Lew Rockwell Institute

This raises another question: how will the deflation of the Everything Bubble play out?

Causes generate effects. As noted in my previous post, if causal conditions have changed, the “guarantee” offered by statistics is empty. This leads to a simple question: what’s changed? Have the causal conditions changed enough to generate different results?

The status quo assumes the economy never really changes, and so the stimulus that worked last time will work again. This ignores the fundamental reality that change is constant and once causal conditions change, the effects will necessarily change as well.

So what’s changed in the 42 years since 1982? Why 1982? 1982 marked the end of the stagflationary 1970s and the start of the 40+-year bull market in stocks, real estate, and until recently, bonds.

1. China was just emerging from the Cultural Revolution. After 40 years of astounding growth, it’s struggling.

2. Debt levels across all sectors–public, corporate and household–were low compared to the present.

3. The global Baby Boom was entering peak earning, household formation, home buying, and starting enterprises. Now they’re retiring and entering the phase of selling assets to downsize and fund retirement.

4. Computer technology entered the mainstream economy and boosted productivity. Now we have AI but its long-term effect on global productivity is unproven.

5. Diminishing returns are manifesting across the global economy, as what worked so well in the boost phase no longer generates the same results.

China has changed in many ways. Scale matters. When a company is small and it boosts revenues by $1 billion, the stock rockets to the moon. Once it’s a trillion-dollar company, adding $1 billion no longer has the same effect. In fact, it’s a red flag that growth has slowed. Once profit margins slip, the stock crashes, as the growth story has ended.

The same causal conditions are present in China, which has reached a vast scale at the top of the S-Curve. China boosted its economy for decades by inflating an unprecedented real estate bubble, which created an enormous wealth effect in its burgeoning middle class. But all bubbles pop, and the concentration of household wealth in real estate means the decline is obliterating the heady sense of confidence generated by soaring assets.

China has also reached limits in exports and domestic consumption, for a variety of reasons.

The “never fails” China credit impulse has failed. Every economy that depends on expanding credit for its growth eventually enters a liquidity trap, where lowering interest rates and lending standards no longer boost assets or consumption because 1) households are wary of adding more debt or 2) households cannot afford to add more debt, even at low rates of interest.

China is also mired in the middle income trap, where the elite holds the majority of wealth and the rural populace is still earning very low incomes.

China pulled the global economy out of the 2008-09 Global Financial Meltdown, that’s not going to happen again. Once causal conditions change, so do the results.

The astounding expansion of credit/debt globally is an example of how a “solution” generates “problems” that only get worse the more “solution” is applied. Flooding the economy with low-cost credit works wonders when debt levels are low and there is pent-up demand for credit.

But once an economy is saturated with credit and staggering under the weight of servicing existing credit, adding more debt creates a problem more credit cannot solve: the greater the burdens of debt, the higher the risks of default.

Global debt has been rising on the shaky foundation of the Everything Bubble: as assets have bubbled higher, they expand the collateral available to borrow against. Once the bubble pops, then the collateral evaporates and the lender is under water: the assets is worth less than the loan amount. There is no escape for either borrower or lender.

Demographics have changed. The massive global Baby Boom is exiting the workforce and starting to liquidate assets to fund retirement. This transition from buying assets to selling assets raises the question: who will buy all these assets at today’s nosebleed overvaluations? Younger generations lacks the capital and income to buy assets at these levels of overvaluation, and there is nothing on the horizon that could change that asymmetry.

Selling pushes down asset prices, which then reduces the collateral supporting global debt, which then lights the fuse of a credit crisis that can’t be resolved by lowering credit and lending standards. Diminishing returns are not reversed by doing more of what’s failed–they’re accelerated into unstable crises by doing more of what’s failed.

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The last data point for the net long position for hedge funds was 17 September (COT report) due to be updated on Friday. Since then, open interest has increased by 28,256 contracts on preliminary figures for yesterday (Tuesday). That implies that this category of trader (managed money) is net long of about 240,000 contracts and therefore highly vulnerable to a bear raid by the swaps (bullion bank traders and market makers). And note how the rise in their net position is in lockstep with the price. But there is other evidence which we cannot ignore and is a new factor in the market.

What are the hedge funds selling to buy gold futures? This is my next chart and it is scary:

This death cross on the USD TWI, when the price is below falling moving averages with the 55-day falling below the 250-day and their decline accelerating explains why hedge funds are throwing caution to winds buying gold futures, seemingly at any price.

Another bizarre market reaction has been to China’s PBOC monetary stimulation, which in the grand scheme is not really significant, cutting key interest rates yesterday by 0.2% to shore up its ailing property market and to support the economy. The POBC seems to have caught Keynesian ‘flu. But instead of the yuan drifting lower as the interest differential with US rates increased, the yuan has soared to the highest level since May 2023.

And then we see commodity prices beginning to move higher. Copper, oil, and others are trending higher together. The chart below shows how individual commodity prices have risen over just one week!

The common factor is that the dollar is falling measured by commodity values. Clearly, markets are now reading an inflationary outcome from the Fed’s 50 basis point cut in the Fed Funds Rate last week. Whatever Jay Powell says publicly about a robust economy, off the record it appears that supporting the economy is now a higher priority than tackling inflation.

By way of confirmation, China indeed has a problem which is rarely mentioned. Export sales are under pressure. Why? It’s because major export markets are in recession. The fact that China has decided to act probably confirms the global recessionary fears informing US monetary policy.

So gold is just the canary signalling the early stages of not just a dollar problem, but accompanying factors are likely leading to the end of its reign as a fiat currency. It is the safest of safe havens in these troubled times, and overbought futures are hardly relevant.

Reprinted with permission from MacleodFinance Substack.

The post Gold Rising? No — the Dollar’s Falling appeared first on LewRockwell.

I was pleased to see the news that 22 Attorneys General, including our great Texan Ken Paxton, have just sent a letter to the American Academy of Pediatrics, warning that corrupt organization that it may be breaking the law with its misleading statements about so-called “gender dysphoria” in minors and the best way to treat it. As reported in a press release by the Do No Harm organization:

Twenty attorneys general signed a letter to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Tuesday warning the medical association that its statements supporting gender medical interventions for children are “deceptive” and may violate states’ consumer protection laws.

The letter, led by Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador, asks the AAP to substantiate its claims that puberty blockers are reversible and to provide information on its communications surrounding its gender medicine guidance.

“Amid a fracturing consensus among the medical establishment on sex change surgeries and drugs for minors, the American Academy of Pediatrics has refused to reevaluate their recommendations,” said Do No Harm Senior Fellow Dr. Jared Ross. “We applaud Attorney General Labrador and all the other attorneys general who are holding the AAP accountable for endorsing unscientific, experimental, and potentially harmful treatments.”

The letter pointed to the AAP’s 2018 policy statement – that the organization reaffirmed in August 2023 – that characterized puberty blockers as “reversible.”

“The 2018 AAP policy statement itself demonstrates that the ‘reversible’ claim is  misleading and deceptive,” the letter states. “It acknowledges that ‘[r]esearch on long-term risks, particularly in terms of bone metabolism and fertility, is currently limited and provides varied results.’ The AAP has no basis to assure parents that giving their children puberty blockers can be fully reversed. It just isn’t true.”

As many of us may recall of our own early adolescence, it is a time of great emotional instability in which one’s sense of self may shift radically within a short period of time. The best longterm study (by Dr. Kenneth Zucker) of minors who display symptoms of confusion about their gender shows that the majority of them will experience a resolution of these symptoms around the age of 18 or 19. About 10% of the boys simply come to terms with the fact that they are gay, and do not really long to become girls.

The Italian painter Caravaggio was fond of depicting effeminate looking boys. While often thought to have been a gay man, he once killed a man in a duel over a woman, so it’s not exactly clear where his preferences lay. The following image of an adolescent boy strikes me as very strange and mysterious.

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UPDATE, 24 September 2024: Gallup issued today a new report about the percentage of people in scientifically representative samples of 1,000 people, in each of 140 countries and areas around the world, the percentage who answered “Yes” to “Do you feel safe walking alone at night in the area where you live?” That percentage is the lowest in Ecuador. Gallup’s report is titled “2024: The Global Safety Report”, and its page five is headlined “Ecuadorians Least Likely in the World to Feel Safe.” Shown there is a graph which indicates that whereas prior to 2017 — which happened to be the year when the U.S. Government took over Ecuador’s government (as this article will explain) — that percentage averaged slightly higher than 50%, it headed downward starting in that year and is now only 27%. Gallup reports there that “Excluding active war zones, feelings of safety in [the province of] Guayas, Ecuador, are the lowest in the world [11%],” and also notes that “the country has spiraled into a deep security crisis. Ecuador is an increasingly important node in global cocaine trafficking.”

——

In the March 2022 issue of the academic journal Global Environmental Change, appeared an article by Hickel, Dorninger, Wieland and Suwandi, “Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015”, which reported that:

in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.

This is being done by the mega-imperialistic U.S. Government and its colonies or ‘allies’, against the global South, and the operation’s center is the U.S. Government, which, itself, is, amongst all of its empire, the paragon of economic inequality: it is the country where 30.3% of U.S. wealth is owned by richest 1%, and where the richest .01% donate 57.16% of all of the political money, so as to control their Government, in order to be able to get for themselves, virtually all of the profits from this looting of the world.

Whereas U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) had, during August 1941 till his death on 12 April 1945, been carefully planning his “United Nations” (which he even named), so as to eliminate and replace all empires and imperialisms for after WW2, and produce a U.N. which would be a democratic world federal government of independent nations, his immediate successor Harry Truman reversed all of that planning, on 25 July 1945, and started the planning for the Military-Industrial Complex that he and his personal hero General Dwight Eisenhower, and also the secret Rhodesist Winston Churchill, had advised him to do in order for the U.S. Government, instead of the U.N., ultimately to take control over the entire planet, every nation, including especially all of the Soviet Union. The way that Eisenhower had put this matter to Truman, was that unless the U.S. will control the entire world, the Soviet Union will; and this purely win-lose thinking that excluded any possibiity of a win-win result (plus Churchill’s seconding that) led Truman, on 25 July 1945, to demand from the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, that Stalin grant the U.S. Government a veto power over both the domestic policies and the foreign policies of the nations that the Soviet Union had captured from Hitler’s forces. Truman proudly wrote to his wife that night, saying  that Stalin “seems to like it when I hit him with a hammer.” (In other words: Stalin didn’t like it at all.)

Stalin couldn’t accept Truman’s demand, any more than Truman would have accepted a similar demand from Stalin about the nations that America and its colonies such as the UK had conquered in Europe. Stalin (like FDR would have done if he had survived) made no such demand upon Truman or anyone else; and, from that date forward, Stalin recognized that unless he could change Truman’s mind on this (which never happened), the U.S. Government would be at war against the Soviet Government. It turned out to be (on the American side at least) a war not actually between capitalism versus communism (as Truman, Ike, and Churchill, propagandized it to be) but instead between the U.S. against the entire world — to take all of it — as was made clear when U.S. President GHW Bush started, on 24 February 1990, secretly instructing his stooge leaders, such as Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand, that their war against the soon-no-longer-communist Russia would secretly continue until it too becomes a part of the U.S. empire — that America’s NATO will expand all the way up to Russia’s borders.

So, America’s Deep State was born on 25 July 1945, when the U.S. Governmental Executive decision was made that not the United Nations — as FDR had intended — but instead the U.S. Government itself, should take control over the world after WW2 ends. Until 25 July 1945, Truman had been undecided about this, but now he made the decision for a future all-encompassing global American empire, and this decision has profoundly affected the U.S. Government in all of the years that followed. It was the actual beginning of America’s Deep State: the rule over the U.S. Govenment by America’s super-rich, for unlimited expansion of their empire to control the entire planet. It’s a money-funnel not merely from all Americans to America’s few super-rich, but from all people throughout the world, to America’s few super-rich. And that is how it operates, while cutting in the local aristocracy within each colony, to split with them the local take.

Althouth many examples of this imperial rule over its colonies (or ‘allies’) by the U.S. Government are well known, such as the entirely lie-based U.S. invasion of Vietnam (for ‘democracy and freedom’), and the entirely lie-based invasion of Iraq (against ’Saddam’s WMD’), plus numerous U.S. coups such as against Iran and Guatemala and Chile and Ukraine, many other such cases are little known, such as in Ecuador, which is the example that will be discussed here:

An excellent article about how corrupt the U.S. Government is was published on 8 February 2022 and headlined “What if, instead of a movie, I got flung in jail? This lawyer who fought Chevron was”, by Erin Brockovich. It described the case of the U.S. lawyer for Ecuador, Steven Donziger, whom the U.S. regime imprisoned for having won a court case against Chevron/Texaco, to pay a nearly $10 billion fine for having recklessly poisoned indigenous Ecuadorians. The polluter refused to pay, and U.S. courts instead sent to prison Ecuador’s lawyer — and had him disbarred. The victims got nothing. The question of Chevron/Texaco’s guilt was ignored: the fine was simply cancelled. Crucial to Donziger’s penalties was the decision by what Brockovich referred to as “In 2018, an international tribunal ruled that Chevron had been previously released from liability for pollution in the Amazon and ordered Ecuador not to enforce the $9.5bn judgment.” But that ‘tribunal’ wasn’t actually a court-case; it was an arbitration-case, and Ecuador had never authorized sidelining their case, moving it out of the courts and into the extremely corrupt ICSID private system of international arbitration that the U.S. Government had largely created in order to protect the investment assets of its billionaires. Actually, ICSID was started by the U.S. controlled World Bank in 1966, to provide ICSID “arbitration panels” to settle ISDS disputes that international corporations have against governments, substituting for law courts and judges, so as to give corporate investors rights above and beyond those which governments have (rights against foreign governments); therefore, this was a straight-out fascist (or libertarian/neoliberal) invention by the U.S. regime with the cooperation of its colonies. In fact, the entire ISDS system had first been proposed and instituted in 1959, by the former leading Nazi banker Hermann Abs, along with Britain’s Baron Shawcross. ICSID’s real growth that made these fascist (or ‘libertarian’) arrangements common started with Nixon in 1974, and then expanded afterwards by Clinton’s NAFTA treaty, and then by Obama’s proposed TPP, TTIP, and TISA, treaties — and all of that since 1974 has veered way off the rails of the U.S. Constitution, but the U.S. Supreme Court has deferred to the other branches of the U.S. Government, to interpret the Constitution regarding commercial treaties, because America’s billionaires like it that way — regardless of what the Constitution says about ALL treaties (and even though the Supreme Court was, by its passivity on this matter, allowing, basically authorizing, blatant violation of the Treaty Clause in the U.S. Constitution, by allowing the Legislative and Executive Branches of the Government to interpret the Constitution — as-if allowing that didn’t itself violate the Constitution and its separation-of-powers clauses). So, the corruptness here runs as deep as possible.

