Aggregatore di feed

For many years I reported monthly on the jobs reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Over the years the new jobs were consistently in health and social assistance, waitresses and bartenders, and government employment.  

Manufacturing jobs making things that could be exported to pay for imports simply were not present.

I emphasized that the jobs offshoring policy associated with globalism was de-industrializing the United States and destroying the middle class and the ladders of upward mobility that had made America an opportunity society.  I held accountable the economic professors at Harvard and Dartmouth who promised that the lost of US manufacturing jobs, which they derided as “dirty fingernail jobs,” would be replaced by higher paid clean fingernail tech jobs.  No such jobs ever appeared for the displaced manufacturing work force which has ceased to exist.

Fortunately, the US dollar being the world reserve currency allows the US to pay its bills by printing Treasury bonds.  As Treasury bonds are the reserves of most foreign central banks, there has been a constant demand for more reserves.  Thus, financing the US debt has been no problem. When US debt grows, so do the reserves of the world’s central banks.  No problem.  David Stockman in 45 years has been unable to learn this.

The problem is internal.  Manufacturing jobs are high productivity, high value added.  Therefore the wage is high.  The replacement jobs–stocking big box store shelves are low productivity.  Consequently, the growth of income from wages stagnated and declined.  Today American living standards are based more on credit than on productivity.

Engineering and design follow manufacturing.  When manufacturing leaves, so do engineering and design.  

America was the loser.  China was the winner.  Wall Street forced American manufacturers to offshore their production to China in order to raise profits from lower labor and compliance costs. Wall Street ordered US manufacturers to “meet the Chinese price” or Wall Street would finance takeovers of the companies and move their production offshore. Clearly, Wall Street is an anti-American entity.

I remember when Washington’s strategic thinkers said it would be 50 years before China would be a problem for American hegemony. The offshoring of US manufacturing, technology, and business knowhow reduced the time to 5 years.  Today on a purchasing parity comparison, the Chinese economy exceeds that of the US.  This is what globalism did for America.  It made the American economy subordinate to China.

American economists were too well paid by globalists for me to draw them into a debate.  Instead, they stayed with their propaganda, and America lost the ladders of upward mobility.

To worsen the situation, the Democrats and Republican business interests left the borders open to millions of immigrant invaders who have overwhelmed educational, health, and housing services and driven down wages in the low productivity jobs.  Today the profits of fruit and vegetable growers and meat slaughter houses depend on cheap immigrant-invader wages.

But this is only the beginning. According to Bloomberg News, Artificial Intelligence will soon eliminate 20-40% of the jobs in America’s largest cities. Robotics are eliminating other low skilled wage jobs.  What will America do with a population displaced by the digital revolution and AI?

Civilizational collapse stares us in the face, and not a single media source mentions the fact.

Let’s look at June’s jobs report.  It is the same as those I reported over many years.  Where are the 147,000 jobs?  Health care and social assistance provide 58,600 jobs.  Leisure and hospitality provide 20,000 jobs. State and local education provide 63,500 jobs.  That accounts for June’s new jobs.

Clearly this is not a robust economy. Except for the 20,000 leisure and hospitality jobs, most of the rest are financed by  government budget.

Now, you tell me how is America a superpower instead of an emperor without any clothes?  Why should anyone be afraid of a country that pays its bills by printing debt instruments?  The reason is that the US has nuclear weapons and is under Israel’s direction.  

That is sufficient to terrify the world.

The post Globalism Destroyed American Jobs appeared first on LewRockwell.

When the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict started in 2014, American and multinational conglomerates rushed to ensure they got their “piece of the pie” in the unfortunate country. In around a decade or so, the Kiev regime changed laws and enabled the total or near-total takeover of every remotely valuable asset built by generations in the Soviet Union. While the socialist superstate certainly had its flaws, the legacy it left in former Ukraine has never been matched by any government since the latter’s “independence” in 1991.

Namely, while the country had a massive industrial sector until then and a population of 52 million, mostly well-educated and working in various specialist fields (Soviet Ukraine was a scientific and industrial powerhouse no less than Russia itself), after 1991, all this collapsed for good.

By the early 1990s, relatively prosperous Ukraine turned into an underdeveloped country with only a fraction of its Soviet-era scientific and industrial potential, selling mostly agricultural products and essentially serving as a cheap resource for the political West’s brutal (neo)colonial exploitation. By the mid-2010s, NATO fully hijacked the unfortunate country and turned it over to the Neo-Nazi junta that’s now effectively conducting genocide against Ukrainians themselves. Namely, the demographic collapse is so catastrophic that it’s highly likely there’s only half of Ukraine’s 1991 population in the country at this point. The suicidal war with Russia (its closest kin) continues, while the United States is now openly demanding whatever’s left of Ukrainian resources (with even this lost to Russian all-out advance across the frontlines).

