In early 2020, the economic was weakening after more than a decade of remarkably slow economic growth and rising reliance on monetary expansion to prevent the implosion of Fed-created economic bubbles. But then covid happened, and the Fed blamed the disease for the economic collapse and inflation that followed. Now the war will provide yet another way for the Fed and its economists to claim they were doing a great job, and it would have all been a great success if not for the Russians.
According to new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, price inflation in February rose to the highest level recorded in more than forty years. According to the Consumer Price Index for February, year-over-year price inflation rose to 7.9 percent. It hasn’t been that high since January 1982, when the growth rate was at 8.3 percent.
February’s increase was up from January’s year-over-year increase of 7.5 percent. And it was well up from February 2021’s year-over-year increase of 1.7 percent.
A clear inflationary trend began in April 2021 when CPI growth hit the highest rate since 2008. Since then, CPI inflation has accelerated with year-over-year growth nearly doubling over the past 11 months from 4.2 percent to 7.9 percent.
For most of 2021, however, Federal reserve economists and their PhD-wielding allies in academia and the media insisted it was “transitory” and would soon dissipate. By late 2021, however, economists began to admit they were “surprised” and had no explanation for the inflation. (What one actually learns while obtaining a PhD in economics apparently has nothing to do with understanding money or prices.) Jerome Powell then declared that the Fed would prevent inflation from becoming “entrenched.”
Now, high level economists have changed their tune again with Janet Yellen admitting this week that “We’re likely to see another year in which 12-month inflation numbers remain very uncomfortably high.” Yellen had earlier predicted that CPI inflation would drop to around 3 percent, year over year, by the end of 2022.
Yellen was also careful to attempt political damage control by insinuating that price inflation is a result of uncertainty over the Russia-Ukraine war.
Never mind, of course, that the inflation surge began last year and that January’s CPI inflation rate was already near a 40-year high. The current crop of embargoes and bans on Russian oil imports implemented during March were not drivers of February’s continued inflation surge.
Few members of the public, however, will bother with these details, and this will benefit both the Fed and the administration. As far as the Fed is concerned, the important thing is to never, ever admit that price inflation is really being driven by more than a decade of galloping Fed-fueled monetary expansion (aka money printing). This was done largely at the behest of the White House and Congress to keep interest on the debt low and government spending high.
So, we can expect the administration to portray inflation as “Putin’s fault.” In a Friday speech to Democratic activists, Biden even claimed the high inflation rates are not due to “anything we did.” The tactic will no doubt work to convince many. But it’s unclear how many.
President Biden’s “maskless” State of the Union signifies the near-end of the COVID tyranny we have lived under for the past two years. Fortunately for Congress, the President, and the Federal Reserve, the Ukraine-Russia conflict is replacing COVID as a ready-made excuse for their failures and a justification for expanding their power.
Even before politicians began declaring the end of the pandemic, polls showed that rising prices were the people’s top concern – particularly the increase in gas prices. Since Russia is one of the world’s leading energy producers, sanctions imposed on Russia, as well as Germany’s decision (made under pressure from the US) to shut down the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, provide a convenient excuse for rising gas prices. This is the case even though the US, citing the “instability” in world energy markets created by the Russian-Ukraine conflict, has yet to officially ban imports of Russian oil.
The Federal Reserve has been planning several interest rate increases this year, even though some fear that rate increases could decrease growth and increase unemployment. The Russian crisis allows the Fed to either postpone rate increases or blame Russia for any unemployment that accompanies the rate increases. Either way, the Fed can use the crisis to deflect attention away from its responsibility for our economic problems. As of now, it appears the Fed will go through with at least a modest rate increase this month, but because of the Ukraine crisis, the increase will be smaller than previously expected.
The Ukraine crisis also provides an excuse for Congress to do what Congress does best: increase federal spending. President Biden has requested Congress provide an additional $10 billion in emergency military aid to Ukraine. Congress will likely quickly approve the President’s request. This will not likely be the last time Congress rushes billions of “emergency” money to Ukraine.
It is also certain that lobbyists for the military-industrial-complex are already “explaining” to a very receptive Capitol Hill audience why the Ukraine crisis justifies increasing the military budget to “counter the threats” from Russia, China, and whoever else can serve as a convenient boogeyman. It is unlikely there will be much resistance in Congress to a further increase, even though the US already spends more than the combined defense budgets of the next nine biggest spending countries.
Over the past two years, many leading Internet companies did the government’s bidding by “de-platforming” anyone who expressed skepticism of vaccines or promoted alternative treatments — even when they presented evidence to support their claims. These companies are once again helping the government by de-platforming those who question, or are suspected of questioning, the official narrative regarding Ukraine. Yet these companies’ concerns with “fake news” have not led them to stop people from sharing widely debunked stories supporting the US-backed Ukrainian government.
The lockdown and mandates did more harm than the coronavirus itself. They were based on lies promoted by the government and its allies in the “private” sector. Yet too many Americans refuse to even question the US government’s claims regarding the Ukraine crisis or question whether Russia is really responsible for our economic problems as opposed to a spendthrift Congress, successive spendthrift Presidents, and an out-of-control Federal Reserve. The only way to stop authoritarians from using crises like these to grow their power is to make enough people understand a simple truth: authoritarian politicians will always lie to the people to protect and increase their own power.
