Lew Rockwell Institute

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard set off fireworks on Friday when she accused former president Barack Obama of organizing a coup d’état against his successor.  Summarizing the damning evidence in her possession, Gabbard concluded, “These documents detail a treasonous conspiracy by officials at the highest levels of the Obama White House to subvert the will of the American people.”

Treason is a capital offense with no statute of limitations.  So consider how explosive Gabbard’s allegations are.  The senior official in charge of all American Intelligence is stating unequivocally that Obama and his loyal subordinates sabotaged the peaceful transfer of presidential power in 2016, betrayed the American people, and made war against the legitimate government of the United States.  Gabbard just dropped the “Mother of All Bombs” on Obama’s White House syndicate, the Intelligence Community, and the globalist Deep State.

General Michael Flynn, President Trump’s short-lived National Security Advisor, assessed the situation succinctly: “This is surreal.”  As a target of the Deep State’s treacherous lawfare operations, General Flynn views the workings in Washington, D.C., with supreme clarity: “This is why [Gabbard] was attacked so relentlessly over the past few weeks and months.  They knew if there were anyone with the guts to investigate the attempted coup, it would be her.”  Obama loyalists in the Intelligence Community and Obama’s propaganda allies in the corporate news media succeeded in removing General Flynn from his NSA position at the beginning of Trump’s first term.  Perhaps learning from Flynn’s experience, Gabbard has worked quickly to expose the conspirators before they could take her out, too.

Who exactly formed this conspiracy to overturn the 2016 election and topple President Trump’s administration?  DNI Gabbard says that “intelligence was politicized and weaponized by the most powerful people in the Obama Administration to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President [Trump].”  Furthermore, “Obama officials immediately leaned on their allies in the media to advance their falsehoods.  Anonymous IC sources leaked classified information to the Washington Post and others that Russia had intervened to hack the election in Trump’s favor.”

Ezra Cohen, an Intelligence official who has served President Trump in various positions, highlighted the list of principals who conspired to blame Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election loss on the Russians.  In a pivotal National Security Council meeting chaired by Susan Rice, attendees included John Brennan, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, John Kerry, Loretta Lynch, Victoria Nuland, Mary McCord, Avril Haines, Lisa Monaco, Ben Rhodes, and Maher Bitar (an Obama official who immediately went to work for liar Adam Schiff).  That’s a “Who’s Who” list of Russia Hoax plotters.

Truth-tellers at American Thinker and elsewhere have been trying to tell this story for nearly ten years.  No matter how compelling the evidence or persuasive the arguments, the corporate news media have called us “conspiracy theorists” and buried anything that might tarnish Obama’s legacy.  No doubt the national propagandists that disseminate approved “narratives” for the globalist Deep State will continue to do so.  Still, it is satisfying to see this headline at Breitbart: “Declassified: Obama Admin Manufactured Intelligence to Push Fake Trump-Russia Collusion Narrative.”

In other words, Obama and high-ranking members of his administration — including the Intelligence chiefs responsible for safeguarding the nation from foreign and domestic threats — fabricated evidence meant to convince the American people that Russia stole the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton.  Furthermore, this cabal of conspirators fabricated evidence meant to incriminate President Trump, convince Congress to remove him from office, and perhaps even convince a future jury to convict him for espionage and treason.

Obama and his people damaged America’s reputation in the world by pretending that Russia “hacked” the 2016 election.  Along with Hillary Clinton and her campaign (the original plotters who paid for the Steele Dossier and its public dissemination), the Obama administration defrauded the American people by squandering time and resources on a figment of their seditious imaginations.

Consider how many thousands of government agents from the Department of Justice, Department of State, and broader Intelligence Community were ordered to waste years on the job chasing ghosts conjured by Clinton, Obama, Rice, Brennan, Lynch, Comey, Clapper, and their many co-conspirators.

Consider all the real foreign and domestic threats that were entirely ignored because the U.S. government was dedicating substantial resources to an Intelligence operation meant to frame President Trump as a Russian spy.

Consider how much harm Obama, Clinton, and their allies in government offices and corporate newsrooms caused to America by fomenting social division and political strife based on abject lies.

The Obama administration and Clinton campaign essentially conducted a “color revolution” against the United States.  It was their intention to instigate a mass public uprising that would force President Trump from office.  They conspired to overthrow the U.S. government and install a new one more amenable to their interests.  What these “untouchable” elites did was textbook treason and sedition.

We will never have a full accounting of the toll Obama and Clinton’s lies had on America.  It seems reasonable to assume that their lies cost lives.  How many terrorist attacks could have been prevented if Intelligence agents had been working on things that mattered?  Who really murdered Seth Rich?  How many Republicans have been bankrupted in courtrooms while defending themselves against malicious prosecutions arising from the Russia Collusion Hoax?  All of the treasonous criminals who perpetrated this fraud upon the American people made the United States weaker, more divided, and more vulnerable.  That’s Obama’s real legacy.

No-one should minimize the seriousness of these crimes.  Unfortunately, even in conservative circles, it is common to hear someone describe the Russia Collusion Hoax as a Democrat Party “dirty trick.”  This was not a “dirty trick.”  This was treason!

A “dirty trick” might aptly describe social media satirist Douglass Mackey’s trolling humor when he posted a joke encouraging Hillary Clinton’s supporters to vote by text in 2016.  Even though Mackey’s absurd suggestion has been used as a funny meme by both Democrats and Republicans for many election cycles, Hillary actually blamed Mackey for her loss, and Biden’s (in)Justice Department successfully convicted Mackey for engaging in a conspiracy to spread false information.  Thankfully, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unanimously voided his preposterous conviction and ordered the district court to enter a judgment of acquittal.

While Obama-Biden prosecutors were happy to go after meme-makers for engaging in fake conspiracies to spread “misinformation,” they completely ignored the Obama-Clinton conspiracy to manufacture the Russia Collusion Hoax.  Unlike Mackey’s harmless “dirty trick,” the repercussions of the Obama-Clinton “color revolution” were very real.

Setting aside the fact that President Trump’s first term was undermined by a two-year special counsel investigation run by Democrats, when the departing Obama administration decided to blame Russia for Hillary’s 2016 loss, the conspirators compounded tensions between the world’s two dominant nuclear powers for purely political reasons.

As the meeting records from Gabbard’s declassification show, Obama’s National Security Council principals “agreed to recommend sanctioning of certain members of the Russian military intelligence and foreign intelligence chains of command responsible for cyber operations as a response to cyber activity that attempted to influence or interfere with U.S. elections.”  Before Obama left office, he expelled Russian diplomats and left incoming President Trump with a diplomatic hornet’s nest.

As Internet sleuth MAZE points out, shortly after Obama’s scapegoating of Russia, Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Amy Klobuchar traveled to Ukraine and later held a press conference during which they claimed that “Russia attacked the USA by hacking the 2016 election.”  Obama and his co-conspirators advanced an Intelligence operation that could have instigated a direct U.S.-Russia war.  That’s no “dirty trick.”  That’s deadly treason against the United States and the American people.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post Obama’s Real Legacy Comes Into Focus appeared first on LewRockwell.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post ‘War and the Global Economic Crisis’ and ‘Humanity’s Dystopian Crossroads’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Foreign Policy published an article last week by Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes, with the title, When the Threat Is Inside the White House: What CIA insiders make of the MAGA moles and toadies now in charge of U.S. national security. While the intent of the article is to paint Trump and his team as a bunch of Russian toadies, Weiner unwittingly paints a picture of the CIA’s leadership as biased operators with no understanding of Russia… They still think they are engaging a communist authoritarian state.

Here’s the opening paragraph:

If our nation’s spies are the infantry of our ideology, as John Le Carré once observed, Tom Sylvester is an unknown soldier who became a four-star general. Two years ago, he was named the CIA’s deputy director of operations, in charge of thousands of officers conducting espionage, covert action, and paramilitary operations. He won the job by virtue of his role in stealing Russia’s war plans for Ukraine, warning the world about the coming invasion, and providing steadfast support to Kyiv’s military and intelligence services.

Weiner credits Sylvester with “stealing Russia’s war plans for Ukraine,” but completely ignores the role the CIA played in provoking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The entire narrative surrounding Sylvester’s actions is constructed around the premise that Russia is a bad, evil actor and that its actions have nothing to do with Western provocations, especially the expansion of NATO to the East.

The next “highlight” from Weiner’s piece provides an excellent example of the CIA’s bias and ignorance when it comes to Russia:

In the summer of 2017, Sylvester received new marching orders from Tomas Rakusan, the new chief of the clandestine service, whose identity remained a state secret until after his retirement. Rakusan had spied on Russia since before the end of the Cold War, operating throughout Central and Eastern Europe. His hatred of the Russians was bred in the bone. His parents were Czech; he was 9 years old when Soviet troops crushed the Prague Spring uprising in 1968. Rakusan saw Russian President Vladimir Putin’s subversion of the presidential election on Trump’s behalf as the espionage equivalent of 9/11. In retaliation, he aimed to penetrate the Kremlin—among the greatest aspirations of the CIA since its foundation, and a goal never achieved.

Hatred of Russians? It is one thing to despise the Soviet Union, which was governed by a Communist ideology. But the “End of the Cold War” was marked by the peaceful overthrow of a communist government and the creation of a new Russian government that emphasized nationalism and Christianity. So how is that a threat to the United States? Moreover, during the decade of the 1990s, Russia’s military was in disarray and the society was ravaged by economic crisis, which included two periods of hyperinflation, widespread poverty among the Russian people, and a dramatic decline in life expectancy among Russian men.

This did not age well: “Rakusan saw Russian President Vladimir Putin’s subversion of the presidential election on Trump’s behalf as the espionage equivalent of 9/11.” Tulsi Gabbard’s declassification of intelligence documents and emails from various members of the CIA and other intelligence officials on Friday, shows that Rakusan either had his head up his ass or was part of the conspiracy to attack Donald Trump with a lie (or both). The memo carries the following subject line: Intelligence Community suppression of intelligence showing “Russian and criminal actors did not impact” the 2016 presidential election via cyber-attacks on infrastructure. I am sure this caught Tim Weiner by surprise. Certainly takes the wind out of his sails as he tries to portray the CIA as a saintly, honest outfit being undermined by a President who is in the pocket of Putin.

The next couple of paragraphs from Weiner paint a picture of Western intelligence ramping up against Russia, but also exposes CIA’s impotence with respect to human intelligence assets in Russia:

By the summer of 2020, CIA officers were working in close liaison with the British, Dutch, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Estonians, and many other services against the Russians. “There was the strategic decision on how we would share intelligence,” Sylvester said. “We used it as an influence mechanism, in and of itself, to get governments to start cooperating with us.” This hard-won trust “allowed them to open up taps of cooperation and intelligence that they had theretofore not shared with us,” he added. The CIA and its foreign allies were cross-fertilizing intelligence, choreographing operations, and, most importantly, recruiting Russian sources.

The CIA had been able to “push back against the Russian services” largely by “working with liaison partners overseas to expose and disrupt Russian intelligence activities,” then-CIA Director William Burns told me last year. “And then what we tried to build on that, starting in the spring of 2021, was the recruitment dimension of this,” he said. “This was really, especially once the war drums started beating, a once-in-a-generation opportunity, given the disaffection in some parts of the Russian elite and Russian society” against Putin’s regime.

This quote jumped off the page for me: largely by “working with liaison partners overseas to expose and disrupt Russian intelligence activities.” That is a polite way of saying that the the CIA had no assets of its own and was relying on foreign intelligence services, with the bulk of the information coming from Ukraine. And note the significance of the “spring of 2021;” Biden was newly installed as President and the effort to go after Russia on a more intense basis was kicked into high gear.

