Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said on the weekend talk shows that it’s time to start talking about sending US troops to directly fight Russia in Ukraine. Thus to defend Ukraine’s borders, this member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee openly calls for that launch of what would be WWIII. Coons is joined by plenty of Republican Members calling for direct conflict with Russia, including disgraced neocon Rep. Adam Kinzinger. Also today: Fauci spills the beans on lockdowns and MSNBC spills the beans on its view of the role of media in a “free” society…
@ 28:50MSNBC on Musk in media: He is trying to control what people think, that’s our job!
The crisis could still be avoided, but only if Congress becomes serious about cutting spending, starting with the military industrial complex. Congress should also start to reform monetary policy by auditing the Fed, legalizing alternative currencies, and exempting precious metals and cryptocurrencies from all capital gains taxes.
Apr 18 – The Biden administration and its allies continue to use Russian President Vladimir Putin as the convenient excuse for their economic failures. The most recent falsehood is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused March’s 8.5 percent year-over-year increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI).
Prices were surging long before Russian troops entered Ukraine. Furthermore, Putin did not stop exporting food and gas; it was the Biden administration and Congress that imposed sanctions, making US consumers suffer additional price increases. The blame for the economic effects lies with the US government, not Russia.
The United States has for years been meddling in Ukraine’s affairs with the explicit goal of moving US and NATO military forces ever closer to Russia. The most notorious example was the 2014 US-orchestrated coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected government.
Russia has a legitimate grievance over the US supporting expanding NATO to include Ukraine, despite the US having promised not to support expanding NATO beyond Germany’s borders during negotiations over how to end the Cold War. Foreign policy experts, including George Kennan, the architect of the Cold war “containment” strategy, warned that Russia would respond adversely to NATO expansion near Russia.
Before the Ukraine conflict, Biden and his fellow Democrats blamed price increases on “greedy” corporations, going so far as to claim that increasing antitrust prosecutions would somehow bring down prices. Then Putin became the new excuse.
The main culprit behind rising prices is neither Putin nor “greedy” corporations. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues are to blame. Starting in September 2019, when the Fed panicked over a spike in interest rates in the “repurchasing” market that banks use to give each other overnight loans, the Fed has engaged in an unprecedented spree of money creation. The Fed further stepped up its easy money and low, and even zero, interest rate policies in response to the lockdowns. Increasing prices are the direct result of the Fed’s policies.
The Fed is planning to try to tame prices by increasing interest rates and reducing its balance sheet. This will likely tip the economy into a recession. Increasing interest rates will also cause the federal government’s debt payments to increase, which is a reason the Fed will not increase rates to anywhere near where they would be in a free market.
The best-case scenario may be a return to 70s-style “stagflation.” The worst-case scenario is that the Fed’s failure to rein in inflation, fueled by Congress’s failure to stop spending, combined with the continued resentment over the US’s hyper-interventionist foreign policy, will cause a rejection of the dollar’s reserve currency status and lead to a major financial crisis. Such a crisis could result in widespread poverty, as well as violence, crackdowns on liberties, and even the rise of a totalitarian government.
The crisis could still be avoided, but only if Congress becomes serious about cutting spending, starting with the military industrial complex. Congress should also start to reform monetary policy by auditing the Fed, legalizing alternative currencies, and exempting precious metals and cryptocurrencies from all capital gains taxes. The welfare-warfare-fiat money system will end. What is not known is when it will end and whether it will be replaced by an even more authoritarian government or by a return to limited, constitutional government.
What do these endless thousands of migrants at the southern gates of our country bring with them? A desire for a better life, surely, but also a vast dependency on a deeply indebted America for social welfare, housing, health care and education
Their first act on the road to residency and eventual citizenship in this country is to break the laws of the United States by first breaking into our country.
“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion.”
So reads Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution.
Historically, that constitutional duty — to protect America’s states against invasion — has been the province of the president of the United States, the chief executive, who today is Joe Biden.
How did Biden’s predecessors do in discharging their duty to secure America’s borders?
During the War of 1812, President James Madison assigned the defense of New Orleans against an invading British army that had just burned the Capitol and White House to Gen. Andrew Jackson.
On Jan. 8, 1815, Jackson crushed the battle-hardened and numerically superior British force that had invaded our country.
Jackson was also the chosen instrument of President James Monroe to punish and expel Indian marauders raiding Georgia from Spanish Florida in 1818.
