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 The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft

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The Gateway Pundit | by Cullen Linebarger

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(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/il-ritorno-dei-rendimenti-reali-negativi)

Sebbene i rendimenti reali negativi pare non siano più un problema per molti investitori, stanno tornando a essere un tema urgente, soprattutto per chi di noi è concentrato sulla costituzione e la conservazione dei risparmi. La causa principale di questo problema è l'inflazione.

Prima di continuare a discutere dell'inflazione futura e dell'emergere di rendimenti reali negativi, chiariamo innanzitutto cosa significa realmente il termine “inflazione”. Esso, infatti, è spesso utilizzato in modo poco chiaro e le persone ne danno interpretazioni diverse.

Nel linguaggio comune inflazione fa riferimento all'aumento dei prezzi dei beni di consumo: quando gli articoli acquistati nei negozi diventano più costosi mese dopo mese, anno dopo anno. In altre parole, si ottiene di meno in cambio dei propri soldi.

Tuttavia, per comprendere veramente il fenomeno, è importante distinguere tra il sintomo e la causa.

Dal punto di vista economico, la causa dell'inflazione è l'aumento dell'offerta di moneta: questo è ciò che chiamiamo “inflazione monetaria”. Il sintomo di questa causa è l'aumento dei prezzi dei beni, noto anche come “inflazione dei prezzi dei beni”.

Per dirla in parole povere, l'inflazione dei prezzi dei beni è sempre e comunque un fenomeno monetario, come affermò giustamente l'economista americano Milton Friedman.

Tuttavia, se vogliamo essere davvero precisi, dovremmo dire che l'inflazione dei prezzi dei beni è il risultato di un aumento dell'offerta di moneta rispetto alla relativa domanda.

L'inflazione è un problema economico, soprattutto per risparmiatori e investitori, e può essere decisamente distruttiva. Questo vale non solo quando l'inflazione raggiunge livelli così elevati che il denaro perde letteralmente valore, ma anche quando è relativamente bassa ma comunque superiore ai tassi d'interesse nominali.

Ecco un esempio: supponiamo che abbiate un rendimento del 2% sul vostro deposito bancario, ma l'inflazione è del 3%. In questo caso il vostro tasso d'interesse reale – quello aggiustato all'inflazione – diventa -1% (ovvero, il tasso d'interesse nominale del 2% meno il 3% di inflazione). Ciò significa che il potere d'acquisto del vostro deposito bancario diminuisce dell'1% all'anno. E non dimenticate le imposte sulle plusvalenze, le quali vengono applicate ai rendimenti nominali e aggravano ulteriormente le vostre perdite.

Ora, potreste chiedervi: “”Chi è responsabile dell'inflazione come fenomeno monetario”?

La risposta: le banche centrali. Hanno il monopolio sulla creazione del denaro e, su questa base, le banche commerciali sono autorizzate a piramidare le loro riserve.

E ora capite perché è assurdo quando la gente afferma che le banche centrali (o i loro organi di governo) “combattono l'inflazione”.

In realtà, le banche centrali non combattono mai l'inflazione: la creano. A volte creano più inflazione, a volte meno, ma non la combattono mai.

Se prendiamo in considerazione l'area Euro, si potrebbe sostenere che la massa monetaria è cresciuta solo del 4% a febbraio 2025 rispetto all'anno precedente.

Non sembra un numero eccessivamente alto e i prestiti bancari – attraverso i quali viene creato nuovo denaro – sono cresciuti solo del 2% circa. Quindi, com'è possibile che l'inflazione sia in aumento, soprattutto senza una significativa ripresa economica in vista?

Questa argomentazione ha un certo fondamento. Tuttavia, guardando al futuro, ci sono solide ragioni per aspettarsi un massiccio aumento del debito pubblico nei Paesi dell'area Euro. Questo debito non sarà utilizzato solo per acquistare nuove attrezzature militari, ma anche per sostenere uno “Stato sociale” sempre più insostenibile e strutture politiche in crisi.

Per raggiungere questo obiettivo, gli stati dell'area Euro, soprattutto quelli più grandi, emetteranno ingenti quantità di nuovi titoli di stato. Questi ultimi saranno acquistati dalla Banca Centrale Europea. Allo stesso tempo, la BCE abbasserà i tassi d'interesse e conterrà i rendimenti obbligazionari a livelli artificialmente bassi.

Il denaro appena creato verrà speso per trasferimenti sociali, appalti governativi e altre attività politiche.

È noto che i politici tendono a spendere soldi per progetti che non comportano alcun aumento di produttività o ne comportano pochi. Di conseguenza l'aumento della massa monetaria, combinato con la spesa pubblica, farà inevitabilmente aumentare i prezzi dei beni, causando un aumento dell'inflazione.

Proviamo a mettere le cose in prospettiva con qualche numero.

Se i disavanzi pubblici nell'area Euro si attestassero intorno al 5% del PIL e la BCE acquistasse nuove obbligazioni, l'offerta di moneta potrebbe aumentare di circa €800 miliardi. Ciò rappresenterebbe un ritmo di crescita annuo di M3 di circa il 5%. Inoltre l'offerta di moneta aumenterebbe a seguito dell'indebitamento bancario del settore privato.

Nel complesso questo potrebbe spingere l'inflazione nell'area Euro a circa il 4% o più. Se la BCE mantenesse i tassi d'interesse a lungo termine intorno al 3%, il tasso d'interesse reale scenderebbe a -1% (3% del tasso di interesse nominale meno il 4% di inflazione). Ciò significa che gli stati europei ridurrebbero il loro debito reale a spese dei creditori, ovvero risparmiatori e investitori.

Per le obbligazioni a breve termine e i depositi bancari, che solitamente offrono tassi d'interesse più bassi, l'espropriazione attraverso tassi d'interesse reali negativi sarebbe ancora più grave.

In sintesi, questa situazione equivale a quella che viene definita “repressione finanziaria”.

Ma potreste pensare: “Non abbiamo già sperimentato di recente tassi d'interesse negativi”?

Esatto. Dalla fine del 2018 alla fine del 2020, ad esempio, il rendimento nominale del titolo di stato tedesco a 10 anni è stato negativo.

All'epoca l'inflazione rimase relativamente contenuta fino a metà del 2021, quindi non fu l'aumento dell'inflazione a causare il calo del tasso d'interesse reale, bensì il calo dei tassi d'interesse nominali. Successivamente l'inflazione aumentò vertiginosamente, in gran parte a causa dell'aumento del 25% di M3 e l'aumento dell'inflazione spinse ulteriormente i tassi d'interesse reali in territorio negativo.

Guardando al futuro, la situazione sarà probabilmente diversa. L'inflazione sarà la forza trainante dei tassi d'interesse reali negativi.

Nel contesto attuale la BCE avrà difficoltà a riportare i tassi d'interesse nominali allo zero o al di sotto dello zero. I rendimenti obbligazionari in tutto il mondo sono aumentati significativamente e le obbligazioni denominate in euro devono offrire tassi d'interesse sufficientemente interessanti per mantenere vivo l'interesse degli investitori.

Pertanto è probabile che la BCE manipoli il tasso d'interesse nel mercato dei capitali affinché risulti basso ma positivo, garantendo al contempo un'inflazione più elevata. Ciò spingerebbe i tassi d'interesse nominali al di sotto del tasso d'inflazione, facendo sì che i tassi d'interesse reali diventino negativi, con i debitori che ne trarrebbero beneficio a scapito di risparmiatori e obbligazionisti.

La repressione finanziaria derivante dall'aumento dell'inflazione avrà conseguenze economiche e sociali di vasta portata.

I tassi d'interesse reali negativi continueranno a trasformare le economie dell'area Euro in sistemi sempre più di comando e controllo, in cui gli stati dettano legge su produzione, consumi e ogni aspetto della vita economica. Ciò erode le libertà residue di cittadini e imprenditori, rendendo il sistema statale sempre più onnipotente.

I segnali di questo cambiamento sono già visibili. Si pensi, ad esempio, alla palese decisione dell'Unione Europea di sequestrare i risparmi dei cittadini per finanziare spese dettate dalla politica.

L'area Euro sta scivolando in una situazione estremamente precaria: gli stati non riescono più a finanziare la loro insaziabile fame di denaro con le sole entrate fiscali. Di conseguenza i politici faranno sempre più affidamento sul finanziamento tramite debito.

