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John Leake

The post Why Are Massachusetts Senators & Reps So Hopeless? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Rick Rozoff.

TASS News

The post Press review: Putin, Trump discuss Ukraine peace appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tom Woods and I talk about the need to look beyond the Trump administration to plan for a realistic ideological and political plan moving forward. Trump’s election victory was by a very slim margin and the US is still deeply divided. In fact, the break-up of the United States is inevitable:

The post Is the US Headed for Breakup (in the Long Run)? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

The Gateway Pundit

The post Tulsi Gabbard Confirmed as Trump’s Director of National Intelligence in Blow to Deep State appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah:

Sputnik News

The post How Federal Reserve’s Corruption Has Swung US From Crisis to Crisis appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

The National Pulse

The post Neocons Clutch Pearls as DOGE Sets Sights on Globalist National Endowment for Democracy. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

LifeSite News

The post Wisconsin Catholic bishops release immigration letter supporting secure borders appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Suzan Mazur:

What Would Malcolm Forbes Say re Trump/Musk Space Policy?

The post Oscillations: What Would Malcolm Forbes Say re Trump/Musk Space Policy? appeared first on LewRockwell.

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Michel Chossudovsky

The post Why Does Donald Trump Want to Transform Gaza into a “U.S. Territory”? Goodbye to “Greater Israel”? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Mark Thornton writes :

Hi Lew:

Here is the link to the Minor Issues podcast. The “Price of Beef” episode was very popular in video, audio, and text formats. Good feedback on “Closing Signs” from entrepreneurs. I try to reach out to new audiences as much as possible. I would love to see a sample of this work on LewRockwell.com if you think that would be appropriate. I am also attaching the episode script for “Tax Cuts and Tariff Increases” that I have written and recorded but not released until Saturday morning.  

Thanks for your support, Mark

https://mises.org/podcasts/minor-issues

The post Recent episodes of the Minor Issues podcast appeared first on LewRockwell.

https://emilytvproducer.substack.com/cp/157012816

They are still denying organ transplants to unvaccinated……and this patient is related to JD Vance. Call to action if you live in Ohio.

https://docbrown77.substack.com/p/they-are-still-denying-organ-transplants

Medical Right to Refuse Ohio | FAMILY member of VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE DENIED HEART TRANSPLANT at CINCINNATI Children’s HOSPITAL | Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/groups/865453777503768/posts/1551552438893895/

The post JD Vance’s 12-Year-Old Relative Denied Heart Transplant for Not Receiving COVID-19 Genetic Injections appeared first on LewRockwell.

Much has been written in the alternative press over the past year about the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and its other war crimes in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, etc. This has often been viewed within the historical context of the self-declared Zionist Israeli state’s founding in 1948 up to the present day. But far less has been said about the Zionist’s racial-nationalist-settler-colonialist movement’s history of terrorism to seize Palestine and kill and drive the Palestinians into exile that goes back for more than a century

For those who think Donald Trump’s recent announcement that the United States will take over Gaza and force the besieged Palestinians to leave their country is shocking, the history presented by Thomas Suárez will disabuse them of that notion. The Zionist Trump is stating baldly the ultimate goal of the ethnic cleansing of all non-Jews from Palestine, which has been the Zionists’ goal from the beginning and lies behind Biden, who considers himself a Zionist, and Trump’s recent support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

When questioned why he supported the Zionist leaders’ efforts to drive the Palestinians from their land, Winston Churchill, in 1937, replied, “I do not admit the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time.”

As Suárez, a London-based historical researcher, former West Bank resident, violinist, and composer, writes, “He denied that ‘a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the Black people of Australia’ by their replacement with ‘a higher grade race’.” This higher grade race rhetoric is racism, pure and simple, and it has been applied to the Palestinians by the Zionists from the start. Dogs, vermin, etc. Hitler would be proud.

It is nothing new. Ethnic supremacy and a pure Jewish state have always been the goal, even as the Zionists used Nazi rhetoric and tactics that they allegedly abhorred while working with the Nazis to get German Jews into Palestine but nowhere else. What became known as The Haavara Transfer Agreement is proof of that.

In January 1933 when Hitler came to power as German Chancellor, there were international calls for a boycott of German goods and services, supported by prominent Jews and Christians. The boycott caused a severe blow to the Reich’s economy. But an agreement with Hitler was arranged by Zionists to circumvent the boycott and provide Germany with needed capital, with Hitler allowing German Jews with sufficient wealth to emigrate to Palestine in return for their purchase of German goods and equipment, a quid pro quo arrangement that provided Germany with a propaganda win by claiming the boycott-breaking deal was made by Jews. Four years later, Adolph Eichmann, on a trip to Palestine, was involved in a follow-up effort with the Zionist terrorist militia, the Haganah, and its representative Feival Pokes, for the Nazis to pressure German Jewish groups to urge Jews to go only to Palestine and no other countries.

The irony of Churchill’s racist statement is that the Zionists, despite the UK’s Balfour Declaration of 1917 declaring its support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” turned on their British accomplices, who were in Palestine as “administrators” under a League of Nations mandate following WW I, with a savage terrorist campaign to drive the British out. This gave the Zionists a narrative propaganda myth that they have exploited to the present day that they were the victims of occupation in their own land, while it was the Zionists who, through terrorism, were driving the Palestinians from the land that was theirs for a very long time.

Treachery of this nature defines the history of all those arrayed against the Palestinians from the start – as today, with Trump being no exception.

