The Economics of War - Nordstream Sabotage

Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute joins Mises Institute President Jeff Deist and economist Bob Murphy to discuss the economic and political ramifications of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline sabotage:



from The Economics of War - Nordstream Sabotage

Federal Reserve announces major ‘pilot exercise’ for ESG social credit score system

The Federal Reserve has taken a major step in the direction of facilitating an ESG compliant monetary network that effectively acts as a parallel system to that of the Chinese Communist Party’s infamous social credit scoring system.

The Fed said in a statement Thursday:

“Six of the nation's largest banks will participate in a pilot climate scenario analysis exercise designed to enhance the ability of supervisors and firms to measure and manage climate-related financial risks. Scenario analysis—in which the resilience of financial institutions is assessed under different hypothetical climate scenarios—is an emerging tool to assess climate-related financial risks, and there will be no capital or supervisory implications from the pilot.”

In other words, The Fed is working with the big banks to monitor their ability to comply with the ruling class’s preferred enviro statist technocratic tyranny.

The unaccountable people behind the American money printer claim that this exercise is “exploratory in nature and does not have capital consequences.” 

The statement adds that the “scenario analysis can assist firms and supervisors in understanding how climate-related financial risks may manifest and differ from historical experience.”

What exactly does this mean?

The Fed is clearly leaning in to the climate hoax narrative, or the pseudoscientific idea that humans are catastrophically impacting the climate, but not because they somehow care about the environment. The climate narrative is the chief rhetorical facilitator for the ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) movement. 

ESG acts as a trojan horse for the continuing centralization of the American financial system. ESG finance, popularized by hyper political asset management behemoths like BlackRock and Vanguard, acts to prevent outsiders from challenging the regime-connected insiders on Wall Street and in Washington, under the guise of acting to manifest a healthier planet. In other words, pro-ESG institutions are committed to attacking free market principles by means of deception, preferring the CCP-style “stakeholder capitalism” that allows for a small group of technocratic elites to make broad determinations about society.

Unsurprisingly, the legacy media has thus far cheered The Fed’s plan, with The New York Times reporting “that it often lagged behind its global peers when it comes to talking about and coming up with a plan for policing risks related to climate change.”

"The move is significant for a central bank that has often lagged behind its global peers when it comes to talking about and coming up with a plan for policing risks related to climate change." By @jeannasmialek
https://t.co/ET8vOaaxdZ

— Somini Sengupta🥭 (@SominiSengupta) September 29, 2022

The ESG “green transition,” frequently popularized by powerful world governments and the Davos elite, has served as the main vehicle for this movement. Akin to the Chinese social credit score, which is used to coerce businesses, and, by extension, individuals, into specific actions, ESG rules force individuals and businesses in America to deploy capital through the gatekeepers of the system.

The Federal Reserve statement continues:

“By considering a range of possible future climate pathways and associated economic and financial developments, scenario analysis can assist firms and supervisors in understanding how climate-related financial risks may manifest and differ from historical experience.”

The banks involved in this pilot program are Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo.

Of course, it’s just a scenario, until it’s not. The Fed pilot program is set to launch in early 2023.

Reprinted with permission from The Dossier.
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from Federal Reserve announces major ‘pilot exercise’ for ESG social credit score system

Protests Break Out In Europe: Cold Winter Coming

Earlier this week in Germany and the Czech Republic, tens of thousands took to the streets to demand an end to Russia sanctions and the start of the NordStream II pipeline. Then someone blew it up. With better EU/Russia commercial ties no longer an option, how much stronger will protests become? Also today, Kamala Harris tries her hand at foreign policy at the Korea DMZ...with predictable result. Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Protests Break Out In Europe: Cold Winter Coming

CDC Takes a Step Back in Its Push for Mask Wearing at Health Care Facilities

Sanity and freedom has returned at most places many Americans visit, with masks mandated signs, and even masks recommended signs, having been removed. But, at many health care facilities across the country mask mandates have remained in force.

The continuation of mask mandates at health care facilities is especially infuriating because, for our health’s sake, we would hope the people running these places would have understood from early on that the masks both cause health problems and are not shown to provide net protection against coronavirus. Basic medical expertise of the people to whom health care is entrusted is sadly deficient. Alternatively, taking action consistent with that expertise has been overcome by the fear of negative repercussions for standing up for reality in the face of the coronavirus scare.

Walking into a doctor’s office or hospital with their enforced mask mandates is like walking into the future depicted in the movie Idiocracy. You’re supposed to trust the medical judgment of these mask mandate enforcers? Oh brother.

Given a Friday change in guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more health care facilities have been terminating their mask mandates. The change is, though, far from a full repeal. What the CDC should have done was admit that pressuring people to wear masks at health care facilities because of coronavirus is an inexcusable violation of freedom with no medical justification. Instead, the CDC admitted no fault and lifted its guidance only in areas of the country that lack what it considers a high level of transmission of coronavirus.

This CDC change for health care facilities will bring some relief to some people by freeing them from demeaning mask mandates. But, it leaves in place, as has happened in school district and county government coronavirus policies that defer to CDC guidance, dormant mask mandates that can spring back into enforcement if the coronavirus transmission numbers increase again. Plus, with the CDC and health care facilities having admitted no fault for the mask mandate overreach, what preposterous demands might they impose in the name of countering the next health-related scare?

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2022/september/29/cdc-takes-a-step-back-in-its-push-for-mask-wearing-at-health-care-facilities/

Zelenskyy’s $13 Billion OCD Problem

During an interview on the corporate media “Face the Nation” program, the “president” of the fake nation Ukraine, revealed how much of your money is being shoveled into the coffers of oligarchs infamous for theft and forming neo-Nazi paramilitaries.

“The United States gives us $1.5 billion every month to support our budget to fight,” said Zelenskyy, and added that there is “a deficit of $5 billion in our budget,” as if the US, with a staggering deficit problem of its own, is somehow responsible for propping up the neo-Nazi infested “democracy.”

See the entire interview here:

Zelensky said, after revealing the astonishing $1.5 billion in aid on a monthly basis figure, “But believe me, it’s not even nearly enough to cover the civilian infrastructure, schools, hospitals, universities, homes of Ukrainians. Why do we need this? We need the security in order to attract our Ukrainians to come back home.”

In other words, we are responsible to make up for what the oligarchs and kleptocrats in Ukraine have stolen to pad their private fiefdoms and paramilitaries.

As for his fellow Ukrainians, if billions of devalued US dollars defeat Russia (and it most certainly will not), this will convince those that have escaped war and misery, will decide “it’s safe [to] come, settle, work here and will pay taxes and then we won't have a deficit of $5 billion in our budget. So it will be a positive for everybody," Zelensky insisted.

No mention here that thousands have fled Ukraine to escape neo-Nazi persecution, torture, and targeted assassination (for the crime of speaking Russian).

🇺🇦 Ukrainian nationalists terrorizing the people of Eastern Ukraine

In late February 2022, Russian forces & volunteers helped Donbas refugees to leave their destroyed homes & have a chance at a new life. The number of refugees in February exceeds 3.2 million.@georgegalloway 😔 pic.twitter.com/MsFhC08h9a

— Bro Fii (@OB_Ages) September 23, 2022

"And then the United States will not have to continue, give us this support," he concluded, though the way things are going it could be years before the US might "not have to continue" the nonstop aid. Zelensky appeared to be trying to present a strange "win-win" for American, though again if average US taxpayers grasped the full enormity of it, they certainly might question that narrative.

Right. And I have a bridge and a stable of pink ponies on the Moon for sale.

On Monday, Reuters reported:

Negotiators of a stop-gap spending bill in the US Congress have agreed to include nearly $12 billion in new military and economic aid to Ukraine, sources familiar with the talks said on Monday, reflecting continued bipartisan support for the Kyiv government in the wake of Russia's invasion.

In response to a request from the Biden administration, the funding would include $4.5 billion to provide defense capabilities and equipment for Ukraine, as well as $2.7 billion to continue military, intelligence and other defense support, said the sources, who asked not to be identified ahead of the announcement.