Burn’s comment to Weiner is also quite instructive… It shows a mistaken belief on the part of the Director of the CIA about the stability of the Russian government (i.e., given the disaffection in some parts of the Russian elite and Russian society” against Putin’s regime) and is an implicit admission that the CIA had embarked on a program to try to ignite a new color revolution in Russia. This is not my opinion… Weiner’s piece makes that clear in this paragraph:

Kyiv’s spy services, rebuilt by the CIA after Putin seized Crimea and other parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014, had become one of Washington’s best sources of intelligence on the Russians; the CIA was becoming the Ukrainians’ best defense against them. “It was probably one of the best investments that the CIA, the U.S. government, has made,” Sylvester said; it had created “the trust, the confidence, the ability in times of need to feel like you were in the trenches together.” By the fall of 2021, the CIA had given the Ukrainians a graduate course in espionage and paramilitary operations, along with the ability to understand and utilize a steady stream of U.S. intelligence.

I will close with this amazing, but not surprising, revelation from Weiner. He describes Rakusan’s fury in the aftermath of Trump’s election, and Rakusan’s desperate, dangerous actions:

“The Russians manipulated our fucking elections,” he told them. “How do we make sure this never happens again?” He didn’t care if they didn’t speak Russian or had never set foot in Moscow. He ordered them to take their expertise in targeting and recruiting terrorists and turn it against Russian spies, diplomats, and oligarchs.

Got that? “Recruit terrorists!” I don’t ever want to hear another damn word about the US fighting a war on terrorism when we have an admission from the top operations officer in the CIA telling his boys and girls to recruit terrorists, who will be used to attack Russia. I am sure the Russians have read Mr. Weiner’s piece and have taken notice of this fact. I suspect they already knew that.

Based on Weiner’s article, we now know that the US launched an intelligence war on Russia based completely on a lie. And the senior leaders of the CIA went along with it. In my view, the CIA ought to be dismantled and cast to the four winds. We need to start over with some people of actual intelligence.

This article was originally published on Sonar21.

The post The CIA Initiated an Intelligence and Terrorist War on Russia Based on a Lie appeared first on LewRockwell.

A false ideology has driven the U.S. Government to systematically under-report its net indebtedness in order to be able to continue its defrauding the individuals and entities that trust it to repay its existing financial obligations.

The core of libertarianism (neoliberalism, as it’s called in Europe) is (as will be documented in the links here) the false and even insane idea that privatization is better than socialization; but the empirical truth is that in many instances, socialization is far better than privatization (and libertarians-neoliberals cannot accept that fact, because it would destroy their con).

Privatization is the selling of governmental (publicly owned and controlled) assets to private investors. Socialization is the buying of assets, from private individuals, by the government.

Norway presents an excellent case-example of this falsity, even insanity, of (America’s ideology) libertarianism-neoliberalism, which ideology doesn’t drive Norway’s Government.

Here is a video that explains this fact (the vast economic harm that is produced by libertarianism-neoliberalism) in regard to Norway’s having socialized (instead of sold off to investors) its oil assets — and this prominent example (of the enormous benefits that Norwegians derive from that socialization of their oil-wealth) is devastating to libertarianism-neoliberalism:

Here is its transcript, which describes the history of Norway’s state-owned oil company, Equinor (formerly called “Statoil”):

Norway discovered oil in the North Sea in 1969. Most countries would blow it on corruption, debt, and short-term wins. Norway did the opposite. It turned oil into long-term national wealth. Here’s how it became one of the richest countries on Earth.

In the 1960s, Norway was a quiet, modest, country. Known for fishing, farming, and shipping, its economy was steady, but not wealthy. There was no sign it would one day lead the world in wealth per person.

Then in 1969, oil was discovered in the North Sea. Suddenly, Norway had access to massive natural wealth. It was a turning point, one that could’ve gone very wrong.

Many countries that discover oil fall into what’s called the “resource curse.” They overspend. Corruption spreads. Other industries collapse. Oil becomes a blessing, then a trap. [THAT’S THE LIBERTARIAN WAY — PRIVATIZATION.]

But Norway didn’t let that happen. Instead of handing the oil to private companies, it took control. [IT SOCIALIZED THAT ASSET.]

The Government created a national oil company, Statoil, to manage resources for the people.

Norway also made sure oil profits didn’t distort the economy.

It saved most of the money, and refused to spend it all at once [on privatization’s institutionalization of corruptness].

The goal wasn’t fast growth. It was long-term strength [for the public].

In 1990, Norway launched the Government Pension Fund Global. Also known as the Oil Fund. It was designed to turn oil profits into steady income for future generations.

The plan was simple: Invest the oil money in global stocks, bonds, and real estate. Never touch the core savings, only spend a small part of the returns.

That discipline paid off. Today, the fund is worth more than 1.6 trillion dollars. It’s the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. [AS-OF NOW — July 2025 — IT IS WORTH AROUND $1.7T.]

The fund owns shares in over 9,000 companies across the globe. It holds stakes in Apple, Amazon, Nestle, Microsoft, and more. Norway earns money every time those companies grow.

And the Government can use only a small part of the returns each year, around 3 percent. That rule protects the fund from political misuse and reckless spending.

Transparency is key. Every Norwegian can look up exactly where the money is invested. This builds public trust and prevents corruption [such as controls countries like America].

The oil will run out one day. But the wealth won’t. Norway turned a temporary resource into a permanent financial engine.

It used oil not to get rich fast, but to stay rich for generations. With world-class healthcare, education, and low poverty, Norway shows what’s possible with smart [and honestly NOT psychopathic like America is] policy and long-term [NOT “me me me, now now now”] thinking.

——

America’s public debt (including not only the official amount of $36,655,280,579,113.61 but also Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Medicare, and Social Security, all of which are likewise financial obligations of the federal Government: $5T, and $45.8T) totals actually to $87.5T in U.S. Government debt). Per person, that is $87.5T/340 million people, or $257,243 debt per person. (Or: for America’s 253,681,000 adults = -$211,496 per adult.) The median (average) U.S. adult has a net worth exclusive of Governmental obligations, of $112,157. Less that $211,496 (Governmental obligations), this indicates that the total net worth of the average American is -$99,340 — half of Americans are richer, half are poorer, than minus $99,340. America is a nation of predominantly highly negative net-wealth people. (The U.S. Government hides it by enormously underestimating its indebtedness, but this is the fact.)

By contrast, Norway’s public debt per person is non-existent.

Back again to the Governmental level: Norway is one of the few countries that has a “positive net asset position” — owns more than it owes. It currently stands at +$1.5T. America is currently at -$19.9T (the world’s most indebted Government), according to the official figures. The only countries doing better than Norway are China +$2.9T, Japan +$3.3T, and Germany +$3.3T. (Germany, however, is expected to plunge, because of the U.S. Government.) (Russia was not included in those numbers, because of the dubious legality of The West’s seizure of Russia’s sovereign foreign assets, which makes impossible to estimate such numbers for Russia.)

Chapter 20 of the libertarian U.S. Senator Rand Paul’s 2019 book The Case Against Socialism is titled “Hitler Was a Socialist.” Chapter 22 is “The Nazis Didn’t Believe in Private Property.” Rand Paul displays there that he is ignorant of history and writes falsehoods about it. The name Germa Bel isn’t even referred-to in that 354-page book. But as that great social scientist and economic historian Bel has documented in two classic papers, Mussolini carried out the first privatization of governmental assets; and Hitler carried out the second one. So, the fascists actually invented privatization — they were the original ‘libertarians’ or ‘neoliberals’. Furthermore, Tom Perrett, on 23 October 2019, the same year as Dr. Paul’s book, headlined “From Hayek to Hitler: An analysis of the Libertarian to Fascist Pipeline”, and he showed that privatization was hardly an anomaly, because fascism and libertarianism are actually the same, and only the name was changed after WW2 in order to continue on without the opprobrium of having been the losing side in WW2. That name for it, “libertarianism,” was just a PR trick. It’s actually only increasing liberty for the super-rich, at everyone else’s expense. (And in order to do that, the system is rigged so that only the super-rich are on the receiving end of the net-benefits; everybody else is on the paying end — paying that to the super-rich, under a libertarian-neoliberal-fascist Government.)

America is the world’s most libertarian (neoliberal) country. Not only because it is the main practitioner of privatization, but because the basic principle of libertarianism is that an individual’s worth is that person’s net worth (wealth). Consequently, America is run by and for its billionaires. (Click onto that to see the documentation.)

On June 24th, Forbes headlined “Millionaires Are On The Move — Here Are The Countries Winning And Losing Wealthy Residents”, and reported that the biggest number of millionaires and billionaires that are relocating their assets from one country to another was into UAE (because it has no taxes), and the second-biggest was into America (because of its low wages, low unionization, low regulations, low enforcement of regulations of corporations, and especially low taxes for billionaires — in other words, because of its libertarianism), and that Trump has initiated a new program (paid for by U.S. taxpayers) to increase that immigration and investment by foreign millionaires and billionaires. He, being a billionaire himself, wants to increase the number of rich people moving into America, just as he wants to decrease the number of poor people moving into America.

As regards to Norway: social services, such as health care and education, have lower per-capita costs and higher effectiveness (such as higher life-expectancy) in Norway than in America.

The super-rich in America control not only their corporations (profit and ‘non’-profit) but their Government. Apparently, that isn’t the case in Norway — at least not to the same extreme extent.

Back on 21 July 2022, qz dot com headlined “The US government has about $70 trillion in off-balance sheet liabilities” and reported that “a new working paper by University of California-San Diego economics professor James Hamilton estimates that the US was on the hook for more than $70 trillion in off-balance sheet liabilities at the end of 2012.” The incompetently reported qz article blithely said “if the US really doesn’t have the money to pay for all of the Social Security benefits retirees are entitled to in a few decades, those benefits could be trimmed then, or other alterations could be made to the program — such as pushing the retirement age back, which would cut the costs of the program.” It didn’t even consider that instead the owners of U.S. Treasury bonds (far fewer and far wealthier individuals than Social Security recipients) would take a haircut — but blithely proposed that the problem could be solved by hitting the general public instead (something far likelier to provoke a very violent Second American Revolution). The pro-rich anti-public mindset of qz dot com was obvious there: it says that the middle class and poor should be hit with the losses — the rich and especially super-rich should not. Furthermore, their article failed to mention the title of the alleged paper that it claimed to be summarizing, and the link it provided to the paper was to the National Bureau of Economic Research site and said only “Page Not Found”. Had he been pressured, perhaps by the FBI, to remove his paper? So, at around noon on July 20th I emailed Dr. Hamilton to please see his paper. I didn’t hear back from him, but finally found the paper on my own: “OFF-BALANCE-SHEET FEDERAL LIABILITIES”. Its summary or ”Abstract” points out that “The five major categories surveyed include support for housing, other loan guarantees, deposit insurance, actions taken by the Federal Reserve, and government trust funds [Social Security and Medicare]. The total dollar value of notional off-balance-sheet commitments came to $70 trillion as of 2012, or 6 times the size of the reported on-balance-sheet debt.” The paper is outstanding, a real classic, which ought to have (but did not) received headline attention throughout the U.S. press (and from other academics), because of the Governmental lies that it documents, regarding the U.S. Government’s basically bail-out of investors (really of the super-rich) after the 2008 financial crash. (The “little people” got crushed.) Large portions of the U.S. Government’s current debt are comprised of those bailouts of the wealthy. No billionaire or top executive was prosecuted for any of it. At a private meeting with Wall Street bigs (the individuals who had made huge fortunes off of those fraudulently-represented-to-investors mortgage-backed securities) on 27 March 2009, Obama told them “I’m protecting you” from “the pitchforks” and “I’m going to shield you”; and he did exactly that (and so did the press). None of them was prosecuted.

It is by now clear that a new international agency, which will be entirely independent of the U.S. Government (and run perhaps by the BRICS organization) needs to be created to audit each nation’s financial records and issue their creditworthiness-ratings on that basis.

