Lew Rockwell Institute

Evil is not committed by people who feel uncertain about their righteousness, who question their own motives, who worry about betraying themselves. The evil in this world is committed by the spiritual fat cats, by the Pharisees of our own day, the self-righteous who think they are without sin because they are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self-examination. Unpleasant though it may be, the sense of personal sin is precisely that which keeps our sin from getting out of hand…It is a very great blessing because it is the one and only effective safeguard against our own proclivity for evil.

-M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for the healing of Human Evil (1983).

The bad habit of lying starts in childhood when we discover that lying may enable us to indulge in something forbidden, break a rule, or shirk a responsibility without getting into trouble for it. Growing up is the difficult and often painful process of recognizing that there are no free lunches—that everything has to be earned and nothing can be gained without a corresponding sacrifice.

Throughout history, the ruling class has always lied to the people it governs. What seems to make our current era in the West somewhat peculiar is the avidity with which large swaths of the population embrace the practice of constantly lying in the most obvious way about everything.

The ease with which our political class lies about everything has apparently been made possible by the shallowness and sentimentality of our popular culture and the impoverishment of our education.

Recently I listened to Jordan Peterson give lectures on two fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm—Hansel and Gretel and Show White.

I’d long known that the ancient stories collected by the Brothers Grimm revealed the dark side of human nature, and the struggle that all of us must undertake to overcome it. However, I didn’t appreciate the true depth of the horror that Peterson explicates.

His interpretation of these stories made me wonder if Herman Melville had been influenced by them when he wrote Moby Dick—the story of a comfortable young man from New York who, by joining a whaling expedition into the Pacific, has an encounter with the dark side of human nature that most people never recognize because they flatter themselves that they are entirely civilized.

The shallower and less self-aware we become, they less we are able to recognize that many of the people who now direct our institutions are animated by Satanic pride and greed. Many of the most influential people in the West mask their ruthless ambitions in the language of benevolence and virtue signaling. Some of them, like Bluebeard and Queen Grimhilde, seem archetypal in their villainy.

I’m often asked by readers of this newsletter why we aren’t seeing greater and more persistent resistance to the “People of the Lie” who dominate our institutions. The reason, I believe, is that the majority of our citizens is still unable to spot the obvious perfidy that is perpetrated in the public forum every day.

They can’t quite grasp that many of those who occupy leadership positions are terrible people who do terrible things to actual people while convincing themselves they are pursuing their ambitions for the greater good of “humanity” in the abstract.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post People of the Lie appeared first on LewRockwell.

In every political shift, there’s a shadow economy of influence. In the modern GOP, that shadow is cast by a well-financed, highly coordinated network of billionaires, corporate dynasties, and ideological financiers. These actors do not simply donate; they design policy, groom candidates, and capture entire institutions to serve their vision.

This section identifies the top power brokers behind MAGA authoritarianism and the post-Trump far-right. We trace:

• Where their wealth comes from
• What their real goals are
• How they subvert democratic governance
• Their connections to Trumpism, white nationalism, and anti-democratic populism

1. Leonard Leo – Architect of the Shadow Judiciary

Wealth Origin: Federalist Society, Catholic legal networks, undisclosed dark money trusts
Primary Vehicles: Marble Freedom Trust, The 85 Fund, Concord Fund
Goal: Remake the judiciary with ultra-conservative judges who will outlast public majorities.
Trump Connection: Hand-picked most of Trump’s judicial nominees, including three Supreme Court justices.
Impact: Enabled decades-long rollback of reproductive rights, civil rights, and environmental regulations.
Estimated Network Funds: Over $1.6 billion, mostly dark money.
Threat Assessment: Critical — Covert, influential, and legally insulated from public accountability.

2. Charles Koch – The Long Game Oligarch

Wealth Origin: Koch Industries (fossil fuels, chemicals, paper goods)
Primary Vehicles: Americans for Prosperity, Stand Together, DonorsTrust
Goal: Shrink government, eliminate taxes/regulations, weaken labor, privatize public services.
Trump Connection: Initially distanced, then aligned on judicial picks, tax reform, and deregulation.
Impact: Built the pipeline that funds ALEC-written laws, voter suppression, and anti-democratic legislation in red states.
Estimated Network Funds: Tens of billions in combined family and institutional spending since 2008.
Threat Assessment: Critical — Decades-long influence campaign with unmatched state-level control.

One often-overlooked player in the dark money ecosystem is DonorsTrust, sometimes called the “dark money ATM” of the right. This organization launders large donations through anonymous donor-advised funds, making it nearly impossible to trace the original funders of judicial campaigns, ballot initiatives, and think tank operations.

3. Peter Thiel – The Techno-Authoritarian Investor

Wealth Origin: PayPal, Palantir, Facebook early investor
Primary Vehicles: Thiel Capital, Thiel Fellowship, Founders Fund, personal donations
Goal: Dismantle liberal democracy, replace with technocratic nationalism; fund candidates hostile to pluralism.
Trump Connection: Early Trump backer; funded JD Vance and Blake Masters; anti-immigrant and anti-press stances
Impact: Promotes surveillance capitalism; wants “startup society” with limited government and elite control.
Estimated Network Funds: Several billion in personal and directed funds.
Threat Assessment: Critical — Intellectually coherent, media-savvy, and actively reshaping the GOP’s next wave.

4. Rebekah Mercer – The Billionaire Matchmaker of MAGA Media

Wealth Origin: Mercer family hedge fund fortune (Renaissance Technologies)
Primary Vehicles: Mercer Family Foundation, Parler (formerly), Reclaim New York, Make America Number 1 PAC
Goal: Weaponize media and digital platforms to amplify far-right culture wars and dismantle government institutions.
Trump Connection: Top funder of Trump’s 2016 campaign and Steve Bannon’s rise; backed Cambridge Analytica and alt-right influencers.
Impact: Spread disinformation during the 2016 and 2020 elections; funds organizations attacking climate science, voting access, and civil liberties.
Estimated Network Funds: Hundreds of millions via dark money nonprofits.
Threat Assessment: Critical — Mastermind of far-right media architecture, anti-democracy normalization.

5. Stephen Schwarzman – The Wall Street Power Broker

Wealth Origin: CEO and co-founder of Blackstone Group (private equity, real estate, infrastructure)
Primary Vehicles: Personal donations, super PACs, financial industry lobbying
Goal: Protect capital gains and private equity profits, resist taxation and regulation of high finance.
Trump Connection: Top donor and advisor; helped shape Trump’s corporate tax cuts.
Impact: Pushed for deregulation of Wall Street, tax breaks for the ultra-rich, and weakening Dodd-Frank protections.
Estimated Network Funds: Billions in political leverage via Wall Street industry groups.
Threat Assessment: High — Corporate elite with transactional influence over national policy.

6. Harlan Crow – The Justice Purchaser

Wealth Origin: Real estate, Trammell Crow Company inheritance
Primary Vehicles: Personal wealth, Federalist Society donor circles, private gifts
Goal: Shape judicial rulings by supporting anti-regulatory judges and bankrolling ideological allies.
Trump Connection: Close ties to Trump-aligned legal figures; major underwriter of Leo network.
Impact: Provided luxury travel and gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas; funded anti-DEI and pro-theocracy groups.
Estimated Network Funds: Tens of millions personally and through donor advised funds.
Threat Assessment: High — Quiet influencer whose wealth penetrates the highest court.

7. Ken Griffin – The Market Supremacist

Wealth Origin: Founder/CEO of Citadel (hedge fund and market maker)
Primary Vehicles: Super PACs, educational influence, state-level political engineering
Goal: Maintain low-tax, pro-investor climate; suppress progressive taxation and economic justice.
Trump Connection: Supported Trump’s tax agenda; major funder of DeSantis and other MAGA successors.
Impact: Shaped Illinois and Florida politics; attacked teachers’ unions, progressive ballot initiatives.
Estimated Network Funds: Over $500 million in political giving.
Threat Assessment: High — Economic kingmaker using markets to undermine democratic accountability.

8. Rupert Murdoch – The Propaganda Czar

Wealth Origin: News Corp, Fox News, Wall Street Journal
Primary Vehicles: Fox Corporation, NY Post, broadcast dominance
Goal: Consolidate public opinion behind right-wing nationalism, monetize fear, disinformation, and rage.
Trump Connection: Kingmaker of the Trump presidency; Fox News echoed and amplified MAGA lies.
Impact: Promoted election denial, COVID misinformation, white nationalist talking points.
Estimated Network Funds: Billions in media assets and political leverage.
Threat Assessment: Critical — Mass disinformation agent eroding public trust and truth itself.

9. Barre Seid – The Ghost Donor

Wealth Origin: Electronics manufacturing (Tripp Lite)
Primary Vehicles: Marble Freedom Trust (via $1.6B donation), anonymous charitable entities
Goal: Cement hard-right control of judiciary, education, and public discourse.
Trump Connection: Funded Leonard Leo’s empire; passive enabler of post-Trump legal backlash.
Impact: Largest known political donation in U.S. history used to fund anti-democracy infrastructure.
Estimated Network Funds: Over $1.6 billion (single transfer in 2021).
Threat Assessment: Critical — Operates from the shadows but bankrolls America’s ideological capture.

Targeted Strategies to Cut Their Power

1. Direct Public Exposure & Reputation

• Investigative campaigns highlighting lavish perks and self-dealing (e.g., Leo’s use of BH Fund & CRC Advisors).
• Partner with watchdogs (ProPublica, CREW) and use media to debunk understatement narratives (e.g., “court is nonpartisan”).
• Naming and shaming foster public pressure, which is particularly effective for Crow, Seid, Schwarzman, and Mercer, whose wealth is cloaked behind shell networks.

