From The Fields

Hi, this is Richard Fields with this week's Report From the Fields. As I write this tragic tale on Tuesday morning, the Pacific Palisades fire has already incinerated 5,300 structures and it's only 17 percent contained. The Eaton fire has consumed over 5,000 structures and is 35 percent contained. Dry conditions and hurricane speed Santa Ana winds have contributed to the destruction by fire of over 40,000 acres of urban land. At least 24 people have died. For comparison, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 killed 300 people, destroyed only 2,112 acres but, at 17,500, more buildings. But the LA fires are still burning, the winds are still blowing and there is no rain in the forecast.

Naturally, a lot of blaming is going on. Let me begin by pointing out where blame does not belong. Contrary to climate-change scamsters and fearmongers, the cause is not climate change. The climate in the Los Angeles basin has been dry and the Santa Ana winds have been blowing for centuries. Dashiell Hammet wrote "Red Wind", a pot boiler detective story which featured the Santa Ana winds. It was published in 1929, nearly a hundred years ago. There is nothing new about hot dry winds in LA. In fact there is nothing new about fire in the LA basin. Before Angelinos paved and landscaped the city, it was dry grasslands and chaparral. Grass and chaparral fires were a regular occurance.

But, on December 4 of last year, LA Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley wrote a memo foreseeing dire consequences from a $17.6 million fire department budget cut. Among the areas cut was pilot training for water dropping helicopters and deferred maintenance that took fire fighting equipment out of service. One area that was not cut was firefighter salaries. The fact that the nearby 117 million gallon Santa Ynez reservoir had been empty for a year for maintenance probably contributed to fire hydrants going dry.

Meanwhile, billionaires like Rick Caruso are hiring private fire fighting crews at thousands of dollars a day. Successfully, it seems. Caruso's Palisades Village shopping center is still standing. Multi-million dollar mansions across the street have burned to the ground. Nowhere is it written in stone that fire-fighting should be a public service rather than a private service paid for by property owners and their insurers. Municipal fire departments are notoriously subject to crony politics and overspending in less than optimal ways. Private fire-fighting companies whose motive is to make a profit by providing a service that actually prevents and quickly puts out fires, don't have that problem.

Something for Angelinos to ponder as they sift through the ashes and try to figure out how to rebuild. In the long run it would be more effective than begging the Federal government to please, please help us. That's this week's Report From the Fields. See you again next week.

Allegedly, Vladimir Lenin, of all people, said “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”. 2024 was like that, albeit a whole year where decades happened.

2024 was the year that people began to lose faith in the elite dictated established order. All at once. That lack of faith is epitomized by the election to public office of candidates decidedly not a part of the elite establishment. The most compelling example of that is the election of Javier Milei as President of Argentina in late 2023. Milei campaigned as a radical anarcho-capitalist libertarian economist promising to take a chainsaw to government spending. He won. And he's been wielding the chainsaw with a vengeance, cutting Argentine government spending dramatically. As a result, the Argentine Federal budget is in balance for the first time in decades. Inflation has been slashed. Foreign investment into Argentina has boomed along with the Argentine stock market. And the economy has emerged from a long painful recession into growth mode. Doug Barbieri, a Libertarian Counterpoint panelist who actually moved to Argentina has been there while all this took place and will shortly be giving us a boots on the ground description of how it all played out.

Sweden has scrapped their commitment to the 2030 global climate directives.

Voters lost faith in the FBI and other law enforcement organizations when it became clear that crime's of corruption by Hunter Biden while his Dad was Vice President were being ignored and covered up.

Voters lost faith in elite controlled healthcare bureaucracies like the CDC when it became abundantly clear that they were propagating bald faced lies about COVID, from its alleged severity, to its origin, to the efficacy of masks and vaccines, to the effectiveness and fairness of the lockdowns and more. Some heard that COVID fatalities in Africa with its 20 percent vaccination rate were no worse than in the West with vaccination rates nearing 100 percent in some countries.

Voters lost faith in the Climate scare complex when the predictions of polar ice cap disappearance, polar bear extinction and flooding coastal cities failed to materialize even decades after when they were predicted by the likes of Al Gore and John Kerry.

