Lew Rockwell Institute

Prince Andrew shall no longer be called Prince Andrew. He is now just Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. Buckingham Palace made the announcement this week.

The Royals released a statement saying that Andrew will lose his “prince” title and be forced to leave his Royal Lodge home in Windsor. The statement suggests they believe the allegations that he committed sexual assault are true. From the announcement:

These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him. Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.

Revealed in Memoir

The move comes just days after the release of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice. Giuffre accused Andrew of sexually assaulting her when she was 17 after being trafficked to him by Jeffrey Epstein. She died in April of this year; her family said she committed suicide after the “toll of abuse … became unbearable.” Giuffre said she was involved in three sexual encounters with Prince Andrew. One of those times was during an orgy with Epstein and eight other minors.

Andrew had always denied Giuffre’s allegations. But he also paid out a reportedly handsome settlement in 2022. The amount was not disclosed, but reports say it came out to about £12 million ($16.3 million).

Giuffre’s family members were glad to hear the news about Andrew. Her brother, Sky Roberts, and his wife, Amanda Roberts, issued a statement to People magazine, saying, “Today, an ordinary American girl from an ordinary American family brought down a British prince with her truth and extraordinary courage.”

DOJ Stalling

The decision by the Royals to banish Andrew will likely revive scrutiny stateside against the Justice Department (DOJ) for what many believe is a blatant refusal to be fully transparent. The FBI released a statement in June announcing that it was essentially closing the Epstein case. It concluded that Epstein did indeed kill himself, that no list of clients who paid for sex with minors exists, and that there is no “credible evidence” that he blackmailed powerful people. The memo triggered a torrent of backlash, especially from President Donald Trump’s base. Ever since, the Republican-controlled Congress has tried to tamp down the outrage by releasing thousands of documents through the House Oversight Committee. Odd thing to do after the DOJ announced there was nothing more to see.

The flame of public ire burned hot for a few months after the DOJ’s memo, but has died down over the last month. Nevertheless, it’s unlikely to stay that way. The special election of radical Democrat Adelita Grijalva in September has secured Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) the votes he needs to force a discharge petition on a vote to release all DOJ files on Epstein. Massie has criticized the Oversight Committee’s release as a sneaky way for the Trump DOJ to curate what comes out and what doesn’t. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of the discharge petition once the government shutdown ends.

Jes Staley

Massie, during a House committee hearing on oversight of the FBI in September, dropped the name of another alleged Epstein client and indicated he knew the identities of 19 more. He named Jes Staley, a former banking executive who worked with Epstein when he was a client of JPMorgan. The Virgin Islands has sued JPMorgan, Staley’s former employer and Epstein’s former bank, and accused Staley himself of funneling Epstein’s money. The lawsuit revealed emails that suggested “that Staley may have been involved in Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation,” according to reports about the suit. Court documents said Epstein shared photos of young women with Staley. The two had also a discussion that appeared to use Disney characters as code.

Staley has never been charged with sexual crimes. However, he was nevertheless “forced out at Barclays in 2021 as the Financial Conduct Authority, the UK-equivalent of the Securities and Exchange Commission, launched an investigation into allegations that Staley misled the agency and the Barclays board about his dealings with Epstein,” according to reports.

Massie Still Fighting

In early September, Massie and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) held a press conference with eight other alleged Epstein victims. That’s when one of them, Lisa Phillips, said they were going to release their own list. “We know the names,” she said. “Many of us were abused by them. Now, together as survivors, we will confidentially compile the names we all know, who are regularly in the Epstein world. It will be done by survivors, and for survivors.” Afterward, Massie said he would work with the victims to release the names, lest they all be sued into oblivion.

The Royals’ decision to banish Andrew only piles onto the already high stack of evidence suggesting there is much more to Epstein’s operation. It bolsters the raging suspicions that Epstein provided minors for sex to very powerful people. He almost certainly did not traffic only to himself, and almost certainly did traffic to other high-profile figures. It is a stunning display of audacity by the DOJ to continue to pretend it has no credible evidence suggesting otherwise.

This article was originally published on The New American.

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Last week, Peter joined David Lin to discuss recent action in markets and politics. He starts by explaining why the global rush into gold is not a speculative fad but a structural shift in the monetary system. He then lays out the market evidence, the historical context, and the fiscal realities that, in his view, make gold a logical hedge against currency debasement and a warning light for what comes next.

He begins by comparing gold’s latest run to the history books, noting that central banks are not buying gold as a speculative bet, but to re-establish gold as monetary backing for their currencies:

They’re buying gold to restore gold as the monetary backing of their currency. And this, I think, is a major transformation in the global monetary system. I think it’s on the order of, or maybe bigger than what happened in the 1970s when we went off the gold standard. And so the world went from having the US dollar backed by gold as the reserve to just having a fiat currency as the reserve. That was a significant shift in the monetary order.

Peter points to a stark historical metric: measured in real money (gold), US equities have collapsed over decades, and even collecting coins outperformed stocks once dividends and real returns are considered:

Given the fact that just holding gold in a shoebox beat the Dow, and I’m not talking about just the price, it actually beat the return because the dividend yield has been pretty low over these years. You actually did better just holding a gold coin. And so I guess, given that, I think Wall Street finally recognizes that yes, gold has a place in your portfolio. And if that’s the case, well, this rally has a long way to go because that means a lot of investors have a lot of gold they need to buy.

He connects that shift to the unsustainable fiscal path of the United States, arguing the federal government cannot honestly repay its liabilities without dramatic currency debasement:

But I think what’s even more significant is a long overdue realization that the US cannot possibly repay its debt, honestly, that the national debt, which is now 38 trillion, and of course that’s just the bonded debt, not with all the unfunded liabilities, but the treasuries that a lot of foreign central banks own, there’s no way the US government can repay that debt in money that isn’t dramatically debased, meaning that the US government will not be able to raise sufficient tax revenue to make good on its obligations. The Fed is gonna have to print the money.  

Peter is skeptical of government-directed investment and the political incentives that drive where taxpayer money is sent, noting that public officials lack the downside that private investors face:

But when the government is allocating capital, it’s not doing it for those reasons because it’s not allocating your own money. I mean, when Donald Trump decides to put taxpayer money into an investment, it doesn’t cost him anything if it goes sour, right? Remember with Solyndra, right? If you’re investing somebody else’s money and you have no skin in the game, what the hell do you care? So now you start to be guided by politics, right? Which companies is the president investing in? What is he getting under the table to allocate taxpayer money to these investments?

He closes by tying the fiscal and monetary paths together: the only realistic stopper for widespread banking distress, he argues, is massive money printing — and that outcome points to a dollar and sovereign debt crisis, the very signal gold is already sending:

But that is the environment that we’re in. And it’s going to get a lot worse. And I think the only way that we’re not going to see widespread failure in the banking system is if we have massive money printing. And so that’s going to ultimately cause a dollar and sovereign debt crisis. And again, that is what gold is telling you. Gold is the monetary canary in the coal mine.

This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.

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The New York Times has just published an excellent editorial on the dangerous direction in which America is headed under President Trump. It is entitled “Are We Losing Our Democracy?” The editorial lists 12 factors pointing toward America’s slide into authoritarianism. I highly recommend reading it.

Trump and the U.S. national-security establishment are now accelerating America’s slide into authoritarianism with their violent and deadly regime-change operations in Venezuela. Using the federal government’s decades-old drug-war racket, Trump, the Pentagon, and the CIA are illegally killing innocent people on the high seas, engaging in CIA interventionism inside Venezuela (including, no doubt, state-sponsored assassinations), and now threatening to launch direct military bombing attacks on Venezuela itself. As Randolph Bourne pointed out, “War is the health of the state.”

Meanwhile, after flipping back and forth on the Russia-Ukraine war, Trump seems to have finally settled on the side of Ukraine. No doubt the Pentagon played a major role in influencing Trump in this direction, given that it’s the Pentagon, operating through its Cold War dinosaur NATO, that is the entity that is actually waging war against Russia by using Ukraine as its proxy.

Why do I bring up Ukraine in the context of addressing what is going on with Venezuela? Because it’s ironic that ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials and their supporters in the mainstream press have condemned Russia for its “unprovoked” war of aggression against Ukraine, ignoring completely the role that NATO (i.e., the Pentagon) played into intentionally provoking Russia’s invasion.

Why is that ironic? Because those same U.S. officials and many of their mainstream-press acolytes are now non-plussed by the U.S. aggression against Venezuela! It’s as if the U.S. government’s aggression is no big deal while supposed Russian aggression reflects an attempt to conquer the world. (To its credit, in its editorial the New York Times condemns Trump’s and the Pentagon’s extra-judicial killings in the Caribbean as “defiance of U.S. and international law.”)

Trump’s and the Pentagon’s illegal killings in the Caribbean and the CIA’s paramilitary interventionism in Venezuela are bad enough. But make no mistake about it: If Trump launches direct military attacks on Venezuela itself, this will be one more illegal U.S. war of aggression against a country that has not attacked the United States. That’s important because that’s the type of war that was condemned as a war crime at Nuremberg. Moreover, it will be a war that is illegal under our form of constitutional government, given that the U.S. Constitution requires a congressional declaration of war before the president can wage war against another nation state.

What about the much-vaunted U.S. war on drugs? Doesn’t the U.S. government wield the legal authority to enforce its drug war against other nations?

Absolutely not! Every nation on earth has the authority to adopt its own drug policy. No nation is legally required to follow the U.S. government’s dictates on drug prohibition. If Venezuela decided to legalize drugs, that would be its prerogative. By the same token, if the Venezuelan government has drug laws but declines to enforce them, that too is its prerogative. If the Venezuelan government decided to do nothing about drug cartels and drug gangs producing, selling, and exporting drugs, that also would be its prerogative. No nation-state has the legal duty to adopt the U.S. government’s decades-old racket of drug prohibition.

Thus, President Trump’s, the Pentagon’s, and the CIA’s use of their crooked, corrupt, deadly, and destructive drug-war racket to attack and bomb Venezuela will be as illegitimate as President Bush’s, the Pentagon’s, and the CIA’s bogus use of WMDs to attack Iraq. No nation-state has the legitimate authority to attack another nation state — and kill innocent people in the process — in the purported attempt to enforce its own morally bankrupt policy of drug prohibition.

