Amid President Biden’s controversial decision last week to soon meet with Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman — a move that appears to be following the lead of prominent Middle East hawks — the Government Accountability Office released a new report finding that the State and Defense Departments failed to thoroughly investigate and “don’t know” whether the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen used American-made weapons in attacks that killed civilians.
What’s perhaps more revealing about the GAO’s assessment is that it shows the militaristic mindset and poor judgment that got the United States into this strategic and humanitarian nightmare in the first place are alive and well inside the executive branch.
First, the background: For years, Congress has attempted to get straight answers from the executive branch about how involved the U.S. national security state has been in Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s military intervention in Yemen that began in March 2015. Eventually, through compromises — like H.Res.599 that put Congress on record acknowledging U.S. military involvement in the war in Yemen for the first time, and activism-driven wins, like building bipartisan majorities to lead unprecedented votes against U.S. military involvement — oversight has revealed the complicated web of ways the U.S. military was or remains engaged in the Gulf monarchies’ war.
Indeed, this new GAO report resulted from Rep. Ro Khanna’s amendment to the Fiscal Year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act. The GAO — an independent government auditing agency — reviewed what forms of material support, and their impact, the State and Defense Departments provided to the Saudi-led coalition through the end of 2021. It also reviewed the agencies’ compliance with existing U.S. law, including another previously passed Khanna NDAA amendment requiring the Pentagon to review credible allegations of U.S. military or intelligence personnel involvement in the disappearance and torture of Yemenis by Emirati, Emirati-affiliated, and Yemeni security forces in the south.
Among other issues, the GAO found that both the State Department and the Pentagon could not say whether U.S.-made armaments have been used in Yemen without authorization or in violation of international law. It also found that these agencies did not effectively track Saudi, Emirati, or their proxies’ use of U.S.-provided military assistance, and it could not provide any evidence that it had meaningfully investigated allegations of apparent war crimes using U.S.- provided weapons.
A preliminary list of books and articles that may be of interest to libertarian and classical liberal humanists (last updated 6/21/22)
I am grateful to the friends and colleagues who helped me compose this list. If you have additions or edits, please email me at jac3@columbia.edu (providing full references as well as links if online versions are available). Foreign language publications are listed separately at the bottom. I’m especially interested in including critical studies of literature and film that use Austrian economics and/or libertarian philosophy. Thank you!
Jo Ann Cavallo, Professor of Italian, Columbia University
Adamo, Stefano. “Animal Spirits in Designer Suits. The Representation of Finance in Walter Siti’s Resistere non serve a niente.” Rivista di storia economica 3 (2016): 351–80. https://doi.org/10.1410/85082.
—. “The Crisis of the Prato Industrial District in the Works of Edoardo Nesi: A Blend of Nostalgia and Self-Complacency.” Modern Italy 21.3 (August 2016): 245–59. https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2016.30.
—. “The Italian ‘Economic Miracle’ in Coeval Cinema: A Case Study on the Intellectual Reaction to Italy’s Social and Economic Change.” Italian Quarterly 50 (2013): 46–64.
—. “The Italian Financial Novel: Finance As Told By Financial Professionals.” Estudios Libertarios 3 (2020): 49-73.
—. “‘The Libertarian Minimal State?’ A critique of the views of Nozick, Levin and Rand.” Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2002, pp. 141-60; reprinted in Younkins, Ed, ed., Philosophers of Capitalism: Menger, Mises, Rand and Beyond, 2004; http://www.walterblock.com/publications/minimal_state.pdf
—. “On Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard and Thick Libertarianism” June 1, 2014;
Cavallo, Jo Ann. “Contracts, Surveillance, and Censure of State Power in Arienti’s Triunfo da Camarino novella (Le porretane 1.1).” In Cavallo and Lottieri, 141-62. http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8XS5VRF
—. “The Ideological Battle of Roncevaux: The Critique of Political Power from Pulci’s Morgante to Sicilian Puppet Theatre Today.” In Luigi Pulci in Renaissance Florence and Beyond. Eds. James K. Coleman and Andrea Moudarres. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017. 209-32.
