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Writes Fred Simmons:

On July 13, 2025, the day before Donald Trump’s address on Russia’s war in Ukraine, US senator Lindsey Graham made an ambitious statement that in the coming days the world will see a record-breaking supply of weapons to Ukraine and 500% tariffs for all states that help Russia. The decisions voiced by Graham were deemed to be already taken by Washington, that is why Trump’s statement that he gives 50 days to Moscow to agree to a ceasefire or face tariffs at about 100% surprised and even disappointed the world community. Despite senator Graham supported the US President’s decisions, he didn’t miss a chance to lay it on thick again, hinting that Moscow will experience the same consequences as Tehran did on June 21, 2025, unless it complies with the US demands.

It seems that acting this way Graham is trying hard to undermine Donald Trump’s authority as he realizes that he voices much tougher measures than the President is ready to take now. Despite senator Graham publicly demonstrates his loyalty to Trump, his actions evidence the opposite. He seems to play his own game promoting his interests and views on supporting Ukraine and providing military and financial assistance to it.

At the same time Graham’s visits to Kyiv as well as his regular meetings with Ukrainian politicians pose the question of corruption element in his actions. In the days of the Biden administration, the senator’s name more than once made headlines as he was suspected of taking part in corruption schemes of Kyiv and Washington. No secret the administration of the previous US President sent aid to Ukraine significantly smaller than it had been stated. Some part of finances ended up in the pockets of the American officials, who turned a blind eye to the fact that the full volume of funding never reached the front-line units after the Ukrainian establishment got an access to it.

Moreover, Graham directly participated in discussing the amounts of money to be allocated to Kyiv. And at some point, the funds simply disappeared and Ukraine saw none of them. Surprisingly, no light has been shed on this situation, despite billions of dollars were at stake. It has been forgotten as if it never happened.

In general, the policy of senator Graham undermines not only Trump’s authority but also the status of the Republicans and can affect the outcome of the US Senate elections in 2026.

The post The Game of Senator Graham appeared first on LewRockwell.

Il manoscritto fornisce un grimaldello al lettore, una chiave di lettura semplificata, del mondo finanziario e non che sembra essere andato “fuori controllo” negli ultimi quattro anni in particolare. Questa è una storia di cartelli, a livello sovrastatale e sovranazionale, la cui pianificazione centrale ha raggiunto un punto in cui deve essere riformata radicalmente e questa riforma radicale non può avvenire senza una dose di dolore economico che potrebbe mettere a repentaglio la loro autorità. Da qui la risposta al Grande Default attraverso il Grande Reset. Questa è la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso è accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.

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(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/loms-non-puo-essere-salvata)

Come esseri umani, consideriamo comunemente noi stessi, le nostre convinzioni e il nostro lavoro di particolare importanza. Non sorprende, quindi, che quando formiamo istituzioni, coloro che ne fanno parte cerchino di promuoverne la rilevanza, ampliare il proprio lavoro e centralizzare il processo decisionale all'interno del proprio gruppo “particolarmente importante”.

Pochi vogliono disinvestire potere e risorse, figuriamoci perdere il lavoro e mettere a rischio sé stessi e i propri colleghi. Questo difetto fatale infetta tutte le burocrazie, da quelle locali a quelle nazionali, regionali e internazionali.

Non sorprende, quindi, che l'Organizzazione Mondiale della Sanità (OMS), un'organizzazione sanitaria internazionale con oltre 9.000 dipendenti, un quarto dei quali a Ginevra, debba affrontare gli stessi problemi. Originariamente l'OMS aveva come obiettivo principale il trasferimento di competenze dagli stati in difficoltà che emergevano dal colonialismo e la sconfitta della maggiore incidenza di malattie dovuta a minori capacità amministrative e finanziarie. Questi obiettivi davano priorità a principi fondamentali come l'igiene, una buona alimentazione e servizi sanitari competenti, i quali avevano garantito una lunga vita alle persone nei Paesi più ricchi. Ora si concentra maggiormente sul rifornimento di prodotti di largo consumo. Nel corso degli anni il suo budget, il personale e le sue competenze si sono espansi con il diminuire delle reali necessità dei Paesi e della mortalità per malattie infettive.

Sebbene permangano importanti lacune nell'uguaglianza di base in ambito sanitario, recentemente aggravate dalle linee di politica dell'OMS sul Covid-19, il mondo è un posto molto diverso dal 1948, anno della sua fondazione. Invece di riconoscere i progressi, ci viene detto che ci troviamo semplicemente in un “periodo interpandemico” e che all'OMS e ai suoi partner dovrebbero essere attribuite maggiori responsabilità e risorse per salvarci dalla prossima ipotetica epidemia (come ad esempio la Malattia X). Sempre più dipendente da finanziamenti “specifici” provenienti da interessi nazionali e privati, investiti in soluzioni biotecnologiche redditizie anziché nei fattori di base della buona salute, l'OMS assomiglia sempre più ad altri partenariati pubblico-privati che canalizzano il denaro dei contribuenti verso le priorità dell'industria privata.

Le pandemie accadono, ma una naturale comprovata con un impatto significativo sull'aspettativa di vita non si verificava dai tempi dell'influenza spagnola, risalente all'era pre-antibiotica, oltre cento anni fa. Sappiamo tutti che una migliore alimentazione, fognature, acqua potabile, condizioni di vita migliori, antibiotici e farmaci moderni ci proteggono, eppure ci viene detto di avere sempre più paura della prossima epidemia. Il Covid è successo, ma ha colpito soprattutto gli anziani in Europa e nelle Americhe. Inoltre, come ora chiarisce il governo degli Stati Uniti, è stato un errore di laboratorio da parte della stessa industria pandemica che sta promuovendo il nuovo approccio dell'OMS.

Collaborare a livello internazionale in ambito sanitario rimane una pratica diffusa, come dovrebbe essere in un mondo fortemente interdipendente. È inoltre sensato prepararsi a eventi rari e gravi: la maggior parte di noi stipula un'assicurazione. Tuttavia non esageriamo il rischio di alluvione per espandere il settore assicurativo contro le alluvioni, poiché qualsiasi spesa in tal senso viene sottratta ad altre nostre necessità.

La salute pubblica non è diversa. Se dovessimo progettare una nuova OMS ora, nessun modello sensato baserebbe il suo finanziamento e la sua direzione principalmente sugli interessi e sui consigli di coloro che traggono profitto dalle malattie. Piuttosto si baserebbero su stime accurate dei rischi localizzati delle grandi malattie mortali. Un tempo l'OMS era indipendente dagli interessi privati, finanziata principalmente con fondi di base e in grado di stabilire priorità razionali. Quell'OMS non c'è più.

Negli ultimi 80 anni anche il mondo è cambiato. Oggi non ha più senso concentrare migliaia di operatori sanitari in una delle città più costose (e più sane!) del mondo, e non ha più senso, in un mondo tecnologicamente avanzato, mantenere un controllo centralizzato lì. L'OMS è stata strutturata in un'epoca in cui la maggior parte della posta viaggiava ancora via mare. Rappresenta sempre più un'anomalia rispetto alla sua missione e al mondo in cui opera. Una rete di enti regionali radicati nel loro contesto locale non sarebbe più reattiva ed efficace di una burocrazia distante, disconnessa e centralizzata costituita da migliaia di persone?

Nel contesto più ampio di tumulti che sconvolgono l'ordine internazionale post-1945, la recente comunicazione di ritiro degli Stati Uniti dall'OMS rappresenta un'opportunità unica per ripensare al tipo di istituzione sanitaria internazionale di cui il mondo ha bisogno, a come dovrebbe operare, dove, per quale scopo e per quanto tempo.

Quale dovrebbe essere la data di scadenza di un'istituzione internazionale? Nel caso dell'OMS, o la salute sta migliorando con l'aumento delle capacità dei Paesi e dovrebbe essere ridimensionata; oppure la salute sta peggiorando, nel qual caso il modello ha fallito e abbiamo bisogno di qualcosa di più adatto allo scopo.

Le azioni dell'amministrazione Trump rappresentano un'opportunità per rifondare la cooperazione sanitaria internazionale su standard etici e di diritti umani ampiamente riconosciuti. Paesi e popolazioni dovrebbero riprendere il controllo e coloro che traggono profitto dalle malattie non dovrebbero avere alcun ruolo nel processo decisionale. L'OMS, con i suoi quasi 80 anni di storia, proviene da un'epoca passata ed è sempre più estranea al suo mondo. Possiamo fare di meglio.

Un cambiamento radicale nel modo in cui gestiamo la cooperazione sanitaria internazionale sarà doloroso, ma in ultima analisi salutare.

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

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ⁿᵉʷˢ Barron Trump 

@BarronTNews_

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BREAKING: DNI Tulsi Gabbard Confirms Former President Obama Authorized Assassination Attempt on Trump

By Jonathan Gregory Washington, D.C. — July 21, 2025

In what may become the most explosive revelation in U.S. political history, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that declassified intelligence files directly implicate former President Barack Obama in authorizing a covert assassination attempt on then President-elect Donald Trump. The files, set to be publicly released, detail a sprawling, top-secret program initiated in the final 30 days of Obama’s presidency, with the explicit goal of preventing Trump from ever taking office. “Operation Silence was not just surveillance. It was an organized, multi-agency plot to eliminate the President-elect,” Gabbard said during an emergency intelligence briefing. “The documents outline everything, from recruitment of black ops teams, to manipulation of communications, to the final phase; physical removal.” According to sources close to the investigation, a failed attempt on Trump’s ’s life was thwarted only days before the inauguration, thanks to an anonymous whistleblower inside the National Security Command Center.

Redacted transcripts reveal that Obama, under the pretense of national security, convened an off the books task force of senior intelligence officials and military advisors at Camp David in late December. One document, marked Eyes Only 44, reads: “The threat Trump poses to institutional stability cannot be overstated. Removal, if necessary, is justified.” While Obama has not commented publicly, legal teams are reportedly mobilizing behind the scenes. As the files prepare to go public, the country teeters on the edge of political reckoning, and the question now isn’t whether there was a plot, but how far it went, and who else was involved.