Gli investitori privati ​​acquistano titoli di stato europei perché sanno che la BCE non permetterà ai Paesi dell'area Euro di dichiarare default. La BCE continuerà a sostenerli con denaro di nuova emissione quando necessario. Per mantenere il debito accessibile agli stati in difficoltà finanziarie, la BCE abbasserà artificialmente i tassi d'interesse.

Ciò ci porta alla situazione attuale: la BCE sta espandendo l'offerta di moneta acquistando debito pubblico, l'inflazione sta aumentando e i rendimenti nominali delle obbligazioni rimangono artificialmente bassi, con tassi d'interesse reali negativi per risparmiatori e investitori.

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

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The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America, By Janet Levy
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/07/the_forgotten_history_of_britains_white_slaves_in_america.html#ixzz6PAFUvo00

White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America, by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh
https://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963

https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/WhiteCargoTheForgottenHistoryOfBritainsWhiteSlavesInAmerica/White%20Cargo%20-%20The%20Forgotten%20History%20of%20Britain%27s%20White%20Slaves%20In%20America%20.pdf

“In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 white people were shipped to America as slaves. Urchins were swept up from London’s streets to labor in the tobacco fields, where life expectancy was no more than two years. Brothels were raided to provide “breeders” for Virginia. Hopeful migrants were duped into signing as indentured servants, unaware they would become personal property who could be bought, sold, and even gambled away. Transported convicts were paraded for sale like livestock.

“Drawing on letters crying for help, diaries, and court and government archives, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh demonstrate that the brutalities usually associated with black slavery alone were perpetrated on whites throughout British rule. The trade ended with American independence, but the British still tried to sell convicts in their former colonies, which prompted one of the most audacious plots in Anglo-American history.

“This is a saga of exploration and cruelty spanning 170 years that has been submerged under the overwhelming memory of black slavery. White Cargo brings the brutal, uncomfortable story to the surface.”

They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America, by Michael Hoffman

https://dn721603.ca.archive.org/0/items/they-were-white-and-they-were-slaves-the-untold-history-of-the-enslavement-of-wh/They%20Were%20White%20and%20They%20Were%20Slaves_The%20Untold%20History%20of%20the%20Enslavement%20of%20Whites%20in%20Early%20America_Michael%20A.%20Hoffman%20II.pdf

“They Were White and They Were Slaves is a thoroughly researched challenge to the conventional historiography of colonial and industrial labor, a stunning journey into a hidden epoch, the slave trade of Whites, hundreds of thousands of whom were kidnapped, chained, whipped and worked to death in the American colonies and during the Industrial Revolution. This is a chronicle that has never been fully told, part of a vital heritage that has until now comprised the dustiest shelf in the darkest corner of suppressed history.”

Black Slaveowners, By Larry Koger (article)
https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/black-slaveowners/

Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860, by Larry Koger (book)
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Slaveowners-Masters-Carolina-1790-1860/dp/0786469315/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452177778&sr=8-1&keywords=larry+koger

“Drawing on the federal census, wills, mortgage bills of sale, tax returns, and newspaper advertisements, this authoritative study describes the nature of African-American slaveholding, its complexity, and its rationales. It reveals how some African-American slave masters had earned their freedom and how some free Blacks purchased slaves for their own use. The book provides a fresh perspective on slavery in the antebellum South and underscores the importance of African Americans in the history of American slavery.

“The book also paints a picture of the complex social dynamics between free and enslaved Blacks, and between Black and white slaveowners. It illuminates the motivations behind African-American slaveholding–including attempts to create or maintain independence, to accumulate wealth, and to protect family members–and sheds light on the harsh realities of slavery for both Black masters and Black slaves.

• BLACK SLAVEOWNERS–Shows how some African Americans became slave masters

• MOTIVATIONS FOR SLAVEHOLDING–Highlights the motivations behind African-American slaveholding

• SOCIAL DYNAMICS–Sheds light on the complex social dynamics between free and enslaved Blacks

• ANEBELLUM SOUTH–Provides a perspective on slavery in the antebellum South”

Whites Were Slaves In North Africa Before Blacks Were Slaves In The New World, By Paul Craig Roberts
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/03/paul-craig-roberts/whites-were-slaves-in-north-africa-before-blacks-were-slaves-in-the-new-world/

America’s First Slaves: Whites : NPR

White slavery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_slavery

American Pravda: Amazon Book Censorship, by Ron Unz
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-amazon-book-censorship

The post Detailed Facts Concerning Slavery, Reparations And Other Inconvenient Authoritative Information Concerning This Barbaric Institution appeared first on LewRockwell.

Given Marco Rubio’s long history of subservience to the State of Israel — which has earned him a mountain of campaign cash from the country’s US-based collaborators — many Americans were understandably wary that his ascension from senator to secretary of State portended disturbing moves to advance Israel’s interests. However, few foresaw Rubio orchestrating the abduction, imprisonment and deportation of foreign students for using their universal human right of free speech to criticize the Israeli government and advocate for Palestinians.

With President Trump’s blessing, Rubio has targeted many foreign students in this fashion — students who’ve been charged with no crimes. However, no case better illustrates the campaign’s casual cruelty than that of 30-year-old Tufts University PhD candidate Rumeysa Ozturk. Ozturk, who’s been studying child development, was arrested in March and whisked away to a far-off prison merely because — an entire year earlier — she co-authored a Tufts Daily op-ed urging the university to formally characterize Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide, and to sell the school’s Israel-associated investments.

Rubio would like you to assume her essay must have been an unhinged, antisemitic, violence-inciting screed. To the contrary, harkening back to Tufts’ 1989 decision to divest from apartheid South Africa, its tone is decidedly calm and measured. Read this excerpt of the essay’s most pointed language about Israel and judge for yourself:

These [student senate] resolutions were the product of meaningful debate…and represent a sincere effort to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law. Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.

…the student body is calling for … the University to end its complicity with Israel insofar as it is oppressing the Palestinian people and denying their right to self-determination — a right that is guaranteed by international law. These strong lobbying tools are all the more urgent now given the order by the International Court of Justice confirming that the Palestinian people of Gaza’s rights under the Genocide Convention are under a “plausible” risk of being breached.

Ozturk’s persecution represents a major escalation of an aggravating dynamic in which people in the United States are vilified as dangerous, volatile antisemites for saying things about Israel that are frequently said by respected people and institutions in Israel. For example, in an op-ed of his own, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert this week wrote, “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians … Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

In March of this year, the State Department revoked Ozturk’s student visa without notifying her — she had no idea that her presence in the country was now illegal. Four days later, in an incident captured on video, she was grabbed off a Somerville, Massachusetts street by masked, plain-clothed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, taken to New Hampshire and then Vermont, before being shackled in chains and airlifted 1,400 miles to a federal detention center in Louisiana.

For the next month and a half, she was stuffed with 23 others in a cell meant for 14. Ozturk says constant exposure to dust and inadequate ventilation sparked more than a dozen asthma attacks — after having previously had only about 13 in her entire life. Sleep was hard to come by, as motion-detecting fluorescent lights repeatedly triggered throughout the night.

Trying to justify the unjustifiable, the Trump administration has gone to slanderous extremes to vilify Ozturk. In a since-deleted social media post following her arrest, Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said “DHS + ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.” (As an aside, note that, while some 43 Americans — including dual nationals — died in the Oct 7 attacks, there’s no history of Hamas ever setting out to target Americans.)

When protests of Israel’s tactics in Gaza erupted in 2022, Israel supporters across government, major media and social media branded all pro-Palestine protesters as Hamas supporters and antisemites. With the ascendency of the second Trump administration, that tactic has evolved from a malicious PR smear to a government-weaponized allegation that’s putting nonviolent foreign students in prisons and derailing their lives — all in service to a foreign country.

In a partial reversal of her appalling treatment, Ozturk was released from confinement on May 9 on the orders of a federal judge, who also denied the government’s wish to make her wear an ankle monitor. However, her troubles are far from over: In addition to the enduring harm of a six-week interruption of her academic pursuits, she is still targeted for deportation.

When DHS initially leveled the “activities in support of Hamas” accusation against Ozturk, many people assumed the government must have something on her other than an essay in a student newspaper. However, as the weeks ground on, the government never pointed to anything else, something US District Judge William Sessions noted when he ordered her to be released from her cage in Louisiana :

“I suggested to the government that they produce any additional information which would suggest that she posed a substantial risk. And that was three weeks ago, and there has been no evidence introduced by the government other than the op-ed. That literally is the case. There is no evidence here...The court finds that Ms. Öztürk has raised a substantial claim of a constitutional violation.”

