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It is generally believed that American voters elected Donald Trump president at least in part due to their embracing his lies that he was a peacemaker who would not involve the United States in the pointless wars that have proliferated since 9/11. Trump’s predecessor the hapless Genocide Joe Biden had entangled the US deep in a conflict involving nuclear armed Russia and had also armed, funded and politically protected war criminal Israel in its openly declared objective to eliminate the Palestinians. Neither conflict could be justified based on actual American interests. So Trump looked like a better bet than a witless giggler like Kamala Harris, though voters would have benefited from looking at the Trump record during his first term in office where he was little more than Israel’s mouthpiece after being heavily bribed during his campaign by Nevada casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Trump and his ambassador in Israel David Friedman endorsed the oppression of the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza and also illegally approved moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem. Trump also allowed Israel to annex part of the Syrian Golan Heights and ordered the assassination of Qassim Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and regarded as a major enemy by Israel, killing the man when he was in Baghdad Iraq for peace talks. Trump, like his successor Joe Biden, never said “no” to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Be that as it may, the past five months have demonstrated that searching for an honest man (or woman) in Washington would require Diogenes and his lamp, with little hope of coming up with someone who was not alternately a bad joke, an incompetent, or a screaming psychopath. The last several weeks illustrate just how bad things are, though the real fear must be that they can actually get worse if Trump joins Israel when it ignores the current ceasefire and attacks Iran once again. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump will no doubt have to construct a new big lie to explain their belligerency as it is now clear that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.

Even given the horrors being perpetrated by the United States as a bosom buddy ally of Israel, one is nevertheless particularly taken by the malapropisms and the verbal slurs and even threats of physical abuse increasingly being hurled about by the buffoon who pretends to be the president of the United States. Trump, pretending to negotiate with Iran, also saw fit to threaten to “eliminate” the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, if Iran did not submit to unconditional surrender. He claimed to know the “secret location” where Ali Khamenei was hiding but “won’t kill him for now.” Trump also called out Representative Thomas Massie, one of the most principled men in Congress, on social media, calling him a “LOSER” after Massie posted a social media post criticizing the president for unconstitutionally bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities on Saturday night without a declaration of war. Worse still, Trump also engaged in screaming fits focused on two women journalists who questioned his claim that he had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, demanding that CNN’s White House correspondent “Natasha Bertrand should be FIRED from CNN! I watched her for three days doing Fake News. She should be IMMEDIATELY reprimanded, and then thrown out like a dog.”

Over the past few years Trump’s disdain for dogs has often been on display and he has likened a long list of perceived enemies to dogs — including former FBI director James B. Comey, former acting attorney general Sally Yates, and even his own Secretary of State Marco Rubio. As an animal lover, I found Trump’s expression particularly disgusting and I wondered where the sense of dignity and decency was in a man holding the highest office who would use such a phrase. Or of the brain connected to mouth that would use such an expression in the first place, particularly as the ladies were referring to a leaked report by government analysts. The report suggested that the enriched uranium and centrifuges had been removed from the Iranian sites days before Trump had sent his B-2 bombers to attack them in support of Israel’s own attack on Iran several days before. The damage to the sites was considered to be limited. Interestingly, the Defense Department’s own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analysts were among those who were skeptical of Trump’s claims about the Iranian program. To put it succinctly, Trump may have spent billions of dollars successfully bombing empty tunnels and he been since taking pains to pretend otherwise.

Trump has also shifted his tirades over the Iran attack to what he prefers to label his critics’ disdain for the US military, which carried the bombing out under his orders. President Trump and other White House officials are now suggesting that questioning the decision and efficacy of bombing Iran shows a “lack of patriotism” and is something that “disparages American troops.” These claims remind one of the disastrous Iraq War in 2003 when skeptics were simply marginalized by George W Bush as anti-American or as “traitors” by asserting that they didn’t support the troops.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth discussed the Iran operation’s success in a press conference and fielded questions from the press, while President Trump, who was himself a draft dodger during the Vietnam war, shared his opinion on social media where he posted how “Secretary of Defense (War!) Pete Hegseth, together with Military Representatives, will be holding a Major News Conference tomorrow morning at 8 A.M. EST at The Pentagon, in order to fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots. After 36 hours of dangerously flying through Enemy Territory, they landed, they knew the Success was LEGENDARY, and then, two days later, they started reading Fake News by CNN and The Failing New York Times. They felt terribly!”

Hegseth repeated the message from his boss in the White House to the media, explaining how “What’s really happening is you’re undermining the success of incredible B-2 pilots and incredible F-35 pilots and incredible refuelers and incredible air defenders who accomplished their mission, set back a nuclear program in ways that other presidents would have dreamed. How about we celebrate that? How about we talk about how special America is, that we — only we have these capabilities? I think it’s too much to ask, unfortunately, for the fake news.”

And then there was the usual lie encrusted follow-through that inevitably is produced whenever a leading politician screws up. In a long post on his Truth Social account on Wednesday night, President Trump demanded that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial in Israel come to an end. Netanyahu and his wife have been on the receiving end of three charges of bribery, theft, and breach of trust. Trump, who only last month was reputedly not speaking to Netanyahu and as recently as last Tuesday criticized his government as well as Iran by saying “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

But Trump has perhaps inevitably changed his tune under pressure from the Israel Lobby and Congress and is now defending his war criminal buddy while also praising himself, writing how “I was shocked to hear that the State of Israel, which has just had one of its Greatest Moments in History, and is strongly led by Bibi Netanyahu, is continuing its ridiculous Witch Hunt against their Great War Time Prime Minister! Bibi and I just went through HELL together, fighting a very tough and brilliant longtime enemy of Israel, Iran, and Bibi could not have been better, sharper, or stronger in his LOVE for the incredible Holy Land. Anybody else would have suffered losses, embarrassment, and chaos! Bibi Netanyahu was a WARRIOR, like perhaps no other Warrior in the History of Israel, and the result was something that nobody thought was possible, a complete elimination of potentially one of the biggest and most powerful Nuclear Weapons anywhere in the World, and it was going to happen, SOON! We were fighting, literally, for the Survival of Israel, and there is nobody in Israel’s History that fought harder or more competently than Bibi Netanyahu. Despite all of this, I just learned that Bibi has been summoned to Court on Monday for the continuation of this long running politically motivated case…”

And so it goes, so much lying and dissimulation that one has to wonder what surprises will be on the table next week. The fog of war may have lifted for now and the phony ceasefire between Israel and Iran has paused the immediate bloodshed, but don’t be fooled. The respite is to allow an exhausted Israel to rearm with US provided weapons so the neoconservatives and the Israel Firsters aren’t done. The war drums are still beating, and Trump’s America First movement is starting to fracture under the strain, with a growing divide inside MAGA over America’s pointless wars for Israel. One group wants to stay out of foreign conflicts while the other is ready to back Israel completely, no matter the cost. Trump is either consciously or inadvertently playing his usual role of spewing contradictions and sowing confusion and instability every time he speaks or acts. Israel cannot retreat, it can only continue on its path of blood and slaughter, and Iran will not surrender. This might create in the near and long run the potential for a major false flag operation by Israel to draw the US in and trigger a full-blown war against Iran.

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

The post Trump Rolls Over for a New War appeared first on LewRockwell.

As June comes to an end, so does the pagan festival of debauchery known as “Pride Month.”  It has become an annual annoyance to find troupes of dancing gay men — usually semi-naked and engaging in various forms of erotic foreplay — overtaking public streets as the first warm days of summer return.  It would be nice if the LGBTQ+ crowd — or “Alphabet people” to those without a special letter designation — could enjoy their civil rights without resorting to X-rated acts of exhibitionism in front of children and strangers.  Alas, the celebration of sin seems to be “Pride Month’s” chief purpose, which surely explains why its proponents chose one of the deadliest sins — pride — as its defining attribute.

Young people — who spend the first two decades of their lives in indoctrination mills posing as schools — often find it difficult to understand why people over the age of thirty recoil at the sight of lurid circuses of sexual deviancy.  They were taught at an early age that fat, hairy men wearing lipstick and little else are civil rights heroes for flaunting their masturbatory excess in front of anyone who has the bad luck of stumbling upon one of their street shows while walking to nearby places of business.  Democrat-controlled teachers’ unions believe it’s “virtuous” to have drag queens dressed as strippers twerking in front of kindergartners during “story time.”  Democrat-controlled medical associations think it’s “scientific” to “trans” elementary school children by mutilating their bodies and sterilizing them for life.  When all of the adults in positions of authority tell kids that this craziness is not only normal, but also something worth celebrating, young minds struggle to break free from their programming.

Sexual overindulgence and exploitation have defined the last thirty years.  We’ve gone from the occasional gay kiss on prime-time television to full-blown gay orgies when viewers are least expecting it.  At the beginning of the century, proponents of so-called “gay marriage” told us that “love is love” and that gay people just wanted to enjoy the same rights as married couples.  Now the Alphabet Mafia harasses anyone with a differing viewpoint and works to get Christians fired from their jobs.  For years, gay rights advocates beseeched heterosexuals to show compassion for those who might be different.  Yet as soon as those advocates seized the heights of cultural and political power, they showed no compassion at all.

If you defend the millennia-old tradition of marriage as between one man and one woman, you are denounced as a “bigot.”  If you insist that no child is born in the wrong body, you are accused of “committing violence” against “trans” people.  If you refuse to carry the “rainbow flag” or embrace gay idolatry as a religion, you are excommunicated from professions and institutions whose putative missions have nothing to do with “gay rights.”

In Democrat-controlled cities around the country, mass riots in support of criminal illegal aliens routinely desecrate and burn the American flag.  This seems a terribly counterproductive way of convincing American citizens that foreign nationals belong in the United States.  Still, nobody is rounding up the perpetrators who obscenely disrespect the sacrifices of all those Americans who fought and died in the past so that the Stars and Stripes might fly today.

On the other hand, whenever teenagers leave tread marks on rainbow-flag-painted intersections, Democrat officials treat such minor, rebellious incidents as if they were profound offenses to the State.  Democrat-controlled police departments actually waste resources tracking down anyone unwilling to treat gay emblems as sacred shrines.  The same Democrat politicians who can’t be bothered to clean up city streets of drug needles, human waste, and trash spare no expense organizing manhunts for the occasional freethinking troublemaker marking a public street with public speech.

When an American can go to prison for the “hate crime” of disrespecting the Alphabet Army’s flag but foreign nationals are celebrated for burning the American people’s flag, it is easy to understand why so many Americans feel as if they are strangers in their own country.

