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Debt Rattle May 31 2026

May 312026
 
 May 31, 2026  Posted by at 10:01 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  16 Responses »


Jackson Pollock Number 31 1949


• Intercepted Iranian Missile Injures 5 Americans At Kuwaiti Air Base (ZH)
• Global Oil Reserves Fall At The Fastest Rate In History (Snyder)
• Forced To Correct Lies About AfD Leader Alice Weidel, Pay Her Legal Fees (RMX)
• Euroclear Appeals Immediate Enforcement of $256 bln Central Bank Ruling (TASS)
• Ukraine Killed 21 Russian Students And Lied About It (RT)
• Putin Has Countermanded Lavrov and The General Staff (Helmer)
• Congresswoman Wants Democrats Aiding Cuba To Be Investigated For Treason (JTN)
• Trump’s USDA is Making America’s Fabric Great Again (JTN)
• Why The SAVE Act Matters (Stu Cvrk)
• Cuba Falling: A Most Unusual Meeting (Sarah Anderson)
• Court Halts Kennedy Center Construction and Name Change (Turley)
• Crypto And AI Could Be Dirty Words On 2026 Midterm Campaign Trail (CT)
• A New Special Interest Coalition for ’26 and ’28, Datacenters (CTH)

 


 

https://twitter.com/JasonJournoDC/status/2060484422650966145?s=20 https://twitter.com/Real_RobN/status/2060054925938458941?s=20 https://twitter.com/DrJStrategy/status/2060507372359942401?s=20 https://twitter.com/GreereMedeea/status/2060415940953551353?s=20

 


 


Iran today.

• Intercepted Iranian Missile Injures 5 Americans At Kuwaiti Air Base (ZH)

A Saturday message and warning from Iran’s Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters via Al Jazeera: “The management of the Strait of Hormuz is exercised with full authority by the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” It added that “all ships, commercial vessels and tankers are only required to travel through the designated routes and obtain permission from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy.” So despite President Trump’s latest warning which declared strict conditions on reopening the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran appears to be completely brushing his words aside, and is moving closer to formalizing its authority over vital energy shipping waterway.


State-run Nour News is reporting that a bill outlining Tehran’s role in managing passage through the strategic waterway has been finalized and is expected to be brought to a vote soon. According to Bloomberg, Iranian lawmaker Alireza Salimi did not provide a specific timeline for the vote but said the legislation is on track to become law. Salimi said that “only Iran and Oman can decide on Strait of Hormuz management” – adding that “the Omani side has given preliminary approval” to Tehran’s plan. He further emphasized the strategic importance of Hormuz, declaring that “the Strait of Hormuz is more important and more valuable to the Islamic Republic of Iran than dozens of nuclear bombs.”

Previous comments by Salimi indicate the bill would cover shipping security, the collection of navigation and environmental pollution fees, as well as the creation of a regional development and progress fund – all of which critics have dismissed as but Tehran’s ruse to collect what is in effect a “toll”. The legislation is expected to undergo review by Iran’s Guardian Council, which is responsible for vetting and approving all laws before they take effect.

More Reported US Drones Destroyed
Reports of more MQ-9 Reaper damage or destruction have emerged; however, the Pentagon has not verified this, and is not expected to. This along with the past week of ‘live-fire’ tit-for-tat incidents suggests an escalating situation, even as the warring sides try to get back to the peace negotiations table. It looks like it could be related to the Saturday missile attack on a US base in Kuwait, but details are murky. Per DropSite:

• Unfreezing of Assets & Sanctions

• Nuclear File

“So far, there is no timeframe. However, we know that the negotiations are still continuing. The agreement, according to Iranian officials here, is not finalised yet. Proposals and messages are being exchanged through Pakistani mediators and some other regional players as well,” the report says. Per AJ: The Iranians, while saying that it is not finalised, have largely agreed on many items. However, there are still some sticking points. Finally, the Iranians are quite clear at this stage. They are saying that they are not discussing the nuclear file or nuclear programme unless confidence-building measures are put in place. Only if the first phase is successful will they be open to discussing their nuclear programme. These confidence-building measures have been precisely identified as the unfreezing of billions in assets held aborad.

New Iranian Attack on US Base in Kuwait
An Iranian Fateh-110 short-range ballistic missile targeted Kuwait’s Ali Al Salem Air Base, a key operational hub for the U.S. Air Force’s expeditionary forces in the Gulf region. An initial report from Bloomberg News indicates that Kuwaiti air defenses intercepted the tactical ballistic missile in the last 24 hours, but falling debris struck part of the base, injuring five Americans and damaging one MQ-9 Reaper drone while severely damaging another. About five people, including both contractors and active duty personnel, suffered minor injuries, the person said. One Reaper was destroyed and at least one other was seriously damaged. -BBG

News of the strike on ASAB, where the 386th Air Expeditionary Wing under U.S. Air Forces Central acts as a forward logistics, airlift, and combat-power gateway for the broader CENTCOM theater, comes as the US and Iran on Friday reached a tentative memorandum of understanding to extend a ceasefire by 60 days and restart nuclear negotiations. However, the proposal still requires final approval from President Trump, according to U.S. officials cited by Fox News.

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US produces its own.

• Global Oil Reserves Fall At The Fastest Rate In History (Snyder)

No matter what happens now, the world is facing a very painful energy crisis. Let’s be as wildly optimistic as we possibly can and assume that Iran agrees to allow free passage through the Strait of Hormuz with absolutely no tolls or restrictions starting tomorrow. Before normal traffic through the Strait could resume, Iran would first have to remove all of the mines that they have laid in the Strait, and that could take months. Once all of the mines have been removed, it will take the tankers that are currently trapped in the Persian Gulf weeks to arrive at their destinations. Moving forward, Persian Gulf countries will be exporting much less oil and natural gas for the foreseeable future because of all the oil and natural gas infrastructure that was damaged or destroyed during the war. It will take years before all of that infrastructure is fully repaired and rebuilt. Meanwhile, global supplies of oil and natural gas will be very tight for an extended period of time..


What I have just laid out for you is the best case scenario. Ultimately, what we end up facing could be so much worse. Over the past couple of months, global oil reserves have been falling at the fastest rate ever recorded… Record inventory draw: Global oil stocks have fallen by 246 million barrels in March-April, with draws in May hitting a record 8.7 million barrels per day. Hormuz closure impact: The Strait of Hormuz shutdown has cut off 25% of the world’s seaborne oil, compounding already low reserves and boosting prices. US price outlook: Analysts expect U.S. gasoline prices could reach $5 this summer unless flows resume, with relief unlikely before autumn. Needless to say, this is not sustainable.

Here in the United States, the strategic petroleum reserve has been dropping at a record-breaking pace… The SPR’s most recent drawdown, covering the week ended May 22, shows a drop of 9.1 million barrels, leaving the reserves at 365 million barrels. The previous weekly drawdown, covering the week of May 15, was its steepest on record — the U.S. withdrew 9.92 million barrels from the SPR then. Before that record-breaking decline, the largest weekly drop in the SPR’s history occurred in the week ended Oct. 7, 2022, when the reserves dropped by 7.41 million barrels, and was connected to the war in Ukraine. Commercial oil inventories are being rapidly depleted as well.

At some point the tanks are going to hit minimum operating levels and we are going to have an enormous crisis on our hands. The chief economist at Capital Economics is projecting that commercial oil inventories “could reach critically low levels by the end of June”… “At the current pace of drawdown, commercial oil stocks could reach critically low levels by the end of June,” Neil Shearing, chief economist at Capital Economics, wrote in a research note on May 18. If supply conditions don’t improve soon, “prices could rise sharply,” Shearing warned. Jeff Currie is warning that Asia is already very close to minimum operating levels, and he is projecting that the U.S. could potentially be dealing with shortages in July…

Oil markets are nearing minimum operating levels in Asia, with Europe likely next and the U.S. potentially facing shortages by July, said veteran market strategist Jeff Currie on Monday, underscoring the global energy shock due to the Iran war.Headline global inventory figures can be misleading as much of the oil stored worldwide cannot be used immediately, said Currie, Carlyle’s chief strategy officer of energy pathways and co-chairman of Abaxx Markets. A large portion of that oil is needed to keep pipelines and storage systems running safely, leaving only a smaller share available for the market. Asia is already close to these so-called “minimum operating levels,” Currie told CNBC on the sidelines of the UBS Wealth Conference in Singapore.

This is really happening.

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“When “blatant falsehoods are being spread, one cannot let them stand unchallenged,” says Weidel’s spokesman”

• Forced To Correct Lies About AfD Leader Alice Weidel, Pay Her Legal Fees (RMX)

Alice Weidel, co-leader of the anti-migration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, has successfully sued the Left Party leader and won a retraction after she spread falsehoods about Weidel on live television. In mid-May, Ines Schwerdtner, the federal chairwoman of the Left Party, claimed during an interview on Welt TV that Wediel neither resides in Germany nor pays taxes. “Alice Weidel doesn’t even live in Germany, she doesn’t pay taxes here,” she told viewers. This statement is false. While Weidel spends much of her time with her family in Switzerland, she has her primary residence in Germany and pays taxes in the Federal Republic of Germany.


Weidel has been very guarded about the issue over the years, as she faces a high threat level and avoids appearing in public due to the security threat she lives under. Weidel’s lawyers explained in a warning letter, cited by Junge Freiheit, that this claim was false, as their client both lived in Germany and paid taxes. The law firm Höcker filed a lawsuit on the AfD’s behalf seeking an injunction. Weidel’s lawyers also demanded that Schwerdtner ensure the relevant passage was deleted from Welt TV’s programming. Furthermore, the lawsuit calls on the Left Party leader to acknowledge the “claim for damages.”

Following this, Schwerdtner’s lawyer sent a letter to the Höcker law firm stating that their client had “indeed made a mistake.” The Left Party leader additionally undertook to “refrain” from making the false statement that Weidel does not pay taxes in Germany. The letter also pointed out that the interview in question on Welt TV had since been deleted by the broadcaster. Furthermore, Schwerdtner stated that she would transfer the legal fees “within one week.”

Weidel’s press spokesman, Daniel Tapp, told JF that in politics one “shouldn’t be too sensitive in principle.” However, when “blatant falsehoods are being spread, one cannot let them stand unchallenged.” The AfD has been surging in the polls, with one survey last week showing it hitting a record 42 percent in Saxony, double the support of the second-place Christian Democrats (CDU). A poll in May showed the AfD at 29 percent at the national level, while the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) fell to 22 percent.

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How to bankrupt Belgium?

• Euroclear Appeals Immediate Enforcement of $256 bln Central Bank Ruling (TASS)

Euroclear has filed a complaint with the Moscow Arbitration Court against the immediate enforcement of a ruling to recover 18.2 trillion rubles ($256 bln) under a lawsuit by the Central Bank, a source familiar with the proceedings told TASS. According to the source, the complaint against the immediate enforcement of the ruling to recover funds under the Bank of Russia lawsuit was filed this week.


In December 2025, the Bank of Russia filed a lawsuit against Euroclear in the Moscow Arbitration Court for 18.2 trillion rubles ($256 bln), amid the European Union’s plans to use frozen Russian assets to finance Ukraine. This amount includes frozen funds, the value of blocked securities, and lost profits. At the request of the Central Bank, the court closed the proceedings on the regulator’s lawsuit against the Belgian depository to the public. The Bank of Russia stated that the procedure for enforcing the court ruling using the defendant’s assets, including those located in foreign jurisdictions – both friendly and unfriendly – will be determined after the court’s decision enters into force.

On May 20, 2026, the Bank of Russia filed a motion with the Moscow Arbitration Court to immediately enforce the judgment in the 18.2 trillion ruble ($256 bln) lawsuit against Euroclear. The Bank of Russia is also considering the possibility of protecting its interests in international courts and arbitration tribunals, with subsequent enforcement of the decisions of such courts in UN member states. The EU and G7 countries have frozen approximately €300 billion of Russian assets. Approximately €180 billion is held in the Belgian depository Euroclear. The European Commission is seeking approval from EU member states to use Russian assets for Ukraine. However, the EU has failed to agree on a “reparations loan” to Ukraine using frozen Russian assets.

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“In preparation for the funeral, relatives brought numerous wedding dresses to the local morgue: the young women killed in the strike were to be buried in them.”

• Ukraine Killed 21 Russian Students And Lied About It (RT)

A Ukrainian drone raid last week devastated a college dormitory in Starobelsk, in Russia’s Lugansk People’s Republic, killing 21 students – most of them young women – and injuring dozens others. The attack was a deliberate “double-tap” that included two more waves of drones targeting civilians and first responders who raced to the scene, according to Russian officials. Russia branded the raid a “terrorist attack” and a blatant war crime. Horrific footage from the scene backed up the accusations.


However, speaking at an emergency UN Security Council session, Ukrainian envoy to the UN Andrey Melnik dismissed Moscow’s account, denigrating a “so-called incident” in Starobelsk as “a fake story” and accusing Russia of spreading “yet another propaganda narrative.” Kiev’s General Staff separately claimed its forces had targeted a command post of the elite Rubicon drone unit – an allegation for which reporters who visited the scene found no supporting evidence. Here is what Ukraine and the West do not want you to know about the Starobelsk tragedy.

What really happened in Starobelsk? RT senior correspondent Murad Gazdiev was among the first journalists to reach the site, reporting from the scene throughout the two-day search-and-rescue operation. The most horrific thing when he arrived was “children still screaming under the rubble.” According to Gazdiev, blood-stained blankets were visible in the hallway where first responders pulled out the dead, and the ground was littered with students’ belongings and books.

Who was killed by Ukraine in Starobelsk? Among those trapped was 19-year-old Dasha Serdyuk. In her final moments of life, she filmed herself and sent a short video to her friend Nastya in St. Petersburg, pleading for help. Dasha had reportedly dreamed of becoming a kindergarten teacher and had only one year of studies left. An eyewitness described watching a girl sprint from the building mid-attack, telling local media that she managed to leave the dorm but was killed by the blast wave outside.