Suárez makes it clear that the “Palestinians also committed terror attacks, and this book’s focus on Zionist and Israeli terror must never be misinterpreted as excusing Palestinian violence against innocents,” but the “Palestinian terror occurred principally during the uprisings of the late 1920s and late 1930 after years of being institutionally discriminated against and killed for the benefit of the Zionists, and after non-violent resistance – diplomacy, entreaties, strikes, boycotts – proved futile.” His focus in this book, therefore, is to document and offer a comprehensive and structural analysis of the decades-long terror campaign the Zionist racial-nationalist settler movement used to obliterate the “inferior” Arabs who were “dogs in the manger.”

The Zionists’ twin terror campaigns against the Palestinians and the British forced the British to withdraw in 1948. They then turned their full attention to exterminating the Palestinians, which resulted in the what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba – the purging of nearly a million Palestinians from their land and the destruction of more than five hundred of their villages – (what Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, called “a miraculous simplification of our task” ). It was then that the siege of Gaza began, not as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his accomplices claim began after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack.

As Suárez writes, “The siege of Gaza began in 1948, fifty-eight years before the 2006 election of Hamas, which Israeli now uses to justify it. It served then the same purpose it serves today: to block people of the wrong ethnicity from returning home.”

From its start, the Zionist settler project was rooted in a fanatical messianism marketed as the myth of these modern Jewish settlers simply sailing back to the Hebrew land of the Bible after a 2,000 year absence, a land that belonged to them even though they had never lived there. They were just returning to their sovereign home, decreed by God, and those Palestinians living there, no matter for how long, were usurpers who had to be driven from their homes, killed, or forced into exile. The branding of the Jewish state “Israel,” a name entrenched in the messianic Jewish and Christian culture of the West, was crucial since it called up all the nostalgia for the Holy Land of yore and all the images of one’s “true” homecoming. This was crucial to get Christian support in the West.

Palestine Hijacked (2022) is a book of deeply documented historical research (686 detailed endnotes) that tears the mask off the narrative that paints Zionism as a benign force. Through assiduous archival research in poorly accessed and newly declassified archives of the Central Intelligence Agency, the British National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Zionist Organization of America, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, etc., Suárez uses original source documents to hoist the well-known Zionist leaders with their own petards, often in their own words, words never meant to see the light of day. Chaim Weizmann. Theodore Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Moshe Sharett are exposed as liars, and the latter three as ruthless terrorists, with the former three in complete accord with their terror tactics. The same is shown to be true for those Western leaders who supported the terrorist seizure of Palestine by a Zionist racial-nationalist settler movement that had zero legal or moral right to the land, as they still do not.

Suárez sets the scene early on page 14:

Through the decades to come [from the early days of Zionism], from mainstream leaders like David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann to the fanatical terror gang Lehi, the ideological pronouncements of the settler project were couched in the language of messianism. Zionism was building the final Kingdom, the Biblical Third Temple, a resurrection rising from the ashes of the fabled Second Temple and Solomon’s Temple. Zionism’s battles, its enemies, its conquests, its tragedies, were Biblical, and its establishment of the Israeli state in 1948 was sold as the resumption, the reconstitution, of the Biblical realm. As Ben-Gurion put it, “the Bible is our mandate” to take Palestine.

[my emphasis above]

Again, as with Trump’s pronouncement, the old is new and the new, old; thus today we have American conservative Christian evangelicals’ (Christian Zionists) passionate support for Netanyahu’s war crimes, justified and blessed by the Biblical canard that lives on in the propagandistic narrative promoted by Israel and the corporate media.

It’s all here in Suárez’s chronicle. Not just details about the rather well-known Zionist terror attacks such as the bombing of The King David Hotel that could be turned into Zionist propaganda, but all the years of the slaughters of Palestinians, old and young, men and women and children in small villages and markets, in homes and on the roads and in the fields, done without mercy and carried out with a Biblical gleefulness by fanatics doing their “God’s will.” It chills the soul to read the details of such genocide’s long history.

Suárez writes:

The King David bombing endures as the iconic terror attack of the Mandate years, and history books falsely cite it as the most deadly. The 1940 bombing of the Patria [an immigrant ship] bombing was three times deadlier, killing about 267 people, and the two atrocities are identical in the claim that only infrastructure, not people, were the targets.

Of the attacks in which the killing was the acknowledged purpose, at least one of the Irgun’s bombing [the Irgun, the Lehi, and the Haganah were the Zionist’s three main terror groups] of Palestinian markets killed more (July 6, 1980, about 120), and the Zionist armies coming slaughter of villages such as Deir Yassin – still during the Mandate – would also kill more people than the King David attack.

If you wish to understand the terrorist nature of today’s Israeli government, you need to read this book.

If you think the recent Israeli use of exploding pagers has no history, learn about the Zionist use of exploding leaflets long ago.

If you think critics’ use of the term Nazi to describe the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians is over-the-top, learn about the history of Zionist collaborations with Hitler and the Italian fascist Mussolini.

If you think the Israel designs and attacks on Lebanon and Syria are something new, think again.

If you are shocked by the question: Does Israel have a right to exist?, discover the illegal and immoral nature of its claims to that right. Then ask yourself to answer.

If you are afraid to learn these things for fear of being called antisemitic, learn how the Zionist founders of Israel weaponized that term long ago, against fellow Jews and anyone else who dared question their legitimacy, and how their progenitors and the U.S. government that supports them now stand rightly condemned as supporters of genocide.

If you think Zionism and Judaism are synonymous, you have swallowed a package of lies wrapped as a treacherous gift; for Jews with a conscience know that the Zionist project is a terrible stain on their name.

