Lew Rockwell Institute

Former Vice Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Robert Burke is preparing for a new kind of retirement.  Burke was convicted of “conspiracy to commit bribery and bribery. …[and] performing acts affecting a personal financial interest and concealing material facts from the United States.”

He is the highest ranking military officer held to account for his quite understandable actions to get a “good-paying job” after retirement to supplement his approximately $18,000 a month pension.  Seriously, who can blame him?

An inability to count actual numbers, and to live frugally, seems to be a partial result of the so-called “General’s Lobotomy” that follows the award of that very first star.  I cannot verify such medical procedures exist, but I recall the phrase from my time in the Pentagon, mainly to rationalize how some very excellent O-6’s became very different people once granted flag rank.  This phenomenon is not limited to the military, by any means.  Kash Patel and Dan Bongino talked with Maria Bartiromo recently, and quickly put to bed the outlandish notion that Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself.  Are they all pod people?

Burke was convicted of bribery, but his real and most widely shared conviction is a shared vision that the easiest way to become a millionaire these days is to work for the government, either through careerism or election.  In our financialized America, you need to be in on the front end to really benefit, as Charles Hugh Smith explains, and this is well known by those connected to government, in particular, government acquisition.

Bribery and conspiracy to commit bribery are wonderful crimes, low brow and high brow all at once.  Burke was a government goodfella, and it was good while it lasted.  If he gets jail time, I’m sure it will come with its own very fine dining and comfortable meeting rooms.

Seriously, Burke’s case presents a major opportunity to address the military industrial complex, and what it – and our lack of an alert and informed citizenry long before Eisenhower’s two terms – has wrought for our country.  We have no effective national defense, except the nearly 400 million guns held privately in the US, a legacy of a Second Amendment protection of a natural right most countries do not even recognize, much less honor.  The state prefers to rely on federal armies and navies, like the one Admiral Burke served in and influenced for nearly 40 years.

Burke’s crimes amount to profiteering. The government, the state, inadvertently or purposely, creates the structure, and sustains the spirit, of profiteering. To be connected to a state – whether local, state and federal – is to be well taken care of, to be “in the know” as in the example of Nancy Pelosi, et al or less grotesquely, Bob Menendez.

The great Marine Smedley Butler said “War is a Racket.” The racket is about making money from the state, influencing the state for personal profit, and it is about a business of war that destroys goods, and replaces old debts coming due with new debts that the state pushes to the far future. War is often sold as part of the Broken Window Fallacy – destruction isn’t really wasteful or criminal, it’s stimulative and creative.

Butler dedicates a section of his pamphlet to “How to Smash This Racket.” He did not say “reform it” or “closely monitor it” or do a study or create a presidential commission or department, like DOGE.  This racket is smashed by taking the profit out of war.  He writes:

Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted – to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

Butler – like our felonious Burke – was a man who spent his adult life fighting the wars of the United States.  Unlike Burke, Smedley Butler drew the correct conclusion.  He became a bold enemy of the state, if only because he spoke his mind, and shared his assessments and remedies widely.

Which brings us to the most interesting crime of dear Admiral Burke: “concealing material facts from the United States.”  The law itself is entertaining, and describes in some detail the ways in which government departments and their employees Must. Not. Lie.  What a joke!

Burke is a proven devious, persistent and creative liar, in order to get what he wanted and felt he deserved. Concealing material facts from the “United States” means, in the vernacular if not legally, concealing them from the people who paid more than enough for a Republic but received instead an Empire in its cups, stumbling towards the cliffs of insanity.  We have a country at the brink of fiscal collapse, without a single bit of useful “defense” ensconced anywhere in the federal regime.

The company in this case was Next Jump.  It specializes in “scalable leadership coaching through practice not theory.”  You simply cannot make this stuff up.   It is a sign of deep, deep sickness in the system, not just the Pentagon.

On February 13th of 2025, Trump 47 briefly proposed cutting the Pentagon budget in half.  That announcement had the immediate effect of “costing” Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin an estimated $6 Billion in stock valuation.  Congress and the defense lobbies had their mission, and not only did they deliver, but Trump, Janus-like, on April 8th proposed a record-breaking $1 Trillion dollar DoD budget.  Trump said “We have things under order now.”  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Admiral Robert Burke is not the tip of the iceberg; he is not one bad apple.  Burke and his cohorts at Next Jump are just bite-sized chunks of the Department of Defense. He is a chip off the old block, a sample at the Pentagon Costco.  Americans are forced, under threat of arrest, fines and imprisonment, to buy overpriced, overpackaged, non-working condition “defense” in quantities we can’t use today, and can’t consume in a century.

Smedley Butler believed that if we took the profit out of war, allow those who would be fighting to decide if a war was worthwhile (the young, not the old, the poor, not the wealthy) and limited our military forces to home defense purposes – we could smash the war racket.

The first – removing profit from war – really means ending the Fed, because a state with an unlimited ability to “create” money will always attract those who want a piece of that action, who want to win big under the rules of the game.  When it’s not real money, and not your money, those allowed into the federal casino will happily gamble with national defense, as they do with every other project of the state.

Trump was on to something in February – reducing the casino payout by half would impact both those running the casino, and those betting there, overnight.  There would definitely be blood.

If we returned the power to go to war to the people – we could be in for a century or two of peace in the United States, as the youth of our country do not favor war, and have no fantasies about making their bones on a global battlefield.  Butler – who died in June 1940 – could not have imagined that the US would eventually fight nonstop around the planet without any Congressional declarations of war at all – gutting Constitutional guidance meant to assign the decision for war to the People’s representatives.

If we limited our military forces to purely defensive purposes, we could envision a DoD that actually functions as such.  Such a defense-oriented military would have never allowed 9/11, almost a quarter of a century ago, when the DoD – and the MICIMATT around it – defended no American.  It was too busy  cultivating enemies abroad, in hopes of fomenting more war, and war profits.

The Pentagon and Next Jump’s competitors congratulate themselves on rooting out a corrupting influence in their midst.  Naughty Admiral, shame, shame!  Now please go back to your previously scheduled program while we grift and plot, profit and pillage.

Trump can be certainly be proud that we have the “most” of something.  His trillion dollar military is the most expensive, most incompetent, most wasteful, and most worthless on the planet.

The post Navy Admiral Corrupt? How Utterly Disturbing! appeared first on LewRockwell.

The hatred of some in Israel for the people of Gaza – even for little children – is just astounding. If they have even a tiny bit of belief in God, they should pray for forgiveness.

Unfortunately, NPR reported last Thursday (May 15) on “deadly airstrikes, killing more than 150 people in the past day, including dozens of children.”

On May 9 the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and many other publications reported on a meeting of a subcommittee of Israel’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

The hearing in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, was not about concern for children who were starving or who had to have amputations without anesthesia. It was about concern over the public relations harm to Israel.

One of the witnesses was Dr. Sharon Shaul from NATAN, a worldwide humanitarian aid charity.

Dr. Shaul said, “I believe that none of the people sitting around this table are concerned that a suffering child cannot receive painkillers or even minimal medical treatment.”

Then the story said that Knesset member Amit Halevi from Netanyahu’s Likud Party “interrupted her angrily saying, ‘I’m not sure you’re speaking for us when you say we want to treat every child and every woman.’”

