“I wish I owned half of that dog…Because I would kill my half.” – Pudd’nhead Wilson
The fictional genius who invented fingerprint analysis to solve a murder case had already cemented his reputation as a fool decades before with a clumsy joke about killing a dog. Neither his apparent talent nor his subsequent accomplishments could overcome the first impression made on the simple townsfolk of Dawson’s Landing. It was decided then and there, on Wilson’s first day in town, that he must be and would thereafter be referred to as a pudd’nhead.
One hundred years later, not much has changed. Kristi Noem’s anecdote about shooting a vicious dog decades ago has all but ruined her political prospects, which included consideration as Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate.
For all the similarities, though, there are important differences. First, the Dawson’s Landing townsfolk don’t descend into moral panic over Wilson’s remark. Their objection to it was its apparent absurdity. 1830 Missourians understood dogs got shot when they were a nuisance, especially if their offenses included killing livestock and attacking humans. These weren’t people who could afford to be hysterical over killing an animal. They were employed mostly in agriculture, where animals were killed for food on a daily basis, far away from pristine dining rooms where dwelt the few at that time who may have objected.
Neither was this Noem’s first day in town, figuratively speaking. She has been in politics since 2007, serving first as a representative in South Dakota’s State House of Representatives and then as a representative in Congress for several terms. She is halfway through her second term as governor, having won reelection in a landslide after being the one and only governor in the United States who did not lock down her state for even a single day during Coronasteria, a.k.a. “the pandemic.”
It is a mystery how someone with Noem’s wisdom and political experience could commit such a colossal blunder. And let’s be clear, it wasn’t shooting the dog that has sunk her; it was including the anecdote in her book. Had she simply shot the dog and went on with her life, nobody would have known. Even if some opposition researcher had found out in a hypothetical campaign for higher office, nobody would have cared.
Like Wilson, Noem has managed to torpedo a career that featured notable good deeds with the poor choice of a few words.
That words count far more than deeds says more about the American public than it does about Noem. The firestorm that has erupted over poor, vicious “Cricket” (the late canine) certainly includes opportunistic political opponents. No Democrat wants to see Noem picked as Trump’s running mate or otherwise continue to ascend the political ladder. But even conservatives and other heretofore allies have joined her detractors, shrieking their self-righteous indignation on social media under the hashtag #KristiNoemisamonster.
Given the behavior of American presidents just in the years since Cricket met his demise, it is truly terrifying to consider how infantile the American public has become, especially in a democratic republic with most restraints upon the democratic part all but destroyed.
“You asked for miracles, I give you the F.B.I.” So said Hans Gruber, one of the greatest movie villains of all time, played to perfection by the late Alan Rickman. Gruber and his gang are thieves posing as terrorists and need to defeat an electromagnetic lock protecting hundreds of millions of dollars in securities. Although they are unable to do so themselves, Gruber tells his hacker, Theo, not to worry.
What does Gruber know that Theo does not? He knows the U.S. federal government and what local cop Al Johnson calls their “universal terrorist playbook.” The F.B.I. arrives on the scene of the supposed terrorist hostage situation and immediately orders a reluctant city employee to shut down power for ten square blocks of Los Angeles in order to cut off power to the target building. The worker complies and power to the building and the electromagnetic lock protecting the securities is cut off.
One can’t help but laugh as the criminals gleefully charge into the vault to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But it is no laughing matter that this is a perfect metaphor for U.S. foreign policy in general, and Middle Eastern policy in particular.
In the mid-1990s, Osama bin Laden effectively said the same thing as Gruber. Knowing he could never invade or otherwise fight the United States in its own hemisphere, he said he intended instead to provoke the U.S. into invading the Middle East where it could be defeated in a war or attrition, just as he and his fellow Mujahideen had previously defeated the Soviets. That provocation came on September 11, 2001.
It is unclear if Bin Laden was actually involved in the attacks. But they were certainly carried out by likeminded people and Bin Laden had no problem with allowing Americans to assume he was the mastermind. The attacks did just what Bin Laden hoped they would do – get the U.S. to run the “universal terrorist playbook,” meaning going to war in the Middle East where its soldiers could be killed more easily, and its finances drained.
Twenty-three years later, the big, dumb U.S. empire hasn’t learned a thing. In those two decades, federal government debt has skyrocketed from less than $6 trillion to over $30 trillion. Interest on the debt alone is now over $1 trillion per year. And what have American taxpayers, present and future, received for this enormous expenditure? The Taliban has been replaced with the Taliban. Iraq now has a Shiite government that is allied closely with Iran – the same Iran whose “influence in the region” Washington constantly warns against. Libya now has the most vibrant slave trade in African history.