As I pointed out last July —before Trump took steps to concoct the Venezuela crisis — Americans had better brace themselves for another foreign war — as a way to quell the MAGA rebellion over the Jeffrey Epstein files. If that was, in fact, why Trump concocted this crisis, his strategy has worked brilliantly. Excited over the prospect of a regime-change war against Venezuela, Trump’s MAGA supporters have forgotten their Epstein rebellion, and, for all practical purposes, their rebellion is over. The Epstein files will remain secret.

And make no mistake about it: If Trump uses the drug war to launch a regime-change war against Venezuela, America will slide even further into authoritarianism. But of course, that’s what some people would call making America great again.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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As we come to the end of this series, there is time for one final song for the unsung, a sort of swan song, a final elegy and eulogy for those unknown heroes and heroines whose passing from this life went unheeded and unheralded but who have been sung to their rest by ministering angels. Whereas those who have been the focus of the previous essays have all left their mark on history in the sense that their names are known to posterity, albeit not as well-known as they should be, this final song will be of the nameless ones, the vast majority of humankind, whose names have been completely erased from the historical record.

The nameless ones are those whose names are no longer legible on the weather-worn tombstones that mark their resting place. They lived, to be sure; they loved and were loved, we can assume; they might have had children who also had children of their own, and whose children’s children are oblivious of their ever having lived. Their sins are forgotten as are their virtues.

These nameless and unrecorded ones remind us that history comes in two forms. There is recorded history, which is documented and written about and studied, and there is unrecorded history, which is all that has ever happened in the past, known and unknown, documented and undocumented. The former is miniscule in relation to the latter, the mere tip of the historical iceberg.

These hidden heroes of Christendom, these nameless ones, are the saints who are known to God, if unknown to us. They are those who are forgiven by Him, if forgotten by us, who now enjoy His eternal Presence in Heaven. Having been good and faithful servants and soldiers in the Church Militant, they now enjoy their triumph in the Church Triumphant.

Who are they?

They are those who suffered for the Faith in times of persecution. They are the martyrs of the Early Church, who are not listed with the saints because their names are not known. They are those who hid priests during the Tudor Terror in England, putting their lives at risk, or those imprisoned or forced into exile because they would not abandon their faith.

They are the victims of plagues and the victims of war, whose lives were cut tragically short. They are those killed by guillotine, gulag, and gas chamber; and those incinerated by the bombs of blitzkrieged London, carpet-bombed Dresden, and atomic-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And then there are those humble souls who lived quiet uneventful lives in relatively quiet and uneventful times. They are the simple laborers in the vineyard, the sowers of seeds, the shepherds, and the craftsmen. They are the meek who inherited nothing but the earth in which they were laid.

Perhaps these musings on unsung heroes should conclude with a brief meditation on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, the burial site of a World War I soldier whose remains were unidentifiable. It is right and just (dignum et justum est) that Caesar should honor the unknown warrior in this way; but it is much more right and just that Christ should honor those unknown heroes who have fought the good fight through so many centuries.

If Christ so honors these humble souls by raising them from the tomb into His Kingdom in Heaven, it is surely incumbent upon us to honor them also. In doing so, and in doing what they did, we might hope to be where they are. Through their prayers and by the grace of God, we might hope to join the unsung heroes of Christendom in the song of songs that never ends.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

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Readers will be aware that Murray Rothbard conceptualized all rights as property rights, derived from the principle of self-ownership. His concept of individual liberty was thus rooted in the defense of private property rights. This is not to say that he disregarded other philosophical perspectives in which the defense of individual liberty plays a central role. On the contrary, as Sheldon Richman has observed, Rothbard’s own political philosophy encompassed a wide range of perspectives on liberty:

Rothbard took obvious delight in exploring the foundations and ramifications of liberty across disciplines. For him, individual liberty was a single gem with many facets: economic, historical, sociological, political-ethical. A scholar can set his sights on one or another facet, but for Rothbard, something is lost if one neglects the whole gem.

This appreciation for a broader defense of liberty is on full display in Rothbard’s “A Strategy for the Right,” in which he struck a celebratory note describing his “return home to the Right-wing, after 35 years in the political wilderness.” In this 1992 address to the John Randolph Club, Rothbard highlighted the value of forming political coalitions in the defense of liberty, especially with traditional conservatives on the “Old Right” who recognized that a government with unlimited power to intervene in the lives of citizens can only ever be a tyrannical government. The Old Right stood resolutely against what Rothbard called “the power elite” who posed the gravest threat to individual liberty.

Rothbard defined the power elite as “the bureaucrats, politicians, and special interest groups dependent on political rule. They make money out of politics, and so they are intensely interested, and lobby and are active twenty-four hours a day” when ordinary citizens are preoccupied with “the daily business of life, on making a living, being with his family, seeing his friends, etc.” It is precisely because those on the right have little time to devote to politics that forming coalitions in pursuit of common goals becomes important.

This is not, of course, to say that there are no important differences between libertarians and all who travel under the banner of “conservatives.” Nevertheless, Rothbard recognized that although “there were many differences within the framework of the Old Right,” traditional conservatives shared in common the desire to defend the individual from the tyranny of the Leviathan state and from the machinations of Neo-Marxist court intellectuals whose role is to legitimize state power.

From a different perspective, the conservative intellectual historian Richard Weaver also highlighted the importance of joining in common cause with those who defend liberty from different philosophical perspectives. Weaver was a great defender of property rights, and David Gordon has described Weaver’s book Ideas Have Consequences as a brilliant defense of property rights and “one of the founding works of post-World War II American conservatism.” In his essay “Conservatism and Libertarianism: The Common Ground,” Weaver advances an argument very similar in key respects to Rothbard’s “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature”—the argument that individual liberty is an essential attribute of human nature and that no defense of individual liberty can be successful if it operates at the level of high theory in disregard for human nature and the reality of the human condition. Weaver argues:

It is my contention that a conservative is a realist, who believes that there is a structure of reality independent of his own will and desire…this structure consists not merely of the great physical world but also of many laws, principles, and regulations which control human behavior. Though this reality is independent of the individual, it is not hostile to him. It is in fact amenable by him in many ways, but it cannot be changed radically and arbitrarily. This is the cardinal point.

Weaver, like Rothbard, was critical of the progressive radical who revolts against reality, whom he described as “the radical [who] makes his will the law, instead of following the rules of justice and prudence. Fancying that his dream or wish can be substituted for the great world of reality, he gets into a fix from which some good conservative has to rescue him.” This explains the conservative opposition to the progressive radical:

[The radical’s] first thought now is to get control of the state to make all men equal or to make all men rich, or failing that to make all men equally unhappy. This use of political instrumentality to coerce people to conform with his dream, in the face of their belief in a real order, is our reason, I think, for objecting to the radical.

Weaver rejected egalitarian schemes, which he rightly understood to be an excuse for vesting increasing power in the state. He saw the conservative rejection of egalitarianism and the commitment to reality as an important common point between libertarians and conservatives, emphasizing that human nature and human action are the key to understanding reality:

Praxeology, briefly defined, is the science of how things work because of their essential natures. We find this out not by consulting our wishes but by observing them. For example, I believe it is a praxeological law that a seller will always try to get as much as he can for what he has to sell, and a buyer will always try to pay as little as he can to get it. That is a law so universal that we think of it as part of the order of things. Not only is this law a reliable index of human behavior; it also makes possible the free market economy, with its extremely important contribution to political freedom.

These points of common interest between libertarian and conservative thought—while they do not by any means represent a uniform philosophical worldview—help to reinforce the strength of the political defense of liberty. The same applies to the defense of individualism within both traditions, even though here the divergence between the two worldviews becomes sharper. In his essay, “Two Types of American Individualism,” Weaver rejected the individualism which is reflected in “denying our responsibilities to our fellow men” through the type of “isolationism” for which Henry David Thoreau is admired. Instead, Weaver defended an individualism that is “more tolerant and circumspective,” that is not radical but, on the contrary, is rooted in human nature and offers “our best hope for preserving human personality in a civil society.” Weaver’s individualism draws upon a political philosophy that stands against “the forces of regimentation [and] totalitarianism” and is most powerfully expressed in the doctrine of states’ rights.

The standard bearer for this view of individualism is John Randolph of Roanoke, whose political philosophy was firmly realist in the Rothbardian sense, Weaver observing that, “His attitude was one of scorn for those who evade reality.” Randolph defended states’ rights as a doctrine that “in his mind constituted the anchor of liberty.” For Randolph, states’ rights stood as a bulwark against federal coercion, thereby safeguarding the individual citizen from the tyrannical centralization of government power. Weaver described Randolph as an “ultra-individualist,” an independent thinker who “was a follower neither of men’s opinions nor their fortunes, and he did not feel that a bold utterance needed apology.” In Randolph’s political philosophy, individualism was rooted in the social and political context of time and place. Weaver explains:

Individualism is a rejection of presumptive control from without. But Randolph never lost sight of the truth expressed in Aristotle’s dictum that man is a political animal. His individualism is, therefore, what I am going to call “social bond” individualism. It battles unremittingly for individual rights, while recognizing that these have to be secured within the social context… Randolph could not visualize men’s solving political questions through simple self-isolation.

Randolph wanted the locus of power to be as close as possible to those who would be affected by political decisions. He saw this as the most effective way to maximize the scope of individual liberty, arguing that, “Government to be safe and to be free must consist of representatives having a common interest and a common feeling with the represented.” Hence, Weaver argues that, “Randolph deserves to be called a political conservative individualist for two reasons…his belief in the limited though real role of government, and his defense of the smaller but ‘natural’ unit against the larger one which pretends a right to rule.”

This is a concept of individual liberty that treats “the relation of the individual to the state” as instrumental in ensuring as large as possible a scope for individual liberty. In this defense of natural rights, individual liberty, and states’ rights, Randolph helped to forge the foundations of the philosophical tradition which Rothbard celebrated in his “return home to the Right-wing.”

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Click Here:

Zero Hedge

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Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. national intelligence director, said that America’s strategy of “regime change or nation building” had ended under President Donald Trump. I wish it were true. Trump himself said the same thing earlier this year–and has targeted Venezuela for regime change ever since. The U.S. still has its tentacles wrapped around the world via the CIA, the State Department, the U.S. military, and God knows what else.