Though the initial case between Ecuador and Texaco/Chevron was about pollution and deaths from it, that case was nullified by Chevron’s amassing a team of hundreds of lawyers from 60 firms who swamped Donziger and financially destroyed him and got a far-rightwing U.S. judge to convict him with the federal crime of racketeering, by the judge’s accepting the bribed testimony of the Ecuadorian judge who had assessed the $9.5B fine against Chevron, to testify that he had been bribed by Donziger to rule in his country’s (Ecuador’s) favor against Texaco/Chevron. There was no evidence that Donziger had bribed him, but clearly Chevron did, and yet the ‘trial’ judge (whom Chevron had managed to get to handle this case) arbitrarily chose to believe him and thus absolved Chevron of any wrongdoing, and disbarred Donziger and placed him into prison.

Even Wikipedia’s article on Donziger makes clear that his treatment by the U.S. regime was barbaric, corrupt, and illegal, but the regime prides itself not on adhering to any international laws-based order, but instead to its own international rules-based order (where those ‘rules’ are whatever the U.S. regime says they are — no democratic procedure produces them). ICSID is setting some of those “rules.” WarOnWant.org concluded, about the Texaco-v.-Ecuador case: “This case is unprecedented, as far as we know, in directly overturning a democratically accountable, national court judgement. Until now, ISDS tribunals have, on occasion, been asked to order legal proceedings to be put on hold until after the outcome of an ISDS case, but no more. The Chevron case sets an incredibly dangerous precedent that could lead to ISDS tribunals trespassing into domestic courts all over the world, rewriting justice in favour of corporate power.”

In fact, the judge’s ruling against Donziger was so corrupt so that on 26 February 2020, the ABA Journal headlined “Lawyer blasted by judge for conduct in Chevron case should get his law license back, ethics referee says”. The referee was highly critical of the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, who found Donziger to have committed fraud against Texaco/Chevron, and the referee brought forth character witnesses who were themselves highly credible, saying that Donziger is a person of extraordinary integrity and courage. One of these character witnesses was John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and other books against megacorporate criminality and governmental corruption, who is certainly an expert on the subject and who said “from knowing Steve he is incredibly honest.” The referee also grilled Donziger himself, and found him persuasive that Judge Kaplan’s allegations against him were false and that Donziger had presented to Kaplan evidence to that effect, which Kaplan simply ignored in the opinion he wrote. The referee then noted that the susequent Appeals Court decision made at least one crucial false statement in affirming Kaplan’s ruling. There were other remarkable findings by the referee, such as “A total of fifteen to seventeen judges reviewed the Chevron charges of fraud and concluded ‘…contrary to Judge Kaplan.’” The referee noted that “There appears to be no case like this. While Respondent is often his own worst enemy and has made numerous misjudgments due to self-confidence that may border on arrogance, and perhaps too much zeal for his cause, his field of practice is not the usual one.” He urged “that Respondent’s suspension immediately be ended and that he be restored to the bar of this State.” However, it was not done.

On 24 January 2022, the 67-page detailed “Report of monitors: United States v. Steven Donziger” headlined and documented “Donziger Criminal Contempt Proceedings Violated International Human Rights Law and Standards”, and concluded:

After carefully reviewing the transcripts and relevant laws and standards, the Panel’s unequivocal assessment of the criminal contempt proceedings against Steven Donziger is that he has been subject to multiple violations of his internationally protected human rights, including his right to a fair trial by an independent and impartial tribunal and his right to the presumption of innocence. These violations have resulted in prolonged arbitrary detention for Mr. Donziger [which still continues]. …

In instance after instance, when a procedural rule could be deployed against the defendant, the prosecutor and judge did so. Judge Kaplan and Judge Preska consistently interpreted and deployed laws and rules in ways that gave a “rule by law” air of legitimacy to proceedings aimed toward seemingly predetermined conclusions while disregarding fundamental principles of the rule of law. The result was multiple violations of international human rights law and standards. …

The Panel further notes that a proposed visit from the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers has been outstanding since 2014, and recommends that the visit be arranged on an urgent basis.

On 27 January 2022, The Nation headlined “Chevron’s Prosecution of Steven Donziger: Documents reveal a close collaboration between the oil giant, its law firm, and the ‘private prosecutor’ who sent the environmentalist lawyer to federal prison.” Donziger, who still was in prison, was quoted: “Private corporations aren’t supposed to be able to help put people in prison, which is what Chevron did to me. Corporations can sue you in a civil proceeding, but they aren’t allowed to finance a criminal prosecution. If Chevron gets away with this, what kind of a country are we living in?” Of course, the answer is clear.

This case had been dealt with first by a criminal court in Ecuador, against Texaco/Chevron, during the Presidency of that country’s progressive President Rafael Correa, in order to deal with illegal pollution and resulting illnesses and deaths, that were due to Texaco then Chevron’s dumpings of toxic wastes into the forest. In February 2011, an $18 billion judgment — later reduced to $9.5 billion — was rendered against Chevron by the Ecuadorian court. On 4 March 2014, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (in Manhattan) ruled that the $9.5 billion Ecuadorian judgement was the product of fraud and racketeering activity, and thus unenforceable.

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International Man: The Soviet Union used the diagnosis of mental illness as a tool to silence political dissenters. It was a practice known as “psychiatric repression.”

Dissidents who spoke out against the government were often declared insane and forcibly institutionalized in psychiatric hospitals, where the government subjected them to inhumane treatment and abuses.

The diagnoses were often based on political rather than medical criteria and were used as a means of punishment and control.

What is your take on this practice?

Doug Casey: Well, before we get into what happened in the Soviet Union, and what seems to now be happening in the US, we really have to address the validity of psychiatry as a science to start with, and mental illness as being a real illness.

Dr. Thomas Szasz, who died some years ago, made the case that mental illness is not a medical concept and does not have a biological basis. He believed that what people commonly refer to as “mental illness” is actually a label used to describe deviant behavior, emotions, and thoughts that do not conform to social norms. He argued that mental illnesses are not diseases in the traditional sense, as they cannot be objectively measured or diagnosed like physical conditions such as cancer or arteriosclerosis. He wrote numerous books debunking psychiatry; I highly recommend them.

My own view is that people have always had psychological problems, worries, and aberrations. These things were once dealt with by talking to friends, counselors, or religious figures. Since the time of Sigmund Freud, however, “treating” mental conditions has been turned into the business of psychiatry.

Psychiatry has set up a priesthood of doctors who look at what people think, say, and do, and offer opinions as to whether or not it’s healthy. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with studying the way the mind works. The problem arises when a practitioner can impose his opinion on another person. If a surgeon thinks you should have a heart operation, he can’t impose that on you. But if a licensed psychiatrist thinks you should be incarcerated and subjected to various drugs and “therapies,” there may not be much you can do about it.

Coming back to what happened in the Soviet Union, State officials found psychiatry was an excellent way to keep dissidents under control. It’s one thing to be prosecuted because the government thinks you’re politically unreliable and your views are wrong, but another to be punished because a medical practitioner claims you’re insane for holding them. Psychiatry—which I view as a pseudoscience—can easily be used to give a patina of science to political views.

But by saying they were crazy, the Communists were able to attack the actual essence of a person. This is one more thing that made the Communists not just nasty and dangerous, but evil. Evil is a word that’s fallen into disrepute in recent years, perhaps because it’s been used so indiscriminately by poorly educated Bible thumpers. My own view is that many, or most, supposed psychiatric disorders are a consequence of doing evil; if a person can’t confront these things, he may act irrationally, and be viewed as neurotic or psychotic. But putting yourself under the control of a person who’s taken some courses about other doctors’ opinions is rarely a cure.

It’s funny that psychiatrists, as a group, are usually looked down upon by other members of the medical profession. They may have real medical training, but when they go into practice all they basically do is sit behind a couch and listen to people rap about their problems, then experiment with psychoactive drugs, hoping for magic to happen. It’s not a bad gig to sit and listen for several hundred dollars per hour.

In using Freudian talk therapy, psychiatrists are basically no better than a friend or counselor, and often worse. I suspect many are just voyeurs who like to hear about others’ problems, perhaps just looking to compare them with their own. In fact, it can be worse. A lot of people become psychiatrists because they themselves are troubled and they like the idea of listening to other people’s problems and bouncing their arbitrary thoughts back at them.

Worse, the public thinks that psychiatrists actually know how the mind works, and can magically know what they’re thinking. The public thinks shrinks have special powers, like modern witch doctors. That fear, ridiculous as it is, gives them genuine power. That in itself draws the wrong kind of person to psychiatry. There’s a reason why Hannibal Lecter was portrayed as a psychiatrist as opposed to an accountant or an engineer or a salesman.

The process is disguised and legitimized by classifying problems using, among other things, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (called DSM-5 in its latest edition). Unlike a real medical or surgical manual, the book is mostly guesswork and opinion, a modern version of the medieval Malleus Malificarum, which classified everything known about witchcraft.

Although most Freudian talk therapy is actually bunkum, simply allowing a troubled person a chance to talk, even for just 55 minutes, can sometimes be helpful. But the usual cure prescribed today is some type of drug affecting brain function. Most of these drugs only disguise the problem by clouding the mind. These drugs can actually alter the cells in the brain—what they do, and how you think. There are hundreds of psychiatric drugs now—Ritalin, Zoloft, Xanax, and Prozac are common ones—but there are many more that are seriously dangerous.

As a by-the-way, it turns out that FTX had a psychiatrist on the payroll at their Bahamas hangout. The shrink, one Dr. George Lerner, apparently had about 20 FTX employees as private patients at one time. Sam Bankman-Fried himself has stated that he’s been on the antidepressant Emsam for “half his adult life.” It’s a bad idea to invest in a company that has a staff psychiatrist, where lots of people are on psych drugs. What they needed wasn’t a pill pusher, but a decent human who was interested in ethics, and concepts like right and wrong.

In their belief that there’s “bad think” and that they have a right to alter it, psychiatrists have gotten into things like electroshock therapy, which physically destroys people’s brain calls, and prefrontal lobotomies performed by taking an ice pick, going through the side of the eye, and purposefully destroying part of people’s brains.

One of the most inhuman things about the Soviet Union, which was full of bad things, may have been the way it perverted medicine, endorsing psychiatry, to destroy the human spirit itself. This concept is finding its way into the US and the West. Corrupt psych specialists use pseudoscience to prove that people the government deems to have crazy political ideas are indeed crazy. “Crazy” is being defined as not believing what they believe, and saying things that are politically incorrect.

I would submit psychiatry is a phony and dangerous specialty to start with. And putting psychiatric pseudoscientists in charge of determining what’s “good think” and “bad think” is very dangerous.

Medicine shouldn’t be involved in politics, which is certainly the major takeaway of Dr. Fauci’s role in the recent COVID hysteria. And that goes double for psychiatry. Professional associations—like labor unions—are always looking to increase political power and economic wealth for themselves and their members. Bar associations do it for lawyers, the NEA for teachers, the AMA for doctors, and the American Psychiatric Association for shrinks. They’re all dangers to society. But the APA more than most.

To give you an example, I once met a prominent shrink in Washington, DC. He advocated requiring psychiatric tests for all high government officials, to keep dangerous nutcases out of office. That’s understandable. But what if the tests in question skew against certain political, economic, and philosophical beliefs? At this point, it could only play into the hands of those with power.

Remember, control freaks—people that like to control other people—aren’t interested so much in controlling the physical universe as manipulating and controlling other people. They tend to go into government. And when they go into medicine, they’re often drawn to psychiatry.

If you can disguise your desire to control and manipulate your fellow humans by claiming you have medical necessity on your side, you become much more effective and much more dangerous.

International Man: During the Covid mass psychosis, there were reports of certain medical agencies in Canada that suggested refusing the vaccine was a sign of psychiatric problems.

We’ve also seen proponents of climate change hysteria use language to describe skeptics as mentally ill.

What are the implications of this?

Doug Casey: The politicization of psychiatry—trying to control what people think—is really, really dangerous. It’s a trend that has been building for a long time, and I think it’s getting worse.

