Lew Rockwell Institute

International Man: After spending over $350 billion—half of which is reportedly unaccounted for—the US government is finally pulling the plug on supporting the Ukraine in its war with Russia.

What do you make of this?

Doug Casey: It was criminally insane for the US to involve itself in a border war between two countries on the other side of the world. Not many Americans know that “Ukraine,” which was previously always known as “the Ukraine,” means borderland. It was just a region, like Kurdistan, with undefined shifting borders until Lenin created it in 1921.

Why, you might ask, would the West take a chance on starting World War III over the most corrupt country in Europe?

Several reasons. For one, Ukraine has been a highly effective laundromat. Gigantic amounts of American tax dollars disappeared into a black hole to re-emerge in the pockets of NGOs, masquerading as aid. For another, connected scumbags like the Bidens got fat. Scores of billions were redistributed to weapons manufacturers, military contractors, and God knows who else. And, of course, a large coterie of Neocons in DC have made careers out of trying to destroy Russia at any cost.

I only hope that as Trump digs into where all the money has gone, it will result in massive clawbacks and long jail terms for lots of people, both in the US and Europe.

International Man: As the post below makes clear, President Trump is displeased with Zelensky. Without US backing, Zelensky’s days in power in Kiev seem to be numbered.

What are your thoughts on Zelensky’s future and that of Ukraine?

Doug Casey: How Zelensky, a second-rate nobody actor in a poor country, became immensely wealthy is a tale that should be widely disseminated. Years ago, the Panama Papers showed that Zelensky was already worth about $300 million and had two ultra-expensive houses in southern Florida. But to this day, nobody’s looked into the provenance of that fortune. I’m sure it’s grown to billions in the intervening years.

Here’s a rule of thumb: Dictators who are responsible for wholesale destruction, millions of casualties, and massive looting should wind up like Mussolini, who was hung by his heels from a lamppost.

If Zelensky were smart, he’d hightail to a country without extradition. Israel might work, although they declined to shelter Meyer Lansky, who also had Law of Return rights.

At a minimum, he should be indicted for criminally bad taste, prancing around in his faux military olive-green T-shirts and cargo pants for the last three years. Although he went to a nicely laundered black long-sleeve pullover for his formal meeting, last week.

It was hilarious watching Trump treat him with the respect he deserved in the White House before kicking him out (link).

International Man: What are the broader geopolitical consequences of a Russian victory in Ukraine?

How might this impact NATO, the EU, and Europe as a whole?

Doug Casey: Despite Putin having said that he misses the old Soviet Union’s borders, the chances of Russia attempting to conquer Europe are zero. In fact, the chances are that Russia itself—which is a multicultural domestic empire—will disintegrate into lots of smaller units over the next few decades.

People don’t understand that things are very different from the days of the Roman Empire or even before WW1. Back then, it could make sense if you conquered or colonized another country.

Life was cheap; if you won, you got to steal the gold, cattle, artwork, and slaves. Things are different today. If Russia were foolish enough to try to reincorporate the old USSR—forget about the rest of Europe—it will find little “stealable” wealth exists in today’s world. They’d wind up with an extraordinarily expensive war followed by an interminable guerrilla war, resulting in the total collapse of Russia. There’s absolutely nothing to be gained, and everything to be lost.

How do such insane memes even originate? There are psychological reasons, but now isn’t the moment for us to go down that rabbit hole. Russian invasion of Europe is a red herring floated by American and NATO warmongers. Only very stupid and unknowledgeable people even consider it. But that’s not to say great dangers haven’t been set in motion.

Russia has had to triple the size of its army, and that’s expensive. If the war ends, it will have to disband most of it, creating back-to-back distortions in their economy.

Another likelihood is that NATO—which should have been abolished after the Soviet Union disintegrated in the early ’90s, but has continued to grow like a cancer, even though it no longer serves any useful purpose—will finally fall apart. This is a good thing because NATO is nothing but a provocation to Russia and China.

There will be a wave of emigres from the Ukraine, joining the millions who’ve already left. Most Ukrainians are reasonably well-educated. Who wants to stay in a poverty-stricken, war-torn country with a predatory government? Millions more will move west.

As far as rebuilding the Ukraine is concerned, the idea of a Marshall Plan is counterproductive. If foreigners want to come in and carpetbag, that’s one thing. But bankrupt US or EU governments throwing money at the place will just make things worse. It will inevitably go into the pockets of well-placed rich guys, corrupting both the giver and the receiver.

Ukraine should be totally free-marketized. Entrepreneurs will quickly move in, not to create an altruistic sham, a latter-day Potemkin village, but to make a profit. But who knows? Maybe the UN and EU will jury-rig some kind of solution, and the place will resemble a perpetual Gaza or post-war East Germany.

International Man: After pouring so much blood, treasure, and political capital into the Ukrainian quagmire, defeat will be a bitter pill for the Deep State and advocates of this war. The anti-Russia hysteria remains deeply ingrained in large segments of American and European society.

After years of being promised victory, how will these people cope with such a reality check?

Do you think the Deep State will attempt to block any US rapprochement with Russia?

Doug Casey: Russia and the Soviet Union have been the bête noire—the national enemy—of the US ever since I was a little kid. We all practiced duck and cover under our desks for fear of an obviously unprovoked attack by the evil Russkies.

Americans should realize that the enemy was never the Russian people, it was a Soviet state steeped in Marxist-Leninist dogma. And the almost equally pathological US Deep State, populated by our own group of warmongers, opportunists, and sociopaths.

For the last 30 years, there have been more communists in American universities alone than there are in all of Russia. The real danger is the socialists, fascists, communists, and Woke Europeans who have captured most European governments.

In the US, the Deep State complex (with its military, corporate, academic, financial, and entertainment tentacles) shouldn’t be underrated. It needs enemies for the war machine to make essentially useless and obsolescent junk. And for its infotainment arm to keep the hoi polloi in fear, happy to support a government claiming to “defend” them.

The real danger, as JD Vance intimated in his speech in Munich, is within.

Do I think the Deep State will attempt to block any rapprochement with Russia?

Absolutely. They don’t want the chaos to end because it would expose deep layers of crime and corruption, which are as bad throughout the US government as they are in the Ukraine itself. Ending wartime chaos would expose the US government as full of arrogant and entitled grifters.

It would be very inconvenient for them if the Ukraine war, perhaps the most effective money laundromat in all of history, disappeared. Followed by a thorough investigation to determine where the money went. Of course, they’ll want to block any rapprochement with Russia.

If the “Defense” Department and the 15 agencies in the so-called “Intelligence Community” are thoroughly investigated, however, the lives of investigators will be at serious risk. It’s risky business to break the rice bowls of these dudes.

International Man: The previous US administration froze all Russian stock and bond trading in Western financial markets.

If the war ends, these assets will presumably be unfrozen and accessible to Western investors.

What are your thoughts on Russian stocks?

Given the far-reaching consequences of Ukraine losing its war with Russia, what other investment implications do you foresee?

Doug Casey: It’ll be great when it’s possible to buy Russian stocks and bonds again.

There may be some tremendous bargains on offer at that point. Let me re-emphasize what I said earlier: Russia itself will eventually break up into a lot of smaller countries, as did the Soviet Union 30 years ago. Russia isn’t the most stable country in the world, but it’s several standard deviations better than any place in Africa, for instance.

I don’t see Russia as an investment, but rather a high-potential speculation after their markets open again. The country has no debt and could easily go to a gold-backed ruble. The secession of non-Russian possessions could be a very good thing.

Meanwhile in the West, it’s not unlikely that we’ll see a financial and economic collapse as Trump unwinds numerous distortions at the same time he cranks in new ones. The Greater Depression will likely usher the Democrats back into power, which is bad news.

Given that Kiev loses its war with Moscow, it’s pretty certain that now is the time to sell military/industrial stocks, and war stocks. If Trump succeeds in cutting back military spending, as he says, a lot of money will stop flowing to the likes of Lockheed, Raytheon, and Boeing. The “defense” business is absolutely rife with fraud, stupidity and corruption.

They’ve done extremely well over the last 30 years, but based on changes in the macroeconomic situation, I think the party’s over. Not only that, but military technology is changing radically. The type of hi-tech junk that they’re producing—e.g., F-35s, B21s, carriers, and $100,000 artillery rounds—makes about as much sense as producing battleships at the end of World War II. Cheap drones make more sense. As do $20,000 Terminators.

The nature of the whole world is reorienting in every way. Radically.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Geopolitical Shockwaves of Russia’s Victory in Ukraine appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” — George Orwell

The Deep State’s war on truth is being waged with doubletalk, delusion and propaganda.

Through deliberate manipulation of language—what George Orwell called “doublespeak”—Donald Trump has provided cover for the Deep State’s continued grip on power.

While promising to drain the swamp, his administration has instead relied on contradictory policies, misinformation, and propaganda to further entrench the very system he claims to oppose. Although the Trump administration is merely the latest frontman for the Deep State’s efforts to maintain its stranglehold on power, we are approaching a tipping point beyond which there may be no turning back to freedom as we have known it.

This is how “we the people” remain on the losing end of this devil’s bargain that is life in the American police state.

What we desperately need is a reality check, and that starts by disconnecting from the Deep State’s propaganda-riddled, manipulated alternative reality about the state of our nation.

While President Trump, well versed in the “art of the deal,” appears to be saying all the right things about peace, corruption, graft, wasteful spending, free speech, equality, bloated bureaucracy, national security, etc., his administration’s actions tell a far different story about his priorities and his loyalties, which remain self-serving, imperial, flagrantly unconstitutional and intended to keep the Deep State in power.

As always, actions speak louder than words.

When the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are still missing from the White House’s website, that oversight—or deliberate omission—speaks volumes.

Any government that can’t be bothered to include the Constitution among its priorities, or include it anywhere on its administration’s website, is not a government that can be trusted to abide by the Constitution.

Then again, trust has little to do with it.

The Constitution is a contract between the people and the government. What we have been experiencing over the course of both Republican and Democratic presidencies, is a breach of contract. Where the Trump administration differs from those that have come before it is in its willingness to go rogue in defiance of Congress, the courts and the rule of law.

You don’t wage a “common sense” revolution by discarding the Constitution. That way lies dictatorship.

Remember, how you do something is just as important as why you do it.

So, what’s really going on?

As a populace, we have become so desensitized to political lies, especially Trump’s barrage of lies, that we shrug them off and move on. But in doing so, we act as enablers for what hides beneath those lies.

Make no mistake: the Deep State—the real Deep State, not the decoy version of it that Trump trots out to justify dismantling our constitutional republic—hides behind that rhetoric.

As journalist Shawn McCreesh explains, “In order to remake the government, President Trump and his administration are remaking the language used to describe the government. An entire lexicon of progressive terminology nurtured by the last administration has been squelched. In its place is a new vocabulary, honed by the president and echoed by his many imitators in the capital. It is a vocabulary containing many curious uses of doublespeak.”

Doublespeak, as media scholar Edward S. Herman defines it, is characterized by “the ability to lie, whether knowingly or unconsciously, and to get away with it; and the ability to use lies and choose and shape facts selectively, blocking out those that don’t fit an agenda or program.”

The term is derived from George Orwell’s 1984, in which “doublethink” and “Newspeak” are used to manipulate the masses into going along with the government’s agenda.

In true Orwellian fashion, Trump has mastered the art of doublespeak.

For example, McCreesh points to “one presidential order titled ‘Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government’ [that] calls for weaponizing the federal government against itself. Another titled ‘Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling’ demands that ‘patriotic education’ be taught to children… Even as the president signed an executive order titled ‘Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,’ he signed other orders policing language.”

Consider some of Trump’s other uses of alternative facts, misdirection and misnomers to advance the Deep State’s agenda.

In true doublespeak fashion, Trump’s path to peace leads to more war. At the same time that he’s threatening to halt military aid to Ukraine in the name of securing peace with Russia, Trump’s administration is sending $4 billion in weapons and ammunition to Israel so it can continue to wage war on Gaza.

Trump’s path to nationalism by way of isolationism is in fact empire building. At the same time that Trump is declaring himself a nationalist, breaking ranks with America’s allies, withdrawing from international accords, and ceding ground to authoritarian regimes such as Russia, he is also declaring his intent to lay claim to foreign lands such as Gaza, Greenland and Canada as part of a global power grab.

Trump’s path to saving money is spending money. At the same time that Trump claims to be shining a spotlight on wasteful spending in the hopes of balancing the budget, he is also as guilty of spending—and wasting—taxpayer dollars at an alarming rate. At the same that he’s empowering Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to drastically reduce the federal workforce in a bid to save money, he is pushing tax cuts that would add $5-10 trillion to the 10-year deficit. As Reuters reports, DOGE’s savings claims are thus far “unverifiable and its calculations have been riddled with errors and corrections.”

Trump’s path to law and order is allowing the police to act lawlessly. At the same time that the Trump administration is advocating for impose harsher penalties and increased prison sentences, even for nonviolent crimes, Trump is dismantling government policies aimed at holding police accountable for official misconduct.

Trump’s path to efficiency is giving rise to even greater inefficiency. Likening DOGE to a chainsaw hacking away at a bloated bureaucracy, Musk has been wiping out whole segments of the federal workforce, agency by agency, with little thought to what programs might suffer as a result or how to keep the government functioning. As CNN reports, “There have been a lot of reports of federal workers being fired then quickly rehired once agencies realized people with critical skills had been let go…for example: Those managing the US nuclear arsenal, and those working at USDA on the response to the bird flu outbreak.”

Trump’s path to economic triumph is spelling economic disaster. Trump continues to forge ahead with his imposition of tariffs on America’s major trading partners despite warnings from economists and the business sector alike that tariffs will hurt, rather than help, the economy and could lead to a recession and a spike in inflation.

Trump’s path to draining the swamp is letting the swamp run the show. Building on the same patterns he exhibited during his first term, when Trump populated his administration with individuals engaged in a pattern of wasteful and extravagant spending on themselves at the taxpayers’ expense, Trump is once again prioritizing personal profit over the American people.

Trump’s path to free speech is censorship. At the same time that Trump claims to be liberating conservative speech from the muzzling power of political correctness, he is embarking on a massive crackdown on lawful First Amendment activities that would criminalize protest activities and punish individuals and groups advocating for policies that contradict White House executive orders.

Trump’s path to transparency is replacing watchdogs with yes-men and loyalists. At the same time that Trump claims to be bringing transparency back to government, his administration is methodically dismantling all of the systemic checks intended to protect whistleblowers and serve as bulwarks against government corruption.

Trump’s path to ending cancel culture is more cancel culture. At the same time that Trump has declared war against left-leaning, politically correct “wokeness,” he is replacing it with a right-leaning cancel culture that aims to do exactly what the left was accused of doing: renaming public spaces, erasing offensive parts of history, and silencing the opposition.

When you set aside the mountain of contradictory policies and propaganda that have become hallmarks of Trump’s time in office, a grim picture emerges: Trump’s efforts to make America great again are really just a variation on one theme, which is keeping the Deep State in power at the expense of our freedoms.

Indeed, George Orwell’s fictional 1984 could increasingly be mistaken for the Trump Administration’s instruction manual on how to remake the government in the dystopian image of Oceania, the authoritarian regime run by Big Brother.

While America’s founders envisioned a separation of powers held in check by three coequal branches of government (executive, legislative and judicial) as the means of thwarting abuse by any one branch, Orwell’s Oceania has four branches of government (the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love, and the Ministry of Plenty) that work together to maintain Big Brother’s chokehold on power.

As Orwell explains, “The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”

According to Orwell, “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

Thus, the Ministry of Peace is tasked with waging perpetual war in order to keep the government in power. The Ministry of Love is tasked with meting out torture and punishment in order to brainwash the populace into loving Big Brother. The Ministry of Plenty is tasked with maintaining a state of perpetual poverty, scarcity and financial shortages, the rationale being that an impoverished populace is easier to control. And the Ministry of Truth is tasked with disseminating propaganda and rewriting history and language in order to keep the citizens compliant.

The key to this last undertaking, maintaining a chokehold on power, is what Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels referred to as the “big lie.”

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” stated Goebbels. “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Hannah Arendt, writing in The Origins of Totalitarianism, came to the same conclusion:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true… The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

This is how that slippery slope to authoritarianism begins, with lies that masquerade as truths and a populace disinclined to think for themselves.

Which brings us back to the tactics being deployed by the Trump administration.

Conformity, compliance and group think are necessary ingredients for tyrants to succeed.

Yet as historian Anne Applebaum writes in The Atlantic, “We are not a theocracy or a monarchy that accepts the word of the leader or the priesthood as law. We are a democracy that debates facts, seeks to understand problems, and then legislates solutions, all in accordance with a set of rules.”

The answer, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, is that we must re-learn what it means to think for ourselves.

Pay attention. Question everything. Dare to be different. Don’t follow the mob. Don’t let yourself become numb to the world around you. Be compassionate. Be humane. Most of all, don’t allow yourselves to become so desensitized to Trump’s brand of politics that you tolerate behavior in government officials that you would never tolerate from your own children (lying, bullying, name-calling, greed, etc.).

When all is said and done, Trump’s path to putting America First is really about putting Trump first and leaving Americans in bondage to the Deep State.

In Orwell’s world, the state maintained power through deception.

In Trump’s America, doublespeak remains the Deep State’s most powerful weapon—one that thrives as long as the public fails to recognize it for what it is—and Trump is proving to be its most effective mouthpiece.

This originally appeared on The Rutherford Institute.

The post The Deep State’s War on Truth—Waged With Doublespeak, Delusion and Propaganda appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Donald Trump seems to believe that tariffs can help to bring manufacturing back to the States.

Trump’s tariffs have so far been aimed at four targets, the U.S. neighbors Canada and Mexico, China and, soon to come, the European Union.

During his first term Trump negotiated the U.S.M.C.A. with Mexico and Canada, a free trade zone covering the U.S. and its neighbors. He is now attempting to change the rules of it. But the way he does so is inconsistent.

On January 21 Trump promised tariffs on Canada and Mexico. On February 1 he announced them. Three days later he delayed the implementation of those tariffs. On February 27 he said the tariffs would go into effect on March 4. On March 5 he was again forced to pull back (archived):

President Trump said on Wednesday that he would pause tariffs on cars coming into the United States from Canada and Mexico for one month, after a 25 percent tariff that he placed on America’s closest trading partners a day earlier roiled stock markets and prompted stiff resistance from industry.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, read a statement from Mr. Trump on Wednesday saying that White House had spoken with the three largest auto makers, and that a one-month exemption would be given to cars coming in through United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

A one-month exemption is a joke. It takes years to move parts production from one country to another. There are hundreds of companies in Mexico, Canada and the U.S. which make the myriad parts that go into a car. It is an completely integrated industry which took years to build.

U.S. car manufacturers had trusted that U.S.M.C.A. would hold. Should the tariffs apply anytime soon they will have to increase their prices by hefty margins or halt their production.

Trump’s tariffs in north America can largely be seen as pressure method for gaining some valuable concessions from neighboring countries. They are part of a negotiation scheme and unlikely to be a longer term problem.

But Trump’s tariffs against China are a different animal. The Trump administration views China as a strategic enemy and would like to seriously hurt it. But China is able to hit back (archived):

Minutes after President Trump’s latest tariffs took effect, the Chinese government said on Tuesday that it was imposing its own broad tariffs on food imported from the United States and would essentially halt sales to 15 American companies.

