Apartheid Australia: Hell On Earth

Although the Australian government has reluctantly abandoned it's "zero-Covid" policy, which they admit did not work, the same authoritarian mindset dominates its new strategy. If you don't take the health policy steps demanded by the government, you will be essentially under house arrest "indefinitely." If police brutality we have seen in Australia recently were taking place in any country on the US "enemies" list, there would be sanctions and even threats of a "liberation." Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Apartheid Australia: Hell On Earth

What Did the FBI Know?

The New York Times recently reported that the FBI had an undercover informant amid the protestors that entered the US Capitol on Jan. 6 who had related to them his knowledge of the demonstrators’ plans beforehand and his observations of events in the building in real time. The informant was a genuine member of the Proud Boys, one of the groups the feds are trying to charge with conspiracy to overthrow the government.

According to the Times, the informant told the FBI in advance that there was no plan by his colleagues to disrupt the government. He also reported violence and destruction in the Capitol to his FBI handler as it was happening, and the FBI did nothing timely to stop it.

The presence of the informant as a de facto federal agent at the scene before, during and after the commission of what the government considers to be serious felonies raises serious constitutional questions about the FBI’s behavior. The feds have not revealed the existence or identity of this informant; rather, the Times’ reporters found out about him and found another person to corroborate what they learned that he did.

Can the government insert a person into a group under criminal investigation — or “flip” a person who is already in the group — and use him for surveillance without a search warrant? And, when they do this, must prosecutors tell defense attorneys about their informant, particularly if his knowledge and observations are inconsistent with the government’s version of events?

Here is the backstory.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution was written to protect the quintessentially American right to be left alone. It was enacted in the aftermath of egregious violations of colonial privacy by British soldiers and agents.

The typical violation of privacy came in the form of British soldiers knocking on the door of a colonial home — or breaking it down — bearing a general warrant. A general warrant, issued by a secret court in London or by colonial courts here whose judges were loyal to the king, permitted the bearer to search wherever he wished and seize whatever he found.

Fair use excerpt. Read the whole article here.

from What Did the FBI Know?

US Officials Free Meng Wanzhou

After three years seeking the extradition from Canada of Chinese business executive Meng Wanzhou, the Justice Department has thrown in the towel by agreeing to a deal that enabled Meng to return freely to China. Meng had been under three years of house arrest in Canada, as the Justice Department ferociously sought her extradition.

Upon her return to China, Meng was given a hero’s welcome. According to CNN, “tens of millions of people tuned in to watch state media’s online livestream of her arrival.” The Communist Party’s People’s Daily hailed Meng’s return as “a major victory of the Chinese people.”

And there is no question but that Meng and China ended up victorious in this fight. Meng’s release without a guilty plea and a conviction constitutes an implicit acknowledgement that US officials should never have brought the prosecution in the first place. They took three years out of this person’s life, not to mention saddling American taxpayers with an idiotic and ultimately failed extradition attempt.

Meng’s purported crime? That she and her company Huawei had violated US sanctions on Iran!

Yes, you read that right. The US government has imposed sanctions on Iran, which target the Iranian people with death and suffering as a way to force their governmental officials to comply with the dictates of US officials.

What do US sanctions on Iran have to do with China? Or to put it another way, why should China or any other country have to comply with deadly sanctions that the US government has imposed on the Iranian people?

Exactly!

But in the minds of US officials, every country in the world is required to obey any sanctions that the US Empire decides to impose on foreigners. If a citizen of any country dares to violate such sanctions, he will be taken captive and held for extradition back to the United States to stand trial for this heinous offense.

In his July 1821 address to Congress extolling America’s founding foreign policy of non-interventionism, John Quincy Adams said that if America were ever to abandon its founding foreign policy, the US government would begin behaving like the dictator of the world. 

The US prosecution of Meng is a perfect example of what Adams was talking about. The US Empire expects everyone in the world to comply with its immoral and evil policy of sanctions, which, like terrorism, targets innocent people with death and suffering as a way to achieve a political goal.

US officials and the US mainstream press are making a big deal out of a statement that Meng made as part of the plea bargain in which she acknowledged that her company violated the US sanctions on Iran.

Big deal! Why should Huawei, Meng, or any other foreign person or entity be forced to comply with an evil and immoral policy of the US government? Indeed, why should any American citizen have to comply with an evil and immoral policy of their own government?

Immediately after Canada’s arrest of Meng, China arrested two Canadian men and kept them incarcerated while the Meng extradition proceedings were pending. While China steadfastly maintained that these arrests and incarcerations were unrelated to Meng’s arrest, as soon as Meng was released so were the two Canadian men.

The US mainstream press is condemning China’s “hostage diplomacy.” But in their unswerving allegiance to the US national-security state, they are unable to see that it is the US government’s evil and immoral system of sanctions that is the root of the problem. Moreover, they cannot see how foreign interventionism actually makes American citizens less safe.

After all, China is a communist regime — a brutal communist regime. There is no such thing as due process of law in China. If officials wish to take someone into custody, torture him, and incarcerate him indefinitely, they can do it. The entire country is run on the same principles that the Pentagon and the CIA run their torture and prison center in Cuba.

So, why should anyone be surprised when the Chinese communists conduct themselves like communists? When a foreign regime takes a prominent Chinese citizen into custody on ludicrous criminal charges, it is as certain as thunder following lightning that China will do the same to citizens of that country.

In fact, if Canada had ultimately shipped Meng to the United States, you can bet your bottom dollar that there would have been some American businessmen taken into custody in China on bogus charges and kept in jail for as long as Meng was kept in jail. It’s just the way life works. It’s a perfect example of how the US Empire makes American travelers unsafe with its policy of foreign interventionism.

In the wake of the Afghanistan debacle and, now, the implicit acknowledgement of the wrongful prosecution of Meng Wanzhou, it’s time for Americans to do some serious soul-searching about US foreign policy. Is interventionism worth it? Do Americans really want to risk being incarcerated in foreign countries because US officials have imposed a worldwide prohibition against violating sanctions on other countries? More important, should our government be targeting innocent people with death and suffering as a way to achieve a political goal? 

I say: Let’s restore our nation’s founding system of non-interventionism. And let’s do it now, not later.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

from US Officials Free Meng Wanzhou

James Bovard Versus the TSA

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, there was a flurry of action establishing and expanding the United States government’s infringements of freedom in the name of making Americans safer. Along the way, political writer James Bovard documented the vile developments. Speaking Tuesday at the Future of Freedom Foundation’s Restoring Our Civil Liberties webinar, Bovard provided a biting, and at times funny, introduction to destructive and absurd actions the US government has pursued since the...

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from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2021/september/29/james-bovard-versus-the-tsa/

Pompeo: 'No Apologies' For Alleged Plan To Kill Assange

Former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo has responded to a recent Yahoo News investigation detailing Trump Administration plans to kidnap or kill Wikileaks founder Julian Assange that he makes "no apologies" for whatever measure his agency planned to take to safeguard "sensitive information." Also today: new public opinion data carries some bad news for President Biden. Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Pompeo: 'No Apologies' For Alleged Plan To Kill Assange

NY Gov Unhinged: 'Vaccines Are From God...Be My Apostles!"

New York Governor Kathy Hochul went into a bizarre rant in front of a church congregation, shifting a public health problem into one of religious significance. Is this starting to look like a cult instead of science? Also, Gov. Hochul signs executive order to fire thousands of nurses - amidst a critical shortage of nurses in NY. Make sense? Watch today's Liberty Report:



from NY Gov Unhinged: 'Vaccines Are From God...Be My Apostles!"

