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Or we can let the bubble implode under its own weight and have a plan ready to clean house when the dust settles.

Thanks to recency bias, we tend to think the world has always been more or less as it is today. Tectonic shifts beneath the veneer of everyday life escape us unless we make a concerted effort to peel back the veneer of normalcy.

For example, consider the rise of finance as the dominant force in our socio-economic / political status quo. Statistics give us a rough picture of the dominance:

In 2023, the finance, insurance, real estate, rental, and leasing industry contributed 20.7% to the United States’ gross domestic product (GDP). This is higher than the long-term average of 7.29%. In 1947, the finance industry made up only 10% of non-farm business profits. By 2010, the finance industry made up 50% of non-farm business profits.

The chart below of non-bank financial institutions’ assets as a percentage of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) tells the story: prior to the era of financialization, non-bank financial institutions’ assets trundled along for decades at around 40% of GDP. Recall that “non-bank financial institutions” is shorthand for the mechanisms of financialization, which is the globalized commoditization of everything into a tradable financial instrument.

Labor, capital, risk, currencies, commodities, income streams, real-world assets–everything is converted into a financial doppelganger that can be arbitraged and traded for profit. The actual use-value is no longer the “value” being “created;” the “value” is “created” by generating an entirely abstract financial shadow cast by the collateral of the real world.

This transmogrification of the global economy into a fully financialized shadow-world took off in the early 1980s when financiers were first given access to unlimited credit and the other tools of financialization. Non-bank financial institutions’ assets soon soared from 40% of GDP to 140% of GDP, and in the final blow-off phase of hyper-financialization that we’re experiencing now, these assets are 200% of GDP– five times the pre-financialization era levels that were deemed “widespread prosperity” (the Trente Glorieuses, the 30 glorious years of shared prosperity from 1945 to 1975).

The wealth generated by financialization and hyper-financialization isn’t shared; it’s concentrated in the hands of those with access to credit and and the other tools of financialization, currently epitomized by private equity.

This excerpt from a post on promarket.org illuminates the reality that financialization isn’t cost-free to the economy:

“Epstein and Montecino argue that the total cost of the financial system is comprised of rents, misallocation costs, and the costs of the 2008 crisis. Such costs can be divided into two types: transfers and inefficiencies. When combined together, Epstein and Montecino estimate that they total to $688bn a year, or 4 percent of GDP. Cumulatively, from 1990 to 2023, this number would add up to $22.7 trillion.”

Adjusted for inflation, this sum totals $30.2 trillion in today’s dollars–larger than America’s entire GDP of $27 trillion.

The larger point is that an economy that’s dependent on the distortions of financialization for its “growth” and profits is not a stable system; the gross imbalances generated by the distortions undermine its stability, and the system collapses under its own weight once the imbalances destabilize society and the real-world economy.

Read the Whole Article

The post Can We Rein in the Excesses of Financialization Without Crashing the Economy? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Berlin has spurned two key demands that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tried to “sell” during his European tour to promote his so-called Victory Plan: getting the green light for deep strikes into Russian territory (which would require German Taurus missiles, among others) and speeding up Ukraine’s accession to NATO, German media reported.

According to Bild, Zelensky had a packed itinerary that included a whirlwind tour of the UK, France, Italy, and Germany in a bid to garner Western support for his “Victory Plan.” However, the outlet emphasised that although German Chancellor Olaf Scholz did not give a categorical “no”, he did not respond positively to the Ukrainian requests.

Moreover, Bild said the chancellor’s talk about the promised “billions in aid for Ukraine” at a press conference with Zelensky was nothing more than a farce. This package does not include any new weapons since the amount and projects mentioned were, in fact, “already approved and financed last year.”

The outlet said Kiev’s hopes of obtaining more Leopard 2 tanks had been dashed despite the Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) still having around 300 of the main battle tanks in its inventory. The same applies to infantry fighting vehicles and armoured howitzers. The decision comes as the German Defence Ministry does not believe that Kiev will be able to carry out a new counteroffensive in the near future, the sources told the newspaper.

“By the end of the year, with the support of Belgium, Denmark and Norway, we will deliver another package to Ukraine worth €1.4 billion,” Scholz announced on October 11.

According to him, the package includes IRIS-T and Skynex air defence systems, Gepard anti-aircraft guns, self-propelled artillery systems, armoured vehicles, combat drones and radars.

Germany, Ukraine’s second-largest military donor after the US, has so far provided (or planned) military assistance worth approximately €28 billion. However, according to the draft budget, it has halved its military aid to Ukraine for 2025 compared to this year.

Although Zelensky has long insisted that there can be no peace negotiations with the Kremlin and that Russian forces must be driven back to its pre-2014 borders, officials in Kiev reportedly realise this position is unrealistic. The leadership of the current Ukrainian administration is beginning to discuss the handover of territories claimed by Ukraine as part of a peace agreement with Russia, a high-ranking Ukrainian official admitted to a German magazine.

The unnamed source also expressed concern that Washington will cut its previously generous support for Ukraine no matter who wins next month’s US presidential election. The prospects of losing foreign military aid, which has prolonged the conflict so far, coupled with growing discontent in Ukrainian society, may explain Kiev’s shift in position from refusing to negotiate with Russia and its other irreducible demands.

However, the magazine warned that powerful figures in Ukraine still remain staunchly opposed to peace talks.

Kiev’s insistence on joining NATO is a major obstacle to efforts to resolve the Ukrainian conflict through diplomacy. In addition to recognising the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, Russia insists that Ukraine must remain neutral, non-nuclear and unaligned with any military bloc. The Kiev regime, which cancelled elections scheduled for this year and remains in power without being re-elected, is losing Western support and has been considering negotiating with Russia because of this.

At the same time as the German reports, government sources in Berlin said US President Joe Biden will visit Germany this week after cancelling a planned trip last week due to Hurricane Milton.

Senior German officials who spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed media reports that Biden would most likely travel to Berlin within the week but declined to provide further details. According to German media, Biden will meet the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in Berlin on Friday for talks on Ukraine and the Middle East.

The original trip was cancelled, upending plans for a summit of the Ramstein group of countries providing weapons to Ukraine. The meeting at the US airbase of the same name would have discussed possible new aid commitments to Ukraine.

With Biden only after some weeks left in power before handing over the White House to Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, Ukraine has become a less important topic for the outgoing president as he instead aims to ensure that the Democrats remain in power. Coupled with German industry devastated due to anti-Russia sanctions boomeranging, it is easy to see why Ukraine has become a lessened priority for the country’s two largest donors, a projectory that will continue until the war finally concludes.

Source: InfoBrics.

The post Germany Dismisses Ukraine’s Demands for Taurus Missiles and NATO Membership appeared first on LewRockwell.

As the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) carries out widely-criticized responses to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, officials say the agency’s Disaster Recovery Fund is incapable of handling a third major storm.

While some are circulating false accusations that disaster funds have been diverted to immigrants or poured into the proxy war in Ukraine, a review of the agency’s 2024 outlays reveals a different, ongoing drain on FEMA’s coffers: Long after the end of the declared Covid-19 emergency, FEMA is still pumping out billions of dollars to pay for pandemic expenses — including, believe it or not, up to $9,000 each for funerals.

As previously detailed at Stark Realities, governments’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic was disastrous on many fronts. While the Pandora’s box of collateral damage included widespread harm to the physical and mental health of individuals, it also dealt a blow to the nation’s fiscal well-being, as the federal government recklessly showered trillions of dollars it didn’t have on people, businesses and state and local governments — with much of that money intended to offset the effects of government’s own tyrannical and counterproductive policies.

While all but the most diehard Branch Covidians have moved on from that dark chapter, the federal government has a distinct version of “long Covid.” Though it’s not clear where all the money is going, FEMA is paying up to $9,000 each to reimburse funeral expenses for those who die from Covid.

That’s an especially odd example of government picking winners and losers. As Stanford University School of Medicine professor and prominent Covid-regime critic Jay Bhattacharya said in a social media post that drew my attention to this giveaway program and its hyper-longevity, “There are apparently more and less worthy ways to die in the US.”

Indeed: Why is the family of someone who dies from Covid more deserving of a government-paid funeral than the family of someone who dies from cancer, cardiac arrest or a car accident? It bears emphasis that this question was every bit as relevant in 2020 as it is today.

The favoring of one cause of death over another isn’t the only winners-and-losers dimension of the funeral program: There’s no reimbursement for those who’d planned ahead via pre-paid funerals. Echoing the grievances of people who saved up to pay for college only to see their neighbor’s student loans forgiven by vote-buying politicians, some families say they feel like they’re being punished for having planned for the future.

This isn’t FEMA’s first funereal foray, but it’s the largest by orders of magnitude. In the 10 years before the pandemic, FEMA received about 6,000 applications for funeral assistance for various natural disasters. As of Jan. 1, 2024, FEMA had approved more than 300,000 for Covid-19, shelling out $3.15 billion to cover an expense that, whether caused by a pandemic or something else, is universally inevitable.

Of course, the magnitude of that inevitable expense isn’t fixed, and the mere presence of a government subsidy reliably results in higher costs. Knowing they can spend up to $9,000 of other people’s money on their Covid-19 funeral, it’s safe to assume many affected families have made more expensive choices than they otherwise would — bolstering the profits of funeral homes, casket producers and other associated businesses.

Unsurprisingly, the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), a trade group and principal lobbyist for the industry, hailed the passage of the COVID 19 Relief Package/Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2020. The legislation not only funded Covid funeral reimbursements, NFDA enthused, but also funeral payments “for any subsequent major disaster declared by the President,” an expansion the group had been lobbying for.

To qualify for reimbursement under the funeral assistance program, the death certificate must either indicate the death was caused by Covid-19 — or that it merely may have been caused by Covid-19 or “Covid-19-like symptoms.”

As is increasingly the case with government handouts, there’s no requirement of US citizenship, for either the decedent or the person paying the funeral expenses. A family’s ability to pay for the funeral is likewise irrelevant — there are no income or wealth criteria.

There’s more to the cost of this program than the reimbursements themselves — there’s also significant overhead. Pressed to implement the program as soon as possible, FEMA opted against creating a website to receive applications for reimbursement, choosing to instead require that all claims be submitted via 20-minute phone conversations, necessitating the creation of a huge call center operation staffed by 5,000 phone agents, all of whom would require training and support.

While you might think word-of-mouth would be sufficient to encourage widespread use of a handout program, still more money was spent on advertising. In a 2022 report lamenting that many eligible people hadn’t cashed in yet, NPR’s Blake Farmer — blissfully oblivious to the federal government’s relentless march to insolvency — cheerfully said “FEMA is launching an outreach campaign to promote the program, since there’s plenty of money left.”

Fittingly, NPR found the national leader in funeral reimbursement claims at the time was Washington DC, with applications amounting to 77% of Covid-19 fatalities.

Read the Whole Article

The post FEMA Still Paying $9,000 for Covid Funerals, Billions on Pandemic Payouts appeared first on LewRockwell.

Leading up to America’s shameful illegal destructive and evil invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003, all of the U.S. mainstream news-media were uncritically trumpeting the White House’s lies against Iraq and Saddam Hussain, none of these propaganda-organizations were reporting the clearly-established but unpublicized crucial truths. After the falsehood of the White House’s allegations had become no longer credible even to most of the highly deceived American public, the U.S. Government’s excuse became that it had all been due to ‘intelligence failures’ (and U.S.-and-allied ‘historians’ continue to this day to trumpet that lie), but this too was nothing more than a blatant lie. All of this is thoroughly documented HERE. (That’s my article on the Iraq-matter, which links to all of its evidences.) Ever since then, I have known for certain that I live under a dictatorship — even the claim that America is a democracy is no longer true (if it ever was) — and that this Government routinely violates the U.S. Constitution, with total impunity.

Many times since then, I have observed the same thing regarding many other matters. All of these lies have been climaxed by the barbaric U.S.-and-allied Governments’ hoaxes that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 Febrjuary 2022 was “aggression” and “unprovoked,” instead of having been an invasion that was forced upon Russia by the U.S. and its allies — forced upon Russia, which was doing only what it HAD to do in order to protect its own national security against the (up till then) ever-expanding, indeed cancerous, American empire. All of this is thoroughly documented HERE.

