Lew Rockwell Institute

Late yesterday, as I was finishing a hike in the Catskills, I received word that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had been nominated to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy’s prayers were answered. So were mine.

In a video Kennedy posted on YouTube two weeks ago, the newly nominated candidate for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) tells a Tucker Carlson Live audience, “For 19 years, since 2005, I have spent 30 minutes praying every day . . . I ask God … to put me in a position where I could end the chronic disease epidemic and bring health back to our children.”

God listened.

Kennedy has been censored by the Biden administration for speaking the truth. He has been excluded and vilified by the DNC-aligned legacy media as being “anti-vaccine” and “anti-science.” Despite everything that the DNC, the legacy media, and Big Pharma has thrown at him, Kennedy now stands tall as the man with a historic opportunity to reform HHS.

The Department of Health and Human Services is the massive federal agency that has failed in its mission to protect the health of Americans due to corruption, corporate capture, and an arrogant lack of transparency on everything ranging from vaccine safety data to research that serves the interests of industries it is supposed to regulate.

Following President-elect Trump’s announcement on November 14, Kennedy issued this statement on X:

“Thank you, Donald Trump, for your leadership and courage. I’m committed to advancing your vision to Make America Healthy Again. We have a generational opportunity to bring together the greatest minds in science, medicine, industry, and government to put an end to the chronic disease epidemic. I look forward to working with the more than 80,000 employees at HHS to free the agencies from the smothering cloud of corporate capture so they can pursue their mission to make Americans once again the healthiest people on Earth. Together we will clean up corruption, stop the revolving door between industry and government, and return our health agencies to their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science. I will provide Americans with transparency and access to all the data so they can make informed choices for themselves and their families. My commitment to the American people is to be an honest public servant. Let’s go!”

Kennedy’s plan is long past due because the poor health of Americans is now a national crisis.

Americans now die years earlier than people in European countries do even though Americans spend more on health care. Cancer rates are skyrocketing and the term “turbo cancers” in adults under 50 has entered our national health parlance. Diabetes rates and costs are crippling the economy. Autism, once a rare disorder, now dominates our nation’s special education expenditures.

Under the Biden administration, the Department of HHS has said nothing about the ongoing global excess deaths crisis, explained so well here by Dr. John Campbell.

Looking back at the Covid pandemic, the vast majority of our countrymen who died had multiple comorbidities. Our public health system cranked out vaccines that produced serious adverse consequences and failed to stop the spread of the virus. Nothing was done about the comorbidities.

The result was Pfizer and Moderna reaped record profits.

Americans died in droves.

HHS is supposed to protect the health of Americans – not the interests of Big Pharma, Big Ag and Big Chem. The DNC-aligned legacy, such as CNN, are going to scream “Kennedy is anti-vaccine” from now until the confirmation hearings – and well beyond. The thought of Kennedy upending the profitable apple carts of their Big Pharma sponsors is terrifying to decaying news outlets like CNN, which may soon announce layoffs. One can expect what is left of the legacy media will now try to push the U.S.  Senate to block Kennedy’s confirmation.

Big Pharma is already feeling the heat: As reported by Just The News, Pfizer and Moderna stocks fell immediately after RFK Jr. was chosen for HHS Secretary. Moreover, Republican Senator Rand Paul is planning to hold hearings on the Covid cover-up.

Big Pharma is now under seige in the Senate.

My advice to Republican Senators is to reject the influence of Big Pharma and the legacy media. Republican Senators need to respect the will of the people. Afterall, it was  two movements – MAGA and MAHA – that have given their party a mandate to lead and to improve the health of Americans.

For Senators from the Democratic Party, it is time to finally smell the coffee. Supporting Kennedy’s nomination is an opportunity to show Americans that you care about their health more than you do about Big Pharma donors.

Trump and Kennedy now have a mandate to improve the health of the nation. It is an opportunity to leave an historic legacy.

As I finished my hike, I said a prayer of thanks. I thought about the vaccine injuries my sons suffered. I thought about the people I know who have endured Covid vaccine injuries. I thought about the autism warrior moms and dads I have been blessed to meet over the past twenty years. The children we raised to adulthood and to better health. The doctors and scientists who stood up for the truth and were persecuted by their profession, their peers, and the media. The advocates who spoke out and who were attacked. The authors who wrote books they knew would be censored but wrote them anyway.

All of that work and sacrifice led to this moment.

A warrior mom friend of mine who has raised three children with autism sent me a text – an old Mexican proverb.

“They tried to bury us,” she wrote. “They didn’t know that we were seeds.”

This originally appeared on The Kennedy Beacon.

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The autumn sky above the old shot-and-beer city was a deep and endless blue. Woodsmoke hung in the air and small boats chugged out purposeful routes on waterways. The Ravens are playoff-bound, and the youth-strapped Orioles made it to the postseason again. All was right on Baltimore’s harbor Wednesday—perfect even—as joggers politely zig-zagged through the 200 or so folks who’d gathered to pray the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary alongside the world’s loneliest bishop.

Sunlight poured onto the face of Joseph Strickland when he rose from the concrete after leading the Catholic blue-collar symphony in the Salve Regina. Leaves scraped the ground, seagulls called, and a few of the faithful readied themselves to see if the bishop might not mind having his picture taken.

It was as picture-postcard an autumn day as you’re going to find in Baltimore; all seemed just perfect—until that bishop just had to go and spoil everything.

He picked a fight; he confronted the expanding Babylon.

Ah, but wasn’t it such a lovely day to go and die?

Directly after the Rosary, the outcast from Tyler, Texas read aloud a letter he’d written to his episcopal brethren. After just a few words, some in the gathering stood gape-mouthed. The bishop-with-no-flock seemed to have transmogrified into Ezekiel—albeit, a humble and soft-spoken Old Testament version—but still, one who had been commissioned by God, or perhaps by Mary (to whom he had given his priesthood) to address the silence of his old friends in the aftermath of the Synod on Synodality.

Keeping to O.T.-prophet form, Bishop Strickland dismissed pleasantries from the beginning of his letter, a letter that might as well have been written with a reed onto parchment and discovered a thousand years from now in a cave outside of Baltimore. From the top:

You gather here today, present-day apostles, as the Church and, therefore, the world stand perched on the edge of a cliff. And yet you who are entrusted with the keeping of souls choose to speak not a word of the spiritual danger which abounds. Today we stand on the cusp of all that has been prophesied about the Church and the abominations which would come forth in these times, a time when all of hell attacks the Church of Jesus Christ, and a time when the fallen angels of hell no longer seek entry into her sacred halls but instead stand inside, peeking out of her windows and unlocking doors to welcome in more diabolical destruction.

If sinews, flesh, and bones are to reconnect in the valleys of dry bones—in the valleys of both the morally-collapsing world and the Catholic Church— the voice and message should be pointed and strong. Still—in his innermost recesses—even the bishop knew that spinal columns and all the rest wouldn’t be reconnecting inside the high-end hotel. I have to imagine, he believed things would just keep running their course.

But that’s the glory of supernaturalists—those who believe in everyday miracles, the guiding light of guardian angels, and the way in which the flames of Hell or Purgatory consume those who neglect properly shepherding souls. Supernaturalists, like Bishop Strickland, understand God has the power to take a letter, shunned by bishops, and place it as a sacred icon into long-slumbering or timid souls.

Prophets just do what they’re told, and leave the rest to God.

Supernaturalists believe in miracles of wide sweeping scope.

Bishop Strickland finds himself in the middle of both, which is why he finds himself on the fringes.

But on Wednesday, he was more the prophet, who was considering the millions of Catholic youth, the college-aged, and young adults who pour from the Church like biblical plagues, even on a day when Pope Francis urged an international community at the United Nations’ COP29 event to respond swiftly to climate change and to implement billion-dollar plans to make it happen.

Prophets pick strange words and images-rarely heard anymore in this world-to make substantive points about a natural worldview supplanting the spiritual.

Do you not know that Our Lord will send forth His avenging angels to heap coals of fire upon the heads of those who were called to be His apostles and who have not guarded what He has given unto them?

And yet almost all of you, my brothers, stood by silently watching as the Synod on Synodality took place, an abomination constructed not to guard the Deposit of Faith, but to dismantle it, and yet few were the cries heard from you – men who should be willing to die for Christ and His Church.

The Synod’s final document has been released, yet with the sleight of hand which is so characteristic of the Francis-controlled Vatican. By drawing attention to the issues which worried many, they have slipped in what was always their real goal without anyone even noticing. What they were after in the first place was the dismantling of Christ’s Church by replacing the structure of the Church as Our Lord instituted it with a diabolically-inspired new structure of “synodality” which in actuality is a new church that is in no way Catholic.

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Going into the November 5th election, I predicted if the Democrats didn’t cheat, President-Elect Donald J. Trump would win 31 states with 312 votes and win the popular vote by 3% and the GOP would hold the House and pick up the Senate and that is exactly what happened. Trump’s election as the 47th President of the United States has given hope to tens of millions of Americans that his new administration will act to end Biden’s proxy wars with Russia and Iran and will steer clear of an all-out war with the PRC when they blockade China likely sometime early next year perhaps in January around Inauguration Day. Millions of non-Americans abroad likely felt the same sense of relief from Trump’s landslide victory that proved democracy works and the American people still have a choice on who they want to serve as their President.

I have never been more excited about a Republican presidential ticket in my life. Trump now has a mandate from 75 million Americans to fulfill his pledge to end Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine in the first several days of his presidency. He also has a mandate to make peace with China and avoid the outbreak of World War Three over Taiwan and to end our proxy war with Iran in the Middle East while restoring prosperity and freedom to Americans here at home in the interests of healing and uniting our great country.  President-Elect Trump recently stated “I am not going to start wars, I am going to stop wars.” That statement is the very definition of a Reaganite policy of policy of peace through strength that enabled us to win the Cold War against the Soviet Union. A similar policy may enable the US to win our Cold War against the People’s Republic of China.

In addition to pledging to end America’s foreign wars, Trump won by pledging to put America First, implement broad revenue-based tariffs of ten to twenty percent on foreign goods—essentially a variation of former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Border Adjustment Tax which he proposed six years ago, deporting 25 million illegal immigrants and driving down food, fuel and housing prices to make life more affordable for working class and middle-class American citizens. Trump was rewarded with record-breaking support from blacks, Latinos and young adults under thirty years of age.

President-Elect Trump has already begun announcing many of his senior Cabinet member picks, some of them more controversial than others. He announced he has chosen neocon Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), a US Army Reserve Colonel, to serve as his National Security Advisor. Waltz served as a Green Beret and served as a counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney (who notably endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for President) and later opposed withdrawing large numbers of troops from Afghanistan without strict conditions. LTC Darin Gaub (USA Ret.) wrote that “Waltz is well known as a hawkish figure and NEOCON who is more likely to continue to advocate for and push for forever wars than for ending them. If appointed, it remains to be seen how his push for continued conflict will mesh with Trump’s goal of ending it.” However, on the bright side, Waltz is well-informed on the existential threat of super EMP attacked having been briefed by members of the Task Force on National Security which I help lead.

Trump also announced he will nominate Sen. Marco Rubio to serve as his Secretary of State. RFK Jr. reportedly expressed strong opposition to Trump appointing Rubio as Secretary of State while Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) cautioned fellow MAGA supporters from believing Trump had chosen Rubio until Trump had officially confirmed the pick.  According to Politico, this nomination has provoked major backlash from Trump’s MAGA supporters.  Politico reported: “Conservative comedian Dave Smith said Tuesday that Rubio is “a disaster.” “Might as well give Liz Cheney the State Department,” Smith wrote. “Awful sign.” “Rubio? Was Hillary unavailable?” wrote another far-right influencer. Other MAGA acolytes recirculated old Trump Twitter posts about Rubio, including during the 2016 primary, when Trump called him a “perfect little puppet” for the late donor Sheldon Adelson, as well as a “total lightweight” and “overrated politician.”

Glenn Greenwald, a Trump aligned anti-war activist criticized the picks, posting on X: “Trump’s last 3 appointees – Elise Stefanik, Mike Waltz (sic), and Rubio – are war hawks fully aligned with the worst prongs of bipartisan DC consensus.” It seems clear they are not aligned with Trump’s stated America First foreign policy priorities. Unfortunately, Trump’s ‘superhawk’ neocon warmonger Republican establishment picks for Secretary of State with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and National Security Advisor with Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL), could serve to prolong the war in Ukraine indefinitely as they will likely push Trump to demand harsher peace terms for Russia that Putin will never accept.

Before the 2024 presidential election when I was asked during dozens of interviews how I thought Trump’s election would change US foreign policy towards Russia and China, I expressed confidence that Trump would steer clear of wars with both nuclear superpowers so long as Trump didn’t make the same mistake he made during his first term by appointing neocon warmongers and former Iraq war cheerleaders who worked to sabotage all his attempts to end America’s foreign wars in Iraq, Syria and especially Afghanistan. I had hoped that Trump would appoint America First conservatives like Vivek Ramaswamy to his Cabinet. However, it seems he is making the same mistakes in doing so he made during his previous term failing to appoint any America First conservatives/foreign policy restrainers to his incoming administration.

A week ago, I wrote: “I am concerned about the number of neocon imperialist warmongers that are being considered for Trump cabinet positions. Also, he is reportedly being advised by the neocon “America First Policy Institute” think tank on who to pick. We may see a lot of Deep Staters in his second term cabinet. The good news is that if he makes VP Elect JD Vance, his main national security policy advisor, he will make the right decision every time.”

Trump’s neocon Cabinet picks have left his supporters concerned given that there are multiple Trump MAGA supporters on Trump’s transition team. One would think would be strongly advising Trump against some of his counterproductive Cabinet choices who don’t align with his foreign policy views and who could work to sabotage Trump’s America First foreign and national security agenda from within the senior ranks of the administration as well as from Congress with both Houses set to be led by neoconservatives. If Trump’s America First agenda were to be sabotaged by his Deep State Cabinet members and Deep State US Senate Majority Leader, Democrats could take back both houses of Congress in 2026 and then Trump may end up having a failed presidency.