Another victim, identified by the Mash outlet only as Anya, also tried to flee during the strike but was killed by the second drone barrage. An unnamed relative interviewed by the channel said that her body was so severely burned that family members could identify her only by her necklace and earrings. Anya is said to have been due to be married in the summer and is survived by her mother, grandmother, and 10-year-old sister. Olga Vasilenko, a mother of Anastasia, an 18-year-old student at the college also killed in the strike, recalled, as cited by several Russian media: “She called me in the evening, saying: ‘Mom, we’re being bombed’. And then she stopped answering my calls”.

Russia’s human rights commissioner, Yana Lantratova, published photos of all 21 victims – some just 18 years old – offering condolences. “It’s impossible to imagine the pain of a parent who has lost the dearest thing in life – their child,” she said.

There have been no videos from the scene suggesting even the slightest sign of military-related activity. “There wasn’t even a hint of military personnel here. It was a targeted attack on children,” Roman Antonov, a local firefighter, told RT in the aftermath of the strike. A video shared by Mash made before the strike shows students doing what students do – dancing, laughing, and having fun, with some seen washing floors in the dormitory. In the days that have followed, residents, relatives of the dead, survivors, and college staff brought flowers and stuffed animals to the ruins. Churches in Starobelsk have held numerous services for the dead and prayers for the wounded.

A harrowing video has surfaced on social media, reportedly of parents identifying the bodies of their children, with audible, desperate screams. In preparation for the funeral, relatives brought numerous wedding dresses to the local morgue: the young women killed in the strike were to be buried in them.

The death of 21 young people prompted a desire for revenge within the Russian military, with one drone operator filmed inscribing ‘Starobelsk’ on an attack UAV before launching it towards Ukrainian armed forces positions. Russia has maintained it targets only military-related sites.

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Helmer and PCR are in their 80s. Is that why?

• Putin Has Countermanded Lavrov and The General Staff (Helmer)

President Vladimir Putin has ordered his two spokesmen, Dmitry Peskov and Yury Ushakov, to deny Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s statement that the General Staff has been authorized to escalate war operations to regime decapitation in the Ukraine. On Monday evening, May 25, Lavrov telephoned US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and told him he was speaking for Putin: “On behalf of the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin,” the readout said, “S.V. Lavrov officially brought to the American side information that in response to the ongoing terrorist attacks of the Kiev regime against the civilian population and civilian objects on the Russian territory, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation begin systemic and consistent strikes on the facilities located in Kiev, used for the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and on the relevant decision-making centres.”


Lavrov was repeating the new phrase, “systemic and consistent”, which his ministry had published in reverse order four hours earlier. Russian “patience is exhausted,” the ministry had declared. “In this situation, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are beginning to launch consistent and systemic strikes at enterprises of the Ukrainian defence industry in Kiev, including specific facilities for designing, manufacturing and programming drones and preparing them for operation…We are urging residents of the Ukrainian capital not to approach facilities of the military and administrative infrastructure of the Zelensky regime.”

The Russian statements followed the strike over Saturday night-Sunday morning (May 23-24) by an Oreshnik missile on the Bela Tserkva airbase, south of Kiev, which doubles as an underground drone factory and a military command-control bunker. Click for a summary of local and Russian reporting of the targets. The Oreshnik failed, according to Moscow sources. No high-ranking casualties have been reported by either the Russian or Ukrainian media; there has been no evidence of emergency ambulance movements and medical evacuation flights taking high-ranking casualties to hospitals in Poland, Germany, or the US. There was a reported surge of medevac flights from Rzeszow, but that occurred on May 22, before the Oreshnik strike on Bela Tsekrkva.

Surface damage at Bela Tserkva recorded on social media shows no greater damage than earlier drone strikes at Bela Tserkva last August. Former president and deputy head of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev called the Oreshnik, Iskander, Zircon and Kinzhal missile operation, including the Kiev city targets hit, a success in a strategy of persuading Ukrainian hearts and minds; this has not been publicly declared as a war aim by the Security Council before. “The ruins and gray ash on the site of their capital symbols,” Medvedev claimed, “demoralize the enemy no weaker than the loss of the battle banner.”

Lieutenant General (retired) Andrei Kartapolov, head of the State Duma Defense Committee, repeated that the weekend strikes were a new operational initiative. But he qualified the targeting: the aim, he said, is not the Ukrainian parliament Verkhovna Rada but instead “decision-making centres [which are] underground fortified [military] command and control centres…you need to understand that they are not located in the centre of Kiev. These are hidden, well-fortified points. And our task is to identify them and expose them with the help of existing weapons.”

Kartapolov added that the decision on whether this new decapitation operation now extends to Vladimir Zelensky is made by “only one person – our Supreme Commander-in-Chief”. About Putin’s decision — signed, suspended, postponed, canceled — Kartapolov said he preferred “not to engage in speculation”. This was published on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 26. Putin had decided already to announce he didn’t mean decapitation at all.

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A Cuban with a Greek name.

• Congresswoman Wants Democrats Aiding Cuba To Be Investigated For Treason (JTN)

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis also said she believes it was possible the U.S. military would conduct an operation to capture Raul Castro and extradite him into the United States


Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, a prominent Cuban-American who represents New York in the U.S. House, tells Just the News she wants the FBI to investigate Democrats and liberal groups helping Cuba evade U.S. sanctions for the lone crime America’s founding fathers explicitly identified in the Constitution. “Look, I personally, think they need to be investigated for treason,” Malliotakis said during a wide-ranging interview with the John Solomon Reports podcast. “I think that they really need to be investigated by Treasury, also by Justice.”

The New York Republican was reacting to an admission by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., that she recently took an official government trip to Havana and also talked to foreign countries about finding a way to get oil to Cuba around US sanctions and a naval blockade. Malliotakis said she wants to see the House ban the use of tax dollars to make such trips to foreign enemies’ soil. “What we need to do is ensure that none of these congressional delegation trips that are funded by the taxpayers go to actually visit our adversaries and undermine our government,” she said.

“They go and actually meet with the communist regime at your expense as taxpayers to try to undercut what the president is trying to do,” she added. “And by the way, it’s not just hurting, you know, our government. You’re actually hurting the Cuban people. You’re actually supporting a regime that starves its people to death, that has made their lives miserable for 67 years, and has killed their family members and have split up their family members.” Malliotakis, whose mother fled from Cuba during the Castro regime, has long been a fierce critic of the Communist-run government on the island.

She applauded the Trump Justice Department’s decision last week to indict 94-year-old Raul Castro, the former Cuban president, in connection with the fatal shooting down of two American planes in 1996. Malliotakis said she believed it was possible that the U.S. military would eventually conduct an operation to capture Castro and extradite him into the United States to face prosecution like it did with Venezuelan strongarm man Nicolas Maduro in January.

“I think a lot of people looking at the situation are thinking that the U.S. armed forces will go in and get Raul Castro, just like they did Nicolas Maduro,” she said. “You do see ships building up not too far from Cuba’s shores, and you know it is number one a national security issue.

“It is time, No. 1, to push for regime change, and I think that this indictment of Raul Castro gives the Cuban government two options: you either leave the island and allow the people to form political parties, to have free and fair elections to allow them to express themselves without fear of going to jail or being beaten or even killed by their government, and or you will see something like what took place in Venezuela for Nicolas Maduro,” she added.

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“Cotton is a cultural icon, built into American DNA”

• Trump’s USDA is Making America’s Fabric Great Again (JTN)

In years past, the U.S. was referred to as “King Cotton” for its prodigious output of the fiber wanted by the rest of the world. The “Plant Not Plastic” initiative may see a rebirth of that sentiment. On Thursday, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins announced The Great American Cotton Plan, an effort to help revitalize the nation’s cotton-producing industry to move Americans back toward wearing natural fibers as opposed to plastic materials and other pontially toxic fibers. Launched as a cornerstone of the plan to restore domestic textile manufacturing, the “Plant Not Plastic” initiative urges American consumers to choose products made with natural, U.S.-grown cotton over petroleum-based synthetics like polyester.


Working in partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the campaign highlights cotton’s superior breathability, biodegradability, and reduced microplastic shedding—addressing growing concerns about synthetic fibers releasing thousands of plastic particles annually into the environment and potentially into our bodies. By elevating demand for American cotton through education, procurement incentives, and alignment with t he bipartisan Buying American Cotton Act, the initiative simultaneously boosts rural economies, restores domestic textile manufacturing, and advances the Trump administration’s MAHA goals of practical, preventive wellness through everyday choices.

American cotton is key to avoiding human rights abuses
Cotton from many foreign countries, particularly in the global supply chain, has been linked to significant human rights abuses. Concerns include widespread child labor, such as children aged 6–14 working long hours in India’s cottonseed farms.

The underage workers often face pesticide exposure, as well as forced labor involving Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region and past cases in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. In 2011 Bloomberg News sent investigative reporters out to the fields in the west African country to see for themselves how the daily abuse of children results in the “fair trade” fabric used for Americans’ favorite panties and bras. Workers frequently endure debt bondage, minimal or no pay, hazardous conditions, and government or employer coercion. The U.S. Department of Labor flags cotton from several nations for these risks. Ethical sourcing and better traceability are essential to reduce such exploitation.

Natural fibers used to be the norm
Today, approximately 70% of materials are derived from synthetic fibers, with polyester being the most prevalent. But that hasn’t always been the case. For millennia, humans relied exclusively on natural fibers—cotton, wool, silk, linen, and hemp—for clothing and textiles. These materials dominated until the early 20th century. The shift began with rayon (viscose), the first semisynthetic fiber, commercialized around 1905–1910. True synthetics arrived with nylon, introduced by DuPont in 1939, revolutionizing stockings and apparel during WWII. Polyester followed in the 1940s–50s, prized for durability and low cost. Acrylic and spandex soon expanded the range. B

y the late 20th century, synthetic blends dominated global production due to affordability, performance, and scalability. Today, a mix of natural and synthetic fibers prevails, balancing tradition with modern demands for stretch, wrinkle resistance, and sustainability. In 1989, trade association Cotton Incorporated launched its iconic “The Fabric of Our Lives” advertising campaign on Thanksgiving Day. The memorable jingle—“The touch, the feel of cotton, the fabric of our lives”—was first performed by Richie Havens. Aimed at countering synthetic fibers, the campaign celebrated cotton’s natural comfort, softness, and place in everyday American life. It became one of the most successful and long-running textile ads, boosting cotton’s market share and cultural resonance for decades.

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Thorough.

• Why The SAVE Act Matters (Stu Cvrk)

American self-governance rests on one indispensable foundation: that elections reflect the will of eligible citizens, counted accurately, administered transparently. Republicans and election integrity advocates argue that this foundation has been progressively undermined – not necessarily by a single grand conspiracy, but by a systemic pattern of loosened safeguards, dirty voter rolls, exploitable mail-ballot systems, and aggressive Democrat opposition to the audits and reforms that would resolve public doubt once and for all.

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act – which polls at roughly 80 percent public support – would require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. To its advocates, it is the minimum logical response to documented vulnerabilities in the registration and voting system. To its opponents, it is voter suppression. The fight over that characterization is itself a revealing indicator of where the parties stand on the fundamental question: do you want to know, or don’t you? And why! Let’s examine the subject in some detail. Note: the below analysis was written from a Republican/election-integrity-advocate perspective. Where allegations are unconfirmed or contested, they are labeled as such.

Part I: Confirmed And Documented Problems

1. Dirty Voter Rolls – A National Scandal The evidence that American voter rolls are riddled with ineligible registrations is not in dispute. The only dispute is over whether they should be fixed. The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, under Assistant AG Harmeet Dhillon, reviewed voter rolls from just 16 voluntarily cooperating Republican-leaning states and found tens of thousands of apparent noncitizens and hundreds of thousands of dead people still registered to vote. The administration subsequently sued 29 states – including blue-state heavyweights California and New York, and swing states Arizona and Georgia – to compel production of voter roll data under the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act.

In California, a review of voter rolls found registrations tied to P.O. boxes and individuals listed as 125 years old. In Colorado, a lawsuit forced the purge of 372,000 ineligible registrations. In Michigan, dead voters have been documented – some of whom show records of in-person voting after their deaths. In Oregon, similar anomalies have been reported. Judicial Watch has documented tens of thousands of names removed from rolls in multiple states, often only after litigation – raising the obvious question of why states resisted cleanup in the first place.

The consistent pattern: Republicans seek cleanup to remove any possibility that unauthorized people are voting in elections through fraud associated with ballot harvesting. Democrats sue to prevent it for the purposes of preventing disenfranchising eligible voters (with the unspoken reason to enable Democrat ballot harvesting).

2. Noncitizen Voting – Prosecuted Cases Noncitizen voting is not a hypothetical. It is documented, prosecuted, and ongoing. In Philadelphia, ICE and the FBI arrested Mahady Sacko, an illegal alien from Mauritania, for voting in seven federal elections dating to 2008 – despite a 2002 removal order. In Coldwater, Kansas, Mayor Joe Ceballos – a legal permanent resident from Mexico – resigned and faced charges after voting in multiple elections. These are not isolated cases; they are confirmed examples of a vulnerability that Republicans argue the SAVE Act would directly address.

3. Mail Ballot Fraud – A Proven Mechanism Democrats and their media allies spent years insisting mail ballot fraud is vanishingly rare. The prosecution record tells a different story – of widespread, real, and exploitable vulnerabilities (over 1400 cases in this database).

In Pennsylvania, a grand jury indicted three Democrats – Mohammed Nurul Hasan, Mohammed Munsur Ali, and Mohammed Rafikul Islam – for attempting to steal the 2021 mayoral election in Millbourne. Using Pennsylvania’s online voter registration portal (PAOVR), they changed the registered addresses of nearly three dozen non-residents to Millbourne addresses, requested mail ballots on their behalf, filled them out, and submitted them. The system’s vulnerability: anyone with basic personal information about a voter could modify that voter’s registration and divert their ballot to any address in the world. The candidate lost anyway – but the mechanism worked. The “safeguards” the AP assured voters existed did not stop it.