The doctor then replied that she hoped the member would not oppose “a four-year-old child” undergoing an amputation receiving pain medication. “I hope you have that compassion,” Dr. Shaul said.

However, Knesset member Limor Son Har-Melech “pointed at the doctor and said ‘the only treatment that should be given is to you.’” Another member shouted, “You are the sickest doctor I have ever seen.”

Elad Barashi, a producer at Israel’s Channel 14, surpassed even this hatred by writing on social media in early May: “Good morning. Let there be a holocaust in Gaza.”

In another post, he wrote: “I can’t understand the people here in the State of Israel who don’t want to fill Gaza with gas chambers … or train cars … and finish this story. Let there be a holocaust in Gaza.”

He added: “Men, women and children – by any means necessary we must simply carry out a Shoa against them – yes, read that again – H-O-L-O-C-A-U-S-T!”

He said there were 2.6 million terrorists in Gaza and wrote: “Without fear, without weakness – just Crush. Eliminate. Slaughter. Flatten. Dismantle. Smash. Shatter.”

The fanatic Netanyahu has been indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, yet he is a hero in our Congress because of campaign contributions. The rest of the world is overwhelmingly against the genocide in Gaza.

In my column two weeks ago, I wrote of the letter signed by the 36 members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which criticized what it called this “most extremist of Israeli governments” and said, “We stand against the war.”

Even more significant – in fact, almost shocking – is the column Thomas Friedman, the longtime New York Times columnist, published on May 9 entitled “This Israeli Government Is Not Our Ally.”

Friedman said Netanyahu has placed personal political survival before his nation’s and U.S. interests and wrote, “Netanyahu is not our friend.”

He added that “a permanent Israeli military occupation, whose unstated goal will be to pressure all Palestinians to leave is a prescription for a permanent insurgency – Vietnam on the Mediterranean.”

Israel has never had any prominent media voice more supportive than Friedman has been over the years. He has been writing for the New York Times since 1981.

President Trump wrote that the release of the American hostage Edan Alexander a few days ago was “a step taken in good faith toward the United States and the efforts … to put an end to this very brutal war…”

Axios reported that “Israel was not directly involved … and initially learned about it from its intelligence services who spy on Hamas.” This gives credence to the many reports that Trump is tired of being manipulated by Netanyahu.

CNN reported on May 12 that Trump “blindsided Israel several times already – announcing talks with Iran, a deal with Yemen’s Houthi rebels, and direct talks with Hamas,” plus not stopping there on the president’s latest Middle East trip.

Maybe Friedman’s column and some of the statements and actions by Trump will finally give some members of Congress the courage to speak out against Israel’s cruelty in Gaza.

This article was originally published on Knoxville Focus.

The post Israeli Hatred for Children in Gaza Is Shocking appeared first on LewRockwell.

International Man: Who exactly are the neoconservatives—where did this movement originate, what do they fundamentally believe, and why does their ideology seem so relentlessly focused on promoting war and global intervention?

Doug Casey: Most of the neocons have a background as socialists or hardcore leftists. But the neocons are smarter than the average statist in that they could see that socialism was a failure—it wasn’t working anywhere. So what they did was adopt conservative-seeming economic policies, while maintaining all the other trappings of socialism.

Neocons are universally state worshipers. They don’t believe in principles as a matter of principle. You could say that a foundational thinker for the neocons is Niccolò Machiavelli, who promoted the idea in his book The Prince that whatever works and accomplishes the goal of the ruler should be done—that it’s counterproductive to think in terms of right, wrong, or morality.

Many neocons self-identify as Wilsonians. Woodrow Wilson was one of the very worst presidents, responsible for the income tax, the Federal Reserve, US participation in WW1, and trying to “make the world safe for democracy,” among other things.

International Man: The neocon agenda appears to be intellectually rooted in figures like Leo Strauss and even Trotsky. How do you explain the rise of this ideological blend within what many still call the “conservative” movement?

Doug Casey: They only seem conservative because they’ve found it useful to adopt free market–seeming economic policies. This goes back to the long-standing confusion between capitalists and fascists.

Socialists believe in state ownership of the means of production—factories, farms, mines, and the like. Capitalists, however, believe in private ownership of the means of production, as well as private control over them. Fascists—a word that was coined by Mussolini, incidentally—also believe, or at least tolerate, the private ownership of the means of production. That’s why they’re easily confused with capitalists. But fascists believe in complete state control over the means of production, while leaving ownership in private hands.

This is why there’s so much confusion in the public’s eyes between capitalism and fascism. The key difference is control, and a strong partnership between the private and public sectors. That greatly enhances the ability of business owners to enrich themselves, at the expense of the average worker.

In point of fact, neocons are all fascists—in every way. They worship the state, just like in fascist Germany and Italy, where industries were privately owned but completely tied to the interests of the state. Almost all the world’s economies are fascist; there are no pure capitalist or socialist countries. We really should call the neocons fascists.

They also have an aggressive foreign policy, which fascists are known for. They’re fascists in every way, including their support for substantial welfare programs for the populace.

International Man: Despite a track record of costly failures—from endless wars to ballooning government power—why do neoconservatives still wield such influence? Why does anyone in Washington or the media continue to take them seriously?

Doug Casey: I’d say it’s because of their outspoken belief that the State should be the central influence in society. That the government should be the country’s dominant force, not the family, religion, business, or other civil institutions. People now go along with that. It’s understandable that everybody wants a big brother to kiss all their problems and make them better. The average person, who wants something for nothing, a free lunch, is morally weak. And he’s intellectually confused by statist propaganda.

If you create a powerful state which promises to not only take care of you, but also to “win” against other states, a lot of people will respond. Many treat the State the same way football fans treat their favorite teams: “we” will win against “them.” It’s easy to get the hoi polloi hooting and panting like chimpanzees against some fabricated enemy.

Intellectuals have coined arguments that cater to this kind of mass psychology, and people go for it. They like the idea of being protected and being part of a powerful, winning team.

I’ve met any number of well-known neocons personally. Charles Krauthammer, Bill Bennett, and Paul Wolfowitz among them. They’re intellectuals and quite civilized on the surface. But all of them promote completely evil and destructive ideas. The fascist system we have has treated them very well. They’ve become much wealthier than they could have under socialism or capitalism.

International Man: Trump and his envoy, Steve Witkoff, have recently called out the neocons by name.

Figures like Douglas Murray have suggested the term ‘neocon’ is the new n-word. Mark Levin has gone so far as to label its use anti-Semitic.

Why are some neocons using accusations of racism to shut down legitimate and important discussions?

Doug Casey: A great way to shut down any discussion today is to call your opponent a racist. And this has some grounding with neocons because a large majority of them—just like a large majority of intellectuals in general—are Jews. Neocons are reflexively pro-Israel as well. I listened to Mark Levin go on a rant about this on his show recently; he was practically frothing at the mouth in anger.

It’s odd that people consider it racist to stereotype any group and decry that as a bad thing. It’s not. Stereotypes develop because they reflect reality. Members of stereotyped groups often prefer to pretend that we’re all equal, and their group is just like anyone else. But it’s a fact that birds of a feather flock together.

It’s unfortunate that almost all the leading neocon intellectuals are Jews.

