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Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

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Nikki Haley Was Right

Posted by M. C. on January 11, 2024

Abraham Lincoln was a proponent of colonization (funding the removal of freed African Americans to Africa or the Caribbean) from sometime in the 1840s until, though we cannot be certain but most likely, the end of his life. He became a member of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1856. Colonization was a staple of Lincoln’s speeches and public comments from 1854 onwards.

By Kirkpatrick Sale

Nikki Haley was right, poor soul. The “Civil War” was not about slavery, until Lincoln in his Gettysburg address tried to make it so.

Why not believe Lincoln in his first Inaugural Address in 1861, where he says that he had “no right…and no inclination” to end slavery”—in fact he supported an amendment passed by Congress in 1861 that said the  Federal government should never have “the power to abolish or interfere” with slavery where it existed.  His only interest was in making sure the country stayed whole and undivided, and seeing that “the Union of these states is perpetual” and “no state can lawfully secede.”

Shortly after, Lincoln’s army invaded the South, and not a man among its ranks thought that his purpose was ending slavery.

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Why Do Those Who Are Losing Wars Attempt To Escalate Even Greater Wars?

Posted by M. C. on January 11, 2024

The Ron Paul Liberty Report

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Doug Casey on De-Banking, Financial Censorship, and a Social Credit System

Posted by M. C. on January 11, 2024

Doug Casey: The economy is mutating before our very eyes. The whole world is overfinancialized—which means there’s an overwhelming amount of trading and leverage in every kind of stock, bond, property, commodity, derivative, and bitcoin. Huge numbers of people are gambling, using options instead of roulette wheels.

Doug Casey: We already have our own unofficial variety of the Chinese social credit system. They’re called credit scores, computed by outfits like Equifax. Younger people actually like to compare their credit scores, seeing them as signs of approval from the society at large. I know it’s a shocking concept, but you don’t really need a credit score if you pay cash for everything. Stay off the debt treadmill. You don’t have to be a good “consumer.”

by Doug Casey

De-Banking, Financial Censorship

International Man: Since 2020, we’ve seen measures aimed at censoring and de-platforming voices that challenge the mainstream agenda.

Dr. Joseph Mercola has been targeted as a misinformation spreader and deplatformed. Nigel Farage has been de-banked because of his political views.

What’s your take on this trend of hyper-politicization of everything?

Doug Casey: It seems that most everything has been hyper-politicized. But it’s worse than that. There’s a more fundamental problem. The basic philosophical and psychological underpinnings of society have been so poisoned that everybody thinks in terms of politics—which is to say, they think the government should be used to coerce society.

You can’t easily cure the disease of hyper-politicization. The people who control academia, major corporations, the media, and the entertainment industry, among other things, actually hate the values of Western Civilization. Worse, these people control the apparatus of the State and use laws and regulations to enforce their views.

DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) is just the most recent manifestation of the sickness infecting the West. Everybody is viewed as either the oppressor or the oppressed, an essentially Marxist view that amplifies the intrinsically corrosive nature of politics.

As long as the State exists, you’re either the ruler or the ruled. That’s why I “identify,” to use a currently fashionable word, as an AnCap or anarcho-capitalist.

Artificial concepts like “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and “microaggressions” have only come up in the last decade, but they’re now everywhere. They’re hard to wash away because they aren’t just pseudointellectual fads but signs of psychological derangement—or spiritual sickness. The syndrome can be termed “Wokism.”

Although the Wokesters are happy to pass laws, they’re finding laws aren’t really necessary to destroy their enemies. Just make it impossible for them to live normal lives. If they can’t use banks, can’t express themselves, or gain employment, they can be transformed into nonpersons.

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No Border – Say Goodbye to America

Posted by M. C. on January 9, 2024

A contentious point of view with some Libertarians

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/no_border__say_goodbye_to_america.html

By Brian C. Joondeph

Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman scolded the Wall Street Journal for cheerleading an open-border immigration policy. “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state,” he warned.

This leads to a “transfer state,” as the Heritage Foundation describes, the government taxing the upper and middle classes, transferring money to lower economic classes via subsidies and benefits.