Exceeding his mandate, the resolute Jackson entered Florida, expelled the Spanish governor and annexed the peninsula for the United States after executing two British subjects and almost igniting a war with Great Britain.
In 1845, President James K. Polk sent an American army to Texas to validate our claim to all the land north of the Rio Grande that had belonged to the Lone Star Republic when it seceded from Mexico in 1836 and joined the Union in December of 1845.
President Andrew Johnson sent an army to the Mexican border to effect the removal of a French army and Paris-backed regime that had colonized Mexico while the Union was preoccupied with the Confederacy.
The French departed, leaving behind the hapless Habsburg emperor they had installed to face a firing squad.
When Pancho Villa conducted his murderous raid into Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916, Woodrow Wilson sent Gen. John Pershing with an army of 6,000 into Mexico to run him down. They never caught Villa.
By Dwight Eisenhower’s first term, 1 million illegal immigrants had moved into the United States from Mexico. Ike commissioned his friend and West Point classmate Gen. Joseph Swing to effect their removal.
All of these incidents involved America’s southern border, and each of the presidents of that day took seriously their constitutional duty to defend the nation’s borders against invasion, violent or nonviolent.
And how has President Joe Biden discharged that obligation?
In Biden’s first year as president, some 1.7 million Illegal migrants were intercepted crossing into the United States.
The monthly figure from Fiscal Year 2021 was exceeded by the March 2022 figure of 220,000 migrants crossing over into the USA. If sustained, this rate would translate into an invasion of 2.6 million people, predominantly young and predominantly male, in this fiscal year alone.
“Gotaways,” those who breach our borders without ever being stopped and identified by Border Patrol or other authorities, are now estimated at 30,000 a month. Among these clandestinely crossing our border monthly are cartel members, child molesters, drug traffickers and sex offenders. We don’t know who they are, but we do know where they are. They are now our neighbors inside our homeland.
Biden is now planning in May to lift Title 42, which requires that unvaccinated migrants seeking entry at the border remain in Mexico.
According to ABC, the Department of Homeland Security is bracing for as many as 18,000 migrants per day at the US southern border if Title 42 is revoked.
Most of these migrants still come from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, but growing numbers now come from all over the world. They are of every race, nationality, culture, creed and ethnicity, and they are steadily converting America from a First World Western nation into a predominantly Third World country.
By failing or refusing to do his constitutional duty to defend the nation from invasion, Biden is letting this happen. Through his passivity and inaction, he is remaking America. What we are witnessing is the Third Worldization of the USA.
What do these endless thousands of migrants at the southern gates of our country bring with them? A desire for a better life, surely, but also a vast dependency on a deeply indebted America for social welfare, housing, health care and education
Most come with little in the way of skills and almost nothing in the way of personal wealth or a knowledge of our history, heritage and language.
Their first act on the road to residency and eventual citizenship in this country is to break the laws of the United States by first breaking into our country.
A move is afoot to impeach Biden for his failure to do his constitutional duty and defend the southern border of the United States from the invading millions of illegal migrants.
But that would make impeachment the subject of national debate, not the massive illegal migration and the changes it is producing in the character of our country.
Indeed, who stands first in line to succeed an impeached and convicted Joe Biden? Kamala Harris, Biden’s designee to act as America’s “border czar.”
Untangling the core values of America from the Empire of America is made all the harder by tons and tons and tons of physically and mentally destructive drugs coming up through open borders, and by many of the migrants who are coming here and overloading the system of public services, gaming the system, and voting for the system.
The American Immigration Council reports that, as of 2019, there were 44.9 million immigrants living in the US.
In case you’ve been living in a cave, the Biden administration is trying its best to make the southern border a sieve.
But of course, this is a humane act. It has to be. Otherwise, it’s a plan to overwhelm public services, ramp up the Democratic vote, and generally stage a soft invasion whose result will be catastrophic.
For many people, 44.9 million immigrants—or the other figure I found a few months ago, 50 million—are not nearly enough. 44.9 million reflects nothing more than stone cold indifference to suffering.
“Humane” and “caring” mean there must be NO CEILING on immigration. No end to it.
In fact, you can find churches across America whose pastors and parishioners will tell you exactly that. These proud people are evidently tuned into a special broadcast by God or a special edition of the Bible.
How THEY FEEL is the most important factor. To them. Beyond that, no thinking is necessary.