Earlier this year, a host of retired generals and neocons acolytes reportedly briefed Trump at Mar-a-Lago and persuaded Trump to drop his opposition to the Biden-Johnson $61 billion monstrosity. Now, this same neocon cabal that misled Trump to abandon his opposition to further Ukraine aid may be helping to hand-pick his Cabinet officials who will be in charge of determining US foreign policy and national security policy. Suspending aid to Ukraine is absolutely necessary to pressure Zelensky to agree to negotiate an end to the war with Russia so Johnson’s decision to support the Biden Ukraine foreign aid boondoggle has only served to prolong the war several months longer than necessary leading to the deaths of tens of thousands more Ukrainian soldiers. The question is will the neocon cabinet officials Trump is surrounding himself with succeed in convincing him to drop his opposition to forever wars being fought in opposition to US national security interests?

Trump’s choices for Cabinet seem to prioritize loyalty but some of them also seem calibrated to ensure easy bipartisan US Senate confirmation with multiple Democrats voting to support them given Democrats support a hawkish foreign policy particularly with regards to Russia showing he is not overly concerned with picking Cabinet officials who are ideologically aligned with his laudable America First foreign policy agenda. Far-left Democrat members of Congress are also beginning to express support for Trump’s neocon Cabinet picks with whom they align ideologically in terms of supporting America’s failed policy of liberal hegemony. The Hill reports that Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman said he would vote to confirm his colleague Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as secretary of State if selected by President-elect Trump.

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The Trump transition team on Wednesday announced that he is nominating South Dakota governor Kristi Noem as the next head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In the coming weeks, we’ll hear a lot about Noem’s personal politics and origins. We’ll also hear about how the DHS is, as the AP puts it, “one of the biggest government agencies that will be integral to his vow to secure the border and carry out a massive deportation operation.”

Unfortunately, all this misses the most important point about the DHS which is that the DHS was invented in 2002 to justify more government spending, to reward political allies, and to influence local governments with federal grants.

For voters who supported Trump because they thought a Trump presidency might actually reduce government waste, they should now be asking why Trump is appointing any new DHS head at all. The only thing Trump should do with the DHS is abolish it.

For younger readers, or people with terrible memories, this might sound radical or extreme. But, I can assure you, dear reader, that the United States somehow managed to get along for more than 225 years before this department was created twenty-two years ago by Congress and the Bush Administration.

Much of what the Department does today was not new in 2002, of course. The federal government already had a border patrol, and it already collected tariffs on imports. The Coast Guard was alive and well. The Secret Service already existed, as did various agencies related to nuclear energy and the inspection of agricultural projects.

But, the DHS has always been more than just a reorganization of existing agencies. The DHS has overseen new slush funds for domestic police departments. It is the DHS that has largely facilitated the militarization of local police forces. As Wired put it in 2020, “the Homeland Security Grant Program has funneled billions of dollars to law enforcement agencies to acquire military-grade equipment.”

Nonetheless, the creation of the DHS has done nothing to make the border more secure, or to facilitate the enforcement of tariffs. The DHS has never been necessary to patrol US coastal waters. Rather, federal bureaucrats and elected officials pursued the creation of this new enormous government department for political reasons.

The DHS was created to be a cabinet-level agency, and the thing about cabinet-level status is that the move makes it easier for the bureaucrats in charge of the agencies to politically agitate for more government spending in their favor, and to push bigger government in general. It’s no coincidence that as the US government has grown ever larger and more intrusive, so has the number of cabinet-level agencies. So, now we have the EPA, the SBA, and the departments of HUD, Energy, and Education all provided with more direct access to the president and the media. Everything they do is deemed “essential.” Everything they do, we’re told, is a matter of national importance.

DHS is no different. When the 9/11 attacks occurred, they exposed the sheer incompetence, laziness, and inefficiency of government security and defense organizations. Year after year, hundreds of billions of dollars were poured into these organizations — in addition to the countless billions spent on the Pentagon. But when they were shown to be asleep at the switch, what happened? Rather than have their budgets cut, and senior officials fired in droves — as should have happened — George W. Bush and his cronies decided that what the federal government really needed was a new department into which billions more in taxpayer money could be poured.

The was politically important in the sense that making DHS a department made it easier to call for every more funding for its constituent agencies.

It has certainly worked.

Prior to the creation of the DHS, “homeland security” functions were rarely funded at levels exceeding $20 billion per year. Since 2002, though, federal spending on these functions—now consolidated into the DHS—has soared. Since 2001, the total budget for these activities has nearly tripled, rising from $28 billion in 2001 to $112 billion in 2024. (That’s in inflation-adjusted 2023 dollars.) Since the Cold War ended, by the way, spending on so-called homeland security has increased by more than six-fold.

Since 2001, has it really become almost three times more expensive—in inflation adjusted terms, mind you—to patrol the border, to collect tariffs, and to check luggage for guns at the airport? It is difficult to see how.

What we do know is that the DHS has become an important pass-through for government largesse. Some of this goes to local governments, and these dollars give the federal government more power by providing yet another carrot the feds can hold out to local politicians. Billions more goes into the FEMA black hole which spends prodigiously on federal agents who use DHS dollars as a means of punishing their political opponents.

While the Department was created in response to the 9/11 attacks, the Department does nothing to address anything like a 9/11-style attack. All the agencies that were supposed to provide intelligence on such attacks — the FBI for instance, which failed miserably on 9/11 — already exist in other departments and continue to enjoy huge budgets. Meanwhile, the Transportation Security Administration — an agency that has never caught a single terrorist—has managed to smuggle at least $100 million worth of cocaine.

Once upon a time, “homeland security” was supposed to be the job of the Department of Defense. but, it seems the Pentagon has been too busy in Ukraine or Iraq to trouble itself with the defense of the borders and airspace of the United States. In spite of having been freed of its responsibility for “the homeland,” however, the Pentagon’s budget just keeps getting bigger. In 2024, it was at a thirteen-year high and remains—in inflation adjusted terms—above the levels of Reagan’s Cold War spending spree. Pentagon spending is up by 57 percent, inflation-adjusted, since 2001.

There is no doubt, however, that heading the Department in Washington will be great for the career of Kristy Noem. She’ll get invited to cabinet meetings, go on national TV, and generally enjoy the pampered life of a high-ranking bureaucrat. Meanwhile, American taxpayers will pay more and more, in depreciating dollars, for yet another federal department.

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Two days after Donald Trump became the first American since Grover Cleveland to win nonconsecutive presidential elections, the Federal Reserve announced a quarter percent cut in interest rates. Following this announcement, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell held a press conference where he said that he would not comply with any presidential request that he step down before his term ends in May of 2026.

Powell claimed that the president lacks the legal authority to fire the Fed chairman. So, if President Trump tells Chairman Powell “you’re fired,” Powell could bring suit asking a court to review Trump’s action.

President Trump and Chairman Powell are at odds over President Trump’s desire to require the Federal Reserve to consult with the president before changing interest rates or taking other significant actions. Powell is likely to do all he can to convince Congress to reject any legislation giving the president any type of official role in setting monetary policy. After all, Chairman Powell is so protective of Fed autonomy that he opposes auditing the Fed on the grounds that it could threaten the Fed’s independence, even though there is nothing in the Audit the Fed legislation giving the president or Congress any new authority over the Fed’s conduct of monetary policy.

Requiring the Fed to consult with the president regarding monetary policy would likely increase price inflation and dollar devaluation. Politicians usually like low interest rates because they associate low rates with economic growth. Politicians also want the Fed to keep rates low so the federal government can keep racking up huge amounts of debt. Without a central bank that is ready, willing, and able to monetize the federal debt, the welfare-warfare state would not exist.

Despite the claims of Chairman Powell and other central bank apologists, the Fed has never been free of political pressure. Presidents were trying to influence the Federal Reserve long before Donald Trump began posting “mean tweets” about Jerome Powell. Requiring the Fed to consult with the president would at least make the president’s efforts to influence monetary policy open and transparent.

President Trump and other Fed critics such as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren think they are more capable of determining the “correct” interest rate than the Fed. This ignores the fact that interest rates are the price of money and like all prices are shaped by a variety of constantly changing factors. When the Fed manipulates interest rates, it distorts the signals sent to investors. The result is the boom- bust business cycle. The fiat system is also responsible for rising income inequality and the decline of the dollar’s purchasing power, which has lowered most Americans’ standard of living.

President Trump should work to eliminate the need for the Fed to keep interest rates low. He can do this by fighting for massive spending cuts, starting with the military-industrial complex. He should also push Congress to pass the Audit the Fed bill. Additionally, President Trump should support legalizing all competing currencies. The forthcoming tax bill should include a provision exempting precious metals and cryptocurrencies from capital gains taxes. The key to making America great again is to make money free again.

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There were a few seemingly tense moments at the FOMC press conference on Thursday when two reporters asked Jerome Powell about the prospect of Donald Trump asking Powell to resign. The first reporter asked “would you resign if asked to do so by Donald Trump?” To this, Powell responded with a resounding “no” followed by silence. A few moments later, Powell was asked by another reporter if it was lawful for Trump to either remove or “demote”—that is, remove Powell as chairman, but leave him on the Board of Governors—Powell. To this, Powell responded with a forceful “not permitted under the law.”

Apparently, Powell wished to leave no ambiguity whatsoever about this position that he cannot be removed or demoted by a sitting president.

It would agree that the spirit of the law here is that a president not be able to remove a  Fed chairman, except for some kind of misconduct. But, ambiguity remains. Even Alan Blinder, a proponent of the myth of “Fed independence,” admits that in the world of political reality, Trump could potentially remove Powell:

Experts who spoke to ABC News acknowledged that some legal ambiguity looms over what type of conduct warrants sufficient cause for removal, but they said a policy dispute is unlikely to meet such a standard. Still, Trump could attempt to push out Powell and test how courts interpret the law, experts added, noting that the case could end up with the conservative-majority Supreme Court.

“Trump could try and he might try,” Alan Blinder, a professor of economics at Princeton University and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. “It’s very unlikely that he has that authority, but if he takes this to the Supreme Court, I don’t know what to think of the Supreme Court.”

Instead, Trump could leave Powell in his position on the Fed’s 7-member Board of Governors but demote him from his role as chair, Blinder said.

“That’s a subtle question that has never been tested,” Blinder said, acknowledging a lack of clarity about whether it would be allowed. “We can’t answer that quite as definitively.”

In any case, Trump would likely have to expend some serious political capital if he wants to remove Powell via presidential power.

Yet, Powell’s defiance ought to provoke us to ask why wealthy, pampered, out-of-touch technocrats like Jerome Powell get to act like their removal constitutes some sort of transgression. Central bankers are just bureaucrats, and their removal ought to be regarded with no more trepidation than the removal of an undersecretary of agriculture.

Congress Should Fire Powell, and Not Stop There

Regardless of what Trump’s legal powers may be, it is clear that Congress has the power to remove Powell, just as Congress has the power to abolish the central bank altogether.

The Congress ought to abolish the Fed entirely, of course, but if members lack the stomach for that heroic act, Congress can begin with amending the Federal Reserve Act to make it clear that the chairman of the Fed is not a Holy Person, untouchable by the mere mortals who are actually elected to run the federal government. There are many ways Congress could approach this issue. For example, Congress could rewrite the law to allow Congress to remove the Fed chairman with a majority vote in either house. It doesn’t really matter, so long as central bankers get the message that they’re not special.

While Congress is at it, it could make a few other crucial changes as well. Congress should prohibit the Fed from buying any assets of any kind. This would end the Fed’s habit of buying up mortgage-backed securities and government securities to prop up the banker class and Powell’s buddies—i.e., Janet Yellen—at the Treasury. It would also end the Fed’s ability to manipulate interest rates since the Fed’s main tool here is its “open market operations.”

A second key change that is very necessary is removing the Fed’s so called “dual mandate.” As the Fed likes to often mention, the Fed has a dual mandate of both “stable prices” and “maximum employment.” Congress should immediately abolish the mandate for “maximum employment” because the only purpose this has ever served has been as an excuse for the central bank to inflate the money supply. As is abundantly clear from Fed press conferences and publications, the Fed routinely justifies its dovish policy in terms of fulfilling its mandate to maximize inflation. That is, the Fed often says something to the effect of “we’re embracing easy-money policy because our dual mandate to maximize employment says we have to.” Congress should just delete the mandate.

(By the way, the Fed actually has a third mandate. It’s to ensure “moderate long-term interest rates.” Getting rid of the Fed’s power to purchase assets probably nullifies this mandate in any case, but Congress might as well remove any doubt and totally prohibit the Fed from manipulating interest rates of any kind.)

Fed Independence Has Never Been Used for Good Things

Of course, if Congress were to attempt any of this, Fed simps in the media and in Congress will try to talk about how such things are unprecedented and we must respect “Fed independence.” Media stories in the Fed often claim that attempts by elected officials to rein in Fed technocrats violate “long-standing norms” that respect Fed independence.

This is a fantasy version of history. There is not now, and there has never been, any such thing as Fed independence because the Fed always willingly helps the regime get what it wants.

Early on, Fed independence didn’t even exist in theory, and was explicitly limited in law. Prior to 1935, the Comptroller of the Currency and the Secretary of the Treasury sat on the Fed’s Board, thus ensuring a direct line from the White House to the Fed.

In 1933, of course, Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order abolishing the gold standard and ordering the Fed to turn over all its gold to the Treasury. So much for “Fed independence” under the Left’s favorite twentieth-century president.

Even after 1935, it was understood that the Fed would always assist the Treasury with funding whenever necessary. This again became obvious during the Second World War when the Fed essentially helped launder funds for the war effort. The Fed agreed in 1942 to peg interest rates on government securities. The Fed also engaged in a variety of price control measures and regulations designed to assist the White House.

