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Let’s Give Trump Some Credit—On Labor Day He Threw Down the Gauntlet to the Corrupt Military Brass – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on September 10, 2020

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/09/08/lets-give-trump-some-credit-on-labor-day-he-threw-down-the-gauntlet-to-the-corrupt-military-brass/

Paul Craig Roberts

Trump said that the Pentagon brass don’t love him, “because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make eveything else stay happy.”

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the military/security complex for making the same point (see, for example, JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglass, Simon & Schuster, 2008).

The US military/security complex has had its crosshairs on Trump since his first presidential campaign when he said that he was going to normalize relations with Russia.  I don’t think Trump realized what a massive NO-NO this is.  Trump was telling the military-security complex that he was going to take away their concocted enemy that justifies the lucrative $1,000 billion annual budget paid by American taxpayers.

This enormous sum enriches a large number of companies along with the CIA’s power and budget. To tell a powerful institutionalized force that you are going to take away their justification for diverting increasingly scarce American resources into their bank accounts is to ask for assassination. President Trump is in the process of being assassinated, but it is not by bullets. Not even dumbshit Americans will believe another “lone assassin” story.  Trump is being assassinated with a coup—https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/09/08/democrats-have-planned-a-coup-if-trump-wins-reelection/ .

The military/security complex responded to Trump’s policy of normalizing relations with Russia with “Russiagate,” an orchestration initiated by CIA director John Brennan and FBI director Comey.  The CIA has had the media in its pocket since Operation Mockingbird dating back to 1950—https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/10/14/how-the-cia-paid-and-threatened-journalists-to-do-its-work .

The CIA’s “Russiagate” attack on President Trump served the interests of Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party.  The corrupt Democrats quickly joined forces with the CIA and the CIA’s media whores.  The attack on Trump was underway and has not stopped since.

As I posted here—https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/09/08/democrats-have-planned-a-coup-if-trump-wins-reelection/ —the Democrats have worked out with the CIA and the presstitutes their coup plan if Trump is reelected, which he will be.  Most Americans, black, white, hispanic and Asian do not want rioting and looting as everyday experience, which is what we now know the Democrats will give us.

President Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, said today that Trump is “not going to let some lobbyists here in Washington DC – just because they want a new defense contract – suggest that soldiers need to stay abroad one minute longer than they should.”

Everytime Trump has tried to bring our soldiers home, he has been stymied by the military/security complex and the presstitute media. All sorts of phony reasons are concocted and put into the media about why withdrawal would be inimical to American interest.  Many American partiots fall for the concocted arguments and turn against Trump for “endangering America.”

Nothing better illustrates President Trump’s vulnerability than the fact that his own Defense Secretary has not rejected the unsupported anonymous allegation made by a Jew in the Atlantic that President Trump bad-mouthed American war dead and refused to visit a cemetery in France where many are buried.  Even President Trump’s enemy, John Bolton, has refuted the Jew’s allegation.  Bolton said on the record:

“I didn’t hear either of those comments or anything even resembling them,’ Bolton told Fox News. ‘I was there at the point in time that morning when it was decided that he would not go to Aisne-Marne cemetery … It was entirely a weather-related decision, and I thought the proper thing to do.

“I never heard he made that kind of comment about another country’s forces either, no.”

“Fox correspondent John Roberts, who conducted the Bolton interview, added that he has told him, ‘if [Donald Trump] had said he didn’t want to visit Aisne-Marne because the interred heroes were ‘losers’ and ‘suckers,’ he would have written an entire chapter about it in his book, The Room Where It Happened.”  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8709559/Trump-attacks-militarys-commanders-claiming-want-defense-contractors-happy.html

The Atlantic is part of the CIA’s media assets.  The story was handed to the Jewish editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, and the two-bit puppet performed for his master.  The two-bit puppet went on to say that he expects “more confirmation and new pieces of information” to come out in the coming days and weeks that will coroborate that Trump called US war dead “losers and suckers.”

In other words, Goldberg is acknowledging that he will continue to be a  military/security mouthpiece in driving Trump from office.  The purpose of the CIA story handed to Goldberg is to discredit Trump with his patriotic supporters, those who wave the flag, and especially the retired military.  The way the coming coup against Trump works is to turn his supporters against him so that he is isolated and can be ejected from office

Goldberg’s sources, he says, are anonymous. But they are not.  His “sources” are his military/security masters.  Goldberg knows who they are.  Remember, the entire four-year long attack on Trump has relied on anonymous sources.  With anonymous sources, you can make up anything. There is no one to confirm, deny, or to hold accountable.  It is fake news.

Not only are the CIA, Pentagon, and FBI united in the coup against Trump, but also it seems Trump’s Attorney General as well.  It has been months and Barr and Durham have not produced the indictments against the Obama regime personnel who committed felonies while orchestrating “Russiagate.”  The people who committed the felonies and the felonies that were committed are known and are part of the public record.  Yet no indictments. What we are witnessing here is that the Washington Establishment is Democrat and Republican and neither party will defend an elected President at the expense of the Establishment.

To conclude, blatant treason is in plain view.  Not even insouciant Americans can help but see it. Yet, there is not a word about it.  The coming coup seems to have a clear road for success. Something will remain here afterwards, but it will not be the United States of America.

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Today and Yesterday – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on September 10, 2020

The poverty we have today is spiritual poverty. Spiritual poverty is an absence of what traditionally has been known as various human virtues. Much of that spiritual poverty is a result of public and private policy that rewards inferiority and irresponsibility. Chief among the policies that reward inferiority and irresponsibility is the welfare state.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/09/walter-e-williams/today-and-yesterday/

By

In matters of race and other social phenomena, there is a tendency to believe that what is seen today has always been. For black people, the socioeconomic progress achieved during my lifetime, which started in 1936, exceeded anyone’s wildest dreams. In 1936, most black people lived in gross material poverty and racial discrimination. Such poverty and discrimination is all but nonexistent today. Government data, assembled by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, shows that “the average American family … identified as poor by the Census Bureau, lives in an air-conditioned, centrally heated house or apartment … They have a car or truck. (Indeed, 43% of poor families own two or more cars.)” The household “has at least one widescreen TV connected to cable, satellite, or a streaming service, a computer or tablet with internet connection, and a smartphone. (Some 82% of poor families have one or more smartphones.” On top of this, blacks today have the same constitutional guarantees as everyone else, which is not to say that every vestige of racial discrimination has been eliminated.

