluded the whole affair and moved on.  But the pressure from Congress (Republicans included) and the propaganda press for President Trump to comply with the special counsel charade was intense.  Paul Ryan and other congressional RINOs even suggested that Trump would be impeached if he did not permit the manufactured investigation into the Democrat-constructed Russia Collusion Hoax to proceed.  In an effort to keep the peace, President Trump essentially gave corrupt lawyer and staunch Democrat Andrew Weissmann control over the presidency.

The Weissmann presidency was absurd.  When corrupt lawyers are empowered to tell the president of the United States what he may legally do, the Constitution has been entirely shredded.  Instead of an elected president exclusively vested with Executive power, we end up with an unelected legal bureaucracy that enigmatically delegates a handful of incidental powers to the sitting president.

The administrative state likes this arrangement.  Permanent government bureaucrats prefer to limit the president of the United States to theatrical performances that include signing ceremonies and kissing babies.  For everything else, they insist, Americans should leave it to the experts.  Let the prosecutors decide whom to indict.  Let the generals and admirals decide whom to attack.  Let the central bankers decide the value of American currency.  Let the spies wage covert wars at home and across the globe.  “Trust the vast bureaucracy,” the bureaucrats say, “because the administrative state is made up of impartial, incorruptible, competent, and well-meaning experts.”

Except there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution about a Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internal Revenue Service, or Environmental Protection Agency.  These armies of unelected bureaucrats wield power as if they were a separate and unrivaled branch of government.  To the extent that these oversized monsters are remotely constitutional, however, it is only because they exercise delegated powers belonging exclusively to the president of the United States.

The buck stops with the president, not with the bureaucrats.  Corporate news publications that insist it should be the other way around have no interest in protecting the Constitution.  They seek to undermine it.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post Bureaucrats Aren’t Presidents appeared first on LewRockwell.

When it comes to destroying your brand, Norwegian Nobel Committee is the Bud Lite of peace prizes. After all, back in 2009 they gave the Peace Prize to a President Barack Obama who then went on to bomb at least seven countries, set the Middle East on fire, and even conduct drone strikes on American citizens!

Other awardees have had similarly suspicious records as peacemakers. They even gave a Peace Prize to the likes of Henry Kissinger.

This year has proven to be no different. Last week the Nobel Committee announced that the 2025 Peace Prize would go to Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado. Machado has a long history in the Venezuelan opposition including support for and participation in the US-backed, 2002 coup against then-president Hugo Chavez.

She is likewise a strong opponent of current Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, and in 2018 even wrote a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asking for Israel’s assistance in overthrowing the Venezuelan government.

Shouldn’t we be cheering anyone seeking to overthrow Maduro’s authoritarian style of socialism that is hardly helping the people of the country? Perhaps, but what Machado is seeking is very different from working for change in her country’s system of government. She has long worked with and been paid by the US government’s “regime change” apparatus, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

NED was founded under President Reagan to do openly what the CIA has been notorious for doing in secret: overthrowing foreign governments that Washington doesn’t like. Scratch any of the “color revolutions” of the past 30 years and you will find the participation of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Nowhere have these coups and revolutions promoted and funded by NED (and the CIA itself) been even remotely successful. They have only produced broken, ravaged, burned-out shells like we have seen in Libya and elsewhere. They produced chaos and called it freedom and democracy. They even helped put al-Qaeda in power in Syria!

No, you don’t have to love Maduro or his style of governance to be critical of outside attempts to oust him. In President Trump’s first term, he set his neocons loose on Venezuela and the result was the almost comical rise of the political nobody Juan Guaido.

I say “almost comical” because Trump’s neocons wasted untold millions of our dollars on the farce.

Is the Nobel Peace Prize just another deep state, soft-power tool intended to boost the US global military empire? The timing of the award going to the relatively unknown Machado is suspicious. President Trump has parked an armada of warships off the Venezuelan coast as his aides openly talk about “decapitation” strikes on the Venezuelan government. After the extrajudicial killing of some 20 civilians in his attacks on at least four boats off the Venezuelan coast, President Trump is openly bragging that no one dares launch a boat in the area.

The “Peace Prize” endows Machado with a new sense of moral authority and gives weight to any “green-light” she may again give to outside militaries to attack her own country.

What’s wrong with heeding Machado’s calls to “liberate” her country? President John Quincy Adams said it best, America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

We should leave Venezuela alone.

The post The Nobel (War Is) Peace Prize appeared first on LewRockwell.

I’ve seen a lot of empire loyalists going “Why aren’t the Free Palestine people cheering about the ceasefire?”

If you saw a man beating a child into a coma, would you cheer after the beating stopped? No, your first reaction would be horror at what happened and your second would be fear that he’ll attack the kid again. And then at some point you’d start wondering why the guy isn’t in jail.

They actually expected a bunch of parades and trophies for pausing a genocide. They thought they’d get applause and adoration and then everything would go back to how it was pre-2023.

That’s adorable. That’s precious. Not gonna happen, but it’s cute that they thought it would.

❖

Drop Site News reports that after the ceasefire was announced Israeli troops went on an arson spree and torched food, homes and critical infrastructure to ensure that Palestinians would have nothing to return to.

I keep thinking the Israeli military has run out of ways to shock me, but they somehow keep finding new ones.

❖

TYT’s Ana Kasparian was in hot water last week for rubbing her hands together while talking about how creepy and evil Jewish oligarch Larry Ellison is, with critics hastening to compare her depiction of Ellison to the antisemitic “Happy Merchant” meme.

Online Zionists eager to stoke the antisemitism hysteria actually went out of their way to digitally insert the Happy Merchant meme into the actual footage of Kasparian’s portrayal, which was probably done to show the similarities between the portrayal and the meme but in practice made it look as though TYT had displayed an antisemitic graphic during their show.

There is no reason to believe Kasparian was being antisemitic with her portrayal of Ellison, who is indeed creepy and evil. Ask a small child to imitate someone who is wicked and sneaky and they’ll rub their hands together looking sinister in the exact way Kasparian did without knowing anything about Jews or Judaism. The only reason anyone felt the need to insert the Happy Merchant meme into the footage in the first place was because hardly anyone knows what the fuck that is.

This has gotten so fucking stupid. You can’t even talk like a normal person in real time without getting accused of doing an antisemitic trope. Nobody can keep track of every little thing on the ADL no-no list. These freaks were accusing Greta Thunberg of being a Nazi for taking a pro-Palestine photo with an octopus plushie, because apparently octopuses are somewhere on the no-no list.

You’re expected to tip toe around and avoid any reference to money, noses, blood, and who knows whatever the fuck else. Penguins? Poodles? IKEA furniture? No one knows. Nobody can keep track of all that shit, especially when speaking in a real-time format and you don’t have time to pause and research whether a certain normal hand gesture is on the antisemitic trope list. It’s an absurd dynamic designed to stagnate all conversation around criticisms of genocide, empire, and oligarchy.

❖

I got into an interaction with someone online who told me I should hate Hamas because they are a proscribed terrorist group. I said “Oh well if the GOVERNMENT says we have to hate Hamas then I stand corrected.” He said it had nothing to do with the government, arguing that it was just “common sense,” after literally just having cited the proscription of Hamas by his government.

It’s amazing how common this viewpoint is. Westerners actually think “terrorist” is some kind of innate quality that certain groups have, instead of a completely made-up designation imposed by specific governments.

They don’t understand that it’s a government-applied label; they think it’s something that those groups actually ARE. They’re so herd-like in their thinking that they actually allow their rulers to interpret reality on their behalf. And they don’t even know they’re doing it.

The overwhelming majority of the world’s governments do not consider Hamas a terrorist group. It’s a label that’s only applied by the Five Eyes states, the EU, Japan, a couple of the empire’s Latin American client states, and Israel. For everyone else it’s just a Palestinian armed resistance group.

In the US-centralized empire, “terrorist” just means “a population which poses an inconvenience to the interests of the empire”. It’s not a real thing. The UK designated Palestine Action a terrorist group because its activists put paint on some war planes to protest a genocide, while an actual, literal Al Qaeda leader has been warmly embraced by western states because he facilitated their regime change objectives in Syria. There are no consistent standards by which Iran’s IRGC should be considered a terrorist group while Israel’s IDF and Mossad should not.

Anyone who regurgitates the word “terrorist” is just telling you they’re a mindless and compliant empire drone.

❖

The Gaza holocaust will be a litmus test for high-profile figures for decades. Everyone’s comments or lack thereof on Israel’s genocidal atrocities will be looked up and amplified whenever their name rises to public attention. It will be the first step in determining whether anyone deserves to be listened to, taken seriously, or voted for. Their comments on Gaza in the mid-2020s will be the first gate through which they must pass to be considered worthy of attention by normal people.

❖

Someone asked me, “Why do you care so much about Palestine?”

I told them ultimately it’s not even especially about Palestine. I care about humanity. I don’t want my kids and grandkids living in the kind of world that would watch civilians get ripped to shreds in full view of the entire planet with the support of my government and its allies. I think that’s pretty reasonable.

_____________

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The post They Seriously Expected Parades and Trophies For Pausing a Genocide appeared first on LewRockwell.

Taki Theodoracopulos knows his history. African tribes conducted slave wars on one another prior to the discovery of the Americas. The conquering of others and enslaving them released the warriors of the successful tribe from ordinary work, thereby permitting them to concentrate full time on their fighting ability.

Surplus slaves were sold for revenues to Arabs or depending on the time in history to whoever the customers were. The smartest of the African tribes conducting slave wars traded those enslaved to Muslims for firearms, thus giving them the advantage in the black African slave wars.

The vast majority of the blacks that ended up in the New World were provided by the black king of Dahomey. Many of the slaves were themselves formidable warriors defeated in battle.

