- Is America Ready For John Bolton's War With Iran?
Authored by Scott Ritter via The American Conservative,
National Security Advisor John Bolton’s announcement this week that the U.S. is deploying a carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the U.S. Central Command region seemed perfectly framed to put America on a war footing with Iran. And it is.
Claiming that the decision was made in response to “a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings,” Bolton declared that “the United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime.” But, he added, “we are fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces.”
It took the Defense Department a full day to respond to Bolton’s statement, with acting Secretary of Defense Pat Shanahan finally tweeting that the “announced deployment of the @CVN_72 and a @USAirForce bomber task force to the @CENTCOM area of responsibility…represents a prudent repositioning of assets in response to indications of a credible threat by Iranian regime forces.”
Shanahan followed with another tweet:
“We call on the Iranian regime to cease all provocation. We will hold the Iranian regime accountable for any attack on US forces or our interests.”
The USS Abraham Lincoln battle group had deployed a month ago from its Norfolk, Virginia, home port and was recently engaged in maneuvers in the Mediterranean Sea. The Pentagon acknowledged that the Abraham Lincoln was scheduled to support CENTCOM during its deployment, but that its arrival was being “accelerated” due to intelligence indicating an imminent Iranian threat.
The fact that Bolton chose to repurpose routine deployments of U.S. military forces into the Middle East as an emergency response to an unspecified threat from Iran is in and of itself a curiosity. Bolton is an advisor to the president, a non-statutory (i.e., not confirmed by the Senate) member of the White House staff who is not in the military chain of command and lacks any command authority.
While Shanahan followed up indicating that the orders for the deployments had been authorized by him the day of Bolton’s announcement, this simply isn’t the case—they were authorized well prior to Bolton’s statement. The fact that the White House announced the deployment of U.S. military forces in response to allegations of an emerging threat in the Middle East, as opposed to by the Pentagon, reflects the political and operational roots of the current crisis.
“U.S. Central Command [CENTCOM, the U.S. unified military command responsible for the Middle East] continues to track a number of credible threat streams emanating from the regime in Iran throughout the CENTCOM area of responsibility,” a CENTCOM spokesman noted after Shanahan’s tweet.
This threat was deemed serious enough for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to cancel a long-planned visit with Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel. Pompeo instead made a secret trip to Baghdad, where, according to reports, he met with Iraq’s political and national security leadership to discuss the emerging threat from Iran.
In a statement made to reporters on his way to Baghdad, Pompeo declared that “it is absolutely the case that we have seen escalatory actions from the Iranians, and it is equally the case that we will hold the Iranians accountable for attacks on American interests.” He added, “If these actions take place, if they do by some third-party proxy—a militia group, Hezbollah—we will hold the Iranian leadership directly accountable for that.”
But the reality is that the deployment of American military forces and the diversion of the secretary of state to Baghdad is little more than grand theater. This is being done in support of a policy dictated by Israeli intelligence and passed to Bolton during a meeting on April 16, 2019 at the White House, where, according to Bolton, they discussed “Iranian malign activity and other destabilizing actors in the Middle East and around the world.”
The intelligence, derived from analysis conducted by the Mossad, consisted of “scenarios” regarding what Iran “might” be planning. According to an Israeli official, “It is still unclear to us what the Iranians are trying to do and how they are planning to do it, but it is clear to us that the Iranian temperature is on the rise as a result of the growing U.S. pressure campaign against them, and they are considering retaliating against U.S. interests in the Gulf.”
Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, has derided Bolton’s statements as directed by what he derisively termed the “B-team,” which includes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. Zarif accuses Bolton, in concert with the rest of the “B-team,” of trying to push President Trump “into a confrontation he doesn’t want.”
The precise nature of the supposed Iranian threat hasn’t been officially articulated by either the White House or the Pentagon. CENTCOM had nebulously noted that “recent and clear indications that Iranian and Iranian proxy forces were making preparations to possibly attack US forces in the region,” and added that the threats were both maritime and on land.
However, CNN, citing unnamed Pentagon officials, has reported that specific intelligence that Iran was moving short-range ballistic missiles by boat into the Persian Gulf, combined with other indicators, is what triggered the military deployment, and that additional deployments of American forces, including Patriot PAC-3 surface-to-air missiles, was being considered.
“It’s not clear if Iran could launch the missiles from the boats or if they are transporting them to be used by Iranian forces on land,” CNN reported.
This statement is facially absurd. Iran possesses a well-known family of short-range ballistic missiles derived from an indigenously produced copy of the Frog-7, a Russian-made short-range artillery rocket. This weapon, known as the Zelzal-2, has been exported to Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon, where it has been used against Syrian rebels, Saudi-backed opponents of the Houthis, and Israel. The Zelzal-2, lacking a guidance and control system, is not a short-range ballistic missile, but rather an unguided rocket projectile. Iran does, however, possess two derivatives of the Zelzal-2—the Fateh-110 and the Zulfiquar—which meet the technical definition of a short-range ballistic missile.
The Fateh-110 has been exported to Hezbollah, Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq. In September 2018, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fired seven Fateh-110 missiles against Iranian Kurdish opposition forces based in northern Iraq. An even more advanced derivative of the Zelzal-2, known as the Zulfiqar, has recently entered service; in June 2017 and in October 2018, the IRGC fired Zulfiqar surface-to-surface ballistic missiles against ISIS targets located inside Syria.
These missiles are real, and they do pose an active and ongoing threat to American forces deployed in the Middle East. But they are not designed to be operated aboard a ship. Iran has already been accused of supplying Houthi rebel forces with short- and medium-range ballistic missiles via maritime supply routes. A continuation of this activity should hardly trigger a crisis requiring the emergency deployment of U.S. forces. Likewise, Iran has provided short-range ballistic missiles to both Syria and Hezbollah using an existing air bridge between Tehran and Damascus.
