Hans-Hermann Hoppe on Walter Block's defense of Israel's retaliation for the October 7 Hamas attack

Grotesque.  If anything, this assessment of Block’s only indicates that he has lost any sense of measure and proportion...  [H]is call for total and unrestricted war and the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians is actually the complete and uninhibited rejection and renunciation of the non-aggression principle that constitutes one of the very cornerstones of the Rothbardian system.  To believe that Rothbard would have given serious consideration to his WSJ piece is simply ridiculous and only indicates that Block’s understanding of Rothbard is not nearly as good as he himself fancies it to be.  The Rothbard I knew would have denounced the piece in no uncertain terms as monstrous and considered it an unforgivable aberration and disgrace.

~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe, "On Open Letter to Walter E. Block," LewRockwell.com, January 31, 2024

Kevin Duffy on the difference between growth and value investing

Growth investing: Find companies where others underestimate how good things can get. 

Value investing: Find companies where others overestimate how bad things can get. 

Growth and value are just two sides of the same coin.

~ Kevin Duffy, tweets, January 28, 2024

Russ Greene on Unilever's ESG rollercoaster

Unilever's history is a microcosm both of the rise of ESG and of the challenges the ESG agenda is now facing.  The British consumer packaged goods corporation owns several successful brands, including Ben & Jerry's, Dove, and Magnum.  It has prided itself on its ESG credentials, particularly under Paul Polman, Unilever's CEO from 2009 to 2019. 

Under Polman's leadership, the company made a series of corporate commitments to environmental and social causes.  It supported sustainable agriculture at the World Economic Forum.  It helped create the United Nations' "sustainable development goals."  It "made a stand to #unstereotype the way men and women are portrayed in marketing."  Again and again, it filtered its corporate purpose through a progressive worldview. 

While it is now common for brands to advertise their commitments to such causes, Unilever took the lead in incorporating "purpose" into virtually everything it did.  Polman often called for CEOs to focus on creating value for a wider group of "stakeholders," as opposed to narrowly focusing on shareholders; he also campaigned for government efforts to fight climate change. 

At first, Polman's play worked.  In his decade atop the company, Unilever's stock price rose by about 150 percent—"well ahead of the FTSE [Financial Times Stock Exchange] 100 average," The Guardian notes—and it reported decreasing emissions from its factories by 47 percent from 2008 to 2018.  Perhaps it indeed was possible to achieve both purpose and profits, to serve both "stakeholders" and shareholders at once. 

Toward the end of his term, though, signs of trouble appeared.  Kraft Heinz, a firm closely associated with Warren Buffett and his holding company Berkshire Hathaway, made a bid for control of Unilever in 2017.  The company rejected the offer.  This event carried symbolic meaning, as Buffett has a long history of favoring profits over "purpose."  In the fallout, investors increasingly put pressure on Unilever to cut bureaucratic overhead. 

After Polman left the company in 2019, his replacement Alan Jope eagerly picked up the ESG mantle.  A 2021 Unilever blog post declared that there was "No trade-off between purpose and performance."  In 2022, after a backlash against ESG had begun, Jope declared at a Clinton Global Initiative event that Unilever "will not back down on this agenda despite these populist accusations."

Indeed, the populists did not prompt Unilever to back down from ESG.  After all, Unilever is a British company, and in Britain, even conservative politicians have embraced aspects of the ESG agenda.  Market forces, on the other hand, have had an impact.  Investor Terry Smith repeatedly ridiculed Unilever's "virtue-signaling," calling on the company to focus on fundamentals.  Why did Hellmann's mayonnaise need a purpose?  Didn't it already have one, as a salad and sandwich condiment?  Nor was Smith the only investor concerned with Unilever's flagging performance.

Within months of his promise not to back down, Jope announced that he was stepping down as CEO. His replacement, Schumacher, is the one who called the focus on ESG goals a "distraction."

~ Russ Greene, "Is ESG Already Over? CEOs are beginning to wonder what to do when environmental, social, and governance factors are at odds with performance.," Reason.com, February 2024

George Orwell on the pretense for war

Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

~ George Orwell

Dylan Saba on how Israel is losing support among younger American Jews

The younger Jewish community in the United States is far more open to Palestinian liberation, is far more active on this issue than the generations prior and it's posed a real generational divide within the Jewish community, but it's also inspired a lot of hope that we can actually build a pluralistic justice movement on this issue.  And that poses a threat.  That poses a threat to pro-Israel groups, to the older generation who counts on that support from the Jewish community to justify Israel's crimes.  And they're losing that support and the data indicates that they're losing that support and that's a growing trend and it's beautiful to see.

