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Yes, They Were Socialists: How the Nazis Waged War on Private Property

Posted by M. C. on July 6, 2022

The Nazi government took control of the economy, which is what one expects from socialism.

https://mises.org/wire/yes-they-were-socialists-how-nazis-waged-war-private-property

John Kennedy

When the average person thinks of the Nazis, what often comes to mind is World War II, the Holocaust, and rousing speeches of hate. However, the National Socialists also had economic and political policies, policies many just assume were either free market or New Deal–style public works projects like the Autobahn. But Nazi policy was not so cut-and-dried.

The Nazis were socialists, and it showed in many of the policies they implemented after coming to power in 1933. First, like the Soviets, the Nazis initiated a war on private property. Not surprisingly, property rights were severely curbed by National Socialism in the name of public welfare.

How did the National Socialists combat private property in Germany? The first step came shortly after the Nazis took control, when they abolished private property. Article 153 of the Weimar constitution guaranteed private property, with expropriation only to occur within the due process of the law, but this article was nullified by a decree on February 28, 1933. 

With this, the new National Socialist government had complete control of private property in Germany. While they did not take complete control of the lands like the Bolsheviks did in Russia in 1917, the Nazis issued quotas for industries and farms, and later they reorganized all industry into corporations run by members of the Nazi Party. 

The War on Business

Peter Temin wrote about this in Soviet and Nazi Economic Planning, stating:

Both governments reorganized industry into larger units, ostensibly to increase state control over economic activity. The Nazis reorganized industry into 13 administrative groups with a larger number of subgroups to create a private hierarchy for state control. The state could therefore direct a firm’s activities without acquiring direct ownership of enterprises. The pre-existing tendency to form cartels was encouraged to eliminate competition that would destabilize prices.

The Nazis, ironically, called this reorganization “privatization,” although the owners of these corporations were either removed from board positions and replaced by Nazi Party members or sold out and became Nazi Party members. They included IG Farben and the Junkers airplane factory. IG Farben was a chemical company founded in 1925 by Carl Bosch and Carl Duisberg, who were both Jewish, and had a capitalization of around a billion marks by 1926. By 1938, all of the company’s Jewish workers had been purged and the supervisory board replaced by Nazis (see Joseph Borkin’s book The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben).

IG Farben was a clear example of the reorganization of industry the Nazis undertook for their benefit. Sybille Steinbacher, a professor of Holocaust studies, wrote about the public-private partnership in her book Auschwitz, stating:

Otto Ambros and IG Farben director Fritz ter Meer held a board meeting in Berlin with Carl Krauch who was not only a member of the board of directors of IG Farben, but also a member of the circle of industrialists around Reichsfurhrer-SS known as Himmler’s “Circle of Friends.” 

After the Nazis took power, this kind of cooperation was common.

See the rest here

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Build Back Better 2.0: Global Elites Rebrand to ‘Rules-Based World Order’

Posted by M. C. on July 6, 2022

What our ruling class really means is that they want to continue making all of the rules. They have no moral high ground to claim, so a vague appeal to some kind of shared moral principles must suffice. In short, the “rules-based world order” is nothing more than a moral appeal to keep the same people in charge of everything.

More Hubris. Less Freedom.

By Jordan Schachtel
The Dossier

The “free world” is a troublesome slogan, as basic freedoms have become a radical concept in the year 2022. The western ruling class, which used to defend the idea of unalienable rights, has decided that such a term carries too many troublesome connotations regarding the unalienable rights of you, the members of the pleb class. So it’s time for a rebrand, and the deployment of some new rhetoric to protect the elites sitting atop the global hierarchy.

https://twitter.com/GillianMcKeith/status/1544251021362339841?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1544251021362339841%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lewrockwell.com%2F2022%2F07%2Fno_author%2Fbuild-back-better-2-0-global-elites-rebrand-to-rules-based-world-order%2F

In demonstrating their supposed moral superiority, our ruling class is now coalescing behind what they refer to as the “rules-based” world order.

This “rules-based world order,” a bumper sticker slogan that has united the rulers of the Anglosphere, EU and NATO powers against their foreign and domestic enemies, is easy to define, once you understand what they mean by the word “rules.”

