Lew Rockwell Institute

Ridenour says Denmark has no legitimate authority to rule Greenland, which Copenhagen has treated for centuries with racist colonial arrogance.

Incoming U.S. President Donald Trump has boasted about annexing Greenland from Denmark – by military force if needs be.

Veteran journalist Ron Ridenour says, ironically, go ahead Trump, grab Greenland, take all of it.

It’s not that Ridenour is a fan of the new president or endorses U.S. imperialism.

Far from it, Ron Ridenour has been an outspoken critic of American imperialism for over 60 years as a journalist and author.

However, he sees value in the Greenland grab in that it exposes the fraud of the U.S. posing as a protector of NATO allies.

Ridenour has written extensively on what he calls Denmark’s abject servility to U.S. imperialism and NATO’s aggression. He points out that Denmark has been a loyal lackey in promoting the NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.

Now, the U.S. “leader” (master) is snubbing Denmark’s so-called sovereignty over Greenland. The high-handed contempt of Trump towards Denmark is welcomed by Ridenour because it fatally corrodes the NATO alliance.

Ridenour says Denmark has no legitimate authority to rule Greenland, which Copenhagen has treated for centuries with racist colonial arrogance.

Trump’s ambition to annex Greenland for U.S. national security interests is an object lesson to NATO allies that they are ultimately dispensable.

If Trump goes ahead with the Arctic land grab, then the impact on NATO will shatter the illusions of the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

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

The post Grab Greenland? Go on Trump, Expose Fraud of U.S. Protection and Servility of Danish & NATO Lackeys appeared first on LewRockwell.

“In its final hours, the most CORRUPT Administration in American history is covering up Democrats’ trail of criminal activity.” — US Rep. Andrew Clyde 

The Criminal-in-Chief in his last criminal act has issued a “preemptive pardon” to 20 criminals. Mass murderer “Covid-vax Fauci” got one and so did the despicable Liz Cheney and all members of the Jan. 6 House Committee that conducted the unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions of American citizens who attended the rally for President Trump. The “law enforcement” officers who worked to turn the protest into a riot got preemptive pardons.

Biden alleges that his pardons should not be viewed as confirmation that any of the preemptively pardoned persons did anything wrong.  If this is true, why did Biden pardon them?  Indeed, Biden’s pardons convict them. He knows firsthand that they are guilty just as he is, and that is why he pardoned them. 

But did Biden pardon them?  There is no such thing as a preemptive pardon.  Pardons come after indictment or conviction, not before.  A preemptive pardon is an invention that is a product of the gradual transformation of a US president into a caesar who issues laws and rules independently of the legislature and Constitution.  

Having presided for four years over politics prevailing over our legal institutions, Biden declares his optimism “that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics.”

Having made Trump supporters and Trump himself the targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions,” Biden justifies pardons for those who conducted the unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions” on the grounds that they  “do not deserve to be the targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions.”

Keep in mind that Biden pardoned people on death row and 2,500 people convicted for drug offenses, but he could not find a single wrongful convicted January 6 protester to pardon. 

 I have little doubt that among the convicted murderers and drug offenders there are some innocent people, and I have little doubt that the January 6 rally attendees were prosecuted and convicted for political and propaganda reasons. 

Biden says he has tried to convince Trump not “to go back and try to settle scores.”  Here we have Biden, as usual, mischaracterizing the situation. To hold government officials responsible for violating and weaponizing law is not a political settling of scores. It is enforcing the law in order to prevent its weaponization in the future and to hold officials to the same laws that apply to everyone else. The last thing we want is a system in which officials have immunity when they break the law.

All of the perpetrators of the illegal prosecutions of Trump, his attorneys, and the January 6 Trump supporters must be indicted and held accountable. 

I doubt that Biden’s “preemptive” pardons are legal.  But if they are, we are still entitled to know the truth about the crimes.  Therefore, investigations and indictments should go forward. If they are found not guilty, they don’t need the pardon. If guilty, the pardon, if legal, protects them.  They certainly deserve a taste of the experience that they dished out to others.

The post The Biden Regime Was an Amazing Collection of Criminals appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Biden’s pardon of Dr. Anthony Fauci may protect the former National Institutes of Health official from immediate criminal prosecution, but some critics say he is not completely out of legal jeopardy and that public sentiment might still condemn the man who became known during the COVID-19 pandemic as “Mr. Science.”

In the days before Biden offered the pardon to Fauci, along with other critics of Donald Trump, some experts who have followed Fauci’s career and handling of the pandemic, as well as members of the Trump transition team, reiterated their assertion that Fauci perjured himself on several occasions during the pandemic – especially regarding his agency’s links to the lab in Wuhan, China, that might have created the virus that causes COVID-19.

The pardon addresses any COVID-related offenses, and is backdated to 2014—the year a U.S. ban on so-called “gain of function” virus research took effect — research Fauci is accused of outsourcing to China.

Despite reporting that Trump is bent on revenge, the appetite among MAGA appointees for holding Fauci accountable hasn’t been particularly vocal. But former Senate investigator Jason Foster, who now runs the whistleblower nonprofit Empower Oversight, says that Biden’s pardon creates new legal jeopardy for Fauci. Sen. Rand Paul has vowed to continue investigating the COVID origins question, and sources tell RealClearInvestigations that Sen. Ron Johnson and House Republican investigators plan to do so as well. When testifying in those inquiries or answering written depositions, Fauci will be unable to dodge questions by invoking his Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination. “They can ask him if he lied before, replough old ground,” Foster said. “And if he lies about any prior lie, he can be prosecuted for that or held in contempt.”

Andrew Noymer, associate professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine, said such hearings are necessary for scientific and historical reasons. “I’m hopeful that he will now come clean about everything he knows about the origins of the virus,” Noymer said. “For the sake of public trust in science – explaining what killed 20 million people – that a complete account is much more important than speculation about what criminal penalties he may have avoided.”

“These pardons will not stop Department of Justice investigations,” said one adviser to the Trump transition team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We expected this and look at it as a predicate to get truth from people who can no longer use the Fifth Amendment. Now we can bring every one of them in front of a grand jury.”

There is no consensus on Fauci’s handling of the pandemic. Legacy media outlets have promoted Fauci throughout the pandemic as “America’s doctor” who “sticks to the facts” and applauded him as “the nation’s top infectious disease expert.” When he retired from the NIH after five decades in 2022, the New York Times granted him space on its opinion page to advise the next generation of scientists, citing his own accomplishments.

Numerous social media outlets have provided a polar opposite perspective. Several X accounts have uploaded videos that show Fauci’s inconsistencies. For example, Fauci claimed in early 2022 interviews that he never recommended lockdowns, but later said he recommended shutting the country down. Independent journalist Matt Orfalea circulated another set of clips that show Fauci claiming he kept an “open mind” about how the pandemic started while alleging in others that the evidence points against a lab accident and “strongly” in favor of a natural spillover.

As Fauci’s flip-flops generated attention in Republican circles and on social media, he charged that such criticism was “totally preposterous,” adding, “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.”

Fauci’s many contradictory statements even caught the attention of a New York Times contributing opinion writer, Megan K. Stack, who chastised Fauci for “the largely one-sided nature of his public remarks” about the possibility the pandemic started from an accident at a lab his agency had helped fund – the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Initially, Fauci dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” the possibility of a Wuhan lab accident on a Feb. 9, 2020, podcast hosted by Newt Gingrich. Afterward, Fauci reversed himself, stating in several interviews that he had always kept an open mind.

