An Outlet for the Unsaid

The General Melchett school of foreign policy finds a following in Washington’s halls of power, with President Biden as its chief tutor.

posted by Sumantra Maitra at the American Conservative

In a State of the Union address occasionally marred by British Parliament-style back-and-forth and random Brick Tamland-esque yelling, President Joe Biden doubled down on American support for Ukraine.

“Would we stand for the defense of democracy?” Biden furiously asked. “Yes, we would. And yes, we did …We led. We united NATO and built a global coalition. We stood against Putin’s aggression. We stood with the Ukrainian people. Tonight, we are once again joined by Ukraine’s Ambassador to the United States. She represents not just her nation, but the courage of her people. Ambassador, America is united in our support for your country. We will stand with you as long as it takes.”

Ignore the “royal we” and the structural flaws. Americans, especially Republicans, do not share the optimism and sense of commitment to a steady bleed in Europe’s backwater, as poll after poll repeatedly shows. “Stand with Ukraine” does not make any strategic sense either, as there is, thus far, no combined “theory of victory.”

Stand with Ukraine till what and when? Preventing annual waves of attack from Russia? Aiding Kiev to reoccupy Crimea even at the risk of a nuclear war?Being a co-belligerent in all but name? Regime change?

A president’s duty is to clarify, not prevaricate about, the risks of policy to his own countrymen. Instead, President Biden chose to throw red meat to the most internationalist factions within his own party. This is the same party that wanted to mask the entire population from a disease with a modest fatality rate. It is the party that is simultaneously cavalier about trotting up the nuclear escalation ladder over a country their members cannot place on a map.

It is absurd to claim that this is the greatest nuclear challenge since the Cuban Missile Crisis and then in the same breath argue for maximal escalation with no off-ramp towards any compromise. This is the General Melchett school of foreign policy. We are standing behind Ukraine—about four thousand miles behind.

The condemnation was swift. Congressman Dan Bishop tweeted, “No more blank checks to Ukraine.” Senator J.D. Vance said in a statement, “Before President Biden spends another taxpayer dollar in Ukraine, he must lay out a clear plan for ending the conflict in a way that advances our national security interests." One realist voice who has been consistently on the right about Ukraine is Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, who repeatedly tweeted that the U.S. shouldn’t be sending tanks to Ukraine, or continue to unconditionally fund Zelensky.

In a response to my query about whether anything was being done to stop the slippery slope, Rep. Luna said that the exact reverse is happening, as the dominating forces on both sides of the political establishment push us further down the slope. “At what point does supplying the weaponry, manpower, and funding for a war in fact become a declaration of war?” she asked.

Luna also said that Republicans aren’t doing nearly enough, and that the grassroots discomfort with escalation is not reflected in the Republican elite.

I see a lot of war hawks and no peace talks. The ruling political class, both right and left, has essentially teamed up with the military industrial complex in happily barreling towards WWIII without stopping to think through the consequences of what that really means. What this really shows is a ruling elite that is completely disconnected from the lives of those it rules and the real-world effects of advancing a proxy war instead of actively de-escalating it.

This voice of sanity is speaking strategically sound words. In a new paper from RAND Corp., Miranda Priebe and Samuel Charap argued for the same, stating that U.S. interests “often align with but are not synonymous with Ukrainian interests.” Arguing that pushing Russia would mean further escalation from Moscow, they argue that any retaliation to even a non-strategic nuclear use by Russia would almost certainly lead to a full exchange in a “tit-for-tat spiral that produces a NATO–Russia war.”

Given that we do not get to control Russian threat perceptions, the only thing we can do is assuage their fears. The report continues:

Russian use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would have large and unpredictable effects on allied policies toward the war, potentially leading to a breakdown in transatlantic unity. Death and destruction in Ukraine, a tragedy in itself, could also have a major impact on U.S. and allied publics. In short, the Biden administration has ample reason to make the prevention of Russian use of nuclear weapons a paramount priority for the United States.

