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I have just been immersed in an extraordinary experience: a mini-tour of conferences in Brazil encompassing four key cities – Sao Paulo, Rio, Salvador, Belo Horizonte. Full houses, sharp questions, fabulously warm people, divine gastronomy – a deep dive into the 8th largest economy in the world and major BRICS+ node.

As much as I was trying to impress the finer points of the long and winding road to multipolarity and the multiple instances of frontal clash between NATOstan and the Global Majority, I was learning non-stop from an array of generous Brazilians about the current inner contradictions of a society of astonishing complexity.

It’s as if I was immersed in a psychedelic journey conducted by Os Mutantes, the iconic trio of the late 1960s Tropicalia movement: from the business front in Sao Paulo – with its world-class restaurants and frantic deal-making – to the blinding beauty of Rio; from Salvador – the capital of Brazilian Africa – to Belo Horizonte, the capital of the third-wealthiest state in the Federation, Minas Gerais, a powerhouse of iron ore, uranium and niobium exports.

Chancay-Shanghai

I learned about how China chose the state of Bahia as arguably its key node in Brazil, where Chinese investment is everywhere – even if Brazil is not yet a formal member of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

In Rio, I was presented with an astonishing work on Stoics Zeno and Cleanthes by essayist Ciro Moroni – delving among other issues into the equivalences between Stoic theogony/theology and the Hindu Vedanta – the tradition of culture, religion and sacred rituals in India up to the Buddha era.

And in a sort of psychedelic synchronicity, I felt like Zeno in the Agora as we debated the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine at a lovely round pavillion – a mini-Agora – in fabled Liberty Square in Belo Horizonte, across the street from a fabulous exhibition of Treasures of Peruvian Art.

Much to my astonishment, a Peruvian, Carlos Ledesma, flew in from Lima especially for my conference and the exhibition; and then he told me about the Chancay port being built south of Lima, owned 70% by COSCO and the rest by private Peruvian capital; that will be a sister port of Shanghai.

Chancay-Shanghai: APEC in action across the Pacific. Next November, there will be three nearly simultaneous key events in South America: the G20 in Rio, the APEC summit in Lima, and the inauguration of Chancay.

Chancay will be boosted by no less than five rail corridors that may eventually be built – certainly with Chinese investment – from the agribusiness Valhalla in the Brazilian Center-West all the way to Peru.

Yes, China is all over the place in its largest trade partner in Latin America – much to the despair of a Hegemon sending lowly functionary Little Blinken to Beijing to hear the letter of the new law by Xi Jinping himself: it’s cooperation or confrontation, a “downward spiral”. Your downward spiral.

A river from Tibet to Xinjiang

At the Belo Horizonte conference, I shared the stage with remarkable Sebastien Kiwonghi Bizaru from Congo, who supervises PhD programs at the Candido Mendes University as well as being a Professor of International Law, after an extraordinary academic journey.

He is also the author of a ground-breaking book examining the highly debatable role of the UNSC in the conflicts of the Great Lakes – focusing on Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

With top researcher Natacha Rena, we pored over a map of China retracing her travels east to west last year all the way to the Xinjiang border – as she filled me in on the astonishing Honggqi River – or Red Flag River – Project, first proposed in 2017: no less than an attempt to divert water from Tibet to the dry lands and deserts of Xinjiang by building an enormous, over 6,000 km-long artificial river, including the branch canals.

The projected river will be slightly less longer than the Yangtze, diverting 60 billion cubic meters of water a year, more than the annual flow of the Yellow River. Predictably, ecologists in China are attacking the project, which may have already had an official go-ahead and is proceeding discreetly.

And then, as I was on the road between Rio and Minas Gerais, the BRICS 10 Ministers of Economy and heads of Central Banks met in Sao Paulo: and all of them hailed the drive towards “independent” payment settlement mechanisms. Russia is the 2024 president of this crucial group.

Russian Vice-Minister of Finance, Ivan Chebeskov, went straight to the point: “Most countries agree that payment in national currencies is what the BRICS need.” The Russian Ministry of Finance privileges the creation of a common digital platform congregating the BRICS Central Banks’ digital currencies and their national systems of transmitting financial messages.

Crucially, at this BRICS 10 meeting, most members stressed they are in favor of totally bypassing the U.S. dollar for trading.

Russian Minister of Finance Anton Siluanov was even bolder: he said that Russia is proposing to BRICS the creation of an independent and “de-politicized” global system of payments.

Siluanov hinted that the system may be based on blockchain – considering its low cost and minimal control exercised by the Hegemon.

BRICS map the new world in Sao Paulo

A day before the meeting in Sao Paulo, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow supported the development of these BRICS strategies, noting that “if we manage to develop independent financial mechanisms, that will seriously question the globalization mechanism currently led by the West.”

As over 100 nations are currently researching or embryonically implementing a digital currency in their Central Banks, a big breakthrough is imminent in Russia – a process I have been following in detail since last year.

In the end, it’s all about Sovereignty. That was the crux of the most serious debates I had this past week in Brazil, with academic players and on several podcasts related to the conferences. It’s the overarching theme hanging over the Lula government, as the President seems to cast the figure of a lonely fighter cornered by a vicious circle of 5th columnists and comprador elites.

In Belo Horizonte I was presented with yet another astonishing book by a former, brilliant government official, the late Celso Brant. After a sharp analysis of the modern history of Brazil and its interactions with imperialism, he reminds the reader of what stellar Mexican writer and poet Octavio Paz said in the 1980s about Brazil and China: “These will be the two great protagonists of the 21th century.”

When Paz rendered his verdict, every indicator favored Brazil, which since 1870 held the largest GDP growth in the world. Brazil exported more than China, and from 1952 to 1987 was growing at annual rate of 7.4%. Continuing the trend, Brazil would be the 4th largest economy in the world by now (it’s between 8th and 9th, side by side with Italy, and could be the 5th, were not for direct destabilization by the Empire starting in the 2010s, culminating with the Car Wash operation).

That’s exactly what Brant shows: how the Hegemon intervened to crash Brazilian development – and that started way before Car Wash. Kissinger was already saying in the 1970s that “the United States will not allow the birth of a new Japan under the Equator line.”

Hardcore neoliberalism was the privileged tool. While China under Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping and then Jiang Zemin went Full Sovereign, Brazil was mired in neocolonial dependency. Lula tried – and is now trying it again, against all odds and surrounded on all sides, with Brazil branded as a “swing state” by U.S. Think Tankland and potential victim of new rounds of imperial Hybrid War.

Lula – and some solid academic elites away from power – know full well that as a neo-colony, Brazil will never fulfill its potential of being, side by side with China, as prophesized by Paz, the great protagonist of the 21st century.

That was the major takeaway of my psychedelic tour of Tropicalia: Sovereignty. Viktor Orban – accused by simpletons of being a member of a fuzz “Neofascist International” – nailed it with a simole formulation: “The inglorious period of Western civilization will be brought to an end this year, by replacing the world built on progressive-liberal hegemony with a Sovereigntist one.”

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

The post BRIC-o-Rama: on the Road in Brazil, With an Eye on Russia-China appeared first on LewRockwell.

“The physician’s highest and only calling is to restore the sick to health, to cure, as it is termed.”[1]

The reader could be forgiven for thinking that such an aphorism should be self-evident, but when the German physician Samuel Hahnemann wrote these words in 1810, he was asserting a radical departure from the medical practices of his day.

So radical, in fact, that his work would ultimately lead to a revolution in medical care that threatened the livelihoods (and intellectual sinecures) of the established conventional doctors, and a vituperative counter-assault that led to the founding of the American Medical Association (AMA).

When there was a free market for medicine in the United States, patients overwhelmingly chose homeopathy, a complete and principled form system of care, for themselves and their families. The disease, destruction, and death, that marks the state of so-called “public health” in the US now is a sad testament to the suppression of the medical marketplace.

This is not an article about homeopathy, but this debate contains the seeds of today’s crisis. The long-buried story is elucidated by Harris L. Coulter in his scholarly 1973 book, “Divided Legacy: The Conflict Between Homoeopathy and the American Medical Association.”[2]

American medicine was hijacked long before the infamous “Flexner Report” of 1910; without what happened in medicine in the 19th century, the AMA would never have succeeded in monopolizing the industry in the 20th.

Hahnemann attacked the allopaths for abusing and killing patients with ego-driven theorizing and speculative hackwork, and he proposed a alternative system of medicine based on empirical observation and rigorous principles.

The dominant medical view of the 18th and 19th centuries was that disease could be understood mechanistically and reasoned out inductively. George Washington’s famous death is a standard example of these views in practice. His doctors drained over a quart of blood, burned his skin with caustic plasters, induced vomiting, and who knows what else, before he finally succumbed.

The problem for the allopaths, (which was a term they adopted), was that the homeopaths were also highly-trained and respected physicians. The homeopaths were quick to criticize, publicly, the practices (and practitioners) of the day, and to speak directly to the consumer regarding the superiority of their own techniques.

The combination of household adoption of homeopathic treatments by mothers who were loathe to see their children brutalized with mercury (and elated to discover that such diseases as scarlet fever and pneumonia would readily submit to homeopathic approaches), and the unparalleled results of homeopathic physicians in the epidemic of Asiatic Cholera that swept through the country in the middle of the 19th century, led to its widespread adoption.[3] Allopathic physicians began to struggle financially as a result of the competition.

In 1847, they founded the AMA after several decades of attempting to suppress the competition locally; with the establishment of the national organization, the anti-homeopathy faction created a means of forcing the local societies to marginalize non-allopaths by prohibiting membership or even consultation with homeopaths under penalty of fines and expulsion.[4]

One of their main tools for reducing the competition, later supported by the Flexner Report, was to pressure the medical schools not to teach or acknowledge homeopaths, under the threat that their graduates would not be admitted into the society (or licensed). That their primary complaint was financial can be seen in the passage below:

“The dean of the University of Michigan medical department commented [that]…the real issue…was whether the education of homeopaths …was not ‘throwing discouragement in the path of the graduates in scientific medicine, and rendering the struggle for existence more arduous and unremunerative’”[5] (emphasis mine).

The story continues; there is more to be said about the rise of the role of the pharmaceutical companies, the successful influencing of legislatures, and the final concretizing of control that took place with the publication of the Flexner Report, as well as the later effects of government intrusion into medical care through direct finances and manipulation of the insurance market.

However, it is critical to understand that there has never been a time when the purveyors of “conventional, western” medicine were willing simply to allow the best form of medicine to take precedence. In fact, it was the express intention of the agents of the AMA that, “Medical education must function such that [alternatives] will vanish before the meridian sun of allopathy.’”[6]

(The allopaths were explicit; it was always about the money. In 1911, Dr. McCormack, of the AMA, said, “ we must admit that we have never fought the homeopath on matter of principle; we fought him because he came into the community and got the business.”)[7]

They decided they were “The Science,” and then it was just a question of acquiring and maintaining the power to force that onto the populace, regardless of the desires of the patients themselves. The market did decide, and the allopaths didn’t like the decision, so they fought it through politics. It’s a tale as old as time.

As Coulter points out in the introduction, “It is a truism that the practice of medicine is not a purely scientific endeavor. While scientific considerations play their role at all times, the physician is an economic unit competing with other economic units.”[8]

Understanding that the state-sanctioned institutions of medicine were always corrupted is the first step in taking back autonomy over your care. In what ways have we allowed ourselves to internalize the self-serving propaganda of this machine until it becomes our own? We must not be passive consumers.

We must be educated customers of the highest order. Peer-to-peer discussion and review, as well as insistence on access to information and honest debate, are how we begin to determine out what are choices truly are, and how we might heal, in a world where healthcare is governed by institutions with an incentive to keep us sick, as long as it keeps them rich.

The next time you hear a “respectable” professional refuse to debate, or to respond with only derision, because to do otherwise would be to “platform quackery,” ask yourself, “what are the incentives here? And do they line up with my goals?”

There is potential for a spectacularly bright and hope-filled future in healthcare, but we must discard our illusions and our prejudices, and our beliefs that medicine only went bad in 2020.

Our lives depend on it.

—

[1] Hahnemann, Samuel. 1893. Organon of Medicine, 5th and 6th edition, p.53.

[2] Coulter, Harris. 1973. Divided Legacy, The Conflict Between Homoeopathy and the American Medical Association. North Atlantic Books.

[3] https://homstudies.com/academy/some-history-of-the-treatment-of-epidemics-with-homeopathy-julian-winston/

[4] Coulter, ibid, p.181

[5] Coulter, ibid, p.120

[6] Coulter, ibid, p. 192

[7] Coulter, ibid, p. 435

[8] Coulter, ibid, p. ix

The post To Cure or Not To Cure appeared first on LewRockwell.

 

 

di David Stockman

Il tradimento sulla rettitudine fiscale da parte del presidente Johnson potrebbe rappresentare la campana a morto per il Partito repubblicano. Sta rischiando la sua carica di portavoce per $95 miliardi in aiuti esteri che lo Zio Sam non può neanche lontanamente permettersi, e che in realtà non forniscono alcun beneficio alla sicurezza interna dell'America.

Ciò che la Waterloo di Johnson significa, quindi, non è la prospettiva di un'altra battaglia di successione, ma che non ha alcun senso preservare una maggioranza repubblicana e un presidente repubblicano alla Camera, dato che il Partito repubblicano è stato talmente infettato da guerrafondai neoconservatori e politici carrieristi intenti a crogiolarsi in progetti imperiali che il meglio che il caucus repubblicano alla Camera ha potuto fare è stato espellere il precedente deep stater dalla sedia del Presidente.

Il Partito repubblicano è quindi veramente irredimibile. Come disse una volta JFK a proposito della CIA, la sua necessità è essere frantumata in mille pezzi e spazzata nella pattumiera della storia.

Infatti quando si osserva la disastrosa traiettoria fiscale incorporata nelle ultime prospettive fiscali trentennali del CBO, viene davvero da chiedersi cosa stiano realmente pensando le menti in miniatura come quelle del deputato Johnson. Vale a dire, l’ultima relazione del CBO e pubblicata a marzo presuppone che non ci sarà mai più un’altra recessione, né una riacutizzazione dell’inflazione, un’impennata dei tassi d'interesse, una crisi energetica mondiale, una guerra prolungata, o qualsiasi altra crisi immaginabile: solo una tranquilla navigazione economica per i prossimi 30 anni.

Eppure anche secondo i calcoli di questo scenario roseo sotto steroidi il debito pubblico raggiungerà un minimo di $140.000 miliardi entro il 2054. A sua volta ciò farebbe sì che i pagamenti degli interessi sul debito pubblico, con tassi solo 200 punti base più alti di quelli attuali, raggiungano i $10.000 miliardi all’anno.

Non sono necessari paragrafi, pagine e monografie meritevoli di analisi e amplificazioni per capire dove stiamo andando. Il bilancio della nazione è ora sul punto di finire nelle fauci di una macchina apocalittica.

Gli aiuti esteri del portavoce Johnson:

• Indo-Pacifico: $8,1 miliardi

• Israele: $26,4 miliardi

• Ucraina: $60,8 miliardi

• Totale: $95,3 miliardi

Johnson e una buona parte del Partito repubblicano hanno ceduto alla paranoia neoconservatrice, alla stupidità, alle bugie e alle vuote scuse per essere guerrafondai. Per dirla tutta, Putin non ha alcun interesse a molestare i polacchi, per non parlare di assaltare la Porta di Brandeburgo a Berlino. Certamente non è Gandhi, ma è più che intelligente da riconoscere che con un PIL di $2.200 miliardi e un budget di guerra da $80 miliardi non avrebbe senso entrare in guerra contro i $45.000 miliardi di PIL della NATO e i bilanci di guerra combinati superiori a $1.200 miliardi.

Allo stesso modo lo schema rosso di Ponzi cinese da $50.000 miliardi, gravato dal debito, crollerebbe in pochi mesi se il suo flusso di $3.500 miliardi di proventi dalle esportazioni venisse interrotto dopo aver tentato di portare la sua unica portaerei moderna sulla costa della California. E l’Iran non ha armi nucleari, missili a gittata intercontinentale e un PIL pari a 130 ore di produzione annua degli Stati Uniti.

Asse del male? Ma per favore!

Eppure questo è esattamente ciò che il Presidente ha detto di recente dopo aver partecipato a troppi briefing del Deep State ed essersi fatto tirare per la giacchetta. Le creature della Palude vedono sicuramente l'ingenuità e la sfacciata ignoranza del ragazzo come un dono per loro.

Il portavoce Mike Johnson: “Sosterremo la libertà e ci assicureremo che Putin non marci in Europa [...] siamo la più grande nazione del pianeta e dobbiamo comportarci di conseguenza.

Questo è un momento critico, un momento critico sulla scena mondiale. Posso prendere una decisione egoistica e fare qualcosa di diverso, ma qui sto facendo quello che credo sia la cosa giusta. Penso che fornire aiuti all’Ucraina in questo momento sia di fondamentale importanza. Davvero. Credo davvero alle informazioni e ai briefing che abbiamo ricevuto.

Credo che Xi, Vladimir Putin e l’Iran siano davvero l’Asse del male. Quindi penso che Vladimir Putin continuerebbe a marciare attraverso l’Europa se gli fosse permesso. I prossimi potrebbero essere i Balcani o una resa dei conti con la Polonia o con uno dei nostri alleati della NATO.

Per dirla senza mezzi termini, preferirei mandare proiettili in Ucraina piuttosto che i nostri ragazzi. Mio figlio inizierà l'Accademia Navale quest'autunno. Questo è un discorso delicato per me come lo è per tante famiglie americane. Non è un gioco”.

Speaker Mike Johnson: "We're going to stand for freedom and make sure that Putin doesn't march through Europe... we're the greatest Nation on the planet, and we have to act like it"

He confirms Trump supports him and the record-breaking Ukraine funding plan he just introduced pic.twitter.com/uTUjs7rRz2

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 17, 2024

Inutile dire che il portavoce non distingue i Paesi “Baltici” dai “Balcani”, dove la Serbia e gli altri alleati della Russia non tremano riguardo a Putin.

