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The Singaporean container ship Dali struck Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge at 1:27 a.m. on March 26, 2024. Fortunately, only a small amount of debris tumbled with the bridge into the Patapsco River below, and the deaths were limited to six construction workers. Had this accident occurred at 1:27 p.m. instead, the carnage would have been far greater. As it is, the deaths are still a tragedy, and there will be economic devastation aplenty, given that this harbor will have to be shut down for some time. The coal, autos, and much else shipped through this port will find alternatives in other East Coast states, but moving to these supply chain substitutes will be costly.

Terrorism was ruled out as a cause of this calamity. It appears as though the ship’s electronic system was faulty. The pilot lost control of the vessel and collided with one of the stanchions of the bridge, caving it in.

Is there anything that can be done to preclude such accidents forever in the future? No. Unfortunately not. We are all human beings, and our species is the mistake-making animal. Is there anything that can be done to decrease the probability of a repetition of such an occurrence in the future? Happily, there is: an acknowledgement of private property rights and the profit motive.

These two phenomena can be expected to work pretty well on land. Houses are certainly safer than they would otherwise be, thanks to building codes. But they would be even more protected if, instead, these rules were promulgated by private rating agencies which stood to lose money if they did not excel in this task, and would earn additional profits if they did. Think Yelp and Consumer Reports, or Fitch, Moody’s, and Standard & Poor’s in the financial realm.

Our highways have been safer since the advent of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration than they would have been in the absence of any rules of the road at all. But the number of people perishing annually in roadway accidents (currently 40,000) would be even lower if, instead, our streets and highways were privatized. Then, the road owners would gain or lose profits, in competition with others, based in part on how well they did in reducing fatalities.

But we have no such institutions that prevail on the high seas. Rather, the tragedy of the commons plagues this sector of the economy. I would say that “anarchy” prevails on the world’s oceans were I not a supporter of anarcho-capitalism.

How would privatization of all bodies of water function? Well, if I owned a patch of the Atlantic Ocean, I would charge greater fees to, or perhaps even ban, ships such as the Dali if they didn’t meet certain electronic certifications. Ships that lose power can crash into other boats, and I could be sued by the victims, depending upon the contracts I had with my customers.

With private ownership, there would be no more overfishing or danger of whale extinction. Privatization is the last best hope of quelling the tragedy of the commons.

While we are on the subject of water privatization, the repetition of the Katrina disaster of 2005, which killed 1,900 people in New Orleans, would be rendered far less likely. It was not due to the storm, but rather to the failure of the Mississippi River levees. Party City is situated below the water level, and when that failure occurred, massive flooding took place. Who, in turn, was responsible for that state of affairs? It was the much-vaunted United States Army Corps of Engineers. They are still in business! If this body of water had instead been in private hands, it would be under new management today. If McDonald’s were responsible for 1,900 deaths, it would be bankrupted and we would all be patronizing Burger King, Wendy’s, and their ilk.

Want to save some future Baltimore bridges? Apply to the oceans the very same institutions that work so well on land: private property rights and the profit motive.

This originally appeared on Foundation for Economic Education and was reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Could Privatized Oceans Have Prevented the Baltimore Bridge Collapse? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The yield on the 10-year US Treasury note declined 17 basis points to 4.51%. This was triggered by the US Fed declaring it would reduce the pace of quantitative tightening, implying less selling pressure on term bonds. Was this Powell giving in to pressure to reduce interest rates, without appearing to do so? And if so, was the sharp rally in the yen justified?

Let’s take these two issues in turn. First, yield curve control, or better described as a policy of suppressing bond yields along the curve. The reason for doing this is to make government funding cheaper, and to persuade pension funds and insurance companies that the Fed has interest rates under its control, making the purchase of long Treasuries less of a price risk.

The Fed definitely has an incentive to do this today. Government funding is soaring out of control, and there is increasing doubt in foreign investors’ minds that the US Government is already in a debt trap. Janet Yellen’s and her officials’ visits to China will have dispelled any doubts that this is the case. However, there is little evidence yet that domestic US institutions are of the same opinion as foreign investors, and it is crucial that they be reassured. For the Fed to continue to roll off Treasury debt without reinvesting the proceeds may be responsible from a monetary viewpoint, but simply adds to the funding problem.

Hence, the evidence that Powell is under pressure from the US Treasury to cease tapering US Treasuries.

Powell must be hoping that he can keep interest rates and bond yields at current levels, not only for fear of upsetting the Treasury, but also because of the malinvestments in the private sector. Apart from a blip in 2017—2019 when the Fed funds rate briefly rose to 2.5%, basically it has been almost zero from November 2008 to March 2022. That’s almost fourteen years of supporting zombie corporations and unjustifiable debt leverage in both financial models and bank balance sheets. A rise in interest rates from here is bound to crash the private sector, stocks, other financial assets, and property values as the errors in interest rate management come home to roost. And backstopping all this will be the Fed and the US Treasury.

But the most powerful commercial banker in the world warned in a letter to his shareholders that US interest rates could rise to 8% or even higher. Jamie Dimon is firmly in my camp on this issue. He understands what I do: and that is as banks de-risk their balance sheets, the price of credit rises. In other words, from here it will be markets which control interest rates, and the Fed will have to go along with it.

The flight to quality is disastrous for the overleveraged, stocks, and zombie corporations. The beneficiary short-term will be the US Treasury which can continue to sell T-bills. But this is kicking the can down the road: the US Treasury is reducing its debt maturity profile and in the next few years will find it is taking near-cash out of the market to spend unproductively. The inflationary consequences of this funding becomes more immediate because the involvement of long-term savings (pensions, insurance companies, foreign investors) is diminished. This kicked can cannot travel far.

Part of the inflationary fun comes from the carry trade, which is where I bring in Japan. No doubt the sharp rally in the yen from 158 to 152 and change this week was instigated by carry traders who having shorted the yen sought to cover the risk. But the fact remains that 3-month yen can be had for 0.5% or less, and 3-month T-bills pay 5.39%. Unless the BOJ raises rates, this carry-trade will continue and even accelerate to meet the USG’s soaring demand for credit.

China, Russia, and their BRICS+ cohort can see this, as do the world’s neutrals. They are not going to throw good credit after bad. They don’t want to be blamed for triggering an existential dollar crisis, but there’s no way they will be persuaded to rescue America and her dollar. The only people who don’t see this are domestic American investors and their opposite numbers in Europe, Britain, and Japan.

Reprinted with permission from MacleodFinance Substack.

The post Praying for Yield Curve Control appeared first on LewRockwell.

As a former postgraduate member of Merton College, Oxford University, I receive every year from Merton College a thick, well prepared report replete with color photos titled Postmaster and the Merton Record. The report provides a thorough report on everything associated with the college and present and past members as reported during the year. For example, undergraduate performance and prizes, publications and awards of faculty, concerts, the performance of the various sports teams, social events, reports of marriages, deaths, births, remembrances from past graduates, photographs of the college, gardens, and members, and books on the library’s shelves as if to say that here at Merton we still have the timeless products of Western Civilization in print form on library shelves instead of online somewhere in the cloud. In the current issue, those still alive who attended JRR Tolkien’s lectures provide their memories of this remarkable scholar of ancient languages and storyteller (The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings). It all reminds us that at Merton some semblance, some remnant of Britain’s ancient lineage lingers still among the tower of babel England has become.

No doubt the expense and effort to which the college goes to remain in touch with past members–all of whom compose The Merton Society–has in mind bequests. Little doubt Merton graduates attribute part of their success in life to the preparation that Merton gave them. So the large expense of the preparation and distribution of this report is justified. But for my generation and perhaps the one following I wonder about the impact of the report. Clearly, for my generation the collage is no more. It is simply there only in the buildings and memories. The college is no longer a men’s college. Gowns no longer exist. Merton even has female Wardens (presidents). As far as I can tell, and I am unsure, Oxford colleges are now organized like American colleges where students take courses and are graded on the course and graduate when they complete the designated course requirements.

In my day there were no courses and no course requirements. Unlike the US, a bachelor’s degree was a three, not a four-year, process. A student selected a field–mathematics, science, history, literature, languages, classics, PPE (philosophy, politics, and economics–imagine an American student learning all three in three years!) and was assigned a tutor by the college. The student was handed a reading list and encouraged to attend lectures on his chosen field of study. Lectures were provided by lecturers, senior lecturers, (`I am unsure if Oxford had the next rank, readers, or whether these were only at the “red brick universities”) and professors. If memory serves, in the entirety of Oxford colleges there were only two professors of economics. One was a theorist John R. Hicks, and the other, John Jewkes, was an empirical economist who was a member of Merton.

As there were no classes, the purpose of the Oxford gown was to admit you to lectures. As a student at an Oxford college it was your responsibility to prepare for the exam at the end of three years which would determine whether you got a first, a second, a pass, or a fail. A first was a pass into the City (England’s Wall St) or the civil service and a successful career. The colleges didn’t want any results below a second and so tutors did their best to motivate any students who might come up short on motivation.

When you stood for exams, you knew they would be sent to other universities for grading. In those days, integrity was important, and universities did not want to raise integrity questions by being accused of grading their own students easily in order to give them a push ahead. Standards and honor had to be preserved. In those days a first from Oxford or Cambridge was almost as good as being born into an aristocratic family that somehow still managed to have some money despite the dispossession of the aristocracy by the government.

Today all of this is gone, and it is very sad. My impression, I would be happy to be wrong, is that Oxford and Cambridge have been partly, not totally, placed in the role of selling entry into the First World to sons and daughters of well-to-do Indian, African, Asian, and Middle Eastern families. At times over the years I have noticed that white males have almost disappeared from the photographs in Postmaster, although not in the current issue. The aristocratic class seems to have faded away, and with an Indian prime minister of Great Britain and a Muslim Mayor of London, it is unclear in whose hands the British economy rests. Jaguar, for example, once the dominate power at Le Mans and the creator of what Enzo Ferrari himself declared to be the most beautiful car ever made–the E-Type, a specimen of which resides in permanent display in the New York Museum of Modern Art–has passed through a variety of foreign owners and I am unsure where its ownership resides today.

As readers of the few accurate histories of World War II know, US President Roosevelt used the war to destroy England’s leadership of the world economy and to turn the British into a satrapy of the American Empire. The greatest and most accurate of all WW II historians, David Irving, makes it clear that while Churchill was at war with Germany, Roosevelt was at war with England. It was Roosevelt who won. But don’t expect any Oxford historians to say this.

Reading what I have written, it is clear that these matters have been on my mind for some time as I have been diverted from my intention, which was to remark that the important fact of which the Merton College Record has made me aware is that as women, women have disappeared. Today women occupy male roles. With men’s roles colonized by women, there are no longer any male roles.

The Merton hockey team has more female than male members. When I was at Oxford, rugby was more violent than US football. The 11 member Merton rugby team has 4 female members.

What is my point? Nowhere in the 222 page report is that any woman in a woman’s role except on the childbirth page where female Merton graduates have done the dirty on feminism and become married mothers. But there are very few of them, an insufficient number to keep Briton British.

It is astonishing to me how rapidly the Western World has collapsed compared to the long drawn-out time required for Rome to disappear. One would think that, unlike Rome under pressure from external armies, the West with no one attacking it should be able to prolong its continuing existence despite the West’s lost of belief in itself.

But apparently, this is not to be.

The question of the survival of Western civilization is not raised at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford. Indeed, they all seem to want Western civilization not to continue as they have branded it racist. Nowhere is there university faculty with interest to defend truth and the continuation of Western civilization’s existence.

The foundation of the Western world is the pursuit and defense of truth. When that no longer exists, neither does Western civilization.

The post I Am Exhausted from Watching the West Self-Destruct appeared first on LewRockwell.

A few weeks ago our friends at Catholic Family News had an interesting discussion in which Dr. Brian McCall gave a controversial but important opinion regarding the condemnation of Action franćaise by Pius XI. Listen below at 40:00:

The Biography of Marcel Lefebvre says that the 1926 condemnation of Action française was the “turning point in the history of the Church; from then on the bishoprics were given to left-wing clerics whilst all opposition to liberalism was falsely tarred with the same brush as Action Française.”[1] This was at the very moment when the “Avant-guarde Theological Generation” was arising, which would triumph at and after Vatican II.[2]

I don’t think anyone can argue that the condemnation of Action française was a terrible mistake by Pius XI, which is only worsened by his failure to consecrate Russia, leading to World War II.

But what was Dr. McCall saying? McCall is making the same argument of Jacques Maritain in his book Primauté du spirituel, which served to justify the condemnation in 1927. The fact is, there can be no politics which does not maintain the primacy of the spiritual.