Once upon a time, somebody was deemed insane if they were manifestly irrational, walking down the streets yelling and screaming. Someone obviously unable to maintain themselves. They’ve always existed, but as a teeny-weeny portion of society. If they committed an actual tort, it was a matter for the police and the courts. If they didn’t commit an actual crime, then they were just a nuisance—and life is full of nuisances. Historically, crazy people were non-problems. Unless, of course, they got into government…

In the last 100 years, the number of diagnosable psychiatric disorders has grown like topsy. There are hundreds and hundreds of things that are now deemed psychiatric disorders. Enough that almost everybody can now be said to need a psychiatrist. Personal quirks, eccentricities, and non-mainstream beliefs have been made into psychiatric disorders, listed in the DSM, requiring a “qualified” professional to cure. They pretend to do this by bouncing their own personal opinions off of you with talk therapy, or by putting you on dangerous psychiatric drugs.

Soon I expect we’ll see public health used as an excuse to shut down beliefs which don’t suit a certain class of people. It’s very dangerous and it’s very unnecessary.

I’m not saying all psychiatrists are bad. But most are necessarily living in an echo chamber that reinforces bad tendencies. Look at it this way. Not all economists are bad, but they live in a Keynesian echo chamber in today’s world; as a result most economists wind up making bad recommendations. The same is true for psychs, even the ones who join the profession because they really want to help people.

International Man: Where is this trend going? What can the average person do about it?

Doug Casey: We’re facing a multi-front war against Western Civilization in general.

It’s not just a physical war. It’s not just an ideological war. It’s not just a political war. It’s turned into a psychological war.

One of the fronts of attack is to convince the general public—who don’t think about much outside the narrow confines of their own life and watching sports and television—that people who don’t believe a given narrative are, in fact, crazy. The psychiatric profession is very involved in the process.

In my view, this is further proof that many psychiatrists are dupes of evil people. At best.

What can you do about it?

Call out BS wherever you see it. Don’t automatically accept the opinions of people just because they’ve been granted a degree or license. Think critically, and demand logical answers to impolite questions.

Since this is a psychological war more than anything else, speak out whenever you can. Staying quiet makes you complicit in the crime by subtly agreeing with it.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Dangerous Trend of ‘Psychiatric Repression’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

From World War I to the Present: Dollar denominated debt has been the driving force behind all US led wars.

Wall Street creditors are the main actors. 

They were firmly behind Nazi Germany. They financed Operation Barbarossa and the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

“On January 4th, 1932, a meeting was held between British financier Montagu Norman (Governor of the Bank of England), Adolf Hitler and Franz Von Papen (who became Chancellor a few months later in May 1932) At this meeting, an agreement on the financing of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP or Nazi Party) was reached.

This meeting was also attended by US policy-makers and the Dulles brothers, something which their biographers do not like to mention.

A year later, on January 14th, 1933, another meeting was held between Adolph Hitler, Germany’s Financier Baron Kurt von Schroeder, Chancellor Franz von Papen and Hitler’s Economic Advisor Wilhelm Keppler took place, where Hitler’s program was fully approved.” (Y. Rubtsov, text below)

Upon the accession of Adolph Hitler as Chancellor in March 1933, a massive privatization program was initiated which bears the finger-prints of Wall Street.

Dr. Hjalmar Schacht –re-appointed in March 1933 by Adolph Hitler to the position of President of The Reichsbank— was invited to the White House (May 1933) by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“After his meeting with the U.S. President and the big bankers on Wall Street, America allocated Germany new loans totalling $1 billion” [equivalent to $23.7 billion in 2023, PPP estimate] (Y. Rubtsov, op cit)

Newspapers.com 

Barely a year later, in April 1934, The Economist “reported that military expenditure was forcing the Minister of Finance to look for new resources” including the privatization of the Deutsche Reichsbahn (German Railways) (quoted in Germa Bel, p. 20). The Nazi government also sold off State owned shipbuilding companies, State infrastructure and public utilities.

With a “Nazi- Neo-Liberal” slant, –no doubt with “conditionalities”- the privatization program was negotiated with Germany’s Wall Street creditors. Several major banking institutions including  Deutsche Bank and Dresden Bank were also privatized.

“[T]he government of the Nazi Party sold off public ownership in several State-owned firms in the mid-1930s. These firms belonged to a wide range of sectors: steel, mining, banking, local public utilities, shipyards, ship-lines, railways, etc.

In addition, the delivery of some public services that were produced by government prior to the 1930s, especially social and labor-related services, was transferred to the private sector, mainly to organizations within the party.” (Germa Bel, University of Barcelona)

The proceeds of the privatization program were used to repay outstanding debts as well as fund Nazi Germany’s buoyant military industrial complex.

Numerous U.S. conglomerates had invested in Nazi Germany’s arms industry including Ford and General Motors:

Both General Motors and Ford insist that they bear little or no responsibility for the operations of their German subsidiaries, which controlled 70 percent of the German car market at the outbreak of war in 1939 and rapidly retooled themselves to become suppliers of war materiel to the German army.

… In certain instances, American managers of both GM and Ford went along with the conversion of their German plants to military production at a time when U.S. government documents show they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their plants at home. (Washington Post,  November 30, 1998)

“A Famous American Family” Sleeping with the Enemy. The Role of Prescott Bush

Of significance: “A  famous American family” made its fortune from the Nazis, according to John Loftus’ documented historical analysis.

Prescott Bush (grandfather of George W. Bush) was a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. , and director of the Union Banking Corporation , closely linked to the interests of German corporations, including Thyssen Stahl, an important company involved in the arms industry of the Third Reich.

The Bush family links to Nazi Germany’s war economy were first brought to light at the Nuremberg trials in the testimony of Nazi Germany’s steel magnate Fritz Thyssen.

Image: (right) Senator Prescott Bush with his son George H. Walker Bush. (1950s)

Thyssen was a partner of  Prescott Bush.

“From 1945 until 1949 in Nuremberg, one of the lengthiest and, it now appears, most futile interrogations of a Nazi war crimes suspect began in the American Zone of Occupied Germany.

Multibillionaire steel magnate Fritz Thyssen –-the man whose steel combine was the cold heart of the Nazi war machine– talked and talked and talked to a joint US-UK interrogation team.

… What the Allied [Nuremberg] investigators never understood was that they were not asking Thyssen the right question. Thyssen did not need any foreign bank accounts because his family secretly owned an entire chain of banks.

He did not have to transfer his Nazi assets at the end of World War II, all he had to do was transfer the ownership documents – stocks, bonds, deeds and trusts–from his bank in Berlin through his bank in Holland to his American friends in New York City: Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker, Thyssen’s partners … were the father and father-in-law of a future President of the United States. (John Loftus, The Dutch Connection, September 2002).

John Loftus was  a (former) U.S. Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor. during the Nixon Administration.

The American public was not aware of the links of the Bush family to Nazi Germany because the historical record had been carefully withheld by the mainstream media. In September 2004, however, The Guardian revealed that:

George Bush’s grandfather, the late US Senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.  … 

His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.”

( Ben Aris and Duncan Campbell, How Bush’s Grandfather Helped Hitlers Rise to Power,  Guardian, September 25, 2004, emphasis added)

Prescott Bush entered politics in 1950. In 1952 he was elected Senator for Connecticut, a position which he held until January 1963.

Evidence of the Bush family’s  links to Nazism was available well before George Herbert Walker Bush (Senior) and George W. Bush entered politics, not to mention Bush Senior’s stint at the CIA.

The U.S. media remained totally mum. According to John Buchanan (New Hampshire Gazette, 10 October 2003):

“After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media, newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives and Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of and U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his “enem\\y national” partners.

The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler’s rise to power by the subversion of democratic principle and German law. Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker, President Bush’s maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings with the German industrial tycoon for nearly a year after the U.S. entered the war.

While Prescott Bush’s company’s assets, namely Union Banking Corporation  were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act (See below), George W. Bush’s grandfather was never prosecuted for his business dealings with  Nazi Germany.

“In 1952, Prescott Bush was elected to the U.S. Senate, with no press accounts about his well-concealed Nazi past.

There is no record of any U.S. press coverage of the Bush-Nazi connection during any political campaigns conducted by George Herbert Walker Bush, Jeb Bush, or George W. Bush, with the exception of a brief mention in an unrelated story in the Sarasota Herald Tribune in November 2000 and a brief but inaccurate account in The Boston Globe in 2001.” (John Buchanan, op. cit)

Up until Pearl Harbor (December 1941), Wall Street was trading with Germany.

In the wake of Pearl Harbor (1941-1945), Standard Oil “was trading with the enemy” selling oil to Nazi Germany through the intermediation of so-called “neutral countries” including Venezuela and Argentina.

Read the Whole Article

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“The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes.”—Thomas Paine

The government wants your money.

It will beg, steal or borrow if necessary, but it wants your money any way it can get it.

The government’s schemes to swindle, cheat, scam, and generally defraud taxpayers of their hard-earned dollars have run the gamut from wasteful pork barrel legislation, cronyism and graft to asset forfeiture, costly stimulus packages, and a national security complex that continues to undermine our freedoms while failing to making us any safer.

Americans have also been made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the taxpayers.

This is what comes of those $1.2 trillion spending bills: someone’s got to foot the bill.

Because the government’s voracious appetite for money, power and control has grown out of control, its agents have devised other means of funding its excesses and adding to its largesse through taxes disguised as fines, taxes disguised as fees, and taxes disguised as tolls, tickets and penalties.

No matter how much money the government pulls in, it’s never enough (case in point: the endless stopgap funding deals and constant ratcheting up of the debt ceiling), so the government has to keep introducing new plans to empower its agents to seize Americans’ bank accounts.

Make way for the digital dollar.

Whether it’s the central bank digital currency favored by President Biden, or the cryptocurrency being hawked by former President Trump, the end result will still be a form of digital money that makes it easier to track, control and punish the citizenry.

For instance, weeks before the Biden Administration made headlines with its support for a government-issued digital currency, the FBI and the Justice Department quietly moved ahead with plans for a cryptocurrency enforcement team (translation: digital money cops), a virtual asset exploitation unit tasked with investigating crypto crimes and seizing virtual assets, and a crypto czar to oversee it all.

No surprises here, of course.

This is how the government operates: by giving us tools to make our lives “easier” while, in the process, making it easier for the government to crack down.

Indeed, this shift to a digital currency is a global trend.

More than 100 other countries are considering introducing their own digital currencies.

China has already adopted a government-issued digital currency, which not only allows it to surveil and seize people’s financial transactions, but can also work in tandem with its social credit score system to punish individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions (and reward them for adhering to government-sanctioned behavior). As China expert Akram Keram wrote for The Washington Post, “With digital yuan, the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] will have direct control over and access to the financial lives of individuals, without the need to strong-arm intermediary financial entities. In a digital-yuan-consumed society, the government easily could suspend the digital wallets of dissidents and human rights activists.”

Where China goes, the United States eventually follows.

Inevitably, a digital currency will become part of our economy and a central part of the government’s surveillance efforts.

Combine that with ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) initiatives that are tantamount to social media credit scores for corporations, and you will find that we’re traveling the same road as China towards digital authoritarianism. As journalist Jon Brookin warns: “Digital currency issued by a central bank can be used as a tool for government surveillance of citizens and control over their financial transactions.”

As such, digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient.

This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. Much like the war on drugs and the war on terror, this so-called “war on cash” has been sold to the public as a means of fighting terrorists, drug dealers, tax evaders and even COVID-19 germs.

In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal. The rationale (by police) is that cash is the currency for illegal transactions given that it’s harder to track, can be used to pay illegal immigrants, and denies the government its share of the “take,” so doing away with paper money will help law enforcement fight crime and help the government realize more revenue.

According to economist Steve Forbes, “The real reason for this war on cash—start with the big bills and then work your way down—is an ugly power grab by Big Government. People will have less privacy: Electronic commerce makes it easier for Big Brother to see what we’re doing, thereby making it simpler to bar activities it doesn’t like, such as purchasing salt, sugar, big bottles of soda and Big Macs.”

This is how a cashless society—easily monitored, controlled, manipulated, weaponized and locked down—plays right into the hands of the government (and its corporate partners).

Despite what we know about the government and its history of corruption, bumbling, fumbling and data breaches, not to mention how easily technology can be used against us, the shift to a cashless society is really not a hard sell for a society increasingly dependent on technology for the most mundane aspects of life.

In much the same way that Americans have opted into government surveillance through the convenience of GPS devices and cell phones, digital cash—the means of paying with one’s debit card, credit card or cell phone—is becoming the de facto commerce of the American police state.

At one time, it was estimated that smart phones would replace cash and credit cards altogether by 2020. Since then, growing numbers of businesses have adopted no-cash policies, including certain airlines, hotels, rental car companies, restaurants and retail stores. In Sweden, even the homeless and churches accept digital cash.

Making the case for a digital wallet, journalist Lisa Rabasca Roepe argues that there’s no longer a need for cash. “More and more retailers and grocery stores are embracing Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Samsung Pay, and Android Pay,” notes Roepe. “PayPal’s app is now accepted at many chain stores including Barnes & Noble, Foot Locker, Home Depot, and Office Depot. Walmart and CVS have both developed their own payment apps while their competitors Target and RiteAid are working on their own apps.”

So what’s really going on here?

Despite all of the advantages that go along with living in a digital age—namely, convenience—it’s hard to imagine how a cashless world navigated by way of a digital wallet doesn’t signal the beginning of the end for what little privacy we have left and leave us vulnerable to the likes of government thieves, data hackers and an all-knowing, all-seeing Orwellian corpo-governmental state.