In realtà non è difficile capire che la guerra civile e la disputa territoriale tra Kiev e Mosca sul Donbass e sulla sponda del Mar Nero, da Mariupol a Odessa, siano una questione regionale e che è stata ulteriormente alimentata dall’insensata spinta della NATO verso est fino alle porte della Russia.

Vale a dire, la guerra in Ucraina finirebbe domani senza un altro centesimo di aiuti da parte dei contribuenti statunitensi se Washington accettasse che il Paese deve essere porzionato: da un lato tra ciò che le mappe del 1917 mostravano come Novorossiya (Nuova Russia) a est e a sud, e dall'altro parti e pezzi di Polonia, Galizia-Austria e Hetmanati cosacchi al centro e a ovest; accettare di tenere la NATO fuori dai margini dell’Ucraina al centro e a ovest e poi tutto sarà finito.

Tuttavia la follia della russofobia che impedisce agli idioti come Johnson di avere una comprensione anche rudimentale della questione rivela un grosso problema sul perché la politica estera egemonica di Washington sia un tale disastro, la quale genera incessantemente pazzie come l’odierno spreco da $95 miliardi.

Vale a dire, incoraggia gli stati clientelisti e alleati dell’Impero ad assumere posizioni bellicose nei confronti dei rivali e nemici designati da Washington perché manda aiuti nelle loro casse, armi ai loro eserciti e prestigio/importanza personale ai loro politici e diplomatici.

Davvero i politici di destra polacchi continuerebbero ad abbaiare contro la Russia in assenza della sua adesione alla NATO e dello scudo militare e diplomatico fornito dagli Stati Uniti? Dubito che prenderebbero in giro l’orso russo, ma cercherebbero invece un accordo amichevole con un partner commerciale naturale.

Allo stesso modo la Germania. Quest’ultima era così pietrificata dalla Russia che solo nel 2019 ha speso la somma di appena $50 miliardi e l’1,3% del PIL nella difesa, alimentando logicamente la sua fiorente economia industriale e di esportazione con il gas russo a basso costo.

Ciò che è cambiato da allora non è neanche lontanamente la valutazione della Germania sulla minaccia russa, bensì la sua linea di politica in quanto stato clientelista. Il Partito dei Verdi è entrato nella coalizione di governo con i socialdemocratici che suonavano i tamburi di guerra perché vedevano nell’attacco alla Russia e al gas russo un modo per promuovere la loro orribile crociata contro i combustibili fossili – sapendo che lo scudo militare di Washington li proteggeva.

Per quanto riguarda Taiwan, la cosa è ancora più incredibile. Senza gli aiuti “nell'Indo-pacifico” i leader di Taiwan si recherebbero a Pechino per discutere di una sua transizione a “Hong Kong”. La sicurezza interna dell'America non verrebbe intaccata, anzi verrebbero risparmiati 100.000 militari in Estremo Oriente e il costo multimiliardario del pattugliamento del Pacifico.

Poi ovviamente arriviamo ai $26,4 miliardi per Israele. Si tratta di circa il 4,5% del suo PIL e dovrebbero provenire dalle tasse di guerra, non dalla carta di credito dello Zio Sam. La spesa per la difesa di Israele è costantemente crollata a meno del 5% del PIL, anche se il suo elettorato ha ripetutamente eletto governi bellicosi costituiti da guerrafondai di destra e fazioni religiose fanatiche.

Non solo questi governi di Netanyahu hanno costantemente minato una soluzione a due Stati al problema palestinese – inclusa la benedizione al trasferimento di miliardi di contanti ad Hamas al fine di indebolire l’Autorità Palestinese controllata da Fatah – ma hanno demonizzato l’Iran principalmente per scopi di politica interna. In assenza dello scudo della Marina e dell’Aeronautica americana nella regione, nessun governo israeliano avrebbe mai condotto infiniti raid su questo Paese o sabotato a Capitol Hill accordi costruttivi con l’Iran come l’accordo sul nucleare di Obama.

Israele – Spesa militare (% del PIL)

Infatti senza la donazione annuale di $4 miliardi da parte dello Zio Sam e uno scudo militare regionale ancora più prezioso, Netanyahu e le sue coalizioni estremiste sarebbero stati da tempo cacciati dall’elettorato israeliano.

In fin dei conti ciò di cui Washington ora ha bisogno è una disgregazione dell'Unipartito della guerra. Dopo tutto l'azione suicida di Johnson darà dei frutti. Non come intendeva, ma nel modo giusto di cui la democrazia americana ha disperatamente bisogno in questa difficile congiuntura. Infatti la terribile presa dell’Unipartito sulla politica di sicurezza nazionale ha prodotto pura follia in un unico pacchetto. Vale a dire:

• $95 miliardi in aiuti esteri sono uno spreco che non apporta alcun beneficio alla sicurezza interna dell'America;

• Un’estensione della sezione 702 della FISA che amplia arbitrariamente un affronto già eclatante al Quarto Emendamento;

• Il trasferimento illegale a Kiev di miliardi in asset rubati alla Russia;

• Un divieto in nome della sicurezza nazionale ai video di TikTok, visti in stragrande maggioranza da americani sotto i 30 anni le cui abitudini di visione non hanno alcun valore per i comunisti di Pechino.

Categorie di contenuti più popolari su TikTok in tutto il mondo a luglio 2020, per numero di visualizzazioni di hashtag (in miliardi) | Statista

È già abbastanza grave che non ci sia un briciolo di considerazione informata dietro tutto ciò, ma ciò che è davvero allarmante è che ogni singolo democratico alla Camera (210) ha votato a favore di $61 miliardi all'Ucraina. Ciò includeva un voto di 97 voti a favore tra i cosiddetti “progressisti” democratici, i quali hanno anche votato con un voto di 96 voti a favore per gli aiuti a Taiwan – il cui scopo non è sicuramente un vicinato più pacifico sulla costa del Pacifico.

Una volta i democratici erano il partito della pace. Ora non più.

Allo stesso tempo solo quattordici repubblicani hanno votato contro tutte e quattro le componenti di questo attacco su vasta scala alla libertà costituzionale e alla rettitudine fiscale. Come detto prima anche, l’America sta ora procedendo con il pilota automatico verso un debito pubblico da $140.000 miliardi entro la metà del secolo, ma la stragrande maggioranza dei repubblicani alla Camera sceglie di martellare l’economia americana con maggiore debito per finanziare inutili sprechi sotto forma di aiuti esteri.

In questo contesto è stato il prevedibile istrionismo dello stuolo di guerrafondai neoconservatori nel comitato editoriale del Wall Street Journal a giustificare l'interventismo militare cronico con menzogne e falsità. Vale a dire che la narrativa ufficiale nella Città Imperiale e tra i media generalisti della nazione è talmente sbagliata e moralmente ottusa che travisa completamente una linea di politica  davvero sensibile alla sicurezza nazionale.

Di conseguenza la cosiddetta teoria del “dominio”, residuo della Guerra fredda, dev'essere ripudiata una volta per tutte e sostituita con la dottrina Washington-Jefferson “nessuna alleanza vincolante”. Mi riferisco all'idea del tutto obsoleta secondo cui la sicurezza interna dell'America dipenda da un sistema mondiale di alleanze militari, basi e capacità di proiezione della potenza cinetica che consentono a Washington di funzionare come il grande egemone globale, pronto, disposto e in grado di intervenire in qualsiasi situazione militare che può scoppiare tra gli 8 miliardi di persone sul pianeta.

I quattordici del Partito repubblicano elencati di seguito hanno detto “No” a queste formulazioni pericolose, costose e risibili: né la Russia né la Cina rappresentano una minaccia militare per la patria americana, mentre le guerre per procura e le sanzioni economiche contro gli “avversari” demonizzati dal Deep State indeboliscono la libertà e la prosperità nazionale.

Non vi è alcuna ragione reale e plausibile affinché l’economia americana applichi sanzioni e restrizioni commerciali nei confronti di Cina, Iran o Russia; inoltre non esistono minacce alla sicurezza nel mondo oggi che giustifichino neanche lontanamente l’intrusione dello stato di sicurezza nazionale nei diritti e nella privacy dei cittadini americani.

Tuttavia gli pseudo-intellettuali del WSJ hanno tirato fuori Hitler, Tojo e l’epiteto “isolazionista” come se questi riferimenti provassero qualcosa, quando, in realtà, nessuno di essi ha una qualche rilevanza reale per il mondo di oggi. Non ci sono tiranni di stati industriali in marcia da nessuna parte, per non parlare delle reali realtà storiche della questione.

Il fatto è che Stalin e Hitler erano aberrazioni sui generis. Furono incidenti unici della storia derivanti dalla follia di Versailles e dalla pace punitiva dei vincitori resa possibile dall'inutile intervento di Woodrow Wilson in una guerra europea che altrimenti sarebbe finita in una situazione di stallo e nel reciproco esaurimento e bancarotta di tutti i combattenti.

Vale a dire, il DNA delle nazioni del mondo non è infetto da tendenze verso il totalitarismo e l’aggressività. Il mantenimento della pace globale e del commercio pacifico delle nazioni non dipende da un’alleanza di interventisti o da un egemone globale, pronto a far rispettare il suo mandato al minimo scoppio di liti e conflitti locali e regionali.

In fin dei conti il laissez faire è la strada verso la prosperità sia nell’economia che negli affari internazionali. Alleanze militari ed egemoni cadono sempre e comunque prigionieri dei mercanti d'armi che favoriscono.

Non sorprende, quindi, se l'albo d'onore della follia dell'Unipartito sia composto da soli 14 repubblicani alla Camera, velatamente accusati d'essere infami dai globalisti guerrafondai al Wall Street Journal:

Quattordici repubblicani hanno votato contro tutti e quattro i progetti di legge presentati alla Camera, compreso quello che imporrebbe ai cinesi la vendita di TikTok. Ecco l'elenco del disonore in ordine alfabetico: Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.), Andrew Clyde (Ga.), Elijah Crane (Ariz.), Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Bob Good (Va.), Paul Gosar (Ariz.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Andy Harris (Md.), Thomas Massie (Ky.), Troy Nehls (Texas), Ralph Norman (SC), Matt Rosendale (Mont.), Chip Roy (Texas).

Il significato inevitabile dei loro voti è che questi membri non credono che gli Stati Uniti dovrebbero sostenere gli alleati minacciati dagli autoritari in marcia. Come i repubblicani degli anni ’30 che dormivano mentre Hitler e Tojo avanzavano, questi repubblicani pensano che l’America possa resistere a queste battaglie isolandosi. Ma la storia suggerisce che, se prevarranno, i figli e le figlie degli americani finiranno per dover combattere. Meglio aiutare gli alleati che vogliono aiutare sé stessi.

Il caucus isolazionista ha perso a questa tornata, ma questa tendenza del Partito repubblicano è pericolosa. Altri 17 deputati hanno votato a favore delle armi per Israele ma non per Taiwan e l'Ucraina. Vogliono incoraggiare un’invasione cinese? Forse, se la Florida venisse attaccata, si renderebbero conto della realtà dei crescenti pericoli nel mondo.

No, la Florida non sta per essere attaccata da Putin, Xi o dagli Ayatollah. Questi sono solo spauracchi a cui nessun adulto ben informato dovrebbe credere.

Inutile dire che il più accanito neoconservatore e guerrafondaio repubblicano, il senatore Lindsay Graham, non è né ben informato né ha una mente da adulto. Il suo sfogo incoerente e sanguinario in realtà faceva sembrare dei fini pensatori gli editorialisti del WSJ.

“Ecco cosa vi dirò. Se date a Putin l’Ucraina, non si fermerà”, ha detto Graham durante un’intervista a Fox News Sunday. “Non si tratta di contenere la NATO e se gli date l’Ucraina, Taiwan sarà la prossima perché la Cina sta guardando per vedere cosa facciamo”.

“Voglio sapere cosa faremo laggiù prima che ci uccidano qui. E se si fermano gli aiuti, trasformeremo la guerra in un crimine", ha detto Graham. “Stiamo parlando di persone che ci ucciderebbero tutti se potessero arrivare qui. Quando si intercettano informazioni da uno straniero all’estero che parla dell’America, voglio sapere di cosa sta parlando”.

“L’esercito ucraino, con il nostro aiuto, ha ucciso circa il 50% della potenza di combattimento dei russi”, ha detto Graham. “Questo è l’anno per fare di più. Avranno più armi, ma vogliamo anche che ne abbiano di nuove”.

Né il Partito repubblicano alla Camera è stato da meno rispetto agli slanci bellicosi del senatore Graham. Il deputato Ken Buck ha fatto sapere che se uno dice che la sicurezza interna dell'America non è in alcun modo rafforzata dalla fuorviante guerra per procura di Washington contro la Russia, come la deputata Marjorie Greene, allora si è sicuramente un traditore al soldo dello stesso Putin:

“Bene, la Marjorie ha raggiunto un nuovo fondo”, ha detto Buck della sua ex-collega. “Sta solo dando voce alla propaganda russa e, nel farlo, danneggia la politica estera americana. Si sta comportando in modo del tutto irresponsabile. E quando la storia guarderà indietro a questo periodo, la Russia avrà invaso l’Ucraina; quest'ultima sta combattendo per la sua libertà e noi dovremmo supportare chi combatte per la libertà”.

Naturalmente la follia di $200 miliardi di fondi NATO è già uno spreco; centinaia di migliaia di morti; milioni di persone in fuga dal Paese per evitare il caos della guerra e la crudeltà di essere arruolati come carne da cannone per servire il piacere perverso di guerrieri da poltrona a Washington; e le infrastrutture civili di uno dei Paesi più grandi d'Europa nel caos. Tutto ciò non ha nulla a che fare con “chi combatte per la libertà”.

Il fatto innegabile è che in Ucraina non c’è nulla in gioco per cui valga la pena lottare che assomigli neanche lontanamente alla virtù democratica. È stato un pozzo nero di enorme corruzione sin dalla caduta della Cortina di ferro nel 1991 e di recente ha persino necessitato di una visita da parte del capo della CIA affinché dicesse a Zelensky e ai suoi compagni ladri di “smetterla” sul fronte della corruzione.

Come ha affermato il venerabile scrittore William Astore, il vero scopo della puntata ucraina nel giocco della Guerra Infinita è l’arricchimento dei mercanti di morte che hanno preso le leve del potere a Washington:

Naturalmente questo è l’ennesimo trionfo per il MICIMATT: il complesso militare-industriale-congressuale-intelligence- media-accademico-think tank. Il suo potere e la sua avidità sono quasi irresistibili. Aggiungetelo all’AIPAC, alla minaccia dell’inflazione e all’allarmismo e avremo una forza inarrestabile... almeno finché l’impero americano non crollerà definitivamente sotto il peso della sua stessa follia.

Eppure tutta l’insensata bellicosità degli interventisti a Washington non è semplicemente un’assurdità ridicola da un punto di vista empirico. L’attuale consenso neocon/interventista a Washington ripudia palesemente il saggio consiglio di George Washington e Thomas Jefferson di oltre 220 anni fa. Insieme articolarono una teoria della politica estera che non era affatto “isolazionista”, ma realistica e basata sull’evidenza.

Cioè, i Padri fondatori ritenevano che la politica estera dovesse basarsi sui fatti e sulle circostanze per l'interesse nazionale in un dato momento, e che quando i fatti cambiano e le alleanze diventano obsolete, dovrebbero essere abbandonate.

Dal discorso di commiato di George Washington: “La grande regola di condotta per noi, nei confronti delle nazioni straniere, è estendere le nostre relazioni commerciali, per avere con loro il minor legame politico possibile. L’Europa ha una serie di interessi primari che per noi non ha alcun valore, o ne ha uno molto remoto. Essa deve quindi essere coinvolta in frequenti controversie le cui cause sono essenzialmente estranee alle nostre preoccupazioni. Quindi non è saggio da parte nostra implicarci, con legami artificiali, nelle vicissitudini ordinarie della sua linea di politica, o nelle combinazioni e collisioni ordinarie delle sue amicizie o inimicizie [...] la nostra vera linea di politica dev'essere quella di evitare alleanze permanenti con qualsiasi parte del mondo estero [...]”.

Come ulteriormente sottolineato da Jefferson nel suo discorso inaugurale del 1801, questa dottrina realista considerava le alleanze militari estere come accordi di convenienza e dovevano essere liberamente abbandonate o invertite come indicato dalle mutevoli esigenze dell’interesse nazionale. Citando il discorso di commiato di Washington come sua ispirazione, Jefferson descrisse tale dottrina come: “Pace, commercio e amicizia onesta con tutte le nazioni, senza alleanze con nessuna di esse”.

Questa famosa frase è proprio la pietra angolare della linea di politica che si adatta alla realtà odierna. La sicurezza interna dell’America non richiede alleanze o i mezzi per saccheggiare militarmente in tutto il mondo, perché non ci sono potenze militari, industriali e tecnologiche che possano minacciare la sua sicurezza.

Di conseguenza istituzioni come la NATO potrebbero aver servito l’interesse nazionale 70 anni fa rispetto alla Russia stalinista e alle sue capacità e intenzioni militari nei confronti dei suoi ex-alleati in tempo di guerra in Occidente. Ma anche qui gli archivi desecretati da entrambi i lati della Guerra fredda gettano notevoli dubbi sul fatto che Stalin e il comunismo mondiale fossero effettivamente in marcia o avessero l’intenzione o la capacità militare di schiavizzare l’Europa occidentale, per non parlare della patria americana.

Infatti l'ala pacifica e accomodante di Henry Wallace potrebbe essere stata più vicina alla verità delle cricche di Henry Stimson, James Forrestal, Dean Acheson e degli abominevoli fratelli Dulles, i fautori delle linee di politica della Guerra fredda durante quell'epoca.

