When I joined the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves, and later the Idaho Army National Guard, I signed up to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution and our Bill of Rights—not Taipei.
Are you ready to go to war to “protect” a place, thousands of miles away from our nation, which we have no treaty alliance with and no overriding national interest?
I’m not talking about Ukraine, even though we continue to pump that country full of billions of dollars in weapons and supplies in a proxy war against Russia.
I’m talking about Taiwan, located off the coast of China in the Pacific Ocean.
Joe Biden just promised to defend it with the full military might of the United States.
When I joined the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves, and later the Idaho Army National Guard, I signed up to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution and our Bill of Rights—not Taipei.
Here’s the story.
After the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949, and Chairman Mao consolidated the rule of the Communist Party in Beijing, a small collection of anti-communists flew the coop and established themselves on the island of Formosa, about 100 miles from the mainland.
That’s where they’ve been ever since, developing from a military dictatorship to a parliamentary democracy with two major parties. One wants closer integration with Beijing, the other wants full independence.
Both Taipei and Beijing claim to be the legitimate government of all of China.
In the 1970s, our government normalized relations with the Chinese mainland, and de-recognized the “Republic of China” in Taiwan, severing diplomatic relations and abrogating a defense pact.
For over 40 years since then our foreign policy has been guided by “strategic ambiguity.”
Over time, repeated referenced to “the dual mandate” were really just calls for continued activist monetary policy and even for the wildly experimental “unconventional monetary policy” employed after 2008.
In recent years, Congress has attempted to add various new mandates to the Federal Reserve’s mission. In 2020, Democrats introduced the “Federal Reserve Racial and Economic Equity Act.” Then, in 2021, pundits and politicians were telling us that it’s the Fed’s job to “combat climate change.” These are just the latest efforts to use the enormously powerful central bank to achieve political ends to the liking of elected officials.
This is a helpful reminder, of course, that the Fed is not independent from politics. The Federal Reserve has never been politically independent, and it certainly isn’t so now. Fed independence is a fairy tale academic economists like to tell their students. The debate over new mandates has also highlighted the fact the Fed already has no fewer than three mandates explicitly written into law: moderate long term interest rates, maximum employment, and stable prices.
In practice, however, the Fed has only two mandates because the Fed is so limited in what it can do to target long term interest rates in a global marketplace. This has led to what is now a de facto “dual mandate.”
This dual mandate is now all about maximizing employment while also maintaining “stable prices.” What this all means is never precisely spelled out in policy or law. It also changes over time. zero-percent CPI inflation was once the goal. Now the goal is the arbitrary two-percent standard. Similarly, what is meant by “maximum employment” is subject to the arbitrary definition of “full employment.”
In any case, it has been the view of central bankers for decades that one of the easiest ways to “maximize” employment is to embrace accommodative monetary policy. This, however, works counter to the mandate of stable prices by inflating the money supply. This leads to price inflation in the medium to long term.
So, the two mandates are essentially at odds. So which half of the mandate to focus on or emphasize? That’s up to the Fed.
In practice, however, experience suggests that the Fed tends strongly toward embracing the “maximum employment” side of the equation. Time and time again, central bankers have chosen to downplay the stable-prices mandate and embrace expansive monetary policy.
How the Fed Favors Maximum Employment
As a de facto instrument of the federal government, Federal Reserve policy tends to focus on what the federal government focuses on. So, the Fed was moved in the direction of greater focus on employment with the passage of the Employment Act of 1946. The Act stated:
The Congress hereby declares that it is the continuing policy and responsibility of the federal government to use all practicable means consistent with its needs and obligations and other essential considerations of national policy with the assistance and cooperation of industry, agriculture, labor, and state and local governments, to coordinate and utilize all its plans, functions, and resources for the purpose of creating and maintaining, in a manner calculated to foster and promote free and competitive enterprise and the general welfare, conditions under which there will be afforded useful employment for those able, willing, and seeking work, and to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power.
Although highly controversial at the time, the belief that the federal government ought to intervene to maximize employment—whether through fiscal or monetary policy—became well accepted over time. In terms of Fed policy following the adoption of the act, Allan Meltzer—author of a huge history of the Federal Reserve—concludes that “Interpretations of the 1946 Employment Act usually emphasized primacy of full employment.” In other words, the bias was in favor of easy money and intervention designed to stimulate the economy so as to ensure higher employment numbers.
