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The post Tucker and Col. Macgregor Warn How Neocons Are Exploiting the Drug Crisis to Drag America Into War appeared first on LewRockwell.

Remember the old cliché of a pessimist seeing a glass half empty rather than half full? I’m a pessimist by nature, always imagining the downside of something, except when it comes to women. (In their case the downside reveals itself after a while, but the start is always brilliant.) I suppose my pessimism derives from childhood, when dreams never became reality due to a strict nanny and even stricter parents. Or so a shrink might say, although I’ve never been to one, and many of those who have been and whom I have met rarely made any sense.

This preamble on pessimism has to do with the Middle East—Gaza, to be precise. Although it deeply saddens me to write it, it seems to me that I have more chance to run off with Lily James than for peace to hold over that tortured piece of real estate. In fact, it is far more realistic for a lasting peace in Ukraine than a permanent end to the hostilities in Gaza. There are two main obstacles to peace: Hamas and Netanyahu. It is as simple as that.

“Hamas is as likely to voluntarily disarm as Bibi is to become Catholic.”

Conducting summary executions the day after resuming control of Gaza proves that Hamas has learned nothing from this unspeakable tragedy. Sixty-eight thousand dead from Israeli arms, half of them innocent women and children, and all Hamas can think of is to add on to this morbid number. Persuading Hamas to disarm is a key to The Donald’s twenty-point peace plan, but Hamas is as likely to voluntarily disarm as Bibi is to become Catholic.

And let us not forget Netanyahu and his fellow gangsters like Smotrich and Katz. They are the very ones who helped finance Hamas before Oct. 23 in order to keep the Palestinian Authority weak and the West Bank divided. Hamas saved Netanyahu two years ago, and he’s not about to get rid of them, because they come in handy where domestic Israeli politics are concerned.

The horror deal between two very evil parties began in 1996. Following the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli extremist, Hamas and Netanyahu worked hand in hand in defeating the Oslo agreements, and then Bibi facilitated Qatar’s hundreds of millions of dollars in paper bills to Hamas, a fact that weakened the Palestinian Authority to no end. Netanyahu and Hamas still need each other, and I am afraid they will do their utmost to subvert any peace agreement. Gaza, needless to say, cannot be reconstructed overnight. There were 654 Israeli strikes on Gaza’s medical facilities alone. The area has been ground into rubble, making peace over such devastation almost impossible. Netanyahu knew what he was doing by waging total war. He was making peace untenable. Netanyahu’s plan now is to keep the Palestinian Authority from leading a united front with Gaza.

Israel’s creeping takeover of the West Bank has been decades in the making. Seven hundred and forty thousand so-called settlers are now entrenched on Palestinian lands. Last time I was there, during the Yom Kippur War, there were 10,000. Israel has been very smart in its land grab. It has made a two-state solution impossible by an impracticable contiguous Palestinian territory. Land grab aside, a Palestinian state cannot be created unilaterally without the agreement of Israel, and as long as Netanyahu rules, there will be no state of Palestine.

Gaza, of course, is the great tragedy, with displaced families having been bombed in their tents, their shoeless orphan children lying dead next to their parents’ graves. And it gets worse, as far as the prospects of peace are concerned. Close to 11,000 Palestinians are still locked up in Israeli prisons, a third of them without charges or a trial. At least 77 detainees have died in custody over the past two years. Since 1967, when Israel took over the West Bank through force of arms, more than one million Palestinians have been arrested. International condemnation that brought about change in South Africa has not been heard where Palestine is concerned. What I’d like to know is where the international outrage, let alone the diplomatic censure, has been. Is there one rule for rogue countries and another one for Israel?

Israel’s extremist security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has been accused of having deprived prisoners of food and inflicting physical torture. I am not in a position to know whether these charges are true or not, but I do know that they have not been investigated by human rights groups. The other thing I know is that the Trump people are busy sucking up to the Israelis and totally ignoring the plight of the Palestinians. The latter, I need to remind the world, are also people.

This article was originally published on Taki’s Magazine.

The post Peace Without Possibility appeared first on LewRockwell.

Japan’s place in the US’ Chinese Containment Coalition just rose as a result of the unexpected Sino-Indo rapprochement, prior to which the US wanted India to play a complementary role, so Japan is now at the forefront of this effort.

Putin’s senior aide Nikolai Patrushev gave an interview to Arguments and Facts about Japan on the 80th anniversary of its unilateral surrender in World War II in early September that’s important to raise wider awareness of after the appointment of its new ultra-nationalist prime minister. He began by reminding everyone that “Tokyo zealously cultivated an open racism that surpassed German Nazism in its absurdity and inhumanity. And the sovereignty of other countries was considered an empty phrase there.”

Patrushev then touched upon Imperial Japan’s failed geopolitical plot to turn the Sea of Japan into an inland sea and even seize Kamchatka so as “to gain undivided possession of the Sea of Okhotsk” too. He assessed that Japan’s current campaign for “’justice’ on the issue of the so-called ‘northern territories’” is just a disguise for a similar plot to obtain control over new marine (seafood and mineral) resources. Patrushev accordingly warned that it’s planning to make new claims to Russian maritime territory.

The emerging trend of misportraying Imperial Japan as the “victim” of Soviet aggression in 1945, despite the Allies having agreed in advance that the USSR would open up the Manchurian Front three months after the Nazis’ defeat, is meant to lend false legitimacy to these claims. This threat shouldn’t be downplayed, Patrushev warned, since Japan’s “Self-Defense Forces” de facto function as national armed forces, are NATO-backed, and are “systematically building a powerful and ultra-modern submarine fleet”.

In his words, “Japan is one of the most powerful naval powers in the world today. Its fleet is capable of solving almost any task even in remote areas of the World Ocean. The Japanese Navy closely cooperates with the NATO fleet, and at any moment they can be integrated into Western coalition formats.” Even more concerning are Japan’s nuclear breakthrough capabilities: “it is capable of creating its own nuclear arsenal and means of delivery in a few years” if the decision is made, according to Patrushev.

Nevertheless, these threats shouldn’t be exaggerated either since Russia is “building up defensive potential in the Far East and strengthening our naval power in the Pacific Ocean”, thus meaning that it’s more than capable of defending itself from Japan. Rather, “The threat lies not so much in the destroyers and missiles, but in the fact that the national consciousness of the Japanese is shifting from pacifism to rabid revanchism”, which he attributed to a long-running “aggressive propaganda” campaign.

The purpose is to precondition the population to accept the risks associated with Japan more actively advancing US interests in the region via the “Squad” (those two, Australia, and the Philippines), which is envisaged as the core of AUKUS+, the US’ desired NATO-like regional analogue. Japan’s place in the US’ Chinese Containment Coalition just rose as a result of the unexpected Sino-Indo rapprochement, prior to which the US wanted India to play a complementary role, so Japan is now at the forefront of this effort.

The trend is that New Cold War’s focus is shifting from US-led NATO’s containment of Russia in Europe to US-led AUKUS+’s containment of China in Asia, all while the TRIPP Corridor injects Western influence into the Eurasian Heartland to stir trouble for both. India’s Pakistani rival is also poised to play a supportive role on the Central Asian front if tensions with the Taliban abate. Altogether, Poland, Japan, Turkiye, and possibly Pakistan are now the US’ top containment allies, which isn’t lost on Russia, India, and China.

This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

The post Japan Will Play a Much Greater Role in Advancing the American Agenda in Asia appeared first on LewRockwell.

A Truth Social tweet by U.S. President Donald Trump on nuclear weapons has led to some confusion and, as I assume, misinterpretations.

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump – Oct 30, 2025, 1:04 utc

The United States has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country. This was accomplished, including a complete update and renovation of existing weapons, during my First Term in office. Because of the tremendous destructive power, I HATED to do it, but had no choice! Russia is second, and China is a distant third, but will be even within 5 years. Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

The Washington Post interprets it as a test of nuclear warheads:

Trump directs Pentagon to test nuclear weapons for first time since 1992 (archived) – Washington Post
The president said he wanted testing to occur “on an equal basis” with Russia and China. The Kremlin condemned the move, and there was no indication of when tests might take place.

President Donald Trump on Thursday morning said he directed the Pentagon to begin testing nuclear weapons “on an equal basis” with Russia and China, an apparent attempt to flex the United States’ military might ahead of a high-stakes trade meeting here with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.

Trump’s announcement on Truth Social signaled a reversal of decades of United States nuclear policy that could have far-reaching consequences for relations with U.S. adversaries, though his post included very few details about what the tests would entail. The last nuclear weapon test in the United States was held in 1992, before President George H.W. Bush implemented a moratorium on such exercises at the conclusion of the Cold War.

Trump wrote that the process would begin immediately and was in response to other countries’ testing programs.

The president posted about resuming nuclear weapons testing as his helicopter, Marine One, was in the air on his way to meet Xi at Gimhae Air Base.

The Trump tweet is wrong in that it asserts that the U.S. has more nuclear weapons than any other country. All public sources say that Russia with about 4300 nuclear warheads has slightly more than the United States with about 3,600. China has about 5-600 nuclear warheads and is building up its nuclear weapon arsenal to about 1,000 warheads by 2035.

However Trumps next sentence is not about testing nuclear warheads. It is about testing of carrier systems that can deploy nuclear warheads.

Trump says: “Because of other countries testing programs, …”

It is important to distinguish between testing a carrier designed to deliver a nuclear war head and testing the nuclear war head itself. A nuclear carrier can be a bomber, a land based (intercontinental) missile or a submarine based missile or torpedo.

Russia has recently announced a successful test of the Burevestnik cruise missile. This is a nuclear carrier driven by a nuclear-powered jet engine:

The Russian president talked about the new unlimited-range nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile. The weapon was successfully tested last week, when the projectile reportedly traveled more than 14,000 km.

Putin revealed details about the missile’s nuclear-powered turbojet engine, stating that its power unit “is comparable in output with the reactor of a nuclear-propelled submarine, but it’s 1,000 times smaller.”

“The key thing is that while a conventional nuclear reactor starts up in hours, days, or even weeks, this nuclear reactor starts up in minutes or seconds. That’s a giant achievement,” the president said.

Burevestnik is, like the U.S. Tomahawk, a turbo fan driven cruise missile designed to fly at low altitude at a speed of less than Mach 1. While the Tomahawk uses a liquid propellant as a source of heat to drive its engine the Burevestnik uses a miniaturized nuclear reactor of an unknown kind. This gives it unmatched endurance. Both missile can carry conventional or nuclear war heads.

