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Debt Rattle September 11 2026

Sep 112026
 
 September 11, 2026  Posted by at 9:40 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  Add comments


Roy Lichtenstein Femme d’Alger 1963


• Trump Floats $5,000 For Every US Adult Citizen If GOP Holds Congress (ZH)
• ‘The Greatest Evangelist for American Liberty,’ Charlie Kirk (Salgado)
• Tributes Pour in on Anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s Martyrdom (Salgado)
• European Leaders Trying To ‘Buy Time’ For Kiev With Ceasefire Calls – Lavrov (RT)
• ECB Raises Interest Rates to Avoid Settling Ukraine-Russia Conflict (CTH)
• Democrats Asked for It, and Trump and the GOP Delivered (Eric Florack)
• Bessent: ‘Nothing Else Matters’ If China Pulls Ahead of US in AI (ET)
• New Four-hour Elon Musk Documentary (BBC)
• The US Has Entered Stage 3 in the Trade War With Canada (Victor Davis Hanson)
• The Story of Slavery Told Correctly (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Jamaica Demands Answers On Slavery (Egountchi Behanzin)

 


 

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2097489781911368179?s=20 https://twitter.com/Alexs_jame/status/2097873034052821190?s=20

 


 


“Stimmy” Checks?!

• Trump Floats $5,000 For Every US Adult Citizen If GOP Holds Congress (ZH)

During a speech Wednesday night at the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas, Texas, President Trump proposed sending every adult American citizen a $5,000 “Trump dividend” if Republicans retain control of both chambers of Congress in November. “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them,” Trump said, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”bHe continued, “It will be called the Trump dividend,” adding, “Now all we have to do is win.”


Trump told the audience at the American Airlines Center: “Your vote will decide whether our country stumbles at the starting gate of our next 250 years or surges forward and never looks back.” nQuick math: A $5,000 payout to 270 million adults would cost the US government approximately $1.35 trillion. The proposal comes as US public debt surpassed $40 trillion for the first time in recent weeks.mBloomberg strategist Mark Cudmore warned that a large fiscal injection could intensify existing market pressures, including weaker Treasuries, dollar depreciation, and demand for commodities and other real assets.

“The general reaction from markets is very muted precisely as everyone sees almost zero chance of this happening. The US economy is strong and already at risk of running too hot, so pumping in so much extra fiscal stimulus when under funding pressure will exacerbate all the dynamics we’re already focused on in markets: weaker Treasuries, a depreciating dollar and a rush to commodities and real assets,” Cudmore said.

The proposal also arrives as Trump acknowledges that significant fuel-price relief may not come until after the midterms. The national average for gasoline remains above the politically sensitive $ 4-per-gallon level, while diesel prices are at record highs. Trump also indicated that the Iran conflict could continue beyond the elections. President Trump’s approval rating is around 38%, according to reporting by The Guardian.

Vice President JD Vance said that these proposed post-election direct payments to Americans could be funded by revenue from Trump’s wide-ranging tariff program.

Read more …

He gave Trump young America. And now?

• ‘The Greatest Evangelist for American Liberty,’ Charlie Kirk (Salgado)

Exactly a year ago today, an LGBTQ radical assassinated Charlie Kirk with one shot, taking away in a split second a man who could have been the next great leader of America’s Patriots for decades to come. At the Republican midterm convention, President Donald Trump paid tribute to Charlie, and the White House released a video in his honor.


The White House video combined clips of Charlie himself, including from that morning at Utah Valley University just before he died, along with clips from Charlie’s funeral and Trump‘s eulogy. “On that terrible day, Sept. 10, 2025, our greatest evangelist for American liberty became immortal; he’s immortal now for American freedom,” Trump had praised Kirk. Do we remember what Charlie stood for enough to carry on his legacy with enthusiasm and courage?


With his speeches and debates around the country from the time he was a teenager, Charlie Kirk was able to electrify young people in a way the most conservatives never have. “Do you know you are part of something bigger than yourself?” the White House clip of Kirk asked. “Do you know that you are part of the most exciting, diverse, powerful movement in the history of this country? This movement is about the citizens versus the oligarchs. This movement is about We the People versus the ruling class. This movement is about America versus the globalists. This movement is about all of us against them.”

Kirk loved the Biblical saying, “Here I am. It means, ‘Lord, use me.’ Abraham, at the binding of Isaac said, ‘Lord, here I am.’ Moses at the burning bush,… Samuel, Isaiah… It means, ‘give me the orders,’” he said. Erika Kirk has harkened back to this attitude of her husband’s and how he had offered himself to God, without realizing that he was going to be a martyr.

Trump made a point of honoring Charlie Kirk at the midterm convention on the evening of September 9, just before the anniversary of his death. “In Charlie’s honor, I just want to say we love you, Charlie, and Erika is here someplace,” Trump said, urging Charlie’s widow to stand up. The packed crowd gave Erika Kirk a standing ovation, and then broke out into chants of, “Charlie! Charlie!”


During the speech, Trump reflected, “It was actually one year ago tomorrow, a far-left extremist assassinated my great friend and conservative voice, Charlie Kirk, because Charlie Kirk spoke the truth.” And of course, it was precisely Kirk‘s success at what he did, and his unfailing charity in doing so, that made him such a promising candidate for president in the future and a particular target of leftist hatred. Tyler Robinson killed Kirk, and countless leftists celebrated the assassination because Kirk was too persuasive with the truth.

https://twitter.com/Newsforce/status/2097884281355849829?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2097884281355849829%7Ctwgr%5Ec72c95f6b84fa6d7c67e7efa1b40cebad9aa11af%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fpjmedia.com%2Fcatherinesalgado%2F2026%2F09%2F10%2Fthe-greatest-evangelist-for-american-liberty-n4957076


Trump referred to this reality. “What shocked millions of Americans was not only the fact that Charlie was murdered, as bad as it was, but also how many people made an excuse for it or cheered for it. They were cheering, some people, sick people. For a brief moment, the mask came off the radical left, and you saw what they were… all about. And now those same people are trying to get power over you in this election, and they are all voting Democrat.”

We cannot bring back Charlie Kirk, but we can try to continue the work that he began so successfully of bringing young people back to a love for country, faith, and family. Winning this midterm election is what Charlie would want, but it is only the beginning.

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9/11 commemoration turns into Charlie Kirk memorial.

• Tributes Pour in on Anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s Martyrdom (Salgado)

“One year ago, our nation witnessed pure evil when Charlie Kirk was taken from us,” Attorney General Todd Blanche declared September 10. But as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton declared, “I miss my friend, and I’ll honor him by never backing down… Charlie will never be forgotten.”

https://twitter.com/AndrewKolvet/status/2098115149609783776?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2098115149609783776%7Ctwgr%5E0efbd5ae8ecba063350141b98df8c18e7a20623b%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fpjmedia.com%2Fcatherinesalgado%2F2026%2F09%2F10%2Ftributes-pour-in-on-anniversary-of-charlie-kirks-martyrdom-n4957089


President Donald Trump paid tribute to Kirk both at the Republican midterm convention Wednesday night and in a video the White House released to “the greatest evangelist for American liberty.” Trump urged Americans to vote against the party that celebrated Kirk’s death. “It was actually one year ago tomorrow, a far-left extremist assassinated my great friend and conservative voice, Charlie Kirk, because Charlie Kirk spoke the truth,” the president emphasized. Many members of his administration also praised Charlie and mourned the anniversary of his death. Secretary of State Marco Rubio illustrated how he is trying to implement policies that would make Charlie proud.


HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote, “One year ago, a bullet silenced one of the most eloquent truth-tellers of our era. But it could not silence the principles Charlie Kirk stood for. Today, we honor Charlie’s devotion to God, to our country, and to the Constitution. We carry his legacy forward by summoning his best virtues in ourselves—and living with the courage, conviction, and faith that defined his life.” Similarly, Bishop Robert Barron praised Charlie‘s ability to see every human being as a beloved creation of God. Like the White House, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth used the biblical commendation, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”


White House advisor Stephen Miller exclaimed, “Charlie was a beloved friend, an unflinching ally, and an indispensable warrior for America. He was murdered not only by an evil assassin but an entire ecosystem of far-left extremism that normalizes, justifies and glorifies violence against its political opponents. The success of America depends upon the dismantlement of these violent networks. As we grieve an unimaginable loss, we pledge ourselves to accelerate the work for which Charlie gave his very life. No one can remain on the sidelines when the stakes are so vast.”


One artist is honoring Charlie with a statue in New York City, and there is also a new statue of Charlie in Phoenix.


Charlie’s own Turning Point USA and his widow Erika released heart-breaking homages. “We have had to learn how to carry on without the person who was at the center of everything we do,” the TPUSA team said soberly. “We have celebrated milestones that Charlie should have been here to celebrate. We have stood on stages where his voice should have been heard. We have watched his children grow without their father there to see it. And we have felt the weight of his absence in ways that never seem to get easier.” Indeed, “For the people who knew and loved Charlie, September 10 will never simply be an anniversary. It is the day our lives were changed forever.”


The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro warned against conservatives splitting into hate-filled and conspiratorial factions, urging a united front against all the leftists celebrating “Kirkiversary.”

There were even international tributes. Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa posted, “A man of strong faith, a husband and a father, Charlie believed that political and ideological differences should be confronted through argument and democratic debate – never through hatred or violence… Charlie Kirk is no longer with us, but the values he stood for – freedom of expression, faith, courage and peaceful political debate – remain. They deserve to be defended.”

But the greatest tribute that any of us can ever give Charlie Kirk is to continue the work that he started and refuse to let the radical, godless left take over America.

Read more …

“Russia will not accept as a neighbor a nation ruled by a “Russophobic and aggressive neo-Nazi regime,” the top diplomat has said ..”

• European Leaders Trying To ‘Buy Time’ For Kiev With Ceasefire Calls – Lavrov (RT)

Zelensky and Finnish President Stubb, Kiev, Ukraine, August 24, 2026

European leaders calling for a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine conflict are seeking to preserve the government in Kiev in its current aggressive anti-Russian form, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. Even politicians who acknowledge that Kiev cannot militarily retake the former Ukrainian regions that have joined Russia since 2014 and now advocate a truce are pursuing an agenda that threatens Russia and its citizens, the top diplomat said. Speaking in an interview on Tuesday, Lavrov named Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as examples.


The proposed ceasefire “is also just a way to buy time, as everyone knows,” Lavrov said, adding that Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky “makes no secret of that” as he seeks additional weapons supplies. mAccording to the Russian minister, the goal of this ploy is to preserve and keep in power “the regime currently ruling in Kiev,” whose defining traits he described as “Nazism, aggressive Russophobia, violations of human rights, language rights and religious freedom.” As for Europe, it wants to preserve that openly Russophobic and aggressive neo-Nazi regime. It is the European plan. I don’t see how the Russian people can accept this outcome.

Moscow’s objections to freezing the conflict remain unchanged, as does its opposition to proposals to deploy troops from NATO member states in Ukraine following a potential peace deal, Lavrov said. “Any people in military uniforms and any military facilities will be legitimate [targets] for us, and no scenario under which Ukraine will acquire NATO membership in all but name is acceptable to us,” he stressed.Lavrov was interviewed in Moscow by Russian-American television host Dimitri Simes and visiting US political commentator Andrew Napolitano, better known as Judge Napolitano, after his former role on the New Jersey Superior Court.

Read more …

Good observation. The EU blames Putin AND Trump. And it wants no ceasefire.

• ECB Raises Interest Rates to Avoid Settling Ukraine-Russia Conflict (CTH)

The European Central Bank raised interest rates a quarter of a percent claiming the effort will reduce energy prices. However, the primary cause of higher energy costs is energy policy not monetary policy. As you can see, Europe is blaming the Iran conflict, and by extension blaming President Trump for inflicting higher oil and gas prices. Yet in reality, it was the European decision to cut themselves off of Russian oil and gas that led to their massive price increases.


In essence, if you ask yourself how far the EU collective is willing to go in order to combat the fictitious threat represented by Russia’s conflict with non-EU state Ukraine, it appears there is no upper limit. Rather than assist in a resolution of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, they are willing to keep fueling the war and diminishing their own economy in the process. From the perspective of the welfare of the average European, none of this makes sense. This is bureaucratic ideology running amok.

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — The European Central Bank raised interest rates Thursday to cool inflation that is being fed by high oil prices from the Iran war. The decision was supported by a stronger-than-expected economy that suggests businesses can weather the higher borrowing costs. The central bank for the 21 EU member countries that use the euro currency raised its benchmark rate by a quarter percentage point to 2.50% at a meeting held in Berlin, away from the bank’s Frankfurt headquarters.

Bank President Christine Lagarde said at her news conference that “the conflict in the Middle East continues to generate inflation pressures, and inflation is set to remain well above target for an extended period.” “The outlook remains highly uncertain, with risks to the upside for inflation and to the downside for economic growth,” she said, adding that the bank would make future rate decisions meeting by meeting based on incoming data. She said the central bank would not commit to any particular path for rates before seeing the data. (read more)

It is ironic his announcement comes from Berlin as the German economy announces the loss of 100,000 auto workers while the EU Central Bank says, “a stronger than expected economy.” Ever the faithful leftist WEF member, Poland Prime Minister Donald Tusk notes that Poland is paying the highest energy prices in the world, but he faithfully supports the EU agenda. Because it’s Russia’s fault, and of course he does.

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“Stopping him from doing what, exactly?” That’s the question Democrats don’t want asked, because it’s where their whole strategy comes apart.”

• Democrats Asked for It, and Trump and the GOP Delivered (Eric Florack)

Ever the consummate showman, President Trump invented the concept of the midterm convention, and he stepped right in to headline it. But there’s a perfectly legitimate argument that Republicans should run on what they’ve actually accomplished rather than turning this election into another referendum on one man. I made exactly that argument myself, at column length, yesterday in the VIP article, “So, What Has Donald Trump Actually Accomplished?” (If you’re not a VIP member yet, why not?)


Elections ought to be about results, policy, and competing visions for the future — not another round of “Trump good” versus “Trump bad.” That’s the ideal. Unfortunately, politics doesn’t happen in the ideal. It happens in the real world, and every strategy has to survive contact with the reality surrounding it.