China’s Ministry of Finance put tariffs of 15 percent on imports of American chicken, wheat, corn and cotton and 10 percent tariffs on other foods, ranging from soybeans to dairy products. In addition, the Ministry of Commerce said 15 U.S. companies would no longer be allowed to buy products from China except with special permission, including Skydio, which is the largest American maker of drones and a supplier to the U.S. military and emergency services.

Lou Qinjian, a spokesman for China’s National People’s Congress, chastised the United States for violating the World Trade Organization’s free trade rules. “By imposing unilateral tariffs, the U.S. has violated W.T.O. rules and disrupted the security and stability of the global industrial and supply chains,” he said.

Trump claims that tariffs on China are necessary to stop the illegal import of Fentanyl, an addictive synthetic opioid widely used in the U.S.

China counters that it already has put strong controls on Fentanyl and its precursor chemicals. It can not be blamed for a problem that solely exists within the United States:

The reason why the fentanyl issue in the US is so serious has never been external; it has nothing to do with China, which strictly prohibits drugs. Illicit fentanyl started to enter the US market as early as the 1980s. Later, media revealed that US pharmaceutical companies concealed the addictive properties of synthetic opioids and that doctors overprescribed painkillers, leading to widespread addiction among patients. Statistics show that with 5 percent of the world’s population, the US consumes 80 percent of the world’s opioids, but still has not permanently scheduled fentanyl-related substances as a class. The almost abnormal demand has boosted the development of the illegal fentanyl market, fundamentally contributing to the proliferation of fentanyl in the US.

The Global Times points to the social causes of drug addiction:

[T]he lack of social governance in the US has exacerbated the drug problem. US Vice President JD Vance described a similar situation in his autobiography. Many low-income families live in chaotic community environments with a lack of education and supervision. This has led to many children living in adverse conditions of drug abuse and trafficking, forming a vicious cycle that is difficult to break.

China’s government spokesperson is promising to fight back:

Intimidation does not scare us. Bullying does not work on us. Pressuring, coercion or threats are not the right way of dealing with China. Anyone using maximum pressure on China is picking the wrong guy and miscalculating. If the U.S. truly wants to solve the fentanyl issue, then the right thing to do is to consult with China by treating each other as equals.

If war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end.

Such language from China is far from the usual one. It therefore seems unlikely that there will soon be a compromise between the U.S. and China.

With respect to Europe the U.S. claims that it is importing more goods from Europe than it can export to it. That is true but does not cover the full width of economical relations. The U.S. is exporting way more services (think software) to Europe than Europe is exporting to the U.S. The total of goods and services exchanges is a wash. If the U.S. insist on putting tariffs on European goods the EU can counter adding a toll to all U.S. services. The results would be, in theory, a tie.

Tariffs however are dangerous. They distort markets and add significant costs to all participants. Their pain will be mostly felt by U.S. consumers:

All the planned tariffs would take the US tariff rate to above 20% in just a few weeks, the highest since pre-WWI. As Joseph Politano points out, the costs of these actions are enormous, covering $1.3trn in US imports or roughly 42% of all goods brought into the United States, or the single-largest tariff hike since the infamous Smoot-Hawley Act of nearly a century ago.
…
The total costs of these tariffs would raise $160bn from US consumers and businesses paying more for their purchases of imported goods, with more to come. Trump’s Tuesday measures are only 40% of his proposed measures. If the next batch is implemented, it would raise the cost of imports to over $600bn, or 1.6% of GDP.
…
So worried is the International Chamber of Commerce in the US, that it reckoned that the world economy could face a crash similar to the Great Depression of the 1930s unless Trump rows back on his plans. “Our deep concern is that this could be the start of a downward spiral that puts us in 1930s trade-war territory,” said Andrew Wilson, deputy secretary-general of the ICC. So Trump’s measures may go well beyond “a little disturbance”.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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I’m all in favor of a thorough and public audit of the US’s gold reserves. This includes the gold, not only at Fort Knox, but also at the other gold storage facilities at West Point, Denver, and the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Ron Paul was right when, in 2011, he tried to force the federal government to be transparent about its gold holdings.

Virtually everything the US government owns is stolen, whether it’s stolen from Americans or from foreign individuals and institutions. This is certainly true of the federal government’s gold hoard. It’s important to know how much gold the US government owns for the same reason it’s important to know how much of any asset—land, buildings, or cash—the government owns. States can easily convert wealth into power, and it’s good to know how much wealth the regime directly controls. That is, it is important to have a full and accurate account of just how much the US government has stolen. Moreover, we don’t know if the US Treasury or the Federal Reserve is using that gold for secret political transactions it isn’t telling us about.  We already know the Fed makes secret loans it obstinately refuses to make public. An audit is very much in order.

All that said, however, let’s not overstate the importance of the US gold reserve. The gold reserve is not a source of untapped wealth that can be used to balance the budget, pay off the federal debt, or fix the US’s current downward spiral into fiscal insolvency. At only $750 billion, the value of the gold reserve is much too small for any such thing.

Moreover, the gold reserve does not provide “backing” for the US dollar, for US Treasurys, or for any other asset one might possess. The value of the US dollar is determined by supply and demand as it floats freely against other unbacked currencies. The gold in the vaults is of little importance in this respect.

Strangely, however, as the calls for a gold audit have heated up within the Trump administration, one encounters an increasing number of columns and comments inflating the importance of the gold reserve. Not surprisingly, much of this commentary comes from organizations that promote gold as an investment asset, or gold mining as an industry.

In an article at mining.com, for example, the author claims that if the gold hoard proves to be smaller than the official number published by the Treasury Department, the effects could be “profound, triggering market instability, devaluing the US dollar, and causing gold prices to skyrocket.”

It’s hard to see how this would happen in real life. Let’s say that 25 percent of the gold reserve has been stolen. That would mean the value of the gold in the reserves is about $567 billion instead of $757 billion. The US economy totals $30 trillion. If the federal gold hoard dropped 25 percent, the US gold reserve would drop from being the size of 2.5 percent of the US economy to 1.9 percent. Even though the gold isn’t collateral for anything—unless there are secret deals we don’t know about—we’re supposed to believe this would “trigger market instability” and devalue the US dollar? I’m skeptical.

Many other gold-industry-oriented publications make similar claims about the size of the US gold reserves being critical to trust and confidence in the US dollar.

There is good reason to doubt these claims, however. Again: the value of the dollar is not backed by gold or any other government asset. Moreover, it’s important to reject money-crank theories such as those which tell us that fiat currencies are claims, of some sort, on a central bank’s assets. The currencies are not claims on anything, and they’re not backed by anything.

The presence of gold in the US vaults is inconsequential compared to the truly key factors that drive demand for the dollar. The fact US taxes must be paid in dollars is not unimportant, but the dollar is primarily in high demand because the dollar zone is huge, and foreign buyers of US goods need a lot of dollars to buy US goods and services. The Eurodollar economy—which includes the so-called “petrodollar”—extends this demand even further. Moreover, dollars are in high demand because US Treasurys are in high demand. Why are Treasurys in high demand? Because it is known that the US government possesses the power to extract vast amounts of wealth from the taxpayers which makes the default risk of Treasurys very low. Thus, Treasurys are a famously safe asset and have become a key component of the global economy. Buying and selling a lot of Treasurys requires a lot of dollars. Another key component driving the demand for dollars is the fact that foreign central banks continue to devalue their own currencies even faster than the US central bank is devaluing the dollar. When it comes to retaining its value, the US dollar is the “least bad” option among fiat currencies.

Indeed, we even have empirical studies showing there is little convincing evidence that the size of a country’s gold reserves have much to do with that country’s interest rates. In a 2013 study from Dirk Baur and Isaac Miyakawa, the authors look at multiple countries and central banks to examine the effects of gold reserves on “trust” in the form of bond yields and exchange-rate volatility. The results are inconclusive. This is no surprise. It is not at all clear why the size of a gold reserve would dictate any of this in a system characterized by fiat money and which is dominated by strong state institutions, and multiple tax-revenue streams.

If one is concerned about preserving “confidence” in the American state, its institutions, and its money, one would do better to worry about mounting federal deficits, which require flooding the market with ever larger amounts of Treasuries. This puts upward pressure on interest rates and fuels monetary inflation as the US central bank buys up more Treasurys with newly printed money to keep interest rates under control. The fact that the US will add three trillion dollars to its public debt this year—and probably a similar amount next year—poses a far greater risk to dollar values and Treasurys than whether or not someone has been walking off with gold bars from Fort Knox.

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

The post The Gold In Fort Knox Does Not Back the Dollar or Anything Else appeared first on LewRockwell.

The recent measles “outbreak” is being presented incorrectly in certain segments of legacy media. We are hearing that the outbreak is so tragic because, as they cry repeatedly, “measles is vaccine preventable.”

Exhibit A to this narrative: a child has died as a result of measles. And yet that claim is not fully verified, as Dr. Brian Hooker, in a fact sheet published earlier this week in Children’s Health Defense, points out here.

What is certain is the death of a child is always tragic. We pray for the family and hope that the child’s death is fully investigated and that the facts, whatever they may be, are presented to the public.

While many of the measles cases are occurring in what we are told were unvaccinated children, there are also reports that some of the cases involve people who have been vaccinated. In fact, there will also be some people who develop measles following vaccination, which this article, “Can You Get Measles If You Are Vaccinated?” – grudgingly concedes.

We live in a world where we encounter contagious viruses and bacteria all the time. When we’re in good health, we can beat back infectious “pests” even if we get sick for a while. Disease takes hold and seriously threatens the population when there is underlying poor health. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has often pointed out that Covid hit the United States so hard because of our underlying chronic illness burden. In parts of the world where overall health is better, populations were less affected by Covid.

Are there historical examples where disease outbreaks occurred when human populations were globally unwell?

Absolutely.

Historians argue that life in Constantinople, in 536 AD, under the Byzantine Emperor, Justinian I, was the beginning of some of the worst years in history. It was the first recorded global pandemic. Moreover, there were two massive volcanic explosions that occurred outside of Europe which blocked sunlight. Temperatures in Europe and the Mediterranean basin were suddenly 30 degrees colder than average because a thick fog covered the land. Crops failed. Starvation followed.

In the overcrowded streets of Constantinople, the malnourished came into contact with a bacteria named yersinia pestis. The result was Bubonic Plague and what became known as the Great Plague of Justinian.

The plague was so awful that mass graves overflowed. Dead bodies lay in the streets. Boats full of the dead were set on fire and sent out to sea.

It is estimated that anywhere from 25 million to 100 million people died.

Our seasonal measles outbreak pales in comparison to the Plague of Justinian.

But if one listens to the cast of characters that legacy media parades on air, one walks away with the belief that bodies are piling up in the streets of Texas.

On NBC affiliate KPRC Click 2, in Houston, Dr. Peter Hotez, explains the measles outbreak in West Texas, with predictable hyperbole. Hotez, who never strikes me as the picture of perfect health himself, points out that the annual rodeo in Houston could be impacted by “people who are shedding the measles virus.” You’re only safe, Hotez tells us, if you are vaccinated.

Hotez is an advocate of gain-of-function research and in 2024 called the Congressional investigation into the origins of COVID’s origins “absolutely atrocious.”

“Parading prominent virologists in front of C-SPAN cameras to humiliate them is going to have long-term detrimental effects on science, bio-preparedness and virology,” Hotez said at the time.

Similarly, ABC rolled out Dr. Paul Offit, a doctor who has served on the CDC board. Offit criticized HHS Secretary Kennedy, claiming his advice on the measles outbreak is ‘internally contradictory’ because Kennedy said that good nutrition is critical; supplementing with vitamin A is beneficial; and that people can choose to get the measles vaccine but shouldn’t be required to get it.

ABC failed to mention that Dr. Offit has long served on the Advisory Commission on Immunization Practices, and has a significant history of conflicts of interest. For details on that history, look no further than Mark Blaxill’s and Dan Olmsted’s Age of Autism, in which the authors write about Offit’s $29 million windfall from a vaccine he invented while advocating for Big Pharma’s products.

Offit and Hotez are standard bearers of the old public health belief system: for them, the only answer to the threat of disease is vaccine mandates. In their minds, those two words must be connected – ‘vaccine’ and ‘mandatory.’ They hardly mention good nutrition or the need to remove toxins from our environment. And they seem to have amnesia about that thing called ‘Covid.’

These are the same old voices and tropes that the legacy media rolls out with fearful pronouncements, in between commercial breaks loaded with Big Pharma advertising. They, and their handlers, conveniently divert the public’s attention away from the chronic disease epidemics of diabetes, cancer, autism, obesity, neurological disorders, asthma, and more.

In the weeks since the media bought into measles mania, how many children have been diagnosed with autism? How many people have learned that they have ‘turbo cancers’? How many young people died suddenly from Covid vaccine-induced heart problems they did not know they had? How many people have searched for doctors to help them with vaccine injuries, only to have doors slammed in their faces?

The legacy media is asleep at the wheel. Where have they been on these vital health issues, as America gets sicker and sicker?

What if we were presented with better health choices? How would Americans feel about being part of a healthy population, with clean diets and robust immune systems built and sustained to beat back disease?

We have health choices the Byzantines never imagined. We do not have to live in fear of the great plague.

This originally appeared on The Kennedy Beacon.

The post Measles Mania: What the Legacy Media Won’t Tell You appeared first on LewRockwell.

About 25 years ago I got to be pals with a retired CIA analyst named John Mapother who was stationed in Germany and then in Austria between 1947 and 1955. I met him a few times for dinner in Washington D.C. (he lived in Maryland) and we had many long and fascinating conversations about U.S. foreign policy.

As he explained it, the people who drive U.S. foreign policy have a very hard time putting themselves in the shoes of America’s adversaries. In the case of post Cold War Russia, the prevailing mentality seemed to be that Russia was so thoroughly defeated that it was no longer in a position to make claims of having its own national and security interests. If the proud Russians were unwilling to accept their vassalage to the United States and NATO, well, that was just tough s..t for the Russians.

Since Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999, the American inability to see things as Russians sees them has hardened into the presumption that the Russians simply have no standing to make any national security claims, even on its Ukrainian border a few hundred miles from Moscow.

This mentality completely ignores one of the central tenets of foreign relations, which is frequently called the Balance of Power doctrine. Underlying this doctrine is the recognition that—regardless of how benevolent and altruistic people declare themselves to be—when it comes to a dispute over material and strategic interests, the more powerful party can be relied upon to press any advantage he has gained.

To understand this basic reality of all human affairs, consider how few agreements involving substantial interests are consummated on the basis of a handshake instead of legal documents drafted by attorneys. Even partnerships that begin on the friendliest of terms may go sour, resulting in one partner trying to press an advantage against the other. This essential flaw of human nature has been greatly amplified in our Era of Virtue Signaling, in which the most extravagant expressions of virtue are made by the most ruthless people.

In 1823, President James Monroe declared that the United States would not tolerate any European military alliance anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. As he put it in his seventh annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823, the European powers were obligated to respect the Western Hemisphere as the United States’ sphere of interest.

Sphere of interest is a privilege that the U.S. government claims for itself as a given. However, when some other power such as Russia declares a sphere of interest in its own front yard, a few hundred miles from Moscow, the U.S. foreign policy establishment acts perfectly outraged. How dare Vladimir Putin declare a sphere of influence!

How would these same people react if Russia announced a military alliance with Cuba that involved placing sophisticated Russian weaponry and a large signals intelligence infrastructure in Cuba?

President Donald Trump is apparently the first president since 1990 to understand the folly of this mentality and to recognize that Russia is a legitimate nation with legitimate national security interests. Trump appears to understand that the Russian psyche was badly scarred by Napoleon’s invasion in 1812 and especially by Hitler’s in 1941.

For personal reasons, he understands that the Russians could not trust the Biden administration. For equally personal reasons, he understands the folly of blindly trusting the Ukrainian regime. Consider that Zelensky, who is no longer an elected leader of Ukraine, campaigned for Joe Biden.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a British film producer who asked me why the subject of my first book—an Austrian writer and serial killer named Jack Unterweger—was, for a time, the darling of Austria’s leftwing literati before he was exposed as a serial killer.

I pointed out to the producer that the less people know about a person or a situation, the more room they have to project their own fantasies and notions onto the person or situation. Austria’s literati feted Jack Unterweger without knowing a single thing about him or his criminal past. He was a perfect projection screen for their own silly fantasies.

It’s a conspicuous fact about Russia and Ukraine that Americans know absolutely nothing about either country. Although I lived in Austria for fifteen years and speak German, I still don’t presume to understand fully Austrian politics. The only thing Americans know about Russia and Ukraine is what they are presented with in the media, which lies all the time about everything.

Now the Europeans are butt-hurt because President Trump is tired of the killing, destruction, and sending money and weapons into the black hole of Kiev and wants to end it.

The European heads of state remind me of the jilted wife of a rich man who would rather spend millions on attorneys fees in a drawn out divorce instead of obtaining a decent settlement and moving on with her life. While nursing anger and resentment and blowing money on lawyers may satisfy a desire for revenge, it doesn’t achieve anything constructive.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post Foreign Relations & Acrimonious Divorce appeared first on LewRockwell.

Mike Lewis, founder of the website Where Peter Is, has taken a swipe at exorcist Fr. Chad Ripperger. But “taking a swipe” is actually too soft a term when one considers that Mike Lewis didn’t merely challenge certain things Fr. Ripperger has said or written. Throughout his 4,000-word screed, Lewis accuses Fr. Ripperger of making “bizarre” statements that “dissent from the teachings of the Catholic Church.” He even accuses Fr. Ripperger of making statements that are “contrary to Catholic Tradition, doctrine, and theology.” What he offers up as evidence are cherry-picked quotations from various speeches—often leaving off pertinent context—never once supplying any direct evidence to substantiate his very serious charges.

Lewis peppers his article with derogatory accusations, calling Fr. Ripperger things like “a fringe traditionalist figure.” But while such ad hominems are not libelous in themselves, statements like “Fr. Ripperger has a long history of controversial statements and claims, including but not limited to dissent from the teachings of the Catholic Church” could be. It’s one thing to challenge the things someone says, and it is quite another to directly accuse them of what is tantamount to heresy.

Under the heading “A History of Bizarre Statements,” Lewis claims something that is completely untrue, stating it as if it were the truth. He made no attempt to contact Fr. Ripperger to obtain a clarification or to ascertain the truthfulness of his claims—he simply asserted his interpretation of the facts as fact. Lewis wrote:

Following the 2020 election, Marissa Nichols wrote about how members of her Catholic homeschool community were circulating a “Prayer of Command” composed by Fr. Ripperger, who urged that Catholics recite it, asking “Jesus Christ to break any curses, hexes, or spells and send them back to where they came from” in order to “Stop the Steal.” (emphasis added)

I reached out to Fr. Ripperger to ask if he urged Catholics to recite the “Prayer of Command” he composed and if he encouraged the use of the prayer to “stop the steal.” This is what Fr. Ripperger wrote in return:

I wrote a prayer by that title as it is in my Deliverance prayers but they modified it and I never said to say it to stop the steal. I never sent out that “memo.” It was a case of telephone: one person said to pray this prayer from Fr. Ripperger and then it morphed into me saying to say the prayer/Other people were saying that. I wrote a separate prayer (attached) which just tells people to say a prayer for the integrity of the election.