—. “National Political Ideologies and Local Maggio Traditions of the Reggio Emilia Apennines: Roncisvalle vs. Rodomonte.” Conquistare la montagna: la storia di un’idea. Conquering Mountains: The History of an Idea. Eds. Carlo Baja Guarienti and Matteo Al Kalak. Milan: Mondadori, 2016. 121-134. http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8P84C8N
—. “On Political Power and Personal Liberty” in The Prince and The Discourses.” Machiavelli’s The Prince at 500. Ed. John McCormick. Social Research: An International Quarterly 81:1 (Spring 2014): 107-32.
—. “Purgatory 17: On Revenge.” Purgatory: Lectura Dantis. Eds. A. Mandelbaum, A. Oldcorn, C. Ross. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008. 178-90.
—. The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Cavallo, Jo Ann, and Carlo Lottieri, editors. Speaking Truth to Power from Medieval to Modern Italy. Annali d’italianistica 34 (2016).
Cox, Stephen. “Adventures of ‘A Little Boy Lost’: Blake and the Process of Interpretation.” Criticism 23 (1981): 301-316.
—. “The Art of Fiction.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 1 (2000) 313-31.
—. “Ayn Rand.” American Philosophers, 1950-2000. Ed. Philip B. Dematteis and Leemon B. McHenry. Detroit: Gale – Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2003. 255-72.
—. “Ayn Rand: Theory versus Creative Life.” The Journal of Libertarian Studies 8 (1986): 19-29.
—. “The Cather Correspondence.” American Literary History 26 (Summer 2014) 418-29.
—. “Completing Rand’s Literary Theory.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 6 (2004): 67-89.
—. Culture and Liberty: Writings of Isabel Paterson. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2015.
—. “Devices of Deconstruction.” Critical Review 3 (Winter 1989) 56-76.
—. “The Devil’s Reading List.” Raritan 16 (Fall 1996) 97-111.
—. “Having Your Say.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (2002) 339-47.
—. “‘It Couldn’t Be Made Into a Really Good Movie’: The Films of Ayn Rand.” Liberty 1 (August 1987): 5-10.
—. “Literary Theory: Liberal and Otherwise.” Humane Studies Review 5 (Fall 1987) 1, 5-7, 12-14.
—. Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.
—. “Merely Metaphorical?: Ayn Rand, Isabel Paterson, and the Language of Theory.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 8 (Spring 2007) 237-60.
—. “Methods and Limitations.” Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method. Ed. Dan Miller, Mark Bracher, and Donald Ault. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1987. Pp. 19-40, 331-34.
—. “Nathaniel Branden in the Writer’s Workshop.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 16 (December 2016) 245-60.
—. The New Testament and Literature: A Guide to Literary Patterns. Chicago: Open Court, 2006.
—. “Public Virtue and Private Vitality in Shadwell’s Comedies.” Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 16 (1977): 11-22.
—. “Representing Isabel Paterson.” American Literary History 17.2 (2005): 244-58.
—. “Sensibility as Argument.” Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics. Ed. Syndy McMillen Conger. Rutherford NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990. Pp. 63-82.
—. “The Significance of Isabel Paterson.” Liberty 7 (October 1993) 30-41.
—. “The Stranger Within Thee”: Concepts of the Self in Late-Eighteenth-Century Literature. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980.
—. “The Titanic and the Art of Myth.” Critical Review 15 (2003) 403-34.
—. “Willa Cather.” Literary Genius, ed. Joseph Epstein. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2007. Pp. 192-98.
—. The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004.
Fernandez-Morera, Dario. American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas. Praeger, 1996.
Giménez Cavallo, Maria. “Elsa Morante’s La storia: A Posthumanist, Feminist, Anarchist Response to Power.” In Cavallo and Lottieri, pp. 425-47.
Hazlitt, Henry. The Anatomy of Criticism: A Trialogue. Simon & Schuster, 1933.
Long, Roderick T. Rituals of Freedom: Libertarian Themes in Early Confucianism. The Molinari Institute, 2016. Expanded version of his essay “Austro-Libertarian Themes in Early Confucianism” Journal of Libertarian Studies, 17, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 35-62.