Ma la questione fu risolta una volta per tutte nel 1991, quando l’Unione Sovietica scomparve nella pattumiera della storia, e non a causa della NATO o addirittura della minaccia di Reagan. La vera ragione è che il comunismo non funziona: né per le persone che sfrutta e opprime, né per le élite al potere e i compagni con potere statale che potrebbero avere manie di grandezza sulla sostenibilità del proprio governo, per non parlare di estendendolo ai popoli oltre i loro confini.

Anche se la vera lezione del crollo del comunismo sovietico ha attraversato le pagine della storia dopo il 1991, il radicato apparato militare-industriale non era disposto a rinunciare al proprio potere, ai propri bilanci e ai propri vantaggi, proprio come Eisenhower aveva avvertito nel 1961. Di fatto la NATO si è trasformata in qualcosa di molto più odioso di un'alleanza che aveva compiuto la sua missione ed era destinata al pensionamento anticipato secondo la dottrina Washington-Jefferson.

Il residuo russo dell’Unione Sovietica ha oggi un PIL di soli $2.200 miliardi rispetto ai $28.000 miliardi di PIL degli Stati Uniti e ai $46.000 miliardi di tutti i 32 Paesi della NATO messi insieme. E la Russia ha un budget militare pari ad appena il 6% dei $1.250 miliardi di spese complessive per la difesa della NATO e una sola portaerei.

Inoltre quest’ultima è una reliquia del XX secolo che è stata riparata in un bacino di carenaggio sin dal 2017 e non è dotata né di un’armata di navi di scorta e aerei da guerra né di un equipaggio. L’esercito russo, quindi, non ha modo di sbarcare sulle coste del New Jersey e nemmeno di entrare attraverso la Porta di Brandeburgo a Berlino. Né Putin è così stupido da invadere la Polonia, la quale non offre altro che secoli di animosità verso tutto ciò che è russo.

D’altra parte se la Polonia credesse davvero a tutta la retorica anti-Putin lanciata dal suo governo di destra, nel 2024 spenderebbe per la difesa molto di più di $30 miliardi e il 3,1% del PIL per la difesa; né si offrirebbe di ospitare le armi nucleari della NATO accanto all’Orso russo, come ha fatto il suo presidente di recente.

“Se i nostri alleati decidono di schierare armi nucleari sul nostro territorio come parte della condivisione nucleare, e per rafforzare il fianco orientale della NATO, siamo pronti a farlo”, ha detto il presidente polacco Andrzej Duda in un'intervista pubblicata oggi dal quotidiano Fakt.

In verità l’offerta di Duda è solo un altro caso di linea di politica di uno stato cliente impazzito. Liberata la scena dall'intricata alleanza di Washington con le reliquie della NATO, gli elettori polacchi si metterebbero alla ricerca di un nuovo governo e lo farebbero spedendo i propri leader a Mosca per cercare un accordo reciproco nelle relazioni commerciali.

Il fatto è che 33 anni dopo il crollo dell’Unione Sovietica, la NATO non è semplicemente un’inutile reliquia obsoleta, si è trasformata nella più grande organizzazione di marketing e vendita di armamenti nella storia dell’umanità. L'unico vantaggio derivante dal tradire la promessa di Bush padre a Gorbaciov, secondo cui la NATO non si sarebbe espansa di un solo centimetro verso est, è andato agli appaltatori della difesa, in particolare i mercanti di guerra con sede negli Stati Uniti.

Quando l’alleanza NATO si è estesa da 16 nazioni agli attuali 32 Paesi, ognuno dei nuovi membri ha dovuto conformare i propri sistemi d’arma e munizioni agli standard NATO. Non sorprende se Lockheed, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics e United Technologies abbiano prosperato enormemente, anche se di fatto vagavano per le sale del Congresso diffondendo le stesse bugie del pesso sopra del Wall Street Journal e la presunta essenzialità di obsolete alleanze globali.

Inoltre il comunismo cinese, anche nella veste sottilmente velata di “capitalismo rosso”, non è affatto più praticabile o sostenibile della versione sovietica.

In fin dei conti se non ci sono mercati liberi, proprietà e diritti personali di espressione e di riunione tutelati costituzionalmente e onesti tribunali fallimentari per smaltire le scommesse economiche fallite, non si ha un’economia sostenibile o una prosperità in costante aumento. Punto.

Al contrario, la Cina è un vasto castello di carte economico e di malignità stataliste sostenuto da $50.000 miliardi di debito impagabile contratto in appena due decenni.

Di conseguenza dipende totalmente dai guadagni in valuta forte provenienti da $3.500 miliardi di esportazioni annuali, principalmente verso l’Occidente, per evitare che il suo eccesso di infrastrutture e investimenti immobiliari rovesci l’intero castello di carte. In caso di guerra questa ancora di salvezza verrebbe tagliata, facendo crollare altresì l'intera economia cinese.

Quindi non invaderà nessuno, probabilmente nemmeno Taiwan. Il presidente Xi e il suo gruppo di governanti possono amare citare Mao e colorarsi di rosso ideologicamente, ma sanno anche che ciò che si frappone tra loro e una rivolta degli 1,5 miliardi di abitanti oppressi della Cina è un livello costante e ragionevolmente crescente di prosperità interna.

Ciò esclude un’armata cinese di navi dirette verso la costa della California. Infatti anche la Marina che hanno oggi è composta da due portaerei dell’era sovietica e da una nuova capacità navale molto meno formidabile e letale rispetto alle attuali portaerei di classe Gerald Ford di Washington. E le altre 400 navi della Marina sono costituite in gran parte da pattugliatori costieri che probabilmente non riuscirebbero a raggiungere le coste della California tutte intere.

In termini di potenza di fuoco letale, la Marina statunitense dispone di 4,6 milioni di tonnellate di dislocamento, con una media di 15.000 tonnellate per nave. Al contrario la Marina cinese ha solo 2 milioni di tonnellate di dislocamento, con una media di sole 5.000 tonnellate per imbarcazione. La Marina cinese è totalmente visibile, valutabile e tracciabile, e non ha nemmeno lontanamente le dimensioni e la letalità che renderebbero remotamente plausibile un’invasione dell’America.

Infine la principale capacità militare necessaria per la sicurezza nazionale nel mondo attuale è la triade di deterrenza strategica americana che comprende 3.800 testate nucleari. In qualsiasi momento possono essere lanciate:

• lungo i fondali oceanici tra 16 sottomarini della classe Ohio, ciascuno dotato di 80 testate puntabili in modo indipendente;

• dallo spazio aereo da una flotta di 66 bombardieri pesanti B-2 e B-52;

• da silos sotterranei rinforzati e contenenti più di 1.000 testate ICBM.

Questa impressionante forza di ritorsione non può essere rilevata o neutralizzata al 100% da un potenziale ricattatore nucleare.

Si dà il caso che suddetta triade costi circa $65 miliardi all’anno secondo una recente analisi del CBO e la protezione completa delle coste degli Stati Uniti e dello spazio aereo, grazie anche ai grandi fossati oceanici, potrebbe portare la cifra totale della difesa nazionale a $400 miliardi all’anno... al massimo.

Gli altri $500 miliardi di oggi rappresentano le conquiste di bilancio del complesso militare-industriale che si guadagnano da vivere venendo pagati dal Dipartimento della difesa, dal Dipartimento di Stato, dall’AID, dal NED, ecc. e dalla produzione di minacce spropositate e da storie spaventose su spauracchi stranieri.

Di conseguenza esiste una sola cura: una forza potente proveniente dall’esterno della Beltway deve frantumare l’Unipartito in mille pezzi.

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

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The ideal of individual liberty is perennially under attack not only from socialists, as one might logically expect, but also from conservatives who regard individualism as a form of selfishness. The ordinary meaning of selfishness is “caring only about what you want or need without any thought for the needs or wishes of other people,” and many conservatives see this as a major contributing factor in social decline. The conservative British journalist Nick Timothy attributes many social ills to selfishness, arguing that “our society has become more about ‘me’ than ‘we’,” leading to higher rates of crime, antisocial behavior, and a ballooning welfare state as selfish people try to take as much as possible from the public purse while contributing little or nothing to it.

This school of conservative thought regards “excessive individualism” or “hyperindividualism” as a cause of social decay. Its proponents fear that the me-me-me society is partly to blame for the decline of Western civilization and therefore argue that defending individual liberty will only fuel further societal breakdown. As the family continues to be undermined by public policy, books like #MeFirst! A Manifesto for Female Selfishness, which promote “self-worship” and advise women not to have children, are seen as the logical result of individualism. Individualism is often referred to in this context as “rampant individualism” or “atomistic individualism,” which is associated with unhappy outcomes such as increasing loneliness and depression.

Attributing social dysfunction to individualism explains much of the hostility with which many conservatives regard Ayn Rand’s attempt to extol the virtues of what she called selfishness. A review of Nick Timothy’s Rebuilding One Nation offers an example: “Eighties libertarianism has been left sulking on the margins of conservative policymaking for important reasons, and Timothy is ruthless in pointing out its deficiencies: its reputation for selfish individualism (reading Ayn Rand, Timothy tells us, left him ‘cold’) . . . Timothy ventures that individualism has shallow historical roots.”

Being thus opposed to individualism, these conservatives promote communitarian values or various forms of social democracy. They seek to inculcate in citizens a sense of social responsibility by arguing that society matters more than the individual. This form of conservatism ultimately subordinates the individual to the state. This is clear from Timothy’s suggestion that “we are becoming a selfish society. It is the government’s job to tackle that,” which gives a primary role to government interventions designed to counter selfishness. Timothy suggests that “the family should be put at the heart of both welfare and tax policy,” “tax evasion should be countered, and tax havens closed down,” and “workplace rights and consumer protections [should be] enforced.” He argues that “the call of community is part of the conservative philosophy of paradoxes.”

There’s No Such Thing as Society

Margaret Thatcher is often wrongly depicted by communitarian conservatives, including the so-called libertarian conservative prime minister Boris Johnson when he locked down the United Kingdom in 2020, as a “market fundamentalist” who believed that there’s no such thing as society. As Victoria Hewson observes, “Mrs. Thatcher was not arguing that society does not exist,” a point often overlooked even by conservatives:

One might expect the quote to be taken out of context and used as a political weapon by opponents of the Conservative Party. But it is surprising that it has been mischaracterized by our Prime Minister [Boris Johnson], who would be well versed on the statement in full. “There is no such thing as society,” Mrs. Thatcher said. “There is [a] living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.”

In his book In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo, Frank S. Meyer acknowledges that many such conservatives, whom he refers to as “New Conservatives,” appeal to communitarian values because they see individualism as a threat to social cohesion, but he insists that it is only through defending individual liberty that free societies can prosper. He argues:

It is true, of course, that there would be no political or social institutions, nor any meaning to political inquiry, if men lived as single isolated individuals. To insist, as I do, that the individual is the criterion by which institutions and political theories should be judged is not to deny the immediate and obvious meaning of the phrase, “man is a social animal,” that is, that each man has a multifarious set of relationships with other men.

The error made by New Conservatives, as Meyer explains it, lies in hypostatizing the “multifarious set of relationships” between individuals into an entity, society, which itself becomes the subject of rights and obligations owed by individuals to society or owed to the state as the embodiment of society. Meyer criticizes this form of conservativism for overlooking the importance of individual liberty. He describes the New Conservatives as collectivists, explaining that “their position is characterized by an organic view of society; by a subordination of the individual person to society.”

The New Conservatives forget that society only has meaning as a basis for interaction between individuals, and it is through these individual interactions that free societies flourish. As Ludwig von Mises writes: “The concept of freedom always refers to social relations between men. . . . Society is essentially the mutual exchange of services.” Mises depicts individualism as the idea of individual liberty, meaning that the individual is free from state coercion:

The distinctive principle of Western social philosophy is individualism. It aims at the creation of a sphere in which the individual is free to think, to choose, and to act without being restrained by the interference of the social apparatus of coercion and oppression, the State. All the spiritual and material achievements of Western civilization were the result of the operation of this idea of liberty.

Similarly, Friedrich von Hayek observed in “Individualism: True and False” that there is a right and wrong way to understand the meaning of “individualism” and that because rights vest in individuals, the defense of human liberty is always a defense of individual liberty and individual rights. It is important to defend individualism, correctly understood, because without a concept of individualism, it is all but impossible to express the importance of individual liberty.

Meyer is right to warn conservatives that if the individual is subordinated to society, the individual becomes “a secondary being, whose dignity and rights become dependent upon the gift and grace of society or the state.” Attempting to subordinate individual rights to defend society ends up promoting statism, which in turn is a threat to liberty itself. As Meyer argues, “The proper end of political thought and action is the establishment and preservation of freedom.” Collectivism and statism do not preserve freedom but on the contrary undermine it. Timothy thinks that undermining freedom would somehow paradoxically lead to more freedom, as he argues that “by accepting constraints on our freedom, we end up freer and happier.” Here, Timothy falls into the error identified by Meyer, namely that collectivist conservatives fail to recognize that freedom cannot be attained through constraint and state coercion:

They would not or could not see the correlative to their fundamental philosophical position: acceptance of the moral authority derived from transcendent criteria of truth and good must be voluntary if it is to have meaning; if it is coerced by human force, it is meaningless. They were willing, if only the right standards were upheld, to accept an authoritarian structure of state and society. They were, at best, indifferent to freedom in the body politic at the worst, its enemies.

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

The post Defending Individual Liberty appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last January, humanity’s elite gathered again in Davos, Switzerland, to plan out the rest of our lives. World Economic Forum (WEF) honchos are morally superior because they are devoted to destroying your freedom to save the Earth, or at least to safeguard plant habitat.

Sixty heads of government from around the world attended, as did endless Lear Jet–loads of multilateral officials. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, out-blathered President Biden: “The world is not at a single inflection point; it is at multi-inflection points.” (Biden drags “inflection points” into almost every speech.)

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres told the WEF crowd that  “deep reforms to global governance” were needed. And who better to deepen governance than the United Nations, the supreme tyrants’ club in the solar system?

Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, declared, “We have a responsibility to be stewards of our beautiful, small planet’s future. There is something that leaders need to embrace, and it is the responsibility to act, even if it’s not popular.” This spiel perfectly captured the prevailing disdain for democracy — or at least of any populace that fails to vote themselves into ever-greater subjection to their self-proclaimed-expert saviors. WEF Founder Klaus Schwab whooped up the Davos attendees as “trustees of the future.”

No wonder that Australian senator Alex Antic warned in the Australian Parliament: “The WEF is steeped in authoritarianism and Marxist ideology. It’s an ideology which is creeping into governments across the world.”

A world of censorship

The WEF had two big goals this year: “restore trust” and “crush dissent.” Okay, that last one is a paraphrase. Instead, the WEF is proclaiming that the greatest peril humanity now faces is “misinformation and disinformation.” And it knows this because its own truths are self-evident.

The WEF officials have complained bitterly that it is “misinformation” to assert that they are power-crazed maniacs. But consider its June 2020 call for a Great Reset for humanity:

To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a “Great Reset” of capitalism.

“Misinformation” seems to include any facts which obstruct WEF cronies from ruling the earth. The WEF’s latest Global Risks Report warns, “Some governments and platforms … may fail to act to effectively curb falsified information and harmful content, making the definition of ‘truth’ increasingly contentious across societies.” In other words, governments must suppress “falsified” information to save truth. The WEF presumes governments are founts of truth — regardless of “politician” being a term of derision going back thousands of years. Or maybe the WEF considers “truth” the same type of luxury nowadays as eating meat.

The destruction of private property

We are barely two thousand days away from the halcyon time — the year 2030 — when the WEF has promised, “you will own nothing and be happy.” (Davos attendees are exempt from that lofty edict.) Recent political reforms in many nations have furthered the first promise, ravaging private-property rights and subverting individual independence. Australian senator Malcolm Roberts warned:

The plan of the Great Reset is that you will die with nothing. Klaus Schwab’s ‘life by subscription’ is really serfdom. It’s slavery. Billionaire, globalist corporations will own everything — homes, factories, farms, cars, furniture — and everyday citizens will rent what they need, if their social credit score allows.

The world’s kingpins will need to tighten all the mental thumbscrews for propertyless serfs to “be happy.” Public euphoria could be in especially short supply considering other policies championed at the WEF.

Mass surveillance 

“Individual carbon footprint trackers” are a popular panacea at Davos, and the WEF has proposed the “setting of acceptable limits for personal emissions.” How many burps will it take to get sent to reeducation camp?

Footprint trackers will be useless without imposing universal “digital identification,” another WEF pet project. How can government “serve” people unless it can find and accost them at any moment, day or night? Vaccine passports are also a cause célèbres for this crowd. Count on the master wizards to exert far more effort to compel injections than to ensure vaccines actually provide the protection they promise.

Environmental tyranny 

One of the wackiest shows at Davos was performed by British environmental activist Jojo Mehta, the chief of “Stop Ecocide Now.” She hectored Davos attendees to recognize that people making money from farming or fishing could be as guilty as people committing “mass murder and genocide.” But if the elites succeed in stopping farmers from farming and fishermen from fishing, future Swiss shindigs may run short of caviar.

“Climate change” is probably the WEF’s best short-term hope to put a halo over tyranny. This is a topic which requires boundless censorship in order to keep peasants in their place. Cartoonists have long ridiculed all the private jets that fly in for the WEF conference, but such details need to be suppressed on “world security grounds” or some such crap. The same is true for the appalling failure of green energy schemes such as windmills to provide energy at reasonable prices. But those pratfalls did not deter Jane Goodall, an officially designated United Nations Messenger of Peace: “We know exactly what we ought to be doing to slow down and eventually reverse climate change and loss of biodiversity … if only various countries lived up to promises they made about reducing emissions.”

Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s deputy prime minister and a member of the WEF Board of Trustees, recently prattled as if glaciers should have veto power over elections: “Our shrinking glaciers, and our warming oceans, are asking us wordlessly but emphatically, if democratic societies can rise to the existential challenge of climate change.” (A Canadian court recently condemned the Trudeau-Freeland government for tyrannizing truck drivers and other protestors against their COVID policies.)

