Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

Germany on Tuesday announced a $1.1 billion weapons package for Ukraine that Berlin said was to help Kyiv get through the winter.

The package includes a US-made Patriot air defense system, two German-made IRIS-T air defense systems, 10 more German Leopard tanks, and other types of equipment.

“With this new ‘winter package,’ we are further enhancing the readiness of the Ukrainian armed forces in the coming months,” said German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius.

The provision of such a large arms package demonstrates that NATO is preparing to support the conflict for another year. In Washington, the White House and hawks in Congress are considering authorizing a giant Ukraine aid package to get through the 2024 election.

After initially being reluctant to go all in on the proxy war, Germany has become one of Ukraine’s top NATO backers, second only to the US.

According to the German-based Kiel Institute, Berlin has provided Ukraine with about $18 billion in military aid, compared with about $44.5 billion provided by the US.

In the early days of the conflict, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he was opposed to providing Ukraine with tanks and warplanes because he was trying to avoid World War III and nuclear war.

Ukraine has since been armed with dozens of German-made Leopard tanks, and Berlin approved the transfer of Soviet-era MiG-29s from Poland to Ukraine that initially came from Germany’s military.

Authored by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,

• EU storage facilities are filled near capacity levels.

• Demand for gas in the European Union has declined by between 10% and 15% over the past 12 months.

• Interestingly, gas prices in Europe are currently higher than they were when the Chevron workers started striking in September.

The European Union has accumulated record amounts of natural gas in its storage facilities and has done so ahead of its own schedule.

The news about the advanced fill-up of storage caverns was first announced in August by Brussels with understandable pride. In mid-August, storage was full at 90%, which was the November target.

But energy suppliers did not stop there because, as of early October, gas storage in the EU is close to 100% full. There is just one slight problem: it might still not be enough to secure winter gas supply.

Last year, European countries saw a milder-than-usual winter for most of the heating season, which was a welcome manifestation of climate change given the concerns about the sufficiency of gas in storage. In the end, much of the gas bought at exorbitant prices during the summer remained in storage unused because of the weather.

Even with the mild winter and the full storage, however, European governments imposed energy austerity measures on large consumers. This year will be no different. Storage may be full to the brim, but there will be energy savings initiatives—including mandatory ones—recently voted in Germany. Because one thing that commentators often forget when they talk about European gas storage is that it does not cover 100% of consumption.

The storage capacity for natural gas in the European Union actually covers about a third of demand, according to the EU itself. There is space to store up to 100 billion cubic meters of natural gas in the bloc and that is 33% of what it consumes—far from enough if we are talking about supply security.

Because storage can only cover a third of European consumption—or perhaps a little more if we assume energy austerity measures will work as well this year as they did last year—European countries will need to continue importing liquefied natural gas through the winter. Unless, of course, Europe gets lucky with climate change again and has another unusually warm winter.

European officials have been busy this past year to find ways to enhance gas supply security. There was the agreement for joint gas buying, which seems to be working so well Brussels is considering making it a permanent fixture of EU life. There were talks about buying more gas from Azerbaijan, but that kind of fell through after the latest events in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Meanwhile, demand for gas in the European Union has declined by between 10% and 15% over the past 12 months thanks to government efforts—and prices. According to Reuters’s John Kemp, there is little chance for a recovery in demand given that it has remained subdued this year as well, despite greater supply security.

Just how vulnerable Europe’s supply of gas is was demonstrated recently by price movements amid the labor dispute at Chevron’s Gorgon and Wheatstone LNG projects in Australia. Europe is not a big buyer of Australian LNG, but Australia is the world’s largest exporter and any disruption in Australian supply disrupts global supply.

So, when workers at the Chevron projects began striking, prices for gas in Europe surged, adding 13% in a single day. In fairness, they are still nowhere near where they were in the summer of 2022, but a 13% daily price rise is still considerable.

Interestingly, prices are currently higher than they were when the Chevron workers started striking in September. Then, the first day of striking saw Europe’s benchmark TTF price rise to 34.50 euro per megawatt-hour. Now, the front-month TTF contract, per Reuters, is trading at 38 euro per MWh, while the January delivery contract is trading at 44 euro.

This is the price of reliance on a global market for liquefied natural gas that, as we saw last year, can quite easily turn into a sellers’ market whatever plans buyers might have, including a buyers’ cartel. Last year, Europe priced poorer countries out of the market, pushing them back to coal. Yet, while this might be dubious from a climate change fighting perspective, it was the natural thing to do for Europe: secure energy supply.