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“Crisscross billions of years of time and space to see how everyone, and everything, is linked in one universal story, and how an epic series of improbable events connected in order to make life possible.”

Present day apocalyptic events require rigorous observers to adopt investigative attitudes and objective tools of deep cosmology, biblical theology, and systematic geopolitics.

Let’s begin with the primary fact: The universe is all of space and time and their contents. It comprises all of existence, any fundamental interaction, physical process and physical constant, and therefore all forms of matter and energy, and the structures they form, from sub-atomic particles to entire galactic filaments.

Since the early 20th century, the field of cosmology establishes that space and time emerged together when a transcendent force we describe as “God,” created the universe at the Big Bang 13.787±0.020 billion years ago, and that the universe has been expanding since then. The portion of the universe that can be seen by humans is approximately 93 billion light-years in diameter at present, but the total size of the universe is not known.

Here are six extremely helpful source references which will guide and assist you in helping to grasp this significance.

Big History — The Big History of Everything

The True Face of the Left Revealed

Gnosticism: The Enduring Heresy and Menace to Western Civilization

Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist

Cold War on Five Continents: The Geopolitics of Empire and Espionage

Is Atheism Dead? by Eric Metaxas

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Writes Ginny Garner:

Lew,

Key players connected with the murder of Charlie Kirk are tied to the US military. Google searches for places and people involved in the assassination were tracked by IP address to Israel after Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith’s appearances at the TPUSA conference appearances in July. Also, Candace Owens reports an Egyptian plane landed at Provo Airport near the UVU campus six days prior to the tragic event. 

See here.

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Lew,

In this TPUSA Charlie suggests 10/7 was a stand down by the Israeli government and he explains how he was smeared as a Jew hater but he refused to back down. He said asking questions is what keeps us free. He would absolutely want his friend Candace Owens to investigate his assassination. 

See here.

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The PLA is not the Iraqi military of the 1990s, against whom such bullying tactics could succeed. It’s a modern, technologically advanced force equipped with hypersonic weapons that the US can only dream of, capable of obliterating entire American fleets, multiple times over. Every aggressive move by the US is meticulously observed, analyzed, and countered. These exercises in China’s vicinity provide the PLA with invaluable, real-time data on US tactics, communication protocols, and electronic signatures, effectively making the US Navy a live training aid for its own eventual defeat.

The final months of 2025 have witnessed an unprecedented escalation in Washington DC’s relentless campaign to “contain” (in reality, to besiege) one of the multipolar world’s primary pillars – the People’s Republic of China. Under the thin, tattered veil of “freedom of navigation” and “regional stability”, the United States, its vassals and satellite states have unleashed a tsunami of aggressive military exercises across the increasingly contested Asia-Pacific, in a desperate attempt to project an image of “strength” that belies a deep-seated strategic panic. This geopolitical offensive is not merely a routine demonstration of force, but a frantic heartbeat of a dying hegemony, a coordinated series of war games designed to simulate a conflict the political West can no longer win in reality.

The strategic landscape has been defined by both a qualitative and quantitative leap in provocation. We have moved beyond the predictable, annual routines of previous years. The campaign of “stabilizing” joint military exercises in 2025 include the “Pacific Steller” (multiple locations in the Celebes and Philippine Seas, February), “Cobra Gold” (Thailand, February-March), ‘Sea Dragon” (US-occupied Guam, March), “Pacific Sentry” (multiple locations across Asia-Pacific and North America, April), “Balikatan” (the Philippines, April-May), “Talisman Sabre” (Australia, July-August), “Resolute Force Pacific” (Micronesia, July-August), “Super Garuda Shield” (Indonesia, August-September), “Freedom Edge” (South Korea, September), “Resolute Dragon” (Japan, September), the ongoing “Malabar” (Guam again, October-November), etc.

What’s the one common denominator of all these “democratic” military activities? Well, obviously, the “evil, aggressive” China that “dared” to place itself so close to American “strategic interests”. It should also be noted that this doesn’t come anywhere near completing the list of all American military drills and other activities across the wider region. The US Navy carrier strike groups, the USAF air armadas, as well as the US Army and Marine Corps missile units are all deployed around China. Whether it’s the East and South China Seas, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Guam, etc, the Pentagon is there to “explain the need for freedom of navigation”. A host of American destroyers and other ships regularly sail in the vicinity of Chinese waters and, more importantly, maritime trade routes (the lifeline of Beijing’s export).

Even more importantly, these vessels are followed by nuclear-powered attack (SSGNs) and ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs), lurking in the depths and waiting for a command to unleash thermonuclear hellfire on China’s bustling megacities. Does the Asian giant have similar military and naval forces in the vicinity of American coasts? Certainly not. On the contrary, during my recent visit to China, its intellectuals and even public officials spoke of the need for nuclear disarmament while we were in range of US nuclear-tipped cruise missiles deployed in Japan. The Pentagon regularly practices long-range strikes on Chinese coastal areas, including scenarios explicitly modeled on the blockade of the aforementioned Chinese maritime lanes that are critically important for its economic development.

The message is as crude as it is intentional: Washington DC seeks the capability to strangle China’s economic lifelines and enforce a medieval-style strategic siege in the 21st century. The naval and other military drills are designed to integrate various elements of the Pentagon’s power projection capabilities. The units that are engaged in these exercises are the vanguard of America’s highly destabilizing “Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations” doctrine, which envisages capturing and reinforcing strategic locations in the First Island Chain. Their mission? To function as forward operating bases and disposable missile squads, aiming to turn the sovereign territories of other nations into a powder keg aimed directly at the Chinese mainland, threatening cities as far as Chongqing.

Expectedly, the mainstream propaganda machine paints all this as “forward defense”, instead of what it really is – a weaponization of geography against China. Although highly destabilizing, it’s hardly surprising. It’s highly reminiscent of the regular thalassocratic approach when fighting tellurocracies (land powers). The narrative peddled by the Pentagon and its echo chambers in the Western corporate media is one of “deterring Chinese aggression”. This is a masterclass in psychological projection. When was the last time the People’s Liberation Army conducted carrier group drills off the coast of California or fired a missile in the Gulf of Mexico? Or better yet, when was the last time China invaded a sovereign country under a bogus claim of “liberation” (from itself and its resources) or “freedom and democracy”?

It is the US, a power from a different hemisphere, that keeps sending warships over 10,000 km from its coasts. Meanwhile, it screams “Monroe Doctrine!” when China tries to establish normal economic and trade cooperation with any independent country south of the Rio Grande. The sheer scale and offensive posture of American military exercises — practicing maritime blockades and strikes against integrated air defenses — reveals who the real aggressor is. It doesn’t take a military expert to understand these are not defensive maneuvers, but the rehearsal of what can only be described as full-scale aggression. The increase in the frequency of these drills is also quite revealing, as well as the fact that the US is integrating as many vassals and satellite states as possible into these activities and mustering these auxiliary forces.

The timing of this third and fourth trimester surge is critically significant. It coincides with two pivotal developments. First, the continued, remarkable success of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which is weaving the economic fabric of Eurasia and beyond into a cohesive, cooperative whole, free from the shackles of the US-dominated monetary system. Second, the definitive failure of Washington DC’s hybrid war in NATO-occupied Ukraine, which has exposed the fatal limits of its conventional military power and accelerated the de-dollarization of the global economy. The frantic militarism in the Asia-Pacific is therefore a direct response to these geopolitical failures. Unable to compete economically or through its failed “rules-based world order”, the warmongers and war criminals in Washington DC are falling back on their only remaining tool: brute military force.

However, this desperate gambit is doomed to fail. The PLA is not the Iraqi military of the 1990s, against whom such bullying tactics could succeed. It’s a modern, technologically advanced force equipped with hypersonic weapons that the US can only dream of, capable of obliterating entire American fleets, multiple times over. Every aggressive move by the US is meticulously observed, analyzed, and countered. These exercises in China’s vicinity provide the PLA with invaluable, real-time data on US tactics, communication protocols, and electronic signatures, effectively making the US Navy a live training aid for its own eventual defeat. Not to mention that Beijing is not alone. Its allies, Russia and North Korea, are there to provide any assistance (not that the Asian giant needs it, but it’s always good to have a friend watch your back).

This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

The post America’s Desperate Gambit To Further Militarize the Asia-Pacific Region appeared first on LewRockwell.

As a kid growing up in the 1980s, war seemed like a video game I could watch on my TV.

And if you were unsure about some military action, you must be some commie who hates America.

Yes, dear reader, that was where I was. I thought only “liberals” hesitated to use the military, so I as a non-liberal had to stand up and cheer every time.

Now, the reality is this:

Progressives overwhelmingly supported the Spanish-American War, the world wars, and the “vital center” Democrats supported the entire Cold War. Then after the Cold War they were ready to go in Bosnia, Serbia, and a long list of other places.

Antiwar? Don’t make me laugh.

The left has always recognized the revolutionary potential of war. You think Mao Tse-Tung was “antiwar”?

Progressive intellectuals urged U.S. intervention into World War I in part because they knew it would undermine American fidelity to the free market, and begin the process of government management of the economy and society. These people were not “antiwar.”

So I was wrong about that.

When I went off to college in 1990, I couldn’t tell my new roommate enthusiastically enough how much I favored going after Saddam Hussein. I couldn’t understand why Pat Buchanan was against it, but I figured he just had a blind spot.

Then the bombs started falling, and within a month it was all over. The Bob Hope special celebrating the victory was dutifully aired.

And I thought: why am I cheering when there are now who knows how many widows and orphans in a country that never harmed me?

Even if the war had been strictly necessary, I could not take part in that. That was inhuman.

I went in to see Charles Maier, my left-liberal European history professor, to ask about his support for the war (again, these people are not antiwar) and my own misgivings. He directed me to the current cover story in the left-liberal New Republic in defense of the war.

Around that time I discovered Chronicles magazine, whose writers put the superficial and not very bright Sean Hannity and other neoconservative radio hosts to shame. Here in these pages was conservatism, as opposed to the hideous parody most people knew.

And these guys were all against the war, too.

I later discovered that Russell Kirk, whose book The Conservative Mind was a foundational text of the modern American conservative movement, had said in a private letter that George H.W. Bush should be strung up on the White House lawn for war crimes.

Was Russell Kirk a commie? Come on.

