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https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/29/john-kiriakou-reflections-on-the-deep-states-media-watchdog-tool/

Newsguard: Ex-CIA Agent Calls Out Deep State for Censoring Media

In early November, the leadership and board of Consortium News, the independent news site, filed a major lawsuit against the federal government and NewsGuard Technologies, Inc.  NewsGuard at first glance looks like a media watchdog organization, a group that seeks to keep misinformation and disinformation out of the mainstream. That notion is quickly dispelled, however, as soon as one takes a look under the hood. But first a little background:

Consortium News is one of the country’s most highly-respected independent news sources. It was founded in 1995 by journalist Robert Parry, who gained fame at the Associated Press, and later at Newsweek, for his role in uncovering the Iran-Contra affair and for breaking the story of CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking. Parry was a winner of the prestigious George Polk Award for National Reporting and of the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, bestowed by Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation. 

Its board of directors includes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges; foreign policy author Diana Johnstone; Black Agenda Report editor Margaret Kimberley; political consultant Garland Nixon; Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe communications director Nat Parry; documentary filmmaker John Pilger; award-winning investigative journalist Gareth Porter; producer and Academy Award nominee Julie Bergman Sender and this author.

NewsGuard is a private company created and run by Steven Brill and L. Gordon Crovitz. Brill founded CourtTV, a digital broadcast network featuring court coverage, as well as a number of mainstream publications. He is also a former columnist at Newsweek and Reuters. Crovitz is a former editorial writer who later became publisher of The Wall Street Journal and the former vice president for planning at Dow Jones. These men have fine journalistic credentials. But that’s not where my complaint lies.

My complaint is that NewsGuard issues what it calls “trust ratings” for news. The company brags on its website that these ratings are “produced by humans, not AI” (artificial intelligence). It offers something called “Misinformation Fingerprints” to tell you when you are consuming what the company has determined to be disinformation. 

They market this as a “journalistic solution to online misinformation,” and they claim to have “partnerships” with the Departments of State and Defense, Microsoft, Apple and other tech giants, although the nature of those partnerships is not clear.

We do know, however, that the Pentagon last year gave NewsGuard $750,000 for access to its “Disinformation Fingerprints” project, which it described in the contract as “a catalog of known hoaxes, lies, and disinformation stories spreading online.” 

Their team of human beings rates alternative media sites all over the world and gives them a score of 0-100. These scores are based on the following set of criteria: 

“Does not repeatedly publish false content (22 points); Gathers and presents information responsibly (18 points); Regularly corrects or clarifies errors (12.5 points); Handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly (12.5 points); Avoids deceptive headlines (10 points); Discloses ownership and financing (7.5 points); Clearly labels advertising (7.5 points); Reveals who’s in charge, including possible conflicts of interest (5 points); Provides names of content creators and their contact or biographical information (5 points).” 

A score of 60 points or more initially gave a site a “green” label. But a score below 60 points gave the site a dreaded “red” label, which appeared on one’s device screen to alert the reader that this might be a dangerous site.  These color ratings were changed a few months ago, replaced by a numerical score from 0 to 100, with zero being utterly unreliable and 100 practically coming from the mouth of God Himself.

So, who are these brilliant and unbiased human beings who get to decide if what we read is real news or disinformation?

One of them is Michael Hayden. (NewsGuard says its advisory board members don’t take an active role in rating news organizations.) The name should ring a bell. Hayden is a retired four-star general who was the director of the National Security Agency (NSA) on Sept. 11, 2001. He was the guy who immediately implemented a massive program of warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, all in the name of “national security.”

Hayden later became director of the CIA, where he oversaw the agency’s illegal, immoral and unethical torture, kidnapping and secret prison programs. He’s also a former principal deputy director of National Intelligence, as if he hadn’t already done enough damage to the country. 

More recently, Hayden was a signatory on an open letter full of disinformation and outright lies that indicated that the Hunter Biden laptop was a “Russian intelligence operation.” That was laughable even before Hunter Biden stated publicly that the laptop was his. 

Another one of NewsGuard’s “advisers” is former Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) Tom Ridge. It was Ridge who implemented the notorious Patriot Act in 2001 and the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which severely restricted Americans’ civil liberties. Those restrictions last to this day.

It was also Ridge who was the subject of a lawsuit in 2004 by Canadian national Maher Arar. Arar was a university professor in Toronto who had gone on vacation to Tunisia in 2002. On his way back to Toronto, while changing planes in New York, he was snatched by FBI agents at the request of the CIA, and with the cooperation of DHS agents, and sent to Syria, where he was tortured mercilessly for 10 months.

The U.S. maintained that he had “connections” to  al-Qaida, allegations that were never proven. The Syrians finally informed the U.S. that, despite the fact that Arar had been forced to sign a confession, he had no information about al-Qaida. He was simply the wrong guy. Arar was released and finally returned to Toronto. Nothing ever came of his suit against Tom Ridge.

Another of NewsGuard’s eminent advisers is Anders Rasmussen, the former prime minister of Denmark and former secretary general of NATO. It was Rasmussen who sent Danish troops into Iraq to look for weapons of mass destruction that never existed. And as the leader of NATO, it was Rasmussen who oversaw NATO’s wars in Afghanistan and Libya. In 2014, this champion of transparency and opponent of disinformation told the Chatham House think tank, “I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organizations — environmental organizations working against shale gas — to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.” Yes, he actually said this, with no evidence or proof whatsoever, that environmentalists oppose fracking only because the Russians have tricked them into it. 

Of course, as NewsGuard maintains, it’s (apparently) not these board members who oversee the ratings of alternative news sites. It’s what NewsGuard calls “journalism analysts.” The journalism analyst who oversaw the Consortium News review was Zach Fishman. Fishman’s only previous employment in journalism was as a “physical and life sciences reporter at The Academic Times,” a now-defunct website, and later as a finance reporter at something called Fastinform. Fishman did not respond to a request for comment on this article.

Fishman, of course, is not the only journalism analyst at NewsGuard. ScheerPost, founded by the eminent former Los Angeles Times journalist Robert Scheer, an 11-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, winner of numerous national journalism awards, author of 13 books and now a professor of communication at the University of Southern California, whose website is also currently being scrutinized by NewsGuard. ScheerPost is edited by Narda Zacchino, a 31-year veteran and former associate editor and vice president of the Los Angeles Times, deputy editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, senior editor at the Center for InvestigativeReporting, and four-time Pulitzer Prize judge. Scheer received a series of emails from NewsGuard “senior analyst” Valerie Pavilonis, 22, in which she asked the same kinds of loaded questions, mostly about Ukraine and Syria, that NewsGuard analysts had asked of Consortium News, The Grayzone, antiwar.com, Mint Press and other now red-listed outlets. 

The extent of Pavilonis’s journalistic experience, as noted in her NewsGuard bio, was as a reporter and editor for her school newspaper, the Yale Daily News; contributor for America Magazine, a Jesuit publication (two stories); the New Haven Independent  (three stories), and “most recently as  an intern for USA Today’s fact-check desk.”  Like Fishman, Pavilonis, a 2022 Yale graduate, did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Poor analysis aside, NewsGuard may have gotten itself in over its head legally in 2021 in an arrogant move that has formed the basis of the Consortium News lawsuit.

In May 2021, Crovitz pitched the idea of an information watchdog to executives at Twitter. Reporting by Matt Taibbi and others on the so-called “Twitter Files” tells us that Crovitz’s written proposal included something heretofore unknown—besides the extension on the Microsoft Edge browser that allows for the “red” or “green” rating, Crovitz offered a “separate product for internal use by content moderation teams.” He promised a new tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to quickly screen language the company associated with “dangerous content.”

The real question was how the company (or its algorithm) would determine what news was true and what was false. For starters, NewsGuard would send readers to official U.S. government sources. More cynically, Crovitz’s pitch noted that “Other content-moderation allies include intelligence and national security officials, reputation management providers, and government agencies” that contract with the firm to identify misinformation trends. Crovitz said that instead of only fact-checking individual pieces of information, NewsGuard could rate the “overall reliability” of a website and “prebunk” information there.

In the end, Twitter wasn’t interested in the service. But Crovitz and his partners forged ahead.  Most important, it was NewsGuard’s admission in that pitch that led to the Consortium News lawsuit. 

Consortium News argues in its court filing:

“In direct violation of the First Amendment, the United States of America and NewsGuard Technologies, Inc. are engaged in a pattern and practice of labeling, stigmatizing, and defaming American media organizations that oppose or dissent from American foreign and defense policy, particularly as to Russia and Ukraine.

This is accomplished by a contract between NewsGuard’s “Misinformation Fingerprints” program and the Department of Defense Cyber Command, an element of the Intelligence Community.  Under this agreement, media organizations that challenge or dispute U.S. foreign and defense policy as to Russia and Ukraine are reported to the government by NewsGuard and labeled as “anti-US,” purveyors of Russian “misinformation” and propaganda, publishing “false content” and failing to meet journalistic standards.  NewsGuard’s contract with the government requires it “to find trustworthy sources,” a provision in violation of the First Amendment that does not permit the government to vet or clear news sources for their reliability, “trustworthiness” or orthodoxy.

Consortium News and other news organizations have been stigmatized and defamed under the Cyber Command contract.  NewsGuard’s warning labels issued under the “Misinformation Fingerprints” program amount to a government-funded advisory as to official disfavored information, telling readers to “proceed with caution” when reading or viewing targeted news organization websites, including Consortium News.”

