Lew Rockwell Institute

Since the wildfires (which, in my California childhood and girlhood, used to be called “forest fires”) broke out last week in Los Angeles, I have been living in a kind of anguish. It is not, of course, thankfully, the material agony faced by the millions of people now in a hellscape that used to be a paradise, or the unimaginable agony faced by the tens of thousands who have lost their homes and belongings.

Mine is an intellectual misery, rather, as I watch something unfold that is clearly, to me at least, the latest Pearl Harbor in our history.

It is so clear to me that events in Los Angeles constitute an attack that is part of a war. Pearl Harbor was the second attack on our homeland since the War of 1812; 9/11 was the third; and the Battle of Los Angeles is the fourth.

In order to make that statement, I have to explain again what a war is. Since April of 2020, when Brian O’Shea first explained to me “unrestricted warfare’, that Chinese Communist concept and goal, and that the CCP makes war in ways with which Westerners were unfamiliar, I have been persuaded by his argument that we are under attack unconventionally from multiple directions.

To recap: “unrestricted warfare” is a method of degrading the resources and morale of the enemy so thoroughly, bit by bit, that a shot need not be fired.

Brian gave me a dramatic image familiar to China hawks, in explaining this concept: we in the West expect to see war as an invasion or a bombing attack or to see enemy boots on the ground. We expect armies in uniforms on a battlefield, facing off.

But the goal of “unrestricted warfare” is to surround the enemy before the enemy even realizes what is happening.

Western warfare, he explained, is like chess: clearly marked kings and queens and knights squaring off directly against one another. The CCP’s “unrestricted warfare,” in contrast, is like the ancient Chinese game of Go, in which the goal is steadily, stealthily to surround, and thus paralyze, your opponent.

If you understand this concept, most of the last five years make sense. You are also more likely to survive what is — a war.

I do not mean to suggest, as those who follow my work know, that we are under attack by the CCP alone. The alliance is global and multifaceted: the WEF, WHO, Bill Gates, tech bros, “globalist technocrat oligarchs”, to hammer out a phrase; the aligned Bad Actors.

I have explained that the mRNA injections (the Pfizer version made by BioNTech, according to my original research, in a MOU with the Chinese Communist Party) and our pharmaceutical supply in general, now held hostage by China, are part of this “unrestricted warfare” against us. The “mandates”, that stripped us of thousands of able-bodied and experienced firefighters, police, soldiers and sailors, special forces operators, EMTs, and other health care workers — the key people who can protect “the homeland” in the event of an attack — were part of this warfare. The purchasing of farmland by China (and by its proxy, Canada) and China’s purchasing of farmland near 19 of our military bases in what The New York Post calls an “alarming” threat to our national security — ditto.

A treasonous administration in which the President’s son, Hunter Biden, accepted what may have been vast sums of money from China, unrelated to legitimate business dealings — has been part of this war. The Chinese “weather balloon” — per the Chinese Embassy and much of our legacy media — but “spy balloon,” per our intelligence community, that traversed the United States continent, and which no doubt mapped military installations and other infrastructure on its path, and about which we were told by our leadership not to worry, is part of this war. (Did you know, by the way, that this spy balloon had been permitted to use a US telecommunications company to communicate with China, on its journey? Neither had I. That kind of coordination used to be called both espionage and treason and would properly be a capital sentence for whoever facilitated these communications and this operation.)

Of course, 16 to 30 million people, millions of them men of military age, with military bearing and training, and from nations such as Azerbaijan and Somalia and Afghanistan, that export mercenaries, entering the US via a staged three-nation operation underwritten by the US State Department and the United Nations, to be met by a State Department-funded “Welcome Corps”, are part of that war.

Of course these foreigners vanishing into the interior, or being housed in barracks-type accommodation, including at sensitive sites such as Chicago O’Hare airport, in housing paid for by the US Government, is part of this war.

That is all a staging operation.

Of course, the fact that some of them are terrorists or aligned with terrorist nations, and that, according to former border agent JJ Carrell, in the past they’d be interviewed by the FBI and deported, but now they are simply let go into the interior, is part of that war.

JJ Carrell testified to Congress that over 250,000 “special interest aliens” have now entered the United States.

Of course, “Sanctuary cities” that position these potentially violent men across our nation, are part of this war. Of course, the otherwise insane “defund the police” movement, that sprang up like crocuses in the Spring, out of nowhere, is part of this war.

Now – obviously – in Los Angeles, this stealthy war had moved from being latent, staging its various elements and features across our nation, to becoming “hot” or “kinetic,” as veterans such as my husband would say.

The painful aspect of this moment is that our country for the most part does not realize that there has been a “hot” attack on the US, covered via the narrative and reality of the Los Angeles wildfires.

Let me restate (as I feel I have been doing since I wrote my 2007 book about how democracies die, The End of America) that in crisis narratives designed to destroy Republics or Parliamentary democracies, a disaster can be real and also be exploited and manipulated.

What if an attack was waged on the US homeland, but no one realized it because it was simply called something else?

That is what we are seeing now, in my view: a war in plain sight, an attack on our second largest city, but one that is brilliantly concealed from the public by simply being narrated to obscure its nature.

Yes, the attack started with wildfires. But every year has wildfire season in California. What was different?

As fires broke out in Pacific Palisades last Tuesday, then continued day after day to spread to other areas in the city, LA Mayor Karen Bass was in — Accra, Ghana. Why? “The mayor was selected by President Joe Biden as one of his four-member presidential delegation to attend the inauguration of the African nation’s incoming president, John Dramani Mahama.”

It is unusual if not weird for a President to ask a city Mayor, who does not work for the Federal government, and who has no current connection to the US embassy in Ghana, to represent the US government on a trip of this kind. US Ambassador Virginia Palmer would represent the US typically at an inauguration in her assigned country.

Yet the Presidential delegation with its abruptly chosen member from LA, did not even make it onto the US Embassy in Ghana’s website.

The White House announced this four-person delegation on January 3 — just four days before the Ghanaian Inauguration on January 7. All of this is unusually sudden and somewhat random protocol.

Look at the delegation members:

President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. today announced the designation of a Presidential Delegation to attend the Inauguration of His Excellency John Dramani Mahama on January 7, 2025, in Accra, Ghana.

The Honorable Shalanda D. Young, Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget, will lead the delegation.

Members of the Presidential Delegation:

The Honorable Virginia E. Palmer, United States Ambassador to the Republic of Ghana

The Honorable Karen Bass, Mayor of Los Angeles, California

The Honorable Frances Z. Brown, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs, National Security Council, The White House.

So — the Director of OMB, one of the most important and powerful agencies in the US, and the one that oversees funding and that is in charge of identifying financial corruption — odd, needed elsewhere, but ok; the US Ambassador to Ghana, yes of course; a top specialist on Africa in the National Security Council, yes, makes sense; and — the mayor of Los Angeles?

One thing in this picture does not belong.

Then – last Tuesday and Wednesday, as firefighters bravely sought to manage the spreading infernos, a key reservoir was empty. Why? Cosmetic repairs to its cover. The hydrants in the affluent neighborhood of Pacific Palisades were dry, as the Los Angeles Times reported.

“The Santa Ynez Reservoir was out of use and closed for repairs to its cover, leaving a 117-million-gallon water storage complex empty in the heart of the Palisades, […]

The large reservoir, had it been operable, could have helped with extending water pressure in the Palisades on Tuesday night, but only for a time, a former DWP general manager told Hamilton.”

This kind of activity — creating a context of vulnerability – is standard in preparing for an attack in a “hot war.”

It is called sabotage: cutting the supply lines to a targeted population. You have to look at what actually happened in Los Angeles, rather than listen to what events are being called.

This all may be being called incompetence in the local media, but it looks like war preparation and war engagement to me. (This tactic of the leader being absent before a crisis by fire, is part of a playbook, it appears.

Then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison was also on vacation when wildfires devastated formerly protected acres in Australia in 2019, destroying millions of animals and precious ecosystems and thus opening these acres up for development and exploitation. He too, as DailyClout.io’s original reporting showed at the time, could have called for firefighting planes in a treaty with the US Forest Service, and chose not to do so).

Then — ten thousand homes were reported to have been destroyed, and by yesterday, ten people were confirmed dead (the number today has risen to 16).

180,000 people were reported to have been displaced, as multiple fires assailed and destroyed much of what had been some of the most valuable and beautiful real estate in the nation — the neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, along with iconic homes along the shoreline; and as fires threatened Mandeville Canyon and Brentwood and Encino and Pasadena; and destroyed Altadena.

As I write, multiple fires are still burning, pouring toxins into the atmosphere, and winds are expected to pick up tomorrow and Tuesday, threatening more destruction. The scenes were unforgettable; a raging red-magenta glow like the mouth of Hell stretched across the legendary, familiar, sparkling night horizon, and extended what seemed like miles into the jet-black sky.

Read the Whole Article

The post What Is a War? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The pious display of Jimmy Carter’s casket was a last-ditch attempt to give U.S. politics an image of unity, dignity, decency, and decorum.

The funeral pageantry and tributes to the late Jimmy Carter seemed a tad contrived, as if America’s political establishment was trying its best to project an image of national unity and reverential soul – at a time when the country is irrevocably, bitterly divided and its institutions are tarnished beyond redemption.

Carter died at the age of 100 on December 29 – the longest-lived U.S. president in history – and was given a state funeral on January 9 in the National Cathedral in Washington. A national day of mourning was declared, and flags flew at half mast on public buildings.

The drawn-out funeral arrangement seemed to give the media endless scope for nostalgia about a humble peanut farmer who became president for one term between 1977 and 1981. The rose-tinted view of Carter’s legacy harked to a time of supposed decency and bipartisan civility in American politics.

The contrast with the present partisan enmity in U.S. politics could not be sharper. The contempt between Democrats and Republicans could not be more vicious.

Republican President-elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20. He takes over from Democrat Joe Biden. The vaunted peaceful transfer of power is a charade. During the election campaign last year, Biden repeatedly called Trump the “biggest threat to our democracy.” This was a reference to Trump’s demagoguery and fascist proclivities.

Yet, at the funeral for Carter, Trump was seated beside former Democrat President Barack Obama, chatting and smiling before the service. Also sitting in the front rows were Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost the election to Trump – despite her condemnations also lambasting Trump as a threat to democracy.

The contrived bonhomie between Obama and Trump was cringemaking. Trump had stoked the false claims about “Kenyan-born” Obama not being an American citizen and dog-whistled racist hatred by referring to him as Barack Hussein Obama.

Two days before Carter’s funeral, Trump was mouthing off about forcibly taking back the Panama Canal and he trashed Carter for signing away American ownership of the canal in 1977.

The top mourners in the National Cathedral included former presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush.

The church pews were more fitting of the dock at the Nuremberg Trials for war criminals.

Biden gave an oration for his “close friend” as if to grift off the image of Carter as a benign Commander-in-Chief.

Biden couldn’t resist sticking it to Trump with pointed “lessons” from Carter’s life of humility, public service and lack of ego. Biden also said Carter was an exemplar of resisting “the greatest sin – the abuse of power.”

How absurdly rich that Biden should stand up to lecture on not abusing power after he used his presidential office to pardon his convicted criminal son. Biden is rushing through preemptive pardons for people that the Democrats fear the Trump administration will go after in reprisal prosecutions.