This year, Europe appears to be content in the knowledge its gas storage caverns are full, and with average seasonal drawdowns at less than 600 TWh, the chances of a shortage are slim. Of course, there is also the lower energy consumption by industrial users, which may be positive for gas storage levels but is negative from an economic growth perspective, yet it is not drawing much attention, at least from European officials.

Commentators do pay attention, however. In a September column about the reduction in industrial gas consumption, Reuters’ Kemp spelled it out quite simply. Noting the significant reduction in consumption, which has enhanced supply security for the winter months, he went on to write that “the region has paid a high price in terms of reduced manufacturing activity, which could lead to permanent deindustrialization unless gas prices are reduced significantly within the next couple of years.”

Authored by Terri Wu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Didier Raoult, a renowned French microbiologist, announced hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as an effective cure for COVID-19 on Feb. 25, 2020. The following month, former U.S. President Donald Trump cited his research and called the drug a “game changer.” Since then, Dr. Raoult has been engulfed in a global controversy.

Initially, in March 2020, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted HCQ, a drug widely used against malaria and arthritis, an emergency use authorization (EUA) for treating COVID-19.

However, on May 22, 2020, the Lancet medical journal published a now-retracted study saying that HCQ brought about a much higher risk of death and heart problems in hospitalized COVID-19 patients, citing data from nearly 100,000 patients in over 600 hospitals. The authors noted the mortality rate of the total surveyed population was 11.1 percent, while the death rate was 16 percent and higher for the groups given various HCQ treatments—nearly double that of the control group, which was not given HCQ treatment.

The study preceded a series of decisions by health authorities. In three days, the World Health Organization (WHO) suspended a clinical trial of HCQ for COVID-19. During the same week, France also banned its use on COVID-19 patients, revoking an emergency authorization of HCQ for COVID-19 issued two weeks earlier.

On June 15, 2020, the FDA revoked the EUA of HCQ, citing cardiac adverse events and other side effects. Six months later, the FDA approved EUAs for Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, emergency authorizations contingent on “no adequate, approved, and available alternatives,” according to the FDA announcement.

“Chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine was prescribed 1 billion times in the year of 2006. So it means that if 10 percent of the people died with this, that would have made 100 million people die of heart attack, which is stupid,” Dr. Raoult told The Epoch Times. HCQ is a newer and improved version of chloroquine.

He said he and other experts wrote to the Lancet, saying the study’s findings were impossible. A few months later, the journal retracted the paper. When retracting the article on June 4, 2020, the authors said they could “no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources.” They also apologized for causing “any embarrassment or inconvenience” to the journal and its readers.

A day before the retraction of the paper, the WHO announced it was resuming the clinical trial of HCQ on COVID-19. On June 20, 2020, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) halted its clinical trial, citing no harm and no benefit of HCQ on COVID-19 patients. A month later, the WHO also discontinued its HCQ treatment arm for COVID-19 for similar reasons. France’s ban on using HCQ for COVID-19 patients has not been lifted.

Yet Dr. Raoult persisted in treating COVID-19 patients with HCQ and azithromycin, an antibiotic. On April 4, 2023, he published preliminary results of treating over 30,000 patients between March 2020 and December 2021 at the institute he led until August 2022, the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection (IHU). He said the fatality rate of those treated with HCQ was at 7 percent, “half of the fatality rate of the deaths of any series of hospitalized patients [who] needed oxygen.” “So it’s very efficient,” he added.

In May, French medical bodies called for sanctions against Dr. Raoult for “the largest ‘unauthorised’ clinical trial ever seen.” Dr. Raoult responded, “There’s no trial, only the therapeutical choice by the doctors.”

Over the years, HCQ has remained a contentious topic. Because he stood by his statement of HCQ’s effectiveness on COVID-19, Dr. Raoult, an accomplished scientist who received one of the highest honors in France—the prestigious Grand Prix Inserm—in 2010, has been labeled an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist.

In response, he has maintained that he is not against vaccines, but to him, the equation of risks and benefits doesn’t hold for COVID-19 patients under 50 with low risk, especially children, to elect to take the injections.

He spoke to The Epoch Times while promoting his autobiography at a conference in Saint-Hyacinthe, a small city east of Montreal. The autobiography was published in France in April and in Canada in October. “Being a doctor and courageous runs in my family,” he said.

