Lew Rockwell Institute

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David Krall wrote:

“to be the greatest president in American history.”

Sorry, that ship has already sailed.

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Writes Tim McGraw:

Hi Lew,

I enjoyed reading your latest article on the Libertarian (Rothbard’s) position on nuclear weapons. It’s interesting that so many nuclear bombs have been set off in the Northern Hemisphere vs. the Southern Hemisphere that the Northern Hemisphere has more background radiation than the Southern Hemisphere. There is no safe level of radiation.

After Fukushima, one almost feels like they need a Geiger Counter to buy fish from the Pacific at the market. Odd that no one tested nuclear weapons in the Atlantic Ocean. Gee, I wonder why.

“Mommy! Why is the salmon in the fridge glowing?”

Nuclear weapons are indiscriminate and shouldn’t be allowed. Poison gas has been outlawed, as has germ warfare. Why not ban nuclear weapons?

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Thanks, Johnny Kramer. 

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See here.

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Activist Post

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Americans have, of late, heard a lot about “common good” capitalism. However, as with most political adjectives and modifiers, the term is misleading, and as a result, a false premise on which to build one’s understanding.

As Donald Boudreaux has recently written, “If all that ‘common good capitalism” means is capitalism as understood and championed over the past 250 years by liberal scholars… this new name serves no good purpose…it suggests (what I’ll call) ‘true capitalism’…doesn’t promote the common good…Yet…advocates of true capitalism (including me), do indeed believe that true capitalism promotes the common good. And to back our case, we’ve got lots of sound theory and solid evidence.”

Leonard Read, founder and guiding light of the Foundation for Economic Education, “the granddaddy of all libertarian organizations,” was one of the strongest voices for there being no difference between true capitalism and capitalism that advances the common good for decades. He most directly addressed such issues in his “Exalting the Common Good,” Chapter 13 in his 1982 The Path of Duty, the last book he published.

Read started with an inspirational quote, at least for those who believe in freedom, from George Sutherland, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1922 to 1938:

To sustain the individual freedom of action contemplated by the Constitution is not to strike down the common good, but to exalt it; for surely the good of society as a whole cannot be better served than by the preservation against arbitrary restraint of the liberties of its constituent members.

Unfortunately, Justice Sutherland’s wisdom is a far cry from what most people today, or when Read wrote, seem to believe.

Most citizens in today’s U.S.A. haven’t the slightest understanding of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Sutherland, on the other hand, understood these writings as well as did the authors of these politico-economic, spiritual documents: the greatest in all history! The basic premise that separates the American experiment in Man-Government relationships from all others is contained in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

So how much did those who signed that document believe in the freedoms it enshrined? What were they willing to put on the line as a result?

Reflect on the fact that these signers were, for the most part, men of means…signing their own death warrant, so contrary to popular opinion were their glorious intentions!

They were willing to trade their well-being to bring about, at best, the birth of a nation with unprecedented freedom principles; or a dangerous hangman’s rope, at worse!

Almost to a man, they paid a heavy price…Few survived to live out natural lives. They pledged–and they paid–and in doing so they gave birth to your and my freedom. Would you have signed the Declaration? Your answer is affirmative—provided that you are trying, regardless of opposition and unpopularity, to regain the liberty our Founding Fathers bequeathed to us Americans. Hail to their wisdom, courage and exemplarity.

But what has that got to do with “common good” capitalism?

Justice Sutherland insisted that we should exalt the common good, his reference being the good set forth in our Constitution.

Why do so few approve, accept and abide by the freedom way of life?…The truth as I now see it? No one can or ever will be able to explain the miracle of freedom. Were clear, lucid and persuasive explanation a requirement, some one or more of us would need to understand and explain every facet of human action–creativity at the human level. No individual is or ever has been graced with such wisdom. Nor is such omniscience necessary for a belief in freedom.

Many individuals have looked upon freedom, not as a miracle, but as an explainable way of life. Being unable to explain it themselves and knowing of no one who can, they hold it in far less esteem than socialism which they find easier to explain.

[Consequently] All but a few are blind to freedom’s miracles…[because] the more one knows the more awareness of how little he knows…is the beginning of such wisdom as is within mortal man’s domain.

There are reasons galore as to why freedom is not believed to be a miracle. Here is one: Our everyday life is crowded with miracles, so many that they have become commonplace…taken for granted.

Does the inability of anyone to recognize and explain the entirety of the miracle of freedom, which is the miracle of the private property and voluntary relationships of “ordinary” capitalism (not common good capitalism nor crony capitalism nor dog-eat-dog capitalism) mean freedom, clearly in many ways in retreat today, is beyond recovery?

Is it practical to believe in the unexplainable miracle, freedom?

The answer is an unequivocal “Yes.” Why? Because the individual’s freedom to act creatively as he pleases is materially, morally and spiritually sound.

At our down-to-earth level, more miracles than anyone can count result from freedom, the greatest demonstration in all history being the American miracle..[resulting because] When our tiny bits of expertise are free to flow, they configurate…these bits make the miracle.

Some nations have freedom in the blood and are ready to face the greatest perils and hardships in its defense…Other nations, once they have grown prosperous, lose interest in freedom and let it be snatched away from them without lifting a hand to defend it, lest they should endanger thus the comforts that, in fact, they owe to it alone. It is easy to see that what is lacking in such nations is a genuine love of freedom, that lofty aspiration which, I confess, defies analysis. For it is something one must feel.

Let us then believe that the miracle of freedom will rise again!

*Excerpted from Freedom in One Lesson: The Best of Leonard Read (2025), Edited with Commentary by Gary Galles.

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The bombing of three nuclear sites in Iran by the United States makes more salient than usual a vital issue. What is an appropriate libertarian policy for libertarians regarding these weapons? Is it all right for nations to possess them? If they do possess them, is it all right to threaten to use them or even to use them?

In seeking guidance on these issues, we should consult the work of our greatest libertarian theorist, who was thoroughly familiar with the just war tradition and also had a vast knowledge of contemporary events. I refer of course, to Murray Rothbard, and in today’s article, I’m going to discuss a part of his epochal essay “Two Just Wars” that deals with the issues I’ve mentioned.

Murray first discusses a point that would derail his whole analysis if it was accepted. Some people, such as the CIA agent William F. Buckley Jr., argue that killing millions of people isn’t morally worse than killing one person. Thus, if you argue that nuclear weapons kill people indiscriminately, it doesn’t matter.  That of course is a terrible argument. Even if its premise that killing millions of people isn’t morally worse than killing one person is accepted—which of course it shouldn’t be—it wouldn’t follow that it is morally no worse to kill noncombatants than combatants. And nuclear weapons can’t discriminate between these two groups. But Murray takes the argument on his own terms and pulverizes the premise: “William Buckley and other conservatives have propounded the curious moral doctrine that it is no worse to kill millions than it is to kill one man. The man who does either is, to be sure, a murderer; but surely it makes a huge difference how many people he kills. We may see this by phrasing the problem thus: after a man has already killed one person, does it make any difference whether he stops killing now or goes on a further rampage and kills many dozen more people? Obviously, it does.”

For Murray, whether a weapon can discriminate between combatants and noncombatants is the key issue in assessing the morality of using the weapon. He explains this point here: “It has often been maintained, and especially by conservatives, that the development of the horrendous modern weapons of mass murder (nuclear weapons, rockets, germ warfare, etc.) is only a difference of degree rather than kind from the simpler weapons of an earlier era. Of course, one answer to this is that when the degree is the number of human lives, the difference is a very big one, But another answer that the libertarian is particularly equipped to give is that while the bow and arrow and even the rifle can be pinpointed, if the will be there, against actual criminals, modern nuclear weapons cannot. Here is a crucial difference in kind. Of course, the bow and arrow could be used for aggressive purposes, but it could also be pinpointed to use only against aggressors. Nuclear weapons, even ‘conventional’ aerial bombs, cannot be. These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction. (The only exception would be the extremely rare case where a mass of people who were all criminals inhabited a vast geographical area.) We must, therefore, conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat thereof, is a sin and a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification.”