Reading this, one might believe neolibs and neocons, so prevalent in Congress and our government, are generously helping the Ukrainian people, but this is nothing short of a sick joke. In fact, the US national security state doesn’t give a fig about the fate of the Ukrainian people. It is using Ukraine as a battlefield in an undeclared war between Russia and NATO, a fight NATO has itched for since its inception in 1949.

Of course, “defending” Europe from “Russian [and previously Soviet] aggression” is only part of the manufactured picture, as NATO has long been used as an enforcer in the Balkans, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.

As for the crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia by the neoliberal NATO hit squad, the late Ramsey Clark, a former senior official in the Kennedy and Johnson Justice Department, organized “Text of Indictment by the Independent Commission of Inquiry Hearing to Investigate US/NATO War Crimes Against the People of Yugoslavia.” Ramsey indicted

The Government of every NATO country that participated directly in the assaults on Yugoslavia with aircraft, missiles, or personnel and Commanding Generals, Admirals, NATO personnel directly involved in designating targets, flight crews and deck crews of the NATO military bomber and assault aircraft, NATO military personnel directly involved in targeting, preparing and launching missiles at Yugoslavia, the governments of the NATO countries’ personnel causing, condoning or failing to prevent violence in Yugoslavia before and during NATO occupation and Others to be named.

The document, of course, was ignored by NATO, the US, and the corporate war propaganda media. NATO prefers to take out media that does not support its murderous and unprovoked actions, as it did when Obama decided to use NATO to turn Libya into a third-world hellhole and slave market.

A press conference held by the Broadcast Employees Libya declared:

In an act of international terrorism and in violation of Security Council resolutions of the UN, NATO attacked the facilities of the Broadcasting Department of Libya during the early hours of [July 7, 2011]. Three of our technicians were killed and 15 injured while performing their professional duty as Libyan journalists… We are employees of Libyan state television. We are not a military target, we are not officers in the army and not a threat to civilians. We are doing our job as journalists in representing what from the bottom of my heart we believe is the reality of the NATO aggression and violence in Libya.

According to research conducted by the Foundation to Battle Injustice,

not only the United States, but also other members of the NATO, including the United Kingdom, are responsible for war crimes in the Middle East. So far, none of these States has suffered any economic or legal responsibility for their crimes, despite the confirmed and recognized facts of brutal reprisals against civilians and the use of prohibited weapons against civilians.

NATO enforcers committed numerous war crimes, according to a November 2020 report.

According to a report on the actions of the military in Afghanistan, which has long been classified, Australian soldiers deliberately killed farmers and civilians in Afghanistan as part of a rite of passage through which all recruits had to go. The report was published after a four-year investigation, during which more than 400 witnesses were interviewed and several thousand documents were examined. The report provides evidence that one of the Australian soldiers knocked a local unarmed resident to the ground and shot him in the back of the head, despite the fact that the civilian posed absolutely no threat. The investigation also learned about another incident when Australian mercenaries and patrol members “deliberately attacked” unarmed civilians, after which they planted weapons and ammunition on them, trying to create the impression that they were in danger. Soldiers also competed to outperform other patrols in the number of civilian enemies killed in combat.

The United Kingdom, being a NATO member country, was one of the first to take part in the operation against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001. British forces were involved in the killing of nearly 300 Afghan civilians, including at least 86 children and more than 200 adult civilians. The British Armed Forces paid compensation to Afghan civilians in the amount of $940,657 for 289 dead civilians between 2006 and 2014, which is an average of $3,254 per family. In other words, for the UK, the life of an Afghan civilian during the war cost an average of 2,380 pounds. The youngest victim was a three-year-old boy who was killed during a mine clearance operation by British forces. One of the most serious incidents listed in the protocols is the death of four children who were allegedly “mistakenly shot” by British soldiers during an incident in December 2009. Many military experts are still wondering how four children from the same family can be “shot by mistake”. (Emphasis in original.)

The manifest absurdity of NATO propaganda focusing on unproven and fake (e.g. Bucha) war crimes is intended to rationalize mass murder on a large scale.

Day 204.
Ukrainian army attack, deliberately targeting civilian areas in Donetsk. There is no Russian military element there. This coverage will never appear in the Western media. They are just waiting for news of slander and propaganda like #Izyum, #Bucha, & #Kramatorsk. pic.twitter.com/tSm5bC8jhE

— AW. Wikanadi  (@awwikanadi) September 21, 2022

Important video segment for discussions with people who believe the US and west war propaganda wholeheartedly. Like the russian systematic rape stories or bucha. I found it in the intro to "redacted" live shows, then googled because no source.Sry fr ads.https://t.co/Ow1oYfwM7D

— Dodo Dadabi (@DDadabi) September 21, 2022

NATO war propaganda has remained an integral part of the “alliance” since its inception. NATO’s pernicious media spin has focused on the Cold War, anticommunism, the arms race, the Vietnam War, “Team B” (to overestimate the effectiveness of the Soviet military), the propaganda by Le Cercle, also known as the “Piny Group” (mostly from intelligence services), the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, and the effort to turn the “war on terror” into a noble cause (as if 900,000 deaths and $8 trillion squandered was worth it, as the late Madeline Albright might have said).

All of the above should provide enough evidence of the murderous character of NATO, the serial murdering midget created by the US national security state to enforce neoliberal doctrine on the reluctant.

Ukraine hopes for a surplus of gravy from the United States and, despite public opposition, will get pretty much what it wants, including missiles able to reach the interior of Russia, including its nuclear power plants (a truly psychopathic proposal of murder en masse).

Reprinted with permission from Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.
Subscribe and support the author here.

from Zelenskyy’s $13 Billion OCD Problem

The Americans Did It

In his remarkable book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, the Flemish psychologist Mathias Desmet explains how collective psychosis can cause people to lose their critical faculties. He cites a famous experiment in which a person can be made to say that one line on a diagram is the same length as another, when in fact it is longer, if seven or eight actors have pretended to come to the same conclusion before him.

Desmet is writing mainly about the coercive psychosis of Covid. But the same arguments apply to the current collective psychosis about Russia. For years and decades now, we have been fed horror stories about Russia. These have of course only increased in intensity since the invasion of Ukraine. We have now reached a situation in which entire sections of the media, and their respective national governments, claim to believe things which are simply impossible.

The latest example is the apparent sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines. Russia has been immediately blamed but the accusation is not credible, for the following reasons. I defy any person endowed with normal critical faculties to show the opposite.

The Americans have been opposed to Nord Stream 2 for years.

It was Germany, on the orders of the USA, that decided not to open the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in February. Joe Biden said in front of Olaf Scholz, ‘We will put an end to it.’ When asked how the US would do this, he replied, ‘I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.’[1] Victoria Nuland made it even more clear in January.[2] 

This is a long-standing American position. Under the Trump administration, extraterritorial sanctions were imposed on European companies working on the construction of the pipeline. Trump attended the Three Seas summit in Warsaw in 2018, an initiative to encourage the building of infrastructure to make Europe able to receive American liquefied natural gas in place of Russian gas. There is therefore a very long-standing US opposition to the continuing and increased supply of gas by Russia to Germany.

The Americans, together with the Poles and the Ukrainians, have been mounting a vociferous campaign against Nord Stream 2 for years, the Poles comparing the pipeline to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of September 1939. The former German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, has been vilified and nearly expelled from his own party for working for Nord Stream 2. In the face of all this hostility, Russia has continued to build the pipeline, completing it last year to the absolute fury of all the above-mentioned countries. Why would Russia blow it up after spending billions on it?

Russia has no motive to destroy the pipelines, but instead has an active interest in their remaining operational, including for political reasons. 

In the current situation, Germany refused to open Nord Stream 2 and then the Russians, ostensibly for technical reasons, idled Nord Stream 1. 

If you believe that the technical reasons are just a pretext, and that in reality the Russians idled Nord Stream 1 to put pressure on the Europeans, as has been widely alleged, then only possible logical conclusion is that that the pressure in question is being wielded in an attempt to force the Europeans to open Nord Stream 2, by making them realise they need it. 