First, when I say privacy, I’m not just referring to the things that you don’t want people to know about, those little things you do behind closed doors that are neither illegal nor harmful but embarrassing or intimate. I am also referring to the things that are deeply personal and which no one need know about, certainly not the government and its constabulary of busybodies, nannies, Peeping Toms, jail wardens and petty bureaucrats.

Second, we’re already witnessing how easy it will be for government agents to manipulate digital wallets for their own gain in order to track your movements, monitor your activities and communications, and ultimately shut you down. For example, civil asset forfeiture schemes are becoming even more profitable for police agencies thanks to ERAD (Electronic Recovery and Access to Data) devices supplied by the Department of Homeland Security that allow police to not only determine the balance of any magnetic-stripe card (i.e., debit, credit and gift cards) but also freeze and seize any funds on pre-paid money cards. In fact, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it does not violate the Fourth Amendment for police to scan or swipe your credit card. Expect those numbers to skyrocket once digital money cops show up in full force.

Third, a government-issued digital currency will give the government the ultimate control of the economy and complete access to the citizenry’s pocketbook. While the government might tout the ease with which it can deposit stimulus funds into the citizenry’s accounts, such a system could also introduce what economists refer to as “negative interest rates.” Instead of being limited by a zero bound threshold on interest rates, the government could impose negative rates on digital accounts in order to control economic growth. “If the cash is electronic, the government can just erase 2 percent of your money every year,” said David Yermack, a finance professor at New York University.

Fourth, a digital currency will open Americans—and their bank accounts—up to even greater financial vulnerabilities from hackers and government agents alike.

Fifth, digital authoritarianism will redefine what it means to be free in almost every aspect of our lives. Again, we must look to China to understand what awaits us. As Human Rights Watch analyst Maya Wang explains: “Chinese authorities use technology to control the population all over the country in subtler but still powerful ways. The central bank is adopting digital currency, which will allow Beijing to surveil—and control—people’s financial transactions. China is building so-called safe cities, which integrate data from intrusive surveillance systems to predict and prevent everything from fires to natural disasters and political dissent. The government believes that these intrusions, together with administrative actions, such as denying blacklisted people access to services, will nudge people toward ‘positive behaviors,’ including greater compliance with government policies and healthy habits such as exercising.”

Short of returning to a pre-technological, Luddite age, there’s really no way to pull this horse back now that it’s left the gate. To our detriment, we have virtually no control over who accesses our private information, how it is stored, or how it is used. And in terms of our bargaining power over digital privacy rights, we have been reduced to a pitiful, unenviable position in which we can only hope and trust that those in power will treat our information with respect.

At a minimum, before any kind of digital currency is adopted, we need stricter laws on data privacy and an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices by the government and its corporate partners.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the ramifications of any government having this much unregulated, unaccountable power to target, track, round up and detain its citizens is beyond chilling.

The post Hidden Agendas: Beware of the Government’s Push for a Digital Currency appeared first on LewRockwell.

As Israel butchers hundreds of civilians in its latest attacks on Lebanon, leaked documents have surfaced revealing that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken knowingly lied to congress about Israel’s siege warfare against civilians in Gaza.

ProPublica’s Brett Murphy, who has been covering aspects of this story for months, has a new article out titled “Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.” In it we learn that both USAID and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration produced two separate reports this past spring concluding that Israel was deliberately blocking much-needed humanitarian aid from Palestinian civilians in Gaza, which under US law should have led to the suspension of US weapons supplies. Blinken dismissed these findings, as did the rest of the headless cohort known as the Biden administration.

Days after receiving these reports, Blinken delivered a statement to congress that he knew to be false, saying, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

This was a lie. Blinken’s own people were telling him Israel was obstructing aid, but he lied to congress about it in order to ensure that Israel would keep receiving the weapons it needs to keep killing Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

Blinken needs to resign. There need to be calls from Dem senators demanding it. https://t.co/61X6KyIZ14 pic.twitter.com/dhsSlsyNAg

— austerity is theft (@wideofthepost) September 24, 2024

This is what happens when you don’t prosecute your war criminals. Blinken lied to congress that Israel wasn’t assessed to have been blocking aid when both USAID and the State Department’s refugees bureau had indeed assessed that the Israeli government is doing precisely that, because he knew he’d never be jailed for lying in facilitation of horrific war crimes.

Blinken has watched George W Bush’s entire cabinet not only walk free but continue to have high-profile careers in government, punditry, think tanks and the military-industrial complex, when they all should have been caged for two decades now. He watched CIA officials like Michael Hayden lie to congress about the agency’s torture program without ever facing any consequences. He watched Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lie to congress about the NSA’s surveillance program without ever facing any consequences. He knew he could lie to congress about some of the worst atrocities his nation has ever participated in because he knew there would never be any consequences for this.

None of the world’s worst people are in prison, but if you ever did anything to try to bring them to justice yourself you’d spend the rest of your life behind bars, or be executed. The law doesn’t exist to protect ordinary people from the worst of our society, it exists to protect the worst of our society from ordinary people.

Unchecked massacres in Lebanon. A continuing genocide in Palestine. The state just murdered an innocent man.

Y’all know that a democratic administration is in power right now? Just wanted to point that out… pic.twitter.com/Dan5iMXLyl

— Greg J Stoker (@gregjstoker) September 24, 2024

It’s worth noting here that while powerful men in Washington break the law and lie in facilitation of mass atrocities, the US is executing Black men without evidence of their guilt. The state of Missouri just executed a man named Marcellus Williams despite objections from prosecutors, jurors, and the victim’s own family due to a lack of solid evidence that he actually committed the murder he was convicted of. Days earlier, Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah was executed in North Carolina despite the key witness in his case recanting his testimony against him.

Both men were Black, and both men were Muslim. As men with white skin lie with impunity to help butcher brown-skinned civilians in the middle east, I personally find this noteworthy.

This has been going on a long time. In 1902, the renowned attorney Clarence Darrow said the following in a speech to inmates at the Cook County Jail in Chicago:

“Those men who own the earth make the laws to protect what they have. They fix up a sort of fence or pen around what they have, and they fix the law so the fellow on the outside cannot get in. The laws are really organized for the protection of the men who rule the world. They were never organized or enforced to do justice. We have no system for doing justice, not the slightest in the world.”

It’s just as true in 2024 as it was in 1902.

_______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

The post Blinken Lied to Congress About Israeli War Crimes Because He Knows He’ll Get Away With It appeared first on LewRockwell.

With less than a month before the crucial BRICS annual summit in Kazan under the Russian presidency, serious informed discussions are raging in Moscow and other Eurasian capitals on what should be at the table in the de-dollarization and alternative payment system front.

Earlier this month Andrey Mikhailishin, head of the task force on financial services of the BRICS Business Council, detailed the list of top projects under consideration. They include:

• A common unit of account – as in The Unit, whose contours were first revealed exclusively by Sputnik.
• A platform for multilateral settlements and payments in BRICS digital currencies, connecting the financial markets of BRICS members: that’s BRICS Bridge, which bears similarities with the Bank of International Settlements-linked MBridge,  already in effect. That will complement intrabank systems already in action, as in Russia’s SPFS and Iran’s CPAM settling financial transactions – and 60% of their trade – in their own currencies.
• A blockchain-based payment system that entirely bypasses the US dollar: BRICS Pay. Arguably 159 participants may be ready to adopt this sanction-evading, similar-to-SWIFT mechanism right away.
• A settlement depository (Clear).
• An insurance system.
• And crucially a BRICS rating agency, independent from the Western giants.

What’s at stake is the extremely complex design of a brand-new financial system – decentralized and using digital technology. BRICS Clear, for instance, will be using blockchain to record securities and exchange them.

As for The Unit, the value of the common unit of account is pegged by 40% to gold and by 60% to a basket of BRICS member’s national currencies. The BRICS Business Council considers The Unit a “convenient and universal” instrument, since a unit can be converted into any national currency.

That would definitely solve the nagging problem of exchange rate volatility when cash balances accumulate from settlements in national currencies; for example, a mountain of Indian rupees used to pay for Russian energy.

Who Do I Call to Talk to BRICS?

I asked a very direct question to two Russian analysts, one of them a finance tech executive with vast experience across Europe, and the other the head of an investment fund with global reach. Considering the sensitivity of their posts, they prefer to remain anonymous.

The question: Is BRICS ready to become an actor in Kazan next month, and what should be on the table in terms of the strategy to establish an alternative payment system?

The Answers. Analyst 1:

“Time has come for BRICS to become a real actor. The world demands it. The leaders of BRICS countries clearly understand it. They have the moral power and the political will to set up an organization to provide a number for BRICS to be called in – that’s the best question for the upcoming summit.”

The analyst is referring to what could be dubbed “the Kissinger moment”, when Dr. K famously quipped, in the Cold War era, “when I want to talk to Europe, who do I call?”

Now to Analyst 2:

“For a BRICS agreement amongst countries to mean something, countries need to agree on a framework of action and that means accepting some responsibilities in exchange for certain rights. And it sounds there’s no better way to achieve that than to arrive at mutually agreed obligations on settlement of financial transactions.”

One of the analysts added a very important, specific point: “By now the situation is pretty clear, to properly address the issue of cross-border payments. The best mechanism should be based on the New Development Bank (NDB), given that Russia has a mandate to propose the new president of that organization. Whoever the candidate will be, cross-border payments should be at the top of his agenda.”

The NDB is the BRICS bank, based in Shanghai. The analyst hopes this decision on the future of the NDB will be made before the BRICS summit: “Given the diplomatic and political considerations, the candidate should be made known, formally or informally to the member countries.”

New BRICS blockchain payment system to be game-changer amid ‘unstoppable’ dedollarization – expert

Moscow’s decision to create a new BRICS blockchain-based payment system is a “game changing” development for the multipolar world, Christopher Douglas Emms, head of the Brokerage… pic.twitter.com/4cEBFb3c7c

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) September 4, 2024

As it stands, the talk of the town in Moscow informed circles is that Alexey Mohzin, the IMF’s executive director for Russia, has a 60% chance to be appointed to the NDB. In parallel, Ksenia Yudaeva, a former G20 sherpa and former deputy of Russia Central Bank’s Elvira Nabiullina, may become the new representative with the IMF.

So what may be in the cards is a NDB/IMF reshuffle on the Russian front. The focus should be on the potential for future productive change – rather than missed opportunities; the NDB’s policies so far have not been exactly revolutionary – considering that the bank’s statutes are linked to the US dollar.

The new deal could place the NDB as leverage for a reform of the IMF, rather than an alternative to it.

The “Kissinger moment” does play a key role in this equation. It will highlight that until the moment turns into reality, the NDB should be the sole actor for effective changes in crucial matters like the stability of the financial infrastructure.

And from that perspective, as one of the analysts note, “The UNIT and all other similar projects may be presented as complementary risk management tools hedging against reckless monetary policies and Global Financial Crisis-2 risks.”

Time though is running out – fast. President Putin recently met with the Russian Union of Industrialists. They have sent a letter to the administration and the Russian Central Bank outlining what they consider the most promising ideas.

The Unit is one of them. Prime Minister Mishustin’s government is now on the final stages of deciding which projects to support: for the BRICS summit in Kazan, and one week before, for the annual summit of the BRICS Business Council in Moscow.

A BRICS Bretton Woods?

I posed the same BRICS question to the Russian analysts also to indispensable Prof. Michael Hudson – who actually provided a concise in-depth critique of what may be on the table, while offering a different solution.

For Prof. Hudson, “a new institution has to be created – a Central Bank empowered to issue credit to finance the trade and payments deficits of some countries, with an artificial bancor-type SDR [Special Drawing Rights].”

Prof. Hudson argues “this would be different (his italics) from a clearing house system for existing banks. It would be a BRICS’ IMF. Its bancors credit or balance sheet would only be for settlements among governments, not a generally traded currency. Indeed, making the bancor widely traded as a speculative vehicle (such as the UNIT is) would introduce major instability and have nothing to do with the needed bank transfer balance sheet.”

A reformed NDB, possibly next year under a new Russian presidency, should have all it takes to become a “BRICS’ IMF.”

Prof. Hudson adds that “to succeed, the Kazan conference should be a full-fledged BRICS Bretton Woods. Maybe it is too soon to actually introduce a fait accompli. Perhaps it would be a venue to throw open a set of alternatives — including what would happen by ‘doing nothing’ and going with the current IMF system. The fact that the IMF just cancelled its trip to analyze the Russian economy may be a catalyst.”

Prof. Hudson in fact refers directly to Executive Director for Russia, Alexey Mohzin, who confirmed that the IMF should have come to Russia for consultations, part of their annual review of the Russian economy, but cancelled it because of “technical unpreparedness”.

All that brings us once again to the “Kissinger moment”; it’s unclear whether Kazan will come up with a “BRICS number” anyone could call.

Leaving the dollar-based system for good: What are the digital ruble and BRICS Bridge?

By July 1, 2025, the largest Russian banks will have to provide their clients with the ability to conduct transactions in digital rubles, according to the Russian Central Bank. Pilot testing… pic.twitter.com/fXlp0He0X3

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) September 16, 2024

Prof. Hudson makes an essential last point on the Global South’s dollar debt: he stresses “how to handle BRICS members existing overhang of dollar debts” is a major problem.

What is clear is that “the BRICS bank [the NDB] should not finance deficits by member countries for such payments. In practice, there would have to be a moratorium on such payments – in view of the present weaponization of Western finance.”

Prof. Hudson recalls the chapter in his book Super Imperialism “on how the US moved against Britain in 1944 to get an agreement that it then presented as a pro-US fait accompli to Europe.” The book “reviews all the arguments that took place there.”

