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Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

On April 30, 1934, under pressure from Italian-American lobby groups, the United States Congress passed a law enshrining Columbus Day as a national holiday.

President Franklin Roosevelt quickly signed the bill into law, and the very first Columbus Day was celebrated in October of that year.

Undoubtedly people had a different view of the world back then… and a different set of values.

Few cared about the plight of the indigenous who were wiped out as a result of European conquest.

Even just a few decades ago when I was a kid in elementary school, I remember learning that ‘Columbus discovered America’. There was no discussion of genocide.

It wasn’t until I was a sophomore at West Point that I picked up Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States (and then Columbus’s own diaries) and started reading about the mass-extermination of entire tribes.

Columbus himself wrote about his first encounter with the extremely peaceful and welcoming Arawak Indians of the Bahama Islands:

“They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron… They would make fine servants… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

And so he did.

“I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.”

Columbus had already written back to his investors in Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, that the Caribbean islands possessed “great mines of gold.”

It was all lies. Columbus was desperately attempting to justify their investment.

In Haiti, Columbus ordered the natives to bring him all of their gold. But there was hardly an ounce of gold anywhere on the island. So Columbus had them slaughtered. Within two years, 250,000 were dead.

Now, this letter isn’t intended to rail against Columbus. Point is, I never learned any of this information in school. Decades ago, no one really did.

But today, people are starting to be aware of what Columbus did. And our values are vastly different today than they were in 1937. Or in 1492.

Decades ago… and certainly hundreds of years ago… the idea of a ‘superior race’ still prevailed, endowed by their creator with the right to subjugate all inferior races.

This readily-accepted belief was the pretext of slavery and genocide.

Even as recently as the early 1900s, there were entire fields of ‘science’ devoted to studying the technical differences among various races and drawing data-driven conclusions about superiority.

Phrenologists, for example, would take precise measurements of people’s skulls– the circumference of the head, the ratio of forehead to eyebrow measurements, etc.– and deduce the intellectual capacity and character traits of entire races.

Jews could not be trusted. Blacks and Asians were inferior. These assertions were based on ‘scientific evidence’, even in nations like Sweden, the United Kingdom, and United States.

Today we’re obviously more advanced than our ancestors were. We know that their science was complete bullshit, and our values are totally different.

There are entire movements now (particularly among university students) to remove statues, rename buildings, and re-designate holidays.

Frankly this is a pretty slippery slope. If we judge everyone throughout history based on our values today, we’ll never stop tearing down monuments.

Even someone as forward-thinking as Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. And that’s a LOT of elementary schools to rename.

More importantly, there will come a time in the future when our own descendants judge us harshly for our short-sighted values.

Fortunately we no longer have faux-scientists today writing dissertations about racial superiority.

But we do have entire fields of ‘science’ that will truly bewilder future historians. Economics is one of them.

Our society awards some of its most distinguished prizes for intellectual achievement to economists who tell us that the path to prosperity is to print money, raise taxes, and go into debt.

Economists tell us that we can spend our way out of recession, borrow our way out of debt, and that there will never be any consequences from conjuring trillions of units of paper currency out of thin air.

They created a central banking system whereby an unelected committee of economists possesses nearly totalitarian control of the money supply… and hence the power to influence the price of EVERYTHING– food, fuel, housing, utilities, financial markets, etc.

Economists have managed to convince the world that inflation, i.e. rising prices, is actually a GOOD thing… and that prices quadrupling and quintupling during the average person’s lifespan is ‘normal’.

They’ve also succeeded in making policy-makers terrified of deflation (falling prices) even though just about any rational individual would naturally prefer falling (or at least stable) prices to rising prices.

Economists make the most ridiculous assertions, like “The debt doesn’t matter because we owe it to ourselves…” as if it’s perfectly acceptable for the US government to default on its citizens.

Or that the US economy is so strong because the American consumer spends so much money, i.e. consumption (and not production) drives prosperity.

The public believes all this nonsense because the ‘scientists’ say it’s true.

The scientists also come up with fuzzy mathematics to support their assertions. Last Friday, for example, the Labor Department reported that the US economy lost 33,000 jobs in September.

Yet miraculously the unemployment rate actually declined, i.e. fewer people are unemployed despite there being fewer jobs in the economy.

None of this makes any sense. Fewer jobs means lower unemployment. Spend more money. Print more money. Borrow more money. Debt is wealth. Consumption is prosperity.

All of this is based on ‘science’.

We may rightfully take umbrage with the values and ideas of our ancestors.

But it’s worth turning that mirror on ourselves and examining our own beliefs… for there will undoubtedly come a time when our own descendants wonder how we could have been so foolish.

Do you have a Plan B?