As Russia continues to supply gas through the overland Yamal and Druzhba (Friendship) pipelines, and as Russia recently foiled a plot to blow up the Turk Stream pipeline[3], it is incredible to allege that Russia wants to stop supplying Europe with gas. 

On the contrary, the continued supply of gas, which is now sold for roubles, has helped the rouble become one of the strongest performing currencies in the world, its strength enabling the Russian Central Bank to cut interest rates and recover from the initial shock caused by the sanctions in March. Russia has every interest in continuing to sell gas, including in the current conditions of economic warfare. By the same token, Russia’s enemies have every motive for removing this leverage from Russia.

If you argue, as does the President of the European Commission, that Russia is trying to blackmail Europe by cutting gas supplies, then by what possible logic would Russia sabotage the pipeline? The destruction of the pipeline removes precisely any ability of Russia to blackmail anyone. That is presumably why it was sabotaged.

Could Russia have done it?

The crazier media have been full of speculation about Russian frogmen carrying out a secret mission. Anything is possible. But if this is the truth, then it shows up Nato in rather a bad light. The explosions occurred just a few kilometres or a few dozen kilometres from the Polish, Danish and German coasts – all Nato members. If Nato is not capable of protecting a key item of European infrastructure, then what is the use of it?

By contrast, the Americans conducted exercises in June 2022 on Bornholm, the Danish island where the pipeline blew up, testing underwater explosives and drones.[4] So while it is very difficult to see how Russian frogmen could have carried out an operation under Nato’s very nose, it is easy to see how the Americans could have done it because they were practicing that very thing right there three months ago. Maybe that is what the exercises were really all about.

However, if you do believe that the Russians could have sent a secret hit squad to blow up a pipeline under the Baltic Sea, then it is inconceivable that they would blow up their own pipeline and not Baltic Pipe, which (coincidentally?) was officially opened on the very day after Nord Stream 2 was attacked. Baltic Pipe is a Norwegian-Danish-Polish project designed to supply gas from Norway to Denmark and Poland and to reduce dependency on Russia. If you think that Russia is trying to sabotage Europe’s gas supplies, you must surely conclude that it would blow up Baltic Pipe instead. If Russia wants to starve Europe of gas, it needs only not to put any gas into Nord Stream 2, it does not need to blow it up.

F*ck the EU

The US Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, who as we saw above, said in January that she had told the Germans Nord Stream 2 would not go ahead, famously had a phone conversation in 2014 with the then US ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, in which the two of them decided the composition of the new Ukrainian government.[5] At one point, Nuland expressed in vulgar but succinct terms US policy over Ukraine: “Fuck the EU.”

That is exactly what the Americans have just done. At least, that is what the former Polish Foreign Minister and former Defence Minister, Radek Sikorski, thinks. One of the most vicious Russophobes in a very Russophobic country, Sikorski is very close to the security services. On the day of the attack, he tweeted quite simply, with a photo of the gas bubbling up to the surface of the sea, “Thank you, USA.”[6]

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=95&v=OS4O8rGRLf8&feature=youtu.be
[2]https://twitter.com/StateDept/status/1486818088016355336
[3]https://tass.com/society/1511625
[4]https://seapowermagazine.org/baltops-22-a-perfect-opportunity-for-research-and-resting-new-technology/
[5]https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/feb/07/eu-us-diplomat-victoria-nuland-phonecall-leaked-video
[6]https://twitter.com/radeksikorski/status/1574800653724966915


Reprinted with author's permission from Forum for Democracy.
John Laughland is Director of Forum for Democracy International and a Member of the Academic Board of the Ron Paul Institute. He is a Visiting Fellow at Mathais Corvinius College in Budapest, Hungary.

from The Americans Did It

Who Blew Up The Pipeline? The Plot Thickens!

Former Polish Defense Minister Radek Sikorski (husband of US neocon Anne Applebaum) publicly thanked the US government for blowing up NordStream I and II on Twitter yesterday, a move that made even his own fellow countrymen feel awkward. The seeming terrorist attack was less a move against Russia than against Germany. So who did it? Why? Also today, Sen. McConnell rolls over on even more billions to Ukraine. And...is Elon turning his eyes toward Rumble? Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Who Blew Up The Pipeline? The Plot Thickens!

Washington’s Pointless War on Behalf of a Fake Nation

The messages are coming in loud and clear today – from the crashing pound, to repudiation of establishment governments in Italy, Sweden and more to come, to Hungarian Prime Minister Orban’s call to end the Sanctions War and do so pronto.

So let’s be clear: Washington’s dunderheaded intervention in the intramural spat between Russia and Ukraine and the accompanying global Sanctions War is the surely the stupidest, most destructive project to arise from the banks of the Potomac in modern times. And the architects of this perfidious folly – Biden, Blinkin, Sullivan, Nuland, et. al. – cannot be condemned harshly enough.

After all, this madness is being pursued in the name of abstract policy norms – the rule of law and sanctity of borders – that make Washington a laughing stock. More than any other nation on planet earth (and by a long-shot), it has serially and blatantly violated these standards scores of times in recent decades.

Among other actions, Washington’s interventions in Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, etc. were not only pointless; they were also a self-evident violation of the very rule of law and sanctity of borders upon which Washington now beats its breasts ever more stridently.

Moreover, by wallowing in this unhinged hypocrisy Washington has abandoned every semblance of commonsense as to why this conflict happened in the first place and why it is wholly irrelevant to the national security of the American homeland, or, for that matter, Europe, as well.

The fundamental fact is, aside from the historically short interval of iron-fisted communist rule during the Soviet era, Ukraine had never been a nation-state within its post-1991 happenstance borders. In fact, for upwards of 275 years before 1918 much of its territories were borderlands, vassals and outright provinces of Czarist Russia.

So we are not dealing with the invasion of a long-established, ethnically and linguistically coherent state by its aggressive neighbor, but with the leftover potpourri of separate tongues, territories, economies, and histories that were smashed together by brutal communist rulers between 1918 and 1991.

Accordingly, the fast-approaching dark, cold winter of stagflationary collapse in Europe is not being done in heroic defense of the grand principles proffered by Washington and NATO. To the contrary, it amounts to the pointless and grubby business of preserving a vile status quo ante that was confected on the lands north of the Black Sea, not by the ordinary course of historical evolution and nation-state accretion, but by the bloody-hands of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev.

In any event, the staggering economic costs for the everyday peoples of Europe in pursuit of such a threadbare and illegitimate purpose is starting to register among the long-suffering victims of Brussels’ elitist rulers. Hence the thunderbolts from the Italian elections this weekend and Viktor Orbán’s parallel appeal to the European Union to lift sanctions and thereby potentially reduce energy prices by half in one swell swoop.

Nor is Orbán the only one calling for an end to sanctions, with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotaki calling for a repeal of Russian sanctions as well. Other political leaders, such as Matteo Salvini, who leads the conservative League party and will be a major force in Italy’s new government, says that Europe needs a "rethink" on Russian sanctions due to the harmful economic effects.

Likewise, the conservative Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has also been pushing for an end to sanctions and an re-opening of the Nord Stream 1 & 2 gas pipelines due to soaring energy costs in Germany. AfD member of the Bundestag, Mariana Harder-Kühnel, for instance, recently echoed Orbán’s call.

"The EU bureaucracy has turned the screw on the sanctions, and now we are paying the bill," she said.

In this context, the ructions since Friday in the FX market for the pound sterling speak more powerfully than anything else.

The British pound briefly plunged to its lowest level ever early this AM, touching $1.0349 during Asian trading hours, breaking through its previous record low of 1985. Moreover, today’s cliff-dive followed a tumble of 3% on Friday, after the new Truss government announced sweeping tax cuts and a massive energy bailout for businesses and individuals.

Likewise, the price of U.K. government debt has fallen in tandem with the pound, with yields rising sharply again today. The 10-year government bond was yielding 4.11%, up 28 basis points from Friday and a staggering 342% from the 0.93% yield of just one year ago.


(bigger)

For want of doubt, here is the path of pound sterling over the last twelve months. That’s a massive thumbs down by the FX markets if there ever was one.