Only since the Monetary Accord of 1951 has there been a de jure nod to giving the Fed autonomy on policy. The Fed has never used any of this alleged autonomy to do anything good, however. We’ve seen this proven countless times since the Fed has always gladly done its part to ensure the Treasury gets what it wants. From the Fed’s efforts to finance federal deficits in the 1970s, to the Plaza Accord in 1985, and to the flood of easy money since 2008, the Fed has never used its so-called independence to actually rein in federal profligacy.

What Matters to the Fed Is Protecting the Banking Class

Central bankers have never cared about Fed independence as a way of limiting state power. According to its own historical narrative, the Fed has now allegedly been “autonomous” for sixty years or more. Has inflation and federal spending been more restrained during that time? Obviously not. The Fed has always and everywhere been happy to enrich the state, regardless of whatever levels of self-governance it might achieve.

The real reason the Fed wants more independence is so the Fed can also more easily enrich the banker class while also making the Treasury happy.  That is, the banking cartel that works hand in glove with the Fed cares deeply about having control over who gets onto the Board of Governors and who gets to be chairman. The elite bankers are perfectly willing to effectively serve the Treasury so long as the cartel gets to have its own people in charge. This is how the banker class ensures that its monopolistic powers are protected, the competition is crushed, and the bailouts are guaranteed.

If the Fed pushes back against the elected government, it’s only if the priorities of the elected government conflict with the Fed’s priority, which is serving the interests of the banker class. Experience makes it abundantly clear that central bankers are fine with endless price inflation. But, the Fed wants to inflate in a way that most suits the Fed and the banking cartel. That’s why Powell and the Fed are so opposed to the idea of being removed from office. There is no higher principle here. There is only power.

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

The post Congress Should Fire Jerome Powell appeared first on LewRockwell.

“If you look at the dependency of the economy on organized crime and war, the deep state is not something that happens in Washington. It’s something that happens within the cash flows of every county in America. There are 3,100 counties and 50 states and those are highly dependent on the financial machinery of the deep state. So, the corruption whether it is organized crime or war is really bottoms up. Many people in America want Trump to reduce dependency on organized crime and money laundering. But they are not prepared for the financial ramifications if he does……It is good news if trump wants to get us out of the Paris Agreement (binding agreement on climate change) but if Trump is here to sell us out for the central bankers to create an alternate digital financial and monetary system and digital ID’s to finally snap a control system into place, then we’re in real trouble. I call this the Digital Concentration Camp. If you look at what Trump said about a digital ID, I think it is deeply concerning. Trump has been on the wrong side of many of these specific points.

We do not want:

• An all-financial monetary system (all debt-based dollar)
• We do not want a digital ID, and
• Last thing we want is somebody auditing or running the fed reserve who wants to put a mesh network in the back of your head and hook you up to an (Elon Musk) satellite.

So, what you see around the president is a multiple personality disorder of (choosing) people who want to build the control grid and are deep in the defense industry like Musk and Peter Thiel, but also people like Kennedy who want freedom and is sincere about that”. 

• Excerpted from Catherine Ann Fitts, Inside Trumps Victory, RFK and the Deep State, blckbxtoday.com,

Nov. 6, 2024.

In a September 9 article at LewRockwell.com, I suspected that an oligarch would end up running the U.S. after the 2024 election, not the political candidate of either party:

“The 2024 presidential selection is a contest between de-facto shadow presidents of either old elite Mark Zuckerberg or new elite Elon Musk, not Harris versus Trump”.

Three days after the election, Fox News reported that my apprehension was fulfilled:

“Elon Musk Joins Donald Trump in ‘Very Good Call’ with Ukrainian President Zelensky”.

At least the Trump-Musk Republican version of presidential governance doesn’t hide their cabal of oligarchs any longer or hide that the US is an oligarchy not a republic or democracy.

But in the quote at the top, Catherine Austin Fitts, former HUD assistant secretary under Trump, charges that Trump’s partnership with Silicon Valley billionaire Elon Musk, who is pushing for a nation-wide digital surveillance system, conflicts with sentiments of the voters who elected him. Potentially problematic is that Musk is the leader of a clique of Silicon Valley high tech billionaires (Peter Thiel, Larry Page, Larry Ellison and the Pay Pal Mafia), who want to install a total surveillance state under the guise of rollout of Artificial Intelligence technology (“AI” is a euphemism for automation and surveillance capitalism).

Fitts says what high-tech power elites want to move everyone into is a “digital concentration camp”.  This is best reflected by high-tech billionaire Larry Ellison who states that AI will entail a mandate to wear body cameras by 2025 to “keep everybody on their best behavior” (see video here). How digital technology would know who is wearing that camera, however, is unknown without embedding the wearer with a chip.

Moreover, Trump’s vice president-elect J.D. Vance (born James D. Bowman) once worked for Peter Thiel at Mithril Capital, a high-tech venture capital firm. Thiel donated $15 million to Vance’s 2022 senate campaign in Ohio.  Musk and Thiel were big donors to Trump’s recent presidential campaign. If you voted for Trump, this clique is who you effectually voted for.  So, Trump has a nepotistic and donor/patronage relationship with advocates for digital banking and surveillance who are in his administration. It’s not that Trump is a fox who has been let into the proverbial Deep State henhouse as the Deep State contends, but the chicken hawks have set up an ambush of Trump as their prey.

The conventional media portrayal of the mysterious “Deep State” is that it is solely a creature of Federal government intelligence and justice agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA, DOJ, etc.). To the contrary, Fitts points out that the Deep State is corrupted mostly by state and local governments who depend on money laundering from illicit government enterprises and wars. Think of an otherwise barren state like New Mexico whose political economy disproportionately depends on the military industrial complex and wars. Fitts says for Trump to succeed with his Deep State plan, he must gain preliminary “alignments” for federal revenue sharing between state and local governments preliminary to his taking office.  Another factor in this Deep State public theater, is the weaponizing of the World Health Organization (WHO) that is planning for another virus lockdown simulation in 2025 for the H5N1 Virus.

As part of a pending free speech violation lawsuit, Shiva Ayyadurai, PhD, candidate for US Senate in 2020 from Massachusetts, discovered there is a covert Back Door Portal to Twitter which gives government the capability to secretly ban or limit any Internet speech it wants. Shiva’s lawsuit alleges Twitter CEO Elon Musk is a de facto government agent. Shiva was banned from Twitter. Then when restored, he could only receive 5,000 visitors per day instead of the previous 500,000 per day. So, election interference law was also violated. All Twitter subscribers in the US are still subject to this same covert violation of the Constitution. There is nothing in Trump’s new plan to dismantle the deep state that addresses the violation of free speech and shadow banning by private corporations through the Internet.

Freedom from such a “digital concentration camp” is dependent on Trump’s “multiple personality disorder”, according to Fitts.  What she means by “multiple personality disorder” is what sociologists call social role alternation. This is a shift or conversion, much like a religious conversion, from one ideology and self-identity to another and mental compartmentalization of both. Put differently, it is pretending to be two different people. For example, a social worker who is a revolutionary Marxist Democrat may also be a Republican conservative Christian when at church. This also explains what is called “Trump Derangement Syndrome” by his opponents who go berserk because their livelihoods and social status are being threatened by Deep State cutbacks and agency elimination.

Fitts also mentions that there are still pending lawsuits against Trump that will likely continue to be prosecuted to attempt to control his decision making to drain the swamp.  Especially notorious are hoked-up lawsuits in New York against Trump for tax fraud and hush money and election subversion in Georgia. These lawsuits are arguably intergovernmental blackmail, potential bribery or other forms of coercion to preserve state and local entitlements, disbursements, water supply allocations, offshore oil and gas leases, and favorable enforcement or lax enforcement of drug laws from the federal government.  So, implementation of any reductions to the deep state may consequently entail threats to Trump, incarcerating him in state prison or, as we have seen, attempts on Trump’s life.

While such political shakedown lawsuits against Trump may seem irrational and vindictive to the average citizen, they could also be seen as quite rational, albeit criminal, in a system of federalism during a time of wild government spending on wars and corporate fascism due to plausible loss of the reserve status of the US dollar.  Some 25 corporations centered around Silicon Valley and San Francisco funded about $90 million to BLM (and $220 million to Antifa from Soros) in 2020 to go to symbolic war with Trump’s federal government.  It is not coincidental that these 25 seemingly lawless corporations produce only nonessential and luxury goods that are vulnerable to any large structural economic contraction. They wanted government to shut down the competitive small business sector by lockdowns and shot mandates, together with their sponsoring of mass vandalism and shoplifting, to capture their customers and shift them to their online services and deliveries.  Trump did nothing to pursue adjudication of these crimes during his first term by use of federal racketeering laws. Nor did Trump pursue just compensation for the victims from these corporate crimes due to government inaction, as provided under the 5th amendment to the Constitution.

That the Republicans appear to have a filibuster-proof Congress may play a role in this bargaining by lawsuit because a Trump Congress could retaliate by limiting federal allocations to those states regardless of the outcome of Trump lawsuits.  Adding fuel to the Deep State bonfire, Trump has an opportunity to change the composition to the Supreme Court to 7 conservative and 2 liberals.

Any rollout of digital automation or surveillance technology of government may entail downsizing or eliminating federal agencies or departments.  But Trump’s prevarication and “multiple personality disorder” about his promises to curtail the deep state continue currently.  Perhaps we can better understand his past ambivalence in downsizing the Deep State given he was trying to do so almost singularly.  This time he has the backing of a cabal of other high tech corporate heads who have a pecuniary interest in such a government downsizing. The dilemma at hand is that it may take installation of a Capitalist surveillance state to get any reduction in the size of government. The outcome of this intergovernmental chess game about the deep state remains to be seen.

A quotation by Niccolo Machiavelli may be fitting in closure of this article: “But above all he (a prince) must refrain from seizing the property of others, because a man is quicker to forget the death of his father than the loss of his inheritance” – The Prince

The post Freedom from Digital Hell Depends on Trump’s “Multiple Personality Disorder” appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Amazing Political Comeback of Donald Trump

Given that I strongly disliked the policies of both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, I didn’t pay much attention to the twists and turns of our recent presidential election, and although I voted, I wrote in someone else’s name. I can’t quite remember whom I honored with that protest vote, though it may have been former British MP George Galloway, a pugnacious pundit and host on RT.

One silver lining in not having supported either major candidate in the race is that unlike many others I won’t be disappointed in my choice.

For example, some commentators had reluctantly backed Trump, hoping that he had learned his lessons from the many mistakes he had made in his first term. But just a couple of days before the vote, their candidate said that his likely choices for Secretary of Defense would include former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or Sen. Tom Cotton, both of whom were hardcore Neocons, and the subsequent names floated for Secretary of State and National Security Advisor have been Sen. Marco Rubio and Richard Grenell, who also fall into much the same category. These early indications suggested that the Trump Administration would likely continue the same very aggressive foreign policies of the Biden Administration, and some of Trump’s erstwhile supporters probably began grinding their teeth in frustration.

They surely recalled that during his original 2016 campaign Trump had regularly denounced his own Republican Party’s ruling Neocon establishment, famously declaring in one of the primary debates that the Iraq War of President George W. Bush had been a huge disaster for America, a statement that shocked and horrified all his Republican rivals but may have helped win him the nomination. However, once he actually reached the Oval Office, he soon placed our national security policies in the hands of Pompeo and John Bolton, both arch-Neocons of the worst sort, and they did whatever they wanted. Indeed, I’ve read that in the book he published after leaving the administration, Bolton bragged how easily he had tricked and manipulated his ignorant and detached superior, heaping insults and ridicule upon the president whom he once had served.

However, talk of such potential Neocon appointments may have provoked a political backlash, and by the weekend Trump had declared that neither Pompeo nor Nikki Haley would have any role in his new administration, thereby soothing some of those concerns.

It is widely accepted that in a presidential administration, personnel is policy, so as we learn the names of Trump’s senior appointments over the next few weeks, we will also discover the likely trajectory of the next four years.

Although it is unclear what use Trump will make of his new term in office, the mere fact that he regained the White House certainly ranks as the most spectacular political comeback in our nation’s nearly 250 year history, easily outdistancing the split second term of Grover Cleveland in 1893 or Richard Nixon’s political resurrection in 1968. Indeed, the challenges Trump overcame along the way to Election Day sound like something out of a satirical Hollywood film.

While in office, he had been impeached not once but twice, and after his outraged supporters stormed the Capitol in early 2020, he was widely declared an “insurrectionist” by the Trump-hating media. I doubt that any other major political figure in American history has ever been so massively and uniformly vilified by that media, which for generations had been recognized as having the power to make or break presidential candidates.

Then, as Trump geared up for his 2024 run, Democratic prosecutors across the country brought him up on a host of criminal charges, eventually convicting him of 34 felonies and fining him hundreds of millions of dollars, so for a time it looked like he might have to campaign for the White House from a prison-cell.

After successfully capturing the Republican nomination, Trump soon became the victim of two separate assassination attempts, one of which nearly succeeded. Rather than being shocked, I was puzzled that there hadn’t already been many more such incidents:

When I first heard that Trump had survived an attempted assassination, my surprise was not that it had occurred but that there hadn’t already been a dozen or more previous attacks. I doubt that any political figure in modern American history has ever been so massively demonized by our mainstream media as Donald J. Trump during the last eight or nine years. He’s been vilified as a fascist, a Hitler, a traitor, a Russian stooge, a rapist, a racist, a swindler. Trump was endlessly portrayed as a fiend absolutely determined to destroy American freedom and democracy, someone who represented our country’s deadliest human enemy.

Our media creates our reality and for most of the last decade, hundreds of millions of Americans have been completely blanketed by these unrelenting waves of ferocious anti-Trump propaganda, so surely many thousands of them would have been unbalanced enough to consider saving our country by taking the law into their own hands and patriotically risking their lives to eliminate that deadly human menace. The media had spent all these years painting a very bright target on Trump’s back, and I’ve been astonished that until a couple of days ago no American had yet taken aim at it.

• The Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 17, 2024 • 2,000 Words

Yet despite all those seemingly insurmountable challenges, Trump ultimately triumphed, winning the presidential race far more convincingly than most observers had expected, and even capturing a majority of the popular vote, becoming the first Republican to do so in twenty years.