British military analyst Jack Watling has argued that there is little the West can actually do. “The Russians are massing airborne troops in Luhansk and armoured units to the South, while Wagner continues to assault Bakhmut,” he wrote, adding that “the Russians are hoping that if they bleed out Ukraine’s better units now they will hold onto the territory they have seized.” Regardless of the moral value of sending tanks to Ukraine, it will not dramatically alter the balance of power on the ground. The Russians are training more, producing more, throwing more bodies onto the pile, and shelling at a rate that is unthinkable for Western artillery. Small number of tanks distributed over a long term won’t change that ratio.

No great power is entitled to a sphere of influence, but spheres organically develop due to geography and asymmetry of interest. We are going to learn the hard way why spheres of influence are the natural state of affairs in an emerging multipolar world. Crimea or the Donbas isn’t worth nuclear exchange for the U.S., Cuba, Britain, Australia, or Canada. Geography and kinship are natural, and to go against nature has costs. It is the harsh truth, irrespective of one’s personal moral preference.

A central European diplomat recently told me, on condition of anonymity but with a loaded wink, that Ukrainians are “fighting for us.” That sentence, diplomatic as it is, can be twisted in two different ways. The superficial reading is that Ukrainians are fighting for democracy and liberty. The other meaning is that the Ukrainians are our cannon fodder.

There is no direct strategic interest for the United States in Ukraine. The liberal support for Ukraine—including the occasional bouts of support for symbolic measures like banning Russian people from fleeing the war zone, expelling Russian students from the country, or giving Dostoevsky, Pushkin, and Tchaikovsky the decolonization treatment—demonstrates something deeper than pragmatism.

Waving the flag for Ukraine provides an outlet for the unsaid and unsayable to those who, due to social pressures and hyper-liberal norms, are increasingly hesitant about waving their own national flags, defending their own borders, and chest-thumping to the beat of their natural jingoism and xenophobia. These are dark but very human instincts that are often buried under layers and layers of human civility and propriety. That is why I see lines of blue and yellow in front of most houses on Monument Avenue, Richmond, but not an American flag. It is far easier to take a moral side in a faraway war with no direct blood cost, and wave another team’s colors, talking about defending their border and their sovereignty being under invasion.

There are, however, pesky limits to consider, like declining general public support for another “forever war.” It is easy for President Biden to talk about standing behind Ukraine as he preaches to the converted. But when there are no common war aims, things are bound to get more complicated. If every cause becomes one’s cause to support, every pain will eventually be one’s pain to endure.

Candace's 1st movie with GAF wins at the MovieGuide Awards 🎉🎉

 

Source: https://www.digitaljournal.com/entertainment/candace-cameron-bure-wins-big-at-the-2023-movieguide-awards/article

Actress and filmmaker Candace Cameron Bure (“Full House” fame) has a major reason to be proud. She won big at the 2023 Movieguide Awards, which took place on February 10.

Bure’s movie “A Christmas…Present,” which she executive produced, won the award for “Best Family TV Movie” and she was also honored with the Grace Award for “Most Inspired Performance” for playing Maggie Larson in the film.

The movie was also nominated for the “Epiphany Prize.”

Lesley Demetriades directed “A Christmas…Present,” and the screenplay was written by Rick Garman. It was conceived and developed through her Candy Rock Entertainment venture, “A Christmas…Present,” and this marked Bure’s first project with Great American Family.

“Tonight, was a really good night, I took home two awards. I was shocked and I am on Cloud 9, and I feel very humbled and grateful. I am more grateful than most people would understand,” Bure posted on her Instagram story.

“I really feel honored to be recognized, and I am so proud of my company too, this is our first movie out of the gate,” she added.

“Thank you to the cast and crew for creating such a special movie,” directed Lesley Demetriades remarked on social media.

In return, Bure thanked Demetriades for her guidance and leadership. “Lesley, thank you for leading us in this beautiful movie. A huge congratulations to us all. What a blessing,” Bure exclaimed.

We Can ‘Fix’ The Climate Without Destroying Our World

posted by Denis de Bernardy at American Thinker

A Climate Counternarrative

Land stewards often grok that topsoil loss is a significant contributor to atmospheric carbon dioxide. Soil emissions dwarf industrial ones, after all. But farmers have been disturbing soil since long before the industrial era, so they’re hard-pressed to explain what changed around then.

