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Soros-Backed Coalition Preparing for Post-Election Day Chaos — ‘We’re Going to Fight Like Hell’

Posted by M. C. on September 18, 2020

Soros-the anti-christ.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/17/soros-backed-coalition-preparing-for-post-election-day-chaos-were-going-to-fight-like-hell/

by Joshua Klein

Under the guise of seeking to “prevent a constitutional crisis,” a massive network of well funded left-wing activists and progressive groups are training, organizing, and planning to mobilize millions of Americans should President Trump “contest the election results,” refuse to concede, or claim an early victory.

More than 80 advocacy groups and grassroots organizations have joined in a broad coalition calling itself “Protect the Results” and proclaiming that “we cannot ignore the threat that Trump poses to our democracy and a peaceful transition of power.”

The coalition is a joint project of Indivisible and Stand Up America, two left-wing groups founded in response to President Trump’s 2016 election and whose goals are “to organize and resist Trump’s dangerous agenda” and “to defeat Trump and his enablers.”

Seeking to “protect” election results by use of its millions of members, the coalition calls to “take coordinated action” and “prepare for a potential post-election crisis.”

“Be prepared,” warns a video on its homepage…

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Pentagon Papers Whistleblower Dismantles Myths Around Assange

Posted by M. C. on September 18, 2020

https://shadowproof.com/2020/09/16/pentagon-papers-ellsberg-extradition-trial-assange/

Kevin Gosztola

Opponents of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange often hold up Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg as an example of someone who was responsible for a good leak. They insist WikiLeaks is not like the Pentagon Papers because supposedly Assange was reckless with sensitive documents.

On the seventh day of an extradition trial against Assange, Ellsberg dismantled this false narrative and outlined for a British magistrate court why Assange would not receive a fair trial in the United States.

Assange is accused of 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer crime that, as alleged in the indictment, is written like an Espionage Act offense.

The charges criminalize the act of merely receiving classified information, as well as the publication of state secrets from the United States government. It targets common practices in news gathering, which is why the case is widely opposed by press freedom organizations throughout the world.

James Lewis, a prosecutor from the Crown Prosecution Service who represents the U.S. government, told Ellsberg, “When you published the Pentagon Papers, you were very careful in what you provided to the media.”

The lead prosecutor highlighted the fact that Ellsberg withheld four volumes of the Pentagon Papers that he did not want published because they may have impacted diplomatic efforts to end the Vietnam War. However, Ellsberg’s decision to withhold those volumes had nothing to do with protecting the names of U.S. intelligence sources.

As Ellsberg described for the court, the 4,000 pages of documents he disclosed to the media contained thousands of names of Americans, Vietnamese, and North Vietnamese. There was even a clandestine CIA officer, who was named.

Nowhere in the Pentagon Papers was an “adequate justification for the killing that we were doing,” Ellsberg said. “I was afraid if I redacted or withheld anything at all it would be inferred I left out” the good reasons why the U.S. was pursuing the Vietnam War.

Ellsberg was concerned about revealing the name of a clandestine CIA officer, though he mentioned the individual was well-known in South Vietnam. Had he published the name of the officer today, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act could have easily been used to prosecute him. But he left it in the documents so no one could make inferences about redacted sections that may undermine what he exposed.

Like Assange, Ellsberg wanted the public to have a complete record.

This did not exactly distinguish Ellsberg from Assange so Lewis explicitly highlighted an article, “Why WikiLeaks Is Unlike The Pentagon Papers,” by attorney Floyd Abrams, which he wrote for the Wall Street Journal.

Abrams was one of the attorneys who represented the New York Times in the civil case that argued the government should not be able to block the media organization from publishing the Pentagon Papers. And like Lewis, Abrams fixated on the four volumes that were kept confidential.

Ellsberg insisted Abrams was “mistaken.” He never had any discussion with Ellsberg while defending the right to publish before the Supreme Court so Ellsberg said Abrams could not possibly understand his motives very well.

In the decades since the Pentagon Papers were disclosed, Ellsberg shared how he faced a “great deal” of defamation and then “neglect” to someone who was mentioned as a “clear patriot.” He was used as a “foil” against new revelations from WikiLeaks, “which were supposedly very different.” Such a distinction is “misleading in terms of motive and effect.”

Ellsberg noted Assange withheld 15,000 files from the release of the Afghanistan War Logs. He also requested assistance from the State Department and the Defense Department on redacting names, but they refused to help WikiLeaks redact a single document, even though it is a standard journalistic practice to consult officials to minimize harm.

“I have no doubt that Julian would have removed those names,” Ellsberg declared. Both the State and Defense Departments could have helped WikiLeaks remove the names of individuals, who prosecutors insist were negatively impacted.

Yet, rather than take steps to protect individuals, Ellsberg suggested these government agencies chose to “preserve the possibility of charging Mr Assange with precisely the charges” he faces now.

Not a single person has been identified by the U.S. government when they talk about deaths, physical harm, or incarceration that were linked to the WikiLeaks publications.

The lead prosecutor asked Ellsberg if it was his view that any harm to individuals was the fault of the American government for letting Assange publish material without redactions.

Ellsberg indicated they bear “heavy responsibility.”
Lewis attempted to trap Ellsberg into conceding Assange had engaged in conduct that resulted in grave harm to vulnerable individuals. He read multiple sections of an affidavit from Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg, who is in the Eastern District of Virginia where Assange was indicted.

It covered a laundry list of allegations: they named local Afghans and Iraqis that were providing information to coalition forces, forced journalists and religious leaders to flee, led to harassment of Chinese academics labeled as “rats,” fueled violent threats against people who met with U.S. embassy staff, resulted in Iranians being identified and outed, and spurred violence by the Taliban.

“How can you say honestly and in an unbiased way that there is no evidence that WikiLeaks put anyone in danger?” Lewis asked.

Ellsberg told Lewis he found the government’s assertions to be “highly cynical.” He invited Lewis to correct him if he was wrong, but it is his understanding that no one actually suffered harm as a result of these threats. “Did one of them suffer the carrying out of these threats?”

Lewis replied the rules are you don’t get to ask the questions. He tried to move on as Ellsberg insisted he be allowed to provide the rest of his answer, but Judge Vanessa Baraitser would not let Ellsberg complete his response.

It deeply upset Assange, who spoke from inside the glass box where he sits each day. Baraitser reminded him not to interrupt proceedings as Edward Fitzgerald, a defense attorney, attempted to convince the court that Ellsberg should be able to finish his answer.

Lewis continued, “Is it your position there was absolutely no danger caused by publishing the unredacted names of these informants?”

In response, Ellsberg said the U.S. government is “extremely cynical in pretending its concerned for these people.” It has displayed “contempt for Middle Easterners” throughout the last 19 years.

As Lewis insisted one had to conclude Iraqis, Afghans, or Syrians named in the WikiLeaks publications were murdered or forced to flee, Ellsberg refused to accept this presumption.

“I’m sorry, sir, but it doesn’t seem to be at all obvious that this small fraction of people that have been murdered in the course of both sides of conflicts can be attributed to WikiLeaks disclosures,” Ellsberg stated.

If the Taliban had disappeared someone, Ellsberg said that would be a seriously harmful consequence. “I am not aware of one single instance in the last 10 years.”

At no point did the lead prosecutor offer any specific example of a death, and so the record remains as it has been since Chelsea Manning was put on trial. The government has no evidence that anyone was ever killed as a result of transparency forced by WikiLeaks.

Ellsberg informed the court his motive was no different from Assange’s motive. The Espionage Act charges that Assange faces are not meaningfully different either. And, in fact, he faced efforts by the government to wiretap and incapacitate him just like Assange did while in the Ecuador embassy in London.