In fact, the situation is so bad that the infamous BlackRock, the world’s most exploitative (neo)colonial conglomerate, has actually given up on NATO-occupied Ukraine. According to Bloomberg, it suspended work on “a multibillion-dollar Ukraine recovery fund”, supposedly following President Donald Trump’s election win. Apparently, this prompted France to work on a replacement deal, with initial support from Germany, Poland and Italy. The report, published on July 5, further states that BlackRock ceased all efforts to “search for institutional investors in January”, effectively ending the planned $500 million fund that was intended to be secured from various Western governments, development grants and investment banks. In turn, another $2 billion from other private investors was also lost after they withdrew.

The report also points out that the investment stopped due to “a lack of interest amid perceived uncertainty in Ukraine”. In other words, nobody wants to sink billions of dollars into an endemically corrupt mafia state run by Neo-Nazi goons in the middle of an unwinnable war with a military superpower nextdoor. Truly shocking. However, jokes aside, it doesn’t take an economic expert to understand that the most basic logic implies that nobody remotely sane would make that kind of investment. Worse yet, the notion of “perceived uncertainty” is even more laughable. Namely, as previously mentioned, the Russian military is now advancing on multiple fronts, meaning that this “uncertainty” is not a matter of perception, but an objective reality that any thinking investor would take into account.

The Bloomberg report further states that the investment fund was scheduled to be unveiled at the “Ukraine Recovery Conference” on July 10-11 in Rome. A BlackRock spokesperson said that the conglomerate “completed advisory work for the recovery fund pro bono in 2024, but no longer has any active mandate”. Worse yet, although France promised to “step up”, it seems this is also falling through. Citing “people familiar with the matter” Bloomberg reports that “it remains uncertain how effective the plan will be without American backing”. In other words, investors from the European Union are just as skeptical as their US counterparts, which tends to happen when people are getting their information from sources other than the mainstream propaganda machine which still insists that the Kiev regime is “defeating Russia”.

Numerous independent authors from around the world (particularly at InfoBRICS), have been reporting that the so-called minerals deal that the Trump administration was trying to push for since it came to power would fall through. We repeatedly argued that the minerals promised by the Neo-Nazi junta weren’t even under its control, while areas with any known resources lack the mining industry to support extraction.

It would take years and tens (if not hundreds) of billions in investment just to establish it. In other words, the investors would need to give lots of money to the losing side. Expectedly, such business deals are wholly unattractive to people who don’t like losing massive financial assets. The Kiev regime tried to do everything in its power (effectively selling the entire country) to change their opinions, but to no avail.

For instance, the Neo-Nazi junta frontman Volodymyr Zelensky pompously announced his $1 trillion “reconstruction plan” years ago, even promising each corporation what can only be described as free rei(g)n in oblasts (regions) they invested in. The results have been catastrophic for NATO-occupied Ukraine, with around 30% of its arable land handed over to (neo)colonialists.

In addition, cheap Ukrainian agricultural products flooded European markets (after they were initially promised to starving Africans and for which Russia was blamed by the mainstream propaganda machine), resulting in massive protests by farmers across the “old continent” as their market share collapsed virtually overnight. However, even this turned out to be a bad investment, particularly after the Russian military entered the Dnepropetrovsk oblast.

Source Infobrics.org.

The post Why BlackRock Suddenly Gave Up on the Neo-Nazi Junta appeared first on LewRockwell.

FDR as Our Greatest Twentieth Century President

A few weeks ago I’d published an article on Father Charles Coughlin, the notorious radio priest of the 1930s, and my extensive reading revealed that he had been a far more formidable figure than I’d ever realized.

Although he was relegated to just a sentence or two in my introductory history textbooks, Coughlin had pioneered political commentary in the new medium of radio broadcasting, and partly as a result he had amassed an astonishing audience of perhaps 35 million regular listeners by the early 1930s, a total that may have amounted to one-quarter or more of all American adults. This enormous following probably made him the world’s most influential media figure, someone who dominated large segments of American society. Although the occasional fireside chats of President Franklin Roosevelt were hugely popular and FDR received thousands of letters each day, Coughlin’s own audience was much larger and his daily volume of mail far greater.

As a populist social reformer widely regarded as being on the left, Coughlin had been a strong and important early supporter of FDR and his New Deal economic policies, but he eventually came to regard these as a failure and turned against Roosevelt, also later becoming a leading figure in the effort to keep America out of World War II. That latter political turn led FDR to successfully deploy the full power of his federal government to drive Coughlin from the airwaves and permanently end his political activities.

• American Pravda: Father Charles Coughlin
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 19, 2025 • 8,000 Words

Coughlin was hardly alone in his strong opposition to our involvement in World War II, with polls showing that some 80% of the American people held similar views, nor was he even the most prominent public opponent.