2. Financial Transparency & Flow Interruption

• Enact the DISCLOSE Act: mandates disclosure of all donations >$10K to 501(c)s and Super PACs.
• Ban dark-money interchanges between nonprofits and for-profits (e.g., Leo’s CRC Advisors).
• Require donor disclosure for amicus briefs in key SCOTUS cases to reveal funding flows from Leo, Koch, and Crow

3. Ethics & Anti-Corruption Legislation

• Pass the American Anti-Corruption Act to:
  • Limit gifts from billionaires (including travel and hospitality)
  • Mandate full disclosure of board memberships and private consulting by justices and lawmakers
• Extend gift bans and recusal requirements to SCOTUS justices, targeting Crow and Alito’s relationships.

4. Legal & Tax Enforcement

• Use IRS and AG investigations to challenge nonprofit fundraising abuses (e.g., Seid‑Leo $1.6 billion Marble Freedom Trust)
• Strengthen FEC enforcement by prohibiting dark-money PAC coordination and reforming membership rules (Koch’s networks).

5. Strategic Disinvestment & Boycott

• Mobilize shareholder resolutions in banks and asset managers tied to Griffin, Schwarzman, and Thiel.
• Launch public boycotts of Murdoch-owned outlets (FOX, NY Post), especially during major stories.

6. Campaign Finance & Electoral Overhaul

• Expand public financing so billionaire-backed candidates don’t outspend grassroots campaigns.
• De-gerrymander Redistricting & Enforce Voting Rights to break hold of Koch- and Griffin-funded hardened districts.

7. Civic Media & Narrative Disruption

• Fund truth-based “dark money tracker” media to expose donors (cross-linked with crisis areas like SCOTUS, Congress).
• Support local fact-checking in swing areas where Mercer or Crow-funded outlets smear opponents.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Elite Funders Reshaping Democracy in Their Image appeared first on LewRockwell.

On August 6, 2025, the world marked the 80th anniversary of the American destruction of Hiroshima. As in decades past, Hiroshima Day served to honor the first victims of atomic warfare and to reaffirm the enduring promise that their suffering would not be in vain, that they and the residents of Nagasaki, devastated three days later in 1945, would be the last places to endure such a fate.

Within that commemorative framework, Hiroshima has been effectively rendered an abstraction and reduced to a cautionary tale. With the involuntary sacrifice of that city and its inhabitants, humanity was offered a profound lesson. In the ruins of Hiroshima, the world confronted a vision of nothing less than its own potential end. And awareness of that apocalyptic possibility emerged almost immediately. The very next day, in fact, the American newspaper PM, based in New York, ran an article speculating on the catastrophic consequences of an atomic bomb detonating in the heart of that very city.

For the first time, thanks to Hiroshima, human beings became an endangered species. People everywhere were presented with an existential choice between the quick and the dead, between one world and none. Humanity could recover its moral bearings and pursue the abolition of nuclear weapons and the renunciation of war, or accept the inevitability that such man-made forces would ultimately abolish most or all of us. (Think “nuclear winter.”) Only through the former could we hope for collective redemption rather than collective suicide.

In our annual ritual of remembrance, Hiroshima is recalled not so much as a site of mass slaughter, but as a symbol of peace, hope, and resilience, a testament to our professed commitment to “never again.” Yet this year, such sanitized appeals of official memory rang increasingly hollow. After all, eight decades later, humanity (or at least its leadership) continues to demonstrate that it learned remarkably little from the horrors of Hiroshima.

What, after all, could it mean to commemorate such a moment in a world where today not one, but nine nuclear-armed states hold humanity hostage to the threat of sudden, total annihilation? Worse yet, today’s arsenals contain thousands of thermonuclear weapons, some of them up to 1,000 times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Worse yet, those arsenals are being “modernized” regularly, the American one to the tune of $1.5 trillion or more as a significant portion of our national resources continues to be siphoned away from meeting human needs and redirected toward preparations for (in)human destruction.

Worse yet, all too many of those weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, poised to extinguish life on Earth in what Daniel Ellsberg, the man who long ago released the top-secret Pentagon Papers, once described as a “single, immense hammer-blow to be executed with the automaticity of a mousetrap at almost any provocation.”

Under this country’s current launch-on-warning posture, President Donald Trump (and any president who follows him) holds sole, unquestioned authority to initiate a retaliatory nuclear strike, with as little as six minutes to decide following an alert about a possible nuclear attack (despite a well-documented history of false alarms). This scenario also presumes that the U.S. would only be acting in “self-defense” in response to a nuclear strike by another nation, although mutually assured destruction renders such concepts obsolete. In reality, that assumption is far from certain. Washington (unlike, for example, Beijing) has never adopted a no-first-use policy and continues to reserve the right to initiate a nuclear strike preemptively.

Moreover, what does it mean to remember Hiroshima in a world where, while no atomic bomb has been dropped on Gaza, the tonnage of “conventional” explosives unleashed there is already equivalent to six Hiroshima bombings? As the nuclear abolitionist organization Nihon Hidankyo, composed of Japanese atomic bomb survivors, warned in the lead-up to being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024, the suffering of Gaza’s children all too eerily mirrors their own experiences in Hiroshima.

That city is therefore not merely a past atrocity but an open wound, not simply a lesson of history but an ongoing nightmare. There is, in short, no true way to meaningfully honor its memory while so many countries (my own included) actively prepare for future nuclear war.

At this moment, the history of the bomb needs to be reconsidered, not as an isolated development in an increasingly distant past but as inextricably linked to broader questions of mass violence now, including in Gaza. Such an approach, in fact, would reflect the way the bomb was originally understood by many of the scientists who built it, sensing that it would prove to be what some of them would soon describe as “a weapon of genocide.”

Destroying Cities and Calling it Peace

After those two atomic bombs leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, slaughtering up to 210,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians by deliberate design, most Americans responded with relief. Echoing the official narrative, they celebrated the bomb as a triumph of scientific ingenuity and a “winning weapon” associated with bringing a swift and decisive end to World War II, the bloodiest conflict in human history.

Decades of historical scholarship have demonstrated that such a narrative is largely a myth. In the aftermath of those two bombings, a carefully constructed postwar consensus quickly emerged, bolstered by inflated claims that those two bombs were used only as a last resort, that they saved half a million American lives, and, perversely enough, that they constituted a form of “mercy killing” that spared many Japanese civilians. In reality, clear alternatives were then available, rendering the use of nuclear weapons unnecessary and immoral as well as, given the future nuclearization of the planet, strategically self-defeating.

Nonetheless, a war-weary American public overwhelmingly endorsed the bombings. Postwar polls indicated that 85% of them supported a decision made without their knowledge, input, or any form of democratic oversight. Notably, nearly a quarter of respondents expressed a further vengeful, even genocidal disappointment that Japan had surrendered so quickly, denying the United States the opportunity to drop “many more” atomic bombs (although no additional atomic weapons were then available).

It remains unclear whether, had they been ready, Washington would have used them. Despite President Harry Truman’s public posture of steely resolve, his private reflections suggest a deep unease, even horror over their use. As Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace recorded in his diary, Truman had “given orders to stop atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, all those kids.”

Why, then, were most Americans not similarly horrified? As historians John Dower and Ronald Takaki have shown, such exterminationist sentiments were fueled by anti-Asian racism, which framed the Pacific War in the American imagination as a race war. But perhaps more important, the way had been paved for them by the normalization of the practice of devastating area bombing, or more accurately, the terror bombing of both Nazi Germany and Japan.

Over the course of the war, the United States and Great Britain had “perfected” that indiscriminate method of destruction, targeting civilian morale and the collective will and capacity of a nation to sustain its war effort. This came despite the fact that President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly condemned the aerial bombardment of civilian infrastructure before the U.S. entry into the war as “inhuman barbarism.”

As Daniel Ellsberg observed, when it came to the rapid erosion of ethical restraints under the exigencies of an existential war, “liberal democracies… in fighting an evil enemy, picked up the methods of that enemy and made them into a private ethic that was indistinguishable really from Hitler’s ethic.” That moral collapse would be evident in the devastation wrought upon the German cities of Hamburg and Dresden, as well as in the similar destruction inflicted by the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities.

That descent into “barbarism” was not lost on contemporary observers. Reflecting on the 1943 Allied bombing of Hamburg, outspoken pacifist Vera Brittain described the destruction as a scene from “the evil nightmare of a homicidal maniac” and as “irrefutable evidence of the moral and spiritual abyss into which Britain and her rulers have descended.” She warned that such actions stemmed from a selective and hypocritical blindness, observing that, “in the Nazis and the Japanese we recognize cruelty when we see it, yet that same cruelty is being created, unperceived, amongst ourselves.”

And such a recognition wasn’t confined to pacifists but extended to policymakers. In response to the devastation caused by the “conventional” bombing campaign against Japan, including the burning to death of as many as 130,000 people in Tokyo in a single night in March 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson warned that, if such attacks continued, “we might get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities.” (The New York Times reported that the bombing of Tokyo may have killed as many as one to two million people. While not necessarily accurate, such reporting reflected a broader desensitization to mass death that had come to define the logic of total war, as well as a growing public tolerance among Americans for urbicide, the city-scale slaughter of civilians.)

On Nazi and Nuclear Holocausts

Not everyone in the Allied nations shared in the prevailing atmosphere of apathy or even jubilation over those nuclear bombings. Before the second bomb struck Nagasaki, French philosopher Albert Camus expressed his horror that even in a war defined by unprecedented, industrialized slaughter, Hiroshima stood apart. The destruction of that city, he observed, marked the moment when “mechanistic civilization has come to its final stage of savagery.” Soon after, American cultural critic Dwight Macdonald condemned the bombings in Politics, arguing that they placed Americans “on the same moral plane” as the Nazis, rendering the American people as complicit in the crimes of their government as the German people had been in theirs.

