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I governi nazionali europei si sono impegnati a chiudere le centrali nucleari, rendendole insostenibili con una tassazione predatoria; a penalizzare gli investimenti nella distribuzione con normative assurde; a imporre un mix energetico volatile e intermittente; a gravare il settore energetico con tasse elevate e ritardi amministrativi. Cosa poteva andare storto? Tutto. E così è stato. Le energie rinnovabili, pur essendo essenziali in un mix energetico equilibrato, non possono garantire sicurezza e stabilità a causa della loro volatilità e della loro natura intermittente. Ecco perché è essenziale disporre di un sistema bilanciato con energia di base in funzione ininterrottamente, come l'energia idroelettrica, nucleare e il gas naturale come riserva. Distruggere l'accesso all'energia nucleare con chiusure inutili e una tassazione predatoria è stata una delle cause principali del blackout spagnolo ad aprile di quest'anno. Spagna e Portogallo producono elettricità con oltre il 60% di energia solare ed eolica. Le centrali idroelettriche, nucleari e a gas a ciclo combinato devono coprire le carenze. Non è possibile avere un sistema stabile e sicuro con un'alimentazione continua se la rete elettrica non è bilanciata per evitare blackout totali. Secondo Euronews, la Francia a volte produce troppa elettricità, costringendo il gestore di rete RTE a disconnettere i siti solari ed eolici. Il consumatore paga le tasse per coprire le perdite del gestore. Questa procedura impedisce un blackout generale della rete, ma rappresenta una doppia spesa che non esisterebbe se l'Europa non avesse un pregiudizio nei confronti del mining di Bitcoin. Un sistema privo di inerzia fisica, fornito da fonti energetiche di base in costante funzionamento – nucleare e idroelettrico – rende impossibile stabilizzare la rete in caso di interruzioni dell'approvvigionamento. Quando si è verificato il blackout la rete elettrica spagnola era composta per quasi l'80% da fonti rinnovabili, per l'11% da fonti nucleari e solo per il 3% da gas naturale. Non c'era praticamente alcuna generazione di base, o inerzia fisica, in grado di assorbire lo shock. I blackout, che avrebbero dovuto essere qualcosa di obsoleto e dimenticato, sono diventati la norma da quando i politici hanno ideologizzato l'energia. Altri Paesi hanno sofferto di problemi simili: Australia (2016), Germania (2017) e Regno Unito (2019) hanno subito blackout a causa di riserve energetiche o di misure di stabilità della rete insufficienti. E per quanto riguarda quest'ultima, in particolar modo, le cose non sono cambiate da allora e ciò metterà ulteriore pressione nel futuro prossimo sulla rete energetica francese. Tuttavia, nessuno di questi incidenti è stato così drammatico o scandaloso come quello in Spagna. Ciò che è accaduto in Spagna è un sintomo, non un incidente. I governi spagnoli hanno deciso che la chiusura di tutte le centrali nucleari sarà effettiva nel 2035. Nonostante tutti i tecnici ci ricordino che funzionano perfettamente e che la loro durata potrebbe essere prolungata di almeno dieci anni, questa azione aumenterà la dipendenza dalle energie rinnovabili e dal gas naturale russo. In altre parole, la politica miope della Spagna renderà il Paese ancora più dipendente da Cina e Russia per l'energia, costringendolo a continui blackout e tagli alle forniture per l'industria. La propaganda ci ha fatto credere che le energie rinnovabili avrebbero portato competitività e stabilità alla rete, ma la realtà dimostra che un'eccessiva dipendenza dalle fonti rinnovabili e una carenza di fonti energetiche di base indicano che la rete elettrica dipenderà sempre più dalle poche centrali nucleari e a gas naturale rimaste per mantenere la stabilità dell'approvvigionamento.

____________________________________________________________________________________ 

di Joakim Book

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/il-blackout-spagnolo-dimostra-perche)

Quando la rete elettrica spagnola è crollata in un normale lunedì di fine aprile, sono morti con essa anche i sogni di energia rinnovabile e il team per la transizione verde.

Ryan McMaken si è affrettato a sottolineare che, secondo convinzioni politiche simili a quelle del Green Deal europeo, convenienza e affidabilità non sono virtù importanti della rete elettrica europea. Quando si mettono tutte le proprie risorse in un unico posto, una tale strategia è destinata a fallire... a maggior ragione, poi, se si tratta di rete elettrica.

Mentre le autorità spagnole hanno negato che le energie rinnovabili siano state la causa della perdita di frequenza che ha causato l'interruzione dell'elettricità per circa 60 milioni di persone in Spagna e Portogallo, diversi commentatori ed esperti si sono schierati pubblicamente e hanno confessato che la causa era l'eccessiva dipendenza dall'energia solare al momento del blackout.

La manipolazione da parte dei media generalisti, sempre più irrilevanti, è stata per lo più triste da guardare. Ironia della sorte l'autore dell'articolo di propaganda sulla Reuters ha cercato di allontanare la colpa dalle divinità verdi affermando che non erano loro da criticare bensì le “energie rinnovabili nella rete moderna”. Oh, ok.

Torniamo indietro. Avete sentito parlare di ESG (criteri ambientali, sociali e di governance) di recente? Neanch'io. Nel giro di pochi anni c'è stata una notevole inversione di tendenza nell'uso aziendale del termine “ESG”. Da concetto onnicomprensivo, pronunciato da ogni amministratore delegato e imposto a ogni dipendente da ogni ufficio risorse umane di ogni azienda sufficientemente grande, è semplicemente svanito.

Da un giorno all'altro, a nessuno importava più. Un recente sondaggio ha suggerito che solo il 7% di coloro che un paio d'anni fa erano stati assunti per lavorare sui criteri ESG a livello di aziende lo sono ancora oggi. Puff, spariti.

E tutto è avvenuto in silenzio. Matt Levine, famoso per “Money Stuff” su Bloomberg, ha ripetutamente ipotizzato che i criteri ESG – come tante altre cose – fossero un fenomeno legato ai tassi d'interesse bassi. Non appena tassi e inflazione hanno iniziato a farsi sentire, le persone hanno rapidamente abbandonato gli sforzi virtuosi per la giustizia ambientale e sociale.

Ecco una previsione alla luce del disastro spagnolo: la cosiddetta “onda verde” – o la minacciosa transizione energetica – che spinge pannelli solari su ogni tetto e ricopre il paesaggio di turbine eoliche, subirà un destino simile.

Perché? Oltre a rovinare le reti e a comparire nel dibattito politico e sociale, non sta facendo molto altro. La “transizione” verde non ha ottenuto praticamente nulla nei circa 30 anni in cui ha dominato le menti di intellettuali e politici. Non ci credete? Guardate un grafico del consumo globale di energia primaria per fonte e constatate voi stessi.

Nel 1991, l'anno in cui sono nato – per prendere un anno a caso dagli anni '90, quando il movimento per il cambiamento climatico si è davvero scatenato – il 77,5% del consumo energetico proveniva da petrolio, gas e carbone. Nel 2023, dopo migliaia di miliardi spesi per elettrificare le reti, costruire impianti solari e sovvenzionare questa o quella iniziativa ecologica, dopo folli sforzi sociali e politici per volare meno, mangiare in modo sostenibile e riciclare la plastica e così via, quella stessa percentuale si attesta al 76,55%. Tre decenni di energie, denaro e propaganda e l'ago della bilancia non si è minimamente spostato.

A quanto pare, le persone vogliono la loro energia, le loro auto, le loro cose, i loro viaggi e, in definitiva, sopravvivere. Qualsiasi cosa si faccia dall'alto per ostacolare tutto questo non ha altro che effetti marginali.

Ciò che è stato fatto è stato destabilizzare molte reti elettriche in tutto il mondo. Il solare e l'eolico hanno sostituito parte della biomassa e parte del nucleare con percentuali a una sola cifra, e le reti stanno già andando in pezzi – ad esempio, in Spagna. E non è che (“noi”) non lo sapessimo. Sepolte nei rapporti di ricerca e nei documenti informativi della Federal Energy Regulatory Commission all'Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, le conclusioni sono chiare: più inaffidabili, meno inerzia, più rischio di crolli di frequenza che innescano un blocco totale.

I grandi cambiamenti, storicamente parlando, che hanno portato alla sostituzione del biocarburante con il carbone e poi con il gas naturale erano già stati in gran parte completati alla fine degli anni '70. La lezione che possiamo trarre dalla storia dell'umanità e dal suo rapporto con il mondo naturale è che l'obiettivo è ottenere di più e meglio (più economico, più veloce, più sicuro, più stabile); non peggio, più costoso o meno affidabile. “Ogni transizione energetica che abbiamo avuto”, ho scritto l'anno scorso, “è stata additiva”. Come civiltà non “sostituiamo”, o “eliminiamo gradualmente”, le fonti energetiche; le facciamo evolvere con fonti migliori. E, come dimostra il disastro elettrico spagnolo, fonti inaffidabili come l'eolico e il solare non sono migliori.

Così come i criteri ESG stanno scomparendo silenziosamente dall'attenzione di quasi tutti, si spera che l'ossessione per tutto ciò che è green scomparirà da un momento all'altro.

La legge della politica climatica, alla quale Roger Pielke Jr. ha prestato il suo nome, afferma che “ogni volta che obiettivi ambientali ed economici vengono contrapposti, l'economia vince sempre”.

Questa è la lezione degli ultimi trent'anni di politiche e propaganda green, così come del più recente fenomeno ESG. Quando i fattori finanziari ed economici incidono, i sogni (in realtà gli incubi) di “crisi” climatiche e le relative urgenti proposte politiche svaniscono. Ora che la maggior parte delle reti elettriche occidentali è stata saturata da energia eolica e solare, con prezzi alle stelle e blackout sempre più frequenti, i sogni green sono destinati a finire.

Col tempo, l'intera portata della “transizione verde” diventerà oggetto di curiosità storica, di interesse esclusivo per sociologi e storici della politica. Che gran bella liberazione!

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

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

All government intervention is bad, but the income tax is a particularly insidious form of evil. As the great libertarian theorist Frank Chodorov wrote in 1954: “With this definition of ‘evil’ in mind, it is the purpose of this book [The Income Tax: Root of All Evil] to show that many laws and governmental practices are impregnated with it, and to trace this wholesale infringement of our rights to the power acquired by the federal government in 1913 to tax our incomes—the Sixteenth Amendment. That is the ‘root.’ Furthermore, proof will be offered to support the proposition that the ‘evil’ has reached the point where the doctrine of natural rights has been all but abrogated in fact, if not in theory. As a consequence, the kind of government we are acquiring is distinctly different from that envisaged by the Founding Fathers; it is fast becoming a government that conceives itself to be the source of rights, which it gives and can recall at its own pleasure. The transformation is not yet complete, but it will be seen as we go along that completion is not far off—if nothing is done to prevent it.”

Why did Chodorov maintain that the income tax is so evil? He explains in a devastating argument: “Income and inheritance taxes imply the denial of private property, and in that are different in principle from all other taxes. The government says to the citizen: ‘Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide.’ This is no exaggeration. Take a look at the income-tax report that you are required by law to make out, and you will see that the government arbitrarily sets down the amount of your income you may have for your living, for your business requirements, for the maintenance of your family, for medical expenses, and so on. After granting these exemptions, with a flourish of generosity, the government decides what percentage of the remainder it will appropriate. The rest you may have. The percentage of the appropriation may be (and has been) raised from year to year, and the exemptions may be (and have been) lowered from year to year. The amount of your earnings that you may retain for yourself is determined by the needs of government, and you have nothing to say about it. The right of decision as to the disposition of your property rests in the government by virtue of the Sixteenth Amendment of the Constitution.”

The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises noted that the income tax rests on a false premise, namely, that money can be taken from people without having an adverse effect on production. “Interventionism is guided by the idea that interfering with property rights does not affect the size of production. The most naive manifestation of this fallacy is presented by confiscatory interventionism. The yield of production activities is considered a given magnitude independent of the merely accidental arrangements of society’s social order. The task of the government is seen as the ‘fair’ distribution of this national income among the various members of society.

The interventionists and the socialists contend that all commodities are turned out by a social process of production. When this process comes to an end and its fruits ripen, a second social process, that of distribution of the yield, follows and allots a share to each. The characteristic feature of the capitalist order is that the shares allotted are unequal. Some people–the entrepreneurs, the capitalists, and the landowners–appropriate to themselves more than they should. Accordingly, the portions of other people are curtailed. Government should by rights expropriate the surplus of the privileged and distribute it among the underprivileged.