Ellsberg recalled that he did not tell the public what led him to disclose the Pentagon Papers because he expected to be able to testify about his motive during his trial.

When his lawyer asked him why he copied the Pentagon Papers, the prosecution immediately objected. Each time his lawyer tried to rephrase the question, the court refused to permit him to tell the jury “why he had done what he’d done.”

Federal courts continue to handle Espionage Act cases in the same manner. “The notion of motive or extenuating circumstances is irrelevant,” Ellsberg added.

“The meaning of which is I did not get a fair trial, despite a very intelligent and conscientious judge. No one since me has had a fair trial.”

“Julian Assange could not get a remotely fair trial under those charges in the United States,” Ellsberg concluded.

Photo of Daniel Ellsberg by Christopher Michel

***

[NOTE: John Goetz, an investigative journalist who worked for Der Spiegel in 2010-2011, gave crucial testimony on German citizen Khaled el-Masri, who the CIA kidnapped and tortured. He described how WikiLeaks disclosures helped El-Masri and provided support for a statement El-Masri has submitted to the court. When El-Masri’s statement is read into the record or made public, I will cover this important aspect of the extradition trial in full.]

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I See A Ray Of Light

Posted by M. C. on September 18, 2020

And on this Constitution Day 2020, let me again quote Thomas Jefferson: “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

https://chuckbaldwinlive.com/Articles/tabid/109/ID/4060/I-See-A-Ray-Of-Light.aspx

Chuck Baldwin

Amidst the rush among the media, medical and political establishments to have a corona vaccine delivered to the American people before the end of the year comes this report that should give us all pause.

Writing for ZeroHedge.com, Tyler Durden reports:

This really should be one of the biggest scandals in public health, but it’s given little attention – mainly because of the high-profile nature of the people and organisations involved.

The United Nations has been forced to admit that a major international vaccine initiative is actually causing the outbreak of the very disease it was supposed to wipe-out.

While international organisations like the World Health Organization (WHO) will regularly boast about supposedly ‘eradicating polio’ with vaccines, the opposite seems to be the case. Their decades-long campaign to eradicate polio is now killing scores of innocent young people living in poor countries.

Now it seems that health officials are beginning to admit that their plan to stop ‘wild’ polio is backfiring, as scores of children are being paralyzed by a deadly strain of the pathogen derived from a live vaccine – causing a virulent polio to spread.

This latest pharma-induced pandemic has broken out in the African countries of Chad and Sudan, and the culprit has been identified: a vaccine-derived polio virus type 2. Officials now fear this new dangerous strain could soon ‘jump continents,’ causing further deadly outbreaks around the world.

Shocking as it sounds, this Big Pharma debacle is not new. After spending some $16 billion over 30 years to eradicate polio, international health bodies have ‘accidentally’ reintroduced the disease in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and also Iran, as the central Asia region was hit by a virulent strain of polio spawned by the corporate pharmaceutical vaccine distributed there. Also, in 2019, the government of Ethiopia ordered the destruction of 57,000 vials of type 2 oral polio vaccine (mOPV2) following a similar outbreak of vaccine-induced polio.

It’s important to note that the oral polio vaccine being pushed on to the African population by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) is a consortium which is supported and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

All of this should be a cause for concern, especially with western governments and transnational pharmaceutical giants all rushing to roll-out their new Gates-funded experimental coronavirus vaccine for the global population.

Currently, the first experimental COVID-19 vaccine is being tested on the African population through GAVI Vaccine Alliance, another organization funded by the Gates Foundation. A large round of human trials will take place in South Africa, locally managed by the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg—yet another Gates-funded institution.

This latest revelation from Africa should prompt media and health advocates to ask hard questions about the efficacy and safety of the much-hyped COVID ‘miracle’ vaccine.

I believe the American people are starting to realize something stinks about the corona narrative. Just two or three weeks ago, surveys indicated that two-thirds of adults would eagerly take the corona vaccination when it is available. But reports I’ve read over the last few days say that at least half of the American people would firmly reject the vaccination.

I’ve documented in this column several times the scandalous nature of Bill Gates’ pharmaceutical experimentations. Durden’s report above is merely the latest in a long string of Gates-funded vaccinations gone badly.

It is no secret that Bill Gates is a rabid eugenicist and the son of a rabid eugenicist. He openly brags about using pharmaceuticals to significantly reduce the earth’s population. That’s not the record of a man who wants to save lives. The only reason anyone would consider Bill Gates any kind of an authority on medical healing is due solely to the fact that we live in a money-crazed culture in which politicians and the media elite give super-rich scumbags like Gates slave-like obeisance. If Gates declared himself to be an expert in alien life forms, those same politicians and media elite would fall all over themselves saying it was true.

In this column last week, I said:

President Trump has tasked the U.S. military with the responsibility of distributing a domestic vaccine and says he expects the vaccine to be ready before Election Day. (What a coincidence!) He has also exempted the final stages of the drug’s testing regimen so as to have it ready this year.

A new vaccine takes years to develop and test. But this drug is going to be ready in a matter of months. And the drug’s manufacturer(s) is being granted zero liability for any harm resulting from the drug. Typically, after many years of laboratory testing and a new drug is ready for mass testing on humans, U.S. military personnel are the guinea pigs. With the corona vaccine, however, America’s families are going to be the guinea pigs—including our children.

We already know about the recent horror stories that have been caused by Bill Gates’ pharmaceutical trials in Africa and India, including a polio epidemic and the sterilizations of unsuspecting women and girls. And anyone who has studied the modern history of vaccines is acquainted with the billions of dollars that the U.S. government has doled out to the victims of vaccinations. We are also acquainted with the parallel rise of autism and crib death with the rise of vaccinations.

Yet no one will have a clue as to what chemicals will be in the corona cocktail. We are just supposed to trust Trump, Gates and Fauci and be good little slaves and take the shot.

Regular readers of this column know I am not shy about saying that I believe Donald Trump is a Trojan Horse. If a Democrat president were using military troops to deliver a vaccine to the American people, conservatives and Christians would be in open revolt. But they insist that Trump is playing 5G chess with the bad guys and always does right even when it looks like he’s doing wrong. Of course, Freedom 101 tells us that that kind of blind faith in ANY elected politician is a recipe for disaster.

And on this Constitution Day 2020, let me again quote Thomas Jefferson: “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

National elections are the perfect cover for subversion and subterfuge against our Constitution. All people can see or talk about is the left-right paradigm being played out by whatever actors happen to be on the political stage at the time. This year it’s Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The public theater of a national election successfully masks the nefarious agenda being carried out by both parties behind the curtain. Again, this is why I know Trump will win (and it might not even be close). How can his robotic supporters say no when their political Superman tells them to take the corona vaccination?

But in the midst of this very thick fog, I see a ray of light.

A man I have known both professionally and personally for many decades, a man who is a stalwart supporter of Donald Trump, Dr. Don Boys, recently wrote the following:

World scientists are working feverishly to develop a vaccine for the Chinese coronavirus [I personally reject that characterization of the virus], and they are suggesting that it might be available before the end of this year. I don’t mean to be critical, but they haven’t found a vaccine for AIDS after throwing billions of dollars at it for more than 30 years.

And there is no vaccine even for the common cold that’s been around for millennia.

If and when a vaccine is available, there are definite indications that everyone will be required to get it. Virginia has already made that decision. And that is the problem before us. After we live through the pandemic and the arguments about masks and lockdowns, now we face the most dangerous part of the battle—telling the do-gooders what they can do with the vaccine.

Mr. Trump will make the biggest mistake of his presidency if he tries to force every American to accept the jab. Trump declared, “Our military is now being mobilized so at the end of the year we’re going to be able to give it to a lot of people very, very rapidly.” Well, Mr. Trump, to quote Samuel Goldwyn, “include me out.” Forced vaccination for the Chinese coronavirus will be divisive, dangerous, and deadly!

