Only Trump Could Go to North Korea - Tom Luongo

Donald Trump did the unthinkable. He went to North Korea. He stepped over the line in the sand demarked by Washington protocol for nearly seventy years.

And that Washington establishment, predictably, hates him for it. It can be felt from all sides of the political rotunda. They hate that Trump realizes their position, one of maximum pressure, isn’t working.

They despise that Russia and China will benefit from ending this frozen conflict not to mention Koreans on both sides of the DMZ.

The cynic in me thinks they are angry that the American people will benefit as well.

So this weekend was a good one for peaceniks around the world. Trump and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping agreed to back down on the worst of his trade war demands.

Trump presumably had a good meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin which likely set the stage for his meeting with Chairman Kim Jong-un. Remember Kim met with Putin earlier this year and designated him as his go-between with Trump after the talks in Hanoi fell apart.

The Bile Belt

This event should not be downplayed. Trump showed great humility and generosity towards Kim at the moment of truth. We should be cheering this regardless of what we think of him personally.

Diplomacy is not groveling. It is the acknowledgment of the other person’s basic humanity, a fundamental point lost in the political cesspit that is D.C.

Because of his previous mistakes and belligerence, only Trump could have made the walk across the DMZ to meet Kim on his territory. Only someone as blunt as Trump could cut through the nonsense that North Korea isn’t capable of independent action.

And only people so full of bile and despite would not be happy about this. Only people so enthralled with the thought of war and their own political and social ambitions would look at this event and seek to tear it down.

These are the people who lost yesterday in Trump’s historic and brilliant bit of diplomacy. And they are complaining bitterly about it today.

Everyone else wins.

In the land of the Twitterati, after stripping away the snark masquerading as analysis, we are left with a bunch of malcontents bemoaning their lost relevance.

I’m not praising him today to get back on anyone’s good side. I’ve been very straight about this. When Trump does good I praise him. When he screws up or acts dangerously I lambaste him.

And that is exactly how we should treat, at all times, all politicians everywhere. The telling point today is that the whole of the Washington establishment, Democrats and Neocons, are aghast at the prospect of peace.

The Wrong Path to Peace

I’ve been a harsh critic of most of Trump’s foreign policy moves since April 2017, when he bombed the airbase at Khan Sheikoun in Syria. It was the first inkling that he didn’t understand the rules of the game he was playing.

And those initial bombings would cost him far more in the end then he could ever gain. Not only did he lose most of his first term in office but he lost the trust of most world leaders pandering to establishment forces within the U.S. Deep State and donor class.

We can trace each move since then as a continuum leading up to Iran shooting down a U.S. Global Hawk drone and see we were always going to end up right where we are.

Because the alternative is a world at war. And think what you want about Trump, I’ve never been convinced that he was interested in that. If anything his problem has been allowing his fundamental humanity to be twisted into something ugly, limbicly lashing out at ‘bad guys’ like at Khan Shiekoun and not seeing the lies around it for what they were.

In the past few weeks we’ve seen a smarter, savvier Trump avoid the traps his allies and advisors set for him. He’s showed immense restraint.

And now, Trump is climbing down off the immense mountain of entitlement he and his advisors placed him on. By stepping over the line into North Korea and meeting with Kim for nearly an hour he’s beginning to deliver on the promises he made during the 2016 campaign.

Why wouldn’t I or anyone else be cheering?

When Iran shot down that drone I said on Sputnik Radio that to solve Iran’s nuclear weapons problem Trump should be looking to North Korea. Getting Kim to agree to freezing warhead production, and presumably dissemination, ends the possibility of Iran achieving that goal anytime soon.

After meeting with most of his ‘enemies’ at the G-20, Trump did just that. He pivoted away from Iran, now a source of political pitfalls, back to North Korea which was the right thing to do.

If Iran wanted a bomb they would have one. If Russia and China wanted Iran to have one, they would have one.

So all of this talk is simply theater. Just like the strategic importance of North Korea in 2019 is still relevant with China fully capable of projecting its interests on its own.

It’s time for this insanity to end. Full stop.

The Koreans want it. The Russians want it. The Chinese want it. Japan wants it.

And we should want it too.

Free at Last?

From the moment he began to engage Kim directly Trump’s strategy was to acknowledge the reality that North Korea can stand on its own. That it is not a puppet state of China.

It has been a constant theme of his while his advisory team tells him otherwise.