American scholar Lewis Mumford likewise regarded that moment as a profound moral collapse. It marked, he argued in 1959, the point at which the U.S. decided to commit the better part of its national energies to preparation for wholesale human extermination. With the advent of the bomb, Americans accepted their role as “moral monsters,” legitimizing technological slaughter as a permissible instrument of state power. “In principle,” he wrote, “the extermination camps where the Nazis incinerated over six million helpless Jews were no different from the urban crematoriums our air force improvised in its attacks by napalm bombs on Tokyo,” laying the groundwork for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The specter of Nazism has always loomed large over the atomic bomb. It was, after all, the fear of a Nazi bomb that first catalyzed the Manhattan Project that would create the American bombs. While the fall of the Nazi regime preceded the use of atomic weapons on Japan by nearly three months, as soft-spoken astronomer Carl Sagan once observed, the ideological imprint of Nazism was etched into the littered landscape of charred bodies and scorched earth of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It endured in the brutal logic of total war carried forward through the ensuing Cold War arms race with the Soviet Union and culminated in the grotesque accumulation of nuclear arsenals with tens of thousands of world-destroying weapons poised to obliterate humanity.

In a 1986 keynote address before the World Jewish Congress in Jerusalem, “The Final Solution to the Human Problem,” Sagan argued that Hitler “haunts our century… [as] he has shattered our confidence that civilized societies can impose limits on human destructiveness.” In their mutually reinforcing preparations to annihilate one another, erase the past, and foreclose the possibility of future generations, he concluded, “the superpowers have dutifully embraced this legacy… Adolf Hitler lives on.”

Lacking Hitler, Sagan suggested, Washington and Moscow imposed his image on each other. This was necessary because “nuclear weapons represent such a surpassing evil that they can be justified only by an equally evil adversary.” Humanity, he warned, was then locked in a downward spiral into a moral abyss reminiscent of a Greek tragedy. “When we engage in a death struggle with a monster, there is a real danger that we ourselves will, by slow and imperceptible changes, become transmogrified into monsters. We may be the last to notice what is happening to us.”

This influence was evident in the fact that fear of a Nazi bomb had served as the initial impetus for the Manhattan Project and that the future nuclear state would share certain characteristics of the Nazi regime. As psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton described it, such a state would rely on “the genocidal mentality,” a psychological willingness, combined with the technological capacity and institutional planning necessary to, under certain circumstances, deliberately destroy entire human populations.

No More Hiroshimas

In concluding his 1986 address, Carl Sagan warned that World War II had never truly ended. And in a sense, it hasn’t ended even today, given that nine countries now possess such world-destroying weaponry. After all, were a nuclear war to happen in the years to come, a scenario the most powerful states have spent the past 80 years preparing for and making ever more likely, the Allies will have retroactively lost the war. In the radioactive ruins of what was once Washington and New York, Leningrad, Moscow, and Beijing, New Delhi, and Islamabad, no less potentially across much of the rest of this planet, we would witness “the fulfillment of Hitler’s last and maddest vision.”

Such a future is anything but hypothetical. It may, in some sense, already be unfolding around us. It takes no great imagination to envision Hiroshima in the wreckage of Gaza or in the increasingly bombed-out cities of Ukraine. And that’s just a hint of the future, were nuclear weapons ever to be used. If we don’t dedicate ourselves to building a world without war and without nuclear weapons, sooner or later we will undoubtedly witness just such devastation on a global and irreversible scale.

To survive as a species and preserve our humanity, we must, as Dwight Macdonald urged us in August 1945, begin to think “dangerous” thoughts “of sabotage, resistance, rebellion, and the fraternity of all [people] everywhere.” Only then could we commemorate Hiroshima Day without the hypocrisy of talking peace while endlessly preparing for a world-ending war. Only then could we begin to fulfill the enduring promise of never again, no more Hiroshimas.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

The post What Do We Forget When We Remember Hiroshima? appeared first on LewRockwell.

While recently channel surfing on Sirius/XM radio, buzzing through the ’70s and ’80s rock stations, I caught a live New York City tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, who died two weeks ago at age 76. Ozzy lived a wild existence, more than mirrored by his music, not only as a solo “artist” (I don’t like that word) but with the grim “work” of his rock group Black Sabbath. He found himself in quite a pit, which he wrote about expressively in his agonizing songs, some of which seemed satanic.

As a product of those times, I listened to all that junk and knew it word for word. I lived a wild life as well. I most certainly didn’t mess with anything that appeared satanic, but as a young person, well, you often didn’t know what the hell (pun intended) you were listening to. Although with many of Black Sabbath’s lyrics, even a dimwitted teenage idiot growing up in Butler, Pennsylvania, in the early 1980s (that was me) could discern something potentially sinister going on.

Words like “Hell” jumped out at you.

And yet, as Scott Ventureyra wrote about in an insightful tribute here at Crisis, Ozzy, like so many of the perverse rockers of his era, seemed to be “channeling confusion not conviction” with his lyrics. At times, “Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath [seemed to be] channeling a kind of exaggerated darkness that was more dramatic than truly diabolical.”

Perhaps. Unfortunately, it was always exasperatingly hard to tell with these types. Their “art” was often unclear and empty and dark. It was downright depressing. It is no coincidence that Ozzy scribbled songs with titles like “Suicide Solution” and found himself “going off the rails” on a “Crazy Train.”

Getting back to the Ozzy tribute on the Sirius/XM channel, it was hosted by a 1980s MTV VJ. In between cuts, the VJ shared a quip with the audience—or at least what he considered to be funny and expected would get a rise or applause. He quoted some fellow rocker who had shared Ozzy’s degenerate lifestyle and who had quipped to the ailing Ozzy that he would see him in Hell someday, where they would “have a beer” together.

The VJ and audience chuckled.

But in truth, of course, that wasn’t funny, especially if it wasn’t a joke. It was nothing to laugh at.

Let me be clear: Hell is not a place where you and your buddies in the afterlife have a beer together. Should you be so horribly unfortunate to end up there, you’re not going to be hanging out at bars and tossing down brewskis with Lucifer.

If that’s where you end up, the Prince of Darkness will have a decidedly different plan for you. You will not enjoy those plans. It isn’t going to be Coors and cigars and guitars and partying with hot groupie chicks.

I really need not say any of this to readers at Crisis Magazine, but I’ll offer just a few vivid descriptions for any non-Catholics or non-Christians who are reading.

Jesus Christ described Hell as a “fiery furnace” where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” It is a place of “unquenchable” “eternal fire” and “eternal punishment” (see Matthew 13:41-42 and 25:41-46, and Mark 9:43).

One of the greatest visionaries in the history of the Church, Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824), described Hell as a place where “nothing is to be seen but dismal dungeons, dark caverns, frightful deserts, fetid swamps filled with every imaginable species of poisonous and disgusting reptile.” It is a place of “perpetual scenes of wretched discord,” filled with “every species of sin and corruption, either under the most horrible forms imaginable, or represented by different kinds of dreadful torments.” It is a scene of “horror,” a vast “temple of anguish and despair” in which there is no comfort and not a “consoling idea admitted.” For those who are there for all eternity, the suffering is made worse by the “absorbing tremendous conviction” that the just and all-powerful God has given the damned what they deserve.

St. Faustina Kowalska (1905-38), in October 1936, had a vision in which she said she was led by an angel to what she called the “chasms of Hell.” The Polish nun described it as a place of “great torture” and “fire that will penetrate the soul without destroying it—a terrible suffering.” “I, Sister Faustina Kowalska, by the order of God, have visited the Abysses of Hell so that I might tell souls about it and testify to its existence,” she wrote in her diary.

Faustina observed Dante-like sections reserved for specific agonies earned in this fallen world. “There are caverns and pits of torture where one form of agony differs from another,” she recorded. “There are special tortures destined for particular souls…. Each soul undergoes terrible and indescribable sufferings related to the manner in which it has sinned.”

According to Faustina, this was merely “a pale shadow of the things I saw. But I noticed one thing: That most of the souls there are those who disbelieved that there is a Hell.”

Akin to what the Fatima children experienced in their vision of Hell on July 13, 1917, the Divine Mercy saint added: “I would have died at the very sight of these tortures if the omnipotence of God had not supported me.”

Among the children of Fatima, the oldest, Lucia, described Hell as a “sea of fire” filled with “demons and souls in human form, like transparent embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about…great clouds of smoke.” The children heard “shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us.”

It was after this vision that Our Lady of Fatima—that is, the Blessed Mother—taught a special prayer to the shepherd children, which we now know as the “Fatima Prayer” that ends each decade of the Rosary: “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of Hell, especially those in most need of Thy mercy.”

I could go on and on with chilling descriptions of the underworld.

Read the Whole Article

The post To Hell With Ozzy Osbourne appeared first on LewRockwell.

They do it because these billionaires, who control the firms that sell to the U.S. Government (and not — or very little — to consumers), need to control the U.S. Government, in order to control their market. A billionaire wants to control his/her market; and if one’s market is one’s Government (and its allies), then this is the way to do that — by controlling one’s own Government. And there is, by now, massive — and it’s entirely consistent — evidence that America’s billionaires DO control the U.S. Govenment.

On 16 August 2021, Jon Schwarz, at The Intercept, headlined “$10,000 INVESTED IN DEFENSE STOCKS WHEN AFGHANISTAN WAR BEGAN NOW WORTH ALMOST $100,000: Was the Afghanistan War a failure? Not for the top five defense contractors and their shareholders.” Does that reality place into an entirely different perspective than what the billionaires-controlled ‘news’-media have reported to you, about why the repeated promises during that two-decades-long U.S. invasion and military occupation of Afghanistan — promises to end it — turned out to have been a lie until Joe Biden (who wanted to instead increase the Obama-created war against Russia in Ukraine) carried out the withdrawal of America from Afghanistan, which Trump had promised to deliver but never did deliver? Of course, there is a lot of important history about that matter, which has been hidden from — instead of reported to — the American people. And the American public vote in elections, on the basis of what both contending Parties want the public not to know — such as that in America, the war-business is the most profitable one of them all, and actually controls the Government.