Now in the market economy this alleged dualism of two independent processes, that of production and that of distribution, does not exist. There is only one process going on. Goods are not first produced and then distributed. There is no such thing as an appropriation of portions out of a stock of ownerless goods. The products come into existence as somebody’s property. If one wants to distribute them, one must first confiscate them. It is certainly very easy for the governmental apparatus of compulsion and coercion to embark upon confiscation and expropriation. But this does not prove that a durable system of economic affairs can be built upon such confiscation and expropriation.

When the Vikings turned their backs upon a community of autarkic peasants whom they had plundered, the surviving victims began to work, to till the soil, and to build again. When the pirates returned after some years, they again found things to seize. But capitalism cannot stand such reiterated predatory raids. Its capital accumulation and investments are founded upon the expectation that no such expropriation will occur. If this expectation is absent, people will prefer to consume their capital instead of safeguarding it for the expropriators. This is the inherent error of all plans that aim at combining private ownership and reiterated expropriation.”

Mises characterized progressive taxation as insane: “Progressive taxation of income and profits means that precisely those parts of the income which people would have saved and invested are taxed away. Take the example of the United States. A few years ago, there was an “excess-profit” tax, which meant that out of one dollar earned, a corporation retained only eighteen cents. When these eighteen cents were paid out to the shareholders, those who had a great number of shares had to pay another sixty or eighty or even greater percent of it in taxes. Out of the dollar of profit they retained about seven cents, and ninety-three cents went to the government. Of this ninety-three percent, the greater part would have been saved and invested. Instead, the government used it for current expenditure. This is the policy of the United States. I think I have made it clear that the policy of the United States is not an example to be imitated by other countries. This policy of the United States is worse than bad—it is insane.”

Further, as the great Murray Rothbard noted with his customary brilliance, taxation is theft: “For there is one crucially important power inherent in the nature of the State apparatus. All other persons and groups in society (except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and bank robbers) obtain their income voluntarily: either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift (e.g., membership in a club or association, bequest, or inheritance). Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as ‘taxation,’ although in less regularized epochs it was often known as tribute.’ Taxation is theft, purely and simply, even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects. lt would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition of taxation which does not also include theft. Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay, his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist. lt is true that State apologists maintain that taxation is ‘really’’ voluntary; one simple but instructive refutation of this claim is to ponder what would happen if the government were to abolish taxation, and to confine itself to simple requests for voluntary contributions. Does anyone really believe that anything comparable to the current vast revenues of the State would continue to pour into its coffers? lt is likely that even those theorists who claim that punishment never deters action would balk at such a claim. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter was correct when he acidly wrote that ‘the theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.’

Let’s do everything we can to get rid of the monstrously evil income tax.

The post Why the Income Tax Is Evil appeared first on LewRockwell.

Everywhere, power is exerted over people’s life, liberty, and property by governments.

Limiting Governments

In tribes, power was exerted by chiefs. In larger agricultural civilizations, power was exerted by kings. The person who used the most power reigned.

In Israel initially, laws were given by God and administered by judges, and collective self-defense was organized under military leaders. In Israel later, power was exerted by kings, and people soon fell away from God.

The Dutch Republic, then England, and then the American Colonies had printed Bibles in people’s native tongues, and had reformed churches. These innovations helped people individually grow close to God. People’s natural envy was better-controlled, so people were able to add more value. Naturally, people chose to make themselves freer. The American Colonies started out with the world’s lowest taxes and greatest freedom.

The Constitution’s ratifiers needed support from people who had lived in freedom, experienced abuses of power by government people, and fought for freedom. To earn acceptance, the ratifiers took the best-available theory and transformed it into rules and sanctions.

The Constitution’s foremost rule is that no person shall be unduly deprived of life, liberty, or property.

Rules are followed more fully when sanctions get used.

The Constitution’s sanctions are that government powers must be separated into national and state jurisdictions, and that within jurisdictions, government powers must be separated into legislative, executive, and judicial branches. In each separated power, each person is required to support the Constitution by using his powers against other powers to offset and therefore limit the other powers.

Separate and offset. Divide and limit.

But after ratification, the drafters and their distinguished colleagues slacked off.

They never spun off analogous constitutions that would limit other powerful groups. They began working within parties to disuse the Constitution’s sanctions.

The Constitution’s sanctions now get systematically disused by government people. These people collude using parties.

Limiting a Party

Parties control governments. Parties’ people therefore exert government power over people’s life, liberty, and property.

We need at least one major party to have enumerated, limited powers. Some rules must be in a party constitution:

The [republican Constitution party] congress shall have power to solicit and collect donations;

to arrange national party meetings;

to set schedules for, and national party controls on, state party selection of candidates for the national government;

— and

to make all party laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this constitution in the republican Constitution party government, or in any department or officer thereof.

The republican Constitution party shall have no platform.

The Constitution Needs a Good Party, pp. 43–4 53 (discussions omitted)

Other rules must be in party laws:

A previously-elected candidate shall qualify to run as a member of the party only if his Conservative Review Liberty Score [or alternatively, his John Birch Society Freedom Index in his most-recent term] is a minimum of 80%.

Party-sanctioned debates shall have no moderators, no commentators from the start to the finish of the debate, and no questions other than the questions asked by the candidates during the debates.

Candidates for Congress shall be selected using closed caucuses with proportional voting.

The candidate for president shall be selected using closed caucuses with proportional voting, using a candidate electoral college the same in numbers and distribution as the electoral college, and counting only candidate electors from regions represented by the party in the House or Senate.

State caucuses to select candidates for Congress and president shall be scheduled one state at a time, approximately equally-spaced apart in time, in order of decreasing party strength. The party strength shall be the average of the party proportions of the vote in the most-recent elections for each House and Senate seat in the state, with each election counted as being of equal weight in the average.

The Constitution Needs a Good Party, pp. 48–53 (discussions omitted)

The party constitution must have sanctions that replicate the best-available model: the Constitution’s separated, offsetting powers.

A limited party can be built multiple ways, for instance by electing an independent to be president.

Limiting Other Groups

Other groups also exert power over people’s life, liberty, or property. Group constitutions are needed, for example, for state governments, legislative houses, and major businesses.

State governments need limited, enumerated powers: to tax, borrow, regulate intrastate commerce, establish intercity roads, define and punish criminal offenses, regulate domestic and family affairs, administer civil justice in intrastate cases, appoint officers and train the militia, and enact exclusive legislation over the government district and needful buildings.

State governments should not be empowered to regulate property that’s not in commerce, regulate businesses, operate and regulate schools, or operate and regulate social services. Excluding these powers will protect state residents’ liberty and property, for example so that residents can provide or choose schooling, or can provide or choose charity social services, without being boxed out by government-advantaged producers.

The state constitutions’ sanctions must replicate the Constitution’s separated, offsetting powers.

Legislative houses have limited, enumerated powers vested in them by their jurisdiction constitutions.

In each legislative house, the powers must be separated well. Working groups must each have limited, enumerated power over at most one individual clause in the jurisdiction constitution. Each house member must choose to belong to just one working group. Each member will be incentivized to offset and limit other working groups’ members.

Major businesses that wield security, surveillance, or other powers over people’s life, liberty, or property need rules and sanctions that internally limit these businesses’ powers. To succeed, these businesses must limit their own operations and develop better products that customers choose.

Like the ratifying generation’s people, we the people must accept no less than freedom—from all powerful groups; and most crucially right now, from at least one party.

Separate and offset. Divide and limit.

The post Limiting Governments by Limiting a Party appeared first on LewRockwell.

Like a child with his new favorite toy at Christmas, President Trump is using tariff taxes not only to attempt to centrally plan the pricing of thousands of goods and services in the economy, but also to engage in election interference in other countries.  The latter statement refers to how he recently put the government of Brazil on notice that 50 percent tariff taxes would be imposed on Brazilian imports to the U.S. unless it dropped the legal case against the former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.  I bet you thought that Donald Trump was against one country interfering with the electoral politics of another country, didn’t you?

With this threat President Trump is essentially saying, “We will punish American consumers with higher prices on goods imported from Brazil unless you run your legal system the way I, Donald Trump, want you to run it.”  No skin off Donald Trump’s back, only hapless American consumers and tariff taxpayers.  Imagine if say, Japan or Canada made similar threats of quadrupling tariff taxes on American imports into their countries unless we changed our immigration laws, quit deporting illegal aliens, let illegal aliens who have committed additional crimes out of prison, etc.  Why, Donald Trump would be outraged!

Then there is the chaotic global economic uncertainty caused by Trump’s ever-growing list of tariff tax threats, which seem to randomly range from around 15 percent to 50 percent or higher, involving dozens of countries.  Just last year the average American tariff tax on imports was 2.5 percent.  In doing this President Trump is posing as the Jolly Green Giant of negotiators, a one-man negotiating “team” taking on all the other countries in the planet under the apparent assumption that a balance of trade with all countries is the goal.  Who could argue that the residents of Liechtenstein should induced to buy as much from America as Americans buy from Liechtenstein?

Negotiating tariff rates with all the countries of the world just may be more difficult and time consuming than Trump thinks.  The most famous American tariff in American history, the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 (with a 60 percent average tariff rate), spawned an international trade war that shrunk world trade by two thirds in three years and exacerbated the Great Depression. After the war the nations of the world went to work negotiating down tariff rates because the whole world understood the economic catastrophe that was created by such a shrinkage of the international division of labor, the lifeblood of economic prosperity.  The created the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947 when the average worldwide tariff tax rate was around 25 percent.

For the next fifty years round after round of negotiations whittled down the worldwide average tariff rate to 5 percent.  This was a tremendous boost to post-war worldwide economic growth and prosperity.  There were numerous rounds of negotiations that lasted from five months to seven years.  Each round, in the end, tended to reduce tariff rates and non-tariff trade barriers.

Every country has its own special interest politics that will affect how such country-to-country negotiations take place, and there are bound to have been some negotiations that impeded rather than encouraged more world trade, but certainly on balance tariff taxes were reduced severely over that half century.

President Trump’s increases in the average American tariff rate by at least a multiple of four, at a minimum, threatens to bring us back to where we were in 1947.  But not to worry, The Great Jolly Green Giant Negotiator is confident that he can do in five days or less what the entire world took fifty years to achieve just in case his hyper-protectionist policies blow up in his face (economically speaking).  This kind of thinking is what F.A. Hayek, in his critique of socialism, called “the pretense of [more than is humanly possible] knowledge” and “the fatal conceit.”

The post Trump’s Election Interference Tariff appeared first on LewRockwell.

Jack Callahan was frying rainbow trout on his camp stove along the Upper Sacramento when the news broke on his iPhone. California’s Caligula was at it again, crying about federal agents doing what they’re supposed to do—enforce the law.

This time, Gavin Newsom was throwing his slick-haired tantrum over immigration raids at marijuana farms where ten children were found working illegally.

“Trump calls me ‘Newscum’ — but he’s the real scum,” whined Slick on social media. Jack set down his spatula and shook his head. Here was the second-worst governor in America—barely edging out Oregon’s Tina Kotek for the title—defending child labor while posturing as the champion of righteousness.

On this issue, the Golden State Gasbag cannot see the forest for the trees of farmed cannabis. Federal agents discovered ten illegal alien minors at the Glass House Farms facility in Camarillo, eight of them unaccompanied. These were children—children—toiling in marijuana fields while families across America struggle to find honest work.

Yet Newscum focused his outrage not on the exploitation of these kids, but on the federal agents who rescued them.

“Why are there children working at a marijuana facility, Gavin?” asked the Department of Homeland Security. It’s a question that cuts to the heart of what Slick has done to California.

Under his watch, the Golden State has become a playground for illegal exploitation while he spends fifty million taxpayer dollars fighting the federal government instead of protecting vulnerable children.

Jack Callahan knows what real Americans are thinking as they watch this spectacle unfold. While the governor tweets about “kids running from tear gas,” he ignores the fact that these same kids were being exploited as cheap labor in his marijuana wonderland. The man who calls himself a progressive champion is defending a system that turns children into field hands.

The Oily Eel is giving the Sapphic Sphinx up north a run for her money as America’s worst governor, but at least she has the decency to keep her failures closer to home. Newsom broadcasts his moral bankruptcy to the world while spending taxpayer money on legal battles against the work of law enforcement.