Finally, Iran has transferred short-range ballistic missiles to the Iraqi popular militias, Shiite groups affiliated with the IRGC. All this activity has taken place over the course of the past few years and, except for the Houthis, none have required missiles to be sent via sea.
The threat being promulgated by Bolton, CENTCOM, Pompeo, and the media ignores the reality that Iran has been preparing to strike American military forces in the Middle East for years as part of its efforts towards self-defense. Iran’s short-range ballistic missile capability is part of a larger missile threat that could, at a moment’s notice, blanket U.S. bases in the region with high explosives. Dispatching the Abraham Lincoln battle group and a B-52 task force to the Middle East is an act of theatrical bravado that will do nothing to change that. Iran’s missile force is, for the most part, mobile.
The American experience in the Gulf War, and Saudi Arabia’s experience in Yemen, should underscore the reality that mobile relocatable targets such as Iran’s missile arsenal are virtually impossible to interdict through airpower.
By purposefully escalating tensions with Iran using manufactured intelligence about an all too real threat, Bolton is setting the country up for a war it is not prepared to fight and most likely cannot win. This point is driven home by the fact that Mike Pompeo has been recalled from his trip to participate in a National Security Council meeting where the Pentagon will lay out in stark detail the realities of a military conflict with Iran, including the high costs. (Hopefully, they’ll emphasize that Iran would win such a war simply by not losing—all they’d have to do is ride out any American attack.)
That Israel is behind the scenes supplying the intelligence and motivation makes Bolton’s actions even more questionable. It shows that it is John Bolton, not Iran, who poses the greatest threat to American national security today.
- Model XXX: PornHub Traffic Explodes With "Tesla" Searches After Musk's Smut-Inspired Tweets
We reported yesterday that a couple having sex inside of a Tesla Model X while it was on Autopilot inspired Elon Musk to make grade school-quality jokes on Twitter. But it’s not just Musk who’s reaping the benefits of the now-viral smut – it’s also proving to be beneficial to popular pornography website PornHub, which is seeing a massive surge in Tesla-related searches amid higher traffic, according to RT.
Footage of a couple having sex in a Tesla Model X started circulating on the website at the end of April, which inspired users to seek out similar videos. The popularity also inspired PornHub to put up an Instagram post, writing “Reporting you to Elon for not having two hands on the wheel with autopilot enabled.”
To which, Musk replied:
Shoulda seen it coming …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 9, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Shortly after, search volume on PornHub skyrocketed to over 3 million people in the course of just 10 days, with the “huge spike” occurring just after Musk’s tweet. The video itself has racked up 7.8 million views.
And despite Musk now facing a trial for his last sex-related tweet, he continues to joke about it.
Basically begging for it
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 9, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
It’s useful to know that all those 80 to 100 hour work weeks that Musk continually complains about are helping him to be productive. In the meantime, we can’t help but wonder: how many of those 7.8 million views came from a Fremont IP address?
- The World To America: "You're Fired!"
Authored by Dmitry Orlov via Club Orlov blog,
Some ironies are just too precious to pass by.
The 2016 US presidential elections gave us Donald Trump, a reality TV star whose famous tag line from his show “The Apprentice” was “You are fired!” Focus on this tag line; it is all that is important to this story. Some Trump Derangement Disorder sufferers might disagree. This is because they are laboring under certain misapprehensions: that the US is a democracy; or that it matters who is president. It isn’t and it doesn’t. By this point, the choice of president matters as much as the choice of conductor for the band that plays aboard a ship as it vanishes beneath the waves.
I have made these points continuously since before Trump got into office. Whether or not you think that Trump was actually elected, he did get in somehow, and there are reasons to believe that this had something to do with his wonderfully refreshing “You are fired!” tag line. It’s a fair guess that what motivated people to vote for him was their ardent wish that somebody would come along and fire all of the miscreants that infest Washington, DC and surrounding areas. Alas, that he couldn’t do. Figurehead leaders are never granted the authority to dismantle the political establishments that install them. But that is not to say that it can’t be done at all.
What happened instead was that the political establishment spent two years thrashing about in search of a reason to say “You are fired!” to Trump but has been unable to find one, and so Trump remains in office, although to say that he “remains in power” would be to invite sardonic laughter from anyone who knows what real political power smells like. Trump is but a prisoner in the White House, just like his predecessor was. Ironically, the quest for Trump’s impeachment has been fruitless as far as firing him, but most fruitful in terms of enhancing his ability to not only fire lots of establishment figures but perhaps even send them to jail—with the help of the Justice Department—and his character traits of extreme rancor, spitefulness and vindictiveness should be most conducive toward that end, making for a fun spectacle. His numerous enemies and detractors may yet look back wistfully on the halcyon days when they could lambaste him with impunity.
The quest to stop Trump started well before the election, with Obama and the Clintons collaborating on misusing federal resources to dig up dirt on Trump; specifically, evidence of “Russian collusion”… and they couldn’t find any. They did manage to find some “Russian meddling” (in the form of Facebook clickbait ads) but the evidence they dug up was too ridiculous to show in court. Too bad they didn’t look for Ukrainian collusion and meddling, or Israeli collusion and meddling, or Saudi collusion and meddling, because then they would have found plenty—enough to not only knock Hillary Clinton out of the running but also to lock her up. It would have been a constructive, useful exercise for them to go look for Ukrainian political meddling, but as I’ve explained before the American modus operandi is quite the opposite, and it compelled them to go after Russia instead.
