Biden Reneged – Now Russian Army Will Talk

A year ago today (on Dec. 30, 2021) US President Joe Biden, in a telephone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, assured him that "Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine.”

Against that backdrop, bilateral talks in Geneva to start on January 9, 2022 seemed off to a promising start. The Kremlin clearly thought so. Then Biden changed his mind. The key issue of offensive missiles on Russia’s borders fell off the table.

Glimmer of Hope on Dec. 30

The day after the Dec. 30 Biden-Putin conversation, the Kremlin published this readout:

The conversation focused on the implementation of the agreement to launch negotiations on providing Russia with legally binding security guarantees, reached during the December 7 [Putin-Biden] videoconference to launch negotiations … Vladimir Putin … stressed that the negotiations needed to produce solid legally binding guarantees ruling out NATO’s eastward expansion and the deployment of weapons that threaten Russia in the immediate vicinity of its borders. …

It was confirmed that the negotiations would take place first in Geneva on January 9–10 … The presidents agreed to personally supervise these negotiating tracks, especially bilateral, with a focus on reaching results quickly.

In this context, Joseph Biden emphasized that Russia and the US shared a special responsibility for ensuring stability in Europe and the whole world, and that Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine. … [Emphasis added.]

Hopes Dashed on Feb. 12

After a Feb. 12 telephone conversation between Putin and Biden, Putin aide Yury Ushakov provided the following readout to the media, describing the telephone talk as "follow-up of sorts" to the Dec. 7 and Dec. 30 conversations. Ushakov:

I want to note straight away that the Russian President responded by saying that Russia was going to carefully study President Biden’s proposals … . He made clear, however, that these proposals did not really address the central, key elements of Russia’s initiatives either with regards to non-expansion of NATO, or non-deployment of strike weapons systems on Ukrainian territory … To these items, we have received no meaningful response.

The rest of 2022 is history, as they say. The complete absence of mutual trust – and the lack of contacts at a political and diplomatic level – has driven US-Russia relations down to a perilously low level. I have not seen its like in the half-century I have devoted to watching Russia quite closely.

A kind of denouement came yesterday, as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov asserted:

Our proposals for the demilitarization and denazification of the territories controlled by the regime, the elimination of threats to Russia’s security emanating from there, including our new lands, are well known to the enemy.

The point is simple: Fulfill them for your own good. Otherwise, the issue will be decided by the Russian army.

Lavrov again used that curious but important Russian compound word недоговороспособность, denoting Ukraine’s inability to negotiate – at least until Zelensky or a successor gets the okay from Washington.

Enter the Russian army.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com.

from Biden Reneged – Now Russian Army Will Talk

Big Brother in the Big Apple

“Big Brother is protecting you.” That is a quote from New York City Mayor Eric Adams in a Saturday article at Politico. Adams made the comment in defense of the extensive web of high-tech surveillance his city government deploys against people in America’s most populous city, as well as the mayor’s desire to expand the surveilling.

Such a comment is very disturbing for any liberty loving individual who has a basic understanding of George Orwell’s novel from which the “Big Brother” mention is derived as well as the amazing capability of the surveillance technology available to governments nowadays.

Over at Reason, J.D. Tuccille provides an insightful analysis of why people should respond to Adams’s “Big Brother” comment by telling Adams to “get lost.” Read here Tuccille’s Friday article “New York City Mayor Eric Adams Wants You to Love Big Brother.”

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2022/december/30/big-brother-in-the-big-apple/

MIT Adopts Free Speech Resolution: 'We Cannot Prohibit Speech as Offensive or Injurious.'

We recently discussed schools joining the University of Chicago free speech alliance. Now, the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have adopted a resolution defending freedom of speech and expression, including speech deemed “offensive or injurious.” It is a triumph for free speech. However, while 98 faculty voted for the resolution, 52 professors voted against the free speech principles.

The Free Expression Statement is a balanced affirmation of the essential role of free speech in higher education.

A commitment to free expression includes hearing and hosting speakers, including those whose views or opinions may not be shared by many members of the MIT community and may be harmful to some. This commitment includes the freedom to criticize and peacefully protest speakers to whom one may object, but it does not extend to suppressing or restricting such speakers from expressing their views. Debate and deliberation of controversial ideas are hallmarks of the Institute’s educational and research missions and are essential to the pursuit of truth, knowledge, equity, and justice.

What is unnerving is that a third of the faculty disagreed with the resolution despite the following reservation:

MIT does not protect direct threats, harassment, plagiarism, or other speech that falls outside the boundaries of the First Amendment. Moreover, the time, place, and manner of protected expression, including organized protests, may be restrained so as not to disrupt the essential activities of the Institute.

However, the statement makes the key acknowledgment that “we cannot prohibit speech that some experience as offensive or injurious.” That is clearly unacceptable for many in academic. Silencing opposing views or voices has become a core principle for many professors who now refer to free speech as an ever present danger on campuses.

MIT has not always stood by free speech. As we previously discussed, the university yielded to cancel culture by barring a guest lecture to be given by University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot in 2021.

MIT also attracted criticism over abandoning standardized testing to achieve greater diversity. It later reversed that decision.

The new resolution is a victory for the “MIT Free Speech Alliance,” which has fought to defend free speech against a growing number of faculty.

University of Chicago emeritus biology Professor Jerry Coyne raised some good-faith objections on his Why Evolution Is True blog, including the resolution “calling for ‘civility and mutual respect’, as well as ‘considering the possibility of offense and injury’. You simply cannot have free speech without offense and injury. Abbot’s invitation provoked precisely such offense and injury, with many people supporting his deplatforming.”

However, the references are part of a graph that refers to the personal responsibility of faculty to maintain civility and mutual respect. It follows an express protection for offensive speech:

We cannot prohibit speech that some experience as offensive or injurious. At the same time, MIT deeply values civility, mutual respect, and uninhibited, wide-open debate. In fostering such debate, we have a responsibility to express ourselves in ways that consider the prospect of offense and injury and the risk of discouraging others from expressing their own views. This responsibility complements, and does not conflict with, the right to free expression. Even robust disagreements shall not be liable to official censure or disciplinary action. This applies broadly. For example, when MIT leaders speak on matters of public interest, whether in their own voice or in the name of MIT, this should always be understood as being open to debate by the broader MIT community.

Overall, the resolution is a powerful defense of free speech. MIT has joined a growing minority of schools resisting the anti-free speech movement discussed in my recent law review article. Jonathan Turley, Harm and Hegemony: The Decline of Free Speech in the United States, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

from MIT Adopts Free Speech Resolution: 'We Cannot Prohibit Speech as Offensive or Injurious.'

Blackrock to Take Zelenskyy’s Panhandling Act to the Next Level

Blackrock is the world’s largest asset management and investment firm. It invests more than $10 trillion in client funds, a mountain of cash that casts a shadow over the GDP of many countries, including Germany, the fourth largest GDP in the world. It is fair to say it controls, or has outsized influence, on the Federal Reserve, Wall Street banks, including Goldman Sachs and Vanguard, the WEF meet and greet at Davos (and its control freak Great Reset), and all that follows, including President Biden and Congress.

Larry Fink, the founder, and CEO of Blackrock has teamed up with the Man in Perpetual Green, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “Specialists of this company are already helping Ukraine to structure the fund for the reconstruction of our state,” said Green Man after a video call with Fink, according to Bloomberg.

Zelenskyy has taken his worldwide panhandling act to the next level. According to Zelenskyy’s government web page—up and running, although average Ukrainians are freezing in the dark—Larry Fink will help drum up the funds to rebuild what will be blown up again. (As for Zelenskyy’s website, it is safe for the moment, hosted as it is in Santa Clara, California.)

In accordance with the preliminary agreements struck earlier this year between the Head of State and Larry Fink, the BlackRock team has been working for several months on a project to advise the Ukrainian government on how to structure the country’s reconstruction funds.

