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Why Chicago’s Mayor Blames Her City’s Murders on Wisconsin and Indiana | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on August 11, 2020

Yet, as we have seen, Chicago is the reason Chicago has homicide rates many times higher than most areas of neighboring states. Let the Chicagoans address the problems they’ve created. After all, the demand for national policy to address Chicago’s problems only places on all Americans the burden of addressing a crisis that is specific to only a small minority of areas and regions in the US. The fact that Chicago is a basket case of a city is no reason for the rest of the country to adopt the sorts of policies Chicago politicians want—and which are likely the cause of their problems in the first place.  

https://mises.org/wire/why-chicagos-mayor-blames-her-citys-murders-wisconsin-and-indiana?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=d0b9c5b21d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-d0b9c5b21d-228343965

Listen to the Radio Rothbard version of this article.

It is now well known that the City of Chicago and Illinois overall have adopted stringent gun control laws over the years. Thus, the pro–gun control Giffords Center gives the state of Illinois a lofty “A-” on its “annual gun scorecard.”

Yet, somehow, shootings are surging in the city this year. Although crime in Chicago—like in the nation overall—is lower today than it was during the 1980s and 1990s, murders have been a perennial problem in Chicago for years. As the Chicago Sun-Times reported last week:

The 105 murders reported in July are a nearly 139% increase from the 44 reported in July 2019, according to police data released Saturday. The 406 shooting incidents last month were a 75% increase from the 232 reported in the same month-to-month comparison….Murders are up 51% from the same point last year, along with a 47% increase in shootings, police said.

So, how to explain the increase in homicides, especially in light of Chicago’s stringent gun control? After all, the logic behind the arguments made by most gun control advocates is that areas with numerous government prohibitions on gun ownership will have less crime.

Well, the mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, has a ready explanation: she claims people are bringing in guns from other parts of the country where it’s much easier to buy guns. These guns are then supposedly taken to Chicago, where they are sold on the black market and used in shootings. Lightfoot claims: “We are being inundated with guns from states that have virtually no gun control, no background checks, no ban on assault weapons….That is hurting cities like Chicago,”

Lightfoot then takes her claims to the logical next step. As she states in a July 20 letter to Donald Trump, since Illinois and Chicago can’t directly impose more gun control on neighboring states, she wants the national government to intervene and impose nationwide controls instead.

This is a common tactic among those who aren’t content with destroying basic freedoms in their own jurisdictions. When neighboring jurisdictions allow “too much” freedom, prohibitionists demand that the federal government step in to impose uniform prohibitions on everyone. The idea here is that “open borders” between states allow persons and weapons (and drugs and other goods) to freely cross from one state to another. This freedom of movement, it is claimed, means that gun control can only work if there is a single nationwide policy.

Why Neighboring States Aren’t the Problem

But before we look at Lightfoot’s latest call for national mandates, let’s first back up a step and ask ourselves whether it’s even plausible that Illinois’s neighbors are the reason that homicides remain so high in Chicago.

On the surface, we can see how Lightfoot might be able to get away with making such a claim. As the Gifford Center’s ranking system shows, Illinois is surrounded by states where it is far easier to buy a gun than in Illinois. Wisconsin, for example, receives a “C-” in the Giffords gun control rankings. Indiana does even “worse,” with a ranking of “D-.”

Some might see this and conclude that maybe Lightfoot is right, and that maybe Chicago is a “victim” of its neighbors such as Wisconsin.

But when we look more closely, we quickly find that the problem with Chicago clearly isn’t guns.

According to crime data from the FBI, Chicago in 2018 had a homicide rate of 20.7 homicides per 100,000 population. The state of Illinois overall has a homicide rate of 6.9 per 100,000. As you might guess, a sizable portion of the homicides that occur in Illinois happen within the city limits of Chicago. In fact, if we remove the city from Illinois, “Illinois without Chicago” has a homicide rate of only 3.2 per 100,000.

The first question that presents itself is this: If Illinois has relatively uniform gun control laws throughout the state, why are there so many more homicides in Chicago per capita than in the rest of the state?  Presumably gun owners can use those guns to carry out crimes anywhere in the state. So why are so many crimes concentrated just in Chicago? It’s a question Lightfoot can’t answer so long as she insists that crime in Chicago is being driven by guns imported from somewhere else.

But what about guns that are allegedly coming in from other states? If we look at nearby states with much more laissez-faire gun laws, then surely homicides will be more numerous, right? Wrong.

In Indiana—Illinois’s neighbor to the east—the statewide homicide rate is similar to that of Illinois: 6.5 per 100,000. Moreover, Indiana is similar to Illinois in that homicide cases are largely limited to only a handful of areas. Again, we find that although it is relatively easy to buy a gun in Indiana statewide, homicides are concentrated in only a few cities, specifically Indianapolis, Gary, and Fort Wayne. (If we were to exclude Indianapolis, Gary, and Fort Wayne from Indiana’s homicide total, we’d find that Indiana has a homicide rate of 3.5 per 100,000.) Out of Indiana’s 6.7 million residents, 5.5 million of them live in areas where homicide rates are a small fraction of Chicago’s.

Comparisons are even more stark when we look at Wisconsin, Illinois’s neighbor to the north. In Wisconsin statewide, the homicide rate is only 3 per 100,000. In Kenosha, just north of the border with Illinois, the homicide rate is 4 per 100,000.

