Category Archives: Militarization

The Ukraine Mess is Animal Farm in Reverse: Starring Blackrock and Other Pigs

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By Phil Butler

Source: New Eastern Outlook

Recently, the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said that the European Union should double its assistance to Ukraine. She went on to say the EU should create a support fund of 50 billion euros by the end of the year and that everything should be done to ensure victory on the battlefield for the Ukrainians.

The European Union has created a “support package” for Ukraine for 2023 of up to €18 billion. This money, however, is not in the form of gifts, grants, or to create an emergency war chest. These billions are a loan under an EU macro-financial assistance program dubbed the MFA+ Instrument. In the fine print, EU member states are guaranteeing these loans as well as paying the interest for the Ukrainians. The move is extraordinary given that Ukraine is not an EU member and that, even before the current conflict, was one of the most corrupt governments on Earth. This begs the question, “Why?”

The EU is issuing special bonds to be sold to investors for this purpose at a time when many people in the European Union go without proper healthcare, services, and even employment. The European Union, EU Member States, and European financial institutions have already dispersed some €49 billion to President Zelensky’s regime. This figure, added to the $76.8 billion already funneled to Ukraine, dwarfs any assistance given to any other country in the world. This very conservative report from the Council of Foreign Relations shows the U.S. alone has shoveled more into Zelensky’s coffers than Afghanistan, Israel, Jordan, Ethiopia, and Iraq combined in 2020.

In all, some 47 countries have given money and arms to Ukraine. As of now, EU Institutions (?) handed Zelensky over €30 billion. The UK has forked over about €10 billion as their pensioners worry about what’s for dinner next. Germany has given somewhere around €8 billion, and Japan almost €7 billion. The Netherlands, Canada, and Poland have pitched in about €5 billion each, and the list of others about €14 billion. The numbers, as you would expect, do not all add up. A U.S. News & World Reports story from earlier this year claimed total aid to Zelensky’s country had exceeded €150 billion as of January of this year. Again, why?

The answer, this time, is really simple. BlackRock, and the new investment initiative to rebuild Ukraine (whatever’s left of it). You already knew this, right? Zelensky and BlackRock’s BlackRock CEO Larry Fink met late last year, and in November, the Ukrainian Ministry of the Economy (MoE) and BlackRock Financial Markets Advisory (FMA) signed a memorandum to structure Ukraine’s reconstruction funds (PDF). Also, in on the moneymaking schemes in war-torn Ukraine are Nestlé, International Finance Corporation, the private investment arm of the World Bank, Australia’s Tattarang Group,

Zelensky has called the rebuilding of his country, once it’s been used up as a proxy NATO against Russia, “the greatest opportunity in Europe since World War Two.” Earlier this year, Fink told Barron’s and other financial magazines that Western investors will be “flooding” Ukraine post-war and the country could become “a beacon to the rest of the world of the power of capitalism”. Also, JPMorgan Chase is joining BlackRock to help Ukraine set up a reconstruction bank to steer public seed capital.

This American Conservative report says, “BlackRock Plots to Buy Ukraine,” in a recent editorial. Author Bradley Devlin outlines the Ukraine case, while also revealing how Fink and BlackRock are transforming America into a nation of renters by artificially elevating the prices of normal houses. If ever a man were appropriately named, Fink is that man.

“Why?” Is there any doubt about why some poor untrained bartender from Kyiv is in a foxhole being bombarded by Russian artillery? Doesn’t all the misleading media, inflated Ukraine military gains, and Joe Biden’s cock of the walk attitude toward a peace deal make more sense now? And Ursula, the lady I fondly refer to as Frau von der Clucky for her chicken-like pecking and strutting about while millions either die or are in harm’s way because of all the Western world barnyard antics right out of Orwell’s Animal Farm. While someone’s Dad takes a bullet or shrapnel in Donetsk, our leaders keep crowing, snorting, braying, and hog-wallering in their capitalistic farm dream.

Why? Greed, that’s why.

More Warmongers Elevated In The Biden Administration

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com.au

The Biden administration looks set to become even more warlike than it already was if you can imagine, with virulent Russia hawk Victoria Nuland and virulent China hawk Charles Q Brown now being elevated to lofty positions by the White House.

Nuland, the wife of alpha neocon Robert Kagan, has been named acting deputy secretary of state by President Biden, at least until a new deputy secretary has been named. This places her at second in command within the State Department, second only to Tony Blinken.

In an article about Nuland’s unique role in souring relations between the US and Russia during her previous tenure in the State Department under Obama, Responsible Statecraft’s Connor Echols writes the following of the latest news:

Nuland’s appointment will be a boon for Russia hawks who want to turn up the heat on the Kremlin. But, for those who favor a negotiated end to the conflict in Ukraine, a promotion for the notoriously “undiplomatic diplomat” will be a bitter pill.

A few quick reminders are in order. When Nuland was serving in the Obama administration, she had a now-infamous leaked call with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. As the Maidan Uprising roiled the country, the pair of American diplomats discussed conversations with opposition leaders, and Nuland expressed support for putting Arseniy Yatseniuk into power. (Yatseniuk would become prime minister later that month, after Russia-friendly former President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country.) At one memorable point in the call, Nuland said “Fu–k the EU” in response to Europe’s softer stance on the protests.