Because these weapons cannot discriminate, it is wrong to use or possess them. Moreover, getting rid of them should have the highest priority for libertarians. Doing this is much more important than privatizing the economy, even though that is also very important: “This is why the old cliché no longer holds that it is not the arms but the will to use them that is significant in judging matters of war and peace. For it is precisely the characteristic of modern weapons that they cannot be used selectively, cannot be used in a libertarian manner. Therefore, their very existence must be condemned, and nuclear disarmament becomes a good to be pursued for its own sake. And if we will indeed use our strategic intelligence, we will see that such disarmament is not only a good, but the highest political good that we can pursue in the modern world. For just as murder is a more heinous crime against another man than larceny, so mass murder—indeed murder so widespread as to threaten human civilization and human survival itself—is the worst crime that any man could possibly commit. And that crime is now imminent. And the forestalling of massive annihilation is far more important, in truth, than the demunicipalization of garbage disposal, as worthwhile as that may be. Or are libertarians going to wax properly indignant about price control or the income tax, and yet shrug their shoulders at or even positively advocate the ultimate crime of mass murder?”

Murray was always alert to objections, as long as they were serious objections, and one objection he took very seriously indeed is that his views are inconsistent. He opposes wars between nations because he thinks they will almost inevitably lead to nuclear war, but he sometimes supports revolutions within a state. He answers that his views are perfectly consistent: “Now there are crucial and vital differences between inter-State warfare on the one hand and revolutions against the State or conflicts between private individuals on the other. One vital difference is the shift in geography. In a revolution, the conflict takes place within the same geographical area: both the minions of the State and the revolutionaries inhabit the same territory. Inter-State warfare, on the other hand, takes place between two groups, each having a monopoly over its own geographical area; that is, it takes place between inhabitants of different territories. From this difference there flow several important consequences: (1) in inter-State war the scope for the use of modern weapons of destruction is far greater. For if the “escalation” of weaponry in an intra-territorial conflict becomes too great, each side will blow itself up with the weapons directed against the other. Neither a revolutionary group nor a State combating revolution, for example, can use nuclear weapons against the other. But, on the other hand, when the warring parties inhabit different territorial areas, the scope for modern weaponry becomes enormous, and the entire arsenal of mass devastation can come into play. A second consequence (2) is that while it is possible for revolutionaries to pinpoint their targets and confine them to their State enemies, and thus avoid aggressing against innocent people, pinpointing is far less possible in an inter-State war. This is true even with older weapons; and, of course, with modern weapons there can be no pinpointing whatever. Furthermore, (3) since each State can mobilize all the people and resources in its territory, the other State comes to regard all the citizens of the opposing country as at least temporarily its enemies and to treat them accordingly by extending the war to them. Thus, all of the consequences of inter-territorial war make it almost inevitable that inter-State war will involve aggression by each side against the innocent civilians—the private individuals—of the other. This inevitability becomes absolute with modern weapons of mass destruction.”

Let’s do everything we can to get rid of nuclear weapons. A good way to do this is to go all out to distribute Murray article “Two Just Wars.”

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The American empire is not going gently into that good night. Just the same, it is collapsing, and its falling parts and failed pieces will create a fertile, fecund and wild new world, eventually.

From centralization will come decentralization, and from decentralization, liberty.

The State’s stage-managed chaos will tumble from the stage, flowing out from the cities, the theme songs confused and grating, the audience grumbling and nervous.

When empires realize they have crossed the rubicon, they contract rapidly to control the little that remains to it, the homeland.  It could be the Fatherland, or the Motherland, terminology not native to Americans, but fundamental to the state as it seeks to identify its beating heart, its functioning liver, its screaming lungs.

For the US, there will be ongoing civil war, some civil, and some war-like, a map of which will bring to mind the latest map of Israeli occupation of Palestine, speckled, transitory, asymmetrical, in motion, red with blood and hate.

The political leadership is untrusted, and untrustworthy, a long trend in American history now impossible to reverse as the empire consumes and redistributes nearly half of the GDP annually.

Thanks to the Federal Reserve, the US dollar awaits nothing but sentencing. Judge and jury at home and abroad long ago pronounced the dollar guilty of perjury, false impersonation, and posing a danger to others.

The performative wars of the West – death and destruction a simple side effect – are increasing tapped out, and the people of the west are increasingly unable to fight, and unwilling to serve the decadent and failing empire.  Other armies around the world may be directed to die – but will there be enough soldiers?  Who will fight hand to hand for Empire?  NATO and the US put Ukrainians up to a fight – and within a year, millions of Ukrainians had fled Ukraine, and withing two years, specialized kidnapping teams had to be deployed throughout the towns and countryside to grab draft dodgers and send them to the front to die for a Western imperial game, this one, NATO expansion towards Russia.  We see the same challenge in the other main US proxy.

Israel as US proxy cum overlord is busy creating its own mini-empire, extending its will and Washington’s, in service to “Western values.”  Among those values, imperial to their core, are deceit, non-stop aggression, racism, totalitarianism, and – as we have passively watched for almost two years – desensitizing the genocide of Muslims and Christians by American and Israeli Zionists.  The Gazan fishbowl sits on the imperial table, in all of its bloody horror.  It is the crown of decades of Israel’s Nazi-esque obsession with control, murder, and scientific study of human animals, where every ounce of cement, and every edible calorie allowed into Gaza was calculated and controlled, to ensure no human growth, and no humanity.  Despite Israeli “science,” images of Gaza’s cities only two years ago revealed spirit and beauty, industry and hope. Today, Israel with US funding and military aid has dropped the equivalent of 8 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs on the 25 mile long strip.  The IDF hustle moving Gazans north and south, and back again, encircling them in ever smaller target zones, aggressively starving them is all public, and by design, public.

Congressman Thomas Massie was asked by Theo Vonn last week what the US got for its close and very  expensive relationship with Israel.  Massie said we get more and more people who hate us.  Massie speaks for Americans, not for the empire.  As a result, he is being electorally challenged and publicly demeaned not only by AIPAC, but by his own Republican Party, and an imperial Trump tweetstorm for “failing” to put America First.

Dollar-funded AI-assisted modern weapons, drone sneak attacks, sabotage of communications, energy grid, and social systems – all controlled by men in safe rooms underground or halfway around the planet – is the empire’s way of war.  Foreign proxies must now provide the “armies.” At this late stage, Americans will no longer be easily sent abroad or consent to fight imperial war.

Data used by the IDF to track their onslaught and manipulation of the remaining Gazans on the strip – a place that once held 2.3 million people in an area the size of Detroit – was analyzed, and published on the Harvard Dataverse academic research website.  The data shows that the current population of Gaza is now 1.85 million, down from 2.3 million 18 months ago. Imperial media, this time the AP, refutes the so-called “Harvard Report” because it’s not Harvard, and it’s not a report.  But curiously the fact-checker points out that the IDF isn’t really concerned about the entire population of Gaza, so subtracting the missing Gazans and suggesting they lie rotting under the rubble is wholly inappropriate.  We wouldn’t want to draw the wrong conclusions here.

In December, Amnesty International considered that 90% of Gazans constituted 1.9 million souls, meaning there were then 2.1 million.  We could quote the numbers used by Knesset member Bezalel Smotrich, who referred to 2 million Gazans in December, and in January, 1.5 million.