And dumb.

I heard Trump say that the vaccination would not be required, but I don’t trust his health advisors at the federal health agencies. Those agencies are snake pits of corruption run by political hacks with medical degrees. None have ever looked a COVID-19 patient in the eye, and few have ever looked a patient in the eyes.

I wonder if Mr. Trump will assure Americans that we will not experience the following for not getting vaccinated: will we be safe from losing a job; losing our insurance or Medicare; have our children taken from us; or be required to have some identification to permit us to buy or sell?

Many federal health officials’ eyes glaze over when they think and speak of financial benefits for COVID-19 research and treatment. Hospitals have been making huge profits from Medicare patients, as revealed by Senator Scott Jensen, Republican from Minnesota, on Fox News. He reported that hospitals are paid more if Medicare patients are listed as having the Chinese coronavirus and three times the normal price if they are put on a ventilator. This is what prompted the minor scandal recently when so many hospitals were listing suicide, heart deaths, etc., as COVID-19 deaths. One man died in an auto accident, another died of a heart attack, another died of gunshot wounds, yet all three were listed as having COVID-19.

Follow the money; after all, it’s yours.  

However, it is not only local hospitals reaping the profits of death but federal health officials who are embedded with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes for Health (NIH), and the World Health Organization (WHO). The CDC is the federal agency responsible for directing, developing, and deciding on safety and efficacy. In simple terms: does it work, is it safe, and is it really necessary?

It is a fact known by all informed people that all drugs and vaccines are not safe for everyone. Many people have died or been harmed for life because of a bad reaction to drugs or vaccines. No health expert on earth will guarantee you that you will be safe by getting a vaccination. Drug and vaccine manufacturing companies are protected by law from being held legally accountable for any harmful reactions. Wonder why that is true if they are safe.  

If force is used to vaccinate everyone, it will make criminals out of Trump’s best supporters and may put some of us in jail. One of my readers said if Trump’s federal troops try to force him to be injected with mercury, he will inject the injecter with lead. Both mercury and lead are lethal. Forced vaccinations mean many will be shot, really shot!

Since I believe the vaccine may be worse than the disease, I will refuse to be vaccinated, although I’m convinced Trump’s advisors will recommend draconian measures to force me (in a free society) to capitulate. I would not even consider getting vaccinated if I were given the right answers to these questions: does the vaccine contain mercury, formaldehyde, or any human cells? What evidence is available that it will work? What proof is there to know it is safe? What are the full results of the tests? If you have a negative reaction such as being paralyzed, who pays, and how much? Why can’t we have religious objections since they are available in other matters?

And this former Republican legislator, longtime fundamentalist (he would shun the term evangelical) evangelist, conservative Christian author and Republican loyalist concluded his missive with this sentence:

I hope Mr. Trump will promise not to force free citizens to have a chip implanted or number tattooed on the hand or forehead.

As I said: I see a ray of light.

P.S. My staff has just produced a brand new DVD entitled The Rise Of The Beast: Coronavirus And Antichrist.

This DVD contains FIVE of my recent messages:

The Scofield Rapture: A False Escape From The Beast

The False Security Of The Beast

The Command To Resist The Beast

The Masks Of The Beast

The Marks Of The Beast

The propaganda and government overreach of the coronavirus is illustrative of the hideous damage being caused by C. I. Scofield’s false prophecy doctrines. These messages show how the evangelical church has become little more than a glorified political special interest group and is unwittingly assisting the work of antichrist through these false prophecy teachings.

These five messages are a monumental wake-up call for the Church to cast off the complacency associated with Scofield Zionism and return to the clarion call of God to be the salt and light of our country—before our liberties are totally destroyed and it becomes too late.

Order The Rise Of The Beast: Coronavirus And Antichrist here.

 

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ClubOrlov: Interview on Radio Voice America

Posted by M. C. on September 18, 2020

The big surprise as far as the sequence of collapse stages in the United States is concerned is that social and cultural collapse have already happened. That is, the United States, from a social and cultural perspective, are pretty much one hundred percent defunct. There’s no getting back to normal. And so once the financial realm goes and it becomes impossible to continue importing everything that the United States needs—which is just about everything at this point, as the US doesn’t really make anything any more—the other stages of collapse will swiftly follow. And as far as political collapse—well, we have to wait until the November elections to see how that’s going to turn out.

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2020/09/interview-on-radio-voice-america.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXFNKfEcVYc&feature=youtu.be

Welcome back to Turning Hard Times into Good Times. I’m your host Jay Taylor. I’m really pleased to have with me once again Dmitry Orlov.

Dmitry was born and grew up in Leningrad, but has lived in the United States. He moved here in the mid-seventies. He has since gone back to Russia, where he is living now.

But Dmitry was an eyewitness to the Soviet collapse over several extended visits to his Russian homeland between the eighties and mid-nineties. He is an engineer who has contributed to fields as diverse as high-energy Physics and Internet Security, as well as a leading Peak Oil theorist. He is the author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects (2008) and The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors’ Toolkit (2013).

Welcome, Dmitry, and thank you so much for joining us again.

A: Great to be on your program again, Jay.

Q: It’s really good to hear your voice. I know we had you on [the program] back in 2014. It’s been a long time—way too long, as far as I’m concerned. In that discussion we talked about the five stages of collapse that you observed in the fall of the USSR. Could you review them really quickly, and compare them to what you are seeing, what you have witnessed and observed in the United States as you lived here, and of course in your post now in Russia.

A: Yes. The five stages of collapse as I defined them were financial, commercial, political, social and cultural. I observed that the first three, in Russia. The finance collapsed because the Soviet Union basically ran out of money. Commercial collapse because industry, Soviet industry, fell apart because it was distributed among fifteen Soviet socialist republics, and when the Soviet Union fell apart all of the supply chains broke down.

Political collapse: obviously there wasn’t really a functional government at all for a period of time in the nineties. Lots of American consultants running around and privatizing things in a fashion that created a lot of incredibly corrupt, super-rich oligarchs who then fled with their money, a lot of them.

Surprisingly, social and cultural collapse didn’t really get very far until Russia started regaining its health. Some of the other Soviet socialist republics are in the throes of full-on social and cultural collapse, but Russia avoided this fate.

Now, what’s happening in the United States right now is that the financial realm has become this incredible Potemkin village. The Americans are running this completely unprecedented experiment where they basically are blowing the hugest financial bubbles that they possibly could in just about everything: obviously in finance itself, but also in medicine, in real estate, the stock market—and all of that is directly connected to the printing press. The printing press in the United States now monetizes half of the entire federal spending, and the United States every year now borrows twice the amount of money that the federal government earns in a year. So basically this thing looks like it’s gone off the rails and is heading straight into a ravine, but for now this is just being papered over with this fake printed money.

The big surprise as far as the sequence of collapse stages in the United States is concerned is that social and cultural collapse have already happened. That is, the United States, from a social and cultural perspective, are pretty much one hundred percent defunct. There’s no getting back to normal. And so once the financial realm goes and it becomes impossible to continue importing everything that the United States needs—which is just about everything at this point, as the US doesn’t really make anything any more—the other stages of collapse will swiftly follow. And as far as political collapse—well, we have to wait until the November elections to see how that’s going to turn out.

Q: Yes. There’s a lot of concern about that here, for sure, about what things might look like either way, whoever wins the election…that social collapse, and lack of seeing things together as a nation is dividing us; it’s really like nothing I’ve ever seen in my life.