International Man: The neocons have long pushed for US war with Iran. What would the geopolitical fallout be if they succeed, and how might such a war impact global markets, energy prices, and economic stability?

Doug Casey: It would be a huge mistake for the US to attack Iran, as they seem to be planning to do. They’re moving B-52 and B-2 bombers to Diego Garcia, which is within easy striking distance of Iran, while Trump thumps his chest and threatens war. It’s a mistake because Iran is a somewhat advanced society with about 92 million people; it’s hunting big game, not like the pipsqueak countries the US has been losing against for the last 75 years. But also because any outside attack always unites a domestic population. It would unite them against the US, and further empower the Mohammedan ideologues now in charge.

It would also be a mistake because it would be immoral—not that anyone cares. The Iranians have never attacked the US. The world is, I think, getting tired of the US promiscuously bombing anyone they like. In fact, almost all of the Islamic terrorism over the last 30 or 40 years has come from Sunni Muslims. The Iranians are Shia Muslims. They don’t get along well with the Sunnis—much like Irish Catholics never got along with Irish Protestants, or Protestants and Catholics in Europe generally never got along back in the days when religion was a factor.

It’s suspicious, now that Trump has become so cozy with the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, which are all run by Sunnis. It makes sense that they’d like to use the US as a cat’s paw to steal Iran’s oil. Just as Israel would like to use the US as a means of taking out their enemy. It looks like the US, and Trump, are being used to do the bidding of the Arabs and the Israelis. Although we’re in no way threatened by the Iranians.

If a war did happen, the Iranians are in a perfect position to close the Strait of Hormuz, which is the conduit for around 40% of global oil exports—about 21 million barrels transit the Strait daily. None of it, incidentally, goes to the US. It’s genuinely not our problem.

The smart thing for the US is simply to leave Iran alone. If they have problems with their neighbors— Saudi Arabia and particularly Israel—let them sort it out among themselves.

Because Iran is a theocracy, making many economic decisions based on religion rather than economics, the current regime will eventually collapse, and the country will reorient. The last thing we need is to carry somebody else’s water by starting a potentially catastrophic war where the US has absolutely nothing to gain, but a lot to lose.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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We have one very, very clear red line, and that is enrichment. We cannot allow even 1% of an enrichment capability,” Steve Witkoff, U.S. Special Envoy, ABC’s “This Week”

“Demanding zero uranium enrichment means NO DEAL”, Sayed Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s Foreign Minister

You could have spotted this from a mile away.

President Trump—who sabotaged the most stringent and comprehensive nuclear agreement in history (The JCPOA)—ordered his special envoy to make a surprise announcement that crosses all of Iran’s “red lines” and makes war between the US and Iran inevitable. Anyone with half a brain could see that this was the strategy from the very beginning. Just as Washington encouraged Kiev to intensify its bombardment of the Donbas forcing Putin to send Russian forces into Ukraine, so too, Washington lured Tehran into nuclear “talks” with the clear intention of creating a pretext for launching a war on Iran. In both cases, US war-planners ‘moved heaven and earth’ to make it look like the opposite party provoked the conflict when, in fact, Washington was the primary instigator. Let me explain:

On Sunday, US special envoy Steve Witkoff said the following on ABC’s “This Week”:

“We have one very, very clear red line, and that is enrichment. We cannot allow even 1% of an enrichment capability.”

Full Stop. Witkoff’s comments require thorough and unbiased analysis, mainly because they are designed with one purpose in mind: To sabotage the nuclear talks. There’s no other explanation. The Trump administration and anyone who has followed this issue over the last decade and a half knows that Iran’s biggest and brightest red line is enrichment. In the four meetings that have been conducted in Oman since April, US negotiators were told explicitly that nuclear enrichment was “non-negotiable” and ‘off the table’. In other words, they agreed that the issue would not be discussed or even brought up. (Non-negotiable means non-negotiable.) So, we must assume that the reason Witkoff decided to make this unexpected announcement was either because he wanted to torpedo the negotiations or because he doesn’t understand plain English. Which is it?

We think Witkoff understands plain English, in fact, we’re sure of it. So, what was his motive; why did he decide to deliver this bombshell on national TV to an American audience instead of Iranian negotiators who would have challenged him on the issue? Why?

There can only be one reason; he wants to sabotage the talks. He wants to force the Iranians to terminate the meetings so it appears that they do not sincerely seek peace. That is how Trump and Co. intend to turn-the-tables and make it look like Iran is the “bad guy.” More importantly, any suspension of the talks by Iran will be used as a justification for US-Israeli air strikes on targets in Iran. Trump has already threatened that—if the talks broke down—he would unleash holy hell on Iran. Witkoff has now laid the groundwork for those attacks.

Other analysts are starting to figure out what is going on behind the smokescreen of the nuclear talks. Here’s how Michael Tracey summed it up:

If anyone suspected that the purpose of this “negotiating” exercise was to set up an impossible endpoint (humiliating Iranian capitulation) and then when Iran balks, use that as a pretext to bomb Iran (“We tried to negotiate first!”) there is growing evidence for your suspicions

He’s right, isn’t he? The talks were a “set up” that was concocted to create a justification for war. It’s clear as day. Much of the public’s confusion on this matter is attributable to Witkoff himself, who seems like an affable and credible fellow, whose position on nuclear enrichment is identical to rabid ‘foam-at-the-mouth’ warmongers like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. Think about that for a minute; Witkoff’s position is the same as Bolton’s and Pompeo’s. There’s no difference.

So, why is nuclear enrichment such a big deal that Iran won’t even discuss it?

Because Iranians have great pride and they will not allow themselves to be treated like second-class citizens by the likes of the US and Israel. That’s why.

Look: Iran’s right to nuclear enrichment is not a privilege granted by executive fiat or presidential edict. It’s a fundamental right that is enshrined in international law under the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. President Donald Trump does not have the authority to forbid Iran from engaging in activities that are not only perfectly legal under NPT statutes but also affirmed under the treaty’s “inalienable right” clause. Inquisitive people might want to read the section of the treaty itself to corroborate what we are saying here:

NPT Article IV and the Right to Nuclear Technology

Article IV Text (on the Right to Nuclear Technology):

Paragraph 1: “Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.”

Paragraph 2: E ncourages cooperation in sharing nuclear technology for peaceful uses, particularly for developing countries.

What part of the above statement is ambiguous?

There is nothing ambiguous about this statement. Iran clearly has “the inalienable right… to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination.” That means that neither Trump nor anyone else can selectively order Iran to stop doing what is clearly permitted under an internationally recognized treaty.

And we should also pay special attention to the language that is used in the passage. The treaty does not simply refer to the “rights” of the participating parties; they refer to “inalienable right” which means that nuclear enrichment is a “fundamental, natural right that cannot be taken away or surrendered, either by a government or individual.”

The wording was formulated to avoid the situation we have today in which an impulsive and domineering despot arbitrarily repeals the laws (and rights) that don’t align with his own dubious political objectives. By refusing to comply with Trump’s executive edict, Iran is basically defending the global system upon which international law rests. It is a rejection of Trump’s iron-fisted unilateralism. We should all be grateful for Iran’s gutsy perseverance.