With Trump now returning to the White House and likely to be dominating the headlines for the next several years, I’ve added a new section that groups together my articles regarding his policies and activities.

• Donald Trump Articles
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • 45,000 Words

How the Democrats Resurrected Trump in 2023

Although Trump’s political triumph was quite remarkable, he certainly had a great deal of help in achieving that result, and I think that most of the credit goes to his political enemies in the Democratic Party, whose seething hatred had inspired efforts that completely backfired. In August 2023, I’d described how this had played out.

Media is the oxygen of political campaigns, and Trump’s totally unexpected primary and general election victories in 2016 were driven by the massive attention he received for his sometimes outrageous public statements, coverage greatly amplified by the unprecedented number of Twitter followers he had quickly amassed on social media. His bitter political enemies recognized the enormous, unfiltered power of that latter communication tool, and after he reached the White House, they exerted huge pressure upon Twitter to begin censoring him. The notion of an American tech company restricting the political speech of a sitting American President seemed like something out of a Monty Python sketch, but it actually happened. Meanwhile, many of his leading activist supporters and pundit allies were completely purged from that platform, blows that greatly hindered his reelection campaign. Then after his November defeat and Joseph Biden’s inauguration, Trump himself suffered the same fate, with his Twitter account permanently suspended.

With Trump banned from Twitter in early 2021, his political standing soon ebbed away as more and more of his low-information political base gradually forgot about him. This led many observers to conclude that his time had passed and some rival would likely capture the Republican nomination in the 2024 primaries.

However, that decline was quickly reversed when Trump’s bitterly self-destructive Democratic Party enemies launched a series of prosecutions against him on a variety of different charges, ranging from mishandling secret documents to paying hush money to a former girlfriend to election fraud, all rather dubious charges. With such exciting new topics, the endless Trump Political Reality show had suddenly returned as popular entertainment, regaining the very high ratings it had previously enjoyed. Trump once again became the great hero of his populist Republican supporters, with recent polls showing he was drawing far more support in the 2024 primaries than all his Republican rivals combined.

Indeed, some cynical observers even suggested that this outcome might have been intentional. Perhaps the Democrats regarded Trump as the weakest Republican candidate they might face in 2024, and sought to ensure his renomination. Such a deeply Machiavellian strategy might be possible, but all of these various prosecutions and trials will surely keep Trump at the top of the news cycle from now until November 2024, whether Election Day finds him still on trial or already serving time behind bars. It’s easy to imagine that the same tidal wave of backlash sentiment now propelling Trump to a landslide victory in the forthcoming primaries might also carry over into November, returning him to the Presidency, whether from the courtroom or the jail house.

We should consider that even a couple of months ago when Trump’s legal problems were only just beginning, he already began attracting strongly sympathetic remarks from unexpected ideological quarters.

Columnist Kevin Barrett is a Muslim convert friendly towards Iran, and in May he published a short item that opened by characterizing Trump as “an odious figure…A narcissistic semi-literate scoundrel.” But his piece was entitled “Why I’m ALMOST Ready to Vote for Trump,” and he explained that the totally unhinged campaign of vilification by our entire political and media establishment against the obnoxious former President had largely shifted him in that direction. He also cited the analysis of a popular progressive podcaster:

Jimmy Dore makes a good case that Trump’s civil trial for sexual assault and defamation was “A Pure Democratic Hit Job.” Dore points out that New York’s bizarre one-year repeal of the statute of limitations was specifically designed to grease the skids for Carroll-v-Trump. Since when did governments start temporarily repealing statutes of limitations so they can go after political figures they don’t like? The move seems especially egregious because it involved an almost three-decade-old case in which the alleged victim can’t even remember which year the alleged assault happened, and has no evidence whatsoever other than her word against his. If you’re going to do something as extreme as suspending the statute of limitations so you can prosecute a specific case, shouldn’t you at least have some evidence?

Around the same time, other influential progressive journalists such as Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate similarly ridiculed Trump’s indictment on hush-money charges by an NYC prosecutor.

• American Pravda: Donald Trump, Eugene Debs, and AMLO
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 7, 2023 • 4,900 Words

Read the Whole Article

The post Immigration, Hispanics, and the Political Triumph of Donald Trump appeared first on LewRockwell.

The news cycle leading up to a hurricane is long, but soon after landfall and damage reports; it disappears. The dead are counted, dollar amounts are guessed at and FEMA sends in the troops,…eventually.  The aftermath is soon forgotten, but not by the displaced, or the many other victims fighting-off loss, facing endless cleanups and depression.

After direct hits by 3 major ‘canes in 14 months, I know.  After weeks of sleeping with chainsaws, aching hands and back, I still wonder at the strange coincidence of getting whacked, over and over and over again.

Salty sweat burned my eyes, yet memories of hurricanes remain; too many hurricanes!  They used to come every 20 years?  Donna, Betsy and Andrew came years apart. There was a pause after Michael in 2018, then Idalia, Debby, Helene,..Milton; wham bam thank you mam!

After floods, drought and “wildfires”; summer 2024 saw swarms of over 500 tornadoes trash the midsection of the country.  Natural Climate variations,…I think not.

Dozens of weather modification patents have been filed since the late 1940s.  Over 60  countries have been involved in climate tinkering, mostly for stealthy weather warfare?  While this tactic has been a classified operation in the U.S. with any discussion currently under gag order, crazy weather phenomenon, yearly 500yr floods, extended droughts and even earthquakes around the globe have been common, continuous and not random.

Coincidence or conspiracy?  One needn’t look far for theories supported by reports and analysis of chemtrail chemicals,…of microwave arrays like HAARP in Alaska and the Antarctic,…of radar installation activity/inactivity surrounding hurricane tracks.

Were this sneaky cat let outta the bag, liability would eclipse the national debt!

But who dunnit?  Russia, China or the good ol’ DOD? Either way, “legal” immunity is conferred on perpetrators.

I can accept the occasional natural disaster, but the thought of engineered calamities makes me madder than hell.  There is way too much evidence to ignore artificial weather modification.  Shoot, I know we are warming, but it ain’t all CO2!  Look at the urbanization, black asphalt, deforestation, drained wetlands…Look at the thermal effect of plastics on our oceans….Look at the heat trapped by countless acres of black asphalt and emitted by vehicles, air conditioners, jets and all manner of burning things.

In summer, I get a consistent 5-6 degree drop in temperature when leaving the city strip and returning to tree-lined country roads!

Am I to Believe???

Given all the false flag events, weaponized diseases, media propaganda, deep state manipulations of public perceptions, needless wars, security state invasions of privacy and corruption at all levels of government and bureaucracy; am I to believe that weather has NOT been turned against us???

Given the utter destruction of Florida’s Gulf Coast and millions of acres of inland farms, am I to believe that constant hurricanes do NOT open all that valuable real estate to go for fire-sale prices???

Given the gag order on the National Weather Service to discuss climate engineering, am I to believe that secrecy is NOT politically motivated to protect “Green” globalist programs and the CO2 narrative mandating electric vehicles, wind farms and solar arrays?

Yes, summers are hotter, winters colder and extreme events more common, but why am I still repairing buildings, clearing downed ancient trees and weeping over the loss of fruit and nut crops and the destruction of forests?  No one follows weather more closely than farmers and fishermen, their incomes and our food depend on it.  And as a health researcher, beside mercury, lead, arsenic and cadmium; aluminum is the most prevalent toxic metal found in lab analysis! Metals are responsible for a variety of human diseases!!!   ( https://substack.com/home/post/p-145766894 )

Is there any government official or news outlet with the integrity to investigate climate engineering and willing to focus on this gross misuse of technology?  Trump?  RFK?  Musk?

How many disastrous events can be chalked-up to mere coincidence when we know for certain global agendas are afoot!

*** see;   https://gregreese.substack.com/p/weather-wars-fema-and-equitable-mass

*** see;   geoengineeringwatch.org ; https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/us-presidential-candidate-robert-f-kennedy-jr-and-dane-wigington-is-climate-engineering-real/

The post Weather or Not? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist churches in Florida are rejoicing and thanking God that Amendment 3 on the Florida ballot to legalize the recreational use of marijuana was rejected by Florida voters. Although a majority of people in Florida did vote in favor of the amendment, it needed to receive a 60% supermajority to be approved.

The ballot summary of Amendment 3 read:

Allows adults 21 years or older to possess, purchase, or use marijuana products and marijuana accessories for non-medical personal consumption by smoking, ingestion, or otherwise; allows Medical Marijuana Treatment Centers, and other state licensed entities, to acquire, cultivate, process, manufacture, sell, and distribute such products and accessories. Applies to Florida law; does not change, or immunize violations of, federal law. Establishes possession limits for personal use. Allows consistent legislation. Defines terms. Provides effective date.

Florida voters approved legalizing medical marijuana in 2016 after rejecting it the first time it was on the ballot.

More than 140 measures appeared on state ballots alongside races for president and top state offices. In addition to Florida, recreational marijuana was on the ballot in North and South Dakota for the third time but failed to pass. In Nebraska, voters approved the legalization of the medical use of marijuana.

This means that the recreational use of marijuana remains legal in 24 states and the District of Columbia and the medical use of marijuana is now legal in 39 states, the District of Columbia, and the other U.S. territories of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.

Regardless of what state they are in, conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist churches can be counted on to oppose marijuana ballot initiatives, and especially initiatives to legalize the recreational use of marijuana like those that failed in Florida and North and South Dakota. Likewise, most members of these churches can be counted on to oppose marijuana ballot initiatives, and again, especially initiatives to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Most church members, but not all, although I suspect that most of those who voted in favor of such ballot initiatives would not make their vote known publicly, at least around their fellow congregants.

So, why do conservative Christians oppose ballot initiatives to legalize, for medical or recreational use, marijuana?

Regarding medical marijuana, religious people would generally say that they oppose its legalization because its medical benefits have been exaggerated and because most of the people that would use it for “medical reasons” just want to legally get high. I am not sure of their first point but I think they are correct on the second.

Regarding recreational marijuana, religious people would generally say that they oppose its legalization because it is harmful, addictive, potentially destructive, and/or immoral. As a theological and cultural conservative, on this they will get no argument from me.

None of this has anything to do with the real issue.

The real issue has nothing to do with the benefits of medical marijuana or the motive of medical marijuana users. The real issue has nothing to do with the physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual effects of marijuana. The real issue has nothing to do with anyone growing, buying, selling, or using marijuana at all.

The real issue is the proper role of government.

Is it or is it not the proper role of government to prohibit, regulate, restrict, or otherwise control what a man desires to buy, sell, grow, process, transport, manufacture, advertise, use, or possess or what a man desires to eat, drink, smoke, inject, absorb, snort, sniff, inhale, swallow, or otherwise ingest into his mouth, nose, veins, or lungs?

It is a yes or no question.

Unfortunately, most conservative Christians will answer in the affirmative. Why? Because they have failed. They have failed to convince those outside of their churches to not use marijuana. So, because they have failed, they are seeking to use the power of the government to force people not to use marijuana by threatening them with fines and imprisonment or to make it very difficult for people to legally use marijuana. This is why conservative Christians oppose ballot initiatives to legalize marijuana.

Since there are no principles in the Bible that would mandate or suggest to Christians that they use the force of government to prevent people from doing something just because they don’t like it, conservative Christians should listen to the wisdom of the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises:

A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police. He who wants to reform his countrymen must take recourse to persuasion. This alone is the democratic way of bringing about changes. If a man fails in his endeavors to convince other people of the soundness of his ideas, he should blame his own disabilities. He should not ask for a law, that is, for compulsion and coercion by the police.

Regardless of how they personally feel about marijuana, conservative, evangelical, and fundamentalist Christians should be the first to support marijuana ballot initiatives and the last to use the power of the government to force people to behave in a certain way.

The post Why Conservative Christians Oppose Marijuana Ballot Initiatives appeared first on LewRockwell.

10 November 2024, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Because I am and always have been a progressive, I’ve always been strongly opposed to the post-Abraham-Lincoln Republican Party, which has always represented ONLY America’s wealthiest, against everybody else; but, as an investigative historian I have also come to recognize that ever since 25 July 1945, the Democratic Party — just like the Republican Party — is LIKEWISE representing ONLY the billionaires, who are united in placing as their #1 priority the creation and universal expansion of the U.S. empire, which started on that date and has been expanding ever since, though nowadays there is no other empire on this planet, and though the hundreds of trillions of U.S. dollars that have been spent on this imperial expansion (by means of subversions, sanctions, coups, and outright military invasions) have benefitted ONLY that richest 1% of the richest 1% of Americans, and have murdered tens of millions of people around the world and created hundreds of millions of people to become refugees (not to mention that these expenditures have come at the expense of trillions of dollars that could otherwise have gone toward increasing the health, education, social security, and general welfare, of the American public). This massive harm, by and for America’s billionaires, is the result of what is commonly called “neoconservatism,” which is the belief that the U.S. Government (which is controlled by America’s billionaires) must control all other countries.

So, the things that I will say here against the Democratic Party are equally the case against ALSO the Republican Party: BOTH Parties are billionaire-controlled and for billionaire-benefit. Both of America’s Parties are for the billionaires (and their millions of neoconservative agents) against the public. They control the public by deceiving the public through the ‘news’-media that they control by means not only of their ownership of them but also by their OTHER corporations (profit and ‘non’-profit) advertising in them. That’s the way the billionaires — America’s actual Deep State — achieve and maintain their control.

At The Hill’s “Rising” on 14 August 2019, Krystal Ball gave the supreme documentation that in order to get and retain employment by any U.S. major ‘news’ medium, a journalist MUST be either corrupt or else stupid or else just desperate to make that much money (i.e., corrupt, like I just said).