The controversy surrounding the call — and larger implications of U.S. involvement in the ouster of Yanukovych — kicked up tensions with Russia and contributed to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to seize Crimea and support an insurgency in eastern Ukraine. Her handing out  food to demonstrators on the ground in Kyiv probably didn’t help either. Nuland, along with State Department sanctions czar Daniel Fried, then led the effort to punish Putin through sanctions. Another official at State reportedly asked Fried if “the Russians realize that the two hardest-line people in the entire U.S. government are now in a position to go after them?”

In a 2015 Consortium News article titled “The Mess That Nuland Made,” the late Robert Parry singled out Nuland as the primary architect of the 2014 regime change operation in Ukraine, which, as Aaron Maté explained last year, paved the way to the war we’re seeing there today. Hopefully her position winds up being temporary.

In other news, the Senate Arms Services Committee has voted to confirm Biden’s selection of General Charles Q Brown Jr as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replacing Mark Milley. A full senate vote will now take place on whether to confirm Brown — currently the Air Force Chief of Staff — for the nation’s highest military office.

Brown is unambiguous about his belief that the US must hasten to militarize against China in the so-called Indo-Pacific to prepare for confrontation between the two powers, calling for more US bases in the region and increased efforts to arm Taiwan during his hearing before the Senate Arms Services Committee earlier this month.

Back in May, Moon of Alabama flagged Brown’s nomination in an article which also noted that several advocates of military restraint had been resigning from their positions within the administration, including Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state who Nuland has taken over for.

It’s too soon to draw any firm conclusions, but to see voices of restraint stepping down and proponents of escalation stepping up could be a bad portent of things to come.

America’s Constitutional Government Is Gone

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

The few people who benefit from the U.S. Government’s being the world’s most powerful are U.S.-and-allied billionaires, who profit from the enormous sales of U.S.-made war-weapons and from the international extraction corporations such as Exxon-Mobil which rely upon its military, but all of this comes at the expense of the publics in every country including that of America itself. Any empire serves only its aristocracy, at the expense of the public. In modern times, the publics need to be deceived by the media and by the billionaires’ other agencies, so as to become deceived to vote for the billionaires’ candidates. This requires massive censorship, notwithstanding that America’s Constitution bans such censorship.

Freedom of the press, and freedom of expression, are ‘guaranteed’ in the U.S. Constitution, but if the controlling owners of the press are a small group of people who benefit from the fact that the wealthiest 1% of the wealthiest 1% of Americans — the wealthiest ten-thousandth of Americans — donate 57.16% of all the money that funds U.S. political campaigns, and that the “Top 400 Donors” (all of whom are multi-billionaires, not merely billionaires) donate 29.86%, or virtually 30%, of all political money, in the U.S., then how likely will the ‘news’-media be to accept for publication or to broadcast news reports that threaten this status-quo from which all of them have made and keep their enormous wealth? Not only do those billionaires own or control virtually all of the ‘news’-media, but the other corporations that they also own or control advertise in them; and, so, they select to hire editors and producers who will reject job-applicants who would report the types of things that those controllers want the public not to know — things such as these. The most-important realities are thus effectively censored-out.

For an example of the most-important realities, here is an entirely truthful 10-minute-long entirely independently produced compendium video that shows the key evidences that the overthrow of Ukraine’s Government in February 2014 was definitely not the democratic revolution that all of the U.S.-and-allied press pretend it was, but was instead a U.S. coup. And here is the complete showing of the smoking-gun piece of evidence in it, so that one can now see this crucial item of evidence within its broader context, and understand how it fits into that context, to produce crucial history instead of the ‘news’-media-promulgated myth that strings together lie-upon-lie. It’s documentation of how the war inside Ukraine (and to which U.S. taxpayers donated over a hundred billion dollars last year) actually started — via this U.S. coup. And here is an even broader contextual documentation of how that U.S. coup started this war, which U.S.-and-allied Governments and their ‘news’-media blame against Russia — as-if it were the case that Russia had expanded up to NATO’s border, instead of NATO’s having expanded up to Russia’s border.

Is that evidence consistent with what has been widely reported by the ‘news’-media about the overthrow of Ukraine’s Government in February 2014 and about how the war in Ukraine started (supposedly on 24 February 2022)? Did America’s Government start this war, or did Russia’s Government start it? And how important is the answer to that question, to the public’s ability to make fact-based choices when elections are held to determine whom will be occuping seats in Congress, and in the White House? As the brilliant geostrategist who anonymously writes the “Moon of Alabama” blog headlined on July 25th, “Who Can Give Security Guarantees To Ukraine?”, and he concluded there that the U.S. Government and its stooges in its NATO military alliance against Russia now clearly have no intention of providing any such, but that Russia can — and that the longer that America’s war against Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine and killing Ukraine’s soldiers continues, the more onerous to the people of Ukraine will be the peace-terms that Russia will be able to offer to Ukraine for there to be any peace at all in Ukraine. It’s America’s war, but Russia will settle it.

Here is an interview of a very successful Asian journalist for major news-media, who had been participating in the so-called ‘democracy’ demonstrations in Hong Kong until he discovered that they had been initiated behind-the-scenes by the U.S. Government, and then he wrote a book about that, and he describes in this interview how the news-reporting that he and the rest of the press were doing had been fooled by the U.S. Government’s very elaborate and highly bribe-based operation against (i.e., to weaken) China’s Government.

