Category Archives: war

Where the $1.3 Trillion Per Year U.S. Military Budget Goes

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

Nobody can give a precise dollar-number to U.S. ‘Defense’ spending because the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department has never been able to pass an audit, and is by far the most corrupt of all federal Departments (and is the ONLY Department that has never passed an audit), and also because much of America’s military spending is being paid out from other federal Departments in order to keep down the published annual U.S. Government ‘Defense’ expenditure numbers (which come from ONLY the “U.S. ‘Defense’ Department). Those are expenditures for America’s privatized and overwhelmingly profit-driven Military-Industrial Complex. (By contrast: Russia and China require, by law, that their armaments-firms be majority-owned by the Government itself.)

According to the best available estimates, the U.S. Government has been spending, in total, for over a decade now, around $1.3T to $1.5T annually on ‘defense’, and this is around half of all military spending worldwide by all 200-or-so nations, and is more than half (around 53%) of all of the U.S. federal Government’s ‘discretionary’ (or congressionally voted for) annual expenditures.

Unlike regular manufacturers, which sell entirely or mainly to consumers and to businesses, not to their Government, armament-firms need to control their Government in order to control their markets (which are their Government and its ‘allied’ Governments — including NATO), and so they (in purely capitalist countries such as the U.S.) do control their Government. This is why the armaments-business (except in countries whose armaments-sector is socialized) is infamously corrupt. In order to hide the extent of that corruption (and to promote ever-higher military spending), the ‘news’-media need — in those countries — to be likewise effectively controlled by the investors in those firms.

Consequently, America, which has no national-security threat from any country (so, these astronomical ‘defense’-expenditures are blatantly inappropriate), spends annually around half of all of the money that the entire world spends on the military. And most of that money gets paid to its armaments-firms. Or, as Stephen Semler, an expert on these matters, put it regarding last year’s numbers, “How much of the $858 billion authorized by the FY2023 NDAA will be transferred to military contractors? I estimate $452 billion.” That is 52% of the 53% of the federal Government’s discretionary spending that is being allocated to ‘Defense’. Thus, 26% of the money that Congress authorizes the U.S. federal Government to pay each year, goes to military contractors. Thus: if $452B is going to armaments-firms, and if $1.356T is going to ‘defense’ (both of which are reasonable estimates), then one-third of ‘defense’ spending goes to armaments-firms, and that is around 17% of the money that the U.S. Government pays each year for everything (including non-discretionary).

If this had not been happening each year after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, then the current U.S. federal debt would be far less, if any at all — but, in any case, that expense (which went, and is going, to exceptionally rich individuals) will be paid by future generations of Americans, by means of both increased taxes and reduced services from the U.S. Government. What pays for bombs (and funds the purchase of yachts) today will be taken from everyone’s infants tomorrow. And it is taking millions of lives in the targeted lands, and has been doing so for decades now. A psychopathic U.S. Government is producing these results.

America’s ‘Defense’ Department is so corrupt that when I happened recently to be re-reading my 14 January 2020 article about its corruptness, “US Military Spending: TRILLIONS of Dollars Unaccounted For”, yet a new detail of this corruptness, which I had not previously noticed, struck me. It happened in this passage:

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Mick West, who blogs as metabunk, is a propagandist for the “Establishment” or the billionaires’ preferences of what the public should believe; and, on 16 May 2018, he headlined “Debunked: Missing $21 Trillion / $6.5 Trillion / $2.3 Trillion – Journal Vouchers”.

He presented a representative of America’s Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) asserting, to US House members, that “this is not a new story, it dates back to 2001 and before,”.

And, West noted:

“All these things are accounting things that, as Norquist says ‘occur after the money is spent’. They are things that you want to get right in your accounting, but if you get the values wrong then it does not mean you’ve lost the money. It means you’ve got some estimate wrong, and you’ll put to little or to much [West meant “too much or too little”] in one fund or another.”

Referring, then, to the $21 trillion, he wrote:

“This is just more of the same though, still not missing money, still just unsupported accounting information transfers.”

However, only a sucker would take that casual attitude to the enormous amount of money in the ‘defense’ budget that is “unsupported” as to who received it, and whether or not those payments were in accord with what Congress had actually authorized.

Furthermore, such a casual attitude toward US ‘defense’-expenditures — the expenditures which constitute actually over half of the US federal Government’s discretionary expenditures, and even around half of the total world’s military expenditures — is an invitation to corruption in over half of this Government’s annually authorized spending; and any intelligent person would expect that such an invitation would be taken advantage of by insiders who are in a position to benefit from it.

West quotes from only one alleged authority, the “Defense Department Comptroller, David L. Norquist,” a person who is largely responsible for the problem, who said “it’s an accounting problem that does need to be solved because it can help hide other underlying issues,” but (at 1:43 in the accompanying video) “it’s not the same thing as not being able to account for money that Congress has given you to spend, but it’s still a problem that needs to be fixed.”

Mick West simply trusted this statement, by Norquist — though Norquist is one of the officials responsible for the problem — but Norquist failed to prove (and wasn’t even asked to prove) it, by the Representatives whom he was there addressing, who didn’t seem to be alarmed about where that $21T actually went) his key assertion, that “it’s not the same thing as not being able to account for money that Congress has given you to spend.”

Even if that assertion is true (which should not be assumed, and which even seems ludicrous on its very face), the problem is unquestionably an invitation to corruption in ‘defense’-expenditures, and those are precisely the type of federal expenditures that overwhelmingly dominate the income to the federal Government’s contractors, the corporations that make all or most of their profits from sales to the federal Government and to its allied governments (such as to the Saud family).

Therefore, casually allowing — and not even investigating as being possibly treasonous — these expenditures, is, itself, enormously scandalous, but the Representatives there were treating it so casually.

In fact, at the very opening of the hearing, which was held on 10 January 2018 (at 02:12 in the video of the 1:41:33-long hearing, above) the Chairman of the Committee emphasized the “We must spend more” on the military, even though we already spend around half of the entire world’s military expenditures. Manifestly, this hearing was a charade.

In the full video, the passage that Mick West quoted from is at 18:00-22:00, and the Representatives were clearly on the side of the charade, not on the side of the American people. Clearly, all members of that Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, behave as if they are in the pockets of firms such as Lockheed Martin.