Thomas Suárez has written a brave and great book. He should have the last word:

The reason Israel holds millions of human beings under various levels of apartheid, the reason it keeps millions more languishing in refuge camps, is not that they are Palestinians, not that they are Arab.

It is rather, strictly, because they are not Jewish. If they were Jewish, whether Palestinian or Arab or anything else, they would be welcomed and given a generous subsidy to move in from whatever part of the world they live and take over a house whose owner was expelled because s/he is not Jewish.

Nothing in the history of Zionism, of the Israeli state, or the so-called conflict can be understood divorced from this.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism Forged An Apartheid State From River to Sea By Thomas Suárez appeared first on LewRockwell.

Recently, as I doused our closet in room spray, my husband objected, noting that it “probably wasn’t good for our lungs”. My fancy new spray—aptly named “High Maintenance”—not good for the lungs? Well, we will die in freshly scented clothes, then.

His medical warning had little effect on me for good reason: I am a walking miracle, having spent a good decade of my life traveling in the back seat of the family car—windows up, inhaling cigarette smoke, hairspray and cheap colognes. Room spray, by comparison, seems benign.

For all our worries about nanoparticles and estrogen, nothing tested human biology like the combination of Marlboros, Aqua Net and Jovan Musk; and nothing absorbed these odors better than the plush upholstery of a 1985 Pontiac Bonneville. Add the intensifying effects of Florida sun and some freshly-applied nail polish, and you’ve created a mobile gas chamber—my childhood tradition for countless trips to Sunday morning church.

Even if I rode in a jar of hot fumes, I reflect with fondness on those years. The real beauty was not in the smoke and hairspray, of course—memorably pungent as those were. It was in the unlikely pair who got pregnant before marriage. It was a Navy guy who worked to move his young family out of the trailer park. It was a mom who took her kids to church, and her smoker husband who discovered Jesus. It ended with three kids and nine grandkids. Ultimately, it was God’s story—twelve little souls born of two redeemed sinners who had no money, no connections, and no plan.

Unplanned or not, my carcinogenic 1980’s upbringing has gained some stature in my eyes. My parents, despite their bumpy backstory, made everything seem effortless—and perhaps it really was. Their low-energy parenting had its merits, and chief among them was the sturdier humans it produced. I must, therefore, thank my parents for what they didn’t have and didn’t do.

My parents never obsessed over anything, yet I knew what they thought about everything. They never fretted about safety, cholesterol, or endocrine disruptors; they made few, if any, rules for the house. The ones they had could be summarized: Eat and do what you want, but remember that taxes, divorce, and communism are bad. Less was more, in truth.

They didn’t just play it loose on the health front, either: life itself was unscripted. With no drugged and sedated children and no “college readiness” rat race, my family life was largely a noisy free-for-all. If we were thereby less polished, we at least enjoyed liberty. We were free to work, free to play, and free to fail— so long as we did so within the moral absolutes of our Christian faith. Somehow this formula produced a lawyer, an architect, and a writer.

If they seemed a bit careless, they did a masterful job of creating self-starters. My dad wasn’t doing “intentional parenting,” nor was my mom anything like a “tiger mom.” If today’s children have helicopter parents, we had dirt-bike parents. They weren’t hovering around campus at teacher conferences or fretting over team tryouts. They felt no obligation to plan elaborate “picture parties” for prom—the family room wall would do just fine. They had great faith in common sense and natural immunity; being stupid had consequences, and hand sanitizer didn’t exist.

My children would consider all this part of a troubling past, too: We didn’t do organized sports. We didn’t schedule outings. We wandered the neighborhood without phones or protective gear. We didn’t eat organic food or carry water bottles. Even worse, we didn’t do “sports physicals” or routine checkups—instead, we got chicken pox, acne, and crooked teeth.

We didn’t have screens or schedules, but our corner TV was on duty around the clock; no hour was passed in silence. It blasted out news, game shows, soap operas and cartoons until Hawaii Five-O roared onto the screen—my doom signal for homework and dinner. Television would rattle on without me for a while, but I regularly sneaked out at 11:30 to catch Johnny Carson, a regrettable perk of being a first-grader with no bedtime.

My dad didn’t indulge much leisure, so we didn’t do vacations. However, we had a glorious beach nearby. Even so, our beach days were a mettle-testing affair: We brought a cooler of off-brand sodas, a couple bags of chips, and no sunscreen. We parked on the side of A1A and schlepped through sand dunes thick with sand spurs. Five sunny hours later, we were ready to peel our way into a tan. After rinsing our feet with a milk jug of saltwater, we crammed back into a hot station wagon for the sticky ride home. The two-Marlboro journey would usually have us there in 45 minutes.

Every now and then I share these snippets of lore with my children, who’ve been told to stay away from cigarettes, stay off the sand dunes, and wear sunscreen. They have far more, yet they know less. They can’t appreciate what they have, nor can they know what their generation lost—the beauty of being average, and the reckless rough-and-tumble of an ordinary day.

This originally appeared on Restoring Truth.

The post Through Smoke and Hairspray appeared first on LewRockwell.

The signs are now up at the corners of major intersections:

• Get up to $7,830 with three children
• Get up to $6,960 with two children
• Get up to $4,213 with one child

Sometimes the amounts are higher:

• Get up to $12,930 with three children
• Get up to $10,360 with two children
• Get up to $5,913 with one child

These signs are advertisements for welfare payments.