Either we are heading into revolutions, or we are heading into a WW3 if the U.S. refuses to give up its hegemonic position (which is based on such lies) (and which hegemony is essential to hundreds of coups, invasions and even the genocide in Gaza). No matter how violent revolutions would be, a Third World War would be vastly more so. A Second American Revolution is therefore a necessity now. The problem is the U.S. Government, which has been built on lies ever since it started the Cold War on 25 July 1945. That decision produced America’s military-industrial complex, which has been built up ever since then and now consumes more than half of all congressionally authorized federal spending each and every year, dwarfing all other purposes. (And the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department is by far the most corrupt of all Departments of the U.S. Government.) That dominance of the military is entirely consistent with an extremely libertarian-neoliberal-fascist Government — which IS the problem. It is the world’s problem.

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post The U.S. Government Is Actually at Least $70 Trillion in Debt. appeared first on LewRockwell.

The yield on the 30-year US Treasury bond just crossed the 5.0% mark for the first time in 17 years. So it might be useful to revisit where we have been lo these many decades.

We are referring to the long bond’s utterly fabricated 54 year journey since the Camp David event in August 1971. By our reckoning, the latter provides proof positive that the Donald’s blunderbuss attack on the Fed is fully warranted and that his negative characterization of its competence is absolutely correct.

To wit, Jay Powell and the whole parade of Keynesian central bankers who came before him—save for William McChesney Martin and Tall Paul Volcker—were neither competent nor deserving of the Fed’s vaunted “independence”. Indeed, you could have gotten a better result from a posse of random names snatched out of the Cleveland phone book—which is to say, from the nation’s vast private markets in interest rates, stock, bonds, derivatives and other financial assets.

The real import of the Donald’s current attack on Powell, therefore, is not actually about his cockamamie judgement that the Fed funds rate should be 300 basis points lower at this particular point in time. The real gravamen of Trump’s complaint is that the Fed should not even be fiddling with the rate on overnight money or the level and shape of the entire debt market yield curve in the first place.

In fact, neither the 12 men/women on the FOMC, nor the one man or woman who is temporarily domiciled in the Oval Office each four years nor the clown car battalions on Capitol Hill who mostly spend a lifetime there, are competent to set interest rates. That’s a job for free, flexible, dynamic, competitive, information-rich private markets, not an agency of the state. Full stop.

The evidence for that proposition is that the Fed has been dead wrong about the long-term interest rates for at least the five decades since Nixon manhandled Chairman Arthur Burns into cranking up the Fed’s printing presses in behalf of his 1972 reelection campaign. In short order that brought the demise of the Breton Woods gold exchange system, which was already on its death bed owing to Fed financing during the prior decade of LBJ’s “guns and butter” fiscal extravaganza.

Thereafter, of course, the world entered the era of fiat central bank money, dirty (government manipulated) floats in foreign exchange markets and the financial rule of a few fallible monetary apparatchiks. The latter claimed, of course, to be in the high-minded business of delivering the greater good for all the people as opposed to market-based traders, investors, businesses and other economic players with skin in the game merely attempting to pursue their own selfish good.

Indeed, the dispositive proof of the generic incompetence of monetary central planners (aka central bankers) is the four decade’s march of the long bond relentlessly down the yield hill as depicted in the graph below. It shows that from the peak of 15.2% in September 1981, to the bottom at 1.20% in March 2022, the long-bond’s yield traversed 1400 basis points of nearly continuous decline. Yet nothing remotely like this 49-year one-way journey could have occurred on the free market operating under a regime of sound money.

To wit, sound money rates would never have been this high in the first place, nor would they have tumbled this low eventually. And that’s to say nothing of a one-way direction of travel the whole time in between. To the contrary, the graph has “central bankers at work” written all over it because the price of bonds (i.e. yields) on the free market would have continuously zigged and zagged in a narrow but directionless range for the entire half century running.

30-Year US Treasury Bond Yield, 1981 to 2025

That the above anomalous path was the handiwork of the Fed and its foreign central bank accomplices is further reinforced by the graph below, which extracts CPI inflation on a Y/Y basis from the nominal yield. And on this “real yield” basis, the range is even more stupendously unmarket-like, ranging from a +940 basis points high in June 1983 to a -610 basis points low in March 2022.

Again, that’s 1550 basis points of range variation. Yet baring some unimaginable catastrophe even far worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s, there is simply no scenario—-no imaginable imbalance of supply and demand in the bond pits—so extreme as to generate real yield outcomes this variant.

After all, the real yield is the return needed to cover taxes and the opportunity cost of locking up money (via duration risk) for one-third of a century. There is nothing in the history or logic of finance that suggests that the real interest rate in its natural state would even remotely vary by such extreme magnitudes, and most especially that it would plunge into negative real yield territory at the durations and depths depicted in the graph.

Nevertheless, under the tutelage of the Fed and its fellow-traveling central banks, the pattern below did actually happen. This means, in turn, that current financial investor and trader mindsets and the market’s very internal memory muscles have been profoundly mis-shaped by the 40-year yield slide depicted in the graphs.

Accordingly, we would suggest that the debt markets are just beginning a new price discovery process that incepted in March 2022. That’s when for the first time in a half century the central banks of the world were compelled to shut down their printing presses simultaneously because under the conceit of the “Great Moderation” mantra promulgated by Bernanke in February 2004 the nearly double-digit inflation that peaked in the summer of 2022 was never supposed to happen. So they central bankers panicked and lurched into an anti-inflation mode almost on a dime.

As is also evident in the graph, real yields have consequently sprung-higher by 860 basis points from the March 2022 bottom to a current level of about +2.5%. That’s just 38 months on a new path that is diametrically opposite to that of the prior 40 years.

Undoubtedly, traders trained in the central bank printing press era of the last four decades are expecting only a temporary reversal like all the other minor upward blips shown in the graph. Indeed, their trading charts are geared to issuing “buy signals” at exactly those expected points.

But if the central banks do not restart their printing presses soon, and we believe they will not owing to excess embedded inflation, trading models will issue no buy signals. And, at length, markets will become sorely disappointed, meaning that bond selling will commence at scale as traders and algos pivot to selling that which the central banks are not buying, as opposed to front-running the continuously expanding central bank balance sheets, as they have been doing for decades.

Inflation-Adjusted 30-Year US Treasury Bond Yield, 1981 to 2025

Needless to say, front-running of the central banks by global traders and algos has been a massive, market-driving force in recent decades because the central banks have literally been buying US government issued and guaranteed debt securities hand over fist. In the case of the Fed alone, its balance sheet of mostly US Treasury paper has exploded from $80 billion in June 1971 to the money-printing high of $9.0 trillion in March 2022.

That’s a gain of 113X for anyone keeping score, which, in turn compared to a national income or GDP gain of just 21X during the same 51 year period.

Yet and yet. That’s really not the half of it when you consider the fellow-traveling central banks of the world, which for better or worse responded to the Fed’s flood of dollar liabilities by massive, continuous currency market interventions and “dirty floats”. In turn, these Treasury bond-buying sprees by foriegn central banks were designed to thwart the free market logic of Uncle Milton Friedman and thereby prevent the natural and substantial appreciation of their own exchange rates which would have occurred on an honest free market.

Accordingly, the tiny $15 billion holdings of US Treasury debt by the combined central banks of the world outside of the US in June 1971 soared to $1 trillion by the turn of the century and to a peak of $4.4 trillion by the 2022 top of the central bank money-printing era. In total, therefore, once the central banks were freed from the discipline of fixed exchange rates and gold convertibility in August 1971 it truly was a world of Katie-bar-the-door.

As it happened, US Treasury paper held by the ECB (or its predecessors), the Bank of Japan, the People’s Bank of China, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Petro-States, South Korea and the other East Asian exporters plus the rest of the world amounted to only 0.5% of world GDP in June 1971.

That is to say, during the shaky final days of the Breton Woods gold standard there was no reason for foreign central banks to own material amounts of the so-called dollar reserve currency. By the time Greenspan got to the Fed in 1987, however, the dirty float game had already developed a goodly head of steam. At that point, the foreign central banks held $500 billion of US Treasury paper, amounting to 3.3% of global GDP.

Thereafter, of course, it was off to the races as Greenspan’s Keynesian Fed cranked up the printing presses, even as foreign banks sopped up a rising share of the increasingly unwanted dollars earned in trade. By the eve of the Great Financial Crisis, therefore, foreign central banks held $1.5 trillion of US government debt, which figure climbed steadily higher thereafter in response to the massive outpouring of dollar liabilities from the Fed and the swelling US trade deficits which resulted from it.

Alas, by the money-printing peak of March 2022, foreign central banks owned $4.4 trillion of US government debt, amounting to 4.7% of global GDP, which had reached nearly $96 trillion.

As is evident from the chart, by 2024 the ECB, Bank of Japan and People’s Bank of China alone held $3.73 trillion of US Treasury debt. It is not surprising, therefore, that in 2024 combined US imports from these three major trading partners totaled $1.256 trillion compared to exports to these countries of just $596 billion, yielding a yawning trade deficit of $600 billion per year.

In short, the debt and inflation-saturated US economy after five decades of money-printing leadership at the Fed is essentially in the business of buying foreign goods and selling Uncle Sam’s debt paper to cover the shortfall.

Needless to say, during the same period the Fed’s balance sheet, which is comprised mainly of US government debt and guaranteed agency paper on the asset side, also soared skyward. The Fed’s holding of $80 billion of US Treasury paper in June 1971 had multiplied by a factor of 111X to the aforementioned $9.0 trillion by the March 2022 peak. Relative to national income, the Fed’s balance sheet went from an already bloated (by historic standards) 6.9% of GDP in Q2 1971 to 36% of US GDP by the peak in March 2022.

There should be no mystery, therefore, as to how the inflation bloated yield of 15.2% on the 30-year Treasury Bond in July 1982 marched relentlessly downhill to just 1.2% in March 2022: Namely, the combined central banks of the world had their big fat thumbs on the supply and demand scales in the bond pits of the world like never before imagined.

That is to say, the holdings of the Fed plus the central banks of the world depicted in the table above amounted to just $95 billion in June 1971 and roughly 3.2% of global GDP. By contrast, at the money-printing apotheosis in March 2022, the Fed and its fellow-traveling central banks around the planet held $13.4 trillion of US Treasury debt, which amounted to 14% of global GDP.

In short, the U.S. dollar has not been a “reserve currency” in the classic sense since August 1971. That’s when the world stumbled into purely fiat moneys traded via dirty floats on the world’s exchange markets by central banks eager to counter-act the massive monetary inflation of the Federal Reserve.

That is, foreign central bank holdings of dollar securities were not substitutes for gold as were sterling reserves in the 1920s and dollar reserves under Breton Woods. They were simply the accumulated coin of dirty floats designed to counter the flood of the Fed’s inflationary dollars in the foreign exchange markets.

To be sure, the trick of dirty floats and dollar hoards worked for several decades…..until suddenly it didn’t, doesn’t and won’t for as far as the eye can see in the world ahead. In turn, how the end of global central bank monetization of Uncle Sam’s debt is likely to play out in the years ahead will be the subject of Part 3.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

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As Syria descends into full-scale civil war, with more than a thousand people killed in just the last few days, it may be a good time to remember the phrase, “Assad must go.” That was the slogan the regime-changers rolled out some 14 years ago during the “Arab Spring” that was supposed to usher liberal democracies into power throughout the region.

From Tunisia to Egypt to Libya and on to Syria, the plan was to remake the Middle East according to the will of Washington’s “master planners.” The State Department, the media, the Pentagon, and the think tanks fed by the military-industrial complex were all enthusiastically on-board the program because making war and overthrowing governments is their bread and butter.

If the United States pursued a foreign policy of non-interventionism as laid out by our Founders the massive “national security state” would cease to exist. We would return to being a republic and they would have to return to honest work.

Instead, a determined effort that took nearly 14 years finally produced the “regime change” in Syria last December that the neocons wanted. Assad did finally go – to exile in Russia – but as is always the case with US-directed regime change, his replacement was even worse. Imagine all those years fighting the “war on terror” and then cheering when a branch of al-Qaeda takes power in Syria. Yet that’s exactly what happened, with President Trump going so far as to praise Syria’s self-appointed president as, “a tough guy, a fighter, with a very strong background.”