And here’s the reality Republicans can’t wish away: Democrats have already made Donald Trump the centerpiece. They’ve been doing it for over a decade. Since he first came down that escalator, Democrats and most of the institutional media have treated virtually everything in American life as somehow being about Donald Trump — his personality, his tweets, his speeches, his insults, his policies, his supporters, his opponents, his legal troubles, his victories, his defeats.

Did the cat hack up a hairball on your pillow while you were sleeping? Trump’s fault. Car won’t start? Trump’s fault. Kid brought home a report card that reads like a cry for help? Also, somehow, Trump’s fault. At this point, Democrats have done everything but formally rename the San Andreas Fault “Trump’s Fault.” For years, Democrats told voters, loudly and on an endless loop, that the defining issue facing the country is Donald Trump. They made him the issue. They made him the villain. They made him the explanation for everything they didn’t like.

They made him the explanation for everything that happened after he left office. They made him the explanation for everything that’s happened since he came back. bAnd now, having spent years insisting Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Republic, they apparently expect Republicans to politely agree that maybe we shouldn’t bring him up too much this fall? That’s adorable.

Sorry. That’s not how this works. Republicans can certainly choose to talk about something else — but that strategy has a fatal flaw: you don’t get to unilaterally decide what the other side’s campaign is about. If Democrats plan to spend the whole cycle talking about Trump (and obviously they do), pretending he isn’t part of the election just hands them the subject uncontested. Not answering them isn’t strategy. It’s surrender with better lighting.

There’s also a real difference between making Trump the centerpiece and simply recognizing that the opposition has already made him the centerpiece. Those aren’t nearly the same move. Republicans don’t have to make every speech about Trump. They don’t need his face on every mailer. They don’t need every candidate sounding like they were personally deputized by Trump to defend Western civilization before breakfast. But they do need to recognize the political battlefield they’re standing on.

The question isn’t whether Republicans should crown Donald Trump the centerpiece of the midterms. It’s whether they’re willing to fight on the battlefield that already exists — which is exactly what I did in yesterday’s column, and from what I saw, what they did last night, in Texas. If Democrats are going to campaign on stopping Trump, Republicans have every right, and frankly an obligation, to ask voters a simple follow-up: “Stopping him from doing what, exactly?” That’s the question Democrats don’t want asked, because it’s where their whole strategy comes apart.

It’s one thing to tell voters that Donald Trump is an awful human being, a threat to democracy, a fascist, a dictator-in-waiting, or whatever label happens to be trending that week. And as they’ve demonstrated, you don’t even need to have any proof of any of it. Simple repetition does the work. However, it’s an entirely different thing to explain why the actual policies voters are living under should be thrown out. Democrats have clearly demonstrated that they can’t do the second part. They’ve never had to — they’ve spent a decade coasting on the former.

Read more …

“There Is No Day After Tomorrow”; Bessent Warns Of Consequences To Losing AI Arms Race To China,

• Bessent: ‘Nothing Else Matters’ If China Pulls Ahead of US in AI (ET)

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the United States cannot afford to fall behind China in artificial intelligence, warning that a Chinese lead would outweigh other U.S. advantages. “Beating China – there is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this,” Bessent said on Sept. 9 at Breitbart News’s “State of the Economy” event in Washington. “If they were to pull ahead of us on AI, then nothing else matters.” Bessent made the remarks while answering a question about opposition to data centers and the need to expand the infrastructure required for AI development.


On the same day, the National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and FBI issued a joint advisory accusing six China-based AI companies of conducting industrial-scale campaigns to extract capabilities from U.S. frontier AI models. The agencies named DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI, saying the companies had extracted billions of tokens through millions of requests to frontier models including Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok since at least late 2024.

Agencies Detail Model Distillation
Knowledge distillation is a machine learning technique in which one model is trained using the outputs of another. The technique is commonly used legitimately, including to develop smaller or less expensive models. The advisory alleged, however, that the six companies engaged in “aggressive, malicious, and targeted” distillation at an industrial scale to extract restricted proprietary functions and capabilities from U.S. models. The NSA said the companies were systematically extracting U.S. model capabilities to train their own systems.

According to the advisory, the companies distributed their activity across model providers, cloud platforms, and other infrastructure to avoid detection. Some used third-party services to relay requests to U.S. models, allowing them to bypass geographic restrictions and other safeguards, the agencies said. The agencies assessed that the alleged activity took place “likely with Chinese government awareness.” The advisory did not state that Chinese authorities directed the individual campaigns.

It said DeepSeek had allegedly conducted an organized campaign since at least late 2024 to obtain reasoning capabilities, specialized optimizations, and other functions for use in its R1 and V3 models. The agencies also attributed large-scale distillation activity to Alibaba’s Qwen models and to models developed by the other four companies. The agencies said such activity could allow Chinese AI developers to narrow the technology gap while avoiding some of the computing power, electricity, foundational research, and other costs required to independently develop frontier models. The advisory stated that advances in Chinese AI models could also expand military and cyber capabilities.

Beijing rejected the allegations on Sept. 9. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said China’s AI development came from domestic technological development and international cooperation. The Sept. 8 advisory urged American AI companies and infrastructure providers to improve detection of suspicious activity and strengthen coordination across model developers, cloud providers, and application programming interface providers to counter large-scale distillation campaigns.

Earlier Warnings From US AI Companies
The federal advisory follows earlier accusations by American AI developers. Anthropic said in February that it had identified industrial-scale campaigns by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax involving more than 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts. The accounts violated its terms of service and regional access restrictions, Anthropic said. It also said that while distillation is a legitimate training method, competitors can misuse it to acquire capabilities developed by other companies without bearing comparable development costs.

OpenAI separately told the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party in February that it had observed activity indicating continued attempts by DeepSeek to distill capabilities from OpenAI and other U.S. frontier models, including through increasingly obfuscated methods intended to make the activity harder to detect.

Data Centers and the AI Race
Bessent tied the competition with China to the U.S. buildout of data centers and other infrastructure needed for AI. He said the United States currently has the lead because of its technology companies, advanced chips, financing, and startup ecosystem, but argued that development could not be paused. “We can’t pause,” Bessent said. “You can’t, because the Chinese won’t pause.”

He criticized technology companies for failing to engage adequately with communities affected by new data-center construction. Bessent also alleged that some opposition to data-center development involved Chinese “agitprop.” He did not identify specific examples for that assertion during the discussion. He gave data-center developers, hyperscalers, and major AI companies a “D-minus” for community outreach and said they needed to do a better job explaining their projects and potential benefits to residents.

Read more …

Missed chance,.

• New Four-hour Elon Musk Documentary (BBC)

The Venice Film Festival has hosted the premiere of major documentary-maker Alex Gibney’s epic and provocative new profile of the richest man on Earth, which has been years in the making. Here are five key takeaways from the film.


Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning director of Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, has made documentaries about some of the richest and most powerful people on Earth. But none of them has been as rich and powerful as Elon Musk. Maybe that’s why Gibney’s profile of the tech entrepreneur and SpaceX boss is such an epic. Musk, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, has a running time of 225 minutes, and will be released with a 10-minute intermission – so that’s almost four hours on the life and work of the world’s richest man.

Still, the time rockets by. There is little in the film that isn’t already on record, but Gibney gathers all the extant reporting into one breathlessly fast-moving, largely negative, and terrifyingly apocalyptic profile. Here are five things you should know about the documentary – just in case you don’t have four hours to spare.

1. Musk himself isn’t interviewed – but appears as an AI avatar
Gibney initially tried for an interview with Musk, but when the project was announced back in March 2023, Musk declared on social media that it would be a “hit piece”, to which Gibney responded, “How would you know?” The director’s solution is to have an AI-generated avatar of Musk repeat things that he has said in public. This is apt, says Gibney in his voiceover, because Musk believes that we might all be living in a simulation – a video game being played by our descendants in the future.

2. David Byrne helped write a theme song
David Byrne has co-written Let Me Sell You a Dream for the film’s closing credits, which has lyrics consisting entirely of phrases spoken by Musk in the past. The title is appropriate, according to some of Gibney’s interviewees, who say that Musk tends to attract investment by promising that imagined future accomplishments – such as cities on Mars and completely safe self-driving cars – are imminent or already realised.

“That’s not happening,” says Adam Becker, an author and astrophysicist, about Musk’s scheme to colonise Mars. “The gravity is too low, the radiation is too high, there’s no air, and the dirt is filled with poison.” Musk has consistently defended his visionary philosophy however: “I’m very good at predicting the future,” he told The Economist in a July interview. “I’m not perfect but I’m very good… people don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass – maybe not exactly in the timing that I thought, but it will come to pass.”


3. Musk’s time in the White House is scrutinised The film suggests that Musk dealt with the US government the way he dealt with Twitter. Zoë Schiffer, the author of Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter, says that after Musk bought the social media platform, what she refers to as his “goons” pushed out the majority of the staff without pausing to learn what they actually did. Later, as the head of President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, Musk followed “the Twitter playbook”, Schiffer says, describing how he tried and failed to wipe out the US national debt by slashing the budget of numerous departments, this time with the help of a group of assistants in their early twenties who had no government experience. Musk bemoaned that Doge had become “the whipping boy for everything” in an interview with the Washington Post in May last year, just before leaving the Trump administration.


4. An old British film makes a surprise appearance
Gibney uses clips from a British fantasy film, The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1937), to illustrate his very dramatic view of Musk. In this black-and-white classic, based on an HG Wells story, a celestial being bestows an ordinary man (Roland Young) with infinite powers. The man eventually demands that the world’s leaders change society instantly, but he ends up accidentally destroying the planet.

5. The film has had a strong reception so far
Reviews from the Venice premiere have so far been largely positive. Variety called it “a lacerating and important watch, grounded in Gibney’s supremely insightful but user-friendly mastery of the documentary form”, while in a four-star review, The Telegraph dubbed it “a chillingly forensic hatchet job”. Unsurprisingly, Musk himself has not been one of its admirers: on X on Wednesday, among other comments, he described the film as “a hit piece that misses, and makes the fatal sin of being boring for 4 hours”.

Read more …

“They’re fed up with countries that said for 30 years they were gonna protect themselves and help NATO, and the most egregious offender in the last 15 years has been Canada.”

• The US Has Entered Stage 3 in the Trade War With Canada (Victor Davis Hanson)

The philosopher Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher, once said that you don’t step into the same river twice, meaning the river flows. Other people look at that quote and said he meant panta rhei, everything flows or changes, although he didn’t necessarily say that himself. Everything changes. That applies to our current U.S.-Canadian spat. We were given an initial description in the media, and then we had some clarification, and now we’re in what I would call Stage Three.


Stage One was outrage at Donald Trump and the United States, and this is the narrative that we got from one side, from Mark Carney. He said the Americans are at it again, and Trump in particular. They’re bullying us. They’re demanding that they’re gonna take away our sovereignty, and they’re saying to whom, and with whom we can trade and with whom we can’t. And then, they wanna squash Canadian nationalism, and they want to suppress indigenous reading, literature, influence in the French language, and we’re not gonna do that. So we had to back out.

So, everybody got very angry. The Wall Street Journal said: This is a silly Trump spectacle right on the eve of the midterms. This is crazy. nAnd then we went into Stage Two: clarification. People in Canada, 90%, supported Carney. They were booing the American “Star-Spangled Banner” when it was played at sporting events in Canada. And they started to informally boycott U.S. products.

And then they stuck out their chest and said we might not give four million barrels of oil to the United States from Canada. We may stop our pipeline. We can do all of these things to the United States. They need us. And the world is against Trump. And our prime minister can deal with China if he wants. He prefers China. bSo, we heard all that, and then we found out that the deal was almost cemented, and Carney brought up his objections at the last moment.

Then we found out the United States did not wanna suppress the French language or Indigenous culture in Canada. It just said our digital media companies operate worldwide. Why, in this particular country of Canada, should they pay a 5% surtax on top of charge, in addition to income tax, just to subsidize for the particular agendas of the Canadian government? We don’t do that to Canada. We don’t say, “If you come into the United States and you have a product or a media conglomerate, we’re gonna slap a 5% so we wanna promote DEI, we want to promote poor white people in East Palestine.” We don’t do that.

Then we find out that we don’t want to take away Canada’s sovereignty. We are in an existential struggle to save the West from Chinese mercantilism. They have been dumping product. They have been manipulating currency. They’ve been stealing patents. They don’t respect copyrights. They run up trillion-dollar surpluses with us, half a trillion with Europe, and we’re saying no more. We want symmetry.

And [China], to get around that, is dumping cheap steel and aluminum and saying to Canada, “You can buy our product very cheap, much cheaper than you can produce it. Then you can use it in your assembly of cars and trucks and other manufactured goods and send it into the United States and undercut American producers. You win, and then we get around the American tariffs.” And Trump and his team said, “No, we know what you’re doing.” So, that was a clarification that didn’t look too good.

Then people said, “Well, wait a minute. Canada can’t even send its oil, highly sulfurous and thick tar sands, to Ontario or to British Columbia because the provinces are so at each other’s throats under this weird system that they don’t. They have almost autonomy with one another, and they won’t let pipelines be built. But the Americans will let it be built.” So, they need the 4 million-a-day export. After all, if Canada’s doing so well, why don’t … Alberta said, “We can’t give you our oil. We need it. We’re booming. That’s what we’ve been told.

“Why would we give it to a booming United States that already is the greatest producer of gas and oil in history and self-sufficient, unless it’s in our interest? It’s right across the border. The United States treats us better than our other provinces treat us. They allow a pipeline into a foreign country, i.e., the United States. Our other provinces don’t allow Alberta to do that. “And, by the way, they allow a pipeline then to go into Quebec and Ontario. If we cut off their pipeline, they’ll cut off two of our provinces.”

And then the jobs report came out. We’ve only been at this 10 days, but it already affected the August jobs report. They said, “We didn’t need the United States.” Well, they’re down 41,000 jobs. And we can hurt the United States? The United States is up 160,000 jobs. And so now we’re in a crisis. How does Canada get out of this situation? Because they walked out of a deal that was better than basically any other deal the United States had cut with other countries, and it was only one of two countries. The other in the same league was communist China that retaliated against the United States.