By the way, just to underscore Witkoff’s hypocrisy on this matter, here is a short video on Fox News of Witkoff stating unequivocally that Iran would be permitted to enrich at 3.67% which is a position he now rejects. The interview was conducted in April, a month before he banned all enrichment activities.

What conclusions can we draw from this sudden about-face on the part of the administration that has put us all on the path to war?

First of all, we can assume that the US-Iran negotiations were set up to fail, in fact, the plan to create a justification for war required that the talks fail.

Second, we can assume that Trump—who presented himself as an opponent of foreign interventions and who promised “to pursue a new era of peace, understanding, and good will”—is following in the footsteps of his warmongering predecessors and has no intention of keeping his word to the American people.

And third, we can assume that Trump is zeroing in on Iran in order to repay the wealthy billionaire Zionists who filled his campaign coffers (with over $100 million) and helped him win the 2024 election. We never believed for a minute that the millions in campaign donations were given without “strings attached”. Bibi and his Zionist allies want the US to spearhead a war on Iran, and Trump is the man who can deliver that war. All he needs is some type of credible justification for launching his preemptive attacks…. which the failed negotiations will provide.

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

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Triage means sacrifices will have to be made and distributed to those most able to afford them to spare those least able to afford them.

There are many consequential things we can’t discuss factually because the topic upsets everyone. And since getting upset shuts down any direct discussion of difficult issues, these issues metastasize into problems that end up sinking the ship.

The Titanic has already struck the iceberg and is doomed, but since this upsets the passengers, we dance around the facts rather than take immediate action. Everything about the situation is upsetting, and so emotions dominate the zeitgeist: resentments, blame-game, accusations, the whole self-reinforcing dynamic leads to people shouting at others as they drown. The last word, indeed.

Federal deficit spending and the overweighting of entitlement spending on retirees is too upsetting to discuss factually, so we don’t. But the math doesn’t work, and so the ship will sink. This was obvious 20 years ago, when I posted this: Boomers, Prepare to Fall on Your Swords (June 2005), in which I suggested that well-off Boomers address the problem by gracefully making the necessary sacrifices rather than heap them on the younger generations.

It was even more obvious by 2013, when I posted this: Generation X: An Inconvenient Era (May 23, 2013), in which correspondent Eric A. explains how the math doesn’t work.

Let’s start with some necessary stipulations. When I suggest well-off Boomers accept the need to make sacrifices to save the ship from sinking, I suggest this as someone in this cohort.

I am a Boomer, drawing my Social Security benefit, which like my lifetime income, is close to the national median SSA benefit. I’m solidly in the middle of the pack. Being over the age of 65, I also have Medicare benefits. Like many others of my generation, I’ve lived frugally, saved money, worked hard, etc. Since I’m still working, I pay Social Security and Medicare taxes–15.3% of all earned income as I am self-employed.

Unlike others in my generation, I attribute only a modest percentage of my net worth to frugality and working hard, as the majority of whatever “wealth” I own is the direct result of the hyper-financialization credit-asset bubble that’s been inflated since 2007.

Those who were able to buy assets such as houses and stocks decades ago saw their net worth rise to extraordinary heights in the bubble. Those who didn’t or couldn’t buy assets before the bubble did not see their net worth rise to extraordinary heights.

Let’s go over how we got here. The current federal tax system and retiree benefits evolved in the 1930s to the mid-1960s. In the 1930s, retirement meant poverty for many workers who were unable to save a nestegg large enough to fund their no-earnings years. Social Security was enacted as a way of using the SSA (Social Security Administration) taxes (FICA to employers) paid by current workers (1% of wages in those days) to fund a modest retirement income for retirees.

Social Security was always a pay as you go system. Whatever SSA tax revenues that weren’t distributed piled up in a Trust Fund. This Trust Fund was eliminated in the mid-1960s, and excess SSA taxes went into the federal general fund. The current Trust Fund is a useful fiction. When SSA runs a deficit, the Treasury funds the deficit by selling Treasury bonds, just as it does with all other deficit spending.

Political realities demanded that the program be universal to attract widespread support. So millionaires collect Social Security and Medicare benefits, too. As SSA’s financial foundations erode, a modest reform was enacted: above a modest income, 50% of SSA benefits are taxed as regular income.

Back when the program was enacted, there were around 10 workers for every retiree. The demographics and economy were different then. The economy was mostly domestic, and the bubble of the 1920s had popped. Financialization and globalization were at low ebb. Everyone assumed there would always be 10 workers for every retiree.

But people started living longer, the disabled were added to Social Security, and Medicare ballooned from a modest program to an open-ended spending juggernaut. In other words, the economy changed, demographics changed, but the system has not been changed to reflect these realities. SSA and Medicare taxes have increased dramatically, but these programs are still funded by payroll taxes paid by employees and employers.

Capital (assets, income from capital gains, speculation and investments) only pays a thin slice of Medicare via the Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT) on capital gains incomes above $200,000 for single taxpayers and above $250,000 for couples filing jointly.

What we’re actually discussing isn’t just generational; it’s 1) the open-ended nature of the SSA, Medicare and Medicaid programs, 2) the impossibility of relying on two workers to pay all the benefits for each retiree as the number of retirees and beneficiaries exceeds 69 million people while the full-time workforce is 135 million, and 3) the extraordinary wealth divide in the U.S. where the majority of the wealth is held by the top few percent and the retiree generation (Boomers) for the reasons stated above.

The solutions are as obvious as plugging a hole in the ship’s hull.

1) The tax burden has to be shifted from labor to capital via financial transaction taxes and ending the multi-trillion dollar exclusions on capital gains.

2) Social Security and Medicare benefits must be means tested; those collecting $10,000 a month in other pensions and investment income don’t need Social Security benefits, which should be reserved for those with no other substantive source of steady income in their retirement years.

3) The open-ended entitlement programs must be limited in some fashion, and there is no way to do this that will not upset everyone. Hard choices–triage–must be made, as doing nothing is choosing to let the ship sink.

Let’s feast on the facts of the matter. Those who need a calming agent, please do so now.

Read the Whole Article

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The most important sentence from President Trump about yesterday’s phone call between President Putin and him is this:

Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire and, more importantly, an END to the War. The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of.

The most important sentence by President Putin about yesterday’s phone call is this:

Notably, Russia’s position is clear. Eliminating the root causes of this crisis is what matters most to us.

Russia will not fall for ending the war without having achieved its main goal.

Western media, here the NY Times, continue to play dumb (archived) about what the Russia’s main goal is:

[Putin] repeated his mantra that a peace deal needs to “remove the root causes of this crisis,” referring to Russia’s pursuit of wide-ranging influence over Ukraine.

David Ignatius, a CIA spokesperson at the Washington Post, makes a similar (archived) nonsensical claim:

He still wants victory, which he described once again after Monday’s call with the phrase “eliminate the root causes of the crisis.” That’s code for his conviction that Ukraine cannot be a European country, as it wants, but must remain under Russian hegemony.

Russia as well as Ukraine are European countries. Russia has no interest in having ‘hegemony’ or ‘wide-ranking influence’ over Ukraine. Its interest is the defense of the Russian Federation. It had to prevent Ukraine from becoming a U.S. (NATO) spear tip aimed at its heart.