Well, Dmitry, since Nixon removed gold from the dollar back in 1971, and by extension the international monetary system, that allowed the United States then to start printing money, as you pointed out. The US is unprecedented…modern monetary theory [MMT] now [I suppose] is in play. That along with the US military…Kissinger went off and signed a deal with Saudi Arabia basically guaranteeing that all the world’s oil at that time would be paid for in dollars, and when you think about all the countries around the world that have to import oil, that meant that virtually every country in the world needed to find dollars. That put a bid under the dollar and allowed the dollar to be a “strong” currency even though it had nothing backing it. But as you point out, the US is now having to borrow most everything…almost all its deficit spending is being financed by printing money because foreigners are no longer—[not] to the extent they were, anyway—buying Treasuries.

So do you see the possibility of the dollar losing its hegemony and giving way to some other form of currency?

A: Well, yes. The other forms of currency already exist. Lots of countries are trading using commodity exchanges and currency swaps. So a lot of countries really just don’t need the dollar. Iran, for instance, doesn’t use the dollar at all to sell its oil, which it does: it’s a major oil producer. Other countries will follow suit.

The thing about making the dollar “attractive” really has to do with the ability of Washington to overthrow regimes it doesn’t like in various parts of the world, to basically scare everyone into submission. But now if you look at where the revolts are happening, the more or less successful revolts, they’re happening in France; they’re happening in Bulgaria, which is part of the EU; [there have been] huge demonstrations in Berlin, and of course various cities in the United States itself are now basically ablaze. There is permanent revolt happening in various parts of the world. So this is chickens coming home to roost, and the collective West is no longer an entity that can scare the world into submission. That, coupled with the fact that the dollar is being debased at an ever increasing rate through money printing and deficit financing basically means that this is going to end very abruptly, the way pyramid schemes generally do, within a single news cycle.

Q: Yes. It’s interesting to note, from my perspective, that China is the largest gold producer now in the world. They don’t export any of their gold; they keep it for themselves. Russia is also a very substantial gold producer, and I notice from what I can see that both countries are building their gold reserves very dramatically. Do you think that that is a policy due to their lack of confidence, or their view that the dollar’s days are numbered?

A: Well Russia no longer has any dollar reserves at all. It has opted for gold. China is getting rid of its US Treasuries at an ever-increasing rate. The plan is basically to have trade conducted not in the dollar but in the countries’ own currencies using various types of currency swap agreements backed by gold. This is how international trade was done before. Until the US dollar came off the gold standard it was basically various currencies, [for example] the Mexican silver dollar, things like that, that were backed by metal. So we’re back to that scheme, and this is perfectly normal. We’ll be able to look back on this curious interlude, from the seventies until 2021 perhaps, [and] look back on it as an aberration. Read the rest of this entry »

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Governments Will Impose New Lockdowns If They Think They Can Get Away with It | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on September 18, 2020

Make no mistake, many politicians would love to impose lockdowns again, and indefinitely. After all, the power to micromanage the behavior of every business and household in the manner of covid lockdowns is a power undreamed of by even the most despotic emperor of old. It’s not a power a regime would abandon lightly.

https://mises.org/wire/governments-will-impose-new-lockdowns-if-they-think-they-can-get-away-it

This year’s stay-at-home orders and lockdowns imposed by governments on their populations represent a watershed moment in the history of the modern state.

Before March 2020, it is unlikely that many politicians—let alone many ordinary people—thought it would be feasible or likely for government officials to force hundreds of millions of human beings to “self-isolate.”

But it turns out governments were indeed able to force a sizable portion of the population to abandon jobs, religious practices, extended families, and community life in the name of “flattening the curve.”

Whether through fear manufactured by the news media or through outright threats of punishment, business owners shuttered their shops and offices, churches closed down, and schools abandoned their students.

Over time, most governments lessened their restrictions, largely out of fear that tax revenues would collapse and out of fear that the public would become unwilling to obey lockdown edicts indefinitely.

Those fears—not scientific objectivity—have been guiding the gradual loosening of lockdowns and lockdown-related restrictions in recent weeks. After all, in many jurisdictions—both in the USA and in Europe—cases and case growth are far above what they were back in March and April when we were told that high case totals absolutely required strict lockdowns. If case numbers are higher now than during the previous peak, why no new lockdowns?

Make no mistake, many politicians would love to impose lockdowns again, and indefinitely. After all, the power to micromanage the behavior of every business and household in the manner of covid lockdowns is a power undreamed of by even the most despotic emperor of old. It’s not a power a regime would abandon lightly.

But could they get away with it? This is a question every prolockdown politician is asking. For the extent to which lockdowns have been scaled back and lessened, we cannot thank any enlightenment or change of heart on the part of politicians. If lockdowns now seem to be receding, it’s because policymakers fear another round of lockdowns would be greeted with resistance rather than obedience. In short, the retreat of lockdowns is a result of an uneasy truce between the antilockdown public (which is by no means the whole public) and the prolockdown politicians. The politicians have conceded nothing in terms of their asserted authority, but they nonetheless fear greater resistance in the future.

Regimes Continue to Threaten More Lockdowns

Although they’re slowly backing off on full lockdowns for now, governments have been very careful to maintain that they retain the power to reimpose them—including full-on strict and ruthless lockdown—at any time. In some areas, this has already been done, such as in southern Australia and in New Zealand. In the state of Victoria in Australia, for instance, residents in recent weeks have been subject to strict curfews and even road closures preventing them from traveling more than a few miles form their homes. Those who dissent—such as a pregnant mother who was arrested for merely discussing an upcoming protest—are brutalized. Meanwhile, military personnel enforce martial law, dragging people from their cars and demanding they show their “papers.”

China continues to impose regional and partial lockdowns. Belgium, meanwhile, insists it may yet still impose “total lockdown.” Back in July, the UK’s Boris Johnson told the nation’s residents to follow the social distancing rules now or face harsher lockdowns in the future. Last week Johnson’s government announced strict new social distancing rules, prohibiting any gatherings of more than six people in most cases.

Nor have American politicians abandoned these newfound powers. In Utah, which did not impose a lockdown in March or April, the authorities are still threatening a possible future “complete shutdown.” Governors in states including Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, and Michigan have all threatened new lockdowns if the residents don’t do as they’re told.

(Only two governors, to my knowledge, have said they will not impose future lockdowns. Earlier this month, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida vowed “we will never do any of these lockdowns again,” and Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, which has never imposed a lockdown at all, has also said lockdowns are not on the table.)

In many cases politicians have substituted face masks and targeted lockdowns (of bars and nightclubs, etc.) in lieu of full stay-at-home orders. This limits public dissent by limiting the number of businesses and industries where people are thrown out of work and business owners are effectively robbed of their property. Fewer destitute or jobless voters likely translates into less active dissent.

This permanent embrace of emergency power is to be expected. Governments have long used crises as an excuse to expand government power, often with the glowing approval of the electorate. After the end of World War II, for example, the party platform of the British Labour Party explicitly sought to extend wartime economic planning indefinitely. The idea was that central planning had won the war and now it would “win the peace.” This meant a host of boards and commissions that would control everything from farming to housing.

But that’s just one example. As Robert Higgs has shown in his book Crisis and Leviathan, using wars and other crises to permanently expand state power is just standard operating procedure for countless regimes. It’s what governments do.

Governments Are Limited Only by the Public’s Resistance

On the other hand, governments are limited by how much the public is willing to tolerate. As Étienne de La Boétie has shown, all regimes—even authoritarian ones—are ultimately limited by public approval and obedience. Without public opinion on their side, regimes become constrained, even in a police state.