Despite the fact that black slaves brought to America by slave traders financed by Jews, and despite the fact that Muslims were the main customers for black slaves long before there were any white people in North and South America, today American blacks adopt African and Muslim names. As Taki says, it is “like Jews adopting Adolf as their favorite first name, or Palestinians naming their newly born Bibi.”

Here is a totally ignorant, totally indoctrinated product of American “education” giving us the facts as CNN, a lie machine, invents them. She claims that blacks enslaved by whites for no other reason than their skin color jumped “into the waters infested with sharks rather than” be a slave forced to “work by the whip.”

The stupidity of this CNN woman is beyond comprehension. Rather than to be a valued investment doing agricultural work and carefully treated for the investment the slave represented to the owner, the slave preferred to be eaten by sharks. This is the mentality of CNN, the most absurd of the ridiculous Western media.

A year or so ago I read an article in the City Journal. It was about a white slaveowner in the Caribbean who owned 50 black male slaves who worked his sugar plantation. The author raised an interesting question: who was the real boss, the lone white man or the 50 black men, some of whom where highly trained fighters?

The simple-minded, easily indoctrinated black female CNN product of the CNN lie machine actually is so entirely ignorant that she believes people without a labor force other than already enslaved people for which they pay a high price, purchase them not for their labor but in order to beat them, whip them with whips, rape their wives and daughters and, thereby, make their huge investment in their labor worthless, and thereby fail as an agricultural producer, and likely be murdered by angry blacks who outnumbered the whites 50 or 100 to 1.

As I have previously reported, Abe Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” was a war measure that intended to produce a black slave revolt in the entire South, thus causing the Southern troops to desert the front lines and rush home to the defense of their wives and children.

Not a single Confederate soldier left the front. The  war criminal in the White House–Abe Lincoln–believed the propaganda in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most evil of all propaganda tracts.

The slaves did not revolt. Why? Because they were not treated as the Northern propagandists reported. Indeed, in many cases, the slaves ran the plantation. Black oversears were common. Imagine blacks whipping other blacks. This is the mentality of CNN.

Today in American Universities, now reduced to anti-American propaganda machines, reside America’s real enemies. Our enemies are not George W. Bush’s chef, a recently deported victim of ICE’s lack of judgment. America’s enemies are white liberals and woke left and Israel.

And yet it is their enemies that Americans embrace.

A people this utterly stupid has no future.

The post ‘African Rulers Virulently Opposed British Antislavery Efforts’ – Taki appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Art is magic liberated from the lie of being truth.”

– Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

It is hard to keep your head when all about you, nuts are knocking on it to remind you of things that are not true in a world where reality is hard to find because of endless propaganda, artificial intelligence, personal betrayals, and nuts who know nothing but can’t stop telling you the nothing that they know. They are always falling but seem to be reborn endlessly, popping up in new clothes as advocates for the latest fashionable truths that they rejected only yesterday. They always jump on the band wagon, aka the nut wagon, where they trade old falsehoods for new truths to create chaos. It makes one a wee bit suspicious.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? You’re nuts. What about them?

See what I mean? It’s very hard these days. Nudniks repeat the same circular explanations for why things are as they are until you feel your head will explode. One minute you expect the world to end in a nuclear war; the next you are munching on peanuts and sipping wine as the full moon rises with a grin as if to say it’s time for a Moon Dance “’Neath the cover of October skies / And all the leaves on the trees are falling / To the sound of the breezes that blow / And I’m trying to please to the calling / Of your heartstrings that play soft and low.” But everyone knows the Irish are nuts, crazy romantics and always looking for a fight or a roll in the hay after a few drinks.

Which reminds me, my ninety two year-old mother-in-law, who had dementia in her last years, once said to me, after I asked her at dinner if she would like a roll, “Well, that’s the first time a man has ever asked me that!” So I passed her one.

As chance would have it, as a refuge from the nuttiness of the 1970s, the so-called “Me Decade” of navel gazing, Watergate, the death of the anti-war movement, the Arab Oil Boycott, the Son-of-Sam killings, and the conservative retrenchment under Ronald Reagan, among a few highlights, we came to live in the beautiful Berkshires mountains of western Massachusetts, an area that produces many nuts.

One day in August 1980 when we were living in New York City, my wife and I were walking north along the Hudson River in Riverside Park. About fifty yards or so in front of us a woman jumped in fright, screaming as three big cats crossed the path in front of her. As we approached, we saw that they were monstrous rats, who then recrossed the path to their cozy abode in the big rocks along the riverbank.

Sometimes rats are just rats, this time they seemed oracular. It was time for us to leave.

Within a few weeks, having put some belongings in storage, we got a small tent and sleeping bags and headed north to western Massachusetts, where we had previously lived. While camping up on a mountain side, I went down to a pay phone that we passed on our way up and made a chance phone call to a number I had seen in the local newspaper, a call that led that very night to an apartment and the start of our forty-five year long life in the southern Berkshires, an area of exquisite natural beauty, despite or maybe because of the nuts.

“I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then,” sings Bob Seger in “Against the Wind.” Those lines come back to me as I walk through the sun-dappled woods these luminescent October days. It sure seems like paradise. The breeze in the trees and the fluttering multi-colored leaves, the pine needles like a soft bed underfoot. Most migratory birds have headed south but the remaining ones are flitting about. The cool air intermingles with sunny warm spots that stop you in your tracks in wonder at the beauty of the world despite its man-made horrors.

And then, of course, the reminders of what as a boy I didn’t know then but do know now that follow me everywhere, even as I try to revel in the beauty of my enclosure in this magical forest. Not the revelations of the nuts who know nothing but can’t stop telling me the nothing that they now tell me they know – that they have just discovered – but the truth about the CIA’s MKUltra mind- control program that is now nearly synonymous with the digital life of the Internet and the intelligence agents posing as liberators of the public mind. Mind-control on a vast, vast scale of false trails to lead the nuts into thinking they have cracked the shell to grasp the inner truth. As Adorno puts it:

It is precisely the critical element that is wanting in ostensibly independent thought. Insistence on the cosmic secret hidden beneath the outer shell, in reverently omitting to establish the relation between the two, often enough confirms by just this omission that the shell has its good reasons that must be accepted without asking questions.

Look, they seem to say, this is the secret truth, but unlike the King’s Men, their revelations always put Humpty Dumpty’s shell back together again. And so it goes, as the nuts rain down on our sore heads.

I try not to think of such things as I walk, but when I return home with bumps on my head from the nuts hitting me, I sit and reflect on what crept to mind when I was walking, trying to forget.

I think also of my trust in others when I was a boy, and how in recent years that trust has evaporated as people have used me and my writing for their own agendas. Always taking and never giving, always asking me to review their books and never reviewing mine. Using my words as if they were theirs. Acting as if we were walking the same dissidents’ road together when their forked tongues had them secretly following the one most traveled. I am saying this with a sigh, that what Bob Seger passionately sings in “Against the Wind” seems so true: “And the years rolled slowly past / And I found myself alone / Surrounded by strangers / I thought were my friends.”

If it sounds like I am complaining, it is because my head is sore. The woods are lovely, dark and deep this time of year, and I return from my walks with pockets full of mumbles of false promises together with black walnuts, chestnuts, hickory nuts – even acorns and pine cones – that the wind has blown down to hit my head hard to remind me to wake up. As another singer, Paul Simon puts it in his great song, “The Boxer”:  “All lies and jest / Still, a man hears what he wants to hear / And disregards the rest.”

“Well, I’m older now but still running against the wind.”

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Nuts or Not, We Have the Music appeared first on LewRockwell.

Wars are mass-murder, massive theft, and unrelenting propaganda.  In this country they’re lucrative overseas entanglements, as government diverts loot from taxpayers to the war industry.  They’re also perpetual, as war embellishes the sanctity of the State as well as providing grounds for increased plunder of its population.  Wars are government as Houdini, drawing attention to the bloody far-away while relieving attention on the corrupt close-at-hand.  For the victor, the propaganda is inked as truth in the history books.  War is the health of the state, Randolph Bourne concluded, but not for the people under it:

In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

Government-controlled monetary policy is cover for counterfeiting, an insidious form of taxation that creates gross economic distortions and inequalities.  Presidential elections are extravagant contests between straw men owned by those behind the throne.  Formal education is indoctrination into dominant narratives.  The US Constitution is a feel-good distraction from the larceny and depravity of the political class.

Blogger JD Breen has published a brief history of the 21st century in two parts (here and here).   “As last century was launched when the Maine sank in Havana harbor, this one turned when the Twin Towers were toppled. . . . The remnants of the U.S. Constitution went in the shredder.”  Shocking, but not surprising, he said, given the destruction wrought by US intervention in Muslim countries over the decades.

But government, as we’ve learned, is never accountable for wrong-doing. If it was, it would imply the state is fallible, a blasphemous idea.

Instead of blaming their own covert coups and military misadventures, government officials told us “the terrorists hated us for our freedoms”. So to keep us safe, they stripped more of them away.

They invaded countries they’d already wanted to conquer, cracked down on the one they already ruled, and counterfeited trillions of new currency so we could pay for their “mistakes”.

According to a Brown University report, total cost of the post-9/11 government adventure was $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths.  And what of 9/11 itself?  Was it merely a coincidence it amounted to the New Pearl Harbor sought by the neocon think tank, the Project for the New American Century (1997-2006)?  Is it possible the exceptional nation is completely devoid of moral scruples?

It’s not as if our condition has improved since then — see Part II of Breen’s history.  And what do we make of the end phase of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, conducted by Israel, funded involuntarily by US taxpayers?  Or the proxy war in Ukraine, another wealth- and lives-draining operation?  Or the regime’s war on the First Amendment following the assassination of a beloved conservative activist?