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A few weeks ago we noted that New York’s ‘smart money’ at a variety of U.S. banking institutions were tripping over each other to underwrite dividend recaps for owners of expensive commercial real estate projects just as buyers of those properties suddenly dried up completely (see: NYC Commercial Real Estate Sales Plunge Over 50% As Owners Lever Up In The Absence Of Buyers).  But we’re sure it was nothing…the 27-year-old analysts leading those bank deals, fully syndicated deals in which their respective employers will retain no risk by the way, probably just know more about the commercial real estate market than those who count themselves among the list of former prospective buyers.

Still, it does seem odd that the commercial real estate market in NYC is collapsing at the same time that residential foreclosures are surging to levels not seen since the 2009 crisis.  As Property Shark points out today, foreclosures across NYC surged 79% YoY in Q3 2017, to 859, and remain at the highest levels since the ‘great recession.’

All 5 boroughs registered increases in the number of homes scheduled for auction, though Staten Island, the Bronx, and Brooklyn saw numbers skyrocket compared to Q3 2016, up 264%, 145% and 118%, respectively.

Meanwhile, the eastern neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx seem to be the most impacted as Staten Island foreclosures are rising fairly uniformly.

And here is a more in-depth look at the individual boroughs…

Bronx:

A record-high number of homes were scheduled for auction in Q3 2017, representing a 145% increase compared to Q3 2016. The number of cases in the Bronx kept relatively at the same levels for the past quarters with a spike in Q2 2016 but otherwise hovering around 100 homes per quarter or even lower than that. Back in the second quarter, the Bronx was the only borough that recorded a year-over-year decrease in foreclosure activity. The situation changed drastically in Q3 2017 when 247 homes were scheduled for the first time.

 

Zip code 10469 had the highest number of new foreclosures: 32 homes were scheduled here in Q3 2017. Not far behind, zip codes 10462, 10473, 10466, and 10465 all had close to 30 new cases each, showing a concentration of foreclosure activity in the eastern half of the borough. The graph below captures the evolution in the number of cases and the spike recorded this previous quarter.

Brooklyn:

While compared to the previous quarter’s count of 264 homes scheduled for auction, Q3 2017 seems to have brought some respite for Brooklyn, the number of homes headed for auction is still high. Q3 2017 brought a 118% year-over-year jump, given that 205 homes were headed for the auction block. When looking at Q3 2016, only 94 new foreclosures were recorded in the borough.

 

Zip code 11236, covering Canarsie, had the most cases filed – 31 homeowners here saw their homes scheduled to be auctioned in Q3 2017. East NY, Canarsie, and the Flatlands are usually the scene for the highest number of cases in Brooklyn, but this time we noticed increases in Southern Brooklyn zip codes as well. For example, in 11229 there were only 4 first-time foreclosures in Q3 2016, compared to 15 in Q3 2017. Bed-Stuy’s 11233 also recorded a jump in cases from 2 in Q3 2016 to 10 in Q3 2017.

 

The first three quarters of 2017 were particularly harsh for Brooklyn homeowners, especially compared to the numbers we tracked over the past years. While in 2016 there were a total of 410 homes scheduled for auction in the borough, with only 3 quarters elapsed from 2017, there have already been 637 new foreclosures. Check out the graph below for a detailed, by-quarter evolution of first-time foreclosures in Brooklyn.

Staten Island:

Historically, Staten Island had low numbers of homes heading for the auction block, but the second quarter of 2017 brought a record-high number: 105 first-time foreclosures were scheduled. In Q3 2017, the number went down 24% quarter-over-quarter, but it was up 246% year-over-year. That’s also due to the fact that Q3 2016 only had 22 cases, which was low even for what we’re used to seeing each quarter in Staten Island.

Queens:

Back in Q3 2016, Queens accounted for almost half of new foreclosure cases in NYC, as 227 of the 481 new foreclosures in the city were recorded in Queens . The first two quarters of 2017 brought a high number of cases with a peak in Q2. In the third quarter of 2017, however, foreclosures in Queens dropped 26% quarter-over-quarter and settled in at 288 cases.

 

Though still up 27% compared to Q3 2016, Queens is now far from having around half of all NYC cases, mainly as a result of the increases recorded in Brooklyn and the Bronx. In Q3 2017, the number of new foreclosures in each of the two boroughs was close to reaching the one recorded in Queens.

 

Queens also used to be home to the top zip code by number of foreclosures – Jamaica’s 11434 consistently had a high number of cases each quarter. This time, there were 29 first-time foreclosures in 11434, fewer than the numbers recorded in the top zip codes for both Brooklyn and the Bronx.