Topsoil loss is a concern irrespective of the climate narrative. It matters if you value healthy food grown in thriving ecosystems. It makes sense to promote gardening, urban agroecology, and regenerative farming on that basis alone. Doing so has no downsides and depends on no one.

Prompting climate activists to promote these activities is also a great way to make them (unwittingly) work against the globalist agenda. They’re on boardalready. Simply tell them that teaching gardening at schools is a very effective way to use fewer fossil fuels. More food sovereignty won’t hurt your community.

Canopy Loss

At the same time, regenerative farming can build soil without addressing the key reason topsoil ends up in the atmosphere. Research on forestry emissions inadvertently reveals what that is.

Briefly, a cleared forest releases a slow-motion plume of carbon dioxide as forestry waste decomposes. This continues until the new canopy has grown enough to soak that up. By contrast, thinning a forest leaves the canopy intact. That avoids these releases to begin with.

This highlights three things that happen when you clear a field. (1) You remove canopy above ground. (2) You leave organic waste that decomposes behind. (3) Plants soak up the resulting soil emissions.

Land stewards have been removing the plants that offset these soil emissions since the industrial era.

Loggers adopted clear-cutting at the turn of the 20th century. A cleared forest is a wide-open field. The soil fungi, which need plants for sugars, eventually die. The wind takes the soil emissions up in the atmosphere before nearby plants soak them up.

From the 19th century onward, farmers began managing ever larger fields as family farms vanished, land changed hands, and factory farming took off. Gone were the plants in hedgerows that limited tillage erosion while keeping the soil fungi alive, breaking the wind, and soaking up the soil emissions.

Changes also took place in places with little or no tree canopy, to begin with. Settlers moved West just as new plows made it practical to till the Great Plains, for instance. Wide open farm fields and overgrazed paddocks soon replaced large swaths of prairie. Dead waters might also be emitting their soil carbon in shallow areas.

Avoiding these emissions is straightforward. When you clear a field, leave plants around to soak them up. Alley cropping is a simple way to do that. The alleys can be wide enough to not block sunlight. Planting directly into cloverand other well-designed intercropping system would work too.

It follows that farmers could stick with planting rows of coppice trees on contour to turn this around. Better yet, they could semi-manage narrow bands around them like roadsides to restore wildlife habitat. There are much betterways to address biodiversity loss, but that is good enough.

Accounting Chicanery

You can tell that these emissions are the only ones that matter by auditing the deceitful carbon bean counting.

The salient point to know about the carbon accounting framework is that it mirrors what goes on in a financial statement. Emission sources such as fossil fuels are like the expenses you’d book in a profit and loss statement. Carbon stocks such as forests are like balance sheet entries.

Would-be carbon income sources are a control freak’s wet dream. They’d include allowances, rewards for putting “green” energy on the grid, and carbon offsets (indulgences). Those are chiefly sold by large landowners, the conservancies who run their hunting estates, and fossil fuel giants.

Carbon stocks get little attention beyond the egregious shenanigans that surround green finance. They sport a value that fluctuates over time while keeping what goes on inside them out of scrutiny. The vast majority of carbon emissions occur inside these black boxes.

This creates a double standard. Cherry-picked sources like fossil fuels and cow burps get vilified as reducible flows. Other sources get flatly ignored. Instead, carbon stock changes get tracked as proxies. Those rely on long-term estimate models that mostly capture land use changes.

This arrangement makes sense only if the avoidable carbon emissions that disappear inside carbon stocks are negligible compared to the ones that appear as reducible flows. The contrary is like balancing your household’s budget while ignoring big-ticket items like revenue and rent.

Soil Emissions

Forestry emissions research shows that these hidden sources of carbon emissions are anything but negligible. A cleared forest emits kilograms of carbon dioxide per square meter until the canopy recovers. A thinned forest produces no such emissions.

Kilograms of avoidable emissions per square meter works out to around 10 tons per acre. Loggers clear over 60 million acres each year. That’s a German economy worth of avoidable emissions that long-term models used to track carbon stocks hide from view. This is sketchy accounting.

The kicker is reduced-impact logging. It proposes to make carbon stocks more effective by reducing such forestry emissions. That is shameless.

Farming emissions are much larger. The plumes are such that you can tellwhen farmers are clearing or burning fields on NASA visualizations.