Davos provided a cosseting atmosphere that encouraged some supposedly objective observers to reveal their fervent dogmas. New York Times climate correspondent David Gelles gave a speech in which he said:

implored a room full of CEOs, diplomats and NGO leaders to step up their urgency and begin considering truly radical political and economic interventions…. The hour is late, and it’s incumbent on those with the capital and the clout to start deploying the whole of their resources toward the climate crisis.

To boost confidence in the all-electric future, government censors will need to be extra vigilant during harsh winter weather so that people are not warned that their Tesla becomes a useless block of metal during cold snaps.

But the point of the “climate change” hysteria is not to protect either the environment or humanity. It is to provide a pretext for perpetual, boundless subjugation by the elites. According to Christine Anderson, a member of the European Parliament from Germany, “The green agenda is just part of [the overall globalist agenda], which is to erect a totalitarian regime, in which people are under complete control.” If Davos folks were meeting in the woods and subsisting on nuts and berries, they would have more credibility to lecture everyone else on their diets.

Monetary control 

The WEF is also gung-ho on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). The U.S. dollar has lost 97 percent of its value since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, but politicians deserve more arbitrary power over the currency, right? Never forget: “cash is printed freedom.” But CBDCs have powerful appeal to would-be financial tyrants. Saule Omarova, Biden’s nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, proposed in 2021 to give government total control over every person’s finances: “There will be no more private bank accounts, and all of the deposit accounts will be held directly at the Fed.” And you will be happy or you will be relocated to Fargo.

A 2023 WEF analysis declared, “CBDCs offer potential benefits for financial inclusion, but…. Governments and central banks need to be transparent and honest about the potential advantages and risks of digital currencies in order to build public trust in CBDCs.” To expect central banks to be honest and transparent is worse than believing in the tooth fairy. This is not how political machinations to depreciate a currency happen.

The WEF states that “CBDCs would allow for the creation of digital records and traces, and this could make it easier to stop money laundering and flows of money used to finance terrorism.” Even better — CBDCs could enable government officials to prohibit citizens from spending anything on unapproved items — or maybe to financially destroy anyone who complained about central banks. As Mark Seilor observed, “CBDCs are a totalitarian’s wet dream, and would enable governments to centrally enforce tyrannical policies on an industrial scale — at the flick of a switch — without the need for human enforcement agents.”

The swagger of the Davos crowd is beyond parody. WEF president Borge Brende promised: “We will make sure that we bring together the right people … to see how we can solve this very challenging world.” But how can they have the right people when neither you nor I were invited?

Paeans to democracy

The WEF offers platitudes for democracy while championing iron-fisted paternalist policies. This is why pervasive censorship is vital to carry out WEF-favored schemes to force common people to stop bothering the environment. Government policies will be propelled by alarmist pronouncements which private citizens could debunk.

With WEF-sanctioned censorship, self-government could be replaced by “one person, one vote, one time.” Whoever wins a national election will take control of the censorship regime and exploit it to insulate and perpetuate their power. We already saw that in this nation. Censorship helped Biden win the 2020 election, and his administration proceeded to carry out potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history,” according to Federal Judge Terry Doughty. (The Supreme Court will settle that censorship controversy.)

The specter of libertarianism

But there is a specter haunting the Davos crowd. WEF Chairman  Klaus Schwab recently practically echoed Marx’s Communist Manifesto, warning of a new specter haunting the world.  Schwab derided  “an anti-System which is called Libertarianism, which means to tear down everything which creates some kind of influence of government into private lives.” But it is not libertarians’ fault that Schwab’s standard for “some kind of influence of government” is eerily similar to medieval serfdom. Schwab also warned of the rising danger of individuals become “ego centric.” And we all know that the worst form of selfishness is refusal to submit to your superiors.

The most effective rebuttal at Davos of the WEF sirens of subjugation came from the newly elected president of Argentina. Javier Milei exhorted the friends of freedom around the globe: “Do not be intimidated either by the political class or the parasites who live off of the State. The State is the problem itself.” Milei’s scoff at people “motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste” was perhaps the ultimate face slap for the self-proclaimed saviors in Switzerland.

Boneheaded delusions

So many of the follies championed at Davos arise from the boneheaded delusion that political power is irredeemably benevolent. We should not trust elitists who portray “truth” as the same type of despicable luxury as eating meat or owning your own automobile. And we should not trust those who seek to convert officialdom into a priesthood with the right to blindfold people, to muzzle them, and to slash their living standards.

Luckily, people still have freedom to scoff on social media (thanks in large part to Elon Musk). Maybe the next Davos confab will convince critics to cease referring to the “World Enslavement Forum.” It would help if WEF ceased fearing “runaway skepticism” with the same dread that old southern plantation owners viewed runaway slaves.

This article was originally published in the April 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.

The post The World Economic Forum Is Still Conspiring Against Your Freedom appeared first on LewRockwell.

Executive summary

An Epoch Times story released today revealed that the CDC deliberately lied to the public about the safety of the COVID vaccines. When asked about the deaths, the CDC lied to the public and falsely claimed that they had no evidence that the COVID vaccines have killed anyone.

The CDC lied. People died.

The evidence is crystal clear that the COVID vaccines are causing massive damage to people’s hearts and brains.

In this article, I’ll show you the evidence for afib and aortic aneurysms which are two important side effects that are obviously caused by the COVID vaccine and, just like death, are being ignored by the CDC.

The key part of the story

“U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials found evidence that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines caused multiple deaths before claiming that there was no evidence linking the vaccines to any deaths, The Epoch Times has learned.

CDC employees worked to track down information on reported post-vaccination deaths and learned that myocarditis—or heart inflammation, a confirmed side effect of the vaccines—was listed on death certificates and in autopsies for some of the deaths, according to an internal file obtained by The Epoch Times.

…

Despite the findings, most of which were made by the end of 2021, the CDC claimed that it had seen no signs linking the Moderna and Pfizer messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines to any deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).”

Wow. “Seen no signs.”

Are they blind?

In other words… if they don’t agree with the evidence, they simply claim it does not exist

The CDC had evidence the vaccines were killing people but they convinced themselves that these were just coincidences and not related to the vaccine.

So, in the CDC’s view, when young healthy people simply drop dead unexpectedly in their sleep within 24 hours after getting the COVID shot, that would not be considered to be any evidence that the vaccine might have killed them.

It’s fair to say that their statements about not having any evidence were simply false and misleading.

They should have said “We have evidence that hundreds of people have died from the vaccine, but we don’t believe any of it” which would at least be more accurate.

I spoke to the Epoch Times reporter who wrote the story. He was never able to speak with anyone at the CDC live. It was all via email. These people are all afraid of a live interview.

The death of the son of a prominent physician

VAERS recently started an investigation into this death which was first reported to VAERS 3 years ago (and re-reported because the original never appeared in the system).

His father is a very prominent and capable physician at one of the top medical schools in the country. His father is 100% certain the COVID vaccine killed his son, but he’s not speaking out publicly about it.

I was on the phone with a VAERS investigator who was investigating this “high priority” report that was filed 3 years ago.

She admitted they are understaffed but “catching up.”

OK, so they’re basically 3 years behind in investigating the highest priority deaths to determine whether they were caused by a vaccine or not.

This particular death was a perfectly healthy 52-year man with no comorbidities who died in his sleep just 5 days after his first dose.

He got a first dose of Pfizer, felt horrible, had a heart attack on the day of the shot and was sicker than a dog after that. He died 5 days later from an aortic aneurysm.

From the VAERS report:

“The HCP explained that 3 months after his father got injured from the vaccine, the son of doctor 2, who was young and healthy, decided to get the vaccine despite his dad having cardiac issues and then he had a heart attack that day and died five days later.”

His father had afib right after his first shot. He had an ablation to fix the afib. He was urged to get a second shot and developed afib immediately after the second shot.

Do you see a pattern here? Shot—> afib, Shot —> afib.

The CDC doesn’t see a connection. They think this is just a coincidence.

Bottom line: This death was caused by the COVID vaccine, but the father and mother won’t speak publicly about it.

Read the Whole Article

The post The CDC Lied; People Died appeared first on LewRockwell.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has responded to the International Criminal Court’s rumored plans to indict Israeli officials for war crimes by claiming that for the ICC to do so would be an “antisemitic hate crime”.

Yes, you read that correctly.

“If this does happen, it will be an indelible stain on humanity. It would be an unprecedented antisemitic hate crime that would add fuel to the antisemitic incitement that is already raging in the world,” said Netanyahu this past Tuesday.

So, to be absolutely clear, Israel’s top government official has announced that charges against himself and other Israeli leaders for obvious war crimes like intentionally bombing and starving civilians would be both “antisemitic” and a “hate crime”.

So, to make things even clearer, when a supporter of the state of Israel claims to be sincerely super duper worried about “antisemitism”, this is the kind of thing they are talking about. This is what the label “antisemitism” has come to mean. It means literally any opposition to, criticism of, or consequences for a nuclear-armed genocidal apartheid ethnostate which is backed by the most powerful empire that has ever existed.

I need you to understand that when an Israel supporter claims to be very sincerely concerned about “antisemitism”, this is the “antisemitism” they’re talking about: pic.twitter.com/kx7TlfHXnq

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 2, 2024

Keeping that in mind, let’s turn now to the bill that just passed in the US House of Representatives which can be used to suppress entirely legitimate political speech critical of Israel as “antisemitic”.

Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp reports:

“The House on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed a bill that conflates criticism of the modern state of Israel with antisemitism and will mandate that definition be used by the Department of Education when enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws.

“The bill could be used to crack down on pro-Palestine protesters at college campuses across the country, who have been falsely labeled ‘antisemitic’ despite Jewish students participating in the protests.

“The legislation adopts the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which lists ‘drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ as an example of antisemitism.

“The IHRA also defines antisemitism as applying ‘double standards’ to Israel by ‘requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation’ and ‘denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination’ by ‘claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.’”

House Passes Bill That Conflates Criticism of Israel With Antisemitism
The legislation adopts a definition of antisemitism that could be used by the Dept of Education to crackdown on college protests
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Gaza #Israel #censorship https://t.co/glebgTsFsY pic.twitter.com/ulsf3PfQOK

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) May 1, 2024

This comes as House Democrat Richie Torres teams up with Republican Mike Lawler to advance a bill which would create “antisemitism monitors” on university campuses which receive federal funding, which means the US government is actively working to police political speech in response to criticisms of US government policies. Perfectly normal thing to happen in a healthy liberal democracy.

And again, this is happening within a political climate in which the Israeli government publicly announces that “antisemitism” includes charging Israeli war criminals for extensively documented war crimes.

The thing about conflating support for Israel with Judaism and criticism of Israel with anti-semitism is that it necessarily asserts that there’s a religion which holds as an article of faith that your tax dollars must be used to murder foreigners in the middle east, and that any objection to this on your part therefore amounts to religious persecution. Anyone who makes this conflation is saying, “Judaism is a religion which believes your tax dollars need to go toward support for the military adventurism of the state of Israel, and if you don’t like it then you’re basically a Nazi.”

Bipartisan Bill Would Create ‘Antisemitism Monitors’ at College Campuses
Pro-Palestine protests have been falsely labeled as ‘antisemitic’ even though many Jewish students are involved
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Gaza #campusProtests #FreedomOfSpeech https://t.co/AzO355K7Md pic.twitter.com/PlqBQAb8Cg

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) April 29, 2024

Which is as self-evidently ridiculous as any position could possibly be, from any angle you could possibly look at it. Obviously the religion of Judaism itself does not say that western governments should be backing nonstop mass military slaughter in the Palestinian Territories and in Israel’s neighboring countries, which is why many Jews do not hold the position that this should be happening. And even if that was a fundamental tenet of the Jewish faith, a religion which asserts that a foreign country has a right to immensely consequential support from your country’s government would need to be criticized aggressively and relentlessly.

You don’t get to claim that criticism of any part a powerful country’s foreign policy is not allowed because such criticism is against your religion or religiously persecutes you. That’s not a thing.

The “antisemitism” moral panic has officially jumped the shark. It has long been absurd, but now it’s a parody of itself. Things are only going to get dumber and more insulting to your intelligence from here.

___________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

The post The ‘Antisemitism’ Moral Panic Has Officially Jumped the Shark appeared first on LewRockwell.

Two years ago, David Tait, CEO of the World Gold Council announced an initiative to introduce blockchain technology to ensure that gold bars have been responsibly sourced and to establish a chain of custody, digitising the entire supply chain of gold bar production. There is no doubt that between them, the WGC and LBMA have been bringing considerable pressure to bear on refiners, markets, and miners in Switzerland, Japan, North America, Australia, and South Africa — some of which have signed up to the initiative.

At the launch of this “gold bar integrity programme” Sakhilla Mirza, LBMA’s General Council reckoned that the pilot scheme would take about three months (to mid-2022). Yet it was only this March that aXedras, a Swiss-based software business funded by the WGC was appointed the service provider for the gold bar database. The drawn-out timescale is likely evidence of participants dragging their feet.

This initiative is driven by environmental concerns that the mining and processing of gold bars should be ESG compliant. The pilot project run by aXedras involved 8 mines, 9 refiners, 4 logistic companies, and 10 banks & dealers. Now that the company has been appointed to run the Gold Bar Integrity Database, we will probably hear more about this in the coming months.

Why are the WGC/LBMA doing this?

There is no doubt that the mining industry is coming under political pressure to reduce its carbon footprint and attend to wider environmental concerns. The World Gold Council is a mining industry backed organisation, so it in turn has to demonstrate the industry’s ESG credentials. That it has chosen the blockchain route to identify compliant gold bars seems hard to justify on the basis that it adds nothing to ESG compliance, except perhaps for new gold mined, sourced, and processed by LBMA members. Annual gold output globally is about 3,000 tonnes, which is only 1.5% of above-ground stocks. It only makes sense if existing bars amounting to about 80,000 tonnes are grandfathered in (most of the rest are classified as jewellery), which would be a considerably more difficult project.

Notable by their absence are Asian interests. This is particularly important because according to the LBMA presentation in 2022 announcing this joint initiative, the blockchain project commences with the one-kilo 9999 bars, and not the LBMA’s 400-ouncers. The LBMA’s CEO claimed that these non-deliverable bars (to the London market) represent the bigger risk and gives the greater reward on the project.

When we look at global mine output, that which evades the London market and therefore this initiative could be over half the 3,000 tonne annual total, considering Russia, China, and many other Asian miners, refiners, and buyers are not in the scheme. Indeed, according to Ruth Crowell, LBMA’s CEO, only 41% of global refinery output has signed up to the pilot.

To justify the project, the WGC commissioned an opinion survey, which has been presented at a number of promotional conferences. This is illustrated below, in this case given by Ruth Crowell, the LBMA’s CEO.

The WGC survey is of the retail market, which has limited relevance other perhaps than for the WGC’s public relations. The retail market invests almost entirely in regulated ETFs and coin, very few taking delivery of bars. Furthermore, surveys of this sort offer a preselected list of clipboard options, which are often unrelated to the true reasons for not investing. Followers of this Substack will know that the reason retail investors don’t buy gold is because they don’t actually understand it.

However, there can be little doubt that the WGC intends that all regulated businesses, particularly ETFs, will require newly mined gold to be delivered with a blockchain certificate. Unless a refiner can self-certify bars to put onto a blockchain, which defeats the ESG and supply chain integrity concerns, the amount of gold going onto this blockchain is severely limited. Given the small quantities involved, could this develop a premium for blockchained gold?

It would be a mistake to rule it out. If ETFs are only permitted to buy blockchained gold, just imagine the chaos if (or rather when) Joe Public suddenly decides to buy gold ETFs en masse. A situation is bound to develop whereby ETF trustees and custodians would have to suspend share creation for lack of blockchained bullion. But given that the project doesn’t involve LBMA deliverable bars, at least initially, that will be a problem deferred, even if this project gets beyond its pilot scheme.

It is doubly difficult to see, other than political correctness what this scheme delivers. Gold bars taken into vaults are already tested, and subject to frequent metal audits. The existence of a separate electronic identity is simply superfluous. It is possession of the bar which matters, not an electronic identity, a fact which seems to have been lost on the planners.

Will central banks subscribe to this scheme?

The largest category of recorded holders is central banks, which according to the WGC collectively own 35,976 tonnes. Some nations, such as the US and UK, hold their gold in their treasury ministries which politicises their holdings and makes it difficult to imagine them agreeing to any blockchain identification, even for gold held earmarked for other nations’ holdings. And there is the problem identified by analyst Frank Veneroso twenty years ago: gold out on lease or swapped is not actually in possession.

In 2002, Veneroso put this at between 10,000—14,000 tonnes, the latter figure being half global central bank holdings at that time. He claimed that much of this gold had been sold into the market and turned into jewellery. In addition, the US is known to have indulged in price suppression schemes, which probably explains why gold earmarked for Germany was not immediately available when Germany requested the repatriation of a minor part of her holdings at the New York Fed.

If there is one thing central banks and their governments will agree on, it is that their holdings are secret and must not be identified other than in official statistical releases. Nor, even more importantly, should the hidden reserves held in sovereign wealth funds and elsewhere be identified.

HNW family offices and individuals will not comply

The whole point about owning gold bars is they are a hidden, hoarded stash of real money, held by high net worth individuals and their family offices with a common purpose: to protect their wealth from governments and their fiat currencies. With this in mind, they are not about to divulge anything. Just imagine the response to this form of meddling, which they would certainly view as the means by which government authorities could track their ownership of bars.

Nor would they take delivery of “compliant gold”. It would be a simple matter for bullion dealers in, say, Dubai to detach gold bars from the blockchain, destroying the latter’s integrity. And if the blockchain is taken as evidence of ownership (otherwise, why have it?) then the bar’s identity could possibly be passed on to an unsuspecting buyer in lieu of the bar itself.