In Minnesota, a duo pleaded guilty to flooding an election with fraudulent ballots. In Connecticut, a state employee was arrested for switching Republican voters’ registrations to Democrat without their knowledge. Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight organization was forced to pay the largest campaign finance violation fine in Georgia history.

4. ActBlue – Active Congressional Investigation With Significant Red Flags This is not an allegation. This is an active, documented federal investigation backed by congressional subpoenas. The House Judiciary, Oversight, and Administration Committees released a joint interim report in April 2026 finding that five current and former ActBlue employees – including its general counsel (fired), legal department personnel, and VP of customer service – collectively invoked the Fifth Amendment 146 times during depositions. Not once or twice. 146 times. Not a single substantive question was answered.

The report also found that ActBlue made its fraud-prevention rules more lenient twice during the 2024 election cycle, and that internal training materials directed fraud-prevention staff to “look for reasons to accept contributions” rather than scrutinize them. The entire legal and compliance team – every member – had resigned, been fired, or gone on extended leave by March 2025, in the months immediately following the election.

The New York Times – not a right-wing outlet – reported on the foreign donation concerns. Former Biden White House Counsel Dana Remus, working at ActBlue’s law firm Covington, reportedly warned that ActBlue’s CEO may have misrepresented facts to Congress. House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan summarized the irony: Democrats spent a decade accusing Trump of foreign campaign collusion. The evidence of foreign money flowing into Democrat fundraising infrastructure is now the subject of formal congressional investigation.

Fulton County has become the symbolic epicenter of 2020 election integrity concerns, and for documented reasons.

In January 2026, the Georgia State Election Board revealed that investigators could not locate a single “zero tape” from Fulton County’s 148 early voting machines from the 2020 general election. Zero tapes are the legal documents that certify each ballot tabulator began counting at zero – preventing pre-loaded votes or test data from being counted as real votes. Their absence does not prove fraud. But their absence also cannot be explained away. A December 2025 admission by Fulton County’s attorney confirmed that more than 100 tabulator closing tapes – representing roughly 315,000 votes – were never signed by poll workers as required by law.

The week after the State Election Board meeting, the FBI executed a search warrant at the Fulton County election office, specifically seeking the zero tapes. The search warrant itself represents a federal judicial determination that probable cause existed to search. Fulton County has not produced a satisfactory accounting of what happened to these documents.

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Unusual indeed.

• Cuba Falling: A Most Unusual Meeting (Sarah Anderson)

There are a lot of stories about Cuba floating around right now. Some are MSM outlets acting like they have a scoop on something that’s been happening or rumored to be happening for months. Some are simply absurd and probably not true. Most aren’t actually verified by the Donald Trump administration and come from anonymous sources. I’m not even going to bother with those today. I saw this happen in the final months before we captured Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Most of these reporters and media outlets didn’t even care about these countries until they became newsworthy, and once they do become hot topics, they’ll publish just about anything to get clicks. I can’t do that.


But what I can tell you is that what the regime is saying and what’s happening on the ground tell two different stories. Both the “president,” Miguel Díaz-Canel, and the foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez, have been doing interviews for a month or two now, warning of the United States’ impending military aggression, claiming the people of Cuba will fight the imperialists, etc. In the last week or two, Díaz-Canel claimed publicly that the U.S. “will cause a bloodbath with incalculable consequences.” Most recently, Rodríguez has been going after Marco Rubio with his favorite talking point: Rubio has a personal vendetta against the regime — as if he’s not just one of the millions of Cubans who have seen their parents and grandparents flee the communist s**thole in which they were forced to live. He just happens to be the one with the power to do something about it.

But while these guys are going on all the TV networks yelling about U.S. aggression, on the ground, the regime is actually playing nice with the U.S. because it knows it holds no leverage. On Friday, the most unusual thing happened. United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) Commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan was at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, and he met with Army Corps General, Gen. Roberto Legrá Sotolongo, First Deputy Minister of the Chief of the General Staff, and other senior leaders from the Cuban military at the perimeter of the facility. They even posed for a picture:

According to SOUTHCOM, the visit was “for a brief exchange on operational security matters. Gen. Donovan also led a perimeter security assessment of the naval base and discussed force protection, safety of service members and their families, and operational readiness with base officials.”

Keep in mind that the regime considers our base at Guantanamo Bay an illegal occupation. This extremely rare, high-level face-to-face meeting was described as “positive” by both sides. The Cuban Ministry of Defense said in a statement, “Both delegations considered the meeting to be positive, where issues related to security around the dividing perimeter of the military enclave were addressed and they agreed to maintain communication between both military commands.”

While some in the MSM are downplaying it, this isn’t something you see every day, but then again, a lot of what we’re witnessing lately is unusual. The regime is doing interviews with the U.S. press, including Fox News. The CIA director is holding talks in (and making threats) in Havana. Cubans standing on rooftops raising U.S. flags or writing “Long live Trump” on building walls without fear.

In the past, low-level “fence line” meetings took place each month between U.S. and Cuban military officials at the naval base, but Trump had them suspended when he took office in 2025. This is not a continuation of that. This is not routine. As I keep saying, we don’t know when or how this will end, but Trump promises that it will soon, that he’ll be the president who finally ends 67 years of communist Cuba. Right now, all of the signs are supporting that. No matter how defiant it acts publicly, the regime knows it’s backed into a corner.

Read more …

“The Administration should appeal the decision and may soon be able to resume work on the Center, regardless of its name.’

• Court Halts Kennedy Center Construction and Name Change (Turley)

In a ruling Friday, District Judge Christopher Cooper ordered the cessation of all repair plans for the Kennedy Center and the removal of Trump’s name from the building within two weeks. It is a detailed and comprehensive opinion, but I believe that Judge Cooper is wrong on the cessation of repairs. I previously expressed skepticism over the claim that the board could order such a change unilaterally. I have previously addressed the naming controversy, which raised the very issues that Judge Cooper cited in his rejection of the right to rename the Center without congressional approval.


However, the opinion becomes more challengeable when the court addresses the decision to close the Center for two years to carry out major renovations. The opinion is rife with digs at President Donald Trump for his social media postings and his unilateral plan for a ballroom. Judge Cooper editorializes that “Especially after the demolition of the East Wing of the White House— which occurred out of the blue a few months after President Trump pledged that construction would not ‘interfere with’ and would ‘pay[] total respect to the existing building’—there has been understandable concern that the Kennedy Center may be the next target of the wrecking ball.”

Judge Cooper accepts that the Center is long overdue for major renovations and that the Board had the authority to order them. He further rejects the sweeping claims of litigants that Trump was planning to effectively raze the Center: “The evidence before the Court does not demonstrate that the Center is poised for wholesale destruction and rebuilding, à la the East Wing.” However, Cooper rules that the Board could not have given the decision sufficient time or attention in carrying out the plan. He declared that “None of the board members had sufficient information in advance of the March 16 meeting to make a well-considered decision to close the center.”

The court’s tight analysis is lost in supporting the cessation of repairs. While he acknowledges that such repairs have long been planned and studied, he cites differing statements on the plan to continue operations before a later decision to close the Center. The court finds that the record illustrates a failure to fulfill the fiduciary duty of the board and Chair: “Whatever happened during that purported four-month incubation period, Board input was, most evidently, an afterthought. Trustees learned about the plan to close the Center at the same time as the general public, by social media post. Deprived of time and information, they had no meaningful opportunity to consider perhaps the most momentous decision in the Center’s lifetime since it opened in 1971.”

That analysis is heavily laden with assumptions on the lack of consideration of the Board. The same approach could be used to set aside an array of board decisions that do not evidence sufficient concern or scrutiny for the satisfaction of a judge. Judge Cooper seems to recognize how far the court was taking its own authority in countermanding the decision:

“The Court appreciates that, in both the charitable and corporate spheres, board meetings are often scripted affairs… The Court should not be heard to suggest that trustees must scrutinize every piece of prefatory work that has been done, or labor through the night debating the relative merits of their decisions in order to discharge their fiduciary duties— especially where, as here, a board is large and comprised of members who may not be well schooled in the subject matter before them. “ Yet, the court still concludes that this Board “seems to have fallen grossly short of prudent decision-making.” That seems far too subjective and fluid a standard for federal courts to micromanage executive branch decision-making.

For his part, President Trump was equally sweeping and unrestrained in his response. He declared that he would order the Commerce Department to transfer the Center to Congress “so they can make a determination as to what to do with it.” Given that Judge Cooper’s order on the cessation of repairs may be reversed, it is unnecessary unless the naming of the Center is the overriding consideration. In either case, it would make little sense for the Center to be placed under the supervision of Congress. It would be appropriate for Congress to address the naming question as well as potentially being heard on the need for a closure.

In the end, I thought that the court’s cessation analysis conveyed ample reasons, but Judge Cooper himself (and others) may be unhappy with how the decision was made. It is less clear why that should matter. There are ample reasons to close the Center to facilitate what the court acknowledges will be extensive and major renovations. That construction can only be facilitated and expedited if there is not a simultaneous need to keep a substantial part of the Center operating for the public. The Administration should appeal the decision and may soon be able to resume work on the Center, regardless of its name.

Read more …

Not sure why Zerohedge runs a May 11 article, but I already formatted it when I saw that, so…

• Crypto And AI Could Be Dirty Words On 2026 Midterm Campaign Trail (CT)

The AI and crypto industries have made headlines over the past year thanks to the impressive war chests amassed by corporate political action committees (PACs). Profligate spending during the last federal elections in the US has led to unprecedented policy changes favoring the crypto industry, with indications that a full legislative framework in the form of the CLARITY Act is on its way to becoming law. But this hasn’t endeared the crypto industry to voters. Recent polls from Politico show distrust of the crypto industry, and the electorate isn’t sold on the benefits of AI.


“Voters across the ideological spectrum are raising concerns,” Michael Beckel, director of money in politics reform at Issue One, told Cointelegraph. “Some candidates on both sides of the aisle are trying to harness that frustration and outrage.” According to the recent poll by Public First for Politico, most Americans don’t trust crypto and don’t believe in the benefits of AI.

While Republican voters are somewhat more likely to trust crypto, 47% of Americans overall trust a traditional bank over a crypto platform, while 17% trust a crypto platform as much as a traditional bank. The numbers for AI aren’t great either. Some 43% of Americans overall believe that the risks outweigh the benefits, while 33% believe the inverse.

Currently, most people haven’t heard about the major crypto and AI lobbies. According to Politico, only nine percent have heard of AI Super PAC Leading the Future. Only three percent have heard of pro-crypto PAC Fairshake. That’s not much compared to public awareness of large lobbies like the National Rifle Association or the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which are practically household names. Still, association with crypto could be a problem. Ohio Republican Representative Jim Renacci told Politico, “I do think if they see somebody is backed by crypto, that’s always going to be a problem, because, let’s face it, the people that I talk to in Ohio, they don’t understand crypto, and most say they’re not comfortable with [it].”

Improving awareness around crypto lobbies may not help them much. Rick Claypool, research director at Public Citizen, told Cointelegraph: “Generally speaking, voters are against corporate money influencing politics.” “Even after Citizens United, the norm had been for big, brand-name corporations not to engage directly. Or when they did engage, they would often contribute through dark money groups that obscure their funding source.” In this regard, the crypto industry’s spending spree in 2024 was somewhat unusual. Major contributors like Coinbase or a16z weren’t shy about the millions of dollars they put into campaigns.

But even then, “the voter-facing message from Fairshake was never about crypto, which voters never really cared about.” Mailers and ad buys reflected the supported candidates’ positions more broadly, or sometimes attacked those of the perceived anti-crypto candidate. Overall, “candidates who are seen as not beholden to corporate interests have an electoral edge,” said Claypool. This was true for populist candidates like US Senator Bernie Sanders and even US President Donald Trump, who claimed during his 2016 campaign that “he was so rich he could not be bought, which is laughable in hindsight.”

If awareness about crypto — and crypto’s concerted efforts to influence policy — increases among the electorate, it may not shake out well. Issue One’s Beckel said, “If voters view an industry as toxic, that can have serious implications for candidates who don’t want to be perceived as too close to a controversial company or industry.”

Read more …

If you’re not in the industry or live nearby, how could you know?

• A New Special Interest Coalition for ’26 and ’28, Datacenters (CTH)

A few weeks ago, I was having a politics conversation with a tech insider. The issue of datacenters became a focus of the conversation. The first response from him was “this is the issue that might decide 2026 and will certainly decide 2028.” The tech side of the issue is essentially: As 5G wifi was to mobile connectivity, so too are the datacenters the cornerstone of nationwide AI rollout. Eventually, all of the datacenters will interconnect and become part of a massive information system that houses all knowledge, a great digital brain. From that point, engagement with Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems will become like a public utility.


The datacenters themselves can be a hot button issue as their proximity to people creates friction. Battles against datacenters are taking place in rural and non-rural areas alike. With deep pockets and strong national security arguments involving the “AI race,” the technocrats are currently winning the argument. However, as with all special interest issues, the opportunity for political benefit now determines DC advocacy. WATCH:

What are your thoughts on this issue? Is opposition to datacenters strong enough to tilt the outcome of the 2026 midterms? And do you believe 2028 will be determined with this issue at the forefront?

Read more …

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/lovetocook12345/status/2060372306308862314?s=20 https://twitter.com/CreasonJana/status/2060427311208386655?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle May 28 2026

May 282026
 
 May 28, 2026  Posted by at 9:37 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  44 Responses »


Andy Warhol Mick Jagger 1975


• SpaceX-Tesla Merger Speculation Grows (ZH)
• No, Iran and China Are Not ‘Winning’ (Ben Shapiro)
• Trump Red Line: No Sanctions Relief Unless Iran Gives Up Uranium (ZH)
• President Trump: Iran is Negotiating on Fumes (CTH)
• Democrat Voter Fraud in America is Legion – Dr. Jerome Corsi (USAW)
• The Islamic Terrorist Conquest of West Africa (Lawrence A. Franklin)
• Pope Leo Needs Trump to Tame AI (Daniel McCarthy)
• Russian Court Orders Euroclear To Pay €200 Billion (RT)
• Ukraine War Enters ‘A New Phase’ (Stephen Green)
• Small Business Administration: $200 Billion In Fradulent Pandemic Loans (JTN)
• Two Countries in the World Retaliated Against Us, China and Canada (CTH)
• Home of 20-Year CIA Senior Manager Raided: $40 Million in Gold Bars (CTH)
• President Trump Praises DNI Tulsi Gabbard for Her Incredible Work (CTH)

 


 

https://twitter.com/Sassafrass_84/status/2059039734114955467?s=20

 


 


It’s harder to keep them apart than to merge them.