Earlier this year, I published a long article on the career of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and his America First campaign, a political movement that had similarly sought to block our involvement in the war. In that work, I’d drawn very heavily upon an excellent 2024 book of that title by historian H.W. Brands, whose coverage focused entirely upon that Roosevelt-Lindbergh political duel of the early 1940s.

• American Pravda: Charles A. Lindbergh and the America First Movement
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 10, 2025 • 15,600 Words

Although Coughlin and Lindbergh were the primary figures in those articles, in each case President Roosevelt had been their main opponent, so he also had a central role both in my political narrative and in the extensive reading that I had undertaken to produce it.

Prior to Roosevelt, no American president had ever dared to exceed the two term limit informally established by George Washington, but FDR shattered that tradition by winning a third and eventually a fourth term, becoming the longest-serving president in our national history. My school textbooks told the story of how FDR’s New Deal rescued our country from the terrible depths of the Great Depression and then how that same president went on to win the Second World War against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the greatest military conflict in human history.

During his many years in office, FDR had hugely expanded the size and scope of the American federal government, establishing Social Security, Federal Deposit Insurance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and numerous other basic elements of our society that I had always taken for granted. Along the way, he had become an enormously popular hero to a huge fraction of the American public, notably including a young Ronald Reagan, who began his political career as an ardent New Deal Democrat, and despite his later decades as a conservative Republican still always lionized FDR and many of his policies.

Given such political achievements, it’s hardly surprising that Roosevelt’s Wikipedia page runs 21,000 words, with another 32,000 words devoted to his New Deal policies, with the former declaring:

Historians and political scientists consistently rank Roosevelt, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln as the three greatest presidents.

These articles and my reading led me to realize the very scanty and meager extent of my knowledge of FDR and his New Deal policies. For nearly my entire life, my understanding had been limited to what I had gleaned from my textbooks and absorbed over the years from my newspapers and magazines. However, about eight or nine years ago, I’d read a highly critical late 1940s book about Roosevelt and his presidency, and found it sufficiently persuasive that I’d later summarized some of its surprising information in a 2018 article. But in the back of my mind, I’d always wondered whether that account was merely a severely distorted and one-sided critique, a biased version of events that I had accepted because of my general ignorance of the subject.

Therefore, I recently decided to broaden my historical understanding of that era with an extensive study of FDR and his presidency, focusing my reading upon fully mainstream historiography, and that major project consumed much of the month of June.

The Privileged Life and Early Career of FDR

I’d been very favorably impressed with the Brands book, and noticed that the same author had previously published a lengthy 2008 biography of FDR that had been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, so Traitor to His Class, a doorstop-sized work running around 900 pages seemed like a good starting point for my investigation.

From the beginning, Brands emphasized Roosevelt’s very wealthy and elite family background. The future president was a descendent of the early Dutch settlers who had founded New York, and he followed that family tradition by being educated at Groton and Harvard College. FDR seems to have been a mediocre student with few if any intellectual interests, and years later he always described his failure to be admitted to Harvard’s elite Porcellian social club as the greatest disappointment of his entire life. By all accounts, Roosevelt almost never read any books, with the sole exception being dime detective stories. I’d sometimes come across these sorts of striking anecdotes about FDR in my casual readings, but having them explicitly stated in such a weighty and widely-praised biography fully confirmed their credibility.

After college, FDR enrolled at Columbia Law School, though he found legal studies rather uninteresting, received mediocre grades, and dropped out before graduating. By contrast, he was a very active and enthusiastic member of the New York City Yacht Club, so despite his lack of a law degree, a yachting friend of his soon offered him an unpaid apprenticeship at one of America’s most prestigious law firms. Roosevelt found practical legal work just as dull as he had his law school classes, but the couple of years or so he spent in that position, half of that time working without salary, seems to have been the only real job he ever held in his entire life.

During that period, Roosevelt was already telling his friends that he intended to make politics his career and hoped to reach the presidency, something that struck me as an astonishingly bold goal for someone then in his late 20s with such unimpressive personal achievements. But his very successful subsequent political career owed much to a crucial factor that I had entirely failed to grasp.

When I first began reading candid accounts of FDR’s background and his personal characteristics, the historical analogy that immediately came to my mind was that of President George W. Bush, but I’d failed to fully appreciate just how closely the two cases matched. As most people know, Bush’s very successful career in Republican Party politics was almost entirely due to the famous name of his father, President George H.W. Bush, with many ignorant voters notoriously getting the two men confused. I think it’s widely acknowledged that if Bush’s last name or even his first name had been something different, it’s unlikely that he would have ever been elected to anything at all.

Similarly, I’d always found it an odd coincidence that America had had two presidents with the rather unusual name Roosevelt just a couple of decades apart, but until reading the Brands book I’d failed to understand that much more than mere coincidence was involved.

