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Twenty years on, families of 9/11 victims demand Washington finally declassifies documents – could they shed light on CIA’s role? — RT Op-ed

Posted by M. C. on August 12, 2021

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/531765-families-9-11-declassified-documents/

By Kit Klarenberg, an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg Relatives believe the information will prove the Saudi government was complicit in the attacks – while newly available files have already raised questions about Langley’s involvement.

Family members of 9/11 victims have warned Joe Biden to stay away from the upcoming 20th anniversary memorial events, unless officials are willing to declassify documents that the relatives believe will prove the Saudi Arabian government was involved in the attacks.

“There is simply no reason – unmerited claims of ‘national security’ or otherwise – to keep this information secret,” an open letter, signed by 1,700 people directly affected by the incident, stated. 

Allegations of Riyadh’s involvement in the tragedy have long abounded, not least because 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. The highly controversial 9/11 Commission Report of 2004 found no evidence “the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually” funded Al-Qaeda, but did identify Saudi individuals and organizations as Al-Qaeda’s primary funding source. Two commission co-chairs, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, have since asserted that the investigation was “set up to fail.”

In March 2018, after many years of fruitless struggle, a US court finally allowed a lawsuit against the government of Saudi Arabia brought by the families of the attack’s victims, businesses, insurers, and over 20,000 people injured that fateful day, to proceed. 

One of the key questions under consideration is the level of contact between the hijackers and potential or confirmed Saudi government operatives – be they diplomatic or intelligence staff, or otherwise. Nonetheless, the presiding judge has to date restricted plaintiffs’ discovery to just two individuals, Omar al-Bayoumi and Fahad al-Thumairy.

According to previously classified memoranda, the FBI “believes it possible” Bayoumi “was an agent of the Saudi Government and that he may have been reporting on the local community to the Saudi Government officials.” The Bureau also discovered that he had “ties to terrorist elements.” Thumairy was a Saudi Islamic Affairs official and imam at King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles.

Both had intimate contact with American Airlines Flight 77 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar after their January 2000 arrival in the US, and were named in a 2012 FBI report on the progress of Operation Encore, its investigation into Saudi government involvement in 9/11. The document was only released due to Freedom of Information litigation, and so comprehensively censored that even the probe’s title was redacted. 

What remains extant indicates that Bayoumi and Thumairy “provided (or directed others to provide) the hijackers with assistance in daily activities, including procuring living quarters, financial assistance, and assistance in obtaining flight lessons and driver’s licenses,” with the latter “immediately [assigning] an individual to take care” of Hazmi and Mihdhar after meeting them. 

Washington has gone to enormous efforts to suppress the unexpurgated FBI report, and any and all records related to Operation Encore, which collapsed in 2016 due to a purported byzantine bust-up within the Bureau over investigative methods. Throughout his tenure as Attorney General, William Barr has consistently blocked release of this additional information by asserting the government’s “state secrets privilege”.

See the rest here

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Is America Becoming a Failed State? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on August 12, 2021

America is unable to win the wars she chooses to fight. She cannot or will not control and defend her borders from a mass migrant invasion. She cannot halt an outbreak of criminality and killing in her great cities. She has not run a trade surplus in four decades. Her dependency upon foreign producers is unprecedented. And her budget deficits continue to break records every year — as does her soaring national debt.

Is that not the description of a failed or failing state?

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/08/patrick-j-buchanan/is-america-becoming-a-failed-state/

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Suddenly, Sunday, a riveting report came over cable news:

The U.S. embassy was urging all Americans to “leave Afghanistan as soon as possible.” Message: Get out while you can.

Adding urgency was news that three northern provincial capitals, including Kunduz city, had fallen to the Taliban, making it five provincial capitals overrun since Friday.

The huge investment in blood and treasure by the United States over two decades to remake Afghanistan appears about to be wiped out, whole and entire, and we appear about to sustain our worst diplomatic and political defeat since the fall of Saigon.

Not once in this century has the U.S. decisively won one of the wars it launched — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen or Libya. And the sole superpower status we enjoyed as the 21st century began is gone with the wind.

Yet America’s hawks are urging us to give a new war guarantee to Taiwan, should Beijing exercise its claim, though former President Richard Nixon and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger assented in 1972 that Taiwan is “a part of China.”