The poverty we have today is spiritual poverty. Spiritual poverty is an absence of what traditionally has been known as various human virtues. Much of that spiritual poverty is a result of public and private policy that rewards inferiority and irresponsibility. Chief among the policies that reward inferiority and irresponsibility is the welfare state. When some people know they can have children out of wedlock, drop out of school and refuse employment and suffer little consequence and social sanction, one should not be surprised to see the growth of such behavior. Today’s out-of-wedlock births among blacks is over 70%, but in the 1930s, it was 11%. During the same period, out-of-wedlock births among whites was 3%; today, it is over 30%. It is fashionable and politically correct to blame today’s 21% black poverty on racial discrimination. That is nonsense. Why? The poverty rate among black husband-and-wife families has been in the single digits for more than two decades. Can anyone produce evidence that racists discriminate against black female-headed families but not black husband-and-wife families?

For most people, education is one of the steppingstones out of poverty, and it has been a steppingstone for many black people. Today, decent education is just about impossible at many big-city public schools where violence, disorder, disrespect and assaults on teachers are routine. The kind of disrespectful and violent behavior observed in many predominantly black schools is entirely new. Some have suggested that such disorder is part of black culture, but that is an insulting lie. Black people can be thankful that double standards, and public and private policies rewarding inferiority and irresponsibility, were not broadly accepted during the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. There would not have been the kind of intellectual excellence and spiritual courage that created the world’s most successful civil rights movement.

Many whites are ashamed, saddened and guilt-ridden by our history of slavery, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination. They see that justice and compensation for that ugly history is to hold their fellow black Americans accountable to the kind of standards and conduct they would never accept from whites. That behavior and conduct is relatively new. Meet with black people in their 70s or older, even liberal politicians such as Charles Rangel (age 90), and Reps. Eddie Bernice Johnson (85), Alcee Hastings (83) and Maxine Waters (82). Ask them whether their parents would have tolerated their assaulting and cursing of teachers or any other adult. I bet you the rent money their parents and other parents of that era would not have accepted the grossly disrespectful behavior seen today among many black youngsters who use foul language and racial epithets at one another. These older blacks will tell you that, had they behaved that way, they would have felt serious pain in their hind parts. If blacks of yesteryear would not accept such self-destructive behavior, why should today’s blacks accept it?

Black people have made tremendous gains over the years that came as a result of hard work, sacrifice and a no-nonsense approach to life. Recovering those virtues can provide solutions to many of today’s problems.

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Who Propaganda Promotes Globalists’ Digital Cashless Society And Will Destroy American Life As We Know It – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on September 10, 2020

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/09/no_author/who-propaganda-promotes-globalists-digital-cashless-society-and-will-destroy-american-life-as-we-know-it/

By Bill Sardi

…Not to worry about anthrax, which is a bacterium, or any other respiratory virus like tuberculosis, it’s just COVID-19 coronavirus that the world should fear and that adheres to paper money, even though more die of TB than COVID-19 every year. So, you know there must be some hidden agenda here…

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MKULTRA and the CIA’s War on the Human Mind | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on September 9, 2020

Stephen Kinzer’s Poisoner in Chief is a highly readable, thoroughly researched introduction to the life and work of one of America’s most unknown, and yet infamous, government agents. Kinzer is to be thanked for his plainspoken, courageous book. Even those who have studied the CIA and the various schemes and crimes which “the Agency” has committed over the past seventy-five years will be surprised by some of the information Kinzer relates. To see in one volume a rendering of just some of the lives ruined by just one CIA program, MKULTRA, is a sobering revelation.

https://mises.org/wire/mkultra-and-cias-war-human-mind?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=c2ae49e1c2-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-c2ae49e1c2-228343965

[Review of Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019)]

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has a fearsome reputation. The author and executor of countless coups and political assassinations, the CIA is notorious for waterboarding, “extraordinary rendition,” regime change, kidnapping, narcotics smuggling, financing of guerrilla wars, and many other unsavory activities around the world, including against Americans, even inside the United States.

But “fearsome” does not mean “flawless.” The CIA has failed at least as often as it has succeeded, and sometimes the failures are so flagrant—such as sending thousands of anticommunist guerrilla fighters behind enemy lines in Korea, Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia during the Cold War, where nearly all of them died—that CIA insiders wryly refer to their organization as “Clowns In Action.”

Which is it? Is the CIA a dastardly menace or a hotbed of horrible mistakes? If Stephen Kinzer’s new book, Poisoner in Chief, is any indication, the answer is both.

A veteran reporter on foreign conflicts such as those in Rwanda, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Iran, Kinzer is a former New York Times correspondent and, most famously, the author of the 2006 bestseller Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. In his latest effort he brings his analytical skills to bear on perhaps the most disturbing CIA project of them all: MKULTRA, the top-secret, long-running effort to find a method for controlling the human mind.

“History’s most systematic search for techniques of mind control,” Kinzer writes, was a by-product of World War II. At the end of 1942, a University of Wisconsin bacteriologist named Ira Baldwin—“America’s first bio-warrior” and a part-time Quaker preacher—was loaned to Washington (with the blessing of the University of Wisconsin president) in order to set up and run a bioweapons program for the United States military (p. 16). Based out of Camp Detrick in Maryland, the Baldwin lab cranked out bioweapons for possible use against Allied enemies. In one of Baldwin’s bigger projects, shipment of tons of anthrax spores, ordered by Winston Churchill for potential use against the Nazis, was approved by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and almost ready for delivery when the Germans surrendered on May 7, 1945 (p. 19).

For many, even for Quaker preachers, World War II cleared away the last of the psychological hurdles against unleashing bioweapons against an enemy. Kinzer’s book tells the tale of how the targeting of unsuspecting populations was later justified by the bigger war, the Cold War, which followed the demise of the Third Reich.