In other words, “The transfer state redistributes funds from those with high-skill and high-income levels to those with lower skill levels.”

Heritage makes the assumption, “It takes the entire net tax payments (taxes paid minus benefits received) of one college-educated family to pay for the net benefits received by one low-skill immigrant family.”

What happens when that ratio changes to one financially sound family supporting not one, but two, three, or more families through ever-increasing taxes and families to support?

Which is why a welfare state in an open-borders country will eventually reaching a tipping point. Are we already there?

As reported by Fox News’s Griff Jenkins, “Encounters with illegal immigrants at the southern border have topped over 300,000 in December.” Do the math. That’s 3.6 million per year, more than the population of every U.S. city except Los Angeles and New York.

How many migrants are not encountered? Those are called “gotaways” and Border Patrol estimates 1,000 per day, or 365,000 per year. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledges, “600,000 illegal ‘gotaways’ crossed border in 2023, calls immigration system broken.”

These are estimates. But the real number is unknowable. Let’s say a million gotaways a year, making the total 4.6 million migrants a year, more than the population of L.A. added to America each and every year.

As most migrants are unskilled, unable to speak English, many illiterate and unemployable, they are by necessity, supported by American taxpayers for food, shelter, education, travel, health care, and clothing.

What does that cost? “NYC’s daily per-person cost to house migrants climbs to nearly $400.” What about health care? California plans to provide free health care insurance to all illegal migrants, at an annual cost of about $4,000 for each adult.

According to Judicial Watch the “Net cost of illegal immigration is greater than the annual gross domestic product (GDP) of 15 different states.”

Clearly this is not sustainable. U.S. national debt recently topped $34 trillion. With the current interest rate on the debt at about 3 percent, interest on the debt is more than $1 trillion per year. Interest alone consumes about a quarter of the $4.4 trillion in annual federal receipts, more than defense spending.

We will be borrowing money to pay the interest on previously borrowed money. Economist Herbert Stein observed, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop“.

The something is America as we know it.

There is no interest in securing our national border. In a hyper-partisan Washington, D.C., this is one of few examples where Republicans and Democrats actually agree.

Democrats want new voters. Their policies and leaders are not so popular these days. Some 63 percent of likely U.S. voters think the U.S. is heading in the wrong direction, according to Rasmussen Reports. Only 24 percent of voters strongly approve of the job President Biden is doing.

Creating a new dependency class of tens of millions of potential voters serves Democrat electoral interests. Republicans don’t mind ceding power to the Democrats as long as their wallets are thick with cash.

Open borders provide cheap labor for the Chamber of Commerce Republican establishment. GOP lawmakers are rewarded with generous campaign contributions and other financial perks in exchange for looking the other way from an open border.

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson visited the U.S.-Mexican border with a gaggle of Republicans, huffing and puffing about what a “catastrophe” exists at the border. So what? Lots of talk but no action.

Going back to his predecessor Paul Ryan, Republicans have fought Trump on building a border wall and applied no pressure on Biden to secure the border. They could defund any responsible agencies including Homeland Security and Customs and Border Enforcement until the border was secure,

They will probably vote to reward DHS with a new building, rather than holding them accountable, as they did with the weaponized and corrupt FBI. The DHS secretary, rather than securing the homeland per his job description, blames climate change rather than his inaction and incompetence.

The power of the purse and impeachment are unknown or enigmatic concepts to Congressional Republicans. Instead, the Republican Speaker is “advocating” for solutions. What a tough guy he is.

Financial ramifications are a fraction of the problem. What about the fact that there are millions of young, military aged men, from all over the world, including countries not friendly to U.S. interests, unvetted, with unknown backgrounds or intentions, now in this country?

How many are, as Trump would describe, “bad hombres”? Intent on crime or terrorism? The number of Chinese migrants crossing into America has risen dramatically.

If 4 million to 5 million migrants come to America each year, and 10 percent are troublemakers, that’s 450,000, the same size as the active duty U.S. Army.

Our enemies would not need to attack us from the outside, their militaries may already be embedded in America.