~ Dylan Saba, "Zionist anti-Palestinian censorship is surging," Chris Hedges Report, 24:00 mark, November 24, 2023

George Kennan on the false "good vs. evil" narrative

In this day of another great political-emotional preoccupation, when the image of the Soviet Union leaders has replaced that of Hitler in so many Western minds as the center and source of all possible evil, it is perhaps particularly desirable that we should remember these things.  Let us not repeat the mistake of believing that either good or evil is total.  Let us beware, in future, of wholly condemning an entire people and wholly exculpating others.  Let us remember that the great moral issues, on which civilization is going to stand or fall, cut across all military and indeological borders, across peoples, classes, and regimes - across, in fact, the make-up of the human individual himself.  No other people, as a whole, is entirely our enemy.  No people at all - not even ourselves - is entirely our friend.

~ George Kennan, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, Chapter 23: "Russia and the West as Allies," p. 369

1961

Kevin Duffy on American imperialism and the Israel alliance

At the core of American imperialism is the noble cause.  Woodrow Wilson got the ad campaign started when he coined the phrase “making the world safe for democracy.”  In 2009, the Navy came up with the slogan “a global force for good.”  (This lasted all of five years.)  The mask is now off Israel.  Its carefully cultivated image as an enlightened, progressive, tolerant democracy has been shattered… not good for the U.S. global brand.  America’s longstanding policy of unconditional support for Israel is now in question, i.e. the imperial delusion is bumping into harsh reality.

~ Kevin Duffy, "The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Investment implications," The Coffee Can Portfolio, January 6, 2024

Jim Grant on making interest rate forecasts

Q: A friend once said, “It’s okay to forecast the end of the world, just don't ever give a date.”  When people ask you about timing, what do you tell them? 

A: Oh, I’ve become very wily.  Years ago, someone asked me to forecast the 10-year yield one year hence, and I had the presence of mind to say no, thank you.  I count that as my journalistic coming of age.  Only rookies pick levels and dates.

~ Jim Grant, The Austrian, January-February 2021

Michael Hartnett: "Everyone’s fully invested in U.S. exceptionalism"

Everyone’s fully invested in U.S. exceptionalism.  A bond investor is overweight U.S. Treasurys.  An equity investor is massively long U.S. stocks and massively long U.S. tech stocks, and everyone’s now overweight the dollar.  And I just wonder if this is the thing that we’re going to get wrong…  You can only sell what you own.  And everyone owns America.  And I just worry – whether it’s starting today or whether it’s done in three months’ time – that the dollar’s going to get spanked.  It’s partly because the market ultimately knows that we need to delever, it knows that there’s too much debt and knows that the deficit is so big.  But it also knows that society and the politicians would rather address that through debasement, a weaker currency, than by attacking the root of the problem, which is reducing spending and reducing expectations of spending.

~ Michael Hartnett, chief investment strategist, BofA Merrill Lynch, speaking at Grant’s Conference, October 2023

Sheera Frenkel on the Gaza blockade (2010)

Israel's blockade of Gaza includes a complex and ever-changing list of goods that are allowed in. Items such as cement or metal are barred because they can be used for military purposes, Israeli officials say.

According to figures published by Gisha in coordination with the United Nations, Israel allows in 25 percent of the goods it had permitted into Gaza before the Hamas takeover. In the years prior to the closure, Israel allowed an average of 10,400 trucks to enter Gaza with goods each month. Israel now allows approximately 2,500 trucks a month.

The figures show that Israel also has limited the goods allowed to enter Gaza to 40 types of items, while before June 2007 approximately 4,000 types of goods were listed as entering Gaza.

Israel expanded its list slightly Wednesday to include soda, juice, jam, spices, shaving cream, potato chips, cookies and candy, said Palestinian liaison official Raed Fattouh, who coordinates the flow of goods into Gaza with Israel.

~ Sheera Frenkel, "Israeli document: Gaza blockade isn't about security," McClatchy Newspapers, June 9, 2010

Ilana Mercer on the "seething snake pit that is Gaza"

In 2005, with great enthusiasm from the Israeli Left, Gaza was given over to the dogs of war, Hamas and their avid constituents.  Despite the fertile, coastal land they were handed, the precious ground water they sit on, and generous international assistance, the place soon went to the dogs.  Egypt, Jordan and Israel are all terrified to open their borders to the seething snake pit that is Gaza.

It matters not whether you think the cauldron of cruelty that is Gaza created its inhabitants or whether it’s the obverse.  The reality is that every nation in the region fears the Gazans.  Nobody in the region wants immigrants from Gaza...