The broader picture of that deeply corrupt management of ‘the news’ by America’s very wealthiest, is documented in detail here. It all started when U.S. President FDR died and his successor, Harry Truman (influenced by the advice from Winston Churchill and especially General Dwight Eisenhower), decided on 25 July 1945 for the U.S. Government to ultimately take control over all nations. This hegemonic or global-imperialist U.S. Government has made the world we live in today. But what percentage of the public know anything about this reality, of the world in which all of us are living? The ignorance and deception of the masses is the basis for these ‘democracies’.

Another key provision of the U.S. Constitution is that ONLY the U.S. Congress can authorize a war and the sending of U.S. forces abroad in order to participate in a war. However, this provision of the U.S. Constitution is likewise now being routinely violated by the U.S. Government. It has to be done because the key beneficiaries of U.S. imperialism are America’s billionaires, who control the U.S. Government. And this is the reason why after WW II, the U.S. Government has invaded and otherwise participated in 297 wars though none of them were ever declared by the U.S. Congress as the U.S. Constitution requires.

Politics is now a puppet-show in these ‘democracies’; and the ‘news’-media are merely a part of that puppet-show.

These realities are ugly, but they are real.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

How So Many Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Nukes

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

Social psychosis is widespread.  In the words of the British psychiatrist, R. D. Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.”

He was not referring to raving, drooling, hitting-your-head-against-the-wall lunacy but a taken-for-granted acceptance of a world long teetering on the edge of nuclear extinction, to take the most extreme example, but surely only one of many.  The insouciant acceptance and support of psychotic rulers who promote first-strike nuclear war is very common.  First strike nuclear policy is United States policy.

I recently wrote an article about the dangers of the fourteen U.S. Trident submarines.  These subs constantly cruise under the oceans carrying 3,360 nuclear warheads equivalent to 134,400 Hiroshima bombs.  All are on first strike triggers.  And of course these are supplemented by all the land and air based nukes.  My point was not very complicated: now that the United States government has abrogated all nuclear weapons treaties and continues to escalate its war against Russia in Ukraine, we are closer to nuclear annihilation than ever before.

This conclusion is shared by many esteemed thinkers such as the late Daniel Ellsberg who died  on June 16, 2023 and whose 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, makes clear that nuclear war, waged intentionally or by mistake or accident, is very possible. In the months before he died, he warned that this is now especially true with the situation in Ukraine and the U.S. provocations against China.

The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal recently addressed the UN Security Council on the danger of U.S. actions in Ukraine and asked:

Will we see another Douma deception, but this time in Zaporizhzhia?

Why are we doing this? Why are we tempting nuclear annihilation by flooding Ukraine with advanced weapons and sabotaging negotiations at every turn?

Finian Cunningham has just raised the specter of a thermonuclear catastrophe initiated by a U.S./Ukrainian false flag attack on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant.

So my article was in no way unusual, except for my concentration on the Trident submarines.

When, against my better judgment, I read some commentators’ responses to my piece at a few websites where my article was posted, I was taken aback when I read the following [all emphases are mine]:

  • Like many other boomers, Edward J Curtin Jr is caught up in ‘nuclear terror’ … whereas on 4chan you see that a large portion of the young generation has come to accept the massive evidence that Hiroshima & Nagasaki were chemically firebombed like Tokyo, and ‘nuclear weapons’ most likely do not exist at all. The 10 alleged ‘nuclear powers’ have had reasons to hoax together, just like the global collusion on ‘covid’ & ‘vaccines’.
  • So, the point is? Subs with nukes have been cruising around the world’s oceans for over 60 years, back to the time when they tried to scare us with the Cuban missile crisis. I was on a fast attack sub during the Vietnam war, friend of mine got boomer duty, which is what they call the ones that carry the missiles. They’re there for show, they aren’t going to use them. Yes, they should be banned internationally, just in case. But as with the Nuremberg trials and principles, that’s not nearly enough. We’re going to need to create our own New World Order
  • This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper

        I vote for the bang!

  • The nuke is exaggerated. Reality is that too many will survive a nuclear WWIII.
    There will still be too many useless eaters and psychos left in the underground bunkers no matter how many nukes we drop. Like Chernobyl it will only develop to paradises for animals, natives and homeless on food stamps, while we the exceptionals will suffer from an underground life for 50 years without seeing natural light . A global virus and for double insurance a coupled vaxx, will be a much more effective tool to clean the filth and double shareholders profit..
  • Dear Ed the sea monsters about as real as nukes.
  • Another one of the “elites” hoaxes.

To hear that there are no nuclear weapons and never were; to learn that some in their embrace of nihilism hope for a nuclear holocaust; to read that nuclear weapons are never going to be used because they only exist for show – well, this at least confirmed my suspicion that many who comment on articles are either bonkers or trolls or both.  Some probably have nothing better to do than inform writers how wrong they are.  It frightened me.  It made me wonder how many of the millions of silent ones think similarly or have come to embrace hopelessness as a way of life – the feeling that they have no power because that has been drilled into them from birth.  I have long thought that cultural normality can be understood as the use of one’s freedom to create a prison, a cell in which one can convince oneself that one is safe because the authorities have established a sacred umbrella to protect one from an apocalyptic hard rain that they never think is going to fall.