(bigger)

But the relevant point here is not all the Keynesian palaver about the "mistake" of lowering the 45% top income tax rate and removing other disincentives to work and investment that take UK marginal rates as high as 60%. These reductions in the crushing tax rates that Conservative and Labor government alike have erected atop the UK’s lavish Welfare State are long-overdue and will, in fact, stimulate compensatory economic activity.

What’s actually going to destroy the remnants of the UK’s fiscal sustainability is Truss’ utterly foolish plan to freeze all energy prices for all citizens and businesses at a cost of upwards of $200 billion per year or 5% of GDP. But that’s neocon insanity run amok.

If London wants to relieve its consumers of onerous energy prices and utility bills it only need follow Orban’s advice and terminate its Sanctions War against Russian energy, food and other commodity exports. And it wouldn’t cost the Exchequer a dime.

That is to say, the pound’s crash ought to be a general wake-up call to Europe and Washington, too. By declaring war on the productive and peaceful commerce with Russia that previously prevailed, Europe’s leaders – -especially the new government of United Kingdom – have sacrificed their own prosperity and the living standards of their citizens in behalf of a prodigiously corrupt, anti-democratic regime in Kiev that is dedicated to preserving intact nothing more noble than the dead hand of the Soviet Presidium.

Or as our friend James Howard Kunstler rightly summarized:

Let us agree that the place called Ukraine was never any of America’s business. For centuries we ignored it, through all the colorful cavalry charges to-and-fro of Turks and Tatars, the reign of the dashing Zaporozhian Cossacks, the cruel abuses of Stalin, then Hitler, and the dull, gray Khrushchev-to-Yeltsin years. But then, having destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia and sundry other places all on a great hegemonic lark, the professional warmongers of our land and their catamites in Washington made Ukraine their next special project. They engineered the 2014 coup in Kiev that ousted the elected president, Mr. Yanyukovich, to set up a giant grifting parlor and international money-laundromat. The other strategic aim was to prepare Ukraine for NATO membership, which would have made it, in effect, a forward missile base right up against Russia’s border. Because, well, Russia, Russia, Russia!

So we return to the question at hand: Every Ukrainian presidential election since 1991 has revealed a nation radically split between pro-Russian populations in the east and south and anti-Russian nationalists in the center and west. When the mailed fist of communist rule was removed, in fact, Ukraine became a territory yearning to be partitioned into more amenable jurisdictions of governance.

For instance, here is the results of the 2010 election that put a pro-Russian politician in the president’s office and at length gave rise to Washington’s putsch during the Maiden uprising that soon drove the country into civil war.


(bigger)

The above map barely does justice to the actual figures. In many of the yellow Tymoshenko-supporting areas the vote was 80% or higher in favor of the latter’s nationalist candidacy, while in the much of the blue area the pro-Russian Yanukovych won be similar massive pluralities.

Yet this wasn’t a one-time fluke of short-term electoral politics: It was actually the recrudescence of the manner in which the fake nation of Ukraine was put together during the last three centuries.

Prior to the end of WWI, there was no Ukrainian state. Like the artificial and unsustainable polities of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, which were confected by self-serving politicians at Versailles (especially the domestic vote seeking Woodrow Wilson), Ukraine was a product of geopolitical engineering – in this case by the new rulers of the Soviet Union.

Indeed, the historical provenance of "Ukraine" can be described in a nutshell. What was to become Ukraine joined Russia in 1654 when Bohdan Khmelnitsky, a Hetman of the Zaporozhian Host, petitioned Russian czar Alexey to accept the Zaporozhian Host into Russia. That is to say, Imperial Russia spawned the latter day polity of Ukraine by annexing into its service the fearsome Cossack Warriors who inhabited its central region.

The army and a small territory then under Hetman control was called "u kraine," which means in Russian "at the edge," a term that had originated in the twelfth century to describe lands on the border of Russia.

During the next 250 years the expansionist Czars annexed more and more of the adjacent territory, designating the eastern and southern regions as "Novorussiya" (New Russia), which territories included Catherine the Great’s purchase of Crimea from the Ottoman’s in 1783.

That is to say, at the time of America’s own independence the heart of today’s Ukraine was ruled by the long arm of Czarist autocracy.

After the Bolshevik revolution, of course, the map changed radically. In 1919 Lenin created the socialist state of Ukraine on part of the territory of the former Russian Empire. Ukraine officially became the Ukrainian People’s Republic with the capital of Kharkov in 1922 (moved to Kiev in 1934).

Accordingly, the new communist state swallowed up Novorussiya per the eastern and southern portions of the green area in the map below, including Donetsk, and Lugansk regions, as well as the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions bordering the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea that are the sites of today’s Russia-sponsored succession referendums.

Then in 1939, as a result of the infamous Nazi-Soviet Pact, Stalin annexed the eastern territories of Poland, as designated by the yellow areas of the map. Thus, the historic territory of Galicia and the Polish city of Lvov were incorporated into Ukraine by the joint decree of Stalin and Hitler.

In June of 1940, Stalin next annexed Northern Bukovina (brown area) from Romania. And then at the Yalta conference in 1945, upon Stalin’s insistence to Churchill and Roosevelt, the Hungarian Carpathian Ruthenia was incorporated into the Soviet Union and added to Ukraine.

Taken together, these Stalinist seizures are now known as Western Ukraine, the people’s of which understandably do not cotton to things Russian. At the same time, the 85% Russian-speaking population inhabiting the purple area (Crimea) was gifted to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954 for the very reason of extending his own accession to the communist dictatorship.

Nevertheless, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited these communist-confected borders within which there were upwards of 40 millions Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Tartars and countless lesser nationalities – all trapped in a newly declared country in which they didn’t especially wish to reside.


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Indeed, the reason that the hapless state of "Ukraine" needs relief in partition, not a war to preserve the handiwork if Czars and Commissars, was well summarized by Alexander G. Markovsky in the American Thinker:

Today’s Ukrainian civil war is thus greatly exacerbated by the fact that unlike pluralistic societies such as the USA, Canada, Switzerland, and Russia, which are tolerant of different cultures, religions, and languages, Ukraine is not. Unsurprisingly, devotion to pluralism proved not to be her forte. Even though the Kiev regime had no historical roots in the real estate it inhabited, it imposed Ukrainian rules and the Ukrainian language on non-Ukrainian people after declaring independence.

As a result, pro-Russian sentiments – ranging from the recognition of the official status of the Russian language to outright secession – have always been prevalent in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. Western Ukraine has always gravitated toward its Polish, Romanian, and Hungarian roots. Emphatically anti-Russian, Poland may not miss this strategic opportunity to re-acquire its land and avenge the humiliation inflicted by the Yalta Conference.

The West’s insistence on maintaining the status quo of the Ukrainian borders established by Lenin, Stalin and Hitler exposes the disconnect between strategic doctrine and moral principles.

Indeed, Poles make no secret of their ambitions. Polish President Andrzej Duda, recently declared, "For decades, and maybe, God forbid, for centuries, there will be no more borders between our countries – Poland and Ukraine. There will be no such border!"

Romania is not far behind, especially in light of many inhabitants of former Northern Bukovina already carrying Romanian passports.

The territory of Ukraine is a mosaic of other people’s lands. If we want to stop this insane war and ensure peace in Europe, instead of calling Russia’s sponsored referendum in Eastern Ukraine a sham, we should conduct an honest referendum in all the disputed territories under the auspices of the UN and let the people decide what government they want.

Needless to say, partition of the fake state of Ukraine is not remotely on Washington’s mind. After all, it would remove the latest neocon reason for spreading the blessings of Forever Wars to the fairest parts of the planet.

David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America and TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.

from Washington’s Pointless War on Behalf of a Fake Nation

Sabotage? Both NordStream Pipelines Blown Up!

It appears as if some kind of explosion blew three huge holes in the NordStream I and II pipelines near Danish waters. Massive leaks are showing up on the surface of the Baltic Sea. Whodunnit? Would Washington blow up Russia's pipeline? Germany? Russia? Also today, the Democrats have become the party of war. Finally: Another $12 billion for Ukraine snuck into "must-pass" spending bill. Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Sabotage? Both NordStream Pipelines Blown Up!