“We must have government,” Robert Higgs wrote in Chapter One of his classic, Crisis and Leviathan, originally published in 1988. “Without government to defend us from external aggression, preserve domestic order, define and enforce property rights, few of us could achieve much.”Since then Dr. Higgs has taken a different perspective:

Everyone can see the immense harm the state causes day in and day out, not to mention its periodic orgies of mass death and destruction. In the past century alone, states caused hundreds of millions of deaths, not to the combatants on both sides of the many wars they launched, whose casualties loom large enough, but to “their own” populations, whom they have chosen to shoot, bomb, shell, hack, stab, beat, gas, starve, work to death, and otherwise obliterate in ways too grotesque to contemplate calmly.

Yet, almost incomprehensibly, people fear that without the state’s supposedly all-important protection, society will lapse into disorder and people will suffer grave harm.

And for assurance we can do it if we try, as I’ve quoted many times, from Thomas Paine::

There is a natural aptness in man, and more so in society, because it embraces a greater variety of abilities and resource, to accommodate itself to whatever situation it is in. The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act: a general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.

If we want a consistent, moral approach to life we should let the engine of prosperity and peace, the laissez-faire free market, meaning a market unobstructed by government, serve as our governing apparatus, not “government” as we’ve known it.

A revised birth certificate

The following is at best a draft of what a new Declaration of Independence  — Declaration of Independence from the American State —might look like:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people possess certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; that to secure these rights, we recognize that sovereignty resides with each person only, that we are free to contract with security agencies for protection of life and property, as we judge necessary.

We further hold that the American state secures its false sovereignty through a monopoly of force over the area comprising its claimed boundaries, which through repeated infractions of our natural liberties threaten our survival, prosperity, and general well-being.

Though prudence will dictate that governance long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, we hold that our American society is approaching full collapse due to the state’s means of governance, consisting of, but not limited to:

• Plunder of the people through vast and complex schemes of taxation
• State control of the monetary unit through its central bank, the Federal Reserve, that produces severe economic inequalities, periodic crises, and crushing debt
• Suicidal foreign policy with an end-of-civilization nuclear component
• Onerous regulations that fatten administrative state functions while draining wealth from those who produce it
• Corrupt elections and corruption of elected officials by other states, especially Israel
• State-controlled education and media that ensures preferred narratives remain unchallenged from mainstream sources
• Numerous false flags used to violate our freedom and safety while justifying war
• Propaganda, an ongoing stream of lies and deceptions
• Widespread psychological problems, including drug and alcohol addiction

We, therefore, as voluntary signatories to this Declaration, declare we are absolved from all allegiance to the American state, and that all political connection between it and us is hereby totally dissolved.  And for the support of this Declaration, should the state refuse to recognize our freedom, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

The post Breaking Free From State Rule appeared first on LewRockwell.

Kishore Mahbubani is a Singaporean diplomat who has served for ten years as as ambassador to the United Nations. His talks about global policies and their development are always of interest.

His most recent one under the question “What will geopolitics look like in the next ten years?” is no exception (video).

The most important part starts at 22:54 min. Here I am mostly interested in what Mahbubani has to say about Europe (edited machine transcript):

I want to emphasize that the in current situation the key word you got to understand is complexity. [The world] is extremely complex because there are a lot of moving parts all the time. So for a start clearly and at the at the highest strategic level as you know in the cold war was bipolar the cold war ended and it became unipolar. And now we have what you have a strange combination of both a bipolar and multipolar world.
[…]
But there are also other powers [besides the U.S., China and India] that are clearly changing the situation.

Again, clearly Russia matters, right? And the biggest strategic mistake that the Europeans made in dealing with Russia is that they only look at the size of its economy and didn’t look at the overall national strength and their military capability.

So the Ukraine war could have been avoided if the Europeans had just shown some degree of respect for Russia’s own long-term strategic interests. And the tragedy of the Europeans trying to punish the rest of the world for buying Russian oil is that they could have avoided this war with Russia if they had shown some strategic common sense in dealing with Russia.

He later blames the mistake on the serious lack of abilities of the current crop of European leaders:

So all that is what I mean with complexity. It is not a simple black and white chessboard, you know, it’s extremely complex and you got to watch all the moving parts.

The people who can get the big picture are the ones who will succeed and thrive and those who don’t, like the Europeans, sadly .. .

The Europeans live in a delusionary world, and I mean that quite seriously because they, you know if you just look at the photograph of the European leaders sitting on sofas in front of the school teacher Donald Trump at his desk lecturing these European leaders. They look like school children. I mean the optics itself captured what had happened.

And for a respected prime minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte, whom I met, who is a very thoughtful intelligent guy by the way, for him to call Trump daddy? I mean it shows you that something has gone wrong.

So this actually I must tell you: In my last conversation with Kissinger he told me candidly that the quality of mind of these Europeans has gone down so much they don’t understand how much the world has changed. So this is an example of where – if you understand the world you can navigate through it, but if you don’t understand the world, like the Europeans, they seem to be in trouble.

Mahbubani diagnosis of Europe’s disease is in my view correct. But what might be the best therapy to correct this situation?

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Mahbubani on Europe’s Strategic Disease appeared first on LewRockwell.

For most Americans, and certainly for baby boomers, we remember the first major exposé before Congress during the Church Committee hearings, when William Colby, the head of the CIA admitted under oath that the agency had its tentacles in much of the American mainstream media and promulgated bogus stories for citizens to consume.

This revelation shocked and saddened the public, because Americans had long placed their trust in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major television networks. It was the first time many realized that forces working behind the scenes were manipulating the truth for their own advantage, and these forces were completely hidden from public view.

For investigative journalists, those hearings opened a Pandora’s box. Around the same time, Daniel Ellsberg’s release of The Pentagon Papers revealed the extent of deception behind America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. We learned that the narratives surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin incident were fabrications for going to war.

As a result of those lies, at least 58,000 American soldiers died and over 300,000 were wounded. Even more tragic, more than 1.5 million Vietnamese, who were mostly civilians, lost their lives. The US left Southeast Asia contaminated with Agent Orange, a toxin that continues to harm human life and the environment to this day. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers became ill after the war, not only from PTSD but also from exposure to this deadly chemical. Once again, those we trusted — presidents, legislators, secular experts, and the media — deceived us. They denied any connection between exposure and illness just as they denied accountability.

The same pattern repeated itself decades later with the invasion of Iraq. The public was again led into a war built upon false narratives and largely perpetuated by the New York Times and its top journalist Judith Miller. Again, thousands of civilians died; the country was poisoned with depleted uranium, leaving yet another lethal legacy for future generations. Across history, countless examples reveal how special interest groups and lobbyists have infiltrated federal agencies in order to dominate the political system and control much of the media. Yet no one has been held accountable for the destruction and suffering that these lies and wars have inflicted upon innocent people.

Fast forward to the Trump and Biden years. Americans were told that the COVID-19 vaccines were “safe and effective” by the very same media and federal authorities they had trusted for decades. Few acknowledged that much of the science behind these assurances had been captured by private entities and compromised by conflicts of interest. Again, accountability was absent. 

The same was true for the tobacco industry cover up that funded misleading research and public campaigns to deny a link between smoking and cancer. In 2008, the major Wall Street banks’ reckless speculation, completely ignored or denied by rating agencies and public regulators, created a financial crisis that decimated people’s savings and left millions of Americans homeless. Yet few executives faced any consequences, which again confirms suspicions that the system protects power and not people. And then perhaps one of the most unconstitutional and egregious examples was the Cambridge Analytica scandal whereby social media manipulation reached new heights when private data from millions of Facebook users were used to influence elections. 

The average American remains deeply trusting. Americans believe that legislators, journalists, professional institutions, and public health officials possess greater knowledge and therefore act in the public’s best interest. But if our leaders in government, media, and industry have been consistently wrong, from the Korean War onward, why should anyone still believe them? Why do they refuse to admit when they are wrong?

No matter how respected someone may be in their field, if that person dares to challenge the prevailing groupthink in science, medicine, nutrition, geopolitics, or whichever party holds the White House, they are quickly labeled an outcast. They face censorship and ridicule, or even professional punishment. So why doesn’t the public rise up to question these narratives? Why have we grown so complacent?

We are now beginning to see that those who control the White House, Congress, and even the social media platforms, such as Facebook and X, have become handmaidens of the CIA, Homeland Security, the national security state, and the military-industrial complex. Yet unlike in earlier eras, none of these so-called puppet masters have been held to account. That, however, may finally be changing. James Comey’s perjury before Congress was recently exposed thanks to declassified documents released by Tulsi Gabbard. The curtain is beginning to lift on decades of corruption within federal agencies. Figures such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are now leading what some see as a revolutionary crusade for transparency and a systemic reform in our federal healthcare system.

But there remains a deeper problem and it lies in the silence of average Americans. In most cases, the mainstream media continues to defend those now being exposed and continues to reinforce the very institutions under scrutiny. This should serve as a wake-up call; we should not place blind trust in government agencies, the media, or even the scientific and medical establishments. The Pentagon and its allies operate within a self-serving hierarchical cabal, which has become insulated from accountability. Somewhere along the way, we lost the distinction between subjective belief and objective truth.

And now we are witnessing the cabal of corporate and bureaucratic power, which once controlled narratives from behind closed doors has been joined, and in some ways replaced, by a new alliance rooted in grievance, nationalism, Christian patriotism, and populist fervor. Under the Trump administration, ideology has become a weapon of identity to transform disinformation into a badge of loyalty. The same tactics once used by corporate lobbyists to manipulate markets are now being employed by demagogues to coerce emotions. Nationalism, cloaked in the rhetoric of fanatical patriotism, has become the new currency of control. Yet it serves the same ends to divide, distract, confuse and dominate. What was once the propaganda of corporate power has evolved into the propaganda of tribal belonging, which may be an even more volatile force because it falsely masquerades as freedom and liberty.