We mustn’t quibble, it’s just people we are killing, and debris we are creating.  The imperial model in twilight is quite the spectacle.  As the empire ends, and refuses to go gracefully, we find western institutional aid includes a new category of “sustainable rubble management.”  It is the broken window fallacy, writ large.

US households today owe $18 trillion in private debt, and they are accountable for the federal government’s debt of $37 trillion.  Thus, average household debt has risen to $408,000, and it’s still rising.

Empires large and small make war, and work to sustain war, to dissolve or inflate away their debt while stifling and snuffing out their citizen cowherd, squeezing out the milk, and eventually grinding the meat and bones.  When the average American thinks of Gaza, they feel shame. When our government, and our willing proxies, do the genocide math, they are fine tuning their future plans.

The empire is planning for its future. We ought to do the same.

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In their book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engermen analyzed various elements of the slave economy including the role of slave traders from New England in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the profitability of slave labor, and material conditions on Southern plantations including the health, diet, and general lifestyle of slaves. For embarking on this study of economic history—first published in 1974—they were accused by progressive academics of being “amoral” and “trying to sell slavery.”

Although they rejected the accusation that their work was “amoral,” Fogel and Engerman later conceded that their critics were right that they had “failed to deal with moral issues” arising from their study and therefore “seemed to be diminishing the moral horror of slavery and providing (no matter how innocent the intention) an apologia for centuries of exploitation.” They admitted that, being economists, they had not “immersed ourselves in the history of the religious movements that spawned the antislavery ethic or in the history of the political struggle against slavery.” They acknowledged that “understanding the economics and demography of slavery, or even slave culture, did not by itself provide an adequate basis for coming to grips with the moral problem of slavery.” They accepted that one would need to conduct a religious study to understand “the role of religious inspiration in the shaping of the antislavery ethic.”

Although this “afterword” to their book written in 1989 was by no means offered as an apology, and did not retract the study but merely addressed the moral concerns, the tone of their comments vaguely echoes the apology of the President of the American Historical Association after his abortive attempt to reject “presentism” in historical analysis. When he was denounced for being amoral and “harmful” he said:

My September Perspectives on History column has generated anger and dismay among many of our colleagues and members. I take full responsibility that it did not convey what I intended and for the harm that it has caused. I had hoped to open a conversation on how we “do” history in our current politically charged environment. Instead, I foreclosed this conversation for many members, causing harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association.…

I sincerely regret the way I have alienated some of my Black colleagues and friends. I am deeply sorry. In my clumsy efforts to draw attention to methodological flaws in teleological presentism, I left the impression that questions posed from absence, grief, memory, and resilience somehow matter less than those posed from positions of power. This absolutely is not true. It wasn’t my intention to leave that impression, but my provocation completely missed the mark.

What lies behind these mea culpa statements by academics who fail to meet the moral standards set by the history police? The notion that slavery discourse must be exclusively concerned with brutality may appear to be morally sound, which may explain why Fogel and Engerman decided that their critics had a good point about the importance of overcoming their “obtuse secularism” before commenting on the economics of cotton production in the nineteenth century. But progressive critics are themselves no paragons of moral virtue. They are entirely self-serving and hypocritical. Their fulminations on the brutality of slavery—in common with many such moralistic narratives—are rooted in political debate and their own political ambitions. Therefore, it is to politics, and not to moral philosophy, that we must look for an explanation as to why the findings of Fogel and Engerman are denounced as “amoral.”

Time on the Cross was infuriating to those who insist that the only thing that ever needs to be said about slavery is that it was brutal. To ensure that the historical discourse focuses exclusively on brutality, they seek to quash all evidence that may point towards an alternative depiction of life in the Old South. They were particularly enraged that Fogel and Engerman studied food, shelter, clothing, and medical care and found no evidence of systematic brutality, findings that undermined progressive narratives of systematic rape, murder, and torture. To enhance their fictitious tales of woe—many of which they learned from watching Hollywood films—they skip right over the abolition of slavery and argue that the systematic violence against black people only got worse after abolition. For example, the Equal Justice Initiative says that after emancipation “thousands of Black people were forced into a brutal [penal servitude] system that historians have called ‘worse than slavery.’”

Northern politicians have long emphasized the brutal character of slavery in debate with their political opponents in the South, while conveniently avoiding all mention of brutality when reminded of their own history as slave states. Speaking in 1856, Charles Sumner—a senator from Massachusetts who was famous for what William Dunning calls his “exalted moral fervor”—railed against the South using the language of rape and depravity. He argued that allowing Southern slaveowners to settle in Kansas would be “the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling [Kansas] to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the hideous offspring of such a crime.” Yet, as Jefferson Davis observed in a senate speech in 1848, Northern politicians did not seem to regard slavery as the greatest moral crime when they themselves were slave states: “They have sold their slaves when they ceased to be profitable, and slavery became to them a sin of horrid enormity when the property was transferred from themselves to their brother.” The benign view of slavery that New England politicians adopted in relation to their own history transformed into moral outrage in debate with South Carolina. To denounce Andrew Pickens Butler—the senator from South Carolina who co-authored the Kansas-Nebraska Act—Charles Sumner fulminated for five hours on the subject of slavery as “harlotry”:

The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight; — I mean the harlot Slavery. For her his tongue is always profuse with words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator. The frenzy of Don Quixote in behalf of his wench Dulcinea del Toboso is all surpassed.

If Northern politicians genuinely regarded slavery with the extreme horror that they expressed in relation to the South, why did they not view their own history in the same light? Curiously, they only managed to summon this horror in debate with their political opponents. Hence Jefferson Davis remarked in the Senate in 1848: “This opposition to slavery is political, and rapid are the strides it is making in aggression.” To congressmen from Massachusetts, slavery in Massachusetts was not horrifying at all, but slavery in South Carolina was the greatest horror show on earth. Such double standards are the hallmark of the hypocrite.

In their article “Hypocrisy and Moral Authority,” Jessica Isserow and Colin Klein define hypocrites as “persons who have undermined their claim to moral authority.” They emphasize that this does not mean that the point made by hypocrites is necessarily false. It is true that slavery is immoral. However, the goal of hypocrites today in pontificating on the immorality of slavery is not merely to inform people that slavery is immoral (which everyone knows), nor is it to persuade people to adopt the view that slavery is immoral (as everyone already views it as immoral). Instead, the goal is to achieve a particular political outcome by means of moral authority that the moralizers lack. While their hypocrisy will not cause us to doubt the inherent truth of their stated moral position (namely, the moral truth that slavery is wrong), it nevertheless justifies us in rejecting their self-serving political arguments. As Isserow and Klein explain in their analysis of the nature of hypocrisy, “Since [hypocrites] do not seem to take the cause sufficiently seriously, they may lose a certain measure of trust; perhaps they cannot be fully relied on.” They see this as the essence of hypocrisy:

…hypocrites are persons who have, by mismatch between judgments and actions, undermined their claim to moral authority, where (very roughly), a person’s moral authority is understood as a kind of standing that they occupy within a particular moral community—a status that is intimately tied up with their capacity to (1) warrant esteem, and (2) bestow (dis)esteem on others.

Fogel and Engermen were therefore right to reject the charge that their study of the slave economy was “amoral.” That would make no more sense than accusing a botanist of offering an “amoral” taxonomy of plant species, or a physicist of giving an “amoral” explanation of the laws of motion. Their answer to the claim that they were trying to “sell slavery” was “No. And even if we were, you wouldn’t buy it. No one would buy it.” The same critics conveniently abandon their concerns about “amorality” when the focus shifts to the North African slave trade. Then the same progressives at once forget their concerns with brutality and commence fulminating on theories of capitalistic exploitation blaming Europe for the fact that Africans sold other Africans into slavery:

Advancement in industrial and production methods, for instance, helped Europe’s population to boom. As economic growth reached its peak during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, so did improvements in various industrial sectors, which forced Europeans to look beyond Europe for colonies. By 1815, many European states were searching, if not for colonies, then at least for outlets for trade. North Africa was one of the favorite destinations.