Zelenskyy and Fink “agreed to focus in the near term on coordinating the efforts of all potential investors and participants in the reconstruction of our country, channelling investment into the most relevant and impactful sectors of the Ukrainian economy,” CNBC reports.

Good luck with that. It might be a good idea to glance at Ukraine’s massive corruption before investing a dime in that black hole. According to Transparency International, Ukraine is the second most corrupt country in Europe and ranked 120 out of 182 of the most corrupt countries in the world.

According to Dragon Capital, the richest Ukrainian oligarchs in 2016, two years after the USG-orchestrated coup in Kyiv, have accumulated over $11 billion, almost 13% of Ukraine’s GDP.

Much of the money accrued by Rinat Akhmetov, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, Victor Pinchuk, and former president and confectionary/automotive magnate Petro Poroshenko, was taken through the neoliberal organized theft of public assets, known as privatization. Kolomoyskyi is a major funder of the neo-Nazi group, Right Sector. He is widely seen as the puppet master of the former comedian and current president Zelenskyy. His reach includes business operations in the US.

Ukraine is a money launderer’s dream come true. Its banking sector thrives on Ponzi schemes. Oligarchs reap fortunes skimming billions from government-subsidized gas prices. Corrupt officials collaborate with oligarchs to monopolize business. In 2015, it was determined less than 50 percent of businesses in Ukraine turned a profit, and 9.8 of all business operations were controlled by and benefited corrupt government officials and the oligarchs they work for.

In July, the Associated Press reported,

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's dismissal of senior officials is casting an inconvenient light on an issue that the Biden administration has largely ignored since the outbreak of war with Russia: Ukraine's history of rampant corruption and shaky governance.

Of course, Biden—or that is, since he is obviously cognitively impaired, his neocon “advisers”—do not give a hoot about the suffering of average Ukrainians victimized by free-hand oligarchs and corrupt government officials. It’s all about Russia, China, and the role of the world hegemon.

Earlier this year, Larry Fink told stockholders “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is reversing the long-running trend of globalization.” Strangely, Fink seems to believe Russia’s effort to keep NATO out of Ukraine and away from its western border has “exacerbated the polarization and extremist behavior we are seeing across society today.” Submit, lest you be tarred and feathered as a polarized extremist.

It now appears Fink’s cherished globalization is headed for the rocks as the growth of capital markets slow and the centrally managed economy pivots toward recession (actually a full-blown depression, but this scary subject is rarely broached in the respectable, misinformation, narrative-strict corporate propaganda media).

Larry’s not alone in his waking nightmare. Oaktree Capital Management founder Howard Marks also loses sleep over the demise of centralized, corporate-driven, neoliberal-infused, government-enforced globalization. Marks and WEF said in April “the war is forcing the pendulum of international affairs to swing away from globalization as companies and governments rethink their interdependence.”

To be sure, authoritarian regimes often cut themselves off from the global market for a host of reasons—Russia’s Vladimir Putin is just one example.

If not for lies, these guys would stand naked. According to the World Economic Forum, Putin is an “authoritarian” because he understands the global elite want to kill him, destroy Russia, and turn its JDAM-blasted smoldering remains into mutually hostile little bantustans, thus easily plundered and controlled. It has nothing to do with interdependence or the joke that is democracy. That’s feel-good PR pablum designed to deceive you.

“The basic problem with globalization is not hard to grasp,” writes Mike Whitney. “The giant corporations have outsourced millions of high-paying manufacturing jobs to low wage platforms across Asia leaving behind thousands of shuttered factories and broken communities, a sharp spike in opiate addiction, and the steady erosion of living standards.”

Putin argued the elite are oblivious to the effect of their predation. I disagree. Pathocrats enjoy witnessing the misery of millions, that’s how they get their jollies. If they are oblivious to anything, it is that many of them may be swinging from lamp posts before this is over.

It seems like elites don’t see the deepening stratification in society and the erosion of the middle class…(but the situation) creates a climate of uncertainty that has a direct impact on the public mood. Sociological studies conducted around the world show that people in different countries and on different continents tend to see the future as murky and bleak. This is sad. The future does not entice them, but frightens them. At the same time, people see no real opportunities or means for changing anything, influencing events and shaping policy. As for the claim that the fringe and populists have defeated the sensible, sober and responsible minority—we are not talking about populists or anything like that but about ordinary people, ordinary citizens who are losing trust in the ruling class. That is the problem.

Zelenskyy and Fink are preparing to turn a profit on the destruction of Ukraine. “Bringing in BlackRock signals the beginning of the much-anticipated shift from bilking taxpayers to bilking private investors,” writes JD Rucker.

BlackRock will wield its tremendous influence over corporations across the globe to funnel as much private equity into the nation as possible where the money will be distributed to all powerful parties [oligarchs] that need their palms greased.

Corrupt government officials (many of them Ukronazis) and the psychopathic oligarchs they serve will profit from the Zelenskyy-Fink scheme to rebuild what Russia will knock down. Russia is determined, for the sake of its national security, to turn Ukraine into a toothless, nazi- and NATO-free rump state, a former oligarch-dominated state busted up into little harmless and easily controlled remnants.

I don’t have a crystal ball, but I believe Zelenskyy will ultimately flee the country with a proverbial suitcase stuffed with fiat greenbacks and equally devalued paper money of the European Union, following in the footsteps of previous defeated and humiliated autocrats.

Larry Fink will continue to be Larry Fink. He will push “stakeholder capitalism,” squeaky clean window dressing for predatory neoliberalism. Larry knows what side of his bread gets the butter, that’s why he has embraced “woke” politics. “Stakeholder capitalism might just force CEOs to think twice before doing things that hurt the public,” the New York Post surmises.

More PR poison. For “Klaus Schwab and the WEF, the framework of stakeholder capitalism must be globalized,” observes Michael Rectenwald at Mises Wire. Schwab and the WEF have high hopes for rebranded neoliberalism merged with the preposterous “woke” ideology.

Not going to happen. The collective nations of the world, led by the example of Russia, will ultimately pitch neoliberalism into the dustbin of history. The problem is WEF and globalist psychopaths, deluded by mental illness and corrosive hubris. They may indeed begin the process of irradiating the planet and making any sort of social and commercial activity a relic of a forgotten past.

Reprinted with permission from Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.
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from Blackrock to Take Zelenskyy’s Panhandling Act to the Next Level

Manipulation! Four Ways The Mainstream Media Lied To Us In 2022

Journalists are supposed to inform the public. That is the job of what has been referred to as the Fourth Estate. They are supposed to expose the crimes of the state against the people. But something is very wrong with our mainstream media. Journalists and their institutions have upended their traditional roles and decided to side with the political power against the people. We are just beginning to see the ugly truth with the release of the Twitter Files, but more importantly in the mainstream media reaction to what should be the biggest story of the century: silence. Watch today's all-new Liberty Report:



from Manipulation! Four Ways The Mainstream Media Lied To Us In 2022

How an Occupied Twitter Ruined Countless Lives

From the beginning of the Covid panic, it felt that something was very wrong. Never had a pandemic, much less a seasonal pathogenic wave, been treated as a quasi-military emergency requiring the upending of all freedoms and rights. 

What made it more bizarre was how alone those of us who objected felt until very recently when Elon Musk finally bought the platform Twitter, fired all the embedded federal agents, and has started to release the files. 

As Elon said, every conspiracy theory about Twitter was true and then some. And what applies at Twitter pertains equally to Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all platforms associated with those companies (YouTube, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp). 

The proof is all there. These platforms colluded with the federal government’s administrative arm to craft a particular Covid narrative, throttling and censoring dissidents and boosting any credentialled expert who was willing to toe the line. 

At this point, it is wise to trust no one and nothing but those who fought against this nonsense. As the crisis began, I was blessed with an unusually large reach on most platforms. But I sat by and watched it dwindle to nothingness as the months went on. Yes, I had posts pulled but I was never banned. It’s just that my channels of communication shrunk dramatically by the months and weeks. 