Before we issue any war guarantee to Taipei, we might consider the Pentagon’s evaluation of the results of a recent war game in which the U.S. confronted China over Taiwan.

How did it go? Says vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten, “Without overstating the issue, it failed miserably.

“An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years just ran rings around us. … They knew exactly what we were going to do before we did it, and they took advantage of it.”

Are we Americans prepared, in any way, for an air-sea-and-missile war in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific over islands they claim as their historic national territory but we have never claimed as ours?

Here at home, the COVID-19 pandemic, now in a fourth wave, is infecting 100,000 Americans every day, with hospitalizations rising commensurately. For that third of a nation still unvaccinated, the delta variant is a potential death sentence.

Despite this medical crisis that is common to us all, our political divide is manifesting itself in savage battles over vaccinations, masks and mandates.

And while COVID-19 continues to infect, hospitalize and kill, scores of thousands of Americans are being annually lost to drug overdoses and opioids. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 93,000 overdose deaths occurred across the country in 2020, and 3 in 4 fatal overdoses can be attributed to opioids.

More Americans are dying yearly from overdoses and opioids than all the Americans dead during the war in Vietnam.

The U.S. trade deficit numbers just came in for June, where the deficit in goods alone increased to $91 billion for the month. This translates into $1 trillion a year.

The largest component of that trade deficit is with China — an extraordinary level of U.S. dependency on a foreign nation for the vital necessities of its national life, let alone on an adversary like China.

On our southern border, an invasion of our country is taking place.

Every month President Joe Biden has been in office, illegal border crossings have increased. In June, Border Patrol recorded 178,000 border arrests — a 571% jump from June 2020. Border arrests have already reached their highest since 2000 and are on track to reach 1.8 million this year.

Biden is failing in his first constitutional duty — to defend the United States from foreign invasion. We Americans no longer decide who comes into our national home and whom we shall adopt as new citizens. Others decide, others determine our future, for us.

We defend the borders of scores of nations; we cannot, or Biden will not, defend our own. And, as former President Ronald Reagan reminded us, a country that can’t or won’t defend its borders isn’t really a country anymore.

In our great cities, public shootings and killings have begun to exceed those of previous years. Police, under attack and abuse from the elites and people they protect, are resigning and retiring in record numbers.

Consider.

America is unable to win the wars she chooses to fight. She cannot or will not control and defend her borders from a mass migrant invasion. She cannot halt an outbreak of criminality and killing in her great cities. She has not run a trade surplus in four decades. Her dependency upon foreign producers is unprecedented. And her budget deficits continue to break records every year — as does her soaring national debt.

Is that not the description of a failed or failing state?

Asked by a despondent young friend if the defeat at Saratoga and potential loss of the American colonies meant the ruin of Britain, Adam Smith assured him, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”

Britain would go on from the loss of her 13 colonies to create the greatest empire since Rome.

Yet if there is “a great deal of ruin in a nation,” we Americans certainly appear to be testing those limits.

Patrick J. Buchanan is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever See his website.

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How the Warfare-Welfare State (Unfortunately) Unites Americans | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on August 12, 2021

Essentially, the American welfare state functions as an enormous carrot to ensure that a sizable portion of the American electorate think twice before risking its access to the federal welfare trough.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/how-the-warfare-welfare-state-unfortunately-unites-americans/

by Ryan McMaken

In case you haven’t noticed, America is “deeply divided.” At least, that’s what a seemingly nonstop stream of headlines from major media sources would have us believe. “Trump Leaves America at Its Most Divided since the Civil War,” reads one CNN headline from earlier this year. Meanwhile, in his speeches from the first few months of his presidency, President Biden frequently claimed to be trying to restore national “unity.” More recently, the debate over vaccine mandates has prompted countless op-eds on how there are now “two Americas” or that differences in vaccination rates from state to state reflect a “deeply divided” America.

How deep are these divisions, really?

