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Writes Caitlin Johnstone:

President Trump is reportedly returning to Washington early from a G7 summit in Canada and has told his national security council to prepare for an urgent meeting in the situation room, apparently to discuss Iran.

The US president has taken to social media to terrorize Iranian civilians, telling Tehran’s millions of inhabitants that they must immediately evacuate the city and saying “Iran should have signed the ‘deal’ I told them to sign.”

Weirdly, the strongest indication that Trump has made a decision to attack Iran might be a recent post on Truth Social about former Fox News darling Tucker Carlson.

“Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that,” IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!” the president posted.

Carlson has been an outspoken critic of warmongering toward Iran, and was reportedly responsible for personally talking the president out of his Iran brinkmanship in the first Trump administration.

Antiwar’s Scott Horton is reporting that, according to his sources, the Trump administration has already decided to join in Israel’s war.

Capitol Hill is clearly worried that a war with Iran is imminent, with numerous lawmakers in the House and the Senate scrambling to get legislation in place that would stop the president from ordering such a war.

Benjamin Netanyahu has been speaking to the western press to argue in favor of assassinating Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. I keep thinking about the Mad King in Game of Thrones who went nuts and kept ordering everyone to be burned, until a member of his own court decided enough is enough and slit his throat.

A full-scale US war against Iran is one of the worst things that could possibly happen. Full stop. It would likely entail millions of deaths, massive worldwide economic suffering, chaos and devastation throughout the middle east unlike anything we’ve ever seen, and could easily wind up with an Israeli nuclear weapon exploding in Tehran. There is a reason even a lot of otherwise war-happy swamp monsters in Washington have resisted going down this path. I really, really hope it doesn’t happen.

If this is the direction the empire chooses to go, expect mass-scale psychological manipulation on an entirely unprecedented level to dupe the public into going along with this thing. Expect far more lies. Expect far more propaganda. Expect psyops. Maybe a false flag attack or two. It will be bad.

Don’t buy into the lies. Oppose their warmongering at the top of your lungs, with everything you’ve got. I will be doing the same.

Anyone who supports this war is an enemy of the human species.

The post Don’t buy into the lies appeared first on LewRockwell.

Bill Madden wrote:

As President Trump and many of our elected representatives would say: “America First – right behind Israel.”

See here.

The post America First appeared first on LewRockwell.

Rick Rozoff wrote:

My comment beneath the Candace Owens video:

American officials and their Israeli ventriloquists earlier accused Iraq, Libya and Syria of conspiring to develop ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ and now the three nations, all the homes of ancient and venerable civilizations, to all intents no longer exist. Now for a nation that has inherited a 3,000-year-old civilization and has a population of 90 million, more than the first three countries combined.

The post Candace Owens’ J’accuse appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin.

The post Major Breaking: Something Very, Very Bad Is Happening appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Antiwar.com

The post Israeli Official Says War With Iran Is ‘Premised’ on the Idea of the US Entering appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

InfoWars

The post Watch: Tucker Carlson OBLITERATE Senator Ted Cruz Over Iran Warmongering appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm

Daily Wire

The post Tulsi Gabbard Joins Trump In Situation Room Amid Reports Of Rift With President appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

“The evangelical community helped deliver the White House to President Donald Trump and, therefore, believes his administration should support Israel’s biblical rights to its historical heartland of Judea and Samaria, Dr. Mike Evans, founder of Friends of Zion, told Fox News Digital.

“We hold strongly to that stand. President Trump won because of the Evangelical vote. There are 52 million of us in America, and we are Bible believers,” he continued. “Jesus said, ‘You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria,'” he said. His organization claims nearly 30 million members.” LRC Political Theater

…

Hi Lew,

Oh, this “doctor” Mike Evans is a piece of work. “52 million Bible believers”, I hope it’s a bit higher than that. 30 million members claimed by Evans in his group of Zionist supporters. That is depressing if true.

The quote Evans cites is Jesus saying that witnesses in Jerusalem, etc., who saw his crucifixion (torture and murder) and Resurrection should testify to the Truth. It doesn’t mean that today’s Christians should defend Zionists running the Levant. Evans is insane, but no doubt very rich.

The post “Doctor” Mike Evans and the Evangelicals appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Antiwar.com

The post Germany’s Merz: Israel Is ‘Doing Dirty Work for Us’ In Iran appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

LifeNews.com

The post Bill Gates’s Daughter Phoebe is a Radical Abortion Activist Just Like Him appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

‘Execution site’: Palestinians face death collecting food at US-Israeli Gaza aid points.

Middle East Eye

The post ‘Execution site’: Palestinians face death collecting food at US-Israeli Gaza aid points appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

BBC coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza ‘systematically biased against Palestinians’

Middle East Eye

The post BBC coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza ‘systematically biased against Palestinians’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Hagee, Graham, Evans urge US support for Israel against Iran threat 

Fox News

The post Hagee, Graham, Evans urge US support for Israel against Iran threat appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s tells it like it is. 

See here.

The post MTG: We Are Sick and Tired of Foreign Wars appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

LifeSite News

The post House Republicans investigating USCCB, Catholic Charities over funding for illegal aliens appeared first on LewRockwell.

____________________________________________________________________________________

di Daniel Lacalle

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/la-big-beautiful-bill-e-molto-meglio)

Le prospettive di bilancio degli Stati Uniti sono motivo di preoccupazione. Tutti lo capiscono, il problema è che la maggior parte degli economisti keynesiani non è disposta ad ammettere che il problema del deficit sia interamente un problema di spesa.

Coloro che propugnano l'aumento delle tasse e della spesa non considerano mai l'impatto negativo delle tasse sulla crescita e sull'occupazione, né la natura ciclica delle entrate.