Well, they were in Mongolia on Sunday, while the best proxy for his antiwar base was on Air Force One.

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Trump’s instincts about denuclearization are correct and laudable. It has been his execution of how to achieve that goal that has been the problem.

He has allowed unbridled hawks whose sanity should surely be questioned to define him and his policy. He knows the failure of the Hanoi talks were a mistake.

He knows that the adventure in Venezuela was as well.

In the past ten days he’s called out National Security Advisor John Bolton publicly, called him a hawk and sent him to Mongolia while Trump made history.

Say what you want about him, Trump is pretty good at this messaging thing.

The coming days will be filled with discussion about what this all means.

I’m not going to do that now. Let’s enjoy the first bit of good foreign policy news since April 2017 and realize that the ship is turning and headed back to port.

Trump’s not out of the rough seas yet, but he finally found the right course to steer.

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https://tomluongo.me/2019/07/01/only-trump-could-go-to-north-korea/

Where Does Trump Go From Here With Iran? — Tom LUONGO

Donald Trump has boxed himself into a corner. His maximum pressure campaign on Russia, China, Iran and the Palestinians isn’t working. Time is ticking by and we are now, officially, into campaign season for 2020, when these operations were supposed to have been resolved by now.

While Trump still draws nearly unfathomable crowds for his rallies he is staring at an abyss of bad decisions in front of him which will see him either reverse course on all of his signature wins with his base over the past year – getting tough on Iran and China, going after evil socialists in Venezuela – or face a global economic meltdown which his daily Surreality Show is fomenting.

Trump refuses to take responsibility for anything that is happening. Everything is someone else’s fault.

Trade balance? China. Europe. Mexico. Canada.

Unrest in the Middle East? Iran. ISIS. Hezbollah. Russia.

Collapse and conflict in Ukraine? Russia.

Border Security? The Democrats.

Interest Rates? The Fed.

His inability to see how his moves affect events in the context of the global arena is his greatest weakness. It should have been a strength, his lack of shame. But it isn’t. Because now he’s gotten himself so far over-extended on Iran he’s been exposed as all bark and no bite.

He’s pushed Iran into a corner and from that corner they decided to finally strike back by downing a Global Hawk drone flying in full stealth mode over Iranian airspace if the Iranian side of the story is to be believed.

And regardless of the specifics of the situation, since we will never know the truth of the matter, the outcome and the way the narratives were handled it’s clear that Iran was sending a very strong message to the US.

Not one more inch.

Because while the US is more than capable of wiping Iran off the map for all intents and purposes, the truth is that for all of that capability, the after-effects of using it would be devastating for the world.

In common parlance the term is ‘blowback.’

The Western financial system is very much a paper tiger. And I do believe someone finally whispered in Trump’s ear after the drone was shot down that if he strikes Iran the consequences would be devastating for everyone.

Remember, Iran has nothing left to lose financially. The US has tried to take it all away. If the sanctions are working they are only doing so to accelerate the timetable which brought us to this point.

And a man who has nothing left to lose is a man who could easily lose it and take everyone with him. Pepe Escobar wrote about this at length recently. And while I agree with his overall thesis I think he’s out over his skis about the numbers themselves.

Suffice it to say that with nearly $13 trillion in negative-yielding debt, Deutsche Bank functionally insolvent and oil supplies vulnerable to supply shock that the aftermath of a series of attacks on infrastructure around the region, that over-leveraged capital markets trading at nose-bleed prices could collapse quickly triggering cascading defaults around the globe.

Regardless of the specifics, chaos would be the order of the day and markets hate chaos.

So Iran shot down that drone knowing full well that any US response would be disproportionate, to use Trump’s words. It took a level of character I didn’t think he or anyone else thought he had in calling off the airstrikes.

So I’ll give him credit for that. He needs to do more of it. And his signaling to Iran that he’s willing to talk with no pre-conditions is proof that he’s got negotiations on his mind. But Iran can no more come to the table with Trump than Trump can back down on his bluster and sabre-rattling with Iran.

Iran is right to say they won’t negotiate at gunpoint. This is especially true when it has been revealed that the guns themselves can’t actually be fired. Their leadership would collapse overnight if they began talks with Trump. That drone is now a rallying point for Iranians to support their government on in the short-term.

They gain nothing by coming to the table. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif went on a charm tour earlier this year to make Iran’s case and was roundly ignored by the US The opportunity was there then and the message from Iran was ignored.