Tax deductions—and exemptions, exclusions, and loopholes—lower one’s taxable income and therefore the amount of taxes owed to the federal government. It doesn’t matter what the deductions are for, what the amounts are, whom they benefit, or why they were instituted. Tax deductions are always a good thing because they allow Americans to keep more money in their pockets and out of the greedy hands of Uncle Sam.

Tax credits are even better.

Tax credits are dollar-for-dollar reductions in the amount of income tax owed. It doesn’t matter what the credits are for, what the amounts are, whom they benefit, or why they were instituted. Tax credits are always a good thing because they allow Americans to keep even more money in their pockets and out of the greedy hands of Uncle Sam.

Tax deductions and credits are not subsidies that have to be “paid for”—not unless you think that the federal government is entitled to a portion of every American’s income.

But then there are “refundable tax credits.”

Regular tax credits may reduce the tax owed to zero, but once that happens, no remaining credit can be taken. A refundable tax credit is treated as a payment from the taxpayer like federal income tax withheld or estimated tax payments. If the tax credit “payment” is more than the tax owed after the regular tax credits are applied, then the taxpayer receives a “refund” of money that he never actually paid in.

The aforementioned signs, which are ubiquitous during tax season, get their figures from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC).

The amount of one’s EITC benefit depends on a recipient’s income and number of children. For tax year 2024, the maximum amount of EITC that one can receive is:

$7,830 with three or more qualifying children
$6,960 with two qualifying children
$4,213 with one qualifying child
$632 with no qualifying children

To receive the EITC, one’s earned income and adjusted gross income (AGI) must each be less than:

$59,899 ($66,819 married filing jointly) with three or more qualifying children
$55,768 ($62,688 married filing jointly) with two qualifying children
$49,084 ($56,004 married filing jointly) with one qualifying child
$18,591 ($25,511 married filing jointly) with no qualifying children

And, as an added bonus, the EITC has no effect on other welfare benefits. According to the IRS:

Any refund you receive because of the EIC can’t be counted as income when determining whether you or anyone else is eligible for benefits or assistance, or how much you or anyone else can receive, under any federal program or under any state or local program financed in whole or in part with federal funds.

The CTC is a partially refundable tax credit. It provides households with up to $2,000 per child. However, the maximum refundable amount is $1,700. This is the Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC).

Refundable tax credits are the ultimate form of welfare because they are payments made in cash like the TANF or SSI programs instead of payments made to a third party, like Medicaid, or deposited on an Electronic Benefit Card (EBC), as in SNAP (food stamps).

Real welfare reform must start with the elimination of refundable tax credits. Just don’t look for Republicans to eliminate them. They have increased them for decades.

The post Millions of Americans Will Begin Receiving Large Welfare Payments This Month appeared first on LewRockwell.

Harvard has long been accused of fostering an anti-free speech environment and quelching viewpoint diversity. That was the subject of my recent debate with Law Professor Randall Kennedy at Harvard. A new report confirms many of the objections raised in that debate, including a chilling environment where only a third of Harvard’s most recent graduating class expressed comfort in discussing controversial subjects.

Some 89 percent of the graduating class responded to the survey. The study of the Classroom Social Compact Committee, co-chaired by Economics professor David I. Laibson ’88 and History professor Maya R. Jasanoff ’96, found that, with an overwhelmingly liberal faculty and student body, even liberal Harvard students still found a chilling environment for free expression at the school. And it is getting worse. The results show a 13 percent decrease from the Class of 2023.

This year, Harvard found itself in a familiar spot on the annual ranking of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE): dead last among 251 universities and colleges.

What is most striking is the fact that Harvard has created this hostile environment while maintaining an overwhelmingly liberal student body and faculty. Only 9 percent of the class identified as conservative or very conservative.

Yet, even liberals feel stifled at Harvard. Only 41 percent of liberal students reported being comfortable discussing controversial topics, and only 25 percent of moderates and 17 percent of conservatives felt comfortable in doing so.

During the Harvard debate, I raised the gradual reduction of conservatives and libertarians in the student body and the faculty.

The Harvard Crimson has documented how the school’s departments have virtually eliminated Republicans. In one study of multiple departments last year, they found that more than 75 percent of the faculty self-identified as “liberal” or “very liberal.”

Only  5 percent identified as “conservative,” and only 0.4% as “very conservative.”

According to Gallup, the U.S. population is roughly equally divided among conservatives (36%), moderates (35%), and liberals (26%).

So Harvard has three times the number of liberals as the nation at large, and less than three percent identify as “conservative” rather than 35 percent nationally.

Among law school faculty who donated more than $200 to a political party, 91 percent of the Harvard faculty gave to Democrats.

While Professor Kennedy dismissed the notion that Harvard should look more like America, the problem is that it does not even look like Massachusetts. Even as one of the most liberal states in the country, roughly one-third of the voters still identify as Republican.

The student body shows the same bias of selection. Harvard Crimson previously found that only 7 percent of incoming students identified as conservative. The latest survey shows that level at 9 percent.

Some faculty members are wringing their hands over this continued hostile environment. However, the faculty as a whole is unwilling to restore free speech and intellectual diversity by adding conservative and libertarian faculty members and sponsoring events that reflect a broad array of viewpoints.

Given my respect for Professor Kennedy, I was surprised that he dismissed the sharp rise in students saying that they did not feel comfortable speaking in classes. Referring to them as “conservative snowflakes,” he insisted that they had to have the courage of their convictions.