This important truth about post-Liberal Catholic politics is summed up in the person of Charles Murras, the founder and leader of Action française. The man was a lapsed Catholic turned Agnostic. And yet he realised what “New Atheist” Richard Dawkins could admit recently, that he did not want to live in a world that was not at least “culturally Christian.” And so Charles Murras co-founded and helped to lead Action française until the Pope saw that the Church could not support any political movement which failed to place “Jesus is King” at the forefront of everything – from souls to society. And thus, shortly before this condemnation, Pius XI had already done one of his greatest acts as Pope – institute the Feast of Christ the King.

The Meddling of Popes in Affairs of the Laity

But before I draw out the important point McCall makes for our times regarding Trump, I would like to state emphatically that it was Papal interference in the domain of the laity that helped to create a confused political situation, leading to the Avant-guarde generation that triumphed after Vatican II. As I have argued elsewhere, the false spirit of Vatican I de facto suppressed the dogma non definitum of the Two Swords doctrine.

What is the Two Swords doctrine? Before the Liberal revolt, “the Church” was the community of all the baptised, and the laity governed the Church according to the temporal sword, and the clergy governed the Church according to the spiritual sword. This is why we should reject the Liberal phrase “Church and State,” for the very terms negate the Two Swords dogma. No, “The Church” is all the baptised. “The State” is merely the lay rulers of the Church. The Pope is not the Church and the Church is not the Pope.

But beginning especially with Bl. Pius IX, the Pope overreacted to the Liberal takeover. Pio Nono broke with centuries of tradition by disallowing lay participation at Vatican I. Then Leo XIII became the first Liberal Pope to go beyond his authority with Third Republic France, dictating to the laity what should be their political views in the temporal sphere. This led to Le Sillon, which was condemned by Pius X – another Papal interference, right or wrong, in the domain of the laity. And then came the condemnation of Action française – more papal interference – which was immediately reversed by Pius XII.

Thus the nation of France – one of the most influential Catholic nations of the modern period – was constantly swung back and forth by Papal interference in the domain of the laity. As Fimister notes, the doctrine of the Two Swords was understood to mean that the clerics “may intervene in the temporal only ratione peccati, only when the temporal strays from its sphere into conflict with natural or divine law.” Whatever we might think of the defects in Le Sillon or Action française, what grave sin justified the entire suppression of a lay political movement? These were overreactions on the part of the popes of modernity, and because of the false spirit of Vatican I, too many lay rules of the Church – the old nobility – obediently went along with this papal excess. This situation ultimately led to the de facto imposition of Liberalism onto the world’s remaining Catholic nations after Vatican II, when the Vatican was imposing American-style “religious liberty” on nations like Spain, and the laity were laying down as if clerics should be the politicians. This, then, has a direct line to Pope Francis’s attempt to dictate to the world’s governments that the death penalty – the literal temporal sword – cannot be wielded any longer, as Kwasniewski notes in an important essay.

This is why I submit that the problems of the Vatican II era must be dealt with at their roots, which predate that Council by a few generations. Recovering the Two Swords doctrine is critical for this in the post-Liberal conversation among Catholic lay nobility who have become leaders in politics and society. Now, let’s return to McCall’s important point.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Danger of Trump to Postliberal Catholicism appeared first on LewRockwell.

Vitamin B3 comes in two primary forms: niacin, also known as nicotinic acid, and niacinamide (NAM), which is sometimes referred to as nicotinamide. Both forms of vitamin B3 are essential to human health and play important roles in cellular metabolism, converting the food you eat into energy.

These forms of vitamin B3 also serve as precursors for the coenzymes nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADP), which are vital for energy production, DNA repair and cell signaling. Increasing your intake of vitamin B3 as you age may also be useful for supporting optimal health, with research showing it not only improves body composition but also glucose control.

Vitamin B3 Increases Muscle Mass, Decreases Fat and Improves Glucose Homeostasis

A study published in The Journal of Nutrition, Health and Aging suggests getting enough vitamin B3 in your diet could help maintain muscle mass and strength as you age, while also helping control body fat and blood sugar levels.1

The study involved people aged 40 and older, with researchers analyzing information from three data sets: one focusing on hand grip strength, with 3,772 participants, another on body composition like muscle and fat, with 3,279 participants, and a third on how the body handles glucose, or blood sugar, with 9,189 participants.

The scientists looked at niacin intake and other factors like physical activity and diet, then used various statistical methods to see how they related to muscle strength, muscle mass, fat levels, bone health, insulin resistance, blood sugar levels and the risk of losing muscle mass with age, or sarcopenia.

Consuming more niacin was linked to stronger hand grip, increased muscle mass and higher bone mineral content. People with higher niacin intake also had less body fat and a lower risk of losing muscle mass as they age. Further, niacin seemed to help with blood sugar control, showing benefits in reducing insulin resistance and keeping fasting blood sugar and insulin levels in check, especially in people without diabetes.

Vitamin B3 Increases NAD+ and NADP Levels, Leading to Significant Health Gains

One reason why vitamin B3 may be so useful as you age is due to its ability to increase NAD+ and NADP levels. As noted in the blog To Extract Knowledge From Matter, which is inspired by the work of the late Ray Peat:2

“The study is epidemiological and it did not distinguish between the various forms of vitamin B3 available through the diet or supplements. However, it was well-controlled and its findings match the known biochemical effects of vitamin B3, which the study authors cite themselves as the likely reasons for the observed results.

Namely, vitamin B3 increases NAD and NADP levels, which results in improved glucose metabolism as well as higher tissue anabolism (through NADP).”

NAD+ modulates energy production and many enzymes and in so doing controls hundreds of processes in your body including the survival of cells and energy metabolism. NAD+ is influenced on a daily basis by what you eat, exercise levels and more, and also declines with age, leading to changes in metabolism and an increased risk of disease.3

Boosting NAD+ levels may be akin to a fountain of youth, which is where vitamin B3 — as an NAD+ precursor — comes in. Supplementation with NAM has been found to improve insulin sensitivity in models of human diabetes, for instance, and it also decreases oxidative stress and prevents fatty liver.4

It also shows impressive promise for fighting obesity and associated diseases, including stroke, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and certain cancers, which have reached epidemic levels worldwide.5

Writing in The Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, researchers from Tsinghua University, Beijing, revealed that NAM reprograms adipose cellular metabolism and increases mitochondrial biogenesis to ameliorate obesity.6 In a study on obese mice, NAM supplementation led to significant reductions in fat mass and improved glucose tolerance, while increasing mitochondrial biogenesis in fat tissue.7

‘Striking’ Dose-Dependent Effects — But Only to a Point

The featured Journal of Nutrition, Health and Aging study found that niacin improves insulin resistance and glucose homeostasis at doses commonly consumed in the U.S. diet.8 However, it also revealed a strong dose-dependent effect. As reported by To Extract Knowledge From Matter:9

“Perhaps the most useful finding of the study was the striking dose-dependence of the effects it discovered — i.e., for every extra 1 mg/kg of weight of daily vitamin B3 consumed, a person lost 60 g of fat and gained 60 g of muscle. Oh, and if this was not already a spectacular result, the effects of vitamin B3 were the strongest in people with obesity (high BMI), hypertension, or advanced age — precisely the people who need benefits the most.”

The researchers pointed out that high doses of niacin may cause undesirable effects, including promoting insulin resistance. This is due to its dosage:10

“Some previous studies have suggested that niacin promotes insulin resistance, which is a significant side effect when niacin is used as a lipid-lowering drug. The reason for this inconsistent result lies in the dosage of niacin. When niacin is used as a lipid-lowering drug, its daily dose is 2-6 g, which far exceeds the daily dietary dose.”

To Extract Knowledge From Matter further explained:11

“Now, the study did have a cutoff in its vitamin B3 intake range. The maximum intake included in the study was about 238 mg daily. We don’t know if the benefits of vitamin B3 hold beyond those daily intake levels, but animal studies seem to suggest at least the metabolic benefits hold until at least a human-equivalent dose (HED) of 5mg/kg daily.

Since muscle and fat mass are largely a function of the metabolic rate, the study seems to suggest that an intake of vitamin B3 up to 5mg/kg daily may be even more beneficial.

The study does caution that when vitamin B3 is used as a lipid-lowering agent (i.e. in doses of 2g+ daily) negative effects and even reversal of the benefits may occur, so I’d suggest careful experimentation until the optimal daily dose is found, which will probably be different for each person.”

As I’ve explained in previous articles, however, too much niacinamide can backfire. A dose of just 50 milligrams (mg) three times per day will provide the fuel for nicotinamide phosphoribosyltransferase (NAMPT), the rate limiting enzyme for NAD+. Nichola Conlon, Ph.D., a molecular biologist, antiaging specialist and founder of a nutraceutical company that produces an NAD+ boosting supplement, explained in our past interview:12

“The reason the salvage pathway declines with age is because of this one key enzyme. NAMPT actually recycles niacinamide and converts it into NMN [nicotinamide mononucleotide], which then gets converted back into NAD. The rate limiting step, the bottleneck in that process, is NAMPT. And lo and behold, that is the key enzyme that declines as we get older.

Studies have demonstrated that you get a 50% decrease in this enzyme between the ages of 45 and 60. That’s a significant decline considering how important this is for new NAD production. The decline in the levels of this enzyme again correlate with the decline in NAD that we experience.

Many diseases and issues that are associated with NAD decline are found to be because of a reduction in this enzyme. So, it’s absolutely critical to try and improve the activation and expression of this enzyme in the body to enhance NAD. It worked brilliantly to give us high NAD levels when we were younger, so why not restore it back to that?”

Tips for Vitamin B3 Intake

For optimal health, I recommend taking 50 mg of niacinamide three times per day. This dosage has been shown to optimize energy metabolism and boost NAD+ levels, which are foundational for everything else to work. It can be taken four times a day if you space them out. Take a dose as soon as you get up, another before going to bed, and two more evenly spaced between those times.

The problem with taking too much vitamin B3, whether in the form of niacin or niacinamide, is that it might backfire and contribute to cardiovascular disease as documented by the Cleveland Clinic.13 Also, please note that although niacinamide and niacin are both forms of vitamin B3, niacin will not activate NAMPT like niacinamide, so it is best to use niacinamide. Additionally, niacinamide, unlike niacin, will not cause flushing, which is due to a large release of histamine.

It would also be helpful to make sure you’re getting all the other B vitamins, as they too are crucial for good health, including optimal mitochondrial function — especially regular niacin, riboflavin and folate. Decreased mitochondrial function is often due to a deficiency in B vitamins, and that’s easy to fix with a low-dose, high-quality B complex.

As for food sources, vitamin B3 is found in grass fed beef, mushrooms and avocados.14 Vitamin B6 is plentiful in grass fed beef, potatoes, bananas and avocados.15 You can find folate, or vitamin B9, in spinach, broccoli, avocado and asparagus.16 Vitamin B12-rich foods include grass fed beef liver, wild rainbow trout and wild sockeye salmon.

Sources and References

• 1, 8, 10 The Journal of Nutrition, Health and Aging September 2023, Volume 27, Issue 9, Pages 709-718
• 2, 9, 11 To Extract Knowledge From Matter February 23, 2024 (Archived)
• 3 Cell Metabolism, 28 Feb 2018, 27(3):529-547
• 4, 5 The Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry May 21, 2022, Introduction
• 6 The Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry May 21, 2022
• 7 The Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry May 21, 2022, Abstract
• 12 Substack March 28, 2022
• 13 Nature Medicine February 19, 2024; 30: 424-434
• 14 My Food Data, Top 10 Foods Highest in Vitamin B3 (Niacin) April 25, 2024
• 15 My Food Data, Top 10 Foods Highest in Vitamin B6 April 25, 2024
• 16 My Food Data, Top 10 Foods Highest in Vitamin B9 (Folate) April 25, 2024

The post Vitamin B3 Boosts Muscle Mass, Improves Glucose Control appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last week the U.S. House of Representatives, in a 320-91 vote, approved the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (ASAA), requiring the Department of Education to expand the definition of anti-Semitism as demanded by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). This bipartisan measure, expected to be adopted by the Senate, comes at a time when police authorities are seeking to suppress anti-Israel protests that have been raging at college campuses across the country where protesters have been demanding their respective universities divest from support for the Israeli military.

The protests mirror those of the 1980s that called for Washington to divest from the South African apartheid government. In the end, they were successful, as both houses of Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto of the Comprehensive Apartheid Act, which levied economic sanctions against the Republic of South Africa—something the students at Brown University accomplished in late April as they subsequently dismantled their encampment.

The ASAA was decried as a “ridiculous hate speech bill” by staunch conservative Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz:

Antisemitism is wrong, but this legislation is written without regard for the Constitution, common sense, or even the common understanding of the meaning of words. The Gospel itself would meet the definition of antisemitism under the terms of this bill!

Judaism rejects that Jesus is the Messiah and, thus, the divine Son of God. The Sanhedrin—the Jewish body politic—brought Jesus to the Governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, to be crucified for the crime of blasphemy since He called God His Father (Matthew 26:57-68). While the Romans were the ones who materially crucified the Lord, Jews were responsible for bringing Him to Pilate because only the Roman authorities could carry out this type of humiliating capital punishment. And it was not just the Jewish rulers that called for the crucifixion of Christ; it was the crowds of Jerusalem, too, when they shouted: “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” (Matthew 27:22-23; Mark 15:13; Luke 23:21).