Assad, like Libya’s Gaddafi and the others targeted for “regime change,” was no saint. But as with Libya, we are seeing the chaos unleashed by US intervention in Syria is making the country far worse than before. Libya has remained in chaos and civil war for the past decade, with no future for its people. That seems to be what is in store for Syria as well. The new, unelected regime has slaughtered Alawites and Christians from nearly day one, and last week turned its guns on the Druze minority. A country of many different faiths and ethnic groups has been ripped apart, probably for good.

Those pushing regime change all these years called us “Assad apologists” when we cautioned against intervention. We should not expect an apology now that their regime change has achieved the opposite of what they promised.

The failed Soviet Union demonstrated that central planning never works. Centrally-planned economies produce luxury for the elites and poverty for everyone else. Yet the US foreign policy establishment believes it can centrally plan the government, economy, and even religion of countries thousands of miles away and about which it knows nothing. Once again we can see how wrong they are and what destruction their actions cause.

Syria’s descent into mayhem and violence is another tragic reminder that Washington’s neocons are very good at undermining and overthrowing governments abroad that refuse to “play ball” according to DC rules, but when it comes to actually bringing anything of value from the chaos they create they are hopelessly incompetent. In Syria the damage is done, and future generations will continue to suffer from the cruel folly of those convinced they know how to run everyone else’s lives.

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This is the greatest, and most insightful and profound episode of this wonderful podcast. Absolutely incredible!

The historical analysis is minutely detailed and brilliant, showing what has been really going on in regard to politics, demographics, shifts in culture, socioeconomic trends impacting America over decades.

Make this go viral. Send or post copies to family, friends, colleagues, and people you love and deeply respect who you believe must know this crucial information.

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Thanks, Johnny Kramer. 

How Much Are the OTHERS Losing?!

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Thanks, Maureen McKerracher.

See here.

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Thanks, Johnny Kramer . 

Heather Mac Donald

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Thanks, John Frahm.

CNBC News

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President Trump wants the Fed to drastically lower interest rates. This means more Fed counterfeiting and more inflation. With government spending, deficits, and debts continuing their march higher (and tariffs on top) … Are you excited for higher prices?

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Click Here:

Global Research

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What is the conspiracy theory of history? Is it true? In this week’s column, I’m going to discuss the great Murray Rothbard’s analysis of the subject. As always, he is our best guide. Then, I’ll give examples of what Murray calls “good” conspiracy theories.

Murray begins his analysis by noting that the Establishment attacks the conspiracy theory: “Anytime that a hard-nosed analysis is put forth of who our rulers are, of how their political and economic interests interlock, it is invariably denounced by Establishment liberals and conservatives (and even by many libertarians) as a ‘conspiracy theory of history,’ ‘paranoid,’ ‘economic determinist,’ and even ‘Marxist.’ These smear labels are applied across the board, even though such realistic analyses can be, and have been, made from any and all parts of the economic spectrum, from the John Birch Society to the Communist Party. The most common label is ‘conspiracy theorist,’ almost always leveled as a hostile epithet rather than adopted by the ‘conspiracy theorist’ himself.”

Murray next points out that it is natural that the Establishment attack the conspiracy theory because it has an interest in saying that that the Deep State isn’t a plot to hold power but an inevitable development that it is futile to resist: “It is no wonder that usually these realistic analyses are spelled out by various ‘extremists’ who are outside the Establishment consensus. For it is vital to the continued rule of the State apparatus that it have legitimacy and even sanctity in the eyes of the public, and it is vital to that sanctity that our politicians and bureaucrats be deemed to be disembodied spirits solely devoted to the ‘public good.’ Once let the cat out of the bag that these spirits are all too often grounded in the solid earth of advancing a set of economic interests through use of the State, and the basic mystique of government begins to collapse.”

Murray was a great teacher, and he gives us some simple example to show how to use conspiracy theories: “Let us take an easy example. Suppose we find that Congress has passed a law raising the steel tariff or imposing import quotas on steel? Surely only a moron will fail to realize that the tariff or quota was passed at the behest of lobbyists from the domestic steel industry, anxious to keep out efficient foreign competitors. No one would level a charge of ‘conspiracy theorist’ against such a conclusion. But what the conspiracy theorist is doing is simply to extend his analysis to more complex measures of government: say, to public works projects, the establishment of the ICC, the creation of the Federal Reserve System, or the entry of the United States into a war. In each of these cases, the conspiracy theorist asks himself the question cui bono? Who benefits from this measure? If he finds that Measure A benefits X and Y, his next step is to investigate the hypothesis: did X and Y in fact lobby or exert pressure for the passage of Measure A? In short, did X and Y realize that they would benefit and act accordingly?”

It’s a basic principle of Austrian economics that human beings act for a purpose, Rothbard says, and conspiracy theorists apply this principle: “Far from being a paranoid or a determinist, the conspiracy analyst is a praxeologist; that is, he believes that people act purposively, that they make conscious choices to employ means in order to arrive at goals. Hence, if a steel tariff is passed, he assumes that the steel industry lobbied for it; if a public works project is created, he hypothesizes that it was promoted by an alliance of construction firms and unions who enjoyed public works contracts, and bureaucrats who expanded their jobs and incomes. It is the opponents of ‘conspiracy’ analysis who profess to believe that all events—at least in government—are random and unplanned, and that therefore people do not engage in purposive choice and planning.”

It doesn’t follow that all conspiracy theories are right. Murray warns us against two fallacies: First, showing that someone benefits from a measure isn’t enough to show that he is behind the measure. That is a hypothesis that has to be investigated. Second, there isn’t One Big Conspiracy theory that explains all of history: “There are, of course, good conspiracy analysts and bad conspiracy analysts, just as there are good and bad historians or practitioners of any discipline. The bad conspiracy analyst tends to make two kinds of mistakes, which indeed leave him open to the Establishment charge of ‘paranoia’ First, he stops with the cui bono; if measure A benefits X and Y, he simply concludes that therefore X and Y were responsible. He fails to realize that this is just a hypothesis and must be verified by finding out whether or not X and Y really did so. (Perhaps the wackiest example of this was the British journalist Douglas Reed who, seeing that the result of Hitler’s policies was the destruction of Germany, concluded, without further evidence, that therefore Hitler was a conscious agent of external forces who deliberately set out to ruin Germany.) Secondly, the bad conspiracy analyst seems to have a compulsion to wrap up all the conspiracies, all the bad guy power blocs, into one giant conspiracy. Instead of seeing that there are several power blocs trying to gain control of government, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in alliance, he has to assume—again without evidence—that a small group of men controls them all and only seems to send them into conflict.”

Now that we have our basic framework for understanding the conspiracy theory. I’d like to give two examples of “good” conspiracy theories.

The first of these is the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. There is massive evidence that Franklin Roosevelt provoked the Japanese attack in order to get America into World War II. The great historian Robert Higgs summarizes the evidence: “A short comment is no place to settle the controversies that have raged ever since the attack about what Roosevelt and his chief subordinates knew in advance, but one thing has been known for a long time: however ‘dastardly’ the attack might have been, it was anything but ‘unprovoked.’ Indeed, even admirers and defenders of Roosevelt, such as Robert B. Stinnett and George Victor, have documented provocations aplenty. (See the former’s Day of Deceit: The Truth About Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor and the latter’s The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable.)  On December 8, the same day that Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war against Japan, former president Herbert Hoover wrote a private letter in which he remarked, ‘You and I know that this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bitten.’”

Higgs presents his conclusion about what this evidence shows: “On the basis of facts accumulated over the past seven decades and available to anyone who cares to examine them, we are justified in saying that Hoover’s characterization of the war’s provocation was entirely accurate – both with regard to the Japanese imperial government as ‘rattlesnakes’ and with regard to the U.S. government’s ‘putting pins in.’ Indeed, we now have a much firmer basis for that characterization than Hoover could have had on December 8, 1941. Countless lies have been told, massive cover-ups have been staged, propaganda has flowed like a river, yet in this one regard, at least, the truth has undeniably been brought out.”

Higgs points out that some pro-Roosevelt historians praise him for his deception and make clear his own attitude toward this: “Most American historians, of course, no longer bother to deny this truth. They simply take it in stride, presuming that the Japanese attack, by giving Roosevelt the public support he needed to bring the United States into the war against Germany through the  ‘the back door’ was a good thing for this country and for the world at large. Indeed, some actually shower the president with approbation for his mendacious maneuvering to wrench the American people away from their unsophisticated devotion to ‘isolationism.’ In no small part, Roosevelt’s unrelenting dishonesty with the American people (Stanford University  historian David M. Kennedy tactfully  refers to the president’s ‘frequently cagey misrepresentations’) in 1940 and 1941 – plain enough if one reads nothing more than his pre-Pearl Harbor correspondence with Winston Churchill – is counted among his principal qualifications for ‘greatness’ and for his (to my mind, incomprehensible) status as an American demigod.”

I’d like to turn to another “good” conspiracy theory: the string of political assassinations in the 1960s. Once more, let’s turn to Murray Rothbard; “John F. Kennedy; Malcolm X; Martin Luther King; Robert F. Kennedy; and now George Corley Wallace: the litany of political assassinations and attempts in the last decade rolls on. In each of these atrocities, we are fed with a line of cant from the liberals and from the Establishment media. In the first place, every one of these assassinations is supposed to have been performed, must have been performed, by ‘one lone nut’ – to which we can add the one lone nut who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald in the prison basement. One loner, a twisted psycho, whose motives are therefore of course puzzling and obscure, and who never, never acted in concert with anyone. (The only exception is the murder of Malcolm, where the evident conspiracy was foisted upon a few lowly members of the Black Muslims.) Even in the case of James Earl Ray, who was mysteriously showered with money, false passports, and double identities, and who vainly tried to claim that he was part of a conspiracy before he was shouted down by the judge and his own lawyer – even there the lone nut theory is stubbornly upheld. It is not enough that our intelligence is systematically insulted with me lone nut theory; we also have to be bombarded with the inevitable liberal hobby horses: a plea for gun control, Jeremiads about our ‘sick society’ and our ‘climate of violence’, and, a new gimmick, blaming the war in Vietnam for this climate and therefore for the assault on George Wallace. Without going into the myriad details of Assassination Revisionism, doesn’t anyone see a pattern in our litany of murdered and wounded, a pattern that should leap out at anyone willing to believe his eyes? For all of the victims have had one thing in common: all were, to a greater or lesser extent, important anti-Establishment figures, and, what is more were men with the charismatic capacity to mobilize large sections of the populace against our rulers. All therefore constituted ‘populist’ threats against the ruling elite, especially if we focus on the mainstream ‘right-center’ wing of the ruling classes. Even as Establishmenty a figure as John F, Kennedy, the first of the victims, had the capacity to mobilize large segments of the public against the center-right Establishment.”

Let’s do everything we can to promote “good” conspiracy theories, following the path of the great Murray Rothbard!

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Sometimes I think it’s astonishing how aggressively Israel’s supporters work to stomp out criticism of Israel. Then I remember that these people also support mass murdering children; trying to take away my speech rights is one of their less evil goals. It shouldn’t shock me.

I saw someone talking online about how crazy it is that music groups who speak out against Israel’s atrocities are starting to form alliances with each other in an effort to counteract the campaign to silence them and destroy their careers, saying it shouldn’t be necessary to form an alliance in order to oppose an ongoing genocide. And that’s true, it shouldn’t be necessary. But it also shouldn’t surprise us that people who think bombing hospitals is fine would try to cancel musicians for criticizing Israel.

One mistake westerners keep making is thinking of Israel’s supporters as normal people with normal moral standards just because we happen to know them and interact with them in our communities. They look like us, speak like us, dress like us and act like us, so we assume they must think and feel a lot like us as well.

