Lew Rockwell Institute

From Chapter 4 of my book, Write like they’re your last words

Ray Kurzweil is a name you should get to know thoroughly, particularly his law of accelerating returns.  He’s achieved world fame for a number of reasons, two of which are his highly accurate predictions and his exponential view of technology.

Living with exponential trends is confounding because they mimic linear trends in their early stages then suddenly shoot skyward.  As Kurzweil often describes it, “If I count 30 steps linearly I get to 30.  If I count exponentially, 30 steps later I’m at a billion.  It makes a dramatic difference.”

Here’s the point: Technology is advancing at an exponential rate, but we experience it linearly.  If two points on an exponential curve are close  enough, the experience of moving from one to the other will seem linear.  Thus, our expectations and projections about the future are often based on the wrong scale — linear instead of exponential.

(Linear versus exponential: Linear growth is steady; exponential growth becomes explosive.  Source: The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology [2005], Ray Kurzweil)

As Kurzweil explains in The Singularity is Near [emphasis mine in all extracts],

Exponential growth is seductive, starting out slowly and virtually unnoticeably, but beyond the knee of the curve it turns explosive and profoundly transformative. The future is widely misunderstood. Our forebears expected it to be pretty much like their present, which had been pretty much like their past. Exponential trends did exist one thousand years ago, but they were at that very early stage in which they were so flat and so slow that they looked like no trend at all.

If Kurzweil is correct then before the middle of this century technology will reach a point he calls the Singularity, where the rate of change will be explosive.  The rapid pace will still be finite, but it will seem infinite to biologically unenhanced humans.  As he explains:

The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality.

If these prospects leave you uneasy you’re not alone.  Kurzweil, though, sees this state of affairs as a goal worth reaching.

All the machines we have met to date lack the essential subtlety of human biological qualities. Although the Singularity has many faces, its most important implication is this: our technology will match and then vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits.

Why do I mention all this in a book about writing?  Because you will be writing in Kurzweil’s world.

There are many high-IQ people who are in agreement with Kurzweil but who nevertheless talk about the future as if technology were an irrelevant consideration.  Political commentators especially have been speculating on presidential candidates for 2020 and 2024, as if the world will be essentially the same then as it is now in late 2016.

Maybe, maybe not, but the trend is clear: As technology advances individuals gain increasing control over their lives.  They’re not as dependent on the ones above them as the ones above them think they are.

If anything is clear about the 2016 presidential election it is the failure of the Establishment to push their favored candidate into the White House.  How did this happen?  A technology known as the Web.  As Gary North wrote in 2013,

What is going to shape the thinking of the American electorate is access to the Web, which enables people to read in-depth stories that interest them, and which interest people of similar perspectives. The social media will determine which news stories are read, not a handful of news screeners at the four major television networks. . . .

Technology is poised to redefine life-as-we-know-it.   There are numerous books that advance this outlook in great detail, among which are:

Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology,

The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology,

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization,

Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves.

And more recently,

The Singularity is Nearer

How to use AI (for Real People)

And putting technology in an economics context,

Human Action: Scholar’s Edition.

Technological change is coming at us in ways that resonate with science fantasy.  Nothing short of a global calamity will stop it.

You might be familiar with Moore’s Law and how it’s driving technological development.  It is and it isn’t.  Let’s clear this up.

In 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, published a paper in which he noted that the number of components on an integrated circuit doubled every year.  Since the cost of the integrated circuit would remain roughly constant, we would get twice the speed and twice the circuitry at the same price.  Though later revised to every two years, Moore’s prediction has proven to be remarkably accurate and is known eponymously as Moore’s Law.  Kurzweil gives us a sense of what this means:

When I was an undergraduate [in the late 1960s] we all shared a computer at MIT that took up half a building.  The computer in your cell phone is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful.  That’s a billion-fold increase in price/performance of computing since I was an undergraduate.

Many observers predict Moore’s Law will end within the next few years, and with it we’ll see tech development slow from a sprint to a walk.  But as Kurzweil frequently points out,

It is important to note that Moore’s Law of Integrated Circuits was not the first, but the fifth paradigm to provide accelerating price-performance. Computing devices have been consistently multiplying in power (per unit of time) from the mechanical calculating devices used in the 1890 U.S. Census, to Turing’s relay-based “Robinson” machine that cracked the Nazi enigma code, to the CBS vacuum tube computer that predicted the election of Eisenhower, to the transistor-based machines used in the first space launches, to the integrated-circuit-based personal computer which I used to dictate (and automatically transcribe) this essay.

He thinks the sixth paradigm of computing will be modeled on the structure of the human brain:

Chips today are flat (although it does require up to 20 layers of material to produce one layer of circuitry). Our brain, in contrast, is organized in three dimensions. We live in a three dimensional world, why not use the third dimension? The human brain actually uses a very inefficient electrochemical digital controlled analog computational process. The bulk of the calculations are done in the interneuronal connections at a speed of only about 200 calculations per second (in each connection), which is about ten million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits. But the brain gains its prodigious powers from its extremely parallel organization in three dimensions.

There are many technologies in the wings that build circuitry in three dimensions.

As he writes in The Singularity is Near, it is specifically information technology that is growing exponentially.  But this is far from a limiting factor:

We see information at every level of existence. Every form of human knowledge and artistic expression– scientific and engineering ideas and designs, literature, music, pictures, movies– can be expressed as digital information.

Nanotechnology represents the intersection of information technology with the physical world.  By controlling the structure of matter at an atomic level, nanotechnology will launch a revolution in manufacturing, including factories on a desktop.

We no longer expect just our dinner from the marketplace.  We expect better lives and are willing to pay for them.  Competition and market demand are driving technological development.

At this writing Uber is operating self-driving car service in Pittsburgh and Arizona.  As mentioned earlier, tech billionaires are funding research to discover ways to arrest and possibly reverse aging.  Within the next 20 years we will likely see a computer as human-like as anyone you know, only a million times smarter.  New methods of production based on atomically precise manufacturing will raise the poorest of the poor to living standards far beyond those of the developed world today, and with less ecological impact.

Moore’s Law will stall, but the exponential progression of technology will continue as long as civilization survives.

Pay attention to technology.  It’s paying attention to you.

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President Trump campaigned on getting the United States out of the Ukraine War on “Day 1”. It is now Day 211. The President continues to refer to the war as “Biden’s War,” but how many days must pass before it becomes “Biden & Trump’s War”? It’s time for President Trump to do what he should have done on Day 1 … Get America out.

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Thanks, Saleh Abdullah.

The New Yorker

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Many people wish they could have met a great figure in history. What would it be like to talk to Newton, to Tesla, to Shakespeare? Those of us lucky enough to know Dr. Ron Paul don’t have to speculate. We know one of the truly great figures in American history, the best Congressman we have ever had. I have known him for decades, and I’d like to tell you something about him as a person and about his achievements.

I had the rare honor of serving as Ron Paul’s congressional chief of staff and observed him in many proud moments in those days, and in his presidential campaigns.

Ron urged his followers to read and learn. Countless high school and college students began reading dense and difficult treatises in economics and political philosophy because Ron encouraged them to. Ron’s followers, meanwhile, were curious enough to dig beneath the surface. Is the state really a benign institution that can costlessly provide us whatever we might demand? Or might there be moral, economic, and political factors standing in the way of these utopian dreams?

It’s very hard to build up an army of young people intellectually curious enough to read serious books and consider ideas that go beyond the conventional wisdom they learned in school about government and market. It’s hard to build up a movement of people whose moral sense is developed enough to recognize that barking demands and enforcing them with the state’s gun is the behavior of a thug, not a civilized person. And it’s hard to persuade people of the counter-intuitive idea that society runs better and individuals are more prosperous when no one is “in charge” at all.

Yet Ron accomplished all these things.

As the person who reached more people with the message of liberty than anyone in our time, Ron has also taught us how that message can and must be spread. I want to talk about some of these lessons.

First and foremost, Ron is a critic of the warfare state. The subject of war cannot, and should not, be avoided.

Ron is not a pacifist – an ancient charge against those who oppose constant war. He believes in the right to self-defense, but he does not believe in the initiation of violence, whether by private criminals or the state. He is a man of peace and the golden rule, in his private life and his policy.

The war in Iraq, which was still a live issue when Ron first ran for the Republican nomination, had been sold to the public on the basis of lies that were transparent and insulting even by the US government’s standards. The devastation – in terms of deaths, maimings, displacement, and sheer destruction – appalled every decent human being.

Yes, the Department of Education is an outrage, but it is nothing next to the horrifying images of what happened to the men, women, and children of Iraq. If he wasn’t going to denounce such a clear moral evil, Ron thought, what was the point of being in public life at all?

Still, this is the issue strategists would have had him avoid. Just talk about the budget, talk about the greatness of America, talk about whatever everyone else was talking about, and you’ll be fine. And, they neglected to add, forgotten.

But had Ron shied away from this issue, there would have been no Ron Paul Revolution. It was his courageous refusal to back down from certain unspeakable truths about the American role in the world that caused Americans, and especially students, to sit up and take notice.

Worried about the budget? You can’t run an empire on the cheap. Concerned about TSA groping, or government eavesdropping, or cameras trained on you? These are the inevitable policies of a hegemon. In case after case, Ron pointed to the connection between an imperial policy abroad and abuses and outrages at home. While still in his thirties, Murray Rothbard wrote privately that he was beginning to view war as “the key to the whole libertarian business.” Here is another way Ron Paul has been faithful to the Rothbardian tradition. Time after time, in interviews and public appearances, Ron has brought the questions posed to him back to the central issues of war and foreign policy.

Inspired by Ron, libertarians began to challenge conservatives by reminding them that war, after all, is the ultimate government program. War has it all: propaganda, censorship, spying, crony contracts, money printing, skyrocketing spending, debt creation, central planning, hubris – everything we associate with the worst interventions into the economy.

But Ron Paul permanently changed the nature of the discussion on war and foreign policy. The word “nonintervention” rarely appeared in foreign-policy discussions before 2007. Opposition to war was associated with anti-capitalist causes. That is no longer the case.

In exposing the fraudulent American foreign policy debate, Ron exposed an overlooked truth about American political life. The debates Americans are allowed to have are ones in which the real decisions have already been made: income tax or consumption tax, fiscal stimulus or monetary stimulus, sanctions or war, later war or war right away. With debates like these, it hardly matters who wins. Ron pulled back the curtain on all of it. Ron kept insisting that there was no real foreign policy debate in America because all we were allowed to do was argue over what kind of intervention the US government should pursue. Whether intervention itself was desirable, or whether the bipartisan assumptions behind US foreign policy were sound – this was not even mentioned, much less debated

Of course, Ron applies his wisdom to the current war between Russia and the Ukraine. In contrast to brain-dead Biden and his gang of neo con warmongers, he urged us to stay out of it. Likewise, he wants us to avoid a confrontation with China. We can have friendly relations with both China and Russia, and neither country threatens us. Why provoke a war that could lead to the nuclear annihilation of the world? As Ron said in a recent article, “’War is a racket, wrote US Maj. General Smedley Butler in 1935. He explained: ‘A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.’”