ⁿᵉʷˢ Barron Trump on X: “BREAKING: DNI Tulsi Gabbard Confirms Former President Obama Authorized Assassination Attempt on Trump By Jonathan Gregory Washington, D.C. — July 21, 2025 In what may become the most explosive revelation in U.S. political history, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi https://t.co/tPQTW6YpG6” / X

The post BREAKING: DNI Tulsi Gabbard Confirms Former President Obama Authorized Assassination Attempt on Trump appeared first on LewRockwell.

The reader should be advised that this work is Seminal and advocates changes in actual structure and function of government to comply with Constitution and Economic Reality. Many details are excluded for brevity.

We must, to the extent possible, separate Communist Cities from the people who actually work to support their families. Failure to do so will result in Civil War.

Our Constitution and the people who work demand that the Federal Establishment AKA Government  stop all payments to states for all reasons not enumerated in the  US Constitution. The Federal Establishment would then return a large proportion of income taxes collected in a state to that state. States would then assume their Constitutional responsibility for state functions that have been unlawfully usurped by the Federal Establishment.

Most importantly, the states would then assume financial responsibility for their Communist cities and Illegal Invaders. This would greatly reduce the probability of a Civil War between working MAGA people and able- bodied non-working Communists and their illegal Invaders in Communist Cities, which are also Sanctuary Cities. We know that Communism fails when it runs out of other people’s money, and we want to expedite that failure before we have a Civil War between productive workers and parasitic Communists.

Now let’s look at some estimated Income figures to put things into perspective. The Federal Government’s income is roughly $5 Trillion but it spends $7.5 Trillion. Simply stated, it borrows 50% more than its tax revenue from the States. In other words, there is no way that any state pays their share of federal expenses, not by a long shot. I hope that if we end much of the waste, fraud, and abuse by transferring most functions to the states where it belongs, then we will have all the money needed by the states. Remember that my numbers leave out a lot of details and are reasonable estimates at best, but the figures are so gross that it makes little difference in the theory proposed.

If the Federal Government also wants to end its deficits, it will have to obey the Constitution and eliminate all unconstitutional expenses such as Foreign Aid, Wars for Profit, Troops stationed overseas, etc. As an Economist, I can say that if they don’t do this, we are looking at Dystopia, regardless of Trump’s well-intentioned programs..

The previous statements are based on the foundational principles set forth in our Constitution, and returns it to the proper legal relationship between the States and the Federal Establishment AKA Government. The wrongful Income Tax caused the problem, now let it righteously prevent a Civil War.

My prediction of a Civil War between MAGA people and Communists/Illegal Invaders is very realistic and has already started in several major Communist cities.

The FBI should arrest those who are financing the insurrectionists to commit Treason. If the FBI fails, disband it and replace with Militia of the Several States, as specified in Constitution. Their failure constitutes Treason in itself!

In fact, our Declaration of Independence cites similar reasons for our war for independence. Consider this:  we have a great Constitution, but it is ignored by a majority of elected officials, Judges, and Bureaucrats of the Administrative State. A majority of these government employees are bribed to benefit those who pay the bribes. Officials are seldom prosecuted for their crimes against the People, including Treason. I maintain that a majority of the Government is in fact a Criminal Enterprise, with no legal authority from the Constitution.

We must institute the Broken Windows Theory of Law Enforcement for government employees, stipulating that to prevent major crimes you must strictly enforce laws against minor crime. We will never have our freedoms and a Constitutional Republic until we effectively prosecute government employees for their crimes. In other words, we need effective and honest Federal Law Enforcement and we damn sure never had Failure of the corrupt FBI to prosecute Government employees for theft and Treason is the single-most-important reason for our problems.

May God Bless You and our Republic

Please send your comments to

[email protected]

The post How to Constitutionally Separate Communist Cities Without Civil War. appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Economist surely ranks as the world’s most influential newsweekly, and the cover story of its latest issue must have greatly surprised many longtime readers of that staunchly neoliberal publication. The headline was “Scrap the Asylum System” and the inside pages fleshed out this emphatic statement in a leader backed by a long article.

For decades, the Economist has been known for its strong support of immigration and immigrants, asylum-seeking refugees certainly included, and an apparent ideological reversal of such magnitude naturally caught my eye.

Although many different elements may have gone into this surprising shift, I suspect that the strident anti-immigration policies and rhetoric of President Donald Trump were probably the decisive factor.

Over the last couple of months, Trump’s immigration-control measures have been unprecedented in their harshness, sending masked federal officers to snatch suspected illegal immigrants off the streets of our major cities, then deploying thousands of national guardsmen and marines to Los Angeles to intimidate and suppress the resulting public protests. Judges, mayors and other elected officials from around the country have sometimes been arrested and dragged away for allegedly interfering with such immigration operations.

California is America’s largest state with a population of some 40 million, perhaps half of them from an immigrant background, and our senior U.S. Senator is Alex Padilla, a respected moderate Democrat from the Los Angeles area. Last month Sen. Padilla attempted to ask Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem a probing question about immigration policies at her LA press conference, only to be manhandled, handcuffed, and thrown to the ground by members of her security detail, an incident that absolutely astonished me. I’d never previously heard of any similar physical attack upon so high-ranking an elected official in modern American history. This seemed more like the sort of behavior we’d expect to see in a despotic Third World dictatorship.

Video Link

• Open Borders, American Elites, and the Minimum Wage
  Views change about massive immigration once both sides of the issue are heard
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 11, 2013 • 1,700 Words

The political elites of both major parties continued to completely ignore these widespread popular sentiments. Therefore they were totally shocked a couple of years later when Donald Trump suddenly made immigration his signature issue and used it to easily crush all his Republican establishment opponents in the primary and seize the GOP nomination for himself. Decades of very heavy immigration had dramatically changed the racial demographics of our country, thereby greatly unsettling large portions of the white majority, while the reigning Democratic Party establishment ferociously vilified anyone who dared question the economic logic of their lunatic Open Borders dogma. This opened the door to Trump’s populist, racially-charged insurgent candidacy.

A few weeks before Trump’s upset November 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, I’d published an article emphasizing all of these important points:

In the year 1915 America was over 85% white, and a half-century later in 1965, that same 85% ratio still nearly applied. But partly due to the passage of the Immigration Reform Act of that year, America’s demographics changed very rapidly over the following five decades. By 2015 there had been a 700% increase in the total number of Hispanics and Asians and the black population was nearly 100% larger, while the number of (non-Hispanic) whites had grown less than 25%, with much of even that small increase due to the huge influx of Middle Easterners, North Africans, and other non-European Caucasians officially classified by our U.S. Census as “white.” As a consequence of these sharply divergent demographic trends, American whites have fallen to little more than 60% of the total, and are now projected to become a minority within just another generation or two, already reduced to representing barely half of all children under the age of 10.

Demographic changes so enormous and rapid on a continental scale are probably unprecedented in all human history, and our political establishment was remarkably blind for having failed to anticipate the possible popular reaction. Over the last twelve months, Donald Trump, a socially liberal New Yorker, has utilized the immigration issue to seize the GOP presidential nomination against the vehement opposition of nearly the entire Republican establishment, conservative and moderate alike, and at times his campaign has enjoyed a lead in the national polls, placing him within possible reach of the White House. Instead of wondering how a candidate came to take advantage of that particular issue, perhaps we should instead ask ourselves why it hadn’t happened sooner.

The answer is that for various pragmatic and ideological reasons the ruling elites of both our major parties have largely either ignored or publicly welcomed the demographic changes transforming the nation they jointly control. Continuous heavy immigration has long been seen as an unabashed positive both by open borders libertarians of the economically-focused Right and also by open borders multiculturalists of the socially-focused Left, and these ideological positions permeate the community of policy experts, staffers, donors, and media pundits who constitute our political ecosphere.

Earlier this year, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, an elderly individual with unabashed socialistic views, was interviewed by Vox‘s Ezra Klein, and explained that “of course” heavy foreign immigration—let alone “open borders”—represented the economic dream of extreme free market libertarians such as the Koch brothers, since that policy would obviously drive down the wages of workers and greatly advantage Capital at the expense of Labor. These notions scandalized his neoliberal interlocutor, and the following day another Vox colleague joined in the attack, harshly denouncing the candidate’s views as “ugly” and “wrongheaded,” while instead pointing to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal as the proper font of progressive economic doctrine. Faced with such sharp attacks by young and influential Democratic pundits less than half his age, Sanders soon retreated from his simple statement of fact, and henceforth avoided raising the immigration issue during the remainder of his campaign.

Only a brash, self-funded billionaire contemptuous of establishment wisdom would challenge this bipartisan immigration consensus among our political elites, and only a prominent celebrity could launch his campaign with sufficient visibility to achieve a media breakthrough. This seemed an unlikely combination of traits to find in one individual, but the unlikely occurred, and our national politics has been upended.

There had already been strong previous indications of this smoldering political volcano among voters, though these signs were repeatedly ignored or discounted by the DC Republican apparatchiks who spent their time attending each others’ receptions and fundraisers. During the 2014 election cycle, immigration was a key issue behind the stunning defeat of Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who lost to an unknown primary challenger whom he outspent 40-to-1, constituting one of the greatest upsets in Congressional history. Prior to that, anti-immigration Tea Party insurgents had ended the long careers of incumbent Republican senators Bob Bennett of Utah in 2010 and Richard Lugar of Indiana in 2012.

• A “Grand Bargain” on Immigration Reform?
  An alliance of pro-immigrant Democrats and anti-immigration Republicans could finally fix our broken system
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 3, 2016 • 4,700 Words

The symbolic centerpiece of Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign had been his promise to build a wall to block the influx of illegal immigrants. Once in office, he did no such thing, and just a couple of months after the 2018 midterm elections, I published a January 2019 article pointing out that even the underlying premise of his proposal made absolutely no sense, probably reflecting Trump’s own ignorance of the issue along with the equal ignorance of his agitated right-wing supporters.

Read the Whole Article

The post ICE Raids, Asylum Policies, and Other Immigration Controversies appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of my major questions throughout life has been whether the bad things that happen around us are a result of a secretive group of bad actors (e.g., an organized conspiracy) or are simply a naturally emergent phenomenon that would occur regardless of which group was in power behind the scenes. The reason this is fundamentally a difficult question to answer is that in most cases, a compelling argument can be made for each, so ultimately, the interpretation you choose comes down to your own biases. In my own case, I still am not sure which is at play.