The latest major installment in this anti-Russian hoax is truthfully recounted and described in the following video, a 20-minute discussion that includes Alexander Mercouris, one of the greatest investigative journalists, and whose many videos I have been following for years I have never yet found to have alleged anything to be false — this being an absolutely extraordinary record:

“Woodward ‘WAR,’ Biden stared down Putin nuke threat”

14 October 2024 (also available at youtube but with interrupting ads)

I might also add here that if you might think that Mercouris is reading from a teleprompter because NO ONE can have THIS MUCH of a total-recall memory and have both maps and time-lines, and not only events, at ready-recall and logically interconnected in his head, so as to be able to tell on the very day of a historic event, what has been happening and why, this is the way he is: he doesn’t need to look at notes or at a prepared script in order to be able to do what he does. He is a great historian, and not ONLY a great investigative journalist. He is authentically a phenomenon — which none of the U.S.-and-allied media would ever want to hire (because he is too honest, too competent, and too insightful, for any of them to want to hire).

Also on October 14th, one of the major newspapers in America’s colony of the UK, the Independent, headlined as boringly as they could for a number of supposedly minor news-stories about the Ukraine war, “Ukraine-Russia latest: Kremlin accuses NATO of stoking nuclear tensions as drill with 2,000 troops launched”, including the actually ominous major news report, that Friedrich Merz, who is widely expected to be Germany’s next leader (and Germany is America’s largest colony, with 231 U.S. military bases), had criticized Germany’s current leader Olaf Scholz, for NOT transgressing Russia’s stated red line that if any NATO nation allows Ukraine to use that nation’s donated missiles so as to strike deep enough into Russia to threaten to decapitate Russia’s central command in The Kremlin, then Russia won’t wait but will promptly destroy not only Ukraine but that nation and any (such as America) who have allowed it to allow that permission to Ukraine. Merz said he would “supply [to Ukraine] the Taurus missiles. Then it is up to (Russian President Vladimir) Putin to decide how far he wants to escalate this war”, “according to N-TV” (which is viewed by only 1% of the German public). In other words: just as in America the expected winner of the White House, Kamala Harris, is not known by the American people to want to force Russia to start WW3, so too is this the case in the U.S. regime’s biggest colony.

This time it is not just Iraq etcetera that the U.S. regime wants to conquer, but Russia itself. And Russia has already made clear that they won’t allow this to happen. Russia is not “playing chicken” with America, and it is not playing cat-and-mouse with it either. Unlike the U.S. regime, it has no interest in taking over the entire world, but it DOES have not only an interest but a determination, to remain a sovereign and independent country over its own territory, even if it will have to conquer a colony that the U.S. seized (in 2014), so as to protect itself from the U.S. regime. That’s a fact which almost nobody in the U.S. empire talks about.

PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.). I am not asking for money, but I am asking my readers to spread my articles far and wide, because I specialize in documenting what the Deep State is constantly hiding. This is, in fact, today’s samizdat.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Only Idiots, at This Stage, Still Trust Any Mainstream American News-Media. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Israel’s permanent national security doctrine is basically “We can have peace tomorrow if we just kill a few more people today.”

But it’s always today. Tomorrow never comes.

Israel never succeeds in killing its way to peace, because that’s not actually a thing.

You can’t murder, oppress and tyrannize people into obedience. You can kill off the people who oppose you, but in doing so you just create more people who oppose you. You can scorch the earth killing off every member of Hamas and Hezbollah, but in so doing you just ensure the birth of more Hamases and Hezbollahs.

The only way to murder a population into submission is to kill everyone. To turn the entire middle east into a barren wasteland of death and destruction, so there’s nobody left living to oppose you. That’s the only way “kill today to have peace tomorrow” can work.

And in fairness it did work for other western settler-colonialist projects. In North America and Australia the white man just killed and killed and killed and killed until the opposition was exterminated and the few who remained were broken.

But the indigenous population of historic Palestine is different, in that it doesn’t stand alone. They are surrounded by ancient civilizations who have a longstanding relationship with them, and a kinship of religion and culture. Any move to exterminate the indigenous population like other western settler-colonialist projects have done draws hostilities from surrounding nations, as we are seeing today.

So in order for Israel to kill its way into peace, it needs to not just kill off the Palestinians but kill everyone in the surrounding region who would oppose its doing so. And the Israelis know this, which is why you hear some far right Zionists talking about the need for a “Greater Israel” whose territory extends far beyond Israel’s current borders.

So Israel will always exist in a continuous state of war until it either (A) ceases to exist in its present tyrannical iteration or (B) kills or breaks all its enemies throughout west Asia. That’s the only way the dust can ever settle on the killing.

And that’s why Israel cannot continue to exist in its present iteration. It was a very, very bad idea, just like all the many other very, very bad ideas throughout history, like slavery.

In order for the killing to end, the murderous settler-colonialist project known as Israel must end. This is a big task, but so was freeing the slaves. The only alternative is to plunge further and further down along this trajectory toward more and more killing, drawing in more and more powerful military forces and exponentially expanding the death toll in the process.

A massive war between Israel’s powerful western allies against Iran and its partners in the region would kill millions upon millions of people and devastate the world economy. But that’s precisely the trajectory that western support for Israel’s killing campaigns has us on.

I find this an untenable prospect. It would be much less devastating to dismantle the apartheid state of Israel and make arrangements for the west to absorb anyone who wishes to flee from a state where everyone would have equal rights. It would be difficult, it would be inconvenient, but it would be much, much easier and more ethical than helping Israel continue enacting its “kill today to have peace tomorrow” doctrine.

Nobody has ever presented an argument for why Israel should continue to exist in its present iteration that is both logically and morally defensible. It’s just a crazy, stupid thing we are doing, the same as all the other crazy, stupid things we’ve done throughout history. One day this will be seen clearly by everyone.

__________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

The post Israel’s Motto Is ‘We Can Have Peace Tomorrow If We Just Kill A Few More People Today’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Parthians feared us; we, in turn, held them in dread, and from the mating of our two fears would come war.

—Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar

Hadrian was the Emperor of Rome in the years 117-138 AD, at the Roman Empire’s zenith. During his reign he constantly contended with the practical problem of how to incorporate people with strong tribal identities into a multiethnic polity. He often found it formidably difficult.

This morning I thought of Hadrian’s troubles when I read an investor newsletter issued by a friend to his clients in which he presents his reflections on the macro social and economic risks of the coming presidential election in November.

As he pointed out, America is now divided into two political tribes. He believes we should be prepared for the possibility that, regardless of the election’s outcome, we will likely experience civil unrest. He did not predict which election outcome will likely produce the more disorderly social outcome. However, it seems to me that if the George Floyd riots of 2020 offer any guidance, we may be in for similar rioting, burning, and looting if Trump wins.

While Democrats often point to the January 6 Capitol “attack,” this riot did not feature incendiary devices, and the rioters did not destroy the building apart from smashing windows, prying open doors, and overturning furniture and file cabinets in Congressional offices. It seems to me that the lack of arson at the Capitol riot sharply distinguishes it from the George Floyd riots in which historic buildings like St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington were set ablaze.

My friend’s newsletter featured a poignant section in which he reflected on how hard it has become for the two different factions in our society to understand each other. This resonated with me, as I often find myself unable to comprehend or communicate with old friends and even family members who have declared their intention to vote for Kamala Harris.

At moments like these, it’s important to understand that when we disagree about something, we tend to assume we are talking about the same thing. After all, we are both speaking the English language and referring to the same objects. This makes it hard to understand why we view the matter in such opposing ways.

In fact, though we are using the same words and referring to the same objects, we attribute vastly different significance to the same phenomena. A vivid illustration of this lies in the domain of humor. What some people regard as a harmless and funny joke may be viewed as outrageously offensive by others.

While Trump supporters are afraid that Harris will be the puppet of shadowy interests, Harris supporters think it’s a good thing that the chief executive will be constrained by a committee. As they see it, rule by a Harris committee is far preferable to rule by true executive power vested in Donald Trump.

Lately I’ve been wondering if, thousands of years ago, tribal conflict may have served some natural evolutionary function—something like “survival of the fittest tribe.” Rereading Homer’s Iliad a few days ago, I was struck by how much warfare during late Bronze Age Greece was apparently a matter of stealing the other tribe’s young and beautiful women. As distressing as this is for contemporary American sensibilities, I wonder if this was a matter of the stronger warriors get the most attractive females and therefore produce stronger and healthier children.

IF the above conceptualization is plausible, I wonder what it implies for tribal conflict in contemporary America, in which women play such a prominent role. I’d rather face Achilles himself than a legion of female Kamala Harris supporters. The former would give me a quick and painless death, while the latter would vex me to despair.

In an effort to learn more about mankind’s tribal nature, I just ordered The Tribal Mind and the Psychology of Collectivism, edited By Joseph P. Forgas, which appears to be a fascinating book. Dr. Forgas is a Hungarian born Australian who has spent decades researching social perceptions and judgements. I look forward to diving into this book and will post a report as soon as I can.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post Understanding Tribalism appeared first on LewRockwell.

The largest survey of U.S. Catholics ever conducted shows that the faithful want reverent, solemn worship and an end to distributing Holy Communion in the hand and the use of extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion.

On Tuesday, the Real Presence Coalition (RPC) released the results of its massive July 2024 survey seeking to identify causes of a lack of faith in the Eucharist among many self-professed Catholics in the United States. 

The survey, conducted with assistance from the national polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, received nearly 16,000 responses, including from 14,725 U.S. lay Catholics across every Latin diocese in the country. 780 responses were submitted by attendees of the U.S. bishops’ National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis.

“This is the single largest survey of Catholics ever undertaken in the United States,” said RPC spokesperson Vicki Yamasaki. “Surveys from organizations such as Pew Research and Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) come nowhere close to the number of Catholics participating in this survey.”

Notably, the RPC survey drew heavily upon practicing Catholics, with 97 percent of respondents saying that they attend Mass at least once a week and believe in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Most respondents, 84 percent, identified themselves as Catholics “from infancy.”

Asked what has contributed most to loss of faith in the Eucharist, respondents overwhelmingly cited reception of Holy Communion in the hand while standing, with nearly 58 percent saying it has had the “greatest” level of impact. 

They also pointed to the scandal of offering Holy Communion to public sinners who reject Catholic teaching, lack of reverence in the presence of the Eucharist, casual attitudes toward the Eucharist from clergy, failure to catechize the faithful, and moving the tabernacle away from the center of the sanctuary.

More than 71 percent of respondents ranked “homosexuality in the priesthood” as having a “major” or “greatest” level of impact on the decline of belief in the Eucharist as well.

A majority also said that the use of extraordinary ministers, replacement of sacred music with contemporary music, ending ad orientem worship, removing altar rails, failing to hold Eucharistic events like adoration and processions, the decline of beauty in church architecture and liturgy, loss of silence, and the clerical abuse crisis have had “major” or “greatest” impact.

realpresencecoalition.com

The Real Presence Coalition, a group of prominent Catholic figures that includes Bishop Joseph Strickland, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, Father Donald Calloway, MIC, and LifeSiteNews CEO and co-founder John-Henry Westen, noted that respondents expressed concern about “a general decline in reverence during Mass, including casual dress, loud talking, and treating the Mass as a social event.” 

Respondents additionally criticized “irreverent conduct” among the clergy, “with reports of priests rushing through liturgical prayers and failing to handle the Eucharist with care,” and “weak leadership among Church leaders, undermining the Church’s moral authority and causing scandal among the faithful.”

“There is a strong perception that Church leaders, including bishops and the Pope, are inconsistent and weak in upholding Canon 915,” which requires Holy Communion to be denied to manifest grave sinners, according to a presentation by Public Opinion Strategies. 

“Many respondents expressed concern over the lack of reverence shown to the tabernacle, such as failing to genuflect or bow when passing it, casual behavior around it, and laypeople accessing it,” the presentation added. 