What’s changed now that Trump wants to talk?

The sanctions are working? Please, don’t make me laugh. Russia’s National Security Advisor Nikolai Patrushev made it clear in his remarks that Russia stands behind Iran and that it will not tolerate any more aggression by the USI’m sure John Bolton’s mustache didn’t want to hear that.

“In the context of the statements made by our partners with regard to a major regional power, namely Iran, I would like to say the following: Iran has always been and remains our ally and partner, with which we are consistently developing relations both on bilateral basis and within multilateral formats,” Patrushev said after the trilateral meeting.

“This is why we believe that it is inadmissible to describe Iran as a major threat to regional security and, moreover, to put it on par with the Islamic State or any other terrorist organization,” Patrushev stated.

Russia’s National Security Advisor calling Iran an ally was significant. And I have to think that given some of the circumstances surrounding the drone that part of Iran’s message was 1) we have better weapons than you think we had and 2) the Russians gave them to us while denying it.

So, if you are coming after us it will have to be at a level that will make everyone outside of K-Street very uncomfortable. Trump will literally have to ‘go big or go home.’ Given the circumstances that seems unlikely.

It is in Russia’s long-term best interest to keep Iran stable and relatively prosperous. They cannot afford a failed state and chaos in Iran. Note the timing of violent uprisings in Georgia. Don’t think these things are related? Think again.

Keeping the Russians busy with multiple hotspots is the plan here. But Russia isn’t confused about this strategy. Expect in the coming weeks to see more direct support from Russia to Iran. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Goods-for-Oil program hasn’t already been expanded and that Iran is one of those countries the Bank of Russia mentioned wanting access to Russia’s version of SWIFT, SPFS, to clear transactions sanctioned by the US

It’s not like it would matter one bit to most Russian banks since they are already sanctioned by the US in the first place.

Once that happens and it’s clear the US will not stop Iranian tankers from sailing, all that remains is for the proper financial intermediaries to be put in place to keep the US off balance and Iran’s oil will flow.

The sanctions will be in effect, Iran will be starved of dollars and the medium-term pain will be acute. But it will be another move away from the dollar settling the trade of oil.

So back to my original question, where does Trump go from here? Iran won’t allow him to save face. I don’t have a good answer for that but Iran is betting that re-election will stay his hand for another year. He can and should start with firing the architects of this failed ‘maximum pressure’ policy and send everyone a clear signal that he’s ready to climb off the mountain they’ve built for him.

As long as the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia look the other way while Iran ‘smuggles’ its oil everything will calm down. If they don’t then things will get ugly from here for all involved.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/07/01/where-does-trump-go-from-here-with-iran/

Hope for a Breakthrough in Korea - By Ray McGovern

Donald Trump will ultimately have to remind his national security adviser and secretary of state who is president if there’s to be progress on North Korea, says Ray McGovern. 

There is hope for some real progress in U.S.-North Korean relations after Sunday morning’s unscheduled meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, largely because Russia and China seem more determined than ever to facilitate forward movement.

Sitting down before the talks began, Kim underlined the importance of the meeting.“I hope it can be the foundation for better things that people will not be expecting,” he said. “Our great relationship will provide the magical power with which to overcome hardships and obstacles in the tasks that need to be done from now on.”

Trump was equally positive speaking of Kim:

“We’ve developed a very good relationship and we understand each other very well. I do believe he understands me, and I think I maybe understand him, and sometimes that can lead to very good things.”

Trump said the two sides would designate teams, with the U.S. team headed by special envoy Stephen Biegun under the auspices of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to start work in the next two to three weeks. “They’ll start a process, and we’ll see what happens,” he said.

New Impetus

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, who met individually with President Trump at the G20 in Osaka, have been singing from the same sheet of Korea music — particularly in the wake of Xi’s visit to North Korea on June 20-21. Putin’s remarks are the most illuminating. 

In an interview with The Financial Times, Putin pointed to “the tragedies of Libya and Iraq” — meaning, of course, what happened to each of them as they lacked a nuclear deterrent. Applying that lesson to North Korea, Putin said,

“What we should be talking about is not how to make North Korea disarm, but how to ensure the unconditional security of North Korea and how to make any country, including North Korea, feel safe and protected by international law. …”

“We should think about guarantees, which we should use as the basis for talks with North Korea. We must take into account the dangers arising from … the presence of nuclear weapons,” he said, adding that if a way can be found to satisfy North Korea’s understandable determination to protect its security, “the situation may take a turn nobody can imagine today.”