This ignores the fact that they depend upon professors for recommendations, and challenging the school’s orthodoxy can threaten their standing. Moreover, a recent survey shows that even liberal students feel chilled in the environment created by Harvard faculty and administrators.

There was a hopeful aspect, however, to the debate. Before the debate, the large audience voted heavily in favor of Harvard’s position. However, after the debate, they overwhelmingly voted against Harvard’s position on free speech.

It is an example of how exposure to opposing views can change the bias or assumptions in higher education.

There is little likelihood that Harvard or higher education will change. It is like the old joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb. The answer is just one but the bulb really has to want to change.

At the end of the day, there is no real indication that Harvard faculty want any of this to change. They will continue to report the results of surveys and express deep angst and confusion over the results. What they will not do is meaningfully change their course in the hiring of faculty, admission of students, and sponsoring of debates.

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

The post Crimson Tide: Only One-Third of Harvard Students Feel Comfortable Speaking About Controversial Subjects appeared first on LewRockwell.

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The post Mike Benz Takes Us Down the USAID Rabbit Hole (It’s Worse Than You Think) appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), created more than a century ago to assist Congress in its constitutionally mandated oversight responsibilities, issued a report just last year which estimated that in a span of 20 years, including 2023, that the US Government made $2.7 TRILLION dollars in improper expenditures resulting from overpayments, inaccurate record keeping, and fraud. In fiscal year 2023 alone, GAO determined the federal government improperly dispensed $269 Billion.

Let this sink in for those who are getting the vapors about administrative overreach into sensitive Treasury payment systems: TRILLIONS of our tax dollars have been lost through faulty payment systems. Rising taxes, mounting deficits and loss of faith in government are the effects.

The problem isn’t that President Trump and Elon Musk are diving into this, but that sweeping action to attack corruption has not been attempted by Congress, or by the Executive branch, in many a year.

This critical condition is above and beyond political parties and personalities. The failure to root out financial and other corruption in the US government has placed our nation in grave jeopardy through rising, seemingly uncontrollable deficits.

Government elites, kleptocrats, conniving with contractors, have long enabled this perilous condition, not the work-a-day federal employees.

The revolving door, individuals moving from high office in government to highly paid positions in the private sector, and back to the revolving door, has represented a takeover of the government by private interests.

This awareness inspires caution about the motives, intent and direction of the present bureaucratic realignment.

As a member of the Government Oversight Committee for 16 years, I yelled “stop thief,” many times into a din of indifference, inertia and blind acceptance of corruption as the implicate order. It was extraordinary to witness elected officials who helplessly shrugged at a system riddled with thievery while they, and they alone, were empowered to set it right.

Years before I was elected to Congress, I was Mayor of Cleveland. In my first year in office, I was able to cut city government spending by 10% without reducing service –through the elimination of waste, fraud and abuse – and ran the government on a cash basis.

I look at present federal spending, approaching $7 Trillion annually, $5.2 Trillion coming from revenues and $1.9 Trillion borrowed (adding to the deficit), with the interest on the national debt now exceeding $1 Trillion dollars annually.

I can easily envision that the elimination of waste, fraud and abuse at a federal level could save the American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars annually, helping to protect revenues for basic government services and lowering the national debt’s dangerous trajectory.

As the President’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative moves relentlessly through the innards of the federal government, it exposes decades of failure of administrative responsibility for the custody of U.S. taxpayers’ money.

I am not, nor have I been an apologist for this or any White House. Immediately, I am deeply concerned about the potential destruction which may be visited upon the American people by the summary firings and defunding of entire government agencies.

Yes, the government is riddled with waste. It is also true that the government provides essential services, programs and lifelines for millions. There clearly needs to be a reset, but it can and must be done with care and caution consistent with forming a more perfect union. Public money for public good.

Congress, as a body, has for years failed to act on the systemic corruption which its own auditors uncovered. Upon receiving detailed reports on misspending Congress could have denied funds to departments and agencies until accounts were put in order. It did not. Instead, offending agencies often saw their budgets increase.

The Supreme Court may ultimately decide on legitimate questions of the constitutionality of DOGE’s bull-in-the-china-shop approach, its end-run of Congress’ statutory authority to create an operative federal department, and its indiscriminate reduction of the federal work force.

The revelations of the staggering amounts of money involved in misspending, government waste, fraud and abuse will surely shock most American taxpayers who, at best, are living paycheck to paycheck, and once informed of the scope of waste of their tax dollars will demand action to stop it.

This originally appeared on The Kucinich Report.

The post From Oversight to Overlooked: The Government’s Failure to Control Trillions in Misspent Funds appeared first on LewRockwell.

Either Ukraine surrenders unconditionally – or the war show must go on. Meanwhile, let’s Keep on Trumpin’.

Mr. Disco Inferno has reverted to his default mode of throwing tantrum after tantrum because nearly everybody in West Asia and beyond is sayin’ NO to the Gaza Riviera Resort and Casino scam.

Here’s a partial pile-up:

Egypt: the Palestinians will not be ethnic cleansed here, or in Jordan, or anywhere else.

Saudi Arabia: We will not normalize with Israel before there is a sovereign Palestinian state.

Turkey, via Sultan Erdogan: No power can remove Palestinians from their “eternal” homeland.

Arab League: this is a “complete detachment from reality.”

Hamas: there will be no more ceasefire violations.

Iran, via Leader Khamenei: we will NOT negotiate anything with you.

And this is just the beginning.

Russia, via Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov: “Washington’s attempts to give Moscow ultimatums or to demonstrate the alleged ‘big favor’ in exchange for unacceptable U.S. demands are doomed to failure in the dialogue with Russia.”