Let’s look at the other key issue in Ron’s congressional career. After he suspended his 2008 campaign for president, he gave an extraordinary speech. No focus groups urged Ron to talk about the Federal Reserve. No politician had made an issue of the Fed in an election in its 100-year history. Stick to the script, the professionals would have said: lower taxes and lower spending, the monotonous refrain uttered by every Republican politician, who typically has no interest in carrying through with either one anyway.

Here again, had Ron adopted conventional political advice, he would have forfeited these historic moments and the Ron Paul phenomenon would have been greatly diminished, if not compromised altogether. Yet Ron pointed to the Fed as the source of the boom-bust cycle that has harmed so many Americans. His dogged insistence on this point got a great many Americans curious: what, after all, was the Fed, and what was it up to? An unlikely issue, to be sure, and yet it was his willingness to talk about it that in my view helps to account for much of his fundraising success. There was a small but untapped portion of the public that responded with enthusiasm to Ron’s very mention of the Fed, and they wanted more.

Of course, it’s not enough just to get rid of the Fed, essential as that is. We need sound money, and for Ron, following Mises and Rothbard, this means the gold standard.

In 1982, Ron Paul served on the U.S. Gold Commission to evaluate the role of gold in the monetary system. In fact, the Commission was his idea. It was carrying forth a promise made in the Republican platform.

Ron couldn’t pick the members, so from the beginning, the deck was stacked. The majority was dominated by monetarists, who saw gold as too scarce and paper as just fine. Ron Paul’s team was ready, however, with this marvelous minority report.

Rarely has a dissent on a government commission done so much good!

The result was The Case for Gold, and it was the greatest result of the commission. It covers the history of gold in the United States, explains that its breakdown was caused by governments, and explains the merit of having sound money: prices reflect market realities, government stays in check, and the people retain their freedom.

The scholarship and rigor impressed even the critics of the minority. Ron and Lewis Lehrman worked with a team of economists that included Murray Rothbard, who was the main author, so it is hardly surprising that such a book would result.

I am convinced that historians, whether or not they agree with him, will continue to marvel at Ron Paul for many, many years to come. Libertarians a century from now will be in disbelief at the very notion that such a man actually served in the US Congress of our time.

One of the most thrilling memories of the 2012 campaign was the sight of those huge crowds who came out to see Ron. His competitors, meanwhile, couldn’t fill half a Starbucks. When I worked as Ron’s chief of staff in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I could only dream of such a day.

Now what was it that attracted all these people to Ron Paul? He didn’t offer his followers a spot on the federal gravy train. He didn’t pass some phony bill. In fact, he didn’t do any of the things we associate with politicians. What his supporters love about him has nothing to do with politics at all.

Ron is the anti-politician. He tells unfashionable truths, educates rather than flatters the public, and stands up for principle even when the whole world is arrayed against him.

Of course, Ron Paul deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. In a just world, he would also win the Medal of Freedom, and all the honors for which a man in his position is eligible.

But history is littered with forgotten politicians who earned piles of awards handed out by other politicians. What matters to Ron more than all the honors and ceremonies in the world is all of you, and your commitment to the immortal ideas he has championed all his life.

It’s Ron’s truth-telling and his urge to educate the public that should inspire us as we carry on into the future.

Little did he know that those thankless years of pointing out the State’s lies and refusing to be absorbed into the Blob would in fact make him a hero one day. To see Ron speaking to many thousands of cheering kids, when all the while respectable opinion had been warning them to stay far away from this dangerous man, is more gratifying and encouraging than I can say. I was especially thrilled when a tempestuous Ron, responding to the Establishment’s description of his campaign as “dangerous,” said,” you’re darn right — I am dangerous— to them.”

Even the mainstream media has to acknowledge the existence of a whole new category of thinker: one that is antiwar, anti-Fed, anti-police state, and pro-market. The libertarian view is even on the map of those who despise it. That, too, is Ron’s doing.

Young people are reading major treatises in economics and philosophy because Ron Paul recommended them. Who else in public life can come close to saying that?

No politician is going to trick the public into embracing liberty, even if liberty were his true goal and not just a word he uses in fundraising letters. For liberty to advance, a critical mass of the public has to understand and support it. That doesn’t have to mean a majority, or even anywhere near it. But some baseline of support has to exist.

That is why Ron Paul’s work is so important and so lasting. And what is even more amazing is that Ron Paul continues to be a great leader and educator at an age when most people have long since retired. Throughout his 80s, he conducted a podcast and wrote a weekly column, and although he has just turned 90, he gives no signs of stopping. Many of his devoted admirers joined him in a wonderful birthday party at his ranch, and Tulsi Gabbard paid eloquent tribute to him. Let’s do everything we can to spread the teachings of this great American and hero!

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Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are about to make decisions that could radically alter the trajectory of human history.  When they meet in Alaska on Friday, the stakes will be incredibly high.  If they are able to agree to some sort of a deal, the world will rejoice.  But if the meeting goes badly, there will be immense pressure on western leaders to militarily intervene in Ukraine in order to prevent Russia from taking as much territory as it wants.  At the moment, Russian forces are moving forward quite rapidly.  If negotiations can stop them, western leaders will be thrilled.  But if talks fail, the conflict in Ukraine will dramatically escalate, and that will put us dangerously close to nuclear war.

On Wednesday, President Trump was asked about what will happen if the Russians do not agree to end the war.

President Trump responded by warning that there will be “very severe consequences”…

US President Donald Trump promised “very severe consequences” on Russia if its President Vladimir Putin doesn’t agree to end his war in Ukraine during the two leaders’ meeting on Friday.

“There will be consequences,” Trump just said during an event at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

Asked if that meant new sanctions or tariffs, Trump demurred.

“I don’t have to say,” he said, adding only: “There will be very severe consequences.”

This was not a wise thing to say just before such an important meeting.

As I have stated over and over again, threatening the Russians will not work.

If Trump insists on making threats, it will backfire severely.

The Russians have already said that they are willing to end the war, but they want certain things in return.

Of course what the Russians have proposed is not acceptable to the Ukrainians or to our European allies at all, and that is not likely to change any time soon.

A virtual conference that included Trump and leaders from all over Europe was held on Wednesday, and President Trump felt that it went very well…

The president joined a call earlier on Aug. 13 with Zelenskyy and European leaders, two days before Trump’s one-on-one summit with Putin in Alaska. Trump is trying to push Moscow into a peace deal that Kyiv and its allies fear will include the loss of significant territory seized by Russia in its three-year war on Ukraine.

“I would rate it a 10,” Trump told reporters on August 13 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. “Very friendly.”

Zelenskyy was in Berlin for the virtual conference hosted by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz that included the leaders of Finland, France, Great Britain, Italy, Poland, the European Union and NATO. Vice President JD Vance was also expected to join the portion that included Trump.

Following the virtual conference, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz made it exceedingly clear where our European allies stand…

The German leader said Ukraine would need a seat at the table if peace was to be reached in Ukraine, and that he told Mr. Trump he would speak to him after his Alaska meeting with Putin.

“We want to make sure that the right chronology happens: that there is a ceasefire and that there is an agreement that is discussed after that,” he said. “A legal recognition of Russian ownership of this territory cannot happen. There have to be robust security guarantees. The sovereignty of Ukraine has to be respected. Negotiations have to be part of a larger transatlantic strategy, and has to be part of necessary pressure on Russia.”

Merz added, “If there is no movement on the Russian side, we and the U.S. have to put more pressure on Russia. President Trump knows this position and largely agrees with it, and we had a good conversation with each other.”

Merz obviously does not want a peace agreement to happen, because there is no way that the Russians are going to agree to any of that.

The Russians are not going to give one inch of the territory that they have taken in the five provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Crimea back to Ukraine.

In fact, the Russians want Ukraine to hand over all of the territory that the Ukrainians are still holding in those five provinces.

If Ukraine is not willing to hand over all of that territory, Russia will simply take it.

That is the Russian position, and they see no reason to compromise because they are clearly winning the war.

When asked about Trump’s suggestion that there could be some “swapping of territories”, the Russians made it very clear that this is a non-starter…

Russia pointed to its constitution in response to a remark by U.S. President Donald Trump that there would likely be a “swapping of territories” in a deal to end Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Trump is due to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday to discuss a peace deal. Territorial control is a key issue. Russia has seized about a fifth of Ukrainian land in the east. Ukraine controls no Russian territory.

Asked about Trump’s suggestion that Russia and Ukraine could swap land, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Alexei Fadeev said at a news briefing on Wednesday that there was “no need to even invent anything territorial.”

“The structure of the Russian Federation is enshrined in the Constitution of our country,” Fadeev said, originally in Russian. “That says it all.”

The Russians also want Ukraine to be permanently banned from joining NATO.

This is something that the Ukrainians and our European allies are adamantly against.

So I have no idea why so many pundits think that a deal is possible, because the two sides are not even in the same universe when it comes to what an acceptable deal would look like.

Ahead of the meeting on Friday, the White House has been trying to play down expectations…

“This is a listening exercise for the president,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Aug. 12. “This is for the president to go and to get a more firm and better understanding of how we can hopefully bring this war to an end.”

I give Trump credit for being willing to sit down with Putin.

The window of opportunity for a peaceful solution is almost closed, and so let’s hope that this last-ditch effort is successful.

Because if it isn’t successful and we get to the “very severe consequences” phase, that will have massive implications for all of humanity.

20 years ago, if someone told you that a day would come when the only thing standing between us and nuclear war would be Donald Trump, would you have believed it?

But here we are.

The meeting in Alaska on Friday really will be one of the most important events in modern history, and the fate of our society is hanging in the balance.

Reprinted with permission from The Economic Collapse.

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According to- abcnews.go.com: Beyond the banking world, a parallel universe of shadow banks has grown in the form of hedge funds and money market funds. They’re outside the reach of conventional financial regulation, prompting authorities to plan introducing new rules to prevent the obscure sector from triggering a new financial crisis. But in doing so they risk drying up an important source of funding to banks and firms. 

In the financial world, there is a narrow divide between heaven and hell. Frenchman Loïc Féry realized this when he was 33. He was a rising star in the banking world, managing the trade in complex loan packages for an investment bank. According to his business card, he was the bank’s “global head of credit markets.” But then one of his employees gambled away about €250 million ($317 million), and suddenly Féry was without a job.

In any alternative media space, you are sure to find much talk about US dollar dominance, as well as optimistic forecasts of its imminent decline. This is also true in the radical right, where nationalists pine after an end to US imperial hegemony and the rise of a more multipolar world.