Ludwig von Mises built on this notion when he noted in his book Liberalism:

there has never been a political power that voluntarily desisted from impeding the free development and operation of the institution of private ownership of the means of production. Governments tolerate private property when they are compelled to do so, but they do not acknowledge it voluntarily in recognition of its necessity. Even liberal politicians, on gaining power, have usually relegated their liberal principles more or less to the background. The tendency to impose oppressive restraints on private property, to abuse political power, and to refuse to respect or recognize any free sphere outside or beyond the dominion of the state is too deeply ingrained in the mentality of those who control the governmental apparatus of compulsion and coercion for them ever to be able to resist it voluntarily. A liberal government is a contradictio in adjecto. Governments must be forced into adopting liberalism by the power of the unanimous opinion of the people; that they could voluntarily become liberal is not to be expected.

In other words, governments don’t refrain from exercising ever more power unless they are prevented from doing so. But what did he mean by a government being “forced into adopting liberalism by the power of the unanimous opinion of the people”? Mises was very much a man who understood how states work in the real world. So it’s a safe bet that he didn’t think the public’s “unanimous opinion” was somehow magically transformed into a government limiting itself.

Rather, Mises understood that governments are limited by pressures applied by groups external to the state apparatus itself. These could take the form of widespread noncompliance, peaceful protests, or even armed resistance. But to think that governments will limit themselves without at least the fear of some form of resistance would be fanciful, to say the least.

And this is likely what is limiting governments in their dreams of ever-harsher lockdowns right now. We’ve already seen this dynamic in action in Serbia, for example, where the regime attempted to reimpose a nationwide lockdown. This proposal was greeted with both peaceful and violent protests. The state partially retreated and opted instead for much weaker regional lockdowns. Protests also continue to grow in Germany, and have even cropped up in London.

In the US, of course, protests of various types have appeared since April, and given the volume of anger over lockdowns and business closures expressed across a wide variety of media, it’s easy to see why state and local governments should expect trouble if they try another full-scale lockdown. One need only step out one’s front door in many areas to see countless examples of passive noncompliance and resistance to mask orders and social distancing decrees.

Complicating matters is the low state of public approval of police forces. It’s true that police tend to receive public support when they are seen battling rioters and thugs. But public support would likely wither quickly were the police unleashed on middle-class suburbanites who fail to follow stay-at-home orders.

If American governors and mayors try a new set of lockdowns, just how far will they willing to go to enforce them? Will they call in the national guard and open fire on middle-class dissenters? If police attempt to break into homes in the manner we have witnessed in Australia, things might turn out quite differently here. In situations like that, at least some residents will defend themselves with firearms.

Ensuring compliance will also become especially difficult as lockdowns empty the public purse. As the economy weakens, so will tax revenues, and public welfare programs can’t subsist on newly printed money forever. As local, state, and federal amenities and free money programs come up short of funds, it will become harder to buy off the voters with yet another government check.

Admittedly, governments can always double down on enforcement by imposing strict police states. This can work in the short term. But then what? Outside of places like China and Australia, it appears many regimes aren’t yet prepared to find out. But they’re not willing to concede defeat, either. The lockdown state will press the issue as far as the voters and taxpayers are willing to let it go.

Author:

Contact Ryan McMaken

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and The Austrian, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado and was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

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Why U.S. Wildfires Hit California More Than the Southeast | Intellectual Takeout

Posted by M. C. on September 18, 2020

The wildfires are a reminder of an unpleasant reality: governments are poor stewards of the environment.

Looking elsewhere for a solution.

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/why-u-s-wildfires-hit-california-more-than-the-southeast/

By Jon Miltimore

California wildfires continue to blaze in one of the worst fire seasons in recent memory. While California fires are nothing new, government data show the damage has been substantial.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection says that since August 15, when California’s fire activity accelerated, there have been at least 24 fatalities and more than 4,200 structures destroyed. (Ten people have also died in Oregon, CNN reports.) So far in 2020, California wildfires have burned more than 3.2 million acres of land – an area roughly the size of Connecticut.

As the fires rage, politicians argue over what (and who) is to blame.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti say climate change is the culprit, while President Donald Trump says the fires are the result of poor land management.

These answers are not mutually exclusive, of course, and evidence suggests that both poor land management and California’s high temperatures and arid climate have played a role.

While addressing California’s extreme temperatures is difficult, especially in the short term (unless you’re a member of the X-Men named Storm), evidence suggests immediate solutions are available to improve state and federal forestry management.

Excessive Extinguishing

Citing the fires scorching the West, The New York Times last week ran an article that stated it was time for government agencies to rethink their fire management policies.

“For over a century, firefighting agencies have focused on extinguishing fires whenever they occur. That strategy has often proved counterproductive,” the Times reports. “Many landscapes evolved to burn periodically, and when fires are suppressed, vegetation builds up thickly in forests. So when fires do break out, they tend to be far more severe and destructive.”

This was precisely what economist Jairaj Devadiga pointed out in a 2018 FEE article that examined why California’s wildfires historically have been much worse than those of Baja California, where fires are allowed to burn naturally at low intensity, regularly clearing out forest floors and limiting the spread of large conflagrations.

Though the Times doesn’t mention Baja California, the paper does endorse the Mexican state’s strategy of allowing fires to burn naturally to eliminate vegetation, pointing out that experts attribute the tactic to the more successful fire prevention approach found in the Southeastern United States.

Scientists who study wildfires agree that allowing forests and grasslands to burn periodically — by, say, intentionally setting smaller fires under controlled conditions — can be a more effective way to clear out vegetation. In Ponderosa pine forests, for instance, low-level fire can nurture ecosystems and help prevent destructive large-scale fires from breaking out.

This already occurs in the Southeastern United States, where officials use prescribed fires to burn millions of acres each year. While the region still sees destructive blazes — like Tennessee’s drought-fueled Great Smoky Mountains fires in 2016, which killed at least 14 people — experts credit the use of controlled burns with sparing many Southeastern communities from fire damage.

Contrary to Western states, “fire is widely accepted as a tool for land management in the Southeast,” fire scientist Crystal Kolden told the Times. This is in stark contrast to California, where just 50,000 acres were intentionally burned in 2017. (As a point of reference, academics estimate between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres of forest burned annually in prehistoric California.)

Fortunately, it appears that political leaders are beginning to recognize the problem. In August,

Newsom signed a memo acknowledging California needs more preventive fire.

While this is a step in the right direction, federal regulations could prove an obstacle to the strategy.

As Sam Rutzick at Reason point outs, the Clean Air Act of 1990 treats the smoke from a controlled burn as a pollutant (in contrast to a wildfire allowed to burn) and the National Environmental Policy Act requires “a couple-thousand-page document analyzing every single conceivable impact to the environment that the (burn) plan might have.”

Ownership vs. Stewardship

The wildfires are a reminder of an unpleasant reality: governments are poor stewards of the environment.

 

As the economist Holly Fretwell has observed, it has become conventional wisdom that government officials know best when it comes to protecting the environment. But the reality is government officials and bureaucrats operate under incentive structures and management systems that often run counter to effective land management.

Unlike private landowners, they have little incentive to be prudent long-term stewards of the land, which is why, Fretwell points out, “almost one-third of the acreage managed by the Forest Service is at high risk of catastrophic wildfire.”

The truth is federal agencies are much better at enforcing regulations than providing meaningful land stewardship. This is one of inherent problems when lands are owned collectively. As FEE’s Webb Beard has observed, echoing Aristotle, when something is owned by everyone, it is effectively owned by no one. The incentive to maintain or improve it is removed because these decision-makers do not benefit from prudent stewardship, and often do benefit from imprudent exploitation, neglect, and virtue-signaling but counterproductive “protection.”

This is why many economists see property rights as a solution to federal land mismanagement. When individuals own something, they have incentive to maintain it and protect it effectively, evidenced by the strong record of private property owners who have turned around threatened ecosystems.