Russia has also tested its long announced Poseidon torpedo:

Russia successfully tested a nuclear-powered underwater Poseidon drone on Tuesday, Putin revealed. The development of the massive torpedo-shaped nuclear-capable drone was first announced in 2018, but had been shrouded in mystery ever since.

“For the first time, we succeeded not only in launching it from a carrier submarine using a booster engine but also in starting its nuclear power unit, which propelled the drone for a certain amount of time,” Putin stated.

The device is unrivaled by any other weapon “anywhere in the world when it comes to speed and depth,” the president stressed, adding that an analogous weapon is unlikely to be fielded by any other nation soon. The power of Poseidon greatly surpasses the characteristics of Russia’s upcoming Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), Putin stated, apparently referring to the yield of its nuclear payload.

The Poseidon torpedo is likely using a nuclear reactor which is in principle similar to the one on the Burevestnik cruise missile. Its most important advantage is again its high endurance. Poseidon is designed to carry a large nuclear warhead. Should that explode near to some harbor it would likely cause a large tsunami.

Trump also said: “I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. …”

All nuclear warheads the U.S. has are under the control of the Department of Energy. It is the sole agency that can do test explosions of nuclear warheads. The nuclear delivery vehicles which are used to deploy the war heads are under the control of the Department of Defense (or ‘Department of War’ as Trump calls it).

Trump said “Because of other countries testing programs” and “start testing … on an equal basis” both in reference of nuclear delivery vehicle tests of other countries.

Trump thereby likely meant to order the DoD to test its nuclear delivery vehicles, just like Russia has recently done. He did not order the DoE to test nuclear war heads.

The testing of nuclear delivery vehicles, like intercontinental missiles, is a routine that has been done every years since those exist.

It is nothing to panic about.

Trumps language is however as usual imprecise. May be he really has ordered to test a nuclear war head? Russia is not sure about this:

Russia will respond “accordingly” if the US violates a moratorium on testing nuclear weapons, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.
…
Responding to Trump’s claims of other countries carrying out nuclear tests, Peskov said “we are so far not aware of this.”

“If it is about Burevestnik, then it is not a nuclear test,” he insisted. “All nations are developing their defense systems, but this is not a nuclear test.”
…
Washington test-fired an unarmed, nuclear-capable Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile in February and launched four Trident II missiles from a submarine in September.

Russia last tested a nuclear weapon during the Soviet period in 1990. The US halted its testing in 1992 under a Congress-mandated moratorium.

To test a nuclear war head Trump would have to ask Congress to lift the moratorium on testing. He would also have to order the Department of Energy to prepare a test site. That process alone is estimated to take three years.

There is thus absolutely no reason for headline panics.

This article was originally published on Moon of Alabama.

The post A Nuclear Delivery Vehicle Is Not a Nuclear War Head appeared first on LewRockwell.

It was 1981, and a series of brightly colored TV-show posters hung on the chalkboard—Howdy Doody, Superman, a ventriloquist dummy, and a few others. The third-grade teacher polled the class on the previous night’s homework assignment to find out from their parents which of the given options had been their favorite to watch as a child.

I was sitting in that class, and when she got to me, I was unable to answer. “My parents grew up in Cuba so, none of these.”

It fell silent and every eye in the room focused on me. One of the mean kids called out, “She’s Cuuuuuuban,” in the same tone you’d say someone had terrible body odor.

In South Florida in the wake of the Mariel Boatlift, there was strong anti-Cuban sentiment. My teacher, in all charity and goodwill, admonished that student and explained that immigrants had come to the United States seeking a better life.

That afternoon, when I relayed this story to my mother, she became indignant. Her family had not come seeking a better life, she said. Then she nailed it: “We came seeking freedom.”

That distinction always stuck with me, well before I knew why.

In the late 1950s, my teenage parents left Cuba with their families before Castro locked the island down. Years later, they met in college in Florida, married, and had me. So immigration (now called “migration,” as though people are animals—a topic for another day) is a hot topic for me. But what right do I have to think a nation can justly limit who enters when I would not be here were it not for U.S. immigration policy?

Well, what is the purpose of immigration policy? It is now most often framed in terms of the U.S.’s obligation to provide direct assistance to prospective immigrants (offer them a “better life”?) rather than about opening up to them the blessings of liberty: the freedom to build a life and enjoy the fruits of one’s labor.

Some believe the blessings of liberty—a phrase which comes from the Preamble to our Constitution—are represented by the Statue of Liberty, which is often invoked as a national symbol that means the United States welcomes all immigrants. Bishop Robert Barron, when discussing a specifically American approach to immigration last year, invoked the Statue of Liberty and, in particular, the “huddled masses” mentioned in the poem at its base—but he did not complete the line in which that famous phrase appears.

“The New Colossus,” written in 1883 by Emma Lazarus and enshrined at the base of Lady Liberty, describes the poor, huddled masses as yearning not for assistance, or even for a “better life,” but yearning to breathe free.

Who was Emma Lazarus? Few know that this New York–born poet came from a wealthy, well-educated, Sephardic Jewish family whose American roots dated to colonial times—and even included a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Beyond her writing, she volunteered as an English teacher to Jewish immigrants and helped found the Hebrew Technical Institute to provide them with job training.

Lazarus gives Lady Liberty the name “Mother of Exiles” and describes her taking in the “homeless,” that term meaning not what we would today call the “unhoused” but, instead, men without a country.

Now, surely there is room for both, but should exiles “yearning to breathe free” be evaluated differently as possible new American citizens from those seeking “a better life”? Or, are we wrong to even ask this question?

Pope Leo XIV wrote in Dilexi Te that the Church knows that “in every rejected migrant, it is Christ himself who knocks at the door of the community.”

I suppose in response I want to ask, in all charity, really? Or is this hyperbole for effect? Every single one? If this is the case, why are any limits on immigration ever permitted by Catholic teaching? Why have nations at all then?

Individuals are not statistics, but statistics are the aggregate of individual actions. When a prospective immigrant is a criminal, and/or when statistics show dramatic increases in crime by the nationality he is a member of, should that factor in at all? What about when he has evidenced no aspiration, affinity, or even openness to the values that define the host nation, yet he wants to enter and remain (unlike the Holy Family who, it is so often pointed out to us, sojourned in Egypt during a period of danger but returned to their homeland when the danger passed)? Does a civil government have any responsibility whatsoever to its citizens to preserve their way of life?

When the Church in any Christian culture sets forth as part of her salvific mission the worthy endeavor of accompanying immigrants, to what extent must that accompaniment include evangelization, even the bare minimum of proclaiming that the Gospel is true, that Christ died for us, and that we need Him to go to Heaven?

“Evangelize” was not listed among those action words listed by Pope Francis, quoted by Leo in Dilexi Te, that “our response to the challenges posed by contemporary migration can be summed up in four verbs: welcome, protect, promote, and integrate.”

And finally, I suppose it goes without saying, or should, that Christ wants us to be Christian. If He is knocking at the door of a community, He is probably going to tell us to repent and believe in the Gospel. Is it wrong for the Church, in a historically Christian country, to seek to preserve that nation’s Christian character by urging the civil government to limit the number of non-Christians it admits, especially if she is not making it an express priority to evangelize them?

I would say it is not wrong.

For freedom Christ has set us free. Properly understood, freedom orients us to Heaven. Even in the narrower political sense of the word, self-government and individual liberty orient us—even force us—to make good use of our talents in service to others, for the sake of ourselves and our families.

Give us your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, indeed!

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post Yearning To Breathe Free appeared first on LewRockwell.

A soul! a soul! a soul-cake!
Please good Missus, a soul-cake!
An apple, a pear, a plum or a cherry,
Any good thing to make us all merry,
One for Peter, two for Paul,
Three for the One (Him) who made us all.
—Traditional Souling Song

With the approach of Halloween, another “Holiday” battle begins.  Unlike the annual fracas every December which pits believers in Christ’s birth and cultural traditionalists on the one side against those who believe that the celebration of Jesus’ birth should be submerged in a generic “Holiday Season,” this one sends Christians against Christians.  On the one side are those who believe that anything to do with the dark or spooky – to include Halloween itself – must be linked directly to the Satanic.  On the other are those who believe that there is nothing wrong with a bit of a fright – and more importantly the carving of pumpkins, the wearing of costumes, and the collection of candy in one of the few remaining communal observances left in modern North America.  The cause of the latter is not helped by the ever-increasing appropriation of Halloween by Wiccans and outright Satanists, as well as the fact that it has outdone Easter as the number two holiday in retail terms.  Against this onslaught, most Christian defenders of Halloween have only wholesome memories or parties and trick-or-treating to offer in defence of their position.

Of course, the entire societal scene has grown much darker – indeed, much more Satanic since this writer was a child in the 1960s.  Infanticide is embraced by both political parties, and – if their behaviour during COVID is to be believed – most of the Catholic Church hierarchy believe their Sacramental ministrations to be optional extras, ultimately unnecessary for Salvation.  Their attitudes are echoed by the laity in the universalism that Pope Benedict XVI decried in 2016.  In such an atmosphere, one might be forgiven for thinking that almost anything or anyone, from presidents to prelates, may well be agents of the prince of darkness – as indeed we ourselves are so often whenever we sin.

But we do need to get a grip, and remember the reality underlying all else: the Church’s teachings are true, and her rites efficacious, regardless of follies in Church and State.  We need to remember that a great deal of what we take as information regarding the preternatural comes from Protestant sources, who often regard Catholicism (and Orthodoxy) as little better than paganism. The meaning of symbols can change over time, and if we are not aware, we can make egregious mistakes.  Many regard the pentagram as a symbol of witchcraft and evil.  Not knowing their history, they do not realise that the Satanists invert it, as they do the Crucifix, to blaspheme it.  In this they are not trying to offend the Wiccans and Neopagans, who use it in an upright manner, but its older Christian meaning.  As readers of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight will remember, to our Catholic fathers it symbolised both the Five Wounds of Christ and the Five Joys of Our Lady (two more were added later to this number).  Tourists visiting California’s Missions may be horrified by seeing the Eye in the Triangle on various of St. Junipero Serra’s chasubles.  Lest they assume that the Golden State was a Masonic plot from the beginning, it were well for them to remember that the offending image was a perfectly decent symbol of the Trinity in Medieval times.  Spain in the 18th century had not yet gotten the news that it was to be reserved to the use of an Order whose basic belief – Conduct over Creed – would one day completely obscure St. Junipero’s message of Salvation through Christ and His Church.  Indeed, in this area, most of us are probably as Masonic as those who have undergone their strange rites of initiation.