 

Not surprisingly, the only folks that haven’t experienced a surge in foreclosures are the bankers and hedgies living in Manhattan who continue to benefit from bubbly markets growing bubblier by the day…at least for now.

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As US forces prepare to join their South Korean partners for yet another round of the military exercises that North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un is so fond of, the US has sent a nuclear-powered sub to participate.

The nuclear-powered submarine Michigan will arrive in the Korean port city of Busan, situated in the southern part of the country, by the end of the week, according to Bloomberg, which cited local media reports.

The sub will conduct joint drills with the US aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan in the waters off the peninsula next week.

With North Korea celebrating the founding of the country's ruling Communist Party on Oct. 10, US and South Korean defense officials are anticipating that the country could launch another provocative missile test as soon as tonight.

The US dispatched the USS Ronald Reagan to South Korea last month after North Korea twice fired IRBMs over the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.

According to a map showing the locations of US Naval assets (the ones that've been publicly, at least) created by Stratfor, the USS Ronald Reagan is presently making a scheduled refueling stop in Hong Kong but is expected to return to the peninsula shortly.

The escalation – which conjures up memories of the time Trump revealed that he'd ordered three nuclear subs to Korea, only for it to be revealed that they were actually traveling in the opposite direction – comes as the president has stepped up his rhetoric against the North, recently offering a string of cryptic threats about a coming "storm", though he has so far refused to elaborate.

Earlier Monday, Defense Secretary James Mattis said that while the US is trying to force North Korea to halt its nuclear weapons program through diplomacy and economic pressure, soldiers must be prepared to fight if negotiations fail and things go south, Trump seems to have suggested they will.

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Authored by Andrew Napolitano via LewRockwell.com,

Here we go again. The United States has been rattled to the core by an unspeakable act of evil perpetrated by a hater of humanity. A quiet, wealthy loner rented a hotel suite in Las Vegas, armed it with shooting platforms and automatic weapons, knocked out two of the windows, and shot at innocents 32 floors below. Fifty-nine people were murdered, and 527 were injured.

The killer used rifles that he purchased legally and altered illegally. He effectively transformed several rifles that emit one round per trigger pull and present the next round in the barrel for immediate use (semiautomatics) into rifles that emit rounds continuously when the trigger is pulled — hundreds of rounds per minute (automatics). Though some automatic rifles that were manufactured before 1986 can lawfully be purchased today with an onerous federal permit, automatic weapons generally have been unlawful in the United States since 1934. Even the police and the military are not permitted to use them here.

I present this brief summary of the recent tragedy and the implicated gun laws to address the issue of whether the government can keep us safe.

Those who fought the Revolution and wrote the Constitution knew that the government cannot keep us safe. Because they used violence against the king and his soldiers to secede from Great Britain, they recognized that all people have a natural right to use a weapon of contemporary technological capabilities to protect themselves and their liberty and property. They sought to assure the exercise of this right by enacting the now well-known Second Amendment, which prohibits the government from infringing upon the right to keep and bear arms.

When the Supreme Court interpreted this right in 2008 and 2010, it referred to the right to keep and bear arms as pre-political. “Pre-political” means that the right pre-existed the government. It is a secular term for a fundamental, or natural, right. A natural right is one that stems from our humanity — such as freedom of thought, speech, religion, self-defense, privacy, travel, etc. It does not come from the government, and it exists in the absence of government.

The recognition of a right as fundamental or natural or pre-political is not a mere academic exercise. This is so because rights in this category cannot be abrogated by the popular will. Stated differently, just as your right to think as you wish and say what you think cannot be interfered with or taken away in America by legislation, so, too, your right to own, carry and use arms of the same sophistication as are generally available to bad guys and to government officials cannot be interfered with or taken away by legislation. That is at least the modern theory of the Second Amendment.

Notwithstanding the oath that all in government have taken to uphold the Constitution, many in government reject the Second Amendment. Their enjoyment of power and love of office rank higher in their hearts and minds than does their constitutionally required fidelity to the protection of personal freedoms. They think the government can right any wrong and protect us from any evil and acquire for us any good just to keep us safe, even if constitutional norms are violated in doing so.

Can the government keep us safe? In a word, no.

This is not a novel or arcane observation but rather a rational conclusion from knowing history and everyday life. In Europe, where the right to keep and bear arms is nearly nonexistent for those outside government, killers strike with bombs and knives and trucks. In America, killers use guns and only stop when they are killed by law-abiding civilians or by the police.

The answer to government failure is a candid recognition that in a free society – one in which we are all free to come and go as we see fit without government inquiry or interference – we must be prepared for these tragedies.

We must keep ourselves safe, as well as those whom we invite onto our properties.