Life itself is not a science, nor should science ever dictate what life means to us. Credentials, titles, university degrees and institutional power do not confer moral authority or wisdom. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism,

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”

To paraphrase, the purpose of propaganda is not to make people believe lies but to make them believe nothing. Propaganda and fear work together to dissolve a shared sense of truth. When citizens are bombarded by contradictions, falsehoods and shifting narratives, they eventually stop believing in anything at all. That loss of belief makes them more malleable and easier to control.

When people believe in nothing, they become vulnerable to believe anything. That is where tribalism begins, and where volatile separation and division take root. Those in power want you to believe only in them. This is why we see no massive peaceful marches to end wars in the Middle East or Ukraine. We have come to trust our unhinged ideologies and the political identities they represent more than we trust ourselves. Why can’t we look beyond our narrow belief systems to find common ground?

Propaganda has reached every corner of daily life. Consider that more than 100 million American adults are now clinically obese, and 74 percent are overweight. This is not simply a matter of personal choice. It reflects a failure of truth. The public has been misled about what they eat and how food affects their health. Never has a Surgeon General stood before the nation to declare that we must stop the insanity of industrial food and its devastating impact on our wellbeing. If we were completely honest with ourselves, we might begin to ask: What beliefs control our perception of reality? How often have we trusted, only to discover that we were wrong?

When you look in the mirror, who stands beside you? Is it the CEO of McDonald’s or Coca-Cola, the executives at Pfizer, or the heads of MSNBC, CNN, and Fox? Because without these figures feeding our complacency, many of us would finally break free from our comfort zones. It is time to stop pretending we are uninformed and powerless. We can no longer afford to remain passive in the face of deception and the nation’s growing tyranny.

History shows that breakdowns often precede breakthroughs. Yet today we seem to be racing toward catastrophe at accelerating speed. When all the assumed rules of how society operates no longer seem to make sense, collapse becomes inevitable. America, we have a problem.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post America, We Have a Problem. ‘Propaganda Has Reached Every Corner of Daily Life’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

The precedent set by Russia’s restrained response to Ukraine obtaining the F-16s, which could also be nuclear-equipped, suggests that tensions with the US will remain manageable if Ukraine obtains the Tomahawks too due to the modus vivendi that’s arguably been in place for managing them.

The latest talk about the US transferring longer-range Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine, which Putin said earlier this month could only be used with US military personnel’s direct involvement, has prompted concerns about a potentially uncontrollable escalation spiral. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov assessed that such a development would lead to “a significant change in the situation” but nonetheless reaffirmed that it wouldn’t prevent Russia from achieving its goals in the special operation.

Ukraine’s explicitly stated goal in obtaining these arms is to “pressure” Russia into freezing the Line of Contact without any concessions from Kiev, which would essentially amount to Moscow conceding on its aforesaid goals since none would be achieved in full should that happen, ergo why it hasn’t agreed. In pursuit of that end, Ukraine threatened to cause a blackout in the Russian capital, which would likely be accompanied by more attacks against civilian and military logistics targets far behind the frontlines.

Some are therefore worried that that Russian-US tensions could spiral out of control, especially after Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov noted that the Tomahawks can be nuclear-equipped, but the precedent set by the F-16s suggests that they’ll remain manageable. Putin himself warned in early 2024 that they too could be nuclear-equipped, yet Russia ultimately didn’t treat their use as a potential nuclear first-strike. This is arguably due to the modus vivendi that was described here in late 2024:

“[Comparatively pragmatic US ‘deep state’ figures] who still call the shots always signal their escalatory intentions far in advance so that Russia could prepare itself and thus be less likely to ‘overreact’ in some way that risks World War III. Likewise, Russia continues restraining itself from replicating the US’ ‘shock-and-awe’ campaign in order to reduce the likelihood of the West ‘overreacting’ by directly intervening in the conflict to salvage their geopolitical project and thus risking World War III.

It can only be speculated whether this interplay is due to each’s permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (‘deep state’) behaving responsibly on their own considering the enormity of what’s at stake or if it’s the result of a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’. Whatever the truth may be, the aforesaid model accounts for the unexpected moves or lack thereof from each, which are the US correspondingly telegraphing its escalatory intentions and Russia never seriously escalating in kind.”

The latest talk about the US transferring longer-range Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine fits the pattern of leaks serving to tip Russia off about this preplanned escalation so it can prepare its responses in advance. Time and again, Putin has exercised an almost saintly degree of self-restraint in refusing to escalate, whether symmetrically or asymmetrically. Readers can learn more about these precedents from the eight analyses enumerated in the one from late 2024 that was hyperlinked to above.

The only exception was him authorizing the use of the Oreshniks in November after the US and UK let Ukraine use their long-range missiles inside of Russia, obviously through the direct involvement of their military personnel, which he might repeat if Ukraine obtains the Tomahawks. He didn’t authorize them after Ukraine’s strategic drone strikes against parts of Russia’s nuclear triad in June that were much more provocative, however, which might have been due to his diplomatic calculations vis-à-vis Trump.

Whether one agrees with the policy or not, it’s arguably the case that Putin wants to avoid doing anything that could reaffirm Trump’s perception (carefully crafted by the warmongers around him like Zelensky and Lindsey Graham) that Russia is escalating, thus falsely justifying “reciprocal US escalations”. So long as he continues formulating policy based on this calculation, and there’s no credible indication thus far that it’s changed, then any escalation over the Tomahawks will likely remain manageable.

This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

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Writes Bill Madden:

According to Thomas Jefferson, our Constitution was designed to “chain down the government” in order to protect the people from tyranny.  For those wanting world domination, the people cannot be free but totally under the control of the government.  Through the process of Gradualism, many parts of our Constitution have already been rendered ineffective. 

Originally, the states (individual countries at that time) were to enjoy most of the power in the country and the central government was responsible for only the functions listed in the Enumerated Powers section of the Constitution.  We were these United States and not the United States.  The power shifted during the Civil War and, it is claimed, that states rights died at Appomattox.  The legislation passed in 1913 continued the assault on the Constitution – and our freedoms.

Our fiat dollar is unconstitutional and we have enormous debt and rapidly increasing prices.  We are paying over one trillion dollars a year interest on the national debt when the Constitution stipulates that Congress shall coin money and issue it into circulation interest free.  The major owners of the large banks owning the unconstitutional Federal Reserve Bank profit from the interest as part of the wealth transfer.  Wars are profitable for our controllers, so we are continually at war directly, via proxy or helping belligerent nations with military aid paid for by American taxpayers.  Undeclared wars are unconstitutional as is foreign aid which is considered “coerced charity” by most legitimate constitutional scholars.  Many of our government agencies are unconstitutional as is much of our federal spending.

Currently, both our First and Second Amendments are in the process of being rendered ineffective.  We will lose our legal right to speak honestly and to protect ourselves.  It won’t be long before the entire Constitution is ineffective.  Many patriots believe that we are being too heavily influenced by the City of London and that, what happens there, soon happens here.  Please invest a few minutes in this video.

Gradualism wouldn’t be effective without years of complicity by our elected representatives.  We have a few statesmen in Congress but we have mostly whores.  Not surprisingly, the statesmen are being oppressed by our controllers and, in some cases, by President Trump.  Our country and our freedoms can only be protected by vigilance on our part.  Unfortunately, most of us are ignorant of what is going and not too eager to learn what is going on.

The post The Constitution appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Tim McGraw:

Halloween in Healdsburg

The post Halloween in Healdsburg appeared first on LewRockwell.

Il vero “nemico” dietro le quinte non è la Cina, non è la Russia, non è nemmeno Israele... è l'Europa. Ogni mossa di Trump è stata combattuta con unghie e denti proprio dall'UE, ogni voce discordante s'è levata dall'UE. Alla fine della fiera, per quanto una crisi possa essere ingegnerizzata o meno, c'è bisogno di collaterale fisico per dimostrare di poter resistere a essa. L'UE non ce l'ha, per giunta nemmeno quello energetico. Trump ha rispedito al mittente la strategia europea di prosciugare di capitale gli USA: ha tagliato fuori l'UE da qualunque fonte di approvvigionamento energetico a basso costo, costringendola ad andare all-in sulla narrativa fraudolenta riguardo la Russia. Ha fatto saltare gli accordi di ricostruzione dell'Ucraina precedentemente ad appannaggio di UE e UK e ha stretto accordi con gli stati del Golfo tagliando fuori, ancora una volta, UE e UK. Trump ha altresì capito che gli accordi di pace senza sviluppo commerciale sono inutili: ecco perché la pace tra azeri e armeni prevede un corridoio per i trasporti tra i Paesi fino al Mar Caspio; ecco perché la pace con la Russia e la Cina prevede la costruzione di un corridoio di trasporti da San Pietroburgo fino a Chabahar sull'Oceano indiano; ecco perché il piano di sviluppo immobiliare a Gaza. Il vero interesse dell'amministrazione Trump è spaccare in due l'Europa: dividere gli stati del Sud da quelli del Nord. Separare il grano dalla pula: creare un cuneo tra Francia, Germania, Inghilterra e tra Italia, Spagna, Portogallo, Grecia. Ecco perché spagnoli e portoghesi stanno raggiungendo accordi per spostare la produzione di alcune imprese negli Stati Uniti; perché l'Italia continua a guadagnare fiducia nel mercato obbligazionario; perché la Grecia si vede arrivare sul suo territorio armamenti americani spostati dalla Germania. Il recente “gioco” del riconoscimento dello stato di Palestina è un test di lealtà dell'UE: essa sta pericolosamente perdendo il controllo sul Mediterraneo e qualunque accesso rimanente a una parvenza di collaterale decente.

