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What “New Libertarian Country” Projects Get Wrong

Posted by M. C. on August 13, 2022

By Joe Jarvis 

What “New Libertarian Country” Projects Get Wrong

Correction: This article has been edited to add information about Prospera’s legal standing.

I want to found my own country. I don’t like any of the options available, and I think I could design a better governing structure that allows freedom and prosperity to flourish.

But that’s a tall order.

There have been a number or projects and concepts which tried to gain various levels of autonomy.

Operation Atlantis

In the early 70s, Operation Atlantis intended to gather libertarians, sail out to international waters, and declare sovereignty. They built a boat out of rebar and concrete, and it sank into the Hudson. They revived it, and managed to bring it all the way down to the Bahamas… where it sank again.

Who isn’t John Galt?

More recently a couple projects in Chile named after an Ayn Rand character fell apart before they began. And those weren’t even special jurisdictions that could set their own tax rates and business regulations, for example. They were essentially just meant to be intentional communities with likeminded people come together to learn and produce.

One appeared to be a legit scam, and the other was abandoned due to the political situation in Chile.

Chile had a lot going for it, but then elected extreme socialists who are rewriting the Constitution, and went mental over Covid… so it turned out not to be the best location for those looking for freedom.

Liberland

Then there is Liberland, which seven years ago planted its flag on an unoccupied river island between Croatia and Serbia which neither country officially claimed since the 1991 dissolution of Yugoslavia. Its motto is “To live and let live” and they have done a great job thinking through a form of Republican government, and mapping out the land. They want to essentially become a micro-state with a free economic zone.

But no one actually lives on the land, and visitors have in the past been detained by Croatian secret service just for visiting. However the President of Liberland claims they are building more positive ties with the Croatian government.

Prospera

One of the most promising projects to create a special legal jurisdiction is Prospera on the island of Roatan, part of Honduras. It used existing legislation to create a ZEDE– Zone for Employment and Economic Development.

The project was well underway when a new party came to power vowing to boot the “neo-colonizers”. Prospera has a solid legal basis to fight any revocation of its charter… in Honduran courts. Not exactly known as a country extremely committed to rule of law.

However, after publishing this article, Prospera’s legal team reached out to inform me that although the legislation authorizing ZEDEs has been repealed, the government has “not officially denied our position that the ZEDE repeal does not apply to Prospera.”

Furthermore, if it comes to it, the project will likely not be arguing in Honduran courts due to “legal stability agreements that ensure jurisdiction for any dispute is the international arbitration body known as ICSID.”

I do however think my earlier point stands: how much growth and prosperity do you expect to attract locked in a legal battle for existence, in a hostile political environment?

Don’t get me wrong, I think projects like these are awesome, and I’m glad someone is doing it.

But to try to gain more success, we need to look at these with a critical eye, to learn what worked, what didn’t, and where we can improve to make the dream a reality.

One issue is is hostility of host/ neighboring governments:

  • Everything should be completely legal
  • Should have support or at least acceptance of surrounding community

Second, these need to be profitable and scalable:

  • Startup phase is fine, but how will you make money in the not-so-distant future?
  • Scale is key to making a profit and attracting investment

A third problem is starting too big:

  • Insufficient benefits to get people to move
  • Declaring sovereignty is not the first step

So I have been thinking about how I could solve these problems to make a new country project a success.

And I came up with a five step plan to start small, and grow into a sovereign country.

  1. Grow an online community focused on parallel economy businesses
  2. Build a physical community to incubate parallel economy businesses
  3. Expand physical community to achieve scale and self-sufficiency
  4. Charter a special economic zone to increase legal, regulatory, and tax benefits to members
  5. Purchase sovereignty, and form new country

This solves the previous problems identified by:

  • All legal, choose friendly places
  • Ways to profit built into each phase, with scale
  • Incremental, step by step, attracting the right people at each phase
  • Each layer builds on a strong foundation.

So I am starting with the Parallel Economy Project.