Biden’s Brain: Jake Sullivan Warns Russia of 'Catastrophic Consequences'

The former Coca-Cola scholar, Jake Sullivan, now dispensing “advice” to the cognitively impaired Joe Biden, has warned Russia the US will act “decisively” if Russia uses tactical nukes in Ukraine.

“We have communicated directly, privately, and at very high levels to the Kremlin that any use of nuclear weapons will be met with catastrophic consequences for Russia, that the US and our allies will respond decisively, and we have been clear and specific about what that will entail,” Sullivan told CBS’s Face The Nation and also ABC This Week.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan tells @GStephanopoulos that the U.S. has “communicated directly, privately to the Russians at very high levels that there will be catastrophic consequences for Russia if they use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.” https://t.co/WjkMx7W8gE pic.twitter.com/UA6ISv0M5a

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) September 25, 2022

Naturally, a real neocon had to set the stage, as the ever vociferous and absurd Max Boot did prior to Sullivan’s remarks:

Opinion by Max Boot: Putin’s nuclear threats show weakness. The West must not be intimidated. https://t.co/OClKvCgFSD

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) September 21, 2022

Naturally, Yalie Sullivan didn’t specify what “catastrophic consequences” the US would take, but we can guess, considering the US is the only state to ever use nuclear weapons, specifically on civilians.

Sullivan said that the Russian leader Putin had been “waving around the nuclear card at various points through this conflict”, and it was a matter that Biden’s administration has “to take deadly seriously because it is a matter of paramount seriousness – the possible use of nuclear weapons for the first time since the second world war”.

No mention here by this professional truth spinner and tutored Clintonite singling out the party responsible for using nukes at the end of WWII.

That's really rich coming from the president of a country that has dropped nuclear bombs on defenceless civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. pic.twitter.com/yCMioFO8v1

— Hassan Mafi ‏ (@thatdayin1992) September 20, 2022

I’d guess the average American, especially the sort “educated” in “public” (state) schools (indoctrination centers), does not know, either. Most have swallowed whole the lie that nuking babies and grandmothers saved the lives of a million or more American soldiers prepared to invade Japan (this would have included my father). Most probably also don’t know that the Japanese were ready to surrender if a deal on the fate of the emperor could be arranged.

As for the largely ignorant younger generation, steeped in a tidal wave of historical lies and misinformation, the following graphic novel should be required reading:

Anyone who talks lightly about nuclear attacks as if they were a game card should read the manga ‘ Barefoot Gen ‘ which describes the aftermath of the Hiroshima nuclear attack. Those who were shocked by film ‘ Grave of the Fireflies ‘ probably won't be able to finish it. pic.twitter.com/iY3L5ZOqIf

— Haruna Vian (@ObiwanHaruna) September 26, 2022

The sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians had little to do with a Japanese surrender. It was about showing the Soviet Union the US possessed a new and frightening atomic weapon.

But never mind. Sullivan and the rest of this befuddled and “woke” (the latter a showy pretense that will soon enough face betrayal) administration are looking for excuses to escalate the crisis.

Sullivan and the rest of the demo-cons (cousins of the neocons) know Russia will not use nuclear weapons unless there is an existential threat levied against them.

Sullivan’s remarks are simply more propagandistic hogwash for the average, ill-informed, and often intellectually lazy American to ponder. Nothing scares like vaporization, radiation sickness, or nuclear winter starvation.

“We will continue to support Ukraine in its efforts to defend its country and defend its democracy,” Sullivan said, pointing to more than $15bn in weapons, including air defense systems, hundreds of artillery pieces and rounds of artillery, that the US has supplied to Ukraine.

He said that Moscow’s mobilization of troops was a “sham referenda in the occupied regions” that would not deter the US. “What Putin has done is not exactly a sign of strength or confidence – frankly, it’s a sign that they’re struggling badly on the Russian side,” Sullivan said.

But, Sullivan added, it is “too soon to make comprehensive predictions” about a collapse of Russian forces.

The lies seem to be endless and Mr. Sullivan apparently revels in telling them while maintaining his “professional” arrogant demeanor.

Of course, it is “too soon to make comprehensive predictions” about the inevitable collapse of the CIA’s currently favorite anti-Russian puppet. Regardless, the corrupt kleptocracy imposed by Ukrainian oligarchs after the fall of the Soviet Union and assisted by nazified militias will fall, and with a whimper.

For weeks now on end, we have been told by the pathologically lying corporate propaganda media that Russia’s special operation is collapsing and Putin is about to have a nervous breakdown.

Nonsense. Russia is taking its time.

I admit I do not support the invasion of any country for any reason beyond self-defense—and yet this is precisely what Russia is doing.

Imagine American-hating and ruthlessly barbaric Nazis amassing in Ottawa or British Columbia, maybe on the Mexican border, and asking Russia for missiles and kamikaze drones to strike Washington DC, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Seattle, any city near or on the border.

How long would it take to eradicate this threat and what country would condemn the exercise of self-defense?

Again, never mind. For the US, the war in Ukraine is not about an existential threat. It is about the 70-plus-year-old effort to surround and destroy Russia, even though the boogeyman communists are now a minority of largely politically powerless nostalgists. The idea was not to defeat the threat of communism, as we were endlessly told, but to weaken all rivals.

The US imperial agenda in a nutshell - the threat to Russia and China is no different! Its time to fight for a multipolar world and to break away from US hegemony aka Neoliberalism. Neofeudalism Reject corrupt politicians! pic.twitter.com/eojq8CMExs

— Dunkeroo⏳🇵🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇾🇪 🇸🇾🇷🇺🇨🇳 (@duncanmacmartin) March 31, 2022

Libya used its oil exports to raise the living standards of the average Libyan. It didn’t allow transnational corporations to steal its precious natural resources. That is why Muammar Gaddafi had to be assassinated in the most brutal and public way. It was such a grotesque display, the psychopath Hillary Clinton was obliged to chuckle and cheer on national television.

Both Russia and China stand in the way of the financial elite’s parasitical neoliberal hegemonic world scheme, an effort to rob, steal, and kill without serious repercussions or resistance. Period.

It has nothing to do with Putin, his supposed desire to nuke everyone and everything. It’s about, as the late Zbigniew Brzeziński wrote: the “three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy… to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”

The “barbarians,” of course, are those who wish to determine their own fate, maintain their own sovereignty, and decide upon the development and distribution of their natural resources.

Even the geopolitically clueless Donald Trump realizes continued escalation in Ukraine will not have a happy ending:

The conflict in Ukraine could escalate into the Third World War, former US President Donald Trump warned, after Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow will use all necessary means to defend itself against threats to its territorial integrity. pic.twitter.com/Bry5l55pMs

— Спринтер (@Sprinter88000) September 24, 2022

The effort to keep the “barbarians” (in this case Russia, viscerally hated by the ethnic Pole Zbigniew Brzeziński) from “coming together” will in fact be a complete success if implemented—there will no longer be much humanity to manipulate, only nuclear winter, mass starvation, and, if we are lucky, a return to the Dark Ages.

Reprinted with permission from Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.
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from Biden’s Brain: Jake Sullivan Warns Russia of 'Catastrophic Consequences'

Revolution in Italy? Voters 'Threw The Bums Out!'

A political tidal wave broke over Italy over the weekend, as voters by a large majority elected a right-wing government. European Union officials warned Italians not to vote the "wrong" way...but they did anyway. What is the bigger picture? Also today, a vote in Ukraine's eastern provinces promises escalation. And...guess who's got covid...again? Watch today's Liberty Report:

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2022/september/26/revolution-in-italy-voters-threw-the-bums-out/

Understanding Why Current CIA Analysis Generally is Useless

At risk of sounding like a cranky old man complaining about kids playing ball in the street in front of my house, I want to try to help the folks who have never worked as an analyst at the CIA understand why the current organization is virtually useless. It boils down to this very simple fact–CIA analysts now work in Mission Centers alongside with CIA operations officers and intelligence analysis takes a back seat to operational priorities.

