US President Joe Biden seems to think things are “hunky dory” for the American people, according to Sky News host Rita Panahi.
“The US is experiencing a 40-year high inflation rate. People are struggling to afford groceries or to fill their car with gas,” Ms Panahi said.
“Crime is soaring across the US and the country has completely lost control of its southern border with more than 200,000 illegal immigrants crossing a month.
“But sure, the American people have never had it better, they’re just ungrateful or suffering from a unique variety of long COVID.
“The man is either unhinged, hopelessly confused or just lying. At this point there are no other options.”
We call this exception agency delegation. Agents undertake actions on our behalf. In this case, someone else steals, and perhaps we benefit from it. But because we didn’t directly undertake the action, we can pretend we’re not culpable. It can even mean that if someone else initiates violence, and I cheer it, I’m still a good person because I didn’t actually commit the act.
Theft and violence always reduce happiness, harmony, and prosperity. Always.
That’s a principle. Whenever we can repeatedly observe a cause and effect relationship in nature and state it as a testable formula, we have a principle. It’s like gravity. You can threaten to drop a bowling ball from the 20th story of a building, and before you do it, we can not only predict that it will fall to the ground but also tell you how fast the ball will fall.
Theft and violence always reduce happiness, harmony, and prosperity. Always.
How do we know?
Everyone is always pursuing happiness. Our actions are designed to make us happier.
Some actions are for immediate gratification, such as enjoying an ice cream cone, and some acts are for long-term gains, like going to college. Happier now or happier later, either way, we’re pursuing happiness.
Pursuing happiness sometimes involves competing values. Life can be hard. Sometimes we choose a harder thing, something we don’t really want to do because we prize something else even more. We might even make sacrifices, perhaps caring for a family member who doesn’t appreciate it, because we’d be even less happy if we didn’t live by our values. Indeed, sometimes we only have bad options, yet we choose the one we believe will deliver the most relative happiness.
No matter what happens, we want to maximize our happiness. It’s a fundamental drive.
Everyone is pursuing happiness
The statement, “everyone is always pursuing happiness,” is an axiom. An axiom is a self-evident fact. It doesn’t require a fancy defense. Is there anything you just read that isn’t self-evident?
There are two other axioms of human nature that we can add to the fact that everyone has a fundamental drive to be happy. The experience of…
Physical harm always decreases a person’s happiness.
Theft or property damage always decreases the owner’s happiness.
In other words, a mugging comes as a surprise. No one would walk (with normal obliviousness) down the path where the assault and battery were to occur, if they knew in advance it was coming. So those are obvious statements. Indeed, they are both axioms.
But if we want a better world, where you, me, and others around us can experience well-being and even flourish, it should provoke a question…
Theft and violence always reduce happiness. Always.
Well, not just happiness. Let’s be more precise. People tend to think of happiness as an emotion. Call it joy or a sense of flourishing. But it takes two other primary forms.
We want the resources necessary to provide for our needs and our wants. We call that prosperity, and we each get to define it for ourselves. Human wants vary tremendously. We may want more possessions, to provide for our family, to have the ability to share or give gifts, to pursue hobbies and avocations, or something else.
On top of that, vandalism, mugging, rape, and murder are disturbances of the peace. We call these acts crime, and the persons experiencing these acts, victims. Victims want to be free of crime. We all want to live our lives in harmony.
Put that all together, and now we have the complete picture, and we can derive a principle.
Theft and violence always reduce happiness, harmony, and prosperity. Always.
The common goal of all these movements and agendas is to capture all of the resources of the world — the ownership of them — for a small global cabal that has the know-how to program the computer systems that will ultimately dictate the lives of everyone.
When they talk about “wealth redistribution,” what they’re really referring to is the redistribution of resources from us to them. The goal is for you to own nothing. Everything you need, from the shirt on your back to a roof over your head, you’ll have to rent from the globalist owners.
February 21, 2022, the Canadian Parliament approved Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s motion to invoke the Emergencies Act, with 185 votes for and 151 against, in response to the peaceful trucker protest against vaccine mandates.1 While Trudeau in a February 14, 2022, press conference (above) promised the Act would be limited in time, geographical location and scope, he’s already reneging on that promise.