As the author emphasized, the two terms in office of President Theodore Roosevelt, followed by his extremely active and high-profile post-presidential career had made TR the foremost public figure of his era, also establishing “Roosevelt” as the most famous political name in America, perhaps even in the entire world. FDR came from an entirely different branch of that family, being only a fifth cousin of his important relative, although his wife Eleanor was actually TR’s niece. But FDR’s very famous last name was still regularly regarded as a major political asset, with Democratic Party leaders always glad to put up a Roosevelt of their own and capitalize on the huge fame of the progressive Republican of the same surname.

So when the Democrats of Dutchess County in Upstate New York heard that FDR might be interested in running for office, they eagerly recruited him even though he’d spent the last few years living in New York City. His district was a heavily Republican one and Roosevelt was wealthy enough to fund his own race, so he seemed like the ideal candidate. FDR was handsome and charming and he campaigned in an expensive and gaudy red automobile at a time when horse-and-buggies were still the main means of transportation, so as he drove around his rural district, his unusual vehicle often attracted as much attention as the candidate who rode inside it. The year 1910 happened to be a very good one for Democrats, so Roosevelt won an upset victory by 1,440 votes, entering the New York State Legislature, while his fellow Democrats gained control of both houses.

The election of a Democratic Roosevelt was considered a major political novelty, especially since most people incorrectly assumed that he was actually a close relative of the recent Republican president. The New York Times soon published a lengthy profile on the freshman lawmaker, with the feature writer even declaring that “His patronymic had gone before him.”

Back then, the notorious Tammany Hall Democratic political machine ran New York City, with the state’s Democrats being sharply divided into pro- and anti-Tammany factions. FDR became a leading figure in the latter camp, probably inspired by a mixture of TR’s progressive views and his own shrewd political instincts on how to make a quick name for himself.

Once again, the Roosevelt surname worked wonders, and the freshman lawmaker received a great deal of national media attention as he and his allies successfully blocked the preferred Tammany candidate for New York Senator, an office that was still selected by a vote of the State Legislature. Numerous newspapers all across the country hailed FDR’s efforts and ran his photograph, with the Cleveland Plain Dealer identifying the young officeholder with TR’s battles against corruption, while lauding his bright political future:

Franklin D. Roosevelt is beginning his public career fully as auspiciously…If none of the colonel’s sons turn out to be fit objects for popular admiration, may it not be possible that this rising star may continue the Roosevelt dynasty?

Over the years that followed, this same exact pattern would often repeat itself. Political opportunities of an important nature would regularly be showered upon a relatively young man whose own rather undistinguished personal achievements while in office would otherwise have passed almost unnoticed. Being a political celebrity with a famous last name was just as beneficial a century or more ago as it has been in recent decades.

A bitter political battle between progressive and non-progressive New York Republicans had allowed FDR to initially slip into office, and in 1912 this same Republican battle was repeated on the national level. Theodore Roosevelt came out of retirement to mount a vigorous third-party challenge to his own hand-picked successor President William Howard Taft, with the result of the bitter three-way presidential race being the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Meanwhile, FDR won a difficult reelection campaign by the same relatively narrow margin as before.

Franklin Roosevelt in the Wilson Administration

Roosevelt seemed generally bored by state politics and he was also enough of a realist to recognize that once internal Republican battles subsided, any hopes of reelection in his district would probably fade away. He had enthusiastically endorsed Wilson for the presidency, so he eagerly sought a position in the new administration. Wilson had appointed a North Carolinian newspaperman named Josephus Daniels as Secretary of the Navy, and FDR successfully lobbied Daniels for the position of Assistant Secretary, a perfect fit given Roosevelt’s love of yachting as well as his desire to follow in the footsteps of TR, who had himself served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy decades earlier.

Daniels had no interest or experience in either naval affairs or administration, and had been advised by his predecessor that the Secretary of the Navy did nothing but approve the requests of the various admirals. But being a Bryan progressive, he was extremely suspicious of all the corporate military contractors, and according to a contemporaneous observer quoted by Brands, rightfully so, with the navy brass mostly consisting of deadwood, often corruptly linked to their corporate suppliers.

Daniels had a good working relationship with his young subordinate, and given his lack of interest in naval matters, he delegated a great deal of authority to FDR. According to Brands, even though Roosevelt had barely turned thirty, he already had his eye set on the White House, and therefore made every effort to ingratiate himself with the leadership of the navy. This included pressing very hard for an aggressive new building program of battleships, destroyers, and submarines, a project aimed at making our navy second to none, which was an extremely radical American idea for that era.