Judge Sessions called Ozturk’s seizure “a traumatic incident” and said “her continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens.” That is most certainly the Trump administration’s goal.

Falling for Rubio’s dishonest portrayal of his prey and failing to scrutinize the facts, many so-called “conservatives” have enthused over his drive to deport anti-Israel activists and rushed to defend it. In their flimsiest argument, you’ll find them claiming Ozturk and others have no right of free speech because they’re not US citizens. That hollow attack rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of rights — one that wrongly views rights as government-granted privileges, rather than something that springs from one’s humanity. As I’ve explained elsewhere at Stark Realities, the Constitution’s Bill of Rights isn’t a granting of rights, it’s a prohibition against government interference with pre-existing rights shared by everyone on Earth.

Employing a quintessential straw man argument, Rubio and others also say “nobody has a right to a visa.” The controversy has never been about any mythical entitlement to visas — it’s about the morality and constitutionality of using visa revocations as a means of punishing and suppressing expression of certain political beliefs.

To mete out that punishment, Rubio and the Trump administration are exploiting the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which recklessly empowers the secretary of State — a single individual — to deport foreigners the secretary deems “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests” of the United States. The law provides no elaboration on that standard, much less any provision for its application with any semblance of due process for the affected individual.

Invoking that provision, the administration told a court that DHS and ICE determined Ozturk “had been involved in associations that ‘may undermine U.S foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization’ including co-authoring an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus.”

First, note how tangential and tenuous the opening and concluding allegations are. The government says Ozturk is being targeted for unspecified “associations,” and because her stance on Israel merely overlaps with the stance of a campus group that was only temporarily banned.

Next, we see the Trump administration dishonestly saying Ozturk “indicat[ed] support for Hamas” by writing an op-ed calling for Tufts to say Israel is committing war crimes, and to divest from the country. The op-ed never mentions Hamas or Oct. 7 or even implicitly endorses the group or its tactics, and there’s been no allegation of any other form of her supposed “support for Hamas.”

The administration also employs the Israeli-propagandist idea that criticism of the State of Israel — a political entity — creates a “hostile environment” for Jewish students. That notion is itself a form of bigotry — as it presumes all Jews endorse Israel’s actions. Of course, that presumption is belied by the significant presence of Jewish students in many protests of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Meanwhile, the notion that pro-Israel Jews should be protected from hearing contrary views is wildly hypocritical from an administration that — in regard to other topics — has rightly targeted censorship meant to prevent so-called “snowflakes” from having their feelings hurt.

Defenders of the administration’s conduct are compelled to do more than point to its supposed legality under a 1952 law. From FDR putting Japanese-Americans in concentration camps to Woodrow Wilson jailing opponents of the draft, there’s a difference between legality and morality and bona fide constitutionality. Meanwhile, Ozturk’s ongoing challenge of her arrest and pending deportation may well reset the bounds of what’s legal under the Immigration and Nationality Act, with the courts potentially ruling it’s unconstitutional to revoke a visa over the expression of an opinion.

Finally, even the most ardent backers of the Israeli government should recognize that the use of the Immigration Act to round up and deport people whose views are inconsistent with the current administration’s foreign policy threatens to set a dangerous precedent — one that could see a future, Israel-hostile White House seizing, jailing and deporting foreign students who advocate US aid to Israel.

Read the Whole Article

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It is correct, analytically and logically, to distinguish secession from war. Many states secede peacefully, and it does not logically follow that secession must occasion war. The Southern states of America seceded peacefully, and Lincoln’s subsequent war which followed four months after secession was entirely unnecessary. Hence, Murray Rothbard wrote in his memo to the Volker Fund in 1961 that,

The road to Civil War must be divided into two parts:

• • the causes of the controversy over slavery leading to secession, and
  • the immediate causes of the war itself.

The reason for such split is that secession need not have led to Civil War, despite the assumption to the contrary by most historians.

Nevertheless, in understanding the Southern Cause it would be historically misleading to isolate secession entirely from the war, or to treat the two events as hermetically sealed off from each other. It is important to split them for the purpose Rothbard stated, namely, to debunk the assumption that secession must involve war, because many people wrongly view calls for secession as calls for war. But it does not follow that in understanding American history, the two events must be treated, for all purposes, as if they were not in any way historically, causally, or morally connected.

The Southern Cause found its expression in both secession and war, and it would be quite wrong to pretend that secession and war had nothing to do with each other as many libertarians attempt to do. They leap from one assumption—that secession and war need always be bound together—to the opposite assumption, that secession and war had nothing to do with each other. Their reason for clinging to this second assumption is that they wish to depict the Southern Cause as having two morally-distinct elements, one of which was just while the other was unjust.

Secession is seen as having been motivated primarily by a wicked cause, namely slavery, while the war itself is seen as motivated by a just cause, namely self-defense. In essence, they view the Southern Cause as containing two distinct moral elements: the morality of secession and the morality of war. They presume that the wickedness of the first would in no way taint the justice of the second, since they view the two as morally distinct. For libertarians who agree with Rothbard that the war of defense against Northern aggression was just, the morality of secession still remains contested.

In his article, “A Moral Accounting of the Union and the Confederacy,” Donald Livingston argues that secession was morally sound. He begins by establishing the foundations of his moral premise, namely, the right to secede:

Libertarians are and must be sympathetic to secession, for secession is nothing other than an exit right, a right internal to the very idea of liberty. Secession is not always justified, but, for libertarians, it is presumed morally justified unless compelling reasons to the contrary exist.

The question that must then arise is how secession could be morally sound if the aim of secession was to defend slavery. In Livingston’s view, the claim that secession was motivated by a desire to defend slavery is not based on historical analysis but on the mythology surrounding the righteousness of Lincoln’s War. He calls this the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” myth:

First, the founding myth of American nationalism is that the South seceded to protect slavery while the North invaded to abolish it. The vast resources available to the central government and its cultural elites have been used to drum this “Battle Hymn of the Republic” myth into the public consciousness for over a century. This myth, however, is false.

As we are here concerned with a moral defense of secession, it is significant to note that Livingston’s defense of the morality of secession does not depend on denying the immorality of slavery. It is often supposed that those who insist that the South seceded for liberty and independence must necessarily hold the view that slavery is moral. The perennial retort of those who insist that secession was about slavery is: “Liberty to do what? Independence to do what?” Their argument is that any claim to value liberty must be rejected if the person who seeks to defend his liberty is wicked and immoral, or seeks to use his liberty for wicked and immoral purposes. Livingston observes that the same accusation was made against the American revolutionaries, as slavery was legal in all colonies at the time:

One is reminded of Dr. Johnson’s irritation at the American colonists who threatened secession from Britain: he wondered why he had to hear constant yelps about liberty from the drivers of slaves. It is impossible not to feel the force of this argument, and we must acknowledge that slavery was a moral stain on the seceding American colonies, all of which allowed slavery in 1776, as well as on the seceding Southern states, all of which allowed slavery in 1861.

Livingston is highlighting the tendency to forget that slavery was legal in the American colonies when they seceded from the British Crown. Moreover, since there was an abolitionist movement well underway in the British Empire at the time—with slavery in the English common law having been ruled to be illegal by the Somerset case in 1772—it is noteworthy that rarely, if ever, do abolitionists argue that the American Revolution was “about slavery” or caused by a desire “to defend slavery.” Be that as it may, Livingston’s main point is not merely to highlight this hypocrisy, but to make the moral case for secession. Addressing the “yelps about liberty from the drivers of slaves” leveled against the American revolutionaries, he argues that “slavery is not the only moral wrong in the world, and its presence does not make other actions automatically immoral, nor opposing actions automatically moral.” People have no trouble understanding this point in the context of the American Revolution—the presence of slavery in the American colonies does not make the American Declaration of Independence immoral, as some activists peddling the “original sin” theory of American Independence have tried to claim. Indeed, this is the very parallel Murray Rothbard draws in his comment on secession in his “Just War” article.