The ruined Third Reich provided much of the original brainpower for MKULTRA. Immediately after World War II, the CIA—formed out of the Office of War Information in 1945—was faced with a choice. The Germans and the Japanese had been conducting advanced experiments on germ warfare and other forms of biological weaponry. Should the Allies prosecute as war criminals the scientists involved with such projects, or hire them as expert advisors? With the Cold War starting and the Soviets looming as an unpredictable enemy, the CIA, with the tacit approval of the few members of the United States Congress who were allowed to know even the existence of the Central Intelligence Agency, decided to make use of the bioweapon expertise of erstwhile foes in order to counter the new adversary in Moscow.

For example, Kurt Blome, the Nazis’ director of biowarfare research and development whose work had been championed by Heinrich Himmler, was acquitted, by American political fiat, at the Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg in 1947 and sent to work—as part of Operation Paperclip designed mainly to bring German rocket scientists to the US—at Camp Detrick (pp. 20–24).

It was at Camp Detrick that Blome encountered a rising star in the CIA, Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb, a bacteriological specialist who had been a star student of Ira Baldwin’s at Wisconsin, is the main figure in Kinzer’s book. His career is virtually synonymous with MKULTRA. Under the direction of Gottlieb, the CIA’s laboratories at Camp Detrick transitioned from R&D on bioweapons—often using unwitting American subjects, such as in 1950 when a US Navy minesweeper “specially equipped with large aerosol hoses” spent six days spraying the Serratia marcescens bacterium into the San Francisco fog, infecting some eight hundred thousand people (pp. 37–38)—to drugs which could be used for mind control. (MKNAOMI, MKULTRA’s sister CIA project, was also tasked with finding poisons and biotoxins which the CIA and the US government could use in various operations.) Gottlieb provided the big ideas into which to fit Blome’s nefarious knowledge of mass murder by bacillus. Gottlieb became, virtually overnight and with the help of former Nazi doctors, America’s “poisoner in chief.”

The CIA’s mind control program, which was assuming a bigger and bigger importance as fears of Soviet brainwashing grew in the US, was originally called Operation Bluebird and was personally overseen by CIA higher-up Allen Dulles. (47) At first, the Bluebird team experimented with “hypnosis, electroshock, and sensory deprivation,” along with drugs like sodium amytal, at CIA sites in “secret prisons in Germany and Japan,” looking for a way to extract information out of POWs and captured spies (pp. 44, 48–49). But Dulles was unsatisfied with the results and decided to give the young CIA recruit Sidney Gottlieb control of Bluebird’s updated iteration: Operation Artichoke (pp. 51–52). The goal of Artichoke was to do whatever it took to get prisoners to divulge military and state secrets to the CIA. The Cold War would brook nothing short of full-scale war against the human mind.

Dulles became deputy director of central intelligence three days after launching Artichoke in 1951, and Gottlieb, invisible to the outside world, was given virtually unlimited rein to carry out any experiments thought necessary to achieve mind control (p. 51). This drive to achieve total operational control over the human psyche eclipsed all reality and tactical limitation. If the US didn’t win the race to the mind control method, many in the CIA thought, the entire American population lay vulnerable to mental enslavement by the Soviets. Dulles, Kinzer writes, despite a disastrously unsuccessful three-year “Artichoke” attack on a Bulgarian political prisoner named Dmitri Dimitrov, “had convinced himself not only that mind control techniques exist but that Communists had discovered them, and that this posed a mortal threat to the rest of the world” (pp. 52–53).

Mind control was the pressing need, but nothing brought it within reach. Technique after technique, drug after drug, was tried on prisoners, but to no avail. In frustration, Artichoke agents under Gottlieb upped the ante, turning to marijuana, cocaine, and then heroin as possible catalysts of CIA-directed, anti-Soviet brainwashing. As part of Artichoke, a University of Rochester psychology professor was given a grant by the US Navy to test heroin on his students. The control of the mind remained as elusive as ever, despite the massive dosing of the Rochester student population with opiates. Nothing seemed to have the potential to crack open the mind for the CIA (p. 59).

Someone in Artichoke suggested using mescaline after the other narcotics failed, and this gave Sidney Gottlieb an idea. He remembered hearing about a drug called LSD which Dr. Albert Hofmann had discovered during an experiment at Sandoz laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, in 1943. Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), an ergot enzyme, produced extraordinary and disturbing psychological effects, Dr. Hofmann found when he ingested some and recorded the drug’s effects. Washington learned of Hofmann’s discovery in 1949, and one of the chemical specialists in the US military complex told Gottlieb of the new substance (pp. 34–35) In 1951, Gottlieb asked Harold Abramson, who had been a physician in the Chemical Warfare Service during World War II, to administer LSD to him. Gottlieb experienced the same psychedelic state as Dr. Hofmann had described. Other subjects were tested, as well, not all of them wittingly, and all seemed to exhibit similar reactions. LSD most definitely altered the mind (pp. 60–61). Gottlieb was convinced that he had found the magical drug which would allow the CIA to control the psyche, and therefore to beat the Soviets at (what Allen Dulles, Gottlieb, and many others at CIA thought, at least, was) the Soviets’ own game.

The experiments on human subjects followed rapidly after Gottlieb’s conversion to belief in the powers of LSD. These experiments often ended in death, often by murder. One study quoted by Kinzer reports that

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How Capitalists Improve Human Productivity | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on September 9, 2020

Thus, capital is “‘stored-up’ labor, land, and time”—saved resources. The time element is particularly relevant in understanding capital; as a matter of fact, capital can be (also) conceived as previous human beings’ efforts whose outcome—i.e., advancement toward the enjoyment of final consumption—we can now benefit from. In this sense, Böhm-Bawerk’s metaphor is highly illuminating:

The boy who cuts a stick with his knife is, strictly speaking, only continuing the work of the miner who, centuries ago, thrust the first spade into the ground to sink the shaft from which the ore was brought to make the blade. (The Positive Theory of Capital [1891] 1930, p. 88, qtd. in Rothbard 2009, pp. 481–82)

Therefore, insofar as capital is the inheritance of past human action, it’s analogous to giants on whose shoulders today’s producers of consumptive goods are standing:

https://mises.org/wire/how-capitalists-improve-human-productivity?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=c2ae49e1c2-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-c2ae49e1c2-228343965

To quote the last paragraph of this 2008 article by Robert Murphy, when asked why Austrian school economics should be studied, the best answer is: “the Austrian theory of capital is the best one you can find if you really want to grasp how the economy actually works—beyond sterile mathematics and static timeless analysis.”