Le spese aumentano durante i periodi di crescita economica e aumentano ancora più rapidamente durante le recessioni, il che si traduce costantemente in un debito più elevato.

Le tasse elevate non sono uno strumento per ridurre il debito pubblico, ma per giustificarlo. Aumentando costantemente la spesa pubblica e le tasse, i governi attuano un'espropriazione al rallentatore della ricchezza della nazione.

La Francia è la prova lampante della trappola fiscale keynesiana: ha il cuneo fiscale più alto nell'OCSE, ha un'enorme spesa pubblica e le sue prospettive fiscali sono peggiori di quelle di qualsiasi economia sviluppata, con un deficit insostenibile del 5,8%, soprattutto se consideriamo le sue enormi passività non finanziate che raggiungono il 400% del PIL, in aggiunta all'attuale debito al 116% del PIL.

I doppi standard degli economisti

È interessante notare che molti economisti erano lieti di sostenere il piano economico di Kamala Harris, che prevedeva forti aumenti della spesa, tasse più alte e più debito.

Il Congressional Budget Office aveva ipotizzato un aumento del debito pari a $8.300 miliardi, ipotizzando costi più elevati ed entrate più deboli, con un debito detenuto dal pubblico che sarebbe salito al 134% del PIL entro il 2035.

Gli stessi economisti e premi Nobel che hanno sostenuto il programma della Harris, basato su tasse elevate, spesa elevata e debito, sostengono che la Big Beautiful Bill dell'amministrazione Trump distruggerà i conti nazionali. Perché?

Un ampio consenso tra accademici ed economisti tende a minimizzare la continua crescita della dimensione dello stato nell'economia, ignorando gli effetti negativi delle tasse elevate e di un settore pubblico sovradimensionato sulla crescita, sugli investimenti e sulla produttività.

Uno stato ipertrofico viene sempre difeso. Non sorprende, visto che la maggior parte di questi economisti si occupa di governi ed enti finanziati con fondi pubblici.

Pertanto gli investitori globali leggono sempre stime negative quando un'amministrazione promuove tagli fiscali e riduzioni della spesa, e praticamente nulla quando la spesa pubblica va fuori controllo.

Capire la Big Beautiful Bill

Il concetto di tagli fiscali non finanziati è uno dei più offensivi. I tagli fiscali restituiscono parte del denaro che i cittadini hanno guadagnato. L'unica parte non finanziata di un bilancio è la spesa pubblica in deficit.

Musk ha criticato la “Big Beautiful Bill” definendola “abominevole”, ma dobbiamo capire alcune cose.

Un disegno di legge importante come questo non sarà mai perfetto. L'amministrazione deve trovare il sostegno della maggior parte dei membri del Congresso e del Senato, molti dei quali hanno priorità di bilancio diverse.

Il disegno di legge prevede quasi $1.700 miliardi di tagli alla spesa obbligatoria, la più grande riduzione nella storia degli Stati Uniti. Questi tagli rappresentano modifiche permanenti alla legge.

Il disegno di legge comporterà una riduzione del deficit netto di $1.400 miliardi nel prossimo decennio, tenendo conto sia dei tagli alla spesa sia dei nuovi tagli fiscali.

Non si prende in considerazione alcun impatto positivo derivante da tagli alla spesa discrezionale, entrate dai dazi, o miglioramenti nelle entrate.

La Casa Bianca sostiene inoltre che, se si considerano l'aumento delle entrate tramite i dazi e gli ulteriori tagli alla spesa discrezionale, la riduzione cumulativa del deficit potrebbe raggiungere i $6.600 miliardi.

Prorogando i tagli fiscali del 2017, il disegno di legge impedisce alla maggior parte dei contribuenti di subire aumenti fiscali che si sarebbero verificati se suddetti tagli fossero scaduti. Sostiene gli investimenti, la spesa dei consumatori e la crescita economica. Gli sgravi fiscali mirati stimolano inoltre l'attività economica.

Sarà inoltre essenziale eliminare gli oneri normativi per stimolare la crescita e gli investimenti, generando ulteriori entrate fiscali e riducendo ulteriormente il deficit.

Anche una stima prudente della Tax Foundation prevede un incremento del PIL a lungo termine pari allo 0,8% derivante dalle disposizioni fiscali contenute nel disegno di legge.

L'amministrazione Trump dovrebbe fare di più?

Ciò che trovo sorprendente è che Musk non abbia preso in considerazione l'effetto della Curva di Laffer in questa legge. Posso capire che gli economisti statalisti vogliano negare l'evidente effetto positivo dei tagli fiscali sulla crescita delle entrate, ma un imprenditore serio come lui dovrebbe come minimo presumere un miglioramento significativo delle entrate.

Secondo la mia analisi, questi tagli fiscali e misure di deregolamentazione rappresenteranno una fonte maggiore di riduzione del deficit rispetto ai tagli alla spesa, per quanto essenziali.

L'amministrazione Trump dovrebbe fare di più? Certo che sì. Nessuno, da Bessent a Trump, lo nega.

Ma l'economia statunitense deve uscire da questo incubo fiscale, concentrandosi sulla crescita del settore privato in modo che i tagli alla spesa possano essere estesi e incrementati. In un'economia in cui la crescita del PIL nel 2024 è stata interamente trainata dalla spesa in deficit, è necessario ripulire il disastro e contemporaneamente stimolare la crescita produttiva.

Ogni economista libertario o Austriaco dovrebbe sostenere questa proposta di legge come primo passo essenziale, che potrebbe non essere perfetto ma è fondamentale per l'economia statunitense, e tener presente l'impatto sulla Curva di Laffer di una riduzione delle tasse e la spinta economica della deregolamentazione.

Se non crediamo noi negli effetti positivi dei tagli fiscali e della deregolamentazione, nessun altro ci crederà e la prossima legge sarà più grande e più brutta.