For instance, I frequently see policies be enacted in a coordinated fashion that lead to a clear outcome, and then watch as the years play out, that every institution works in unison to ensure that outcome comes to pass, and as such, when I see the opening moves, I tend to assume the ultimate outcome will follow (which, for example, is why I knew there would be vaccine mandates at the start of 2021).

Note: as it’s a bit of a tangent, I included a recent fairly impactful example of one of these coordinated campaigns at the end of the article.

Conversely, I often ask people directly connected to the government who is actually making the decisions that affect all of us, and one of the most informed people I know simply shared:

You can always point a finger at a specific agency or person, but the reality is that as the government gets bigger and bigger, more and more fiefdoms will emerge within it, and those groups will fight for their own interests at the expense of everyone else.

Note: many Federal agencies depend on obtaining congressional funding and, therefore, will engage in stunts to ensure that funding is allocated to them. For example, the CDC will routinely hype up inconsequential “pandemics” each year, as this nationwide drama allows them to obtain more funding.

The CDC’s Longstanding Corruption

Everyone has specific government agencies they dislike. One of mine has been the CDC because the CDC always promotes and protects vaccines (regardless of how egregious the vaccine is), criticizes integrative medical therapies, and promotes disease management strategies that are not very effective (e.g., masking for COVID).

It hence should not come as a surprise that the CDC has a longstanding history of corruption, did a variety of unscrupulous things to promote the COVID vaccines and in the present moment, has been the most resistant agency to the MAHA policies RFK Jr. has been working to enact (which in addition to being shown through news reports has been shared with me by people directly connected to the H.H.S.).

The CDC has enormous credibility among physicians, in no small part because the agency is generally thought to be free of industry bias. Financial dealings with bio-pharmaceutical companies threaten that reputation.—Marcia Angell MD, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine

In turn, if you browse their website, you will frequently encounter this CME disclaimer:

“CDC, our planners, content experts, and their spouses/partners wish to disclose they have no financial interests or other relationships with the manufacturers of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services, or commercial supporters. Planners have reviewed content to ensure there is no bias. CDC does not accept commercial support.”

One of the primary ways the CDC legally takes bribes is due to a 1983 law where Congress authorized the CDC to accept gifts “made unconditionally…for the benefit of the [Public Health] Service or for the carrying out of any of its functions.” Following this, in 1992, Congress established The National Foundation for the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, allowing the CDC to obtain additional funding for its work. Two years later, it was incorporated to “mobilize philanthropic and private-sector resources.”

Note: other Federal agencies, including the CIA and the NIH, have similar foundations (that are not subject to legal oversight such as Freedom of Information Act requests with many foundation directors later getting lucrative pharmaceutical employment).

Not surprisingly, the CDC Foundation has been accused of egregious conduct since its inception and has received nearly 1 billion dollars from corporate “donors” (criticisms include a scathing editorial in one of the world’s top medical journals). Some of the best examples of this corruption are documented in a 2019 letter to the CDC from a group of non-profit watchdog organizations. To quote part of it:

In 2011, Type Investigations reported that Exponent Inc, a firm that performs research for the pesticide industry, gave $60,000 to the CDC Foundation for a study to prove the safety of two pesticides. “We have a professional money-laundering facility at the Centers for Disease Control Foundation….They accept projects from anyone on the outside,” said James O’Callaghan, a researcher at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

Between 2010 and 2015, Coca-Cola contributed more than $1 million to the CDC Foundation. It also received significant benefits from the CDC, including collaborative meetings and advice from a top CDC staffer on how to lobby the World Health Organization to curtail its efforts to reduce consumption of added sugars.

The BMJ also reported on contributions from Roche to the CDC Foundation in support of the CDC’s Take 3 flu campaign, which encourages people to “take antiviral medicine if a doctor prescribes it.” Roche manufactures Tamiflu, an antiviral medication for the flu [for reference, Roche was able to convince governments around the world to stockpile hundreds of millions of dollars of Tamiflu while refusing to release any of their clinical data—and it was eventually concluded that the benefits of the drug are negligible, while significant harms result from the medication].

These “donations” in turn often shape the “impartial” guidelines we are expected to follow:

“In 2010, the CDC, in conjunction with the CDC Foundation, formed the Viral Hepatitis Action Coalition, which supports research and promotes expanded testing and treatment of hepatitis C in the United States and globally. Industry has donated over $26 million to the coalition through the CDC Foundation since 2010. Corporate members of the coalition include Abbott Laboratories, AbbVie, Gilead, Janssen, Merck, OraSure Technologies, Quest Diagnostics, and Siemens—each of which produces products to test for or treat hepatitis C infection.”

Conflict of interest forms filed by the 34 members of the external working group that wrote and reviewed the new CDC recommendation in 2012 show that nine had financial ties to the manufacturers. A report by the Office of the Inspector General found that CDC’s external advisors played an influential role in decision-making for the federal government and that there was a systemic lack of oversight of the ethics program with 97% of disclosure forms filed by advisors found to be incomplete, and 13% of advisors who participated in meetings not filing any disclosure at all.

Note: key funders of the CDC foundation (detailed here) include Act Blue (a key Democratic political advocacy group), key vaccine organizations such as GAVI and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the major vaccine manufacturers (e.g., Pfizer, Moderna, Merck and J&J), and tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and PayPal.

Recognizing these concerning trends, employees of the CDC in 2016 anonymously complained to their leadership regarding the agency’s corruption:

It appears that our mission is being influenced and shaped by outside parties and rogue interests…What concerns us most, is that it is becoming the norm and not the rare exception. Some senior management officials at CDC are clearly aware and even condone these behaviors. Others see it and turn the other way. Some staff are intimidated and pressed to do things they know are not right. We have representatives across the agency that witness this unacceptable behavior. It occurs at all levels and in all of our respective units.

Recently, the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP) has been implicated in a “cover up” of inaccurate screening data for the Wise Woman (WW) Program. There was a coordinated effort by that Center to “bury” the fact that screening numbers for the WW program were misrepresented in documents sent to Congress; screening numbers for 2014 and 2015 did not meet expectations despite a multi­million dollar investment; and definitions were changed and data “cooked” to make the results look better than they were. Data were clearly manipulated in irregular ways. An “internal review” that involved staff across CDC occurred and its findings were essentially suppressed so media and/or Congressional staff would not become aware of the problems.

Finally, most of the scientists at CDC operate with the utmost integrity and ethics. However, this “climate of disregard” puts many of us in difficult positions. We are often directed to do things we know are not right. For example, Congress has made it very clear that domestic funding for NCCDPHP (and other CIOs) should be used for domestic work and that the bulk of NCCDPHP funding should be allocated to program (not research).

Why in FY17 is NCCDPHP diverting money away from program priorities that directly benefit the public to support an expensive [global health] research that may not yield anything that benefits the [American] public?

Finally, the CDC’s dealings with corporate interests had drawn scrutiny and concern from Congress:

In February 2019, Congresswomen Chellie Pingree and Rosa DeLauro wrote the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services calling for an investigation of CDC’s interactions with Coca-Cola. They noted that the evidence shows “a troubling pattern of the company using access to high-level CDC officials to shape debates over public health policy directly involving the nutritional value of its products.” The congresswomen requested that the Inspector General “determine whether there is a broader pattern of inappropriate industry influence at the agency, and make recommendations to address this issue.”

Unfortunately, due to the politicization surrounding COVID, all of this was swept under the rug, the requested 2019 investigation was never conducted, and the (fairly recent) story was largely forgotten.

Ideology or Corruption?

Much in the same way, I always wonder to what degree events are “natural” vs. “orchestrated.” I also often wonder to what degree conduct I find reprehensible is due to corruption or simply ideological fixation, once again finding it’s ultimately hard to say, as such a strong case can be made for each conclusion.

For example, in the case of vaccines, while clear financial conflicts of interest can be shown in certain cases (e.g., what I showed above with the CDC), I find the zealous adherence to all vaccines being “safe and effective” tends to be ideological in nature, as believing in vaccines has been instilled as a core belief of anyone affiliated with “science” or “medicine.”

Initially this can be quite subtle, but in time, that ideological bias quickly adds up. This is because (as mentioned before) most things aren’t clear cut, so depending on what one is biased to notice, one can rapidly be left with a world view where all “the evidence” supports their position, even if a great deal of it does not.
Note: one of the major problems in human society is that human beings typically cannot be fully aware of all the information they are exposed to (as there is an overwhelming amount of it). As a result, they typically will filter their perception of reality to concentrate on the things that give “value” to them, which typically are what conforms to their existing biases. Because of this, people will often become absolutely certain their interpretation of reality is correct, even if many (with different biases from them) have diametrically opposed interpretations of reality.

In the case of vaccines, this is a critical concept to understand as evaluating the actual risks and benefits of a routine vaccine requires you to assess:

• What percent of the unvaccinated population is likely to get the infection.
• What percent of those infected will have a moderate or severe illness.
• How effectively the vaccine prevents those vaccinated from catching the illness or developing moderate or severe complications from it.
• How long the vaccine’s effectiveness lasts.
• How long does it take the infection to become resistant to the vaccine (making it useless).
• What are the consequences of the vaccine triggering a mutation in the infection.
• How likely the vaccine is to cause an acute moderate or acute severe reaction.
• How likely the vaccine is to cause a chronic moderate or chronic severe reaction.
• Who is at risk of having a more severe reaction to the vaccine?

Each of these is quite a task to figure out, and as a result most of the relevant points for each of the above simply are not taken into account when deciding upon a vaccine recommendation. Rather, a few points (typically highlighted by a pharmaceutical marketing division) are focused on, and the interpretation of the vaccine’s risks and benefits are seen through that lens (e.g., “cervical cancer is deadly” and “the HPV vaccine prevents cervical cancer), while pieces of evidence which challenge the predetermined conclusion (e.g., evidence of vaccine harm) are dismissed and filtered away.

As a result, many vaccines are on the market where their risks clearly and unambiguously outweigh their benefits, while in parallel, vaccines are viewed as a homogenous entity despite some (e.g., the HPV and COVID vaccines) being much more dangerous and unnecessary than many others.