That video OUGHT to have been headlined the way that this article is, but, perhaps because it was so explosive in its content, The Hill wanted it to attract as little attention as possible and so headlined it instead with the very routine “Krystal Ball exposes anti-Bernie media bias” (which was only the video’s opening, but that was just the opening 2 minutes of this 8-minute video, which was devoted 100% to explaining the deep corruptness of today’s Democratic Party and of its ‘news’-media. Ball’s co-host Saagar Enjeti further detailed the way in which an American ‘journalist’ is effectively coerced to either avoid reporting truths that the employers want the public not to know, or else to accept to be made available to only ‘alternative news’ audiences — who already know that the major ‘news’-media are untrustworthy because they are publicizing ONLY what their corporate masters want the public to ‘know’.

On 6 November 2024 (the day after the election), Krystal Ball posted at the progressive honest journalist Ryan Grim’s DropSiteNews, “Bernie Would Have Won”, and analyzed the election-results so as to conclude that whereas Trump’s conservative populism was viewed by the Republican Party’s megadonors as being acceptable, the Democratic Party’s megadonors viewed Bernie Sanders’s progressive populism as being deeply unacceptable and therefore they ditched his Presidential campaigns both in 2016 and in 2020. I have analyzed national polling on Sanders’s net-approval ratings throughout his time in the U.S. Senate and have many times mentioned in my articles that but for the hostility towards him by America’s billionaires, he would have easily won the Democratic Party’s primaries and the Presidency, and that the DNC just didn’t care about that clear fact. The same thing happened with RFK Jr. in 2023-2024: like Bernie, his net-approval ratings soared above any of the other Presidential candidates but the DNC ditched him, too, and so gave us, instead, first Joe Biden, and then Kamala Harris — both of whose net-approval ratings were well below zero — as were Trump’s. The billionaires WON’T ALLOW THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO GET AS A PRESIDENT A PERSON THAT THE AMERICAN PUBLIC WANT TO BECOME THE PRESIDENT.

The problem here ISN’T the U.S. Constitution but America’s billionaires. Tinkering with the Constitution or the laws can’t solve this problem: the U.S. is a dictatorship by them, in fact; and, now that it is so, they won’t willingly let go of it. They have made that repeatedly clear.

If a person is incorruptible, that person has no chance to rise to or even near the top in American politics at the federal Government level. That’s just a fact now. And this Government has the nerve to set itself as being the model that the entire world should look up to. It proclaims that the countries it wants to conquer are ‘autocracies’ instead of, like the U.S., a ‘democracy’ — and their ‘news’-media follow that lying imperialistic line, as-if it were instead fact. This is how they ‘justify’ their supposed right to control the countries they haven’t YET conquered. It’s all lies.

This originally appeared on The Duran.

The post The Deep Corruptness of Today’s Democratic Party appeared first on LewRockwell.

Biden’s legacy is genocide, war, and nuclear brinkmanship. That’s all anyone should talk about when this psychopath finally dies. Anything positive he may have accomplished in his political career is a drop in the ocean compared to the significance of these mass-scale abuses.

Biden spent his entire career promoting war and militarism at every opportunity, and then spent the twilight years of his time in Washington choosing to continue supplying an active genocide that is fully dependent on US-supplied arms.

He refused off-ramp after off-ramp to the horrific war in Ukraine that has burned through a generation of men in that country, which he knowingly provoked by amassing a military proxy threat on Russia’s border in ways the US would never tolerate being amassed on its own border. In the early weeks of the conflict Biden and his fellow empire managers sabotaged peace talks to keep the war going for as long as possible with the goal of bleeding Moscow, and at one point his own intelligence agencies reportedly assessed that the probability of a nuclear war erupting on this front was as high as 50–50.

Coin toss odds on nuclear war. To call this a crime against humanity would be a massive understatement.

Biden has been facilitating Israeli atrocities in the middle east with US military expansionism in the region and bombing operations in Yemen, Iraq and Syria. He will spend his lame duck months backing Israel’s scorched earth demolition of southern Lebanon.

This is who Biden is. It is who he has always been. It is true that his brain has begun to rot away like just like his conscience has rotted, but in his lucid moments he adamantly defends his administration’s decisions as the only correct course of action, and it aligns perfectly with his past. To know this, one need only to look at the pivotal role he played in pushing the Iraq invasion, or his extremist rhetoric about how “If there were not an Israel we’d have to invent one.”

This is the legacy that Democrats were forced to spend the last election cycle pretending is great and awesome. It’s no wonder they lost. So now, as a parting gift from Joe Biden, Americans and the world get another four years of Donald Trump.

That’s the story of Joe Biden. That’s the whole entire thing. Anything on top of that is irrelevant narrative fluff.

__________________

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The post Biden’s Legacy Is Genocide, War, and Nuclear Brinkmanship appeared first on LewRockwell.

Donald Trump appears to have been the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote.

Scouring the internet, the only Democrat figure who seems to be smiling is President Joe Biden. For the others it seems to be a time of mourning. A look at the results, their implications, and the machinations of the federal bureaucracy is in order.

The very best wrapup is by Victor Davis Hanson.

Harris-Walz were not the only losers: There were the media which gave him 95% negative coverage and the pollsters:

The polls — with the exception once again of AltasIntel, Trafalgar, and Rasmussen — were off, and way off in the Senate races. The pollsters’ reputation is again in full reverse and now back to their nadir of 2020 and 2016. Many shamelessly warped their data in the last two weeks to gin up Kamala Harris momentum, fundraising, and voter turnout. And to no avail.

There were plenty of indications long ago in key states of a Donald Trump thunderstorm: defections of minorities, anger among both the Jewish and Muslim voters, alienated union members, massive increases in Republican registrations, and non-Election Day balloting. And all were deliberately ignored by the corrupt media and pollsters.

The worst of cable news was MSNBC, which Comcast is trying to unload. I don’t see any takers.

The issues Harris-Walz chose to run on were wildly unpopular, says Hanson:

Open borders, hyperinflation, abortion deification, the transgendered mania, the crime wave, and the “green” obsessions all did their bit to repel voters. The “racist” Trump won more minority support than any Dole, McCain, or Romney figure of the past.

Their lawfare efforts proved unavailing, and this week Jack Smith moved to end those cases against him. New York Judge Juan Merchan is reportedly considering dropping the meritless “hush money” case against Trump.

Trump won, of course, but he wasn’t the only winner. (And he hasn’t eschewed trolling the losers. Noting that the greatly outfunded Harris blew through her $1 billion war chest and still has a $20 million campaign debt, he offered to help her out with the surplus remaining in his campaign chest. Interestingly, it turns out she gave Oprah $1 million dollars to interview her. Heck, Joe Rogan wasn’t going to charge her anything. He has about 50 million viewers, and yet Harris in effect turned him down by demanding concessions that were unreasonable. She also spent millions on staging the celebrity endorsers she cajoled into appearing at her late rallies to drum up apparent support — apparent because it was obvious that people were drawn to free concerts, not Harris.) There were those who joined him in this fight — Hanson names Elon Musk, RFK Jr., Joe Rogan, and Tulsi Gabbard. (Friday, it turned out even Bill Gates is interested in joining up, not that I think Trump should welcome the offer.)

The Left is now blaming a lot of people and things for this loss, including Biden for not getting out earlier and, alternatively, for allowing himself to be a victim of the Pelosi coup.  Like Hanson, though, I think they need to blame themselves for having sought

“to drive down the American people’s throat the most radical and absurd agenda of the last two centuries that ruined the economy, exploded our border, made moonscapes of our big cities, destroyed women’s sports, set the world abroad afire, weaponized the courts and the bureaucracies, and sought to tear the country in two.”

Around the world, even before he’s sworn into office, the Trump win is having significant impact. Liz Wheeler lists the first consequential results:

Trump is President-elect for two days:

• Stock market hits record high
• Migrant caravan at our border dissolves
• Hamas calls for end to war
• Bitcoin hits record high
• Putin ready to end Ukraine war
• Qatar kicks out Hamas leaders
• EU will buy U.S. gas not Russian gas
• Putin will sell oil in U.S. dollars
• Zelenskyy phones Trump & Elon
• NYC Mayor ends vouchers for illegals
• Mexico to stop migrants at U.S. border
• China wants to work peacefully with us
• Big U.S. company to move out of China

“I repeat: Trump has been President-elect for two days.”

Others have reported that even the Taliban wants to talk to the newly-reelected president.

For many, the demographics of his voters may come as a shock. If, for example, if you get your news from Tik Tok you’d see young women sobbing, shaving their heads, and disowning family members who voted for Trump and might think the entire tranche of young women is psychotic, but not only did he win young men under 30, young women under thirty shifted 11 points toward him.

Read the Whole Article

The post How Badly Harris Lost and Why appeared first on LewRockwell.

You must admit, it’s a little spooky how quickly and rigorously Mr. Trump intends to deconstruct those parts of the government at war with the people: clean out “rogue bureaucrats,” firehose the malignant agencies, release and expose their document trails on spying, censorship, lawfare, and abuse-of-power. The consequence would be the return of consequence in our national life. It’s been absent for so long you can hardly imagine its power to get people’s minds right.

There are already reports of frenzy among the culpable DOJ lawyers, and FBI Director Wray is set to resign before Mr. Trump can fire him. Attorney General Merrick Garland has gone radio-silent for his own good since Election Day. Expect many abiding mysteries to get unraveled, such as exactly how many federal agents did work the crowd around the Capitol on J-6, 2021 — which Mr. Wray has pretended to not be able to discuss “due to ongoing investigations.” Expect to learn more about the pipe-bomb caper at the DNC HQ a few blocks away that same day. Prepare to be amazed at how deeply criminal these schemes were. You must wonder if the document-shredding party is already underway, despite calls to preserve all the emails, memos, and texts.

Then there are the poisoned realms of the intel blob located at CIA, DHS, State, DOD, and elsewhere being subject to inquiry and overhaul. Think: John Brennan, James Clapper, Bill Barr, Michael Atkinson, Mayorkas, Judge Boasberg, Mary McCord, Col. Vindman, Senator Warner, Avril Haines, Victoria Nuland, Samantha Power, Gina Haspel, Marie Yovanovitch, Jen Easterly, all their deputies, and many more unknown to the public. Some of these names may yet seem obscure to you. They were all neck-deep in what looks a lot like sedition, treason, real conspiracies, not theories. Even state officials such as New York AG Letitia James, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, and Fulton County, GA, DA Fani Willis, would be subject to federal charges under 18USC Section 242: willful deprivation of constitutional rights acting under color of law. That is exactly what the Trump lawfare cases amounted to.

And then, of course, there are the long-running rumors of pedophilia and human trafficking networks among the elite, the Jeffrey Epstein list and the P. Diddy list. If these things exist, and they are released, history would shudder. Think: the Clinton Foundation.

These people are looking ahead 70 days with visions of shoes dropping and hammers falling. If the mysteries are revealed, it’s hard to imagine that criminal proceedings would not be far behind. You can also imagine that the motivation across a broad and powerful elite class runs white-hot to stop Mr. Trump from entering the Oval Office. So, these days ahead will be fraught with threats, schemes, plots, ploys, and deceptions. The paranoia must be out of this world among people who still have the resources and hold the levers-of-power needed to undertake nefarious deeds.

There is chatter about “a coup” being considered among as-yet-unnamed parties in the Pentagon to prevent Mr. Trump from rising back into power. It’s unclear how that would work among our high command of transsexual generals and admirals and their hapless DEI adjutants. The strata of colonels benath them might have different ideas. But it could be the starting gun for actual civil war. We would find out what the Second Amendment is all about. “Joe Biden” likes to say that the citizenry can’t go up against his F-16 war-planes, but he evidently does not understand how much mischief can be made with small arms — rifles, grenades, rockets, drones — despite examples of it all over the world lately. That is hypothetical for now, of course.

In short, these are dangerous times. Mr. Trump would be advised to stay out of airplanes until inauguration day and to be extra-careful who he puts himself around, especially in public. You also must expect more lawfare of the most extreme sort going forward to January, every possible stone unturned to find procedural tricks to prevent certification of the election. Do you think Norm Eisen, Marc Elias, and Andrew Weissmann just laid back and watched football this weekend? They are probably quarterbacking efforts to finagle ballots for the remaining contested seats in Congress, in order to game-out Rep. Jamie Raskin’s well-publicized block-Trump play this coming Jan. 6.

These are the darkest and most explosive parts of Mr. Trump’s admirably deep to-do list for fixing the many things that have stopped working in American life. The simplest picture of our current predicament, and why people voted as they did, is of “things going in the wrong direction,” Well, what direction is that, exactly? The tyranny of giant forces over our little lives and communities. It’s a leviathan government seeking to invade and dominate everything — and to do it with maximum malice when resisted. It has left American men and women mentally disordered, demoralized, stolen their sense of purpose, deprived them of roles in society that provide meaning, alienated them from each other, and from their history. And it has left them, as Robert Kennedy points out, catastrophically unhealthy.

All of which is to say, we have more to clean up and reorganize than just our government. We’re going to get it done, you may be sure, even if the zeitgeist has to drag us kicking and screaming out of the malaise we’re stuck in. All of this points to some very different new arrangements to be made in our everyday life, beginning with the realization that the era of getting something-for-nothing is over.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post Mysteries Revealed appeared first on LewRockwell.

The West doesn’t have the financial clout to pursue global primacy – if it ever did.

The election has occurred; Trump will take office in January; many of the existing Party Nomenklatura will be replaced; different policies will be announced – but actually taking power (rather than just sitting in the White House) will be more complex. The U.S. has devolved into many disparate fiefdoms – almost princedoms – from the CIA to the Justice Department. And regulatory ‘agencies’ too, have been implanted to preserve Nomenklatura hold on the System’s lifeblood.

Pulling these ideological adversaries into new thinking will not proceed entirely smoothly.

However, the U.S. election also, has been a referendum on the prevalent western intellectual mainstream. And that likely will be more decisive than the U.S. domestic vote – important though that is. The U.S. has shifted strategically away from the managerial techno-oligarchy that took its grip in the 1970s. Today’s shift is reflected across the U.S.