But if Lightfoot is to believed, guns are being sold across state lines in places like Kenosha and then illegally exported to Chicago, where the guns are then used in crimes. Again we’re left wondering why criminals refrain from using these easy-to-get guns in Kenosha. Why is Wisconsin—where it’s much easier to buy a gun than in Illinois—experiencing a homicide rate that’s less than one-sixth of Chicago’s?  If the ease with which one can purchase a gun is what determines homicide rates, then we’d expect to see even higher rates in suburban Indiana and Wisconsin than in Chicago.

This, of course, is not happening, precisely because guns obviously don’t cause homicides in Chicago. Chicagoans are responsible for these crimes, while residents of Wisconsin and Indiana—who have much easier access to guns—are somehow able to politely restrain themselves from shooting each other at similar rates.

Making Chicago’s Problem Everyone’s Problem

Once we embrace this false narrative of how other states are the cause of Chicago’s crime, a natural solution presents itself: have the federal government step in.

The “argument” is basically this: since people and guns can move freely across the Illinois state border, and across Chicago city limits, it is the job of the federal government to “solve” the problem by imposing the sort of gun control Lightfoot wants nationwide.

Governments and politicians have tried these tactics for many years, with guns, with alcohol, and with drugs. It is claimed that neighboring states allow “too much freedom” and that therefore national prohibitions must be enforced.

Yet, as we have seen, Chicago is the reason Chicago has homicide rates many times higher than most areas of neighboring states. Let the Chicagoans address the problems they’ve created. After all, the demand for national policy to address Chicago’s problems only places on all Americans the burden of addressing a crisis that is specific to only a small minority of areas and regions in the US. The fact that Chicago is a basket case of a city is no reason for the rest of the country to adopt the sorts of policies Chicago politicians want—and which are likely the cause of their problems in the first place.

[RELATED: “Why Open Borders between States in America Might Lead to Disaster” by Ryan McMaken]

If politicians in Chicago are so concerned about guns from out of state—and if they’re so convinced gun control is the answer—it’s up to them to stop the guns at the state border or at city limits. Illinois and Chicago taxpayers taxpayers should be the only ones paying for whatever ill-advised checkpoints, searches, and investigations Chicago politicians want to carry out in the name of ridding Chicago of of guns. This will spare the taxpayers of the rest of the country from being forced to take on the expense of the immense and costly administrative state that is necessary to “protect” Chicago from Wisconsin.

Moreover, nowadays it should be no problem for Illinois could come up with a legal basis for doing this. Chicago and Illinois can simply follow the lead of states like New York—which now has “traveler checkpoints” to monitor everyone entering the state in order to enforce covid-19 quarantine rules. Chicago can declare guns a “public health crisis” and get to work monitoring every visitor for illegal guns. Would such a scheme be expensive and onerous? It certainly would be. Entrepreneurs, tourists, and other productive members of society would learn to avoid Illinois and Chicago, and take their business elsewhere.  But let that be Chicago’s problem, and no one else’s.

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 Russia Likes to Play Aerial ‘Chicken’ with America | The National Interest

Posted by M. C. on August 11, 2020

Nevertheless, the number of such incidents is dwarfed by the surging U.S. military presence along Russia’s border and the incidents that a more robust presence is generating. In other words, most of the interceptions are taking place near Russia and thousands of miles away from the American homeland. The undeniable reality is that the United States and its NATO allies are crowding Russia, not that Russia is crowding the United States, and the aerial encounters must be viewed in that context.

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-russia-likes-play-aerial-%E2%80%98chicken%E2%80%99-america-166450

by Ted Galen Carpenter

Over the past few months, there has been a surge of alarming incidents between U.S. and Russian military aircraft. Most of the cases have entailed U.S. spy planes flying near the Russian coast adjacent to the Black Sea—supposedly in international airspace. It is a reckless practice that easily could escalate into a broader, very dangerous confrontation.

The Black Sea region definitely is the epicenter of such episodes. On July 30, a Russian Su-27 jet fighter intercepted two American surveillance aircraft; according to Russian officials, it was the fourth time in the final week of July that they caught U.S. planes in that sector approaching the Russian coast. Yet another interception took place on August 5, again involving two U.S. spy planes. Antiwar.com analyst Jason Ditz notes that although U.S. officials did not comment on why those spy planes are there, “the U.S. has seemed to have a growing interest in the Black Sea as tensions grow between Russia and NATO member Romania over control of that inland sea.”

Following the July 30 episode, U.S. officials claimed that the Russian Su-27 “buzzed” the American aircraft, creating a needless safety hazard. That complaint is a frequent U.S. response to such encounters. In January 2018, the Pentagon asserted that a Russian fighter came within five feet of a U.S. Navy plane in an incident over the Black Sea. Similarly, in September 2016, Washington alleged that a Russian fighter flew within ten feet of the U.S. aircraft it was trying to intercept.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of interceptions of U.S. and NATO military planes each year, not only in the Black Sea region but over the Baltic Sea and areas along the lengthy land border between NATO members and the Russian Federation. In addition, troubling incidents have involved Russian planes buzzing U.S. and NATO ships.

Although both sides can be faulted for engaging in needlessly provocative and dangerous behavior, the United States deserves the bulk of the blame.  As ABC News noted in an April 2020 investigation into such close encounters, most of the episodes have been in the Baltic Sea and Black Sea. The report noted further that “U.S. officials believe Russia’s close encounters with the U.S. military are prompted by Russia’s effort to reassert itself militarily around its borders.”

Granted, Russian aircraft have sometimes conducted provocative aerial approaches to U.S. territory, especially near Alaska, and the frequency of that behavior seems to be growing.  Nevertheless, the number of such incidents is dwarfed by the surging U.S. military presence along Russia’s border and the incidents that a more robust presence is generating. In other words, most of the interceptions are taking place near Russia and thousands of miles away from the American homeland. The undeniable reality is that the United States and its NATO allies are crowding Russia, not that Russia is crowding the United States, and the aerial encounters must be viewed in that context.

