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Federal Reserve Responsibility for Consumer and Government Debt Crises

Posted by M. C. on March 5, 2024

The economic crisis will be worsened by the moral crisis caused by the belief among too many Americans at all levels of society that they have a right to government-provided economic security at the expense of their fellow citizens. This will result in violence and the growth of authoritarian political movements.

by Ron Paul

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/federal-reserve-responsibility-for-consumer-and-government-debt-crises

According to the Federal Reserve, credit card delinquencies increased by 50 percent in 2023, while consumer debt grew to 17.5 trillion dollars. A recent survey by Clever Real Estate found that three in five Americans have credit card debt and that 23 percent of Americans increase their credit card debt every month. The survey also found that 48 percent of Americans (including 59 percent of millennials) use credit cards for essential living expenses.

The overreliance on credit cards and the accompanying increase in consumer debt are consequences of our fiat money system. Since Richard Nixon severed the last link between the dollar and gold in August of 1971, the dollar’s value has declined by 87 percent based on the government’s understated Consumer Price Index numbers. This means that even though Americans’ nominal wages have increased, their real wages have declined as their dollars buy less.

The continuing erosion of the dollar’s value makes it impossible for many Americans to accumulate meaningful savings. Those Americans who can save may actually lose money by doing so thanks to the Federal Reserve’s inflation tax that erodes the value of savings. This is why Congress has felt it necessary to provide tax incentives to encourage saving for things like retirement, education, and health care.

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Washington’s ‘Credibility’ Gap

Posted by M. C. on March 5, 2024

The danger now that this credibility crisis has become obvious to all is that the neocons will again show up as arsonists at the fire they set themselves. We have reached the limits of US force, we are now reaping what the neocon interventionists have sown for the past three decades. And it isn’t going to be pretty.

by Daniel McAdams

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/washingtons-credibility-gap

This article first appeared as an exclusive update to RPI subscribers. Subscribe for free here.

I know one good writer for the American Greatness publication – Julie Kelly who writes on the injustice of the January 6th persecutions – but even though I get their regular updates in my email box I never open them up. It seems like more or less just another of the “conservative” outlets that churn out highly political and politicized fodder – with plenty of “outrage stories” –  not very well thought-out on pages heavily laden with annoying ads.

Again, I could be wrong.

But one recent headline from my in-box caught my attention so I opened it up: “Lack of Credibility Places U.S. Deterrence Under Great Strain.” In the piece – predictably – the authors open with the statement, “American national security and the security of many of our allies depend upon the ability of the U.S. to deter aggression.” The presumption already in the piece is laid out: the US is the “indispensable nation” that must expend unlimited resources anywhere and everywhere to maintain total dominance for its own sake and for the sake of its allies.

Failure to dominate everywhere will lead to failure to survive anywhere. 

The other assumption in the piece is that the massive US monetary outlay in and of itself will be sufficient to dissuade any country (or group) anywhere on earth from taking any course of action in opposition to Washington’s will – even if said country or group believes course of action in question is critical to its own national security needs or interests. With enough weapons, tough talk, and eagerness to use both, any nation or group will give up on its own goals and interests and defer to those of Washington. Will bow to Washington’s will.

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Know Your Enemy – Part 2

Posted by M. C. on March 3, 2024

– the Frankfurt School and how we got here

Probably the most influential member of the newly established Frankfurt School in America was Herbert Marcuse. He defined what he meant by disintegrating and destroying the Christian Western civilization from within: “One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society – there is one thing we can say with complete assurance: the traditional idea of revolution and the traditional strategy of revolution has ended- What we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.”

Christian Western civilization = Christian terrorists. Aren’t you glad the FIB is on top of that crisis?

Francis Christian

https://francischristian.substack.com/p/know-your-enemy-part-2

In my previous Substack essay, I addressed the urgent imperative for our present generation to understand the pressing, pertinent, ever present and long shadow of Bolshevism (the Russian brand of Communism) in society today. My readers are encouraged to refer back to Part 1 of this essay, since in every way, this essay is a continuation of the previous one.

After the violent, bloody events of October 1917 brought the Communists to power in Russia, it became clear to the Bolsheviks over the next few years, that much of Europe would not succumb to a bloody political takeover and revolution. It had been tried – incipient, violent Communist takeover projects in Germany, Hungary and Italy had all failed and were extinguished in their very early stages. Since the internationalization of Communism/Bolshevism is a fundamental goal of the Communist tyranny, a different way to take over society had to be found.