FDR was hugely ambitious, continually seeking every possible path for political advancement. Despite being only in his very early 30s and lacking any significant accomplishments, he decided to run for New York’s U.S. Senate seat in 1914, the first time that position was determined by popular election. Roosevelt had only served less than eighteen months in the Wilson Administration and Wilson anyway discouraged his appointees from involvement in state politics, so when he faced the longtime politician backed by the Tammany machine, he was crushed in the worst election defeat of his career. FDR got barely a quarter of the vote in the Democratic primary, while his opponent went on to lose heavily in November to the Republican candidate.

The outbreak of the First World War later that same year proved a major political opportunity for FDR, with our sleepy peacetime navy suddenly facing the potential challenge of a world military conflict as the threat of German U-boat attacks gradually drew America into the war. Daniels was firmly aligned with Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in the anti-militarist, anti-war camp, while Roosevelt took a very different position than his superior in public hearings, emphasizing the need to greatly expand our naval forces. The 1915 sinking of the Lusitania almost led Wilson to declare war, prompting Bryan’s resignation with Daniels nearly following him out the door. Roosevelt railed against his superior in private, while emphasizing his very contrary views to Wilson and the rest of the government.

While the leadership of the Republican Party was strongly pro-war, the Democrats were sharply divided, with their urban Irish and German voters and their Western progressives strongly opposed, so Wilson’s very difficult 1916 reelection campaign had to carefully balance those conflicting elements. Wilson therefore campaigned on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” but then brought America into the conflict just months after his extremely narrow victory. Roosevelt took full advantage of this new opportunity, doing his best to promote naval shipbuilding, proposing some innovative wartime measures, and even hiring his own publicist to promote his activities.

On a much more embarrassing personal note, his wife Eleanor received some important media attention, being featured in a 1917 Sunday Times article on the importance of following federal guidelines to conserve food during wartime. The very affluent but rather insouciant Mrs. Roosevelt emphasized that both she and her numerous family servants were doing everything they could to economize:

Making the ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible but highly profitable. Since I have started following the home-card instructions, prices have risen but my bills are no larger.

In 1918 FDR arranged to travel to Britain on an inspection tour, including a brief trip to the Western Front in France, a visit that allowed him to always afterward claim that he had “seen combat.” Although he was just a junior figure in the Wilson Administration, his famous last name once again opened many important doors, getting him lengthy personal meetings with King George V, British Prime Minister Lloyd George, French Premier Georges Clemenceau, and many other top officials.

Upon his return home FDR planned to resign his government position and join a naval unit, thinking that he might see combat. As Brands explained, “With luck he might be decorated, even lightly wounded,” something that would prove very useful for a “president-in-the-making.” But the war ended too soon for his plans to come to fruition.

Many millions of those who reelected Wilson in 1916 did so believing that he had promised to keep America out of the European war, and they were outraged when he asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany just weeks after his second inauguration. Wilson also soon enacted a military draft, the first and only such measure in our national history except for the Civil War fought more than two generations earlier.

Potentially forcing millions of Americans to fight and die thousands of miles from home in a foreign war proved extremely unpopular in many parts of the country, and harsh sedition laws were soon passed, threatening long prison sentences for anyone who challenged those controversial government policies. In 1912 socialist Eugene Debs had won 6% of the presidential vote, among the best results for any minor party candidate in history, but when he made a few disparaging public remarks in 1918 about government policies and the draft, he was quickly sentenced to ten years in federal prison for sedition.

All these factors together with Wilson’s other political blunders resulted in a sweeping Republican victory in the 1918 elections, followed by Wilson’s severe stroke and the final Congressional defeat of his effort to enroll the U.S. in the League of Nations, an international project that he regarded as his main public legacy.

As a result, the Democrats realized that they faced almost certain defeat in 1920, so they nominated a bland Midwestern governor to lead the hopeless effort. The Democratic convention then balanced that ticket by picking as vice president the young and attractive 38-year-old FDR, a Wilsonian progressive with a famous name. Just as expected, Republican Warren Harding won by a huge landslide with over 60% of the vote, while his party picked up enough additional Congressional seats to establish majorities larger than any they had enjoyed since the Reconstruction Era two generations earlier. This election represented the greatest political defeat that the Democrats had suffered since the Civil War and marked the beginning of the near-total Republican national political dominance of the 1920s.

But Roosevelt himself had meanwhile gained his first national platform, giving most American voters an opportunity to size him up and recognize that he compared favorably with the winning candidate. As Brands puts it, “If voters could envision Warren Harding as president, they could certainly envision Franklin Roosevelt.” So FDR was hardly damaged by being on the losing ticket, and he had now become one of the leading figures in the national Democratic Party, much closer to his longstanding goal of reaching the White House than might have seemed possible just a year or two earlier.

While he contemplated his next political move, Roosevelt’s new political stature and his Washington connections soon landed him a very lucrative position as a front-man and rainmaker at a New York financial house run by a sailing friend of his. That position paid him the pre-tax current equivalent of millions of dollars each year for part-time work with only vague duties.