Any suffering of any kind anywhere in the world that might be mitigated by living in the US has one remedy: open borders.
And I’m not even talking about the hordes of American Lefties for whom virtue signaling is a profession. For those credentialed people, life itself IS unlimited immigration.
As I’ve written before, and will write again, open borders is an elite operation, and one of its purposes is supporting the transport of drugs into the US—a trillion-dollar business involving the washing of money through major banks.
The drugs ruin and kill huge numbers of people here in America. The drugs are extremely effective weapons of war. Those who physically survive do so with addled minds.
If you need to bring yourself up to speed on this, talk to an honest DEA agent who has seen the effects up close and personal. Or someone who has lost a relative.
Drugs are taking down America. This has been going on for 50 years.
A confluence of circumstances has come together to create a “perfect storm” for global food production, and now that “perfect storm” is about to get even worse. For months I warned that this crisis was coming, and in recent weeks I have been documenting how dire conditions have already become all over the globe. The head of the UN World Food Program is warning that this is going to be the worst worldwide food crisis since World War II, and even Joe Biden is admitting that the approaching food shortages “are going to be real”. Unfortunately, there have been some new developments which threaten to significantly escalate things.
In recent days, the number of newly confirmed COVID cases in China has soared to record highs, and Chinese authorities have responded to this with unprecedented lockdowns.
Nearly 400 million people across 45 cities in China are under full or partial lockdown as part of China’s strict zero-Covid policy. Together they represent 40%, or $7.2 trillion, of annual gross domestic product for the world’s second-largest economy, according to data from Nomura Holdings.
Analysts are ringing warning bells, but say investors aren’t properly assessing how serious the global economic fallout might be from these prolonged isolation orders.
Chinese lockdowns are a lot more brutal than lockdowns in the western world.
I have never seen anything like that before, and these lockdowns will continue as long as COVID keeps spreading.
To put this in perspective, the number of people that are currently locked down in China is greater than the total population of the United States.
Needless to say, these lockdowns are bringing the Chinese economy to a grinding halt, and that is going to affect the entire planet. At the Port of Shanghai, activity “is essentially at a standstill”…
The Port of Shanghai, which handled over 20% of Chinese freight traffic in 2021, is essentially at a standstill. Food supplies stuck in shipping containers without access to refrigeration are rotting.
This is an enormous problem for those of us in the western world, because our stores are normally filled with goods that have been made in China.
And this even extends to our food supply. For example, we send giant mountains of apples to China where they are processed and sent back to us as apple juice.
We need to hope that the lockdowns in China end soon, because if that does not happen it will likely create tremendous shortages all over the planet.
Meanwhile, the fertilizer crisis in the United States is about to get even worse.
Previously, I have written about how the skyrocketing cost of fertilizer is going to cause massive problems for many U.S. farmers, and now many of those farmers may not be able to get the fertilizer that they need at all due to “railroad-mandated shipping reductions”. The following comes directly from a notice released by CF Industries…
CF Industries Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: CF), a leading global manufacturer of hydrogen and nitrogen products, today informed customers it serves by Union Pacific rail lines that railroad-mandated shipping reductions would result in nitrogen fertilizer shipment delays during the spring application season and that it would be unable to accept new rail sales involving Union Pacific for the foreseeable future. The Company understands that it is one of only 30 companies to face these restrictions.
CF Industries ships to customers via Union Pacific rail lines primarily from its Donaldsonville Complex in Louisiana and its Port Neal Complex in Iowa. The rail lines serve key agricultural areas such as Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas and California. Products that will be affected include nitrogen fertilizers such as urea and urea ammonium nitrate (UAN) as well as diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), an emissions control product required for diesel trucks. CF Industries is the largest producer of urea, UAN and DEF in North America, and its Donaldsonville Complex is the largest single production facility for the products in North America.
Fear regarding the strength of Islamic extremism in Africa now appears to have reached the point that AFRICOM leaders are content to do the same. A willingness to work with graduates of the SOA who orchestrated coups and committed human rights abuses in Latin America disgraced the US military. The apparent indifference of the US military hierarchy to similar behavior by African alumni of US training programs creates the prospect of a similar disgrace.
antiwar.com
Americans should be experiencing an uneasy sense of déjà vu. In the last two years, U.S.-trained officers have overthrown West African governments at least four times. There are indications that other graduates have undermined civilian governments in other portions of the continent. But U.S. military officials have been less than informative. US Africa Command (AFRICOM) can’t explain why there has been a surge in coups. Indeed, AFRICOM insists that it doesn’t even know how often they’ve happened. That position reflects convenient ignorance, at best.