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

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

Saturday morning, we toodled over to the next town, Salem, New York, (pop. 2,612, per capita income $19,499) fifty miles northeast of Albany, to catch one of the hundreds of “No Kings” demos across the nation sponsored by Shanghai-based software billionaire Neville Roy Singham, Walmart heiress Christy Walton, Paypal partner (and Linked-in founder) Reid Hoffman, and father-and son team, George and Alex Soros.

Speaking of A;ex Soros, Saturday also happened to be his wedding day, to Huma Abedin, former Hillary Clinton sidekick and BFF (and ex-wife of disgraced congressman and convicted sex offender Anthony Weiner.) The nuptials happened at the Soros’s Hamptons estate. Cable news covered the fabulous cavalcade of black Escalade limousines conveying the super-elite of Progressive-Wokery to the glorious event. The New York Times, with its habitual lack of self-awareness, styled the event thusly:

“Liberal royalty?” Say, what. . . ? There is such a thing? In the party of No Kings? What’s the deal, then? Just princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, earls, viscounts, baronets, lairds, marquis, knights and dames, and so on. Yet, no king? Well, if you asked the fortunate wedding guests, they might aver to Hillary Clinton as a sort-of Queen of the party, or maybe just Queen Bee. As for former president Bill, he appears to be undergoing slow-motion mummification, so he currently occupies an ambiguous zone between this world and the next, with no mojo left for kingly duties. Anyway, it rained that day down on the South Fork.

Meanwhile, back upstate, cloudy and cool but no rain, some two-hundred wrathful plebeian souls gathered at the one-stoplight-intersection in little Salem, these days mainly a farm community, the old railroad engine repair shop defunct, and many good non-farm jobs with it, the usual story in this corner of the country. The hopped-up crowd was well-supplied with signs and placards, many avouching Down with Oligarchs! — which, oddly, seemed a sort of backhanded reference to billionaires of the very type underwriting the day’s festivities, not to mention the super-rich “liberal royalty” gang gathered for the Soros-Abedin royal wedding.

But that was only one of the many incongruities haunting the mass protest against the abhorred president, Mr. Trump. For instance, one poor fellow on the southeast corner of South Main and East Broadway inveighed mournfully against the suppression of free speech, apparently unaware of the epic efforts 2021 to 2025 by “Joe Biden’s” underlings to censor the Internet and de-platform the regime’s critics (including yours truly, whose website was mysteriously destroyed in October 2024).

The moiling mob was overwhelmingly geriatric, perhaps reflecting the backwater demographics of a region with few job opportunities for young folk. A spirit of revival bubbled among them as they reenacted old rituals of the hippie halcyon, the grand old days of the Vietnam War protests, when thousands gathered to levitate the Pentagon. Only now, their sentiments and beliefs exhibit a striking and peculiar inversion of the ancient 1960s credos that drove the beloved Movement.

I know because I was there, on campus, between 1966 and 1971. Back then, the Left opposed the wicked “establishment” and all its nefarious operations, from the war in Vietnam to the FBI’s underhanded suppression of political dissent. These days, strange to relate, the Left stands in staunch defense of the Deep State, big government (and its prodigious corruption), and the politicization of the FBI and CIA.

Their placards lament the withering of “our democracy,” yet they were just fine with “Joe Biden” selecting a 2024 presidential candidate for them — with no customary vote by party delegates, or anything approaching an open democratic process. They shout for the “rule-of-law,” except when it concerns special persons such as the former president’s crackhead, bag-man son. They’re all for the colossal grift around the war in Ukraine. And don’t forget they supported vaccine mandates, the closing and ruination of small businesses (while Walmart and Taco Bell were allowed to thrive), and all the other hypocritical, fraudulent, lethal actions of Covid-19 policy.

The object of the “No Kings” shuck and jive, you might suspect, was to prepare so many friction-points around the country that violence was apt to erupt in order to create a George Floyd-type martyr figure, so as to re-energize the Left for another sustained summer of riots. There was plenty of mayhem around the country but, alas, no martyr emerged, no apotheosis of “progressive” victim-hood. . . only the peculiar murder of two Minnesota legislators by an apparently deranged Democratic party fringe character, the sometime evangelist and Tim Walz appointee, Vance Boelter.

$65-million is a plausible number for the money spent by billionaires and political NGOs on the nation-wide “No Kings” project. A lot of that was paid directly to protesters for just showing up. (They ran ads on Craig’s List to enlist players.) None of them showed up in the Hamptons, though, where “liberal royalty” assembled for their special event. You’ve got to think that they missed something rather bigly there.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post King-less? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Vacuous Pete read the US DoD FY 26 posture statement last week, explaining how the feds will spend the new trillion dollar US defense budget.  The SecDef seems unaware of the idiocy, and the irony, of what he presented to Congress.

We may quibble on whether it was idiot-speak, mendacity, or simple ignorance.  I’m agreeable that in Pete’s case, it could be all three.

First we have the sheer inability to identify the problem.  Pete says, “The $961.6 billion budget put forward by the President reverses four years of mismanagement and underinvestment.”  I’m not sure Pete has looked at Pentagon budget trends since WWII, but that budget has a long established pattern.  Robert Higgs’ “ratchet effect” is clearly shown in this chart:

As Charles Hugh Smith explains, ratchet-systems produce bloat that is easy to expand and hard to reduce. “Four years of mismanagement” tells us that the DoD has no idea what is happening, what to do, and will proceed accordingly. Smith writes that over time, only the “delusionally incompetent” remain inside these systems “…[leading] to the substitution of PR and artifice for actually reducing the organization to a sustainable level, for what’s required is not just a revised spreadsheet but an entirely new culture and value system.”