Back in 1970, Zbig Brzezinski (who was to become National Security Adviser to President Carter) wrote a book foreseeing the new era: What he then called ‘The Technetronic Era’,

“involved the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society … dominated by an élite, unrestrained by traditional values … [and practicing] continuous surveillance over every citizen … [together with] manipulation of the behaviour and intellectual functioning of all people … [would become the new norm].”

Elsewhere, Brzezinski argued that “the nation-state … has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state”.

Brzezinski was plain wrong about the benefits of tech cosmopolitan governance. And he was decisively, and disastrously, wrong in the policy prescriptions that he adduced from the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 – that no country or group of countries would ever dare to stand up to U.S. power. Brzezinski argued in The Grand Chessboard that Russia would have no choice but to submit to the expansion of NATO, and to the geopolitical dictates of the U.S.

But Russia did not succumb. And as a result of the élites’ 1991 ‘End of History’ euphoria, the West launched war in Ukraine to prove its point – that no single country could hope to stand against the combined weight of all NATO. They said that because they believed it. They believed in the western Manifest Destiny. They did not understand the other options Russia had.

Today, the Ukraine war is lost. Hundreds of thousands have died unnecessarily – for a conceit. The ‘other war’ in the Middle East fares no differently. The Israeli-U.S. war on Iran will be lost, and tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese will have died pointlessly.

And the ‘forever wars’ too, that were expected by the Supreme Commander of NATO in the wake of 9/11 to topple an array of states (first Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran), not only did they not result in consolidating U.S. hegemony, but they have led instead to Kazan and to BRICS, with its long tail of aspirant members, ready to face down foreign colonialism.

The Kazan summit was cautious. It didn’t project a flush of solutions; some BRICS states were hesitant (the U.S. election was scheduled for the following week). Putin’s comments to these latter states were carefully calibrated: Look at what the U.S. can do to you, should you fall foul of it, at any point. Protect yourselves.

All that the BRICS President (Putin) could say, at this juncture, was: Here are the problems that [we have to solve]. It is premature to set up a full alternative Bretton Woods structure at this time. But we can set up the core to a prudent alternative for working in the dollar sphere: a settlement and clearing system, BRICS Clear; a reference unit of account; a re-insurance structure and the BRICS Card – a retail payment card system similar to AliPay.

Perhaps a Reserve Currency and the full Bretton Woods paraphernalia will prove unnecessary. Financial technology is evolving fast – and providing that the BRICS clearance system is functional, a multitude of fin-tech separate trade channels may ultimately be what results.

But a ‘week is a long time in politics’. And one week later, the western intellectual paradigm was upended. The Shibboleths of the last fifty years were rejected across the board in the U.S. by voters. The ideology of ‘undoing’ the cultural past; the casting aside the lessons of history (for, it is claimed, ‘wrongful’ perspectives) and the rejection of systems of ethics reflected in the myths and stories of a community, have themselves been rejected!

It is ok again to be a ‘civilisational state”. The radical doubting and cynicism of the Anglo-sphere is reduced to one perspective amongst many. And no longer can be the universal narrative.

Well, post the U.S. election, BRICS sentiment must be turbo-charged. Notions that were not thinkable last week, just became possible and thinkable a week later. Historians may look back, and observe that the future architecture of modern global finance, modern global economy may have struggled to be born at Kazan, but is now a healthy infant.

Will it all happen smoothly? Of course not. Differences between BRICS member and ‘partner’ states will remain, but this week a window has opened, fresh air has entered, and many will breathe more easily. If there is one thing that should be clear, a second Trump Administration is unlikely to feel the need to launch a ‘war on the world’ to maintain its global hegemony (as the 2022 National Defence Strategy insist it should).

For the U.S. today faces its own internal structural contradictions to which Trump regularly alluded when he talked about the evaporated American real economy owing to the off-shored manufacturing base. A recent report by the RAND Organisation states starkly however, that the U.S. defence industrial base is unable to meet the equipment, technology, and munitions needs of the U.S. and its allies and partners. A protracted conflict, especially in multiple theatres, would require much greater capacity [– and a radically increased defence budget].

Trump’s industrial recuperation plan, however, of painfully high tariffs ringing American manufacturing; an end to Federal profligacy and lower taxes suggests however, a reversal into fiscal rectitude – after decades of fiscal laxity and uncontrolled borrowing. Not big military spending! (Defence spending, by the way, during the Cold War relied on top marginal income tax rates above 70 percent and corporate tax rates averaging 50 percent – which does not seem to accord with what Trump has in mind).

Professor Richard Wolff comments in a recent interview that the West as a whole is in deep trouble financially, precisely as a result of such unrestrained government expenditures:

“For the first time, a couple of years ago, bondholders were unwilling to continue to fund the deficits of Great Britain, and [the UK government was thrown out]. Mr. Macron is now heading right down that same path. Bondholders have told the French that they are not going to continue to fund their national debt.

Here’s how it works. Bondholders are telling the French, you have to rein in spending … The bondholders are saying, you have to stop running deficits. And, as every undergraduate knows, the way you would rein in deficits could be to cut spending. But there is an alternative: It’s called taxing. And it’s called taxing corporations and the rich because the others don’t have any more for you to tax – you’ve done all you can [do with taxes on ordinary French citizens].

[However] taxing corporations and the rich … somehow, is not only ‘not doable’, but not debatable. It can’t be put on the table: Nothing. (or, something so minuscule that will never deal with the deficit). We now have too much debt. And it turns out that the government, like the American government, is facing the next few years where it will have to spend as much on servicing its debt as it is on defence. And that doesn’t leave very much for everybody else. And everybody else is saying: no, no, no, no, no, no.

And now the bondholder gets worried, because one way to resolve this would be to stop paying the bond holders and that, of course, must never be. So you’ve got two absurdities. You can’t stop paying the bondholders (when, of course, you can, but with dire consequences). And you can’t tax corporations and the rich. And, of course you can. I think we are reaching a point in which these contradictions have accumulated. You don’t have to be a Hegelian or a Marxist to understand that these accumulating contradictions are very profound, very large, and very fundamental”.

They tell us that on the one hand that the world does not accept the western vision as being of universal application – and on the other hand, the West doesn’t have the financial clout to pursue global primacy – if it ever did: Zugzwang.

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

The post The West’s Very Fundamental Accumulating Contradictions appeared first on LewRockwell.

“If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti-Mask. Vax vs. Anti-vax. Rich vs. poor. Man vs. woman. Cop vs. citizen. [Etc.] The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar… and why?”

The above observation by Shera Starr cannot be improved upon.

And yet, the answer to the question is fairly simple.

But let’s first take a look at this anomaly. It’s natural to identify with some individuals more than others. That tendency occurred before Homo sapiens came into being. In addition, the tendency for animals to group into families or packs also predates humans.

We tend to want to be around those who behave the way we do and have the same perceptions as we do. That only makes sense. We wish to surround ourselves with those who are unlikely to surprise and possibly even endanger us by behaving in a fashion that we would not ourselves choose.

This is the basis of trust – an essential in group or herd mentality. And being a part of a group or herd brings to us increased safety.

So, what then, of those who are not within our group or herd? How do we relate to them?

Well, any nature programme that covers animals gathered around a water hole can provide that answer.

We see a small group of wild pigs drinking alongside a group of wildebeests. Neither species is predatory, so they learn to recognise that, even though one group is made up of savannah-living grazers and the other are forest-living foragers, they can easily co-exist, which will increase the ability of both species to use the water hole at the same time.

We might also see a group of hyenas using the water hole, but we notice that the prey animals all seek to keep a distance between themselves and the predatory hyenas. Everyone understands that they are all at the water hole for the same reason and it makes sense to share, even if, in another situation, they are natural enemies.

In fact, in most of nature, we see that species adapt to a condition of mutual tolerance in order to be able to coexist.

No surprise, then, that Homo sapiens got on the mutual tolerance bandwagon in its formative stages and, for the most part, has remained that way.

But it is also true that predators develop dual habits. They may exercise tolerance at the water hole, but at some point, they mean to make a meal of their water hole neighbours.

And when doing so, many species create associations with others of their kind to hunt.

This, too, is true of humans. Most of humanity seeks to live in a spirit of cooperation with others.

In the countryside, people erect walls and fences to establish boundaries, then find it expedient to respect such divisions in order to live in peace. Even in cities, people who live cheek by jowl in the same building respect each other’s privacy for the most part. Even if they do not become friends, they either remain polite or ignore each other.

Although there are always exceptions, for the most part, mankind behaves in a manner that is based upon “getting along.” He might argue with others, but for the most part, he understands that cooperation generally should be the objective, as it’s in his best interests.

But why, then, are we seeing in so many of the countries of the First World, a rapidly increasing polarity amongst people. Ms. Starr is exactly correct. Those who would be most inclined toward mutual tolerance have, in recent years, become so polarised that they cannot so much as get together with their own families for the holidays without getting into heated arguments.

Why are people of today so solidly in one of two camps?

Can this be blamed on the rise of the internet? Well, no, the internet has become the source of a plethora of opinions and perceptions. And more than closing people off to polarised “A” and “B” choices, the internet has served to broaden public discourse.

Of course, most people express distrust for the media, particularly those networks that purportedly deal in “news.” What passes for news today is far from objective information that the viewer can then assess at his leisure.

On one network, we view unceasing diatribes against one political party. Then we turn the channel and view unceasing diatribes against the opposing party.

In turning on the News, we arrive at Indoctrination Central.

But if we really pay attention objectively, we discover that the same programmes are dictating to us that it is either our humanitarian duty to vax, or that vaxxing will enslave us to globalists who will inject us with microchips.

They are also our source for the opposing beliefs that warfare is essential to protect us against those who seek to destroy us, or that it will be the wars themselves that will destroy us.

In fact, all of Ms. Starr’s concerns find their source in the media. When we ask the question, “Who is shaking the jar… and why?” we find that those who control the media are at the source of the polarisation of people, especially in the First World.

As to the “Why?” the answer is so simple that it’s often overlooked. Like the ants, the more a people can be made to fight each other, the easier it is to subjugate them.

And since the effort to polarise people has become so massive, we can only conclude that the ultimate objective will be to implement a far greater level of subjugation, in an abnormally short period of time.

Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. white. Man vs. woman. Divide and conquer.

In such a socio-political climate, the challenge will be to keep your wits about you. As the jar is shaken on a daily basis, it will be vital to recognise that those who control the media are creating a war between the pigs and the wildebeests. This is something that is not desired by either species, but as Hermann Goering stated, “Why, of course the people don’t want war.” They must be goaded into it if those who are pulling the stings are to achieve greater subjugation.

In the coming years, this trend can be expected to become far worse than at present. The challenge will be to escape the jar if you can. Find a location where the state of warfare is less pronounced, or if this is not possible, seek a location within the jar that’s away from the fray.

Those who fall for the bait – who buy into rabidly supporting one political party or another, or who allow themselves to be angered at an entire race, or who are conned into hatred of an entire gender – will prove to be the greatest casualties of subjugation.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Learning From Ants appeared first on LewRockwell.

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The post Getting Ready for Winter appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Everybody knows the boat is leaking/Everybody knows the captain lied”
– Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows”

When the polls closed on Tuesday, November 5th, I was sound asleep, like a baby rocking gently in his cradle, lost to the frenzied rants or joyful shouting of the different political claques.  Even though I missed the results of what the mass media had been telling us was the most important election in our lifetimes, I was happily oblivious to their cant.  I remember hearing that nonsense many times before.

I gave up on my country’s electoral system more than fifty years ago.  Every presidential election is a contest between two sides of the ruling monied elite, chosen to represent their interests.  It is corrupt beyond repair and was so even then.  Do most people have a clue that their country is owned and run by a small group of the super-rich and ten or so financial institutions, such as BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, etc., the big banks and financial interests that in 1947 formed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to spearhead the U.S. warfare state around the world in support of its economy that is reliant on endless war?

The electorate continually puts its hope in the performers that the spectacle’s producers put up to front for their interests, failing to grasp that the rulers’ interests are not theirs.  Arguing and anguishing over certain policy differences between Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, they fail to see that both exist to serve global capital, not regular people, that exchanging presidents is a counterfeiter’s con-game with the voters the scammers’ marks.

Trump’s current victory is an example of that, as was Biden’s in 2020.  If Harris had won, it would have proven the same.  They are two sides of one coin.  That the system is rigged by the oligarchs should be obvious but isn’t.  Or maybe it is obvious but people secretly harbor a perverse liking for it.  Stranger things are true, as on personal levels people embrace the symptoms of their neuroses because the symptoms are their disguised solutions, their ways of staying stuck because change is hard and frightening and requires admitting repressed realities.

The cliché that all politics is local has a certain appeal and a trace of veracity, but 99 + % of the truth lies elsewhere.  Apprimately 145 + million Americans just lined up to vote like puppies looking for a bone to be thrown their way by the people who own the country.  They do get a bone here and there, which keeps them looking for the meat, but that is reserved for the fat cats, as always.

I understand why people prefer upbeat words, but very often the upbeat is really the downbeat of hopelessness in disguise.  A coverup.  And seemingly hopeless words, such as that our presidents are the public personae of the rapacious oligarchy, are actually far more hopeful, even though they reveal long-held assumptions to be delusional.

Imagine what might happen if a great portion of people refused to vote for the charlatans chosen to run for president.

The fear that there was even a slight chance that this might happen lies behind all the pep talks and moralizing about doing your civic duty, which is such “a privilege.”  Vote, even if it’s for the “lesser of two evils.”

But please, let us not mention the great evil that lies behind these lessers.  Vote and we’ll give you a sticker. A sticker that signifies your gullibility.

There is a “system,” as young radicals referred to the U.S.’s political-economic structure back in the 1960s.  I was one of them, a conscientious objector from the Marine Corps and a graduate student studying sociology, deeply influenced by the work and moral voice of C. Wright Mills and his powerful books, The Power Elite, The Causes of World War III, and Listen, Yankee, and William Domhoff’s Who Rules America, a work that has gone through seven updated editions.