When Jimmy Carter won the election in 1976, he was a relative breath of fresh air in the corrupt milieu of Washington. It was after the Watergate scandal of the Richard Nixon presidency, which was notorious for lies and political intrigue. It was also the end of the shameful Vietnam War – an imperialist genocide waged on lies about defending democracy against communism in Southeast Asia.

But Carter’s presidency wasn’t distinguished by greatness. He lost the 1980 election to Republican Ronald Reagan owing to a mess over the Iranian revolution kicking out the US-backed client dictatorship of Shah Pahlavi in Tehran.

Carter’s long post-presidential career as a humanitarian envoy in a private capacity did gain international respect. But in later life, he was outspokenly critical of his own nation’s politics. Carter denounced the distorting effect of big money in American elections. He said with candid truth that the U.S. was no longer a democracy but rather had become an oligarchy.

Trump’s incoming administration has more billionaires than any previous one in history. Chief among them is South African-born tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, the richest man in the U.S., who donated $250 million to the Trump campaign.

American democracy died decades ago. The exact death knell is debatable. Was it the CIA assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963, or was it the vote-rigging theft of the presidential election in 1960 by JFK with the help of the Mafia?

Was it the Vietnam War that killed millions of Vietnamese that Carter’s election tried to redeem? Or was it Carter’s support for Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, a network of Islamists that evolved into Al Qaeda terrorists?

The same terrorists who Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden bombed multiple countries to supposedly defeat? The same terrorists who have taken over Syria and whom the U.S. media is busily whitewashing as a legitimate government in Damascus.

Or did U.S. democracy die when Teddy Roosevelt grabbed Panama with imperialist thuggery to construct the 80-kilometer canal (1904-1914)? The canal that Trump wants to grab back – by military force if needs be.

Or was it the failed fascist coup against another Roosevelt, FDR, in 1933, by Nazi-supporting American corporate leaders?

Or the rise of the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his valedictory speech in 1961? Or the creation of the CIA assassination organization in 1947, which Eisenhower later ordered to carry out the coups in Iran and Guatemala in 1953 and 54?

Or was it slave-owning “Founding Fathers” at the birth of the United States of America who went on to exterminate native Americans to steal their lands?

The web of lies and deception in American imperialist politics runs deep and wide. All of the above is but a glimpse of the nefarious disease.

The precise date of death for American pretensions of democracy is hard to determine.

But what we see now in the present day is a moribund state of corruption, lies, and loathing where the office is an openly oligarchic plaything, where foreign policy and imperialist bullying will henceforth be conducted by billionaires via Twitter. The mutual contempt for democracy among American political puppets of the warmongering oligarchy is no longer concealed.

The pious display of Jimmy Carter’s casket was a last-ditch attempt to give U.S. politics an image of unity, dignity, decency, and decorum.

American democracy was buried a long time ago.

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

The post Farewell to Jimmy Carter… and American Democracy appeared first on LewRockwell.

The New American Cold War Against China

Over the last year I gradually became familiar with Chas Freeman, one of America’s most distinguished professional diplomats and a longtime expert on China. Despite his illustrious career, he had rarely appeared anywhere in our mainstream media, but once I discovered his interviews on several YouTube channels, I was extremely impressed by the depth of his knowledge and analysis, so I published an article presenting his views.

In one of his public lectures, he suggested that America’s new Cold War against China had many similarities to our previous conflict against the USSR, except that this time we were playing the role of our old vanquished adversary, an analogy I had frequently expressed myself:

In international affairs, as in physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Our actions have stimulated China to mirror, meet, and match our military hostility to it. We are now in an arms race with China, and it is far from clear that we are holding our own…

Despite China’s remarkable military buildup, Beijing has so far kept defense spending well below two percent of GDP. Meanwhile, cost control continues to elude the Pentagon. DoD has never passed an audit and is infamous for the waste, fraud, and mismanagement that result from its reliance on cost-plus procurement from the U.S. equivalent of profit-driven state-owned enterprises – military-industrial corporate bureaucracies whose revenues (and profits) come entirely from the government. The U.S. defense budget is out of control in terms of our ability to pay for it.

Four decades ago, the United States bankrupted the Soviet Union by forcing it to devote ever more of its economy to defense while neglecting the welfare of its citizens. Now we Americans are diverting ever more borrowed and taxpayer dollars to our military even as our human and physical infrastructure decays. In some ways, in relation to China, we are now in the position of the USSR in the Cold War. Our fiscal trajectory is injurious to the general welfare of Americans. That, along with our liberties, is, however, what our armed forces are meant to defend.

• Ambassador Chas Freeman on Our Cold War Against China
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 9, 2024 • 7,500 Words

Around that same time, someone else brought to my attention some of the YouTube channels created by Westerners who documented their travels to various foreign lands including China, or those who had actually moved to that country and were living there. I was fascinated to discover the existence of such widespread sources of personal, first-hand information about the reality of life in that enormous country, including both its huge cities and its small rural villages. After spending a couple of days viewing dozens of such videos, I published an article presenting some of my conclusions:

From the late 1970s onward, my predictions for China’s future development had always been far more optimistic than those of anyone else whom I knew, but nonetheless I have been staggered by the astonishing scale of that country’s achievements over the last 45 years…

Consider that in 1980, the Chinese population overwhelmingly consisted of desperately impoverished peasants, far poorer than Haitians. And compare that recent past with those videos of China’s enormous, futuristic cities, now among the most advanced in the entire world, with nearly all of those gleaming, towering edifices constructed in just the last two or three decades. Obviously, nothing like this has ever previously happened in the history of the world…

As a child, I occasionally visited Disneyland, and one of the popular early attractions of that pioneering theme park was Tomorrowland, depicting the urban wonders that our future would hold. But as far as I can tell, few if any of those developments ever occurred in our own country, with California’s aging, increasingly decrepit freeways merely becoming much more congested than they were a half-century ago, and America lacking even a single mile of high-speed rail. Meanwhile, the scenes of China’s magnificent cities seem exactly like what Walt Disney had originally envisioned, but filled with far more greenery and nature areas and constructed on a scale ten-thousand times larger.

The greatest factor behind China’s tremendous success had obviously been the high ability and hard work of the Chinese people, together with the clear competence of their government and its leadership:

For decades, international testing has shown that China has the world’s highest average IQ, and this finding has dramatic implications at the top end. As physicist Steve Hsu pointed out in 2008, international psychometric data indicates that the American population probably contains some 10,000 individuals having an IQ of 160 or higher, while the total for China is around 300,000, a figure thirty times larger.

Over the last couple of generations, respectable American intellectual circles have severely anathematized this controversial topic, but scientific reality exists whether or not our elites choose to pretend otherwise. Indeed, these racial and evolutionary factors regarding the Chinese people have been completely obvious to me for nearly the last half-century, and such factors largely explained my confident expectations of China’s rise, expectations that have been proven entirely correct.

• American Pravda: Propaganda-Hoaxes vs. Chinese Reality
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 16, 2024 • 6,700 Words

A central point of that second article had been that China’s greatest resource was the large number of its highly-intelligent and well-educated citizens. As it happens, one such individual named Hua Bin had recently begun reading our website, and he left a favorable comment describing his own perspective.

…As a Chinese, I have already tuned out the dishonest western media when it comes to reporting on China (or any adversarial countries for that matter). I used to read NYT, WSJ, FT, the Economist, etc almost on daily basis, especially their reports on China, for at least 2 decades. But since 2017 or so, the bias in the reporting has become epidemic, even laughable. Now I receive most of my news from the so-called alternative media…

I myself certainly serve as a living proof of the vast changes that have happened in China – I was earning an income 6,000 times of my first job after college in 1993, when I retired 6 years ago. And no, I wasn’t a business owner either. I’d love to share some insights from an authentic local Chinese perspective.

When I checked, I discovered he’d left another favorable comment last month on one of my previous China articles, in which he had emphasized the positive traits inculcated by the Confucianist thought that has traditionally played such a central role in Chinese culture:

…One critical thing to know about China is the importance the country and its population attach to the concept of meritocracy and virture in personal behavior, economic life, and governance. This is the ideal to aspire as taught by Confucius since 500BCE. Just like the Bible, Confucius thoughts is a guide to the Chinese nation for the last 2500 years. Unlike the Bible, it is still a required part of the curriculum for every school child (except during the turbulent times of Cultural Revolution). The revival of Confucius teaching is a big part of the country’s success.

In his most recent comment, Hua also mentioned that he’d created a Substack in the last few weeks, and had begun writing various pieces on China’s economy, technology, and military preparedness against the U.S., providing links to several of these. On that Substack, he described himself as a retired business executive and geopolitical observer.

Once I began reading his posts, I was very impressed by his analysis and the wealth of detailed information he included, much of which was entirely new to me. His coverage of some of these important matters was quite extensive and he provided an important perspective I hadn’t previously encountered anywhere else. Therefore, we are republishing his Substack posts and adding him as a regular columnist to our website:

• The Chinese Perspective
  Hua Bin • The Unz Review

In addition, I’m excerpting major portions of his posts and aggregating them for this article, while retaining all his original bolding and without correcting his very minor typos.

Comparing the Chinese and American Economies

Given his business background, it’s hardly surprising that a number of his posts focused on economic matters, and these included his first, debunking the myth of Chinese underconsumption that has become so widespread among hostile Western leaders and the mainstream media outlets that function as their echo chambers. He began by emphasizing that many of the largest expenses for American consumers simply didn’t exist in China:

Very importantly, Chinese consumers spend far less on big ticket service items – rental (China home ownership is over 90% compared with 60% in the US), healthcare (largely free or heavily subsidized), and education (free public education all the way through university and graduate school).

He went on to provide a long list of important comparison points, many of which would probably surprise even well-informed Americans.

It’s not just Chinese consumers spend less to get same, they actually consumer quite a lot given the nominal per capita GDP is less than 20% of US:

• China has the largest global retail goods sales, 20% larger than US, at dollar value without adjusting for purchasing power
• China auto sales was 30 million units in 2023 compared with 15 million in the US
• 13 million residential units were sold in China in 2023 (after 3 years’ negative growth) compared with 4 million sold in the US
• China accounts for 30% global luxury goods sales, even in economic downturn, 2X of US
• China is the largest outbound tourist country with 200 million outbound trips made a year
• China leads the world in sales of mobile phones, LED TV, home electronics, sporting goods and a lot of other consumer goods by a wide margin
• China consumers 1/3 of electricity generated in the world, reaching 8000 terrawatt hours last year compared with 4000 terrawatt hours for the US
• China has surpassed the US in per capita daily calorie and protein intake
• Chinese life expectancy is 78.6 compared with 77.5 in the US, when 18% of US GDP is in the healthcare sector and 7% in China
• Chinese graduates over 5 million STEM college students a year verse 800,000 in the US
• Chinese total household debt is $11 trillion vs $17.8 trillion in the US
• Chinese total household savings is $2 trillion vs. $911 billion in the US
• According to the Federal Reserve, 40% Americans cannot cover with $400 unexpected expense. I don’t know any comparable number for the Chinese

Based on data, I think it’s safe to argue Chinese consumers don’t underspend compared with global average or even over-consumption countries like the US. They certainly have a bigger cushion in the form of savings and much less indebted.