What happened to their claim that the only thing that matters is brutality? Like all self-serving claims, brutality is only called into service when it suits the political argument. One could still ask why this hypocrisy matters—why not ignore the hypocrisy and focus on the merits of the progressive claim that studying the economics of slavery in America amounts to “sanitizing” it? The first answer is that the tale of non-stop systematic brutality in the Old South is simply not true. Further, as Fogel and Engerman argue, erasing this history diminishes our understanding of the world and of American history. It diminishes black people into nothing but victims. By studying the economics of slavery, Fogel and Engerman succeeded in achieving their main aim: “to correct the perversion of the history of blacks—in order to strike down the view that black Americans were without culture, without achievement, and without development for their first two hundred and fifty years on American soil.”

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

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The losers in all this unseemly business are the European public. They are being screwed by U.S.-led militarism and European elites who are pimping their civilian economies.

Mark Rutte, the civilian figurehead chief of the NATO alliance, sparked viral headlines and memes this week after he referred to U.S. President Donald Trump as “daddy”.

Even Western news media were taken aback. Reporters questioned whether the former Dutch prime minister was going too far in his obsequiousness and demeaning himself. Without any shame, Rutte doubled down, ladling more compliments on Trump, and praising him for achieving what no other U.S. president has done – forcing European states to ramp up military spending.

The NATO secretary-general’s weird choice of words was not merely abject sycophancy. It was a Freudian slip revealing the sinister and abusive relationship that the United States has with its so-called allies.

At one point, the American president joked that if Rutte doesn’t like him sufficiently, he would “hit him.”

The occasion was the annual summit of the NATO military bloc, which this year was held in The Hague, Netherlands. It wasn’t just Rutte who was scraping and bowing. Most of the leaders from the 32-nation alliance were bending over backwards to appease Trump.

Trump has been relentlessly browbeating the Europeans to spend more of their economies on the military. He has scoffed at them for being “freeloaders” on American security and demanded that they increase their annual military budgets up from 2 percent of national economic output to 5 percent.

This week, the NATO alliance declared a “historic transformation” by announcing a formal commitment to reach the 5 percent target by 2035. That translates into trillions of more euros allocated to militarism, inevitably to the detriment of the civilian economy and social development, as well as inflaming geopolitical conflict.

Most of this new military expenditure will be used to purchase U.S. weapons, such as the F-35 fighter jet and Patriot air defense system, both of which are overpriced and overrated in performance. A new study published this week by the Bruegel and Kiel Institutes found that European nations are heavily dependent on the United States for the manufacture and supply of military equipment. That means that the gargantuan increase in NATO budgets will primarily benefit America’s military industry.

Another Freudian slip came from Trump himself, who said of European political leaders at the NATO summit, “these people really love their countries… it’s not a rip-off and we’re [the US] here to help them protect their countries.”

How twisted. These European politicians are betraying the peaceful interests of the European public while serving the warmongering system of US-led military capitalism. Trump’s talk of “protection” is in reality a Mafia-style protection racket, a racket that NATO has facilitated since its founding in 1949 under the guise of “defending” the “free world” against the Soviet Union.

Rutte, who was appointed as NATO chief last year, taking over from Norwegian Yes Man Jens Stoltenberg, has proven himself to be an ideal choice for intensifying the racket. The Dutch former politician is renowned for building consensus, and he has gone out of his way to court Trump’s narcissism. Rutte has deftly lobbied European states on the “need” to spend more on military, by constantly talking up the alleged threat posed by Russia. The Western media dutifully amplifies the absurd propaganda.

On the eve of the NATO summit this week, Rutte messaged Trump with gushing praise. “Mr President, Dear Donald… Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win.”

Having extorted more money from European taxpayers, Trump left the NATO summit with a new, happy view of the organization. He ditched his previous griping about European “freeloaders,” and he reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to the alliance’s joint defense clause. Trump even adopted the inane talk about Russia attacking other countries after Ukraine.

This is what the European lackeys and Russophobes on both sides of the Atlantic want above all else. Trump’s earlier warnings about pulling the U.S. out of the NATO alliance had unnerved the transatlantic imperialist axis. Those warnings from Trump were always empty. There is no way the U.S. would leave NATO because of its function as a multilateral cover for American imperialism. Nevertheless, Trump’s seeming contempt for the alliance had undermined its unity and the military racket.

By sucking up to Trump’s ego, the alliance appears to have regained purpose. Russophobic political leaders were praising Trump for “making NATO great again.”

For all his bullying talk and bravado, Trump seems to be a weak character who is malleable when his ego is massaged.

The European vassals groveled like never before. Apart from the promises to vastly increase spending on (U.S.) military weapons, the NATO summit was organized to hold brief meetings so as not to bore Trump, given his notorious short attention span.

He was given the indulgent privilege of staying in the Dutch royal palace as a special guest of King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima. Everything about this summit was focused on pandering to Trump’s ego.

The European NATO sycophants even played down their usual soliciting of more military aid for Ukraine, knowing that this annoys Trump’s transactional obsession to cut losses over the failed proxy war against Russia. The Ukraine conflict was only a sideline issue. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky was invited to attend, but he was told to put his begging bowl away. He even donned a smart civilian suit instead of his normal cosplay military garb, which again indicated that the NATO organizers had decided to prioritize toadying up to Trump.

The joint communique issued at the end of the conference designated Russia as the top threat to international security ahead of terrorism and other dangers, which contradicts Trump’s earlier calls for improving relations with Moscow.

From NATO’s point of view, it was a successful week. Uncle Sam is now a Daddy, and the alliance has found a restored unity because the American president won trillions of dollars worth of subsidies for the U.S. military-industrial complex. The European sycophants got what they wanted, too – a U.S. president who has returned to the fold of the anti-Russia alliance.

The losers in all this unseemly business are the European public. They are being screwed by U.S.-led militarism and European elites who are pimping their civilian economies.

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

The post Who’s Your Daddy? NATO Elites Pimp Europe’s Economy for U.S. Military Racket appeared first on LewRockwell.

It is generally believed that American voters elected Donald Trump president at least in part due to their embracing his lies that he was a peacemaker who would not involve the United States in the pointless wars that have proliferated since 9/11. Trump’s predecessor the hapless Genocide Joe Biden had entangled the US deep in a conflict involving nuclear armed Russia and had also armed, funded and politically protected war criminal Israel in its openly declared objective to eliminate the Palestinians. Neither conflict could be justified based on actual American interests. So Trump looked like a better bet than a witless giggler like Kamala Harris, though voters would have benefited from looking at the Trump record during his first term in office where he was little more than Israel’s mouthpiece after being heavily bribed during his campaign by Nevada casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Trump and his ambassador in Israel David Friedman endorsed the oppression of the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza and also illegally approved moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem. Trump also allowed Israel to annex part of the Syrian Golan Heights and ordered the assassination of Qassim Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and regarded as a major enemy by Israel, killing the man when he was in Baghdad Iraq for peace talks. Trump, like his successor Joe Biden, never said “no” to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Be that as it may, the past five months have demonstrated that searching for an honest man (or woman) in Washington would require Diogenes and his lamp, with little hope of coming up with someone who was not alternately a bad joke, an incompetent, or a screaming psychopath. The last several weeks illustrate just how bad things are, though the real fear must be that they can actually get worse if Trump joins Israel when it ignores the current ceasefire and attacks Iran once again. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump will no doubt have to construct a new big lie to explain their belligerency as it is now clear that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.