Livingston, therefore, argues that the desire for liberty and independence does not become “immoral” merely because slavery was legal at the time. However, a further point still remains to be addressed, namely, whether the aim of secession was specifically to defend slavery. Those who run this argument claim that Southerners themselves said they were seceding to defend slavery. They rely on the mention of slavery in the secession declarations of South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas. They also rely on remarks made by Alexander Stephens, the Confederate Vice President, at an event in Georgia after secession but before the war, where he outlined the reasons why the Southern states had seceded and formed the Confederate Government. It is striking that the entire case for declaring that secession was “about slavery” relies almost entirely on these sources and often treats them as conclusive regarding the cause of secession. As they see it, there is no need to study any further historical context, because the secession declarations of these four states have settled the issue once and for all. As Rod Barr observes:

Often I hear that the primary sources I quote in defense of Southern secession are “cherry picked” or “out of context.” Those making these charges will then point to the four Declarations of Causes or The Cornerstone Speech as proof of my lack of context.

Curiously, the secession declarations of the states that did not mention slavery are deemed to be irrelevant. Nor is Alexander Stephens’s full speech deemed to be of any interest—except for the passage where he mentions that racial inequality is the “cornerstone” of the constitution. Yet, as Livingstone points out, Stephens’s views on racial inequality were no more significant than anything else he said in his speech. Livingston explains that these views on racial inequality were widespread at the time:

Nearly all Americans, North and South, saw America as a white European polity, and held that neither Indian nor African populations would ever participate as social and political equals…. As long as it was humane, slavery was considered a reasonable and productive arrangement for both blacks and whites. Thus, the tolerance of slavery can be viewed as the practical outcome of a white Euro-centric mindset.

This being the widespread view, which was also expressed on several occasions by Abraham Lincoln, it would make little sense for the South to secede specifically to defend that view. Livingston further points out that there was no threat to slavery in the Union, as Abraham Lincoln had repeatedly said that he did not intend to abolish slavery and indeed had no legal power to do so. Those who insist that secession was “obviously” about defending slavery rely on an alleged hypothetical threat that the South is said to have feared—the suggestion being that even though there was no threat to slavery yet, they may have been afraid that such a threat might hypothetically arise in future and may therefore have decided to quit while they were ahead. As David Gordon writes, such fears would have been fanciful at the time given Lincoln’s distinct lack of interest in threatening slavery:

The evidence that Lincoln did not invade the South to end slavery is well known, and I shall not rehearse it here. Suffice it to say that he sponsored the 1861 Corwin Amendment, which would have permanently guaranteed slavery in the states where it existed. Consider this alongside his first inaugural address, which above all emphasized the collection of duties and imposts.

The slave states and free states were certainly embroiled in political controversy over the legality of slavery in the Western territories. In his Volker Fund memo, Rothbard observes that, “The basic root of the controversy over slavery to secession, in my opinion, was the aggressive, expansionist aims of the Southern ‘slavocracy’” in an attempt “to foist the immoral system of slavery on Western territories.” But there is a significant difference between political machinations aimed at “foisting” slavery onto the Western territories, and the subsequent decision to secede. Logically, if the South had decided to secede in a fit of pique because they did not get their way in attempting to “foist” slavery on the West, how would seceding assist the “slavocracy” in achieving this goal they are said to have cherished? Seceding could not be a way of “foisting” slavery on the free territories. Seceding would accomplish the very opposite, because they had exited from the Union—slavery would be gone from all American territories. Rothbard indeed, echoing the abolitionists at the time, remarks that the Southern states should have been left to secede in peace as that would have been the end of slavery in the United States.

It is obvious that while the “slavocracy” may perhaps have dreamed of “foisting” slavery on the Western territories, seceding from the United States would in no way help them achieve this goal. The “slavocracy” did not even have a numerical majority in the conventions held to decide the question of secession. They would easily have been outvoted by citizens of the South who did not own slaves nor have any business or any other interests in the Western territories. The majority of Southerners, many of whom had fought to defend the Union in previous wars, would not leave the Union simply because the “slavocrats” had business interests out West that depended on slavery—not least being that it would help to maintain the political balance of power between the free states and slave states. Their political controversies over control of the Western territories, which Rothbard describes as “slavery-in-the-territories struggles of the 1850s,” were not controversies over whether to secede, and they do not supply the explanation for why they seceded in 1860-1861. Indeed, in his subsequent robust defense of the Southern Cause, Rothbard makes no mention of the political “slavery-in-the-territories struggles of the 1850s” when he explains why the South seceded:

In 1861, the Southern states, believing correctly that their cherished institutions were under grave threat and assault from the federal government, decided to exercise their natural, contractual, and constitutional right to withdraw, to “secede” from that Union. The separate Southern states then exercised their contractual right as sovereign republics to come together in another confederation, the Confederate States of America.

It is also worth noting that there was a vibrant abolitionist movement underway in the South, especially in Virginia where attempts had already twice been made to abolish slavery. Seceding could not reasonably have been seen by the “slavocracy” as a way of defending slavery given these conditions. They would be just as vulnerable to the growing abolitionist movement after secession as they were before, if not more so. Thomas Jefferson was known to have been sympathetic to abolition. Robert E. Lee had declared slavery to be a political and moral evil. Like John C. Calhoun—who was also a slave owner—the Confederate leaders who expressed opposition to abolition were concerned more with the practical challenges posed by the abolitionists trying to foment violent revolution, than with a defense of slavery as an institution. The “slavocracy” could have had no reason to suppose that they would be able to cling onto slavery forever. Livingston explains:

Calhoun [in 1837] carefully separated the question of slavery “in the abstract,” as Southerners called it, from slavery as a practical question. He tried to make clear that his point was only about the latter, and that under the institution, the African population had made remarkable progress and was capable of further improvements. He called the institution an “experiment,” which should be given a period of time, and he put no limit on the improvements of which Africans were capable.

As James Rutledge Roesch explains, far from seeing the dispute over slavery as a reason for secession, Calhoun tried to highlight that if the dispute was not resolved the hatred raised against the South would lead to disunion:

“However sound the great body of the non-slaveholding States are at present, in the course of a few years they will be succeeded by those who will have been taught to hate the people and institutions of nearly one half of the Union, with a hatred more deadly than one hostile nation ever entertained toward another,” warned Calhoun. “It is easy to see the end. By the necessary course of events…we must become, finally, two peoples.”

Rather than theorize about the hypothetical pre-emptive action the “slavocrats” may have wished to take, the historian Charles Adams has taken a different approach. In his review of Adams’s book When in the Course of Human Events, David Gordon highlights the role played by “financial affairs” in Adams’s account of the causes of both secession and war:

The Southern states favored a regime of free trade: this would enable them to benefit to the greatest extent possible from their cotton exports. By contrast, many in the North favored high tariffs to help local industries.

Because of high tariffs, the South was burdened to benefit the North, a situation hardly likely to promote amicable relations.

The significance of Adams’s emphasis on the financial causes of secession is that it opens up avenues for fresh insights into this important historical era, and a clear view that is not submerged in moralizing about slavery. Gordon quotes the explanation given by Adams as to why the stakes concerning tariffs were so high as to lead the South to secede and the North to attack:

Lincoln was determined, come what may, to collect tariffs from the ports of the seceding states. “Lincoln’s inaugural address on 4 March 1861, certainly set the stage for war, and most of the South saw it that way. It sounded conciliatory . . . [but] he would, however, use federal power to hold federal property (the forts) and ‘to collect the duties and impost; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion.’ Southerners immediately saw the meaning behind Lincoln’s words”… The arguments in favor of the “tariff war” thesis were well-known to contemporaries, both in America and abroad.

Adams casts much-needed light on the fuller picture that risks being lost when the history police insist that secession must obviously have been “about slavery.” Livingston points out that this insistence that the South seceded to defend slavery was certainly not the prevailing view at the time. For example, before secession Lincoln did not see the concerns of the South as being “about slavery”:

Unlike contemporary Americans who have inherited the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” view of a demonic South and virtuous North, Lincoln understood slavery as a national evil inherited from British colonial practice… Lincoln acknowledged the common moral understanding of Northerners and Southerners on the question of slavery. On August 21, 1858, he said, “Before proceeding, let me say I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up. This I believe of the masses of the north and south. . . . When southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact.”

Finally, the best people to ask why they seceded are those who seceded. Jefferson Davis, in his book, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, answers that question by explaining the Southern Cause as Southerners saw it:

When the cause was lost, what cause was it? Not that of the South only, but the cause of constitutional government, of the supremacy of law, of the natural rights of man.

The post The Southern Cause: What Led to Secession appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Mises Institute Revisionist History of War Conference

On May 15-17, the libertarian Mises Institute hosted a “Revisionist History of War Conference” at its Auburn headquarters.