The others admitted, “Aw, shucks. We know we’ve had asymmetrical tariffs with you for a long time. We understand this is a reckoning. Let’s kind of moderate it and don’t get too hysterical that we’ve been taking you to the cleaners on trade.” OK. Not Canada. Canada immediately started retaliating like China. OK. And now they’re in Stage Three. What is Stage Three? Stage Three is the Americans are saying to themselves:

Well, we have 13 times the economy that Canada does, and we have nine times the population, and we have one state, California, that has about the same population as all of Canada. And of all of our states, it’s the worst run, the most socialist, with the most inept governor, and usually with the highest social welfare costs, the highest taxes, the highest unemployment, the highest inflation, the highest power. And guess what? It has double the gross domestic product of Canada, even though there’s the same population. Double.

And then the Americans are saying: “We don’t want—we don’t need your oil. We can produce your oil. We’d like your oil. It helps you. It helps us. But if you don’t wanna cut us off, cut us off. And we’d like to trade with you, but you know what? If you don’t wanna—if you wanna help Canada get around our tariffs, and we understand that, just don’t do it. And the subtext behind all of this is the United States is fed up. They’re fed up with countries that said for 30 years they were gonna protect themselves and help NATO, and the most egregious offender in the last 15 years has been Canada.

Read more …

High time this story was told.

• The Story of Slavery Told Correctly (Paul Craig Roberts)

For several decades I have emphasized that black slavery was a product of black slave wars in Africa for which no white person has any responsibility. It was black African rulers, such as the King of Dahomey, who enslaved and sold black Africans to Arabs and to British and European colonies in the New World where there was abundant resources and fertile land but no work force. This is an indisputable fact. Some of the most famous leftists in history, such as Karl Polanyi, have documented this fact.


Today as I write there stands on the Atlantic coast of Africa three miles south of Ouidan in Benin, the former Kingdom of Dahomey, the Gate of No Return, a memorial erected to mark the departure point where Africans enslaved by Africans were loaded aboard ships to be marketed to Arabs and to British and European colonists in the New World. The Gate of No Return sits at the end of a road known as the Route of the Slaves. As far as I can ascertain, none of this factual history is acknowledged in any black studies program in any Western university or by any of the black organizations agitating for reparations from white peoples who neither enslaved nor owned a slave.

In the Western World the entire story of slavery is a total fabrication. It is important to understand that no white Southerners or white anyone went into Africa to round up black slaves. The black King of Dahomey was a powerful person. His army was armed with rifles obtained from the Arabs in exchange for slaves. The King had an Amazon contingent, reportedly extremely ferocious. No one was going to poach on the King of Dahomey. Any who wanted slaves paid the King’s price. Dahomey dominated the slave wars, and the captives of Dahomey’s wars were the slaves who ended up in America.

As slaves were the products of slave wars between black Africans, many of the slaves sold to colonists in the British colonies that eventually became the US were themselves warriors engaged in slave wars against other blacks who were defeated in combat. I have often made the point that every collection of slaves on Southern plantations in the American South contained trained warriors captured in combat who greatly outnumbered the number of whites on the “slave cotton plantations.” Any such behavior of slave owners, such as that fraudulently reported by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin would have resulted in a successful uprising.

Plantation owners understood this, and for their own preservation and that of their families did not behave as the lying bitch Harriet Beecher Stowe alleges in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The purpose of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was war propaganda, to stir up hatred of the South by northerners in order to make acceptable Lincoln’s war criminals, Sherman and Sheridan. The south was defeated by the North’s destruction of the South’s livestock and farms, leaving the Confederacy unable to provision the Army of Northern Virginia which in the end was marching in bare feet with no food.

The proof that there was unity between the slaves and the plantation owners was demonstrated by the complete failure of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. This was a war measure that Lincoln intended would draw Confederate soldiers from the front lines to return home to protect their families from black insurrection. But no insurrection occurred, and the Southern soldiers did not leave the front lines.

Lincoln, a war criminal of the highest order, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which as Lincoln’s own Secretary of State pointed out, applied only to slaves under Confederate control, and not to any under Union control, out of frustration that Union general after Union general whose forces were three to four times larger than Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia were repeated defeated by General Robert E. Lee, a leader who steadfastly refused to participate in war crimes.

The Emancipation Proclamation was a complete failure as a war measure. But the white liberals misrepresented a war measure as the freeing of the slaves from “Southern oppression.” What are we to think of northern liberals this totally dishonest, this totally devoid of all integrity, of all respect for historical truth? I won’t print the expletives that come to mind. The “freedom” left former slaves without homes and food. Many were raped by Union soldiers. “Liberated” blacks followed behind the Union armies hoping their “liberators” would provide food and water and medical care. But as the Union soldiers did not own the former slaves, no one had an investment or interest in them.

“Liberation” was chaos for the “liberated.” Many of the “liberated” experienced devastating hardship and death. Historians have documented that the contraband camps that were set up by the Union were characterized by overcrowding, poor sanitation, meager food rations and by massive outbreaks of diseases such as smallpox and dysentery. The brutal conditions killed a large percentage of the Southern black population. The consequence of “emancipation” was genocide. The former slaves who survived did so by performing manual labor for the Union occupying army.

A country with a high percentage of people as dishonest as white liberals has no chance of being great if it is to be a multicultural society. No multicultural society can exist when the disparate interests are turned against one another in hate, which is what the white liberals have done to America.

The alleged American “civil war” is another fabrication. The war was the result of the North, which Lincoln called the Union, invading a separate country, the Confederacy, which had exercised its constitutional right to exit the United States in order to avoid being economically exploited by northern manufacturing which insisted on a tariff to be paid by the South on its exports and imports. The day before Lincoln’s inauguration the Northern Congress passed the Morrill Tariff that imposed massive economic cost on the South. Simultaneously Lincoln and the Northern Congress offered the South Constitutional protection forever of slavery if the South would stay in the Union and pay the tariff.

The South replied that their concern is the tariff, not slavery. Despite all evidence the white liberals claim without a shred of evidence that the Union cause was to deliver blacks from slavery. Clearly, people as unworthy as white liberals desperately need to be replaced by immigrant-invaders. I was delighted when I read that the white liberal government in Massachusetts had decided to replace themselves with Muslims. Perhaps there is some virtue in The Camp of the Saints. The white liberals will be the first to go, just as they are in The Camp of the Saints.

Read more …

“Egountchi Behanzin, founding president of the international African Black Defense League, spokesperson for the Pan-African Brothers, political analyst, and pan-African activist..”

• Jamaica Demands Answers On Slavery (Egountchi Behanzin)

Knocking on the king’s door: Decades in the making, the September 7 filing brings a direct legal challenge against the British Crown for its ties to the slave system


On September 7, 2026, a high-level Jamaican delegation delivered a historic legal petition to Buckingham Palace addressed to King Charles III. Its objective was to compel the monarch, as Jamaica’s head of state, to refer to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the island’s highest court of appeal, three questions that have haunted the British Empire for centuries. Was the forced transportation of Africans to Jamaica and their subsequent enslavement lawful? Did this system constitute a crime against humanity? Does the United Kingdom bear an obligation to make reparation for slavery and its enduring consequences?

Culture Minister Olivia Grange, who led the delegation, shared a photo on X of herself holding the document aloft, captioned: “The petition has been filed.” King Charles III was not present at the handover. British media reported he was on vacation at the time, though Buckingham Palace said it had worked closely with the Governor General of Jamaica to ensure the petition was properly lodged.

Why the date is no coincidence
The day before, on Sunday, September 6, the delegation had taken part in a church service in south London under the theme of “remembrance, justice and repair,” ahead of the formal filing the following day. This timing is no accident: September 6 commemorates the 1781 departure of the slave ship Zong, aboard which more than 140 enslaved Africans were thrown into the sea so their owners could collect an insurance payout. That crime, unpunished for 245 years, now stands as the symbol of a justice the diaspora refuses to let fade into oblivion.

“In relation to the wrongs that were done, we want answers,” Grange told the Associated Press the day before the filing. “Once we get those answers, then our attorneys will determine what the next move is.” This petition is part of a strategy, built step by step by Jamaica’s National Council on Reparations chaired by Laleta Davis Mattis, with the support of a legal subcommittee led by attorney Bert Samuels, and a team of UK lawyers. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has thrown its full weight behind the effort proof that this question reaches beyond the borders of a single island. The entire post-slavery Caribbean is rising behind Jamaica.

The UN slavery resolution as a first step
But it is precisely here that Jamaica’s fight joins Africa’s own, and this link must now be made visible, since Western media have worked hard to keep it quiet. On March 25, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted, on Ghana’s initiative, resolution A/RES/80/250 – the very first resolution in UN history devoted exclusively to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.One hundred and twenty-three states voted in favor. Only three opposed it: the United States, Israel, and Argentina. Fifty-two countries, mostly European including the United Kingdom itself, chose to hide behind abstention.

The resolution designates the transatlantic trafficking of Africans and racialized chattel enslavement as the “gravest crime against humanity.” Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama, speaking on behalf of the African Group of 54 states, the UN’s largest regional bloc, declared that voting for the text meant standing on the right side of history. It calls for the restitution of looted cultural property, formal apologies, and opens the door to the consideration of financial compensation. This is an international normative framework, patiently built by the African Union since February 2024, when it proclaimed 2025 the “Year of Justice for Africans through Reparations for Slavery, Colonialism, and Apartheid.”

Jamaican jurist Bert Samuels was not mistaken when he stated that this UN resolution strengthens Jamaica’s legal position against London. Here is the thread that binds Accra to Kingston, the African motherland to the diaspora torn from it. A single struggle is fought on two complementary fronts – one continental and diplomatic, the other insular and judicial, both aimed at the same goal of making the former empire pay for four centuries of human plunder.

A history of reversed debts
To grasp the full weight of this gesture, one must recall that Haiti, the first free black nation of the modern era, was forced in 1825 to pay France a colossal indemnity to “compensate” former slave owners for the loss of their “human property” – a debt that bled Haiti’s economy for more than a century. History, as written by the colonial powers, long decreed that it was the enslavers who deserved compensation, never the enslaved.

Jamaica’s petition overturns this criminal logic. It is no longer the victims who owe the executioner, it is the executioner who must now answer to its victims. This reversal builds on groundwork laid over more than a decade by the CARICOM itself, which as early as 2013 adopted its own ten-point plan for reparatory justice, demanding formal apologies, debt cancellation, technology transfers, and public health programs to offset the health devastation bequeathed by slavery.

The September 7 filing is therefore the legal culmination of a long matured Caribbean strategy that has now chosen to confront head on, in a court of law, the very institution that sanctioned and protected the slave system: the British Crown.

What it means for the diaspora
For the African diaspora across Africa, the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbean alike, this filing is experienced as a long-deferred reckoning. For generations, our elders awaited a political gesture of this magnitude – a formal legal demand addressed directly to the head of the house that organized, financed, and profited from the trade.

Reparations movements that once fought each in their own corner Caribbean organizations, Afro-descendant collectives in the Americas, African diasporas in Europe, activists on the continent itself are beginning to speak with a single voice, carried by recognized institutions: the African Union on one side, CARICOM on the other, and now the UN as a global sounding board.

In West Africa, Jamaica’s move is being followed with particular attention, seen as the natural extension of the fight President Mahama carried to the UN stage. The Africa that watched its children leave in chains is, four centuries later, reunited with a part of its diaspora now come to knock, together, on the same imperial door. In Southern Africa, where the memory of apartheid remains raw, many Pan-African organizations see in this filing further proof that struggles for historical justice slavery, colonialism, apartheid can no longer be treated separately, but must be understood as a single, unified case against the West.

In Europe, among Afro-descendant communities in France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom itself, Jamaica’s petition serves as both a signal of hope and a painful reminder: That our own states of origin or residence still drag their feet on these questions, while little Jamaica, with its modest means, dared to carry the fight directly to the monarch’s door. In the Americas, Afro-descendant movements from Brazil to Colombia are also watching this case closely, seeing in it a potential legal precedent that could be mobilized for their own claims against the former Iberian colonial powers.

This convergence is visibly rattling Western capitals. The United Kingdom’s vote – an abstention, that is, a refusal to choose – speaks volumes about the quiet panic setting in London. One can sense, in the remarks of certain British political figures, particularly within Euroskeptic and identitarian factions, a desire to ridicule Jamaica’s move, to dismiss it as an expensive whim or a political stunt.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2098040640378425446?s=20 https://twitter.com/Alexs_jame/status/2098084514627019002?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Home › Forums › Debt Rattle September 11 2026

Viewing 32 posts - 1 through 32 (of 32 total)
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  • September 11, 2026 at 9:40 am #249571
    Raúl Ilargi Meijer
    Keymaster

    Roy Lichtenstein Femme d’Alger 1963 • Trump Floats $5,000 For Every US Adult Citizen If GOP Holds Congress (ZH) • ‘The Greatest Evangelist for America
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle September 11 2026]

    September 11, 2026 at 10:06 am #249593
    Dr. D
    Participant

    “Ukraine Proxy War End Game Begins, Collective West Total Panic | Alex Christoforou Neutrality Studies 224K views

    Except there is no “West.” The U.S. is trying to broker peace as the only one talking, so it’s not exactly a surprise to us that the war ends: that’s the whole point. The U.S. looks about as un-panicked as it is physically possible to be. Except for the chronically online, Ukraine never crosses a single American mind here, which is the definitional opposite of “Panic.” We are not afraid. And we are also not aware. And we also dgaf what happens to Ukraine, I hope they cease to exist and stop stealing my money.

    So almost every word of this made up. I’d say it’s to give Trump a sad, as he will be sobbing in the rough on the 9th hole at Mar-a-lago, but it’s much worse than that: Alex ACTUALLY BELIEVES this. Almost two years. Clue-hone ringing non stop, day and night, and he won’t pick it up. Lavrov, Putin, other ministers say so almost daily: nothing.

    Okay man. Stanislav says the same thing: first question: “Only and solely the AMERICANS are attacking Russia. There are no Europeans, not even any Ukrainians involved at all. What’s your expert opinion on this sir?” JHC. WTF. THEY DON’T BELIEVE EVEN PUTIN AND LAVROV. I guess Lavrov has no idea which nations he’s at war with, boys! That’s at the 00:59 second mark.

    He then laments that we’re all going to starve because the U.S. both buys, and does not buy, Russian fertilizer.

    IT’S WINTER HERE, DIPS—T, we won’t need fertilizer until spring. Nothing seems to have happened from the LAST drop in fertilizer that was going to kill us all, only last month, when it WAS spring. Get a grip. We’re at the 2:01 minute mark with this genius.