Fossil fuels contribute atmospheric carbon dioxide too, of course. 12% of the total, according to a paper that drew an outpour of rage. That is high. Consider that a farm field has little carbon dioxide around it. The number likely comes from sources with no nearby plants, like industrial chimneys.

Curbing that waste is not hard. We could pipe the output of smokestacks towards hemp fields using glorified drip irrigation systems. The plants will know what to do with carbon dioxide and water. Hemp soaks up toxins, so there is little need for filtering. It has many industrial uses, like paper.

Then again, addressing topsoil loss would quickly reintroduce the problem that plants were struggling with before the industrial era. Namely, too little carbon dioxide. So leaving it in the atmosphere makes good sense too.

Global Desertification

An intriguing twist is that topsoil loss genuinely affects the climate.

Essentially, soil with less carbon holds less water, as does soil with less cover. Runoffs lead to erosion, bare soil, and ponds, fueling water evaporation. Water vapor is the greenhouse gas that actually matters. But the real concern is rainfall.

Inland water evaporation contributes to inland rain. Water that has run off downstream cannot produce downwind rain. Drying landscapes become drier and drought-prone over time, with intermittent floods tied to runoffs. Droughts and floods fuel yet more topsoil loss. And with it, this cycle.

Climate change is just a sorry rebrand of desertification, in other words. Plantations, overgrazing, and infrastructure that channels water downhill compound all of these issues and habitat loss. Those are unequivocally man-made. So are the shoddy decisions that amplify natural calamities.

Desertification is straightforward to reverse. Harvest water, slow it down to help it soak in, and use a combination of plants, mulch, and windbreaks to limit soil evaporation. That will rehydrate a landscape and can re-green a desert. We can even do this at scale with bulldozers and seed pellets.

Scheming Ecofascists

Put together, the only emergency is stopping this clown show. Debunkingenvironmental propaganda has yet to stop the heinous control agenda and the neocolonial land theft it is fueling. Pulling the rug from under it might.

The propaganda doesn’t stand a chance in court, so defanging it there makes sense. Rural communities could also make a mockery of it by turning the carbon hockey stick around.

Even then, it might continue unabated until we end it in our communities. Share this and promote food sovereignty to do your bit.

X22, And we Know, and more- Feb 11

 

How Can We Stop The Wreckage Of Cultural Marxism? Spencer Klavan Has Some Ideas

If you can’t believe in something beyond this life, 

you’ll struggle to make sense of things here and now.

posted by Jesse Russell at The Federalist

In his 11th thesis in his famous “Theses on Feuerbach” (1888), Karl Marx famously said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” This phrase has been interpreted in several ways by both Marx’s critics and his fans, but one salient reading is that Marx saw philosophy leading fundamentally toward revolutionary change.

For earlier Marxists, the goal was principally economic (although the early seeds of the sexual and cultural revolution were sown by Marx and his followers). However, in the post-Trump era, the focus of many on the left has been a cultural revolution that would leave (the wealthiest “progressive”) capitalists in charge of the economic system while allegedly creating a more “inclusive and tolerant” form of capitalism.

One of the key elements of this “cultural Marxism” is the eradication or at least modification of the foundation of Western thought, including and especially the classical traditions of Greece and Rome. Since Western civilization is fundamentally sexist and racist, this thinking argues, so also rotten are its intellectual foundations in the thought of the ancient Mediterranean.

One individual who has provided a robust defense of the West’s classical tradition is Spencer Klavan. He is an associate editor of The Claremont Review of Books as well as the features editor for The American Mind. He is also the host of the “Young Heretics Show” and the author of the forthcoming “How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises.” He recently penned the forward to a new edition of “The Stoics.” So I asked for his antidote to postmodern decay.

Jesse Russell: What do you see as the primary crisis in the West today? 

Spencer Klavan: The West’s primary crisis, which occupies the central portion of my book, is the loss of our ancestral faith. Friedrich Nietzsche saw it coming in “The Gay Science.” In the most famous passage he ever wrote, the “madman” wails over the death of God because he can see what no one else can see: that the belief in a creator consciousness is the foundation stone upon which all our moral axioms rest. Without it, our morality looks very different. We end up trying “to become gods ourselves.”