Voters lost confidence in government bean counters when they were told that inflation was under control even as it surged to 9 percent and when election year job gains turned into job losses after the figures were revised, conveniently after the election.

In France President Emmanuel Macron was compelled to call snap elections where the National Rally Party won more than twice as many votes as Macron's Central Alliance.

In Italy Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy won a majority of the Italian Parliament.

In Hungary, Victor Orban's Fidesz Party won a parliamentary majority.

The Law and Justice Party won a majority in Poland.

And in the United States, the candidate with the felony convictions and civil lawsuit losses, not to mention nearly unanimous disparagement by the elite controlled corporate media, Donald J. Trump, won a second nonconsecutive term as president in spite of everything the elites could throw at him.

What's interesting from a libertarian perspective is that legacy media, which is, of course, totally controlled by the entrenched elites are loudly bemoaning these electoral results as a takeover by the far right. They are not. The libertarian Milei is particularly not a man of the right. And the rest of them ran on some libertarian issues, less regulation and government discrimination in the form of DEI policies among them. They also ran on economically illiterate populist issues like the scourge of immigration. But a significant portion of that anti-immigration fear is based on the reality that the entrenched elites have long been encouraging immigration as a way of padding their own party's voter rolls.

Worldwide, the people have said loudly and clearly to the established elites and their media mouthpieces, we don't trust you, we don't like you and we will elect anyone who opposes you.

The danger is that the newly elected will wimp out on the reasons they were elected and succumb to the monetary and prestige temptations of becoming part of the establishment elite... and ultimately changing nothing. The only leader who seems willing to break that mold is Milei in Argentina. Hopefully others will follow his example. That's this week's Report From the Fields. I'm Richard Fields. See you again next week.

Hi, this is Richard Fields with this week's Report From the Fields. As longtime viewers of this show know, I am no fan of President-elect Trump...or lame duck President Biden. Trump ran on a couple of really simple-minded and stupid planks. Rounding up millions of immigrants and sending them back to their countries of origin. And enacting tariffs so extreme that they would pretty much end U.S. participation in international trade. And to the extent they didn't do that they would effectively be a national sales tax on top of the income tax and inflation which functions as a tax.

But he is doing a couple of things right. He's not appointing members of the deep state who destroyed his first term from within. He's appointing avowed deep state destroyers like Tulsi Gabbard to Director of National Intelligence and Kash Patel as FBI Director.

But his most inspired move is to appoint quasi-libertarians Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami to the Department of Government efficiency or DOGE. And DOGE isn't even a real government agency. Their mission is to find regulations of little utility that can be rolled back or eliminated either by executive order or by congressional action and then fire all the regulators that enforce those now nonexistent regulations. The Supreme Court getting rid of Chevron deference (where the regulators were all assumed to be experts who must be deferred to) will actually put this effort in the realm of the possible. Unlike the Grace Commission under Reagan which made lots of good recommendations which were largely ignored. Both Trump and Musk have been talking to Argentina's Javier Milei who has been successfully taking a chainsaw to Argentina's bureaucratic class for a year now.

But the deep state and the administrative state are fighting back. They're trying to get as many judges confirmed as they can while the Democrats still control the Senate. They're sending every missile, tank, artillery shell and bullet they can scrounge up to Ukraine before Trump takes office. They're signing contracts right and left to put boondoggles in place under the terms of the Inflation Reduction Act so that Trump will be contractually bound to spend the money. And, by the way, the Inflation Reduction Act has little to do with inflation. It's mostly a framework for spending stupendous amounts of money on green energy projects of dubious utility. During the last few weeks of Trump's first term he issued an executive order creating Schedule F federal employees who would be exempt from civil service job protections. Biden rescinded it. Putting it back in place could take a long time.

Even some states are getting involved. California Governor Newsome has convened a special session of the state legislature to authorize a $25 million legal defense fund. Probably to prevent a loss of federal funds coming to California courtesy of Biden and the Democrats.