The Austrian school’s understanding of capital and production relies upon three main pillars. First: the factors of production comprise both nature-given factors—namely land and labor—and non-nature-given (i.e., produced by giving up production aimed at immediate consumption) ones—namely capital goods. Second: production in a capitalistic economy requires time and features several stages. Third: the ultimate source of wants satisfaction—and hence of subjective value—is consumption, which is the sole ultimate end of production; hence, the farther in time from consumption the output of production is, the less it’s valued—in other words, people have time preferences.

Understanding Production and Time

What is production? It’s human action blending commodities (land) and human energy (labor) in order to attain goods and services conducive to wants satisfaction. If production leads to direct want satisfaction, the outcome of production is consumption goods; otherwise—i.e., if the outcome is delayed want satisfaction, that is, goods and services conducive to satisfaction in future time—the outcome is capital goods.

As Rothbard very effectively describes it, capital is

a way station along the road to the enjoyment of consumers’ goods. He who possesses capital is that much further advanced in time on the road to the desired consumers’ good….Capital goods are “stored-up” labor, land, and time; they are intermediate way stations on the road to the eventual attainment of the consumers’ goods into which they are transformed. (Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market [2009], pp. 52, 58)

Thus, capital is “‘stored-up’ labor, land, and time”—saved resources. The time element is particularly relevant in understanding capital; as a matter of fact, capital can be (also) conceived as previous human beings’ efforts whose outcome—i.e., advancement toward the enjoyment of final consumption—we can now benefit from. In this sense, Böhm-Bawerk’s metaphor is highly illuminating:

The boy who cuts a stick with his knife is, strictly speaking, only continuing the work of the miner who, centuries ago, thrust the first spade into the ground to sink the shaft from which the ore was brought to make the blade. (The Positive Theory of Capital [1891] 1930, p. 88, qtd. in Rothbard 2009, pp. 481–82)

Therefore, insofar as capital is the inheritance of past human action, it’s analogous to giants on whose shoulders today’s producers of consumptive goods are standing: it’s the produced but not yet consumed (and thus transferred into the future) outcome of human action. The metaphors of standing on the shoulders of giants, the knife-ore, and the way station are helpful in understanding another feature of capital: namely capital accumulation as length of production.

In fact, the more capitalistic the economy, the lengthier its structure of production—or, if you will, the taller the giants on whose shoulders the current producers of consumption goods are standing. In other words, even though thinking of a “capitalistic” structure of production as “lengthy” might seem counterintuitive, it nonetheless makes perfect sense. Actually, in order to produce more efficiently (i.e., with a lower input-output ratio) and/or more effectively (i.e., attaining more sophisticated products, such as PCs, smartphones, etc.) today, some human productive action—blending time, labor, and natural resources (land)—needs to have been performed and saved (i.e., not consumed) in the past. In a sense, capital gives producers a head start when compared to the same production occurring without its aid.

Hence, every single capital good is akin to a segment or brick on a road leading to consumption—i.e., satisfaction of wants. The lengthier the structure of production is, the farther the road can go.

Understanding the Role of Capital

Given that production is ultimately the outcome of blending land, labor and time, we are left with one question: What’s the role of capital? First of all, it should now be clear that if we trace production far back enough, “we must arrive at a point where only labor and nature existed and there were no capital goods” (Rothbard 2009, p. 10).

That said, we know that production takes time. A useful way to visualize the interplay of land, labor, and capital in production is the following: since any conceivable consumption good is ultimately an actualization of land and labor’s potential suitability to satisfy human needs, the only obstacle between the original factors (land and labor) and final wants satisfaction (consumption) is time. Imagine you are given an egg. If you want to attain a full-fledged chicken, you will need stored-up grain (i.e., land) to feed the newborn chick and “stored-up” labor to take care of and raise it. Both land and labor are to be taken away from other employments, i.e., saved). You also require the time necessary to bridge the gap between the egg (a potential chicken) and the actual chicken—that is, the final consumption good.

So, back to the role of capital: capital allows original factors’ owners to anticipate consumption which would otherwise be accessible only in later time. Thus, capitalists make it possible for laborers and landowners to exchange the future goods they produce—which will ripen only in due time—for present and immediately consumable ones saved (stored) by the capitalists. In other words, capitalists perform a service for the owners of original factors, satisfying and accommodating the latter’s time preferences (i.e., their desire to consume sooner rather than later). As Rothbard phrases it,

The capitalists’ function is thus a time function, and their income is precisely an income representing the agio [i.e., the premium] of present as compared to future goods….Capitalists restrict their present consumption and use these savings of money to supply money (present goods) to factor owners who are producing only future goods. This is the service—an advance of time—that the capitalists supply to the owners of factors, and for which the latter voluntarily pay in the form of the interest rate. (Rothbard 2009, p. 374)

But how does it work in practice? Look at figure 1 (taken from Rothbard 2009, p. 369, figure 41). Consider, for the sake of simplicity, only one stage of production (say, the last one, delivering the consumption goods worth one hundred ounces of gold).

Figure 1

Absent capitalists, the owners of land and labor would need: first, to save enough resources in order to buy the intermediate goods worth 80 ounces of gold from previous-stage producers to work with (but this would be tantamount to becoming capitalists themselves!); second, and more important in practical terms, they would have to wait for the final product to be delivered to consumers, who will pay for it only at the very end of the productive process. Instead, thanks to capitalists, the owners of land and labor get paid—by capitalists—before the final consumption goods are sold in the market, thus enjoying consumption before the end of production.

However, this advanced payment that the owners of original factors enjoy comes at a price—namely the discount rate (or agio). That’s why landowners and laborers, even though the value they added amounts to 20 ounces of gold (100 – 80), will earn only 15 ounces: the difference (5 ounces) is paid to capitalists, who advanced present actual consumable goods (say, money) in exchange for future potential ones.

Conclusion

The concept of capital is intertwined with the idea of time and of saving (storing) scarce resources. Capitalists, acting as intermediaries between present production and future consumption, are the key players in every capitalistic economy: they make it possible for present producers (landowners and laborers) of future potential consumptive goods to enjoy consumption before the actual end of production—thus satisfying the latter’s time preferences.