On 15 November 2018, Reuters headlined “Pentagon fails its first-ever audit, official says”, and reported that: “‘We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it,’ Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan told reporters.”

On 27 November 2018, The Nation headlined “Exclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed” and David Lindorff opened:

“On November 15, Ernst & Young and other private firms that were hired to audit the Pentagon announced that they could not complete the job. Congress had ordered an independent audit of the Department of Defense, the government’s largest discretionary cost center — the Pentagon receives 54 cents out of every dollar in federal appropriations — after the Pentagon failed for decades to audit itself. The firms concluded, however, that the DoD’s financial records were riddled with so many bookkeeping deficiencies, irregularities, and errors that a reliable audit was simply impossible.”

So, that was the result of the latest version of this charade, which is virtual treason by the Federal Government.

In short: Congress is satisfied for this situation to continue, and the members of Congress evidently have no fear that the voters back home will vote against them if a challenger makes this issue a major issue in that Senator’s or Representative’s next Party primary.

The presumption is that the voters don’t care, and that the ‘news’-media won’t enlighten the voters about this matter, and about how it impacts, for example, which nations the US will categorize as being an “ally,” to sell weapons to, and which nations it will categorize as being an “enemy,” to target for conquest.

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So, what now struck me now was the name there, “David Norquist.” Maybe you remember the famous libertarian phrase about spending by the U.S. federal Government, that the libertarian goal is to “shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Here is one of the many articles that were published about that:

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https://www.ussc.edu.au/analysis/grover-norquists-no-tax-call-a-wedge-for-republicans

10 December 2012

GROVER NORQUIST’S NO-TAX CALL A WEDGE FOR REPUBLICANS


  • By     Dr Nicole Hemmer, Honorary Associate, United States Studies Centre

“Who the hell is Grover Norquist, anyway?”

The question came from former US president George HW Bush this northern summer, but in the past few weeks many Americans have been asking the same thing.

Norquist, an anti-tax activist, now dominates discussion of the fiscal cliff. His “no-new-taxes” pledge has been signed by nearly every Republican in congress. The problem? To avoid going off that fiscal cliff, congress must make a “grand bargain” by January 1. If it doesn’t include tax rate increases, President Barack Obama won’t sign it into law.

Republicans are in a bind. They could agree to tax-rate increases on Americans making more than $US250,000 a year in return for cuts to programs such as Medicare. That, however, would mean breaking Norquist’s pledge. And Norquist has made it clear that any Republican who does so will face a primary challenge in the next election.

So, to echo Bush: “Who the hell is Grover Norquist, anyway?”

Norquist runs Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax organisation he founded in 1986.

His opposition to taxation is an expression of his deep disdain for government. “I don’t want to abolish government,” he famously quipped. “I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

This “starve the beast” mentality has long been a conservative strategy for reducing the size of government. A strict diet of diminishing revenues, anti-tax advocates argue, will naturally lead to a smaller federal state.

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As it turns out, David Norquist and Grover Norquist are brothers. So: while David Norquist makes money by fronting for the billionaires who control firms such as Lockheed Martin Corporation, Grover Norquist makes money by fronting for the billionaires who control firms such as Lockheed Martin Corporation. David does it by rationalizing away those peoples’ corruptness as being a concern for U.S. taxpayers; and Grover does it by leading the Republican argument against the Government’s non-‘defense’ spending. (While Republicans want to reduce non-‘defense’-spending, they want to increase ‘defense’-spending. Democrats want to increase all federal spending, but ESPECIALLY for ‘defense’.)

The standard libertarian claim that “shrinking the government” is at all an issue or what motivates their wealthiest donors whom they are actually fronting for, is a lie. The only real issue that is involved here is: Who is, and who isn’t, getting the Government’s money.

All of federal politicians’ talk about the need to eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse” is also lies, because they themselves — those federal office-holders — got there and stay there by participating in it. If they’re not corrupt, they’re not in office, because this system is built upon corruption.

Whereas Republican billionaires demand that all federal expenditures except for ‘defense’ get slashed, Democratic billionaires demand that all federal expenditures get slashed but that ‘defense’ spending must never be reduced. So: what’s the real difference (except for the hypocritical rhetoric on the Democratic or “liberal” side)? The billionaires who control those arms-contracting companies control also which contenders for federal offices will become elected.

And here is how one of the billionaires’ ‘news’-media (in this case, the “Fact Check” columnist at the New York Times), on 3 December 2018, cited uncritically David Norquist’s fraudulent argument that nothing more was involved here than an accounting-problem — as-if those congressional and ‘Defense’ Department officials were upholding their obligations to THEIR “stockholders,” who are all U.S. citizens — by continuing to tolerate unauditable financial books at the largest federal Department: “The Misleading Claim That $21 Trillion in Misspent Pentagon Funds Could Pay for ‘Medicare for All’: Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the rising liberal star, cited a figure that refers to nearly two decades of internal financial adjustments, not actual spending.” And even the grandstanding ‘progressives’ in Congress did not take to task that lying ‘news’-medium for attacking them on a mere sub-allegation to the real issue here, which was the enormous corruptness that inevitably stands behind all of this.

The only way for an authentic progressive political candidate to deal with this is to declare publicly (and to document it by means of linked-to-evidence news-reports online, like the present one) that ‘our’ Government and media are controlled by the organized mega-crooks, who are this nation’s wealthiest individuals — the only group of individuals who benefit from it — who are this nation’s actual enemies: its corrupters. But, of course, no billionaire will fund such a campaign, and any news-medium that reports on it (except by lying against it) will likewise get no investors.

That is how bad that the situation really is. People need to be discussing this, in public, here and elsewhere. Because that is the problem. It is the problem that needs to be fixed. But how can it be done? And THAT is the question.

PS: Preliminary reports suggest that on account of this Government’s dual World War III against both Russia and China, the ‘Defense’ budget for next year will probably soar perhaps more than by 10%. The Congress now is well over 95% neoconservatives, in both houses. They’ve virtually all been bought.

Austerity, War & Dictatorship… the Charade of Western Democracy Is Over. Can We Lose Those Chains?

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By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Western liberal democracy and its ubiquitous “austerity economics” is a euphemism for fascism. And the charade is finally coming to an end.