Note: as many people have requested, I have provided a concise summary of the risks and benefits of each childhood vaccine here.

Read the Whole Article

The post Where Does the CDC’s Pervasive Dishonesty Come From? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Malnutrition-related deaths in Gaza are beginning to climb, with the health ministry reporting 18 in a single 24-hour period. Doctors report that people are “collapsing” in the street, and Gaza journalist Nahed Hajjaj is warning the world not to be surprised if the remaining reporters in the enclave are soon silenced by starvation.

Unless something drastically changes, things can be expected to get much worse very rapidly.

Meanwhile Israeli forces are setting new records with their massacres of starving civilians seeking aid, with 85 killed in a single day on Sunday.

If this isn’t evil, then nothing is evil. If Israel isn’t evil, then nothing is.

So what’s the plan here? Do we just sit and watch Israel starve Gaza to death with the support of our own governments?

And then what? We just go along with our lives, knowing that that happened? That this is what we are as a society? That our civilization is comfortable allowing something like that to happen? And that our rulers could do the same thing to another inconvenient population at any time?

We’re just meant to be cool with that? And go on living like it’s normal?

I’m genuinely curious. How exactly is everyone planning to go about living their lives after that point? How does that work, exactly?

I’m asking because I don’t know. I mean, I know what my own government and its allies should do, but I don’t know what we as ordinary members of the public are supposed to do.

You’ll see western pundits and politicians asking “How do we get a ceasefire in Gaza?” or “How do we end hunger in Gaza?” as though it’s some kind of ineffable mystery, which is kind of like a man strangling a child to death while saying “The child is being strangled, but HOW do we stop the child strangulation from occurring?”

It’s not some mystery how to get a ceasefire in Gaza; the empire is the fire. It simply needs to cease firing. Israel’s holocaust in Gaza is made possible only by the support of its western backers, primarily the United States. Numerous Israeli military insiders have acknowledged that none of this would be possible without US support. If the United States and its western allies ceased backing Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, a ceasefire would have to occur.

Likewise, it is not a mystery how to get food into Gaza. You just drive the food on in and give it to people. They’ve got roads and gates right there. The only reason people in Gaza are starving is because western governments (including my own Australia) conspired to pretend to believe that UNRWA is a terrorist organization to justify cutting off critical aid, while doing nothing to pressure Israel into allowing aid to flow freely.

And now Israel and the US empire are monopolizing the delivery of “aid” through the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose facilities now see civilians massacred every day for the crime of attempting to obtain food.

UNRWA has enough food for the entire population of #Gaza for over three months stockpiled in warehouses–including this one in Al Arish, Egypt–awaiting entry.

The supplies are available. The systems are in place.

Open the gates, lift the siege, allow UNRWA to do its work and… pic.twitter.com/3e1bVbFnGv

— UNRWA (@UNRWA) July 19, 2025

The organizations, funding and delivery systems to feed Gaza are all 100 percent fully available (at no cost to Israel, by the way). They’re just not being allowed to provide aid because the goal is to remove all Palestinians from Gaza via death or displacement. The people of Gaza are starving because the west is helping Israel starve Gaza. It really is that simple.

This isn’t some kind of unfortunate famine caused by a drought or natural disaster. It is a deliberately manufactured starvation campaign, implemented with genocidal intent.

To paraphrase Utah Phillips, Gaza isn’t starving, it is being starved. And the people who are starving it have names and addresses.

___________________

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The post Gaza Isn’t Starving, It Is Being Starved appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Washington Post is giving me a déjà vu feeling about the JFK assassination. After publishing an extraordinary article detailing how recently revealed records of the CIA disclose that it has been lying continuously about the George Joannides matter for more than 60 years, the Post has now followed up with an editorial emphasizing how important it is for government institutions to begin telling the truth so that we can renew our trust in government. Otherwise, the Post suggests, people will continue to have paranoid delusions that give rise to conspiracy theories.

What?

It has just been revealed that the CIA has lied about a critically important aspect of the Kennedy assassination. Oh well, ho hum. We all know that the CIA lies. Golly, if only the CIA would start telling the truth. Then we no longer would have all these silly conspiracy theories.

Why the seemingly blasé attitude toward the CIA’s lies regarding Joannides? My hunch is that it’s because long ago the Post subscribed to the lone-nut theory of the assassination — a theory to which it has obviously remained wedded regardless of the overwhelming circumstantial evidence of guilt on the part of the national-security establishment, including the evidence establishing the fraudulent autopsy that the military conducted on JFK’s body on the very evening of the assassination. As the Post writes in its editorial, “When Oswald killed Kennedy…”

That’s got to explain the lack of interest in following up on why the CIA has lied about Joannides for so long. In other words, the Post could have written an editorial calling on the CIA to come clean — to explain why it has lied about Joannides for so long. Okay, sure, the CIA officials who began the lying in 1963 are all dead. But somehow the instruction to continue the lying about Joannides was transmitted from CIA generation to CIA generation. How did that happen? Why did it happen? Who are the people in the CIA today who received that instruction? What was told to them?

The Post could be leading the way in demanding answers from the CIA. Rather than simply exhorting the CIA to tell the truth in the future, it could be calling on Congresswoman Luna to subpoena CIA officials to explain under oath the reasons for the lies surrounding Joannides. Isn’t that the moral and ethical duty of the press?

My opinion is that the basic problem is that by steadfastly hewing to the official lone-nut theory of the assassination, the Post, as well as much of the other mainstream press, simply cannot bring itself to think the unthinkable — that the lone-nut theory of the assassination is simply wrong — that the assassination was, in fact, a regime-change operation orchestrated and carried about by the U.S. national-security establishment. After all, what the Post cannot deny is that the 60 years of CIA’s lies about Joannides is a puzzle piece that fits perfectly within the overall mosaic of a national-security state regime-change operation.

The reason that the CIA’s attitude seems like déjà vu all over again for me is that we saw this same phenomenon take place back in the 1990s. On November 8, 1998, the Post published a story about how the Assassination Records Review Board had determined that there had been two brain exams as part of the JFK autopsy. You can read the story here.

What was that significant? Well, one reason is that the military pathologists claimed that there was only one brain exam, which meant that they were doing exactly what those CIA officials have been doing. They were intentionally, knowingly, and deliberately lying! Another reason is that the second brain exam necessarily Iinvolved a brain that belonged to someone other than Kennedy. Isn’t that something worth investigating? The Post article states “The central contention of the report is that brain photographs in the Kennedy records are not of Kennedy’s brain and show much less damage than Kennedy sustained when he was shot in Dallas and brought to Parkland Hospital there on Nov. 22, 1963…. ‘I am 90 to 95 percent certain that the photographs in the Archives are not of President Kennedy’s brain,’ [Douglas] Horne, a former naval officer, said in an interview.”

Now, wouldn’t you think that that would be enough for a mainstream paper to send an investigative reporter to get to the bottom of all this? After all, an allegation that the military is lying about something that is quite important — the fraudulent autopsy of a president — is a fairly serious accusation. Isn’t that worth checking out? Isn’t that the job of an independent press?

Apparently not because the Post, as far as I know, did not launch any investigation into the matters that it itself detailed in that 1998 article, just as it is showing no proclivity toward doing insofar as the Joannides lies are concerned. After publishing that article in 1998, they apparently just dropped the matter, just as they are apparently now ready to drop the Joannides matter.

Moreover, don’t forget: Someone had slipped a provision into the JFK Records Act that prohibited the Assassination Records Review Board in from reinvestigating any aspect of the assassination. Surely, the Post knew that. So, given that the ARRB was prohibited from getting to the bottom of the two brain exams and the rest of the fraudulent autopsy, shouldn’t that have motivated the mainstream press, which was not operating under such a prohibition, to undertake such an investigation. Obviously not.

When the Post talks about the distrust of government among the American people, it conveniently avoids another critically important point — that the American people have an equal distrust in the mainstream press. I wonder why.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post Déjà Vu on JFK at the Washington Post appeared first on LewRockwell.

How wise is it to blast out threats of nuclear war almost non-stop? The financial investment advisory guru, Martin Armstrong, has just issued another such warning to the world: 100% Chance of Nuclear War – Martin Armstrong | Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog, by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com.

Six weeks ago, legendary financial and geopolitical cycle analyst Martin Armstrong was signaling a big turn toward war. Now, Armstrong says,

“The chances of war with a nuclear exchange is at 100%. . .. Plan on it, this is coming.”

The continuous yelling “Wolf” is obnoxious in many ways, because it has the intention to bring fear to the people, to make them morally weak, as they are afraid. The long-term effect is that people do not believe the warning anymore, even if and when it could become true.

Which it will not.

In the case of Armstrong, who introduces his reputation by pretending having predicted every major (financial) crisis in the past, it may have to do with attracting investors into the war industry or any associated high-yielding investments.

In any case, I dare say, scaring people without any solid evidence, i.e., “The chances of war with a nuclear exchange is at 100%. . .. Plan on it, this is coming,” is outright criminal.

Fear achieves making people submissive, obedient, as they are afraid of authorities, of the unknown their beloved authorities may bring and so they give in against their own interests. In the case of yelling “nuclear war is coming,” people suddenly turn to NATO for fake security, as they believe war will bring them Peace.

Armstrong is part of the “controlled opposition”, though not much opposition is seen, just aberrant warnings. He may get his instructions from the Deep State – or some military industrial monster. Who knows, maybe NATO.

See this for Armstrong’s full article and “100% nuclear warning.”

NATO is the world’s largest and most dangerous war and killing machine. Wars and conflicts initiated or participated in by NATO have caused at least 30 to 35 million deaths since its creation in 1949.

People are so scared that they lose reason and act not only against their own interests, but against the interests of the world at large.

This phenomenon of senselessness and mindlessness has been well-studied and softly propagated by Tavistock, the world’s foremost social and mind engineering institute based in the UK, and illustrated in George Orwell’s book “1984”, where logic was turned upside down, literally into War is Peace and Peace is War.

When recently President Trump bombed Iran, he said something to the effect, he hopes his bombing of Iran will lead to lasting Peace. And surely, more than a handful people believed him.