We can specialize and trade to build a foundation for a new economy that will support projects like these, so we don’t have to rely on hostile institutions.

That’s what the Parallel Economy Project is all about. Being part of a community taking steps to ensure that they are in positions of strength for the coming new economic order.

Join today on Locals with a free trial using code FOUNDER (expires on September 18). There are two exclusive videos already uploaded, one on why geopolitical changes over the next decade could allow new countries to form, and the other on how to use mass desire to market a parallel economy business.

In September, a new video will be released that goes into much more detail on the physical community which I intend to break ground on by September 1, 2024– two years from launch.

If you’d like to get the brainstorming going about what kinds of parallel economy businesses you could start, enter your email below, and I will send you a free video with 12 parallel economy business ideas you can start making money with today.

If we do it right, we will have all the replacements ready when the old institutions come crumbling down. Massive wealth and power will be decentralized, and transferred into the hands of those who saw what was coming, and prepared.

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Thomas Piketty Wants to Bring Back Communism in the Guise of Democratic Socialism

Posted by M. C. on August 13, 2022

Piketty is a Marxist who has written a great deal on income distribution to promote income redistribution and other Marxist goals. He exhibits no knowledge of economics and economic theory except that implied by the construction of economic statistics. His proposed solutions are implicitly violent, destructive, and unable to achieve the desired results.

https://mises.org/wire/thomas-piketty-wants-bring-back-communism-guise-democratic-socialism

Mark Thornton

Thomas Piketty
A Brief History of Equality
Harvard University Press, 2022

Thomas Piketty’s Brief History is the fourth installment of his assault on economic inequality, following as it does the best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Capital and Ideology. The third, Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016–2021, is just a collection of popular articles based on which the New York Times dubbed Piketty a “vaguely left-of-center” economist. This slim fourth volume from Harvard University Press calls for far-reaching socialist policies to establish economic equality. It is a siren song of communism: “economic justice” without any cost or noteworthy harm to society.

The primary reason for my concern with Piketty and this book is the relative influence of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto (written with Frederick Engels) versus his Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy. The Manifesto was short, on point, and politically actionable while Kapital was long, jargony, filled with footnotes, and nebulous concerning political action. Indeed, Marx’s view of history told Kapital readers to sit tight for generations and suffer, while the Manifesto was an immediate call to arms around the world!

In terms of relevance, the Manifesto’s ten-point program would become the political action platform for democratic socialists worldwide and public policy in leading nations by 1917. In contrast, the highly improbable Marxist takeover of Russia had no blueprint from Kapital, led to one economic disaster after another, and ended in failure, as Ludwig von Mises predicted. Piketty may have at least learned that lesson and advocates a social-democratic-type takeover.

All of Piketty’s books are terrible from an economic perspective. Most importantly, all are as dangerous to political economy as Marx’s books were catastrophic to hundreds of millions of people, especially the lower-income people Marx and Piketty propose to help. The brevity of this book makes it potentially the most socially devastating of the four.

Brief History

Up until two centuries ago, more than 95 percent of humanity lived in “extreme poverty.” That number had fallen to about one-third of the global population by the end of the 1980s and is now less than 10 percent, and still falling, all during a period of rapid population increase. This is one of the most important facts you can say about the entire history of humanity, and yet it seems not widely known—and how it was achieved is completely lost on Piketty.

Piketty gives no indication to me that he is an economist or any kind of disinterested objective scientific observer. However, his statistic- and chart-filled books give the impression of a scientific basis for his policy conclusion. Piketty is a Marxist, an advocate for communism, but all in the guise of a conventional democratic socialism. However, his dedication of the book reminds readers of the Manifesto’s finale.

He does admit that the last quarter millennium has also been a powerful movement toward greater economic equality, but he largely ignores how the enormous, sustained increase in the standard of living was achieved. It just happened. He does want readers to understand his views that this improvement was not the result of capitalism, that sociopolitical systems are just a matter of democratic choice, and that various forms of socialist and union agitation are to be credited with economic progress.

