Lew Rockwell Institute

A week after the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, a large explosion incinerated a parking lot near the busy Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, killing more than 470 people. It was a horrifying, chaotic scene. Burnt clothing was strewn about, scorched vehicles piled atop one another, and charred buildings surrounded the impact zone. Israel claimed the blast was caused by an errant rocket fired by Palestinian extremists, but an investigation by Forensic Architecture later indicated that the missile was most likely launched from Israel, not from inside Gaza.

In those first days of the onslaught, it wasn’t yet clear that wiping out Gaza’s entire healthcare system could conceivably be part of the Israeli plan. After all, it’s well known that purposely bombing or otherwise destroying hospitals violates the Geneva Conventions and is a war crime, so there was still some hope that the explosion at Al-Ahli was accidental. And that, of course, would be the narrative that Israeli authorities would continue to push over the nearly two years of death and misery that followed.

A month into Israel’s Gaza offensive, however, soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would raid the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, dismantling its dialysis center with no explanation as to why such life-saving medical equipment would be targeted. (Not even Israel was contending that Hamas was having kidney problems.) Then, in December 2023, Al-Awda Hospital, also in northern Gaza, was hit, while at least one doctor was shot by Israeli snipers stationed outside it. As unnerving as such news stories were, the most gruesome footage released at the time came from Al-Nasr children’s hospital, where infants were found dead and decomposing in an empty ICU ward. Evacuation orders had been given and the medical staff had fled, unable to take the babies with them.

For those monitoring such events, a deadly pattern was beginning to emerge, and Israel’s excuses for its malevolent behavior were already losing credibility.

Shortly after Israel issued warnings to evacuate the Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City in mid-January 2024, its troops launched rockets at the building, destroying what remained of its functioning medical equipment. Following that attack, ever more clinics were also targeted by Israeli forces. A Jordan Field Hospital was shelled that January and again this past August. An air strike hit Yafa hospital early in December 2023. The Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis in southern Gaza was also damaged last May and again this August, when the hospital and an ambulance were struck, killing 20, including five journalists.

While human-rights groups like the International Criminal Court, the United Nations, and the Red Cross have condemned Israel for such attacks, its forces have continued to decimate medical facilities and aid sites. At the same time, Israeli authorities claimed that they were only targeting Hamas command centers and weapons storage facilities.

The Death of Gaza’s Only Cancer Center

In early 2024, the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, first hit in October 2023 and shuttered in November of that year, was in the early stages of being demolished by IDF battalions. A video released in February by Middle East Eye showed footage of an elated Israeli soldier sharing a TikTok video of himself driving a bulldozer into that hospital, chuckling as his digger crushed a cinderblock wall. “The hospital accidentally broke,” he said. Evidence of Israel’s crimes was by then accumulating, much of it provided by the IDF itself.

When that Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital opened in 2018, it quickly became Gaza’s leading and most well-equipped cancer treatment facility. As the Covid-19 pandemic reached Gaza in 2020, all oncology operations were transferred to that hospital to free up space at other clinics, making it the only cancer center to serve Gaza’s population of more than two million.

“This hospital will help transform the health sector,” Palestinian Health Minister Jawad Awwad said shortly before its opening. “[It] will help people who are going through extreme difficulties.”

Little did he know that those already facing severe difficulties due to their cancer diagnoses would all too soon face full-blown catastrophe. In March 2025, what remained of the hospital would be razed, erasing all traces of Gaza’s once-promising cancer treatment.

Before October 7, 2023, the most common cancers afflicting Palestinians in Gaza were breast and colon cancer. Survival rates were, however, much lower there than in Israel, thanks to more limited medical resources and restrictions imposed by that country. From 2016 to 2019, while cases in Gaza were on the rise, there was at least hope that the hospital, funded by Turkey, would offer much-needed cancer screenings that had previously been unavailable.

“The repercussions of the current conflict on cancer care in Gaza will likely be felt for years to come,” according to a November 2023 editorial in the medical journal Cureus. “The immediate challenges of drugs, damaged infrastructure, and reduced access to specialized treatment have long-term consequences on the overall health outcomes of current patients.”

In other words, lack of medical care and worse cancer rates will not only continue to disproportionately affect Gazans compared to Israelis, but conditions will undoubtedly deteriorate significantly more. And such predictions don’t even take into account the fact that war itself causes cancer, painting an even bleaker picture of the medical future for Palestinians in Gaza.  

The Case of Fallujah

When the Second Battle of Fallujah, part of America’s nightmarish war in Iraq, ended in December 2004, the embattled city was a toxic warzone, contaminated with munitions, depleted uranium (DU), and poisoned dust from collapsed buildings. Not surprisingly, in the years that followed, cancer rates increased almost exponentially there. Initially, doctors began to notice that more cancers were being diagnosed. Scientific research would soon back up their observations, revealing a startling trend.

In the decade after the fighting had mostly ended, leukemia rates among the local population skyrocketed by a dizzying 2,200%. It was the most significant increase ever recorded after a war, exceeding even Hiroshima’s 660% rise over a more extended period of time. One study later tallied a fourfold increase in all cancers and, for childhood cancers, a twelvefold increase.

The most likely source of many of those cancers was the mixture of DU, building materials, and other leftover munitions. Researchers soon observed that residing inside or near contaminated sites in Fallujah was likely the catalyst for the boom in cancer rates.

“Our research in Fallujah indicated that the majority of families returned to their bombarded homes and lived there, or otherwise rebuilt on top of the contaminated rubble of their old homes,” explained Dr. Mozghan Savabieasfahani, an environmental toxicologist who studied the health impacts of war in Fallujah. “When possible, they also used building materials that were salvaged from the bombarded sites. Such common practices will contribute to the public’s continuous exposure to toxic metals years after the bombardment of their area has ended.”

While difficult to quantify, we do have some idea of the amount of munitions and DU that continues to plague that city. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United States fired between 170 and 1,700 tons of tank-busting munitions in Iraq, including Fallujah, which might have amounted to as many as 300,000 rounds of DU. While only mildly radioactive, persistent exposure to depleted uranium has a cumulative effect on the human body. The more you’re exposed, the more the radioactive particles build up in your bones, which, in turn, can cause cancers like leukemia.

With its population of 300,000, Fallujah served as a military testing ground for munitions much like those that Gaza endures today. In the short span of one month, from March 19 to April 18, 2003, more than 29,199 bombs were dropped on Iraq, 19,040 of which were precision-guided, along with another 1,276 cluster bombs. The impacts were grave. More than 60 of Fallujah’s 200 mosques were destroyed, and of the city’s 50,000 buildings, more than 10,000 were imploded and 39,000 damaged. Amid such destruction, there was a whole lot of toxic waste. As a March 2025 report from Brown University’s Costs of War Project noted, “We found that the environmental impact of warfighting and the presence of heavy metals are long-lasting and widespread in both human bodies and soil.”

Exposure to heavy metals is distinctly associated with cancer risk. “Prolonged exposure to specific heavy metals has been correlated with the onset of various cancers, including those affecting the skin, lungs, and kidneys,” a 2023 report in Scientific Studies explains. “The gradual buildup of these metals within the body can lead to persistent toxic effects. Even minimal exposure levels can result in their gradual accumulation in tissues, disrupting normal cellular operations and heightening the likelihood of diseases, particularly cancer.”

And it wasn’t just cancer that afflicted the population that stuck around or returned to Fallujah. Infants began to be born with alarming birth defects. A 2010 study found a significant increase in heart ailments among babies there, with rates 13 times higher and nervous system defects 33 times higher than in European births.

“We have all kinds of defects now, ranging from congenital heart disease to severe physical abnormalities, both in numbers you cannot imagine,” Dr Samira Alani, a pediatric specialist at Fallujah General Hospital, who co-authored the birth-defect study, told Al Jazeera in 2013. “We have so many cases of babies with multiple system defects… Multiple abnormalities in one baby. For example, we just had one baby with central nervous system problems, skeletal defects, and heart abnormalities. This is common in Fallujah today.”