The U.S. and Ukraine are manipulating everyone for the Globalist agenda, damn the consequences.
NATO is a paper tiger that has never been tested. When the day comes that it is finally tested, when the shells start flying and the laser guided bombs flatten buildings, Poland is only ensuring that it is her cities and her people that are flattened first.
They’d better follow Hungary’s lead and dispense with their America-as-savior fantasies and historical differences with Russia in a hurry. Western hyenas will keep poking the bear into a darker and darker corner. Putin has shown tremendous patience with these bloodthirsty animals over the years, but every bear has his limits.
Update March 8: Does Tucker Carlson read The Good Citizen?
In Carlson’s monologue last night he begins by showing the CBS Blinken interview on Sunday that also inspired this piece. Blinken goes on TV and nonchalantly sells out Poland as ground zero for a NATO war with Russia. Despite Poland’s relentless insistence that the WILL NOT be sending any fighter jets to Ukraine, Blinken callously ignores them on live TV. This is how the U.S. treats its allies, with reckless disregard and back stabbing PR diplomacy. Tucker also shows the Lindsay Graham rah rah speech to Ukrainian soldiers from 2016 I embedded at the end of this piece yesterday, where he says war with Russia is coming and the U.S. has their back.
On September 11, 2002, the Bush anniversary speech of 9/11 I recall hearing him name Saddam Hussein and Iraq in the speech and knew right then and there he was manufacturing consent for an invasion of Iraq despite the country have zero connections to the 9/11 attacks. I explicitly remember yelling to family members around me that the U.S. will invade Iraq next. They were so wrapped up in the superficial emotionalism of the speech and the moment, they told me I was crazy and to sit down and shut up. Family, eh?
When I watched the Blinken CBS interview Sunday, I got the same chills I got watching the Bush speech that day. It made me sick. This is how the U.S. psychologically manipulates its population into wars and in this case uses Poland as a sacrificial lamb for what would surely be a destructive global conflict. According to one analyst Tucker cites in his monologue, who war gamed a U.S.-Russia conflict in 2019, it would result in a billion dead. A billion.
Turns out the coronavirus and jabs didn’t do enough on the depopulation front, so it’s on to steps 2, 3 and 4. War, energy crisis, and mass starvation. Those Georgia guide stones aren’t going to be realized on their own.
The whole 22 minute Tucker piece is worth the watch as he shows how the blood thirsty hyenas explicitly wanted Russia to invade and do not want the war to end. Strangely the entire rest of the western corporate media completely ignore this Poland sell-out story even though it may be the first public signal from the U.S. of a desire to start World War Three.
Dancing with The Globalists The propaganda is endless and everywhere. The images of babies and elderly people fleeing war blasted across western “news” sites with unsubtle headlines like:
PUTIN HAS THIS BABY’S BLOOD ON HIS HANDS!
There was once a masterful art to effective propaganda as psychological manipulation. Subtlety is no longer required with so many eager to assimilate to the latest media created madness, socially conditioned to reveal their stupidity in the comment sections: “Putin is the next Hitler! Someone needs to stop him at once!”
The citizens are seamlessly assimilating to this prepared Ukrainian Borg, happy to outsource their brains to a western corporate media who command them to only devote their emotions to the cause and nothing more.
Everything is designed to pull at the heart strings of people to manufacture consent for this conflict that should never have started and could be immediately ended with Ukraine disavowing NATO membership and allowing three majority Russian regions to rejoin their mother.
This is what the west wants, more war, more refugees, more propaganda to be used for their efforts to topple Putin in Russia. The warring neoliberals and neocons have been planning this for years and are loving every minute of the show.
April, 2004: In the attack on Fallujah, which ended after 3 weeks in defeat of the “coalition”:
“Forces bombed the power plant at the beginning of the assault; The town was placed under siege; the ban on bringing in food, medicine, and other basic items was broken only when Iraqis en masse challenged the roadblocks. After initial instances in which people were prevented from leaving, U.S. forces began allowing everyone to leave except for what they called ‘military age males,’ men usually between 15 and 60. Keeping noncombatants from leaving a place under bombardment is a violation of the laws of war.
“The main hospital in Fallujah is across the Euphrates from the bulk of the town. Right at the beginning, the Americans shut down the main bridge, cutting off the hospital from the town. This hospital closing (not the only such that I documented in Iraq) also violates the Geneva Convention.
“In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and 2000-pound bombs, and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunships that can demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had snipers criss-crossing the whole town. For weeks, Fallujah was a series of sometimes mutually inaccessible pockets, divided by the no-man’s-lands of sniper fire paths. Snipers fired indiscriminately, usually at whatever moved. Of 20 people I saw come into the clinic only five were ‘military-age males.’ I saw old women, old men, a child of 10 shot through the head
“One thing that snipers were very discriminating about every single ambulance I saw had bullet holes in it. Two I inspected bore clear evidence of specific, deliberate sniping. Friends of mine who went out to gather in wounded people were shot at. When we first reported this fact, we came in for near-universal execration. Many just refused to believe it. Some asked me how I knew that it wasn’t the mujahedin. Interesting question. Had, say, Brownsville, Texas, been encircled by the Vietnamese and bombarded and Brownsville ambulances been shot up, the question of whether the residents were shooting at their own ambulances, I somehow guess, would not have come up. Later, our reports were confirmed by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and even by the U.S. military.