I was one of sixteen speakers invited to make a presentation, with my topic being “The True History of World War II.” I thought my thirty-five minute talk went well, and the audio version is now available:

Video Link

So although the mainstream media continues to stubbornly promote a very distorted view of the facts, anyone who seeks to get the other side of the Ukraine war story from highly-regarded individuals can easily do so.

But suppose these powerful video platforms did not exist, nor their social media distribution channels, nor any other elements of today’s Internet.

Under those conditions, Mearsheimer, Sachs, McGovern, and all these other highly-credentialed experts might still hold exactly the same contrary views of our conflict with Russia, but would anyone have ever heard about them? Mearsheimer’s 2014 lecture would have only been seen by its original audience of several hundred, and when the war broke out eight years later, perhaps a few of them might have dimly remembered his arguments, rather than the thirty million who then discovered his presentation and watched it in 2022. After Carlson was fired by FoxNews, he would have disappeared almost without a trace, never attracting the many millions of viewers who have continued to watch him on the Internet.

Furthermore, suppose that the Western conflict with Russia had ultimately been entirely successful, with military reverses or economic devastation eventually leading to the collapse of the Russian government. If Putin and his entire political circle had been overthrown, then killed or driven into exile, while his country was subdued and firmly brought into the American orbit, would anyone have much questioned the exact circumstances under which the war began?

I think these thoughts should be firmly kept in mind as we begin exploring the history of the Second World War, a conflict whose standard historical narrative all of us have absorbed throughout our entire lives from every mainstream media source.

The Origins of World War II According to A.J.P. Taylor

There exist countless starting points for those who seek to discover the true history of World War II. But I think that one of the best of these comes in a relatively short book published in 1961 by A.J.P. Taylor, a renowned Oxford historian.

As a Harvard freshman, I had taken an introductory history course, and one of the primary required texts on World War II had been Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War. In that book, he persuasively laid out a case for how the conflict began that was radically different from what I had always been told in all my media accounts. That sharp difference was true at the time and it has remained so during the decades since then.

As most of us know from our standard history books, the flashpoint of the conflict had been Germany’s demand for the return of Danzig. But that border city under Polish control had a 95% German population, which overwhelmingly desired reunification with its traditional homeland after twenty years of enforced separation following the end of the First World War. According to Taylor only a dreadful diplomatic blunder by the British had led the Poles to refuse that reasonable request, thereby provoking the war. The widespread later claim that Hitler sought to conquer the world was totally absurd, and instead the German leader had actually made every effort to avoid war with Britain or France.

The 80th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II naturally prompted numerous historical discussions in the media, and these led me to dig out my old copy of Taylor’s short volume, which I reread for the first time in nearly forty years.

I found it just as masterful and persuasive as I had back in my college dorm room days, and the glowing cover-blurbs suggested some of the immediate acclaim the work had received. The Washington Post lauded the author as “Britain’s most prominent living historian,” World Politics called it “Powerfully argued, brilliantly written, and always persuasive,” The New Statesman, Britain leading leftist magazine, described it as “A masterpiece: lucid, compassionate, beautifully written,” and the august Times Literary Supplement characterized it as “simple, devastating, superlatively readable, and deeply disturbing.” As an international best-seller, it surely ranked as Taylor’s most famous work, and I could easily understand why it was still on my required college reading list nearly two decades after its original publication.

Yet in revisiting Taylor’s ground-breaking history, I made a surprising discovery. Despite all the international sales and critical praise, the book’s findings soon aroused tremendous hostility in certain quarters. Taylor’s lectures at Oxford had been enormously popular for a quarter century, but as a direct result of the controversy “Britain’s most prominent living historian” was summarily purged from the faculty not long afterwards. At the beginning of his first chapter, Taylor had noted how strange he found it that more than twenty years after the start of the world’s most cataclysmic war no serious history had been produced carefully analyzing the outbreak. Perhaps the retaliation that he encountered led him to better understand part of that puzzle.

Despite the intense mainstream hostility to any such candid account of the origins of the world war, others have occasionally undertaken that same project, and sometimes with considerable difficulty they have managed to get their books into print.

Decades after Taylor’s pioneering volume, an outstanding historical analysis reaching very similar conclusions was published in German by Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof, who had spent his career as a fully mainstream professional military man, rising to the rank of major general in the German army before retiring. A couple of years ago I finally read the English translation of 1939 – The War That Had Many Fathers, which appeared in 2011, released exactly a half-century after Taylor’s seminal work.

The author considerably extended Taylor’s analysis, with his 700 pages describing in great detail the enormous efforts that Hitler had taken to avoid war and settle that boundary dispute, even spending many months on fruitless negotiations and offering extremely reasonable terms. Indeed, the German dictator had made numerous concessions to Poland that none of his democratic Weimar predecessors had ever been willing to consider. But these proposals were all rejected, while Polish provocations escalated, including violent attacks on their own country’s sizeable German minority population, until war seemed the only possible option.

The historical account presented in both these major works suggested eerie echoes of the factors behind Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Then as now, politically influential elements in the West seemed quite eager to provoke the war, using Danzig as the spark to ignite the conflict much like the simmering bloodshed in the Donbass had been used to force Putin’s hand.

Read the Whole Article

The post The True History of World War II appeared first on LewRockwell.

Days before negotiations towards an and of the conflict the operational tempo of the war in Ukraine has increased.

During the last week of May the Russian forces took 18 settlements and over 200 square kilometer. During the last 24 hours at least another 3 settlements have changed hands. The Ukrainian army is no longer capable to hold its defense lines. Its situation is deteriorating day by day.

On Saturday a Russian missile attack hit a Ukrainian military training camp. It killed or wounded about 100 soldiers. It was the second time the camp had been hit. Other agglomerations of Ukrainian forces had previously experienced the same fate. Still, Ukrainian forces beyond the frontline keep bunching up to become targets of long range weapons.

Taking responsibility for the repeated mistakes the commander of the Ukrainian ground forces resigned:

Commander of the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Mykhailo Drapatyi, has submitted his resignation over the tragedy at the 239th Training Range Center, where a Russian strike killed soldiers from a training battalion.

The loss is significant:

[Drapatyi] is considered one of the most skilled commanders in the Ukrainian Armed Forces and was a leading candidate to become the future Commander-in-Chief, expected to succeed Syrskyi.

On Saturday/Sunday Ukrainian diversion groups used explosives to destroy two Russian railroad bridges in the Kursk and Bryansk region. These bridges were located some 50 kilometer north of the Sumy region frontline. The hits will impact, if only for a short time, the railway bound supply of Russian forces north of Sumy.

One of the bridge explosions destroyed a civil passenger train. Some 10 people were killed and some 100 were wounded. This was likely intended and thereby a terror attack.

On Sunday morning a large scale operation by the Ukrainian secret service managed to attack multiple strategic airfields throughout Russia. Ukrainian sources claimed attacks on five airfields and the destruction of more than 40 strategic bombers.

Current damage assessment confirms attacks on two airfields and the destruction or damaging of up to 10 bombers.

The attack allegedly used 120 remotely controlled drones launched from civil trucks positioned near those airfields. Ukrainian sources claim that the operation took 18 month to prepare. It seems that the Russian mobile telephone network was used to remotely control the drones. It will be thereby relatively easy to prevent another attack of this kind by blocking the relevant traffic through these channels.

While the attack is of high propaganda value it will have no favorable impact on the Ukrainian position on the battle field. It will rather entice the Russian forces to hit harder, mostly likely by long range attacks against Ukrainian decision centers.

The U.S. claims to not have been informed about the attack on strategic (nuclear) Russian assets. The claim is not plausible. As former CIA agent Larry Johnson asserts:

In my opinion, none of these attacks could have been planned and executed without assistance, if not the direct involvement, of Western intelligence and NATO officers. The drones likely were activated by a remote signal made possible by Western satellites and/or systems like Starlink. Those systems also played a critical role in enabling the drones to navigate to the targeted airfields.

On Sunday eve the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov initiated a phone call with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The content of the call has not been published.

Also on Sunday the Russian forces launched about 500 long range drones against targets in Ukraine. On Monday morning some 100 drones were launched by Ukraine towards Moscow.  Damage assessments of these attacks are not yet available.

The escalation of the war beyond the immediate battlefield came on the eve of Ukrainian-Russian negotiations in Istanbul, Turkey.