While comprehensive health assessments in Iraq are scant, evidence continues to suggest that high cancer rates persist in places like Fallujah. “Fallujah today, among other bombarded cities in Iraq, reports a high rate of cancers,” researchers from the Costs of War Project study report. “These high rates of cancer and birth defects may be attributed to exposure to the remnants of war, as are manifold other similar spikes in, for example, early onset cancers and respiratory diseases.”

As devastating as the war in Iraq was — and as contaminated as Fallujah remains — it’s nearly impossible to envision what the future holds for those left in Gaza, where the situation is so much worse. If Fallujah teaches us anything, it’s that Israel’s destruction will cause cancer rates to rise significantly, impacting generations to come.

Manufacturing Cancer

The aerial photographs and satellite footage are grisly. Israel’s U.S.-backed military machine has dropped so many bombs that entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble. Gaza, by every measure, is a land of immense suffering. As Palestinian children hang on the brink of starvation, it feels strange to discuss the health effects they might face in the decades ahead, should they be fortunate enough to survive.

While data often conceals the truth, in Gaza, numbers reveal a dire reality. As of this year, nearly 70% of all roads had been destroyed, 90% of all homes damaged or completely gone, 85% of farmland affected, and 84% of healthcare facilities obliterated. To date, Israel’s relentless death machine has created at least 50 million tons of rubble, human remains, and hazardous materials — all the noxious ingredients necessary for a future cancer epidemic.

From October 2023 to April 2024, well over 70,000 tons of explosives were dropped on Gaza, which, according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, was equivalent to two nuclear bombs. While the extent and exact types of weaponry used there are not fully known, the European Parliament has accused Israel of deploying depleted uranium, which, if true, will only add to the future cancer ills of Gazans. Most bombs contain heavy metals like lead, antimony, bismuth, cobalt, and tungsten, which end up polluting the soil and groundwater, while impacting agriculture and access to clean water for years to come.

“The toxicological effects of metals and energetic materials on microorganisms, plants, and animals vary widely and can be significantly different depending on whether the exposure is acute (short term) or chronic (long term),” reads a 2021 report commissioned by the Guide to Explosive Ordnance Pollution of the Environment. “In some cases, the toxic effects may not be immediately apparent, but instead may be linked to an increased risk of cancer, or increased risk of mutation during pregnancy, which may not become evident for many years.”

Given such information, we can only begin to predict how toxic the destruction may prove to be. The homes that once stood in the Gaza Strip were mainly made of concrete and steel. Particles of dust released from such crumbled buildings can themselves cause lung, colon, and stomach cancers.

As current cancer patients die slow deaths with no access to the care they need, future patients, who will acquire cancer thanks to Israel’s genocidal mania, will no doubt meet the same fate unless there is significant intervention.

“[A]pproximately 2,700 [Gazans] in advanced stages of the disease await treatment with no hope or treatment options within the Gaza Strip under an ongoing closure of Gaza’s crossings, and the disruption of emergency medical evacuation mechanisms,” states a May 2025 report by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. “[We hold] Israel fully responsible for the deaths of hundreds of cancer patients and for deliberately obliterating any opportunities of treatment for thousands more by destroying their treatment centers and depriving them of travel. Such acts fall under the crime of genocide ongoing in the Gaza Strip.”

Israel’s methodical destruction in Gaza has taken on many forms, from bombing civilian enclaves and hospitals to withholding food, water, and medical care from those most in need. In due time, Israel will undoubtedly use the cancers it will have created as a means to an end, fully aware that Palestinians there have no way of preparing for the health crises that are coming.

Cancer, in short, will be but another weapon added to Israel’s ever-increasing arsenal.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

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President Trump’s relentless attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve help remind us why the Constitution established a totally different monetary system than the one under which we have all been born and raised.

The reason that the Federal Reserve — or central bank — was established as an independent federal agency was because it’s a very bad idea to have a president deciding monetary policy. That’s because presidents inevitably want to use the monetary system to benefit themselves politically, which ordinarily means expanding the money supply to create an artificial sense of economic prosperity, which then enables a president to exclaim, “Do you see how beneficial my tariffs and other economic policies are?” Then, when prices of things start rising in response to the expanded quantity of devalued money in the system, a president can easily blame the rising prices on such things as greed, profiteering, Big Oil, and so forth, with hardly anyone realizing that the president’s monetary policies are the reason for the price rises.

By making the Fed independent of presidential control, the idea is that the people at the Fed would manage the money supply in a responsible, non-political way. Of course, this is pure nonsense. Throughout the long history of the Federal Reserve, there have been instances where Federal Reserve officials have responded and reacted to political events, oftentimes with the intent to benefit one political party over another.

But the most important thing to understand about America’s central bank is that it is based on the socialist principle of central planning, which, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out, produces “planned chaos.” That’s what we have had during the entire existence of the Federal Reserve — planned monetary chaos. That’s because no one, no matter how smart, can centrally manage something as complex as money, especially in a very complex market economy like that of the United States.

Thus, the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 was a bad idea from the very start. While the ostensible purpose was to have a governmental entity that would stabilize money and the banking system, the result has been the exact opposite.

The Framers established a totally different monetary system — one that had no central bank as well as no paper money. Our American ancestors knew that if they established a paper-money system, the president or the central bank would end up printing vast quantities of paper money to finance their schemes and their wars. They knew that the inflation of the money supply would end up going on forever. The government would be able to plunder and loot the citizenry through monetary debasement — i.e., the indirect tax of inflation.

So, the Constitution established a monetary system based on the official money being gold coins and silver coins rather than paper money. The federal government was only given the power to coin money, not print money. Moreover, the states were expressly prohibited from making anything but gold coins and silver coins legal tender or official money.

In this way, presidents would not be able to play political games to benefit themselves by printing up more money because gold and silver cannot be printed. While the Constitution authorized the federal government to borrow money by issuing debt instruments such as bills, notes, and bonds, everyone understood that these debt instruments were not money but instead promises to pay money, with the money being gold coins or silver coins.

That monetary system, which lasted for more than 100 years, was one of the important factors (along with no income taxation, welfare state, Social Security, Medicare and economic regulations and minimal immigration controls) that contributed to the extraordinarily high level of economic prosperity in the late 1800s. In fact, people were actually using their savings to invest in 100-year bonds issued by corporations because they knew they would retain their value since they were payable in gold coins.

It all came to an end with President Franklin Roosevelt’s extraordinary “emergency” decree in 1933 that effectively amended the Constitution by ending America’s gold-coin/silver-coin monetary system in favor of a monetary system based on irredeemable paper money. Combined with the Federal Reserve, which had been launched in 1913, FDR’s paper money system put America on the road to planned monetary chaos, including booms and busts, ever-expanding quantities of money, and constant debasement of  paper money.

The real issue shouldn’t be whether President Trump should be trying to control the Federal Reserve. They real issue that the American people should be discussing and debating is whether to abolish the Federal Reserve and restore a monetary system based on gold coins and silver coins or, even better, adopt Friedrich Hayek’s concept of a totally free-market monetary system, one that would entail a separation of money and the state.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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On September 2nd I headlined “1 Republican and 6 Democrats in House Try to force Trump to Release Epstein Records”, but in the past 24 hours that has already become 3 Republicans and 203 Democrats.

The Democratic Party propaganda-news-medium National Public Radio (NPR) headlines today (September 3rd) “Epstein survivors join with lawmakers in calling for full release of government files” and pretends that this was “an effort led by Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif. and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., to force a House vote that would require the Justice Department to release its records in full, with redactions to protect information about victims and ongoing investigations,” though, actually, the only “Sponser” and author of the Petition was the Republican Thomas Massie, and the Democrat Ro Khanna wasn’t even listed among the six Democrats who were included yesterday as joining in to support it: he became the 54th Representative to sign it — hardly a “leader” in it — he just wanted to get onto what by then had clearly become a winning bandwagon (especially for Democrats).