“The best estimates are that roughly 900-1000 people were killed directly, blown up, burnt, or shot. Of them, my guess, based on news reports and personal observation, is that 2/3 to 3/4 were noncombatants.“
“A hospital has been razed to the ground in one of the heaviest U.S. air raids in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Witnesses said only the facade remained of the small Nazzal Emergency Hospital in the center of the city. A nearby medical supplies storeroom and dozens of houses were damaged as US forces continued preparing the ground for an expected major assault.“
“In a series of actions over the weekend, the United States military and Iraqi government destroyed a civilian hospital in a massive air raid, captured the main hospital, and prohibited the use of ambulances in the besieged city of Fallujah.“
“NEAR Fallujah, Iraq Nov. 12, 2004 — Hundreds of men trying to flee the assault on Fallujah have been turned back by U.S. troops following orders ‘We assume they’ll go home and just wait out the storm or find a place that’s safe,’ one 1st Cavalry Division officer, who declined to be named, said Thursday. Army Col. Michael Formica, who leads forces isolating Fallujah, admits the rule sounds ‘callous.’ But he insists it’s key to the mission’s success.
“Tell them ‘Stay in your houses, stay away from windows and stay off the roof and you’ll live through Fallujah,’ [Army Col. Michael] Formica, of the 1st Cavalry Division’s 2nd Brigade, told his battalion commanders in a radio conference call Wednesday night.
“Troops have cut off all roads and bridges leading out of the city. Relatively few residents have sought to get through On Wednesday and Thursday, American troops sunk boats being used to ferry people across the river. “
— “GIs Force Men Fleeing Fallujah to Return,” Associated Press, Nov. 16, 2004
“Insurgent attacks across Iraq stretched American forces to their limits yesterday when rebels appeared to be in control of at least two cities, and the operation in Fallujah entered its most dangerous phase. Some of the toughest street fighting encountered so far erupted during the day as rebels reemerged in areas already secured by U.S. Marines in the north of the city. Gunmen resumed positions on the roofs of mosques which had earlier been cleared
“‘I’m supposed to shoot into the houses before our troops go in,’ said Marine Cpl. Will Porter “
— “U.S. troops stretched to limit as insurgents fight back,” Robin Gedye, Nov. 13, 2004
“Her shins, shattered by bullets from U.S. soldiers when they fired through the front door of her house, are both covered by casts. Small plastic drainage backs filled with red fluid sit upon her abdomen, where she took shrapnel from another bullet.
“Fatima Harouz, 12 years old, lives in Latifiya, a city just south of Baghdad. Just three days ago soldiers attacked her home. Her mother, standing with us says, ‘They attacked our home and there weren’t even any resistance fighters in our area.’ Her brother was shot and killed, and his wife was wounded as their home was ransacked by soldiers. ‘Before they left, they killed all of our chickens,’ added Fatima’s mother, her eyes a mixture of fear, shock and rage.“
— Slash and Burn, Dahr Jamail, November 17, 2004
“Journalists with the troops speak of a city that is gradually being devastated. Scarcely a single house does not bear some form of weapons scar and many have been rendered uninhabitable.
“Tactics handed down from years of urban warfare in Israel mean that troops sometimes search rows of buildings by punching holes through walls with high velocity bullets rather than moving from house to house through doors, thus reducing the risk of booby traps and increasing the element of surprise.“
— “The Telegraph: U.S. troops stretched to limit as insurgents fight back,” Robin Gedye, Nov. 13, 2004
“The 33-year-old Associated Press photographer [Bilal Hussein] stayed behind to capture insider images during the siege of [Fallujah] In the hours and days that followed, heavy bombing raids and thunderous artillery shelling turned Hussein’s northern Jolan neighborhood into a zone of rubble and death. The walls of his house were pockmarked by coalition fire.
“‘Destruction was everywhere. I saw people lying dead in the streets, wounded were bleeding and there was no one to come and help them. U.S. soldiers began to open fire on the houses, so I decided that it was very dangerous to stay in my house,’ he said. Hussein moved from house to house — dodging gunfire — and reached the river. ‘I decided to swim but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river.’
“He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross. ’I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim.’“
— “AP Photographer Flees Fallujah,” Katarina Kratovac, Nov. 14, 2004
“No outside aid has reached civilians in the city since the offensive began last Monday, and yesterday U.S. forces kept an Iraqi Red Crescent aid convoy of seven trucks and ambulances waiting at the main hospital near a bridge on the edge of the city. Reports from within Fallujah yesterday said bodies lay in the streets, homes and mosques were destroyed, and power and telephone lines were down.
“However, [Marine] Col. [Mike] Shupp said the Red Crescent did not need to deliver aid to civilians in Fallujah and questioned whether there were any. He said: “There is no need to bring supplies in because we have supplies of our own for the people.