In any case, the complete failure of Mueller’s team to find anything actionable against Trump has left him grasping at straws, and the one straw he seized upon was the vague possibility of accusing Trump of obstructing justice, based on 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2), which specifies that someone is guilty of obstruction as follows: “…obstructs, influences or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” Apparently, a neuron snapped inside poor Mueller’s head making him think that his own investigation was an “official proceeding,” although if you look up this term you’ll find that it relates to things happening inside courtrooms, with one or more judges presiding, and to launch such a proceeding requires evidence that a crime has been committed. If there is no crime, then there is no proceeding, and nothing to obstruct, influence or impede.
There ensued a sort of bureaucratic danse macabre. Normally, the Attorney General has the authority to provide guidance on such questions, and AG Jeff Sessions could have told Mueller that 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2) is only relevant to court proceedings and that would have been it. But Sessions had the unfortunate luck of having had a casual chat with the amiable and roly-poly Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. By virtue of this little chat Sessions contaminated his precious bodily fluids (just breathing the same air as a Russian can be politically fatal, you know) and was forced to recuse himself from Mueller’s investigation. Trump’s legal team then reached out to William Barr, a former AG, and asked him to chime in. Barr wrote a memo clarifying the issue and sent it to deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who remained as second-in-command at the Justice Department after Sessions’ recusal, and who should have read it, understood it and acted on it, terminating Mueller’s investigation, but somehow he didn’t.
The denouement of this bureaucratic danse macabre played out as follows. After the midterm elections Trump said “You’re fired!” to Jeff Sessions and William Barr was confirmed as AG. Barr then said “You’re fired!” to both Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller for being unpardonably dense. Barr also made it clear that he plans to leave no stone unturned in investigating this fantastic instance of misuse of official resources and prosecutorial misconduct. This will be fun to watch, if you have nothing more important to pay attention to, but I suspect that the phrase “You’re fired!” will continue to bounce around the halls of Washington like a rubber grenade for a good long time. There are, however, things to pay attention to that are far more important.
There is a lot happening in the world all at once right now. The entire planet is rapidly reconfiguring itself. The world is begging for a new, post-capitalist, post-industrial order to be born, but the overabundance of natural resources that have made previous such revolutions possible (coal for the age of steam, oil for the current oil age) simply no longer exist. All that remains is optimizations, enhancements and reconfigurations of the existing order of things, cutting out that which is most harmful and most dysfunctional. To this end, Western European nations are attempting to reclaim the sovereignty they ceded to the United States and the European Union while Eurasia is coming together to form a massive economic and security conglomerate centered on China and Russia.
Both are playing for time, because redirecting trade and financial flows away from the US is quite a process.
The world’s central banks are doing their best to get rid of their US dollar reserves and to buy gold, which, as of this April, they are allowed to consider a risk-free financial asset. Many people now expect gold to go up as a result, but that expectation is based on an illusion. Think of gold as a lighthouse and of fiat currencies as sinking ships: those aboard them may look around and decide that the lighthouse is going up, but that’s just an optical illusion. The purchasing power of fiat currencies is sure to fall (some more than others). The purchasing power of gold will seem to increase, but that will also be an illusion: it will appear to rise against the backdrop of crashing markets, in real estate and physical plant especially. But overall the purchasing power of gold will drop too, because the future purchasing power of any financial asset is determined by just one thing: energy, fossil fuel energy in particular, and energy from crude oil above all. Without energy, nothing within an economy moves, unless it is an agrarian economy based on fodder and animal muscle power.
A particularly interesting piece to the gold story is that it may turn out that much of the gold supposedly stored in the US may in fact be missing. Since Nixon closed the “gold window” in 1971, ending the convertibility of US dollar for gold bullion, and until recently the US dollar has been able to retain its position as a global reserve currency by an act of sheer financial levitation, but that bit of magic may have actually been sleight of hand: behind-the-scenes gold sales to the largest US creditors. When various countries, Germany in particular, have attempted to repatriate their gold, which they had entrusted to the US, they were rebuffed, and when they did succeed, the gold that was returned wasn’t the same gold, and it took a long time. The US hunger for gold has forced it to conduct rather unseemly heists, stealing the gold reserves of Iraq, Libya and the Ukraine. Thus, when the time comes for the US to defend its currency by employing its hoard of gold, it may turn out that the cupboard is bare.
Gold is becoming increasingly important, but energy is more important still, and always will be. After being pushed into the background for a few years, questions of energy supply and energy security are once again becoming front and center. Peak Oil turns out to not be dead after all; it was just postponed by a few years by virtue of the US burning through a huge pile of retirement savings while exploiting shale oil. But now most of the sweet spots have been tapped already and diminishing returns on continued frantic drilling are being added to the fracking industry’s permanently dismal financial returns. In the meantime, Russia has built several natural gas liquefaction plants, a new oil pipeline to China and two new gas pipelines to Turkey and Germany, and to Western Europe beyond, which will circumvent the Ukraine, reducing its value as a geopolitical asset to zero.
A desperate ploy by the US to seize control of Venezuela’s oil fields has backfired in a most embarrassing fashion; there, recent developments have brought up an important question: What if the US threw a color revolution but nobody came? As I had predicted would happen six years ago in my book The Five Stages of Collapsethe Color Revolution Syndicate has steadily lost its mojo. In spite of all the bluster by various Washington foreign policy has-beens, a US military intervention in Venezuela is unthinkable: Venezuela’s Russian S-300 air defense systems effectively make it a no-fly zone for US planes. Meanwhile, the US, having cut itself off from Venezuela’s oil using its own sanctions, has been forced to resort to importing Russian oil. (For now, but not for much longer, the US has a glut of low-quality light crude from fracking, but it’s useless for making diesel and other distillates unless it is blended with heavier grades of crude, which have to be imported.)