Our deluded empathy is leftists’ greatest weapon; they conquer us when we fear hurt feelings.  “Political correctness” teaches us to censor ourselves, until those who decide what is “politically correct” gain enough political power to censor us with force.  So be wary of those who implore others to disregard moral virtue in the name of “love” because those same people are quick to punish virtue as “hate.”

The Gay Gestapo did not materialize overnight.  Before it could wield the power it has today, society first had to be degraded.  Christian virtue had to be minimized, mocked, and maligned.  It might surprise high-schoolers to learn that there was a time when entire families could enjoy a movie without worrying that some graphic sex scene would pop up in the middle to embarrass children, parents, and grandparents.  Nobody had to wonder whether a summer blockbuster would descend into veritable porn.  By the ’80s, however, it became almost standard practice for Hollywood studios to pause their movies’ storytelling so that they could show big-name celebrities simulating sex.  It’s bizarre when you think about it: One moment you’re watching a movie about fighter jets or aliens, and all of a sudden, there’s a scene that requires A-list stars to be undressed.

Read the Whole Article

The post Pride Remains a Sin appeared first on LewRockwell.

The violence that has been the primary characteristic of the 21sr century has reached a level of recklessness that threatens life on our planet.  It was only the other day that some unidentified person or agency green-lighted an attack on Russia’s strategic triad.  According to Russian war doctrine, this attack, of which President Trump says he was unaware, requires a Russian strategic response. Putin, being a humane and reasonable person averse to war , side-stepped the issue by declaring the attack to be an act of terrorism and not of war.  It is extraordinary that no one is interested in identifying who so irresponsibly green-lighted  an attack that could have initiated nuclear war.  

How can Washington and the Kremlin be so insouciant and uninterested in a provocation that could have resulted in nuclear war? Whoever green-lighted the attack did not know that Putin would simply not acknowledge that such an attack took place.  Whoever green-lighted the attack was OK with launching a nuclear war. What is to prevent such a thing again happening?

We must be thankful that Putin side-stepped the issue.  But we must also consider the effect of Putin’s side-stepping the attack. The person or agency that authorized the attack must be confident that Russia will never respond to any provocation, and, therefore, the provocations will increase in their intensity.  At some point, it won’t be possible for Putin to side-step the provocation. Thus, Putin might be bringing on the war he hopes to avoid by side-stepping provocations.

In addition to the conflict with Russia, there is the conflict with Iran.  Netanyahu, using the powerful influence of the Israel Lobby over Washington, pressured President Trump to bomb Iran’s uranium enrichment sites, claiming without evidence that Iran was producing a nuclear weapon.

Trump in what might be an act of brilliance dropped the bombs on the Iranian sites and declared them obliterated whether they were or not, thereby removing Netanyahu’s only argument for war with Iran.  With the nuclear facilities destroyed, there can be no bomb.  Thus, Trump removed Netanyahu’s case for preemptive war against Iran, thereby removing the reason for wider conflict in the Middle East.  Let’s hope Iran understands what has really happened, and cooperates with President Trump in removing the conflict from the agenda.

There still remains anger caused by Israel’s merciless destruction of Gaza and its people. How a people who claim to be victims of a holocaust can submit Palestinians to one is difficult to comprehend. But the Arab states that could protest have all been destroyed by American presidents for Israel.  Washington’s bombs have turned Iraq, Libya, and Syria into non-functioning states, and Hezbollah  has been decapitated and cut off from supplies.  The only remaining Arab country is Saudi Arabia, the military ability of which is marginal.  Washington sicced the Saudis on Yemen, and it was unsuccessful.  The Houthis are the only remaining Arabs, other than the remains of Hamas,  who continue to oppose Israel. They are dependent on Iran, who are Persians, not Arabs, and if Trump has succeeded in removing Netanyahu’s justification for war with Iran, it seems likely that Iran will call off the Houthis.

This opens a chance for peace in the Middle East after a quarter century of America’s wars against Arabs for Israel, wars disguised as a “war on terror” and “bringing democracy” in order to deceive the American people about the expenditure of trillions of American taxpayers’ dollars for the exclusive benefit of Israel, while American veterans who were deceived into fighting the wars for Greater Israel are left to live on the streets.

Previously, in a joint news conference with Netanyahu, Trump declared Gaza as a US possession that would be the anchor of an American reconstructed Middle East.  In place of Greater Israel–an aspiration, not a reality–which with its recent Israeli additions now extends from the Nile to include Pakistan and half of Saudi Arabia, Trump indicated that there would be a profit-sharing American colony, unlike the colonial extractive colonies of prior times. Trump has talked it up with the Saudis, and there are indications that he wants to add Iran to the deal.  Trump seems to be saying that instead of war let’s go into business together.  This plan requires the Zionists to give up their agenda for Israeli hegemony over the Middle East. Can the Zionists help to save the world from war?

If Trump can pull this off, assuming that he is thinking along this line–he is so changeable that it is hard to know–Trump would go down as the greatest president in American history. Instead of Muslims and Israelis exhausting themselves in wars, they would be making money together.  There is no better outcome.

Can we get there?

Two formidable forces are blocking the way.  The American Zionist Neoconservative doctrine of US hegemony spelled out in the Wolfowitz Doctrine, and the Israeli hegemonic doctrine of Greater Israel.

Trump can clear both obstacles out of the way. He can renounce the Wolfowitz doctrine of American hegemony, and he can tell Netanyahu that if he sticks with Greater Israel, Israel goes it alone, that the United States will not establish for Israel at Americans’ lives and expense Israel’s hegemony over the Middle East.

It is time that we Americans began speaking honestly and openly about our unrealistic foreign policy and our subservience to Israel.  We must set aside the propagandistic excuses US governments used–the war on terror, promotion of democracy–and understand that the only two forces for war and instability in the world are Washington and Tel Aviv’s hegemonic ambitions.  

All that Donald Trump needs to do to be known in history as America’s greatest president is to publicly repudiate the neoconservative Zionists’ doctrine of US hegemony and to tell Israel that if Israel continues to pursue its hegemony over the Middle East, it will do so without Washington’s support and with Washington’s opposition.

This is a very easy and effective way of pushing back the minute hand of the doomsday clock and giving the world time to get rid of nuclear weapons before they are used to destroy us.

Let us hope and pray that Trump can recognize the leadership role that awaits him and that he can fill the role and not be blocked by his own Zionist government, the ruling American establishment, and the Israel Lobby.

If Trump fails, the world is likely to be destroyed in nuclear Armageddon.

The post President Trump: Seize Your Opportunity to be the Greatest American President in History appeared first on LewRockwell.

After the first Pentagon press briefing on Operation “Midnight Hammer”, even the mainstream propaganda machine remained “unconvinced”. Obviously, many will attribute this to the Trump Derangement Syndrome. However, while TDS is still a big part of their motivation, the mainstream media might actually be onto something in this particular case (they can’t be wrong 100% of the time, right?).

And no, the Trump administration screaming “fake news” at everything isn’t helping. On the contrary, it’s only making things worse. Namely, US President Donald Trump pompously announced yesterday’s Pentagon briefing on their Iran attack (a more detailed one, but still very unconvincing, to say the least).

The “irrefutable” press conference provided more details on the supposed “level of destruction” of the three Iranian nuclear facilities, namely Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.

The Isfahan Nuclear Research Center is an atomic scientific center and a key uranium conversion facility located southeast of Isfahan, a historic city in central Iran. The Natanz Nuclear Facility is Tehran’s main uranium enrichment complex, situated approximately 120 kilometers north of Isfahan.

And last but certainly not least, the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, a heavily fortified uranium enrichment facility buried deep into a mountain approximately 30 km northeast of Qom, another historic city in northern Iran (you get a lot of those in a country whose history spans millennia). Expectedly, the Fordow facility is the main point of contention, as the US insists that it was destroyed, although irrefutable evidence for that is sorely lacking. Precisely this notion enraged Trump, who even pointed out that B-2 pilots were supposedly “upset by all the fake news”.

“Secretary of Defense (War!) Pete Hegseth, together with Military Representatives, will be holding a Major News Conference tomorrow morning at 8 A.M. EST at The Pentagon, in order to fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots. These Patriots were very upset!

After 36 hours of dangerously flying through Enemy Territory, they landed, they knew the Success was LEGENDARY, and then, two days later, they started reading Fake News by CNN and The Failing New York Times. They felt terribly! Fortunately for them and, as usual, solely for the purpose of demeaning PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, the Fake News (Times and CNN) lied and totally misrepresented the Facts, none of which they had (because it was too soon, there were no Facts out there yet!). The News Conference will prove both interesting and irrefutable. Enjoy!” Trump posted on Truth Social.

The controversy was also exacerbated by a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report leaked to CNN. Namely, the agency’s assessment strongly suggested that Operation “Midnight Hammer” fell flat after the US airstrikes failed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program.

CNN cited “two of the people familiar with the assessment” who allegedly said that “Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed”, one of whom concluded that “the centrifuges are largely intact”. In addition, several other sources reported that Tehran moved the enriched uranium out of the three facilities before the US sent the B-2 strategic bombers to attack them. The DIA’s report also claims that Iran’s nuclear program was “set back maybe a few months, tops”. In the meantime, these assessments were dropped in favor of Trump’s claims, with Israeli and top US spy agencies (including the CIA) backing him.

However, even their reports still question the validity of Trump’s claims that Iranian nuclear facilities were “totally obliterated”.

Namely, CIA Director John Ratcliffe stated that his agency “obtained a body of credible evidence [that] indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged”.

Obviously, we could simply dismiss this as pure semantics, but “totally obliterated” and “severely damaged” are two very different outcomes. Trump’s rather “colorful” way of expressing his opinions can certainly add to the general confusion, but a matter like this requires 100% accurate damage assessments. And yet, top officials of the Trump administration continued to use similar ways to describe the supposed “success” of Operation “Midnight Hammer”. For instance, Hegseth used terms such as “decimating, obliterating and destroying Iran’s nuclear capabilities”.

Worse yet, instead of providing the alleged “irrefutable” evidence that Iranian facilities were “totally obliterated”, the press briefing largely focused on very detailed accounts of what American troops in the Middle East are “going through” (as if anyone is forcing them at gunpoint to participate in the all-encompassing US aggression against the world). In addition, just like Trump himself, DoD and Pentagon officials appointed by him stressed the strain of flying 37 hours from Missouri to Iran. And while Hegseth mostly relied on emotions and cheap jingoism, General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, focused more on the specifications of the GBU-57A/B MOP (Massive Ordnance Penetrator) 14-tonne “bunker buster” bombs that were dropped on Fordow and Natanz facilities, insisting they “functioned as designed, meaning they exploded”.