~ Ilana Mercer, "Hamas, Israel and the Anatomy of State Treason," The Unz Review, October 12, 2023

Uri Averny on the first Gaza War (2009)

WHAT WAS THE AIM?  Tzipi Livni [Minister of Foreign Affairs] announced it openly: to liquidate Hamas rule in Gaza.  The Qassams served only as a pretext. 

Liquidate Hamas rule?  That sounds like a chapter out of “The March of Folly”.  After all, it is no secret that it was the Israeli government which set up Hamas to start with.  When I once asked a former Shin-Bet chief, Yaakov Peri, about it, he answered enigmatically: “We did not create it, but we did not hinder its creation.” 

For years, the occupation authorities favored the Islamic movement in the occupied territories.  All other political activities were rigorously suppressed, but their activities in the mosques were permitted.  The calculation was simple and naive: at the time, the PLO was considered the main enemy, Yasser Arafat was the current Satan.  The Islamic movement was preaching against the PLO and Arafat, and was therefore viewed as an ally.

With the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987, the Islamic movement officially renamed itself Hamas (Arabic initials of “Islamic Resistance Movement”) and joined the fight.  Even then, the Shin-Bet took no action against them for almost a year, while Fatah members were executed or imprisoned in large numbers.  Only after a year, were Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his colleagues also arrested.

Since then the wheel has turned.  Hamas has now become the current Satan, and the PLO is considered by many in Israel almost as a branch of the Zionist organization. The logical conclusion for an Israeli government seeking peace would have been to make wide-ranging concessions to the Fatah leadership: ending of the occupation, signing of a peace treaty, foundation of the State of Palestine, withdrawal to the 1967 borders, a reasonable solution of the refugee problem, release of all Palestinian prisoners.  That would have arrested the rise of Hamas for sure. 

But logic has little influence on politics.

~ Uri Averny, "Molten Lead," Gush Shalom, January 9, 2009

Phil Butler on how lithium is tied to the Russia-Ukraine War

The riddle of unhinged EU support for the Zelensky regime in Kyiv is now solved. Anyone inclined can unravel why the Germans, in particular, backstabbed Russia in the Minsk peace boondoggle.  Lithium.

Energy Monitor’s parent company, GlobalData, recently released a report showing that Europe’s biggest lithium reserves lie in the Donbass region of Russia.  The former Ukrainian Shevchenkivske field in the Donetsk region and the Kruta Balka block in the Zaporizhzhia region are now part of Russia.  These reserves add tremendously to Russia’s humongous Lithium deposits (now 1.5M metric tons) and solidify the country’s top ten position globally.  If we consider other BRICS nations’ reserves, including China (2M metric tons), EU industry is at a leverage point.

What’s most significant about this is that the EU, and Germany in particular, desperately need the rare mineral to manufacture green energy technologies such as wind turbines, electric vehicles, and a wide variety of electronic devices.

~ Phil Butler, "The EU Is Willing to Go To War Over Lithium?," LewRockwell.com, January 3, 2023

Eric Margolis on life in Gaza

I have been watching and writing about the agony of Palestine for some 70 years.   I’ve watched what was to have been a small Jewish enclave grow into a powerful Sparta with some 200 nuclear weapons and unprecedented control of the US Congress and media. 

Gaza, this miserable, squalid human garbage dump, is a giant open-air prison packed with 2.2 million Palestinian refugees driven from the newly created state of Israel in 1948.  Israel and its close ally Egypt keep Gaza bottled up on its land and sea borders.  Palestinians are only allowed to fish along the shore.  Coastal gas and oil reserves have been expropriated by Israel and Egypt.

[...]

Gaza’s two million people subsist on the edge of starvation.  Israel openly boasts that it allows just enough food into the enclave to prevent outright starvation.  Chemicals to treat water are banned.  Electricity runs only a few hours daily because the power plant was bombed by Israel’s US-supplied air force.  Hospitals have almost no medicines.  In short, wartime conditions in the open-air prison.  Even the wretched animals in Gaza Zoo are starving.  Hamas fighters have reportedly even killed cats and dogs.

The intensive punishment of Gaza, a crime under international law, began after its people voted in a free election for the Hamas movement over the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which is more or less run by Israel and the United States.  Israel helped found Hamas in 1987 to split the PLO, but then sought, with the US, to destroy the organization, branding it ‘terrorist.’

~ Eric Margolis, "How Much Longer Will Palestinians Be Martyr People?," LewRockwell.com, October 14, 2023

Tzipi Hotovely on the possibility of a Palestinian state

Q: Is there still a state for a two-state solution?