    Yes, listened to MacGregor, to keep up. Fact-Free zone for both of them. All emotion, all opinion. Showing the photos of windows and orphans. …Officially casualties from Iran are lower than the baseline without a war, in training exercises. Fact. We can discuss the veracity of it, but that’s a different approach, one where facts matter. MacGregor also reverses himself — yet again daily — saying the Generals and upper officers support the Iran war now, which was my argument, when I posted “Generals and Majors” video. Ah, so they are BOTH all for AND all against it. There is BOTH unity and division. Got it. And you’re not crazy at all. It’s exclusively hand-waving like this, I am quite obviously dumber at the end than the beginning. It’s the spaghetti of discourse, thrown at the wall.

    “Right-Wing Bolsonaro Overtakes Socialist Lula On Polymarket As Brazil Election Nears

    USAID. As with AfD, I really can’t tell the two parties apart. It’s not that I don’t believe them, but it’s probably what they do once in office is subterranean and denied, while their public policy – all smoke – are as similar as historical Democrats and Republicans: hardly distinguishable. Fill me in if I’m wrong here.

    “Supreme Court Blocks Missouri Republicans’ New Congressional Map

    All the other maps went through. Kavanaugh, being a Democrat, whose first act was to support abortion, also supports Democrats in elections. How does that work? No? Well his record is a strange thing for a Conservative to do. Best of both worlds: bashed and death threats for being a Conservative; BUT ALSO no credit for pushing the Left policies forward as tirelessly as Roberts and Sotomayor.

    I guess my point is: don’t just read the headlines. Don’t get baffled that someone “Named” things. I named this snake a “Rose” then handed it to you in a bouquet. It would be rude of you to notice, and not hold it to your nose and sniff. You know a tree by its fruits, and this one’s nuts.

    “Melania Trump’s Team Finally Breaks Silence On Natalie Harp Frenzy

    Why do Democrats hate strong women so much? I thought we were supposed to support all women – Gurl Power! — because they are innately morally superior.

    “Trump Floats $5,000 “Stimmy” Checks For Every US Adult Citizen If GOP Holds Congress

    To show how things work, what will they DO with the check? 1) Pay off debt 2) Buy consumer goods. So banks and corporations are AGAINST this? Oh, so who is against it? Now or in general? So it’s not about all that, is it? If it were “Capitalism” all these Capitalists – most of the country — would be for it. Instead they are against. They hate money. Discuss.

    “Trump Open To Pardoning Cohen After Former Attorney Says He Was Pressured

    Does any sane person think he was NOT pressured?

    “”If [China] were to pull ahead of us on AI, then nothing else matters…” –Bessant

    Elaborate, please. I cannot conceptualize what you mean here.

    “Iran War Until 2029? Vance, Rubio Privately Warn Trump It Could Drag Through End Of His Term

    What do you mean by “war”? A war would have two sides. Iran is not one of them, it would seem.

    “Merz accuses the AfD’s concept of remigration being “nothing other than a synonym for ethnic cleansing based on origin and skin color”…
    “Migrants Responsible For 47% Of All Violent Crime In German State Of Bavaria”

    No comment.
    Sin
    https://sinfest.xyz/btphp/comics/2026-09-11.jpg

    September 11, 2026 at 10:07 am #249594
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    The new world order which punishes Americans is helped get off the ground by Trump
    Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

    What’s the joke Putin, Xi and Modi? Well, Trump actually – whose childish antics are making us all rich.

    What was the joke? When leaders of China, Russia and India huddled together recently at the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), they had a funny moment for a few seconds, captured by world media and shared on social media extensively. The SCO was initially just China, Russia and some former Central Asian Soviet states, but in recent years has expanded its membership to Iran, Pakistan and India – making it a formidable bloc. The joke Putin, Xi and Modi shared might have been at Donald Trump’s expense, as the more that the U.S. president does internationally, the more of a joke he becomes universally around the world. The U.S. president is literally a comic figure – a clown who amuses world leaders who are embracing a new multipolar world which has found a new system of global trade that bypasses the U.S. altogether. Like BRICS, the SCO is growing all the time and now planning to have its own development bank, as these countries totally abandon the U.S. dollar, the U.S. banking system, and now the IMF and World Bank.

    The joke, possibly, is that it is Trump and his erroneous policy decisions which accelerate the growth of both the SCO and BRICS each day – as Trump’s ideas are so firmly rooted in a period of time in the second half of the 20th century where the U.S. was the dominant superpower and could bully everyone on the planet with its foreign policies. In the old days, huge foreign policy failures like Korea and Vietnam mattered less, as America was always the 600-pound gorilla who could sit wherever it wanted to sit when it entered a room. Having said that, the Vietnam war was hugely expensive and cost the American economy heavily – which is why Nixon decoupled the dollar from gold, so that future wars could be fought with freshly minted dollars with no side effects. In reality, subsequent wars – certainly Iraq and Afghanistan – were fought using money which was essentially borrowed from Global South countries, even China, through treasury bonds – basically loans given to countries backed by the U.S. government. But in recent weeks, with the real story of the Iran war emerging, some economists are wondering how much longer America has in this new system of endless borrowing from the Global South. With the rapid acceleration of both SCO and BRICS, borrowing money from the U.S. treasury might simply become an outdated idea – and a surplus of dollars around the world which not many people want only means one thing: inflation.

    Inflation would come about, economists argue, as the price of the U.S. dollar would have to be weakened – which at a glance doesn’t look like a bad thing (and something that Trump actually wants). A cheaper dollar gives a shot in the arm to U.S. manufacturers, but it also makes foreign goods more expensive, which drives inflation. Leaders like Trump, who don’t really understand international trade, don’t get the downside to a weaker dollar – which is an argument that only works when you have real control over the world’s economies and their central banks, like in Nixon’s day. “It may be our dollar, but it’s your problem,” one of Nixon’s advisors is quoted as saying to Europeans in the early seventies at a conference which explained how he planned to weaken the U.S. dollar and keep the hegemony.

    Trump can’t do both. And the more he messes with foreign policy – like a disgruntled, privileged brat who is used to his tantrums getting attention – the more the U.S. economy and its once-hegemony sinks. Perhaps this is what Putin, Xi and Modi were laughing about. Their economies are literally being advanced by Trump’s stupidity and every poor decision he makes based on nursing his own wounded ego. The recent attack by U.S. forces on an island in the Persian Gulf must have made all three laugh their socks off, as it will cost the U.S. dearly. Did Trump do it so he could lie to U.S. reporters and claim to have attacked Kharg Island instead? Does he even understand the basic unwritten rule of escalation in the Middle East? Iran now has to hit U.S. troops and bases twice or three times harder just to retain its political capital. Can the U.S. sustain such a beating when its own arsenal is down to worrying levels never seen before, in particular interceptor missiles like THAAD?

    The delusional antics of Trump are leading America to ruin at a speed most thought was unimaginable. While few – if any – U.S. presidents, unlike U.S. soldiers, understand how poor the U.S. military is (all it ever does is lose wars it starts and has to retreat in embarrassment), it is telling how out-of-date Trump is when it comes to global economics and where the U.S. stands in the world. His recent campaign against India was pathetic – singling out an old ally with sky-high tariffs which will force Modi to forget the U.S. market altogether and look elsewhere for its exports. India has no choice when it comes to Russian oil, which is the lifeline of its economy, and now secondary sanctions which Trump is imposing on countries that do business with Iran are also hitting Delhi. But does America come out of it even looking like a winner when it has to block India’s exports of rice to Iran? America’s delusional views about where it stands in the world today are seen in the same prism as bags of rice. Trump can’t stop Iran selling oil to China, but it can block bags of rice from being loaded onto ships or trucks headed towards Iran. This is not a superpower flexing its muscles – but more of a former empire struggling to cope with the new pecking order which has pushed it down the line. Maybe the joke in Tianjin was: “How can we fix the U.S. elections so Trump comes back for a third term?”

    The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

    The new world order which punishes Americans is helped get off the ground by Trump

    September 11, 2026 at 10:08 am #249595
    Dr. D
    Participant

    NaefreAgain


    “And now he’s here again to capitalize on people’s emotions.”

    September 11, 2026 at 10:14 am #249596
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    This is what the US is doing

    COL Douglas Macgregor : Trump Admin Careening into the Abyss

    September 11, 2026 at 10:57 am #249597
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    The upcoming collapse

    China Doesn’t Need to Win the AI Race
    It only needs to slow it down. 2008 showed us what happens next.

    Jay MartinAug 04, 2026
    It Was Never About the Houses

    Everyone remembers 2008. Almost nobody remembers 2006.

    2008 is the year with the name. Lehman Brothers collapsed. Markets fell apart. Governments rescued banks. But by the time any of that happened, the outcome had already been decided. The year that actually matters is 2006 – the year the whole structure quietly died while every headline said things were fine.

    Stay with me, because the details of what happened in 2006 are a timeless lesson that we will inevitably learn again.

    In the early 2000s, the most popular mortgage sold to riskier American borrowers was called a 2/28. It worked like this: for the first two years, you paid a low, easy rate. Then, for the remaining twenty-eight years, the rate jumped to something much higher – something most of these borrowers could never afford.

    That sounds like a trap, but here’s the thing: nobody expected to pay the higher rate. Not the borrower. Not the bank. The plan – the openly understood plan – was that your house would be worth more in two years. You would take a new loan against the higher value, pay off the old loan, and start a fresh two-year window of cheap payments.

    By the end of 2006, nearly four out of five of these loans written in 2003 had already been refinanced; the system worked great.

    The loans were never built to be repaid. They were built to be replaced.

    Now, here is the part almost everyone remembers backwards. House prices did not crash in 2006. They were at record highs. What changed was the speed at which prices were climbing. Price gains that had been running in the mid-teens started shrinking – still positive, still climbing, just climbing slower.

    And in that same year, 2006, with prices near their all-time peak, borrowers started missing payments in growing numbers.

    Why?

    A borrower whose house went up eight percent instead of fifteen could not pull out enough new value from their home equity to replace the old loan. Remember, the new loan had to be big enough to pay off the entire old loan plus the fees – and banks would only lend against value the house had actually gained over and above the existing loan – so when the gains shrank, the new loan came up short. The loan replacement chain broke.

    The crash in prices came a year later, and the panic came two years after that. The real estate crash was the echo, not the boom.

    That part is very important to understand: The loans did not fail when prices fell. The loans failed when prices stopped rising fast enough.

    Demand for housing was never the problem: people needed houses before 2008, during 2008, and after 2008. The problem was that a financial structure had been built on top of housing that only worked if prices rose faster every single year. The real economy – families needing a place to live – was healthy. The financial economy stacked on top of it needed something no real economy can deliver forever: acceleration.

    The Bills Get Paid With the Next Round

    Now let me show you where I see this same structure today.

    OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is the most valuable startup in history. Here is its price tag over the last two and a half years:

    In early 2024, investors valued the company at $86 billion.

    By October 2024, $157 billion.

    By March 2025, $300 billion.

    By October 2025, $500 billion.

    And this past March 31, it closed a $122 billion funding round – the largest private raise ever recorded – at a valuation of $852 billion.

    Now the other side of the ledger. OpenAI brought in roughly $20 billion in revenue in 2025. That is real money, and it tripled from the year before. But the company spends far more than that – on computing power, on staff, on research – and loses tens of billions of dollars a year. It has never earned a profit.

    So ask the obvious question: how does a company that loses tens of billions a year pay its bills?

    It raises new money. OpenAI signed its giant computing contracts months and years ago – and as those bills come due, each new funding round is what pays them. Meanwhile, the higher valuation convinces the next group of investors to fund the round after that. Investors keep writing bigger checks for one reason: the price keeps going up. Fast.

    Each round from 2024 through 2025 valued the company at roughly 1.7 to 1.9 times the round before it.

    For OpenAI, the rising valuation is not a scoreboard. It is the income. The company pays yesterday’s bills with today’s higher price – by raising cash against the gain in asset value, exactly the way a 2/28 borrower paid off the old mortgage with the new appraisal.

    And the bills are enormous, because of how AI computing is bought. OpenAI has signed contracts promising to pay for computing power years into the future – hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth – whether it ends up using that power or not. These are called take-or-pay contracts: you take the product, or you pay anyway.

    The companies supplying the computing power – Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Amazon – are set to receive those hundreds of billions, and they record them as ‘backlog ‘: guaranteed future revenue, signed and locked in.

    Oracle’s backlog now stands at $638 billion, up 363% in a single year. Microsoft’s stands at $625 billion. Across the four big platforms, the total contracted backlog is roughly $2.1 trillion.

    Here is a detail that is very important. Analysts who have traced those contracts estimate that about half of that $2.1 trillion is owed by just two companies – OpenAI and Anthropic – neither of which earns a profit.

    More than half of Oracle’s entire backlog traces back to OpenAI alone.

    And it goes one step further, just like it did in 2006. The tech giants like Microsoft and Oracle are not simply waiting to collect on these promises. They are borrowing against this guaranteed future revenue – raising debt to pour concrete and fill buildings with chips, with the signed contracts serving as proof to lenders that the money is coming…

    Their construction spending has gone from $150 billion in 2023, to $226 billion in 2024, to $410 billion in 2025, to roughly $725 billion planned for this year. And this year, for the first time, that construction bill is bigger than all the cash these companies collect from their entire businesses combined. Every additional dollar of building is now funded by borrowing.

    Follow the chain slowly, because this is the whole picture:

    OpenAI promises to make future payments it can only fulfill by raising new money.

    It can only raise that new money if its valuation keeps climbing.

    The tech giants count those future payments as guaranteed revenue.

    Then they borrow real money against that guarantee.

    Wall Street calls this backlog “locked-in future demand.” Traced to its source, it is a $2 trillion loan to borrowers with zero income.

    Thirty Years of One-Time Events

    So what could slow the climb?

    For that, we need to talk about some recent news out of China – and about a pattern that is now thirty years old.

    In the 1990s, China took over furniture, textiles, and toys. Analysts called it cheap labour, nothing more. In the 2000s, it took steel and shipbuilding. A one-off, the same analysts said. Then solar panels – today China makes roughly eight out of every ten in the world. Then batteries. Then electric vehicles. Tesla, which once dominated the Chinese EV market, now holds only a single-digit share, while BYD, its former student, sells more electric cars than any company on earth.

    Every single time, the American reaction followed the same script: dismiss it as an isolated event, right up until the industry was gone. Nobody connected the dominoes.