Western liberal democracy and its ubiquitous “austerity economics” is a euphemism for fascism. And the charade is finally coming to an end.

Austerity is not some recent policy under neoliberal capitalism. It was born out of the historic crisis in the Western system following the First World War and during the 1930s when fascism became a way to curtail any democratic challenge to the prevailing capitalist system.

That political instrument of repression is wielded today across all Western states. Quite amazingly, for a long time, few people recognized their captive, repressive state as fascism. We generally lived under the illusion that we were free citizens in “liberal democracies”.

In this interview, Clara E Mattei explains how the technocratic-sounding “austerity” is used to hide the brutal reality of dictatorship and repression against the vast majority of citizen workers in Western states.

Clara Mattei is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department of The New School for Social Research, New York. She is the author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism.

Her book investigates the origins of austerity as an economic policy after the crisis of World War One. Crucially, she argues that austerity is not merely about governments balancing financial budgets. Professor Mattei contends that austerity policy implemented by all Western governments is a political instrument of mass repression to prevent any challenge to the prevailing capitalist order.

Austerity forces the vast majority to accept unacceptable conditions that are otherwise shockingly anti-democratic. The precariousness and insecurity of employment, the widespread denial of social services, deprivation and poverty, and the relentless abuse of taxes and resources that are fueling insane militarism and war.

If we really did live in free, democratic societies why are such deformities enforced without any alternative? Austerity is used to crush the political imagination for any reasonable, more humane, more peaceful alternative.

However, as Clara Mattei points out in this interview, the extreme anti-democratic conditions in Western societies are inevitably forcing greater numbers of people to question the injustices and hideous anomalies of the prevailing capitalist order.

People are realizing that Western governments are in reality regimes of repression in service for the enrichment of a minority. That fundamental deformity is why Western societies are collapsing and why the United States and its Western lackeys are driven to increasing conflict against Russia and China.

The charade of “Western democracy” is coming to an end. The rulers and their pantomime political parties are losing the moral authority to hold power over the masses.

As people necessarily seek ways to reinvent societies that are fit for meeting their democratic needs, socialist solutions are beckoning. We have to throw off the mental shackles imposed by our dictators, and realize, as Karl Marx once eloquently said, that we have got nothing to lose except our chains.

The war, the separation of the world, or the end of an Empire?

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All empires are mortal. So is the “American Empire ».
Painting by Alexandre Granger

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: VoltaireNet.org

Many are those who predict a World War. Indeed, some groups are preparing for it. But the States are reasonable and, in fact, consider rather an amicable separation, a division of the world into two different worlds, one unipolar and the other multipolar. Perhaps we are actually witnessing a third scenario: the “American Empire” is not struggling in the trap of Thucydides; it is collapsing like its former Soviet rival died.

The American “Straussians,” the Ukrainian “integral nationalists,” the Israeli “revisionist Zionists” and the Japanese “militarists” are calling for a generalized war. They are alone and they are not mass movements. No state has yet committed itself to this course.

Germany with 100 billion euros and Poland with much less money are rearming massively. But neither of them seems eager to take on Russia.

Australia and Japan are also investing in armaments, but neither of them has an autonomous army.

The United States is no longer able to replenish its military and is no longer able to create new weapons. They are content to reproduce the weapons of the 1980s in an assembly line fashion. However, they maintain their nuclear weapons.

Russia has already modernized its armies and is organizing itself to renew the ammunition it uses in Ukraine and to mass produce its new weapons, which no one can compete with. China, for its part, is rearming to control the Far East and, in the long term, to protect its trade routes. India thinks of itself as a maritime power.

It is therefore difficult to see who would and could start a World War.

Contrary to their speeches, French leaders are not at all preparing for a high-intensity war [1]. The military programming law, established for ten years, plans to build a nuclear aircraft carrier, but reduces the size of the army. It is a question of giving ourselves the means of projection, but not of defending our territory. Paris continues to reason as a colonial power while the world is becoming multipolar. It is a classic: the generals prepare for the previous war and ignore the reality of tomorrow.

The European Union is implementing its “Strategic Compass”. The Commission coordinates the military investments of its member states. In practice, they all play the game, but pursue different goals. The Commission, on the other hand, is trying to take control of decisions on the financing of armies, which until now have depended on their national parliaments. This would make it possible to build an empire, but not to declare a generalized war.
Clearly everyone is playing a game, but apart from Russia and China, none is preparing for a high-intensity war. Rather, we are witnessing a redistribution of the cards. This month, Washington is sending Liz Rosenberg and Brian Nelson, two specialists in unilateral coercive measures [2], to Europe with the mission of forcing the Allies to comply. In the words of former President George Bush Jr. during the war “against terrorism”: “Whoever is not with us is against us”.

Liz Rosenberg is efficient and unscrupulous. She is the one who brought the Syrian economy to its knees, condemning millions of people to poverty because they dared to resist and defeat the Empire’s surrogates.

The Hollywood western discourse a la George Bush Jr. of good guys and bad guys has failed with Türkiye, which has already experienced the 2016 coup attempt and the 2023 earthquake. Ankara knows that it has nothing good to expect from Washington and is already looking to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Yet the same discourse should succeed with the Europeans, who remain fascinated by the power of the United States. Of course this power is in decline, but so are the Europeans. No one has learned any lessons from the sabotage of the Russian-German-French-Dutch gas pipelines, North Stream. Not only did the victims take the blame without saying anything, but they are about to receive further punishment for crimes they did not commit.

The world should therefore be divided into two blocs, on the one hand the US hyperpower and its vassals, on the other the multipolar world. In terms of the number of states, this should be half and half, but in terms of population, only 13% for the Western bloc against 87% for the multipolar world.

The international institutions can no longer function. They should either fall into lethargy or be dissolved. The first examples that come to mind are the effective exit of Russia from the Council of Europe and the empty seats of Western Europeans in the Arctic Council during the year of the Russian presidency. Other institutions are no longer relevant, such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which was supposed to organize East-West dialogue. Only the attachment of Russia and China to the United Nations should preserve them in the short term, as the United States is already thinking of transforming the Organization into a structure reserved exclusively for the Allied Nations.