In essence, Mike Lewis took an email written by someone else and attributed its contents and its intentions to Fr. Ripperger. Had he reached out to Fr. Ripperger to confirm the situation prior to publishing, he likely would have received the same response. But instead, Lewis rushed to publish without verifying his claims; and immediately after stating this blatant falsehood, Lewis all but accused Fr. Ripperger of heresy: “Fr. Ripperger has made other statements that are not only contrary to Catholic tradition, doctrine, and theology, but which threaten spiritual and physical harm to the vulnerable people who look to him as a religious authority” (emphasis added).

The Church defines heresy as: “the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith.” Such matters which must be believed include Church doctrines, so for Lewis to claim that Fr. Ripperger is making statements contrary to doctrine, he is accusing him of spreading heretical ideas. Subsequent to this, Lewis never points out any specific doctrine, tradition, or theological teaching which he believes Fr. Ripperger to have contradicted—he merely relies upon inference and suggestion to substantiate this claim.

In the next section, “‘Making Stuff Up’ About Demons?” Lewis refers to a video clip of Fr. Ripperger talking about the hierarchical structure of Hell. Here, Lewis quoted a criticism from Fr. Matthew Schneider, who asserted that Fr. Ripperger is “making stuff up from nowhere” about the hierarchy of Hell:

According to one of these priest-theologians, Fr. Matthew Schneider, LC, Fr. Ripperger’s teachings on demon hierarchy appear to deviate from traditional views, which often either depict demons as chaotic without a clear hierarchy or align them with the seven deadly sins. He wrote of Fr. Ripperger’s claims in this video, “As far as I can tell, he’s making stuff up from nowhere.”

From here, Lewis quoted extensively from Fr. Ripperger’s talk, wherein he explained the authority of demons over others. If anyone is deviating from the traditional views of the hierarchy, it is Fr. Schneider (as well as Lewis, hiding behind Fr. Schneider’s comments). St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in the first part of the Summa Theologica an answer to question 109, “The Ordering of the Bad Angels:”

On 1 Corinthians 15:24 the gloss says: “While the world lasts, angels will preside over angels, men over men, and demons over demons.”

I answer that, Since action follows the nature of a thing, where natures are subordinate, actions also must be subordinate to each other. Thus it is in corporeal things, for as the inferior bodies by natural order are below the heavenly bodies, their actions and movements are subject to the actions and movements of the heavenly bodies. Now it is plain from what we have said (Article 1), that the demons are by natural order subject to others; and hence their actions are subject to the action of those above them, and this is what we mean by precedence—that the action of the subject should be under the action of the prelate. So the very natural disposition of the demons requires that there should be authority among them. This agrees too with Divine wisdom, which leaves nothing inordinate, which “reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly” (Wisdom 8:1).

Had Lewis simply turned to Aquinas on the matter, he would have understood that what Fr. Ripperger said is indeed a part of the Church’s theological tradition and teaching. Rather, this is supposed to stand as one of Lewis’ examples of Fr. Ripperger contradicting “Catholic tradition, doctrine, and theology.” This is now the second time Lewis failed to do even a baseline level of research.

Read the Whole Article

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Trump blames other countries like Canada, Mexico, and China for the drug problem in the U.S. and thinks the solution is to raise taxes on Americans by raising tariffs. The terrible truth, as recently stated by Jacob Hornberger, is simply this: “American consumers want drugs and are willing to pay for them. To meet that enormous demand, other people sell them the drugs they want to buy.”

The post Trump Just Doesn’t Get It on Drugs appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Maureen.

The post Gregorian Chants Honor and Praise God – Rite of Prayer God in the Monastery appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Gateway Pundit

 

The post Rep. Thomas Massie, Sen. Mike Lee Introduce Bills to Audit and Abolish Federal Reserve appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post The Deep State Strikes Back! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Trump Is Lying About the Panama Canal

-China never owned or controlled the Panama Canal, a Hong Kong firm owned and operated the Balboa and Cristobal ports via Panama Ports Company.

-The US is not “reclaiming” anything, BlackRock is buying an 80% stake in the ports; the Hong Kong firm will make a 5 billion dollar profit from the sale and US citizens will not benefit at all.

-The Panama Canal will continue to be operated by the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), an autonomous Panamanian government agency.

Based on the information provided in the X posts, the associated trends, and the related web results, your analysis is largely accurate and aligns with the statements made by Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino and the broader context. Let’s break it down step by step to clarify Trump’s claim, China’s involvement, BlackRock’s role, and the U.S.’s position:

1. Trump’s Claim: “We’re Reclaiming the Panama Canal”

In his address to Congress on March 4, 2025 (as quoted in Thread 1, Post 1897135115785945233 by

@MarioNawfal

), President Donald Trump stated, “My administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal… The Panama Canal was built by Americans, for Americans—not for others.”

He also mentioned in earlier statements (e.g., January 2025, as noted in web result 3, The Washington Post) that “China is operating the Panama Canal… we’re taking it back, or something very powerful is going to happen.”

Panama’s President Mulino, in the target post (Thread 0, Post 1897277981648969826 by

@MarioNawfal

), directly refuted this, stating, “Once again, President Trump is lying. The Panama Canal is not in the process of being restored, and this is certainly not the task that was even discussed… The Canal is Panamanian and will continue to be Panamanian!”

Conclusion: Trump’s claim that the U.S. is “reclaiming” the Panama Canal is factually incorrect in the context of current events. The Panama Canal has been under Panamanian sovereignty since the Torrijos-Carter Treaties of 1977, with full control transferred to Panama in 1999. The U.S. is not “taking back” the canal, nor is there any legal or operational basis for such a claim in this instance.

2. China’s Involvement: Did China Own or Control the Panama Canal?

Trump’s assertion that “China is operating the Panama Canal” is also misleading. The Panama Canal itself is managed and operated by the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), an autonomous Panamanian government agency (as stated in web results 2, 3, and 7, Reuters and The Washington Post).

However, China (or Chinese entities) has been involved indirectly through commercial operations near the canal. Specifically:

CK Hutchison, a Hong Kong-based company (publicly listed but subject to some Chinese oversight, as noted in web result 2, Reuters), owned and operated the Balboa and Cristobal ports via Panama Ports Company until the recent sale.

Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region of China, and U.S. officials, including Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have expressed concerns about Chinese influence or potential security risks due to CK Hutchison’s presence (web results 2, 3, and 7).

China has not owned or controlled the canal itself, but U.S. policymakers have worried that Chinese-operated ports could pose a strategic or intelligence risk, especially in the event of a conflict (web result 3, The Washington Post).

Conclusion: China never owned or controlled the Panama Canal. The canal remains under Panamanian sovereignty. CK Hutchison’s operation of the ports near the canal was a commercial activity, not a direct control of the canal, and its connection to China is indirect (via Hong Kong’s status). Trump’s framing exaggerates China’s role, which Panama and experts (e.g., web result 3) have clarified as a misrepresentation.

3. BlackRock’s Role: Buying from CK Hutchison, Not the U.S. Taking Over

BlackRock, a U.S.-based investment firm, led a consortium (including Global Infrastructure Partners and Terminal Investment) to acquire an 80% stake in Hutchison Ports, including the Balboa and Cristobal ports, from CK Hutchison for $22.8 billion (web results 1, 2, and 3, WSJ, Reuters, and The Washington Post).

This transaction shifts control of the ports from a Hong Kong-based company to U.S.-led investors, aligning with Trump’s expressed concerns about Chinese influence (trend post by

@CollinRugg

, trend 1).

However, this deal does not involve the U.S. government “taking back” the canal or its operations. It is a private-sector investment by BlackRock and its partners, not a governmental or national reclamation (as emphasized by Mulino in the target post and web result 3).

Conclusion: BlackRock is purchasing the ports from CK Hutchison, not the U.S. government taking back the Panama Canal. The U.S. is not directly profiting from this transaction, as it is a private business deal, not a governmental acquisition or nationalization.

4. U.S. Profit and Involvement

The U.S. government is not profiting from BlackRock’s acquisition, as the deal is a private transaction between BlackRock’s consortium and CK Hutchison.

Trump’s statements may reflect a broader policy goal of countering perceived Chinese influence in strategic regions like the Panama Canal, but there is no evidence in the provided data that the U.S. is taking ownership, control, or financial gain from the canal itself (web result 3, The Washington Post, and Mulino’s statement in the target post).

Some U.S. officials, like Secretary Rubio, have pressured Panama to address Chinese presence (web result 7, Reuters), but this is diplomatic pressure, not an action to reclaim the canal.

Conclusion: The U.S. is not profiting from or taking control of the Panama Canal. BlackRock’s purchase is a private investment, and any U.S. involvement is limited to diplomatic or strategic concerns, not direct ownership or profit.

Overall Assessment: Is Trump Lying?

Yes, in the literal sense: Trump’s claim that the U.S. is “reclaiming the Panama Canal” from China is factually inaccurate. The canal is and remains under Panamanian sovereignty, and China does not own or operate it. CK Hutchison’s port operations were a commercial activity, not canal control, and BlackRock’s acquisition is a private deal, not a U.S. governmental action.

Contextual Nuance: Trump’s statements may reflect political rhetoric or strategic concerns about Chinese influence in the region (via Hong Kong firms or potential security risks at the ports). However, these concerns do not align with the reality of Panama’s sovereignty or the nature of BlackRock’s transaction.

Final Summary:

Trump is incorrect when he says the U.S. is “taking back the Panama Canal” from China. China never owned or controlled the canal; it was Panamanian, and CK Hutchison’s port operations were a separate commercial entity based in Hong Kong.

BlackRock’s $22.8 billion purchase from CK Hutchison shifts port control to U.S.-led investors, but this is not the U.S. government taking over or profiting—it’s a private transaction.

Panama’s President Mulino’s rebuttal is accurate: the canal is Panamanian, and Trump’s claims misrepresent the situation.

Viewpoint: The Panama Canal Caper, by Murray N. Rothbard

Ronald Reagan has been making a great deal of hay in the primaries with a demagogic and jingoistic campaign on behalf of maintaining the alleged sovereignty of the United States over the Panama Canal and the Canal Zone. The Ford Administration reply that the treaty with Panama retained ultimate sovereignty in the hands of Panama is correct but only scratches the surface of the problem. One neglected point is that the Canal Zone is an egregious example of socialism in action, since the U.S. government owns not only the Canal but the entire Zone territory, and every Zonian resident is a U.S. government employee. How can an alleged opponent of Big Government devote so much energy to a persistent defense of an enclave of U.S. socialism?

A second neglected point—neglected by Americans, of course, not the Panamanians—is how the United States came to exercise total occupation and control of a slice of Latin America that is clearly not part of the United States. The answer is a naked imperialist power grab, in which our first openly imperialist President, Theodore Roosevelt, engineered a phony “revolution” in northern Colombia, a coup directed by officials of the American-built Panama Railroad Co., and then quickly defended by U.S. troops against attempts of the Colombians to land troops to put down the coup.

The U.S.-organized coup was justified by Roosevelt as a protection of American tax-payers against the desire of the Colombian government to “hold up” the United States for an extra $10 million for the right to build a canal across the isthmus of Panama in northern Colombia. The actual facts, however, were very different. The United States had agreed to pay $40 million to the virtually bankrupt French-owned Panama Canal Co., for the right to build a canal, and what the Colombian government wanted was not an extra $10 million from the U.S., but $10 million to come out of the agreed-upon $40 million. In other words, President Roosevelt organized the power-grab, engineered a coup in Colombia, and quickly recognized the “rebels,” not to save American taxpayers any money, but to save $10 million for the French Panama Canal Co.

Why was the U.S. government so tender to a bankrupt French canal company? The answer is that the company’s stock had all been quietly purchased in advance by a syndicate of powerful Wall Street financiers, close to Roosevelt, including J.P. Morgan and Co., George W. Perkins, Morgan partner, Herbert Saterlee (a Morgan son-in-law), H.H. Rogers and James Stillman, close to the Rockefellers, Paul M. Warburg and Jacob H. Schiff of Kuhn-Loeb, Nelson P. Cromwell, a founder of the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, and Douglas Robinson, brother-in-law of Teddy Roosevelt. The syndicate purchased the shares at two-thirds of par, and, after the coup, were able to sell their shares to the U.S. government, now in charge of the prospective canal, for 130 percent of par, thus doubling their investment.

After purchasing the shares, the syndicate hired William Nelson Cromwell, of the Cromwell family, for $830,000 to lobby for an American takeover of the canal. It was Cromwell who literally sat in an office of the White House and who wrote the orders for Roosevelt by which the President engineered the imperialist grab of the isthmus of Panama. Later, after the coup was accomplished, Cromwell, as fiscal agent. of the syndicate, invested $6 million of their ill-gotten gains in New York City real estate mortgages through the real-estate firm of Roosevelt’s brother-in-law, Douglas Robinson.

When these ugly facts were brought to light several years later by the New York World and the Indianapolis News, President Roosevelt attempted to bring indictments against these newspapers for “criminal libel” against himself. Fortunately, in a notable victory for freedom of the press against attempted suppression, the Supreme Court quashed the indictments. (The full story of the Panama Canal caper can be found in a book by one of the New York World journalists, the highly conservative Earl Harding, in The Untold Story of Panama, New York: Athene Press, 1959.)

Thus, the Panama Canal case demonstrates, with shining clarity, how behind the typical nationalist demagogy and vainglory of every imperialist power grab, there lurks the use of the State apparatus to gain special privileges and subsidies for powerful financial interests.

The Treaty That Wall Street Wrote. By Murray N. Rothbard

This article originally appeared on Dec. 5, 1977, in Inquiry, vol. 1, no. 2: pp. 9–14. It has been reprinted in Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy (Center for Libertarian Studies, 1995).

The Panama Canal question has already established itself as the hottest political issue for the coming year. Ronald Reagan, who almost rode to the Republican nomination last year on a promise to keep the canal, is back again, leading the powerful forces opposing the new Carter treaties with the government of Panama. Alert to the polls that show that Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to giving up the canal, the Republican National Committee and most Republicans across the country have gleefully seized upon this issue, thus going flatly against the counsel of former President Ford, who vigorously supports the treaty.

In the liberal and “moderate” press, the contending forces are lined up in an all-too-familiar morality play. Opposed to the treaty are reactionaries and jingoists, emotionally and irrationally devoted to the mystique of American “sovereignty” in a foreign land; in its favor are sensible and moderate internationalists, people who believe in friendly cooperation between the United States and Third-World nations and who wish to jettison the last remnants of a nave and outdated American imperialism left over from the innocent if clumsy swaggering of Theodore Roosevelt. What could be a more clear-cut moral lineup: for the treaty, all the good guys, from Carter to Ford to the New York Times and the Washington Post; against, all the certified Bad Guys from Reagan to the American Conservative Union to the John Birch Society?

But you can’t always tell all about the game from a list of the players – and there is more to be said than the standard account in the Establishment media. The Reaganite bluster about sovereignty can easily be dismissed; there are, however, more important questions about the new Panama treaty: Does it really abandon US imperial domination of the canal and the Canal Zone? Does the treaty really turn this area of Panama back to the Panamanians? If we consider the treaty in the light of these questions rather than in relation to jingoist notions, we will come up with a very different view of the big political issue of the year.

Particularly revealing are the statements of high American officials and other advocates in assuring the American public of the fallacy of right-wing fears about the treaty. Thus, Henry Kissinger announced his “strong view” that the treaty “is in the national interest of the United States.” Kissinger went on to explain that “the new treaty marks an improvement over the present situation in that it assures continuing, efficient, nondiscriminatory, and secure access to the Panama Canal with the support of the countries of the Western Hemisphere instead of against their opposition and eventually their harassment.”[1] In short, it is better to stay in more subtly and induce Panama and the rest of the world to support our dominion than to stay in nakedly and face the hostility of the Panamanians and most other nations.

In his public statement announcing the agreement on the basic elements of the Panama treaty, President Carter stressed that he and the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed that the pact will be “important to our long-term national interests.” Specifically, the United States will formally continue in charge of the canal until the year 2000: “We will have operating control and the right to protect and defend the Panama Canal with our military forces until the end of the century.” But even after that “we will have the right to assure the maintenance of the permanent neutrality of the canal as we may determine necessary. Our warships are guaranteed the permanent right to expeditious passage without regard to propulsion or cargo.”[2]

Or, as the Carter administration’s summary of the Panama agreement put it, “The U.S. will have the permanent right to defend the neutrality of the canal from any threat, for an indefinite period.” President Carter himself has stated flatly, “If it is attacked by any means, I will defend it.” He has assured the public that “if we ever have to go into Panama, there will be no legal question under these treaties.”[3] In short, there are no limits in this treaty on the actions that the United States will be able to take, even after the year 2000, to preserve what it deems to be the “neutrality” of the canal.[4]

Thus, in exchange for the mystique of sovereignty and formal national ownership, the United States has acquired the agreement of the Panamanian government in its perpetual ultimate control of the canal. Or, as Ellsworth Bunker, one of the two American negotiators of the treaty – the other was Sol Linowitz – admonished the critics, “It is not ownership but use that is important.” He could have added the fact that the ability to use and control property is precisely the function of ownership.[5]

When the new treaty was announced, Bunker and Linowitz spelled out one of its major advantages to US dominion. As the August 13 New York Times phrased it, Bunker and Linowitz “said they thought that continued operation of the canal was threatened more by possible Panamanian sabotage or disorders that might follow a failure to carry out the agreement than by external threats that they asserted the United States would be free to curb.”

But particularly fascinating is the argument on behalf of the Panama treaty by the most sophisticated of American conservative organs, National Review. National Review begins its editorial by assuaging the hurt to the “national pride” of conservatives, and assuring their conservative followers that it understands their “soul-searing” pain. Then, NR proceeds to instruct its constituency in the realities of today’s world. “Conservatives are realists, and here is a test of realism.” Specifically, and echoing Kissinger, Linowitz, and Bunker, NR points out that “our own military men support the treaty on the ground that the canal can be better defended with the treaty than without it.” First of all, under the new treaty Panama agrees that the United States may continue to use its air and sea forces to defend the Panama Canal against an external attack. NR then turns to the “most realistic kind” of military threat to US rule over the canal, namely “guerrilla warfare, and defense against that is very difficult under any circumstances.” And then NR adds the clincher: “One thing is sure – it could be done far better together with Panama than without it; or worse, against it.” In short, the Panamanian government would now be ranged against such guerrilla warfare rather than overtly or covertly supporting it.

Addressing a common fear of the treaty critics, NR supposes that Panama violates the treaty. In that case, the magazine concludes, “we will still be in a position to act if and when necessary. And what is most important, we would almost surely be in a stronger position to act at some later time in response to an actual threat or violation of the treaty than we would be now in defense of our own refusal to ratify.”[6] In other words, far better for the United States to exercise its power in defense of a treaty – and therefore in command of wide international support – than in isolation after refusing to ratify.

In a similar vein, Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, told a White House meeting of prominent Georgians and Floridians that “if he were in the Kremlin and he could think of anything that … might alienate countries against the United States even further, it would be defeat of these treaties.”[7]

A common conservative charge is that the treaty will hand over the canal to a “Communist” Torrijos regime in Panama. Far from being a “Communist,” however, General Torrijos is in hot water in his own country, especially among the anti-imperialist critics on the Left.[8]

Panamanian newspapers were highly reluctant to reveal to their readers the details of the agreement with the United States. The New York Times reported that “rather than expressing joy at the culmination of the long negotiations, most Panamanians appeared today to be uncertain and confused. ” Addressing a meeting of the Panamanian Student Federation, that country’s chief negotiator of the agreement, Dr. Romulo Escobar Bethancourt, admitted that many aspects of the treaty were “bad” and even “ugly”; in defense, Escobar demagogically posed the only alternative to the treaty as a “confrontation” with the United States and the “massacre of the best of our youth.”