So I realized: I’ve been lied to, big time.

Fast forward to 2010. I’m speaking at an event hosted by the Tenth Amendment Center. It’s a mixed crowd. There are plenty of people who believe in the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus. (By that time, I didn’t believe in any bipartisan anything, because they were always terrible.)

I briefly had the thought: maybe I won’t discuss foreign policy in my speech. Maybe I’ll just stick to issues we all agree on.

And then I felt a sting of shame: would Ron Paul act like this? Would he be a coward who backed away from controversy for the sake of applause?

So I determined to do it.

For half an hour I built up my capital with them by making them laugh and applaud.

And then in the final 15 minutes I said, I hate to break it to you, but I’m not only against the domestic idiocy, but I’m against the foreign policy, too. A rough transcript is in bold:

And I say this knowing that some of you are going to disagree with me. But I’m telling you, I am not a leftist in any way. I have come to the conclusion that they’re lying sociopaths domestically and that they don’t magically transform into angels when it comes to foreign policy. They are also lying to us.

I think back to the 1990s when I was, you know, well, younger than I am now. And I, I basically believed that, well, I’m a good little conservative. And so when the authorities tell me that military action is necessary, only a pinko commie would question them. Now, that was a big, big moral mistake. I made an intellectual mistake, and I’m sorry I made it.

I think back to the disgraceful ways I used to make up excuses for these people. They would do commit horrific atrocities on the most flimsy pretexts. The arguments they made for some of these wars were so transparent, how can a conservative who’s supposed to be dedicated to reason and Western civilization be swept up in this? It’s beneath us to fall for some of this stuff, and yet I fell for it. I would go around searching for corroborating evidence to support the lies of my overlords in the regime.

If I had seen a poor Russian in the Soviet Union doing the same thing, saying, what Pravda is telling us is true,I’ve been looking it up and I’ve found all this evidence, I would have treated that person with contempt. But for some reason, when it was my own looting expropriators, it was okay for me to make excuses for them and to search out corroborating evidence even for arguments that they themselves had abandoned.

And I finally just decided, and this was back in the early 1990s, after the first Persian Gulf War. And this is a war a lot of people thought was unobjectionable: Saddam’s a bad guy, he’s said to be massing his troops on the Saudi border, etc. But I remember hearing about people retreating, being incinerated.

I’m being asked to have a Bob Hope special to celebrate this? I thought to myself, what’s happening to me? What have I allowed this institution to do to me that I could look so callously on these poor people?

These people were conscripted, most of them. I don’t care that the sociopaths in DC have told me I’m supposed to hate these people, because I don’t hate them.

You know, if there had been an earthquake over there, we would all be tears and pity about it. But when they’re incinerated alive? Nothing. These people are treated like human garbage. And I just decided at that point: I’m not doing this anymore. I don’t believe what you are telling me. I don’t believe your phony baloney reasons for your wars, and I’m done making excuses for them.

Because unlike the regime, I really do believe in absolute moral standards.

As the 1990s progressed, we got the sanctions regime on Saddam. The UN says 500,000 children have died of malnutrition because of the sanctions. I don’t like or trust the UN any more than you do. The usual response was: that’s a phony statistic. Or if Saddam hadn’t spent all his money on palaces, the kids could have eaten — whatever. That’s neither here nor there.

The point is, neither Madeleine Albright nor Bill Richardson questioned that figure. They said that price was “worth it.” They didn’t say: the UN is lying. They said that price is worth it.

I am expected to defend the idea that an atrocity like that is “worth it”? You cannot possibly be a conservative if this is how you think.

It is indeed impossible for a conservative, who lectures the world about moral relativism, to make excuses for moral outrages just because they happen to be committed by Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton.

I might add, in case you need to be reminded: Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton are not your friends, so you need not do unpaid labor making excuses for their crimes.

We are better than this. How can we allow ourselves to be so dehumanized that we sit here and allow ourselves make excuses for outrages like this? Do we believe in moral absolutes or do we not?

People used to say, “I like Ron Paul except for his foreign policy.” But his foreign policy is the best thing about him.

It took me a while to understand all this, but eventually I got there.

And one of our great heroes in all this, who has shown the right wing that they’re under no moral obligation to support a foreign policy whose premises were agreed on by the establishment of both parties, has been the brilliant Scott Horton.

This guy knows more truth about U.S. foreign policy than I have ever known about anything.

And now he’s teaching it, so our brains can be filled with facts rather than the absurdities of Lindsey Graham.

It’s the Scott Horton Academy, and his launch discount expires tonight.

I know how hard Scott worked on it, to make it the best it can possibly be for you.

Click the link, for the work of this great hero is what the world needs now:

https://www.ScottHortonAcademy.com

The post I Made Excuses for Atrocities appeared first on LewRockwell.

Today’s politicians are heavily indebted to Alexander Hamilton for pushing the machinery of big government under their control.  In assessing Hamilton’s role, it’s important to remember that the country formerly began for the second time in 1789 when the Constitution was ratified by nine of the thirteen states.   Neither the Articles of Confederation nor the Constitution would have been created had it not been for the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Even after Common Sense, the idea of secession was not greeted with unanimous approval.  About 20 percent of the population remained loyal to Britain, and many left the country during or after the war.  The loyalists had their own heroic writer, James Chalmers, who penned a response to Paine that ends by declaring “independence and slavery are synonymous terms.”  It wasn’t a popular sentiment.  Another 20-30 percent rallied with the revolutionaries, while the majority couldn’t make up their minds, though that started to change after Washington’s first victory, the Battle of Trenton, and Paine’s first American Crisis essay.

Then there was still the technical matter of getting members of the Continental Congress to sign a treasonous document.  Would today’s Congress underwrite any document that claimed it was their right and duty to throw off such governments that violated man’s inalienable rights?  How could they?  Their business is defending “national security,” not protecting individual rights.

Fifty-six members of the Congress signed the Declaration.  Many were lawyers and merchants.  All were well educated and most were at least moderately wealthy.  John Hancock, perhaps the wealthiest, signed in a bold and stylish manner so that, according to legend, George III would not need glasses to read it.  It has since become a synonym for “signature.”  All 56 signers were willing to risk their “lives and fortunes” to support the Declaration.

The lawyers, at least, were likely well-versed in James Otis, Jr.’s court battle against the Crown’s writs of assistance, which “were broad search warrants that allowed British customs officials to search property without a court order and force law enforcement officials to help them.”  According to John Adams’s reconstruction of Otis’s four-hour oration, he was so thorough and eloquent that “every man of a crowded audience was ready” to take up arms against the Crown.  Otis said a man’s home is his castle, and if he behaves quietly he must be as well-protected as a prince.  In journalist A. J. Langguth’s words, Otis was saying,

Every man was his own sovereign, subject to laws engraved on his heart and revealed to him by his Maker. No other creature on earth could legitimately challenge a man’s right to his life, his liberty and his property. That principle, that unalterable law, took precedence . . . even over the survival of the state.

The issue of sovereignty

In broad strokes, sovereignty passed from the individual in the Declaration, to the States in the Articles, to the federal government in the Constitution.  The idea that drove secession, inviolable individual rights, was discarded, even after the Bill of Rights was appended on December 15, 1791.  Though the Rights have binding legal force, the judge in all cases is the government itself.

Alexander Hamilton wrote 51 of the 85 Federalist papers, his brainchild and all under the pseudonym Publius, advocating for ratification of a document, the US Constitution, that would create a stronger, more energetic federal government. Since a government of that nature was the recent object of secession, he had to take pains to avoid sounding like he wanted another England.  Thus, we find In Federalist No. 22,

The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE [caps in original]. The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority.

How many American soldiers thought they fighting for an “American empire”?

In Federalist No. 84, he argued against including a Bill of Rights, saying they were not only unnecessary but dangerous.  “For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?”

Later, he wrote,

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people. . . The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give, therefore, to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and, as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government. Can a democratic Assembly, who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.

We needn’t worry this is a recipe for tyranny because those rich and well-born “will ever maintain good government.”  All they need are the right tools to get the job done.  As Treasury Secretary under President Washington, he proposed the creation of a national bank.

It is a fact, well understood, that public banks have found admission and patronage among the principal and most enlightened commercial nations. . . .

Trade and industry, wherever they have been tried, have been indebted to them for important aid, and government has been repeatedly under the greatest obligations to them in dangerous and distressing emergencies.

Hamilton’s model for an American national bank was the Bank of England, which had been around since 1694.

[It] unites public authority and faith with private credit, and hence we see what a vast fabric of paper credit is raised on a visionary basis. Had it not been for this, England would never have found sufficient funds to carry on her wars; but with the help of this, she has done, and is doing, wonders.

Hamilton was correct.  The Bank had been indispensable in funding England’s wars with its “vast fabric of paper credit [no doubt raised] on a visionary basis.” And it is continuing along this path today:

It serves as a fundamental tool for influencing interest rates throughout the economy. Changes in the base rate directly impact borrowing costs for individuals, businesses, and financial institutions. The Bank of England’s interest rates are pivotal in shaping the UK’s monetary policy and influencing borrowing costs for individuals and businesses.

Sound familiar?  Who would disagree that the Federal Reserve creates a vast fabric of digits on a visionary basis, its vision being to keep the government loaded with debt so it can practice war anywhere it wishes as dollar holders see their purchasing power plunge ever closer to zero.

George Will was right.  We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton’s country.

The post Birth of a Nation, Death of an Ideal appeared first on LewRockwell.

China is not worried; the tech expectation is that they won’t need anything from the US in the spectrum of 2 to 3 years.

So the latest incarnation of the much-hyped G-2 came and went. It did feel like a switch from Trump Tariff Temper Tantrum to Temporary Truce.

Naturally there has been an avalanche of spin focusing on the easing of “trade tensions”; but what really mattered in practical terms was the lack of a full “deal” after 1h40 of debate in South Korea – complete with a smiling handshake coda.

Well, anyone with an IQ over room temperature knew from the start what Trump wanted to extract from Beijing. Essentially 3 items:

1. Easing of restrictions on rare earth exports, because the whole, vast US industrial-military complex with its coterie of embedded high-tech industries simply cannot be “affected” by a supply chain rupture, and there’s no way to build one in less than at least 5 years.
2. China should buy enormous amounts of US agricultural products, especially soybeans: otherwise Trump’s voter base will be in revolt, then bye bye to mid-terms and even the next presidential victory. Toxic asset Steve Bannon has already announced, on the record, that Trump will run.
3. China should buy enormous amounts of overpriced American oil and simultaneously decrease, drastically, its energy imports from Russia; hence Moscow will be “forced” to be back to the “negotiating table” re: Ukraine.