Meanwhile, Russia and Belarus have been staging a noisy lover’s quarrel over Russian oil exports to Europe, much of which go through a Belarussian pipeline. Russia and Belarus—or Byelorussia, or White Russia—are not exactly distinct entities in most ways, and when they fight the bystanders should discount the foul language and instead look out for flying pots and cutlery. The result of this family spat is that White Russia will no longer supply the Ukraine with products distilled from Russian oil. Another odd development is that the Russian oil being piped to White Russia, and from thence to the EU, has become mysteriously contaminated and the flow has been stopped until the situation is resolved, causing a bit of a panic in Europe. The US volunteered to unseal its Strategic Petroleum Reserve to compensate, but then, in another bizarre twist, some of that oil too has turned out to have gone foul. More foul yet, the US has imposed unilateral sanctions on Iran, threatening anyone who imports Iranian oil, bringing up another important question: What is the US imposes unilateral sanctions on the whole world, and everybody just yawns?
Financially ruinous and generally nonsensical schemes such as tar sands, shale oil and industrial-scale photovoltaics, wind generation and electric cars will only accelerate the process of sorting nations into energy haves and energy have-nots, with the have-nots wiping themselves out sooner rather than later. Leaving aside various fictional and notional schemes (nuclear fusion, space mirrors, etc.) and focusing just on the technologies that already exist, there is only one way to maintain industrial civilization, and that is nuclear, based on Uranium 235 (which is scarce) and Plutonium 239 produced from Uranium 238 (of which there is enough to last for thousands of years) using fast neutron reactors. If you don’t like this choice, then your other choice is to go completely agrarian, with significantly reduced population densities and no urban centers of any size.
And if you do like this choice, then you have few alternatives other than to go with the world’s main purveyor of nuclear technology (VVER-series light water reactors, BN-series fast neutron breeder reactors and closed nuclear fuel cycle technology) which happens to be Russia’s state-owned conglomerate Rosatom. It owns over a third of the world nuclear energy market and has a portfolio of international projects stretching far into the future that includes as much as 80% of the reactors that are going to be built. The US hasn’t been able to complete a nuclear reactor in decades, the Europeans managed to get just one new reactor on line (in China) while Japan’s nuclear program has been in disarray ever since Fukushima and Toshiba’s financially disastrous acquisition of Westinghouse. The only other contenders are South Korea and China. Again, if you don’t like nuclear—for whatever reason—then you can always just buy yourself some pasture and some hayfields and start breeding donkeys.
This may seem like shocking news to someone who’s been exposed solely to mass media in the US and other Anglophone countries or in the EU. Well, it may be shocking, but it’s definitely not news: none of these developments is particularly new, and none of them is unforeseen. The high level of denial of all of the above issues in Washington, which has been ground zero in a powerful explosion of unreality, and in Western media generally, is also unsurprising; nor is it helpful. Upon finding these things out for yourself, you may be tempted to shout about them from rooftops. This, I dare say, would be inadvisable. The proper thing to do with people who insist on remaining in denial is to humor them, to run out the clock on any games they try to play with you, and then to politely bid them adieu. Indeed, this is what we are seeing: nobody particularly wants to negotiate with US officials but they do so anyway because, as every crisis negotiator knows, it is essential to keep talking, even if simply to stall for time. While they are talking the hostages—to Wall Street, to the Pentagon, to US Treasury and Federal Reserve—are quietly being evacuated. Time is running out for the US, and once it has run out, what we will hear, in a supreme twist of irony, is the whole world telling the US: “You’re fired!”
- MQ-25 Stealth Drone First Flight Could Be One Month Away
Boeing is about to conduct the first test flight of a refueling stealth drone for the US Navy; it will provide the needed refueling capability thereby extending the combat range of Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet, Boeing EA-18G Growler, and Lockheed Martin F-35C fighters.
Boeing told FlightGlobal that the MQ-25 would take to the skies in 2H19, but declined to give specific dates. On April 26, the defense manufacture transported the drone 37 miles on a nondescript flatbed truck from the company’s manufacturing facility at Lambert International Airport in St. Louis, Missouri to MidAmerica St. Louis Airport, a public use airport located adjacent to Scott Air Force Base in St. Clair County, Illinois.
The MQ-25 brings refueling capabilities, autonomy, and the ability to be launched from an aircraft carrier to deliver a solution that meets the Navy’s goals: put a low-cost aerial refueling drone on the flight deck by mid-2020s to extend the range of its 4th and 5th generation fighters.
Dave Bujold, Boeing MQ-25 program manager, told the online aviation and aerospace website that a series of ground tests on the MQ-25 has already had promising results, but with the transfer to MidAmerica St. Louis Airport, the drone will be able to conduct its first flight test in less congested airspace.
The flight tests are expected to run over 1.5 years to evaluate several subsystems, including the refueling pod. Once the drone’s flight characteristics are examined and various subsystems evaluated, the company is expected to begin inflight refueling tests with Navy aircraft.
“This was already a built airframe, so that’s really helping to accelerate what MQ-25 is going to do,” says Knappenberger. “It’s also going to be helping with some of the air worthiness and some of the initial testing that’s going to be happening on that platform.”
The Navy expects the MQ-25 to have initial operational capability by mid-2020s if the test flights go as plan. The service is also equipping its carrier decks with ground control stations to support the new refueling drones.
- John Quincy Adams' Warning Ignored: Washington Has Become The World's Dictatress
Authored by Jacob Nornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,
In his Fourth of July address to Congress in 1821, U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams stated that if America were ever to abandon its founding foreign policy of non-interventionism, she would inevitably become the world’s “dictatress” and begin behaving accordingly.