Schwarz opened:

IF YOU PURCHASED $10,000 of stock evenly divided among America’s top five defense contractors on September 18, 2001 — the day President George W. Bush signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks — and faithfully reinvested all dividends, it would now be worth $97,295.

This is a far greater return than was available in the overall stock market over the same period. $10,000 invested in an S&P 500 index fund on September 18, 2001, would now be worth $61,613.

That is, defense stocks outperformed the stock market overall by 58 percent during the Afghanistan War.

Moreover, given that the top five biggest defense contractors — Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — are of course part of the S&P 500, the remaining firms had lower returns than the overall S&P returns.

These numbers suggest that it is incorrect to conclude that the Taliban’s immediate takeover of Afghanistan upon the U.S.’s departure means that the Afghanistan War was a failure. On the contrary, from the perspective of some of the most powerful people in the U.S., it may have been an extraordinary success. Notably, the boards of directors of all five defense contractors include retired top-level military officers. …

And yet Trump has the nerve now to be campaigning to win a Nobel Peace Prize — like the war-mongering Obama (in Syria, Libya and Ukraine) won during his first year as President — as being a ‘peacemaker’, because Trump says that he has prevented wars from happening that he says would otherwise have happened (if he hadn’t secretly stopped them from happening, he says). (That con is obviously aimed at fools, but he has always had plenty of those.)

In fact, the very first actual achievement of Trump as America’s new President in 2017 was Trump’s making the world’s all-time biggest-ever armaments sale, which was hidden by all U.S.-and-allied (billionaires-controlled) ‘news’-media but I headlined it on 21 May 2017, “U.S. $350 Billion Arms-Sale to Sauds Cements U.S.-Jihadist Alliance” and opened:

On Saturday, May 20th, U.S. President Donald Trump and the Saud family inked an all-time record-high $350 billion ten-year arms-deal that not only will cement-in the Saud family’s position as the world’s largest foreign purchasers of U.S.-produced weaponry, but will make the Saud family, and America’s ruling families, become, in effect, one aristocracy over both nations, because neither side will be able to violate the will of the other. As the years roll on, their mutual dependency will deepen, each and every year.

Sixteen years after the Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud (who was nicknamed “Bandar Bush” for his intimacy with the Bush family) served in Washington as Saudi Arabia’s U.S. Ambassador and he and his wife personally paid tens of thousands of dollars to the Sauds’ minders who paid for the apartments and for the pilot-training of 9/11 jihadists, and the U.S. government hid this fact from the U.S. public for fifteen years until it was made public but suppressed by the U.S. press so that Americans still don’t know about it, the U.S. and Saudi aristocracies are now becoming bound together even more strongly than before, because of this record-shattering deal that Trump’s team negotiated with the Sauds.

The U.S. government officially blames Iran for the 9/11 attacks and has fined Iran $10.5 billion for those attacks. The Sauds hate Iran and claim that Iran poses an “existential threat” to them. These new weapons will, the Sauds claim, “protect” them from Iran. Right after Trump won the 2016 election, he staffed the top level of his incoming Administration with people who consider Iran to be the main source of terrorism. In a 5 February 2017 Super Bowl television interview, Trump was asked what his policies would be regarding Iran, and he answered (video here, transcript here): “They have total disregard for our country. They are the number one terrorist state.” But he provided no specifics. This ‘defense’ deal is a big specific part of the answer, to that question. The U.S. will now be even more tightly allied with the Sauds (the world’s wealthiest family) than was previously the case.

According to a report in the New York Times on May 18th, President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner participated importantly in these negotiations, when he spoke by phone with the CEO of the biggest American weapons-maker, Lockheed Martin, to request her to discount a crucial radar-system, so that the deal could be accepted by Saudi Prince Muhammed bin Salman al-Saud, and she said yes, which was necessary in order for the entire $350 billion package to be accepted. Unreported, however, about this matter, was whether any concession was made by the Trump Administration to Lockheed Martin, in order to be able to win from them this crucial discount. Whether any such verbal commitments were made, might never become publicly known, but this is the way that deals are made.

Trump as the U.S. President has been even a bigger boost to the fortunes of the controlling billionaires over the U.S. armaments manufacturers, and over the corporations that contract-out the Government’s mercenaries, than he has been to his other billionaire funders, such as the Israeli and American citizen Miriam Adelson.

However, he is just another in a long string of such White House agents for America’s billionaires. Furthermore, ever since the Soviet Union ended in 1991, America’s armaments manufacturers and mercenary-contractors — the megacorporations that sell to the U.S. Government and to its allied Governments, not to consumers — have been by far the most profitable of all U.S. corporations, and so it’s not ONLY “the top five biggest defense contractors” but ALL defense contractors that have far outperformed the rest of the U.S. stock market ever since 1991. Those firms control the U.S. Government because they need to in order to control their market (U.S.-and-allied Governments — the U.S. empire) after there really was (ever since 1991) no longer any real NEED for what they supplied, because America’s biggest if not ONLY ‘enemy’ (ever since 25 July 1945) “Soviet communism,” no longer even existed. After 1991, virtually all of America’s military contracting was graft-based. And this is the reason why the Pentagon’s budget after 1991 (when it should have at least halved) continued stable until Gerge W. Bush and his 9/11 operation, then soared in order to “deal with terrorism,” then declined slightly under Obama (as the “terrorism” threat no longer was so terrorizing to Americans), then has been again soaring under first Trump, and then Biden, and now yet again Trump — all while that budget ought to have been cut by around 50% in 1992, and then remained stable thereafter, not artificially inflated by creating terrorist incidents and then creating ‘the Russian threat’, and now ‘the Chinese threat’. It is all a mega-criminal racket by U.S.-and-allied billionaires (and the political agents that they have funded).

Analogous to the hypocrisy of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for his rhetoric in favor of peace: what about billionaires declaring themselves as being “philanthropists” for forming tax-avoidance organizations called ‘non-profits’ that really aren’t the “non” part, but are instead devious legalistic constructs to INCREASE their profits? For example, as Dr. Vandana Shiva has said recently (but the link in it was supplied by me):

Bill Gates is not a philanthropist. He gives a little bit of money to take over entire sectors. The big seed banks are called the CJR system. He gives a million here, but he takes all the seeds of that system. All of these seed banks of the world, he now controls by giving a tiny bit. But that’s not where he stops. He then develops, promotes, technologies for patenting. So he controls the seeds of the world, he finances the Svalbard seed bank, then he creates patent systems and he destroys the international system that controls the country’s rights to their seed, so that all the seeds of the world are his seeds, and he can be the new Monsanto on a global scale.

The Svalbard seed bank alleges that it excludes GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) seeds and is ONLY about non-patent-protected, natural, seeds, but why then are investors such as Bill Gates funding it, and why is there a “lack of direct representation of farmers, despite the fact that they are the main suppliers of seeds, within the governance of an institution such as the [Svalbard] Crop Trust.”? The old “Trust” system that was based upon patents of “intellectual property,” is expected to become extended to include ALSO things that are natural. This can be done simply by those billionaires bribing, promoting, and hiring into elective public offices, officials who will, as legislators, write the legal loopholes, and, as government regulators, allow these entirely artificial monopolies and oligopolies — “Trusts” — regarding GMOs. This is the really long-term-investor’s view. And, if it fails to pan out, the billionaire still gets the tax-cut and the prestige of being a ‘philanthropist’ — even though betting AGAINST the public’s welfare (and so actually a “malanthropist”). Therefore, OBVIOUSLY, there should be NO tax-deductions for, and no ‘non’-profits that are allowed to accept a donation from, any billionaire (or from any organization that HAS accepted a donation from one). Actually, if a “philanthropic” organization really DOES contribute more to the public’s welfare than it or its founders and owners take from the public (and add to the public’s tax-burden and national-debt burden), then that ‘charity’ ought far more properly to become AN AGENCY OF, AND THUS ANSWERABLE TO, and therefore nationalized BY, the Government — no longer serving the intentions and priorities of billionaires. America is possibly the least-socialized country and ought to become considerably more socialized and less ‘free-market’ (which is mainly freedom for the super-rich).

Here is the type of individual — an individual who shares the value-system that predominates amongst billionaires but not amongst the general public — who rises to the leadership of billionaire-backed ‘charities’. More details about that person are at Wikipedia. Bad as most U.S. Government officials, appointed by elected Government officials, are, none are that bad, because any elected Government official who had voted to approve the appointment of a person with a record like that, would be likely to voted out of office for having done so. Billionaires know this, and therefore don’t choose for public office individuals such as that. In order to be chosen by billionaires to be funded into a public office, only individuals who aren’t so obviously evil are selected to present to the voters as a candidate, or as a Party’s nominee. So, the point here is that charities should be prohibited if backed by a billionaire, if not prohibited altogether and all replaced by taxpayer-funded entities, which are answerable TO the public.

Basically, all ‘democracies’ that are based upon competing political Parties contesting to deceive the most voters to s‘elect’ from amongst the candidates that have the backing of at least one billionaire funding their campaigns — which campaigns are contests between competing groups, or “Parties,” of billionaires contending against each other by using lies and gimmicks (such as gerrymandering) to beat the other billionaire Parties — have nothing to do with representing the public. They represent only the billionaires.

Every existing ‘democracy’ is a billionaires’ racket, and every OTHER government is the less hypocritical type of tyranny. Something totally different from either type is needed: authentic democracy. (I described it at that final link.)