“Whether we recognize North Korea as a nuclear power or not, the number of nuclear charges it has will not decrease. We must proceed from modern realities …” And those realities include fundamental, immediate security concerns for both Russia and China. Putin put it this way:

”[W]e have a common border, even if a short one, with North Korea, therefore, this problem has a direct bearing on us. The United States is located across the ocean … while we are right here, in this region, and the North Korean nuclear range is not far away from our border. This why this concerns us directly, and we never stop thinking about it.”

Xi’s ‘Reasonable Expectations’

Last week in Pyongyang, Chinese President Xi Jinping saidChina is waiting for a desired response in stalled nuclear talks with the United States.

“North Korea would like to remain patient, but it hopes the relevant party will meet halfway with North Korea to explore resolution plans that accommodate each other’s reasonable concerns,” he said.

A commentary in China’s official Xinhua news agency said China could play a unique role in breaking the cycle of mistrust between North Korea and the U.S, but that both sides “need to have reasonable expectations and refrain from imposing unilateral and unrealistic demands.”

There is little doubt that the Russians and Chinese have been comparing notes on what they see as a potentially explosive (literally) problem in their respective backyards, the more so inasmuch as the two countries have become allies in all but name.

On a three-day visit to Moscow in early June, President Xi spoke of his “deep personal friendship” with Putin, with whom he has “met nearly 30 times in the past six years.” For his part, Putin claimed “Russian-Chinese relations have reached an unprecedented level. It is a global partnership and strategic cooperation.”

A Fundamental Strategic Change

Whether they are “best friends” or not, the claim of unprecedented strategic cooperation happens to be true — and is the most fundamental change in the world strategic equation in decades. Given the fear they share that things could get out of hand in Korea with the mercurial Trump and his hawkish advisers calling the shots, it is a safe bet that Putin and Xi have been coordinating closely on North Korea.

The next step could be stepped-up efforts to persuade Trump that China and Russia can somehow guarantee continued nuclear restraint on Pyongyang’s part, in return for U.S. agreement to move step by step — rather than full bore — toward at least partial North Korean denuclearization — and perhaps some relaxation in U.S. economic sanctions. Xi and Putin may have broached that kind of deal to Trump in Osaka.

There is also a salutary sign that President Trump has learned more about the effects of a military conflict with North Korea, and that he has come to realize that Pyongyang already has not only a nuclear, but also a formidable conventional deterrent: massed artillery.

“There are 35 million people in Seoul, 25 miles away,” Trump said on Sunday. “All accessible by what they already have in the mountains. There’s nothing like that anywhere in terms of danger.”

Obstacles Still Formidable

Trump will have to remind his national security adviser, John Bolton, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, that he is the president and that he intends to take a firmer grip on reins regarding Korean policy. Given their maladroit performance on both Iran and Venezuela, it would, at first blush, seem easy to jettison the two super-hawks.

But this would mean running afoul of the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academe-Think-Tank (MICIMATT) complex, in which the corporate-controlled media play thesine-qua-nonrole today.

In a harbinger of things to come, The Washington Post’s initial report on the outcome of the Trump-Kim talks contained two distortions: “Trump … misrepresented what had been achieved, claiming that North Korea had ceased ballistic missile tests and was continuing to send back remains of U.S. servicemen killed in the Korean War.”

The Trump administration could reasonably call that “fake news.” True, North Korea tested short-range ballistic missiles last spring, but Kim’s promise to Trump was to stop testing strategicnot tactical missiles, and North Korea has adhered to that promise. As for the return of the remains of U.S. servicemen: True, such remains that remain are no longer being sent back to the U.S., but it was the U.S. that put a stop to that after the summit in Hanoi failed. 

We can surely expect more disingenuous “reporting” of that kind.

Whether Trump can stand up to the MICIMATT on Korea remains to be seen. There is a huge amount of arms-maker-arms-dealer profiteering going on in the Far East, as long as tensions there can be stoked and kept at a sufficiently high level.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His first portfolio at CIA was referent-analyst for Soviet policy toward China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/07/no_author/hope-for-a-breakthrough-in-korea/

Vox Popoli: They are still coming

And they won't stop coming until they are physically stopped with military violence:

They just keep coming.

A report from the Center for Immigration Studies indicates another 35,000 African migrants are on their way to the United States.