One would think that U.S. military and political leaders would exercise greater caution.  It is highly unlikely that the information gathered from spy planes flying off of the Russian coast adds so much to the intelligence already available from satellites that it is worth the risk of a collision and the dangerous diplomatic and military fallout that would ensue. Indeed, the current crop of officials should have learned that lesson from the April 2001 crisis that erupted when a U.S. surveillance plane collided with a Chinese fighter.  Not only was the Chinese pilot killed, but the damaged U.S. aircraft had to make an emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island.

The following days were filled with alarming tensions. Beijing was understandably miffed but then escalated the confrontation by refusing to release the aircraft and—even worse—refusing to release the crew. Eventually, the two governments reached an awkward compromise with George W. Bush’s administration issuing an ultra-vague apology and the crew being able to return home.  China, though, kept the aircraft and its sophisticated technology.

Perhaps most troubling, anti-China hawks in the United States sought to exploit the crisis to promote a much harder-line overall foreign policy toward Beijing. An article by neo-conservative luminaries William Kristol and Robert Kagan was typical.  The authors described the conciliatory U.S. response as “a national humiliation.” Kristol and Kagan saw much wider, dangerous ramifications from such alleged appeasement. “As the Chinese understand better than American leaders, President Bush has revealed weakness. And he has revealed fear: fear of the political, strategic, and economic consequences of meeting a Chinese challenge. Having exposed this weakness and fear, the Chinese will try to exploit it again and again.”

It is a safe bet, that given the current extent of hostility toward Russia among America’s opinion elites, hawkish types would be even more likely to magnify any crisis involving a similar incident. There would be massive political and media pressure on the White House to take an uncompromising stance against Moscow and “stand up to Putin.” The already dangerous cold war with Russia could easily turn hot. Officials authorizing the provocative spy plane flights along Russia’s borders are playing a game of international chicken.  And as the outcomes of games of chicken using automobiles have shown far too often, they can end tragically.  Responsible military and civilian officials should not behave in such a juvenile fashion.

Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at the National Interest, is the author of twelve books and more than 850 articles on international affairs. 

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Flight from New York – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on August 11, 2020

Think about this for a minute. Assume you are the owner of a Minneapolis business or an outside investor considering an investment in the city. Would you want an investment in a city in which the mayor and city council, state attorney general and state governor think that the police—not rioters and looters—are the number one threat to public safety? No you wouldn’t, not unless you are crazy, but that is the way Democrats think.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/08/10/flight-from-new-york/

Paul Craig Roberts

New York City is in Serious trouble.  Indeed, all diverse US cities are in trouble, especially those ruled by Democrats.  The combination of coronavirus and unchecked rioting and looting have undermined their economies.

Working at home has taught businesses that they do not need to accumulate employees in office complexes.  Working at home saves money for businesses and employees.  With profits and raises harder to come by, dispensing with office complexes and commutes is cost effective.

High income people who no longer need to work in office complexes do not need expensive Manhattan brownstones and apartments.  They can escape to Mystic Connecticut — https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-07/as-new-yorkers-flee-once-humble-seaside-town-sees-bidding-wars?cmpid=BBD080720_BIZ&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=200807&utm_campaign=bloombergdaily&sref=Y1NA6MHq — or somewhere else.

On top of the depression of Manhattan office and apartment prices from the emerging work-at-home culture, we have the assault on NYC residents from the breakdown of law and order and the Democrat mayor’s decimation of the police budget in order to pay NYC hotels for housing the homeless, drug addicts, and child abusers in upper income West Side Manhattan — https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8603433/Upper-West-residents-fury-homeless-junkies-sex-offenders-moved-luxury-hotels.html .

And it is not only in New York City that people are deciding against downtown locations. In Minneapolis, the police department has publicly announced that the police are unable to protect the public from robbery and abuse.  The police advise the public that when confronted by robbers, “do as they say” — https://www.breitbart.com/crime/2020/08/02/minneapolis-police-department-advises-residents-to-give-in-to-criminals/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=todays_hottest_stories&utm_campaign=20200802 .

This might be good advice for Minneapolis citizens, but it is advice that violates the “broken windows” theory of policing, which says that disorder and visible signs of crime create an environment that encourages more crime and disorder.  We see the truth of this theory in Portland, where the toleration of disorder by city authorities has brought the city more than 70 days of disorder. Aftifa and Black Lives Matter have been given immunity by public authorities for their acts of violence and destruction.

The Minneapolis city council has compounded the city’s problem by its effort to defund and disband the city’s police department, with one member of the council arguing that the need to be protected from theft and violence is a form of privilege.

Think about this for a minute.  Assume you are the owner of a Minneapolis business or an outside investor considering an investment in the city.  Would you want an investment in a city in which the mayor and city council, state attorney general and state governor think that the police—not rioters and looters—are the number one threat to public safety?  No you wouldn’t, not unless you are crazy, but that is the way Democrats think.

Steve Cramer, president and CEO of the Minneapolis Downtown Council, told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that concerns over public safety and the future of the city’s police department have some companies looking to leave downtown — https://kstp.com/business/minneapolis-downtown-council-says-up-to-10000-jobs-could-be-lost-over-public-safety-concerns/5819417/?cat=1 .