There were (and are) many other books that told the story truly, but even reading them won’t help unless you are willing to dispense with the obvious illusions and face the bleakness of a corrupt system.  Willing to take it personally.  Willing to recognize the systemic evil that under-girds the System.  Willing to accept the void that the Trappist monk Thomas Merton termed the Unspeakable:

It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss.

This void is the fact that the U.S. political economy is controlled by a small group of the wealthiest nihilists and is maintained through lies, a military-industrial economy, and perpetual wars around the world to maintain and increase their wealth.  It is a death cult that people worship by their participation.

Although in subsequent years it became fashionable to decry the use of the term “the system,” there was a system then and there is one now, run by the upper class elite whose wealth has increased exponentially over the years throughout Democratic and Republican administrations.  This system is tightly entwined throughout the social structure of the country, part of the everyday fabric of American life.  It is fueled by the corporate mass media of all political persuasions.  Understanding it helps to explain most of what is going on today, including the farcical election just concluded.  A battle between two candidates who represent the forces that oppress the common people, support the genocide of the Palestinians, and are figureheads for the warfare state.

The system has evolved its methods of control since the 1950s but is essentially unchanged.  It is now monopoly global capitalism joined with the steroidal injection of digital technology and the Internet to create a seamless marriage of economic exploitation and non-stop propaganda that has coopted and controlled the working classes and leftist intellectuals alike. Those middle to upper middle classes who like to consider themselves liberal or progressive accept the status quo because it rewards them at the expense of struggling peoples at home and abroad.  They can afford to play along and look away, being typical Babbitts.  And the right-wing was always in the pocket of the power elites.

Elections are said to be about pocket-book issues, which is largely true, but the oligarchic control of the nation’s pocketbook is not the focus.  Small stuff is.

Listen to Peter Philips, a sociologist in Mills’s tradition, who tells the truth that most can’t bear to hear and will never accept. His latest book is, Titans of Capital.  Here he is being interviewed by Robert Scheer, These Ten Companies Run Our “Democracy.”

It’s nothing new, but to accept it would require an American revolution, which isn’t coming.  No, it’s not coming when so many people “do their civic duty” and vote for presidential candidates fronting for the upper class’s interests.

As I am finishing writing these words, a headline appears at The New York Times Corporation to make me laugh and give me that all-over happy tingle.  It reads: “Popularist Revolt Against Elite’s Vision of the U.S.”   Subheaded with these introductory words: “In the end, Donald Trump is not the historical aberration some thought he was, but a force reshaping the modern U.S., writes Peter Baker in an analysis.”

Not an historical aberration!  Then he must not be a deviation from the normal type of American president.  Trump is a good old normal American president, claims the Times.  Is this a Freudian slip?

The “elite’s vision?”  So the Times is also admitting that there is an elite and they have a vision for the common people?  I wondered what kind of confession was to follow?  So I followed.

The article by Baker has a strangely punctuated title with an ambiguous meaning that its text contradicts: ‘Trump’s America’: Comeback Victory Signals a Different Kind of Country.”  It opens with the introductory words I quoted above, as if to reinforce the point.  Not an historical aberration, which for anyone who understands the English language means he is normal.  But then Baker mixes his illogical word salad with dressing.

He writes, as if there were some logical connection between his sentences:

Populist disenchantment with the nation’s direction and resentment against elites proved to be deeper and more profound than many in both parties had recognized. Mr. Trump’s testosterone-driven campaign capitalized on resistance to electing the first woman president.

Is he not saying that there is an elite that the common people are rebelling against by voting for Trump and that Harris has been chosen by these same elites and as a woman she is the focus of the fat, seventy-eight year-old Trump’s massive testosterone drive because she is a woman?

But if Trump is not an historical aberration and therefore has also been chosen by the elites, then the “popularist revolt” is no revolt at all but a con job played out by the billionaire elite who support Trump.  Baker and all the “experts” he quotes are loathe to admit openly that the ruling oligarchy is split; that both Harris and Trump are candidates of the elite who war among themselves but who in the end reap the spoils of the system.  That they are allied in an overall goal.

Baker tells us about Kamala Harris, who was not chosen by the people but by the elite who control the Democratic party, that “Once she took the torch from Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris initially emphasized a positive, joy-filled mission to the future, consolidating excited Democrats behind her, but it was not enough to win over uncommitted voters.”

Joy didn’t work.  Well what the heck!

Baker also tells us that trashing Trump and emphasizing unity didn’t either because the American people want a strongman.

What? a non-aberrational strong man?

But Baker goes on to castigate Trump as a criminal, a liar, a fraud, a conspiracy theorist, etc. while the joyful Harris just miscalculated and underestimated popular discontent.  This is the usual Times’ schtick.  Turn to the New York Post for the obverse and have a chuckle at the absurd game the media play on the public.

Baker’s headline tells us that Trump’s win signals that the U.S. is now a different kind of country because so many people are fed up with how it’s being run.  Different from 2016 when Trump won?

If only it were a different country, but it isn’t.  The same elite money forces run the show.  Elections don’t change that.  People continue to be suckers.

Baker lets it slip again with these words:

The assumption that Mr. Trump represented an anomaly who would at last be consigned to the ash heap of history was washed away on Tuesday night by a red current that swept through battleground states – and swept away the understanding of America long nurtured by its ruling elite of both parties.

Yes, the “ruling elite.”  One elite.  Both parties.  And nothing was swept away.  This ruling elite is just laughing and no doubt secretly applauding the stenographers who serve their interests, such as Peter Baker, who portrays them in typically deceptive Times’ gobbledygook fashion as “perplexed.”  Have a laugh!

“Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich stay rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows”

Do they?

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Everybody Knows: Do They? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The hagiography of Donald Trump has started. The one below by the very evil Stephen Miller should be a wake-up call as to what lies immediately ahead. This dude is among the nastiest of the immigrant-howlers and border “invasion” propagandists, and he is heading straight for a high berth in the Donald’s government in waiting.

Needless to say, if he succeeds in duping Trump into launching a massive multi-million person deportation drive—complete with nation-wide midnight raids and swelling internment camps—right out of the gate on January 20th, the second Trump Administration will be stillborn.

On the one hand, such a misguided action would hammer tens of thousands of small businesses which employ 8.5 million illegal aliens in labor intensive industries across the length and breadth of the land, and which workers currently pay upwards of $100 billion per year in taxes. At the same time, a sweeping outbreak of litigation and Congressional intervention would also ensue, fostering bitter political polarization and legislative and judicial combat far more intense than what has already materialized to date.

Yes, there are undoubtedly a few thousand criminals who have been released into the interior under Washington’s absurd “parole” system, but those can be targeted as a matter of prioritized regular law enforcement. What is not remotely needed, however, is the arrest and deportation of millions of economic migrants who are filling the yawning gaps in America’s worker-hungry economy.

These hard-working folks at construction sites, warehouses, chicken-slaughtering plants, fast food joints, landscaping operations etc. are “illegal” only because Federal law requires them to violate an ancient Federal statute in order to get arrested, scheduled for an asylum hearing and paroled into the economy, waiting months and years for their hearings and adjudication.

This is Big Government statism run wild. In fact, if there were a decent sized immigration quota of say 500,000 per year for unskilled workers versus the current ludicrous cap of 10,000, none of these 8.5 million workers would be “illegal” or standing in the path of the Donald’s impending raids. To the contrary, they would have gotten a green card long ago and many of them would have already earned their citizenship in the regular way.

Yet here is Miller’s over-the-top valorization of Donald Trump, implying that the very gods of history have chosen him to thwart a foreign “invasion” that is nothing of the kind; and which actually represents the free market trying to balance labor supply and demand by working around the idiotic obstacles posed by the Washington politicians.

The electoral landslide achieved by @realDonaldTrump is not only the single greatest win in American Political history but in the modern history of civilization. Nothing else even comes close.

This is unparalleled, unmatched and unrivaled. He defeated the Bush Dynasty, Clinton Dynasty, Cheney Dynasty, Obama Dynasty, Biden Dynasty and the entire corrupt machine behind Kamala Harris.

He defeated every sinister Marxist prosecutor, every vile hoax, every DOJ witch hunt, every communist persecution, every illegal act of censorship and surveillance, and the ruthlessly politicized and weaponized justice system.

He defeated the corrupt legacy media, the political class, the donor class, the pundit class. He defeated not one but TWO Democrat nominees and their rigged primary. He defeated the corrupt Democrat Congress. He defied death itself and survived multiple assassination attempts. Trump did the impossible over and over and over again. THE BIGGEST VICTORY EVER SEEN. No comparison.

To be sure, much of the above describes the consequences of Tuesday’s election. The Cheney’s, Bush’s, Biden’s, Obama’s and the insufferable shills of the mainstream media all got their comeuppance, and a much deserved opportunity to pout and lick their wounds.

But for crying out loud. It wasn’t Donald Trump the super-politician, savior of the American Way and Horatio-at-the-Bridge who single-handedly and by force of will brought about Tuesday’s sweeping repudiation of UniParty rule. It was, instead, soaring gas and grocery prices which caused them to pull the GOP lever—a punishing, 40-year high inflation surge that was, ironically, caused by the Donald’s own lockdowns and spend, borrow and print madness of 2020, as we demonstrated yesterday.

So the question recurs. If Biden’s “bad” economy was largely the aftermath of the Donald’s bacchanalia of spending and stimmies was the Donald’s purported “good” economy all that it’s cracked-up to be?

In a word, no. Real economic growth during Obama’s second term averaged 2.43% per annum, while the growth rate was 2.31% per annum during Trump’s first 3.25 years before the Lockdowns hit in Q2 2020. What these figures convey, therefore, is not a break-away boom under the Donald, but a sub-par but continuous expansion of the post-Financial Crisis business cycle that reflected the resilience of America’s market economy, not the policy palaver and machinations emanating from either incumbent of the Oval Office.

In fact, we do not propose to supply a magnifying glass to examine the graph below, but even then its damn evident that there is no way to tell when the Obama Administration ended and the Trump pre-lockdown years began. There flat out was no semblance of a boom on the Donald’s watch, and, actually, a growth rate even before the madness of the Lockdowns and stimmies that was just 75% of the 3.0% average for all Presidents between 1954 and 2016.

Real Final Sales Of Domestic Product, Q4 2012 to Q1 2020

Moreover, if the Greatest Economy Ever is a figment of the Donald’s reckless imagination, the question then becomes what might be expected under the far more challenging and fraught conditions which will prevail in January 2025 and beyond?

Stated differently, what is likely to happen when the next Trump Administration slams the already faltering, debt-ridden US economy with the double-whammy of a suddenly shrunken labor supply due to mass deportations, coupled with a massive increase in demand?

The latter, in turn, is owing to the already towering public debt increases that are baked into the cake under existing UniParty policy, which would then be drastically compounded by the Donald’s sweeping tax cuts and the massive spending increases for defense and border control which he has also promised.

Needless to say, Trump spent the campaign slicing and dicing the Federal income tax nearly as fast as he served up fries at the McDonald’s drive-thru window in late October. So doing, he proposed to extend the lower rates, family tax credits and investment incentives of the 2017 Tax Act after they expire in 2025 and to also exempt tips, social security benefits and overtime wages from the Federal income tax.

As it happens, however, those items alone would generate a revenue loss of $9 trillion over the next decade, but in the final weeks of the campaign he also proposed to exempt firefighters, police officers, military personnel and veterans from the Federal income tax, as well. This was self-evidently an appeal to the “first responders” constituencies.

Like in the case of most attempts to buy votes, however, the fiscal cost is not inconsiderable. To wit, we estimate that relieving first responders from the Federal income tax would cost another $2.5 trillion in revenue loss over 10 years.

That’s because there are 370,000 firemen, 708,000 policemen, 2.86 million uniformed military personnel and 18.0 million veterans in the US. These 22 million citizens have an estimated average income of $82,000 per year, which translates to about $60,000 each of AGI (adjusted gross income). At an average income tax rate of 14.7% these exclusions would generate $250 billion per year of reduced income tax payments.

In all, candidate Trump thus tossed out promises to cut income taxes by $11.5 trillion over the next 10-year budget window. And yet his hagiographers claim that he is not a regular politician!

In any event, these sweeping reductions which would amount to upwards of 34% of CBO’s estimated baseline income tax revenue of $33.7 trillion over the next 10-year period. Alas, even in the halcyon days of Reagan supply-side tax cutting no one really dreamed of eliminating fully one-third of the so-called crime of 1913 (16th Amendment which enabled the income tax).

10-Year Revenue Loss:

• Extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts: $5.350 trillion.
• Exempt overtime income: $2.000 trillion.
• End Taxation of Social Security benefits: $1.300 trillion.
• Exempt Tip income: $300 billion.
• Exempt Income of Firemen, Policemen, Military and Veterans: $2.500 trillion.
• Trump Total Revenue Loss: $11.500 trillion.
• CBO Income Tax Baseline Revenue: $33.700 trillion.
• Trump Revenue Loss As % of Baseline: 34%

Then again, the Donald did tender an off-the-spectrum idea to at least partially fund the even greater fiscal madness than he accomplished the first time around. To wit, scrapping the income tax entirely in favor of taxing consumption via stiff levies on imported goods and merchandise.

“In the old days when we were smart, when we were a smart country, in the 1890s and all, this is when the country was relatively the richest it ever was. It had all tariffs. It didn’t have an income tax,” Trump said at a sit-down with voters in New York on Friday for “Fox & Friends.” “Now we have income taxes, and we have people that are dying.”

Actually, however, 19th century America was even smarter than the Donald realizes. In 1900 total Federal spending amounted to just 3.5% of GDP because back then America was still a peaceful republic and had no Warfare State or even significant standing army at all. And save for the most advanced precincts of Europe, the Welfare State hadn’t yet been invented, either.

So, yes, the so-called “revenue tariffs” of the 19th century did meet the income needs of the Federal government to the point of actually balancing the budget year-after-year between 1870 and 1900. Indeed, the actual annual surpluses were large enough to pay down most of the Civil War debt, to boot.