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Tony Blinken Is A Cold-Blooded Sociopath

Posted by M. C. on January 9, 2024

I mean, can you believe the gall of this freak? As though his own administration wasn’t responsible for most of those killings. As though Israel has not spent the last three months directing wildly disproportionate firepower at the places it knows journalists are hiding

Caitlin Johnstone

https://substack.com/inbox/post/140464817

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken just referred to the US-sponsored assassination of yet another journalist in Gaza as a “terrible tragedy”, as though the reporter was struck by lightning or died in a car crash or something.

Speaking at a press conference in Qatar on Sunday, Blinken was asked to comment on the murder of Al Jazeera journalist Hamza Dahdouh, who was killed in Gaza by an Israeli airstrike on a car has was traveling in with two other journalists, one of whom also died. Hamza Dahdouh was the eldest son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, whose wife, son, daughter and baby grandson were murdered in another Israeli airstrike in late October.

In response to an Al Jazeera reporter’s question about whether the United States condemns the murder of innocent journalists, Blinken replied as follows:

“I am deeply, deeply sorry for the almost unimaginable loss suffered by your colleague Wael al-Dahdouh. I am a parent myself. I can’t begin to imagine the horror that he’s experienced, not once, but now twice. This is an unimaginable tragedy, and that’s also been the case for, as I said, far too many innocent Palestinian men, women, and children — civilians, also journalists, Palestinian and other.”

Blinken went on to acknowledge the scores of journalists who have been killed in Gaza, saying that this shows the need to get humanitarian aid into the enclave and achieve a lasting peace. What Blinken did not do is issue anything resembling a condemnation of Israel and the clear and demonstrable fact that it has been highly focused on the task of murdering journalists in Gaza. He just offered his deepest condolences for Dahdouh’s death, framed it as a passive “tragedy” instead of an active assassination using highly sophisticated military technology under the sponsorship and support of the United States, and moved on.

It’s hard to say who’s worse, the far-right Israelis who openly revel in the butchery they are inflicting in Gaza, or the liberal Americans who directly sponsor that butchery and then look you dead in the eye and tell you how deeply, sincerely sorry they are to hear that another person in Gaza has died in a tragic accident.

Blinken is always doing sociopathic stuff like this. Late last month he tweeted, “This has been an extraordinarily dangerous year for press around the world. Many killed, many more wounded, hundreds detained, attacked, threatened, injured — simply for doing their jobs. I am profoundly grateful to the press for getting accurate, timely information to people.”

I mean, can you believe the gall of this freak? As though his own administration wasn’t responsible for most of those killings. As though Israel has not spent the last three months directing wildly disproportionate firepower at the places it knows journalists are hiding

He’s standing there on top of a pile of corpses while mournfully shaking his head about their tragic unfortunate deaths.

There’s something about the job of US secretary of state that appears to require a significant level of sociopathy. From war criminal Henry Kissinger to Madeleine “We think the price was worth it” Albright to Mike “We lied, we cheated, we stole” Pompeo, the absolute worst person in any given presidential administration is very often the head of the State Department. A severe personality disorder is practically in the job description.

This is because while the secretary of state is officially the head of US diplomacy, “diplomacy” for the US empire looks a whole lot different from what it looks like for normal countries. US “diplomacy”, in practice, typically looks like going from country to country negotiating for international alignment behind wars, starvation sanctions, proxy conflicts and western-backed uprisings. In theory the State Department should be the department of peace, but in practice it’s just a subtler, sneakier military department.

Nothing epitomizes the depraved manipulations of the US empire better than Antony Blinken. There is no better representation of that empire than Tony standing there on his mountain of corpses, covered in blood, telling you how sorry he is to learn of the unfortunate accidental deaths of the people he just murdered, staring at you with his cold dead eyes, playing remarkably soulless blues guitar under the light of a bright red moon.

_____________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Walter Block: Hats Off To Oregon

Posted by M. C. on January 9, 2024

Under alcohol prohibition, there were deaths due to gangs fighting each other for turf. No such occurrences take place under legalization. Do we really want to go the Mexican route, where drug gangs are so powerful? Oregon, and Oregon alone, is showing the path out of that particular morass.