Survey respondents proposed numerous recommendations to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) on renewing faith in the Eucharist, with the top recommendation being encouraging reception of the Eucharist on the tongue while kneeling (29 percent). The next was catechizing the faithful, such as on transubstantiation and worthy reception (24 percent). 

Respondents further urged bishops to promote “greater reverence for the Eucharist,” for example, by kneeling and genuflecting, to eliminate extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion, and to deny Communion to public sinners.

Read the Whole Article

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The US Government Believed That About 90% Of The World Population Would Die An Attack With Nuclear Weapons

Hiroshima. Chernobyl. Nagasaki. Fukushima. They’re practically household names at this point. As such, most people know that the consequences of the radioactive fallout spread far beyond the borders of these towns and cities. What you may not realize, however, is just how far.

In some cases, the consequences might seem trivial. Take, for example, the lack of salad greens throughout France for months following the Chernobyl disaster.

Meanwhile, the black rain following the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were clearly devastating.

In this regard, radioactive fallout can be elusive—taking a ruinous toll on some, while others are left seemingly untouched.

Either way, the most important point to remember is that fallout is the inevitable result of practically any major nuclear event. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a meltdown at one of the world’s 450 active nuclear facilities, a terrorist attack with a dirty bomb, or full-scale nuclear war: fallout will be a fact of life for anyone in the surrounding area.

The silver lining? Radioactive fallout isn’t nearly as instantaneous, destructive, and unpredictable as a nuclear blast or meltdown. Indeed, it is something that you can prepare for—something you can work around and navigate your way through.

So in this post, we’re going to take a deeper look at the nature of nuclear fallout and delve a bit deep into the chances of surviving a nuclear attack.

This means we’re going to look at the science behind it, the basics of how fallout works, the situations that can arise, and the challenges you may face in the event of a nuclear disaster.

We will also pay close attention to prevailing wind patterns and geography, allowing us to gauge how much radioactive fallout you would potentially be exposed to during a nuclear attack or disaster.

Read the Whole Article

The post Preparing for the Unexpected appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ho pubblicato il mio terzo libro, il titolo è Il Grande Default. Lo trovate disponibile per l'acquisto al seguente link su Amazon: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0DJK1J4K9

L'accumulo di capitale è necessario per fornire i finanziamenti alle imprese sostenibili, le quali generano occupazione, reddito e gettito fiscale. La determinazione dei prezzi nei mercati dei capitali è essenziale per valutare accuratamente il rapporto rischio/rendimento sia degli investimenti economici reali che delle attività finanziarie. La determinazione dei prezzi alimenta quindi l'allocazione efficiente del capitale al suo impiego più redditizio sulla base delle informazioni raccolte da milioni di investitori. Questo concetto è uno dei fondamenti cruciali della teoria capitalista.

Quando le banche centrali hanno spinto i tassi d'interesse sia a lungo che a breve termine ai minimi storici, sono successe due cose:

• Gli investimenti meno attraenti sono diventati "redditizi";

• L'allocazione del capitale ha iniziato a subire distorsioni.

Il tasso d'interesse è essenzialmente il "prezzo del tempo", poiché il futuro tende ad essere più rischioso del presente. Quando prendiamo in prestito dal futuro per investire, un tasso d'interesse cerca di riflettere questo rischio: maggiore è l'incertezza, maggiore è il tasso d'interesse. O è così che dovrebbe andare, ma le banche centrali hanno fatto e stanno facendo di tutto per aggirare questa legge economica. Con tassi d'interesse molto bassi o negativi, che sono diventati comuni dal 2010 in poi, i finanziamenti diventano disponibili anche per quegli investimenti che non sono redditizi.  Questa è un'allocazione del capitale pericolosa perché tali imprese non redditizie dovrebbero fallire, ma schivano il proverbiale proiettile d'argento grazie ai finanziamenti artificialmente a buon mercato. Queste imprese "zombi" sprecano capitale che invece potrebbe essere utilizzato per finanziare investimenti più redditizi, il che a sua volta si tradurrebbe in salari più elevati, dividendi e plusvalenze per gli azionisti e un'economia più vigorosa e dinamica.

Questo è il fardello che le banche centrali hanno apposto sulle spalle dell'economia mondiale, e si vede anche nei numeri ufficiali. La misurazione dell'impatto della distruzione creativa, ovvero il flusso di innovazioni tecnologiche nell'economia, è ostacolata dal fatto che non è osservabile. Quando si manifesta un'innovazione tecnologica in grado di aumentare la redditività, le imprese acquisiscono nuove attrezzature e lavoratori più qualificati per integrarle nella produzione. Sebbene possiamo misurare attrezzature, macchinari e persino la qualità del lavoro, l'aumento effettivo della produttività dell'innovazione non può essere osservato direttamente, almeno a livello "macro".

Tuttavia conosciamo il livello di aumento della produzione, gli investimenti in attrezzature e macchinari (capitale) e il miglioramento della quantità/qualità della forza lavoro. La parte riguardante l'aumento della produzione che non può essere spiegata da questi elementi può essere interpretata come crescita della produttività in tutta l'economia.

Le banche centrali hanno svuotato l'economia mondiale indebolendo seriamente il processo di distruzione creativa e hanno distrutto il meccanismo di determinazione dei prezzi nei mercati dei capitali, il che ha portato a gravi distorsioni (bolle) nei mercati finanziari. La conseguente fragilità dell'economia mondiale e dei mercati finanziari significa che siamo soggetti ad un crollo epico, che danneggerà gravemente famiglie, aziende e persino i Paesi. Le probabilità che il suo epicentro sia l'Europa sono molto alte. In un periodo come questo in cui le finanze delle imprese sono sotto forte stress ed il loro patrimonio netto fortemente eroso, le banche commerciali finiranno nuovamente nell'occhio del ciclone a causa dell'inettitudine del governo italiano e dell'azzardo morale generato dal denaro facile.

E quando tale crollo arriverà, con esso verrà deciso il destino delle nostre generazioni e di quelle future. Se lasciamo che le banche centrali assumano il pieno controllo delle nostre economie, emergerà uno scenario futuro davvero orribile. La generazione degli anni '30 e '40 ha affrontato tempi difficili e ha imparato a lavorare duro, a risparmiare denaro e a lasciare che l'economia facesse il suo corso. Questo semplice fatto è ciò che ha prodotto i bei tempi degli anni '50 e '60, rendendo gli Stati Uniti leader mondiali senza pari, in tutti i sensi. Il 1955, infatti, fu l'ultimo anno in cui gli USA sperimentarono una deflazione dei prezzi al consumo. Però, come dice il proverbio, ciò che una generazione impara quella successiva dimentica.

Richard Nixon si ritrovò a far fronte ad un aumento dell'inflazione dei prezzi: 4,3% nel 1971. Il dollaro era in calo ed i francesi stavano arrivando con le portaerei sui lidi americani per scambiare i loro dollari in oro. Cosa fece Nixon? Tagliò la spesa pubblica, le tasse e si rimboccò le maniche per trovare una via d'uscita dal buco in cui lo aveva scaraventato Lyndon Johnson con le politiche di "Guns and butter"? No, ordinò invece la chiusura della "finestra dell'oro". Da allora in poi l'America avrebbe operato con un nuovo tipo di denaro fasullo, coperto solo dalla credibilità dei futuri capi del Tesoro e della FED.

L'inflazione salì al 13% nel 1980 e sembrava inarrestabile, almeno fino a quando Paul Volcker la riportò sotto controllo. Questa spallata garantì agli Stati Uniti 20 anni di relativa prosperità. Ma da allora è come se fosse stato reciso l'ultimo barlume di sanità economica nelle menti degli economisti mainstream e degli imbonitori nei media generalisti.

In primo luogo, nel 2001 George W. Bush cedette ai guerrafondai e all'ala militare/industriale del Deep State dando il via alla guerra più lunga, più costosa e più inutile nella storia degli Stati Uniti. Non c'era un nemico identificabile. Nel frattempo anche il capo della FED, Alan Greenspan, imboccò la strada dell'azzardo morale infinito: piuttosto che lasciare che l'economia guarisse da sola dopo la recessione del 2001, la manipolò e la distorse ulteriormente abbassando il tasso di riferimento oltre 500 punti base.

Questi tassi d'interesse artificialmente bassi generarono la crisi dei mutui del 2008-2009. Poi sia la FED, con il successore di Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, che il governo federale, con Barack Obama, hanno raddoppiato la dose. Bernanke giustificò la propria mancanza di spina dorsale nel suo libro, The Courage to Act, e come il suo predecessore tagliò il tasso di riferimento di oltre 5 punti percentuali fino a quasi zero. Obama continuò a finanziare le cattedrali nel deserto avviate dalla precedente amministrazione e sebbene si fosse impegnato a far uscire l'America dalle futili guerre di Bush, quando arrivò il momento critico piuttosto che scontrarsi con i guerrafondai, compresi Hillary Clinton e Joe Biden, si lasciò andare.

La crisi successiva, nel settembre 2019, non ha fatto altro che portare alla luce tutti quegli errori economici spazzati sotto il tappeto in passato ma moltiplicati nei costi. La continua distorsione dei mercati attraverso gli interventi progressivi e crescenti da parte del sistema bancario centrale non solo ha creato un scollamento gigantesco tra Main Street e Wall Street, ma i presunti guadagni generati da quest'ultimo comparto sono stati il risultato di un trasferimento di ricchezza grazie alla stampa di denaro. Ma l'Effetto Cantillon non ha ripercussioni solo sull'inflazione dei prezzi, anche e soprattutto sulla qualità degli investimenti" (o pseudo tali) che vengono intrapresi.

Infatti esso toglie risorse preziose a quelle attività che avrebbero creato una prosperità genuina, come abbiamo visto nella sezione precedente, e le costringe al fallimento. Cosa che non sarebbe accaduta in un mercato non ostacolato. Nel contempo quelle realtà privilegiate artificialmente restano in piedi e non si dedicano più a servire il cliente, bensì gozzovigliano con l'ingegneria finanziaria. La speculazione forsennata che ne emerge non è più quel processo migliorativo che funge da collante tra produzione presente e futura, bensì una mania che spinge gli attori di mercato a rincorrere tutti quegli asset che ancora mostrano un rendimento positivo. Non esiste più un mark-to-market, ma solo un market maker (banca centrale) che man mano socializza comparti interi dell'economia nel momento in cui finiscono sotto pressione a causa degli interventi precedenti.

Accade per eccellenza nel mercato obbligazionario statale e si sta diffondendo al resto dei mercati, come quello obbligazionario societario.

Mises aveva messo in guardia nel suo piccolo gioiello degli anni '50, Planned Chaos, da questo percorso pericoloso. È una strada verso la rovina che infatti richiede interventi sempre più grandi ed invadenti per permettere allo status quo di andare avanti ancora un giorno in più. Il problema è il prezzo da pagare e stiamo vedendo che più passa il tempo più si fa salato, sia in termini economici che in termini sociali. Non dovrebbe sorprendere quindi che il vicepresidente della Banca mondiale, Carmen Reinhardt, ha detto che un disastro finanziario è all'orizzonte: default sovrano e default per il debito aziendale. Il fatto stesso di un crollo imminente non dovrebbe essere una sorpresa, specialmente se ci si ricorda di $1,5 triliardi di derivati in un'economia mondiale che genera solo $80.000 miliardi/anno in beni e scambi misurabili. Non importa ciò che le banche centrali hanno tentato di fare per fermare un nuovo crash dei mercati, niente ha funzionato. I tassi d'interesse da zero a negativi non hanno funzionato, l'apertura di prestiti repo overnight per $100 miliardi a banche fallite non ha funzionato, né il salvataggio da $4.500 miliardi. Non importa cosa provano a fare questi maghi finanziari, la situazione continua a peggiorare. Piuttosto che riconoscere ciò che sta realmente accadendo, sono stati selezionati capri espiatori per spostare la colpa.