Prof. Hudson wishes he would be part of the new, ongoing process. Imagine if BRICS+ manages to pull it off: getting a Global Majority-approved agreement on a new, equitable, fair financial system then presented to the $35 trillion-indebted superpower as a fait accompli.

This originally appeared on Sputnik News.

The post Will a BRICS Bretton Woods Take Place in Kazan? appeared first on LewRockwell.

We are weeks away from another national election and still staring at ugly political realities—an election in which the propaganda machine and its celebrity buffoons prop up an unpopular Marxist; and a nonstop campaign of ballot hijinks and judicial malfeasance. One man is the singular enemy of the Left, the bullseye for several assassination crews. The foundations of our storied American experiment are covered in graffiti, riddled with tunnels, and stinking of weed. As dismal as our political prospects appear now, our post-2020 apocalypse has served at least one useful function; it has pulled off the masks to reveal two very real spiritual forces at work in our world.

Those of us who grew up in the 1970’s and 1980’s remember a time when such spiritual realities weren’t yet forced to the surface. The average American wasn’t drawn to visceral ideologies. Being a Democrat simply meant cheering for the working man, with the requisite affinities for taxes, labor unions, and women’s rights. Being a Republican likely meant you championed wealth creation and embraced free markets and lower taxes, with little patience for social agitators. Neither party seemed eager to welcome illegals or publicly snuggle with communists—although the Left has always made room for them.

For a few post-war decades, and even in the Cold War’s nuclear fears, our political parties carried on with their usual theater. Average people had no real audience for strident opinions—we had no Facebook rants—and nobody except Hitler himself was called a “literal Hitler”. The Constitution wasn’t decried as a racist blueprint for inequity and oppression. The state didn’t shamelessly prosecute the incumbent’s political rivals. For many, beliefs filed neatly into the “religious” and “political”—the former regarded as a benign but private affair, and the latter aired only at election time. Simply put, most were aware of neither the deep magic nor the deep state, content and safe enough with a two-dimensional understanding of life.

Yet during those decades of sleepy prosperity, the Left slowly gathered its own faithful through their unified appetite for all sorts of darkness. They knew the American electorate couldn’t stomach the hard stuff yet—and Rome wasn’t built in a day—so transformation would require patience and shrewd calculations. It helped that Americans were prosperous, entertained, and unsuspicious; America was strong, free speech was good, Marxism was bad, and there were two genders. Common ground like this gave cover for dirty work behind the scenes in Capitols, schools, and churches. The Left’s quiet capture moved along with the help of complacent and distracted citizens, hastening their transformation into willing dupes.

Moms and dads would always need to send kids to schools, and that is where the long-game has seen its great successes. Textbooks and teachers undermined the fussy old experiment; they praised the Great Society, riots, and the United Nations but cast shade on “greedy” capitalists and religious conservatives. Outside the classroom, decades of well-trained sheep would welcome government programs and echo talking points of the fifth estate—Oprah, Dan, and Katie seemed so smart! Nobody needed to know about dusty stuff like the Constitution, regulatory agencies, or federal judges; journalists were keeping an eye on those things. Fortunately for the Left, political news was often dismissed as mere partisanship, anyways; and without spiritual eyesight, Americans continued to ignore the threats.

Patience has paid off handsomely. Medicine, education, and government are now fully enveloped in the Left’s death culture—as witnessed in the drugged masses, dismembered unborn, and “nonbinary” children that epitomize its celebrated programs. The American idea isn’t enough to stave them off anymore; the safety net is gone, citizenship is meaningless, and the Constitution is trampled. The fumes of hell will continue to ignite the Left’s multiplying evils; and dependably, they will also inspire the cowardice and compromise of blind enablers on Right.

For a surface understanding of our perils, we can trace our own steps down to the pit by reading history and economics. We can read of wicked tyrants, communism’s lies, death camps, and failed utopian schemes. We can even connect our cultural decay—broken homes, riots, perversions, addictions— with data that proves the collective failure of all sorts of compassionate federal remedies and social movements. Such facts do tell part of the story.

For a deeper understanding, though, we must look beyond timelines and statistics to see what bubbled beneath the surface. For this, we can’t rely on historians or political theorists—not even the good ones. Proverbs teaches, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” and only with such wisdom can we see through headlines to the old enemy, lurking and lusting for unwary souls as he did in the ancient garden.

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The post Dancing Around the Fires of Hell appeared first on LewRockwell.

In the summer of 2006 I found myself, by a strange twist of fate, attending an afternoon party in Saint-Tropez hosted by P. Diddy and Paris Hilton at one of the tony town’s beach clubs. Immediately upon walking into the pool area, I felt a strong antipathy to the event’s energy and atmosphere. Both Paris and Diddy seemed uncomfortable, and their body language and affect spread to the other party-goers.

It was still early and few had drunk enough alcohol or yet taken ecstasy or cocaine to overcome their self-consciousness about being at a party in Saint-Tropez hosted by Paris Hilton and P. Diddy. It occurred to me as I sipped my glass of rosé that the stiffness could be remedied by a good music soundtrack. Alas, the “music” consisted entirely of a thunderous beat, with no discernible harmony or melody.

Sensing the low energy, Diddy grabbed a microphone and yelled, “It’s time to get the women wet!” which prompted a few half-hearted cheers from the crowd. “Throw them into the pool!” he yelled. On his command, a few bikini-clad girls were flung into the water.

A few seconds later I noticed that a brunette was suspended motionlessly and face down in the pool, apparently unconscious. Luckily someone from the club staff noticed her at the same time I did, and quickly jumped in and hauled her to the steps. Blood was flowing from her nose and it appeared that she had dove into the shallow end and struck her face on the bottom. I feared she had broken her neck, but then she seemed to revive. A few minutes later paramedics arrived, and I suppose they took her to the local clinic.

The point of this introduction is not to judge the desire to attend a Bacchanalia—to experience a dopamine rush of intoxication and sexual desire induced by the presence of beautiful women. While I am not advocating that people participate in such parties, I can understand why they would want to.

The trouble is that if chasing this kind of dopamine rush becomes your primary pursuit, you are likely to grow bored with ordinary pleasure and seek to obtain the same high through darker, more taboo means. This is the affliction of sexual sadists who find themselves needing to exert power and to inflict pain on their partners to obtain satisfaction from the sexual encounter.

Diddy was, I thought, an icon of our debased era.

Observing him hunched over with the microphone, wearing ridiculous clothes, and occasionally shouting silly exhortations, I contrasted him with Nat King Cole—a splendid musician and a perfect gentleman. While Cole ultimately became famous for his silky voice, he was also one of the finest jazz pianists of all time.

I thought of the ridicule that Cole had to endure when prominent blacks such as Thurgood Marshall called him an “Uncle Tom” because he was well-spoken, had fine manners, and wore fine suits.

“I think P. Diddy’s music and style suck,” I remarked to my party companion. “And it wouldn’t surprise me if he is involved in serious criminal activity.”

This morning I was reminded of this party 18 years ago when I read the INDICTMENT of the United States District Court, Southern District of New York. Count One—if proven to be true at his trial—is consistent with my perception at the time I observed him.

I was right about P. Diddy and Thurgood Marshall was wrong about Nat King Cole. Cole was not an “Uncle Tom,” but an artist who loved music and wanted to focus entirely on his craft. Under constant pressure to get involved in politics, his hand was forced when he was attacked at a 1956 performance in Birmingham, Alabama by three Klan members. I have long wondered if these idiot goons were incited to do this by an agent provocateur. The timing—right as Cole was under maximum pressure to become a political activist—and the theatrical quality of the attack strike me as suspicious.

At Cole’s funeral, Jack Benny captured his character with the following eulogy:

Nat Cole was a man who gave so much and still had so much to give. He gave it in song, in friendship to his fellow man, devotion to his family. He was a star, a tremendous success as an entertainer, an institution. But he was an even greater success as a man, as a husband, as a father, as a friend.

American culture needs far more guys like Nat King Cole and far fewer like P. Diddy.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post P. Diddy Is Icon of Our Debased Era appeared first on LewRockwell.

ProPublica headlines:

Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.

The selected formulation is unfortunately not covering the real issue at hand.

U.S. law prohibits military aid to countries which are hindering U.S. humanitarian aid.

Two government entities subordinated to the State Department concluded, in writing, that Israel was blocking their humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.

The Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, reported to Congress the opposite conclusion because he intended to deliver more military aid to Gaza.

By misleading Congress on humanitarian aid to Gaza Blinken deliberated broke the law.

That should have been the headline:

The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.

The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.

But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

This case should be sufficient for Congress to open an inquiry and to demand under oath witness statements from Blinken and others involved in the affair. It could be a great instrument during the current election campaign to damage the position of Democratic candidates.

However that is unlikely to happen.

Unfortunately Blinken lied to Congress about Israeli war crimes because he knew that he would get away with it.

The uni-state, the foreign policy conglomerate which resides in both parties and the bureaucracy, will not allow that U.S. war-crimes or those of its associated forces will ever be prosecuted. The Bush administration did get away with lying about weapons of mass destruction. The CIA and the Pentagon got away with torturing hundreds of innocent people.

Would the Republicans prosecuted Blinken as they should they would have to break with their own support and commitment to Zionist supremacy. With their own candidate’s campaign depending on donations from Zionist billionaires there is no chance that the Republicans will break away from their previous policies.

The will of the people, as enacted in laws, gets ignored in favor of monies that allow established politicians to continue their games.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post How Political Corruption Allows Antony Blinken To Break the Law appeared first on LewRockwell.

On January 6, 2021, nearly five hours passed between the breach of the Capitol perimeter and the arrival of a National Guard contingent ready and waiting to deploy just ten minutes away. Had the National Guard arrived within that first hour, “January 6” would have no more historical resonance than any other day on the calendar.

Any number of people bear the blame for this calamitous security failure, but that list does not include the two most frequently cited scapegoats, the D.C. National Guard or President Donald Trump.

Of the thousands of words of sworn testimony, some of the most revealing came from Colonel Earl Matthews. In rebutting the questions asked by Rep. Norma Torres, a California Democrat, at a congressional hearing on April 17, 2024, the intrepid Matthews shared some inconvenient truths.

“Do you know if ideas like the President seizing ballot boxes was something [Army] Secretary [Ryan] McCarthy was considering when making decisions about deploying the Guard on January 6?” asked Torres.

“I think it was, but I think it was not a rational belief,” said the African-American Matthews, the Chief Legal Advisor for the D.C. National Guard on January 6. Not liking the answer, Torres promptly cut him off.

“Was there widespread fear within the Department of Defense about the President using the military or other levers of the State to impact the election around the time of the 2020 election,” Torres continued, hoping to get an answer more to her liking. This question backfired as well.

“No. It was not a widespread fear,” said Matthews. “It was a fear among a clique of officers led by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who talked about a so-called Reichstag moment.” Not wanting to hear any more of the truth, Torres cut Matthews off again.

In the movies — Seven Days in May, Dr. Strangelove, White House Down — that “clique” of coup-minded generals inevitably emerge from some right-wing fever swamp. In Washington circa 2020, that clique was headed by the proudly woke Gen. Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a hero on the Left.

January 6, of course, proved to be a Reichstag moment, but in precisely the opposite way Milley suggested. Democratic Party leadership responded to the riot much the way the Nazi leadership responded to the Reichstag fire, namely using an event of ambiguous origin as pretext to suppress speech and imprison its political opponents.

For the Democrats, Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans served the role that Jews and communists did for the Nazis. With the perpetrators identified, all investigations for the next two years would be tailored to defame the accused and exculpate the complicit.

By the evening of January 6, the Reichstag narrative had been set. Said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to her filmmaker daughter Alexandra, “I just feel sick with what he did to the Capitol and to the country today. He’s got to pay a price for that.” The “he,” of course, was Donald Trump.

For the following two years, the left controlled the White House, Congress, the media, and the D.C. courts. That control enabled them to shoehorn all evidence into their pre-set narrative. In her recently released book, The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House, Pelosi ignored all the facts that have emerged since Republicans won the House and doubled down on her scandalously fake thesis:

Watching the insurrection, which Trump had instigated, begging him to provide the National Guard — as he did and which he refused to send — and taking into account my own worries about the basic security of Vice President Mike Pence, hiding inside the Capitol complex, and the important role he had to play, I knew we had to prevail.

Thanks to the underreported efforts of the House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight and its chairman Barry Loudermilk, we are beginning to see just how crudely false was Pelosi’s interpretation of that day’s events.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered the keynote address at “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion,” hosted by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI). The event was held on September 23, in the Kennedy Caucus Room in the Senate.

The capacity crowd of 300 guests was joined by an online audience of over 100,000 across multiple streaming platforms. Speakers at the event included Harvard’s Dr. Chris Palmer, Stanford graduate and public health advocate Dr. Casey Means, New York Times best-selling author Calley Means, journalist and health advocate Vani Hari, and Senator Johnson.

In his address, Kennedy outlined major problems with and solutions to America’s health crises.

Kennedy explained that it is wrong to measure the state of the nation’s health with statistics detailing money spent on healthcare and earned by insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Instead, Kennedy said that the state of healthcare should be measured by patient outcomes including life expectancy, chronic disease levels and childhood obesity. In all of these areas, the U.S., he said,  is far behind other countries with smaller economies.