The Pew Research Center recently surveyed the American public on their sixteen greatest fears.  Nuclear war was not one them.  It was as if nuclear weapons did not exist, as if they have been buried in the cellar of public awareness.  As if Mad Magazine’s  Alfred E. Newman’s motto was the national motto: “What? Me worry?”  No doubt more Americans are aware of the gross public spectacle of Joey Chestnut stuffing his mouth with sixty-five hot dogs in ten minutes than they are of the Biden administration’s insane escalation toward nuclear war in Ukraine.  We live in Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle.”

Although he was writing years ago, Ronald Laing’s words sound ironically prescient today after so many years of endless propaganda, the destruction of human experience resulting in destructive behavior, and the relentless diminishment of human beings to the status of machines:

At this moment in history, we are all caught in the hell of frenetic passivity. We find ourselves threatened by extermination that will be reciprocal, that no one wishes, that everyone fears, that may just happen to us ‘because’ no one knows how to stop it. There is one possibility of doing so if we can understand the structure of this alienation of ourselves from our experience, our experience from our deeds, our deeds from human authorship. Everyone will be carrying out orders. Where do they come from? Always from elsewhere. Is it still possible to reconstitute our destiny out of the hellish and inhuman fatality?

That is the key question now that more than fifty years have elapsed since Laing penned those words in his now classic book, The Politics of Experience (isbn.nu).  He said then, which is exponentially truer today, that “machines are already becoming better at communicating with each other than human beings with each other.”  Talking about deep things has become passé for so many.

If we don’t start worrying and unlove the machines, we are doomed sooner or later.  Sooner is probable.  Nuclear weapons are very real.  They are poised and ready to fly.  If we continue to live in denial of the madness of those who provoke their use while calmly promoting first-strike policies as the U.S. government does, we are worse than fools.  We are suicidal.

As Daniel Ellsberg told us, “Don’t wait ‘till the bombs are actually falling.”  That will be too late.  There is no doubt that before a nuclear war can happen, we must go insane, normally so.

Let’s make the few protest voices in the wilderness the cries of hundreds of millions:

End nuclear weapons now before they end us.

Stop escalating the war in Ukraine now.

Make peace with Russia and China now.

“There is such a thing as being too late,” Martin Luther King, Jr. told us on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated in a U.S. government plot.

“We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.”

Ukraine and the great revival of American empire

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By Andrew J. Bacevich

Source: Information Clearing House

Amidst the dross that clutters the New York Times op-ed page on most days, glimmers of enlightenment occasionally appear. A recent guest column by Grey Anderson and Thomas Meaney offers a case in point.

“NATO Isn’t What It Says It Is,” declares the headline. Contrary to the claims of its architects and defenders, Anderson and Meaney argue persuasively that the central purpose of the alliance from its founding was not to deter aggression from the East and certainly not to promote democracy, but to “bind Western Europe to a far vaster project of a U.S.-led world order.” In return for Cold War-era security guarantees, America’s European allies offered deference and concessions on issues like trade and monetary policy. “In that mission,” they write, NATO “has proved remarkably successful.” A plot of real estate especially valued by members of the American elite, Europe thereby became the centerpiece of the postwar American imperium.

The end of the Cold War called these arrangements into question. Desperate to preserve NATO’s viability, proponents claimed that the alliance needed to go “out of area or out of business.” NATO embraced an activist posture, leading to reckless state building interventions in Libya and Afghanistan. The results were not favorable. Acceding to U.S. pressure to venture out of area proved to be costly and served chiefly to undermine NATO’s credibility as a militarily capable enterprise.

Enter Vladimir Putin to save the day. Just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine provided the U.S. with an excuse to forget its own post-9/11 military failures, so too it has enabled NATO to once more constitute itself as the chief instrument for defending the West—and, crucially, to do so without actually exacting a blood sacrifice from either Americans or Europeans.

In this context, the actual fate of Ukraine itself figures as something of an afterthought. The real issue centers on reviving damaged aspirations of American global primacy. With something like unanimity, the U.S. national security establishment is devoted to the proposition that the United States must remain the world’s sole superpower, even if this requires ignoring a vast accumulation of contrary evidence suggesting the emergence of a multipolar order. On that score, Putin’s recklessness came as an impeccably timed gift.

There is an element of genius at work here. Defeating Russia without having to do any actual fighting becomes the means to restore the image of American indispensability squandered during the decades that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. For Washington, as Anderson and Meaney appreciate, the true stakes in Ukraine go far beyond the question of whose flag flies over Crimea. If Ukraine “wins” its war with Russia—however “winning” is defined and however great the price Ukrainians must pay—NATO itself (and the NATO lobby in Washington) will claim vindication.

Rest assured that major European nations will then quietly renege on promises to boost their military spending, with actual responsibility for European security once more falling to the United States. With the centennial of World War II now within hailing distance, U.S. troops will remain permanently garrisoned in Europe. This will serve as cause for celebration throughout the U.S. military industrial complex, which will prosper.

Flexing its muscles, the United States will inevitably prod a greatly expanded NATO into turning its attention to enforcing the “rules-based international order” in the Asia-Pacific, with China as the chosen adversary. Ukraine will thereby serve as a template of sorts as the U.S. and its allies throw their weight around many thousands of miles from Europe proper.