McCloskey, Deirdre. “Economics With a Human Face: Adam Smith did not believe people are merely economic maximizers. Instead, we balance self- interest with humane sympathy for others. Deirdre N. McCloskey reviews Cents and Sensibility by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro.” Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2017. https://www.wsj.com/articles/economics-with-a-human-face-1505343242
McMaken, Ryan. Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre. 2012.
Mendenhall, Allen. Literature and Liberty: Essays in Libertarian Literary Criticism. Lexington Books, 2014.
—. Shouting Softly: Lines on Law, Literature, and Culture. St. Augustine Press, 2021.
—. “Manzoni’s unfulfilled legacy. On the economic lessons of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed.” The New Criterion 36.6 (2018): 35-38. ISSN:0734-0222.
Nock, Albert J. Francis Rabelais the Man and his Work. Harper & brothers, 1929.
Perdices de Blas, Luis, and John Reeder. “Quixotes, Don Juans, rogues and arbitristas in seventeenth century Castile. Oeconomia. Editions NecPlus, vol. 3-4 (2013): 561-91. https://journals.openedition.org/oeconomia/702
Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Penguin, 2011.
—. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Viking, 2018.
Rand, Ayn. The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature. Signet; Revised edition, 1971.
Rothbard, Murray. “Movie Reviews.” The Rothbard Reader, edited by Joseph T. Salerno and Matthew McCaffrey. The Mises Institute, 2016. 293-303. https://cdn.mises.org/The%20Rothbard%20Reader.pdf. Many other reviews can be found dispersed throughout The Complete Libertarian Forum 1969-1984 under the rubric “Mr First Nighter.”
Skwire, Sarah “Curse, Interrupted: Richard III, Jacob and Esau, and the Elizabethan Succession Crisis” in a special issue of Religions on Shakespeare and Religion, 2019.
—. “History through a Classical Liberal Feminist Lens” in What is Classical Liberal History? Ed. Michael J. Douma and Phillip W. Magness. Lexington Books, 2018.
—. “Edna Ferber’s Business Stories” in Capitalism and Commerce in Imaginative Literature, Lexington Press 2016.
—. “Without Respect of Persons: Gender Equality, Theology, and the Law in the Writing of Margaret Fell” Social Philosophy and Policy, 2015.
—. “Take Physic, Pomp’: King Lear Learns Sympathy” in Sympathy: The History of a Concept, Ed. Eric Schliesser, Oxford University Press, 2015.
—. “Eating Brains and Breaking Windows” (with Steven Horwitz), in Economics of the Undead, Glen Whitman and James Dow, Eds. Rowman and Littlefield, 2014.
—. “Not-So-Bleak House” in New Developments in Economic Education, Eds. Franklin G Mixon and Richard J. Cebula, Edward Elgar, 2014.
Spivey, Matt. Re-Reading Economics in Literature: A Capitalist Critical Perspective. Lexington Books, 2020.
Sunderland, Luke. Rebel Barons: Resisting Royal Power in Medieval Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Thomas, William, ed. The Literary Art of Ayn Rand. Poughkeepsie NY: Objectivist Center, 2005.
Torres Louis, and Michelle Marder Kamhi. What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand. Open Court, 2000
Turner, Frederick. The Culture of Hope. Free Press, 1995.
—. Shakespeare’s Twenty-first Century Economics. Oxford University Press, 1999.
Van Es, Bart. Shakespeare in Company. Oxford UP, 2015.
Watts, Michael. The Literary Book of Economics: Including Readings from Literature and Drama on Economic Concepts, Issues, and Themes. Intercollegiate Studies, 2003.
Wright, Robert. Nonzero:The Logic of Human Destiny. Pantheon, 2000.
Younkins, Edward W., ed. Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”: A Philosophical and Literary Companion. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007.
—, ed. Capitalism and Commerce in Imaginative Literature: Perspectives on Business from Novels and Plays. Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2015.
Sotomayor also writes: “If a State cannot offer subsidies to its citizens without being required to fund religious exercise, any State that values its historic antiestablishment interests more than this Court does will have to curtail the support it offers to its citizens.” I ask: so what’s wrong with that? Government has no business subsidizing people. If it wants them to have more money, cut and abolish taxes.
How clear are these opening words of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”?