Francis Christian’s Essays is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In a diabolically evil and brilliant move, the Bolsheviks decided to corrupt, subvert, radically change and transform society from within. No cataclysmic, single, violent revolution was necessary. The takeover would be accomplished by a pervasive rot from within.

Just as a chief goal of the Bolsheviks of the Russian revolution was the overthrow of Russian Christian society and the Russian Orthodox Church with the declaration of atheism as the only State doctrine, those who wished to export the revolution to Western Europe realized that Western civilization had resulted from the touch of Christ upon the Western centuries. The foundations of the value systems of the West built in these Christian centuries had to be attacked from within – and overturned.

In Frankfurt, Germany, a group of intellectuals (who had earlier met with Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Moscow) founded the “Institute for Social Research” in 1923 and subsequently formulated the goal of achieving the takeover of society by fostering a “cultural revolution.” The Institute worked closely with the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. During its first ten years in Germany, it used the Weimar Republic (post-first world war Germany) and its citizens as a testing ground for the cultural takeover of the West. The cultural and moral decadence of Germany in the 1920s was largely a result of the activities of the Frankfurt “Institute for Social Research” and affiliated groups and disciples of the new Bolshevism, including theatre/burlesque and the German film industry (which later migrated to Hollywood).

Rather than a murderous, continuous class struggle between the oppressed worker and the “bourgeois” as envisioned by Marx, the new cultural Marxists of Frankfurt put forward the theory that everyone in the West was oppressed by the norms of Western, Christian civilization – the logical, next step for them, was the overthrow of the Christian West. The revolution would then be complete.

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Cocoa Panic? World’s Largest Chocolatier Plans 19% Workforce Cut As Prices Hit Record Highs

Posted by M. C. on March 3, 2024

Now that is a problem!

Of course we have a military base in Ghana. Maybe the military could actually do something worthwhile in a foreign country where they don’t belong and help with the chocolate.

https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/?s=03

https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/cocoa-panic-worlds-largest-chocolatier-plans-19-workforce-cut-prices-hit-record-highs

Tyler Durden's Photo

by Tyler Durden

The world’s largest maker of bulk chocolate is planning to cut about 19% of its workforce, totaling 2,500 jobs, as part of a cost-reduction strategy in response to a worsening cocoa shortage in West Africa, which has driven prices to record highs. 

“It’s about reducing complexity and eliminating duplication and inefficient structures,” Swiss chocolate maker Barry Callebaut CEO Peter Feld said in an interview with German newspaper Handelsblatt on Monday. 

Feld continued: “It’s about reducing complexity and eliminating duplication and inefficient structures.” 

Handelsblatt said the job cuts will be implemented across Barry Callebaut’s operations worldwide over the coming 18 months. 

The move signifies Barry Callebaut is likely preparing for future demand woes as cocoa output in top grower Ivory Coast collapses, sending prices in London to record highs. 

According to trader Ecom Agroindustrial Corp., Ivory Coast’s cocoa output is expected to plunge by as much as 20% this growing season. 

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The Hazards of One-way Communication and What to Do about Them

Posted by M. C. on March 2, 2024

An excerpt from The Sociobiology of Liberty

The 19th Century Prussian–evolved plan, imported into America around the turn of the 20th Century, is to transform our free-thinking children into good little “human resources” who will always follow one-way communication (orders) without hesitation — and will stop thinking for themselves.

Frederick the Great and the Prussian elite determined this was necessary to turn their kids into effective cannon-fodder so they wouldn’t lose the next war with Napoleon. I’m not making that up. And “we” adopted it.

By L. Reichard White

The Hazards of One-way Communication and What to Do about Them

Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner. –Lao Tzu

When one of our small-group ancestors saw another’s face, unless the second ancestor was blind, the seeing of faces was mutual. This “mutual seeing” results in “two-way communication.” But today there are folks who haven’t ever seen your face at all, yet you may still feel you know them face-to-face – – – because you have seen their faces.

TV news readers such as Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, etc. are early 21st Century examples, as are movie stars and other “celebrities.” Taylor Swift? AND, especially politicians.

While they’ve never seen our face, we see theirs regularly on TV, newscasts, movies, podcasts, in the newspapers, etc.. This results in one-way communication — them to us. Affiliation that happens as a result of such one-way communication has quite interesting side-effects – – –

During the evolution of our ancestral small-groups — 30 folks all in the same place at the same time was a large gathering — there was no writing so nearly all of their communication was face-to-face and in-the-moment. This meant that face-to-face responses were always possible and expected, even if just an acknowledgement that the previous message had arrived.