Even given the horrors being perpetrated by the United States as a bosom buddy ally of Israel, one is nevertheless particularly taken by the malapropisms and the verbal slurs and even threats of physical abuse increasingly being hurled about by the buffoon who pretends to be the president of the United States. Trump, pretending to negotiate with Iran, also saw fit to threaten to “eliminate” the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, if Iran did not submit to unconditional surrender. He claimed to know the “secret location” where Ali Khamenei was hiding but “won’t kill him for now.” Trump also called out Representative Thomas Massie, one of the most principled men in Congress, on social media, calling him a “LOSER” after Massie posted a social media post criticizing the president for unconstitutionally bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities on Saturday night without a declaration of war. Worse still, Trump also engaged in screaming fits focused on two women journalists who questioned his claim that he had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, demanding that CNN’s White House correspondent “Natasha Bertrand should be FIRED from CNN! I watched her for three days doing Fake News. She should be IMMEDIATELY reprimanded, and then thrown out like a dog.”

Over the past few years Trump’s disdain for dogs has often been on display and he has likened a long list of perceived enemies to dogs — including former FBI director James B. Comey, former acting attorney general Sally Yates, and even his own Secretary of State Marco Rubio. As an animal lover, I found Trump’s expression particularly disgusting and I wondered where the sense of dignity and decency was in a man holding the highest office who would use such a phrase. Or of the brain connected to mouth that would use such an expression in the first place, particularly as the ladies were referring to a leaked report by government analysts. The report suggested that the enriched uranium and centrifuges had been removed from the Iranian sites days before Trump had sent his B-2 bombers to attack them in support of Israel’s own attack on Iran several days before. The damage to the sites was considered to be limited. Interestingly, the Defense Department’s own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analysts were among those who were skeptical of Trump’s claims about the Iranian program. To put it succinctly, Trump may have spent billions of dollars successfully bombing empty tunnels and he been since taking pains to pretend otherwise.

Trump has also shifted his tirades over the Iran attack to what he prefers to label his critics’ disdain for the US military, which carried the bombing out under his orders. President Trump and other White House officials are now suggesting that questioning the decision and efficacy of bombing Iran shows a “lack of patriotism” and is something that “disparages American troops.” These claims remind one of the disastrous Iraq War in 2003 when skeptics were simply marginalized by George W Bush as anti-American or as “traitors” by asserting that they didn’t support the troops.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth discussed the Iran operation’s success in a press conference and fielded questions from the press, while President Trump, who was himself a draft dodger during the Vietnam war, shared his opinion on social media where he posted how “Secretary of Defense (War!) Pete Hegseth, together with Military Representatives, will be holding a Major News Conference tomorrow morning at 8 A.M. EST at The Pentagon, in order to fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots. After 36 hours of dangerously flying through Enemy Territory, they landed, they knew the Success was LEGENDARY, and then, two days later, they started reading Fake News by CNN and The Failing New York Times. They felt terribly!”

Hegseth repeated the message from his boss in the White House to the media, explaining how “What’s really happening is you’re undermining the success of incredible B-2 pilots and incredible F-35 pilots and incredible refuelers and incredible air defenders who accomplished their mission, set back a nuclear program in ways that other presidents would have dreamed. How about we celebrate that? How about we talk about how special America is, that we — only we have these capabilities? I think it’s too much to ask, unfortunately, for the fake news.”

And then there was the usual lie encrusted follow-through that inevitably is produced whenever a leading politician screws up. In a long post on his Truth Social account on Wednesday night, President Trump demanded that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial in Israel come to an end. Netanyahu and his wife have been on the receiving end of three charges of bribery, theft, and breach of trust. Trump, who only last month was reputedly not speaking to Netanyahu and as recently as last Tuesday criticized his government as well as Iran by saying “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

But Trump has perhaps inevitably changed his tune under pressure from the Israel Lobby and Congress and is now defending his war criminal buddy while also praising himself, writing how “I was shocked to hear that the State of Israel, which has just had one of its Greatest Moments in History, and is strongly led by Bibi Netanyahu, is continuing its ridiculous Witch Hunt against their Great War Time Prime Minister! Bibi and I just went through HELL together, fighting a very tough and brilliant longtime enemy of Israel, Iran, and Bibi could not have been better, sharper, or stronger in his LOVE for the incredible Holy Land. Anybody else would have suffered losses, embarrassment, and chaos! Bibi Netanyahu was a WARRIOR, like perhaps no other Warrior in the History of Israel, and the result was something that nobody thought was possible, a complete elimination of potentially one of the biggest and most powerful Nuclear Weapons anywhere in the World, and it was going to happen, SOON! We were fighting, literally, for the Survival of Israel, and there is nobody in Israel’s History that fought harder or more competently than Bibi Netanyahu. Despite all of this, I just learned that Bibi has been summoned to Court on Monday for the continuation of this long running politically motivated case…”

And so it goes, so much lying and dissimulation that one has to wonder what surprises will be on the table next week. The fog of war may have lifted for now and the phony ceasefire between Israel and Iran has paused the immediate bloodshed, but don’t be fooled. The respite is to allow an exhausted Israel to rearm with US provided weapons so the neoconservatives and the Israel Firsters aren’t done. The war drums are still beating, and Trump’s America First movement is starting to fracture under the strain, with a growing divide inside MAGA over America’s pointless wars for Israel. One group wants to stay out of foreign conflicts while the other is ready to back Israel completely, no matter the cost. Trump is either consciously or inadvertently playing his usual role of spewing contradictions and sowing confusion and instability every time he speaks or acts. Israel cannot retreat, it can only continue on its path of blood and slaughter, and Iran will not surrender. This might create in the near and long run the potential for a major false flag operation by Israel to draw the US in and trigger a full-blown war against Iran.

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

The post Trump Rolls Over for a New War appeared first on LewRockwell.

As June comes to an end, so does the pagan festival of debauchery known as “Pride Month.”  It has become an annual annoyance to find troupes of dancing gay men — usually semi-naked and engaging in various forms of erotic foreplay — overtaking public streets as the first warm days of summer return.  It would be nice if the LGBTQ+ crowd — or “Alphabet people” to those without a special letter designation — could enjoy their civil rights without resorting to X-rated acts of exhibitionism in front of children and strangers.  Alas, the celebration of sin seems to be “Pride Month’s” chief purpose, which surely explains why its proponents chose one of the deadliest sins — pride — as its defining attribute.

Young people — who spend the first two decades of their lives in indoctrination mills posing as schools — often find it difficult to understand why people over the age of thirty recoil at the sight of lurid circuses of sexual deviancy.  They were taught at an early age that fat, hairy men wearing lipstick and little else are civil rights heroes for flaunting their masturbatory excess in front of anyone who has the bad luck of stumbling upon one of their street shows while walking to nearby places of business.  Democrat-controlled teachers’ unions believe it’s “virtuous” to have drag queens dressed as strippers twerking in front of kindergartners during “story time.”  Democrat-controlled medical associations think it’s “scientific” to “trans” elementary school children by mutilating their bodies and sterilizing them for life.  When all of the adults in positions of authority tell kids that this craziness is not only normal, but also something worth celebrating, young minds struggle to break free from their programming.

Sexual overindulgence and exploitation have defined the last thirty years.  We’ve gone from the occasional gay kiss on prime-time television to full-blown gay orgies when viewers are least expecting it.  At the beginning of the century, proponents of so-called “gay marriage” told us that “love is love” and that gay people just wanted to enjoy the same rights as married couples.  Now the Alphabet Mafia harasses anyone with a differing viewpoint and works to get Christians fired from their jobs.  For years, gay rights advocates beseeched heterosexuals to show compassion for those who might be different.  Yet as soon as those advocates seized the heights of cultural and political power, they showed no compassion at all.