A different NY Times piece about the Russian northern defenses build up after Finland joined NATO is far more correct when it states (archived):

From Moscow’s perspective, the Russians need to bolster their defenses to protect themselves from NATO expansion, which has always been a sore subject. The Baltic nations were the first members of the former Soviet Union to join NATO, bringing large stretches of Russia’s border up against NATO’s. The prospect of Ukraine, an even bigger former Soviet republic, following suit was so threatening to Moscow that it became one of the causes of the most devastating land war in generations.

It is NATO expansion, not Ukraine the country, that is the root cause of the war. It is NATO expansion that has to be eliminated.

The U.S. and its European allies are still in denial of that. To ignore that the U.S. has, for over 30 years, been driving the NATO expansion that led to the war, allows Trump to play a ‘mediator’ in war in which the U.S. is a dominant participant.

It is stupid for western media to accept Trump’s claim (archived) of such a role:

After phone calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump posted that “Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire and, more importantly, an END to the War”.
…
In remarks that indicated that Washington may be stepping back from a role as a mediator, Trump said the “conditions” for a deal could only be agreed by the warring parties “because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of”.
…
Trump also said that immediately after his call with Putin, he recounted the conversation to Zelenskyy together with the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Finland and the European Commission.  (1)
…
But two people briefed on the call with the European leaders said Trump was clear that he would pull the US back from engaging with the conflict and leave Ukraine and Russia to directly negotiate a ceasefire. He also made no promise of future US sanctions against Russia should Putin refuse any peace attempts. One person familiar with the conversation said the leaders were stunned by the US president’s description of what was agreed. They added it was clear Trump was “not ready to put greater pressure” on Putin to come to the negotiating table in earnest.

Trump is pretending to wash his hands (archived) over Ukraine:

The US desire to disengage has been flagged for weeks, by Trump himself but also by secretary of state Marco Rubio and vice-president JD Vance, who have repeatedly expressed frustration with Russia and Ukraine in equal measure. Vance told reporters on Monday that the US might ultimately have to say: “This is not our war.”

The U.S. can not be a mediator in a war, or wash its hands over it, when it continues to supply weapons and the all important field intelligence and communication means needed to wage it. Only yesterday the U.S. allowed Australia to send (old) U.S. made tanks to Ukraine.

Trump’s claims of disengaging from the war has yet to be confirmed by any evidence that he is really going to do so.

The only thing Trump did reject so far was to join the European attempts to escalate the war by inserting their own troops into it.

Having learned from the economic disaster his tariffs have caused Trump also rejected plans to impose secondary sanctions in form of 500% tariffs on anyone who continues to buy oil from Russia.

Aside from that Trump has kept support for the war on the same level as before and only refrained from expanding it.

That he is, for now, leaving the negotiations to Russia and Ukraine, is an admission that he has failed to keep his election promise of making peace.

The U.S. will have to reengage in negotiations if peace is to be achieved. It is U.S. (NATO) expansionism that has cause the war.

Russia needs to remove the root cause, U.S. (NATO) expansionism, to achieve peace.

A complete victory in Ukraine is a necessary but not yet sufficient condition for that.

But chances are good that the further disagreements over the defeat of Ukraine will rip NATO apart.

That might be the victory President Putin has on his mind.

—
(1) The FT claims that: “[Trump] recounted the conversation to Zelenskyy together with the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Finland and the European Commission.

But Trump’s statement does not mention Britain at all: “I have so informed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, of Ukraine, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, President Emmanuel Macron, of France, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, of Italy, Chancellor Friedrich Merz, of Germany, and President Alexander Stubb, of Finland, during a call with me, immediately after the call with President Putin.”

It seems like, despite the FT‘s claim, Prime Minister Starmer was left out in the cold on this.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Ukraine Negotiations Still Hover Around Its Root Cause appeared first on LewRockwell.

Some people might be wondering why a backwater nation like South Africa has become a flash point in the global debate over politics and culture. It’s really not that hard to understand once you recognize the core conflict, which is in part about racial division but also about the fundamental evils of the political left and socialism.

South Africa represents a perfect petri dish, a window into the minds of progressive authoritarians. The country is near the end point of the natural socialist evolution – From “hopeful humanist endeavor” to the communist slave plantation that all socialist adventures inevitably become.

A key pillar of leftist authoritarianism is an obsessive desire to prevent people from walking away. In other words, citizens are seen as property of the collective and property of the greater progressive experiment. When citizens try to leave, this is treated as a crime beyond reckoning.

It’s a concept I’ve been writing about for many years now. Walking away from from the leftist plantation brings the entire edifice into question; it is the worst thing a citizen can do.

Afrikaners that want to immigrate to the US under the refugee program put in place by the Trump Administration are being targeted by a malicious smear campaign. Recently, the SA parliament debated what should be done about these immigrants and also debated how to protect SA’s image in the world stage.

Their narrative was broad, but it basically asserts that Afrikaners that talk openly about racial discrimination and race motivated murders of whites might be investigated under treason laws. By extension, Afrikaner refugees seeking to leave SA could be designated as threats to national security. Anyone warning about the growing movement for racial genocide of Afrikaners is a potential traitor and a threat to the country (Go to 118:00 for the discussion).

The African National Congress has implemented at least 142 race-based laws (similar to DEI policies in the US) designed to redistribute wealth, property and jobs away from the white population into the hands of the black population.

And, the progressive authoritarians believe they have the perfect justification for the continuing oppression of whites – Because Apartheid existed 35 years ago in South Africa, this means that any brutality that happens to Afrikaners today is fair game.

It’s the same argument that leftists use in Europe and the US: “White westerners were colonizers and colonization is evil, therefore, as repentance for their sins against the multicultural gods, whites must allow their societies to be deconstructed and submit to generations of abuse.”

My question is, why would we do that? We can simply organize and tribalize if that’s the intention of the progressive movement. We can easily drop the hammer on them if necessary. The only reason progressives and socialists think they can railroad white citizens in South Africa is because they assume we will sit back and let them.

Just so there’s no misunderstanding, everything happening in South Africa is a consequence of progressive governance. The race targeting of whites, the crumbling infrastructure, the 32% unemployment rate, the ongoing civil instability, etc. They’ve had 30 years to make things better and instead they made things worse.

Conservatives have no political power and white citizens have no political power (their representation in government is next to nil).

One might wonder why the government hasn’t swiped all the farm land from the Afrikaners already? The conundrum for progressive authoritarians is that they want to, but the vast majority of their domestic food production relies on the expertise of white farmers. They remember the starvation crisis that happened when Zimbabwe ethnically cleansed white farmers. They have to get rid of the Afrikaners slowly and replace them with black farmers over a period of years.

Utility and political optics require that the SA government keep Afrikaner farmers trapped within the country so they can continue to produce until the government sees fit to eliminate them completely.

I believe the “treason” narrative is part of this agenda, along with the general smear campaign. If even a handful of Afrikaners are able to come to the US and succeed this will encourage thousands more to leave SA. The country will then lose a large portion of its most productive citizens. The last vestiges of civil stability will disappear. South Africa will collapse.

This is why some officials are begging Afrikaners to stay. This why the government is talking about national security concerns over a mere 59 immigrants leaving for America. Secretly, they know that an eventual mass exodus of white farmers is coming and it will crush their fraudulent system.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post Leftist Plantation: It’s Now ‘Treason’ For White Farmers To Leave South Africa? appeared first on LewRockwell.