Later reports zeroed in on Fauci’s secret involvement in prominent March 2020 research, called the “proximal origin” paper, that turned public and scientific sentiment against the possibility of a lab accident. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the paper concluded, adding, “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Published in the prestigious Nature Medicine journal, “proximal origin” is the most-cited scientific paper of 2020.

Subsequent emails showed that Fauci helped guide the “proximal origin” paper to publication, as congressional probers found, “without revealing that he had been involved with its creation and had even, according to the emails, given it his approval.”

Distancing himself from his own emails, Fauci later told the Times that he wasn’t sure he even got around to reading the paper. But the House later released a multi-day deposition of Fauci where he was asked about his involvement in the “proximal origin” paper. Under oath, Fauci admitted to having received and read several drafts of the paper.

But while dissembling to the media is not a crime, lying to Congress is illegal. And the Department of Justice has two referrals from Congress already requesting that Fauci be prosecuted for lying under oath.

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The January 2, 2025 Joe Rogan Experience interview with former Texas Governor Rick Perry and W. Bryan Hubbard who was the first chairman of the Kentucky Opioid Commission covered the topic of ibogaine. Many people are not aware of its healing properties as a psychedelic. It was classified in 1970 as a Class I drug later tied to the US Controlled Substances Act (CSA) so its distribution, sale and use is prohibited even for clinical research trials. The federal CSA was part of President Richard Nixon’s declared war on drugs (WOD).

Current treatment methods for people with opiate drug addiction(s) and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have not been encouraging over time. Why this excitement about a psychedelic called ibogaine? The limited published research shows promise in its use to heal people from opiate drug addiction, PTSD and other substance addictions.

Governor Perry’s disciplined excitement in the Joe Rogan interview (referencing the January 2024 Stanford University study) of very positive outcomes for people receiving it in a prescribed manner and medical oversight shows he is convinced of its effectiveness with the need for repeat treatments very low. No information from the interview was provided about ibogaine dosage, cost per dose and cost for clinical treatment.

“Ibogaine is a naturally occurring psychoactive compound found in the root bark of the Tabernanthe iboga, a shrub native to Central and West Africa. How ibogaine works in the brain is not well understood. It interacts with numerous neurotransmitters in the central nervous system, including components of the acetylcholine, serotonin, dopamine, glutamate, and opioid systems. Its effects are prolonged, beginning half an hour to three hours after ingestion and peaking after eighteen to thirty-six hours.” This information is from the Univertiy of Califronia Berkeley’s Center for the Science of Psychedelics. Here is the ibogaine molecule.

“Ibogaine can be dangerous. There are numerous reports in the scientific literature of people having fatal cardiac events after taking ibogaine. Because ibogaine can affect the heartbeat, it can be particularly risky for people with preexisting cardiac problems or when mixed with other drugs.”

“For centuries, members of the Bwiti religion have used iboga as a sacrament in rituals . . . “ Ibogaine’s use is new to nations since 1900 outside of the central Africa home of the Bwiti culture.

“Purified ibogaine hydrochloride was first introduced to European consumers in 1939 under the name Lambarène. It was sold in France until around 1970 as an antidepressant that could improve mood and physical strength, and was used by athletes and those recovering from illness. Ibogaine’s potential to interrupt drug addiction was first recognized in 1962 by Howard Lotsof, a heroin addict who experimented with ibogaine. The experience was so transformative Lotsof spent the rest of his life advocating for it as a cure for substance abuse.”

“Schedule I drugs are those that have the following characteristic according to the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA):

• The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse.
• The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical treatment use in the U.S.
• It has a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision.

According to federal law, no prescriptions may be written for Schedule I substances, and they are not readily available for clinical use.” The US DEA web site describes five drug classification schedules.

The online Ibogaine Journal lists some countries where it can be accessed. Canada allows doctors to prescribe it with supervised medical use. Mexico has no specific laws on ibogaine making it a top spot for people looking for ibogaine treatments. “Its lack of strict rules pulls in those seeking different ways to treat addiction.”

European countries apply different ibogaine laws. “Belgium prohibits the possession, distribution, or production of ibogaine without explicit permission.” France and Sweden have criminalized it. Portugal decriminalized its possession in 2001. Doctors in Brazil can prescribe ibogaine since 2016. Costa Rica and Gabon allows its purchase and use. Ibogaine’s public access depends on country of residence.

The recent Joe Rogan interview about ibogaine’s efficacy should place political and public pressure on the US DEA to move it from Shedule I to a lower schedule so it can be available for US based clinical research trials leading to possible public benefits. The federal WOD’s unintended consequences continue today which no one imagined in the early 1970’s. It is time the federal government declare defeat in this part of the WOD and surrender to the reality of life.

The post Ibogaine Is Gaining appeared first on LewRockwell.

The GOP really is so schizophrenic as to be worthless.

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Francis also adds that “the dignity and rights of migrants trump any national security concerns.”  Great.  Now he can tear down all his walls around the Vatican and empty out the Vatican coffers to feed and house the “newcomers” and members of ISIS.  Lead by example, Francis!  Don’t be like those hypocrites in Martha’s Vineyard.

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Thanks, Rick Rozoff.

Jonathan Turley

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It was Alexander Hamilton who invented the notion of “implied powers” of the Constitution which has morphed into the deceitful notion of “a living constitution” (aka whatever the politicians of the day say it is).  The constitutional amendment process be damned.

Hamilton, an inveterate statist, central planner, protectionist, central bank worshipper, and corporate welfare advocate, also proposed the following:  If the federal government does something that is unconstitutional, the fact that the government did it makes it constitutional.  Like waging wars without constitutionally mandated congressional declarations of war for example.

Now comes the issue of Brandon’s “preemptive” pardons of his son and all the rest of the Biden crime family.  Where this idea of “preemptive” pardons come from is Gerald Ford’s first time ever preemptive pardon of Nixon, who had not been charged with any crime.  There you go: another example of the Hamiltonian Constitution which has no basis in legality and is only in place because politicians who despise all constitutional limits on their powers like it and think they can get away with it.

The post The “Hamiltonian Constitution” versus the Actual Constitution appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Infowars

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North Dakota is staunchly conservative, having voted Republican in every presidential election since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. So how is it that the state boasts the only state-owned bank in the nation? Has it secretly gone socialist?

No. The Bank of North Dakota (BND) operates on the same principles as any capitalist bank, except that its profits and benefits serve the North Dakota public rather than private investors and executives. The BND provides a unique, innovative model, in which public ownership is leveraged to enhance the workings of the private sector. It invests in and supports private enterprise — local businesses, agriculture, and economic development – the core activities of a capitalist system where private property and enterprise are central. Across the country, small businesses are now failing at increasingly high rates, but that’s not true in North Dakota, which was rated by Forbes Magazine the best state in which to start a business in 2024.

The BND was founded in 1919, when North Dakota farmers rose up against the powerful out-of-state banking-railroad-granary cartel that was unfairly foreclosing on their farms. They formed the Non-Partisan League, won an election, and founded the state’s own bank and granary, both of which are still active today.

The BND operates within the private financial market, working alongside private banks rather than replacing them. It provides loans and other banking services, primarily to other banks, local governments, and state agencies, which then lend to or invest in private sector enterprises. It operates with a profit motive, with profits either retained as capital to increase the bank’s loan capacity or returned to the state’s general fund, supporting public projects, education, and infrastructure.