The price laborers and landowners choose to pay capitalists is the interest (or discount) rate, i.e., the price (or agio) of early consumption. Symmetrically, capitalists are remunerated by landowners and laborers for foregoing consumption today to the advantage of the latter.

Author:

Fabrizio Ferrari

Fabrizio Ferrari holds a M.Sc. in Economics from Catholic University, Milan. Follow him on Twitter and Linkedin.

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Hypocrisy on Display at Assange’s Extradition Hearing – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on September 9, 2020

Summers argued it was “entirely unfair” to add what were in law new and separate criminal allegations, at short notice and “entirely without warning and not giving the defense time to respond to it. What is happening here is abnormal, unfair and liable to create real injustice if allowed to continue.”

https://original.antiwar.com/?p=2012340900

I went to the Old Bailey today expecting to be awed by the majesty of the law, and left revolted by the sordid administration of injustice.

There is a romance which attaches to the Old Bailey. The name of course means fortified enclosure and it occupies a millennia old footprint on the edge of London’s ancient city wall. It is the site of the medieval Newgate Prison, and formal trials have taken place at the Old Bailey for at least 500 years, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. For the majority of that time, those convicted even of minor offenses of theft were taken out and executed in the alleyway outside. It is believed that hundreds, perhaps thousands, lie buried under the pavements.

The hefty Gothic architecture of the current grand building dates back no further than 1905, and round the back and sides of that is wrapped some horrible cheap utility building from the 1930’s. It was through a tunneled entrance into this portion that five of us, Julian’s nominated family and friends, made our nervous way this morning. We were shown to Court 10 up many stairs that seemed like the back entrance to a particularly unloved works canteen. Tiles were chipped, walls were filthy and flakes of paint hung down from crumbling ceilings. Only the security cameras watching us were new – so new, in fact, that little piles of plaster and brick dust lay under each.

Court 10 appeared to be a fairly bright and open modern box, with pleasant light woodwork, jammed as a mezzanine inside a great vault of the old building. A massive arch intruded incongruously into the space and was obviously damp, sheets of delaminating white paint drooping down from it like flags of forlorn surrender. The dock in which Julian would be held still had a bulletproof glass screen in front, like Belmarsh, but it was not boxed in. There was no top to the screen, no low ceiling, so sound could flow freely over and Julian seemed much more in the court. It also had many more and wider slits than the notorious Belmarsh Box, and Julian was able to communicate quite readily and freely through them with his lawyers, which this time he was not prevented from doing.

Rather to our surprise, nobody else was allowed into the public gallery of court 10 but us five. Others like John Pilger and Kristin Hrafnsson, editor in chief of WikiLeaks, were shunted into the adjacent court 9 where a very small number were permitted to squint at a tiny screen, on which the sound was so inaudible John Pilger simply left. Many others who had expected to attend, such as Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders, were simply excluded, as were MPs from the German federal parliament (both the German MPs and Reporters Without Borders at least later got access to the inadequate video following strong representations from the German Embassy).

The reason given that only five of us were allowed in the public gallery of some 40 seats was social distancing; except we were allowed to all sit together in consecutive seats in the front row. The two rows behind us remained completely empty.

To finish scene setting, Julian himself looked tidy and well groomed and dressed, and appeared to have regained a little lost weight, but with a definite unhealthy puffiness about his features. In the morning he appeared disengaged and disoriented rather as he had at Belmarsh, but in the afternoon he perked up and was very much engaged with his defense team, interacting as normally as could be expected in these circumstances. Read the rest of this entry »

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Malcolm X on Property, Integration, and Economic Independence – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on September 9, 2020

I don’t think having an opportunity to ride either at the front or the back or the middle of someone else’s bus does not dignify you. When you have your own bus, then you have dignity. When you have your own school, you have dignity. When you have own your own country, you have dignity. When you have something of your own, you have dignity.

But whenever you are begging for a chance to participate in that which belongs to someone else, or use that which belongs to someone else, on an equal basis with the owner, that’s not dignity, that’s ignorance.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/09/no_author/malcolm-x-on-property-integration-and-economic-independence/

By José Niño

With another Martin Luther King Day come and gone, we were reminded that the views of King are regarded as the model for the “civil rights movement.”

Some of this is merited, of course. King stood up to governments that used state force, via Jim Crow laws to mandate segregation and violate property rights.

Unfortunately, not all of King’s views on property and economic independence were equally enlightened.

For a start, King was no friend of markets. In 33 Question About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask, Tom Woods uncovered a speech King gave to his staff revealing his disapproval:

You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars…. [W]e are treading in difficult waters, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong… with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.

But King wasn’t working alone in the civil rights movement. While far less remembered and honored today, Malcolm X provided a far different and more radical view of how to achieve more independence and prosperity for historically disadvantaged groups.

Choosing Markets Over Forced Integration

Libertarian rapper Eric July produced an excellent video explaining Malcolm X’s philosophy when contrasted to MLK’s vision of forced integration. Malcolm X recognized the power of capitalism, and saw it as a means of advancing the community.

July highlights an interview with Eleanor Fischer in which Malcolm X called forced integration hypocritical and understood the flaws of its involuntary nature:

Well, any form of integration, forced integration, any effort to force integration upon whites is actually hypocritical. It is a form of hypocrisy involved. If a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that’s brotherhood. But if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that’s not brotherhood, that’s hypocrisy. And what America is trying to do is pass laws to force whites to pretend that they want Negroes into their schools or in their places of employment. Well, this is hypocrisy, and this makes a worse relationship between black and white, rather than if this could be brought about on a voluntary basis.

He then expanded on the flaws of MLK’s forced integration strategy when the topic of the Montgomery Bus Boycott came up:

I don’t think having an opportunity to ride either at the front or the back or the middle of someone else’s bus does not dignify you. When you have your own bus, then you have dignity. When you have your own school, you have dignity. When you have own your own country, you have dignity. When you have something of your own, you have dignity.

But whenever you are begging for a chance to participate in that which belongs to someone else, or use that which belongs to someone else, on an equal basis with the owner, that’s not dignity, that’s ignorance.

Malcolm X also critiqued the sit-in strategies civil rights activists employed and insisted that blacks build their own economic institutions instead:

Instead of the negro leaders having the black man begging for a chance to dine in white restaurants, the negro leaders should be showing the black man to do something to strengthen his own economy, to give himself an independent economy, or to provide job opportunities for himself. Not begging for a cup of coffee in a white man’s restaurant.