Dallo schema Ponzi delle pensioni fino alla "Everything bubble" dei giorni nostri, il sistema in cui operiamo è stato distorto a tal punto che ormai inizia ad essere una passività anche per chi è ai posti di comando. L'incapacità di attuare un calcolo economico in accordo coi mercati è il cuore del problema. La teoria Austriaca del ciclo economico, annunciata da Ludwig von Mises nel 1912, ci dice che un'offerta di denaro gonfiata porta a distorsioni dei prezzi nei mercati dei capitali. Queste distorsioni promuovono investimenti in linee di produzione che produrranno perdite quando l'offerta di moneta smetterà di crescere, peggio quando si contrae.

La tesi di un Grande Reset è la demolizione controllata dell'economia. Questa non è un'ipotesi campata in aria, bensì documentata sin dal 1977 e avanzata nientemeno che da Paul Volcker. Il settore più colpito è quello della piccola/media impresa. Questo è il cuore della classe media, la quale è indebitata a livelli senza precedenti e quindi ferma al proverbiale Picco del Debito. Non è più in grado di rispondere agli stimoli monetari e non essendoci più bilanci da saturare attraverso il credito facile la pianificazione centrale fallisce. Nessuna forward guidance è in grado di aggirare questo esito.

Quindi cosa fanno i pianificatori monetari centrali? Agirebbero in base alla fallacia della finestra rotta, annientando il sopraccitato settore per poi permettergli, attraverso sovvenzioni, di tornare a produrre. Un deleveraging classico di quell'ammontare di debiti significherebbe anche la deflagrazione di tutte quelle entità che sono connesse col sistema bancario centrale e che ne traggono profitto: grandi banche commerciali e stati. Libero mercato significa necessariamente libera scelta,  e la piccola/media impresa è la quintessenza del decentramento e dell'imprevidibilità. La spasmodica ricerca del controllo da parte delle autorità centrali, sventolando il feticcio delle emergenze, serve quindi a tenere tutti buoni mentre si riorganizza il "giocattolo". Una strategia, questa, che diventa sempre più impellente per l'UE in particolar modo man mano che passa il tempo. Senza integrazione fiscale, e soprattutto senza un sistema di emissione obbligazionaria di debito comune, non supererà la proverbiale notte. Ha bisogno come il pane di questa soluzione e ciò significa maggiore centralizzazione dei poteri, con tutte le conseguenze del caso.

Il mio libro, in definitiva, esplora e analizza la logica conclusione dell'economia mista, un viaggio per comprendere e svelare le meccaniche ombra che regolano il mondo dell'economia e della finanza di oggi. L'esperimento di fondere insieme economia e geopolitica chiarisce il caos socioeconomico dei giorni nostri, permettendo al lettore di acquisire un nuovo grado di consapevolezza e quindi la possibilità di sfruttare opportunità che prima non vedeva. Un vantaggio comparato rispetto agli altri che, al giorno d'oggi, significa salvezza (economica) oppure dannazione (economica). Il manoscritto va a concludere la mia trilogia di testi dedicati alla corretta e facile comprensione dei temi economici attraverso gli occhiali della Scuola Austriaca. Tutto è iniziato con L'economia è un gioco da ragazzi che presentava ai lettori la teoria basilare, poi ho proseguito con La fine delle fallacie economiche in cui portavo a un livello avanzato la teoria e ora sono pronto a chiudere questo filone con la "messa in pratica", facendo evolvere la teoria del ciclo economico attraverso l'inclusione del sistema bancario ombra e le tematiche geopolitiche.

Un testo, Il Grande Default (qui la versione cartacea) (qui la versione digitale), che sicuramente vi prenderà del tempo ma in cambio di questo investimento metterà insieme i tasselli di quel mosaico che ancora appare confuso a molti.

 

 

di Barry Brownstein

Di recente un lettore mi ha ricordato che il nome ufficiale della Corea del Nord è Repubblica Popolare Democratica di Corea. La denominazione amaramente ironica della Corea del Nord è stata usata da altri stati totalitari. La Repubblica Democratica Tedesca era il nome ufficiale della Germania dell'Est; il governo genocida di Pol Pot in Cambogia era noto come Kampuchea Democratica; il regime comunista separatista dello Yemen del Sud era noto come Repubblica Democratica Popolare dello Yemen.

Sappiamo da coloro che sono fuggiti dalla Corea del Nord che, nonostante le loro sofferenze estreme, alle persone lì viene detto di vivere nel Paese più bello del mondo. Come spiegò F. A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom: “Se il sentimento di oppressione nei Paesi totalitari è in generale molto meno acuto di quanto la maggior parte delle persone nei Paesi liberali immagini, questo è perché i governi totalitari riescono a far pensare le persone come vogliono loro”.

L'identità americana ruota attorno alla libertà. In un sondaggio recente il 91% degli americani ha affermato che la libertà è il loro valore più importante. In un altro sondaggio il 91% degli americani ha affermato che “il diritto di voto è estremamente o molto importante per l'identità della nazione”. Per quanto riguarda la preservazione della libertà, il 94% afferma che “la Costituzione degli Stati Uniti è 'importante' per proteggere la loro libertà”.

Le persone ragionevoli potrebbero essere lo stesso preoccupate, soprattutto se nella loro testa si fa spazio una domanda: la maggior parte degli americani coglie il vero significato di libertà? I ​​collettivisti hanno portato le persone a credere che la democrazia sia sinonimo di libertà. Alcuni individui credono sinceramente che difendendo la nostra democrazia, stiano salvaguardando la libertà. Hanno confuso l'ideale liberale classico di libertà con ciò che F. A. Hayek chiamava libertà politica, ovvero “la partecipazione degli esseri umani nella scelta del proprio governo, nel processo legislativo e nel controllo dell'amministrazione pubblica”.

Il voto non garantisce che una società si muoverà verso la minimizzazione della “coercizione o dei suoi effetti dannosi”. Hayek ci invitò a ricordare che “abbiamo visto milioni di persone votare per essere completamente dipendenti da un tiranno [e] ha fatto capire alla nostra generazione che scegliere il proprio governo non significa necessariamente garantire la libertà”.

Nella sua opera del 1960, The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek descrisse come la “realizzazione parziale” dell’“ideale di libertà” sia ciò che “ha reso possibili i risultati della civiltà [occidentale]”. Proseguì con questo avvertimento: “Dobbiamo sperare che esisterà ancora un ampio consenso su certi valori fondamentali. Ma non è così scontato e se questi valori devono riacquistare potere, sono necessari una totale riformulazione e rivendicazione”.

Nel 2024 potremo dire che l'ampio “consenso” sull’ideale di libertà è scomparso.

In The Constitution of Liberty Hayek spiegò di aver usato la parola libertà con due connotazioni diverse: l'ideale liberale classico di libertà dalla coercizione e l'ideale collettivista di libertà dalla necessità. Spiegò che questi due ideali non possono coesistere logicamente o moralmente. Una volta che la libertà dalla necessità diventa un obiettivo diffuso, le richieste di ridistribuzione della ricchezza diventano la norma.

L'ideale liberale classico di libertà dalla coercizione significa che le persone ​​hanno l'autonomia di fare scelte e portare avanti progetti personali invece di essere costretti dalle decisioni arbitrarie di un altro. In The Road to Serfdom Hayek scrisse che una società libera dipende dalle virtù di “indipendenza, autosufficienza e volontà di correre rischi, la prontezza a sostenere la propria convinzione contro la maggioranza e la volontà di cooperare volontariamente con il proprio vicino”.

L'ideale collettivista di libertà dalla necessità erode queste virtù. Nelle parole di Hayek, libertà dalla necessità significa “liberazione dalla costrizione delle circostanze che inevitabilmente limitano la gamma di scelta di tutti noi”.

Come scrisse Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty, l'ideale di libertà dalla necessità significa che i politici affermano di fare l'impossibile “per soddisfare i nostri desideri”. Richiede alle autorità di esercitare il potere di coercizione per limitare la libertà personale. Gli individui tendono a conformarsi quando il loro ambiente, o le loro circostanze, sono controllati da qualcun altro, costringendoli ad agire in modi che soddisfano gli obiettivi di qualcun altro.

Hayek lanciò questo allarme in The Road to Serfdom: “Non vi è dubbio che la promessa di una maggiore libertà sia diventata una delle armi più efficaci della propaganda socialista e che la convinzione che il socialismo porterebbe la libertà sia genuina e sincera”.

Dubitare delle buone intenzioni dei politici è saggio, ma dubitare di quelle dei nostri vicini, colleghi e familiari è controproducente. Immaginiamo un futuro in cui le idee liberali classiche di libertà dalla coercizione tornino a essere diffuse. Se ciò accadrà, sarà perché i nostri “vicini” avranno cambiato idea. Come scrisse Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, molti di quelli che conosciamo “indietreggerebbero se si convincessero che la realizzazione del loro programma significherebbe la distruzione della libertà”.

Il contraccolpo potrebbe iniziare quando i nostri vicini comprendono il male della coercizione. Hayek scrisse in The Constitution of Liberty che “la coercizione è un male proprio perché elimina un individuo come persona pensante e lo rende un mero strumento nel raggiungimento degli scopi di qualcun altro". La gamma di scelte personali si erode in molti modi: quale università vi ammetterà, quali occupazioni saranno aperte a voi, quale macchina potrete guidare, come riscalderete la vostra casa, ecc. Costringere un individuo in modo che qualcun altro possa essere libero dalla necessità di scelta non produce mai libertà.

L'avvertimento di Hayek è un potente promemoria riguardo le conseguenze della nostra confusione.

Una volta ammessa questa identificazione tra libertà e potere, non c'è limite ai sofismi che possono essere utilizzati per sostenere misure che distruggono la libertà individuale; non c'è fine ai trucchi con cui le persone possono essere esortate, sempre in nome della libertà, a rinunciare alla propria di libertà.

Non puntiamo il dito contro i politici. Alcuni hanno bisogno di poca persuasione per abbandonare la loro libertà. Hayek disse: “Ci sono persone che non apprezzano la libertà di cui ci occupiamo, che non riescono a vedere che ne traggono grandi benefici, e saranno pronte a rinunciarvi per ottenere altri vantaggi. Per queste persone la necessità di agire secondo i propri piani viene percepita più come un peso che come un vantaggio”.

Gli autoritari non impongono il socialismo dall'alto verso il basso; molti lo accolgono con favore dal basso.

Se siamo perplessi sul perché i nostri vicini credano a ciò che noi riteniamo sia solo becera propaganda, in realtà non dovremmo esserlo. Nel suo romanzo, Seduction of the Minotaur, Anaïs Nin ha scritto: “Non vediamo le cose per come stanno, le vediamo per come siamo noi”. In questo caso se la libertà sembra gravosa per alcuni, saranno persuasi dai vari sofismi che supportano la loro visione.

Queste persone sono facilmente convinte che la ridistribuzione della ricchezza, soprattutto se è vantaggiosa per loro ed è approvata da funzionari eletti, equivale a una maggiore libertà. Di conseguenza riterranno vantaggiosa per la società ogni proposta che va a ridurre la libertà delle persone ​​di decidere la propria condotta. Le garanzie costituzionali che limitano il potere dello stato saranno quindi definite come ostacoli alla libertà e alla democrazia.

Hayek scrisse: “Il compito di una politica di libertà deve [...] essere quello di minimizzare la coercizione o i suoi effetti dannosi, anche se non può eliminarli”. Quando l'ideale di vera libertà dalla coercizione non è più un obiettivo sociale condiviso, la storia ci insegna che orrori inimmaginabili sono proprio dietro l'angolo.

[*] traduzione di Francesco Simoncelli: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/

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di Allen Gindler

Uno dei principi fondamentali del marxismo è la teoria del valore-lavoro, la quale afferma che il valore di una merce è determinato dalla quantità di tempo e lavoro socialmente necessario per produrla. In questo contesto il lavoro stesso diventa una merce, qualcosa che può essere acquistato e venduto sul mercato. Marx sostiene che, nel capitalismo, i lavoratori sono costretti a vendere la loro forza lavoro ai capitalisti, sfruttati perché pagati a salari inferiori rispetto al valore pieno prodotto dal loro lavoro. Questa differenza, o “plusvalore”, viene sottratta dal capitalista tramite il profitto. Questa analogia tra lavoro e merci, però, rivela profondi difetti quando esaminata criticamente.