Often though, this hope is little more than wishful thinking, with unlikely challengers to US power much overhyped. This is especially true concerning US dollar hegemony, a topic that is ripe for misunderstanding at the best of times.

It’s important to keep in mind that people have been forecasting the decline of the dollar ever since it attained its status as global reserve currency. As far back as 1960, the economist Robert Triffin was warning of an “imminent threat to the once-mighty US dollar”. Understanding the reason for Triffin’s pessimism, and why it turned out to be misguided, is crucial to understanding today’s global monetary system and the enduring dominance of the dollar.

Triffin’s concerns were more informed than most: his “Triffin dilemma”, as it came to be known, highlighted an inherent problem with a country’s national currency also serving as the reserve currency of choice for the international system. The country supplying the world with the reserve currency has to produce a surplus of money, thereby creating a trade deficit. In other words, the supplier country needs to be continually losing money to fill up the reserves of other countries and make the currency a low-risk option to hold as a reserve. But if the supplier country becomes too indebted to the rest of the world in this scenario, then its currency ceases to be such a low-risk asset, and that’s the dilemma.

After World War II, the US sent lots of dollars abroad through the Marshall Plan, military spending, and the American middle-class importing lots of foreign goods. So how did the domestic US dollar get around Triffin’s dilemma? It didn’t.

Enter the Eurodollar

Triffin’s dilemma was especially a problem for the US dollar because it was backed by gold. After all, what would happen when the world needed more dollars than US gold reserves could back? Much like the kind of collapse that would happen if everyone tried to withdraw their money from banks at the same time, the whole system faced implosion if the US could not keep its foreign dollars backed up with gold.

The standard story is that this problem was resolved in 1971, when Richard Nixon ended the Bretton Woods international system and finally decoupled the US dollar from gold. But by this point, private banks had already long replaced gold exchange and quietly adopted a new form of exchange, extricated from any reserves or real currency, this was a truly global, offshore economic system outside the purview of central banks. This was the Eurodollar system. In this context, “Euro” is used as a synonym for “offshore” rather than referring to actual euros. So, the Eurodollar system is the shadow, offshore money system denominated in US dollars.

No one is really sure of how the Eurodollar system emerged (more on that later), but by the late 1950s there had been a huge growth in US dollar deposits in European banks, mostly in the City of London. With pre-war practices, these deposits would have been remitted to the central bank or deposited to the banks’ accounts in the U.S., but gradually, banks began to use these dollar deposits to issue loans denominated in US dollars. By 1959, the economist Paul Einzig reported that

The Eurodollar market was for years hidden from economists and other readers of the financial press by a remarkable conspiracy of silence. I stumbled on its existence by sheer accident in October 1959, and when I embarked on an enquiry about it in London banking circles several bankers emphatically asked me not to write about the new practice.

Britain’s economic goal of making London a center for international financial capital manifested in deregulation and comprehensive secrecy protections; this gave the city a competitive edge against other European countries, and put it and its web of British offshore territories at the very centre of this emerging system.

Since the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1979, Britain has undergone a great experiment. Economically, the UK became the exemplar of neoliberalism in Europe. Politically, the UK has quietly transitioned to a postnational state, undergoing one of the greatest demographic transformations in the West.

As the Eurodollar market exploded, it became the lifeblood of the global economy, quickly fulfilling a need banks had for an international currency system. Banks could now transact rapidly and efficiently across countries and continents without the need of a physical currency, an innovation that helped unleash economic activity. The Eurodollar system functioned like an early cryptocurrency, existing as a digital ledger and communications network rather than a traditional currency.

Driving the global economy is a kind of bankers virtual currency, created by and used to satisfy the demands of banks, a series of claims and liabilities exchanged between banks to meet their monetary needs. How can you travel to Indonesia and make an instant withdrawal from an ATM, withdrawing from your local bank back home? Only with a vastly complex and efficient communications network connecting the global banking system.

The Eurodollar was the emergence of this system, and central banks have little control over it. For all the scare-mongering from libertarians about “Fed money-printing”, it is international bankers — outside the regulations of the US Federal Reserve — who are the ones in control of creating the US dollar supply on international markets. Big commercial banks create Eurodollars using the offshore system without the backing of the Federal Reserve. This is done through fractional lending, where dollar deposits are used as collateral to loan out a higher amount of dollars.

Again: private banks create money out of thin air by creating debt

Discovering money creation rests with private banks is a revelation that tends to shock people and send them into a state of denial — surely the state would not outsource something this fundamental to private actors.

But don’t take my word for it, a source as good as the Bank of England wrote in a report titled “Money creation in the modern economy” that:

Most of the money in circulation is created, not by the printing presses of the Bank of England, but by the commercial banks themselves: banks create money whenever they lend to someone in the economy or buy an asset from consumers. And, in contrast to descriptions found in some textbooks, the Bank of England does not directly control the quantity of either base, or broad money. Of the two types of broad money, bank deposits make up the vast majority – 97% of the amount currently in circulation. And in the modern economy, those bank deposits are mostly created by commercial banks themselves.

So international bankers have created a shadow money system, with the Eurodollar system functioning as a kind of “dark energy” of the global economy, ever-present but unseen, something which the US Federal Reserve or any other central bank can do little to control. In fact, no one even knows how much money exists in the Eurodollar system, with estimates measuring it in anything from tens to hundreds of trillions. As the economist Fritz Machlup once told a meeting of his colleagues:

We don’t even know enough about the Eurodollar market to say that it should be controlled.

If you want to visualise what this shadow money system looks like, this is an attempt at illustrating all the instruments involved in the supply of the US dollar:

Still confused? You’re not alone. If this illustrates anything, it’s that the federal reserve and central banking is just a small part of the story. This enormously complex web developed over decades through private institutions, satisfying the need for a truly global money system unconstrained by national barriers.

But in the process of decoupling the dollar from Federal Reserve reserve control, bankers have given themselves the power to create unsanctioned and unregulated money. This translates to enormous power to override national government’s monetary policy and fulfill many of the roles most people assume central banks and their governments are handling:

Because Eurocurrencies give private financial institutions the unrestricted ability to expand the availability of a particular currency, the country whose currency is the target of the Euroinstrument no longer has exclusive control over its money supply.

…

Furthermore, the lack of reserve requirements on Eurodollars creates a potentially infinite money multiplier, potentially leading to an infinite degree of inflation, all without the input of the Federal Reserve or the U.S. Treasury. Thus, the power to control the number of dollars (or dollar-equivalent instruments) in the market has been taken out of the exclusive control of U.S. authority and diffused among foreign banking institutions.

Discussion around economics is still heavily focused on central bank monetary policy and government programs like Quantitative Easing, which helps maintain the illusion that it’s still accountable, elected representatives with the final say.

It’s understandable we are biased to focus on government institutions: it has always been understood that monetary sovereignty is a prerequisite for political sovereignty. But it is now clear that governments have quietly surrendered a great degree of monetary sovereignty to the private interests running the international banking system — one of the most significant and revolutionary political changes ever, yet one hardly discussed.

It’s shocking to discover the scope and influence of this system, and to discover everything presented here has been out in the open for years, strangely ignored or overlooked by popular economists, financial analysts and politicians alike. Yet some esteemed economists like Paul Einzig and Milton Friedman did identify and study this system, and both also wrote of a grand “conspiracy of silence” by the global banking cartel to hide its existence. Since most economic analysis still ignores it, we are left with an always partial view of how the economy functions.

Read the Whole Article

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Pressure on Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve continues to mount as both Wall Street and the White House demand more easy money to keep asset price inflation accelerating ever upward. These inflationists also hope that easy money-policy will somehow reverse the current stagnating trend in employment. In recent months, both President Trump and the usual Wall Street outlets have insisted that the Fed reduce the target policy interest rate to ensure that stock prices and real estate prices continue to skyrocket ever upward.

This is the last thing ordinary Americans need right now. Yes, continually rising asset prices are good for firms and individuals who already own large amounts of assets. These people have been pushing for lower interest rates for decades now, because lower interest rates function as a subsidy for asset owners and fuel rising asset prices. Moreover, since the late 1980s, with the Greenspan put, the Fed’s commitment to manipulating interest rates ever downward has been a boon for Wall Street hedge fund managers and investment bankers.

On the other hand, ordinary people have done less well. As home prices have spiraled upward—fueled by loose monetary policy (i.e., low-interest-rate policy) housing has become increasingly unaffordable for first-time homebuyers and middle-income families.

The politicians, pundits, and lobbyists who now advocate for the Fed to lower the target rate are basically advertising that they couldn’t care less about whether or not ordinary people can afford to buy a home. By this way of thinking, all that matters is that the wealthy asset owners get more of their low-interest subsidy and “number go up”—specifically the S&P 500—for Trump and his Wall Street allies.

Moreover, if the Fed pushes for lower rates right now—which requires more money creation from the FOMC’s open market operations—then the Fed will be “loosening into inflation.” That is, the Fed will be adopting looser, more inflationary monetary policy at the same time that there is an upward trend in price inflation. Not only are CPI and PPI prices accelerating again, but the US is in the midst of a meltup with the S&P 500 near all-time highs, with gold, crypto, and more all ripping to new highs. This is not an economy with too little liquidity. This is an economy with trillions of dollars from the covid-era mega-inflation still sloshing around the economy.

Jerome Powell is hardly a hard-money guy, and his claims that Fed policy is “restrictive” right now, must be viewed with extreme skepticism. Of course an inflationist central banker like Powell would say that his policy is restrictive even when it’s not. But Powell also fears undermining Fed legitimacy by triggering price inflation reminiscent of the 1970s—or even reminiscent of 2022 when CPI inflation hit 40-year highs. The general public in America already knows that it’s creaking under the weight of 25 percent inflation over the past five years, with no relief in sight. Powell likely knows that a return to 2022-style inflation would present significant political problems for the central bank, and he’s motivated to avoid that.

PPI and CPI Increases Show Price Inflation Isn’t Going Away

New numbers from the Federal government’s own official reports suggests that Powell and the Fed are rights to be concerned.

On Thursday, the BLS released a new report showing that producer prices surged in July. The producer price index (PPI) rose by 0.9 percent, month over month, during July. That’s the largest MoM increase since March of 2022, and it’s the seventh largest increase in PPI in more than fifteen years. The year-over-year increase in the PPI also rose to a five-month high, rising by 3.3 percent, year over year.

Moreover, the BLS’s CPI report for July shows that the year-over-year change to the CPI rose again in July to 2.7 percent. The YoY CPI has now risen three months in a row. Measured month over month, the CPI has risen four months in a row, with the CPI up by 0.2 percent from June to July.