So we should expect Mr. Disco Inferno to go totally ballistic in the next few days, literally burning the [geopolitical] dancefloor: “Burning, burning (Disco Infernoooooo) / burning burning / burn that mother down”.

Now gimme $500 billion in rare earth metals

Mr. Disco Inferno has stated that under his Gaza Riviera scheme,

Palestinians would have no right of return after they are expelled because “they are going to have much better housing.” That will signify the normalization of ethnic cleansing under a Nakba 2.0 on steroids – billed as a “humanitarian” real estate development opportunity in a “phenomenal location”.

It’s no wonder that even feeble Arab vassals of the Empire of Chaos had to reject it. Not to mention that would Nakba 2.0 be implemented, Palestinian armed resistance will go sky-high, with instrumental input by a rejuvenated Hezbollah.

The Trump Gaza Riviera Resort and Casino scheme is essentially reviving an Israeli Ministry of Intelligence deportation framework detailed as early as in October 13, 2023 – and leaked by the Israeli news magazine Calcalist 11 days later.

At the time, the plan called to deport the people of Gaza to north Sinai, after totally “clearing” Gaza and installing them on tent cities in a “closed security zone” within Egypt. This plan was at least partly implemented.

Then, in May 2024, Netanyahu’s office came up with an even more detailed four-step plan which started with – what else – “demolition”. Trump has used the exact terminology to describe Gaza.

The Israeli plan included setting up “Hamas-free zones supervised by an UAE-led coalition; designing “new cities” from scratch; and if everything went swell, rinse and repeat in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. We may be on stage 1 of this plan.

Gaza is in fact the toxic blueprint for a much larger and insidious NATO project, encompassing vast tracts of West Asia, as Israel all the way through has been weaponized by U.S. and UK; Turkey continued to supply it with Azeri oil from the BTC pipeline; and Arab “leadership” has behaved like eunuchs – at least until the announcement of Gaza Riviera.

Compared to the upgraded Forever Wars chapter in West Asia, the Forever Wars chapter in Ukraine is a much tougher proposition.

Mr. Disco Inferno’s much hyped “peace” plan for Ukraine was actually put on hold, as he decided to send his special envoy, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg to the Munich Security Conference to feel the pulse of the NATO vassals.

Translation: let’s cut a deal on all those rare earth metals. The sweaty sweatshirt actor in Kiev is ready to give up all available Ukrainian land and resources to save himself. Problem is the absolute majority of those rare earth metals are in Novorossiya, and already in the possession of Russia.

Mr. Disco Inferno did not beat around the bush:

“They have very valuable lands in terms of rare earth metals, oil and gas. I want our money to be protected, we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars. And they may make a deal, they may not. They may become Russian someday, they may not become Russian. But we will have all this money, and I say I want it back. I said I want the equivalent of, say, $500 billion in rare earth metals. And they basically agreed to do that. So at least we don’t feel like fools.”

U.S.-Russia relations “on the verge of rupture”

Kellogg is dismissed in Moscow’s circles of power as “a representative of the U.S. industrial-military complex” and more bluntly, as the proverbial imperial asset: a militarily illiterate Cold War-style general with zero knowledge of geopolitics. Whenever he opens his mouth in public, that is duly confirmed.

Moreover his daughter, Megan Mobbs, is the president of the RT Weatherman Foundation, which since the start of the war in 2022 runs a logistical hub on the border with Romania to evacuate wounded and killed American mercenaries to a medical center in Germany, as well as to deliver different firms of “aid” to Ukraine.

In January 2023, her foundation sponsored Kellogg’s trip to Ukraine, after which he called the U.S. Senate to “provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs to defeat Russia’s military, implement strict accountability measures for that military assistance, and do it now.”

The mood in informed Moscow is that a potential U.S.-Russia negotiation will have less than zero effect on the current plans of Russia’s General Staff. On the battlefield, Russian forces continue to advance and consolidate what is defined as a “road net” – former Ukrainian supply routes -, preparing for better weather in Spring which will potentialize even more their advantage on air power and drones.

Once again it was Ryabkov who laid down the line on what Moscow expects from Trump 2.0:

“The first step towards normalizing bilateral relations, meaning negotiations based on the principles of mutual respect and equality, should be taken by the United States. We are open to dialogue, ready to negotiate in a tough bargaining mode, taking into account the realities ‘on the ground’ and our national interests, predetermined by history and geography. So the decisions and choice are up to Trump and his team.”

The problem is the Empire of Chaos does not do “mutual respect and equality”; it is exceptionalist by definition. The Empire of Chaos does not do “dialog”: it’s always “my way or the highway”. And the memory-impaired Empire of Chaos dismisses both “history and geography”.

After detailing how “relations between Moscow and Washington are balancing on the verge of rupture”; how Russia “sees no practical changes” in the U.S.’s Ukrainian policy; how Moscow and Washington “have not yet agreed on high-level contacts”; and how Moscow “does not expect its relations with Washington to get much better” under Trump 2.0, Ryabkov, as a clincher, in fact already painted the Big Picture ahead:

“Washington’s attempts to give Moscow ultimatums or to demonstrate the alleged ‘big favor’ in exchange for unacceptable U.S. demands are doomed to failure in the dialogue with Russia.”

Neither Trump nor Kellogg seem to have gotten the message.

Not to mention that the CIA is feeding them a comet of stupidities when it comes to the state of the Russian economy.