As if that’s not controversial—and wrong—enough, NewsGuard takes it upon itself to warn readers away from every article on a news website if they have a problem with a single article on the website. Consortium News notes in its lawsuit that NewsGuard has red listed the site after disagreeing with the conclusions of six articles out of tens of thousands published by Consortium News. And more cynically, although NewsGuard has existed since 2018, it did not contact, target, or label Consortium News until March 2022, after its contract with the US Cyber Command came into effect. And NewsGuard has targeted only articles dealing with the 2014 coup in Ukraine, the influence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine and “overtly genocidal” policies of the Ukrainian government, the same three topics that are the subject of NewsGuard’s “Misinformation Fingerprints” project under contract with the Cyber Command.

I will admit that when this story initially broke over a year ago, with NewsGuard challenging the reporting and independence of Consortium News, The Grayzone, and others, it felt like a David and Goliath scenario. Was it even possible to stand up against an organization with the backing of the federal government and mainstream news outlets? The answer is: It doesn’t matter.  Sometimes the truth finds itself under attack. And when that happens, the truth fights back with what it has—the facts.

Consortium News made a decision early on to play NewsGuard’s game. Editor-in-chief Joe Lauria dutifully and honestly answered NewsGuard’s questions, only to be red listed anyway.  The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal took a different tack. He told podcast host Jimmy Dore that he and Grayzone would wear their NewsGuard red listing as a “badge of honor.” Blumenthal also wrote to NewsGuard:

Your board of advisors includes Anders Fogg Rasmussen, the former NATO Secretary General who presided over the regime change war that transformed Libya from a prosperous, stable nation into the hellish site of literal slave auctions and ISIS havens, describing the murderous mission as a “great success;” former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, who oversaw the growth of secret torture and mass surveillance programs in partnership with Dick Cheney; Richard Stengel, the self-proclaimed “chief propagandist” of the State Department; Arne Duncan, the privatization-hungry former Secretary of Education who proclaimed that Hurricane Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans” because it literally wiped out public schools; Tom Ridge, who as DHS secretary deployed cartoonish color-coded terror alerts (like NewsGuard’s media “nutritional labels”) to frighten the U.S. public into line with Bush’s catastrophic “war on terror;” and John Battelle, co-founder of the Wired magazine, which exists as a clearinghouse for the military-intelligence apparatus and was launched with seed money from Jeffrey Epstein beneficiary Nicholas Negroponte, the younger brother of former Director of National Intelligence and documented Central American death squad overseer John Negroponte.

NewsGuard’s listed partners represent some of the most notorious purveyors of state violence and imperialist propaganda on the planet. They include the U.S. Department of Defense, which has racked up a body county of tens of millions of civilians in the past century, carrying out or assisting genocidal wars of extermination from Korea to Yemen to Vietnam to Iraq, while systematically lying to the American public about its criminal fiasco in Afghanistan. You are also partnered with the Department of State, the main artery for launching regime change wars that have destabilized large swathes of the Middle East while imposing sadistic sanctions that have starved millions across the Global South. Newsguard’s partnerships are supplemented by imperialist cutouts like the German Marshall Fund, the U.S. government-sponsored lobby spreading disinformation to push censorship of anti-war media outlets like ours through its Alliance for Securing Democracy. Then there is the World Health Organization, a NewsGuard partner whose second largest funder is Bill Gates, the oligarchic Microsoft founder who is one of the four richest men in the world. Gates’ former tech company, Microsoft, is also a NewsGuard partner, marketing your ranking app to public schools across the country, even as Gates plows millions into destroying public education.

Antiwar.com’s editors have elected to simply ignore NewsGuard. Robert Scheer has done the same. After a lengthy and well-documented defense of the news that has appeared on ScheerPost, much of which was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief Chris Hedges, Scheer elected to ignore the company.

I know many of these people. Washington is a small town. Having spent 15 years at the CIA and another two-and-a-half on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, I’ve gotten to know a lot of the players in government. 

I can tell you that they are as cynical and as dangerous as they seem. They are also the hypocrites they appear to be. Their thirst for power, and, once they have that, money, is exactly what you would expect of sociopaths who have climbed to the top of their fields on the backs of those around them.

Keep in mind that these “arbiters of truth” are the same men who have led us into false wars, who have gleefully violated even the most basic human rights and civil liberties, and who have made untold riches doing it. We must not trust them. 

After all, they think so little of us that they won’t respect the constitutional rights and freedoms that are not even theirs to take away. I, for one, will not take my orders from the likes of Deep State veterans, militarists and credibly accused liars Mike Hayden, Tom Ridge, Anders Rasmussen or the former corporate journalists who employ them. 

In the meantime, we must all support Consortium News’s David versus the Pentagon’s and NewsGuard’s Goliath. It’s hard to trust in the system that we’ve given ourselves.  But that’s what we have to do here. And in the meantime, I will remain a loyal and regular reader of ScheerPost, Consortium News, antiwar.com, The Grayzone and others who have the guts to give me the truthful and independent news I need. You should, too.

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/28/patrick-lawrence-medias-fatal-compromises/

Media’s Fatal Compromises

The practice of “embedding,” which requires correspondents to report in war and conflict zones as part of a given military unit, struck me as a repellent compromise with power as soon as American media began accepting this unacceptable practice. It is an undisguised effort to control what correspondents see and hear, and so what they write or broadcast, and so what their readers, listeners and viewers think.

It is a trick, in short. The ruling or governing power’s military pretends it respects the rightful freedom of an independent press, while correspondents and editors get to pretend they serve as brave correspondents and principled editors.

There is no respect, bravery or principle in any of it. Embedding is a charade, an offense on the part of everyone who participates in it.

It is an act of deprivation in that it gives those reading or viewing the work of embedded correspondents the illusion they are informed while they are, most of the time, kept ignorant of the war or conflict they are eager to understand. 

As in various other ways, Israel’s real-time barbarity in Gaza has worsened the relationship between media — Western media, I mean — and the powers they are supposed to report upon. As to audiences, they — we — are left utterly confused to the extent the common language with which people can communicate begins to fail them. 

The result is not silence. It is a senseless cacophony that echoes through a weird no-man’s land in which nothing can be said without the risk of retribution or condemnation or banishment. Civil discourse is more or less out of the question. 

We are now a dreadful step on from embedding, it seems. It is no longer enough to tether correspondents to the perspective of the military from whose side they report. We appear to be on the way to having wars fought — huge, bloody, consequential wars — without any witnesses. 

Last week Politico published a lengthy piece on the Biden regime’s argument that the current “pause” in Israel’s merciless murder spree in Gaza and the exchange of hostages proves the policy cliques in Washington have done the right thing. It does not take much for these dangerously unqualified people to fool themselves. 

But the White House remains “‘deeply, deeply worried’ about Israel’s longer-term strategy and what the next phase of the war may look like,” Politico reported. Then this:

“And there was some concern in the administration about an unintended consequence of the pause: that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel.”

In plain English, Biden’s people fret about what the slaughter of Palestinians will look like once it resumes — appearances being not quite all but nearly. But if there was no one there to see and report the savagery, there would be no appearances to worry about. 

Trita Parsi at the Quincy Institute brought this quotation to my attention, and I cannot do better than his comment on it: “I’m speechless.” 

It is interesting that at least some people in the Biden regime seem to consider relations between power and the media to be adversarial in the old-fashioned way. And how fine it would be were the corporate press and broadcasters to get their correspondents into Gaza on their own and report what they see as they see it. 

This seems to me perfectly possible. The BBC, Al Jazeera, and various wire services — Reuters, The Associated Press, Agence France–Presse — are among the news organizations with bureaus in Gaza City. 

Since Vietnam

But the record to date indicates that cowardice and supine compliance will prevail over the aforementioned bravery and principle. This is how embedding journalists got started in the post–1975 years. The defeat in Vietnam spooked the Pentagon and the political leadership, which blamed the media for turning Americans against the war. By the Gulf War, August 1990 to February 1991, embeddedness was s.o.p. among American media. 

A reporter named Brett Wilkins published a well-reported piece in Common Dreams a month into the Israel Defense Forces’ war crimes in Gaza. In “U.S. Corporate Media Outlets Allow IDF to Vet ‘All Materials’ from Embedded Reporters in Gaza,” Wilkins laid out the whole disgusting nine. His lead:

“U.S. corporate media outlets have granted Israeli military commanders pre-publication review rights for ‘all materials and footage’ recorded by their correspondents embedded with the Israel Defense Forces during the invasion of Gaza, a precondition condemned by press freedom advocates.”

Wilkins goes on to name a few of the names — among them CNN and NBC — who indulge their spinelessness in this manner. And he quotes the feckless Fareed Zakaria offering the boilerplate excuse for this gross breach of professional ethics. “CNN has agreed to these terms in order to provide a limited window into Israel’s operations in Gaza,” Zakaria deadpans. 

Speechless a second time. 

A photojournalist named Zach D. Roberts gets my award for the pithiest summation of this daily travesty. “What CNN is doing here is creating ad b-roll [supplementary video footage] for the IDF,” Roberts said. “It’s nothing resembling news and the CNN employees that participated in it aren’t anything resembling journalists.” 

So far as I can make out there are few-to-no exceptions to this condemnable practice. The New York Times sent two correspondents and a photographer into Al–Shifa Hospital earlier this month and had the integrity to acknowledge they were escorted by the IDF and to report that a hole in the ground the diameter of a manhole cover did not look much like a Hamas command center. 