The real tragedy here is success or failure in any of these endeavors doesn’t affect the lives of people living in the United States one way or another. It’s just a giant rip off that funnels trillions to connected defense contractors while allowing lifelong bureaucrats in the Administrative and Deep States to continue in the delusion that they’re running the world when instead they’re running the U.S. into the ground.
“Big Johnson” from Die Hard exemplifies these would be masters of the universe perfectly. He displays the precise combination of unbridled arrogance and cluelessness as he condescends to the local rubes while being played like a fiddle by Gruber as do the Tony Blinkens and Victoria Nulands of real-world D.C. Every faction in the Middle East has played the empire for its own ends while the empire stumbles around the region like a drunk looking for a brawl. Both Israel and its regional enemies have done so, often simultaneously. So have Washington’s supposed Islamic allies. The empire sees itself as James Bond; in reality its more like Lenny from Of Mice and Men. Puppies and pretty girls beware.
Just as it was becoming impossible to deny the empire’s proxy war in Ukraine is lost, along comes another one.
How convenient.
Of course, we heard the usual pronouncements from U.S. politicians about their commitment to “our close ally Israel,” meaning their commitment to send billions of dollars to them, most of which will be spent with American defense contractors.
Anyone familiar with my writing over the past two decades can probably guess my position: no, not a penny. However, I also expressed my opposition to the empire dictating to Israel about how to respond. That’s the real reason for the foreign aid, besides enriching defense contractors. The empire buys compliance with its wishes.
For expressing these opinions, I was immediately called “antisemitic” on social media. If the source of this smear was the shrieking neocon harpy, Nikki Haley, or anyone of her ilk, I wouldn’t even bother to respond. But since some of this is coming from friends, both of the real world and social media variety, I thought I would write about this from a personal perspective.
I consider myself first and foremost an American. But like every American who ever lived, including “native Americans” [sic], my ancestors came from other countries. As you may have surmised from my surname, the ancestors on my father’s side came from Ireland.
So, how could an Irish American possibly understand having your country violently attacked by terrorists? Those of you with historical knowledge beyond three weeks ago are already chuckling. For the rest, Ireland was embroiled in a violent civil war for a large part of the 20th century. A religiously inspired, non-governmental paramilitary group launched frequent terrorist attacks on both government officials and civilians alike. They assassinated people. They kidnapped people. They bombed parades. You may remember a U2 song about one such incident. Good tune.
Peace was finally established in the 1990s, before I had formed much of a political philosophy. But were it still going on today, I would oppose any aid by the U.S. government to either side of the dispute and any U.S. intervention into the internal affairs of Ireland.
I suppose that makes me “anti-Celtic” to the terminally limbic currently parroting the empire’s “antisemitic” slur against me or anyone else who opposes U.S. involvement in the current conflict in Israel.
Let me say for the record that I do not hate my fellow Irishmen. That does not follow from my mere opposition to taxing Americans to subsidize them. Nor does my criticism of the Irish government’s abysmal Covid policies translate to hatred for the Irish people. One would think this goes without saying. Apparently, it doesn’t.
I can imagine there are some who consider my analogy a poor one. After all, Ireland is a “western” country of “white people” and can’t compare to what the Israelis are facing in the Middle East. While I don’t share that view, I will respond to it.
Perhaps I’ve buried the lede, but my mother’s ancestors came from Lebanon. Specifically, they were part of the Maronite Christian majority of that country before large influxes of Palestinian Muslims in 1948 and 1967. Some of my mother’s ancestors had already come to America to escape Ottoman rule before WWI. Her own parents came in the late 1920s after a financial crisis cleaned out my industrialist grandfather. But many are still there.
Beirut was once called, “The Paris of the Middle East.” It was a breathtakingly beautiful city in a country with a 5,000-year history of advanced civilization. It was all but destroyed by the same people the Israelis are fighting today.
I have relatives who were killed or displaced during the bloody civil war that raged in Lebanon 1975-90. Violence continues in Lebanon to this day thanks to the presence of Islamic paramilitary groups like Hezbollah (which is also a political party). It is not an exaggeration to say that Lebanon’s and Israel’s problems are virtually identical.
Still, I disapprove of the previous U.S. interventions in Lebanon and would oppose any new subsidies or interventions there in the future, even if ostensibly to rid Lebanon of the violent fanatics who have destroyed it. This doesn’t mean I hate my fellow Lebanese any more than I hate the Irish or the Jews, for that matter. It’s simply a political position. And it’s the right one, for several reasons.
First, I am in a political relationship (whether I like it or not) with 330 million or so other Americans, most of whom do not have familial relationships with people in Ireland or Lebanon. Said political relationship does not give me the right to force them to defend the countries of my ancestors any more than it gives them the right to do likewise to me.