Judging by the U.S. Supreme Court’s many ventures into this area, we’d have to say not very clear at all. There’s a lesson in that. Constitutions don’t interpret themselves. People do, and the line between interpreting and making law is not as bright as we’re told.
The latest Court decision in the matter, Carson v. Makin, is instructive in that regard. The 6-3 decision — Republican appointees made up the majority, Democratic appointees the minority — struck down Maine’s exclusion of religious schools from a program that provides tax-funded tuition assistance to all parents who live in school districts that do not provide “free, public” secondary education. That’s over half the districts. Maine, according to the Court, is the most rural state in the country. Who knew?
Under the program, those parents can spend the money at another district’s school or at an academically accredited “nonsectarian” private school. The plaintiffs, two families, argued that this restriction violates both the Free-exercise clause and the establishment clause of the First Amendment, along with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The U.S. district and appellate courts had sided with the state.
The six justices of the majority held that the exclusion of sectarian schools violated the guarantee of the free exercise of religion despite the fact that religion permeated the regular curriculum. (Remember, these were state-approved schools academically.) But the minority justices said the exclusion violated the prohibition on the establishment of religion because the money would go to schools that used it to teach their particular faiths. It was establishment clause v. free-exercise clause.
So who is right? Can that question be answered? Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion and the dissenting opinions by retiring Justice Stephen Breyer and Justice Sonia Sotomayor point to many Court precedents that seem to support their conflicting positions. But the precedents aren’t much help because one can always say that an earlier case differed in an important way from the current one.
Leaving aside one’s background philosophy, all of the arguments seem plausible and consistent with the constitutional text. One might appeal to historical materials, but my hunch is you can find disagreements there too. There’s a lesson in all this, one captured by legal scholar John Hasnas in “The Myth of the Rule of Law.” (A discussion of Hasnas’s paper is here.)
“Ownership is the enemy of communism. Communism preaches and teaches that you should own nothing, that you should not have any private property. So Klaus Schwab and the Great Reset, are secretly financing communism. And so when they spread the lies and propaganda that state ‘you will own absolutely nothing,’ that is totally full-blown Marxist and communist revolutionary talk,” he said.
“The Marxist and communist revolutionaries are totally financed by the super capitalist class. They’re totally financed by the globalist elite. They’re totally bankrolled by the wealthiest and richest international banking families in the world,” McGuire said during the June 20 episode of “The Paul McGuire Report.”
The internationally recognized prophecy expert added that the super-elite international banking families, or super capitalists, have been financing capitalism, which he said is the secret agent of super-capitalism.
McGuire also said this is a way of seizing all the money, assets, labor and property and disguising it as a communist revolution, which in reality is really a bloodthirsty heist by the globalists using their Marxist and communist armies to steal all the wealth of the middle class and working class of every nation in the world.
“The wealthiest families in the world like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds have been bankrolling communism and Marxism since the beginning and they are ruthless,” McGuire said. He pointed out that all the communist revolutions and Marxist revolutions have been financed by the super-wealthy capitalists for the purpose of increasing their wealth and power further.
The Bible prophecy professor cited that this is what happened in Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela. He said the masses of people there don’t have a middle class – people are either starving and or very wealthy.
“Only the very ignorant will actually believe that communism or socialism is about wealth redistribution and utopia for the worker or the common man,” he said. “Communists and Marxists are like the members of a bizarre religious cult who believe that communism or socialism is a means to help the common man. That is a big lie.”
In other words, the police had to protect themselves first, because if the police are hurt, then the suspect can do even more damage. There is a certain reasonable logic here, of course, but it’s in conflict with post-Columbine training. Moreover, police know they will not be held to any contractual standard that mandates intervention. They can decide for themselves whether to intervene, and will face no consequences other than some short-term political blowback. Virtually no one in the Uvalde debacle has any reason to fear losing his generous taxpayer-funded pension.
Here is an often-used tactic employed to defend government police organizations from criticism. Whenever critics point out police incompetence or abuse, defenders counter with “The next time you need help, call a crackhead!” This same phrase was used by Louisiana senator John Kennedy when singing the praises of uniformed government bureaucrats in 2021. The phrase often produces many smug nods from the “Back the Blue” crowd, and one can buy T-shirts with this progovernment slogan as well.