The Panama government announced its intention to hold an early national plebiscite to decide on ratification of the treaty, but it is clear that the plebiscite, which endorsed the treaty by two to one, was held in the midst of a propaganda campaign branding any criticism of the treaty as “treason against our fatherland.” More important, it was held while many of the leading opponents of the treaty were languishing in exile. For, over the past three years, the Torrijos regime has systematically deported its most outspoken critics, including likely opponents of the new treaty, to Miami, Mexico, and Venezuela.[9]

Indeed, one of the major unsuccessful demands of the Panamanian Left was that Torrijos keep his promise to declare a general amnesty for political prisoners, and that he allow all the exiles to return to Panama and challenge the treaty. In the light of this situation, it must be considered a joke in questionable taste for Dr. Escobar to condemn the Panamanian exiles in Miami for urging US senators to vote against the treaty. Obviously, a simple way for Panama to put a stop to this activity would be to allow the exiles to return to their Panamanian homeland.

Moreover, a full and fair debate over the plebiscite was precluded by the Torrijos regime’s iron control of the media. Every one of the newspapers and television stations is owned or controlled by the government, and the radio stations are also effectively ruled by the regime.

Press censorship and restrictions on public assembly were officially lifted during the 40 days prior to the plebiscite, but Torrijos refused to grant any additional time for public debate. As Marlise Simons reported in the Washington Post of October l3, “Officials say that Panamanians know enough about the treaties and only troublemakers want more time.”

Mounting criticism of the treaty has come from conservative as well as leftist critics of the Torrijos regime. The conservative Movement of Independent Lawyers of Panama has denounced the treaty for approving the “first American intervention in our country of the twenty-first century.” The MILP went on to assert that “the ordinary Panamanian will easily understand that … there will be a new version – perhaps slightly less grotesque than before – of the hated American perpetuity on the canal issue.” Both the Christian Democratic and Social Democratic parties also came out against the treaties, “pointing out that in 1926 and again in 1947, Panama had rejected drafts attempting to legalize the U.S. military bases [there].”[10] And Panama’s Trotskyist Revolutionary Socialist League made the significant statement that the present would be a particularly auspicious time to confront American imperialism: “Today we have the eyes of the world on us, today we have international support, today imperialism has been weakened by Watergate and Vietnam.”[11]

On September 6, the Panamanian Left made known its displeasure with the treaty; 1,500 students demonstrated in Panama City against the “dirty treaty” and its provisions for maintaining American military bases and perpetual rights of American intervention. The protest was stamped out by Torrijos’s National Guard, which injured dozens of demonstrators and arrested over 30 students.

If the Panama treaties merely provide a sophisticated fig leaf for continued American domination of the canal, why then did the Torrijos regime sign the accord in the face of the domestic troubles that would predictably ensue? One answer to this question might be that venerable motive, money – a vital aspect of the treaty is US agreement to sugarcoat the pill by multiplying manyfold the annual revenues going into the coffers of the Panamanian treasury. Currently, the US government pays $2.3 million a year to Panama for use of the canal. The treaty proposes to increase this amount by giving Panama $0.30 per ton out of the current canal toll of $1.29 per ton. With corrections for inflation, this share is expected to amount to a revenue of $40 to $50 million per year. In addition, operational revenues will be paid for such services as ship repair and dockage; this is expected to amount to $20 million per year.

But this is far from all. The United States also pledges to undertake a five-year program of supplying financial goodies to Panama: $200 million of Export-Import Bank credits; $75 million in Agency International Development housing credits; and $20 million in loan guarantees from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. This amounts to a five-year boodle of nearly $300 million, which, added to $70 million per annum, makes a handsome subsidy package, and is perhaps worth the risk of a few student demonstrations.

Apparently, the Carter administration feels that it can sell this package to the American public with the argument that none of this money will come directly out of taxes. The annual sum will initially come out of the toll revenues of the US government-owned Panama Canal Company, and later out of the budget of the new, frankly governmental American agency that is scheduled to replace the Panama Canal Company in running the canal. The five-year plan, too, consists of loans and loan guarantees. While all this is ultimately guaranteed by the US taxpayer, the subsidy package, being long-run and indirect, might be slipped by the American taxpayer without causing an outcry.

Focusing on the money enables us to ponder the seemingly curious phenomenon that American big business, unlike our conservative ideologues, is overwhelmingly in favor of the Panama treaty. The advocates include such influential business leaders as Irving S. Shapiro of DuPont, head of the Business Roundtable and such groups as the National Association of Manufacturers. One general reason for this support is that these sophisticated business groups understand and welcome the treaty as a more subtle and acceptable form of American imperialism. A more specific reason is the effect the treaty will have for those firms with trade and investment in Latin America. Rejection of the treaty might mean anti-American unrest throughout the region and might have a “destabilizing” effect on American investments there. Private US investment in Latin America is estimated at $24 billion, while total two-way US trade there amounted to $34 billion in 1976. As John M. Goshko reported in the August 22 Washington Post:

These economic factors could produce some startling surprises about where different interest groups line up in the battle.

There is the strong likelihood that the normally conservative, Republican-leaning business establishment will be solidly on the side of a Democratic president. …

Where the business community is concerned, Carter administration strategists contend, the case for supporting the treaties seems ironclad. In fact, the administration privately is counting on big business to provide some potentially crucial help in getting the treaties past the hurdle of Senate ratification.

Already, Henry R. Geyelin, president of the Council of the Americas, a nonprofit business association comprising every major US firm doing business in Latin America, has testified on behalf of such a treaty before the House Panama Canal Subcommittee.

But explanations in terms of groups or classes are never as rewarding as the concrete unveiling of specific monetary interests. Thus, there needs to be further investigation of which US business or financial groups might be benefiting specifically from the hundreds of millions of dollars that the US government will be pouring into Panama. One clear group of beneficiaries is the American exporters who will receive orders from the $300 million package. US foreign aid is a clever mechanism by which American taxpayers and the US government subsidize American export firms: the dollars are extracted from the taxpayer and are then funneled by the US government to the foreign recipients, who in turn spend the dollars on American exporters. In this case the process is clear: the Panama treaty explicitly applies “Buy American” provisions to the aid, making sure that the American exporters receive the dollars as rapidly as possible.

But there is another use that the Panamanian government will have for the US aid, one that may prove to be a more intimate lead to the underlying reason for concluding this treaty. Panama is heavily in debt to US banks, and the influx of hundreds of millions of dollars will certainly ease its burden in paying the interest and principal on the debt; it may even save Panama from bankruptcy – and the American banks from severe embarrassment. We must therefore contemplate the possibility that the nub of the Panama treaty is a covert bailout operation by which the American taxpayer is being gulled into subsidizing, and even salvaging, a handful of US banks.

This suggestion does not seem very outrageous if we consider the history of how the United States got involved with the Panama Canal in the first place. It’s not just, as Senator Hayakawa (R-CA) said, that “we stole it [the canal] fair and square.” Or that President Theodore Roosevelt engineered a phony “revolution” in 1903, by which employees of the American-owned railroad declared the Panama section of Colombia independent and American ships prevented Colombia from putting down the rebellion. The similarity with the present theme comes from the hidden motive behind Teddy Roosevelt’s flamboyant actions.

In order to build the canal, the United States felt that it had to purchase the right to do so from the bankrupt French-owned company that had failed in its attempt to dig the canal. Teddy Roosevelt explained that he acted out of indignation at the Colombian government’s insisting on a $10-million “holdup” of American taxpayers for the right to build a canal in Panama. Actually, the US government was perfectly willing to pay $40 million to the French Panama Canal Company. The $10 million to Colombia would have come, not from the taxpayers, but out of the $40 million cut going to the French company.

Why, then, did Teddy Roosevelt swing the big stick and foment a phony revolution in Colombia, in order to save $10 million for the coffers of a bankrupt French-owned company? The answer, which came out years later, is that the “French” company was French no longer; its shares had been secretly bought up shortly before by a syndicate of Wall Street bankers, headed by J.P. Morgan and Company. The syndicate hired the eminent Wall Street lawyer, William Nelson Cromwell, to get the American money, and it was Cromwell, sitting in the White House itself, who wrote TR’s dispatches and orders and engineered the entire operation. After the syndicate got the $40 million, they were able to sell their shares to the US government for twice what they had paid.

Moreover, one of the syndicate members was none other than Teddy Roosevelt’s brother-in-law, Douglas E. Robinson. Not only did Robinson benefit as a syndicate member, but most of the $40 million from the US taxpayers was funneled by Cromwell into the New York real estate firm of the same Douglas Robinson.

And so we should not be surprised to discover that US government action in Panama today is for the purpose of subsidizing the Wall Street bankers. Judging from the facts available to us, the current treaty may well be a rerun of the original bailout.

Commercial banks refuse to make public the details of specific loans like those to Panama, and the Panamanian government is not exactly generous with such information either. However, some broad information is available. When General Torrijos seized power in the 1968 coup, Panama’s national debt abroad was $167 million; its estimated total current debt is more than $3.5 billion. More pertinently, the total debt of the Panama government to US banks is reported by the Library of Congress at $1.7 billion. In a memorandum to the president of Panama, the Department of Planning stated that no less than 39 percent of Panama’s budget is being used to service its foreign debt, which amounts to $42 million per year and includes $25 million in interest and $17 million in amortizing principal.

Leading the parade of American banks involved in Panama are the First National City Bank and the Chase Manhattan Bank, the flagship bank for the far-flung Rockefeller financial interests. Both of these banks serve as fiscal agents for the government of Panama. In one advertisement for a $115 million loan to Panama, for example, the First National City Bank is listed as the agent for the loan. Other participating banks included the Bank of America, Bankers Trust, Chase Manhattan, the First National Bank of Boston, the First National Bank of Chicago, the Republic National Bank of Dallas, and the Marine Midland Bank.

We might well ask, why did the New York banks pour all these loans into Torrijos’s Panama? It seems clear that the money was a quid pro quo for Torrijos’s decision – on the advice of leading New York banks – to reorganize Panama’s banking laws in July 1970. This reorganization provided a favorable haven, free of taxes and onerous regulations, for foreign banks in Panama, much as Panama has long provided a flag of convenience for world shipping. Since the 1970 legal change, total banking assets in Panama have expanded enormously from a few banks with a few million dollars to 73 banks with total assets of $8.6 billion conducting transactions throughout the world. Prominent among the US banks expanding rapidly in Panama since the 1970 legislation are the First National City Bank, the Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, and the Marine Midland Bank.

It was a deal that benefited the US banks and the Torrijos regime, which could thereby expand its wealth as well as its political power in Panama. But now the US taxpayer is being subtly asked to pick up the tab.

If a handful of large US banks will be the major beneficiaries of the Panama Canal treaty, have they also had any role in lobbying for or negotiating the treaty itself? Or will their gains be merely a lucky windfall from decisions made by the US government for very different reasons? Let us see. While the treaty was being negotiated, then-Senator Gale McGee (D-WY), one of the leading protreaty people in Congress, held a meeting at the State Department at the end of October 1975 to organize a protreaty lobby. In attendance were lobbyists for the Chase Manhattan Bank, the Bank of America, such large corporations as Gulf Oil and Rockwell International, as well as representatives of the Council of the Americas. A campaign kitty was raised at that meeting, estimates of the size ranging from $100,000 to $500,000. Subsequent meetings brought in lobbyists for other large banks and corporations, including Pan American World Airways. Plans were made at these meetings to pressure the US Chamber of Commerce into supporting the future treaty.[12]

The influence of the bankers and the corporations, however, has been even more direct. When Carter took office he appointed the dynamic and highly influential Sol Linowitz, former ambassador to the Organization of American States and long an advocate of a new treaty, to join the octogenarian Ellsworth Bunker on the Panama Canal negotiating team. Bunker himself is a former director of Bankers Trust, and his brother, Arthur Hugh Bunker, is a longtime director of Lehman Brothers.

Linowitz’s connections are more numerous and impressive. He is a member of the powerful Council on Foreign Relations, which is dominated as well as chaired by David Rockefeller, who is also chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Moreover, Linowitz is a member of the exclusive and now-famous Trilateral Commission, which was founded and is dominated by David Rockefeller and which includes so many foreign-policy and economic-affairs leaders of the Carter administration – from Carter himself to Vice President Mondale, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and National Security Adviser Brzezinski. In addition, Linowitz is a trustee and former chairman of the policy committee of the Center for Inter-American Relations, an organization founded and chaired by David Rockefeller, whose directors interlock heavily with the Council for Foreign Relations. Linowitz was also a member of Nelson Rockefeller’s personal vehicle for his abortive presidential run, the National Committee on Critical Choices for Americans. As a member of the board of directors of Time, Inc., Linowitz also wields a degree of influence on the media.

Even more pertinently, upon his appointment as negotiator of the canal treaties, Sol Linowitz was a member of the board and the executive committee of Marine Midland Bank and of Pan Am. He was also a large stockholder in Marine Midland. The Marine Midland connection is clear and direct; for, as Congressman George Hansen (R-ID) has disclosed, the government of Panama owes Marine Midland Bank nearly $8 million. Furthermore, it was only after Hansen and Senator James McClure (R-ID) filed suit on April 20 for a temporary restraining order against Linowitz as canal negotiator that Linowitz finally resigned his positions with Marine Midland.

The suit sought the restraining order on the ground of conflict of interest on the part of Linowitz, at least until this presidential appointment should be confirmed by the Senate. Linowitz, however, insisted on keeping his high positions at Pan Am while negotiating and arguing on behalf of the canal treaty. Pan Am’s connection, while intriguing, does not seem as direct as Marine Midland’s. Pan Am has for decades been within the Rockefeller financial ambit, as is indicated by James S. Rockefeller’s presence on the airline’s board of directors. Other directors are Frank Stanton of CBS and Donald Kendall of Pepsico, both of whom are directors at Atlantic Richfield Company, whose president Robert O. Anderson is a member of the board of Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank. Until he became secretary of state, Cyrus Vance was also a director of Pan Am. While too much should not be made of a list of corporate interconnections, the above establishes a clear pattern of Linowitz-Rockefeller commonality of interest and action.

We have already seen that Pan Am participated in the McGee-organized corporate lobbying in favor of a Panama treaty. What does Pan Am have to gain from Torrijos? One obvious benefit is the protection of the company’s landing rights in Panama. It just might be important that Panama serves as Pan Am’s headquarters for Latin America.

One of the most important influences in the drive toward a treaty was the new Washington-based Commission on US-Latin American Relations. The commission was organized in 1974 by the Center for Inter-American Relations and was largely financed by Ford Foundation and Rockefeller funds. Its chairman until recently was Sol Linowitz, with Dr. Robert A. Pastor serving as the staff director. Other members of the Linowitz Commission included such influential Trilateral Commission members as W. Michael Blumenthal, who is now secretary of the treasury; Samuel P. Huntington, now an aide to the National Security Council; Peter Peterson, chairman of Lehman Brothers; and Elliot Richardson.

In December 1976, Pastor wrote a report for the Linowitz Commission, urging a new treaty and substantial funds for Panama; the Council on Foreign Relations promptly held a special colloquium on the subject and endorsed the Linowitz Report. The next month, Brzezinski, national security adviser to Carter, appointed a special assistant on the Panama question, who turned out to be none other than Dr. Robert Pastor.

Without delay, Pastor drew up a National Security Council memorandum recommending a new Panama Canal treaty. The paper was approved by Brzezinski, and then, after being checked out with longtime Nelson Rockefeller foreign-policy aide Henry Kissinger, endorsed by Carter. As the culmination of the Linowitz-Rockefeller drive, Linowitz then got himself appointed negotiator for the new Panama treaty.

There are several ironies that emerge from a careful look at the Panama Canal treaty fight – especially the picture of this country’s liberals and progressives battling to pour money into the coffers of a handful of Wall Street banks in the name of a treaty they mistakenly believe represents a withdrawal of US power abroad. It doesn’t, and those who automatically oppose anything the right wing favors need to do some hard rethinking of their reflexive support for the new Panama Canal treaties.

Notes

[1] New York Times, August 18, 1977.

[2] New York Times, August 13, 1977.

[3] Los Angeles Times, October 23, 1977.

[4] For a confirming view, see the report on the broadcast by Sol Linowitz over the Voice of America, in Harry B. Ellis, “Carter Still Presses for Canal Treaty,” Christian Science Monitor, August 31, 1977.

[5] Actually, it is unclear that even our existing status in Panama is one of sovereignty and ownership over the Canal Zone. The 1903 treaty with Panama merely grants to the United States “in perpetuity the use, occupation and control of a zone. ” The Supreme Court of the Canal Zone on May 6, 1907, in the case of Canal Zone v. Coulson, ruled, quite in the spirit of the treaty, that “the United States is not owner in fee of the Canal Zone; it has only the use and occupation as long as it complies with the terms of the treaty.” It is true, however, that the US Supreme Court chose to disregard such limits in the same year, asserting that “the title of the United States to the Canal Zone is not imperfect.’” (Wilson v. Shaw)

[6] “The Proposed Treaty: Preliminary Thoughts,” National Review, September 2, 1977.

[7] Don Irwin, “Rusk Sees Chance of War in Panama,” Los Angeles Times, August 31, 1977.

[8] The other major charge by the Right is that Torrijos is a “dictator.” This is true enough, but the charge comes with peculiar ill grace from a movement that has expressed its devoted admiration for every dictatorial and fascist regime in the world, from South Africa to Chile, South Korea, and the Philippines.

[9] New York Times, August 11.

[10] Washington Post, October 13.

[11] New York Times, August 11.

[12] See Russell W. Howe and Sarah H. Trott, The Power Peddlers, Doubleday, p.123.

The Untold Story of Panama, New York: Athene Press, 1959 by Earl Harding

(I have an autographed hard back copy of this rare seminal book)

The post Trump Is Lying About the Panama Canal appeared first on LewRockwell.

VIDEO: Activists in Illinois and Indiana are talking about changing the state borders so separatist Illinois counties can join Indiana. As you’d expect, many politicians hate the idea.

The post 33 Counties In Illinois Have Voted to Leave the State appeared first on LewRockwell.

In order to fathom the extent of lying by the U.S. media, here is a summary of famous ones, each linked to proofs that the given statement (which still remains believed-in by many if not most Americans, because the truth of the matter has been censored-out by the U.S. press and ‘historians’) is false, false, false … — loaded with falsehoods:

Iraq was invaded and destroyed on 20 March 2023 because of ‘intelligence failures’, not because of lies by the U.S. President which the President knew at the time to BE lies.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 started the war in Ukraine and was aggression and absolutely unprovoked — not at all any sort of necessary defensive measure by Russia in order to prevent a Third World War between the U.S. and Russia.

China is a dictatorship that is trying to acquire Taiwan by force, if necessary, and the U.S. is the global defender of democracy and so is arming Taiwan in order that it can protect itself against Chinese aggression.