I would consider it especially bad behavior on my part to try to shame other Americans into involving themselves in the affairs of other countries because I happen to have relatives there. And it would be foolhardy of them to allow me to do so.
Second, we already have quite a bit of data on the results of U.S. interventions in the Middle East and those data are not difficult to interpret. Every intervention has been an unmitigated disaster, without exception yielding results precisely opposite of the stated goals. Every. Single. One. And in return for this long train of debacles, American taxpayers have received nothing but $30 trillion in debt and an economy disproportionately skewed towards producing weapons of war that add nothing to their quality of life.
There is no reason to believe it’s going to be any different this time.
Lastly, for those naïve enough to believe the U.S. government’s involvement in this affair is humanitarian or based on any sympathy for the Jewish people, it isn’t. This is pure imperial politics, nothing more. The empire wishes to maintain its hegemony and this conflict will help it do that. It never stopped fighting the Cold War against Russia, despite the fall of the USSR.
Operating under the “Whoever controls Eurasia controls the world” thesis, the empire has done everything it can to keep Russia from establishing economic relationships with Europe or the Middle East. Thus the “humanitarian” regime-change operations in Syria and Ukraine throughout this century, in countries which “coincidentally” are home to Russia’s only warm water ports on this side of the world.
This is also the reason for the disproportionate hatred of Iran. Were Iran and Syria to form a “Shiite corridor” in the Middle East, Russia would have an opportunity to exert enormous influence in the region. That the Iraq War made this corridor far more possible by handing Iraq to the Iran-friendly Shiites is proof that the empire can be both evil and stupid at the same time.
Were Russia still supplying Europe with most of its energy through the Nordstream pipelines, the empire’s control over Eurasia would be seriously threatened.
So, the empire badgered the Russians into invading Ukraine and now has a proxy war in the Middle East to, at the very least, keep that region in a state of chaos, making it difficult for Russia (or China) to strengthen relationships there.
It’s also an opportunity for another large scale rip off of the American taxpayer. Notice that the media are already preparing the American public that this will be a “long war” that will require America’s full support. Translation: we’re about to lose Ukraine as a funding vehicle and we’re going to pivot back to the Middle East.
The empire will send billions to Israel because it wants Israel to respond to the Hamas attack in a way that will benefit the empire, not the Israeli or American people.
This not a binary choice between U.S. support or the destruction of Israel as a nation. Israel is a rich country with a modern military, including over 200 nuclear warheads. It could crush the Palestinians in Gaza in a single day and is capable of defeating every hostile nation in the region.
The empire doesn’t want that. It wants its “long war,” meaning years of funding, with complicated rules of engagement for the Israelis so that everyone can tell themselves the lie that they are not killing civilians. Meanwhile the empire can go on sucking the lifeblood out of both Israeli and American taxpayers for the benefit of its corporate partners.
One might be tempted to think it is at least a good thing that the empire restrains Israel. After all, no one wants to see the whole region turned to glass, no matter how heinous the attacks on Israel may have been.
Neither does Israel. When the war is over and the enemy defeated, Israel still has to go on existing in the region. It does them no good to create a desert around their country. Absent U.S. involvement, Israel would have to tailor its response to its consequences. It must do enough to eliminate the threat, if possible, while not going so far as to alienate the rest of the region.
Contrary to neocon talking points, Israel is not “surrounded by enemies bent on its destruction.” Egypt tried to warn Israel about the Hamas attack. Its government has no more love for the Palestinians than Israel does. Much progress has been made between Israel and its Muslim neighbors in the past decade. It is not in Israel’s nor its neighbors’ interests to return to 1967.
It is not in American taxpayers’ interest to be involved in this conflict. Americans are constantly told Israel is a “key ally” but are never told how they benefit from this alliance. They don’t. The empire benefits. And like every other empire in human history, its interests run contrary to those of its citizens.
Like Great Britain before it, America became the richest country in the world with a limited government and a free market economy. Also like Great Britain, it is bankrupting itself trying to maintain a global empire. Adding a proxy war in Israel to the debacle in Ukraine might just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back (no pun intended).
While much of American politics in the 21st century has been dominated by foreign policy, the past two and a half years have not. The hysterical government response to Covid-19 forced Americans to shift their focus back home and grapple with basic questions of liberty in the face of an increasingly totalitarian state.
Former President Trump has a checkered record at best on Covid. While he maintains to this day locking down American “saved millions of lives,” he did ultimately leave that decision to the states, administratively, if not financially.
Unfortunately, while Republican governors were generally less severe in imposing lockdown policies and tended to begin easing them more quickly than Democratic governors, very few took a principled stand. Exceptions that rule were Governors Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Ron DeSantis of Florida.