 We like to think this isn’t the case. We think we can get by on just “niceness” or on the “common decency” that supposedly animates all civilized people and teaches us that “all men are created equal.” But the central truths of the West aren’t “self-evident” in that purely natural sense. They don’t just occur to us out of the blue. In fact, most people throughout history have not believed in human equality. We believe in it, or we used to, for a very specific reason: because we believed it was endowed in us by our creator.

As Nietzsche saw, if you take that belief away, the old morality might endure for a little while among those who have “blindly accepted what has been labeled right since childhood.” It’s a kind of moral inertia. But eventually, the confidence of the old ways will fade, and you’ll regress to a kind of neo-paganism — the paganism we see in, for instance, our blind worship of abortion and euthanasia as triumphs of a god we call “progress.” 

You don’t have to become a practicing Christian overnight. But you can’t preserve the ideals of the West without some belief in their logical premise, which is the existence of a Creator God.

Americans (even conservatives) are notoriously progressive. What do you think we can learn from the ancient world? 

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the American shipyards, he observed a conviction among the sailors there that “the finest ship constructed today must be useless after a very short time.” My friend James Poulos likes to point out that this is a fundamentally American sensibility. Tocqueville said that the American “hastens towards an immense grandeur which he dimly conceives as the goal of humanity.”

In that sense, yes, we’re progressive. In its best expression, this amounts to a kind of cosmic optimism: History is going somewhere, and it’s somewhere good. But of course, as we know from the eugenic excesses of the formal progressive movement, there’s an extremely ugly version of progressivism too. Consider, for instance, Woodrow Wilson’s “Study of Administration” and the arrogant assurance of the late 1800s that mankind had moved beyond all this representative government stuff. Too slow! Too inefficient! That’s “progressivism” in the nasty sense.

I think what makes all the difference is where you position yourself in respect to history. Wilson and the progressives always thought of themselves, implicitly or explicitly, as the managers of history; they stood outside and, through some kind of divine vision, saw where the future was headed. And if the deplorables didn’t like it, then they’d better get out of the way or submit to being crushed under the great march of “progress.” Obama used to talk this way all the time — whenever he invoked the “arc of history” to suggest that only regressive troglodytes could dare oppose his policies.

What we can learn from ancient insight on this score, then, is this: If history is rolling forward, then we’re all in it. No one man can grasp the reins and muscle things his way. You have to gradually move the ball forward by rational deliberation and persuasion. The ancient art of phronēsis — “prudence” — is the moral faculty of discerning what’s right in the here and now, not according to some grand fantasy you have about “the arc of history.” As I argue in the book, drawing in large part on Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” you’ll do much more good if you pour your attention and your efforts into the here and now rather than fantasizing about your place in some grand narrative scheme.

In your discussion of the Stoics, you mention that they emphasized the fundamental humanity of all humans. Why do you think that in our own era, people have returned to an often ferocious tribalism?

Well, it comes right back to what I said above about God. The Stoics, as I explain in that introduction, arrived at their rather unusual belief in human equality because they believed in a single god, whom they called “Zeus” or even “the Logos,” governing all things. This enabled them to claim, as Aratus wrote in his poem the Phaenomena, that “we are his offspring” — all of us.

If you don’t have that common ancestor, then why should men be equal? They’re certainly not equal in ability or strength. It takes theology to reveal the truth that we are all brothers and sisters because only in heaven do we have one father. That’s made explicit in the letters of Seneca and the Handbook of Epictetus, which you’ll find in “Gateway to the Stoics.”

How is it possible to maintain a strong cultural identity while valuing other cultures and living harmoniously with humans from different backgrounds? 

No one was better about this question, in my opinion than Edmund Burke. You read “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” and then you hold that up against what he says in his “Speech in General Reply in the Impeachment of Warren Hastings.” 

Burke is holding two truths delicately in balance. First, all moral convictions have a history. They don’t just drop down from the sky. They come through us through centuries of striving and reasoning, gradually built in the working out of tradition. So we should cherish that tradition and the “little platoons” where we are schooled in it.