Financial Surveillance Powers Will Be Permanently Expanded
The act was invoked to allow the government to physically disperse the trucker convoy without actually listening to their complaint, and to punish anyone who has supported the protest.
Under the act, banks are empowered to seize the personal bank accounts of anyone suspected of participating in the protest, or supporting it with as little as a $25 donation. Disturbingly, the surveillance powers over financial transactions granted by the act are actually intended to become permanent. As reported by National Review:2
“In a February 14 news conference, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said that the government was using the Emergencies Act to broaden ‘the scope of Canada’s anti-money-laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use.’
That broadened power requires all forms of digital transactions, including cryptocurrencies, to be reported to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada. (I.e., ‘Fintrac’).
‘As of today, all crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with Fintrac, and they must report large and suspicious transactions to Fintrac,’ Freeland said.
She justified the move as a way to ‘mitigate the risk’ of ‘illicit funds’ and ‘increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by Fintrac and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement’ …
Freeland said the trucker convoy, which had assembled to protest coronavirus restrictions, had ‘highlighted the fact’ that digital assets and funding mechanisms ‘weren’t captured’ by the Canadian government’s pre-existing surveillance powers.
As a result, she said, ‘the government will also bring forward legislation to provide these authorities to FinTrac on a permanent basis.’”
As noted by the National Review, we can already tell what the Canadian government will do with those expanded surveillance powers. We’re seeing their intentions in action. By invoking the Act, Trudeau has given himself the unilateral power to destroy the lives of Canadians who happen to disagree with him, regardless of the issue at hand. When he announced his invocation of the order, he promised the Canadian people that his expanded authorities would ‘be time-limited, geographically targeted, as well as reasonable and proportionate to the threats they are meant to address.’ Not a single part of that sentence has proved to be true. ~ National Review
Without court order or due process, the government can now freeze bank accounts, cancel insurance policies and revoke drivers’ licenses, and the victims have no recourse or remedy.
“All this, of course, flies in the face of Trudeau’s promise that the Emergencies Act powers would be temporary,” National Review notes, adding:3
“When he announced his invocation of the order, he promised the Canadian people that his expanded authorities would ‘be time-limited, geographically targeted, as well as reasonable and proportionate to the threats they are meant to address.’ Not a single part of that sentence has proved to be true.”
Government Wants to Decide How You Spend Your Money
What’s happening in Canada should be a sobering wakeup call for the whole world. They’re showing us exactly what’s in store for all of us. Governments will basically control dissent through financial tyranny and blackmail.
The next step in that direction is the implementation of programmable digital currencies, worldwide. As reported by The Telegraph in June 2021, the Bank of England has already started moving on a programmable central bank digital currency (CBDC), and there’s no doubt that this is the plan of all central banks worldwide.4
Executive board member of the European Central Bank, Fabio Panetta, mentioned it in his December 10, 2021, lecture on the future of digital money in Rome, Italy.5
What’s meant by a “programmable” currency? As explained by The Telegraph,6 “Digital cash could be programmed to ensure it is only spent on essentials, or goods which an employer or government deems to be sensible.” In other words, the issuer of the money would have complete control over how you, the recipient, spend it.
“Tom Mutton, a director at the Bank of England, said during a conference … that programming could become a key feature of any future central bank digital currency …” The Telegraph reported.7
“He said … what happens if one of the participants in a transaction puts a restriction on [future use of the money]? There could be some socially beneficial outcomes from that, preventing activity which is seen to be socially harmful in some way. But at the same time it could be a restriction on people’s freedoms.’”
… the treaty is a part of a much larger program by which we arm all these nations against Russia… A joint military program has already been made… It thus becomes an offensive and defensive military alliance against Russia. I believe our foreign policy should be aimed primarily at security and peace, and I believe such an alliance is more likely to produce war than peace.
Feb 28 – When the Bush Administration announced in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would be eligible for NATO membership, I knew it was a terrible idea. Nearly two decades after the end of both the Warsaw Pact and the Cold War, expanding NATO made no sense. NATO itself made no sense.
Explaining my “no” vote on a bill to endorse the expansion, I said at the time:
NATO is an organization whose purpose ended with the end of its Warsaw Pact adversary… This current round of NATO expansion is a political reward to governments in Georgia and Ukraine that came to power as a result of US-supported revolutions, the so-called Orange Revolution and Rose Revolution.