This discussion of FDR’s early career has run far longer than I had originally intended, and was drawn from less than the first 150 pages of Brands’ 900 page volume, while it lacks any of the important events of Roosevelt’s dozen years in the White House. But although I had been somewhat familiar with his years in the presidency, I was very surprised by what these earlier years revealed about the future president’s personality and character.

Brands is a biographer sympathetic to his subject, but many of the basic facts he set forth in a friendly manner seemed quite remarkable to me. Politics obviously attracts the politically-ambitious, but I’m not sure I’d ever read a biography of someone who had been so firmly determined to reach the presidency from such a young age despite his complete lack of any personal achievements, notable or otherwise. Roosevelt was a handsome, charming fellow, but his only major assets seemed to have been his personal wealth and his famous political name, while he appeared to have no clear goals or interests in public policy, let alone any ideology, being almost a blank slate in that regard.

I recalled the stinging remarks that Texas Democrat Jim Hightower made decades later regarding a future President Bush: “He was born on third base and thought he had hit a triple.”

Years later, the eminent progressive jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes famously declared that Roosevelt had a “second-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament.” But this sounded exactly like the sort of thing Neocon pundits might have said about President George W. Bush in the years after 9/11.

I think all these aspects of Roosevelt’s personality are highly relevant as we begin to consider his later political career and his time in office.

Given the enormous hagiography that eventually enveloped FDR’s wartime presidency and continued during the decades that followed, I think this examination of his early career helpfully cuts him down to normal size, allowing the contrary evidence to become much more believable. Once we begin to think of Franklin Roosevelt as being more of a George W. Bush or a Warren Harding, subsequent matters begin to make much more sense.

Read the Whole Article

The post President Franklin Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and the New Deal appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Vatican, on July 3, approved a new votive Mass “for care of creation” which Pope Leo XIV celebrated for the first time on July 9. A follow-on from the Francis pontificate promulgated to mark the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si’, the new votive Mass has elicited a variety of contradictory responses. I’ll weigh in: I think it is balanced in the middle, and in medio stat virtus. It’s in the middle because it avoids two extremes: the Scylla of secular environmentalism and the Charybdis of disregard for the inherent good of the temporal world. Let’s examine both.

Secular Environmentalism

Vatican sources said the new text was a response to Laudato Si’s call to recognize human life is “grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbor and with the earth itself” (66). That insight is biblically grounded. It is part of what I call our “Genesis heritage,” the common Jewish-Christian patrimony about seeing the world that comes from the first book of the Bible.

That book also teaches that those relationships are warped by sin. Man hides from God (Genesis 3:8). With only two people in the world, one already blames the other (3:12). The postlapsarian resistance of nature—even one’s body—is already announced by God (3:16-19).

Genesis also teaches a truth we cannot lose sight of: man has dominion over the created world. The “world” and man are not at least co-equal partners. Creation is a tool for human good (Genesis 1:26-28). That dominion over creation is intended by God (1:26), given explicitly to man (1:28), and connected to participation in the divine image and likeness (1:27) because it involves man’s ongoing share in co-creation under God.

God invites man to co-creation in an IKEA world—assembly required—by which, as rational and responsible creatures, humans can build. They must build responsibly, which means that they can be faithless fiduciaries of that dominion. The solution is conversion: be a faithful fiduciary.

Secular environmentalism neglects this idea. It either denigrates man as a lousy steward of creation and/or makes creation at least man’s co-equal. Those ideas are wrong on Genesis’ warrant.

Man is not just another creature: he is creation’s apex. All other things are simply decreed; man’s creation is preceded by God’s deliberation and receives a unique dimension—the divine image and likeness. Everything else made is “good.” Only man’s creation is pronounced “very good.” And nothing else is created after man, with God taking His rest—not as an absence from the ongoing work of creation (that would be deism) but because he has other persons with whom to share it.

Pope St. John Paul II repeated Vatican II constantly that “man is the only creature God wanted for himself” (Gaudium et Spes, 24). Who is “himself?” For Augustine, it’s God (Confessions 1,1). For Vatican II (according to Fr. Peter Stravinskas), it is man because seipsam refers to “creature.” So, is “himself” man or God? I suggest we expand the Council to encompass both. God wanted man as man, not just as another creature decorating His world. And God wanted man for God, as a creature capable of a communion of persons with Him who is the Ultimate Communio Personarum in the most important bond of all: love.

That is not the perspective of secular environmentalism. It is ready to cut man down and aggrandize creation. Consider efforts to confer “rights” on rivers, animals, and other phenomenon, an initiative foretold by Justice William Douglas in his 1972 Sierra Club v. Morton opinion seeking to enfranchise trees.