See the rest here

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The Only ‘National Security’ Necessary Is the Elimination of the ‘National Security State’

Posted by M. C. on August 13, 2022

“The words ‘national’ and ‘security’ are like precursors for a binary chemical weapon: not overly dangerous by themselves, but capable of completely shutting down the brain and nervous system when used in combination.”

~ John Alejandro King a.k.a. The Covert Comic

By Gary D. Barnett

The Only ‘National Security’ Necessary Is the Elimination of the ‘National Security State’

“I’m afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.”

~ Jim Garrison

“National Security” is just the excuse for every form imaginable of tyranny, totalitarianism, privacy destruction, abuse of freedoms, aggression, terror, and war. Every time I hear this deceptive and scurrilous term, I cringe knowing that lies, deceit, and horror are on the horizon. It is based completely on false fear; fear planted in the minds of the people in order to force (goad) them to run to government and the state for protection from fabricated enemies. It is the state’s go to argument when additional control is sought, and it has worked nearly every time it has been tried. It is currently the mainstay of this fascist state called America, and it is still effective. The term ‘national security’ is nothing more than sheer propaganda based on unwarranted fearmongering.

One has to wonder, given that this country has never been aggressively attacked on its home soil by any foreign aggressor state, how the term ‘national security’ ever became the default reasoning for any and every aggressive war waged by this government against countries around the world. It is not just war against other innocent countries that has been waged, aggression in the name of national security has been levied against the American population almost continually, whether in the case of desired war, disasters, ‘pandemics,’ bogus ‘climate change’ risks, state and federal emergencies, and any number of other deceptive means of control.

Before the letters start rolling in claiming that the sinking of the Lusitania, the Pearl Harbor attack, the Gulf of Tonkin false flag, and the 9/11 inside job were acts of pure aggression by outsiders, please refrain from such nonsense. They all, and many more, were set up and staged, and led to major wars of aggression by the U.S. against multiple foreign countries that had nothing to do with attacking America. In the process, freedom was destroyed. This has been written about by very many scholars for decades, and plenty of proof has been forthcoming. As I have stated over and over again, the United States has aggressively attacked many other countries, as well as Americans, and has prosecuted wars of aggression for 93% (an understatement in my estimation) of its entire history against those who never attacked or were a threat to this country; all under the pretext of ‘national security.’

See the rest here

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Victor Davis Hanson: FBI, RIP?

Posted by M. C. on August 13, 2022

The agency has become dangerous to Americans and an existential threat to their democracy and rule of law. The FBI should be dispersing its investigatory responsibilities to other government investigative agencies that have not yet lost the public’s trust.

Tyler Durden's Photo

BY TYLER DURDEN

FRIDAY, AUG 12, 2022 – 11:05 PM

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/victor-davis-hanson-fbi-rip

The FBI is dissolving before our eyes into a rogue security service akin to those in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.

Take the FBI’s deliberately asymmetrical application of the law. This week the bureau surprise-raided the home of former President Donald Trump — an historical first.

A massive phalanx of FBI agents swooped into the Trump residence while he was not home, to confiscate his personal property, safe, and records. All of this was over an archival dispute of presidential papers common to many former presidents. Agents swarmed the entire house, including the wardrobe closet of the former first lady.

Note we are less than 90 days out from a midterm election, and this was not just a raid, but a political act.

The Democratic Party is anticipated to suffer historical losses. Trump was on the verge of announcing his 2024 presidential candidacy. In many polls, he remains the Republican front-runner for the nomination — and well ahead of incumbent President Joe Biden in a putative 2024 rematch.

In 2016 then FBI Director James Comey announced that candidate Hillary Clinton was guilty of destroying subpoenaed emails — a likely felony pertaining to her tenure as secretary of state. Yet he all but pledged that she would not be prosecuted given her status as a presidential candidate.

As far as targeting presidential candidates, Trump was impeached in 2020 ostensibly for delaying military aid to Ukraine by asking Ukrainian officials to investigate more fully the clearly corrupt Biden family — given Joe Biden at the time was a likely possible presidential opponent in 2020.