A: I think it's about time for the world to realize the Oslo paradigm failed on the 7th of October and we need to build a new one.

Q: But does that new one include the Palestinians living in a state of their own?

A: I think the biggest question is, "What type of Palestinians are on the other side?"

Q: Do they have a state?

A: The answer is absolutely no!  And I'll tell you why...  Israel knows today and the world should know now, the reason the Oslo Accords failed is because the Palestinians never wanted to have a state next to Israel.  They want to have a state from the river to the sea.

~ Tzipi Hotovely, Israeli ambassador to the UK, "Israel Ambassador's Mask Off Moment," Novara Media, 0:15 mark, December 13, 2023

Ayn Rand on the Arab-Israeli conflict

The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures.  They are typically nomads.  Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it's the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent.  When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are.  Israel is a mixed economy inclined toward socialism.  But when it comes to the power of the mind—the development of industry in that wasted desert continent—versus savages who don't want to use their minds, then if one cares about the future of civilization, don't wait for the government to do something.  Give whatever you can.  This is the first time I've contributed to a public cause: helping Israel in an emergency.

~ Ayn Rand, Ford Hall Forum Lecture, 1974 

(As quoted in "Ayn Rand v. Murray Rothbard: A deep dive into the Libertarian view of Israel/Palestine," Daily Kos, March 31, 2015)

Adam Shatz on biographer Max Hastings meeting Benjamin Netanyahu

The defining drama of Netanyahu’s life as a young man took place in July 1976, when [older brother] Yoni was killed at Entebbe airport, during a mission to rescue Israeli and Jewish hostages from Air France Flight 139, which had been hijacked by four members of a German cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

[...]

Commissioned by the family to write Yoni’s biography, Max Hastings portrayed him as a moody, stubborn loner, much like his father, only without his father’s brains – ‘a troubled young man of moderate intelligence, striving to come to terms with intellectual concepts beyond his grasp’.  Far from being the peerless commander, Yoni had been ‘actively disliked by more than a few of his men’.  Furious at Hastings, the Netanyahus had the book published in a bowdlerised form.  Hastings, who wrote about his encounter with the family in his memoirs (‘one of the sorriest episodes of my career’), took a particularly strong dislike to Bibi, who boasted: ‘In the next war, if we do it right, we’ll have a chance to get all the Arabs out … We can clear the West Bank, sort out Jerusalem.’  Bibi’s racism, Hastings recalled, wasn’t limited to Arabs.  ‘He joked about the Golani Brigade, the infantry force in which so many men were North African or Yemeni Jews.  “They’re OK as long as they are led by white officers,” he grinned.’ 

~ Adam Shatz, "The Sea is the Same Sea: A Biography of Netanyahu," Portside, August 30, 2018

Adam Raz on treatment of Israeli Arabs from 1948 to 1966

The origins of the brutality documented in all its ugliness last week – an Israeli soldier shooting an unarmed Palestinian who was trying to protect the electric generator he needs to function, amid the abject poverty of the South Hebron Hills – date back quite a few decades, to the period of military rule in Israel proper.  Testimony from recently declassified documents, together with historical records in archives, shed light on the acute violence that prevailed in the “state within a state” that Israel foisted upon extensive areas of the country where Arab citizens lived, from 1948 until 1966.

~ Adam Raz, "How Israel Tormented Arabs in Its First Decades – and Tried to Cover It Up," Haaretz, January 9, 2021

Mazen Masri on how Arab Israelis were treated during early years of statehood

The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, issued on 14 May 1948, offered “the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel … full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.”  This ostensibly universal provision was no more, at this delicate moment, than necessary lip-service paid to the international community by the signatories of the Declaration: “the representatives of the Jewish Community of Eretz-Israel and of the Zionist Movement.”  Right from the beginning, Israel's leaders took measures and adopted policies that rendered the idea of citizenship empty and meaningless insofar as the indigenous Palestinians were concerned.  Even though the majority of the Palestinians were expelled in 1948 (only 160,000 remained in 1949, about 18 percent of the pre-1948 total), the leaders of the state saw the mere presence of the remaining Palestinians as a threat to the “Jewishness” of the state, a security threat, and a barrier to taking over the land.