As a Christian, more so as a Catholic priest, upholding and preaching on these historical facts does not make me an anti-Semite any more than preaching against any LGTBQ+ legislation makes me a fascist.

The legislation was also opposed by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), a Jewish progressive who is the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. He stated:

This definition, adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance or IHRA, includes, quote, contemporary examples of antisemitism, close quote. The problem is that these examples may include protected speech in some context, particularly with respect to criticism of the state of Israel. 

The IHRA’s website classifies anti-Semitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Aside the ambiguity of the IHRA’s definition, it does not link anti-Semitism to other forms of racism. In addition, the wording seems to be more concerned on silencing critics of Israel than halting actual anti-Semitic threats from far-right white supremacists, as with the massacre of eleven Jewish worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018.

In other words, criticism against the State of Israel, such as the Israeli military offensive in Gaza that has reportedly killed nearly 35,000 Palestinians and injured approximately 78,000, could be deemed as anti-Semitic; or opposition to illegal settlement activity targeting Christian community buildings and land can be deemed as anti-Semitic and punishable under the law.

Read the Whole Article

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Student protests across the United States point to growing disgust among young Americans toward the Biden administration’s “ironclad” support for Israel amid the worst genocide in modern times.

Daniel Lazare is a historian of the U.S. Constitution and politics. He discusses the impact that the relentless violence in the Middle East is having on US politics and the forthcoming presidential election in November. In particular, how the complicity of the U.S. under Biden in the genocide perpetrated by Israel is alienating large numbers of youth as well as many other American voters.

The incumbent Democrat president is counting on the votes of younger citizens as he faces off with Republican contender Donald Trump in a tight election only 4 months away.

Lazare draws a parallel with the 1968 presidential election when an incumbent Democrat White House was lost because of widespread protests against the Vietnam War.

Biden is heading toward a similar fate as protests in universities and colleges spread against the genocide in Gaza that his administration is enabling with weapons supplies and political support to the Israeli regime.

Lazare believes we are witnessing a historic moment of change in the United States where the horror of Gaza is radicalizing American voters to repudiate the imperialist conduct of U.S. power.

“U.S. global power has never been so vulnerable,” he comments as the United States faces its worst internal political crisis since the foundation of the republic in 1776. Lazare points to the failure of the U.S. capitalist system at a pivotal moment when increasing numbers of its young people are more aware and critical of warmongering foreign policy.

As the university protests grow the fascistic response by the U.S. state to crush legitimate protest is only further radicalizing American youth. This is a wake-up call for radical political change in the United States (and other Western states) because all established parties are now exposed as imperialistic and opposed to any form of genuine democracy.

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

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On the 27th of March, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed an executive order which had the purpose of curbing speech deemed as “anti-semitic” on all state-run universities. Unfortunately, speech protection on public universities has been shaky in the past with universities attempting to restrict speech many times with varying levels of success. Supreme Court decision Healey v James 1972 states that “Among the rights protected by the First Amendment is the right of individuals to associate to further their personal beliefs. While the freedom of association is not explicitly set out in the Amendment, it has been held to be implicit in the freedoms of speech, assembly, and petition.” There is a long precedent of courts protecting speech, even what is considered hate speech in the United States. This has previously extended to college campuses, although states universities have challenged this ruling.

The terrible events of October 7 have prompted the Governor to issue an executive decree related to speech, specifically speech which is deemed to be anti-semitic. One can argue the semantics behind labeling anti-zionist speech as anti-semitic speech, but regardless, the First Amendment and court precedent has been clear on the topic. The executive order given by Governor Abbott features language which conflicts with the the First Amendment. In the order, the Governor supposes that the graffiti marked on Texas university campuses was anti-semitic. While of course graffiti or property damage of any sort is unacceptable, the pictures mentioned are not anti-semitic but are anti-zionist. Similarly, any sort of harassment or violent threats of individuals cannot be condoned, but his executive order goes far beyond that. The order essentially strengthens and affirms the state’s ability to crack down on undesirable speech on state campuses. He also orders campus free speech policies to be revised to take into account a rise in anti-semitic language.

The difference between anti-semitic and anti-zionist speech is tricky, full of conflicting definitions and bias. This is why the best policy is to follow the precedent laid out by the Supreme Court. In addition to banning protected hate speech, Texas universities have also curbed speech that may “disrupt the core education educational purpose of a university”. This is of course subjective, as any single faculty member could claim that a person’s speech, or words written on clothing is disruptive. Additionally, the United States has a history of peaceful protests on college campuses and in the public sphere. Restricting these protests is anti-American, and anti-freedom of expression.

One could argue that this sort of speech may make some uncomfortable, or that some may feel unsafe as a result. Supreme Court decision Snyder v Phelps, 2011 should quiet these concerns. This case involved members of the Westboro Baptist Church, and their picketing, specifically that of veteran funerals. Their picketing signs would widely be though of as hateful, and anti-social. The picketers were initially told to dismiss and fined considerably. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, ending with the confirmation that peaceful hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. Additionally, it was understood that even speech which may disrupt in the public sphere is protected, as the picketing took place initially at a funeral. Relating this back to Texas universities, the implications should be clear. Speech in the public sphere, which is not a true threat, is protected by the constitution.

Peaceful protesting in American cities and college campuses is a normal activity and is beneficial for societal dialogue. This is also one of the ways which citizens are able to keep government accountable, especially while the federal state is so expansive. Governor Abbott has claimed to be a defender of freedom and the constitution. As is often the case with politicians, this is virtue signaling, not action. The constitution is clear on how expression is to be protected in the public sphere. The libertarian solution of course may be to support a society which consists exclusively of private property and private communities. If this were the case, every institution could clearly set preferred speech guidelines without violating civil rights. As this is not currently the case, libertarians should recognize the constitution and the importance of the rule of law in society. Governor Abbott would be wise to do so as well, irregardless of donor or voter pushback.

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

The post Texas Governor Abbott Doesn’t Understand the First Amendment appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Why do we borrow our own currency in the first place?”

Stephanie Kelton posed this question in her new documentary, Finding the Money, and a clip of Jared Berstein’s fumbled response to the question has gone viral on social media. Bernstein is the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers to Biden, and so we would expect that he would have an articulate answer to Kelton’s question, but he did not.

Instead of trying to parse his response or explain why he fumbled, I want to provide an answer: the State borrows to expropriate real resources from the private, productive part of society.

When I made this claim on Twitter, one MMTer responded (somewhat) approvingly: “We all agree on this part. The question is how they do it and what the effect is. MMT gets that part right [and] Austrians get it wrong.”

So let me go into a bit more detail. The reason the State borrows money (money that it also has the power to tax and print) is so that it can balance the negative political consequences of its various methods of expropriation.

Murray Rothbard would take issue with the original question as soon as the third word, “we,” is uttered:

The useful collective term “we” has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If “we are the government,” then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also “voluntary” on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that “we owe it to ourselves” (Anatomy of the State, p. 10)

Rothbard was responding to those who downplay the burden of government debt by over-aggregating the groups of winners and losers into one “we.” MMTers, on the other hand, go many strides further by claiming that public debt isn’t a burden at all. For them, public debt is private savings—they literally flip public debts and deficits upside down.

While they describe their framework as providing the “full picture” of government finance, they do not proceed in their analysis (at least not in sufficient detail) by asking what happens when the government pays the people holding the bonds. The money used to pay back the bondholder ultimately comes from taxing and printing, both of which involve expropriation from the private sector.

So MMT’s public-debt-as-private-savings falls apart with just one additional step of analysis. The closest Kelton gets to this insight in her book, The Deficit Myth, is this: “In truth, paying interest on government bonds is no more difficult than processing any other payment. To pay the interest, the Federal Reserve simply credits the appropriate bank account.” Later, she describes that the only potential constraint is price inflation: “Every dollar that is paid in the form of interest becomes income to bondholders. If those interest payments become too large, the risk is that total spending could push the economy above its speed limit.”

And that’s the end of it. Paying bondholders might have negative consequences in the form of excessive price inflation. MMTers don’t connect debt service to their prior claims that public debt is actually private savings because it negates the alleged aggregate benefits of government bonds held by the public. Paying bondholders requires an expropriation from the productive part of society in the form of either taxes or diminished purchasing power, which means public debt is not private savings in the aggregate.

They employ an individual bondholder’s perspective when it suits them and employ an aggregate perspective when it suits them. They see, correctly, that holding a bond means that you can receive payments from Uncle Sam in the future, but then gloss over the costs of Uncle Sam servicing this debt. It’s a perfect example of a violation of what Henry Hazlitt described in 1946 as the art of economics: “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate hut at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”

In Economics in One Lesson, Hazlitt relied on the work of Frédéric Bastiat from 1850. Despite its name, Modern Monetary Theory is full of old errors. The only thing new about it is the jargon they use to do something people have been doing for millennia: disguise the true costs of government expropriation.

Since the State has nothing and produces nothing, everything it does involves expropriation and distortion. The reason it employs a variety of methods of expropriation is because each one has negative political consequences. If any one method is employed “too much,” the politicians and bureaucrats who wield that particular weapon get blamed and can lose their position. Using one particular weapon “too much” makes the State’s expropriation obvious and risks revolt in either soft or hard forms.

Heavy taxation is unpopular. High interest rates are unpopular. Price inflation is unpopular. But if the State can blend taxing, borrowing, and printing in just the right amounts, then they can boil the frogs without them jumping out of the pot.

This insight reveals something about MMT. As much as its proponents brandish accounting tautologies and purely descriptive claims about government finance, in the end it is 100% political. Their framework is about giving the State maximum power—power to expropriate and power to override what would prevail in unhampered markets. This is on full display in their writings and in their new film. They want to revolutionize the way politicians and voters view money and debt for the sake of their progressive agenda. When it comes to climate change, inequality, healthcare for all, and all the other Green New Deal issues, they want a world in which nobody asks about the costs.

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

The post MMT and Boiling Frogs appeared first on LewRockwell.

 

 

di James Bovard

L'amministrazione Biden sta cercando di rafforzare la sua campagna di rielezione silurando le importazioni cinesi. In un discorso del 17 aprile a Pittsburgh, il cuore dell’industria siderurgica americana, Biden ha annunciato di voler triplicare i dazi sulle importazioni cinesi di acciaio e alluminio. I dazi attualmente ammontano a circa il 7,5%. Un comunicato stampa della Casa Bianca affermava: “ Il presidente Biden sa che l’acciaio è la spina dorsale dell’economia americana e un fondamento della nostra sicurezza nazionale”. Questa è l’ennesima prova che, per quanto riguarda la politica commerciale, i politici americani non hanno imparato nulla e non hanno dimenticato nulla.

Biden non aveva promesso di lasciarsi alle spalle le linee di politica stupide? Ricordate l'affermazione di Donald Trump del 2018 secondo cui “le guerre commerciali sono positive e facili da vincere”? Quando Trump impose un dazio del 25% sulle importazioni di acciaio nel 2018 venne ampiamente criticato per aver sovvertito la salute del settore manifatturiero americano solo per tenere in piedi un’unica industria.

Adesso Biden ha raddoppiato la posta in gioco. Il Washington Post scrisse nel 2021: “Una delle iniziative commerciali più controverse di Trump, che ha fatto arrabbiare gli alleati degli Stati Uniti e ha attirato il disprezzo di molti economisti, è diventata un pilastro della politica commerciale 'incentrata sui lavoratori' di Biden”. Ci sono 135.000 lavoratori in questo settore negli Stati Uniti rispetto ai più di sei milioni nelle industrie che usano l'acciaio. Politici e burocrati fanno finta che quest'ultimo numero non esista. Il Post scrisse che “l’amministrazione Biden è determinata a mantenere il proprio sostegno agli United Steelworkers, una forza portante negli stati chiave del Midwest”. I dazi sono diventati sempre più distruttivi; il prezzo dell’acciaio laminato a caldo è aumentato di oltre il 300% e i produttori si sono lamentati della carenza di materiali, dell’aumento dei prezzi e dei ritardi nelle consegne.

I produttori di acciaio sono stati i più grandi piagnucoloni e criminali del mondo commerciale nella storia americana moderna. L’industria dell’acciaio è stata fortemente protetta sin dalla costruzione della prima acciaieria in America nel 1875. Grazie a dazi elevati, Andrew Carnegie progettò il trust dell’acciaio, diventato leggendario per la vendita di acciaio all’estero a un prezzo di gran lunga inferiore rispetto a quello negli Stati Uniti. La US Steel si fece un occhio nero quando il presidente Theodore Roosevelt acquistò acciaio prodotto negli Stati Uniti direttamente in America Centrale, al 40% in meno rispetto a Pittsburgh, per la costruzione del Canale di Panama.