Worse, NATO, sort of abandoned by the US, is becoming a European “force de frappe” where every country is investing their resources, stretching to huge debt, into armament, into the war industry and mostly the US weapons manufacturers because they are not (yet) very important in Europe.

The head of NATO, who has been put in his position by Washington and the World Economic Forum (WEF), will make sure that the US, inventor and creator of NATO (in April 1949, in Washington DC), also benefits from the European fear and war machine.

All means are good to create fear and submissiveness. It is one of the first steps towards full enslavement and tyranny. Armstrong and his ilk are just one “civilian” branch. More important are all those European heads of government, implanted, literally with fake elections, all trained by the WEF’s Academy for Young Global Leaders (YGL), and the chief backers of the WEF.

They include US and international financial institutions, such as BlackRock, Vanguard and StateStreet – and others, lesser-known financial interests – all eventually leading to the City of London, an independent enclave within London, where most if not all, of the financial and economic manipulations originate.

And guess who controls the City of London? Yes, you are right. Those people who are not to be mentioned, lest you are ready to be prosecuted for discriminatory remarks.

The current Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, former Dutch Prime Minister, is one of them, a WEF YGL. He makes sure that the 30 European NATO members (the other two are the US and Canada) – most of them also European Union members, follow the trend of War is Peace and Peace is War – as a doctrine that after one or two generations can hardly be erased from the minds of the populace at large.

The US has a 1.3 trillion dollar budget foreseen just to renew and build up their nuclear arsenal by 2035. The EU wants a trillion euros military budget by 2030, literally to go to war with Russia. This is openly said by Madame Ursula Von der Leyen, unelected President of the European Commission (EC).

All this is made public to scare you.

Or does anyone really believe that European leaders are so stupid to plan a nuclear war that may wipe them out as well?

As Fidel Castro already said (see this) and many before and after him, including President Putin, a nuclear war is unpredictable and has no winners.

What leader in his most submissive mode wants really to wipe out himself, his children, grandchildren, and his loved ones? This sounds like a camouflaged suicide pact. And frankly the world is not quite there yet.

So, People and Humanity of this world, stay away from this war propaganda. Think for yourself. Think in the first place Peace, always Peace and Harmony. War has no place in such a scenario, in a world of peaceful cohabitation.

You may be amazed to know about the hidden, invisible power of your mind, how it can shape the future, a future that we, The People, choose on our own and step away from what an unnamed elite pretends to choose for the good of Us. Our spirituality is the most powerful means towards harmonious cohabitation we have.

Use it. Open your eyes and ears and act for your and humanity’s interests of Peace and harmonious and prosperous togetherness.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post Screaming – Nuclear War Is Coming! ‘All This Is Made Up to Scare You’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard set off fireworks on Friday when she accused former president Barack Obama of organizing a coup d’état against his successor.  Summarizing the damning evidence in her possession, Gabbard concluded, “These documents detail a treasonous conspiracy by officials at the highest levels of the Obama White House to subvert the will of the American people.”

Treason is a capital offense with no statute of limitations.  So consider how explosive Gabbard’s allegations are.  The senior official in charge of all American Intelligence is stating unequivocally that Obama and his loyal subordinates sabotaged the peaceful transfer of presidential power in 2016, betrayed the American people, and made war against the legitimate government of the United States.  Gabbard just dropped the “Mother of All Bombs” on Obama’s White House syndicate, the Intelligence Community, and the globalist Deep State.

General Michael Flynn, President Trump’s short-lived National Security Advisor, assessed the situation succinctly: “This is surreal.”  As a target of the Deep State’s treacherous lawfare operations, General Flynn views the workings in Washington, D.C., with supreme clarity: “This is why [Gabbard] was attacked so relentlessly over the past few weeks and months.  They knew if there were anyone with the guts to investigate the attempted coup, it would be her.”  Obama loyalists in the Intelligence Community and Obama’s propaganda allies in the corporate news media succeeded in removing General Flynn from his NSA position at the beginning of Trump’s first term.  Perhaps learning from Flynn’s experience, Gabbard has worked quickly to expose the conspirators before they could take her out, too.

Who exactly formed this conspiracy to overturn the 2016 election and topple President Trump’s administration?  DNI Gabbard says that “intelligence was politicized and weaponized by the most powerful people in the Obama Administration to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President [Trump].”  Furthermore, “Obama officials immediately leaned on their allies in the media to advance their falsehoods.  Anonymous IC sources leaked classified information to the Washington Post and others that Russia had intervened to hack the election in Trump’s favor.”

Ezra Cohen, an Intelligence official who has served President Trump in various positions, highlighted the list of principals who conspired to blame Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election loss on the Russians.  In a pivotal National Security Council meeting chaired by Susan Rice, attendees included John Brennan, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, John Kerry, Loretta Lynch, Victoria Nuland, Mary McCord, Avril Haines, Lisa Monaco, Ben Rhodes, and Maher Bitar (an Obama official who immediately went to work for liar Adam Schiff).  That’s a “Who’s Who” list of Russia Hoax plotters.

Truth-tellers at American Thinker and elsewhere have been trying to tell this story for nearly ten years.  No matter how compelling the evidence or persuasive the arguments, the corporate news media have called us “conspiracy theorists” and buried anything that might tarnish Obama’s legacy.  No doubt the national propagandists that disseminate approved “narratives” for the globalist Deep State will continue to do so.  Still, it is satisfying to see this headline at Breitbart: “Declassified: Obama Admin Manufactured Intelligence to Push Fake Trump-Russia Collusion Narrative.”

In other words, Obama and high-ranking members of his administration — including the Intelligence chiefs responsible for safeguarding the nation from foreign and domestic threats — fabricated evidence meant to convince the American people that Russia stole the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton.  Furthermore, this cabal of conspirators fabricated evidence meant to incriminate President Trump, convince Congress to remove him from office, and perhaps even convince a future jury to convict him for espionage and treason.

Obama and his people damaged America’s reputation in the world by pretending that Russia “hacked” the 2016 election.  Along with Hillary Clinton and her campaign (the original plotters who paid for the Steele Dossier and its public dissemination), the Obama administration defrauded the American people by squandering time and resources on a figment of their seditious imaginations.

Consider how many thousands of government agents from the Department of Justice, Department of State, and broader Intelligence Community were ordered to waste years on the job chasing ghosts conjured by Clinton, Obama, Rice, Brennan, Lynch, Comey, Clapper, and their many co-conspirators.

Consider all the real foreign and domestic threats that were entirely ignored because the U.S. government was dedicating substantial resources to an Intelligence operation meant to frame President Trump as a Russian spy.

Consider how much harm Obama, Clinton, and their allies in government offices and corporate newsrooms caused to America by fomenting social division and political strife based on abject lies.

The Obama administration and Clinton campaign essentially conducted a “color revolution” against the United States.  It was their intention to instigate a mass public uprising that would force President Trump from office.  They conspired to overthrow the U.S. government and install a new one more amenable to their interests.  What these “untouchable” elites did was textbook treason and sedition.

We will never have a full accounting of the toll Obama and Clinton’s lies had on America.  It seems reasonable to assume that their lies cost lives.  How many terrorist attacks could have been prevented if Intelligence agents had been working on things that mattered?  Who really murdered Seth Rich?  How many Republicans have been bankrupted in courtrooms while defending themselves against malicious prosecutions arising from the Russia Collusion Hoax?  All of the treasonous criminals who perpetrated this fraud upon the American people made the United States weaker, more divided, and more vulnerable.  That’s Obama’s real legacy.

No-one should minimize the seriousness of these crimes.  Unfortunately, even in conservative circles, it is common to hear someone describe the Russia Collusion Hoax as a Democrat Party “dirty trick.”  This was not a “dirty trick.”  This was treason!

A “dirty trick” might aptly describe social media satirist Douglass Mackey’s trolling humor when he posted a joke encouraging Hillary Clinton’s supporters to vote by text in 2016.  Even though Mackey’s absurd suggestion has been used as a funny meme by both Democrats and Republicans for many election cycles, Hillary actually blamed Mackey for her loss, and Biden’s (in)Justice Department successfully convicted Mackey for engaging in a conspiracy to spread false information.  Thankfully, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unanimously voided his preposterous conviction and ordered the district court to enter a judgment of acquittal.

While Obama-Biden prosecutors were happy to go after meme-makers for engaging in fake conspiracies to spread “misinformation,” they completely ignored the Obama-Clinton conspiracy to manufacture the Russia Collusion Hoax.  Unlike Mackey’s harmless “dirty trick,” the repercussions of the Obama-Clinton “color revolution” were very real.

Setting aside the fact that President Trump’s first term was undermined by a two-year special counsel investigation run by Democrats, when the departing Obama administration decided to blame Russia for Hillary’s 2016 loss, the conspirators compounded tensions between the world’s two dominant nuclear powers for purely political reasons.

As the meeting records from Gabbard’s declassification show, Obama’s National Security Council principals “agreed to recommend sanctioning of certain members of the Russian military intelligence and foreign intelligence chains of command responsible for cyber operations as a response to cyber activity that attempted to influence or interfere with U.S. elections.”  Before Obama left office, he expelled Russian diplomats and left incoming President Trump with a diplomatic hornet’s nest.

As Internet sleuth MAZE points out, shortly after Obama’s scapegoating of Russia, Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Amy Klobuchar traveled to Ukraine and later held a press conference during which they claimed that “Russia attacked the USA by hacking the 2016 election.”  Obama and his co-conspirators advanced an Intelligence operation that could have instigated a direct U.S.-Russia war.  That’s no “dirty trick.”  That’s deadly treason against the United States and the American people.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post Obama’s Real Legacy Comes Into Focus appeared first on LewRockwell.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post ‘War and the Global Economic Crisis’ and ‘Humanity’s Dystopian Crossroads’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Foreign Policy published an article last week by Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes, with the title, When the Threat Is Inside the White House: What CIA insiders make of the MAGA moles and toadies now in charge of U.S. national security. While the intent of the article is to paint Trump and his team as a bunch of Russian toadies, Weiner unwittingly paints a picture of the CIA’s leadership as biased operators with no understanding of Russia… They still think they are engaging a communist authoritarian state.