Jack finished his trout dinner as the sun set over the Trinity Mountains, thinking about the ten children pulled from the weed fields. Do they not deserve better than Slick’s California, where exploitation masquerades as compassion and child labor hides behind progressive talking points?

Fogged by a lifetime of narcissism, the governor doesn’t recognize what the rest of America sees clearly: a sociopath who values political theater over protecting children.

This article was originally published on The O’Leary Review.

The post Mr. Callahan Has His Say: California’s Governor Defends Child Exploitation, Attacks Law Enforcement appeared first on LewRockwell.

Like a trailer park after a line of tornadoes, the landscape is littered with debris from awful presidencies. But few opportunities have been as wasted as the one Donald Trump is squandering. This shouldn’t be surprising.

Six months ago he re-entered office, bearing specific promises and broad support. The hope was that he’d learned lessons about the nature of the presidency, and about political enemies who use nefarious means to preserve their power.

What we’ve learned (again) is that Donald Trump isn’t capable of learning anything, and that many Americans aren’t either. Love him or loathe him, most insist on seeing Trump for what he isn’t.

In the minds of many, this shallow showman is either an unrivaled villain or unerring saint. Instead, he’s a fairly standard politician with boisterous style and overbearing flair.

The PT Barnum of the last half century, Trump is among the great marketers and most brash self-promoters this country has seen. Fortunately for him, plenty of suckers are born every minute. But not enough for what he tried this week.

“Someone Got to Her”

Doug Casey often quips that the economic collapse he foresees will be even worse than he thinks it will be. After watching Trump’s attempt to stifle the Epstein story, I can say the same about my expectation of government corruption.

The FBI that identified every 55 year-old grandma who was invited into the Capitol can’t find one elite client of a powerful pedophile ring.

Worse, after assuring us it had ample evidence they were primed to reveal, the “Justice” Department now disavows any knowledge of Jeffery Epstein’s Intelligence connections, insists there’s no reason to think he was murdered, and denies his child-rape racket even existed.

The latest from Attorney General Pam Bondi – who in February said she had a list of Epstein clients sitting on her desk – is that Epstein was a lone pervert who wallowed in kiddie porn… which may make Ghislaine Maxwell wonder why she’s sitting in jail.

Tom Woods recalled an interview Bondi did with Jesse Watters. Regarding the Epstein case, she asserted:

“What you’re going to see, hopefully tomorrow, is a lot of flight logs, a lot of names, a lot of information. But, um, it’s pretty sick what that man did.”

Waters adds, “And he had help.” Bondi answers, “He sure did.”

As Woods rightly wonders, “So what happened to all that? Where are the flight logs and the names?”

In another interview, Bondi said the FBI had a “truckload of evidence”. She reiterated that “we believe in transparency and America has the right to know.”

Until, suddenly, they don’t.

In the movie, All The President’s Men, Carl Bernstein (played by Dustin Hoffman) is stunned that a librarian he called about CIA agent Howard Hunt checking out books completely reversed her story after she placed him on hold.

“Someone got to her”, he told Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward. Since Bondi’s confident assertions a couple months ago, that appears to have happened to the Attorney General.

Someone seems to have gotten to the president too.

Trump’s latest spin is that released files could “destroy [innocent] people”. Of course they could… if the release is done carelessly. Even if done right, it’ll bring a wave of defamation suits. But this is why the information should be vetted and verified before its unveiled.

Yet this isn’t news. It’s always been the case. Was Trump previously unaware of possible retribution, or that powerful pedophiles might disapprove being publicized? Destroying them is the whole point!

Why didn’t these scruples prevent the Administration from trumpeting its earlier assurances that it possessed flight logs and client lists, and promising to publicize them because “the American people have a right to know”?

What changed between Bondi saying the lists were on her desk and pledging to release them, to now assuring us no lists exist and acting as if only kooks would assume they did?

Lame and Pathetic

No one with an IQ above room temperature (Celsius) buys what the Administration is selling. And the people peddling it must know it elicits eye-rolls and anger. But they obviously don’t care, which is also illuminating.

How disgusting must the details be, and how serious the threats against anyone who’d expose them, for high-ranking members of the Administration to willingly crater their credibility and ravage their reputations?

Were the ridiculous stories they put out this week less to convince us that they were true than to inform the people they’re protecting that their secrets are safe with the US government? Possibly.

It’s also possible they decided this information couldn’t be revealed once they saw how bad it was. That wouldn’t be surprising.

Maybe the Administration determined, as Scott Adams surmised, that the information could jeopardize “national security” (never-mind the disturbing implications of that) or that the American people couldn’t handle the truth.

Perhaps. But then they shouldn’t have boldly promised what they weren’t prepared to deliver, while repeatedly claiming they’d seen the evidence they now say wasn’t there.

A few days ago, the president embarrassed himself by chastising a reporter who dared ask about disclosures Trump’s own team previously promised. It was a reasonable question (indeed, an obligatory one) to ask on the first opportunity since Trump’s team told us there was nothing to reveal. Aside from being lame and pathetic, Trump’s dismissive response contradicted accusatory comments he’d frequently made.

Good Guesses

During his question, the reporter asked about Epstein’s Intelligence connections. But he understated the case. He said that Trump’s former Labor Secretary, Alex Acosta, who was the US Attorney in Miami who cut Epstein a plea in 2008, “allegedly” claimed Epstein worked for Intelligence agencies.

But this isn’t “alleged”.

Acosta stated in Court documents that the CIA approached Acosta and told him to back off Epstein because of his connections. Pam Bondi was a Florida prosecutor at the time and elected to Florida AG soon after so… despite her feigned ignorance this week… it’s unlikely she didn’t know this.

The question isn’t whether this one-time math teacher – who became an exclusive “hedge-fund manager” who turned down $500M accounts while living in the largest residence in Manhattan – worked with Intelligence agencies. It’s how many and which ones.

The CIA is a good guess. But Mossad is a better one. It was likely both, and maybe more.

Among Epstein’s mentors was media mogul Robert Maxwell, who had known connections to Mossad (among other intel agencies), and whose daughter now sits in prison for crimes apparently no one committed.

To borrow another famous quote from All the President’s Men, we should “follow the money”. Epstein invested in Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s defense intelligence start-up, and was funded by Zionist billionaire Les Wexner… who also has Mossad links.

Coincidentally, as Trump’s Epstein about-face was underway, the current Prime Minister of Israel paid his third visit to Washington since the president took office. For a tiny country halfway around the world, that seems like a lot.

During that time, at the behest of “our greatest ally”, the US has unleashed repeated attacks on Yemen, launched a reckless strikes on Iran, and keeps funding ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza. Aside from a few crony corporations and connected insiders, none of this benefits a single American.

So why does it happen? Do campaign contributions explain it? Or was there something more insidious, including “systematic blackmail” (which the Trump Administration also denies) of Epstein patrons who apparently never existed?

Maybe the “Justice” Department isn’t orchestrating a cover-up at at the behest of the Intelligence apparatus in the U.S. and Israel.

But if it were, it could hardly look any different.

This article was originally published on Premium Insights.

The post Nothing To See appeared first on LewRockwell.

Matt Smith: All right. Good morning, Doug. Lots happening these days. I’d love to get your take on—I think starting with the Epstein case. Case closed, apparently. What do you think? What’s going on?

Doug Casey: Well, where to start on this thing? It’s so ultra disappointing, so embarrassing, and so serious that it’s hard to figure out where to begin. But it’s been obvious to me, from watching these things, that this could only end very, very badly. And it’s shameful the way Bongino and Patel—who made a point of saying how honest they were and how they were going to reform things—have just backed off and said there’s nothing there.

And then this woman—Bondi. That was equally inexplicable. She says she’s got all this stuff on her desk, ready to go, and it turns out she doesn’t have it after all. There’s clearly corruption here. It’s very bad.

And it occurred to me how similar this might be to the famous Dreyfus case in France, around the turn of the 20th century. I became, to use a French phrase, a cause célèbre, and overturned the government. This has got the potential to do the same thing.

Matt Smith: One of the things I was thinking about with the whole thing is: what does it take to make these people, who have impeached themselves publicly recently by making claims about evidence that existed—and who have been champions for this cause, for transparency around this for so long—but again, some of these people have now publicly impeached themselves, like Pam Bondi and others, to make this kind of U-turn?

It is such a drastic U-turn, it implies something really scary to me. Because I don’t think you do this for self-gain. I don’t think you can be bribed into destroying yourself like this. I think fear is the only thing that could possibly motivate someone to do this.

So there is something they’ve been exposed to that is so scary to them that they are willing to destroy their whole sense of identity—their reputation—over it. Fear is the only thing I can even imagine that would do it. And it’s got to be fear that probably most of us have never experienced.

I try to put myself in that role, and I think maybe the fear of watching my children be brutalized in front of me might make me do this. But other than that, I just can’t imagine it. I really can’t imagine. So I think the implications are actually pretty frightening.

Doug Casey: Yeah. I don’t see how Bongino in particular can live with himself. It’s like overturning his whole persona. Everybody knows these people are lying. The question is: why are they lying?

Fear, of course—I think you’re right. Because no amount of money would do it. These guys have plenty of money. Bongino and Patel can’t be doing it to maintain their crappy government jobs. They don’t need that. They don’t need money.

By doing this and discrediting themselves, Patel and Bongino are going to be marked men for the rest of their lives. Public frauds.

What’s going on? What are the secrets that somebody is trying to hide? Could it be that Trump himself is implicated with what Epstein was doing? Or are there so many high government officials and billionaires that are so heavily involved in really disgusting things that it would overturn all credibility in the US government and the US power structure?

This is a big deal.

Matt Smith: Yeah, I think it’s a really big deal. And I think it shows what we’re really dealing with here. Because I don’t know what exactly would be revealed by revealing all the Epstein stuff, but the motivation of the people who are willing to destroy themselves in order to cover it up implies something insidious, something dangerous, something scary—probably something beyond our comprehension.

Doug Casey: It must be that. And haven’t these people thought this out a little bit? It’s really simple. Patel and Bongino—I don’t know anything about Bondi—but if you double back like this, it’s obvious that you’re being intimidated or lying. What did they think was going to happen?

So it must be that they’re being threatened on a really serious level. That’s the only thing I can figure.

Matt Smith: That’s the only thing I can figure too.

So, the other thing—I have basically just a whole list of random news items. I think maybe they’re connected, maybe they’re not connected, but I think they’re interesting. I want you to comment on them.

The second one is that the US Army Corps of Engineers is active today in essentially rebuilding a whole bunch of Israeli defense structures.

You know, it’s not just that we’re sending weapons. It’s that that we’re actively involved. The US Army Corps of Engineers is actually rebuilding infrastructure to accommodate the Israeli Air Force’s new refueling aircraft and helicopters, as well as constructing new headquarters for their 13th Naval Commando Unit, and numerous other projects. This is costing billions of shekels, and it’s all according to official documents from the US Army Corps of Engineers published online.

Doug Casey: Well, perhaps this relates in some way to the Epstein scandal. Why is Israel, in effect, being turned into the 51st state—and treated even better than a state? The money that’s being directed there—couldn’t the Army Corps of Engineers be helpful to the Carolinas or Texas instead?

Israel is getting a lot more attention than actual states in the US. This is frankly criminal. Look, I’ve never been anti-Israel per se. It’s just another nation-state. I understand why the Jews started it, and all that. I get it, and I’ve always been sympathetic, especially since I’m not sympathetic to the Muslim world. But this? What’s the matter with Trump? He looks like he’s under Netanyahu’s thumb.

Maybe it ties into the whole Epstein thing. Because apologists for Israel—like Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro—are rabid. They’re frothing and drooling at the mouth when anything is said that might possibly be counter to Israel’s interests. Wait a minute—who are they working for? What’s going on here?

Matt Smith: And in addition to that, we have Trump’s announcement that we’ll be sending more weapons to Ukraine.

Doug Casey: Yeah. Got to continue the war. A pointless war. It should be completely obvious to everybody that Russia is going to win.

Instead of ending the war Trump is making it much worse. Everyone has forgotten the reason they invaded is because they were provoked.

Trump is continuing the war at great expense. Young men are getting killed and maimed pointlessly. It’s crazy. You can’t justify it. You can’t rationalize it. Just like you can’t rationalize attacking Iran—a country on the other side of the world that’s never done anything to the US—just because it helps the Israelis. This isn’t our problem, but we’ve made it a much bigger one by getting involved.