This kind of straining after gnats subsequent to a full dinner of whole camel is very common to-day, and can give us quite the feeling of virtue.  Into this situation falls poor hapless Halloween and its central – if latter-day – rite of Trick or Treat.  So we must use our imaginations, and return to a time when Europe was Catholic and primarily agrarian.  Even in the towns with their merchants and artisans, markets and fairs, and their cities (who added cathedrals to the other four items of urban life in that time), as in the countryside with its forests, fields, and manors, there was no secular popular entertainment; no movies, radio, television, nor computers.  Life was very much governed by the dogmas and practises of the Church – and of the latter, not least the Liturgical Calendar.

From the rites of the Church re-emerged the theatre, in the form of miracle, morality, mystery, and mummers’ plays, which brought the teachings of the Church to life in full view of the faithful.  These in turn filtered down to everyday life.  Depending on specific locales, eves of major feasts – Candlemas, Ss. Philip and James, the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, St. Peter in Chains, All Saints, and the Circumcision in particular, though there were others – lent themselves to bonfires, ghost stories, and the like.  Folklore spoke of various sorts of enchantment, of fairies, ghosts, and witches – of preternatural evil repelled by supernatural means – the Church’s Sacramentals in particular.  There were often also performers – usually local youths or children – going from house to house, singing seasonal songs or performing simple plays that illustrated the nature of the season.

The triduum of All Hallows tide – the Eve of All Saints, the feast itself, and the following day’s observance of All Souls – lent itself to all sorts of these observances, given that all of us have many deceased loved ones – family and friends.  As with other such vigils, folklore played a big role; in many places, the dead were believed to return for meals with their families – ideas that survive in Catholic places from Brittany to Mexico.

There was in a great number of places – and especially in the British Isles – “Guising” or “Souling.”  Dressed in costumes, believed in some places (though far from everywhere) to hide one’s identity from any of the hostile unseen forces, people went from house to house, soliciting goodies in return for prayers for the living and dead of the house visited.  In places where this was called “Souling,” “Soul Cakes” were the expected reward, along with some variety of the song quoted at the beginning of this article.

After the Protestant revolt, a lot of these customs were continued, although severed from their original intent due to the new official theology, which frowned on prayers for the dead (a liability which would be overwhelmed by the tide of aspirations after the bloodbath of World War I, but that is another story).  A great many of these then crossed the Atlantic during the colonial settlement of the Atlantic States, and with subsequent immigration.  Among them was Halloween.

Of course, it was somewhat different from what it had been.  Although its Irish proponents still prayed for the dead, most of its Scots importers did not.  Halloween parties were spooky, and often included light-hearted fortune-telling, generally aimed at figuring out one’s future spouse.  The bonfires survived; and the tradition of playing pranks and tricks grew up.  As the 19th century went on the tricks escalated into widespread vandalism.  (This era is depicted in the Halloween scenes of the classic film, Meet Me in St. Louis.)  “Trick or Treat,” developed as a kind of extortion – and it was no empty threat.

After World War I, cities across the United States made a determined effort to end the mayhem.  From these efforts emerged the sanitised trick-or-treating with which we are familiar, as parents were encouraged to get younger children into the act and accompany them while doing so.  Advertising swiftly arose to encourage the trend – not least by makers of both candy and holiday decorations.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Wholesome Truth Behind ‘Trick or Treating’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

When people stop participating in their own servitude, then things change.

A dedicated cadre of readers is devoted to reminding me that I’ve been wrong since 2009, as stocks, housing and GDP have all soared. We skeptics and doom-and-gloomers have all been wrong, and when stocks briefly dip, we’re identified as broken clocks–right on occasion but not for being “right.”

These readers are of course doing well. None are in the bottom 50% of Americans who have already experienced the crash. But since the top 10% dominate the media, both legacy and social media, and they’ve done splendidly in the Everything Bubble that’s been inflating for the past 16 years, then they don’t see the crash the 50% have experienced, for the top 10% live in a completely different world from the bottom 50%, whose experience tracks a third-world country far removed from jetting around the world and complaining about high taxes.

Life has crashed for the bottom 50% since 2009, but since those reporting the “news,” issuing glowing commentary about AI, nuclear power, missions to the Moon, etc., and making big bucks as influencers didn’t experience the crash, it has gone largely unnoticed except for occasional reporting in the legacy and social media: people making substantially more than minimum wage living in vans and cars because they can’t afford the local rents, and similar stories.

In a Snow Paradise, They Live in This Parking Lot People experiencing homelessness can sleep in their cars in this wealthy ski town in Colorado, but only if they have a job.

The Invisible Man We see right through the unshowered soul living in a car by the beach, or by the Walmart, or by the side of the road. But he’s there, and he used to be somebody. He still is. A firsthand account of homelessness in America.

An American physician with nearly 50 years of experience brought me up short when he reported that for many Americans, the healthcare they receive is equivalent to what third-world residents receive. Third World–which evokes grinding poverty, inescapable immiseration, failing infrastructure, a neofeudal divide between the few wealthy and the many poor, a society with no limits on exploitation and profiteering ruled by elites that are not merely corrupt but also incompetent–has been replaced by the sanitized developing world, but the point here isn’t the trend to sanitize repellent realities with textual tropes, it’s the refusal of America’s top 10% to acknowledge that for many of the bottom 50%, America under their leadership is a third world nation.

The top 10% cling to the soaring stock market and rising GDP as markers of the nation’s robust economy and success to avoid dealing with lived reality, as if their fairy-tale belief that soaring stocks means life is good is actually real; if you’re falling behind, well, work harder, work smarter, be more frugal–be more like us, in other words.

While the top 10% busy themselves with using AI to improve work flow, obsessing over geopolitics and the decay of the perks of their Titanium credit card, other Americans are concerned with finding a second or third side-hustle as the soaring costs of utilities, rent, auto insurance and repairs, childcare and healthcare are forcing choices nobody wants to make: what not to pay.

As the cracks widen, it gets harder not to avoid falling into one. So much of everyday life in America is now a parody of precarity that is right out of a black-comedy script of a nation blindly telling itself that all is well because AI is amazing and we’re going back to the Moon while families are abandoning their beloved pets because they cannot afford four-figure vet bills.

The top 10%, secure in their bubble, don’t even notice that private equity is snapping up vet clinics precisely because people will pay whatever it takes to care for their pet. This is exploitation and profiteering on a scale that makes a mockery of the fantasy that ours is an economy of opportunity.

The withdrawal of the top 10% from the bottom 90% is not a new trend; it’s merely gathered momentum. Author Christopher Lasch described this class bifurcation decades ago in his 1995 book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.

It’s important to the top 10% to maintain the illusion that they didn’t benefit from conditions that are no longer available to all. They are loathe to admit that the US economy is now one in which the bottom 90% work to serve the top 10%, who account for half of all consumer spending and the lion’s share of discretionary spending–all the goodies such as vacations overseas, mileage upgrades to business class, etc.

As I outline in my recent books, Progress is illusory, a myth that cloaks the reality that life is getting more difficult, not easier: this is Anti-Progress, the opposite of Progress.

This reality is fragmented by distractions and addictions and the busy-ness of trying to do all the unpaid shadow work now required to keep everything glued together. All that was once authentic has been slowly replaced by Ultra-Processed Life, artifices that are easier to manage than messy reality.

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The post Yes, Everything Crashed–Just Not For You appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

I am 99% certain a bullet grazed President Trump’s ear in Butler, PA last year. I say 99% because I am aware of his involvement with WWE which uses fake blood. I remember when his Secret Service pushed him to the ground behind the podium and Trump reappeared with what looks like dried blood on his ear and face, but no blood was dripping. Then he and his security team gather together and pause while an active shooter may still be present. Trump raises his fist three times shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight! and the iconic photo with the American flag perfectly positioned behind them was published everywhere. The next day Elon Musk endorsed him and Trump’s MAGA supporters attributed Trump’s survival to a miracle. The momentum overwhelmingly propelled Trump to win the presidency. I saw this video of the event for the first time and now I think my doubt was well placed. It looks orchestrated. What do you think?

Watch Here.

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Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University. Mormons settled in Utah in 1847 and today 55-60% of the state’s residents are baptized members of the LDS Church. Kirk once said half of his TPUSA staff were Mormons. Investigative journalist Greg Reese did a report on the ties between American Zionism and Masonic Mormons. 

Greg Reese

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Writes Bill Madden

This 10 minute video discusses the real cause of WW I and, you can be very sure, all subsequent military aggression.  We quite often blame Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt for campaigning against war and, once elected, taking us to WW I and WW II.  Actually, then as now, the decisions for all important political policy are made at a higher level by our controllers, the super-rich owners of our country.  They control us by funding “their” political candidates in the primary elections so that we can elect one of their candidates in the general elections.

What is required for execution of the policies decided on from above are hypocritical, political whores who are comfortable saying one thing while doing another.  Our “Peace President” is a fine example. 

For those still believing that politicians lead the country, please consider this:  If you were the owner of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of assets in this country, would you trust the management of the country to humans completely devoid of character?  

The post The Peace President Now for War with Venezuela 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 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 la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.

____________________________________________________________________________________

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/mining-di-bitcoin-e-banane-islandesi)

In una sconsiderata strategia di marketing ecologico per il suo Paese, il primo ministro islandese, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, ha dichiarato al Financial Times a fine marzo che la sua isola nel mezzo dell'Atlantico dovrebbe usare la sua abbondante energia non per il mining di Bitcoin ma per... coltivare mais (!).

Elogiando la sovranità alimentare in un mondo costellato da crisi energetiche, catene di approvvigionamento sconquassate e guerre, ha ampliato il suo spunto di discussione sull'attualità affermando che “Bitcoin è un problema mondiale”, che “i data center in Islanda utilizzano una quota significativa della nostra energia verde” e che, secondo un nuovo piano energetico per il futuro, Bitcoin non ne avrebbe avuto alcun ruolo.