Taking all this together, we find price inflation is headed upward and not back to “the two-percent goal” as Fed economists have long insisted. Even worse, current trends suggests that the economy could be headed toward stagflation with prices stubbornly trending upward, and employment trend stagnating or worsening. A recent analysis from Bloomberg noticed this unfortunate situation:

So, with Trump and Wall Street beating the drum for even more monetary inflation, what should the Fed really be doing? The answer is: “nothing.” The last thing that regular Americans need right now is a Fed loosening policy just as CPI and PPI inflation are accelerating. And the last thing regular Americans need right now is rising home prices. Moreover, the Fed shouldn’t even be targeting any specific level for short-term interest rates—or long-term interest rates either. The Fed should simply allow markets to determine interest rates, and if that leads to rising interest rates, that will simply illustrate what a sham current interest rates are under the influence of incessant Fed meddling. Moreover, if the fed simply refrains from manipulating interest rates—which, again, is done partly with newly created money—then monetary inflation may finally be truly restrictive and consumers might finally get some relief in the form of price deflation.

Of course, we’ll also hear from the usual inflationists that a lack of Fed-fueled liquidity would lead to a worsening employment situation. Unfortunately, we’re likely to get that one way or another at this point. After more than fifteen years of “quantitative easing,” and more than a decade of ultra-low-interest-rate policy, the US is in the midst of an unsustainable “everything bubble.” This leaves us with two choices: keep the bubble going with more monetary inflation, which will mean more upward spiraling prices and unaffordable housing. Or, the Fed could step back, and allow the market to actually function, which will mean the bubbles will pop. That will lead to temporary unemployment and economic disruption. But it would also finally give regular people a chance to actually move into truly productive, non-bubble lines of work, and acquire assets at normal, non-bubble prices.

Unfortunately, the latter options will be opposed at every turn by Donald Trump, Wall Street, and the Central Bank cabal. Let’s hope that somehow, some way, they fail.

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

The post The Last Thing We Need Right Now Is a Fed Rate Cut appeared first on LewRockwell.

Some readers might recall a year ago the internet was in an uproar about a commencement speech given by Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker at Benedictine College, a private Catholic liberal arts school in Kansas. The speech went viral due to his denouncement of abortion, Pride Month, COVID-19 lockdowns and the tyranny of diversity, equity and inclusion.

However, it was his comments on women in the workforce that really put a twist in the panties of the leftist media:

“I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you, how many of you are sitting here now about to cross the stage, and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you’re going to get in your career…

Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world. But I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.”

“I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother…”

Leftists were enraged and attempted to cancel Butker. The problem was that cancel culture was in steep decline and the activist mobs had already lost much of their previous influence. More than DEI, more than ESG, more than CRT or the LGBT movement, leftists are most protective of feminism. It is, in a way, the “mother” of all other progressive propaganda movements in America.

As I have noted in the past, there are many Marxist and globalist ideologies focused on social engineering, but the first and perhaps most dangerous in the US is feminism. It’s not a coincidence that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published their Communist Manifesto in February of 1848, and feminism traces its roots directly to the Seneca Falls Convention in New York, held in July of 1848 (many of the women involved in the event would go on to express ties to socialism, including Fabian socialism).

Feminism was originally predicated on the idea that women should have access to the same legal rights as men. This was achieved many decades ago, yet activists continue to demand more privileges as the movement seeks to justify its ongoing existence. This begs the question: What is the real purpose of feminism?

In my research I recently stumbled across an article titled “Global 7 Billion: Half A Solution From Ted Turner” published by Forbes Magazine in 2011. For those who are unaware, Turner has been deeply involved in the globalist population control agenda prescribed by the Club of Rome and the UN since the 1970s. Turner publicly called for population reduction on a number of occasions and admitted that he thinks that an 80% decline in human beings would be ideal.

This agenda was launched in the name of “man-made climate change”, which has been thoroughly debunked as fraudulent (see my articles on the lack of correlation or causation between carbon emissions and temperatures in long term climate history, as an example).

Turner made it clear that population control primarily targeted women through increased access to contraception and abortion (the obvious), but one comment in the article stood out immediately. Forbes notes:

“There’s never a golden bullet to a systemic problem such as this, but the closest thing that does exists is not contraception provision, it is girls’ education.

Educating girls enables them to see and enact opportunities outside of childraising, and once they have other options they become much more likely to reach for the birth control after 2.5 children, just like their Western counterparts (often in direct contravention of patriarchal and religious doctrine — which education empowers them to resist)…”

The article goes on to argue that the educational focus on girls over boys is not unfair, but an act of historical correction for previous injustices (reparations). For any DEI agenda, abandoning meritocracy in order to enforce“fairness” requires that we subsidize one group over another. Feminism is no different.

Women today outnumber men in college admissions because colleges deliberately overlook male applicants (often with superior merits) and give female applicants special preference. Beyond that, women are more likely to be given grants and scholarships. Scholarships specifically designated for women number in the thousands, while male only scholarships number in the dozens.

In the business world, women are once again given special preference due to subsidies. State and federal governments have established numerous grants (Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) Grant Program), programs and tax deductions (like the Work Opportunity Tax Credit) for companies that hire more women.  ESG related initiatives (funded by globalists) were the greatest driver of women-centric hiring, with companies getting access to a number of loans and incentives in exchange for a hiring focus on women and minorities. There are no such programs or incentives specifically for hiring men, especially white men.

The disparity is undeniable – Most women can only “succeed” in the working world when they are propped up by governments, NGOs and corporations seeking government payouts.

And, as Ted Turner and Forbes assert, this is by design. The longer women stay within the educational system and the more they are pushed into the workforce, the more likely they are to take contraception and the more likely they are to reject traditional relationships and not start a family. As a bonus, the longer women stay in the current far-left academic environment the more they can be indoctrinated with feminism and the less they will want to have children anyway.

In other words, feminism is primarily about population control and it is proving to be wildly effective. Within the next five years, 45% of women ages 25-44 will be single and childless. Western population growth is in steep decline and by the next generation there will be a societal crisis with the elderly greatly outnumbering the young.

We need to start asking hard questions as a civilization, and this is where we come back to Harrison Butker and his commencement speech in Kansas. In an open minded, liberal and “democratic” society we’re not supposed put limits on personal freedom. For around 70 years America has functioned on an “anything goes” playbook (the liberal playbook). If it feels good, do it. Don’t let “the man” hold you back. But this philosophy is not working, it’s destroying us.  It turns out that gender roles are actually important.

What can we do about it? I suggest adopting a principle that weighs costs vs. benefits when it comes to women in the workforce. Not just women as a group, but individual women and their potential. I call this the “Butker Principle”.

The Butker Principle requires that women consider the advantages of the career they are pursuing and ask: “Is my job more valuable to the world than raising a healthy family?”

Is she working in STEM improving important technologies? Is she saving lives as a doctor or nurse? Is she providing a service that most people cannot provide? Does she own and operate a business that is creating jobs? Or, is she working as an HR representative taking mindless complaints from other women who should be at home?

Furthermore, we need to ask: “Can a man do the same job better?”

If so, then a man should be in that position providing greater value and greater productivity. At bottom, there are not many women in many fields of expertise that are offering the world more than if they were simply nurturing children to become better adults in the future.

This might sound like the kind of “greater good” argument the political left is known for, but I would point out that the greater good for leftists is always the worst case scenario for everyone else. We’ve had many years to observe the effects of feminism on our society and it is a clear net negative. The “greater good”, in this case, is to simply correct that mistake.

We must also consider the economic benefits if most women were to leave the labor pool. For example, the larger female workforce has saturated markets and throttled wage growth over the years. You want to know why almost 70% of American families used to be able to live on a single income in 1970 and that number has dropped to 25% today? Inflation is not the only factor.

Wages are about supply and demand, like anything else. Women flooded into white collar and retail environments and gave corporations a massive gift – Not only could these conglomerates keep wages low because of too much competition, they could also get subsidies for hiring females and making them feel independent (relying on big daddy CEO is apparently independent while relying on a husband is not…).

Beyond driving down wages, single women also eat up a large portion of the US housing market (more than illegal immigrants). The extra demand throttles supply and drives up home prices and rent payments. Imagine if just 20% of working women left the labor pool and abandoned single life – The housing supply would skyrocket and prices would drop dramatically. Women could save the economy simply by not taking up space.

This is not to say that there are not women out there doing great work. I’m sure there are many, but again, if we were to examine the situation case by case I think we would find that the majority of women are not working in jobs that are more important than building a family. The Butker Principle must be applied to save our nation, to save the nuclear family and to save the psychological health of the west.

Women have been conned by feminist propaganda into believing that they can have it all – They think they can pursue a stunning career in which they receive endless accolades and applause. They think they can gain masculine power and financial parity and they think they can have a family whenever it suits them. This false assumption has led many women to waste their 20s struggling for “boss babe” status and missing out on their prime years finding a husband and building a home.

To be sure, liberals (and many libertarians) will argue that if a woman wants to waste her life away working in a meaningless office job instead of having kids, then that is her right. I probably would have said the same thing twenty years ago but history is not kind to people who ignore the hard data. The west is decaying at a rapid rate and drastic measures need to be taken.

Does this mean forcing women to stay home? In a way, yes, but not by erasing their freedom to work. Rather, the solution may be as basic as returning to meritocracy in business environments. How? By canceling all government incentives and educational scholarships specifically for women of child bearing age. And, by eliminating affirmative action laws that push companies to maintain a female labor quota, specifically Title VII and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972.

In other words, level the playing field back to the days before second wave feminism and let women compete. Most will not be capable, which means they will be forced to temper their expectations and fantasies, find a man, have children and, God forbid, become happy housewives. What a tragedy that would be…

To summarize, the Butker Principle is meant to defeat an agenda that was set in motion over a century ago to undermine western civilization, drive down wages and artificially suppress the population. The poisonous fruits of that agenda are now widely visible. Some of the people involved in the early movement might have had good intentions, but this is ultimately irrelevant. The results are the results, and feminism is a disaster for everyone except the globalists and the corporate oligarchy.

The fastest way to end feminism is to end the majority of female participation in the jobs market. It’s the only solution that makes sense.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post The Butker Principle: Is America Better Off Without Women in the Workforce? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The ostensible purpose of the U.S. war on drugs is to prevent Americans from getting their hands on illicit drugs and ingesting them. Think about that for a moment: The entire drug-war apparatus and the massive militarized drug-war police state exist for the purpose of preventing Americans from possessing and ingesting unapproved substances that they wish to possess and ingest.

I consider that amazing.

Let’s divide American drug consumers into two broad categories: those who are addicted to drugs and those who simply use them because it makes them feel good.

In either case, why is the federal government so hell-bent on preventing all these people from consuming what they want to consume?

I think the government’s response would be that drugs are harmful. Okay, let’s concede that point. Such being the case, being addicted to harmful drugs is clearly something bad. The addict is essentially committing slow-motion suicide. Even if he doesn’t die, his health is severely and adversely affected. Oftentimes, the addict is unable to hold a job and goes broke.