The reality however, is something quite different. Experience continues to teach us again and again, that when one encounters violent felons—as did the children in Uvalde, Texas—calling a crackhead may not produce results much worse than calling the police. A crackhead is probably going to run the other direction when faced with a gun-toting maniac. As we learned at Uvalde, many police officers will do exactly the same.
The “call a crackhead” propaganda is also especially insidious because it is designed to back the idea that “taxes are the price we pay for civilization” and the myth of the “social contract.” In this supposed quid pro quo, the taxpayers pay their taxes and then the government provides “public safety.” That, at least, is the myth the regime repeats over and over.
This myth is being exposed for what it is in real time in the Uvalde investigation right now. Each new revelation shows just how uninterested law enforcement officers can be in providing any of that “protection” that they insist the taxpayers pay so much to fund. Rather, Uvalde has shown that the primary interest of law enforcement was officer safety, not public safety. So much for that “social contract” we keep hearing about.
Ultimately, unlike a private sector service, police do not operate under any contractual obligations to provide services in any particular way. Thus, they can decide to do nothing and face no real consequences.
New Revelations Show Police Simply Chose to Do Nothing
In the Texas Senate this week, senators and the public are starting to see what passes for police work in Texas.
Although police spokesmen repeatedly claimed police could not engage the shooter because of a locked door, it turns out that was a lie. Reuters reported yesterday:
The classroom door in the Uvalde elementary school where 19 children and two teachers were killed in May was not locked even as police waited for a key, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said on Tuesday.
There was no evidence any law enforcement officer ever tried the classroom door to see if it was locked, McCraw said at a Texas Senate hearing into the shooting.
“I don’t believe based on the information we have right now that door was ever secured,” McCraw said. “He (the shooter) didn’t have a key … and he couldn’t lock it from the inside.”
So, why did police wait outside so long? They claimed it was because they didn’t have the equipment they needed. That also turned out to be a lie. According to McGraw: “Three minutes after the subject entered the building, there was a sufficient number of armed personnel to isolate, distract, and neutralize the subject…. the on-scene commander decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children.”
Expect a Cover-Up
Naturally, police personnel and their allies in local government have acted to conceal information on the police response from the public. The city’s district attorney has intervened to prevent the release of “any records.” Moreover, the Texas Department of Public Safety is pressuring the state’s attorney general to ensure that body camera footage from the incident remains hidden—presumably forever because police rather conveniently claim the footage exposes police tactics to potential future shooters.
No Accountability
Unfortunately, legal recourse for police incompetence and inaction is virtually nonexistent in the US,
Sanctions have backfired on those described by Vladimir Putin as the unfriendly nations. It is setting in train a series of events likely to undermine the whole Western financial system, as prices rise driving interest rates higher, and economic activity shrinks. These developments alone are leading to contracting bank credit, crashing stock markets, and sharply higher bond yields.
Last week, I wrote about the impact on the banking system and the likely consequences. Russia, China, and associated nations who depend upon them for trade and economic development are now moving to protect themselves from what is emerging as a full scale systemic and fiat currency crisis for the dollar and the entire Western financial system.
These developments are hastening the end of the petrodollar era and the dollar’s role as a reserve currency. A central Asian replacement is planned to be a new super-currency used for cross-border payments, based on an index of a basket of commodities and currencies of the participating nations. Including currencies is a mistake, but otherwise the proposition has merit.
This article explains why and how a properly constructed scheme would work. I demonstrate why it could act as a de facto gold standard.
Its designers intend this new trade currency to appeal to other important nations, such as Saudi Arabia, into using a commodity-linked currency for settling their trade payments, replacing the dying petrodollar. But its success could prove to be fatal for the fiat dollar and other Western currencies. With the demise of the dollar, the new super-currency can be expected to lead eventually to some national currencies adopting gold standards.