The current war in the Middle East was started by Hamas on 7 October 2023, and Israel is not the aggressor but is only defending itself as it must and should do; and, though the U.S. opposes some of the tactics that Israel is doing, the U.S. is right to be arming the only democracy in the Middle East.

The 28 February 2024 collapse, at the White House, of relations between the U.S. and Ukraine — and between the U.S. and EU — was caused by Trump’s (and Vance’s) childish demand that Zelensky be more grateful for the hundreds of billions of dollars that the U.S. Government has given to Ukraine, and was NOT caused by Zelensky’s trying to propagandize there to the American people, over the heads of Trump and Vance, to make them add to the agreement that the U.S. and Ukraine were all set to sign after this press converence, some new clauses that would make the agreement unacceptable to Russia and therefore doom any posssibility of a successful negotiation between Trump and Putin to reach a negotiated settlement of the war in Ukraine.

For an example of the U.S. media’s pouring lie upon lie about just the last-listed (which, of course, is the most recent), of those instances of the U.S. media’s systematically deceiving the American public about crucial historical events, I suggest reading the transcript of, or listening to, the National Public Radio broadcasted 3 March 2024 edition of the WBUR produced “On Point” program, titled “A meltdown in the White House over Ukraine”, in which three scholars who intensely support Ukraine against Russia set forth their false narratives about the entire matter — and totally ignore the extensive documentation that the villain in the entire Ukraine war is and has been the United States Government, which caused the war and still refuses to recognize, much less to acknowledge, that Russia’s 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine was a necessary defensive measure by Russia in order to prevent a Third World War between the U.S. and Russia.

For any American or person anywhere who is not aware that the peoples in non-U.S.-allied countries throughout the world consider, by overwhelming margins, that the U.S. Government is “the biggest threat to peace in the world” — far higher than is Russia or China or Iran or any of the countries that the U.S. Government is constantly trying to “regime-change” or conquer, here is the evidence of this, that — likewise — has effectively been hidden instead of reported to the peoples, the publics, by the media, throughout the U.S. empire.

It is an empire based on lies that are based on, essentially, a systematic and pervasive dictatorial censorship by the regime.

This originally appeared on Eric’s Substack.

The post The Extent of Lying in the U.S. Press appeared first on LewRockwell.

Art requires the use of imagination, but so does political and social analysis. But imagination is just a first step; it proves nothing.

Evidence is required. But imagination rules out nothing from the start. If one cannot imagine an hypothesis or a scene – no matter how seemingly implausible – to be possibly true, one will leave it unexamined. As Graeme MacQueen, the author of the crucial book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception, and much else, put it:

Suppose our imaginations can embrace the possibility that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by elements in the U.S. government. In that case what do we do next? There is no mystery. Once the imagination stops filtering out a hypothesis and allows it into the realm of the possible, it can be put to the test. Evidence and reason must now do the job. Imagination cannot settle the question of truth or falsity any more than ideology, morality, or “common sense.”

We know that in the case of the attacks of September 11, 2001 that this is precisely what did not occur. Various hypotheses were ignored and emotional patriotism held sway.  The script had been written in advance and the good and bad characters chosen.  “It was another Pearl Harbor, bin Laden did it from his cave in Afghanistan, it seemed like a movie, etc.”  And those anthrax attacks were claimed to be second stage terror attacks of these monsters, except that it turned out this wasn’t so and that the anthrax came from a U.S. government lab.  MacQueen proved in his book that this was so and that the anthrax attacks were directly linked to the those of September 11, later showing through meticulously logical and evidence-based research that both were inside jobs.

Even today, this conclusion is hard for most people to accept, for the conclusion they started with – what was planted in their brains – precluded imagining another hypothesis.  To do so was considered too outrageous – an impossibility that offended the patriotic heart.

And of course the Bush administration’s lies steamrolled any skepticism, the Patriot Act was quickly passed, and endless U.S. wars of aggression ensued, both preceding and following Colin Powell’s Academy Award performance at the United Nations. But he too was an honorable man.

They too are honorable men.

So if you sat with your mouth agape in shock at the dog and pony show in DC between Trump, the reality TV actor, and Zelensky, the comedian, who became Ukraine’s president and Trump’s apprentice in 2019 during Trump’s first term, let me suggest a bizarre possibility at a time when the bizarre has become commonplace.

Across the spectrum of opinion on the mainstream and alternative media, it is assumed without question that what took place on Friday, February 28, 2025 between Trump and Zelensky, ably assisted by Vance, should be taken at face value – in other words, as real.

The political reactions to that shouting match are what one would expect.

The Democrats are outraged that Trump (and Vance) would bully and humiliate an heroic ally who has been fighting a valiant war against the evil Russians and Putin.

Thus Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, toeing the party war line, had this to say:

Trump criticizes Zelensky, the leader of a democratic country who is courageously fighting Russian imperialism, while he aligns himself with Putin, the dictator who started the bloodiest European war in 80 years. Sorry, President Trump. We believe in democracy, not authoritarianism.

And on the Republican side, Senator Lindsay Graham, while calling the meeting “a complete disaster” but urging continued support for the war for “democracy,” said he was never more proud of Trump:

What I saw in the Oval office was disrespectful and I don’t know if we can ever do business with Zelensky again.

These reactions have been repeated ad infinitum. They are equally absurd propaganda in the service of the U.S. elites’ Repubmocratic tandem team of imperialists.

And then there are the reactions of utter shock from all corners who call this fight an historic and a diplomatic turning point to be immortalized.

It is hard, I know, to hear an unbearable possibility: But suppose it were a performance, not just in the sense that Trump and Vance set Zelensky up, but as a coordinated reality TV show in which all the principle actors were performing from a script whose goal was the opposite of all the subsequent interpretations. A script that allowed for some improvisation, as comedians like Zelensky and reality TV stars like Trump are adept at.  Improvisations that may have gone a step too far and elicited outbursts that tarnished the performance but did not derail the overall goal of showing that the puppet-apprentice serves at the whim of the show’s host, and despite all the loot showered upon him, he could still be fired and replaced with another puppet, as the play would proceed under a new name.

As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “There are unconscious actors among them, and involuntary actors; the genuine are always rare, especially genuine actors.”

If it sounds hyperbolic to entertain such a thought, I agree. Yet I assume you would agree that we are living in hyperbolic and vertiginous times, a society of the spectacle, as Guy Debord called his famous book. A time when acting is promoted as the pinnacle of the professions, a skill requisite for spy craft, stagecraft, and political craft in equal measure.

A meaningless coincidence it no doubt is, but the famous shout down of Zelensky by Trump and Vance and Zelensky’s responses just “happened” to occur 48 hours before Hollywood’s self-celebration of the Academy Awards.

Of course I have no evidence for this hypothesis and it might sound as if I have come unhinged. But wouldn’t it serve common sense to entertain it as an alternative interpretation when hyper reality has become commonplace and the realization that we have been ruled by con men and fraudsters is widely accepted?

Over the same 48 hours, the Trump administration, that is allegedly antiwar and deeply affected by all the deaths in Ukraine, has had Secretary of State Marco Rubio expedite the shipment of $4 billion in military aid to Israel to continue its savage slaughter of Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, et al. Rubio said this is part of the $12 billion Trump has approved in arms for Israel since he took office 42 days ago. Antiwar.com has reported:

The statement came a day after the statement [sic] department approved three separate arms deals for Israel worth nearly $3 billion, which includes a huge number of 2,000-pound bombs. The biggest sale, which will likely be funded by US military aid, includes 35,529 MK-84 or BLU-117 2,000-pound b[sic]ombs and 4,000 I-2000 Penetrator warheads.

Israel has used heavy bombs in strikes on residential buildings that have killed hundreds of civilians. It has also weaponized the bombs as chemical weapons after finding that dropping several of them on tunnels releases deadly carbon monoxide gas.

As I have written previously, there is far more to consider when you hear clapping for Trump’s plans to “end” the U.S. proxy war against Russia. You can end the overt war and continue the covert.

As the Roman poet Virgil, drawing on Homer and Greek mythology, tells us in his great poem The Aeneid, that after a fruitless ten year siege of Russia – I mean Troy – the Greeks built a huge wooden horse at the request of Odysseus, the “wily” one, within which they hid Odysseus and his armed men.  The Trojans, believing they were being gifted, wheeled the horse into the city, only to be shocked when in the night the Greeks emerged from the horse and destroyed Troy.

So to paraphrase a few lines from Bob Dylan about my speculation here – Don’t fear if you hear a foreign sound to your ear, it’s alright, reader, I’m only wondering – Who holds the joker in this “card game”?

I sense, said Laocoön in The Aeneid, “some crookedness is in this thing.”

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Whose Dog Was Being Wagged During Showtime Between Trump and Zelensky? appeared first on LewRockwell.

“The Ukraine is a very fertile country, but by no means agreeable.”

– Madame de Staël

“500 million Europeans are asking 300 million Americans to defend [Ukraine] against 140 million Russians.”

– Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland

For three years, many who couldn’t previously distinguish the Ukraine from a ukulele confidently identified heroes and villains in that corner of the world.

The last several months, as the futility of the fight became undeniable, even the most ardent warhawks appeared ready to move on. They seemed almost bored with Ukraine, resigned that a wasteful war would wind down… and began putting their fury on other fads.

But then, last Friday, this happened:

And suddenly… Blue and Gold was back in fashion!

I’m neither a Russophile (except with regard to one woman) nor a “Putin apologist” (whatever that is). But I do have an aversion to being vaporized in a nuclear war.

About multi-faceted conflicts in distant lands among people we’ll never meet, it’s OK to be indifferent. In fact, it’s probably smart.

To almost everyone, particularly flag-emoji outsiders who are most emotional in their predictable opinions, foreign affairs are incomprehensible. The more we learn, the less we know. Which is ample reason to keep our distance.

Hunk of Meat

That is particularly true regarding the sticky web weaving Russia to Ukraine. Let’s pull some threads, and see what we can untangle.

Albeit to a lesser degree than many Mideast countries that were completely made up, the Ukraine is an amorphous construct. Even its modern Slavonic name means “on the edge”, what Americans might call a frontier.

As with Poland or the Punjab, it’s historically been a hunk of meat buzzed by hungry flies, and regularly contested by rival dogs. Over the centuries, Russians, Ottomans, and Mongols tugged it east, whereas Poles, Austrians, and Americans have pulled it west.

On occasion, the hounds drop the slab, show their teeth, and turn on each other. Which is why canines from distant neighborhoods should stay on their leash.

The Ukraine is not merely a breadbasket of Europe. It’s its cradle. It’s the land through which the greatest number of European peoples approached their eventual homeland. It’s also the fertile crib of Mother Russia.

From north of Lake Balkhash and the regions round the Aral Sea, the fourth century Huns pressed west. These warriors epitomized ferocity, and were quintessential nomads. “Their country”, said a proverb, “was the back of a horse”.

Pressed by eastern enemies and depleted lands, the invaders rode “their country” across the steppes, forded the Volga, and overcame the Ostrogoths in what is now Ukraine.

From the other direction, migrant Slavs crossed the Danube, to scoop scattered crumbs of stale Roman bread. In the sixth century, Avars arrived thru southern Russia to fill the vacuum of vacating Huns. They enslaved the Slavs, who gave their name to a perpetual practice.

Creating the Ukraine

The original Slavs probably came from the marshy regions of western Russia, bounded roughly by Kiev, Mogilev, and Brest-Litovsk. These poor people were regularly overrun, repeatedly enslaved, and routinely pushed around.

Migration and war shuffled them across eastern Europe, breeding an abiding variety of kindred customs and related languages. Polish, Czech, and Slovak tongues rose in the west. Great Russian, White Russian, and “Little Russian“ (Ruthenian and Ukrainian) developed in the east. Nearly all of these…as well as Slovene, Serb, and Bulgarian to the south…have remained mostly intelligible to speakers of any one of them.

Several Slavic tribes settled the valleys of the Dnieper and the Don. They cleared forests, drained swamps, killed beasts, and created the Ukraine.

By the ninth century, Scandinavian Vikings invaded from the north, and plied Russian rivers. They penetrated as far south as Kiev, which grew as Moslem control of the eastern Mediterranean diverted trade from Italian ports to Russian towns. By the tenth century, Kiev had become the commercial hub of an emerging Rus.

As the millennium turned, Vladimir, Fifth Grand Duke of Kiev, ruled the rising principality. His marriage to the daughter of Emperor Basil II united Russian regions in religion, alphabet, and art to the Byzantine empire they longed to conquer.

Islands and Poles

For several hundred years, the various principalities that comprised Russia mostly acknowledged the suzerainty of Kiev. But by the 13th century, the Kievan realm began to recede. Eighty civil wars and almost fifty invasions ravaged Russia in this period.

As Italian commerce revived, Black Sea commerce faltered… and Kiev declined. Mongol invasions sealed the city’s Medieval fate. It was about this time that leadership passed from the “Little Russians” of Ukraine to the “Great Russians” around the nascent village of Moscow.

As late as 1300, “Russia” existed only as scattered islands of northern city-states, Lithuanian dependencies, and eastern principalities floating haphazardly on a vast feudal sea. As Moscow grew and Russia congealed, Kiev lay dormant. Around it, the Cossacks stirred and the Poles moved in.

In the mid-seventeenth century, a Cossack chief serving the occupying Poles demanded redress for an insult from a ruling Polish nobleman. Not receiving satisfaction, he fled to the Crimea, and enlisted the khan of the Tatars to help him overthrow the Poles.

As often happens, the mercenary alliance was initially fruitful, but ultimately soured. The Poles were pushed back. But their new king upped the ante. Bribery turned the Tatars. They ditched the Cossacks, who resorted to Russia to rescue Ukraine and (most importantly) themselves.

Swinging Gate

After receiving the request, Czar Alexis asked his assembly to annex Ukraine. Despite the risk of war with Catholic Poland, the annexation of a Ukraine both Orthodox and Russian was ultimately approved.

The Cossacks, dreading the Russian czar less than the Turkish sultan or the Polish king, also agreed. They voted unanimously to yield Ukraine to emerging Muscovy.

Coming during the same generation Russia conquered Siberia to reach the Pacific, this acquisition implies that the real founder of the Russian Empire was Czar Alexis rather than his celebrated son, Peter the Great.

But as thru a swinging gate in a western saloon, fresh fighters routinely crossed this fluid frontier. Crimean Tatars resented Russian rule, and shifted allegiance from the victorious Cossacks to the vengeful Poles.

After years of war and a convoluted peace, Ukraine was carved. Poland kept the west (with long interludes of Turkish rule). Kiev and Ukraine east of the Dnieper were ceded to Russia. This division held for a century, till the first partition of Poland.

During this period, under the imperial guidance of Romanov rule, Ukraine struggled to preserve its identity under nominal control of the Dnieper Cossacks. This soil sowed many resentments.

After a failed Ukrainian attempt to break away during a Swedish invasion, the Russians annexed Crimea and suppressed Ukraine. They renamed it “Little Russia”, and abolished all traces of separate traditions.

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Last Friday, U.S. President Donald J. Trump and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky held the most amazing press conference of all time. For 30 minutes, Trump insisted on the importance of a peace deal in Ukraine and Zelensky refused to concede any concrete points that would make a peace deal possible. Tempers flared, and Trump ended the meeting by telling Zelensky that “the problem is I’ve empowered you to be a tough guy,” and that “I don’t think you’d be a tough guy without the United States.” He told Zelensky that “You don’t have the cards” and that “you’re either going to make a deal or we’re out,” in which case the Ukrainians would have to “fight it out” without U.S. support, which “I don’t think is going to be pretty.” Thereafter administration officials sent the Ukrainian delegation packing, their minerals deal unsigned, their lunch uneaten.

The exchange cast the entire European establishment into a psychiatric crisis. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said it “took [his] breath away,” adding, absurdly, that he “would never have believed that we would ever have to defend Ukraine from the United States.” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, meanwhile, deplored this “new era of lawlessness,” emphasising that “For us, it is clear that we stand firmly by the side of sovereign and free Ukraine.” The “enemy,” she said, “sits alone in the Kremlin, not in Kyiv or Brussels. We can never accept a reversal of the roles of perpetrator and victim.” You will note that German political leaders have ceased regarding the United States – the foremost guarantor of their security – as their most central ally. Their primary loyalties have shifted to the Ukraine. More on that below.

On Sunday, Germany’s most tiresome state media talkshow host, Caren Miosga, convened an emergency meeting of very stupid people to have a sad about the breakdown in Ukraine-U.S. relations.

Our Mickey Mouse Club foreign minister Baerbock was there, and she spoke in grave tones about the immorality of it all, insisting that “we Europeans” must show “resolve” in this dark time. Claudia Major, a lunatic political scientist suffering from a surfeit of estrogen and a deficit of neural matter, deplored Trump’s “preference for Russia” and his “preference for autocracy.” She said it was outrageous that great powers like the United States and Russia could just sit at a table and “clarify the important questions” while all others have no role to play at all and are reduced to the status of mere “bargaining chips.” Perhaps if Germany had more than 150 operational main battle tanks and munitions stores to last us beyond a few days of fighting, we would not be mere bargaining chips. Instead, we have one of the world’s most expensive social welfare systems and a tumorous bureaucracy the likes of which human civilisation has never seen before. Priorities!

Major also said many other crazy things. For example, she said we have to be very clear on the importance of fighting for the Ukraine and against Russia. That means, I guess, that we will fight Russia all by ourselves if we have to. With what, is unclear. Then a vacant Baerbock said we need to find partners across the world, including the Gulf states, to ensure that Russia, China and the United States don’t just divide up the world among themselves. Apparently Baerbock has no idea that these nations, being great powers, have long since done precisely that. She furthermore explained that the United States aren’t our partner anymore, and then she also said that we have to do everything to ensure the United States continues to be our partner, among other things by explaining to the Americans that there will be “consequences” if they cease being our partner.

Such is the state of political discourse in the insane asylum known as the Federal Republic of Germany, in case you were wondering.

Also on Sunday, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer convened his farcical Ukraine Summit in London. The event had been scheduled well before Zelensky’s Oval Office beatdown, but it was an opportunity to stand strong with the black jumper man, who was apparently so traumatised by his international humiliation on Friday that he had yet to change his clothes.

At the end of it all the Eurotards and Zelensky, together with a politically disgraced Justin Trudeau and the Turkish Foreign Minister, stood impotently on a staircase for a group photo, flanked by profoundly lame “SECURING OUR FUTURE” signs. It is all about making a statement, saying the right words, and sending the right media message, here in newly independent Europe.

The sharp-eyed among you will notice German Chancellor Olaf Scholz posing in the third row – yet another clue that we have before us a deeply irrelevant moment. These people are not going to secure anybody’s future. They are just going to light a bunch of money on fire. At a press conference afterwards, they announced their pathbreaking achievements, which came primarily in the form of commitments. The Summit attendees are committed to military aid for Ukraine, they are committed to Ukrainian sovereignty, they are committed to Ukraine’s defence and they are committed to developing a cringe “coalition of the willing” to enforce any future peace agreement that Trump might hammer out without consulting them or giving the slightest shit what they think about it.