This was tragic for me simply because I watched the population gradually fall into a medieval-style disease panic that tore families apart, kept loved ones from traveling, wrecked businesses and churches, and even violated the sanctity of the homes. This “invisible enemy” about which everyone in government was going on about shredded the whole social fabric. 

I had been writing about pandemics and interventions for 16 years, warning repeatedly that this was possible. Knowing about this history, and having a platform to speak, I felt a very strong moral obligation to share my knowledge if only to make some contribution to calm people down and perhaps relax some of the impositions on liberty. But at that very moment, my voice was nearly silenced. And I was hardly alone. Hundreds and thousands of others were in the same position but we had a very difficult time even finding each other. 

There was one exception early on. I wrote a piece on Woodstock and the 1968-69 flu season. A fact-checker rated it as true and the Facebook algorithms really screwed up. Facebook pushed it out for about two weeks before someone figured out what was happening and then throttled it back heavily. Or perhaps there was one employee there who made it so. I really do not know. In the meantime, this one article garnered millions of views and shares. 

It was my first experience with the astounding power of these venues to shape the public mind. People innocently use all these tools without the slightest understanding that there is a reason why they are seeing what they are seeing. Every word or picture you see on your apps is there for a reason, a choice of this or that, and the driving force here is what powerful people what you to see and not see. 

We know now that the stream of information is carefully curated by algorithms and human intervention, not to fit with your interests as they once claimed, but to fit with regime interests.

In other words, what people used to say about the CCP role in the management of TikTok applies fully in the US today with all the main tech companies. And please keep in mind, we only know this because of the dump of Twitter files. All of this is still happening at Google, Meta, and LinkedIn. The latter removes posts by Brownstone often. And the rest throttle our reach. 

This has been going on for years, but Covid intensified it all. Even from the beginning, something was very off. For example, on March 19 – the day after the Fauci/Birx/Trump press conference and the day before CISA seized control of all labor markets – an obscure digital education entrepreneur named Thomas Pueyo came out with an implausibly documented and comprehensively argued piece called The Hammer and the Dance. 

It was an elaborate argument for locking down to flatten the curve, complete with fancy graphs and pseudo-scientific blather of every sort. The author was essentially unknown but within 24 hours, the piece was garnering many millions of shares and being spread everywhere by all the big tech platforms, as if it were some kind of canonical treatise. I doubt seriously that he wrote it – no way in one day; it had to be planned for weeks – but rather that he volunteered his name to be attached to it. It became the most important framing of the lockdown that appeared that month. 

Watching that one preposterous article take over so aggressively, even as dissidents’ writings slipped into nothingness, including my own, was quite a bit of digital magic to behold. But we know now it was not magic. It was a policy. It was an intention. It was a propaganda ploy. Again, we must understand that this is still going on right now, with the only real exception among the larger players being Twitter. 

There is one solace. We know now that we were not all going crazy. It was all deliberate. Matt Taibbi puts it well:

Sometime in the last decade, many people — I was one — began to feel robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn’t define. Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted. The public’s reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable. You’d read that seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement that a certain thing was true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward place with friends, family, others. Should you say something? Are you the crazy one?

I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time. This is why these Twitter files have been such a balm. This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve been selling. Personally, once I saw that these lurid files could be used as a road map back to something like reality — I wasn’t sure until this week — I relaxed for the first time in probably seven or eight years.

So far, thanks to the great work of David Zweig, who has somehow managed to elude the censors all along (he was in attendance at the original Great Barrington Declaration event, god bless him), we have a better accounting of what happened. Names we all recognize as friends are listed, including Martin Kulldorff and Andrew Bostom, but there are thousands more. There is no question in my mind that my own accounts were targeted. 

This is about much more than free speech and the operation of media channels without government intervention. The Covid controls utterly smashed American liberty and social functioning, resulting in mass suffering, educational losses, shattered communities, and a precipitous collapse in public health that has shaved off years in life expectancy and caused an explosion of excess deaths. 

It might have been stopped or at least lessened in duration with some open discussion. This is not just of interest to tech and legal geeks. The closing down of opinion and debate resulted in unspeakable human carnage. And even as I write, the largest sources of the mainstream media are still refusing to report on this. 

Ask yourself: why might this be? I think we all know the answer. 

As a final note, I can assure you that this is only the beginning. The full story ropes in the whole of the administrative state, FTX, huge nonprofit organizations, and many back channels of power, money, and truly evil collaboration. We may never get the full story, and justice as always will be elusive, but we cannot let this moment in history slip by without as much accountability as we can provide. 

1. THREAD:

THE TWITTER FILES: HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE

– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy
– By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed
– By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022

Reprinted with permission from Brownstone Institute.

from How an Occupied Twitter Ruined Countless Lives

When the FBI Attacks Critics as “Conspiracy Theorists,” It’s Time to Reform the Bureau

Below is my column in the Hill on the need for a new “Church Committee” to investigate and reform the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after years of scandals involving alleged political bias. In response to criticism over its role in Twitter’s censorship system, the FBI lashed out against critics as “conspiracy theorists” spreading disinformation. However, it still refuses to supply new information on other companies, beyond Twitter, that it has paid to engage in censorship.

Here is the column:

“Conspiracy theorists … feeding the American public misinformation” is a familiar attack line for anyone raising free-speech concerns over the FBI’s role in social media censorship. What is different is that this attack came from the country’s largest law enforcement agency, the FBI — and, since the FBI has made combatting “disinformation” a major focus of its work, the labeling of its critics is particularly menacing.

Fifty years ago, the Watergate scandal provoked a series of events that transformed not only the presidency but federal agencies like the FBI. Americans demanded answers about the involvement of the FBI and other federal agencies in domestic politics. Ultimately, Congress not only investigated the FBI but later impanelled the Church Committee to investigate a host of other abuses by intelligence agencies.

A quick review of recent disclosures and controversies shows ample need for a new Church Committee:

The Russian investigations

The FBI previously was at the center of controversies over documented political bias. Without repeating the long history from the Russian influence scandal, FBI officials like Peter Strzok were fired after emails showed open bias against presidential candidate Donald Trump. The FBI ignored warnings that the so-called Steele dossier, largely funded by the Clinton campaign, was likely used by Russian intelligence to spread disinformation. It continued its investigation despite early refutations of key allegations or discrediting of sources.

Biden family business

The FBI has taken on the character of a Praetorian Guard when the Biden family has found itself in scandals.

For example, there was Hunter Biden’s handgun, acquired by apparently lying on federal forms. In 2018, the gun allegedly was tossed into a trash bin in Wilmington, Del., by Hallie Biden, the widow of Hunter’s deceased brother and with whom Hunter had a relationship at the time. Secret Service agents reportedly appeared at the gun shop with no apparent reason, and Hunter later said the matter would be handled by the FBI. Nothing was done despite the apparent violation of federal law.

Later, the diary of Hunter’s sister, Ashley, went missing. While the alleged theft normally would be handled as a relatively minor local criminal matter, the FBI launched a major investigation that continued for months to pursue those who acquired the diary, which reportedly contains embarrassing entries involving President Biden. Such a massive FBI deployment shocked many of us, but the FBI built a federal case against those who took possession of the diary.

Targeting Republicans and conservatives

Recently the FBI was flagged for targeting two senior House Intelligence Committee staffers in grand jury subpoenas sent to Google. It has been criticized for using the Jan. 6 Capitol riot investigations to target conservative groups and GOP members of Congress, including seizing the phone of one GOP member.

The FBI also has been criticized for targeting pro-life violence while not showing the same vigor toward pro-choice violence.

Hunter’s laptop

While the FBI was eager to continue the Russian investigations with no clear evidence of collusion, it showed the opposite inclination when given Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop. The laptop would seem to be a target-rich environment for criminal investigators, with photos and emails detailing an array of potential crimes involving foreign transactions, guns, drugs and prostitutes. However, reports indicate that FBI officials moved to quash or slow any investigation.