L'idea che il lavoro sia una merce è stata criticata nelle opere di molti importanti economisti, sia della Scuola Austriaca che da altri. Friedrich Hayek, nel suo libro The Road to Serfdom (1944), offre un'ampia critica della pianificazione economica socialista, includendo anche il trattamento marxista del lavoro come merce. La critica di Hayek al marxismo sostiene che esso porta alla centralizzazione del potere, dove lo stato controlla il lavoro e altri aspetti dell'economia. Trattare il lavoro come una merce controllata all'interno di un'economia pianificata mina la libertà individuale e porta a una forma di “servitù della gleba”.

Secondo Hayek la libertà economica, inclusa la libertà di scegliere il proprio lavoro e negoziare i salari, è essenziale per la libertà politica. La sua critica implica che l'approccio marxista al lavoro è fondamentalmente imperfetto e pericoloso per la libertà individuale.

Karl Polanyi, nella sua opera The Great Transformation (1944), introduce il concetto di “merci fittizie” per descrivere cose come lavoro, terra e denaro, trattate come merci in un'economia di mercato ma non veramente tali nel senso tradizionale. Polanyi sostiene che il lavoro è una “merce fittizia”, perché non è prodotta per la vendita ma è un aspetto intrinseco della vita umana.

Critica anche la mercificazione del lavoro, perché riduce gli esseri umani a meri input nel processo di produzione, ignorandone il significato sociale e morale. Sostiene, poi, che trattare il lavoro come una merce è innaturale e dannoso, e porta alla disintegrazione sociale e allo sfruttamento.

Ludwig von Mises, nella sua opera Human Action (1949), critica il concetto marxista del lavoro come merce dal punto di vista della Scuola Austriaca. Egli sostiene che il lavoro non può essere trattato come un qualsiasi altro bene o servizio, perché è intrinsecamente legato alla scelta e all'azione umana. Mises dice che il lavoro è un'espressione di preferenze e valori individuali, e che non possono essere ridotti a un prezzo di mercato. Critica l'economia marxista per non aver riconosciuto la natura soggettiva del valore, sostenendo che il lavoro non è una merce omogenea e varia a seconda dell'individuo e del contesto.

L'enfasi di Mises sulla scelta individuale e sulla teoria soggettiva del valore ci suggerisce che il trattamento del lavoro da parte di Marx come merce è una semplificazione eccessiva, e che ignora la complessità del comportamento umano e delle relazioni economiche.

Lo strano caso del lavoro come merce

Secondo Marx la forza lavoro è trattata come una merce che i lavoratori vendono in cambio di salari, ma questa merce è diversa da qualsiasi altra. Marx stesso riconosce che la forza lavoro è unica, perché è legata direttamente agli esseri umani; non può essere separata dalla persona che la fornisce. Questo legame intrinseco tra lavoro e lavoratore crea diverse contraddizioni nella teoria marxista.

In primo luogo, se la forza lavoro è una merce, è davvero molto strana. Secondo Marx questa merce è sempre venduta al di sotto del suo valore. In altre parole, i lavoratori vendono costantemente la loro capacità di lavorare a un prezzo inferiore rispetto al suo valore, generando plusvalore per il capitalista. Ma questo aspetto solleva una domanda fondamentale: se il lavoro è una merce, perché è l'unica merce che viene costantemente venduta al di sotto del suo costo? In qualsiasi altro mercato vendere una merce al di sotto del suo valore sarebbe considerata una pratica commerciale insostenibile, la cui unica conclusione è la bancarotta. Eppure nella teoria di Marx questo non solo è comune, ma necessario per il funzionamento del capitalismo.

Questa nozione implica che i lavoratori siano degli “imprenditori stupidi”, i quali vendono ogni giorno la loro merce, il lavoro, in perdita. Questa caratterizzazione non è solo degradante, ma anche illogica. È difficile concepire una qualsiasi persona razionale, per non parlare di un’intera classe di esse, che si impegna costantemente in una pratica economica talmente controproducente.

In altre parole, se accettiamo la premessa che la forza lavoro è una merce, allora dobbiamo anche accettare che i lavoratori accolgono sistematicamente un valore inferiore a quello di mercato per il loro prodotto. Ciò va contro i principi economici di base, in cui i venditori cercano di massimizzare il prezzo che ricevono per i loro beni o servizi. L'idea che un'intera classe di persone venderebbe volontariamente il proprio lavoro al di sotto del suo valore sfida la logica e mina la credibilità della teoria marxista.

Per illustrare l'assurdità del lavoro-merce, si consideri l'esempio di un idraulico. Egli possiede i propri strumenti e opera in modo indipendente, non vende la propria forza lavoro a un capitalista. Fornisce un servizio direttamente ai clienti e addebita una tariffa per il proprio lavoro. In questo scenario l'idraulico è sia il proprietario dei mezzi di produzione (i propri strumenti e competenze) sia il fornitore del servizio; controlla il prezzo della propria manodopera e le condizioni in cui lavora.

Tuttavia, secondo la teoria marxista, questo idraulico venderebbe la propria forza lavoro al di sotto del suo valore, anche se stabilisse le proprie tariffe e condizioni di lavoro. Non ha molto senso. L'idraulico, agendo come “capitalista” di sé, cercherebbe di applicare un prezzo che copra i propri costi e fornisca un margine di profitto. Non c'è ragione per cui la propria forza lavoro debba essere venduta al di sotto del suo valore, e il concetto di plusvalore diventa irrilevante in questo contesto. L'idraulico non è un “imprenditore”, ma un attore di mercato razionale che stabilisce i prezzi in base al valore del proprio lavoro.

L'esperienza socialista: manodopera sottocosto

I marxisti sostengono che lo sfruttamento del lavoro è insito nel capitalismo e che il socialismo lo correggerebbe abolendo la proprietà privata dei mezzi di produzione. Tuttavia l'esperienza dei regimi socialisti, come l'Unione Sovietica, la Cina sotto Mao e Cuba, racconta una storia diversa.

Anche in queste società marxiste i lavoratori continuavano a vendere la loro forza lavoro in cambio di salari. Lo stato, piuttosto che i capitalisti, controllava i mezzi di produzione e determinava la distribuzione del plusvalore. Tuttavia ciò non eliminò la critica marxista secondo cui il lavoro veniva venduto al di sotto del suo valore. Infatti i marxisti sostenevano che lo sfruttamento da loro denunciato andava avanti, con lo stato che agiva come capitalista e appropriandosi del plusvalore dei lavoratori.

Se i lavoratori in un ambiente socialista continuano a vendere il loro lavoro al di sotto del suo valore, allora il marxismo è un fallimento non solo come critica al capitalismo, ma anche come guida per costruire una società senza classi. La persistenza di questa dinamica anche col socialismo suggerisce che il marxismo è profondamente fallace, sia nella teoria che nella pratica.

Il marxismo come sofisma

L'intero quadro marxista si basa sulla premessa che il lavoro è una merce. Se il lavoro non è una merce, la coerenza logica del marxismo crolla perché i suoi concetti chiave (plusvalore, sfruttamento, contraddizioni del capitalismo e inevitabilità della rivoluzione socialista) perdono il loro fondamento.

Se il lavoro non è una merce, allora:

• Il plusvalore non può essere calcolato nel modo descritto da Marx, il che indebolisce il concetto di sfruttamento capitalista;

• Lo sfruttamento dei lavoratori, come lo definì Marx, non può aver luogo se dal lavoro non viene estratto alcun plusvalore;

• La contraddizione tra forze produttive e rapporti di produzione potrebbe non esistere nella forma teorizzata da Marx, eliminando la forza trainante dietro il cosiddetto crollo del capitalismo;

• La giustificazione di una rivoluzione socialista risulta indebolita, poiché il proletariato non subisce lo sfruttamento cronico che, secondo Marx, porta a un cambiamento rivoluzionario.

L'affidamento del marxismo alla premessa fallace del lavoro-merce lo priva delle sue fondamenta. Dati i difetti teorici e pratici del marxismo, è ragionevole concludere che esso funziona come una forma di sofisma nella teoria socio-economica. Il sofisma si riferisce a un argomento che appare plausibile in superficie, ma è fondamentalmente fuorviante e in ultima analisi inattuabile. Il marxismo si adatta bene a questa definizione.

[*] traduzione di Francesco Simoncelli: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/

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Following Hurricane Helene, many private helicopter pilots launched their own search and rescue missions. One would think government officials would welcome the help of these volunteers, but instead they harassed them and even threatened to arrest them!

For example, one private helicopter pilot rescued an individual stranded by Helene. Unfortunately, he was threatened with arrest if he flew his helicopter back into the impacted area to save someone left behind on the earlier flight.

In a video shared by comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore, Jonathan Howard, a member of the Florida State Guard and volunteer for the nonprofit group Aerial Recovery, discussed how the government took credit for the rescue of an 11-day-old baby even though the rescue was done totally by volunteers. Mr. Howard stated that when he goes on a search and rescue mission he sees around forty other private helicopters and just two military helicopters.

One reason the federal government is unable to provide adequate aid to those impacted by Helene (and now Milton) is the government is sending military aid worth billions of dollars to Ukraine and Israel. In fact, over 700 members of the Tennessee National Guard are deploying to the Middle East as people in the state deal with damage from Hurricane Helene!

When questioned on Fox News about Helene’s impact, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham made an impassioned plea …. for more aid to Israel. Senator Graham is far from the only member of Congress to put the needs of foreign countries and the military-industrial complex ahead of Americans.

Congress will likely consider a multi-billion-dollar disaster relief bill in the post-election “lame duck” session. Conservative Republicans will (properly) demand the spending be offset by cuts in other spending. The problem is most of these “fiscal conservatives” will vote to increase the national debt to fund the military-industrial-complex.

When I served in Congress, I voted against federal disaster aid even when the disaster impacted my district. Inevitably my office would receive complaints from outraged constituents. After a few months of jumping through the federal government’s bureaucratic hoops in seeking to recover from the disaster, many constituents would call my office to say that they now agree that they would be better off if the government would stop trying to “help” the victims of natural disasters.

One of the helicopter pilots who voluntarily flew into the areas impacted by Helene was Curves fitness chain founder Gary Heavin. Mr. Heavin, in addition to being a successful businessman, is a passionate advocate for liberty who serves on the advisory board of my Institute for Peace and Prosperity. It is not surprising that someone who believes in liberty would be willing to help those in need rather than rely on the government to provide assistance.

Contrary to the lies spread by authoritarians, libertarianism does not require selfishness. Libertarians welcome voluntary action to help those in need. Libertarians object to government assistance because it is based on force. Authoritarianism leads to poverty, war, chaos in the streets, and a lack of compassion for the less fortunate. Liberty leads to prosperity, peace, and a flourishing of private charities.

The post Hurricane Response Proves Volunteerism Is Better Than Authoritarianism appeared first on LewRockwell.

In the U.S., 66% of adults are estimated to have at least one prescription, and the average person has nine filled annually. As an awake physician, one of the most depressing aspects of my work is seeing patients, especially the elderly, weighed down by numerous prescriptions that frequently do more harm than good.

For example, as I showed here, statins provide a negligible benefit (e.g., at best, taking them for five years extends one’s lifespan by 3-4 days) but create significant side effects such as severe muscle pain and cognitive impairment for 20% of users.

This tragic situation is best demonstrated by a 2007 study which showed that simply discontinuing the least necessary prescriptions resulted in a 23% reduction in the death rate and an 18.2% decrease in hospital referrals. Sadly, since the trend in medicine is always to have people on more drugs, data like this has had no effect on the practice of the overprescription of medications.

Over the years, I’ve asked dozens of holistic doctors which widely prescribed drugs they consider to be the most unnecessary and dangerous, and in addition to statins, three frequently make their list:
•NSAID painkillers (discussed further here).
•SSRI antidepressants (discussed further here).
•Stomach acid blocking PPIs (the focus of this article).