According to CIS’s Todd Bensman:

Like the proverbial “bulge in the belly of the snake,” unusually high numbers of non-Latino migrants, obviously not from Central America, are now reportedly passing from Colombia through Panama on their way to the U.S. southern border. Their numbers range to the tens of thousands, whose vanguards we have already seen at the U.S. Southwest Border in recent months: Cameroonians, Ghanaians, Congolese, Haitians, Cubans, and some from the Middle East.

Word of their successful entries into the United States this year clearly reached home countries because now a swell numbering as many as 35,000 is on an infamous migrant passage through which migrants have long funneled from South America to North America: the Darien Gap.

I am told this by two eye-witnesses who have just returned from the Colombia-Panama region on either side of the Gap. One of them is Panama-based author and freelance journalist Chuck Holton, who just visited the Colombian side in the frontier border town of Turbo, which is notorious as a migrant staging area for U.S.-bound migrants to be smuggled through the Darien Gap passage into Panama. The other source is Diane Edrington, a Mississippi-based nurse practitioner who has worked for years as a Panama Missions volunteer and who just returned from camps I visited in December on the Panama side of the Darien Gap.

Holton tells Bensman the word is out on US sanctuary cities.

“They have some level of understanding of what a sanctuary city is. ‘If we can get to one of those they won’t mess with us; They won’t get us out,'” he says, according to the CIS report.

That which can't continue, won't. This is why you always sink the ships. The first ships. And it's obviously time to legally eliminate the sanctuary cities.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2019/07/they-are-still-coming.html

Vox Popoli: The war on American history

It's not going to stop until they all go.

According to the Wall Street Journal, former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick has persuaded Nike to scrap plans to sell a shoe featuring the 13-star version of the American flag, known as the Betsy Ross flag. Kaepernick informed Nike that the 13-star version of the flag constitutes an “offensive symbol” due to its connection to an age of slavery. Nike agreed, and the shoe has been pulled.

It's amazing that some people still think the USA is a single nation. Whatever Kaepernick and Nike belong to, it isn't America.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-war-on-american-history.html

Vox Popoli: Mailvox: defending Ben Shapiro (About Jews and Jesus - and ALWAYS read the comments on a Vox Day site!)

Jew613 rather unwisely attempted to defend the Littlest Chickenhawk's disrespect for Jesus Christ:

Jews never believed Jesus was anything but a man. This can't possibly be news to you. There are a series of very specific prophecies, which werent fulfilled. Hence the need for a second coming so Jews rejected him. While the Gemara doesnt mention Jesus, the vat of semen story is not about your Jesus, why do you expect reverence for your divinity from another religion? There isnt any such respect shown to from Christians towards Jews, Rabbis, shuls, or the religion itself.

It's not news to me or anyone here that Jews never believed Jesus was anything but a man. Hey, at least they believe he actually existed and walked the Holy Land, right? But apparentlyit is news to a lot of PragerU-supporting Christians and conservative Shapiro fans, which has been demonstrated rather clearly by their reaction to Big Bear breaking the news to them.

As to why we expect respect - not reverence, respect - for our Lord and Savior from another religion, it is because you live in our Christian civilization. You don't live in a Jewish civilization, you don't live in a Jewish society, you don't live in the Jewish homeland, you live in a Christian civilization and a Christian society. So, if you don't want to show respect for Jesus Christ, for Christianity, and Christian traditions, that's your choice and your prerogative, but then by all means get your fat, subversive, inversive asses out of our collective house.

When I lived in Japan, I showed respect for both their Shinto spirits and the Amidha Buddha worshipped by my hosts, not because I believed in any of it in the slightest, but because I was a guest in their civilization and their society. I didn't try to forcibly alter their society because I was accustomed to using a fork instead of chopsticks and leaving my shoes on inside the house. How do you not understand that basic principle of decent human behavior?

Now, it is an absolute lie to claim that there is no respect shown to Jews, Rabbis, shuls, and Judaism by tens of millions of Christians across the West. An ABSOLUTE and shameless lie. But that raises the question, on precisely what grounds does the Jewish religion even merit any respect? What is there to respect, exactly? Very, very few non-Jews even know what that religion is, much less what the average practitioner believes. The rabbis literally make it an imperative, if not a capital offense, to share even basic facts about your religion with outsiders. So how can anyone be expected to respect what is purposefully hidden from them?