The computer repairman who acquired the laptop, John Paul Mac Isaac, said he struggled to get the FBI to respond and that agents made thinly veiled threats regarding any disclosures of material related to the Biden family; he said one agent told him that “in their experience, nothing ever happens to people that don’t talk about these things.”

The ‘Twitter Files’

The “Twitter Files” released by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, show as many as 80 agents targeting social-media posters for censorship on the site. This included alleged briefings that Twitter officials said was the reason they spiked the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election.

The FBI sent 150 messages on back channels to just one Twitter official to flag accounts. One Twitter executive expressed unease over the FBI’s pressure, declaring: “They are probing & pushing everywhere they can (including by whispering to congressional staff).”

We also have learned that Twitter hired a number of retired FBI agents, including former FBI general counsel James Baker, who was a critical and controversial figure in past bureau scandals over political bias.

Attacking critics

It is not clear what is more chilling — the menacing role played by the FBI in Twitter’s censorship program, or its mendacious response to the disclosure of that role. The FBI has issued a series of “nothing-to-see-here” statements regarding the Twitter Files.

In its latest statement, the FBI insists it did not command Twitter to take any specific action when flagging accounts to be censored. Of course, it didn’t have to threaten the company — because we now have an effective state media by consent rather than coercion. Moreover, an FBI warning tends to concentrate the minds of most people without the need for a specific threat.

Finally, the files show that the FBI paid Twitter millions as part of this censorship system — a windfall favorably reported to Baker before he was fired from Twitter by Musk.

Criticizing the FBI is now ‘disinformation’

Responding to the disclosures and criticism, an FBI spokesperson declared: “The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

Arguably, “working every day to protect the American public” need not include censoring the public to protect it from errant or misleading ideas.

However, it is the attack on its critics that is most striking. While the FBI denounced critics of an earlier era as communists and “fellow travelers,” it now uses the same attack narrative to label its critics as “conspiracy theorists.”

After Watergate, there was bipartisan support for reforming the FBI and intelligence agencies. Today, that cacophony of voices has been replaced by crickets, as much of the media imposes another effective blackout on coverage of the Twitter Files. This media silence suggests that the FBI found the “sweet spot” on censorship, supporting the views of the political and media establishment.

As for the rest of us, the FBI now declares us to be part of a disinformation danger which it is committed to stamping out — “conspiracy theorists” misleading the public simply by criticizing the bureau.

Clearly, this is the time for a new Church Committee — and time to reform the FBI.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. You can find his updates online @JonathanTurley.

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

from When the FBI Attacks Critics as “Conspiracy Theorists,” It’s Time to Reform the Bureau

Zelensky’s diaspora delegation led by economic hit-woman who led plunder of Ukraine

Steel fencing and police barricades ringed the perimeter of the US Capitol Building hours ahead of the arrival of Volodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian president appeared in Washington DC in the early afternoon on December 21, 2022, emerging from a US military jet clad in an olive drab sweatshirt and cargo pants, and charged with a singular mission: convince Congress and the Biden administration to send his government more than the whopping $45 billion in military and humanitarian aid it had already allocated for 2023.

Just outside the police barricades, at the eastern side of the Capitol grounds, as a demonstration by a small but dedicated group of antiwar activists wound down, a group of around 20 Ukrainians in dark business attire gathered for a photo. They were on their way into the Capitol, where they were to function as Zelensky’s personal cheering section, representing the Ukrainian diaspora before a nationally televised audience.

I approached members of the delegation to challenge them on Zelensky’s lobbying push and the planned expansion of the NATO proxy war he is leading against Russia. My questions were met with a torrent of worn-out talking points about Ukraine’s crusade to defend democracy, accusations that Moscow was sponsoring my reporting, and a complaint that $45 billion in US aid was too little.

Caught up w/ the Ukrainian diaspora delegation on their way into the Capitol to cheer for Zelensky
They told me $45 billion wasn't enough, neo-Nazis do not exist in Ukraine and the banning of the Russian wing of the Orthodox Church & oppo parties was justified bc "martial law" pic.twitter.com/pFE2wmWaH9

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 22, 2022

Several of the Ukrainian delegates I encountered on the way into the US Capitol happened to have played significant roles in the transformation of Ukraine from a neutral state into a hyper-militarized vassal of the US and the IMF.

The most voluble among them, acting as a de facto spokesperson for the group, was Natalie Jaresko. A Ukrainian-American financial industry operative, Jaresko presided over several IMF austerity packages and the rampant privatization of Ukraine’s economy as the country’s Minister of Finance in its post-coup government.

The economic hit-woman

In our exchange, Jaresko unabashedly defended Zelensky’s outlawing of 11 opposition political parties, his banning of opposition media, and his plans to blacklist the Russian wing of the Orthodox Church. “It’s martial law!” Jaresko exclaimed, justifying Kiev’s authoritarian crackdown as a necessary wartime measure.

Jaresko has seen the corruption and de-democratization of Ukraine from within. She helped open up the country’s economy to Western multinationals after being appointed to the Foreign Investors Advisory Council of Victor Yuschenko, a neoliberal president who gained power thanks to the “Orange Revolution” backed by US intelligence and Western-aligned oligarchs George Soros and Boris Berisovsky in 2005.

Under Yuschenko’s reign, Ukraine’s government officially heroized the World War Two-era Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. During our exchange, Jaresko deflected when asked if she supported Bandera. However, her brother, John, has presided over the construction of a memorial in Bloomingdale, New Jersey to “Heroes of Ukraine” including World War Two-era Nazi collaborators, according to researcher Moss Robeson.

Nine years later, following the Euromaidan coup also engineered by Washington, Jaresko rose to Minister of Finance. She was granted Ukrainian citizenship on the day of her appointment.

Through her new post, Jaresko assumed control of Datagroup, the company that oversees Ukraine’s telecom sector. As former investment executive Tim Duff recounted, Jaresko “immediately proceeded to squeeze her competitor, the owner of Datagroup, out of business using the kind of foreign currency loan debt scam favored by Mafia hoods and economic hitmen employed by the CIA.”

While in Kiev, steering the government alongside a cadre of Ukrainian-American operatives, Jaresko grumbled about her salary while angling for opportunities to supplement it. In a withering analysis of her financial self-dealing, the late investigative journalist Robert Parry found that Jaresko “collected $1.77 million in bonuses from a US-taxpayer-financed investment fund where her annual compensation was supposed to be limited to $150,000”

As Jaresko lapped up praise from Beltway corporate media, the NATO-sponsored Atlantic Council that employed her as a visiting fellow acknowledged that under her watch, “the average monthly wage in Ukraine is only $194, an inflation rate of 55 percent is decimating citizens’ purchasing power, and a painful IMF-mandated austerity program involving sweeping cuts to social programs is being implemented.”

In 2017, Jaresko was rewarded with an appointment and $625,000 salary as director of Promesa, the unelected US board charged with restructuring Puerto Rico’s debt – and which average Puerto Ricans refer to derisively as “La Junta.” Jaresko resigned rom her position this April after leaving Puerto Rico’s economy firmly in the hands of Wall Street creditors.

Natalie Jaresko of the ⁦@FOMBPR⁩ is resigning.

She was never welcomed in Puerto Rico.

Her policies will leave people on the island suffering for decades while ensuring huge profits for wall street.

Its time to #abolishlajunta https://t.co/6GuvLfmqwb

— Julio E. (@jlopezvarona) February 3, 2022

The all-encompassing shock therapy that Jaresko prescribed from Puerto Rico to Ukraine was only possible thanks to society-wide disasters. In San Juan, it was Hurricane Maria that placed neoliberal capitalism on overdrive; in Kiev, it was a coup and a proxy war. Indeed, the conflict with Russia has provided Zelensky with justification to strip 70 percent of Ukraine’s workers of collective bargaining rights and arrest everyone from his political rivals to socialist organizers – a wave of repression that Jaresko explicitly justified in her exchange with me.

The Ukrainian president accompanied his Pinochet-style crackdown with an appeal this October at the NYSE Stock Exchange for multinational corporations to deepen their exploitation of his country’s economy and resources. As The Grayzone’s Alex Rubinstein reported, Zelensky’s foreign investment initiative plastered the word “deregulation” across the homepage of its website.