“We spend four times per capita on health care than the Italians,” Kennedy said. But Italians live 7.5 years longer than us on average. Are we? And incidentally, Americans had the highest life expectancy in the world when I was growing up. Today, we are an average of six years behind our European neighbors. Are we lazier and more suicidal than Italians? Or is there a problem with our system? Are there problems with our incentives? Are there problems with our food?”

Kennedy criticized the Affordable Care Act, often referred to as Obamacare. “Obamacare actually incentivizes insurance companies to raise premiums to get 15% of a larger pie,” he said. “This is why premiums have increased 100% since the passage of Obamacare, making health care the largest driver of inflation while American life expectancy plummets.”

Covid Crisis Cannot Be Solved by Pharmaceuticals

Kennedy also told the audience that while the U.S. had one of the worst Covid outcomes in the world in terms of patient mortality, the solution to this problem lies not in pharmaceuticals but in the diet and lifestyle of Americans compared to those elsewhere.

“Our health leaders said that Covid was a pharmaceutical deficiency,” he explained. “This was a lie. We have the highest chronic disease rate on earth.”

He enumerated the problems in the American system, saying that two thirds of adults in the U.S. suffer from chronic health issues. “Years ago, that number was 1%,” he said. “When my uncle was president, about 1% of the children in this country had a chronic disease. That number may be as high as 60% in America [today]. 74% of Americans are now overweight or obese, including 50% of our children. 120 years ago, when somebody was obese, they were sent to the circus.”

Kennedy presented an alarming statistic that 50% of American teens are obese. This compares to a Japanese childhood obesity rate of 3%.

Our Children Are Being Abused 

Kennedy described the chronic disease epidemic among American children as a form of abuse of the country’s most vulnerable. Calling the country’s children the “most precious assets that we have in this country,” he asked, “How can we let this happen to them? How can we call ourselves a moral nation, the most exemplary democracy in the world if we are treating our children like this?”

Kennedy went on to describe how diseases that once only affected the old are now increasingly common among children. “About 18% of American teens now have fatty liver disease,” Kennedy stated. “When I was a boy, this only affected late stage alcoholics who were elderly. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and old. Young adult cancers are up 79% and 1 in 4 American women is on antidepressant medication. 40% of teens have a mental health diagnosis. 15% of high high schoolers are on Adderall…No other country has anything like this.”

Kennedy pointed to ultra-processed foods as the primary culprit in the medical crisis impacting the young. “70% of American children’s diet is now ultra processed,” he said, “which means industrial manufactured in a factory.”

He went on to explain that following tighter regulations of the tobacco industry, many scientists who worked for cigarette manufacturers started working for corporations that manufacture processed foods subsequent to the acquisition of industrial food processors by tobacco firms.

These foods, Kennedy explained, are stuffed with chemicals that did not exist a century ago. Many such chemicals are banned from  human consumption in Europe. However, “They are ubiquitous in American processed foods,” noted Kennedy. “We are literally poisoning our children systematically for profit.”

Kennedy identified a second culprit –   “toxic chemicals in our food, our medicine and our environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs and toxic waste permeate every cell in our bodies. This assault on our children’s cells and hormones is unrelenting.”

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First Things editor Mark Bauerlein spoke September 12 at Belmont House, in Washington, D.C., about his latest book, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, the sequel to his 2008 Dumbest Generation. Both books are about the consequences of letting a generation come of age on screens. The earlier book warned against potential effects; the latest examines what happens when that generation crosses the line into what should be chronological adulthood.

Readers can delve into Bauerlein’s books to digest the full range of problems the screened generation faces. I’ll limit myself to three.

First, screen dependency decimated reading and, consequently, knowledge skills. Screen-based learning was originally touted as a way to tailor education to an individual child’s interests and levels, but—especially after the Covid lockdown—it has become apparent that putting the libraries of the world at the click of a button has not elevated the literacy or cultural levels of young people.

When Pope Francis recently spoke of getting people (especially seminarians) to read literature, in part to get them off screens, I argued that the papal proposal failed to account for how screens change the way people approach reading. They’re not just “different delivery modes.” They fundamentally differ in how each approaches a fixed text as well as how they condition the writing of that text. Let’s just say, James Fenimore Cooper would not have had a career as a Tweet writer.

Second, building on the previous argument, Bauerlein criticizes screens for caging young people in youth culture. Books at least occasionally force young people to engage in what once used to be called “higher culture,” that is, something beyond the interest level of the contemporary teen or young adult. In many ways, it is an “anti-intellectual” culture. Social media reinforces these youth-centric foci by its “friending” mechanisms, which reinforce the predominantly youth world and ethos for its users. Instead of cross-generational fertilization, the youth orientation of social media, argues Bauerlein, boxes young people into a youth ghetto, with all the callowness such confinement would likely entail. Far from being “diverse” or “inclusive,” it frames a world that is generationally (and culturally) monochromatic and exclusive of worldviews other than its own.

Third—and to me the most important of Bauerlein’s arguments—is the immanentizing effect of screens. Bauerlein touched on this argument briefly at the conclusion of his remarks, but it perhaps is the most important of them: the here-and-now, youth-centric, temporal focus of screens leaves no room for the transcendent. How does Transcendence break into social media?

And, if the transcendent does not find a place in social media, where do God or any of the “existential questions” fit in? Do they even become questions? Do they even get considered? Bauerlein does not think it coincidental (neither do I) that, as social media came to dominate generations, those generations also produced the phenomenon of religiously disaffiliated people we call “nones.”

The culture and ethos of the screen is flat and temporal, very immanent, very now, in some sense very ephemeral. None of those characteristics is conducive to openness to transcendence. They in fact foster an indifference to, if not alienation from, more transcendent realities.

The outcome is not, however, merely religious disaffiliation. It arguably also goes hand in hand with other phenomena, such as the greater indices of depression and mental illness among youth, social dysfunctionality, and even suicide. This is especially rampant in the teen years and especially among teenage girls who, struggling to establish their own sense of identity, suffer from being immersed into a peer culture that is often negative, unconfident, and even guilt-ridden. Such are the wages of immanence.

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The post The Ever-Present But Anti-Transcendent Screen appeared first on LewRockwell.

“To be prepared for war,” George Washington said, “is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.” President Ronald Reagan agreed with his forebear’s words, and peace through strength became a theme of his administration. In the past four decades, the American arsenal helped secure that peace, but political neglect has led to its atrophy as other nations’ war machines have kicked into high gear. Most Americans do not realize the specter of great power conflict has risen again.

It is far past time to rebuild America’s military. We can avoid war by preparing for it.

When America’s senior military leaders testify before my colleagues and me on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee behind closed doors, they have said that we face some of the most dangerous global threat environments since World War II. Then, they darken that already unsettling picture by explaining that our armed forces are at risk of being underequipped and outgunned. We struggle to build and maintain ships, our fighter jet fleet is dangerously small, and our military infrastructure is outdated. Meanwhile, America’s adversaries are growing their militaries and getting more aggressive.

In China, the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has orchestrated a historic military modernization intended to exploit the U.S. military’s weaknesses. He has overtaken the U.S. Navy in fleet size, built one of the world’s largest missile stockpiles and made big advances in space. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has thrown Europe into war and mobilized his society for long-term conflict. Iran and its proxy groups have escalated their shadow war against Israel and increased attacks on U.S. ships and soldiers. And North Korea has disregarded efforts toward arms control negotiations and moved toward wartime readiness.

Worse yet, these governments are materially helping one another, cooperating in new ways to prevent an American-led 21st century. Iran has provided Russia with battlefield drones, and China is sending technical and logistical help to aid Mr. Putin’s war. They are also helping one another prepare for future fights by increasing weapons transfers and to evade sanctions. Their unprecedented coordination makes new global conflict increasingly possible.

That theoretical future could come faster than most Americans think. We may find ourselves in a state of extreme vulnerability in a matter of a few years, according to a growing consensus of experts. Our military readiness could be at its lowest point in decades just as China’s military in particular hits its stride. The U.S. Indo-Pacific commander released what I believe to be the largest list of unfunded items ever for services and combatant commands for next year’s budget, amounting to $11 billion. It requested funding for a raft of infrastructure, missile defense and targeting programs that would prove vital in a Pacific fight. China, on the other hand, has no such problems, as it accumulates the world’s leading hypersonic arsenal with a mix of other lethal cruise and attack missiles.

Our military leaders are being forced to make impossible choices. The Navy is struggling to adequately fund new ships, routine maintenance and munition procurement; it is unable to effectively address all three. We recently signed a deal to sell submarines to Australia, but we’ve failed to sufficiently fund our own submarine industrial base, leaving an aging fleet unprepared to respond to threats. Two of the three most important nuclear modernization programs are underfunded and are at risk of delays. The military faces a backlog of at least $180 billion for basic maintenance, from barracks to training ranges. This projects weakness to our adversaries as we send service members abroad with diminished ability to respond to crises.

Fortunately, we can change course. We can avoid that extreme vulnerability and resurrect American military might.

On Wednesday I am publishing a plan that includes a series of detailed proposals to address this reality head-on. We have been living off the Reagan military buildup for too long; it is time for updates and upgrades. My plan outlines why and how the United States should aim to spend an additional $55 billion on the military in the 2025 fiscal year and grow military spending from a projected 2.9 percent of our national gross domestic product this year to 5 percent over the next five to seven years.

It would be a significant investment that would start a reckoning over our nation’s spending priorities. There will be conversations ahead about all manner of budget questions. We do not need to spend this much indefinitely — but we do need a short-term generational investment to help us prevent another world war.

My blueprint would grow the Navy to 357 ships by 2035 and halt our shrinking Air Force fleet by producing at least 340 additional fighters in five years. This will help patch near-term holes and put each fleet on a sustainable trajectory. The plan would also replenish the Air Force tanker and training fleets, accelerate the modernization of the Army and Marine Corps, and invest in joint capabilities that are all too often forgotten, including logistics and munitions.

The proposal would build on the $3.3 billion in submarine industrial base funding included in the national security supplemental passed in April, so we can bolster our defense and that of our allies. It would also rapidly equip service members all over the world with innovative technologies at scale, from the seabed to the stars.

We should pair increased investment with wiser spending. Combining this crucial investment with fiscal responsibility would funnel resources to the most strategic ends. Emerging technology must play an essential role, and we can build and deploy much of it in less than five years. My road map would also help make improvements to the military procurement system and increase accountability for bureaucrats and companies that fail to perform on vital national security projects.

This whole endeavor would shake our status quo but be far less disruptive and expensive than the alternative. Should China decide to wage war with the United States, the global economy could immediately fall into a depression. Americans have grown far too comfortable under the decades-old presumption of overwhelming military superiority. And that false sense of security has led us to ignore necessary maintenance and made us vulnerable.

Our ability to deter our adversaries can be regained because we have done it before. At the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, in the twilight of the Soviet Union, George H.W. Bush reflected on the lessons of Pearl Harbor. Though the conflict was long gone, it taught him an enduring lesson: “When it comes to national defense,” he said, “finishing second means finishing last.”

Regaining American strength will be expensive. But fighting a war — and worse, losing one — is far more costly. We need to begin a national conversation today on how we achieve a peaceful, prosperous and American-led 21st century. The first step is a generational investment in the U.S. military.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Most Americans Do Not Realize the Specter of Great Power Conflict Has Risen Again and Are Not Prepared for Major War appeared first on LewRockwell.

The recent assassination attempt against President Trump at his golf course in Florida leads most people to think that an organization is out to get him, and people are right to think so. The fact that it was the second assassination attempt in a very short time certainly lends credence to this.

But, we are told by the leftwing mass media, we must not think so. Each assassination attempt was the work of a “lone nut,” and the lone nuts had no connection with each other. To think otherwise would be the product of a “conspiracy theory of history,” and that this is the sign of paranoia. The great Murray Rothbard memorably satirized this attitude, in response to several political assassinations in 1968: “John F. Kennedy; Malcolm X; Martin Luther King; Robert F. Kennedy; and now George Corley Wallace: the litany of political assassinations and attempts in the last decade rolls on. (And we might add: General Edwin Walker, and George Lincoln Rockwell. In each of these atrocities, we are fed with a line of cant from the liberals and from the Establishment media. In the first place, every one of these assassinations is supposed to have been performed, must have been performed, by ‘one lone nut’ – to which we can add the one lone nut who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald in the prison basement. One loner, a twisted psycho, whose motives are therefore of course puzzling and obscure, and who never, never acted in concert with anyone. (The only exception is the murder of Malcolm, where the evident conspiracy was foisted upon a few lowly members of the Black Muslims.) Even in the case of James Earl Ray, who was mysteriously showered with money, false passports, and double identities, and who vainly tried to claim that he was part of a conspiracy before he was shouted down by the judge and his own lawyer – even there the lone nut theory is stubbornly upheld.

Without going into the myriad details of Assassination Revisionism, doesn’t anyone see a pattern in our litany of murdered and wounded, a pattern that should leap out at anyone willing to believe his eyes? For all of the victims have had one thing in common: all were, to a greater or lesser extent, important anti-Establishment figures, and, what is more, were men with the charismatic capacity to mobilize large sections of the populace against our rulers.

The last line of Murray’s statement explains perfectly why the left wants Trump dead. He is a “loose cannon” who might do or say something that would jeopardize their control of the government. True enough, the unholy alliance of the left with neocon warmongers was largely able to keep Trump under control when he was president before, but they cannot take chances. Trump has been skeptical of unlimited American aid to the pro-Nazi Zelensky government, and he opposes sending nuclear weapons to Ukraine. The unholy cabal cannot take a chance that this might happen.