It’s lying like this (sometimes blatant like this) by Democratic Party ‘news’-media, that is driving more and more Democratic Party registered voters to reregister as being Independent, because they increasingly recognize that — just like Republican Party voters have been routinely deceived to support the Republican Party — Democratic Party voters have been routinely deceived to support the Democratic Party.

On 12 January 2024, Gallup headlined “Independent Party ID Tied for High; Democratic ID at New Low” and reported that whereas Democratic Party support has been declining rather steadily ever since Obama entered the White House in 2008, and Republican Party support had plunged sharply to new lows during GW Bush’s second term 2004-2008, Independents — which when Obama entered the White House in 2008 were tied with Democrats, and the Republican Party was deeply unpopular because of Bush — rose from 35% of the electorate in 2009 to 43% in 2014 and repeated that all-time high of 43% again in 2022, and repeated it yet again in Gallup’s next, which poll was in 2024 (but reported by them in 2025): yet again 43%. So: in 2024, 28% were Republicans, 28% were Democrats, and 43% were Independents, according to the 2025 Gallup news-report about Americans’ political self-identifications.

In other words: whereas a high of 34% were Republicans in 2004, and a high of 36% were Democrats in 2008, now both parties are at 28%, while Independents are stable at 43%, which is way higher than EITHER Party has ever achieved since Gallup started polling this matter in 1988.

Right now, the trend is ESPECIALLY endangering the Democratic Party. On August 20th, the Democratic Party’s New York Times headlined “The Democratic Party Faces a Voter Registration Crisis: The party is bleeding support beyond the ballot box, a new analysis shows.” It opened:

The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls.

Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot.

That four-year swing toward the Republicans adds up to 4.5 million voters, a deep political hole that could take years for Democrats to climb out from.

Change in share of registered voters, 2020-24 …

All told, Democrats lost about 2.1 million registered voters between the 2020 and 2024 elections in the 30 states, along with Washington, D.C., that allow people to register with a political party. (In the remaining 20 states, voters do not register with a political party.) Republicans gained 2.4 million.

It quoted Democratic office-holders saying that the solution needs to be the Democratic Party’s policies moving even farther to the right, toward the super-rich and authoritarianism — that this slide is a result of the American public’s wanting to expand the military and armaments-production more, and to cut Social Security, education, health care, and aid to the poor. But actually, the data — which the NYT doesn’t even mention — proves the exact opposite. The billionaires want that Party to move rightward, but the American public, as shown in those polls, clearly want it to move leftward — and the NYT publishes the views of the billionaires’ agents (and ignores the relevant data: the polling-data on the public’s actual policy-priorities). So: that’s just yet more of the Democrtic Party’s ‘news’-propaganda media

Consequently: more and more voters now are Independent, and it has become the largest of the three categories. But there is no “Independent” Party. If one will form, then billionaires will donate to it, so that, like both of the existing Parties, it too will be receiving most of its money from the billionaires and will therefore serve the billionaires, just like both of the existing Parties do, and long have been doing.

The reason for this terminal corruption of the U.S. Government is that in an electoral ‘democracy’, all of the potentially winning Parties receive most of their money from the richest .01% of the richest .01% of the population, and therefore are dependent upon and therefore MUST serve them, regardless of the actual needs of the public.

The only way to solve this problem is to do away with selecting Government leaders by means of public elections by billionaires-deceived voters, and to replace it by lottery-democracies, in which all legislators — the individuals who WRITE the laws — will be selected by a purely random means, a lottery; and those legislators then will select from amongst themselves the head-of-state. (A Constitutional Amendment would be needed in order to do this.) I have described the system here. The documentation that it’s necessary is here.

In short: without this change, democracy is impossible to achieve, and what we today call “democracy” isn’t at all representing the policy-priorities of the public, but DOES represent the policy-priorities of billionaires — which are virtually the opposite of the public’s policy-priorities. It’s dictatorship by the billionaires. That is why we need this change. The world is getting worse — not better. It is moving even farther to the right. Do you want this for your children, and for theirs? If the answer is no, then we need a Constitutional Amendment. It is necessary.

Regardless which of the billionaires’ Parties will win, and which of them will lose, we’ll have a Government by and for the billionaires, not by and for us. That is the reality, as-of now.

We don’t have this bad Government by mere incompetency; we have it by design: it has been built into its design. Maybe the writers of our Constitution didn’t trust the public enough. Maybe they distrusted the public too much. But we need a Government that serves the public — NOT that serves only the richest .01% of the richest .01%, as we now have. This change is necessary.

Right now, we have a government that serves the richest .01% of the richest .01%. The Epstein affair is merely one of the innumerable examples of this.

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

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Raw Story

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Stephen Mack wrote:

I read Dr. Ron Paul’s essay about President Trump’s proposal to rename the Department of Defense, the Department of War:

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/department-of-war/

His article includes this observation that supports the change:

“With that in mind, returning the Department of Defense to the Department of War, which is how it started, may not be such a bad idea after all – as long as we can be honest about the rest of the terms around our warmaking.”

That sentence is also an invitation to revisit the bracing essay, A Plan of a Peace-Office for the United States, written by Dr. Benjamin Rush, the brilliant Founding Father, Physician and great Christian Humanist.

https://artandtheology.org/2017/06/14/essay-a-plan-of-a-peace-office-for-the-united-states-by-benjamin-rush/

Dr. Rush argues trenchantly for the creation of a Peace Office as a counter to the Department of War.  His essay describes the governing philosophy of a Peace Office.  He follows that with the recommendation that a sign be placed over the door of the War Office with this comparative inscription:

1. An office for butchering the human species.
2. A Widow and Orphan making office.
3. A broken bone making office.
4. A wooden leg making office.
5. An office for the creating of public and private vices.
6. An office for creating a public debt.
7. An office for creating speculators, stock jobbers, and bankrupts.
8. An office for creating famine.
9. An office for creating pestilential diseases.
10. An office for creating poverty, and the destruction of liberty and national happiness.

In the lobby of this office let there be painted representations of all the common military instruments of death, also human skulls, broken bones, unburied and putrefying dead bodies, hospitals crowded with sick and wounded soldiers, villages on fire, mothers in besieged towns eating the flesh of their children, ships sinking in the ocean, rivers dyed with blood, and extensive plains without a tree or fence or any object but the ruins of deserted farm houses.

Above this group of woeful figures, let the following words be inserted, in red characters to represent human blood:

NATIONAL GLORY

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Jerome Barber wrote:

Build to rent.  You literally will own nothing and be happy.

See here.

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Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

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Ben Bartee

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Part 1

If the Donald wishes to clear the purportedly hallowed precincts of the Federal Reserve of mortgage fraudsters, the facts of the case tell us he has a much bigger challenge than issuing Fed governor Lisa Cook her walking papers via a White House press release. That’s because her sin of obtaining a 15-year mortgage on an Ann Arbor, Michigan residence at 2.5% on June 18, 2021 and a 30-year mortgage on an Atlanta condo at 3.25% on July 2, 2021, while claiming both as a “primary” residence, wasn’t the half of it.

The real crime is that not only a Fed governor but any resident of America could get a long-term mortgage this cheap in 2021. After all, during 2021 the Y/Y inflation rate per our trusty 16% trimmed mean CPI posted at 3.17%. That means Cook’s Ann Arbor mortgage was written at -0.67% on an inflation-adjusted basis and the Atlanta loan at +0.08%.

Both rates are economically absurd and were available to Lisa Cook or anyone else in America only because the monetary fraudsters on the FOMC had their big fat thumbs on the scales in the bond pits. And we do mean fraud: The Fed’s balance sheet rose by $1.2 trillion or 17% during the 12-month period ending on July 7, 2021, and at a time, as we will amplify below, when the Fed’s balance sheet should have actually grown by essentially zero.

That is to say, the FOMC was buying government debt and GSE paper hand-0ver-fist with fiat credits snatched from thin digital air, thereby starkly falsifying yields and prices in the bond pits. There is not a chance in the hot place that tax-paying, real money savers left to their own devices would accept such niggardly real yields.