But “limited windows,” in Zakaria’s slithery phrase, are nonsense, and the Times should have declined the tour on any terms but its own. This seems to me the only way the press and broadcasters can reclaim the professional sovereignty they gave up in the post–Vietnam years. 

Devastated Credibility

Since then we have witnessed a succession of what I count as fatal compromises. This kind of conduct is part of what has devastated Western media’s credibility and left the reading and viewing public abandoned in the dark. Now we are down to embedding as bog standard procedure and the hinted possibility that correspondents may not be able to bear witness to conflicts and wars under any circumstances. 

Journalists were once considered among the guardians of language. Writing and editing with rigorous attention to clarity and correct usage was how language as a vessel of meaning was preserved and protected. 

Look at the circus all around us now. Anti–Semitism can mean anything you want it to mean. Ditto anti–Zionism. Anti–Israel can mean anti–Semitic, Hamas can be cast as a terrorist organization, a real-time genocide can be marked down as self-defense. The Times invites us, in Sunday’s editions, to wring our hands as we search for “a moral center in this era of war.” 

It is an invitation to drown in blur and induced confusion. I put this down in part — in large part — to the derelictions of those reporting what is called — incorrectly, a case in point — the Israel–Gaza war. 

I have watched recently a goodly number of videos recorded in Gaza and seen many photographs taken on the ground there. Here is a video of Gazans fleeing for their lives, published two weeks into the bombing by Al Jazeera. Here are some photographs shot by Mohammed Zaanoun, a Palestinian photographer, and published on Nov. 23 by The New Humanitarian, which was founded at the U.N. in the mid–1990s. 

This kind of material, produced by professional journalists, various kinds of nongovernmental organizations, relief agencies and the like, is readily available. How differently would people think, how much clearer would their understanding and conclusions be, were our major media to make it available.

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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/rogue_nation

The White House Goes Rogue: Secret Surveillance Program Breaks All the Laws

“We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.” — William O. Douglas, dissenting in Osborn v. United States (1966)

The government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.

Don’t believe it.

It doesn’t matter whether you obey every law. The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.

For instance, it was recently revealed that the White House, relying on a set of privacy loopholes, has been sidestepping the Fourth Amendment by paying AT&T to allow federal, state, and local law enforcement to access—without a warrant—the phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.

This goes way beyond the NSA’s metadata collection program.

Operated during the Obama, Trump and now the Biden presidencies, this secret dragnet surveillance program (formerly known as Hemisphere and now dubbed Data Analytical Services) uses its association with the White House to sidestep a vast array of privacy and transparency laws.

According to Senator Ron Wyden, Hemisphere has been operating without any oversight for more than a decade under the guise of cracking down on drug traffickers.

This is how the government routinely breaks the law and gets away with it: in the so-called name of national security.

More than a trillion domestic phone records are mined through this mass surveillance program every year, warrantlessly targeting not only those suspected of criminal activity but anyone with whom they might have contact, including spouses, children, parents, and friends.

It’s not just law enforcement agencies investigating drug crimes who are using Hemisphere to sidestep the Fourth Amendment, either. Those who have received training on the program reportedly include postal workers, prison officials, highway patrol officers, border cops, and the National Guard.

It’s a program ripe for abuse, and you can bet it’s getting abused.

Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands—haven’t made America any safer, and they certainly aren’t helping to preserve our freedoms.

Indeed, America will never be safe as long as the U.S. government is allowed to shred the Constitution.

The Fourth Amendment was intended to serve as a protective forcefield around our persons, our property, our activities, our communications and our movements. It keeps the government out of our private business except in certain, extenuating circumstances.

Those extenuating circumstances are spelled out clearly: government officials must have probable cause that criminal activity is afoot (a higher legal standard than “reasonable suspicion”), which is required by the Constitution before any government official can search an individual or his property.

Unfortunately, all three branches of government—the legislatures, courts and executive offices—have given the police state all kinds of leeway when it comes to sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.

As a result, on a daily basis, Americans are already being made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to clear the nearly insurmountable hurdle that increasingly defines life in the United States: we are now guilty until proven innocent.

Warrantless, dragnet surveillance is the manifestation of a lawless government that has gone rogue in its determination to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, the Constitution be damned.

Dragnet surveillance. Geofencing. Fusion centers. Smart devices. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.

What these add up to is a world in which, on any given day, the average person is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

This creepy new era of government/corporate spying—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted every second of every day—has been made possible by a global army of techno-tyrants, electronic eavesdroppers, robotic snoops and digital Peeping Toms.

The government has a veritable arsenal of surveillance tools to track our movements, monitor our spending, and sniff out all the ways in which our thoughts, actions and social circles might land us on the government’s naughty list, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.

Rounding out the list of ways in which the Techno-Corporate State and the U.S. government are colluding to nullify the privacy rights of the individual is the Biden Administration’s latest drive to harness the power of artificial intelligence technologies while claiming to protect the citizenry from harm.

In his executive order on artificial intelligence, President Biden is calling for guidelines on how the government will use AI while simultaneously insisting that corporations protect consumer privacy.

Talk about ironic that the very government that has been covertly invading our privacy rights wants to appoint itself the guardian of those rights.

Tell me this: how do you trust a government that continuously sidesteps the Constitution and undermines our rights? You can’t.

A government that repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn can’t be trusted.

At a minimum, you shouldn’t trust the government with your privacy, property or freedoms.

Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests.

Remember the purpose of a good government is to protect the lives and liberties of its people.

Unfortunately, what we have been saddled with is, in almost every regard, the exact opposite of an institution dedicated to protecting the lives and liberties of its people.

Indeed, the government has a history of shamelessly exploiting national emergencies for its own nefarious purposes.

Terrorist attacks, mass shootings, civil unrest, economic instability, pandemics, natural disasters: the government has been taking advantage of such crises for years now in order to gain greater power over an unsuspecting and largely gullible populace.

That’s exactly where we find ourselves now: caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called “emergency” state.

All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will. 

This is the grim reality of life in the American police state: our so-called rights have been reduced to technicalities in the face of the government’s ongoing power grabs.

While surveillance may span a broad spectrum of methods and scenarios, the common denominator remains the same: a complete disregard for the rights of the citizenry. 

With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which the Constitution means nothing.

Any attempt by the government to encroach upon the citizenry’s privacy rights or establish a system by which the populace can be targeted, tracked, monitored and singled out must be met with extreme caution.

Dragnet surveillance in an age of pre-crime policing and overcriminalization is basically a fishing expedition carried out without a warrant, a blatant attempt to circumvent the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement and prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.

What we need is a digital “No Trespassing” sign that protects our privacy rights and affirms our right to be left alone.

Then again, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what we really need is a government that respects the rights of the citizenry and obeys the law.

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 https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/11/29/war-is-not-abstracted-anymore/

War Is Not Abstracted Anymore

Pentagon contractor Elon Musk and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu had a conversation that they broadcast on Twitter during Musk’s apology pilgrimage to Israel in a desperate bid to salvage his public image amid costly accusations of antisemitism.

The “conversation” was really more of a monologue, with the Israeli leader droning on in his conspicuously American accent while Musk meekly agreed with him on every point. During his lecture, Bibi said something worth highlighting while complaining about the worldwide pro-Palestine protests that have been underway since the beginning of Israel’s ongoing Gaza massacre.

“We have mass demonstrations,” Netanyahu said at around the 15:55 mark. “Where were these demonstrations when over a million Arabs and Muslims were killed in Syria, in Yemen, many of them starving to death, those who didn’t die in explosions. Where were the demonstrations in London? In Paris? In San Francisco? In Washington? Where are they?”

“The answer is they don’t care about the Palestinians, they hate Israel,” Netanyahu said. “And they hate Israel because they hate America.”

You hear this “where were the protests over Yemen and Syria?” talking point over and over again from Israel apologists, the argument essentially being that because few people protested the mass killings in those countries then Israel should get to do a little genocide of its own, as a treat.

This talking point is stupid for a few reasons, including the way it tends to avoid the inconvenient fact that the bloodshed in both Yemen and Syria was facilitated by US interventionism, just like the bloodshed in Gaza is. The civil war in Syria was only able to occur because the western alliance and its regional partners flooded the nation with weapons given to extremist factions in the hope of toppling Damascus, and Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in Yemen were fully backed by the US and its allies.

The talking point is also stupid because there are many entirely legitimate reasons the Gaza massacre is getting special attention. In a recent New York Times article titled “Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace,” Lauren Leatherby explains that Israel’s actions in Gaza are actually quite different from other conflicts this century, killing far more civilians far more rapidly than the wars in places like Syria and Ukraine. Last week the UN’s emergency relief coordinator Martin Griffiths said during a CNN interview that Gaza is the worst humanitarian crisis he’s ever seen, even worse than the Killing Fields in Cambodia. This conflict is being treated differently because it is different.

Another reason this specific bombing campaign is getting so much more public backlash than others is because the pro-Palestine movement has had generations to build, whereas when the west lays waste to a country using military explosives it’s normally a fast ordeal which moves from manufacturing consent to execution very quickly. By the time people figure out they were lied to about the justifications for a depraved war the empire is usually two or three new wars down the track. The Israel-Palestine issue has been just sitting there for decades, so there’s been time to accumulate popular opposition. Once someone learns about the realities of the Palestinian plight they very seldom abandon their support for it, so every newly-opened pair of eyes stays open on this issue for a lifetime.