How so? Let me take you back in time to 1985. In the old days the Directorate of Intelligence occupied the north wing of the CIA and the Directorate of Operations sat in the south wing. There was a time when there were doors separating the two wings–I understand it was in place until 1978. Prior to 1978, if you strolled out of your office in the Central American Branch, for example, and tried to go to the operations side of the house you were stopped at the halfway point to the other side by a locked door. Intelligence and Operations were kept separate. The Ops folks understandably wanted to protect their sources and feared that an analyst could compromise a sensitive asset.

When I came along in 1985, those doors had been removed and analysts and operations officers could, in theory, interact. But there was still a separation. The stereotypical analyst was a nerd. Not in the bad sense. But the majority of analysts were introverted personalities. The stereotypical operations officer was the exact opposite–outgoing, liked to socialize and bullshit.

I worked both sides of the house. I did two “internships” with the Operations folks in 1985/86 and then entered the trenches as an analyst. Analysts would start their day with a morning meeting to review overnight intelligence developments and identify possible articles that could be written and submitted to the National Intelligence Daily and/or the Presidential Daily Brief. At the end of the meeting, the analyst would head to the toilet where he or she would brush their teeth, floss and relieve themselves. I am not exaggerating. The mirrors in the bathrooms on the analytical side of the house were speckled with the results of flossing. What about doing a “number 1?” A number of the male analysts would enter a stall and close the door to urinate in private. The average analyst was not comfortable standing at the urinal chatting with a colleague while answering nature’s call.

Ops officers, by contrast, after their morning meeting or review of operational traffic from overseas, also would trundle off to the toilets. Few brushed their teeth and flossed at work (I presume most did that at home before heading to the office every morning). Male ops officers would stand shoulder to shoulder at the urinal and make un-woke jokes and chat up their colleagues.

I offer this crude example because it highlights the personality differences that characterized the Intelligence Directorate vice the Operations Directorate. (Note–I am not arguing that this was the ideal system, I am trying to help you understand the bureaucratic and personality dynamics that separated the two Directorates.)

Intelligence analysts rarely had access to operational traffic while Ops officers had full access to the raw intel the analysts were receiving. This created tension, especially when the operations side of the house was pursuing a policy objective such as supporting the mujahedeen in Afghanistan or the Contras in Central America. Analysts faced pressure to produce analysis that supported the operations programs and, in several instances, were not privy to what was actually happening on the ground in the conflict zones.

Let me offer one anecdote where I was a first hand witness. On Tuesday, March 15, 1988, I was part of a CIA briefing team sent to meet with members of Congress to discuss intelligence that the Sandinistas were massing troops on the southern border of Honduras in a location known colloquially as the Bocay Salient. There was a training base for the Contras in the Bocay. I was the Honduran analyst at the time and was accompanied by the military analyst from the Nicaraguan Branch and a representative of the Directorate of Operations who worked on the military ops in the Central American Task Force .

Halfway through the briefing, which was attended only by Republican members of the House, we received “intelligence” that Sandinista troops had entered the Bocay and were attacking the contra base. It was presented as if this was a modern day attack on the Alamo. Contra forces were fighting valiantly but being mauled by the more numerous Sandinista battalions. We ended the briefing and hurried back to Headquarters to try to figure out what was going on.

When we climbed into the CIA van to head back up the river to Headquarters, the Ops representative from the Central American Task Force began yelling at me and the military analyst from the Nicaragua Branch, accusing us of having helped create this crisis because our past analysis was not sufficiently supportive, in his opinion, of the Contra cause.

Upon arriving back at CIA Headquarters, I went to my terminal and pulled up the “intelligence” about the attack on the Contras. The intelligence told a different story. The Bocay Salient was very sparsely populated with people back then and the terrain featured mountains and triple canopy jungle. You could send an army division into that region and they would be lost in the jungle. Impossible terrain to move in force. The intelligence report from the CIA base camp in the Bocay stated that there had been contact several kilometers from the base with a Sandinista patrol. WHAT??!!

The members of Congress and the Reagan National Security team had been informed that a massacre, a la The Alamo, was underway. I received a phone call from one of Elliot Abrams’ senior staffers. Steve was in a panic and repeated to me the story of the Contras being wiped out. I calmed him down and read to him the actual details. His response, “OH MY GOD. I’ve got to tell Elliot.”

President Reagan had been briefed and was going to deliver a speech castigating the Democrats for not heeding his warnings about the Sandinista threat. And this is what happened:

President Reagan ordered 3,200 American troops sent to Honduras for military exercises Wednesday in what the White House described as ‘a measured response’ to a Nicaraguan invasion directed against US-backed Contra rebels. . . .

The announcement, read to reporters at a late-night White House briefing, followed a day-long round of deliberations within the administration and on Capitol Hill on a cross-border offensive denied by the Nicaraguan government.

With US officials charging the drive was intended to crush a Contra force weakened by the Feb. 29 cutoff of American aid, Fitzwater said Reagan ordered the action in response to a request from Honduran President Jose Azcona Hoyos. . . .

Although the White House had confirmed an earlier ‘request for assistance’ from Azcona, it was not described as an appeal for military support. Officials said the decision to send troops was a response to a subsequent request, conveyed to US Ambassador Everett Briggs in Tegucigalpa around 5:30 p.m. EST, the same time a high-level review of options was under way in the White House Situation Room.

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/03/16/President-Reagan-ordered-3200-American-troops-sent-to-Honduras/2620574491600/

That, boys and girls, is how the sausage of foreign and military policy is made. This was pure theater. The Contra forces in the Bocay were in no danger. Yes, the Sandinistas had entered Honduras in a very remote, strategically unimportant area. But the United States seized on this incident to create a justification to deploy the 82nd Airborne to Honduras.

Now you may understand my cynicism and doubts about pronouncements from the US intelligence community.

In 2015, then CIA Director John Brennan reorganized the CIA and brought the analysts and operations folks together in Mission Centers, e.g. Counter Terrorism Center, Counter Narcotics Center, Counter Proliferation Center, etc. On the superficial level this sounds like a dandy idea because analysts will now have direct access to what the operations folks are working on. But that is not how it works out.


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Paul Pillar, a retired CIA officer, wrote a terrific piece about Brennan Rube Goldberg Initiative, The CIA and the Cult of Reorganization. Here are some of the key points:

Now the Central Intelligence Agency is being hit again with the reorganization bug, with changes that director John Brennan announced last week. The intelligence community has been subjected to this sort of thing at least as much as other parts of the federal bureaucracy. The most notable instance was a reorganization of the community a decade ago as the most visible part of the 9/11 Commission’s response to a popular demand to shake things up after a terrible terrorist attack. That change added new bureaucracy on top of continuing old organizations, and in the years since has given us little or no reason to believe that it was a net improvement.

The principal feature of the changes that Brennan announced is to move all of the agency’s operational and analytical work, and not just selected parts of it, into integrated “mission centers” covering issue areas defined either geographically or functionally. As with most other reorganizations, both criticism and praise tend to be overstated. Any change in a bureaucracy’s performance, for good or for ill, resulting from changing the wiring diagram will not be nearly as pronounced as either critics or promoters usually would lead us to believe.

A criticism of this newest reorganization, for example, is that it would lead to still more focus on current doings at the expense of longer-range analysis. But within each issue area there is no reason to believe that worthwhile long-range analysis cannot be done in the mission centers. Another line of criticism involves a feared compromise of the integrity of analysis because of overly close association of the analysts with operators. This would only be a problem, however, where covert action is involved. Although some unfortunate experiences involving Central America in the 1980s demonstrate the corrupting potential, covert action—despite the public image of what the CIA does—constitutes a small (and usually well-compartmented) portion of the agency’s work. There is a substantial hazard of policy preferences influencing analysis stemming from relations with policy-makers, but that is a separate matter from relations between analysts and operators within an intelligence agency.

https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-cia-and-the-cult-of-reorganization/

The last sentence is the critical point. Imagine you are the senior analyst responsible for Russia in the Mission Center handling the Ukraine crisis. Do you think that analyst is allowed to make the historically factual argument that Russia believed it was facing a future attack from NATO because of NATO’s stated intentions to bring Ukraine into the NATO universe? Do you think the analyst would be allowed to point out that US and NATO military exercises in Ukraine, along with training of Ukrainian forces, had heightened Russian fears? The answer is no. Any analyst daring to push such verboten issues would be committing career suicide. Plus the analyst would be accused of undermining US and NATO policy.