Some people, although my readers won’t be among them, might object; “Can Americans really be so evil that they would use assassination as a political tool? Oddly enough, these same Americans have no difficulty in accepting that political assassinations elsewhere in the world are the products of conspiracies. But somehow America is different. This is the illusion of American exceptionalism. This notion is false. Americans are governed by the same laws of politics as everyone else, and one of these laws is that the state is a criminal gang. American politicians aren’t guided by high-minded idealism.

There is another reason the left wants to get rid of Trump, and this is that Kamala Harris is a pro-Communist, fanatical feminist, and part black, although she could easily pass as white if she wanted to. She combines in her cackling person the total agenda of the pro-Communist and woke left. Trump is unsound on some economic issues, most notably tariffs and deficit spending, but he is no communist.

Harris is. Her father is a leading Marxist theoretician, and she gives every indication that she follows in his footsteps. Here is some information on her father: “Donald Harris was raised in Jamaica, got his undergraduate degree in London, and later obtained his doctorate from UC Berkeley, where he met Kamala Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan.

Trump’s claim stems from an article in a 1976 issue of The Stanford Daily, where he was deemed a ‘Marxist’ scholar from an opposition party after Stanford granted him tenure because he was ‘too charismatic, a pied piper leading students astray from neo-Classical economics.’

In 1976, Donald Harris wrote his most famous book, ‘Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution.’ The book critiques mainstream economic theories and proposes an alternative model by synthesizing the work of David Ricardo, Michael Kalecki, and, most notably, Karl Marx.”

If we wonder which organization is a likely suspect in the Trump assassination attempts, we don’t have far to look, although whether these suspicions prove to be correct must await further investigation. The CIA has been involved in numerous assassination plots since its inception.

One of these plots is especially important in current circumstances. The CIA is implicated in the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963. Jacob Hornberger has done a great deal of research on this topic and here is what he says. “Why would the CIA snuff out the life of President Kennedy? Because Kennedy was determined to snuff out the life of the CIA, which the CIA, not surprisingly, considered would be a grave threat to ‘national security.’ After Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the presidential race in 1968, Robert Kennedy was the odds-on favorite to become the next president. He blamed the CIA for his brother’s death and was determined to bring the agency to heel. For that reason, the CIA had to kill him. David Talbot, the author of Brothers, a book about President Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, gives a vivid account: ‘As I write in my book Brothers, Robert Kennedy, who served as his brother’s attorney general and knew more about the dark side of American power than any other official of his day, was the first JFK conspiracy theorist. Journalist Jack Newfield, a close friend of RFK, told me: ‘With that amazing computer brain of his, he put it all together on the afternoon of November 22,’ the day in 1963 that President Kennedy was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy figured out that his brother was killed by CIA plotters, using members of the criminal underworld and Cuban exiles. As I reveal in Brothers, RFK planned to reopen the investigation into his brother’s murder if he had been elected president in 1968.” The CIA can’t take the chance that the loose cannon Trump will decide to act against them.

Let’s do everything we can to defeat the efforts of the unholy alliance of leftists and Trotskyite neo-cons who control brain-dead “President” Joe Biden and look forward to controlling Kamela Harris. An excellent first step would be to abolish the CIA and FBI, as the great Dr. Ron Paul has urged us to do.

The post ‘Lone Nuts’ and Political Reality appeared first on LewRockwell.

As Democrats and Republicans both express support for tariffs, the economic implications of protectionist policies are once again at the forefront of public debate. Both parties differ on the size of their proposed tariffs, but the New York Times reports that “both Democrats and Republicans are expressing support for tariffs to protect American industry, reversing decades of trade thinking in Washington.” Proposals to impose tariffs on imports from China seem to be particularly attractive to both red and blue voters:

The tariffs have proved popular with industries that have faced stiff competition from Chinese firms, like makers of kitchen cabinets…the industry realized that Chinese companies had taken over about 40 percent of the market and that their share was continuing to grow.

In “Protectionism and the Destruction of Prosperity,” Rothbard explains why tariffs and protectionism are incompatible with economic prosperity:

As we unravel the tangled web of protectionist argument, we should keep our eye on two essential points: (1) protectionism means force in restraint of trade; and (2) the key is what happens to the consumer. Invariably, we will find that the protectionists are out to cripple, exploit and impose severe losses not only on foreign consumers but especially on Americans.

Rothbard’s point is that free trade is essential to the prosperity of ordinary consumers. Protectionism ultimately hurts domestic consumers when import tariffs cause prices of domestic goods to rise: “And since each and every one of us is a consumer, this means that protectionism is out to mulct all of us for the benefit of a specially privileged, subsidized few.” Moreover, tariffs do not create “fair” trade any more than price controls create “fair” prices. As Rothbard warns,

Whenever someone starts talking about “fair competition” or indeed, about “fairness” in general, it is time to keep a sharp eye on your wallet, for it is about to be picked. For the genuinely “fair” is simply the voluntary terms of exchange, mutually agreed upon by the buyer and seller. As most of the medieval scholastics were able to figure out, there is no “just” (or “fair”) price outside of the market price.

It is clear that no economy can prosper in the long run while the government attempts to fix prices or to control the terms of trade. Supporters of free trade, therefore, oppose all forms of protectionism. However, that is not the end of the story as far as concerns the industries which have lost their market share to China, and in “Nations by Consent: Decomposing the Nation State” Rothbard turns his attention to the deeper underlying concerns of the protectionists.

For opponents of protectionism, it seems to be logical that promoting free trade requires support for open borders, on the assumption that borders inherently impede free trade through border controls and tariffs.

While that may seem logical, it is a grave misstep to leap from free trade to open borders. That unfortunate leap arises from a failure to understand the importance of nations and national borders, and the importance of political boundaries in defending national identity and culture. In “Nations by Consent,” Rothbard observes that, “The genuine nation, or nationality, has made a dramatic reappearance on the world stage.” He addresses the tension between open borders and the risk of eroding a nation’s cultural boundaries, arguing that this is a problem that needs to be borne in mind by classical liberals who support free trade:

The question of open borders, or free immigration, has become an accelerating problem for classical liberals. This is first, because the welfare state increasingly subsidizes immigrants to enter and receive permanent assistance, and second, because cultural boundaries have become increasingly swamped.

The growing pressure on national and cultural boundaries prompted Rothbard to change his views on immigration, as he recognized that the disintegration of national and cultural identity could no longer simply be swept aside as inconsequential by those who, as he did, support free trade:

Previously, it had been easy to dismiss as unrealistic Jean Raspail’s anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints, in which virtually the entire population of India decides to move, in small boats, into France, and the French, infected by liberal ideology, cannot summon the will to prevent economic and cultural national destruction. As cultural and welfare-state problems have intensified, it became impossible to dismiss Raspail’s concerns any longer.

Some commentators have assumed that Rothbard simply abandoned his principled support for free trade, so it is important to clarify that maintaining the integrity of national borders does not entail abandoning free trade. On the contrary, Rothbard recognizes that human beings lie at the heart of all human action, including market exchange, and nations are not simply economic zones whose sole purpose is to provide a platform for global trade. Rothbard explains:

Contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language, and a culture. Every person is born into one or several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group, with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions. He is generally born into a “country.” He is always born into a specific historical context of time and place, meaning neighborhood and land area.

Therefore, Rothbard saw no contradiction between the principle of nations by consent—including the right to secede—and his support for free trade. He distinguished between political boundaries and economic boundaries, arguing that political boundaries do not imply the need for economic boundaries represented by destructive customs barriers and protectionist tariffs. He explains:

One goal for libertarians should be to transform existing nation-states into national entities whose boundaries could be called just, in the same sense that private property boundaries are just; that is, to decompose existing coercive nation-states into genuine nations, or nations by consent…even under a minimal state, national boundaries would still make a difference, often a big one to the inhabitants of the area.

Rothbard also recognizes that politicians are often tempted to follow political boundaries with protectionist policies, making overblown promises to put their own citizens in a stronger economic position by protecting them from free trade. The political desire to protect domestic producers who are outcompeted by foreign producers explains why many supporters of free trade are hostile to nationalism—they fear that a devotion to one’s nation will only encourage further protectionist measures of the type now being proposed by both parties. But Rothbard insists that, far from fueling protectionism by erecting more borders and more tariffs, the principle of nations by consent is more conducive to free trade:

A common response to a world of proliferating nations is to worry about the multitude of trade barriers that might be erected. But, other things being equal, the greater the number of new nations, and the smaller the size of each, the better. For it would be far more difficult to sow the illusion of self-sufficiency if the slogan were “Buy North Dakotan” or even “Buy 56th Street” than it now is to convince the public to “Buy American.” Similarly, “Down with South Dakota,” or a fortiori, “Down with 55th Street,” would be a more difficult sell than spreading fear or hatred of the Japanese. Similarly, the absurdities and the unfortunate consequences of fiat paper money would be far more evident if each province or each neighborhood or street block were to print its own currency. A more decentralized world would be far more likely to turn to sound market commodities, such as gold or silver, for its money.

Rothbard’s insights highlight the political interdependence between the open borders debate and the debate about tariffs. In these debates, it is important to reiterate that free trade does not require nations to abolish their borders, nor does it require supporting open immigration. National sentiment is a reality of human nature and the reality is, therefore, that many people would not sacrifice their national identity for the rather abstract notion of the economic prosperity which comes with free trade. They might well decide there is a tradeoff to be made between economic prosperity and their national or cultural integrity.

It must be emphasized that national borders do not impede free trade for the simple reason that free trade is voluntary. Safeguarding a country’s borders would no more impede voluntary free trade than walls and a locked door would prevent the homeowner from participating in voluntary exchange with others.

The post Tariffs, Protectionism, and Why Borders Matter appeared first on LewRockwell.

“He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.”      – William Blake, Eternity

“But dreamin’ was as easy as believin’ it was never gonna end
And lovin’ her was easier than anything I’ll ever do again”
– Kris Kristofferson, “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)”

Kris Kristofferson, a man of deep soul and poetic genius, is eighty-eight years-old, an elderly man who has come a long way down life’s road, now “Looking at a looking glass/ Running out of time/ On a face you used to know.”

His songs keep echoing in my mind, and I am sure in the minds of millions of others.

Great songwriter-singers, like great poets, are possessed by a passionate melancholic sensibility that gives them joy in the telling.  They seem always to be homesick for a home they can’t define or find.  At the heart of their songs is a presence of an absence that is unnamable. That is what draws listeners in.

While great songs usually take but a few minutes to travel from the singer’s mouth to the listener’s ears, they keep echoing for a long time, as if they had taken both singer and listener on a circular journey out and back, and then, in true Odyssean fashion, replay the cyclic song of the shared poetic mystery that is life and death, love and loss, the going up and coming down, the abiding nostalgia for a future home and a past that was a fleeting moment in time.

Time is the core theme of all great writers.  Its mystery, its intimacy, how it holds us as we try to tell it, as if we could, knowing that we can’t as it mocks all our pretensions.

My 100 year-old  mother, as she neared death, would often plead with me, “Don’t let me go, Eddy.”  I would tell her I was trying, knowing my efforts were a temporary stay and that through our conversations we were building what D. H. Lawrence called her “ship of death”:

Build then the ship of death, for you must take
the longest journey, to oblivion.
And die the death, the long and painful death
that lies between the old self and the new.
***
We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do
is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship
of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.
***
And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing
on the pink flood,
and the frail soul steps out, into her house again
filling the heart with peace.

In those days she also used to ask me: “Now that you have lived more of your life in Massachusetts than in New York City, where do you say you are from and which do you consider your home?”  I didn’t know what to say but would wonder where I would like to be buried, as if it mattered.  I would be dead.  Home.  I don’t think so.  Not underground, so why does it matter where.

Home isn’t a place for permanently sleeping.  It’s the place from which we launch our ships out into the world.  And the place that we discover when all our sailing is done and we enter the harbor of the ultimate unknown.

Where was the lightning before it flashed?

Kris Kristofferson is an astonishing songwriter and bard, a man of faith and conscience, and a humorously devilish performer with an on-stage persona of a spiritual satyr.  Although he retired from performing a few years ago, he wrote and performed some of the finest songs in the American songbook.  A man’s and a woman’s man, he wrote songs of exquisite passion and sensitivity and rough rollicking freedom that only an emotionless zombie would fail to be moved by.  And in the last 15 or so  years, he has fearlessly confronted his mortality, writing many brave tunes that bookend his earliest hits, such as Help Me Make It Through the Night.

I have loved and listened to his music for a long time and wish to honor him.

This is my small tribute to a great artist, a poetic genius whose songs manifest the fact that he studied the Romantic poets.

Counterpose what is perhaps his most well-known song, Me and Bobby McGee, first made famous by the rocking swirling twirling wild dervish Janis Joplin, a former lover so I’ve heard, confirming William Blake’s dictum that “Exuberance is Beauty” with his lilting poem that is little known but whose gorgeous melody confirms in turn the saying of that other Romantic poet, John Keats, that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”: Shadows of Her Mind.  Two meditations in very different song styles on love, loneliness, searching, loss, and the secrets of one’s soul – a magician at work. Whether partly truth or partly fiction doesn’t matter. Secrets are secrets, sung or spun like memories in the mind, webs of wonder.

Kristofferson broke barriers when he found success in Nashville’s country and western scene in the early 1970s.  He made explicit the sexuality and the yearning for love that underlay traditional country music. The endless yearning that never ends.  Its secret.  Not just sex in the back room of a honky-tonk, but the “Achin’ with the feelin’ of the freedom of an eagle when she flies,” as he sings in Loving Her Was Easier.  Something intangible.  True passion for love and life.