Alas, the degrees of commitment vary drastically among the parties involved. The UK and France are ready to send their soldiers to the contact line next week. Germany and Italy, not so much. The Americans were accordingly unimpressed, if slightly bemused. Afterwards, J.D. Vance gave this statement in an interview with Sean Hannity:

If you want real security guarantees, if you want to actually ensure that Vladimir Putin does not invade Ukraine again, the very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine. That is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years

After the London Summit, Zelensky said he believed the United States would continue supplying military aid to his country, because the two countries have a “strong enough partnership.” He also said that any peace deal “is still very, very far away.” The man must have absorbed from the Eurotards in London the uncertain hope that Trump represents a passing anomaly rather than a permanent political shift, and that if we can all just hang on until 2029, a new Bidenesqsue president will take the reins and we can get back to our costly games of brinksmanship on the Eastern Front.

The problem with this thesis is that nobody is remotely sure it is true and also that 2029 is a long way off. Trump responded by saying that “This is the worst statement that could have been made by Zelenskyy,” and then he suspended all military aid to Ukraine. I guess the Ukraine and the United States do not have a “strong enough partnership” after all. The suspension will take some months to affect Ukraine’s prospects on the battlefield, but its consequences for Zelensky’s attitude have been quite immediate. The man has now decided that he is ready “to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible” and that he is also ready to “work fast to end the war” and that he is furthermore ready “to move very fast through all the next stages and to work with the US to agree on a strong final deal.” Zelensky is all about fastness now.

Eurotard-in-Chief Ursula von der Leyen responded to the American aid suspension by unveiling a five-point plan to “rearm Europe.” In the CDU they just love five-point plans. The Eurotards want to relax debt rules and incentivise member states to spend more on defence and they’re even going to set up a 150 billion-Euro fund for this purpose. Because it is the EU we are talking about, all of this is going to be extremely cumbersome, stupid, wasteful and the direct archetypal opposite of fast. Also it turns out that a great many member states don’t want Brussels to be doing this at all:

National capitals fear European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will exploit this crisis to extend Brussels’ powers to new areas and strengthen her influence vis-à-vis national governments.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, she sidelined countries to purchase vaccines on their behalf, and at the start of the war in Ukraine, she took the lead on Russia sanctions and weapons deliveries for Kyiv …

EU leaders don’t want this to happen againon a sensitive issue like defense spending.

“Defense is still very much also a national responsibility,” said a seniorEU diplomat last week explaining their country’s opposition toward an defense cash pot handled by the Commission …

Countries such as Poland and Finland in particular want to shield defense from the Commission’s attempted overreach.

“Poland has a clear idea about wanting to do this outside of the Commission,” said a second EU diplomat from another country.

They added, however, these lofty arguments are really a “fig leaf to hide more sensitive issues such as member states not wanting to have any outsider saying what you should do.”

The EU is an economic union, not a mutual defence league, and it exists in its current form only because the United States has pacified Europe. Should this pacifying force disappear, the Brussels pencil-pushers will not be able to replace it with all the billion-Euro funds in the world, because as European countries rearm and see to their own defence, they will discover that they have divergent interests. They will lose enthusiasm for paying bureaucrats in Belgium to fund the rearmament of rivals and Europe will return to the way it always was before the Americans arrived – a Continent of rivalries and shifting alliances, a Continent of nations rather than currency zones and customs spheres, but perhaps also a Continent that prefers once again to be ruled by adults rather than by the neotenous, moralising hall monitors who presently imagine themselves to be in charge.

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The case for getting out of NATO encompasses four fundamental propositions:

• First, the Federal budget has become a self-fueling fiscal doomsday machine, even as the Fed has run out of capacity to monetize the skyrocketing public debt.
• Second, the only viable starting point for fiscal salvation is slashing the nation’s elephantine Warfare State by at least $500 billion per year.
• Third, the route to that end is a return to the “no entangling alliance” wisdom of the Founders, which means bringing the Empire Home, closing the 750 US bases abroad, scuttling much of the US Navy and Army and withdrawing from NATO and similar lesser commitments elsewhere.
• Fourthly, jettisoning NATO requires debunking its Origins Story and the false claim that it brought peace and security to post-war America when what it actually did was transform Washington into the War Capital of the World, dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, neocon warmongers and a vast Warfare State nomenklatura.

Part 1

As to the impending fiscal calamity, just recall this sequence. When Ronald Reagan attacked the soaring Federal deficits in 1980 the public debt was less than $1 trillion and about 30% of GDP. But it had erupted to $20 trillion by Donald Trump’s first election, now stands at $36 trillion and will be hitting $62 trillion and 163% of GDP by the mid-2030s.

Yet even that figure embodies CBO’s most recent Rosy Scenario fairy tale under which—-

• Congress never again adopts a single new spending increase or tax cut.
• The $5 trillion of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts are allowed to expire next year.
• There are no recessions or other economic crises for the remainder of this decade and forever thereafter, world without end.
• And despite 7% of GDP deficits and annual interest expense of $1.7 trillion by 2034 the average yield on the public debt clocks in at a minuscule 3.4%.

Yes, and if dogs could whistle the world would be a chorus! Boost the average debt yield by a minimally realistic 250 basis points, however, and now you have $3 trillion of annual interest expense and a $4.5 trillion deficit by 2034.

In short, there is a doom-loop building inside the fiscal equation under which soaring interest expense will ignite a veritable budgetary wildfire, powering the public debt upward to $150 trillion by mid-century, even under CBO’s cheerful baseline.

Of course, long before the debt actually hits this staggering figure, the whole system would implode. Every remnant of America as we now know it would go down the tubes.

So slashing the national security budget by $500 billion per year is especially urgent since there is no chance whatsoever of getting similar giant slices out of the other two fiscal biggies— Social Security and Medicare, which are surrounded by a veritable wall of political terrorists on the left.

Fortunately, slashing the Pentagon by 50% is fully warranted. Today’s bloated Empire-serving Warfare State is not remotely necessary for homeland security or the foreign policy of a peaceful Republic.

When you add-up the current year $927 billion for the national defense function, $66 billion for international operations and aid and $370 billion for veterans disability and health care—you get a comprehensive national security budget of nearly $1.4 trillion. 

Moreover, three things stand out when this stupendous total is looked at in historic perspective. First, the disappearance of the heavily armed Soviet Empire into the dustbin of history in 1991 left no visible trace on national security spending.

In fact, at the peak of the Cold War in 1962 when JFK faced down Khrushchev in Cuba the comprehensive national security budget in today’s dollars stood at just $640 billion. That was barely 46% of the current level, and it was still only $810 billion by 1990 on the eve of the Soviet collapse.

So what transpired thereafter is astounding. An adversary armed to the teeth with upwards of 37,000 nukes and a 4 million man conventional armed force vanished from the face of the earth. And yet the national security budget kept rising skyward to the present $1.4 trillion without missing a beat.

The second point is that the largest military increases occurred not in the Cold War heat circa 1960, but during the Reagan era of the 1980s when the Soviet Union was already on its last leg economically and militarily. Still, the constant dollar US national security budget actually soared by +42%, from $570 billion to the aforementioned $810 billion.

There’s no mystery as to why. During the Reagan Era the neocons hijacked the Republican party and cast its historic fiscal prudence to the winds, claiming that massive defense increases were needed because the Soviets were on the verge of a nuclear first strike capacity.

That latter was an abject lie as proven by the fact that less than 10% of the Reagan defense build-up actually went to the strategic nuclear arsenal. Most of it was for conventional forces including the 600-ship Navy, massive air power increases, new tanks, expanded air and sealift and extensive new cruise missiles and electronics warfare capabilities.

All of these latter forces had but one purpose: Namely, overseas power projection and the conduct of wars of invasion and occupation in a world in which the US was not threatened in the slightest by any industrial power with expansive conventional warfare capabilities.

The real effect of the Reagan defense build-up, therefore, was to supply future administrations with the military wherewithal to launch serial adventures in Regime Change. That is, real defense spending should have been cut in half or by $400 billion (FY 2025 $) upon the Soviet demise but was actually increased by $600 billion, thereby enabling military interventions from the First Gulf War onward.

Thirdly, the Forever Wars have been a physical, medical and fiscal disaster. Currently 5 million wounded veterans receive disability compensation and 9 million receive health care benefits. That is, one out of every 30 adult Americans is a VA client.

Accordingly, the “deferred cost” of Empire has literally shot the moon. In today’s dollars, veterans benefits have risen from $57 billion in 1962, mainly representing WWII veterans, to $370 billion. This 6.5X rise represents the frightful human and fiscal tab for the Empire.

Part 2

So, how did a peaceful Republic secure behind the great Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats, which until 1949 eschewed permanent “entangling alliances” abroad, end up with an global Empire that it doesn’t need and can’t even remotely afford?

The answer, we believe, lies in three strategic mistakes made on the banks of the Potomac in 1917, 1949 and 1991, respectively, that have enabled the rise of a self-fueling Warfare State. This fiscal monster, to repeat, can only be eliminated by returning to Jefferson’s admonition that America should pursue—-

Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.

For most of its history, of course, America had adhered to this advice yet had been invasion-free owing to the great Atlantic and Pacific ocean moats. These blessings of Providence, in turn, enabled America to remain a peaceful Republic because its favorable geography precluded the need for a large standing military, heavy taxes, a powerful central government and, most especially, the need for entangling alliances with foreign nations.

In fact, an early treaty with France was canceled by Congress in 1797, meaning that the nation was free of permanent alliances for the next 152 years. Even as late as 1919 Congress prudently rejected the entanglements of the League of Nations Treaty after Wilson’s foolish crusade blatantly failed to make the world safe for democracy.

The inexorable slide toward Empire thus incepted only in 1949 when the Senate ratified the NATO Treaty. But, as we will argue, that was based on utterly false lessons from the world wars and a misguided theory of collective international security.

To be sure, Jefferson’s admonition had preiviously been the default position of American governance. This was demonstrated by the radical demobilization of military forces even after America had uncharacteristically elected to go to war on the world stage in both 1917 and 1941.

Thus, the US military budget on the eve of World War I was just $11 billion when expressed in present day dollars and amounted to a slim 0.9% of GDP. But after Wilson plunged American forces into the stalemated trenches on the Western Front, constant dollar military spending soared 18-fold to $194 billion by war’s end.

That amounted to nearly 15% of GDP at the wartime peak but immediately upon the armistice a sweeping demobilization began. By 1924, 100% of the troops were home and military spending bottomed out at just $12 billion. That amounted to a 93% reduction from the wartime peak and just 0.8% of GDP.

The pre-war status quo ante had thus been fully restored, implying that the lurch into a foreign war had amounted to a one-off venture, and a bad one at that.

Indeed, US intervention in the Great War had been a calamitous mistake. On the date Congress declared war (April 6, 1917) there was not even the slightest chance of a German attack on America. By then the German Fleet was quarantined in its Jutland home-port by the Royal Navy and all sides to the conflict were running out of draftable men, materiale, morale and fiscal resources.

Yet that Woodrow Wilson had plunged the US into the stalemated carnage of the old world for the vainglorious purpose of acquiring a powerful seat at the post–war peace conference is indisputable based on the testimony of his intimate alter ego, Colonel House. So doing, Wilson tipped the balance on the Western Front to a victory by the Entente powers led by England and France.

That is to say, the natural end to this pointless “world war” would have left all the sides exhausted, bankrupt and demoralized, and their respective domestic “war parties” subject to massive repudiation at the post-war polls. But the arrival of two million fresh American doughboys and massive armaments from Washington literally rechanneled history, enabling a vindictive peace of the victors at Versailles—a travesty that sowed the seeds for the even more calamitous second world war.

Yet it can’t be gainsaid that Wilson’s foolish intervention encouraged a last futile offensive by Russia in the summer of 1917, the failure of which soon gave birth to the bloody revolution of Lenin and Stalin. Likewise, the parceling out of the parts and pieces of Germany to France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium and others by the victors at Versailles fostered the stab-in-the-back myth and revanchist campaigns on which Hitler rode to power.

More importantly still, the alleged “lessons” of the interwar period and WWII were falsely played and replayed in the years after 1945. To wit, the Wilson–enabled rise of Hitler and Stalin did not happen, as claimed, because the good people of England and America slept through the 1920s and 1930s. These monsters of the 20th century were not resident in the DNA of nations nor do they continuously lurk among the lesser tinpots who rise from time to time to authoritarian tyranny among the far flung nations of the earth.

To the contrary, they were aberrations—freaks of historical happenstance. That means that even after the two catastrophic world wars there was no baseline case for Empire as a requisite of America’s homeland security. Washington and Jefferson were still correct even in 1946 and beyond.

For a brief moment after WWII ended, in fact, Jefferson’s admonition had prevailed yet again when another massive post-war demobilization occurred, laying the ground for a return to the pre–1914 status quo ante.

Accordingly, the war-weary Washington policy makers were absolutely correct when they brought America’s 12 million-man expeditionary force home, reducing it to 1.3 million by 1948, and also abruptly closed the fiscal sluice-gates to what had become America’s Brobdingnagian war budget.

When translated into present day dollars there’s no room for doubt: Military spending in FY 2025 dollars dropped form $1.7 trillion in 1945 to just $125 billion by 1948, marking another stunning 93% reduction in the post-war military budget.

And well it should have. At that point there was absolutely no military threat anywhere on the planet to the homeland security and liberty of America.

Japan’s leading cities had been fried alive by horrendous nuclear and conventional bombing assaults and Germany’s industry had been laid waste by nightly bomber storms for months on end

That’s to say nothing, of course, of the prostate corpus of Stalinist Russia, which had suffered 27 million military and civilian deaths due to bombs, bullets, starvation, disease, pestilence, atrocities and other barely imaginable inhuman afflictions. And that was atop the destruction of 32,000 industrial enterprises and upwards of 70,000 towns and villages—all leaving tens of millions of Soviet citizens destitute.

In some kind of ghoulish absolution, therefore, the slate had been wiped clean. There wasn’t even a scant reason for American expeditionary forces to remain outside the homeland after 1945—nor for bases, alliances and commitments to intervene anywhere abroad that would put American servicemen in harms’ way.

Part 3

And yet Washington’s incipient “War Party” of military contractors and globe-trotting officialdom gestated in the heat of World War II was not about to go quietly into the good night. Instead, the Cold War was midwifed on the banks of the Potomac when President Truman fell under the spell of war-hawks like Secretary James Byrnes, Dean Acheson, James Forrestal and the Dulles brothers, who were loath to go back to their mundane lives as civilian bankers, politicians or peacetime diplomats.

So exactly 11 months after Hitlers’ demise at his own hand in his bunker and a mere eight months after Armageddon had been visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the out-of-power but inveterate war-mongering Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton Missouri.

That opening call to the Cold War was powerfully seconded barely 10 months latter when the US president delivered his “Truman Doctrine” speech to the Congress. That latter was a belligerent oration which laid the planking for the post-1947 web of entangling alliances and the budget-crushing American Empire it fostered.

It can be well and truly said, however, that the ruckus in Greece and Turkey caused by local communist parties, which was the basis for Truman’s declaration, didn’t amount to a hill-of-beans with respect to the homeland security of America.

Yes, Stalin wanted a port on the Turkish Dardanelles, as had all the Russian Czars for generations before him. But so what?

Likewise, after a decade of brutal political and economic oppression by both a homegrown dictatorship and the Nazi occupiers, the Greek people were seeking more relief than could be delivered by the sickly  King George II. So they were understandably lured by the false promises of the communist left.

But, again, so what?

The population of Greece at the time was a mere 7.3 million and even in today’s dollars its GDP was just $50 billion and $7,000 per capita, meaning that Greece was a museum piece of western history that had dwindled to an economic cipher. Had the local communist party come to power that misfortune for the Greek people would have had no bearing on America’s homeland security 5,000 miles away on the far side of the Atlantic moat.

As it happened, the author of the Truman Doctrine was Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, who was a pompous Yale-trained international lawyer from Washington’s elite Covington & Burling. He’d had been a New Dealer during the early 1930s. but then came back to the State Department in 1941, where he had designed the American/British/Dutch embargo against Japan.

In thereby paving the way to Pearl Harbor he actually became the “trigger man” for America’s entry into World War II by unilaterally shutting-off 100% of Japan’s oil while FDR was away meeting with Churchill at the famous “Atlantic Charter” confab in Newfoundland in August 1941.

Acheson was also an inveterate anglophile who apparently suffered from “empire-envy”. He thus imagined that America should step into Great Britain’s imperial shoes when it emerged economically crippled from WWII and could no longer provide aid to Greece and Turkey.

So upon such advice from the Brits in February 1947, Acheson had sprung into action. In a pivotal meeting shortly thereafter with Congressional leaders, Acheson articulated what would later become known as the “domino theory.”

He stated that more was at stake than Greece and Turkey, for if they should fall communism would likely spread south to Iran and as far east as India. Acheson reportedly concluded that “not since the days of Rome and Carthage” had such a polarization of power existed.

That was utter poppycock. Should the people of Iran and India have made the stupid mistake of voting in their small but noisy communist parties, it would have posed no material threat whatsoever to the military security of Americans.

The Greek-Turkey aid gambit of March 1947, of course, was just the opening salvo. Soon the baleful idea that communist political gains anywhere in democratic Europe were to be viewed as cause for national security alarums gathered momentum on the banks of the Potomac.

Consequently, the modest aid to Greece and Turkey quickly ballooned into the Marshall plan announced in June 1947. Again, in today’s dollars the Marshall plan provided upwards of $175 billion to Western European countries between 1948 and 1951.

Needless to say, by virtue of doling out such tremendous sums of money Washington was soon knee-deep in the domestic politics, economics and inter-country intrigues of post-war Europe.

But why? There was not a snowballs’ chance in the hot place that a communist France or red Luxembourg would have been a military threat to the US. Or even that in league with Soviet Russia they would have posed a conventional military challenge on the New Jersey shores 4,000 miles to the further side of the Atlantic moat.

Indeed, the US had left WWII with the greatest assemblage of naval power in human history—including 28 aircraft carriers, 23 battleships, 72 cruisers, 377 destroyers, and hundreds of auxiliary vessels. Altogether this amounted to 10 million tons of naval vessel capacity or more than six times the 1.5 million tons of the Soviet Navy, whose fleets consisted of far fewer and far less lethal warships.

Needless to say, therefore, neither the Truman Doctrine nor the Marshall plan advanced America’s military security in any material manner. The requisite muscle to defend the American shorelines and airspace had already been bought and paid for during WWII.

But these politico-economic programs did grease the slippery slope to NATO and entangling alliances and interventions stretching to all four corners of the planet. And they did most definitely set off alarm bells in the Kremlin, where the hyper-paranoid Joseph Stalin everywhere and always expected treachery from friend and foe alike.

That was a given—considering the blood-soaked path by which he had climbed to absolute power in the Soviet Union itself and the treachery of Hitler’s double-cross after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 and the subsequent devastating invasion of Russia by the Nazi.

So it is not surprising that Stalin soon suspected that his wartime allies—especially with FDR and Churchill gone—were laying the groundwork for the isolation and encirclement of Soviet Russia, exactly as the allied powers had attempted after WWI.

To be sure, Stalin was among the most wretched rulers ever to oppress a decent-sized chunk of mankind, and would have remained a blight on his own countrymen and ogre before the world during the remaining six years of his despicable life. But he was no threat to the American homeland as the now open archives of the old Soviet Union prove in spades.

These documents, in fact, amount to the national security dog which didn’t bark. Dig, scour, search and forage thru them as you might. Yet they will fail to reveal any Soviet plan or capability to militarily conquer western Europe.