There are lots of other problems in Trump world. Like the fact that there have been no indictments handed down, and there should have been by now. There have apparently been no investigations on anything, although I’ve heard they’re supposed to be starting something on Comey.

It looks like DOGE is dead or dying. Musk has quit in disgust. That was supposed to be the centerpiece of the Trump regime.

Matt Smith: Well, maybe it goes back to our first point: that there’s something out there scaring the hell out of enough people that they’re willing to do things that shock us all, perhaps.

And incidentally, my friend from Ukraine—she lives in Kyiv—told me that a lot of the recent Russian attacks there have targeted recruitment centers. These are the conscription centers, and apparently, there was a lot of praise among some people in Kyiv over that. But some officials came out and denounced it as treasonous to be happy about the destruction of those recruitment facilities.

Just a side note, but it shows what happens to a country in a state of war. It becomes a very dangerous place to live.

Doug Casey: Yes. The rumors have been floating around for some time that it’s not just recruitment—they’re actually sending out press gangs to round up anyone who looks like good cannon fodder on the front lines.

And with the nature of warfare now, “cannon fodder” is the right term. With drones advancing in technology almost weekly, if you’re a soldier on the front lines you’re dead meat.

Matt Smith: Yeah, it’s awful.

The next thing that stood out to me—among everything else that’s happening—was this big press announcement today by the former governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem. And this is great news: apparently now, in TSA it’s no longer necessary to take off your shoes.

Doug Casey: That’s good. It means flying won’t be quite as degrading. But I suppose you’re still going to have to take off your belt and everything else.

Matt Smith: Yeah, and still go through screening. And if some alarm goes off, or you’re randomly selected, you still get the pat-down by some agent of the state. So yeah—it’s still not good. But this is what’s being trumpeted as progress, I guess, for the American people.

The other thing that seems totally unrelated—but I think it’s noteworthy—is that over the weekend, there was this incredible anti-gringo sentiment. Really, riots or protests in Mexico City. And I don’t know if these things are organized—it seems like most of these big groups are organized by someone, you know, Soros types to sow discontent—but it just shows that the world is becoming a lot less friendly and a lot more risky across the board.

And I don’t know if you saw any of those signs, but they were saying things like “Kill a gringo,” “Gringo go home,” all that kind of stuff. Pretty nasty environment.

Doug Casey: Apparently this was all in Mexico City. I’ve been to Mexico City a couple of times in recent years, and it never struck me that there were a lot of gringos there. If you want to find gringos in Mexico, you go to San Miguel de Allende—full of gringos—or better yet, down to Cabo, which is absolutely full of them. No protests there. Why in Mexico City, of all places? Who could care enough about a few gringos running around in a city of 15 million? It doesn’t make any sense.

Matt Smith: Yeah, it doesn’t. But I think it’s just another sign—like, I don’t think these big movements are organic. Just like BLM wasn’t organic. Just like Antifa seems inorganic. It seems to me there’s another effort to divide people, to create conflict.

And this is one that—at least for Americans living abroad—you have to be aware of. You have to be aware of it. You’d think, of all people, Mexicans could see the comedic irony in “Gringos go home” when the US is full of tens of millions of Mexicans.

Doug Casey: I know. Don’t these people have any self-awareness at all? Which, of course, leads me to believe that there’s some group that’s trying to create chaos. And I think you were getting into this. The fact that foreigners, Canadians and certainly Europeans, really don’t want to come to the US anymore.

It feels like an unfriendly place. Your electronic devices might be searched, you could be forced to unlock them and show what’s there. And if they don’t like it, maybe they’ll do something to you. Maybe they’ll throw you in a prison for a few days while they sort your papers out.

This has happened to several Canadians already, which seems really out of line. Everything considered, if I were a foreigner, I wouldn’t want to come back to the US.

In fact, as an American, I’m not sure I want to go back to the US. The summer’s still young, and things could still get wild and woolly.

Matt Smith: Yeah, I’m not going. And with the new requirement—if you’re applying for a particular type of visa, I think it’s just a visitor or educational visa—you now have to unlock all your social media accounts.

And in the statement, as I understand it, it didn’t just say list all your social media accounts—it said unlock them. Which makes me think that Palantir is already hard at work and has probably identified you and all your accounts, and they just want to make sure it’s all visible. And if you don’t fully disclose, they can drop you into a Kafka-esque nightmare, where they accuse you of not disclosing everything, and now you’re really in trouble.

And there’s this other thing going on—this hasn’t gotten national news, and I don’t know why, because it’s a huge deal—there are coordinated attacks on ICE agents by armed, masked, body-armored, well-armed, apparently leftist groups that are unhappy with the deportation agenda.

You can just see this escalating in wild ways as it continues. And the budget for ICE grew 800% in the “Big Beautiful Bill.” It’s now something like nearly $75 billion—up from around $8 billion.

Doug Casey: That’s a gigantic increase in budget. And even that is dwarfed by the $200 billion increase in the military budget. Further proof that the “Big Beautiful Bill” is just a tax-and-spend bill. That’s really what it is—and it’s not in any way improving the freedoms of the average American.

I wonder if Michael Yon could be right when he says that many thousands of the illegal migrants are actually surreptitious military agents who can be activated at the right time. It’d be shocking to imagine there wouldn’t be some of them in there. If you run an intel agency somewhere and you see an opportunity—“Hey, now’s our chance to slip some in”—you’d almost be abdicating your duty not to do it.

Matt Smith: If, for instance, I were running a foreign intel agency and I wanted to create chaos in the US, I might tell some of my guys already here to track down ICE agents—not hard to find—and assassinate them. At that point, the US government would have to strike back. And since they don’t know who did it for sure, it becomes a dragnet and a lockdown for everyone. That’s a good way to do it.

Doug Casey: Yes, agreed.

Matt Smith: Another thing, for years there’ve been these citizenship-by-investment programs. And I think you were really the instigator of a lot of that thinking. These programs let you essentially buy a passport as a backup option.

But now they’re under a lot of scrutiny. These passports are potentially losing their ability to travel visa-free to the EU and the US. They’re considering proposals like mandatory 30-day residency requirements and other changes to try to assuage the concerns of larger state blocs.

I think these programs are dead. I don’t think they’ll work anymore—if they ever really did. They just won’t work now.

Doug Casey: Yeah. I think the idea of, in effect, renting a citizenship so you can travel—is flawed. Every passport says right on it that it’s the property of the issuing government. It’s not actually yours. It can be taken away at any time.

These rental-country options were okay when there were only a few and it wasn’t a big deal. But now it is a big deal. There are a lot of them out there. And you’ve got to admit, many of these microstates, like all those tiny Caribbean countries… why are they recognized as real governments? Like, come on. They have the same votes in the UN General Assembly as the US or China or the EU? And I speak as someone who doesn’t believe in nation states.

Not that the UN serves any useful purpose. In fact, it’s a negative influence and should have been disbanded years ago—just like NATO.

Travel documents that you buy issued by these countries—they’re going away. I still think everyone ought to have a second or third passport or citizenship, but getting one from these little Caribbean microstates? That’s on its way out. You’re probably just wasting your money.

Matt Smith: Maybe with a country like Turkey, where they still have a program—it’s more expensive, but at least it’s a bigger state with some real heft. They can’t be bullied around the way a place like St. Kitts can.

Doug Casey: That’s right. Turkey is a real country. You’re right—they can’t be pushed around.

Matt Smith: So maybe that’s still a valid option. But if nothing else, getting a legitimate residency outside your home country—I think the imperative is growing. And if you don’t have one, I’d do some work to get it. Some of them are easy to get. Mexico, for example.

Although, I’m personally a little concerned about the spreading anti-gringo sentiment there.

Doug Casey: The US government is a problem everywhere.

I noticed you’re not at your usual station for our calls. So—where are you today?

Matt Smith: I’m in Brazil today. I’m in São Paulo. Just wanted a little warmer weather, a bigger city environment, better shopping. I can get my full blood panel done here—which I like to do regularly for preventative health—for about $150. It costs me over $2,000 to do the same thing in the US. And it’s easier to do here than in Uruguay.

It’s cheap, too—very affordable for that kind of stuff. And the cuisine in Brazil is different from the Spanish-speaking countries, which is a nice change as well. We had Peruvian last night and Thai for lunch yesterday. I mean, I love Uruguay—it has many redeeming qualities. A broad palate is not one of them. You know, they like certain things, and you don’t get much that survives beyond that very well. So that’s also kind of a—well, it’s a good opportunity. Not that it matters that much, but it’s nice to have when you can get it.

The other thing—this relates to the economy. I listened to you talk on another podcast about the economy and the state of things, and what could happen from here. One thing of note—it’s not hugely substantial—but the M2 money supply, which just means the money supply continues to be printed, although there are lots of ways to measure the money supply.

And, you know, these are US numbers, and you can’t trust any government numbers. But officially, the money supply continues to grow—19 months in a row now—still expanding. That means there’s still inflation. According to the official numbers, it’s expanding at 4.5% year-over-year, which isn’t terrible, but still, we grew the money supply by 30% during COVID. So yes, this is better—but I think it’s a sign that inflation is the only way they think they’re getting out of this game, economically.

One of the things they asked you was: Is there any way out? Is there any way out of the economic troubles the US faces? And I’d just like to ask you the same question.

Doug Casey: Well, if I were the president of the US—in other words, if I were Trump—what would I do to stop the country’s decline?

It would take radical action to reduce the size of the government. Trump is not doing that. The action he should take would be devastating to large parts of the economy—the parasitic parts.

Is it possible to pay off the national debt without destroying the value of the currency? Yes, but I think they want to pay it off with pocket change by making the dollar worthless. I think that would be the worst alternative. But it’s the one we’re following.

Matt Smith: Yeah. That seems to be the path.

Doug Casey: Listen, I’ve said in the past that I’d consider something as radical as defaulting on the national debt. And people say, “Well, how can you do that? The banks would fail. Insurance companies own a lot of bonds. It would be a daisy chain of problems. People couldn’t get their money out of the banks because the banks wouldn’t be there,” and so on.

Well, I suppose. But I always like to look at the bright side, as you know. And the bright side is, if you defaulted on the national debt your children and grandchildren can avoid becoming indentured servants to pay it off.

Default on the national debt—and yes, I know it sounds outrageous, ridiculous, un-American, all those things—is going to happen one way or the other. But if you defaulted on it, all the real wealth in the world would still exist. The factories, the farms, the businesses, the technologies—they’re not going to vanish just because the creditors are stiffed. Governments do it all the time because they’re essentially criminal enterprises. And it would punish the cronies who’ve been enabling the State, with its wars and gifts to the political class.

The currency at that point would shift to a commodity like gold, maybe supplemented by Bitcoin. All the real wealth would still be there. It would be a boon for the average guy..

Matt Smith: It would mostly punish—well, isn’t most of the debt now not even owned by foreigners? Maybe it’s 50/50? About half foreign-owned, half American entities—banks, insurance companies, pension funds?

Doug Casey: I think the breakdown is overwhelmingly domestic, not foreign.

The people who own US government debt have, in effect, been financing the terrible things the US government has been doing. They’re codependent with it.

One of the reasons to default on the debt: it would punish the groups that have enabled all the terrible things the US government has done. So yeah, we’d be freeing up the next generations. We’d be punishing the people who have been financing the US government.

It would also enable taxes to be radically decreased, because at the same time you’d have to abolish lots of government agencies.

As outrageous as it sounds, if you defaulted on the debt honestly— insofar as any default can be “honest”—as opposed to gradually and dishonestly through currency debasement, it’s the better option. I once had a collection of worthless currencies and defaulted government bonds. They make interesting decorations.

So that’s my solution. But this is all just academic speculation. They’re not going to default on it overtly.

Matt Smith: Yeah, I think the argument against defaulting honestly is that it would really hurt a lot of Americans too—pension funds, retirement accounts, insurance companies, and so on.

And so the argument for doing it dishonestly is that you avoid the pain for people here and now—by putting the burden on future generations.

But that’s a lie, because the truth is the standard of living has been destroyed in America. The middle class is shrinking dramatically. People are suffering. And the amount of inflation they need at this stage is way higher than this four and a half percent.