The diaspora lobbyist

As I challenged the Ukrainian delegation on the nearly $100 billion of military aid the US has forked over to Kiev, a bespectacled middle-aged man interjected, demanding to know why I supposedly supported an “unprovoked” assault on an “innocent people.”

I countered that I opposed the Ukrainian military’s 8-year-long attack on the ethnic Russian population of Donetsk and Lugansk, where thousands had been killed before the Russian military ever entered Ukraine in February 2022. I then asked the indignant character if he also opposed the shelling of civilians in the eastern republics.

His reply came in the form of a firm “no!”

That person turns out to be a member of the US Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe named Orest Deychakiwsky. His commission is charged with monitoring Ukrainian compliance with OSCE commitments, including those Kiev made – and relentlessly violated –– to the Minsk Accords. As former German Chancellor Angela Merkel confessed this December, Ukraine’s Western backers used the Minsk Accords as a stalling tactic to prepare it for military conflict with Russia.

So the guy at :39 who says the Ukrainian shelling of Donetsk and Lugansk should not stop appears to be Orest Deychakiwsky, who was a member of the US Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe https://t.co/MJYkLN1JXP pic.twitter.com/H6jrfPhjol

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 22, 2022

The son of a former member of Stepan Bandera’s OUN-B organization that collaborated with Nazi Germany towards the end of World War II, Deychakiwsky serves as the Vice President of the US-Ukraine Foundation. He previously worked at the Helsinki Commission under Sen. Ben Cardin, the pro-war Democrat who sponsored the Magnitsky Act imposing the first set of harsh post-Cold War sanctions on Russia and helping set the stage for the current conflict.

The Maidan infowarrior

A member of the Ukrainian delegation who remained in the background while her fellow delegates jawed at me strongly resembled a prominent functionary of the post-Maidan media complex spawned with hundreds of millions in Western donations.

She closely resembled Anastasia Stanko, the deputy editor of Hromadske, a broadcast network she helped to found on the eve of the Maidan coup. Stanko was honored by the corporate-funded Committee to Protect Journalists with its 2018 press freedom award.

While opposition and Russian-language outlets have been banned by Zelensky, pro-NATO infowar instruments like Hromadske have flourished thanks to massive donations from the EU, USAID, the Thomson Foundation and transnational elites like Paypal founder Pierre Omidyar.

Though Hromadske has attempted to strike the liberal tone its benefactors prefer, it has occasionally provided a platform for genocide-level anti-Russian nationalism.

This March, days after Russia launched its military operation inside Ukraine, a guest on Hromadske ranted that the ethnic Russian population of Donetsk was filled “superfluous” and “absolutely useless people” who “must be killed.”

Pierre Omidyar partnered w/the US Embassy in Kiev to found Hromadske & advance the Euromaidan color revolution

As @RealAlexRubi and I reported, Hromadske has hosted a radio show that was part of the Omidyar-sponsored International Fact-Checking Network https://t.co/dh0DhilRxL https://t.co/RH6vz5smg4

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 20, 2022

Researcher Moss Robeson noted in his analysis of Zelensky’s Ukrainian diaspora delegation that it also included Andrew Mac, an unpaid advisor to Zelensky described by Politico as “one of the biggest Washington power players for Ukraine.”

“We’re gonna send a lot more!”

With tens of billions more on the way to Ukraine, the country’s debt to international creditors continues to grow, setting the stage for another crushing wave of austerity after the war. The diaspora operatives I encountered on their way into the Capitol gallery appeared poised to guide the plunder from the comfort of suburban America.

In the meantime, lawmakers from both parties can hardly contain their exuberance for expanding the proxy war. As one of the energy industry’s favorite senators, Democrat Joe Manchin, exclaimed when I asked him on a sidewalk outside the Capitol about the billions in military aid on the way to Ukraine, “We’re gonna send a lot more. I’m all in!”

Reprinted with permission from The Grayzone.
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from Zelensky’s diaspora delegation led by economic hit-woman who led plunder of Ukraine

Ukraine War Tolls Death Knell for NATO

The defining moment in US President Joe Biden’s press conference at the White House last Wednesday, during President Zelensky’s visit, was his virtual admission that he is constrained in the proxy war in Ukraine, as European allies don’t want a war with Russia. 

To quote Biden, “Now, you say, ‘Why don’t we just give Ukraine everything there is to give?’ Well, for two reasons. One, there’s an entire Alliance that is critical to stay with Ukraine. And the idea that we would give Ukraine material that is fundamentally different than is already going there would have a prospect of breaking up NATO and breaking up the European Union and the rest of the world… I’ve spent several hundred hours face-to-face with our European allies and the heads of state of those countries, and making the case as to why it was overwhelmingly in their interest that they continue to support Ukraine… They understand it fully, but they’re not looking to go to war with Russia. They’re not looking for a third World War.”

Biden realised at that point that “I probably already said too much” and abruptly ended the press conference. He probably forgot that he was dwelling on the fragility of Western unity.

The whole point is that the western commentariat largely forgets that Russia’s core agenda is not about territorial conquest — much as Ukraine is vital to Russian interests — but about NATO expansion. And that has not changed. 

Every now and then President Putin revisits the fundamental theme that the US consistently aimed to weaken and dismember Russia. As recently as last Wednesday, Putin invoked the Chechen war in the 1990s — “the use of international terrorists in the Caucasus, to finish off Russia and to split the Russian Federation… They [US] claimed to condemn al-Qaeda and other criminals, yet they considered using them on the territory of Russia as acceptable and provided all kinds of assistance to them, including material, information, political and any other support, notably military support, to encourage them to continue fighting against Russia.” 

Putin has a phenomenal memory and would have been alluding to Biden’s careful choice of William Burns as his CIA chief. Burns was Moscow Embassy’s point person for Chechnya in the 1990s! Putin has now ordered a nation-wide campaign to root out the vast tentacles that the US intelligence planted on Russian soil for internal subversion. Carnegie, once headed by Burns, has since shut down its Moscow office, and the Russian staff fled to the West!

The leitmotif of the expanded meeting of the Board of the Defence Ministry in Moscow on Wednesday, which Putin addressed, was the profound reality that Russia’s confrontation with the US is not going to end with Ukraine war. Putin exhorted the Russian top brass to “carefully analyse” the lessons of Ukraine and Syrian conflicts. 

Importantly, Putin said, “We will continue maintaining and improving the combat readiness of the nuclear triad. It is the main guarantee that our sovereignty and territorial integrity, strategic parity and the general balance of forces in the world are preserved. This year, the level of modern armaments in the strategic nuclear forces has already exceeded 91 percent. We continue rearming the regiments of our strategic missile forces with modern missile systems with Avangard hypersonic warheads.”

Equally, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu proposed at Wednesday’s meeting a military build-up “to bolster Russia’s security,” including: 

- Creation of a corresponding group of forces in Russia’s northwest to counter Finland and Sweden’s induction as NATO members; 

- Creation of two new motorised infantry divisions in the Kherson and Zaporozhya regions, as well as an army corps in Karelia, facing Finnish border; 

- Upgrade of 7 motorised infantry brigades into motorised infantry divisions in the Western, Central and Eastern military districts, and in the Northern Fleet; 

- Addition of two more air assault divisions in the Airborne Forces;

- Provision of a composite aviation division and an army aviation brigade with 80-100 combat helicopters within each combined arms (tank) army; 

- Creation of 3 additional air division commands, eight bomber aviation regiments, one fighter aviation regiment, and six army aviation brigades; 

- Creation of 5 district artillery divisions, as well as super-heavy artillery brigades for building artillery reserves along the so-called strategic axis; 

- Creation of 5 naval infantry brigades for the Navy’s coastal troops based on the existing naval infantry brigades; 

- Increase in the size of the Armed Forces to 1.5 million service personnel, with 695,000 people serving under contract.