According to the BND website, more than $1 billion had been transferred to the state’s general fund and special programs through 2018, most of it in the previous decade. That is a substantial sum for a state with a population that is only about one-fifteenth the size of Los Angeles County.

The BND actually beats private banks at their own game, generating a larger return on equity (ROE) for its public citizen-owners than even the largest Wall Street banks return to their private investors.

Why So Profitable? The BND Model

For nearly a century, the BND maintained a low profile. But in 2014, it was featured in the Wall Street Journal, which reported that the Bank of North Dakota “is more profitable than Goldman Sachs Group Inc., has a better credit rating than J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and hasn’t seen profit growth drop since 2003.” The article credited this success to the shale oil boom; but North Dakota was already reporting record profits in the spring of 2009, when every other state was in the red and the oil boom had not yet hit.

The average return on equity (ROE) of the BND from 2000 through 2023 (its latest annual report) was 19.51%. (ROE = net profit divided by shareholder equity.) Compare JPMorgan Chase (JPM), by far the largest bank in the country, with 2.4 trillion in deposits. Its average ROE from 2000-23 was 11.38% over the same period. For a detailed breakdown, see here.

Note that these respective returns are for shareholder/owners. The BND has only one shareholder, the state itself. State pension funds can buy stocks, but state general funds typically do not invest in them. Their money is held in banks as deposits, which pay a lower return than bank stock. The California Pooled Money Investment Account (PMIA), for example, held an average $166 billion in California state funds in fiscal year 2023-24, in a variety of investments including federal bills, bonds, notes and securities; time deposits and CDs; and corporate bonds and commercial paper. It yielded only 3.927% during that fiscal year. A state-owned bank on the BND model could have generated a five times higher return for the state.

How could the BND have outperformed JPM, the nation’s largest bank? Most important, it has substantially lower costs and risks than private commercial banks. It has no exorbitantly-paid executives; pays no bonuses, fees, or commissions; has no private shareholders; and has low borrowing costs. It engages in old-fashioned conservative banking and does not speculate in derivatives, so it has no losses or risk from derivative trades gone wrong.

The BND does not need to advertise or compete for depositors. It has a massive, captive deposit base in the state itself, which must deposit all of its revenues in the BND by law.  Most state agencies also must deposit there. The BND takes some token individual deposits, but it does not compete with local banks for commercial deposits or loans. Municipal government deposits are generally reserved for local community banks, which are able to use those funds to back loans because the BND provides letters of credit guaranteeing them. The BND also has a massive capital base, with a sizable capital fund totaling $1.059 billion in 2023, along with deposits of $8.7 billion.

Among other costs avoided by the BND are those for fines, penalties and settlements arising from government and civil lawsuits. Since the year 2000, JPM has paid more than $40 billion in total fines and settlements to regulators, enforcement agencies and lawsuits related to anti-​competitive practices, securities abuses and other violations; and it is still facing several hundred open legal cases.

The State’s Deposits Are Safer in Its Own Bank

The BND is not only more profitable but is safer than JPM. In fact federal data show that JPM is the most systemically risky bank in the country. The BND, by contrast, has also been called the nation’s safest bank. Its stock cannot be short-sold, since it is not publicly traded; the bank cannot go bankrupt, because all of the state’s revenues are deposited in it by law; and it will not suffer a run, since the state would not “run” on itself.

Compare JP Morgan Chase, which has over $1 trillion in uninsured deposits, the type most likely to be withdrawn in a crisis. In 2023, the FDIC insurance fund had a balance of only $116.1 billion – only 5% of JPM’s total deposits of $2.38 trillion. JPM also had major counterparty risk in the derivatives market, with $61 trillion in total derivatives or $628 billion in netted derivatives. That’s five times those of Credit Suisse, a SIFI (Systemically Important Financial Institution) which went insolvent in 2023.

Not just the Bank of North Dakota but North Dakota’s local banks are very safe, aided by the BND with liquidity, capitalization, regulation, loan guarantees, and other banker’s bank services. No local North Dakota banks have been in trouble during this century, but if they were to suffer a bank run, the BND would be there to help. According to its former CEO Eric Hardmeyer, the BND has a pre-approved fed funds line set up with every bank in the state; and if that is insufficient for liquidity, the BND can simply buy loans from a troubled local bank as needed.

Today state governments typically deposit their revenues in giant Wall Street banks designated as SIFIs, including JPM; but those banks are riskier than they appear. They “insure” their capital with interconnected derivatives backed by collateral that has been “rehypothecated” (pledged or re-used several times over). The Financial Stability Board in Basel has declared that practice to be risky, “as highlighted during the 2007-09 global financial crisis.” The five largest Wall Street depository banks hold $223 trillion in derivatives — called a “ticking time bomb” by the Bank for International Settlements — and they have a combined half trillion dollars in commercial real estate loans, also very risky in the current financial environment.

Under the Dodd Frank Act of 2010, a SIFI that goes bankrupt will not be bailed out by the government but will be recapitalized through “bail ins,” meaning the banks are to “bail in” or extract capital from their creditors. That includes their “secured” and “collateralized” depositors, including state and local governments. Under the Bankruptcy Act of 2005 and Uniform Commercial Code Secs. 8 and 9, derivative and repo claims have seniority over all others and could easily wipe out all of the capital of a SIFI, including the “collateralized” deposits of state and local governments. The details are complicated, but the threat is real and imminent. See fuller discussions here and here, David Rodgers Webb’s The Great Taking, and Chris Martenson’s series drilling down into the obscure legalese of the enabling legislation, concluding here.

Even if the SIFIs remain solvent, they are not using state deposits and investments for the benefit of the state from which they come, and often they are betting against the public interest. The BND, on the other hand, is mandated to use its revenues for the benefit of the North Dakota public. Other states would do well to follow North Dakota’s lead.

Read the Whole Article

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Sachs, professor at Columbia University, has advised presidents and heads of NGOs over a long career. He remains extremely well connected at the highest political and intelligence levels.

Rather than Israel being an extension of US policy in the region, Sachs declares that Benjamin Netanyahu is steering American policy with Israel’s wars in Gaza, Lebanon and even had a hand in earlier wars such as Iraq. He also argues that western countries, led by the US, and not Vladimir Putin, are ultimately to blame for starting Russia’s war in Ukraine. An advisor to UN Secretaries General and governments around the world, Sachs gives us some personal insights into his own experience of what he says was a CIA orchestrated coup in Haiti, and how he decodes the intentions of those he is certain are taking us ever closer to global nuclear catastrophe.

Sachs’ opinions are well worth listening to.

This originally appeared on MacleodFinance Substack.

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Federal agencies classify trillions of pages of documents each year—enough secrets to fill 20 million filing cabinets. Washington politicians and federal agencies routinely blindfold American citizens on the most important and most reckless decisions the government takes. As President Joe Biden told Special Counsel Robert Hur in late 2022, “We over-classify everything…. And 99.9% of it has nothing to do with anything I couldn’t pick up and read out loud to the public.”

The change in presidential administrations is the ideal chance for sweeping disclosures of pseudo-secrets that will provide a booster shot for American democracy.

President-elect Donald Trump should follow the precedent set by President Barack Obama. In 2009, Obama speedily released many of the secret George W. Bush administration legal memos that asserted that a president could declare martial law in the US and ignore the Fourth Amendment and other constitutional safeguards. Those disclosures helped portray Obama as a champion of civil liberties, regardless of his novel prerogative that presidents were entitled to assassinate American citizens who were designated as terrorist suspects. Unfortunately, Trump in his first term failed to open the files to disclose Obama’s biggest unconstitutional power grabs.