By Walter E. Block

Many states have legalized marijuana, not just for medical purposes. They have also done so for entertainment, and hats off to them too. The government, nor anyone else, simply has no business prohibiting adults from imbibing whatever drugs they wish into their own bodies.

Prohibition, whether of alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, or any other drug for that matter, is profoundly incompatible with the ideals of democracy (not that this system is any great shakes either, but that is an entirely different matter). Such laws are in effect stating that adults are too stupid to know what kind of substances to imbibe. But if they are that foolish, it would be a disaster, would it not, to allow them within a million miles of a voting booth. On the other hand, they are indeed allowed to cast a ballot. Those morons? The critics simply cannot have it both ways. Either the citizenry are idiots and ought to be prohibited from certain drugs, in which case they should not be allowed to vote, or, if they are, then they ought to be trusted and not be treated like children when it comes to drugs. Paternalism is fine and dandy for kids, but certainly not for adults, at least not according to the democratic ethos.

So, yes, congratulations to the many states that have legalized pot for medicinal or entertainment or any other purpose.

But Oregon deserves special congratulation in this regard. It has employed this libertarian doctrine of freedom not only to cannabis, but to other, possibly more addictive drugs as well, including small amounts of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine. However, the Beaver state now finds itself under attack for its civilized legal system.

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The Case of the Disappearing Defense Secretary

Posted by M. C. on January 9, 2024

Biden may not have been informed where Austin was but I bet Raytheon knew.

The Ron Paul Liberty Report

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I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

Posted by M. C. on January 8, 2024

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The Great John Pilger

Posted by M. C. on January 8, 2024

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

“The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism’, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.

The world suffered a great loss when the Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger died December 30 at the age of 84. One fact stands out foremost in his decades-long career as a writer and intellectual: He opposed war and fascism. He thought that the United States and Britain all too often supported war and fascism, and he often had occasion to criticize other intellectuals as lackeys of the state, in a way that will remind readers of LRC of Murray Rothbard’s similar attacks on “court historians.”

To be against fascism, we have to be able to identify the fascists properly. Pilger argues that in the war between Russia and the Ukraine, those who condemn Putin as a “fascist” have matters backwards. It is the Ukrainian leadership who are the real fascists:

“The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism’, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.

Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.

In 2014, neo Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being ‘pro-Moscow’. The coup regime included prominent ‘extreme nationalists’ — Nazis in all but name.

At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the ‘white supremacist militias’ active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.’ The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.

Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the ‘Wolfsangel’, was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas region. According to the United Nations 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.

This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a ‘Putin apologist’, regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a Nato-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.

Journalists who travelled to the Donbas were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.” See here.

We need to ask ourselves a question about war. Why is it bad? The answer is obvious. It causes an enormous amount of death, injury, and suffering. We see this happening in the war between Israel and Hamas. Millions of Palestinian have been displaced while Gaza has been bombed to smithereens, and the death toll continues to mount. John Pilger strongly supported Palestinian rights, which earned him the obloquy of pro-Israel lobby:

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“US Foreign Policy Is a Scam Built on Corruption”

Posted by M. C. on January 8, 2024

Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs reminds us that war is a racket.

Major General Smedley Darlington Butler was, at the time of his death in 1940, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. During his 34-year career, he fought in the Philippine–American War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Mexican Revolution, and World War I.

However, at some point after World War I, he began to have grave doubts about his profession. Over time, with study and reflection, he concluded that he had NOT spent his life fighting and killing for the American people, but for special interests in New York City and Washington.

As he memorably stated it in his 1935 book, War is a Racket:

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

Though war is indeed profitable for the financiers and industrialists who champion it, it is invariably a disaster for a free citizenry. As James Madison remarked in a 1795 pamphlet:

Of all the evils to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops every other. War is the patent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes, are the known instruments for bringing the many under the dominion of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people! No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

I thought of Butler and Madison this morning when a friend in Boston sent me an essay by Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs that begins as follows:

US Foreign Policy Is a Scam Built on Corruption

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