For want of doubt on this matter, here is the Fed’s march of shame/fraud during the 35 years after Greenspan embarked upon Keynesian monetary central planning until the Fed’s pivot to inflation-fighting in 2022. During that period the real yield on the 30-year mortgage went from +6.4% to -1.2%, thereby representing a 760 basis point swing in a single, relentless direction over 35 years.

Needless to say, the odds of that happening on an honest free market in money and debt are 0.000%! In fact, this relentless march downhill to these absurdly low bond and mortgage yields pales Lisa Cook’s alleged fraud into insignificance. The pattern in this chart amounts to wanton monetary fraud on an epic scale.

Inflation-Adjusted Yield on 30-Year Mortgages, 1977 to 2022

Again, for want of further doubt on this matter, here is the Fed’s balance sheet over the same 35-year period.

For crying out loud! It expanded by 35X during a period in which the nominal GDP rose by only 5.2Xand real GDP by just 2.4X. That is to say, the Fed pumped fraudulent credit into the financial markets at a 11% per annum rate for 35 years running. So doing it resembled nothing so much as an end-stage alcoholic self-medicating on an endless bender.

Absent this $8.5 trillion flood of central bank credit authorized by Alan Greenspan and his heirs and assigns, of course, there is no chance whatsoever that the march of monetary shame depicted in the graph above would have occurred; and also that Lisa Cook and millions of other Americans would have gotten 30-year mortgages at just 3% in June/July 2021.

35X Rise In Fed Balance Sheet, Q2 1987 to Q1 2022

Needless to say, there is a devastating irony embedded in the near $9 trillion peak of the Fed’s balance sheet displayed above. To wit, in March 2020 the Fed in its capacity as lead bank regulator finally abolished the archaic requirement that banks maintain cash reserves against deposits at the Fed equal to stated fractions of these balances. In the period immediately before their long overdue abolition, the reserve requirements were 3% for large deposit levels (above $17 million) and 10% for very large deposit levels over $128 million.

At the same time, the Congress and the Fed substituted a more sensible balance sheet based regime that consisted of liquidity coverage ratios (LCR) and equity and other capital ratios against adjusted balance sheet assets. What this meant as a practical matter, of course, is that thereafter banks did not really need the Fed in order to remain appropriately liquid or to fund and grow their balance sheets, thereby supplying an adequate credit supply to the main street economy.

Specifically, the Liquidity Coverage ratio could be met by holding US treasury paper, traditional cash reserves at the Fed or other high quality short term paper, while lending growth and asset expansion could be accommodated by raising equity capital through retained earnings or market offerings. That is to say, the new post-Dodd-Frank liquity and capital ratios superseded the traditional central bank function of reserve provision to the banking system in order to mitigate bank runs or smoothly enable growth of bank credit and deposits.

In effect, the regulatory policy action culminating in the March 2020 abolition of required reserves took both the “banking” and the “reserve” functions out of the Fed’s remit, leaving it buck naked as the pure monetary central planning agency that it had gradually become since the time of Alan Greenspan. The only possible residual “banking” function now possessed by the Fed is that of a funding source of last resort for banks that for some reason may be unable to acquire sufficient deposits in the private money markets to fund their balance sheets.

Alas, with a proper “mobilized discount rate” at the Fed’s discount windows that function would be nearly vestigial, as well. Going way back to 1913 and the “real bills” doctrine on which Carter Glass founded the Fed, the discount window would charge the market interest rate plus a stiff penalty spread in order to discourage use except for very rare circumstances. That is to say, there is nothing wrong with the free markets in money that says private funding will not be available at market clearing rates.

Indeed, if at some point in time market clearing rates on deposits should prove to be “too high” because yields on a given banks’ assets were lower, the solution would be insolvency and liquidation of the institution in question. And in a market with more than $105 trillion of debt instruments outstanding, it is easy enough to see that a few periodic bank bankruptcies among badly managed institutions that got in over their ski’s would actually be a good thing—a purging mechanism to keep banking markets disciplined and solvent.

In any event, the Fed’s current $6.5 trillion QT (quantitative tightening) balance sheet is far, far too big for any residual function as a funds supplier of last resort at market rates. Indeed, the Fed’s balance sheet got to such brobdignagian girth purely owing to the dysfunctional pursuit of its Greenspanian monetary central planning model.

Alas, the latter is based on the dubious proposition that main street prosperity is everywhere and always retarded by the free market’s alleged inability to set interest rates and financial asset prices correctly. And that it therefore needs a monetary Sherpa to guide financial asset pricing, and the prosperity that flows from savings and capital investment.

But today’s histrionics tells you all you need to know about that misguided proposition. Main Street needs only a free market in capital and money—not Jay Powell nor Donald Trump—- to price stocks, bonds, loans, money or real estate. And not the 11 additional geniuses on the Open Market Committee, either.

So if the Donald really wants to bring back a golden age of prosperity he needs only continue his brutal attacks on individual members of the monetary politburo until the public finally sees that the entire central banking emperor is naked.

In this context, it can be well and truly said that the Fed put itself out of its historic central banking business in March 2020. What’s left, of course, is its mission creep based monetary central planning operation, which has been a disaster and nonstarter from the get go.

As it happens, the Donald has a way of stumbling into good outcomes–like the impending peace deal in Ukraine and the dismantlement of the unnecessary American Empire that can follow in its wake—even if he doesn’t know exactly why.

So in the case of the other great dysfunctional institution on the banks of the Potomac, let’s hope that the sacking of Lisa Cook is just the opening salvo. What really needs to happen is a mercy-killing of the entire FOMC and 95% of what today constitutes the massive rogue monetary central planning agency domiciled in the Eccles Building. The latter is truly a clear and present danger to American prosperity.

Part 2

If we are lucky the firing of Lisa Cook may turn out to be the straw that finally breaks the camels back. To wit, both Wall Street speculators and Washington spenders have been out in force screeching in behalf of the sacred “independence” of the Fed. But maybe people will begin to wonder how in the world a society based on free market governance of economic life and constitutional and democratic arrangement of political life came to place such massive, unaccountable power in the hands of just 12 bureaucrats (FOMC).

Indeed, we’d say bring on the Fed “independence” debate because in the present day and age there is no compelling reason at all to invest such massive financial power in an institution that is both unaccountable to the electorate and self-evidently in the tank for the gamblers, spenders and war-mongers who thrive on its largesse.

So let’s just start with a contra-factual. Assume that the entire FOMC is fired and not replaced; that the current Fed practice of buying and selling government debt paper and other securities via the FOMC is banned; that US Treasuries are made ineligible collateral for loans from the Fed’s discount windows; and that the Fed is forbidden from paying interest on bank reserves or their money market equivalent such as overnight repos.

Of course, the same crew of howlers for Fed independence–ranging from Wall Streeter’s to Senator Elizabeth Warren to huffy MSM financial journalists at CNBC and The Economist—will say that upon activation of the contra-factual summarized above all economic hell would break-out on Wall Street and main street alike.

Actually, we’d beg to differ by going straight to the core of the argument for an all-powerful state-enabled financial Sherpa. The claim is that this ensures financial stability and enhanced economic growth, while the absence of a powerful central bank would send the hapless free market economy spiraling into a paroxysm of financial crises, recessions and sub-par economic growth.

As it happens, there is not a shred of empirical evidence to support those contentions and plenty of reason to believe that the vaunted macro-economic management functions of the Fed are simply the fruits of Mission Creep over many decades. The latter being capped off by the sharp turn toward out and out monetary central planning when Alan Greenspan took the helm in August 1987.

In that context, let us start with a simple performance test based on key macro-economic outcomes as between the two book-end periods:

• the two decades after the so-called Treasury Accord in March 1951 and Nixon’s deep-sixing of the gold standard at Camp David in August 1971.
• the 18 years between the Greenspan housing bubble peak in Q4 2007 and Q2 2025.