The Loss in Afghanistan Is Only the Latest Chapter in a Long Story of Intervention

US interventions abroad in the postwar period have created nothing but problems, problems regularly made worse by later attempts to solve the problems created by those previous interventions. While one can find innumerable instances of these failures in South and Central America, Europe, Africa, or Southeast Asia, the US interventions in Central Asia and the Middle East over the past forty years stand among the most illuminating case studies of this phenomenon. They illustrate the full folly, arrogance, and immorality of the US foreign policy establishment in a way perhaps unparalleled since its involvement in Indochina (approximately 1950–73), and should dissuade anyone from believing that the foreign policy, security, and military establishment ever learn any lessons or will “get it right next time.”

In 1990, just months after intervening in Panama to remove former CIA asset Manuel Noriega from power, on the other side of the world another former instrument of US power, Saddam Hussein, caught Washington’s attention when he invaded Kuwait.

Saddam had been cultivated by the CIA through the 1960s and '70s, and when he took power in Iraq launched a war against the recently liberated Iranians with US backing—the Iranians having finally thrown off the despotic US puppet regime installed following the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup against Mohammad Mossadegh. The war, which killed over a million and lasted a decade, left Iraq in serious debt to the Sunni kingdoms of the Arabian Peninsula. The Kuwaitis, not being repaid fast enough, subsequently began slant drilling Iraqi oil fields.

Saddam, of course, called Washington to complain. However, with events in Europe preoccupying his attention, George H.W. Bush had initially signaled Saddam to deal with the issue. After making more complaints and the Kuwaitis refusing to pick up the phone, Saddam invaded.

Whether Bush had been playing a game with Saddam or just hadn’t thought things through, Saddam’s invasion was totally unacceptable to the Saudis. Hurriedly assembling his forces and marshalling his international backers, Bush launched the first Iraq war just months later.

With Saddam easily driven back into Iraq, the elder Bush initially encouraged the majority Iraqi Shia and Kurds to rise up against the Iraqi dictator. But, belatedly realizing that such a move would serve only to empower Iran, he betrayed them. Leaving intact crucial military assets, US forces stood down as Saddam killed an estimated hundred thousand Iraqi Shia and Kurds.

Under Bill Clinton, Iraq was left to descend further into poverty and death under a crippling regime of sanctions put in place by the US that resulted in the deaths of over a half million children under the age of five. Even though the sanctions accomplished nothing else, then secretary of state Madeleine Albright was proud to declare later that she would do the same thing again if presented the chance. 

Critically, US troops and bases established during the first Iraq war, also known as Desert Storm, were left in place despite Dick Cheney, then Bush Sr.’s secretary of defense, declaring in the run-up to the war that the bases would be removed once Saddam had been driven out. Over the next decade, until they finally succeeded in slamming a pair of planes into New York City skyscrapers, the presence of US troops and bases in the Islamic holy land served as a magnet for repeated Sunni extremist attacks, including a car bombing and the Khobar Tower attacks, which killed over two dozen Americans.

Elsewhere, in an attempt to give the Soviets their own Vietnam, a series of US administrations, beginning with Jimmy Carter, funded and aided the mujahideen in Afghanistan. When the war ended, with the Soviets defeated and the US establishment no longer interested, the already poor country, which had suffered over 2 million civilian deaths, was further reduced to poverty and misery as the factions the US had variously supported descended into a fractious civil war that killed further tens of thousands, created a half million refugees, and opened up space for terrorist organizations to set up shop.

The Pashtun Taliban, a creation of long-standing US “allies” in the Pakistani intelligence services, eventually succeeded in taking control of most of the country, and were still trying to dislodge former US-backed warlords in the northeast of the country when 9/11 happened. Though there was no evidence linking the Taliban to al-Qaeda’s attacks (and in fact the strongest evidence for outside support has long pointed to the Saudis, specifically Prince Bandar bin Sultan), the second Bush administration conflated the two in order to justify its 2001 invasion.

Even more egregious lies were propagated in an attempt to legitimize the later invasion of Iraq. As early as 1998, key figures in the second Bush administration, such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, were planning for Iraq war 2. As part of their Project for the New American Century, they plotted to invade not only Iraq and Afghanistan, but also Syria—all in order to encircle Iran, the one country in the region that had successfully thrown off the US imperial yoke, and whose real sin, despite decades of propaganda, was thinking that Iranian natural resources were for Iranian enrichment, not Western oil interests.

In both cases, these manufactured wars of choice were utterly bungled—resulting in the construction of a US taxpayer-funded kleptocracy in Kabul hated by virtually everyone in the country and a Shia-dominated Iraq aligned with Iran. In the first case, the war in Afghanistan was essentially decided in favor of the Taliban’s return no later than 2006, while in the latter, it led directly to the rise of ISIS.

For having made a horrible mess of things, empowering Iran, the very country that was ultimately to be reabsorbed into the American sphere, Barack Obama continued George W. Bush’s policy of backing Sunni extremist group elsewhere in the Middle East in order to satisfy Riyadh’s fury over Bush’s almost unfathomable hubris and stupidity. So it happened that at the same time the Saudis were backing the Sunni terrorists in Iraq, the same ones killing US soldiers, the US began backing those terrorists’ allies in Iran, Libya, and Syria—in the last case including Jabhat al-Nusra, literally al-Qaeda by another name.

Who benefitted from these policies is obvious: the pillars of the military-industrial complex, Raytheon, Lockheed, General Dynamics, and General Atomics; the major US banks, who own the majority of their shares as well as buy and service the US debt; and the various outlets and think tanks of the foreign policy establishment—Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, the Rand Corporation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the American Enterprise Institute, to name just a few—all of which make a living selling the lie that the US isn’t safe and that threats to our freedom lurk everywhere.

Who doesn’t benefit from these policies and institutional arrangements is equally obvious: the American people, the ordinary enlisted men and women of our armed forces, and those unlucky enough to be living in countries deemed “core American interests,” to use the favorite vacuous phrase of the intellectual establishment, who legitimate the continuation of these immoral and intellectually deficient policies to the detriment of ordinary people everywhere.

In truth, there is no state on earth powerful enough to affect real core US interests: the US homeland. These wars cost $7.8 trillion by the government’s own admission, tens of thousands of American lives, and have resulted in the creation of a domestic surveillance and police state, all while making the world less safe—terrorist groups and terrorist attacks have risen by orders of magnitude since 9/11 precisely because of US actions overseas.

So while the foreign policy and military establishment try to turn China into the next bogeyman in order to justify continued foreign meddling and domestic indebtedness, and the partisan media of both sides try to pin the blame for the debacle of the Afghanistan pullout on Joe Biden or Donald Trump, respectively, the American people should understand that the outcome of the war in Afghanistan was decided many years, many lives, and many dollars ago. And as US military interventions continue in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, they should recognize that the best way to avoid debacles like Afghanistan is by not allowing their government to create them in the first place. 

Reprinted with permission from Mises.org.

from The Loss in Afghanistan Is Only the Latest Chapter in a Long Story of Intervention

Afghanistan: Where's The Cash?

Afghanistan’s US-run government was the world’s largest producer and exporter of opium, morphine, and the end-product, heroin.

As it did after first seizing power in the mid-1990’s, Taliban, the Islamic anti-drug and anti-communist movement, is shutting down the Afghan drug trade. Billions worth of heroin, opium and morphine that had been flowing into Central Asia, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Southeast Asia will be sharply reduced. Afghanistan’s drug-based economy is now in dire jeopardy.

But you would not know this if you follow the biased western press, notably the big US TV networks, social media and the BBC which thinks it’s Britain’s old colonial office. Western media has focused almost exclusively on the supposed plight of well-off westernized Afghan women in Kabul. That’s all you see on TV.

That these pampered ladies can’t easily get their nails done is not Afghanistan’s biggest problem. Nor is the closing of dance studios or fashion boutiques.