Noem deserves top honors on principle for never locking down her state a single day. She also took the most libertarian approach to Covid vaccines, neither mandating them nor prohibiting businesses or other private organizations from mandating them on their own property.
DeSantis was the first governor to drop all statewide Covid restrictions and was more willing to use government power against the private sector in both prohibiting vaccine mandates and in combatting “woke” cultural issues according to the preferences of his supporters.
Both Noem and DeSantis were rewarded with landslides in 2022 after having won much narrower victories in 2018. Both correctly cited their stands for individual liberty during the pandemic as political risks that paid off in their acceptance speeches.
While Noem’s policies were much purer on these grounds, DeSantis is the governor of a much more populous and politically important state. Unsurprisingly, he has emerged as a credible challenger to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination for president.
Having listened to DeSantis’ stirring victory speech on November 9, I couldn’t help wondering what a DeSantis presidency might look like. While DeSantis is certainly a more polished politician and more disciplined person than Trump, and while I would have rather lived in Florida in January 2021 than California, I couldn’t help being concerned about DeSantis’ foreign policy instincts.
Like Governor Noem, DeSantis has had few opportunities to opine on foreign policy. Also, like Noem, DeSantis has on those occasions spouted generic, establishment rhetoric about the threat China represents.
More telling is DeSantis’ record in Congress, to which he was elected as a veteran and supporter of the Iraq War. DeSantis opposed Obama’s war ambitions in Syria, as did a lot of Republicans just because it was Obama. Otherwise, he sounded much more like a neocon.
He supported President Trump’s decision not to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2017 making all the arguments one might expect from any establishment Republican. DeSantis certainly isn’t Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, but he’s no Rand Paul, either.
Neither is Donald Trump, one would correctly argue, but here is the rub. Trump seems to have a genuine aversion to war that not only exceeds that of most of the politicians in his party, but even that of most of his supporters.
A month ago, Europe was facing a prospective humanitarian disaster. Having no substantial natural energy resources of its own and having virtually eliminated its nuclear power capabilities, its loss of Russian energy imports threatened to leave hundreds of millions in the freezing cold.
The good news is Europe does have a plan to muddle through this winter. They have stockpiled enough reserves to avoid disaster this year, as long as it is not abnormally cold, and Russia doesn’t cut off what gas it is still exporting to Europe before the weather breaks.
The bad news is Europe has a plan to muddle through this winter. That they will be able to avoid catastrophe means there is no reason the war can’t continue through next summer. Even war cheerleader CNN admits there may be a much bigger problem next winter, but for now Ukrainians and Russians will continue to die before their time.
And while Europe won’t have an historic calamity on its hands, things will still be bad there, especially for the most vulnerable. Just as with Covid lockdowns, the laptop and latte class will repeat vapid slogans like “We’re all in this together” while people on the margins struggle with choices the former can’t even fathom, like between energy and food, or medicine.
So, in addition to the deaths on the battlefield and collateral civilian deaths, many will die of cold in Europe this winter who wouldn’t have otherwise.
The Biden administration continues to support Ukrainian President Zelensky’s position to fight the Russians until they relinquish all former Ukrainian territory, including Crimea. Western media continues to bolster this departure from reality. Last week, Newsweek described Biden’s statement that Putin “could just flat leave, and still probably hold his position together in Russia,” as “an off-ramp” for Putin, but one he probably would not take.
The last part is true. Putin isn’t going anywhere. Neither is the Russian army suffering major losses of territory. As Colonel Douglas Macgregor said during his appearance on Tom Mullen Talks Freedom, Russia controls a “banana-shaped” band of territory from the Luhansk Oblast (roughly “province”) to Kherson, north of Crimea, and down to the sea along that line. 95 percent of Ukraine’s GDP is produced in this Russian-controlled territory.
** FILE ** In this Sept. 18, 2001 file photo, a red crane looms over the smoldering wreckage of World Trade Center Building 7 in New York. Federal investigators said Thursday they have solved one of the undying mysteries of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks: the collapse of World Trade Center building 7, a source of long-running conspiracy theories.(AP Photo/Roberto Borea, File) ORG XMIT: WX104
There are two camps in the 9/11 war. Both are wrong. As a result, almost no one learns anything from the tragedy that occurred on and after September 11, 2001.
One camp is the “never forget” crowd. These are the proponents of Washington, D.C.s’ imperial, worldwide standing army. They insist people never forget the terrorist attacks because…well, it’s not entirely clear why we shouldn’t forget. Something about being vigilant, because “freedom isn’t free.” Or something.