Needless to say, we have not chosen these intervals randomly. In fact, the first period represents mainly the “light touch” monetary policy era of William McChesney Martin. The latter was actually the Truman Administration’s Treasury Department official who negotiated the deal which freed the Fed from its WW II subservience to the financing needs of Uncle Sam. Crucially, Martin also had matured financially in the household of a Fed governor in the roaring 1920s and as president of the New York Stock Exchange during the crash of the 1930s. That is to say, he had experienced first hand the dangers of Fed fueled financial bubbles and their destructive aftermath, too.

By contrast, the post Q4 2007 period involved full-on monetary central planning from the Eccles Building led by Keynesian academics and Washington apparatchiks. During this interval the Fed’s massive daily presence in the canyons of Wall Street was continuous, heavy-handed and predicated upon the false contention that financial stability and sustained economic growth and full-employment were unobtainable absent massive infusions of Fed credit into the bond and stock trading pits and continuous micro-management of money market rates and the yield curve. And the latter was to be accomplished via deft buying and selling (that is, overwhelmingly “buying”) of treasury debt and other securities as instructed daily by the FOMC.

To be sure, this isn’t a perfect test but if you are not totally bamboozled by the recency bias, it is evident that there was a night and day difference in the modality of central bank operations as between the two periods. For want of doubt, consider William McChesney Martin’s famous aphorism that the job of the Fed “is to take away the punch bowl just as the party is getting started”. Yet as to the 2007-2025 period, find us any even vaguely similar utterances from Bernanke, Yellen and Powell or, for that matter, any member of the FOMC, and we will be literally shocked.

Needless to say, you won’t find one because the whole mentality of the FOMC has changed drastically since the 1950s and 1960s. The Martin Fed actually respected the free market, and sought keep its impact on financial markets and asset prices as absolutely minimal as possible. By contrast, the Fed under Bernanke et. al. since the Great Financial crisis, especially, has mistaken itself for the Little Dutch Boy with his finger in the dike.

That’s right. The FOMC actually thinks its ministrations constitute the difference between national economic prosperity and crisis-ridden economic dysfunction. And that, in turn, its ability to steer the economy toward prosperity rather than collapse is owing to the fact that the 12-person FOMC has far better insight as to the correct interest rates, yield curve and stock index level at any point in time than would a genuine free market in financial instruments that is unenlightened by the wisdom possessed at the FOMC.

Well, we not only think not. We know not!

You can’t get any better contrast on the matters of macro-economic stability and the trend level of economic growth and employment than is depicted in the table below.

As to the growth/full employment metric, the comparison speaks for itself. The two decade CAGR for real growth in the Martin era was 4.24% per annum or more than double the 1.95% per annum gain during the heavy-duty monetary central planning era originally spawned by Greenspan and then executed by Bernanke, Yellen and Powell after Q4 2007.

Indeed, the table compares long-term trends—two decades way back then compared to the two most recent decades—so there is nothing to debate about timing or short-term aberrations. The heavy-handed interventionist Fed of recent times has drastically retarded economic growth, not enhanced it.

At the same time, the modern interventionist Fed, as depicted in the second column, has caused a sharp increase in macro-economic volatility and instability compared to what prevailed during the “light touch” Martin Era when the business cycle was largely operating on its own natural steam and forces. We reach that conclusion by comparing the standard deviation for both nominal and real growth as between the two periods, and, even more crucially, the so-called coefficients of variation.

The latter tells you everything you need to know. Given that the mean growth trend was sharply lower over Q4 2007 to Q2 2025 while the standard deviation was much higher, you got a compounding effect in this bottom line metric. To wit, the coefficient of variation with respect to nominal GDP during the last 18 years was more than double its level during the Martin Era, while the coefficient of variation since 2007 with respect to real GDP was triple that which prevailed during the 1950s and 1960s.

In short, contrary to Ben Bernanke’s humbug about the “Great Moderation” in recent times—allegedly due to the superior performance of the FOMC—-the truth is very simple: Greenspanian monetary central planning has caused a sharp and unmistakable increase in economic volatility and instability.

To be sure, there should be no mystery as to why monetary central planning results in less growth and more instability. It’s actually inherent in the beast because despite all its pretensions to arcane “monetary science” the Fed’s mindset and tools alike are about as primitive as it gets: Namely, the entirety of monetary central planning is based on the proposition that debt can never be cheap enough, and that more and more of the latter is the elixir that fuels enhanced economic growth and rising prosperity.

Actually, however, not at all. Excessive and artificial debt levels due to central bank induced mispricing causes financial bubbles and diversion of capital and economic resources to unproductive speculation and malinvestment. They also generate boom and bust stock market and credit cycles, which raise the volatility and instability of the main street economy.

For want of doubt here is the national leverage ratio since 1951, which is measured as total public and private debt divided by nominal GDP. Self-evidently, during the high growth/low GDP volatility period of the Martin era, the national leverage ratio hugged closely to its historical level at about 150% of GDP. However, after the Fed was cut loose from the gold standard anchor of Breton Woods in August 1971 it was off to the races.

During the entirety of the post-2007 period, the national leverage ratio stood in the range of 350% to 400% of GDP. In turn, those two extra turns of debt now amount to $60 trillion of incremental debt being lugged around by the US economy.

In short, the massively excessive debt of the recent period of Keynesian monetary central planning was a growth retardant, not an elixir; and it also saturated the financial system with excessive credit and liquidity, which fostered boom and bust financial bubbles and subsequent violent collapses and liquidations.

National Leverage Ratio (Debt-to-GDP), 1951 to 2025

Finally, there is another crucial aspect of the Martin era that militates in favor of firing the entire FOMC and abolishing any further buying and selling of debt and other securities in the open market by the Fed. To wit, the overwhelmingly favored policy tool during the Martin era was the Fed’sdiscount rate, which is inherently a tool of old-fashioned central banking, not modern day monetary central planning.

In the first place, the Discount Window is passive. It is not meant to steer the financial markets or macro-manage the main street GDP. Instead, it was conceived by Carter Glass and the Fed founders as a back-up source of required reserves, enabling banks to meet unusual depositor demands for cash without shrinking their credit and deposit books; and to thereby steady the main street economy and enable a more continuous process of investment expansion and economic growth than had prevailed during the latter part of the 19th century.

Yet, heaven forfend, there were no implicit or explicit targets for GDP growth, employment rates, housing starts, CapEx or any of the other “incoming data” indicators tracked to the week and second decimal point by today’s monetary central planners. Thus, during the entirely of the Martin Era there was not a single Fed proclamation about its Federal funds targets, nor any frenzied financial market speculation about 25, 50 or even 100 basis point increases/decreases in interest rates in the run-up to each Fed meeting. Those key movements were left to the wisdom of the money markets.

Accordingly, during the 228 months of William McChesney Martin’s tenure as Fed chairman, the Fed took interest rate action via the passive Discount Rate just 30 times, representing hardly 13% of the monthly meetings. By contrast, 100% of Fed monthly meetings are now effectively “live”, even as the FOMC’s open market desk is busy buying or selling securities virtually every week, day and hour that the financial markets are open for business.

Fed Discount Rate Levels And Changes During The Martin Era, 1951 to 1970

At the end of the day, there is plenty of historical evidence for the proposition that the entire FOMC should be fired, followed by the abolition of the FOMC entirely. As we will amplify further in Part 3, the American economy needs neither an “independent” Fed nor a super-interventionist FOMC to prosper. The US economy would do just fine with free markets in money, debt, stocks and derivatives, and at most a mobilized rate at the Discount window to provide high cost liquidity in extremis.

Part 3

The screeching in behalf of an “independent” Fed versus one purportedly stacked and dominated by the Donald has continued unabated. Lately, it seems that the talking heads on CNBC can’t gum about much else.

