Monthly Archives: September 2015

Sep 12 2015

Taxation & Its Role in the Destruction of Our Economy


Re-Posted from Armstrong Economics Posted on September 12, 2015 by

iitalit001p4

QUESTION: Thank you for your fascinating blog. I thoroughly enjoy reading your analysis on social, political, financial and historical topics. i would like to make a couple points with questions and get your analysis or feedback on these.

First point: You describe that post 2015.75 (Big Bang), you expect a peak in bonds (safe haven) that will coincide with a low in stocks due to global fear. The eventual collapse in bonds will drive everyone into “private assets” causing a major rise in stocks and commodities due to lack of confidence in government. At the same time, you say that government won’t give up the fight on taxation and asset seizure. So, my question is, what good is it to invest in stocks in this private phase if the government will most likely tax all profits to the point of making the investment pointless? Why would people continue to buy stocks then? Typically when fair rule of law degrades, people hoard and don’t invest, correct?
…
Thanks for your analysis!

ANSWER: Historically, this has been the difference between movable and immovable assets, such as real estate. Collectibles, stocks, and precious metals are in the moveable category. Of course this is what governments are now attempting to seize.

The best hedge would be to have assets in terms of stocks in the USA, and certainly not in Europe. It may be harder to engage in a taxation of shares as an asset, whereas in Europe they are much closer to communism and see nothing wrong with taxing assets, not just income.

Rome-Middle-6

If we look at the fall of Rome, the first asset class to decline was real estate, as you cannot take it with you when you leave town. Thus, the population of Rome collapsed from 1 million to 15,000 by the Middle Ages. People had no choice and just walked away, unable to pay the taxes demanded.

Taxes are the great destroyer. You are an economic slave if you simply cannot retire without having to pay taxes. Taxes reduce economic growth and lower productivity for they are no different, economically speaking, from some gangster demanding “protection” money to operate a business.

Sep 10 2015

National Poll – Broad Support Pushes Donald Trump Even Higher – Trump Continues To Pull Away…


The cut off should be 3% or greater now, none of those in the under 3% have any chance and they should be asked to drop out. By the end of this month make the cut 4% or greater and we’ll get down to a group that is more manageable.

Sep 10 2015

Iowa Feeling The Bern – Bernie Sanders Now Defeating Hillary Clinton In Iowa – (Full Poll Results pdf)….


GO BERNIE

Sep 10 2015

The Brzezinski/Obama Axis


Post By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

[September 23, 2009] Updated September 9, 2015 with a shocking epilogue]

Back in 1985, I wrote an article on Brzezinski for The Intercollegiate Review.  Before citing some of the more relevant passages of that article, it should be borne in mind that Brzezinski, a political scientist, served as President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser. One does not have to read Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid to know that Carter is an anti-Semite.  Brzezinski has earned the same reputation.

Not only has Brzezinski publicly defended the anti-Semitic canard that the relationship between America and Israel is the result of Jewish pressure, but he also signed a letter demanding dialogue with Hamas, whose charter calls for Israel’s destruction. It behooves us to understand the mentality of Obama’s [former] Middle East adviser.

Long before he became Mr. Carter’s national security adviser, Brzezinski rejected what he and most political scientists term the “black-and-white” image of the American and Soviet political systems.  “This image,” he says, “is held by traditional anti-Communists.”  Brzezinski thus affirmed he is not quite an anti-Communist.  In fact, he deplores anti-Communism as “a relic of the Cold War, of the age of ideology.”

Not only did Brzezinski reject the “black-and-white” image of the American and Soviet forms of government, he rejects the very notion of good and bad regimes!  Brzezinski is simply a moral or cultural (or historical) relativist, and relativism has certainly modulated Barack Obama’s mentality.

The influence of political scientists like Brzezinski is wide and deep. His relativism prompts him to negotiate with and appease terrorist regimes.  With Brzezinski as his adviser, Obama will be more disposed to appease Iran and betray America’s allies, above all Israel.

Since Brzezinski is a relativist, he denies the existence of objective or trans-historical standards for determining whether the way of life of one nation, group, or individual is morally superior to that of another.  (The members of the UN General Assembly must be pleased to hear this, despite the UN’s notorious record of condemning Israel without having ever condemned an Islamic state.)