A perfect example of how this rhetoric works comes from the Bank of Japan’s Governor Haruhiko Kuroda in July. As the yen was really starting to slide against the dollar, he opined that “This is not so much a yen weakness as a dollar strength.” Kuroda said these words after years of negative rates, and right after the BOJ had doubled down on buying up “vast quantities of bonds” to force down interest rates and borrowing costs. Kuroda’s words also came weeks after the Swiss National Bank raised interest rates for the first time in 15 years.
On February 8, the Japanese yen fell to a 24-year low against the dollar, dropping to 143 yen per dollar. Not much has changed since then with the yen hovering between 142 and 144 per dollar. In September of 2021, one only needed 109 yen to buy a dollar.
The yen is sliding the most among the world’s major currencies, but it’s not alone. Over the past year, the euro has fallen 14 percent against the dollar while the pound has fallen 13 percent. Even the Chinese yuan, which is subject to even more currency manipulation than the West’s central banks, has fallen against the dollar.
All of this means is we’re hearing a lot about the supposedly “strong dollar,” but not in a good way. Rather, the reputedly strong dollar is being discussed in a context of how harmful it is, and how we must explore ways to make the dollar weaker as soon as politically feasible.
Such talk must be heartily opposed, of course, as the dollar is not “too strong,” Rather, talk of the dollar’s “strength” is not really about the dollar at all. It’s about the weakness of other currencies and it’s about how other central banks have embraced monetary policy that’s even worse than that of the US’s Fed. If, say, other national governments and central banks are concerned about the dollar being too strong, those institutions are welcome to embrace policies that will strengthen their own currencies.
Instead, we’ll hear about how the Fed must “do something” to weaken the dollar through more easy money and thus stick it to Americans who hold dollars by lessening their purchasing power.
“We Didn’t Inflate Currency X Too Much, it’s All the Dollar’s Fault”
A perfect example of how this rhetoric works comes from the Bank of Japan’s Governor Haruhiko Kuroda in July. As the yen was really starting to slide against the dollar, he opined that “This is not so much a yen weakness as a dollar strength.” Kuroda said these words after years of negative rates, and right after the BOJ had doubled down on buying up “vast quantities of bonds” to force down interest rates and borrowing costs. Kuroda’s words also came weeks after the Swiss National Bank raised interest rates for the first time in 15 years. That was just one more example of how dovish the ECB was compared to other banks, and yet, Kuroda then manages to say with a straight face that this is all about the dollar.
This is the sort of talk we should learn to expect on the “strong dollar.” The central banks who are devaluing their currency, aren’t to blame, you see. It’s the dollar’s fault.
Other critiques of the strong are less explicit on this last point and are more just in the business of priming the pump to convince us all that a relatively less-weak dollar is a bad thing.
Blaming a “Strong” Dollar Rather than Weak, Inflated Currencies
On March 5, Ukraine’s Putsch “Prime Minister” Arseniy Yatsenyuk, arbitrarily sacked three senior Defence Ministry politicians, Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Oleynik, with Deputy Defense Ministers Vladimir Mozharovskiy and Arturo Francisco Babenko.
According to Itar-Tass (6th March 2014) they had drawn Yatsenyuk’s ire by expressing:
“sharp criticism over giving the Right Sector militants the status of regular military units.”
A contact of the publication stated that one of the three had also:
“told Yatsenyuk that actions of today’s Kiev authorities in overtures with radical nationalist organizations would destroy national unity” and that it was simply: “harmful to involve the state military agency in such dangerous games.” Their stand resulted in “management reshuffles” – in the country in which Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland has stated that the US has invested $5 Billion: “in the development of democratic institutions and skills in promoting civil society and a good form of government.”(1)
So far US multi-billion democracy-building via the man of whom Nuland opined to the US Ambassador to the Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt: “I think Yats is the guy …”(2) has all the hallmarks of becoming a mirror of the historic tragedies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and being plotted via further humanitarian horrors committed by their proxies in Syria.
Additionally the Nobel Peace Laureate American President appears to have reignited the Cold War, laid to rest with such joy across the world as the Berlin Wall fell just over twenty four years ago, on the 9th November 1989.