The U.S. global military footprint will expand. U.S. efforts to put its house in order domestically will founder. Pressing global problems like the climate crisis will be treated as afterthoughts. But the empire that has no name will persist, which ultimately is the purpose of the game.

President Biden is fond of saying that the world has arrived at an “inflection point,” implying the need to change directions. Yet the overarching theme of his approach to foreign policy is stasis. He clings to the geopolitical logic that prompted NATO’s founding in 1949.

Back then, when Europe was weak and Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, that logic may have possessed some merit. But today the importance attributed to NATO testifies chiefly to the bankruptcy of American strategic thought and an inability to prioritize actually existing U.S. national interests, both foreign and domestic.

A sound revision of U.S. national security strategy would begin with announcing a timeline for withdrawing from NATO, converting it into an arrangement wholly owned and operated by Europe. The near impossibility of even imagining such an action by the United States testifies to the dearth of imagination that prevails in Washington.

Geopolitical Chessboard Shifts Against US Empire

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By Pepe Escobar

Source: The Unz Review

The geopolitical chessboard is in perpetual shift – and never more than in our current incandescent juncture.

A fascinating consensus in discussions among Chinese scholars – including those part of the Asian and American diasporas – is that not only Germany/EU lost Russia, perhaps irretrievably, but China gained Russia, with an economy highly complementary to China’s own and with solid ties with the Global South/Global Majority that can benefit and aid Beijing.

Meanwhile, a smatter of Atlanticist foreign policy analysts are now busy trying to change the narrative on NATO vs. Russia, applying the rudiments of realpolitik.

The new spin is that it’s “strategic insanity” for Washington to expect to defeat Moscow, and that NATO is experiencing “donor fatigue” as the sweatshirt warmonger in Kiev “loses credibility”.

Translation: it’s NATO as a whole that is completely losing credibility, as its humiliation in the Ukraine battlefield is now painfully graphic for all the Global Majority to see.

Additionally, “donor fatigue” means losing a major war, badly. As military analyst Andrei Martyanov has relentlessly stressed, “NATO ‘planning’ is a joke. And they are envious, painfully envious and jealous.”

A credible path ahead is that Moscow will not negotiate with NATO – a mere Pentagon add-on – but offer individual European nations a security pact with Russia that would make their need to belong to NATO redundant. That would assure security for any participating nation and relieve pressure on it from Washington.

Bets could be made that the most relevant European powers might accept it, but certainly not Poland – the hyena of Europe – and the Baltic chihuahuas.

In parallel, China could offer peace treaties to Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, and subsequently a significant part of the US Empire of Bases might vanish.

The problem, once again, is that vassal states don’t have the authority or power to comply with any agreement ensuring peace. German businessmen, off the record, are sure that sooner or later Berlin may defy Washington and do business with the Russia-China strategic partnership because it benefits Germany.

Yet the golden rule still has not been met: if a vassal state wants to be treated as a sovereign state, the first thing to do is to shut down key branches of the Empire of Bases and expel US troops.

Iraq is trying to do it for years now, with no success. One third of Syria remains US-occupied – even as the US lost its proxy war against Damascus due to Russian intervention.

The Ukraine Project as an existential conflict

Russia has been forced to fight against a neighbor and kin that it simply can’t afford to lose; and as a nuclear and hypersonic power, it won’t.

Even if Moscow will be somewhat strategically weakened, whatever the outcome, it’s the US – in the view of Chinese scholars – that may have committed its greatest strategic blunder since the establishment of the Empire: turning the Ukraine Project into an existential conflict, and committing the entire Empire and all its vassals to a Total War against Russia.

That’s why we have no peace negotiations, and the refusal even of a cease fire; the only possible outcome devised by the Straussian neocon psychos who run US foreign policy is unconditional Russian surrender.

In the recent past, Washington could afford to lose its wars of choice against Vietnam and Afghanistan. But it simply can’t afford to lose the war on Russia. When that happens, and it’s already on the horizon, the Revolt of the Vassals will be far reaching.

It’s quite clear that from now on China and BRICS+ – with expansion starting at the summit in South Africa next month – will turbo-charge the undermining of the US dollar. With or without India.

There will be no imminent BRICS currency – as noted by some excellent points in this discussion. The scope is huge, sherpas are only in the initial debating stages, and the broad outlines have not been defined yet.

The BRICS+ approach will evolve from improved cross border settlement mechanisms – something everyone from Putin to Central Bank head Elvira Nabiullina have stressed – to eventually a new currency way further down the road.

This would probably be a trade instrument rather than a sovereign currency like the euro. It will be designed to compete against the US dollar in trade, initially among BRICS+ nations, and capable of circumventing the hegemonic US dollar ecosystem.

The key question is how long the Empire’s fake economy – clinically deconstructed by Michael Hudson – can hold out in this wide spectrum geoeconomic war.

Everything is a ‘national security threat’

On the electronic technology front, the Empire has gone no holds barred to impose global economic dependency, monopolizing intellectual property rights and as Michael Hudson notes, “extracting economic rent from charging high prices for high-technology computer chips, communications, and arms production.”

In practice, not much is happening other than the prohibition for Taiwan to supply valuable chips to China, and asking TSMC to build, as soon as possible, a chip manufacturing complex in Arizona.