There was never any chance that China would even contemplate discussing item 3 – considering the role of energy in the comprehensive Russia-China strategic partnership.

So what we had were minor concessions on items 1 and 2, still quite vague.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce, for its part, officially announced that Washington will cancel the 10% so-called “fentanyl tariffs” and suspend, for an additional year, the 24% reciprocal tariffs levied on all Chinese products, including those coming from “one country, two systems” stawarts Hong Kong and Macao.

Soybean concessions were expected. Brazil played a not very wise game by raising the price of their soybeans from $530 per ton to $680. Beijing started to have second thoughts on buying more from their BRICS brothers: China moreover is Brazil’s top trade partner. Beijing combined the devaluation of the US dollar with the bumper US crop where farmers are willing to apply a discount of 10%, and in the end got out with a good deal – with the extra bonus of appeasing the Circus Ringmaster’s domestic supporters.

Navigating the “giant ship”

Instead of trademark Circus Ringmaster boasting/bragging re: deals that may exist only in his mind, it’s much more relevant to pay attention to how this G-2 was interpreted by China.

The emphasis was on cooperation, appeasement of Trump’s volatility plus a subtle History lesson – with a long view. See for instance the terminology employed by Xi, classic metaphorical China:

“In the face of winds, waves and challenges, we should stay the right course, navigate through the complex landscape, and ensure the steady sailing forward of the giant ship of China-U.S. relations.”

Other Chinese ministerial texts sailed even further than Xi’s “giant ship”. They emphasize the concept of “mutual achievement and common prosperity”. That’s not new, coming from official China. But then there was a startling, explicit statement:

“China’s development and revitalization and President Trump’s goal of ‘making America great again’ are not mutually exclusive.”

Translation: the Beijing leadership now is self-confident enough when it comes to China’s renewed strenghths and the “objective situation” – as in the state of the geopolitical and geoeconomic chessboard. So they believe that the US and China may not necessarily have to fall into the abyss of a zero-sum game.

It’s impossible to tell whether Trump himself fully understands it. Assorted Sinophobes advising him certainly don’t.

It’s also crucial to place the G-2 in South Korea in the context of what happened right before, earlier in the week, during the several summits inbuilt in the annual ASEAN sumitt in Kuala Lumpur, as I addressed it here.

The renewed interconnected trade drive between the ASEAN + 3 (China, Japan and South Korea) and the RCEP (encompassing most of Asia-Pacific) points to East Asia counteracting the imperial tariff tantrums as a concerted unit.

And on the crucial, progressive yuanization of the planet, it was also this week that Beijing officially boosted petroyuan deals with the Arab petro-monarchies while inviting all its BRICS brothers and partners to use the Chinese Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS): in short, the digital yuan.

In parallel, Li Chenggang, Vice-Minister of Commerce and China’s International Trade Representative, made sure how the rare earth export control measures will affect China’s foreign trade in green tech products.

He said that these export controls are most of all connected with improving security: “Green development is a development philosophy (…)  On the relationship between security and development (…) in short, ensuring security is essential for better development, and better development, in turn, guarantees stronger security.”

Global South nations will understand that. Not necessarily the Pentagon.

Not a word on semiconductors or Taiwan

Right after the G-2, Xi continued to enjoy the limelight at the first session of the 32nd APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting, with a five-point proposal for promoting inclusive economic globalization, to the benefit of the “Asia-Pacific community” (not “Indo-Pacific”, which is conceptually void).

Xi talked directly to the Global South; he called for “joint efforts” to “safeguard the multilateral trading system”; build an “open regional economic environment”; keep the stability and “smooth flow of industrial and supply chains”; promote digitalization and greening of trade; and promote “universally beneficial and inclusive development.”

That’s not exactly a Trump 2.0 platform.

Well, China will host APEC 2026, and the US will host the G-20 in 2026. This G-2 in South Korea certainly may be seen as a symbolic pause, or a time out. Yet no one knows what the Circus Ringmaster may be up to next – including himself.

Two final, key points: not a word on both sides on possible US concessions related to export controls on advanced semiconductors. That means no deal. China is not worried; the tech expectation is that they won’t need anything from the US in the spectrum of 2 to 3 years.

And not a word on Taiwan. All bets are off – but it may be the case that somebody whispered on Trump’s ear (he doesn’t read) the content of Zhou Bo’s latest sharp column on the matter.

So no provocation and/or escalation. At least for now.

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

The post Trump, Xi and That G-2 in South Korea appeared first on LewRockwell.

Now that Donald Trump is President of the United States of America and is strenuously attempting to confirm his right to do “whatever I want to do” over the entire world, it is easy to forget that minus his inability to articulate a coherent sentence his predecessors suffered from much of the same delusion. George W Bush called for a global war on terror and declared himself to be the “new sheriff in town,” a conceit that led to killing millions in Afghanistan and Iraq, while Barack Obama invaded Libya and met on Thursday mornings with his “security advisers to draw up lists of American citizens overseas who would be killed.”

Even the mentally challenged Genocide Joe Biden praised his steering of the Ship of State in a speech at the State Department a week before he passed the imperial baton on to Trump at the January 20th presidential inauguration. In his speech, he argued that he was handing off to President Trump a strong position on the world stage, making the case for continuity in US efforts to counter “threats” posed by China’s global ambitions and Russia’s aggression.

In his remarks at State, Biden sought to make the case for his “exemplary” foreign policy legacy, as Trump, at that time and not yet in office, was already promising something different while threatening allies and calling for America’s territorial expansion, not to mention how he would be renaming international bodies of water and national monuments and sites, in many cases seeking to name them after himself.

Biden engaged in a prolonged boast about his achievements which was inevitably devoid of any real substance, saying “My administration is leaving the next administration with a very strong hand to play. The United States is winning the worldwide competition compared to four years ago. America is stronger. Our alliances are stronger, our adversaries and competitors are weaker. We have not gone to war to make these things happen.”

Biden conveniently forgot to mention how the US under his control was heavily involved in two major wars, in Ukraine and in Gaza. And then there was the disastrous retreat from Afghanistan after twenty years of wasted effort, countless dead bodies, and trillions of dollars thrown down a bottomless pit. He also did not mention the genocide being carried out by his good friends the Israelis which was and is enabled by uncritical support from Washington. Recent reports suggest that White House staff involved in Middle Eastern Policy under Biden sometimes suggested that the US try to rein-in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s slaughter of the Palestinians as it was attracting increasing international criticism over Washington’s enabling role, but Biden refused to discuss the matter, responding only that “I am a Zionist!”

Perhaps someone should have suggested that Biden’s inclinations to go where the Jewish billionaire money leads him, one assumes, ought to be secondary to his oath of office and his doing what is best for the American people rather than for the fellow ardent Zionists like Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and others that he surrounded himself with. Blinken notably raced off to Israel immediately after the October 7th Hamas attack and announced upon arrival at the airport “I am here as Jew!” If Biden had had even an ounce of integrity and gumption he should have fired Blinken immediately, but of course he did not and it set an example for what had followed under Trump where two New York Jews named Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have de facto been negotiating with Israel and the Arabs even though they were knowledgeable only of their career specialties, i.e. real estate. The result of that, a green light for Israel to keep doing the killing to clear Gaza for redevelopment as the Trump Riviera, should have been obvious when the two men announced that they did not see any genocide taking place in Gaza, something that has been clearly visible to 90% of the world’s population.

Trump, now that he has been in place for nine months, is rather like a throwback to a twelve year old boy whose self esteem derives from having become a bully who terrorizes younger and smaller children in the schoolyard. In the current environment, Trump is killing fishermen in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean under the undemonstrated pretense that they are “narcoterrorists,” whatever that is supposed to mean. One might suspect that Trump’s willingness to kill repeatedly without providing any evidence that the victim deserved such a fate might come from over-exposure to his good friends in Israel where shooting children by the Israeli Army (IDF) is considered de rigueur.

Trump also does not hesitate to verbally terrorize foreign heads of state, ambassadors, journalists and anyone else he perceives as having slighted him in the least. They are all set up for punishment to demonstrate what a real he-man he is. Unfortunately for the United States, all that he most often succeeds in doing is to create contempt for the US and for the system that produces presidents like Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden and, the ultimate product, Donald J Trump himself, whose most enduring saying is “You’re fired!” delivered with a malignant sneer and a pointed finger.

Indeed, there is always something new and exciting to report when Trump, who just might be experiencing a major health crisis, is around asserting himself. The latest news is that he has ordered the Pentagon (i.e. now known as the War Department) to begin upgrading America’s nuclear arsenal by increasing “testing” of the hardware. Trump appeared to be suggesting the US will resume testing nuclear weapons for the first time in three decades, saying only that it would be on an “equal basis” with presumed competitors like Russia and China. He might also be looking at Iran and oddly left Israel with its secret arsenal that is reportedly under the “Samson Option” targeting European cities including Rome out of the reckoning.

Significantly, the news of the changed policy broke while Trump was meeting with President Xi Jinping in China, presumably as a form of warning. An announcement about the testing subsequently appeared on Trump’s Truth Social in which the president wrote “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.” There was no indication whether the Pentagon would start detonating actual warheads, meaning that Trump was offering few details about what seemed to be a significant shift in US defense policy. The US already regularly tests missiles that are capable of delivering a nuclear warhead, but it has not actually detonated the weapons since 1992 because of a test ban.

When he spoke to reporters later in China, Trump was somewhat evasive or even confused, saying in regard to other nuclear armed countries that they “seem to all be nuclear testing” but in the United States, “We have more nuclear weapons than anybody. We don’t do testing. I see them testing and I say, well, if they’re going to test, I guess we have to test.” When asked where the tests would take place he said, “It’ll be announced. We have test sites.”

The presumption is that The Donald will use the “enhanced” weapons to threaten other nations to obey the pronouncements coming out of the White House. Trump, being somewhat simple minded beyond the use of threats, clearly does not perceive that he is inviting other governments to do likewise, creating an arms race that could easily lead to the end of the world in a nuclear holocaust if someone twitches. That someone could easily be Trump himself as he is clearly incapable of foreseeing consequences for any of the impulsive actions that he is prone to.