Federal secrecy is perhaps the most important bulwark of the Censorship Industrial Complex. Americans deserve to know how many blindfolds were slapped on Americans in recent years. The Supreme Court took a dive on the censorship issue last year by claiming that the victims did not have legal standing. It would be relatively simple to “correct” that decision by disclosing a torrent of cases of “Censors Gone Wild.” How many more humorous memes did the White House or federal agencies demand be suppressed? How many more internal emails or texts reveal White House appointees hellbent on muzzling critics regardless of the First Amendment?

Americans deserve to know whether federal agencies secretly targeted them as terrorist suspects. A year ago, the House Judiciary Committee revealed that, according to federal agencies, anything you purchase can be used against you. And if you didn’t want to be categorized as a “lone wolf” potential terrorist, you never should have bought that Bass Pro hat—one of the bizarre warning signs. If you bought a gun or ammo since 2021, federal bureaucrats may have automatically classified you as a “potential active shooter.” The shocking details of that surveillance scheme need to be exposed as quickly as possible. At the same time, the feds cast absurdly broad nets of suspicion on average Americans, potentially incriminating details of Biden family dealings with China, Romania, Ukraine, and other nations were kept secret. DC is one paradox after another.

The Founding Fathers recognized the perils of foreign entanglement but federal secrecy has shrouded the vast majority of details of recent US government blundering abroad. As I noted in an April 2023 Mises piece, practically the only candor regarding the Russia-Ukraine war occurred when secret documents leaked out revealing that the Ukrainian military was in far worse shape than the Biden administration claimed. The White House, State Department, and Pentagon were adamant that American citizens had no right to know how their tax dollars were being squandered in East Europe.

Since those leaks in early 2023, the US government apparently pulled plenty of strings and may have paid plenty of money to deter a ceasefire in that war. White House and State Department officials bluntly opposed any cessation in hostilities in Eastern Europe.

Opening files in the White House, Pentagon, State Department, and CIA could answer vital questions: Why was the US government seemingly doing everything possible to perpetuate the bloodbath? What steps, if any, did the White House take to prevent effective anti-fraud protections in the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid sent to Ukraine? Did Biden policymakers help perpetuate the Russia-Ukraine war to make Biden look tough or the world savior of democracy?

The Pentagon Papers, leaked in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg, helped vaccinate Americans against blindly trusting any president seeking to con them into a foreign conflict. Unfortunately, that vaccination faded as decades passed. Opening files on the US intervention in Ukraine could make it far more difficult for future presidents to drag the US into a foreign conflict. As WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange observed: “If wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth.”

President Trump must make opening the files a top priority because otherwise damn little sunlight will disinfect Washington. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has largely collapsed. Shortly before Trump’s first term, the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform bluntly admitted: “FOIA is broken.” Federal agencies have a backlog of hundreds of thousands of FOIA requests they haven’t answered and responses sometimes take years. Never forget that the Food and Drug Administration claimed it would need 75 years to disclose the Pfizer application for its covid vaccine that the FDA approved in 108 days. Unfortunately, such idiocy is practically Standard Operating Procedure inside the Beltway. Prior to the 2016 election, the State Department declared that it would require 75 years to comply with its FOIA request for emails from the top aides of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (at a time when Hillary was running for president). Perhaps the only thing more absurd is the pretexts offered for refusing to disclose documents. The Drug Enforcement Administration denied a FOIA request by someone seeking “information about his own kidnappers… because he did not have a signed waiver from the men who had held him hostage,” the Washington Examiner reported.

A boot from the Trump White House will open far more filing cabinets than endless appeals to FOIA denials. The new president can reap the gratitude of millions of Americans for speedily shedding light on the biggest covid controversies. Why did the Centers for Disease Control in 2021 delay divulging the failure of covid vaccines to prevent infections and transmission? Are there other details waiting to be unearthed about how federal agencies bankrolled the reckless gain-of-function that escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and killed seven million people around the globe?

Sweeping disclosures of federal secrets and outrages are one of the best ways to break the dominance of Washington insiders. In a 2002 decision condemning the Bush administration’s mass secret arrests after 9/11, a federal appeals court declared, “When government begins closing doors, it selectively controls information rightfully belonging to the people. Selective information is misinformation.” Washington’s pervasive secrecy vests vast power in any official who chooses to selectively leak documents to spin public perceptions.

President Trump’s first administration was crippled by leaks—including former FBI chief James Comey’s personal memos that were delivered to the New York Times, leading to the unjustified appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller who roiled American politics for two years. Trump’s first impeachment was spurred by the 2019 leak of his phone call transcript with the Ukrainian president. Sweeping disclosures of unjustified secrets will undercut federal officials who might seek to undermine the new president with misleading selective leaks.

Secrecy is not a technical glitch in administrative regimes. The whole point of secrecy is to prevent citizens from controlling the government. To expect bureaucracies to “correct” excessive secrecy is like expecting kings to abdicate their thrones. There is no reason for citizens to trust secretive federal programs more than Washington trusts American citizens.

Pervasive secrecy defines democracy: people merely select their Supreme Deceivers. If trillions of pages of new secrets a year is not a perversion of democracy, why not simply keep secret everything that the government does?

Attorney General Ramsey Clark warned in 1967: “Nothing so diminishes democracy as secrecy.” Yet Americans are still told that they are governing themselves because they are permitted to vote for presidents who appoint bureaucrats who drop an Iron Curtain around federal machinations.

In his Farewell Address on Wednesday evening, President Biden warned: “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power.” During the pandemic, the biggest misinformation of them all was Biden’s promise that anyone who got the covid vaccine would never be infected with covid. Biden also declared, “The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.” Secrecy and lying are two sides of the same political coin. If Biden is worried about “lies told for power,” then he should not have perpetuated the secrecy regime that is an entitlement program for Washington liars.

Even libertarians and pro-freedom zealots who oppose Trump should support exposing all the recent abuses committed by Washington politicians and bureaucrats. Shocking Americans by exposing federal crimes could provide an anti-Leviathan vaccination. That could be effective regardless of whether the Food and Drug Administration ever approves that vax.

The post For Inauguration Day, Open Federal Files and Give Truth a Chance appeared first on LewRockwell.

Governments are in the flimflam business.

Pared down to the bare essentials, governments can be very useful in passing and enforcing a small number of very basic laws. These laws should be limited to policing those who would seek to aggress against others, or their property. Governments may also have a value in providing protection from invasion – organizing an army of able-bodied people to address this collective problem, if and when it occurs.

And that’s about it. Beyond that, the private sector can, and almost always does, do a better job at virtually everything else. Therefore, a government should be small, cost very little to run and do as little as possible.

But since a government already exists, why not have it do more? Why not assign to it some of those tasks that tend not to attract businessmen?

Well, the simple, but almost universally little-understood, reason is that governments do not actually produce anything. They are, in fact, a parasitical construct that consumes money but creates nothing of worth.

Unlike businesses, they don’t operate on a profit basis. In fact, few politicians or civil servants have any grasp of the concept that prosperity is only created when someone invests his money in a venture, creates a profit and saves or re-invests the difference.

Although this may seem like a harsh criticism, it’s borne out by the fact that all governments consume money and are more wasteful than any business would be. Worse, politicians and civil servants typically fail entirely to understand that this is a fundamental problem.

And, yet, like all people, people in governments wish to personally advance, both in position and financial worth.

And here is where the perennial bugbear of governments appears.