A philosopher once asked, if a tree falls in the forest without a man around, does it make a sound? It does—at least for the squirrel who flees being crushed. Today’s question, however, should be: If a tree falls in the forest without a man around, who cares? “Who” applies only to persons. Does a pristine world of babbling brooks, trees, and squirrels “care?” That question needs to be asked by all the young people foregoing parenthood “in the name of the planet.” That is also abandonment of the Genesis heritage. Let’s not overvalue the environment.

Read the Whole Article

The post Thoughts About the Mass for Care of Creation appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Parasitic Super-Rich Ruling Class (PSRRC) has been actively stealing from the people and attempting to control our government since its founding. But their Coup in 1913 was the nefarious beginning of the end of our freedoms and our Constitutional Republic.

The PSRRC started digging our grave with four consecutive tools in the Coup of 1913. These started with the ratifications of the 16th and 17th Amendments, authorizing income taxes and direct voting for Senators. The newly-formed IRS then authorized Tax-Free Foundations. The Congress passed another unconstitutional law in 1913 authorizing the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank as the last nail in the coffin.

Now let’s look at the four pillars of our destruction in more detail: !. Income Taxes, 2.Direct Voting for Senators, 3. Tax- Free Foundations and 4.the privately-owned Federal Reserve Bank.

The Federal Reserve Bank and its branches are unconstitutional and privately-owned. This Bank is the single greatest threat to our freedoms and prosperity. It is generally accepted that those who control the money supply (and you surely know who they are!), control the country, regardless of election results.

The Federal Reserve Bank’s Power to print fiat currency allows them to finance wars for profit and other government boondoggles for the benefit of the PSRRC at the expense of the public.

The bank prints unconstitutional fiat money out of thin air to buy government bonds to finance government deficits, which exceed 37 trillion dollars. To the extent that this fiat money exceeds production of goods and services, it is also inflationary.

Our Constitution requires the use of gold and silver for currency. The Federal Reserve unlawfully prints fiat dollars because they can’t create gold and silver to finance wars for profit or fund Communist cities. The Federal Reserve has the power to expand and contract fiat currency, causing inflation and depression, which in turn causes redistribution of wealth to the PSRRC. They could not do this with gold and silver lawful money.

The Second Pillar for the demise of our Republic was the 17th Amendment that allowed Senators to be elected rather than appointed by state legislatures. The result was that states and the people lost their voice in the Senate  and gave it to big money, the PSRRC.

The Third Pillar was Tax-Free Foundations enabled by the new IRS. This allowed the wealthy to retain the power of their money, with strings, thru eternity. This gave them additional  power to control corporations with control of additional stock.

These four Pillars were the foundation for the gradual cumulative destruction of our Constitutional Republic over the last 112 years.

We must remember that the Media is mostly owned or controlled by the PSRRC. The media, along with the educational system, brainwashed much of the population and were especially effective among the ill-educated in the Communist inner cities.

The end result is an all-powerful corrupt Federal Establishment, half of which is a Criminal Enterprise because of its usurped powers rightfully belonging to the states. The federal income tax was the key, because it gave the Federal Establishment all the money needed to fund usurped state functions, concentrating all power in Washington DC.

The Federal Income Tax reversed the Constitutional relationship between the States and the Federal Establishment. Constitutionally, each state is in fact a Sovereign Government. The Federal Establishment is not a Sovereign Government and has very limited powers under its creation document crafted by the several states, the US Constitution. The Income Tax unlawfully gave the federal establishment the money to usurp and control state functions.

Democrat politicians, leaders and funders are simply promoting a Communist agenda. Their power is centered in the Communist cities where unconstitutional federal funding of able-bodied Communists and illegal invaders is the rule. If this continues with tax money extorted from working people, there will be Civil War,  It is inevitable.

I don’t see how any Democrat can be reelected if people are informed, when every last Democrat voted against massive tax cuts for the average person. I am well-aware that this latest bill does not reduce the deficit, but we must pray that Trump’s great vision comes to fruition…otherwise we are doomed.

I have written on the specifics of the unlawful existence and actions of federal agencies and departments in the past, and will do so again. But, I leave you with this thought:

Any unlawful functions or actions not under the Constitution are null and void, and President Trump can (and should!) cancel them with the stroke of his pen . That is, of course, if the PSRRC and their minions in government don’t kill him as it is alleged that they did to the Kennedy Brothers and so many others who oppose their criminality against the people.

The post The 1913 Coup Was the Beginning of the End of Our Freedoms and Our Constitutional Republic appeared first on LewRockwell.

On Sept. 16, 2001, five days after the attacks on New York and Washington, DC, President George W. Bush declared, “This crusade – this war on terrorism – is going to take a while. And the American people must be patient. I’m going to be patient. But I can assure the American people I am determined.”