He freely admitted that one difficulty that China currently faced was finding suitable employment for large numbers of its college-educated youths, who are unwilling to work in the factories as so many of their parents had done. Therefore:

…there are 30 million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the country. As a result, China has the world’s highest adoption of robotics – 50% of all robots sold in the world is in China.

Meanwhile, American society has solved this same problem by providing an enormous number of highly-paid service jobs, but it’s unclear whether most of these actually create any net value for our society and our economy:

The US does produce a lot more service industry jobs (80% GDP) vs. China (55%). There is clearly more bankers, lawyers, accountants, consultants, insurance agents, PR specialists, stock brokers, computer programmers, real estate agents, health workers in the US. As a result, the average American consumes a lot more services offered by these professions. China produces more (manufacturing GDP at 32% GDP) than US (10%). Therefore, Chinese consumers buy a lot and the country also exports a lot.

A second myth that Hua addressed in a November post was that of Chinese “overcapacity.” But this actually amounted to a euphemistic Western way of admitting that its own business enterprises could not compete with those of China. Such accusations were often coupled with complaints that many Chinese businesses are state-owned rather than private.

However, as he pointed out, this criticism seemed logically inconsistent. America’s reigning neoliberal dogma had always maintained that government-owned enterprises were inherently inefficient and uncompetitive, so denouncing China for having many such state-owned enterprises that were successfully outcompeting private Western corporations merely demonstrated the bankruptcy of that ideological framework.

Instead, he argued that the ultimate ownership structure of such companies mattered less than whether the marketplace in which they operated was sufficiently competitive, and in many sectors such widespread competition was far more the case in China than in America:

While there is a mix of different types of ownerships (including fully foreign-owned like Tesla) in China, major players in these industries in the US are entirely privately owned.

In all these fields, China is pulling ahead or improving faster than the US for a critical reason – the marketplaces are simply more competitive in China. Ownership simply has no effect on enterprise/industry competitiveness.

In the electric automative sector, the US has one big player Tesla while China has BYD, Cherry, Great Wall, Nio, Xpeng, Li, Huawei, Xiaomi, and dozens more as well as Tesla.

In mobile phones, the US has one single player Apple while China has Huawei, Xiaomi, Honor, Vivo, Oppo, and also Apple and Samsung.

In ecommerce, the US has Amazon (with eBay at a distant No 2 with a fraction of Amazon’s market share) while China has Alibaba, JD, PDD, Douyin/TikTok Shopping and also Amazon and eBay (before they pulled out after losing the competition). Same is true for almost all other critical industries.

The secret of economic success is NOT ownership but rather the presence of competition (i.e. market). Competition leads to intense pressure to innovate, improve quality, and reduce costs. It leads to an expansion of capacity and scale as businesses try to compete and win. It leads to true meritocracy – i.e. may the best player win.

On the other hand, lack of competition leads to monopoly and stagnation as the players underinvest, pursue barriers against competition, and raise margins/prices. You can do an industry by industry analysis for US businesses and find out the level of concentration (thus lack of competition) very easily.

I would argue China is a far more market-oriented economy than the US in most industries. This is the underlying reason for China’s competitiveness and the so-called “overcapacity”. The US attempts to undermine China’s competitiveness will get nowhere because the Chinese do not buy into its self-serving “neoliberal” economic policies.

The severe consequences of such lack of market competition in America was most obviously apparent in the military sector. Thus, despite our gargantuan military spending, we have been completely unable to match Russia’s far smaller economy in producing the munitions being expended in the Ukraine war:

One interesting manifestation of the US problem with its monopolistic private sector is its inability to keep up weapons production to support the Ukraine war. Its military industrial complex is plagued with undercapacity, high cost, and low efficiency despite having the world’s largest military budget (by an enormous margin). The consolidation of the vaulted military-industrial complex into 5 giants has led to a lack of competition and accountability in most parts of the defence acquisition system. It has led to undercapacity and extreme high costs (of course high margins).

Today while these private defence contractors boast the highest revenue and market cap globally, the US cannot even produce sufficient basic ammunitions such as 155′ artillery shells let alone missiles, warships, fighters and other sophisticated weapons at scale. If the US cannot outcompete production against Russia, what is its chance against China, the world’s largest industrial powerhouse? China’s “overcapacity” issue is indeed a nightmare for the US.

A couple of days later, Hua published a post focusing on the GDP comparisons between China and the U.S. made by Western media outlets. These have always heavily favored the latter country, but he suggested that some of them were highly misleading.

First, he argued that the Chinese government had been entirely correct in bursting the country’s huge real estate bubble. By contrast, the American government had allowed its own similar housing bubble to grow unchecked prior to 2008, ultimately resulting in the devastating financial collapse of that year. He also supported the deliberate shift away from consumer tech and the deflation of the stock market bubble, policies that he argued had been beneficial despite their very negative portrayal in Western media:

However, the reality is that bursting the overpriced and over-leveraged real estate bubble is a necessity and arguably long overdue; consumer tech is absorbing too much resources and leading to short-sighted oligarchies and unsustainable wealth disparity; and the stock market is never a reliable indicator of either overall Chinese economic performance or individual business performance anyways. BYD, the EV maker, now trades lower than 5 years ago despite the fact it dethroned Tesla as the global EV leader in early 2024 and its sales have grown severalfold.

He went on to note that the headline GDP figures seized upon by Western media outlets failed to consider numerous crucial elements:

Ignoring the obvious difference in nominal market exchange GDP vs. Purchasing Power Parity GDP which puts the size of Chinese economy a third bigger than the US already, I have focused only on nominal GDP comparison for simplicity.

Here are some interesting factoids I uncovered (everything can be referenced from sources such as Statista, US Bureau of Economic Analysis, China National Bureau of Statistics):

1. Imputations: this refers to “economic output” that is NOT traded in the marketplace but assigned a value in GDP calculation. One example is the imputed rental of owner-occupied housing, which estimate how much rent you would have to pay if your own house was rented to you. This value is included in the reported GDP in the US. Another example is the treatment of employer-provided health insurance, which estimates how much health insurance you would pay yourself if it was not provided by employer. Again, this imputation is included in GDP calculation in the US.

As of 2023, such imputations account for $4 trillion in US GDP (round 14% of total).

In China, imputation to GDP is ZERO because China doesn’t recognize the concept of imputed/implied economic output in its statistics compilation. Too bad your house is not assigned an arbitrary “productive value” once you buy it in China

2. Construction: in the US, construction contributes to 4% GDP (roughly $1.1 trillion) while in China, construction contributes to 7% GDP (roughly $1.2 trillion). However, China pours the same amount of concrete in 3 years as the US did in the last century. China imported $128 billion worth of iron ore in 2022 and US imported $1.15 billion in 2021. China produced 1.34 billion tons of steel in 2022 vs. 97 million tons by the US in the same year. China built 45,000 km high speed rail in the past decade and US built none.

Considering all the ports, highways, bridges, apartment buildings China builds every year vs. the US, the almost identical construction value in GDP seems laughable.

This shows the non-sense of comparing US GDP vs China.

3. Professional services: services such as law, accounting, tax, insurance, marketing, etc. account for 13% US GDP ($3.5 trillion) while it accounts for 3% Chinese GDP ($0.5 trillion). There are 1.33 million lawyers in the US vs. 650,000 in China; 1.65 million accountants and auditors in the US vs. 300,000 in China; 59,000 CFAs in the US vs. 4,000 in China. 20,000 lobbyists are registered in Washington DC alone while China has no such profession. And of course, the pay for these jobs is much better in the US, ergo the higher GDP value. There are definitely more lawsuits, insurance transactions, annual tax auditing, and congressional lobbying happening in the US vs China. But it is unclear how that translates into national power.

4. Manufacturing and services: 38% of Chinese GDP comes from manufacturing and 55% from services. In the US, 11% and 88% respectively. Very literally, China is a much more productive force of “hard goods” while US is a post-industrial economy tilted overwhelmingly as a “soft goods” producer. If the day comes for a hot war between the two countries, China is far better prepared for a hard power confrontation.

As an example of the ridiculous factors behind these misleading Western GDP statistics, he pointed out some of the items that the British had chosen to include in their own GDP:

A side note, I also ran across some less wholesome facts when doing research on the subject. I refer to a Financial Times report just for a laugh. In 2014, UK started to include prostitution and illegal drugs in its GDP reporting to the tune of 10 billion pounds a year. This raised the reported UK GDP by 5% in an effort to help the government raise its debt ceiling.

To derive at this number, the statistics bureau had to make some assumptions: “The ONS breakdown estimates that each of the UK’s estimated 60,879 prostitutes took about 25 clients a week in 2009, at an average rate of £67.16. It also estimates that the UK had 38,000 heroin users, while sales of the drug amounted to £754m with a street price of £37 a gram.”

Thus, Western economists have adopted a bizarre framework in which rising levels of crime contribute to the official economic measure of national prosperity.

I strongly agreed with all of his arguments, and his telling point about how the service sector of an economy can be easily manipulated is one that I have previously emphasized as well. Certainly many service industries are absolutely legitimate, necessary, and valuable in a modern economy. But that sector can also be artificially inflated without limit by including the output of individuals who spend their days trading meme stocks or crypto currencies back-and-forth, or who hire each other as diversity-coaches. So I think it is quite enlightening to exclude services and compare the two economies by focusing entirely upon the productive portion of the GDP.

Moreover, although he conservatively relied upon nominal exchange rates in comparing the two GDPs, most analysts agree that the use of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) statistics is much more realistic. If we combine these two approaches, the disparity between the real productive GDP of the two countries turns out to be enormous.

Read the Whole Article

The post China vs. America: A Comprehensive Review of the Economic, Technological, and Military Factors appeared first on LewRockwell.

I am being asked if the issuance by the dreadful Biden regime of a new package of sanctions against Russian oil exports are a gift to the incoming Trump  presidency or a poisoned chalice. My answer is neither.  The sanctions, if the incoming Trump regime leaves them in place, are a  poisoned chalice for the American consumer and for America’s European allies or puppets.  If the sanctions succeed, reducing the world’s supply of oil in the market will drive up prices.  The demand for oil is inelastic with respect to price. A higher price of oil will increase Russian oil renevues and hurt everyone else. 

In Germany industry is already leaving to locate in countries with less costly energy. This will leave Germans unemployed.  American commute times mean that higher energy prices cut into discretionary income and consumer spending, reducing the outlook for growth and profits. For Russia it means a higher oil revenues. If I were in charge in Russia, I would not sell energy to enemies conducting war against Russia.  Russia can finance its domestic developments without foreign exchange. Michael Hudson and I have explained this many times. We are amazed that Putin tolerates the incompetence or worse of his central bank director, whose 21% interest rates are a worse threat to Russia than NATO, American sanctions, and the remnants of the Ukrainian army. 

The Russians can deliver oil wherever they wish to whomever they wish.  The last thing they need is insurance on oil tankers.  Russia can accompany the oil tanker with warships or submarines, or more cheaply with targeting information ready to release hypersonic missiles on any threat. 

One has to wonder why the Biden idiots punish Americans and Washington’s allies? Gilbert Doctorow attributes the idiocy to defective information, or disinformation, fed to the administration and Congress by the CIA. I think Doctorow is correct. I once had an inside  look at the CIA’s decision making  and it was ridiculous, a product of morons.