Here’s the opening paragraph:

If our nation’s spies are the infantry of our ideology, as John Le Carré once observed, Tom Sylvester is an unknown soldier who became a four-star general. Two years ago, he was named the CIA’s deputy director of operations, in charge of thousands of officers conducting espionage, covert action, and paramilitary operations. He won the job by virtue of his role in stealing Russia’s war plans for Ukraine, warning the world about the coming invasion, and providing steadfast support to Kyiv’s military and intelligence services.

Weiner credits Sylvester with “stealing Russia’s war plans for Ukraine,” but completely ignores the role the CIA played in provoking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The entire narrative surrounding Sylvester’s actions is constructed around the premise that Russia is a bad, evil actor and that its actions have nothing to do with Western provocations, especially the expansion of NATO to the East.

The next “highlight” from Weiner’s piece provides an excellent example of the CIA’s bias and ignorance when it comes to Russia:

In the summer of 2017, Sylvester received new marching orders from Tomas Rakusan, the new chief of the clandestine service, whose identity remained a state secret until after his retirement. Rakusan had spied on Russia since before the end of the Cold War, operating throughout Central and Eastern Europe. His hatred of the Russians was bred in the bone. His parents were Czech; he was 9 years old when Soviet troops crushed the Prague Spring uprising in 1968. Rakusan saw Russian President Vladimir Putin’s subversion of the presidential election on Trump’s behalf as the espionage equivalent of 9/11. In retaliation, he aimed to penetrate the Kremlin—among the greatest aspirations of the CIA since its foundation, and a goal never achieved.

Hatred of Russians? It is one thing to despise the Soviet Union, which was governed by a Communist ideology. But the “End of the Cold War” was marked by the peaceful overthrow of a communist government and the creation of a new Russian government that emphasized nationalism and Christianity. So how is that a threat to the United States? Moreover, during the decade of the 1990s, Russia’s military was in disarray and the society was ravaged by economic crisis, which included two periods of hyperinflation, widespread poverty among the Russian people, and a dramatic decline in life expectancy among Russian men.

This did not age well: “Rakusan saw Russian President Vladimir Putin’s subversion of the presidential election on Trump’s behalf as the espionage equivalent of 9/11.” Tulsi Gabbard’s declassification of intelligence documents and emails from various members of the CIA and other intelligence officials on Friday, shows that Rakusan either had his head up his ass or was part of the conspiracy to attack Donald Trump with a lie (or both). The memo carries the following subject line: Intelligence Community suppression of intelligence showing “Russian and criminal actors did not impact” the 2016 presidential election via cyber-attacks on infrastructure. I am sure this caught Tim Weiner by surprise. Certainly takes the wind out of his sails as he tries to portray the CIA as a saintly, honest outfit being undermined by a President who is in the pocket of Putin.

The next couple of paragraphs from Weiner paint a picture of Western intelligence ramping up against Russia, but also exposes CIA’s impotence with respect to human intelligence assets in Russia:

By the summer of 2020, CIA officers were working in close liaison with the British, Dutch, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Estonians, and many other services against the Russians. “There was the strategic decision on how we would share intelligence,” Sylvester said. “We used it as an influence mechanism, in and of itself, to get governments to start cooperating with us.” This hard-won trust “allowed them to open up taps of cooperation and intelligence that they had theretofore not shared with us,” he added. The CIA and its foreign allies were cross-fertilizing intelligence, choreographing operations, and, most importantly, recruiting Russian sources.

The CIA had been able to “push back against the Russian services” largely by “working with liaison partners overseas to expose and disrupt Russian intelligence activities,” then-CIA Director William Burns told me last year. “And then what we tried to build on that, starting in the spring of 2021, was the recruitment dimension of this,” he said. “This was really, especially once the war drums started beating, a once-in-a-generation opportunity, given the disaffection in some parts of the Russian elite and Russian society” against Putin’s regime.

This quote jumped off the page for me: largely by “working with liaison partners overseas to expose and disrupt Russian intelligence activities.” That is a polite way of saying that the the CIA had no assets of its own and was relying on foreign intelligence services, with the bulk of the information coming from Ukraine. And note the significance of the “spring of 2021;” Biden was newly installed as President and the effort to go after Russia on a more intense basis was kicked into high gear.

Burn’s comment to Weiner is also quite instructive… It shows a mistaken belief on the part of the Director of the CIA about the stability of the Russian government (i.e., given the disaffection in some parts of the Russian elite and Russian society” against Putin’s regime) and is an implicit admission that the CIA had embarked on a program to try to ignite a new color revolution in Russia. This is not my opinion… Weiner’s piece makes that clear in this paragraph:

Kyiv’s spy services, rebuilt by the CIA after Putin seized Crimea and other parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014, had become one of Washington’s best sources of intelligence on the Russians; the CIA was becoming the Ukrainians’ best defense against them. “It was probably one of the best investments that the CIA, the U.S. government, has made,” Sylvester said; it had created “the trust, the confidence, the ability in times of need to feel like you were in the trenches together.” By the fall of 2021, the CIA had given the Ukrainians a graduate course in espionage and paramilitary operations, along with the ability to understand and utilize a steady stream of U.S. intelligence.

I will close with this amazing, but not surprising, revelation from Weiner. He describes Rakusan’s fury in the aftermath of Trump’s election, and Rakusan’s desperate, dangerous actions:

“The Russians manipulated our fucking elections,” he told them. “How do we make sure this never happens again?” He didn’t care if they didn’t speak Russian or had never set foot in Moscow. He ordered them to take their expertise in targeting and recruiting terrorists and turn it against Russian spies, diplomats, and oligarchs.

Got that? “Recruit terrorists!” I don’t ever want to hear another damn word about the US fighting a war on terrorism when we have an admission from the top operations officer in the CIA telling his boys and girls to recruit terrorists, who will be used to attack Russia. I am sure the Russians have read Mr. Weiner’s piece and have taken notice of this fact. I suspect they already knew that.

Based on Weiner’s article, we now know that the US launched an intelligence war on Russia based completely on a lie. And the senior leaders of the CIA went along with it. In my view, the CIA ought to be dismantled and cast to the four winds. We need to start over with some people of actual intelligence.

This article was originally published on Sonar21.

The post The CIA Initiated an Intelligence and Terrorist War on Russia Based on a Lie appeared first on LewRockwell.

A false ideology has driven the U.S. Government to systematically under-report its net indebtedness in order to be able to continue its defrauding the individuals and entities that trust it to repay its existing financial obligations.

The core of libertarianism (neoliberalism, as it’s called in Europe) is (as will be documented in the links here) the false and even insane idea that privatization is better than socialization; but the empirical truth is that in many instances, socialization is far better than privatization (and libertarians-neoliberals cannot accept that fact, because it would destroy their con).

Privatization is the selling of governmental (publicly owned and controlled) assets to private investors. Socialization is the buying of assets, from private individuals, by the government.

Norway presents an excellent case-example of this falsity, even insanity, of (America’s ideology) libertarianism-neoliberalism, which ideology doesn’t drive Norway’s Government.

Here is a video that explains this fact (the vast economic harm that is produced by libertarianism-neoliberalism) in regard to Norway’s having socialized (instead of sold off to investors) its oil assets — and this prominent example (of the enormous benefits that Norwegians derive from that socialization of their oil-wealth) is devastating to libertarianism-neoliberalism:

Here is its transcript, which describes the history of Norway’s state-owned oil company, Equinor (formerly called “Statoil”):

Norway discovered oil in the North Sea in 1969. Most countries would blow it on corruption, debt, and short-term wins. Norway did the opposite. It turned oil into long-term national wealth. Here’s how it became one of the richest countries on Earth.

In the 1960s, Norway was a quiet, modest, country. Known for fishing, farming, and shipping, its economy was steady, but not wealthy. There was no sign it would one day lead the world in wealth per person.

Then in 1969, oil was discovered in the North Sea. Suddenly, Norway had access to massive natural wealth. It was a turning point, one that could’ve gone very wrong.

Many countries that discover oil fall into what’s called the “resource curse.” They overspend. Corruption spreads. Other industries collapse. Oil becomes a blessing, then a trap. [THAT’S THE LIBERTARIAN WAY — PRIVATIZATION.]

But Norway didn’t let that happen. Instead of handing the oil to private companies, it took control. [IT SOCIALIZED THAT ASSET.]

The Government created a national oil company, Statoil, to manage resources for the people.

Norway also made sure oil profits didn’t distort the economy.

It saved most of the money, and refused to spend it all at once [on privatization’s institutionalization of corruptness].

The goal wasn’t fast growth. It was long-term strength [for the public].

In 1990, Norway launched the Government Pension Fund Global. Also known as the Oil Fund. It was designed to turn oil profits into steady income for future generations.

The plan was simple: Invest the oil money in global stocks, bonds, and real estate. Never touch the core savings, only spend a small part of the returns.

That discipline paid off. Today, the fund is worth more than 1.6 trillion dollars. It’s the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. [AS-OF NOW — July 2025 — IT IS WORTH AROUND $1.7T.]

The fund owns shares in over 9,000 companies across the globe. It holds stakes in Apple, Amazon, Nestle, Microsoft, and more. Norway earns money every time those companies grow.

And the Government can use only a small part of the returns each year, around 3 percent. That rule protects the fund from political misuse and reckless spending.

Transparency is key. Every Norwegian can look up exactly where the money is invested. This builds public trust and prevents corruption [such as controls countries like America].

The oil will run out one day. But the wealth won’t. Norway turned a temporary resource into a permanent financial engine.

It used oil not to get rich fast, but to stay rich for generations. With world-class healthcare, education, and low poverty, Norway shows what’s possible with smart [and honestly NOT psychopathic like America is] policy and long-term [NOT “me me me, now now now”] thinking.

——

America’s public debt (including not only the official amount of $36,655,280,579,113.61 but also Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Medicare, and Social Security, all of which are likewise financial obligations of the federal Government: $5T, and $45.8T) totals actually to $87.5T in U.S. Government debt). Per person, that is $87.5T/340 million people, or $257,243 debt per person. (Or: for America’s 253,681,000 adults = -$211,496 per adult.) The median (average) U.S. adult has a net worth exclusive of Governmental obligations, of $112,157. Less that $211,496 (Governmental obligations), this indicates that the total net worth of the average American is -$99,340 — half of Americans are richer, half are poorer, than minus $99,340. America is a nation of predominantly highly negative net-wealth people. (The U.S. Government hides it by enormously underestimating its indebtedness, but this is the fact.)