Meanwhile the situation relating to the Gaza-Israel “Trump Peace Plan” continues to unravel. The ceasefire came into effect on October 11th, but Israel continued to commit dozens of ceasefire violations by shelling and shooting Palestinians including on the day before, when it struck targets in the southern Gaza Strip after it said its troops came under fire from Hamas militants. Five Palestinians were also reported killed on Thursday and a family of eleven trying to return to their former home on the following Friday were also killed by the Israeli Army. In the wake of the massacre of the family, which included seven children and three women, accomplished by firing a tank shell at their vehicle, Israeli sources claimed that they had crossed what Israel has referred to as a self-proclaimed “Yellow Line.” Israel again violated the agreement on Wednesday when Netanyahu ordered a heavy shelling and bombing that killed over 100 Gazans, including 46 children, over an alleged shooting incident. The Israeli response was reportedly greenlighted by Trump and his negotiations team, who were advised of the plan in advance.

The “Yellow Line”, beyond which Israeli forces have withdrawn, is unmarked or sign posted and is basically a killing field for any Palestine who approaches it. It separates areas under continuing Israeli military control – which is described as a security zone that includes more than 50 percent of Gaza – as permitted in Donald Trump’s Gaza ceasefire plan. Israeli “Defense” Minister Israel Katz, in the wake of the killing of the large family, has ordered Israeli forces to physically place warning signs to the approaches to the “Yellow Line” but he has also authorized Israeli soldiers to target and to kill anyone who crosses it.

This is ominous. It suggests that, even if the “ceasefire” holds, the Israeli government plans to maintain indefinitely its current military occupation of more than 50% of the territory of the Gaza Strip, territory which includes the great majority of Gaza’s agricultural land and which has already been effectively ethnically cleansed of Palestinians due to the bombing that has destroyed infrastructure in 90% of Gaza. Israel understands that even if the Palestinians wish to return home they will have no shelter, no jobs, no schools, hospitals or religious buildings, and no sources of income apart from charity. They will also be completely dependent on Israel allowing entry of food and medicine, which, as noted above, is now continuing to be restricted in spite of the ceasefire agreement.

There are reports that some Israeli Ministers have said: “As Soon as we get the hostages back, we will resume the slaughter.” Nearly all observers note that Israel does not have a good record on fulfilling ceasefire or other agreements and its withdrawal from occupied territory is often delayed through various contrivances. It has been well demonstrated that Israel is continuing its occupational presence in Areas “B” and “C” of the West Bank, from which, in accordance with the “Oslo” accords, it should have started its gradual withdrawal a quarter-century ago. Roving bands of armed Jewish settlers continue to kill Palestinian farmers, destroying their olive trees and livestock, and burning down their homes without any intercession from IDF soldiers who stand by to watch and applaud the carnage and destruction. For Israel “indefinite” tends to mean “permanent” whenever and wherever Israeli land-grabs are concerned assisted by American leaders like Donald Trump who have approved annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights and East Jerusalem and the ongoing bombing of Lebanon while also giving Israel a free hand on the West Bank.

In fact, formal annexations by Israel are neither necessary nor desirable, since they could provoke Western states which have used the “temporary” excuse to justify their de facto support for Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine rather than to finally take constructive actions to end it. Israel understands that the optimal situation is effectively permanent occupation and control of all the territory of the former State of Palestine without a formal declaration of annexation, and that is undoubtedly what will continue as the Peace Process slowly proceeds, if it does at all. The “Trump peace plan” would, unsurprisingly, permit this status quo to continue.

So the beat goes on. The Trumpean universe continues to expand through threats and the murder of “enemies” even though the real enemy of the American people and their true national interests continues to be “friends” like Israel. And now the US nuclear arsenal is apparently being “tested” to make sure it is ready for use on competitors. Can all of this get any worse? Tune in next week!

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

The post Donald Trump the School Bully appeared first on LewRockwell.

The ultra-wealthy are planning your future right now. They’ll call it ‘utopia’ and sell it to you as such, but it’s actually the opposite. Welcome to the first of a two-part series.

Utopia is a place of “ideal perfection, especially in laws, government, and social conditions.” At least, that’s the dictionary definition.

The thing is, despite humans having tried for thousands of years to attain Eden-esque perfection, it’s impossible. Worse, the irony of such efforts is literally baked into the word ‘utopia:’

From Merriam Webster (emphasis added):

In 1516, English humanist Sir Thomas More published a book titled Utopia, which compared social and economic conditions in Europe with those of an ideal society on an imaginary island located off the coast of the Americas. More wanted to imply that the perfect conditions on his fictional island could never really exist, so he called it “Utopia,” a name he created by combining the Greek words ou (“not, no”) and topos (“place”).

Still, that doesn’t stop people from trying to create fictional paradise. The latest attempts are — unsurprisingly — conceived of, funded by, and built by our billionaire overlords, who aim to own everything and define how our lives will be lived in the future.

At the same time, a paradox is unfolding. While several attempts at billionaire-initiated paradises are currently in the works, some efforts are failing, some are falling apart, and some are simply struggling to get off the ground.

What we know about Silicon Valley elites, bitcoin bros, and AI billionaires is that they dream big and have virtually limitless finances. So even failed attempts at utopia — or whatever their version of it is — gets the entire cohort a step closer to decoding a formula that might stick. It’s like unlimited funding to indulge a God complex.

In part one of this series, we’re looking at four concepts for creating paradise on earth crafted by the freedom loving, libertarian, optimized-living-through-technology crowd. What exactly do these communities promise? Who’s behind them? And most importantly, could they just be 15-minute dystopian wolves in utopian sheep’s clothing? Let’s dive in.

1. Próspera (Honduras)

Próspera began as a bold libertarian experiment on the tropical island of Roatán, off the northern coast of Honduras. It’s the brainchild of Erick Brimen, a Venezuelan-born wealth fund manager who imagined a city run not by politicians, but by market forces and blockchain logic. He’s aiming to create a low-tax, deregulated tech haven where businesses can make their own laws, or choose to implement existing national laws from a menu of 36 countries. Residents pay low taxes (payable in Bitcoin), and biotech startups push the limits of radical life extension with experimental, as yet unproven treatments disallowed in other countries.

With venture capital backing from Coinbase and Sam Altman–linked projects, plus support from figures like Peter Thiel, Próspera has quickly become a magnet for crypto evangelists, longevity obsessives, and deregulation devotees. It hosts conferences with themes like: “Make death optional.” It’s creating a walled city with private arbitration courts, judges who adjudicate online from Arizona (no idea why Arizona — our research was not explicit), and QR-code entry checkpoints.

But like all utopias, this charter city dream has clashed with reality. One critic called it a “libertarian fantasy… that’s not going to turn out well.” The Honduran government that initially supported the project and allowed for the zoning laws making it possible has since collapsed in scandal — with the former president serving time in US prison for conspiring to import and distribute over 400 tons of cocaine. That’s a lot of blow.

Locals in the nearby village of Crawfish Rock have not taken kindly to the idea of the gated city and have accused Próspera of land grabs, environmental damage, and trying to push them out. When the current democratic socialist President, Xiomara Castro, declared the former administration’s zoning laws unconstitutional, Próspera fought back in international court, demanding nearly $11 billion USD in damages — about a third of the country’s GDP — an amount that would bankrupt the country if they lose the case.

Brimen is doubling down, lobbying American politicians to argue in his favor and launching a spin-off project aimed at Africa.

This all plays out as an ironic twist of history: a 21st-century version of the banana republic, complete with foreign investors, private courts, and corporate control over land, law, and labor. The term ‘banana republic’ was coined by author O. Henry to describe Honduras — a place where US fruit companies ran the economy. Now, crypto-capitalists and Silicon Valley VCs are picking up where the plantations left off, except this time, they’re promising immortality instead of bananas.

2. NEOM (Saudi Arabia)

NEOM was supposed to be Saudi Arabia’s leap into the future: a $500 billion high-tech oasis in the desert that would make even Silicon Valley blush. Conceived in 2017 by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as the crown jewel of his Vision 2030 plan, NEOM promised flying taxis, robot dinosaurs, artificial moons, a desert ski resort with fake snow, and a 170-kilometer mirrored city called The Line.

This mirrored city was meant to stretch 170 kilometers across the desert with no cars, no roads, and no emissions — just smart infrastructure, biometric surveillance, and those previously mentioned flying taxis.

None of this matters; Saudi officials press on. Promotional videos still promise a gleaming future where “Neomians” live in harmony with nature, technology, and robot dinosaurs. But those on the ground tell a different story — of constant surveillance, sexual harassment allegations ignored by leadership, and Orwellian control over employee life. Promises of a liberalized social zone — with alcohol, gender mixing, freedom — have quietly been walked back by a government known for its public stonings and other extreme punishment for ‘immorality.’

NEOM may, in fact, never turn out to be the future of urban life. But it may just be the world’s most expensive monument to authoritarian delusion: a dystopian nightmare of a city built on sand, surveillance, and slogans.

3. Telosa (Somewhere, USA)

Telosa is what happens when a billionaire tries to build a utopian city without using the word ‘utopia.’ Marc Lore, former Walmart executive and founder of Jet.com and Diapers.com, envisions a new city rising from scratch somewhere in the American desert (or possibly Appalachia), designed to be sustainable, walkable, tech-forward, and just equitable enough to keep you from asking too many questions.

According to Telosa’s website, this categorically, definitely, 100 percent isn’t a utopia.

Is the goal to create a utopia?

No, we are absolutely not attempting to create a utopia. Utopian projects are focused on creating a perfect, idealistic state — we are not. We are firmly grounded in reality and what is possible.

We are focused on the best, most sustainable solutions for infrastructure, urban design, economic vibrancy and city services, but we fully recognize that no solution is perfect and all human systems have flaws. Therefore, we are committed to new ideas, finding the best way to solve difficult problems and constant improvement.

And yet the renderings and promo videos suggest otherwise: gleaming towers, shaded plazas, handicap-accessible courtyards, and monorails slicing silently through eco-optimized zones. If it looks like utopia, smells like utopia, and plans to engineer human behavior like utopia — well, you do the math.