And we’re going to get much higher inflation than this in order to get out of it. I mean, my best guess is you’d have to devalue the dollar—effectively, compared to something like gold—by about 90% from here, just to have any chance of inflating your way out.

And in that case, everyone in the here and now gets destroyed anyway—including the retirees, the people with pensions, insurance companies, and everything else. Isn’t that true?

Doug Casey: Yes, it is. But worse things have happened.

Look at what happened to Germany during World War 2. Look at what happened to Japan during World War 2. Their real wealth was actually destroyed—obliterated and burned down. That wouldn’t be the case in the US.

It’s hard to do this gradually, on a gradient. This is a mistake I think Milei has made in Argentina. He should have defaulted on the Argentine national debt, because it’s not nearly as central to the standard of living of the average Argentine as the US national debt is to Americans and the world at large.

He should have done that. He didn’t. Now he’s stuck with an albatross around his neck. But I don’t want to nitpick with Milei, because he’s made tremendous improvements. Still, that would have been my suggestion.

Is there any way out of this thing gradually? Well, I guess it’s possible—but you’d have to radically cut back US government spending and abolish a lot of agencies. That would allow you to cut taxes, which would generate more money to pay off the debt. But like I said, I’m against paying off that debt at this point.

Matt Smith: And you’d have to radically increase the growth rate of the US, too, at the same time.

Doug Casey: Right. Well, you would—by getting rid of regulations and by eliminating the debt service. Of course, the economy would grow and expand.

But at this point, it’s funny—foreigners are still investing in the US, as risky as it is. That’s because it’s the best place they can think of. Other places have even more problems than the US. Europe, for example, is a genuinely sinking ship. I still think the European Union is going to break up—catastrophically.

I wouldn’t put a nickel into Europe right now as a long-term investment.

Matt Smith: I can’t recall the exact statistics, but there’s some measure of the amount of assets owned by foreigners in the US, and that number has been going down substantially over the last few months. They’ve been pulling capital out of the US—maybe out of concerns about what Trump might do, or other things.

So they are finding other places to put it. Maybe it’s in gold. Maybe it’s in their local markets. I don’t know.

I mean, European stocks have gone up recently. So it seems like that shift is happening. The US is no longer the go-to destination for travel, for investing your money. Those things are degrading over time, aren’t they?

Doug Casey: Yes. And it’s no longer the beacon of freedom that it once was. People are very suspicious of it now. Foreign governments and institutions don’t want to hold the hot potato of US government debt denominated in dollars.

On top of that, citizens don’t want to keep their capital in their own countries either, where they’re subject to the depredations of their governments.

So, if you’re a productive person or a productive company—where do you go in the world?

I think the options are becoming more and more limited.

Matt Smith: Yeah. I don’t know where they’re putting that capital, but the foreign outflows are definitely happening.

We’ve been putting it in gold. And gold, as we speak, is around $3,350 per ounce—very close to its all-time high. But as you’ve pointed out, if the dollar were to be redeemable at a fixed rate with gold, it would need to be priced at $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, even $50,000 an ounce.

Who knows what the number is?

Doug Casey: Wouldn’t you say that in order for us to inflate our way out of the debt, whether or not we eventually fix the dollar to gold, we’ll end up in the same place?

Matt Smith: Exactly. If we were to inflate our way out of the debt, that would necessarily mean gold would have to rise compared to the dollar—to that kind of level.

Doug Casey: I think so.

Even though gold is reasonably priced right now relative to everything else—you’re right. The one thing I think is certain is that the average guy—the people in the lower classes, the middle class, even part of the upper middle class—they’re the ones who are going to be hurt.

It’s not the guys really at the top who are going to get hurt. They have the political connections. They get the money first. They’re wired in. They’re going to do fine. As the dollar is inflated out of existence, it’s going to hurt the average American. There’s no way around it.

Which is why default would be better. It would cause real losses. It would cause some bank failures, and who knows what the knock-on effects would be—but the piper must be paid at some point.

Matt Smith: And another bright side of defaulting on the debt is that people would say, “God, I’ve got to cut back on living on credit. I’ve got to cut back on consumption. I’ve got to start producing things and building assets.” That’s what causes a boom—when people say, “Enough of this lying around. I’ve got to start doing something.”

Doug Casey: I’m all for that. But it’s unlikely to happen that way, because of the way the government is going—but that’s what should happen. It would be better after, admittedly, a period of chaos. The markets have to be cleansed of ingrained distortions.

Matt Smith: What do you think of Trump’s tariff ideas? He said something yesterday about putting a huge tariff on copper. Did you hear that?

Doug Casey: Yes, and copper went up about 10% or 15% overnight. I haven’t checked the copper stocks I own to see if they’ve responded yet. The problem is that Trump is acting like a schizophrenic. He’s completely unpredictable. Many of the things he does are just totally irrational—almost psychotic.

It makes it impossible for businessmen to plan. He can change things overnight—this or that—and your whole plan goes out the window.

Matt Smith: Yeah, it’s impossible. The guy’s turning into a disaster, I’m afraid. It’s not just that he’s an egomaniac. It’s not just that he can never admit he made a mistake. He’s turning into a megalomaniac.

Doug Casey: I’m a bit afraid of the guy—and I say that as someone who was glad he won instead of Kamala.

Matt Smith: Yeah. My gladness in that regard is definitely fading, because now we’re looking at what Trump did versus our fears of what Kamala might have done. She’s inept—maybe she wouldn’t have done much at all. I don’t know.

Still, if I voted—which I don’t—I probably still would have voted for Trump. But at this point, we’re comparing fears of Kamala with the actual realities of what Trump is doing, and it’s not great.

He talks about wanting to bring back manufacturing to the US, especially under this BBB bill—not “Build Back Better” but “Big Beautiful Bill.” They’re both triple-Bs, ironically.

Doug Casey: Funny coincidence.

Matt Smith: Yeah. The bill is mostly focused on military-related things. But it becomes impossible to plan any kind of new manufacturing when the price of copper might go up 500%. How does that work?

You can’t rebuild America if you can’t even build a cost structure to plan around.

Doug Casey: Of course, Trump would say, “Well, we can mine copper in the US.”

Yes, we can—if we can find a big enough copper deposit, then raise billions to develop it, and understand that it’ll take 10 years before cash flow starts—if it ever starts.

Matt Smith: Well, I heard our buddy Frank Giustra is looking for great projects in the US to help support this. Frank is smart, and it’s good that he’s focused on it.

But even then, it takes a long time to turn anything around.

Doug Casey: Exactly. And who wants to make a multi-billion dollar investment when chaos could overturn everything tomorrow morning?

One of the key components to real progress is the rule of law—stability. Without stability, you can’t plan or build anything meaningful.

Matt Smith: Yeah, I agree entirely.

It’s a wild time. And when you look at all these seemingly unrelated factors together—what’s your overall impression?

Doug Casey: We’re in for tough times. I really think so.

I still believe there’s a possibility of a genuine civil war in the US—not like the “unpleasantness” from 1861 to 1865. It’s not going to look like that. It’s going to be more like an informal guerrilla war.

Matt Smith: And we might be seeing early signs of that already, with these targeted attacks on ICE agents.

Doug Casey: Entirely possible. Like I said, if I were a malefactor running a foreign intelligence agency—one of the many countries that don’t like the US and want to weaken it—that’s exactly the path I’d take.

Matt Smith: Yeah, I agree.

Okay—so with that, just a reminder: we have our Plan B Uruguay conference coming up in October. If you don’t have your residency yet, or you don’t have a backup plan in case things go south—like certain historical periods we’ve referenced in the past—you might want to check out that conference.

You can learn more at crisisinvesting.com. There’s a link at the top called “Plan B Uruguay”—check it out and see if it’s right for you and your family.

Doug Casey: And I’ll add—since the seasons are opposite here in the southern hemisphere—when it’s cold and snowy in the US, you can escape to South America, where it’s warm and balmy.

Matt Smith: That’s right. October is actually a very pleasant month in Uruguay. A great time to be there.

Doug Casey: Absolutely.

Matt Smith: All right, we’ll leave it there for today, Doug.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Fear, Corruption, and the Coming Collapse of the American System appeared first on LewRockwell.

If one thinks that arming Ukraine against Russia or having Israeli soldiers and also American contractors slaughter Gazan civilians are not supportive of any United States actual interests, last week could easily be written off as yet another descent into Hell on the part of the United States. Americans and others should have the right to criticize how the Israelis wage war without being denounced and criminalized by governments that have been corrupted from the inside, most often by money, but that is exactly what is going on in the US and in select countries in Europe. Watching children being targeted for killing and complaining about it does not make one an anti-Semite even though the Israeli government exploits that issue precisely as a tool to avoid any consequences for its horrific behavior. Here in America, it’s past time for the White House and Congress to rid themselves of their obscene and unseemly obsession with judging overseas developments using the optics of Israel loyalty tests. There is a appreciable difference between hating Israel reflexively based on its religion and acting like a member of a cheering gallery on steroids every time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes to town.

There were three major developments during the week. The first was the passage through Congress and the signing by President Donald Trump of the “big, beautiful budget bill” which establishes by law the national government’s spending projections for 2026. The fiscal year begins on October 1st. The government has long exploited alleged foreign threats to national security to boost spending to enhance America’s military power. This tendency has been largely unchallenged since 9/11, when President George W Bush announced that he and the US now represented “a new sheriff in town” and would be waging war against terrorists worldwide. In 2025 Pentagon costs were budgeted at the $895 billion level. Now, however, President Donald Trump has topped even that with his bill, adding $150 billion to the military budget for 2026, which will exceed in theory for the first time more than $1 trillion.

Interestingly, however, the reality is that the US has for some time exceeded $1 trillion due to the way the government handles its war costs through unfunded material transfers and extra expenses that are approved outside the budget process itself, combined with the fact that the Pentagon’s several components and poor money management make it impossible to be successfully audited. Based on the $895 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), US national security spending for 2025 is, for example, expected to actually reach about $1.77 trillion. The difference partly derives from military-related spending from other government agencies not funded by the NDAA, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security as well as from the national security share of the interest accrued on the US debt.

In September 2024 the Government Accounting Office reported that the Defense Department “remains the only major federal agency that has never been able to achieve a clean audit opinion.” And the numbers are astonishing. In fiscal year 2024, which ran from October 1st, 2023 to September 30th, 2024, the Pentagon could not account for at least 44% of its assets, nor for at least 68% of the money allocated by Congress.

The biggest addition to actual defense spending is the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, with a new front recently opened in Iran, that the US is supporting off-budget, meaning that they are being paid for “out of pocket” and the money is printed up by the Federal Reserve and is added to the government debt, where it increases through the accumulation of interest to bill and bond holders. The Federal debt is now $37 trillion and Trump’s bill is expected to add at least $3 trillion more to it. Foreign nations that have invested in the debt by buying Treasury Bills might soon figure out that it is a bad investment and will stop doing so and the dollar will plummet.

And then there is the visit to Washington, the third by Benjamin Netanyahu since Trump became president six months ago, which was memorable in its own way. Netanyahu was in America again due to the fact that he wanted something. The larger issue is to get US direct support to renew an attack on Iran and the second objective being to speed up the resupply of weapons as Israel had de facto lost the conflict with the Iranians having run through its defensive weapons. What arrangements have been made vis-à-vis Iran have not yet been completely revealed, but it has been reported that multiple transport plane loads have been making their way filled with weapons drawn from US reserve stocks that are on their way to Tel Aviv as a gift from the US to Israel. And then there was the comedy routine provided by Netanyahu proposing Trump as recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, possibly the first time when a head of a state that is openly carrying out a genocide plus mass deportations and is about to create concentration camps endorses the country leader who enables the mass murder taking place. While in Washington Netanyahu also carried out the usual sucking up to Congress and vice versa as well as the closed-door meeting with the Jewish billionaires that have so effectively corrupted the US government.

The third performance of comic opera took place over Ukraine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth apparently halted the shipment of new weapons to Kiev as a means of disengaging from the conflict with Russia. While it is clear that the US has no interest to be fighting a proxy war with Moscow, Trump had proven unable to end the fighting on his first day in office, which he had promised pre-election. To everyone’s actual surprise, Trump did not appear to know about the decision and reversed it, exhibiting some actual confusion during a press conference over what had happened. It was reminiscent of last week’s bizarre development over the disappearance of Israeli spy Jeffrey Epstein’s “client list” possibly to avoid embarrassing Israel and also, it has been suggested, to eliminate any speculation regarding Donald Trump’s relationship with Epstein in Florida back prior to 2019. It might be reasonable to assume that the whole episode amounts to one more big lie and cover-up coming out of the clownish ensemble that constitutes the Trump cabinet.