Well, there is no doubt that the divisions are nontrivial. In recent years, talk of secession has become more frequent and more urgent. For several years now, a quarter of Americans polled have claimed to support the idea of secession. In 2018, a Zogby poll concluded 39 percent of those polled agree that residents of a state should “have the final say” as to whether or not that state remains part of the United States. Nor are predictions of secession among Americans something reserved only for the distant future. In a 2020 poll, Zogby pollsters found that “[a] little over one-half of likely voters believe all 50 states will remain united under the Constitution five to ten years from now. In contrast, roughly one-quarter believe at least one state will secede from the union during the 2020s.”

These trends suggest a deterioration of national unity, to be sure. But has the movement toward disunity reached a critical point at which de facto political disunity results? If we’re not there yet, at what point will it be reached?

The answer is we still have a long way to go until we reach the point when U.S. citizens will demand, en masse, political separation from Washington, DC.

This is because there are two important factors that continue to work in favor of a unified political system controlled by Washington. The first is the welfare state, and the second is American paranoia over foreign “enemies.”

Welfare Spending

With the advent of the New Deal in the 1930s, the federal government built a system of largesse that tied most Americans, at some point in their lives, to federal benefits through the Social Security system. Until that time, state and local governments in the United States had long employed a variety of poverty-relief programs. But after the 1930s, thanks to Social Security, Americans would look to the federal government for direct cash payments. Over time, of course, this would be greatly expanded with the invention of Medicare, and then Medicaid, and then again with the Bush administration’s immense expansion of Medicare with the prescription drug benefit.

Today, 69.8 million (one in five) Americans receive some kind of benefit through the Social Security administration. Sixty-one million Americans (18 percent) are on Medicare. An additional 72 million Americans are on Medicaid. (Preliminary data suggests total Medicaid enrollment surged to above 80 million during 2020.)

Indeed, the American welfare state is the largest in the Western world, by far. Most European welfare states, for example, “serve” populations that are small fractions of the size of the U.S.’s population. While the U.S. has 330 million people, Norway has 5 million. Switzerland has 8 million. Even the larger European welfare states—i.e., Italy with 60 million and Germany with 84 million—are mere fractions of the size of the U.S.

The political effect of all this is to keep Americans tied to federal spending, thus contributing to political unity. For example, were a U.S. state to contemplate secession from the U.S., it’s easy to imagine what would happen. The federal government would vow to cut off all Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security recipients from payments. Elderly voters would panic, demanding that no secession could be possible until they received assurances that they would somehow continue to receive “their” monthly welfare payments.

Essentially, the American welfare state functions as an enormous carrot to ensure that a sizable portion of the American electorate think twice before risking its access to the federal welfare trough.

We saw this phenomenon at work in Britain the run-up to the Scottish independence vote in 2014. It is likely not a coincidence that the over-sixty-five demographic constituted one of the largest anti-independence blocs. According to postelection polls, among those Scottish voters polled, a whopping 73 percent of voters over sixty-five reported voting no. For those under fifty-five, the no vote was closer to 50 percent. Fears over maintaining pension benefits from the central government in London likely were a significant factor.

Military Paranoia

A second major factor pushing the US toward continued political unity is the American tendency toward paranoia over perceived foreign threats. As the Old Right journalist Garet Garrett pointed out, Americans are routinely caught up in “a complex of vaunting and fear.” This is a complex in which Americans talk tough about being the most powerful nation in the world, yet they are also fundamentally fearful, sure that countless foreign powers are poised to attack the United States at any time.

We continue to see this today. For example, a July 2021 poll of Americans concluded “two-thirds of Americans believe Iran poses a threat to the U.S.” A lopsided majority of 84 percent are sure a nuclear-armed Iran would be a grave threat to the US. It remains unclear why a nuclear-armed Iran should be any more of a threat to the US than a nuclear-armed Pakistan, yet such explanations are surely unnecessary from the point of view of the American foreign policy establishment. It’s a safe bet that few Americans are even aware that Pakistan is a nuclear state. Americans fear Iran because policymakers and media pundits have told them to be afraid.1

Similarly, many Americans remain fearful over China. Gallup polls from earlier this year show Americans increasingly fear China, with 63 percent of Americans polled labeling China a “critical threat.”

Facts suggest China isn’t nearly as powerful geopolitically as today’s new Cold Warriors would have us believe,2 but the true extent of China’s power is a separate matter from what matters for domestic politics—the common perception among many Americans that China is immensely powerful.