But, when confronted with the abuses of the East India Company and the excesses of the British Empire, Burke was moved to proclaim that morality is not “geographical.” In other words, the truths that we access in and through our traditions don’t change just because we encounter other people from other traditions. Incidentally, Churchill’s essay on “Consistency in Politics” from 1932 is a great reflection on how Burke balanced these two beliefs.

In Isaiah 60, the prophet has a vision of all Earth’s many peoples coming to Zion from afar. Jerusalem, the holy land, “will drink the milk of nations.” But all the different cultures retain their local customs, goods, and traditions because they are each capable of expressing the fundamental truths of God.

In other words, absolute truth is capable of many different expressions. But it always comes to us embodied in the wisdom of history and tradition — so we can never just abandon or reject our past because it doesn’t measure up to our pure and perfect notion of the disembodied good. The good — just like the human soul — is always embodied.

Some people are turning to Stoicism in place of Christianity. Do you think Stoicism has the capacity to satisfy humankind’s religious needs? 

I’m afraid I don’t. It’s a start — C.S. Lewis said of Wordsworth’s poetry that it was enough for “the man coming up from below.” I think Stoicism is a bit like that — as I write in my foreword to “Gateway,” it’s a better foothold against the atomization of modernity than most of today’s trendy ideologies. But it has a big problem, which is what some philosophers call “corporealism.” That is, if the Stoics aren’t outright materialists, they nevertheless believe that there is nothing beyond this cosmos, this world, where everything that exists is a physical body. God is co-extensive with the universe, a thin fire pervading a world made of bodies, and that’s all there is.

And you can see in his “Meditations,” Emperor Marcus Aurelius struggles so hard to find in a purely corporeal world a reason to seek virtue, even if there’s nothing after this life. I think that would probably be enough if virtue did indeed carry its own rewards, as it should in an ideal world. But the great Christian insight is that the world is not ideal; it is horribly broken, and there are injustices within it that only some future state or infinite bliss can answer for. If you can’t believe in that future state, in something beyond this life, you’ll struggle to make sense of things.

Yes, the US Government Has Defaulted Before

Yes, the US Government Has Defaulted Before

Ryan McMaken - Mises.org

The regime is trying to whip up maximum hysteria or the chances that the US government could default on its debts if the debt ceiling is not raised.

Anyone whose been paying attention for a while, however, knows there's a 99.99 percent chance that the parties involved will soon raise the debt ceiling and the US will go back to adding to its $30-trillion-plus debt hoard as usual. Yet the political posturing over the debt ceiling always offers the media and Democratic politicians a chance to assure us that any default will bring about a second Great Depression and financial collapse.

One key component of this strategy is convincing people that the United States has never defaulted before, and has always made good on its financial obligations. This is key because it helps create the impression that were the United States to default, the result would a step into the great unknown, a “financial crisis and a calamity.”

As part of this strategy, Treasury secretary Janet Yellen is at it again, repeating her often-used claims that the US has never defaulted. This week, she's telling the usual story on ABC news, claiming, "America has paid all of its bills on time since 1789."

Yet the United States government has most certainly defaulted on debts before—more than once. Moreover, if we expand the idea of default slightly to encompass the idea of inflating away a government's debt in real terms, default has been even more common.

First, let’s look at the most notorious case of US default on its debt obligation.

The 1934 Default on Liberty Bonds

In 1934, the United States defaulted on the fourth Liberty Bond. The contracts between debtor and creditor on these bonds was clear. The bonds were to be payable in gold. This presented a big problem for the US, which was facing big debts into the 1930s after the First World War. As described by John Chamberlain:

By the time Franklin Roosevelt entered office in 1933, the interest payments alone were draining the treasury of gold; and because the treasury had only $4.2 billion in gold it was obvious there would be no way to pay the principal when it became due in 1938, not to mention meet expenses and other debt obligations. These other debt obligations were substantial. Ever since the 1890s the Treasury had been gold short and had financed this deficit by making new bond issues to attract gold for paying the interest of previous issues. The result was that by 1933 the total debt was $22 billion and the amount of gold needed to pay even the interest on it was soon going to be insufficient.

So how did the US government deal with this? Chamberlain notes “Roosevelt decided to default on the whole of the domestically-held debt by refusing to redeem in gold to Americans.”