But they don’t. If you’re still supporting Israel in the year 2025, there’s something seriously wrong with you as a person. You do not have a normal, healthy sense of empathy and morality.

It’s 2025. Israeli soldiers are telling the Israeli press that they’re being ordered to massacre starving civilians trying to obtain food from aid centers. Countless doctors have been telling the world that Israeli snipers are routinely, deliberately shooting children in the head and chest throughout the Gaza Strip. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and all the leading genocide experts and human rights authorities are saying that a genocide is being perpetrated in Gaza. The New York fucking Times just published an op-ed by a Zionist genocide scholar who’s finally admitting that it’s a genocide.

There’s no way to deny what this is anymore. If you still support Israel in the year 2025, it’s not because you don’t believe Israel is committing horrific atrocities. It’s because you believe those horrific atrocities are good, and you want to see more of them.

Most Israel supporters will deny that this is the case, because they lie. They lie constantly. They have no moral problem with lying. They have no moral problem with burning children alive, so of course they have no problem with lying.

That’s where people go wrong. They assume Israel supporters can’t possibly be lying about their concerns about “antisemitism” in order to promote the information interests of Israel, because nobody could be that evil. But Israel supporters think it’s fine to intentionally starve babies by blockading baby formula from entering Gaza. Of course they are that evil.

People assume Israel’s supporters wouldn’t deliberately stage fake antisemitic incidents or artificially inflate antisemitism figures in their own countries so that their governments will implement authoritarian measures to stomp out criticism of Israel in the name of fighting antisemitism, because they assume nobody could be that depraved. But these people think it’s fine for the IDF to systematically assassinate Palestinian journalists to stop them from telling the truth. Of course they are that depraved.

Of course they’d try to silence our speech. Of course they’d try to send our kids off to war with Iran. Of course they’d work to manipulate our government. Of course they’d pollute the information ecosystem with mountains of lies. They support a live-streamed genocide. They’re bad people.

Supporting Israel and its actions is not some political opinion like your position on property taxes or marijuana legalization. It’s not just some people having a point of view we need to respect and treat as equal to our own view on the matter. They’re working to make it possible to conduct an extermination campaign of unfathomable horror. That’s as political as a gang rape, and just as worthy of respect.

There’s not really anything you can put past Israel’s supporters at this point. They will lie. They will manipulate. They will pretend to believe things they do not believe. They will pretend to feel things they do not feel. And they will do these things to facilitate some of the worst atrocities you can possibly imagine.

This is who Israel’s supporters are. They’re showing you who they are every single day. See here.

Comment by PCR:  It is shameful how weak, cowardly, and corrupt people are.  They will support genocide rather than to criticize Israel.

The post The Total Unaccountability of Israel Demonstrates the Moral Failure of the Western World appeared first on LewRockwell.

In a culture where every contour of the public life assists in communicating the message of Jesus Christ, the first citizen of the realm will be the Church, she who is both Bride and Body of Christ, the beloved one whom God Himself has chosen and designated to be Mother of all who have been redeemed in Christ. Followed by the Church is the family which, by hallowed and repeated usage, forms the domestic Church, whose actions are meant to model the life of the Holy Family. And, finally, there is the individual.

But this is not the isolated individual, uprooted from the sources that nourish and give life. If it is to be a culture of life, one whose lineaments have been shaped by the event of Jesus Christ, then it will not impede the actions of the true self, averse to all that is best for it; but only the atomized self, the self-determined self, living apart from others in a state of enmity and opposition to anything that tries to thwart its appetites and desires.

Here, then, are the two contrasting styles which currently contend for mastery in the public life, each refusing to settle for anything less than a complete sweep of the culture, however fiercely at variance their views of ultimate reality may be. On the one hand, there is the solipsist, the one who lives for himself alone, whose appetite for pleasure must not be trifled with by appeals to altruism or the common good. While, on the other hand, there is the selfless man, who lives entirely for God and neighbor and whose highest civic ambition is to assist in the creation of a genuinely Christian culture. Now, to be sure, the adherents of each remain rooted in a finite world, anchored therefore to the same contingent state we must all endure, which means neither one can possibly lay claim to being the cause of its own existence.

By that plain and ineluctable fact, therefore, each necessarily stands in relation to an Infinite and Absolute Other. But whereas the solipsist aims to absolutize himself, standing in majestic isolation from God, in defiance of God, while constantly disdaining the company of others, the genuinely selfless man is content to bow down before the true and everlasting Absolute and, thus, to serve others because they bear His image. It is he who, in accepting his creaturely status, his radical dependency upon Another, is free to give himself away and thus find and fulfill himself in doing so. He alone understands that before God or neighbor, the same truth applies: that in order to be at all, one must remain always in relation to another.

The Mexican poet Octavio Paz put it well when he said, “In the North American ethic, the center is the individual; in Hispanic morals, on the other hand, the true protagonist is the family.” Or, to give it a more acerbic spin, there is this from the writer Richard Rodriguez, who writes that while in Mexico “life is tragic and everyone is Catholic and cheerful, in the United States, which is Protestant and optimistic, everyone is depressed.” A variation perhaps on the same paradox might be the comment made by Frank Sheed, the famous Catholic apologist, who would often opine, “I find absolutely no grounds for optimism, and I have every reason for hope.”

Apart from God, then, on what basis will such hope be found? Only a God who is Himself a Holy Family, and thus the ultimate ground and model for a culture rooted in the family—where membership is precisely defined by the relations that both distinguish and define them, to recall the celebrated definition offered by Boethius: “Substance comprehends unity. Relation multiplies Trinity.” Chesterton was able to say the same thing, of course, only more simply: “It is not well for God to be alone.”

Surely this is what accounts for the fact that both the idea and the institution of a Confessional Order—where the Triune God is first, followed by the family of the Church, along with her countless progeny configured to God’s own inner life—emerged not out of the Northern European and Protestant countries but out of Catholic Spain, whose very identity as a nation and a people was forged in the Faith of the Catholic Thing.

And what, finally, is the Confessional State? It is not a juridical theory, although much ink has been spilled by scholars who have often theorized about it. It is, rather, an act and expression of love, in which one gives to one’s neighbor and the society in which they both live the very best thing that one has: namely, the truth about Jesus Christ, and the way of life He has come among us to establish.

Christopher Dawson, the eminent Catholic historian and sociologist, who has left us dozens of books on the subject of religion and culture, insisting that nothing is more natural than that men should seek to integrate the two, called it, quite simply, Christendom, which he defined as “a political society whose principle of unity is the public profession of the Christian faith.” This is not unlike St. Augustine’s description, incidentally, which he set down in the early fifth century in his great work The City of God: “A gathering of reasonable men united by the things for which they have a shared love.”

One could perhaps put it in more epigrammatic form by quoting the last heir to the Roman Catholic Empire of Europe, Archduke Otto von Habsburg, who, speaking of the future of Europe, remarked pithily, “The Cross does not need Europe; Europe needs the Cross.”

What did he mean by that? He meant that for Europe to recover her soul, the meaning and purpose of her existence as a people, she would need to first rediscover her roots in the Christian religion, which is to say, the Roman Catholic Church. It is in Christ’s Church alone that we trace the origins and development of Western Culture, she having both created and sustained the patrimony inherited from Israel, Greece, and Rome, catalyzing so great and far reaching an explosion of mind and spirit that, even now, we continue to draw inspiration from its source.

Read the Whole Article

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[This article was first published by Global Research. You may read it here.]

The article below was first published on July 8, 2016.

America’s preemptive nuclear doctrine was firmly entrenched prior to Donald Trump’s accession to the White House. The use of nukes against North Korea has been on the drawing board of the Pentagon for more than half a century.

In June 2016 under the Obama administration, top military brass together with the CEOs of the weapons industry debated the deployment of nuclear weapons against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

The event was intended to sensitize senior decision makers. The focus was on building a consensus (within the Armed Forces, the science labs, the nuclear industry, etc) in favor of preemptive nuclear war.

It was a form of “internal propaganda” intended for senior decision makers (top officials) within the military as well as the weapons industry. The emphasis was on “building peace” and “global security” through the “preemptive” deployment of nukes (air, land and sea) against four designated “rogue” countries, which allegedly are threatening the Western world.

One of the keynote speakers at the Doomsday Forum, USAF Chief of Staff for Nuclear Integration, Gen. Robin Rand, is presently involved under the helm of Secretary of Defense General Mattis in coordinating the deployment of strike capabilities to East Asia. Gen. Robin Rand heads the Air Force’s nuclear forces and bombers. His responsibility consists in “moving ahead with plans to deploy its most advanced weapons to the [East Asian] region…” Recent reports confirm an unfolding consensus within the military establishment:

“Military leaders regularly, and since the change of administration, have listed China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and ISIS as the major areas of concern for the future. From a security standpoint, tensions with North Korea continue to escalate, with reverberations throughout the region. In response to Pyongyang’s nuclear missile program, … the U.S. sped up the deployment of THAAD anti-missile interceptors to South Korea. This may reassure Seoul, and to a lesser extent Tokyo, but it has incensed Beijing.” (Defense One, March 17, 2017)

The DPRK is a a buffer state, a “stepping stone.” The unspoken truth is that the THAAD missiles stationed in South Korea are not intended for the DPRK, they are also slated to be used against China and Russia.

—Michel Chossudovsky, 6 August 2022

On June 21, 2017, 250 top military brass, military planners, corporate military-industrial “defense” contractors, top officials and scientists from the nuclear weapons laboratories as well as prominent academics gathered at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Albuquerque, New Mexico to discuss, debate and promote the Pentagon’s One Trillion Dollar Nuclear Weapons program.

Russia is allegedly “threatening the Western world.” The objective is to develop the preemptive use of nuclear weapons (i.e., nuclear war as a means of self-defense).

The event organized by “The Strategic Deterrent Coalition” (a non profit organization) was funded by Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Orbital ATK, BAE Systems among other generous donors.

Among the main speakers (see program here) were Adm. Cecil Haney, Commander of the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Lt. Gen. Jack Weinstein, Dep. USAF Chief of Staff for Nuclear Integration, Gen. Robin Rand, Commander, Air Force Global Strike Command, Gen. (ret.) Frank Klotz, Administrator, National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), as well senior officials from America’s top weapons labs including Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. Representatives from the UK, Canada, Denmark and the Republic of Korea (ROK) were also in attendance.

According to STRATCOM Commander Adm. Cecil D. Haney, (image below)

“America is quickly running out of time to ensure the viability of its nuclear deterrence and must invest the funds to upgrade not only its nuclear weapons stockpile, but the missiles, submarines and bombers capable of delivering a strike we hope we never have to make.” (Albuquerque Journal, June 22, 2016)

Adm. Haney refers to “deterrence,” a Cold War concept which was officially scrapped in 2002 (under the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review). What is contemplated under America’s nuclear doctrine is the first strike preemptive use of nuclear weapons against both nuclear as well as non-nuclear states.

The enemies of America were clearly identified. The aggressor nations against which the “preemptive” use (for self-defense) of advanced nuclear weapons is contemplated were explicitly mentioned:

Haney presented an overview of the world’s “strategic environment” which he said may be at its most precarious point in history – in large part because of the actions of Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and extremist groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaida.

Russia poses a threat just by virtue of the size of its nuclear arsenal, which it continues to modernize, but it’s also improving its conventional military forces, maintaining a significant quantity of non-strategic nuclear weapons and aggressively pursuing new war-fighting technologies, he said. (Albuquerque Journal, June 22, 2016)

The event sponsored by the Strategic Deterrent Coalition (SDC) was geared towards the “education of decision-makers on the importance of a “valid nuclear triad” – strategic bombers, land-launched missiles and submarine-launched missiles – according to its board president, Sherman McCorkle.” The notion of Triad “relates to the fact that U.S. strategic nuclear weapons are based in the water, on land and in the air.”