“Ted Turner and buffalo ranchers brought the buffalo population back from the brink of extinction because of property rights. Fishermen almost fished the population of British Columbia halibut into extinction, and property rights brought their population back,” Beard wrote. “In many regions of Africa, trophy hunting helps to keep populations of certain animals from dipping to extinction levels and helps to fund conservation.”

If you’re wondering why you rarely hear of wildfires ravaging Texas, consider this fact: 95 percent of Texas’ land mass is privately owned.

As the Times points out, effectively managing wildfires will require “a cultural shift” in thinking.

This means finally accepting the efficacy of prescribed burning, but it also means decentralizing the process and allowing more private ownership and more localized stewardship over these lands.

As Dr. Kolden points out, indigenous populations have a long track record of using fire effectively to manage forested areas.

“We should be empowering the people who know how to do this,” Kolden told the Times.

This is no small matter. It’s not exactly the hallmark of government agencies and bureaucrats to acknowledge that others might have more local knowledge and expertise to solve a problem than they do.

There’s also the matter of addressing federal regulations that make it difficult for state agencies to use controlled burning as a tool (though simply eliminating policies that call for automatically extinguishing natural blazes is a step in the right direction).

It should also be acknowledged that no solution will immediately solve California’s wildfire problem. The journal Nature Sustainability published a report in February stating the Golden State would have to burn 20 million acres of forested land to restore forest health. You don’t solve a century’s worth of mismanagement overnight.

The good news is, as Elizabeth Weil noted in a recent ProPublica article, “we know how to prevent megafires.” The solution is ending aggressive fire suppression and empowering individuals who understand land management.

Lenya Quinn-Davidson, a fire adviser for the University of California Cooperative Extension and director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council, said this means embracing the hands-off fire prevention culture of the Southeast.

“Your average person goes out back with Grandpa, and they burn 10 acres on the back 40 you know, on a Sunday,” Quinn-Davidson told Weil.

In other words, it means relinquishing control, which is something politicians and bureaucrats have a hard time doing, especially in the Golden State.

That may be the biggest hurdle for preventing disastrous wildfires in California.

—

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has appeared in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Washington Times.

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Fox News Cuts Off Newt Gingrich After He Points Out George Soros Role in Electing Prosecutors

Posted by M. C. on September 17, 2020

FOX News in league with the anti-christ Soros.

https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2020/09/17/fox-news-cuts-off-newt-gingrich-after-he-points-out-george-soros-role-in-electing-prosecutors/

by Joel B. Pollak and Penny Starr

Fox News cut off former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich on Wednesday after he brought up the role of billionaire left-wing financier George Soros in funding the election of left-wing prosecutors in local elections over the past several years.

Gingrich argued that the rise in crime in many Democrat-governed cities was partly the result of the election of left-wing district attorneys who had received financial assistance from George Soros.

But commentators Melissa Francis and Marie Harf attempted to silence Gingrich.

This is one of the weirdest exchanges I’ve ever seen on TV. @newtgingrich correctly points out that George Soros threw an unprecedented amount of money into DA races all over the country to elect radicals and Fox News basically told him to shut up. WTF? pic.twitter.com/IxwcLG2gOH

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) September 16, 2020

“Look, the number one problem in almost all these cities is George Soros-elected, left-wing, anti-police, pro-criminal district attorneys who refuse to keep people locked up,” Gingrich said. “Just yesterday they put somebody back on the streets who’s wanted for two different murders in New York City.”

He continued: “You cannot solve this problem — and both [Kamala] Harris and [Joe] Biden have talked very proudly out what they call ‘progressive district attorneys’. Progressive district attorneys are anti-police, pro-criminal, and overwhelmingly elected with George Soros’s money.

“And they’re a major cause of the violence we’re seeing because they keep putting the violent criminals back on the street,” Gingrich said.

“I’m not sure we need to bring George Soros into this,” Francis replied.

“He paid for it,” Gingrich, who was obviously taken aback by the interruption. “I mean, why can’t we discuss that fact that millions of dollars….”.

“No he didn’t,” Harf interjected. “I agree with Melissa. George Soros doesn’t need to be a part of this conversation.”

“Okay, so it’s verboten,” Gingrich said, using the German word for “forbidden.”

As Breitbart News reported in May 2018, Soros became involved in several local races for district attorney, in Northern California and around the nation. His goal was to defeat “law-and-order” candidates and elect “progressive” prosecutors.

The Los Angeles Times noted, in an article titled “Here’s why George Soros, liberal groups are spending big to help decide who’s your next D.A.”:

The effort is part of a years-long campaign by liberal groups to reshape the nation’s criminal justice system.

…

Where law-and-order campaigns appeal to fear, the new strategy targets anger.

One issue that has caught fire is police shootings.

“It’s really coming from this Black Lives Matter moment of police accountability,” said Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, criminal justice and drug policy director for the ACLU of California.

Much of the money remained “hidden,” funneled (presumably legally) through non-profit groups that did not have to disclose their donors.

It is therefore unknown precisely how many races Soros was involved in, though the Times reported that the number was at least 21. In many cases, Soros backed left-wing candidates against establishment Democrats.

Soros-backed prosecutors have played a role in several national controversies. They include Kim Foxx, the Chicago-area prosecutor who mishandled the Jussie Smollet hate crime hoax; Kim Garnder, the St. Louis prosecutor who charged the McCloskeys after they defended their home from a Black Lives Matter mob by standing outside with their guns; and Diana Becton, who has charged a California couple with a hate crime for painting over a “Black Lives Matter” mural on a public road.

In a 2018 essay about Soros in Tablet magazine, an online Jewish publication, James Kirchik noted that while some criticism of Soros is indeed antisemitic, some is not, and focuses on legitimate criticism of his role in funding the far left around the world.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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Trump, Biden, Jorgensen discuss military and veterans issues – Task & Purpose

Posted by M. C. on September 17, 2020

Jo Who?

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/trump-biden-jorgensen-defense-veterans-issues

For the first time, all three major presidential candidates have weighed in on the most pressing issues facing service members, military families, and veterans.

President Donald Trump, his democratic rival former Vice President Joe Biden, and Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen have provided answers to the Military Officers Association of America to a wide variety of questions about their plans for the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

MOAA, a non-partisan group, published the verbatim responses from Trump, Biden, and Jorgensen on Wednesday without any editorial comment.

“We wanted to go beyond the soundbites for our membership,” said retired Air Force Col. Dan Merry, MOAA’s vice president of government relations. “When candidates discuss military and veteran issues on the campaign trail they hit the high notes and play to a wide audience.” 

“Our members have a deeper understanding, and a much deeper involvement, with these topics,” he continued. “We thank the candidates for offering their expanded plans on these important issues, and we hope making the responses available to everyone, members and nonmembers alike, will help all voters make an informed decision.”

Separately, Task & Purpose has submitted questions to the Trump and Biden campaigns. Neither has provided responses.

Here are some of the highlights from candidates’ responses to MOAA:

Greatest national security threats

Trump views China as a growing military and economic threat to the United States as it seeks to increase its influence worldwide. China and other “near-peer competitors” represent the greatest long-term security challenges.

The president also reiterated that NATO allies need to spend more of their own money on defense and he vowed that the United States and its allies would continue to work with partners in the Middle East to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

While Biden acknowledged that Russia and China are both immediate threats, he argued that several of the greatest dangers facing the United States stem from climate change and global pandemics, like the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).

Biden also vowed to “end the forever wars” while leaving a counterterrorism force in Afghanistan and maintaining a small presence of U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria to prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State terrorist group, adding: “We do not need large deployments of combat forces to maintain our security.”