The FBI has devolved into a personal retrieval service for the incorrigible Biden family. It suppressed, for political purposes, information surrounding Hunter Biden’s missing laptop on the eve of the 2020 election.

Previously, the FBI never pursued Hunter’s fraudulently registered firearm, his mysterious foreign income, his felonious crack cocaine use, or his regular employment of foreign prostitutes.

Yet in a pre-dawn raid just before the 2020 election, the FBI targeted the home of journalist James O’Keefe on grounds that someone had passed to him the lost and lurid diary of Ashley Biden, Biden’s wayward daughter.

At various times, in Stasi-style the FBI has publicly shackled Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro, swarmed the office of Trump’s legal counsel Rudy Giuliani, and sent a SWAT team to surround the house of Trump ally Roger Stone. Meanwhile, terrorists and cartels walk with impunity across an open border.

FBI Director Christopher Wray last week cut short his evasive testimony before Congress. He claimed he had to leave for a critical appointment — only to use his FBI Gulfstream luxury jet to fly to his favorite vacation spot in the Adirondacks.

Wray took over from disgraced interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe. The latter admitted lying repeatedly to federal investigators and signed off on a fraudulent FBI FISA application. He faced zero legal consequences.

McCabe, remember, was also the point man in the softball Hillary Clinton email investigation — while his wife was a political candidate and recipient of thousands of dollars from a political action committee with close ties to the Clinton family.

McCabe took over from disgraced FBI Director James Comey. On 245 occasions, Comey claimed under oath before the House Intelligence Committee that he had no memory or knowledge of key questions concerning his tenure. With impunity, he leaked confidential FBI memos to the media.

Comey took over from Director Robert Mueller. Implausibly, Mueller swore under oath that he had no knowledge, either of the Steele dossier or of Fusion GPS, the firm that commissioned Christopher Steele to compile the dossier. But those were the very twin catalysts that had prompted his entire special investigation into the Russian collusion hoax.

FBI legal counsel Kevin Clinesmith was convicted of a felony for altering an FBI warrant request to spy on an innocent Carter Page.

The FBI, by Comey’s own public boasts, bragged how it caught National Security Advisor-designate General Michael Flynn in its Crossfire Hurricane Russian collusion hoax.

As special counsel, Mueller then fired two of his top investigators — Lisa Page and Peter Strzok — for improper personal and professional behavior. He then staggered their releases to mask their collaborative wrongdoing.

Mueller’s team deleted critical cell phone evidence under subpoena that might well have revealed systemic FBI-related bias.

The FBI interferes with and warps national elections. It hires complete frauds as informants who are far worse than its targets. It humiliates or exempts government and elected officials based on their politics. It violates the civil liberties of individual American citizens.

The FBI’s highest officials now routinely mislead Congress. They have erased or altered court and subpoenaed evidence. They illegally leak confidential material to the media. And they have lied under oath to federal investigators.

The agency has become dangerous to Americans and an existential threat to their democracy and rule of law. The FBI should be dispersing its investigatory responsibilities to other government investigative agencies that have not yet lost the public’s trust.

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Covid RIP… and Ron Paul was Right.

Posted by M. C. on August 13, 2022

https://mailchi.mp/ronpaulinstitute/ronright?e=4e0de347c8

…In a similar vein, and almost under the radar, the CDC just announced that everything they had been demanding and telling us for the past two plus years has been a lie. It doesn’t matter if you stand six feet away from people, it doesn’t matter if you are vaccinated or unvaccinated. You don’t need to quarantine. Kids can stay in school if someone around them has contracted the ‘rona.

The CDC and the thugs around them are pretending that this is something new, that they suddenly understand “the Science” better. They will not admit that they were lying and manipulating all along in pursuit of power and money…

As he wrote in the earliest days of the Covid scare, when the “experts” were shutting the country down:

If anything, what people like Fauci and the other fearmongers are demanding will likely make the disease worse. The martial law they dream about will leave people hunkered down inside their homes instead of going outdoors or to the beach where the sunshine and fresh air would help boost immunity. … People should ask themselves whether this coronavirus “pandemic” could be a big hoax, with the actual danger of the disease massively exaggerated by those who seek to profit – financially or politically – from the ensuing panic...