“[U.S.-chosen Iraqi Prime Minister] Mr. [Iyad] Allawi also said he doubted reports of civilians in the city. This contradicted accounts from residents inside the city
“‘Our situation is very hard,’ said one resident [Abu Mustafa] contacted by telephone in the central Hay al Dubat neighborhood. ‘We don’t have food or water. My seven children all have severe diarrhea.’
“‘One of my sons was wounded by shrapnel last night and he’s bleeding, but I can’t do anything to help him.’
“It is thought about half of Fallujah’s 300,000 people fled the fighting in the city. In April, 2,000 U.S. Marines fought for three weeks and failed to take Fallujah. This time, six times that number were sent Major General Richard Natonski of the U.S. Marine Corps: ‘We had the green light this time and we went all the way.’ [M]ore than 20 different types of planes were used in bombing swarms as U.S. soldiers began clearing weapons and fighters from every one of Fallujah’s 50,000 buildings, bands of insurgents were still roaming freely in some neighborhoods.“
— “Bodies litter streets in rubble of Fallujah,” Calum MacDonald, Nov. 15, 2004
“[T]he command in Baghdad thought there were at least 2,000 insurgents, and perhaps as many as 5,000. But the coalition forces have failed to find large clusters and now think that there might have been less than 1,000, military sources said yesterday. The senior defense official said some generals now think there might have been 600 or fewer.“
“Fallujah has been under relentless aerial and artillery bombardment and without electricity since Monday. Reports have said residents are running low on food. An officer here said it was likely that those who stay in their homes would live through the assault, but agreed the city was a risky and frightening place to live.
“U.S. military says it does all it can to prevent bombing buildings with civilians inside them.“
— “GIs Force Men Fleeing Fallujah to Return,” Associated Press, Nov. 16, 2004
“You read about precision strikes, and it’s true that America’s GPS-guided bombs are very accurate when they’re not malfunctioning, the 80 or 85 percent of the time that they work, their targeting radius is 10 meters, i.e., they hit within 10 meters of the target. Even the smallest of them, however, the 500-pound bomb, has a blast radius of 400 meters.“
“Once the battle ends, military officials say all surviving military-age men can expect to be tested for explosive residue, catalogued, checked against insurgent databases and interrogated about ties with the guerrillas. U.S. and Iraqi troops are in the midst of searching homes, and plan to check every house in the city for weapons.“
— “GIs Force Men Fleeing Fallujah to Return,” Associated Press, Nov. 16, 2004
“[A]ll the excuses Mr. Bush gave for attacking the people of Iraq were either wrong or lies. We’ll only mention in passing that the domestic price for ‘our’ sarkar attacking Iraq, a country with no WMD, no al-Qaeda links, and no connections to 9/11 so far has been $87 billion, a good chunk of our civil liberties — and 1,239 or so American soldier’s lives, not to mention a minimum of approximately 8,000 more wounded and/or maimed.“
— L. Reichard White, “The Only Way to Make Your Vote Count,” Oct. 31, 2004
So, are Putin and the Russians as good at invading countries and murdering men, women and children as these guys?
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L. Reichard White [send him mail] taught physics, designed and built a house, ran for Nevada State Senate, served two terms on the Libertarian National Committee, managed a theater company, etc. For the next few decades, he supported his writing habit by beating casinos at their own games. His hobby, though, is explaining things he wishes someone had explained to him. You can find a few of his other explanations listed here.
Biden is no JFK. It is clear Biden does not possess an iota of Jack Kennedy’s intelligence, courage, nerve, vigor, or idealism. He is a lifetime political grifter and partisan hack who parasitically attached himself to the DC establishment. That such a nonentity could even sniff the US Senate, much less become president, is an indictment of our system. But at the moment he is, or appears to be, the voice of reason against the John Boltons of the world.
Joe Biden’s perverse legacy, if that term even applies anymore, may well be determined in the coming weeks by his handling of events in Ukraine. He can improve it by showing restraint against the relentless neoconservative chorus. One wonders what the results of a pure popular vote on the question of going to war with Russia over Ukraine would be, versus a vote solely within the DC beltway.
Note: Biden was silent on the recent imposition of emergency martial law by the Trudeau government in Ottawa (a few hundred miles from Washington, DC), but has plenty to say about Kiev (4,881 distant miles). This is not coincidental. As journalist Glenn Greenwald puts it, we are required by Western propaganda to denounce actions by Vladimir Putin (such as freezing the bank assets of political opponent Alexei Navalny) while cheering the same actions taken by the Canadian government against money donated to truckers. Crackdowns in “democracies” are subject to a more enlightened standard:
[W]hen these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited. That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression. Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West’s official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.1
Much of today’s Western rhetoric about the former USSR employs this language of treason, accusing war skeptics of siding with Putin. American politicians and media often veer into outright Russophobia, sometimes with a not-subtle racial animus. This flows in large part from the 2016 election of Donald Trump, which somehow had to be the result of Russian interference and not Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings. It was remarkable to see so many politicians and pundits risk resurrecting a Cold War with a nuclear power simply to hurt Trump politically. But it worked: they got rid of Trump, and now the Cold War is back.