The project is called “Telosa,” from the Greek word telos — meaning “highest purpose.” Hey — stop calling it utopia!

The big idea is for 50,000 people to move to this yet-to-be-determined place by 2030 and have the population eventually grow to 5 million. Everyone lives within a short walk (15 minutes maybe?) of everything they need — a school, a park, a job (lolz!), and probably an AI wellness coach. Cars, of course, are banned. There will be solar-powered towers and vertical farms and an economy based on “equitism,” a remix of a 19th-century idea where the city itself owns the land and uses rising property values to fund social services.

But for all its lofty ideas, Telosa has yet to put a single shovel in the ground. There’s no final site, no government approval, and no clear funding beyond Lore’s initial push. It’s still just a shimmering concept, a mirage sketched by a star architect (Bjarke Ingels) and floated in interviews, TED talks, and design expos.

Critics argue that if Lore really wanted to help people, he could invest in solving infrastructure problems in existing cities. Others point out that “15-minute cities” — the model Telosa clearly mirrors — have become a global flashpoint, praised by urban planners but derided by skeptics as a way to centralize control, limit movement, and monitor citizens.

So far, Telosa’s biggest achievement is that it’s really good at marketing a city that doesn’t exist. If it ever does gets built, we may finally get to ask: does a billionaire-designed city really offer freedom — or just the illusion of choice in a world where the architecture has already made the decisions for you?

Read the Whole Article

The post The Ultra-Wealthy Are Planning Your Future Right Now appeared first on LewRockwell.

An article by Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp has highlighted the widely-ignored fact that according to AFRICOM the US waged a three-day bombing campaign in Somalia from October 26 — October 28, bringing the total number of US airstrikes in that nation this year to 89.

What percentage of Americans even realize that Trump has bombed Somalia nearly a hundred times this year? I doubt it’s even one percent. The mainstream press barely mention it. Americans have hardly any idea who their own country is bombing.

In theory the press are there to create an informed electorate who can then use their votes to move their government in a healthy direction. In practice the press are there to keep the public too ignorant, propagandized and distracted to meddle in the workings of the imperial machine.

❖

Israel keeps violating the “ceasefire” and bombing Gaza whenever it wants to, then saying the ceasefire is back in effect. It’s like saying you’ve quit smoking whenever you’re not currently having a cigarette.

NPR reports that after a mid-“ceasefire” bombing campaign that killed 104 people including 46 children, Benjamin Netanyahu “ordered the strikes after accusing Hamas of violating the ceasefire for handing over body parts this week that Israel said were partial remains of a hostage recovered earlier in the war.”

Saying you massacred children because you weren’t given the correct pieces of a corpse just might be the craziest justification for a war crime that anyone has ever offered.

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Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon accused UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese of witchcraft for her report on Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza. That’s right. Witchcraft.

“Miss Albanese, you are a witch and this report is another page in your spell book,” Danon said in response to Albanese’s remarks to the UN’s Third Committee on Gaza.

Says a lot about the strength of their arguments, really.

Pro-Palestine arguments are like, “Here’s raw video footage of atrocities, IDF admissions of war crimes, IDF soldiers documenting their own sadism, eyewitness testimony from western doctors, and analysis from every major human rights group,” while pro-Israel arguments are like, “You’re a witch doing witchcraft!”

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Israeli media report that their government is preparing to wage a “propaganda war” for when foreign journalists are able to gain access to Gaza in advance of the expected PR fallout as the world learns “the human stories from Gaza in the voices and faces of the residents themselves.”

It’s such a trip how as a state the Israelis understand the importance of perception management more acutely than any nation on earth, but as individuals they still can’t resist the urge to club an old woman on camera or post pictures of themselves wearing stolen panties in Gaza. Really drives home how the entire state is premised on the understanding that its existence depends on actively cultivating the support of powerful western military forces using aggressive lobbying and propaganda campaigns, but the state is also premised on extreme hatred and racism, and these two essential ingredients are clashing with more and more regularity when it comes to Gaza.

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It’s not okay to still support a two-state solution in 2025. Israel has spent two years showing the world that it should not exist as a state. It needs to be disarmed, dismantled, and denazified.

It was still excusable to naively believe a two-state solution was workable prior to 2023, but after two years of Israeli officials openly saying with the overwhelming support of their citizenry that there will never be a Palestinian state while committing a genocide in full view of the entire world, this is no longer a tenable position to have. There is no longer any excuse for still believing the state of Israel will allow the Palestinians to have a fully sovereign state and leave them in peace, especially not after watching it wage war on all its neighbors with the blatantly obvious goal of domination and territorial expansion.

The Israel experiment has been run. The results of that experiment show that it is not workable. Everything we’ve seen these last two years is the result of Zionists getting everything they want. This is what that looks like. The world needs to terminate the experiment by any means necessary and end the Zionist state forever.

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Groyper leader Nick Fuentes just went on Infowars to join Alex Jones in endorsing regime change interventionism in Venezuela by the Trump administration.

The entire American right is just Dick Cheney wearing various costumes. The empire doesn’t just control the opposition, it controls the opposition to the opposition.

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The post Americans Have No Idea Who Their Government Is Bombing appeared first on LewRockwell.

Americans oftentimes forget that the Constitution called the federal government into existence and, equally important, limited its powers to those enumerated in the Constitution itself. In fact, the only reason our American ancestors accepted the Constitution was because they were assured that its powers would be few, limited, and extremely restricted.

Thus, the Constitution did not call into existence a government with inherent powers, like the traditional “police powers” that characterized governments throughout history. If it had done that, our American ancestors would never have approved it. Instead, it was clearly understood that the only powers that the federal government could legally exercise were those enumerated in the Constitution. If a power wasn’t enumerated, it could not legally be exercised.

This is what was meant by the term “limited-government republic.” For the first time in history, a people had limited the powers of their own government by the document that called the government into existence.

If Americans didn’t like that system, they could change it by amending the Constitution, which provided for the means to do that.

Our American ancestors were still not satisfied. They were still extremely concerned about the possibility that the federal government could end up wielding omnipotent, tyrannical powers over them, similar to those that had been wielded and exercised by King George.

They were particularly concerned that the president, even though democratically elected, might decide to use his power, especially in combination with the military, to arbitrarily kill people.

The advocates of the Constitution did their best to put their minds at ease. They pointed out that the Constitution did not give the federal government the power to arbitrarily kill people. Therefore, since such a power wasn’t enumerated, it could not legally be exercised.

Moreover, given the fierce opposition to “standing armies,” it was also understood that the president would never have a large military force to impose that type of tyranny on the American people, a tyranny that would involve the arbitrary killing of people.

Those arguments were still not sufficient for the American people. As a condition for accepting the Constitution, they demanded a Bill of Rights, which actually should have been called a Bill of Prohibitions because it doesn’t grant rights at all. Instead, it expressly prohibited the federal government from infringing or destroying rights. The Second Amendment guaranteed the right to keep and bear arms, which ensured that people would have the means by which to resist the tyranny of their own president and his army.

The Fifth Amendment prohibited the federal government from depriving any person of life without due process of law. Stretching all the way back to the Magna Carta in 1215, the term due process had come to mean, at a minimum, the dual requirement of formal notice and the right to be heard before being assassinated or executed.

Notice something important about the Fifth Amendment: Its protection applies to “persons,” not just American citizens. Our American ancestors ensured that the president would be precluded from killing anyone without due process of law — that is, without formal notice (e.g., an indictment) and the right to be heard (e.g., a hearing or trial).

Thus, under our system of government, there was simply no power of assassination, given that assassination obviously involves the taking of life without due process of law.

Central to America’s constitutional form of limited government was the judicial branch of the government. Its job was to enforce the Constitution against the other two branches of the federal government. Thus, if a president were to begin assassinating people, the judicial branch’s responsibility would be to declare such action in violation of the Constitution and to put a stop to it through injunctive relief.

The same thing applied to Congress, which wielded the constitutional power of impeachment. If a president and his minions began assassinating people, it would be the responsibility of Congress to impeach him and remove him from office.

That was our system of government for around 150 years. That’s a very long time. For a century and a half, the president had no power of assassination. I’d say that’s a very big success story.

That all changed in the late 1940s, when the structure of the federal government was changed from a limited-government republic to what is called a national-security state, which consisted of the Pentagon, a vast, permanent standing army, the CIA, and the NSA — that is, precisely the type of governmental structure our American ancestors had rejected. Federal officials justified this monumental conversion by claiming that it was necessary to protect the United States from a communist takeover.

Interestingly enough, however, they effected this revolutionary change without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment, which was required by the Constitution. Why is that important? Because as a practical matter, a national-security state comes with the automatic acquisition of omnipotent, totalitarian-like, dark-side powers, including the power of assassination.

Thus, as a practical matter, the conversion to a national-security state operated as a de facto amendment of the Constitution, one that amended the Fifth Amendment — but without a constitutional amendment. Once the conversion took place, the president and his national-security establishment wielded the omnipotent, dark-side power to assassinate anyone they wanted, so long as they determined that the victim posed a threat to “national security.”

Given the enormous power of this new vast, permanent, and powerful standing army, the U.S. Supreme Court and the rest of the federal judiciary immediately made it clear that they would never declare any action of the national-security establishment unconstitutional, including the newly acquired power of assassination. The reason for this judicial deference, notwithstanding its clear violation of the Fifth Amendment, was that the judiciary knew that it lacked the ability to enforce its rulings against the omnipotent power of the Pentagon, the vast military-intelligence establishment, the CIA, and the NSA.

Thus, that’s how the American people ended up living in a society in which the president and his vast, all-powerful national-security establishment wield the omnipotent dark-side power to assassinate anyone they want, foreigner or American. That’s obviously not what our American ancestors had in mind when they approved the establishment of the federal government.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post How the Federal Government Acquired the Power of Assassination appeared first on LewRockwell.

Just a few days ago I stated that Trump is targeting Venezuela under the pretext of countering drug trafficking. But the real reasons for this are clear:

Venzuela is, as Politico points out, not known for drug trafficking. It does not have ‘cocaine facilities’. But it does have the largest oil reserves in the world. That has always made it a target for a U.S. regime-change operations.

But Venezuela is also a huge country double the size of Iraq with a mountainous and often densely wooded countryside. The U.S. military is unable to invade, occupy and control it.