If you defend the millennia-old tradition of marriage as between one man and one woman, you are denounced as a “bigot.”  If you insist that no child is born in the wrong body, you are accused of “committing violence” against “trans” people.  If you refuse to carry the “rainbow flag” or embrace gay idolatry as a religion, you are excommunicated from professions and institutions whose putative missions have nothing to do with “gay rights.”

In Democrat-controlled cities around the country, mass riots in support of criminal illegal aliens routinely desecrate and burn the American flag.  This seems a terribly counterproductive way of convincing American citizens that foreign nationals belong in the United States.  Still, nobody is rounding up the perpetrators who obscenely disrespect the sacrifices of all those Americans who fought and died in the past so that the Stars and Stripes might fly today.

On the other hand, whenever teenagers leave tread marks on rainbow-flag-painted intersections, Democrat officials treat such minor, rebellious incidents as if they were profound offenses to the State.  Democrat-controlled police departments actually waste resources tracking down anyone unwilling to treat gay emblems as sacred shrines.  The same Democrat politicians who can’t be bothered to clean up city streets of drug needles, human waste, and trash spare no expense organizing manhunts for the occasional freethinking troublemaker marking a public street with public speech.

When an American can go to prison for the “hate crime” of disrespecting the Alphabet Army’s flag but foreign nationals are celebrated for burning the American people’s flag, it is easy to understand why so many Americans feel as if they are strangers in their own country.

Our deluded empathy is leftists’ greatest weapon; they conquer us when we fear hurt feelings.  “Political correctness” teaches us to censor ourselves, until those who decide what is “politically correct” gain enough political power to censor us with force.  So be wary of those who implore others to disregard moral virtue in the name of “love” because those same people are quick to punish virtue as “hate.”

The Gay Gestapo did not materialize overnight.  Before it could wield the power it has today, society first had to be degraded.  Christian virtue had to be minimized, mocked, and maligned.  It might surprise high-schoolers to learn that there was a time when entire families could enjoy a movie without worrying that some graphic sex scene would pop up in the middle to embarrass children, parents, and grandparents.  Nobody had to wonder whether a summer blockbuster would descend into veritable porn.  By the ’80s, however, it became almost standard practice for Hollywood studios to pause their movies’ storytelling so that they could show big-name celebrities simulating sex.  It’s bizarre when you think about it: One moment you’re watching a movie about fighter jets or aliens, and all of a sudden, there’s a scene that requires A-list stars to be undressed.

Read the Whole Article

The post Pride Remains a Sin appeared first on LewRockwell.

The violence that has been the primary characteristic of the 21sr century has reached a level of recklessness that threatens life on our planet.  It was only the other day that some unidentified person or agency green-lighted an attack on Russia’s strategic triad.  According to Russian war doctrine, this attack, of which President Trump says he was unaware, requires a Russian strategic response. Putin, being a humane and reasonable person averse to war , side-stepped the issue by declaring the attack to be an act of terrorism and not of war.  It is extraordinary that no one is interested in identifying who so irresponsibly green-lighted  an attack that could have initiated nuclear war.  

How can Washington and the Kremlin be so insouciant and uninterested in a provocation that could have resulted in nuclear war? Whoever green-lighted the attack did not know that Putin would simply not acknowledge that such an attack took place.  Whoever green-lighted the attack was OK with launching a nuclear war. What is to prevent such a thing again happening?

We must be thankful that Putin side-stepped the issue.  But we must also consider the effect of Putin’s side-stepping the attack. The person or agency that authorized the attack must be confident that Russia will never respond to any provocation, and, therefore, the provocations will increase in their intensity.  At some point, it won’t be possible for Putin to side-step the provocation. Thus, Putin might be bringing on the war he hopes to avoid by side-stepping provocations.

In addition to the conflict with Russia, there is the conflict with Iran.  Netanyahu, using the powerful influence of the Israel Lobby over Washington, pressured President Trump to bomb Iran’s uranium enrichment sites, claiming without evidence that Iran was producing a nuclear weapon.

Trump in what might be an act of brilliance dropped the bombs on the Iranian sites and declared them obliterated whether they were or not, thereby removing Netanyahu’s only argument for war with Iran.  With the nuclear facilities destroyed, there can be no bomb.  Thus, Trump removed Netanyahu’s case for preemptive war against Iran, thereby removing the reason for wider conflict in the Middle East.  Let’s hope Iran understands what has really happened, and cooperates with President Trump in removing the conflict from the agenda.

There still remains anger caused by Israel’s merciless destruction of Gaza and its people. How a people who claim to be victims of a holocaust can submit Palestinians to one is difficult to comprehend. But the Arab states that could protest have all been destroyed by American presidents for Israel.  Washington’s bombs have turned Iraq, Libya, and Syria into non-functioning states, and Hezbollah  has been decapitated and cut off from supplies.  The only remaining Arab country is Saudi Arabia, the military ability of which is marginal.  Washington sicced the Saudis on Yemen, and it was unsuccessful.  The Houthis are the only remaining Arabs, other than the remains of Hamas,  who continue to oppose Israel. They are dependent on Iran, who are Persians, not Arabs, and if Trump has succeeded in removing Netanyahu’s justification for war with Iran, it seems likely that Iran will call off the Houthis.

This opens a chance for peace in the Middle East after a quarter century of America’s wars against Arabs for Israel, wars disguised as a “war on terror” and “bringing democracy” in order to deceive the American people about the expenditure of trillions of American taxpayers’ dollars for the exclusive benefit of Israel, while American veterans who were deceived into fighting the wars for Greater Israel are left to live on the streets.

Previously, in a joint news conference with Netanyahu, Trump declared Gaza as a US possession that would be the anchor of an American reconstructed Middle East.  In place of Greater Israel–an aspiration, not a reality–which with its recent Israeli additions now extends from the Nile to include Pakistan and half of Saudi Arabia, Trump indicated that there would be a profit-sharing American colony, unlike the colonial extractive colonies of prior times. Trump has talked it up with the Saudis, and there are indications that he wants to add Iran to the deal.  Trump seems to be saying that instead of war let’s go into business together.  This plan requires the Zionists to give up their agenda for Israeli hegemony over the Middle East. Can the Zionists help to save the world from war?

If Trump can pull this off, assuming that he is thinking along this line–he is so changeable that it is hard to know–Trump would go down as the greatest president in American history. Instead of Muslims and Israelis exhausting themselves in wars, they would be making money together.  There is no better outcome.

Can we get there?

Two formidable forces are blocking the way.  The American Zionist Neoconservative doctrine of US hegemony spelled out in the Wolfowitz Doctrine, and the Israeli hegemonic doctrine of Greater Israel.

Trump can clear both obstacles out of the way. He can renounce the Wolfowitz doctrine of American hegemony, and he can tell Netanyahu that if he sticks with Greater Israel, Israel goes it alone, that the United States will not establish for Israel at Americans’ lives and expense Israel’s hegemony over the Middle East.

It is time that we Americans began speaking honestly and openly about our unrealistic foreign policy and our subservience to Israel.  We must set aside the propagandistic excuses US governments used–the war on terror, promotion of democracy–and understand that the only two forces for war and instability in the world are Washington and Tel Aviv’s hegemonic ambitions.  

All that Donald Trump needs to do to be known in history as America’s greatest president is to publicly repudiate the neoconservative Zionists’ doctrine of US hegemony and to tell Israel that if Israel continues to pursue its hegemony over the Middle East, it will do so without Washington’s support and with Washington’s opposition.