He was an oddball.  Here was a man whose inspiration for Me and Bobby McGee was a foreign film, La Strada (The Road), made by the extraordinary Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini.  Not the stuff of movie theaters in small Texas towns.  In the film Anthony Quinn is driving around on a motorcycle with a feeble-minded girl whose playing of a trombone gets on his nerves, so while she is sleeping, he abandons her by the side of the road.  He later hears a woman singing the melody the girl was always playing and learns the girl has died.  Kris explains:

To me, that was the feeling at the end of ‘Bobby McGee.’ The two-edged sword that freedom is. He was free when he left the girl, but it destroyed him. That’s where the line ‘Freedom’s just another name for nothing left to lose’ came from.

Not exactly country, yet a traditional storyteller, a Rhodes scholar and a former Army Captain, an Oxford “egghead” in love with romantic poetry, a sensitive athlete, a risk-taker who gave up a teaching position at West Point for a janitor’s job in Nashville to try his hand at songwriting, a patriot with a dissenter’s heart, he is an unusual man, to put it mildly.  A gambler.  A man who knows that heaven and hell are born together and that the body and soul cannot be divorced, that all art is incarnational and meant to be about ecstasy and misery, not the middle normal ground where people measure out their lives in coffee spoons.  He always wanted to tell what he knew, come what may, as he sings in To Beat the Devil:

I was born a lonely singer, and I’m bound to die the same,
But I’ve got to feed the hunger in my soul.
And if I never have a nickel, I won’t ever die ashamed.
‘Cos I don’t believe that no-one wants to know.

What do people want to know?  A bit here and there, I guess, but not too much, not the secrets of our souls. Not the truth about their government’s killers, the lies that drive a Billy Dee to drugs and death, and the hypocritical fears of cops and people who wish to squelch the truths of the desperate ones for fear that they might reveal secrets best buried with the bodies.  Secrets not about the dead but the living – or more appropriately put, the living dead.  Kris has always had that wild man’s frenzy to never let the living dead eat him up, as D. H. Lawrence put it.

There are only a handful of songwriters with the artistic gift of soul-sympathy to write verses like the following, and Kris did it again and again over fifty years:

Billy Dee was seventeen when he turned twenty-one
Fooling with some foolish things he could’ve left alone
But he had to try to satisfy a thirst he couldn’t name
Driven toward the darkness by the devils in his veins

All around the honky-tonks, searching for a sign
Gettin’ by on gettin’ high on women, words and wine
Some folks called him crazy, Lord, and others called him free
But we just called us lucky for the love of Billy Dee

Like William Blake – “Can I see another’s woe/And not be in sorrow too?/Can I see another’s grief/And not seek for kind relief?” – Billy Dee captures in rollicking sound more truth about addiction than a thousand self-important editorials about drugs.

Kristofferson joins with Dylan Thomas, the Welsh bard, another wild man with an exquisite sense for the music of language and the married themes of youth and age, sex and death, love and loss, home and the search, always the search:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Although most of his songs lack overt political content, such concerns are scattered throughout his massive oeuvre (nearly 400 songs) where his passion for the victims of America’s war machine and his respect for great spiritual heroes like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and John and Robert Kennedy ring out in very powerful songs that are not well known.  Note his use of the word they in They Killed Him, surely not a mistake for such a careful songwriter.  Sounds like Dylan about the assassination of President Kennedy in Murder Most Foul: “They killed him once and they killed him twice/Killed him like a human sacrifice.”

And in The Circle, a song about Bill  Clinton killing with a missile an Iraqi artist and her husband and the wounding of her children, his condemnation is powerful as he links it to the disappeared of Argentina in a circle of sorrow.  Of course, no one is responsible.

“Not I” said the soldier
“I just follow orders and it was my duty to do my job well”
“Not I” said the leader who ordered the slaughter
“I’m saddened it happened, but then, war is hell”
“Not us” said the others who heard of the horror
Turned a cold shoulder on all that was done
In all the confusion a single conclusion
The circle of sorrow has only begun

As everyone knows, songs have a powerful hold on our memories, and sometimes we learn ironic truths about them only years later.

When I was young, my large family, consisting of my parents and seven sisters and me – Bronx kids – would go on vacation for a week in the late summer to a farm called Edgewater.  We would pack our clothes in cartons weeks in advance and would load into the car like sardines layered in a can.  On the trip north to the Catskill mountains, in our wild excitement, we would sing all sorts of happy songs, many from Broadway shows.  As we approached the farm, we would go crazy with excitement and sing over and over the repetitive song we had learned somewhere: We’re Here Because We’re Here Because We’re Here.  To us it was a song of joy; we had arrived at our Shangri-La, our ideal home, paradise regained.  To this day, the name Edgewater is like Proust’s madeleine dipped in tea for many of us.

What we didn’t know was that the song we were singing was the sardonic song that WWI soldiers sang as they awaited absurd and senseless death in the mud and rat-filled trenches of the war to end all wars.  Sardonic words to them and joy to us. They were there because they were there and it was meaningless.  We sang it out of joy.  So Blakean:

Man was made for joy and woe
Then when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine
A clothing for the soul to bind.

To listen to Kris Kristofferson’s vast oeuvre is a confirmation of that Blakean truth.  It is to realize that all those songs he has written and sung have been his way of fulfilling the words of another Romantic poet who was Blake’s contemporary, John Keats.  Keats called life “a vale of soul-making,” meaning that people are not souls until they make themselves by developing an individual identity by doing what they were meant to do, by listening to the voice within, not the cacophony without.  Kris did exactly that to the consternation of his family.  He answered the hero’s spiritual call that asked him to follow his true self.  The call that Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, says, when refused, results in sterility:

Often in actual life, and not infrequently in the myths and popular tales, we encounter the dull case of the call unanswered; for it is always possible to turn the ear to other interests. Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or “culture,” the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering life becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless. . . . Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide him from his Minotaur. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration.

By answering the call, Kris blossomed into his sacred calling with all its unremitting deaths and births, unlike his character, Saul Darby, whose life’s obsessive labor was to build Darby’s Castle as a monument to his ego, even as he failed to hear his young wife weeping in the next room.  Yet befitting the artist that he is who can grasp two tragic truths at once, perhaps Kris was singing of himself as well.

In Ken Burns’ fascinating documentary series, Country Music, Kris answers the question of why he took such a radical turn early on and gave up his military road to success for a lowly job as a janitor in Nashville where he hoped to write songs.  He said:

I love William Blake…. William Blake said, ‘If he who is organized by the divine for spiritual communion, refuse and bury his talent in the earth, even though he should want natural bread, shame and confusion of face will pursue him throughout life to eternity.’

When he answered this call of the spirit and took such a dramatic turn away from the conventional road to success, his mother wrote him a letter essentially disowning him (“dis-owning” – an interesting word!).  When Johnny Cash read it, he sardonically said, “Isn’t it nice to get a letter from home?”

Not devoid of humor, Kristofferson wrote Jessie Younger, a catchy tune that no doubt concealed his pain while sharing it, an example of his extraordinary ability to use words in paradoxical ways:

Jesse Younger’s parents wonder where it all went wrong
that Jesse’s name has turned to ashes on their tongues
But he chose to starve and try to carve a future of his own
And he got his druthers because now his younger brother
Is his father’s and his mother’s only son

A close examination of so many of his lyrics leaves me aghast at his talent.

There are just a handful of songwriter/performers who can match the art of Kris Kristofferson.  Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Paul Simon particularly come to mind, for their work also contains that deep spiritual questing for “home,” the enigmatic word we use to try to capture life’s deepest yearnings.

Kris has an attribute that is very beautiful and emanates from a very deep place. Heart.  Spirit.  Soul.  His songs are permeated with the quality Keats called “soul-making.”  Life as a vale of soul-making.  One can hear it throughout Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, that plaintiff cry from the bottom of a despairing bottle that gripped the great Johnny Cash as well.  Like Dylan so often, the tintinnabulation of the bells conjures someone calling a lost soul to return home.  “Then I headed back for home/And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin’/And it echoed through the canyons/Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday”

Whatever word we give it, this quality shines through in a beautifully poignant way, especially in a concert he gave in the Plaza de la Trinidad, an intimate venue, when he was seventy-four years old.  Age has etched its marks on his rueful countenance but has added pathos to his performance.  His song selection, while including many of his famous hits, also contains lesser-known songs that add an even greater humanness to his deeply moving performance.  I am reminded of something the English writer John Berger said of Rembrandt: “The late Rembrandt self-portraits contain or embody a paradox: they are clearly about old age, yet they address the future. They assume something coming towards them apart from Death.”

Kris Kristofferson may have been “out of sight and out of mind” in recent years, so I would like to bring him back to your attention and salute him as we remember him.

Thank you, Kris.  You are an inspiration.  Blessings as you fall into grace, as you reminded us with Why Me Lord.

And here is his encore, “The Last Thing to Go”:

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post The Free Soul of a Genius: Kris Kristofferson appeared first on LewRockwell.

On August 27 the former president of Ukraine Vladimir Zelenski announced that he would soon present a plan for ending the war with Russia:

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday that the war with Russia would eventually end in dialogue, but that Kyiv had to be in a strong position and that he would present a plan to U.S. President Joe Biden and his two potential successors.

The Ukrainian leader, addressing a news conference, said Kyiv’s three-week-old incursion into Russia’s Kursk region was part of that plan, but that it also comprised other steps on the economic and diplomatic fronts.

“The main point of this plan is to force Russia to end the war. And I want that very much – (that it would be) fair for Ukraine,” he told reporters in Kyiv of the war launched by Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
…
Zelenskiy said he hoped to go to the United States in September to attend the U.N. General Assembly in New York and that he was preparing to meet Biden.

The plan will also be presented to the presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

It is believed that this announcement came in response to a silent request by Ukraine’s supporters for a longer term perspective.

Details of the plan have since leaked bit by bit:

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has revealed a new detail about the victory plan he plans to present to US President Joe Biden next week.
…
“Decisions regarding the plan mostly depend on him [Biden – ed.]. They depend on other allies too, but there are points that depend on positive will and support from the United States. I really hope he will back this plan,” Zelenskyy said.
…
“This plan is based on decisions which would need to be adopted within the period from October to December… Then the plan will work, we think,” he said.

Earlier, Zelenskyy revealed that the plan consists of four points to increase Ukraine’s defence capability, “plus another one that we’ll need after the war”.

The ‘victory plan’ is not about a real plan for Ukraine’s action but a list of demands towards the ‘western’ supporters of Ukraine.

The theory in Kiev is that a fulfillment of these demands will allow Ukraine to win the war and to press Russian into accepting Ukraine’s 10 point ‘peace plan‘.

As explained by a Zelinski advisor:

A source close to Zelensky told the Kyiv Independent that the “victory plan” aims “to create such conditions and such an atmosphere that Russia will no longer be able to ignore the peace formula and the peace summit.”
…
“The problem is, to get to that point where we have any sort of peace negotiations, Russia must feel like they’re going to lose, and we are not there yet,” Rep. Jimmy Panetta, a Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee in Congress, told the Kyiv Independent.

“I hope part of this victory plan is how we can shape battlefield conditions to reach that point,” said Panetta, who met Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials in Kyiv last weekend.

From other reporting we know that Zelenski’s ‘victory plan’ demands include:

• to allow unrestricted long range missile strikes into Russia
• to invite Ukraine in the borders of 1991 to join NATO at a nearby date
• to immediately negotiate and accept Ukraine’s membership in the the European Union
• to permanently supply advanced heavy weapons to Ukraine
• to provide additional hundreds of billions of dollars for ‘reconstruction’ without any restrictions attached to it

The ‘victory plan’ requests are of course outrageous and delusional and have little to no chance to be fulfilled.

Zelenski’s opposition in Ukraine is therefore convinced that the plan was formulated to get rejected. The refusal of the plan would be used by Zelenski to then justify peace negotiations with Russia (machine translation):

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky will pass on his “victory plan” to the United States in order to get a refusal and then start negotiations with Russia.

This opinion was expressed by former Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.

According to Lutsenko, that is why the Ukrainian government constantly blames the allies for the situation at the front.

“The entire propaganda machine of the President’s Office constantly hammers into the heads of Ukrainians that we have problems only because the United States does not want to give us permission for long – range missiles Jassm, Atacms, Storm shadow / Scalp,” the ex-prosecutor general wrote.

Zelenski’s, not Ukraine’s, real victory plan would thus go like this:

According to Lutsenko, Zelensky act according to this plan:

1. 1. We are submitting a new mega-list of requirements for weapons and money to the United States.
   2. We have polite doubts that this will change the course of the war and lead us to the borders of 1991.
   3. We declare that we have been abandoned and have no other choice but to return to the World Forums with the participation of Russia.
   4. During the negotiations, we receive demands from Putin in the style of Istanbul.
   5. We declare that this is the subject of a referendum and that a ceasefire is necessary for this.
   6. We sign a cease-fire.
   7. We pose as the president of the world and hold presidential elections. Preferably – without lifting martial law, so that democracy does not interfere, and the military recruitment offices can manage the polling stations.

Lutsenko called it a “cynical show” that ” is easily read by both ukrpolitikum and our allies.”

Zelenski’s real plan, as listed by Lutsenko, sounds nifty and would probably work in a normal state. But Ukraine is a state in which a small minority of well armed and ruthless fascists have control over all major political decisions. They are adamant against any negotiations with, or concessions to Russia and have threatened to overthrow any government that would try to go that way.

It is hard to see how Zelenski can get convince those men to agree with his plans.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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