They show, therefore, that Washington’s standing up of NATO was a giant historical mistake. It was not needed to contain Soviet military aggression, but it did foster a half-century of hegemonic folly in Washington and a fiscally crushing Warfare State.

It is in the nature of human history, it seems, that a wrong path taken like Wilson’s 1917 error frequently begets another baleful turn. The slippery slope here had further materialized when Britain and America had needed to ally with the vile red tyrants of Moscow to rid the world of the Hitlerian nightmare that rose up from the ashes of Versailles.

Indeed, this wartime alliance with the devil seemed so urgent to both Churchill and FDR that they more or less ceded the nations of eastern Europe to the then advancing Red Army at the Yalta Conference in February 1945.

In return for Stalin’s continued march toward Berlin, the Big Three principals reached an understanding that the Soviet Union would exert significant influence over Eastern Europe from Poland down to Yugoslavia.

Of course, free elections and democratic governments were to arise in areas occupied by the Red Army, but neither Churchill nor FDR provided any enforcement mechanism. It was a case of saying Eastern Europe is in your sphere of influence, Uncle Joe—by wink from the cynical Churchill and by nod from the doddering Roosevelt.

For his part, of course, Stalin was then in the business of rescuing his bloody regime from the near extinction event that had accompanied the Nazi invasion. His aim, therefore, was not about the ideological project of extending communism westward.

Instead, it was focused on driving the remnants of the Wehrmacht from his own country and establishing an invincible “cordon sanitaire” from the Baltic to the Adriatic, as Churchill himself later charged. Never again would marauding armies from Europe plunder the Russian motherland.

Needless to say, the arrival of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO— within 25 months between March 1947 and April 1949–sent Stalin’s wartime understandings into a tailspin. Slowly at first and then aggressively he developed a paranoid certainty that his capitalist allies were once again in the business of attempting to encircle and destroy the Soviet Union.

This Soviet departure from the cooperative modus operandi of the wartime alliance thus arose from yet another unforced error in Washington. We are referring to the latter’s badly misplaced fears that deteriorating economic conditions in Western Europe could lead to the aforementioned communist parties coming to political power in France, Italy and elsewhere.

To be sure, communist governments in Western Europe would have been a misfortune for any electorate which stupidly put them in power. But that would have been a domestic governance problem over there, not a threat to the American homeland over here.

Nevertheless, Washington’s gratuitous antidote for what was essentially an internal political problem in western Europe was a sweeping course of economic and military interventions that were clinically described as “containment” measures designed only to keep the Soviet Union in its Yalta lane.

They were not meant to be the prelude to an attack on eastern Europe or Moscow itself, but if you examine a thousand random documents from the archives of the Soviet foreign ministry or even the correspondence of Stalin himself it is readily apparent that these initiatives were viewed in Moscow as anything but a polite message to stay in lane.

To the contrary, they were seen on the Soviet side as an incipient assault on the Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe that Stalin believed he had won on the blood-soaked battlefields against the Nazi.

To be sure, writing off this string of what came to be called “captive nations” would have amounted to an embrace of realpolitik that would have made moralists and anti-communist ideologues bristle. But abandonment of Eastern Europe per the Yalta zones of influence scheme was exactly what became Washington’s de facto policy until the very end of the Cold War in 1991, anyway.

That is to say, the uprisings against the Soviet hegemon in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981 generated no response from the West beyond empty speeches and hortatory resolutions from western parliaments. The whole policy of “containment”, therefore, was actually just a large-scale effort by Washington to steer European politics away from the communist Left.

But why in the hell was thwarting the foolishness of communism in Europe America’s business at all?

That is, NATO was essentially an instrument of political control on the European side of the Atlantic, not a military shield that added any incremental security for the citizens domiciled on the North American side of the pond.

So the question recurs as to exactly why was America’s fully warranted post-war demobilization reversed after 1947 for no good reason of homeland military security?

Part of the answer is embedded in the popular Keynesian theorem which held that post-war demobilization would result in a devastating collapse of so-called “aggregate demand” and a resulting spiral into depression unless treated with aggressive counter-cyclical fiscal stabilization measures.

Since most of post-war Europe was fiscally incapacitated, economic aid proffered by Washington through the Marshall plan, therefore, amounted to a surrogate form of Keynesian stabilization against a depressionary relapse.

Needless to say, the hive mind on the Potomac had it all wrong, and the evidence was right in its own backyard.

During the very first year of demobilization the US private sector economy came bounding out of the starting gates after being freed from wartime controls. Real private GDP grew by nearly 27% in 1946 over prior year and never looked back, expanding by 50% through 1950.

And it did so with no fiscal stabilization help from Washington, which was blocked by a Republican Congress, even as the American economy never came close to tumbling into the feared Keynesian abyss.

That the prevailing Keynesian theorem was just plain wrong was also well illustrated by the contemporaneous economic rebound in the western zone of Germany. The latter’s economy took off well before the Marshall Plan aid made any substantial impact owing to Ludwig Erhard’s famous turn to currency reform and free market policies.

In short, Washington’s Soviet “containment” policies were unnecessary as a matter of America’s homeland military security. Yet based on fuzzy thinking about economics and the taste for international power politics that had been acquired by Washington’s ruling class during WWII the US stumbled into the very entangling alliances that Washington and Jefferson had forsworn.

Part 4

The Soviet Union’s acquisition of the A-bomb in 1949 did not change the equation or gainsay the case that the entanglements of the Marshall Plan and NATO were a mistake. Crucially, neither did it create a military requirement for US air bases in Europe or alliances with European countries.

Instead, home territories and the open oceans and skies turned out to be more than adequate for basing the nuclear arsenals of both sides.

Indeed, once both sides had the A-bomb the age of nuclear deterrence or MAD (mutual assured destruction) commenced. Notwithstanding the fringe views of the likes of Herman Khan, nuclear war was soon deemed to be unwinnable and the focus shifted to the ability to reliably deliver a devastating second strike in response to a potential nuclear provocation.

This “assured” destruction was itself the defense against nuclear attack. But to be an effective deterrent the opposing side had to believe that its opponent’s ability to deliver was operationally full-proof and highly certain to happen.

In this respect, during the strategic bomber age of the 1950s the US established such deterrence early on—with the introduction of the Boeing B-52 in 1955 removing any doubt.

The B-52 had a range of nearly 9,000 miles without aerial refueling, even as it carried a payload of A-bombs far heavier than any previous aircraft, was powered by far more reliable engines and could attain altitudes beyond the reach of Soviet interdiction.

As it happened, the Soviets were late to the strategic bomber game, even after they detonated a serviceable nuke in August 1949. At the time and for several years to follow the Soviets relied upon a reverse-engineered copy of America’s earlier, far less capable B-29 to deliver their A-bombs. Soviet bombers thus faced significant range and payload capacity challenges, which made it difficult to deliver a meaningful number of nukes to the U.S. without risking detection and interception.

The Soviets soon learned the deterrence game, however, when they were the first to demonstrate a successful ICBM in mid-1957. Yet not withstanding the vaunted “missile gap” charge by JFK during the 1960 campaign, the Soviet Union had only deployed four ICBMs by 196o.

The United States’ own first successful ICBM tests didn’t occur until October 1959. But by the end of the following year it had deployed approximately 20 Atlas ICBMs, which figure grew to 129 ICBMs by the peak of the liquid fueled rocket era in 1962. The missile gap, alas, was massively in the US’ favor.

As the 1960s unfolded, both sides developed far larger numbers of more powerful, reliable and securely-protected, solid-fuel ICBMs, but neither the logic nor logistics of nuclear deterrence ever changed. To wit, the core national security policy of both sides remained based on the certainty of a devastating second strike retaliation against the cities and industries of a foe, delivered by ICBMs securely based in hardened underground silos in their home territories.

As technology evolved the same logic was extended to submarine based missiles, which were not only hidden even more securely in the deep ocean bottoms, but also required no allied partners to operate.

In short, by the time the Cold War reached it peak in the mid-1960s, two thing had been established. First, strategic nuclear deterrence was the heart of national security for both sides and was operated unilaterally from bases in the home country of each. In America’s case, therefore, the technological advances of the 20th century in no way negated the wisdom of the Founders’ 18th century admonition to eschew entangling alliances.

Secondly, throughout the entirety of the Cold War the Soviet Union never presented a meaningful threat of conventional military attack on the USA.

In fact, even at its military peak in the 1980s the Soviet Navy had but a single Nimitz class aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, and only a handful of amphibious ships and troop transports capable of reaching America. This rudimentary sealift capacity would have faced, in any event, insuperable challenges landing troops on the New Jersey coast owing to lack of air cover, antisubmarine protection and sufficient refueling logistics.

Thus, even in the second half of the 20th century, NATO was not any kind of militarily necessary defense asset for the US.

To the contrary, from the very get-go NATO was a make-work project for the State Department and foreign affairs officialdom including wartime spooks who were out of business after August 1945; and, at length, it became a taxpayer-funded marketing organization for the US military-industrial complex and its congressional pork barrel champions.

NATO was thus not about homeland military security but was actually a globalist project of international politics that eventually transformed Washington into a menace and the War Capital of the World. Accordingly, NATO and the whole string of entangling alliances it begat elsewhere on the planet, functioned to actually diminish America’s homeland security, even as it added mightily to its fiscal cost.

That’s because the nearly 300,000 US servicemen remaining in Europe during the Cold War and the scores of bases and facilities which supported them were stationed there as “trip wires”.

Their purpose was to bring the US to the fight immediately upon a Soviet incursion in western Europe. While the latter was an exceedingly low-probability contingency, it should have been addressed, in any case, by Europe’s own military capabilities from its own fiscal resources. After all these years, Donald Trump is absolutely correct on that matter.

As the great Senator Robert Taft held at the time, the modest threat to homeland security presented by the war-ravaged corpus of the Soviet Union and the collectivist disaster imposed on China by Mao could have been readily handled with a invincible nuclear deterrent and fortress defense of America’s airspace and shorelines. As he said in his speech against ratification of the NATO Treaty,

… If we undertake to arm all the nations around Russia from Norway on the north to Turkey on the south, and Russia sees itself ringed about gradually by so-called defensive arms from Norway and Denmark to Turkey and Greece, it may form a different opinion…. how would we feel if Russia undertook to arm a country on our border; Mexico, for instance?

For want of doubt, just consider that every single war fought after the 1949 NATO Treaty ratification was unecessary and a blatant waste of American treasure and blood—to say nothing of the millions of foreigners who have been killed and maimed by these military operations.

That is to say, how in the world was America’s homeland security enhanced by the pointless bloodbath on the Korean peninsula just one year after NATO’s birth? Had China and the regime in Pyongyang prevailed would Seoul today actually look that much different than Shanghai or would it matter?

Likewise, what was accomplished by the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953? Since that paved the way for restoration of the brutal thievery of the Shah and the even more benighted rule of the mullahs who replaced him, exactly what was the point? Denying the Soviets a Persian Gulf port for a blue water Navy that it never actually had?

Soon came the 1954 partition of Vietnam, its own civil war and an utterly heinous Washington intervention that brought death to 58,000 American soldiers along with 300,000 wounded and 75,000 severely disabled for life. And that’s to say nothing of 3.4 million Vietnamese—60% of whom were civilians—whose lives were snuffed out and for what?

Well, apparently so that this “domino” would not fall into the laps of the Chicoms, which were allegedly doing the bidding of the Kremlin? Yet what in the world did this slaughter contribute to America’s homeland security then, and most especially now?

After all, three decades after the Soviets passed into the dustbin of history and 52 years after Nixon went to Beijing and was feted by Mao, Vietnam remains an “unfallen” domino. Rather than being under the thumb of Beijing, in fact, the red capitalists of Vietnam are now exporting even cheaper shoes and shirts to America, thereby taking away market share on Walmart shelves from the red capitalists of China.

Indeed, in the light of history all of the Forever Wars and interventions that flowed from the Empire which was built upon the false foundation of NATO were not just pointless; they were tantamount to criminal undertakings—given their historical pointlessness.

And yet and yet. The list of interventions goes on and on—almost always on the grounds that these disasters are necessary to support local “allies” or bolster regional stability—with the middle east iterations of this canard being especially loathsome.

The first Gulf War, for instance, amounted to a spat between Saddam Hussein and the Emir of Kuwait over directional drilling in the Rumaila oilfield that straddled their border. But so frickin’ what!

There is not the slightest case that this intervention on behalf of a purported “ally” in Kuwait that we didn’t need in the first place had any benefit to the homeland security of America. It simply provided occasion for a CNN reality TV show about tank battles in the desert.

The same can be said of the shock and awe campaign a decade later that finally suspended Saddam from the end of a rope—only to open Iraq to anti-American chaos led by the dominant vengeance-seeking Shiite population. Ditto for Libya, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Lebanon—all victims of Washington conducted or supplied military assaults that had absolutely nothing to do with the military defense of the North American continent.

Indeed, the interventions box-score since Washington abandoned the Founders’ wisdom regarding foreign entanglements is approximately 0 wins, 12 losses.  Every single one of these significant interventions in behalf of entangling alliances and Washington’s global Empire have been a failure.

Part 5

That surely has profound implications. It must perforce mean that the predicate on which they were based was deeply flawed.

In fact, the case for a true America First policy—that is, returning to the pre-1948 status quo ante and a proper Fortress America military posture—has powerfully strengthened during the last three decades.

That’s because in the world of 2025 the only theoretical military threat to America’s homeland security is the possibility of nuclear attack or blackmail in the form of a First Strike capacity so overwhelming, lethal and effective that an adversary could simply call out checkmate and demand Washington’s surrender.

Fortunately, there is no nation on earth that has anything close to the Nuclear First Strike force that would be needed to totally overwhelm America’s triad nuclear deterrent and thereby avoid a retaliatory annihilation of its own country and people if it attempted to strike first.

After all, the US has 3,700 active nuclear warheads, of which about 1,800 are operational at any point in time. In turn, these are spread under the seven seas, in hardened silos and among a fleet of 66 strategic bombers—all beyond the detection or reach of any other nuclear power.

For instance, the Ohio class nuclear submarines each have 20 missile tubes, with each missile carrying an average of four-to-five warheads. That’s 90 independently targetable warheads per boat. At any given time 12 of the 14 Ohio class nuclear subs are actively deployed, and spread around the oceans of the planet within a firing range of 4,000 miles.

So at the point of attack that’s 1,080 deep-sea nuclear warheads cruising along the ocean bottoms that would need to be identified, located and neutralized before any would be nuclear attacker or blackmailer even gets started. Even Russia’s vaunted hypersonic missiles couldn’t find and take out by surprise the US sea-based deterrent.

And then there are the roughly 300 nukes aboard the 66 strategic bombers, which also are not sitting on a single airfield Pearl Harbor style waiting to be obliterated either, but are constantly rotating in the air and on the move.

Likewise, the 400 Minutemen III missiles are spread out in extremely hardened silos deep underground across a broad swath of the upper Midwest. Each missile currently carries one nuclear warhead in compliance with the Start Treaty but could be MIRV’d in response to a severe threat, creating upwards of a thousand more retaliatory warheads.

Needless to say, there is no way that America’s nuclear deterrent can be neutralized by a blackmailer. And that gets us to the heart of the case for drastically downsizing America’s military muscle. To wit, according to the most recent CBO estimates the nuclear triad will cost only about $75 billion per year to maintain over the next decade, including allowances for periodic weapons upgrades.

That’s right. The core component of America’s military security requires only 7% of today’s massive military budget. Moreover, the sea-based ballistic missile force is estimated to cost just $188 billion over the entire next decade or only 1.9% of the $10 trillion CBO defense baseline.

So after setting aside $75 billion per year for the strategic nuclear triad, how much of the remaining $900 billion+ DOD budget would needed in a post-NATO world shorn of America’s entangling alliances, foreign bases and foolish overseas commitments—such as the utter folly of decreeing which Chinese political faction is permitted to rule Taiwan.

And please don’t say because semiconductors. Beijing actually practices the reverse of Lenin’s aphorism. That is to say, to keep their subjects fat and happy Beijing’s rulers will sell us shirts, shoes, solar panels, semiconductors and even the rope to hang them with if they should ever foolishly attack the American homeland.

So the question recurs: In addition to an invincible nuclear deterrent what would be the cost of a conventional Fortress America defense of the continental shorelines and airspace?

The starting point is that a conventional invasion by an adversary would require a massive military armada many times the size of current US forces, huge air and sealift resources and humongous supply lines and logistics capacities.

You also need an initial GDP of say $50 trillion to sustain what would be the most colossal mobilization of weaponry and materiale in human history. And that’s to say nothing of needing to be ruled by suicidal leaders willing to risk the nuclear destruction of their own countries in order to accomplish, what? Occupy Denver?

Obviously, no nation has the GDP or military heft to successful execute an invasion of the American homeland. Russia’s GDP is a scant $2 trillion, not the $50 trillion that would needed for it to put invasionary forces on the New Jersey shores. And its ordinary defense budget apart from the SMO is $75 billion, which amounts to about four weeks of waste in the Pentagon’s $950 billion monster.

As for China, it doesn’t have the sustainable economic heft to even think about landing on the California shores because it has accumulated in excess of $50 trillion of debt in barely two decades!

Rather than growing organically in the historic capitalist mode, it printed, borrowed, spent and built like there was no tomorrow. The resulting simulacrum of prosperity would not last six months if China’s $3.6 trillion global export market—-the source of the hard cash that keeps its Ponzi upright—were to crash, which is exactly what would happen if it tried to invade America.

Indeed, when it comes to the threat of a conventional military invasion the vast Atlantic and Pacific moats are even greater barriers to foreign military assault in the 21st century than they so successfully proved to be in the 19th century. That’s because today’s advanced surveillance technology and anti-ship missiles would consign an enemy naval armada to Davy Jones’ Locker nearly as soon as it steamed out of its own territorial waters. With today’s military technologies there can be no Pearl Harbor redux.

Indeed, America’s ostensible “enemies” actually have no invasionary capacity at all. Russia has only one aircraft carrier—the aforementioned 1980s era relic which has been in dry-dock for repairs since 2017 and is equipped with neither a phalanx of escort ships and suite of attack and fighter aircraft nor even an active crew.

Likewise, China has just three aircraft carriers—two of which are refurbished rust buckets purchased from the remnants of the old Soviet Union (actually Ukraine!).

In short, neither China nor Russia will be steaming their tiny 3 and 1 carrier battle groups toward the US shores any time soon. An invasionary force that had any chance at all of surviving dense flocks of US cruise missiles, drones, jet fighters, attack submarines and electronics warfare, we’d dare say, need to be 100X larger.

Again, there is also no GDP in the world—$2 trillion for Russia or $18 trillion for China—that is even remotely close in size to the $50 trillion, or even $100 trillion, that would be needed to support such an invasionary force without capsizing the adversary’s home economy.

Still, Washington maintains a globe-spanning conventional war-fighting capability driven by NATO and other foreign entanglements fully one-third of a century after the Soviet Empire collapsed and China went the Red Capitalist route of deep global economic integration.

We are referring, of course, to the 173,000 US troops in 159 countries and the network of 750 bases in 80 countries. This includes —

• 19 bases and nearly 34,000 troops in Germany.
• 44 bases and 12,250 troops in Italy.
• 120 bases and 53,700 troops in Japan.
• 73 bases and 26,400 troops in South Korea

All told, Washington equips, trains and deploys an armed force of 2.86 million not for purposes of homeland defense but overwhelmingly for missions of overseas offense, invasion and occupation all over the planet. So if Washington withdrew from NATO and its clones, conventional military requirements would shrink drastically.