Moreover, with the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, Congress devalued the dollar from $20.67 per ounce to $35 per ounce—a reduction of 40 percent. Or, put another way, the amount of gold represented by a dollar was reduced to 59 percent of its former amount.

The US offered to pay its creditors in paper dollars, but only in new, devalued dollars.1 This constituted default on these Liberty Bonds, since, as the Supreme Court noted in Perry v. United States, Congress had “regulated the value of money so as to invalidate the obligations which the Government had theretofore issued in the exercise of the power to borrow money on the credit of the United States.”

This was clearly not a case of the US making good on its debt obligations, and to claim this is not default requires the sort of hairsplitting that only the most credulous Beltway insider could embrace.

Indeed, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in their book This Time Is Different list this episode as a “default (by abrogation of the gold clause in 1933)” and as “de facto default.”2

The Short Default of 1979

A second, less egregious case of default occurred in 1979. As Jason Zweig noted in 2011:

In April and May 1979, amid computer malfunctions, heavy demand from small investors and in the wake of Congressional debate over raising the debt ceiling, the U.S. failed to make timely payments on some $122 million in Treasury bills. The Treasury characterized the problem as a delay rather than as a default. While the error affected only a fraction of 1% of the U.S. debt, short-term interest rates—then around 9%—jumped 0.6 percentage point and the U.S. was promptly sued by bondholders for breach of contract.

Apparently, the United States sometimes does not pay its debts. While the 1979 default was relatively small, the 1934 default affected millions of Americans who had bought Liberty Bonds mistakenly thinking the government would make good on its promises. They were very wrong.

So, it is simply untrue that the US has never defaulted as Yellen claims. But this claim remains a useful tactic in sowing fear about “unprecedented” acts that would bring the entire US economy crashing down.

Default through Devaluation

But outright repudiation of contracts is only one way of defaulting on one’s obligations. Another is to deliberately devalue a nation’s currency—i.e., inflate it—so as to devalue the amount of debt a government owns in real terms.

And Zweig writes investors view this as a real form of avoiding one’s debt obligations:

Perhaps the biggest worry [among investors] isn't default but … "financial repression." In dozens of cases, governments have dug out from under burdensome debts not by refusing to pay interest but rather through other harsh means. For example, by keeping short-term interest rates below the level of inflation, a government can pay off its bondholders with cheapening money. Through regulations, it can compel banks and other financial firms to buy its own debt, much like geese being force-fed for foie gras. As a result, current yields and future inflation-adjusted returns on government bonds fall.

This strategy, Zweig concludes, “stiffs bond investors with negative returns after inflation.”

Zweig categorizes this as something separate from default, but Reinhart and Rogoff clearly consider it a form of de facto default. They write: “The combination of heightened financial repression with rises in inflation wasan especially popular form of default from the 1960s to the early 1980s” (emphasis added).3

(In the United States, a key event in this respect occurred in 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window. This was an explicit repudiation of the US’s obligation to repay dollars in gold to foreign states, and it also greatly enabled the US government in terms of financial repression and monetary inflation.)

Since the Great Recession, financial repression is popular again. This method of de facto default has enabled the federal government to take on massive amounts of new debt at rock-bottom interest rates. In real terms, the US government—or any government using this tactic—pays back its debts in devalued currency, essentially enabling the government to make good on the full extent of its debts. The cost to the public manifests in asset price inflation, goods price inflation, and a “hunt for yield” driven by a famine of income on safe assets. Americans of more modest means are those who suffer the most, and the result has been a widening gap of inequality in wealth.

It may very well be that a default could lead to significant economic and financial disruptions. But let's stop pretending that a default is unprecedented or that the United States always pays its bills. It's true that the US's current debt machine, enabled through financial repression, is a form of slow-motion default. But that doesn't make the US government any less of a deadbeat.

• 1. The Supreme Court summed it up this way: “The Joint Resolution of June 5, 1933, had enacted that such bonds should be discharged by payment, dollar for dollar, in any coin or currency which, at time of payment, was legal tender for public and private debts. The bondholder, having been refused payment in gold coin of the former standard or in an equal weight of gold, demanded currency in an amount exceeding the face of the bond in the same ratio as that borne by the number of grains in the former gold dollar to the number in the existing one—or $1.69 of currency for every dollar of the bond. The Treasury declined to pay him more than the face of the bond in currency, and he sued in the Court of Claims.”
• 
  
• 2. Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 111, 117.
• 3. Ibid., p. 117.