Providing US military guarantees to Ukraine and Georgia can only further strain our military. This NATO expansion may well involve the US military in conflicts unrelated to our national interest…
Unfortunately, as we have seen this past week, my fears have come true. One does not need to approve of Russia’s military actions to analyze its stated motivation: NATO membership for Ukraine was a red line it was not willing to see crossed. As we find ourselves at risk of a terrible escalation, we should remind ourselves that it didn’t have to happen this way. There was no advantage to the United States to expand and threaten to expand NATO to Russia’s doorstep. There is no way to argue that we are any safer for it.
NATO itself was a huge mistake.
When in 1949 the US Senate initially voted on the NATO treaty, Sen. Robert Taft – known as “Mr. Republican” – gave an excellent speech on why he voted against creating NATO.
Explaining his “no” vote, Taft said:
… the treaty is a part of a much larger program by which we arm all these nations against Russia… A joint military program has already been made… It thus becomes an offensive and defensive military alliance against Russia. I believe our foreign policy should be aimed primarily at security and peace, and I believe such an alliance is more likely to produce war than peace.
Taft continued:
If we undertake to arm all the nations around Russia…and Russia sees itself ringed about gradually by so-called defensive arms from Norway and Denmark to Turkey and Greece, it may form a different opinion. It may decide that the arming of western Europe, regardless of its present purpose, looks to an attack upon Russia. Its view may be unreasonable, and I think it is. But from the Russian standpoint it may not seem unreasonable. They may well decide that if war is the certain result, that war might better occur now rather than after the arming of Europe is completed…
How right he was.
NATO went off the rails long before 2008, however. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949 and by the start of the Korean War just over a year later, NATO was very much involved in the military operation of the war in Asia, not Europe!
NATO’s purpose was stated to “guarantee the safety and freedom of its members by political and military means.” It is a job not well done!
I believe as strongly today as I did back in my 2008 House Floor speech that, “NATO should be disbanded, not expanded.” In the meantime, expansion should be off the table. The risks do not outweigh the benefits!
So, as we wait for the widespread adoption of an alternative to government-controlled money, whether in crypto or elsewhere, those who believe in freedom should consider making the reintroduction of large-denomination bills a political priority. The level of oppression currently on display in Canada makes clear that we must do everything possible to prevent the same from coming here.
The Canadian government is now freezing the bank accounts and personal assets of those who donated to support the Freedom Convoy, which is an organized political protest of the vaccine mandates. The deputy prime minister announced that they will retain these so-called emergency powers permanently going forward and will also seek to implement additional measures to further restrict the ability of political protestors to raise funds or otherwise use the banking system.
This highlights the need to eliminate the state’s control over money, at least in societies that wish to remain free. As articulated in a fascinating Twitter thread, constitutional rights become utterly meaningless if there are no practical means to exercise them. Free speech rights and the right to assemble are of little use to those who have no ability to access their money. Organizing an assembly requires being able to afford the costs associated with travel. Exercising free speech rights, at least if one wishes to do so effectively, requires at least some funds to ensure that the message reaches a large audience.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau understands this fact, which is why his administration has chosen to freeze the bank accounts of those directly involved in the protest, as well as those who merely donated to help support the protest efforts. When a similarly power-hungry tyrant seeks to do the same here in the United States, the Constitution will be utterly powerless to stop them. Good luck mounting an effective protest to an unjust and tyrannical government without having access to money or the banking system.
It is therefore necessary that Americans start taking the necessary measures to help ensure such tyranny cannot come here. While the ultimate solution will require finding a path to free-market money, the Canadian experience makes clear that simply waiting for that to happen is too risky.
In the meantime, more must be done to bring the government’s war on cash to an immediate end. A future president and Congress can accomplish this by requiring the US Treasury to start printing $500 and $1,000 bills immediately, to make up for the loss in purchasing power that has occurred since the Treasury formally discontinued those higher-denomination bills back in 1969. There should also be a requirement that new higher-denomination bills be introduced when needed to offset the effects of inflation. In other words, when the cumulative effects of inflation inevitably produce another 50 percent decline in the value of US currency, the Treasury should also be required to automatically introduce a $2,000 bill into circulation, for example. This is necessary to ensure that Americans’ fundamental right to access cash is not eroded by the silent, but incredibly pernicious, effects of inflation. And while the practical value of this reform is admittedly modest, its main value lies in what it accomplishes in terms of reframing the debate regarding the nature of money and the state.
