Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 376

The Devil is in the Details of any State Takeover of California’s Private Electric Utilities

“The devil’s greatest trick ever played is to claim he doesn’t exist” – Charles Baudelaire

The current justification for the State of California to take over its three private investor-owned electric utilities (PG&E, SDG&E and Edison) is that public utilities do not have to pay a profit to its shareholders.  This ideology devilishly misleads Californians.

After 30 years of working for county government and public utilities in California I realized that government doesn’t solve problems, it just ...

‘They Died for Nothing’: America and the Myth of World War II

The eightieth anniversary of the D-Day landing in Normandy during World War II has come and passed, and this will be the last commemoration for many veterans of that operation. Commentary on the yearly events held in France evinced a noticeably nostalgic quality; America’s victory in World War II and its memory might be one of the last bits of cultural heritage most Americans still share, albeit tenuously.

Reading this commentary made me think of something my father told me last year, after my g...

US-NATO Threats Ignore ‘Red Lines’ in Ukraine

Front lines are collapsing for the Ukrainian army, whole units surrendering. Top commanders are fired. Faced with complete disarray of the U.S.-NATO instigated war in Ukraine, U.S. militarists are doubling down.

According to the Ukrainian constitution, President Volodymir Zelensky’s term in office is over. But he remains in power by martial law. This has led Ukrainian workers to hold strikes and work stoppages. But this news is ignored in the Western media.

A national truckers’ work slowdown ins...

The Summer of Living Dangerously

The plutocracy believes that afterwards they can buy the whole thing for a pittance while flies are still laying eggs in European carcasses.

So Le Petit Roi in Paris was predictably crushed in the European polls. He has called parliamentary snap elections, dissolving the Assemblée Nationale in an act of blind, puerile revenge on French citizens, de facto attacking French institutional democracy.

That doesn’t mean much anyway, because the lineaments of “liberty, equality, fraternity” have long be...

Timely Lessons About Tyranny from the Father of the Constitution

“Take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.” — James Madison

James Madison, often referred to as the “Father of the Constitution,” once predicted that the Bill of Rights would become mere “parchment barrier,” words on paper ignored by successive generations of Americans.

How right he was.

Although Madison initially felt that the inclusion of a bill of rights in the originally ratified Constitution was unnecessary to its success, Thomas Jefferson persuaded him that “a bill of rights is ...

Van Cliburn, Moscow, 1958

The Cold War could have ended that year with the Moscow success of the American concert pianist Van Cliburn.
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An American performed Russian music better than the Russian pianists. The Russians could have sabotaged Van Cliburn by leaving some piano keys out of tune or by the conductor changing pace on him. But the Russian conductor recognized greatness and contributed to it. In all my years of concert attendance I have never seen such an outpouring of applause, affection, and flowers with which ...

Restoring the Soil To Make the Deserts Bloom

Did none of the Masters of the Universe take Marketing 101? I know it’s a quasi-discipline, much déclassé, for the peons in flyover country who sell widgets to live, but it does determine the world. What do you want to buy with your disposable income? What food, what house, what car, what do your children lust after?  Shopping decisions determine the shape of the real world, where real things happen. For some people, it’s their only opportunity for self-determination, and take it they will. This...

When Writing Functions as a Big-Time Sleeping Pill

Maybe it doesn’t rise to the level of a felony.

But certainly a citation should be issued.

The writer should have to pay. He should have to surrender an old typewriter or a keyboard—along with a promise to do better in the future.

I’ve found a soporific passage. I want you to read it. I’m not going to name the writer.

Try to stay awake. It’s a paragraph of sheer diabolical torture:

“Saying that Africans must have control over their own countries and their own future, U.S. officials backed the ad...

Underdogs Need To Keep Fighting Like Mad Dogs

Why I’m here instead of some superstar is one of those anomalies that defies explanation.  But allow me to congratulate you on earning your degrees.

Almost without exception a college commencement speaker is a high-achiever whose mere presence will tell graduates making it big is possible.  The message they deliver varies widely in details and tone, but there are some common lines of thought among the most popular.  Let’s look at a few of them:

— Bono, University of Pennsylvania, 2004 said this ...

USS Liberty Survivors Reunite and Call For a Congressional Investigation into the Deadly Attack on Their Ship

“If the truth about the attack on the USS Liberty isn’t told to the American public, our Republic will fall. When your own government sets you up to be murdered, this speaks to the influence the Zionist state of Israel has with our politicians. Not one president from LBJ to Biden has lifted a finger nor has the Congress.” – Phil Tourney, USS Liberty attack survivor.

Now is the best time for Americans to demand an open and honest congressional investigation of the June 8, 1967 unprovoked and deli...