At this writing, Putin has declared the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent and autonomous from Ukraine. Russian forces have entered Ukraine and launched missiles; deaths and injuries are reported. Those troops reportedly have control over the Chernobyl power plant. Ludwig von Mises’s birthplace, today called Lviv, is threatened.
In response, Biden today announced retaliatory sanctions against Russia and promised severe economic consequences for Putin’s actions. Military and aerospace technology will be blocked, while Russian banks will be shut off from international markets. US and EU officials also have considered the more severe option of removing the country from the SWIFT system of international payments, which would cut off foreign-currency purchases of oil, gas, and other Russian exports.
Still, Biden has shown restraint. Let’s hope he keeps to this commitment made earlier today:
“Our forces are not and will not be engaged in the conflict,” he said. “Our forces are not going to Europe to fight in Ukraine but defend [sic] our NATO allies and reassure those allies in the east.”
There will be plenty of voices in Biden’s ear demanding more, much more. The subcurrent to Biden’s election in 2020 was the return of neoconservatism with a vengeance. Many of the worst foreign policy hawks, from David Frum to Max Boot to Bill Kristol, have found their home in the Democratic Party. The GOP, for its part, is scrambling to outdo the Democrats in their bellicosity for Putin in a nauseatingly transparent effort to make Biden look weak for the upcoming midterm elections. Hence the sorry spectacle of former Trump national security advisor John Bolton—among the worst war promoters in modern history—solemnly lecturing us on MSNBC about Biden’s failure to have placed US troops in Ukraine weeks ago. Unless Putin’s foray is short lived, rest assured that Congress, the Pentagon, the spy agencies, Biden’s cabinet, and his own party leaders (mindful of polls) will call for US military strikes. Some will call for American troops to defend Ukraine on the ground.
President John F. Kennedy faced similar pressures in his brief years as president. Regardless of one’s views on Camelot, Kennedy was a New England liberal and idealist—not a neoconservative. He sincerely abhorred the possible use of nuclear weapons in a conflict with the Soviets. He communicated clandestinely with Nikita Khrushchev to avoid just such a conflict and managed to bring the US back from the brink of an ugly tank standoff in Berlin during 1961—stating, to the chagrin of the Cold Warriors, that the Berlin Wall was “a hell of a lot better than a war.”
Kennedy similarly resisted calls by the Pentagon, CIA, and Joint Chiefs for the US to back a puppet government in Laos. He was reasonably firm in his opposition to escalations in Vietnam, denying repeated Pentagon requests for thousands of ground troops. Time and again he imagined his reelection in 1964 would free him politically to remove America completely from Southeast Asia.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the pressure on Kennedy to use nuclear missiles against that tiny, impoverished country was intense. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, CIA deputy Richard Helms, the Joint Chiefs, and one particularly bloodthirsty general named Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay all pressed hard for action. They considered JFK’s Cuban blockade disastrously weak. One CIA operative called his failure to launch a nuclear strike “treasonous.” LeMay compared it to appeasement in Munich. And of course his own vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was never an ally when it counted. Kennedy’s only firm and trusted confidant throughout all of it was his own brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
Like Trump, JFK faced almost mutinous attacks and subterfuge from within: by his own cabinet, administrative agencies, military commanders, and especially the CIA.
Biden is no JFK. It is clear Biden does not possess an iota of Jack Kennedy’s intelligence, courage, nerve, vigor, or idealism. He is a lifetime political grifter and partisan hack who parasitically attached himself to the DC establishment. That such a nonentity could even sniff the US Senate, much less become president, is an indictment of our system. But at the moment he is, or appears to be, the voice of reason against the John Boltons of the world.
1. Glenn Greenwald, “The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West,” Glenn Greenwald, Feb. 21, 2022, https://greenwald.substack.com.
Cooking up enemies and conflict with lies and propaganda has never been so obvious.
US foreign policy is a racket. The war designers in the MIC, the government, media and think tanks will never suffer consequences of their treachery and stupidity. The EU has agreed to a suicide pact with the U.S., which will require it buys U.S. natural gas at inflated prices rather than from their neighbor and friends in Russia whom they recently asked to build more pipelines to supply cheap energy to the continent. With friends like the U.S., who needs enemies?
Putin Swings Back Listening to Putin’s recent speech that preceded the declaration to recognize the independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, it was difficult not to notice that something was incredibly off about his claims. They simply did not match what the western corporate press, those dutiful stenographers for NATO power have been reporting for years. Putin gave the world a history lesson, pulled back the curtain on western lies and hypocrisies, (only some of them, there are a thousand curtains that need pulling back) and showed the world he’s not going to be pushed around by the little hyenas of the European prairie any longer.
In some middle eastern folklore hyenas are referred to as symbols of treachery and stupidity. In other mythologies they are known as vampire creatures who stalk and suck the blood of their prey. The phrase ‘laugh like a hyena’ dates back centuries in English literature including Shakespeare, and now embodies the number two position of the American executive branch. More on hyenas later.