The sanctions imposed on Russia, including sanctions on personal yachts and even personally on Russian President Putin reek of childishness, not of a great power.  Ukraine is of no strategic importance to anyone but Russia. Yeltsin’s government was stupid or well bribed to agree to Ukraine being broken off from Russia.  Regardless, Ukraine is not our problem.  It is Russia’s, and Washington should stay clear of the problem. Instead, Washington seems intent on bringing us to major war.

Doctorow makes the point that if the Kremlin regards the new sanctions as a threat, the effect of the sanctions will be to cause Russia to escalate the war to victory before the sanctions can have any effect.  In effect, the stupid Biden regime’s sanctions will prompt Putin to get off his butt, stop his delaying tactics and get the war over. 

Let us take a look at sanctions.  I can understand how Washington might get away with telling a country that they cannot sell to or buy from the US. I don’t know if this violation of contracts is legal. I assume that “national security,” one of the greatest lies in the Western world, justifies anything. I don’t understand how Washington can tell France, for example, and the rest of the world that they cannot sell to or buy from other countries.  Moreover, if Washington does, why does anyone pay any attention to Washington?  The world’s passive acceptance of Washington’s dictums is extraordinary. What if the world’s governments told Washington that Americans cannot sell or buy anything from us? It is amazing that Russia and China sell strategic minerals to the US.

A country that keeps its central bank reserves in US Treasuries risks the confiscation of the securities by Washington, leaving the country without reserves.  This is what Russia’s central bank director did to Russia.  Another cost of US sanctions was imposed on the French bank, Paribas, which had to pay $1.1 billion to Washington to continue its operations in the US for the penalty of financing a French government contract with Russia.

But a country does not have to keep its reserves in dollar-denominated US Treasuries or do business in the US.  A country can put its sovereignty first.  A sensible central bank would sell the US Treasuries and purchase gold, stored domestically and not with the US Federal Reserve where it can be confiscated. Today anyone who trusts an asset in America is a fool.

The indications are that Washington intends to break up BRICS with sanctions. To succeed in this endeavor requires the BRICS to passively accept the sanctions.  In other words, obeying Washington is what the world is accustomed to do. They do it without thinking.  The world hasn’t learned to stand up for itself.

But it is easy.  All the countries of the world need to do is to tell Washington that they reject Washington’s control over to whom they can sell and purchase, and that the US cannot sell or purchase from them.  In other words, it is child’s play to isolate Washington and leave the US sinking.  This prospect has never occurred to the American foreign policy “experts,” or to Washington’s victims who so willingly summit themselves to domination, or to Putin and Xi who are so determined to avoid confrontation.

Why do governments submit themselves to Washington’s control?  My suspicion is that Washington owns the governments. As I was told in the Pentagon by a high ranking presidential official, “We give foreign government officials bags of money.  We own them.  They report to us.”

Perhaps Putin should use the increase in oil revenues to rival Washington in the payoff of foreign governments. At the present time, Washington is, with Israel, the only payer.

As long as governments belongs to Washington, the outcome is predictable. 

The post The Folly and Illegality of Sanctions appeared first on LewRockwell.

Britain is back in the news for its mishandled child gang rape scandals. This is a continuation of a crisis that has been ongoing in the U.K. since at least the year 2000. While many believe these to be decade-old crimes that now only need to be investigated and closed, it is much more likely that they continue to occur. This is because the underlying motivation behind them still exists. First, some backstory for those unfamiliar.

For at least two decades, English schoolgirls as young as 12 were groomed by groups of Muslim men and systematically drugged, threatened, and repeatedly raped. They were not only literally passed between these men in houses of horror, they were told that if they did not return on another day, for a recurrence of their victimization, their parents would be killed and their houses would be burned down.

When some of those girls eventually overcame the immense terror of what had happened to them and informed authorities, entire police departments, local city councils, and the nation’s Crown Prosecution Service refused to investigate out of fear that they would be viewed as racist and that they would create “community unrest.” The anticipated reaction of the public against those immigrants was perceived as worse than the assaults that had taken place. Thus, the behavior continued unabated, and for thousands of girls and their devastated families, justice continues to be elusive.

Behind veneered speeches about “cultural differences” and “cultural incompatibility,” there has been a failure to properly assert the truth that the children who were raped were targeted specifically because they were white and not Muslim. These men were not targeting members of their own community. They were targeting those they believed held dhimmi status (a second-class social position given to non-Muslims in a conquered land). MP Robert Jenrick faced media criticism for merely stating that the mass immigration of alien cultures was the genesis of this catastrophe; but he didn’t go far enough.

Ultimately, these systematic rapes were (and are) acts of war against a people whom they consider to be conquered. These children are the victims of a religious war that they didn’t know they were fighting. If we do not acknowledge this, then we cannot have an honest conversation about immigration policy in the West. It would be preposterous to expect, for example, that mass immigration from Hungary to England would similarly result in the gang rape of British schoolchildren. Our feigned ignorance on this matter represents a political cowardice that betrays these children and condemns the next generation to a similar fate.

Some of it is the subtle racism of low expectations—as if men from Pakistan are too inherently stupid or have innately lower impulse control, so as to be unable to avoid raping children in their downtime. More commonly, though, it is a spineless refusal to admit that Islamic immigration is a danger to the West and that the children of England have been made into victims by an unholy union of the gutless political class and aggressive, criminal, Muslim gangs.

Those who engaged in this behavior and were prosecuted still live among the British people. A leader of one such grooming gang, Qari Abdul Rauf, was sent to prison for only six years; and after serving two and a half years, he was released in November 2014. He was not deported back to Pakistan because that would “deprive the man of the right to family life,” since he has a wife and five children in the U.K. He continues to live in the town where he committed these acts of barbarism. His story is not unique.

While the deportation of criminals who have served more than 12 months is supposed to be standard, human rights exceptions can be made, and they have become the norm. As a result, people are no longer being deported if their country of origin has poorer health-care access than England, which is most of the world. It is considered inhumane to do so. But the inhumanity of allowing these people to live freely among their victims is never considered.

Read the Whole Article

The post Muslim Rape Gangs as Religious Warfare appeared first on LewRockwell.

Even though we are two weeks into 2025, I want to suggest some more New Year’s resolutions.

The Federal Reserve should resolve to stop enabling excessive federal spending by purchasing Treasury bonds, thus monetizing the federal debt. The Federal Reserve’s monetization of federal debt enables the federal government to amass trillions of debt while running a global empire abroad and a welfare state at home.

The American people feel the effects of the Fed’s debt monetization in the form of the regressive inflation tax.

Eventually the monetization of federal debt will lead to a major economic crisis caused by, or resulting in, the rejection of the dollar’s world reserve currency status.

The Federal Reserve should also resolve to refrain from developing a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). A digital currency controlled by the Fed will give government new power to violate Americans’ financial privacy.

The media should resolve to stop gaslighting the American people with misinformation. For example, the media should stop repeating the lie that a failure to raise the debt ceiling will lead to a government default on its debts. The truth is a refusal to raise the debt ceiling would force Congress to reduce present and future spending — just like most people do when they find themselves in debt.

Another example of false news is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unrelated to the US supported 2014 coup in Ukraine and the breaking of the promise that if the Soviet Union withdrew from Eastern Europe the US would not support expanding NATO.

Finally, those committed to the cause of liberty should resolve to increase their understanding of the benefits of liberty and the dangers of authoritarianism. This means studying the works of libertarian thinkers like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard as well as of the opponents of liberty on both the left and right. It also means staying up to date with current events and trying to find the truth behind the lies of the mainstream media and the political class. Understanding our opponents’ arguments helps us win debates and, more importantly, win converts.

Those wishing to advance the cause of liberty should spend time thinking about how their skills and interests can be best used to help the cause. Some people are best suited to run for public office while others are drawn to teaching or working for a public policy “think tank.” There is a great need for more journalists who understand economics and liberty.

There is also a need for pro-liberty individuals who make movies, write books, and preform music. I have always believed music must be part of any successful libertarian revolution. Anyone who doubts the importance of culture should consider how many people were introduced to the ideas of liberty through Ayn Rand’s novels, and how many people came to understand the evils of authoritarianism through the novels of George Orwell.

The liberty movement also needs more people willing to not just fund candidates but also to invest in those organizations developing and spreading information about the ideas of liberty and the dangers of all forms of authoritarianism. I hope everyone joins me in resolving to make 2025 a year of liberty, peace, and prosperity.

The post 2025 New Year’s Resolutions, Part Two appeared first on LewRockwell.

In recent weeks, political soothsayers have speculated about a wide variety of odious new policies the incoming Trump administration and its allies in Congress may or may not pursue. No one can predict with certainty which of those measures they will inflict on us and which they’ll forget about.  But we can make one prediction with utter confidence. The White House and large bipartisan majorities in Congress will continue their lavish support for Israel’s war on Gaza, however catastrophic the results.

Washington has supplied a large share of the armaments that have allowed the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to rain death and destruction on Gaza (not to speak of Lebanon) over the past year and a quarter. Before October 7, 2023, when Hamas and other groups attacked southern Israel, that country was receiving $3.8 billion worth of American military aid annually. Since then, the floodgates have opened and $18 billion worth of arms have flowed out. The ghastly results have shocked people and governments across the globe.

In early 2024, the United Nations General Assembly and International Court of Justice condemned the war being waged on the people of Gaza and, in November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, and Médecins Sans Frontières all followed with determinations that Israel was indeed committing genocide.

This country’s laws and regulations prohibit aid to military forces deliberately killing or wounding civilians or committing other grave human rights abuses. No matter, the U.S.-to-Israel weapons pipeline has kept right on flowing, completely unchecked. A cornucopia of military funds and hardware for Israel in the early months of the war came from just two nations: 69% from the United States and 30% from Germany.

Were it just about any other country than Israel committing such a genocide, Washington would have cut off arms shipments months ago. But U.S. leaders have long carved out gaping exceptions for Israel. Those policies have contributed mightily to the lethality of the onslaught, which has so far killed at least 52,000 Palestinians, 46,000 of whom are believed to have been civilians. And of those civilian dead, five of every six are also believed to have been women or children. Israeli air strikes and other kinds of bombardment have also destroyed or severely damaged almost half a million housing units, more than 500 schools, just about every hospital in Gaza, and large parts of that region’s food and water systems — all with dire consequences for health and life.

Bombs Leave Their Calling Cards

From October 2023 through October 2024, reports Brett Murphy at ProPublica, 50,000 tons (yes, tons!) of U.S. war matériel were shipped to Israel. A partial list of the munitions included in those shipments has been compiled by the Costs of War Project. The list (which, the project stresses, is far from complete) includes 2,600 250-pound bombs, 8,700 500-pound bombs, and a trove of 16,000 behemoths, each weighing in at 2,000 pounds. In January 2024, Washington also added to Israel’s inventory of U.S.-made F-15 and F-35 fighter jets. Naturally, we taxpayers footed the bill.

As Abigail Hauslohner and Michael Birnbaum of the Washington Post noted in late October, “The pace and volume of weaponry have meant that U.S. munitions make up a substantial portion of Israel’s arsenal, with an American-made fleet of warplanes to deliver the heaviest bombs to their targets.” When confronted with solid evidence that Israel has been using U.S. military aid to commit genocide, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters, “We do not have enough information to reach definitive conclusions about particular incidents or to make legal determinations.”