It’s just a lot of fuzzy baloney used to justify massive military spending, the empire’s war or intervention du jour, and convince the gullible who join the military they are defending freedom, as if Americans would be less free if the empire didn’t invade Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Syria, or…
The other camp is the “truther” camp, convinced that because the government lied about a lot of things regarding 9/11, that those lies prove the attack was “an inside job,” perpetrated by the Bush administration and/or the Deep State to justify the decades of aggressive war abroad and totalitarianism at home that followed it.
Both camps conjure up villains people can blame for ills they ultimately brought upon themselves, at least in the aggregate.
First, the “never forgetters.” Are there any who aren’t somehow connected to the bloated, $800 billion/year and growing cancer called the U.S. military? Or at least believe the myth perpetuated in this nauseating Lee Greenwood song:
“And I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free
And I won’t forget the men who died, who gave that right to me
And I’d gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today
‘Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land! God bless the U.S.A.”
It’s hard to get more wrong about “America” than those lyrics. First, the American principle is that freedom is a natural right, “endowed by our Creator.” It is not given by anyone, least of all soldiers consuming taxes in an unnecessary war. Not only was the freedom of Americans not in jeopardy during any war in my lifetime (born 1965), none were even “defensive” wars.
Goebbels couldn’t have penned better propaganda nor a bigger lie than this million-selling drivel.
Americans would have been far better off if the entire Cold War national security state were dismantled in 1991, including the global standing army – as Americans were promised it would be – and no wars fought in the past thirty years.
They would have been better off still staying out of WWII and letting the Nazis and Soviets destroy each other, instead of handing one evil empire half of Europe in its zeal to destroy the other.
Instead, the Cold War apparatus was redirected towards terrorism, its military and economic interventions in the Middle East provoking the 9/11 attack.
That brings us to camp #2, the “truthers.” A lot of these people are well-intentioned and have what the never forgetter crowd lacks: a healthy skepticism of their government and of government in general. But their zeal to prove government is evil (which it is) leads them to make improbable conclusions and ignore other explanations that fit the available facts much better.
In 2020, candidate Joe Biden made it as clear as Joe Biden can make anything that the days of looking past the atrocities committed by the Saudi Arabian government would be over should he be elected. An October 2, 2020 post on his campaign website read,
“Under a Biden-Harris administration, we will reassess our relationship with the Kingdom, end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.”
Less than two years later, President Biden is scheduled to visit Saudi Arabia in hopes of persuading the kingdom he disparaged as a candidate to increase oil production. Biden is suffering the worst approval ratings of any president in recent memory due to runaway inflation, in part the result of his own energy policies.
The trip follows Biden’s attempt to bully U.S. oil producers into boosting production, something they rightly pointed out is being strangled by the president’s own policies in the short term and economically unviable in the long term given a sitting U.S. president who has vowed to put them out of business.
Meanwhile, the president’s supporters are demanding Biden try to keep his campaign promises regarding Saudi Arabia. In an article in Foreign Policy, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy demands Biden procure real concessions from the kingdom on human rights abuses. His screed is emblematic of the departure from reality that pervades Washington on all issues, foreign and domestic.
Remember, Biden is not traveling to Saudi to offer the kingdom help. He is asking for help from them. What leverage does Murphy believe the president holds over a government that not long ago wouldn’t even answer his phone calls?
Murphy claims, “Over and over again, the Saudi government acts in ways that are directly contrary to U.S. security interests.” But he gives no examples of legitimate security interests that have anything to do with Saudi Arabia. The bulk of the complaints against the kingdom relate to its human rights abuses, which, however deserving of condemnation, do not threaten the security of American citizens in any way.
In one sense, the Covid-19 era revitalized American federalism. While every U.S. state except South Dakota at first followed the advice of the federal government’s various national public health agencies and their spokesman, Anthony Fauci, M.D., eventually more and more diversity began to emerge in the way individual states responded to the virus.
In September of 2020, after televising a roundtable of non-government scientists from Harvard and Stanford, Governor Ron DeSantis reopened Florida completely and banned local jurisdictions from fining people for noncompliance with mask mandates.
Observing the political gains DeSantis enjoyed from lifting restrictions and the absence of disaster predicted by all opposed to DeSantis politically, Iowa’s governor lifted all restrictions in February 2021, followed closely by Gov. Abbot of Texas the following month.
While states with Republican governors trumpet their states as “free states” due to generally less severe and shorter-lived lockdowns, and proponents of decentralization from across the political spectrum point to this as a triumph of local government, federalism completely failed in the most important respect. Every United States citizen, regardless of the decisions of their state and local elected leaders, is being forced to pay for lockdowns equally.