Expect at least a $4 trillion evaluation.

But what happens if something happens to Elon Musk?

• SpaceX-Tesla Merger Speculation Grows (ZH)

Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives has pointed out for months the potential for a SpaceX-Tesla merger, discussing the possibility with Bloomberg in February and, more recently, on a podcast where he said the probability is 80% by 2027. Polymarket odds of a merger by the end of the year stand at 32%. Now, CNBC has joined the growing speculation that Musk may eventually merge Tesla and SpaceX into one mega-company. The report said: “The two companies already have a laundry list of shared resources, and Musk has discussed with colleagues the possibility of folding the companies together, according to people familiar with the talks who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the topic.”


A current Tesla employee told CNBC that many workers at the electric vehicle company have long expected such a transaction to eventually take place and that the topic is openly discussed internally. Another person close to the company said that shared challenges tied to power and compute constraints have led to regular collaborations. Both companies already overlap across AI, compute, power, batteries, materials, engineering, suppliers, board members, and personnel. SpaceX now includes Starlink and xAI, while Tesla is increasingly becoming an AI and robotics company, in addition to remaining one of the leading EV makers.

https://twitter.com/TheSonOfWalkley/status/2059348595019550769?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2059348595019550769%7Ctwgr%5E625e36eedb1d9d3dbbc2ddd4320d05cb54e8efc4%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Ftechnology%2Fspacex-tesla-merger-speculation-grows-decade-cross-company-deals-reveal-deeper

Financial ties between the two companies are already well known: Tesla invested $2 billion in xAI, which became part of SpaceX after the merger. SpaceX bought $697 million worth of Tesla Megapack systems for xAI data centers and $131 million worth of Cybertrucks. Past transactions also included Tesla selling solar equipment and parts to SpaceX, Tesla using SpaceX jets, and SpaceX helping with Cybertruck materials.Tejpaul Bhatia, a longtime SpaceX investor and CEO of Nebex, told CNBC that “Parallel entrepreneurship seems to work for him [Elon Musk].”

Tesla’s market cap currently sits at around $1.6 trillion, while SpaceX is expected to start trading on Nasdaq in about two weeks, after achieving a private market valuation of $1.25 trillion earlier this year. Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives recently told Anthony Pompliano that he has a high-conviction view (80-85% chance) that SpaceX will merge with Tesla in 2027, post-IPO.

Musk sits on both company boards and holds 85% voting power at SpaceX, which would mean limited resistance when the time comes for a merger. EV blog Electrek laid out Musk’s creative engineering of billion-dollar self-dealings over the years:

1. SolarCity — $2.6 billion (2016): Tesla acquired SolarCity, a money-losing solar installer where Musk served as chairman and was the largest shareholder, for $2.6 billion in an all-stock deal. Shareholders sued, alleging it was a bailout of a company that was running out of cash. Musk sat on both boards. A Delaware court ultimately ruled the deal was “fair,” but other Tesla directors settled for $60 million without admitting fault. Musk argued that SolarCity’s solar business had become an integral part of Tesla’s own business, but shortly after winning the lawsuit, Tesla shut down parts of its solar operations and stopped reporting quarterly solar deployment.

2. Twitter/X — $44 billion (2022): Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion, a price he himself tried to back out of after realizing he overpaid. Within a year, Fidelity had revalued its stake as down 65%. By October 2024, the platform was valued at roughly $9-10 billion. Then, in March 2025, Musk had xAI acquire X for $33 billion ($45 billion including $12 billion in debt) — effectively bailing out his private investors by magically restoring a platform worth $9 billion to a $33 billion valuation on the back of xAI.

3. xAI — Tesla’s $2 billion investment, then SpaceX absorption (2025-2026): Tesla disclosed a $2 billion investment in Musk’s xAI in January 2026, despite shareholders having previously rejected a proposal. Days later, Musk was rumored to be floating a three-way merger. Within weeks, SpaceX acquired xAI in a deal worth roughly $250 billion. Weeks after that, Musk admitted xAI was “not built right” and needed to be rebuilt — after Tesla shareholders’ money was already in and SpaceX shareholders had swallowed the dilution.

4. Tesla-SpaceX merger (2026-2027?): Now Musk wants to combine the whole thing. If this happens, Tesla shareholders will be merging their $1.6 trillion company with an entity that Musk controls with 85% voting power — an entity that now includes the wreckage of Twitter, a money-losing AI company he admitted was built wrong, and a rocket business with an insane valuation that rests on ever-delayed Mars dreams and “data centers in space.”

Polymarket odds of a SpaceX-Tesla merger by the end of the year stand at 32%.

Read more …

But the media like that picture.

• No, Iran and China Are Not ‘Winning’ (Ben Shapiro)

For years, much of the American media has operated under a peculiar assumption: that the best way to confront adversaries such as China and Iran is to accommodate them. If the United States applies pressure, the narrative quickly becomes that America is overextended, losing leverage, or somehow empowering its enemies. That narrative has resurfaced during President Donald Trump’s confrontation with Tehran and Beijing. According to outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, both Iran and China are supposedly emerging stronger from the current conflict. It is a difficult claim to square with reality.


Iran’s senior military leadership has been decimated. Its regional proxy network has been weakened. Its economy remains in severe distress, and its military capabilities have been heavily degraded. Yet much of the media coverage treats Iran’s mere survival as evidence that it is somehow winning. The New York Times recently argued that Iran had “succeeded in confounding U.S. and Israeli expectations for a speedy victory,” suggesting that Tehran had created a kind of stalemate. But modern wars rarely end with formal surrender ceremonies or total collapse. By the standards of contemporary warfare, weakening an enemy’s military leadership, degrading its economy, and limiting its regional influence would traditionally be viewed as significant strategic gains.

Instead, media coverage often defines victory so narrowly that any continued resistance by Iran becomes proof of American failure. The Times also suggested that Iran had “maintained control” over the Strait of Hormuz. But if Iran truly controlled the strait in any meaningful sense, it would be freely exporting its own oil and profiting from commercial traffic through the region. It is doing neither. Iran’s threats against shipping lanes reflect desperation and leverage-seeking behavior, not dominance.

In fact, instability in the Strait creates problems not only for the United States and its allies but also for China, which depends heavily on imported oil flowing through the Gulf. That reality complicates the simplistic narrative that Beijing somehow benefits automatically from chaos in the Middle East. To be sure, the Trump administration has exercised restraint in certain areas, particularly regarding direct attacks on Iranian energy infrastructure. But that restraint reflects strategic calculation, not weakness. Completely destroying Iran’s energy sector could devastate the Iranian population and eliminate the economic foundation for any future moderate government.

The same pattern appears in coverage of China. The Post recently highlighted a reported intelligence assessment claiming that Beijing is exploiting the Iran conflict to maximize its advantage over the United States. The report pointed to Chinese weapons sales, diplomatic messaging and China’s ability to study American military operations. None of that is surprising. Great powers routinely study conflicts and attempt to exploit geopolitical openings. That does not mean they are winning. China still faces the same structural problems it faced before the conflict began: slowing economic growth, demographic decline, mounting debt and heavy dependence on imported energy. Prolonged instability in the Middle East threatens Beijing’s economy as much as Washington’s.

The Post also emphasized concerns that the conflict is depleting American munitions stockpiles that could be needed in a future Taiwan contingency. That concern is legitimate. But it reflects years of inadequate defense production and military downsizing under previous administrations, not some strategic triumph by Beijing. Critics of American foreign policy often argue that China can portray the United States as an aggressive power in decline. But China’s own behavior makes that argument difficult to sustain. Beijing continues threatening Taiwan, tightening control over Hong Kong, expanding military influence across the Pacific, and pressuring neighboring countries throughout Asia.

The idea that China is positioned to win a global moral argument against the United States requires overlooking much of Beijing’s conduct. Ultimately, the broader media narrative reflects a longstanding tendency in parts of the American press to interpret nearly every assertion of U.S. power as evidence of American weakness. Military action becomes proof of overreach. Economic pressure becomes recklessness. Adversaries surviving become adversaries winning.

But survival is not victory, and disruption is not dominance. Whatever criticisms one may have of Trump’s foreign policy, the central premise of his approach remains straightforward: American strength deters adversaries more effectively than accommodation does… History suggests that argument deserves more serious consideration than much of the current media coverage is willing to give it.

Read more …

“No, no, not at all. Not sanctions relief, no..”

• Trump Red Line: No Sanctions Relief Unless Iran Gives Up Uranium (ZH)

Trump Red Line
President Trump has reasserted his ‘red line’ for negotiations, centered on enriched uranium and the nuclear issue: President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that Iran would not get sanctions relief in exchange for giving up their highly enriched uranium. His comments come as the United States and Iran try to strike a deal to end the conflict that has engulfed the Middle East for the last three months.


“No, no, not at all. Not sanctions relief, no,” Trump told PBS News during a short phone call when asked if the current deal would mean that Iran would give up their highly enriched uranium in exchange for sanctions relief. Trump also in a televised Wednesday afternoon cabinet meeting said Iran is “intent on a deal” but that “Iran is negotiating on fumes.”

White House Rejects ‘Complete Fabrication’ Of Iran TV MOU Contents. The Trump administration has denied the morning Iranian state media reports on the contents of a current ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ (MOU) – which curiously had left out any reference whatsoever to the fate of Iran’s enriched uranium…

WHITE HOUSE: NOBODY SHOULD BELIEVE IRAN STATE MEDIA REPORTING

WHITE HOUSE CALLS REPORTED IRAN MOU A ‘COMPLETE FABRICATION’

An official underscored that it is a “complete fabrication” – and so it seems we are yet again back at square one, as Tehran has also said it is only engaged in ‘indirect’ contact with Washington at this point. There are further reports in US media that the Pentagon has drawn up a new target list, and has acknowledged that the Iranians have been able to better hide their missile launch sites. Also emerging are ambiguous reports of some kind of potential explosion incident at a petrochemical complex at Asaluyeh, in Iran’s Bushehr province. US side denounces Iranian state media reporting on current MOU draft and status:

Oil Dumps on MOU Headlines
As for the status of talks, the below headlines present the latest (and noticeably absent is the enriched uranium question, or release of Iranian funds). Bloomberg summarizes: “An unofficial draft of a US-Iran interim peace deal says maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz can return to normal within a month of the agreement being finalized, according to Iranian state television. It’s unclear how recent the draft, reported by IRIB News, is or whether the US has agreed to the terms.”

Read more …

“Iran thought they were going to outwait me, you know: “We’ll out wait him, he’s got the midterms.”

• President Trump: Iran is Negotiating on Fumes (CTH)

Earlier today, President Trump and Vice President JD Vance held a cabinet meeting in the White House. The assembled press pool was invited to attend. Again, President Trump being the most transparent administration in history.


President Trump walked through many of the policy agendas within the various cabinet offices, and each cabinet head responded by discussing what their department was doing to combat waste and fraud and align for the strongest economic outcome. At 26:39 of the video, Secretary of State Marco Rubio walks through the current status of engagement with Iran, Venezuela and Cuba. At 45:00 of the video, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth discusses the ongoing military operation in the Middle East, against Iran. At 54:11 Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent provides an update.

At 58:00 the media question session begins. WATCH:

“Iran thought they were going to outwait me, you know: “We’ll out wait him, he’s got the midterms.” I don’t care about the midterms, look what happened last night, that was the prelude to the midterms. They want very much to make a deal. So far, they haven’t gotten there. We’re not satisfied with it, but we will be — either that or we’ll have to just finish the job. The strait’s going to be open to everybody. It’s international waters. Nobody’s going to control it. We’re going to watch over it.”

“Iran is negotiating on fumes, but we’ll see what happens. We can make a good deal right now, but maybe not a great deal, and if it’s not a great deal, we’re not making it. Iran will receive no concessions or sanctions relief in exchange for handing over its highly enriched uranium. Iran cannot be allowed to possess a nuclear weapon because it will use it immediately and without hesitation.”

Read more …

“I believe Trump is going to have to call in the National Guard in certain states in order to get a fair election.”

• Democrat Voter Fraud in America is Legion – Dr. Jerome Corsi (USAW)

Dr. Jerome Corsi has a Harvard PhD in political science. He has written more than 50 books, and many of them became best-sellers. Dr. Corsi says the Democrat election and voter fraud days are caving in on them. The last time Dr. Corsi was on USAW, he said “Democrat Voter Fraud in America is Legion.” Former CIA Director John Brennan must have heard Dr. Corsi because two weeks later, the headline reads, “John Brennan: “Legion Of Professionals” In DOJ, FBI, CIA Are Still Resisting Trump’s Influence.” Was this a coincidence Brennan used the term “Legion”? Dr. Corsi says, “No, I think he is responding to the fact the resistance to Trump is overwhelming. He is balancing out the legitimate charge that the cheating is ‘Legion.’ He’s saying a ‘Legion’ of people are opposing Trump. That’s the real ‘Legion,’ and it’s Trump that is awful, and he’s the one blocking democracy. It’s ridiculous.”


So, former CIA Director Brennan is basically saying voter fraud is real? Dr. Corsi says, “Yes, he’s admitting it, and then he’s countering it saying the real ‘Legion’ are people opposing Trump. So, he’s trying to change the subject by using the same words. It doesn’t work. John Brennann is arguing that it is legitimate to oppose the President of the United States and the bureaucracy. . .. Therefore, he is legitimating insurrection.”