Since governments, by rights, should never expand unless absolutely necessary, and since this is never enough for those who people any government, they must somehow con the public into believing that government expansion is “for the good of the people.”

Ergo, even the smallest of governments, in the smallest of jurisdictions, will learn to cajole the public. As the government grows, the con-game grows and duplicity, trickery and skullduggery become the lifeblood of the government – any government.

The con-game becomes, “Vote for me and I’ll provide you with something at the expense of someone else.”

“It is the primary business of any government to grow its own power and wealth at the expense of its people.”

At some point, all governments figure out that the greatest way to expand their own power and personal wealth is through fear. If a people can be made afraid, the government can bypass reason and appeal to emotion – always an easier sell.

For millennia, governments (like organised religions and for the same reason) have peddled the fear of a demon – usually in the form of an aggressive opponent from outside the jurisdiction who can be regarded as wishing to aggress against the country. In modern times, however, the spin doctors have done this concept one better – they’ve learned to peddle, not an individual, country or army as the demon, but a concept.

As the reader will know, in recent decades, all any government has needed to do is claim that something that they oppose is related somehow to terrorism and they will be given carte blanche to crush it, however implausible the given reasoning may be.

Another highly successful demon is Climate Change.

The Climate Change concept was invented out of whole fabric by the Club of Rome, which was created in 1968 by David Rockefeller. It was originally called “Global Cooling,” as, at that time, the earth was passing through one of its cyclic cooling periods. However, that period soon came to an end and the earth entered a global warming period. So, the same “science” that was used for Global Cooling was then attributed without any change whatever to the new “Global Warming.”

When that cycle ended and the proponents of Global Warming again had egg on their faces for pushing warming during a new periodic cooling cycle, the proponents finally got clever and renamed it “Climate Change.”

From that day forward, any flood, drought, hurricane, tornado or variation in the ice caps has immediately been blamed on “increased Climate Change,” even though such occurrences have been with us forever and will be with us forever.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly polled scientists as to whether they agree that climate change exists, and the IPCC states that over 97% agree. What is not asked is whether Climate Change is a direct result of man’s intervention. Asked if climate changes from time to time, the answer is, of course, “yes.” In fact, 100% of scientists should agree, based upon the wording of the question.

But, of course, this is not science at all, but deception. Always phrase the question in such a way that you will receive the desired answer.

So, the outcome is that the great majority of people are sold on the idea that Climate Change is due to man’s creation of CO2 and that mankind has to be controlled, or he will destroy the planet with CO2 emissions.

Since “scientists” are represented as agreeing on this, people tend not to question the logic. The fact that all plants breathe CO2 and would die without it and that, if all plant life were to expire, all animal life would then expire, does not occur to the listener. His government has spoken and he needs to be afraid.

Since the mid-1970s, politicians have periodically claimed that life on earth will come to an end in a decade or so if emissions are not eliminated globally. Whenever one of these deadlines passes, the presenters simply move up the date another decade or so, maintaining the fear, but never actually reaching the end of the world.

Of course, the Great Lie should be exposed, due to the fact that governments do not actually pass laws to eliminate CO2 emissions; they merely create taxation and fines for those manufacturers who create CO2.

So, apparently, it’s all right to end the world, if you pay a hefty tax, instead of cutting CO2.

“The Jews will destroy Germany”… “The Iranians will destroy the world if they can make a nuclear bomb”… “Your car will destroy the earth”… but Air Force One, which creates 336 times the CO2 of a car, will not.

With government propaganda, the sky is always falling.

All the best propaganda appeals at a gut level. If people can be made to abandon reason and accept government-created fear, they can be controlled.

This doesn’t mean that governments can’t ever be trusted, but it means that they shouldn’t ever be trusted. They should always be questioned, not only as their propaganda is so often false, but as they are, inherently, in the flimflam business.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post The Sky Is Falling appeared first on LewRockwell.

Americans have completed their long goodbye to Joe Biden.  After a life spent cheerleading and facilitating wars, interventions, conflict and corruption, Biden blew through money that wasn’t there, declared a constitutional amendment that doesn’t exist, and took credit for a joint Israel/Hamas interim pause in the wholesale slaughter in Gaza that could and should have been approved 13 months ago, but for the fact that Biden, Blinken and Sullivan wished to continue that slaughter.

Over a year ago, the newly elected House Speaker could not get a meeting with Biden for months – and when he did, Biden’s staff was reluctant to allow alone time with Speaker Johnson.  Not because mild-mannered House Zionist and spendthrift was dangerous to the president, but because staffers had no idea what Biden would say to him.  As it turns out, Johnson recalls that Biden didn’t know, or couldn’t remember, what was in bills and orders he was signing.  Johnson said, “I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing ….We are in serious trouble—who is running the country?”

Yet, Johnson did nothing.  He didn’t meet with colleagues and cabinet members regarding invocation of the 25th Amendment.  He didn’t talk to government leaders or the press about his experience and what it meant for national security.  He didn’t do anything but continue to spend like a drunken sailor, relying on Democrat votes as needed to push through spending extensions and additions.

The country dodged a bullet and survived Biden’s presidency.  Sadly, we could say much the same for many past presidencies – knowing that those most deadly to the Constitution have been in the distant past, with Lincoln, Wilson and FDR.  But with every statist ideologue, every war-loving interventionist, every moralizing hypocrite and every power hungry sociopath in the Oval – the constitutional republic has been harmed, diminished, and starved.

The “Wolf You Feed” proverb might be helpful here.  Can we imagine America as a self-governing republic, with a constitutionally limited federal institution easily supported by a union of consenting states, themselves free to separate from the union at any time?  Can we imagine a decentralized restoration of human and economic liberty that would celebrate, rather than dread, modern technology and artificial intelligence?   Can we imagine peace between neighbors and around the globe?

Most of us cannot. The wolf in Washington we have been feeding is the evil one,“full of rage, jealousy, arrogance, greed, sorrow, regret, lies, laziness, and self-pity.” 

One cannot think of rage, jealousy, arrogance, greed, regret, lies and laziness without thinking of Joe Biden – not because he is a standout in these categories, but because he is the most recent president in a long line of similar creatures.  Who can imagine that any other president, or presidential candidate, would not match Biden in these characteristics?  Hillary Clinton?  Mike Pence?  Kamala Harris?  The evil wolf is the norm of our modern politicians, a rule made evident only by the rarity of its exceptions.

The rise to executive power of a somewhat chastened Donald Trump doesn’t negate the fact that we have no agent in Washington who fundamentally understands that the state is the evil wolf.  To nourish the state, we feed it our minds, our energies, and our children.  We are frightened of it and by it, and we behave cautiously around it.  We fully expect it to act on its worst emotions, its greed, its rage, its arrogance, and it never disappoints.  MAGA embracing American empire, overnight? Well, yes, and we better go along with it.

Trump was elected to put the evil state wolf on a diet, but the wolf holds the key to the larder.  Like many who struggle with compulsive addictions, the evil wolf is the first to tell you how hard they are trying, how everybody else gets it wrong, misunderstands. Humility is not part of the evil wolf’s makeup, just as it is no part of government.  Anyone listening to the government representatives in Los Angeles or Sacramento wax eloquent on all the mistakes they didn’t make has gotten a perfect sampler of the 24/7/365 mentality of the state at every level.