Jorgensen vowed to bring home all U.S. troops stationed overseas, end all U.S. military aid to foreign countries, and focus on defending the homeland.

“We should turn America into one giant Switzerland: armed and neutral, with a military force that’s ready to defend America’s shores and soil against any foreign attack,” she said.

Defense spending

Trump said he was proud to approve a $738 billion budget for the Defense Department in December, which the president said has helped repair the damage caused by budget cuts under former President Barack Obama.

“In addition to massive acquisitions made over the past two years, our current effort authorizes nearly 100 new F-35s; 24 brand-new F/A-18s; 155 Army helicopters, of all different types; 165 brand-new Abrams tanks; more than 50 Paladin howitzers; 2 new Virginia-class submarines; 3 new Arleigh Burke destroyers; a Ford-class aircraft carrier, and two others on their way; and much, much more. And it’s all made, right here, in the USA,” the president said.

Biden claimed that Trump has “abandoned all fiscal discipline” regarding defense spending by focusing on older legacy weapon systems when the military really needs to prepare for future wars by investing in cyber, space, unmanned systems, and artificial intelligence technologies.

“We can maintain a strong defense and protect our safety and security for less,” Biden said. “The real question is not how much we invest — it’s how we invest.”

Jorgensen said that defense spending would fall under her administration because no U.S. troops would be stationed overseas.

“With no U.S. involvement in foreign wars, a military that’s laser-focused on defending America, and a citizenry with the unabridged right to keep and bear arms, America will be safe,” she said.

Recruitment and the Selective Service System

For Trump, the best recruiting tool for the all-volunteer force is to ensure that veterans successfully make the transition to the private sector.

“To that end, I have signed an executive order supporting our veterans during their transition from uniformed service to civilian life,” the president said. “I’m honored to be at the forefront of the greatest strides ever made at the [Department of Veterans Affairs] for our veterans.”

Biden said he does not believe the United States needs a larger military, nor does he see a reason to bring back the draft.

“I would, however, ensure that women are also eligible to register for the Selective Service System so that men and women are treated equally in the event of future conflicts,” Biden said. “We should explore targeted recruiting efforts to build a military that is more geographically and demographically representative of the nation as a whole and that has the skill sets needed for modern warfare.”

Jorgensen promised to abolish the Selective Service System because there has not been a draft since the Vietnam War.

“The so-called military-civilian divide can best be bridged by staying out of foreign conflicts, and creating as much transparency as possible while maintaining the protection of vital military intelligence,” she said.

Caring for veterans

Trump touted the reforms to the Department of Veterans Affairs passed under his administration, including the MISSION Act, allowing veterans to get care from private healthcare providers without prior authorizations.

The president also stressed that the VA is working on reform its health system so that veterans will have one electronic copy of their medical records “from the first day of boot camp until they are honorably laid to rest.”

Biden said he would prioritize research into emerging service-connected conditions including Traumatic Brain Injury and exposure to toxins.

“I would expand the list of presumptive conditions to ensure that no veteran who experienced a TBI or had exposure to burn pits or other environmental toxins goes without access to VA health care and benefits,” Biden said. “We must never again have an Agent Orange-like crisis.”

Jorgensen said she plans to drastically cut the cost of healthcare by reducing government and insurance paperwork so that veterans could afford better medical care.

“I will work to replace the VA with direct payments to veterans who were wounded in combat, so they can spend their health-care dollars how and where they want to spend them,” Jorgensen said. “Veterans deserve better than denied care and bureaucratic roadblocks.”

Related: Here are the biggest national security challenges that Trump or Biden will face after the presidential election

 

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Convergence of Quandaries – Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on September 17, 2020

Afterward, BLM “protesters” showed up at the hospital where the deputies were undergoing surgery, shouting “I hope they die.” I can’t wait to hear Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell try to explain that to their faithful fans on MSNBC.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/convergence-of-quandaries/

James Howard Kunstler

And so, America has a new manufactured crisis, ElectionGate, as if all the other troubles piling up like tropical depressions marching across the September seas were not enough. Let me remind you what else is going on. The Wuhan pandemic is still on the scene, the economy is collapsing, a domestic race-war is escalating, the whole west coast is burning, and US oil production is crashing. Oh… and slow-moving tropical storm Sally is forecast to come ashore as a hurricane on the Gulf Coast today, dumping up to two feet of rain.

America needs a constitutional crisis like a hole in the head, and that’s exactly what’s being engineered for the holiday season by the clever folks in the Democratic Party’s Lawfare auxiliary. Here’s how it works: the complicit newspapers and cable news channels publish polls showing Joe Biden leading in several swing states, even if it’s not true. Facebook and Twitter amplify expectations of a Biden victory. This sets the stage for a furor when it turns out that he loses on election night. On cue, Antifa and BLM commence to riot all around the country. Meanwhile, a mighty harvest of mail-in votes pours into election districts utterly unequipped to validate them.

Lawfare cadres agitate in the contested states’ legislatures to send rogue elector slates to the electoral college. The dispute ends up in congress, which awaits a seating of newly-elected representatives on January 4, hopefully for Lawfare, mostly Democrats. Whoops…!  Turns out the Dems lost their majority there too. Fighting in the streets ramps up and overwhelms hamstrung police forces in Democratic-run cities. January 20 — Inauguration Day — rolls around and the Dems ask the military to drag Trump out of the White House “with great dispatch!” as Mr. Biden himself put it so nicely back in the summer. The US military breaks into two factions. Voilà: Civil War Two.

You didn’t read that here first, of course. It’s been all over the web for weeks, since the Democratic Party-sponsored Transition Integrity Project (cough cough) ran their summer “war game,” intending to demonstrate that any Trump election victory would be evidence of treason and require correction by any means necessary, including sedition, which they’d already tried a few times in an organized way since 2016 (and botched). The Democrats are crazy enough now to want this. They have driven themselves crazy for years with the death-wish of eradicating western civ (and themselves with it). There are many exegeses of this phenomenon, mostly derived from Marxist theories of revolution, but my own explanation departs from that.

The orgy of political hysteria, insane thinking, and violence is a psychotic reaction to the collapsing techno-industrial economy — a feature of it, actually. When all familiar social and economic arrangements are threatened, people go nuts. Interestingly, the craziness actually started in the colleges and universities where ideas (the products of thinking) are supposed to be the stock-in-trade. The more pressing the practical matters of daily life became, the less intellectuals wanted to face them. So, they desperately generated a force-field of crazy counter-ideas to repel the threat, a curriculum of wishful thinking, childish utopian nostrums, and exercises in boundary-smashing. As all this moved out of the campuses (the graduation function), it infected every other corner of American endeavor, institutions, business, news media, sports, Hollywood, etc. The country is now out of its mind… echoes of France, 1793… a rhyme, not a reprise.

The US economy began a slow and insidious collapse because its petroleum energy base became unaffordable. The reality of that was obscured by paradoxical appearances: the shale oil miracle goosed up US oil production from under five million barrels-a-day in 2007 to thirteen million barrels-a-day in 2019. Pretty awesome. Seemed like we were awash in oil. The problem was the companies producing shale oil couldn’t make money at it, and the loans that went into staging the shale oil “miracle” went bad… and then the companies couldn’t get new loans… and went bankrupt. So, the crash of US oil production is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that is sure to continue and will make things worse. Now, less than a year after reaching that majestic 13 million barrels-a-day, production has fallen to around 10 million a day — quite an impressive drop. Further obscuring the actual dynamic in play, gasoline prices at the pump are quite low — under $2.50-a-gallon where I live, compared with $4-plus a couple of years ago — and most citizens consider the price of gasoline their sole index of how things are going in the oil industry.