However, Caine himself effectively invalidated his own briefing by saying that

“the Joint Force does not do [battle damage assessments]”, adding that “by design, we don’t grade our own homework” and that this is done by intelligence services. However, those same agencies initially denied the facilities were destroyed and changed their assessment only after massive political pressure to do so. Worse yet, Caine cited one of the B-2 pilots, saying that “the blast from the initial bombs was so big as it was like an overwhelming flash of daylight”.

This goes entirely against Caine’s explanation of how the MOP works, when he stated that it explodes underground, meaning there are little to no visible explosions on the outside. To make matters worse, Caine also admitted that the Iranians built a concrete cover that further reinforced the Fordow facility.

And yet, the matter of potential radioactive fallout has never been addressed by anyone in the Trump administration or the Pentagon.

Namely, the uranium used as fuel in nuclear power plants is enriched at 3.67%, which is considered far below the 90% or higher used in nuclear weapons. It should be noted that the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters used precisely this sort of nuclear fuel, which still resulted in massive radioactive contamination. On the other hand, the Fordow facility had uranium enriched at 60%, meaning that radioactive fallout would’ve been far worse. Given the fact that no radiation was detected in the aftermath of the US strike, the only logical conclusion is that the reactors weren’t destroyed. Some have tried to explain this by claiming that this is because the Iranians moved the uranium several days or weeks before the US attack.

However, Trump himself refuted those claims, insisting that the cars and trucks seen at Fordow were moving the concrete that was used to reinforce the facility. In the meantime, the mainstream media are citing “European capitals” as the source of the claim that Iran supposedly “moved the enriched uranium elsewhere” (although nobody seems to know where exactly). Financial Times insists that

“Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile remains largely intact following US strikes on its main nuclear sites, European capitals believe, calling into question President Donald Trump’s assertion that the bombing ‘obliterated’ the Islamic republic’s nuclear programme”. Further citing two anonymous sources, FT claims that “Iran’s stockpile of 408kg of uranium enriched close to weapons-grade levels […] had been distributed to various other locations”.

And yet, despite all the uncertainty, the Trump administration keeps insisting that the facilities are at least “no longer operational”. Bizarrely enough, Trump has even suggested US investment in a “peaceful Iranian nuclear program”. Namely, according to CNN, the Trump administration “has discussed possibly helping Iran access as much as $30 billion to build a civilian-energy-producing nuclear program”. The report also suggests that “America’s Arab partners would foot the bill”. This is yet to be confirmed, but if true, it could reveal that Trump’s motivation for the strikes was at least partially economic and financial. Namely, Iran’s nuclear facilities were built with Russian, Chinese and North Korean assistance, so bombing them (after 15 years of planning) was a good way to get Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang “out of business” in Iran.

Video: Political Theatre. Trump’s Attack against Iran

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post Disgraced Pentagon Still Insists That Iranian Nuclear Facilities Were ‘Destroyed’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Takeaways:
* Stocks haven’t kept pace during historical monetary hyperinflation periods despite bull markets. Diversified investment portfolios of say 60% stocks/40% bonds vastly underperform farmland and commodities futures during hyperinflationary periods.
* Pending Congressional legislation will replace the US dollar for a programmable Stable Coin to pay down the national debt.
* Stable Coins must be bought first from an investment house to buy any investments and from retailers of goods and services.
* Stablecoins are programmed money that must backup the coins with commensurate purchases of Treasury Bills. Effectually, the mandated pre-purchase of Stable Coins is a disguised excise tax.
* Stable Coins may be a return to the “Wildcat Banking” era of the 1830’s which resulted in the Panic of 1837 (see Jessica Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis, 2013 and Simone Polillo, Conservatives versus Wildcats: A Sociology of Financial Conflict, 2013)
* Deflating the national debt is expected to bring about corresponding deflation in prices for goods and services in which case learning from periods of hyperinflation may be irrelevant and we would have to learn from the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
* Investment-grade bonds, defensive stocks (consumer goods companies), dividend-paying stocks, cash-generating small businesses, and cash are the best performing investments during deflationary periods.

My friend James Anthony offers some wise information to consider before the Great Money Reset expected later this year in his June 28 article “Good Moneys: 100%-Reserve Gold, Stock-Based Money”. But Anthony discusses “potential” gains in value not “actual” historical rates of return or loss during hyperinflationary periods. Some more nuanced information on how differing investments have historically performed during hyperinflationary periods is necessary, with the caveat that we may end up with deflation.

Fortunately, in 2010 the global investment firm Alliance Bernstein conducted research as to how various investments performed during three hyperinflationary periods in the US, Britain and Japan. The research paper is titled Deflating Inflation: Redefining the Inflation-Resistant Portfolio. This study focused on investment performance during differing periods of gold-backed currency and debt-backed currency as we have had since the US dollar was untethered from being backed by gold reserves in 1972.

The Alliance study compared investment performance (loss or gain) with money inflation as a baseline. This is called a “Beta” score in investing parlance. The higher the Beta score, the greater the risk. A Beta score is reflexive or correlated in that it indicates how much loss or gain was realized for every 1% of inflation. This is in keeping with the investment principle “the greater the risk, the higher the expected rate of return” on an investment and vice versa.  The findings of the Alliance Bernstein report are summed up in words as follows:

“In the US, for example, for a given 1% increase in the inflation rate, 20-year nominal bonds fell 3.1 times as much. Stocks, too, tend to be vulnerable to most rising inflation environments: on average, the S&P 500 historically dropped 2.4 times the rise in inflation, and the broad equity indices of many other countries showed a similar sensitivity. This explains the dismal performance we saw in the traditional 60% stock/40% bond portfolio during the periods of accelerating inflation”.  Conversely, productive farmland gained 1.7 times the inflation rate while commodities like gold, soybean or cattle futures gained 6.5 times the inflation rate. This is why mega billionaire oligarchs such as Bill Gates have invested in farmland in preparation for the Great Reset.

The Alliance study can also be summed up in numbers as follows:

Importantly, the report warns that stock values typically rise in bull markets during monetary inflation periods and this can be deceiving because they have historically not kept pace with money inflation.

So, based on history, conventional asset diversification of 60% stocks/40% bonds will likely result in a net loss after adjusting for money inflation despite a bull market in stocks. An asset portfolio weighted toward productive farmland and commodity futures (gold, platinum, agricultural products, crude oil, natural gas, livestock, lumber, etc.) is more likely to outperform inflation by multiples of 1.7 times to 6.5 times a 1% rise in inflation if investment performance mimics past hyperinflations.

However, what we’re ultimately expecting under the substitution of Stable Coins for US Dollars is deflation in goods and service prices because the debt bubble will deflate (see below).

The Emergence of Stable Coin “Wildcat” Marketized Money Market?

What you may not have been informed of yet is that if you buy stocks, bonds or commodity futures contracts you must pay for them in Stable Coins, as cash, checks, and credit cards will be extinguished under the Genius Act passed by the US Senate and the Stable Act pending in the House of Representatives.

We also need to understand that if we are going to be buying stocks that we must first buy a Stable Coin from Fidelity, Vanguard, Blackrock, or some other investment house, which is backed by short term Treasury Bills. The issuers of stable coins cannot be the Federal Reserve Banks but large retail corporations like Walmart, Amazon, Kroger or Chevron gasoline which will use your money to buy T-bills. Stable Coins or tokens can also be issued by the monied class such as the Ivanka Trump Stable Coin.  Issuers, however, will be allowed to use the “float” on your money as collateral for seven days (but who will police the zillions of such transactions, so this provision won’t be abused?).

The purpose of Stable Coins is to boost demand for treasury securities to pay off the federal debt.  A Stable Coin will be like a prepaid debit card.  It is programmed money.  You will be constrained from going into personal debt or taking out loans for cars, real estate, small business start-ups. There will be capital contraction. Governments will be inhibited to issue tax exempt bonds to pay for infrastructure and businesses discouraged to borrow to invest in inventions.  You can still get a loan from a bank, but you must pay for it in Stable Coin backed by some corporation or investment house buying T-bills.  You will be forced to “buy the debt bubble” or “buy the churn” (revenue loss) before it blows up. This, however, does not necessarily constrain government to continue to rack up even more debt.  Experts say this will lead to deflation (a decrease in the prices of goods and services).

Stable Coin will mean the US economy will be returning to the “wildcat” banking era before the Civil War where unregulated banks (not corporations of issuers of coins) supplied a medium of exchange in the form of bearer notes based on their own credit.  Wildcat banking led to the Panic of 1837.

The institutionalization of Stable Coins will mean having to do homework to investigate the soundness of each issuer before you buy a so-called Stable Coin. For example, in 2023 the “Circle” Stablecoin substantially dipped under its stabilized one dollar unit value when it was discovered that $3.3 billion of its $40 billion reserves were invested in Silicon Valley Bank which was pending collapse due to its investment in failed high tech enterprises.

In the proposed Stable Coin environment, bank loans are expected to charge from 10.9% to 18.9% interest to constrain households from taking on new debt.  Residential real estate values would likely drop to the equivalent of an “all cash” price due to higher mortgage interest rates (typically 5% to 10% cash adjustment).

What will happen to small businesses which would have to issue their own Stable Coin is uncertain. As mentioned by James Anthony, several states are authorizing the issuance of Gold Back Paper Dollars containing trace amounts of gold dust. This may allow some greater flexibility for small businesses and sustain a resemblance of a cash economy.  Gold-backed paper dollars would likely be more valuable than T-bill backed Stable Coins.  But it is unclear whether buying Stable Coins to buy Gold Backed Paper Dollars would equate to double taxation of sorts. Rather, would each state have a clearinghouse for Gold Backed paper coins or tokens?

From the Austrian School of economics, inflation is legalized theft that is blamed on impersonal economic forces rather than political manipulation. Government works by blaming economic downturns and wiping out of the value of money depicted as acts of God, stock market boom and bust cycles, plagues, or wars.

We will likely have some sort of major crisis to justify the compulsory transition to a planned Stable Coin money economy by bank closures, lockdowns, and martial law to cover up the machinations of wiping out the currency value of the dollar. Government often uses mass media predictive programming to mentally prepare us for such shocks (see my article on how the California Energy Crisis of 2001 was “predicted” by Hollywood movies “Recent Science Hoaxes Reruns of California Energy Crisis of 2001”).

The above discussion of Stable Coins is drawn from an online interview with economics expert Paul Gallagher (“Why Stable Coin Isn’t”, June 27, 2025, Youtube). Any errors or omissions are my own.