Dalle dichiarazioni della signora Jakobsdóttir possiamo imparare molto su commercio, energia, agricoltura, mining di Bitcoin e ostentazione politica, quindi approfondiamo.

Innanzitutto se non avete capito cosa fa Bitcoin, come le macchine per il mining (“ASIC”) proteggono la rete o perché è importante per il mondo, qualsiasi energia consumata dai suoi computer, dalle sue macchine per il mining o dai suoi wallet hardware vi sembrerà uno spreco. Ma questo non è il punto: le democrazie liberali occidentali non allocano l'elettricità in base ai casi d'uso che i loro attuali funzionari pubblici ritengono utili, ma lasciano che i singoli individui paghino per le necessità che loro ritengono preziose. Pensate a tutte quelle abbuffate di Netflix, ai videogiochi o alle decorazioni natalizie, che consumano tutte quantità di elettricità simili a quelle del mining globale di Bitcoin.

In secondo luogo l'elettricità totale utilizzata dai data center in Islanda (solo alcuni di essi fanno mining) è stata di 1.169 GWh nel 2021, circa il 6% del consumo totale del Paese, ovvero poco più del consumo di tutte le famiglie messe insieme. Tale consumo è completamente sminuito dall'elefante energetico nella stanza: l'industria dell'alluminio. Circa due terzi dell'elettricità nazionale (ovvero 12.454 GWh, ovvero 11 volte il consumo totale dei data center, ovvero circa il 20% del consumo energetico totale, quest'ultimo dato include anche il riscaldamento e la benzina) viene utilizzato per trasformare la bauxite importata in alluminio destinato all'esportazione. È un'attività piuttosto redditizia. Le tre fonderie di alluminio del Paese contribuiscono all'economia islandese quasi quanto il settore turistico, molto più noto e pubblicizzato.

È anche per questo che Daníel Jónsson, amministratore delegato di GreenBlocks, un'azienda di mining, ha aperto il suo editoriale sul quotidiano islandese Visir criticando la Jakobsdóttir con la proposta di una centrale idroelettrica in Etiopia. L'energia e l'elettricità inutilizzate sono una calamita per i miner di Bitcoin, poiché prendono l'elettricità che non può essere prontamente utilizzata per altri scopi e la trasformano in una delle risorse più liquide e trasferibili a livello mondiale.

Jónsson osserva che il principio “non è poi così diverso dal percorso intrapreso dall'Islanda negli anni '60, quando [gli islandesi] decisero di costruire centrali elettriche ed esportare elettricità [...] per l'industria dell'alluminio”. Sebbene gli islandesi abbiano molto da dire sugli impianti geotermici e sulle dighe fluviali, è innegabile che il popolo islandese viva bene anche grazie al successo dell'esportazione di elettricità.

Il mining di Bitcoin è solo un altro modo per fare la stessa cosa: trasformare l'energia intrappolata, con pochi usi alternativi, in qualcosa che il resto del mondo desidera avere.

In terzo luogo, il mais?! Davvero?! La mentalità da pianificazione centralizzata coinvolta qui è sorprendente. A 64 gradi nord in un paesaggio aspro con poche superfici pianeggianti o terreni coltivabili come invece negli infiniti campi di mais del Midwest, dove per otto mesi all'anno non cresce altro che ghiacciai e cumuli di neve, dove le risorse naturali più abbondanti sono pesci, cascate e calore geotermico, si vuole coltivare mais?

Certo, proprio come le stampanti di banconote infinite possono permettere a qualsiasi azienda, organizzazione o governo di sopravvivere, l'elettricità infinita può far accadere la maggior parte delle cose. Di conseguenza in Islanda si può coltivare di tutto, compresi i pomodori locali – che invadono i negozi di Reykjavík – e fichi, arance e banane – che crescono invece in una serra gestita da un'università a un'ora dalla città (a quanto pare in Islanda si coltivano banane dagli anni '50, anche se non sono mai diventate commercialmente redditizie poiché la scarsa luce solare, anche integrata con quella artificiale, fa maturare una pianta di banana in circa due anni rispetto ai pochi mesi necessari in Sud America o in Africa).

In quarto luogo il valore economico del commercio. Nel suo libro, The Myth of the Rational Voter, l'economista Bryan Caplan della George Mason University documenta come una delle differenze tra la popolazione e gli economisti sia il grado di esitazione nell'interagire con gli stranieri, in particolare per quanto riguarda il valore del commercio estero. Mentre gli economisti, alla lavagna, iniziano a blaterare di Ricardo o del vantaggio comparato, i cittadini comuni tendono a pensare a localismo, perdita di posti di lavoro e delocalizzazione.

Forse la popolazione di un Paese, affamata di banane, potrebbe essere meglio rifornita coltivandole utilizzando abbondante elettricità locale, anche se il clima e la scarsa insolazione invernale non sono adatti. Oppure si potrebbe ottenere frutta in quantità maggiore, più economica e di migliore qualità acquistando bauxite dall'estero, investendovi due terzi dell'elettricità nazionale, trasportando all'estero l'alluminio risultante e infine facendo tornare altre navi e aerei con banane e pomodori freschi.

I giornalisti del Financial Times hanno aggiunto con naturalezza che “l'Islanda produce la maggior parte dei prodotti animali che consuma, ma solo l'1% dei suoi cereali e il 43% delle sue verdure”, come se queste fossero statistiche in qualche modo rilevanti. Lo stesso si può dire di una città o di una famiglia (“[...] produce solo circa l'1% del suo consumo alimentare e il 5% delle sue verdure, in gran parte dal suo orto estivo”); non hanno alcun significato economico.

Prendiamo ad esempio New York City. Nonostante i numerosi orti comunitari e gli sforzi considerevoli compiuti negli ultimi anni dalle autorità per sostenere i prodotti locali in città, possiamo tranquillamente supporre che solo una miseria del cibo consumato ogni giorno a Manhattan venga coltivata lì. Nessuna persona sana di mente pensa che questo sia un problema. In economie integrate e monetarie con facile accesso ai trasporti e al commercio internazionale, queste cose non contano più.

Il sistema economico è controintuitivo in questo senso: ciò che a un osservatore superficiale può sembrare una follia assoluta, può avere perfettamente senso. È meglio coltivare le mele localmente o farsele spedire dalla Nuova Zelanda? L'Islanda dovrebbe coltivare banane, fichi e mais, o utilizzare l'energia per fornire circa il 2% dell'alluminio mondiale?

Nonostante la “disastrosa” carenza di produzione agricola dell'Islanda, il Paese è ben fornito di cereali e ortaggi tutto l'anno, proprio come agli abitanti di New York non mancano frutta e verdura fresche. L'idea risale ai dibattiti sulle Corn Laws del 1800 e, dopo la vittoria del libero scambio, la Britannia ha esplicitamente fatto affidamento sugli stranieri per il suo sostentamento. Un gran bell'affare.

Utilizzando calcoli economici e profitti/perdite derivanti dal sistema dei prezzi, possiamo trovare la risposta a queste domande: se un'azienda o un'attività realizza un profitto è la conferma che il prodotto è stato valutato positivamente dai consumatori rispetto a ciò che è stato impiegato per realizzarlo.

Ma forse possiamo fare entrambe le cose? Un computer ASIC è poco più di una rumorosa stufa dotata di alcuni processi di hashing, i quali convertono quasi tutta l'elettricità consumata in calore. Se i funzionari pubblici islandesi volessero coltivare più pomodori, banane, o mais utilizzando l'elettricità verde di cui la loro terra è così benedetta, potrebbero semplicemente piazzare qualche ASIC nelle loro serre.

Immaginate: potreste acquistare verdure islandesi coltivate localmente e proteggere la più grande rete monetaria digitale del mondo. Forse la coinbase guadagnata da miner Bitcoin potrebbe pagare uno staff di ricerca proprio su Bitcoin presso l'ufficio del Primo Ministro islandese.

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

Supporta Francesco Simoncelli's Freedonia lasciando una mancia in satoshi di bitcoin scannerizzando il QR seguente.

Lew,

Gee, I wonder which foreign power Kash Patel wanted to protect by shutting down the probe by National Counterterrorism Chief Joe Kent? Tucker Carlson recently commended Kent as a good and decent man.

Daily Mail

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Putin remains focussed on achieving a new Europe-wide security architecture, writes Alastair Crooke.

Trump’s attempt to build a ‘Budapest scenario’ (i.e. a Putin-Trump summit grounded on the earlier Alaska ‘understanding’) was unilaterally cancelled (by the U.S.) amid acrimony. Putin had initiated the 2.5 hr Monday call. It reportedly contained tough talking by Putin about the lack of U.S. preparation towards a political framework – both in respect to Ukraine, but crucially also in respect to Russia’s wider security needs.

However, when it was announced by the American side, Trump’s proposal had reverted (yet again) to the Keith Kellogg (the U.S. Ukraine Envoy) doctrine of a ‘frozen conflict’ on the existing Contact Line preceding any peace negotiations – not vice versa.

Trump must have known well before the Budapest talks were mooted that this Kellogg doctrine had been rejected, time after time, by Moscow. So why did he repeat the demand for it again? In any event, the Budapest summit scenario had to be cancelled after the pre-agreed ‘set-up’ call between Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Secretary of State Marco Rubio ran up against a wall. As Lavrov again insisted that a Kellogg-style ceasefire in place would not fly.

It seems that the U.S. Administration expected that its threats to supply Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles amid toughening U.S. rhetoric of deep strikes into Russia would be pressure enough to have Putin agree a freeze in the here and now format, with all discussion of details and a wider solution postponed, sine die.

Russian military analysts reportedly told Putin that Trump’s threats were bluff — even if the Tomahawk supplies were made available, the quantity would be limited and would not inflict any tactical or strategic defeat on Russia.

The course of events implies that either Trump did not grasp this Russian ‘reality’ – despite two years of repetition that Russia would not budge on a ‘here and now freeze’. Or alternatively, that the ‘dark money’ interests came down hard on Trump, telling him that a real peace process with Russia was not allowed. So Trump cancelled the whole scenario, muttering to the media that a Budapest meeting would have been “a waste of time” — leaving his Administration (U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent) to announce new sanctions on Russia’s largest oil companies, accompanied by a call to allies to join with them.