______________________________________________________________________________________

di Daniel Lacalle

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/cosa-impedisce-a-trump-di-accendere)

Negli ultimi mesi molti libertari hanno criticato le politiche economiche di Donald Trump, sostenendo che non sta attuando drastici tagli alla spesa pubblica come ha fatto Javier Milei in Argentina.

Tuttavia questo confronto ignora le principali differenze strutturali e contestuali tra i due Paesi e i loro governi. Di seguito una spiegazione dettagliata del perché la situazione negli Stati Uniti è diversa da quella in Argentina e del perché le critiche alla strategia di Trump sono infondate.

1. Il bilancio ostruito: l'eredità di Biden

È difficile capire perché i libertari europei non riescano a comprendere un concetto così basilare come quello di “anno fiscale”. L'anno fiscale statunitense inizia il 1° ottobre e l'amministrazione Biden ne ha approfittato per aumentare la spesa.

Quando Trump ha assunto la carica nel gennaio 2025, il 97% del bilancio federale per tale anno era già stato impegnato o speso. Ciò era dovuto all'approvazione da parte dell'amministrazione Biden di diverse “Risoluzioni di continuità per l'intero anno” che bloccavano la maggior parte dei fondi e delle spese per l'anno fiscale 2025. Pertanto Trump non aveva margine per effettuare tagli immediati e drastici, poiché la maggior parte del bilancio era intoccabile fino al successivo ciclo fiscale.

Nonostante ciò nel 2025 sono state effettuate riduzioni della spesa discrezionale pari a $541 miliardi e il deficit accumulato tra aprile e maggio 2025 è stato inferiore del 97% rispetto allo stesso periodo del 2024.

2. Spesa non discrezionale e discrezionale

La spesa non discrezionale (che include programmi come la previdenza sociale e Medicare) era già stata aumentata dall'amministrazione Biden e tale aumento è entrato in vigore tra febbraio e dicembre 2024. L'anno fiscale statunitense inizia a ottobre e Biden ha implementato la maggior parte di questi aumenti attraverso risoluzioni continue e l'estensione dei programmi esistenti, consolidando e, in molti casi, aumentando la spesa federale in settori chiave.

Tali risoluzioni prevedevano oltre $100 miliardi in fondi per programmi federali di assistenza in caso di calamità, $29 miliardi per il Fondo di soccorso in caso di calamità della FEMA e $10 miliardi in assistenza economica per i produttori agricoli.

Alla fine del 2024 Biden ha approvato un aumento di $54 miliardi (8%) nei principali programmi di spesa obbligatoria come la previdenza sociale, Medicare e Medicaid, nonché l'estensione dell'Obamacare, tutti applicabili al 2025.

Il bilancio dell'Agenzia per la protezione dell'ambiente (EPA) è cresciuto di $21 miliardi (700%) e l'amministrazione Trump è riuscita a stanziare solo $14 miliardi discrezionali.

È fondamentale ricordare che Biden ha fatto tutto questo senza una nuova legge di bilancio, semplicemente mantenendo ed estendendo gli stanziamenti esistenti.

Il bilancio proposto da Biden per il 2025 prevedeva ulteriori aumenti, ma questi sono stati bloccati perché non hanno ricevuto l'approvazione del Congresso.

Trump ha bisogno dell'approvazione del Congresso per annullare questi aumenti e ridurre la spesa. Questo è ciò che prevede la “Big Beautiful Bill”. D'altro canto sono state impegnate anche spese discrezionali, soprattutto per la difesa, limitando ulteriormente il margine di manovra immediato del nuovo governo.

La Big Beautiful Bill prevede la prima riduzione della spesa non discrezionale negli ultimi sessant'anni ($1.600 miliardi) e $2.400 miliardi per quella non discrezionale.

3. Risultati fiscali iniziali

Nonostante queste restrizioni, l'amministrazione Trump ha ottenuto alcuni progressi: ad aprile è stato registrato il secondo surplus fiscale più grande della storia e, sebbene a maggio sia ricomparso un deficit, il deficit tra marzo e maggio è stato contenuto rispetto al 2024. Ciò indica che erano già state adottate misure per migliorare la situazione fiscale, principalmente attraverso maggiori entrate derivanti da accordi commerciali e dalla crescita del settore privato.

4. La “Big Beautiful Bill” e la riduzione del deficit

È sorprendente che alcuni libertari e Austriaci critichino la Big Beautiful Bill, aderendo alla narrazione keynesiana secondo cui non ci saranno miglioramenti nelle entrate, nella crescita, nell'occupazione, o negli investimenti derivanti dalla deregolamentazione, dagli accordi commerciali e dai tagli fiscali.

Mi sorprende che alcuni libertari neghino la Curva di Laffer e l'impulso dato dalla deregolamentazione. La Big Beautiful Bill incorpora $7.000 miliardi in investimenti dai negoziati commerciali, che attrarranno anche $4.000 miliardi di entrate fiscali nel corso della legislatura e un effetto di stimolo sull'economia che si traduce in un aumento delle entrate fiscali nello scenario di base da $1.200 miliardi.

Contrariamente a quanto sostengono alcuni critici, la “Big Beautiful Bill” non aumenterà il deficit, ma lo ridurrà significativamente.

Tra il 2026 e il 2027 si prevede una riduzione di $1.600 miliardi nella spesa non discrezionale e $2.400 miliardi in quella discrezionale. Inoltre si prevede un aumento delle entrate fiscali grazie alla deregolamentazione, ai tagli fiscali e ai nuovi accordi commerciali, cose che rafforzeranno la crescita economica e l'occupazione.

Noi liberali, libertari e Austriaci dovremmo essere meno critici nei confronti del più grande sforzo di riduzione dello stato, liberalizzazione, deregolamentazione, tagli alla spesa e riduzione delle tasse dal 1990, ma soprattutto, alcuni non dovrebbero accettare la narrazione che nega l'effetto positivo sulle entrate e sulla crescita da parte della deregolamentazione, dei tagli alle tasse e dei negoziati commerciali.

5. Confronto con Milei: somiglianze e differenze

Milei è stato in grado di attuare tagli immediati perché ha ereditato un bilancio aperto e un'inflazione estremamente elevata, cose che gli hanno permesso di ridurre la spesa pubblica in termini reali senza doverla aggiustare all'inflazione. Il bilancio dell'Argentina non include le disposizioni introdotte dall'amministrazione Biden, quindi Milei è stato in grado di attuare una riduzione del 30% della spesa pubblica immediatamente e con indiscutibile successo, soprattutto eliminando sussidi, opere pubbliche e trasferimenti sociali non automatici.

Al contrario Trump ha ereditato un bilancio già impegnato e un'inflazione molto più bassa (meno del 2,5%), limitando l'impatto del mancato aggiustamento della spesa all'inflazione.

Confrontando le due amministrazioni, si nota uno sforzo molto simile. Trump ha ridotto la spesa pubblica del 5% nel primo trimestre, con risparmi superiori a $540 miliardi. Entro la fine del suo mandato, Trump avrà attuato una riduzione della spesa pubblica equivalente a quella di Milei.

Entrambi i leader hanno promosso politiche di riduzione delle tasse, deregolamentazione e incentivo degli investimenti e dell'occupazione. Tuttavia gli strumenti e il margine di manovra di Trump sono stati condizionati dalla struttura istituzionale statunitense e dalle decisioni della precedente amministrazione.

6. Conclusione

Le politiche di Trump e Milei condividono l'obiettivo di ridurre la spesa pubblica, promuovere la crescita e migliorare l'occupazione, ma le circostanze di partenza sono radicalmente diverse. Criticare Trump per non aver acceso immediatamente la “motosega” ignora i vincoli di bilancio e legali che deve affrontare negli Stati Uniti. Ciò che conta è riconoscere che, entro i suoi limiti, Trump sta attuando tagli storici e politiche pro-crescita che avranno un impatto positivo sull'economia statunitense nel medio termine.

Il mio messaggio a coloro che attaccano l'amministrazione Trump perché non è abbastanza liberale è il seguente:

• Indicate un'unica amministrazione statunitense che abbia implementato con successo un approccio analogo alla deregolamentazione, ai tagli fiscali e alla riduzione della spesa, approvando al contempo una significativa riduzione della spesa non discrezionale sia al Congresso che al Senato.

• È curioso accettare le stime keynesiane sull'impatto fiscale. È sorprendente negare l'impatto positivo della riduzione delle importazioni, dell'aumento delle esportazioni e di maggiori introiti derivanti dagli accordi commerciali. Negare la spinta economica e fiscale derivante dalla deregolamentazione e dai tagli fiscali è imperdonabile.

[*] traduzione di Francesco Simoncelli: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/

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Perhaps there is no more fitting way to observe or commemorate October 13th and the divisive controversies it still engenders and ensues than to read/reread the classic controversial remarks below. Since it was first delivered in 1980, the words have taken on a dramatic new meaning:

For America to Live, Europe Must Die, by Russell Means

Means was an Oglala Lakota activist for the rights of Native Americans, Libertarian political activist and presidential candidate, actor, musician and writer. He became a prominent member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) after joining the organization in December 1969 and helped organize notable events that attracted national and international media coverage.

Means was active in international issues of indigenous peoples, including working with groups in Central and South America and with the United Nations for recognition of their rights. He was active in politics at his native Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and at the state and national level.

Beginning an acting career in 1992, he appeared on numerous television series and in several films, including The Last of the Mohicans, Pocahontas, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. He released his own music CD. Means published his autobiography Where White Men Fear to Tread in 1995.