Putin summed up: “We will not repeat the mistakes of the past… We are not going to militarise our country or militarise the economy… and we will not do things we do not really need, to the detriment of our people and the economy, the social sphere. We will improve the Russian Armed Forces and the entire military component. We will do it calmly, routinely and consistently, without haste.” 

If the neocons in the driving seat in the Beltway wanted an arms race, they have it now. The paradox, however, is that this is going to be different from the bipolar Cold War era arms race. 

If the US intention was to weaken Russia before confronting China, things aren’t working that way. Instead, the US is getting locked into a confrontation with Russia and the ties between the two big powers are at a breaking point. Russia expects the US to roll back NATO’s expansion, as promised to the Soviet leadership in 1989. 

The neocons had expected a “win-win” in Ukraine: Russian defeat and a disgraceful end to Putin presidency; a weakened Russia, as in the 1990s, groping for a new start; consolidation of western unity under a triumphant America; a massive boost in the upcoming struggle with China for supremacy in the world order; and a New American Century under the “rules-based world order”. 

But instead, this is turning out to be a classic Zugzwang in the endgame — to borrow from German chess literature — where the US is under obligation to make a move on Ukraine but whichever move it makes will only worsen its geopolitical position. 

Biden has understood that Russia cannot be defeated in Ukraine; nor are Russian people in any mood for an insurrection. Putin’s popularity is soaring high, as Russian objectives in Ukraine are being steadily realised. Thus, Biden is getting a vague sense, perhaps, that Russia isn’t exactly seeing things in Ukraine as a binary of victory and defeat, but is gearing up for the long haul to sort out NATO once and for all. 

The transformation of Belarus as a “nuclear-capable” state carries a profound message from Moscow to Brussels and Washington. Biden cannot miss it. (See my blog NATO nuclear compass rendered unavailing, Indian Punchline, Dec. 21, 2022

Logically, the option open to the US at this point would be to disengage. But that becomes an abject admission of defeat and will mean the death knell for the NATO, and Washington’s transatlantic leadership goes kaput. And, worse still, major west European powers — Germany, France and Italy — may start looking for a modus vivendi with Russia. Above all, how can NATO possibly survive without an “enemy”?

Clearly, neither the US nor its allies are in a position to fight a continental war. But even if they are, what about the emerging scenario in the Asia-Pacific, where the “no limits” partnership between China and Russia has added an intriguing layer in the geopolitics?

The neocons in the Beltway have bitten more than what they could chew. Their last card will be to push for a direct US military intervention in the Ukraine war under the banner of a “coalition of the willing.”

Reprinted with permission from Indian Punchline.

from Ukraine War Tolls Death Knell for NATO

Omnibus shows Congress’s Priorities: Authoritarianism and War

Those hoping for a Christmastime government shutdown were once again disappointed when Congress passed a 4,000-page, $1.7 trillion omnibus appropriations bill that few, if any, Representatives and Senators read before voting on. The Republican leadership celebrated this bloated monstrosity because it spends $858 billion on warfare while “only” spending $772.5 billion on welfare.

No one should think Republican insistence on more warfare than welfare spending means Democrats oppose the warfare state. Under President Biden and a Democrat-controlled Congress, “defense” spending has increased by 4.3 percent over the last two years. Similarly, every Republican President in recent years—including two who had a Republican-controlled Congress for at least part of their term—supported huge increases in welfare state spending. Most Democrats only pretend to oppose warfare and most Republicans only pretend to oppose welfare to appease their parties’ respective bases.

The Omnibus appropriates a $44.5 billion giveaway to Ukraine. This brings the total US spending on Ukraine’s military to over $100 billion - approximately 50 percent more than Russia’s entire military budget! This money is spent in a conflict that does not affect US security, yet one that would likely have not occurred were it not for prior US meddling in the region.

The Omnibus bill provides $11.3 billion for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a $569.6 million increase and $524 billion above the President’s request. According to the Democratic leadership, the funding increase is so the FBI can better fight “extremist violence and domestic terrorists.”

The public recently learned what the FBI considers an appropriate way to fight “extremism,” with the release of emails between Twitter officials and the FBI. These memos show the Bureau was working with Twitter—and almost certainly other social media companies—to suppress certain stories, such as Hunter Biden’s laptop, and points of view, such as skepticism regarding masks, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates. The bureau even used taxpayer funds to reimburse Twitter for the costs of implementing these “requests.” Government officials working with private companies to silence American citizens is a clear violation of the First Amendment.

This is hardly the first time the FBI has violated the constitutional rights of American citizens. In fact, since its founding the Bureau has targeted political activists and leaders such as Martin Luther King, whose agenda was considered “extreme” or “dangerous” by the Bureau’s corrupt leadership. The idea of a national police force with the power to target Americans because of their political beliefs would have horrified the drafters of the Constitution. The federal government has no constitutional authority over criminal law except for cases of piracy, counterfeiting, and treason. Libertarians, constitutional conservatives, and progressives who still care about civil liberties should join together to defund the FBI.

The fiscal year 2022 omnibus appropriations bill expands government, reduces liberty, and increases government debt, forcing the Federal Reserve to monetize more debt leading to more price inflation. Our political elites prioritize militarism abroad and authoritarianism at home over addressing the problems facing the American people like the Federal Reserve’s destructive monetary policy. This will fuel growing discontent with the political system. As the economy continues to worsen and the attempt to run the world continues to result in failures, the discontent will grow until the welfare warfare system collapses and, hopefully, a new error of liberty peace and prosperity dawns.

from Omnibus shows Congress’s Priorities: Authoritarianism and War

Lindsey Graham, the Ugly American

Lindsey Graham, the neocon senator for South Carolina, wants to murder Vladimir Putin.

Lindsey Graham says the only way the war in Ukraine will end is if Russia "breaks" and someone "takes Putin out" pic.twitter.com/M5do9Oj06q

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) December 23, 2022

Many members of the political class are unapologetic psychopaths who are eager to resolve geopolitical issues with murder, torture, and rape. The “indispensable nation” believes it can murder anybody it wants after appropriate propaganda and demonization.

Let’s turn the tables. Imagine, if you will, a top-level Russian politician declaring Joe Biden must be liquidated, maybe like Kennedy. What do you think the response would be in the US?

When it comes to pushing back against Russia, we need to be all-in using every tool in the toolbox.

State sponsor of terrorism designation is the appropriate label for Putin’s Russia.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) December 21, 2022

In neocon Bizarro World, black is white, and white is black. Graham wants to label Russia a terrorist state. In fact, Graham, as a vocal and irrational neocon advocate of mass murder, is a terrorist representing a terrorist government.

Consider the long list of countries bombed, their populations murdered, and terrorized, by the USG neoliberal war machine.

It does get tiresome to list all the nations the USG has messed with, undermined, occupied, and terrorized. This is not something one can write about if he or she is a corporate war propaganda journalist. It’s verboten, an assured career killer.

This is how the process works.

It was outlined by John Perkins, a “hitman” for the neoliberal financial elite. In his 2004 book, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,” he writes

Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign "aid" organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. I should know; I was an EHM.

Let’s call it a Neoliberal Mafia partnered with a USG enforcer and executioner.

If bribery of autocrats and sadistic dictators does not work, if rigged elections are not possible and if a population resists the dictates of an imposed neoliberal financial order, that’s when the military steps in, cheered on by the likes of the pathocrat Sen. Lindsey Graham and other neocons.

Graham is not calling for the assassination of Vladimir Putin due to Putin’s imagined “New Hitler” personality and behavior. He is calling for the murder of Putin and the destruction of Russia because the USG client state on Russia’s border is losing the war big time. Graham wants Putin double-tapped, or maybe sadistically carved up like Moammar Gadaffi by CIA mercenaries. It appears it is the only solution his pathological mind may conceive.