These perceptions will continue to fuel the notion among many Americans that the American regime ought to pursue a goal of maximum geopolitical power. This means a continued preference for a unified American regime with enormous tax revenues and military spending.

In other words, fear of China and Iran, combined with the more practical desire for continued “free” money from the federal government, will continue to fuel opposition to any serious movement toward secession.

On the other hand, this is all true only in the short term. Over a longer time horizon, matters are far less certain. Should the US continue with its current policies of reckless deficit spending, the longer-term prognosis points toward insolvency, and a relative decline in federal power compared to state governments, which may find themselves picking up the welfare slack as the spending power of federal welfare payments declines thanks to a declining dollar.

We saw similar dynamics at work in the waning days of the Soviet Union. A bankrupt regime is a regime with declining legitimacy. In such a situation, it is also likely that domestic concerns would overwhelm geopolitical concerns, and the stage would finally be set for true de facto separatism in the U.S. But for now, this does not appear to be likely in the short term.

This article was originally featured at the Ludwig von Mises Institute

About Ryan McMaken

Ryan McMaken is the editor of Mises Wire and The Austrian. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

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UN Globalists Arriving In UK For Climate Summit Won’t Face COVID Restrictions Imposed On British Citizens | ZeroHedge

Posted by M. C. on August 12, 2021

Beiing “in” with the “In crowd”

If your square you ain’t there.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/un-globalists-arriving-uk-climate-summit-wont-face-covid-restrictions-imposed-british

Tyler Durden's Photoby Tyler Durden

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

While British holidaymakers continue to face uncertainty and headaches over returning from foreign vacations, UN globalists arriving for a climate conference in Scotland won’t face the same COVID-19 restrictions.

For months, Brits have been hesitant to travel due to onerous quarantine rules which enforce self-isolation upon return from different destinations.

This was exacerbated by the government constantly changing which countries were on the green, amber, amber-plus and red lists – leaving many holidaymakers in limbo stranded abroad.

UK citizens returning home from red list countries, many of which are located in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, have to undergo a brutally enforced quarantine in specially designated prison-like hotels at their own expense.

The 10 day quarantine applies even if the individual is vaccinated, while those returning from amber countries have to perform the same self-isolation at home, with local authorities and police routinely checking up on them.

However, the same rules won’t apply to globalist environmentalist alarmists visiting Scotland for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in November.

Around 25,000 government figures, media, and environmental campaigners, most of whom will arrive on CO2-belching flights before lecturing us on our energy use, have been given special dispensation by the government.

That means they won’t need to be vaccinated to enter the country if they are arriving from green or amber list countries.

“There will be no requirement for self-isolation on arrival to the UK for those coming from amber or green list countries whether vaccinated or not,” the UK government confirmed.

In addition, those arriving from ‘deadly’ red list countries that Brits have been told to avoid like the plague will only have to endure a quarantine period of 5 days, and presumably it will take place in a much nicer setting than Brits are having to endure.

The government justified the double standard by basically arguing that climate change is an important issue, just as Black Lives Matter protesters were allowed to gather in their thousands at the height of the pandemic, presumably because “systemic racism” was more of a threat than COVID-19.

“This would not be the first event held in Britain where the global elite were allowed exemptions to strict coronavirus rules not afforded the ordinary Briton,” writes Victoria Friedman.

“The G7 Summit in Cornwall, England, in early June, saw pictures released of world leaders maskless, in close proximity to each other, and touching one another, in contravention of the then-rules demanding social distancing and face coverings. The official portrait, however, saw the heads of state and government carefully choreographed, seated six feet apart.”

Us and them.

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Vaccinated People With Breakthrough Infections Can Spread The CDCDelta Variant, CDC Says

Posted by M. C. on August 12, 2021

New Covid symptom – Feeling like a government pawn.

The CDC said the finding that fully vaccinated people could spread the virus was behind its move to change its mask guidance.

gam·bit

 (găm′bĭt)n.1. An opening in chess in which the player risks one or more minor pieces, usually a pawn, in order to gain a favorable position.2. A maneuver, stratagem, or opening remark, especially one intended to bring about a desired result.