More importantly, Christians are not living in your civilization or your society. You are living in ours. You are a guest, you are not a co-owner, let alone the proprietor of the place. That means you owe respect and conformity to Christian rules, traditions, and sensibilities, whereas Christians owe you nothing at all unless they happen to live in Israel.

Now, I am aware that God promised Abraham that he would be "a blessing" and his children would be "to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation". And that was assuming they actually kept their side of the bargain. I note that He never promised the children of Abraham, of which the Jews are a one-thirteenth fraction, that they would heal the world, let alone rule the nations and eat like effendi with thousands of subhuman animals to serve them as slaves.

So, my question to Jew613 is this: who promised you that?

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2019/07/mailvox-defending-ben-shapiro.html

Of Two Minds - Following in Rome's Footsteps: Moral Decay, Rising Inequality

Here is the moral decay of America's ruling elites boiled down to a single word.

There are many reasons why Imperial Rome declined, but two primary causes that get relatively little attention are moral decay and soaring wealth inequality. The two are of course intimately connected: once the morals of the ruling Elites degrade, what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine, too.

I've previously covered two other key characteristics of an empire in terminal decline: complacency and intellectual sclerosis, what I have termed a failure of imagination.

Michael Grant described these causes of decline in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire, a short book I have been recommending since 2009:

There was no room at all, in these ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which had now arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as itself. (The Status Quo) attitude is a complacent acceptance of things as they are, without a single new idea.

This acceptance was accompanied by greatly excessive optimism about the present and future. Even when the end was only sixty years away, and the Empire was already crumbling fast, Rutilius continued to address the spirit of Rome with the same supreme assurance.

This blind adherence to the ideas of the past ranks high among the principal causes of the downfall of Rome. If you were sufficiently lulled by these traditional fictions, there was no call to take any practical first-aid measures at all.

A lengthier book by Adrian Goldsworthy How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpoweraddresses the same issues from a slightly different perspective.

Glenn Stehle, commenting on a thread in the excellent website peakoilbarrel.com(operated by the estimable Ron Patterson) made a number of excellent points that I am taking the liberty of excerpting: (with thanks to correspondent Paul S.)

The set of values developed by the early Romans called mos maiorum, Peter Turchin explains in War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, was gradually replaced by one of personal greed and pursuit of self-interest.

“Probably the most important value was virtus (virtue), which derived from the word vir (man) and embodied all the qualities of a true man as a member of society,” explains Turchin.

“Virtus included the ability to distinguish between good and evil and to act in ways that promoted good, and especially the common good. Unlike Greeks, Romans did not stress individual prowess, as exhibited by Homeric heroes or Olympic champions. The ideal of hero was one whose courage, wisdom, and self-sacrifice saved his country in time of peril,” Turchin adds.

And as Turchin goes on to explain:

"Unlike the selfish elites of the later periods, the aristocracy of the early Republic did not spare its blood or treasure in the service of the common interest. When 50,000 Romans, a staggering one fifth of Rome’s total manpower, perished in the battle of Cannae, as mentioned previously, the senate lost almost one third of its membership.This suggests that the senatorial aristocracy was more likely to be killed in wars than the average citizen...

The wealthy classes were also the first to volunteer extra taxes when they were needed… A graduated scale was used in which the senators paid the most, followed by the knights, and then other citizens. In addition, officers and centurions (but not common soldiers!) served without pay, saving the state 20 percent of the legion’s payroll...

The richest 1 percent of the Romans during the early Republic was only 10 to 20 times as wealthy as an average Roman citizen."

Now compare that to the situation in Late Antiquity when

"an average Roman noble of senatorial class had property valued in the neighborhood of 20,000 Roman pounds of gold. There was no 'middle class' comparable to the small landholders of the third century B.C.; the huge majority of the population was made up of landless peasants working land that belonged to nobles. These peasants had hardly any property at all, but if we estimate it (very generously) at one tenth of a pound of gold, the wealth differential would be 200,000! Inequality grew both as a result of the rich getting richer (late imperial senators were 100 times wealthier than their Republican predecessors) and those of the middling wealth becoming poor."

Do you see any similarities with the present-day realities depicted in these charts?

And how many congresspeople served in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan? How many presidential candidates had boots on the ground in combat theaters? The answer is one. Here is the moral decay of America's ruling elites boiled down to a single word. 

Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($6.95 ebook, $12 print, $13.08 audiobook): Read the first section for free in PDF format.


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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune19/romes-footsteps6-19.html?fullweb=1