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post How Billionaires Who Sell to the U.S. Government Control the U.S. Government appeared first on LewRockwell.

With his education and healthcare policies, President Trump is highlighting a major divide between conservatives and libertarians on both education and healthcare.

As everyone knows, Trump is doing his best to induce universities to abandon leftist concepts involving what is known as DEI — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. He is doing this by threatening a cut-off of federal funds to such universities until they comply with his wishes, at which point he will restore the funding.

Trump’s strategy is working brilliantly. Most of the universities he has targeted have quickly abandoned their leftist principles in order to maintain themselves on the federal dole. In other words, they place a higher value on the dole than they do on their principles.

Conservatives love it. They have always hated DEI and so Trump continues to be their hero. They especially love his threat to cut off federal aid as a way to induce universities to change their policies.

Libertarians take a different position. We believe that there should be a total separation of education and the state, in the same way that our ancestors separated religion and state. We hold that the federal government (and the state governments) have no more business funding universities or telling universities how to run their affairs than it does funding churches or telling churches how to run their affairs.

Thus, under the libertarian philosophy, there would be no government funding of universities at all. Therefore, Trump could not threaten a cutoff of federal funds as a way to induce a university to change its policies because there would be no federal funds to cut off.

By the same token, universities would be free to run their affairs the way they want, which is how things work in a genuinely free society. If a university wishes to adopt DEI, that is its right. If consumers (i.e., students or faculty) don’t like it, they can go elsewhere.

Thus, the big difference between conservatives and libertarians is that conservatives believe in a system where the federal government is taxing people in order to deliver the money to universities. They also favor a system in which the president can use that dole as a way to have universities run their school the way the president wants. Libertarians, on the other hand, favor a complete separation of education and the state, one in which there is no taxpayer dole paid to universities and in which universities are free to run their school the way they want.

It’s the same with healthcare. Conservatives love that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services is running the department in an anti-vaccine direction.

Libertarians, on the other hand, favor a complete separation of healthcare and the state, just like with education and religion. Therefore, under libertarianism, there would be no Department of Health and Human Services or any other federal healthcare agency. The federal government would have no more to do with healthcare than it does with religion.

Thus, the federal government would not be pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine. For that matter, unlike conservatism, which is anti-vaccine, libertarianism is neither pro-vaccine nor anti-vaccine. Libertarianism is pro-freedom, which means that a free society is one in which people are free to be pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine.

The bottom line, of course, is that in favoring government control over education and healthcare, conservatives favor a system that is, at its core, anti-freedom. Moreover, they inevitably lament and cry when leftists gain control over their system and use it to move things in a leftist direction. By separating education and the state and healthcare and the state, libertarians favor freedom and also don’t have to concern themselves about the wrong people gaining the levers of power.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post Conservatives Versus Libertarians on Education and Healthcare appeared first on LewRockwell.

WASHINGTON, D.C.  — The U.S. State Department under the Trump administration has indicated it intends to go through with the destruction of approximately $10 million worth of contraceptives whose distribution to Africa has been canceled by rule changes against taxpayer funding of abortion.

During a July 29 State Department press briefing, a reporter asked for an update about “millions of dollars’ worth of contraceptives stocked in Belgium that are due to be incinerated in France […] I know that the Belgian government is trying to find alternative solutions. Is the U.S. government ready to find alternative solutions or are they destined to be destroyed?”

“Well, I do – I want to have that taken back. This is a situation that changes each day,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce responded. “This is a situation regarding birth control and other mechanisms that could be used – first of all, that would violate our Mexico City policy regarding the use of abortifacients, but also the use of some elements that could be used in a kind of forced sterilization framework that some nations do apply, which also we will not facilitate.”

“I think this was a purchase from the previous administration, and so we’re dealing with that,” she added. Bruce’s comments indicated the planned disposal is still on track but did not conclusively rule out a pause or a different decision.

The Department of State later said that “a preliminary decision” was made to destroy certain “abortifacient” contraceptives, The Hill reports, and that the Kemp-Kasten amendment also bars the federal government from aiding any entity with a program of “coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization,” which affects “non-abortifacient contraceptives provided as assistance to entities that do not make the commitment required under the policy.”

The Center for Family & Human Rights (C-Fam) notes that the stockpile, which includes birth control pills, implants, shots, and IUDs, is valued at $10 million and that two prominent international abortion facilitators, International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and MSI Reproductive Choices (formerly Marie Stopes), had offered to buy the drugs, a deal that would have violated the Mexico City Policy. Population control in Africa has been a particular focus of both organizations and of the United Nations Population Fund.

Seventy-seven percent of the supply had been intended to go to five African countries, according to IPPF: Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Mali, and Congo. The abortion giant estimated that the loss will mean a 28 percent reduction in Tanzania’s “needed” contraceptives, a 24 percent reduction in Mali’s, and an almost 14 percent reduction of Kenya’s annual so-called “contraceptive need.”

Many contraceptive methods, including birth control pills and IUDs, acts as abortifacients. Moreover, birth control has been found to cause serious medical harm to women.

Within days of returning to office, President Donald Trump signed executive orders to reinstate the Mexico City Policy governing foreign aid and direct federal agencies to recognize the Hyde Amendment’s limits on dispensing federal money domestically.

The Mexico City Policy forbids non-governmental organizations from using taxpayer dollars for elective abortions abroad. President Ronald Reagan first instituted the policy in 1984, and President George W. Bush reinstated it in 2001. For decades, it has been taken for granted that Democrat presidents rescind the policy shortly after taking office and Republican presidents restore it. Restoring the policy was one of the first acts of Trump’s first term, and he said on the 2024 campaign trail he would “consider” bringing it back.

Likewise, the Hyde Amendment is traditionally included every year in federal budgets with little objection and has been estimated to have saved more than two million lives since its adoption decades ago by forbidding most taxpayer dollars from directly funding abortions except for cases of rape, incest, or alleged threat to a mother’s life. President Joe Biden proposed removing it in the budgets he submitted to Congress and worked throughout his presidency to distribute funds to entities involved in abortion.

Abortion, the destruction of an innocent unborn baby in his or her mother’s womb, is always gravely unjust and never necessary to protect a mother’s health.

Trump has also cut millions in pro-abortion subsidies by freezing U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spending.

In March, the administration froze Title X “family planning” grants to nonprofits it said violated its executive orders on immigration and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, including Planned Parenthood affiliates in nine states.

In July, Trump signed into law his controversial “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (BBB), a wide-ranging policy package that includes a one-year ban on federal tax dollars going through Medicaid to any entity that commits abortions for reasons other than rape, incest, or supposed threats to the mother’s life, although that provision is currently held up by a legal challenge.

Other Republicans have proposed standalone measures to fully cut off Planned Parenthood’s government funding: the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act, which permanently bans federal funds from being used for abortion; and the Defund Planned Parenthood Act, which disqualifies Planned Parenthood and its affiliates specifically. But they would require 60 votes to make it through the Senate.

This article was originally published on Lifesite News.

The post Trump Admin To Destroy $10 Million Worth of Contraception, Abortifacients Intended for Africa appeared first on LewRockwell.

Hell is truth seen too late.  — Thomas Hobbes

Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. – Etienne de La Boétie

In politics, corruption begins with the corrupted.  We see turpitude throughout society’s power structure, but it’s only there because we accepted a devil’s bargain.  It took shape long before the current crop of office holders ran for political office.  It was their goal — political office — that people accepted as necessary and right.  Without politicians in office running a government we would be in anarchy, and everyone understood anarchy meant people would be at each other’s throats, and life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Political office is a position of power over others.  It is not found in nature, but then neither are houses, jet planes, or Starbuck’s.  How did this oddball arrangement — political office — get started?  And why is it considered more important than housing, planes, coffee, or our individual lives?

In a state of nature each of us would be responsible for our survival and well-being.  One way is to cooperate with others and produce and trade for the things we need.  It’s called the free market.  Another way is to steal from the producers.  It’s called the government.  A third way is to put yourself at the mercy of the first two and ask them to support you.

Thievery as a career requires at least three conditions.  First, the power to steal and get away with it.  Second, the lack of scruples about taking by force what someone else has produced.  And third, how to redefine number two so that number one can become acceptable to society at large.

Over time it became clear to the politicians that, quoting Shakespeare’s Juliet, “’Tis but thy name that is my enemy.”  No one can institute theft and call it by that name, so someone invented a new word, taxes, and declared that taxes takes the thievery out of theft.  There is no violation of ethics if politicians can tax their brothers.  In fact, taking the property of others by force is not really theft, it’s a price paid for a civilized society.  This price is special because it’s not determined by market (voluntary) forces like other prices but rather by a committee.

Thus, we have special names for these special things: Taxes are what politicians call prices, while the committee bears the distinguished name Congress, a body the vassals elect because they have no choice about not electing them and whose decisions are imposed by an implicit threat of death for resistors.

It should be clear that the politicians and the countless agencies they’ve established constitute the government, and that this government is, so the story goes, imposed in the name of protecting us from life’s countless hazards.  It should also be clear that language attempts to hide the distinction between government’s “business model” and those in the market.

Besides the time-tested method of bombing a country back to the Stone Age, Western politicians today are waging war using a Trojan Horse technique.  Rather than sending hoards of soldiers to cross a country’s border and wreak havoc on their people and property, today’s politicians get elected in an enemy’s government (usually their own) then open the floodgates of immigration.  It’s ingenious because migration is a natural process, and political support accelerates the process and avoids the problems of a direct hostile attack.

National security, freedom’s graveyard

Messing in the affairs of other countries has been policy since President Truman institutionalized the national security state with the National Security Act of 1947, his recognition of the State of Israel in 1948, and policy report NSC-68 of 1950 calling for “a massive build-up of the U.S. military and its weaponry.” The red threat served as the excuse for an egregious departure from the government’s founding principle of nonintervention, and its effects have been and will continue to be totally ruinous.