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/07/30/1022867219/cdc-study-provincetown-delta-vaccinated-breakthrough-mask-guidance

Laurel Wamsley at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., November 7, 2018. (photo by Allison Shelley)

Laurel Wamsley

When revising its mask guidance this week to urge even vaccinated people to wear masks indoors in much of the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was criticized for not citing data in making that move.

Now it has — and the data is sobering.

The study details a COVID-19 outbreak that started July 3 in Provincetown, Mass., involving 469 cases. It found that three-quarters of cases occurred in fully vaccinated people. Massachusetts has a high rate of vaccination: about 69% among eligible adults in the state at the time of the study.

It also found no significant difference in the viral load present in the breakthrough infections occurring in fully vaccinated people and the other cases, suggesting the viral load of vaccinated and unvaccinated persons infected with the coronavirus is similar.

The CDC said the finding that fully vaccinated people could spread the virus was behind its move to change its mask guidance.

“High viral loads suggest an increased risk of transmission and raised concern that, unlike with other variants, vaccinated people infected with Delta can transmit the virus,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, said in a statement Friday.

“This finding is concerning and was a pivotal discovery leading to CDC’s updated mask recommendation. The masking recommendation was updated to ensure the vaccinated public would not unknowingly transmit virus to others, including their unvaccinated or immunocompromised loved ones,” Walensky said…

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The Right AOC on Point: Exposing the real racism in math instruction debate

Posted by M. C. on August 11, 2021

Bill and Melinda Gates in action

John Locke Foundation CEO Amy Cooke, “The Right AOC,” critiques a recent document that argues precise mathematics instruction is racist. Contact Amy at therightaoc@johnlocke.org. Follow her at https://www.facebook.com/TheRightAOC​…​ and https://twitter.com/TheRightAOC​​​​​​.

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Watch “stop your stupid” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on August 11, 2021

https://youtu.be/s3_4_iBKiwU

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Who Is Joe Manchin? | Mises Institute

Posted by M. C. on August 11, 2021

https://mises.org/power-market/who-joe-manchin

Robert Aro

He may not be a household name, but the letter Senator Joe Manchin (D) from West Virginia wrote to the Federal Reserve chair Thursday is worthy of consideration. The notable part is where he writes:

With the recession over and our strong economic recovery well underway, I am increasingly alarmed that the Fed continues to inject record amounts of stimulus into our economy by continuing an emergency level of quantitative easing (QE) with asset purchases of $120 billion per month of Treasury securities and mortgage backed securities.

Recall that the shortest recession in US history, all of two months, ended last April, as announced by the National Bureau of Economic Research in July. Perhaps the delay in reporting the recession data, or the surprisingly short span of the recession helped prompt the senator’s frustration? He continues:

The Fed has sustained $120 billion per month in asset purchases since June 2020, despite increasing vaccination rates to combat the virus and additional fiscal stimulus from Congress in the ARP [American Rescue Plan]. The record amount of stimulus in the economy has led to the most inflation momentum in 30 years, and our economy has not even fully reopened yet.

At the time of writing, the Fed’s balance sheet stood at $8.2 trillion, which is an increase of over $4 trillion since the formal start of the recession last year. He goes on to say that continual stimulus, coupled with further fiscal stimulus, will lead to “unavoidable inflation taxes” Americans cannot afford. He concludes that

it is imperative we begin to understand that long term policy responses tailored for an economic depression, like the Great Depression and Great Recession of 2008, may not be what is required for today’s economy and could result in higher than desired inflation if not removed in time.

The letter is hardly perfect. He doesn’t convey all the nuances, such as the issues with inflation, the Fed’s role in causing booms and busts, etc. And ultimately, he commends the Fed for their intervention, though he questions why it’s continuing this long. It’s understandable, as he’s a senator, not an economist, and may not even be aware of the over-a-century-long history of Austrian economics. However, he seems aware that something isn’t quite right and correctly notes that it’s the Fed’s actions which hurt a lot of Americans.

Albeit small, when someone in the Senate takes an interest in the Fed’s activities and even questions their behavior, it is a step in a better direction. If the ninety-nine other senators and more average citizens question the Fed, it could create opportunities to invoke societal change, to severely limit, and potentially erase the state entirely … one day.