No can can deny that Adams’ prediction has come true. America has truly become the world’s dictatress — an arrogant, ruthless, brutal dictatress that brooks no dissent from anyone in the world.
Now, I use the term “America” because that’s the term Adams used. In actuality, however, it’s not America that has become the world’s dictatress. It is the U.S. government that has become the world’s dictatress.
A good example of this phenomenon involves Meng Wanzhou, a Chinese citizen who serves as chief financial officer of the giant Chinese technology firm Huawei. Having been arrested by Canadian authorities and placed under house arrest, Meng is suffering the wrath of the world’s dictatress.
What is her purported crime? That she violated U.S. sanctions against Iran.
What do U.S. sanctions on Iran have to do with her? Exactly! She’s a Chinese citizen, not an American citizen. So, why is she being prosecuted by the U.S. government?
Sanctions have become a standard tool of U.S. foreign policy. With the exception of libertarians, hardly anyone raises an eyebrow over their imposition and enforcement. Their objective is to target foreign citizens with death, suffering, and economic privation as a way to bend their regime to the will of the U.S. dictratress and her brutal and ruthless agents.
After all, what could be more brutal and ruthless than to target innocent people with death and impoverishment as a way to get to their government? Most foreign citizens have as little control over the actions of their government as individual American citizens have over the actions of their government. Where is the morality in targeting innocent people, especially as a way to achieve a political goal? Isn’t that why people condemn terrorism?
It’s bad enough to target innocent foreign citizens with death and impoverishment to achieve a political goal. But it’s also important to keep in mind that sanctions are an attack on the economic liberty of the American people. Sanctions impose criminal penalties on U.S. citizens who trade with Iranians. If an American trades with Iranians, the dictatress goes after him with a vengeance, either with criminal prosecution or civil fines or both.
A good example of this phenomenon took place when the dictatress was enforcing its system of sanctions against Iraq during the 1990s. The sanctions were killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. That’s didn’t bother the dictatress, at least not enough to bring an end to the sanctions. The idea was that if a sufficiently large number of children could be killed, Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein would abdicate in favor of a U.S.-approved dictator, or that there would be a coup or a violent revolution that would accomplish the same thing. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright expressed the official view of the dictatress when she announced that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were “worth it.”
An American citizen named Bert Sacks, who was stricken by a crisis of conscience, traveled to Iraq with medicines to help out the Iraqi people. The dictatress went after him with a vengeance, hitting him with a fine and then pursuing its collection for around a decade. (See here and here.)
That is bad enough. But here is where Adams’ point comes into play. The federal government is not satisfied with just requiring its own citizens to comply with its evil system. In its role as worldwide dictatress, the federal government requires everyone in the world to comply with its evil system. The dictatress claims worldwide jurisdiction for its evil system of sanctions.
That’s why Meng Wanzhou was arrested and placed under house arrest in Canada. Yes, Canada! She wasn’t even in the United States when she was arrested. The dictatress announced that she had violated its Iran sanctions in some dealings that she supposedly had with some bank located thousands of miles away from American shores.The dictatress then prevailed on Canada to arrest her while she was in that country so that she could be extradited to the United States to stand trial for her purported violation of U.S. sanctions on Iran.
Why are innocent foreign citizens be targeted for death and economic suffering simply because U.S. officials don’t like their government? Why are American citizens have their freedoms destroyed for the same reason? And why are foreign citizens around the world be targeted with criminal prosecution for violating the federal government’s evil system of sanctions?
It’s all because of what John Quincy Adams observed almost 200 years ago: If the United States were ever to abandon its founding foreign policy of non-interventionism, the federal government would inevitably become the world’s dictatress, and a brutal, ruthless one at that.
- A "Cancer On Our Economy": Report Finds Over $7 Billion Laundered Through British Columbia In 2018
It may have taken a while, but now that housing prices are starting to crash in Vancouver, BC legislators are finally starting to get wise to the fact that the province has been a hot bed for money laundering. It was an easy problem to ignore with prices on the way up, but on the way down – not so much.
And so an independent report released on Thursday concluded that an astounding $7.4 billion was laundered in British Columbia in 2018, out of a total of $46.7 billion laundered across Canada throughout the same period. The report was published by an expert panel led by former B.C. deputy attorney general Maureen Maloney.
Attorney General David Eby told a news conference Thursday:
“Wealthy criminals and those attempting to evade taxes have had the run of our province for too long, to the point that they are now distorting our economy, hurting families looking for housing, and impacting those who have lost loved ones due to the opioid overdose (crisis).”
The reports come after the government commissioned them to try and shed light on laundering by organized crime in BC’s real estate market. This follows last June’s report on dirty money in casinos, which we also wrote about just days ago.
RCMP commissioner Peter German was commissioned to write the report on real estate, and he concluded that illicit money is what led to “a frenzy of buying” that caused housing prices to spike around Metro Vancouver. The report concludes that there are thousands of properties worth billions at high risk for money laundering.
Eby, who has been a frequent critic of liberal legislators for allowing the laundering to happen, continued: “His findings are stark evidence of the consequences of an absence of oversight, the weakness of data collection, and the total indifference of governments until now to this malignant cancer on our economy and our society.”
Michael Lee, Opposition Liberal critic for the attorney general said:
“The BC Liberals are calling on John Horgan and the NDP to carefully consider the reports and move quickly to engage with the federal government and take action to ensure that those who break the law are prosecuted and ultimately convicted.”
An international anti-money laundering agency said last year that organized criminals were laundering about $1 billion per year in the province.