Surely, if the president of the United States were to have appeared at the concert venue in Las Vegas to address the crowd, the Las Vegas killer would never have succeeded in bringing his arsenal to his hotel room. Government always protects its own. Shouldn’t landowners who invite the public to their properties do the same?

Add to government’s incompetence its useless intrusive omnipresence. In present-day America, the National Security Agency — the federal government’s domestic spying agency — captures in real time the contents of every telephone call, email and text message, as well as all data sent over fiber-optic cables everywhere in the U.S. Thus, whatever electronic communications the Las Vegas killer participated in prior to his murders are in the possession of the federal government.

Mass surveillance is expressly prohibited by the Fourth Amendment, but the government does it nevertheless. It claims it does so to keep us safe. Yet this exquisite constitutional violation results in too much information for the feds to examine in a timely manner. That’s why the evidence of these massacres – from Sandy Hook to Boston to Orlando to San Bernardino to Las Vegas – is always discovered too late. At this writing, the government has yet to reveal what it knew about the Las Vegas killer’s plans before he executed them and executed innocents.

This leaves us in a very precarious position today.

The government cannot keep us safe, but it claims that it can. It wants to interfere with our natural rights to self-defense and to privacy, but whenever it does so, it keeps us less safe. And in whatever arena it keeps us less safe and falsely fosters the impression that we are safe, we become less free.

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Conjuring up images of Hillary and her team bashing Blackberry phones with hammers, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Mirando revealed in a court hearing Friday that embattled Congressional IT staffer Imran Awan apparently wiped his cell phone clean just hours before being arrested by the FBI at Dulles airport while attempting to flee to Pakistan.  As Forbes points out this morning, this new information came out in a hearing in which Awan’s attorney argued that his curfew should be lifted and his ankle bracelet removed.

Imran Awan, the IT professional Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) kept on her congressional payroll long after it became known he was under investigation by the Capitol Police, wiped his phone hours before he was arrested last July.

 

But we are just starting to learn about this case. This is new revelation that Awan wiped his phone just before he attempted to fly away to Pakistan came out last Friday when Awan appeared in court.

 

Awan’s attorney, Chris Gowen, argued that Awan should have his curfew lifted and that the tracking device on his ankle should be removed.

 

This prompted Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Mirando to say that when Imran was arrested at Dulles International Airport a cellphone found on him “had been wiped clean just a few hours before.”

Awan’s attorney, and long-time Clinton employee (see: Arrested DNC Staffer Awan Retains Long-Time Clinton Associate For Legal Help), Chris Gowen tried to argue that Awan’s phone was blank because he had just purchased it while seemingly hoping that the FBI had simply overlooked the “.obliterate file” that was created when the phone was intentionally wiped clean. 

Gowen tried to counter this by telling the judge: “Awan had recently bought the phone, so of course it didn’t have any data on it.”

 

But Mirando countered by saying the FBI found that the phone had been wiped on purpose. A time stamp on the iPhone indicated it had been wiped at 6:30 p.m. that evening (Awan was arrested around 10 p.m.). Awan also had a laptop on him, but one of the few things on the computer was a resume. Mirando used this and other details—such as that the Awan’s quickly sold many of their Virginia properties—to explain that Imran had no intention of returning.

 

The iPhone Awan was carrying has a feature built in that allows someone to wipe it before they sell it. Investigators were nevertheless able to determine when it was wiped because the phone created a “.obliterated” file with a time stamp.

 

There are some cases where an iPhone won’t create a .obliterated file that can be easily found, but there are other techniques used by investigators to uncover and see when an iPhone was wiped.

 

Awan might be a savvy former IT professional, but in this case the FBI was able to see that he purposely deleted data before showing up for his flight to Pakistan. Awan knew his wife had been detained temporarily at the airport and questioned, so he had reason to believe the same would happen to him.

Shockingly, Gowen didn’t use his former employer’s ‘like with a cloth’ defense which proved so effective for Hillary…

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Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

The following is a random assortment of headlines that we may see in the future.

However, they’re not fanciful; they’re based upon historical, political actions taken by past empires when they were in decline.

The wording, however, has been modernised to reflect current media presentation.

“President Announces Executive Order to Keep US Dollars at Home”

The accompanying article then goes on to describe that a financial crisis could be on the horizon, as US dollars are exiting the country. This is due to those people who are retired and who receive Social Security courtesy of the government but live overseas, where they spend America’s money. In order to ensure that a crisis doesn’t occur, the president declares that those who “threaten the country’s solvency” in this way will have their cheques ceased until they return to US soil, so that they can reinvest in the Greater Good of all their countrymen.