Further, except temporarily in emergencies or coordinated activities such as a hunt, there was no permanent chain-of-command or even meaningful hierarchical rank to block originations, corrections, or other responses.

Even in tribal meets, everyone who wished-to could speak or else, even in the case of a war council, co-ordinated action wasn’t going to happen. Our Native Americans carried this natural base-line mode of “open-mic” social organization to it’s logical conclusion – – –

“People [native Americans] who do not vote for an issue — whether they abstain or vote against it — often resent having to abide by it and insist that they should not be affected by the final decision since they did not themselves affirm it. A number of Indian groups — such as the Hopis here in the Southwest — are still divided over the issue of their constitution, those who voted against it or who did not participate in the constitutional election, insisting that they should not be bound by the vote of the others.” –James E. Officer, Journal of American Indian Education, Volume 3 Number 1, October 1963, INFORMAL POWER STRUCTURES WITHIN, INDIAN COMMUNITIES

This mode of social organization, depending on multi-way communication, is still practiced elsewhere as, for example, “Quaker Process,” etc.

And even some of our early American thinkers understood the logic – – –

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MSNBC, Paul Krugman Panic Over “White Rural Rage”

Posted by M. C. on March 2, 2024

Don’t forget those deplorable Christian terrorists!

By Matt Taibbi
Racket News

“Tom, I’ll start with you,” began Mika Brzezinski. “Why are rural white voters a threat to democracy at this point?”

Fastball delivered, University of Maryland professor and co-author of just-released White Rural Rage: The Threat To American Democracy Tom Schaller took a swing. He and Mika first complained rural voters should be supporting Joe Biden, given his roots — you’d have to be pretty high to call Scranton “rural,” but whatever — then Schaller read off small town America’s charge sheet: rural whites, he said, are the most “racist,” “xenophobic,” “anti-immigrant and anti-gay,” “conspiracist,” “anti-democratic,” they “don’t believe in an independent press or free speech,” and are “most likely to accept or excuse violence,” for starters.

White Rural Rage, which I made the mistake of reading,is a vicious manifesto in the anti-populist tradition nailed by Thomas Frank in The People, No. When rural voters in the late 1800s defied New York banking interests and demanded currency reform to allow farmers an escape from one of the original “rigged games” in finance, relentless propaganda ensued. Rural populists were depicted as dirty, bigoted, ignorant. They refused expert wisdom, represented a “frantic challenge against every feature of our civilization,” and waged a “shameful insurrection against law and national honesty.” A populist caricature in Judge magazine showed a violent, destructive idiot, a real-life Lennie from still-unwritten Of Mice and Men, standing over the defiled corpse of civilized America.

The theme is back, condescension multiplied. Despite a pandemic that just graphically demonstrated the social contributions of farmers, truckers, train operators, and other “essential workers,” the people working those jobs were demonized during the crisis as murderous horse-paste eaters and insurrectionists. Their chief crimes: protesting lockdowns and school closures that disproportionately affected them, and being consumers of supposed foreign-inspired “misinformation” that led them to refuse appropriate political choices offered them.

Nobel-winning columnist Paul Krugman of the New York Times spent the last year telling “ignorant” Middle America its negative feelings about the economy are “demonstrably false,” because despite what their bank accounts or home evaluations might say, “Bidenomics is still working very well.” When White Rural Rage came out this week he rushed to review it, the intransigent refusal of yokels to accept his wisdom being his favored current hobby horse. “The Mystery of Rural White Rage” is remarkable on multiple levels, one being that after spending so much energy talking about the health of the economy, he pulls out an economic version of Sam Kinison’s classic “Move to the Food!” routine:

The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated story, and imports play a role, but it’s also mainly about technological change that favors metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers. Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are?

He answers his question: “Some cities have become unaffordable… and many workers are reluctant to leave their families and communities.”

Read the Whole Article

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Know Your Enemy

Posted by M. C. on March 2, 2024

– we must not underestimate them

To the well known aphorism, “those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it,” I would like to add another phrase of my own, that perhaps more accurately describes the present – those who sleep through the past are sleepwalking into disaster.

Francis Christian

https://francischristian.substack.com/p/know-your-enemy

A remarkable disappearing act has taken place in the last thirty odd years since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Through a coordinated propaganda campaign by think tanks, legacy media, the internet and governments, the mass genocides, murders, terrors, tortures, incarcerations, disappearances, show trials, famines and multiplied miseries of Communism have been all but completely hidden from the masses.