Eby continued:
“To me, this issue feels like a national-level crisis. I hope that is a message that Ottawa is receiving as well.” Federal Organized Crime Reduction Minister Bill Blair is working with Eby on a resolution.
Green Leader Andrew Weaver called for a public inquiry: “Namely, that it would improve public awareness, play a crucial role in fault finding, and would help to develop full recommendations.”
In sum, the report makes 29 recommendations, including for the entire province to launch a financial investigations unit.
Finance Minister Carole James said: “…all the recommendations look critical, but the government wants to ensure it’s prioritizing the most important ones, while also noting that action already underway in the legislature on some solutions.”
BC has tabled legislation to try and stop laundering by shining sunlight on anonymous real estate owners behind shell companies. Eby has also noted that some criminals laundering money through the province’s luxury car sector are even getting provincial sales tax rebates.
Already, regulators and agencies are starting to work together to respond to the report’s findings, according to CTV News:
The B.C. Real Estate Council said it would be partnering with the federal Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, or FINTRAC, to identify and deter money laundering and terrorist financing in the industry.
The B.C. Real Estate Association, the body that serves 23,000 realtors in B.C., said in April that it would join with four other agencies to keep the proceeds of crime out of real estate.
The other participating organizations include the Appraisal Institute of Canada, BC Notaries Association, Canada Mortgage Brokers Association and the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver. Each organization has committed to sharing information, accepting only verified funds and making anti-money laundering education mandatory for its agents.
In late April, we highlighted measures that Vancouver casinos were taking against money laundering, noting that they were resulting in casinos taking a brutal hit to their bottom lines.
Vancouver area casinos had, for years, been accepting millions of dollars in questionable cash from people that showed up with suitcases and hockey bags stuffed with dollar bills, according to Eby. But, just as what happened with Vancouver’s equally “questionable” housing market, reality eventually caught up and even the slowest of regulators started to realize that this behavior isn’t normal. And this reality is hitting casinos hard.
New rules implemented last year make it more important to identify the source of funds like these, which has caused a slow down for the casino business, who was complicit in
launderingaccepting this money in years prior.Andrew Hood, a Toronto-based equity analyst at M Capital Partners Inc. who covers Dundee Corp., one of Parq’s two owners said: “The anti-money laundering regulations in British Columbia have been a problem. The regulations were supposed to cut down on illicit gambling but, of course, that hurt volumes across casinos.”
- Carden: Read Hayek As If Your Children's Lives Depend On It
Authored by Art Carden via The American Institute for Economic Research,
Had he not passed away (about a month and a half before his 93rd birthday in 1992), F.A. Hayek would have celebrated his 120th birthday a few days ago. Hayek carried the flag for what Peter J. Boettke calls “mainline” (as opposed to “mainstream”) economics in the 20th century. About a decade ago, I exhorted students at an Institute for Humane Studies seminar to read Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom as if their children’s lives depend on it.
Boettke’s new book F.A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy, and Social Philosophy reinforces my assessment, and newfound public enthusiasm for socialism – democratic socialism, of course, like they practice in Norway, and not the top-down totalitarian variety of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, which anyway was “not real socialism” – reinforces my sense of urgency. Boettke’s book will, I hope, induce more scholars to take Hayek seriously and to reexamine his contributions to economic science, political theory, and social philosophy.
The knowledge problem, which Hayek explained most famously in his classic essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” and his collection of essays Individualism and Economic Order — which includes “The Use of Knowledge in Society” — is at the heart of Hayek’s work from beginning to end. How, Hayek asks, do people possessing fragmentary knowledge dispersed over some 7.5 billion minds coordinate and reconcile their disparate and often-conflicting plans? As Boettke has written elsewhere with Zachary Caceres and Adam Martin, “error is obvious, coordination is the puzzle” (in a paper of that title). To Hayek (and Boettke), a lot of the economic modeling that explores the characteristics of and transitions between different equilibria obscures (or begs) the scientifically important and scientifically interesting questions about, for example, the institutional context governing political and commercial exchange.
Boettke divides Hayek’s career into four periods. From 1920 through 1945 (though he never abandoned the project), Hayek focused on “economics as a coordination problem,” to borrow the title of a book by Gerald O’Driscoll. 1940-1960 was the “abuse of reason project,” in which Hayek took the social sciences to task for thinking of articulated reason and planning as “solutions” to social problems of calculation and coordination. From 1960 to 1980, Hayek worked on “the restatement of the liberal principles of justice,” and from 1980 through his death was a protracted emphasis on “philosophical anthropology and the study of man.”
In his analysis of these phases of Hayek’s intellectual evolution, Boettke dispels a few myths and works (albeit implicitly) to rescue Hayek’s scientific program from the calumnies of his modern ideological critics. Keynes, Boettke argues, did not win the Hayek-Keynes debate, just as the socialists did not win the socialist calculation debate. Importantly, The Road to Serfdom was not a “slippery slope” argument in which any intervention whatsoever ultimately leads to totalitarianism.
Take the Hayek-Keynes debate, for example. Boettke notes that “Keynes’s theory begins with an aggregate demand failure, and thus, with unemployment. Idle resources are postulated, not explained” (p. 43). Hayek, by contrast, builds on a tradition stretching back to Adam Smith and J.B. Say and reaching through luminaries of the Austrian school like Carl Menger, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser, and Ludwig von Mises in working to explain how, in light of what we know about how alternative institutional arrangements generate alternative outcomes, we end up with miscoordination and with idle resources to begin with. Hayek concludes, famously, that “Mr. Keynes’s aggregates conceal the most fundamental mechanisms of change.” Those most fundamental mechanisms of change, in turn, are informed by “the epistemic function of alternative institutional arrangements and its impact on productive specialization and peaceful cooperation” (pp. 29-30, Boettke’s words, emphasis in original).