But in the final analysis, isn’t it up the drug addict to seek treatment, such as with an organization that is comparable to Alcoholics Anonymous? Does it really do the addict much good to try to deprive him of his drugs with the war on drugs? Anyway, as we have seen for decades, the drug war doesn’t really deprive anyone, including addicts, of drugs. It just makes illicit drugs more expensive in the black market. Not surprisingly, the addict then resorts to such crimes as theft, robbery, and burglary in a desperate attempt to get the money to purchase drugs on the black market.

The recreational drug user is simply using drugs for his own personal reasons. He’s really in no different position than someone who drinks liquor or wine on a periodic basis. It makes him feel good. Sure, it might be harmful to his health in the long run but he’s willing to take that chance. Why is that any business of government?

Are there people who die of “drug overdoses”? Sure, but the dark irony is that many of them who die of a “drug overdose” do not die of an actual “drug overdose.” Instead, they die from consuming corrupted drugs that are sold on the black market, which officials incorrectly label as a “drug overdose.” So, the war on drugs is responsible for those deaths. With drug legalization, drug users would be buying non-corrupted drugs from pharmacies or other reputable businesses.

Again, though, given that all these drug users are voluntarily wishing to consume drugs for whatever reason, why is it necessary for government to prevent them from doing so through the criminalization of possession and through the criminalization of production and distribution?

Could the reason simply be that the government has an interest in keeping Americans healthy? If so, why is that the role of government? Governments are supposed to be the servants, not the masters. Servants have no business determining what their masters do to seek happiness, even if what their masters are doing is harmful or destructive to themselves?

There is a much bigger, more fundamental reason for the war on drugs. That reason is control, which, of course, means the destruction of individual freedom. The war on drugs not only sends a message that the federal government is the master and the citizens are the servant, it also enables the federal government to maintain massive control over everyone in society. Control is what the drug-war police state is all about.

Every drug-war police-state measure has ever been adopted has failed to achieve their ostensible goal of preventing American consumers from getting their hands on drugs and ingesting them. Yet, every such police-state measure has increasingly expanded the control of the government over the citizenry. After all, when a new police-state measure, such as asset forfeiture or mandatory minimum sentences, fails to achieve the ostensible goal, it’s never repealed. Instead, it remains intact and more police-state measures are simply added on top of it.

The reason that federal officials are now redefining the war on drugs as a “war on terrorism” is so that they can get the military involved in what is really a criminal offense. In other words, more control — in fact, the totalitarian type of control that comes with the militarization of society. This “war on terrorism” policy is, of course, music to the ears of the national-security establishment — i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — because it enables that part of the federal government to better solidify its control over the American people.

Notice something important: They never “win” their war on drugs but they are forever using it to expand their control over the American people.

I would be remiss if I failed to point out another big reason for the drug war — there is a huge federal bureaucracy that has become dependent on the drug war. I’m referring, of course, to federal judges, federal prosecutors, DEA agents, and all the clerks and administrators who receive generous taxpayer-funded salaries to play their part in waging the war on drugs. There are also those federal officials on the take. And then there is the CIA, whose drug-war income would cease with drug legalization.

Control and money. That’s what drives the war on drugs.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post Why the Drug War? appeared first on LewRockwell.

If Moscow previously relied on treaties and ‘playing normal’, now it relies on unpredictability, interconnected fronts, and a balance of threats.

Another round of negotiations between Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and the Russian leadership? A meeting between Witkoff and President Putin is now imminent. At the same time, General Keith Kellogg has been in Kiev. This comes as Trump’s so-called ‘ultimatum’ is set to expire – although Trump himself casts doubt whether the sanctions that may follow might not ‘bother’ Putin at all.

Has anything changed – beyond Russia’s accelerating advances across the extent of the contact line?

In one sense, nothing has changed. The Russian position remains as set out by President Putin on 14 June 2024. Has the U.S. position changed? No.

Earlier this month, Trump ‘whisperer’ General Kellogg suggested that the U.S. deploy all of its ballistic-missile submarines to see whether Putin was “bluffing”. So there you have it: Kellogg continues to believe that Putin is ‘bluffing’. It seems that the Kellogg faction in Team Trump simply cannot either hear or assimilate what Putin has been telling them since June 2024 (‘root causes are what matters’).

For Kellogg, et al, pressure on Putin alone is what will bring the Kellogg ceasefire.

The Chair of Russia’s Federation Committee on International Affairs Grigory Karasin, a senior Russian negotiator, laid out the situation very clearly: “All the emotions now dominating the media space – with all these statements and references to big names, such as Trump – should be taken calmly“, Karasin told Izvestia:

“There will be contacts with him [Witkoff] that will reveal what the United States actually thinks, not for the public eye – about the absolutely destructive role currently played by the European Union countries, which tightly control the Zelensky regime. All of that will be discussed. I believe that following these contacts, we will at least know everything of substance. Therefore, we must remain patient, composed, and resist emotional responses”.

It seems that, from the Russian perspective, the purpose is to fully understand the U.S. framework of limitations within which Trump operates.

It is within this ‘limitations’ context that Trump’s comments about having two Ohio class nuclear submarines “cruise the coast” of Russia must be understood. He and his close adviser Kellogg’s statements on submarines reflect a miscasting of the role of second strike submarines –they must lie silently, and undetected, on the ocean floor, and absolutely not be flaunted in full view!.

But in Trump’s case, his silly comment was perhaps designed more for domestic effect. Trump is under multiple pressures. He is entrapped by metastasizing Epstein allegations (with more shoes set to drop reportedly).  And like a number of past U.S. Presidents, he is trapped by Israel – whether by the web of donors and big money interests, or be it, like Clinton, by more salacious and damaging threats.

Sensing weakness, the Republican Old Guard led by Mitch McConnell and Senator Graham espy an opportunity to weaken the MAGA constituency, and return the GOP from its populist flowering to its traditional ‘Country Club’ uniparty leadership.

A powerful Senate committee has voted – with strong support from both Democrats and Trump’s fellow Republicans – to send a spending measure that includes $1 billion of support for Ukraine to a full vote in the Senate, despite the Administration having asked Congress to eliminate such funding in its defence budget request.

Separately, Republican Senator Murkowski and Democrat Shaheen, both members of the Appropriations Committee, have introduced a bill that would provide $54.6 billion in aid to Ukraine over the next two years. (The Murkowski-Shaheen bill faces a stiff struggle to become law).

Trump, of course, had campaigned on the platform of no further funding for the Ukraine war to his MAGA base. Should the $1 billion measure pass, his MAGA supporters – already infuriated by what they claim to be an Epstein cover up – will feel a further betrayal.

No President can afford to appear that he is being steamrollered by Congress, not least over a key campaign promise. He (or she) must seek to dominate Congress, and not become its cat-paw – especially as the Senate furore for sanctions is all about blocking Trump’s way to strategic normalisation with Russia.

It may be that Trump’s ‘sub-deployment’ statement therefore was made more for Congressional ‘effect’ – to foreground his ‘tough’ approach towards Russia, and to imply he has other tools, beyond sanctions, (on which he is a sceptic).

That – the Ukraine impasse – however, is not the end to Trump’s woes, and to his shackles. The Israeli ‘Judea’ (the Settler, Messianic) Establishment has rebuffed Witkoff’s attempts to stop the genocide and starvation of Gazans. The images of famine are hurting Trump, who according to Hebrew language Yedioth Ahronoth, citing sources close to Netanyahu, claims that Trump has given a green light for a strong military operation (as long as negotiations have reached a dead end). “Matters are heading towards complete occupation of the Strip – and, if this does not suit the Chief of Staff, let him resign” is the blunt advice from the Netanyahu entourage.

The Gaza war is recasting American politics, especially among young Americans (and Europeans). Trump recently warned a Jewish donor that his base are coming “to hate Israel”. Trump’s base is scattering away.

After a massive backlash to the Trump administration’s cutting of federal emergency funding to cities and states that boycott Israel, the DHS was obliged to update its memo to remove the Israel boycott prohibition. The order now only applies to DEI and immigration violations. The MAGA base increasingly see ‘Israel First’ policies as a betrayal of the ‘America First’ campaign pledge.

So, per Grigory Karasin’s analysis, “contacts with Steve Witkoff should reveal the true position of the U.S. [its constraints and limitations], in contrast to the loud statements coming from the White House on the run-up to the expiration of the “resolution deadline” for the Ukrainian conflict – and the introduction of new anti-Russian sanctions”.

Witkoff, on the other hand, is likely to be probing for any flexibility in Russia’s stated position, and to explore the possibility for the imposing of deadlines for reaching agreements with Kiev. Moscow supports a fourth round of Istanbul talks. The media frenzy, the missile sub flap, are all part to typical Trumpian pressure tactics ahead of negotiations.

The reality that the frenzy hides, however, is that Trump has few cards with which to escalate pressure on Russia (weapons inventories are exhausted) and resort to longer-range missiles would raise a clamour amongst the MAGA that Trump is taking America to WW3.

What Trump really needs is something to protect himself from Senate pressures that threaten to tie him into never-ending sanctions and Ukraine funding escalation – something that at least portends an end to conflict within a reasonable timeline.

Is that possible? Doubtful. Kiev seems to be on a slow fuse self-destruction. It is too early to see who might emerge from the turmoil.

Paradoxically, Trump’s Ohio Class ‘cruising of Russia’s coastline’ taunt – though absurd – has given Moscow the pretext to propose something that has long been on President Putin’s ‘Drawing Board’:

Russia officially announced its withdrawal from the self-imposed restrictions under the moratorium on the deployment of intermediate- and shorter-range missiles (INF Treaty), justifying this by the actions of the U.S., which long ago deployed similar systems in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, thereby violating the status quo. For the first time, Russia officially points out that the threat of American INF missiles comes not only from Europe but also from the Asia-Pacific region.

At the level of formal logic, Moscow’s lifting of the moratorium on INF deployment is nothing more than a symmetrical response to prior escalation by Washington. But on a deeper level, Russia is not just ‘responding’– it is creating a new strategic architecture in the absence of international restrictions. And among other things, it has serial production of theOreshnik in its hands, as well as a direct ally, North Korea, in the Asia Pacific region.

This paradigm shift is intended to be strategic. Whereas Moscow previously relied on treaties and ‘playing normal’, now it relies on unpredictability, interconnected fronts, and a balance of threats.

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

The post Russia Seeks To Comprehend Fully the Various Constraints on Trump appeared first on LewRockwell.

H.E. Gideon Sa’ar
Foreign Minister
Government of Israel
August 9, 2025

Dear Mr. Minister,

I write to you following your speech at the United Nations Security Council on August 5. I attended the session but did not have the chance to speak with you following the session. I want to share my reflections on your speech.