In sum, Malcolm X was not interested in forced integration and focused his energies toward black economic self-sufficiency. It did not matter to him if blacks had to live separately from whites, as long as each community did not infringe on the rights of others.

He drew examples from the Japanese and Chinese communities in the U.S. to drive this point home:

When you are equal with another person, the problem of integration doesn’t even arise. It doesn’t come up. The Chinese in this country aren’t asking for integration. The Japanese aren’t asking for integration. The only minority in America that’s asking for integration is the so-called Negro, primarily because he is inferior, not inherently inferior, but he’s economically, socially, politically inferior. And this exists because he has never tried to stand on his own two feet and do something for himself. He has filled the role of a beggar.

For these reasons, among others, Murray Rothbard praised Malcolm X describing him as a “great black leader” and acknowledged that Malcolm X’s black nationalism was “a lot more libertarian than the compulsory integration pushed by King, the NAACP, and white liberals.”

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bionic mosquito: Malcolm X Was Right

Posted by M. C. on September 9, 2020

http://bionicmosquito.blogspot.com/2020/09/malcolm-x-was-right.html

Malcolm X Was Right

The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros, and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked, or deceived by the white liberal then Negros would get together and solve our own problems.

I grew up in a city that would be considered a large bedroom community of a much larger city. My hometown had a mixed population – mixed in total, but not so much by neighborhood; mixed, meaning, basically black and white. During my school years, our public school district began the program of forced integration via bussing, and I was sent to the other side of town along with some of my earlier classmates.

While reading an essay entitled “My Career as a White Police Officer,” by Daniel Vinyard, I thought: this was not my experience. What was his experience? Read the essay – every sort of nasty, brutish, and violent behavior you can imagine.

Of course, he is a cop and I was a school student – we were certainly not dealing with the same randomly selected population. At my school, yes there would be occasional fights – almost always black against black, occasionally females going at it but usually males. While Vinyard describes fights as always involving large groups of blacks, I don’t recall anything like this – just two people pissed off at each other for whatever reason.

Even with large groups gathered around to watch the fight, it wouldn’t turn into a riot. Unlike what Vinyard describes today, there were “rules”: third parties wouldn’t get involved, there were no weapons, there were no cheap shots when the fight was over. I don’t recall a stabbing or shooting at the school, and this was even before metal detectors and high security fences became standard; our campus was as open as could be.

In all of those years of forced integration (seven, in total), I only had meaningful trouble with a black individual once. He was looking over the shoulder of a friend of mine while my friend was opening his locker. The guy wanted to see the combination. I stepped in and stopped it. The guy didn’t like this and said he would come after us, which he did a couple of days later.

Upon receiving this threat, my friend no longer came to school – there was only about a week or two left in the school year – leaving me to deal with the problem. So much for whites watching out for each other. It got dealt with, and I was just a little worse for wear. Frankly, I had more trouble with those of my “tribe” who were recent immigrants than I did with any of the black students.

Yes, I attended an integrated school – but integrated almost only in name, although I had a few good friends who were black. During lunch, mostly the white kids hung out in one area, and the black kids in another. Rarely was there any trouble between the groups. I would attend many of the high school football and basketball games. Large crowds, no trouble.

I had a few friends who lived on the other side of town. I never had a problem visiting, not even at night. Sure, there were neighborhoods that no one wanted to go to – especially after dark. I am just saying that this wasn’t true everywhere. I remember even walking home from school a few times without a concern and without an issue – several miles, at least half of which were through predominantly black neighborhoods.

As an aside, and not correlated to race in any way that I can remember: there was a large field between the main campus and the student parking lot. By the time you got to your car, you were quite high from the fumes…. Just like at the best rock concerts of the time! Our sense of smell offers some of the best memories in life.

I had a job after school. Also, at work, I had a couple of good friends who were black – good guys, hardworking; nothing like what Vinyard describes. Again, I know: we are dealing with different subsets, but still.

A couple of years ago I went to my high school reunion. I was talking to a classmate – a black woman who just retired from the police department of the same city where we grew up and went to school. I asked her about the schools: what has happened since the forced bussing began. Let’s just say it has been a disaster for the black community.

 

When bussing started, we had three private schools in town; today there are twenty. The schools are segregated again, now based on those who can afford to pay double for school: once through taxes and again through private tuition. And this, as you can imagine, primarily breaks down by race.

Now, those with money no longer care about the quality of the schools in the district. When I was young, and before bussing, this wasn’t the case. Yes, we went to the neighborhood school, but the district office had jurisdiction over all the schools. She described the hell-hole that is the public schools now. Again, nothing at all like my experience from my high school years.

I wouldn’t trade my high school experience for any other. However, given her description of the situation today, I wouldn’t wish today’s experience on my worst enemy.

I know this experience seems from another world, given what we see on the news every day. Yet, I am certain that my experience during that time in our history wasn’t unique or even rare. So, why am I offering such detail? What has changed, from the time of these experiences until today?

From “Why America Has Gone Mad,” by Jared Taylor:

Ever since Jamestown, we have groped for a solution to the terrible problem of trying to build a nation of different races. Could it not be clearer that the attempt has failed?

We were one of the earlier high school classes to go through forced bussing. This was not terribly long after LBJ’s Great Society programs, which brings me back to the quote by Malcolm X. If one can say – as Taylor does – that the attempt has failed, it has only failed due to the efforts of white liberals, and it is white liberals who are driving the failure even today and it is white liberals who are stoking the flames of the divide.

Since the end of slavery in America, I think it is safe to say that slowly, but surely, progress was being made in this “attempt” of building a nation of different races in America. No, not uninterrupted progress, and no, not always peaceful; there were always setbacks: for example, Charles Burris recently commented on the Tulsa Race Massacre, a horrendous episode.

But blacks were moving into the middle class, black business owners were on the increase, black families were intact, there were schools for blacks that ranked with some of the finest in the country.