Putin’s speech corrected the hyena’s revisionist attempts of events in Ukraine the past eight years and revealed a man who, having watched his nation get pushed to its limits with broken promises and door mat NATO diplomacy, showed that he’s simply had enough. And good for him. In our new multi polar world of geopolitical chess the bear and dragon are ascendant, and realist foreign policy doesn’t require the permission of any community, particularly a deceitful paper tiger like NATO or useless cabal of globalist order-takers at the EU or UN. While there’s little to celebrate with these new circumstances for global conflict, a convenient distraction from the last engineered global conflict, we must recognize the chance for lasting peace and alliance between the west and Russia was denied by the U.S. every step of the way.
All that remains is brutal realism and the flexing of power, the kind of realism rooted in self interest to serve the people of a nation and defend it from encroaching hyenas. Twenty years of poking the bear has consequences, but hyenas don’t know anything beyond their instincts, treachery and stupidity.
Media A-Z Given the role of the global corporate press in engineering a pandemic and all the crimes that followed the past two years, it’s astounding that people who know their lies and propaganda were constant and shameful watch the same servants of power report on Russia and Putin and believe what they are saying is the truth. But that’s how that saying goes: fool me once here and twice there, happy to get fooled again and again.
Everything they’ve reported since the U.S. backed coup in Ukraine of 2014, from the “dignity revolution” where Neo-Nazi nationalists from western Ukraine were mobilized as shock troops to overthrow the Yanukovych government with US Aid (Soros), and brutally attacked any Russian loyalists, burning forty alive in a building in Odessa, to the annexation of Crimea whose population prefers Russia, to the constant violations of the Minsk agreement by Ukrainian forces along the cease fire lines, to claims of “Ukrainian democracy” when it’s at best a dysfunctional corrupt Oligarchy, has all been one stream of endless lies.1 Add to that the domestic lies of Trump-Russia collusion, set up through CIA and FBI attempted coups of a democratically elected President at home engineered by the opposition party, while constantly vilifying anyone who asked any questions at all as “Putin’s Puppet” or a “Russian sympathizer” and you have one of the biggest psychological operations ever unleashed on western populations, not to mention grotesque acts of overt treason.
Yet still, many who know that the media and government pandemic lies are terrifyingly real, still believe the stories about Putin and Russia. But that’s how logic works: if A was lying about everything regarding X, they’re certainly telling the truth regarding Y and Z.
Russia is a dictatorship because they have state-run media that parrots the Putin regime propaganda. Not like America, where we have a totally free press 😒
War Chefs If there was ever anything noble in war, the courage, bravery, facing one’s mortality, the tactics and maneuvers of battles that required out-smarting one’s enemy, Sun Tzu’s art, all that is lost to advanced technology and a desire to manipulate public sentiment above all things. They call them hybrid wars, asymmetric wars, psychological wars, information wars and has been proffered on this outfit the most evil of all where victims are unsuspecting innocents believing their governments have their best interests in mind – Silent Wars – atrocities by states against their own citizens.
Today wars are not fought, they’re curated like an exhibit at a museum. They are designed like a tapestry or an exotic dish on a cooking show. A little bit of false flag fava beans, julian propaganda peppers, sliced projection potatoes, a splash of historical revisionism radishes, piles of intel leeks and you have the makings of war by design. Put it all into an oven where your enemy feels the burn and acts in a way you can claim was their true evil nature all along, and you have a nice dish of cooked up conflict. When you control the global media machine who work for the head chefs designing this war dish, it makes it effortless to serve up this heaping load of detestable horse shit as reality. Millions will rush to obediently eat and regurgitate it.
However, coming from a group of nations that have spent the better part of the last century shaping the world as they saw fit—ranging from national partitions and redrawn borders to invasions and regime-change operations—the vocal condemnations of Russia ring slightly hypocritical.
Israel stands as a prime example of the double-standards at work. Since its creation by a United Nations partition scheme in what was formally Palestine, the U.S. has given Israel over $100 billion in aid—all as the regime in Tel Aviv grabs Arab land and terrorizes the civilians who live on it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to recognize two break-off republics in eastern Ukraine as independent states, stoking cries of horror and condemnation from the Western keepers of the ‘rules-based international order.’
The Russian legislature passed a bill last week calling on Putin to recognize the ‘People’s Republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk, which each declared secession from Ukraine following a U.S.-sponsored coup there in 2014. While the Kremlin initially dismissed the idea, saying the move would run afoul of ceasefire agreements struck in Minsk, the president reversed course on Monday following appeals from leaders of the break-away states. He later deployed soldiers for a peacekeeping mission in the war-torn region, where fighting between Kiev and separatist forces has sharply escalated in recent days.
Moscow’s decision to recognize the republics—which have now operated outside Kiev’s control for some seven years—was met with predictable outrage from Western officials. The U.S. State Department dubbed the move a “clear attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty,” comments echoed by the United Nations, the European Union and the NATO military alliance. The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borell, meanwhile, has accused Russia of a “determined effort to redefine the multilateral order” established in the wake of the Second World War.
Proponents of that post-war system have long maintained that it has kept the peace over the last 80 years. A key tenet of the global order states that borders drawn after WWII must remain set in stone, and Russia’s seizure of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and its earlier recognition of South Ossetia have been cited as major destabilizing actions. Its move in the Donbas will almost certainly be added to the list.