Durante le amministrazioni Johnson, Nixon e Carter, le importazioni di acciaio dall’Europa e dal Giappone furono soffocate dalle cosiddette restrizioni volontarie, che gli stranieri accettarono a malincuore invece di essere totalmente banditi dal mercato statunitense. Ma vietare i prodotti stranieri fece emergere il peggio delle aziende statunitensi. L'allora vice ambasciatore commerciale statunitense, Linn Williams, ammise che nel 1984 gli Stati Uniti erano “uno dei produttori [di acciaio] meno efficienti al mondo”. Il capo della Nucor Minimill, Ken Iverson, osservò nel 1986:

Non appena i prezzi cominciarono a salire [grazie alle restrizioni all’importazione] e le aziende siderurgiche cominciarono ad essere redditizie, queste ultime smisero di modernizzarsi. È solo sotto l'intensa pressione competitiva – sia internamente da parte delle mini-acciaierie, sia esternamente da parte di giapponesi e coreani – che le grandi aziende siderurgiche sono costrette a modernizzarsi.

Ma queste realtà di base non impedirono all’amministrazione Reagan di limitare severamente le importazioni di acciaio dal 1982 in poi. Nel 1984 il Congresso approvò un disegno di legge che conteneva una disposizione sulla scarsità di offerta, intesa “a proteggere gli acquirenti nazionali di prodotti siderurgici da eccessive turbolenze dovute all’incapacità di ottenere forniture adeguate da fonti nazionali”. Ma il Dipartimento del Commercio decise che nessun onere era troppo grande, nessun prezzo troppo alto e nessuna qualità troppo bassa per costringere i produttori americani a finanziare i produttori di acciaio statunitensi.

Nel 1986 lo stesso Dipartimento del Commercio impiegò in media 236 giorni per approvare una richiesta di fornitura scarsa. Come testimoniò Allan Mendelowitz del General Accounting Office: “Uno dei motivi per cui le decisioni hanno richiesto così tanto tempo [...] era specificamente quello di creare ostacoli all’acquisizione di acciaio attraverso il nostro programma”. Il vice segretario aggiunto Gilbert Kaplan, che gestiva tale programma, dichiarò nel 1988 che una scarsità di scorte “non è una situazione negativa. [...] è una situazione positiva”, il che significa che il settore “sta andando molto bene”. La linea di politica federale sull’acciaio conferiva a un solo uomo l’autorità di giudicare se i produttori americani avessero davvero bisogno dell’acciaio che chiedevano. Bill Lane, un alto funzionario della Caterpillar, ci ha ricordato che: “I prezzi elevati dell’acciaio e le carenze indotte dalle quote stavano minando l’efficienza delle fabbriche poiché i processi just-in-time hanno lasciato il posto a soluzioni alternative just-in-case”.

Le quote sull'acciaio dell'amministrazione Reagan distrussero molti più posti di lavoro di quanti ne salvarono. Il professor Hans Mueller ha stimato che esse comportarono la perdita di tredici posti di lavoro nelle industrie che utilizzavano l'acciaio per ogni posto di lavoro salvato di un operaio siderurgico. L’Institute for International Economics ha stimato che le quote costavano l’equivalente di $750.000 all’anno per ogni lavoro siderurgico salvato. Uno studio della Federal Trade Commission del 1984 stimava che le quote sull’acciaio costavano all’economia statunitense $25 per ogni dollaro aggiuntivo di profitto netto dei produttori di acciaio americani.

Nonostante la devastazione economica, nel 1989 il presidente George H. W. Bush estese le quote di importazione dell’acciaio per altri due anni e mezzo. Bush definì l’estensione delle quote un “programma di liberalizzazione del commercio dell’acciaio”, come se la retorica del libero mercato potesse magicamente trasformare la natura di un sistema invece protezionistico. Le quote del 1989 furono ampliate per includere tubi per il petrolio, assali e ruote di locomotive ferroviarie, danneggiando così sia l'industria petrolifera statunitense che i produttori di treni. Con l'amministrazione Bush gli Stati Uniti imposero 231 quote separate che coprivano 500 diversi prodotti siderurgici sulle importazioni di acciaio da diverse nazioni.

La linea di politica siderurgica di Reagan e Bush mise in ginocchio la competitività degli Stati Uniti. L’ex-presidente della International Trade Commission (ITC), Paula Stern, ha osservato: “I prezzi gonfiati dell’acciaio negli Stati Uniti sono stati un fattore importante nell’erosione della preminenza manifatturiera e dell’occupazione degli Stati Uniti dagli anni ’60 alla metà degli anni ’80”. L’ITC ha concluso che le quote di importazione sull’acciaio fecero salire il deficit commerciale degli Stati Uniti, causando un aumento significativo delle importazioni di manufatti contenenti acciaio e una diminuzione delle esportazioni statunitensi di prodotti siderurgici.

I politici che sostenevano il blocco dei porti americani contro l’acciaio estero non hanno mai ammesso che l’acciaio americano fosse ampiamente percepito come di qualità inferiore rispetto a quello estero. Il rifiuto della Ford Motor Company per l'acciaio prodotto negli Stati Uniti durante gli anni '80 era cinque volte superiore a quello per l'acciaio estero. Un sondaggio ITC del 1990 mostrò che il 55% degli acquirenti americani di barre e tondini di acciaio inossidabile valutava la qualità dei prodotti e il servizio clienti giapponesi “eccellenti”, mentre solo il 2% valutava altrettanto positivamente la qualità dei prodotti e del servizio statunitensi.

Ma le follie protezionistiche della fine del XX secolo non impedirono a George W. Bush, il primo presidente del nuovo secolo, di imporre nuove restrizioni sulle importazioni di acciaio. Quando entrò in carica più della metà di tutte le importazioni di acciaio erano limitate dal controllo federale sui prezzi, attraverso sanzioni contro i sussidi esteri o sanzioni contro i prezzi bassi (il cosiddetto dumping). I lobbisti dell’acciaio ebbero un ruolo importante nella stesura delle leggi statunitensi sul “commercio equo”, le quali aiutavano a garantire che la concorrenza estera venisse giudicata colpevole nonostante l’assenza di illeciti.

Anche se all’inizio degli anni 2000 le importazioni complessive di acciaio erano in calo, l’ITC ha concluso che le acciaierie americane erano state danneggiate da una “impennata” delle stesse. L’unico prodotto con importazioni in forte aumento erano le bramme di acciaio: prodotti non finiti acquistati dalle acciaierie americane e trasformati in prodotti finiti di valore più elevato. L’ITC ha sottolineato che le acciaierie americane erano state gravemente danneggiate dalle lastre straniere che avevano volontariamente acquistato e da cui avevano tratto profitto. Non aveva alcun senso ma, poiché era la legge commerciale degli Stati Uniti, non doveva avere senso.

L'amministrazione Bush sapeva già prima d'imporre nuovi dazi che i problemi dell'industria siderurgica non erano dovuti al commercio sleale. All'inizio del 2001 il Dipartimento del Tesoro incaricò il Boston Consulting Group di analizzare l'industria siderurgica statunitense e la situazione mondiale dell'acciaio. L’American Metal Market riferì che lo studio “ha evidenziato le inefficienze nella produzione di acciaio statunitense rispetto ai concorrenti mondiali” e “ha misurato l’efficienza dell’industria siderurgica statunitense, posizionandola nell’ultimo terzo di un confronto globale”. Le aziende siderurgiche statunitensi furono indignate dallo studio, quindi il Dipartimento del Tesoro cancellò quella relazione.

Il 5 marzo 2002 il presidente Bush impose un nuovo dazio del 30% sulle importazioni di acciaio: “Il libero scambio è un importante motore della crescita economica e una pietra angolare della mia agenda economica”. Disse poi come avrebbe protetto i lavoratori americani da quella pietra angolare:

Parte integrante del nostro impegno per il libero scambio è far rispettare le leggi sul commercio e garantire che le industrie e i lavoratori americani possano competere in base a condizioni di parità [...]. Oggi annuncio la mia decisione d'imporre misure di salvaguardia temporanee per dare all’industria siderurgica americana e ai suoi lavoratori la possibilità di adattarsi al grande afflusso di acciaio estero.

Bush invocò le leggi statunitensi sul commercio equo e la “parità di condizioni” e poi annunciò che stava fornendo un sollievo speciale ai produttori di acciaio che non avevano nulla a che fare con le leggi sulle presunte importazioni sleali.

L’amministrazione Bush sapeva che i dazi sull’acciaio avrebbero distrutto posti di lavoro nel settore manifatturiero americano, ma li impose comunque. Il principale consigliere economico di Bush, Glenn Hubbard, “ha pubblicato analisi dettagliate contro i dazi, comprese le perdite di posti di lavoro stato per stato che ha previsto per il settore manifatturiero”, scrisse il Washington Post. Le perdite di posti di lavoro stimate non sono mai state rese pubbliche. Un’analisi economica della fine del 2001, condotta dalla società di consulenza Trade Partnership Worldwide, stimava che “i nuovi dazi sull’acciaio costeranno circa otto posti di lavoro americani per ogni lavoro siderurgico protetto”.

I prezzi dell’acciaio laminato a caldo raddoppiarono tra il momento in cui l’ITC raccomandò i dazi sulle importazioni, nel dicembre 2001, e l’estate del 2002. Anche i produttori statunitensi vennero devastati dalla carenza di prodotti siderurgici, poiché i dazi interruppero il commercio internazionale e scoraggiaribi le esportazioni verso gli Stati Uniti. In molti casi le acciaierie statunitensi infransero i contratti e costrinsero i clienti americani a pagare prezzi molto più alti. La Consuming Industries Trade Action Coalition ha stimato che “l’aumento dei prezzi dell’acciaio è costato 200.000 posti di lavoro americani e $4 miliardi in salari persi da febbraio a novembre 2002”. Un’analisi dell’ITC ha concluso che i nuovi dazi costarono alle industrie consumatrici di acciaio $9 per ogni dollaro di profitti aggiuntivi. Alla fine del 2003, di fronte alle minacce di ritorsioni commerciali europee dopo le sentenze del World Trade Center contro i dazi, Bush li sospese.

Trump ha fatto eco alle follie dei presidenti repubblicani pre-Depressione come Herbert Hoover.  I dazi sull’acciaio e sull’alluminio hanno scatenato ritorsioni estere che a loro volta hanno distrutto circa trecentomila posti di lavoro. Il 7 aprile 2021 la segretaria al Commercio Gina Raimondo ha dichiarato che tali dazi “hanno contribuito a salvare posti di lavoro americani nelle industrie dell’acciaio e dell’alluminio”. Li ha anche giustificati come un modo per “livellare il campo di gioco”. La Raimondo ha continuato la tradizione dei segretari del Commercio rifiutandosi di utilizzare la partita doppia, guardando invece esclusivamente al profitto delle industrie protette. Sfortunatamente l’amministrazione Biden ha considerato quei dazi un brillante successo.

Se il protezionismo producesse competitività, i produttori di acciaio americani sarebbero diventati leader mondiali già da tempo. I dazi sull’acciaio sono una delle linee di politica anti-industriali più sfacciate, un avvertimento eterno sull’incorreggibilità dei politici a caccia di voti e contributi elettorali. Il futuro della politica commerciale è cruciale per il futuro della libertà. Ogni restrizione su un venditore estero è un controllo su un acquirente americano. Non dovrebbe essere un crimine federale che i produttori americani possano acquistare acciaio a prezzi bassi.

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

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Brown University’s cost of the Afghan war project just concluded that America’s longest war cost an estimated $US 2.2 trillion dollars – that’s ‘trillion dollars.”

If we add in George W. Bush’s fake `war on terror,’ Brown’s scholars estimate that the cost rises to US $8 trillion!

Most of this huge amount was financed by loans, not through taxes.  Meaning that every dollar spent must be paid for by borrowing. That means paying interest (raised by taxes) on the borrowed money – $95 billion dollars of taxpayer money that Biden just gave to Israel, Taiwan and Ukraine in a desperate attempt to buy the November election.

Interestingly, the much-ballyhooed war in Afghanistan has all but vanished from the media.  All the CNN generals who postured on TV about the Afghan War have fallen into silence.  They were dead wrong about the war.  The minute Donald Trump ended the Afghan War by cutting off the billions in US money that kept the corrupt US-backed Kabul regime alive, the war ended and the blizzard of propaganda against Taliban abated.  The $2.2 trillion war abruptly became unimportant.

I was blacklisted by top newspapers and TV stations in the US, Mideast and Europe for having predicted that the Taliban resistance movement would win the conflict. I wrote that Taliban was the only legitimate mass political movement in Afghanistan.  America co-opted other groups, like the heroin-dealing Tajik Northern Alliance and some anti-Taliban factions backed by Russia or Iran. The US ended up backing the Afghan heroin trade – which Taliban has completely shut down since it returned to power in Kabul. 