For all the alarming seriousness of two South Asian nuclear powers coming to the razor’s edge of a lethal exchange, the 2025 India–Pakistan war could not but contain elements of a Bollywood extravaganza.

Frantic dancing indeed, which risked getting out of control pretty fast. Forget dodgy, plodding UN mediation or any serious investigation of the suspicious attack out of the blue on tourists in India-held Kashmir.

Right off the bat, on 7 May, India’s Modi government dramatically launched ‘Operation Sindoor’ against Pakistan, a missile offensive billed as “counter-terrorism.” Pakistan immediately launched a counterpunch codenamed ‘Operation Bunyan al-Marsus’ against the “Indian invasion.”

Culture is key. Sindoor is classic Hindu culture, referring to the vermillion mark applied on the forehead of married women. No wonder the Chinese immediately translated it as ‘Operation Vermillion.’

Yet what the whole planet retained from the alarming escalation, irrespective of any attempt at contextualization, not to mention color-coded cultural practices, was the Top Gun element with a Bollywood twist: the Pakistani Air Force (PAF) and the Indian Air Force (IAF), on the night of 7 May, directly involved in the largest, and most high-tech air battle of the young 21st century, lasting a full hour and featuring scores of 4th and 4.5 generation fighter jets.

Dramatic entertainment value was provided, quirkily enough, not by Indians, but by a Chinese netizen, notorious internet blogger Hao Gege, and his hilarious global blockbuster parody video “The newly bought plane was shot down.” He was, of course, referring to the IAF’s French Rafales decimated by Chinese J-10C fighters, which have fully mastered electronic warfare and are equipped with cheap, precise, and brutally efficient PL-15 air-to-air missiles.

Add to it Chinese hardware such as the HQ-9 air defense system and ZDK-03 AWACS. A J-10C, which, incidentally, costs only $40 million, roughly six times less than a Rafale.

Inevitably, the whole thing turned into a public relations nightmare, not only for New Delhi, but mostly for the French military-industrial complex, complete with a cornucopia of spin from all sides. Islamabad claimed it destroyed six Indian fighter jets (including as many as three Rafales, with a collective price tag of $865 million, plus one Russian Su-30, one MiG-29, and one Israeli Heron UAV); paralyzed 70 percent of India’s power grid; and smashed India’s made-in-Russia S-400 defense system. India, for its part, fiercely denied all of the above over and over again.

Then, after so much sound and fury, Pakistan on 10 May announced it had won the war. Two days later, India announced the same.

The sound and fury though continued unabated, ranging from the J-10C basking in Top Gun superstar status and Chinese stocks skyrocketing in a much-vaunted “DeepSeek moment” in modern warfare to the ridiculous sight of US President Donald Trump claiming he was responsible for the India–Pakistan ceasefire, which as it stands, looks more like a pause.

Get a Rafale for the price of six J-10Cs

The fact is both Islamabad and New Delhi deployed a fast and furious arsenal of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, glide bombs, and suicide drones to attack each other in a series of cross-border strikes, while at the same time confronted with the startling inneffectiveness of a great deal of their own air defense and anti-missile systems. No wonder both needed a ‘ceasefire’ – fast.

The predominant interpretation all across the globe does stand on solid facts. And those facts are profoundly game-changing: For the first time ever, Made-in-China weapons and equipment defeated similar-grade western weapons and hardware, not in a war gaming scenario, but in high-intensity air battle conditions. No amount of spin and glossy ads can compare with this practical demonstration by the Chinese military-industrial complex.

The J-10C, by the way, is not even a latest generation Chinese fighter; those would be the J-20 and J-35 (both 5th generation stealth fighters); the J-16 and J-15 (4.5 generation multirole fighters); and the 6th generation fighters (J-36 and J-50) still being tested.

Arguably, one of the best, concise explanations of the PAF/Chinese accomplishment was written by former PLA Air Force Colonel and strategist Professor Wang Xiangsui. He attributes it to a triad: mastery of systems warfare – as in highly integrated and synchronized Chinese air combat systems, Pakistani pilot competence, and preparedness for war. What PAF did, he reasons, emulates what China has been doing: investing in 6th-generation fighters, DF-17 missiles, and quantum satellites.

Further solid analyses by military expert Zhang Xuefeng and military expert Bai Mengchen complement in detail Wang’s conceptual framework.

When Hindutva meets Zionism 

So what was this lightning war all about? It was not only about the intractable Kashmir problem inherited from the British Raj. As much as there are plenty of repulsive aspects inherent to both the Hindutva fanatics around Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the ghastly Pakistani junta-in-charge who – illegally – imprisoned Pakistan’s sitting Prime Minister Imran Khan, such a war can only profit those usual suspects bent on unleashing various degrees of Hybrid War and Divide and Rule across the Global South.

Both India and Pakistan are permanent members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Their dispute could have been managed at the SCO table, with Russia, China, and Iran present to mediate and placate. Instead, Moscow and Tehran acted independently and bilaterally, both trying their own way to instill some sense in the belligerents as mediators. Their success is debatable.

India is also – in theory – a top BRICS member, one of the founders of the multipolar powerhouse. It boasts an excellent strategic relationship with Russia and a geoeconomic relationship with the new BRICS+ West Asian power, Iran. To pit India against Pakistan is to pit New Delhi against Beijing, which fully supports Islamabad via the flagship New Silk Roads project, CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor). So the war can also be viewed as an attack on BRICS from the inside.

It was so easy to have both India and Pakistan’s so-called “elites” fall into the trap. One just needs to manipulate cheap “national pride” emotions – and the usual suspects are masters of that domain.

The Big Picture gets even murkier when we see that New Delhi, always insecure because, unlike the Chinese, it has not buried its own “century of humiliation” vis a vis Anglo power, is still wobbling between deeper geoeconomic integration with Russia – and China – while relying on defense and security from the Washington–Tel Aviv axis.

Hindutva and Zionism meet in more ways than one. India uses Heron and Searcher Israeli drones to patrol its borders, as well as Spike anti-tank missiles. Israeli advisors have trained Indian intel ops. Israeli cybersecurity firms help New Delhi track espionage threats and assorted “insurgencies.”

Junaid S. Ahmad, the director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID) in Islamabad, takes it a step further. He directly points to “Gaza in the Himalayas” – with the Modi government embroiled in a “fantasy war” over Kashmir.

With India importing vast swathes of war tech equipment, Ahmad argues, “Zionism and Hindutva do not merely share tactics – they share a cosmology: a belief that supremacy is sacred, and conquest is redemption,” with Muslims in Gaza branded as “Hamas sympathizers” finding the equivalent in Kashmiris branded as “terror-adjacent.”

Ahmad correctly identifies Hindutva as a “supremacist theology,” with a Hindu state “purified of difference – be it Muslims, Christians, or Dalits.” How can that possibly be accepted by the BRICS ethos?

The 2025 India–Pakistan war may go down in history because of the notorious air battle and the Bollywood antics – a messy post-modernist interpolation of tech warfare, psychological operations, information warfare, and cognitive dissonance. It stood casually, for a few days, as a global reality show and entertainment spectacular rather than an actual war. And that’s worrying enough, because it masks deep troubles inside systemically troubled India.