The Western bloc should also reorganize itself. Until now, the European continent was dominated economically by Germany. In order to be certain that Germany would never get closer to Russia, the United States wanted Berlin to be content with the western part of the continent and leave the center in the hands of Warsaw. So Germany and Poland armed themselves to impose themselves in their respective zones of influence, but when the American star faded, they would fight against each other.

When the Soviet Empire fell, it abandoned its allies and vassals. Having seen its inability to solve the problems, the USSR first stopped supporting Cuba economically, then dropped its vassals of the Warsaw Pact, and finally collapsed on itself. The same process is beginning today.
The first U.S. Gulf War, the 9/11 attacks and their host of wars in the broader Middle East, the expansion of Nato and the Ukrainian conflict will have offered only three decades of survival to the American Empire. It was backed by its former Soviet rival. It has lost its raison d’être with its dissolution. It is time for it to disappear too.

Translation
Roger Lagassé

[1] «En 2030, l’armée française ne sera pas prête à une guerre de haute intensité», Jean-Dominique Merchet, L’Opinion, 7 avril 2023.

[2] «US sanction officials plan missions to clamp down on Russia», Fatima Hussein, Associated Press, April 7, 2023.

New York Times Is Now Telling Bigger Lies Than Iraq WMDs and More Effectively

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By David Swanson

Source: War Is a Crime

The New York Times routinely tells bigger lies than the clumsy nonsense it published about weapons in Iraq. Here’s an example. This package of lies is called “Liberals Have a Blind Spot on Defense” but mentions nothing related to defense. It simply pretends that militarism is defensive by applying that word and by lying that “we face simultaneous and growing military threats from Russia and China.” Seriously? Where?

The U.S. military budget is more than those of most nations of the world combined. Only 29 nations, out of some 200 on Earth, spend even 1 percent what the U.S. does. Of those 29, a full 26 are U.S. weapons customers. Many of those receive free U.S. weapons and/or training and/or have U.S. bases in their countries. Only one non-ally, non-weapons customer (albeit a collaborator in bioweapons research labs) spends over 10% what the U.S. does, namely China, which was at 37% of U.S. spending in 2021 and likely about the same now despite the highly horrifying increases widely reported in the U.S. media and on the floor of Congress. (That’s not considering weapons for Ukraine and various other U.S. expenses.) While the U.S. has planted military bases around Russia and China, neither has a military base anywhere near the United States, and neither has threatened the United States.

Now, if you don’t want to fill the globe with U.S. weaponry and provoke Russia and China on their borders, the New York Times has some additional lies for you: “Defense spending is about as pure an application of a domestic industrial policy — with thousands of good-paying, high-skilled manufacturing jobs — as any other high-tech sector.”

No, it is not.  Just about any other way of spending public dollars, or even not taxing them in the first place, produces more and better jobs.

Here’s a doozie:

“Liberals also used to be hostile to the military on the assumption that it skewed right wing, but that’s a harder argument to make when the right is complaining about a ‘woke military.’”

What in the world would it mean to oppose organized mass murder because it skews right wing? What the hell else could it skew? I oppose militarism because it kills, destroys, damages the Earth, drives homelessness and illness and poverty, prevents global cooperation, tears down the rule of law, prevents self-governance, produces the dumbest pages of the New York Times, fuels bigotry, and militarizes police, and because there are better ways to resolve disputes and to resist the militarism of others. I’m not going to start cheering for mass killings because some general doesn’t hate enough groups.

Then there’s this lie: “The Biden administration touts the size of its $842 billion budget request, and in nominal terms it’s the largest ever. But that fails to account for inflation.”

If you look at U.S. military spending according to SIPRI in constant 2021 dollars from 1949 to now (all the years they provide, with their calculation adjusting for inflation), Obama’s 2011 record will probably fall this year. If you look at actual numbers, not adjusting for inflation, Biden has set a new record each year. If you add in the free weapons for Ukraine, then, even adjusting for inflation, the record fell this past year and will probably be broken again in the coming year.

You’ll hear all sorts of different numbers, depending on what’s included. Most used is probably $886 billion for what Biden has proposed, which includes the military, the nuclear weapons, and some of “Homeland Security.” In the absence of massive public pressure on a topic the public hardly knows exists, we can count on an increase by Congress, plus major new piles of free weapons to Ukraine. For the first time, U.S. military spending (not counting various secret spending, veterans spending, etc.) will likely top $950 billion as predicted here.

War profiteer-funded stink tankers like to view military spending as a philanthropic project to be measured as a percentage of an “economy” or GDP, as if the more money a country has, the more it should spend on organized killing. There are two more sensible ways to look at it. Both can be seen at Mapping Militarism.

One is as simple amounts per nation. In these terms, the U.S. is at a historic high and soaring far, far over the rest of the world.

The other way to look at it is per capita. As with a comparison of absolute spending, one has to travel far down the list to find any of the designated enemies of the U.S. government. But here Russia jumps to the top of that list, spending a full 20% of what the U.S. does per person, while only spending less than 9% in total dollars. In contrast, China slides down the list, spending less than 9% per person what the United States does, while spending 37% in absolute dollars. Iran, meanwhile, spends 5% per capita what the U.S. does, compared to just over 1% in total spending.

Our New York Times friend writes that the U.S. needs to spend more to dominate four oceans, while China need worry only about one.  But here the U.S. desire to treat economic competition as a form of war blinds the commentator to the fact that a lack of war facilitates economic success. As Jimmy Carter told Donald Trump, “Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None. And we have stayed at war. . . . China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that’s why they’re ahead of us. In almost every way.”

But you could drop the idiotic economic competition and still understand the benefits of investing in something other than death since tiny fractions of military spending could transform the United States and the rest of the world. Surely there would remain plenty of other things to lie about.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: To Heal the Great Divide

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

It has been fifty-five years since Senator Robert F. Kennedy stepped onto the presidential nominating stage to try to mend the massive breach that had opened in American society.  The country was torn asunder by the Vietnam War, racism, poverty, the assassination of President Kennedy and the soon-to-be assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Chaos reigned as Lyndon Johnson lied and Richard Nixon matched him in verbal and actual treachery.  A war between Middle America and the elites running the government was breaking out across the country.  A great divide between whites and blacks, rich and poor, the working class and the upper class was opening wide.  The Tet Offensive had just ripped the face off the official lies about the course of the war in Vietnam and the emperor, Lyndon Jonson, stood naked and would soon announce that he would not run again.