In your speech your failed to recognize why almost the entire world, including many Jews such as myself, are aghast at your government’s behavior. In the view of most of the world, with which I concur, Israel is engaged in mass murder and starvation; you would not have known it from your speech. You failed to acknowledge that Israel has caused the deaths to date of some 18,500 Palestinian children, whose names were recently listed by The Washington Post. You blamed all the mass murder of civilians by Israeli forces on Hamas, even as the world watches video clips every day of Israeli forces killing starving civilians in cold blood as they approach food distribution points. You lamented the starvation of 20 hostages but failed to mention Israel’s starvation of 2 million Palestinians. You failed to mention that your own prime minister worked actively over the years to fund Hamas, as The Times of Israel has documented.

Whether your oversights are the result of obtuseness or prevarication, they would be a tragedy for Israel alone were it not for the fact that you attempted to rope me and millions of other Jews into your government’s crimes against humanity. You declared at the U.N. session that Israel is “The sovereign state of the Jewish people.” This is false. Israel is the sovereign state of its citizens. I am a Jew, and a citizen of the United States. Israel is not my state and never will be.

Your language about Jews in your speech betrayed the gulf between us. You referred to Judaism as a nationality. This is indeed the Zionist construct, but it runs counter to 2,000 years of Jewish belief and Jewish life. It is an idea that I and millions of other Jews reject. Judaism for me and for countless others outside of Israel is a life of ethics, culture, tradition, law, and belief that has nothing to do with nationality. For 2,000 years, Jews lived in all parts of the world in countless nations.

The great Rabbinic sages of the Babylonian Talmud in fact explicitly proscribed a mass return of the Jewish people to Jerusalem, telling the Jewish people to live in their own homelands (Ketubot 111a). Sadly, the Zionists undertook massive campaigns including financial subsidies and scare tactics to induce Jewish communities to leave their own homelands, languages, local cultures, and relations with their fellow inhabitants to draw them to Israel. I have traveled throughout the world visiting nearly empty synagogues and vacated Jewish communities, with only a few elderly Jews remaining, and where these few remaining Jews insisted that their communities once lived in peace and harmony with the non-Jewish majorities. Zionism has weakened or put an end to countless vibrant communities of our co-religionists around the world.

It is an ironic fact that when Zionists convinced the British Government in 1917 to issue the Balfour Declaration, the one Jew in the Cabinet, Sir Edwin Montagu, strenuously objected, stating that he was a British citizen who happened to be Jewish, not the member of a Jewish nation: “I assert that there is not a Jewish nation. The members of my family, for instance, who have been in this country for generations, have no sort or kind of community of view or of desire with any Jewish family in any other country beyond the fact that they profess to a greater or less degree the same religion.”

In this context, it’s also worth recalling that the Balfour Declaration states clearly and unequivocally that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Zionism has failed that test.

Your government is committed to the permanent occupation of all of Palestine and stands in violent, unrelenting opposition to a sovereign State of Palestine. The founding platform of Likud in 1977 hides nothing in this regard, declaring openly that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” To accomplish this, Israel demonizes the Palestinian people and crushes them physically, through mass starvation, murder, ethnic cleansing, administrative detention, torture, land seizures, and other forms of brutal repression. You yourself shamefully declared that “all Palestinian factions” support terrorism.

Your counterpart at the U.N. Security Council session, Palestinian Ambassador Riyad Mansour, declared just the opposite. He stated clearly: “The solution is ending this illegal occupation and ending this disastrous conflict; it is the realization of the independence and sovereignty of the Palestinian state, not its destruction; it is the fulfillment of our rights, not their continued denial; it is respect for international law, not its trampling; it is the implementation of the two-state solution, not a one state reality with Palestinians condemned to genocide, ethnic cleansing, or apartheid.”

Israel stands against almost the entire world in its endeavor to block the two-state solution. Already, 147 countries recognize the State of Palestine, and many more will soon do so. One-hundred and seventy U.N. member states recently voted in support of the right of the Palestinian people to political self-determination, with only six opposed (Argentina, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, Paraguay, United States).

Your presentation utterly neglected the powerful “New York Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State solution,” issued by the world community at the High-Level International Conference on Implementing the Two-State Solution held on July 29, 2025, just one week before your own speech at the U.N. Security Council. Saudi Arabia and France co-chaired that high-level conference. Arab and Islamic nations all over the world called for peace and normalization of relations with Israel when Israel abides by international law and decency in line with the two-state solution. Your government rejects peace, because it aims for domination over all of Palestine instead.

Israel holds on to its extremist position by a slenderest of threads, backed (until now) by the United States but by no other major power. We also should acknowledge a major reason for the U,S. backing until now: Christian Evangelical Protestants who believe that the gathering of the Jews in Israel is the prelude to the damnation or conversion of the Jews, and the end of the world. Those are your government’s allies. As for overall American public opinion, disapproval of Israel’s actions now stands at 60%, with only 32% approving.

Mr. Minister, the global revulsion you cited is against the actions of your government, not against Jews. Israel is threatened from within by zealotry and extremism that in turn bring worldwide disapprobation of Israel by Jews and non-Jews alike. The great threat to Israel’s survival is not the Arab nations, the Palestinians, or Iran, but the policies of Israel’s extremist government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, and Itamar Ben-Gvir.

The two-state solution is the path—and the only path—to Israel’s survival. You may believe that nuclear weapons and the U.S. government are your salvation, but brute power will be evanescent if Israel’s grave injustice toward the Palestinian people continues. The Jewish Prophets taught again and again that unjust states do not long survive.

Sincerely yours,

Jeffrey D. Sachs

This article was originally published on ScheerPost.

The post Open Letter to Israel Foreign Minister Sa’ar appeared first on LewRockwell.

There is much confusion about why the August 15th Trump-Putin ended the way it did. Here is a typical example:

The reason why I was expecting this outcome will be explained here.

On 4 December 2024, when Trump hired General Keith Kellogg to be his negotiator on the Ukraine war, I headlined “Reuters reports Trump is set to continue Biden’s policies on Ukraine.” and opened:

On December 4th, Reuters headlined [misleadingly in its ‘off the table’] “Trump’s plan for Ukraine comes into focus: Territorial concessions but NATO off the table”, and reported from named and unnamed sources, what the proposals have been by individuals who have publicly stated their own recommended policies regarding the war in Ukraine, and all of these individuals have been neoconservative, which is to say that they assume that the U.S. must continue to be the dominant force and ultimate decision-maker regarding Ukraine and its international relations (indeed, international relations everywhere) — continue to include Ukraine as being a part of the U.S. empire.

The ONLY one of that article’s named sources who has actually been appointed by Trump to be a part of his Administration regard Ukraine is Keith Kellogg, whom Trump has given this precise portfolio, of being the United States Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia. And, so, Kellogg’s 9,000-word atrociously written plan — which was superbly outlined, summarized, and linked-to on December 2nd at the merely 1,000-word crystal-clear and accurate “What’s Inside Keith Kellogg’s Ukraine Peace Plan?”, and so I won’t say anything more about it — does actually have some important confirmation by today’s Donald Trump, because Trump gave this portfolio to Kellogg. This plan is the main one that the Reuters article cites. Reuters accurately characterizes what it says, including that, “Trump’s advisers would try forcing Moscow and Kyiv into negotiations with carrots and sticks, including halting military aid to Kyiv unless it agrees to talk but boosting assistance if Russian President Vladimir Putin refuses.”

In other words, Trump’s plan is to threaten Russia — which is clearly heading toward victory in Ukraine — by “boosting assistance if Russian President Vladimir Putin refuses.”

Notice there that Reuters doesn’t want its readers to know that Russia is clearly heading toward victory in Ukraine, and that it ALSO doesn’t want them to know that that word “boosting” would be applied specifically to constitute boosting-to-UKRAINE, which means to CONTINUE the Biden Administration’s policy regarding this war: i.e., to intensify America’s war against Russia.

Another vaguery in that article is “NATO membership for Ukraine would be put on hold.” The actual statement in the Kellogg plan is that Trump should “put off NATO membership for Ukraine for an extended period in exchange for a comprehensive and verifiable peace deal with security guarantees [FOR UKRAINE — so the U.S. Government would CONTINUE to control Ukraine].” Putin has repeatedly made unambiguously clear that one of his three NON-negotiable requirements in order to end this war is to make Ukrainian membership in Nato IMPOSSIBLE — not merely prohibited in the short term, but impossible ever. The Kellogg plan fails even to address ANY of Russia’s three bare-minimum requirements (those three non-negotiable requirements) in order to end its proxy-war against the U.S. empire’s war against Russia, that is being waged in the battlefields of Ukraine.

In other words: Trump’s policy toward Russia will be Biden’s policy toward Russia, and this is a policy that would lead inevitably to WW3, because the U.S. Government is — in its actions and not merely in its words — just as determined to conquer (control) Russia, as Russia is determined NOT to be controlled by ANY foreign power.

(And, so, too, we know why both the Reuters article’s headline, “Trump’s plan for Ukraine comes into focus: Territorial concessions but NATO off the table”, and its report, are vaguely written, so as to avoid calling their readers’ attention to what the reality is that they are pretending to be informing them about.)

Then, on 6 March 2025, I headlined “Why America, the EU, and Ukraine, Should Lose to Russia in Ukraine’s War”, and opened by explaining and documeting that:

The war in Ukraine is, but in reverse, the same situation that America’s President JFK had faced with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev wouldn’t agree to a mutually acceptable settlement — which he did, and so WW3 was averted on that occasion. But whereas Khrushchev was reasonable; Obama, Biden, and Trump, are not; and, so, we again stand at the brink of a WW3, but this time with a truly evil head-of-state (Obama, then Biden, and now Trump), who might even be willing to go beyond that brink — into WW3 — in order to become able to achieve world-conquest. This is as-if Khrushchev had said no to JFK’s proposal in 1962 — but, thankfully, he didn’t; so, WW3 was averted, on that occasion.

How often have you heard or seen the situation in the matter of Cuba being near to the White House (near to America’s central command) being analogized to Ukraine’s being near — far nearer, in fact — to The Kremlin (Russia’s central command)? No, you probably haven’t encountered this historical context before, because it’s not being published — at least not in America and its allied countries. It’s being hidden.

The Ukrainian war actually started after the democratically elected President of Ukraine (an infamously corrupt country), who was committed to keeping his country internationally neutral (not allied with either Russia or the United States), met privately with both the U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010, shortly following that Ukrainian President’s election earlier in 2010; and, on both occasions, he rejected their urgings for Ukraine to become allied with the United States against his adjoining country Russia. This was being urged upon him so that America could position its nuclear missiles at the Russian border with Ukraine, less than a five-minute striking-distance away from hitting the Kremlin in Moscow.

The war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said (NOT in 2022 as is alleged in the U.S.-controlled nations).