White liberals felt none of this was moving fast enough, or they felt that pandering to blacks would gain more votes. Every line of black progress on every measure takes a bend for the worse starting in the mid-1960s, and it is tied to the government programs enacted by white liberals. For example, from Walter Williams:

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year only 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. As late as 1950, female-headed households constituted only 18 percent of the black population. Today it’s close to 70 percent. In much earlier times, during the late 1800s, there were only slight differences between the black family structure and those of other ethnic groups. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were two-parent households.

Exacerbating this situation was the purposely destructive weaponizing of Cultural Marxism and Critical Race Theory, taught at universities and in school districts across the country, all run by – you guessed it – white liberals.

Malcolm X wasn’t one sided on this. He also knew that white conservatives were a threat – but at least they didn’t pretend. His main point, as I take it: if left alone, blacks can solve their own problems. And, until the 1960s and despite still suffering under many troubling yokes, the track record would support his contention.

Sixty years of purposeful cultural destruction, driven by white liberals, has taken its toll.

Conclusion

No, I don’t have the black experience. Maybe I should just shut up. But I am guessing that I have more of the black experience than most of the white liberals who are doing all of the damage or who are virtue-signal posting BLM signs on their front lawns. In any case, there is no hope for justice, peace, or progress if we cannot speak openly on such matters.

Today, the loudest mouthpieces on these issues – both white and black mouthpieces – scream about what white people must do to solve black problems. Malcolm X offered the opposite message: that the place to start is for white liberals to stop “helping” the black community and for leadership in the black community to focus on the problems and solutions within the black community.

Apparently LeBron James is reading The Autobiography of Malcom X; let’s hope he understands the message. His is one voice that can bring some peace, if he chooses to do so.

I will suggest that another place to start is to string up the white liberals in the town square – actually, let’s start here first. If reparations are necessary to right this wrong, this is a good place to start – an eye for an eye, so to speak.

Epilogue

The passage from Malcolm X begins with the following, which I did not include above: “The white liberal is the worst enemy to America….”

He is right on this point as well. It isn’t an America of more than one race that cannot work; it is an America divided by drastically different values that is the problem. America doesn’t have a racial divide; it has a values divide.

I have been harmed far more by white people in this country who hold to radical liberal and neocon values than by black people.

Posted by bionic mosquito

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Foreign Aid Folly – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on September 9, 2020

Throughout these essays, there are five things relating to foreign aid that resonate:

  1. Foreign aid is simply money confiscated from American taxpayers and sent to countries that many Americans couldn’t locate on a map and may have never even heard of.
  2. Foreign aid is both foreign welfare and foreign bribery.
  3. No American should be forced to “contribute” to the aid of the people or the government of any other country.
  4. All charity should be private and voluntary. Charity that is not voluntary is theft.
  5. All foreign aid should be ended, and no exceptions should be made for natural disasters, humanitarian concerns, national interest, or political objectives.

To those Americans who think that aid should be given to foreign countries, I say put your money where your mouth is.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/09/laurence-m-vance/foreign-aid-folly/

By

The Trump administration is threatening to withhold nearly $130 million in U.S. foreign aid to Ethiopia.

Good. But this is simply another case of the right policy for the wrong reason.

The reason is not important. I will make it as simple as I can.

Ethiopia wants to build a dam on the Nile River. Egypt and Sudan oppose the dam “until the countries reached a legally binding deal that would address how to manage water flows during droughts or dryer rainy seasons, and established a mechanism to resolve disputes regarding the dam.” The United States is trying to mediate the dispute.

According to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in fiscal year 2019, the United States provided $829 million in foreign assistance to Ethiopia. That amount is “only” supposed to be $144 million for fiscal year 2020. Motion Picture Money P… Buy New $14.99 (as of 02:21 EDT – Details)

The United States is threatening to withhold funding for security assistance, counterterrorism and military education and training, anti-human trafficking programs, and broader development assistance funding, but not funding for emergency humanitarian relief, food assistance, or health programs aimed at addressing COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS.

How many Americans know that the U.S. government gives millions of American taxpayer dollars to Ethiopia every year? Even back in 2001, American taxpayers handed over $151 to Ethiopia.

How many Americans would willingly give some of their money to the government of Ethiopia, NGOs that operate in Ethiopia, or directly to the Ethiopian people?

Americans are a generous people. Perhaps some of them would. Maybe they have family in Ethiopia, maybe they trace their ancestry back to Ethiopia, maybe they have a bleeding heart, maybe they want to do it for the children in Ethiopia, maybe they want to make the world a better place, or maybe they feel guilty about living a comfortable life in America?

But if the government of Ethiopia or the government of the United States sent a letter to every American household appealing for funds for Ethiopia, how many Americans would get out their wallet, checkbook, or credit card?

I think you know the answer.

And, of course, it’s not just Ethiopia.

According to ForeignAssistance.gov:

Today, the U.S. manages foreign assistance programs in more than 100 countries around the world through the efforts of over 20 different U.S. government agencies. These investments further America’s foreign policy interests on issues ranging from expanding free markets, combating extremism, ensuring stable democracies, and addressing the root causes of poverty, while simultaneously fostering global good will.

One hundred countries? If you think that sounds expensive, then you are right. The amount of foreign assistance requested for fiscal year 2021 (Oct. 1, 2020-Sept. 30, 2021) is $31.2 billion. This includes 3.3 billion for Israel, 124.5 million for Iraq, $371.8 million for Afghanistan, 1.381 billion for Egypt, 102.3 million for South Sudan, 90.7 million for India, and $316.9 million for Ukraine.

Again, how many Americans know this and how many Americans would willingly give some of their money to government of, or the people in, these countries?

The answer to both questions is undoubtedly the same: not too many.

Yes, foreign aid should be withheld from Ethiopia this year, next year, and every year after that. But it should also be withheld from every other country as well.

Fortunately, I have a new publication that tells the unvarnished truth about foreign aid.