On March 16, 1968, Senator Kennedy declared his candidacy with these words:

I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I’m obliged to do all that I can.

I run to seek new policies – policies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities, policies to close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, in this country and around the rest of the world.

By the end of 1968, a plague year if there ever were one, Richard Nixon, together with his goon squad, prepared to occupy the White House, Vietnam raged on, and everything King and Kennedy stood for seemed lost.  Ignorance, vituperation, and the divide-and-conquer technique long practiced by the power elites set into the body politic like a deadly cancer.  Something died, all hope seemed lost, and the perilous course RFK spoke of was never stopped.  Jackals with polished faces have sat in the White House ever since.

Today hope is resurrected.  Enter Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. center stage who will declare his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president on Wednesday, April 19, in Boston, Massachusetts.

The wheel of history has turned and 2023 resembles 1968 in many ways while getting worse in others.  The divide in the country remains but has greatly widened.  The CIA and the intelligence agencies totally control the mainstream media now.  The Pentagon’s budget has increased exponentially.  The U.S. wages a savage war against Russia in Ukraine under the blatant lie of defending freedom while supporting Nazis and greatly risking nuclear war.  It provokes war with China.  Permanent war is government policy with military bases and CIA and special forces all over the world, waging semi-clandestine wars, or maybe just wars that people don’t want to know about.  The gap between the rich and the poor has widened while the elites mock working class people as moronic deplorables.  The Department of Defense controls the development, manufacturing, clinical testing, supply, production, and distribution of the mRNA vaccines, while the criminal pharmaceutical companies reap obscene profits.  Lies are piled upon lies in what amounts to an Orwellian nightmare.  And while LBJ and Nixon have been replaced by Joe Biden, the warfare state roll on.

Some things have changed, of course.  In 1968, liberals were turning against the U.S. war against Vietnam and were growing wary of the CIA.  Today they support all the Democratic-led wars and love the CIA.  They trust the obvious media lies and those of a proven liar such as Anthony Fauci.  Nowhere is this sadly truer than with the extended Kennedy family, who in their support for Biden, Fauci, the CIA, etc. have betrayed JFK and RFK.  Their smugness and support for Biden against their brother who is carrying on his uncle’s and father’s legacy is betrayal of the worst kind.

Despite a family actively opposed to his candidacy, despite all the media lies about him, and despite the odds makers giving him little chance, RFK, Jr. is entering the race.  It is an act of supreme moral courage.

Like his father in ’68, he is the only candidate who can heal this nation’s great divide.

That he is opposed by a huge array of people who will lie about him because he is a truthteller does not deter him.  Those lies immediately started up again as soon as word got out that he might run.  It’s an old story.

Trash will be thrown at him.  Every blemish of his nearly seventy years will be dredged up to paint him as a villain, a flawed man, a hypocrite – name all the negative terms you can think of and the real hypocrites, in their self-righteous rage, will use them against him.  They will bounce off him.  He is ready.

When Bobby, Jr. was young, his father handed him a book and said with urgency, “I want you to read this.”  It was Albert Camus’s The Plague.  He read it and it has informed his life ever since.  Just as in 1968, we live in plague times, and the plague is US, it runs through all our institutions and, as in Camus’s books, the rats are running wild, devouring truth and the values that can redeem us.  As he has written in his beautiful and important book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, Camus’s analysis of Sisyphus and the ancient Greeks has taught him an important lesson:

It is neither our position nor our circumstances that define us, according to the Stoics, but our response to those circumstance; when destiny crushes us, small heroic gestures of courage and service can bring us peace and fulfillment. In applying our shoulder to the stone, we give order to a chaotic universe. Of the many wonderful things my father left me, this philosophical truth was perhaps the most useful. In many ways, it has defined my life, and has allowed me to find serenity and purpose even in the most trying and tragic circumstances. (p.287)

Despite its brilliance, American Values (see this) was completely ignored by the mainstream press.  Why?  Because it revolves around “Chapter 9, Senator Robert F. Kennedy” and the long war between the Kennedys and the CIA that resulted in the deaths of JFK and RFK.  In this chapter, RFK, Jr. brilliantly shows that he fully grasps the CIA’s evil history.  All the other chapters, while very interesting personal and family history, pale in importance.   No member of the Kennedy family since JFK or RFK has dared to say what RFK, Jr. does in this book.  He indicts the CIA.  This is probably not a small part of his extended family’s animosity toward him.  Family taboos must be protected, as if they were state secrets.

But his indictment of the CIA is the fundamental reason why it and the media will at all costs try to prevent him from getting the nomination.  The character assassination will be intense.

Kennedy knows he faces an uphill battle for the presidency, but no matter what forces are aligned against him, political and familial, he will not back down.

He will surprise all the pundits, for his appeal crosses party lines.  He is tough and very smart.  He has been so hated and falsely maligned by the mainstream media for so long that he is skilled at keeping to his message, which I think will be positive and inspirational, something that this country is desperate for after so many years of lies and treachery.

Even Biden’s supporters in the Democratic party know he is a flawed candidate on his last legs, laboring to keep his words straight and his steps solid.  While he may have long served as the establishment’s war puppet, there are many nervous Democrats who want to finally cut their strings with him.  And the Republicans are a party in disarray, internally torn and tired of the Trump saga which will not end.

Two clowns don’t make for a pretty picture running the country and the world into the ground.  Biden and Trump and their predecessors are naked now and not just does one boy see it and shout it only to be ignored.  There is a growing feeling throughout the country that truth and goodness spoken clearly are desperately needed to unite the country through common values. Bob Dylan got it right back a few years:

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

Every day Americans are bombarded with bad news: the U.S. war against Russia via Ukraine, the lies about the “threats” from Russia and China, the collapsing economy, toxic spills, gun violence, corporate gangsters ripping off the average American and funneling those monies to the politicians who pimp for them, the egregious Covid-19 and “vaccine” lies that are daily being exposed as deadly frauds, the growing threat of nuclear war, etc.

Bad bad news, and with it a growing public sense of hopelessness.  A pall of unacknowledged depression smothers the country.  People are dying for hope, as they were in 1968.  In their inner hearts there is this desperate yearning for one brave soul to stand up and tell Americans the truth about what has happened to their country.  Bobby Kennedy, Jr. is the only one who can move Americans to hope again.