Finally, there is one other story that I consider a pure product of the ignorance and downright stupidity that characterizes the Trump regime. The United Nations Human Rights Council has what they refer to as a Special Rapporteur and investigator over developments in Israel and Palestine, to include the Israeli occupied territories on the West Bank. Francesca Albanese, an Italian, is an experienced bureaucrat of demonstrated integrity who has focused on human rights issues. She has been under intense pressure from both the United States and Israel to forego on reporting Israel’s atrocities, particularly in Gaza, but those who have actually interacted with her claim that she has recorded developments honestly and accurately. This past week, coinciding with the Netanyahu visit, Washington decided to move against her with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing sanctions against her.

This is how Rubio described the case to be made to justify the sanctions: “Today I am imposing sanctions on UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for her illegitimate and shameful efforts to prompt [International Criminal Court] action against US and Israeli officials, companies, and executives… Albanese’s campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated. We will always stand by our partners in their right to self-defense.”

One begins to wonder if Rubio is as totally ignorant and stupid as his boss. The US has previously called on the UN to replace Albanese and a week before the sanctions were issued a warning from Washington suggested that something was coming. “The United States once again expressed its grave concerns to UN Secretary-General António Guterres about the continued activities of Francesca Albanese … and again called upon the Secretary-General to condemn her activities and call for her removal,” the US UN mission said in a statement on July 1. The US has characteristically accused Albanese of “virulent antisemitism” for her criticism of Israel, a smear on Albanese also made by President Joe Biden’s administration after she last year produced a report accusing Israel of genocide. One might observe that in February the US also used the sanctions tool against the justices of the International Criminal Court (and their families) after the court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and the Israel’s former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on charges of genocide.

Wish that were all, but there is one more story about what a fine place “America’s best friend and closest ally” Israel actually is. A twenty-year old Palestinian American from Tampa Florida, Seif al-Din Muslat, was visiting family in the town of Sinjil, north of Ramallah, on Friday. In town, he was confronted and beaten to death by rampaging Israeli settlers. Another Palestinian teen Mohammad Shalabi was shot dead in the same incident. The US Embassy apparently was informed of the killing by the boy’s family but as usual it will take no action and will defer to the so-called Israeli justice system to investigate. That means that the scum Settlers, largely expat Americans from places like Brooklyn, will in no way be punished and will walk free to kill more Palestinian children. There have been an increasing number of instances where Israeli settlers in the West Bank ransack Palestinian neighborhoods and towns, burning homes and vehicles and destroying crops and businesses in attacks. And they feel free to kill any Palestinian who crosses their paths or who tries to intervene. Thank you Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump for your loyalty to murderous Jews. It does you proud, or at least it demonstrates what you are made of!

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

The post Another Week in Washington To Remember appeared first on LewRockwell.

As Epstein was murdered to keep him quiet, it was obvious no files would be released.  AG Bondi said she had the files and videos and was going through them.  But then the men in black paid a visit, and suddenly there were no files.  Moreover, the authorities concluded that Epstein committed suicide in his prison cell.  So we are left with the puzzle, there is no evidence that Epstein did anything wrong, so he committed suicide for no reason. If Epstein had no client list, to whom was he trafficking the minors?

The stink is so strong that Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI, is reportedly considering resigning. I cited a news source from India to show that the entire world is watching the US government make a fool of itself.

This is not a “who is the most MAGA, Bondi or Bongino, situation.” It is the ruling elite preventing the whistle from being blown on them, backed up by Netanyahu making sure Trump understands that Epstein’s connection to Mossad does not come up.  Indeed, that and not Iran could be the real reason for Netanyahu’s visit.  If Iran was the reason, how come we have not heard anything about the discussion or decision?

The situation seems clear enough.  So many important people are ensnared in videos engaged in sex with underaged persons that it must be hushed up. Otherwise, Americans will lose confidence in their leadership class.  So folks there is nothing there.  The Clintons and the princes and all the others were flown to Epstein’s island where there were underaged sexual attractions just to see the island and to have tea with Epstein, a math teacher who somehow overnight became super rich.

It is necessary to turn the Epstein Saga into a conspiracy theory or into misinformation in order to save the public’s belief in the leadership class.

It was the same with the coverups of the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, and 9/11.  Everyone on the Warren Commission knew that Oswald was a patsy, just as the other investigators knew that Sirhan Sirhan was a patsy, that James Earl Ray was a patsy, that Osama bin Laden was a patsy.  It was simply imperative that Americans not know that the CIA and Joint Chiefs had assassinated President Kennedy, that the CIA killed Robert Kennedy as he was about to be elected president and would hold accountable the murderers of his brother, that the FBI killed MLK because they feared his leadership, and that 9/11 was impossible without the complicity of the highest levels of the US government. The George W. Bush regime claimed to have had no inkling of the 9/11 attack, but Mossad had a camera team on the scene ready to film the destruction of the World Trade Center.  The Mossad agents were arrested, held two months, and quietly released. There is no mention of the Israeli agents’ advanced knowledge of the 9/11 attack in the official 9/11 Commission report.

The raw fact is that politicized agencies of the US government have agendas that are more important to them than integrity, law, the Constitution, and the American people.  The purpose of 9/11 was to provide the Zionist neoconservatives with the “New Pearl Harbor” they said they needed in order to destroy the Arab countries opposed to Israel’s territorial expansion.  “Seven countries in five years” was a neoconservative project for Israel’s benefit.

The probable Epstein story is that Israel, knowing of the sexual perversion rife among the American leadership class, set up Epstein to ensnare those who could be blackmailed to conform American policies with Israel’s interest.  How else do we explain the US spending the 21st century fighting wars for Israel, protecting and enabling Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, passing laws that protect Israel from protests and boycotts and preventing Americans from stating the truth about Israel?

America has been the instrument of Israeli aggression.  Israel has so much blackmail power over the American ruling class that the United States of America is locked into its role as Israel’s agent.

Tucker Carlson points out in his speech in this video  that it is not anti-semitic to ask valid questions, but Israel has so brainwashed and indoctrinated Americans that Americans think it is wrong to ask any question about Israel, thus giving Israel free rein over the United States.

Clearly, America is a captive nation.

How things have changed.

The post The Epstein Saga appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Trump administration, which won the 2024 election promising libertarian smaller government and an end to endless wars, has summarily dumped its libertarian promises. Elon Musk has split from the administration after spending several months identifying myriad opportunities to cut federal spending under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The “Big, Beautiful Bill” has replaced those cuts with spending increases that will outpace those under the previous Democratic administration, as every Republican administration of my lifetime has done. Funding the Ukraine War is also back online.

History isn’t just rhyming here; it’s repeating. It is the mirror image of the post-Revolutionary War split between Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian libertarians after their common enemy, the British, was defeated. Today, the MAGA Republicans embody classic Hobbesian/Burkean conservatism, while modern libertarians carry the torch of Jeffersonian principles rooted in John Locke’s property based inalienable rights. The defeat of the modern “British”—the progressive left—has exposed this divide, revealing that the MAGA movement’s heart beats closer to Hobbesian control than Lockean liberty.

Many conservatives may object to my identification together of Hobbes and Burke, given the quite different visions they had for the form of government. But they both agreed on the purpose of government: to hold back man’s savage instincts at any cost, including liberty.

In my book, Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From?, I argue that conservatives, at their core, believe that the “inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection,” as Burke said in Reflections on the Revolution in France. Men are entitled only what liberty the government allows after fulfilling this primary purpose. Burke agreed with Hobbes on this essential point, quoting Hobbes directly in explaining the problem with natural rights: that they give men “a right to everything.”

Burke’s only departure from Hobbes was the means for this thwarting. Hobbes argued that only a unitary, all powerful central government could achieve it. Burke argued that what he called “prescription” – the power of long-established traditions to restrain the savage impulses – could also play a part.

MAGA Republicans are a striking combination of both visions. Their rhetoric often champions “law and order,” a Hobbesian call to maintain societal stability against perceived threats. They have no problem with a massive military establishment, although they reject wars of choice for the purposes of benefiting the peoples of foreign nations rather than purely for domestic security.

The culture wars, on the other hand, are rooted in Burkean prescription. The overturning of long-established norms and traditions – standard ops for the revolutionary left – are a direct threat to civilization that must be reversed. Here there is some overlap with libertarianism. If those traditions are the non-involvement of government in certain areas of human activity, libertarians are all for it. But even if the particular tradition is inconsistent with libertarian principles, those traditions must be maintained, similar to the conservative insistence on maintaining primogeniture in Jefferson’s day.

Since for conservatives the natural state of man is a state of war, the natural economic system of conservativism is mercantilism, which views economic activity as having winners and losers. Recall Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. His constant complaint was “we don’t win anymore” when speaking of international trade. He promised instead that Americans would “get tired of winning.” Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists saw the economy precisely the same and made the same promises.

None of this is at all compatible with the libertarian worldview, where life, liberty, and entitlement to the fruits of one’s labor are property rights the government is tasked to defend. This “American Creed,” crystallized in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, was endorsed by the revolutionary Congress in 1776 but quickly rejected by the conservative Federalists once the Revolutionary War was won. Jeffersonians were just as startled by the abrupt shift away from those principles once the Federalists took power as modern libertarians are by Trump and MAGA’s whiplash turn today.

Progressives represented a threat to both conservative order and libertarian freedom, uniting these groups in a temporary alliance. Yet, just as the Federalists and Jeffersonians diverged after defeating the British, the MAGA Republicans and libertarians are splitting post-progressive defeat.

But between the reign of the Federalists and ultimate conservative victory under the Republicans, something happened. Jefferson called it “the revolution of 1800,” considering his and his party’s election as a return to the original revolution’s libertarian roots. What followed was a half century of libertarian dominance in American electoral politics, where even the suggestion the government should be involved in building roads could lose one an election.

Yes, this period was marred by the institution of slavery, a norm of human civilization for all of recorded history, but this was not at all an essential or necessary part of the libertarian system. On the contrary, Locke rejected slavery as merely the state of war in another form. Jefferson himself and his compatriots were constantly seeking a way out of the institution. All the arguments for continuing the institution – even when made by Jeffersonians in times of weakness – were rooted in conservative thinking, not libertarian principles.

The American Revolution itself was rooted in libertarianism, with Locke’s ideas flowing through the writings of British Whigs John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon and American revolutionaries like Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson. Thus, when the Federalists assumed power and began governing as conservatives, there was a backlash that led to decades of libertarian electoral victories.

Can another revolution of 1800 occur in America today? The prospects seem grim. Lockean property rights are no longer even a memory for most modern Americans. A century and a half of progressive (originally “Republican Party”) education has purged those ideas from the American psyche. When considering a political issue, absolutely no one poses the question, “Who has a property right here?” – the only question that should be posed in any political argument.

Still, the original libertarian movement during the Enlightenment came from somewhere. The history of mankind is decidedly unlibertarian until this relatively brief, shining moment that just happened to be responsible for everything good about modern civilization – including but by no mean limited to the abolition of slavery. The inalienable rights of the individual, including the right to compete in a free market, to be left alone by the government unless convicted of a crime by his peers (not the government), the freedom to say or think anything one believes without fear of violent repression – these are all libertarian ideas.

The vestiges of these ideas are still alive – barely – in the modern American psyche, despite more than a century’s attacks from the left and right. Perhaps only another Enlightenment can reawaken them. Libertarians can only hope.

The post Trump and MAGA Predictably Dump Their Few Libertarian Positions appeared first on LewRockwell.

All hail our blurt-worthy President!  On a daily basis, he does his part to reveal the stained wife beater worn underneath the Empire’s fraying costume.

The United States empire already consumes 40% of what we make, more if you consider its nonstop borrowing from future taxpayers.  It regulates and controls much of the non-state economy, and is frenetically militarizing in every direction. Yet focusing only on these facts can reduce our recognition of the real and unlimited power of individual action.

Using billions in military force against a disarmed population, the US and Israel pursue a shared objective of genocide, land and gas field theft.  They ended Syria in a similar way, eliminating Syria’s defenses and “rehabilitating” CIA-created “ISIS” into the ruling party, elections always optional for our favorite allies.  Gaza, Syria, and Iran today are seamless parts of the same Middle Eastern policy the US has wasted $6 Trillion and countless millions of lives in the past 30 plus years.