His father was a military doctor, and his great-grandfather an infectious disease doctor. He was born in French Dakar, today’s Senegal in West Africa, while his father was posted there working on malnutrition. His grandmother ran a resistance network against the Nazis and survived from Ravensbrück, a women’s concentration camp in northern Germany, 50 miles north of Berlin.

“I don’t want to be ashamed to be less courageous. She was deported to Ravensbrück, my God,” he said. “It’s in my family. Sometimes you need to disobey because you think it’s not good to obey some things incompatible with your moral sense.”

He said patients were told not to see doctors and doctors not to see patients during the COVID lockdown. That was “completely stupid” to him. In March 2020, he opened IHU to COVID-19 patients who were willing to receive HCQ treatments, and people queued in winding single-file lines outside his institute to wait for their turns.

To him, countering the mainstream recommendation that HCQ was dangerous for COVID-19 patients was just an outcome of doing his job. “I don’t care about what the others say. I’m just talking about what I’m seeing. It’s not a Christian opinion; I don’t get any opinion.”

He said he was encouraged by a recent U.S. appeals court decision allowing a lawsuit from three doctors against the FDA to proceed. On Sept. 1, a panel of three judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal in New Orleans revived the case, which alleges the FDA overstepping its authority by running a campaign against ivermectin’s effectiveness in treating COVID-19 patients.

“It was very interesting because I hope it will happen sometime in France—the doctor is in charge of treating the patient. This is his role and his duty. So you can have recommendation information from the government or from the agency, but it cannot replace the responsibility of the doctor who prescribes the treatment,” Dr. Raoult said.

He added that patients should hold the doctor accountable if he didn’t do his job. “But it’s not an agency that should determine what the doctor [should] do.”

The maverick scientist, now 71, said he wasn’t aware of any complaints from the 30,000 COVID-19 patients treated at IHU under his leadership. “This means that the people who have never seen the patient in the Ministry of Health don’t know better than we who treated 30,000 people. And I’ve been practicing medicine for 42 years, so I know what I’m doing.”

“Self-esteem is more important than the esteem of others,” he said about one of the themes of his autobiography. “I need to be agreed with myself. This is critical.”

Tanya Du contributed to this report.

Authored by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,

India’s diesel exports loading for Europe hit a record high in September amid open arbitrage for westbound shipments, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing tanker-tracking data and analysts.

Last month, diesel cargoes loading from India and bound for Europe averaged between 280,000 barrels per day (bpd) and 303,000 bpd – or roughly half of all Indian diesel shipments in September, according to vessel-tracking data by LSEG, Vortexa, and Kpler cited by Reuters.

At the same time, Indian diesel shipments eastwards to Singapore slumped in September.

The east-west arbitrage on diesel futures in Europe and in Asia jumped last month, which incentivized traders to ship more of the India-produced fuel to Europe, analysts told Reuters.

But the differentials have narrowed in the past week, which means that India’s diesel shipments to Europe are unlikely to repeat in October the highs from September, they added.

The high Indian exports of diesel to Europe last month could help Europe stock on fuel supplies ahead of the winter, on one hand, and potentially ease the downward pressure on refining margins in Asia, on the other hand, according to the traders and analysts who have spoken to Reuters.

The higher shipments in September may have also been the result of the temporary Russian ban on diesel exports to most markets, including Turkey, Serena Huang, Vortexa’s head of APAC analysis, told Reuters.

At the end of last week, Russia lifted the ban on most of its diesel exports, two weeks after announcing export restrictions on diesel and gasoline to curb soaring domestic prices.

The ban on diesel and gasoline exports, enforced on September 21, affected Russia’s diesel exports which have been diverted away from the EU after the embargo kicked in in February. Russia is now shipping diesel to Turkey, the Middle East, North and West Africa, and Brazil in South America.

Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

As Chinese authorities escorted the senior Federal Reserve official from his Shanghai hotel room, they demanded he “say good things about China” when back in the United States.

The atmosphere was “frightening,” the official, who remained unnamed, recalled to the Fed.

That was the first of four times the official was detained and interrogated during a 2019 trip to Shanghai. Chinese authorities threatened his family, tapped his phones and computers, and copied contact information of other Federal Reserve officials from his account on Chinese social media app WeChat, according to Senate Homeland Security Committee Republicans who made public the details in a report last July.