Today, of course, the Warfare State, Welfare State and the Washington pork barrels account for 25% of GDP. So the Donald may be directionally correct in wanting to tax consumption rather than income, but, as usual, he was off by about seven orders of magnitude when it comes to the size of the Federal budget that needs be financed.

Pursuant to his 21st century version of the revenue tariff, Trump has pledged to impose a 20% universal tariff on all imports from all countries with a specific 60% rate for Chinese imports. Based on current US import levels of $3.5 trillion per year from worldwide sources and $450 billion from China, the Donald’s tariffs would generate about $900 billion of receipts per annum.

To be sure, Trump’s claim that these giant tariffs would be paid for by Chinamen, Mexicans and European socialists is just more of his standard baloney. Tariffs are paid for by consumers, but that’s actually the hidden virtue of the Tariff Man’s favorite word.

The truth is, government should be paid for via taxation on current citizens, not fobbed off in the form of giant debts on future citizens, born and unborn. So if we are going to have Big Government at 25% of GDP rather than 19th century government at 3.5% of GDP, and the Donald is a Big Government Man if there ever was one, better that the burden be placed on consumption—not production, work, income and investment.

After all, today the “makers” get hit good and hard by the current exceedingly lopsided income tax system. Thus, the top 1% pays 46% of income taxes, while the top 5% pay 66% and the top 10% pay 76% of all income taxes. On the other end, by contrast, the bottom 50% pay just 2.3% of individual income taxes, while 40% of all families pay no income tax at all.

In any event, the math works out such that the proposed Trumpian revenue tariffs would generate about $9 trillion over the next decade or nearly 80% of the $11.5 trillion revenue loss from drastically shrinking the income tax coverage and collection rate. So that’s a seeming step in the direction of fiscal solvency rather than more UniParty free lunches.

To be sure, the proper redirection of Federal tax policy would be a national sales taxes or VAT levy, which could be applied to both goods and services and to domestically produced output as well as to imports. Thus, a 5% VAT on the current $20 trillion per year of total PCE (personal consumption expenditures) would generate the equivalent of Trump’s revenue tariff, while a 15% levy on total PCE could replace both the Trump tariff and the remainder of the income tax entirely.

Still, this sweeping change in the composition and incidence of tax policy doesn’t really put the impending fiscal disaster to bed. Not by a long shot.

If you assume the Donald’s big revenue tariffs and sweeping income tax cuts and that the other Federal payroll, corporate and excise taxes remain the same, 10-year revenues compute to just $60 trillion versus built in spending of $85 trillion per the CBO baseline. In short, even with a giant Trumpified version of the historical revenue tariff, the Donald’s budget plan would still generate $25 trillion of red ink over the next decade.

10-Year Budget Outlook with Trump Tax Cuts and Tariffs, 2025 to 2034:

• Individual income taxes with Trump cuts: $22.0 trillion.
• Trump Revenue Tariffs: $9.0 trillion.
• Existing Payroll Taxes: $20.9 trillion.
• Existing Corporate Tax Ex-Trump Cut to 15% on Manufacturers: $4.6 trillion.
• Other Existing Federal Receipts: $3.5 trillion.
• Total Federal Revenue Under Trump Policy: $60.0 trillion.
• CBO Baseline Federal Outlays: $85.0 trillion.
• 10-Year Trump Deficit: $25.0 trillion.

To be sure, the Donald has promised to turn Elon Musk lose on a crusade against government waste and inefficiency, and we say more power to him. If anyone has the courage and smarts to take on the Swamp, surely Elon Musk is at the top of the list.

Then again, the Donald has promised to shield 82% of the budget from any cuts at all. That’s right. Elon could huff and puff and shrink the non-exempt programs and agencies by one-third and still leave deficits in excess of $20 trillion over the next decade.

10-year Cost Of Programs Trump Has Championed, Promised Not To Cut or Can’t Cut:

• Social Security: $20.0 trillion.
• Medicare: $16.0 trillion.
• Federal Military and Civilian Retirement Pensions: $2.5 trillion.
• Veterans’ programs: $3.0 trillion.
• National Security Budget: $15.5 trillion.
• Interest On the Public Debt: $13.0 trillion.
• Total Exempt Programs: $70.0 trillion.
• Exempt Programs As % of $85 trillion CBO Baseline: 82%.

In short, even with the Donald’s full revenue tariffs and assuming Elon could actually slash 33% of the non-exempt budget without closing the Washington Monument, the bottom-line math leaves little to the imagination. Spending at $80 trillion would amount to 22.7% of GDP, while the Donald’s tariff-heavy revenue package would generate $60 trillion of Federal receipts over the next decade, amounting to about 17.0% of GDP.

In turn, that would leave a structural deficit of nearly 6% of GDP as far as the eye can see. And that projection assumes no recession ever again and that interest on a public debt approaching $60 trillion by 2034 would average just 3.3% across the maturity spectrum.

We will take the unders on that proposition any day of the week and twice on Sunday. That is to say, CBO’s projection of $1.7 trillion of annual interest expense by 2034 is likely understated by several trillions. Per year.

In any event, the challenge of financing these giant deficits along with $900 billion per year of Trump tariffs would be considerable. The latter alone would amount to nearly 10% of annual US consumption of consumer goods and fixed investment goods.

So if the Fed were to “accommodate” these massive Trump tariffs by running the printing presses red hot in an attempt to compensate for lost household purchasing power, it could well trigger a burst of inflation even more virulent than that of 2021-2024. On the other hand, were it to adhere to the correct sound money solution and refuse to “accommodate” both the massive Trump deficits and the giant Trump tariffs, bond yields and interest rates would soar, even as the main street economy contracted sharply in response to a one-time 10% increase in the general price level.

Needless to say, financing massive budget deficits honestly in the bond pits rather than at the Fed’s printing presses would also unleash the mother of all meltdowns in today’s insanely inflated financial markets. The Donald would therefore get his tariff and some substantial re-shoring of industrial production, but also a hair-curling recession on main street and a Bronx Cheer from the canyons of Wall Street.

As to the inflation-battered constituencies who tendered an economic protest vote for Trump on Tuesday, not so much. Under the Donald’s impending plan to massively shrink the labor supply and massively increase consumer demand at the same time, what lies ahead is punishing interest rates and a deep and prolonged period of stagflation that even the wizards at the Fed will be powerless to counteract.

So there is every reason to believe that by 2028 the marginal constituencies who re-elected the Donald this time will be ready for still another “student body left” pivot next time. That’s because in the interim the myth of the Greatest Economy Ever will have been destroyed in daily living color by the colossal failure of the Donald’s half-assed theory of economics.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post On the Donald’s Half-Assed Economics and the Payback Ahead appeared first on LewRockwell.

An excessive desire for liberty at the expense of everything else is what undermines democracy and leads to the demand for tyranny.

      —Plato

In a lecture at Notre Dame a few years ago, Alasdair MacIntyre argued that the claims and conceptions of universal and inalienable human dignity as reflected in documents such as the 1948 United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in various post-war European constitutions are puzzling, since this dignity requires a duty of respect to everyone just for being human, no matter their behavior or character, so Stalin the mass murderer has as much dignity and deserves as much respect as Mother Teresa. Aquinas’ view of dignitas as interpreted by Charles De Koninick is a challenge to this view, for it assigns human dignity, not to the mere fact of being human, but to end to which we are called, which is supernatural, union with God, which might not be attained due to one’s choices on earth against those common goods which enable our attainment of the supernatural end, and so human dignitas could be lost. According to this view, which is founded on the end to which humans are called and the virtue of justice, not the mere fact of being human and an ambiguous and philosophically ungrounded human dignity, the 20th-century concept of human dignity is much too individualistic, and because it is not based in justice and the common good, only can provide negative prescriptions against the undignified treatment of humans. It is unable to provide positive prescriptions that enable persons to obtain the common goods and the virtues they need to attain their supernatural end. For MacIntyre, we need to speak of human dignity in terms of justice, what we owe to each other for the sake of enabling persons to attain their personal and common goods and final end, which is the knowledge and love of God in this life and the next.

I would like to use MacIntyre’s lecture as a springboard to talk about the current situation of the world. Since March of 2020, we have suffered an all-out, deliberate, and planned assault on both human dignity and justice. To see this, I cite the Catechism of Catholic Church’s section on “Respect for the Dignity of Human Persons” which is a kind of synthesis of the Thomistic justice and common good-oriented and the modern rights and dignity-oriented views, presenting a set of both negative proscriptions and positive prescriptions for what this respect requires. It will be shown that every one of these has been violated to the core under the pretext of public health.  I think the reason for the success of this assault, waged by billionaire globalist elites with the complicity and cooperation of national governments, is the lack of popular resistance to it, indeed, the popular acceptance and even celebration of it. And I think the reason for this malignant effect upon souls is the ideology of secular liberalism.

David Walsh in his 2016 book Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being argues that the secular liberalism that produced the 1948 United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and various post-war European constitutions, although not founded on any particular theology or metaphysics or anthropology, indeed, not founded on anything other than a consensus and commitment to the rights and dignity of the human person, is worth preserving and celebrating for its wonderful achievements. He writes:

Liberal constitutions have emerged from the competition of modern political forms to outlast and surpass all rivals. Not only did they supersede monarchical and aristocratic forms to establish commercial republics, but they have overcome the far more formidable challenges posed by collectivist and authoritarian rivals in the last and present centuries. Despite their weakness and unpreparedness, liberal democracies found within themselves the resources necessary to defeat fascism and persevere through the long confrontation with communism. Now they stand as the exemplars not only of economic and political success but as the model of moral legitimacy the world over, even as they are challenged by the lingering assertion of authoritarian models. No higher aspiration prevails in the contemporary world than to create a political order that is derived from and ordered toward the preservation of individual dignity and respect. The moral and political authority of liberal democratic forms may be ironic, given their own inner self-doubt, but it can hardly be denied as a global reality.

Well, the irony, I am afraid, is much deeper than mere “inner self-doubt.” In the section on the Fifth Commandment, under the heading of “Respect for the Dignity of Persons,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church presents five norms that must be obeyed and upheld by persons and societies. Far from fulfilling these norms, virtually all the governments of liberal democracies in the world, those with “no higher aspiration . . . than to create a political order that is derived from and ordered to the preservation of individual dignity and respect,” have attacked the dignity of persons on a scale never before seen in human history. The Catechism states:

Respect for the souls of others: scandal

Therefore, they are guilty of scandal who establish laws or social structures leading to the decline of morals and the corruption of religious practice, or to “social conditions that, intentionally or not, make Christian conduct and obedience to the Commandments difficult and practically impossible.” This is also true of business leaders who make rules encouraging fraud, teachers who provoke their children to anger, or manipulators of public opinion who turn it away from moral values.

Respect for health

Concern for the health of its citizens requires that society help in the attainment of living-conditions that allow them to grow and reach maturity: food and clothing, housing, health care, basic education, employment, and social assistance.

If morality requires respect for the life of the body, it does not make it an absolute value. It rejects a neo-pagan notion that tends to promote the cult of the body, to sacrifice everything for its sake, to idolize physical perfection and success at sports.

Respect for the person and scientific research

Research or experimentation on the human being cannot legitimate acts that are in themselves contrary to the dignity of persons and to the moral law. The subjects’ potential consent does not justify such acts. Experimentation on human beings is not morally legitimate if it exposes the subject’s life or physical and psychological integrity to disproportionate or avoidable risks. Experimentation on human beings does not conform to the dignity of the person if it takes place without the informed consent of the subject or those who legitimately speak for him.

Respect for bodily integrity

Kidnapping and hostage taking bring on a reign of terror; by means of threats they subject their victims to intolerable pressures. They are morally wrong. Terrorism threatens, wounds, and kills indiscriminately; it is gravely against justice and charity. Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity. Except when performed for strictly therapeutic medical reasons, directly intended amputations, mutilations, and sterilizations performed on innocent persons are against the moral law.91 [what is this number?]

Respect for the dead

The dying should be given attention and care to help them live their last moments in dignity and peace. They will be helped by the prayer of their relatives, who must see to it that the sick receive at the proper time the sacraments that prepare them to meet the living God.

How have the “models of moral legitimacy” called liberal democracies lived up to these five norms? Since March of 2020, we have witnessed the emergence of a global totalitarianism the scope and gravity of which has no precedent in history, replete with monstrous scandals (laws allowing abortion mills and liquor stores to stay open while schools and churches are shut down), domestic terrorism ( fear-porn propaganda and state-sanctioned violence against peaceful protesters), horrific medical experimentation with no informed consent, and a wanton disrespect for health (outlawing effective life-saving medicine, mandating immune-system destroying injections), bodily integrity (mandatory masks, and vaccinations known to cause sterilization and death), and the dead (forcing the dying to die alone in nursing homes and hospitals).

Reiner Fuellmich and the late Vladimir Zelenko, just to name two of the most prominent and heroic truth-tellers and activists, have made a powerful case that what should be called the plandemic is the greatest crime against humanity ever committed, essentially a global medical experiment ordered to genocidal depopulation and sterilization, Big Pharma profits, and elite, totalitarian, economic and political control. We must add to this the psychological devastation of billions of brainwashed, abused, degraded, and dehumanized persons through what has been diagnosed by competent psychologists as mass-formation psychosis. What we have witnessed in the very liberal democracies that according to Walsh are “the exemplars not only of economic and political success but as the model of moral legitimacy the world over” is a global mass-terror campaign of fear and torture in which millions consented to, or at least did not widely and forcefully resist, a global economic shutdown leading to millions of deaths, the devastation of national economies, and the destruction of the property-owning middle class. This shutdown included deprivation of fundamental human rights, including the setting up of literal concentration camps for the unvaccinated, the physically and psychologically damaging and medically useless masking of whole populations, including young children, and the coercive program of injecting every living human being with an untested, gene-altering serum known to kill more than it saves, all for a disease that according to the actual numbers was and is for the vast majority of people no more fatal than the flu.

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