Dr. Corsi says the Democrat Party has changed into a communist party, and there is really nothing democratic about it. Dr. Corsi explains, “The design of the (Democrat) party is to destroy America. That was the original communist plan. Now, the Democrat Party is open to supporting Marxists for office and Islamists, radical Islamists like Mamdani (NYC Mayor). You have this fusion of radical Islam and Leftism because they both hate the United States. They are going on the theory of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Dr. Corsi goes on to say, “The Democrat Party has gone insane. They have no agenda, and all they want is power. It does not matter how they get it. They are increasingly becoming violent in the attempt to grasp power. That is becoming apparent to the American people. When the American people see that, the Democrat Party will have no reason for existing. It is rapidly proceeding to that point. . .. The Democrat Party has become rogue, anti-God, anti-family and an anti-life destruction engine. It’s become dangerous.”

Dr. Jerome Corsi points out the losses at the Supreme Court are making voter fraud more difficult with rulings that make it illegal to give extra days to count votes and forbidding redistricting on race alone. These are just a few of the ways Democrats are losing their voter fraud grip. There are also 130 lawsuits across 32 states to stop Dem voter fraud, and there are DOJ lawsuits to clean up voter rolls with 29 states that are blocking access. Dems are desperately trying to hold onto their voter fraud. Dr. Corsi says with the Senate refusing to pass the “Save Act,” President Trump will be forced to declare a national emergency, probably sooner than later. November midterms are a little more than five months away.

In closing, Dr. Corsi predicts, “President Trump is not going to allow the Democrats to steal the midterm elections and have two years more of impeachment after impeachment, which is what the Democrats have vowed to do. . .. I believe Trump is going to have to call in the National Guard in certain states in order to get a fair election.”

Read more …

From west to east.

• The Islamic Terrorist Conquest of West Africa (Lawrence A. Franklin)

The widened scope and quickened pace of the Islamic State’s military operations in the Sahel region — just below North Africa, roughly from Senegal to Sudan — threatens to alter the strategic orientation of the African continent. Efforts at countering terrorist operations in the Sahel, such as they were, have evidently failed. As all roads to Mali’s capital of Bamoko are now blocked, that country might be the first state to “go under.” On April 25, during a coordinated attack on several Malian cities, Muslim terrorists killed the country’s Minister of Defense. The terrorists then drove the Malian Army and its allied Russian mercenaries out of the country’s north.


The military juntas ruling Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have proven themselves as ineffective at combatting Islamic terrorist operations as the democracies that they overthrew. The increasing terrorist assaults across the Sahel and the jihadists’s determined efforts to take over Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have eroded the sovereignty of these states. The combat successes of the jihadists in the Sahel in March 2022 precipitated their elevation to the status of “Islamic State Sahel Province” within the hierarchy of the IS, and several other factors have facilitated the growth of the jihadist advance in the Sahel.

The cooling of the once global counterterrorist crusade — following an apparent shift in focus by the world’s great power rivalries, as well as fewer resources directed against the terrorist problem — left a vacuum that was adroitly filled by jihadist groups, which has reduced the pressure on Islamic State and Al Qaeda regional affiliates. Another situation that might have impacted negatively upon the Sahel’s overall security is the monumental migratory flow of Africans from sub-Saharan countries who pass through the Sahel to the Mediterranean, and the consequent stress this puts on the Sahel economies.

A third force eroding state sovereignty of Sahel countries is warfare waged by Al Qaeda terrorist affiliates that are rivals of the Islamic State, such as the Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM). JNIM also coordinates attacks with the Malian anti-government militia known as the Azawad Liberation Front. Jihadist violence has become ubiquitous in the Sahel, and recently expanded to include fighting between Islamic State and Al Qaeda. On April 2, a notable clash between these two rival terrorist networks occurred in western Niger. The Sahel now appears to be the epicenter of global terrorist violence. Sahel’s terrorist groups might also be acquiring confidence that they can achieve permanent and more ambitious goals in the near future.

slamic State units have also been exploiting the deteriorating security situation in the Sahel and in Nigeria’s northeastern states, which are already governed under Islamic sharia law. Islamic State probably feels buoyed by its easy success in recent battles with the Nigerian Army. On April 25, Al Qaeda terrorists conducted simultaneous attacks against several Malian urban areas. Their success might well tempt jihadist fighters to move into major urban areas in northern Nigeria and elsewhere in the Sahel. An additional worrisome trend indicates that terrorist violence is moving westward to Africa’s Atlantic coast.

State control increasingly is being eroded in the Sahel region, despite multilateral efforts to sustain the sovereignty of several states in the Sahel, such as the Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF) consisting of Chad, Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, and, until last year, Niger. The MNJTF had made significant strides in halting the advance of the Al Qaeda-affiliated Boko Haram terrorist group, particularly in Chad, but recently the overall scorecard is less conclusive. The MNJTF is sustained mostly by the continent-wide Organization of the African Union (OAU). While the MNJTF originally planned to field a 10,000-member OAU army, insufficient air cover, poor communications, and logistical problems have reduced the organization’s effectiveness.

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All this talk about democracy and transparency. Nothing is less transparent then the Vatican.

• Pope Leo Needs Trump to Tame AI (Daniel McCarthy)

Pope Leo is right about the need to make artificial intelligence answer to the human good. AI has to be subject to human moral responsibility. But whose? The pope warns against power accumulating in private hands: A few companies, led by a handful of executives and board members, control AI development. The hard question Leo’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” tries to answer is how to make AI accountable to public authority and the common good, not just the interests of its creators. This is where Leo runs into trouble — his view of politics is one-sided and decades out of touch.The encyclical is written in the language of 20th-century liberalism, with the United Nations and international bodies playing an outsize role.


“International organizations, particularly the United Nations, are essential instruments for promoting a civilization of love,” he writes, in the context of “negotiating shared regulations on the use of digital technologies, in order to protect civilians and the most vulnerable from ‘invisible’ yet real forms of violence.” Leo compares AI to the Tower of Babel, yet that image applies at least as well to the U.N. Citing the teachings of Saint John Paul II and Pius XII, Leo affirms, “the Church values democracy insofar as it guarantees the effective participation of citizens, enables them to elect and peacefully replace their leaders and prevents power from being monopolized by small elite groups motivated by particular or ideological interests.”

By that measure, how democratic are most international organizations? “In a world where data, computational resources and regulatory influence remain in the hands of a few, to speak of the common good means exposing this new form of epistemic, economic and political asymmetry and naming the new monopolies of AI,” writes Leo. Hear hear! The pope is absolutely correct about the need for transparency — if we want ethical AI, we have to know whose ethics are being written into the system. Ordinary people have to know who in the major tech companies is responsible for teaching these machines, instilling rules in them, and what those rules are.

And the public has to exercise due skepticism about the supposedly objective results that AI inquiries generate — the results conform to someone’s chosen criteria and expectations. The machines may generate their own answers; they don’t do their own moral thinking: “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean,” the pope writes. “Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences.”

These things must all be supplied by human beings, and as the pope says, we shouldn’t trust tech companies to come up with the right guardrails on their own. The technology is so powerful, its uses have to be debated by a well-informed public, and Big Tech must be answerable to higher authority. Yet Leo often downplays the role of elected national governments in this, favoring nebulous “new collaborative efforts” among “political leaders, labor organizations, the business world and the scientific community.” That’s consistent with his confidence in the cacophonous United Nations, as well as his thinking about “how legislative and regulatory decisions impact the dignity of work, shared prosperity, inequality reduction and environmental protection” in the context of AI.

It’s one smorgasbord after another — a welter of competing interests and agendas that can’t be brought into focus in time while AI races ahead. Leo appreciates the speed at which the technology is moving, but not the need for commensurate “dispatch” on the part of the political response. A policymaker has to be able to act quickly to keep up with AI and has to have one will and voice — in short, what’s needed is a strong executive backed by the popular authority of a national election. The age of AI has serious implications for the institutions of government, and it makes the presidency more important than ever. It’s not the United Nations or an amorphous assortment of interest groups Leo needs to appeal to; it’s President Trump.

“Magnifica Humanitas” doesn’t do that. The pope would not, and should not, trim Catholic Social Teaching down to suit Trump; on economics, war and much else, there are sharp differences. Yet Leo’s encyclical goes beyond the necessary points of disagreement to embrace a broadly liberal and internationalist agenda — even including global warming on his ideological checklist. If commonsense AI regulation is going to succeed, not only does it need Trump’s support, it has to have his voters’ backing, too. Leo needs to learn to speak their language, if he wants to stop AI running away with our lives.

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Will we risk the entire global financial system?

• Russian Court Orders Euroclear To Pay €200 Billion (RT)

A Moscow arbitration court has granted the Bank of Russia’s request for the immediate enforcement of a ruling ordering Euroclear to pay around €200 billion ($233 billion), RBK reported on Tuesday, citing lawyers for the Belgian clearing house. Ukraine’s Western backers froze about $300 billion in Russian sovereign assets after the escalation of the conflict between Moscow and Kiev in 2022, most of it held at the Brussels-based depository. While the EU has so far stopped short of seizing the assets outright, Brussels has transferred some €6.6 billion in profits generated from frozen Russian central bank assets to a fund for Ukraine since 2024.


Moscow has said any use of its frozen assets would amount to theft, also warning it could retaliate by seizing about €200 billion in Western assets held in Russia, though it has so far stopped short of doing so. Commenting on the latest ruling, lawyers for Euroclear, Sergey Savelyev and Maksim Kulkov, claimed to RBK that its right to a fair trial had been violated but declined further comment due to the closed nature of the proceedings. The Bank of Russia described the ruling as fair, noting that it takes into account not only the ongoing nature of the violation, but also the risk that any delay in enforcement would prolong the restoration of the violated rights.

The initial ruling ordering Euroclear to pay €200 billion was issued by the arbitration court last week. Commenting at the time, Euroclear called it unfounded, adding that such claims are not recognized under EU law. It also pledged to appeal the verdict. Shortly after filing a lawsuit against Euroclear in December, the Bank of Russia said it could expand its legal action over frozen assets beyond the Belgian-based depository to include other European banks that also hold its funds.

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Putin will have to flatten Kiev after all.

• Ukraine War Enters ‘A New Phase’ (Stephen Green)

“Russia is considering limiting exports of diesel and jet fuel,” Bloomberg and other sources reported Tuesday, “as refinery run rates fall to multi-year lows amid Ukraine’s escalating attacks.” An Interfax source claimed that the decision to ban exports is at “an advanced stage,” but no date has been set. If it comes to pass, that would be bad for diesel prices and inflation right here at home, but worse for Moscow’s finances. Just the fact that the Kremlin is considering an export ban is more evidence that Kyiv’s drone campaign is increasingly effective — against Russia’s energy production at home, and closer to the frontlines in Ukraine.


The brutal math is that most months this year, Ukraine managed to kill or wound more Russian soldiers than Moscow was able to recruit. After nearly four-and-a-half years of remorseless attritional warfare, that’s not a good place to be. And it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. ISW’s George Barros said on Monday, “The war in Ukraine has entered a new phase.” Well, maybe take a statement like that one with several grains of salt. While ISW’s reporting is rock solid — everything they post in their daily Russo-Ukraine War updates is open-source and verifiable — the organization’s analysis can be somewhat (ahem) less reliable.

Estimates vary, but ISW believes that Russian forces suffered a net loss of territory in April, while others claim it happened in April and in February. There are still a few days of fighting to go in May, but Russia is believed to maybe have lost a little ground again this month.nThrough the end of April, Russian advances in 2026 average about 2.9 km2, per day, down sharply from 9.76 km2 per day in early 2025. Russian casualties are much higher, too.

Two things seem to have changed. One is that Ukraine finally has enough mid-range drones to do to Russian forces what Russian forces spent 2025 doing to Ukraine: interdicting soldiers and logistics well behind the front lines “by fielding new technologies such as the US-made Hornet strike UAV, among other systems,” as Barros put it. The other is that Ukraine is now systematically going after Russian fuel trucks, further complicating Moscow’s logistical problems.

Trent wonders if the losses are “enough to cause fuel shortages, fuel rationing & the shutdown of civilian motor traffic between Crimea and Russia?” Regardless, Kyiv spent 2025 giving up ground, yes, but also destroying Russian air defenses faster than Russian industry can replace them. The bloody results speak for themselves on the ground, and in Moscow’s concerns over fuel exports. With no end in sight to this stupid war, there’s no doubt in my mind that Barros is correct when he says that “Ukraine’s advantage in intermediate range strikes is notably not permanent,” and that “Russia will very likely eventually develop countermeasures to mitigate Ukraine’s advantages.”

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“..200 billion in fraudulent PPP loans that the Biden administration tried to hide, and forgive, and sweep under the rug,”

• Small Business Administration: $200 Billion In Fradulent Pandemic Loans (JTN)

Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler said that the agency found $200 billion in fraudulent Paycheck Protection Program loans, which were intended to allow businesses to pay staff during the pandemic. “At the SBA, we found $200 billion in fraudulent PPP loans that the Biden administration tried to hide, and forgive, and sweep under the rug,” Loeffler said during President Donald Trump’s Cabinet meeting at Camp David on Wednesday.


She said that $22 billion in those fraudulent loans have been turned over to the U.S. Treasury and Department of Justice for collections and prosecution, and people who have been convicted of fraud are serving prison sentences. Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler said that the agency found $200 billion in fraudulent Paycheck Protection Program loans, which were intended to allow businesses to pay staff during the pandemic.

“At the SBA, we found $200 billion in fraudulent PPP loans that the Biden administration tried to hide, and forgive, and sweep under the rug,” Loeffler said during President Donald Trump’s Cabinet meeting at Camp David on Wednesday. She said that $22 billion in those fraudulent loans have been turned over to the U.S. Treasury and Department of Justice for collections and prosecution, and people who have been convicted of fraud are serving prison sentences.