Trump stated in March that the US had flowed $350 Billion in arms and aid to Ukraine, much more than the additional $100 Billion from a host of countries.  Trump’s off the cuff accounting came under fire in Europe.  Either way, that war, like the one on Gaza, is fundamentally a US and NATO Goliath power play against a Russian David.  In terms of purchasing power parity terms, the odds are six to one against Russia, yet we’re always the righteous victims of someone else’s ambition.

US and her allies playing David against Goliathic enemies is not only a false narrative, it’s a collapsing one. US encouragement and support for Ukraine and Israel illustrate the cold reality of the American military-driven economy, and the coming intersection of the American Empire with the edge of a financial cliff.  Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech, for all of its appeal for an alert citizenry, and for all of its cautions about the power of the military industrial congressional complex, might be summed up simply as “Follow the money.”  But following the money also contains some clues to how empire is resisted.

Two recent examples come to mind.  First, the Malaysian-born, ethnic Chinese, American Presbyterian CEO of Intel, Lip-Bu Tan, is cutting jobs everywhere, including significant cuts in Israel. The other is Sweden’s new law that bans buying sex via sites like Onlyfans, and makes “purchase” on such platforms a punishable crime.

Intel is a global company, interested in homing or rehoming more of its capability inside the US.  The vulnerability of its manufacturing facilities in Kiryat Gat surely had little to do with the layoffs, nor did world popular opinion of investing in Israel, given its behavior and practices.

Likewise, Onlyfans is just an unintentional “victim” of a Swedish legal process inching towards consistency.  Buying sex in person in Sweden is criminalized, thus buying it virtually from presumably at-risk sex workers, should also be criminalized.  It can’t be related to the fact that the owners of Onlyfans are major donors to Israel directly, and were the top donor to AIPAC in 2023. Nor could it have much to do with last year’s movement by Onlyfans “creators – the sex workers Sweden wishes to protect – to boycott the platform because of its ties to Israel, and that government’s longstanding policy of genocide.

While these decisions are state and corporate, this is how individual agency works. It operates in the “free market” of people, ideas, and communities.  It’s often like a shadow at the corner of your eye, or a sudden sound you cannot fully identify, ephemerous yet all around us.  We know the world can be seen and heard far beyond the frequency ranges that humans experience, hence the popular term “dog-whistling.”  The contemptuous mainstream denigration of a dog whistle also tells us that “the state” doesn’t like it.  We have the 20th century example of misty poets, who wrote on two levels, one for casual observers, conforming to the state narrative; the other, secret and perhaps terrifying messaging for people ready to understand.  No doubt, the Straussian idea of esoteric understanding falls in this category; one message for the many, and a secret hidden message for the few who can interpret it.

Happily, we don’t need to huddle over obscure texts, incessantly monitor our political leadership for signs of sanity, or be lectured to about “4D chess” and “trust the plan.” All of this implies a human-designed centralized control system.  It conditions us to obey, to serve the state, and to accept proto-totalitarianism.

When a country, a business or a person exercises public independence from the US Empire and its cohorts, they become targets for destruction.  Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, and Iran, Russia and China have all been on the bloody receiving end of the imperial drive to control and exploit.  But Intel simply decided to follow a path of future prosperity; Sweden is simply aligning its internal and external code. Quietly, both acts subvert empire; brilliantly, any imperial response will be an own goal.

Just being ourselves, we the people are the primary threat to the state.  Even when we simply ask it to do better, it becomes enraged!  The best survival plan its luminaries can come up with is to cede the world to idiocracy-style programming, then run and hide in a bunker somewhere.

States and empires produce slavery at worst, and peonage as a rule. But as the center rots and its institutions hollow, the American Empire has unintentionally driven both its opponents and its victims to be tougher, more cynical, more perceptive, quicker to act, and more skilled and creative in the use of the world’s greatest technologies than any of our politicians, or their allied billionaires and financiers.

The political education of Elon Musk took less than a year; hundreds of millions of people have spent decades “serving empire” and now realize there is a whole bright and wonderful world out there – and all of us calmly aim to make that part of the world even bigger.

Like blind men describing the elephant, we all know something different and unique about how the state operates, the crimes it commits, the secrets it keeps, and the lies it tells.  Some would say this fragmentation of knowledge is why we can’t “fix it!”

But do we really need a future strong leader to fight the state, a bold new party to compete for power under the rigged system that allows us to “choose?”  Or might we instead – today, and tomorrow, and every day – simply try to align our own public and private values, and exercise our own personal sovereignty for peace and prosperity?

The post Doing Our Part To End the Empire appeared first on LewRockwell.

They both blame ‘the other side’, when, actually, EACH of the ‘two sides’ (which together constitute the entire public) is being controlled by the mere thousand-or-so super-wealthy few individuals who — because of their control over the ‘news’-media, politicians, think tanks, etc. — effectively control public opinion, and so control the Government in this ‘democracy’ and benefit from it even when the public (both the liberals and the conservatives) are being harmed by it. Those ‘two sides’ blame each other — INSTEAD OF blaming only the billionaires (who, collectively, on both the conservative and the liberal side, benefit enormously FROM these policies — which harm the public).

Here’s an example of this deception, on the conservative side, on July 11th, from Zero Hedge, “JPM CEO Jamie Dimon Unloads On Democrats: ‘Idiots’ Obsessed With Failed Wokeism”:

The inconvenient truth for Democrats is that there is still no bottom in sight, as the party of leftist radicals doubles, triples, and quadruples down on diversity, equity, inclusion, all things woke, and most alarmingly, a rapid descent into embracing Marxist ideas. That’s why rational people have been jumping ship from the imploding party. Just look at the tech bros who voted for President Trump and how the right side of the political spectrum reformatted itself with a relatable message: ‘America First’…

On Thursday, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon spoke at a foreign ministry event in Dublin, blasting the Democratic Party for going off the deep end with DEI, gender politics, and a series of failed policies that he said have harmed the country. “I have a lot of friends who are Democrats, and they’re idiots,” Dimon said at the event.

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Holy. Shit.

Jamie Dimon on Democrats today:

“I have a lot of friends who are Democrats today, and they’re idiots. I always say they have big hearts and little brains. They do not understand how the real world works. Almost every single policy they rolled out has failed.”

“I always say they have big hearts and little brains. They do not understand how the real world works. Almost every single policy rolled out failed.” Dimon continued, “They overdid DEI …. We all were devoted to reaching out to the Black community, Hispanic, the LGBT community, the disabled — we do all of that. But to the extent, they gotta stop it. And they gotta go back to being more practical. They’re very ideological.”

He described himself as “barely a Democrat” since the party of woke has fallen into the abyss. His criticism of the Democratic Party also extended to politics in New York City — particularly Manhattan, where the bank is headquartered — which now faces the possibility of a Marxist becoming mayor later this year.

“Barely a Democrat”? Please. Dimon was a full-blown kneeler not long ago…

Rudy Havenstein, Senior Markets Commentator.

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Replying to @RudyHavenstein

Jamie Dimon kneeling on a taxpayer.

“This guy [Zohran Mamdani] just got elected — he’s more of a Marxist than a socialist, and now you see these Democrats falling all over themselves saying, ‘Well, he’s pointing out some real problems, affordable housing and grocery prices.’ OK, maybe,” Dimon said. “There’s the same ideological mush that means nothing in the real world.”

Dimon’s criticism of the Democratic Party is nothing new. In late May, the CEO blasted Democrats for the border invasion they facilitated over the Biden-Harris regime’s first term.

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JAMIE DIMON: “I call it blue tape. Republicans generally don’t like red tape … But most Democrats, they love it. They want more of it and they want to make it so confusing you can’t even meet the rules, so you get punished and fined afterwards.”

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12:30 PM · May 31, 2025

“If you do not control the borders, you are going to destroy our country … Now that they are sending migrants into New York … all my super liberal friends realize what the problem is,” Dimon told CNBC last year.

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JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon: “If you do not control the borders, you are going to destroy our country … Now that they are sending migrants into New York … all my super liberal friends realize what the problem is.”

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1:16 PM · Sep 25, 2024

Dimon’s criticism signals that the party of leftist radicals is nowhere near a reset. In fact, it has gone further off course — doubling, even tripling down on failed policies that are driving more of its own supporters to jump ship and align with the America First movement.

Jason Curtis Anderson from One City Rising highlights just how far off course Zohran and the Democratic Party have gone (and spoiler alert: it’s bad):

Zohran’s worldview is shaped by his father, who has dedicated his life to promoting anti-Western values and decolonization—a field in which he is regarded as a thought leader.

Marxism has become the philosophy of the “death to America” class, …

The conservatives allege that there is nothing on the left that is not Marxist. They do this because Karl Marx was so stupid that he blamed society’s problems on “the bourgeoisie” or middle class INSTEAD of on the aristocracy (the billionaires), and he even advocated for the extremely stupid labor theory of value, whose empirical falsehood guarantees the failure of any Marxist economy. But conservatives are so stupid as to fall for that ridiculous lie-based attack against ALL of the left (that attack’s presumption that there is no leftist other than Marxist ones).

And here’s an example of this deception on the liberal side, on July 12th, from The Daily Beast, “Plea Deal for 9/11 Mastermind Tossed in Trash”:

A plea deal that would have meant life in prison for accused 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was tossed out by a federal appeals court Friday.

In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “indisputably” acted within his authority when he nixed the deal last August.

“Having properly assumed the convening authority, the Secretary determined that the ‘families and the American public deserve the opportunity to see military commission trials carried out.’ The Secretary acted within the bounds of his legal authority, and we decline to second-guess his judgment,” wrote Judges Patricia Millett and Neomi Rao, appointees of former President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump, respectively. …

The deal had been struck, a senior law enforcement official close to the situation told the Daily Beast, due to concerns from the defense and victims’ families that it might not be legally feasible for the Osama bin Laden confidant to get the death penalty amid claims he was tortured while in custody. …

That article lies by pretending that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was guilty of having planned the 9/11 attacks, though the only ‘evidence’ the U.S. Government has that he did is that after he had been waterboarded 183 times, he signed a confession that he had planned those attacks. It was not willingly said by him but had been ONLY under that (ever since 1929) internationally recognized form of “torture” extracted from him by the U.S. Government — the Government BY America’s billionaires (not by America’s conservatives, and not by America’s liberals, but by America’s billionaires — both the conservative ones and the liberal ones). The U.S. Government has no legal case against him but is keeping him in prison incommunicado until he dies, so that he will never be allowed to say to the public what his case is. His case has not been, and will not be, made public; only the U.S. Government’s ‘case’ (which is an entirely illegal ‘case’ instead of an actual “case”) has been made public.

Consequently: America is a dictatorship by America’s billionaires — NOT by “conservatives” nor by “liberals” — but this is instead a Government that is effectively on the basis of one-dollar-one-vote (rule by wealth) instead of one-person-one-vote (rule by the people). And BOTH the liberal billionaires’ media AND the conservative billionaires’ media HIDE this fact FROM the public, instead of to publish it to the people.

The reality is that humans — just like other animal-species — are easy for anyone in the billionaire-class and richer to exploit en-masse on the basis of emotions, simply by hiring tried-and-proven experts at doing this (such as also are hired by corporations that advertise — it’s all about marketing). It’s the professional way to control the public. Billionaires do it all the time. It’s very expensive to do, and requires an enormous amount of empirical studies, tests (such as this), in order to do it so that all parts of an entire marketing campaign will together produce success — produce control in the desired way, the way that the investors intend and fund. When what is being marketed is the Government itself (which creates and enforces the laws), billionaire-class investors will invest whatever they must in order to win what they want. They will and do control the Government, by controlling the voters in this way. They can and do terrorize their sucker-voters by appealing to them on the basis of their irrational fears (such as this Rupert Murdoch smear of Zohran Mamdani as being an ‘anti-Semite’ based on the false assumption that anyone who supports the Palestinians against the Israelis MUST and can only BE an ‘anti-Semite’ — and Murdoch threw in there as a bonus the false idea that Chinese and pro-Chinese people, who are hated also by the owners of the New York Times and whom the U.S. Government is aiming to harm, are plain evil). To be frank about this: since they believe in one-dollar-one-vote rule instead of in one-person-one-vote rule, they (not ONLY the conservative ones but also the liberal ones) actually believe, deep down, that they have a RIGHT to control the Government. (That is a bipartisan belief amongst them, though some of the liberal ones CLAIM to support the one-person-one-vote rule.)