What really matters is that Afghan wedding parties and villages are no longer being savaged by US warplanes or B-1 and B-52 heavy bombers, or that wide scale torture by the Communist-run secret police, whose head, Amrullah Saleh, was a key US ally and the nation’s real strongmen, has been ended by Taliban.

Meanwhile, western media simply ignores the plight of women in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. I well recall being twice arrested in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia by religious police for walking with an attractive lady (an Estee Lauder beauty consultant).

I was arrested in Kuwait under similar suspicion. I was whipped by Saudi airport security police. And yet all we hear about or see are films of wicked Taliban soldiers maltreating Afghan women.

What I really want to know is what happened to all the billions in drug money reaped by the US-backed regime in Kabul and its allied warlords? Where are the pallets of fresh US $100 bills flown in from Washington to finance the Kabul regime? We saw the same phenomena in US-occupied Iraq. These mountains of cash just went ‘walkabout,’ as the Aussies say. Americans and US Arab allies grabbed the majority of these missing funds.

Iraq and Afghanistan account for one of the biggest thefts of money in modern history. Much of this sordid story has been documented by the US government’s own anti-corruption agency, SIGAR, which has waged a valiant battle to combat crime in Afghanistan during the $2 trillion, two-decade war.

Many of the drug-dealing criminals have already bailed out of Afghanistan via a US/British/French airlift. Others, Taliban opponents, mostly Tajik and Uzbek gang bosses, have managed to gain refuge in neighboring Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

The most formidable opposition to Taliban came from the Tajik Northern Alliance in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. This US-allied group dominated the drug trade until run out of business by Taliban. Now it’s trying to rally with secret backing from France, India and the US.

China is playing a cautious game in Afghanistan. I was invited by Chinese military intelligence to Beijing in 1981 to ask me if Beijing should begin supplying arms to the Afghan Islamic anti-Soviet resistance, aka ‘mujahidin.’ This was the most momentous act in the growing China-Soviet split. No one in Washington seemed to see or understand it.

Forty years later, China is still wrestling with this problem. Beijing wants good relations with Taliban but is seriously scared by the notion of Islamic wild men who support freedom and independence for the Chinese-ruled Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang (Eastern Turkestan).

Meanwhile, the great American-Afghan money machine has ground to a halt as its produce is secreted away in US real estate and Swiss banks.

Reprinted with permission from EricMargolis.com.

from Afghanistan: Where's The Cash?

Freedom prevails: COVID data shows ‘public health’ mandates only harm people

There’s something about human nature that causes people in power to want to “do something” when faced with an unknown problem. Yet sometimes, doing nothing is better than “doing something.” When it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more evidence is emerging that the laissez-faire approach to the issue — at least on a governmental/”public health” level — was the solution all along. 

The path chosen by Sweden, Belarus and a select few nations — which put the power in the hands of individuals to make their own health choices, instead of imposing draconian government edicts — appears to have won the day. With almost two years of data now in our hands, it sure seems that the ruling class has a lot to answer for.

Since the first COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China, in early 2020, the supposed expert class has told us that their forcible “mitigation and suppression” tools, such as lockdowns, masks, and social distancing via government edicts, were absolutely necessary to prevent incredible potential damage that would have been caused by the apparent unchecked circulation of this virus. 

The “experts” overwhelmingly endorsed these Chinese Communist Party-endorsed “health” measures, declaring them scientific overnight, despite many of these tools never being utilized in the event of a global pandemic. Far from looking back to reassess the premise of their grand plans, these leaders continued to plow forward with further and further restrictions on our liberties. They then pivoted to using these instruments of power in combination with compulsory therapy regimes, all under the guise of keeping us simple-minded plebs safe from the virus. Sure, all of our unalienable rights were seemingly stripped away without due process, but governments assured us that these supposedly scientifically proven measures would shield us from COVID-19. At the very least, we were told that these restrictions would be worth it because they are “keeping us safe.”

Now, almost two years have passed, and there is simply no evidence to date that these measures helped with our virus problem. In fact, given the excess death data of laissez-faire Sweden, you can now make the case that these “public health” solutions actually caused far more health problems than COVID-19 ever could by itself.

Excess deaths data tell us an incredible tale. Sweden has been largely open and free from any restrictions for 15 months and counting, and Stockholm has seen virtually *zero* excess deaths from the “deadly pandemic.” 

As I told you almost 400 days ago ⬇️

Sweden is overcounting Covid death.
Covid death: ~15k
Excess death: ~3.5k
...80% of european countries have more excess death (per mio)!

Basically no excess death in Sweden for 15 month now (3.5k excess June 2020 as well).

Sweden wins!
1/2 pic.twitter.com/o6ppty8rO1

— Prof. Freedom (@prof_freedom) September 24, 2021

Belarus had the mildest Covid restrictions in Europe (no LD, open borders) and has one of the lowest vacc rates. It has less than 4000 Covid deaths (out of 9 mill). Could you imagine all the lives and money we could save short and long term and if our govt emulated Belarus?

— Ewa Mazierska (@EwaMazierska) September 21, 2021

As of 9/25/2021, non-intervention countries Sweden and Belarus rank 43rd and 111th respectfully among nations in terms of COVID deaths per/100k population.

Again, this begs the question:

If Sweden and Belarus were able to outperform other nations by simply doing nothing, what exactly have all of these “public health expert” interventions accomplished?

The “experts” told us that their approach would certainly result in human catastrophe, with bodies lining every city block. Yet the opposite is true. Life has moved on from COVID in these nations, where the illness is being treated comparable to seasonal influenza.

Moreover, there appears to be declining confidence that the latest promised “cure” to the disease (mRNA injections) are acting as a cure in any way, shape, or form.

The Wall Street Journal: Israel, 80% Vaccinated, Suffers Another Covid-19 Surge.https://t.co/jDEoDJeHc4

— Charlie Oliver (@itscomplicated) August 13, 2021

* This is just a shocking observation, Not a correlation or a conclusion against vax.

Most countries with high % EXCESS DEATH in August
Israel, Qatar, Iceland, Spain: 21-25%
Finland, Chile, US, UK: 14-16%
Are highest vax. rates: 70-90% of adults
Source:https://t.co/I4lEF2hYuY pic.twitter.com/kYNQOaLxfV

— Ray Armat, Ph.D. (@RayArmat) September 24, 2021

In Sweden, children remained in school. Businesses remained open. People were allowed to live their lives as they saw fit. And yet, Sweden and others demonstrated excess mortality that was lower than average when compared to nations that had the most restrictions.

In America, due to government edicts, our overall health declined, we got sicker, we saw an unprecedented obesity increase, among other issues caused by “public health” interventions. Far from solving the virus issue at hand, it’s become clear that all of these mandates and restrictions just added additional problems on top of the issue of an endemic seasonal virus.

Indeed, sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something, especially when you’re trying to fight a war against an endemic, submicroscopic infectious particle.

Reprinted with author's permission from The Dossier.
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from Freedom prevails: COVID data shows ‘public health’ mandates only harm people

‘Don’t Be Bullied’ about Experimental Coronavirus Vaccine Shots Say Billboards in Several States

People driving around the Texas cities of Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas over the last few days have seen new billboards along major highways encouraging them to resist the incessant bullying from politicians, media, schools, businesses, and employers related to the experimental coronavirus “vaccine” shots. The huge billboards declare the messages “Make an Informed Choice!” and “DON’T BE BULLIED.” The billboards also display the image of a gloved hand holding a vial labeled “COVID...