Few condemned Graham for his remarks. Few, it would seem, find his threats immoral, brutal, and medieval. It is, however, the new normal in America for the state to deal with problems through the naked application of violence, murder, trauma, misery, and the wholesale destruction of property. From a militarized domestic police to trained killers sent abroad, the rulers are constructing, piece by piece, the edifice of a total, global control system. The current objective is to get rid of the competition.

The neoliberal normal now does away with obfuscation and doing dirty deeds in secret. It now tells us what it will do, almost exclusively based on lies, fabrications, or contrived rationale stripped of context and injected with manipulative emotional appeal. Millions are conned, like children.

Prior to Bush and Iraq, I cannot recall hearing an American politician publicly call for the assassination of a foreign leader. It just didn’t happen, although behind the scenes bloody acts were routinely committed.

How things change. Now Senate fixtures stand up like Mafia thugs, calling for war and ruthless murder of designated enemies, most urgently competitors. This is now politically normal, perhaps in part due to the decadence and moral turpitude of the nation, much of it culturally induced.

We are told about murders, they are right out in the open, and we yawn. Moammar Gaddafi. Saddam Hussein. A multitude of unknowns is killed sans trial or conviction by way of sophisticated drones bristling with Hellfire missiles.

If a politician has regrets about the largely Democrat march to nuclear annihilation, he or she is moronically linked to Putin, without a shred of evidence, of course.

Consider Kurt Eichenwald, a rather combative Democrat propagandist wedded to the drive to end life on the planet, although he does not see it that way. He clings to the repeatedly discredited idiocy that opposition to war makes one a Putin stooge (and for far too many, by extension within that warped mindset, a domestic terrorist).

New on my substack: MAGA maniacs like Hawley, Boebert, Gaetz, & Greene, arent just useful idiots. They are Putin’s coconspirators in mass murder & will go down in history with the same contempt once reserved for Americans in the 1930s/40s who loved Nazis https://t.co/g2noP6fFfs

— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) December 23, 2022

I could go on, but there is little use. Point is that the USG, its bureaucrats, “stakeholders,” associated death merchants, and NYT Twitter blue-checked apologists, are free range, peddling a demented mantra, a passel of lies insisting, without evidence, that Putin and Russia want to take over Europe, maybe the entire world, just like Hitler supposedly want to do.

It’s manipulative blather.

The bottom line, Lindsey Graham is a long-time warmonger. I don’t believe there is a USG invasion or staged coup he has not supported during his overdue time in Congress. I find it outrageous Graham is not censured for making such threatening and violent remarks. His belligerent threat will add fuel to the propaganda operation now underway to demonize Putin and Russia to such a degree that ignorant Americans will go along with a possible war, as they did at the beginning of the Bush clan’s destruction of Iraq and later Afghanistan.

Reprinted with permission from Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.
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from Lindsey Graham, the Ugly American

Dennis Kucinich Discusses the Pressure on Congress Members to Support War

Dennis Kucinich proved his antiwar bona fides over 16 years in the United States House of Representatives as a Democrat from Ohio and two campaigns for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. In a new interview with host Chris Hedges at The Chris Hedges Report, Kucinich discusses some of the pressure members of Congress are under that helps ensure that few members speak out against war like he did.

Monetary contributions to the Democratic Party, Kucinich suggests in the interview, are a key reason why antiwar voices are now absent among Democrats in the House who he notes have, in contrast with Republican members, voted unanimously for funding the Ukraine War. Kucinich states that he thinks the Democratic Party’s determination 35 or 40 years ago to take corporate donations contributed much to quashing antiwar action by Democratic members because, “in Washington, he or she who pays the piper, you know, plays the tune, and that’s what’s happened.”

A ”new benchmark” in “slavish obedience to the status quo within the party” in support of war was reached in October, Kucinich asserts, when a group of Democratic House members, after encountering some pushback, quickly retracted their letter to President Joe Biden in which they had requested that Biden consider seeking a diplomatic resolution of the Ukraine War.

Kucinich also notes in the interview the funding of congressional campaigns by the “arms industry” that is “making money hand over fist with the expansion of war” contributes to the limiting of antiwar advocacy in Congress. But, Kucinich adds that such funding is “not all it’s about.” Also important is the influence on Congress members’ constituents of a “heavily mediated environment which supports war.” Kucinich explains:

The request to fund a war goes into the larger, heavily mediated environment which supports a war, and, if you stand against the funding, then your constituents who may be great Americans look at that and they say, “Well, why aren’t you supporting America?”. And I think that members of Congress are always concerned about being caught betwixt and between on what their constituents think as opposed to the doubts that they have.

Another factor Kucinich explains puts pressure on Congress members to support war fueling spending is advocacy from businesses in their districts that profit from such. States Kucinich: “So, what happens is, when the Pentagon budget comes up, there are a parade of various businesses — small and large — who will make appointments with the congressperson or staff and lay out how many jobs are in the district and how important it is to a district business to have this budget passed.”

Further, notes Kucinich in the interview, “peer pressure” and “herd instinct” affect Congress members looking up at the vote board and seeing all the pro military spending and prowar votes coming in from fellow members. This encourages wavering members to fall in line and vote the same way.

Summing up the situation Congress members are in, Kucinich states that “it’s a rare individual” who will risk his political career by acting counter to the “enormous pressure.”

Watch Kucinich’s interview here:

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2022/december/21/dennis-kucinich-discusses-the-pressure-on-congress-members-to-support-war/

'Gimme Some More!' - Zelensky In Washington, Slams New $47 Billion As 'Not Enough!'

Ukraine's president, Vladimir Zelensky, made a surprise visit to Washington, DC, today, where he is expected to "discuss strategy" with President Biden and to address the US Congress. While Congress has just topped up Biden's latest Ukraine request to $47 billion, the AP is reporting that Zelensky's message is going to be "that's not enough!" Both Party leaders whole-heartedly support giving Ukraine "whatever it takes" as Americans face runaway inflation and recession. Watch today's Liberty Report:



from 'Gimme Some More!' - Zelensky In Washington, Slams New $47 Billion As 'Not Enough!'

Washington Is Prolonging Ukraine's Suffering

During a speech given on November 29, Polish Vice-Minister of National Defense (MON) Marcin Ociepa said: "The probability of a war in which we will be involved is very high. Too high for us to treat this scenario only hypothetically." The Polish MON is allegedly planning to call up 200,000 reservists in 2023 for a few weeks’ training, but observers in Warsaw suspect this action could easily lead to a national mobilization.

Meanwhile, inside the Biden administration, there is growing concern that the Ukrainian war effort will collapse under the weight of a Russian offensive. And as the ground in Southern Ukraine finally freezes, the administration’s fears are justified. In an interview published in the Economist, head of Ukraine’s armed forces General Valery Zaluzhny admitted that Russian mobilization and tactics are working. He even hinted that Ukrainian forces might be unable to withstand the coming Russian onslaught.

Yet, Zaluzhny rejected any notion of a negotiated settlement and instead pleaded for more equipment and support. He went on to insist that with 300 new tanks, 600 to 700 new infantry fighting vehicles, and 500 new Howitzers, he could still win the war with Russia. Truthfully, General Zaluzhny is not asking for assistance, he’s asking for a new army. Therein lies the greatest danger for Washington and its NATO allies. 

When things go badly for Washington’s foreign policy, the true believers in the great cause always draw deeply from the well of ideological self-delusion to steel themselves for the final battle. Blinken, Klain, Austin, and the rest of the war party continue to pledge eternal support for Kiev regardless of the cost. Like the “best and the brightest” of the 1960s they are eager to sacrifice realism to wishful thinking, to wallow in the splash of publicity and self-promotion in one public visit to Ukraine after another.

This spectacle is frighteningly reminiscent of events more than 50 years ago, when Washington’s proxy war in Vietnam was failing. Doubters within the Johnson administration about the wisdom of intervening on the ground to rescue Saigon from certain destruction went into hiding. In 1963, Washington already had 16,000 military advisors in Vietnam. The idea that Washington was supporting a government in South Vietnam that might not win against North Vietnam was dismissed out of hand. Secretary of State Dean Rusk said, “We will not pull out until the war is won.”