By contrast, Norway’s public debt per person is non-existent.

Back again to the Governmental level: Norway is one of the few countries that has a “positive net asset position” — owns more than it owes. It currently stands at +$1.5T. America is currently at -$19.9T (the world’s most indebted Government), according to the official figures. The only countries doing better than Norway are China +$2.9T, Japan +$3.3T, and Germany +$3.3T. (Germany, however, is expected to plunge, because of the U.S. Government.) (Russia was not included in those numbers, because of the dubious legality of The West’s seizure of Russia’s sovereign foreign assets, which makes impossible to estimate such numbers for Russia.)

Chapter 20 of the libertarian U.S. Senator Rand Paul’s 2019 book The Case Against Socialism is titled “Hitler Was a Socialist.” Chapter 22 is “The Nazis Didn’t Believe in Private Property.” Rand Paul displays there that he is ignorant of history and writes falsehoods about it. The name Germa Bel isn’t even referred-to in that 354-page book. But as that great social scientist and economic historian Bel has documented in two classic papers, Mussolini carried out the first privatization of governmental assets; and Hitler carried out the second one. So, the fascists actually invented privatization — they were the original ‘libertarians’ or ‘neoliberals’. Furthermore, Tom Perrett, on 23 October 2019, the same year as Dr. Paul’s book, headlined “From Hayek to Hitler: An analysis of the Libertarian to Fascist Pipeline”, and he showed that privatization was hardly an anomaly, because fascism and libertarianism are actually the same, and only the name was changed after WW2 in order to continue on without the opprobrium of having been the losing side in WW2. That name for it, “libertarianism,” was just a PR trick. It’s actually only increasing liberty for the super-rich, at everyone else’s expense. (And in order to do that, the system is rigged so that only the super-rich are on the receiving end of the net-benefits; everybody else is on the paying end — paying that to the super-rich, under a libertarian-neoliberal-fascist Government.)

America is the world’s most libertarian (neoliberal) country. Not only because it is the main practitioner of privatization, but because the basic principle of libertarianism is that an individual’s worth is that person’s net worth (wealth). Consequently, America is run by and for its billionaires. (Click onto that to see the documentation.)

On June 24th, Forbes headlined “Millionaires Are On The Move — Here Are The Countries Winning And Losing Wealthy Residents”, and reported that the biggest number of millionaires and billionaires that are relocating their assets from one country to another was into UAE (because it has no taxes), and the second-biggest was into America (because of its low wages, low unionization, low regulations, low enforcement of regulations of corporations, and especially low taxes for billionaires — in other words, because of its libertarianism), and that Trump has initiated a new program (paid for by U.S. taxpayers) to increase that immigration and investment by foreign millionaires and billionaires. He, being a billionaire himself, wants to increase the number of rich people moving into America, just as he wants to decrease the number of poor people moving into America.

As regards to Norway: social services, such as health care and education, have lower per-capita costs and higher effectiveness (such as higher life-expectancy) in Norway than in America.

The super-rich in America control not only their corporations (profit and ‘non’-profit) but their Government. Apparently, that isn’t the case in Norway — at least not to the same extreme extent.

Back on 21 July 2022, qz dot com headlined “The US government has about $70 trillion in off-balance sheet liabilities” and reported that “a new working paper by University of California-San Diego economics professor James Hamilton estimates that the US was on the hook for more than $70 trillion in off-balance sheet liabilities at the end of 2012.” The incompetently reported qz article blithely said “if the US really doesn’t have the money to pay for all of the Social Security benefits retirees are entitled to in a few decades, those benefits could be trimmed then, or other alterations could be made to the program — such as pushing the retirement age back, which would cut the costs of the program.” It didn’t even consider that instead the owners of U.S. Treasury bonds (far fewer and far wealthier individuals than Social Security recipients) would take a haircut — but blithely proposed that the problem could be solved by hitting the general public instead (something far likelier to provoke a very violent Second American Revolution). The pro-rich anti-public mindset of qz dot com was obvious there: it says that the middle class and poor should be hit with the losses — the rich and especially super-rich should not. Furthermore, their article failed to mention the title of the alleged paper that it claimed to be summarizing, and the link it provided to the paper was to the National Bureau of Economic Research site and said only “Page Not Found”. Had he been pressured, perhaps by the FBI, to remove his paper? So, at around noon on July 20th I emailed Dr. Hamilton to please see his paper. I didn’t hear back from him, but finally found the paper on my own: “OFF-BALANCE-SHEET FEDERAL LIABILITIES”. Its summary or ”Abstract” points out that “The five major categories surveyed include support for housing, other loan guarantees, deposit insurance, actions taken by the Federal Reserve, and government trust funds [Social Security and Medicare]. The total dollar value of notional off-balance-sheet commitments came to $70 trillion as of 2012, or 6 times the size of the reported on-balance-sheet debt.” The paper is outstanding, a real classic, which ought to have (but did not) received headline attention throughout the U.S. press (and from other academics), because of the Governmental lies that it documents, regarding the U.S. Government’s basically bail-out of investors (really of the super-rich) after the 2008 financial crash. (The “little people” got crushed.) Large portions of the U.S. Government’s current debt are comprised of those bailouts of the wealthy. No billionaire or top executive was prosecuted for any of it. At a private meeting with Wall Street bigs (the individuals who had made huge fortunes off of those fraudulently-represented-to-investors mortgage-backed securities) on 27 March 2009, Obama told them “I’m protecting you” from “the pitchforks” and “I’m going to shield you”; and he did exactly that (and so did the press). None of them was prosecuted.

It is by now clear that a new international agency, which will be entirely independent of the U.S. Government (and run perhaps by the BRICS organization) needs to be created to audit each nation’s financial records and issue their creditworthiness-ratings on that basis.

Either we are heading into revolutions, or we are heading into a WW3 if the U.S. refuses to give up its hegemonic position (which is based on such lies) (and which hegemony is essential to hundreds of coups, invasions and even the genocide in Gaza). No matter how violent revolutions would be, a Third World War would be vastly more so. A Second American Revolution is therefore a necessity now. The problem is the U.S. Government, which has been built on lies ever since it started the Cold War on 25 July 1945. That decision produced America’s military-industrial complex, which has been built up ever since then and now consumes more than half of all congressionally authorized federal spending each and every year, dwarfing all other purposes. (And the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department is by far the most corrupt of all Departments of the U.S. Government.) That dominance of the military is entirely consistent with an extremely libertarian-neoliberal-fascist Government — which IS the problem. It is the world’s problem.

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post The U.S. Government Is Actually at Least $70 Trillion in Debt. appeared first on LewRockwell.

The yield on the 30-year US Treasury bond just crossed the 5.0% mark for the first time in 17 years. So it might be useful to revisit where we have been lo these many decades.

We are referring to the long bond’s utterly fabricated 54 year journey since the Camp David event in August 1971. By our reckoning, the latter provides proof positive that the Donald’s blunderbuss attack on the Fed is fully warranted and that his negative characterization of its competence is absolutely correct.

To wit, Jay Powell and the whole parade of Keynesian central bankers who came before him—save for William McChesney Martin and Tall Paul Volcker—were neither competent nor deserving of the Fed’s vaunted “independence”. Indeed, you could have gotten a better result from a posse of random names snatched out of the Cleveland phone book—which is to say, from the nation’s vast private markets in interest rates, stock, bonds, derivatives and other financial assets.

The real import of the Donald’s current attack on Powell, therefore, is not actually about his cockamamie judgement that the Fed funds rate should be 300 basis points lower at this particular point in time. The real gravamen of Trump’s complaint is that the Fed should not even be fiddling with the rate on overnight money or the level and shape of the entire debt market yield curve in the first place.

In fact, neither the 12 men/women on the FOMC, nor the one man or woman who is temporarily domiciled in the Oval Office each four years nor the clown car battalions on Capitol Hill who mostly spend a lifetime there, are competent to set interest rates. That’s a job for free, flexible, dynamic, competitive, information-rich private markets, not an agency of the state. Full stop.

The evidence for that proposition is that the Fed has been dead wrong about the long-term interest rates for at least the five decades since Nixon manhandled Chairman Arthur Burns into cranking up the Fed’s printing presses in behalf of his 1972 reelection campaign. In short order that brought the demise of the Breton Woods gold exchange system, which was already on its death bed owing to Fed financing during the prior decade of LBJ’s “guns and butter” fiscal extravaganza.

Thereafter, of course, the world entered the era of fiat central bank money, dirty (government manipulated) floats in foreign exchange markets and the financial rule of a few fallible monetary apparatchiks. The latter claimed, of course, to be in the high-minded business of delivering the greater good for all the people as opposed to market-based traders, investors, businesses and other economic players with skin in the game merely attempting to pursue their own selfish good.

Indeed, the dispositive proof of the generic incompetence of monetary central planners (aka central bankers) is the four decade’s march of the long bond relentlessly down the yield hill as depicted in the graph below. It shows that from the peak of 15.2% in September 1981, to the bottom at 1.20% in March 2022, the long-bond’s yield traversed 1400 basis points of nearly continuous decline. Yet nothing remotely like this 49-year one-way journey could have occurred on the free market operating under a regime of sound money.

To wit, sound money rates would never have been this high in the first place, nor would they have tumbled this low eventually. And that’s to say nothing of a one-way direction of travel the whole time in between. To the contrary, the graph has “central bankers at work” written all over it because the price of bonds (i.e. yields) on the free market would have continuously zigged and zagged in a narrow but directionless range for the entire half century running.

30-Year US Treasury Bond Yield, 1981 to 2025

That the above anomalous path was the handiwork of the Fed and its foreign central bank accomplices is further reinforced by the graph below, which extracts CPI inflation on a Y/Y basis from the nominal yield. And on this “real yield” basis, the range is even more stupendously unmarket-like, ranging from a +940 basis points high in June 1983 to a -610 basis points low in March 2022.

Again, that’s 1550 basis points of range variation. Yet baring some unimaginable catastrophe even far worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s, there is simply no scenario—-no imaginable imbalance of supply and demand in the bond pits—so extreme as to generate real yield outcomes this variant.