FDR’s early death resulted in his enemies taking control of Washington and converting his dream into a Cold War nightmare. Bretton Woods institutions like the World Bank and IMF were turned into instruments for usurious re-colonialization instead of long-term productive credit generators under an international New Deal. Throughout the Cold War, the United Nations became increasingly an impotent servant of empire without any means of giving a voice to the majority of her 193 member nations.
It would do us well to take Putin’s words with full seriousness and avoid staining human history with another world war.
Faced with increasing pressure to dissolve the five member UN Security Council, President Putin warned on October 21:
“If we remove the veto right of the permanent members, the UN would die the very same day – it would turn into the League of Nations. It would simply become a discussion platform”.
As walls separating east and west along Manichean Cold War lines of “democratic/free” vs “authoritarian/enslaved” are quickly being erected before our eyes, it is worth pondering not only the deeper implication of the Russian president’s message but also those healthier pathways out of the coming storm before it is too late.
League of Nations and the Imperial Hoax of WWI
Created in 1919 by forces centered in London and the racist Anglo-American establishment of the USA, the League of Nations was sold to a beaten-down world as the last and greatest hope for peace.
The groups then centered around Round Table leader Lord Alfred Milner (1), had taken control of the British Government in a form of soft coup in 1916 in order to shape the terms of the post-war order.
It was a major gamble of course since there were no guarantees that those imperial plotters who kicked over the world chessboard in 1914 would necessarily come out victorious.
From 1902 onward, Lord Milner, King Edward VII and his coterie of imperial co-thinkers across the Anglo-American deep state had invested significantly into lighting the world on fire via color revolutions, a plethora of assassinations and of course a long-planned global war that turned the world inside out.
In opposition to standard theory narratives taught in sundry history departments, WWI was a war with one aim: Destroy the spread of a community of cooperating sovereign nation states which had been forming in the last decades of the 19th century. Internationally, statesmen of 1870-1900 were applying Lincoln’s system of protectionism, national credit, industrial growth and win-win cooperation under the banner of “American System” champions Friedrich List and Henry C Carey. By 1890, such policies were championed by Sergei Witte of Russia, Otto von Bismarck of Germany, President Carnot of France, and many Lincoln republicans in the USA.
Despite the fact that Russia was a member of the British-led Entente Cordiale, both Germany and Russia who had historically tended to industrial cooperation along Witte-Bismarck strategic lines were the primary targets for destruction.
This was a fact better understood at the time, with The Daily Mail of December 14, 1909 even publishing an editorial reading: “the king [Edward VII] and his councillors have strained every nerve to establish Ententes with Russia and with Italy; and have formed an Entente with France, and as well with Japan. Why? To isolate Germany.”
It is without a doubt that many Anglo-American grand strategists expected a cooperative United States to be drawn into “the war that was to end all wars” much earlier on. With nationalist President McKinley’s 1901 murder, anglophile traitors quickly swept into power under Teddy Roosevelt who was seduced into King Edward VII’s plans for an Anglo-American special relationship as the basis for a new Anglo-Saxon world order.
Woodrow Wilson’s accession to the presidency from 1912-1920, and the establishment of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 only re-enforced the belief that America was sufficiently under the control of a supranational financier elite which had never quite forgiven the belligerent colony for winning independence in 1783.
When Germany found herself the last nation to be prepared for a war that had been set into motion by the architects of the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale (later joined by a bewildered Russia), America was expected to jump in immediately.
Military pacts well known to all geopoliticians of 1914 ensured Russian intervention on Serbia’s side if the latter got in a fight. Similarly, Germany had guaranteed its support for Austria in any fight it found itself enmeshed in.
When an anarchist terror cell from Serbia known as ‘the Black Hand’ was deployed to kill Archduke Ferdinand of Austria on June 28, 1914, a chain of events was put into motion that led a sleep walking world into the slaughterhouse.
Finally realizing what had happened, Kaiser Wilhelm wrote despairingly in August 1914:
“England, Russia, and France have agreed among themselves… to take the Austro-Serbian conflict for an excuse for waging a war of extermination against us… That is the real naked situation slowly and cleverly set going by Edward VII and… finally brought to a conclusion by George V… So the famous encirclement of Germany has finally become a fact, despite every effort of our politicians and diplomats to prevent it. The net has been suddenly thrown over our head, and England sneeringly reaps the most brilliant success of her persistently prosecuted purely anti-German world policy against which we have proved ourselves helpless, while she twists the noose of our political and economic destruction out of our fidelity to Austria, as we squirm isolated in the net. A great achievement, which arouses the admiration even of him who is to be destroyed as its result! Edward VII is stronger after his death than am I who am still alive!”
“In addition to the statement out of the U.S.-EU summit, NATO leaders on Monday took a swipe at Russia, deploring its military activities near the borders of NATO countries.”
Unlike our president, vice president, Secretary of Defense, and “woke” military command, Putin has some noticeably redeeming features. He thinks marriage should be exclusively between heterosexuals, that males and females differ in socially significant biological ways, and that white people are not inherently evil. Believing and defending such politically inconvenient truths may be necessary for saving “the entire West.” It might be even more useful for this purpose than trying to relive the Second World War by taking on Russia and China.