Pundits continue to expose government for its lies, deceptions, aggressions, and avoidable failures.  (See here, here, here, here, here, and here).  The obscenity of government’s unnecessary wars is struggling to stay hidden.  And few are paying attention to the Doomsday Clock, now closer than ever to midnight.  We are forced to abide in ruining our economy through taxes and destruction of the dollar to pay for murdering people in far-away places, and possibly all of life itself.  But it keeps DoD contractors fat and happy and the politicians alive and in office.

Later in life Harry Truman spoke out about the Frankenstein monster he created.  In a December 22, 1963 op-ed in the Washington Post — one month after JFK’s assassination — he wrote:

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue— and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

Should we be surprised when government is given an inch it takes a mile?  Is that not the history of the Constitution, a document of limited powers that Hamilton and others subverted?

In none of the critiques have I read a proposal for doing away with government as it exists.  Jacob G. Hornberger was written endlessly about the harm and futility of government’s immigration control, for example, yet he and most others don’t extend that analysis to government itself.  Still, he acknowledges the Jeffersonian truth that the people have a right to abolish destructive governments and form new ones.

Since it was his creation, Truman can be credited with showing how destructive the National Security State has been.  I submit a new way of governing society is in order, and it’s hiding in plain sight.  Government can and should be market-based, rather than an institution of our demise.  See this.

The post President Harry S. Truman, Founding Father appeared first on LewRockwell.

Official report of the cause of Spain’s blackout
Via @FT pic.twitter.com/lJCzhVSbZP

— The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) August 12, 2025

The post Official: Spanish Grid Outage Linked to Renewable Instability appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Brian. Dunaway:

This time I like Trump’s taste, but how about the basement incinerator?! And only two? I can think of maybe two that shouldn’t be in the basement incinerator.

Better yet, how about a nice big bonfire on the South Lawn! We’ll make a party of it — I’ll bring the margaritas and salsa.

See here.

The post Trump Hides Obama And Bush Portraits In White House Stairwel appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Tim McGraw:

Very cool that Tulsi Gabbard showed up and gave a speech.

The post Reflections on Dr. Ron Paul’s 90th Birthday BBQ Party appeared first on LewRockwell.

Americans’ views on Israel have shifted dramatically over the years. Which voter groups are driving that trend, and why?

The post Barnes and Baris Episode 95: What Are the Odds? appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Trump repeatedly tells the American people that the government is taking in lots of cash from tariffs. But the same government is going further into debt and racking up deficits with a Big Beautiful Bill. Wasn’t the goal of electing Donald Trump to cut the government down in size? Instead, the government grows, and Americans have to pay yet another tax (tariffs) to pay for its growth.

The post Who Pay’s The Tariffs? Foreign Countries, Or Americans? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer.

The post Ron Paul is the richest man in America appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post The Duran: Alaska Summit, Final Off-Ramp for Trump w/ Robert Barnes appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

The Washington Post

The post Pentagon plan would create National Guard ‘reaction force’ for civil unrest appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks,  Johnny Kramer. 

The post TMZ’s Harvey Levin: Exposing What I Know About The Epstein Files appeared first on LewRockwell.

Bureau of Labor Statistics head Dr. Erika McEntarfer is one of the latest persons President Trump has told “you’re fired.” President Trump said this month that he fired Dr. McEntarfer because the president believed she manipulated jobs data. Manipulations, he stated, include the updated May and June BLS numbers showing the U.S. economy created 258,000 fewer jobs than originally reported, as well as the weaker than expected July jobs report. All of this, the president suggested, was designed to make President Trump look bad.

Following Dr. McEntarfer’s firing, many commenters worried that President Trump’s actions would create the perception that government unemployment and inflation data is manipulated to produce the numbers desired by the president. A loss of confidence in government statistics could impact demand for US Treasuries. This is because the value of Treasuries is adjusted based on the BLS-issued Consumer Price Index (CPI). If investors don’t trust the CPI figures, they can demand higher returns, increasing government’s interest payments.

President Trump is correct that BLS manipulates statistics related to the economy, but it has been doing so since long before Donald Trump moved to the White House.

For example, starting in 1994, the BLS stopped including “discouraged” workers who have stopped looking for work in the official unemployment figures. The BLS also includes those working part-time as employed even if the only reason they are working part-time is they cannot find full-time work. According to John Williams, publisher of the website Shadow Stats, including discouraged and part-time workers who want full-time work in the unemployment figures increases the unemployment rate by almost 20 percent!

The government also understates the effects of inflation. One way it does this is by using “chained CPI.” Chained CPI means that even if price inflation has made steak unaffordable for most Americans, the government does not consider their standard of living lowered if they can buy a “substitute” such as hamburger.

This ignores the fact that if consumers viewed hamburger and steak as equivalent then they would likely have chosen cheaper hamburger before Federal Reserve-caused price inflation made steak unaffordable, leaving them no choice but to purchase hamburger. According to John Williams’s Shadow Stats, using a more accurate definition of inflation would increase the inflation rate to as much as 12 percent.

Manipulating the unemployment and inflation rates allows the government to gaslight the people into believing that the economy is strong and any signs of weakness — such as rising prices or an increase in unemployment in their town — are anomalies that do not reflect the economy’s real condition. Manipulating the inflation figures to understate the true amount of inflation also lowers the “cost of living” increases the government must provide for veterans, beneficiaries of Social Security, and others. This provides a way for government to cut spending without Congress members having politically difficult votes.

President Trump has done a service by highlighting that government statistics regarding the economy are manipulated. Many of those criticizing President Trump for endangering the “credibility” of government’s inflation and unemployment numbers are either unaware of, or more likely have no problem with, manipulating data to fool the public into thinking the welfare-warfare system and the fiat money system are “working.” They only object to manipulating the data to benefit President Trump. President Trump should ensure the government’s unemployment and inflation figures are as accurate as possible by appointing John Williams of Shadow Stats to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The post Newsflash: Governments Lie appeared first on LewRockwell.

Decades ago during my years in college and grad school, I had a strong side-interest in Soviet history, and read quite a number of weighty books in that subject. Most of these heavily focused upon the Stalin era, describing the almost unprecedented loss of life that occurred during that period from the combination of executions, Gulag deaths, and terrible famines.

But these horrifying stories were sometimes leavened by episodes so strange and ironic that I was never entirely sure whether they were real or merely invented.

For example, during the first half of the 1930s, the Great Famine caused by forced collectivization and dekulakization was widely described as having caused many, many millions of deaths. Stalin pushed ahead with this project despite the considerable misgivings of some of the other Soviet leaders, most of whom would themselves soon be purged and often shot just a few years later.

Given such horrifying famine conditions in the Ukraine and other Soviet regions, social order collapsed to the point that many of these deaths went unreported at the time. Thus, they only became apparent several years later when the Soviet Census of 1937 found that there were considerably fewer Soviet citizens alive than had been expected.

According to my history textbooks, Stalin was greatly dismayed by these Census results. But rather than admitting that his policies may have had such adverse consequences, the Communist dictator decided that the expert statisticians of the Census bureau were responsible for the problem, and had them all purged and shot as dastardly anti-Soviet saboteurs and wreckers.

Naturally, I always snickered a little at those forced to live under such a bizarre and irrational autocrat who reacted to a less than favorable message by shooting the messenger. And at least according to Wikipedia, the basic story of such Stalinist irrationality was apparently true, with the 1937 Soviet Census showing that the population was perhaps 10 million lower than had been expected and the Census bureau was indeed purged as a consequence.

But today, in the wake of the apparent economic and political consequences of President Donald Trump’s bizarre and autocratic tariff policies, I am reminded of the famous opening lines of one of Marx’s books, in which the author claimed that historical events appear twice, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” Thus, during the last week or so, we have seen our own government react in ways quite similar to those of Stalin, though so far at least lacking the sanguinary component.

Earlier this year on April 2nd, Trump had declared “Liberation Day,” unveiling a sweeping new set of tariffs against the trade goods of every other country in the world. His new tariff rates were so extremely high and seemingly arbitrary that I doubt I was the only one who wondered whether his presentation had accidentally been delayed twenty-four hours and he had originally scheduled his announcement for April Fools’ Day.

Certainly nothing like this had ever previously happened in American history. Indeed, I could not recall any foreign dictator let alone a democratically-elected leader who had ever unilaterally done anything so strange with regard to foreign trade. As I wrote soon afterward:

Tariffs are just a type of tax levied on imports, and America annually imports well over $3 trillion worth of foreign goods, so tariff taxes obviously have a huge economic impact. But Trump suddenly raised those taxes by more than a factor of ten, taking them from around 2.5% to 29%, rates far, far beyond those of the notorious 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff and reaching the levels of more than 100 years ago. This certainly amounted to one of the largest tax increases in all of human history.

Trump’s policies were so strange and destructive that the broader historical analogy that immediately came to my mind was the disastrous Great Leap Forward implemented in China under Chairman Mao. A few days after Trump’s declaration I published a piece making this suggestion.

• President Donald Trump and Chairman Mao
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 7, 2025 • 3,800 Words

As might naturally be expected, our financial markets completely panicked at these huge new import taxes. The terrible blows to stock prices, bond rates, and the value of the dollar all seemed to reflect the belief of investors that our country was facing total economic disaster.

As I soon emphasized, one reason for such widespread financial fear was Trump’s bizarre claim that unlike all previous American presidents, he possessed the power to set tariff tax rates by emergency decree:

According to our Constitution, tariffs and other tax changes must be enacted by Congressional legislation. But Trump ignored those requirements, instead claiming that he had the power to unilaterally set tariff tax rates under the emergency provisions of a 1977 law that no one had ever previously believed could be used for that purpose.