The United States is the most over-propagandized nation on earth.  Americans are barraged around the clock by government propaganda, commercial messages, internet agitprop and pro-war movies.  Even the old Soviet Union was not so flooded by non-stop propaganda. 

Today, we get 24/7 advertising for Ukraine, Taiwan and, of course, Israel.  Women have been a particular target for the anti-Taliban propaganda – the same Taliban that were US allies in the 1980’s, as I saw.  Taliban’s mountaineers are a wild and crazy bunch of warriors.  Everything they believe in runs counter to the overly feminized United States.

The zeitgeist of the Afghan warriors Taliban’s credo is ‘tobacco, guns, and war.’ 

My columns about why war in Afghanistan was a huge mistake made me an object of hate. A former born-again evangelical prime minister of Canada actually sent his flunkies to get my 40-year old column dropped from the nation’s largest newspaper.  He detested what I had to say but apparently lost no sleep over the scores of Canadian soldiers he sent to their death in Afghanistan or the millions wasted on the foolish Afghan War.

Politicians and generals who lose wars and trillions of dollars should admit their folly and resign.  The media that promoted the colonial Afghan war should be rid of the propagandists infesting its ranks.  Today, we see CNN, the New York Times, and Fox, the twin voices of America’s neocons, cheer-leading for the massacres in Gaza.

Instead, those newscasters who shilled for the Afghan War are now busily promoted President Biden’s wars.  They and TV commentators seem to have no shame when it comes to their hugely bloody, expensive errors in Afghanistan.  Nor do we find many commentators or critics who share the least guilt over carpet bombing Afghan villages by B-52 and B-1 heavy bombers.

How many Afghan civilians did we kill?  The Pentagon refuses to release estimates.  The Soviets are estimated to have killed two million Afghans.  I believe the US has killed at least one million.

A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, suddenly we are taking about real money.  Part of the dangerous inflation that today bedevils America was caused by reckless government spending on Afghanistan – as well as Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. 

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These people have to be stopped!

We are talking about the nation’s unhinged monetary politburo domiciled in the Eccles Building, of course. It is bad enough that their relentless inflation of financial assets has showered the 1% with untold trillions of windfall gains, but their ultimate crime is that they lured the nation’s elected politician into a veritable fiscal trance. Consequently, future generations will be lugging the service costs on insuperable public debts for years to come.

For more than two decades these foolish PhDs and monetary apparatchiks drove the entire Treasury yield curve to rock bottom, even as public debt erupted skyward. In this context, the single biggest chunk of the Treasury debt lies in the 90-day T-bill sector, but between December 2007 and June 2023 the inflation-adjusted yield on this workhorse debt security was negative 95% of the time.

That’s right. During that 187-month span, the interest rate exceeded the running (LTM) inflation rate during only nine months, as depicted by the purple area picking above the zero bound in the chart, and even then by just a tad. All the rest of the time, Uncle Sam was happily taxing the inflationary rise in nominal incomes, even as his debt service payments were dramatically lagging the 78% rise of CPI during that period.

Inflation-Adjusted Yield On 90-Day T-bills, 2007 to 2022

The above was the fiscal equivalent of Novocain. It enabled the elected politicians to merrily jig up and down Pennsylvania Avenue and stroll the K-Street corridors dispensing bountiful goodies left and right, while experiencing nary a moment of pain from the massive debt burden they were piling on the main street economy.

Accordingly, during the quarter-century between Q4 1997 and Q1 2022 the public debt soared from $5.5 trillion to $30.4 trillion or by 453%. In any rational world a commensurate rise in Federal interest expense would have surely awakened at least some of the revilers.

But not in Fed World. As it happened, Uncle Sam’s interest expense only increased by 73%, rising from $368 billion to $635 billion per year during the same period.  By contrast, had interest rates remained at the not unreasonable levels posted in late 1997, the interest expense level by Q1 2022, when the Fed finally awakened to the inflationary monster it had fostered, would have been $2.03 trillion per annum.

In short, the Fed reckless and relentless repression of interest rates during that quarter century fostered an elephant in the room that was one for the ages. Annualized Federal interest expense was fully $1.3 trillion lower than would have been the case at the yield curve in place in Q4 1997.

Alas, the missing interest expense amounted to the equivalent of the entire social security budget!

So, we’d guess the politicians might have been aroused from their slumber had interest expense reflected market rates. Instead, they were actually getting dreadfully wrong price signals and the present fiscal catastrophe is the consequence.

Index Of Public Debt Versus Federal Interest Expense, Q4 1997-Q1 2022

Needless to say, the US economy was not wallowing in failure or under-performance at the rates which prevailed in 1997. In fact, during that year real GDP growth was +4.5%, inflation posted at just 1.7%, real median family income rose by 3.2%, job growth was 2.8% and the real interest rates on the 10-year UST was +4.0%.

In short, 1997 generated one of the strongest macroeconomic performances in recent decades—even with inflation-adjusted yields on the 10-year UST of +4.0%. So there was no compelling reason for a massive compression of interest rates, but that is exactly what the Fed engineered over the next two decades. As shown in the graph below, rates were systematically pushed lower by 300 to 500 basis points across the curve by the bottom in 2020-2021.

Current yields are higher by 300 to 400 basis points from this recent bottom, but here’s the thing: They are only back to nominal levels prevalent at the beginning of the period in 1997, even as inflation is running at 3-4% Y/Y increases, or double the levels of 1997.

US Treasury Yields, 1997 to 2024

Unfortunately, even as the Fed has tepidly moved toward normalization of yields as shown in the graph above, Wall Street is bringing unrelenting pressure for a new round of rates cuts, which would result in yet another spree of the deep interest rate repression and distortion that has fueled Washington’s fiscal binge since the turn of the century.

As it is, the public debt is already growing at an accelerating clip, even before the US economy succumbs to the recession that is now gathering force. And we do mean accelerating. The public debt has recently been increasing by $1 trillion every 100 days. That’s $10 billion per day, $416 million per hour.

In fact, Uncle Sam’s debt has risen by $470 billion in the first two months of this year to $34.5 trillion and is on pace to surpass $35 trillion in a little over a month, $37 trillion well before year’s end, and $40 trillion some time in 2025. That’s about two years ahead of the current CBO (Congressional Budget Office) forecast.

On the current path, moreover, the public debt will reach $60 trillion by the end of the 10-year budget window. But even that depends upon the CBO’s latest iteration of Rosy Scenario, which envisions no recession ever again, just 2% inflation as far as the eye can see and real interest rates of barely 1%. And that’s to say nothing of the trillions in phony spending cuts and out-year tax increases that are built into the CBO baseline but which Congress will never actually allow to materialize.

What is worse, even with partial normalization of rates, a veritable tsunami of Federal interest expense is now gathering steam. That is because the ultra-low yields of 2007 to 2022 are now rolling over into the current market rates shown above—at the same time that the amount of public debt outstanding is heading skyward. As a result, the annualized run rate of Federal interest expense hit $1.1 trillion in February and is heading for $1.6 trillion by the end of the current fiscal year in September.

Finally, even as the run-rate of interest expense has been soaring, the bureaucrats at the US Treasury have been drastically shortening the maturity of the outstanding debt, as it rolls over. Accordingly, more than $21 trillion of Treasury paper has been refinanced in the under one-year T-bill market, thereby lowering the weighted-average maturity of the public debt to less than five- years.

The apparent bet is that the Fed will be cutting rates soon. As is becoming more apparent by the day, however, that’s just not in the cards: No matter how you slice it, the running level of inflation has remained exceedingly sticky and shows no signs of dropping below its current 3-4% range any time soon.

What is also becoming more apparent by the day is that the money-printers at the Fed have led Washington into a massive fiscal calamity. It is only a matter of time, therefore, until the brown stuff hits the fan like never before.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

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To be crucified is to suffer and die slowly and agonizingly.  It was a common form of execution in the ancient world.  It is generally associated with Rome’s killing of Jesus and carries profound symbolic spiritual meaning for Christians.  In its figurative sense, it refers to many types of suffering and death inflicted on the weak by the strong, such as the ongoing genocidal slaughter of Palestinians by the Israel government.

Twenty or so years ago when the wearing of crosses by all types of people was the cultural rage, a woman I know said she was thinking of getting one.  When I asked her why, since she was Jewish, she said it was because she thought they were beautiful.  She seemed oblivious to the fact that to Christians they were gruesome but revelatory spiritual symbols, the equivalent of the electric chair or a noose, but linked to the Easter Resurrection and the non-violent triumph over death that is at the core of Christianity.

Her focus on beauty forcibly struck me that secular culture had triumphed in its establishment of an anti-creed creed wherein the pursuit of a sense of well-being and aesthetic tranquility had trumped traditional belief, while it used all faiths in its pursuit of a self-centered nihilism through a faux-spirituality linked to a precious aesthetic of beauty.

Philip Rieff noticed this in the mid-1960s when he wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic:

To raise the question of nihilism, as sociologists since Auguste Comte have done, demonstrates a major change in tone: the note of apprehension has gone out of the asking. We believe that we know something our predecessors did not: that we can live freely at last, enjoying all our senses – except the sense of the past – as unremembering, honest, and friendly barbarians all, in a technological Eden. . . . this culture, which once imagined itself inside a church, feels trapped in something like a zoo of separate cages. Modern men are like Rilke’s panther, forever looking out of one cage into another.

While today those cages would better be described as cells – as in cell phones – Rieff’s point was prescient in the extreme, echoing in its way Max Weber’s 1905 prophecy in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism of the coming “iron cage.”

It would be understandable if you assumed the photograph of the crucifix that precedes my words was taken in a church since its foregrounding before the apse of the Medieval Spanish church of San Martin at Fuentidueña makes it seem so.  It was not, except if you realize that museums have become the modern churches, where people flock to revere art for art’s sake and perhaps to find some consolation they have lost at a deeper level.

Museums that have been built and maintained by the very rich to serve as their own churches to the glory of mammon and their own self-deluded immortalization.

Mammon that has been built on the backs of the poor and working class, just as these edifices have.

Beneath all high cultural institutions such as museums and arts venues like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center in New York, etc., lies the expropriated labor and land of the lower classes, the same classes whose sweat and blood was exploited throughout capital’s historical transmutations from commercial to industrial to financial to create the immense wealth of the super-rich.

There is a reason the nineteenth-century America industrialists such as Vanderbilt, Mellon, Carnegie, Rockefeller, et al. were called “The Robber Barons.”  They were crooks.  They are still with us, of course, aided and abetted by today’s latest billionaire class.  They build and finance the aforementioned cultural institutions as well as own and operate the major institutions of mass communication and entertainment, such as newspapers, television networks, telecommunication corporations, film studios, etc. – the entertainment industrial complex.  In this direct communication capacity, they control the mediation of “reality” to the general population.  They serve the interests of what the great crusading sociologist C. Wright Mills called the power elite in and out of government, of which they are an interlocking part, and through which they move smoothly in a game of revolving chairs.  They operate the great Spectacle for the general population while moving the levers of power backstage.

When he died, Mills was working on a massive book exploring what he provisionally titled The Cultural Apparatus.  He defined this complex as follows:

The cultural apparatus is composed of all the organizations and milieux in which artistic, intellectual, and scientific work goes on and of the means by which such work is made available . . . it contains an elaborate set of institutions: of schools and theaters, newspapers and census bureaus,  studios, laboratories, museums, little magazines and radio networks. . . Inside this network, standing between men and events, the images, meanings, and slogans that define the worlds in which [we] live are organized and compared, maintained and revised, lost and cherished, hidden, debunked, celebrated.  Taken as a whole the cultural apparatus is the lens of mankind through which men see; the medium by which they report and interpret what they see.

Columbia University, where he taught and is today in the news headlines for its police crackdown on student dissent for their pro-Palestinian protest, is one of those elite cultural institutions, a place Mills was never comfortable at and whose colleagues looked at him askance for his critique of the power elite’s warfare state.

Columbia, with its racist history as it saw its elite status threatened by the growth of the neighboring black community in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, and Columbia’s further expansion into these neighborhoods since.

Columbia, like all elite cultural institutions, born in its own mind sui generis and raised to the heights in purity and innocence, but whose foundation is rotten with dirty money.

Yet, as Terry Eagleton recently wrote in the London Review of Books, “This is not the way culture generally likes to see itself. Like the Oedipal child, it tends to disavow its lowly parentage and fantasise that it sprang from its own loins, self-generating and self-fashioning.”  Like Columbia and all the elite universities of “higher learning” –  Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc. – that serve as legitimating tools for the power elite and their mendaciousness, the museums and other well-known arts institutions exert an enormous influence, not only over culture in the high cultural sense, but over the transformation of society as a whole, often in ways that go unnoticed.  Eagleton again:

There’s an irony here, since few things bind art so closely to its material context as its claim to stand free of that context. This is because the work of art as autonomous and self-determining, an idea born sometime in the late 18th century, is the model of a version of the human subject that has been rapidly gaining ground in actual life. Men and women are now seen as authors of themselves . . .