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from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2021/september/27/don-t-be-bullied-about-experimental-coronavirus-vaccine-shots-say-billboards-in-several-states/

Follow The Science? CDC Director Throws Expert Committee Under The Bus

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has chosen to ignore the recommendation of her own panel of medical professional experts that booster shots were not necessary for the vast majority of the population. Walensky has sided with the vax manufacturers and endorsed boosters, promising even more astronomical profits for Big Pharma. Science...or politics? Also today: Norway dumps all existing coronavirus restrictions while Netherlands adopts Soviet-style internal digital passports, allowing only vaxxed to take part in daily life? Science and science? Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Follow The Science? CDC Director Throws Expert Committee Under The Bus

The Biggest Federal Reserve Scandal

Following revelations that Federal Reserve officials made trades in financial assets while the Fed was taking extraordinary efforts to “stimulate” the economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell ordered a review of the Fed’s ethics rules. While these trades appear problematic, they pale in comparison to the biggest Fed scandal — the Fed’s impoverishment of ordinary Americans, enrichment of the elites, and facilitation of government debt and deficits.

The depression induced by coronavirus, though really caused by so-called public health actions government took in response, was the official reason for the Fed’s increased asset purchases last year. However, the Fed actually started ramping up its money creating activities in September of 2019, when it began pouring billions a day into the repo markets, which banks use to make short-term loans to each other, in order to keep repo market interest rates low.

Coronavirus was just a convenient excuse for the Fed to do more of what it was already doing. Now, the Fed is using the limited reopening as a scapegoat for rising prices. Of course, anyone who understands Austrian economics understands that rising prices are a symptom, not a cause, of inflation. Inflation is the very act of money creation by the Fed.

Rising prices that diminish the average American’s standard of living are not the only result of the Fed’s manipulation of the money supply. The manipulation distorts economic signals, producing results including booms, bubbles, and busts.

Inflation has always benefited the well-connected elites who receive the Fed’s newly created money before the new money causes widespread price increases. The true motivation behind Fed policies was revealed by former Fed official Andrew Huszar in 2013. Huszar, writing for the Wall Street Journal, confirmed that quantitative easing kept stock prices high, instead of helping Americans struggling with the aftereffects of the 2008 meltdown.

Other beneficiaries of the Fed are big-spending politicians. The Federal Reserve's purchase of federal debt instruments keeps the federal government's debt servicing costs manageable. This is why, despite Chairman Powell's recent suggestion that the Fed will soon begin “tapering” its purchases of Treasuries, the Fed is unlikely to significantly reduce its purchase of Treasuries or allow interest rates to significantly increase.

Powell is also unlikely to upset President Biden and Biden’s congressional allies as long as progressives are urging Biden not to reappoint Powell. Progressives want to replace Powell with someone more committed to fighting climate change and systemic racism, two boogeymen routinely bought out as excuses for vast expansions in government spending and power.

Another major scandal involving the Fed is Congress’ refusal to pass the Audit the Fed bill and let the American people know the truth about the Fed’s operations. Audit the Fed authorizes a Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit of the Fed’s dealing with foreign governments and central banks, the Fed’s discount window operations, reserves of member banks, securities credit, interest on deposits, and open market transactions. Audit the Fed would finally reveal the truth about the Fed’s operations.

A limited audit authorized by the Dodd-Frank Act found that between 2007 and 2010, the Federal Reserve committed over 16 trillion dollars to foreign central banks and politically influential private companies. Imagine what a full audit would find. It is time to end the scandal of allowing a secretive central bank to have so much power over the economy and our liberty. It is time to audit, and end, the Fed.

from The Biggest Federal Reserve Scandal

My Time with the FBI

From the early 1990s onward, I was exposing FBI crimes, lies, and cover-ups. FBI director Louis Freeh publicly denounced me after I wrote a Wall Street Journal piece on the FBI’s killing of an innocent mother holding her baby at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. I continued hammering FBI abuses in the Journal, Playboy, American Spectator, and other publications.

One of the FBI’s biggest blunders occurred when it falsely accused a hapless security guard of masterminding an explosion at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Richard Jewell heroically saved lives by detecting and removing a pipe bomb before it exploded. But the FBI decided that Jewell had actually planted the bomb and leaked that charge to the media, which proceeded to drag Jewell’s life through the dirt for eighty-eight days. The FBI did nothing to curb the media harassment long after it recognized Jewell was innocent. I flogged the FBI’s vilification of Jewell in my 2000 book, Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years. 

In August 2001, I took a brief vacation in the mountains of western North Carolina. My then spouse was leafing through a tourist guidebook and swooned over a chalet inn she saw that was far off the beaten path. Alas, the directions to that hideaway were not worth a plug nickel. After futilely roving that zip code for an hour, I pulled up in front of a hardware store in Whittier, a one-stoplight hamlet, to cuss and recheck the map.

I stepped out of my car and fired up a cheap cigar as I leaned against the front hood of my Ford. Ninety seconds later, a big ol’ bald guy wearing bib overalls came bounding out of the hardware store and asked in a booming voice: “What part of Maryland you from?”

“Rockville,” I replied.

He told me his name was Dennis and started chatting me up at racehorse pace. He told me that he was originally from Maryland, had been living down here for twenty years, worked as a long-haul truck driver and maybe that’s why he had prostate problems. He boasted that he lost $5,000 gambling last year at a nearby Cherokee Indian casino but a buddy of his lost $60,000. He said he owned four acres of land a few miles away and then bragged about all the babes he’d boinked before he got married in 1987.

I nodded and threw in an occasional “huh.” Since I was raised in the mountains of Virginia, I was accustomed to country folks rattling on like they hadn’t spoken to anyone since the last solar eclipse. But something about this guy’s palavering seemed amiss.

And then he suddenly paused midsentence and stared at me intently.

“I think you might be an undercover federal agent,” he gravely announced.

Holy crap! I would have been less astounded if he'd accused me of being a vampire come to rob the local blood bank.

“Why do you think I’m a fed?” I asked incredulously. Shazam—my battered railroad cap was supposed to make me immune from such suspicions.

“Because you’re driving a black car with a Maryland license plate,” he replied without missing a beat.

I rolled my eyes and raised both arms by my side. “Are there any other signs of undercover federal agents?” I asked.

“Ya—they have hidden tracking devices on the underside of the back of the car.”

“Feel free to check out my car,” I grinned.

“OK!”

He and I walked to the back of my vehicle, he got down on his knees and pawed his big right hand around the Ford’s underside. A minute later, after he found no GPS tracker, he decided I wasn’t a G-man and gave me a hearty handshake.

“I didn’t mean no harm by saying you were a fed,” he apologized.

“No sweat,” I replied. “Feds don’t like me.”

“It’s just that this whole area was crawling with hundreds of FBI agents a few years ago—ever since they heard Eric Rudolph was hiding out somewhere in the mountains nearby,” Dennis explained.

“Whoa—I had forgotten the feds came looking for Rudolph in North Carolina,” I replied. 

After the FBI finished slandering Richard Jewell, they announced that Rudolph was the 1996 Olympic bomber, placed him on their Most Wanted list, and put a million-dollar bounty on his head.

Dennis warmed to the subject. “The FBI bragged that they were sending their best agents here and would catch Rudolph real quick. FBI came in like they owned the place. When they took over a motel for their headquarters, their agents went around banging on doors and threw every guest out on the spot. Their strutting was so bad that some restaurants refused to serve them. Well, they didn’t really refuse—they just told the FBI agents they had to leave their guns outside. Restaurants knew the agents weren’t allowed to do that. People taunted the feds with signs saying, ‘Eric Rudolph Ate Here.’”

“And they never caught Rudolph,” I commented.

“No,” Dennis replied. “Nobody would give them the time of day. After a few months, most of the agents were sent back to Washington.”

Dennis became more at ease after I mentioned that I’d written about federal outrages at Waco and Ruby Ridge—two cases that epitomized the FBI’s right to kill with impunity. Dennis was far better informed on Waco and Ruby Ridge than the vast majority of people I met inside the Beltway, who took their reality from the Washington Post.