For years he has been telling harsh truths that many who profit from the lies do not want to hear. That our waters are polluted and the chemical companies are criminals; that the pharmaceutical companies are criminal enterprises polluting people’s bodies; that the CIA is organized crime polluting people’s minds and assassinating its anti-war leaders; that the Pentagon is a criminal enterprise not defending but risking American’s lives and their livelihood; that the U.S. government has joined with mega-corporations to run a Mob-like fleecing of the American people; that not one of Sirhan Sirhan’s bullets killed his father, Senator Robert Kennedy, who was shot from behind at close range by a CIA hit man; that the so-called Covid vaccines are very dangerous and have never been appropriately tested and many people are dying and being injured as a result; that Anthony Fauci is a liar and fraud who fronts for Big Pharma (see this) in the Covid-19 crisis that is an intelligence-run operation controlled by spooks working with medical technocrats; and that we are close to losing our country and any semblance of its democratic ideals.

These are not liberal or conservative positions.  They are self-evident conclusions of a patriot, as they should be for everyone.

And because they have become such to more and more Americans who can think without reacting, Kennedy’s voice and his candidacy will grow in strength across the great divide.

The media attacks will be intense and simply full of lies.  They love to call him an “anti-vaxxer,” when he is not opposed to all vaccines.  But no matter how many times he has explained this, the media twist it to serve their masters.

For example, The New York Post recently published a slimy piece that could serve as a template for all the propaganda aimed at Kennedy.  Let me quote:

Robert has said Sirhan did not actually participate in the murder of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy during a Los Angeles presidential campaign stop in 1968.

This of course is a lie.  RFK, Jr. has said that Sirhan fired a pistol but none of his bullets hit the Senator.  He has said a CIA hit man shot his father at close range from behind as the official autopsy clearly showed, while Sirhan was standing in front of the Senator.

Lie number two.  The Post writes:

In it [a speech], he implied that those who oppose vaccines are being persecuted more severely than Anne Frank, the German teen who hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam before being sent to her death at Auschwitz.

He never implied that.  His point was clear: that in the coming digital surveillance state there will be nowhere to hide, not even in an attic, because the surveillance technology will track everyone everywhere, day and night.

These are but a few examples.  Look and you will find them everywhere now and in the coming days.

The hyenas with polished faces will try like hell to dismiss Robert f. Kennedy, Jr. as a flake, a fraud, and a conspiracy nut on an ego-trip.  Too many people can now see through such propaganda.  He is the real thing, our best hope to bridge the great divide that has been created by the elites to divide the American people.

He will not back down, and all people of good will who believe the U.S. can still find its way out of the morass we find ourselves in, should back him up.  He has warned us, he has given us his voice, and his moral courage should be followed by all who hope to hope.

The pundits who dismiss his chances will then be shocked.

We are Closening to a Move Through the Cycle – But First Will Come Disorder

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By Alastair Crooke

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Is the collective West nearing the end of a cycle? Or are we still in mid-cycle? And could it be an epochal point of inflection?

The question posed at this point is: Is the collective West nearing the end of a cycle? Or are we still in mid-cycle? And is this a four-generational mini-cycle, or an epochal point of inflection?

Is Russo-Chinese Entente and the global tectonic discontent with the ‘Rules Order’ – on the heels of a long trajectory of catastrophes from Viet Nam, through Iraq to Ukraine – sufficient to move the West on to the next stage of cyclical change from apex to disillusionment, retrenchment and eventual stabilisation? Or not?

A major inflection point is typically a period in history when all the negative components from the outgoing era ‘come into play’ – all at once, and all together; and when an anxious ruling class resorts to widespread repression.

Elements of such crises of inflection are today everywhere present: Deep schism in the U.S.; mass protest in France, and across Europe. A crisis in Israel. Faltering economies; and the threat of some, as yet undefined, financial crisis chilling the air.

Yet, anger erupts at the very suggestion that the West is in difficulties; that its ‘moment in the sun’ must give place to others,and to other cultures’ ways of doing things. The consequence to such a moment of epochal ‘in-betweeness’ has been characterised historically by the irruption of disorder, the breakdown of ethical norms, and the loss of a grip on what is real: Black becomes white; right becomes wrong; up becomes down.

That’s where we are – in the grip of western élite anxiety and a desperation to keep the ‘old machinery’s’ wheels spinning; its ratchets loudly opening and closing, and its levers clanging into, and out of place – all to give the impression of forward motion when, in truth, practically all of western energy is consumed in simply keeping the mechanism noisily aloft, and not crashing to an irreversible, dysfunctional stop.

So, this is the paradigm that governs western politics today: Doubling-down on the Rules Order with no strategic blueprint of what it is supposed to achieve – in fact no blueprint at all, except for ‘fingers crossed’ that something beneficial for the West will emerge, ex machina. The various foreign policy ‘narratives’ (Taiwan, Ukraine, Iran, Israel) contain little of substance. They are all clever linguistics; appeals to emotion, and with no real substance.

All this is hard to assimilate for those living in the non-West. For they do not come face-to-face with western Europe’s repeat re-anactment of the French Revolution’s iconic secular, egalitarian reform of human society – with ‘the specific timbre, flavour and ideology’ shifting, according to prevailing historic conditions.

Other nations unafflicted by this ideology (i.e., effectively the non-West) find it perplexing. The West’s culture war barely touches cultures outside its own. Yet, paradoxically, it dominates global geo-politics – for now.

Today’s ‘flavour’ is termed ‘our’ liberal democracy – the ‘our’ signifying its link to a set of precepts that defies clear definition or nomenclature; but one, that from the 1970s, has drifted into a radical enmity towards the traditional European and American cultural legacy.

What is singular about the present re-enactment is that whereas the French Revolution was about achieving class equality;ending the division between aristocracy and their vassals, liberalism today represents a modification of ideology” that U.S. writer Christopher Rufo suggests, “says that we want to categorize people based on group identity and then equalize outcomes across every axis – predominantly the economic axis, health axis, employment axis, criminal justice axis—and then formalize and enforce a general levelling”.

They want absolute democratic levelling of every societal discrepancy – reaching even, back into history, to historic discrimination and inequalities; and to have history re-written to highlight such ancient practice so that they can be routed out through enforced reverse discrimination.