Really? How much information would be enough then? Isn’t it sufficient to see Israeli forces repeatedly target clinics, homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools with massive, precision-guided bombs? Isn’t it enough when the IDF targets the very “safe zones” in which they have commanded civilians to take shelter, or when they repeatedly bomb and strafe places where people have gathered around aid trucks to try to obtain some small portion of the trickle of food that the Israeli government led by Netanyahu has decided to allow into Gaza?

If the U.S. State Department’s analysts really were having trouble making “definitive conclusions about particular incidents,” then Stephan Semler was ready to lend a hand with a report at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft entitled “20 Times Israel Used U.S. Arms in Likely War Crimes.” Worse yet, his list, he points out, represents only “a small fraction of potential war crimes committed with U.S.-provided weapons,” and all 20 of the attacks he focuses on occurred at locations where no armed resistance forces seemed to be present. Here are a few incidents from the list:

When warplanes bombed a busy market in northern Gaza’s Jabalya refugee camp, killing 69 people in October 2023, U.N. investigators determined that U.S.-made 2,000-pound GBU-31 air-dropped munitions had been used. A couple of weeks later, the U.N. found that “several” GBU-31s were responsible for flattening a built-up area of more than 60,000 square feet within Gaza City, killing 91 people, 39 of them children. A weapon dropped on a residential building last January, killing 18 (including 10 children), left behind a fragment identifying it as a 250-pound Boeing GBU-39. An airstrike on a tent camp for displaced people in Rafah in May, killing 46 people, left behind a GBU-39 tailfin made in Colorado. The next month, a bomb-navigating device manufactured by Honeywell was found in the rubble of a U.N.-run school where 40 people, including 23 women and children, had been killed. In July, more than 90 people were slaughtered in a bombing of the Al-Mawasi refugee camp, an Israeli army-designated “safe zone” near the southwest corner of Gaza. A tailfin found on the scene came from a U.S.-built JDAM guidance system that’s commonly used on 1,000- or 2,000-pound bombs. Also in July, fragments of the motor and guidance system of a Lockheed-Martin Hellfire missile fired from a U.S.-made Apache helicopter were found in the remains of a U.N.-run school where refugees were sheltering. Twenty-two had been killed in the attack.

“Everyone Knew the Rules Were Different for Israel”

In December, a group of Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the State Department of violating a 1997 act of Congress that prohibits arms transfers to any government that commits gross human rights violations.

As the Guardian reported, a large number of countries “have privately been sanctioned and faced consequences for committing human rights violations” under the act, which is known as the “Leahy law” after its original sponsor, former Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont. But since 2020, a special committee, the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum (ILVF), has decided whether payments or shipments destined for Israel should be permitted. According to the Guardian, Israel has “benefited from extraordinary policies inside the ILVF,” under which arms transfers get a green light no matter how egregiously Israeli occupation forces may have violated human rights. In the words of a former official, “Nobody said it, but everyone knew the rules were different for Israel.”

According to the Post‘s Abigail Hauslohner and Michael Birnbaum, the process of determining whether Israel is using U.S.-supplied weapons to commit war crimes “has become functionally irrelevant, with more senior leaders at the State Department broadly dismissive of non-Israeli sources and unwilling to sign off on action plans” for disallowing aid. A midlevel department official, once stationed in Jerusalem, told Post reporters that senior officials “often dismissed the credibility of Palestinian sources, eyewitness accounts, nongovernmental organizations… and even the United Nations.” So, the arms have continued flowing, with no letup in sight.

In January 2024, Jack Lew, the Biden administration’s ambassador to Israel, sent a cable to top State Department officials urging that they approve the IDF’s request for thousands of GBU-39 bombs. Lew noted that those weapons were more precise and had a smaller blast radius than the 2,000-pound “dumb bombs” Israel had been dropping in the war’s early months. Furthermore, he claimed, their air force had a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding civilian deaths when using the GBU-39.

That was, unfortunately, pure eyewash. At the time of the cable, Amnesty International had already shown that the Israeli Defense Forces were killing civilians with GBU-39s. The State Department nevertheless accepted Lew’s claims and approved the sale, paving the way for even more missiles and bombs to rain down on Palestinians. In reporting on the Lew cable, ProPublica‘s Brett Murphy wrote, “While the U.S. hoped that the smaller bombs would prevent unnecessary deaths, experts in the laws of war say the size of the bomb doesn’t matter if it kills more civilians than the military target justifies.” That principle implies that when there is no military target, an attack causing even one civilian casualty should be charged as a war crime.

During 2024, with its unrelenting bombardment of Gaza and then Lebanon, too, Israel chewed rapidly through its munition stocks. The Biden administration came to the rescue in late November by approving $680 million in additional munitions deliveries to Israel — and that was just the appetizer. This month, ignoring Israel’s 15 months of brutal attacks on Gaza’s population, the administration notified Congress of plans to provide $8 billion worth of additional arms, including Hellfire missiles, long-range 155-millimeter artillery shells, 500-pound bombs, and much more.

Big Death Tolls Come in Small Packages

International bodies have accused Israel of using not only bombardment but also direct starvation as a weapon, which would qualify as yet another kind of war crime. In early 2024, responding to pressure from advocacy groups, Joe Biden signed a national security memo designated NSM-20. It required the State Department to halt the provision of armaments to any country arbitrarily restricting the delivery of food, medical supplies, or other humanitarian aid to the civilian population of an area where that country is using those armaments. But the memo has made virtually no difference.

In April, the two top federal authorities on humanitarian aid — the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department’s refugee bureau — submitted reports showing that Israel had indeed deliberately blocked food and medical shipments into Gaza. Under NSM-20, such actions should have triggered a cutoff of arms shipments to the offending country. But when the reports touched off a surge of outrage among the department’s rank and file and demands for an arms embargo, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top brass steamrolled all objections and approved continued shipments, according to Brett Murphy of ProPublica.

Another dimension of Israel’s war-by-starvation has been illustrated and quantified in a spatial analysis published by the British-based group Forensic Architecture. See, for example, the maps and text on pages 252–258 of their report, which reveal in stark detail the extent to which Israeli forces have ravaged agricultural lands in Gaza. Alongside bombing, shelling, and tank traffic, bulldozers have played an outsized role in the near-obliteration of that area’s food production capacity. The model D-9 bulldozers that are used to demolish Gaza’s buildings and lay waste to her farmland are manufactured by Caterpillar, whose global headquarters is in Texas.

In the early months of the war, Biden administration officials also took advantage of federal law, which doesn’t require that military aid shipments whose dollar value falls below certain limits be reported. They simply ordered that the huge quantities of arms then destined for Israel be split up into ever smaller cargoes. And so it came to pass that, during the first five months of the war, the Biden administration delivered more than 100 loads of arms. In other words, on average during that period, an American vessel laden with “precision-guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid” was being unloaded at an Israeli dock once every 36 hours.

Israeli pilots have used U.S.-built fighter jets for the lion’s share of their airstrikes on Gaza and, by last summer, even more aircraft were needed to sustain such levels of bombing. Of course, jets are too big and expensive to be provided covertly, so, in August, Secretary of State Blinken publicly approved the transfer of nearly $20 billion worth of F-15 jets and other equipment to the IDF. The aircraft account for most of that sum, but the deal also includes hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ground vehicles and tank and mortar ammunition.

In September, Bernie Sanders, who served in Congress alongside Patrick Leahy from 2007 until the latter’s retirement in 2023, further enhanced the good reputation of Vermont senators by introducing three resolutions that would have blocked the State Department’s $20 billion Israel aid package. But when the measures came up for a vote in November, all Republicans, along with two-thirds of Sanders’s fellow Democrats, joined forces to vote them down. So, as always, Israel will continue to get its jets, tanks, and ammo.

With scant political opposition, the new Republican-controlled Congress and Trump White House will undoubtedly only double down on material support for Israel’s war crimes. And they are already threatening people who demonstrate publicly in support of an arms embargo with investigation, prosecution, deportation, or other kinds of attacks. Citing those and other threats, Ben Samuels of Haaretz anticipates that Trump’s promise “to crack down on pro-Palestinian sentiment in America will be a defining factor of his administration’s early days” and that “the fight against the pro-Palestinian movement might be one of the only things that has a clear path across the government” — that is, the suppression could be bipartisan. For the people of Gaza and their American supporters, 2025 could turn out to be even more horrifying than the ghastly year just passed.

The post When Israeli Warplanes Rain Death on Gaza, the Copilot Is Uncle Sam appeared first on LewRockwell.

In the December 29, 2024, issue of the conservative Wall Street Journal, the paper’s longtime columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady, who also serves on the Journal’s editorial board, wrote an article harshly criticizing the dictatorships in Cuba and Venezuela. Quoting a State Department statement issued in January 2021, she points out that the Cuban communist regime is a murderous supporter of terrorism that lets the Cuban people “go hungry, homeless, and without medicine.”

O’Grady also also points out that Cuba is a supporter of the dictatorial regime of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, who has ruthlessly tyrannized the Venezuelan people, not only politically but also economically with the same type of socialist economic system that exists in Cuba. Harkening back to the popular post-9/11 U.S. “war on terrorism,” which replaced the previously popular “war on communism,” she points out that Venezuela is as big a supporter of terrorism as Cuba is.

O’Grady concludes her essay with the following statement: “Under Cuban political tutelage, eight million Venezuelans have fled the country, there are 1,900 political prisoners, and the five patriots inside the [Argentine] embassy are being starved to death. This is state-sponsored terrorism by any other name.”

Yesterday, the Journal published an editorial calling on the U.S. government to come to the support of the Venezuelan people. The editorial points out that “only Venezuelans can reclaim their democracy” but then adds this concluding interventionist line: “But a U.S. policy that restores sanctions on Venezuelan oil exports and puts maximum pressure on the regime would at least show which side America is on.”

Those two articles demonstrate much of what is wrong with the U.S. government’s foreign policy of interventionism, which, needless to say, is favored not only by  right-wingers but also by left-wingers.

Consider Cuba. For more than 60 years, the U.S. government has maintained a harsh system of sanctions against the people of that nation. We call it an “economic embargo” but that’s just another fancy word for the modern-day term of “sanctions.”

The U.S. embargo targets the Cuban people with death by starvation — the same thing that O’Grady criticizes the Cuban and Venezuela regimes for doing. The idea behind the embargo is that if the Cuban people are faced with death by starvation, they will rise up in a violent revolution, oust their communist regime, and replace it with a pro-U.S. puppet regime that will do the bidding of the U.S. government. It would all be billed as bringing “freedom” to Cuba, much like “Operation Enduring Freedom” and “Operation Iraqi Freedom” were going to bring “freedom” to the people of those nations.

But notice something important about this strategy: Both regimes — the Cuban regime and the U.S. regime — are doing the same thing — bringing death by starvation to the Cuban people. The Cuban regime is doing it with its socialist system. The U.S. regime is doing it with its embargo. The Cuban people are in the middle of this vise, having their lives and well-being squeezed out of them by both regimes. The only difference is that the Cuban death machine is an unintended result of socialism while the U.S. death machine is an intentional, knowing, and deliberate act designed to kill people.