Propaganda: Sensitizing “Top Officials”

The SDC’s “educational endeavor” largely consists in building a consensus in favor of preemptive nuclear war (within the Armed Forces, the science labs, the nuclear industry, etc). It is a form of “internal propaganda” intended for senior decision makers (top officials) within the military as well as the weapons industry. The emphasis is “building peace” and “global security” through the “preemptive” deployment of nukes (air, land and sea) against four designated “rogue” countries, which allegedly are threatening the Western world.

The debate was coupled with veiled threats pointing to the possible use of nuclear warheads on a first strike basis against Russia, North Korea and Iran:

Coupled with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric and “destabilizing actions in Syria and Ukraine,” Haney cautioned that “Russia must understand that it would be a serious miscalculation to consider nuclear escalation as a viable option.”

North Korea continues to undermine regional stability by conducting nuclear tests and advancing its ballistic missile technology, Haney said.

Iran’s continued involvement in Middle East conflicts and development of ballistic missile programs and cyberspace capabilities require vigilance, particularly if there are any shifts in Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he said. (Albuquerque Journal, June 22, 2016)

Theater of the absurd: the US is intent upon using nuclear weapons as a means of self defense against Al Qaeda and ISIS under the Administration’s counter-terrorism initiative:

And the United States is part of an international campaign against violent extremist organizations groups “seeking to destroy our democratic way of life.”

To effectively keep adversaries and potential adversaries in check, America must maintain “a safe, secure, effective and ready nuclear deterrent.”

Lest we forget, Al Qaeda was created by the CIA and the ISIS is supported and funded by two of America’s staunchest allies: Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

The One Trillion Dollar Question: “Blow up the Planet”, “Bankrupt the Country”

“Blowing up the Planet” through the use of “peace-making nuclear bombs” is a money-making undertaking, a corporate bonanza for what Eisenhower called “the military industrial complex”:

“All three legs of the “nuclear triad” must receive considerable investments to ensure their long-term viability.” (Adm. Haney, op cit)

The expenditure is for a 30-year program to “modernize” the US nuclear arsenal and production facilities. … This plan, which has received almost no attention by the mass media, includes redesigned nuclear warheads, as well as new nuclear bombers, submarines, land-based missiles, weapons labs and production plants. The estimated cost? $1,000,000,000,000.00 — or, for those readers unfamiliar with such lofty figures, $1 trillion.

Critics charge that the expenditure of this staggering sum will either bankrupt the country or, at the least, require massive cutbacks in funding for other federal government programs. (Prof. Lawrence S. Wittner, The History News Network)

Hillary Clinton –whose election campaign is also supported by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman et al.— favors the first strike use of nuclear weapons:

… “the nuclear option should not at all be taken off the table. That has been my position consistently.” (ABC News, December 15, 2015)

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m president, we will attack Iran. In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.” (ABC “Good Morning America.”, quoted by Reuters, April 22, 2008 during 2008 presidential election campaign)

The world is at a dangerous crossroads. A new arms race has been launched. Its planning horizon is 30 years. The money allocated by the US federal government to the development of America’s preemptive nuclear war arsenal is of the order of one trillion dollars, that is the preliminary estimate, an astronomical amount (which could be increased):

“Today, our stockpile is the oldest it’s ever been, with the average age of a (nuclear) warhead at 27 years and growing,” he said.

The nation’s national security labs – like Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore – are key to ensuring the viability of the nuclear arsenal.

Despite the challenges, Haney said, “U.S. Strategic Command is a ready force capable of delivering comprehensive war-fighting solutions.”

In response to this venue, the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) organized a counter-event symposium on June 20-21. The LASG referred to the Strategic Deterrent Coalition’s Symposium as the “Doomsday Forum”.

According to Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) director Greg Mello:

“This Symposium comes at a time when ambitious US nuclear weapons plans, expected to cost $1 trillion over the next 30 years, are coming under withering criticism from recent US senior military and civilian defense officials, independent analysts, members of Congress, and diplomats”.

The nuclear weapons plan constitutes a multibillion dollar bonanza, ironically, for the military industrial contractors which generously financed the Symposium:

“…Air Force nuclear weapons replacements and upgrades are expected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Much of that money would go to the sponsors of this symposium.“

This important event –which consists in building a consensus in favor of a possible first strike preemptive US nuclear attack against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea– has barely been covered by the mainstream media.

Oops….The organizers must have got their countries mixed up: North Korea was on the list of invitees. Canada was not mentioned. (See below)

This article was originally published on MichelChossudovsky.substack.com.

The post The Doomsday Forum appeared first on LewRockwell.

People often project their values onto others. But cultural frameworks can be profoundly alien. What passes for virtue in one society may be incomprehensible—or nonexistent—in another. Predictably, well-meaning interventions from the outside often fail to achieve their intended goals. Without grasping the moral foundation of a culture, outsider solutions rarely reach the root and usually exacerbate the rot.

What looks like righteous indignation in Indians—especially to Western observers shaped by the Ten Commandments—is often just fury at being out-scammed, deprived, or physically harmed. Virtue-signaling comes easily to those who lack inner values or original thought. Indian moral posturing is mostly for Western eyes, where it can yield material or reputational gain. Within India, moral appeals carry no weight and instead invite ridicule. Conscience is not a private compass but a public costume—worn only when it might be seen.

The Indian mind, in its unaltered state—untouched by Western ideas—shuns moral reflection. For those who believe they’ve “arrived,” nothing is more gratifying than testing power and watching others suffer. Sadism becomes self-affirmation. It is not enough to cause pain; prolonging another’s suffering becomes a performance of superiority. The ultimate thrill is not justice or truth, but the sight of others on their knees, begging.

The powerless imitate this in another register. During highly charged spectacles—such as when a girl publicly claims victimhood—crowds gather not to uphold justice but to revel in the drama. Disinterested in evidence, they perform “chivalry” through mob energy: blind to their cowardice, drunk on shared chaos. It is not solidarity, but the thrill of spectacle—a counterfeit belonging forged in hatred.

In such frenzied states, individuals dissolve into the mob, feeling momentarily invincible, as if even the impossible lies within reach. But sooner or later, they collide with reality and collapse under its weight, as evidenced by India’s wretchedness, dysfunction, and lawlessness. Yet in that moment, the illusion of power is intoxicating and cathartic, numbing them to their own pain and humiliating existence.

This reveals a deeper pathology: the mimicry of Western moral language without the culture of introspection that gave rise to it. Words like “justice,” “equality,” and “human rights” are wielded not as moral commitments but as tools of leverage. Had India never encountered the West, such hypocrisy might not exist. But mimicry without soul corrodes, not uplifts. Stripped of their roots and filtered through corrupt systems and unformed minds, these terms collapse into incoherence.

A real community requires discipline, goodwill, and moral clarity—virtues that cannot take root in minds addicted to noise, chaos, and spectacle. Civilization does not emerge from nature; it is forged over millennia through restraint, trust, and moral effort. It grows not in frenzy, but in the quiet labor of responsibility and mutual regard.

And so India drapes its primal urges in borrowed virtue—never confronting the abyss within, only decorating it. What remains is moral staleness and cultural decay. Tribes—never “noble savages” to begin with—have, in imitating a Western façade, devolved into slums fouled by sewage, plagued by disease, and ruled by opportunism and crime.

Western observers often mistake Indian gestures for evidence of shared values. But what they see is not empathy—it is simulation.

In the West, conscience was shaped through centuries of religious introspection, legal reasoning, and philosophical debate, yielding an inner moral law responsive to something higher than group identity or convenience. In India, by contrast, magical thinking and herd instinct prevail.

Western institutions emerged only after a critical mass of individuals began to think in moral and rational terms. The spark of conscience came first. Institutions were built to preserve and transmit those hard-won insights. At least in principle, they exist to cultivate independent judgment, moral reasoning, and accountability to something beyond blood, tribe, or caste. They orient the mind toward truth.

Legal institutions in India were not the fruit of moral or philosophical insight—colonial powers imposed them. Once handed over to Indian control, the spirit of justice, institutional restraint, and the rule of law were gutted and perverted. Bureaucrats extract bribes—and take sadistic pleasure in doing so.

Severed from any moral foundation, institutions lose meaning. In a culture where virtues are unrewarded and even punished, character is a liability. Survival depends not on principle, but on cunning.

Whether in the family, at school, in the temple, or in the state, Indian institutions exist primarily to control, entrench hierarchy, and enable predation. Teachers demand rote obedience. Religious leaders enforce hollow rituals, not reflection. The individual’s moral development is not merely neglected—it is systematically crushed.

It took me more than a year of living in the UK even to begin grasping what “truth” meant. Until then, truth was simply whatever worked in the moment, whatever was most expedient.

Until this fundamental divergence between the West and India is acknowledged, one side will continue to believe it is engaged in a shared moral conversation. At the same time, the other will merely calculate how best to exploit its terms.

Christian missionaries and British administrators tried to awaken a moral conscience in India. But after three centuries, their influence remained largely superficial. Whatever gains were made have since decayed into mimicry—gestures without conviction, language without inner transformation. Lacking deep roots, these borrowed ideals now obstruct real, bottom-up reform.

What is often mistaken for “honor” in India is, in truth, ego. When a daughter is raped, the family’s first instinct is not to seek justice, but to suppress the event. Were it true honor they wished to preserve, they would hunt down the perpetrator without pause. But it is not virtue they fear losing—it is face. What drives them is not moral outrage but social embarrassment.

What we call “honor killing” should, more truthfully, be called “ego killing.”

Without a moral or rational compass, expediency and material gratification become the only guides. Even the superficial shame imposed by colonial presence has long since faded. However, that shame was never internalized—it was merely a superficial layer, incapable of penetrating the deeper structure of Indian psychology.

Many marriage-age Indian girls fast weekly for Lord Shiva, hoping to secure “good husbands.” But in this cultural lexicon, what counts as “good”? Ask, and the answer almost always revolves around financial status and fair skin. Skin-lightening creams, including those marketed for intimate areas, dominate the cosmetics market. Parents openly inquire about the bribes a prospective groom receives.

In India, corruption carries no stigma; the corrupt are admired for their ability to extract and manipulate. Power—not character—is the highest virtue. This logic defines what matters to the bride, her family, and society as a whole.

Guilt and gratitude are hard to find.

I remember the arranged marriage of a female relative. Nearly a hundred people from the groom’s side traveled from a distant city. As hosts, my grandfather and father bore all expenses and provided the dowry. But after the ceremony—once the bride had moved to the groom’s hotel—the family made a fresh demand for a substantial additional dowry. They hinted at returning the bride if the payment wasn’t made—a threat they knew would never be acted upon, since the marriage had been consummated.

In a society where apathy is the norm, where relatives gossip about your pain or quietly savor it, there was no choice but to scramble for the money, whatever the cost, however deep the shame. This is life in a culture built on mistrust, where institutions are arbitrary and power overrides principle.

I remember the sinking feeling of that night—a familiar, formless dread I had grown up with, one that clung to me for decades, even after I left India. It was a floating abstraction, unmoored from anything objective. Born of arbitrariness, it defied resolution through simple introspection.

Despite years of inner work—deconstructing the mind and rebuilding it from the ground up—the scars remain, along with many unknown unknowns. I still catch myself hesitating over matters that, had my cognitive wiring been cleaner—fewer scars, more moral resoluteness—would feel instinctively clear.

The work was not just about managing anxiety, but about dismantling the very structure of thought and decision-making. Without a taught social conduct and mental skills rooted in reason and morality—a kind of civilizational hardwiring of the mind—the raw instincts of the flesh, and what might be called sins—envy, lust, covetousness—govern it. If such a mind is intelligent, it simply rationalizes its sinful nature.

This is the Catch-22: how does one use such a mind to resolve its own problems? Even someone who longs for change must spend decades—perhaps a lifetime—in a Sisyphean task. Which is precisely why almost no one dares to begin.