Four days after that, President Bush declared the “war on terror” to be primarily against al-Qaeda. “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda,” he said in an address to Congress and the nation, “but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

He described the enemy thus:

This group and its leader — a person named Osama bin Laden — are linked to many other organizations in different countries, including the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.  There are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 countries.

Bush was correct in his assessment of the group.

One of those countries into which al-Qaeda jihadists implanted themselves was Syria, where from 2011 – with the support of the Obama Administration – they attempted to overthrow the secular leader, Bashar al-Assad, using terrorist tactics they had been well-trained in.

They soon changed their name – but not their stripes – and became the Al-Nusra Front, headed up by an experienced jihadist who fought against US troops in Iraq by the name of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. His group was known for chopping off heads. Perhaps even American heads.

Last December Jolani’s jihadists – with support from the US, Turkey, and Israel – finally brought down the Assad government and quicker than you can say “Washington PR makeover” he clipped his beard, switched out his tactical military watch for a $90,000 Patek Philippe World Time Chronograph, and declared himself president.

The “civilized world” cheered the re-emergence of democracy in Syria!

At their first meeting earlier this year in Saudi Arabia, President Trump praised jihadist Jolani as “a young, attractive fellow” and “a tough guy, a fighter, with a very strong background. He has a lot of potential, he’s a real leader.”

This was a US-designated global terrorist with a $10 million bounty placed on his head by the US authorities. His “wanted” poster STILL remains on the X account of the US Embassy in Syria!

This week, President Trump “removed sanctions on Jolani’s Syria at (Israeli Prime Minister) Netanyahu’s request,” and just yesterday Secretary of State removed Jolani’s old al-Qaeda affiliate (which had gone from al-Nusra to HTS over the years) from the US terrorist list.

As one observer on X quipped:

The history of the GWOT (Global War on Terror) began in 2001 with the US invading Afghanistan to dig out Al Qaeda. It ends twenty-four years later with the US recognizing an AQ affiliate as the new ruler of Syria.

According to Brown University’s Cost of War Project, the “Global War on Terror” cost the American people at least eight trillion dollars. It also took the lives of perhaps a million people.

And what did we get for all this blood and treasure? In Afghanistan, the Taliban were after 20 years of US military action replaced by the Taliban, and in Syria a fierce opponent of al-Qaeda was replaced by…al-Qaeda!

As Jake Sullivan, then right hand to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, wrote to the Secretary in 2012, “al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria.” He wasn’t joking!

That was the shot…here’s the chaser:

In the same week the United States removed sanctions on al-Qaeda ruled Syria, it placed sanctions on…UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese!

Who is Albanese? She is the fearless defender of human life in a Gaza where it is slowly being extinguished by Israel with the backing (and weapons) of the US government.

In hitting UN human rights defender Albanese with sanctions, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote:

Today I am imposing sanctions on UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for her illegitimate and shameful efforts to prompt @IntlCrimCourt action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies, and executives.

Albanese’s campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated. We will always stand by our partners in their right to self-defense.

The United States will continue to take whatever actions we deem necessary to respond to lawfare and protect our sovereignty and that of our allies. (emphasis added)

What might those “whatever actions” be? Clearly it is a physical threat against Albanese for speaking out against a mass murder happening in real time, observable for all who wish to do so on our own computer screens.

So that is it. The “Global War on Terror” is over. Terrorists have been elevated by the US government to be heads of state and those who speak out against state terrorism are threatened with “whatever actions we deem necessary” to shut them up.

Reprinted with permission from The Ron Paul Institute.

The post ‘Global War on Terror’ Is Over. Terror Won. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

The writing Muses are jealous mistresses.

The post Ernest Hemingway: Video Documentary appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Andy Thomas.

The post Sermon: “Righteousness Exalteth A Nation,” And Supporting Israel’s Genocide In G… appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Chris Sullivan.

The post Trump Welcomed a War Criminal to the White House appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Tim McGraw.

The post Dylan Alexander (30) Returns to his hometown in Rural Maine after 10 years appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

Someone should tell Trump that his war against the Houthis was a failure. The mighty US Navy lost.

The post Houthis Sink “Magic Seas” Cargo Ship appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Krall.

Alon Mizrahi on Substack

The post How Israel ends, part 2 appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Facebook

The post The sound of silence isn’t the sound of freedom appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Mikki Willis

The post False Flag Incoming? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Bruce McLane.

Facebook

The post New anti war song appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post What Is The ‘Canary Mission’ And Why Are US Officials Using It To Attack The First Amendment? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Tim McGraw.

The post Griffith Park, Los Angeles: The Untold History appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

J. Lee’s Stack

The post Feeling Some Orange Buyer’s Remorse? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Matt Taibbi

The post At Last: John Brennan and James Comey Under Criminal Investigation for Russiagate appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Ginny Garner.

Infowars

The post Did Weather Weapon Cause Texas Flooding? appeared first on LewRockwell.