As for the Fed’s response, as reported by Politico:

A Fed spokesperson said the central bank received Manchin’s letter and planned to respond.

We will continue to monitor the situation and look forward to hearing more from the Fed. Until then, let’s consider another question: Where do all the mainstream economists stand with the Fed’s intervention in the free market?

Across the USA, there are a handful of Ivy League schools and countless institutions of higher learning that all teach economics. They each have a roster of academics who get paid to continually study, teach, and write about economics. But the silence from these “intellectuals” remains deafening. It’s almost as if the mainstream academic community didn’t understand what the Fed is doing and therefore remains silent. Or maybe they do understand but don’t care to warn the public. If the latter is true, it could be due to the intellectuals’ comfort and security, which is handsomely paid for by the state. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe once said, the state offers the intellectual “a warm, secure, and permanent berth in its apparatus.”

How difficult is it for the truth, freedom, and liberty to compete with that?

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Eviction Moratorium: A Postmortem on Private Property | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on August 11, 2021

A dangerous precedent has been established. If eviction moratoriums are deemed a lawful intervention, why shouldn’t the seizing of private property be used to quell future “crises”?

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/eviction-moratorium-a-postmortem-on-private-property/

by Michael Milano

At the beseeching of congressional Democrats and the fanatical urgings of Nancy Pelosi, who called the extension of the federal eviction moratorium a “moral imperative,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a new nationwide ban on evictions for counties with heightened levels of coronavirus community transmission. This latest CDC order comes in spite of President Biden’s candid admission that “the bulk of the constitutional scholarship says it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.” In The Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard attests that the “right to contract is strictly derivable from the right of private property.” If private property is a keystone for prosperous societies and a fundamental tenant of common law, what happens in the aftermath of the vitiation of millions of private contracts?

A brief recap. In March 2020 under the CARES Act, an eviction moratorium was applied to all dwelling units participating in federal assistance programs. Invoking the Public Health Service Act of 1944, the CDC broadened the moratorium to cover all rental properties countrywide in September 2020. The CDC’s unprecedented unilateral expansion was rationalized as a reasonable measure to combat the spread of COVID-19 by preventing crowded living conditions that would stem from mass evictions and by facilitating self-isolation. This decree, initially slated to end after three months, had been extended on five separate occasions. Rent protection programs have additionally been enacted at the state level. In some states these eviction moratoriums are scheduled to expire over the upcoming weeks. In others, they are set to continue indefinitely.

In consonance with the ethos of a free society, the United States Constitution is a document grounded in natural rights, conceived to protect private property. The Founding Fathers did not include a universal pandemic exception. The Fifth Amendment states that no one shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” but does permit private property to be expropriated with just compensation (e.g., eminent domain). The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees due process protection at the state level. According to the Contract Clause, no state “may pass a law impairing the obligation of contracts.” During the eviction moratorium however, contractual obligations were voided, property was despotically taken with no compensation, and liberty was deprived without a hearing.

For many painstaking months, landlords have been stripped of their rights to freely use their property, while being forced to fulfill legal duties for squatters. Courts at the district level ruled the CDC’s edict unconstitutional, yet the moratorium persisted. In June 2021, the Supreme Court chimed in, allowing the eviction moratoriums to stand in the case of Alabama Association of Realtors v. Department of Health and Human Services. However, Justice Brett Kavanaugh clearly stated that the CDC exceeded its authority, that congressional authorization would be required for a moratorium extension, and that his deciding vote was cast only due to the fact that a few weeks remained before the moratorium was set to expire. Nevertheless, in open defiance of the Supreme Court ruling, the CDC issued their slightly scaled back, 60 day ban on evictions, at the beginning of August.

A dangerous precedent has been established. If eviction moratoriums are deemed a lawful intervention, why shouldn’t the seizing of private property be used to quell future “crises”? Will the current fallout include landlords abandoning the industry, or will rents be raised to offset uncertainty risks as speculated by Jeff Deist? How do members of a society continue to confidently form agreements when the trust associated with contract enforcement erodes?