Amorality produces a social horror, leaving no one truly better off. Among the poor, life is governed by a poverty instinct—an unthinking surrender to impulse, a compulsive descent into short-term gratification. Worse, every decision seems to spiral downward, almost suicidally, as if their compass points toward the cesspool—one a rational observer might not even know existed, let alone imagine anyone would return to after being offered a way out. “The dog returns to its vomit, and the sow that was washed returns to her wallowing in the mud.” Offer them opportunities, extend help, and yet they slide back—effortlessly, almost mechanically—into the same wretchedness.

Among the powerful, things are no better. They are atomized and paranoid; the closer they are to someone, the less they trust them. Their days are consumed by scheming, extracting, and indulging the same base instincts. Even when they succeed financially, they remain anxious and joyless. Once their youth fades, their bodies and minds begin to decay. Their wealth—often built on the mindset of expropriation of public resources—leaves them in an ecology that is ugly, polluted, unsafe, and spiritually barren. Their children, raised without conscience or purpose, grow up self-absorbed, incapable of value creation—a liability, and often, their greatest threat. Intelligence without morality may be an engine, but it is a rudderless one.

Someone raised in a society grounded in morality and reason might assume that shedding magical thinking, creating a moral fabric, or escaping the anxiety bred by an arbitrary, Orwellian environment, is as easy as flipping a switch. But that is projection. He mistakes his own moral and cognitive framework for a universal baseline. Moral people struggle to grasp the nature of evil and depravity; intelligent people, the depth of stupidity.

I often wonder what the emotional inner world must look like for others, especially young girls from lower castes growing up in the slums. If one dared to psychoanalyze it honestly, one might not find agency or reflection at all, but something mechanical, almost unconscious—a mind shaped not by values, but by raw survival.

On the many occasions I’ve tried to help, I’ve rarely encountered righteous indignation. What I found instead was a readiness to barter dignity for crumbs. They were sheepish—unable or unwilling to assert themselves—and betrayed those trying to help, without guilt, without hesitation. There was no horizon of tomorrow—only the hunger and bargaining of now.

I once had a maid—a beautiful woman in her early thirties—with six or seven children, all of whom were daughters, except for the youngest. One day, she arrived with one side of her face so swollen that her eye had nearly vanished. She confided in me about her life.

As a young girl, she had been kidnapped by a man and locked away in a remote village, completely cut off from escape or help. In her world, a girl who had been raped was seen as public property. Her family would have disowned her, society would have shunned her, and no institution would offer protection or support—she knew instinctively that the very systems meant to guard the vulnerable preyed on them.

The man who had abducted her became, in time, the person I came to know as her husband.

Naive and idealistic, I encouraged her to report the incident to the police and enroll her daughters in school. Then one day, I noticed that her eldest, around thirteen years old, had been missing for several days. Calmly, almost casually, she told me she had sent the girl to someone unknown, far from Delhi. She had, in effect, sold her own daughter to sexual slavery.

It became clear she was not just a victim of her culture, but a vessel for perpetuating it. I gave up trying to change her world. These days, I observe events in India as I would a documentary—distant, unalterable, and morally inert. It is what it is. Indignation has no purchase in a society without moral architecture.

Many of society’s ills are intricately intertwined. Whether through fear, ignorance, or self-interest, whole communities become complicit. These abuses cannot be undone by law or policy alone—especially in a culture that lacks the will, the conscience, or the imagination to change.

Women being arrested and then raped at police stations is tragically common. When I was at university, a group of boys visited a prostitute. The police raided the brothel, took a bribe, and let the boys go. The woman was detained. I later learned she could barely walk the next day—raped by the very officers sworn to protect her. The judge showed no interest in her condition. Society believed she had gotten what she deserved.

Fairness and justice are alien concepts to Indians. Ask someone to be considerate, and they often laugh. Worse still, many take pleasure in cruelty.

When I first lived in the UK, I had very little money. I survived on rotten potatoes, boiled rice, baked beans, and peanut butter. Yet many who knew my situation helped me find work. Institutions supported me, though, in hindsight, it was not their duty to assist an international student who claimed he could support himself.

In India, the opposite holds true: the higher one rises, the more predatory and sadistic one becomes. Every institutional interaction is transactional. Favors are granted with condescension and always come at a price. Strangers constantly size you up. If you come from a lower-class family, you face open abuse, exploitation, and degradation.

Over time, media exposure and Western feminist influence produced a patchwork of pro-women laws. But these laws were built on sand. Without the philosophical foundations that guided British legal reform—principles such as individual rights, due process, and moral reasoning—these laws yielded unintended consequences, exacerbating the situation. Concepts such as individual rights, due process, and universal justice—born from centuries of legal evolution in the West—found no fertile soil in India. The result was not justice, but distortion.

Without a moral culture, institutions decay into tools of manipulation and control, perpetuating the very abuses they claim to prevent. The police continued to prey on the most vulnerable—poor women and orphaned boys—where sodomy was disturbingly common. Male victims who sought help at police stations were mocked, dismissed, or further victimized.

The new legal framework enabled imprisonment based solely on accusations of rape, without requiring evidence. A woman could live with a man for years and later accuse him of rape throughout the relationship. In a functioning system, such claims would warrant serious investigation. Instead, a toxic combination of cowardice, opportunism, stupidity, and corruption caused police to shirk their duties. They passed unexamined cases to the courts, focusing instead on extracting bribes.

Corrupt judges, eager to appear virtuous, accepted a woman’s word at face value—even when evidence suggested otherwise—condemning men to prison as cases dragged on for years or decades. More commonly, however, the judge took a hefty bribe on the first day and let the accused walk free.

Over time, many middle-class women came to believe they could act with impunity. Today, any legal dispute involving a woman is reflexively recast as sexual assault, regardless of evidence or facts. Meanwhile, most genuine cases of rape go unreported. It is not uncommon for a real victim who insists on pursuing justice against a powerful man to vanish with police complicity.

In a society steeped in cowardice, subservience, intellectual laziness—and indeed, cuckishness—people habitually believe a woman’s word over objective truth. Indian men exalt women publicly while surrendering moral authority within their own homes. Mothers wield near-total control over child-rearing, shaping the emotional and ethical worldview of the next generation. In practice, India is not a patriarchy but a matriarchy—one that rules through emotional blackmail, superstition, and passive domination rather than moral guidance or rational order.

This emotional matriarchy leaves a deep imprint on children. Boys grow up without a model of principled masculinity, facing only a choice between tyrannical fathers and emotionally manipulative mothers. Girls learn that power lies in passive aggression, guilt, and appearance. The result is a society where neither gender is equipped to think morally, act rationally, or take responsibility. Children are not taught to cultivate conscience or independent judgment; instead, they absorb a worldview shaped by superstition, shame, and emotional coercion—passed down uncritically from one generation to the next.

It is crucial to emphasize that the public exaltation of women in India is not rooted in respect because respect, as a virtue, requires both morality and reason. What masquerades as reverence is a projection of women’s perceived sexual power, mixed with a shallow substitute for intimacy and self-worth. But this idolization is unstable. Just as a powerful man is swiftly cut down when he loses status, a woman who appears vulnerable—especially before a faceless crowd of men—can quickly become a target. Without moral foundations, the same impulses that worship her can turn predatory in an instant.

Women should have gained awareness of their rights. However, the very idea of rights does not take root in a culture where moral introspection and rational thought have never been cultivated. Without that foundation, any privilege extended to women is quickly weaponized, stripped of principle, and bent to serve personal advantage. Such privileges are not even well-meaning to begin with; they are granted for the sake of demagoguery.

When I was growing up, profanity marked you as low-class. Boys and girls sat in separate rows, and girls dressed modestly, with legs and chests fully covered. Promiscuity was unheard of in small-town life, though rumors attributed it to remote villages untouched by Victorian shame. Divorce was virtually nonexistent. Even drinking was hidden: bars had curtained booths, and alcohol itself was a source of quiet disgrace.

Then came the internet. It opened up unprecedented communication channels with the West and flooded India with opportunity. As the country absorbed vast amounts of the West’s back-office work, many believed this exposure would educate, uplift, and civilize Indians. Closer connection with the West promised economic growth, cultural refinement, female empowerment, and perhaps even a moral renaissance.

Over time, it became clear that India had not absorbed the West’s highest values. It had latched onto the lowest. Divorce rates soared in major cities. Drinking became a sign of sophistication, while those who abstained were mocked. Promiscuity, once unthinkable, spread rapidly. Women began stepping out in short pajamas almost overnight. In a total inversion of what we once admired—refinement, self-restraint, manners—low-class behavior became aspirational.

Western feminism—once rooted in deep philosophical struggles for liberty, personhood, and dignity—was imported into India stripped of its moral foundation. It arrived as fashion, not philosophy. Empowerment was reduced to vulgarity, rebellion to posturing. Instead of cultivating strength through self-possession or inner clarity, Indian women were encouraged to mimic the most garish traits of the West’s cultural underclass: aggression without courage, sexuality without self-respect, and outrage without introspection. What should have sparked a moral awakening became a spectacle of borrowed rage, untethered from any inner struggle for truth.

Indian television began romanticizing the mythical past while promoting some of the worst modern vices—unhealthy relationships, casual sex, and substance abuse. Growing up, we were utterly unaware of drugs; now, their use is rampant. A few decades ago, Indian girls would never have used profanities. Today, vulgarity is a badge of sophistication. To appear “cool,” a girl must casually deploy the most grotesque language.

“Wokeness” has been imported wholesale into India. Those who don’t virtue-signal according to its dogmas are dismissed as backward. But virtue signaling provides the illusion of moral depth without the burden of thought. With no one to challenge it, the shallow appear enlightened, facing no cost for their hypocrisy. Even abroad, Indian women have mastered the optics of social justice, fluent in its vocabulary but detached from its roots.

In India, public performance and private conduct rarely align—a contradiction smoothed over by habitual hypocrisy. The irrational mind feels no dissonance.

The West’s values were earned through centuries of religious introspection, political struggle, and moral philosophy, driven not by convenience but by conscience—a relentless pursuit of truth. India has not Westernized—it has mimicked the West’s underclass and called it progress. Education is a badge, not discipline; ethics, mere imitation; enlightenment, a caricature absorbed without effort and wielded without understanding.

Schooled in Western phrases but untouched by Western thought, India’s elite wear borrowed language like a costume, invoking liberty, dignity, and secularism without grasping their meaning. For them, modernity is a lifestyle brand, not a moral evolution. They speak of freedom while enforcing conformity. For them, hypocrisy is not a flaw—it is the organizing principle of their lives. Institutions reward appearances over truth.

The failure of the Indian elite to develop a social and moral consciousness, and worse, that the higher they go, the more sadistic and exploitative they become, ensures that India continues to degrade.

Colonialism imposed laws, language, and institutions on India, but left its conscience untouched or hardened by resentment. Modernity became a public mask, discarded in private. True civilization demands painful inner transformation, not cosmetic change.

Real progress requires confronting the void within—a spiritual emptiness that has long been ignored. Awakening cannot come from slogans or mimicry; it must be suffered into existence.

Without a foundation in morality or reason, Indians mistook Western civilization’s fruits—prosperity, pleasure, ease—for its roots. They imported only what they recognized: the indulgences of America’s underclass. The deeper virtues—introspection, discipline, spiritual ambition—remained invisible. Western ideals were stripped of substance and repurposed to satisfy the most primitive appetites.

The post Corruption Is Deep-rooted appeared first on LewRockwell.

On Tuesday, the yield on the 10-year Treasury surged nearly 10 basis points in a few hours, rising above 4.49 percent. The rising yield came after the release of new price-inflation data showing that CPI growth had hit a five-month high and remained well above the Federal Reserve’s two-percent target for price inflation. Rising yields often indicate that bond investors believe price inflation will continue to grow, so it was probably no coincidence that bond yields—especially on longer-term bonds—jumped following the report’s release.

Whatever the reason behind the rising yield, this is bad news for those who were looking for a good reason to believe that mortgage rates will significantly fall again soon. Mortgages for single-family homes closely follow the 10-year yield, and, as the 10-year yield has risen in recent years, the average 30-year mortgage more than doubled. Ity rose from under three percent in mid 2021 to above seven percent by late 2023. It has remained above six percent ever since.