 

“FBI Warnings Come to Pass—Domestic Terrorist Attacks in Five States. President Announces Emergency Measures”

Shootings occur in several states, all within a brief time period. The president orders martial law, citing the already established authorization under the Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the suspension of habeas corpus. Although it’s initially announced as a temporary emergency measure, the country becomes a permanent police state.

 

“Recent Domestic Terrorism Incidents Linked to Inadequate Control of International Travel”

The accompanying article describes what FBI and CIA intel has “revealed”—that domestic terrorists travel in and out of the country at will and that, therefore, terrorist incidents could have been prevented if international travel were curtailed.

Most people today would agree that governments are becoming more restrictive and many of them are fearful that, in the future, there’s a danger that their liberties will be increasingly removed – a development they say they wouldn’t accept, were it to happen.

Yet, each time another liberty is impaired or removed, these same people shrug their shoulders and accept that the latest loss of liberty is “necessary” for the safety of all.

Why does this occur?

Well, each time a government seeks to curtail a freedom, the spin doctors devise a plausible explanation that suggests that the new restriction is being imposed for the good of the public.

This technique has worked well throughout history. Whenever a government chooses to oppress its people beyond the level that they’d normally accept, one of the most popular solutions is to capitalise on an existing event that instils fear in the people. If no such event occurs, it’s created, often as a false-flag incident—one where the government itself stages a threat to the security of the people, blames it on others, then offers to remove the threat by removing freedoms.

As John Adams said on many occasions, “Those who trade liberty for security have neither.” Quite so.

Whenever a country implements capital controls, migration controls, or any other significant loss of freedom, it’s a sure bet that that government is slipping in its ability to hold on to the customary cooperation of its people. Any government that’s steadily robbed its people of their ambition and/or prosperity finds that, at some point, those people begin to vote with their feet. They tend to first move their money to a jurisdiction that’s less restrictive. At some point, they tend to move themselves to a jurisdiction that allows them greater freedom and opportunity.

The US was built upon this principle. Originally, colonists who were prepared to be hard-working and self-reliant left England, Holland, Germany, etc., willing to accept the hardships of frontier life for the hope of greater self-determination. Later, in the 19th century, millions of similarly minded people from all over Europe migrated west for the same reason. These people became the backbone of the industrial revolution, turning the US into the world’s most productive nation.

But, today, the shoe is clearly on the other foot. America has become grossly over-regulated and both money and people are quietly migrating elsewhere. As this trend becomes more prominent, we shall surely see greater restrictions on such people, who have inherited the pioneering spirit and are now seeking other countries where there’s greater opportunity for self-determination.

Again, none of the above is anything new. This scenario has played itself out time and again, throughout history. And, always, there have been warning signs, if the people were able to read them.

Invariably, the justification of greater restrictions, such as in the above hypothetical headlines, means the removal of freedoms. In every case, the spin used is that the removal is for “the greater good.”

Morris and Linda Tannehill, in The Market for Liberty, phrased it this way:

“Enslaving men ‘for the good of society’ is one of the most subtle and widespread forms of slavery.”

And again, historically, such restrictions are typically a last-ditch effort on the part of a declining country to trap their citizens like sheep in a pen, to be available for a final shearing before the collapse. Ayn Rand described it as follows:

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

Should we at some point in the near future see headlines like those above, we would be wise to take it as a warning (if we have any vision) that dramatically increased controls are, in fact, the death-knell of freedom.

The choice then will be whether to accept subjugation or vote with our feet.

This by no means suggests a change in our ideals. On the contrary, it means making a move in order to continue to live by our ideals, as exemplified in this final quote, from Thomas Paine:

“My country is wherever liberty lives.”

(Mister Paine was born in England, but moved to America in 1774 and never regretted his flight to freedom.)

Throughout history, there have always been countries that were in decline at the same time as there were countries that were opening up. The present time is no different. The principle remains the same; only the names of the countries change.

*  *  *

Wealth confiscation and shrinking personal liberty are virtually inevitable as an economy collapses. They go hand in hand. That’s why we put together the Guide to Surviving and Thriving During an Economic Collapse for our readers. Click here to download your free PDF copy now.

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Henry Kaufman, the former chief economist of Salomon Brothers in the 70’s and 80’s who earned the moniker of “Dr. Doom” for his frequent criticisms of the Fed’s interest rate policies, has some advice for President Trump on how to pick the next Fed Chair: find someone willing to break up the “too big to fail” banks.

“You’ve got to be small enough to fail” without that failure causing problems that cascade through the financial system, Kaufman said in the question-and-answer session of an Economic Club of New York breakfast on Oct. 5 at the imposing University Club on Fifth Avenue. As it is now, Kaufman said, “We are trying to preserve conglomeration.”

 

 It’s more important for the next Fed chief to have a good understanding of how markets work than it is to own a Ph.D. in economics or to have been a business titan, Kaufman said.