Dennis wasn’t the type to take guff from any federal agent. He was a hunter, and proudly recapped how he'd told a Fish and Wildlife Service agent to go to hell a few months earlier. He started out talking about how the people in that neck of the woods were fine folks but later lamented that most of his neighbors had no interest in ideas. He wasn’t like them, he assured me, because “I didn’t fall off the pickle wagon yesterday” (i.e., wasn’t born yesterday).

After two hours, Dennis was “talked out.” He wasn’t familiar with that chalet that my wife wanted to visit but said that she and I were welcome to stay at his house that night. I thanked him kindly but said we should probably be heading down the road toward Asheville.

Eric Rudolph was finally captured in 2003 by a local policeman in a small town about an hour from that hardware store. He pleaded guilty to the Atlanta bombing as well as bombings of abortion clinics and a lesbian nightclub. Shortly after Rudolph was apprehended after more than four years in the mountains, a British newspaper pointed out that the FBI’s failure to catch him illustrated “all the shortcomings of a hi-tech, militarized federal force unable to negotiate such alien, not to say hostile, territory.” To nail Rudolph, the feds had pulled out all their tricks, including “bloodhounds, electronic motion detectors, and heat-sensing helicopters.” Instead of a triumphal “perp walk” and press conference, the FBI spurred the local sale of bumper stickers proclaiming, “Eric Rudolph: 1998 Hide and Seek Champion.”

One lesson I took from Dennis was that the FBI’s power and federal legitimacy are far more tenuous than Washington recognizes. Beyond the nation’s big cities and the coastlines, federal authority hinges largely on the consent of local citizens. Once that consent vanishes, FBI agents are left to sit in their cars eating their lunches all by themselves. But plenty of pundits and congressmen still clamor for the government to confiscate everyone’s guns or forcibly inject their children. If the feds came in and started shooting mountain men who refused to surrender their firearms, they would likely quickly find themselves in a worse plight than Custer at the Little Big Horn.

And the other lesson I took from meeting Dennis?

People in Washington think I'm a redneck, and rednecks think I'm an undercover fed. I can’t get a break.

Reprinted with permission from Mises.org.

from My Time with the FBI

Russiagate, More Like Watergate

CNN Chief Media Reporter Brian Stelter hopped on the set of Reliable Sources last weekend, and offered his take on Special Counsel John Durham’s recent indictment of former Perkins Coie attorney Michael Sussmann, calling Durham’s probe a “total bust.” This was in the context of accusing other networks like Fox and OAN of a pattern of “lie, rinse, repeat.”

I was sick last week and didn’t get around to reading the Sussmann case until Tuesday. I can’t imagine Stelter has read it, since the whole thing is about complicity on his side of the media aisle in years of repeat errors and lies, including multiple editorial double-downs even after a major story was publicly exposed as factually incorrect. A long list of press figures — from Stelter’s own CNN colleague and shameless intelligence community spokesclown Natasha Bertrand, to reporters from The New Yorker, Time, MSNBC, Fortune, the Financial Times, and especially Slate and The Atlantic — were witting or unwitting pawns in a scheme to sell the public on a transparently moronic hoax, i.e. that Donald Trump’s campaign was communicating mysterious digital treason to Russia’s Alfa Bank via a secret computer server.

The story sounded absurd from the start, and was instantly challenged by experts. Even outlets normally hostile to Donald Trump like the New York Times and the Washington Post correctly steered clear of it initially. However, plenty of other reporters fell for it and kept falling for it, including Stelter’s own CNN. We’ve known this story was false since at least December 9th, 2019, when Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz told us that “the FBI investigated whether there were cyber links between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, but had concluded by early February 2017 that there were no such links”:


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Horowitz’s conclusion was particularly embarrassing for CNN, which cited “sources close to the investigation” in March of 2017 — well after the FBI had already decided there was nothing there, according to Horowitz — to report the “FBI investigation continues” into the “‘odd’ computer link.” Moreover, when the original main source for the Alfa story, a “computer expert” who went by the name “Tea Leaves,” refused CNN’s requests for an interview for that piece, the network explained in apparent seriousness that “fear has now silenced several of the computer scientists who first analyzed the data,” as if a combo squad of Russian spies and Trump goons might put bullets in their heads.

We find out from this indictment that those sources were terrified, all right, only not of Russians or Trump, but of being found out. In fact, the “academics” who were the sources for Franklin Foer’s original October 31, 2016 Slate article, “Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?”, were so concerned a nonsense allegation of secret Trump-Russia communication wouldn’t pass a public smell test that one of them proposed faking the story to make them “appear to communicate,” literally using the word “faking” in an email.

They ended up not going that far, but the “research” they did produce was so weak that one of them complained that they couldn’t “technically make any claims that would fly public scrutiny,” even if reporters and others lived down to their expectations and proved “not smart enough to refute our ‘best case’ scenario.” The researcher’s email went on, in a line that summed up much of the Russiagate phenomenon:

The only thing that drives us at this point is that we just do not like [Trump]… Folks, I am afraid we have tunnel vision. Time to regroup?

The intrepid reporting heroes who bought this manure-sack from these people were the ones to whom Rachel Maddow said, with a straight face, “We are blessed to have journalists as talented as you… writing about this.”

"We are blessed as a country to have journalists as talented as you and Franklin Foer writing about this."

-@maddow in 2018 to Dexter Filkins on his and Foer's stories about secret Trump-Russian bank contacts -- a DNC-funded scam that is now subject to a federal indictment. pic.twitter.com/hdlDy7ZweU

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) September 17, 2021

The indictment makes a conspicuous point of elucidating a long list of characters in and around the Clinton campaign who were privy to Sussmann’s Trump-Alfa project. In one passage, Durham explains who’s on an email chain about the subject dated September 15, 2016, after Sussmann had given the story to the New York Times and four days before Sussmann would deliver it to the General Counsel of the FBI:

On or about September 15 , 2016, Campaign Lawyer-1 exchanged emails with the Clinton Campaign’s campaign manager, communications director, and foreign policy advisor concerning the Russian Bank-1 allegations that SUSSMANN had recently shared with Reporter-1.

Campaign Lawyer-1 is Marc Elias, the General Counsel for the Hillary Clinton campaign. Durham also lists former Clinton campaign manager and current Harvard fellow and House Majority PAC president Robby Mook, former Clinton communications director and current Showtime The Circus co-host Jennifer Palmieri, and former Clinton foreign policy advisor and current National Security Advisor to Joe Biden Jake Sullivan.

Fair use excerpt. Read the rest here.

from Russiagate, More Like Watergate

America at the Crossroads- Liberty or Tyranny?

The daily lecturing and scolding by media, medical “experts”, politicians and worry warts to take the Covid-19 “Vaccine” is unprecedented. To hear them tell it EVERYONE should be fully vaccinated including children. Time and time again you hear, “Just shut up and get the shot!” as if repeating the same mantra over and over makes it true.

But if you talk to seasoned medical professionals privately (the medical community is terrified of being cancelled if they dare speak truth publicly) they will tell you there has never been a medication suitable for every single human being on earth. Human beings are marvelously unique creatures that require specialized care based on their particular health circumstances.

What about aspirin? The Bayer pharmaceutical company began producing aspirin in 1897, 124 years ago so we’ve had plenty of time to learn about the benefits and risk factors it entails. If you go to Harvard Health Publishing/ Harvard Medical School Answers about aspirin - Harvard Health you’ll learn that it’s NOT a good idea for EVERYONE to take aspirin:

'A lot of people take aspirin who really shouldn't,' says Dr. Christopher Cannon, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

 'Everyone assumes aspirin is harmless, but it's not.' For some, the downsides of aspirin—mainly gastrointestinal bleeding—outweigh its benefits.”

Imagine that!

The lowly, benign aspirin’s potential risks may outweigh any benefits.