Brzezinski’s relativism also makes him a “weather-vane” political scientist.  He turns with the winds of power. Working in a pluralistic and egalitarian country like America – a secular society – he conveniently adopts tolerance as his operational principle on the one hand, and equality as his primary value on the other.  He is quite at home with the moral equivalency that has shaped US foreign policy toward Israel and Islamic dictatorships.

Brzezinski views history through the lens of Marxism, which, despite its atheism, has much in common with Islam.  Both Communism and Islam are universalistic ideologies that reject the idea of the nation-state.  Both do not regard adherence to treaties between nations as obligatory.  Both Communism and Islam are militaristic and expansionist creeds that do not recognize international borders. Brzezinski’s globalism is evident in Jimmy Carter.  Under Brzezinski’s influence, Carter lowered the defense budget and pursued a soft line toward the Soviet Union. Obama is pursuing a very soft line toward Islam.

As a crypto-Marxist, Brzezinski deplores the nation-state. His book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, declares that “With the splitting and eclipse of Christianity man began to worship a new deity: the nation.  The nation became a mystical object claiming man’s love and loyalty.  The nation-state along with the doctrine of national sovereignty fragmented humanity.  It could not provide a rational framework within which the relations between nations could develop.”  Brzezinski sees the nation-state as having only partly increased man’s social consciousness and only partially alleviated the human condition.

“That is why Marxism,” he contends, “represents a further vital and creative stage in the maturing of man’s universal vision.”  Marxism, he says, “was the most powerful doctrine for generating a universal and secular human consciousness.” Embodied in the Soviet Union, however, Communism became the dogma of a party and, under Stalin, “was wedded to Russian nationalism.”

Although Brzezinski poses as a humanist, he makes a most inhumane statement by saying that: “although Stalinism may have been a needless tragedy, for both the Russian people and Communism as an ideal, there is the intellectually tantalizing possibility that for the world at large it was … a blessing in disguise.”!!! Brzezinski could as readily say: “Yes, Muslims slaughtered more than 200 million people, but Islam brought hundreds of Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Hindu, and Buddhist communities under a single universal vision, that of the Quran”!!!

Brzezinski, a self-professed secularist, is an internationalist whose moral relativism contradicts the moral law or natural rights doctrine of America’s Declaration of Independence. His relativism and internationalism contradict the teachings of the America’s Founding Fathers, who endowed the United States with a national identity and character, as that which animated Abraham Lincoln.  To put it more bluntly: Brzezinski’s political mentality, like that of countless other American academics, is anti-American. An Obama-Brzezinski axis has revolutionary significance. It may accelerate the de-Americanization and decline of the United States [as I warned six years ago.]

 

Epilogue September 10, 2015:

Obama’s nuke deal with Iran is the offspring of Brzezinski’s mentality.

Sep 10 2015

50 U.S. Intelligence Analysts Claim Intel Reports Doctored To Be More Favorable To White House ISIS Narrative…


BHO told us what he was going to do with the country but no one listened or cared it only mattered that we elected a black man with no experience at doing anything but writing books about himself was elected President. What I can not understand is why anyone would be surprised that BHO has made a total mess of the country and the world in 7 years — how could the outcome had ever been any different!

Sep 10 2015

There is no way this Woman should be president


Hillary – Anyone Else would Be Prosecuted

Re-Posted from Armstrong Economics Posted on September 10, 2015 by

Hillary-5

NBC News host Chuck Todd said Wednesday. “This is no longer — she can’t just say this is a partisan witch hunt by the House Republicans,” Todd said. “The FBI is now investigating, regarding the classified info situation. And, look, the best explanation still questions her initial judgment of why did she do this in the first place. And really, [it seems] the only motivation [was] to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests. It feels as if that is the only reasons that she did this.”

When Bryan Pagliano, who set up Hillary’s server in her New York home, was called to testify in front of a house panel investigating the assassination of the American ambassador in Benghazi, Libya, he took the fifth Amendment. When a low level IT guy is advised by his lawyers to take the 5th Amendment and remain silent, that shows that there is definitely a major risk that what Hillary has done is indeed criminal. If any emails show her bargaining for donations to her foundation using the position of Secretary of State, sorry – that is Treason. Why did so many foreign governments donate to the Clinton foundation? Come on!

Just one email with Haiti mentioning if they give her brother a gold mining contract and she then approves billions to Haiti, well that would be enough to send her to prison for 25 years and be remembered along side Benedict Arnold. The same would be true for ANY donation to the Clinton foundation.

Sep 10 2015

For Ted Cruz Supporters…..


I support Ted and I have done so with personal money.