But perhaps the dumbest thing about this talking point is the fact that it ultimately works against the agendas of the people saying it. Israel apologists keep asking “Where were the protests over Yemen and Syria,” and gradually the millions of people who are beginning to wake up to the criminality of the US-centralized power alliance as a result of the Gaza massacre are going to start asking themselves the same question.

Because the assault on Gaza is so uniquely horrific and is being broadcast onto people’s social media feeds in real time, millions of people around the world are being snapped out of the propaganda-induced coma that has had them consenting to evil war after evil war over the years. People are starting to realize they’ve been deceived about the Israel-Palestine conflict, and they’re starting to wonder what else they’ve been deceived about. Keep asking them “Where were the protests over Yemen and Syria,” and eventually they’re going to start researching those conflicts and learning about their own government’s role in them, and from there it’s only a matter of time before they start asking, “Hey yeah! Where WERE the protests over Yemen and Syria??”

In a new article for The Guardian titled “The war in Gaza has been an intense lesson in western hypocrisy. It won’t be forgotten,” Nesrine Malik writes that “for the first time that I can think of, western powers are unable to credibly pretend that there is some global system of rules that they uphold. They seem to simply say: there are exceptions, and that’s just the way it is. No, it can’t be explained and yes, it will carry on until it doesn’t at some point, which seems to be when Israeli authorities feel like it.”

“Part of that inability to reach for convincing narratives about why so many innocent people must die is that events escalated so quickly,” Malik adds. “There was no time to set the pace of the attacks on Gaza, prepare justifications and hope that eventually, when it was all over, time and short attention spans would cover up the toll. Gaza has been a uniquely, inconveniently, intense conflict… The area is so densely populated that the toll of civilians is too high, and evidence for having undermined Hamas’s capabilities, the only possible justification for the casualties, is too low.”

This is the sort of political moment in which newly-formed critics of the western war machine are being asked to think carefully about why there hasn’t been a robust resistance to their governments’ other criminal actions. Which looks like a nightmare waiting to happen for the propagandists whose job is to manufacture consent for depraved acts of war.

One thing the empire is about to realize is that the western public has lost all its appetite for war. All the careful sanitising, video-gamifying and propagandizing that has been put in place since Vietnam in order to build a platform of consent for “humanitarian” wars has cratered into nothing over the course of mere weeks. 

You can’t have an up close and personal relationship with the reality of bombs and all the things they do to human flesh and then go back to the way you were ever again. Millions of western eyes have been changed forever. 

“War” is not abstracted any more.

....

 https://brownstone.org/articles/join-the-resistance/

Join the Resistance

Should governments know any limits to their power? One thousand years ago, after King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta, the answer became yes. The state could not legally brutalize the population with impunity. 

That conviction led to the triumph of human freedom that gradually transformed life on earth, from lives that were nasty, brutish, and short to beautiful lives of flourishing and longevity. There was a new consensus—and it worked. 

That progress came to a strange and abrupt halt in March 2020. A challenging and transformative epoch was born. The churches and schools were closed. Small businesses, too. The freedom to travel was ended. Censorship became the norm. We were ruled by bureaucrats backed by fake science, fake news, and spying digital overlords. Their plans were ambitious, and they included vaccine passports, a central bank digital currency, 15-minute cities, and a life of masks, mandates, and restrictions. 

They didn’t get their full agenda through, but that was mainly because the vaccine for the pathogen, about which they panicked the world, did not work. That was an enormous failure, and a setback. 

But make no mistake: there has been no letting up on the bigger agenda. What happened in March 2020 was a high-tech coup d’etat against rights and freedoms. It has not gone away. That’s why there have been no apologies for the pandemic response. Too many people got rich, and they got most of what they wanted as a start to the Great Reset. 

There will be many more crises: more weird diseases, more anomalous weather patterns, more and unexpected reasons to panic the population into society-wide panic for another “all-of-government” response. The mainstream media will fall in line just like the last time. Same with all major social media and major corporate voices, all backed by deep-state bureaucracies, some of which didn’t even exist a decade ago.

With a population less healthy, less educated, and more disoriented than in centuries, they might get away with it. 

Brownstone Institute was founded in 2021 as a machinery of response, rooted ultimately in facts, logic, analytical clarity, and the determination to resist and rebuild. We do this through unrelenting research and commentary (over 2000 articles, 7 books, and reprints in most languages). The journalism here is filling a crucial role that the mainstream media neglects. 

This is matched by a Fellows program that provides social and financial support for the most compelling and effective intellectual voices of resistance who have been sidelined, censored, and canceled. 

Why was it necessary to found a new institute? You know the answer: the old intellectual establishment flopped. They were completely unprepared for what happened. They had no real answers. This includes the academic realm, of course, but also the old “think tank” world that either went along or stayed silent through the entire crisis. Caution and careerism dominated over conviction and courage. Civilization itself unraveled before our eyes, but the “best and brightest” failed in every way. 

Before this turning point, we had no idea just how many of the institutions and individuals we once trusted were really nothing but grafts and grifts. They failed us and left us confused, confounded, and betrayed. Brownstone, on the other hand, is the real deal, an innovative research source that is in no way beholden to the Establishment and willing to stand up for human rights when it actually matters. 

Today, Brownstone is widely regarded as the center of the resistance. With millions of readers and many thousands of backers, Brownstone is doing the hard work of debunking the Great Reset and shining a light on the better path of freedom and hope. In the long term, we hope to contribute to a serious revival of rationality and humane values. 

But even in the short term, Brownstone is saving great minds from obscurity and doing the essential research to solve the myriad puzzles in the world, such as how it came to be that the World Health Organization became a voice for the CCP and why social media has become a tool of deep-state propaganda. 

This is why today we are asking for your support for our work. We rely fundamentally on year-end contributions to pay the bills, support our Fellows, underwrite the research, and serve as a force of resistance in dark times. 

For millions around the world, Brownstone has become a source of hope and refuge of sanity, proof that we are not all going insane and that freedom of thought, speech, association, and enterprise still stand a chance. 

Freedom is right and it works. Government/corporate plans are wrong and fail to achieve their objectives. Today these are not sayable words but we are saying them anyway. And we are walking the walk: taking in great intellectuals, writers, researchers, attorneys, scientists, and many others who need support when all the old institutions have abandoned them. 

Make no mistake: representative government, as it came to be called, is right now in the process of being replaced by a biosecurity state that cares nothing for what its subjects believe or say. It’s massive transformation, and so shocking because we never thought we would live in such times. We never imagined that fundamental truths about human rights and freedoms would come to be dismissed as old-fashioned and no longer considered to be meaningful concerns. Our job is just to go along as nearly the entire planet is taken over by technocratic oligarchy that answers to no one but the 1 percent of ruling-class wealth. 

All the ideals of the past – freedom, democracy, an open public square, and government subject to the will of the people – are being thrown out. Yes, it began perhaps decades ago but the event that precipitated the massive push to reconstruct the country and the world was a pandemic that gave the excuse to destroy freedom, the limits of government, and even the idea of democracy itself. Our job was just to go along, no matter how bogus were the claims coming from elite circles. 

The challenges of our time are completely different from the past. We must counter ruling-class opinion on empirical, legal, and practical grounds. We need all hands on deck to make it clear: we will not relent, no matter how many strange edicts are issued from above, no matter how many big shots tell us otherwise, no matter how many tricks and ploys come our way. 

These are the critical years in which we must act. The great concern that you, and all people of sound mind, have is what happens when all our freedoms are gone. How do we get them back at that point? Let’s hope and work to make sure that it does not come to that. In truth, the overclass has overreached on a number of fronts. It is deeply vulnerable to being debunked and discredited, but the time is now. We don’t want to wait until it is too late. 

This is why Brownstone institute is asking for your most generous support right now. There is not a moment to lose. We cannot promise victory in our time. The crisis is too deep and too entrenched for a short-term fix. But we can guarantee this: without a serious resistance, deep-state actors and their government/corporate backers will get their way. Doing nothing is the surest way to make the coup d’etat of March 2020 a permanent feature of the world. We cannot allow that, not if we truly care about the future of civilization. 

Brownstone Institute is new but agile, operationally very small. One experienced entrepreneur looked at our structure, budget, and impact and said it was so spectacular that the model should be written up in the Harvard Business Review as a new way to be a nonprofit organization. It’s that innovative. 

That’s very kind, but of course that will never happen and it doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is the work we do, the impact we have, and salvific ideas gaining support from Brownstone’s existence. 

We would be so proud and grateful for your support right now. As a new nonprofit, we are still in the position of uncertainty in terms of planning for all that we need to do. We face huge demand for more retreats, public events, publications, books, fellowships, and research teams. There seems to be an infinite demand right now, limited only by the resources we have. This is how you can help. So many people are relying on it. More importantly, the cause of freedom and civilization itself rely on it. 

It seems incredible to say, but we must face the truth. So much of what we used to call civilization is sweeping toward destruction. Those who are not admitting this are either wallowing in blindness, afraid to tell the truth, or simply too lazy to care. We have a massive moral obligation to throw ourselves into the battle. 

With limited resources but intense passion, Brownstone Institute is engaging on all levels and in every possible way. 

Will you join us today in this great effort? We are grateful. It’s all our moral obligation to do what we can to make a difference. It could be now or never; we do not know for sure. We do know that the great challenge is upon us. It’s a minority that truly understands. You are among them.