However, if the US Administration’s choice as a democratic Prime Minister is scarily woeful, the man who would be President, Dmitry Yarosh, is nothing short of astonishing. As Julie Levesque has written in a meticulous, jaw dropping article: “Dmitry Yarosh, leader of the Maidan Brown Shirts (is) on an international wanted list and charged with inciting terrorism.
“Under the new government, Yarosh is leader of the Neo-Nazi Right Sector delegation to the Ukraine Parliament. His close friend and political partner Andriy Parubiy co-founder of the Neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine (subsequently renamed Svoboda) was appointed by the new government to the position of Secretary of the National Security and National Defense Committee (RNBOU), a key position which overseas the Ministry of Defense, the Armed Forces, Law Enforcement, National Security and Intelligence. Right Sektor leaders Yarosh was appointed to the number two position at RNBOU.”
Levesque asks: “Have the Neo-Nazis cornered Ukraine’s National Security agenda?”.
The answer would appear to be a rapidly accelerating affirmative, with Robert Parry stating that Neo-Nazis are now in charge of four Ministries and:
HUXLEY: I should say that there are two main impersonal forces, er…the first of them is not exceedingly important in the United States at the present time, though very important in other countries. This is the force which in general terms can be called overpopulation, the mounting pressure of population pressing upon existing resources.
Great interview by Wallace. His son is sub-optimal relative to him. FOX was right to fire him but FOX too should be fired over the lies it shilled during the pandemic e.g. pushing the fraud dangerous COVID gene injections.
THE MIKE WALLACE INTERVIEW Guest: Aldous Huxley 5/18/58
WALLACE: This is Aldous Huxley, a man haunted by a vision of hell on earth. A searing social critic, Mr. Huxley 27 years ago, wrote Brave New World, a novel that predicted that some day the entire world would live under a frightful dictatorship. Today Mr. Huxley says that his fictional world of horror is probably just around the corner for all of us. We’ll find out why, in a moment.
(OPENING CREDITS)
WALLACE: Good evening, I’m Mike Wallace. Tonight’s guest, Aldous Huxley, is a man of letters, as disturbing as he is distinguished. Born in England, now a resident of California, Mr. Huxley has written some of the most electric novels and social criticism of this century.
He’s just finished a series of essays called “Enemies of Freedom,” in which he outlines and defines some of the threats to our freedom in the United States; and Mr. Huxley, right of the bat, let me ask you this: as you see it, who and what are the enemies of freedom here in the United States?
HUXLEY: Well, I don’t think you can say who in the United States, I don’t think there are any sinister persons deliberately trying to rob people of their freedom, but I do think, first of all, that there are a number of impersonal forces which are pushing in the direction of less and less freedom, and I also think that there are a number of technological devices which anybody who wishes to use can use to accelerate this process of going away from freedom, of imposing control.
WALLACE: Well, what are these forces and these devices, Mr. Huxley?
HUXLEY: I should say that there are two main impersonal forces, er…the first of them is not exceedingly important in the United States at the present time, though very important in other countries. This is the force which in general terms can be called overpopulation, the mounting pressure of population pressing upon existing resources.
WALLACE: Uh-huh.
HUXLEY: Uh…this, of course, is an extraordinary thing; something is happening which has never happened in the world’s history before, I mean, let’s just take a simple fact that between the time of birth of Christ and the landing of the May Flower, the population of the earth doubled. It rose from two hundred and fifty million to probably five hundred million. Today, the population of the earth is rising at such a rate that it will double in half a century.
WALLACE: Well, why should overpopulation work to diminish our freedoms?
HUXLEY: Well, in a number of ways. I mean, the…the experts in the field like Harrison Brown, for example, pointed out that in the underdeveloped countries actually the standard of living is at present falling. The people have less to eat and less goods per capita than they had fifty years ago;
and as the position of these countries, the economic position, becomes more and more precarious, obviously the central government has to take over more and more responsibility for keeping the ship-of-state on an even keel, and then of course you are likely to get social unrest under such conditions, with again an intervention of the central government.
So that, I think that one sees here a pattern which seems to be pushing very strongly towards a totalitarian regime. And unfortunately, as in all these underdeveloped countries the only highly organized political party is the Communist Party, it looks rather as though they will be the heirs to this unfortunate process, that they will step into the power…the position of power.
WALLACE: Well then, ironically enough one of the greatest forces against communism in the world, the Catholic Church, according to your thesis would seem to be pushing us directly into the hands of the communists because they are against birth control.