Conclusion

It is understandable that in a world where the bureaucrats are increasingly in charge of markets this sort of scheme can arise. To be fair to the WGC and LBMA, for political reasons they probably have little alternative to going down this route. That said, statistical abuse by the WGC in the form of a retail survey to justify this should be recognised for what it is.

The impracticality and unacceptability of it may or may not be reflected in the building of aXedras’s gold bar database. It should be noted that the scheme does not involve the largest gold exchange dealing in 9999 one-kilo bars — the Shanghai Gold Exchange. Nor does it involve the Eurasian exchanges linked to it, such as the Moscow exchange and Dubai.

Reprinted with permission from MacleodFinance Substack.

The post Putting Gold on a Blockchain appeared first on LewRockwell.

If we believe history, which is becoming more and more of a skeptics allusive magic trick, the Minoan society, a highly advanced peaceful society, was wiped out by the Myceneans’ because they didn’t like them.  The Galatians from the Bible disappeared from existence because the Romans – didn’t like them.  The Aztecs disappeared – and no ‘expert historian’ knows why.  The Anasazi disappeared – the civilization on Easter Island gone – Mayans gone –  and despite these civilizations being advanced some reaching into 1400 AD – there is no explanation.  Only guesses.

WHY do historians guess?   How can historians give a detailed account of Pliny The Elders bathroom habits dating from 2,000 years ago – but can’t give any explanation regarding what happened to entire civilizations having gone extinct?   How can we be sure they ever existed?

THE BIG PICTURE:  The CoVid Vax has been determined to be a bioweapon utilized by our own Pharma companies to ‘depopulate’ as in kill.   The World Economic Forum routinely espouses that the solution to the world’s problems is to kill ¾ of humans.  Christians, are calling for the culling of 2 million Palestinians.  Politicians have called for the murder of all MAGAs.  MAGA’s who supported the January 6th prisoners are calling for the culling of university students – teens.  Blacks want to wipe out whites.  Elites want to kill all those who are not of ‘likemindedness’.

And suddenly you realize that humanity pointing the finger at all other humans is a justification. Where are the good guys?   Where are the ones who don’t believe The Solution to our ills is death?

Everywhere you look our global culture is built on death and destruction.  Art no longer exists.  Philosophy is nonexistent.  When I was attending a Bible oriented church there was a small contingent of divorcees and windows and single women who I came to realize needed help – like me.  I sought to organize a ministry utilizing the large group of high school and college talent to become helpers.  For example – a woman in need of lawn mowing or climbing a ladder to fix a smoke alarm – could access help from another Christian capable of the task voluntarily.  My church scrapped my desire, my ministry, because.   Simply because.

Too often, church leaders fall into the egocentricity of power.  In their circle, they see themselves as ‘elite’.  As someone having greater quality understanding than – everyone else.  Typically, they don’t realize their own spiral until the church empties.

Elites claim their eliteness comes from their Money.  Elite:  superior in quality, rank, skill, achievement, education…  The vast majority of ‘elites’ can’t even brush their own teeth.   They mask achievement in fake philanthropy that never achieves the stated purpose.  Poverty is not eradicated. Cancer is not cured.   The Elite have brought nothing of value to planet earth.  Nothing.

People are praising police who use violence against protesters like a crowd at a public hanging.  Only to learn that the agitators are paid nonstudent activist/provocateurs.  As though this has never happened before.  But it did occur for the entire four years of Trump’s presidency.  Yet, they fell for it – again and demanded ALL students be expelled, labeled for life, jailed, forced into welfare.  What happened to humanity?   Ask the Minoans.

Because Putin’s war strategy was not to carpet bomb Ukraine of all civilians, intel and pundits claim Putin has lost the war.   Death and casualties is the measurement of winning a war…  The more civilians, the greater the victory.  Because ‘depopulation’ is the killing field of psychology.

“Poland calls on EU for rule on Ukraine draft dodgers”.  Not enough Ukrainians are dead – and the killer is Zelenskyy via his Handlers.  Of the 4.3 million Ukrainians living abroad, just 860,000 are conscription age men.  That’s all that are left to take care of the 3.5 million women and children.

Poland wants them to be killed in war.  The EU agrees.

Despite the media portraying millennials as ignorant twits living in mommy’s basement, every millennial I know (quite a few) are not only educated via college, but seem to have a better grasp pf the economic ramifications of America and the globe.  They don’t want war.   They want to live their lives and prosper.  They understand who is behind the Curtain running the show and that America is on the verge of collapse.  They are NOT happy with the current government structure.

This population demographic is likely the least racist, least judgmental, and highest educated.  But they are not tolerant – of illegals, campsites, homelessness, and leftist policy agendas.  When the Zionists meet their ‘maker’, millennials will eradicate the corrupt system that enjoys a peasant class/Elite class society in favor of a more modern future.   A RESET where the power is returned to the people.  Listening to them they are not afraid of hard work – living off the grid – and waiting for the time when they can rebuild.

The Israeli War Mentality that runs Western nations is built on an abject hatred of everyone non-Ashkenazi.   Including Sephardic Jews.  The leaders of Israel and the west are aging. The strategies of these ancients are cancerous tumors destroying their own.   According to every protocol – the youth market is mandatory in order to win.  According to the World Economic Forum they have indoctrinated 1400 Young Global Leaders.  Not nearly enough to gain order of The Globe.  Especially a globe under infinite wars.

As the boomers fade, a new culture, a new society, is rising.  Perhaps more in line with the Minoans who simply wanted to trade and prosper as a unified nationalist civilization.

Reprinted with permission from Helena-The Nationalist Voice.

The post Western Humanity Wherein Killing Is the Solution appeared first on LewRockwell.

That this level of incendiary outrage has seeped into the mainstream media tells us that the bill for America’s gluttony of inequality is long overdue.

Two primary trends may be reversing: wage earners–labor–may be finally starting to regain some of the share of Gross Domestic Income (GDI) lost to capital over the past 54 years, and economic class identity that collapsed in favor of individual identity–enabling the siphoning of $149 trillion in GDI from labor to capital since 1970–may be reviving.

The two trends are intertwined: the cultural dominance of identity politics came at the expense of economic class identity, which effectively blinded us as a nation to the multi-decade transfer of wealth from wage earners to owners / managers of capital.

If we are wondering how the bottom 90% have lost ground, we can start with the social-cultural blindness to the collapse of class identity which enabled the dominance of capital politically, economically and socially, as manifested in the rise of globalization and financialization, the tools used to transfer income from labor to capital.

Capital’s increasing share of domestic income was not pre-ordained; it was the result of specific policy decisions, starting with globalization’s downward pressure on domestic wages. The fancy term for forcing American workers to compete with other workers around the world whose cost of living is a fraction of ours is global wage arbitrage: capital shifted jobs to low-wage regions at will to increase profits at the expense of domestic wages.

This is the fundamental advantage capital has over labor: capital is globally mobile, labor is grounded in a particular place. Yes, workers can move around the world, too, but there are restrictions, both legal and in cost / sacrifice, as the effort and expense required to move from one country to another are significant.

Capital doesn’t care about a place or community; that’s up to the residents. If capital shifts overseas to lower costs / increase profits, well folks, make do with what’s left.

Financialization amplified capital’s dominance of the economy, for capital gained tremendous power as credit and leverage expanded capital’s scale and reach at the expense of domestic workers and communities.

It’s equally important to note that the corporate dominance generated by globalization and financialization also gutted small business and the local enterprises that provide the bulk of the jobs and cohesion in communities.

Read the Whole Article

The post Labor Rising: Will Class Identity Finally Matter Again? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Moe, Larry, and Curly are planning to rob a bank.

They are careful and exhaustive in their deliberations.  They determine which of them will drive the getaway car.  They discuss, intensively, the best access and egress routes before and after their crime.  They study, over and over again, the electronic and other defensive measures employed by their target so that their gang can obviate them.  They find out at which dates and times there will be the fewest customers at this bank so as to ensure not only their own safety, but that there will be the least collateral harm; they are bank robbers, not murderers.  How many and how well motivated the bank guards will be is an issue over which they have pored for hours.   They are not at all a bunch of nerds, such as those depicted by the television show The Big Bang Theory.  They are indeed sophisticated in electronics, as are the aforementioned, but they were not bullied when they were kids; they were the macho bullies themselves.  They are seriously planning to rob a bank and take rational steps toward this end.  They plan for all contingencies.  They agree that at 11 A.M. next Tuesday, they will engage in their heist.

Why rob a bank?  Willie Sutton, famous bank robber, is their mentor.  He explained: “That’s where they keep the money.”

Have they yet committed a crime?  (Tuesday is now several days away.)  Certainly, they have, at least in the eyes of extant law.  Here is one definition thereof: “Conspiracy is an agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal act, along with an intent to achieve the agreement’s goal. Most U.S. jurisdictions also require an overt act toward furthering the agreement.”

So far, does the Three Stooges Gang qualify?  It is difficult to see why its members do not.  There has certainly been “an agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal act, along with an intent to achieve the agreement’s goal.”  Thus, in those states that do not also “require an overt act toward furthering the agreement,” it is a matter of case closed.  Lock ’em up, and throw away the key.

But what about an “overt act”?  Well, if that requires an actual robbery, the TSG is innocent, at least for now.  However, they have indeed committed numerous “overt acts.”  They have committed pen to paper in their planning.  They have cleared their calendars for next Tuesday.  After careful search, they have identified which car they will steal and then ditch after the robbery.  So they may well be guilty of conspiracy in all fifty states.  (I assume away all Soros-inspired attorneys general.)

In sharp contrast, on the basis of libertarian theory, the three miscreants are not yet guilty of any rights violation whatsoever.  Whom have they, at least so far, victimized?  No one.  If what they have so far done is a crime, it is a victimless crime.

They might have aborted their plan ten minutes before they were scheduled to implement it.  If so, what crime did they commit?  If bad intentions, of which they are certainly guilty, are criminalized, then all of us — except, perhaps, for a few saints, and I am not even sure of them in this regard — would be in jail when caught.

I am now thinking of punching you in the nose, gentle reader.  I can anticipate, in loving detail in my mind’s eye, how your proboscis will feel when impacted by my fist.  I can just see the blood flowing.  I have plotted my escape route.  Ha, the cops will never catch me, since I am now wearing a COVID mask.

But good sense and morality prevails, and I do not follow through on this dastardly deed.  Am I a criminal nevertheless?  Yes, according to the laws now on the books.  No, on the basis of libertarian law and common sense.

This originally appeared on American Thinker and was reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post The Libertarian Case Against Punishing a ‘Conspiracy’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

A few days ago, I thumbed through the latest issue of the Uline catalog, an inch-thick treasury of industrial solutions for every imaginable warehouse scenario. It occupies a niche in the catalog market, with most of its products impervious to muddy feet, chemical waste and general abuse. I receive this hulking volume because I ordered a wooden dolly a few years ago during a move, making me a valued customer to the Wisconsin-based company.

Most catalogs land in the kitchen garbage can before they can clutter my counter. Clothing, home decor, and sports gear are among the regular offerings. Keeping the counter clean takes vigilance, because every couple days, there’s a must-have seasonal “collection” to whet my appetite for more spending. If you take the bait and buy something from any of these retailers, you’ll immediately receive the next new catalog; it’s important to keep stoking the flames of discontent, without delay.

A couple of the publications are particularly egregious offenders, measuring at least a half-inch thick and delivered rather presumptuously given their hefty size and my lack of purchase history. The worst is Restoration Hardware’s ponderous, multi-volume furniture series, which would look handsome in any library; Atlanta’s snooty quarter-inch real estate folios take second place by weight, but first in pretentious copywriting. A quick flip through any of these fat glossies promises prestige and importance on a scale not afforded by the thinner and less venerable competitors.

Here is where the humble Uline catalog stole my heart. On the surface, its utilitarian looks would appear a disadvantage; it lacks the cool elegance and haute aesthetic of its fancier print brethren. Every issue looks the same, full of heavy-duty products and bright colors that suit the tastes of OSHA inspectors and warehouse managers, not style mavens and influencers. Nonetheless, I adore these very distinctions, which imbue its pages with an unembellished, midwestern warmth that welcomes every boot and heel to its oil-absorbing and water-proof world.

Let’s start our trip through this sensible catalog at the front door. No need for the fine Persian rugs and light colors that stir feminine ire when muddy visitors breach the threshold; at Uline, you can step in straight from the chemical spill or baseball field, without so much as removing your shoes. Yes, their entry mat colors are limited, but if burgundy is too wild, you can go with black. One even resembles a fancy berber carpet; if you need something a little more refined, they offer a resort version, which is modeled with a pair of high heels on it. (Still worried about dirty feet? Try their shoe-covering booties, located on the protective clothing aisle.)

Talk of industrial supply summons ideas of spartan factory and warehouse implements like safety vests and mops; be prepared for surprises here, though, because Uline also sells comfortable furniture. So long as you like steel, plastic and polywood, you’ll be pleased with the seating selections—some are upholstered, and all repel liquids and preclude pillow-fluffing. Too bad I didn’t know this years ago when I patrolled our cushioned sectional for misplaced pillows and unreported juice-box spills. Why buy pillows anyways, since they only end up on the floor? Every parent needs to receive a Uline catalog early in the childrearing process, heading off pointless gruntwork before it steals one’s zest for life.

I love one-stop shops, and with the exception of groceries, this retailer fits the bill. You can find a Uline answer for almost every need in your home. Need storage solutions? They sell everything from 40-drawer rolling carts to forklift-ready bins. Need kitchen supplies? They’ve got food packaging containers, and there are whole sections of jugs, cups and utensils. Need cleaning supplies? This is near and dear to my heart, and apparently to Uline’s too; I’m currently eyeing their backpack commercial vacuum. For medical needs, you can outfit your own urgent care with first aid kits, eyewash stations and protective gear. Somebody threw up? Try a spill kit or a roll of “sorbent”, which promises to soak up acids, oils and other gross liquids.

Read the Whole Article

The post From Cradle to Grave in the Uline Catalog appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, Boom!”
— R.E.M.

The world we’ve known is over. The US Congress finally pushed the big red button. When the West froze around $300 billion of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves in March 2022 it was the first step in breaking down the system of foreign exchange reserves that makes up the global economy.

Freezing assets of countries they are mad at isn’t new behavior from the locusts that run the G-7 countries. We still have to listen to conservatards whine about Obama giving Iran back “pallets of cash” for signing the JCPOA (Iran Nuclear Deal) in 2015, when all he did was unfreeze assets we’d frozen in 1979…

… 1979, folks. Seriously. Get a grip on reality. Obama gave Iran back their money. I’m no Obama fan, far from it, but as payments go, it was really nothing.

Freezing assets, however, isn’t really theft, it’s just the tip.

The money frozen in 2022 was supposed to operate the same way. It was supposed to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin into ending the war in Ukraine. The theory being that the oligarchs whose money that represented would push Putin out of power to get that money back.

Theories, by the way, speaking as a scientist, mostly suck.

Putin used this to his advantage, rallying the world around him and to the burgeoning BRICS Alliance. It worked a treat and here we are with $90 per barrel oil, raging inflation and a shattered Ukraine.

Typically, the British call this, “money well spent.”

Overall, it was a statement by the G-7 that no one’s money is safe. Look, no offense to Iran (or Venezuela or anyone else who previously ran into this problem), but cutting them out of the global economy was an effective piece of intimidation of everyone else.

It had it’s limits, however. And the increasingly common usage of sanctions while possibly effective in enforcing the rules based order demanded by the G-7, only decreased the cost/benefit analysis of playing by those rules in the future. Eventually someone would turn what was supposed to be a weakness into a strength.

No self-proclaimed ‘serious person’ in DC, London and/or Brussels thought that doing something so arrogant (and stupid) to one of the most important commodity-producing countries in the world would backfire on them. When you stop to think about it we’re talking about a country, Russia, that in 2023 exported more wheat than the 3rd largest producer (the US) harvested — approx. 60 million tonnes exported (RUS) vs. 47 million tonnes produced (US).

So, like the hubristic morons they are, our leadership thought this would work. It didn’t.

Or was their plan even dumber?

Because the recent actions by the US vis a vis Russia and China is so dumb it defies description. Congress has authorized President Joah Bii-DEN! to seize Russia’s foreign exchange reserves as they have threatened to do for the past six months and hand the money to Ukraine.

This isn’t the tip anymore, this is just outright theft.

And they call this #winning.

Leaving aside the inconsolable butthurt this move implies, it really signifies that this may have actually been the plan all along.

In their April 26th livestream, the Alexes at The Duran brought up the brilliant point that the real target of this move to seize Russia’s forex reserves wasn’t Russia, but China. (START AT the 3:00)

By all accounts the US has frozen a small portion of the $300 billion of Russia’s money sitting around now collecting interest because of Jerome Powell. But in the Age of Bii-Den! no foreign policy blunder is too small, no shakedown attempt to brazen, and no act of diplomatic vandalism too destructive.

Sec. of State Antony Blinken’s ‘performance’ in Beijing was nothing short of a declaration of war, as Alex Mercouris put it, and he’s absolutely right. It’s good to see both of them come to the same conclusion I reached during the first days of the Bii-Denn! Junta…

… that they are trying to destroy the United States.

So, all in all, the threat hangs out there that the G-7 stands ready to seize Russia’s forex reserves, which is an implicit threat to China that the US will cancel all outstanding debts owed to China because we are at war with them.

Because this is exactly where this leads.

Russia famously sold all of their US Treasury reserves in 2021 in preparation for war with NATO over Ukraine. There were no CUSIPs to cancel unilaterally by the US. As always, Vlad is one step ahead of the predictably brutish neocons at the US Dept. of State.

Even though Vicky the Hutt is gone and the US is offering a few fig leaves to Russia here and there to simulate attempts at opening up a diplomatic end to Ukraine, Russia is looking at Blinken, David Cameron (UK), Josep Borrell (EU) and the rest of the Gang that Can’t Sanction Straight and calmly saying, “Nyet. Fuck you, pay me.”