Alas, this barrage of self-interested humbug from Wall Street and Washington alike amounts to obsessing about the wrong question. As we have suggested in Parts 1 & 2, the question is not whether Jay Powell and the FOMC should be setting interest rates versus Donald Trump and his minions. To the contrary, the real issue is why anyone in the Eccles Building should be setting interest rates at all.

To wit, what in the hell is wrong with the free market? And by that we mean the tens of thousands, if not millions, of traders and investors with skin in the game who would otherwise set interest rates by bid and ask without any guidance and pegging from what amounts to a monetary politburo—even as the latter is pleased to be known by the utterly false and antiseptic title as the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).

For crying out loud. There is nothing “open” or “market” about it. The FOMC is an all-powerful price control arm of the state, which derives its massive financial clout from a monopoly on the legal right to counterfeit dollars snatched from thin air.

Yet, why in the world at this late date are they still printing dollars? As we have shown repeatedly, there is no reason whatsoever for the Fed to pursue it original mission of supplying reserves to the commercial banking system. After all, the Fed itself abolished any and all reserve requirements more than five years ago!

Instead, the banking system is now regulated—for better or worse–by a balance sheet based regime including prescribed liquidity ratios based on qualifying assets such as US treasury bills, which exist in ever increasing abundance thanks to the Trumpified spenders and borrowers in Washington; and also equity capital at prescribed ratios to total bank assets, which equity capital, again, can be acquired nearly without limit via retained earnings or new equity issuance. So there would be no barrier to commercial banking expansion so long as balance sheets are managed prudently.

Similarly, money and credit is the lifeblood of modern capitalism, but why in the world is it held that an unaccountable monetary politburo of 12 appointed bureaucrats is required in order to create serviceable money and credit? Indeed, the free market everywhere and always is responsive to demands for every kind of good or service—including that of money for transactions, payments, safekeeping, lending and borrowing.

As to the latter, there is now $4 trillion of crypto currencies outstanding. That’s a hell of a lot of private money—and it’s really no different in the context of the digital age than private bank issued money was during the national banking era prior to Washington’s granting the Fed a monopoly on the printing press. That is to say, the free market had proven back then and is doing so again now that it can create serviceable money without any action or guarantee by the state.

To be sure, the “use case” has been somewhat slow developing for the innumerable cryptos now on offer, but the recent Genius Act passed by the not-so-geniuses in Washington actually turns Treasury bills into everyday money (stable coins), which can be transacted instantly over the blockchain by anyone who can buy, borrow or steal a computer or iPhone. Indeed, so-called “stable coins” are actually the equivalent of national bank notes issued during the National Banking era between 1863 and 1913, which were also backed 100% by US Treasury debt. In short, there is nothing new under the sun about non-state or private money at all.

Stated differently, a century ago private banks created hand-to-hand currency that was backed 100% by Treasury bonds but guaranteed only by the issuing bank. Today, the Genius Act enables private crypto banks to issue essentially the same kind of hand-to-keyboard transactional money, albeit usable even more conveniently on a computer-to-computer basis over the blockchain.

As for the necessity of a state run central bank to enable adequate credit supplies, fuhgeddaboudit! There is currently $104 trillion of debt of every shape, size and domination outstanding in the USA alone. Indeed, the problem is way too much credit owing to the Fed’s repression of interest rates and the resulting sub-economic yields that result. Still, at market rates people and corporations alike would be rewarded for saving, meaning that there would be plenty of honest savings-based funding at market clearing yields for the legitimate credit needs of the economy.

In short, the banking system no longer needs “reserves” supplied by the Fed, and the economy does not need a central banking monopoly to be adequately supplied with money and credit. Accordingly, we once again get to the true core of Federal Reserve operations, which is not really about reserves, money or credit.

To the contrary, the Fed today is a destructive state agency in the business of monetary central planning, predicted upon a simple but infinitely erroneous proposition: Namely, the claim that free financial markets cannot properly price interest rates for optimum growth and macro-economic stability. Alas, in Part 2 we proved that proposition is utter nonsense with respect to both growth and stability.

Of course, the prospect of free financial markets operating without an authoritarian financial Sherpa and interest rate pegger in the Eccles Building would generate coronaries among the speculators on Wall Street and the spenders in Washington. They would falsely shriek that somehow the financial system needs a liquidity supplier of last resort to prevent the ultra-low probability that a market-clearing interest rate would somehow fail to balance the supply of private savings with the demand for investible and loanable funds.

Fine. An ultimate liquidity backstop at market rates is a contradiction in terms because at some rate there will always be depositors and liquidity providers. But for those academics and socialists—yes, we do repeat ourselves—who think capitalism needs training wheels, then just revive the Discount Window and a mobilized discount rate.

Beyond that, shutdown everything else round and about the Eccles Building. That is, fire the current FOMC , abolish the open market desk and replace the Federal Reserve Board with citizens randomly drawn from the Brooklyn telephone book. The latter would operate not through a central planning oriented open market desk, but via a passive discount window based on free market interest rates plus a penalty spread. It would be a standing facility that would be virtually never used. But a warm financial blanket nonetheless.

Needless to say, a passive discount window would put the Wall Street gamblers out of business because the leveraged carry trades would no longer be profitable, and PE multiples would fall sharply based on market driven DCF calculations, not phony 10-year Treasury yields confected by the FOMC.

Even more decisively, it would also put the Washington spenders out of business, as well. Forced to pay soaring market clearing interest rates on the Uncle Sam’s massive public debt, the spenders would have absolutely no running room to spend another dime on America’s massively overdrawn credit card.

Finally, the question therefore recurs: In a free market financial system with the printing presses of the Fed set at or near idle on a permanent basis, would the stock market capitalization of the US have exploded from 40% of GDP in the era before Greenspan and his heirs and assigns to nearly 20o% at present?

As the man said on late night TV—not on your life!

US Stock Market Capitalization As a % of GDP, 1970 to 2022

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post Hey, POTUS, Fire The Real Mortgage Fraudsters—The Entire FOMC appeared first on LewRockwell.

Peace-loving people throughout the world breathed a sigh of relief when the Israeli-American war on Iran ended in June after 12 days, with President Trump racing to triumphantly declare US strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program.

While his rhetoric suggested he wanted Israel and the world to view the US bombing as a lasting resolution of accusations that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons, Israel and its Western collaborators are already setting the stage for new aggression against Iran. Israeli strikes could be just days or weeks away, with Netanyahu hoping that, this time, the United States will be drawn into yet another protracted, bloody regime-change campaign to further the Israeli agenda.

On Thursday, France, Germany and the United Kingdom notified the UN Security Council that they were starting the process to reimpose UN sanctions on Iran via “snapback” provisions of the 2015 nuclear deal.

Under that agreement — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — Iran agreed to many additional safeguards to ensure its nuclear program remains peaceful. For example, Iran eliminated its inventory of medium-enriched uranium, cut its low-enriched uranium by 98%, capped future enrichment at 3.67%, and rendered its heavy-water reactor inoperable by filling it with concrete. In exchange, Iran was granted sanctions relief.

Despite Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA, President Trump spontaneously withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018 and reimposed US sanctions that his administration called “the toughest sanctions ever imposed” on Iran. Victimized by a new round of Israel-encouraged US economic warfare, and lacking any other leverage to nudge the United States back into the deal, Iran began enriching uranium well above the levels allowed under the JCPOA.

Parroting Israel, Trump has insisted that Iran must cease all nuclear enrichment, something Tehran has categorically ruled out for years, asserting that it’s Iran’s right, both as a sovereign state and — unlike nuclear-armed Israel — as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Internal politics play a significant role in the impasse, with important Iranian segments opposed to bending to Western demands on a point of national pride for the scientifically-advanced country.

In something akin to Vito Corleone’s “offer that can’t be refused,” US-Israeli insistence on zero enrichment is — quite deliberately — a demand that won’t be accepted. To the benefit of the warmongers, this demand helps ensure perpetual tension and recurring US-Israeli military brinksmanship, all pursuant to Israel’s long-standing goal of maneuvering the United States into an all-out war on Iran, or at least a major drive to topple the regime via proxies. That’s consistent with Israel’s strategy, which centers on continuously shattering territories and countries throughout the region so none can serve as a potent rival. It’s a strategy that’s taken an unfathomable toll that falls heaviest on the people of the region, but also profoundly harms the United States.