What has this to do with foreign policy? Well, pretty well everything (so long as ‘our’ liberalism) retains its capture of the western institutional framework.

Bear this background in mind when thinking of the western political class’s reaction to events, say, in the Middle East, or in Ukraine. Although the cognitive élite contends that they are tolerant, inclusive, and pluralistic, they will not accept the moral legitimacy of their opponents. That is why in the U.S. – where the Cultural War is most developed – the language deployed by its foreign policy practitioners is so intemperate and inflammatory towards non-compliant states.

The point here is that, as Professor Frank Furedi has emphasised, the contemporary ‘timbre’ is one no longer merely adversarial, but unremittingly hegemonic. It is not a ‘turn’. It is a rupture: The determination to displace other sets of values by a western inspired ‘Rules-Based Order’.

Being a ‘liberal’ (in this strictly narrow sense) isn’t something you ‘do’; it is what you ‘are’. You think ‘right thoughts’ and utter ‘right speak’. Persuasion and compromise reflect only moral weakness in this vision. Ask the U.S. neocons!

We are used to hearing western officials talk about the ‘Rules-Based Order’ and the Multi-Polar System as rivals in a new global framework of intense ‘competition’. That however, would be to misconceive the nature of the ‘liberal’ project. They are not rivals: There cannot be ‘rivals’; they can only be recalcitrant other societies that have refused the analysis and the need to root out all cultural and psychological structures of inequity from their own domains. (Hence, China is hounded on its alleged deficiency in respect to the Uyghurs).

The cognitive privilege of ‘awareness’ is what lies behind the western ‘doubling-down’ on imposing a global Rules-BasedOrder: No compromise. The moral enterprise is more intent on its elevated moral station than on coming to terms with or managing, say, a defeat in Ukraine.

Just yesterday, the Bank of America in London was forced to cut short a two-day, online conference on geopolitics; and apologised to attendees following the outrage expressed at a speaker’s comments that were deemed ‘pro-Russian’ by some attendees.

What was said? Professor Nicolai Petro’s remarks at the session where he said: “Under any scenario, Ukraine would be the overwhelming loser in the war: Its industrial capacity devastated … and its population shrunk as people departed to look for employment abroad. If this is what is meant by removing Ukraine’s capacity to wage war against Russia, then it [Russia] will have won”. Professor Petro added that the U.S. government had no interest in a ceasefire, as it had the most to gain from a prolonged conflict.

No compromise is allowed. To speak thus, to inhabit the western moral high ground creating ‘villains’, clearly is more important than coming to terms with reality. Professor Petro’s comments were condemned as “rolling through Moscow’s talking points”.

Yet, these cultural revolutionaries face a pitfall, Christopher Rufo writes,

“Theirs is actually, not an easy task. This is very difficult, and, in fact, I think is somewhat impossible. If you look at even the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s … They had a program of economic and social levelling that was more totalitarian and more drastic than anything that had ever happened in the past. [Yet] after the Revolution collapsed, after the period of retrenchment, social scientists looked at the data and discovered that a generation later, those initial inequalities had stabilized … The point is that forced levelling is very elusive. It’s very difficult to achieve, even when you are doing it at the tip of a spear or at the point of a gun.

The levelling project being essentially nihilistic becomes captured by the destructive side of the revolution – its authors so absorbed with dismantling structures that they do not attend to the need to think policies through, before launching into them. The latter are not adept at doing politics: at making politics ‘work’.

Thus, discontent at the welling string of western foreign policy flops grows. Crises multiply, both in number and across different societal dimensions. Perhaps, we are closening to a point of beginning to move through the cycle – toward disillusionment, retrenchment, and stabilization; the prerequisite step to catharsis and ultimate renewal. Yet, it would be a mistake to underestimate the longevity and tenacity of the western revolutionary impulse.

“The revolution does not operate as an explicit political movement. It operates laterally through the bureaucracy and it filters its revolutionary language through the language of the therapeutic, the language of the pedagogical, or the language of the corporate HR department”, Professor Furedi writes. “And then, it establishes power anti-democratically, bypassing the democratic structure: using this manipulative and soft language – to continue the revolution from within the institutions.”

High Stakes as Uncle Sam’s Days of Impunity Are Finally Over

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By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The edifice of American imperial power has never been challenged at its foundation. It is now.

Russia and China are determined to hold the American perpetrators of the Nord Stream sabotage to account. Uncle Sam’s days – indeed decades – of wanton criminality are over. There’s going to be hell to pay as the imperialist tyranny in Washington hits a wall of reality.

Several weeks have gone by with the United States and its Western lackeys stonewalling at the United Nations Security Council, squirming and resisting calls from Moscow and Beijing for an international criminal investigation into the sabotage of the Baltic Sea pipelines that were blown up in September.

A swathe of independent observers, such as American economics professor Jeffrey Sachs and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, have concurred with the investigative report published on February 8 by renowned journalist Seymour Hersh which claims that U.S. President Joe Biden and his senior White House staff ordered the Pentagon to take out the natural gas pipeline that runs along the Baltic Sea bed from Russia to Germany.

Russia and China are adamant about not letting this vital subject be ignored. They want a proper investigation, international accountability and criminal prosecution. Moscow and Beijing are right to insist on this. Washington and its Western allies’ presumption of impunity has gone on for too many decades. The buck stops here and both Russia and China are strong enough to ensure that the United States cannot threaten, blackmail, or arm-twist its way out of scrutiny.

The Nord Stream project is a major international civilian infrastructure, costing in excess of $20 billion to construct over more than a decade. At 1,200 kilometres in length under the Baltic Sea, it is an impressive feat of engineering, symbolizing the mutual benefits of good neighborliness and cooperative trading.

For the United States to blow this pipeline up in order to knock Russia out of the European energy market so that it could muscle in with its own more expensive gas supplies is a shocking act of state terrorism and criminality. It is also potentially an act of war against Russia and callous sabotage against supposed European allies whose citizens are now suffering economic misery from soaring energy bills. German workers have this week shut down the entire economy from industrial protests over collapsing businesses and unbearable cost of living.