This informs all four phases of Hayek’s work. The socialist calculation debate has been misinterpreted as what we might call a “big enough computer” problem. According to this perspective, Hayek criticized socialist planning on the grounds that it is merely inefficient relative to market calculation. Advances in economic modeling combined with orders-of-magnitude increases in computational capacity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries mean Hayek’s criticism of the inefficiency of socialist planning no longer applies. Hayek, it seems, has been refuted by Moore’s law.
But this is a straw man, and it is one Hayek addresses at the very beginning of “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” He notes that if we define the economic calculation problem as one of solving a massive system of known equations producing known outputs using known inputs, then “economic calculation” is simply a matter of math. It might be hard math, but it’s just math all the same.
That, however, isn’t Hayek’s argument, and as Boettke explains in detail, Hayek is not answered completely or correctly by the mechanism-design studies for which Leonid Hurwicz was awarded the Nobel or the information-economics contributions that earned Joseph Stiglitz a Nobel. Hayek’s emphasis, Boettke points out (p. 82), is on “how actors within the process are going to learn what they need to learn and why they need to learn it so they can adjust their plans to those of others who are also continually learning and in such a manner that the coordination of economic activities through time is achieved.”
Competition, then, becomes a way of discovering the nature of “things” and “implies the existence of sheer (or ‘radical’) ignorance and genuine uncertainty, which is a highly significant element of Hayek’s economic thought and marks an important departure from mainstream economics” (p. 86).
Or, as Boettke puts it in summarizing the Hayekian position (p. 111):
“The competitive market process embodies greater knowledge than any single mind could possess because its institutional structure enables individuals to utilize their own subjective knowledge in pursuing their goals, and contains endogenous mechanisms that encourage the entrepreneurial discovery and spontaneous correction of economic errors.”
In this light, Boettke argues, we should read The Road to Serfdom not as a political tract but as a detailed examination of how a real-life socialist economy would have to solve economic and social problems. It raises a crucial point that builds on the questions pursued by Adam Smith, the father of mainline economics. Smith, Hayek, and others in the “mainline” differ largely in their assumptions about people’s moral and cognitive capacity, and the institutional problem for mainline economics is not, as Boettke quotes Hayek on Smith’s analysis of our capabilities, searching for a system that helps good people do the most good but “a system under which bad men can do least harm” (pp. 228-29).
This informed Hayek’s turn toward political theory and “philosophical anthropology” in The Constitution of Liberty; Law, Legislation, and Liberty; and The Fatal Conceit. What, Hayek asked, are the “liberal principles of justice” and the underlying principles that encourage and govern social cooperation broadly construed? What, he asks, constitutes “the political order of a free people”? Boettke’s treatment shows us that Hayek is worth reading in a new light.
Hayek worked in the context of the near death of civilization in the world wars, near-universal enthusiasm for socialism among the intellectuals, and repeated exhortations in the face of periodic economic troubles that this time really was the Final Crisis of Capitalism. In Boettke’s hands, Hayek’s work is a beginning, not an end: it is the jumping-off point into a vital and dynamic research program on how economic coordination happens in a world rife with fallibility and ignorance. F.A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy, and Social Philosophy is essential reading for any scholar interested in the Hayekian tradition.
- US Special Forces Command Issues New Guide For Overthrowing Foreign Governments
No kidding – this is not our headline, but Newsweek’s: “US Special Forces School Publishes New Guide For Overthrowing Foreign Governments” – and as far as we can tell they are the only major mainstream outlet to have picked up on the fact that the US military is now essentially openly bragging on past and future capabilities to foster covert regime change operations.
The 250-page study entitled “Support to Resistance: Strategic Purpose and Effectiveness” was put out by the Joint Special Operations University under US Special Operations Command, which is the Army’s official unified command center which overseas all joint covert and clandestine missions out of MacDill AFB, Florida.
Via “Rare Historical Photos”: The CIA sent 2,300 Stinger missiles to various mujahedin outfits throughout Afghanistan over the course of the Afghan-Soviet war. “This work will serve as a benchmark reference on resistance movements for the benefit of the special operations community and its civilian leadership,” the report introduces.
The study examines 47 instances of US special forces trying to intervene in various countries from 1941-2003, thus special attention is given to the Cold War, but it doesn’t include coups which lacked “legitimate resistance movements” — such as the case of ‘Operation AJAX’ in 1953 which overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.
Though infamous disasters such the abortive CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba are highlighted, the US military report (perhaps predictably) finds that among those nearly fifty covert interventions surveyed, most interventions were “successful”.
“One thing common to all 47 cases reviewed in this study is the fact that the targeted state was ruled either by an unfriendly occupying force or by a repressive authoritarian regime,” the author, Army Special Forces veteran Will Irwin wrote. The study focuses on historical regime change operations but in parts hints at the future, saying, “Russia and China have boldly demonstrated expansionist tendencies.”
* * *
Success vs. Failure data from the new US military study published earlier this week entitled Support to Resistance: Strategic Purpose and Effectiveness
It also asserts that unrest across the Middle East since the fall of the Soviet Union should ultimately be blamed on the legacy of past Soviet policy and failures, rather than on the United States.
Newsweek summarizes of the study’s conclusions:
Of the 47 cases analyzed, 23 were deemed “successful,” 20 were designated “failures,” two were classified as “partially successful” and two more—both during World War II—were called “inconclusive” as the broader conflict led to an Allied victory anyway. Coercion was the most successful method at a three-quarters rate of success or partial success, while disruption worked just over half the time and regime change only yielded the desired result in 29 percent of the cases reviewed.