“Almost overnight the brakes went on in downtown,” Cramer said. “The point where it all started to change was the day the City Council announced it supported defunding the police department.” Cramer said in a six-week period from that day there were 45 companies that indicated they were either moving out of downtown or were a business that was no longer moving downtown, and there were 13 companies in that group with 100 or more employees and one with 600.

Levin Lewis, executive director of the Minneapolis Business Owners and Managers Association, told KSTP that some high-end development deals have stalled because of public safety worries, and it could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Flight from Chicago will be next — https://www.rt.com/usa/497565-chicago-riots-looting-videos-police/

If we add to the problems afflicting cities, such as the breakdown in public safety and the abandonment of office building complexes, the homelessness that now afflicts high income cities such as Manhattan, Malibu California, Seattle, and San Francisco, it is obvous that urban existence is losing its charm.

There is a larger and more dangerous issue that has gone unreported by presstitutes. The “George Floyd protests” were organized multi-city acts of violence led by the largely white organizations—Antifa and Black Lives Matter—funded by Jewish and Gentile billionaires, philanthropic foundations, and corporations.  This financing has not been investigated.  I doubt it has anything to do with police violence.  What it has achieved is to worsen race relations by portraying blacks as violent, lawless, and disrespectful of others and their property. It is another wedge driven in to disunite the American people.

In Minneapolis 80% of the black population oppose disbanding the police.  Black businesses suffered along with others from looting and burning.  The “George Floyd protests” was not a black event.  It was a white event organized and paid for by whites.  This is so true that it is now satire — https://babylonbee.com/news/riotous-blm-protest-suddenly-realizes-they-dont-have-any-black-people 

We need to get to the bottom of this, but it won’t happen. The presstitutes will only cover it up.  The FBI is too busy investigating Russian media and “white supremacy” groups to look into the real fomenters of racial conflict.

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Huawei, Tik-Tok and WeChat, by Larry Romanoff – The Unz Review

Posted by M. C. on August 11, 2020

That part is okay, but how can the CIA and NSA approach Huawei and ask the company to build back doors into its equipment so the US can spy on China – among all other countries?

https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/huawei-tik-tok-and-wechat/

First, let’s dispel the combined notion that China spies on everyone and the US spies on no one. There is so much public evidence to destroy both these assertions that I won’t bother repeating them here. I will however remind readers that a few years ago China more or less banned Windows 8 from the country because it was discovered that the O/S had a built-in NSA back door.[1] It seems that Germany reported on this first, but the devastating proof was at an IT conference where a Microsoft executive was interrupted during a speech with precisely this accusation.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] He did not deny it because the person making the accusation was the person who discovered it and had with him the proof, but refused to discuss it and changed the subject.

But this is hardly news. Forty years ago it was proven that all Xerox copy machines delivered to foreign embassies and consulates in the US were “espionage-ready”.[10][11] Also, for at least 20 years, and perhaps much more, it was common knowledge that when any foreign embassies, consulates, banks and other corporations ordered computers and similar hardware from US suppliers, those shipments were intercepted by UPS, delivered to the CIA and/or NSA for installation of “extra” hardware and software before delivery to their destinations. This was one of the confirmations by Edward Snowden.[12][13][14][15] Any search on this will give you millions of hits unless Google chooses that moment to lose its memory.

Huawei

Trump’s problems with Huawei are twofold. The most obvious is that China is eating America’s lunch when it comes to innovation and invention and Trump would like to slow this down by destroying Huawei and is clearly making every possible effort in this regard, including bullying and threatening half the known world against using Huawei’s products. But this is the small part of the problem; the real issue is espionage. There is no practical value in disputing the assertion that Cisco and other American hardware and software firms install back doors to all their equipment for the convenience of CIA and NSA access. But suddenly Huawei is replacing Cisco and those other American firms with its better and less expensive equipment.

That part is okay, but how can the CIA and NSA approach Huawei and ask the company to build back doors into its equipment so the US can spy on China – among all other countries? There is no solution to this problem other than to trash Huawei’s reputation by accusing it of being an espionage threat and having the company’s equipment banned. And this applies not only to the US, but to the entire Five Eyes Espionage Network, involving the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.[16] Briefly, this was set up to break laws while pretending no laws were being broken. It is generally against the law for a government to spy on its own citizens, but that law doesn’t apply to a foreign government. So Canada spies on Australian citizens and sends the information to the Australian spooks who can claim they did nothing wrong. Rinse and repeat. The sad part is that the “intelligence” received is usually of little interest to the four minor participants but all of it is shared with the US who are frothing to spy on the entire world and to take possession of “every communication” of every kind in the entire world. Thus, it isn’t sufficient to ban Huawei only from the US because this company’s equipment would castrate the NSA’s effort in the other four nations. Thus, US bullying to ensure each of its five eyes is Huawei-free. And that’s the entire story, like it or not.

Tik-Tok

Tik-Tok is nothing of consequence, except that it is in direct competition with similar American platforms and has proven too popular and too competitive to be permitted to survive. This is just a cheap, below-the-belt and illegal-as-hell shot at China. No threat, no nothing. However, as with all similar IT products and platforms it contains much personal information especially useful for marketing, which has so far been the private property of people like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Thus, Trump kills two birds with one stone: either simply kill Tik-Tok on some trumped-up accusation (if you’ll excuse the expression) of espionage, or force a sale to an American company. Either way, China loses massively while the political oppression and marketing value of that personal information remains safely in trusted American hands.

WeChat

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Beirut Devastated: The New Paradigm May Be Explosive — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on August 11, 2020

Much then, hangs on the forensics: Was this a bold ‘false flag’ initiative to upturn the strategic status quo (of the kind on which Israel once prided itself), hiding beneath, and making use of a publicly known vulnerability at the Beirut port – the storage of 2,700 kg of ammonium nitrate – in order to destroy Hizbullah’s strategic place in the region, and to shift politics in an unexpected new direction (favourable to Israel)?