The post The Coming of a Stable Coin ‘Wildcat’ Money Marketized Excise Tax? appeared first on LewRockwell.

A few years ago, I came out of the closet and announced that I had African American Fatigue Syndrome. Nobody much noticed it at the time; a few people chuckled, and a few more shouted “racist!” Now Black Fatigue is all the rage. It’s encouraging that more people have finally stopped holding their tongues about a “forbidden” topic.

But a new malady is upon the land. Perhaps not a Biblical plague, but an intellectual impatience that can no longer grin and bear it. Something was triggered in the U.S. population when the Artist Formerly Known as Kanye West suddenly became the world’s foremost admirer of Adolph Hitler. Black podcasters like Jason Whitlock and the Hoge Twins became emboldened and started freely discussing the disproportionate power that Jews- who constitute only two percent of all Americans- wield in this country. Thanks to the histrionic Israeli partisan Ben Shapiro, who fired her from Daily Wire, Candace Owens has now become the daughter David Duke would have had, if he’d been on the down low with a soul sister. Many Blacks have long distrusted Jews; I know, I worked with hundreds of them as a young blue collar college dropout. And now all that historical mistrust is bubbling to the surface.

Tucker Carlson has also joined the fray, in his inimitable, limited way. Just for revealing what a Zionist pawn Senator Ted Cruz is, Tucker is being freely referred to as “anti-Semitic.” Join the crowd, Tucker. If you can be blasted for simply asking why our country should be so enamored with, attached to, and financially committed to another nation, then you should start to see just how restricted our First Amendment has become. Just as daily video doses of violent ghetto behavior have ultimately resulted in a chronic Black Fatigue, years of reverential Holocaust dramas and proclamations that Jews are God’s “chosen people” have produced another, perhaps more serious disorder. Jewish Fatigue Syndrome. I certainly have it. But fear not; you can live with it. As with Black Fatigue, the only way to counteract JFS is to confront it. A problem cannot be solved if we will not admit it exists.

So we need to stop nodding and smiling at ridiculous Orwellian concepts like “Holocaust Denial.” You don’t have to debate the specifics with anyone, and besides the court historians will not debate. Because their job is to uphold all the historical lies, they will either ignore you or call you the predictable names. Let’s discuss the ongoing Holocaust in Gaza. Can I capitalize that, or would it be “anti-Semitic?” After all, we don’t even call the millions of Catholics murdered by the Bolsheviks a Holocaust, let alone give it the exceptional honor of being capitalized. How about the fifty million or whatever killed by Mao Tse-Tung? I’m not going to use the inexplicable new spelling of Mao Zedung, any more than I’m going to call Muammar Qadaffi, Gadhafi. However you spell his name, doesn’t his death total make Hitler’s alleged crimes pale in comparison? Can’t Mao get a little love from the court historians? If only China had had Jews to herd into concentration camps.

Pol Pot. Robert Mugabe. Two other nonwhite tyrants who had quite impressive Body Counts. But no one mentions them. Mugabe just died a few years ago at age 95. I don’t recall any outrage over a man who we are told killed 3-6 million Zimbabweans- about one third of the population- remaining in power so long. I don’t know, shouldn’t that have sparked an Adolph Eichmann kind of outrage? It appears that some Holocausts, or holocausts, are more equal than others. The Holocaust has become quite an industry onto itself. Hollywood can’t stop making more movies about it. And that has been an essential reason why Jewish Fatigue can now be mentioned publicly. Even if every aspect of the Holocaust, as first promulgated in a 1980s television miniseries, is 100 percent accurate, at what point do we stop paying so much inordinate attention to it? Why is “Never Again!” a cry that is exclusively reserved for this particular subject?

Since the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948, the Middle East has been a tinderbox of ancient ethnic hostilities. Israel fought four major wars against neighboring countries like Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, in its first twenty five years alone. Since the neocons took control of U.S. foreign policy during the Reagan administration, America has been a consistent presence there, hovering in the background like the big brother waiting to pounce on any perceived slight to the younger sibling. We fought the Gulf “War” (really, don’t you have to have two sides for a real war?) in 1989, for no other reason than to protect Israeli interests. U.S. envoy April Glaspie famously told former CIA asset Saddam Hussein that if he invaded the tiny artificial oil oligarchy of Kuwait, that we wouldn’t interfere. Of course, that was a lie. The only people cheering on such lunacy were the leaders of Israel.

I lost count of how many times we bombed Iraq in the subsequent years. Our embargo killed over a million Iraqis, including over 500,000 children. We ventured into Afghanistan for no reason whatsoever. Well, except that Israel requested it. And that’s all that matters in “our” defense department. No one says “no” to Israel. Except John F. Kennedy. We all know what happened to him. Obama became embroiled in Syria and Yemen because Israel wanted it. They’re like a collective, spoiled trust fund baby. Donald Trump, after rightly criticizing Obama for bombing Syria, did so himself when ordered to. You know exactly who gave the orders. And now, we may become deeply embroiled in Israel’s war with Iran, again at Israel’s request. Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen- none of them have ever done anything to us. We have no beef with any of them. But Israel does. All of this is in their interests, not ours.

But long before our forever wars in the Middle East, some people had already developed JFS. They noticed that the head of every Hollywood film studio was Jewish. As was the head of every television network. And the head of every record company. The two big comic book publishers, DC and Marvel, were both run by Jews. Most U.S. publishing houses have long been Jewish run. Considering that Jews are such a minute portion of the population, how could this logically be? Perhaps just as significantly, how could so few Americans fail to notice? Just asking these questions would have been impossible a few years ago. People instinctively know that you shouldn’t bring up the subject of wildly disproportionate Jewish power. And just why shouldn’t you? What is there to fear, from such a tiny minority group, which we are told have been the world’s persecuted scapegoats for all of recorded history?

If you don’t want people to say your ethnic/religious group is in control of things, then why do you act as if they’re right? The last thing you should do is pass something as sinister and unconstitutional as the Antisemitism Awareness Act. The last thing you should do is try to clamp down on pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. The last thing you should do is hold out a chair for the president of Israel, when you are the President of the United States. The last thing you should do is to counter all criticism with cries of “anti-Semitism!” The term is not only so overused as to be meaningless, it is inaccurate. All the Arabic people are Semitic, not just Israelis. So you wind up castigating those who are defending Iranians, Serbians, and Iraqis as being prejudiced against them. It’s as pointless of a label as “racist” is. Debate the subject. Without calling names. Or demanding that people be cancelled.

Read the Whole Article

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Tim McGraw wrote:

My Dad had access to the Lamar Hunt suite at Arrowhead Stadium in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Lamar Hunt founded and owned the Kansas City Chiefs NFL football team. Hunt was friends with Ewing Kauffman, the founder and owner of the Kansas Royals baseball team, which played in Royal Stadium next door to Arrowhead. They shared the same huge parking lot in the Missouri countryside. My Dad worked for Ewing Kauffman as the Chief Operating Officer of Marion Laboratories.

My Dad took me to a couple of Chiefs games back then. We always had the use of the Hunt suite, along with other people. The luxury suites were on the west side of the stadium. The field went north and south, and still does. It’s one of the older football stadiums now, but it’s been renovated a few times.

It was a beautiful fall day. The sun was out, and it was about 75°F, a perfect day for football.

The Houston Oilers were the visiting team. Dan Pastorini was the quarterback and punter for the Oilers. He was a helluva athlete. Ken Burrough, #00, was the Oilers’ speedy receiver.       

The Chiefs were winning the game. The Oilers had the ball deep in their own territory with two and a half minutes left in the game. Pastorini took the snap and went back to pass. He dodged a couple of tacklers and then launched the football way up into the air down the eastern sideline. Pastorini was almost in the endzone at the south end of the stadium when he let the ball go.

The ball reached its apex about even with the second level of the stadium. The ball hung in the air for at least five seconds, probably more. Downfield, Ken Burrough outran the KC defenders. It looked to me like the Chiefs’ defensive backs figured no one could throw the ball that far.

But there was Burrough to catch the rainbow pass of 51 yards (it looked like more from the stands). Touchdown, Oilers, and they win the game.

All of us KC fans saw that pass and couldn’t believe it. How could Pastorini throw it that far, and Burrough run that far that fast? And the fans clapped.

I think that’s the only time I’ve ever seen the home fans clap for a play by the visiting team. Midwesterners are polite, and they acknowledge greatness when they see it, no matter who it is.

TJM

Pastorini Touchdown to Burrough

Dan Pastorini threw a 51-yard touchdown pass to Ken Burrough

in a game against the Kansas City Chiefs. This key play occurred in the final 2½ minutes and turned the game around, giving the Houston Oilers the advantage. On this play, Burrough, a fleet wide receiver, beat Rich Sowells and Phil Wise with a deep post pattern, securing the ball and making a decisive impact on the game’s outcome.

Ken Burrough dead at 73

 

The post Dan Pastorini to Ken Borough TD Pass appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

I haven’t seen the full helicopter attack scene in decades. David Jones did a great job as the aerial coordinator. I’m sure that Jones also flew the chopper with the helicopter camera. No one could fly a chopper like David Jones. David Jones hired me for the job on the movie in Belem, Brazil. We’d hang out together after work at the Verandah Bar and swap aviation stories. Jones was a great guy and a fantastic pilot. He could do things with a chopper that I didn’t think were possible. Jones had two double Bombay gins every night. No more. No less.

David Jones told me that he had to quit on the “Apocalypse Now” set in the Philippines. The movie was killing him. The filming was grueling, along with the heat, humidity, diseases, and Coppola was insane. But Jones made the helicopter attack scene before he left.

The post “Apocalypse Now”, Helicopter Attack Scene, Full Scene 1080P HD Widescreen appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah. 

Sputnik News

 

The post Trump’s Budget Bill Leads US Into Debt Musk appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm. 

The American Conservative

 

The post The Difference Between an ‘Ally’ and a ‘Protectorate’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

 Thanks, Donald Atkins .

The post They Lied About Who the Enemy Is appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

Interesting difference of opinion. Children’s Health Defense’s Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR) and Wireless Team is warning about the adverse health effects of wireless wearables while HHS Secretary and CHD founder and former chairman RFK Jr. is promoting their use. 

See here.

 

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This classic episode of The Twilight Zone – The Eye of the Beholder, originally aired on Friday, November 11, 1960. I was eight years old, and it scared the Hell outta me.

Perhaps it planted a deep seed within me that ten years later, in November of 1970, I became a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist.