Of course, the Nord Stream sabotage is an urgent matter of basic justice, accountability for an atrocious crime, as well as massive international financial reparations. It’s almost hilarious how the self-proclaimed American protagonist of “rules-based global order” is desperately procrastinating over a glaring incident of dereliction and chaos.

But more than the essential obligation of justice is the legacy of impunity. For the perpetrators of such a wanton terrorist act not to be held accountable sets a perilous precedent. Otherwise, what is stopping the state terrorists from repeating equally brazen acts of sabotage and warmongering? The very concept of international law and the United Nations Charter is demolished, not simply undermined.

The Nord Stream incident potentially opens an era of rampant lawlessness and state banditry – by a nuclear superpower, the United States, using its Western minions for cover. The Western news media, in their reluctance to investigate, are also exposed as nothing more than propaganda channels in the service of imperial masters.

The present is reminiscent of the 1930s during a time of fascist expansionism by Nazi Germany and other imperialist nations, including the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Spain and Japan, and others. Nazi Germany was not the unique culprit during that earlier time of barbarism, notwithstanding the official Western revisionism of history to absolve itself.

After the Second World War amid the ashes of international destruction and up to 85 million deaths, the United Nations and its Charter were founded to ostensibly enshrine the stricture that there would be no repetition of the 1930s-style lawlessness and state terrorism.

That lofty aspiration was always a pathetic illusion. The decades after WWII saw no halt to the imperialist warmongering and subterfuges carried out primarily by the United States and its Western allies, in particular Britain. What a mockery that the U.S. and Britain were afforded permanent member states of the UN Security Council given that these two rogue powers have been largely responsible for countless wars post-1945. The decades-long wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are but the most notorious war crimes of the Anglo-American “special relationship”.

During the Cold War decades, the Soviet Union provided a limited check on the worst depredations by Western imperialists. The People’s Republic of China was not strong enough to act as a deterrent force.

For about two decades after the Cold War officially ended in 1991 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States rulers perceived a license for “full-spectrum dominance”. Washington embarked on a frenzy of endless wars that up till recently have prevailed.

The first reality check on the unbridled violence of the U.S. imperialists and their NATO henchmen was Russia’s military intervention in Syria in late 2015 to put an end to the Western machinations for yet another regime-change operation. Washington and its accomplices failed in their nefarious goals in Syria, albeit the Americans persist in illegally occupying part of the Arab country and stealing its oil resources.

Ukraine is the full manifestation of the end to impunity for the United States.

Russia under Vladimir Putin has recovered the military strength that was lost with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In some ways, present-day Russia is even more formidable owing to the development of new forms of weapons, such as hypersonic missiles and S-500 air defenses. Also, Russia’s economy is on a sounder footing than the Soviet Union which relied excessively on militarism. Hence, Moscow has been able to withstand the economic assault that Washington and its allies have tried to mount over the Ukraine conflict.

Just as important, too, China has risen to economic and military superpower status. Together, Russia and China now present an invulnerable countervailing force to the United States and its Western allies.

For nearly eight decades after World War Two, the United States was relatively free to run amok, trashing international law and nations’ sovereignty, racking up death tolls by the millions, and terrorizing the planet with its “benign”, narcissistic tyranny.

The conflict in Ukraine, where Russia has said “enough is enough” to years of U.S.-led NATO aggression, is demonstrating that the days of impunity are finally over for the would-be American hegemon.

Washington has recklessly raised the stakes to an unsustainable height in Ukraine. It has bet the house – and farm – on subjugating Russia for its next insatiable imperial move against China. But Moscow and Beijing are calling Uncle Sam’s bluff. The buck stops here.

The edifice of American imperial power has never been challenged at its foundation. It is now.

Seymour Hersh: the CIA Knows Ukrainian Officials Are Skimming US Aid

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Hersh says the CIA estimates at least $400 million was embezzled last year in funds earmarked for diesel payments

By Dave DeCamp

Source: Antiwar.com

On Wednesday, Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a report on Substack that alleged the CIA was aware of widespread corruption in Ukraine and the embezzlement of US aid.

The report said the Ukrainian government has been using US taxpayer money to purchase diesel from Russia to fuel its military. Hersh said Zelensky “has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments.”

Hersh said according to one estimate by CIA analysts, at least $400 million in funds were embezzled last year. Sources told Hersh that Ukrainian officials are also “competing” to set up front companies for export contracts to private arms dealers around the world.

The issue of corruption was raised during a meeting between CIA Director William Burns and Zelensky in January. An intelligence official with direct knowledge of the meeting told Hersh that Burns delivered a stunning message to Zelensky.

Hersh wrote: “The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian president, because ‘he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.’”

During the meeting, Burns presented Zelensky with a list of 35 generals and senior government officials whose corruption was known to the CIA. Zelensky responded by dismissing 10 officials who were engaged in flagrant corruption. “The ten he got rid of were brazenly bragging about the money they had—driving around Kiev in their new Mercedes,” the intelligence official said.

Hersh said Zelensky’s “half-hearted response” and the “lack of concern” in the White House angered some US intelligence officials. The intelligence official speaking to Hersh criticized President Biden’s two main foreign policy advisors, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

“They have no experience, judgment, and moral integrity. They just tell lies, make up stories. Diplomatic deniability is something else,” the official said. The official said there was a “total breakdown between the White House leadership and the intelligence community.”

The report said the rift started in the fall when the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines were blown up. According to Hersh’s earlier reporting, President Biden ordered the operation that took out the pipelines. “Destroying the Nord Stream pipelines was never discussed, or even known in advance, by the community,” the official said.

The official said there is “no strategy for ending the war” within the Biden administration and offered more scathing criticism of Blinken and Sullivan.

“Burns is not the problem,” the official said. “The problem is Biden and his principal lieutenants—Blinken and Sullivan and their court of worshippers—who see those who criticize Zelensky as being pro-Putin. ‘We are against evil. Ukraine will fight ’til the last military shell is gone, and still fight.’ And here’s Biden who is telling America that we’re going to fight as long as it takes.”

Hersh’s story comes after a series of leaked top-secret documents from the Pentagon and other government agencies surfaced online. Some of the documents show US war planning for Ukraine and reveal the US doubts Kyiv’s ability to launch a successful counter-offensive, offering a starkly different view of Ukraine’s abilities than what Biden officials have been saying publicly.