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https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/11/27/never-stop-being-shocked-by-the-depravity-of-the-empire/

Never Stop Being Shocked By The Depravity Of The Empire

A friend of mine shared my article about how the Biden administration is worried the pause in fighting will allow journalists into Gaza to show Israel’s crimes to the world, saying he knows he shouldn’t be surprised by how evil these freaks are but somehow he still is.

I told him I actually consciously cultivate the ability to stay surprised by such things. If you stop being surprised when you see the world’s most powerful people always finding new and innovative ways to make the world a worse place for ordinary human beings, it means it’s become normalized in your system in some way. It means that on top of all the other horrible evils they’ve inflicted upon our world, they’ve also managed to steal an important part of your humanity.

No longer being shocked by the murderousness of the empire is a counterintuitive sign that something unhealthy is happening to you, like when the body stops shivering as it sinks into the later stages of hypothermia, or when the hunger pangs go away in the later stages of starvation. It’s a sign that your system is no longer forcefully rejecting conditions it ought to reject, and has instead shifted into giving up and trying to conserve energy.

I spend all day every day staring into the ugliest parts of the imperial machine, but I refuse to let it desensitize me. These monsters have taken so very, very much from the world, and I refuse to let them take that too. I refuse to let them rob me of my humanity like that.

I see it as a sacred duty to keep a flame lit in myself which knows what a healthy world looks like, which knows what sanity looks like, which knows how things ought to be, and which naturally finds it jarring when the sickness of this civilization reveals itself.

I refuse to accept this as normal. I refuse to let the abuses of the empire turn me into a callused, jaded husk of a human who can only respond to each new monstrosity with a deep world-weary sigh. I make sure it still brings up a white hot rage in me. I make sure it still brings white hot tears to my eyes.

You can’t let them take that from you. You can’t let them harden your heart and darken your eyes. We’ve got to keep the flame burning for a sane and healthy world, if not for ourselves then for our children, and for future generations who we will never meet. 

If you’re still finding yourself shocked and shaken by the actions of our rulers, that’s a very healthy sign. It means they haven’t got you yet. It means they haven’t succeeded in snuffing out your flame. 

We’ve got to protect our sensitivity at all costs. We’ve got to maintain that visceral rejection of madness, because that’s what’s calling us home. That’s what’s calling us home to a healthy world. That’s what will guide our way as we fight our way there, one small, almost-insignificant victory at a time.

If they haven’t yet snuffed out your flame today, that’s one more small win for humanity. That’s one more tiny step toward health.

....

 https://www.globalresearch.ca/who-pandemic-treaty-amendments-international-health-regulations-enabling-global-health-dictatorship/5841152

The WHO Pandemic Treaty and Amendments to the International Health Regulations: Enabling a Global Health Dictatorship

Intended to form part of international law, preparations for the creation of a World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic treaty began in 2001. Far from strengthening the prevention of, preparedness for, and response to future pandemics as the latest draft of the text claims, its implementation could severely undermine democracy by limiting the ability of national parliaments to make crucial healthcare decisions in the best interests of their citizens. Aided by proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations of 2005, the treaty threatens to transform the WHO into a global health dictatorship.

The sweeping influence exerted by the WHO during the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of revised International Health Regulations passed at a meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA) in 2005. The decision-making body of the WHO, the WHA’s meetings are held annually in Geneva, Switzerland, and attended by delegations from the WHO’s 194 Member States.

Prior to 2005, the WHO had principally acted as a coordinator, assistant, or collaborator to the public health services and drug regulatory authorities of its Member States. But with the passing of the revised International Health Regulations, the WHO took on vast new powers that were unprecedented in the field of global health. These essentially enable it to decide when a public health emergency of international concern exists and to take key decisions regarding what measures should be implemented in response. Under the regulations, the WHO’s recommended actions can include vaccination, quarantine, isolation, drug treatment, and contact tracing, among others.

The WHO “Stealth Coup” to Dictate Global Health Agenda of Gates, Big Pharma

Now, however, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the road is being prepared for the WHO’s already considerable powers to be expanded still further. Particularly worryingly, the latest draft of the proposed amendments to the regulations shows that clauses that previously made their provisions non-binding are being reworded – effectively making them mandatory and giving the WHO real decision-making powers over its Member States. As such, claims that the planned pandemic treaty will not undermine national sovereignty are at best disingenuous, as its text has to be viewed in light of the increased authority that, if approved, will be given to the WHO under the amended International Health Regulations.

The WHO Thinks You Have “Too Much Information”

The growing concern over the WHO pandemic treaty isn’t simply that it could undermine democracy by preventing national parliaments from being able to make crucial healthcare decisions in the best interests of their citizens. Through introducing the term “infodemic,” the treaty seems to be attempting to prevent the spread of truthful information about science-based natural health approaches and dangerous experimental vaccines. Without citing any evidence, the text claims that having “too much information” available during a disease outbreak causes “confusion and risk-taking behaviors that can harm health.” Suggesting who this wording is primarily intended to benefit – namely, the WHO itself – the text states that having too much information apparently “leads to mistrust in health authorities.” To counter this, “infodemic management, at local, national, regional and international levels,” is proposed.

The pandemic treaty also dramatically expands the WHO’s areas of interest. Through what it terms a “One Health approach,” the global body now intends to be able to take decisions in health matters related to animals, ecosystems, and the environment. The treaty specifically refers to “taking action on climate change,” for example. Several observers have suggested that with these extended powers, the WHO could potentially declare an environmental or climate emergency and enforce lockdowns.

Given the global body’s close links to Bill Gates and the pharma industry, and the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding it receives from them, there is a growing worldwide recognition that this looming power grab represents a fundamental threat to democracy. At the very least, the increasing transfer of powers to the WHO raises important questions regarding national sovereignty and personal liberty.

Ultimately, if its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is that the WHO has sold its soul to corporate interests and cannot be trusted to take important decisions on global health. It is surely in all of our interests to demand that our national lawmakers do not sign away the sovereignty that the WHO is seeking.

....

https://bracingviews.com/2023/11/20/15000-bombs-equivalent-to-two-hiroshimas/

15,000 Bombs Equivalent to Two Hiroshimas

The Israeli Annihilation of Gaza

After dropping 6000 bombs in six days, the Israeli Air Force has now reached the staggering sum of at least 15,000 bombs dropped on densely populated areas of Gaza. The bomb tonnage is already equivalent to two Hiroshimas, notes Joshua Frank at TomDispatch. As he puts it:

[W]ell over 25,000 tons of bombs had already been dropped on Gaza by early November, the equivalent of two Hiroshima-style nukes (without the radiation). Under such circumstances, a nuclear-capable Israel that blatantly flouts international law could prove a clear and present danger, not only to defenseless Palestinians but to a world already in ever more danger and disarray.

Israel is the only power in the Middle East with nuclear weapons; it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the right-wing government of Netanyahu would choose to use one or more if cornered.

Netanyahu’s goal seems clear: make Gaza uninhabitable to Palestinians through a combination of massive bombing, blockades (water, food, medical supplies, and other essentials), and invasion and occupation. Palestinians are to be “pushed” into the Sinai Desert, with Gaza absorbed into Israel. All this is being justified in the name of neutralizing Hamas, a terrorist organization that has no ability to hurt Israel in a major way. (The brutal attacks of October 7th were a one-off made more brutal by Israeli helicopter gunships whose counterattacks killed friendlies as well as the Hamas attackers.)

In the name of destroying Hamas, Israel is ethnically cleansing Gaza so it can be absorbed into Israel. Apparently, there are enormous gas reserves off Gaza, possibly worth $500 billion, which were to be shared between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza. With the Palestinians either dead, severely wounded, or evicted from Gaza, Israel will likely claim total ownership over those gas fields. Israel may yet become a major gas supplier to Europe, replacing much of the gas lost when Putin blew up his own gas pipelines to Germany. (Just kidding: America did that, as President Biden promised he would.)

Meanwhile, Joe Biden penned an op-ed to the Washington Post equating Hamas with Putin as “pure, unadulterated evil.” Hamas is allegedly trying to wipe Israel off the map with its “ideology of destruction,” but of course Hamas has no military ability to do this, whereas Israel does indeed have the power to wipe Gaza off the map. So where does Biden see the future heading? Consider this passage:

There must be no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, no reoccupation, no siege or blockade, and no reduction in territory. And after this war is over, the voices of Palestinian people and their aspirations must be at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza.

As we strive for peace, Gaza and the West Bank should be reunited under a single governance structure, ultimately under a revitalized Palestinian Authority, as we all work toward a two-state solution.

He may as well wish for puppies and unicorns for everyone. Israel doesn’t want a two-state solution with a thriving Palestinian state. Netanyahu’s goal, to repeat myself, is clear: Gaza absorbed into Israel, with Palestinians displaced in another Nakba, along with the West Bank slowly absorbed into Israel as illegal Jewish settlements are extended.

This is, essentially, what Thucydides meant when he said: the strong do what they will; the weak suffer what they must.

What Biden’s op-ed was really about was justifying his $105 billion package in giveaways, mainly for Ukraine and Israel, with more than half that money flowing to U.S. weapons makers, the merchants of death or, as Biden calls them, job creators. In short, Biden celebrates the creation of a few jobs in America in the name of killing tens of thousands of Russians and Palestinians with American-made weaponry paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

Biden calls that “democracy” in action, the work of the world’s “essential nation” in contrast to the “murderous nihilism” of Hamas.

“Murderous nihilism”? Well, as we used to say as kids, it takes one to know one.