Maj. Gen. Andrew M. Rohling, the commander of US Army Southern European Task Force, Africa, insists that the Pentagon’s objective is to “showcase a way, the American way, that we train and build leaders not only in their tactical tasks, but in the ethos of the United States Army.” But as analyst Nick Turse, a fellow at The Nation Institute, observes, those values have been lacking in Africa, especially in West Africa, “where U.S.-trained officers have attempted at least nine coups (and succeeded in at least eight) across five West African countries, including Burkina Faso (three times), Guinea, Mali (three times), Mauritania, and the Gambia. The four most recent coups by US trainees have occurred in Burkina Faso (2022), Guinea (2021) and twice in Mali (2020 and 2021).”
The latest cases of officers who had received US military training going on to stage an epidemic of coups in Africa is reminiscent of the long, odious history of the School of the Americas (SOA). The US Army established that training center in 1946 at Fort Benning, Georgia. The curriculum emphasized the most up-to-date military tactics, especially in counterinsurgency warfare. But that was not the sole mission of the school. In addition to core military training, the goal supposedly was to educate officers from allied countries in Latin America about the importance of democratic values and civilian control of the military. During the next 54 years, the SOA trained more than 63,000 soldiers from 21 countries,
It is not certain whether US officials were sincere about promoting a commitment to democracy, or whether that stated objective was merely cynical propaganda. In any case, the results were appallingly bad. A December 2000 ABC News story by investigative reporter Barbara Starr noted that “The list of graduates from the School of the Americas is a who’s who of Latin American despots. Students have included Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri of Argentina, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia.”
In addition to the School of the Americas being an incubator for future coup leaders, graduates amassed a horrid record on human rights. Critics derided the institution as a school for dictators, torturers, and assassins. The track record seemed to support that assessment. According to Starr, “graduates cut a swath through El Salvador during its civil war, being involved in the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the El Mozote massacre in which 900 peasants were killed, and the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests.”
According to Russian MOD lab staff ordered to remain silent and sign NDAs.
If only they knew the U.S. military is already on the ground in Ukraine and has been there with the CIA since 2014. World War Three has already started. The U.S. government just needs an excuse for their own people to get behind what they’ve already set in motion years ago.
A special military operation by Russian troops has yielded additional information on US military and biological activities in Ukraine, confirming numerous violations of the Biological Weapons Convention.
Taking advantage of existing gaps in international law and the lack of a clear verification mechanism, the US administration has consistently built up its military-biological capabilities in various regions of the world.
The Russian Federation has made continuous efforts to establish a BTWC verification mechanism, but this initiative has been consistently blocked by the collective West, led by the US, since 2001.
The existing UN Secretary-General’s Mechanism to Investigate the Suspected Use of Biological and Toxin Weapons, as well as the 1925 Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases and Bacteriological Methods of Warfare and Military Conflict, do not cover the verification of States Parties’ biological activities.
We have previously provided a scheme for the US coordination of biological laboratories and research institutes in Ukraine.
One of its elements is the Ukrainian Science and Technology Centre (STCU), a seemingly non-public organization that has nothing to do with the Pentagon.
Its legal status is defined by the Agreement of October 25, 1993, between the governments of Ukraine, Canada, the USA, and Sweden and the Protocol of Amendment of July 7, 1997.
STCU is headquartered in Kiev and has regional offices in Baku, Chisinau and Tbilisi, as well as in Kharkov and Lvov.
However, the Russian Ministry of Defence’s Chemical and Biological Threat Expertise Centre found that the STCU’s main activity is to act as a distribution center for grants for research of interest to the Pentagon, including biological weapons research.
In recent years alone, Washington has spent more than $350 million on STCU projects.
The U.S. customers and sponsors of STCU are the Department of State and the Department of Defense. Funding is also provided through the Environmental Protection Agency, the US Departments of Agriculture, Health and Energy.
Between 2014 and 2022, the Ukrainian Science and Technology Centre implemented five hundred R&D projects in post-Soviet countries (Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and Azerbaijan).
Many of them are aimed at studying potential biological weapons agents (plague, tularaemia) and pathogens of economic importance (pathogenic avian influenza, African swine fever).