“Suspended in time and space for a moment, your introduction to Miss Janet Tyler, who lives in a very private world of darkness, a universe whose dimensions are the size, thickness, length of a swath of bandages that cover her face. In a moment, we’ll go back into this room, and also in a moment, we’ll look under those bandages, keeping in mind, of course, that we’re not to be surprised by what we see, because this isn’t just a hospital, and this patient 307 is not just a woman. This happens to be The Twilight Zone, and Miss Janet Tyler, with you, is about to enter it.”

 

The post A Cautionary Tale appeared first on LewRockwell.

Progressives, it seems, have always been obsessed with racial biological collectivism. Whether it was Progressives in the early 20th Century during the so-called Progressive Era (1900-1920) and their mania for eugenics, scientific racism, and race suicide; or today’s Progressives, equally obsessed with identity politics; race, class, gender and queer studies; and intersectionality.

The Progressive Era was a crucial time in American intellectual history. Scholars as divergent as Murray N. Rothbard and G. William Domhoff have documented the impact of thousands of key academics such as Richard T. Ely, Herbert Baxter Adams, and John W. Burgess who received their graduate training in Germany during this period, dominated by the rise of Bismarck’s welfare-warfare state. They returned home imbued with these ideas, which their apt pupils such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson transformed into hard reality. This worship of the newly-discovered wonders of statism, combined with the influx of Darwinian evolutionary naturalism, ”social imperialism,” Fabian socialism imported from Great Britain, the increasing secularization of postmillennial evangelical pietism, all provided the satanic breeding ground for the incubus that emerged as progressivism – complete with its elite notions of centralized political/economic planning, aggressive nationalism, eugenics and the idea of “race suicide. It is a seminal focus of their skewed, maniacal totalitarian world view. Progressives have always insisted upon rule by an elitist professional class of credentialed experts removed from the populist majority of everyday Americans, who they regarded as “deplorables,” “white trash,” or “the unwashed masses.”

Here are some intellectual resources which tell the nefarious backstory:

The Eugenics Crusade

Eugenics in High School History: Failure to Confront the Past  by Thomas F. Cargill

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, by Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine

Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding, by Charles Benedict Davenport

The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant

The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, by Lothrop. Stoddard

Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, by Christine Rosen

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg

Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, by Thomas C. Leonard

Liberal Fascism: the Secret History of the American left, from Mussolini to the politics of change, by Jonah Goldberg

For the Betterment of the Race: The Rise and Fall of the International Movement for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene, by Stefan Kühl

The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, by Stefan Kühl

Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, by James Q. Whitman

The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, by Dinesh D’Souza

Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, by Robert N. Proctor

Hitler is Winning: How Hitler’s Plan For A Master Race Was Created By The West And Is Being Implemented Today, by Jerry Leonard

The post Progressivism = Racial Biological Collectivism appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah. 

Information Liberation

 

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LIBERA NOS A MALO
Considerations on the Great Reset and the New World Order

No one will be part of the New World Order
unless he carries out an act of worship to Lucifer.
No one will enter the New Age unless he receives Luciferian initiation.

David Spangler
Director of the United Nations Planetary Initiative Project
(Reflections on The Christ, Findhorn, 1978.

For more than a year and a half we have been helplessly witnessing the succession of incongruent events to which most of us are unable to give a plausible justification.

The pandemic emergency has made particularly evident the contradictions and illogicalities of measures nominally intended to limit contagion – lockdowns, curfews, closures of commercial activities, limitations of public services and classes, suspension of citizens’ rights – but which are disavowed daily by conflicting voices, by clear evidence of ineffectiveness, by contradictions on the part of the same health authorities. There is no need to list the measures that almost all the governments of the world have taken without achieving the promised results. If we limit ourselves to the presumed advantages that the experimental gene serum should have brought to the community – above all immunity to the virus and renewed freedom of movement – we discover that an Oxford University study published in The Lancet stated that the viral load of those vaccinated with a double dose is 251 times greater than the first strains of the virus, despite the proclamations of world leaders, starting with the Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, according to whom “whoever gets vaccinated lives, whoever does not get the vaccine dies.” The side effects of the gene serum, cleverly disguised or deliberately not registered by the national health authorities, seem to confirm the danger of taking the vaccine and the disturbing unknowns for the health of citizens, which we will soon have to face.

From science to scientism

The art of medicine – which is not science, but the application of scientific principles to different cases each time, on an experiential and experimental basis – seems to have renounced its prudence, in the name of an emergency that has risen to the level of priesthood of a religion – the religion of science, in fact – which in order to be such has cloaked itself in a dogmatism bordering on superstition. The ministers of this cult have constituted themselves as a caste of untouchables, exempt from any criticism even when their claims are denied by the evidence of the facts. The principles of medicine, considered universally valid until February 2020, have given way to improvisation, to the point of being advised to vaccinate at the height of the pandemic, the obligation of masks being imposed although they are useless, the arbitrary mandating of bizarre distances, the prohibition of treatments with effective drugs and the imposition of experimental gene therapies in violation of normal safety protocols. And just as there are new Covid priests, so there are also new heretics, that is, those who reject the new pandemic religion and want to remain faithful to the Hippocratic Oath. Not infrequently, the aura of infallibility that surrounds virologists and other more or less titled scientists does not seem to be questioned due to their conflicts of interest or by the substantial financial benefits received by pharmaceutical companies, which under normal conditions would be scandalous and criminal.

What many fail to understand is the inconsistency between the stated aims and the means that are adopted in a constantly changing manner in order to achieve them. If in Sweden the absence of lockdowns and masks did not lead to higher infection rates than those in countries where people have been confined to their homes or where they have had masks put on even in primary schools, this element is not considered as proof of ineffectiveness of the measures. If in Israel or in Great Britain mass vaccination has increased infections and made them more virulent, their example does not induce the rulers of other countries to be cautious in the vaccination campaign, but rather pushes them to evaluate the mandatory nature of their giving of the vaccine. If ivermectin or hyperimmune plasma prove to be valid treatments, this is not enough to authorize them, let alone recommend them. And those who wonder the reason for this disconcerting irrationality end up refraining from judgment, giving a sort of fideistic acceptance to the pronouncements of the Covid priests, or conversely considering doctors as unreliable sorcerers.

A single script under a single direction

As I said earlier, we are faced with a colossal deception, based on lies and fraud. This deception starts from the premise that the justifications put forward by the authorities in support of their actions are sincere. More simply, the mistake consists in believing that the rulers are honest and in assuming that they do not lie to us. So we persist in finding more or less plausible justifications, with the sole purpose of not recognizing that we are the object of a conspiracy planned to the smallest detail. And while we try to rationally explain irrational behavior, while we attribute logic to the illogical actions of those who govern us, cognitive dissonance leads us to close our eyes to reality and to believe the most shameless lies.

We should have understood – I wrote it some time ago – that the Great Reset plan was not the result of the ravings of some “conspiracy theorist” but the crude evidence of a criminal plan, conceived for decades and aimed at establishing a universal dictatorship in which a minority of immeasurably rich and powerful people intends to enslave and subjugate the whole of humanity to the globalist ideology. The accusation of “conspiracy theory” could perhaps have made sense when the conspiracy was not yet evident, but today denying what the elite has planned since the 1950s is unjustifiable. What Kalergi, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Klaus Schwab, Jacques Attali and Bill Gates have been saying since World War II has been published in books and newspapers, commented on and taken up by international bodies and foundations, made up precisely by parties and government majorities. The United States of Europe, uncontrolled immigration, the reduction of wages, the cancellation of trade union guarantees, the renunciation of national sovereignty, the single currency, the control of citizens under the pretext of a pandemic, and the reduction of the population through the use of vaccines with new technologies are not recent inventions, but the result of a planned, organized and coordinated action – an action that clearly shows itself perfectly adhering to a single script under a single direction.

The criminal mens

Once it is understood that the present events have been intended in order to obtain certain results – and consequently to pursue certain interests on behalf of a minority part of humanity, with incalculable harm for the majority – we must also have the honesty to recognize the criminal mens [mind] of the authors of this plan. This criminal design also makes us understand the fraud perpetrated by civil authority in presenting certain measures as an unavoidable response to unpredictable events, when the events have been artfully created and magnified with the sole purpose of legitimizing a revolution – which Schwab identifies as the fourth industrial revolution – intended by the elite to the detriment of all humanity. The enslavement of authority is on the other hand the result of a process that began even earlier, with the French Revolution, and which made the political class the servant not of God (whose Lordship it disdainfully disregards) nor of the sovereign people (which it despises and uses only to legitimize itself), but of the economic and financial potentates, of the international oligarchy of bankers and usurers, of multinationals and pharmaceutical companies. In reality, on closer inspection, all these subjects belong to a small number of well-known very rich families.

Equal enslavement is also evident in the media: journalists have accepted – without any scruple of conscience – prostituting themselves to the powerful, going so far as to censor the truth and spread shameless lies without even trying to give them the appearance of credibility. Up until last year journalists counted the numbers of the “victims” of Covid by presenting anyone who tested positive as terminally ill; today those who die after being vaccinated are always and only taken by a vague “illness,” and even before the post mortem examinations, they officially decide that there is no correlation between a person’s death and the administration of the gene serum. They twist the truth with impunity when it does not confirm their narrative, bending it to fit their purposes.

What has been happening for a year and a half had been widely announced, down to the smallest detail, by the creators of the Great Reset themselves; just as we were told the measures that would be adopted. On February 17, 1950, testifying before the United States Senate, the well-known banker James Warburg said,

“We will have a world government, whether you like it or not. The only question that arises is whether this world government will be established by consensus or by force.”

Four years later, the Bilderberg Group was born, which has counted among its members characters such as [Italian businessman Gianni] Agnelli, Henry Kissinger, Mario Monti, and the current Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi. In 1991, David Rockefeller wrote:

“The world is ready for a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is certainly preferable to the national self-determination practiced in past centuries.”

And he added: “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the ‘right’ global crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.” Today we can affirm that this “right crisis” coincides with the pandemic emergency and with the “lockstep” outlined since 2010 by the Rockefeller Foundation document “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” in which the events we are now witnessing are all anticipated.

In short, they have created a false problem in order to be able to impose population control measures as an apparent solution, cancel small and medium-sized businesses with lockdowns and the green pass to the benefit of a few international groups, demolish education by imposing distance learning, lower the cost of manpower and employees with “smart working,” privatize public health for the benefit of Big Pharma, and allow governments to use the state of emergency to legislate in derogation of the law and impose so-called vaccines on the entire population, making citizens traceable in all their movements and either chronically ill or sterile.