....

https://www.oftwominds.com/blognov23/renters-move11-23.html

What Happens When Millions of Renters Can No Longer Afford High Rents and Move Back Home?

Recency bias can stretch back 40 years. It's been over 40 years since the U.S. experienced a deep recession (what I call a "real recession") which is characterized by elevated inflation, interest rates, yields, unemployment, defaults and bankruptcies, none of which can be reversed with air-drops of "free money" because higher inflation, rates and yields all limit central bank money-printing and fiscal "free money" via deficit spending.

Without air-drops of trillions of dollars in "free money", the accumulated excesses of the economy have to sort themselves out the hard way via defaults, bankruptcies, insolvencies, layoffs, tightening credit and reduced spending / consumption.

The last time this burn-off of excesses could no longer be pushed forward occurred in 1980-82, the deepest downturn since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Few remember the 1980-82 recession and even fewer think a recurrence is even possible. The dead-wood of excesses never get burned off, they just pile higher with each central bank-fiscal bailout / "free money" air-drop.

Recessions which burn off excesses act as catalysts for profound social, financial and economic shifts. Up until the recession, everyone assumes the current situation is permanent and forever. This is the equivalent of assuming a forest piled high with deadwood will never catch fire.

By way of example, consider that the relatively mild dot-com implosion recession of 2000-02 led to 100,000 residents of the San Francisco Bay Area moving away to lower-cost climes because once the layoffs swept through the dot-com bloat, people could not longer afford the high rents and cost of living.

The situation now is far more precarious due to the spread of high rents from a few urban areas to virtually the entire nation. As a percentage of net income, the cost of living is far higher than it was in 2000. Given the nonsensical manner that official inflation is calculated (owners equivalent rent, etc.), statistics are untrustworthy measures. An apples-to-apples comparison of purchasing power of wages (i.e. what percentage of wages are required to pay rent, taxes, insurance, transportation, childcare, food, etc.) is the only accurate measure of the true impact of the soaring cost of living.

The consensus holds that soaring rents are the result of housing shortages. In other words, the demand for housing is so strong that landlords can charge a premium.

So what happens to the strong demand for rentals and the resulting high rents if millions of renters vacate their apartments and move in with other single households? This is precisely what happens in a recession in which millions lose their jobs (or have to take lower income work) and can no longer afford stratospheric rents.

The facts suggest that instead of a housing shortage, we have an enormous quantity of housing that is currently occupied by a single person--housing that could easily accommodate more occupants per unit.

To sketch out how this scenario could play out, let's start with some basic facts about America's housing stock, the age of the occupants and the number of single-person households. As shown on this chart courtesy of the Federal Reserve, there are 145 million housing units in the U.S.--85 million owner-occupied homes and condos, 44 million rented houses and apartments, and 16 million unoccupied dwellings, of which 7+ million are 2nd homes / vacation homes. The remaining 9 million unoccupied homes may be in the process of being sold or held off the market for various reasons, or they're abandoned or no longer livable due to obsolescence / decay.

Some might be in areas with poor employment options and so the demand is so low that vacancies abound.



Next, let's look at home ownership and one-person households. According to the Census Bureau, "There were 37.9 million one-person households, 29% of all U.S. households in 2022. In 1960, single-person households represented only 13% of all households." (There are about 132 million households in the U.S.)

The Census Bureau also reported that 46.4% of U.S. adults are single--that's 117.6 million unmarried Americans, "nearly every other adult aged 18 and over. This includes those who are divorced or widowed as well as those who have never married."

About 11% of these one-person households are 65 years of age or older, or about 14.65 million people.



As you might imagine, homeownership is skewed to the older population, as is ownership of homes without mortgages, i.e. homes owned free and clear.

According to How the Demographics Are Shaping the Housing Market, older Americans own almost 90% of all housing: The Silent Generation (78 and older) own 11.3%, Boomers (ages 59 to 77) own 43.5% and Gen X (ages 43 to 58) owns 32.5%. Some break the Boomers into Boomers I (ages 69-77) and Boomers II (ages 59-68).

We can thus project that a substantial percentage of individuals age 65 and older who are living alone own their own homes. It required a much more modest down payment and percentage of net income two or three generations ago to buy a home, and so it's to be expected that home ownership is heavily skewed to older cohorts who were able to buy homes with median incomes--something that is no longer possible for younger generations.

There are also millions of renters who live alone, some percentage of which might be persuaded to accept a roommate if their income/finances deteriorate. Of the 38 million single-person households, how many would welcome another occupant? Retirees with limited income might welcome paying boarders, and single elderly might offer free housing to younger family members in exchange for help around the house.

How many Boomers and Gen X homeowners would accept an adult child or grandchild moving home if financial conditions preclude any other option? Anecdotally, I see grandparents hosting a grandchild and her daughter, and I hear accounts of an elderly parent deeding their home to the adult child who moves back home and cares for the parent.

It is well within the realm of possibility that 10% of the roughly 40 million single-person households could vacate their rentals and move in with another single or into a large empty-nest home owned by parents are grandparents should conditions change and high rents are no longer affordable. That would leave about 10% of the rental housing unoccupied.

Although few believe it is even in the realm of possibility, in an extended downturn, 8 million renters could vacate now-unaffordable rentals for far more affordable living spaces in other dwellings. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention, which in the case of unaffordable rents in a recession, we can modify to necessity is the mother of radically downsizing expenses by any means available.

Rents tend to be as stubborn as human nature. Landlords tend to believe the highest rent ever received is the "fair price," and the majority will cling to this fantasy long past the point at which a rational assessment of market conditions would suggest a 25% reduction in asking rent would be the bare minimum to snare a tenant for the vacant flat.

If the 2000-02 recession is any guide, tenants will cling on to their over-priced flats as long as possible, hoping for a job offer that never transpires. The unemployment checks aren't enough, temp gigs dry up, savings run out and the inability to continue paying sky-high rent finally forces a move.

No one remembers what happens in a deep, prolonged recession, and we're long overdue to find out what happens. What's no longer affordable is eventually jettisoned, including high-rent homes and apartments. 

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/22/patrick-lawrence-what-died-60-years-ago/

What Died 60 Years Ago?

A President and a Nation’s Promise  

On January 9, 1953, The Washington Post published an editorial we can read all these years later as a murmur amid a long silence. “Choice or Chance” was a blunt worry about what the Central Intelligence Agency was getting up to. Was the CIA to analyze information it gathered or that had come to it—a matter of chance—or was it actively and covertly to execute interventions of its own choosing? Was its swiftly accumulating power properly subject to political oversight, or was it, as The Post appeared to think, becoming a power unto itself—operating, in effect, beyond lawful controls? These were the questions five years after the agency was founded, one year after President Truman created the National Security Agency by secret decree.

The CIA hardly invented clandestine operations, coups, assassinations, disinformation campaigns, election fixing, bribery in high places, false flags, and the like. But it was elaborating and institutionalizing such intrigues. The extra–Constitutional autonomy of what we now call the national-security state was already evident. The Post stood with those who objected—at least it did on page 20 of that winter Friday’s editions. The agency’s activities were “incompatible with a democracy,” Washington’s local paper protested. Reform was in order. 

As interesting as The Post’s editorial was the dead quiet that followed. Nothing more was published on the topic for 20 years. The Post’s comment prompted no significant reforms. In an appointment whose importance will be evident, the easily manipulable Truman named Allen Dulles the CIA’s director less than a month after The Post editorial appeared. Dulles, in turn, put Frank Wisner, a former Office of Strategic Services man, in charge of the agency’s “black operations.” These included, among much else, making maximum use of the media by compromising its ranks—not least its high command.

I describe the national-security state’s early, formative years, during which it gathered not only power, but also the unlawful sovereignty by way of which “the intelligence community”—odious phrase—now plagues us. As Aaron Good writes with impressive acuity in his not-to-be-missed American Exception: Empire and the Deep State (Skyhorse, 2022), by the time Truman authorized the NSA and named Dulles to run the CIA, the Deep State—and I am fine with this term—was already a reality and had determined that democracy was an impediment to its interests and operations it would not tolerate.

President Kennedy was assassinated a decade after The Post registered its concern about the CIA’s activities and Dulles assumed control in Langley, Virginia. Turning time in the other direction, it was 60 years ago Tuesday that JFK keeled over in the back seat of his Lincoln Continental while driving through Dallas. There is no danger of overstating the significance of Kennedy’s murder: The consequences of his death cannot be overstated. 

Let us consider these. What else slumped over on the afternoon of November 22, 1963? What did America lose besides a president? Extending the thought to take in our decade of assassinations, what did Americans lose with the murders of Malcolm X (February 1965), King (April 1968), and Robert F. Kennedy (two months later)? Martin Luther King, Jr., I will mention straightaway, was not the only one of these four to have a dream. They all did. 

Many writers and analysts have implicated Dulles and the CIA in John Kennedy’s assassination with varying degrees of certainty. Most recently we have David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (Harper Collins, 2015) and Oliver Stone’s two films, JFK (1991) and JFK Revisited (2021). As Stone asserted in an interview recorded two years ago this month, Dulles was operationally responsible, in all likelihood in the service of various New York financial interests who considered Kennedy a threat to the order, global and domestic, from which they benefited.

A snippet from that exchange:

Dulles, yes, but I think he had to get permission from higher-ups, somebody in, I think, the East Coast financial structure, maybe—you know the Rockefellers have done so much evil to this country I certainly could not put it beyond their capacity to have participated, because Kennedy was dangerous to business, and they knew it, and what they feared most was his reelection in ’64…. That’s the way I see it. They knew if he got reelected they would be dead in the water because he would have more power.