 

William McChesney Martin, who ran the Fed from 1951 to 1970, never earned a graduate degree in economics. But he “turned in a good performance” in overseeing a period of healthy economic growth, Kaufman said. In contrast, he said, the two Fed chiefs who followed Martin allowed high inflation to become embedded in the U.S. economy in the 1970s. The first, Arthur Burns, was a distinguished Ph.D. economist from Columbia University. The second, G. William Miller, came to the Fed from Textron Inc., where he was chief executive officer.

Of course, even though Kaufman is credited with accurately calling the market bottom on August 17, 1982, he has proven on several occasions that he doesn’t quite always get things right.  He invested some of his personal wealth with Bernie Madoff, which ultimately turned out to be one of the biggest ponzi schemes in American history, and was the chairman of the Lehman board’s finance and risk committee before the bank collapsed into bankruptcy in 2008…not a great track record of late.

That said, Kaufman seems to have learned from those mistakes after leaving the Economic Club of New York with the following uplifting thought: “There will be another financial crisis. And it will pop out. And we’ll all say, ‘How did it happen?’”

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Authored by Ryan McMaken via Mises Canada,

Columbus Day this year brought with it the usual acrimony, and this Salon article hit the usual talking points by declaring European settlement of the Americas to be “the most massive act of genocide” in world history.

Salon quotes historian David Stannard who writes:

“[O]n average, for every 20 natives alive at the moment of European contact — when the lands of the Americas teemed with numerous tens of millions of people — only one stood in their place when the bloodbath was over.”

Figures like these remain hotly debated, but few disagree that, ultimately, the number of natives was extremely small when compared to the overall size of the Americas.

In other words, the number of people relative to the amount of natural resources in the New World was tiny, and population density in the Americas continues to be low by global standards even today.

While many pundits and historians commonly debate the violent conflicts between tribes and settlers in the popular media, we hear far less from scholars who take a serious look at the economic implications of the relatively underpopulated lands in the Americas.

The Americas are Different

There is a growing scholarship on the economic history of the Americas and on so-called “frontier states.”

Over the past century, scholars have noted that frontier regions in places like the Americas, Australia, and Eastern Russia are, in fact, different economically, politically, and sociologically from other parts of the world where the local ethnic population has — in many cases — occupied the lands for centuries.

This is not the case in the Americas where new groups of people settled on lands once held by completely different groups with different customs, economic practices, and institutions. The movement of peoples onto frontier lands, and the exploitation of natural resources there, has shaped the economic and political realities of today.

This scholarship on frontier settlement arguably began with Frederick Jackson Turner and his “Turner Thesis,” which was first advanced in 1893.

Turner focused primarily on the experience of the United States, but Walter Prescott Webb would attempt to develop these ideas into a more universally applicable set of ideas in his 1951 book The Great Frontier. For Webb, “the great frontier” included not just North America, but also Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. (Later historians would add Eastern Russia to this list.)

Since then, most historians working on the issues of frontier history have attempted to either build upon the work of Webb and Turner, or to refute them. In either case, however, there is a recognition that frontier states are something different, and that the high period of frontier settlement, from 1500 to 1900, revolutionized the global economy and global demographics.

What is a Frontier State?

Frontier states are – to use a definition employed by political scientist Roberto Foa – “countries that in recent centuries have extended rule over new territories adjacent to their core regions.”

Economist Edward Barbier, in his book, Scarcity and Frontiers, adds that these regions are also characterized by a small labor force relative to the amount of land and natural resources available. That is, frontier areas are notable for experiencing labor shortages which lead to a wide variety of political and demographic outcomes.

Immigration and Slavery

Consider the problem a land owner faces in a frontier setting. He or she sees abundant farm land for crops, or mountain lands for mining. At the same time, there are few people in the area to plant and harvest the crops, or dig the mines. As noted by many historians of the native tribes, of course, the indigenous population had already been decimated by disease and military conflict. Unlike the situation in Africa, India, and East Asia, settlements in the Americas found themselves with large tracts of land inhabited by few people.

The solution to this economic problem, of course, is to bring in more abundant labor. This can be done through several means. First, of all, an owner (whether the owner be a private party or a state organization) can convince settlers to voluntarily move to a new region. A variety of different strategies have been employed in the New World in this regard. In early decades, North American colonies often relied on indentures servants who were held to a period of servitude in exchange for the cost of transporting the immigrant to the New World. The laborer, of course, was drawn by the prospect of obtaining freedom at the end of the contracted period. Later, the US used the Homestead Acts and land-sales schemes to attract settlers to frontier lands. Canada employed similar tactics. In Argentina, on the other hand, the Argentinian state actively subsidized the migration of immigrants from Italy to South America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Throughout the Americas, settlers relocated from Europe in a search for relatively cheap lands or as a hoped escape from the social and economic ailments of the Old World.