HUXLEY: Well, I think this strange paradox probably is true. There is, er…, it’s an extraordinary situation actually. I mean, one has to look at it, of course, from a biological point of view: the whole essence of biological life on earth is a question of balance and what we’ve done is to practice death control in the most intensive manner without balancing this with birth control at the other end. Consequently, the birth rates remain as high as they were and death rates have fallen substantially. (COUGHS)
WALLACE: All right then, so much, for the time being anyway, for overpopulation. Another force that is diminishing our freedoms?
HUXLEY: Well another force which I think is very strongly operative in this country is the force of what may be called of overorganization. Er…As technology becomes more and more complicated, it becomes necessary to have more and more elaborate organizations, more hierarchical organizations, and incidentally the advance of technology is being accompanied by an advance in the science of organization.
It’s now possible to make organizations on a larger scale than it was ever possible before, and so that you have more and more people living their lives out as subordinates in these hierarchical systems controlled by bureaucracy, either the bureaucracies of big businesses or the bureaucracies of big government.
WALLACE: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Now the devices that you were talking about, are there specific devices or er…methods of communication which diminish our freedoms in addition to overpopulation and overorganization?
HUXLEY: Well, there are certainly devices which can be used in this way. I mean, let us er…take after all, a piece of very recent and very painful history is the propaganda used by Hitler, which was incredibly effective.
I mean, what were Hitler’s methods? Hitler used terror on the one kind, brute force on the one hand, but he also used a very efficient form of propaganda, which er…he was using every modern device at that time. He didn’t have TV., but he had the radio which he used to the fullest extent, and was able to impose his will on an immense mass of people. I mean, the Germans were a highly educated people.
What if I told you that the World Economic Forum’s climate agenda is to stop economic growth, and shut down many industries, which would be accomplished by having a WEF-designed artificial intelligence systemdecide which industries are to be liquidated? And that the WEF expects working people to be paying money to the masses of economically displaced people, to induce them not to work?
You would probably laugh at me, call me a crazy person, and refuse to even consider that seriously. That story could not possibly be true! An important global organization cannot propose such an absurdity! What a stupid conspiracy theory, probably invented by some weirdo who is living under a rock!
If that is your reaction, you are a perfectly normal person, as no well-adjusted individual would ever come up with such nonsensical proposals. Even I, if I heard something like that from a random individual I just met, would probably just dismiss such things as crazy talk.
All good, but this very proposal is the central part of the WEF’s agenda, proudly featured on its homepage. I did not come up with anything it did not actually say!
I discussed their “can the economy grow forever” proposal in a separate article of mine. Check it out.
We need to liquidate entire industries to meet our climate goals
To decide which industries to shut down, we need to use WEF-selected Artificial Intelligence to make the decisions
We need to pay displaced people NOT to work
Does this sound totally bonkers? Not sure about you, but it does sound insane to me. And yet, it is all there in the WEF-endorsed video, and the article is prominently featured on the WEF home page. I did not invent anything, I just understood the article and retold its meaning in plain language.
There is no “conspiracy theory” concocted here, and everything was obtained by simply reviewing ONE WEF agenda article and its attached video.
Eugyppius was my first Substack subscription and I always love to read his writings. He, quite correctly, notes the vacuity, or emptiness, of the language used by Klaus Schwab in his book. He notes the seeming pointlessness of the endless passages in it.
These are brief statements that are so tautological, banal or bizarre that they ought to embarrass any author.
Eugyppius’ conclusion, which I respect but cannot agree with in relation to the article we are reviewing today, is that
The Davos crowd see themselves as post-ideological, technocratic problem-solvers, but it’s impossible to deny that some kind of abstruse, malformed ideological system pervades Schwab’s work. It might be too ungainly and broken to acknowledge or defend, and it’s remarkably hard to describe, but it’s there. Postwar optimism and the generations of uninterrupted technological progress that followed, encouraged some people to believe that we were on the verge of a new world, one where a utopian global order would supplant both nation states and corporations, ushering in a post-capitalist, post-nationalist era, where all our most pressing problems would be solved. Yet the nations states stayed around, for-profit businesses are still here, and technological progress has stalled. What remains is a lot of jargon and vacuity, signifying nothing.