Ukraine’s international position continues to deteriorate. Coming June 6 EU import privileges for Ukrainian products will end. The impact on the Ukraine economy will be serious. Yesterday Poland, Ukraine’s most supportive neighbor, elected a conservative president who is not in favor of Ukraine.

The Ukrainian side had likely hoped that its attack on strategic Russian airfields would entice Russia to delay or break-off the talks in Istanbul. They will however take place and continue.

Both sides are expected to exchange memoranda about their envisioned paths towards an end of the war.

I do expect the Russian side to deliver some kind of ultimatum.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Ukraine – Strategic Escalation Intended To Influence Talks appeared first on LewRockwell.

Do you hear those alarm bells ringing? Looks like June is bustin’ out all over, as the old Broadway ditty goes. Bedlam is in the air, and in more varieties than Heinz has pickles. Take your pick: civil war blooming in France and the UK, maybe even Germany — if it can shake off its psychotic stupor. World War III flutters over the continent like an answered prayer coming in for a landing. And here in the USA, genuine insurrection ripens with the summer’s peaches.

The Champs Elysees was a battlefield Saturday night as a soccer celebration went all Jihad, leaving two rioters dead and hundreds arrested (unreported inThe New York Times, of course, because. . . reasons). The two Alexanders at The Duran report that a plot is underway in London to deep-six (not eighty-six) Labour PM Sir Keir Starmer, who enjoys the lowest poll ratings in the history of British polling. Ol’ Keir likes to throw grannies in jail for rude Facebook posts while Islamic rape gangs do their thing and knife attacks multiply on the indigenous population. Not a good look. Perennial nationalist irritant Tommy Robinson was released from prison the other day, too, and you can expect fury arising around — and at him — as the sceptered isle day-by-day disappears under a burqa.

Starmer, Macron, new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, plus the unelected EU apparatus under Ursula von der Leyen all seem to be avid for war with Russia. They are insane, of course, and not just because their combined militaries are joke. They stirred the pot badly over the weekend, helping Ukraine carry out drone attacks against Russian air defense bases as far afield as Siberia and outside Murmansk, way up north on the Barents Sea. The bold attack was apparently carried out after a year-and-a-half of planning, using tractor-trailer trucks to transport concealed drones in on-board shipping containers deep into Russia. The drones took out Russian aircraft enabled to launch cruise missiles and long-range radar detection planes, all tolled estimated at $7-billion damage. The gambit would have required NATO satellite targeting assistance.

You might recall a week ago, Chancellor Merz declared that Germany gave Ukraine “permission” to carry out long-range strikes into Russia. Smooth move, Friedrich. He is, apparently, unaware that in so-doing he automatically gave Russia permission to strike deep into Germany as well, which Russia has not yet done. Instead, it replied with missile strikes against Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kyiv, little more than a routine smack-back, but perhaps an ominous prelude to worse in the offing.

You understand that things are escalating steeply now in this conflict. A lot high ranking officials in Russia have lost patience with Mr. Putin’s slow-moving, on-the-ground grind and refusal so far to inflict more serious damage on the Ukrainian capital, which he could turn into an ashtray on a half-hour’s notice, if required. You might suppose he has sought strategically to avoid the total destruction of this cousin-country so that it would not be a failed state in the aftermath of war. It would be to Russia’s advantage if Ukraine could function as a neutralized, sovereign, self-supporting buffer state rather than an ungovernable basket-case / money pit region harboring non-state terrorists of various stripes. The former outcome is surely still preferable to the latter, despite the most recent provocations.

All of this puts Mr. Trump in a bind. His efforts to negotiate peace are on-the-rocks for now, as is his (America’s) ability to control the maniac globalist warmongers of NATO. Many in the US, and Mr. Trump himself, make noises about backing off the big mess altogether and dissociating from a NATO alliance that has lost its purpose and meaning, becoming, in fact, a menace to our interests.

Against all this expanding havoc, peace talks are still scheduled for Istanbul today. Ukraine and Russia have both exchanged ceasefire proposals. Mr. Trump reportedly conferred with President Putin about it. The finalized memorandum said, “Russia is ready to work with Ukraine on a memorandum on a possible future peace treaty defining a number of positions.” Take-away? Russia wants to conclude this war. Mr. Trump wants to end it, too. Mr. Zelenskyy, maybe not so much, since his fate is only secure as long as the war keeps going and he is not overthrown by his own wing-men.

Neither the US nor the NATO / EU axis will participate in the Istanbul peace talks directly, but you can suppose that Merz, Macron, Starmer, and von der Leyen are looking to stir-the-pot in the background. You might conclude that war is all they’ve got left as summer draws near and each of them face a European population primed to explode at its feckless, noxious, incompetent leadership. I would expect much more fighting in the streets of the European capitals going forward, and falling governments. It could prove hard to put these Humpty-dumpties back together, with years of political chaos following.

Things are heating up in the USA, too, as an Egyptian national torched a crowd of pro-Israel marchers with a home-made flamethrower in Boulder, Colorado, on Sunday, while “Trans-tifa,” as it styled itself, went to work on Christians assembled in a Seattle park last week. The Democratic Party — like the EU’s warmonger parties — has nothing left but violence against anything that looks like nationalism and traditional values. It’s so bad, and Democratic leadership is so demented, that they are liable to turn Donald Trump into another Abe Lincoln.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post The Widening Gyre appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tonight will be fateful for the conflict’s future.

Ukraine carried out strategic drone strikes on Sunday against several bases all across Russia that are known to house elements of its nuclear triad. This came a day before the second round of the newly resumed Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul and less than a week after Trump warned Putin that “bad things..REALLY BAD” might soon happen to Russia. It therefore can’t be ruled out that he knew about this and might have even discreetly signaled his approval in order to “force Russia into peace”.

Of course, it’s also possible that he was bluffing and the Biden-era CIA helped orchestrate this attack in advance without him every finding out so that Ukraine could either sabotage peace talks if he won and pressured Zelensky into them or coerce maximum concessions from Russia, but his ominous words still look bad. Whatever the extent of Trump’s knowledge may or may not be, Putin might once again climb the escalation ladder by dropping more Oreshniks on Ukraine, which could risk a rupture in their ties.

Seeing as how Trump is being left in the dark about the conflict by his closest advisors (not counting Witkoff) as proven by him misportraying Russia’s retaliatory strikes against Ukraine over the past week as unprovoked, he might react the same way to Russia’s inevitable retaliation. His ally Lindsay Graham already prepared legislation for imposing 500% tariffs on all Russian energy clients, which Trump might approve in response, and this could pair with ramping up armed aid to Ukraine in a major escalation.

Everything therefore depends on the form of Russia’s retaliation; the US’ response; and – if they’re not canceled as a result – the outcome of tomorrow’s talks in Istanbul. If the first two phases of this scenario sequence don’t spiral out of control, then it’ll all depend on whether Ukraine makes concessions to Russia after its retaliation; Russia makes concessions to Ukraine after the US’ response to Russia’s retaliation; or their talks are once again inconclusive. The first is by far the best outcome for Russia.

The second would suggest that Ukraine’s strategic drone strikes on Russia’s nuclear triad and the US’ response to its retaliation pressured Putin to compromise on his stated goals. These are Ukraine’s withdrawal from the entirety of the disputed regions, its demilitarization, denazification, and restoring its constitutional neutrality. Freezing the Line of Contact (LOC), even perhaps in exchange for some US sanctions relief and a resource-centric strategic partnership with it, could cede Russia’s strategic edge.

Not only might Ukraine rearm and reposition ahead of reinitiating hostilities on comparatively better terms, but uniformed Western troops might also flood into Ukraine, where they could then function as tripwires for manipulating Trump into “escalating to de-escalate” if they’re attacked by Russia. As for the third possibility, inconclusive talks, Trump might soon lose patience with Russia and thus “escalate to de-escalate” anyhow. He could always just walk away, however, but his recent posts suggest that he won’t.

Overall, Ukraine’s unprecedented provocation will escalate the conflict, but it’s unclear what will follow Russia’s inevitable retaliation. Russia will either coerce the concessions from Ukraine that Putin demands for peace; the US’ response to its retaliation will coerce concessions from Russia to Ukraine instead; or both will remain manageable and tomorrow’s talks will be inconclusive, thus likely only delaying the US’ seemingly inevitable escalated involvement. Tonight will therefore be fateful for the conflict’s future.