And, by all accounts, the EU is paying Russia while Bii-Denn! tries to open up global oil markets in a desperate bid to bring oil prices down because “Our Money, Your Problem” is now “Our Commodities, Your Political Unrest” or something like that.

This speaks to the heart of this matter, there is no trust left between these ‘combatants’ and, by extension, the rest of the world. Global trade rests on trust. Trust that if you do business in one country, what you’ve personally earned is considered your property. If that trust is broken it’s not likely not coming back anytime soon.

Seizing those assets is simply spitting in the eye of the very ideas on which Pax Americana was built. You can say it was always a lie and that’s your prerogative, but the key to continuing any good racket is not to shake down the mark to the point where he sees the grift.

I guess they no longer teach that at Globalist Central.

The saddest part about this is that, truly, the target of this insanity isn’t even China or Russia or Iran… the real target is us, the people who are responsible for the debt their inanity represents. The real problem is that they are broke, are about to break all of the promises of the past two generations, and want you to believe it was Russia and China’s fault.

But these people are simple, garden variety narcissistic abusers, who sit there in their ivory towers nursing the holes where their hearts are supposed to be, screaming, “Why are you making me beat you like this!”

Why indeed?

BOOM!

I was contacted by Sputnik News for comments on this issue which were far more professional than those I just typed. As always, in the interests of transparency, I publish the full comments for your confirmation of whatever you think of me.

The US House passed legislation that would give Biden the legal authority to confiscate frozen Russian financial assets and transfer to them to Ukraine.

1. If the US really does pull the trigger and confiscates Russia’s financial assets, what are some of the potential consequences for the hegemony of the US dollar and financial system? 

I could write a book on this issue, to be honest. But, in short, nothing good.  What this would do is ensure the US is no longer a place where trade and business are protected by law.  Congress is literally throwing the entire concept of foreign exchange into the trash can and lighting it on fire by giving President Biden this power, which no one should have.

This isn’t about Russia or anyone’s opinion about what they are doing in Ukraine.  This is about the US as a bastion for the rule of law as it pertains to business and banking.  Now, we’ve been trending towards this moment for the past two decades, but this would be a move from which the current US government cannot and will not recover from.

It will signal to the rest of the world that their money is no longer safe from confiscation if it is held in US banks.  That at any time if someone in Congress has a grudge against you, they can just seize it and move on.  We Americans have lived under the spectre of ‘asset forfeiture’ laws for years as a consequence of our “War on Drugs” during the Reagan administration.  The corruption it created is legendary.

Every country looking to do business with the US in the future now lives with that.  This one act is what signals the end of the modern era of finance and trade.  From here the world will fracture and the US will lose trillions in future trade.  This confirms my argument that US leadership are vandals intent on the collapse of the US rather than having any allegiance whatsoever to the people or what’s left of the ideals on which the country was founded.

2. How are other countries likely to react to such a move? Are there any other alternatives to the US dollar and financial system that they could turn to?

This move will not have immediate effects that we’ll see play out in capital markets beyond accelerating trends already in place.  As of right now there is no alternative to the US dollar because of its primacy in settling global trade.  The euro gave up that potential role when they went to negative interest rates last decade.

The Chinese yuan is not ready for this role either.  But with this move by the US, it will now gain momentum towards fulfilling that role. And, believe me, the Chinese government is fully aware of this.

In the short run, paradoxically, it will cause a run into the US dollar, as people who need them to service debt will hoard them, but with the intention of paying those debts off.  This will put upward pressure on the dollar making our sovereign debt that much harder to service.  The vandals of the Biden administration are fully aware of this, and if anything, are cheering it on.

But once trust is broken it is nearly impossible to regain it.  Capital flows to where it is treated best.  This was the US’s real super-power for all of these years.  We treated capital well.  It’s what drove our banking dominance.  That dominance will fade and the world, in the short term, will turn to gold until a new system emerges.

3. US lawmakers are constantly saying that giving more money to the US military industrial complex via Ukraine spending is great for the economy, creates jobs. Is that actually the case?

Yes, most of the money isn’t actually going to Ukraine.  I suspect that most of it is going to replace what we’ve already stripped from ours and the rest of NATO’s stores.  This money is just ensuring that the war wanted so desperately by the people who stand behind our politicians is fully funded.

War is not good for the economy, it diverts precious capital from productive innovation into weapons and bombs.  As always, all they sell us on is the stuff that is seen, the jobs for making bombs.  What they ignore are the costs to that, the unseen things we didn’t build with that same money that would alleviate future needs.  It’s just pathetic grandstanding and it’s why representative Republics always fail the same way.

Creating jobs is a politician’s priority, but it isn’t in the people’s priority.  What the people want is to not be looted and create their own opportunities. But that implies we don’t need the politicians, which we don’t, and we can’t have that gaining traction, now can we?

Reprinted with permission from Gold Goats ‘n Guns.

The post It’s the End of the Foreign Exchange Reserves as We Know It appeared first on LewRockwell.

A 19th century plantation slave suffered less abuse than an American today and was less likely to have his head cracked open by a police baton than a Columbia University Student. Here are the lost rights of Americans from A to Z.

Republican US senators are no better friends of the US Constitution than the administrators at Columbia University, Netanyahu and the Israel Lobby, the NYPD, and the whore media. For example, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R, TN) labeled as “terrorists” students who protest against Israel’s destruction of Palestine. In order to protect Israel from students protesting genocide, Blackburn wants the students added to the terrorist watch list and prohibited from flying:

“Any student who has promoted terrorism or engaged in terrorists[sic] acts on behalf of Hamas should be immediately be [sic] added to the terrorist watch list and placed on the [Transportation Security Administration] No Fly List,” Blackburn wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday. The stupid US senator sees the students as acting “on behalf of Hamas” and not on the basis of their moral conscience.

Senator Rick Scott (R, FL) accuses protesting students of violating Israel’s right to commit genocide and wants the US Justice (sic) Department to investigate the students for “conspiring to violate the civil rights of a religious minority.” US senators are falling all over themselves pimping for Netanyahu’s final solution to the “Palestinian Problem.”

One can see American conservatives supporting these demands, not realizing that their own Constitutional rights are in the crosshairs.

Today in America there is no thought. There is only manipulated emotion and the sale of Americans’ honor for campaign contributions. So what does voting fix?

The 21st century began with the George W. Bush’s suspension of habeas corpus on suspicion alone, and American liberty has gone downhill continuously at increasing speed. Only a simulacrum of the country into which I was born remains.

Americans are not permitted to speak freely about Israel. Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs points out the incongruity of a university, whose existence is based on freedom of speech, repressing freedom of speech.

Closing down voices is today the primary function of the Israel Lobby, media, universities and “education” in general. It applies to faculty as well as to students. The Israel Lobby was able to reach into a Catholic university and cancel the tenure awarded to Norman Finkelstein and into the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and cancel the tenured appointment of a recruit from the University of Virginia. One wonders If the Israel Lobby will order Columbia to fire Professor Sachs.

The post The US Constitution Is Another Victim of Genocide appeared first on LewRockwell.

Here’s what everyone needs to understand about Ukraine:

The United States has already moved on to Plan B. No, the Biden administration has not issued an official statement on the matter, but the shift has already begun. The Washington Brain-trust has abandoned any hope of winning the war outright (Plan A) and has, thus, adopted a different strategy altogether. (Plan B)

Plan B is a combination of two main elements:

• A—A Strategy of Denial, which is ‘a defensive approach designed to stop an adversary’ from achieving its goals. In this case, the objective is to prolong the conflict for as long as possible to prevent Russian from achieving a clear victory. That is the top priority.
• B—To continue to increase and intensify asymmetrical attacks on vital infrastructure and civilian areas in Russia proper in order to inflict as much damage on Russia as possible.

This, in essence, is Plan B. Any concern for the Ukrainian people or the future viability of the Ukrainian state, have not been factored in to Washington’s cynical calculation. What matters is preventing a Russian victory and inflicting as much pain on Russia as possible. Those are the primary objectives. In practical terms, that means that more Ukrainian soldiers will be slaughtered wholesale in order to continue using Ukraine as a launching pad for attacks on Russia. In fact, UK warlords have already confirmed what we are saying here. Check out this excerpt from an article at Zero Hedge:

… UK defense chief, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, telling Financial Times that the West’s new infusion of military aid will help Ukraine increase its long-range strikes on Russian territory:

Ukraine is set to increase long-range attacks inside Russia as an influx of western military aid aims to help Kyiv shape the war “in much stronger ways”, the head of the UK military has said….

Adm. Radakin continued, “As Ukraine gains more capabilities for the long-range fight . . . its ability to continue deep operations will [increasingly] become a feature” of the war…… More of Radakin’s words point to escalation (and not negotiations) in the following… UK Defense Chief Says Ukraine To Increase Long-Range Strikes In Russia, Zero Hedge

See what I mean? This is Plan B spelled out in black and white. There is no longer any expectation that Ukraine will win the war. None. The country will merely be used as a platform for hectoring, harassing and terrorizing the Russian people. That’s Plan B in a nutshell.

But how can we be certain that Plan B has already begun?

First, consider the allocation of resources provided under the new “National Security Supplemental” that Biden signed into law earlier this week. The bill provides $61 billion for Ukraine, of which a mere $13 billion will be spent on weapons and weapons systems. How is that paltry sum going to help defeat the Russian Army?

Keep in mind, the US and NATO allies have already spent more than $200 billion funding the war in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are losing. How is another $13 billion supposed to make a difference?

It won’t, nor is it intended to. As we said earlier, the real purpose of the money is to prevent a clear Russian victory by launching random attacks on critical infrastructure and civilian areas in Russia. Once you understand that the basic operational plan has changed, developments on the ground begin to make sense. The goal is to antagonize a geopolitical rival not to win a war. Capisce?

Here’s what the $61 billion aid package will not do: (According to political analyst Ted Snider)

It will not provide enough money. It will not provide the badly needed weapons, nor deliver them on time. It will not provide the even more badly needed troops. And it will not provide victory…..Though $61 billion is a massive amount of money, it is not massive enough to defeat Russia. What $61 Billion for Ukraine Won’t Do, The American Conservative

It’s worth noting, that most of Ukraine’s best-trained combat units have already been obliterated. They’re gone. That has forced the Zelensky regime to abduct men off the streets of Kiev and send them into battle with just two-weeks training, which is why casualties are so high. No one believes that these “green recruits” are going to rout the Russian Army or even slow its inexorable advance. No one. These men are simply being sacrificed so Washington can continue to launch its drone attacks on Russian oil facilities near Moscow or bomb civilian villages on the Russian border or conduct airstrikes on the Kerch Bridge . In other words, this ongoing orgy of carnage is being perpetuated so that deranged western elites can continue to deliver glancing blows that the Russian bear brushes off like a pesky mosquito. That is the value these billionaire elites place on human life. It means nothing to them. Check out this clip from an article by Scott Ritter:

US President Joe Biden recently signed a long-delayed $95 billion package, including $61 billion in aid for Ukraine, into law. At least $13.8 billion of this sum will be used to deliver weaponry, such as long-range ATACMS missiles and F-16 fighter jets….

“The $13.8 billion in military assistance that will be provided to Ukraine will be insufficient to basically halt the ongoing Russian advance,” and “to change the outcome on the battlefield,” he stated….

Russia currently enjoys “military superiority, if not outright supremacy, along the entire line of contact, not just on the front lines, but extending well into the rear areas of the Ukrainian defense areas.”… Scott Ritter: Hefty US Military Aid for Ukraine Won’t Hamper Russia’s Strategic Advantage, Sputnik

The American people who foolishly believe that the new supplemental aid package will help to expel the “evil” Russians from Ukraine are living in La la land. Nothing could be further from the truth. No one who follows events on the ground thinks Ukraine has any chance of beating a well-equipped and highly-motivated Russian Army that boasts nearly unlimited reserves, unlimited industrial capacity, unlimited resources and a firm conviction that the West is using Ukraine to break up their country and install its own puppet in Moscow. That’s what they are fighting for, and that’s why they’re going to win. Here’s more from Snider:

“$61 billion will not change the outcome of this war,” Nicolai Petro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhodes and the author of The Tragedy of Ukraine, (According to) Valery Zaluzhny…..That… would require five to seven times that amount, or $350-400 billion.” (But) Even if the money was sufficient, it would not provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs because the weapons are not available for purchase. (According to) Retired U.S. Army Colonel Daniel Davis, Senior Fellow at Defense Priorities: “even if you get the money, you’re not going to have the number of artillery shells, interceptor missiles for air defense. You can’t make the artillery shells any faster than we are right now. It’s a matter of physical capacity: we can’t do it.”…

Even if the West could provide Ukraine with the weapons on time, the “big problem for Ukraine,” Davis says, is not the provision of weapons, but the “manpower issue.” Ukraine’s losses on the battlefield, to death and injury, have left Ukraine with a bigger manpower problem than artillery problem…. even if the U.S. gave Ukraine all the weapons it needed, they “don’t have the men to use them.” What $61 Billion for Ukraine Won’t Do, The American Conservative

This is all pretty basic stuff. Obviously, if you don’t have the men or the money or the weapons, you’re going to lose. And, the maniacal stewards of this failed anti-Russia crusade KNOW that Ukraine is going to lose, but they’ve chosen to continue the war anyway. Why?

Because the lives, and the destruction, and the dissolution of the Ukrainian state don’t matter to them. All that matters is inflicting pain on Russia, whatever the cost. That is the ‘noble cause’ for which 500,000 Ukrainians have given their lives. And that is why this bloody debacle continues to drag on endlessly even though the outcome has never been in doubt.

Reprinted with permission from  The Unz Review.

The post Washington Moves On to Plan B appeared first on LewRockwell.

 

 

di Jimmy Song

Nelle prime tre parti di questa serie ho esaminato i diversi modi in cui il denaro fiat ha portato a terribili incentivi a livello individuale, aziendale e nazionale. Siamo più isolati che mai, siamo meno soddisfatti del nostro lavoro e lavoriamo sotto la scure di stati tirannici e autoritari. In questo articolo analizzerò i modi in cui il mondo intero reagisce agli incentivi del denaro fiat.

Gli articoli precedenti parlavano più in generale di come gli individui, le aziende e le nazioni sono influenzati dal denaro fiat; quello di oggi sarà molto più specifico poiché esiste un solo mondo in cui viviamo e non c'è bisogno di parlare in generale. Inizierò questo articolo con un contesto storico, in quanto ciò ci darà una migliore comprensione del motivo per cui gli incentivi finanziari nel mondo sono come sono.

BRETTON WOODS

Iniziamo l'analisi degli incentivi monetari fiat a livello mondiale con uno dei principali eventi storici che hanno plasmato il mondo in cui viviamo oggi: gli Accordi di Bretton Woods del 1944.

Bretton Woods è una piccola città del New Hampshire dove i burocrati di tutto il mondo si riunirono per stabilire quello che chiamarono “un nuovo ordine monetario mondiale”. Se sembra inquietante e sinistro, è perché lo è.

L’idea della conferenza era quella di risolvere i problemi della Prima Guerra Mondiale, dove i pagamenti di riparazione e le lacune attorno al gold standard allora ristabilito causarono il caos in tante economie e alla fine portarono alla Seconda Guerra Mondiale. Ritornare al gold standard pre-Prima guerra mondiale era troppo difficile da conciliare con il controllo monetario delle banche centrali a cui ogni Paese si era abituato, quindi la conferenza era un modo per capire come stabilire un altro ordine monetario.

I problemi principali erano che ogni Paese voleva la legittimità dell’oro, ma anche la tassazione nascosta del denaro fiat grazie al sistema bancario centrale. La soluzione fu quella di aggiungere un livello indiretto al rimborso dell’oro.

Prima della Prima Guerra Mondiale l’oro era convertibile direttamente presso le banche commerciali. Negli Stati Uniti si potevano scambiare $20,67 con un'oncia d'oro; nel Regno Unito si potevano scambiare £4,25 con un'oncia d'oro. La valuta era coperta dall’oro e la convertibilità la manteneva scarsa. La maggior parte delle valute era coperta dall'oro e per esse il cambio estero era facile e non fluttuava perché l'oro era lo standard.

L’avvento del sistema bancario centrale ha cambiato la situazione, poiché alcune banche centrali spendevano molto più delle loro riserve e dovevano sospendere la convertibilità. Durante la Prima Guerra Mondiale le banche centrali stamparono denaro che aveva una parvenza di legittimità con la promessa di futura convertibilità, ma in realtà erano in bancarotta. Il risultato era prevedibile: quelle valute che erano coperte da meno oro avevano un prezzo più basso. Alla fine arrivò l’iperinflazione, come il divorzio tra le celebrità.

Che tutti rimanessero in un gold standard era auspicabile poiché l’età dell’oro, La Belle Époque, aveva portato grande prosperità. La ragione principale è che l’oro rende molto più semplice il cambio estero e la sua scarsità rende difficile l'imbroglio.

Ma ecco il problema nel momento storico in cui ebbe luogo Bretton Woods: circa tre quarti di tutto l’oro del mondo si trovava negli Stati Uniti. Questo perché questi ultimi avevano grandi surplus commerciali rispetto ad altri Paesi ed essi spedivano oro negli Stati Uniti per bilanciare i cambi, anche se alla fine, quando finirono l’oro, gli Stati Uniti prestarono loro denaro. I Paesi in guerra in Europa erano spendaccioni poiché impegnati a combattere la Seconda Guerra Mondiale. Gli Stati Uniti avevano l’oro e, come il tizio con un enorme vantaggio in una partita di poker, avevano un’enorme influenza sul suo spostamento.

Ciò che i delegati a Bretton Woods decisero fu di aggiungere un livello indiretto: invece di tornare a un rigido gold standard, gli Stati Uniti avrebbero imposto a tutti gli altri un gold-exchange standard con il dollaro come sostituto dell’oro. Invece di utilizzare il metallo giallo per i saldi commerciali internazionali, il dollaro sarebbe diventata la valuta di riferimento. Gli Stati Uniti garantivano il cambio del dollaro con l’oro a $35 l’oncia, ma solo alle altre banche centrali. Undici anni prima degli Accordi di Bretton Woods ai cittadini statunitensi era già stato impedito di convertire dollari in oro attraverso l’Ordine esecutivo 6102 di Franklin D. Roosevelt.