Everything the elite wanted to do, they have done. And what is incomprehensible is that in the face of the evidence of the premeditation of this terrible crime against humanity, which sees the leaders of almost the whole world as accomplices and traitors, there is not a single magistrate who opens a file against them to ascertain the truth and condemn the guilty and complicit. Those who disagree are not only censored but pointed out as public enemies, as infectors, as non-persons for whom no rights are recognized.

Deep state and deep church

Now, in the face of a criminal plan, it would be at least logical to denounce it and make it known, in order to then be able to avert it and try those who are guilty. The list of traitors should start with the heads of government, with cabinet members and elected officials, and then continue with the virologists and corrupt doctors, the complicit officials, the leaders of the armed forces incapable of opposing the violation of the Constitution, the sold-out journalists, the cowardly judges and the obsequious unions. In that long list that will perhaps be drawn up one day, the leaders of the Catholic Church should also be listed, starting with Bergoglio and not a few of the Bishops, who have become zealous executors of the will of the prince against the mandate received from Christ. And certainly, in that list, one would know the extent of the conspiracy and the number of the conspirators, confirming the crisis of authority and the perversion of civil and religious power. In short, it would be understood that the corrupt part of the civil authority – the deep state – and the corrupt part of ecclesiastical authority – the deep church – are two sides of the same coin, both instrumental to the establishment of the New World Order.

However, in order to understand this alliance between civil and religious power, it is necessary to recognize the spiritual and eschatological dimension of the present conflict, framing it in the context of the war that Lucifer, ever since his fall, has waged against God. This war, whose outcomes have been decided ab æterno with the inexorable defeat of Satan and the Antichrist and the overwhelming victory of the Woman encircled with the stars, is now approaching its conclusion. This is why the forces of darkness are so wild at present, so impatient to cancel the name of Our Lord from the earth, to not only destroy his tangible presence in our cities by tearing down churches, demolishing crosses, and suppressing Christian holidays; but also by eliminating memory, cancelling Christian civilization, adulterating its teaching, and debasing its worship. And in order to do this, the presence of a faithful and courageous Hierarchy, ready to suffer martyrdom in order to defend Christian faith and moral teaching, is certainly an obstacle. This is why, from the very initial phase of the globalist plan, it was essential to corrupt the Hierarchy in morals and doctrine, to infiltrate it with fifth columns and sleeper cells, to deprive it of any supernatural yearning, and to make it vulnerable to blackmail thanks to financial and sexual scandals; all with the purpose of excluding it and eliminating it once its purpose has been achieved, according to established practice.

This infiltration operation began at the end of the 1950’s, when the project of the New World Order was just taking shape. It began its own work of subversion a few years later, with the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, in view of which the election of Roncalli and the expulsion of Cardinal Siri, Pacelli’s “dauphin” or probable successor as pope, represented a reason for enthusiasm both for the progressive and modernist element within the Church, as well as for the communist, liberal, and Masonic element of the civil world. Vatican II represented within the ecclesial body what the Tennis Court Oath [of the French Revolution] was for civil society: the beginning of the Revolution. And if on many occasions I have drawn attention to the subversive nature of the Council, today I believe that a historical analysis deserves attention in which apparently disconnected facts acquire a disturbing significance, explaining many things.

Liaisons dangereuses

As Michael J. Matt has reported in a recent video at The Remnant, today we are beginning to put together all the pieces of the mosaic, and we discover – by the very admission of one of the protagonists – that Msgr. Hélder Câmara, Archbishop of Olinda and Recife in Brazil, had a meeting in those years with the young Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum and theorizer of the Great Reset. Once Schwab recognized Câmara for his opposition to the traditional Church and his revolutionary and pauperist theories, he invited him to the Davos Forum, considering his participation in this event as extremely important in view of the project of the New Order. We know that Hélder Câmara was among the organizers of the “Pact of the Catacombs,” which was signed by about forty ultra-progressivist Bishops on 16 November 1965, a few days before the closing of the Council. Among the heretical theses of that document, there is also collaboration in the establishment of “another, new social order”, n. 9) based on justice and equality. And we are not surprised to learn that among the signatories there was also Msgr. Enrique Angelelli, the auxiliary bishop of Cordoba in Argentina, “[a] point of reference for then-Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio”. Bergoglio himself declared right from the beginning of his Pontificate that he agreed with the demands of the Pact of the Catacombs. On 20 October 2019, during the Synod on the Amazon, the celebration of the pact between the conspirators was repeated in the Catacombs of Santa Domitilla, confirming that the plan begun at the Council had found fulfillment precisely in Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Far from distancing himself from the ultra-progressivists who support him and who determined his election at the last Conclave, Bergoglio never misses an opportunity to give proof of his perfect coherence with the plan of the New World Order, beginning with the collaboration of Vatican commissions and dicasteries with environmentalism of a Malthusian matrix and their participation in the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, a global alliance with the Rothschilds, the Rockefeller Foundation, and large banks. So on the one hand we have David Rockefeller with the Trilateral Commission, and on the other we have Klaus Schwab, who is related by marriage with the Rothschilds (here), with the World Economic Forum, and both of them are arm-in-arm with the head of the Catholic Church to establish the New Order by means of the Great Reset, as has been planned since the 1950’s.

The world depopulation plan 

Among the associates of this pactum sceleris there must also be counted some members of the Pontifical Academy for Life, which recently had its organizational structure overturned by Bergoglio himself when he removed the members who were most faithful to the Magisterium, replacing them with supporters of depopulation, contraception, and abortion. There should be no surprise at the Holy See’s support for vaccines: in June 2011 the Sovereign Independent carried the headline on its front page: “Depopulation Through Forced Vaccination: The Zero Carbon Solution!” (here). Beside the headline, a photograph of Bill Gates was accompanied by a quote from him: “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive services [abortion and contraception], we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.” This is what Bill Gates said eleven years ago. Today he is one of the shareholders of the Black Rock group that finances the pharmaceutical companies that produce the vaccines, one of the main sponsors of the World Health Organization (WHO), and also of a myriad of public and private entities connected to health. At his side we curiously find George Soros, the “philanthropist” of the Open Society, which together with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently invested in a British company that produces swabs for Covid testing. And since we are talking about economic issues, I would like to recall that the Holy See has held shares worth about €20 million in two pharmaceutical companies that have produced a contraceptive drug, and more recently it invested in a fund that guaranteed very high profits in the event of a geopolitical or pandemic crisis thanks to speculation on international currencies, the “Geo-Risk” fund managed by the Merrill Lynch investment bank, which had to close it because of its skyrocketing yields after the first few months of the pandemic. Other capital, coming from the “Peter’s Pence” collection, had been used to finance various other initiatives, even collaborating with [Italian businessman] Lapo Elkann, whose endeavors include Rocketman, the autobiographical film of Elton John. To say nothing of the real estate speculations and the purchase of the London building at 60 Sloane Avenue that the news coverage has amply informed us on, a purchase that I know, from a reliable source, was decided on by Bergoglio himself. And then there’s China: always in the name of “coherence” and the “church of the poor for the poor” that is so dear to Bergoglio’s heart, there are those who believe that the secret Accord prepared by the Jesuits and former-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick may have obtained substantial funding from the communist regime in Beijing in exchange for the Vatican’s silence over the persecution of Catholics and the violation of human rights.

Deep state interference 

There have been manifold examples of interference by the deep state in the life of the Church. We cannot forget the emails of John Podesta and Hillary Clinton, which show the intention to oust Benedict XVI from the papacy and so to initiate a new “springtime of the Church” that would be progressivist and globalist, which later came about with the resignation of Benedict and the election of the Argentine. Nor can we overlook the interference of entities and institutions that are anything but close to religion, such as the B’nai B’rith, in dictating the direction of the “renewal” of the Church after Vatican II and most of all under this Pontificate. Finally, we should remember on the one hand the disdainful refusals to grant audiences to conservative political and institutional personalities, and on the other hand the passionate smiling encounters with leaders of the Left and of progressivism, along with expressions of enthusiastic satisfaction on the occasion of their election. Many of them owe their success to having attended universities run by the Society of Jesus or circles of Catholicism that in Italy would be called Dossettian,1 where the network of social and political relations constitutes a sort of progressive Freemasonry and ensures dazzling careers for so-called “adult Catholics,” those who use the name “Christian” without behaving consistently with Christian faith and morality in their service of public affairs: Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi; Romano Prodi, Mario Monti, Giuseppe Conte, and Mario Draghi; to name only a few. As we can see, the cooperation between the deep state and deep church is long-standing and has now produced the results hoped for by its supporters, with very serious damage to both the State and religion.

The closure of churches in early 2020, even before the civil authorities imposed the lockdowns; the prohibition of the celebration of Masses and the administration of the Sacraments during the pandemic emergency; the grotesque ceremony performed on 27 March 2020 in Saint Peter’s Square; the insistence on vaccines and their promotion as morally legitimate despite having been produced with cell lines originating with aborted fetuses; Bergoglio’s declarations that the genetic serum represents a “moral duty” for every Christian; the introduction of the “Green Pass” health passport in the Vatican and more recently in Catholic schools and in some seminaries; the Holy See prohibiting Bishops from announcing that they are against the vaccination obligation, promptly endorsed by certain Bishops’ Conferences – these are all elements that demonstrate the subordination of the deep church to the orders of the deep state, and the way in which the Bergoglian church is an integral part of the globalist plan. If we combine all this with the idolatrous cult of the pachamama right under the arches of Saint Peter’s Basilica; the insistence on irenicist ecumenism, pacifism, and pauperism; the endorsement of situation ethics and the substantial legitimization of adultery and concubinage in Amoris Laetitia; the declaration that the death penalty is morally illicit; the endorsement of left-wing politicians, revolutionary leaders, and abortion activists; the words of understanding for LGBT issues, homosexuals, and transsexuals; the silence over the legitimization of homosexual unions and the even more disconcerting silence over the blessing of sodomitical couples by German Bishops and priests; and the prohibition of the Tridentine Mass with the abolition of Benedict XVI’s Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, we realize that Jorge Mario Bergoglio is carrying out the task entrusted to him by the globalist elite, which wants him to be the liquidator of the Catholic Church and the founder of a philanthropic and ecumenical sect of Masonic inspiration that is meant to constitute the Universal Religion in support of the New Order. Whether this action is being carried out with full awareness, out of fear, or under blackmail, nothing detracts from the gravity of what is happening, nor from the moral responsibility of those who promote it.