Is themost powerful supranational organization, whose Young Leaders lead governments of many important countries, states, or territories, or collectively own and manage trillions of dollars, simply a nonsense production factory? Are their messages “signifying nothing”? Why does the WEF exist, then? To blather nonsense? Do people gather in Davos for nothing but vacuous press releases?
Or is there something important hidden behind the seeming lack of understandable intent?
Is there a possibility that important, world-changing ideas are wrapped in layers of feel-good, patronizing, virtue-signaling words, intentionally strung together into endless, hard-to-understand sentences?
My answer is: the WEF purposely makes their proposals to be difficult for ordinary people to comprehend. To a person reading without paying close attention, their writings appear to be feel-good generalities writtenwithout a purpose — and yet when understood fully, they contain radical proposals that would upend the most basic foundations of our Western societies.
When reading the “WEF Agenda” articles, such as “can the economy grow forever” article, I was struck by the verbosity, meaninglessness, empty generality, and vacuity of the language, just like eugyppius was.
In an interview full of shocking statements, President Biden told 60 Minutes last night that the Covid pandemic is now over. It may sound good this close to the election, but such an announcement has enormous implications for those still being fired and harassed. Also today: blockbuster NY Post article claims Facebook spied on (conservative) users PRIVATE msgs and sent them to the FBI.
This Taiwan situation is getting uglier and uglier, much faster than many expected, and the president of the world’s mightiest war machine is either two stupid, too bloodthirsty, too careless or too demented to navigate this situation with the sensitivity it deserves. Things never should have been allowed to get this far, and the US empire is showing us every indication that it intends to take things much, much further.
The president of the United States has once again committed the US military to direct hot war with China in the event of an attack on Taiwan, a commitment that was once again walked back by his White House handlers.
In a recent 60 Minutes interview, Biden was asked point-blank by CBS News’ Scott Pelley if US forces would defend Taiwan from an attack by the mainland.
“Yes, if in fact there was an unprecedented attack,” Biden said.
“After our interview a White House official told us US policy has not changed,” Pelly narrates after the comment. “Officially, the U.S. will not say whether American forces would defend Taiwan. But the commander-in-chief had a view of his own.”
“So unlike Ukraine, to be clear, sir, US Forces, US men and women would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion?” Pelley asked.
This is by my count the fourth time the US president has made such remarks in transgression of his government’s standing policy of “strategic ambiguity” on this issue only to have them walked back by administration staff.
With well over a billion monthly views, Britain’s populist and pugnacious Daily Mail is one of the world’s most widely-read newspapers on the Internet, having twice the traffic of the Washington Post and five times that of the Wall Street Journal, even sometimes approaching the readership of the New York Times. The publication has stayed true to its original tabloid roots and its success comes from its willingness to wholeheartedly jump on those controversial stories that other outlets avoid.
Meanwhile, the British Lancet is located at the opposite end of the spectrum of respectability, being one of the world’s most prestigious and authoritative medical journals, as sober and responsible as any publication in existence.
So very early last Thursday morning the world witnessed a bizarre “Clash of the Titans” style controversy as an explosive headline in the Daily Mail denounced the Lancet for supposedly indulging in sensationalism.
Surely many millions saw that headline and reacted with shock—at least that fraction of the typical Daily Mail readership that had ever heard of the Lancet.
More than two years ago the Lancet had established the Covid Commission, tasked with investigating all aspects of the worldwide disease outbreak that was already beginning to claim millions of lives. As might be expected, the panel was heavily stocked with the “Great and the Good” of global public health policy, as reflected in its chairman Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, a pillar of the academic establishment who had twice been named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Then last week the Covid Commission report was finally been released, prompting that immediate, ferocious attack by the Daily Mail, with the first two paragraphs of the article describing the controversy:
The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, has sensationally claimed Covid may have leaked out of a US lab.
Unveiling the results of a two-year investigation into the origins of the pandemic, the magazine’s team tasked with uncovering the truth stated it was ‘plausible’ the virus could have emerged in America.
Since April 2020 I’ve stood almost alone in publicly arguing that Covid was probably an American virus, with the global outbreak being blowback from a disastrously reckless biowarfare attack against China (and Iran). So I was obviously gratified to discover that somewhat parallel accusations were now apparently being made by so august and respectable a publication as the Lancet and the group of international experts it had convened.