In other words, it is much easier for a government to implement the totalitarian measures currently on display in Canada when the populace already concedes that the state has the right to monitor banking transactions and views unmonitored transactions as synonymous with illicit activity. Merely protecting the right to access physical cash is thus an inherent repudiation of this view and instead signals a recognition that Americans are entitled to money and banking, especially to those forms of money that are hard for the government to control. And successfully shifting the Overton window in that way would greatly increase the likelihood of enacting more substantive reforms, like repealing the Patriot Act and other bank-monitoring laws.
So, as we wait for the widespread adoption of an alternative to government-controlled money, whether in crypto or elsewhere, those who believe in freedom should consider making the reintroduction of large-denomination bills a political priority. The level of oppression currently on display in Canada makes clear that we must do everything possible to prevent the same from coming here.
After my original posting, a lot of people suggested I ask Stephanie Seneff to sponsor me. In fact, if I had a dime for everyone who suggested Stephanie, I could retire 🙂
Stephanie and I are good friends (we talk all the time). She would do it if she were an MIT faculty member. But she isn’t.
I can tell you one thing though: it was absolutely stunning to me that she was the only person at MIT people suggested I ask. That in itself is remarkable.
The entire MIT faculty is wrong on this issue
There are over 1,000 faculty members at MIT and not a single one thinks the vaccines might be unsafe? Nobody?!?!?
OK, I can live with that. Apparently, they’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid at MIT.
But what is totally unacceptable is that they refuse to even consider the possibility that they could be wrong.
What ever happened to open-minded scientists?
I know that there are a few faculty members who believe I should be able to speak at MIT, but they are afraid of retribution from their peers. So they avoid the controversy by doing nothing. They won’t even let me publicly reveal who they are.
What’s even worse than that is that there are serious cases of vaccine injury at MIT that are not being reported
More on those stories later. They’ve been covered up.
MIT should be speaking out for what the science says, not actively suppressing scientific discourse.
MIT should be a leader in science. They should be saying the science does not support the use of the vaccine, the vaccine mandates, and mask mandates. That’s what a great science institution should do: look at the data and tell the truth.
MIT does the opposite. They refuse to even look at the data. They simply go along with the narrative and suppress anyone who questions whether the government is telling us the truth.
Summary
MIT is a heartless institution that will not face the possibility they are wrong. They just don’t want to talk about it.
They will not even acknowledge the vaccine injuries within their own community.
MIT used to be a great institution. Those days are gone.
Europe is staring at a complete collapse of its economy if they sanction Russia’s energy sector and shut down her ability to do business with their banks. The question no one is asking is, “Did they provoke this fight on purpose to do exactly this?” From where I’m sitting, it looks to me like their insistence on zero diplomatic concessions to Russia led directly to this outcome. So, the answer to my question is ‘Yes, it was deliberate.’
The EU has unveiled its first tranche of economic sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. EU leadership looks even more angry about this outcome than US leadership does. Here’s the article covering this tangled mess by Sputnik News.
We know that the EU is very dependent on Russian energy and the existing sanctions have hampered EU-Russian trade for years now. Europe is incredibly vulnerable here to any form of supply/demand shocks as their financial system teeters on the edge of the abyss.
There is no solidarity between the US and the EU on these matters, as I’ve pointed out in post after post here. So, the question now is, if Europe is targeting Russian energy exports and the ability of EU banks to do business to buy Russian gas and other export commodities why would they pick this fight?
The answer must be that this is exactly what they wanted in the first place.
In the US we call this ‘suicide by cop,’ which is exactly how I framed it when asked by Sputnik for my thoughts on the subject this morning. I was asked on Monday before Putin’s intervention in Ukraine, to answer the following questions. Events moved beyond them, obviously, but I publish them here anyway because they are still of some value. {current editorial comments in brackets}
According to recent research, US liquefied natural gas export capacity will be the world’s largest by the end of 2022. Could it be that part of the whole game around Ukraine was about the US petroleum sector benefitting from the current standoff in Ukraine?