And further another interesting element involved the failure of operations which intervened in countries “under peacetime conditions”:
Other major findings included observations that most operations “were carried out under wartime conditions, with those being nearly twice as successful as cases conducted under peacetime conditions” and “support to nonviolent civil resistance seems to be more likely to succeed than support to armed resistance.” At the same time, they were also “most effective when conducted in direct support of a military campaign rather than as an independent or main effort operation.”
The report identifies about half a dozen governments from Indonesia to Afghanistan to Serbia to Iraq that were “successfully” overthrown by US operations, but in many more cases identifies covert “disrupt” operations for a desired outcome.
The study did not include within its scope current US involved proxy wars which have unfolded in the past decade, such in Syria or Libya or Ukraine, but only mentions these in passing.
In concluding remarks the author acknowledges that the study could help “explore ways the timely application of SOF capabilities” can influence “resistance movements” which are becoming increasingly violent, “thereby possibly helping to prevent the next Syria”.
Whether this means swifter action would have resulted in quick regime change in Syria or if the study author believes US support to the “rebels” was doomed from the beginning remains unexplored.
- Here's A Lesson From The 108,000 Millionaires Who Left Their Home Countries Last Year
Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
According to a recent report from Bloomberg, more than 108,000 millionaires left their home countries last year in search of greener pastures.
Most emigrated from countries like China and Russia… no surprise there.
India also saw a large outflow of millionaires as tax authorities tightened their grip. And Turkey continues to see an exodus, in the wake of strong-man President Erdogan.
But Western countries like France and England also lost boat loads (or planes full) of millionaires. Excessive taxation is the most obvious reason.
For instance France taxes the net wealth of households worth more than €1.3 million. As a result there are fewer and fewer households worth more than €1.3 million every year. What a surprise!
And the United States was the second most popular destination for fleeing millionaires.
There are plenty of great reasons to move to the US: safety, a strong economy, certain personal freedoms. It still has a reputation worldwide as a good home for the wealthy.
But if these wealthy immigrants stick around the US for a few more years, they’ll find that the country is rapidly turning into what they left behind:
a country that is deeply suspicious and resentful of wealthy people.
That is especially true of New York City, which is still a top destination for global millionaires.
NYC’s mayor, Comrade Bill de Blasio, came right out and told his “brothers and sisters” that the private wealth in New York City is in the ‘wrong hands’. He thinks your money should be in his hands.
Then, of course, the Queen Bolshevik herself, Comrade Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, led the charge to chase away Amazon’s new headquarters.
Amazon would have brought billions of dollars and 25,000 jobs to the city. But the Bolsheviks had to torpedo that idea, because some rich people would have also benefited.
Then NYC demonized hedge fund manager Ken Griffin for spending $240 million on an apartment in Manhattan. The government introduced new taxes– in addition to property taxes– specifically targeting him, and others who invest tons of money to live in the city.
Not surprisingly, this all made Ken Griffin back off his plans to move his $29 billion hedge fund from Chicago to NYC.
These wealthy immigrants who fled Europe’s insane taxes might soon realize they’ve jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire…
Sure, New York City is not as Communist as China. Come to think of it, perhaps that should be Comrade de Blasio’s new slogan– “New York: Not as communist as China…”
Not quite.
And yet, nearly all of the 2020 Presidential candidates are crawling over each other to out-Bolshevik one another.
Despite the fact that Sweden abandoned it’s wealth tax when it didn’t work, and France eviscerated it’s wealthy population, Elizabeth Warren proposes the same plan.
Bernie Sanders does his part by proposing shockingly high estate taxes, much like the inheritance taxes many of these wealthy immigrants are leaving behind.
We’ve heard calls for 70% income taxes, nationalization of entire industries, and free EVERYTHING.
Again, this is precisely why many of these people left their home countries in the first place.
But that’s the funny thing about wealth: it’s incredibly mobile.
Centuries ago in the Middle Ages, wealth was tied to the land. If you were rich, it’s because you had huuuuge tracts of land, and legions of medieval serfs working for you.
That was all fine and good. But it was virtually impossible to pick up and move… and bring your welath with you. The King could always confiscate your lands. And you’d instantly become poor (or dead).
Today, wealth is portable. We can shift funds across the world with a mouse click, and spread our assets across multiple jurisdictions and territories with hardly any effort.
The world is a big place, and there are a lot of jurisdictions where wealth, talent, and productivity are still highly regarded.
Just a three hour flight from New York City, Puerto Rico rolls out the red carpet for people who want to contribute to the economy.
As we’ve discussed before, Puerto Rico offers a 4% corporate tax rate, along with ZERO dividend tax when you take the money out of your company and put it in your pocket.
If you live in the US (on the mainland, that is– since Puerto Rico is part of the US), you’ll pay 10x that amount in federal tax alone, not including state tax.
Regardless of whether or not this is a good option for you, the lesson remains: the ability to remain MOBILE and AGILE is a large part of any Plan B.
[A very important part of this is having a SECOND PASSPORT– which you could obtain in a number of ways: ancestry, residency, or even ‘economic citizenship’.]
Whether you are from China, Bangladesh, France or the USA, there may come a time you decide it’s time to hit the eject button and get out of Dodge.
This can happen suddenly. And it’s best to have a plan in place before you need it.
Think about it like you would an insurance policy: you don’t call the insurance company after your roof catches fire. You have it in place as soon as you buy your home… and sleep well knowing that you’re covered.
That’s all a Plan B really is. It’s a perfectly sensible thing to think about.
And to continue learning how to ensure you thrive no matter what happens next in the world, I encourage you to download our free Perfect Plan B Guide.
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