The post “For America to Live, Europe Must Die” appeared first on LewRockwell.

Everybody except a few leftist fanatics hates paying their income tax, and they are right to do so. As the great Murray Rothbard has taught us, taxation is theft, pure and simple. The government takes what is rightfully yours and spends it on whatever it wants. If this isn’t theft, what is?

Imagine that your neighbor has a lot of money that you would like for yourself. You hold him up at gunpoint and take his money. This is obviously theft. Why is it any different if the government does it? As Rothbard puts it, “For there is one crucially important power inherent in the nature of the State apparatus. All other persons and groups in society (except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and bank robbers) obtain their income voluntarily: either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift (e.g., membership in a club or association, bequest, or inheritance). Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as ‘taxation,’ although in less regularized epochs it was often known as ‘tribute.’ Taxation is theft, purely and simply, even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.”

Rothbard is well aware that some people, owing to years of indoctrination in “public” schools, will find this hard to accept. With his customary polemical brilliance, he challenges skeptics to find the difference: “It would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition of taxation which does not also include theft. Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay, his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist. It is true that State apologists maintain that taxation is ‘really’ voluntary; one simple but instructive refutation of this claim is to ponder what would happen if the government were to abolish taxation, and to confine itself to simple requests for voluntary contributions. Does anyone really believe that anything comparable to the current vast revenues of the State would continue to pour into its coffers? It is likely that even those theorists who claim that punishment never deters action would balk at such a claim. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter was correct when he acidly wrote that ‘the theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.’”

One way supporters of taxation try to show that it is different from theft is to argue that because we live in a democracy, “We the People” have voted to establish a government that can tax us. Nothing doing, says Rothbard. With passionate eloquence, he says: “It is also contended that, in democratic government, the act of voting makes the government and all its works and powers truly ‘voluntary.’ Again, there are many fallacies with this popular argument. In the first place, even if the majority of the public specifically endorsed each and every particular act of the government, this would simply be majority tyranny rather than a voluntary act undergone by every person in the country. Murder is murder, theft is theft, whether undertaken by one man against another, or by a group, or even by the majority of people within a given territorial area. The fact that a majority might support or condone an act of theft does not diminish the criminal essence of the act or its grave injustice. Otherwise, we would have to say, for example, that any Jews murdered by the democratically elected Nazi government were not murdered, but only ‘voluntarily committed suicide’—surely, the grotesque but logical implication of the ‘democracy as voluntary’ doctrine.”

I’ve already mentioned that the government indoctrinates us with propaganda, and this was a theme dear to Rothbard’s heart. He blamed the statist “intellectuals” for this: “It is instructive to inquire why it is that the State, in contrast to the highwayman, invariably surrounds itself with an ideology of legitimacy, why it must indulge in all these hypocrisies. The reason is that the highwayman is not a visible, permanent, legal, or legitimate member of society, let alone a member with exalted status. He is always on the run from his victims or from the State itself. But the State, in contrast to a band of highwaymen, is not considered a criminal organization; on the contrary, its minions have generally held the positions of highest status in society. It is a status that allows the State to feed off its victims while making at least most of them support, or at least be resigned to, this exploitative process. In fact, it is precisely the function of the State’s ideological minions and allies to explain to the public that the Emperor does indeed have a fine set of clothes. In brief, the ideologists must explain that, while theft by one or more persons or groups is bad and criminal, that when the State engages in such acts, it is not theft but the legitimate and even sanctified act called ‘taxation.’”

But if taxation is theft, what can we do about it? If we refuse to pay, the government will seize our assets by force and put us in jail. What can we do now, while we educate people about taxation?

Rothbard had very different ideas about this from many so-called supporters of the free market. They want to simplify the process of taxation by making it easier to file your taxes. People spend a lot of time looking for deductions and loopholes, so why not eliminate these and impose a low flat tax on everybody? For Rothbard, this is precisely the wrong approach to take. We should make it difficult, not easy, to pay. Otherwise, we will become accustomed to taxation, and the government will keep raising the rate of the “low” flat tax, leaving us worse off than we were before, since we will have high taxes with no exemptions. As Rothbard explains, “But we can do better than that. We have to look differently at taxation. We have to stop looking at taxes as a mighty system for achieving social goals, which merely needs to be made ‘fair’ and rational in order to usher in Utopia. We have to start looking at taxation as a vast system of robbery and oppression, by which some people are enabled to live coercively and parasitically at the expense of others. We must realize that from the point of view of justice or of economic prosperity, the less people are taxed, the better. That is why we should rejoice at every new loophole, new credit, new manifestation of the ‘underground’ economy. The Soviet Union can produce or work only to the extent that individuals are able to avoid the myriad of controls, taxes, and regulations. The same is true of most Third World countries, and the same is increasingly true of us. Every economic activity that escapes taxes and controls is not only a blow for freedom and property rights; it is also one more instance of a free flow of productive energy getting out from under parasitic repression. That is why we should welcome every new loophole, shelter, credit, or exemption, and work, not to shut them down but to expand them to include everyone else, including ourselves.” [Rothbard was writing here before the fall of the Soviet Union.]

Let’s do everything we can to teach people that taxation is theft. Abolish the income tax!

The post Rothbard on Taxation appeared first on LewRockwell.

Eight years ago this month I commented that “I would not be surprised to see the US government legalize marijuana within the next five years.” That conclusion came upon my consideration of the then 64 percent nationwide support for legalization among Americans who had been recently polled by Gallup, plus — for the first time — majority support among Republicans.

Since then, support for legalization has come in even higher among Americans generally and Republicans. A 2023 Gallup poll measured support for marijuana legalization up another six percent to reach 70 percent of Americans. Support among Republicans came in at 55 percent — up four percent from the 2017 Gallup poll.

Currently, there is much speculation regarding what may be the result of the Trump administration’s ongoing review of whether marijuana should be moved from the most restrictive Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) to Schedule II or Schedule III that progressively relax government prohibition. Leaving marijuana where it is in the CSA would be an affront to legalization proponents, while even dropping marijuana down to Schedule III that allows much medical use but still retains many aspects of the war on marijuana would be underwhelming.

President Donald Trump and Republican leadership in the United States House of Representatives and Senate may garner a major benefit for their party if they enact marijuana legalization within the next twelve months instead of continuing to keep in place the unpopular prohibitionary policy. Trump could announce soon the move of marijuana down to Schedule III, but the major news could be his concurrent announcement that he and Republican congressional leaders will be working on enacting legislation in the next few months that will bring about national marijuana legalization and an end altogether the US government’s war on marijuana.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) has argued that the Republican House leadership may have prevented the loss of the Republican House majority in the November 2018 election if the leadership had previously allowed members to approve in a floor vote leaving marijuana law up to the states. Maybe taking such action soon in the House and Senate would benefit Republican congressional contenders in the November of 2026 election. With marijuana legalization popular, making it a reality may be a wild card Republicans can play to keep their House and Senate majorities.

This article was originally published on The Ron Paul Institute.

The post Can Marijuana Legalization Help Keep Republican Majorities in Congress? appeared first on LewRockwell.

This paper is based upon the following five assumptions:

1. The Christian Church is based on the teachings of Jesus Christ, and I am not aware of Him ever advocating Genocide or picking any group to be the “Chosen Ones”. So are Zionist Christian Churches really Christian, and are Zionist Jews really Jews?

2. Our Politicians either honor their Solemn Oath to the Constitution, or they don’t. And most don’t.

3. Politicians were elected because most voters are ignorant, apathetic and brainwashed by Media owned or controlled by the Evil Ones.

4. President Trump has the rare opportunity to return us to a Constitutional Republic, but this is impossible unless he obeys the Constitution, deports all illegal Invaders, and removes the financial burden of Foreign Aid and Troops deployed overseas.

The Coup of 1913 was the beginning of the end of the Constitutional Republic.  The Federal government was then funded by income taxes rather than tariffs, reversing the roles of states and the federal government. The Unconstitutional Federal Reserve Bank then printed fiat currency to finance wars and scams with eternal inflation. States lost control of the Senate, which was their voice in Congress, and is now controlled by big money, the Evil Ones. Tax-Free Foundations were formed so the rich could control their money thru eternity.

NOW WE ARE IN A POSITION TO UNDERSTAND THAT OUR FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS MOSTLY A GIGANTIC UNLAWFUL CRIME MACHINE SUCKING THE LIFE BLOOD OUT OF THE PEOPLE.

President Trump alone has the power to reverse this unconstitutional coup, but he must have honest law enforcement to investigate and charge bureaucrats and members of Congress for crimes, including Treason. The complicit and corrupt FBI is the primary reason for our present dire situation.

I support President Trump, regardless of his many flaws, because he is the only man with public support, charisma, knowledge, and courage to save us at the risk of his own life. The Evil Ones in the Deep State, aka the Zionist Jewish Lobby aka Parasitic Super-Rich Ruling Class aka Wealthy Families and their minions in government, will not willingly give up the Trillions of profits from mass murder and all manner of crimes done in our name. Remember that the Evil Ones in the Deep State consist of Jews and Gentiles in both political parties, so it is wrong to blame Jews alone.

I have recommended that President Trump start his campaign to return to Constitutional government and prosperity by terminating foreign aid, troop deployments on foreign soil, the Federal Reserve Bank, and replace Fiat currency with gold and silver. He must also deport Illegal Invaders before they revolt, which has already started. These moves can be accomplished quickly to generate time to make other substantial changes required to prevent an Economic collapse.

If President Trump refuses to terminate Foreign Aid, return troops deployed overseas, terminate Federal Reserve Bank and return to gold and silver currency, you can assume he is part of the Zionist Jewish Lobby aka Deep State or he is controlled by them. These changes affect the major sources of Blood Money.