L’accordo di Bretton Woods mise il dollaro al posto dell’oro come valuta per il commercio internazionale e successivamente conferì agli Stati Uniti un potere egemonico.

EGEMONIA DEL DOLLARO

Il motivo per cui il gold standard funzionava bene era perché nessuno stato poteva imbrogliare. La bilancia commerciale internazionale richiedeva una consegna reale di oro e ciò significava che qualsiasi stampa di denaro in eccesso avrebbe causato il deflusso dell’oro fuori dal Paese, provocandone infine la bancarotta.

Si supponeva che il gold-exchange standard avesse vantaggi simili, con la convertibilità dei dollari in oro che fungeva da protezione per qualsiasi eccesso di stampa di denaro da parte degli Stati Uniti. Eppure questo vincolo non fu realmente tale. Il gold-exchange standard diede agli Stati Uniti la capacità unica di stampare dollari e chiunque altro li doveva accettare, anche se non erano coperti dall'oro fisico. Non era più il metallo giallo a essere inviato per i pagamenti della bilancia commerciale internazionale, bensì i dollari.

La capacità di stampare denaro con cui ogni altro Paese regolava i propri scambi commerciali diede agli Stati Uniti più potere sul resto del mondo. Avevano il dominio monetario sugli altri grazie allo standard del dollaro. Erano sia un giocatore in campo che un arbitro. In un certo senso le due superpotenze del secondo dopoguerra adottarono strategie diverse per controllare le rispettive sfere d'influenza.

L’URSS usò la guerra, lo spionaggio e gli intrighi, mentre gli Stati Uniti usarono l’imperialismo monetario. Il soft power di questi ultimi tramite il dollaro si rivelò molto più efficace delle tattiche di guerra e di spionaggio dell’URSS. Infatti il dominio monetario degli Stati Uniti era così profondo che l’URSS dovette ricorrere all’eurodollaro per regolare i commerci internazionali.

L’EURODOLLARO

L’eurodollaro prende il nome dal fatto che le banche europee iniziarono a prestare dollari nonostante non fossero membri del sistema Federal Reserve. Attualmente molte più banche rispetto a quelle europee emettono prestiti in dollari sulla base della riserva frazionaria.

Dato che all’epoca c'era la Guerra Fredda, l’URSS non poteva ottenere prestiti in dollari dalle banche statunitensi, ma riuscì a ottenere prestiti dalle banche europee per saldare i commerci internazionali. Perché queste banche collaborarono? Ricordate che a quel tempo c’erano partiti comunisti in tutta Europa e rispondevano tutti a Mosca. Alcuni di questi membri fondarono banche che i sovietici finirono per utilizzare, ma il potere del dollaro era così grande che perfino l’Unione Sovietica dovette sottomettersi!

L’egemonia del dollaro aveva favorito gli Stati Uniti nel commercio internazionale, poiché divennero la banca centrale di tutte le altre banche centrali. Il sistema dell’eurodollaro esiste ancora oggi, in cui le banche non statunitensi prestano dollari e non solo in Europa, ma in molte altre parti del mondo. Di conseguenza le altre banche centrali manterranno i dollari in riserva e potranno poi essere utilizzati, attraverso la riserva frazionaria, per crearne di più. C’è un limite, però, perché tali dollari sono necessari per combattere una qualsiasi debolezza delle loro divise e prestare troppi dollari può rapidamente esaurire le loro riserve, lasciandoli vulnerabili all’iperinflazione.

IL PETRODOLLARO

Gli Stati Uniti abusarono del proprio potere di stampare denaro e diffondere inflazione dei prezzi nel resto del mondo, impegnandosi in molte spese dissolute. Programmi di assistenza sociale come Medicare e Medicaid furono avviati negli anni ’60 e altri come la previdenza sociale furono ampliati. Anche varie operazioni della Guerra Fredda furono finanziate con denaro fiat, la più costosa delle quali fu la guerra del Vietnam. Gli Stati Uniti pagarono tutti questi programmi stampando dollari che non erano coperti dall’oro e questa spesa innervosì le altre banche centrali.

Gran parte dell’oro era già stato riscattato all’inizio degli anni ’70 e l’offerta di dollari rispetto alle riserve significava che la FED era probabilmente in bancarotta. Quando sempre più Paesi iniziarono a minacciare di convertire i loro dollari in oro, Richard Nixon ne sospese la convertibilità nell’agosto 1971. La sospensione avrebbe dovuto essere temporanea, ma alla fine si rivelò permanente.

Senza dubbio Nixon pensava che tale sospensione avrebbe potuto essere abrogata una volta che il dollaro fosse tornato forte. Infatti lo stesso percorso era quello che aveva intrapreso molte volte la Banca d’Inghilterra nei suoi oltre 300 anni di storia, ma per rafforzare di nuovo il dollaro era necessaria una disciplina fiscale maggiore e la sospensione temporanea divenne rapidamente permanente dato che l’inflazione dei prezzi degli anni ’70 portò un notevole malessere nell’economia statunitense.

La sospensione della convertibilità dell’oro minacciò la supremazia del dollaro, così Nixon fece passare gli Stati Uniti al petrolio. La transizione fu un po’ dura e provocò una forte inflazione del dollaro negli anni ’70. In un certo senso l’inflazione dei prezzi degli anni ’70 era lo scotto per gli eccessi degli anni ’60, ma con il sostegno dell’Arabia Saudita gli Stati Uniti riuscirono a far diventare il dollaro la valuta mondiale di riferimento per il petrolio.

L’egemonia del dollaro ebbe quindi un intoppo negli anni ’70, ma continuò il suo dominio una volta che si affermò il petrodollaro.

EFFETTO CANTILLON MONDIALE

Gli Stati Uniti continuano ad avere questo privilegio esorbitante di poter stampare il denaro che il mondo usa per i saldi internazionali e ciò significa, tra le altre cose, scambiare dollari per beni e servizi provenienti da altri Paesi. Gli effetti sono sottili ma profondi.

Innanzitutto il denaro stampato viene generalmente speso prima negli Stati Uniti, pertanto tutti coloro che ci vivono traggono vantaggio dell’Effetto Cantillon. I cinesi, d’altro canto, devono aspettare di essere pagati per i loro beni che vendono negli Stati Uniti prima di mettere le mani sui dollari, pertanto le persone che vengono pagate negli Stati Uniti generalmente vengono pagate di più.

Questo può sembrare positivo, ma dato che la produzione manifatturiera può essere spostata l’Effetto Cantillon mondiale l'ha spinta all’estero. La manodopera è più economica nei Paesi che ci perdono da suddetto Effetto, quindi è naturalmente lì che si sposta la produzione manifatturiera. A partire dagli anni ’70 i posti di lavoro nel settore manifatturiero si sono spostati dagli Stati Uniti verso Paesi con manodopera molto più economica e ciò non solo ha significato la scomparsa di molti buoni posti di lavoro della classe media, ma anche che gli Stati Uniti sono diventati sempre più dipendenti dal settore manifatturiero estero che, in qualsiasi tipo di conflitto, li rende vulnerabili.

In secondo luogo le opportunità migliori e più redditizie si trovano negli Stati Uniti. Molte persone credono in una sorta di eccezionalismo americano, ma questo è solo narcisismo. Il motivo per cui ci sono tante persone ricche negli Stati Uniti è perché essi hanno la valuta di riserva mondiale. Il successo aziendale negli Stati Uniti si traduce in una ricompensa monetaria maggiore rispetto ad altri Paesi a causa dell’Effetto Cantillon. Più soldi circolano negli Stati Uniti e quindi il successo dà più ricompense. Di conseguenza sempre più persone vogliono trasferirsi negli Stati Uniti ed essi possono scegliere chi far entrare, il che porta all’effetto successivo.

In terzo luogo c’è una gigantesca fuga di talenti negli Stati Uniti. Le persone più ambiziose di altri Paesi vengono negli Stati Uniti e vivono molto meglio che nei loro luoghi d’origine. La fuga di cervelli significa che altri Paesi ne soffrono: i migliori e i più brillanti tra i Paesi in via di sviluppo votano con i piedi e non sono solo gli Stati Uniti a trarne vantaggio, ma anche quei Paesi generalmente più in alto nella scala dell'Effetto Cantillon. I Paesi ricchi diventano più ricchi in termini di capitale umano, mentre quelli poveri diventano più poveri. Gran parte della devastazione nei Paesi più poveri è sostanzialmente dovuta al fatto che sono tra le fila dei perdenti nell'Effetto Cantillon.

ORGANIZZAZIONE A TRE LETTERE

Ciò che è ancora peggio per questi Paesi più poveri è il governo autoritario dei Paesi più ricchi. Il colonialismo è in gran parte scomparso dopo la Seconda guerra mondiale, ma ora abbiamo il dominio economico attraverso l’egemonia del dollaro. Questo è ciò che comunemente viene chiamato imperialismo monetario.

Il metodo dell’imperialismo monetario degli Stati Uniti è attraverso l’uso di organizzazioni a tre lettere: FMI, BRI, WEF e Banca Mondiale sono alcune delle istituzioni utilizzate per questo dominio. Il funzionamento interno di queste organizzazioni va oltre lo scopo di questo articolo, ma essenzialmente concedono prestiti ai Paesi che sono tra le fila dei perdenti nell'Effetto Cantillon in modo da dominarli.

Il modo in cui funziona tale dominio è questo: le banche dei Paesi che sono tra le fila dei vincitori nell'Effetto Cantillon concedono prestiti ai Paesi che ci perdono; poi quando questi prestiti non vengono ripagati le organizzazioni a tre lettere intervengono per “salvare” le banche che hanno prestato questi fondi. Essenzialmente si fanno carico del prestito e ne prolungano la durata in cambio del controllo organizzativo sul bilancio del Paese. Tali restrizioni possono includere voci come una percentuale sul bilancio nazionale che può essere spesa per le infrastrutture. Spesso a questi governi indebitati viene richiesto di istituire una banca centrale indipendente, la quale può essere utilizzata per ovviare alla necessità di qualsiasi approvazione governativa. Tra le altre cose i Paesi sottomessi sono tenuti a vendere alcuni dei loro beni nazionali, come i diritti minerari o la terra, a società straniere, completando il processo di dominio.

In questo modo il denaro fiat viene usato per ottenere le risorse di un Paese in via di sviluppo.

Ciò che è interessante ora è che la Cina sta facendo qualcosa di molto simile con la sua Nuova via della seta: concede prestiti e si impossessa delle risorse di un Paese dopo che il denaro è stato mal gestito. La Cina sta entrando nel gioco dell’imperialismo monetario a cui gli Stati Uniti hanno sempre giocato.

OBBLIGO MORALE MONDIALE

Nell’ultimo articolo ho scritto che il potere della stampa di denaro a livello nazionale crea l’obbligo morale affinché gli stati risolvano ogni problema che un Paese potrebbe avere. Questo perché per chi non lo sapesse, il denaro fiat sembra gratuito e se si può usare il denaro per risolvere un problema e non lo si fa, allora uno può apparire come un grande idiota.

La stessa dinamica è estremamente accentuata sulla scena mondiale, tranne che, invece di individui o aziende che ottengono i benefici di vari programmi di welfare e di salvataggio, ci sono i Paesi. Ma chi è il garante? Beh, chi stampa i soldi ovviamente. E questo obbligo morale a livello mondiale spetta agli Stati Uniti in quanto controllori della valuta di riserva mondiale.

Il primo e più ovvio modo in cui gli Stati Uniti sono moralmente obbligati è il salvataggio delle altre banche centrali. Stabilire linee di swap o strutture temporanee di liquidità sono in realtà solo eufemismi per stampare grandi quantità di denaro per conto di un altro Paese. Abbiamo visto che la FED lo ha fatto per molte banche centrali durante la crisi sanitaria, pertanto se un Paese sta esaurendo i dollari per stabilizzare i tassi di cambio, gli Stati Uniti danno a queste banche centrali più munizioni.

Quei Paesi che non godono del favore degli Stati Uniti non dispongono di tale ancora di salvezza monetaria, come dimostrano le iperinflazioni di Venezuela, Zimbabwe e Libano. Il messaggio che arriva alle orecchie della comunità mondiale è chiaro: non fare arrabbiare gli Stati Uniti altrimenti non otterrete un piano di salvataggio quando ne avrete davvero bisogno. Pertanto ogni Paese è incentivato a seguire la linea di politica statunitense.

Gli Stati Uniti si assumono anche molte responsabilità a livello internazionale, soprattutto in materia militare e vengono coinvolti in molte guerre. Lo stesso vale per il precedente Paese con valuta di riserva mondiale, il Regno Unito. Se studite la storia, la marina e l’esercito del Regno Unito furono schierati in luoghi lontani come il Sud Africa, l’India e il Medio Oriente come parte del loro obbligo morale di mantenere la pace. Gli Stati Uniti fanno lo stesso oggi, inviando le proprie truppe in molti conflitti in tutto il mondo. La principale differenza tra il Regno Unito e gli Stati Uniti è che il primo aveva il possesso fisico delle colonie, mentre i secondi hanno il dominio monetario.

Gli Stati Uniti spendono tonnellate di denaro in diverse parti del mondo. I programmi per assistere altri Paesi iniziarono con il Piano Marshall e, subito dopo, con la guerra di Corea. A quel tempo gli Stati Uniti erano alla ricerca di alleati nella Guerra Fredda ed entrambe le azioni erano modi affinché potessero servire i propri alleati. Stamparono denaro per finanziare questi Paesi, ma chi furono i perdenti? In sostanza ogni altro Paese che non ricevette il denaro “gratuito”. Il dollaro, essendo la valuta di riserva, ha dato agli Stati Uniti il diritto di scegliere vincitori e vinti a livello mondiale.

Non sorprende se i maggiori alleati degli Stati Uniti si siano comportati straordinariamente bene durante l’egemonia del dollaro. Corea del Sud, Giappone, Europa occidentale, Singapore e Taiwan hanno tutti prosperato, in parte grazie alla posizione in alto nella scala dell'Effetto Cantillon. I pagamenti nei confronti degli alleati sono stati venduti come obblighi morali per la pace mondiale.

Il risultato è che gli Stati Uniti sono implicitamente una terza parte in ogni conflitto e poiché il dollaro è la valuta di riserva del mondo, tutto è nell’interesse degli Stati Uniti e finiscono per dominare qualsiasi discorso di pace, qualunque sia il conflitto.

STANDARDIZZAZIONE MONDIALE

A livello nazionale c’è una tendenza alla standardizzazione a causa del denaro fiat: le grandi aziende hanno bisogno di molti ingranaggi e la fornitura di questi diventa una responsabilità che le nazioni si assumono sotto forma di istruzione e licenze.

C'è un livello ancora più ampio di standardizzazione a livello mondiale e non sorprende che questa standardizzazione sia dominata dagli Stati Uniti. L'istruzione universitaria statunitense, soprattutto da parte delle scuole prestigiose, è ambita in tutto il mondo proprio perché una laurea conseguita in quei luoghi dà accesso a lavori ben retribuiti negli Stati Uniti e le richieste delle grandi aziende fanno sì che sistemi simili vengano istituiti ovunque. Anche le licenze tendono a essere molto simili, dominate da ciò che fanno gli Stati Uniti.

Ma più di questi standard “duri” ci sono gli standard “morbidi” della cultura. Gli Stati Uniti hanno stabilito un’egemonia culturale negli stessi luoghi in cui hanno l’egemonia del dollaro. Ciò è dovuto ai posti di lavoro desiderabili negli Stati Uniti a causa dell’Effetto Cantillon. Le persone di maggior successo in ogni Paese immigrano negli Stati Uniti e, avendo successo, vengono imitati. Queste persone saranno più americanizzate rispetto alla persona tipica e quindi i valori americani, in particolare quelli delle università e delle aziende, verranno esportati in ogni altro Paese.

Inoltre i film più costosi, la musica e i programmi TV più popolari proverranno tutti dagli Stati Uniti o avranno una forte influenza statunitense. Il motivo è che essi hanno più denaro e possono permettersi di sovvenzionare queste industrie. In pratica questo significa che ogni Paese usa l’inglese come seconda lingua e la maggior parte delle persone si standardizza verso i modi americani negli affari internazionali.

TENDENZA ALLA TIRANNIA

La tendenza alla tirannia a livello nazionale deriva dal fatto che chi stampa denaro si assume molte responsabilità e genera molta dipendenza. A livello mondiale questa dipendenza si manifesta in alleanze e la corrispondente tirannia si manifesta in quanto gli Stati Uniti dominano politicamente altri Paesi.

Possiamo vederlo molto chiaramente nella guerra in Ucraina, dove gli Stati Uniti hanno sostanzialmente coinvolto la maggior parte dei loro alleati nel conflitto chiedendo loro di contribuire con armi e denaro. Ma non è tutto. Comportamenti socialmente inaccettabili negli Stati Uniti diventano rapidamente socialmente inaccettabili ovunque. Infatti questo è lo scopo di molti incontri del WEF, in cui le élite si riuniscono per definire l’agenda per il futuro.

C'è una ragione per cui l'energia “verde” è universalmente popolare e perché l'energia nucleare è andata riducendosi ovunque negli ultimi 30 anni: le élite creano la cultura negli Stati Uniti e questa viene esportata altrove. C'è una ragione per cui le questioni transgender sono diventate improvvisamente un importante motivo di protesta in molti luoghi in tutto il mondo e perché BLM è diventato improvvisamente un problema in molti luoghi in tutto il mondo solo dopo esserlo diventato negli Stati Uniti. La visione elitaria viene scaricata sul popolo da coloro che controllano il denaro e il mondo intero è stato soggetto a essi.