Although Covid relief was federally funded, it wasn’t paid for with higher taxes. It would have been impossible to collect more taxes from a society producing considerably less wealth. Instead, the money was created by the Federal Reserve and handed out through programs created by the CARES Act and subsequent legislation.
We are feeling the effects of that money creation combined with decreased production now. Although his Republican critics would like to blame President Biden for rising prices today (and he has certainly contributed to them, especially energy prices), the majority of the spending authorized and new money created occurred while Trump was still in office.
M1 showed the supply of dollars at $4 trillion in February 2020. It was $16 trillion by May 2020 and $18 trillion when Trump left office in January 2021. It was just over $20 trillion as of January 2022.
President Biden, on the other hand, has largely failed to get most of the spending he wanted beyond an early Covid relief bill similar in size to the CARES Act. However, due to the mechanics of the way money gets spent by the federal government after it is appropriated by Congress, even much of the money appropriated in 2020 wasn’t spent until 2021.
That and the general lag between new money creation and the resulting rise in consumer prices is why price inflation only began in earnest in 2021. But this is not to lay the blame at Trump’s or Biden’s doorstep. Rather, it was the very bipartisan departure from reality, including by most the American public, that a large percentage of the economy could be turned off while people went on consuming as they did before.
Many otherwise “fiscally conservative” people threw up their hands and justified Covid bailouts on the grounds that those ordered to close their businesses or stay home from their jobs weren’t “at fault,” and therefore were entitled to bailouts.
It doesn’t matter who was at fault for lockdowns. Goods that are not produced cannot be consumed. One cannot consume more than one produces unless someone else provides the difference. Scarcity does not make exceptions for assignment of blame, political theories, or feelings. Even if lockdowns significantly reduced Covid deaths, which they didn’t, one still had to face the reality that producing enough to survive takes priority over avoiding the virus.
The truly “federalist” approach to Covid-19 would have been to allow each state to decide and pay for the policies it chose to implement in response to the virus. Politicians spoke in absolutes, saying lockdowns were “necessary.” Well, producing enough to survive was more necessary. This would have been true even if the virus had turned out to be as deadly as it was originally touted.
Had governors been forced to face reality and decide how to respond to lockdowns without external bailout money, there may not have been any lockdowns at all. If there were, they would have been fewer, of less severity, and of shorter duration.
This would not have made a bit of difference overall in the number of Covid deaths, as the retrospective comparisons of “open” vs. “locked down” states so clearly show.
Like TARP in 2008 and every other bailout, profits have been privatized and costs socialized. People who elected governors who took a more realistic approach to Covid and who themselves balanced the personal risk of contracting the disease more realistically with the responsibility of supporting themselves are paying the same cost in runaway inflation as those whose governors closed their economies completely and kept them closed for much longer periods of time.
Today, Americans are being asked to again support a departure from reality. The U.S. government, the most prolific invader of foreign nations in the past seventy years, has proclaimed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine beyond the pale and imposed drastic sanctions in response. President Biden has acknowledged this will have a cost to American citizens, although he has vastly understated the cost.
The president and others have tried to shift the blame for present economic pain onto Putin. This is dishonest for two reasons. One, it is not Putin’s invasion but the sanctions in response to the that will cause economic hardship, just as it wasn’t “Covid” but the government response to the virus that caused the economic fallout we’re experiencing now.
Most importantly, the economic consequences of Biden’s Russia sanctions have not even begun to be felt by American consumers. They are just now suffering the effects of Covid lockdowns. The Russia sanctions could have far more onerous economic consequences, especially if they result in a new world economic order where a significant portion of the global population no longer uses the U.S. dollar as its reserve currency. That is a reality Americans are not ready to face.
Regardless of whether Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was justified, America may not be able to afford the combined cost of Biden’s sanctions and the Covid lockdowns. Ignoring that reality may have fatal consequences for both America’s economy its political order.
Us Military: List Of Us Military Bases for United States Military Bases World Map – Printable Map
Four weeks ago, I predicted, “American taxpayers are going to be regaled with propaganda about the need to increase military spending in reaction to Putin’s invasion and accede to even more troops deployed overseas.”
Right on cue, Gen. Tod Wolters, U.S. European Command chief, did precisely that.
“I think what we need to do from a U.S. force perspective is look at what takes place in Europe following the completion of Ukraine-Russia scenario and examine the European contributions, and based off the breadth and depth of the European contributions, be prepared to adjust the U.S. contributions. And my suspicion is we’re going to still need more,” he said.
Following the Ukraine-Russia scenario? So, once the Ukraine-Russia war is over, in which zero American soldiers fought, American taxpayers should pay for even more soldiers deployed in Europe to…what? Not fight again?