Point for Pete – he is good at substituting PR and artifice for the real change that is required.

Much of the latest posture statement is indeed delusional. Pete states,

The President has also been clear – we will not tolerate attacks on American vessels. To that end, we have completed a highly successful and focused campaign against the Houthis. Our message — and our goal — was clear: Stop shooting at our ships and we will stop shooting at you. I am pleased to report that the attacks on American ships have now ended.

The reason the Houthis stopped targeting our naval vessels is because we removed them from the line of fire after the loss of a few billion dollars in drones and other weapons, all without slowing the Houthis attacks on Israel-bound shipping.

Along these delusional lines, Hegseth takes credit for the diplomatic blackmail of Panama to give US vessels priority “Free and First” passage, posing this as a question of military strength. He goes on to emphasize US military protection of the border, even as border control in the US is and will remain a bureaucratic enforcement operation, not “defense” to be funded in a new way.

While he correctly wants a lean and nimble force, he ignores or is unaware that the DoD is little more than a massive jobs program for low wage earners all the way to up to retired generals and admirals, and the expensive stovepiped acquisition octopus that embraces them all, and directly attaches itself to half of every dollar spent in the Pentagon right off the top.  In turn, this MIC provides back to the DoD small numbers of uber expensive offensive platforms that are impossible to efficiently maintain, both for us and for the many “allies” we pressure into buying our not-lean and not-nimble products.

Pete nods to a future “Golden Dome,” innocently or ignorantly foretelling another massive overpriced stovepiped acquisition, run by contractors, that will, as in the past, deliver no effective defense – a fact we will discover 15 years and a dozen trillion dollars hence.

Pete likes lean and nimble, but we suffer one General or Flag officer for every 3,300 active duty service members, twice the ratio we had during World War II.  Beta AI could do the jobs of every one of our generals today, and not a soul would notice.  Hegseth’s reduction of GO/FO by 20% is too few by half, and yet he offered no comparable reduction in the 900 global locations where US troops are stationed around the world.

He advocates a government-funded shipping industry, comparing the productivity of modern ships built by China (and he might also have mentioned Russia or India).   Barring major acquisition reform, US subsidized shipbuilding circa 2026 will be terminally expensive and permanently technologically behind the times, a welfare scheme for the less competitive.  Similarly, Hegseth advocates a next generation F-35, with a new number and name. We know what our system produces, but why doesn’t Hegseth? In terms of the nuclear triad, Hegseth recognizes it is old and probably dysfunctional, but seems to have no sense of how to deal with the most important aspect of real deterrence, nor the cost of reshaping or fundamentally reducing it. I mean how many nukes does a man need? Pete has no idea.

Underlying this obscene budget request is the silent witness, the fundamental missing link – and that is the absolute and urgent necessity of blowing up entirely our current USG approach to defense.  To blow the OLDTHINK out of the water, and to truly ban the bloat, we must institute zero-based budgeting from the Pentagon, and a zero-based analysis of the real requirements of a republican defense.  For 60 years we have designed and funded the military of a slowly collapsing and increasingly desperate empire.  We would do far better to think about and identify the real defensive needs of a constitutionally defined Republic, the one our founders presumed, and our people deserve.

That said – the idiocy is clear, and it would not be a challenge for any American to name a thousand more sterling examples of Pentagon stupidity.  Oh, and Pete said the Pentagon must pass, and will pass an audit by 2028. I hope the Congressional audience laughed at that joke. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Three days after his briefing, Hegseth wakes up to find that the President was lying about diplomacy with Iran, and more interested in big beautiful nuclear war than the lean and nimble deterrent force he told Pete and the rest of the country about earlier. Oh the irony, or maybe Pete’s just a patsy.  Either way, Trump colluded with Israel in last week’s surprise attack and regime decapitation, “justified” by an Iranian nuclear weapons program that Trump’s own DNI briefed Congress a few weeks earlier DID NOT EXIST.  Israel’s attack was assisted in advance and in real time by US and Germany and probably other NATO forces, and passively supported by the neutered neighbors of Israel, including a former ISIS commander with significant American blood on his hands.  As Trump would say, so sad. Hegseth appealed to America First as Trump voters understood it, but Trump himself clarified that he “developed” American First, and it means whatever he says it means.

When your president is a real life Humpty Dumpty and the elites openly parasitical, when your empire is collapsing under the predictable trifecta of corruption, debt, and arrogance, what can we the people expect?

I think instead of listening to Pete Hegseth, we would do better to listen to Petyr Baelish.

Sometimes when I try to understand a person’s motives, I play a little game. I assume the worst. What’s the worst reason they could possibly have for saying what they say, or doing what they do? Then I ask myself, ‘how well does that reason explain what they say and what they do?

Along those lines, I think before building great ships, the USG will facilitate an all expenses paid funeral at sea for our oldest carrier, the USS Nimitz, as it diverts post haste to the current theater of war.  This event may be facilitated by Israel aching for a false flag every couple of decades, or another psychopathic ally. War will intensify, and a nuclear attack or accident will “allow” the empire of fools to justify domestic totalitarianism, and continued endless war.  I’m pretty sure that Alex Karp will help out, given his view that the tech industry has “a moral duty to work with the US government,…an affirmative obligation to support the state that made its rise possible.”

There is nothing new here.  The evil of the state is perennial, persistent, with a taproot to hell. Henry David Thoreau wrote – perhaps with a future Pete Hegseth in mind as he tries to “fix” the Pentagon –“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one striking at the root.”  The time for hacking the branches of evil is coming to an end, perhaps an abrupt end. We must strike the root.

The post Chewing the Fat About Cutting the Bloat at the Nuclear BBQ appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Donald called Fed Chairman Powell a “numbskull” last week and deservedly so. But to paraphrase an old adage, when the cap fits said numbskulls tend to wear it themselves.