When taking this all into account, proponents of strict constitutionalism are inevitably forced to reconcile their philosophy in the face of a swelling regulatory state, led by power mongering aspiring autocrats, who perceive the founding documents as ignorable relics. None of this should be overly surprising given that politicians and bureaucrats are perversely incentivized to perpetually expand the size of government. In spite of illusions of separated powers, regardless of whether the reigns are wielded by Democrats or Republicans, when the state is the ultimate arbiter, even in cases involving itself, justice becomes an empty abstraction distributed to gain political favor.

Applying one set of ethical standards to the citizenry and another to the state is hypocrisy and downright immoral. In a system that preserves property rights, a creditor may grant a debtor forgiveness solely for obligations between the two parties. As Lysander Spooner wrote in No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority:

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.

Michael Milano is an entrepreneur in the midst of penning his first novel. He earned his PhD from The Ohio State University. His areas of interest include Austrian economics, crypto-assets, evolutionary biology, and stoicism.

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Doug Casey on Why Almost Nothing is Cheap – International Man

Posted by M. C. on August 11, 2021

Let’s dismiss the foolish and anachronistic idea of saving dollars in a bank as well. So what can you save with in today’s monetarily distorted world? The answer is “useful things,” mainly household commodities. I’m not sure exactly how bad the Greater Depression will be or how long it will last, but it makes all the sense in the world to stockpile usable things in lieu of monetary savings.

Above all, this isn’t the time for business as usual. You’ll notice that “Working in a conventional job” didn’t occur on the list above. And I pity the poor fools working for some corporation and hoping things get better.

https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-on-why-almost-nothing-is-cheap/

by Doug Casey

Stocks, bonds, and urban property—conventional investments—aren’t cheap in today’s investment world.

Because of the trillions of currency units that governments all over the world have created since the start of the crisis in 2007, financial assets are grossly overpriced. Meanwhile, real wages are slipping rapidly among those who are working, and—regardless of what official figures say—a large portion of the population is unemployed or underemployed. The next chapter in this sad drama will include a rapid rise in consumer prices.

We are in a financial no-man’s land. That said, what you should do with your time and money presents some tough alternatives. “Saving” is compromised because of depreciating currency and artificially low interest rates. “Investing” is problematical because of a deteriorating economy, unpredictable and increasing regulation, and rising taxes. “Speculation” is the best answer, of course, and I cover what that means elsewhere. But it may not suit everyone as a methodology.

There are, however, several other alternatives to dealing with the question, “What should I do with my time and money now?” They include active business, entrepreneurialism, innovation, “hoarding,” and agriculture. There’s obviously some degree of overlap with these things, but they are essentially different in nature.

Active Business

Warren Buffet’s success notwithstanding, relatively few large fortunes have been made by investing. Most are made by creating, building, and running a business. But the same things that make investing hard today are going to make active business even harder. Sure, there will be plenty of people out there to hire—but in today’s litigious and regulated environment, an employee is a large potential liability as much as a current asset.

Business itself is seen as a convenient milk cow by bankrupt governments—and it’s much easier to tap small businesses than taxpayers at large. Big business (which I’ll arbitrarily define as companies with at least several thousand employees) actually encourages regulation and taxes because their main competition is from small businesses: namely, you. Big business is much more able to absorb the cost of new regulation and can hire lobbyists to influence its direction. Businesses that are “too big to fail” can count on government help.

You certainly don’t want to be an employee, but running an active business is increasingly problematical. Unless it’s a special situation, I’d be inclined to sell a business, take the money, and run. It’s Atlas Shrugged time.

Entrepreneurialism

An entrepreneur is “one who takes between,” looking at the French roots of the word. Buy here for a dollar, sell there for two—a good business if you can do it with a million widgets, hopefully, all at once and on credit. An entrepreneur ideally needs few employees and little fixed overhead.

Just as a speculator capitalizes on distortions in the financial markets, an entrepreneur does so in the business world. The more distortions in the market, the more bankruptcies and distress sales, the more variation in prosperity and attitudes between countries, and the more opportunities for the entrepreneur.

The years to come are going to be tough on investors and businessmen but full of opportunity for speculators and entrepreneurs. Keep your passport current, your powder dry, and your eyes open. I suggest you reform your thinking along those lines.

Innovation

The two mainsprings of human progress are saving (producing more than you consume and setting aside the difference) and new technology (improved ways of doing things).