Loeffler said that, because small businesses are some of the biggest taxpayers in the U.S., they bear a lot of the impact from fraud. “They show up every day. They work hard to provide for their employees, to build their businesses. They’re doing it the honest way. And they see fraudsters taking from the American people. It’s taxpayer money,” she said. The PPP provided government-backed loans to help small businesses keep their workforces employed during the pandemic. The program stopped accepting new applications on May 31, 2021.

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Quo Vadis, Ottawa?

• Two Countries in the World Retaliated Against Us, China and Canada (CTH)

I never quite understood just how controlled the information flow is inside Canada until about two years ago when we began closely monitoring Canadian positioning for the upcoming USMCA (CUSMA) renegotiation/cancellation. It quickly became obvious the majority of Canadians have no idea why it is almost a certainty the U.S. would exit the trilateral arrangement and position for a bilateral free trade agreement.


In the two years that have passed, now we see a few Canadians starting to realize the core issues of trade conflict that make any FTA between the U.S. and Canada almost impossible. The largest issue centers around Canada’s net-zero carbon legislation that now completely disconnects them from aligned North American energy policy between the U.S. and Mexico.

A trilateral agreement requires core alignment on industrial manufacturing, and that requires similar abilities & similar energy policy. You cannot make steel, iron and aluminum without coal and gas. You need joules for heavy industrial manufacturing that cannot be achieved without exploiting coal, gas or oil (carbon materials). Canada’s energy policy no longer aligns with industrial manufacturing. This core issue cannot be resolved at the current level of energy policy in Canada.

There are other issues like Canadian trade deals with China, non-tariff barriers, legislated rules over intellectual property and other points of significant friction that make alignment within North America challenging. However, the energy component makes compatible trade impossible.

In the interview below, U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra appears on a podcast with David Leis, for a blunt conversation about trade, pipelines, critical minerals, China, and why the U.S. is growing frustrated with Canada’s direction. At the end Hoekstra even explains why he is doing Canadian podcasts; because information within Canada is restricted by the government control of media – and that explains why most Canadians are clueless about the issues.

I’ve prompted the interview to the point that gets into the details. If you are interested to be fully understanding of what is coming, this is a solid reference point. Also, if you have financial investments associated with Canada or any system that is connected to the economic relationship between the U.S. and Canada, you need to watch this interview to proactively defend your financial interests. VIDEO PROMPTED:

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Watch it or listen to this roughly 30 minutes (prompted) as you cook, drive or go about your day. But listen to it and see the disconnect between Canada and the USA as outlined. Things are going to get much worse in this relationship as the finality of it all suddenly starts to sink in north of the border with the average Canadian.

Additionally, there’s another short segment on U.S-Canadian trade as discussed by U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer recently at a Council on Foreign Relations event.

QUESTION: “How serious is the fissures? Are the fissures with Canada, the rupture with Canada? And can you envisage USMCA being transformed into separate agreement with Mexico, separate agreement with Canada, or no agreement with Canada?”

USTR GREER: “Well, I would say that, you know, the team right now is in Mexico. My team, and they’re negotiating with Mexico on a bilateral basis. I speak with some regularity to my Canadian counterparts.

Our sense is that we have with Canada, you know, some some trade challenges, which, you know, to some people, you know, some people may think, oh, those are just irritants to us. They’re, they’re significant, and the reality is, we’ve spent the past year and a half going to countries, telling them we have to have some level of tariff on the globe to deal with this giant death that we’re dealing with, to try to reshore, etc.

And, and most countries have, you know, I know grudgingly, but they said we understand your policy, we understand so we’re going to negotiate with you, we’re going to remove some of these tariffs and non tariff barriers, etc. Canada’s approach has been different.

They like China retaliated against the United States. Two countries in the world retaliated against us, People’s Republic of China and Canada, so they’re just, they’re just in a different spot, and it’s, it’s hard to see necessarily where that ends.”

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“$40 Million in Gold Bars, $2 Million Cash and 35 Rolexes”

• Home of 20-Year CIA Senior Manager Raided: $40 Million in Gold Bars (CTH)

An interesting arrest that might warrant some background material prior to today’s events. Keep in mind there are several indicted individuals from Venezuela and Mexico now said to be cooperating with the DOJ and federal law enforcement. In addition to former Venezuela dictator Nicolas Maduro in the Southern District of New York, we should also note three Mexican officials connected to the Sinaloa cartel previously turned themselves in to U.S. federal officials and are said to be cooperating.


Earlier this month, Gerardo Mérida, a retired Mexican army general who served as public-security secretary in northwestern Sinaloa state surrendered in Tucson, Arizona. Enrique Inzunza Cazárez, who is also facing drug trafficking and weapon charges, was taken into custody in San Diego by the DEA. Sinaloa businessman Enrique Diaz Vega – another name from the SDNY indictment – also turned himself into U.S. authorities in Arizona.

As you read this story, also keep in mind the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, falls under the authority of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and that agency oversees a background check program, known as “continuous vetting.” According to NBC News a 20-year veteran manger within the CIA named David Rush has been arrested on suspicion of embezzlement and theft. The CIA operative was reported to have been referred to the FBI by CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

(VIA NBC) WASHINGTON — A former CIA senior officer with top secret-level clearance has been accused of secretly stashing millions of dollars in gold bars in his home that he said he needed for “work-related expenses,” according to court documents and two people familiar with his employment history.

David Rush, who held a management position, was charged with criminal theft of public money in a complaint filed last week in the Eastern District of Virginia. His lawyer didn’t respond to a request for comment. He was also accused of lying to his employers about his background for nearly two decades. Asked about Rush’s case, a CIA spokesperson said in a statement joint statement with the FBI that the FBI had arrested a person after a referral from the agency.

“After a CIA internal investigation identified potential violations of the law, CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred the information to the FBI for a law enforcement investigation,” the written statement said. “The FBI is working closely with our partners at the CIA and the Department of Justice as we continue to investigate this matter fully. We are committed to following the facts, ensuring accountability, and pursuing justice in accordance with the law.”

[…] It wasn’t clear how the investigation into Rush began, and it also wasn’t clear when he left the CIA. His home was raided just last week.

From November through March, Rush made several requests for funds, including for foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars, according to an affidavit filed in federal court by an FBI agent investigating the case. In a storage space near his office, investigators found only a portion of the funds. On May 18, federal agents searched Rush’s home and seized roughly 300 gold bars worth more than $40 million, court documents said. Agents also seized about $2 million in U.S. currency and 35 luxury watches, mostly Rolexes, according to the affidavit.

The affidavit alleges Rush knowingly took part of the money he requested for work-related expenses to his home for personal gain. The court filing didn’t specify which agency employed Rush, but the two people familiar with his employment history said he was with the CIA. (link) Separate allegations in the complaint accuse Rush of falsifying his background over nearly two decades in dealings with government employers.

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She’s not gone yet.

• President Trump Praises DNI Tulsi Gabbard for Her Incredible Work (CTH)

During a cabinet meeting today at the White House, President Trump took the opportunity to thank Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, for her exceptional work and focus within the intelligence system to organize strong reforms that will be around for a long time. DNI Tulsi Gabbard has indeed been a transformative member of the cabinet, working through her office and agency while partnered with CIA Director John Ratcliffe and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio. Mrs. Gabbard is leaving on June 30 to stand beside her husband Abraham as he battles a bone cancer diagnosis. WATCH:


It is expected that DNI Gabbard will deliver more information to the American public through a series of declassifications prior to the end of her tenure. There is no immediate discussion of her replacement and Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Aaron Lukas, will serve as Acting Director of National Intelligence following her departure.

REMINDER: There will likely be a great deal of rumor and speculation about a different permanent replacement. One name sure to surface within the discussion is Devin Nunes, but I strongly doubt the former Chairman of the HPSCI would desire or accept the position.If, and that is a very big ‘if’, Devin Nunes was to accept the role, that would indicate a remarkable change in his opinion about the overall intelligence apparatus. Therefore, I doubt this is an option. Devin Nunes believes in the historic fidelity of the intelligence institutions. As a result, the DNI position has seemed smaller and less significant.

The only way Nunes would take the job is if two things changed. First, he now believed the construct of the United States intelligence apparatus is teetering on the edge of irreversible corruption (he did not previously hold this position); and second, if he sees that Tulsi has now proven the power of the DNI in the intelligence apparatus. As readers here will fully understand, until DNI Gabbard that power was never fully extended. Former House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) member Elise Stefanik will likely be another name. She would have the full support of the Susie Wiles grouping. The same network who advocated for Mike Waltz to be National Security Advisor.

However, Stefanik would greatly please Laura Loomer, Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro; while conversely providing fuel for Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly antagonisms. Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn would likely be another name. Unfortunately, Flynn’s judgement is not stellar, and while he has been supportive of Mrs. Gabbard it’s not likely President Trump wants that kind of Flynn drama or the issues he brings with him for a nomination. That said, if the political calculation is to fuel the core base, Flynn might stand a chance at nomination. But don’t overthink it, Flynn would be of no value in the DNI position for anything of substance. Again, weak judgement (led to his former demise) and grifting tendencies.

Two other names of note: Scott Perry from Pennsylvania who was a target of the FBI/IC for his support of President Trump, and Rick Crawford the current Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, a gang of eight member. The IC has nothing to fear from either of these names. They are essentially Mike Waltz clones, though to be fair I might be a little harsh on Perry.

Rick Crawford, as HPSCI Chairman, allowed Tulsi Gabbard to review the Atkinson transcript. Still, he didn’t act until Gabbard asked to see it and later pushed to declassify it. While he had the authority to handle it himself, like many congressional IC members in both the House and Senate, he seemed wary of challenging the very system they’re tasked with overseeing. [TIP: If whoever’s name it is currently falls under the IC oversight mechanism, they probably fear the “seven ways from Sunday” group, unlike Tulsi Gabbard. Accept this reality and adjust your perspective accordingly.]

GOPe types and “CONservative” influencers might also bring up Trey Gowdy or former HPSCI Chairman Mike Rogers. If either of these names show up, there’s a problem. And anyone advancing these names…. well, they’re the problem. One name that would seem to fit the role and responsibilities would be former Congressman Dan Bishop, currently serving as a U.S. Attorney in North Carolina. Bishop was a member of the House Subcommittee on Govt Weaponization that frustratingly went nowhere as it was designed to fail by House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan. Bishop himself was frustrated by the lack of assertiveness within the sub-committee structure. There’s no immediate need for any speculative guesswork. ADNI Aaron Lukas will likely do a solid job.

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https://twitter.com/NiohBerg/status/2059207985797169529?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle July 17 2025

Jul 172025
 
 July 17, 2025  Posted by at 8:51 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  41 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Portrait of Dora Maar 1943

 

• Trump Arms Ukraine. Russia Doesn’t Care (Kornev)
• Trump’s Tariff Revenues Reach Record Highs (Salgado)
• Federal Judge Takes Control of US Government (Spivak)
• Zelensky Not A Dependable Partner For US – Former Trump Adviser (RT)
• EU Is Funding The ‘Death’ Of Ukraine – Zakharova (RT)
• The Conflict in Ukraine Is Widening out of Control (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Kremlin Urges Trump To Pressure Kiev (RT)
• Zelensky Urges Trump To Revisit Ukrainian Missile Proposal (RT)
• Trump Sprang Ukraine Surprise On NATO States – Reuters (RT)
• The Battle For The Middle East Is Going Global (Sadygzade)
• MTG Tries to Stop US Funding of Israeli Aggression (Paul Craig Roberts)
• India, China, Brazil Facing ‘Consequences’ For Russia Trade Ties – Rutte (RT)
• EU Plan To Move Frozen Russian Money Would Be ‘Expropriation’ – Euroclear (RT)
• Adam Schiff Faces Federal Criminal Referral Over ‘Mortgage Fraud’ (Margolis)
• EU General Court Orders Le Pen Family To Give EU €300k (RT)

 

 

euro

GMO

Beck

 

 

 

 

“Russia’s layered air defense network, including the S-300, S-400, and S-500 systems, was designed with threats like ATACMS in mind. While a 100% interception rate is unrealistic, operational experience shows a high level of effectiveness..”

• Trump Arms Ukraine. Russia Doesn’t Care (Kornev)

On Monday, July 14, US President Donald Trump announced that he had decided to supply Patriot missile systems to Kiev, with the first deliveries expected in the coming days. The key element of this move lies not just in the type of weapons, but in the logistics behind them. While the deliveries will be formally carried out by Washington, the funding will come from NATO allies. The first batteries will be transferred from Germany, which will later be compensated by new shipments from the United States. In essence, a new mechanism is taking shape: American weapons, paid for with European money. But what does this actually mean in practical terms? Is this a major escalation, a political gesture, or simply a reshuffling of existing commitments? And more importantly, how will this affect the battlefield itself?

According to Trump, Ukraine will receive 17 Patriot systems – a statement that immediately raises questions. Most importantly, it’s unclear exactly what the administration considers a “system.” If he meant 17 launchers, that would translate into just three or four full batteries, since each battery includes a radar, command post, and between four and eight launchers. This would not represent a dramatic escalation, but rather allow the Ukrainian Armed Forces to replenish and rotate previously supplied batteries.A more ambitious interpretation would assume that Trump meant 17 full batteries. That would be the single largest delivery of air defense systems to Ukraine to date – several times more than what the country currently fields. While the US has the industrial capacity and inventory to provide this quantity, such a generous transfer would be uncharacteristic of Trump’s approach.

His goal is to make a visible impact, not to set records. The more plausible scenario is that this is a European-funded replacement for earlier systems that have been damaged or expended. In parallel with the Patriot announcement, details began to emerge about long-range missiles. According to The Washington Post, the Trump administration is considering removing all restrictions on Ukraine’s use of ATACMS missiles to strike targets deep inside Russian territory. It’s worth clarifying that Ukraine already possesses such missiles. Since 2023, its forces have deployed ATACMS variants with a range of up to 190 km, and since spring of 2024, longer-range versions capable of reaching 300 km. The change lies not in the hardware itself, but in the potential shift in how it can be used.