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/08/09/beirut-devastated-the-new-paradigm-may-be-explosive/

 Alastair Crooke

Sometimes the news cycle and the geo-political cycle simply part company. This is one such occasion – the devastation of Beirut Port. What happened there is destined to constitute a major geo-political event – whatever way its sequellae should cascade out and shape the future. There are good, historic reasons for this parting of the ways: One (which explains the regional silence), is that we have not yet had the forensics. Yes, satellite photos galore, but not the nitty-gritty from the ground. Not the forensics.

The main stream media is in a hurry to ‘shape’ its story of the explosion in advance of the Special Tribunal verdict on the death of Rafic Hariri (now due on 18 August), and which is expected to indict Hizbullah members. Yet there are still many unanswered questions. It will be a further few days until these forensics become available from the site. They will of course be contested, and may resolve very little.

Against this silence, awaiting word from key players, the western and Israeli media headlines are churning out ‘everything you need to know’, and their ‘wrap-ups’ from Beirut. It is however, far from wrapped-up. More questions arise as the days pass. And the region has a collective memory of such geo-political inflection points.

The ‘popular’ 1953 uprising against PM Mossadegh, which transpired to be an MI6/CIA coup, and which – subsequently – was to usher in the game-changing Iranian Revolution; the 2005 assassination of Rafic Hariri, which led to Syria’s exit from Lebanon – and on flimsy computer patterning of calls (of unknown content) on ‘families’ of cell phones – was institutionalised into shaping the culpability of Hizbullah, and concomitantly, the movement’s widespread terrorist designation. (Hizbullah has, from the outset, disputed the western/international narrative on the Hariri assassination).

Yet the truth is, that what happened to Rafic Hariri remains still obscured in the fog of partisan war (as maybe will be the fate of this week’s Beirut devastation). In Syria, the Chemical Weapons story for Douma became another ‘turning point’, amidst the roar of U.S. Tomahawk missiles (as Assad became a Chemical Weapons pariah). Yet, documents from the OPCW in last days show the chemical weapons claim was a fabrication.

Yes, the region has good cause to pause. On the one hand, we have not had the forensics on the Port explosion, and on the other, we have Trump’s assertion – later reiterated by him – that he was told by his military generals that what happened in Beirut was “an attack” (a bomb). The President did not “speculate” that it was an attack. He said plainly that his generals had told him so.

This statement cannot entirely be air-brushed out of the calculus. And nor can the exact mirroring of the strangely unified ‘shape’ and mushroom effect of the Beirut main explosion with a similar ‘unexplained explosion’ some months ago in Syria – be discounted. And finally, there is the question: Were there three explosions?

So, we await what is likely to be a perfectly binary outcome. Either the devastation resulted from culpable negligence by the port security authorities, or was a bold attempt to audaciously ‘explode’ the current regional dynamics; to re-shape narratives and radically to re-cast geopolitics. Both are possible.

What then? The Israeli narrative is that the destruction in Beirut will cause the Lebanese population to rise up against Hizballah, and will demand that its munitions be removed away from population centres. (Israel of course would welcome the visibility into Hizbullah’s arsenals that this would entail). The scheduling of an emergency UNSC meeting for Monday, and calls to place Lebanon under international supervision, suggest that western states will be seeking to use the crisis further to weaken and constrain Hizbullah.

March 14th will seek to capitalise on what has happened to mobilise the Lebanese against Hizballah, but it is unlikely to get the domestic resonance that others may anticipate. The port of Beirut historically has been a Sunni patrimony. It has no single security structure, and these latter are no friend to Hizbullah. The port is also open to inspection by UNIFIL. If the management of the facility were to be characterised, it would be said to be one of decay and rampant venality. It is possible that this – culpable negligence leading to accident – was responsible fully or partially, for what happened.

If so, it would seem that public anger may focus more on the corrupt Za’im (the ‘capos’ of the system that have been ravaging the economic structure for their own enrichment for decades), than necessarily be directed at Hizbullah. Indeed, the present government may have a tough time to survive – even though it was not in office at the time any negligence may have occurred. That responsibility belongs to the Old Guard.

Were it to transpire that Trump was broadly correct, and that what occurred was an attack of some sort, it would not be hard to answer to the question cui bono? Israeli journalists are already preening themselves over the ‘event’s auspicious timing: That “Lebanon [now] is bound to implode”, and that the explosion’s ‘shockwaves’ will discomfort Hizbullah for a long time to come, but more especially in advance of the Special Tribunal report.

One Israeli journalist added that the explosion “at Lebanon’s main port sends a warning message to Iran, too, who only about a month ago said it would deploy ships and oil tankers to Lebanon. There were even talks of a vessel that would host a power station, which would give Beirut electricity … Israel and the United States in particular, fear these ships, if they do make it to Lebanon, would start a regular supply line not only of oil, flour and medicine, but also of weapons, ammunitions and missile parts”.

Much then, hangs on the forensics: Was this a bold ‘false flag’ initiative to upturn the strategic status quo (of the kind on which Israel once prided itself), hiding beneath, and making use of a publicly known vulnerability at the Beirut port – the storage of 2,700 kg of ammonium nitrate – in order to destroy Hizbullah’s strategic place in the region, and to shift politics in an unexpected new direction (favourable to Israel)?

Or, a further example of Lebanese élite lassitude and venality, caring only for themselves and nothing for the well-being of its people?