Let us recall – the ‘Russian’ reality is that Putin would not want to repeat the mistake of 1918, when Russia signed the humiliating Brest-Litovsk peace, under pressure from Germany. Putin often repeats that it was precisely the pressures to ‘let’s just stop’ in 1918 that cost Russia its status as a major power, and lost it entire generations of Russians. The colossal effort of millions of people was exchanged for the humiliating Brest-Litovsk peace. Chaos and collapse followed.

Putin remains focussed on achieving a new Europe-wide security architecture, though Trump’s capriciousness and unseen constraints must put new calls by Putin or meetings into question. Putin is angry — many Russian ‘red lines’ have been crossed; escalation is coming – perhaps at an unprecedented level.

The Europeans, undaunted by the Belgrade meeting cancellation, are touting a ’new/old’ twelve-point plan that would rule out territorial concessions and would prescribe a ceasefire along the current front lines. The western Ruling Strata are making matters abundantly clear: Russia must be defeated. Escalation has already begun: New EU sanctions on Russian gas imports into the EU have been announced and overnight strikes on oil refineries in Hungary and Romania (the latter being a NATO state) were launched. Again, the message to EU states is clear: no backsliding. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk underlined on X the point: “All Russian targets in the EU are legitimate”. The EU is clearly willing to go to any length to make war on its own to compel adherence.

Given that the Kiev side finds it impossible to contemplate resiling from any part of its territory – whilst Russia retains the preponderance of hard force – it is hard to see how any negotiation is feasible at this time. Likely, Ukraine will be settled by a trial of strength. The EU urgency to its attempt to win Trump to its side likely reflects its fear of the accelerating and accumulating Russian military victories.

All this Russia turmoil is occurring as Bessent heads to Kuala Lumpur to challenge China’s response to the U.S.’ sudden extension (after holding apparently promising trade talks) of export controls to tech products imported by China. China riposted by promulgating rare earth controls in retaliation.

An angry Trump exploded – threatening China with 100% tariffs. The U.S. stock market, following a well-worn pattern, initially crashed, but Trump quickly posted an upbeat announcement in time for the opening of the ‘futures market’, and buyers piled in, with stocks hitting record highs. For Americans, all was well.

However, last Monday, Trump’s eulogistically positive language towards China – unexpectedly shot-up to volume ‘11’: “I think when we finish our meetings in South Korea [with Xi], China and I will have a really fair and really great trade deal together”, Trump said. He voiced hope that China would resume purchases of American soybeans after imports by Beijing plunged amid the tariff standoff. He also urged China “to stop with the fentanyl”, accusing the Chinese authorities of failing to curb exports of the synthetic opioid and its chemical precursors

And just to ensure that the stock market rocketed to yet a new record high, Trump added that he doesn’t think that ‘China wants to invade Taiwan’.

However, now that Moscow has effectively put a stop to the U.S. ‘Budapest’ scenario, the question is: Will Xi too decide that continuing with Trump capriciousness is worth the inevitable angst (the meeting in South Korea is unconfirmed at this point). And angst seems likely to soar.

Perhaps however, Trump’s shift to such excessively positive language towards China reflects something else: A shock development for Trump and the U.S. possibly?

The newly inaugurated Prime Minister of Japan, Sanae Takaishi, had widely been expected, on taking office, to deliver strong anti-China rhetoric; to strengthen the alliance with the U.S.; to boost Japan’s military power; and to contain Beijing.

Yet, the opposite happened.

In her first address to the nation, Takaishi said that she would not support the U.S. trade war against China, and would not become an instrument of U.S. economic pressure. She openly criticised Trump’s tariff policy, calling it ‘the most dangerous mistake of the 21stcentury’.

Reuters commented that her stance was wholly unexpected in Washington. A big shock. It emerged that since taking office, the new PM had held a series of meetings with the largest Japanese corporations who had conveyed a unified and urgent message to her: Simply – the Japanese economy would not survive another trade war.

Then, one week after taking office, she openly expressed support for China, executing the biggest foreign policy pivot since WW2. China was no longer the ‘enemy’.

A new era in Asia has arrived. Trump is in shock: He accused Takaishi of betraying the principles of free trade. CNN called it a ‘stab in the back’, by a close ally.

But worse was to come: Polls showed the PM enjoyed 60% support for her stance on Japanese economic independence – and more than 50% supported her position on China, too!

Bloomberg dropped a further bombshell: Takaishi has begun – in conjunction with China and South Korea – a strategic recalibration of Asia’s monetary architecture in response to Washington’s growing use of economic power as leverage. China, Japan, and South Korea are building a common currency area. The proposed trilateral swap would allow the three to settle trade, extend liquidity, and manage crises through their own currencies – entirely independently from the West.

Were these projects to mature, it would chip away at the scaffolding of dollar primacy by removing 15% of global trading from the dollar sphere, and would likely see the entire existing (pro-western) Asian balance of power collapse.

It goes further: Takaishi’s vision would mesh with the SCO/BRICS unfolding of its digital clearing system across all of Central Asia. Yet Trump wants the BRICS dismantled, together with any other threats to U.S. dollar hegemony. Expect escalation – more threats of tariffs.

Should China not respond sufficiently enthusiastically to the Trump charm offensive, then matters likely will escalate in tandem with escalations versus Russia (Venezuela and possibly Iran). Trump has already threatened Japan with sanctions, though this seems likely only to push Japan closer to China where the predominance of Japan’s trading interests now lies. A volatile period lies ahead, likely punctuated by violent oscillations in financial markets.

Russia and China remain closely aligned on geo-political issues – and both may have other reasons to keep talking with Trump (if only to avoid inadvertently triggering a financial crisis in the West for which they will be blamed), or for military de-confliction purposes. But it seems that more than for these states alone, the Trump leverage tactics are backfiring – whilst the debt and credit crisis in the U.S. grows ever more acute.

Any of these geo-political trysts could ignite into flames. Ukraine-Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan-India and of course Gaza and West Bank, are just some of the hotspots. The situation is brittle; Trump exists beyond strategic analysis, and the Europeans lack any real leadership and are embarked internally on war psychosis.

As the old Viennese saying has it: “In Vienna, the situation is desperate – but not serious” (i.e. have no expectation anyone in the West will react to it with any modicum of sobriety).

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

The post The World Financial and Geo-Political Framework at a Time of Imminent Disorder appeared first on LewRockwell.

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“But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.”—Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Monsters don’t always come wrapped in the trappings of horror or myth.

Most often, monsters in the real world look like ordinary people. They walk among us. They smile for the cameras. They promise protection and prosperity even as they feed on fear and obedience.

All is not as it seems.

We are living in two worlds.

There’s the world we’re shown—the bright, propaganda-driven illusion manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors—and the world we actually inhabit, where economic inequality widens, real agendas are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak, and “freedom” is rationed out in controlled, legalistic doses by militarized police and federal agents.

We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.

Tune out the distractions and diversions, and you run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: monsters with human faces walk among us.

Many of them work for the U.S. government.

Through its power grabs, brutality, greed, corruption, and tyranny, the government has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to fight—terrorism, torture, disease, drug trafficking, trafficking of persons, violence, theft, even scientific experimentations that treat humans as test subjects.

With every passing day, it becomes painfully evident that the American Police State has developed its own monstrous alter ego: the Vampire State.

Like its legendary namesake, it survives by draining the lifeblood of the nation—the sweat, money, labor, privacy, and freedoms of “We the People.”

One tax, one law, one war, one surveillance program at a time, it takes what it needs and bleeds us dry.

As in every great horror story, the most terrifying monsters are the ones that look familiar. Of all the gothic figures, Bram Stoker’s vampire—a cold, calculating predator bent on conquest—may be the closest to the waking nightmare unfolding before us.

Like its mythic counterpart, the Vampire State seduces its victims with promises of safety, comfort, and national greatness. Once trust is secured and access granted, it feeds slowly and methodically—just enough to keep the populace docile, but never enough to rouse them from their trance.

Lulled by propaganda and partisan loyalty, the people become what Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, feared most: a zombie-fied mob, mindless to the very monster that feeds on them.

Once it latches on, the Vampire State’s tyrannical hunger only grows.

The Vampire State feeds on fear. Fear is the oxygen of tyranny. Every crisis—real or manufactured—fuels the quest for more power. Serling showed how quickly panic corrodes a community in The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, where neighbors, convinced that danger lurks next door, transform into a violent mob and turn on each other. Our headlines change—drug wars and ICE raids, “domestic extremists” and pandemics, foreign hit lists and necessary military strikes—but the script remains the same: politicians play savior, and a browbeaten populace surrenders their rights for the illusion of safety.

Fear, however, is only the beginning. Once fear takes hold, the next step is to turn people against one another. Demagogues know well how to do this.

The Vampire State feeds on division. In He’s Alive, Serling’s young fanatic learns the oldest trick in the book: “The people will follow you if you give them something to hate.” The American Police State has perfected that art—pitting citizen against immigrant, left against right, protester against police, rich against poor—because a divided nation is far easier to control.

Division, in turn, breeds submission. Once a society is at war with itself, obedience becomes the only refuge.

The Vampire State feeds on obedience. In Serling’s The Obsolete Man, a religious librarian in an atheist society where books are destroyed is condemned to death for obsolescence. The real crime was individuality. Today, bureaucracies demand the same submission—teachers disciplined for dissent, journalists axed for challenging the prevailing order, citizens detained under executive orders for speech deemed “dangerous.” Resistance is drained until only compliance remains.

Obedience, however, is never enough. Tyranny requires endless sustenance—material, financial, and human.

The Vampire State feeds on wealth. No predator survives without a steady source of sustenance, and the state’s preferred meal is the taxpayer. Endless wars, bloated budgets, emergency powers and corporate concessions keep the machine humming. As in Judgment Night and The Purple Testament, the war engine consumes bodies and earnings while sanctioning the cost as “patriotism.” Trillions get funneled to defense contractors and prison profiteers even as the public is told is “no money” for justice, infrastructure, welfare, or the basic maintenance of a free society.

Yet even that cannot satisfy a regime that wants total control. To control completely, it must know everything about those in its power.

The Vampire State feeds on privacy. A true predator must know its prey. The predatory state now drinks deeply from the digital lifeblood of the nation—every call logged, every movement tracked, every purchase recorded. Palantir-powered surveillance, biometric checkpoints, facial recognition databases: this is Serling’s cautionary universe updated for the algorithmic age.

And when fear, division, obedience, wealth, and privacy have been mined to exhaustion, the Vampire State turns to its most precious prey—the human spirit.