Our concern about Washington’s activities in Ukraine stems from the fact that, contrary to its international obligations, the US has retained norms in its national legislation that allow for work in the field of biological weapons.
The ratification of the 1925 Geneva Protocol by the United States was accompanied by a number of reservations, one of which allows for the retaliatory use of chemical and toxin weapons.
Under the US Federal Unity and Cohesion Against Terrorism Act, research into biological weapons is permitted with the approval of the US government. Participants in such research are not criminally liable for developing such weapons.
Program directed by US and EU military managers.
Thus, the US administration is implementing the principle that domestic law takes precedence over international law in this area. The most ethically controversial research is conducted outside national jurisdictions.
Here’s a great way to reduce the artificially induced doubling of the price of a gallon of gas: Reduce how far a gallon of gas will propel your car.
That’s what Corn Pop just did by issuing a diktat – these are styled “executive orders” to make them seem less diktaty – that “gas” will henceforth be 85 percent gas rather than 90 percent. Another 5 percent of the stuff you pump will be ethanol – alcohol derived from corn.
Supposedly, this will reduce the cost of a gallon since ethanol is “renewable” and made right here, in the USSA. Actually, it will reduce the fuel efficiency of every car that burns it because alcohol contains substantially less energy (BTUs) than gasoline. So you’ll pay a bit less – maybe – but you’ll go less far.
And so, pay more often.
Isn’t it grand?
Corn Pop pays off the corn lobby – the agribusiness cartels that control the corn in this country – and Americans get to pay more, again.
They will also pay more in other ways.
For food, for instance. Corn diverted to make fuel means less corn for feed – for cattle. And chickens and pigs and every other iteration of livestock that eats corn. You’ll pay more to get to and from the store and while at the store, you’ll pay more for what’s in the store.
As a sign of the times, this week I witnessed a 40-something year old black cop at a gas station speaking to the 50-something white station owner when the cop said, “I am so sick of this fear bull*@$t, as soon as they put the Covid bottle of fear back on the shelf, they take the Ukraine fear bottle off and put it in front of people and yell lies at them until they are actually afraid! Don’t people know that all this BS only benefits the people trying to control you!”
In a matter of about a month, the United States federal government silently and unilaterally exited from a two-year war on an illusory, and perhaps illusionary, virus, and pivoted toward fomenting and provoking a kinetic war with a nuclear-armed Russia. While many people in the U.S. unquestioningly and dutifully removed their masks and started using the Ukrainian flag emoji on their iPhones and social media feeds, the rest of us are left with trying to discern between whether we are on the precipice of a kinetic World War III or simply witnessing a bankrupt and petrodollar-dependant Leviathan in its death throes.
Or perhaps both.
As a sign of the times, this week I witnessed a 40-something year old black cop at a gas station speaking to the 50-something white station owner when the cop said, “I am so sick of this fear bull*@$t, as soon as they put the Covid bottle of fear back on the shelf, they take the Ukraine fear bottle off and put it in front of people and yell lies at them until they are actually afraid! Don’t people know that all this BS only benefits the people trying to control you!” He was wearing a mask strapped absurdly far under his chin. When asked why he was wearing a mask, he said: “So I can ask everyone who two weeks ago was asking me to pull up my mask why they aren’t wearing theirs anymore! I’m going to keep wearing it like this until they wake up!”
COVID LESSONS AND CURRENT CONDITIONS
Acknowleding this reality, the CDC is now rapidly revising its statistics, admitting that “the pandemic” was a non-event health-wise. The brilliant saints who recognized at the outset that “Covid” was always the 2020 Seasonal Flu dressed up and repackaged for purposes of maintaining political control have now been vindicated. The pandemic narrative was and is a story, a story that appears to have been authored in order to distract the public from the pain and discomfort associated with an economic decoupling from China. It is now fairly clear that the Powers That Be (PTB) used the pandemic story to hold, gain, and consolidate economic and political power through an economic crisis that they knew was already upon us in January of 2020.