Meanwhile, home prices continued to rise well into mid 2025. This combination of rising home prices and rising mortgage rates has made housing unaffordable for a growing share of propsective homebuyers.

In response to this trend, The Trump administration’s FHFA Director, Bill Pulte—a scion and nepo baby from a wealthy family of homebuilders—has demanded that the central bank intervene to force down mortgage rates in order to stimulate residential home sales and home prices. Pulte claims that Fed chairman Jerome Powell’s lack of enthusiasm for lowering interest rates is “the main reason” that there is not more home-sales activity. Pulte concludes that Powell is “hurting the mortgage market” by “improperly keeping interest rates high.” Pulte apparently believes that more people would buy homes if only the Fed fixed the situation with lower interest rates.

When the Fed intervenes to lower interest rates, monetary inflation is required. To demand lower interest rate policy—as Pulte is doing—is to demand more inflation. At the core of this inflationist position is the misconception that rising home prices—and their negative effect on homeownership—can somehow be “fixed” or rendered irrelevant by lower interest rates. This is not how things work, however. Even if mortgage rates were to go down again, rising prices mean homeowners would still be stuck with higher costs and higher property taxes that result from rising prices. Moreover, Pulte is wrong to even assume that Fed intervention via the policy interest rate would somehow, magically, bring down 30-year mortgage rates.

Problems with Rising Home Prices 

Last week, we explored the many ways that the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy and asset purchases have fueled rising home prices. There is a close correlation between the central bank’s purchases of mortgage backed securities, the falling federal funds rate, and rising home prices. Falling interest rates have fueled rising home prices. This has led to historic lows in the affordability of homeownership, and a rising average age for home owners.

As home prices have risen, homes have become less affordable. Notably, the median home price has become much larger over time, when compared to the median household income. In 1985, for example, the median home price was 3.6 times the size of annual median household income. By 2023, the median home price was 5.3 times the median household income.

Source: US Census Bureau (MSPUS and MEHOINUSA646N)

Rather than address the larger issues of asset-price inflation fueled by easy money, advocates of central planning, like Pulte, insist that the best way to “solve” the problem is to have the central bank somehow force down mortgage rates.

Assuming that the central bank has the power to do this, would it make housing more affordable? In certain ways, yes. If the only measure of affordability is the size of the monthly mortgage payment, then lower mortgage rates, all else being equal, make home purchases more affordable. For example, a $500,000 loan at 3% for 30 years will require a monthly payment (on principle and interest) of about $2100. On the other hand, the same loan at 6% will require a monthly payment of nearly 3,000 per month.

But, monthly costs associated with a home purchase do not consist of only payments on a loan’s principal and interest. Homeowners must also pay property taxes and insurance. Home buyers must also come up with down payments which, of course, are proportional to the home price. Thus, home-price inflation leads to higher down payments while also driving up property taxes—which are also tied to the home price. The monetary inflation that underlies rising home prices also tends to inflate the price of services like homeowner’s insurance. Principal and interest may be fixed in a 30-year mortgage, but taxes and insurance—which increase with price inflation—are not fixed. Thus, these costs are certainly not made irrelevant by falling interest rates.

It is not surprising that, as home prices increased in the wake of the covid panic’s runaway monetary inflation, the Atlanta Fed’s affordability index plummeted to historic lows.

Source: Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank.

We can partly see why this happened if we compare prices and income over time. In 1985, for example, the median home price was about $81,000, but rose by 406 percent to about $426,000 in 2023. Obviously, any taxes, insurance, and down payments that are proportional to the home price were far lower in 1985 than they are now. Moreover, as home prices quintupled from 1985 to 2023, median household income only increased by 241 percent, rising from about $23,000 in 1985 to $84,000 in 2023.

Source: US Census Bureau (MSPUS and MEHOINUSA646N)

These rising prices took their toll on affordability, even as interest rates were falling. For example, from 2006 through 2021, the average mortgage rate fell consistently. Yet, during most of that period, the affordability index only moved sideways.

Moreover, this proved to be unsustainable. The problem with constantly falling interest rates is that, eventually, they get so low that there’s not room to move downward. In 2021, mortgage rates were at or near all-time lows. Yet, the very small uptick in average mortgage rates that occurred from 2021 to 2025—with rates still below historically normal levels—caused affordability to collapse.

So, Pulte is simply wrong if he’s claiming that the Fed would increase the affordability of homes if only Jerome Powell would intervene to force down mortgage rates.

Does the Fed Have the Power to Reduce Mortgage Rates?

Finally, we have to ask ourselves if the Fed even has the ability to somehow force down mortgage rates by lowering the Fed’s policy interest rate. It appears that this may be possible some of the time. For example, from 2008 to 2022—a period when bond investors showed little concern over deficits or price inflation—both long-term and short-term yields declined as the Fed cut the target policy interest rate.

Those days, however, appear to be over. For example, when the Fed cut the policy rate in September of last year, the average mortgage rate increased. In the wake of the Federal Reserve’s extreme monetary inflation of 2020-2021, and as federal deficits continue to mount bond yields are likely to increase if the Fed tries to embrace a new easy money stance pushing lower interest rates.

Source: Freddie Mac.

Not only is Pulte wrong that falling mortgage rates necessarily make homeownership more affordable, he is also probably wrong that the Fed can reduce those rates by targeting a lower policy rate. If Pulte really wanted to see homes become more affordable, he would push for less monetary inflation and for lower federal deficits. He would push for the Fed to reduce its balance sheet of mortgage backed securities. All that, however, would lead to falling home prices, and that would run afoul of the administration’s Wall Street allies who incessantly demand more asset price inflation.

The post It Will Take More Than Low Interest Rates To Make Houses Affordable appeared first on LewRockwell.

What goes on in Washington is underappreciated for those of us who like a bit of humor mixed in with our politics. This past week we have been treated to a whole series of malapropisms coming out of the mouth of President Donald Trump, including the questioning of the president of Liberia Joseph Boakai by Trump over how he speaks such excellent English. “Such good English,” Trump said. “Where did you learn to speak so beautifully? In Liberia? That’s very interesting. Where were you educated? Where? In Liberia? Well, that’s very interesting. It’s beautiful English. I have people at this table who can’t speak nearly as well.” Trump presumably was not briefed on the fact that Liberia was founded by the United States to give a home to freed African-American slaves in the early 1800s and became a nation in 1847. English is its official language.

But far better than that brief interlude has been the week-long battle over releasing the “client lists” and other documents and material ostensibly relating to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Epstein became an extremely wealthy man with luxury homes in New York City and Palm Beach as well as a ranch in New Mexico and the private Epstein Island in the US Virgin Islands, which can reached only by boat. All his other properties were connected by virtue of his private jetliner the “Lolita Express.” Insofar as can be determined, though not actually demonstrated given the lack of documentation, Epstein may have made his millions through exploitation of pedophilia, recruiting underage girls to submit to rape to sexually service his wealthy male clients, who might then have been blackmailed.

Compilations of some publicly available court records reveal that Epstein entertained at least twenty-one billionaires, as well as leading political figures like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and also four former Israeli prime ministers. Clinton allegedly flew on the “Lolita Express” twenty-six times. And there were many celebrities like Prince Andrew and Robert Kraft. There is also a surprising number of Silicon Valley personalities including Bill Gates and Sergey Brin. Epstein also was a great pal of Donald Trump during their younger days when Trump was at Mar a Lago and Epstein had a waterfront mansion in Palm Beach, with Trump describing Epstein as his “best friend.” Epstein was eventually arrested on sex trafficking of minors charges and died in a New York City jail in August 2019 in what has been described by police and the White House as a suicide but which many believe to have been murder by the government to silence him.

One of the great mysteries of Epstein is how he made his vast fortune. Was he blackmailing his “clients” while having sex with the underaged women using films made from concealed video cameras in his various residences? Or was there something more sinister, like an intelligence connection with the Israeli Mossad or the CIA? There were some clear connections with Israel with the four former Israeli prime ministers having visited him at his mansion in New York City. A number of his billionaire friends were Jews with close connections to the Israeli government and Epstein’s girlfriend (and procurer) was Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of a prominent Israeli spy, Robert Maxwell. But the suggestion of an intelligence connection would require answers to two questions: first, what kind of information could he have hoped to obtain from his clients? And two, who would be willing to pay large sums of money for whatever information he would acquire from old men sleeping with 13 year old girls?

Drawing of my own experiences as a CIA officer in Europe during the seventies and eighties, operations using women to entice prominent men were called “honeypots” or “honeytraps.” They were only used in certain geographic areas where there were foreign diplomats from countries that were considered not friendly and therefore targets for recruitment. As I recall Vienna was particularly favored as it had numerous Russians and Eastern Europeans resident in the city during the Cold War doing jobs that linked them to their respective governments. The objective was to draw them into an illicit relationship and eventually convince them, usually by offering them money, to share the information they had about the intentions of their governments lest they be exposed for their private behavior.

As it seems unlikely that Epstein was engaged in out-and-out blackmail, perhaps the answers to those questions about what he was up to are among the many records detailing Epstein’s associates and his contacts. Trump the presidential candidate promised to make public the thousands of documents, videos and photos that were found in a safe in his New York City. If the records are ever made public, they might confirm that Epstein was indeed working for Israel, which I believe to be the case, and that would have provided motive to silence him. Imagine, for example, if it were to be confirmed that Epstein and his contacts were part of some massive spying/influencing operation directed against the US government and the American people? That would not go down well, particularly as it is well known inside counterintelligence circles in Washington that Israel is undoubtedly the most active foreign government in spying on the US and interfering in American government policies, witness only for example what it taking place in the Middle East currently with Donald Trump dancing to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tune. And there is a precedent in large scale spying by the Jewish state in the so-called “art students” selling cosmetics at American malls before 9/11.

In any event, Donald Trump became president based on his promises to end wars and challenge the deep state by exposing the documents and stories behind Epstein, JFK, RFK and 9/11. He has, unfortunately, reneged on those promises though he has now kicked the ball down the court by ordering his Attorney General Pam Bondi to go through the Epstein material and release whatever is “credible.” If, as I suspect, Trump is trying the suppress the material revealing his closeness to Epstein, she will be loyal to her boss, find little of interest and, in particular, nothing that is incriminating in terms of the president.

Nor is Pam Bondi likely to confirm evidence of Israel’s possible spying through creation of some kind of cooperative arrangement with a large group of elite Americans who have been blackmailed. One should take note that Trump indicated initially that he would not pursue the Epstein issue just after Benjamin Netanyahu had three meetings with him during a visit that was sought by the Israeli prime minister and there was uncharacteristically no press conference afterwards to describe what was discussed. Netanyahu is known to be in political trouble in Israel due to his corruption trial and a rift with the United States at this time would be far from welcome for his supporters back at home. By that thinking, Netanyahu may have appeared in Washington to add Israel’s voice to that of the ruling deep state that release of Epstein information is a no-no. If the Epstein files were to be released, then all the effort put into collecting blackmail capability over what might be regarded as the American ruling class would be wasted. If the files are released and the information is public, the possible blackmail information, if it exists, would be mostly useless. And, more importantly, the American public would learn that Israel is seeking to blackmail the American elite to serve Israel’s, not America’s, interest.

To conclude where this article began with the impulsive belligerency and tone deafness of the current administration, President Donald Trump doesn’t want the support of any MAGA members who demand the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files and he is prepared to tell them so to their faces. That is the message he sent out in a Wednesday morning social-media diatribe followed by comments made later at the White House. Trump condemned his “PAST” supporters of buying into “bullshit.” Then he broke with them completely, saying: “Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!” He doubled down later in the day, again referring to those demanding more information as “stupid people” doing the Democrats’ work, words that he might very well live to regret!

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

The post What’s Going on in the ‘Honeypot?’ appeared first on LewRockwell.