Across our 235 year national history, all our past changes in tariff, trade, or tax policy—including Smoot-Hawley, NAFTA, the WTO, and Trump 45’s own USMCA—had always been the result of months or years of political negotiations, and then ultimately approved or rejected by Congress. But now these multi-trillion-dollar decisions were being made at the personal whim of someone who had seemingly proclaimed himself a reigning, empowered American autocrat.

As might be expected, Trump’s huge tax increase on $3 trillion of imports quickly led to a very sharp drop in stock prices, but Trump declared that he was unbending and would never waver. China had prepared for exactly such an economic attack, and when it soon retaliated with similar tariffs on American products, Trump counter-retaliated, with several days of those tit-for-tat exchanges eventually raising tariff rates against China to an astonishing 145%, essentially banning almost all Chinese goods. Many other countries and the EU also threatened similar retaliatory tariffs, but since their tax rates were governed by law rather than autocratic whim, their responses were necessarily much slower.

Although Trump initially promised to stay the course, the quick collapse in the financial markets soon forced him to back down, drastically reducing his new tariff rates for three months while he negotiated bilateral trade deals with other countries.

However, just a week after he announced those gigantic tariffs against the entire world and repeatedly promised to maintain or even further raise them, Trump suddenly changed his mind. Although he kept the Chinese rates at those ridiculous levels, he declared that tariffs on all other countries would suddenly be reduced to a very high but rational 10% rate for the next 90 days while he decided what to do.

Thus, during the course of a single week, Trump had raised American tariffs by more than a factor of ten, then dropped them by a factor of two, representing exactly the sort of tax policy we might expect to see in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Trump’s totally unexpected reversal naturally produced a huge recovery in stock prices, which regained much of the ground that they had previously lost, and Trump boasted about all the money that his friends had made from that unprecedented market rebound. This led to some dark suspicions that our unfortunate country had just witnessed one of the most outrageously blatant examples of insider trading in all of human history.

Across thousands of years, the world has seen many important countries ruled by absolute monarchs or all-powerful dictators, with some of these leaders even considered deranged. But I can’t recall any past example in which a major nation’s tax, tariff, or tribute policies have undergone such rapid and sudden changes, moving up and down by huge amounts apparently based upon personal whim. Certainly Caligula never did anything so peculiar, nor Louis XIV nor Genghis Khan nor anyone else who comes to mind. Lopping off the heads of a few random government officials was one thing, but drastic changes in national financial policies were generally taken much more seriously. I don’t think that Tamerlane ever suddenly raised the tribute he demanded from his terrified subjects by a factor of ten, then a few days later lowered it back down by a factor of two.

What will our tariff rates on $3 trillion of imports be like in a few months? I doubt that anyone can say, even including the current occupant of the Oval Office. For example, late Friday night the Trump Administration apparently exempted smartphones, computer equipment, and other electronics from his Chinese tariffs, hoping that the timing would help hide that further abject surrender from the American population.

Consider America’s major business corporations or even its small mom-and-pop operations. Nearly all of these have some substantial connection to international trade, even if they merely rely upon ordinary products that they buy at Costco or Walmart. On April 2nd, Trump announced his huge new tariffs that would greatly raise the price of those products or possibly lead to their disappearance, then on April 9th he changed his mind and suspended those tariffs for 90 days, but still proposed to afterward enact them, while essentially banning nearly all Chinese imported goods with a 145% tariff that may or may not continue.

Under those circumstances, how could any rational corporate planner—or even sensible small-businessman—formulate any long-term investment plans? For at least the next 90 days, virtually all business investment will surely remain frozen, except perhaps for a little panic-buying. It’s hardly surprising that consumer sentiment quickly reached the worst levels since record-keeping began.

• Donald Trump’s Looney Tunes Trade Policy
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 14, 2025 • 3,800 Words

Trump’s dramatic U-turn a week after his initial tariff announcement did allow the financial markets to stabilize and regain the ground they had lost, though his many critics began to ridicule him with the acronym TACO—“Trump Always Chickens Out”—using it to describe our president’s regular response to strong challenges. Even so, most observers predicted that the higher tariff rates that remained together with the tremendous uncertainty and the sharp decline in consumer sentiment would probably result in serious economic problems whether or not Trump ever made good on his threat to revisit the tariff issue after ninety days.

But contrary to those plausible concerns, the employment numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) over the next several months remained surprisingly strong, puzzling those who had warned that economic uncertainty would sharply reduce the willingness of businesses to expand and create jobs.

Read the Whole Article

The post History as Farce with Donald Trump’s Tariff Policies appeared first on LewRockwell.

For all of its flaws, the United States has one of the best governments that has ever been developed. This is because the system is rife with checks and balances, where one part of the country or government can constrain another part from acting out of line, and the public has a voice that can frequently be mobilized if things become too egregious and bring everything back to balance.

This framework naturally leads to bad actors taking a multi-pronged approach where they attempt to co-opt every single thing that constrains their misdeeds. While challenging, this can eventually be done with concerted effort. For example, during COVID-19, virtually every institution that should have prevented the unconstitutional lockdowns, the top-down suppression of unpatented COVID-19 treatments, and the COVID-19 vaccine mandates (let alone their approvals) failed as every institution worked in concert to advance the COVID cartel—resulting in arguably the worst “public health” crime in history.

Yet, even here, due to the independent media, liberty-minded politicians, and the egregiousness of the COVID policies, a check was eventually able to neutralize the COVID cartel. Furthermore, beyond the COVID vaccine program failing to accomplish its primary goal (an annual mandated vaccine and mainstreaming mRNA technology) the trust they’ve long used to market medical products has been shattered and longterm, COVID is now arguably costing the medical industry far more than was made from the pandemic—all of which illustrates our political system has a robust series of checks once things get too out of line.

Exempting Liability

Since so many institutions within our society have been co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry, it has both become vital to find alternative options (e.g., creating a robust independent media) and to protect the viable options that remain.

One of those has always been the courts, as frequently, if a bad actor steps too far out of line, a legal framework exists to constrain their actions. For this reason, a holy grail of the industries which profit from poisoning us has long been to take away the ability of the courts to check them by passing laws (or securing court rulings) that shield them from liability and hence terminate the lawsuits that can stop their egregious conduct.

For example, the whole-cell DPT vaccine was long recognized to be a particularly dangerous vaccine which frequently caused brain damage and death, yet for decades the medical community and government covered it up, and industry refused to bring a safer (but more expensive) acellular DPT vaccine to market.

As a grassroots awareness of the dangers of the vaccine spread across the country (aided by a 1982 NBC program) more and more lawsuits were filed against vaccine manufacturers, the majority of which were for DPT injuries.

Information provided by the three commercial manufacturers of diphtheria and tetanus toxoids and pertussis (DPT) vaccine indicates a striking increase in the number of lawsuits filed against them alleging damage caused by the vaccine. Only one such case was filed in 1978, whereas 73 were filed in 1984. During the seven-year period from 1978 to 1984, the average amount claimed per suit has risen from $10 million to $46.5 million. If the current trend continues, suits will pose an increasing threat to the availability of DTP vaccines in the United States.

Because of this, DPT manufacturers rapidly left the market (e.g., due to rising liability insurance costs) and by 1984, only one remained. As such, something needed to be done to protect the vaccine supply, and a deal was brokered between advocates for vaccine injured children (along with their supporters within Congress) and the pharmaceutical industry. After some work, a framework was put together which was intended to help the vaccine-injured (as lawsuits for vaccine injuries were a grueling and not always successful process), create safer vaccines, and transfer liability from the vaccine manufacturers to the US government so the manufacturers could remain in business.

On one hand, this act accomplished positive things (e.g., vaccine manufacturers became required to list lots as previously ambiguous lot numbers had been used to escape liability for injuries, a safer DPT vaccine was finally brought to market, and VAERS was created). Conversely however, since many provisions of the act designed to protect the vaccine injured were at the H.H.S. Secretary’s discretion and the government ultimately paid for injury compensation. It created a massive incentive to deny that injuries could occur, and as a result, most of the acts’ intended provisions failed to manifest or were systematically undermined.

As such, there’s still very little reliable data on vaccine injury (e.g., VAERS was systematically undermined as the government did not want a publicly available injury database), the science linking vaccines to specific injuries that was supposed to be done never got done, and most importantly it’s nearly impossible for vaccine injuries “not supported by science” to be compensated in the vaccine court. Worst still, a 2011 Supreme Court ruling further gutted the act, making it impossible for vaccine manufacturers to be directly sued, even in cases of grossly defective vaccines that the 1986 law had specifically intended to allow.
Note: this is somewhat similar to how the highly contentious 2015 California law, which took away religious exemptions to vaccination (effectively mandating them), was signed by the governor under the understanding that medical exemptions would always be honored, shortly after which a new law was passed which banned medical exemptions to vaccination in California.

Conversely, this birthed a massive industry, as removing the primary check against the industry (lawsuits for injuries they caused) incentivized producing a glut of new vaccines to enter the market and removed any incentive to ensure their safety. As such, an apparatus gradually developed to ensure investors could expect a successful return on upcoming vaccines by ensuring they would always be approved and mandated upon our children, eventually culminating in the COVID catastrophe.

Fortunately, as our system has a robust series of checks and balances, even though a primary one failed (injury lawsuits), eventually the unrestrained proliferation of injurious vaccines went so far a new check emerged—public loss of trust in the vaccine apparatus, MAHA’s political ascendency and RFK becoming a H.H.S. Secretary who amongst other things has begun to implement the key safety provisions of the 1986 Act every Secretary before him refused to do.