Acid Reflux

Your stomach contains acid that it uses to digest food (primarily by turning on powerful enzymes that digest protein). When the stomach is digesting food, the acid should stay inside the stomach, but sometimes, it leaks back up into the esophagus (your throat) because the muscle that seals the top of the stomach (the LES) fails to fully seal. Since stomach acid is irritating, it frequently creates an unpleasant condition known as heartburn when it refluxes into areas like the throat that are not resistant to its acidity.

Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) is a very common condition, estimated to affect 20% of adults (ranging between 18.1% to 27.8% of adults in the USA), is slightly more common in women, and those numbers have been gradually increasing globally.

In addition to overt acid reflux, another condition is silent reflux (laryngopharyngeal reflux), where minor reflux occurs without causing overt heartburn. It is often the root cause of a variety of other symptoms, such as:

•Allergies
•Asthma and reactive airway diseases
•Burning in the mouth or on the tongue
•Chronic sore throat
•Ear pressure and ear infections
•Frequently feeling like you need to clear your throat (and sometimes cough)
•Post-nasal drip
•Sensation of a painless lump in the throat
•Sinus issues

While most medical conditions are overemphasized to sell more prescriptions, silent reflux is not, and it is quite rare for me to meet an otolaryngologist (ENT) who recognizes this is the root cause of their patients’ symptoms. Fortunately, silent reflux is highly responsive to lifestyle changes (e.g., not eating at night), and those measures frequently produce profound improvements for patients.

Why Stomach Acid Is Essential for Your Health

Subtle distortions frequently occur in science, creating a false conception of reality that conveniently allows a profitable industry to exist. For example, stomach acid is largely viewed as unnecessary and thus frequently possible to justify eliminating with acid suppressing medications. In reality, it has numerous vital functions:

Protein Digestion: Amino acids, the building blocks of the body, are obtained from protein. Without sufficient acid, proteins can’t be properly digested, leading to significant nutritional deficiencies, impaired energy levels, mood or cognitive function, and food sensitivities from undigested foreign proteins entering the bloodstream.

Sterilizing the Stomach: Acid is a barrier to harmful microbes, preventing them from entering and infecting the digestive tract. Those with low stomach acid are thus at higher risk for severe foodborne illnesses and hospital-acquired infections.

For example, one study found that ventilated patients who received an acid blocking medication (which was not as powerful as the newer PPIs) were twice as likely to develop pneumonia and 60 percent more likely to die from hospital acquired pneumonia. Similarly, a Clostridium difficile infection is the leading cause of hospital-associated infectious diarrhea. It has a considerable impact on the length of a hospital stay and its costs—those on PPIs were found to be twice as likely to develop this condition. Furthermore, one large review of septic patients found those on PPIs were 4.3% more likely to die than those not on PPIs.
Note: the largest review that has been done so far of PPIs and COVID-19 found PPIs increased a COVID patient’s risk of dying by 77%.

Many of the issues with acid suppression are best illustrated by how they alter the normal bacterial flora of the gut. For example, to quote the manufacturer of one PPI:

Like other agents that elevate intragastric pH, omeprazole [Prilosec] administered for 14 days in healthy subjects significantly increased the intragastric concentrations of viable bacteria. The pattern of the bacterial species was unchanged from that commonly found in saliva. All changes were resolved within three days of stopping treatment.

Nutrient Absorption: Many (myself included) believe one of the primary causes of all the chronic illnesses we see today are widespread deficiencies of vital nutrients. Much of this deficiency comes from:
•Industrial agriculture (which nutritionally depletes the soil)
•Chelating herbicides such as Roundup (which sequester essential minerals like manganese)
•Food processing (which removes many vital nutrients from food)
•Impaired absorption of the nutrients that remain.

Note: manganese deficiency is a root cause of many debilitating conditions, such as hyper-mobile connective tissue disorders (which make individuals much more sensitive to environmental toxins—for example, patients with ligamentous laxity are much more vulnerable to vaccine injuries). Fortunately, with appropriate manganese supplementation,& these conditions often significantly improve.

Poor stomach acid levels hinder the absorption of critical minerals and vitamins. Beyond making individual amino acids available, certain vitamins (e.g., B12) depend upon stomach acid for absorption, and many minerals bound to plants (e.g., iron) will only separate and become absorbable in an acidic environment.

Note: this is a key reason why stomach acid deficiency is particularly problematic for vegetarians.

Digestive Signaling: Acid stimulates the release of hormones (e.g., secretin and cholecystokinin) and enzymes necessary for digestion. These signals ensure that the pancreas releases the right enzymes to continue breaking down food and that the digestive system functions efficiently. Impaired acid levels can disrupt this process, leading to issues like indigestion and floating stools.

Why would Nature expend so much metabolic energy to provide each one of us at birth (and until at least age forty) with an ample supply of stomach acid and pepsin if it weren’t really necessary for digestion?” — Jonathan Wright MD

Read the Whole Article

The post The Great Acid Reflux Scam appeared first on LewRockwell.

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Biden Administration mismanagement – or worse – from day one of the latest Israeli multi-front war in the Middle East has led us to where we are today, at the brink of an all-out regional war with some 40,000 US troops and multiple US military bases in the region with targets on their back.

Biden’s blank check to Israel after the attacks of October 7, 2023, to launch multiple wars against its neighbors and carry out the mass murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza has drawn the US right into the middle of a bubbling cauldron of WWIII. And rather than take a sober look at actual US national security interests, Biden and his neocon incompetents are busy adding fuel to the fire hanging on to the pipe dream that they could do what they failed to do so many times before: remake the Middle East in their neocon image.

According to an article in Politico this past week, while Biden Administration officials publicly urged restraint and a reduction in violence, they privately were working with the Israeli government to encourage a widening of Israel’s military operations to include its northern neighbor, Lebanon. Two top Biden Administration officials, Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shift Israel’s military focus from the already-flattened Gaza northward to Lebanon.

As Politico reports:

Behind the scenes, Hochstein, McGurk and other top U.S. national security officials are describing Israel’s Lebanon operations as a history-defining moment — one that will reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come.

Where have we heard this kind of “let’s do war to re-shape the Middle East” argument before? As Wikileaks reminds us, appearing before the US Congress in 2002 and urging the US to attack Iraq, Netanyahu himself promised that “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”

Yeah, Bibi. How’d that work out for us?

So why is it that 22 years later senior US officials are echoing Netanyahu’s bogus 2002 lies to draw the US into another “history-defining” catastrophe in the Middle East? For Hochstein it might be that he is not the unbiased “honest broker” we need to keep us out of unnecessary war. After all, as the New York Times reminds us, Hochstein was born in Israel, had/has Israeli citizenship, and even served in the Israeli Defense Forces!

Now he is serving as President Biden’s top advisor for the Middle East – a position where it is critical to bring no personal biases to the table.

This should not automatically disqualify him from the position, of course, but just as with concerns over Victoria Nuland and Antony Blinken’s Ukrainian background, neocons pushing for war in the “old country” from which they should have left old allegiances behind should raise a few eyebrows.

McGurk is similarly compromised, as he is another Victoria Nuland/Zelig-like character who has spent his career weaseling into Republican and Democratic Administrations as an “expert,” while his actual expertise comprises solely his adherence to the neocon ideology of all war all the time. He was on board for Bush’s “remaking of the Middle East” to Obama’s fake “Arab Spring to remake the Middle East” to Trump’s “trash the Iran deal to remake the Middle East.”

The guy is a loser who has been wrong his whole career, with a trail of failures that would sink a normal person. But like the Energizer Bunny he just keeps on ticking and ticking toward yet another disaster.

As Politico goes on to note, the Hochstein/McGurk plan to urge Israeli attacks on Lebanon was not widely accepted among actual experts in the Administration:

The decision to focus on Hezbollah sparked division within the U.S. government, drawing opposition from people inside the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community who believed Israel’s move against the Iran-backed militia could drag American forces into yet another Middle East conflict.

Of course there is built into the Politico article the assumption that Hochstein and McGurk were at all concerned about “dragging American forces” into Israel’s regional war. In fact, their intent was the opposite. They no doubt yearned to draw the US government into Israel’s regional war.

Which brings us to where we are today, with the Biden Administration committing more US weapons systems and more US military personnel to serve on the ground in Israel in its war against Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. All at once. How’s that for neocon ambition?

As Pentagon Press Secretary Patrick Ryder announced today:

At the direction of the President, @SecDef authorized the deployment of a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery and associated crew of U.S. military personnel to Israel to help bolster Israel’s air defenses. Full statement:https://t.co/iP8QhG7pTZ

— Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder (@PentagonPresSec) October 13, 2024

With today’s news that Lebanon successfully counter-attacked Israel – hitting an Israeli military base and taking out dozens of IDF soldiers – it appears certain that President Biden and his neocon-dominated foreign policy team are setting up US military members to be killed in Israel to manufacture consent for a full-on US war against all of Israel’s enemies in the region.

They want American soldiers killed in Israel because they know the enormous propaganda value, particularly among a US population that is increasingly against US involvement in Israel’s wars and in favor of ending them instead.

With Kamala tanking in the eyes of a voting public increasingly unappetized by wilted word salads, an old-fashioned war might be just what the Biden brigades are cooking up to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.

With their track record of failure, it is time for those of us who are sane to be very, very worried.

This is going to get really bad really fast if we cannot get the attention of a slumbering – or worse – Congress.

This originally appeared on The Ron Paul Institute.

The post Do they Want American Troops to Die? appeared first on LewRockwell.

You think the bankers are up to no good? No band of scoundrels has brought more chaos and grief to the life of this republic than the claque that gathers darkly under the banner of “Lawfare.” Its public face is Lawfaremedia.org, run by Benjamin Wittes a Brookings senior fellow, but that gang functions only to lend a false-front of decorum to the operations of its Democratic Party activist lawyer-army led by Field Marshal Marc Elias, architect of the ballot fraud that has caused Americans to lose faith in their elections.

Marc Elias was the original expeditor of the RussiaGate hoax in 2016 from his perch at Perkins Coie, then Hillary Clinton’s campaign law firm, which laundered payments to Christopher Steele, front-man for Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS political PR shop, which concocted the fraudulent “dossier,” and set in motion a train of DC intel blob legal shenanigans aimed at defenestrating Donald Trump from the White House — the Mueller Investigation, impeachment, etc.

While all that was going on through the Trump term, and with the Covid-19 Op providing cover, Mr. Elias engineered the 2020 changes in many states’ election laws and bylaws to permit large-scale mail-in voting, organized ballot-harvesting activities, and the use of drop-boxes for receiving bundled votes. He and his George Soros-financed staff lawyers sued states that attempted to require voter-identification, and provided legal protection for Mark Zuckerberg’s $419-million-dollar assault on election precinct staffing in swing states. When the 2020 election concluded suspiciously, Mr. Elias and his gang joined lawsuits in every case where the balloting was contested and got more than sixty of them dismissed on the basis of “standing,” without the merits of the cases being heard. This is Lawfare.

This time around, 2024, Mr. Elias has done everything possible to ensure that millions of illegal aliens stuffed into swing states will have their putative identities attached to harvested mail-in ballots from addresses such as Walmart parking lots and storage units, and has filed lawsuits wherever a state threatens to require proof of citizenship for voting. He has also filed sixty peremptory lawsuits to obstruct attempts to audit any election count after November 5 — as if it is an affront to democracy to even ask questions about official misconduct.

A parallel Lawfare scam underway is the Democratic Party-sponsored 65 Project that seeks to disbar Trump-adjacent lawyers who attempt to challenge any voting irregularities in this year’s election. It’s mission statement reads:

The 65 Project is a bipartisan effort to protect democracy from these once-and-future abuses by holding accountable Big Lie Lawyers who bring fraudulent and malicious lawsuits to overturn legitimate election results, and by working with bar associations to deter future abuses by establishing clear standards for conduct that punish lies about the conduct or results of elections.