If the former, and events presage a renewed attempt to crush Hizbullah, the new regional paradigm indeed may be explosive.

© 2010 – 2020 | Strategic Culture Foundation | Republishing is welcomed with reference to Strategic Culture online journal www.strategic-culture.org.

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The Twilight Zone – A Long Overdue Economic Crisis

Posted by M. C. on August 11, 2020

https://internationalman.com/articles/the-twilight-zone/

by Jeff Thomas

“Imagine if you will, a situation in which the economy of a nation is overdue to experience an economic collapse of epic proportions, but remains endlessly at the brink. Every day, a collapse is more likely, yet the economic house of cards remains in a state of suspended animation. Some people become increasingly edgy, while others become more complacent. Only a few choose to actually prepare for what’s coming.

“An impossible situation? Yes. But we’d be well-advised to recognise that it couldn’t only occur… in the Twilight Zone.”

For those old enough to remember The Twilight Zone, the quirky “what if” American television programme, this episode introduction by host Rod Serling would seem to fit right into the show’s format.

The programme ran from 1959 to 1964, presenting somewhat unreal twists on the normal world we live in. Each episode would examine how people would deal with the episode’s situation and generally end with a moral lesson from Mister Serling as to the nature of mankind.

Strangely, the above episode, as unlikely as it might have seemed a mere decade ago, is playing out in real life.

Stocks are climbing in price, whilst dividends are in decline or, for some of the fastest-growing companies, non-existent. Bonds are a worse bet, yet a bond bubble of epic proportion exists. The world’s governments are dumping US debt, yet the Fed is buying billions of dollars of debt each month.

Indeed, debt is now growing at least twice as fast as the economy that must pay for it.

Quantitative Easing was invented to bail out banks in 2008, but continues to this day, long after the problem was claimed to have ended.

Benefits from Welfare and Social Security programmes are at an all-time high, yet they’re underfunded to the point of certain collapse in the near future, independent of the other impending economic calamities.

Meanwhile, multiple unnecessary wars are being waged at a staggering cost to a nation that’s already insolvent, yet additional countries are being threatened with possible warfare if they don’t “behave.”

We’re in the extraordinary situation of being in the longest boom period in history, yet there’s no real boom, only the illusion of one.

At such a time, it would be predictable that those who have become worried would flood toward precious metals, as they have done for thousands of years, whenever the economic situation became untenable. Yet only a tiny portion of the world’s population are doing so.

Never in history have the major economies of the world been in an economic bubble that includes virtually everything. And yet, incredibly, this situation has existed for over a decade. Technically, we’ve been in a depression since 2007 and yet the bubble that should have burst back then simply keeps growing.

So, does this mean that the age of crashes is over, that the bubble can expand forever without bursting?

Well, no. The bubble will most certainly burst, and the more inflates, the worse the eventual debacle will be.

We’re therefore in a state of suspended animation, waiting for the shoe to drop.

Some of the best economic minds began to warn about the coming crash as its causes began to take shape decades ago. And almost to a man, they predicted that it would have taken place already, at least five years ago.

But how might they have estimated a possible date for such an event? Economic crashes are notoriously difficult to pin down as to timing.

Well, all of them (and here I must include myself) made the assumption that conditions would have become so economically unsupportable by now that surely a collapse would have been a virtual certainty.

And in this we were conceptually correct. Where we were mistaken was that all logic supported the assumption that, once conditions had reached that point, money would begin to exit the system, ensuring a crash.

Historically, this is always what happens. When a crash is near, the smart money makes an exit. Yet, this time around, whenever money has left the system, it has been replaced by dramatically increased debt, obscuring the fact that the smart money has begun its exit.

Therefore, we’ve continued to appear as though we remain in a boom – the longest boom in history. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people are unable to recognize the plethora of signs that are indicating that the economy has been hollowed out.

In addition, stats like inflation and unemployment have been fudged ever since the Clinton administration, to mislead the population into believing that they’ve not risen to depression levels.

The icing on the cake has been that the media – 80% of which are owned by the same six Deep State corporations – deliver a daily message that the economy is on the rise and the public should “buy, buy, buy!”

Not surprisingly, those who provided an early warning to the coming economic crisis are regularly told, “You’ve been crying, ‘Wolf!’ for years. The crash hasn’t happened. You were wrong.”

And this criticism is not unearned. There’s no question that the timing has been prolonged beyond all expectations. However, the fundamentals remain the same and, today, are far more pronounced than they were in 2007.

Back then, we expected a small crash, which did occur, followed by the “eye of the hurricane,” a quiet period of three to five years when a false recovery would take place.

That “eye” proved to be artificially expanded by the Deep State’s diverse players, to the ultimate detriment of virtually all people.

The second, major crash – predicted prior to 2007 to occur several years after the 2007 minor crash – is not only still looming; it’s more certain than ever before. The fundamentals remain the same and will reach their logical conclusion.

To be sure, this has led those economists who have been tracking the pending economic debacle for decades, to have the sensation of suspended animation for several years.

Not surprising then, that the present state of affairs seems like an episode of The Twilight Zone, with the unfortunate twist that this is not a television show; it’s an artificially delayed reality.

Editor’s Note: We’re on the cusp of a economic crisis that could eclipse anything we’ve seen before. And most people won’t be prepared for what’s coming.

That’s exactly why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released a free report with all the details on how to survive an economic collapse. Click here to download the PDF now.

 

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The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : Coronavirus is the New ‘Terrorism’

Posted by M. C. on August 10, 2020

Pelosi’s plan will lead to either a federal mask mandate or federal funding of state and local mask mandate enforcement. Those who resist wearing masks could likely be reported to the authorities by government-funded mask monitors. We can label this the “Stasi” approach to health policy, after the infamous East German secret police force.