Innovation takes a certain kind of mind and skill set. Not everyone can be an Edison, a Watt, a Wright, or a Ford. However, with more scientists and engineers alive today than have lived in all history put together, you can plan on lots more in the way of innovation.

What you want to do is put yourself in front of innovation; even if you aren’t the innovator, you can be a facilitator—something like Steve Ballmer was to Bill Gates—which will give you an excuse to hang out with the younger generation and play amateur venture capitalist.

This argues for two things. One is reading very broadly (but especially in science) so that you can more easily make the correct decision as to which innovations will be profitable. The other is building enough capital to liberate your time to try something new and perhaps put money into start-ups.

Hoarding

In the days when gold and silver were day-to-day money, “saving” was actually identical to “hoarding.” The only difference was the connotation of the words.

Today you can no longer even hoard copper coins because (unbeknownst to Boobus americanus) there’s very little copper left in the penny. It’s now 97.5% zinc. It will soon disappear from circulation anyway.

Let’s dismiss the foolish and anachronistic idea of saving dollars in a bank as well. So what can you save with in today’s monetarily distorted world? The answer is “useful things,” mainly household commodities. I’m not sure exactly how bad the Greater Depression will be or how long it will last, but it makes all the sense in the world to stockpile usable things in lieu of monetary savings.

The things I’m talking about could be generally described as “consumer perishables.” Instead of putting $10,000 extra in the bank to be inflated away, go out and buy things like motor oil, ammunition, light bulbs, toilet paper, cigarettes, liquor, soap, sugar, and dried beans. There are many advantages to doing this.

Taxes – As these things go up in price and you consume them, you won’t have any resulting taxes, as you would for a successful investment.

Volume Savings – When you buy a whole bunch at once, especially when Walmart or Costco has them on sale, you’ll greatly reduce your cost.

Convenience – You’ll have them all now and won’t have to waste time getting them later, especially if they’re no longer readily available. Expect shortages in the years ahead.

There are hundreds of items to put on the list and much more to be said about the whole approach. The idea is basically that of my old friend John Pugsley, which he explained fully in his book The Alpha Strategy. Take this point very seriously. It’s something absolutely everybody can and should do.

Agriculture

During the last generation, mothers wanted their kids to grow up and be investment bankers. That thought will be totally banished soon and for a long time. I suspect farmers and ranchers will become the next paradigm of success after being viewed as backward hayseeds for generations.

Agriculture isn’t an easy business, and it has plenty of risks. But there’s always going to be a demand for its products. Margins are low or non-existent at the moment. Corn, soy, coffee, cotton, and other agricultural commodities are currently selling for only a bit more than their cost of production, which is unsustainable. This means bargains are available now. Eventually, margins will go way up. There’s still plenty of potential farmland around the world that’s wild or fallow, but politics is likely to keep it that way. The population won’t be growing that much (and will be falling in the developed world), but some people will be wealthier and want to eat better. You want the kind of food that people with money prefer.

I’m not crazy about commodity-type foods, like wheat, soy, and corn; these are high-volume, industrial-style foods, subject to political interference. And they’re not important as foods for wealthy people, which is the profitable part of the market. Niche markets with niche products are the way to fly.

I suggest upmarket specialty products like exotic fruits and vegetables, fish, dairy, and beef. The problem is that in “advanced” countries like the US, national, state, and local governments often make small commercial producers’ lives absolutely miserable. Maybe you can grow stuff, but it’s extremely costly in terms of paperwork and legal fees to sell it, especially if the product is animal-based—meat, milk, cheese, and such. Niche foods are, however, potentially a very good business. Eternal optimist that I am, I see one of the many benefits of the impending bankruptcy of most governments as again making it feasible to grow and sell food locally.

Above all, this isn’t the time for business as usual. You’ll notice that “Working in a conventional job” didn’t occur on the list above. And I pity the poor fools working for some corporation and hoping things get better.

Editor’s Note: A severe financial hurricane far greater than what we’ve seen in 2007 is on the horizon. And most investors won’t be prepared for what’s coming. That’s why Doug Casey and his team have prepared a timely video that addresses the coming crisis and what you could do to protect yourself.

Be seeing you

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