Up until now, Washington has forbidden Kiev from using these weapons to strike internationally recognized Russian territory. According to American press reports, those limits may now be dropped. While this move would entail risks, it doesn’t represent a strategic game-changer. Russia’s layered air defense network, including the S-300, S-400, and S-500 systems, was designed with threats like ATACMS in mind. While a 100% interception rate is unrealistic, operational experience shows a high level of effectiveness. The threat is real, but hardly decisive.

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“Tariff revenues reached a record level of $113 billion, representing a significant financial boost and hitting a new high for this year..”

“Compared to last June, this year’s figures are up 301%..”

• Trump’s Tariff Revenues Reach Record Highs (Salgado)

Revenues from Donald Trump’s tariffs have hit record highs as of the start of this month, as the president announced more tariffs, especially on hostile countries. Tariff revenues reached a record level of $113 billion, representing a significant financial boost and hitting a new high for this year, Fox Business reported. Democrats, who prefer taxing Americans to tariffing foreigners, have bewailed the tariffs nonstop, but Trump’s optimism about the revenues seems to be justified so far. We need fewer taxes on Americans and more tariffs on belligerent nations that hate the USA. And companies that dislike the tariffs should bring operations back to America.

A June 30 press release from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) previously boasted that the majority of the tariff revenues collected this year are due to Trump‘s tariffs, with which he is leveling the international trade playing field and penalizing hostile countries. Fox News added more details on the newest numbers: The U.S. received more than $27 billion in customs duties in June, the highest figure so far this year, according to the Treasury Department’s “Customs and Certain Excise Taxes” data. Compared to last June, this year’s figures are up 301%. In January, tariff revenues hovered around $7.9 billion and more than doubled in April to $16.3 billion. Meanwhile, July is on track to continue as a revenue contributor for the federal government.

Even before the newest revenue numbers were announced, DHS was celebrating the tariffs’ success. “We are proud to help President Trump make America richer and reverse a broken trade system that resulted in millions of jobs shipped overseas and made us dependent on foreign adversaries for essential goods,” said an unnamed senior official. “This administration will always put the American first.” The U.S. slapped all the European Union countries and Mexico with 27% tariffs this month, Fox stated, and Trump imposed a particularly hefty 50% tariff on Brazil for attacking freedom of speech and undermining free elections. “Goods transshipped to evade this 50% Tariff will be subject to that higher Tariff,” Trump wrote the Brazilian president Lula before warning, “If for any reason you decide to raise your Tariffs, then, whatever number you choose to raise them by, will be added onto the 50% that we charge.”

Many countries around the world have long imposed significant tariffs on American goods while demanding no reciprocal tariffs on their goods. Trump was determined to change that rigged and unjust system. That naturally infuriated the countries that had become accustomed to taking advantage of us, and Democrats always take part in those criticizing in America, but the change was actually long overdue. Trump also aims to bring manufacturing back to America and encourage both companies and customers to prefer goods made in America. As Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick reminded anti-tariff gripers, “Remember, there’s a ZERO percent tariff on all goods made in the USA!”

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Lawfare squared and cubed. Congress may not approve, nor may the Supreme court, but this judge is determined to find a way.

• Federal Judge Takes Control of US Government (Spivak)

Just days after the Supreme Court again made it clear that the separation of powers is sacrosanct, Indira Talwani, an Obama appointed federal judge in Massachusetts, has taken the unprecedented step of ordering the government to fund Planned Parenthood, purporting to enjoin implementation of a portion of the Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) passed by Congress. The BBB imposed a one-year ban on state Medicaid payments to health care nonprofits that offer abortions and also received more than $800,000 in federal funding in 2023. Three days after the president signed the BBB into law, Planned Parenthood sought a temporary restraining order (TRO). Without hearing from the government, complying with federal rules, or even providing an explanation, within hours after the filing, Talwani issued a TRO for at least 14 days that requires the government to spend money Congress declined to appropriate.

Four days later, the administration asked Talwani to dissolve the TRO because of its obvious infirmities. Instead, she doubled down, issuing an amended TRO that satisfied the technical requirements she had previously ignored. I work with Planned Parenthood’s very capable lead lawyers. Without the facts or the law on their side, they did the right thing. They found a far-left federal judge who has repeatedly ruled against the Trump administration and is willing to create a constitutional crisis to advance a political cause. Numerous Supreme Court decisions explain that merely because something is legal does not mean that Congress must fund it, or continue to do so. Just a few weeks ago, in Medina v. Planned Parenthood, the Supreme Court rejected Planned Parenthood’s challenge to South Carolina’s right to exclude Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program.

For more than 40 years, the Hyde Amendment has generally prohibited federal funding for abortion, and the court has repeatedly held that the government is under no contrary obligations (e.g., Maher v. Roe and Harris v. McRae). Talwani’s order violates Article I of the Constitution, which could not be more clear: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” Article I vests the power to authorize spending exclusively in Congress. In OPM v. Richmond (1989), the Supreme Court confirmed that the Appropriations Clause conveys a “straightforward and explicit command” that no money “can be paid out of the Treasury unless it has been appropriated by an act of Congress.”

There is no basis in the Constitution or any Supreme Court decision to support the right of a court – any court – to interfere in congressional decisions to fund, or cease funding, a private organization. To the contrary, in Rust v. Sullivan (1991), the Supreme Court held that “the Government has no constitutional duty to subsidize an activity merely because the activity is constitutionally protected.”Planned Parenthood’s main argument is the equivalent of jury nullification. Because it is the dominant provider of abortion services in the United States, limiting its ability to carry out its mission would deprive women of access to such services. Even if true, that is a political argument unsuccessfully made during the last election and during the debate over the BBB.

Planned Parenthood asserts that the BBB is an unconstitutional bill of attainder because the criteria for defunding effectively single it out. That absurd argument flies in the face of an unbroken line of cases that apply the Article I prohibition on bills of attainder only to criminal or quasi-criminal punishment. Congress often funds, or defunds, individuals and organizations. In Nixon v. Administrator of General Services (1971), the Supreme Court rejected the proposition that an individual or defined group is subject to a bill of attainder merely because Congress singles them out. Talwani did not mention bills of attainder in her amended TRO. Planned Parenthood also claims that defunding its efforts constitutes viewpoint retaliation under the First Amendment, and a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fifth Amendment.

In Rust, the Supreme Court rejected similar claims. In its papers, Planned Parenthood cites no Supreme Court case compelling Congress to appropriate spending on these grounds. Nonetheless, in her amended TRO, Talwani relied on the First and Fifth Amendments to justify issuance of the TRO. She also rejected the government’s concern that it would be harmed if it paid money to Planned Parenthood, because, she averred, the government likely would instead use the funds to pay another provider. By that logic, a mugger is only taking money that his victim would probably spend on something else. The first hearing is on Friday. If Talwani does not relent, she can expect an unpleasant rebuke from appellate courts.

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“..in order for the US-Ukraine partnership to work, Kiev “must become transparent and corruption-free.”

• Zelensky Not A Dependable Partner For US – Former Trump Adviser (RT)

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky and his chief of staff Andrey Yermak are not “dependable” partners for the US, former Trump adviser Steve Cortes has said, pointing to transparency and corruption issues in Kiev. Cortes made the statement in a reply on X to Ukrainian journalist Diana Panchenko, who had stressed the importance of knowing “the difference between helping Ukraine and helping Zelensky.” She claimed that “Ukrainians want peace” while “Zelensky wants money and to stay in power.” “Exactly,” Cortes responded, stating that in order for the US-Ukraine partnership to work, Kiev “must become transparent and corruption-free.” “Yermak and Zelensky are not dependable, believable partners for the United States,” he said.

Cortes, who previously served as a senior adviser to President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance, has long been critical of the Ukrainian government’s internal practices. Earlier this month, he published a commentary warning of waning trust in Kiev’s leadership, singling out Yermak as a central figure in what he described as systemic corruption, calling him Ukraine’s “co-president” and accusing him of shielding officials under criminal investigation. Cortes argued that Yermak has become a nuisance in UK-Ukraine relations, noting bipartisan frustration with the aide. He specifically cited Yermak’s role in the dismissal of General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, a popular and respected military leader, while officials like Deputy Prime Minister Aleksey Chernyshov—who has faced corruption allegations—remained in office. Chernyshov, however, was ultimately sacked earlier this week amid an ongoing cabinet reshuffle.

The former adviser’s remarks echo longstanding concerns expressed by Donald Trump, who has also described Zelensky as the “primary obstacle” to peace and has repeatedly criticized the scale of US support for Ukraine and the lack of accountability for the billions of dollars sent to Kiev. In March, Trump adviser David Sacks also called for a full audit of US aid to Ukraine, claiming there had been “tons of stories” about corruption and the misuse of American weapons. He said the only remaining question was “how much” had been stolen, calling Kiev’s leadership massively corrupt.

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“.. it’s a bit like being told to foot the bill for a meal someone else enjoys, only for them to end up dead afterward. Am I correct?”

• EU Is Funding The ‘Death’ Of Ukraine – Zakharova (RT)

The European Union is funding the “death” of Ukraine by paying for weapons sent to Kiev, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said. On Monday, US President Donald Trump unveiled a proposal to continue delivering American weapons to Ukraine at the expense of EU taxpayers. Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, said that the proposal was welcome, but that Trump should not take credit for aid unless the US is willing to “share the burden.” “Was Kaja starting to figure things out?” Zakharova wrote on social media on Wednesday. “Let’s help her: it’s a bit like being told to foot the bill for a meal someone else enjoys, only for them to end up dead afterward. Am I correct?”

Moscow has consistently argued that no amount of Western military aid will make it change its core goals in the conflict. The Kremlin has described the EU’s approach as an attempt to prolong the war “to the last Ukrainian” and harm Russia, using Ukraine as a proxy. Trump has emphasized that arms sales to Ukraine are a business opportunity for the US. His administration maintains the proposal is naturally shifting responsibility for Ukraine’s future to the EU, which it says has the most to gain or lose.

”Europe wants to take the traditional defense of Europe. They should,” US Ambassador to NATO Matt Whitaker told Fox News. “The reality right now in Europe is they cannot manufacture the armaments required on the battlefield of Ukraine, or on the battlefield if there is a potential war in Europe.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday that the EU was placing “improper pressure” on Trump to adopt a more pro-Ukrainian stance. He warned that escalating sanctions on Moscow – something Trump also threatened – would ultimately harm EU member states more than Russia.

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“The dilemma is that the US weapons industry is too powerful for peace.”

• The Conflict in Ukraine Is Widening out of Control (Paul Craig Roberts)

Since early 2022, more than three years ago, my theme has been that Russian President Putin’s unwillingness or inability to bring the conflict with Ukraine to a quick end will result in an ever-widening war culminating in a major conflagration far beyond Donbas and Ukraine. It was obvious to me, but not to Putin and to my critics, that by refusing to use sufficient force to end the conflict Putin was guaranteeing the increased participation of Washington and NATO in the conflict. Over the years of the conflict I have provided numerous updates on “The Ever-widening War.”

The war has widened into an attack on Russian strategic forces and recent talk of providing Ukraine with missiles to attack Moscow. According to news reports, Europe is preparing for war with Russia. The conflict has already gone far beyond Donbas. The point of a major conflagration cannot be far off. One Russian commentator says “World War III has already begun.” Putin, and as far as I can tell, few in Russia understand the Zionist neoconservatives doctrine of American hegemony. It seems that Putin has never heard of the three decades old Wolfowitz doctrine. Putin himself admits that he has only now understood the situation that confronts Russia. As John Helmer reports:

“Putin has just admitted this in a television interview on July 14. “I thought that the contradictions with the West were primarily ideological,” he said. “It seemed logical at the time – Cold War inertia, different views of the world, values, the organization of society. But even when the ideology disappeared, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the same, almost routine deviation from Russia’s interests continued. And it was not because of ideas [ideology], but because of the pursuit of advantages – geopolitical, economic, strategic. The world respects only those who can protect themselves. Until we show that we are an independent and sovereign power that stands behind our interests, there will be no room for anyone to treat us as equals.”

President Trump, stopped by the Ruling Establishment from his domestic agenda, has turned to foreign affairs where he can remain in the limelight by bullying other countries to conform to his edicts. He has now given Putin 50 days to comply. To comply with what? With Zelensky’s demands? What is the agreement for which Trump demands Putin’s consent? As the conflict is between Washington and Russia, the agreement has to be made by Trump and Putin. Putin has made it clear that the agreement must deal with “the root cause” of the conflict, which is the absence of a mutual security agreement. But if Washington is set on hegemony, there can be no mutual security agreement.

Here is the real situation: Two heavily nuclear armed governments are both in denial of reality. Putin and Lavrov are governed by their illusion that the difference between Russia and the West can be resolved through words. Washington is dangerous because the Zionist neoconservative doctrine of American hegemony is institutionalized. To avoid the brewing conflagration, all Washington and the EU need to do is to agree with Russia to a mutual security treaty. Russia only wants threats off its borders. Russia has no territorial ambitions unless Russia is driven to them by security threats. Trump wants America to make money. How does America make money when US aggression cuts the West off from the majority of the world? The only reason for BRICS is Washington’s hostility to Russia, China, and Iran. The dilemma is that the US weapons industry is too powerful for peace.

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“..sanctions would be imposed on Russia and its trade partners unless hostilities are halted within 50 days. No similar deadline was issued for Ukraine.”

• Kremlin Urges Trump To Pressure Kiev (RT)

The Kremlin urges all nations to push Kiev to reach a negotiated settlement in the Ukraine conflict and hopes US President Donald Trump is privately doing so, spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday.Earlier in the week, Trump unveiled a proposal under which NATO member states supporting Kiev would purchase American-made weapons for Ukraine’s fight against Russia. He also warned that sanctions would be imposed on Russia and its trade partners unless hostilities are halted within 50 days. No similar deadline was issued for Ukraine. ”There were a lot of remarks about [Trump’s] disappointment [with Russian President Vladimir Putin], but we want to hope that in parallel to that, pressure is being applied to the Ukrainian side,” Peskov told journalists. “It appears that the Ukrainian side takes all statements of support as signals to continue war, not as signals for peace.”