What does the Bharat concept – the new official name for India – really entail? Bharat refers to Emperor Bharata, identified as the first conqueror of the whole Indian subcontinent. Very Israeli-style, a Bharata Empire mural has since 2023 been showcased in the Indian Parliament, directly incorporating territories that belong to Pakistan and Bangladesh.

So what can be realistically interpreted as “terrorism” under a Bharat lens, really? All Kashmiris, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis may be categorized as such? The actual leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) parent organization, the Rashtrapati Bhagwat, insists that the “Bharata Empire” will inevitably come to fruition. In parallel, Indian media went into a frenzy promoting the independence of Balochistan from Pakistan.

Who wins out of all this strife? Certainly not Indians themselves. Certainly not BRICS. Only the usual Divide and Rule suspects.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.

The post India–Pakistan War: The Winners and the Losers appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of the ways that brutal right-wing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet would terrorize the Chilean people into patriotic submission to his authority was by disappearing people. This was different from simply torturing and executing them. He and his goons certainly did that too. But disappearing people was different. With executions and bodies, families at least had certainty with respect to what had happened to their loved one. With disappearances, they never could be certain that their loved one really was dead. There was always a small part of people that retained some amount of hope that maybe — just maybe — their loved one would show up after being released from years or decades in some prison. It was a brutal way to psychologically torture the family members of the person who had been disappeared and everyone else in society.

In a sense, disappearing people is what the U.S. government has been doing with immigrants that it is sending to El Salvador. Once U.S. officials deliver people into the clutches of El Salvador’s brutal dictatorial regime, the U.S. government ostensibly loses control over them. At that point, people are taken to the country’s infamous terrorism confinement center where they are subjected to torture and indefinite detention and even the possibility of extra-judicial execution.

Equally important, the inmate is denied any contact with the outside world. His family does not know his condition. For all they know, he could be dead. He has been disappeared into the bowels of the terrorist confinement center for as long as El Salvador’s dictatorial regime wants him there.

In an article in the Los Angeles Times, one of the 110,000 people who have been incarcerated in El Salvador is 37-year-old René Mauricio Tadeo Serrano, who was arrested in 2022 while working at a factory. His mother, Maria Serrano, says that she has not heard from him for nearly three years. According to the Times article, “On a recent morning, Serrano stood outside the prosecutor’s office begging for information on her son’s case, alongside dozens of other mothers whose children have disappeared.”

Three years! Imagine sitting in this brutal prison and not receiving visitors, including your very own family. Imagine not knowing whether you’ll ever get out. That’s assuming, of course, that Serrano is still alive.

It’s worth mentioning that the people who the U.S. government is disappearing into the Salvadoran system for an undefined period of time have not been convicted of any crime, either in the United States or in El Salvador.

Unfortunately, El Salvador’s system of disappearing people is now our system too. That’s because of the partnership that the U.S. government has entered into with El Salvador’s brutal dictatorship.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that was not the type of system envisioned by our American ancestors who founded our nation. In fact, it was the Allende-Bukele type of system that our ancestors fiercely opposed.

That’s why our American ancestors demanded the enactment of the Bill of Rights immediately after the Constitution was adopted. They wanted to make it clear that the American system would never become an Allende-Bukele system. Their mindset was clearly reflected in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments, which guaranteed that what is being done in El Salvador and what was done in Chile under Pinochet would never happen here in the United States.

That’s how we got due process of law, trial by jury, the right to a speedy trial, right to counsel, the presumption of innocence, protection against cruel and unusual punishments, and other protections, along with the writ of habeas corpus, which has been called the linchpin of a free society.

Many people in El Salvador love Bukele and his brutal system. Indeed, many right-wing Americans do too, just as they loved Pinochet and his brutal system. That’s because they don’t care about freedom as much as they care about being kept “safe.” Thus, like people throughout history, they are eager and willing to trade their liberty for the pretense of safety. But as one Salvadoran put it, “We used to be afraid of the gangs. Now we’re afraid of the state.” In other words, the chickens who eagerly and willingly enter into their cages to be kept safe finally start realizing that being guarded by the fox comes with problems.

Appellate Judge Alex Kosinski once pointed out that people who surrender their guns will only make that mistake once. The reason is that once they have surrendered their guns, their regime will never permit them to get them back in order to be able to make the mistake again.

The same argument applies to civil liberties. If Americans surrender their civil liberties for the pretense of safety or security, they will likely find that they will only make that mistake once, especially after a few hundred of them have been disappeared into the bowels of the terrorism confinement center of El Salvador or some other brutal dictatorial regime. At that point, many people will immediately go silent or, even worse, suddenly becomes ardent supporters of the system, as they did in Chile and as they have done in El Salvador.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post Disappearing People appeared first on LewRockwell.

Note: In my opinion neither Putin nor Trump are engaged in “peace negotiations” for the purpose of ending the military conflict in Ukraine.  Putin’s purpose is to use negotiations to achieve a Great Power Agreement, a New Yalta.  Putin says the purpose of the negotiations is to solve the “root cause of the conflict,” which is the absence of a Great Power Agreement.  For Trump the purpose is to withdraw US focus, money and weapons and to concentrate them on China, which is regarded as Washington’s more dangerous and powerful enemy.

It is amazing how difficult it is for the Western foreign policy community and media to recognize and acknowledge facts.  Generally speaking, analysts who tell you the difference between the truth and the narrative are brushed aside. All sorts of dismissive names are applied to us few, and false narratives serving agendas prevail. Policymakers themselves end up believing the false narratives, and this raises the risks of dangerous miscalculations.

For example, one of the most dangerous of the false narratives is that the slowness of Russia’s military advance against Ukraine is the consequence of Russian military weakness, high Russian battlefield casualties, the vulnerability of the Russian economy to US sanctions, and Putin’s unrealistic expectation to be regarded by Ukrainians as a liberator.  

The truth is entirely different.  Every time Putin endorses negotiations, he emphasizes that they must address the “root cause” of the conflict.  The root cause is the absence of a Great Power Agreement.  Putin is using a long drawn out war that the West tires of to initiate “peace negotiations” that Putin hopes to turn into a Great Power Agreement like the one he and his foreign minister failed to achieve in the winter of 2021-2022.

Washington policymakers have concluded that Russia’s weakness allows the US to withdraw from Ukraine and turn the war over to Europeans, while Washington gears up to deal with the more dangerous enemy–China.  Failed Ukraine peace negotiations are the intended excuse for Trump washing his hands and walking away.  What it signifies is Washington’s refocusing on China as the most dangerous adversary. 

It is my opinion that China is not an adversary any more than Russia and Iran are, but the narrative demands that they are adversaries. The American military/security complex cannot exist without adversaries.  That is the reason America has adversaries. Without adversaries what would the CIA, NSA, Defense Intelligence Agency, think tanks such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies, organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, university international studies departments, and publications such as Foreign Affairs do?  The United States has massive vested interests in having adversaries, the more dangerous the better.  

The question has arisen:  How does the US deal with so many adversaries. Formerly, we were assured that we could defeat all adversaries simultaneously.  Today it is recognized that we cannot.  Wess Mitchell in a recent article in Foreign Affairs says it is the policy of the Trump administration to sequence its conflicts. As Washington regards Russia as the weaker of its two main “adversaries,” Washington is turning the Ukraine conflict over to its European puppets while Washington takes on China.