Notice the term “Big Lie” to foreclose any inquiry at all into election fraud. That half the people in this country accept such an Orwellian con tells you the vital role played by the perversion of language in the Democratic Party’s war against the citizens of this land. Exactly who is to say, in advance of the event, that any objection to a vote count is fraudulent and malicious? Answer: the people who have maliciously committed fraud. The Democrats have been grooming the public for years with that phrase, the Big Lie, in exactly the same way that pedos groom innocent pubescents who accept the authority of any grown-up, no matter what debauchery they are subjected to.

It’s a tragic turn of fate for our country that the law, and language with it, have been turned into weapons for national suicide. The net result is a nation that can’t think straight anymore and cannot construct any coherent set of rules to live by. So we find ourselves in a society where stealing is no longer a crime, where border-jumping has been downgraded to a clerical error (“undocumented”), where little children are allowed to decide whether they are male or female, where speech that disagrees with the authorities agenda is “misinformation” subject to censorship and prosecution, where candidates for the highest office get selected “democratically” without any votes cast, and where you can be run-over and ruined financially in court by the bottomless legal resources of the Deep State for just speaking your mind.

Now I will tell you something that deeply troubles me and might trouble you. Forgive me if I throw the Overton Window wide open here. Readers may know that I am an American Jew. We have entered a new era of antisemitism. Many might say it is due to the conduct of Israel warring against its enemies. I would say it is as much due to the adoption of Jihad politics by the Marxist-Woke campaign as an instrument to promote political and social chaos in America. Lawfare is essentially jihad waged via the courts against our own disintegrating common culture and national interests.

The lineup of the leading Lawfare attorneys are Jews: Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, Benjamin Wittes, Andrew Weissmann, Michael Bromwich, Michael Sussmann, Lawrence Tribe, Daniel Goldman, Paul Rosenzweig, the exceptionally profligate serial liar Rep. Adam Schiff, and many others. I can’t say I understand exactly what motivates them to engage these antics. (Possibly to defend their Deep State clients against many previous crimes committed since 2016, especially within the FBI and DOJ.) But it’s a really bad look on top of being a nefarious agenda. They are disgracing the rest of us American Jews and putting us in danger. Shame on them. They must be defeated, and their defeat must come within the arena of the very law they work so hard to pervert.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post Lawfare Is Jihad Against Our Country appeared first on LewRockwell.

Playing nice’ won’t change its paradigm. Failure does.

With the assassination of Sayed Hassan Nasrallah and a number of the Hizbullah senior leadership in Beirut – expressly without prior warning being given to the Pentagon – Netanyahu fired the start gun on an implicit Israeli widening of war to – using Israel’s term – the ‘octopus’ tentacles’: Hizbullah in Lebanon; Ansarullah in Yemen; the Syrian government and the Iraqi Hash’ad A-Shaabi forces.

Well, after the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh and part of Hizbullah’s leadership cadre (including a senior Iranian general), Iran – demonised as the ‘octopus head’ – entered the conflict with a volley of missiles that targeted airfields, military bases and the Mossad HQ – but intentionally caused no deaths.

Israel thus made the U.S. (and most of Europe) partners or accomplices to a war now definitively cast as neo-imperialism versus the whole of the non-West. Palestinians – the global icons of the aspiration for national liberation – were to be annihilated from historic Palestine.

Further, the bombing in Beirut, and Iran’s riposte to it, now ranges Israel backed and materially supported by the U.S. vs Iran, backed and materially supported by Russia. Israel, the military correspondent of Yedioth Ahronoth warns, ‘must go crazy and strike Iran – because striking Iran “will end the current war”’.

Plainly, it marks the end to ‘playing nice’ – of incrementally escalating, one calculated step after another – as if playing chess with an opponent who calculates similarly. Both now threaten to take a hammer to the chess board. ‘Chess is over’.

It seems that Moscow too, understands that ‘chess’ simply cannot be played when the opponent is no ‘adult’, but a reckless sociopath ready to sweep away the board – to gamble all on an ephemeral ‘great victory’ move.

Looked at dispassionately, either the Israelis are inviting their own demise by over-extending across seven fronts. Or their hope lies with invoking the threat of their demise as the means to bring in the United States. As with Zelensky in Ukraine, there is ‘no hope’ unless the U.S. adds its fire-power decisively – both Netanyahu and Zelensky assume.

So, in West Asia the U.S. is now supporting, no less, than a war against humanity per se, and against the world. This clearly cannot be in America’s self-interest. Do its power-broker Panjandrums realise the possible consequences for it to stand against the World in an act of gross immorality? Netanyahu is betting his house – and now the West’s – on the outcome of his roulette table ‘bet’.

Is there a sense amongst the Panjandrums that the U.S. is betting on the wrong horse? Whilst it seems there are some contrarians placed at a high level in the U.S. military who do have reservations – as in every ‘war game’ the U.S. loses in the Near East – their voices are few. The wider political class clamours for revenge on Iran.

The dilemma of why there are so few opposing voices in Washington has been addressed and explained by Professor Michael Hudson. Hudson explains that matters are not so simple; that context is missing. Professor Hudson’s reply is paraphrased below from two long commentaries (here and here):

“Everything that’s happened today was planned out just 50 years ago, back in 1974 and 1973. “I worked at the Hudson Institute for about five years, 1972 to ‘76. I sat in on meetings with Uzi Arad, who became Netanyahu’s chief military advisor after heading Mossad. I worked very closely with Uzi there … I want to describe how the whole strategy that led to the United States today, not wanting peace, but wanting Israel to take over the whole Near East, took shape gradually.

“On one occasion, I brought my mentor, Terrence McCarthy, to the Hudson Institute, to talk about the Islamic worldview, and every two sentences, Uzi would interrupt: “No, no, we’ve got to kill them all”. And other people, members of the Institute, were also just talking continually about killing Arabs”.

The strategy of using Israel as the regional battering ram to achieve U.S. (imperial) objectives was worked out essentially in the 1960s by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Jackson was nicknamed ‘the Senator from Boeing’ for his support for the military-industrial complex. And the military-industrial complex backed him to become chair of the Democratic National Committee. He was too twice an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination for the 1972 and 1976 Presidential elections.

Well, he was backed by Herman Kahn too, who became the key strategist for U.S. hegemony in the Hudson Institute.

Initially, Israel didn’t really play a role in the U.S. plan; Jackson (of Norwegian descent) simply hated communism, he hated the Russians, and had a lot of support within the Democratic Party. But when all of this strategy was being put together, Herman Khan’s great achievement was to convince the U.S. Empire builders that the key to achieving their control in the Middle East was to rely on Israel as its foreign legion.

And that arms-length arrangement enabled the U.S. to play the role, Hudson says, of the ‘good cop’, whilst designating Israel to play its role as ruthless proxy. And that’s why the State Department turned over management of U.S. diplomacy to Zionists – to separate and distinguish Israeli behaviour from the claimed probity of U.S. imperialism.

Herman Khan described the virtue of Jackson for Zionists to Professor Hudson as precisely that he was not Jewish, a defender of the military complex and a strong opponent of the arms control system that was underway. Jackson fought against arms control – “we’ve got to have war”. And he proceeded to stuff the State Department and other U.S. agencies with neocons (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearl, Douglas Fife, among others), who, from the beginning, planned for a permanent worldwide war. The takeover of government policy was led by Jackson’s former senate aides.

Herman’s analysis was systems analysis: Firstly, define the overall aim and then work backwards.“Well, you can see what the Israeli policy is today. First of all, you isolate the Palestinians [into] strategic hamlets. That’s what Gaza had already been turned into for the last 15 years”.

“The aim all along has been to kill them. Or first of all, to make life so unpleasant for them that they’ll emigrate. That’s the easy way. Why would anyone want to stay in Gaza when what’s happening to them is what’s happening today? You’re going to leave. But if they don’t leave, you’re going to have to kill them, ideally by bombing because that minimizes the domestic casualties”, Hudson notes.

“And nobody seems to have noticed that what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank now – is all based on the “strategic hamlets” idea from the Vietnam war: the fact that you could just divide all of Vietnam into little parts, having guards at all the transition points from one part to another. Everything that Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere throughout Israel was pioneered in Vietnam”.

If you analysed these neo-cons, Hudson relates,

“they had a virtual religion. I met many at the Hudson Institute; some of them, or their fathers, were Trotskyists. And they picked up Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution. That is, an unfolding revolution – whereas Trotsky said began in Soviet Russia was going to spread around the world: The neo-cons adapted this and said, “No, the permanent Revolution is the American Empire – it’s going to expand, and expand and nothing can stop us – to the entire world”.

The Scoop Jackson neo-cons were brought in – from the beginning – to do exactly what they’re doing today. To empower Israel as America’s proxy, to conquer the oil-producing countries, and make them part of greater Israel.

“And the aim of the United States was always oil. That meant the United States had to secure the Near East and there were two proxy armies to do it. And these two armies fought together as allies, down to today. On the one hand, the al-Qaeda jihadis, on the other hand, their managers, the Israelis, hand in hand”.

“[W]hat we’re seeing is, as I said, a charade that somehow what Israel is doing is “all Netanyahu’s fault, all the fault of the Right-wing there” – and yet from the very beginning they were promoted, supported with huge amounts of money, all of the bombs they needed, all the armaments they needed, all the funding they needed … All of that was given to them precisely to do exactly what they’re doing today”.

“No, there can’t be a two-state solution because Netanyahu said, “We hate the Gazans, we hate the Palestinians, we hate the Arabs – there cannot be a two-state solution and here’s my map,” before the United Nations, “here’s Israel: there’s no one who’s not Jewish in Israel – we’re a Jewish state” – he comes right out and says it”.

Hudson then gets to the bottom of it all. He points us to the fundamental game-changer: Why it is difficult for the U.S. to change its approach – the Vietnam War had shown that any attempted conscription by western democracies was not viable. Lyndon Johnson in 1968 had to withdraw from running for election precisely because everywhere he would go, there would be non-stop stop-the-war demonstrations.

The ‘bedrock’ which Hudson underlines, is the understanding that western democracies no longer can field a domestic army through conscription. ‘And what that means is that today’s tactics are limited to bombing, but not occupying countries.Thus, Israel – whose forces are limited – can drop bombs on Gaza and Hezbollah, and try to knock out things, but neither the Israeli army, nor any other army, would really be able to invade and try to take over a country, or even south Lebanon – in the way that armies did in World War II – so the U.S. drew the lesson. It turned to proxies’.

“So what is left for the United States? Well, I think there’s only one form of non-atomic war that democracies can afford, and that’s terrorism [i.e positively seeking huge collateral deaths]. And I think you should look at Ukraine and Israel as the terrorist alternative to atomic war”, Hudson suggests.

The bottom line, he notes, is what then does this imply with Israel continuing to insist on engaging the U.S. in its regional war? The U.S. is not going to send troops. It can’t do that. The ruling cadre have tried terrorism and the result of terrorism is to align the rest of the world against the West, appalled by the wanton killing and by the breaking of all of the rules of war.

Hudson concludes, “I don’t see Congress being reasonable. I think that the State Department and the National Security Agency and the Democratic Party leadership, with its basis in the military-industrial complex, is absolutely committed”.

The latter might say “Well, who wants to live in a world where we can’t control? Who wants to live in a world where other countries are independent, where they have their own policy? Who wants to live in a world where we can’t siphon off their economic surplus for us? If we can’t take everything and dominate the world, well, who wants to live in that kind of a world?”

That’s the mentality with which we’re dealing; ‘Playing nice’ won’t change that paradigm. Failure does.

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

The post Israel Does What It Does; It Was Always Planned This Way appeared first on LewRockwell.

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The post How Ukrainian Society Fights Reality appeared first on LewRockwell.

There is some speculation in Washington about a so-called October Surprise being engineered by either party or their supporters to change the outcome of the upcoming election. The original October Surprise took place in 1980, when Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager William Casey conspired with several senior CIA officers in Europe to convince the Iranian government to delay the release of the American Embassy hostages until after the November election against Jimmy Carter. Casey believed that any earlier release of the hostages would give a boost to the Carter campaign, demonstrating that the Democratic Party’s policy of how to deal with Iran was working. The Iranian government was approached secretly using CIA resources and complied with the request, believing that it would result in a less hostile relationship with the new administration. In the event, Reagan defeated Carter and some believed that the continuation of the hostage crisis had made the administration look feckless and hurt the incumbent just enough to change the outcome of the election. Since that time “October Surprise” has become shorthand for playing a political dirty trick shortly before the election to directly impact negatively on a candidate’s credibility or ability to respond to problems.