Supporters of expediting production and use of a vaccine should remember the 1976 swine flu vaccine debacle. The swine flu vaccine was rushed into production in response to political pressure to “do something.” The result was a vaccine that was more of a danger than the flu.

Unfortunately, those who raise legitimate concerns regarding the safety of vaccines are smeared as “conspiracy theorists.” This is the equivalent of stating that anyone who dares criticize our interventionist foreign policy “hates freedom” and is probably a “terrorist sympathizer.”

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2020/august/10/coronavirus-is-the-new-terrorism/?mc_cid=60edae2c90&mc_eid=4e0de347c8

Written by Ron Paul

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has proposed the next multi-trillion dollar “coronavirus relief” spending bill that will support testing, tracing, treatment, isolation, and mask policies that have been part of a “national strategic plan” she has been advocating. The Trump administration is not opposing Pelosi’s plan on principle. Instead, it is haggling over the price.

But, even if the strategic plan could be implemented at little or no monetary cost, it would still impose an unacceptable cost in lost liberty.

Pelosi’s plan will lead to either a federal mask mandate or federal funding of state and local mask mandate enforcement. Those who resist wearing masks could likely be reported to the authorities by government-funded mask monitors. We can label this the “Stasi” approach to health policy, after the infamous East German secret police force.

Contact tracing could lead to forcing individuals to download a tracing app. The app would record where an individual goes and alert authorities that an individual has been near someone who has tested positive for coronavirus.

The strategic plan could eventually include Bill Gates’ and Anthony Fauci’s suggestion that individuals receive “digital certificates” indicating they are vaccinated for or immune to coronavirus. A certificate would be required before an individual can go to work, to school, or even to the grocery store. The need to demonstrate vaccination for or immunity to coronavirus in order to resume normal life would cause many people to “voluntarily” receive a potentially dangerous coronavirus vaccine.

The Trump administration has already spent billions of dollars to support efforts of companies to develop a coronavirus vaccine. Policymakers have stated that once a vaccine is developed it will be rushed into production and onto the market. Supporters of expediting production and use of a vaccine should remember the 1976 swine flu vaccine debacle. The swine flu vaccine was rushed into production in response to political pressure to “do something.” The result was a vaccine that was more of a danger than the flu.

Unfortunately, those who raise legitimate concerns regarding the safety of vaccines are smeared as “conspiracy theorists.” This is the equivalent of stating that anyone who dares criticize our interventionist foreign policy “hates freedom” and is probably a “terrorist sympathizer.”

The coronavirus panic has given new life to the push for a unique patient identifier. The unique patient identifier was authorized in 1996, but appropriations bills since 1998 have contained a provision forbidding the federal government from developing and implementing the identifier. Unfortunately, two weeks ago, the House of Representatives voted to repeal the ban. The unique patient identifier would aid government efforts to track and vaccinate every American, as well as to infringe in other ways on liberty in the name of “health.”

Politicians and bureaucrats cannot eliminate a virus any more than they can eliminate terrorism. What they can do is use terrorism, a virus, and other real, exaggerated, or manufactured crises to expand their power at the expense of our liberty.

Politicians will never resist the temptation to use crises as excuses to gain more power. Therefore, it is up to those of us who know the truth to spread the message of liberty and grow the liberty movement, A strong liberty movement is the only thing that can force the politicians to stop stealing our liberty while promising phantom security from terrorists and viruses.

Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
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Pennsylvania Is Playing Politics with Drug Rationing | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on August 10, 2020

Just as a reminder of the kind of central planners we are dealing with, this is the same Pennsylvania Department of Health that decreed on May 12 that nursing homes “must continue to take new admissions, if appropriate beds are available, and a suspected or confirmed positive for COVID-19 is not a reason to deny admission.” Months later, nearly 70 percent of coronavirus fatalities in the state have occurred in nursing homes.

Not being content with causing such a disaster, the state health department has issued guidance on how healthcare facilities should ration the limited supply of the new drug Remdesivir in the event that there are not enough doses to go around,

The middle of a pandemic is no time for social engineering, but it is also not a time for state involvement in healthcare to begin with. That involvement has led to thousands of nursing home patients dying and has now led to a blatant redistributionist drug-rationing scheme. Further involvement is only going to make matters worse and continue to poison a crucial aspect of our lives with politics even more than it already is.

https://mises.org/wire/pennsylvania-playing-politics-drug-rationing?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=4010b6d4b9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-4010b6d4b9-228343965

“Never let a crisis go to waste,” the old adage goes, and the coronavirus fiasco has demonstrated this principle in action more times than one can count. From declarations of veritable society-wide house arrest to crazed government spending and monetary policy, there has been no shortage of opportunistic actors working to live out their dreams of power and dominion over others that “normal” times would not allow. Another such instance of gleeful advantage taking has come to light in the form of the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s “Ethical Allocation Framework for Emerging Treatments of COVID-19” guideline, a document that barely conceals its authors’ desire to use the current fiasco as an opportunity to engage in their own schemes of egalitarian social engineering.

Just as a reminder of the kind of central planners we are dealing with, this is the same Pennsylvania Department of Health that decreed on May 12 that nursing homes “must continue to take new admissions, if appropriate beds are available, and a suspected or confirmed positive for COVID-19 is not a reason to deny admission.” Months later, nearly 70 percent of coronavirus fatalities in the state have occurred in nursing homes.