Sincerely yours,

Daniel McAdams
Executive Director
Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

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Klaus Schwab and the WEF just got creepier

Posted by M. C. on August 13, 2022

Every time I turn around, there’s another creepy thing coming out of the World Economic Forum.

Now they’re proposing that governments use artificial intelligence to handle “content moderation” on social media, so that opinions that contradict those of “subject matter experts” (who can still utter that phrase without a snicker?) might be more easily penalized or even removed.

Here’s their graphic:
Comedian Dave Chappelle has it right: “The more you say I can’t say something, the more urgent it is for me to say it.”

Not ten years ago we thought you could say just about anything online, and the enforcers of allowable opinion just had to deal with it.

That’s still largely true, but the major platforms — where most people would have heard what you had to say — have been clamping down, as we all know.

I finally had to take the Tom Woods Show Elite off Facebook because I could see the writing on the wall. Post after post kept getting taken down, and eventually Facebook required me to approve each post manually — impossible in a group as energetic and robust as mine.

Screw that, I decided.

So we moved onto a no-censorship platform.

But there’s always a concern: will people really follow me onto a less-trafficked platform? Will the group lose its vibrancy?

Here’s what I didn’t expect:

A whole bunch of people joined specifically because I had left Facebook. “Finally!” they said.

So far I’ve been able to hold off the tentacles of the World Economic Forum and their creepy creeps and lying liars, so I hope you’ll join me in there for no-holds-barred exchanges of ideas, via this link:
 http://www.SupportingListeners.com
Tom Woods

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‘The FBI Raid On Melania’s Closet Was Justified,’ Says Merrick Garland Wearing Gorgeous New Evening Gown And Sun Hat

Posted by M. C. on August 12, 2022

At publishing time, Trump took to Truth Social to announce that all his golf clubs were also missing.

https://babylonbee.com/news/the-fbi-raid-was-justified-says-merrick-garland-wearing-strapless-gown-and-sun-hat-from-melanias-closet

Article Image

WASHINGTON, D.C. — With many Americans up in arms over the unprecedented raid of former President Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago by the FBI, Attorney General Garland released a statement to assure everyone the raid was completely justified. Eyewitnesses noted he looked unusually fetching in an elegant Dolce & Gabbana evening gown and a Dior sun hat.

“We wouldn’t raid Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate or Melania’s wardrobe unless it was absolutely, 100% necessary,” said Garland. “I resent any accusation that this raid was influenced by partisan politics or my insatiable desire to wear pretty designer dresses.” The Attorney General then did a little spin in his purple gown as the press gasped with delight.

FBI Director Christopher Wray echoed the statement as he strode up to the Hoover Building in a dazzling pair of diamond-encrusted Alexander McQueen stilettos. “The men and women of the FBI are paragons of unassailable integrity and impartiality, and any suggestion otherwise is murderous treason,” he said. Several news outlets present also noted the delicious smell of Chanel No.5 in the air.

At publishing time, Trump took to Truth Social to announce that all his golf clubs were also missing.

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The Attempt to Prosecute Donald Trump Is Unleashing More Than Our Political System Can Handle

Posted by M. C. on August 12, 2022

Because I spent many years researching and writing about federal criminal law, I can say that if federal authorities wish to charge someone with a crime, nothing, not even the law itself, stands in their way. So, if the Biden administration really wants to charge Trump with something, the FBI will have no trouble cooking up something to order.

https://mises.org/wire/attempt-prosecute-donald-trump-unleashing-more-our-political-system-can-handle

William L. Anderson

With the recent FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Florida home, the Democrats and the Biden administration have raised the political stakes to a level from which this country as we have known it may never return. All one can say to those that are demanding a criminal prosecution of the former president is: Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.