By the spring of 1965, American military advisors were already dying. General Westmoreland, then commander of Military Assistance Command Vietnam, reported to LBJ: “It is increasingly apparent that the existing levels of United States aid cannot prevent the collapse of South Vietnam... North Vietnam is moving in for the kill... Acting on the request of the South Vietnamese government, the decision must be made to commit as soon as possible 125,000 United States troops to prevent the Communist takeover.”

The Biden administration’s unconditional support for the Zelensky regime in Kiev is reaching a strategic inflection point not unlike the one LBJ reached in 1965. Just as LBJ suddenly determined in 1964 that peace and security in Southeast Asia was a vital US strategic interest, the Biden administration is making a similar argument now for Ukraine. Like South Vietnam in the 1960s, Ukraine is losing its war with Russia.

Ukraine’s hospitals and morgues are filled to capacity with wounded and dying Ukrainian soldiers. Washington’s proxy in Kiev has squandered its human capital and considerable Western aid in a series of self-defeating counter-offensives. Ukrainian soldiers manning the defensive lines facing Russian soldiers in Southern Ukraine are brave men, but they are not fools. The Spartans at Thermopylae were brave, and they still died.

Read the whole article here.

from Washington Is Prolonging Ukraine's Suffering

Happy Holidays: 4,000+ Page, $2 Trillion, Dog's Breakfast Budget Dropped At Last Minute

The "must pass" omnibus bill ramps spending to the outer limits as Democrats face loss of power in the House in January. Packed full of warfare-welfare state spending, the disgusting mess is symbolic of the decline of the US Congress as a legitimate legislative body. Also today: US missiles striking Russian territory...what could go wrong? Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Happy Holidays: 4,000+ Page, $2 Trillion, Dog's Breakfast Budget Dropped At Last Minute

We Are Still Locked Down

Consider just how fortunate we are to have the Twitter Files. Every few days, we are seeing dumps of documents from the operations of Twitter before Elon Musk took over. This weekend’s release was especially shocking. It revealed a close and symbiotic relationship between the company’s management and the FBI, which employs 80 people to police social networks and flag posts. They aren’t looking for crime. They were focused on wrongthink on matters of politics. 

In other words, all our worst suspicions have been confirmed. We still await the Covid files but let there be no doubt about what they will show in grim detail. Twitter worked with government to throttle the reach and searchability of accounts that took issue with the main messaging of the CDC/HHS from early in lockdowns to the present. We already knew that Facebook had deleted 7 million posts in the second quarter of 2020. Twitter pulled some 10,000 accounts down. 

Twitter is now mostly open, for now. The rest of the venues remain wholly controlled. Brownstone has posts tagged, throttled, and sometimes deleted from LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and it is a constant struggle to avoid Google’s own push against our content. Even ridiculous sites with no credibility or reach appear high in search engines when our content is searched. This is not an algorithm at work. 

On this basis alone, it is fair to say that we are still in lockdown nearly three years later. The point of such top-down censorship is not only to control the public mind. It is also to keep all of us from finding each other. It truly did work for a very long time. It took nearly a year for the group that we now know as the anti-lockdown movement to form. Even when Brownstone was founded, I had not known about Justin Hart’s Rational Ground. Now of course we work closely together. 

The impact of all this work to keep us apart has been huge. It’s why those of us who resisted from the very beginning felt so very alone, and we could not understand why. Were we going crazy? What is wrong with people that they seem not to be objecting to having their schools and churches closed? Why was the media demonizing people for wanting to get haircuts? Whatever happened to the Bill of Rights and why does no one seem even to be complaining about what was happening?

Let us pause to explore the meaning of lockdown. We often hear now that the US never did lock down, as ridiculous as that sounds. Epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya grew so tired of hearing this claim that he formulated a definition: any government policy that seeks to keep people physically separate under the excuse that doing so mitigates against some crisis. This would include claims, for example, that other people are biohazards, and would include fear-mongering propaganda, and much else.

Think back to March 16, 2020 in the White House press conference when Deborah Birx summed up the whole theme of the day. “We really want people to be separated at this time, to be able to address this virus,” she said. If you think about it, that is surely among the most draconian demands ever made by any government against its people. It means the abolition of freedom and society too. It’s utterly astonishing, and yet the media gathered there just nodded heads as if this were completely normal. 

Part of the mandatory separation – part of the lockdown – was information control to keep people who opposed what was happening from finding each other. This trick truly did work because all our usual methods for digital socializing came to be nationalized overnight. We did not know this because there was no real announcement but it was nonetheless real. We had come to rely on social media to give us a sense of the public mind but that came to an end during the most shocking policies ever imposed on so many Americans. And the policy happened all over the world except for one state and about 5 nations. 

The lockdown included information control and that was crucial. As for the possibility of hearing the opinions of others, we also faced egregious stay-at-home orders and limits on the numbers of people who could even enter our own homes. I’ve not seen a complete study on what happened but in Western Massachusetts where I was at the time, no more than 10 people were allowed to meet in one setting. Thus no weddings, funerals, or large house parties. Private citizens became so zealous in their enforcement of this that they would fly drones over communities to look for cars bunched up and rat out the address to the local media. This truly did happen. 

Only now do we see the larger point. It was to prohibit an opposition from forming and to gaslight the whole population into thinking that everyone was going along with this, since this was nothing but “common sense public health measures.” Anthony Fauci told us this many times. This might also have contributed to the huge decline in the health of the population. People lost a sense of hope and turned to substance abuse and overeating. Gyms were closed and so were all in-person AA meetings. The lockdowns contributed as much as 40 percent to the overall excess deaths in that year alone.

Eventually of course many things opened up but unvaccinated visitors from other countries are still not allowed in, which is an outrage. I have a conductor friend from the UK who has constant invitations to conduct in the US but he is simply not allowed into the country. For three years now! 

Question: have we really ever left lockdowns? We are far less free today and far more censored. Twitter is an aberration among the major tech platforms. Media is controlled too. But for Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and few others, plus the mighty Epoch Times, where would we even get our news? And thank goodness for Substack, which has allowed so many writers and researchers to have an outlet. The point is that these are all lights peeking through a darkness that is still being imposed from above. Which is to say: the emergency for human liberty is still with us. 

They wanted to keep us separate, and the excuse was a virus. The rule of separation (and the stickers are still everywhere in this country) was truly to keep us apart. One of the most powerful books to come out of our era is Naomi Wolf’s The Bodies of Others. The core theory was that separating humans from other humans was the whole point: to take away our social connection and the possibility of living a dignified life of our own choosing. The only beneficiaries to the policy were tech, media, and government. Her book is a classic for the ages. 

Part of this separation included the attack on small business and traditional commerce. The word commerce comes from commercium in Latin, a word that figured prominently in a composed verse from medieval Christianity that became a much-loved motet: O Admirabile Commercium. The point is to draw attention to the exchange between time and eternity as instantiated in the incarnation that Christmas celebrates. 

Commerce has long been the meeting place for humans to form social order. Trade means mutual benefit, finding value in each other. That it came under such severe attack makes sense from the point of view of a ruling class that was attacking human association at its root. 

Even today, we are having difficulty finding each other and are relieved when we do so. I was struck by this during the Brownstone holiday party a few days ago. There we were all together, the room filled with incredibly energy, everyone toasting friendship and connection, smiles everywhere, a profound sense of gratitude for the physical space that allowed us to meet and eat, all of us knowing full well that we went months and even a year and longer when we could not do this by order of government edict. Just discovering each other, and sharing tales and ideas, amounts to an act of defiance. 

Two Christmases came and went when we were told that meeting and celebrating the season was a biohazard and not recommended. In some places, it was forbidden. It’s hard to imagine a more grim policy and it still shocks us to think back and realize that it was all deliberate. One means to reverse this horror is simple: find friends, celebrate together, share stories and ideals, promote peace and love, and work to rebuild what we have lost.

Reprinted with permission from Brownstone Institute.

from We Are Still Locked Down