Today, surnames throughout the Americas remind us of the pan-European flavor of immigration in the region. One need only peruse a list of Latin American heads of state to see names such as Michelle Bachelet, Pedro Kuczynski, Cristina Kirchner, Vicente Fox, and others.

Nor was voluntary migration limited to Europeans. By the 19th century, Chinese laborers attempted to take advantage of labor shortages in California, and Japanese laborers did the same in California, Brazil, and Peru. As slaves were emancipated in Cuba, tens of thousands of Chinese workers were imported to replace them.

In many cases, though, immigration was not sufficient to bring down wages to a level preferred by owners and their government allies. Thus, the politically powerful turned to slavery instead. Naturally, imported slave labor would depress wages for both the slaves themselves and for the existing free population that preceded the slaves. This tactic was especially useful in cases where manual labor was particularly difficult, as in the case of the sugarcane fields of the Caribbean or the cotton plantations of the American South. The greatest importer of slaves, however, was Brazil where slaves would, for a time, greatly outnumber the European-descended population.

What began as a basic labor-shortage “solution” would evolve over time into a major sociological and political issue that colors politics to this day. And, contrary to what many naïve American leftists seem to think, the issue of slavery and racial politics is anything but unique to the United States. It is a characteristic of frontier states across the globe. Moreover, we might note slavery in the Americas was hardly attributable to the settlers being especially inhumane in their practices relative to other societies at the time. What was different in the Americas was this: the relative abundance of land and capital relative to labor made slavery pay much more relative to other parts of the world. There’s a reason the Spanish home country abolished slavery decades before slavery was abolished in Cuba. It simply paid more in the Caribbean.

Effects on Europe

The new lands themselves weren’t the only areas affected, of course. As Webb noted, the Europeans were “transformed” by the settlement of these new lands. This became all the more obvious as Western Europe’s population began to explode in the Early Modern period and into the 19th century. The abundance of land in the Americas created an easy “solution” for European politicians who could simply encourage (either through exhortation or financial subsidization) troublesome social classes to emigrate across the ocean. The British actively shipped criminals to their colonies across the sea, and certainly the large scale movement of laborers from desperately poor places — like southern Italy and Ireland during the 19th century — transformed the demographic and political realities of those regions.

Even in the face of imported slave labor, the relatively low density of workers in the New World allowed for a constant re-adjustment of wages in both Europe and the colonies as the population exodus to the New World increased workers scarcity — and therefore wages — back in the countries of origin.

Meanwhile, those who remained in Europe took advantage of the vast raw materials found in the Americas, including the region’s many fisheries, mining operations, and plantations.

Implications for Today

We continue to see the effects of the New World’s frontier origins in modern politics. Given the relatively recent histories of their populations, the social dynamics of the Americas are quite different from that of Europe.

In spite of recent claims that Europe is being erased by immigration from the Near East and Africa, the fact is that Europe remains far more culturally uniform than is usually the case in any modern post-frontier state. While the United States is, for example, 70-percent European in origin, most European countries remain at least 90 percent “white.” Not even Canada, which is is much more “European” than the US — with only 19 percent of its population listed as “visible minority” — comes close to the sort of cultural uniformity that is today common in the nation states of Europe.

Latin America, of course, is far more diverse still, with Brazil, for example, reporting less than 40 percent of its population as being primarily of European ancestry. The legacy of imported slaves and surviving indigenous populations remains an undeniable factor in Brazilian politics today. Only Russia — itself a recent frontier state — comes close to experiencing a similar situation in ethnic demographics.

Thus, it is “cute” when Europeans lecture Americans (including Latin Americans) about “tolerance” and “openness” when history suggests that it is the denizens of the New World who know far more about such things than the Europeans who stayed home and attempted to exploit those who made the hard journey to frontier lands. It was, after all, the European regimes that exported their political problems to the New World and happily profited from the exploitation of slave labor to supply Europe with sugar and other staples. It was the residents of the Americas themselves who had to deal first-hand with these issues, including broader demographic trends. The fact that the US population quintupled between 1830 and 1900, for example, was certainly no small affair. As historian Jon Grinspan notes, during this period, “at least 18 million immigrants arrived from Europe, more people than had lived in all of America in 1830.” Given the propensity for world war displayed by Europeans over the past century, one can only guess with extreme trepidation how a similarly destabilizing situation would be faced by Europeans in the modern world.