This barb is being deployed repeatedly at the Russian government (and the Chinese government in reference to trade policy), in condemning its invasion of Ukraine as violating the modern construction that is the liberal international order, or the illusion of “Pax Americana,” or better yet, the “rules” of territorial sovereignty established after World War II.

Of course, these rules are necessarily malleable, as our rulers have spent the last decades justifying their routine invasions of foreign nations under the banner of democracy, freedom, and the like.

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Cold War CIA Experiments on Children Exposed

Posted by M. C. on July 6, 2022

In turn, one can only hope that independent investigations are launched into the question – in Denmark, authorities illegally shredded records related to the CIA experiments after learning the criminal conspiracy was finally being scrutinized by outsiders. Clearly, the coverup continues even today.

Spreading war, dissention and death across the planet

By Kit Klarenberg
Kit’s Newsletter

https://kitklarenberg.substack.com/p/cold-war-cia-experiments-on-children

In a new two-part investigation for The Dissenter, I delve into the murky and disturbing world of CIA experiments conducted on children during the Cold War.

The first expands on an extraordinary Danish Radio report, published in December, which exposed how scores of children in Copenhagen – many of them orphans – were subject to mind control experiments for at least two decades.

Children underwent regular tests, including being forced to listen to recordings on headphones of loud noises, screams, and statements intended to scare them. Staff strapped them to a chair while electrodes were placed on their arms, legs, and chest, measuring their heart rate, temperature, and sweat levels.

It seems certain these tests, conducted without their purpose ever being disclosed to participants in a gross breach of medical ethics, related to the CIA’s notorious MKULTRA. The established narrative of the program is that it concerned mind control, and was ultimately an expensive failure. In reality, most confirmed MKULTRA efforts actually concerned physical and psychological torture, and techniques derived from this research continue to be employed today. Some were applied to Guantanamo Bay inmates, for example.

The Danish experiments were likely conducted for this purpose. The CIA’s torture manual discusses how, when its assorted techniques are applied, “the usual effect…is regression,” and a subject’s “mature defenses crumbles [sic] as he becomes more childlike [emphasis added].”

The second probes the disquieting question of whether state-sanctioned paedophile communes in West Germany may have been encouraged by the CIA. At precisely the same time the Agency was exacting psychological torment on defenceless orphans in Denmark, authorities in West Berlin were entertaining the ideas of psychologist Helmut Kentler, who argued that placing at-risk youths in the care of child sex predators would effectively integrate them into society.

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The G-7 Squawks But They’ve Already Lost the War Against Russia

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2022

By Tom Luongo

Gold Goats ‘n Guns

In desperation I expect a false flag provocation to force the Russians into a move or simply justify the Davos pulling us into their next war, i.e. another virus or chemical weapons attack this time blamed on Putin.

The G-7 Squawks But They’ve Already Lost the War Against Russia

So, the G-7 leaders are in agreement, more war with Russia. Without actually saying exactly that, that was the main takeaway from he meeting of the most feckless leaders in the world.

They also pledged $600 billion they don’t have to fund global infrastructure projects to ‘combat China’s Belt and Road Initiative.’ One wonders where all this money and, in the case of Europe, energy is going to come from to fund all of this.

But the question I’ve had from the beginning of this obvious war of attrition the West wants to impose on Russia is the following: Do we have the stamina, in terms of real production capacity, to cash these checks our leaders are writing?

A major report from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), one of the oldest military think tanks in the UK emphatically said not in anyone’s wildest dreams. Alex Mercouris of The Duran did an amazing job of breaking down what RUSI thought about NATO’s ability to wage war vs. Russia’s current military tempo, days before this idea caught fire.

In short, the gulf between NATO’s annual munition production and weekly consumption by the UAF is staggeringly vast.

I told you at the outset of this war that Russia was absolutely engaged in a war of attrition against the West, hoping NATO would take the bait of a ground war in Ukraine.  I didn’t have numbers to back this up, only the inference because of what I understood about Putin and his previous maneuvers against the West.

What’s obvious to me is the neocons and neoliberals controlling the West think they can turn Ukraine into a quagmire for Putin, but what if Putin thinks he can turn Ukraine into a quagmire for them?