Although the raid ostensibly was to see if Trump took classified documents from the White House when he left in a chaotic move in January 2021, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy believes the Biden administration was again attempting to find that proverbial “smoking gun” tying Trump to the January 6 Capitol riot. Whether or not Attorney General Merrick Garland is able to grab the brass ring and prosecute Trump after yet one more fishing expedition is another story, although I doubt that any president has seen as many resources used to investigate him as has Donald Trump, but the Department of Justice has not filed charges yet.

Understand that anyone reading this article has committed a federal crime at some point, perhaps more than once. I adopted four children from overseas, and while I was not involved in the details (done through legitimate and registered adoption agencies), I can be held criminally responsible if anyone paid bribes in the countries where the adoptions took place. Even if investigators could not prove someone paid bribes, they could still charge me with a crime on a mere pretext. And the charges would stick, and most likely a federal jury would vote to convict.

Remember that Democrats wanted Amy Coney Barrett’s adoption of two children from Haiti investigated. While the demands were overtly political, it was clear that the Democrats believed in using criminal law to achieve political purposes in her case, but using the law that way hardly is limited to operatives of the Democratic Party.

(Lest one believe I exaggerate, read this account about lobster importers charged with federal crimes for allegedly violating Honduran lobster regulations—with the attorney general of Honduras telling the FBI there was no violation. A federal jury convicted the men, and they were sent to federal prison for eight years.)

See the rest here

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How Ukraine Lost Its Riches

Posted by M. C. on August 12, 2022

At the end of March, after negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey, there was nearly an agreement on a ceasefire and on the end of the war. Joe Biden then tasked Boris Johnson with telling Zelensky to continue the war. The ‘west’ would otherwise stop paying him. Zelensky did as he was told and stopped all negotiations with Russia.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/08/how-ukraine-lost-its-riches.html#more

On February 24, the day Russian troops crossed the borders to Ukraine, I wrote about the potential end state of the operation:

Looking at this map I believe that the most advantageous end state for Russia would be the creation of a new independent country, call it Novorussiya, on the land east of the Dnieper and south along the coast that holds a majority ethnic Russian population and that, in 1922, had been attached to the Ukraine by Lenin. That state would be politically, culturally and militarily aligned with Russia.


bigger

This would eliminate Ukrainian access to the Black Sea and create a land bridge towards the Moldavian breakaway Transnistria which is under Russian protection.

The rest of the Ukraine would be a land confined, mostly agricultural state, disarmed and too poor to be build up to a new threat to Russia anytime soon. Politically it would be dominated by fascists from Galicia which would then become a major problem for the European Union.

On March 19 I revisited the question and added Kryvyi Rih (Kriwoi Rog in Russian), the yellow part of the map, to the list:

Novorossiya roughly includes the red and yellow areas in the above map. It also includes the valuable Soviet developed iron ore mines and factories of Kryvyi Rih west of the Dnieper river.

I especially want to point out that I spoke of a “mostly agricultural state, disarmed and too poor to be build up to a new threat to Russia anytime soon.”

I could say that because nearly all of Ukraine’s resources and industries are in the south and east. If Russia takes those or creates the new state of Novorossiya the ‘rest of Ukraine’ will be mostly de-industrialized. Also of note is that the south and east include most of the famous black soil areas, which consists of a half meter deep humus layer that allows for good agricultural results without using much fertilizers.

Much of the steel and heavy machine industries in the south and east have been neglected over the last 30 years under Ukrainian rule or were destroyed during the wars that are raging since 2014. It will require very large investments to revive them but the potential profits will be great.

Nearly half a year after I wrote about it, the Washington Post, with the help of some Canadians, is catching up on the issue:

In the Ukraine war, a battle for the nation’s mineral and energy wealth

After nearly six months of fighting, Moscow’s sloppy war has yielded at least one big reward: expanded control over some of the most mineral-rich lands in Europe. Ukraine harbors some of the world’s largest reserves of titanium and iron ore, fields of untapped lithium, as well as massive deposits of coal. Collectively, they are worth tens of trillions of dollars.