This is a very easy and effective way of pushing back the minute hand of the doomsday clock and giving the world time to get rid of nuclear weapons before they are used to destroy us.

Let us hope and pray that Trump can recognize the leadership role that awaits him and that he can fill the role and not be blocked by his own Zionist government, the ruling American establishment, and the Israel Lobby.

If Trump fails, the world is likely to be destroyed in nuclear Armageddon.

The post President Trump: Seize Your Opportunity to be the Greatest American President in History appeared first on LewRockwell.

After the first Pentagon press briefing on Operation “Midnight Hammer”, even the mainstream propaganda machine remained “unconvinced”. Obviously, many will attribute this to the Trump Derangement Syndrome. However, while TDS is still a big part of their motivation, the mainstream media might actually be onto something in this particular case (they can’t be wrong 100% of the time, right?).

And no, the Trump administration screaming “fake news” at everything isn’t helping. On the contrary, it’s only making things worse. Namely, US President Donald Trump pompously announced yesterday’s Pentagon briefing on their Iran attack (a more detailed one, but still very unconvincing, to say the least).

The “irrefutable” press conference provided more details on the supposed “level of destruction” of the three Iranian nuclear facilities, namely Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.

The Isfahan Nuclear Research Center is an atomic scientific center and a key uranium conversion facility located southeast of Isfahan, a historic city in central Iran. The Natanz Nuclear Facility is Tehran’s main uranium enrichment complex, situated approximately 120 kilometers north of Isfahan.

And last but certainly not least, the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, a heavily fortified uranium enrichment facility buried deep into a mountain approximately 30 km northeast of Qom, another historic city in northern Iran (you get a lot of those in a country whose history spans millennia). Expectedly, the Fordow facility is the main point of contention, as the US insists that it was destroyed, although irrefutable evidence for that is sorely lacking. Precisely this notion enraged Trump, who even pointed out that B-2 pilots were supposedly “upset by all the fake news”.

“Secretary of Defense (War!) Pete Hegseth, together with Military Representatives, will be holding a Major News Conference tomorrow morning at 8 A.M. EST at The Pentagon, in order to fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots. These Patriots were very upset!

After 36 hours of dangerously flying through Enemy Territory, they landed, they knew the Success was LEGENDARY, and then, two days later, they started reading Fake News by CNN and The Failing New York Times. They felt terribly! Fortunately for them and, as usual, solely for the purpose of demeaning PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, the Fake News (Times and CNN) lied and totally misrepresented the Facts, none of which they had (because it was too soon, there were no Facts out there yet!). The News Conference will prove both interesting and irrefutable. Enjoy!” Trump posted on Truth Social.

The controversy was also exacerbated by a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report leaked to CNN. Namely, the agency’s assessment strongly suggested that Operation “Midnight Hammer” fell flat after the US airstrikes failed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program.

CNN cited “two of the people familiar with the assessment” who allegedly said that “Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed”, one of whom concluded that “the centrifuges are largely intact”. In addition, several other sources reported that Tehran moved the enriched uranium out of the three facilities before the US sent the B-2 strategic bombers to attack them. The DIA’s report also claims that Iran’s nuclear program was “set back maybe a few months, tops”. In the meantime, these assessments were dropped in favor of Trump’s claims, with Israeli and top US spy agencies (including the CIA) backing him.

However, even their reports still question the validity of Trump’s claims that Iranian nuclear facilities were “totally obliterated”.

Namely, CIA Director John Ratcliffe stated that his agency “obtained a body of credible evidence [that] indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged”.

Obviously, we could simply dismiss this as pure semantics, but “totally obliterated” and “severely damaged” are two very different outcomes. Trump’s rather “colorful” way of expressing his opinions can certainly add to the general confusion, but a matter like this requires 100% accurate damage assessments. And yet, top officials of the Trump administration continued to use similar ways to describe the supposed “success” of Operation “Midnight Hammer”. For instance, Hegseth used terms such as “decimating, obliterating and destroying Iran’s nuclear capabilities”.

Worse yet, instead of providing the alleged “irrefutable” evidence that Iranian facilities were “totally obliterated”, the press briefing largely focused on very detailed accounts of what American troops in the Middle East are “going through” (as if anyone is forcing them at gunpoint to participate in the all-encompassing US aggression against the world). In addition, just like Trump himself, DoD and Pentagon officials appointed by him stressed the strain of flying 37 hours from Missouri to Iran. And while Hegseth mostly relied on emotions and cheap jingoism, General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, focused more on the specifications of the GBU-57A/B MOP (Massive Ordnance Penetrator) 14-tonne “bunker buster” bombs that were dropped on Fordow and Natanz facilities, insisting they “functioned as designed, meaning they exploded”.

However, Caine himself effectively invalidated his own briefing by saying that

“the Joint Force does not do [battle damage assessments]”, adding that “by design, we don’t grade our own homework” and that this is done by intelligence services. However, those same agencies initially denied the facilities were destroyed and changed their assessment only after massive political pressure to do so. Worse yet, Caine cited one of the B-2 pilots, saying that “the blast from the initial bombs was so big as it was like an overwhelming flash of daylight”.

This goes entirely against Caine’s explanation of how the MOP works, when he stated that it explodes underground, meaning there are little to no visible explosions on the outside. To make matters worse, Caine also admitted that the Iranians built a concrete cover that further reinforced the Fordow facility.

And yet, the matter of potential radioactive fallout has never been addressed by anyone in the Trump administration or the Pentagon.

Namely, the uranium used as fuel in nuclear power plants is enriched at 3.67%, which is considered far below the 90% or higher used in nuclear weapons. It should be noted that the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters used precisely this sort of nuclear fuel, which still resulted in massive radioactive contamination. On the other hand, the Fordow facility had uranium enriched at 60%, meaning that radioactive fallout would’ve been far worse. Given the fact that no radiation was detected in the aftermath of the US strike, the only logical conclusion is that the reactors weren’t destroyed. Some have tried to explain this by claiming that this is because the Iranians moved the uranium several days or weeks before the US attack.

However, Trump himself refuted those claims, insisting that the cars and trucks seen at Fordow were moving the concrete that was used to reinforce the facility. In the meantime, the mainstream media are citing “European capitals” as the source of the claim that Iran supposedly “moved the enriched uranium elsewhere” (although nobody seems to know where exactly). Financial Times insists that

“Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile remains largely intact following US strikes on its main nuclear sites, European capitals believe, calling into question President Donald Trump’s assertion that the bombing ‘obliterated’ the Islamic republic’s nuclear programme”. Further citing two anonymous sources, FT claims that “Iran’s stockpile of 408kg of uranium enriched close to weapons-grade levels […] had been distributed to various other locations”.

And yet, despite all the uncertainty, the Trump administration keeps insisting that the facilities are at least “no longer operational”. Bizarrely enough, Trump has even suggested US investment in a “peaceful Iranian nuclear program”. Namely, according to CNN, the Trump administration “has discussed possibly helping Iran access as much as $30 billion to build a civilian-energy-producing nuclear program”. The report also suggests that “America’s Arab partners would foot the bill”. This is yet to be confirmed, but if true, it could reveal that Trump’s motivation for the strikes was at least partially economic and financial. Namely, Iran’s nuclear facilities were built with Russian, Chinese and North Korean assistance, so bombing them (after 15 years of planning) was a good way to get Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang “out of business” in Iran.