If broader UN sanctions are indeed reimposed on Iran via the JCPOA snapback provisions 30 days from last week’s joint notification, Iran’s rulers will be under pressure to respond. In July, Iran’s deputy foreign minister threatened that Iran may do so by withdrawing from the NPT, which would mean an end to ongoing supervision of the Iranian nuclear program by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Iran’s relationship with the IAEA is already badly strained. “Iran expelled IAEA inspectors in the wake of the US-Israeli war in response to the watchdog’s role in providing a pretext for the initial Israeli attack and for its failure to condemn the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities,” explained Antiwar.com’s Dave DeCamp. Iran also says it suspects Israel obtained information from the IAEA that enabled the assassinations of more than a dozen Iranian scientists in June.

Iran allowed a team of inspectors to return last week, but it remains to be seen how much access they’ll be given. Among the largest questions looming over Iran’s bombed nuclear program: Where is the stockpile of 60%-enriched uranium that had been held deep under a mountain at Fordow? That enrichment facility was hammered by US bunker-buster bombs on June 22, but some reports have suggested Iran preemptively moved the uranium to another location before the Trump-ordered strike.

With both Israel and the United States threatening renewed warfare if Iran makes good on its promise to continue enriching uranium, Tehran will be justifiably reluctant to disclose the fate of its 60%-enriched uranium, or to give full access to its nuclear facilities, including those hit by Israel and the United States in June. After all, full transparency would certainly be exploited by military planners in Washington and Tel Aviv.

It’s a no-win situation for Iran. A withdrawal from the NPT will be portrayed by Israel and its Western allies as proof that Iran is building a nuclear bomb. The same narrative will be promoted if Iran continues to allow inspections, but fails to grant every request for access to sites around the country. It’s easy to purposefully trigger refusals — for example, by asking for access to sites that aren’t sincerely suspected of harboring nuclear assets, but are nonetheless sensitive from an Iranian national security standpoint.

Either way, Israel and its collaborators in Western governments can create a pretext for military intervention. Ironically, Israel may be pushing Iran into a corner that prompts Ayatollah Khamenei to withdraw his religious edict forbidding the development of nuclear weapons, turning a long-false accusation into reality.

Short of an all-out war or regime-change campaign, Israel — at the least — wants to impose a new, violent reality on Iran, says Trita Parsi, executive director of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “What the Israelis wanted to achieve [in June], short of decapitation, was to make sure that they turn Iran into the next Lebanon or Syria, a country that Israel can bomb at will without American involvement and with complete impunity,” said Parsi on a recent appearance on the Scott Horton Show. “It’s part of the larger security strategy of the Israelis, which is security through complete military hegemony and domination. This is why they are very inclined to start a war again, and they want to do so before the political window in Washington closes.”

To preclude a new era in which Iran is routinely bombed by Israel, Parsi thinks Tehran will take a far more aggressive approach to retaliation than it did in June. “The Iranians will not show any of the restraint they showed in the last 12-day war. It’s very clear they were [planning] for a long confrontation, and as a result, they were not consuming everything they had at an early or a fast pace. But for the next war, they’re probably going to go all-in right away to completely dispel any notion in Israel that they can turn Iran into the next Syria.” Such a massive retaliation would seemingly amplify the risk of major US involvement.

Iran’s likely approach to the next round of warfare may be driving a sense of urgency in Israel to strike soon, given both countries are racing to replenish their arsenals. It’s not clear who’s best-positioned for that competition and the next exchange of fire.

Israel rapidly neutralized Iran’s air defenses in June, but, as the war progressed, Iran had increasing success of its own, bypassing Israeli air defenses and achieving some spectacular hypersonic ballistic-missile strikes on targets around the country. On the other hand, Iran’s offensive missile arsenal was depleted by use and degraded by Israeli attacks, and its missile and fuel production facilities were also hit.

IDF air defenses reportedly ran low on ammunition too, and the US arsenal was also weakened. In the most egregious example, to defend Israel from the consequences of its aggression, the US military burned through a quarter of its global inventory of high-end, THAAD missile interceptors, firing 150 of them at a staggering cost of some $2 billion. At the pace Lockheed Martin produces them, it will take more than a year to restore the THAAD inventory.

In addition to the ambiguous, multi-variable dynamics of the arms race, Israel’s eagerness to start the next round of warfare could also be driven by the shelf-life of whatever assets the Mossad still has inside Iran. Such assets played a major role in Israel’s surprise attack — reportedly deploying long-concealed drones, destroying anti-aircraft batteries, and facilitating the assassination of scientists and military commanders. Since the war, Iran has been sweeping the country for remaining Israeli assets, and rounding up suspected spies.

As Parsi indicated, US politics must also figure in Israel’s calculus. Americans’ support of Israel has been cratering as the IDF campaign in Gaza continues to produce images of suffering on an enormous scale, alongside a never-ending stream of credible testimonies about Israeli atrocities against civilians. The collapse in pro-Israel sentiment extends to what has long been the foremost cornerstone of Israeli support — the Republican Party. A spring Pew poll found that 50% of Republicans under 50 now have an unfavorable view of the Zionist state, and Trump’s decision to join Israel’s war on Iran in June sparked an uproar from his America-First base, led by influential figures like Steve Bannon.

Meanwhile, legislators from both sides of the aisle have been enduring disruptions at summer-recess town halls, with angry constituents condemning them for failing to block ongoing US facilitation of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Add it all up, and Israel would likely want to make its next attempt at entangling Trump in a major war well before he’s highly sensitized to the potential impact on the 2025 midterms. Taking the longer view, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others must be contemplating the possibility that the long era of unwavering US support of Israel could be at the beginning of its end — incentivizing them to cash in on every American dollar, missile, UN veto and misguided military intervention they can before the party’s over.

In the meantime, Israel and its collaborators throughout the West will continue doing all they can grease the skids for the next war, which includes propaganda campaigns to cultivate fear and loathing of Iran.

Decades into that undertaking, the anti-Iran material is dominated by tired old lines that just don’t hit like they used to, like warnings that Iran is “months away” from having a nuclear weapon — warnings we’ve been subjected to for decades, despite contradictory conclusions of the US intelligence community.

After launching his war on Iran in June, Netanyahu dusted off a propaganda line from the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, claiming Israeli intelligence had just learned that, if Iran obtained nuclear weapons, it would hand them over to non-state proxies to inflict “nuclear terrorism on global scale.” The fact that Netanyahu quickly dropped that far-fetched claim from his wartime oratory speaks volumes.

Speaking of things that sound made up, last week Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his security agencies determined Iran had directed arson attacks on a Jewish business and a synagogue in Australia in 2024. Western reporters dutifully quoted the claim, without adding their newfangled “without evidence” modifier they selectively apply to statements made by politicians they revile. Iran’s supposed motive? “To undermine social cohesion and sow discord in our community,” said Albanese with a straight face. Embedding a second dubious claim inside the first, Australia says its intelligence community reached its conclusion about Iranian government involvement in the arsons on its own.

After leveling the accusation, Australia expelled Iran’s ambassador — the first time it did so to any country’s ambassador since World War II — and designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist group. Aside from serving the broader propaganda campaign, the claim and related moves carried potential political benefits for Albanese — countering Netanyahu’s recent accusation that Albanese had failed to take “decisive action” against an “alarming rise of antisemitism in Australia.” Netanyahu even went so far as to assign the Australian prime minister a Sept 23, Rosh Hashanah deadline to “replace weakness with action, appeasement with resolve.”

You can expect many more accusations to be leveled against Iran in the coming days and weeks. Some may be true, but allow me to pass on a useful reminder from Aussie Caitlin Johnstone. With each new claim, bear in mind Hitchens’ Razor: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

This article was originally published on Stark Realities.