Surely, that’s where we are this morning upon Israel’s reprehensible attack on Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities and decapitation of its military and scientific leadership. Self-evidently, the attack was well known to Trump and tacitly greenlighted by him during the course of several conversations this past week with Netanyahu himself.

And that’s no armchair surmise. The Donald has been yapping like a banshee this morning telling one and all reporters that the attack fits like hand-in-glove to his “art of the deal” maneuvers. It may look like more war but its actually just part of the Donald’s brilliant pursuit of peace. Says he.

Thus, he told CNN’s Dana Bash that he had given Iran 60 days to capitulate to his demands regarding a new nuke treaty, and yesterday was day 61. The implication, of course, is that he gave them fair warning and therefore Tehran needed a 2X4 between the eyes for failing to satisfy the Great Dealmaker on the Potomac on a timely basis.

Likewise, ABC’s Trump-hating Jonathan Karl also got a heads up to the effect that –

I just spoke to President Trump and asked him about the Israeli attack on Iran. Here’s what he told me: “I think it’s been excellent.  We gave them a chance and they didn’t take it. They got hit hard, very hard. They got hit about as hard as you’re going to get hit. And there’s more to come. a lot more.”

Moreover, just in case the message through these ordinarily hostile reporters wasn’t clear, the Donald let loose on social media a fusillade of bombast, bravado and sheer juvenile depravity that has never before been issued from the Oval Office in such raw and unfiltered form.

No, MAGA fanboys, these aren’t the art-of-the-deal words of even a blustering real estate developer from the backstreets of Queens. Indeed, we can’t imagine even in the Queens that you would expect an amicable cancellation of your plumber’s bill after you put a contract out on his brother-in-law.

And yet and yet. What in the hell is the Donald doing bringing America to the brink of yet another Forever War against a country that is in no way, shape or form a threat to the Homeland Security of the United States?

Indeed, the whole Iranian imbroglio is a direct repudiation of the entire America First proposition. Iran’s capacity to inflict military harm on the US homeland amounts to zero, nichts, nada, nugatory, nein and nyet. So why is POTUS giving bellicosity a new name by threatening that American weapons will be used to wipe Iran from the face of the earth?

For want of doubt, here are the facts about Iran’s nonexistent military threat to the American homeland. First, it has no blue water Navy such as aircraft carriers or world-scale cruisers, destroyers and attack submarines.

Instead, its Navy operates almost exclusively in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea and consists of a mix of small, coastal patrol boats including corvettes, frigates and mini submarines, totaling at most 100,000 tons of displacement. That figure is just 2% of the 4.5 million tons of Blue Water capacity embedded in the US Navy’s 11 aircraft carriers, 70 destroyers, 22 cruisers and 66 attack submarines, among others.

Secondly, Iran also has no long range bombers at all with a range of more than 2,800 kilometers. Even then its most advanced longer-range aircraft, the Su-24MK, is for the most part not operational, owing to lack of spare parts and maintenance. Only 20 of possibly 40 of these longer range aircraft are currently believed to be air worthy combatants.

Finally, while it does have upwards of 1,400 to 2,700 short and medium range missiles, none of these have the range to come anywhere near the continental US. That’s because the distance between Tehran and Washington DC, Chicago and Denver is 10,050, 10,300 and 11,100 kilometers, respectively, but Iran posses zero intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of spanning that distance.

In fact, the range on its numerous short range (SRBM) and medium range (MRBM) missiles is only 300 to 2,000 kilometers. That is, the maximum extent of Iran’s military attack perimeter is not even the Strait of Gibraltar, which is 5,000 kilometers from Tehran!

Iran’s Inventory Of Short And Medium Range Ballistic Missiles

Sources: Estimates are derived from U.S. Central Command (2023 testimony by Gen. Kenneth McKenzie), Iran Watch, CSIS reports, and posts on X. Quantities are approximate due to Iran’s secretive program.

So when we say zero military threat to the US homeland we mean exactly that. The only thing Iran can really threaten is a limited number of US bases, military personnel and naval ships that Washington has foolishly put in harm’s way in the middle east, Persian Gulf, Red Sea and Mediterranean.

Yet and yet. All of those military assets are about the operations of Empire, not the military security of the American homeland situated between the great ocean moats.

So what we really have unfolding in front of our very eyes is a real world demonstration of the folly of Empire, global alliances and allies and the related costly, unnecessary military footprint that spans the globe. Indeed, even as we write American lives at these unnecessary middle east military locations are being put in harms’ way by a decision in Washington to help Israel intercept the Iranian missiles that have been launched by Tehran in response to Israel’s foolish attack – with weapons also supplied and largely funded by Washington.

The very idea that Netanyahu had no choice but to preemptively attack Israel because it faces an existential threat from a purported imminent Iranian “breakout” of nuclear weapons is not merely a blatant lie; it’s unadulterated horse shit.

Exactly 90 days ago, in fact, the one utterly honest official in the vast US intelligence community, Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, made it very clear that there is no Iranian “breakout” that even remotely justifies Israel’s blatant act of war:

“We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Supreme Leader Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003,”

So there is no way in god’s green earth that the above declaration has changed in three months, thereby purportedly necessitating last night’s attack. To the contrary, the attack was “preemptive” alright, but what was being pre-empted was the slight possibility that the sixth negotiating session between the White House and Iran scheduled for this weekend might have led to a “breakthrough” of another kind – that is, a pathway to a detente between Washington and Tehran.

So there you have it. The decades long Israeli lie about Iran’s nuclear ambitions was in danger of being exposed and discredited for all the world to see. So once again the tail of a reckless “ally” wagged the dog of Washington’s War Machine into yet another chapter of death and mayhem.