    On July 16, 2026, a Chinese AI lab called Moonshot released a model named Kimi K3. Within a day it took the number one spot on a widely watched coding leaderboard, beating the best models from Anthropic and OpenAI in blind tests – at roughly forty percent lower cost. Eleven days later, Moonshot gave the model away: anyone, anywhere, can now download it and run it on their own computers, free.

    The White House AI czar, David Sacks, called it what it is: “This is concerning.”

    The usage numbers say it is more than concerning. On OpenRouter – a marketplace where businesses shop for AI models the way you shop for flights – American models handled about 70% of the traffic a year ago. Today they handle about 30%. The single most-used AI provider on the platform is now Chinese.

    Now connect this to the structure we just walked through.

    The Chinese models do not need to be better than American ones. They need to be nearly as good and nearly free – and they are. That pulls some customers away entirely, and it forces down the prices American labs can charge the customers who stay. Both forces push on the same number: the speed of American AI revenue growth.

    And the speed is the collateral. Remember the funding ladder: every OpenAI round from 2024 to 2025 came in at 1.7 to 1.9 times the round before. The next step the structure is counting on – a public share offering at more than $1 trillion – would be a step of barely 1.2 times. The smallest jump ever, at the exact moment free Chinese models are attacking the growth that justifies it. The offering was expected this year.

    It is reportedly slipping.

    China does not need to beat American AI. It only needs to slow it down – because a structure financed on acceleration does not break on decline. It breaks on “slower.”

    House prices in 2006 didn’t have to crash to kill the machine. They only had to rise eight percent instead of fifteen.

    The Catfish Comes Home

    Last October I wrote about the catfish effect — the strategy China has run for twenty-five years. Beijing invited the world’s strongest companies into its market on purpose: Google, Facebook, Uber, Tesla. The foreign competition forced Chinese firms to get better, faster. And when the students had learned enough, the rules tightened, and the teachers went home. Baidu, WeChat, Didi, and BYD came out of those waters stronger than anything that swam in.

    Now look at what Washington is debating this month: banning Chinese AI models from the American market.

    Sit with the symmetry for a second. China used competition to grow strong. America is preparing to use protection to grow weak.

    Because a ban does not fix anything. Ban the Chinese models, and millions of American businesses lose access to a nearly-free tool their competitors in the rest of the world keep using — while the protected American labs, guaranteed their home market, lose the pressure that forces improvement. Allow the models in, and the growth curve keeps bending, and the trillion-dollar structure built on that curve keeps straining. There is no third door. When every available move makes things worse, it means the real mistakes were made years earlier — one dismissed domino at a time.

    What Makes This Domino Different

    There is a third borrower in this story, and it is the biggest one of all.

    The United States government also spends more than it earns. Over the last twelve months, the gap was $1.6 trillion. It covers that gap the only way a borrower without profits can: by raising new money (treasuries) from lenders around the world. And here is the part most people never think about. America does not pay off its old debt, either. When an old treasury comes due, the government sells a new treasury to pay back the old one. Roughly $12 trillion of existing debt must be replaced this way before the end of next year.

    The debt is never repaid. It is replaced. Where have you heard that before?

    So ask about America the exact question we asked about OpenAI: how does a borrower that spends more than it earns, and never repays its old loans, stay operational? The same way. Only as long as people keep lending. And why do people keep lending? Not because they expect the money back – America has not run a meaningful surplus in a quarter century. They lend because they believe there will always be another lender behind them: that American growth will keep the whole structure credible, forever.

    The 2/28 borrower ran on rising house prices. OpenAI runs on a rising valuation. The US Treasury runs on the world’s unshaken belief in American growth. Three borrowers, one requirement: the next check must always be bigger than the last.

    And these structures are not sitting side by side. They are stacked, each standing on the one below. The belief in American AI holds up the S&P 500. The S&P 500 holds the world’s savings in American markets. And the world’s savings fund the Treasury’s next auction – at a moment when the national debt is $39.8 trillion and the interest alone now costs over $1 trillion a year, more than the entire military.

    In 2008, when everything broke, frightened money poured into US government bonds, because the fear was pointed at the banks. Nobody doubted the US government. So when investors yanked their money out of everything else, they needed a safe place to put it – and they lined up to buy government bonds. A huge crowd of eager lenders meant Washington could offer tiny interest rates and still borrow trillions. The panic itself handed the government cheap money for the rescue.

    Now run the next crisis. This time the fear would not be pointed at the banks. A crash in the AI trade is a crash in the belief that America owns the future of technology – the very belief that keeps the world lending to Washington in the first place. The scared money doesn’t line up to buy American bonds this time. Some of it walks away to other markets. And a government that spends $1.6 trillion more than it earns cannot stop borrowing while lenders hesitate. It has to keep selling treasuries to a thinner crowd, which means offering higher and higher interest to get the same money.

    It’s Not the Economy, Stupid

    People needed houses before 2008, during 2008, and after 2008. People will use AI before, during, and after whatever comes next. The technology is real. The demand is real. That was never the question – and anyone arguing about whether AI is “real” is answering a question nobody needed to ask.

    In 2006, the only number that mattered was not “are house prices high?” It was “are house prices still rising faster than last year?” The moment the honest answer became no, everything that followed was just arithmetic working itself out – quietly for a year, then loudly for two.

    So don’t ask whether American AI is impressive. It is. Ask the 2006 question: what happens to a $2 trillion promise when the growth slows down?

    We already know the answer. We just don’t like remembering it.

    So What Do I Do, Jay?

    Here is how I think about a setup like this.

    Start with what you cannot do: you cannot time it. The gap between “the growth slowed” and “the structure broke” lasted almost two years last time. The people who saw the mortgage problem in 2006 looked wrong – publicly, painfully wrong – for month after month while prices kept printing record highs.

    Anyone who tells you the date this breaks is guessing. The mechanism is knowable. The calendar is not.

    What you can do is watch the right number. This whole essay comes down to one lesson: the headline numbers will look wonderful right up to the end. House prices were at record highs while the loans underneath them were dying. So don’t watch the records. Watch the speed. Does OpenAI’s next raise price above the last one, and by how much? Do the backlogs keep growing, or just stay large? And watch for one moment in particular: the first time a tech giant announces it is cutting its construction spending – and its stock goes up on the news. The day the market rewards a company for leaving the race is the day the race is over.

    Next, know what you actually own. Roughly forty percent of the S&P 500 is ten companies. If your retirement sits in an index fund, you are not spread across five hundred businesses – nearly half of your savings is a bet on one single belief, the same belief this entire essay has been about. That’s not a reason to panic. It is a reason to know it. Most people don’t.

    Then ask the question this essay has been circling the whole way through. Everything in it – the mortgage, the funding round, the backlog, the bond – is the same object: a promise that only holds if a bigger promise arrives behind it. So look at each thing you own and ask: does this depend on somebody else’s promise staying believed? Some things do. Some things don’t. There’s a reason that in every era where paper promises came under question – the 1970s, 2008, today – the world’s savings drifted toward things that are nobody’s IOU. I’ll let you draw your own conclusion there.

    And finally – manage your mind, because this is where most people actually fail. Not in the analysis. In the waiting. If the structure holds for another year of record highs, the crowd will tell you that you were wrong, that this time is different, that the skeptics missed the greatest boom in history. That pressure breaks more investors than any crash does. The people who came through 2008 intact were not the ones who predicted Lehman’s date. They were the ones who understood the machine, positioned themselves so its breaking wouldn’t break them, and then had the discipline to look wrong until they were right.

    Be patient. Trust your process. And keep your eye on the only number that has ever mattered: not how high, but how fast.

    Honest question – let me know in the comments: what am I missing?

    That’s it for today,

    Jay Martin

    If you appreciate my writing, please share it with someone!

    Share

    September 11, 2026 at 11:00 am #249598
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    https://jaymartin.substack.com/

    September 11, 2026 at 11:14 am #249599
    Dr. D
    Participant

    “Fake News outlet lying to millions that he was nowhere near Ground Zero after 9/11”

    Just make stuff up. Just lie. And THEY are not the problem. The problem is, if you’re Johnson, MacGregor, Fox News, the minute after they lie, we just watch the next segment and believe again. That’s US, or rather: You.

    “AI+robots will more than double the global economy in less than 10 years”

    Show me any rational math on this. 2) What will they do except make more robots, for the service of robots, and nothing for the use and happiness of humankind? Is the purpose of GDP to move widgets from one hole to another, or to advance human happiness? Not a trick question. See Dmitry Orlov’s “Technosphere”.

    He is creating CyberCabs for robots to ride in because humans won’t be able to afford them.

    “• ‘The Greatest Evangelist for American Liberty,’ Charlie Kirk (Salgado)

    Saint Charlie Kirk, now a symbol, not a man. Not a fan. Also nothing about the story makes sense, not just the assassination, but nothing from him in high school, his family, his parents, his wife, his children, nothing. All I need to know is, there is nothing but chaff, the abundance of far, far too many facts, which means it is all a very high-level op. They can no longer hide facts from the internet, so they throw a field of hay on top, hoping to hide the needle.

    You can hide the needle, but I don’t care: all I need to know is that there’s an op and it’s not organic. Then the list of suspects drops to almost zero. Same with 911: as soon as ANY of the explanations make no sense, no one is interested, and they’re repeated anyway, the list of people involved becomes: “The U.S. Government at the Presidential level.” Only there. The cover-up gives it away, not the crime.

    AlwaysForget
    https://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/styles/scale_w1024/s3/static/D8Image/2023/09/11/kanekoa-9.11-post.jpg?itok=uuvYnU31

    Back to Charlie: why him? A: He was the voice of discussion and moderation. He has to go to permit adequate division and violence in America. To inspire a Civil War, Socialist World Revolution, Russian Rev. 2.0. Okay, the Left cheered for that. But the point of putting them on camera was to make the Right mad enough to shoot the Left for it. That’s what all of this is for. What’s forgotten? Law. Constitution. Society. Charity. Forgiveness. Forbearance. Like the Patriot Act, the very things that we must support and make America, America. We must burn the village to save the village.

    ““Russia will not accept as a neighbor a nation ruled by a “Russophobic and aggressive neo-Nazi regime,” the top diplomat has said ..”

    Actually had not thought of that, but “America will not accept as a neighbor a nation ruled by a “Russophobic and aggressive neo-Nazi regime,” one that bankrupts itself sending weapons to open Nazis attempting a genocide, and applauds them with standing ovations in Parliament. This is bad. Especially when backed with an active Eugenics program that has killed 100,000. How many will be enough, my friend? A million Emo girls? Two million? When there is no other cause of death in any Province?

    “• ECB Raises Interest Rates to Avoid Settling Ukraine-Russia Conflict (CTH)

    Raising rates increases the need for money, so it doesn’t stop inflation. This is because the Keynesian premise is s—t. But whatever. Same as Luongo says, the ECB and Europe is being slow-squeezed, they cannot afford this. We are in better condition and in an open squeeze, they will pass out first. This is also Yen-Carry issue, the real bomb.

    “Democrats have already made Donald Trump the centerpiece. They’ve been doing it for over a decade.”

    They are Donald Trump’s best friend and the only reason he has power. Same as Carney.

    However, just like Canada, they have no policies, no plan, no point or purpose of their own. Their plan is: we will destroy this nation down to the bedrock. Then leave it as rubble. Tell me what you believe in. What your goal is. They cannot, because they #AntiBelieve, in #AntiLogos style. They are only against, not for. Break, never build. Building takes creativity which is a thing the Devil doesn’t have, only Obedience.

    Now I vehemently disagree with like, going to Mars, space, to pave every remaining inch of green for robotics. But it IS a plan. It IS creative. It does go somewhere. The other side goes nowhere. And that is appropriate since it’s essentially Feudalism, Plato of 400BC. Human Population of 500 million, widely advertised not just on rocks but by the Club of Rome. The Hunger Games made real.

    David Byrne has co-written Let Me Sell You a Dream:

    “He said the Americans are at it again, and Trump in particular. They’re bullying us.”

    Or are you just a p-ssy? What you’re saying here is “Mommy! someone was mean to me! I need Daddy to help.” Uhh, you know how that sounds, right? It doesn’t inspire a lot of adherence and respect? Are we overstating the case? Just yesterday Carney said he’ll never talk so long as anyone in America makes memes about him. So no, that’s not mis-representing the case.

    The article, however, states facts, which will not be read nor persuasive to Canadians who, as a demographic, are completely brainwashed and lost. Ask me how I know. If you’re Canadian and you’re NOT like this, you also know. I don’t need to tell you.

    “For several decades I have emphasized that black slavery was a product of black slave wars in Africa for which no white person has any responsibility.”

    Similarly, these are objective, consensus facts, which is why no one cares and they don’t matter at all.

    “In the Western World the entire story of slavery is a total fabrication.”

    Well, not the “entire”, that wouldn’t work; it’s a dangerous mischaracterization so elaborate it essentially reverses the Truth. PCR then likewise misrepresents a number of things, but on a far smaller scale.

    “Decades in the making, the September 7 filing brings a direct legal challenge against the British Crown for its ties to the slave system”

    So the nation that essentially outlawed slavery worldwide, taking 50 years and using their warships and British lives to do it, owes reparations. This is where we are now. A bold plan! Hope it works for you. Italians, who arrived in 1910, owe reparations to Jamaicans that arrived here in 1970.

    “The video shows the robot up close — its hands, joints, sensors and body design”

    A government spy and executioner in every home. And you get to pay for the privilege!

    “AI chips are climbing ~40–50% a year. Grid power outside China is only climbing ~10–20%.”

    All resources on earth must be burned. All remaining green must be paved into concrete. Or our Great Masterwork is not done. For our Great Master.

    September 11, 2026 at 2:11 pm #249606
    zerosum
    Participant

    A discussion with Copilot on TARIFFS.

    **Takeaway:**
    When you add the **tariff war with Canada** and the **collapse in consumer spending**, the fiscal math gets even worse.
    These two missing pieces make it *impossible* for tariff income to replace taxes or reduce bond issuance.
    In fact, they push the U.S. into **higher deficits**, **higher borrowing**, and **higher interest costs**.
    You should confirm financial information with a trusted source.