This war was started by the U.S. against Russia — NOT by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 such as the liars allege — it was started in February 2014 by a U.S. coup which replaced the democratically elected and neutralist Ukrainian President, with a U.S. selected and rabidly anti-Russian leader, who immediately imposed an ethnic-cleansing program to get rid of the residents in the regions that had voted overwhelmingly for the overthrown President. Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022, in order to prevent Ukraine from allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief for Russia to respond before its central command would already be beheaded by America’s nuclear strike. (As I headlined on 28 October 2022, “NATO Wants To Place Nuclear Missiles On Finland’s Russian Border — Finland Says Yes”. The U.S. had demanded this, especially because it will place American nuclear missiles far nearer to The Kremlin than at present, only 507 miles away — not as close as Ukraine, but the closest yet.)

Ukraine was neutral between Russia and America until Obama’s brilliantly executed Ukrainian coup, which his Administration started planning by no later than June 2011, culminated successfully in February 2014 and promptly appointed a rabid anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled goverment an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” to kill protesters, and, ultimately, to terrorize the residents in those regions in order to kill as many of them as possible and to force the others to flee into Russia so that when elections would be held, pro-Russian voters would no longer be in the electorate.

The U.S. Government had engaged the Gallup polling organization, both before and after the coup, in order to poll Ukrainians, and especially ones who lived in its Crimean independent republic (where Russia has had its main naval base ever since 1783), regarding their views on U.S., Russia, NATO, and the EU; and, generally, Ukrainians were far more pro-Russia than pro-U.S., pro-NATO, or pro-EU, but this was especially the case in Crimea; so, America’s Government knew that Crimeans would be especially resistant. However, this was not really new information. During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the coup.

In other words: what Obama did was generally successful: it grabbed Ukraine, or most of it, and it changed Ukrainians’ minds regarding America and Russia. But only after the subsequent passage of time did the American billionaires’ neoconservative heart become successfully grafted into the Ukrainian nation so as to make Ukraine a viable place to position U.S. nuclear missiles against Moscow (which is the U.S. Government’s goal there). Furthermore: America’s rulers also needed to do some work upon U.S. public opinion. Not until February of 2014 — the time of Obama’s coup — did more than 15% of the American public have a “very unfavorable” view of Russia. (Right before Russia invaded Ukraine, that figure had already risen to 42%. America’s press — and academia or public-policy ‘experts’ — have been very effective at managing public opinion, for the benefit of America’s billionaires.) …

Then, finally, as the Ukrainian government (now under Volodmyr Zelensky) was greatly intensifying its shelling of the break-away far-eastern region, Russia presented, to both the U.S. Government and its NATO military alliance against Russia, two proposed agreements for negotiation (one to U.S., the other to NATO), stating Russia’s core national-security demands, but neither the U.S. nor its NATO agreed to negotiate. The key portions of the two 17 December 2021 proposed Agreements, with both the U.S. and with its NATO, were, in regards to the U.S. and in regards to NATO, that NATO must no longer expand and must reverse some of its expansions toward Russia, and that Ukraine must be permanently prohibited to become a NATO member. Then, on 7 January 2022, the U.S. and its NATO, contemptuously rejected Russia’s core national-security demands, which had been stated. Then, on 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine just as JFK would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev during the 1062 Cuban Missile Crisis had rejected America’s core national-security demands. On that day — 24 February 2022 — Putin also addressed the Russian people on television and explained to them why this was being done. His speech on that day opened with virtually a summary of the reasons that he had provided 15 years earlier in his classic 10 February 2007 30-minute speech at the Munich Security Conference, such as when he spoke against NATO expansion (immediately after his discussing Ukraine):

NATO is not a universal organisation, as opposed to the UN. It is first and foremost a military and political alliance, military and political! Well, ensuring one’s own security is the right of any sovereign state. We are not arguing against this. Of course we are not objecting to this. But why is it necessary to put military infrastructure on our borders during this expansion?

Putin has always known that this is a dream by the U.S. Government to conquer Russia by placing a missile a mere five minutes away from Moscow.

At least up until the 15 August 2025 private meeting between Trump and Putin, I have seen no indication that Trump has been informed of any of this essential-to-know history. Indeed, Kellogg still retains his position as the United States Special Envoy for Ukraine, and he continues to advocate that Ukraine (the nearest-of-all countries to The Kremlin) will ultimately become a member of NATO. And, on 14 April 2025, the U.S. propaganda agency Associated Press (AP) headlined “Russian missiles hit Ukrainian city of Sumy during Palm Sunday celebrations, killing more than 30” and reported that Kellogg “said the Sumy attack crossed ‘any line of decency’.” Trump, however, later commented “I was told they made a mistake.” He didn’t say who had told him this — perhaps it was the lone non-neocon whom he had appointed, his Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. But Trump still hasn’t fired Kellogg, and Kellogg still advocates for Ukraine’s ultimately joining NATO. And, at least until the joint August 15th Putin-Trump summit, there has been no indication that Trump has been informed that the war in Ukraine was initiated by Obama in 2014 and NOT by Biden (as Trump has constantly been alleging), who merely continued it after Trump also did in his first term. Nor is there any indication that Trump ever had read Putin’s breakthrough 10 February 2007 30-minute speech at the Munich Security Conference (see its transcript here), which speech was accurately summarized by Wikipedia. That speech has turned out to have been 100% prophetic of, and virtually predicting, the war in Ukraine, and explaining why Russians will never tolerate any entrance of Ukraine into NATO — not now, and not in the future.

Whatever of this history that was unknown to Trump until 15 August 2025 can therefore reasonably be assumed to have been made clear to him by Putin on that day, so that Trump would now know that America, the EU, and Ukraine, should lose to Russia in Ukraine’s war that Obama had started. Should lose it not ONLY because they (OBAMA) had started it, but especially because, otherwise, this war will become escalated by the U.S. into World War Three, which would be a lose-lose war that would kill off more than half of the planet’s human population within just the first two years of the blasts.

So: the reason why Trump seemed off his game after the August 15th private meeting with Putin is that what Putin was telling him was not only true, but it was — to Trump — shocking. He had not encountered it in such media as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or Washington Post or Fox News or BBC.

The question is whether he will act on it. Of course, if he were a person of integrity, he would. But is he? And if he hasn’t been, then could he reverse on this? We’ll see.

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post The Reason for the Trump-Putin Summit’s Puzzling End appeared first on LewRockwell.

What do we make of it?

A good result came of it.  Trump moved away from his demand for a ceasefire and said that it was more important to work toward a permanent peace than a ceasefire which is seldom kept.  This would seem to commit Trump to addressing the root cause of the conflict, which is Russia’s insecurity with NATO all over her borders.

Putin said that the meeting marked the transition from confrontation and threats to dialogue.  This prospect alone made the meeting worthwhile.

These are good results.  In a world of nuclear weapons the level of tension had become untenable.

For hopes to be realized two barriers must be recognized and overcome.  One is the neoconservative doctrine of American hegemony.  The other is the interest of the US military/security complex.

The doctrine of hegemony requires overcoming Russia in order to achieve Washington’s unilateralism.  Is this doctrine too institutionalized to be repudiated?

The budget, influence over Congress, and power of the military/security complex requires a major enemy.  Russia fills that role.  Peace on equal terms with Russia takes away the enemy, and the budget and influence of the military/security complex declines.  There are military bases or weapon manufacturers in almost every state, which means this interest is also institutionalized as President Eisenhower warned us it would be.

Therefore, the question before us is:  how likely is it that Trump can get NATO and missile bases off of Russia’s border?  It is not at all likely if attention cannot be directed to the basic problem.

How helpful will media be?  It is the wrong focus to emphasize that Putin wanted the meeting in order to show that he was not isolated and could meet with the American president like Zelensky and Netanyahu do.  

The meeting was fortuitous. Trump had trapped himself.  His threatened secondary sanctions or tariffs against India and other BRICS members backfired.  Faced with his own 10-day deadline, he had to find a way out. He found it in an immediate meeting with Putin.  For Trump the meeting was a way of getting himself off of the spot.

The opportunity to wind down a confrontation that would likely end in nuclear war is based on luck.  Can this lucky outcome be turned into a mutual security agreement?  That depends on the strength of the neoconservatives’ doctrine of hegemony and the willingness of the military/security complex to accept declining sales and profits. Until it is realized that these two interests are the barriers to peace that must be overcome, there will be no peace process.

The post The Putin-Trump Meeting appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity’s 9th annual conference, “Blueprint for Peace” was held Saturday, a day after a possibly promising new start to the end of the US-NATO-Russia war in Ukraine, at a time where the world remains seconds away from nuclear destruction, due to accident or imperial malpractice.

August 16th featured lively and passionate set of speakers, to a room literally packed with great minds intent on tackling the great and urgent problems that Americans face now. You can watch the first part of it here, with the wonderful Dr. Jeffrey Sachs and a “Judging Freedom” panel hosted by the great Judge Andrew Napolitano.

I’m now 22 years distant from leaving the Pentagon with a different perspective on the state, 22 years on a journey to help myself and others see the state for what it is, what it has done, and what it is doing.  Every day we learn new things, and grow our network, something Ron Paul talked about at the conclusion of the conference.  He is approaching his 90th birthday with more fight and more love than ever before, and with millions of Americans not just wishing him well, but joining his cause of peace and liberty, of sound money and limited government.

Joining is perhaps not the right word; adopting the Ron Paul standard may more accurate.  Ron Paul always stood up to power, spoke truth, opposed war and promoted real liberty.  He took no offense in the decades where the state and statists fought him and ignored his advice, and he is gentle and kind, in a way that the generation now turning 90 often are. So when younger people, all the subsequent generations, at whatever age they discover Ron Paul, adopt his standard, it doesn’t create new Ron Pauls:  It creates, and has created, a vast Ron Paul army.  A subset of Americans who are smart, bold, economically astute, tech savvy, state-cynical, intensely curious, unintimidated and unintimidatable.  Rubber meeting road comes to mind.

US government at all levels today consumes – and constitutes – 70% of the economy, as much as Europe, nearly as much as the Soviet Union in its heyday (where 25% of actual market was grey, black, or private).  We are told we are free, in this debt-fueled mess of a state that constrains rather than serves, pillages rather than produces, is a stupidly proud enemy of liberty, and an active enemy of peace.  Nassim Taleb provided seven key “facts” of the world today that should intensely concern state lovers everywhere, facts that do intensely concern those who hope to survive the state’s inevitable, confiscatory, and bloody collapse.

Enough plaudits – I was as impressed with the speakers as I was with the quality and attitude of the crowd convened to hear them.

Several things surprised me a little bit.  I’ll share two here:

Speakers – and attendees in side conversations – talked about their visits abroad to Russia and Iran specifically, and time spent in the homes and neighborhoods of average citizens there. Journalists Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil found – in a way that is I believe timeless – that the same economic and political challenges people face in their own countries are remarkably similar to what Americans face. It takes two or more incomes to raise a family these days, good childcare is hard to find, mothers worry about their children’s education and futures, and everyone is living paycheck to paycheck, can’t save a dime or a dollar, one big accident or job loss from disaster.  Freedom of speech, and beyond that freedom of thought, is possibly more evident in Russia and Iran – maybe even China – than it is in the US and Europe.  Everywhere around the world, local and national politics continually disappoint the average people.  One speaker, an MP from the Netherlands Thierry Baudet, beautifully shared his story of Orwellian unfreedom in his own country, and in the EU.