Russia is not capable of conquering Europe. But he doesn’t need to to defeat them. He just needs to create a version of this map:

I knew that Putin wouldn’t commit Russia to this conflict if it couldn’t sustain fighting it.  I also knew that the West would LIE OUTRAGEOUSLY about the level of corruption within the Russian society to play on the biases of marginally-informed American armchair generals. 

See the rest here

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Lincoln’s Repudiation of the Declaration of Independence

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2022

Lincoln’s Repudiation of the Declaration of Independence

By Thomas DiLorenzo

Perhaps the biggest falsehood ever pedaled about Abraham Lincoln is that he was devoted to the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Exactly the opposite is true; he repudiated every one of the main principles of the Declaration with his words and, more importantly, his actions.  In our time the odd and ahistorical writings of Harry Jaffa and his “Straussian” cult followers have been the primary means of spreading this enormous falsehood.  (Jaffa was neither a historian nor a philosopher but a supposed expert in “rhetoric” who spent his career writing books instructing Americans about the allegedly “real meaning” of historical documents in writings that were often either void of historical facts or flatly contradicted by them).

Contrary to what every American is taught beginning with elementary school (or sooner), Lincoln did not believe that all men are created equal.  He repeatedly denied this for his entire adult life, even announcing during one of the Lincoln/Douglas debates that “I as much as any man want the superior position” to belong to the white race.  He was proud to be a white supremacist’s white supremacist. “Before, after, and during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in public and in private, Lincoln used the N-word,” wrote Lerone Bennett, Jr. in Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, p. 97.

While in the Illinois legislature Lincoln supported the Illinois black codes which deprived free blacks of citizenship.  He supported the 1848 amendment to the Illinois constitution that forbade blacks from emigrating into the state.  He was the “manager” of the Illinois Colonization Society that used tax dollars to deport the small number of free blacks that lived in the state.  Until his dying day he plotted to deport all the black people out of America (See Colonization after Emancipation by Philip Magness and Sebastian Page).

Lincoln invented a bizarre new theory of the American founding to “justify” his destruction of the voluntary union of the founding fathers that was initiated by the Declaration of Independence – their declaration of secession from the British empire.  As summarized by legal/constitutional scholar James Ostrowski, Lincoln’s absurd theory was that:

  • No state may ever secede from the union for any reason.
  • If any state secedes, the federal government shall invade such state with sufficient military force to suppress the secession.
  • The federal government may require all states to raise militias to suppress the secession of their sister states.
  • After suppressing secession the federal government may rule by martial law until such time as the state(s) accepts federal supremacy.
  • The federal government may force the states to adopt new state constitutions imposed on them at gunpoint by military authorities.
  • The president may, on his own authority and without consulting any other branch of government, suspend the Bill of Rights and the writ of habeas corpus.

No state would ever have ratified the Constitution if this – Lincoln’s ridiculous and tyrannical new theory – is what the citizens of the states thought the Constitution said.

See the rest here

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A ‘New Compact’ With Saudi Arabia Is a Terrible Idea

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2022

We should make sure that the U.S. is never again in a position where it is expected to support another Saudi war.

This gets at the core problem with what Cook and Indyk are proposing: the closer relationship with Saudi Arabia that they want would be a destabilizing and destructive one. It would fuel regional rivalries and keep the U.S. ensnared in conflicts that have nothing to do with American security.

By Daniel Larison
Eunomia

https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/a-new-compact-with-saudi-arabia-is

Steven Cook and Martin Indyk urge Biden to bind the U.S. even more tightly to Saudi Arabia:

Biden should instead consider a more fundamental reconceptualization of the bilateral relationship. What both countries need is a new compact that focuses on countering a major strategic threat they both face: Iran’s nuclear program.

Cook and Indyk’s article is a fairly standard rehash of familiar pro-Saudi claims. While they propose a “new compact” between our governments, the ideas in their article are very old and largely outdated. They assert that the “benefits of reconciliation are self-evident,” but this hasn’t been true for years. If the benefits were so self-evident, they wouldn’t need to be justifying closer ties with Riyadh, and the truth is that the benefits to the United States are nowhere to be found.