I am well-aware that federal government also consists of thousands of departments, agencies, boards, etc, most of which are an unconstitutional Criminal Enterprise run by bureaucrats of the Administrative State. These bureaucrats are responsible for most of the additional waste, fraud, and abuse.

Repeating: President Trump must end Foreign Aid, Return our Troops, Terminate the Federal Reserve Bank, return to gold and silver currency and quickly deport Illegal Invaders. These moves would return a minimum of 10% of income to the government and deprive the Deep State of most of their Blood Money. It would also return the American Dream and many other benefits to younger generations just starting their families and careers.

I pray that President Trump is not part of the Zionist Jewish Lobby or Controlled by them. We desperately need him to terminate the many functions usurped from the states, as well as the many unconstitutional activities of the Administrative State. He must also develop his economic plan to offset the looming Depression.

The post If Trump Refuses to Obey the Constitution, Has He Joined the Evil Ones in the Zionist Deep State? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Free speech is not dead—it has just been parceled out among favored groups. This explains why the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer insisted that there is free speech in the UK, despite the fact that thousands have been arrested for social media posts that are offensive to the left. Even in the most despotic regimes there are surely pockets of free speech to be found, among those whose speech may, for the moment, be deemed unthreatening to the regime. The right to free speech in the UK is enjoyed by designated groups who are certainly free to express their perfectly acceptable opinions—or “lawful opinions” as they call it—without fear of arrest, while others, under various pretexts such as stamping out hate or preventing disorder, are thrown in jail for expressing unpopular or “legal but harmful” opinions.

Although most people claim to agree that “free speech includes hate speech,” they are quick to make exceptions for words that, in their view, violate public order legislation. Double standards in the public discourse on free speech became increasingly apparent when police in the UK—who have arrested comedians for posts that were offensive to various “protected groups”—declined to intervene when someone ghoulishly celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination on social media, even though the ghoul added, in reference to conservatives, that people should “kill them all.” Under the public order laws, it now seems that “the litmus test for ‘disorder’ is not disruption or violence, but rather whether you offend leftists.” Offending the left is seen as a greater threat to public order than calling for the killing of conservatives or erupting in celebration when this happens.

In a similar example, cancelling one of the favored comedians of the left was regarded by many on the left as a greater outrage than the assassination of Charlie Kirk because, after all, Kirk offended the left. After being briefly cancelled for his comments on the assassination, Jimmy Kimmel returned to his show to declare his unwavering support for free speech. So Mr. Kimmel gets his show back, which is being hailed as a victory by everyone. Even those who are not on the left, who are not fans of his show, highlight the danger that cancelling the left could easily be turned against the right. For example, Joe Rogan said,

“The companies, if they’re being pressured by the government – so if that’s real – and if people on the right are like, ‘Yeah, go get ’em,’ oh, my God, you’re crazy,” Mr. Rogan said. “You’re crazy for supporting this. Because it will be used on you.”

From a principled perspective, it is not enough to say that free speech on the left should be defended for strategic reasons, because one day the left might return to power and turn the tables on the right. It should be clear to everyone by now that the left will always violate free speech rights of conservatives, whether or not conservatives do the same to them, because tyranny and attacks on individual liberty are hallmarks of socialistic ideologies. The more important question is, does it make sense to declare a principled belief in absolute free speech while ignoring the fact that free speech is subject to these brazen double standards?

Absolutist defenders of free speech argue that double standards in enforcement of an ideal standard are not relevant to the principle being defended. After all, the validity of a principle does not depend on how it applies to different cases, and the fact that the left violates free speech protection with impunity does not mean we should all abandon the defense of free speech. Opponents of this view, in particular conservatives who are not prepared to ignore the double standards, wish to fight fire with fire by enforcing the same “consequences” on the left as the left, when in power, invariably imposes on conservatives. Thus, we see the methods of cancel culture swinging from left to right, which further erodes free speech to everyone’s ultimate detriment.

From a natural rights libertarian perspective, there is more to free speech than the First Amendment and whether cancel culture is being wielded by federal authorities. Readers will be aware that Murray Rothbard regarded all rights as private property rights. In his philosophy, the right to free speech does not come from the Constitution, nor is it a free-standing right unconnected to any other rights; instead, like all rights, it is an emanation of the right to self-ownership. In his view, “There is no extra ‘right of free speech’ or free press beyond the property rights that a person may have in any given case.” He further explains that, “Only when the ‘right to free speech’ is treated simply as a subdivision of property right does it become valid, workable, and absolute.” Free speech is absolute only in the sense that property rights are absolute. Divorced from its foundations in self-ownership and private property, the right to free speech becomes incoherent. It becomes nothing but a euphemism for power, denoting which side has the power to crush their political opponents. The right to free speech can only be defended, as an absolute right, if it is understood, like all other rights, by reference to the principles of private property. In the Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard explains,

Liberals generally wish to preserve the concept of “rights” for such “human” rights as freedom of speech, while denying the concept to private property. And yet, on the contrary, the concept of “rights” only makes sense as property rights. For not only are there no human rights which are not also property rights, but the former rights lose their absoluteness and clarity and become fuzzy and vulnerable when property rights are not used as the standard.

The limitation of government power in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution protects free speech from threats by the government, but it says nothing about cancel culture and whether or not private employers should fire people for their political views. Thus, cancel culture is used—first by one side and then the other—to silence their opponents and destroy their lives. Vengeance then sets in, and people naturally desire to destroy the lives of those who previously did the same to them. There is no satisfactory solution to this problem when private property is itself under attack, and when the protection of free speech is vested in the very same state that is subject to the whims of democratic control first by one political party and then the next. Speaking of “free speech” in public space, Rothbard warns that this problem is insoluble:

Of course, so long as the streets continue to be government owned, the problem and the conflict remain insoluble; for government ownership of the streets means that all of one’s other property rights, including speech, assembly, distribution of leaflets, etc., will be hampered and restricted by the ever-present necessity to traverse and use government-owned streets, which government may decide to block or restrict in any way…whichever way it chooses, the “rights” of some taxpayers will have to be curtailed.

Rothbard’s point is that when government-controlled property is involved, we are up against the intractable fact that the satisfactory defense of private property is incompatible with state power. Given the nature of state power, any individual rights expressed to be “absolute” are only enjoyed while, and to the extent that, they are backed by state power. In these circumstances, Rothbard explains, in attempting to resolve disputes about free speech “there is no satisfactory way to resolve this question because there is no clear locus of property rights involved.”

As Rothbard saw it, only by reference to the principles of property rights can disputes over the boundaries of free speech be satisfactorily resolved. This is based on identifying the owner of the relevant premises, and also on defending the natural right of each man to speak freely regardless of his ideology or identity. Free speech—like all other liberal ideals—will inevitably be threatened if the state continues to favor different groups at the expense of others. As Ludwig von Mises cautioned, “liberalism has always had in view the good of the whole, not that of any special group.” Rules must apply in the same way to all, and not be specially tailored for different groups based on political ideology or personal identity.

The post How Double Standards Erode Free Speech appeared first on LewRockwell.

Zelensky’s corrupt dictatorship is just a pale reflection of his patrons in Washington, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, and London.

Since the United States-led NATO proxy war against Russia erupted in February 2022, the European Union has doled out $216 billion in aid to Ukraine. That’s equivalent to €186 billion, according to the EU’s latest official count. The true figure is likely to be even more.

The United States has given a similar amount to Ukraine. All paid for by taxpayers.

That’s about $400 billion total in three years, with the EU promising more over the next few years.

To put this in perspective, the EU aid to Ukraine is multiples more than all of the 27 member nations have received – combined – from the bloc’s collective budget and administration. According to Euronews reporting, some of the biggest recipients of EU subsidies each year are Germany (€14 bn), France (€16.5 bn), and Poland (€14 bn). Some of the smaller recipient countries are Austria, Denmark, and Ireland (around €2 bn).

That means Ukraine has received heaps more than all of the EU members combined.

Get your head around that. Ukraine, which is not a member of the European Union, is receiving manifold what actual member states are receiving. And you wonder why people in France are angrily taking to the streets because their shambolic government wants to cut pensions and other social welfare services to save money. Elsewhere, European governments are collapsing from unsustainable debt. And, at the same time, European citizens are constantly being lectured that their states need to spend more and more money on the NATO alliance, even to the insulting point of having to accept the cutting of social benefits and public services.

Ukraine and its corrupt Kiev regime of NeoNazis has bled Europe dry. The so-called president, Vladimir Zelensky (who canceled elections last year, so he’s not really a legitimate president), is reported to be funneling €50 million a month to overseas funds for his retirement while his wife goes luxury shopping in New York and Paris. Other members of the regime, like former prime minister and now “defense” minister Denys Shmyhal, are also reportedly up to their eyes in corruption, siphoning off billions in the military aid that Western taxpayers have paid for.

This week, Zelensky took his brassneckery to new levels – if that’s possible. He is demanding that Ukraine be made a member of the EU, and he wants to change the rules of the bloc to speed up the process. The EU has granted Ukraine (and Moldova) a fast-track path to membership, but, to its credit, Hungary has objected to this.

In June, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán cast a veto on continuing access talks for Ukraine. According to EU rules, there must be unanimity among member nations for the approval of new members. Orbán said Ukraine is not eligible because of the current war against Russia. “We would be importing a war,” he said.

Also, Budapest objects to Ukrainian language laws that discriminate against a Hungarian minority in the western Zakarpattia region of Ukraine. (The Russian language has been banned, too, in public offices.)

A referendum held in Hungary in June recorded that 95 percent of voters were against Ukraine becoming a member of the EU.