Read the Whole Article

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I don’t know why Iran agreed to the ceasefire, but it did. Iranian leaders, in my opinion, are frighteningly naive. Some apparently believe that they can achieve a legitimate negotiated deal with Donald Trump. I suggest the Ayatollah and IRGC commanders read Donald Trump’s Truth Social posting regarding Bibi Netanyahu (see image). Despite Trump’s temper tantrum on Monday — when he dropped the F-bomb complaining about the ignorance of Iran and Israel — he still has his lips firmly planted on Bibi’s backside and will likely look for a pretext to continue the war with Iran.

While there is no doubt that Israel inflicted some serious damage on Iran by killing scores of military leaders and nuclear scientists, Iran hit Israel far harder. Consider the following facts:

Israel has one international airport… Ben Gurion.

Iran has 29 international airports.

By closing Ben Gurion, Iran cut off Israel’s access to commercial air traffic. Israel hit at least three airports in Iran, but did not stop commercial air traffic to Iran.

How about seaports? Israel only has two ports that handle container ships — Haifa and Ashdod. Iran forced the closure of Haifa and was on its way to doing the same to Ashdod. Iran, by contrast, has eight principal ports on the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman:

Port of Shahid Rajaee (Bandar Abbas complex)

Bandar Abbas (general shipping)

Chabahar (direct access to Indian Ocean)

Bandar Khomeini, Bandar Mahshahr, Bushehr, Parsian, Hormuz

None were forced to suspend operations.

If Iran had shuttered Ashdod, Israel would have faced the prospect of significant shortages of essential items, including food and energy. Israel would have been compelled to rely on military airports for resupply, but it appears those airfields were hit by Iranian missiles and suffered some damage. The extent of the destruction is unknown thanks to the efficiency of Israeli censors.

Iran also hurt Israel’s ability to refine oil at the Haifa Refinery — Operated by BAZAN Group (formerly Oil Refineries Ltd.), located in Haifa Bay, with a capacity of approximately 197,000 barrels per day (~9 million tons annually). Iran reportedly hit and severely damaged the Haifa Refinery. Israel has one other refinery at Ashdod — Owned by Paz Oil Company, based in Ashdod, with a capacity of about 108,000 barrels per day (~5.4 million tons annually). I have seen no reports about Iranian attacks on the facility at Ashdod.

Had this war continued, Israel likely would have faced an unprecedented economic crisis if it lost its two main container ports and its refineries. Because Israel’s air-defense system had been rendered inoperable and Iran continued to demonstrate the ability to hit critical infrastructure, Israel could have faced a genuine existential crisis.

IAEA Director Rafael Grossi is in a panic. During an interview with a French TV station, he admitted:

The IAEA has lost the ability to monitor Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile following the recent escalation between Israel and Iran.

I think Iranian officials now realize they were played for fools by the IAEA. Circumstantial evidence points to IAEA as the source that provided the names, addresses and phone numbers of the Iranian nuclear scientists that were murdered by Israeli operatives. Iran is taking steps to end its relationship with the IAEA, according to Eureka News:

The Iranian Parliament approved a bill on Wednesday to suspend cooperation with the IAEA.

Alireza Salimi, a member of the Iranian Parliament’s presidency, stated that the decision would be referred to the Supreme National Security Council for approval. He also said that agency inspectors would be banned from entering the country and that sanctions would be imposed on those who allowed them in.

“The International Atomic Energy Agency did not even formally condemn the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, so it has lost its international credibility,” said Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of the Parliament.

He also stressed that the country intends to continue working on peaceful nuclear energy, despite the threats. “Iran will be more ready and prepared than ever, our hand is on the trigger, and we will respond with overwhelming force to any aggression,” he stated.

Grossi is throwing his own version of a temper tantrum, telling Eureka News:

Iran has an obligation to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency on its nuclear program,” its Director General, Rafael Grossi, told France 2 on Wednesday.

In detail, the senior official stated that Iran’s cooperation with the agency “is not a favor, it is a legal obligation as long as Iran remains a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

In light of the events of the last 12 days, Iran would be entirely justified to withdraw from the NPT. I wonder if Russia and China are reconsidering their cooperation with IAEA. Russia’s Sergei Lavrov made the same observation as Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf (see above)… harshly criticizing the IAEA’s failure to denounce the Israeli and US attacks on Iran’s nuclear plants.

While Trump is confident that Iran will return to the negotiating table, I remain skeptical that Iran is willing to sit down with Steve Witkoff and agree to halt all uranium enrichment. Given the perfidy of the IAEA and the unlawful actions of Israel and the United States, Iranian officials would be fools to entertain such talks. That’s my opinion. We will see what Iranian officials say this week.

This article was originally published on Sonar21.

The post The War on Iran Is Not Over appeared first on LewRockwell.

Donald Trump and his allies continue to complain that the central bank isn’t inflating the money supply enough. Last week, Bill Pulte, Trump’s appointee to the Federal Housing and Finance Administration—and the head of Fannie and Freddie—complained that Powell and the FOMC weren’t forcing down interest rates enough.

Pulte wrote on X/Twitter:

Because President Trump has crushed inflation, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell needs to lower interest rates today, and if not Chairman Powell needs to resign, immediately. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can help so many more Americans if Chair Powell will just do his job and lower rates.

With these comments, Pulte is demonstrating that he, like his boss Donald Trump, subscribes to the standard Yellen-Bernanke inflationist model of monetary policy: the job of the central bank is to forever force down interest rates, churn out more easy money, and devalue the currency.

Pulte claims publicly that this somehow makes homes more affordable. As we’ll see below, though, the Fed’s easy-money policy of recent decades has not made home more affordable. Rather, Fed policy has helped to relentless increase home prices through the Fed’s asset purchases, interest rate policy, and monetary inflation.

Although Pulte is engaging in performative protests against “too-high” interest rates, it is more likely he is being motivated by the usual crony “capitalist” agenda: press for more monetary inflation so Wall Street will enjoy the fruits of more asset-price inflation.

Of course, that’s just speculation. But, his actual motivations are immaterial to the fact that following the recommendation of Trump, Vance, Pulte, et al, will only continue to blow up a housing bubble and place housing ever more beyond the reach of ordinary people.

Do Falling Interest Rates Increase Home Prices?

There is a fairly clear inverse relationship between interest rates and home prices. This is certainly obvious to real estate agents and their lobbyists who perennially lobby for lower interest rates because they know that lower interest rates lead to more home purchases and higher prices. This in turn, leads to higher commissions for agents.

The inverse relationship is reflected in this graph:

Source: Source: US Census Bureau and Freddie Mac.

There are many factors that affect mortgage rates, of course, but over the past thirty years—and especially since 2009—falling interest rates have coincided with rising home prices. In fact, falling interest rates slightly precede rising home prices, suggesting a causal relationship.

It’s easy to picture how falling interest rates lead to higher prices. When mortgage rates are low, it is easier to afford monthly payments on, say, a $300,000 mortgage. At three percent, the monthly payment is about $1700 per month. At six percent, though, the payment on the same mortgage is nearly $2300 per month. Clearly, there are more potential buyers for the house at the lower interest rate.

But there are important monetary reasons that explain why low interest rates drive prices higher. In the modern context of inflationary fiat currency, lower interest rates are usually fueled by new money creation, and this monetary inflation drives more asset price inflation.

This is because central banks “set” their lower interest rates through open market operations that involve increases in the money supply. In Understanding Money Mechanics, economist Bob Murphy explains:

Specifically, when monetary base growth is high, the federal funds rate is low. And vice versa, when the growth in the monetary base slows, the fed funds rate shoots up.

There is nothing mysterious about this. To repeat, this is the standard explanation given in economics textbooks—not just Austrian texts—to explain how a central bank “sets” interest rates. When the central bank wants to cut rates, it buys more assets and floods the market with more base money. And when the central bank wants to raise rates, it slows the pace of monetary inflation (or even reverses course entirely and shrinks the monetary base).

In other words, falling interest rates are a manifestation of monetary inflation, and monetary inflation often shows up as asset price inflation. We see this reflected in home prices when the central bank works to drive down interest rates. This, of course, is also reflected in consumer price inflation, which rose to forty-year highs in 2022. It is not a coincidence that after a decade of extreme efforts to inflate home prices after 2009, consumer prices surged nearly 25 percent in only five years, from 2020 to 2025.

The Fed’s Stockpile of Mortgage Securities

The Federal Reserve has been deliberately and specifically meddling with home prices ever since Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan explicitly sought to blow up a housing bubble as a means of exiting the 2001 recession in the United States. This policy, however, reached never-before-seen levels of intervention in 2009 when the central bank directly intervened in the economy to buy up trillions of dollars worth of mortgage backed securities (MBSs). The Fed did this to force down mortgage rates and to inflate prices of MBSs as a means of bailing out major commercial banks which faced catastrophic declines in their mortgage-heavy portfolios.

No discussion about home prices or mortgage rates captures the full context of the housing market unless we consider the effects of the Fed’s stockpile of mortgage-backed securities. So long as the fed sits on its hoard of mortgage assets, home prices are being inflated by artificial Fed-created demand for mortgages.

(Alex Pollock has examined how the Fed turned itself into the world’s largest Savings and Loan through this process.)

We can see the history of this phenomenon in the graph below. When the 2007 housing crash began, the Fed sprang into action to bail out Wall Street by buying up MBS assets. This turned around the downward trend in housing prices which would have made housing more affordable, but would also have made banks lose a lot of money. So, the Fed (and the Bush administration) decided to inflate real estate asset prices, and prices headed up again. The Fed bought up more of these assets in 2013 and 2014 to further “stimulate” asset prices and force down mortgage rates. When the Fed finally began to allow some of these assets to roll off the balance sheet in 2019, home prices finally moderated. But, the Fed started a new buying Frenzy in response to the covid panic, and home prices surged with historic speed.

Source: US Census Bureau and Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

It is true that, in recent years, the Fed has very slowly allowed some of these assets to begin rolling off the balance sheet. Not surprisingly, we have also seen home prices finally start to level off. But, the rate at which the allows this to happen is purposely extremely slow so as to ensure that home prices do not actually fall by any significant amount. Again, what comes first is concern for Wall Street. Falling home prices, of course, would be denounced as “deflation,” which the central bank eternally opposes. After all, the whole point of the Fed’s mortgage asset purchases is to make homes more expensive. That’s good for the banks which continue to benefit from the ongoing bailout that is the Fed’s asset purchase scheme.

Why Care if Home Prices Rise?

But why should we care if home prices rise? After all, as Pulte suggests, can’t “we” just make homes affordable again by lowering interest rates?

Well, it’s not that easy.