Sep 10 2015

Backward Muslims and Stultified Israelis


Post by Prof. Paul Eidelberg

To begin to understand why Muslims are backward, consider this passage from G. E. Von Grunebaum’s Modern Islam (1962):

“It is essential to realize that Muslim civilization is a cultural entity that does not share our [Western] primary aspirations.  It is not vitally interested in analytical self-understanding, and it is even less interested in the structural study of other cultures, either as an end in itself or as a means of a clearer understanding of its own character and history.”

Bernard Lewis’ essay, “The Roots of Muslim Rage” (1990), not only portrays Islam’s profound hatred of the West, but its overweening arrogance and utter contempt for Western civilization.  Convinced of its possession of absolute truth, Islam cannot believe it is of any value to study cultures steeped in error.  Hence it discourages among the faithful any incentive to understand other cultures from the latter’s own point of view.

Unlike Jews (and Westerners generally), people mired in the mentality of the Qur’an or of Islamic culture lack the ability to see or respect the other fellow’s point of view and to moderate their demands accordingly. This attitude makes fools of Israeli prime ministers who negotiate with Muslims!

The late Professor Y. Harkabi, a prominent Israeli expert on Islam, failed to draw this conclusion.  Even though his book, Arab Attitudes to Israel (1972), is replete with Islamic vilification of Jews and Israel, he advocated a Muslim state in Judea and Samaria!  I mention Harkabi because he was not only a former Director of Israel Military Intelligence, but also the mentor of Shimon Peres.  Indeed, he was once head of Israel’s Command and Staff College.

The officers who graduated that College  – Ariel Sharon was one of them – were surely influenced by Harkabi’s book, whose most significant message was not the obvious hatred of the Arab world toward Israel, but Harkabi’s conclusion that justice favors neither side of the Arab-Israel conflict!

Harkabi’s moral equivalency is rooted in cultural relativism, a doctrine to which he explicitly subscribed.

This university-bred doctrine, which has tainted Israel’s ruling elites, has undermined wholehearted confidence in the justice of Israel’s cause.  This doctrine is foreign to Islam.  Utterly convinced of the absolute justice of their cause, Muslims look upon Jews who defend themselves as “aggressors.”  That Jews should kill Muslims (even in self-defense) enrages these Quranic believers and arouses in them a relentless and all-consuming desire for revenge unlimited by the passage of time.

The civilized idea of “enemies in war, in peace friends” – proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence – contradicts Islamic culture and theology.  This idea presupposes an international community of sovereign nation-states which, despite frequent wars, acknowledges that people can be friends despite their differences.  Nothing in Islamic history affirms this basic principle of civilization.  To reject this principle is to exalt war on the one hand, and to deny the sanctity of human life on the other – precisely the ethos of Jihad.

There is but one honest conclusion to be drawn from this fourteen-century Islamic ethos:  Israel will not enjoy genuine peace with its neighbors so long as Muslims remain Muslims! (Syrian-born psychiatrist Dr. Wafa Sultan concludes that Islam must be “transformed,” not merely “reformed.”)

Harkabi’s aforementioned book provides an abundance of documentary evidence to confirm this conclusion, a conclusion obscured by his cultural relativism.  This relativism has stultified the mentality of Israel’s ruling elites: politicians and judges, academics and journalists.  Despite Arab-Islamic barbarism, they stubbornly refuse to acknowledge and confront the enormity of evil that animates Israel’s enemies, and they persist in negotiating with these Janus-faced Jew-haters whose fanaticism, sterility, and love of death constitute the negation of civilization.

Israel desperately needs a new dispensation, one that transcends our stupefying and spiritless era of relativism. Needed is a dispensation conducive to the ascendancy of men of truth and moral courage.  I see no such men in the secular democratic world, enslaved in nihilism, materialism, and moral egalitarianism –    a world that blurs distinctions between good and evil and between what is noble and what is base.  Needed, therefore, is a renaissance of Hebraic civilization.

The first, practical step in this renaissance is to advance into leadership a man who will take a non-compromising position on the Land of Israel.  By itself, this position entails fidelity to the People of Israel and the Torah.  This bold refusal to negotiate over the Land of Israel will generate the spiritual courage required for a renaissance of Hebraic civilization, whose rationality, creativity and love of life constitute the West’s most precious beliefs and values.

Sep 10 2015

REFUGEES


A picture is worth a thousand words!