Keep the Change

posted by Alan Joseph Bauer at Townhall

Long before the destruction of the pipelines, both Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland warned that an invasion by Russia of Ukraine would lead to Nordstream 2 never going online. One envisioned hard sanctions on those involved in constructing and running the newer pipelines (there are 2 for each of Nordstream 1 & 2). When pressed, each said in a somewhat obtuse manner that they had the means to make sure that the pipelines never became operational. And with that, the Obama alumni signaled that they were getting back into regime change. Both the Bush and Obama (but notably not Trump) administrations tried their hand at regime change primarily in the Middle East. How did that turn out?

Iraq: Still a basket case with a weak government and ethnic and religious divisions. Saddam Hussein supposedly said that if the US removes him, they will need seven Saddams in his place. For once, he may have been right. The US thought that it could import democracy, but the country was financially better off under its dictator than it is in the post-war turmoil that exists today.

Afghanistan: After the US left behind billions of dollars of military hardware as well as allies who aided the US during 20 years of war, the Taliban found itself ruling more land than it had prior to the US invasion. Women’s rights are being rolled back and the Taliban have found China to be a new friend who can help in developing natural resources like lithium.

Syria: When Obama’s red line on poison gas vanished in the sand, the possibility of removing Assad from power went with it. Syria is still a broken country and Assad has overcome most of the opposition with the strong aid of Iran and Hezbollah. The US still attacks ISIS now and then but Assad remains in control of the vast majority of the country.

Libya: Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took great pride in having played a role in the death of Moammar Gaddafi. But with his demise, a formerly relatively stable oil state that had been aiding the West against terrorism and nuclear proliferation, became a free-for-all that saw the death of the US ambassador and two of his colleagues. Libya is a failed state of warlords and tribes, and nothing good has come from the killing of Col. Gaddafi, only more unrest and fighting.

So it’s fair to say that the Obama veterans are 0-4 on regime change. They definitely had help in their failure from George Bush and his neocons. But really, they do not know how to effectively remove a leader unfriendly to the US and install one who does that which the US asks. It would be 0-5 if we included Egypt, where Obama and his people liked the Muslim Brotherhood; the Egyptian people threw out Mohamed Morsi and installed General El-Sisi who would be a great ally if the US would let him. Due to being rebuffed by the current administration, El-Sisi reintroduced Russian fighters into Egypt for the first time in nearly 50 years.

So we have Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Susan Rice, Samantha Power and maybe between flights, John Kerry figuring that they have so much experience in regime change that the time has come to look at a bigger target—Russia. That Russia has more nuclear weapons than does the US or that nobody in Washington would have a clue as to what might come after Putin does not deter our regime change warriors. Just throw out the old and roll the dice—something better has to come along. Blowing up the Nordstream pipelines was an attempt to hasten regime change in Moscow. Deny Putin his Euro-dollars for gas and the economy will tank and the people will throw him out. Putin is too smart and devious for our armchair regime changers. He continues to make war in Ukraine and in some areas he apparently is seeing some levels of success despite huge losses of men and equipment. Successful regime change has to come from the bottom—the people want new leaders enough to risk taking on the government. And this is the shame on the Obama team when they left Iranian protesters high and dry; ditto for Biden and the current unrest there. When the people want to get rid of their leaders, the US may be able to help them to do so when it serves US interests.

Amateur hour in Washington involves blowing up Russian gas pipelines and supplying weaponry to Ukraine until the Russians decide to attack a NATO country or set off a nuclear bomb. These people are not serious, and the death and destruction they have left in their wake are proof of their utter incompetence. If they were a serious lot, they would tell President Zelensky that a peace conference is coming, whether he likes it or not. Zelensky sees how much the Biden administration wants to get rid of Putin and he gains nearly endless weaponry and financial support—even at the expense of US capabilities and readiness—as the White House plays out its fantasy of weakening and getting rid of Vladimir Putin.

One day Vladimir Putin will no longer rule Russia. But the clowns in the White House will not be the ones choosing what day that will be.