Russia’s economy grew by 4.1% in 2024. Energy and raw materials continue to be sold across the Global Majority and bring in a lot of revenue which now stays in Russia, because transferring capital out is nearly impossible. So now all profits are invested across Russia, which was not the case before the start of the SMO nearly 3 years ago.

The war may be far away from Moscow – over 1,000 km. But the Russian economy as a whole can now be characterized largely as a war economy. The revival of the arms industry generated a lot of jobs in several provinces and in fact redistributed the flow of money within Russia.

All the bombast coming from Trump, the inanities coming from Kellogg and the massive P.R. to come out of the Munich Security Conference won’t alter facts on the battlefield. There will be no two-bit “ceasefire”. Either Ukraine surrenders unconditionally – or the [war] show must go on. Meanwhile, let’s Keep on Trumpin’.

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

The post Keep on Trumpin’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s return to the White House there has been an atmosphere of palpable panic among the usual suspects. Establishment bureaucrats are screaming bloody murder in aisles like spoiled toddlers at Walmart after being told they’re not going to get whatever they want from the American taxpayer. These people are long overdue for a spanking and a nap.

Elon Musk’s DOGE group has wasted no time in pursuing total transparency of the federal government’s funding operations and I have to say, the reaction from the leftist establishment is even more unhinged than I could have imagined. In the past week, Democrats and activist judges have actually attempted to stop the new head of the Treasury Department, Scott Bessent, from accessing funding allocation records. In other words, the person in charge of the Treasury is not allowed to investigate how the Treasury is spending American tax dollars.

The temporary freeze on access is in response to lawsuits from 19 Democrat controlled states that are seeking to slow down DOGE efforts. Democrats have recently labeled the DOGE mission an “authoritarian rampage” through the federal government.

What I want people to to do is consider for a moment how truly insane this is. The Trump Administration, duly advanced to the Oval Office by the electoral college and the majority of American voters, ran on a campaign platform of government transparency and efficiency. The public put Trump in office because they WANT an accounting of government activities and overreach.  Democrats have said “no”, the public isn’t allowed to get the reform they voted for.  Democracy indeed.

In my view these judicial orders should be ignored; they serve no purpose other than to protect corruption.  What DOGE is pursuing is essentially an audit of federal operations, something which is supposed to be a normal occurrence anyway. It has not been done properly in generations, and now we know why.

Democrats claim that to undertake such an audit (an audit that the American populace wants) is “authoritarian”. As I’ve noted over the years, the political left and the globalists often brandish words like “democracy” as a weapon against their opponents, but they have never and will never actually respect the will of the people or even the will of the majority they claim to worship.

The bottom line is, they despise you. They see you as a sacrificial beast of burden, a useful tool for achieving their Utopian aspirations.  And if they find that you aren’t beneficial to their new world vision then you’re treated as an enemy to be suppressed or disposed of.

They are Fabian Socialists; elitists with delusions of grandeur. They believe themselves to be leaders by birthright – Philosopher kings genetically predisposed to manage civilization. The rest of us are mere peons too ignorant to understand why total centralization and total secrecy are “essential” for society to progress.  Every terrible thing they do is for our benefit. Our slavery is for our benefit. At least, that’s the underlying message the leftists are promoting.

As noted, it sounds insane when you break down the issue into its uglier parts. The claim that the Trump Administration, backed by the American public, is participating in an “act of tyranny” because they’re auditing the government is mind boggling. How many Americans every year are terrorized by audits executed by the government? And the feds can’t handle one audit of their own without screaming “fascism”?  But if you think about the stakes involved, the frothing desperation of establishment officials makes a lot more sense.

The audit of USAID has so far uncovered billions in mismanaged dollars, billions in payoffs for various corporate media entities, billions to NGOs working against American interests at home and abroad, billions in woke propaganda programs and billions in lost tax dollars spent on items that make little to no sense (unless you consider the possibility that the cash is being secretly funneled to covert projects).

As I write this DOGE is beginning to delve into FEMA, Social Security, Medicaid and the Defense Department. The level of corruption that they will uncover in each of these institutions will easily dwarf everything they found in USAID. Just wait until they try to audit the Federal Reserve and watch the chaos unfold.

These revelations are not really all that shocking to those of us in the Liberty Movement and alternative economics. We’ve been warning about this for many years. However, they do expose a fundamental disconnect in how our culture views and interacts with government.  We’re suffering from a mass Stockholm Syndrome that needs to be addressed.

Over the past century in particular, Americans have forgotten that our forefathers fought and died to free our nation from feudalism and the mentality that the common man is beholden to the whims of an elitist oligarchy. Rather, the founders flipped this ancient system of control on its head and asserted, that by the hand of God and natural law, the individual is endowed with inalienable rights – That the government should be a servant to the people rather than the people being servants to government.

This way of thinking about the structure of human society is new and rare in the annals of history. Tyranny has been the norm for thousands of years. Freedom was a privilege of the wealthy; transparency and accountability for the ruling class were almost unheard of.

The ultimate goal of the leftist/globalist apparatus is to drag the western world back into the dark ages of feudal control, all while regaling us with futurist fantasies of “progress”. Freedom (with responsibility and wisdom) is progress. Globalism is the opposite of freedom and the opposite of progress.

When the political left sees an audit of the apparatus they have spent a century constructing, what they see is the end of their totalitarian dreams. Why? Because evil cannot survive in sunlight, evil requires the protection of the dark. An authoritarian system or technocracy cannot survive if it faces constant scrutiny from the population it means to dominate.