Note: one of the remarkable results of RFK’s tenure and the H.H.S. at last no longer green-lighting (unproven) vaccines for all of America’s children is that the vaccine industry can no longer obtain investor funding for new vaccines (which their trade group has noted is creating an existential threat to the industry).

I mention all of this to provide some context as to when many are quite concerned by the recent push to exempt pesticides from lawsuits.

Monsanto’s Legacy

Monsanto (founded in 1901 where it first produced the controversial artificial sweetener saccharin) has long been one of my least favorite corporations, as it routinely conducts business practices which are both extremely damaging and cruel. For example:

1. Monsanto was heavily invested in dioxins (and related organochlorines like DDT), which they knew were extremely toxic but claimed were “safe.” The most notorious of these was Agent Orange, a potent defoliating (vegetation destroying) agent that was mass-sprayed on Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam (e.g., 12% of South Vietnam) to starve the local population and eliminate hiding places for the Vietcong (for which Monsanto and Dow Chemical were the primary producers). Unfortunately, while the military claimed Agent Orange was safe, it was highly toxic and has since persisted for decades in the environment.

Because of this, Agent Orange caused at least 400,000 deaths and 500,000, often severe, birth defects in Vietnam (with non-Western estimates showing roughly ten times as much harm), and with most of the victims (and their descendants) left with no recourse and a lifetime of death and disability. Likewise, it also severely harmed many Vietnam veterans (e.g., it frequently caused cancer—and in this manner killed a few friends of mine). This in turn, eventually resulted in a 180 million dollar class action settlement (of which Monsanto had to pay approximately 81 million).

Ultimately, while the two components of Agent Orange had some toxicity, the primary issue with Agent Orange was TCDD, a highly toxic dioxin produced during manufacturing, which contaminated the final product, allowing Monsanto to argue Agent Orange was “safe” since TCDD was not part of it. This is a critical point, as Dow had warned Monsanto of the need to reduce TCDD contamination, but Monsanto’s contained much higher levels due to them using a high temperature manufacturing process (which Monsanto’s internal memos described as “dirty”) to accelerate production. As such, depending on the manufacturer and batch, there was a roughly 1000-fold variation in Agent Orange TCDD content.

In 2004, Monsanto spokesman Jill Montgomery said Monsanto should not be liable at all for injuries or deaths caused by Agent Orange, saying: “We are sympathetic with people who believe they have been injured and understand their concern to find the cause, but reliable scientific evidence indicates that Agent Orange is not the cause of serious long-term health effects.

Note: I recently learned from an excellent vaccine safety book (that I’m currently reviewing for an upcoming article) that the same US agencies and scientists (e.g., the CDC and the IOM) who covered up vaccine injuries also spent decades claiming there was “no evidence” for much of Agent Orange’s toxicity.

Additionally, there were many other issues with Agent Orange being leaked into the environment. For example, at their production site in West Virginia, Monsanto routinely disposed of TCDD contaminated wastes in landfills and waterways, polluting the area, and eventually decades later, in 2012, paid $84 million for a class action lawsuit over this (as the residents had experienced a variety of health problems). Likewise, in the 1970s, Monsanto offloaded TCDD containing waste (an impurity in Agent Orange which was its most toxic dioxin) to a company in Missouri without warning them of its toxicity, after which it was disposed of throughout the soil of a popular Missouri riverside resort town (another friend lived next to)—rendering it permanently uninhabitable (for which Monsanto ultimately payed 33 million).

Note: a classic symptom of dioxin poisoning (often seen in these contaminated areas) is chloracne.

2. Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) are extremely resistant to degradation, and hence have many industrial uses (e.g., for insulating, cooling, lubricating or hydraulic fluids or as additives to many common products). Unfortunately, they also persist for decades if not centuries in the environment and are highly toxic (e.g., they often cause cancer, immune suppression, reproductive and developmental issues, endocrine disruption, neurological impairments, liver damage, skin and eye conditions, and cardiovascular and metabolic disorders).
Note: the most extraordinary PCB story I know of is that Kenya had a longstanding problem with thieves dismantling power transformers to extract the durable PCB oil and use it to fry street foods.

Monsanto began producing PCBs in 1929, and before long produced over 99% of America’s. Despite knowing their toxicity as early as the 1930s (and definitely by the 1960s), Monsanto continually claimed they were safe, and only stopped selling them in 1977 shortly before a 1979 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ban due to their toxicity and environmental persistence.

As Monsanto excels in cutthroat legal tactics, they were able to hold PCB lawsuits back for decades (e.g., initially, the only “successful” ones were a few settlements with PCB workers in the 1990s), but eventually in 2003, the dam broke. Many judgments were awarded against Monsanto (primarily for environmental pollution). These included 600 million in 2003 [of which Monsanto directly paid 390 million], 52 million, and then 92 million in 2020, 25 million, 80 million, 537.5 million, then 698 million in 2022, 80 million, then 67 million in 2023, and 35 million, then 160 million in 2024.

Note: Superfund sites designate places too contaminated by hazardous wastes (e.g., toxic chemicals) for general human habitation. In 1995, of America’s 1,238 Superfund sites, 190 had PCB contamination and 80 had dioxin contamination. Sadly, these are not Monsanto’s only Superfund contributions (e.g., they’ve contaminated numerous areas with heavy metals, arsenic, radium and benzenes1,2,3,4).

3. Monsanto has also produced other problematic persistent chemicals. These include Acetochlor and Propachlor, carcinogenic herbicides which persist in the environment (one of which was taken off the market), and Lasso, another problematic herbicide that was phased out.

4. In 1993, Monsanto released a rBGH, a synthetic growth hormone designed to increase cow milk production that ended up in their milk. Health concerns (e.g., preliminary data suggested a cancer,1,2,3 allergy and obesity risk—all of which was subsequently never studied) and animal welfare concerns (e.g., overstraining their milk production lead to an 18% increase in infertility, a 25% increase in mastitis, a 50% increase in lameness and an overall 20-25% increase risk in the animal needing to be culled) it quickly created public concerns about rBGH milk.

To protect their market, Monsanto began an infamous public relations campaign. For example, in 1997 after investigative journalists revealed dairy farms were continuing to use rBGH despite grocery stores promising not to sell that milk (and showed the human and animal health risks from rBGH), Monsanto legally intimated the station into pulling the story and revising it to echo Monsanto’s (unsubstantiated) “safe and effective” claims, after which the journalists were fired for refusing to. Likewise, once milk producers responded to public demands and began specifying on their labels the milk was “rGBH free” Monsanto launched an aggressive legal and legislative campaign to outlaw those labels (which ultimately backfired and made the public much more cynical about the product eventually killing its market).

5. After realizing genetically modified seeds were a highly lucrative market, Monsanto repurposed many of their tactics to monopolize this sector. These included:

• Creating a division to sue small farmers who replanted Monsanto’s genetically modified (GMO) seeds (with over 23 million being awarded to Monsanto).

• Developing seeds which could not reproduce (so farmers would be forced to buy them perpetually), which was eventually withdrawn due to public backlash.

• Having a revolving door at the FDA to shield them from regulatory scrutiny (e.g., this Monsanto Vice President is a well-known example).

• Locking farmers in poorer nations into a cycle of poverty as the seeds were so much more expensive, most notably resulting in mass suicides of Indian farmers who became trapped by debt from Monsanto’s costly BT corn.

• As shown by court documents, manipulating the entire scientific system to create the impression their GMOs were safe (e.g., paying off academics to write or put their names on favorable studies and successfully targeting academic critics along with getting their papers retracted so others would not be willing to risk publishing critical data).1,2,3

• Since significantly more growing cycles exist in topical areas (3-4 rather than 1 in areas with winters), Hawaii became a popular area for cultivating and producing GMO seed crops, rapidly coming to comprise the majority of Hawaii’s agricultural revenue (with 92% coming from GMO corn). As this process required heavy use of restricted-use herbicides and pesticides, due to both environmental concerns and health effects (e.g., cancers and birth defects observed), community resistance gradually mounted against their cultivation.

Note: Monsanto also later received a $10 million fine for using a banned pesticide on Maui and Molokai and a $12 million fine for improperly using a restricted pesticide.

These practices eventually (in 2013-2014) resulted in Kauai (the primary growing site) banning spraying restricted use agrochemicals within 500 feet of schools, hospitals or parks (and requiring announcements of exactl what was being sprayed), a Maui citizen initiative pausing GMO cultivation there until safety studies had been conducted, and the island of Hawai’i banning GMO cultivation. When reading through the reports about what was happening (I was involved in the GMO field at the time due to serious concerns about their safety), I noted how contentious these laws were and was astonished Monsanto had upset Hawaii so much, the citizen initiative was able to pass despite being outspent over 87-1 by the GMO industry (which as far as I know has never otherwise happened). Sadly however, Monsanto was eventually able to overturn all of the laws with the courts by arguing only the state government (which was dependent on the GMO revenue) had the authority to restrict GMO cultivation.
Note: once Monsanto no longer benefited from using Hawaii’s land (e.g., due to fines and community pushback) they shifted their operations to their other USA-based (and subsidized) option, Puerto Rico, where they have continued poisoning the community, but due to the political climate have received minimal pushback. As the land Monsanto used in Hawaii was leased native land,1,2,3 they were able to escape any liability for poisoning the environment, and again offloaded the costs of their predatory practices onto the community.

In short, many people really detest Monsanto (and in my case, presenting all of this is quite cathartic for me—particularly due to my friends’ experiences with Agent Orange). In my eyes, the most important point to take from this is that it is not a good idea to give Monsanto additional legal leverage, as they have shown their legal team will use any means necessary to ensure they can continuing poisoning the world without accountability—and as they have already been successful in fairly outrageous cases, giving them additional tools will make it quite difficult to have any remaining check against their egregious behavior.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Deadly Campaign to Shield All Pesticides from Legal Liability appeared first on LewRockwell.