Foreign Aid Folly is a collection of eleven essays written over the past ten years for six different publications. The contents include:

“The Foreign Aid Debacle”
“Not Tax-Funded Aid to Myanmar”
“Should the U.S. Military Go to Haiti?”
“Egypt and U.S. Foreign Policy”
“Condolences Yes, Assistance No”
“Republicans and Foreign Aid” “Exporting Welfare”
“Conservatives and Foreign Aid”
“Time to End All Foreign Aid”
“Conservatives and the Looting of America”
“The Question that Is Never Asked About U.S. Military Aid to Ukraine”

Throughout these essays, there are five things relating to foreign aid that resonate:

  1. Foreign aid is simply money confiscated from American taxpayers and sent to countries that many Americans couldn’t locate on a map and may have never even heard of.
  2. Foreign aid is both foreign welfare and foreign bribery.
  3. No American should be forced to “contribute” to the aid of the people or the government of any other country.
  4. All charity should be private and voluntary. Charity that is not voluntary is theft.
  5. All foreign aid should be ended, and no exceptions should be made for natural disasters, humanitarian concerns, national interest, or political objectives.

To those Americans who think that aid should be given to foreign countries, I say put your money where your mouth is.

 

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The Trojan Donkey – Doug Casey’s International Man

Posted by M. C. on September 9, 2020

Since earning the nomination as the 2020 Democratic candidate for the presidency, Joe Biden has stated that he is a “transition candidate.”

This was an odd statement, especially for someone who has hardly begun his formal campaign. (He’s not even in office yet and he’s discussing being on the way out?)

Yet this was not just another one-off Biden gaff, as has been suggested by some. Since announcing his pick for vice president, he has stated, “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.”

So what’s up here? The candidate is only a place-holder for the real, intended president?

https://internationalman.com/articles/the-trojan-donkey/

by Jeff Thomas

Since earning the nomination as the 2020 Democratic candidate for the presidency, Joe Biden has stated that he is a “transition candidate.”

This was an odd statement, especially for someone who has hardly begun his formal campaign. (He’s not even in office yet and he’s discussing being on the way out?)

Yet this was not just another one-off Biden gaff, as has been suggested by some. Since announcing his pick for vice president, he has stated, “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.”

So what’s up here? The candidate is only a place-holder for the real, intended president?

Well, let’s have a look at that possibility.

Joe Biden, by any measure, is a poor candidate for the office. After almost half a century in politics, he’s had a career mostly as a political hack who would support any issue that seemed popular at the time. Similarly, his voting record in the Senate has been that of a man who supported whatever bill would please his peers and further his career.

Seemingly, he either has no inner core of belief, or he’s been willing to sacrifice it at a moment’s notice, if it might help his next election. After forty-seven years of elected office, he’s not regarded as having a commitment to… well, anything.

And yet he became the choice of the Democratic party as one candidate after another dropped out of the presidential race. Clearly this was a party that was not only leaderless, but couldn’t even seem to invent a leader for the sake of the election.

Kamala Harris, his presumptive vice president, dropped out of the presidential race in December 2019, when her popularity amongst democrats dropped to 3.4%. Since democrats make up roughly half of the population, this means that less than 2% of Americans would have wanted her as their president.

And yet, as stated above, candidate Biden announces, “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.”

That’s quite curious. He apparently is stating that his only purpose is to win the election, then pass the baton to the next leader. Presumably, his vice president.

This has never occurred in US politics, although it is true that, at this point, Mr. Biden may well be too far gone to even begin to handle the job.

And that leads us to the possibility that the deal has already been brokered – that Mr. Biden would win the election, then have, let’s say, a “medical emergency,” at which point he would pass the reins to the new president – Kamala Harris.

Clearly, Ms. Harris could not have been elected on her own merit, as even democrats found her to be fundamentally lacking last December. Even the more radical elements of the party have sensed that she is untrustworthy and even dangerous.

At this point in America’s history, there’s much debate as to whether the president is the supreme leader, or whether he or she is merely the face presented by the Deep State, who run the country from the background and give the president his marching orders.

Either way, this eventuality would not bode well for the US. As supreme leader, Ms. Harris, based upon her reputation, would be an autocratic figure who behaved rather ruthlessly toward those who failed to comply with her edicts.

But as the figurehead for the Deep State, she would be a very powerful tool, implementing the loss of freedoms that were passed into law with the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act and the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act.

These two acts, taken together, essentially eliminate the US Constitution in practical terms. All that’s necessary to implement them would be for a highly demonstrative president to declare a national emergency. Both acts would then be in force.

It would not be difficult to imagine Ms. Harris in this role.

Presently, we’re watching a very odd set of events unfolding in the US.

Major cities have seen months of continual protests and even rioting, which apparently have been very organized and well-funded.

In a normal situation, the mayors and governors would call in the police to quell such riots.

Yet we’re seeing the opposite. Local political leaders are consistently hamstringing local police, making it impossible for them to do their jobs, thereby increasing the extent of devastation by rioters.

Rioters are routinely let off with a slap on the wrist, whilst those who defend their homes from rioters are arrested and charged.

This, of course, is the exact opposite of what the Rule of Law is meant to achieve.

There’s every reason to believe that this condition will continue to worsen well after the 2020 election, and at some point, Americans from both the right and left will find themselves begging for the federal government to step in – to return the US to a state of relative safety.

Central governments, of course, perennially dislike local policing, as local police tend to be loyal their own communities. However, federal troops have no such loyalty. They perform as their superiors dictate, regardless of where they are deployed.

But once the local police have been gotten out of the way, it would be quite easy for an authoritarian president to deploy federal troops to re-establish order, and initially, this would meet with the approval of worried Americans.

Historically, this has occurred countless times throughout the world. In every case, martial law is instituted as a “temporary measure,” to quell existing unrest. But, as Milton Friedman said, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

If this development is in America’s future, as events indicate, it’s likely that the media will repeat the words, “public safety” endlessly as the situation unfolds. The words “martial law” and “police state” may be heard amongst some of the populace, but will be unlikely to dominate the news programmes.

Another word that’s unlikely to appear often in the media is “tyranny,” yet this will be precisely the result of the introduction of a police state.

But all the above is dependent upon a political leader who has the forceful demeanour to ensure that the job gets done with a minimum of dissent.

The American public are therefore left to ponder whether it may be that a vastly unpopular Trojan donkey may be closer to the presidency than she presently appears.

Editor’s Note: Disturbing economic, political, and social trends are already in motion and now accelerating at breathtaking speed. Most troubling of all, they cannot be stopped.

There will likely be unprecedented volatility of every kind in the months and years ahead.

That’s exactly why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released a free report with all the details on how to survive the crisis ahead.

It will help you understand what is unfolding right before our eyes and what you should do so you don’t get caught in the crosshairs.

 

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