As we grip our armrests, check our seatbelts, and say a prayer, a new captain of the state enterprise takes the helm.  The two wolves are particularly ravenous, one because we have fed it with abandon and it has grown powerful and insatiable.  The other – the one that embodies “love, joy, peace, generosity, truth, empathy, courage, humility, and faith”– has not been fed at all, but it is trotted out periodically during election season to inspire “voters,” only to be locked away, unfed and openly ridiculed until the next election.  The former is the oligarchy-driven state, obsessed with foreign and domestic intervention and control, simultaneously seeking conflict and omniscience.  The latter is simply invisible. 

We have a US government intolerant of criticism, completely unable to distinguish between personal and ideological danger.  That not a single fellow journalist in this press briefing interfered with the state goons escorting Max Blumenthal and dragging Sam Husseini out of the room indicates US state totalitarianism is mature, and widely accepted. 

Another recent revelation illustrates how the evil wolf operates to ensure its bowl is always filled, to overflowing.

How then do we feed the good wolf, or more to the point, can we even nurse it back to health at all?

The first step is to understand the danger the state poses to all life, and all liberty.  Perhaps those silent and passive reporters in Blinken’s press room the other day were correct.  Perhaps they assessed the danger, and their nervous failure to directly act in love, in generosity, with empathy, courage and truth – as their fellows were manhandled and ousted for challenging the state narrative of the day – was justified.

Somehow, I think not.  The danger of the state, that evil wolf today, requires that we not only observe, but act.  

While the evil wolf eats much of what we all produce every day to maintain its heft, its most necessary and critical nutrient is not our money.  It is our respect, our trust, and our obedience.  Perhaps we should withhold all of that, in every possible way, on a daily basis.  Happily, many are on this track, and we should applaud them, assist them and join them.

The good wolf thrives on whatever we can do to express love and empathy, humility and faith, and courage. The good wolf is fed by our demand for truth.  Every one of us is made for this! These qualities are the essence of human survival, they are what is left when everything else has burned away, and collapsed into ruin.  As western Carolinians and eastern Tennesseans rebuild on their own after the floods, as Southern Californians return to sift through the embers, and as two million Palestinians return to the rubble that US weapons rendered, they are kept alive and sane through courage, humility, faith, love, and truth – this is the only way to survive.  It is the only way to win.

The post Dealing With the Bad Wolf appeared first on LewRockwell.

Sometimes the universe laughs at us. Other times, in the words of famed psychologist Carl Jung, it winks.

Jung coined the term “synchronicity” in the 1950s to describe seemingly unrelated events that coincide in improbable ways, yet hold some significance in our lives. Seeing a number repeatedly, running into an old friend unexpectedly, hearing a song you were singing when you turn on the radio—these are all examples of what Jung would describe as “winks from the cosmos.” Today, as we honor the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. and inaugurate our 47th president, I can’t help but wonder if the universe is winking at us.

Many are grappling with the “painful irony” that some Americans will celebrate a civil rights icon on the same day that others will laud “a man who opposes racial progress.” At first glance, it’s easy to see why the timing of these two events might seem unrelated. Martin Luther King Jr. galvanized a movement to secure equality for black Americans who had been deprived of fundamental rights and liberties. By contrast, Donald Trump has been accused of bigotry and racism that has harmed the black community.

Yet if the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that appearances can be deceiving. I think synchronicity is calling us to look deeper into the complicated legacies of these two men, how they have brought us to this unique point in history, and how they might impact our path going forward.

The unprecedented political and cultural divide in America has made the call for unity more urgent than ever. Yet after one of the most politically charged presidential elections in modern history, there is a glimmer of hope. Americans on both sides of the aisle are beginning to find common ground on some of the nation’s most divisive issues. At the same time, we find ourselves grappling with the physical, emotional, and financial toll of an unprecedented natural disaster that has displaced tens of thousands of people. Maybe—just maybe—we’ve been given the rarest of opportunities: a chance to find unity on an even broader level by confronting deep-seated problems afflicting Americans from all walks of life.

Although the driving principle of the Civil Rights Movement was racial equality, King and other leaders recognized that they couldn’t achieve their objective without solidarity between black and white Americans. They would need to work together toward the common goal of eliminating “pervasive and persistent economic want” taking root in both communities.

In the late 1960s white poverty was spreading fast throughout Appalachia, the South, and cities in the Northeast. By 1968, there were almost twice as many white people living in poverty as black people. King understood that if white people faced these headwinds, then black people had little hope of gaining ground; systemic inequalities based on class—not race—ensured that people of any color born into poverty had almost no chance of escaping it.

King cautioned against the temptation to alienate white allies with bitter slogans and rhetoric and instead emphasized the importance of strategic alliances. “There is no solution for [blacks] through isolation,” King argued. United in their common struggle, they stood a better chance of raising the quality of life for all Americans. Four years after delivering his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., King spoke at Stanford University about the growing disparity between two Americas—one of abundance and opportunity, and another of poverty and exclusion—and his belief that “men and women of goodwill [were] beginning to unite across the lines of race and religion and make a way for brotherhood.”

As the Civil Rights Movement faded from view, the quest for racial equality endured while the emphasis on unity subsided. Identity politics emerged in its place, emphasizing differences in race, gender, and sexuality at the expense of our shared values and overshadowing the common ground King envisioned. But two months ago, something unexpected happened. The seeds of unity reappeared.

Historically, the GOP has been regarded as the party of white, wealthy, conservative Americans while the Democratic Party has long been considered the “big tent” for working and middle class whites and people of color. Over the past decade, however, we’ve witnessed a slow but steady shift in the demographic composition of both parties. In the 2024 presidential election, this trend accelerated dramatically.

According to exit polls:

• One out of every three people of color voted for Trump, including 46% of Latinos and 68% of Native Americans, and 21% of black men
• Trump received 45% of the female vote
• He drew support from 47% of Millennials, 43% of Gen Z, and more than 50% of Gen X
• He performed better with lower-income families (52%) than those with higher incomes (46%).

The unlikely coalition that elected Trump was one of the most diverse in the modern era and signaled an historic transformation of parties now unified less by identity group than class. It also reflected the common struggles and concerns of Americans who are increasingly aware of the complexity of the issues facing us.

For example, many who support immigration have concerns about community safety and economic stability and recognize the need for common sense restrictions. Similarly people who respect transgender rights may question the long-term impacts of puberty blockers and surgeries for gender nonconforming youth. Instead of seeing these issues as black or white, more Americans appreciate the intersection of interests, goals and values that transcend racial and ideological divides.

Yes, our country is still very polarized, but there is growing recognition of our shared needs and challenges. The seeds of unity are visible—and they could soon spread further. Last week, we saw signs of unity that might not only transcend the racial and ideological divide, but also the class divide.

Read the Whole Article

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By the time most of you read this column, we will have a new US President. Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated for his second term today at 11:30 AM, Eastern time, and many Americans are hopeful that the disastrous foreign policy of the past four years under Biden will be improved. There is good news and bad news.

First the good news. It is no surprise that Trump’s appointees to foreign policy and national security positions are to the person very hawkish on China. However Trump, as he often does, has defied conventional wisdom on what his China policy might be by not only inviting Chinese leader Xi Jinping to attend the inauguration, but actually picking up the telephone and having a conversation with his Chinese counterpart.

According to a read-out of the call, the two discussed “trade, fentanyl, TikTok, and other subjects” and agreed to remain in regular contact. Winston Churchill is often (inaccurately) credited with the phrase “jaw-jaw is better than war-war,” but nonetheless it is an accurate statement. It is much better to engage even with “adversaries” than to refuse contact and add more sanctions. Those who prefer sanctions over communications are the true isolationists.