When I recorded these remarks I immediately drew lessons from them. Here I will mention two.

One, by 1963 the government that is supposed to serve Americans would no longer be legible to them. Events, contexts, responsible parties and their motivations and intentions: None of this would any longer be transparent. As David Talbot puts it well, the age of secret government had arrived. When we consider the CIA’s confidence as it executed a coup in broad daylight—and the murder of a sitting president has no other name—we have to conclude that by 1963 the Deep State considered its power and autonomy beyond challenge. It could do anything, in other words, and get away with it. 

This is to say that JFK’s murder marked that moment when the national-security state put Americans on notice. It is likely that few people understood this at the time, but that afternoon it asserted what we are best off recognizing now as its ultimate authority—its hidden hegemony, its anti-democratic preeminence—in determining the direction of postwar American society. Anyone who may doubt this can fast-forward to the Russiagate years, when the Deep State’s various manifestations—the intelligence agencies, law enforcement, the judiciary, the media, and so on—conspired to take down another president, this time bloodlessly. 

Two, and this arises from the reality just noted, the democratic process in America has been severely compromised since the early 1960s, and I choose here the mildest language for the condition I describe. If there is a Deep State that permits democratic procedures to take place but does not permit change unacceptable to it, can we speak of such a nation as a democracy, or do we speak of such a nation as a democracy so as to comfort ourselves, to avoid facing what has become of us and been done to us—to flinch, at last, from the hard work of retrieving our public life?

Am I saying that American democracy died in Dallas on November 22, 1963? That we lost that day an authentic democratic process the power of which, according to the Constitution, is supreme? Well done: It is precisely what I am saying, the truth once again proving bitter. Look at the decades since. Have we done much more than spin our wheels, getting nowhere close to the kind of society with the kind of domestic and foreign policies we deserve? This is what comes of not, to keep it simple, facing up.

I am not among those who unduly glorify JFK, or for that matter his brother. Kennedy arrived in the White House a committed Cold Warrior with his share or more of the orthodoxies of the age. But the unmistakable feature of his presidential years was growth, it seems to me. At the time of his death his vision of America and of the world, if I am not excessively generalizing, was very different from what it was at the start. He seems to have achieved a certain new enlightenment. 

Somewhat in the way of FDR, Kennedy came to favor a cooperative coexistence with the Soviet Union, in part, maybe, because of his experience with Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As is well-known, he had ordered the beginning of a radical withdrawal from Vietnam shortly before he was killed. More broadly, Kennedy wanted to cultivate and project another image of who Americans were, to display another attitude, to tell the world we would be different from what we had been by way of another posture and ultimately another purpose. We would go to others in peace and with respect, not war and one or another kind of abuse or coercion.   

Chas Freeman, in a recent interview on Radio Open Source, mentioned that Kennedy wanted to build a world wherein all people were free to live by their own histories, traditions, and cultures, none required to conform to the expectations of others. Can we count JFK an advocate of multipolarity decades before his time? I think so. Multipolarity was the inevitable consequence of the collapse of the Cold War binary. Kennedy, we must wonder, may have seen that far ahead. Was he our first post-exceptionalist president? The scholars can address this thought better than I, but I am perfectly happy to pose the question. 

There is a photograph of Jack and Bobby standing in the Oval Office staring at one another in what looks to be a state of anxiety on the way to mild shock, as if to say, “Whaaat???” I think it was taken around the time of the Bay of Pigs episode, when Dulles tried to trap Kennedy into supplying air cover and JFK shut him down. I have always read the picture, a well lit black-and-white, to show that moment when the two Kennedys realized the CIA and the national-security state altogether had become a monster, that they would have to take it on, and, maybe, that they were both courting trouble. It is well-known that Kennedy had concluded that the agency should be dismantled and that he fired Dulles in November 1961, seven months after the Bay of Pigs disaster. And it is better known what happened two years after that.  

We lost the promise of a better way of life, a more honest way of life, a fairer and more decent way of life when Kennedy lost his life, one that drew from the well of common dreams, not separateness and self-interest—“Ask not,” etc. A better way of life and a better world, one that would have had aspects of beauty about it. America was to remake itself in a new image so far as I understand JFK’s aspirations as they evolved during his White House years. This promise was vibrantly alive during that decade. Bobby and King and in his way Malcolm saw it as JFK did. Then the decade turned into a murder spree intended to extinguish it.

“You’re only a casualty insofar as you forget, and if you remember you are alive,” Oliver Stone said when I interviewed him, “and you’re no longer a casualty because you’re carrying forth a fight, a crusade, not to forget.” Sixty years after the dark day in Dallas, as November 22, 1963, is called, we should ask ourselves whether we are content to be casualties or whether we insist on living and not forgetting.

....

https://brownstone.org/articles/javier-mileis-battle-cry-for-the-people/

Javier Milei’s Battle Cry for the People

“The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism; there is no better way to stifle that criticism than to attack any isolated voice, any raiser of new doubts, as a profane violator of the wisdom of his ancestors. Another potent ideological force is to deprecate the individual and exalt the collectivity of society. For since any given rule implies majority acceptance, any ideological danger to that rule can only start from one or a few independently thinking individuals. The new idea, much less the new critical idea, needs to begin as a small minority opinion; therefore, the State must nip the view in the bud by ridiculing any view that defies the opinions of the mass. “Listen only to your brothers” or “adjust to society” thus become ideological weapons for crushing individual dissent. By such measures, the masses will never learn of the nonexistence of the Emperor’s clothes.” ~ Murray N. Rothbard

Oops, they did it again.

First Giorgia Meloni was elected prime minister of Italy. This despite the objections and smears of the self-important and seemingly all-powerful US Deep State and its Mockingbird press, which in the run-up to the Italian general election had painted her as the second coming of Benito Mussolini. Never mind that the politics of the corporatist Deep State are a lot closer to Mussolini’s fascist vision than those of Meloni, who in the “real world” pragmatically governs from center-right – to the great disappointment of many on both sides of the spectrum.

In the current US corporate media-approved version of the political spectrum, the go-to political character assassination terms “Trump-like,” “alt-right,” “far-right,” fascist, libertarian, neo-Nazi, and radical are all bundled up as synonyms, interchangeably and reflexively applied to anyone whose political beliefs are to the right of the modern embodiments of Marx and Engels’ version of socialism collectively referred to as “Woke” culture.

Each interchangeable term being repeatedly weaponized and launched in harmonized Qassam rocket barrages against non-sycophant independent thinkers, writers, politicians, scientists, or physicians who refuse to contort their speech to fit the approved narratives, gender identifiers and pretzel logic of the Globalist oligarchy. 

Unfortunately for those who maintain the thesaurus of approved “advocacy journalism” euphemisms, “anti-Semitic” has recently become both too inconvenient and too complicated, necessitating that it be struck from currently approved character assassination lexicon.  

After decades of alternating corrupt mismanagement by the two entrenched traditional Argentine parties (Peronists vs Radicals), an academic economist of the Austrian school named Javier Milei has been elected President of Argentina, adding salt to the self-inflicted wounds of approved narrative defenders. And once again, we are predictably being gifted with the usual stream of character assassination and hate speech from Deep State corporatist media lapdogs. My, how the Mockingbird does love to sing.

As with Meloni’s election, we have been treated to yet another peek at the Wizard behind the curtain playing his Mighty Wurlitzer. Labeling Javier Milei as a television personality, a common trope in both domestic and international corporate media, is a gross distortion of reality.

Why is Milei’s training in the Austrian School of economics relevant? Because the economic logic of the Austrian School is based on strict adherence to the idea that social phenomena result exclusively from the motivations and actions of individuals. Austrian school theorists hold that economic theory should be exclusively derived from basic principles of human action.

In other words, growth in the “wealth of nations” is the consequence of actions of the individuals which create value and wealth. The Austrian School emphasizes the importance of free markets, individualism, and minimal government intervention. It should come as no surprise that Ayn Rand highly recommended the economic writings of the Austrian school, particularly those of Ludwig von Mises. Is this starting to make sense now?

In Ayn Rand’s literary metaphor of Galt’s Gulch, the productive have fled and formed their own community, where free-market principles prevail and those who are enterprising succeed without the need for government regulation.

“We are not a state here, not a society of any kind – we’re just a voluntary association of men held together by nothing but every man’s self-interest. I own the valley and I sell the land to the others, when they want it. Judge Narragansett is to act as our arbiter, in case of disagreements. He hasn’t had to be called upon, as yet. They say that it’s hard for men to agree. You’d be surprised how easy it is – when both parties hold as their moral absolute that neither exists for the sake of the other and that reason is their only means of trade.”

(Rand, 2007, p. 748)

Dr. Milei is basically an intellectual academic who became a truth warrior in response to the damage he saw being done to his country by a parasitic administrative state. In other words, he is yet another intellectual critic who is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

He graduated with a degree in economics from the University of Belgrano, and continued on to obtain a masters degree and doctorate in economics from the Instituto de Desarrollo Economico y Social and Torcuato di Tella University. For over twenty years he taught University-level courses in macroeconomics, economic growth, microeconomics, and mathematics for economists, and authored several books in economics and politics.

His signature presidential campaign rallying cry has been “Long live freedom, damn it!” coupled with criticism of the “thieving and corrupt political class” of Argentina. Austrian school logic formulated as populism for the masses. Labeling Dr. Milei as Trump-like is clearly a gross oversimplification.