    —

    # 🇨🇦 **1. Tariff war with Canada → higher prices → lower demand → lower tax revenue**

    Canada is:
    – America’s **#1 export market**
    – America’s **#1 trading partner**
    – A critical part of U.S. supply chains (autos, energy, agriculture, machinery)

    Tariffs on Canada cause:
    – higher import prices
    – higher export retaliation
    – higher supply‑chain costs
    – lower cross‑border trade volumes

    This directly reduces:
    – **U.S. corporate profits**
    – **U.S. income tax receipts**
    – **U.S. payroll tax receipts**
    – **U.S. customs revenue** (because import volume collapses)

    **Result:**
    The tariff war with Canada *reduces* federal revenue more than it increases it.

    This alone kills the idea that tariffs can replace taxes.

    —

    # 🛒 **2. Collapse in consumer spending → lower tax revenue → higher deficits**

    Tariffs raise prices on:
    – food
    – vehicles
    – appliances
    – building materials
    – electronics
    – clothing

    Consumers respond by:
    – buying less
    – delaying purchases
    – trading down
    – cutting discretionary spending

    This reduces:
    – **sales tax revenue (state)**
    – **corporate tax revenue (federal)**
    – **income tax revenue (federal)**
    – **customs revenue (federal)**

    Lower consumer spending is one of the strongest deficit‑increasing forces in the U.S. economy.

    Tariffs *cause* this slowdown.

    —

    # 📉 **3. Lower consumer spending → lower GDP → lower federal revenue**

    GDP falls when:
    – consumption falls
    – imports fall
    – exports fall
    – investment falls

    Lower GDP means:
    – lower tax receipts
    – higher automatic stabilizer spending (unemployment, benefits)
    – higher deficits

    Tariffs therefore **increase** the need for:
    – more Treasury issuance
    – more borrowing
    – higher interest rates

    This is the opposite of the intended fiscal effect.

    —

    # 🧮 **4. Tariff revenue is tiny compared to the losses from Canada + consumers**

    Let’s quantify the scale:

    ### **Tariff revenue (2025–2026):**
    ~$328 billion gross
    ~$160 billion net after refunds

    ### **Losses from Canada + consumer slowdown:**
    – U.S.–Canada trade volume drop: **$1.2–1.5 trillion** annual flow affected
    – Consumer spending slowdown: **$500–700 billion** annual reduction
    – Corporate profit hit: **$200–300 billion**
    – Tax revenue loss: **$150–250 billion**
    – Higher interest costs: **$80–120 billion**

    The unintended losses are **5–10× larger** than tariff revenue.

    Tariffs cannot offset this.

    —

    # 📈 **5. Bond markets punish the slowdown**

    Bond markets see:
    – lower growth
    – higher inflation
    – higher deficits
    – higher issuance
    – weaker foreign demand

    They respond by:
    – demanding higher yields
    – selling long‑duration Treasuries
    – widening term premiums

    Higher yields → higher federal interest costs → more borrowing → more issuance.

    This is the opposite of what tariff advocates promised.

    —

    # 🇯🇵🇨🇳 **6. Japan and China reserve shifts amplify the damage**

    When consumer spending collapses and trade with Canada slows:
    – U.S. growth weakens
    – U.S. inflation stays elevated
    – U.S. deficits rise
    – U.S. yields rise

    Japan and China respond by:
    – reducing Treasury purchases
    – shortening duration
    – diversifying reserves
    – increasing gold holdings

    Less foreign demand → higher yields → higher interest costs → more borrowing.

    This is the feedback loop you identified earlier.

    —

    # 🧩 **7. Final synthesis: Tariffs cannot replace taxes or reduce bond issuance**

    **Conclusion:**
    With Canada and consumer spending included, tariffs *increase* deficits, *increase* borrowing, and *increase* interest costs. They do *not* reduce taxes or bond issuance.

    The unintended consequences dominate completely.

    —

    Tariffs do not reduce deficits — they increase them
    Tariffs were supposed to:

    raise revenue
    reduce deficits
    reduce borrowing

    But the actual effects are:

    slower growth → lower tax revenue
    higher inflation → higher interest costs
    supply‑chain disruption → lower corporate profits
    refunds → negative fiscal flows
    foreign reserve selling → higher yields

    The net fiscal effect is deficit‑increasing, not deficit‑reducing.
    Tariffs increase the need for bond issuance and do not prevent future tax increases.

    ———–

    September 11, 2026 at 2:34 pm #249607
    zerosum
    Participant


    Houthis Capture Red Sea Islands🏝️Russia Hit Kyiv Gas Stations⛽🔥Kharkiv Counter-Attack⚔️MS 2026.09.11


    ————

    September 11, 2026 at 3:06 pm #249608
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggLw9dF_4m0vYhsAyoETUDtQzJtthQodNmksI3u5uhJ_IOI9HSMxQcP2eeFKhd8c8mCVH555mM9447pTU77mtWRO_QrJxNSUOFfnKVBh19lh5jVzN4BPg09Kny-Qh8-TtmgQGdIONOVmQYSltf0YUr_Q125_tZRzxnXjoRU30W0MrOMdeH6FhkM2DHLQg/s1800/Don%20River.jpg

    September 11, 2026 at 3:19 pm #249609
    my parents said know
    Participant

    In all the crap comments that make up zh comment sections now, I thought this one was interesting, and maybe not crap.

    Comments from politicians on cspan constantly refer to how it brought us all together.
    Funerals will do that.

    September 11, 2026 at 3:26 pm #249610
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    The Empty Throne
    For six hundred years, every reserve currency had an obvious heir. The dollar doesn’t – and that changes everything.

    Jay MartinJun 27, 2026
    When a king dies, nobody asks who’s next.

    They already know. The crown prince has been standing beside the throne his whole life. The succession was settled long before the old man stopped breathing. That is the entire purpose of a crown prince – to take the most dangerous moment in the life of a kingdom, the handoff of power, and make it feel boring and inevitable.

    I have written many times that the U.S. dollar will eventually lose its place at the center of the world, and I am not going to re-litigate that today. Empires end. Reserve currencies end. Anyone who tells you the current arrangement is permanent has not read much history. That part I am comfortable with.

    This is not alarmist. It is cyclical.

    Here is the part that I have been thinking about a lot. Who is the crown prince?

    For six hundred years, the crown has always had an heir.

    Portugal handed off to Spain. Spain to the Dutch. The Dutch to France, France to Britain, and Britain to the United States. Roughly a century each. And in every one of those handoffs, you could see the successor standing in the wings. By the time London’s reign was ending, America was already the largest economy on earth and the world’s biggest creditor. The crown did not leap to a stranger. It went to the next-strongest power in the room – the one who already controlled the trade routes and the resources that mattered. That is how reserve currencies have always changed hands. The understudy was already in costume.

    So I did what I always do. I went looking for the understudy.

    And this is where it gets strange. If we pull back the curtain, the wings are empty.

    Many people have an answer to this question, but almost nobody has actually checked their work. Let me walk through a few of the candidates that often come up in conversation.

    The obvious answer that isn’t

    Say “the dollar is finished” at any dinner party and someone will finish your sentence for you.

    “China.”

    It is the reflex. China is the world’s factory, the world’s largest exporter, and the second-largest economy on the planet. Of course, it is next.

    I understand the reflex. But I have learned to be suspicious of any answer the whole room arrives at too quickly. So let me give you three reasons the obvious answer is wrong – and notice that none of them are opinions. They are factual observations.

    One. You cannot be the world’s banker while the doors of your bank are locked.

    A reserve currency has to be something the world can hold freely – buy it, sell it, move it across borders at three in the morning without asking permission. The dollar does that. So did Sterling. So did the Dutch guilder before it. Reserve currencies require deep, liquid, trusted markets and a high degree of convertibility. That is not a feature. It is the whole job.

    China has been the world’s number-two economy and its number-one exporter for decades. And after all that time, here is where its money stands: the yuan makes up roughly 2% of the savings that the world’s governments hold in reserve, and only about 3% of the payments that cross borders. The U.S. dollar is about 58%. That is not a gap. That is a canyon.

    And the canyon is there on purpose. China does not let its money move freely. By law, an ordinary Chinese person can take only about $50,000 out of the country in a year, and big companies need the government’s blessing to send money abroad at all. Picture an engineer in Shenzhen who has done well and wants to move her savings into dollars and park them somewhere safe overseas. She cannot, not really. She hits the fifty-thousand-dollar ceiling by spring, and the rest of her money stays home, where Beijing can see it. China also refuses to let the market decide what the yuan is worth – every morning, the government sets the price and lets it drift only about 2% from there. Why all the rules? Because if money could leave freely, savers could pull their cash out all at once and crash the whole system – and the value of the yuan would be set by the world instead of by Beijing. That is the control China will never give up.

    And here is the part that surprises people. China does not seem to want the job in the first place.

    Back in 2009, the man running China’s central bank said something remarkable. He argued that the whole world had a problem: it leaned too heavily on one country’s money. His fix was not “use ours instead.” It was that the world should run on a neutral kind of money that belongs to no single nation – not America’s, and not China’s either. Think about that. He had the perfect moment to make the case for the yuan, and instead he said no country should hold this kind of power, including his own. That is not a man reaching for the crown. That is a man saying the crown is dangerous.

    The experts who study this say the same thing. Eswar Prasad, a Cornell economist, laid it out in his book Gaining Currency: The Rise of the Renminbi. His point is plain: as long as China keeps its money walled off, the yuan can win a slice of the world’s trade, but it can never become the money the world saves in. And China keeps the wall up by choice. It has relaxed a few of the rules over the years – but only slightly, and only in ways where it can still track and approve every dollar that moves.

    So the usual story has it backwards. China is not a hungry challenger straining for a crown just out of reach. China is the favourite who keeps refusing to enter the race – because the prize comes with a bill it has no intention of paying.

    Two. To be the world’s banker, you have to send your money out into the world. China was built to pull it in.

    This is the part almost everyone misses, so slow down with me.

    Back in 1960, an economist named Robert Triffin pointed out a trap at the heart of being the reserve currency. If the world runs on your money, you have to supply the world with your money – and the only way to do that is to send more of it out than you take in. You have to run deficits. Permanently. The reserve issuer is the buyer of last resort for everyone else’s stuff. America has played that role for eighty years, and the trade deficits people complain about every election cycle are not a bug in the dollar system. They are the rent the United States pays to keep the crown.

    Now look at China. In 2025, it ran a current-account surplus of $735 billion – a record, and on the trade side, the largest surplus any nation has ever run. China’s entire rise was built on selling to the world and banking the proceeds. It is the workshop, not the buyer. To become the world’s reserve issuer, China would have to flip that on its head: import more than it exports, run deficits for decades, and hand its currency to foreigners by the trillions. It would have to dismantle the exact machine that made it strong.

    Strength is earned by playing to your advantage, not by abandoning it. Britain ran deficits to be the world’s banker. America flipped from creditor to debtor to take the throne. China has looked at that bargain and said, politely, no thank you. And I do not blame them.

    Three. China is aging before it is finished climbing.

    When America took the crown in 1944, it was young, growing, and the world’s largest creditor. Every previous successor was the same – population on the way up, not the way down, at the moment of the handoff. Demography was wind in the sails.

    China’s population peaked in 2022 at around 1.4 billion and is now shrinking. Its working-age population has been falling since 2015. The U.N. projects that China will have 1.26 billion people by 2050, roughly 40% of whom will be over the age of 60, and that its population could fall to 633 million by the end of the century. That is not a slowdown. That is a society growing old before it has finished growing rich.

    But isn’t China just early?

    Here is the obvious rebuttal: didn’t every great power start as a workshop? The Dutch built and traded their way to riches, then began lending their winnings to a rising Britain. Britain built the factories, got rich, and became the world’s banker just as America took over the building. America did the same, then shipped its own factories to China. The workshop becomes the bank – it has happened over and over. So maybe China is simply early, and its turn is still coming.

    But look at how each of those turns actually happened, because it lines up with the three reasons above. Every one of those countries made the leap while it was opening its doors, still young, and on its way to becoming rich. China is the reverse on all three: keeping the wall up, aging fast, and not yet wealthy the way the others were. It may be the first workshop in history to grow old and stay locked up before it ever became the bank. And there is a clock problem – this kind of turn takes a generation, but the dollar’s troubles are here this decade. Even if China could one day make it, it would not be ready in time. The crown may move long before China can catch it.

    The shorter conversations

    Once you set China aside, the bench gets thin in a hurry.

    The euro? After the dollar, the euro is the most widely held reserve currency on earth – about 21% of the world’s reserves. So it earns a serious look. But it carries a flaw the dollar does not: the euro is a currency without a country. Twenty nations share it, and each one still borrows on its own, at its own interest rate. There is no single “Europe” bond for the world to buy – you have to choose one country’s debt over another’s. When the world parks its savings, it wants one big, safe, trusted place to put them. The euro offers twenty smaller ones instead. We watched that arrangement nearly tear itself apart during the European debt crisis from 2009 to 2012, when tiny Greece almost brought the whole project down. And after more than twenty-five years, the euro’s share of world reserves has barely moved. A currency that cannot agree on a single government bond is not going to replace the dollar.

    The yen? The Japanese yen and the British pound come next on the list, at about 6% and 5% of world reserves. But neither is a contender – they are warnings. Take Japan. Its government owes more than twice the country’s annual output, the heaviest debt load in the developed world. To keep from drowning in interest payments, the Bank of Japan holds interest rates down by force, and it has bought up nearly half of its own government’s debt to do it. That long squeeze has pushed the yen’s value down for years. Add a population that is both shrinking and growing older, and you do not have a country reaching for the crown. You have a country showing the rest of us what the end of the road looks like. The British pound is the same story in a smaller size – a former empire carrying heavy debt and a shrinking place in the world.

    A BRICS currency? This is the one I get asked about most, and history is blunt about it: monetary unions without political union do not survive.

    The Latin Monetary Union, which tied France, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland together starting in 1865, fractured and was gone by the 1920s. The Scandinavian Monetary Union of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, founded in 1873, met the same end by 1924. And those were neighbours – shared borders, shared culture, shared history – and they still came apart at the first real shock.

    Now look at BRICS. India and China fought a deadly clash in the Galwan Valley in 2020 and remain open strategic rivals. India has stated plainly that it does not want a common currency. The bloc spans democracies and autocracies, creditors and debtors, with no shared central bank, law, or treasury. A common currency is a marriage. It requires you to trust your partner with your savings for the rest of your life. BRICS is not a marriage. It is a networking event with a group photo.

    What about stablecoins?