This isn’t to say American troops should fight in the Ukraine-Russia war, even though it was started by the U.S. State Department. It’s an acknowledgement that they cannot fight in the Ukraine-Russia war, as Joe Biden has so far retained the mental capacity to realize.
The rationalization for this would be to deter Vladimir Putin from invading the territory of a NATO country in the future. But Putin is never going to do that for the same reason Biden is not allowing U.S. troops to be involved in Ukraine. Nuclear powers cannot go to war unless they are ready for the war to end with a nuclear exchange. Period.
Thus, as I argued at the beginning of this conflict, the conclusion to draw from the past four weeks is a dramatic cut in U.S. overseas deployments. Warehousing hundreds of thousands of troops overseas that will never be used for any legitimate purpose is simply a dead weight loss on the U.S. economy.
If Joe Biden insists Americans suffer food shortages in order to signal their virtue in futile sanctions on Russia for its supposedly “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine, then they should respond to him by demanding the overseas military government jobs program – because that’s all it is at this point – be eliminated to help ease the pain.
But what can average Americans do about this? Congress will appropriate the funds for more military spending and, no matter whom they elect president, that president will continue to deploy troops overseas.
Well, for everyone who styles themselves “politically incorrect,” believing they are tougher than the “snowflakes” who can’t bear to hear hard truths, here is some truly politically incorrect talk.
Warning: Saying something half the country will applaud you for, whether it is the liberal or conservative half, is not “politically incorrect.” Telling a truth no one wants to hear is truly politically incorrect. If you don’t want to hear that, stop reading now.
Stop joining the military. Stop encouraging your children to join the military. Stop crowing to the world about how proud you are your children joined the military. We need the military cut drastically, now more than ever.
I can already hear the rationalizations. So, let me address the most common.
“I didn’t join the military to fight unconstitutional wars; I joined to defend the Constitution.” Sorry, this excuse doesn’t hold water. The U.S. government has been fighting unconstitutional wars for almost eighty years at this point. Its record during this century alone is enough that no reasonable person can possibly believe they will be deployed to defend the Constitution.
That’s especially true because the Constitution is not under threat from any foreign power. Not even if the military were cut in half. Not even if it were cut by two-thirds. Want proof? Russia’s military spending is one tenth that of the U.S. on an annual basis. Why is their constitution still intact?
No reasonable person can believe joining the military in 2022 will result in them being deployed to do anything other than more of what the U.S. military has been doing for our entire lives.
“But the military is already stretched to exhaustion.” Yes, this is true. The military is stretched to exhaustion because the government has it doing all sorts of things that harm rather than “serve” U.S. taxpayers. Take away the personnel and U.S. presidents won’t have that choice.
“If people stop joining the military, they will just start drafting soldiers.” Fine. Let’s get to that point and talk about civil disobedience then. Massive movements have formed around vaccine mandates, wrongful police shootings, and controversial public-school curriculums. Whatever one thinks about any of those causes individually, they all pale in comparison to mass murder of foreign populations that never attacked the United States.
I wrote a few days ago that Americans are not ready for the reality that will set in when much of the world ceases to use the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. There are plenty of painful corrections in the domestic economy that are inevitable – zombie jobs that but for government spending underwritten by monetary inflation wouldn’t exist.
Disbanding the worldwide standing army would be one of the least painful corrections to bear. Not only would the net economic loss be eliminated, but hundreds of thousands of military personnel serving no useful purpose overseas would be freed up to do productive work here at home.
It’s hard to blame an eighteen-year-old for joining the military, especially when, on one hand, the government has made it so economically attractive with perks like free college and, on the other, when all of society tells him or her it is a fine and noble pursuit.
America needs to get back to its founding attitude of suspicion of standing armies. John Adams sought political favor by trying to outmaneuver Congress in taking credit for disbanding the entire army. His successor Thomas Jefferson was re-elected in 1804 based on cutting taxes and paying down the national debt after cutting military spending (mostly the navy as the army was already gone) by over 90 percent.
Americans have derived no benefit from eighty years of foreign wars. So, while we’re facing reality, let’s knock off the reflexive, “Thank you for your service.” No American taxpayer has been “served” by any of these wars.
Counter to the government’s propaganda about “freedom not being free,” Americans have become poorer and less free because of the military mischief they have allowed their government to get them into.
Before resorting to eating bugs, as their elites suggest, Americans should take foreign policy into their own hands by ceasing to join the military, discouraging their children from doing so, and ceasing to perpetuate the falsehood that Americans are freer because of the wars its government has fought.
In the 2005 film, Cinderella Man, James J. Braddock’s fight with contender Art Lasky reaches a turning point when Lasky hits Braddock with his best punch. Braddock’s mouthpiece flies out and he is staggered, but he doesn’t go down. He recovers, smiles at Lasky, and goes on to win the fight.