FRAGILITÀ MONDIALE

Non tutto ciò che riguarda l’egemonia del dollaro è negativo. Uno dei vantaggi è che per la maggior parte del mondo alleato con gli Stati Uniti esiste la Pax Americana, o una pace basata sulla protezione dell’America. Tuttavia questa pace ha un costo: dipende dal commercio altamente interconnesso tra le grandi aziende sovvenzionate da ciascun governo, pertanto i prodotti che comprate contengono componenti provenienti da tutte le parti del mondo.

Inoltre il denaro fiat ha essenzialmente creato una o due aziende gigantesche che producono un singolo bene piuttosto che avere molti concorrenti. I chip per computer di un determinato processo di litografia, ad esempio, vengono creati solo da tre o quattro società, e TSMC è l'unica in grado di produrre in modo affidabile determinati tipi.

Questo è il risultato dell’ossessione per la scala prodotta dal denaro fiat, di cui ho parlato nei saggi precedenti: essa rende le merci più economiche ovunque e combatte l’ovvia inflazione dei prezzi, ma il compromesso è una fragile catena di approvvigionamento.

Abbiamo visto cosa significasse durante la crisi sanitaria, quando si è verificata un’enorme interruzione delle supply chain. La produzione non è molto robusta. Nel 2012 i produttori automobilistici hanno subito notevoli sconvolgimenti quando un unico fornitore di una resina speciale in Germania ha fatto esplodere un impianto.

La fragilità non riguarda solo le catene di approvvigionamento, c’è anche una fragilità economica mondiale e lo abbiamo visto nel 2008 con la Grande Crisi Finanziaria. Se ci pensate l’evento scatenante è stato un mucchio di titoli garantiti da ipoteca che non stavano dando più i loro frutti. Ciò a sua volta ha causato il caos nell’intera economia mondiale ed essa è talmente indebitata che qualsiasi flessione può innescare fallimenti a catena.

E non si tratta solo di aziende, ma di interi Paesi. Quelli che vengono salvati vengono sottoposti a una maggiore oppressione da parte dell’ordine monetario internazionale.

Interi Paesi vengono zombificati, diventano servitori dell'FMI o della Banca Mondiale e smettono di prendere decisioni per sé stessi. Il loro destino tende a essere molto cupo, poiché di solito sono gestiti da una piccola cabala di élite che controlla tutto e limita la libertà individuale. I Paesi zombi diventano un guscio vuoto e il sostegno delle organizzazioni a tre lettere consente a questa esistenza zombificata di protrarsi artificialmente nel tempo.

BITCOIN RISOLVE QUESTO PROBLEMA

L’egemonia del dollaro è una sorta di serendipità storica per gli Stati Uniti e ne hanno approfittato usando questo vantaggio per dominare il mondo. Il risultato è stato un mondo ingiusto ordinato secondo la gerarchia dell'Effetto Cantillon. Il miglior capitale umano è stato catturato dagli Stati Uniti anche se i dollari vengono esportati; i Paesi impoveriti diventano zombi al servizio di organizzazioni a tre lettere mentre vengono sfruttati per le loro risorse.

Bitcoin aggiusta l’egemonia del dollaro, perché elimina tale esorbitante privilegio. A differenza del denaro fiat, Bitcoin non è controllato a livello centrale e questa mancanza di controllo centrale significa che avremo condizioni di parità su scala mondiale. I Paesi zombificati verranno rianimati e avranno la possibilità di svilupparsi invece di essere sotto il controllo dei loro padroni. Risolveranno le proprie divergenze e otterremo più diversità invece del dominio degli Stati Uniti.

Il capitale umano sarà utilizzato meglio, perché le persone non dovranno trasferirsi negli Stati Uniti per sfruttare al massimo il proprio talento. Le giurisdizioni che garantiscono la massima libertà avranno più successo, non quella che riuscirà a stampare più denaro per il resto del mondo.

Mi piacerebbe concludere dicendovi che il dominio di Bitcoin è a portata di mano e che tutti questi cambiamenti sono proprio dietro l'angolo. Purtroppo penso che ci sia ancora molta strada da fare. Il dollaro continua a essere il punto di riferimento per ogni Paese, specialmente quelli che stanno attraversando un’iperinflazione, e ci vorrà del tempo prima che l’inflazione del dollaro sia sufficientemente evidente. Per le persone che soffrono di iperinflazione, il tasso storico di espansione del dollaro pari a circa il 7% annuo è un piccolo prezzo da pagare per avere qualcosa di minimamente stabile.

I veri cambiamenti avverranno quando il dollaro si sarà espanso così tanto da andare incontro a un’iperinflazione. Ciò, purtroppo, richiederà molto tempo. Forse questo potrebbe accadere più rapidamente in un mondo che ha due valute di riserva, diciamo un mondo con i BRICS da una parte e gli alleati degli Stati Uniti dall’altra. Ma state tranquilli, quando avverrà la transizione dal dollaro, sarà rapida. L’iperinflazione richiede molto tempo per avviarsi, ma una volta avviata, non è possibile fermarla perché non è possibile riconquistare la fiducia persa.

Fino ad allora è nostro compito come bitcoiner prepararci e non si tratta solo di accumulare sat, anche se questo è certamente necessario, ma costruire le infrastrutture per gestire l'ondata di domanda che sta arrivando.

Resistete e costruite perché un futuro migliore è alle porte.

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

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Lysander Spooner: “Natural Law or the Science of Justice“

The beauty, simplicity, and justice, of natural law is a thing to behold. It harms no one, and protects everyone; this the essence of freedom. Nothing else is necessary concerning man’s interactions with man, as natural law is based upon the premise of doing no harm to another, no use of force against another, and no infringement upon another or his property. Natural laws alone are the only laws necessary, as any laws prescribed and legislated by one man, or any group of men, over another, is not only immoral, it is immediately destructive of all natural law. Man’s laws are an abomination, and by design are meant to regulate, restrict, harm, or control others, which is a violent afront to the actual rights of all men. No manmade laws that stray in any way from natural law should be tolerated or followed.

The foundation and justification of natural law is centered on truth, honesty, and exacting justice, without any bias or undue force in the process. Each individual has to be responsible for upholding natural law. This can be done independently or with a collective of individuals working together, so long as any and all seeking and protecting justice, do so voluntarily, and without any evidence of coercion. There cannot be any shifting of blame in order to avoid guilt, dishonesty, or power-seeking in any legitimate free society, but of course, a society of this nature is simply peaceful anarchy, strictly based only on natural law. In my days as a child, these lessons were learned very early, as children were taught not to steal, never to harm others or their property and possessions, that what is theirs, is theirs, and what is not, is not, and to protect the natural rights of other children. If only adults could live by the rules of children, what a different world this would be.

The laws of nature, natural laws, do not need to be written down, or commanded by the State, as simply understanding that one cannot do any harm to another, or infringe on another’s life, property, and freedom, is a sufficient understanding of right and wrong. With this knowledge in hand, why then are hundreds of thousands (or more) ‘laws’ made arbitrarily by this heinous government? There is a ‘law’ for seemingly every single aspect of life? As I wrote earlier this year:

“No one, no statisticians, and not even this government itself, has any clue as to how many federal laws exist. No one knows how many rules, restrictions, and regulations there are, and it is impossible to find an answer to this question. The Federal Register alone, the daily repository of all proposed and final federal rules and regulations, has well over 85,000 pages. The Code of Federal Regulations through 2019,  has 186,000 pages, and the Federal Register Pages for the past decade eclipsed 800,000 pages. This alone is unimaginable. But of course, there are more. There is a law for every aspect of our lives in this country, and there are a completely separate set of international laws, State laws, county laws, city laws, and licensing laws for every activity or thought. This is total insanity, and why every single ‘citizen’ can be deemed a criminal at any given moment. Even as far back as in the times of Roman historian Tacitus, he stated that, “The more corrupt the State, the more numerous the laws.” The U.S. has more laws by far than any other nation on earth in history, and therefore is the most corrupt and criminal of all time.”

There are only a few legitimate natural laws to live by in order to respect the rights of man, but with governments, there are no limits to bogus ‘laws.’ In fact, all government laws are against peaceful people, so this government is using the force of arms to compel the masses to obey or else. The State breaks every natural law, while at the same time enforcing its illegal mandates on the entire population. The State lies, cheats, steals, rapes, tortures, commits murder by war, both domestically and internationally, ignoring every natural right, but demands its enslaved population to obey without question its fraudulent legislation. This is the reverse of all sanity and justice.

The real crimes committed by man against man are easily understood, as logic, reason, and common sense will uncover. All one has to understand are the simple tenets of natural law. All real crimes come down to harm by one or more against another or against the many, all driven by aggression. In any society based only on natural law, these crimes can be addressed immediately, and severely if necessary, so long as the initial force is only acted upon due to self-defense. This protective posture, whether by one or many, is completely legitimate, and can not only stop the felonious behavior by the few without resort to any interfering State, but will serve as a major deterrent to those who choose to live by criminal means. In other words, the State is completely unnecessary if honest freedom is sought.

The entirety of this line of thinking breaks down immediately once the State has assumed power, due to the fact that the people at large have acquiesced to rule by the few most powerful. The very idea of government has been promoted since the beginning of time, as a way for the few to control the many; all based on the unnatural concept of extreme fear, which exists in the minds of the irresponsible masses due to anxious trepidation of monsters from afar and within. This unwarranted fear and need for protection is planted in the minds of the people from birth, and throughout their lives, and this is of course done by design in order to subdue the natural traits of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility. Without the chains of government, and its massive propaganda campaigns meant to brainwash all, there would be no need to fear, and therefore, a harmonious and peaceful existence would be not only common, but also demanded by each individual.

This brings to mind a very prescient quote by Etienne de la Boetie that describes the psychological breakdown that occurs once rule in in place and voluntarily accepted:

“It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it
promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom
that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it,
obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this
people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.”

Natural law is the only road to freedom, and the only sane governing system, as it is self-governing, and without contradiction. Moral behavior and any ‘obligatory’ responsibility for others, on the other hand, cannot be mandated or ordered, it must be voluntary, and dependent on each individual’s want, need, or penchant for charity. It never can be forced or mandatory, made legal or illegal, as moral behavior is only up to each and every individual acting from a position of willing consent.

Governments and those who control governments, are evil to the core, and this cannot be questioned by any individual capable of thinking critically. The only mission of rule is rule, which decimates any idea of freedom and the natural law of mankind. The abolishment of government can only lead to a better place, eliminating the chains that not only bind us, but destroy our very consciousness.

“A man’s natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime; whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, or by millions calling themselves a government.”

~ Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority

The post All Rule and All Government Are Evil to the Core, and the Abandonment of Natural Law appeared first on LewRockwell.

American universities are besieged by students protesting their schools’ investments in U.S. suppliers of weaponry to the Israeli government, which Israeli officials are using to carry out their military campaign in Gaza. Some universities are now calling in riot police to break up the protests as well as suspending or expelling the protestors. Some university officials and their supporters in the mainstream press are accusing the protestors of being antisemitic.

The accusation of being antisemitism from supporters of the Israeli government is a longstanding one. The supporters are saying that when one opposes the polices and practices of the Israeli government — or the Israeli state itself — that shows that one is antisemitic — that is, that one not only opposes the Israeli government but also that he hates Jews in general. That response has always been a very successful strategical way to suppress dissent against the Israeli government. Since many people do not wish to be perceived as antisemitic, they decide to keep their criticisms of the Israeli government to themselves rather than being labeled as antisemitic.

However, in conflating the Israeli government with Judaism, the proponents of the Israeli government end up actually encouraging antisemitism. That’s because critics of the Israeli government who don’t know much about Judaism are induced to believe that the Israeli government and the Jewish faith are one and the same thing. Therefore, if one concludes that the Israeli state is doing something immoral or bad, the notion is that the immoral and bad act is also part of the Jewish religion. Therefore, conflating the Israeli state and the Jewish religion as a strategic device to suppress dissent against the Israeli government actually serves to encourage the very antisemitism that defenders of the Israeli government lament.

During the child-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, there were people who criticized the Vatican for what they perceived was indifference to child abuse on the part of the Catholic state. As far as I know, the Vatican never made it a policy to respond to the criticisms by accusing critics of being anti-Catholic. Such being the case, people were able to discern that while indifference to child abuse might well have been part of the Catholic state, it was not part of the Catholic religion. Thus, people could separate out the two concepts by criticizing the Vatican while not being perceived as being anti-Catholic.

Let’s assume, however, that the Vatican or its supporters had responded in the same way that defenders of the Israeli state respond. Let’s assume that they said that the criticisms of the Vatican reflected the religious prejudice of the critics. That is, the defenders of the Vatican would be saying that if you criticize the Vatican, it shows that you are prejudiced against Catholics. In that case, one could easily imagine people who didn’t know much about Catholicism would conclude that Catholicism and the Vatican were one and the same thing. Therefore, given that they opposed what they perceived to be the Vatican’s indifference to child abuse, the conflation of the Vatican and Catholicism would encourage them to oppose Catholicism as much as they opposed the Vatican.

Therefore, to diminish antisemitism, the defenders of the Israeli government would be wise to discard their strategy of conflating the Israeli state and the Jewish faith as a way to suppress dissent against the Israeli state. They should instead be emphasizing that the Israeli state and the Jewish religion are two separate and distinct things and that the policies and practices of the Israeli state are not necessarily the tenets of the Jewish religion. In that way, students and others would feel free to criticize the Israeli state while, at the same time, support and embrace the Jewish religion.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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Southern Baptist “leaders”—along with Yaroslav Pyzh, president of Ukrainian Baptist Theological Seminary, and Valerii Antoniu, president of the Baptist Union of Ukraine—urged U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a member and former official of their denomination, to get the votes needed to send more U.S. taxpayer dollars to Ukraine.

Not all Baptist Christians support U.S. foreign aid to Ukraine. I certainly don’t. In fact, I don’t support foreign aid to any country. And many conservative Christians would agree with me.

However, when it comes to U.S. foreign aid to Israel, most conservative Christians—Baptist or otherwise—suddenly lose their aversion to foreign aid.

The $61 billion in foreign aid that Speaker Johnson was able to get passed included $26 billion in aid for Israel. In the House, 21 Republicans joined 37 Democrats in voting against the aid bill. In the Senate, 15 voted with 2 Democrats and an independent against the bill.

Sandra Hagee Parker, chair of the Christians United for Israel Action Fund, praised Johnson for his “fortitude” in pushing for the “vital issue” of Israel aid. “The enemies of America are watching and waiting to see what America does, and we should do everything in our power to have Israel’s back,” she said.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations:

Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since its founding, receiving about $300 billion (adjusted for inflation) in total economic and military assistance.

The United States has provisionally agreed (via a memorandum of understanding) to provide Israel with nearly $4 billion a year through 2028.

Israel has been using American-made weapons against its foes, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, for decades.

Christians who support foreign aid to Israel seek to justify the looting of their fellow Americans by saying a number of things, many of them biblical, and many of them true.

But regardless of what they say, I have just one question for those Christians who support foreign aid to Israel: How much are you willing to give?

In what follows, I give what they say followed by my question, and I think it is a legitimate one.

Jews are God’s chosen people. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

God will restore Israel during the Millennium. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

The Bible says that God will bless them that bless the Jews. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

Unto the Jews were committed the oracles of God. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

Israel is an ally of the United States. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

Antisemitism is on the rise. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

Islam is a false religion. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

Hamas started the war. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

Israel has the right to defend itself. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

Hamas rejects Israel’s right to exist and is committed to its destruction. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

Jesus was a Jew. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

Jews and Christians worship the same God. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

Jesus Christ was the king of the Jews. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

Jesus Christ is the lion of the tribe of Judah. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

God gave Israel the Ten Commandments. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

Jews and Christians are both children of Abraham. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

The writers of the Bible were Jews. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

God gave the Jews the land of Israel. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Okay, so how much are you willing to give?

Hey Christians who support foreign aid to Israel—put your money where your mouth is. Write out a check to the government of Israel or the IDF. Buy a bomb, bullet, or missile from a U.S. defense contractor and send it to Israel. Reach into your wallet and pull out some cash for Israel. Go door to door in your neighborhood and collect money for Israel.

Hey Christians who support foreign aid to Israel—you aren’t going to do any of these things, are you? In fact, the thought of actually doing something yourself never crossed your mind. Shame on you for wanting the broke and bankrupt Uncle Sam to go further into debt and send money that he doesn’t have to a foreign government.

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Gaza is not the only genocide. Genocide is taking place all over Europe and in the US. See this.

All over Europe and the US governments prefer immigrant-invaders over their own citizens.

“The migrants are eligible for free accommodation, free social welfare, free medical care, food, clothes, and various other perks. Whilst at the same time that the Irish government is facilitating mass immigration there are 14,000 Irish homeless people on the streets.” And many more homeless Irish citizens are on the way. Migrants are given free accommodation in hotels and country estates throughout the land, while the Irish people are seriously struggling to make ends meet in a rigged inflationary system, with a never-ending story of sky-high rents, high taxes, inflation, and an ongoing extremely serious accommodation crisis. Many young Irish citizens are left with little option but to live with their parents or emigrate to countries such as Australia as they cannot afford to live in their own country.

This is an extremely important article. It shows that the West is being intentionally destroyed by its own governments. The threat that all citizens in the West face comes not from Russia, China, Iran, but from their own government.

Irish citizens who peacefully protest their replacement by immigrant-invaders are brutally beaten–even mothers and children–by police, which emphasizes the second class status of Irish ethnicity. “Many of the Irish police in balaclavas that are enforcing these tactics against the Irish people are not Irish at all, but are more akin to non-Irish hired mercenaries, or more like an EU army.”

“The stark reality is the Irish government is not really the Irish government it is just a puppet of the EU bureaucracy. Ireland has been a fully controlled vassal state of the banker-controlled EU, in particular since the controversial (and rerun) Lisbon referendum 14 years ago, which hammered a nail in the coffin of Irish sovereignty.”

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