Although much ground has been lost in terms of loss of personal liberty in the last two years, much has also been gained in terms of accurate risk information–exposing precisely who the pandemic plotters and promoters were and are. The political and business leaders who were complicit in fostering the pandemic narrative are not qualified to lead going forward. As compelled vaccination injuries manifest and it is exposed and recognized that there never was a federal or state law or any other legitimate legal authority that would compel innocent and healthy people to submit to a dangerous, Nuremberg Code-violating experimental drug therapy, these political and business leaders must, and inevitably will, be removed from positions of power. We could not agree more with Dr. Robert Malone who advocates that these people be outed, removed from power, and monitored to ensure that they never be afforded the public’s trust in the future. As just two examples of the plans of the Davos clique, both the CEO of UPS, Carol Tome, and the CEO of Wells Fargo, Charlie Scharf, are World Economic Forum alums who were shoe-horned into their positions in late 2019. I suspect there are dozens, if not hundreds, of people like this.
Looking at the past two years with vision unclouded by fearful messages pulsating on every screen, the facts confirm that “Covid” was much more of an economic event than a health event. In January of 2020, before the first “case” allegedly appeared in the U.S.,we saw midnight videos from workers at the Port of Los Angeles showing that the port mysteriously had almost no shipping containers. We felt then that something was afoot. Also in January of 2020, we heard from U.S. CEO’s in Davos that U.S.-China trade had broken down and U.S. exports had come to a standstill. In March 2020, before the pandemic narrative had gotten its sea legs, we saw the Federal Reserve throw out its playbook, violate its charter and federal law, and engage in direct purchases of U.S. Treasuries and unprecedented money printing. Now an ever-increasing plurality of people (including the cop at the gas station) understands the psychological game being played when they hear a maskless Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock and World Economic Forum graduate, tell us that globalization is over and that the pandemic caused economic decoupling with China.
Going forward, we will be more aware and look for and seek to identify the “unseen” and potentially very dangerous and destabilizing second-order effects of things like lockdowns, and PPP money printing. Now add to this list military provocations intended to interfere with trade relationships between the EU and Russia and China and, perhaps most relevant, the very real threats to the international petrodollar system caused by U.S. seizure of Russia’s Forex reserves. If you want to understand why the Russian threat to the dollar is important, read this and this, and most importantly, this. In short, Putin’s so-far successful attempts to demand Russian roubles for Russian gas and Saudi Arabia’s coincident agreement to accept Chinese yuan for its oil rather than the U.S. dollars has the potential to cause an international run on the dollar. The second order domestic effect of this roubles-for-gas cause may mean significant, long-term inflation, and short to medium term stagflation as people and governments holding internationally weakened petrodollars bring them back to the U.S. to buy things that will hold value better than the dollars themselves.
What concerns us most about the recent events in the Russia-Ukraine drama is that the hopelessly outmatched people leading the U.S. have unwittingly taken actions that have resulted in petrodollar destablization and that this will result in an unexpectedly fast decline in U.S. living standards. We are also concerned that the PTB/Davos crowd will do something even more rash and reckless in an attempt to distract us from this reality and/or present a “false cause” for the domestic economic destabilization that they have created by stealing Russian Forex reserves. Whatever the case, the Keynesian fiction of a “consumption-based economy” is likely over. Consuming more than we produce is also therefore over. This will be a very difficult for everyone because all of us have “benefitted”–really been made weaker and more fragile–by an unstable monetary that has lost domestic trust (see the price of Bitcoin) and now has lost international trust. For decades, foreigners, particulary China, Japan, and Russia have been subsidizing the U.S. federal government and U.S. living standards by buying U.S. Treasuries that the U.S. has never had the capability to pay off. Those days are over.
A final concern–a concern that exists only because we have witnessed in the pandemic narrative that our political and business leaders have no allegiance to the United States, its people, or the Constitution–is that the PTB use dollar destabilization to conduct a controlled demolition of the domestic U.S. economy. This would allow fiat money insiders–the same people who benefitted from the 2008 financial bailouts and now include the many Davos/WEF-installed CEOs–to be first in line for the newly printed money and buy up U.S. assets for pennies on the dollar much like Russian oligarchs did following the December 25, 1991 lowering of the flag of the Soviet Union.
Keeping the American people safe is their highest duty, even if that means not doing other things members of Washington’s indefatigable War Party desire to do, such as fight Moscow on Ukraine’s behalf.
Even before Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine some members of the Washington War Party wanted to attack Moscow. As the two-month anniversary of the conflict’s start approaches, an increasing number of US policy warriors appear frustrated that fear of nuclear war is holding back the administration from formally initiating hostilities. They have updated David Farragut’s famous injunction to “Damn the nukes, full speed ahead!”