Will DOGE have an impact on wasteful federal spending, even save the $2 trillion a year that Musk is projecting. Or will the Empire successfully strike back? We'll be watching from the cheap seats. I'm Richard Fields and that's this week's Report From the Fields. See you again next week.

Hi, this is Richard Fields with this week's Report From the Fields. Hopefully this won't be the last Report From the Fields. I say that because in my 77 year lifetime, I have never seen humanity this close to WWIII. And a nuclear WWIII could conceivably mean the end of the human race itself. I don't remember seeing this many cold wars simmering and hot wars escalating simultaneously in my lifetime.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, accusing opposition parties of sympathising with Communist North Korea. The Korean Parliament lifted the declaration and police carried out the wishes of Parliament. Luckily President Yoon saw the light and repealed his martial law edict.
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In the country of Georgia, which used to be part of the Soviet Union, non-government organizations are staging violent protests against the elected Russia aligned Georgian Dream Party because of the Dream Party's slow-walking of entry into the European Union. It appears to be a similar scenario to the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine which overthrew the elected Russia aligned government in favor of a government interested in joining NATO. The Maidan revolution was also run by NGOs financed in part by the CIA. We are now seeing what that resulted in.

In the Middle East Israel is conducting a very hot war against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Both are backed and supplied with arms by Iran. Meanwhile the Houthis, also backed by Iran, are effectively shutting down shipping in the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. The U.S.' Biden administration cannot seem to figure out what side it's on. It's simultaneously supplying Israel with arms and telling them to be nicer to the civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. It seems not to have even considered not taking a side. In the same neighborhood, a hot war continues between the government and rebels in Sudan. And rebels in Syria have captured Aleppo, the largest city in Syria. Syria is allied with Russia.

All this is mostly background noise to what is happening in Ukraine. So far..... I mentioned the Maidan Revolution. That's when the U.S. reneged on its promise not to invite Ukraine to join NATO. Ukraine (and Georgia) border Russia. So fomenting a coup so we could invite them to join NATO, a military alliance between western European countries and the U.S., is akin to the Soviets putting nuclear missiles in Cuba back in the 60s. We put an end to that. Russia is putting an end to Ukraine being in NATO.

In the final days of the Biden administration, Biden, or given Biden's compromised mental faculties, his advisors are dramatically escalating the war in Ukraine. We supplied ATACMS missiles to Ukraine capable of penetrating 190 miles into Russia. They were used..... We gave them landmines and cluster bombs. That's in addition to artillery, anti-armor systems, tanks and drones. The Biden administration is speeding up the delivery of all kinds of weapons in the fear that the incoming Trump administration will put a stop to it. In doing so, we are critically depleting our own stores of weapons and ammunition with limited manufacturing facilities to replace them quickly. Putin has responded with his own escalation. He fired a hypersonic Oresnik missile into Dnipro causing huge kinetic damage. It is a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. Its mach 11 speed probably makes it invulnerable to our anti-missile defense systems. Putin threatened to use it against Warsaw, London, Paris and other NATO capitals if NATO countries keep escalating their assistance to Ukraine. He' s also brought in North Korean troops as cannon fodder.

Meanwhile China is biding its time and making bellicose noises about reclaiming sovereignty over Taiwan. We did nothing when they took over Hong Kong. Will we make good on promises to protect Taiwan? If so, our vaunted aircraft carriers may be sitting ducks for hypersonic missile attacks.

The smart thing to do would be for the U.S. to recognise that its days of empire are over, relinquish our delusions and become a peaceful nation like Italy, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal and all the other empires who are no more.Much better than the possible alternative of nuclear armageddon. That's this week's Report From the Fields. I'm Richard Fields. See you again next week.

Governments are made up of people. Sometimes the people who run the government are well-intentioned. Hoping to be of useful service to their fellow citizens. But sometimes the people who gravitate toward government, both in elected and appointed positions are doing so for their own benefit. Being able to legally exercise power over other people. Or they come to do good and do very, very well. Through the myriad opportunities for graft, corruption and secure, well-paying political patronage jobs.