The Covid-19 pandemic has aggravated and accelerated the damage from that by shutting down much of small business across America since March. The businesses and people who owned them have suffered terribly. That and the public lockdowns have greatly depressed the demand for oil products, driving the price-per-barrel down and reducing the cash flow of the oil companies. That also aggravated worsening relations with our principal trading partner, China, the net effect of which threatens the supply chain for all sorts of critical parts and products needed to keep our complex systems running.

Whether Mr. Trump or anybody can respond intelligently to this long emergency is a matter of considerable moment. As far as election politics are concerned, Mr. Trump is only marginally better positioned because he is not in favor of destroying the existing institutions of the republic as his opponents are. There’s less reason to believe he’s capable of coping with the nuts-and-bolts of the economic collapse that awaits after the election dramaturgy plays out. For Mr. Trump, much depends on the illusory performance of the implausible financial markets. This is the season for market crashes, as it is the season for Atlantic cyclones, and those markets have been acting as toppy as a moon-shot lately.

Meanwhile, the BLM mayhem continues overnight, this time in stodgy little old Lancaster, PA, where a knife-wielding Hispanic man was shot by the cops. Crazy how unjustified that seems. The incident and the reaction to it (riot… fires) followed the assassination attempt of two LA County sheriff’s deputies in their car Saturday night by what appears to have been a black child or a dwarf. Afterward, BLM “protesters” showed up at the hospital where the deputies were undergoing surgery, shouting “I hope they die.” I can’t wait to hear Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell try to explain that to their faithful fans on MSNBC.

Note: I am posting on Parler now as jhkunstler.

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News Media Who Ignore The Assange Trial Are Admitting They Don’t Care About Journalism – Caitlin Johnstone

Posted by M. C. on September 17, 2020

Now that it is out in the open that the US government plans to prosecute any journalist anywhere in the world who it deems to have committed “disclosure of secrets which harm the national interest” (which in Assange’s case means exposing US war crimes), anyone on earth who actually plans on doing real journalism which holds real power to account is at risk.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/09/17/news-media-who-ignore-the-assange-trial-are-admitting-they-dont-care-about-journalism/

author: Caitlin Johnstone
 

The Sydney Morning Herald just published an article titled “Julian Assange interrupts extradition hearing again” about the WikiLeaks founder’s correct interjection that he never put anyone’s lives in danger with the publication of the Manning leaks a decade ago.

It’s actually a rather shocking smear piece for the SMH, who has been one of the better Australian publications at giving Assange a fair hearing over the years. The article’s author Latika Bourke spends an inordinate amount of time waxing on about Assange’s naughty “outburst” and how he was reprimanded for it by the judge, telling readers that the prosecution “separates Assange from the press which also published information revealed by WikiLeaks but without naming journalists, human rights advocates and dissidents who were informing on their governments and repressive regimes”, and bringing up Osama bin Laden’s possession of WikiLeaks documents apropos of precisely nothing.

At no time does Bourke (who has been a regular smearer of Assange) bother to provide the reader with any of the readily available information showing that Assange never caused anyone harm and was not responsible for the unredacted documents being made public. She weaves a narrative about Assange being badly behaved in the courtroom, insinuates that the accusations he objected to could be true to the furthest extent possible without actually making a claim that would need to be retracted, and gets out.

 

And unfortunately this drivel is more or less typical of the coverage Assange’s historic, world-shaping extradition trial has been receiving from the mass media since it resumed this month. To the extent that they report on the trial at all, mainstream news outlets have mostly limited their coverage to trivialities like trouble with courtroom audio equipment or postponement due to a coronavirus scare. No mainstream outlet has been covering this immensely important trial in-depth to anywhere near the extent that former UK ambassador Craig Murray has been doing every night, or explaining to their audience the significance of a precedent which will allow journalists all over the world to be extradited and jailed for exposing embarrassing truths about the US government.

This dereliction of journalistic responsibility was damning enough back when the prosecution was trying to argue that Assange doesn’t have First Amendment protections because he was engaged in espionage and not journalistic behavior. But now that the prosecution has pivoted to arguing that it doesn’t matter that Assange is a journalist because the US government is allowed to imprison people for journalism, this dereliction of duty has become far more pronounced.

Murray writes the following in his latest update:

The prosecution’s line represented a radical departure from their earlier approach which was to claim that Julian Assange is not a journalist and to try and distinguish between his behaviour and that of newspapers. In the first three days of evidence, legal experts had stated that this gloss on the prosecution did not stand up to investigation of the actual charges in the indictment. Experts in journalism also testified that Assange’s relationship with Manning was not materially different from cultivation and encouragement by other journalists of official sources to leak.

 

By general consent, those first evidence days had gone badly for the prosecution. There was then a timeout for (ahem) suspected Covid among the prosecution team. The approach has now changed and on Tuesday a radically more aggressive approach was adopted by the prosecution asserting the right to prosecute all journalists and all media who publish classified information under the Espionage Act (1917).

 

The purpose of the earlier approach was plainly to reduce media support for Assange by differentiating him from other journalists. It had become obvious such an approach ran a real risk of failure, if it could be proved that Assange is a journalist, which line was going well for the defence. So now we have “any journalist can be prosecuted for publishing classified information” as the US government line. I strongly suspect that they have decided they do not have to mitigate against media reaction, as the media is paying no attention to this hearing anyway.

 

Murray’s subsequent breakdown of the prosecution’s arguments makes it clear that he was not over-selling this change in strategy. His notes on attorney for the prosecution James Lewis’ arguments contain lines as blatant as “There are Supreme Court judgements that make it clear that at times the government’s interest in national security must override the First Amendment” and “serial, continuing disclosure of secrets which harm the national interest cannot be justified. It therefore follows that journalists can be prosecuted” in arguing against witness testimony that Assange’s publishing behavior should be protected by the First Amendment.

“The United States Supreme Court has never held that a journalist cannot be prosecuted for publishing national defence information,” Murray reports Lewis argued.

So that’s the precedent the prosecution is setting now. No longer “We can extradite and imprison Assange because he isn’t a journalist”, but “We can extradite and imprison Assange because we’re allowed to extradite and imprison journalists.”

The argument that Assange isn’t a journalist has always been transparently false, whether made in the courtroom or in the court of public opinion. Publishing important information so that the public can understand what’s going on in their world is exactly the thing that journalism is. All WikiLeaks publications have included extensive written analyses of their contents, and its staff have received many esteemed awards for journalism.

 

But the fact that the prosecution is no longer even attempting to argue against the journalistic nature of the actions they are attempting to criminalize means they have ceased trying to pretend that they are not waging a war against worldwide press freedoms. Which means that all journalists and news media outlets have lost their last excuse for not condemning Assange’s persecution with great force and urgency.

Now that it is out in the open that the US government plans to prosecute any journalist anywhere in the world who it deems to have committed “disclosure of secrets which harm the national interest” (which in Assange’s case means exposing US war crimes), anyone on earth who actually plans on doing real journalism which holds real power to account is at risk. If someone isn’t using whatever platform they can to denounce Assange’s persecution, they are showing the world that they have no interest in ever doing real journalism which holds real power to account.

News reporters and news outlets are showing us what they are right at this moment. If they are not speaking out for Assange’s freedom right now they are telling you that his persecution poses no threat to them. They are telling you that they never plan on doing anything that might hold power to account with the light of truth. They are telling you that they will side with power every time. They are telling you they are propagandists.

The prosecution’s new line of argumentation should have drawn massive headlines from all the major news outlets who’ve been bloviating about the dangers posed by Trump’s war on the press with flamboyant preening and self-aggrandizement. Instead they are silent, because they do not care.

To quote Maya Angelou, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.

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Feature image by Garry Knight.

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