Moreover, Tulsi Gabbard’s forthright report of three months ago was just yet another reiteration of what the national intelligence community has been consistently saying since 2007. That’s when the National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) issued at that time caught even George W. Bush short just as he was on the verge of attacking Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons sites in 20o8.

To remind, these periodic NIEs represent a consensus of all 17 US intelligence agencies on salient issues. And on the matter of Iran’s nuclear weapons program the 2007 edition could not have been more unequivocal:

“We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program…

Moreover, the documentary proof of that statement was thoroughly investigated by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) after the 2015 Obama nuke deal. The latter gave the IAEA full access to Iran’s facilities and records. Its report then re-validated that the Iranian weapons program was indeed disbanded in 2003.

Likewise, there is the aforementioned matter of “Dubya’s” memoirs. Near the end of his term in office, George W. Bush was under immense pressure from his vast stable of neocon warmongers to authorize a bombing campaign against Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities. But once the 2007 NIEs came out, even our “mission accomplished” President in a bomber jacket was caught up short, as he confessed in his memoir, Decision Points.

Most revealingly, he complained bitterly that the NIE “tied my hands on the military side” and called its findings “eye-popping.”

Spelling out how the 2007 NIE had kept the US bombers at their bases, President Bush concluded with this kicker:

“But after the NIE, how could I possibly explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?”

Well, yes. But even if Dubya couldn’t make the case, the neocons never stopped trying until they found their mark in Donald J. Trump. And that gets us to the current fraught moment, which follows inexorably upon Trump’s foolish cancellation of Obama’s nuke deal during his first stint in the Oval Office – notwithstanding the fact that the IAEA had affirmed repeatedly that Iran was complying with the agreement.

Indeed, it is worth recalling the completely bogus reasons giving for the 2018 action by Trump because the same lies and distortions stand behind the White House’s current posture of green-lightening and supporting Netanyahu’s dangerous aggression.

In this context, it should be evident to all except blind MAGA fanboys that on most issues the Donald knows little and studies less. Instead, he just declares things to be so, whether true or not; and more often than not to be the fruit of “bad deals” made by his predecessors.

But when it comes to Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, the Donald’s first term whopper was just plain risible. He called it the very worst deal in history including England’s so-called surrender at Munich.

Of course, that was absolutely irrelevant because Iran is not remotely comparable to Nazi Germany. In fact, Iran is a nearly bankrupt country that has no capability whatsoever, as we have shown, to threaten the security and safety of the citizens of Spokane WA, Peoria IL or anywhere else in the USA.

Its $425 billion GDP is the size of Indiana’s; its 500,000 man military is only slightly larger than the US national guard (now occupied elsewhere); and its $25 billion defense budget amounts to just 2.5% of US defense spending.

And unlike Hitler at Munich who got most of what he wanted, the Iranians at Lausanne (where the Obama deal was negotiated) gave up almost all of what they had. That is, they made huge concessions on nearly every issue that makes a difference including the number of permitted centrifuges at Natanz, the status of the Fordow and Arak nuclear facilities, the disposition of their enriched uranium stockpiles, the intrusiveness and scope of the inspections regime and on the matter of Iran’s so-called “breakout” capacity.

While every signatory of the non-proliferation treaty has the right to civilian enrichment, Iran had agreed to reduce the number of centrifuges by 70% from 20,000 to 6,000 and actually did so after the deal took effect. Moreover, it effective enrichment capacity had been reduced by significantly more because the remaining Natanz centrifuges consisted exclusively of its most rudimentary, outdated equipment – first-generation IR-1 knockoffs of 1970s European models.

Not only was Iran not allowed to build or develop newer centrifuge models, but even those remaining were permitted to enrich uranium to a limit of only 3.75% purity. That is to say, to the generation of fissile material for power plants that is not remotely capable of reaching bomb grade concentrations of 90%.

Equally importantly, the agreement eliminated enrichment activity entirely at Fordow. The latter was Iran’s only truly advanced, hardened site that could withstand an onslaught of Israeli or US bunker busters, and it was agreed that zero enrichment activity would take place there, subject to full IAEA inspection.

Instead, Fordow became a small time underground science lab devoted to medical isotope research and crawling with international inspectors. In effectively decommissioning Fordow and thereby eliminating any capacity to cheat – what Iran got in return was at best a fig leave of salve for its national pride.

And yet and yet. Even that was too much for the Israelis hardliners, who bombed the Fordow labs to smithereens last night—just to make sure.

The disposition of the heavy water reactor at Arak was even more dispositive. For years, the War Party had falsely waved the bloody shirt of because “plutonium”. That is, the civilian nuclear reactor being built there was of Canadian “heavy water” design rather than GE or Westinghouse “light water” model. Accordingly, when finished it would have generated plutonium as a waste product rather than conventional spent nuclear fuel rods.

In truth, the Iranians couldn’t have bombed a beehive with the Arak plutonium because you need a reprocessing plant to convert it into bomb grade material. Needless to say, Iran had no such plant, no plan to build one, and no prospect for getting the requisite technology and equipment.

But even that bogeyman was dispatched by the Obama nuke deal that the Donald saw fit to shit can the first time around. The 2015 deal required Iran to destroy or export the heavy water reactor core of its existing plant and replace it with a core that cannot produce material which can be reprocessed into weapons grade plutonium. All of these requirements were subject to rigorous international inspection and, in fact, were actually complied with before Trump cancelled the deal.

As to its already extant enriched uranium stock piles, including some 20% medical-grade material, 97% of this material was to be disposed of, and that requirement was complied with, too. Iran ended up retaining only 300 kilograms of its 10,000 kilogram stockpile—an amount that could be readily stored in the Donald’s wine cellar at Mar-a-Lago.