Not being content with causing such a disaster, the state health department has issued guidance on how healthcare facilities should ration the limited supply of the new drug Remdesivir in the event that there are not enough doses to go around, but notes that the guidelines should apply to any scarce form of treatment. While certainly an unpleasant subject to address, it is true that in the face of scarcity the limited supply of Remdesivir or any other treatment will need to be rationed and that some kind of method of choosing will be needed. Scarcity is simply a fact of life that must be dealt with. However, because the distribution of Remdisivir has been taken over by the federal government, which distributes it to state governments, which in turn distribute it to healthcare providers, the process has unavoidably become political.

Putting all the jargon aside, the guideline is very clear about several points. First, it is not considered acceptable to distribute care via a random lottery, or on a first-come-first-served basis. Rather, healthcare providers must take into consideration “community-benefit” when rationing care and the department recommends the use of a weighted lottery system.

As you can see, the example lottery that the health department provides uses three different criteria to determine how a patient’s lottery chance is weighted: membership in a disadvantaged community, being an essential worker, and likelihood of death in the next year.

While the state’s determination of who is and who is not an essential worker is arbitrary and has been full of problems, one can at least see the logic behind such a consideration, as well as for those patients who are not likely to live much longer, although one must question where the state gets the authority to dictate such things to hospitals.

What raises the most concern is the idea that members of “disadvantaged communities” should be given a better chance at receiving treatment than others. According to the guidance, because “low-income communities and certain racial/ethnic minorities” are being disproportionately burdened by the coronavirus, the end goal of public health is served by benefitting some groups over others. According to the guidance, “the rationale is that a core goal of public health is to redress inequities that make health and safety less accessible to disadvantaged groups.”

One might have thought that the main goal of public health was to save as many lives as possible. But instead, it seems that the state department of health considers the emergency room to be the perfect place to start “mitigating the structural inequities that cause certain communities to bear the greatest burden during the pandemic.”

This formulation makes it unclear what the guidance means when it states that the first goal of the ethical framework is “to safeguard the public’s health by allocating scarce treatments to maximize community benefit.” Does community benefit mean saving as many lives as possible? Or is it some kind of grievance studies conception of equality where arriving at a more “equally distributed” survival rate based on race and socioeconomic status is the goal?

One can certainly argue that certain populations do not have very good access to healthcare resources, but it seems outrageous to think that the time to attempt to remedy such inequality is when triaging patients.

Similarly concerning is the way the guidance recommends that the treating physicians be removed from the rationing process and that it be left in the hands of hospital bureaucrats instead, effectively tying doctors’ hands to treat their patients. Is this the kind of state-run healthcare that we have to look forward to in the future? Doctors as helpless as their patients as bureaucrats “assess” a patient’s social suitability to be worthy of treatment?

The guidance goes on to recommend some procedures for how membership in a “disadvantaged community” should be determined. After noting that both members of low-income communities and racial minorities have been adversely affected by the virus and therefore deserve an increased chance of receiving treatment, the racial component drops entirely from consideration in recommendations, no doubt because such discrimination would be highly illegal and result in a torrent of lawsuits against the state and any hospital foolish enough to try it. The guideline is explicit that “no one is excluded from access based on age, disability, religion, race, ethnicity, national origin, immigration status, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity and to ensure that no one is denied access based on stereotypes, perceived quality of life, or judgments about a person’s worth.” However, one can’t help but think that if racial discrimination were not illegal the logic of this guidance would dictate that it be undertaken in the name of “equality.”

What that list is lacking is a prohibition on discrimination based on socioeconomic status, which is the method the guidance suggests should be used for the purposes of weighing the lottery. Specifically, it recommends the use of the Area Deprivation Index, which is based on data from the 2015 American Community Survey. Hospitals would use the index’s Neighborhood Atlas to enter a patient’s address and determine if they are a disadvantaged community member.

One can’t help but feel that such a system is arbitrary to the extreme. When I entered my address into the Neighborhood Atlas I discovered that no one in my neighborhood would receive any weighted advantage if Remdisivir were needed. However, when I Google mapped the distance between my home and the nearest sector considered to be disadvantaged, I discovered that it was a mere two-minute drive away. Can anything based on something so arbitrary as five-year-old aggregated census block data be considered a useful tool for the fair rationing of treatment?

This entire scheme is just a taste of the ways medical care would be infected with politics if it were to be run by the government. In a system of socialized medicine would we see similar redistributionist schemes of rationing introduced? No doubt, many people of all political persuasions would view it as a fertile field for attempts at social engineering. Similarly, it is not hard to see politicians scheming to ensure that favored constituents and voting blocs have access to care at the expense of their opponent’s supporters, or that whole classes of people are purposefully and consciously disadvantaged based on whoever holds the keys to power at the moment.

The middle of a pandemic is no time for social engineering, but it is also not a time for state involvement in healthcare to begin with. That involvement has led to thousands of nursing home patients dying and has now led to a blatant redistributionist drug-rationing scheme. Further involvement is only going to make matters worse and continue to poison a crucial aspect of our lives with politics even more than it already is.

Author:

Zachary Yost

Zachary Yost is a Mises U alum and freelance writer.

 

 

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Democrats ARE Destroying NYC On Purpose, DeBlasio ADMITS He’s Buying Up Vacant Properties

Posted by M. C. on August 10, 2020

Will New Yorkers quit electing communists?

Nah!

The people most likely to vote de Blasio and Cuomo out of office, middle class so-called conservatives, are the ones leaving NYC.

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If You Have Done Your Best, What Do you Have To Fear? Fame Is Fleeting

Posted by M. C. on August 10, 2020

 

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