It’s no different with Venezuela. The socialist system in that country has brought massive economic chaos and crisis to that nation, just as it has in Cuba. Once again, to bring about regime change, the U.S. government targets the Venezuelan people with harsh economic sanctions. The idea is that if the Venezuelan people and their children are facing death by starvation, they will rise up in a violent revolution, oust Maduro from power, and replace him with a pro-U.S. stooge.

What’s important to recognize is that the situation in Venezuela is the same as it is in Cuba — the Venezuelan people are being squeezed to death by a vise consisting of Venezuelan socialism and U.S. sanctions. The question naturally arises: Why isn’t the U.S. government’s policy of targeting  innocent people with death as a way to achieve a political goal considered terrorism? It seems to me that is precisely what terrorism is.

Given that Maduro has implemented a strict system of gun control, which many American left-wingers favor here in the United States, the Venezuelan people have no effective way to do what the U.S. government and U.S. interventionists want them to do. If they violently revolt with, say, knives, they will be shot dead by the Venezuelan national-security establishment, which is well-armed, just as the U.S. national-security establishment is here in the United States.

So, Venezuelans have taken the most logical route — escape from the country. As the Journal points out, eight million of them have fled in a desperate attempt to save their lives from death by starvation — a death that Venezuelan socialism and U.S. sanctions have jointly imposed on them.

As we all know, many of those Venezuelans have come to the United States and entered the country either illegally or by seeking refugee status. That has  terribly angered and upset many Americans, especially right-wingers. They’re upset because they want those Venezuelans to stay in Venezuela, so that the sanctions can force them to rise up in a violent regime-change revolution against Maduro and his well-armed military forces. The idea is that if people are faced with death by starvation versus rising up in a violent revolution, they will choose the latter, even if thousands of them will be shot dead in the process. So, American immigration-control advocates support the immediate deportation of Venezuelan immigrants to Venezuela, where they can be, once again, targeted with death by starvation by U.S. sanctions in the hopes of achieving regime change.

In my opinion, it would be difficult to find a more morally depraved foreign policy than that, especially for people who pride themselves on going to church every Sunday and who love to wear their religion on their sleeves. Yes, bad things happen around the world, including brutal dictatorships, but there is absolutely no reason why the U.S. government has to make it worse for people. As the Journal rightly points out, it’s up to the foreigners to deal with their problems. What the Journal and other interventionists fail to see, unfortunately, is that U.S. sanctions and embargoes that target the Cuban and Venezuelan people with death violates that principle.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post The Moral Depravity of U.S. Sanctions and Embargoes appeared first on LewRockwell.

This article was written by Brandon Smith and originally published at Birch Gold Group

The underlying strength of economics is that (when approached honestly and with respect to the data) it can give us a relatively accurate measure of progress versus cost. If the rewards outweigh the costs after careful calculation then that economic endeavor will bear fruit. The ability to gauge production, innovation and prosperity with an unbiased eye is essential to true economics.

The problem is that economics is not only a mathematical science, it is also, for lack of a better term, a social science. One has to understand individual psychology and mass psychology. You have to be knowledgeable in the inconsistencies of human emotion and desire as much as you are knowledgeable in the hard realities of supply and demand. Furthermore, not all people that engage in economic study do so for the benefit of humanity.

There is a contingent of financial elitists that seek to use their understanding of the psychological side of economics to socially engineer political outcomes. We’ve heard it said that nuclear science or genetic science offer a power so terrible that they could wipe out civilization if exploited by the wrong hands. I would argue that economic science in the wrong hands outdoes every other competitor because it can be used to enslave humanity forever.

Case in point: What happens when economics is combined with far-left activism and scientific cultism based on fabricated claims? What happens when a group of ultra-wealthy Fabian socialists combine their resources to strangle the free market and manipulate economic outcomes? What do you get when a vast network of international corporations abandon competition and profit for a long term agenda of power and control?

Well, you get insidious programs like ESG and groups like the Council For Inclusive Capitalism. You get direct cooperation between governments and corporations to force a specific way of thinking and living. They present it as philanthropy when it is really a complex form of tyranny.

The globalists want to redefine how we calculate growth according to their illusory metrics. How does one quantify happiness, or fairness, or environmental purity and then add that into GDP? It’s not possible, at least not in an unbiased manner.

Flowery terminology like equity and inclusion have nothing to do with production or economic survival. They do, though, have a lot in common with the social engineering ideals of ESG that most of the west is rejecting. They’re giving “inclusive capitalism” a climate change paint job.

Progressives often condemn the free market profit motive as a “disease” that will destroy our species, but believe me, the worst thing that can possibly happen to the western world today is for corporate moguls to decide they don’t care about money anymore. When groups of mega rich narcopaths discover ideology and start seeing you and I and society as their pet project, the world is in deep trouble.  What is most disturbing is that they scratch and grasp for greater power while pretending as if they’re doing it “for our benefit”.

Will a few of them do good? Sure, that happens at times. But, usually when elites try to influence culture through carrot or stick methods the results are disastrous.

We need to understand this reality first before we can ever understand the motives behind the “net zero” movement. The persistent globalist push for carbon taxation has nothing to do with saving the planet and everything to do with changing the very soil of the economic landscape. Keep in mind that globalism is just a modernized form of feudalism posing as socially conscious governance.

These people don’t actually care about the environment or equality; they care about environmental taxation and “equity”. These are very different things.

And lets not forget that climate scientist claims are based on data derived from the 1880s onward, while they act as if millions of years of the Earth’s temperature history doesn’t exist. Temperatures in the past have been far hotter (and far colder) than they are today, and atmospheric carbon content records going back millions of years show there is no causational relationship between carbon emissions and warming conditions.

The moment you look at the Earth’s climate outside of that tiny sliver of 140 years that climate scientists use for their data, the entire man-made global warming theory falls apart. We barely just exited an ice age and these people are doom mongering about 1.5 degrees Celsius!

Let’s instead consider the short term ramifications of using an equity model for the global economy. What will happen when fairness becomes more important than merit and net zero becomes more important than prosperity?

The more self sufficiency people have, the more free they can be. The more dependency they have on the system, the easier they are to enslave. Carbon controls create an economic environment in which self sufficiency is impossible because they centralize all production into the hands of a select group of self appointed high priests in charge of climate change management. They get to choose the tax burden arbitrarily and they get to choose the conditions of production. Therefore, the elites will control the means of production, all while telling us that those in poverty are the beneficiaries.

The carbon scheme seems to be the last fallback of globalist organizations to create a rationale for wealth redistribution. What will they do if it fails? That’s hard to say. I suppose they will try to start WWIII (I would argue that it’s already started). The point is, much of what the globalists do is a rehashing of old-hat centralization and oligarchy. Call it ESG, call it carbon taxes, call it DEI, the goal is the same – The destruction of the west to make way for a new dark age.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post WEF Elites Unveil Plan To Use Carbon Controls as a Trojan Horse for Global DEI appeared first on LewRockwell.

There’s a funny scene in the film Smokey and the Bandit when Sheriff Buford T. Justice tells his son “Junior” to hand over his service revolver so that he can use it to shoot the fleeing Bandit’s tires. Junior obeys his father and hands over his pistol, but to Buford’s chagrin, the hammer falls on an empty chamber. When Buford asks why his son’s pistol isn’t loaded, Junior replies, “When I put bullets in it, daddy, it gets too heavy.”

I was reminded of this scene when I saw the news that the Santa Inez Reservoir, supplying backup water to Pacific Palisades, was empty during the fires.

Coincidentally, last April I attended a garden party in Pacific Palisades. The back patio of the magnificent (and now incinerated) home commanded a sweeping view of the hills, including the reservoir, and I noticed that the 117-million-gallon water storage facility was empty.

Note the cover in the above photograph from 2022. The rationale for the cover—the construction of which was completed in 2012—was to comply with EPA regulations.

Does it really take almost a year to repair a water tank’s cover? Or—following the same weird logic that Junior applied to leaving his revolver unloaded—did whoever is in charge of LA’s auxiliary water supply conclude that filling the reservoir would make the structure too wet?

As was just reported in the Los Angeles Times:

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday ordered an independent investigation of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power over the loss of water pressure and the empty Santa Ynez Reservoir, calling it “deeply troubling.”

“We need answers to how that happened,” Newsom said in a letter to leaders of DWP and L.A. County Public Works.

DWP spokesperson Ellen Cheng said, “We appreciate the Governor’s letter and believe that an investigation will help identify any new needed capabilities for water systems to support fighting wildfires.”

Today I had a long conversation with a man who installs fire sprinkler systems in buildings. Having worked in fire suppression for forty years, he is a walking encyclopedia about fire, how to prevent it, and how to put it out if one flares up. As he explained:

The vast majority of people—including sophisticated people with valuable properties in places with high fire risk—have no understanding of this risk. They believe that big fires that destroy entire neighborhoods are a thing of the past, and they therefore see no compelling reason to invest in fire prevention—neither in the private nor in the public spheres. I can take one look at a property or a neighborhood and spot the risks, but most people don’t believe me when I point them out. Sadly, it seems that people only learn through loss.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post Why Was the Reservoir Supplying Pacific Palisades Empty? appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Joe Biden awarded the so-called Presidential Medal of Freedom to Pope Francis on Saturday. The award, according to the White House, is allegedly reserved to “individuals who have made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, world peace, or other significant societal, public or private endeavors.”

It’s unclear what the Pope Francis—who is well known for a kneejerk loathing of American Catholics—has ever contributed to American civilization or society. Indeed, Francis recently signaled his contempt for American victims of sexual abuse by appointing Robert McElroy as the next archbishop of Washington, DC. McElroy has spent most of his career as a longtime defender, ally, and confidant of known criminal pederast Theodore McCarrick and his toady Archbishop Donald Wuerl.

But, who can be surprised by such theater from the Biden White House? It is no different from any other administration of recent decades which dole out these awards to important fundraisers and political allies. In many other cases, presidents just hand out these awards to people the presidents would like to meet and would like to be photographed with. Many of these “great” Americans are just actors and pro athletes, people who do nothing of consequence beyond performing various entertainments on TV screens.

To be sure, the entertainers are at least morally neutral ephemera. Far more unfortunate are the awards given out to and endless parade of warmongers and political operatives who receive the “Medal of Freedom” as means of rewarding service to the ruling class.

For example, recall Donald Trump’s handing out the award to Miriam Adelson, an Israeli citizen whose “contribution” to society extends little beyond being a wealthy donor to the Trump campaigns. Adelson, and her late husband Sheldon Adelson, are well known for their advocacy for endless US intervention in the Middle East and the continual fleecing of American taxpayers to subsidize the State of Israel.

In this respect, Adelson is a typical recipient. As James Bovard showed in a mises.org article in 2021, the recipients of the Medal of Freedom area “who’s who” of war criminals and degenerate technocrats. He writes:

Presidential Medals of Freedom have long been far more squalid than the Washington Post recognizes—in part because the Post cheered the wars that spurred many of the most tainted awards.