Video: Political Theatre. Trump’s Attack against Iran

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post Disgraced Pentagon Still Insists That Iranian Nuclear Facilities Were ‘Destroyed’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Takeaways:
* Stocks haven’t kept pace during historical monetary hyperinflation periods despite bull markets. Diversified investment portfolios of say 60% stocks/40% bonds vastly underperform farmland and commodities futures during hyperinflationary periods.
* Pending Congressional legislation will replace the US dollar for a programmable Stable Coin to pay down the national debt.
* Stable Coins must be bought first from an investment house to buy any investments and from retailers of goods and services.
* Stablecoins are programmed money that must backup the coins with commensurate purchases of Treasury Bills. Effectually, the mandated pre-purchase of Stable Coins is a disguised excise tax.
* Stable Coins may be a return to the “Wildcat Banking” era of the 1830’s which resulted in the Panic of 1837 (see Jessica Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis, 2013 and Simone Polillo, Conservatives versus Wildcats: A Sociology of Financial Conflict, 2013)
* Deflating the national debt is expected to bring about corresponding deflation in prices for goods and services in which case learning from periods of hyperinflation may be irrelevant and we would have to learn from the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
* Investment-grade bonds, defensive stocks (consumer goods companies), dividend-paying stocks, cash-generating small businesses, and cash are the best performing investments during deflationary periods.

My friend James Anthony offers some wise information to consider before the Great Money Reset expected later this year in his June 28 article “Good Moneys: 100%-Reserve Gold, Stock-Based Money”. But Anthony discusses “potential” gains in value not “actual” historical rates of return or loss during hyperinflationary periods. Some more nuanced information on how differing investments have historically performed during hyperinflationary periods is necessary, with the caveat that we may end up with deflation.

Fortunately, in 2010 the global investment firm Alliance Bernstein conducted research as to how various investments performed during three hyperinflationary periods in the US, Britain and Japan. The research paper is titled Deflating Inflation: Redefining the Inflation-Resistant Portfolio. This study focused on investment performance during differing periods of gold-backed currency and debt-backed currency as we have had since the US dollar was untethered from being backed by gold reserves in 1972.

The Alliance study compared investment performance (loss or gain) with money inflation as a baseline. This is called a “Beta” score in investing parlance. The higher the Beta score, the greater the risk. A Beta score is reflexive or correlated in that it indicates how much loss or gain was realized for every 1% of inflation. This is in keeping with the investment principle “the greater the risk, the higher the expected rate of return” on an investment and vice versa.  The findings of the Alliance Bernstein report are summed up in words as follows:

“In the US, for example, for a given 1% increase in the inflation rate, 20-year nominal bonds fell 3.1 times as much. Stocks, too, tend to be vulnerable to most rising inflation environments: on average, the S&P 500 historically dropped 2.4 times the rise in inflation, and the broad equity indices of many other countries showed a similar sensitivity. This explains the dismal performance we saw in the traditional 60% stock/40% bond portfolio during the periods of accelerating inflation”.  Conversely, productive farmland gained 1.7 times the inflation rate while commodities like gold, soybean or cattle futures gained 6.5 times the inflation rate. This is why mega billionaire oligarchs such as Bill Gates have invested in farmland in preparation for the Great Reset.

The Alliance study can also be summed up in numbers as follows:

Importantly, the report warns that stock values typically rise in bull markets during monetary inflation periods and this can be deceiving because they have historically not kept pace with money inflation.

So, based on history, conventional asset diversification of 60% stocks/40% bonds will likely result in a net loss after adjusting for money inflation despite a bull market in stocks. An asset portfolio weighted toward productive farmland and commodity futures (gold, platinum, agricultural products, crude oil, natural gas, livestock, lumber, etc.) is more likely to outperform inflation by multiples of 1.7 times to 6.5 times a 1% rise in inflation if investment performance mimics past hyperinflations.

However, what we’re ultimately expecting under the substitution of Stable Coins for US Dollars is deflation in goods and service prices because the debt bubble will deflate (see below).

The Emergence of Stable Coin “Wildcat” Marketized Money Market?

What you may not have been informed of yet is that if you buy stocks, bonds or commodity futures contracts you must pay for them in Stable Coins, as cash, checks, and credit cards will be extinguished under the Genius Act passed by the US Senate and the Stable Act pending in the House of Representatives.

We also need to understand that if we are going to be buying stocks that we must first buy a Stable Coin from Fidelity, Vanguard, Blackrock, or some other investment house, which is backed by short term Treasury Bills. The issuers of stable coins cannot be the Federal Reserve Banks but large retail corporations like Walmart, Amazon, Kroger or Chevron gasoline which will use your money to buy T-bills. Stable Coins or tokens can also be issued by the monied class such as the Ivanka Trump Stable Coin.  Issuers, however, will be allowed to use the “float” on your money as collateral for seven days (but who will police the zillions of such transactions, so this provision won’t be abused?).

The purpose of Stable Coins is to boost demand for treasury securities to pay off the federal debt.  A Stable Coin will be like a prepaid debit card.  It is programmed money.  You will be constrained from going into personal debt or taking out loans for cars, real estate, small business start-ups. There will be capital contraction. Governments will be inhibited to issue tax exempt bonds to pay for infrastructure and businesses discouraged to borrow to invest in inventions.  You can still get a loan from a bank, but you must pay for it in Stable Coin backed by some corporation or investment house buying T-bills.  You will be forced to “buy the debt bubble” or “buy the churn” (revenue loss) before it blows up. This, however, does not necessarily constrain government to continue to rack up even more debt.  Experts say this will lead to deflation (a decrease in the prices of goods and services).

Stable Coin will mean the US economy will be returning to the “wildcat” banking era before the Civil War where unregulated banks (not corporations of issuers of coins) supplied a medium of exchange in the form of bearer notes based on their own credit.  Wildcat banking led to the Panic of 1837.

The institutionalization of Stable Coins will mean having to do homework to investigate the soundness of each issuer before you buy a so-called Stable Coin. For example, in 2023 the “Circle” Stablecoin substantially dipped under its stabilized one dollar unit value when it was discovered that $3.3 billion of its $40 billion reserves were invested in Silicon Valley Bank which was pending collapse due to its investment in failed high tech enterprises.

In the proposed Stable Coin environment, bank loans are expected to charge from 10.9% to 18.9% interest to constrain households from taking on new debt.  Residential real estate values would likely drop to the equivalent of an “all cash” price due to higher mortgage interest rates (typically 5% to 10% cash adjustment).

What will happen to small businesses which would have to issue their own Stable Coin is uncertain. As mentioned by James Anthony, several states are authorizing the issuance of Gold Back Paper Dollars containing trace amounts of gold dust. This may allow some greater flexibility for small businesses and sustain a resemblance of a cash economy.  Gold-backed paper dollars would likely be more valuable than T-bill backed Stable Coins.  But it is unclear whether buying Stable Coins to buy Gold Backed Paper Dollars would equate to double taxation of sorts. Rather, would each state have a clearinghouse for Gold Backed paper coins or tokens?

From the Austrian School of economics, inflation is legalized theft that is blamed on impersonal economic forces rather than political manipulation. Government works by blaming economic downturns and wiping out of the value of money depicted as acts of God, stock market boom and bust cycles, plagues, or wars.

We will likely have some sort of major crisis to justify the compulsory transition to a planned Stable Coin money economy by bank closures, lockdowns, and martial law to cover up the machinations of wiping out the currency value of the dollar. Government often uses mass media predictive programming to mentally prepare us for such shocks (see my article on how the California Energy Crisis of 2001 was “predicted” by Hollywood movies “Recent Science Hoaxes Reruns of California Energy Crisis of 2001”).

The above discussion of Stable Coins is drawn from an online interview with economics expert Paul Gallagher (“Why Stable Coin Isn’t”, June 27, 2025, Youtube). Any errors or omissions are my own.

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