In short, you cannot (or should not) put analysts and operations folks in the same tent, so to speak. Operations will always–I REPEAT–always take precedence over analysis, especially when it comes to issues that are top priority for the White House. This is why I believe the current US intelligence on Ukraine cannot be trusted. It is compromised by US internal politics and by CIA bureaucratic politics.

I believe the United States needs a professional intelligence service that is comprised of analysts who have the task of reviewing all source intelligence and providing political leaders with an unvarnished, apolitical assessment of what is going on in the world. What do I mean by “apolitical?” The analyst and his or her supervisors are not fretting over how the White House or Congress will react to analysis based on genuine intelligence that is out of step with Administration priorities.

I also believe that the United States needs professional case officers who are skilled at recruiting and managing foreign agents who provide the United States with the national secrets of their country.

What has damaged, perhaps irreparably, the CIA’s ability to carry out these two missions is that the operations side of the house also engages in covert and clandestine paramilitary operations. Those activities, because of the amounts of money involved and the risk to the prestige of the United States, inevitably take precedence and put the other two mission–analysis and recruiting information sources–on the back burner.

A great example of this is what happened in the aftermath of the US covert action in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The movie, Charlie Wilson’s War, captures the hubris of that event. Once our mission to force the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan was achieved, Afghanistan fell off the radar as a collection priority and the intelligence analysts lacked the information and resources to track the rise of Al Qaeda. Doing analysis on Afghanistan was a backwater job, with little prospects for promotion, during the 1980s. It was only in the aftermath of 9-11 that Afghanistan became sexy again. And, once again, the analysis took a back seat to the operational priorities of defeating the Taliban. How did that work out?

Reprinted with permission from SONAR21.com.

from Understanding Why Current CIA Analysis Generally is Useless

New Zealand Prime Minister Calls for a Global Censorship System

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is the latest liberal leader to call for an international alliance to censor speech. Unsatisfied with the unprecedented corporate censorship of social media companies, leaders like Hillary Clinton have turned from private censorship to good old-fashioned state censorship. Speech regulation has become an article of faith on the left. Ardern used her speech this week to the United Nations General Assembly to call for censorship on a global scale.

Ardern lashed out at “disinformation” and called for a global coalition to control speech. After nodding toward free speech, she proceeded to lay out a plan for its demise through government regulation:

But what if that lie, told repeatedly, and across many platforms, prompts, inspires, or motivates others to take up arms. To threaten the security of others. To turn a blind eye to atrocities, or worse, to become complicit in them. What then?

This is no longer a hypothetical. The weapons of war have changed, they are upon us and require the same level of action and activity that we put into the weapons of old.

We recognized the threats that the old weapons created. We came together as communities to minimize these threats. We created international rules, norms and expectations. We never saw that as a threat to our individual liberties – rather, it was a preservation of them. The same must apply now as we take on these new challenges.

Ardern noted how extremists use speech to spread lies without noting that non-extremists use the same free speech to counter such views.  To answer her question on “how do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists” is that you convince people using the same free speech. Instead, Ardern appears to want to silence those who have doubts.

While referring to a global censorship coalition as a “light-touch approach to disinformation,” Ardern revealed how sweeping such a system would likely be. She defended the need for such global censorship on having to combat those who question climate change and the need to stop “hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology.”

'After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble? How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology?'

That is the same rationale used by authoritarian countries like China, Iran, and Russia to censor dissidents, minority groups, and political rivals. What is “hateful” and “dangerous” is a fluid concept that government have historically used to silence critics or dissenters.

Ardern is the smiling face of the new generation of censors. At least the old generation of censors like the Iranians do not pretend to support free speech and openly admit that they are crushing dissent. The point is that we need to be equally on guard when censorship is pushed from the left with the best of motivations and the worst of means.

As the great civil libertarian Justice Louis Brandeis once said, “the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

from New Zealand Prime Minister Calls for a Global Censorship System

Will Italy’s Election Foreshadow US Midterms?

Sunday was an historic election day for Italy. A conservative alliance with a populist flair absolutely trounced the technocrats who had been running the country into the ground for the past several years.

The previous prime minister, former Goldman Sachs banker Mario Draghi, implemented one of the most restrictive – and inhuman – Covid shutdowns, which, along with supporting economically suicidal sanctions against Russia, have left Italy an economic basket case.

Replacing the bland banker will likely be Giorgia Meloni from the right-wing Sons of Italy party. Meloni will be a first for Italy: the first female prime minister. But don’t expect the Left to celebrate it: her name cannot be mentioned in the mainstream media without reference to Mussolini.

Ironically, the democratic victory of Meloni and the rest of the Italian right likely owes a great deal of gratitude to one of Europe’s most undemocratic and anti-democratic leaders: European Union Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen.

On the eve of the Italian elections, the unelected von der Leyen warned Italians that if they voted for the “wrong” parties they would be punished. Asked about the surge of the political opposition in Italy on the eve of the elections, she warned Italian voters, “we will see the result of the vote in Italy. If things go in a difficult direction — and I’ve spoken about Hungary and Poland — we have the tools.”

In other words, her message to Italian voters was “yes you can vote, but if you vote in a way I do not approve of, you will be punished.”

Italians rushed to vote in a way she did not approve of. It will be interesting to see what happens.

How does any of this relate to the United States as the US moves closer to the midterm elections? Americans have also been given warnings by the political elites that they dare not vote for the “wrong” candidates or parties.

On September 1st, President Biden issued a warning similar to that of Europe’s von der Leyen. In one of the most bizarre speeches in political history, Biden warned that Trump supporters “…are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love. They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.”

He spoke on a frightening, red-lit stage with US Marines serving as props on either side of him. This was no “Checkers” speech with Nixon speaking wistfully about his cocker spaniel. No, it was a declaration of war against half of the country.

A few weeks ago Sweden threw its left-wing government out and Sunday the Italians did the same. While the political differences in Europe seem more cosmetic than substantive – for example Italy’s presumptive new prime minister supports weapons to Ukraine just like her predecessor – there is still a strong feeling of popular revolt against political elites in the air.

That doesn’t mean things will easily go our way, as there is no automatic libertarian surge. But we must study hard and take advantage of every single opportunity. People are sick of the elites? That means they are likely open to the concepts of non-interventionism and sound money. Let’s help educate them!

from Will Italy’s Election Foreshadow US Midterms?

Most Americans Shrug Off Badgering that They Take the New Coronavirus ‘Bivalent’ Booster Shot

In the face of incessant media badgering to rush out and take the latest version of experimental coronavirus “vaccine” shot — the “bivalent” booster, the vast majority of Americans are saying “nope” and continuing on with their lives. Three weeks into the all-out push to have every American over 12 years old take the new shot (giving these new booster shots to younger children is up next), it appears that less than two percent of eligible Americans have done so.

The growing resistance to the coronavirus shots pushers’ propaganda gives one hope for America. With each new experimental coronavirus shot Americans are being urged to take, the percentage who acquiesce declines. The line that the shots are needed, safe, and effective has proven a farce on all counts. And the latest shot rushed into distribution has taken the previous shots’ mockery of the process for ensuring safety and efficacy to the next level. The truth is out there; increasingly Americans are seeing past the media hype and finding it.

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2022/september/26/most-americans-shrug-off-badgering-that-they-take-the-new-coronavirus-bivalent-booster-shot/

Canadian Academics Say Facts on Ukraine Are Russian Propaganda

According to a gaggle of academics at the University of Calgary, all news reports and opinions contrary to the pretzel twisted narratives of the state on the situation in the Ukraine are nothing less than Russian propaganda and “foreign interference.”

“Our research team has been collecting more than 6.2 million Tweets globally since January 2022 to monitor and measure Russian influence operations on social media,” Jean-Christophe Boucher, Jack Edwards, Jenny Kim, Abbas Badami, and Henry Smith write collectively for the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy.