However, TSMC chairman Mark Liu has remarked that the plant faced a shortage of workers with the “specialized expertise required for equipment installation in a semiconductor-grade facility.” So the much lauded TSMC chip plant in Arizona won’t start production before 2025.

The top Empire/vassal NATO demand is that Germany and the EU must impose a Trade Iron Curtain against the Russia-China strategic partnership and their allies, thus ensuring “de-risk” trade.

Predictably, US Think Tankland has gone bonkers, with American Enterprise Institute hacks rabidly stating that even economic de-risking is not enough: what the US needs is a hard break with China.

In fact that dovetails with Washington smashing international free trade rules and international law, and treating any form of trade and SWIFT and financial exchanges as “national security threats” to US economic and military control.

So the pattern ahead is not China imposing trade sanctions on the EU – which remains a top trade partner for Beijing; it’s Washington imposing a tsunami of sanctions on nations daring to break the US-led trade boycott.

Russia-DPRK meets Russia-Africa

Only this week, the chessboard went through two game-changing moves: the high-profile visit by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to the DPRK, and the Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg.

Shoigu was received in Pyongyang as a rock star. He had a personal meeting with Kim Jong-Un. The mutual goodwill leads to the strong possibility of North Korea eventually joining one of the multilateral organizations carving the path towards multipolarity.

That would be, arguably, an extended Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). It could start with an EAEU-DPRK free trade agreement, such as the ones struck with Vietnam and Cuba.

Russia is the top power in the EAEU and it can ignore sanctions on the DPRK, while BRICS+, SCO or ASEAN have too many second thoughts. A key priority for Moscow is the development of the Far East, more integration with both Koreas, and the Northern Sea Route, or Arctic Silk Road. The DPRK is then a natural partner.

Getting the DPRK into the EAEU will do wonders for BRI investment: a sort of cover which Beijing does not enjoy for the moment when it invests in the DPRK. That could become a classic case of deeper BRI-EAEU integration.

Russian diplomacy at the highest levels is going all out to relieve the pressure over the DPRK. Strategically, that’s a real game-changer; imagine the huge and quite sophisticated North Korean industrial-military complex added to the Russia-China strategic partnership and turning the whole Asia-Pacific paradigm upside down.

The Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg, in itself, was another game-changer that left collective West mainstream media apoplectic. That was nothing less than Russia publicly announcing, in words and deeds, a comprehensive strategic partnership with the whole of Africa even as a hostile collective West wages Hybrid War – and otherwise – against Afro-Eurasia.

Putin showed how Russia holds a 20% share of the global wheat market. In the first 6 months of 2023, it had already exported 10 million tons of grain to Africa. Now Russia will be providing Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Somalia and Eritrea with 25-50 thousand tons of grain each in the next 3-4 months, for free.

Putin detailed everything from approximately 30 energy projects across Africa to the expansion of oil and gas exports and “unique non-energy applications of nuclear technology, including in medicine”; the launching of a Russian industrial zone near the Suez Canal with products to be exported throughout Africa; and the development of Africa’s financial infrastructure, including connection to the Russian payment system.

Crucially, he also extolled closer ties between the EAEU and Africa. A forum panel, “EAEU-Africa: Horizons of Cooperation”, examined the possibilities, which include closer continental connection with both the BRICS and Asia. A torrent of free trade agreements may be in the pipeline.

The scope of the forum was quite impressive. There were “de-neocolonialization” panels, such as “Achieving Technological Sovereignty Through Industrial Cooperation” or “New World Order: from the Legacy of Colonialism to Sovereignty and Development.”

And of course the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) was also discussed, with major players Russia, Iran and India set to promote its crucial extension to Africa, escaping NATO littorals.

Separate from the frantic action in St. Petersburg, Niger went through a military coup. Although the end-result remains to be seen, Niger is likely to join neighboring Mali in reasserting its foreign policy independence from Paris. French influence is also being at least “reset” in the Central African Republic (CAR) and Burkina Faso. Translation: France and the West are being evicted all across the Sahel, one-step at a time, in an irreversible process of decolonization.

Beware the Pale Horses of Destruction

These movements across the chessboard, from the DPRK to Africa and the chip war against China, are as crucial as the coming, shattering humiliation of NATO in Ukraine. Yet not only the Russia-China strategic partnership but also key players across the Global South/Global Majority are fully aware that Washington views Russia as a tactical enemy in preparation for the overriding Total War against China.

As it stands, the still unresolved tragedy in Donbass as it keeps the Empire busy, and away from Asia-Pacific. Yet Washington under the Straussian neocon psychos is increasingly mired in Desperation Row, making it even more dangerous.

All that while the BRICS+ “jungle” turbo-charges the necessary mechanisms capable of sidelining the unipolar Western “garden”, as a helpless Europe is being driven to an abyss, forced to split itself from China, BRICS+ and the de facto Global Majority.

It doesn’t take a seasoned weatherman to see which way the steppe wind blows – as the Pale Horses of Destruction plot the trampling of the chessboard, and the wind begins to howl.

$850 Billion Chicken Comes Home to Roost.

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War Reveals U.S. Military’s Longtime Disinterest in War.