Sep 10 2015

Multiculturalism: France and Israel


Post by Prof. Paul Eidelberg 

Almost 2,400 years ago, Aristotle, the founder of political science and the greatest political scientist, discussed, in his Politics, the various causes of insurrection and revolution.  He drew from his knowledge of some 150 ‘city-states’ on which he wrote treatises (now lost, except for fragments from his treatise on Athens).

One of the causes of insurrection and revolution, he saw, was “heterogeneity of stock,” by which he means what is now called “multiculturalism.”  We see the consequences of multiculturalism violently manifested in France, which has not been able to “integrate” its five million Muslim inhabitants. In hundreds of French “no-go” zone neighborhoods, Muslims have intimidated the government into largely ceding authority over them. Neither tourists nor cops dare enter these Muslim-dominated areas.

America may eventually face such a dilemma with the large and illegal immigration of Hispanics across her southern border. Crime is rampant among them.

It should be obvious that democracies, which are most inclined to multiculturalism, will be most susceptible to “ethnic violence,” a euphemism for budding insurrections.  Aristotle emphasized that the strongest bond of society is friendship, hardly to be expected in multicultural societies.

A related point:  Aristotle distinguished between five different types of democracy. The worst is anarchy, which, he said can hardly be called a ‘regime’ (or polis).  All democracies have an inherent tendency toward anarchy because their two cardinal principles, equality and freedom, lack ethical and ethnic constraints.

Moreover, the egalitarian principle of one adult/one vote is tilting political power to the Left, which is why Barack Obama, a self-professed Muslim, as well as an undisguised anti-American, turns a blind eye to illegal Hispanic immigration, on the one hand, and appoints pro-Muslims to his administration, on the other. American “civilization” is evaporating.

Israel is not immune to this problem, given its burgeoning Arab population, now almost 20 percent.  Most of these Arabs oppose the existence of the Jewish state.  Yet no public official dares address this problem, lest he or she be labeled a “racist.”  Sooner or later, however, “heterogeneity of stock” in Israel will explode, and more violently than the Muslim uprisings in France.  A Muslim insurrection in Israel will have the support of Israel’s neighbors.

Thus, when a French prime minister reaches out to Muslims by tacitly admitting France has failed to live up to its egalitarian ideals, he is not only seeking Muslim votes; he’s hastening the demise of France.

Like Hamas and other Muslim terrorists, the Muslim “rioting” in France is not animated by economic inequality so much as by ethnic antagonism – again, “heterogeneity of stock.”  But it’s precisely French “egalitarian ideals” that provide the political cause of that rioting.

Economic motives aside, French egalitarianism is the ideological cause of France’s permissive immigration laws.  More and more European statesmen have begun to see this, and are limiting the immigration of Muslims to their respective countries.

Aristotle was well aware of the economic causes of insurrection and revolution. Gross economic inequality among the citizens of a polis can transform a democracy into an oligarchy and thereby arouse envious resentment and hatred by the poor. This may be happening in Israel.  Israel has the greatest income inequality among the developed nations; indeed, a small minority controls the wealth of the country.

Aristotle offers constructive advice on these matters, much of which is consistent with Jewish law.  Instead of welfare programs that make citizens dependent on the state, he urges the creation of jobs that will make citizens self-reliant. This will lead to the development of a large middle class, which tends toward moderation and is amenable to the rule of law.

However, just as the laws require the support of morality, so morality requires the support of the laws. But how can morality and the laws integrate ethnic groups having antagonistic conceptions of morality and law?  French leaders obscure this dilemma, as do Israeli politicians. Like typical bourgeois, they believe ethnic conflict can be overcome by economic prosperity and equality – the panacea of Shimon Peres’ New Middle East (which has infected Netanyahu).

Here I am reminded of the 1937 Peel Commission Report, which stated: “Although the Arabs [of Palestine] have benefited from the development of the country owing to Jewish immigration, this has had no conciliatory effect.  On the contrary, improvement in the economic situation in Palestine has meant the deterioration of the political situation.”

The ethnic and ideological significance of this report seems never to have penetrated the democratic mind, including Netanyahu’s.  To this day it is widely believed, by socialists or Marxists as well as by capitalists, that the ultimate cause of conflict is economic scarcity.

Aristotle had a far more comprehensive view of the subject than contemporary political scientists, especially those addicted to “conflict resolution.” It behooves Israeli (as well as European) politicians to consult Aristotle, whose understanding of politics is without equal.☼