The post Israel and the West Set the Stage for Next Round of Warfare on Iran appeared first on LewRockwell.

“The world will soon understand nothing can stop what is coming.”—President Trump

Donald Trump has always been a master of imagery.

From his red MAGA hats to his choreographed rallies, he understands the language of spectacle. Now he has discovered the perfect propaganda machine: AI-generated images.

AI allows the creation of endless variations of Trump-as-warrior, Trump-as-enforcer, Trump-as-savior. These images spread across social media, replicated, remixed, and shared until they become familiar, even normalized.

The latest AI-generated images of Trump, shared on his social media accounts, depict him in the militarized black uniform of a SWAT officer, or in police dress blues.

These memes are carefully crafted signals of how Trump envisions power in America.

These algorithmically perfected images, generated to flood the digital landscape and shape the subconscious of millions, are neither accidental nor new: they are psychological warfare—propaganda that is as old as time.

Propaganda does not persuade through logic. It persuades through familiarity. And Trump’s AI propaganda machine is doing its job: normalizing the sight of a president in a SWAT uniform.

Throughout history, despots have used martial imagery to elevate themselves above the people and justify power by force.

Mussolini wrapped himself in the black shirts of his paramilitaries to rally fascist Italy. Hitler’s carefully staged uniforms and parades signaled total control of the German nation. Stalin and Mao surrounded themselves with martial iconography to convey power over life, death, and law.

The message was always the same: I am not just your leader—I am your protector, your executioner, your law.

Today, Trump joins that lineage—not on a battlefield, but in digital space.

But unlike his predecessors, Trump does not need mass rallies or parades to craft this imagery. Algorithms now do the work of propaganda ministries. And unlike past dictators who required massive propaganda apparatuses, Trump needs only an internet connection and an AI tool to clothe himself in the trappings of authoritarianism.

This may be political theater, but it is also authoritarian propaganda that sends a message that Trump sees himself not as the servant of the people—bound by the Constitution—but as the nation’s chief cop, judge, and executioner.

Under a police state presidency, there are no checks and balances, no due process, no Bill of Rights that should stand in his way. By collapsing the distinction between civil government and militarized force, the president, self-styled as a SWAT chief, suggests that dissent will not be debated—it will be policed.

When Trump dons a SWAT uniform—even digitally—he is telling Americans: this is how I see power. Not as persuasion, not as consent of the governed, but as force delivered at gunpoint.

The SWAT image is the visual embodiment of a police state presidency:

• It signals raids on the homeless, as Trump’s July 2025 executive order mandated when it directed federal agencies to clear encampments nationwide.
• It signals mass arrests of immigrants and families rounded up in early morning ICE sweeps.
• It signals military deployments to American cities, e.g., when Trump sent the National Guard to Los Angeles, a move a federal court recently ruled a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.
• It signals treating dissent as criminality, and opposition as insurgency.

For decades, Americans have watched the rise of SWAT teams transform America—and domestic policing—into a militarized state: battering rams breaking down doors, no-knock raids in the dead of night, armored vehicles patrolling suburban streets, flashbang grenades tossed into homes.

SWAT was originally conceived for rare, high-risk emergencies like hostage situations. Today, it has become the default face of the American police state.

The numbers tell the story.

In 1980, there were roughly 3,000 SWAT raids per year in the United States. By the 2000s, that number had skyrocketed to 80,000 annually.

What was once a rare tactic reserved for hostage situations or heavily armed standoffs is now routine police work. The result has been predictably tragic. Children injured by flash-bang grenades. Elderly homeowners killed when they mistook armed agents for intruders. Family dogs shot in the chaos of mistaken raids.

SWAT culture has normalized the use of military tactics against civilians. It has conditioned Americans to accept armored vehicles on Main Street, black-clad officers in ski masks battering down doors, and neighborhoods transformed into war zones.

The courts have long warned against this drift into militarized policing. Yet what good are limits when the president himself imagines donning the uniform of those who kick down doors?

A Constitution that is ignored in practice, even if acknowledged on paper, is no safeguard at all.

Trump’s AI propaganda takes this dangerous normalization a step further: it places the president himself at the head of the raid—the enforcer-in-chief—rendering him the law, the enforcer, and the judge. This is the very definition of dictatorship.

The Constitution was written precisely to prevent such concentration of power. It was written to prevent the rise of a lawless ruler who would make himself enforcer as well as lawgiver.

That is why the Bill of Rights exists—to put clear, inviolable limits on government power. The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. The First protects dissenters and protesters. The Fifth guarantees due process before life, liberty, or property can be taken.

But in the American police state that is rapidly unfolding, citizens are not sovereign individuals but potential suspects. Dissent is not free expression but insurgency. And the citizenry are not seen as equal participants in a social contract but as a populace to be subdued.

This is not merely unconstitutional. It is anti-constitutional.

What makes Trump’s propaganda even more dangerous is how well it aligns with America’s existing drift toward militarization.

• Police departments nationwide already deploy surplus military equipment: tanks, drones, battlefield weapons.
• Federal agencies like Homeland Security and ICE conduct raids that look indistinguishable from military operations.
• Surveillance technology powered by Palantir and other private firms tracks the movements of ordinary citizens.
• Protests are met with riot gear, tear gas, and mass arrests.
• The carceral prison state is rapidly expanding. Congressional funding for Trump’s $170 billion prison expansion threatens to make incarceration the government’s default solution to social problems.
• Military forces are being used for domestic policing. The federalization of the National Guard to suppress immigration protests in Los Angeles, already struck down as unlawful, is a warning of how military power is being recast as domestic policing.

It must be said: Trump did not create this police state reality. But his presidency gleefully amplifies it, recasting America as a nation where “law and order” means rule at gunpoint.

This shift matters because it changes how people imagine power. A president who wears a SWAT uniform—even in AI fantasy—is telling the public: I am not one of you. I am over you.

The most insidious part of this propaganda is not its shock value but its normalizing function, part of a deliberate strategy to acclimate Americans to authoritarian rule.

Images once seen as dystopian now appear as campaign memes. The president as militarized enforcer becomes a shareable joke, a collectible, a digital poster for the faithful.

But every meme conditions the public to accept what would once have been unthinkable. Today it is a picture. Tomorrow it is policy.

This is how authoritarianism advances—not always through tanks in the streets, but through the slow, steady normalization of force as governance.

Every authoritarian regime has used uniforms and slogans to rebrand tyranny as order. The Nazis had their SS uniforms, the Soviets their red star, the Chinese Communists their Mao suits. Symbols matter because they carry meaning deeper than words.

Trump’s SWAT imagery is America’s warning sign. It is the uniform of repression, masquerading as protection. It is the costume of a ruler who governs by intimidation, not law.

We ignore this at our peril.

If we fail to see the danger, if we laugh it off as mere fantasy, we will wake up one day to find the fantasy has become reality.

The Constitution does not permit presidents to be SWAT chiefs. It does not allow them to enforce laws by decree, to jail dissenters at will, or to treat citizens as insurgents. It insists that the president is a public servant, bound by law and accountable to the people.

But that system only survives if “we the people” demand it.

“Nothing can stop what is coming,” declares Trump? On the contrary: tyranny can always be stopped—if liberty lies in the hearts of the people.

The choice before us is clear: do we accept the imagery of the president as SWAT chief, or do we reaffirm the vision of the founders that no man is above the law?

The time to decide is now. The Constitution will not defend itself.

Trump’s AI propaganda declares that law is whatever the president enforces. It declares that rights are privileges, granted or withdrawn by armored men. It declares that nothing—not law, not courts, not people—can stop what is coming.

But as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that is not the American way.

In a constitutional republic, nothing—not presidents, not uniforms, not threats at gunpoint, not tyranny—should ever be unstoppable.

Americans must decide: will we be governed by the Constitution, or will we be policed by the image of a SWAT-clad ruler who tells us resistance is futile?

The Founders knew the answer. So should we.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

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