Of course. That is a sub-plot in this very complicated story. There are many factors that went into this standoff over Ukraine, which Russia is now accelerating towards an end-game state {boy howdy was that an understatement 12 hours later}. LNG exports from the US is certainly one of them, but I think the bigger issues concern the future of NATO, the security architecture of Europe and who controls it.
I see this as much as a fight between the US/UK and the EU over security as much as it is about the US’s long-standing antipathy to Russian energy exports. These issues are, of course, all intertwined.
Is the current political battle over Ukraine just a pretext for the US to earn money via the energy sector, increasing supplies?
No, it isn’t. It’s much deeper and nuanced than that. There are future weapons contracts for US and UK military contractors at stake here, as well as France’s desires to become a major player in European arms sales.
Russia, I believe, is being used as a bogeyman to advance internal European and ‘Anglo’ political agendas having more to do with shifts in foreign policy focus than just the ‘follow the money’ angle here. ‘Following the energy and arms money’ is an important consideration but I think they are now downstream of a much different security landscape in Europe by 2030.
The European Union is looking for ways to assert its independence from Washington D.C. Downing St. is pushing everyone into conflict for its own selfish and historical reasons, clinging to outdated political theories about controlling the ‘World Island’ and driving a wedge between Russia and China, which is achieving the exact opposite result.
How likely is it that the US might now try to establish control over transit routes going through Ukraine? Will the “Russian invasion” narrative be used as a pretext for doing so?
The transit routes through Ukraine in the minds of the Russian leadership fully depreciated assets that they unfortunately still continue to subsidize. Putin mentioned the cost to subsidizing a hostile regime in Kiev during his speech announcing the recognition of the Donbass, $250 billion over 30 years.
If the US wants control over those transit routes, that’s fine. Russia will happily shut off the gas through them, since it costs Gazprom money to ship gas through them at this point. Putin has ordered Gazprom to keep those pipelines filled as a fig leaf to Europe who has continually bitten his hand.
I expect he won’t care to re-up the transit contract with Ukraine when it expires in December 2024.
So, if DC wants this, Putin will oblige and then stop transit all together, citing conflicts with Ukraine.
To what extent can the US indeed provide energy security for Europe by supplying resources?
The total US LNG output according to the EIA for 2022 is 11.5 bcf per day, which is 115 bcm per year, or roughly the capacities of Nordstream 1 and 2 combined.
Is there 55 bcm of spare capacity (the size of NS2) in the US system to feed a new market in Europe? No, not with demand rising at more than 6% annually and accelerating as the world comes out of COVID-19 lockdowns.
The demand for European LNG is so high that US and Russian suppliers both have massive market opportunities there. So, this isn’t about the money, in the end. With most of Europe ending its COVID-19 restrictions in a desperate attempt to stave off political unrest, demand is only going to rise further.
Moreover, US LNG is far more expensive than Russian piped gas. This is simply a fact. And with the Biden administration working with Davos to lean on banks to retard investment into new oil and gas projects, long-term supply of energy to Europe from the US is limited anyway.
US exports will go to where the bid is the highest and with Europe’s terrible future prospects, massive debt overhang and lack of economic dynamism they will not be capable of outbidding other global customers for gas. That’s been the reason for the insane prices in Europe this winter, competition for limited gas supplies driving prices up, despite rising global capacity.
Can Europe survive without Russian energy supplies, if they were to be disrupted now due to the standoff and sanctions?
While anyone with an ounce of decency deeply regrets and opposes the use of such massive military force as we have seen recently in Ukraine, if there is one lesson to be learned from this entire miserable chapter (and by “chapter” I mean the entirety of post-Cold War US foreign policy) it is this: There are consequences that come with the belief that the key to peace and prosperity is to remake the world in your own image through the use of overt and covert, violent and non-violent means.
As of this writing, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is hunkered down in his bunker somewhere in Kiev, as the sound of the encroaching war gets closer and closer. A grim scene, to be sure.
All the US and EU kisses and roses leading up to this end have turned to dust and barbed wire, as a no-doubt deeply bitter Zelensky has nothing left but to cry out in anger:
Zelensky earlier: “Who is ready to fight with us? I do not see anyone. Who is ready to give Ukraine a guarantee of NATO membership? Everyone is afraid.” — ASB News / MILITARY〽️ (@ASBMilitary) February 25, 2022
The chips are down, as much of the US-equipped and backed Ukrainian military appears to have turned and ran as Russian forces approached. That is not to say that there has not been death and destruction on both sides. The battle for Kherson was brutal, with plenty of Russian losses. But nevertheless, as of this writing, it has fallen to Russian control.