The photo of the crucifix and the apse that precedes my words was recently taken in The Cloisters in upper Manhattan, New York City, where the ghosts of dead religious beliefs prowl about the rooms.  It is meant to present a “chapel-like gallery.”  The Cloisters is a museum owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is now known as The Met Cloisters.  It, and the beautiful 67 acre Fort Tryon Park upon which it sits, was created and financed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. who, according to The Met’s website was fascinated with the past.  “The expert artistry of medieval art as well as its innate spirituality strongly appealed to this philanthropist and collector,” we are told.

Spirituality from the Middle Ages, I will amend, that when it had been transported to the museum was devoid of its living context and could be presented as a gift from a Robber Baron family to the people of NYC who needed to be uplifted by the noblesse oblige kindness of the Rockefellers.  Dead spirits devoid of living inner religiousness who smuggle secret messages to a public hungry for meaning.

Like my friend who considered getting a cross, Rockefeller no doubt found the crucifix and apse that frames it quite beautiful and spiritually uplifting, but not the living spirituality of the criminal Jesus whose message about wealth never informed the Rockefellers’ ruthless exploitation of others on their rise to power.

In years long past, when I first visited The Cloisters, being a native Bronx New Yorker, it was known simply as The Cloisters, even though The Met owned it since its inception in the 1930s.  Before I visited it as a young man, I had the impression it had some religious significance, as the name cloister suggests (early 13c., cloystre, “a monastery or convent, a place of religious retirement or seclusion”).

But I was wrong; it is a museum, a beautiful museum build with stones from European monasteries, churches, and convents transported long ago across the Atlantic and reconstructed on the heights above the Hudson River.  It is filled with medieval art collected by Rockefeller, George Gray Barnard, and other wealthy art collectors.  For those so disposed to wondering what royalty prayed for in medieval days – was it to slaughter as many Muslims as possible in the Crusades? – one can view the tiny prayer book once owned by the Queen of France – and imagine.  Such imagining might cause one to realize how little things have changed and how little things mean a lot.  The trick is to notice them.

Political power needs cultural power to operate effectively.  The elites can’t just slam people around and expect no response.  They need to worm their ideological messages into the public consciousness in pleasing ways.  Writing of Edmund Burke, Eagleton says, “Instead, he recognises that culture in the anthropological sense is the place where power has to bed itself down if it is to be effective. If the political doesn’t find a home in the cultural, its sovereignty won’t take hold.”

Thus, for an example from Hollywood and the pop-cultural realm, we might notice how many movies and TV shows were secretly co-written by the Pentagon.

Another name for this is propaganda

Cultural messaging is where the power elite need to seduce regular people that power is being exercised for their own good and everyone is in bed together.  Soft power.  Nice power.  Power that is disguised as beneficial for all.  Beautiful power.  “Spiritual” power.

As I said, Fort Tryon Park (designed by the Olmsted brothers, sons of the designer of Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted) and The Cloisters are spectacularly beautiful.  Walking through the park on a sunny spring day to reach the museum on its northern end – the flowers and cherry blossom trees dazzling and the Hudson River glistening below – one is overwhelmed by the beauty and grateful to its human gift giver – John D. Rockefeller, Jr.  It takes a little mental stretching to grasp the paradox or the delusional dream of such thankfulness.  But it cuts to the heart of the power of the cultural complex and the ways it works to soften the ruthlessness of its ultra-rich capitalistic controllers.

First they rob you, then they gift you with a walk in the park.

And when you step inside their institutions, you are provided with opportunities to think within controlled parameters, while also getting a whiff of the theatrical nature of your experience.  The whiff is as important as the thinking, for it is a reminder to keep your mouth shut and you too will flourish.  The fraudulence of the cultural entertainment-educational complex can dawn on some who have been invited into the inner sanctums of power and prestige, as it has done presently for many college students (and some faculty) whose consciences do not allow them to sit still while Palestinians are slaughtered.  But if you dare to act upon your sense of being taken for a ride, watch out!   You will be banned from the pleasures that are offered for your acquiescence, as these students are now finding out.

They have rejected that part of the learning experience that George Orwell called Crimestop:

. . . [it] means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.  It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

Sometimes real thinking and conscience win the day, for the power of the elite’s cultural institutions is not omnipotent.  Everyone is not for sale, even those invited into the banquet.  Teach people to think and meditate on history and they just might think outside the cage of your expectations.

While the genocide of the Palestinians is transparent for everyone to see, the leaders of these elite universities, unlike the rebellious students, turn a blind eye to the obvious.  They follow the script they were handed when they accepted their prestigious positions of power, living up to Julian Benda’s famous appellation – The Treason of the Intellectuals.

But “beautiful” power becomes the iron fist when the plebes get too uppity and actually take seriously their studies and rebel as human beings with consciences.  This is the flip side to the hidden messages of the elite cultural institutions.

This two-sided process of hidden and obvious messages operates also in the media complex (see this).   While the so-called liberal and conservative media – all stenographers for the intelligence agencies – pour forth the most blatant propaganda about Palestine, Israel, Russia and Ukraine, etc. that is so conspicuous that it is comedic if it weren’t so dangerous, the self-depicted cognoscenti also ingest subtler messages, often from the alternative media and from people they consider dissidents.  They are like little seeds slipped in as if no one will notice; they work their magic nearly unconsciously.  Few notice them, for they are often imperceptible.  But they have their effects and are cumulative and are far more powerful over time than blatant statements that will turn people off, especially those who think propaganda doesn’t work on them.  This is the power of successful propaganda, whether purposeful  or not.  It particularly works well on “intellectual” and highly-schooled people.

Some people think that if you see more than is apparent when visiting sites such as The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, you are incapable of enjoying the beauty of these “gifts.”  This is not true.  They are not mutually exclusive.  The great African-American scholar W. E. B. DuBois coined a term double-consciousness which I think can be used in this context to describe some people’s experience, not just that of African-Americans.  They see at least two truths simultaneously.  Their unreconciled double-consciousness prevents them from single vision when visiting the power elite’s beautiful creations.  William Blake’s words – “May God us keep from single vision and Newton’s sleep! – inform their perspective.

On the same trip to The Cloisters, my wife and I walked extensively through Central Park, surely one of the most beautiful parks in the world.  It was spectacularly aflame with Cherry Blossom trees and people from all over the world enjoying its pleasures, as did we. I, however, when entering and exiting this paradise, couldn’t help thinking that this park was caged in by the massive apartment complexes of the super-rich elite class, as if to say to the park’s visitors: you can visit but not stay.  We oversee your pleasures.

Max Weber said it well a century ago:

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might be said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post The Hidden Messages of the Power Elite’s Cultural Apparatus appeared first on LewRockwell.

Response to the “antisemitism awareness act of 2023”

What is happening on college campuses and what is being pushed through the Congress

The passage of the “Antisemitism Awareness Act” on May 1, the traditional day for celebrating the contributions of labor, by the House of Representatives, represents a dangerous effort to weaponize the laws and regulations established over the last 150 years to protect citizens against racial discrimination and to use them now to justify the absolute power of a corrupt government, doing the bidding of multinational banks and corporations, to punish anyone speaking out against the horrific actions taking place in Gaza. But the bill is not ultimately about Gaza, or about Israel. It is about giving the government the authority absent from the Constitution to punish citizens for speaking the truth about the illegal and unconstitutional actions of the government, or other governments around the world’.

The current dry run on the campuses of American universities of protests against the Gaza killings was intentionally watered down. It featured students wearing masks, backing corrupt Democratic Party “progressives,” who did not go far in their criticism of the state. It also had the university and the police who had been given instructions not to attack with the brutality that they are capable of in other actions.

The very fact that the campus protests were widely discussed on NPR, a controlled mouthpiece of the multinational banks which entirely ignores all spontaneous actions by citizens, tells us that these student protests were used as cover for passing this bill.

Once the “Antisemitism Awareness Law” is in place and can used to justify massive shifts in the Department of Education, and by extension American elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges and graduate programs, we can be certain that the true steel fist in the velvet glove will get to work shutting down all questions about the special relationship of the United States with Israel not only in terms of protests, but in terms of the content of courses, the text books assigned, and, by extension, in the media as a whole.

And it will not stop there. Once the precedent is in place, all criticism of just about anything can be outlawed, or subject to onerous punishments.

Moreover, there can be no doubt that this law is accompanied by the extension of the secret and top-secret classification system throughout the Department of Education, much as has been done in the Department of Energy and Department of the Treasury over the last few years. In other words, multinational financial entities will be able to give orders for education policy in the US that will be secret, for which it will be a crime (subject to massive fines and jail time) to reveal to the public.

Let us take a look at a few key passages in the Antisemitism Awareness Act.

“An act to provide for the consideration of a definition of antisemitism set forth by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance for the enforcement of Federal antidiscrimination laws concerning education programs or activities, and for other purposes”

[a justification of Federal interference in education at all levels justified by the interpretation of the term “antisemitism” to mean “Zionism” or “Israeli policy.” It is important to note that many of the Republican advocates of these polices embrace the “Great Replacement Theory” that postulates that it is the Jews, and not the rich, who are using immigration to destroy the lives of working Americans. This devious antisemitic political movement is popular among precisely those who are suggesting that attacks on Israel are by their nature “antisemitic.” The term “antisemitic” is but a trial term, a placeholder, for what will be eventually the replaced by the term “anti-American”]

“It is the policy of the United States to enforce such title against prohibited forms of discrimination rooted in antisemitism as vigorously as against all other forms of discrimination prohibited by such title”

[There is no need for a new law against antisemitism. The topic is already addressed extensively in Federal law. The only point is to authorize the use of the term “antisemitism” to suppress free speech]

“(A) increase awareness and understanding of antisemitism, including its threat to America;

[the use of the term “threat to America” expands the definition of “antisemitism” from a civil rights issue to a “national security” issue, and thus justifies the use of secret/top secret classification, and the extended role of Homeland Security, and even intelligence and defense agencies in domestic and international operations against “antisemitism” activities by citizens]

(B) improve safety and security for Jewish communities;

[This phrase is clearly intended to justify new Homeland Security operations and provides authorization for police to do most anything to stop “antisemitism]

(C) reverse the normalization of antisemitism and counter antisemitic discrimination;

[This is a justification for further “anti-disinformation” operations through Homeland Security that can be farmed out to private intelligence, think tanks, and public relations firms]

(D) expand communication and collaboration between communities.”

[This harmless phrase is most likely referring to intelligence fusion centers that will be set up locally and internationally to track any “antisemitism” 24/7 under Homeland Security]

“Antisemitism is on the rise in the United States and is impacting Jewish students in K–12 schools, colleges, and universities.”

[This twisted reasoning implies that stopping antisemitism and protecting Jewish students permits the department of education to issue internal orders regarding teaching, the content of textbooks, the assignment of readings, and even discussion among students regarding Israel and its actions. As stated before, the ultimate goal goes far beyond criticism of Israel. The point is to use civil rights law to create a dictatorship in which criticism is not permitted. This state already exists in most of the corporate world, and government world. It is being extended to education, media, and eventually to all of civil society]

“On December 11, 2019, Executive Order 13899 extended protections against discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to individuals subjected to antisemitism on college and university campuses and tasked Federal agencies to consider the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism”

[This executive order, of questionable constitutionality, empowers “Federal agencies” to take action against individuals and groups for their writings, expressions, or actions because they are “antisemitic]

“The White House released the first-ever United States National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism on May 25, 2023, making clear that the fight against this hate is a national, bipartisan priority that must be successfully conducted through a whole-of-government-and-society approach.”

[The term “National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism” shows the move away from civil rights and into the rhetoric of national security. Such a shift opens the floodgates for the active violation of freedom of speech]

Read the Whole Article

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This article was originally published at Birch Gold Group

World reserve status allows for amazing latitude in terms of monetary policy. The Federal Reserve understands that there is constant demand for dollars overseas as a means to more easily import and export goods. The dollar’s petro-status also makes it essential for trading oil globally. This means that the central bank of the US has been able to create fiat currency from thin air to a far higher degree than any other central bank on the planet while avoiding the immediate effects of hyperinflation.

Much of that cash as well as dollar denominated debt (physical and digital) ends up in the coffers of foreign central banks, international banks and investment firms where it is held as a hedge or used to adjust the exchange rates of other currencies for trade advantage. As much as one-half of the value of all U.S. currency is estimated to be circulating abroad.

World reserve status along with various debt instruments allowed the US government and the Fed to create tens of trillions of dollars in new currency after the 2008 credit crash, all while keeping inflation under control (sort of). The problem is that this system of stowing dollars overseas only lasts so long and eventually the consequences of overprinting come home to roost.

The Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 established the framework for the rise of the US dollar and while the benefits are obvious, especially for the banks, there are numerous costs involved. Think of world reserve status as a “deal with the devil” – You get the fame, you get the fortune, you get the hot girlfriend and the sweet car, but one day the devil is coming to collect and when he does he’s going to take EVERYTHING, including your soul.