The ending of the petrodollar era
Put Ukraine to one side, it’s not the major issue. We should realise what really matters to us all is the real war, which is Russia’s attempts to banish American hegemony in Europe. While in the West we have an image of President Putin as an evil despot determined to take Ukraine back under Russian control, in a speech at St Petersburg’s International Economic Forum this week, Putin’s diagnosis of the West’s problems was more to the point than anything you will hear from our own Dear Leaders: Joe, Boris, Emmanuel, Olaf, et al. It is worth citing relevant extracts from the official English translation of Putin’s speech to highlight his economic understanding of the pickle we in the West have got ourselves into:
“Surging inflation in product and commodity markets had become a fact of life long before the events of this year. The world has been driven into this situation, little by little, by many years of irresponsible macroeconomic policies pursued by the G7 countries, including uncontrolled emission and accumulation of unsecured debt. These processes intensified with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, when supply and demand for goods and services drastically fell on a global scale…
“Because they could not or would not devise any other recipes, the governments of the leading Western economies simply accelerated their money-printing machines. Such a simple way to make up for unprecedented budget deficits…
“I have already cited this figure: over the past two years, the money supply in the United States has grown by more than 38 percent. Previously, a similar rise took decades, but now it grew by 38 percent or 5.9 trillion dollars in two years. By comparison, only a few countries have a bigger gross domestic product. The EU’s money supply has also increased dramatically over this period. It grew by about 20 percent, or 2.5 trillion euros.
“Lately, I have been hearing more and more about the so-called – please excuse me, I really would not like to do this here, even mention my own name in this regard, but I cannot help it – we all hear about the so-called ‘Putin inflation’ in the West. When I see this, I wonder who they expect would buy this nonsense – people who cannot read or write, maybe. Anyone literate enough to read would understand what is actually happening.
“The rising prices, accelerating inflation, shortages of food and fuel, petrol, and problems in the energy sector are the result of system-wide errors the current US administration and European bureaucracy have made in their economic policies. That is where the reasons are, and only there.”[i]
Putin shows that he has at least a superficial understanding of where the West has erred with its neo-Keynesian monetary and economic policies. While some of the economic and monetary elements in his address can be criticised, Putin’s grasp of these subjects puts him head and shoulders above his opposite numbers in the G7.
It is from this disadvantage that the US is trying to impose dollar hegemony on Russian interests in the financial and currency war. We must consider the geopolitics of the matter.
Biden’s “Build Back Better” efforts have been a phenomenal failure so far, but maybe that’s because Americans just don’t understand a good thing when they see it?
This has been Biden’s argument on the state of the economy lately, as he persistently argues that there is no threat of recession because the US jobs market still “strong.” There is no mention from the White House regarding the fact that covid stimulus spending artificially drove up retail demand and created a temporary spike in jobs. If they were to admit that layoffs are about to ramp up because the covid checks are gone and people’s credit cards are maxed out because of inflation, then Biden would have nothing left to brag about.
Biden economic adviser Cecilia Rouse responded to media question on the inflation situation in particular this week and offered even more propaganda, rather than an honest assessment of the dangers ahead. Remember, this is the same administration that was still saying only a year ago that inflation was “transitory” despite all evidence to the contrary. Yet, we’re now supposed to trust their opinions on the potential for recession and solving inflation?
One of the key obstacles to “Build Back Better” is the reality of high inflation. If Biden gets what he wants, which is at bottom an infrastructure renewal plan similar to the New Deal plan under FDR during the Great Depression. Whether or not the New Deal actually saved the US economy is up for debate (the destruction caused by WWII left the US as one of the only major manufacturing nations still intact, and this was the main reason for the explosion in wealth and the national escape from poverty), but even if it made a difference the circumstances today are not the same.
The problem is that FDR was facing a deflationary crash in which the US dollar remained viable and strong. Today, we are dealing with a stagflationary crash in which price inflation is rampant and the dollar’s buying power is growing ever weaker. One of the main reasons for this inflation is due to government spending and massive Federal Reserve stimulus created from thin air.
Peter Doshi is an author of this paper. This paper puts my status as a “misinformation spreader” in serious jeopardy. They may have to start calling me a “truth teller” soon.
Big whoops. That’s not what the CDC and FDA have been saying. This is really embarrassing for them that now others are starting to discover what I’ve been saying for over a year now.
Don’t expect the mainstream media to cover this or ask any questions. That’s not the way it works.
MCViewPoint 