The lion’s share of those coal deposits, which for decades have powered Ukraine’s critical steel industry, are concentrated in the east, where Moscow has made the most inroads. That’s put them in Russian hands, along with significant amounts of other valuable energy and mineral deposits used for everything from aircraft parts to smartphones, according to an analysis for The Washington Post by the Canadian geopolitical risk firm SecDev.
…
“The worst scenario is that Ukraine loses land, no longer has a strong commodity economy and becomes more like one of the Baltic states, a nation unable to sustain its industrial economy,” said Stanislav Zinchenko chief executive of GMK, a Kyiv-based economic think tank. “This is what Russia wants. To weaken us.”
…
Yet SecDev’s analysis indicates that at least $12.4 trillion worth of Ukraine’s energy deposits, metals and minerals are now under Russian control. That figure accounts for nearly half the dollar value of the 2,209 deposits reviewed by the company. In addition to 63 percent of the country’s coal deposits, Moscow has seized 11 percent of its oil deposits, 20 percent of its natural gas deposits, 42 percent of its metals and 33 percent of its deposits of rare earth and other critical minerals including lithium.

I believe that the natural gas share Russia already holds is higher as there are several sub-sea gas fields around Crimea and off the eastern coast.

If the Russian forces also take Kryvyi Rih and Dnipro they will have about 75-80% of Ukraine’s pre-war GDP under their control.

Russia’s war effort is currently financed by the ‘west’ which pays for it through record energy prices created by its own sanctions on Russia.

See the rest here

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Representatives are Too Invested in Defense Contractors

Posted by M. C. on August 12, 2022

After Raytheon and L3Harris, the rest of the top ten defense companies donating campaign cash were Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, BAE Systems, General Atomics, Huntington Ingalls Industries, Boeing, and Leidos. These companies lined members’ campaign coffers with millions of dollars in PAC funding.

https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2022/08/representatives-are-too-invested-in-defense-contractors

BY DYLAN HEDTLER-GAUDETTE & NATHAN SIEGEL

As Congress considers two monumentally important pieces of legislative business — the annual defense policy bill and a historic reform to congressional ethics rules — it is worth taking some time to consider just how deep the potential for corruption goes in both these areas and how they intersect with one another. In other words, congressional corruption and ethical failings are inextricably linked to the military-industrial-congressional complex — the unhealthy intersection between Congress and the defense sector. This situation calls for serious reforms, and Congress is the only stakeholder that can make that happen.

A Cozy Relationship

There are few examples that better highlight the ethical dysfunction in Congress than the excessively cozy relationship between policymakers and the defense industry. Each year, including this one, members of the House and Senate armed services committees and the House and Senate appropriations committees craft the policy and allocate the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that fund the Pentagon. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the primary vehicle for defense policy. The accompanying appropriations bill allocates the money to operationalize the policy laid out in the NDAA. To put this in perspective, consider that the defense budget now clocks in at more than $800 billion and the Pentagon allocated $420 billion in contracts in fiscal year 2020 — over half the total defense budget and a contract dollar amount larger than every other federal agency combined.

In light of the scale and scope of defense spending, reasonable observers could be forgiven for assuming there might be some prudential rules in place to prevent corruption when it comes to Congress’s work regarding the defense industry. Unfortunately, there are virtually no such rules. In fact, the current framework around congressional conflicts of interest and campaign finance regarding industry relationships is so permissive as to all but guarantee the perversion of the policymaking process in this area.

There are few, if any, rules in place that restrict or prohibit members of Congress who sit on committees that oversee and legislate defense policy from holding direct personal financial stakes in defense companies, including through the ownership of stock. This means there is nothing stopping members of the House and Senate armed services committees (as well as each chamber’s respective defense subcommittee of the appropriations committee) from directly tying their own personal financial interests to the financial interests of defense contractors, all while passing laws that would steer billions of tax dollars to those very same companies. Again, these contracts total hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

See the rest here

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