Unfortunately, I suspect the time is coming soon for the US and it may be in the form of a brand new Bretton Woods-like system that removes the dollar as world reserve and replaces it with a new digital basket structure. Global banks are essentially admitting to the plan for a complete overhaul of the dollar-based financial world and the creation of a CBDC-centric system built on “unified ledgers.”

There have been three recent developments all announced in succession that suggest the dollar’s replacement is imminent (before this decade is over).

The IMF’s XC Model – A Centralized Policy For CBDCs

The IMF’s XC platform was released as a theoretical model in November of 2022 and matches closely with their long discussed concept of a global Special Drawing Rights basket, only in this case it would tie together all CBDCs under one umbrella along with “legacy currencies.”

It’s promoted as a policy structure to make cross-border payments in CBDCs “easier” and this model is focused primarily on currency exchanges between governments and central banks. Of course, it places the IMF as the middle-man in terms of controlling the flow of digital transactions. The IMF suggests that the XC platform would make the transition from legacy currencies to CBDCs less complicated for the various nations involved.

As the IMF noted in a discussion on centralized ledgers in 2023:

“We could end up in a world where we have connected entities to some degree, but some entities and some countries that are excluded. And as a global and multilateral institution, we’re sort of aiming to, you know, provide a basic connectivity, a basic set of rules and governance that is truly multilateral and inclusive. So, I think that is—the ambition is to aim for innovation that is compatible with policy goals and that is inclusive relative to the broad membership of, say, the IMF.”

To translate, decentralized systems are bad. “Inclusivity” (collectivism) is good. And the IMF wants to work in tandem with other globalist institutions to be the facilitators (controllers) of that economic collectivism.

Bank For International Settlements Unified Ledger

Not more than a day after the IMF announced their XC platform goals, the BIS announced their plans for a unified ledger for all CBDCs called the ‘BIS Universal Ledger.’ The BIS specifically notes that the project is meant to “inspire trust in central bank digital currencies” while “overcoming the fragmentation of current tokenization efforts.”

While the IMF is focused on international policy control, the BIS is pursuing the technical aspects for the globalization of CBDCs. They make it clear in their white papers that a cashless society is in fact the end game and that digital transactions need to be monitored by a centralized entity in order to keep money “secure.” As the BIS argues in their extensive overview of Unified Ledgers:

“Today, the monetary system stands at the cusp of another major leap. Following dematerialisation and digitalisation, the key development is tokenisation – the process of representing claims digitally on a programmable platform. This can be seen as the next logical step in digital recordkeeping and asset transfer.”

“…The blueprint envisages these elements being brought together in a new type of financial market infrastructure (FMI) – a “unified ledger”. The full benefits of tokenisation could be harnessed in a unified ledger due to the settlement finality that comes from central bank money residing in the same venue as other claims. Leveraging trust in the central bank, a shared venue of this kind has great potential to enhance the monetary and financial system.

There are three major assertions made by the BIS in their program – First, the digitization of money is unavoidable and cash is going to disappear primarily because it makes moving money easier. Second, decentralized payment methods are unacceptable because they are “risky” and only central banks are qualified and “trustworthy” enough to mediate the exchange of money. Third, the use of Unified Ledgers is largely designed to track and trace and even investigate all CBDC transactions, for the public good, of course.

The BIS system deals far more in the realm of private transactions than the IMF example. It is the technical foundation for the centralization of all CBDCs, governed in part by the BIS and the IMF, and it is scheduled to go into wider use in the next two years. There are already multiple nations testing the BIS ledger today. It’s important to understand that whoever acts as the middle-man in the process of the global exchange of money is going to have all the power, over governments and over the populace.

If every movement of wealth is monitored, from the shift of billions between governments to the payment of a few dollars from an individual to a retailer, then every aspect of trade can be throttled on the whims of the observer.

SWIFT Cross Border Project – Another Way To Control The Behavior Of Countries

As we’ve seen with the attempt to use the SWIFT payment network as a bludgeon against Russia, there is an ulterior motive for globalists to have a high speed large scale monetary transaction hub. Again, this is all about centralization, and whoever controls the hub has the means to control trade…to a point.

Locking Russia out of SWIFT has done minimal damage to their economy exactly because there are alternative methods for transferring money to keep the flow of trade running. However, under a CBDC based global monetary umbrella, it would be impossible for any country to work outside the boundaries. It’s not only about the ease of shutting a nation out of the network, it’s also about having the power to immediately block the transfer of funds on the receiving end of the exchange.

Meaning, any funds from any Russian source could be tracked and cut off before they are allowed to get into the hands of, say, a recipient in China or India. Once all governments are completely under the thumb of a centralized monetary system, a centralized ledger and a centralized exchange hub, they will never be able to rebel and this control will trickle down to the general population.

I would also remind readers that the majority of nations are going right along with this program. China is most eager to join the global currency scheme. Russia is still part of the BIS, but their involvement in CBDCs is still unclear. The point is, don’t expect the BRICS to counteract the new monetary order, it’s not going to happen.

CBDCs Automatically Require The End Of The Dollar As World Reserve

So what do all these globalist projects with CBDCs have to do with the dollar and its venerated position as the world reserve currency? The bottom line is this: A unified CBDC system completely excludes the need or use-case for a world reserve currency. The Unified Ledger model takes all CBDCs and homogenizes them into a puddle of liquidity, each CBDC growing similar in characteristics over a short period of time.

The advantages of using the dollar disappear in this scenario and the value of currencies becomes relative to the middle-man. In other words, the IMF, BIS and other related institutions dictate the properties of CBDCs and thus there is no distinguishing aspect of any CBDC that makes one more valuable than the others.

Sure, some countries might be able to separate their currency to a point with superior production or superior technology, but the old model of having a big military as a way to ensure Forex and trade favors is dead. Eventually the globalists will make two predictable arguments:

1) “A world reserve currency under the control of one nation is unfair and we as global bankers need to make the system “more equal.””

2) “Why have a reserve currency at all when all transactions are moderated under our ledger anyway? The dollar is no longer any more easy to use for international trade than any other CBDC, right?”

Finally, the dollar has to die because it’s an integral part of the “old world” of material exchange. The globalists desire a cashless society because it is an easily controlled society. Think of the covid lockdowns and the attempts at vaccine passports – If they had a cashless system in place at that time, they would have gotten everything they wanted. Refuse to take the experimental vaccine? We’ll just shut off your digital accounts and you will starve.

This was even partially attempted (think Canadian trucker protests), but with physical cash there’s always a way around a digital embargo.  Without physical cash you have no other options unless you plan to live completely off the land and barter goods and services (a way of life most people in the first world need a lot of time to get used to).

I believe that a sizable percentage of the American populace will go to war before they accept a cashless society, but in the meantime, there is still the inevitability of a dollar crash to deal with. Globalist organizations are pushing CBDCs to go active VERY quickly, and as this happens along with the centralized ledgers the traditional dollar will swiftly lose favor. This means that those trillions in greenbacks held overseas will start flooding back into America all at once causing an inflationary disaster well beyond what we are witnessing today.

As much as the economy has benefited from world reserve status in the past it will suffer equally as the dollar fades, only to be replaced by a framework even worse than fiat. That is, unless there’s a dramatic upheaval that removes the globalist order from the equation entirely…

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

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“Resentful childless harpies unconsciously longing for domination. Why else worship at the altar of Hamas? Why else would it be so overwhelmingly female?” — Dr. Jordan Peterson

Wasn’t it cute how the youngsters who “occupied” Columbia U’s Hamilton Hall — and were busy smashing things up inside — demanded restaurant-grade meals sent in to avert “starvation and dehydration” amongst their dauntless ranks? You could imagine a colossal mommy breast with three hundred nipples descending from the sky over upper Manhattan to nourish them back to action. “Feed me. . . !”

It turns out, actually, that at least half the troops inside were not students at all, but rather semi-pro activists paid up to $7,000 each by George Soros’s Open Society Institute and other overtly insurrection-themed orgs, so you’d think that the troops could afford to load-up their ever-ready backpacks with Clif bars and bottles of Smart Water. The order-in food and beverage gambit suggests we should understand that this is not so much politics as the acting out of a game — which is exactly what you might expect of people who spend more time on video screens than in the real world — in which something like a half-time intermission for refreshments is de rigueur.

Alas, they were not obliged with DoorDash servings of Alitcha (“Ensemble of potatoes, carrots, collard greens, and cabbage baked in turmeric,” $22.30) from the nearby Massawa Ethiopian bistro, or Firecracker Chicken from Junzi Kitchen over on Broadway and 113th Street. And then, when the cops came to roust them out into the big buses now used as paddy-wagons for such events, the occupiers were heard to whine, “I have finals and I need to go home!” You’ve got to wonder how they’ll make out when “Joe Biden” drafts their ass to go fight the Russians out on the Ukrainian buzzard flats, about which the White House is just now sending out early signals.

It has been observed that a clear majority of the pro-Hamas activists are young women — which makes sense considering that they are the largest demographic evincing mental illness on America’s social landscape these days. Thus, they are marching in support of a sect that specializes in the rape, mutilation, and murder of young women like themselves, or at least treats them as chattels, hidden under black bag-like garments. The group psychology on display has more occult angles than any movie by the Wachowski sisters.

Among the marching Columbia students who are not paid outside activists, a few are apparently Jewish, such as spokesperson Johannah King-Slutzky (actual name, hat-tip Alex Berenson, who ID’d her), the winsome creature who complained about the lack of order-in meals at Hamilton Hall. Another observer on “X” who styles himself @J9_ATX identified the syndrome in play as “oppression envy,” among women seeking compensatory validation for occupying such a privileged niche on Planet Earth as a cushy Ivy League college — featuring international cuisine stations in the dining halls — while their third world sisters trudge through the burning sands of Al-Kufra carrying water-jugs on their heads as they dodge the odious “wind scorpions” of the region.

Higher Ed in the USA was already chugging down the suicide track before this spring’s eruption of pro-Hamas fury. The college loan racket (government-backed) had the perverse effect of pumping up tuition costs beyond what even many pretty well-off families could afford, while loading up young people with life-wrecking obligations (debt which “Joe Biden” is now shifting onto the creditors, US tax-payers). Decades of DEI have filled the faculties with incompetents and assorted malcontents teaching fantasy curricula with no real-life value, and burdened the schools with cadres of overpaid diversity busybodies and thought-police. Diversity college presidents are very publicly failing to cope. The whole rotten train is going off the rails.

I’m not at all sanguine that the society we are becoming will need this vast infrastructure for babysitting young adults who could otherwise make themselves useful and productive on-the-ground in lines of work that actually keep civilized life going. This is too self-evident now to belabor, though there is an awful lot of confusion about what kind of society we might become.

I doubt that it is to be the utopia of robots, A-I, and non-stop sexual titillation that the techno-narcissists dream of. Rather, it will be a society struggling to keep too much complex stuff running with insufficient energy resources and capital — that is, a society falling apart, losing knowledge, technical know-how, comfort, and convenience while having a hard time feeding itself.

The campus Hamas zealots ironically (and tragically) represent exactly the sort of rough medievalism that the citizens of Western Civ countries would be chary of sliding into. You’d have to sadly conclude that many young people really can’t take much more Modernity, and are now pretty avid to opt out of it, even as they gaze into the magic, glowing pixels of their iPhone screens.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post Nostalgia for the Mud appeared first on LewRockwell.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced he will file a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s April 24 TikTok ban, on First Amendment  grounds.

“This decision is a catastrophe for free speech and a disaster for the thousands of young people who love TikTok and even make their living there,” Kennedy said. He continued, “They say it’s about China harvesting your data. That is a smokescreen. Because you know what? The intelligence agencies from lots of countries, especially ours, are harvesting your data from everywhere, all the time.”

Kennedy added, “TikTok users shouldn’t have to wait until I’m president to keep using TikTok.”

Kennedy’s announcement came shortly after President Biden signed the controversial ban into law. In its initial form, the legislation was passed by the House in March, as reported by The Kennedy Beacon. Under the terms of the newly-signed legislation, the earliest the TikTok ban could start is January 2025, so the platform will be live through the November election.

What is the TikTok ban?

This new law forces the divestiture of the US assets and operational control of TikTok by the Chinese based, Cayman Island-registered company ByteDance. Should the company refuse to divest, TikTok will be shut down in the US. Although the bill cites “TikTok” and “ByteDance” it could be applied against any company “controlled by a foreign adversary” operating a social media app with at least 100,000 users.

According to Demand Sage, TikTok has 1.56 billion monthly users globally and is the fifth most popular social media platform, with roughly 170 million users in the US. Nearly 70% of TikTok users are between the ages 18 – 34.