President Lyndon Johnson distributed a bucket of Medals of Freedom to his Vietnam War architects and enablers, including Ellsworth Bunker, Dean Acheson, Dean Rusk, Clark Clifford, Averell Harriman, Cyrus Vance, Walt Rostow, and McGeorge Bundy. When he gave the award to Defense secretary Robert McNamara, he declared, “You have understood that while freedom depends on strength, strength itself depends on the determination of free people.” In reality, Johnson treasured McNamara for his ability to help deceive Americans about how the US was failing in Vietnam. McNamara’s lies helped vastly expand an unnecessary conflict and cost more than a million American and Vietnamese lives. The Washington Post editorial page didn’t complain about those awards, because the Post avidly supported that war. (After exiting the Pentagon, McNamara joined the Post’s board of directors.)

President Richard Nixon inherited the Vietnam War and expanded and intensified US bombing of Indochina. Nixon gave Medals of Freedom to Pentagon chief Melvin Laird (who helped shroud the war’s continuing failure) and his secretary of state, William Rogers. President Gerald Ford gave the Medal of Freedom to his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, and his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld—two persons notorious for tarnishing the honor of the United States in foreign affairs. The Post didn’t denounce the Medal of Freedom for Kissinger; instead, they made the Great Deceiver a columnist.

President George H.W. Bush blanketed Medals of Freedom on top officials involved with the first Gulf War, including Norman Schwarzkopf, Colin Powell, James Baker, Dick Cheney, and Brent Scowcroft. The Post didn’t complain about those awards, because that was another war that the Post editorial page whooped up all the way.

The war on terror made Presidential Medals of Freedom even more shameless. Retired colonel Andrew Bacevich observed, “After 9/11, the Medal of Freedom went from being irrelevant to somewhere between whimsical and fraudulent. Any correlation with freedom as such, never more than tenuous in the first place, dissolved altogether.” After he deceived America into supporting an attack on Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush conferred Medals of Freedom on his Iraq war team, including CIA chief George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, Iraq viceroy Paul Bremer, General Peter Pace, General Richard Myers, and General Tommy Franks, as well as prowar foreign lackeys such as Australian former prime minister John Howard and British former prime minister Tony Blair. The Post was outraged, because—no, wait, the Post editorial page thunderously supported that war, too.

The real function of the Medal is overwhelmingly propagandistic. Its intent is to communicate that those who receive the award are somehow great men and women, who have achieved something wonderful in the service of the American people. This service to “the people” usually just means service to the state.

Functionally, there is no difference at all between the US’s Medal of Freedom ceremonies and the pomp surrounding the Order of Lenin awards handed out by the old Soviet Union. Like the Medal of Freedom, the Order of Lenin was the highest civilian award bestowed by the Soviet State. It was given out to those who made the Soviet state look good and those who pleased the Politburo in some way. As with the Medal of Freedom, the Soviets liked to give their “top award” to former heads of state for their “service” and to entertainers.

In reality, of course, it was all just pure propaganda. Bovard adds:

Presidential Medals of Freedom encourage Americans to view their personal freedom as the result of government intervention—if not as a bequest from the commander in chief. Ironically, the individual who poses the greatest potential threat to freedom has sole discretion to designate the purported best friends of freedom. The media usually provides gushing coverage of the award ceremonies, never mentioning that the arbitrary power of the Supreme Leader was why the Founding Fathers fought a revolution.

Indeed, one could argue that the very idea of chief executives handing out awards runs counter to the idea of “republican simplicity” that was supposedly once at the core of American republicanism. The great libertarian nineteenth-century anti-imperialist William Graham Sumner apparently believed as much. Sumner wrote on how the early Americans had once sought to create something that was different from the European absolutism and state-mongering of old. Speaking of the first Americans, he writes:

They went out into a wilderness, it is true, but they took with them all the art, science, and literature which, up to that time, civilization had produced. They could not, it is true, strip their minds of the ideas which they had inherited, but in time, as they lived on in the new world, they sifted and selected these ideas, retaining what they chose. Of the old-world institutions also they selected and adopted what they chose and threw aside the rest. It was a grand opportunity to be thus able to strip off all the follies and errors which they had inherited, so far as they chose to do so.

They had unlimited land with no feudal restrictions to hinder them in the use of it. Their idea was that they would never allow any of the social and political abuses of the old world to grow up here. There should be no manors, no barons, no ranks, no prelates, no idle classes, no paupers, no disinherited ones except the vicious. There were to be no armies except a militia, which would have no functions but those of police. They would have no court and no pomp; no orders, or ribbons, or decorations, or titles. (Emphasis added.)

Writing in the wake of the Spanish-American war, Sumner was describing how the old idea of the republic was being destroyed from within by the American desire to participate in the “great game” of imperialism and global intervention. Sumner was right, of course. By the turn of the twentieth century, the idea of freedom had become but a small afterthought in Washington DC. The old laissez-faire parties were gone, and the the ruling class was permitted to turn its attention to recreating the so-called “greatness” of the old world on American shores. This meant all the expense pushed by the great powers who put national prestige and “reasons of state” ahead of freedom. This new scheme replaced the old ideal of a frugal, parsimonious regime reined in from pursuing its international ambitions.

A century later, in the Washington of today, presidents fall all over themselves to hand out ribbons, decorations, and titles to their favored allies. All the while they are surrounded by the vulgar pomp of the ruling class as it congratulates itself and feasts at lavish junkets funded by the labors of those who actually work for a living.

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Writes David Martin:

2 Days After Pledging Shelter for Rich LA Libs, Biden Boots 3,000 NC Families Into Streets During Snow Storm

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Writes Ginny Garner:

Lew,

Amos Miller’s attorney Robert Barnes announces the Amish farmer can continue to make his food available to customers outside the state. Meanwhile, a lawsuit by the state of Pennsylvania  is moving through the courts. It was this government harassment of Miller that played a key role in the 2020 election. The case became high profile in the state and throughout the US among Trump supporters. Trump election activity and organizer Scott Presler led a monumentally successful effort to register 180,000 Amish to vote for the first time. 

See here.

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Writes Gail Appel:

Gotta love him

The post Vigano Blasts Clerics Who Profit From Immigration, Backs Mass Deportations appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Tim McGraw:

The fire must have been very hot to bend steel girders. The trees are all burnt, and the leaves are gone. This is a helluva view for a firefighter doing a cleanup. There are no checkpoints like Lahaina, which still has them, this time. I wonder why…

The post Fire Damage in Malibu and Pacific Palisades appeared first on LewRockwell.

Donald Trump is a strong believer in protective tariffs, and this is very bad news for those of us who support the free market. In Trump’s opinion, tariffs are a great idea. Here is what he said about them in an interview last month: “Trump has proposed a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on all imports and 60 percent on goods from China. During Tuesday’s remarks, he singled out imported cars for higher trade duties, saying he would slap a100, 200 or 300 percent tariff on cars made in Mexico. He also floated imposing 50 percent tariffs on goods to force companies to relocate operations to the U.S. to avoid the penalty.

‘First of all, 10 percent when you collect it is hundreds of billions of dollars … all reducing our deficit,’ he said. ‘But really, so there’s two ways of looking at a tariff. You can do it as a money-making instrument, or you can do it as something to get the companies. Now, if you want the companies to come in, the tariff has to be a lot higher than 10 percent because 10 percent is not enough. Guys, they’re not going to do it for 10, but you make a 50 percent tariff, they’re going to come in.’”

Trump discusses tariffs as if they were a way of improving the free market. In fact, though, as the great economist Murray Rothbard points out in Power and Market, tariffs directly attack the essence of the free market, namely that people gain through mutually advantageous trade. Rothbard proves this by a brilliant reductio ad absurdum argument: “The absurdity of the pro-tariff arguments can be seen when we carry the idea of a tariff to its logical conclusion—let us say, the case of two individuals, Jones and Smith.”

You might think that Rothbard has gone too far— aren’t individuals very different from nations? Isn’t a discussion of two-person trade irrelevant? But Rothbard has a convincing response. Often a very simple example. reveals the principle that underlies a much more complicated case. As he explains:

“This is a valid use of the reductio ad absurdum because the same qualitative effects take place when a tariff is levied on a whole nation as when it is levied on one or two people; the difference is merely one of degree. Suppose that Jones has a farm, ‘Jones’ Acres,’ and Smith works for him. Having become steeped in pro-tariff ideas, Jones exhorts Smith to ‘buy Jones’ Acres.’ ‘Keep the money in Jones’ Acres,’ ‘don’t be exploited by the flood of products from the cheap labor of foreigners outside Jones’ Acres,’ and similar maxims become the watchword of the two men. To make sure that their aim is accomplished, Jones levies a 1,000-percent tariff on the imports of all goods and services from ‘abroad,’ i.e., from outside the farm. As a result, Jones and Smith see their leisure, or ‘problems of unemployment,’ disappear as they work from dawn to dusk trying to eke out the production of all the goods they desire. Many they cannot raise at all; others they can, given centuries of effort. It is true that they reap the promise of the protectionists: ‘self-sufficiency,’ although the ‘sufficiency’ is bare subsistence instead of a comfortable standard of living.”

Rothbard next addresses a central point of pro-tariffs defenders like Trump, the alleged need to keep money at home.

“Money is ‘kept at home,’ and they can pay each other very high nominal wages and prices, but the men find that the real value of their wages, in terms of goods, plummets drastically. Truly we are now back in the situation of the isolated or barter economies of Crusoe and Friday. And that is effectively what the tariff principle amounts to. This principle is an attack on the market, and its logical goal is the self-sufficiency of individual producers; it is a goal that, if realized, would spell poverty for all, and death for most, of the present world population. It would be a regression from civilization to barbarism. A mild tariff over a wider area is perhaps only a push in that direction, but it is a push, and the arguments used to justify the tariff apply equally well to a return to the ‘self-sufficiency’ of the jungle.”

Trump said in his interview that high tariffs will encourage foreign firms to relocate to the United States, so that they can avoid paying the tariffs. What this argument ignores is that there is no benefit to American consumers in having firms located here rather than in foreign countries. What matters to consumers is getting the lowest price for the goods and services they want; and if the firm that offers the lowest price is in China rather than America, so what? Trump might counter this by claiming that locating in America opens up jobs for Americans, but this contention presupposes that a substantial number of American workers are unable to find jobs. What is the basis for this assumption? None is offered. Further, any gains that workers could get from new jobs are likely to be erased by the higher prices the tariffs will bring about. As the great economic journalist Henry Hazlitt said: “And this brings us to the real effect of a tariff wall. It is not merely that all its visible gains are offset by less obvious but no less real losses. It results, in fact, in a net loss to the country. For contrary to centuries of interested propaganda and disinterested confusion, the tariff reduces the American level of wages. Let us observe more clearly how it does this. We have seen that the added amount which consumers pay for a tariff-protected article leaves them just that much less with which to buy all other articles.

There is here no net gain to industry as a whole. But as a result of the artificial barrier erected against foreign goods, American labor, capital and land are deflected from what they can do more efficiently to what they do less efficiently. Therefore, as a result of the tariff wall, the average productivity of American labor and capital is reduced. If we look at it now from the consumer’s point of view, we find that he can buy less with his money. Because he has to pay more for sweaters and other protected goods, he can buy less of everything else. The general purchasing power of his income has therefore been reduced. Whether the net effect of the tariff is to lower money wages or to raise money prices will depend upon the monetary policies that are followed. But what is clear is that the tariff—though it may increase wages above what they would have been in the protected industries— must on net balance, when all occupations are considered, reduce real wages.