But there is a global push to force EVERYONE to be injected with a hastily cobbled together gene altering treatment with NO long-term risk studies that is called a “Vaccine”. All this to counter a virus that according to the CDC is survivable by 99.74% of the people infected by it?

Well as we know now it’s a “vaccine” in name only because it doesn’t appear to work very well. Health Ministry chief says coronavirus spread reaching record heights | The Times of Israel On Tuesday September 14, 2021, the Times of Israel reported that:

The current wave of coronavirus infections is surpassing anything seen in previous outbreaks.” Health Ministry data “showed that 10,000 new covid cases were diagnosed in a single day.

According to the Israeli Health Ministry 84% of the people age 12 and up are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 making it one of the most highly “vaccinated” countries in the world. It’s obvious the vaccine doesn’t work as advertised. But it’s worse than that. Not only does it not work very well it has some very nasty side effects for some people.

According to the CDC over 14,000 Americans have died due to an adverse reaction to the “vaccine.” Childrens' Health Defense reported: 

Data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that between Dec. 14, 2020 and Sept. 3, 2021, a total of 675,593 adverse events following COVID vaccines were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). The data included a total of 14,506 reports of deaths — an increase of 595 over the previous week.

Last week President Joe Biden scolded American’s who are reluctant to have the Covid-19 “vaccine” cocktail injected into their bodies. He insisted the “vaccine” was safe and effective, even though the data says otherwise.

President Biden’s patience with those who choose to decide what to inject in their bodies is about up and he’s ordered businesses with at least 100 employees to take the jab, regardless of their personal medical history! And he wants any US military personnel who refuse the injection to be given a Dishonorable Discharge which would effectively cancel them from meaningful employment.

Any thinking person can see through what’s going on here. This is not about protecting anyone’s health, it’s about power and control. And possibly the “vaccine” is intended to cull some of the useless eaters stinking up the planet and ruining it for the elites!

The hysterical “Get the jab!” shrieking makes one think of the famous line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks,’ In this case the anguished cry’s for everyone to take the jab, with absolutely no regard for individual medical conditions should serve as a sober warning for the real game that’s afoot.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer, and political prisoner. He spent several years in Soviet prison camps for his anti-totalitarian views. He said:

What would things been like [in Russia] if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people?

The fact is this madness will not blow over if we just try to get through it and passively go along with the flow. A bully is never stopped by compliance but by resistance. Peaceful resistance is preferable. By simply refusing to comply with the tyrannical edicts we drain them of power. But American’s are well armed, unlike the U.K and Australia.

The tyrants know that pushing freedom loving American’s too far could end their reign of terror. We have the numbers on our side provided enough are willing to say “No, I will not comply.” We have the power to stop this. The only question is, will enough of us use it?

from America at the Crossroads- Liberty or Tyranny?

A State Health Department Leader Who Puts Freedom First

Over the last year and a half, many state health department leaders across America have been leading the charge against freedom. In the name of countering coronavirus, they have been demanding that businesses, churches, and community organizations shut down, and that people stay in their homes, wear masks, “social distance,” and take experimental coronavirus “vaccines.” Those demands and more make up the coronavirus crackdowns that these tyrannical bureaucrats have been pushing on Americans.

In sharp contrast with this mob of tyrannical bureaucrats, on Tuesday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis refreshingly appointed Joseph Ladapo to be the leader of the state’s health department. The new state surgeon general, in his comments at the Tuesday appointment announcement event, spoke boldly in favor of freedom and against using health fearmongering, including the overstating of dangers from coronavirus, as an excuse to violate individual rights.

In laying out his general approach as Florida surgeon general, Ladapo started with a statement about rejecting fear as a guide for public health policy. Ladapo stated:

I talked to the governor, and there are a few things that we’re gonna keep in mind as we approach public health here in the state of Florida. So, the first is that Florida will completely reject fear as a way of making policies in public health. So, we’re done with fear. That’s something that’s been unfortunately a centerpiece of health policy in the United States ever since the beginning of the pandemic, and it’s over here — expiration date, it’s done.

In the question-and-answer period with reporters that followed, Ladapo several times stressed his support for ensuring that his actions as surgeon general do not infringe on people’s freedom. First off in the Q&A, Ladapo clearly stated his support for freedom in the realm of health decisions, declaring, “this idea that, you know, people don’t get to make their own decisions, you know, on issues of health related to their own personal health is wrong, and it’s not something that we’re going to be about.”

Asked about his the Great Barrington Declaration, Ladapo stated, “the spirit of what they believe — that we need to respect human rights, that, you know, people do have autonomy over their lives, and it’s not OK to — it’s not even not OK but it’s not virtuous and it’s not right — to just sort of take away those rights from individuals, I completely agree with that; that’s why I signed it.”

Regarding experimental coronavirus “vaccines” that many governments are pressuring people to receive, Ladapo stated bluntly, “vaccines are up to the person.” Continuing, he said:

There’s nothing special about them compared to any other preventive measure. So, absolutely, great things about vaccines for covid-19 — prevent the risk of serious illness, fantastic. People get to make a choice about what they want to do with that.

Seemingly aware of the potential that someone in support of freedom and against fearmongering being the leader of the Florida state government’s health department can have influence far beyond Florida’s borders, Ladapo said early on in his comments that, in working on “public health” matters in Florida, he will “frankly hopefully set an example for other states around the country and maybe even further than that.”

While the Florida government has taken action against using coronavirus fear as a reason to stomp on freedom in the state, there are still many coronavirus tyrants in America, from the United States president and US Congress members to state governors and legislators to county, city, and school board politicians. And coronavirus crackdowns continue to rage across the continents.

Ladapo’s example of a freedom-respecting and fearmongering-rejecting health department leader can go a long way to educate people about how to better deal with health issues. His example can also demonstrate that there is a viable course of action for people in similar positions that does not depend on inducing panic and employing force.

Watch here Ladapo comments upon his appointment to be Florida surgeon general:



from A State Health Department Leader Who Puts Freedom First

Support The Troops? Biden Demands Dishonorable Discharge For Vax Refusers!

The Biden Administration is demanding that members of the US military who refuse the covid shot be DISHONORABLY discharged! The Administration is also taking aim at military members who prefer to pass on the vax because they have natural immunity from a previous infection. Is this about discipline...or about a political purge of the military? Also today: cancer deaths in UK will skyrocket due to covid lockdowns and care restrictions. Do the world covid elites have an endgame now that their narrative has failed? Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Support The Troops? Biden Demands Dishonorable Discharge For Vax Refusers!

New Proof Emerges of the Biden Family Emails: a Definitive Account of the CIA/Media/BigTech Fraud

A severe escalation of the war on a free internet and free discourse has taken place over the last twelve months. Numerous examples of brute and dangerous censorship have emerged: the destruction by Big Tech monopolies of Parler at the behest of Democratic politicians at the time that it was the most-downloaded app in the country; the banning of the sitting president from social media; and the increasingly explicit threats from elected officials in the majority party of legal and regulatory reprisals in the event that tech platforms do not censor more in accordance with their demands.

But the most severe episode of all was the joint campaign — in the weeks before the 2020 election — by the CIA, Big Tech, the liberal wing of the corporate media and the Democratic Party to censor and suppress a series of major reports about then-presidential frontrunner Joe Biden. On October 14 and then October 15, 2020, The New York Post, the nation's oldest newspaper, published two news reports on Joe Biden's activities in Ukraine and China that raised serious questions about his integrity and ethics: specifically whether he and his family were trading on his name and influence to generate profit for themselves. The Post said that the documents were obtained from a laptop left by Joe Biden's son Hunter at a repair shop.