Another recent version of the Surprise is to spread lies about a candidate’s personal history or regarding his or her acceptance of support from enemies like Russia or China, such as the Clinton campaign attempted to do in 2016. And as a variation on that since the United States became enamored of wars and rumors of war, it involves acceptance of getting engaged in a couple of little wars to demonstrate national resolve and willingness to directly confront America’s enemies to compare one candidate with the other. This also involves considerable creativity and the exercising of one’s imagination as America’s national security has not actually been threatened or challenged by anyone since the Cuban missile crisis of 1963, though the current contretemps with Russia over Ukraine does indeed threaten going nuclear.

Certainly, it is not beyond one’s understanding of just how America’s two top political parties have become so cynical and desperate to win at any cost that wholesale distortion of reality might be considered fair game. Or if it is a foreign player interested in the outcome of the election, staging some kind of provocation or even a false flag operation that would result in a dramatic foreign policy development that could influence voters is possible. If this interference takes place shortly before an actual election with little chance that there will be any way to rebut what is being claimed, it might be referred to as an October Surprise.

I have been thinking of the possibility of an October Surprise in the current context, in which the US is heavily engaged in two undeclared wars which have become controversial among voters, to put it mildly. Unfortunately, the candidates don’t speak much about why we are engaged at all in conflicts that could have been resolved in various ways very early on and there is a certain similarity in how Democrats and Republicans respond to the fighting: both tend to support both Ukraine and Israel with only minor objections to some details in what is taking place. Both parties regard cooperating with Volodymyr Zelensky and Benjamin Netanyahu as unshakable rock-solid foreign relationships, or at least that is what they say in public.

I believe that in reality the Ukraine war is something that the US and NATO are looking for a way out of, but Israel is another story and might well be working up a trap for both US parties that might be considered equivalent to an October Surprise. Apparently I am not the only one thinking that way, including Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut who told CNN’s Erin Burnett that “I certainly worry that Prime Minister Netanyahu is watching the American election as he makes decisions about his military campaigns in the north and in Gaza.” Let us accept that Israel has the most powerful foreign policy lobby in the United States and its associated billionaires also represent the majority of political donations going to both parties. It and its Lobby also interfere in American politics and policies more than any other country, and its power is such that many have come around to the view that on key issues Israel is in control of the politicians in Washington. As evidence of that, witness the outrageous bowing and cheering that war criminal Netanyahu received in Washington from the US Congress even though a majority of Americans want to stop arming Israel and protecting it in places like the UN. Compare a groveling Congress with the disdain and walk-out Netanyahu received from the UN membership when he spoke more recently, where he denounced the UN as a “a swamp of antisemitic bile,” if you want to learn what the rest of the world thinks about the Jewish state and its leader.

And Netanyahu himself has made no secret of his desire to have Donald Trump win the presidency next month as he correctly perceives that Trump would give him anything he wants whenever he wants it, just as he did in 2016-2020, when he endorsed Israel as a Jewish state plausibly including the West Bank and Gaza that could deal with its Palestinian minority as it sees fit. Biden/Harris have also supported Israel enthusiastically with only minor reservations, but the Democratic Party has a small but highly visible and growing anti-war element that is in part behind demonstrations taking place all over the US against the genocide in Gaza. Trump, on the contrary, also has several times voiced his willingness to attack and destroy Iran, including his reaction to Iran’s recent retaliatory Israel strike as “The President Should Blow That Country To Smithereens,” which the Democrats, fearing a major regional escalation, have up until now backed away from, though they have pledged that they would stop Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon if it should seek to do so. They haven’t explained how they would do that and Netanyahu is now threatening to attack what he refers to as Iranian nuclear sites while his government and Biden are also discussing hitting Iran’s oil facilities. There would be plenty of support from Republicans to do just that with the ultra-hawkish Senator Lindsey Graham saying that “These oil refineries need to be hit and hit hard because that is the source of cash for the regime to perpetrate their terror.”

Israel is at the same time increasing its pressure on Lebanon and as well on Syria, where it is bombing targets that it claims to be either “Iranian” or “terrorist-Hezbollah” in nature. Note that Israel, even when it is clearly the aggressor, is always able to define itself as a victim, something which the bought and paid for US government and western media also usually fall in line to do. Netanyahu will increase his attacks on Lebanon and on Gaza and will also respond to Iran’s recent missile attack on Israeli territory with an escalation. The idea will be to draw the United States into the conflict to do the real fighting to destroy Iran. Who would be better in that role than a president or president elect Donald Trump who over the past two weeks has been reacting to an evidence-free claim that the Iranian government has been plotting to assassinate him? Trump has also declared to a group of Jewish Republicans that his Republican Party to be the only US political party that is genuinely pro-Israel! How convenient!

So it will work out this way and be explained by Netanyahu as follow – poor perpetual victim Israel, plagued by an antisemitic United Nations, enemies everywhere, is currently under attack by overwhelming hostile forces and is fighting valiantly, only protected in its hour of need due to its great friend and ally the United States of America. But wait! In its hour of extreme peril, when it is being assailed by the Jew hating probably nuclear armed Iranian mullahs, America is having an election in which one of the two parties, the Democrats, itself has a faction that is awash with antisemitism and is seeking to destroy the state of Israel! Yahweh be thanked that the other party the Republicans is four-square solid in defense of both Israel and the Jewish people! The Americans will hopefully know how to vote!

And the Republican party will be helped in that effort to promote the legend of the antisemitic Democrats by both the Israel Lobby and the fire breathing Dispensationalists within its ranks who currently appear to make up the bulk of the GOP, led by the creepy Christian Zionist head case Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House. So let’s see how this plays out. I predict that the desirability of America being Israel’s bonded slave, due to God’s command concerning his Chosen, will at a certain level surface in the remaining campaign, driven by Israel deliberately provoking situations that will force the United States government to fully commit itself to the Jewish state’s “defense.” That will be spun to become a last-minute endorsement of Donald Trump and what he stands for in terms of his willingness to go about physically destroying all of Israel’s adversaries in the Middle East. I suspect it might prove to be enough confusion to tip the result in a close election. We will know in about a month!

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

The post Will Israel Pull Off an ‘October Surprise’ During the Next Month? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Dear Lew,

We have several LRC readers signed up for the online retreat with Fr. McCarthy in November who heard about Fr. McCarthy’s work through your site. Thanks for everything you do!

In case you’ve never seen it, here’s the ABC special that covered the story of the McCarthy family and the miracle of Edith Stein: “It Takes a Miracle.”

Edith Stein was born on Oct. 12, 1891. She was a Jewish atheist and philosopher who eventually converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun. She died at Auchshwitz on August 9, 1942.

Father McCarthy’s daughter was born on August 8, 1984 (August 9 in Auschwitz time). He and his wife Mary named their little girl Benedicta after Edith Stein. (The name she had taken when she became a nun was St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.)

In 1987, Benedicta, just a toddler, swallowed 16 times the lethal dose of Tylenol. The McCarthy’s started a prayer tree to ask for the intercession of Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Little Benedicta was cured. On October 11, 1998, the Catholic Church declared Edith Stein a saint! Fr. McCarthy con-celebrated the canonization Mass with John Paul II.

The post It Takes a Miracle appeared first on LewRockwell.

Like waves on the ocean, countries tend to go through economic cycles.

First, we have the micro cycles, which tend to rise and fall every few years, but may last a decade or more. Then we have the macro cycles, which tend to take hundreds of years.

In a macro cycle, a nation begins to thrive economically, when the people of that country adhere to a strong work ethic. They invest their money and toil into the economy, make a profit, then either save, purchase goods, reinvest, or a combination of the three.

When the great majority of the people do this, the country thrives economically. The greater the economic freedom (i.e., the less governmental oversight and regulation), the more the country thrives.

But this never lasts forever. The eternal fly in the ointment is that governments seek continually to increase their control over others.

First, they focus on the increased control of their own people through regulations, but invariably, they see the opportunity for broader control, through the domination of other nations. They then invade those nations.

Warfare is the costliest venture that nations enter into, and as such, it’s almost always a mistake. But the zeal to have greater power often brushes that fact aside, and leaders choose to invade other nations.

In almost every instance, they fail to underestimate the resistance from the invaded nation, and very quickly, the cost of the warfare doubles and redoubles, over and over again.

Invariably, the leaders then borrow money to keep the war going. Sometimes, they achieve victory in this manner, but more often than not, they fail. They find that the day comes when they must either sell off major assets to pay their debt, or face economic collapse.

Case in point: In 1800, Spain was the dominant empire of the world, having successfully colonized South and Central America and stripped them of a fortune in gold and silver over the course of three centuries – from 1500 to 1800.

But despite this, decades of war with other European powers left Spain broke. Charles III did what leaders always do – he borrowed heavily and debased the currency. He issued fiat currency in the form of paper pesos and used this currency to fund the Spanish colony of Louisiana.

This was meant to be a temporary measure, but as time dragged on, the peso steadily lost value, then became utterly worthless.

Charles, with no economic wiggle-room left, sent the ship El Cazador to the Louisiana colony to pay off debts. Unfortunately, El Cazador sank in 1784 in a storm, taking 450,000 pesos in silver coins down with her.

When Carlos IV became king of Spain, there were few good options. Rather than give up his throne, he offered to sell Louisiana to France’s Napoleon.

Napoleon took advantage of Spain’s national fire sale and bought Louisiana for a song.

But as stated above, countries tend to rise and fall in cycles. In 1803, Napoleon found himself in similar straights, as his own warfare/debt condition was also reaching a desperate level.

Napoleon offered Louisiana to US President Thomas Jefferson, and like Napoleon, Mister Jefferson was able to pick up the one million square miles of prime real estate for a song – about three cents an acre.

So, to re-cap, the last-straw event that cost Carlos IV his empire was a simple shipwreck. The final event was minor. What really condemned Spain was warfare and debt.

The last-straw event that cost Napoleon his empire was the Battle of Waterloo. The final event was not the largest of battles. What really condemned France was warfare and debt.

Mister Jefferson was a far wiser man. Since the founding of the United States, he had continually warned against both warfare and debt. Although he twice dealt with war with Britain, he avoided military adventures – the invasion of other countries.

Similarly, he borrowed, but always judiciously and only with the ability for repayment.

Under his leadership, the US thrived and the American people reaped the benefits.

But of course, that was many micro cycles ago. The US is now at the end of its macro cycle, which can be evidenced by its involvement in what has become continual warfare. The US now invades several other countries in each presidential cycle, ensuring that, if any war winds down, there are others still steaming ahead. In recent years, the US has invaded Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait and Somalia and has “assisted”, or invaded by proxy, in a host of other invasions.

In addition, threats have been issued to North Korea, Turkey, Iran, Venezuela and others that, “Military action is not off the table,” as regards future military adventures.

Along the way, warfare’s ugly twin – debt – has joined in. The US, once the world’s foremost creditor nation, is now both the world’s foremost aggressor nation and the world’s foremost debtor nation at the same time.

But the US has a problem that neither Spain nor France had in the nineteenth century. It has no colonies to peddle. The US certainly can’t offer up the Louisiana territory to other nations, to pay its unmanageable debt.

In one sense, the American people can rest easy that the US will not be selling off bits of real estate in a fire sale, when the notes come due. But unfortunately, that very fact means that the only other possible outcome – economic collapse – will occur.

At some point in the near future, America Inc. will almost certainly go bust.

But as always, the world will not come to an end. The assets and wealth of the world will simply change hands, as they have done since time immemorial.

The grand experiment that began in 1776 will come to an end, as all once-great nations do. The US will continue to exist, but as a shadow of its former self, in the manner of the failed empires before it.

When we look back, we may find that the final event that triggers collapse was in fact minor, but was the perennial “last straw.”

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

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