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

The post Will Russia’s Retaliation To Ukraine’s Strategic Drone Strikes Decisively End The Conflict? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Japanese company Nippon Steel’s plan to purchase US Steel was bound to provoke a strong reaction from left- and right-wing economic nationalists. After all, US Steel was once the world’s largest company, and it was the first company to be valued at over a billion dollars. US Steel was thus a symbol of America’s economic dominance. So it was not surprising that Nippon Steel’s purchase of US Steel was blocked by both the Biden and Trump administrations. This was disappointing — especially since Nippon Steel planned to invest billions in modernizing US Steel’s facilities.

Last week, President Trump praised the deal with some added conditions. One major condition is that the US government will receive a “golden share” in US Steel. This will enable the government to overrule any business decision made by the company’s management if the government determines the business decision threatens “national security.” This power could be used to prevent US Steel from exporting steel to certain countries, as well as to require US Steel to prioritize production for the military and other government agencies. It could also be used to interfere with labor-management relations based on the idea that a labor dispute can disrupt production and thus harm national security. In fact, there is almost no decision US Steel’s management could make that cannot be labeled as involving “national security.”

Supporters of the “golden share” have forgotten (or never learned) the lessons from the failures of allowing politicians and bureaucrats to run private businesses. When government takes a full or partial ownership interest in a business, the result is decisions made based on political considerations rather than on seeking to improve the company’s productivity and profits. This causes the company to lose money, resulting in laid off workers unless the government tries to cover up failures with subsidies. It also distorts the signals sent to other market actors via the price system because the government-run company is allocating resources based on considerations other than their most efficient use.

This is not the only case where the Trump administration is harming the economy by interfering with businesses. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government sponsored enterprises created to support the housing market, may soon go public. President Trump has stated that the government would nonetheless continue to guarantee Fannie and Freddie backed mortgage loans. This will cause over-investment in housing as investors see only an upside from investing in Fannie and Freddie since the government will bail out Fannie and Freddie if they lose money while investors will keep the profits. The result will be a housing bubble, followed by a housing crash that may be worse than the one Fannie and Freddie — along with the Federal Reserve — helped cause in 2008. Once again, President Trump and his advisors have failed to learn from history.

Government involvement with businesses may be promoted as intended to protect national security, or to protect “great American companies” from being taken over by foreign companies, or to make the American dream of homeownership possible for every American, or to accomplish a myriad of other goals that may sound good in sound bites on the campaign trail. However, the result will be economic stagnation, recessions, or even depressions. To ensure a strong economy, government can get out of the way. A policy of limited government, free markets, free trade, peace, and sound money is the path to prosperity.

The post A Golden Share Will Not Make America Great Again appeared first on LewRockwell.

Should China succeed, the U.S. would lose its ‘magic weapon’ of monetary dominance.

“I believe we must start from the notion of defeat leading to revolution – to grasp the Trump revolution”. 

“The experience underway in the United States, even if we don’t know exactly what it will be, is revolution. Is it a revolution in the strict sense? Is it a counter-revolution?” 

So spoke the French historian and philosopher Emmanuel Todd in his April Moscow lecture, From Russia With Love.

“This [Trump revolution] is, in my opinion, linked to defeat. Various people have reported to me conversations between members of the Trump team, and what is striking is their awareness of defeat. People like J.D. Vance, the Vice President, and many others, are people who understood that America had lost this war”.

This American awareness of defeat, however, contrasts markedly with the Europeans’ surprising lack of awareness – rather it is denial – at their defeat:

“For the United States, it is fundamentally an economic defeat. The sanctions policy showed that the financial power of the West was not omnipotent. The Americans were reminded of the fragility of their military industry. The people at the Pentagon know very well that one of the limits to their action is the limited capacity of the American military-industrial complex”.

“That America is in the midst of a serious revolution, right now – easily comparable to the end of the USSR – is understood by a few”. Yet our preconceptions – political and intellectual – often prevent us from seeing and assimilating the import of this reality”.

Todd, to his credit, admits the difficulty with perception readily:

“I must admit that when the Soviet system actually collapsed, I was unable to foresee the extent of the dislocation and the level of suffering this dislocation would cause for Russia. My experience taught me one important thing: The collapse of a system is as much mental as economic ... I didn’t understand that communism was not only an economic organization but also a belief system, a quasi-religion, that structured Soviet and Russian social life. The dislocation of belief would lead to psychological disorganization far beyond economic disorganization. We are reaching a situation of this type in the West today”.

The psychological dislocation caused by ‘defeat’ may explain (but not justify) the West’s ‘curious’ inability to understand world events: The almost pathological dissociation from the real world that it displays in its words and actions: It’s blindness – for example, to the Russian experience of history and to the long history behind Shi’a defiance in Iran. Yet, even as the political situation deteriorates … there is no sign of the West becoming more reality-based in its understanding – and it is very likely that it will continue to live in its alternative construction of reality – until it is forcibly expelled.

Yanis Varoufakis has pointed out that the reality of the prospect of U.S. economic ‘defeat’ was clearly spelled out by Paul Volcker, former chair of the Federal Reserve, when he said that what holds the entire globalist system together had been the massive flow of capital from abroad – running to more than $2 billion every working day – that sustained America’s comfortable, low inflationary lifestyle.

Today, with the U.S. in an era of unsustainable structural budget deficits, Trump is laser-focused on America’s financial core: The Treasury bond market (America’s lifeline) and the stock market (America’s wallet). Both are fragile. And any external pressure could trigger a chain reaction:

“In short, America is no longer confident in its own financial fortress. And China is no longer playing by the old rules. This isn’t just a trade war — it’s a war for the future of global finance”, Varoufakis states. Which is why Trump threatens war on anyone seeking to supplant or bypass the U.S. dollar trading monopoly.

Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs” therefore were never about balancing trade. What they amount to is an attempt to restructure creditors. “It’s what you do in bankruptcy”, as one commentator wryly notes. The demands for greater contributions from NATO states is precisely an exercise in demanding creditor revenue – as was Trump’s Gulf trip).

The purpose of the New Cold War primordially consists in choking off China’s rise. This aim effectively represents common ground amongst all factions of the Establishment – protecting the dollar system from collapse.

The notion of the U.S. recovering its former position as a world-class manufacturing centre is largely a diversional narrative crafted for domestic purposes. In 1950, the U.S. manufacturing labour force made up 33.7 percent of the domestic economy – a figure that has dwindled to less than 8.4 percent today. To revert would take a generational shift.

So, aside from the China consensus, the Ruling Strata is split – with the likes of JD Vance, and the economic team of Stephen Miran and Russel Vought, concerned more by the risk of U.S. overreach undermining the dollar primacy, whilst the hawks advocate reinforcing the dollar hegemony, with clear demonstrative ‘shows’ of U.S. military muscle.

The re-structuring of creditors underpins too Trump’s hurry to do a ‘deal’ with Russia – one that could bring quick business opportunities and positive capital flows (and collateral) onto the U.S.’ capital account. A deal with Iran potentially could even yield Trump’s apotheosis of U.S. energy dominance, resulting in new revenue inflows that would buttress confidence in the dollar.

In short, Trump’s agenda is not long-term strategic. It is the short-term corralling of aggregate demand for the dollar as the only currency which people demand, albeit even though they do not want to buy anything from the country creating the dollars.

The crucial flaw is that Trump’s crude transactionalism is shredding his credibility as a serious geo-political actor and consequently compelling others to hedge against the dollar.

In short, the collapse in credibility caused by Trump’s disdain for reading; for intel briefings; and his reliance on the he or she who last whispered in his ear, lends to policy flip-flops, and a general desire for others to disengage as far as possible from the unpredictable Trumpland.

Emmanuel Todd warns that the classic response to a collapse in the belief system and the particular psyche that has animated the economic paradigm “is anxiety – rather than any state of freedom and well-being. The beliefs that accompanied Western triumphalism are collapsing. But as in any revolutionary process, we do not yet know which new belief is the most important, which belief will emerge victorious from the process of decomposition”.

Revolutions though they generally destroy, their focus is to harness the energies sufficient to eradicate the institutions that were too rigid to integrate into the demand for change that provoked the revolution in the first place.

In this context, the pursuit of a New Cold War against China precisely is centred around U.S. anxiety (as Todd maintains) – primarily the fear that China’s building of a digital ‘super highway’ for money will prove to be much more advanced than the rickety road that is the American dollar road.

Today that super-wide highway may not be so widely used. That’s now. But already there is a migration from the old road to the Chinese Super highway, as Varoufakis underlines to the Chinese.