For instance, a post-NATO military posture would eliminate most of the nearly one-million man standing US Army. The latter would have no uses abroad because there would be no cause for wars of foreign invasion and occupation, while the odds of any foreign battalions and divisions reaching America for hand-to-hand combat with the US Army in, say North Carolina, are virtually non-existent.

With a proper coastline garrison of missiles, attack submarines and jet fighters any invading army would become shark bait long before it saw the shores of California or New Jersey.

Yet the 462,000 active-duty army soldiers at $112,000 per year each have an annual budget cost of $55 billion, while the 506,000 army reserve costs upwards of $16 billion. And on top of this force structure, of course, you have $77 billion for operations and maintenance and $53 billion for procurement, RDT&E and everything else (based on the FY 2025 budget request).

In all, the current Army budget totals nearly $200 billion, and virtually all of that massive expenditure–nearly 3X the total defense budget of Russia—is deployed in the service of NATO and Empire, not homeland defense. It could readily be cut by 70% or $140 billion.

Likewise, the US Navy and Marine Corps spends $59 billion annually on 515,000 active-duty forces and  88,000 reserves. Yet if you look at the core requirements of a Fortress America defense posture, these forces and expenses are way over the top, as well.

By core missions were refer to the Navy component of the strategic nuclear triad and the Navy’s large force of attack and cruise missile submarines. As it happens, the direct manpower requirements for the 14 Ohio-class Strategic Nuclear Subs is about is about 10,000 military personal when Admirals, overhead, support and woke compliance is included (or not).

Likewise, the 50 or so attack and cruise missile subs have two crews of 132 officers and enlisted men for each boat, for a direct requirement of 13,000 and an overall total of 20,000 including Admirals and overhead.

In short, the core Navy missions of a Fortress America defense involve about 30,000 servicemen or less than 6% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps.

On the other hand, the totally unnecessary carrier battle groups, which operate exclusively in the service of Empire, have crews of 8,000 each when you count the escort ships and suites of aircraft, meaning that the 11 carrier battle groups and their infrastructure require 88,000 direct military personnel and 140,000 overall when you include the usual support and overhead.

Finally, the active-duty force of the Marine Corps is 175,000, and that’s entirely an instrument of invasion and occupation. It’s totally unnecessary for a homeland defense because the latter encompasses neither the halls of Montezuma nor the shores of Tripoli.

In short, fully 315,000 or 60% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps functions in the service of Empire. So, if you redefine the Navy’s missions to focus on strategic nuclear deterrence and coastal defense, it is evident that more than half of the Navy’s force structure is unnecessary muscle.

Instead, it functions in the service of global power projection, policing of the sea-lanes from the Red Sea to the East China Sea and platforming for wars of invasion and occupation.

Overall, the current Navy/Marine Corps budget stands at about $236 billion when you include $59 billion for military personnel, $81 billion for O&M, and $97 billion for procurement, RDT&E and others. A $96 billion or 40% cut, therefore, would still leave $140 billion for the core missions of a Fortress America defense.

Among the services, the $246 billion contained in the Air Force budget is considerably more heavily oriented to a post-NATO Fortress America versus Empire-based national security posture. Both the Minuteman land-based leg of the strategic triad and the strategic bomber forces are funded in this section of the defense budget.

And while a significant fraction of the budget for the manning, operations and procurement of conventional aircraft and missile forces is currently devoted to overseas missions, only the airlift and foreign base component of those outlays inherently function in the service of Empire.

Under a post-NATO Fortress America defense, therefore, a substantial part of the conventional air power, which includes upwards of 4,000 fixed wing and rotary aircraft, would be re-purposed to homeland defense missions, which would insure North American airspace was defended in depth. Accordingly, upwards of 75% or $180 billion of the current Air Force budget would remain in place, limiting the savings to $65 billion.

Finally, an especially sharp knife could be brought down upon the $181 billion component of the  current defense budget which is for the Pentagon and DOD-wide overhead operations. Fully $110 billion or 61% of that huge sum could be cut because it actually funds the hordes of DOD civilian employees and DC/Virginia based contractors which feast upon the Warfare State.

Most of these overhead expenditures are counter-productive. They actually fund the beltway think tanks, consultants, lobbyists and influence-peddling racketeers that keep the Empire defended and fully funded on Capitol Hill.

Overall, therefore, re-sizing the DOD portion of the national security budget to a post-NATO world would generate $410 billion of savings on a FY 2025 basis. Another $50 billion in savings could also be obtained from eliminating most funding for the UN, other international agencies, security assistance and economic aid—all of which service alliances and the Empire, not homeland security.

Adjusted for inflation through the end of the second Trump term in FY 2029 the total savings would come to $500 billion per year.

At the end of the day, Bush the Elder should have parachuted into NATO’s Ramstein air base in Germany and declared “mission accomplished” 34 years ago when the Cold War officially ended—even after 42 years of an unnecessary and largely counter-productive existence.

But now the time to bring the Empire home is surely long, long overdue. The $1.4 trillion annual cost of the Warfare State is no longer even remotely affordable as it fuels a spiraling public debt that menaces the very future of constitutional liberty and capitalist prosperity in the American Republic.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockton’s Contra Corner.

The post NATO: The Case To Get Out Now appeared first on LewRockwell.

I have criticized Donald Trump countless times for his pattern of promising, bloviating, then backing off. Or more often flip flopping. I coined the term the Trumpenstein Project to explain his befuddling behavior. He talked the talk, but never walked the walk. All toupee and no cattle. Well, now he can’t stop walking.

Trump 2.0 has unleashed a series of often fine looking executive orders in his first month back in office. Super model executive orders. He abolished birth right citizenship. He withdrew the U.S. from the WHO. He rolled back any recognition of the transgender lunacy. He declared an emergency at the southern border. He reaffirmed a commitment to free speech and against censorship, for what that’s worth. He is ending the annoying Daylight Savings Time. And now he’s establishing English as the official language of the United States. Now, they all sound really good, but how much will actually change? Already a federal judge has predictably ruled that the ban on birth right citizenship is unconstitutional. That’s what federal judges do under the odious guise of Judicial Review. In thirty days, really on his first day back in office, Trump did more than he did in his previous four years in the White House.

A few days ago, Trump staged (and it was definitely staged) the most remarkable meeting with a foreign leader that Washington, D.C. has ever seen. From the moment he greeted vertically challenged Ukrainian “democratic” leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy with a Trumpian troll at his casual attire, mocking him with “I see you got dressed up,” it was pure WWE theater. Zelenskyy has shown he is willing to wear a suit and tie, if the occasion calls for it. For instance, when he meets with Israeli “democratic” leader Bibi Netanyahu. During the meeting, which was aired live before the press, Trump and J.D. Vance both scolded the pathetic former Ukrainian comedian like he was a naughty schoolboy, not an upstanding world leader who once wowed audiences by playing the piano with his penis. Zelenskyy’s Boris Badenov impression just didn’t intimidate anyone, and Trump supposedly wound up throwing him out of the place.

Yes, Trump made certain to have his hands formed into the familiar triangle, as he met with the upstanding “democratic” leader of Ukraine. Just as Elon Musk made certain to flash similarly unnatural hand and finger formations, during his recent visit to the Oval Office, where one of his estimated one billion children wiped a booger on Trump’s desk or something. To be fair, I recall someone advising me, back in the misty days of America 1.0, that I should form my hands into a triangle when being interviewed. Something about how it displayed confidence and power. I don’t know, it didn’t work for me. I don’t see how you can feign power when the other party knows you don’t have it. All those weird things the rich and famous do with their hands obviously must be significant. They appear to be swearing allegiance to someone or something. Like wearing your guy’s letterman’s jacket. Or a blue collar name tag.

It would have been great to have video of Trump picking up the arrogant “democratic” leader with the Napoleon Complex, and tossing him onto the lawn of the White House. Maybe tarred and feathered him, using red, white and blue tar. Poor Volodymyr didn’t even to get to eat the lunch prepared in his honor. As Trump lashed out at him during the meeting, he certainly sounded the right themes. “You’re playing with millions of lives. You’re playing with World War III.” Zelenskyy appeared unmoved. And his fanbase in Hollywood and the state sponsored media were appalled at how disrespected he was. Treated horribly by the bully Trump and J.D. Vance, whom they never failed to denigrate for supposedly wearing eyeliner. I don’t know, isn’t that kind of bullying? It certainly would be if the eyeliner adorned the face of a random, obese, green haired, heavily tattooed transgender with a nose ring.

Those who somehow thought this cartoonish Bullwinkle villain in a black sweat suit, who refuses to consider a ceasefire or stop sacrificing his people in a hopeless cause, was the good guy, were reaffirming their commitment to war. Zelenskyy appears to want World War III. So does the entire American “Woke” Left. Nuclear weapons are so cool now! No Nukes? Sorry, can’t remember that. My memory is going- smoked a lot of pot back at those concerts. But nukes are a reasonable option when you #Stand with Ukraine. Sure, Zelenskyy banned all opposition parties and shut down newspapers who criticized him. But we paid Ben Stiller $4 million to slobber all over him, and Ben Stiller wouldn’t lie. And do I need to remind you what he can do with a piano? That certainly ought to count for something. Would Bono give a concert in the middle of an alleged war zone for just any “democratic” leader?

It is beyond my poor powers to fathom exactly what the purpose of the steel match encounter between Trump and Zelenskyy was. To make Trump look tough to the MAGA crowd? Why was the press there, and who was the guy who blasted Zelenskyy for his decidedly non-formal outfit? The most important question is; did Trump slip Zelenskyy yet another billion or so during his unceremonious exit from the White House? If Trump permits another penny- before he outlaws them- to be sent to this arrogant actor/dictator, then that destroys any pretense that this was a legitimate event. But I’m guessing that’s what happened. Or will happen. It’s a Trumpenstein thing, you wouldn’t understand. But if Trump stops the aid to Ukraine, and continues to lecture on the dangers of a World War III, then that would be a good thing. And it would cause more “Woke” warmongers’ heads to explode, which is always fun.

TDS levels were already on red alert, prior to the Zelenskyy carnival sideshow. We continue to hear allegations that Elon Musk and DOGE are really “cleaning house.” Firing government workers left and right, many of them the essential, hard working types that most of us are largely unaware of. One claim is that some of these terminated employees were “working on nuclear weapons” or something. That’s kind of vague, isn’t it? Actually, the claims on both sides are pretty dubious. Musk and Trump brag about saving a gazillion dollars or so already. Without eliminating any agencies. Just on auditing USAID. I’d like more details with that, please. And those with TDS are apoplectic about losing the opportunity to pay all those humble and lovable federal workers a very generous wage, along with a much better benefit package than those in the boring world of private industry receive.

I would like to know where all this public outrage was when countless American workers in private industry were kicked to the curb, through no fault of their own, in the past several decades. In the first sixteen years of this century alone, some 600,000 employees were laid off, outsourced, or replaced by cheap foreign labor by just eleven companies. The examples are never ending; IBM got rid of 60,000 employees in 1993. Sears and K-Mart laid off 50,000 in January 1993. Happy New Year! A T &T laid off 40,000 in 1996. Ford eliminated 35,000 workers in 2002. General Motors- 47,000 in 2009. Citigroup- 50,000 in 2008. These are just a few instances of the outsourcing/ downsizing fervor that gripped corporate America, beginning in the 1980s. Dell laid off 26,000 in 2024. I didn’t see any gnashing of teeth over that on social media. But there is a pussyhat-level of screeching over the prospect of government cutbacks.

Why this double standard? Why do the same people who snickered, “you should have learned new skills,” when some useless eater in private industry lost his/her/ job, abandon all reason over the prospect of scrutinizing federal workers? For the first time, I might add. Until now, no one working for the government had to worry about being outsourced. Replaced by a foreign visa worker. The joke goes that it’s impossible to be fired from the federal government. But it’s no joke. You have to do something really awful to lose a government job. So why then, is it so easy to be fired by a private company? As I can personally attest to, this is especially true in so-called “right to work” states. Where they can fire you without cause, as happened to me in 2018. What DOGE is suggesting is finally looking at what various public employees actually do, to earn their generous taxpayer provided income.

In private industry, we all have been scrutinized. I’ve had bosses that literally looked over your shoulder. Stared a hole through you while you were trying to concentrate on your work. That would never happen to any government worker. I had a friend who worked in the Post Office, back when they paid extraordinarily well, and had premium benefits. He described how there was some immigrant worker, whose job it was to sort mail by zip code, that routinely just tossed mail into various zip code slots without even looking at them. Imagine how many others like that there might be. That goes a long way towards explaining why it frequently takes so long for mail to travel such a short distance. My friend eventually grew tired of trying to figure out his job function- no one really supervised him- so he just followed the crowd and did whatever he wanted. I doubt he was the only government worker like this.

I have a lot of family members who work now, or have worked in the past, for the U.S. government. I live in the D.C. suburbs, after all. I see double and triple dippers every day when I’m walking my lovely dog Riley. I can understand how they, or any other government worker, would feel threatened by this. But most of the criticism is coming from those who don’t work for the government. Shouldn’t they be the least bit interested in seeing just what it is they’re paying for? If the urban legends about three hour lunches and the like are true, should those of us who are these workers’ de facto employers have any say about that? You have to have never had any contact with a phone representative from any government agency, to believe there isn’t massive incompetence among the ranks of federal workers. Wait in line at a Social Security office. Or a DMV location. Try contacting the IRS. Or calling your “representative.”

Yes, massive government firings would mean that all those largely “unskilled” workers would be competing for the dwindling number of jobs that pay a living wage, alongside all the “unskilled” workers who never had a government job. That situation has to be addressed. Either Trump oversees the building of a great number of new factories in this country, or you’re going to eventually have to pay millions of people a universal basic income. I think it would be cheaper to pay everyone a UBI, while eliminating all the other programs that supposedly offer assistance, but aren’t easy to get. Whether Elon Musk is planning to nefariously chip and vaccinate us or not, AI is here to stay, and will eliminate even more jobs. We outsourced our industry for good with all those horrific trade deals like NAFTA, which Trump often references with disdain. But those tariffs will mean nothing without new domestic factories.

And in the same week, we saw rumors and more rumors about the Epstein List finally being released. Attorney General Pam Bondi said she had it on her desk, then vented at the FBI for dragging its feet, then dragged her own feet. Eventually, a truly ridiculous photo-op of various conservative “influencers” was widely circulated, where the likes of Mike Cernovich, DC Draino (whoever that is), Liz Wheeler, and the Libs of TikTok woman were captured waving folders that read “The Epstein Files Phase 1.” This “Phase 1” apparently consisted of completely redacted pages. What exactly are the legal ramifications of this “list” anyhow? The authorities admitted taking videos and hard drives from Epstein’s mansion. Why aren’t any “influencers” waving them in public? As I’ve said, if Trump’s name is on any list, MAGA people will say it’s fake. If it’s not, those with TDS will say it’s fake.

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The concept of an impending apocalypse has been a source of fascination, fear, and speculation throughout human history. From ancient texts to modern science fiction, the notion that our civilization could come to an end has sparked countless theories and warnings. While some may dismiss these ideas as mere fantasy or superstition, there are observable trends and events that suggest the potential for catastrophic changes in our world. In this article, we will explore eight warning signs that could indicate an impending apocalypse.

1. Environmental Degradation

One of the most pressing indicators of an impending apocalypse is the rapid degradation of our environment. Climate change, deforestation, pollution, and loss of biodiversity are all symptoms of a planet in distress.

The rise in global temperatures, largely attributed to human activities such as burning fossil fuels and industrial practices, has led to more extreme weather events—hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, and flooding are becoming increasingly common. The accelerating melting of polar ice caps poses a direct threat to coastal communities worldwide. As ecosystems collapse and species go extinct at an unprecedented rate, the foundational elements that sustain life on Earth are unraveling.

This degradation does not only impact natural systems; it also poses significant risks to food security, water supply, and human health. As resources become scarcer and competition for them intensifies, social unrest and conflict may follow—potentially setting the stage for a more significant apocalyptic scenario.

2. Geopolitical Tensions

In an increasingly interconnected world, geopolitical tensions can escalate into larger conflicts with global ramifications. The rise of nationalism, authoritarianism, and territorial disputes has created a volatile international landscape. The possibility of nuclear confrontation remains a critical concern; nations possessing such weapons often find themselves in standoffs that could quickly spiral out of control.

Recent events highlight how fragile peace can be in certain regions. Disputes over resources like water and energy can inflame existing rivalries between nations, leading to potential warfare that could destabilize entire regions and lead to widespread chaos. Furthermore, cyber warfare has emerged as a new battlefield where digital attacks can disrupt critical infrastructure, sowing discord and fear among populations.

The combination of economic instability—often exacerbated by pandemics or climate disasters—can create perfect conditions for civil unrest. History has shown us that desperate times can lead to desperate measures: when people feel cornered or threatened, they may resort to extreme actions that could lead to societal collapse.

3. Economic Instability

Economic systems are inherently complex and interconnected; when one piece falters, the repercussions can be felt globally. Warning signs such as rising debt levels, stock market volatility, and increasing income inequality often precede major economic downturns.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed just how quickly economies can unravel due to unforeseen circumstances. Supply chain disruptions led to shortages of essential goods while unemployment rates soared in many countries. These factors combined with inflation have raised concerns about economic stability as governments struggle to provide support to their citizens.

As more people fall into poverty or see their standard of living decline, social cohesion may erode. Economic desperation can lead individuals or groups to act irrationally or violently in pursuit of survival. In a worst-case scenario, prolonged economic instability could trigger revolutions or regime changes—events that may serve as precursors to larger apocalyptic scenarios.

4. Pandemics and Global Health Crises

The world has witnessed how quickly a virus can spread across borders and disrupt daily life. The COVID-19 pandemic was a stark reminder of this reality—not only did it claim millions of lives but it also exposed weaknesses in global health systems.

As human populations continue to encroach upon wildlife habitats through urbanization and agriculture, the potential for zoonotic diseases (those transmitted from animals to humans) increases dramatically. Climate change also plays a role by shifting habitats and influencing disease patterns.

Emerging infectious diseases pose not only health risks but also social and economic challenges. Overwhelmed healthcare systems may struggle to cope with outbreaks; misinformation can spread rapidly online, leading communities into panic or denial rather than informed action. If unchecked, these global health crises could become more severe over time—potentially contributing to societal breakdowns reminiscent of apocalyptic narratives.

5. Technological Dependence

Our growing reliance on technology presents both remarkable advancements and substantial vulnerabilities. As societies become increasingly digitalized—from smart cities powered by AI algorithms to decentralized finance—the risks associated with technological failures become paramount.

Cybersecurity threats can undermine infrastructures essential for day-to-day life—from power grids to healthcare systems. A coordinated cyberattack could cripple vital services within hours; ransomware attacks have already demonstrated their capacity to disrupt businesses across various sectors.

Moreover, technological advancements bring ethical dilemmas that society struggles to address—questions surrounding artificial intelligence (AI), surveillance states, data privacy rights—creating divisions among populations struggling with these uncertainties. If mishandled or mismanaged, technology might contribute to more significant societal schisms or even lead us down dystopian paths akin to science fiction depictions of apocalypse scenarios.

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