After all, if it were that easy, then we wouldn’t now be looking at housing affordability hit a multi-decade low while the average age of homeowners surges. This didn’t suddenly happen in recent weeks because—as Trump seems to think—Powell is just being intransigent.

According to the Atlanta Fed’s affordability index, affordability has fallen 45 percent since 2012, and began a precipitous decline during the first quarter of 2021—before price inflation forced the the Fed to allow interest rates to increase from historic lows. Moreover, the homeownership rate has fallen by six percent since 2004. This happened in spite of the Fed’s inflation-fueled efforts to drive down mortgage rates again and again. In fact, thanks in part to these efforts, the money supply has increased by 231 percent since the Fed began buying up mortgages in 2009.

Monetary inflation is limited by the political realities of price inflation. Eventually, people start to notice that their wealth and incomes are being inflated away. Central banks cannot just simply inflate nonstop to force down interest rates to please real estate agents and Donald Trump—at least not without imposing the devastating economic effects of price inflation.

Moreover, just driving down mortgage rates comes with other costs. As home prices increase, this can’t fixed by simply financing everything to the hilt at low interest rates. With rising home prices comes higher down payments, higher property taxes, and higher insurance costs. This can’t all just be rolled into mortgages. For many ordinary people, monthly payments raise as home prices rise, even in a low-interest-rate environment.

Unfortunately, central bankers can’t wave a magic wand and make price inflation disappear while the same central bankers also push easy money to force down interest rates. This is why we continue to see declining homeownership rates and rising debt loads as owning a home becomes ever more out of reach.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

The post How the Fed Made Housing Unaffordable appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Democratic Party put another bullet in its head this week with the election of the charming, affable jihadi communist Zohran Mamdani. Is “communist” too harsh a label? (He styles himself, softly, a “socialist.”) Yet his campaign platform looks like a template from the venerable Soviet Council of Ministers circa 1957: Free Everything: housing, buses and subways, college, child-care, government food stores. . . with a cherry-on-top of replacing police with social workers in high crime areas — because rapists and car-jackers would quit their rowdy ways if only they could talk about their feelings.

If you believe the news reports emanating from Woke Central, Zohran received major support from the folks who predominate the Upper West Side, where he was raised-up by his Columbia prof Dad and film-maker Mom. That is, voted in by the same high-income demographic that flocks to Zabar’s Deli on Sunday mornings for smoked sturgeon and babka — a curious alliance. I guess this solves the old riddle of why Europe’s Jews walked so placidly into Auschwitz.

“Life imitates art,” old Oscar Wilde liked to say, and with so many self-administered bullets in its head now, the Democratic Party looks more and more like The Walking Dead, a necromantic tribute to its erstwhile mascot, “Joe Biden,” the Phantom of the White House. Fortunately, the Latinx bombshell, AOC, America’s answer to Eva Peron, has stepped up to the leadership role, flanked by the foxy Jasmine Crockett, with their mentor, Bernie Sanders close at hand (on a leash, really) barking validation for the Party’s death trip.

It’s a wonder of our time (and its playful zeitgeist) that New Yorkers might choose a mayor even worse than the brain-dead colossus, Bill de Blasio, but there it is, in plain sight for all to behold. The Big Apple and its various services will now go from their currently merely broke-ass condition, to the complete collapse of infrastructure, transit, housing, revenue, business, and public safety, in other words, to true Third World authenticity! Serious people, who run viable businesses, support families, and pay whopping taxes, are in a panic, all a’chatter about moving elsewhere.

That chatter is not idle, especially among the class that owns major real estate, of which New York City has a frightening and increasingly obsolete inventory — hundreds of office skyscrapers running at fifty percent (or less) occupancy, which cannot cover their mortgages, maintenance, or taxes. What will become of them? I’ll tell you: some will be foreclosed-on, sold for dimes on the dollar (and fail again under new ownership,) and quite few will stand empty waiting for acanthus tree seeds to sprout on their empty windowsills.

Or, they will turn into “squats,” like the towers in the abandoned city center of Johannesburg that I saw visiting there ten years ago. Those giant office buildings were not converted into “residential,” you understand; folks were simply camping-out there, even with the electricity and water turned off. This is exactly what happens when you run the prosperous people, whom you hate, out of town, which is what happened in that sad-sack nation. How many demonstration projects like that are needed to prove that communism with a racist frosting on top is a mug’s game.

Of course, we’re not there yet. Zohran hasn’t been sworn in, though the victory celebration just now looks like it’s fait accompli. You can only imagine the frantic conversation running between the old party poohbahs out in the cold: Chuck Schumer, Hakim, Nadler, Obama, even the loser, Cuomo, plus the non-elected party apparatchiks: Axelrod, Podesta, Carville, Plouffe, Emmanuel. . . . They’re not saying, but I bet many are silently wondering: Is there some way we can just disappear the guy? Make him go away? X him out? Cancel his ass? (Someone, for Godsake, find a couple of girls who will say he groped them in an elevator!)

Or maybe some electoral work-around? Maybe put what remains of the party’s dwindling financial mojo back behind Eric Adams — yes, he’s still Mayor — who supposedly quit the party (after they tried and failed to stuff him in prison) and is running for mayor now as an independent. . . but who will surely welcome whatever support and moolah they can bring to his cause. Adams’s two great virtues as a political figure: he’s not Bill de Blasio and he’s not Zohran Mamdani.

New York might go down the drain anyway. At least for a while. That broken business model for skyscrapers is not going away anytime soon, and neither is the greatly augmented Third World population funneled across the open border into New York City by “Joe Biden’s” shadowy minders. Will New York turn into that fairytale town whose economy subsisted on people simply taking in each other’s laundry?

Well, the city will always have its geographical assets, like, the best goshdarn ocean harbor in the whole east coast. Something will be there. . . some human agglomeration. But what? And over all of that, like the uncanny eyes of Dr. TJ Eckleburg in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, looming above the ash-heaps of Queens County on the road to West Egg, lately rises the stern visage of Donald J. Trump, New York real estate mogul superbus, and now President of this sore-beset nation, watching events roll out.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

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Israel’s devastating June 13 attack on Iran surprised the world. Not because it happened, but because of when it happened. President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iran a week later caught the world off guard as well — also because of when it happened rather than that it happened.

Trump floated the idea of striking Iranian nuclear sites multiple times over a span of a few days. But he said he would decide within two weeks. Two days later, American B-2 stealth bombers flew into Iranian airspace, dropped 14 bunker-busting bombs — each weighting 30,000 pounds — on three nuclear enrichment sites in Iran, and zipped back home.

Ceasefire

But perhaps most shocking was Trump’s announcement on Monday. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, he declared the war over. He even christened it with a catchy name, the “12 Day War,” not as short as another war the Israelis were involved in (the Six-Day War), but short nonetheless.

Not everyone welcomed the news. Fox’s Mark Levin, for example, did not. He suspects Iran’s nuclear program survived, a sentiment that grew wings Tuesday after legacy media outlets spread far and wide news of an intelligence leak making the same claim.

Levin’s media archenemy, Tucker Carlson, had the opposite reaction. His team stamped Tuesday’s daily morning newsletter with the subject line, “Thank God Donald Trump brokered a ceasefire. That’s the last thing Mark Levin wanted.” After the leak, he sent out another email in the afternoon, claiming the Deep State will stop at nothing to provoke a war.

The world learned of the ceasefire after the president announced it on his Truth Social account Monday evening. “It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran that there will be a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE,” he decreed.  The announcement was so out of the blue that, according to some reports, it “caught even some of Mr. Trump’s own top administration officials by surprise.”

Frustrated Plans

Over the next few hours, it looked as though the two warring countries were reluctant to oblige the American president. Israel and Iran were still lobbing missiles and bombs at each other. The Guardian reported:

Donald Trump has declared a ceasefire intended to bring an end to a 12-day war between Israel and Iran, but despite public acceptance of the truce, both sides continued to exchange fire on Tuesday morning. Air raid sirens sounded in northern Israel at about 10.30am, in response to what the Israeli military said was an Iranian missile launch, about two and a half hours after the ceasefire was first announced. Israeli reports said two missiles had been intercepted. Iran denied launching missiles after the ceasefire but Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said he had ordered immediate retaliation on Tehran.

This made Trump angry. He expressed his dissatisfaction with a rare public use of the “f-word” when talking to reporters. “They don’t know what the f- they’re doing,” he bawled. Trump aired further frustration to the media, specifically aimed at Israel. He said, “Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs, the likes of which I’ve never seen before, the biggest load that we’ve seen.” The Guardian was somehow able to measure Trump’s scolding as “the strongest-worded public rebuke of Israel of any US president in history.”

Trump then told the Israelis, as a stern father would a child, to knock it off. He posted on his Truth Social account in all caps: “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!” And, apparently, Israel listened.

The Jerusalem Post corroborated that Trump indeed read Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the riot act. Israeli fighter jets were just minutes away from hitting 20 Iranian targets when Trump got on a call with Netanyahu and told him to put a lid on it. According to the report:

A source familiar with the details told The Jerusalem Post that Trump raised his voice at the prime minister, demanding, “Stop the attack.” The source noted that Netanyahu managed to say little during the call, though he repeatedly expressed gratitude to the US President. The source said, “It was a tough conversation between Netanyahu and President Trump. Trump viewed this as a personal achievement, and made it clear that no one — absolutely no one — would undermine it.”

The pilots pulled back on the attack and hit a radar station near Tehran as a compromise.

Problem Solved

Shortly afterward, Trump issued another update. This one informed the world that everyone will now behave. “ISRAEL is not going to attack Iran. All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly “Plane Wave” to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES,” Trump wrote.

By late Tuesday morning in the United States, it was beginning to look as if Trump’s peace “imposition” was starting to become reality. The Wall Street Journal reported:

Iran’s foreign minister later said his country would halt firing if Israel stopped its attacks. Israel confirmed the cease-fire on Tuesday morning, saying its war aims had been achieved.

In another round of Middle Eastern kabuki theater designed to preserve national pride, Iran’s foreign minister announced on state TV that Iran had fought until the very last minute.

The Times claimed to have spoken to three diplomats familiar with how the ceasefire came about. And based on that report, the world owes the Qataris a pat on the back for helping the Americans mediate peace:

Qatar intervened on behalf of the Trump administration and persuaded Iran to agree to a cease-fire with Israel.… The three diplomats said that Mr. Trump had told Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the emir of Qatar, that Israel had signed off on an American cease-fire proposal. They added that the president had asked that Qatar help bring Iran on board. The Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, then persuaded Iran to agree to the proposal in a call with the Iranian leadership, the diplomats said.

What was accomplished?

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