In his 1973 classic The Machinery of Freedom, David Friedman outlines his vision of an anarchist society. Anarcho-capitalists forcefully reject paternalism, i.e., the view that people must be forcibly protected from themselves. The only enforceable claim people have against others is to be left alone. Like all anarchists, Friedman objects to the existence of the state, which he says is distinguished from a criminal gang only by the psychological fact that “most people treat government coercion as normal and proper”.

Don’t cry for Argentina, a once and future jewel and the second largest South American country, which is endowed with an embarrassment of natural resource wealth. Whose assets have been mismanaged for decades by a parasitic and dysfunctional government, resulting in widespread economic devastation. During the 19^th century the country enjoyed an almost-unparalleled increase in prosperity, resulting in early 20th century Argentina becoming the seventh-wealthiest nation in the world. In 1896, Argentina’s GDP per capita surpassed that of the United States, and the country was consistently in the global economic top ten until at least 1920.

Buenos Aires was once known as the Paris of South America. Avenida de Mayo looking towards Congress, 1918

Argentina remained among the 15 richest countries until the meteoric mid-century rise to the Presidency of a previously unknown minor military leader named Juan Perón. This political earthquake was followed by a cascade of bad management, political, social, and economic upheaval, USG meddling, and a notorious “dirty war” of the State against dissident citizens.

Now, after decades of high government spending and economic stagnation, despite abundant natural resources, Argentina has become one of the poorest countries in the world. A case study in how a prosperous modern economy can be strangled by an overbearing and corrupt administrative state bureaucracy. Sound familiar?

Dr. Javier Milei leads the “La Libertad Avanza” (Liberty Advances) coalition, and has vowed to “put an end to the parasitic and useless political caste that is destroying this country”. His parties’ campaign has broken the mold of traditional Argentine politics by focusing heavily on social media, particularly TikTok and YouTube, where he developed a strong following among younger supporters.

“Today, the reconstruction of Argentina begins” he confidently asserted, as historic election results poured in. “Argentina’s situation is critical. The changes our country needs are drastic. There is no room for gradualism, no room for lukewarm measures.” “Argentina will return to the place in the world which it should never have lost.”

Local native speakers have a slightly different translation-

No wonder the US Deep State and its Mockingbird media are out to draw blood from this charismatic populist economist. One who dares to combine alternative social media presence with attacks on a parasitic and useless political caste. The elite members of the Atlantic Council and the Council on Foreign Relations must be wetting themselves. Time to let slip the dogs of the censorship-industrial complex, and to watch the Wikipedia and Google ranking manipulation begin. Don’t forget the popcorn.

The truth is that they should be running for their stockpile of Depends. For Austrian school economist Milei self-identifies as an anarcho-capitalist. Not as a “Trump-like,” “alt-right,” “far-right,” fascist, libertarian, neo-Nazi radical. As such, Milei happens to be at the leading edge of a growing contrarian intellectual movement which directly challenges the legitimacy of the administrative state. One which has now grown to the point where it can no longer be dismissed as “a small minority opinion,” and has been catapulted onto the world stage by an independent Latin American nation with nothing to lose and everything to gain.

I kept reading and hearing the term “anarcho-capitalism” pop up in edgy discussions with the various thought leaders whom I encounter in my daily random walk through the community of freedom and sovereignty advocates. Trying it out for size with various free-thinking investors, I repeatedly heard “Yes, I think that term fits the way I think about things”. So, having long ago learned to distrust Wikipedia for opinions on any freethinking ideas, I started texting others in my circle. And I struck gold with Jeffrey Tucker of Brownstone Institute. 

I asked Jeffrey “So, are you an anarcho-capitalist?” He immediately replied “I’ve never called myself that. Too rationalistic and formulistic for my tastes. I just prefer freedom generally speaking, though my teacher was the creator of that term.”

Bingo. I replied “Interesting. Who is?” He simply responded “Murray Rothbard.” I came back with “OK, so now I have to look him up. Recommended reading on background?”

“Oh goodness, it’s all so much,” he replied (I can easily imagine his voice) “I kind of recoil at most of this heavy ideological stuff these days, but let me think for a moment.”

And then he threw open a new “thought” door for me to pass through. “Here is Rothbard’s view of the state as an institution” he wrote, followed by a PDF copy of the essay “Anatomy of the State.” I sent a copy over to Jill as we were boarding yet another flight across the pond, and we both started pouring through this little 58-page gem published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. We were astounded by the ideas flowing from the pages. And suddenly it all made sense. Idea space we had been independently groping, like the blind men trying to describe an elephant, suddenly came into focus, and aspects of the Globalists’ actions and agenda took on new meaning.

“Anarchists oppose the State because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense services from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.”

(Rothbard, 2016)

Indeed, as captured in Dr. Milei’s vow to “put an end to the parasitic and useless political caste that is destroying this country,” at the core of Rothbard’s analysis is the thesis that the State is an insatiable economic parasite, constantly growing by feeding off of the surplus productive labor of those free sovereign individuals over which it asserts the right to govern. 

If one was seeking to develop a diametrically opposed alternative to globalist “one -world government” techno-fascism, anarcho-capitalism would be a pretty good candidate in my opinion.  

In the modern Brave New World which is being aggressively pushed toward a “Dark Aeon” transhumanist future at breakneck speed, the global financial and political elite find the decentralized diversity of cultures and independent nation states an inconvenient source of systemic “friction,” of inefficiency in navigating and achieving the financially optimized utilitarian, Malthusian, homogenized transhuman future which they seek in their endless quest for greater return on investment. 

So what’s a nirvana and immortality-craving psychopathic oligarch to do, in striving to forever maintain wealth and global dominance? Substitute a single “harmonized” global government to resolve the messy chaos of human cultural and political diversity. Trade a complicated mix of different small parasites for one big one to rule them all. Problem solved. Those of us being parasitized will own nothing, be happy, have nowhere to go and no way to get out from under the thumb of this New World Order. What could possibly go wrong?

I submit that we have already lived through a B-grade movie version of that future during the COVIDcrisis of the last four years. You ask what could possibly go wrong with a top-down, centralized authoritarian diktat response to daily management of a globalized one-world socioeconomic system? If you do not immediately recognize the answer, than you are clearly suffering from mass formation (psychosis), and best of luck adapting to the future which is coming at you like a freight train.

Judging by the political stalemate and exploding debt which are the defining characteristics of the current US Imperial administrative state, it may already be too late to stop the out of control freight train barreling towards the DC Beltway. 

As Rothbard points out, the debts of any government are canceled in the event of either revolution or foreign takeover after a lost (political or economic) war. And treaties are not contracts. The indebtedness and collapse of the British royal Tudor family consequent to a failed civil war took down the Italian Medici banking empire. Those who live by the sword often die by the sword. What fate awaits the BlackRock/Vanguard/State Street megafund if either USA or PRC/CCP default?

But meantime (back at the ranch), by monitoring this economic and political experiment involving a government influenced by anarcho-capitalistic socioeconomic theory as it runs its course in Argentina, we may be treated to a foreshadowing of the future which a post BRICS currency-West may soon encounter. Breaking up with an entrenched fiat currency will be hard. I suspect that softening the blow is one motive driving Globalist advocacy for central bank digital currencies (CBDC).

Perhaps the Mockingbird will not sing too loudly, its noisy territorial defense making it harder for freedom lovers to learn necessary lessons from this new Argentine economic experiment. Suffice to say, investment opportunities abound for those who are awake and alert. 

But I have no doubt that, in stubborn non-conformity with Malthusian predictions, both hope and innovation will continue to spring eternal in the human heart.

History as a Race Between State Power and Social Power

Just as the two basic and mutually exclusive interrelations between men are peaceful cooperation or coercive exploitation, production or predation, so the history of mankind, particularly its economic history, may be considered as a contest between these two principles. On the one hand, there is creative productivity, peaceful exchange and cooperation; on the other, coercive dictation and predation over those social relations. Albert Jay Nock happily termed these contesting forces: “social power” and “State power.”

Social power is man’s power over nature, his cooperative transformation of nature’s resources and insight into nature’s laws, for the benefit of all participating individuals. Social power is the power over nature, the living standards achieved by men in mutual exchange. State power, as we have seen, is the coercive and parasitic seizure of this production—a draining of the fruits of society for the benefit of nonproductive (actually antiproductive) rulers.

While social power is over nature, State power is power over man. Through history, man’s productive and creative forces have, time and again, carved out new ways of transforming nature for man’s benefit. These have been the times when social power has spurted ahead of State power, and when the degree of State encroachment over society has considerably lessened.

But always, after a greater or smaller time lag, the State has moved into these new areas, to cripple and confiscate social power once more. If the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries were, in many countries of the West, times of accelerating social power, and a corollary increase in freedom, peace, and material welfare, the twentieth century has been primarily an age in which State power has been catching up—with a consequent reversion to slavery, war, and destruction. In this century, the human race faces, once again, the virulent reign of the State—of the State now armed with the fruits of man’s creative powers, confiscated and perverted to its own aims.

The last few centuries were times when men tried to place constitutional and other limits on the State, only to find that such limits, as with all other attempts, have failed. Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check. The problem of the State is evidently as far from solution as ever. Perhaps new paths of inquiry must be explored, if the successful, final solution of the State question is ever to be attained.

“Anatomy of the State,” Murray N. Rothbard