On TikTok, the popular application has credited Trump with preventing the Congressional ban from taking effect. If true, it is another good Trump move in favor of our Constitutional free speech guarantees.

Likewise with Russia, media reports suggest that holding a conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin will be among the first things Trump does as President. That is great news for all of humanity, as Biden’s dangerous proxy war in Ukraine and refusal to communicate with the Russian president has brought us to the very edge of a once-unimaginable nuclear exchange. When the end of life on earth is at stake, it is reckless to ignore the possibility of de-escalation.

In the Middle East, incoming President Trump is being credited with securing a ceasefire in Gaza, an achievement the Biden Administration seemed incapable of or uninterested in seriously attempting for the past year. Does Trump deserve all the credit? We don’t know. But we do know that thousands have been needlessly slaughtered while Biden dithered and sent more weapons. The wholesale destruction of Gaza with US bombs and financial support will be Biden’s enduring legacy and a stain on everyone involved.

The bad news is that because of President Trump’s decision to appoint the most hawkish advisors, he will be surrounded by individuals who will constantly encourage him to confront rather than disengage. For example, his special envoy on the Ukraine war has recently boxed Trump in on Iran by declaring a return to the failed “maximum pressure” campaign of his first Administration. The policy failed to achieve the desired results when first implemented and it will fail again if adopted again. Why? Iran has developed far more extensive trade ties outside the influence of the US government, for example among the BRICS countries. It is not possible to isolate Iran as it has been in the past. As with China and others, with Iran it would be far better to jaw-jaw than to war-war. Let’s hope President Trump understands that.

We will no doubt see some disappointments in incoming President Trump’s foreign policy, but there are solid reasons to be cautiously optimistic. Particularly when measured against his predecessor.

The post Can Trump Fix Our Broken Foreign Policy? appeared first on LewRockwell.

If past is prologue, Mr. Trump lacks the acumen to carry out his ambitious agenda. The first problem is management style. In his first term, Mr. Trump was a poor administrator because of his mercurial, polarizing style and a general indifference to facts and the hard work of governance. — Jack Goldsmith, The New York Times

Thus spake one Shawn McCreesh of The New York Times, America’s all-wise, all-knowing font of everlasting rectitude. But to answer his question, why blah blah: Donald Trump is glaring because he means bidness. His bidness is to shift the paradigm on the mendaciously sanctimonious managerial class of the USA, of which The New York Times is the principal mouthpiece. DJT looks stern, does he? All that really tells you is how nervous the Old Gray Lady is. A million or more brains, from sea to shining sea are about to get vacuumed out and redecorated

Readers of The New York Times — in their various C-suites, ivory towers, ateliers, yoga parlors, tasting rooms, bioweapon labs, and other haunts — remain utterly baffled about what is to begin today. No amount of ‘splainin’ seems to suffice. They behold the Golden Golem of Greatness (DJT) doing his dance onstage behind the cop, the Indian chief, and the cowpoke and all they can really see are their own careers going up in smoke (along with vested pensions, reputations, possibly even chattels, marriages, and health).

As I write, long before dawn, “Joe Biden” remains President of the US. You must wonder, as the hours dwindle to noon, what pardon power magic he’s saving for the final minutes of his term, while the whole nation is distracted by the spectacle in the Capitol Rotunda, the moiling dignitaries and celebrities, the solemn arrival of the elect, the snarky palaver of the cable news jockeys, the electric charge of history in the large room. . . .

It is a fact, perhaps missed by some of you, that Rep. James Comer’s House Oversight Committee just last week issued criminal referrals on James Biden (“Joe’s” brother) and First Son Hunter. Wait-a-minute, was not Hunter already pardoned for Gawd-knows how many misdeeds dating back to 2014, and (supposedly) preemptively for any alleged crimes to come ever hereafter? Part B of that may yet have to be adjudicated. A pardon is not intended to be a get-out-of-jail-free card. Anyway, would it be difficult for a federal attorney of average ability to draw a connection between the newly referred crimes of those two and the departing President? Hence, will “Joe Biden” pardon “Joe Biden” at 11:30 this morning?

Not to mention about 1000 other current and former public officials quaking in their Beltway McMansions this frosty morning. This is part and parcel, you understand, of the massive Cleanup in Aisle Four that must happen if the agencies of our federal government can ever be trusted again. For instance, the Department of Justice.

At the end of the workday, Friday, AG Merrick Garland made a triumphal final exit from the building past a throng of cheering and clapping employees, including dozens of federal attorneys who zealously persecuted their fellow citizens under color-of-law for no good reason, or real legal predicate, and ruined many lives and households in the process. Do you suppose they get a free pass on that? And what of the three bears of Lawfare: Norm Eisen, Marc Elias, and Mary McCord, all of them present at the creation of serial affronts against the Constitution (and decency) lo this past decade. Do they just skate? I doubt it, though it might take a while to shine a light on their turpitudes.

Will “Joe Biden” wave his pardon wand over Tony Fauci, Francis Collins, Scott Gottlieb, Deborah Birx, Rochelle Walensky, and dozens of other public health officials who sprung the Covid-19 operation and the deadly vaccinations on the country? Or Ralph Baric, hunkered out of sight in his Carolina lab? You realize, of course, that the orgy of illness and death from that is hardly over. For four years under “JB” the truth has been obfuscated and buried, because none of those characters has really had to answer for anything.

So, today another door opens. The To-Do list for Mr. Trump and his aides-de-camp is dauntingly long, the corrections needed are monumental. You might have even noticed that such corrections are badly needed all over the other countries of Western Civ, and strangely many are already following suit. The WEF-inflected governments of France, Germany, and the UK are already a’wobble, and Justin Trudeau threw in the towel two weeks ago. An Arctic blast could not be more fitting for what will move through the DC Swamp at high noon today. That is, if Mr. Trump manages to survive the hours until his swearing-in. Godspeed Number 47! And everybody else: put your tray tables up! A patch of turbulence ahead!

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post Another Door Opens appeared first on LewRockwell.

A fatal bout of runaway instability becomes inevitable when “extraordinary emergency measures” become permanently essential to keep the bubbles from popping.

A funny thing happens as policies intended to fill financial potholes transition from “temporary emergency measures” to “we need to keep doing this to stabilize the status quo”: extremes get more extreme as what were once viewed as extraordinary policy measures required to keep the rickety system from collapsing become the “New Normal.”

Of course the Federal Reserve continues suppressing interest and mortgage rates even after the financial crisis has passed, because if they stopped, the system would revert to crisis and collapse.

I’ve assembled a few charts of extremes becoming more extreme as a consequence of “emergency policies” becoming not just normalized but the keystone of the entire economy. What were desperate expediencies at first are now the lifeblood of the economy: withdraw them and the economy collapses in a heap.

I discussed these extremes in a podcast with Richard Bonugli (26 minutes), with the following charts providing context.

What’s extraordinary is the systemic nature of the current extremes. New heights of precarity are being reached across the entire spectrum of the economy, not just in stock market bubbles but in the concentration of “wealth” in risk-on speculative assets–the very assets most prone to destabilization and reversion to the mean, the statistical dynamic in which outlier metrics eventually return to their starting point.

The causes of this reversion don’t matter; after the fact, pinpointing the cause becomes a popular parlor game, but the reality is systems revert without any specific cause: suppressing instability with extreme policies creates a temporary illusion of stability, but the extreme policies actually increase instability.

Credit-asset bubbles are a manifestation of extremes generating an illusory euphoria of stability while beneath the surface, these extremes are ramping up instability to the point that sudden breakdown / collapse is the only possible outcome.