We find that pro-Russian narratives promoted in the Canadian social media ecosystem on twitter are divided into two large communities:

1) accounts influenced by sources from the United States and 2) those largely influenced by sources from international sources from Russia, Europe, and China.

In other words, any news, despite its country of origin, is “Russian propaganda” if it does not support US, European, and Canadian narratives on the war in the Ukraine.

“First, pro-Russian discourse on Canadian Twitter blames NATO for the conflict suggesting that Russia’s invasion was a result of NATO’s expansionism or aggressive intentions toward Russia,” the authors argue.

There can be no doubt, since the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO has pushed its armaments and soldiers, at the behest of the US, ever closer to the border of Russia. The US made a promise to not move further to the East. Of course, history demonstrates how such promises made by the US State Department are routinely broken.

James Goldgeier writes for War On the Rocks:

More than a quarter-century ago, in February 1990, US Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev discussed NATO’s future role in a unified Germany. Baker told Gorbachev that “there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east” and agreed with Gorbachev’s statement that “Any extension of the zone of NATO is unacceptable.” (Emphasis added.)

David K. Shipler, writing for Washington Monthly, explains how unclassified documents

tell the story of how American officials led the Russians to believe that no expansion would be undertaken by NATO, then later nearly doubled the size of the alliance. Russian and American transcripts and summaries of high-level meetings, posted in recent years by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, record multiple assurances in the early 1990s.

“Second, it is suggested that Western nations are propping up fascists in Ukraine, thus justifying Russia’s actions,” the authors write.

The fourth narrative justifies the invasion by framing it as a war waged against a state that is either fascist or heavily fascist-influenced. They point to the presence of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in the Ukrainian National Guard as proof. The Tweets spread the common Russian government talking point that Ukraine is run by a fascist regime.

One has to wonder if these esteemed academics bothered to delve into factual historical information about Ukrainian “fascism.” Following the US-orchestrated violent coup in 2014, these ultranationalist “fascists” (akin to Nazi ethnic cleansing racists) gained influence within the Ukrainian government and military.

Three members of the Nazi-saluting Svoboda were positioned as members of the first post-coup government. The co-founder of Svoboda, Andriy Paruby, was parliamentary speaker for five years. He founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine along with Oleh Tyahnybok (seen giving a Nazi salute in the above-linked photo). The party’s Wolfsangel logo (basically a rearranged Nazi swastika) and its ultranationalistic philosophy are not “Russian disinformation,” but indisputable historical facts.

According to the propaganda media in the West, Mr. Paruby has changed his ways and has become a respectable member of the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament. He was a leader of the so-called (and laughably titled) “Revolution of Dignity” (the US-orchestrated Maidan Revolution) that violently overthrew the elected leader of the country, Viktor Yanukovych.

Paruby is an admirer of Stepan Bandera, a Nazi Germany collaborator responsible for mass murdering Jews, Russians, communists, Poles, and other minority groups during WWII.

Despite the counter-reality pronouncements of narrative pushing academics tenured at “prestigious” universities, the fact is the ultranationalist movement in Ukraine has grown in scope and influence.

Read the whole article here.

from Canadian Academics Say Facts on Ukraine Are Russian Propaganda

Will Europe Break with the United States?

I received a great questions from a German reader who also happens to be a journalist. He asked, “What would be a way and what would be the practical implications if Europe in general and Germany in particular were to break with the US in order to find a European peace and economic framework including Russia? ”

The craven sycophancy demonstrated by Germany, France and the United Kingdom in their passionate embrace of America’s confrontation with Russia is now on life support. Despite continued bombastic threats to keep arming Ukraine until Russia collapses, economic reality is hitting the Europeans like an icy cold shower from a fire hose. Rapid inflation, particularly in the energy sector, is forcing factories and businesses to shutter operations. The de-industrialization of Europe, especially Germany and the UK, has started. German steel plants are closing, German bakeries are trying to figure out how to pay soaring utility bills while still making bread and pretzels and German toilet-paper manufacturer Hakle GmbH has applied for insolvency proceedings in self-administration. If you don’t have a bidet or a bucket full of sand, toilet paper is an essential item. The inflationary spiral may lead to the day where it is cheaper to wipe your ass with a 100 Euro note than three sheets of Hakle.

So, the economic situation in each of the countries is going to create enormous domestic pressure for the respective European governments, which currently are cheer-leading Ukraine and cursing Russia, to rethink their policies. The Russia/Ukraine war already has created significant fissures among EU members, with Hungary refusing to impose further sanctions on Russia. Cold, hungry voters will become increasingly outraged at sending millions of dollars to Ukraine while deprivation multiples from Berlin to London.

Europe’s rift with Russia is huge and Russia is not in a mood to forgive the insults hurled at all things Russian, theft of Russian financial resources and Europe’s facilitation of terrorist attacks on the soon to be new Russian citizens from the oblasts of Kherson, Zaporhyzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk. Russia holds the critical trump card–it can turn on the flow of gas and oil essential to rekindle manufacturing and home heating in Europe. But I do not think Russia will do so without a quid pro quo. What could that be?

How about Europe breaking with NATO? Or, more simply put, the break up of NATO. Up to this point Europe has embraced the delusion that Russia cannot function economically without a European market. The last six months of Russia’s Special Military Operation have proven that the opposite is true–without Russia’s key resources Europe is a dead economy walking naked into a frozen winter.

Europe’s two largest trading partners are China and the United States. Europe runs a trade deficit with China. If China demands payment in dollars, rather Euros, then the inflationary pressure on Europe will escalate. Why? Because the value of the US dollar has soared relative to the Euro and British pound sterling. They will have to spend more Euros to buy dollars, which means the trade deficit with China is likely to worsen.

The situation with the United States is the opposite. The United States has run a deficit with Europe who, in turn, has enjoyed a surplus. That surplus will go away or, at a minimum, shrink dramatically. Germany’s ability to export products to the United States will weaken because of the price of the dollar and because European factories will close or cut back on production.

Barring a miracle turnaround–i.e, inflation disappears and the energy crisis dissipates–the situation in Europe will become more dire. The history of these kinds of economic upheaval is littered with the corpses of politicians that insisted on pushing policies that hurt their voters. Germany’s Wiemar Republic’s failure paved the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler to power. I am not suggesting a new Hitler is waiting in the wings, but I do believe that the power now wielded by the Greens across Europe will be curtailed or even snuffed out.

The United States is facing its own looming economic disaster. The collapse of the stock market–now down over 20% since the first of the year–is likely to continue. Notwithstanding the Biden administration’s strident insistence that there is no recession, the signs of recession are mounting, especially in the housing market. But the worsening economic picture is not yet sufficient to generate the necessary political pressure among the propagandized American electorate to back away from sending billions to Ukraine. A major shock of stagflation or a collapse of the Ukrainian army, however, could change that calculus.

The United States and Europe are playing a high stakes poker game with Russia. They’ve bet all their chips that Ukraine will either defeat Russia or force Russia to the bargaining table and that Putin, with hat in hand, will crawl on his belly before the western masters and beg for relief. That is insane. But there are many politicians and pundits inhabiting the dark corners of Washington who keenly believe this fantasy.

Russia does not play poker. Russia plays chess and plays it well. Russia’s burgeoning trade and military relations with China, Iran, India and Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Brazil is making Putin’s position stronger, not weaker. The eventual collapse of Ukraine as a result of a wrecked economy and/or battlefield defeats, will be more than a black eye for NATO and, by extension, Europe. It would likely destroy the raison detre’ for NATO. That in turn will lay the foundation for a rapprochement with Russia sans the United States.

The age of the United States’ Colossus is nearing its end. Uncle Sam will no longer have a pack of yipping European Yorkshires, Poodles and Dachshunds on a leash. I think we are on the threshold of a new multi-polar international order that will finally shatter the legacy of European colonialism and American imperialism. As Garland Nixon has wisely noted, “General Winter is on the march.”

Reprinted with permission from Sonar21.com.

from Will Europe Break with the United States?