The deal’s real clincher, however, had been Iran’s agreement to what amounted to a 20-year cradle-to-grave inspection regime encompassing the entire nuclear fuel chain. International inspectors were allowed to visit Iran’s uranium mines and milling and fuel preparation operations; its enrichment equipment manufacturing and fabrication plants; and the storage facilities for its centrifuge rotors and bellows production.

Beyond that, Iran had also agreed to and had complied with a robust program of inspections to prevent smuggling of materials into the country to illicit sites outside of the framework facilities. That encompassed imports of nuclear fuel cycle equipment and materials, including so-called “dual use” items which are essentially civilian imports that could be repurposed to nuclear uses, even peaceful domestic power generation.

In short, even a Houdini could not have secretly broken-out of the box contained in the 2015 agreement and then confronted the world with some kind of fait accompli threat to use the bomb.

To do so would have required diversion of thousands of tons of domestically produced or imported uranium and the illicit milling and upgrading of such material at secret fuel preparation plants. It would also have involved the secret construction of new, hidden enrichment operations of such massive scale that they could house more than 10,000 new centrifuges. It would have also required the building of these massive spinning arrays from tens of thousands of components smuggled into the country and transported to remote enrichment operations – all undetected by the massive complex of spy satellites overhead and covert US and Israeli intelligence agency operatives on the ground in Iran.

Finally, it would have required the activation from scratch of a weaponization program which has been dormant according to the aforementioned US National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) for more than a decade. And then, that the Iranian regime – after cobbling together one or two bombs without testing them or their launch vehicles – would nevertheless have been willing to threaten to use them sight unseen.

Needless to say, to have shit-canned the 2015 agreement you needed to be a raging, certifiable, paranoid boob, at best. Or something very different than the America First champion so loudly advertised by the Donald himself.

There simply was no way that the Iranians could have broken out of the control box established by the 2015 nuke deal. And even if they had managed to defy these immensely prohibitive constraints and get one or a even a few nuclear bombs, what in the world would they do with them?

Drop them on Tel Aviv? That would absolutely insure Israel’s navy and air force would unleash its 200 nukes and thereby incinerate the entire industrial base and major population centers of Iran.

At the end of the day, the idea that deterrence would fail even if a future Iranian regime were to defy all the odds, and also defy the fatwa against nuclear weapons issued by their own Supreme Leader, amounts to one of the most preposterous Big Lies ever concocted.

So in cancelling the deal, what Trump really did was embrace the immense tissue of unwarranted demonization of Iran that the Empire Firsters had fabricated over the  course of three decades. And now after unilaterally abrogating the 2015 deal and slapping brutal sanctions on Iran that has left its economy badly bruised, it is claimed that in recent months the Iranians have not complied with the agreement Trump canceled, and have therefore been sanctioned by the IAEA,

Well, for crying out loud, why would they?! Iran isn’t living up to the letter of the Nuclear nonproliferation treaty perhaps because Israel, which isn’t even a signatory and which has some 200 odd nukes illegally, has threatened to obliterate even the remnant of a civilian nuclear program that Tehran still possesses.

Indeed, seven years later Trump is repeating the same errors by green-lighting the Israeli attack rather than doing the one thing that has been in the so-called “tool kit” of the White House all along.

The fact is, Trump could have told Netanyahu that if he proceeded with the attack right in the middle of his negotiations to revive the nuke deal, then the $4 billion per year of US aid would be cut off, no munitions or spare parts would be supplied to the IDF and the US would introduce in the UN a resolution condemning any Israeli attack.

Needless to say, that would have stopped this chapter of the Forever Wars cold. But, instead, we are now stumbling into a far more dangerous conflagration than ever before – all on the basis of the “breakout” lie that has been promulgated by the neocons and Israel Firsters for decades now.

As a reminder, he is a time line of the hoary lie that has been repeated over and over again from as early as 1995. The claim that a Iranian nuke was just around the corner via this NYT story was a blatant lie that has never stopped replicating.

Indeed, the above was just the beginning. It’s gone on and on and on for the last thirty years.

And now we have the Washington War Machine lining up behind a reckless attempt to defend that lie – just before Israeli’s own best friend ever in the Oval Office might have stumbled into a deal with Iran that would have finally marked this Big Lie’s final demise.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post America First – We Hardly Knew Ye appeared first on LewRockwell.

This article was written by Brandon Smith and originally published at Birch Gold Group

Well, the tensions over mass illegal immigration in the US are finally coming to a boil after 4 years of open borders under the Biden Administration and six months of obstruction by Democrat politicians and judges interfering with deportations. The progressive establishment position on illegals is clear: Make it as easy as possible for anyone to enter the country and make it as difficult as possible to kick them out.

I published a comprehensive overview on the riots in California last week, but I also want to examine how we got here in the first place and why many foreign governments are so intrusive when it comes to US immigration policies.

Think about it for a moment and ask yourself: Why is the rest of the world in our business? Why do they care if we have tighter controls on borders and stricter vetting for immigration? Why don’t foreign governments also complain about Chinese immigration standards, or Saudi Arabia’s standards, or even Australia’s standards? Why does everyone else think they have a say in how America handles immigration?

There are, of course, ideological agendas at play here, but I believe the primary reason for foreign meddling is economic, specifically when it comes to Central America and South America.

I’ve covered these issues briefly in the past but I think it bears repeating that the US is widely considered a kind of global buffet or a wounded gazelle – The entire jungle shows up to take a bite. We’re the cash cow of the planet ready to be milked. The exposure of organizations like USAID proved beyond a doubt that Americans pay for the ENTIRE WORLD. Not only that, but we get to pay for the inflation that is created for every dollar printed and circulated to fill the pockets of foreign interests.