From the start, the evidence of authenticity was overwhelming. The Post published obviously genuine photos of Hunter that were taken from the laptop. Investigations from media outlets found people who had received the emails in real-time and they compared the emails in their possession to the ones in the Post's archive, and they matched word-for-word. One of Hunter's own business associates involved in many of these deals, Tony Bobulinski, confirmed publicly and in interviews that the key emails were genuine and that they referenced Joe Biden's profit participation in one deal being pursued in China. A forensics analyst issued a report concluding the archive had all the earmarks of authenticity. Not even the Bidens denied that the emails were real: something they of course would have done if they had been forged or altered. In sum, as someone who has reported on numerous large archives similar to this one and was faced with the heavy burden of ensuring the documents were genuine before risking one's career and reputation by reporting them, it was clear early on that all the key metrics demonstrated that these documents were real.

Despite all that, former intelligence officials such as Obama's CIA Director John Brennan and his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper led a group of dozens of former spooks in issuing a public statement that disseminated an outright lie: namely, that the laptop was "Russian disinformation.” Note that this phrase contains two separate assertions: 1) the documents came from Russia and 2) they are fake ("disinformation"). The intelligence officials admitted in this letter that — in their words — “we do not know if the emails are genuine or not,” and also admitted that “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.” Yet it repeatedly insinuated that everyone should nonetheless believe this:


(Bigger)

But the complete lack of evidence for these claims — that even these career CIA liars acknowledged plagued their assertions — did not stop the corporate media or Big Tech from repeating this lie over and over, and, far worse, using this lie to censor this reporting from the internet. One of the first to spread this lie was the co-queen of Russiagate frauds, Natasha Bertrand, then of Politico and now promoted, because of lies like this, to CNN. “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” blared her headline in Politico on October 19, just five days after the Post began its reporting. From there, virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.

On October 21 — exactly one week after the Post's first report — The Intercept published a false story under the melodramatic headline “We're Not a Democracy” about these materials from former New York Times reporter James Risen. This propaganda assault masquerading as "news” mindlessly laundered the CIA's lies about the laptop. This is what appeared in this outlet that still claims to do “adversarial” reporting:

Their latest falsehood once again involves Biden, Ukraine, and a laptop mysteriously discovered in a computer repair shop and passed to the New York Post….This week, a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation.

Note that even the intelligence officials, who acknowledged they had no evidence to support this claim, were more honest than The Intercept, which omitted that critical admission. Days later, this very same outlet — which I co-founded seven years earlier to be adversarial, not subservient, to evidence-free assertions from the intelligence community, and which was designed to be an antidote to rather than a clone of The New York Times — told me that I could not publish the article I had written about the Biden archive because it did not meet their lofty and rigorous editorial standards: the same lofty and rigorous editorial standards that led to uncritical endorsement of the CIA's lies just days earlier. It was that episode, as Matt Taibbi recounted at the time, that prompted my resignation from the outlet I created in protest of this censorship, in order to report instead only on free speech platforms such as this one.

But the media disinformation about the Post's documents — obviously designed to protect Joe Biden in the lead-up to the election — were not the worst aspect of what happened here. Far worse was the decision by Twitter to prohibit any discussion of this reporting or posting of links to the story both publicly and privately on the platform. Worse still was the immediate announcement by Facebook through its communications executive Andy Stone — a life-long Democratic Party operative — that it would algorithmically suppress the story pending a "fact check” by "Facebook's third-party fact-check partners.” Despite multiple requests from me and others, Facebook never published the results of this alleged fact-check and still refuse to say whether it ever conducted one. Why? Because the documents they blocked millions of Americans from learning about were clearly true and authentic.

Fair use excerpt. Read the rest here.

from New Proof Emerges of the Biden Family Emails: a Definitive Account of the CIA/Media/BigTech Fraud

Biden’s Wrecking Ball for Financial Privacy

The Biden administration is seeking to compel banks to report to the IRS any bank account with more than $600 in transactions per year. This proposal is a linchpin of Biden’s American Families Plan, and will supposedly help generate almost $500 billion in federal revenue over the next decade. But previous catch-all financial reporting requirements have helped spur national disasters, complete with pervasive federal looting.

Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) denounced the Biden proposal as a “surveillance dragnet,” a “huge violation of privacy,” and “an egregious abuse of Americans’ right to due process by inferring that all US taxpayers are guilty of evading taxes until proven otherwise.” Paul Merski of the Independent Community Bankers of America warns that the Biden proposal would be “be a historic invasion of financial privacy like we’ve never seen before.” Merski also declared, “The IRS is absolutely incapable of handling or processing this massive amount of new data, and they would admit as much — that’s why they’re asking for an additional $80 billion in this budget.”

Actually, federal money cops have long been overwhelmed by too many reports from banks. Prior federal reporting requirements buried bureaucrats in useless reports and became a de facto Terrorist Hijacker Empowerment Act . The 9/11 attacks were preceded by the biggest failure ever by US financial authorities.

The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 made it a federal crime for banks to keep secrets from the government. This law obliged banks and other financial institutions to submit a currency transaction report (CTR) to the federal government for each cash transaction involving more than $10,000. The feds harvested 17 million CTRs in 2000; federal agencies were flooded with tons of paper that bureaucrats often never bothered to examine. Beginning in 1996, banks were also obliged to file a Suspicious Activity Report on any transaction that “has no business or apparent lawful purpose or is not the sort in which the particular customer would normally be expected to engage.” The feds were soon receiving two hundred thousand suspicious activity reports per year. Greg Nojeim of the American Civil Liberties Union observed, “Congress barred financial institutions from telling their customers that their bank had spied on them by reporting their transactions to the federal government.”

That deluge of reports provided a smokescreen for the 9/11 plotters. A 2002 United Nations report on terrorist financing noted that a “suspicious transaction report” had been filed with the US government over a $69,985 wire transfer that Mohamed Atta, leader of the hijackers, received from the United Arab Emirates. However, the report noted, “this particular transaction was not noticed quickly enough, because the report was just one of a very large number and was not distinguishable from those related to other financial crimes.” Atta was on a terrorist watch list, but the avalanche of other reports the feds received targeting home buyers, boat buyers, and other innocuous transactions provided sufficient cover for the attack to proceed.

Rather than recognize how pointless reporting requirements swamped federal watchdogs, Congress responded to 9/11 by vastly expanding federal financial vacuum cleaners. On October 17, 2001, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) was the only member of the House to oppose the International Money Laundering Abatement and Antiterrorist Financing Act of 2001, which became Title III of the Patriot Act. Paul warned that the bill “has more to do with the ongoing war against financial privacy than with the war against international terrorism” and derided it as “a laundry list of dangerous, unconstitutional power grabs…. These measures will actually distract from the battle against terrorism by encouraging law-enforcement authorities to waste time snooping through the financial records of innocent Americans who simply happen to demonstrate an ‘unusual’ pattern in their financial dealings.”

Paul’s warnings were prescient. The Patriot Act turbocharged reporting requirements, and the feds are now receiving two million “Suspicious Activity Reports” a year. It would be worse than naïve to assume that all the reports that banks send to Washington will sit passively in federal databases. 

Financial reporting requirements helped spur one of the most disgraceful federal looting sprees in modern times. The IRS has exploited the technicalities of the Bank Secrecy Act – which requires banks to report any transaction over $10,000 – to preemptively confiscate the bank accounts of innocent Americans. The IRS “enforced” the Bank Secrecy Act by presuming that anyone who deposited slightly less than $10,000 was a criminal. The IRS seized a quarter billion dollars because it disapproved of how businesses and individuals structured their bank deposits and withdrawals. IRS bureaucrats don’t even need to file a criminal charge before snaring citizens’ life savings.

Between 2005 and 2012, the number of IRS seizures for Bank Secrecy Act violations rose more than fivefold, but the vast majority of victims were never criminally prosecuted for structuring offenses. “One-third of those cases involved nothing more than making a series of sub-$10,000 cash transactions,” the Institute for Justice reported. A 2017 Inspector General report found no evidence in 91% of the forfeiture cases that the money came from illegal activities. The IRS chose to seize first, and ask questions later – if at all. IRS investigators simply looked at banking records and then confiscated the accounts of hundreds of people.