The U.S. official recounted Chinese authorities trying to pry “sensitive, non-public economic data” out of him and insisting that he “advise senior government officials” on sensitive economic issues such as trade tariffs while the United States and China were embroiled in a trade war. They forced him to drink liquor and attempted to make him commit to future meetings to allow them to gather economic intelligence.

Unsettling as it is, the incident was but part of a “long-running and brazen” malicious campaign from China over the course of more than a decade to undermine U.S. economic policy and advance Beijing’s ambition to supplant the United States as the global superpower.

Coercion and threats represent only a sliver of the regime’s toolbox used to target the Western political sphere. A Chinese think tank based in Beijing, in partnering with the state-affiliated Tsinghua University, in 2019 rated White House advisors and U.S. governors by their friendliness to Beijing. The group labeled officials as “friendly,” “ambiguous,” or “hardline” after combing through metrics such as age, work history, public statements, trade activities with China, and length of term.

Time, patience, and thoroughness—these are attributes that Michel Juneau-Katsuya, former Asia Pacific chief at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in the 1990s, sees in the Chinese regime’s craft of infiltration.

“They’ve been capable to work in a very holistic way,” he told The Epoch Times.

China, he noted, doesn’t have a democratic election process that could displace the leadership from power. “So they know that they can plant today something that will be capable to be harvested in five, 10 or 15 years.”

Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), who has advocated for a tougher stance on China, agreed.

By leveraging relationships with U.S. officials—called “using the local to surround the central” in communist slogan terms—Beijing can pressure Washington to back policy outcomes favorable to the regime, such as deepening bilateral economic ties and tamping down criticism of the regime’s abysmal human rights record.

A Chinese spy reportedly drove for the recently deceased Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for 20 years.

Christine Fang, an alleged Chinese spy working for China’s top intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, reportedly used campaign fundraising, networking, and romantic relationships with at least two Midwestern city mayors to gain a footing in their spheres of influence.

Ms. Fang also approached Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) when he was a member of the Dublin City Council, raised money for his 2014 reelection campaign, and facilitated an intern’s placement in Mr. Swalwell’s office, according to Axios.

The connection prompted a two-year investigation from the bipartisan House Ethics Committee, which in May ultimately decided not to take any action against the California lawmaker, but cautioned Mr. Swalwell to remain aware of “the possibility that foreign governments may attempt to secure improper influence through gifts and other interactions.”

The United Front network, which helps the Party control the Chinese diaspora, also plays a role in co-opting well-placed individuals for Beijing’s interests.

Lu Jianwang, one of the two alleged operators of a secret Chinese police station in New York, together with his brother, has given tens of thousands of dollars to New York politicians in recent years, including vice chair of the Democratic National Committee Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.), New York Mayor Eric Adams, and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, campaign finance records show.

“Local level officials, state officials are just not going to be as aware of or as attuned to some of these influence efforts—they’re just trying to create jobs,” Sarah Cook, a senior China analyst at the Freedom House, told The Epoch Times.

“The CCP is very good at taking advantage of that, to get people to side with them, to get people in the United States to have a stake in what the CCP also wants. Then later, that can be activated to create situations that are more problematic.”

“I think people at the earliest part of that relationship, don’t realize that,” she added.

As with Ms. Fang’s case, the Chinese influence operations begin early in the local leaders’ careers.

“They’re very, very patient, they have time on their side. Their determination and their focus is remarkable,” Mr. Juneau-Katsuya said of the regime.

He said that Chinese intelligence officers-turned-defectors had detailed to him how they were instructed to be model citizens in the Western world for five to 10 years, working their way up the ladder in society before being “activated.”

Late at night on March 28, a day after the House overwhelmingly passed Rep. Chris Smith’s (R-N.J.) Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023, a furious email from the Chinese embassy’s minister counselor Zhou Zheng arrived at the inbox of an aide to the congressman.

The email, written from a Gmail account registered under Mr. Zhou, declared the bill “absurd” and claimed the “so-called ‘forced organ harvesting’ in China is a farce.”

The bill was the first ever such legislative piece to curb the state-sanctioned killing of prisoners of conscience for their organs, an atrocity that an independent London tribunal in 2019 concluded has taken place in China for years “on a significant scale.”

A number of whistleblowers, including eyewitnesses, have come forward to The Epoch Times to share testimony of the grisly act.

Mr. Zhou, in true Beijing fashion, demanded that the United States stop “baseless hype and anti-China moves and stops preceding [sic] this legislation.”

Mr. Smith said the claims in the email were “a big lie in plain sight.”