Wess Mitchell, a former Trump  senior defense department official, wipes out the narratives and tells us the policy. And no one other than John Helper and myself have commented on it.  

Here is Secretary of State Marco Rubio telling the US Senate yesterday what I have told you, what John Helmer has told you, and what Wess Mitchell has told you:  The purpose of the Ukraine “peace negotiations” is for the US to exit the conflict and focus on China.  Here are Rubio’s words:

The war against China, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday (May 20) – is now the strategic priority for the US. Implementing it requires sequencing Washington’s wars. “Every minute we spend, every dollar we spend on this conflict in Europe [Ukraine] is distracting both our focus and our resources away from a potential for a much more serious and much more cataclysmic confrontation in the Indo-Pacific…they are related but they’re related both ways — they’re related on the one hand by the precedent that it could set, but they’re also related by the fact that every minute that we spend on this [Ukraine] conflict that cannot be won by military means,  every resource that’s expended into it [Ukraine] is money and time that’s not being spent on preventing a much more serious confrontation from a global perspective in the Indo-Pacific.”  Rubio clearly states that the prime target is China.

You can watch and hear Rubio speak here,  at the 53 minute 51 second mark.

In my judgment based on the knowledge I have at the present time, Putin and the Russian foreign policy commentators do not understand what is afoot.  Putin is lost in hopes that peace negotiations can be turned into a Great Power Agreement, a new Yalta. That would be a greater achievement than merely winning a military conflict with Ukraine and, therefore, is worth the sacrifices of Russian troops in a conflict in which Putin prevents a victory, as a victory would prevent the negotiations that Putin imagines could become a Great Power Agreement. 

If Putin had immediately smashed Ukraine, Russia would be regarded as a Great Power and would have obtained its Great Power Agreement.  Instead, Putin created the image of a weak Russia that can be sidelined to Europe while Washington takes on China.

See this, this, this and this.

The post America’s Real Foreign Policy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Civilizations are impermanent, according to optimists. Simple accumulations of wealth and power are bound to fail, according to pessimists. I am somewhere in between, a firm believer that nothing can be sustained over the long term, with human fallibility precipitating the final collapse. The greatest of all early civilization was that of Athens. No society since 450 B.C. has even come close to matching it. What country or state could match philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, playwrights such as Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes, artist-architects like Phidias, and leaders such as Pericles? Not to mention military geniuses like Themistocles and Miltiades. The Athenians were so wise that at times they elected leaders by drawing lots. They instinctively knew that power corrupts, hence they drew lots and the winners were top bananas for one year only. Yet this perfect society of about 30,000 lasted for a few generations at best. Sparta, and ambition to expand, ended the greatest civic experiment ever.

Sparta, of course, lasted even less. Famous throughout history for its doomed stand at Thermopylae, and immortalized as the epitome of martial prowess, this bravest of all societies simply ran out of men. (My mother, grandmother, and grandfather and their grandparents, and their grandparents, were all pure Spartans, and I’m rather proud of that.) Alexander the Great conquered most of the known world but died too young to leave an Alexandrian culture behind.

“At some point civilizations resemble the human body. Age cannot be denied, nor can death.”

Then came Rome’s time, which lasted close to 1,000 years. It ended due to overstretch, and, as Gibbon said when asked why Rome fell, “We should be asking why did she last as long as she did.” A civilization whose growth has exceeded the limits of what is physically possible and whose development has engendered social, fiscal, and political problems with no feasible solutions is bound to fail. At some point civilizations resemble the human body. Age cannot be denied, nor can death. Byzantium came next and lasted almost as long but never had the imprint of Rome as the Byzantine Empire was always under threat and attack from the east and the west. But it oversaw the spread of Christianity, something no other civilization ever accomplished. Byzantium collapsed in 1453, and the Ottomans came next in line.

Mind you, until now I’ve been writing about empires, easily mixed up with civilizations. The Chinese civilization has been around forever, as has the European one. The French and British empires were just offshoots of the latter. As is—yes, you guessed it—the American one, now in its peak and with the inevitable flatterers predicting it is here to stay.

Both the British and French empires are now seen as an evil, especially by the left, but in my book both empires civilized as well as exploited. And both Brits and Frogs learned about owning and selling slaves from African and Arab slavers. As did the Spanish, whose empire actually covered most of the New World. Hypocrisy about the past is ever present, and history is written by those with an axe to grind, mostly if not completely by those on the left. Which brings me to the American empire or civilization, although the latter naming may raise loud guffaws by ever-envious Europeans.

America is not yet 250 years old but remains the global bastion of personal freedom. American boys have twice gone over to Europe to fight and liberate countries, not for conquest, but for the simple belief that freedom is worth dying for. Freedom, of course, is always under threat, especially freedom of speech, with woke doing its best to control it. Woke was basically antiwhite, and despite Trump’s efforts, only last week right here in these United States, I witnessed an example of the war being waged against the white man.

White Afrikaner farmers, descendants of the Boers, who actually founded South Africa 500 years ago, have been under murderous attack since white apartheid gave up power to the black majority 35 years ago. Their once-upon-a-time profitable farms have been taken away without compensation and run into the ground by the blacks. Because white farmers had their farms taken away, The Donald allowed sixty of them to immigrate to these shores. And guess what? All hell broke loose among media pundits of the left-wing persuasion, angry that sixty poor whites had landed on these shores. “Why these whites after the pausing of other refugee programs?” 12 to 20 million illegal mostly brown and blacks in the country, and the media pundits are screaming about sixty white farmers who are here to work. Nice! No country whose fourth estate works tirelessly against the common good can survive, says the great Greek philosopher Taki. America has allowed millions of Central Americans and millions of Africans to these shores, and one day soon whites will be a minority. That is when the great American experiment in liberty will come to an end. According to the great Greek philosopher, that is.

This article was originally published on Taki’s Magazine.

The post End of an Era appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Tim McGraw:

Start the video at the 38:00 mark. The USA is bankrupt. The bond market is demanding higher interest on government bonds. Foreigners and Americans aren’t buying enough of the bonds, so the Fed will just create currency to buy the bonds. This leads to inflation of the money supply and a recession since the government is eating up all the capital (credit) available in the country.

We went through this in the 1970s. They ended with the depression of 1981-82 and interest rates of 21%. Happy Days are Here Again (if you have any savings.) For everyone else, tough times.

The post Representative Thomas Massie Interview on Redacted appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer. 

Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

The post Robot Plumbers, Robot Armies, and Our Imminent A.I. Future appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

The American Conservative

The post Andalusian Leader Praises Farmers—While Bulldozing Their Fields appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Caitlin Johnstone

The post The Western Media Brought Gaza To This Point appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Antiwar.com Original

The post Israeli Hatred for Children in Gaza Is Shocking appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin.

The Unz Review

The post May 22, Forrestal Assassination Day appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin.

The post Scott Ritter Takes Trump’s Measure on Gaza, Ukraine appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Stars and Stripes

The post Truman engaged in ‘largest airstrike in the history of the world’ from an aircraft carrier, top admiral says appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith.  

Haaretz.com

The post Destroying Gaza ‘With Love’: Israel’s New YogiNazis appeared first on LewRockwell.