The Vampire State feeds on hope. The final hunger is spiritual. It drains its victims of hope until despair is all that’s left. A hopeless populace is a controlled one. Serling warned repeatedly that when people lose their moral bearings, they risk becoming the very monsters they fear.

Every horror story reaches a moment when the victims realize what they’re up against. Ours has come. The question is how to break the spell.

While Rod Serling warned of what would happen if fear and conformity became our national creed, filmmaker John Carpenter showed what it looks like when that warning is ignored.

Best known for Halloween, Carpenter’s body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment concern.

Again and again, he portrays governments at war with their own citizens, technology turned against the public, and a populace too anesthetized to resist tyranny.

In Escape from New York, fascism is America’s future. In The Thing, humanity dissolves into paranoia. In Christine, technology turns murderous. In In the Mouth of Madness, evil triumphs when people lose “the ability to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”

And in They Live, Carpenter rips off the mask completely.

Two migrant workers discover that society is controlled by parasitic aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. The people—lulled by comfort, trained by propaganda, hypnotized by screens—serve as hosts for their oppressors.

It is only when homeless drifter John Nada discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.

When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.

It was fiction—but barely.

The monsters Carpenter envisioned were symbolic; ours wear suits and wave flags.

Americans no longer need special Hoffman lenses to see who is draining us. They’re not aliens disguised by human masks; our overlords sit in high offices, issue executive orders, and promise to “save” us while feeding on our fears, labor, and freedoms.

Unless we awaken soon, the Vampire State will finish what both Serling and Carpenter tried to warn us about.

The time for allegory is over; the warning has become the world we live in.

The Vampire State’s power depends on darkness—on secrecy, silence, and the willing ignorance of those it drains.

The remedy is not another political savior or bureaucratic fix. It begins where Serling’s and Carpenter’s parables always began—with the awakening of individual conscience, and the courage to name the real monsters in our midst.

Just as sunlight destroys a vampire, a populace that thinks, questions, and refuses unlawful commands is the surest defense against tyranny.

We cannot fight monsters by becoming them. We cannot defeat evil by imitating its methods.

If the Vampire State thrives on fear, feeds on hate, is empowered by violence, and demands obedience, then our weapon must be courage, our antidote love, our defense nonviolence, and our answer disciplined, creative civil disobedience.

Every generation must relearn these truths.

Almost 250 years after America’s founders pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to unseat a tyrant, we find ourselves under the tyrant’s thumb again, saddled with a government that feeds on the fears of the public to expand its power; a bureaucracy that grows fat on the labor of the governed; a surveillance apparatus that gorges on data, privacy, and dissent; and a war machine that sustains itself on endless conflict.

These are the symptoms of a nation that has forgotten its own cure.

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were meant to serve as stakes through the heart of authoritarian power, but they are not magic incantations.

With every act of blind obedience, every surrendered liberty, every law that elevates the government over the citizenry, our protections diminish.

When that happens, the story turns full circle: fiction becomes prophecy.

In Serling’s universe, there was always a narrator to warn us. In Carpenter’s, the heroes had to liberate themselves from the monsters’ trap.

Our task is both: to see the truth, and to act on it.

As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, monsters walk among us—because we have failed to see them for what they truly are.

The Vampire State is real. But so is the power of the human spirit to resist it.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

The post The Vampire State: Feeding on Our Fear, Freedom and Finances appeared first on LewRockwell.

Russia’s President Putin should read The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli and ponder the famous statement that “it is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”  Putin’s problem is that he is neither loved nor feared.  

Western propaganda has made him unloved, and Putin himself has made himself not feared. President Trump now mocks Putin’s Russia as a “paper tiger.” Putin after four years of conflict hasn’t won a war he should have won, as I have said so many times and as Trump now says, in one week. 

Having failed to fight for a quick victory and to enforce redlines, Putin has relied on announcements of new super weapons to substitute for the lack of response to ever-worsening provocations that Putin’s never-ending war continues to produce.  Having backed down in the face of every provocation, Putin has squandered the Russian deterrent. 

The Kremlin has been unable to prevent Trump and the West from defining the solution as a cease fire.  In an effort to coerce Putin into a cease fire, Trump has now placed sanctions on Russia’s oil customers, India and China.  Writing in the British Telegraph on October 26, Melissa Lawford, described as US Economics Correspondent, reports that Russia finally begins to buckle as it runs out of cards to play just as Trump turns the screws.

Lawford writes that 

“Suddenly, Putin has many reasons to be worried.

“Russia’s economy is beginning to buckle. Businesses have been crippled by high interest rates, government borrowing costs have soared and economy minister Maxim Reshetnikov warned in June that the country was ‘on the brink of a recession’. Warnings are mounting over a potential avalanche of bad debt that could trigger a financial crisis.

“Small pockets of protest are emerging. Earlier this month, hundreds of people gathered in St Petersburg Square to sing an outlawed song calling for Putin to be overthrown.

“Meanwhile, Ukraine has been aggressively ramping up its drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, hammering the country’s petrol supplies.

“Now Donald Trump is turning the screws. After frustration over a lack of progress to end the war in Ukraine, the US president announced new sanctions on two of Russia’s biggest oil companies on Wednesday.

“India and China, the main buyers of Russian oil since the war began, responded by curbing purchases. It threatens to cut off crucial oil revenues to Putin’s war machine – and the Russian state.

“’For the first time in three and a half years, Russia’s really getting hurt,’ says Timothy Ash, an associate fellow at Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia programme. ‘I think there’s some panic.’”

On top of it all a “banking crisis looms” with the prospect of bankrupt companies and a large government budget deficit.

Worst of all, Putin’s never-ending war has come home to the Russian population. 

“Thick plumes of smoke have been rising from Russian oil refineries across the country this year following an unprecedented barrage of Ukrainian drone attacks.

“Since January, Ukraine has hit 21 of Russia’s 38 largest refineries where crude oil is refined into products like petrol. It has struck as far as 683 miles into Russia from the Ukrainian border.

“So much supply has been knocked out that petrol prices have surged by 40% since the start of the year. Officials have introduced rationing in occupied Crimea while small petrol stations in Siberia have closed down. Social media is filled with video footage of enormous queues of cars waiting to fill up.”

The Telegraph article  sets out the new narrative.  Russia is on the ropes.  John Herbst of the Atlantic Council sees paranoia setting in. Timothy Ash of Chatham House sees panic. Harvard’s Craig Kennedy sees a large dark pool of debt that could undermine the economy and the banks’ ability to finance war procurement.  With Putin’s central bank director’s 16.5% interest rates, there is no money available to prevent a systemic crisis. All the while Putin clings to his faith in negotiations with Trump, which is nonsensical as Trump has defined Putin’s resistance to a cease fire as Putin’s disappointing unwillingness to negotiate.  Putin further degraded himself in the eyes of the West by responding to Trump’s sanctions on Russia’s oil customers by sending Kirill Dmitriev to Washington to continue negotiations.  Whatever the truth in this narrative, it is not one that encourages the West to address the root cause of the problem, which is Russia’s security.

With the West convinced that Russia faces collapse, how can Putin think he has a negotiation position?  Since 2014 Putin has used strong words never backed by strong action. Putin has no credibility.  Trump and the Europeans do not want the war to end.  It is too profitable for the US military/security complex with billions of dollars in commissions spilling over into the pockets of European policymakers. The prospect of immediate wealth overwhelms any concern about a future nuclear confrontation, which there will eventually be when the provocations Putin has encouraged become too great for Putin to ignore.

Inside Russia both the Deputy Foreign Minister and the host of the most important Russian state TV news analysis program said that negotiations have failed, and the only alternative is for Russia to end the war by destroying Ukraine’s ability to continue fighting.  Polls show that Russians have a high level of support for Putin, but they also show that Russians want the war to end now with a Russian victory.

How much longer can Putin ignore reality?

Trump also denies reality.  RT reports:

Trump backs renewed Israeli strikes in Gaza

The US president denied that the resumption of hostilities was “jeopardizing” the ceasefire

US President Donald Trump has defended Israel’s renewed strikes in Gaza nearly three weeks into a ceasefire he helped broker.

With both Trump and Putin in denial of reality, no good decisions can be made.

The deployment of nuclear weapons continues.

Putin’s failure to put a stop to Western provocations is leading directly to nuclear war. 

Putin’s aide Yury Ushakov replies to increasing provocations with pleas for negotiations thereby increasing Western contempt for Russia.  

Russia remains ready for a potential meeting between President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, presidential aide Yury Ushakov has said.

Is Ushakov signaling Russia’s willingness to surrender and to accept a cease fire?  The West has made it clear that a cease fire is all that the West is interested in negotiating.  

After four wasted years, the only way out for Russia from Putin’s never-ending ever-widening war is to destroy Kiev’s ability to continue the war. It is not possible for Putin to continue his strategic blunder any longer.

The post How Much Longer Can Putin Ignore Reality? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Democrat party is the undisputed champion of lawfare — the corrupt practice of using the legal system to persecute perceived political enemies and deprive non-Democrats of their constitutional rights.  Donald Trump had a clean criminal record for the first seventy years of his life.  After he became the Republican standard-bearer, dirty Democrat lawyers unleashed an avalanche of meritless criminal investigations, prosecutions, and civil suits that have continued to this day.

Democrat FBI agents and DOJ attorneys tried to frame him as a Russian spy.  Democrat spies hiding within the national security community worked to get him impeached.  Democrat judges permitted Democrat federal agents to raid the president’s private residence and rummage through the first lady’s underwear drawer.  Democrat legislators rewrote civil statutes with the specific intent to target Trump as a defendant.  Democrat attorneys general twisted statutory language to “get Trump” and bankrupt his family.

Democrat prosecutors tried to put President Trump in prison for pursuing lawful remedies to the fraudulent, mail-in-ballot-tainted 2020 “election.”  Democrat prosecutors tried to put him in prison for a nonexistent campaign finance violation.  Democrat prosecutors tried to put him in prison for possessing exculpatory documents that expose the Russia Collusion Hoax for the crime that it is.  Democrat prosecutors tried to put an American president in prison for the rest of his life under the delusional legal fantasy that the commander in chief had engaged in “insurrection” against his own government.