Most of the victims were “legal businesses such as jewelry stores, restaurant owners, gas station owners, scrap metal dealers, and others.” The IRS targeted businesses with legal sources of income because “the Department of Justice had encouraged task forces to engage in ‘quick hits,’ where property was more quickly seized… rather than pursuing cases with other criminal activity (such as drug trafficking and money laundering), which are more time-consuming,” the Inspector General reported.

Would the IRS behave as atrociously with a new $600 reporting requirement as it has in the past with the $10,000 reporting requirement in the Bank Secrecy Act? In US Tax Court, IRS determinations of what citizens owe are “presumed correct,” with taxpayers bearing the burden to prove the feds wrong. Corporations with well-fed legal departments routinely defeat the IRS in court but few citizens can afford to fight a federal agency that appears to hold all the cards. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen declared, “Any suggestion that instead this reporting regime will be used to target enforcement efforts on ordinary Americans is wholly misguided.” Then why do the feds want the data on almost anyone with a bank account?

Biden’s new reporting requirement could be the Bitcoin Relief Act of 2021. Forty banking and financial associations sent a letter to Congress on September 17 warning that the Biden proposal “would create tremendous liability for all affected parties by requiring the collection of financial information for nearly every American without proper explanation of how the IRS will store, protect, and use this enormous trove of personal financial information.” American Banking Association president Rob Nichols warns that requiring “banks to police and report on the accounts of customers…will undermine trust in the banking system and erode the progress we have made reducing the number of unbanked and underbanked in the country.”

The Internal Revenue Service has perennially been the authoritarian means to paternalistic ends. The Washington Post reported that “the single biggest source of new revenue in the [Biden] plan comes from dramatically expanding the clout of the nation’s tax agency.” Biden relishes condemning tax-dodging billionaires but that $600 reporting requirement is a signal that IRS purgatory could soon be crowded with average Americans.

Reprinted with permission from American Institute for Economic Research.

from Biden’s Wrecking Ball for Financial Privacy

Biden's Border Bungle: Immigration...Or Invasion?

Americans on the Left and Right are finding themselves in rare agreement: whatever their position on immigration they view Biden's handling of the mass influx of Haitians at the Texas border as a disaster. How is it possible to have bungled so badly? What is to be done? Also today: "Ten for the big guy" turns out to be fact, not Russian disinformation. So now what? And a shocking discovery from JP Morgan on the Delta Variant. Don't miss today's Liberty Report:



from Biden's Border Bungle: Immigration...Or Invasion?

Rare Instance of a Professional Athlete Hospitalized for Coronavirus

Many politicians, including United States President Joe Biden, like to drone on about how everybody should take experimental coronavirus vaccine shots. Yet, even if we suppose the shots provide much help against coronavirus, many people are at so little risk from coronavirus that it seems very foolhardy for them to risk the side effects of the shots. Two groups with apparently among the lowest risks of death or major sickness from coronavirus are children and professional athletes. The...

Read the full report by clicking the title, below...

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2021/september/21/rare-instance-of-a-professional-athlete-hospitalized-for-coronavirus/

Melbourne Meltdown: Lockdowned Aussies Rise In Revolt

The match that lit the flame was likely the announcement by the government that all construction projects would be put on hold for two weeks to punish construction workers who opposed the mandatory vax. Now, a worker-led rebellion is spreading with protestors shutting down freeways and more. Will the tyranny finally be defeated? Also today, Louisiana State University "unenrolls" students who haven't complied with their vax/testing mandate - but they only return half the money! Finally: masks and distancing are only for the little people. The elites flaunt the rules again and again. Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Melbourne Meltdown: Lockdowned Aussies Rise In Revolt

The Empire’s Last Stand

In the early months of 1947, President Harry Truman and Dean Acheson, his secretary of state, made up their minds to prop up Greece’s openly fascist monarchy against a popular revolt they had cast as a Soviet threat. After much hand-wringing, Truman went to Congress on March 12 to ask for $400 million in aid, not quite $5 billion today when adjusted for inflation.

Truman and Acheson knew the Greek intervention would be a hard sell: Congress was in no mood to spend that kind of money, and the war-weary public harbored hope for FDR’s vision of a postwar order built on the principle of peaceful coexistence. As the speech went through its multiple drafts, Arthur Vandenberg, Republican senator from Michigan and a presence in the planning of America’s postwar posture, offered advice that must be counted elegantly forthright, if diabolic in its cynicism.

It comes down to us today, and for good reason. “Mr. President,” Vandenberg said during White House deliberations, “the only way you are ever going to get this is to make a speech and scare hell out of the American people.”

Truman made his since-famous “scare hell” speech. The Greeks got their $400 million (a remarkable proportion of which was embezzled by government ministers), and the American public was kept scared for the next 40–odd years — the Cold War years.

When It Started

There are various thoughts as to when the Cold War started. Some scholars argue it began as early as the Yalta Conference in early 1945, when Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt told Joseph Stalin there would be no Allied support for the reconstruction of the Soviet Union, which had sacrificed 20 million to 27 million lives to defeat the Germans — a victory that left the Soviet economy in ruins.

My date is March 12, 1947, when Truman delivered his address to a joint session of Congress. And it is remarkable how faithfully the intervention in Greece, the first of Washington’s major Cold War undertakings, has been reproduced during all the decades since. A year later the US (with Britain’s assist) corrupted Italy’s first postwar general elections. Then came the coup in Iran, then the coup in Guatemala, and so on without interruption until our time.

Last Wednesday President Joe Biden announced a new trilateral security agreement with Britain and Australia. Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison, respectively the British and Australian prime ministers, joined him electronically from London and Canberra. Biden couldn’t remember Morrison’s name — “that fella down under” is as far as he got — but let us not allow the shocking incompetence of the man driving our bus to distract us from the gravity of the moment.

There are numerous things to say about the new accord, by which the US and Britain are to provide Australia with the sensitive technology needed to build a fleet of eight or more nuclear-powered submarines. But before we get to anything else, get used to Roman numerals: Last Wednesday was a three-sided declaration that Cold War II is now our new, flesh-and-blood, steel-and-bombs, propaganda-and-paranoia reality.

The Ides of September: Remember the date. Sept. 15, 2021, is our March 12, 1947. Xi Jinping’s People’s Republic is in 2021 what Stalin’s Soviet Union was three-quarters of a century ago. Truman and Acheson changed the world when they drafted the full-of-lies “scare hell” speech — greatly for the worse, of course. Biden, Johnson and Morrison just did the same. It would be hard to overstate the dangers and burdens Cold War II is going to inflict upon us — we Americans, we the rest of the human population.

Remember this, too, and bear witness. It is the US that has assiduously sought to kindle Cold War II, just as it, and not the Soviet Union, was responsible for starting Cold War I. I mention this because the origins of the first Cold War have been hopelessly blurred in the histories. We can watch this time. It is occurring before our eyes.

There had been talk of a new Cold War at least since the US recklessly, stupidly sponsored the coup in Ukraine in February 2014 and the monstrously paranoid Russophobia our authoritarian liberal friends began cultivating two years later. But we seem to have had our oceans and continents mixed up. Hardly are the policy cliques (and their clerks in the press) going to now encourage Americans to see Russia simply as it is. No chance. But it is China and the Chinese that they are now going to distort to the point whether neither is recognizable.

What does this bode for all of us? What will life be like as Cold War II is waged? I shudder to pose these questions, having lived through all of Cold War I, but for the first few years of it. Take my word for it, those too young to share the memories: This ain’t going to be no kind of fun.

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from The Empire’s Last Stand