The billionaires are united against the public but have fierce disagreements amongst themselves, and many truly believe that liberal billionaires must be defeated, or that conservative billionaires must be defeated, and their media reflect those discordant views, but this isn’t democratic (or “republican” as Republicans prefer to call it) media; it still is aristocratic media because it represents ONLY billionaires against the public in order to control the public — and that (control of the public by billionaires) is inconsistent with ANY democracy. It is aristocracy instead.

Now under America’s first-ever billionaire President we even have headlines such as, on Politico on July 12th, “Trump threatens to revoke US citizenship of longtime critic Rosie O’Donnell: The president — who has already sought to limit birthright citizenship for the children of some immigrants — has no clear authority to do so.” He doesn’t lose his political base even after illegally using the U.S. Government to get back against individuals toward whom he has personal peeves. Thus far, the U.S. Supreme Court has been allowing him to do such things — as-if we had a continuation of the monarchy that our Foounders overthrew and replaced, but now being an Amrican monarch. They constantly, and increasingly boldly, rape — and get away with raping —our Founders’ Constitution. There is no accountability in the U.S. regime.

If this sounds like a desperate situation for the public, that’s because it is. To fix such a problem requires extreme changes, no merely moderate ones — it requires replacing the present system. I have elsewhere described my view of what that would be. (In any case, it would need to be an even more profound change than that of America’s first Revolution, in 1776, because this one would need to redefine what “democracy” MEANS — and not merely what the nation’s Constitution and laws ‘should be’ in order to supposedly ‘embody’ that Constitution). Getting there would not be easy or quick (nor was it so for the Founders of America). If America can’t make this change — this fundamental change of its system — then this dictatorship by the billionaires will only keep getting even worse than it already is. And who would want that, except the billionaires, and their millions of agents — and fools?

This is why hiding the truth is necessary for both liberal and conservative billionaires, and it’s why they won’t hire or retain agents who won’t comply with that requirement.

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post Both Liberals and Conservatives Lie, Hide the Truth. appeared first on LewRockwell.

This newsletter was created with the goal of helping others, and over time, I’ve received many messages from people with important questions I’d love to answer. However, writing each article takes a considerable amount of time—just as an example, I’ve spent the past month working on the final installment of the DMSO series, and it’s still not quite finished. Because of this, I’m not always able to respond individually to every inquiry I get.

While I truly wish I could, the most practical solution I’ve found is to host monthly open threads. These provide readers with a space to ask any outstanding questions—especially those left over from previous content—and I make it a priority to respond. Having all the questions in one place also makes it easier for others to benefit from those answers as well.

For each of these open threads, I like to tie in a topic I’ve been meaning to discuss—usually something I’ve been thinking about but haven’t felt warrants a full-length article. This time, I want to focus on a topic near and dear to my heart, healthy children.

The Chronic Disease Epidemic

One of RFK’s rallying cries has been that our children are being stricken by an onslaught of chronic diseases and that this is undermining the strength that is our future, and his organization, the Children’s Health Defense frequently references this chart:

Note: that data comes from this study and this study.

Since trends in motion tend to persist unless significant measures are taken to shift them, as a recently published study confirmed, this problem has continued to worsen.

Nearly half of all children receiving care in the PEDSnet multicenter network had a chronic health condition, while one-third of children in the general population experience from 1 to 15 parent-reported chronic conditions. Furthermore, obesity now affects 20% of children, and early puberty is increasingly common among girls, with 1 in 7 beginning menstruation before age 12 years. Temporal trends also showed deterioration in sleep health and increasing limitations in activity, alongside worsening of an extensive range of physical and emotional symptoms.

In turn, the study’s data shows that the rates of these conditions have roughly doubled over the last 12 years.

Likewise, many other things have rapidly gone awry

Note: this study also highlighted a myriad of other issues, such as our children being more likely to die than other developed nations, in large part due to sudden infant death syndrome (a condition strongly linked to vaccination).

The Other Half of The Picture

While I agree with the gravity of these findings and the urgency to re-evaluate our vaccination program, I feel they only tell half of the story. That is because:
• There are many other factors besides vaccines that also adversely affect children’s health.
• All illnesses (particularly those which result from being poisoned) tend to distribute on a bell curve, so that the severe, easy to spot reactions are only a minority, whereas less severe (and harder to spot) reactions are much more common.

To some extent this is recognized, as autoimmune disorders (a frequent complication of vaccination) are much more common than vaccine sudden deaths—but in most cases it’s missed.

On the one hand, this is due to the “measurement” problem in science, where scientific studies can generally only be conducted if they have a clear metric by which to measure things, thereby creating clear, reproducible data. This becomes an issue when an agent has so many different symptoms that it can make (many of which are quite subtle), they typically will be written off as anecdotal unless they are deliberately traced, and as a result, many common side effects of vaccines are never formally associated with them.
Note: the most recent glaring example of this happened with the COVID vaccines where trial participants were only given a small list of (relatively benign) symptoms they could check off (e.g., fevers or fatigue) so as a result, those were the side-effects that appeared in the published trial reports. Likewise, V-Safe, the CDC program designed to monitor vaccine side effects, did the same; however fortunately, it also included a free text field where participants could enter other symptoms—most of which were never publicly analyzed (and which the government fought in court to avoid disclosing). Because of all of this, the majority of the medical field assumed most of the side effects patients reported from the vaccines (despite many others experiencing the same symptoms) were anecdotal and had nothing to do with the vaccines).

On the other hand, it’s because many of these pathological changes are more subtle and more complex to spot, so since people aren’t trained to notice them, and have gradually become habituated to all of it “being normal” they don’t realize how much things have changed.
Note: doctors are virtually never trained to recognize the subtle neurological injuries which follow vaccination (which indicate damage has also occurred within the brain).

The Hidden Chronic Disease Epidemic

For as long as I can remember, many natural healers have told me that they can normally spot the unvaccinated children as they are much healthier and vibrant than their peers. For example, after I explained some of the ways this can be identified, two readers shared:

Thanks to this substack, I am now the unofficial medical godfather of 4 unvaccinated babies across several families. All are incredibly healthy with none of the typical problems associated with the microstrokes. All have been described by strangers and family as, “wow, your baby is really aware and paying attention. It’s like they’re sentient, I don’t know how else to say it”. And I am sad when I see those other people’s babies because I know they were supposed to be more, undergo less suffering when I hear their random high pitched shrieks.

Last year I attended a fundraiser auction to raise money for local Mennonite schools. Many families, many children. I was struck by the fact that there was a light, a brightness, in these children’s eyes that I had not seen for decades in other children. The Mennonites here do not vaccinate. Now I understand. It hurts my heart.

Likewise, I received this email a few weeks ago from a mother who followed all of my suggestions for a healthy child:

Other than a minor rash, my daughter has never had any health issues. She’s been ahead on all her developmental milestones, and from the very beginning, she’s been incredibly alert and engaged with her surroundings. She’s always exploring, and only cries when there’s a clear reason—if she’s hungry, tired, hurt, or not getting the attention she wants.

When we’re out in public, she smiles at everyone and tries to make friends. People constantly stop us to comment on how beautiful and full of life she is—some even ask if they can hold her. It wasn’t until I had her that I realized how unusual that kind of energy is in a baby. So many infants I see seem withdrawn, like they’re in a kind of daze, avoiding eye contact, and often looking genuinely sickly.

I’m incredibly grateful we were spared that, but at the same time, I’ve started to feel increasingly unsettled by what I see around me. I think a lot about what other parents must be going through—especially single mothers trying to raise kids on limited incomes—and I honestly don’t know how they manage.

One of the most challenging things when you “step out of the matrix” is becoming able to see (fairly disturbing) things all around you, and one of the key reasons why I appreciate stories like these three is because they illustrate that’s what’s been hidden right in front of us is at last becoming more and more visible.

Screens and Children

As cell phones and tablets became widely available, I would see more and more parents (who had their children with them) at medical visits using devices to keep their children content. In many cases, if a device was withdrawn, the children would have a fit (at which point the device was returned to them).

This greatly concerned me, as I could see that the way the screens pulled them in was not having a healthy effect on the child’s developing nervous system (which is why I advise parents to use audio-only media, such as small devices that play children’s songs).

Note: quite a few social media executives have said they have tremendous regret about what their products (intentionally designed to be addictive) have neurologically done to our children. Likewise, many articles have been written about how Silicon Valley tech executives send their kids to an alternative school where phones and screens are banned.1,2,3,4,5

In this publication, I’ve written numerous articles on the mass neurological damage being caused by vaccination.

In one, I showed that neurologic damage from vaccination has been a well-known problem for over a century (that previously was widely reported in the medical literature) and that conditions like autism used to be widely referred to as “mentally retarded,” a change I strongly suspect was done to obfuscate the issue (as autism exists on a wide spectrum, so hearing that someone “became autistic” is much easier to push into the back of one’s mind than if a child rapidly “becomes retarded” after a vaccine).

In the other, I highlighted that the original pertussis (DPwT) vaccine was particularly problematic as it would often cause encephalitis (which was often accompanied by piercing screams) and then leave the child with lasting brain damage. One author who studied this extensively made the fascinating observation that after the DPwT vaccine entered the market in the 1940s, a variety of societal changes followed which matched when the initial cohort who received the DPwT vaccine reached each age bracket.

For example, in the 1950s, a condition termed “minimal brain damage” [MBD] was coined (with the defining characteristic of it being hyperactivity), which before long became “perhaps the most common, and certainly one of the most time-consuming problems in current pediatric practice”. The symptoms of MBD (as defined by America’s Public Health Service and the American Psychiatric Association) had a significant overlap with what was seen after encephalitis, DPT injuries, and what was associated with autism.

In the 1960s, Ritalin came into use for treating attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity, and minimal brain damage was gradually phased out and replaced with ADHD (a condition independent studies show a 3-20 fold increase from vaccination).

I mention all of this because I have had a nagging suspicion that something similar is happening with screens, as they both draw in and pacify neurologically injured children. Furthermore, patterns set in childhood are very difficult to shake for life, and as we are now starting to see a variety of signs the first generation raised on technology has a variety of mental health issues linked to their technology exposure, which further argues for avoiding screens at an early age.

Note: the mother I mentioned above said one of their major challenges with her daughter has been keeping her away from screens (as she is drawn to them whenever they are left open), and as a result they are using screens less now.

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Thanks, Mike Sanders.

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Thanks, 19th

The planet’s eighth largest economy (excl. US, incl. CA) makes another move toward sound currency. “[Texas] House Bill 1056, cleared by both chambers in late May, designates properly marked gold and silver ‘specie’ as legal tender in the Lone Star State starting September 1, 2026.  A second phase – launching no later than May 1, 2027—authorizes an electronic payment rail fully backed by bullion stored in the Texas Bullion Depository.”

And not a moment too soon. “Fifty years after Nixon defaulted on gold convertibility, the dollar faces a new reckoning. But this time, there’s no Saudi oil deal, no Volcker rate hike, and no geopolitical consensus to save it. The DXY just posted its worst start to the year since 1973. Central banks are ditching Treasurys for gold. And BRICS nations are building a parallel system to kill dollar dependence.”

Regarding the latter, the weaponization of the dollar seems to have been the last nail in the coffin. For perspective on proportion, 2024 US GDP was $30.51T, for BRICS, $27.94T. If one includes the BRICS+ countries (Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, UAE), $30.72T. Of course, this does not include other nations in the BRICS+ orbit.

The BRICS strategy has teeth. Gold reserves are currently (if one believes any of these data – sources differ wildly) 8,133 metric tons for the US, 5,757 for BRICS, and 6,618 for BRICS+. (Personal holdings in India are estimated to be 25,000 metric tons, currently valued at $2.7T. The annual consumption in India is estimated to be 800 metric tons.)

BRICS+ also has the corner on gold production with 1033 metric tons per annum, compared to 158 for the US (2024 estimates).

And a quick examination of a world map reveals added leverage to this system, as the BRICS++ community (getting more linked with the OPEC+ community by the minute) controls most of the world’s oil production, as well as vital sea gates.

 

The post Texas Greenlights Gold And Silver As Legal Tender appeared first on LewRockwell.

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