Listening to the speakers and the attendees I began to really understand the globalism that Soros and Schwab envisioned, and that the US state aggressively pursues:  a ruling globally integrated state apparatus geared to destroy liberty, individuality, and sound money, and thus subduing the earth, and enslaving humanity.

The other thing that surprised me, although it shouldn’t have, is the vibrant and exciting readiness for a real fight, and a quiet agreement that the war has started.  While the theme was a blueprint for peace, it felt more like Jesus getting ready to clear out the money changers in the temple.  While I have attended my fair share of Ron Paul rallies and I’ve heard the roar of massive crowds responding to the liberty and peace message, what I sensed yesterday was more army and less fist bump – a set of fighting men and women already well-settled in both intelligence and mission, now self-organizing, specialized, divisions of labor evolving rapidly, and functioning together.  A large and complex war against the state – a war in defense of liberty, in opposition to state slavery, a war seeking not just the end, but a swift end to the debilitating and corrupt state that rules us, and impacts the globe in terrible ways we never think about.  Calls for limited government constitutionality were made, but unlike a decade or two decades ago, the army has long internalized this concept.

I didn’t hear a formal blueprint for peace – in the sense of an architectural plan – but rather a call to arms for an operational war that has already begun.  Yes, we must have sound money, end the Fed and the inflation tax, and revamp and defang the military industrial complex.  Calls were made to cut state corruption, to transform the military into something that can defend a Republic, not serve as red-lines and sitting ducks for a flailing empire. Colonel McGregor – a West Point man – indicated the 850 overseas US military installations could be drawn down immediately to around 120. Dr. Sachs quoted former president Truman, who said publicly in 1963 that the biggest mistake he made was allowing the CIA to go beyond intelligence and be allowed a covert operations mission.  Bringing back diplomacy was mentioned, and also maybe developing actual diplomats and politicians who can represent the United States competently, unlike the mismatch we saw in Alaska on the 16th, with three well-informed, self-controlled, diplomatic statesmen at the table with DC’s Larry, Curly and Mo.

The conference was rich and though-provoking, and there were a noticeable number of digs made at the wealth of the counties surrounding our District 1, and the incompetence, mental laziness and compromised positions of so many who occupy Washington and serve as first beneficiaries of the empire’s global haul over the past 70 plus years – a Federal Reserve empire as much as a military one, because, well, war is the health of the state.

To sum it up, I left the conference and drove west on 66, away from the global capitol of death, criminality and war.  The blueprint for peace, across political divides, is what libertarians from all eras have known it to be – liberty promoted, liberty lived, and liberty ascendant in a thousand different ways.  What a time to be alive!

The post Report From ‘Blueprint for Peace’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Australia’s state broadcaster the ABC gave extensive airtime to Israeli deputy foreign affairs minister Sharren Haskel on Friday, allowing her to voice her objections to Australian demonstrations against the very genocide that she and her government are presently committing in Gaza.

Haskel’s statements were then picked up and printed in outlets like The Guardian, quoting at length her lies denying Israel’s deliberate starvation of Palestinians and her assertion that anti-genocide protesters are “useful idiots” who fell for “terrorist propaganda”.

In an effort to give equal weight to both sides of the issue, The Guardian also quotes a response from a spokesperson for the Palestine Action Group, which helped coordinate the massive march over the Sydney Harbour Bridge earlier this month.

“The only useful idiots here are those in the media who continue to print Israeli propaganda despite two years of being consistently lied to,” the spokesperson said.

I don’t know how anyone could possibly disagree with this. It’s absolutely ridiculous to be giving these freaks a platform to spout lies in the latter half of the year 2025.

How wonderful it is for The Guardian to platform this genocide denier and propagandist who’s part of a fascist regime. This person should be arrested, not headlined in Australia. Those junkets Lenore Taylor had to Israel have really paid off. #AUSPOL pic.twitter.com/i9JyJBmcny

— Eddy Jokovich (@EddyJokovich) August 15, 2025

Stop platforming Israeli government officials and professional genocide apologists. Stop asking them what they think. Stop presenting their lies and manipulations as news stories. Stop asking them if they agree with their critics. Stop doing it. Stop.

Who cares if the government official who is perpetrating a genocide is offended by people saying she’s committing genocide? Who cares if a murderer dislikes being called a murderer while in the middle of an act of murder? Who cares if it hurts their feelings to be told they’re doing the thing that they are doing? Who gives a single solitary fuck?

Of course the people committing the genocide don’t want people saying they’re committing genocide. Of course they don’t. It does not matter. It’s completely irrelevant. Stop treating that like it’s a news story.

Every major human rights group on earth says this is a genocide, including Israeli groups. Genocide scholars and human rights experts around the world are in overwhelming in agreement on this. Once a consensus has been reached on that scale, there is no longer any journalistic obligation to keep asking the people doing the genocide whether they agree that it’s a genocide or how it makes their feelings feel to hear people say that it is.

The facts at this point are so well-established that continuing to give them a broad platform and report on what they say is the same as platforming people who believe Hitler was a good guy who should have finished the job. The only moral difference is that Hitler’s genocide is over so news outlets wouldn’t be actively helping him perpetrate an active genocide like they are in the case of Israel.

This genocide is one nonstop insult to our intelligence. It’s actually degrading at this point. The lies Israel’s supporters have to pretend to believe are getting so ridiculous that supporting Israel is now an act of public humiliation and self-debasement. https://t.co/Kh7aVY4lP7

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 7, 2025

We need to make Israel and its supporters own the shame of their lies. When you’ve got Netanyahu telling Fox News that Gaza looks the way it looks because Hamas put explosives inside “every single building”, that’s the kind of lie that’s meant to humiliate you. It’s commanding a slave to believe two plus two equals five just to demonstrate how completely dominated they are.

It’s a public humiliation ritual, and they should be the ones who are humiliated. In a normal situation, someone saying that Gaza looks like a gravel parking lot because Hamas put explosives in all the buildings would be looked at like they were wearing a gimp mask while covered in bodily fluids in public.

It’s just so submissive and cucky. The hospitals are all Hamas bases. UNRWA is a Hamas stronghold. The journalists are all terrorists. The starving civilians aren’t really starving. Civilians are dying in such high numbers because there are Hamas members hiding behind all the civilians. The UN, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and all major human rights groups all say the things they say because they secretly hate Jews. This obvious land grab is actually about hostages and October 7. Stating self-evident facts is antisemitic blood libel.

These aren’t just lies, they are insults to our intelligence. They are intended to degrade and humiliate us. To believe them is an exercise in self-debasement. They may as well be literally urinating on us and demanding that we say it’s raining.

This is backwards. We’re not the ones who should feel humiliated. We’re not the ones presenting these ridiculous fairytales as true. We’re not the ones committing genocide. This is their shame. It belongs to them. And we will know we’ve won when this is how their lies and atrocities get treated in mainstream discourse. The shame will be placed directly where it belongs.

We will know things have moved toward health when the standard response to an Israel apologist telling obvious lies is a knee-jerk “How embarrassing for you to have to say that like you think it’s true. You’re either a liar or a sucker, and either way, shame on you. You’re either a deceitful freak trying to psychologically manipulate me into supporting the worst things in the world, or you’re a moronic dupe who’s debased themselves by swallowing obvious lies. Either way it’s a pathetic, disgusting, shameful way to live.”

When we’ve moved toward health this will be the standard response, whether it’s in day to day conversation, online interactions, or someone spouting lies on a mainstream punditry show. This is the healthy response to atrociously shameful behavior.

_______________

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Eugyppius

The post The European press are having a big stroppy sad following the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska appeared first on LewRockwell.

While attentive persons are justly concerned and intimately focused upon in-depth detailed examination of the Ukraine/Russia War — the senseless, insane criminality, plunder and grift of the bipartisan War Party in Congress — and their murderous Merchants of death adjuncts in the military-industrial complex, let us never forget and ignore the dire historical precedents or antecedents which led up an earlier epic global conflagration. Hopefully this present conflagration is in the preliminary stages of resolution.

Hitlers Gold: The Real Story of Swiss Banks, The Bis, Dulles and The Aftermath

Virtually the same complicit and compliant corporate and financial interests who enabled Nazi Germany’s warfare state, were responsible for creating this regime of terror. The authoritative volumes by Antony C. Sutton below definitively document these activities essential to understanding the Cold War struggle between East and West.

• Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development 1917 to 1930 — Book by Antony C. Sutton
• Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development 1930 to 1945 — Book by Antony C. Sutton
• Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development 1945 to 1965 — Book by Antony C. Sutton
• Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution — Book by Antony C. Sutton
• Wall Street and FDR — Book by Antony C. Sutton
• The Plot To Seize the White House — Book by Jules Archer
• National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union — Book by Antony C. Sutton
• The Best Enemy Money Can Buy — Book by Antony C. Sutton
• Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler — Book by Antony C. Sutton
• Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust — Book by Edwin Black
• Conjuring Hitler: How Britain And America Made the Third Reich — Book by Guido Giacomo Preparata

In addition, consult the following:

• From Major Jordan’s Diaries — Book by George Racey Jordan.
• Red Carpet: The Connection Between the Kremlin and America’s Most Powerful Businessmen – Armand Hammer, Averell Harriman, Cyrus Eaton, David Rockefeller, Donald Kendall — Book by Joseph Finder
• Techno-Bandits: How the Soviets Are Stealing America’s High-Tech Future — Book by Linda Melvern, David Hebditch and Nick Anning
• Vodka Cola — Book by Charles Levinson
• East Minus West = Zero: Russia’s Debt to the Western World 862-1962 — Book by Werner Keller

The post Tragically, Here Are Little Known Aspects of the Greatest Conflagration of World History Never Taught in an Academic Setting appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Crisis Magazine

The post Persecution of Christians Escalates Across India appeared first on LewRockwell.

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1. Holistic Autoimmune Healing Bible: All-in-one Guide with a 30-Day Plan Built on the ROOT360 Protocol to Reduce Inflammation, Reclaim Energy, and Restore Clarity 
2. The Iron Curtain Over America
3. Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey
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5. America’s Secret Aristocracy: The Families that Built the United States
6. Meditations (150th Anniversary Collection Edition): A Classic History of Philosophy By Marcus Aurelius
7. The Medical-Pharmaceutical Killing Machine: Facing Facts Could Save Your Life
8. The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized: How Regulations Affect Our Everyday Lives 
9. The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality
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14. Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery
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20. The Theory of Money and Credit

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