Along the way, anybody within Trump’s orbit — both well known associates and unknown, random Americans — became a target for Democrat agents, prosecutors, and judges to harass.  In an effort to prop up the fraudulent Russia Collusion Hoax, Democrat prosecutors put President Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, in prison and attempted to do the same to his national security adviser, Michael Flynn.  In an effort to scare potential witnesses, heavily armed agents arrested Trump’s political adviser, Roger Stone, in a predawn raid.  In an effort to suborn false testimony that might implicate Trump in the fraudulent Russia Collusion Hoax, Democrat agents and prosecutors intimidated ancillary campaign workers, such as George Papadopoulos.  Time and again, Democrat agents humiliated Trump associates by publicly arresting them, placing them in handcuffs and leg irons, parading them before corporate news cameras for unnecessary “perp walks,” and strip-searching them while in custody.

Democrat lawyers have prosecuted and sought to disbar (successfully in some instances) numerous attorneys representing President Trump — including Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell.  Democrats in the DOJ prosecuted and imprisoned Trump’s political strategist, Steve Bannon, and his senior economic counselor, Peter Navarro, for contempt of Congress — even though the DOJ has regularly declined to pursue similar charges against Democrats, including Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder.

These are just a handful of the better known individuals who have been unjustly targeted and prosecuted because of their connection to Donald Trump.  In addition to them, thousands of ordinary Americans have been similarly harassed and unjustly prosecuted for identifying as a Trump-supporter and “Make America Great Again” voter.

Democrats in the FBI and DOJ bragged about hunting down Trump-supporters who attended the January 6, 2021 Capitol protest against the mail-in-ballot-rigged 2020 “election.”  Whereas the whole Washington Establishment — including elected officials, judges, bureaucrats, and corporate news propagandists — immediately labeled the three-hour Capitol trespass an “insurrection,” it is important to remember that the vast majority of Americans who were present that day remained outside or walked through open doors, strolled calmly down hallways, and caused no damage of any kind.  In a country known for its Second Amendment defense of personal firearm ownership, these Americans were unarmed and posed no threat.  Nevertheless, a previously disciplined Capitol Police officer shot and killed unarmed U.S. Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt.

Six months earlier, Antifa domestic terrorists and Black Lives Matter rioters burned down cities across the country, killing numerous Americans over months of sustained violence and causing more property damage than any riot in the nation’s history.  Despite the death and destruction during those dangerous months, prominent Democrats and corporate news propagandists insisted on labeling 2020’s domestic terrorism the “Summer of Love.”  The Democrat party’s nominee for vice president, Kamala Harris, encouraged Americans to bail out anyone arrested for looting businesses or burning down neighborhoods.  The Democrat-sponsored riots of 2020 set off a wave of arson, theft, murder, and violence against local police officers.  It was the textbook definition of an “insurrection,” yet Establishment Washington insiders monstrously pretended that the prolonged criminal enterprise should be celebrated as some twisted reenactment of the civil rights movement.  Few people were arrested; fewer were actually prosecuted; even fewer were criminally sentenced.

This is the kind of criminal justice double-standard to which Trump-supporters and MAGA voters have become accustomed.  President Obama’s IRS illegally targeted conservative and religious nonprofits in order to prevent them from working against his re-election efforts.  Under President Biden, FEMA employees intentionally ignored hurricane victims who could be identified as Trump-supporters.  Domestic terrorists vandalize and burn down Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, and pro-life facilities, and Democrat prosecutors refuse to investigate the crimes or punish those responsible.  Violent thugs beat up conservative workers and journalists, and Democrat judges give the criminals a slap on the wrist.  Politicians, judges, and lawyers defended the 2020 riots as a “Summer of Love” but condoned the use of SWAT teams for predawn raids on humble homes owned by retired grandparents accused of being January 6 “insurrectionists.”

With all of this as background, Democrats in office and in corporate newsrooms now accuse President Trump of seeking “revenge” against those who have inflicted harm upon him, his colleagues, and his voters in the recent past.  The prevailing feeling among Democrats in charge of America’s powerful institutions seems to be that Democrats should be allowed to harass and persecute their political opponents without paying any price.  On the contrary, there must be a price.  Otherwise, the crimes Democrats have already committed against conservative Americans will look small compared to what they have planned for the future.

Not only has Illinois governor and aspiring 2028 Democrat presidential nominee J.B. Pritzker called Department of Homeland Security officials and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “Nazis,” but also he plans on prosecuting them for arresting criminal illegal aliens in his state.  Democrat Senator Mark Kelly is threatening to prosecute “young service members” for following President Trump’s lawful orders to wage war against narco-terrorists killing Americans.  Democrat Congressman Eric Swalwell is demanding that Democrat candidates for the presidency pledge to “take a wrecking ball” to the privately funded renovations of the White House’s East Wing.  Other prominent Democrats continue to insist that Democrat aspirants to the presidency first promise to imprison President Trump and his closest advisers for the rest of their lives.

Even after inciting the murder of Charlie Kirk just last month, Democrat pundits are unwilling to moderate their rhetorical calls for violence.  Reptilian James Carville recently argued that all Trump-supporters must be rounded up, shaved bald, dressed in prison uniforms, and paraded down the street so that Democrats can spit on them.  He insists that this “walk of shame” is the “only way to discourage future collaborators.”  This is the kind of persecution and violence Democrats intend to inflict upon conservatives should they reclaim power.

We should not be surprised.  We have endured Democrats’ abuse of the legal system at least since President Clinton was distracting the nation from his own scandals by pretending that freedom-loving Americans pose the greatest threat to the United States.  Hillary Clinton calls us “deplorables.”  Pritzker and the rest call us “fascists” and “Nazis.”  Democrats must be punished for their crimes before Carville and his Antifa friends have a chance to carry out their threats.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post Democrats and Their Lawfare appeared first on LewRockwell.

Introduction: Why Money Power Matters

Most people graduate school knowing trigonometry but not how money is created. We learn to vote for parties but rarely examine who shapes the economic terrain those parties must walk on. Yet for more than a century, the power to create money as interest-bearing debt has quietly concentrated economic and political control in private hands. The result is a world where nations strain under compounding obligations, public debate revolves around the margins of policy, and whole societies become dependent on a credit system they neither designed nor fully understand.

This essay distills key arguments and quotations (historical and contemporary) about how modern banking actually works, why debt has become the engine of governance, and what that means for sovereignty, prosperity, and even our moral compass. The aim is not to recycle slogans but to clarify mechanisms: how money enters circulation, who benefits first, who bears the risks, and why the system almost always demands more growth, more extraction, and more debt.

1) The Core Mechanism: Money as Debt, Not as Value

A century of central banking and commercial credit has normalized a simple but profound fact: most new money is created when banks make loans. As former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert B. Anderson put it in 1959, when a bank issues a loan, it credits a deposit that did not exist the moment before; the new deposit is “new money.” In practice, this means the money supply expands primarily through private lending, not public issuance.

That mechanism is turbocharged by fractional-reserve banking and today by capital-based banking rules: banks do not lend out pre-existing savings one-for-one; they expand deposits by creating credit. Interest is attached to that credit, meaning the system requires continual new borrowing to service past borrowing. If credit creation slows materially, defaults rise, asset prices wobble, and political pressure mounts to “stimulate” again. In short, we live inside a treadmill that is far more credit-driven than most civics textbooks admit.

Critics from Henry Ford to John Scales Avery have argued that this arrangement is structurally unjust because it privatizes the seigniorage (the profit of creating money) and socializes the fallout (inflation, asset bubbles, austerity). Whether or not one accepts every claim these critics make, the underlying math is hard to ignore: when money arrives as interest-bearing debt, the system has a built-in bias toward ever-expanding leverage.

2) From Private Credit to Public Power: How We Got Here

Modern banking’s political leverage grew alongside institutions like the Bank of England and, later, the U.S. Federal Reserve (established in 1913). Whatever the intention of their founders, central banks now sit at the junction of state and finance: they are publicly mandated yet operationally insulated (and privately owned), coordinating liquidity to stabilize the system while commercial banks originate most money-like claims.

This hybrid design has real consequences. It allows a small circle of decision-makers to set the price of money (interest rates), backstop private balance sheets in crises, and influence fiscal choices by making some policies financially easy and others expensive. Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan once emphasized the institution’s independence; the flip side of that independence is low democratic visibility over choices that shape every mortgage, job market, and public budget.

Beyond national central banks lies the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel — often called the “central bank of central banks.” Through standards (Basel accords) and coordination, it helps align global banking rules. Critics argue this produces a technocratic layer of control over national economies with little public oversight. Whether one views that as prudent stewardship or as democratic deficit, it underscores a theme: the architecture of money governance is largely opaque to the public it governs.

3) Debt as an Organizing Principle: Nations on the Hook

If money is introduced mainly through borrowing, then borrowers become the gearwheels of the system. This is true of households, firms, and crucially governments. National debts have exploded over decades. Interest on those debts is neither a schoolbook abstraction nor a harmless line item: it diverts tax revenue from public goods to creditor claims year after year.

Concrete examples illustrate the point. Countries such as Ireland have paid billions annually in debt interest, amounts that can reach a significant share of national profits in strong years. Canada has spent tens of billions per year on interest at various points. The United States services hundreds of billions annually. The deeper the debt stock and the higher the rates, the more fiscal space narrows — and the easier it is for outside creditors and institutions to demand policy concessions as the price of liquidity.

International lending reinforces the pattern. When a country is pulled into a crisis, the usual medicine involves austerity and privatization in exchange for financing — effectively transferring public assets and future cash flows into private hands. Even when such programs stabilize a currency, they often leave a legacy of reduced sovereignty and social strain. Either way, the organizing principle remains: service the debt first.

4) Why Perpetual Growth Feels Non-Negotiable

Once you grasp that interest-bearing credit is the dominant source of new money, the politics of “growth at any cost” make more sense. If economies must expand to service past obligations, then policymakers are incentivized to chase GDP even when the ecological or social returns are negative. This is why governments of every stripe tend to converge on similar policies when growth stalls: tax incentives to borrow and invest, financial repression to keep rates low, deficit spending to plug holes, and pressure on central banks to ease again.

Critics like Roy Madron, John Jopling, and John Scales Avery have argued that this growth-dependency crowds out other goals: equitable distribution, environmental stewardship, and cultural stability. It also explains why mainstream debates often avoid the root structure and instead focus on the speed of the treadmill. We argue about 2% vs. 3% inflation rather than who issues money, who captures seigniorage, and who eats the losses when cycles turn.

As Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard long argued, when credit expansion replaces real savings as the engine of growth, the boom itself becomes the seed of its own collapse. Their Austrian insight — that sound money rooted in market discipline is the only durable safeguard against political manipulation and the cartelization of banking — remains as urgent today as ever (Mises, Human Action; Rothbard, America’s Great Depression; Mises, Theory of Money and Credit).

This synthesis draws on Mises, “The Theory of Money and Credit,” ch. 17; Rothbard, “The Mystery of Banking,” ch. 3; and related works.

5) The Federal Reserve: Public Mandate, Private Origins

The Federal Reserve occupies an unusual space: a public mandate (stable prices, maximum employment) implemented through a system owned by member banks at the regional level. Court language has long acknowledged that Federal Reserve Banks are corporate entities with private shareholders (commercial banks) electing many directors. The Board of Governors is a federal agency, but the operational plumbing marries public purpose with private infrastructure.

From an accountability standpoint, this hybrid model raises fair questions:

• Who ultimately benefits when the Fed backstops markets?
• How do we balance public interest with the stability of private balance sheets?
• Why is the creation and allocation of money largely engineered by institutions that citizens do not vote for?

Even defenders of the status quo should concede that the communications gap is vast: the average citizen has little idea how reserves, repos, and facilities translate into real-world wealth effects. That lack of transparency naturally makes people suspicious — even when the suspicion isn’t always justified — because it means the public has little idea how major financial decisions are made or who benefits from them. In the end, this secrecy prevents ordinary citizens and their representatives from openly debating choices that affect everyone’s livelihoods.

6) Usury, Inflation, and the Cost of “Stability”

When money is predominantly debt, interest is not a side note; it is a structural tax on all who need money to transact. Banks, by creating credit, collect streams of interest that compound through the system. Meanwhile, inflation — the dilution of purchasing power — often becomes a necessary byproduct of keeping debt-loads serviceable. In practice, inflation acts as a stealth transfer from savers and wage earners to those closer to the spigot of new money (large financial institutions and asset owners).

This is not an argument to abolish credit; modern economies need flexible financing. It is an argument to name the trade-offs honestly. When we call monetary loosening a “stimulus,” we should also disclose who absorbs the loss in purchasing power and who gains from asset inflation. When we raise rates to “fight inflation,” we should admit the cost in jobs, bankruptcies, and public budgets. Stability is never free; it is reallocated volatility.

7) The Global Layer: Coordination Without Consent

Beyond national systems lies a web of global coordination — standards, swap lines, and lender-of-last-resort arrangements that knit economies together. Institutions such as the BIS, the IMF, and development banks shape the terms of liquidity and restructuring. Supporters say this is necessary to prevent contagion; critics counter that it allows a transnational financial class to set conditions on democratic societies in moments of maximum vulnerability.

Both views can be true. But whichever side you take, the outcome is similar: creditors hold leverage, and policy follows balance-sheet realities. The deeper the debt and the tighter the markets, the narrower the options for governments and citizens. This is not a conspiracy; it is a design choice we rarely discuss.

8) Sovereignty, Media, and the Narrative Problem

The power to create money and allocate credit inevitably spills into media and politics. Owners of major financial claims own or influence the platforms that shape public narratives. This does not mean that every newsroom takes orders from a bank; it does mean that structural critiques of debt-money systems are often marginalized, while surface controversies get saturation coverage.

The result is a public perpetually debating symptoms — inequality, housing bubbles, wage stagnation, austerity — without interrogating the monetary architecture that channels outcomes. Representative democracy then becomes a choice between parties that manage the same treadmill at different speeds.

9) The Ethical Dimension: Stewardship vs. Exploitation

Strip away the technicalities and we’re left with a moral question: What is money for? If it’s a public utility that measures and mobilizes real work and resources, then its creation and allocation should be transparent, accountable, and aligned with the common good. If money is something sold for profit and interest instead of managed for the public good, then we should at least admit we’re living in a world where banks’ claims on our future work matter more than people’s well-being today.

Across traditions — secular and spiritual — there runs a consistent thread: wealth is stewardship, not ownership. “Dominion” over the earth does not mean permission to strip-mine the future; it means responsibility for the living systems that sustain us. Any economic architecture that demands perpetual extraction to service compounding claims will eventually collide with ecological limits and human dignity.

10) What Reform Could Mean (Without Utopian Promises)

This essay does not prescribe a single fix, but it points toward principles that reformers across the spectrum could evaluate:

1. Monetary transparency: Citizens deserve clear explanations of how money enters circulation, who receives it first, and on what terms.
2. Seigniorage for the public: Explore mechanisms by which the gains from money creation serve public priorities rather than accruing primarily to private balance sheets.
3. Counter-cyclical buffers: Policies that reduce boom-bust extremes (e.g., stricter leverage in booms; automatic stabilizers in busts) can mitigate the human cost of credit cycles.
4. Sovereign capacity: Restore and protect national capacity to issue money or public credit directly for real-economy projects, with independent audits to curb abuse.
5. Ethical limits: Recognize that any system demanding infinite growth on a finite planet is mathematically fragile and morally shortsighted. Design for resilience over hype.

These are not radical ideas; they are overdue discussions in a world where nearly everyone is a debtor, directly or indirectly, to a machine that few understand.

I explore these dynamics in greater depth in my book The Debt Machine: How Private Banks Engineered Global Control, which traces how private money creation became the hidden architecture of global power — and how sovereign nations can reclaim control over credit and policy.

Conclusion: Seeing the Machine

If you remember only one thing, let it be this: money is not neutral. How it is created, who controls its issuance, and what claims attach to it determine the shape of our economies and the boundaries of our politics. We can disagree about the best reforms, but we can no longer afford civic illiteracy about the monetary plumbing that governs our lives.

In a healthy society, the architecture of money would be a public conversation, not a specialist’s secret. Until then, the treadmill will keep turning — and those closest to the controls will keep deciding how fast the rest of us must run.

The post The Hidden Architecture of Debt: How Private Banks Captured the Global Economy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Yesterday U.S. President Donald Trump visited Japan and met with its new Prime Minister Sanae Takaishi. Both are conservatives and agree on many points. Japan is a trusted vassal which rarely collides with the U.S. demands.

But one serious point of contention is open between the two nations and threatens to blow up the relation.

Earlier this year Trump had imposed a 25% tariff on U.S. imports from Japan. The previous prime minister had ‘sold the house’ to lower that rate:

So desperate was now-former Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba to lower Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs on Japanese products to 15%, especially on automotive products, that he signed on to an incredible surrender regarding Tokyo’s promise for the government to invest $550 billion in the US over the coming three years.

Not only does Trump get to choose the projects and the US get the lion’s share of any profits, but if Japan dares to reject any of Trump’s schemes as nonviable, Ishiba has given Trump permission to impose even higher tariffs. The jointly-signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) says that, “In the case where Japan elects not to fund [a project Trump has named—rk], the United States may also impose tariff rate or rates on Japanese imports into the United States at the rate determined by the President [emphasis added].”

The total surrender took the form of a Memorandum of Understanding which did not require a vote in the Diet. But the enormous amount of money it pledges to invest in the U.S. would need parliamentary approval. There was and is practically not chance that anything like it would pass. The ‘investment’ would blow up Japan’s government budget. It would also increase the U.S. trade deficit with Japan.

The completely unbalanced agreement was one reason why Ishiba was ousted from his position.

I had wondered how Takaishi would handle this most important issues. But it seems that both sides have agreed to ignore it:

Inside a gold-drenched palace in Tokyo on Tuesday, President Trump heaped praise on Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s new prime minister, telling her that their countries were “allies at the strongest level” and vowing to come to Japan’s aide on “any favors you need.”

The leaders signed two vaguely worded agreements — one declaring a “new golden age of the US-Japan alliance,” and another to cooperate on expanding the supply chain for rare earth metals — but there was little sign of any breakthrough in the details of the trade deal both countries signed onto in July.

There was no public talk about a major point of contention between the two countries: the details of how Japan intends to spend a promised $550 billion investment into the United States. The promise came as part of the trade deal, and in return for the large investment, Japan was to receive a 15 percent tariff on its exports — a lower rate than Mr. Trump had initially threatened.

Instead, both leaders focused more on what they had in common …

Another report says that the deal was mentioned on the sideline but that nothing was done to resolve its problems:

Trump’s trip to Japan was an early test of whether Takaichi could build inroads with the American president as the countries grapple with security commitments, trade tensions and the threat of China. Japan faces a daunting promise to invest $550 billion in the United States in exchange for lower tariff rates, and Trump administration officials have signaled they want Japan to pay more money to host U.S. troops.
…
Over a lunch of American rice and beef cooked with Japanese ingredients, the prime minister presented Trump with a map of the investments Japan is making into the United States, after the country committed to pour $550 billion into the United States in exchange for lower tariffs. In return, Trump signed lunch menus for Takaichi and her delegation.

“Look, I got a lunch menue signed by Trump and all I had to pay for it were $550 billion.” I don’t think that’s how the world, outside of Trump’s mind, really works.

Trump wants the money to build a ‘sovereign wealth fund’ which he can use to buy and control shares of U.S. companies.

It is therefore likely that he will insist that Japan fulfills the MoU no matter what. But Japan can not do that and Takaichi will have to solve the problem.

As the issue could create a break in U.S.- Japan relations Takaichi will have to prepare for that to happen. Alastair Crooke detects signs that she is already doing this:

In her first address to the nation, Takaishi said that she would not support the US trade war against China, and would not become an instrument of US economic pressure. She openly criticised Trump’s tariff policy, calling it ‘the most dangerous mistake of the 21stcentury’.

Reuters commented that her stance was wholly unexpected in Washington. A big shock. It emerged that since taking office, the new PM had held a series of meetings with the largest Japanese corporations who had conveyed a unified and urgent message to her: Simply — the Japanese economy would not survive another trade war.

Then, one week after taking office, she openly expressed support for China, executing the biggest foreign policy pivot since WW2. China was no longer the ‘enemy’.

Might this be Japan’s real strategy?

To caress the narcissism in Trump to divert him from a Japanese move towards China which eventually may allow it to break with the U.S.?

I for one would call that a good plan.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post How Can Japan Handle Its $550 Billion Trump Problem? appeared first on LewRockwell.