When the economy becomes dependent on ever more extreme financial trickery to maintain the illusion of stability, a death loop becomes normalized: as instability leaks through the extreme policies, then even more extreme measures are instituted, generally behind the scenes. Obscure methods of expanding liquidity are normalized, bank credit and other mechanisms (repos, etc.) are jacked up, all of which serve the goal of duct-taping the system to appear stable to unknowing eyes.

The problem with this financial fentanyl is that it’s impossible to detect the lethality of the dose until it’s too late. That’s the current situation in American and global markets.

Let’s go through a few of the many extremes flashing red warning signs of systemic precarity.

Read the Whole Article

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In my last column, I wrote about the new Independence Day, Jan. 20. This is when a corrupt and tyrannical administration exits Washington, D.C., for Delaware beaches or unwatchable and dying left-wing cable news shows.

Such a housecleaning is long overdue. Thanks to former (that has a nice ring to it) President Joe Biden, America has 10-15 million new illegal aliens, mostly young men of military age, from virtually every country across the globe.

Biden upped the national debt to over $36 trillion, with annual interest payments on this debt exceeding $1 trillion, more than we spend on defense. Crime is out of control, as exemplified by a New York City subway rider being set on fire and a flight attendant getting her throat slit on the 16th Street Mall in Denver.

We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars securing the borders of Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, and others while leaving our borders open with a large welcome mat.

The government has been weaponized against domestic opposition, ranging from a presidential candidate to nonviolent protestors, school board attendee parents, Latin Mass aficionados, and those challenging the whimsical and fickle COVID “science.”

Inflation has wrecked the finances of middle-class America, making it challenging to put groceries on the family table, pay basic bills, and enjoy anything close to the lifestyle of past generations.

The people spoke several months ago, on Nov. 5, by a commanding margin, asking for another helping of MAGA (Make America Great Again) after four years of MASA (Make America Suck Again). We now have president (that has an even better ring) Donald Trump taking a second bite of the presidential apple.

Trump is no longer a neophyte to Washington, D.C., as he was in 2016. He visited the nation’s capital only 17 times before moving into the White House the first time. As the 45th president, he had an up-close-and-personal view of the deep state, administrative state, ruling class, swamp, blob, or whatever you choose to call the permanent and unaccountable national power structure.

America had a chance to vote based on a head-to-head comparison. Both Trump and Biden/Harris had four years to lead the country, for better or for worse. Trump also had four years off the field, planning his second-term strategy.

He has stood down a special counsel investigation based on fabricated campaign opposition research. He was impeached twice. The media criticized his every word or action for four years.

He picked his cabinet, advisors, and inner circle far more strategically and thoughtfully than eight years ago. Rather than trying to play nice with the GOP establishment and ruling class, he is going scorched earth. He has two, maybe four, depending on how the midterm elections go, years to deliver a fatal blow to the corrupt administrative state.

Trump needed his four-year walk in the wilderness to rethink, regroup, and prepare himself for battle. If he won reelection in 2020, his second term would be bogged down with treacherous and disloyal advisors and lawfare from both Republicans and Democrats, threatening to ruin or bankrupt Trump, his family, and his supporters.

Democrats and the ruling class will rue the day they pilfered the 2020 election. Instead of a weakened lame-duck President Trump serving his second term, with the lawfare chihuahuas constantly nipping at his ankles, they had the failed Biden presidency.

Now in 2025, it’s a new and improved Donald Trump, refreshed and ready to release a can of Mar-a-Lago whoop-ass on Washington, D.C.

As Obama adviser David Plouffe threatened, “It is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.”

For four years, from 2020 through 2024, they certainly tried. If the 2024 presidential election turned out differently, Plouffe’s warning would have come true.

Read the Whole Article

The post Has the Storm Arrived? appeared first on LewRockwell.

TikTok is back in the US after a brief shutdown, reportedly because Trump pledged to suspend the Biden administration’s ban. A Gaza ceasefire has also finally emerged due to pressure from Trump after Biden stalled for 15 months, and NBC News is reporting that the Trump administration plans on pressuring the Israeli government throughout negotiations to establish a permanent peace beyond the 42 days scheduled for the first phase of the agreement.

Remember this: it’s not that Trump is good, it’s that Democrats are just that bad. Biden’s completely unconditional facilitation of Israeli atrocities has actually been the exception rather than the norm among US presidents, as Trita Parsi explained in Foreign Policy last April. From what we are seeing so far, Trump is just returning things to their horrible standard baseline.

Trump will go on to do many evil things as president, just as he did during his first term, but none of this will reverse the fact that Biden just spent four years advancing genocide, nuclear brinkmanship and authoritarianism. The Democratic Party plays just as crucial a role in promoting the tyranny and abuse of the US empire as the Republican Party does, and it is nonsensical to think of either of them as a lesser evil. The empire itself must end.

❖

Do yourself a favor and spare yourself the indignity of thinking the ceasefire and suspending the TikTok ban indicate that Trump is going to be a good president. You don’t get to become the US president unless the powers that be trust you to inflict the evils necessary for running the empire.

The system does not work. You cannot vote your way out of the tyranny of the empire, and the president is not going to save you. Trump will do many evil things as president, because that’s what US presidents do.

Don’t believe me? Then watch and pay attention. And learn the lessons you failed to learn last time.

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It’s possible that Trump’s term will constitute another swing from Bush-level depravity to Obama-level depravity.

It isn’t normal for the US empire to be as openly depraved as it has been in Gaza. Normally its evils are much more well-disguised, because it is in the empire’s interests to preserve its image in the eyes of the western public. You only see the really in-your-face acts of monstrosity when a coalition of forces within the swamp are able to seize on a rare opportunity to shove them through, as we saw in the wake of 9/11 and again in the wake of October 7.

The rest of the time, the empire likes to be a lot subtler about its abuses, like it was during the Obama administration and the first Trump administration. Starvation sanctions. Staging coups. Secretly arming proxy forces. Drone assassinations. Covert ops. It prefers these means over the Hulk Smash ground invasions like we saw during George W Bush’s first term, and the overt genocidal atrocities like we saw during Biden’s.

The Zionists, war profiteers and empire managers seized on the rare opportunity presented by October 7 combined with a senile lifelong Zionist in the White House to push through agendas in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon that they had wanted to push through for years, but they greatly damaged the empire’s propaganda interests in the process. We can expect the empire to try to move its ugliness out of the spotlight as swiftly as possible in the coming years and attempt to restore its false public image as a force of good in the world, while continuing to advance its psychopathic agendas in sneakier ways.

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Young Americans can take the same lessons from the TikTok ban that they’ve taken from Gaza: that they live in a tyrannical dystopia, and that the Democratic Party is not their friend.

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To be clear, when you hear people saying that US lawmakers voted to ban TikTok in order to shut down criticism of Israel among young people, it’s not some antisemitic conspiracy theory; they have openly admitted that this was in fact what they were doing. Legislators like Chris Murphy, Mitt Romney, Mike Gallagher and Mike Lawler are all on record saying they supported the ban because of the prevalence of pro-Palestinian content on the platform.

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One of the most politically interesting developments in recent days has been Americans flocking to the Chinese app Red Note in response to the looming TikTok ban and interacting with people in China for the first time in their lives with the help of translation technology.

If you had asked me last month what country I wish ordinary Americans would start communicating with at mass scale, I would have said China without a moment’s hesitation. If this keeps up it’s going to cause some real problems for the empire propagandists down the track.

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