Even if the Saudi government increased oil production, any increase it can deliver won’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, and the Saudi government makes its oil production decisions based on what it perceives to be in its own interests and not as a favor to America. Whatever benefits there are from the relationship, the Saudi government is the one receiving virtually all of them. It is not self-evident at all what the U.S. gets for its trouble, and except for inertia and the pleading of certain interest groups it is hard to see why the U.S. continues to align itself so closely with such an awful state. It would be one thing if someone could demonstrate what the U.S. stands to gain by continuing it, to say nothing of deepening it, but the possible rewards are never specified.

The authors imagine what this “reconciliation” would do: “The pariah would be transformed into a partner.” One problem with this is that Saudi Arabia was never treated as a pariah (quite the opposite), and it has proven itself to be a mostly useless and increasingly pernicious “partner.” Esfandyar Batmanghelidj turns their statement around on them in his response:

Maybe Saudi Arabia shouldn’t be a partner and maybe Iran shouldn’t be a pariah and maybe the US shouldn’t be lording the nature of its relationships with regional powers in ways that create regional imbalances and instability.

This gets at the core problem with what Cook and Indyk are proposing: the closer relationship with Saudi Arabia that they want would be a destabilizing and destructive one. It would fuel regional rivalries and keep the U.S. ensnared in conflicts that have nothing to do with American security. A “more stable Middle Eastern order” will not exist if the U.S. does what the authors want, and by increasing the commitment to Saudi Arabia they guarantee that the U.S. will end up fighting and supporting wars that it could otherwise easily avoid and oppose.

We have already seen in Yemen what indulging the Saudi government does to regional stability. The Saudi government has proven that selling them weapons for “self-defense” has just enabled them to wage an unnecessary and atrocious war against their neighbor. Our government should stop providing them with the means to engage in more aggression in the future, not least because their use of U.S.-made weapons in their war crimes implicates the U.S. in those atrocities. The current truce in Yemen is holding, and that’s good news for the people of Yemen, but we should make sure that the U.S. is never again in a position where it is expected to support another Saudi war, whether it is in Yemen or anywhere else.

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The People Crafting U.S. Policy Aren’t in America

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2022

Again, the American people aren’t expected to think at all, only to stay in line and keep the money flowing.

This is the sad state of foreign policy in America, and it happens right out in the open.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-people-crafting-u-s-policy-arent-in-america/

by Joseph Solis-Mullen 

In a piece of news that shocked the mainstream media, but which shocked no one familiar with the academic industry writ large, retired U.S. Army general John Allen was forced to resign as president of the Brookings Institution after it was revealed the FBI was investigating him for lobbying on behalf of the Qatari monarchy.

Of course, the real news, scarcely noted by The Washington Post, New York Times, or any other purported paper of record, is that Allen was only really in trouble because he hadn’t fulfilled the pro forma legal requirements for those lobbying the U.S. government on behalf of a foreign agent or government.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), under which such activities are regulated, includes several exceptions that allow for such activities without declaring a conflict of interest. Think tanks, a misnomer if ever there was one, operate under an “academic exception” that allows for engagement in “bona fide religious, scholastic, academic, or scientific pursuits or the fine arts.”

Anyone who has ever picked up one of the many deadly dull social science journals where actual, bona fide empirical academic work is done knows this constitutes perhaps a fraction of what think tanks almost daily churn out.

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General Voicemail

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2022

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They don’t dare tell you what today really means

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2022

https://mailchi.mp/tomwoods/independence?e=fa1aba8cd8

Independence Day is coming up, and I wonder how many people really get why it matters.

In school, we were told this: “No taxation without representation.”

Zzzzzzzz.

The real principles were more like the following.

(1) No legislation without representation.

The colonists insisted that they could be governed only by the colonial legislatures. This is the principle of self-government.

This is why a Supreme Court ordering localities around is anti-American in the truest sense. It is the opposite principle from the one the American colonists stood for.

(2) Contrary to the modern Western view of the state that it must be considered one and indivisible, the colonists believed that a smaller unit may withdraw from a larger one. Today we are supposed to consider this unthinkable.

(3) The colonists’ view of the (unwritten) British constitution was that Parliament could legislate only in those areas that had traditionally been within the purview of the British government. Customary practice was the test of constitutionality.

The Parliament’s view, on the other hand, was in effect that the will and act of Parliament sufficed to make its measures constitutional. In other words: if they say it’s constitutional, that makes it constitutional, even if that means the constitution changes from one day to the next.