Zelensky is pushing ahead regardless, with his peevish wheedling. In a joint press conference in Kiev on Monday, with the indulgence of the Dutch PM at his side, Zelensky said: “Ukraine will be in the European Union, with or without Orbán, because it is the choice of the Ukrainian people.”

The little dictator flaunted his insufferable presumptuousness by hinting that the European Union would change its rules to bypass Hungary’s veto – all just to accommodate his scrounging regime. “Changing the procedure is called finding a way without Hungary,” he said. And in a further arrogant dismissal of democratic process, Zelensky asserted that the Hungarian people support his EU ambitions, contradicting the referendum back in June.

Orbán responded firmly by telling Zelensky he could not blackmail his way into the European Union.

Hungary’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó added a dose of reality by stating: “The decision on which country is ready to join the European Union and which can join the EU will not be made by the president of Ukraine, but by the European Union itself, where such decisions require unanimity.”

In a further comment, Szijjártó nailed it by saying that Zelenskyy is “completely detached from reality.” The Hungarian diplomat also reminded that the Kiev regime is blowing up energy infrastructure and jeopardizing the EU members’ vital interests.

Last month, Ukrainian forces exploded the Druzhba oil pipeline from Russia, cutting off energy supplies to Hungary and Slovakia. The Zelensky regime carried out the sabotage as retribution for Budapest’s opposition to Ukraine’s EU application. This is what Orbán was no doubt referring to when he slammed Zelensky this week for using blackmail.

So, there you have it. A corrupt, unelected, Neo-Nazi regime headed up by a Jewish scam-artist who plays piano with his penis while wearing women’s high heels is using terrorist tactics to attack the vital interests of EU members, and is now telling those members that they won’t have a vote in the EU processes, because the regime has decided it will become a member of the bloc. You could not make it up. This, too, after robbing the taxpayers of the bloc of €186 billion to wage a war against Russia – a war that has killed 1.5 million Ukrainian soldiers – which could spiral out of control into a nuclear Third World War.

If this is the kind of ruination that this regime can inflict while not being a member of the EU, one can only imagine the hellscape it will bring after becoming a member.

An analogy could be a householder being tormented by a criminal gang hanging around the gate, and then for the household to invite the gang inside the premises. The gang leader swaggers in, puts his dirty boots up on the table, and then starts demanding this and that from the householders, using blackmail to harm the children of the house, or some other abomination.

However, the real culprits in this obscene farce are the American and European elites who have fomented the war against Russia. Together, they have weaned and pampered the Kiev regime with largesse and indulgence, paid for by the taxpayers. The U.S.-EU transatlantic ruling class has cultivated the regime of corruption and war since the 2014 CIA-backed coup in Kiev against an elected president. The racket has laundered hundreds of billions of public money to the Western military industrial complex. The racket has destroyed the economies of Europe and is now destroying the semblance of democracy within Europe. (It’s not clear what Trump’s position in all of this is, but he probably doesn’t count anyway.)

The Western imperialist ruling class is so obsessed with its scheme for  “strategic defeat” of Russia (and China) and for global domination that it is willing to cultivate any scumbag regime it can make use of for its goals, no matter how much that violates international law and its own professed democratic principles.

Zelensky’s corrupt dictatorship is just a pale reflection of his patrons in Washington, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, and London. They are all detached from reality.

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

The post After Robbing EU Taxpayers, Zelensky Uses Blackmail To Get Inside the Bloc appeared first on LewRockwell.

There is no shortage of failed peace plans in occupied Palestine, all of them incorporating detailed phases and timelines, going back to the presidency of Jimmy Carter. They end the same way. Israel gets what it wants initially — in the latest case the release of the remaining Israeli hostages — while it ignores and violates every other phase until it resumes its attacks on the Palestinian people.

It is a sadistic game. A merry-go-round of death. This ceasefire, like those of the past, is a commercial break. A moment when the condemned man is allowed to smoke a cigarette before being gunned down in a fusillade of bullets.

Once Israeli hostages are released, the genocide will continue. I do not know how soon. Let’s hope the mass slaughter is delayed for at least a few weeks. But a pause in the genocide is the best we can anticipate. Israel is on the cusp of emptying Gaza, which has been all but obliterated under two years of relentless bombing. It is not about to be stopped. This is the culmination of the Zionist dream. The United States, which has given Israel a staggering $22 billion in military aid since Oct, 7, 2023, will not shut down its pipeline, the only tool that might halt the genocide.

Israel, as it always does, will blame Hamas and the Palestinians for failing to abide by the agreement, most probably a refusal — true or not — to disarm, as the proposal demands. Washington, condemning Hamas’s supposed violation, will give Israel the green light to continue its genocide to create Trump’s fantasy of a Gaza Riviera and “special economic zone” with its “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians in exchange for digital tokens.

Of the myriads of peace plans over the decades, the current one is the least serious. Aside from a demand that Hamas release the hostages within 72-hours after the ceasefire begins, it lacks specifics and imposed timetables. It is filled with caveats that allow Israel to abrogate the agreement. And that is the point. It is not designed to be a viable path to peace, which most Israeli leaders understand. Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper, Israel Hayom, established by the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to serve as a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and champion messianic Zionism, instructed its readers not to be concerned about the Trump plan because it is only “rhetoric.”

Israel, in one example from the proposal, will “not return to areas that have been withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”

Who decides if Hamas has “fully implemented” the agreement? Israel. Does anyone believe in Israel’s good faith? Can Israel be trusted as an objective arbitrator of the agreement? If Hamas — demonized as a terrorist group — objects, will anyone listen?

How is it possible that a peace proposal ignores the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 Advisory Opinion, which reiterated that Israel’s occupation is illegal and must end?

How can it fail to mention the Palestinian’s right to self-determination?

Why are Palestinians, who have a right under international law to armed struggle against an occupying power, expected to disarm while Israel, the illegally occupying force, is not?

By what authority can the U.S. establish a “temporary transitional government,” — Trump’s and Tony Blair’s so-called “Board of Peace” — sidelining the Palestinian right to self-determination?

Who gave the U.S. the authority to send to Gaza an “International Stabilization Force,” a polite term for foreign occupation?

How are Palestinians supposed to reconcile themselves to the acceptance of an Israeli “security barrier” on Gaza’s borders, confirmation that the occupation will continue?

How can any proposal ignore the slow-motion genocide and annexation of the West Bank?

Why is Israel, which has destroyed Gaza, not required to pay reparations?

What are Palestinians supposed to make of the demand in the proposal for a “deradicalized” Gazan population? How is this expected to be accomplished? Re-education camps? Wholesale censorship? The rewriting of the school curriculum? Arresting offending Imams in mosques?

And what about addressing the incendiary rhetoric routinely employed by Israeli leaders who describe Palestinians as “human animals” and their children as “little snakes”?

“All of Gaza and every child in Gaza, should starve to death,” the Israeli rabbi Ronen Shaulov announced. “I don’t have mercy for those who, in a few years, will grow up and won’t have mercy for us. Only a stupid fifth column, a hater of Israel has mercy for future terrorists, even though today they are still young and hungry. I hope, may they starve to death, and if anyone has a problem with what I’ve said, that’s their problem.”

Israeli violations of peace agreements have historical precedents.

The Camp David Accords, signed in 1978 by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin — without the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) — led to the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt.

Subsequent phases of the Camp David Accords, which included a promise by Israel to resolve the Palestinian question along with Jordan and Egypt, permit Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza within five years, and end the building of Israeli colonies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were never implemented.

The 1993 Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, saw the PLO recognize Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognize the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people. Yet, what ensued was the disempowerment of the PLO and its transformation into a colonial police force. Oslo II, signed in 1995, detailed the process towards peace and a Palestinian state. But it too was stillborn. It stipulated that any discussion of illegal Jewish “settlements” were to be delayed until “final” status talks. By then, Israeli military withdrawals from the occupied West Bank were scheduled to have been completed. Governing authority was poised to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. Instead, the West Bank was carved up into Areas A, B and C. The Palestinian Authority had limited authority in Areas A and B while Israel controlled all of Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank.

The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the historic lands that Jewish settlers seized from them in 1948 when Israel was created — a right enshrined in international law — was given up by the PLO leader Yasser Arafat. This instantly alienated many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza where 75 percent are refugees or the descendants of refugees. As a consequence, many Palestinians abandoned the PLO in favor of Hamas. Edward Said called the Oslo Accords “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” and lambasted Arafat as “the Pétain of the Palestinians.”

The scheduled Israeli military withdrawals under Oslo never took place. There were around 250,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank when the Oslo agreement was signed. Their numbers today have increased to at least 700,000.

The journalist Robert Fisk called Oslo “a sham, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into abandonment of all that they had sought and struggled for over a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hope in order to emasculate the aspiration of statehood.”

Israel unilaterally broke the last two-month-long ceasefire on March 18 of this year when it launched surprise airstrikes on Gaza. Netanyahu’s office claimed that the resumption of the military campaign was in response to Hamas’s refusal to release hostages, its rejection of proposals to extend the cease-fire and its efforts to rearm. Israel killed more than 400 people in the initial overnight assault and injured over 500, slaughtering and wounding people as they slept. The attack scuttled the second stage of the agreement, which would have seen Hamas release the remaining living male hostages, both civilians and soldiers, for an exchange of Palestinian prisoners and the establishment of a permanent ceasefire along with the eventual lifting of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Israel has carried out murderous assaults on Gaza for decades, cynically calling the bombardment “mowing the lawn.” No peace accord or ceasefire agreement has ever gotten in the way. This one will be no exception.

This bloody saga is not over. Israel’s goals remain unchanged: the dispossession and erasure of Palestinians from their land.

The only peace Israel intends to offer the Palestinians is the peace of the grave.

This article was originally published on ScheerPost.

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