But what the U.S. might want to try in Venezuela is a variant of the Israeli plan for Iran.

A decapitation strike killing President Maduro and the military leadership accompanied by a bombing campaign to take out air defenses and primary defense units. Meanwhile the CIA and special forces will have to work on the ground in Caracas to organize local thugs for an assault on the main government sites and radio/TV buildings.

A few days ago the U.S. ordered the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford to move from the Mediterranean towards Venezuela. The carrier is expected to arrive in early to mid November. I had expected that the U.S. would wait with any attack on Venezuela until the carrier force is in place. Until than it would continue its intimidation strikes on random fishermen at sea.

The Wall Street Journal though says that the U.S. is already ready to strike on land:

U.S. Eyes Striking Venezuelan Military Targets Used for Drug Trafficking (archived) – WSJ

The Trump administration has identified targets in Venezuela that include military facilities used to smuggle drugs, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter. If President Trump decides to move forward with airstrikes, they said, the targets would send a clear message to Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro that it is time to step down.

While the president hasn’t made a final decision on ordering land strikes, the officials said a potential air campaign would focus on targets that sit at the nexus of the drug gangs and the Maduro regime.
…
The potential targets under consideration include ports and airports controlled by the military that are allegedly used to traffic drugs, including naval facilities and airstrips, according to one of the officials.

The Miami Herald says that the decision to attack Venezuela has been made and that strikes are imminent:

U.S. poised to strike military targets in Venezuela in escalation against Maduro regime – Miami Herald

The Trump Administration has made the decision to attack military installations inside Venezuela and the strikes could come at any moment, sources with knowledge of the situation told the Miami Herald, as the U.S. prepares to initiate the next stage of its campaign against the Soles drug cartel.

The planned attacks, also reported by the Wall Street Journal, will seek to destroy military installations used by the drug-trafficking organization the U.S. says is headed by Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and run by top members of his regime.
…
Sources told the Herald that the targets — which could be struck by air in a matter of days or even hours — also aim to decapitate the cartel’s hierarchy.

The attack will follow the usual U.S. war pattern. The first part will be a SEAD campaign. The Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses will target cocaine producing radar installations, fentanyl smuggling S-300 air defense missiles and the ‘cartel’ command and control elements that direct the Venezuelan army’s defenses.

This will mostly be done by launching sea based Tomahawk cruise missiles and long range aerial bombing.

After the SEAD campaign has disabled or destroyed the air defenses the next part of the campaign will attempt to “decapitate the” government’s “hierarchy”.

The part may include more missile strikes but could also be done by special forces within a ground raids campaign and additional CIA controlled local elements.

According to the WSJ the Trump government intends to create a military rebellion against the Venezuelan government.

That though is likely to fail:

U.S. officials now and in Trump’s first term have applied pressure in the hope of provoking a barracks rebellion or an uprising, though the military has stood with Maduro and there have been no reports of protests in Venezuela. The show of American force now, though, is different.
…
If airstrikes don’t force Maduro out of power, they could potentially pressure his inner circle to turn against him, analysts say. However, such a strategy carries tremendous risks and could potentially backfire if troops rally around the flag and put up a fight. Many analysts who have closely tracked Venezuela also say the indictments against Maduro and his top aides underscore for him how costly it would be to leave power, as they could end up facing prosecution.

The military of Venezuela is, as far as it is known, not opposed to the government under President Nicolás Maduro. It is unlikely to bite the hands that feed it and to do the bidding of those who try to bomb it to smithereens.

The plan the Trump administration follows does have a starting point and an aim. But what seems to be missing are several crucial steps in between.

1. Bomb the shit out of Venezuela
2. ???
3. ???
4. ???
5. Welcome a U.S. friendly regime!
6. Profits!

Even if the Venezuelan military revolts against Maduro, which is highly unlikely, it is not clear how this could lead to the installation of the U.S. selected replacement Maria Corina Machado and her gang. Wouldn’t the military rather hang on to power by itself?

And what will the U.S. do if the military of Venezuela decides to hit back?

Venezuela has some 20 Su-30MK2V multi-role fighter airplanes with Russian Kh-31 anti-ship missiles. It also has Iranian-built Peykaap-III (Zolfaghar-class) fast attack craft equipped with CM-90 Anti-Ship Missiles (ASCM) supplied by Iran.

It is quite conceivable that the Venezuelan Navy will by successful in hitting a handful of U.S. ships. What will Trump’s next step be if that were to happen?

This article was originally published on Moon of Alabama.

The post U.S. Ready To Bomb Venezuela Under Absurdly False Pretext appeared first on LewRockwell.

For decades I have been watching American democracy unravel as it became increasingly dysfunctional. US democracy murdered President John F. Kennedy and followed up by murdering his brother, Robert F. Kennedy.  Then President Nixon was murdered politically by democracy with the CIA/Washington Post orchestration of Watergate.

Democracy attempted to frame, indict, and prosecute President Trump for Russiagate, documents gate, insurrection gate, lying on mortgage loan applications, and twice tried to impeach him on false charges.

Democracy and accountable government lied to us about Vietnam, about the USS Liberty, about 9/11, Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein, Ghaddafi, Assad, Sudan, Somalia, Ukraine, South Ossetia, Iran, Russia, China, and Venezuela.

The accumulated failures of democracy eroded its foundations, thereby permitting the executive branch to encroach on the separation of powers and violate the US Constitution.  The US has been in many wars since the last time Congress declared war in December 1941. The president has simply taken war out of Congress’ hands.  

In the 21st century presidents have gone much further by stealing power from the US Constitution and courts.  President George W. Bush declared his power to ignore habeas corpus and to hold American citizens indefinitely on suspicion alone without due process.  President Obama declared his power to murder US citizens on suspicion alone without due process, and he did.  Nothing was done about these unconstitutional acts that ignored judicial authority.

President Trump on his own initiative has committed acts of war against Russia and Iran without a declaration of war with Venezuela waiting in the wings.

The dysfunction of American democracy has reached the point at which the government has been shut down for a month.  Tomorrow 42 million Americans unable or unwilling to support themselves, thereby comprising a burden placed on the 170 million US labor force, run out of SNAP food benefits.  American democracy has become so dysfunctional that nothing is being done to avoid massive violence likely to result from leaving 42 million Americans without food.  

The government has been shut down by the Democrat Party, apparently intent on preventing Trump from implementing his agenda.  In other words, US democracy has become so dysfunctional that Democrats are blocking the agenda elected by voters, that is, they are blocking democracy itself.

Democracy is so dysfunctional that neither the Democrats, nor Trump himself, understand that they have given Trump the opportunity to remove budgetary matters from Congress’ hands just as presidents have removed war from legislators’ hands.  As US presidents can take the country to war without obtaining Congress’ approval, they can certainly issue food stamps without Congress’ approval.  

Such an action by Trump would certainly swing the largest component of the Democrats’ voting bloc to Trump.  42 million Americans, one fourth the size of the US labor force, abandoned by Democrats would be rescued from hunger by Trump’s assumption of the budgetary power abandoned by democracy. 

The tendency of democracy is to devolve or evolve, depending on your point of view, into dictatorship.  We see that in Western Europe today. There is so much faction that governments consist of coalitions of minority parties, often as opposed to one another as to opposition coalitions.  The inability of national democracies to function has given rise to the European Union in which national governments are absorbed into an European government in which power is appointed and elected representatives are powerless.  It is all happening with consent, but the consent is driven by dysfunctional democracy.

The same happened to Rome.  When faction in the Senate prevented effective rule, Rome first tried appointing dictators for limited terms.  Julius Caesar saw the need for a functional government as his opportunity. He centralized power in himself by absorbing the checks and balances, such as consul and pontifex Maximus into himself, while weakening the Senate by increasing its size to 900 members which increased the inability of the Senate to act in solidarity. In this way he created the autocracy in which his adopted son, Octavius, became Augustus, the first Roman Emperor.

Sooner or later American democracy will have the same fate.  Trump just as well should assume autocratic power before a Democrat does.  White ethnic Americans would have no future under  Democrat DEI rule.  It is too late to save American democracy, but there is still a chance for white ethnic Americans unless a DEI Democrat becomes our first emperor.

The DEI Democrats clearly do not believe in democracy, free speech, and equality under the law, and they most certainly do not believe in a white ethnic America which they describe as aversive racism that needs to be bred out of existence.  Democrats believe that nonwhites, whether legal citizens or illegal immigrant-invaders, deserve legal privileges, originally called “affirmative action” to disguise the fact that illegal and unconstitutional racial quotas have been imposed by the Jew Blumrosen at the EEOC, reducing white Americans, especially white heterosexual males, to second class citizenship  (see The New Color Line). As time passed Blumrosen’s race, gender, and sexual preference quotas became “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion.”  As US corporate boards and executives were replaced with DEI indoctrinated university graduates, Americans were flooded with advertisements pushing miscegenation.  The white family disappeared in corporate advertisements.  Corporations such as Starbucks and the US Department of Defense announced that they were not hiring or promoting white heterosexual males. The message to white women is there is no future in a white husband.  Budweiser Light and Gillette ruined their sales with anti-white male advertisements.  In America where the US Constitution guarantees equality under law it became possible to officially discriminate against white people, and nothing was done about it.  Moreover, about 45% of the American electorate continued to vote for Democrats who had destroyed equality under law and the American merit-based society.  American law schools teach that the Constitution is in the way of DEI, now defined as justice, and must be ignored. Journalism schools teach that facts are white racism and irrelevant.  Reporting is a weapon to further a DEI revolution against ethnic American whites .  The Democrat Party, the whore media, and the American educational system agree with the government of Denmark that white people must stop producing white people and instead help to wipe out racist whites by mating with peoples of color. See this.

Putin still deceives himself about Russian democracy.  But all Russian democracy has done is to render Russia impotent to defend itself against Western hostility. It seems more members of the Russian government are working for their own interests, for Western interests, and for global interests than for Russia’s interest.  In the US it has long been the situation that the legislature works for the interest of the private lobbies that fund political campaigns, not for the voters.  Putin should ask himself who Kirill Dmitriev and Elvira Nabiullina are working for before Russians begin asking who Putin is working for.

The post The Days of Democracy Are Over appeared first on LewRockwell.