    There is one more candidate people raise, and it deserves a real answer: stablecoins. Many of you are bullish on them, and you are not wrong to be – they may be the most important monetary innovation in a generation.

    So let me start with what one actually is. A stablecoin is a digital token meant to always be worth one dollar. A private company issues the tokens, and for every token it sells, it holds one real dollar – or one dollar’s worth of U.S. Treasuries – in reserve to back it.

    The advantage? It is as “stable” as a U.S. dollar, but as mobile as a cryptocurrency.

    You can send stablecoins to anyone in the world in seconds, as easily as a text message, without a bank in the middle. That is the appeal, and it is a real one.

    But the same design that makes them work carries a cost. Because private companies issue the stablecoins and keep the record of who holds them, that company can also freeze anyone’s coins – on their own or through government order.

    The dollars backing those tokens still sit inside the U.S. financial system, where they can be frozen as well. So a stablecoin does not remove your dependence on the United States and its banks. It adds a second party you have to trust on top of them. If your fear is having your money switched off, a stablecoin can be switched off more easily than paper dollars, not less.

    Which is why stablecoins, for all their promise, do not answer the question we are asking. A stablecoin is still a dollar – a faster, smarter way to hold and move dollars, but not a replacement for the dollar, and not an escape from depending on the country behind it.

    Stablecoins may extend the dollar’s lifespan, but they do not replace it.

    So what is left?

    This is the moment I kept arriving at, and kept resisting, because it sounds stranger than it is.

    What if we have been asking the wrong question this whole time?

    Every answer history has ever handed us was a country. A flag. A capital city with a mint. And so we go looking for the next flag, come up empty, and conclude that nothing can replace the dollar because no country is ready to.

    But the rule was never really “it has to be a nation.” The rule was “it has to be something the whole world trusts to settle its debts.”

    Because there is one asset that belongs to no government, carries no one’s promise, cannot be printed by a rival, cannot be frozen by an enemy, and has been accepted everywhere on earth for longer than any of these flags have existed. It does not need a central bank, a fiscal union, or a happy marriage between India and China.

    At the end of 2008, this asset accounted for about 9% of global reserves. A single-digit afterthought. By 2024, it had risen to about 16%. And by the end of 2025, it had climbed to roughly 27% – passing U.S. Treasuries as the largest single holding in the world’s central banks.

    By now, you have probably guessed what it is. It is gold. And I know the reflex – the moment a writer says “gold,” half the room rolls their eyes at the “gold bug” and stops reading.

    And I get it. Because gold is useless. You cannot eat it. It pays no interest. It is a soft metal that sits in a vault and does nothing. Its entire value rests on a belief – a shared agreement that the stuff is worth something. Strip away the belief, and you are holding a rock.

    But if we are going to be consistent, we have to run that same test on everything else central banks hold.

    The dollar is also just a belief. So are the euro, the yen, and the yuan. You cannot eat any of them either. A dollar is worth a dollar only because we all agree it is – and because we trust the government printing it not to print too many. Every form of money is a story we have agreed to believe. Money has always been a story.

    So the real question was never “which money has real value.” None of them do.

    The real question is: whose story are you trusting – and what does the storyteller want?

    To believe in the dollar, you must trust Washington – not to print away your savings, not to freeze your account when you fall out of favour. To believe in the yuan, you must trust Beijing. Every national currency hands the pen to a single author, and every one of those authors carries its own self-interest, its own debts, its own enemies, and its own reasons to rewrite the story at your expense.

    So yes – gold is also a belief. But it is the one belief on that list that an author cannot spontaneously print more of or confiscate.

    And this is not my opinion. In 2022, the U.S. and its allies froze over $300 billion of Russia’s reserves in response to the invasion of Ukraine. That afternoon, every finance minister on earth learned the same lesson: an asset held inside someone else’s system is not really your asset.

    That same year, central banks bought more gold than in any year since 1950.

    No central banker actually wants this. Gold is inconvenient – it must be guarded, it is costly to ship, and it settles slowly. It will never be a first choice. But as alliances wobble, trade deals tear up mid-sentence, and currencies get turned into weapons, the conversation shifts from the currency of choice to the asset of last resort.

    “We’re at a unique moment geopolitically, and I could see in the next few years that we are going to have some kind of a grand global economic reordering, something on the equivalent of a new Bretton Woods or the Treaty of Versailles, there’s a very good chance that we are going to have to have that over the next four years.” – Scott Bessent, 6/6/24, prior to becoming U.S. Treasury Secretary

    Global central banks may or may not be forecasting a formal new Bretton Woods, but their balance sheets show they are preparing for a grand global economic reordering.

    Where does that leave us?

    Not, I think, with a coronation. I am not here to tell you gold is the new king – that is the gold bug’s sermon, and it misreads what is happening. Gold is not the heir who finally steps out of the wings. Gold is what the world reaches for when it looks at the wings and finds them empty.

    And the first thing an empty stage tells you is the opposite of doom. A king with no rival does not get overthrown next Tuesday. Because there is no successor currency ready, and no country willing to do the job, the dollar is likely to hold its place far longer than the loudest pundits claim. That is exactly why I am not ringing alarm bells. The dollar does not fall off a cliff. It dies by inches.

    But the people who manage the world’s money see the empty stage too. They know there is no successor – but they no longer trust the incumbent either. So they are doing neither: not betting on a new currency, because there isn’t one, and not fully trusting the old one. They are stepping offstage for now. And in the language of money, stepping off the field means gold.

    So let me be clear about what gold is and is not. It is not the solution, and it is not the future. Gold will never be the world’s reserve or trading currency, for one plain reason: it is slow, and the world needs money that moves in seconds. Gold is not the next act. It is the intermission.

    What comes after the intermission is, most likely, a hybrid – trade priced in several currencies at once, balances settled in part by a neutral asset no government controls. The shape is already faintly visible: central banks hold dollars, euros, and gold side by side today; China’s own central banker called for a neutral money back in 2009; and “a new Bretton Woods,” the phrase the U.S. Treasury Secretary keeps using, describes exactly this – the first Bretton Woods was itself a hybrid, currencies anchored to gold. But I am not going to dress that up as a forecast you can act on. It is a direction, not a destination. Nobody is rewriting the system tomorrow.

    So here is what I actually expect: not a crash, but a long intermission. The dollar slowly losing altitude, with gold held as the placeholder, until something new and concrete finally takes the stage.

    For six hundred years, the question was always the same: which country is next? The strange thing we have to sit with is that this time, the honest answer might be none – at least not for a long while. No crown prince. No next flag. The throne simply stays empty, and gold is the name we give to an empty throne.

    Which means the rising price of gold is not really a story about gold. It is a thermometer. And the temperature is climbing fast: gold has more than doubled since 2022, from about $1,800 an ounce to more than $4,000 today. That is not a metal becoming more useful. It is trust draining out of the system – and as long as that number keeps climbing, the world has not yet agreed on what comes next. That is the gauge to watch: not because gold is the destination, but because it tells you how far we still are from a real one.

    Honest question – let me know in the comments: what am I missing?

    That’s it for today,

    Jay Martin

    If you appreciate my writing, please share it with someone!

    September 11, 2026 at 3:58 pm #249613
    John Day
    Participant

    “One year ago today a LBTQ radical was made into a patsy for Charlie Kirk’s inside-job assassination at the hands of his Israeli-sourced “security” team, but the plan went awry when he turned himself in to police, instead of getting arrested-dead, like he was supposed to.”

    There, fixed it for you… ;-/

    September 11, 2026 at 4:30 pm #249614
    my parents said know
    Participant

    In the posts on zh about 1000s of young male “asylum seekers” being installed in tiny rural UK villages, they should replace the phrase “asylum seekers” with “celibates” (’cause they are, right?)
    That should comfort everyone.

    sad, sad /s

    September 11, 2026 at 5:07 pm #249615
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    Peter Schiff: Economic Armageddon – Bonds & Dollar in Crisis

    September 11, 2026 at 5:32 pm #249616
    Susmarie108
    Participant

    Ilargi,

    Your Charlie Kirk “coverage” is one-sided. Your forgot to see the other side, you know – the one that QUESTIONS the official story. Please explain why.

    Charlie was betrayed. His murder was intentional, ordered from the “top”, and meant to send the rest of us a message. How do I know?

    Dr. D hits on a key aspects: “Saint Charlie Kirk, now a symbol, not a man.” Look at “who” has turned him into a symbol and reflect on their twisted message. See who they point to and then reverse it 180 degrees – you will see the real shooter.

    From Dr. D: “Nothing about the story makes sense, not just the assassination, but nothing from him in high school, his family, his parents, his wife, his children, nothing. All I need to know is, there is nothing but chaff, the abundance of far, far too many facts, which means it is all a very high-level op. They can no longer hide facts from the internet, so they throw a field of hay on top, hoping to hide the needle.”

    “You can hide the needle, but I don’t care: all I need to know is that there’s an op and it’s not organic. Then the list of suspects drops to almost zero. Same with 911: as soon as ANY of the explanations make no sense, no one is interested, and they’re repeated anyway, the list of people involved becomes: “The U.S. Government at the Presidential level.” Only there. The cover-up gives it away, not the crime.

    John Day adds more perspective with a likely fix: “One year ago today a LBTQ radical was made into a patsy for Charlie Kirk’s inside-job assassination at the hands of his Israeli-sourced “security” team, but the plan went awry when he turned himself in to police, instead of getting arrested-dead, like he was supposed to.” “There, fixed it for you… ;-/ ”

    I don’t know who shot Charlie Kirk. The harder “they” keep forcing this slop down our throats the more I know it’s crap. Questioning narrative is the WAY.

    @ Michael Reid: Miss the great stories of you working your land, preparing your cabin and playing outside. Bet you can’t make it through all 14 + minutes (without dancing) linked below!

    LOVE to All who visit. LOVE to Ilargi for his efforts.

    Om Shanti.

    September 11, 2026 at 6:23 pm #249617
    my parents said know
    Participant

    You can’t fool my lyin’ eyes.
    You’re here to demoralize.
    “Take the black pill and get wise!
    “Buck the system- spread the lies!”

    And once you get the world to stand aside
    You’ll find we’re in for one destructive ride.

    September 11, 2026 at 6:28 pm #249618
    my parents said know
    Participant

    That was not meant for you, Susmarie.

    I’m still thinkin’ they’re gonna raise Charlie from the dead.

    September 11, 2026 at 7:26 pm #249620
    tboc
    Participant

    “AI+robots will more than double the global economy in less than 10 years”
    Halve the population and you are there.

    Did you ever spend any time listening to a Kirk youtube video?
    I spent about a minute and a half on the first one i saw on youtube. Just scrolled on by every one after that. Charlie Kirk would not have known the truth were it standing immediately in front of him. Just because one holds an opinion fervently has no bearing on that opinion having any merit. Out playing young people who are products of the United States educational system requires little beside a mean spirited attitude.
    …. …… …. and the horse he rode in on

    my parents said know do you assume the Yemeni’s are incapable of the math an physics necessary to achieve the subject matter of your linked video? The US has Ai and cannot pull those things out of the hat.

    Imagine every untoward thing i might say about Scott Bessent. You will be left wanting.

    Susemarie108 it is pleasant to hear your voice

    September 11, 2026 at 7:38 pm #249621
    zerosum
    Participant

    Ukraine and World Affairs (includes Iran/ME): Weekly Update
    11th September 2026
    Dr. Rob Campbell

    https://robcampbell.substack.com/p/ukraine-and-world-affairs-includes-acd
    —————
    The war with Yemen is gaining importance
    September 11, 2026
    War On Iran: Ansar Allah Goes On The Offensive

    Back in mid July Saudi Arabia reignited its war with Yemen’s Ansar Allah government and the Houthi movement:

    Saudi-led forces bombed the international airport in Sanaa, Yemen, on Monday, reigniting the war with Yemen’s Houthis, officially known as Ansar Allah, which has been in a state of ceasefire that has held relatively well since 2022.

    The attack was claimed by Yemen’s so-called “internationally recognized government,” which is based in Saudi Arabia and doesn’t have an air force of its own, meaning the strikes were almost certainly launched by Saudi warplanes.

    In response, Ansar Allah’s military spokesman, Yahya Saree, vowed Yemen would hit back and said the era of “de-escalation” between the two sides was over. A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition later claimed that Saudi “air defenses intercepted a ballistic missile threat launched by the terrorist Houthi militia towards the southern region.”

    Yemen did retaliate. Missile’s were fired against Saudi airports and oil installations. Ansar Allah set out to block the Red Sea for Saudi related ship traffic. It fired missiles against several vessels which tried to pass through.

    Saudi Arabia had circumvented the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by pumping oil from its eastern oil fields through its East-West pipeline to the Red Sea coast. As the southern Bab el-Mandeb strait was blocked by Ansar Allah the only outlet left for the Saudis was the Suez Canal, which does not allow for the passage of fully loaded Very Large Crude Carriers. Still some 5 million barrels per day were exported through that route.

    More Saudi bombing of Ansar Allah positions followed. Yesterday Ansar Allah hit back where it matters.

    The map shows the positions held by Ansar Allah up to September 9. While the area constitutes only a third of Yemen it is home for about 80% of its population. The southern coast and the large desert in the east are ruled by the ‘international recognized government of Yemen’, which had been installed by Saudi Arabia, and held by various militia hired by Saudi Arabia and other militia hired by the United Arab Emirates (UAE):

    September 11, 2026
    War On Iran: Ansar Allah Goes On The Offensive
    Back in mid July Saudi Arabia reignited its war with Yemen’s Ansar Allah government and the Houthi movement:

    Saudi-led forces bombed the international airport in Sanaa, Yemen, on Monday, reigniting the war with Yemen’s Houthis, officially known as Ansar Allah, which has been in a state of ceasefire that has held relatively well since 2022.

    The attack was claimed by Yemen’s so-called “internationally recognized government,” which is based in Saudi Arabia and doesn’t have an air force of its own, meaning the strikes were almost certainly launched by Saudi warplanes.

    In response, Ansar Allah’s military spokesman, Yahya Saree, vowed Yemen would hit back and said the era of “de-escalation” between the two sides was over. A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition later claimed that Saudi “air defenses intercepted a ballistic missile threat launched by the terrorist Houthi militia towards the southern region.”

    Yemen did retaliate. Missile’s were fired against Saudi airports and oil installations. Ansar Allah set out to block the Red Sea for Saudi related ship traffic. It fired missiles against several vessels which tried to pass through.