A romanticized portrayal to be sure, taken to an even more ridiculous extreme in the climactic bout between Rocky Balboa and Clubber Lang in Rocky III, but it does beg a very relevant question for the U.S. and NATO today:
What if you hit your opponent with your best shot and he doesn’t go down?
U.S.-led NATO effectively did that when it locked Russia out of the SWIFT system, seized Russia’s FOREX assets, and demanded the rest of the world cease all economic relations with Russia. Washington believed this would cripple Russia permanently, possibly leading to a coup in Russia and Putin’s ouster.
It didn’t. That’s not to say it did no damage. The ruble initially plunged in value, causing the Russian central bank to raise interest rates to 20%, effectively freezing the prospects for any investment in growth for the besieged economy. But Russia is still there, as is Putin. The war in Ukraine continues, and Putin has responded.
“A number of countries have taken illegitimate decisions on the so-called freezing of Russian assets. This collective West has actually drawn a line under the reliability of its currencies, we have already spoken about this, it crossed out the trust in these currencies. I have decided to implement a set of measures to switch over payments, as soon as possible, let’s start with our natural gas, to switch over payments for our natural gas supplied to the so-called unfriendly countries into Russian rubles.”
That punch landed, and now it’s Washington’s turn to try to smile in its opponent’s face. The reliable U.S. media ran several stories citing U.S. economists trying to minimize the effectiveness of Russia’s response. Only in this case, life will more likely imitate reality than the arts. When a boxer smiles in a real prize fight, it almost always means he has been hurt.
That’s what prompted Biden to hurry to Brussels for an emergency meeting following Putin’s announcement. Strategies expected to be discussed include redirecting non-Russian supplies of natural gas towards Europe in hopes to lessen its dependency on Russian exports. Currently, Russia supplies about 45% of Europe’s natural gas imports.
Apart from the fact this will still make life more costly for Europeans – if it were not more expensive to purchase natural gas this way, Europe would have already been doing so – it is only one commodity. Russia and Ukraine also supply about 30 percent of the world supply of wheat. Russia is a major source of steel, palladium, and neon gas needed to make computer chips. It supplies 35 percent of the world’s uranium.
Together with Belarus, Russia supplies 40 percent of the world’s potash and large percentages of ammonia and monoammonium phosphate exports. Fertilizer prices had already risen 17 percent in 2021 and are expected to rise an additional 12 percent in 2022.
As it did for decades militarily before invading Ukraine, Russia has so far shown restraint in its economic response to NATO’s sanctions. It has by no means thrown its haymaker, such as simply cutting off Europe’s natural gas completely rather than merely demanding payment in rubles. Neither has it cut off exports of uranium to the United States, although it is publicly considering it.
Of course, these economic “nuclear options” would hurt Russia as much or more as it would the U.S. and Europe. But Russia is a relatively poor country that has been living within its means. It has low debt and a population accustomed to a lower standard of living than those in NATO countries. The U.S. and NATO are quite the opposite.
While the U.S. is still a highly productive country, it has been living well beyond its means, largely made possible by the U.S. dollar’s reserve currency status, which is now in jeopardy as Russia, China, and India – whose populations alone represent 37 percent of the world’s population – take steps to get off the dollar completely. Much of the “Global South” may choose to join them.
This economic world war will harm every country in the world. Mass starvation in poor countries is a real possibility. So is economic collapse in Europe.
President Biden has admitted it will have “a cost” to Americans as well. But his portrayal and average Americans’ understanding of that cost is grossly underestimated.
Russia, China, and India are all formerly socialist countries that have experienced exponential growth since pivoting to market economies. The living standards of most of their people have grown significantly but are still low compared to those of Americans or Europeans. Their older generations remember the grinding poverty they experienced under socialism.
In The Matrix Reloaded, Neo tells the architect he doesn’t believe the machines will destroy all of humanity, because their existence relies upon human energy supplies. The architect replies, “There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.”
Russia, China, India, and much of the world may be similarly prepared. Is the United States?
Over the past seventy years, the United States has attempted to use economic sanctions to remove world leaders it deemed unworthy in Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and other countries. Populations in the target countries, perceiving aggression by an outside threat, have instead rallied around those leaders, preferring even despotic rule by one of their own to the U.S. empire’s meddling in their politics.
Fat, dumb, happy, and untouched by the foreign wars its government has prosecuted all over the world, the U.S. population may not be so willing to accept the “levels of survival” necessary to survive this economic war. And unlike Cuba, Iran, Russia, etc., it will not be a foreign government imposing the sanctions but its own.
How will the U.S. population react when economic reality finally comes to its door?