The new law is both vague and broad in its definition of the terms “controlled” and “foreign adversary.” While short on specifics, it targets any “foreign person” with a 20% or greater stake in a tech company, even if the company is incorporated in the US or majority-owned by Americans. A company could be forced to divest if an American executive at the company is subject to decisional control by a foreign person deemed to be from an adversarial country. The law also applies to companies owned outright by a “foreign adversary,” although the legislation does not provide a list of which nations are considered adversarial for the purposes of future bans.

Public companies and most large private companies have  international stakeholders, thus the law could subject most tech companies to a forced divestiture.

It could also be enforced against people  and entities from beyond China, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela, the six countries officially named by the State Department as adversaries. This of course does not stop trade between China and the US – the two largest trading partners in the world.

Making the passage of the bill all the more puzzling is the fact that there is a long existing enforcement mechanism that the government can take against allegedly maleficent foreign investment via the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). In 2022, there were calls to stop Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter using CFIUS, due to Musk relying on investors from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and China, a strategy President Biden agreed was “worth being looked at,” as reported by CBS News.

Why replicate existing federal powers? Unlike CFIUS which relies on intricate inter-agency cooperation, the new law gives virtually untethered discretion to the president regarding the enforcement of corporate bans. This is why Representative Thomas Massie called the legislation a “trojan horse.”

Read the Whole Article

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The US Congress has become an extension of the Israeli government. We don’t need a president. We have the Israel Lobby.

The US House of Representatives just passed a bill that means prison for any Christian or anyone for that matter who quotes the Bible that says Jesus was handed over by Jews to Pontius Pilate to be scourged and crucified by the Romans.

The bill, which passed 320-91, criminalizes all criticisms of Israel and Jews as anti-semitism. If the Senate passes this bill, I suppose it will end up in book-burning of many works of literature including Shakespeare.

Clearly the majority of the House of Representatives is so much in thrall to the Israel Lobby that there is no hesitancy about normalizing genocide and setting the scene for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

This bill is such an obvious violation of Constitutionally-protected free speech that it tells us that Congress will not come to the aid of free speech as it is closed down everywhere. Will the Supreme Court be too fearful of its own destruction to rule against the bill’s violations of free speech and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment? See this and this.

Glenn Greenwald’s report is very important. Protest has become a criminal act. Freedom in America is dead. The US is a police state, and the police, presstitutes, Christian Zionists, and House of Representatives are very proud of it. See here.

You have to wait through an ad twice before you have the option to cancel ad, and you have to wait for the program to begin. It is a mistake for Greenwald and Rumble to delay his program in this way.

The post Israel Relocates to Washington, D.C. appeared first on LewRockwell.

In the first few weeks following the start of Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza, I brought three messages on the subject. Those three messages are on ONE DVD, which is entitled End-Time Israel.

The three messages on this DVD are:

1. Is The Hamas/Israeli War Fulfilling Bible Prophecy?
2. The Wars Of The Jews
3. Jerusalem Was Ground To Powder Once: Could It Happen Again?

I immediately thought of this message trilogy, and especially the third message, as I watched an interview by Nima Alkhorshid with former U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence Officer and U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter.

What Scott said blew me away.

I know nothing of Ritter’s faith, and I’m sure he has never heard of Chuck Baldwin, but his analysis of the Middle East situation, specifically regarding the future of Israel, was surreal: It was as if he was watching my online sermons.

In that third message listed above, I speculated the possibility that God could be in the process of giving Benjamin Netanyahu over to the same spirit of hate and self-destruction that God gave to the Egyptian Pharaoh at the time of the Exodus.

Of course, most evangelicals erroneously believe that the Zionist state in Palestine is a resurrected Israel of the Bible and is, therefore, permanently and forever the “home” of the “Jews” as a prophetic fulfillment for the return of Christ.

As expected, Mr. Christian Zionist, John Hagee, is beside himself with enthusiasm for an anticipated major war between Israel and Iran.

Pastor John Hagee, founder of the Christians United for Israel lobbying group, said Sunday that Iran’s retaliatory attack on Israel was the start of the “Gog and Magog war” from the Bible and said he’s going to lobby Congress not to “deescalate” tensions and instead support Israel’s war.

“Pastor John Hagee this am says Iran’s missiles are the prophetic start of the ‘Gog and Magog’ war from the Bible (that ends w/ Jesus returning and Jews killed or converted),” Lee Fang commented. “Says he will travel to DC to lobby lawmakers not to ‘deescalate’ and support Israel. Asks for money.”

Fang is right. The whole concept of Scofield’s convoluted concoction known as Christian Zionism/Scofield Futurism/Premillennial Dispensationalism, etc., and its “support for Israel” fascination is in reality a prescription for the introduction of a Jewish Holocaust that would dwarf any and all genocides of human history combined.

According to Christian Zionism, all of this talk of war with Persia and the Arab states is a precursor for the supposed appearance of “Antichrist,” whose plan is to destroy the vast majority of Jews—and only then can Jesus return. Of course, Hagee and his fellow deluded evangelicals are going to be “raptured” to heaven before all of this takes place. Convenient, yes?

But, as I have shown in my Israel and Prophecy messages, Christ’s New Covenant has completely abolished the Old Covenant made with Biblical Israel; in fact, the remnant of Biblical Israel in Jerusalem and Judea was completely destroyed in 70 AD by the Roman army in fulfillment of both Old and New Testament prophecies.

Zionist Israel is a complete counterfeit, and the modern city of Jerusalem is NOT the Jerusalem of the Bible. Under Christ’s New Covenant, the “Jews” are NOT God’s chosen people. God’s elect are people of every race who come to faith in Christ.

Therefore, it is absolutely untrue that modern Israel is promised any sort of “blessing,” “protection” or “perpetuity” in Holy Scripture. Israel is just another pagan antichrist state that opposes Jesus Christ, Christian people and everything the New Covenant stands for. As such, it sits under the judgment and condemnation of Almighty God.

I challenge people to read again the books of the Major Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The vast majority of what they wrote pronounced God’s judgment and destruction upon the wicked, apostate nations of Israel and Judah—prophecies which ALL came true.

The Assyrian Empire completely destroyed Israel (the ten northern tribes) in 721 BC, as prophesied by God’s prophets. The Babylonians destroyed Judah (the two southern tribes), including the city of Jerusalem and the temple, in 586 BC, as prophesied by God’s prophets.

The remnant of the Judahites was completely annihilated by the Romans in 70 AD, as prophesied by God’s prophets, the New Testament apostles, John the Baptist and Jesus Himself.

Bottom line: The covenant with national Israel has been abolished for 2,000 years. There are no more prophecies for Old Covenant Israel. There are no “Jewish signs” portending Christ’s Second Coming. And the Roman city of “Jerusalem” in Palestine today (originally named Aelia Capitolina, meaning “The City of Hadrian and Jupiter,” in 135 AD) has nothing whatsoever to do with the Bible, prophecy or the return of Christ. NOTHING.

Again, Israel has no promise of perpetuity, no more than any other nation. How many countries have ceased to exist over the centuries? Here is a very short list of countries or empires (out of hundreds) that no longer exist:

*Austrian Empire
*Czechoslovakia
*East Germany
*German Empire
*Irish Republic
*Kingdom of Bavaria
*Kingdom of Hungary
*Kingdom of Greece
*Ottoman Empire
*Prussia
*Rhodesia
*Roman Empire
*Russian Republic
*Soviet Union
*Tibet
*United Arab Republic
*Yugoslavia

Question: Did any or all of these countries have a “right” to exist? The answer is a resounding NO! No nation has a “right” to exist.

Rights are gifts from God to individuals. Countries have no such God-ordained rights. Countries have jurisdictional duties and obligations to the individuals they govern (“to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,” Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence), but not rights given by God. All the rights listed in our Bill of Rights are for the American people—NOT the state.

Notice the rights (or freedoms) God gives to His people in His Holy Word: “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” (Mark 16:15). Here we see the right of free speech, the freedom of worship and the right of travel. “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” (I Timothy 5:8) Here we see the right to work, the right to own property, the right to privacy, the freedom of parental authority, the right to self-defense, etc. We could go on and on.

Nations are raised and destroyed by God—as a blessing or a curse.

Jeremiah 18:5 I think Israel’s fin– 10: Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying,  O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the LORD. Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel. At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it; If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them. And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it; If it do evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice, then I will repent of the good, wherewith I said I would benefit them.

As the prophet said, nations are “plucked up” and “pulled down” by God at His Will. The rights given by God to people are NOT given to governments.

So, to the heart of this column: Could Israel cease to exist as a nation-state in the near future, and, if it did, what would happen to the evangelical church?

Here is a portion of Scott Ritter’s analysis in the interview referenced at the beginning of this column:

I think Israel’s finished as a nation-state. I think that they have created the conditions for their own demise.

Israel will never recover from this. And the global isolation will stay forever, because Israel will continue to resist the creation of a Palestinian State.

And so, what’s going to happen is, life in Israel is going to become unlivable. And all these American Jews and all these European Jews that flew to Israel to live in their high rise, to live the nice life, and sip their coffee, and eat their kabob, or whatever they do, Israel’s not going to be able to sustain that lifestyle anymore. So, they’re going to flee by the millions, going back home. And what’s going to be left is the pathetic few, who have nowhere to go. And, therefore, the only route of survival is to be absorbed by a singular Palestinian national entity.

That’s the future of Israel. They did it to themselves. They did it to themselves. Their arrogance, their murderous genocidal policies against the Palestinians has caught up with them.

Israel’s finished. It’s over for Israel. I mean, they haven’t been counted out yet, but there’s no way Israel’s going to survive this struggle. That’s the genius of what Hamas did on October 7. Nobody wants to talk about that genius, but everybody knows that there’s an October 6 reality, and there’s a post-October 7 reality. The post-October 7 reality is: Israel’s finished.

The Israelis today, the political Zionists today who reside in Israel, believe in Amalek! That’s why the prime minister can say it and stay in power! That’s why Israeli soldiers sit there and sing about annihilating the seed of Amalek. It’s their biggest mitzvah. That’s their path to glory; that’s their directive from God: to kill the Palestinian people! That’s why over 60% of them support what’s going on in Gaza. Because they’re all genocidal sick maniacs. And they will continue to be genocidal sick maniacs as long as they have a nation-state that sustains that mentality. A nation-state grounded in the artificial construct of Jewish Supremacy.

There’s no such thing as Jewish Supremacy. They are not the Chosen People of God. They’re humans, just like everybody else. And until the Jews realize that in order to survive, they have to be part of the human race; they have to learn to get along with everybody as equals, not as superiors.

The Jewish people are their own worst enemies. Both those who articulate in favor of Amalek in Palestine and those who are silent as this genocide takes place. If you’re a Jew out there, the best thing you can do right now is stand up against Israel and stop this nonsense. Because otherwise, Israel is going to be the seed of your destruction.

If you have already watched my trilogy of messages on the End-Time Israel DVD—especially the third message—you must have said, “WOW!” as you read Ritter’s analysis.

Will Ritter’s prediction come to pass? Is Israel finished? Will it soon cease to exist as a nation-state? Only God knows.

But suppose for a minute that it IS true, and it really DOES happen. The 64-million-dollar question is, what would happen to the evangelical church?

Who in their right mind would ever again listen to a word of what John Hagee, Robert Jeffress, Franklin Graham, Jack Graham, Kenneth Copeland, Greg Laurie and the rest of these Christian Zionist preachers had to say?

If one day the world woke up and the State of Israel had disappeared—in the same way that the Soviet Union disappeared almost overnight from the list of nations—what would evangelicals do? Without the Israeli state, millions of evangelicals would have no faith. Virtually everything they believe about the Bible depends on that little Zionist State in Palestine. Virtually every doctrine, every teaching, every Bible lesson is intertwined with Zionist Israel.

What would they do? What would they believe? What would happen to their faith?

Think of the books, magazines, Sunday School lessons, sermons, seminary lectures, radio programs, television broadcasts and trips to Israel. Think of all the “prophetic signs” that have consumed millions of hours of discussion and elucidation that would suddenly mean absolutely NOTHING. Think of the “convictions” they have about the “rapture,” the “seven-year tribulation,” the “Antichrist” and even the Second Coming of Christ itself: Everything they have been taught, everything they have believed, everything they have confidently proclaimed to be true would come crashing down on their heads.

What would they do?

Some of them would lose their faith entirely because their faith was a false faith to begin with. Many of Christ’s followers only followed Him because of His miracles; they were never His true disciples. Likewise, many evangelicals have put their faith in the hocus pocus “signs” and “miracles” and “prophetic” euphoria associated with Premillennial Dispensationalism, NOT in the “take up [your] cross and follow me” Christ of the New Covenant.

But I believe that in such a scenario, many millions of evangelicals—after having seen the foolish fallacy of ALL THINGS Christian Zionism—would begin flocking to the true New Covenant Gospel and to the brave preachers who understand and teach it.

If that did happen, it would portend America’s Third Great Awakening. And who knows what would happen after that?

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