    Saudi Arabia had circumvented the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by pumping oil from its eastern oil fields through its East-West pipeline to the Red Sea coast. As the southern Bab el-Mandeb strait was blocked by Ansar Allah the only outlet left for the Saudis was the Suez Canal, which does not allow for the passage of fully loaded Very Large Crude Carriers. Still some 5 million barrels per day were exported through that route.

    More Saudi bombing of Ansar Allah positions followed. Yesterday Ansar Allah hit back where it matters.

    The map shows the positions held by Ansar Allah up to September 9. While the area constitutes only a third of Yemen it is home for about 80% of its population. The southern coast and the large desert in the east are ruled by the ‘international recognized government of Yemen’, which had been installed by Saudi Arabia, and held by various militia hired by Saudi Arabia and other militia hired by the United Arab Emirates (UAE):

    The Saudi controlled forces left their equipment behind and fled towards Taiz. That city is held by Emirati controlled militia which immediately blocked the entry for the Saudi controlled militia forces.
    The blitz operation gave Ansar Allah full hands-on control of the main Red Sea entry without having to resort to the use of longer range missiles.

    Though unconfirmed it is believed that Ansar Allah has additionally fired missiles into Saudi Arabia which destroyed at least parts of its East-West pipeline. This all together leaves no export route for Saudi oil.

    The UAE supported forces in Yemen are also in trouble. While they hold the city of Taiz their western resupply route from Mocha harbor is closed. Ansar Allah forces are also near to the road between Taiz and Aden. Taiz may soon be cut of and encircled.

    The Saudi government is in a twist. Its proxy forces in Yemen have been routed and are in conflict, not only with Ansar Allah, but also with the ‘allied’ militia paid by the UAE. They have also lost most of their trucks and equipment.

    A few weeks ago the Saudis had announced a defense pact with Turkey and Pakistan. But that agreement is only includes the defense of Saudi Arabian territory, not offensive Saudi measures against its southern neighbors in Yemen. The Pakistanis have thus declared that they see no reason to intervene in the conflict.

    Muhammad bin Salman, the current ruler of Saudi Arabia has twice asked the U.S. for help to bomb Ansar Allah in Yemen. The White House, burned by earlier losses in fights against Ansar Allah, has rejected any new active participation in that war. It has instead sent an intelligence unit to help the Saudis find targets. But finding targets is not what matters.

    Bombing Ansar Allah has been tried for years with little results. The Saudis do not have the manpower for an invasion. They will have to find a political solution for the conflict with their neighbor.

    There are signs that yesterday’s surprise attack by Ansar Allah will not be further expanded:

    Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a Houthi political official, said in an interview that the group’s goal was to “fully restore Yemen’s sovereignty and independence” and to confront “the Saudi enemy,” rather than expand its territory.

    “Other factions” in southern Yemen can “retain the areas under their control” until a Yemeni political process is held, Mr. al-Bukhaiti added.

    Ansar Allah is allied with Iran. With Iran controlling the Strait of Hormuz and Ansar Allah in now full control of the Bab el-Mandab oil export from the region has become extremely difficult.

    The price of crude oil is above $100 per barrel. Ten year treasuries are near 5%. Inflation in the U.S. is stubborn at an official 3.4% while the price of diesel has breached the $6 per gallon mark.

    All these numbers, and the upheaval in Yemen, are a consequence of Trump’s decision to launch a war against Iran.

    War On Iran: Ansar Allah Goes On The Offensive


    —————-

    September 11, 2026 at 7:50 pm #249622
    zerosum
    Participant

    https://t.me/Middle_East_Spectator/36654#
    Middle East Spectator — MES

    — 🇸🇦/🇮🇶/🇮🇶 NEW: Satellite imagery shows extensive damage at two pumping stations, Al-Dhekraa and Al-Misbaah, along Saudi Arabia’s East-West Oil Pipeline

    September 11, 2026 at 8:19 pm #249623
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    “
    25 Years Later …
    … defeated, confused and humiliated–this is how the US faces 25th anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy and of the so called GWOT.
    “

    September 11, 2026 at 9:00 pm #249624
    tboc
    Participant

    Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
    By Dylan Thomas

    Do not go gentle into that good night,
    Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
    Because their words had forked no lightning they
    Do not go gentle into that good night.

    Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
    Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
    And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
    Do not go gentle into that good night.

    Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
    Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    And you, my father, there on the sad height,
    Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
    Do not go gentle into that good night.
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    September 11, 2026 at 10:12 pm #249625
    zerosum
    Participant

    Can the Houthis close the Red Sea after seizing the Yemen coast?
    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/11/can-the-houthis-close-the-red-sea-after-seizing-the-yemen-coast

    By Shola Lawal
    Published On 11 Sep 2026

    Houthi forces have captured the whole of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline, reaching all the way to the critically important Bab al-Mandeb shipping gateway, as the group’s rapid offensive continued on Friday.

    On Thursday, the Houthis seized the port city of Mocha, dealing a heavy blow to the Yemeni government backed by neighbouring Saudi Arabia.

    Analysts are calling the Iran-backed Houthi group’s victories the most significant regional development since the US and Israel declared war on Iran in February.

    The offensives could be particularly damaging for Saudi Arabia and its oil exports. The Houthis, who declared a blockade of Saudi-flagged ships in the Red Sea earlier in the year, now have a much firmer control of the Bab al-Mandeb waterway, which Riyadh increasingly relies on for oil exports following blockades of the the Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Gulf, experts say.

    But can the Houthis control the Red Sea?

    Here’s what we know:
    What’s happening in Yemen?
    Yemen has been in a state of war since 2014 when Houthi rebels seized the capital Sanaa, as well as the port city of Hodeidah, forcing the government to step aside.

    With Iran’s backing, the group has since battled a Saudi-backed military coalition of Gulf states fighting on the side of the internationally recognised government of Yemen based in Aden.

    Saudi Arabia entered the war in 2015 in a bid to restore the Yemeni government and counter Iran’s expanding influence.

    Although a UN truce in 2022 halted fighting, intermittent clashes have occurred since then. A new wave of fighting resumed last week – among the most intense in years – as the Houthis attacked positions with the aim of seizing the Red Sea coast. Yemeni government forces struck back.

    In July, amidst the US-Israel war on Iran, the Houthis announced a complete maritime blockade on Saudi Arabia and began launching attacks on Saudi-linked ships passing through the important Bab al-Mandeb Strait.

    The narrow strait is one of the world’s most important shipping lanes connecting the Suez Canal and Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. Roughly 12 percent of global trade passes through daily.

    Even more vessels have used it since Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s energy supplies used to transit annually before the war began in February.

    What do Houthi gains mean for Saudi Arabia?
    The Houthis’ complete control of the Bab al-Mandeb corridor could worsen the ongoing global energy crisis as prices and supplies will increase, warn experts.

    For Saudi Arabia, it could further damage oil exports.

    Since Iran blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, Riyadh has sought to make greater use of its East-West Crude Oil Pipeline, which runs from the Abqaiq oil field across the vast Arabian Peninsula to the western port of Yanbu on the Red Sea. Oil can then be shipped via that sea route instead of the Gulf.

    The pipeline has been active since the 1980s and was purpose-built to avoid disruption in Hormuz. It was temporarily shut down during Houthi drone attacks in 2019.

    Since the February war, the kingdom has increased the pipeline to full capacity, meaning it can now pump up to seven million barrels per day (bpd) across the country to the Red Sea coast, up from five million bpd before the war. As a result, 21 percent more Saudi oil is being shipped through Bab al-Mandeb than before the US-Israeli war began.

    In response, the Houthis have targeted Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea. But with the group now commanding the entire Yemeni coast and Bab al-Mandeb, Saudi exports could take a further hit.

    The Houthis have already targeted Saudi energy installations and southern cities. Images on Friday appeared to show smoke billowing from the East-West pipeline. The Saudis have not confirmed whether it was hit.

    What does this mean for Iran?
    Experts say the Houthis appear intent on opening up a new major front in the US-Iran war and, importantly, to hand Tehran a bingo card in its ongoing stalemate with Washington. Both Iran and the US claim to be in control of the Strait of Hormuz, but much reduced shipping volumes suggest Iran has the upper hand, observers say.

    Proxy control of the Bab al-Mandeb only strengthens that hand.

    “It essentially means Iran now controls the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Hormuz plus,” said Alam Saleh, professor of international relations at the Australian National University.

    It also increases pressure on Washington as surging petrol and food prices have already made the war highly unpopular, with voters expected to show their anger towards Republicans in the November mid-term elections. This week, President Donald Trump acknowledged that it is unlikely the war will end before then.

    While Washington calculates that a strategy of strikes combined with economic pressure could bend Tehran to its will, it is increasingly short on time to shift the situation in its favour, Saleh said.

    The Houthis’ victory not only significantly shifts the power balance in Iran’s favour, it also signals to other powers, such as China and Russia, that US military power in the Middle East is diminishing, he added.

    “Iran has now played the card of global oil prices and energy security. So the Houthis controlling Bab al-Mandeb benefits Iran dramatically.”

    Can the Houthis hold the Red Sea?
    Thursday’s defeat of Yemeni government forces was almost handed to the Houthis on a platter, analysts say.

    Yemeni government forces number an estimated 300,000, while the Houthis have about 250,000.

    However, internal fractures within the Yemeni military, as well as external pressure from Saudi Arabia, have created a highly fragmented front that lacks the cohesion needed to fight a group as quick and adaptable as the Houthis, experts say.

    “I would say that this is a fighting force that is probably more advanced than the force that the Saudis were fighting against about a decade ago,” Mohamad Elmasry, a professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, said of the Houthis.

    In addition, access to Iranian weapons in the past several years, ranging from missiles to drones to air defence systems, has enabled the Houthis to build an impressive stockpile, he added.

    However, Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera that despite their immediate victories, the Houthis are “terrible” at governance and are unlikely to sustain a blockade of Bab al-Mandeb. Their successful advance has happened not because they were underestimated, but because the Saudi-backed coalition was overestimated, he added.

    Still, Saleh of the ANU points out, the Houthis don’t actually need to control the whole of Bab al-Mandeb or the Red Sea to achieve their objectives. A hint of danger is enough to pressure shipping companies and insurance firms that the strait is too risky to enter, he said.

    The question now is whether Riyadh can effectively halt the Houthis with its own air power. In the past 24 hours, Saudi forces have launched dozens of missiles towards Houthi-controlled areas, including Mocha, but that has not appeared to have halted the group.

    A recent defence pact between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkiye is unlikely to kick in, say experts, as countries want to avoid an escalation in the US-Israel conflict with Iran.

    Washington seems unavailable too. US news site Axios reported that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called US President Donald Trump twice on Thursday and requested American air strikes against the Houthis. Trump, however, declined.

    September 11, 2026 at 10:13 pm #249626
    Susmarie108
    Participant

    @tboc – “Did you ever spend any time listening to a Kirk youtube video?”

    No. Not one. Yet the odd thing is that I had a very intense reaction to his killing – on more than a gut level. It was personal.

    As a result, I went back to try and UNDERSTAND who he was. I watched videos and interviews. I listened to the people who were his friends. He clearly had special gifts. He was also extremely naive. It all appeared organic – that he was the right person at the right time, in the right place, with the right (for some) message. It wasn’t until he was murdered that the bigger picture emerged.

    There is no way to reconcile the distortions created by “them” in service of their false narrative about who/why/how Charlie was killed.

    I came to the conclusion that Charlie Kirk was “chosen” by “them” in the early days. They recognized his potential and saw his gifts. They stealthily funded him, infiltrated his Turning Point operations, and his family. Charlie thought he was the driver, the generator of his success, and he was to some degree. Unfortunately, he woke up in the middle of the DREAM by saying what was in his Heart. That was the fatal mistake.

    This is another story about the financialization of everything, including authentic souls like Charlie Kirk. You can agree or disagree with his politics, but that’s not the issue. “They” win when we only see the man they made – and refuse to see the man for who he was.

    September 11, 2026 at 10:17 pm #249627
    zerosum
    Participant


    Full Mobilization in Belarus⚡Kyiv’s Fuel Apocalypse🛢️Frontline Collapse💥 Military Summary 2026.09.11


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    September 12, 2026 at 12:29 am #249628
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    Trita Parsi: Massive Houthi Victory Transforms U.S.-Iran War

    September 12, 2026 at 1:16 am #249629
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    The US asks Russia for HELP: Iran for the First Time wiped out USAF planes with MRBM ‘Qasem Bassir

    The US asks Russia for HELP: Iran for the First Time wiped out USAF planes with MRBM ‘Qasem Bassir’
    ******************************************************

    Well, my dear truth seekers, it seems the United States’ worst nightmare is coming true. Iran’s main allies in the Middle East, Yemen’s Houthis, have launched a full-scale offensive and, over the past 48 hours, captured three major cities: ‘Mokha’, ‘Al Khawkhah’, and ‘Hays’. It is noteworthy that the day before, Iran attacked American warships in the Middle East. Tehran officially stated that this attack was Iran’s response to the United States’ aggressive actions against Iranian oil tankers. Moreover, as it turned out, during this attack, Iran for the first time used its latest electro-optical missiles..

    September 12, 2026 at 1:40 am #249630
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    The days of a unipolar world are numbered.

    Humanity will finally live in an era of universal prosperity and peace.

    September 12, 2026 at 1:48 am #249631
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    Larry Johnson: What We Know — and Still Don’t Know — One Year After Charlie Kirk & on 9/11

    September 12, 2026 at 1:49 pm #249679
    zerosum
    Participant


    LIVE: Xi Jinping BRICS Speech | BRICS Summit 2026 LIVE | Xi Jinping LIVE Speech

    —————

    LIVE: PM Modi holds a meeting with President Xi Jinping of China

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    Putin Says Unipolar World Is ‘Becoming a Thing of the Past’ at BRICS Summit | FULL SPEECH

    9,390 views Premiered 103 minutes ago #BRICS2026 #BRICSSummit #BharatMandapam
    At the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi, Russian President Vladimir Putin called for a shift towards a multipolar world, arguing that the era of a unipolar global order is fading. He criticised Western tariffs and sanctions, called for reforms to global institutions, and urged BRICS nations to play a greater role in shaping the global economic, financial and technological order.

    #BRICS2026 #BRICSSummit #BharatMandapam #BRICSIndia2026 #NDTVWorld
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