“The Falun Gong practitioners and the Uyghurs are being killed for their organs, and it’s tens of thousands every single year, as we know,” he told The Epoch Times.

“Perfectly healthy people being put down in a gurney drugged in order to effectuate two to three of their organs being taken out involuntarily—and they kill them—that is murder. That’s crimes against humanity.”

The New Jersey Republican on April 14 wrote to the Chinese embassy requesting a visa to visit Xinjiang, the northwestern Chinese region where an estimated 1 million Uyghurs are being held in detention camps. He hasn’t heard back.

A few weeks before the email to Mr. Smith, counselor Li Xiang with the Chinese embassy wrote to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), insisting he retract his bill ordering the declassification of information surrounding COVID-19 origins, which had been signed into law on March 20.

Mr. Hawley shrugged it off. “The Chinese government wrote to me and demanded I withdraw my Covid origins bill,” he wrote in a social media post on March 9. “Hahaha. Not a chance.”

Mr. Li also hit a wall when he tried to block a scheduled congressional hearing on the origins of COVID-19. Nor was he successful with his warning to House lawmakers not to meet with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen during her visit to Los Angeles.

The audacity of the regime in making demands of an elected member of Congress “incensed” Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa), one of the recipients of the threatening letter.

“Basically, I just said, ‘No, you can’t tell me who I can and can’t meet with and I’m going to go ahead and meet with her,’” Ms. Hinson told The Epoch Times. “And that’s what we did.”

“The fact that somebody was bold enough to assume that they could send me an email like that, and threaten and bully me—incredulous.”

“I will not be bullied, my mind is not going to be changed on an email like that, where you are deliberately trying to undermine my ability to do my job.”

Read more here…

According to the Federal Reserve, student loans added up to $1.6 trillion in Q2 2023, making them the third largest category of U.S. household debt behind auto loans ($1.8 trillion) and mortgages ($12 trillion).

The current student debt figure represents a 40% increase from a decade ago, resulting in greater pressure for the federal government to do more to help debtors. For example, on Oct 4. 2023, the Biden administration announced an additional $9 billion in student debt cancellations, bringing the total relief amount to $127 billion.

With student debt becoming a broader social issue, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu has visualized data from the Education Data Initiative to show you the median debt per major for a bachelor’s degree in the country.

Dataset and Highlights

The following table includes all of the data we used to create this graphic. Note that we’re showing median student debt, which differs from the mean average.

To understand how this works, imagine a list of every student’s debt for a given major. The median represents the middle value, meaning half of students owe less than that amount, while the other half owes more.

From this dataset we can see that median debt for most Bachelor’s degrees is in the mid $20,000s range. Two outliers at the upper end are Behavioral Sciences ($42,800) and Religious Education ($32,000), while at the lower end we can see Comparative Education ($13,000) and Cognitive Science ($18,100).

Comparative education is a social science that involves the study of education systems, processes, and outcomes across different countries or cultures.

Looking at this data from a broader perspective, we can also see some trends emerge based on field of study. For starters, most Arts and Humanities degrees fall in the upper half of the ranking, while the bottom quarter of the ranking appears to be largely made up of Social Sciences, Sciences, and various business studies.

What About a Master’s Degree?

Education Data Initiative also includes median debt data for master’s degrees.

While obtaining a master’s typically results in a greater amount of student debt, it can actually depend on your major. For instance, the median debt for a master’s in Computer Science is $35,300, which is $7,500 lower than a bachelor’s in Behavioral Science.

The biggest outlier from this list is Graduate Dentistry and Oral Sciences, with a median debt of $158,155. While this may sound like a lot, it should be compared to the average salary of a U.S. dentist, which according to Indeed is $225,400 per year.

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people. From these great staffs, both of the old parties have ganged aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare they have become the tools of corrupt interests which use them in martialling [sic] to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.”—Theodore Roosevelt

From being a nation in a permanent state of emergency, America’s crisis state has gone global.

The military industrial complex, which has established itself as the “solution” to all of our worldly problems (at taxpayer expense, of course), has mired the nation in endless wars abroad waged by U.S. military servicepeople who have been reduced to little more than guns for hire.

Every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has been bought—lock, stock and barrel—and made to dance to the tune of the police state, a.k.a. the Deep State, a.k.a. the military industrial complex, a.k.a. the surveillance state complex.

Even Dwight D. Eisenhower, the retired five-star Army general-turned-president who warned against the disastrous rise of misplaced power by the military industrial complex was complicit in contributing to the build-up of the military’s role in dictating national and international policy.