The elites must be able to steal from the public at will. They must be able to redistribute that wealth to whatever mechanisms they wish without oversight. They must be able to use our labor and our money against us. Remember, these people are a tiny minority; they have no power without the ability to corrupt the structures that society relies on.

If the government and the bureaucrats within it come under surveillance, their power disappears. This is what DOGE is doing – They’re putting a CCTV camera in the face of the functionaries and making them behave.  Lack of oversight has created a cancer upon our nation.  This network of extra-governmental institutions (like USAID) and NGOs is where the real power in America rests. The public can vote however they want but nothing changes because the apparatus and their influence remain regardless of who is elected.

At what point did it become acceptable for the feds to spy on the people while never facing any judgment themselves? At what point did it become an act of treason to check the hard drives and bank accounts of the regime and make sure they aren’t up to something nefarious?

It is time for this archaic form of governance to end. It’s time to do away with feudal tyranny and move on to a better future where total transparency of government is the norm. It should not be considered a revolutionary act to audit the system, it should be expected. The actions of DOGE should be permanently engraved as a standard of western civilization.

If humanity ever hopes to move on to something better; to defeat poverty, to diminish criminality, to live morally, to master our personal weaknesses, to pursue merit, to grow as a species and increase our understanding of the universe around us, we must first be honest about who we are and where we can improve.  This effort begins in only one way:  By forcing the political elites to learn humility.  Today, the people DO NOT have the government they deserve and the fish rots from the head down.

If governments can be humbled, then maybe we as a species have a chance to survive and rise to greater aspirations. If not, then we will remain trapped, hosts to a parasitic organism that uses our own blood and sweat to destroy us. We will struggle daily to fulfill the narcissistic dreams of entitled and power hungry psychopaths who think they own us. We will never know peace.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post Age of Transparency: We Need Mass Surveillance of Governments Instead of Citizens appeared first on LewRockwell.

Several years ago, at the March for Life in Washington, some boys from a Catholic school in Kentucky were being harassed by a native American protester and by a group of black activists, taunting them and refusing to let them be. One of the boys, having in vain confronted the protester, stood like stone, taking the abuse, while some of the others cheered, and a few of them decided to give tit for tat, taunting the protester in turn. It should have been greeted with a shrug and a reminder to those who did respond in kind that there are better and more Christian ways to deal with revilement.

Instead, people across the country leapt to condemn the boys, and even to fantasize about making them objects of their violence, especially the one among them who showed some real courage and restraint. That was to be expected, given the general contempt wherein boys are held—boys, I mean, who have the ordinary and natural feelings of boys. What I did not expect, and what at the time I could make no sense of, was the speed with which their bishop joined in rushing to judgment, far from defending those members of his flock from the general odium, far even from attempting to understand the situation the particular boy was in.

I think I can now make sense of it, though I do not like the sense it makes. As I write, Catholics in America are treated to the unedifying spectacle of what I will call transferred Samaritanism. Suppose the Pharisee, seeing the beaten man at the side of the road, and noting a Samaritan working in the fields nearby, were to call the fellow over and demand that he behave in an open-hearted and inclusive way.

“Let’s see your purse,” says the Pharisee. “Here, take some of these coppers, go and tend to that man in the ditch, and take him to your house. When he gets better, he will want to share your work and your remuneration, which means, of course, that you and your family will get somewhat less than what you get now, but that is just a part of the life of charity that you must live. In fact, the man may end up replacing you entirely, and then think how happy you must be!”

“But if you’re so eager to help,” the Samaritan protests, “why don’t you let him have your position instead of mine?”

“Moi?” says the Pharisee, for I imagine that into every human language a little French must fall. “Oh, I would gladly do so,” he says, “but you see, he’s a peasant as you are, and so he has to do the kind of work you do. I can’t help it. Those are just the facts.” And he hugs himself for his generosity.

“So you have no feeling for me at all?”

“Look,” says the Play-Actor, “let’s get this straight. I put up with you, and you ought to be thankful for that much. You’re a Samaritan, right? Thick in the head, always thinking of yourself, rough and crude, sticking up for your kind. We don’t like you. Shut up and be charitable already.”

There is the key. It is not alone a lack of affection or sympathy for such people as the working class in America—I mean here specifically those who voted for Mr. Trump in the recent election; the “deplorables,” as Mrs. Clinton called them, the “bitter clingers,” as Mr. Obama called them. It is an active antipathy. If such people are hurt by a glut of cheap labor coming from illegal immigrants, that’s icing on the cake.

I am not speaking about everybody here. Still, a consistent mode of behavior, one that hurts the Church you are charged to help to flourish, suggests a consistent underlying passion. In this case, it is not only an ordo amoris out of kilter but an ordo contempti, and in some, an ordo odii. The American Church in my lifetime, as an institution rather than as individual priests or bishops here and there, has done nothing to keep the indigenous working class in the fold, and has especially done nothing to keep such men as many of those high school boys will grow up to be, if they are not going on to college. Men who work with their shoulders and backs don’t listen to feminist scolds, male or female, whose hands are as smooth as their words are shrill.

And that saps the vigor of the Church. Where did the American Church once get all her vocations to the priesthood? Where, I mean, before the elitism of the college-educated set in after Vatican II—when priests and religious sisters sure that they knew better obliterated one form of popular piety after another and devastated the churches the people had long cherished? In my small town, which I guess was typical in this regard, the Church got them from an energetic, faithful, and multi-ethnic working class; roughly fifty, from my town’s incorporation in 1876 to 1965.  I count only three since then.

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