So the colonists insisted on strict construction, if you will, while the British held to more of a “living, breathing” view of the Constitution.

Sound familiar?

So let’s recap: Independence Day is about local self-government, secession, and strict construction. Not exactly the themes you learned in school.

And not even what you’ll learn in graduate school.

One day I decided I had to know what my fellow Columbia Ph.D. students thought Independence Day was all about.

What could these left-liberals be celebrating? They don’t favor local self-government, which is what the war was all about. They don’t favor strict construction of the Constitution, while the colonists were insisting on precisely that, in a British context. And they certainly don’t favor secession.

So what the heck did they think it was all about?

Only one person answered me: “There was a distance involved.”

So the problem was that the ruling class was too far away?

“Come on, men, we must continue making sacrifices so that we may someday have exploiters who live close by!”

Some rallying cry that would have been.

This was a student at what at that time was the #2 academic department in the country for American history.

Don’t let people with fancy credentials intimidate you. If there’s one lesson of the past two years, it’s that.

Now before you go set off explosives, it is my duty as your host to alert you that today our friends at Rocket Languages are taking 60% off just the next 88 foreign-language courses they sell.

I know one of the two co-founders, and we own and love two of their courses. Instead of being a sucker who pays full price, enjoy another benefit of knowing Woods:

http://www.tomwoods.com/rocket

Tom Woods

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Raytheon Unveils New Rent-Seeking Missile

Posted by M. C. on July 5, 2022

With more than $27 billion in annual defense contracts (higher than the budget of NASA), plus a former Air Force general, a retired Joint Chiefs vice chair, and an ex-deputy SecDef on its board, Raytheon was already a lucrative rent-seeker inside the Beltway. But company leaders say the new missile will secure the company’s future against the unlikely possibility of Congress coming to its senses and scaling back America’s overseas quagmires.

Revolver News

America’s formidable military arsenal became even more so this week, as Raytheon Technologies revealed a brand-new rent-seeking missile.

The rent-seeking missile represents a revolutionary breakthrough in stealth technology, capable of blowing up the budget of an entire country before its taxpayers even notice something is wrong.

“People used to point and laugh when Congress would buy dozens of worthless tanks just to prop up General Dynamics,” said Senator and fanatical war hawk Lindsey Graham. “With this new missile, we’ll bankrupt our country before China can even blink.”

As befits its cutting-edge nature, the rent-seeking missile doesn’t come cheap: Each missile will cost $480 million—two hundred and forty times the price of a Tomahawk missile. But Raytheon CEO Gregory Hayes says the number was arrived at after careful thought.

“I just looked up the most expensive house in the D.C. area and multiplied it by ten, LOL,” Hayes told Revolver. “F*** it, next time I’m just gonna say it costs a billion dollars. How many of these dumb congressmen do you suppose know how many zeroes there are in a billion?”

The missile’s design is the product of a more than a decade of work from the finest panderers and parasites in the greater D.C. area. Each missile broadcasts a powerful signal into the subconscious of senior administration officials. The signal makes officials extremely vulnerable to implausible suggestions like “Bashar Assad just did a gas attack on civilians for absolute no reason in a war he was winning,” and convinces them that the best response to such suggestions is to wildly fire dozens of missiles at obscure air bases nobody has heard of. These missiles will have to be replaced, ensuring a steady stream of income that Raytheon can spend on more lobbying and de facto bribes for politicians.

Besides the direct cost per missile, each rent-seeker will also automatically contribute an additional $5 million in aid to Ukraine and $10,000 to the bank account of each retired U.S. general currently working as a consultant.

“Come on, don’t you care about Ukraine?” said Kremer. “Ukraine Ukraine Kyiv Putler Ukraine.”

Experts say the rent-seeking missile’s reveal is likely a response to the People’s Republic of China, which recently revealed it has built an N-bomb capable of striking anywhere in the United States. The rent-seeking missile’s dramatic cost, they noted, will guarantee that America’s military budget remains far ahead of China’s, regardless of its effectiveness. The missile is also a deadlier weapon: While the N-bomb has to actually explode to devastate a city with its 250-decibel n-word, the rent-seeking missile causes the vast majority of its damage before being fired at all. The fact that the damage is inflicted on the U.S. rather than other countries did not seem to perturb members of Congress.

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