For the American Establishment, the Chinese ‘super-highway’ constitutes a ‘clear and present’ danger to its hegemony. The anxiety is not really about Chinese intellectual property or ‘IP theft’. It is the fear that the U.S. cannot keep up with the new financial ecosystems being constructed by China, or the sophistication of the digital yuan.

This anxiety is aggravated – not least – because the Fintech overlords of Silicon Valley are at daggers drawn with the big Wall Street clearing banks (who want to preserve their antiquated systems). China has the advantage here, as its financial and tech sectors are fused, as one.

The fear is plain: Should China succeed, the U.S. would lose its ‘magic weapon’ of monetary dominance:

“And here is the ‘revolution’: No fireworks, no Western headlines. Just one quiet early morning in Beijing where the dollar’s crown slipped. The world’s financial plumbing just got a reroute—through the China [super highway]” 

“For the first time ever, China’s CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payment System) surpassed SWIFT in single-day transaction volume. A red banner flashed across Bank of China’s HQ at 1:30AM on April 16, 2025”.

“CIPS [as Zerohedge tells it] processed a jaw-dropping ¥12.8 trillion RMB in just one day—roughly $1.76 trillion USD. That volume, if verified, overtakes the greenback-dominated SWIFT system in sheer daily cross-border throughput”.

Yes – It’s all about money.

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

The post ‘One Quiet Early Morning in Beijing, the Dollar’s Crown Slipped’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Trump’s deal-making trip to the Middle East, more precisely at the US-Saudi Investment Forum in Riyadh in mid-May 2025, was a multi-purpose trip. First, Saudi Arabia signed a $142 billion arms deal with the US and pledged an additional $600 billion in American investments. That’s deal-making at its best.

Second, during his Saudi stay, Mr. Trump unexpectedly announced lifting all sanctions on Syria.

This is the first time in close to 50 years that Washington leaves Syria free of sanctions. US sanctions in Syria began in 1979. It looks like a monumental shift in US policy in the Middle East. A shift towards Middle East stability?

On the same occasion, President Trump shakes hand with Syria’s Interim President, Ahmad al-Sharaa, initiating one of the most “controversial” policy moves the US have made in the past decades.

Who is Syria’s Interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa?

Born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to a Syrian Sunni Muslim family from the Golan Heights, he grew up in Syria’s capital, Damascus. Al-Sharaa joined al-Qaeda in Iraq shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and fought for three years in the Iraqi insurgency.

So, Mr. Ahmad al-Sharaa, is an al-Qaeda fighter. Al-Qaeda was created by the US in 1988 in Peshawar, Pakistan. Al-Qaeda was founded as a pan-Islamist militant terrorist organization led by Sunni jihadists who self-identify as a vanguard spearheading a global Islamist revolution to unite the Muslim world under a supra-national Islamic caliphate. A later off-spring of al-Qaeda is ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria).

Syria’s current president, Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, was until recently regarded by the US as a senior figure in Al-Qaeda – with a $10 million bounty once placed on his head. No more. Friendship with Mr. Trump is overarching every previous accusation. Mr. al-Sharaa has promised to dismantle the IS (former ISIS) in Syria for better control.

Source: US Embassy Syria

Logically, Mr. Trump is friendly with one of their own (their – meaning the United Sates of America), who fought in Iraq as a counter-terrorist and started his career now in Syria in a similar fashion, but always at the behest of Washington.

What he has done for the US in Syria, making Syria a US friendly place, must be rewarded accordingly. Elimination of sanctions – which are against international law as well as against the Charter of the UN – is just a natural occurrence.

You may say that overall, this is a great move for stability in the Middle East. It allows the Saudis and Emirates to start rebuilding Syria, which was previously not allowed under the sanction regime.

For more details see this.

*

Is there maybe another yet unspoken agenda behind this sanction-lifting and sudden friendliness with Syria? If there is ground for a question there usually is a good reason.

Could it be that stability in the region, especially in Syria, is an asset for Zionist Israel’s plans of expansion towards Greater Israel?

When there is no more fighting, not internally nor against Syria’s neighbors, Israel must be happy. Israel’s way of infiltrating and gradually taking over Syria as a major junk of her Greater Israel dream (with enormous hydrocarbon resources), is made so much easier and without armed interference.

Because one thing is for sure, this Zionist plan of Greater Israel, supported by the US, is not going away and is part and parcel of the genocide in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. As long as the Saudis and Emirates rebuild Syria – it is cost-saving for Zionist Israel later, when they are fully in control of Syria.

Trump has been supporting Netanyahu with arms and is being increasingly criticized for it at home. So, the new strategy is a “diplomatic” support for an even faster expansion of Israel, by making Syria a “peaceful”, even friendly place for the US and friends of the US like Israel.

Just think about it.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post President Trump’s Plans for the Middle East – With Syria in Focus appeared first on LewRockwell.

Papal conclaves are a big deal. The one that elected Pope Leo XIV was only my third, as it was for everyone just shy of 50 years old. And, barring tragedy for either Pope Leo or myself, I only have maybe two or three more.

A papal conclave is the kind of major event a person only experiences a handful of times in their life. Such experiences take on a special significance in part because of the meaning of the event itself—but especially because of their rarity.

Hence the grand excitement over the election of Cardinal Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV. I confess, I have been caught up in it as well. The magnitude of the moment; the election of an American; the name—all of it felt historical, and it’s made being Catholic feel more fun than it has been since perhaps the last conclave.

But I’ve also looked askance at some of the celebrations within my own religion. It’s been a while since the last conclave, sure, but this one seemed a bit different somehow, in ways that often just felt weird.

For one, there was the immediate and gushing praise for the new pope before he even said a word. It’s what The Pillar called a Leonine honeymoon. As the lovely folks at The Pillar pointed out, it’s not a bad thing. Honeymoons are a natural and wholesome part of a budding relationship. A quick acceptance of our new leader, a rush of filial warmth for our new papa, and a curious desire to know the man under the tiara are all wonderful signs of the Holy Spirit within the faithful. And, to my mind, they are proper manifestations of such a “honeymoon” love in ecclesial life.

Nevertheless, I’ve perceived something off in these jubilations (even if only anecdotally). Warm joy is one thing. But many are celebrating how “providential” Leo’s election is—deeming him the man who is perfectly suited to lead us in this upcoming era—based only on the superficial factoids of our first glimpses of him. We take the fact that he’s American to mean he’ll be a good governor of the Vatican; or that he is a polyglot to show that he’ll unify a polarized Church; or even his choice of wardrobe to mean a departure from his predecessor.

Indeed, all these things are hopeful signs that Leo’s pontificate will progress in the direction that I, and many Catholics, think the Church needs to head at the moment. But these kinds of assertions seem shortsighted at this point in his reign. There seems to be a pent-up jubilation over whatever in Leo is different than Francis. He speaks different languages. He’s a different nationality. He wears different clothes. He’s not Francis—thanks be to God’s Providence!

But I can’t help but notice that Pope Leo hasn’t really done anything yet. Yes, there have been some early decisions that seem to make a statement about his intended future. But he has yet to make a really meaningful decree in his governance of the Church. And only after a body of such real work will we really be able to tell what “kind” of pontificate Leo will bring. We may find that he still is very much like Pope Francis.

Which is the other source of Pope Leo’s early praises. Just as many seem to be celebrating that our new pope isn’t Francis, many have already declared him to be in perfect continuity with his predecessor. Sure, he has worn silly red clothes and comported himself more toward the reverence of the office. But in substantial things, they say, he will be Pope Francis the second.

Both jubilations are grasping at straws. Pope Leo may depart from Francis; he may continue Francis; or he may forge a new, third path. I’m old enough to remember the election of Pope Francis and the predictions of his pontificate based only on his name and white cassock. Time proved some of them true and many of them false. There can be value in such predictions; but celebrating them as if they are guaranteed is a recipe for disappointment.

This leads to the other problematic path for those (like me) who are a bit more jaded. It’s a “wait and see” approach, which withholds the celebration or even full religious submission to the new pope until we know he’s in line with our preferences. Let’s see how his curial appointments shake up; what he does about Rupnik; what he does about the Germans. Then we can celebrate him as our new pope, or declare him to indeed be my pope.

But this is also wrongheaded. Leo XIV is the pope right now; and as such, he is owed all the things we owe the pope from day one. Those things don’t include frothing praise at decrees he has yet to give, but they do include respect, ready submission, and good-hearted gladness that the Church, once again, has a successor to Peter on the throne.

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