Kiev in the main may well fall within the next 12-24 hours. Russian troops are already in the city. And Zelensky is in his bunker with fewer and fewer to take his calls. The cavalry he believed was promised him will not be coming to rescue him. Ukraine will be de-militarized and Ukraine will be neutral. Once held up as a great ally of Washington and Brussels, Zelensky is alone.
It brings to mind that great quote I often recycle from RPI academic advisor John Laughland, written as the early US-backed color revolutions rampaged through the former Soviet world in the early 2000s:
It is better to be an enemy of the Americans than their friend. If you are their enemy, they might try to buy you; but if you are their friend they will definitely sell you.
Zelensky has now learned the bitter truth, which previously favored foreign leaders also learned. Most of their lessons have been evenharder than Zelensky’s (at least to this point).
The bitter truth is that Washington’s foreign policy establishment never actually considered Zelensky – or his predecessor Poroshenko – to be allies or partners of the United States. Overflowing with a toxic mix of ignorance, arrogance, and extreme cynicism, Washington’s elites have always viewed Ukraine as a tool to “regime-change” a Russia that, after its post-Yeltsin recovery, would no longer take its direction from them.
The false gods of American exceptionalism are jealous ones indeed.
The American foreign policy establishment wanted a perpetual “Yanks to the Rescue” Russia, whereby US “consultants” and spooks would ensure that the most obsequious candidate would continue to win and rule. A string of Russian presidents who would, à laShevardnadze and a whole string of other post-Soviet leaders, run the country like a family business: lots of biznis deals for family members…and maybe 10 percent for the “big guy.”
Americans are victims (willing or not) of a mass media system as propagandistic as any that existed during Soviet Communism. The “party line” is established and it is unwaveringly followed whether the favored flavor is Fox or MSNBC. When it became obvious that Yeltsin’s one-time understudy, Vladimir Putin, wasn’t going to play that way, the party line came down that he must be demonized.
Not carefully studied and where appropriate opposed (on the basis of actual US interests), but rather Putin had to be demonized and, ultimately, “regime-changed.”
Discourse in the US is so infantile that just writing this objective truth will no doubt land this author in the “Putin’s puppet” purgatory. Not for the first time.
Most Americans will not have heard – and those who have likely do not care – that twice when the Ukrainian people elected a president who was in favor of maintaining good relations with its Russian neighbor the US intervened and overthrew the government. First time in the 2004-5 “Orange Revolution” and then the fateful 2014 “Maidan” revolt, which was explicitly and overtly supported by senior US government officials on the ground in Kiev including Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland and the late neocon warmonger Sen. John McCain.
In the meantime tens of millions of dollars flow from the US taxpayer to favored think tanks, civic organizations, and media outlets via the National Endowment for Democracy (sic) and numerous US-funded related organizations. The goal is the same: manipulate Ukraine so that it remains on Washington’s preferred path (toward conflict with Russia).
It is fashionable – particularly over the past two days – for even antiwar and “restraint”-promoting scribblers and jaw-boners to fall into tune with the warmongers’ songbook of “Russian aggression” as the sole cause of recent bloodshed and destruction.
While anyone with an ounce of decency deeply regrets and opposes the use of such massive military force as we have seen recently in Ukraine, if there is one lesson to be learned from this entire miserable chapter (and by “chapter” I mean the entirety of post-Cold War US foreign policy) it is this: There are consequences that come with the belief that the key to peace and prosperity is to remake the world in your own image through the use of overt and covert, violent and non-violent means. That lesson should have been learned with the fall of Soviet communism itself, but the “victors” were too full of hubris to pause for a moment of humility.
Wishing reality was one thing and accepting that it is another are two very different things. The distinction must be made or the mass mental illness of “American exceptionalism” can never be cured. Otherwise the consequences next time the tectonic plates shift may be far closer to home.
Whether America and the EU like it or not, the era of ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality” is well and truly over. Its end is not to be mourned but to be celebrated. The only pro-America foreign policy is non-intervention in the affairs of others.