Signe’s second toon du jour SIGN17e Military

By Andrew Cockburn

Source: Spoils of War

Watching a recent video of Ukrainian troops scrambling out of a U.S.-supplied Bradley armored fighting vehicle just after it hit a mine, I remembered how hard the U.S. Army bureaucrats and contractors who developed the weapon had fought to keep this vehicle a death trap for anyone riding inside. As originally designed, Bradleys promptly burst into flame when hit with anything much more powerful than a BB pellet, incinerating anyone riding inside. The armor bureaucrats were well aware of this defect, but pausing development for a redesign might have hurt their budget, so they delayed and cheated on tests to keep the program on track. Prior to one test, they covertly substituted water-tanks for the ammunition that would otherwise explode. Only when Jim Burton, a courageous air force lieutenant colonel from the Pentagon’s testing office, enlisted Congress to mandate a proper live fire test were the army’s malign subterfuges exposed and corrected. His principled stand cost him his career, but the Bradley was redesigned, rendering it less potentially lethal for passengers. Hence, forty years on, the survival of those lucky Ukrainians.

This largely forgotten episode serves as a vivid example of an essential truth about our military machine: it is not interested in war.

How else to understand the lack of concern for the lives of troops, or producing a functioning weapon system? As Burton observed in his instructive 1993 memoir Pentagon Wars, the U.S. defense system is “a corrupt business — ethically and morally corrupt from top to bottom.”

Nothing has happened in the intervening years to contradict this assessment, with potentially grim consequences for men and women on the front line. Today, for example, the U.S. Air Force is abandoning its traditional role of protecting and coordinating with troops on the ground, otherwise known as Close Air Support, or CAS. Given its time-honored record of bombing campaigns that had little or no effect on the course of wars, CAS has probably been the only useful function (grudgingly) performed by the service.

The Air Force has always resented the close support mission, accepting the role only because handing it to the Army would entail losing budget share. Thus the A-10 “Warthog” aircraft, specifically dedicated to CAS, was developed by the air force only to ward off a threat from the Army to steal the mission with a new helicopter. As it turned out, the A-10, thanks to the dedicated genius of its creators, notably the late Pierre Sprey, was supremely suited to the mission. But its successful record cuts no ice with the air force, which has worked with might and main to get rid of the A-10 ever since the threat of an army competitor in the eternal battle for budget share had been eliminated.

That campaign is now entering its final stages. The air force is not only getting rid of its remaining fleet of A-10s, it is also eliminating the capability to perform the close air support mission by phasing out the training for pilots and ground controllers essential for this highly specialized task. True, the service claims that the infamously deficient F-35 “fighter” can and will undertake the mission, but that is a laughable notion for many reasons, including the fact that the plane’s 25 mm cannon cannot shoot straight. The consequences for American troops on the ground in future wars will be dire, but their fate apparently carries little weight when set against the unquenchable urge of the air force to assert its independence from the messy realities of ground combat, where wars are won or lost. Thus its hopes and budget plans are focussed on costly systems of dubious relevance to warfare such as the new B-21 bomber, the new Sentinel ICBM, and the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter, none of which will fly for years to come, except in the form of cash out of our pockets.

Pentagon spending this year is projected to nudge $850 billion. (The total national security bill is already way past a trillion, but that’s another story.) Yet, even when endowed with such a gigantic pile of cash, the system is apparently incapable of furnishing the wherewithal for even a limited war, such as the one currently underway in Ukraine. The conflict has been marked by successive announcements that progressively more potent weapon systems are being shipped to the Ukrainians -Javelins anti-tank missiles, 155 mm Howitzers, HIMARS precision long range missiles, Patriots air defense missiles, Abrams tanks, with F-16 fighters in the offing. A U.S. military intelligence officer pointed out to me recently the actual basis on which these systems are selected: “when we run out of the last system we were sending.”

Now Biden has generated global outrage by promising to send cluster bombs, known for their ability to kill and maim children fifty years after the relevant war has ended, as any Laotian farmer could tell you. The military rationale for their use is their supposed utility against “soft” targets such as dismounted infantry, radars, and wheeled vehicles. However, a former armor officer and veteran of the 1991 Gulf war recalled to me that “we disliked them intensely and pleaded with the artillery and Air Force not to employ them. They simply damaged support elements and wheels that followed us into action. After the war we treated numerous people wounded by them including our own soldiers, as well as civilians (children).”

Biden has admitted that these devices are being sent only because the U.S. is running out of the artillery ammunition that the Ukrainians actually require. “This is a war relating to munitions. And they’re running out of that ammunition, and we’re low on it,” he told a TV interviewer. So off go the cluster bombs, their passage lubricated by crocodile tears from administration officials: “I’m not going to stand up here and say it was easy…It’s a decision that required a real hard look at the potential harm to civilians” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters. (Back when it was reported that the Russians were using cluster bombs in Ukraine, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki denounced such action as “a war crime.”)

So, the richest war machine in history, having scraped its cupboard bare, is now reduced to fielding a device of dubious military utility deemed illegal by over a hundred countries. That’s what we get for our $850 billion.

Mental Health Round-Ups: The Next Phase of the Government’s War on Thought Crimes

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is a dangerous activity.”—Hannah Arendt

Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes: mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions.

Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.

If we don’t nip this in the bud, and soon, this will become yet another pretext by which government officials can violate the First and Fourth Amendments at will.

This is how it begins.

In communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, based solely on their own judgment, even if those individuals pose no danger to others.