This is the enduring curse attached to any country “lucky” enough to maintain world reserve currency status. When the Bretton Woods agreement was put in place after World War II there was an unspoken but clear trade-off, a devil’s bargain attached to the dollar’s ascension.

First, Americans were going to have to pay the vast majority of defense spending in the new international order (which would ultimately become NATO). Second, America was gifted the ability to print dollars with wild abandon while mitigating hyperinflation by exporting dollars overseas to foreign banks and corporations. However, the expectation was that the US would have to spread the fiat wealth and feed the coffers of other countries through various subsidies, foreign aid and perhaps even open immigration.

The question is, how does mass immigration play into this arrangement?

The Economic And Social Steam Valve

Using Mexico as an example, we can see some obvious economic advantages for foreign governments if US immigration policies remain unenforced. Mexico has enjoyed an exceedingly low unemployment rate for several years, not just because untold numbers of US manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to the south, but because Mexico has the option of encouraging poverty stricken citizens who can’t get jobs to sneak into the US.

This serves a couple of purposes – It allows Mexico to maintain low unemployment stats. It saves them loads of cash when it comes to social welfare programs (they can send their poor to the US where American taxpayers foot the welfare bill). And, in terms of crime and civil unrest, Mexico is able to relocate their own discontented rabble over the border and let the US deal with those people instead.

The same goes for most of Central and South America. The benefits are just too numerous to ignore. The more open the US border is, the more every third world country near us has to gain.

Immigration Extortion

Most readers might not remember, but under the Biden Administration there was a concerted effort to spin the immigration crisis as a problem of financial instability and humanitarian response. Kamala Harris, the supposed “border czar”, spent years avoiding a visit to the southern border to witness the migrant surge first hand. Instead, she claimed that her energies were better spent on trips to other countries where she could “solve the problem at the source”.

This meant that the Biden Administration would not close the border, but they would pay off foreign governments with billions of dollars in subsidies that would theoretically trickle down to third world populations and keep them at home. These payoffs were also designed to make South American and Central American politicians stop encouraging their people to enter the US illegally.

Of course, Democrats didn’t really want the migrant caravans to stop, but this was a way for them to pretend as if they were taking action.  Meanwhile, foreign leaders were licking their chops; the more migrant mobs tried to force their way across the US border, the more subsidies they could extort from the progressive controlled US government. The incentives for them to continue sending migrant trains north were overwhelming.

The Golden River Of Remittances

While scrolling through Mexican news sources I came across the story that inspired this article: Last week Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum seemingly threatened the US over a proposed tax on “remittances”. If you are not familiar with remittances, they are basically any monies earned (or stolen) within the US by non-citizens and transferred to their home countries.

I have related my own experiences with this issue in past articles – As a construction worker and contractor in Florida in my early 20s I witnessed extensive hiring of illegals who were paid around 30% less than American workers. Most of those guys would end up at the local Winn-Dixie supermarket every payday to cash their checks and wire money to Mexico through Western Union. There would be a long line of them around the front of the store, all of them sending money outside the US.

Now imagine this is happening in every town in the US with illegals, and you’ll start to understand the sheer scale of remittances. The tax on remittances that is currently under review is only around 3%, but some law makers want to the tax closer to 15% or more.  In response Sheinbaum has turned hostile, arguing that Mexicans would “mobilize” in reaction to any fees.

“If necessary, we’ll mobilize. We don’t want taxes on remittances from our fellow countrymen. From the US to Mexico…”

The socialist president did not specify what she meant by “mobilize”, but many commentators assert that this is a threat to mobilize unrest among migrants already within US borders. As we have seen in Los Angeles in the past few days, the threat is not idle. It seems like madness, until we look at how much US cash is actually transferred outside the US by migrants.

Mexico alone received at least $65 billion in remittances from the US last year. In other words, the Mexican economy enjoys a yearly boost of around $65 billion just by encouraging illegals to cross the border. To put this in perspective, Mexico’s entire social welfare budget each year is around $30 billion; less than half of what the country gets through remittances from the US.  Mexico’s tourism industry generates around $32 billion annually; again, less than half of what remittances generate.

Total foreign remittances to Mexico make up around 5% of their annual GDP and it is the largest single source of income from foreign sources.

Also keep in mind that a dollar buys a lot more in Mexico than it does in the US. Want to buy a house in the US? The median price for a three bedroom home is $320,000. In Mexico, a three bedroom home goes for $100,000 (often less). This is yet another reason why illegals march across the border; even when working for 30% less wages they still earn triple the buying power or more in their own country by wiring dollars back home.

Sheinbaum understands full well that her country is highly dependent on the underground cash flows from the US through illegal workers. The same goes for numerous Central and South American countries.  The expectation attached to the current financial order is that Americans get the world reserve currency, but Americans must foot the bill for nearly every other allied nation. This dynamic is changing and the parasitic feeder nations don’t like it. They’ve become so dependent on easy cash from the US they don’t know how to function any other way.

Panic is certain. The economics of illegal immigration are ugly. Some progressives will argue that open borders are “good for America” because remittances and cash outflows help reduce inflation. Obviously that’s not the case, otherwise inflation would have been non-existent under the Biden Administration with its unprecedented migrant invasion.

Not only that, but the mere presence of millions of illegals creates a massive demand spike in goods, services and housing which drives up prices. Add to this the billions of dollars spent every year on subsides for migrants collecting welfare (around 60% of all migrants collect from one or more welfare programs upon entering the US), and you have am undeniable inflationary burden that does not need to be here.

Foreign governments want illegals here because they are yet another tool for bleeding the US for extra funds. They believe they are entitled to this money, but this methodology is about to change. They simply aren’t ready for what is about to happen.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post Illegal Alien Economy: How Foreign Nations Exploit U.S. Borders For Profit appeared first on LewRockwell.