Ukrainian President Zelensky is unlikely to survive his turn being America’s cat’s paw to wrong-foot Russia. While he sits in his bunker contemplating his fate, he may well be visited by the ghosts of Saddam and Gaddafi and all those who preceded him in this position. God help him.
Needless to say, Washington continues to create its “own reality” almost weekly, and this one’s a doozy. There manifestly would be no war in the Ukraine today save for Washington’s machinations back in February 2014, but that bit of crucial history is now deader than a doornail.
In light of the grotesquely one-sided Ukrainian war news on the MSM, it can be well and truly said that America circa February 2022 has become the land where history died.
From the sophomoric coverage of CNN and NBC, for instance, you would think that Ukraine’s borders have been universally agreed upon by one and all for eons; that the government in Kiev has done absolutely nothing to provoke Russian suspicion and anger; and that Uncle Sam, NATO and the European Union have flitted around the neighborhoods on Russia’s borders merely cheer-leading for democracy and selflessly passing out economic aid and cookies to the long-suffering Ukrainian peoples.
Well, no. Today’s hot war eruption in Ukraine would absolutely not be happening save for the violent coup of February 2014 that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected pro-Russian President; and which coup was funded, organized and choreographed by Washington-based neocons, busybodies and arms merchants who otherwise had no reason for even existing in the post-Soviet world.
Moreover, by reviewing the voting patterns of the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election we can see exactly how Washington’s blunderbuss intervention in support of the Maidan putsch put the kibosh on stable governance in Kiev and friendly relations with Ukraine’s historic neighbor and suzerain, Russia. That’s because while the 2010 election reflected the stark divisions of the Ukrainian electorate (see map below) it still produced a government that was reasonably acceptable to most of the electorate, and one which proceeded to work toward new arrangements with both Ukraine’s EU neighbors to the west and Russia to the east.
In the end, that tolerable governing balance was abruptly and unilaterally canceled by Washington’s writ, especially when it then almost instantly embraced and recognized an ad hoc, anti-Russian government which came from the extreme right side of the political/ethnic spectrum.
The effect was to send Kiev on a path toward massive economic and military aid from the US/EU and NATO membership that was bound to produce the adverse Russian reaction that Ambassador George Kennan had warned about two decades earlier.
As to the aid matter, Ukraine received only minor assistance from the west prior to 2014, but upwards of $15 billion since then. That included nearly $3 billion of military aid from the US, $6 billion of development and economic aid from Western donors, $3 billion of subsidized Ex-Im Bank funding from the US and $3 billion of other humanitarian aid. The effect was to turn Ukraine into a ward of Washington — a new post-coup fact on the ground that was blatantly obvious to Moscow.
As to the adverse shock effect of the Maidan coup on Ukrainian governance and external policy, the map below tells you all you need to know. The dark blue parts of the map to the far east (Donbas) indicate an 80% or better vote for Viktor Janukovych in the 2010 election. By contrast, the dark red areas in the west voted 80% or more for the Ukrainian nationalist, Yulie Tymoshenko. That is to say, the skew in the Ukrainian electorate was so extreme as to make America’s current red state/blue state divide seem hardly noteworthy by comparison.
As it happened, the sum of the pro-Janukovych skews from the east and south (Donbas and Crimea) added up to 12.48 million votes and 48.95% of the total, while the sum of the extreme red skews in the center and west (the old eastern Galicia) amounted to 11.59 million votes and 45.47% of the total.
Stated differently, it is hard to imagine an electorate more sharply divided on a regional/ethnic/language basis, but one which still produced a decisive enough victory margin (3.6 percentage points) for Janukovych — so as to be accepted by all parties. That became especially clear when Tymoshenko, who was the incumbent prime minister, withdrew her election challenge a few weeks after the run-off in February 2010.
At that point, of course, Russia had no beef with the Kiev government at all because essentially Janukovych’s “Regions Party” was based on the pro-Russian parts (blue areas) of the Ukrainian electorate.
During the next several years the economic basket case which was Ukraine attempted to improve its circumstances by running a bake-off of sorts between the European Union and Russia with respect to aid and trade deals.
And well its leaders might have: Ukraine had become a cesspool of financial corruption in which a handful of oligarchs had robbed the country blind. Its 2013 real GDP consequently fell to $600 billion (2017 $) — a 33% shrinkage from its 1990 level.