In New York City, for example, you could find yourself forcibly hospitalized for suspected mental illness if you carry “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibit a “willingness to engage in meaningful discussion,” have “excessive fears of specific stimuli,” or refuse “voluntary treatment recommendations.”

While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, they could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”

As the AP reports, federal officials are already looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.

Make no mistake: these are the building blocks for an American gulag no less sinister than that of the gulags of the Cold War-era Soviet Union.

The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state.

The gulag, according to historian Anne Applebaum, used as a form of “administrative exile—which required no trial and no sentencing procedure—was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.”

Totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union also declared dissidents mentally ill and consigned political prisoners to prisons disguised as psychiatric hospitals, where they could be isolated from the rest of society, their ideas discredited, and subjected to electric shocks, drugs and various medical procedures to break them physically and mentally.

In addition to declaring political dissidents mentally unsound, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union also made use of an administrative process for dealing with individuals who were considered a bad influence on others or troublemakers. Author George Kennan describes a process in which:

The obnoxious person may not be guilty of any crime . . . but if, in the opinion of the local authorities, his presence in a particular place is “prejudicial to public order” or “incompatible with public tranquility,” he may be arrested without warrant, may be held from two weeks to two years in prison, and may then be removed by force to any other place within the limits of the empire and there be put under police surveillance for a period of from one to ten years.

Warrantless seizures, surveillance, indefinite detention, isolation, exile… sound familiar?

It should.

The age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by making them disappear—or forcing them to flee—or exiling them literally or figuratively or virtually from their fellow citizens—is happening with increasing frequency in America.

Now, through the use of red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, and pre-crime policing prevention programs, the groundwork is being laid that would allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling those whistleblowers, dissidents and freedom fighters who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.

That the government is using the charge of mental illness as the means by which to immobilize (and disarm) its critics is diabolical. With one stroke of a magistrate’s pen, these individuals are declared mentally ill, locked away against their will, and stripped of their constitutional rights.

These developments are merely the realization of various U.S. government initiatives dating back to 2009, including one dubbed Operation Vigilant Eagle which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”

Coupled with the report on “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” issued by the Department of Homeland Security (curiously enough, a Soviet term), which broadly defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government.

Thus, what began as a blueprint under the Bush administration has since become an operation manual for exiling those who challenge the government’s authority.

An important point to consider, however, is that the government is not merely targeting individuals who are voicing their discontent so much as it is locking up individuals trained in military warfare who are voicing feelings of discontent.

Under the guise of mental health treatment and with the complicity of government psychiatrists and law enforcement officials, these veterans are increasingly being portrayed as ticking time bombs in need of intervention.

For instance, the Justice Department launched a pilot program aimed at training SWAT teams to deal with confrontations involving highly trained and often heavily armed combat veterans.

One tactic being used to deal with so-called “mentally ill suspects who also happen to be trained in modern warfare” is through the use of civil commitment laws, found in all states and employed throughout American history to not only silence but cause dissidents to disappear.

For example, NSA officials attempted to label former employee Russ Tice, who was willing to testify in Congress about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, as “mentally unbalanced” based upon two psychiatric evaluations ordered by his superiors.

NYPD Officer Adrian Schoolcraft had his home raided, and he was handcuffed to a gurney and taken into emergency custody for an alleged psychiatric episode. It was later discovered by way of an internal investigation that his superiors were retaliating against him for reporting police misconduct. Schoolcraft spent six days in the mental facility, and as a further indignity, was presented with a bill for $7,185 upon his release.

Marine Brandon Raub—a 9/11 truther—was arrested and detained in a psychiatric ward under Virginia’s civil commitment law based on posts he had made on his Facebook page that were critical of the government.

Each state has its own set of civil, or involuntary, commitment laws. These laws are extensions of two legal principles: parens patriae Parens patriae (Latin for “parent of the country”), which allows the government to intervene on behalf of citizens who cannot act in their own best interest, and police power, which requires a state to protect the interests of its citizens.

The fusion of these two principles, coupled with a shift towards a dangerousness standard, has resulted in a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State.

The problem, of course, is that the diagnosis of mental illness, while a legitimate concern for some Americans, has over time become a convenient means by which the government and its corporate partners can penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors.

In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed the pathologizing of individuals who resist authority as suffering from oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), defined as “a pattern of disobedient, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures.” Under such a definition, every activist of note throughout our history—from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.—could be classified as suffering from an ODD mental disorder.

Of course, this is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced, declared unfit for society, labelled dangerous or extremist, or turned into outcasts and exiled.

Red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others), are a perfect example of this mindset at work and the ramifications of where this could lead.

As The Washington Post reports, these red flag gun laws “allow a family member, roommate, beau, law enforcement officer or any type of medical professional to file a petition [with a court] asking that a person’s home be temporarily cleared of firearms. It doesn’t require a mental-health diagnosis or an arrest.”

With these red flag gun laws, the stated intention is to disarm individuals who are potential threats.

While in theory it appears perfectly reasonable to want to disarm individuals who are clearly suicidal and/or pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others, where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.

Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.

This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.

This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

Let that sink in a moment.

Now consider the ramifications of giving police that kind of authority in order to preemptively neutralize a potential threat, and you’ll understand why some might view these mental health round-ups with trepidation.

No matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.

Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands. For instance, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

We stand at a crossroads.

As author Erich Fromm warned, “At this point in history, the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.”