You would think that a system that systematically and ruthlessly killed many more millions than the Nazis did and lasted for many more decades than the short, murderous rule of the third Reich would be the subject of numerous scholarly studies, retrospective news articles, actual narratives and case studies and dedicated academic departments. Clearly, this has not been the case – and there is instead a desire by the ruling classes to induce a sense of mass amnesia about the horrors of Communism. Why is this?

Francis Christian’s Essays is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Hollywood has no doubt also played its part in this game of subterfuge and omission. There have been numerous well know, moving motion pictures about the terrors of the Holocaust in which millions of Slavs, Jews, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled were killed. Lest we forget, we must remember the evils of Naziism. But can you remember the last Hollywood generated motion picture that showed you the stories of the much greater number of people that the Bolsheviks (Russian Communists) put to death in the Soviet Union during the years of Communism? Or of the gulag prison system that the Bolsheviks invented to starve, torture and imprison political and other dissidents (and the many, stirring stories of defiance in the gulag, including those by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn). Or of the millions of Christians who were persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and put to death by the Communists? For example, why has there not been a Hollywood motion picture that describes the compelling story of the Christian pastor Richard Wurmbrand (my readers can read his breathtaking, heroic, true story in the 1970s era book, “Tortured for Christ”) who endured many years of torture under Communism? Some motion pictures that tell these stories were produced privately, but not by the marketing and financial juggernaut that is Hollywood. Why is this?

The answer is actually quite simple. The ideological descendants of the same people behind the murderous Bolshevik Communist regime that brought unspeakable suffering to millions of Russians and Eastern Europeans (before engulfing China and SE Asia in a similar convulsion), are in charge of our Western Governments and institutions today. The same players, the same playbook, the same international goals. They don’t want you to know of the connection of course – because if you do, the similarities are so stark that you will take notice and be enraged. The Bolsheviks/Communists of today are just as determined, just as ruthless, just as efficient and likely much more powerful than their Soviet ancestors. We ignore them at our peril.

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Are All The Foreign Policy ‘Experts’ Secretly Putin Puppets?

Posted by M. C. on March 1, 2024

The Ron Paul Liberty Report

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Pentagon Chief: If Ukraine Is Defeated, NATO Will Be At War With Russia

Posted by M. C. on March 1, 2024

This is the single most important, dangerous and highly revealing statement from a top defense official in the West in a long time…

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/pentagon-chief-if-ukraine-defeated-war-nato-will-be-war-russia

Tyler Durden's Photo

by Tyler Durden

This is the single most important, dangerous and highly revealing statement from a top defense official in the West in a long time… It also demonstrates the precarious urgency of the moment and the huge stakes going into the November US election. The world truly stands on the precipice of a nuclear nightmare with the following fresh assertion of Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who said before Congress on Thursday: 

“If Ukraine falls, I really believe that NATO will be in a fight with Russia,” Austin stated.

What’s more is that this came the very day that Russian President Vladimir Putin warned things could easily spiral toward nuclear war in the scenario that NATO sends troops to Ukraine. Watch:

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says if Ukraine falls he really believes NATO will be in a fight with Russia pic.twitter.com/lmOimGsSAH — Sputnik (@SputnikInt) February 29, 2024

According to the fuller context of the Pentagon chief’s statements, he emphasized that more Washington funding is crucial for Ukraine in order to prevent a situation where “one country can redraw its neighbors’ boundaries and illegitimately take over its sovereign territory.”

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Biden Walks Back Prediction That a Gaza Ceasefire Will Be Reached By Monday

Posted by M. C. on March 1, 2024

Netanyahu again called Hamas’s demands ‘delusional,’ signaling a hostage deal is not close

“Hope” is the best Biden can come up with? Shows to go ya whom is running the show.

by Dave DeCamp

antiwar.com

President Biden on Thursday walked back a prediction he made earlier this week that a ceasefire in Gaza could be reached by Monday as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Hamas’s demands “delusional,” signaling a hostage deal is not close.

“Hope springs eternal,” Biden told reporters when asked if he still thought a ceasefire by Monday was possible. “I was on the telephone with the people in the region.  I’m still — probably not by Monday, but I’m hopeful.”

When Biden first predicted a ceasefire by Monday, both Hamas and Israeli officials said he spoke too soon. Hamas officials have said the main gap between the two sides is that they want a permanent ceasefire, while Israel and the US only want to pause the slaughter of Palestinians.

In Tel Aviv on Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu placed all the blame for the lack of a deal on Hamas. “We face a brick wall of delusional, unrealistic Hamas demands,” Netanyahu said, adding that Hamas “knows its demands are delusional and is not even trying to move close to an area of agreement. That’s the situation.”

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