Putin is a ruthless dictator whose brutal aggression against Ukraine is unjustified. Yet the US and European pretense of pious innocence and virginal sanctimony has grown tiresome. The allies knowingly pressed their geopolitical advantage over Moscow and ignored numerous Russian complaints and warnings. Although US recklessness didn’t justify Putin’s response, the cries of outrage emanating from Washington and Brussels are wearing thin. But for persistent allied arrogance and irresponsibility, the current conflict would not likely have happened.
Indeed, the US, other NATO members, and alliance officials ruthlessly played Ukraine false. For 14 years they told Kyiv that they looked forward to it meeting NATO’s criteria and joining the alliance. Last fall Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Ukraine to deliver that message yet again. Reported the Pentagon: “Austin will stress in both Georgia and Ukraine that there is an open door to NATO and encourage the nations to make the changes necessary for them to qualify for membership in the defensive alliance.”
In fact, this was untrue. The George W. Bush administration was essentially alone in 2008 when it pushed NATO to promise eventual membership; since then, no government, at least one that possessed a serious military and would be called upon to battle Russia in war, backed Kyiv’s entry. No one believed Ukraine was defensible. And no one was prepared to go to war for Ukraine, irrespective of whatever promises had been made.
Of course, allied stupidity and perfidy are in the past. Today Russia and Ukraine are at war. Washington should support Ukrainians as they defend themselves. However, the US also should back the Ukrainians in ending hostilities, and a settlement likely to provide a stable peace. Unfortunately, some Americans and allies appear reluctant to accept a compromise. Rather, they are willing to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian, providing Kyiv with the tools of war while assiduously avoiding combat themselves. In this way policy toward Ukraine remains consistent.
Still, Washington is right to avoid involvement in a conflict in which it has no important let alone vital security interests. The Biden administration’s top priority is to protect Americans – their lives, liberties, territory, and prosperity. War is not a charitable enterprise, especially against a nuclear-armed power.
Yet some activists and, of greater concern, officials support going to or at least risking war for Kyiv. Not a fan favorite for most Americans, this strategy has high-level backing. For instance, before the Russian invasion, Representatives Mike Turner (R-Ohio) and Mike Rodgers (R-Al) advocated deploying “a U.S. military presence in the Black Sea to deter a Russian invasion.” Presumably this “military presence” would actively engage the Russian fleet to prevent its support for operations against Ukrainian territory. However, that would not dissuade an attack utilizing ground forces. It also would be an act of war on behalf of a country Washington spent years refusing to treat as an ally.
Far more irresponsible was Sen. Roger Wicker, who in January urged giving “Vladimir Putin a bloody nose.” Wicker’s mad proposal for “military action” would have meant full-scale war. His plan, he stated, “could mean that we stand off with our ships in the Black Sea, and we rain destruction on Russian military capability.” His alternative, if it deserved to be called that, “could mean that we participate, and I would not rule that out, I would not rule out American troops on the ground. We don’t rule out first use nuclear action.” He did not explain how strategic nuclear war could be avoided, grandly declaring that the Biden administration should leave “all options on the table and [grant] no concessions.” Even if the result would have been millions or tens of millions of dead.
Wicker may be the most irresponsible GOP warmonger, but he is only one of many. The late John McCain pushed war against a long list of countries, including Iraq, Iran, Libya, and North Korea, and advocated confrontation with Russia over Georgia in 2008. McCain’s cohort-in-aggression, Lindsey Graham, shared McCain’s lust for war for here, there, and everywhere. Graham even joined with President Donald Trump in suggesting an attack on the North, dismissing the importance of nuclear war “over there,” apparently believing the potential death of millions of Koreans to be of minimal concern.
Yet Democrats, too, would risk millions of lives in deranged hawkish schemes. In January, when there was still hope of keeping the peace in Europe, a former Obama official, Evelyn N. Farkas, proposed war on a grand scale: invading Russia to recover Crimea and the Donbass for Ukraine and Abkhazia and South Ossetia for Georgia. (Presumably phase two of military operations would have retaken territory previously seized from Finland, Poland, Japan, and China.)
She imagined herself as a reincarnated Dwight D. Eisenhower at the head of a new United Nations, as the World War II allies grandly called themselves, or revived Duke of Wellington leading a modern Seventh Coalition, reordering the world: “US leaders should be marshaling an international coalition of the willing, readying military forces to deter Putin and, if necessary, prepare for war.”
MCViewPoint 