The Biden Administration’s response to the latest carnage in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war merely plays into the hands of a salivating military industrial complex for whom war is merely a means to a larger profit margin.

War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. military dropped a bomb every 12 minutes.

President Obama, the antiwar candidate and Nobel Peace Prize winner, waged war longer than any American president. His administration’s targeted-drone killings resulted in at least 1.3 million lives lost to the U.S.-led war on terror.

America has long had a penchant for endless wars that empty our national coffers while fattening those of the military industrial complex.

The United States has been at war for all but 15 years in its 247-year history.

Since 9/11, we’ve spent more than $8 trillion to wage wars abroad, including the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt.

The average American pays over $2300 a year in taxes to support the military, half of which goes to military contractors.

Even with America’s military might spread thin, the war drums continue to sound as the Pentagon polices the rest of the world with counterterror activities in 85 countries.

The American Empire—with its endless wars waged by U.S. military servicepeople who have been reduced to little more than guns for hire: outsourced, stretched too thin, and deployed to far-flung places to police the globe—is approaching a breaking point.

Aided and abetted by the U.S government, the American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Although the U.S. constitutes barely 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 40% of the world’s total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 10 biggest spending nations combined.

Unfortunately, this level of war-mongering doesn’t come cheap to the taxpayers who are forced to foot the bill.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry. In fact, the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors.

For example, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

Consider that the government lost more than $160 billion to waste and fraud by military and defense contractors. With paid contractors often outnumbering enlisted combat troops, the American war effort dubbed as the “coalition of the willing” has quickly evolved into the “coalition of the billing,” with American taxpayers forced to cough up billions of dollars for cash bribes, luxury bases, a highway to nowhere, faulty equipment, salaries for so-called “ghost soldiers,” and overpriced anything and everything associated with the war effort, including a $640 toilet seat and a $7600 coffee pot.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing had been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.

There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially the Department of Defense and its contractors.

Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. Biden, no different from his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically, calling on Congress to approve billions that pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Essentially, in order to fund this burgeoning military empire that polices the globe, the U.S. government is prepared to bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

The illicit merger of the global armaments industry and the Pentagon that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 60 years ago has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

This is exactly the scenario Eisenhower warned against when he cautioned the citizenry not to let the profit-driven war machine endanger our liberties or democratic processes:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

We failed to heed Eisenhower’s warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the growth of and reliance on militarism as the solution for our problems both domestically and abroad bodes ill for the constitutional principles which form the basis of the American experiment in freedom.

As James Madison warned, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

WC: 1659

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org

California’s extremely liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday ruled in favor of California, allowing the state’s ban on high-capacity gun magazines to remain in effect while the state appeals a federal judge’s ruling which found the ban unconstitutional.

In a 7-4 vote, the 9th Circuit stayed a Sept. 22 ruling by US District Judge Robert Benitez in San Diego, who found that the state’s ban violated gun owners’ rights to keep and bear arms under the 2nd Amendment. Benitez cited a 2022 decision by the US Supreme Court in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which requires that firearms restrictions be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Following Benitez’s decision, California AG Bob Bonta (D) moved to stay the decision, which the 9th Circuit’s liberal majority quickly did. The Monday ruling applies to a long-running lawsuit brought by the California Rifle & Pistol Association as well as gun owners challenging the ban.

“If a stay is denied, California will indisputably face an influx of large-capacity magazines like those used in mass shootings in California and elsewhere,” wrote the 9th Circuit Democrat majority.

The four Republican-appointed judges on the 9th Circuit dissented, including US Circuit Judge Patrick Bumatay, who said the majority’s attitude towards the 2nd Amendment was “laughably absurd.”

In response to Monday’s decision, Bonta’s office said it was “relieved that the court considered the public safety of Californians in its decision.”

One can join the raging discussion over the decision over at Calguns.net.

Authored by Francis P. Sempa via RealClear Defense,

In 2017, Robert D. Kaplan wrote an essay describing the geopolitical eclipse of Europe by Asia in the 21^st century, and what this meant for U.S. foreign policy. Though Kaplan used the provocative title, “The Return of Marco Polo’s World and the U.S. Military Response,” his analysis was grounded in geography and history. What Kaplan and others have called the Long European War of the 20^th century (World Wars I and II, and the Cold War) gave rise to the beginnings of what could be a Long Asian War in which China and the United States struggle for control of the World-Island.