But many other issues in New World political realities are a legacy of its frontier past as well. Foa writes:

Frontier zones are found to have ongoing lower levels of public order and deficient public goods provision. Several theories [may] explain this discrepancy, including internal resettlement, costs of monitoring and enforcement, and the relationship between settlers and the indigenous population.

When American states are criticized for being “low-trust” societies, lacking social cohesion, and experiencing relatively high crime rates, these all stem from the realities of the New World’s lack of cultural uniformity and common history among residents. Non-frontier societies have had centuries to become more uniform and more cohesive. New World societies still have a long way to go.

It’s a safe bet that Columbus had no idea the social and economic revolution he was setting off by beginning Europe’s drive toward the “Great Frontier.” He just wanted to get rich. But, we are still living with the legacy of Europe’s expansion to these new lands today.

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US and South Korean officials are nervously watching to see if North Korea follows through with its threats to carry out another nuclear test – or to fire a rumored long-range missile capable of accurately striking the west coast of the US into the Pacific – in celebration of the Oct. 10 anniversary of the Communist Party’s creation. Meanwhile, the Telegraph reports that South Korea has developed a new weapon to hobble the North’s infrastructure should an armed conflict erupt on the peninsula. Given that it's almost daybreak in North Korea, such a test could happen as soon as Monday night, Eastern Time.

The weapon is a graphite bomb – otherwise known as a “blackout bomb” – which South Korean officials say will be capable of shutting down North Korea’s entire power grid. Blackout bombs were first used by the US in Iraq in the 1990 Gulf War and work by releasing a cloud of extremely fine, chemically treated carbon filaments over electrical components. The filaments are so fine that they act like a cloud, but cause short circuits in electrical equipment.

As News.com.au points out, North Korea tends to celebrate the Oct. 10 holiday with military parades and aggressive rhetoric. But this year's festivities could include new provocative weapons tests.

“The Kim regime usually uses these sorts of occasions to demonstrate some show of strength — in this current climate a missile test is a likely result,” says Dr Genevieve Hohnen, lecturer in politics and international relations at Edith Cowan University.

The Telegraph reports that the South developed the bomb to minimize civilian casualties in the North should a conflict erupt. In a statement to Yonhap, a military official said the South Korean army could assemble a blackout bomb at any time. The weapon was reportedly developed by South Korea's Agency for Defense Development.

“All technologies for the development of a graphite bomb led by the ADD have been secured. It is in the stage where we can build the bombs anytime,” a military official told Yonhap.

The bomb is often referred to as a “soft bomb” because it only affects targeted electrical power systems.

As the Telegraph explains, the blackout bomb was developed as part of South Korea’s “three pillars” plan for retaliating against the North if it believes a nuclear strike is imminent. Escalating tensions with the North have inspired the South to move its target date for completion forward by three years. The plan was initially slated to be complete by the mid-2020s.

The first two parts of the plan involve detecting – and then intercepting – North Korea missiles. The second part – aptly named the “massive punishment and retaliation plan” involves launching attacks against the country’s leadership, including a plan to assassinate Kim Jong Un.

South Korea is bringing forward the deployment of its "three pillars" of national defence by as much as three years as a result of the growing threat posed by Pyongyang's nuclear and missile development programmes.

 

The three-pronged strategy was originally scheduled to be in place by the mid-2020s, but North Korea's increasingly aggressive and unpredictable behaviour has forced Seoul to revise that timeline.

 

The Kill Chain programme is designed to detect, identify and intercept incoming missiles in the shortest possible time and operates in conjunction with the Korea Air and Missile Defence system for lower-tier defence against inbound missiles.

 

The final component of the strategy is the Korea Massive Punishment & Retaliation plan, under which Seoul will launch attacks against leadership targets in North Korea if it detects signs that the regime is planning to use nuclear weapons.

South Korea believes North Korea’s energy grid is outdated and vulnerable, and thus would be incredibly susceptible to a “blackout bomb” attack. Blackout bombs were first used by the US against Iraq in the Gulf War of 1990, when they knocked out about 85 percent of Iraq’s electricity. They were also used by NATO against Serbia in 1999, when it damaged around 70 percent of the country’s electrical supply.

* * *

President Donald Trump fired off his latest threatening tweet about North Korea earlier today, reiterating his view that 25 years of US appeasement and billions of dollars in humanitarian aid for the North clearly have not worked. He ended the tweet with yet another vague hint that the US could soon resort to a military strike.

Our country has been unsuccessfully dealing with North Korea for 25 years, giving billions of dollars & getting nothing. Policy didn't work!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 9, 2017

Though the US has rejected North Korea's claims that Trump's rhetoric has amounted to a declaration of war, how much longer can the US credibly claim that "all options are on the table" if North Korea continues to provoke the international community with its missile and nuclear tests?

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