Only minds corrupted by generations of misleading propaganda can regard this conclusion as paradoxical. What other result could we expect from a policy of deliberately using our resources of capital and manpower in less efficient ways than we know how to use them? What other result could we expect from deliberately erecting artificial obstacles to trade and transportation?

For the erection of tariff walls has the same effect as the erection of real walls. It is significant that the protectionists habitually use the language of warfare. They talk of ‘repelling an invasion’ of foreign products. And the means they suggest in the fiscal field are like those of the battlefield. The tariff barriers that are put up to repel this invasion are like the tank traps, trenches, and barbed-wire entanglements created to repel or slow down attempted invasion by a foreign army.”

Let’s do everything we can to oppose tariffs. They make us all poorer.

The post The Menace of Tariffs appeared first on LewRockwell.

[Editor’s note: In this article, originally published in October 1984, Murray Rothbard critiques a problem with the economics of Republicans and conservatives. Namely, its proponents think they can have it both ways by cutting tax rates and increasing government spending, while somehow not running up huge deficits. Much of this is based on the so-called Laffer curve idea, which Rothbard regards with skepticism. Moreover, Rothbard notes that when most conservatives speak of “the gold standard” they mean a government regulated standard which is an ersatz version of the real thing. At the core of it all is a refusal to do anything at all about the enormous American welfare state. At the time, this sort of thing was called “supply-side economics.” Unfortunately, we find that today’s MAGA economics is in many ways a retread of the failed supply-side economics of old, and Rothbard’s critique remains important reading.]

Establishment historians of economic thought—they of the Smith-Marx-Marshall variety—have a compelling need to end their saga with a chapter on the latest Great Man, the latest savior and final culmination of economic science. The last consensus choice was, of course, John Maynard Keynes, but his General Theory is now a half-century old, and economists have for some time been looking around for a new candidate for that final chapter.

For a while, Joseph Schumpeter had a brief run, but his problem was that his work was largely written before the General Theory. Milton Friedman and monetarism lasted a bit longer, but suffered from two grave defects: (1) the lack of anything resembling a great, integrative work; and (2) the fact that monetarism and Chicago School Economics is really only a gloss on theories that had been hammered out before the Keynesian Era by Irving Fisher and by Frank Knight and his colleagues at the University of Chicago.

Was there nothing new to write about since Keynes?

Since the mid-1970s, a school of thought has made its mark that at least gives the impression of something brand new. And since economists, like the Supreme Court, follow the election returns, “supply-side economics” has become noteworthy.

Supply-side economics has been hampered among students of contemporary economics in lacking anything like a grand treatise, or even a single major leader, and there is scarcely unanimity among its practitioners. But it has been able to take 40 Making Economic Sense First published in October 1984. shrewd advantage of highly placed converts in the media and easy access to politicians and think tanks. Already it has begun to make its way into last chapters of works on economic thought.

A central theme of the supply-side school is that a sharp cut in marginal income-tax rates will increase incentives to work and save, and therefore investment and production. That way, few people could take exception. But there are other problems involved. For, at least in the land of the famous Laffer Curve, income tax cuts were treated as the panacea for deficits; drastic cuts would so increase stated revenue as allegedly to yield a balanced budget.

Yet there was no evidence whatever for this claim, and indeed, the likelihood is quite the other way. It is true that if income-tax rates were 98 percent and were cut to 90 percent, there would probably be an increase in revenue; but at the far lower tax levels we have been at, there is no warrant for this assumption. In fact, historically, increases in tax rates have been followed by increases in revenue and vice versa.

But there is a deeper problem with supply-side than the inflated claims of the Laffer Curve. Common to all supplysiders is nonchalance about total government spending and therefore deficits. The supply-siders do not care that tight government spending takes resources that would have gone into the private sector and diverts them to the public sector.

They care only about taxes. Indeed, their attitude toward deficits approaches the old Keynesian “we only owe it to ourselves.” Worse than that: the supply-siders want to maintain the current swollen levels of federal spending. As professed “populists,” their basic argument is that the people want the current level of spending and the people should not be denied.

Even more curious than the supply-sider attitude toward spending is their viewpoint on money. On the one hand, they say they are for hard money and an end to inflation by going back to the “gold standard.” On the other hand, they have consistently attacked the Paul Volcker Federal Reserve, not for Making Economic Sense 41 being too inflationist, but for imposing “too tight” money and thereby “crippling economic growth.”

In short, these self-styled “conservative populists” begin to sound like old-fashioned populists in their devotion to inflation and cheap money. But how square that with their championing of the gold standard?

In the answer to this question lies the key to the heart of the seeming contradictions of the new supply-side economics. For the “gold standard” they want provides only the illusion of a gold standard without the substance. The banks would not have to redeem in gold coin, and the Fed would have the right to change the definition of the gold dollar at will, as a device to fine-tune the economy. In short, what the supply-siders want is not the old hard-money gold standard, but the phony “gold standard” of the Bretton Woods era, which collapsed under the bows of inflation and money management by the Fed.

The heart of supply-side doctrine is revealed in its best-selling philosophic manifesto, The Way the World Works, by Jude Wanniski. Wanniski’s view is that the people, the masses, are always right, and have always been right through history.

In economics, he claims, the masses want a massive welfare state, drastic income-tax cuts, and a balanced budget. How can these contradictory aims be achieved? By the legerdemain of the Laffer Curve. And in the monetary sphere, we might add, what the masses seem to want is inflation and cheap money along with a return to the gold standard. Hence, fueled by the axiom that the public is always right, the supply-siders propose to give the public what they want by giving them an inflationary, cheap-money Fed plus the illusion of stability through a phony gold standard.

The supply-side aim is therefore “democratically” to give the public what they want, and in this case the best definition of “democracy” is that of H.L. Mencken: “Democracy is the view that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

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

The post A Walk on the Supply Side appeared first on LewRockwell.

When I first announced that I was moving to Indonesia in late 2007, one friend looked puzzled. “Indonesia…is that in Bali?” he asked. Interestingly, living in Jakarta is a lot like Houston, without the Cajun food.

I stepped off the plane onto the tarmax on 14 February 2008, having boarded on a crisp winter’s monring in Houston, and into a swampy moldy morning in Jakarta. The arrival area was thick with clove cigarette smoke, and I didn’t encounter air conditioning — such as it was — until I was deep inside the terminal.

I fumbled my way to baggage claim, and after collectng my only bag, I turned to find 10 tiny brown men in blue shirts ready to usher my burden on their carts. Seeing that I would not escape unschathed, I selected one to take my bag.

On the way out, I stopped to exchange two of my six one-hundred dollar bills — my only surviving savings. The exchange rate was 10,000 rupiah to the US dollar, and I became an instant millionaire. The problem was that my new-found fortune was all in 100,000 rupiah notes, and most Indonesians had never even seen one, much less could make change for one.

At that time, there were few Indonesians who had travelled outside their home town, much less out of the counrty. The average day wage was $2, and a fresh college grad could expect to make $300 a month. There were a very select few in the upper class (earning more than $4,000/month), and everyone else was among the working poor.

Over the next 10 years, I watched the economy explode. Almost overnight, there was a vibrant middle class. People were buying their first cars. Younger generations were buying their own homes, leaving the previous two or three generations in the ancient family homestead. Foreign franchises, like Burger King, Subway, 7-11, Carrefour, and many others, were opening on a weekly basis.

Suddenly, Indonesians were travelling overseas and parents were sending their brood to univeristy in Australia, England, Taiwan, and the US. The city centre was on a building spree, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since the 1970s oil boom in Houston. New suburbs of semi-detached Euro-style housing were appearing everywhere, complete with (gasp) yards front and rear.

The government, giddy with the boom, started increasing taxes on everything, mostly to make up for all the losses due to corruption in the state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Indonesia dropped out of OPEC the year I got here, primarily due to the government demanding more and more slices of the oil and gas pie. There is no local oil industry, and the big internationals left rather than put up with the ever-increasing greed of the political types, and the constantly shifting regulatory quagmire.

Meanwhile, the rupiah had been sliding against the dollar, standing at about 15,000 and change to $1. That’s a 50% depreciation in less than 20 years. Prices began ballooning, after the government succumbed to IMF pressure to cut fuel subsidies. Taxes kept rising to pay for the loss of foreign investment compoumded by cancerous corruption and gross mismanagement in the SOEs.

NGOs were pushing the government to install more mass transit systems — high-speed trains, busways, MRT/LRT, etc., — primarily for the benefit of Chinese and European companies and “development” banks. The Indonesian sense of inadequacy and inferiority, inflamed by boundless political greed and corruption, led to outlandish borrowing to build the showroom transit systems that had no master plan or purpose, other than to look shiny and new for political photo ops.

Ultimately, this Me Too building boom culminated the last president declaring he would build a new capital city in the jungles of Borneo — all shiny, and spiffy, and “green,” and outrageously expensive (and riddled with corruption).

And then the Frankenvirus hit.

Read the Whole Article

The post Gulag Archipelago appeared first on LewRockwell.

Western NGOs have sent the Georgian opposition political parties that they finance into the streets to protest the Georgian Dream Party’s sweep of the legislative elections. The Georgian Dream Party favors pragmatic relations with Russia, whereas the collection of small parties financed by the West want to create another Maidan Revolution to open a second front for Washington against Russia. See this.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov says that there is no reason to doubt that the West is trying to push Georgia into war with Russia. See this.

Putin-the-Unready rejects claims that Russia interfered in the Georgian election. Putin still hasn’t learned that the role of good democrat makes no impression on the West. Will Putin’s toleration of hostile actions against Russia lead to the opening of a second front against Russia?

The US Defense Department Inspector General has reported that Congress has appropriated $182 billion for Ukraine since February 2022, $43.84 billion of which went for governance and development. “Governance and development” could mean bribes paid to Ukrainians to support military conflict with Russia.

Ukraine has been fighting Russia with Western weapons and targeting information for close to three years. But Putin doesn’t count this as the West being at war with Russia. Drones hitting deep into Russia also don’t count as the West being at war with Russia. The war doesn’t start until Washington begins firing missiles into Russia. Apparently, some weapons are war weapons and some are not.

Standing aside from Washington’s destabilization and overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014 has left Putin with an ever-widening war that will be difficult to end without Putin making concessions. What will these concessions be?  Washington now has a stake in the outcome, and Trump cannot stand an agreement the media can turn into a Trump defeat from giving in to Putin. The media and Democrats will say that it proves Trump was a Putin agent after all.

The tense situation between Russia and the West cannot be resolved until the conflict in Ukraine is resolved. This dilemma and the huge expense in lives and money associated with the three year war could all have been avoided if Putin had not come up with such an impractical course of action as a limited military operation that allowed Kiev to continue the war.  We would have a better situation today if Putin had struck hard enough to bring the conflict to a quick end before the West could get involved with its prestige committed.

Putin’s dilly-dallying has made Russia look weak, and it has given Washington time to stir up new fronts for Russia in Georgia and Abkhazia. There will be a price to be paid for this dilly-dallying.

Meanwhile the US Democrat Party has revived the “Russian agent” hoax. This time the targets are Elon Musk and Tulsi Gabbard.

See this, this, and this.

The post Will Washington Succeed in Opening More War Fronts for Russia? appeared first on LewRockwell.