As an expression of the “Jewishness” of the state and as a tool to secure a Jewish majority, Israel enacted in 1950 the Law of Return which gave Jews anywhere in the world an absolute right to immigrate and acquire automatic citizenship.  At the same time, Israel was adamant to reduce as much as possible the Palestinians' access to citizenship. It enacted the Nationality Law of 1952, which restricted eligibility to citizenship by imposing onerous requirements on Palestinians (i.e. meeting all the following conditions: to have been Palestinian before the establishment of the state; to have stayed in or entered Israel legally; to be resident in Israel up to 1 July 1952; and to be an inhabitant of the state on the date of entry into force of the law).  Many who “infiltrated” to their villages between 1948 and 1950, and had avoided forcible expulsion across the borders, had to be naturalized to stay in their homeland.

~ Mazen Masri, "Palestinian Citizenship in Israel: An Unwanted Minority Asserts Its Narrative and Identity," Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question

Kevin Duffy comments on Ben Shapiro's selective history of the Arab-Israeli conflict

Well done, Mr. Shapiro, except you forgot to mention a few details: 

• Before WWI, Palestine region was 14% Jews, 10% Christians, 76% Muslims; the early Zionist claim of "a land with no people for a people with no land" was always a lie
• Promise made by the British during WWI to Arabs: if they help the Turks, they get their independence (Damascus Protocol, 1916)
• Contradictory promise to the Zionists to have their own state (Balfour Declaration, 1917)
• Promise made again by the British in WWII to abandon partition and advocate for one state under Arab and Jewish rule (govt white paper, 1939)
• Rise of the Irgun and Stern Gang, considered to be terrorist organizations (Deir Yassin village massacre and bombing of the King David Hotel in 1948)
• Most of the "War for Independence" was fought on Arab lands according to the UN partition plan; 700,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees
• Herut party, which morphed into current Likud party, was founded in 1948 by Irgun leader Menachem Begin; when Begin visited the U.S. seeking support, Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt were outraged, signatories to a scathing letter to the NYT
• Six-Day War (1967): Israel was the aggressor, i.e. if the neighboring Arab countries were preparing to attack, why were they surprised? Another 300,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees
• In 1967, Arabs accounted for 36% of total population. In pre-1967 Israel, Arabs gained citizenship; in newly acquired Gaza and West Bank, they received occupation
• PLO emerges (secular), adopts terrorist tactics modeled after Irgun; crushing of Egypt frees up long repressed Muslim Brotherhood (fundamentalist), gives up violence in the 1970s; Ahmed Yassin set up an Islamic charity in 1973, recognized by Israel in 1979
• Israel never had any intention of giving up the West Bank, supported fundamentalists like Yassin as counterweight to PLO
• Yassin founded Hamas in 1987; Israel provided financial support until 2020 (Hamas served two purposes, preventing a leader emerging to negotiate Palestinian statehood and proving to the world that the other side were evil terrorists); as late as 2019, Netanyahu claimed that Hamas served a purpose and bragged that Israel controlled "the height of the flame"
• Israel poured gasoline on the fire with Gaza (home of Hamas) economically, building a security fence in 1994 and imposing a land, air and sea blockade in 2007, turning the Gaza Strip into a seething snake pit (Israeli per capita GDP is $55,000 vs. $1,250 for those living in Gaza, one of the starkest economic contrasts in the world next to the North Korea Demilitarized Zone)
• Using Israeli proper, where Arabs make up 21% of the population and three-quarters have citizenship, to claim there is no apartheid is a straw man. The critics are referring to the West Bank, where there are two systems of justice: civilian for Jews (Israeli citizens), military for Arabs (non-citizens). According to Addameer, 40% of Palestinian men in the West Bank have been prisoners in Israel's jails.
• In the ongoing conflict since about 2000, Palestinian deaths have outnumbered Israeli deaths 21-to-1

~ Kevin Duffy, comment, "Here’s THE TRUTH About the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (A Comprehensive History)," Ben Shapiro, June 5, 2021

Nima Elbagir on the Israeli justice system in the West Bank

Israel has been operating two distinct justice systems in the West Bank since it captured the area in 1967.  Palestinians living there fall under the jurisdiction of Israel’s military court system, where judges and prosecutors are uniformed Israeli soldiers.  Meanwhile, Jewish settlers there are subject to civilian courts.

A legal adviser at the Israel Defense Forces’ International Law Department told CNN on Wednesday that the different systems were in place because under international law, Israel is not allowed to “export” its own legal system to the West Bank.

B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, a non-governmental organization, says the courts “serve as one of the central systems maintaining Israel’s control over the Palestinian people.”

~ Nima Elbagir, "Release of Palestinian prisoners sheds light on controversial Israeli justice system in the occupied West Bank," CNN, December 8, 2023

Released Palestinian prisoners near Ramallah