What I’m recommending is a more sober assessment of the relative dangers that face our society. The war led by the state, the educational establishment, the media, large segments of corporate capitalism, and now the military against normal America seems far more pernicious than any danger that is coming out of Russia or China. We need a strategy for combatting the internal enemy far more desperately than we need more arms for fighting our foreign competitors.
The reincarnation of Hitler in some national leader and the heroism of Churchill, both stand-by props of neoconservatives, rear their head again in a recent commentary by Daniel Gelernter.
Expecting neocons to abandon their continual reference of these props would be comparable to asking the Democratic Party to stop talking about “systemic racism” or Mike Pompeo to cease mentioning “our values.” Why give up rhetorical tricks that elicit applause and large checks from wealthy sponsors every time one makes use of them? But as I point out in my book on antifascism, those who engage in silly comparisons shouldn’t imagine that the weight of historical scholarship supports their games.
Gelernter gets giddy pulling out his exaggerated, anachronistic parallels between Putin “the murderer” and the evil Führer, the expanding Japanese empire between 1936 and 1941 and the present Chinese government. His description suggests that we are again thickly embroiled in the Second World War, with only the names of the villains having been changed to reflect the minimally altered circumstances. Munich in October 1938 comes back as another neocon reference point in Gelernter’s complaint that we have not armed ourselves to the teeth to combat the new Hitler. Any failure to be immediately ready for war against the neocon-designated enemy brings back memories (at least for Gelernter and his buds) of how “democracies” surrendered to Hitler’s demand to occupy the Czech Sudetenland in 1938.
Allow me to cite what may be Gelernter’s most lunatic statement in this trip down neocon memory lane:
Now imagine that you are Putin himself—a dictator, a murderer, an absolutely brilliant strategist. What would be your next move? Probably to invade one of the Baltic states to break up NATO. In theory, an attack on any NATO member should be treated as an attack on all. But if Putin senses that there will be no response, or a half-response reminiscent of the so-called Phony War, he can destroy the major barrier against Russia taking over Eastern Europe one country at a time. And the sad fact is that if we, in America, are not willing to go to war to protect Estonia from Russia—and I suspect most of us are not—then Europe and ultimately the entire West is at risk.
Here we are dealing not only with the return of Hitler in the person of Putin and the revival of Imperial Japan as the Chicom regime. We must also confront the likelihood that the “entire West is at risk” if a single Russian soldier crosses into Estonian territory. Where, Gelernter asks by implication, is the new Churchill, who will lead our armies to victory, if Nazi Russia decides to occupy Estonia? This, after all, is the greatest threat that now supposedly faces “the entire West.”
One might of course dispute this judgment and point to other far grimmer threats that now confront Western civilization. Like Thucydides and Aristotle, we might be led to the non-neocon conclusion that the greatest threats to governments or societies come from within.
That certainly applies to the Western world and to our own onetime country, which are in the grips of an ugly cultural and political war. Pardon me if I’m more concerned about preserving traditional gender roles or something resembling the family that I grew up in than I am with the Russian bête noire of such worthies as Gelernter, Rep. Eric Swalwell, and journalist Jake Tapper!
Unlike our president, vice president, Secretary of Defense, and “woke” military command, Putin has some noticeably redeeming features. He thinks marriage should be exclusively between heterosexuals, that males and females differ in socially significant biological ways, and that white people are not inherently evil. Believing and defending such politically inconvenient truths may be necessary for saving “the entire West.” It might be even more useful for this purpose than trying to relive the Second World War by taking on Russia and China.
We might also draw a distinction between predatory regimes like Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia—that romped all over the European continent exterminating indigenous populations—and today’s Russia and China, which are asserting traditional national interests. The latter can certainly create trouble, and I am not suggesting that no measures be taken if the Russian government tries to increase its control over Ukraine or if the Chinese government bullies Taiwan more aggressively. But even those aggressive actions would still not be of the same magnitude as Hitler’s armies overrunning Poland and France and murdering millions of their civilian population. Nothing indicates that Putin is about to do anything even remotely as brutal.
Nor is anyone denying that the Chinese government has treated ethnic minorities, particularly the Uyghurs in East Turkestan, quite brutally. We are therefore right to protest such inhumanities and put economic and diplomatic pressures on the Chinese to stop these misdeeds. But the appropriate measures called for in these cases fall far short of the total mobilization required to fight Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II.
What I’m recommending is a more sober assessment of the relative dangers that face our society. The war led by the state, the educational establishment, the media, large segments of corporate capitalism, and now the military against normal America seems far more pernicious than any danger that is coming out of Russia or China. We need a strategy for combatting the internal enemy far more desperately than we need more arms for fighting our foreign competitors.
Paul Gottfried is editor in chief of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He is also the Raffensperger Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Elizabethtown College, where he taught for 25 years, a Guggenheim recipient, and a Yale Ph.D. He is the author of 13 books, most recently Fascism: Career of a Concept and Revisions and Dissents.
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