After all, the real yield is the return needed to cover taxes and the opportunity cost of locking up money (via duration risk) for one-third of a century. There is nothing in the history or logic of finance that suggests that the real interest rate in its natural state would even remotely vary by such extreme magnitudes, and most especially that it would plunge into negative real yield territory at the durations and depths depicted in the graph.

Nevertheless, under the tutelage of the Fed and its fellow-traveling central banks, the pattern below did actually happen. This means, in turn, that current financial investor and trader mindsets and the market’s very internal memory muscles have been profoundly mis-shaped by the 40-year yield slide depicted in the graphs.

Accordingly, we would suggest that the debt markets are just beginning a new price discovery process that incepted in March 2022. That’s when for the first time in a half century the central banks of the world were compelled to shut down their printing presses simultaneously because under the conceit of the “Great Moderation” mantra promulgated by Bernanke in February 2004 the nearly double-digit inflation that peaked in the summer of 2022 was never supposed to happen. So they central bankers panicked and lurched into an anti-inflation mode almost on a dime.

As is also evident in the graph, real yields have consequently sprung-higher by 860 basis points from the March 2022 bottom to a current level of about +2.5%. That’s just 38 months on a new path that is diametrically opposite to that of the prior 40 years.

Undoubtedly, traders trained in the central bank printing press era of the last four decades are expecting only a temporary reversal like all the other minor upward blips shown in the graph. Indeed, their trading charts are geared to issuing “buy signals” at exactly those expected points.

But if the central banks do not restart their printing presses soon, and we believe they will not owing to excess embedded inflation, trading models will issue no buy signals. And, at length, markets will become sorely disappointed, meaning that bond selling will commence at scale as traders and algos pivot to selling that which the central banks are not buying, as opposed to front-running the continuously expanding central bank balance sheets, as they have been doing for decades.

Inflation-Adjusted 30-Year US Treasury Bond Yield, 1981 to 2025

Needless to say, front-running of the central banks by global traders and algos has been a massive, market-driving force in recent decades because the central banks have literally been buying US government issued and guaranteed debt securities hand over fist. In the case of the Fed alone, its balance sheet of mostly US Treasury paper has exploded from $80 billion in June 1971 to the money-printing high of $9.0 trillion in March 2022.

That’s a gain of 113X for anyone keeping score, which, in turn compared to a national income or GDP gain of just 21X during the same 51 year period.

Yet and yet. That’s really not the half of it when you consider the fellow-traveling central banks of the world, which for better or worse responded to the Fed’s flood of dollar liabilities by massive, continuous currency market interventions and “dirty floats”. In turn, these Treasury bond-buying sprees by foriegn central banks were designed to thwart the free market logic of Uncle Milton Friedman and thereby prevent the natural and substantial appreciation of their own exchange rates which would have occurred on an honest free market.

Accordingly, the tiny $15 billion holdings of US Treasury debt by the combined central banks of the world outside of the US in June 1971 soared to $1 trillion by the turn of the century and to a peak of $4.4 trillion by the 2022 top of the central bank money-printing era. In total, therefore, once the central banks were freed from the discipline of fixed exchange rates and gold convertibility in August 1971 it truly was a world of Katie-bar-the-door.

As it happened, US Treasury paper held by the ECB (or its predecessors), the Bank of Japan, the People’s Bank of China, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Petro-States, South Korea and the other East Asian exporters plus the rest of the world amounted to only 0.5% of world GDP in June 1971.

That is to say, during the shaky final days of the Breton Woods gold standard there was no reason for foreign central banks to own material amounts of the so-called dollar reserve currency. By the time Greenspan got to the Fed in 1987, however, the dirty float game had already developed a goodly head of steam. At that point, the foreign central banks held $500 billion of US Treasury paper, amounting to 3.3% of global GDP.

Thereafter, of course, it was off to the races as Greenspan’s Keynesian Fed cranked up the printing presses, even as foreign banks sopped up a rising share of the increasingly unwanted dollars earned in trade. By the eve of the Great Financial Crisis, therefore, foreign central banks held $1.5 trillion of US government debt, which figure climbed steadily higher thereafter in response to the massive outpouring of dollar liabilities from the Fed and the swelling US trade deficits which resulted from it.

Alas, by the money-printing peak of March 2022, foreign central banks owned $4.4 trillion of US government debt, amounting to 4.7% of global GDP, which had reached nearly $96 trillion.

As is evident from the chart, by 2024 the ECB, Bank of Japan and People’s Bank of China alone held $3.73 trillion of US Treasury debt. It is not surprising, therefore, that in 2024 combined US imports from these three major trading partners totaled $1.256 trillion compared to exports to these countries of just $596 billion, yielding a yawning trade deficit of $600 billion per year.

In short, the debt and inflation-saturated US economy after five decades of money-printing leadership at the Fed is essentially in the business of buying foreign goods and selling Uncle Sam’s debt paper to cover the shortfall.

Needless to say, during the same period the Fed’s balance sheet, which is comprised mainly of US government debt and guaranteed agency paper on the asset side, also soared skyward. The Fed’s holding of $80 billion of US Treasury paper in June 1971 had multiplied by a factor of 111X to the aforementioned $9.0 trillion by the March 2022 peak. Relative to national income, the Fed’s balance sheet went from an already bloated (by historic standards) 6.9% of GDP in Q2 1971 to 36% of US GDP by the peak in March 2022.

There should be no mystery, therefore, as to how the inflation bloated yield of 15.2% on the 30-year Treasury Bond in July 1982 marched relentlessly downhill to just 1.2% in March 2022: Namely, the combined central banks of the world had their big fat thumbs on the supply and demand scales in the bond pits of the world like never before imagined.

That is to say, the holdings of the Fed plus the central banks of the world depicted in the table above amounted to just $95 billion in June 1971 and roughly 3.2% of global GDP. By contrast, at the money-printing apotheosis in March 2022, the Fed and its fellow-traveling central banks around the planet held $13.4 trillion of US Treasury debt, which amounted to 14% of global GDP.

In short, the U.S. dollar has not been a “reserve currency” in the classic sense since August 1971. That’s when the world stumbled into purely fiat moneys traded via dirty floats on the world’s exchange markets by central banks eager to counter-act the massive monetary inflation of the Federal Reserve.

That is, foreign central bank holdings of dollar securities were not substitutes for gold as were sterling reserves in the 1920s and dollar reserves under Breton Woods. They were simply the accumulated coin of dirty floats designed to counter the flood of the Fed’s inflationary dollars in the foreign exchange markets.

To be sure, the trick of dirty floats and dollar hoards worked for several decades…..until suddenly it didn’t, doesn’t and won’t for as far as the eye can see in the world ahead. In turn, how the end of global central bank monetization of Uncle Sam’s debt is likely to play out in the years ahead will be the subject of Part 3.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post ‘Reserve Currency’ My Eye! appeared first on LewRockwell.

As Syria descends into full-scale civil war, with more than a thousand people killed in just the last few days, it may be a good time to remember the phrase, “Assad must go.” That was the slogan the regime-changers rolled out some 14 years ago during the “Arab Spring” that was supposed to usher liberal democracies into power throughout the region.

From Tunisia to Egypt to Libya and on to Syria, the plan was to remake the Middle East according to the will of Washington’s “master planners.” The State Department, the media, the Pentagon, and the think tanks fed by the military-industrial complex were all enthusiastically on-board the program because making war and overthrowing governments is their bread and butter.

If the United States pursued a foreign policy of non-interventionism as laid out by our Founders the massive “national security state” would cease to exist. We would return to being a republic and they would have to return to honest work.

Instead, a determined effort that took nearly 14 years finally produced the “regime change” in Syria last December that the neocons wanted. Assad did finally go – to exile in Russia – but as is always the case with US-directed regime change, his replacement was even worse. Imagine all those years fighting the “war on terror” and then cheering when a branch of al-Qaeda takes power in Syria. Yet that’s exactly what happened, with President Trump going so far as to praise Syria’s self-appointed president as, “a tough guy, a fighter, with a very strong background.”

Assad, like Libya’s Gaddafi and the others targeted for “regime change,” was no saint. But as with Libya, we are seeing the chaos unleashed by US intervention in Syria is making the country far worse than before. Libya has remained in chaos and civil war for the past decade, with no future for its people. That seems to be what is in store for Syria as well. The new, unelected regime has slaughtered Alawites and Christians from nearly day one, and last week turned its guns on the Druze minority. A country of many different faiths and ethnic groups has been ripped apart, probably for good.

Those pushing regime change all these years called us “Assad apologists” when we cautioned against intervention. We should not expect an apology now that their regime change has achieved the opposite of what they promised.

The failed Soviet Union demonstrated that central planning never works. Centrally-planned economies produce luxury for the elites and poverty for everyone else. Yet the US foreign policy establishment believes it can centrally plan the government, economy, and even religion of countries thousands of miles away and about which it knows nothing. Once again we can see how wrong they are and what destruction their actions cause.

Syria’s descent into mayhem and violence is another tragic reminder that Washington’s neocons are very good at undermining and overthrowing governments abroad that refuse to “play ball” according to DC rules, but when it comes to actually bringing anything of value from the chaos they create they are hopelessly incompetent. In Syria the damage is done, and future generations will continue to suffer from the cruel folly of those convinced they know how to run everyone else’s lives.

The post America’s Syrian Civil War appeared first on LewRockwell.

This is the greatest, and most insightful and profound episode of this wonderful podcast. Absolutely incredible!

The historical analysis is minutely detailed and brilliant, showing what has been really going on in regard to politics, demographics, shifts in culture, socioeconomic trends impacting America over decades.

Make this go viral. Send or post copies to family, friends, colleagues, and people you love and deeply respect who you believe must know this crucial information.

The post Barnes and Baris Episode 93: What Are the Odds? The NEW swing voter Republicans MUST get to vote in the midterms, and beyond. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer. 

How Much Are the OTHERS Losing?!

The post Stephen Colbert Reportedly LOST $40M per Year for CBS appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Maureen McKerracher.

See here.

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Thanks, Johnny Kramer . 

Heather Mac Donald

The post Every Society Had Slavery. The West Got Rid of It. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

CNBC News

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