In public comments, Trump has alternated between assigning blame to Moscow and Kiev for the lack of progress toward his desired outcome in the conflict. His latest statements have focused on criticizing Russia. In May, Ukraine agreed to resume direct negotiations with Russia after the Trump administration indicated it expected such a step. However, talks stalled after the early June meeting, with Kiev declaring the process “exhausted” and indicating it had only participated to avoid appearing dismissive of Trump’s diplomatic agenda. Moscow has said it remains committed to achieving its core objectives in Ukraine but prefers a diplomatic solution if possible.

Trump’s threats were welcomed by hardliners in the US and Europe. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina issued a veiled threat of military action, writing on X that “if Putin and others are wondering what happens on day 51, I would suggest they call the Ayatollah.” Graham referenced Iran’s supreme leader, whose country was targeted last month by US and Israeli airstrikes. Officials claimed the attacks were necessary to dismantle Tehran’s nuclear infrastructure and prevent the development of a nuclear weapon, a goal that Iran denies pursuing.

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“..Kiev asked the US to station nuclear-capable Tomahawk cruise missiles in Ukraine..”

Great idea. Nazis with nukes.

• Zelensky Urges Trump To Revisit Ukrainian Missile Proposal (RT)

Vladimir Zelensky has called on US President Donald Trump to reconsider Ukraine’s proposal to host long-range American missiles. The appeal comes in the wake of Trump’s pledge this week to provide advanced weapons systems to Kiev, with the caveat that the costs will be covered by other nations. In an interview with Newsmax on Tuesday, Zelensky appealed for even more military aid, referencing part of his “victory plan,” which he had previously presented to both President Joe Biden and Trump in the lead-up to the 2024 US presidential election. ”I remember that we had a powerful deterrence package before President Trump became president. I wanted America to sell us such a package. But it was not done,” Zelensky said.

Previous media reports have suggested that Trump may deliver additional long-range weaponry to Ukraine as part of his new initiatives. Some outlets claimed he had encouraged Zelensky to target Moscow and St. Petersburg, though the White House has refuted them. Publicly, the US president has advised against attacks on the Russian capital. Zelensky first presented his “victory plan” to the US in September 2024. According to leaked classified details of the proposal’s “deterrence package,” Kiev asked the US to station nuclear-capable Tomahawk cruise missiles in Ukraine. The Biden administration reportedly rejected the request outright. Ukrainian lobbying efforts during the 2024 US election cycle drew scrutiny, particularly following Zelensky’s visit to an arms manufacturing facility in the swing state of Pennsylvania.

He was accompanied by prominent Democrats during the trip, including Governor Josh Shapiro and Senator Bob Casey, prompting Republican officials to take aim, accusing him of implicitly supporting the rival party. Zelensky’s subsequent interactions with Trump were also marked by tensions. The planned signing of a minerals deal during his February visit to the White House – an offer of broad US access to Ukrainian natural resources that originally was part of the “victory plan” – erupted into a public dispute in the Oval Office. The agreement was ultimately signed in late April. Moscow has accused Zelensky of prolonging hostilities with Russia despite mounting Ukrainian casualties in a bid to preserve his power through martial law despite his presidential term officially ending last year.

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“And I also suspect that internally in the administration they are only now beginning to sort out what it means in practice.”

• Trump Sprang Ukraine Surprise On NATO States – Reuters (RT)

Several NATO member states were not notified in advance that they would be asked to fund new arms deliveries to Ukraine under US President Donald Trump’s latest proposal, Reuters has reported, citing European officials. On Monday, Trump pledged to provide more US-made weapons to Kiev through a new scheme funded by European NATO members. “We’re not buying it,” Trump said during an Oval Office meeting with the bloc’s secretary-general, Mark Rutte. “We will manufacture it, and they’re going to be paying for it.” Trump noted that the plan is seen by Washington as a business opportunity. Rutte said six countries – Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, and Canada – were willing to take part in the arms procurement scheme.

However, high-ranking sources at the embassies of two of those countries told Reuters they only learned of their supposed participation when the announcement was made. “It is my clear sense that nobody has been briefed about the exact details in advance,” one European ambassador told Reuters. “And I also suspect that internally in the administration they are only now beginning to sort out what it means in practice.” Several countries have already distanced themselves from Trump’s plan. According to Politico and La Stampa, France and Italy will not be financially supporting the effort. Hungary and the Czech Republic have also declined to participate, with Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala saying Prague is focusing on other projects.

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, on the other hand, has welcomed the proposal but emphasized that Washington should “share the burden,” stating that if European countries pay for the weapons, it should be considered as “European support.” Since taking office in January, Trump has renewed pressure on NATO members to increase defense spending and warned that the US may not defend allies who do not meet their obligations. Russia has repeatedly condemned Western arms supplies to Ukraine, arguing that it only prolongs the bloodshed and does not change the course of the conflict. The Kremlin maintains that foreign military aid is being used to escalate the hostilities rather than seek a diplomatic resolution.

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“..the Middle East, where the actions of the US and Israel are seen as manifestations of Western hegemony, while BRICS nations and their partners are increasingly positioning themselves as defenders of multipolarity, sovereignty, and a just international order.”

• The Battle For The Middle East Is Going Global (Sadygzade)

Global events increasingly reflect the growing confrontation between the Western bloc, led by the United States and its allies, and the countries of the so-called “World Majority,” coalescing around BRICS. This geopolitical tension is particularly evident against the backdrop of escalating conflicts in the Middle East, where the actions of the US and Israel are seen as manifestations of Western hegemony, while BRICS nations and their partners are increasingly positioning themselves as defenders of multipolarity, sovereignty, and a just international order.

On July 7, US President Donald Trump hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. The two leaders discussed two major issues: the upcoming negotiations with Iran and the controversial initiative to relocate Palestinians from Gaza. These topics underscored Washington and West Jerusalem’s efforts to reshape the Middle East’s security architecture – framed under the banner of offering a “better future,” yet unfolding amid growing accusations of violations of international law.= During a working dinner, Netanyahu stated that Israel and the US had been consulting with several countries allegedly willing to accept Palestinians wishing to leave Gaza. He emphasized that the proposed relocation would be “voluntary,” offering a better future to those who seek it. According to him, agreements with a number of countries were already nearing completion.

Initially, Trump refrained from making a clear statement on the matter, but later remarked that “neighboring countries have been extremely cooperative,” expressing confidence that “something good will happen.” This ambiguity may reflect either an attempt to soften the political sensitivity of the issue or a reluctance to prematurely reveal the details of a plan that has drawn considerable criticism. Previously, Trump had proposed transforming Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” and relocating its population – an idea harshly rejected both by the residents of the enclave and by international human rights organizations, which characterized it as a form of ethnic cleansing. Behind the scenes of the dinner, indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas were ongoing, focused on securing a ceasefire and a hostage exchange.

The meeting marked the third in-person encounter between Trump and Netanyahu since the Republican leader’s return to the White House in January. Just two weeks earlier, the US had carried out strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in support of Israeli military action. Days later, Trump helped broker a short-term ceasefire in the 12-day war between Israel and Iran – an achievement likely intended to bolster his own diplomatic credentials. During the meeting, Trump announced that his administration had scheduled formal talks with Iran. He said that Tehran had shown a willingness to negotiate following substantial military and economic pressure. US Special Envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff confirmed that the meeting was expected to take place “within the next week.”

Trump also indicated he was open to lifting sanctions on Iran under the right circumstances. Meanwhile, Iran’s newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, expressed hope that tensions with the United States could be resolved through diplomacy. These statements suggested a potential, albeit limited, window for resetting US-Iranian relations, though both sides appeared driven primarily by tactical considerations. The political significance of the Trump-Netanyahu meeting was further underscored by protests outside the White House. Hundreds of demonstrators, waving Palestinian flags, demanded an end to US military support for Israel and called for Netanyahu’s arrest in light of the International Criminal Court’s warrant against him for alleged war crimes in Gaza.

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“..it is impossible not to be thankful for Trump. But Trump’s subservience to Israel is dispiriting and shameful..”

• MTG Tries to Stop US Funding of Israeli Aggression (Paul Craig Roberts)

US Rep. Greene has introduced legislation to remove military aid for Israel from the US budget. Marjorie Greene has done several things that members of the US House and Senate are trained not to do. She acknowledged Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons. Members of the US government are not supposed to acknowledge Israel’s nuclear weapons, because the Symington Amendment forbids aid to governments that enrich weapons grade uranium and produce nuclear weapons outside of International Atomic Energy Agency controls. The Israeli controlled US government avoids the Symington law by refusing to acknowledge the fact that Israel has acquired, with Washington’s assistance, nuclear weapons totally outside the IAEA controls

US Rep. Greene also points out the incongruity of Israel armed with nuclear weapons needing American military aid. This is especially the case when American men and women were killed and wounded fighting Israel’s wars against Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Hezbollah the protector of Lebanon, and then were abandoned by Washington and are living on the streets. The US military is now being urged to die for Israel in Iran. Americans have been so successfully brainwashed by the Israel Lobby that they see no difference between the interest of America and Israel. This is Netanyahu’s constant message. Israel and America are the same country.

President Trump has done a good thing for Americans by closing the border to immigrant-invaders. The Biden regime used American tax dollars to pay for the inflow of millions of non-ethnic Americans across an undefended border to transform the country into a Tower of Babel. President Trump did another good thing in eliminating the intentional discrimination against white ethnic Americans by the Biden regime’s DEI policy which refused to promote white heterosexuals until there was a specified percentage of homosexuals, lesbians, pedophiles, transgendered, and peoples of color. This Democrat liberal/leftwing policy was called “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion,” but white people were not included. So, it is impossible not to be thankful for Trump. But Trump’s subservience to Israel is dispiriting and shameful.

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Yeah, threatening China is a real slick move if you’re located in the North Atlantic.

• India, China, Brazil Facing ‘Consequences’ For Russia Trade Ties – Rutte (RT)

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has warned India, China and Brazil of “consequences” if they continue to do business with Russia. Rutte’s comment came after a meeting with US Senators on Tuesday, following President Donald Trump’s announcement on providing new military aid for Ukraine and a threat to impose 100% secondary tariffs on purchasers of Russian exports, unless a peace agreement is reached within 50 days. “My encouragement to these three countries, particularly is, if you live now in Beijing, or in Delhi, or you are the President of Brazil, you might want to take a look into this, because this might hit you very hard,” Rutte told reporters.

“So I urge you to make a phone call to Vladimir Putin and convey to him that he needs to get serious about peace talks, because if not, the consequences will have a massive impact on Brazil, India, and China,” he added. Since 2022, India and China have significantly increased their oil purchases from Russia. In May, New Delhi emerged as the second-largest buyer of Russian fossil fuels, with estimated purchases totaling $4.9 billion, of which crude constituted about 72% of the total value, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. The US and India are engaged in negotiations for a trade agreement and are racing to meet an August 1 deadline set by Trump, in order to avoid reciprocal tariffs.

Rutte’s warning echoes US Senator Lindsey Graham, who in June said that he was working on a sanctions bill that he called an “economic bunker buster,” aimed at the three countries. Indian diplomats and officials have spoken with the Republican senator who sponsored the bill, which has Trump’s backing. Since he began his second term in January, Trump has issued direct threats to BRICS and imposed new duties on countries perceived to be aligned with the bloc.

https://twitter.com/MyLordBebo/status/1945194167396892930

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Euroclear issues warnings, but at the same time it transfers money to Ukraine.

• EU Plan To Move Frozen Russian Money Would Be ‘Expropriation’ – Euroclear (RT)

European Union plans to move frozen Russian sovereign assets into riskier investments would amount to expropriation, the Belgium-based settlement house Euroclear has warned.In an interview with the Financial Times published Wednesday, Euroclear Chief Executive Valerie Urbain said such a move could expose the EU’s financial system to both legal and systemic risks. Since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, the US and EU have frozen more than $300 billion in Russian state assets. In May, the EU approved a plan to channel profits from those assets to support Ukraine, while some member states have pushed for outright confiscation.

Some $213 billion of the assets are held by Euroclear. The securities depository is currently reinvesting proceeds from Russia’s maturing assets – such as coupon payments and redemptions – primarily through central banks. The G7 is using those returns to support a $50 billion loan to Ukraine. However, as profits have declined following interest rate cuts by the European Central Bank, the European Commission is reportedly considering moving the funds into higher-yield investments to boost Kiev’s funding. Urbain has warned that seeking higher returns could lead to retaliation from Moscow and compromise Euroclear’s central role in the global financial system. “If you increase the revenues, you increase the risks.” Last year, Euroclear transferred €4 billion ($4.3 billion) to Ukraine, and so far this year it has paid €1.8 billion ($1.9 billion), according to Urbain.

She said the EU may try to raise those amounts by creating a “special purpose vehicle” to channel Russian assets into higher-risk investments that could bring “more revenues.” She cautioned that such a structure would involve “a lot of risks for Euroclear and for the European markets globally.” Legally, she said, the move would constitute “expropriation of the cash from Euroclear” without relieving the institution of its liability to the Russian central bank, “a position that we cannot bear.” Moscow has repeatedly warned that seizing its funds would violate international law. Legal and political concerns – particularly over sovereign immunity and property rights – have so far prevented the EU from endorsing full confiscation.

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The facts do seem obvious.

• Adam Schiff Faces Federal Criminal Referral Over ‘Mortgage Fraud’ (Margolis)

President Donald Trump demanded on Tuesday that California Democrat Sen. Adam Schiff be “brought to justice” following allegations of mortgage fraud tied to his Maryland property. The statement came after a federal housing agency reportedly referred the matter to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation into Schiff’s real estate dealings. “I have always suspected Shifty Adam Schiff was a scam artist,” he wrote. “And now I learn that Fannie Mae’s Financial Crimes Division have concluded that Adam Schiff has engaged in a sustained pattern of possible Mortgage Fraud.” “I always knew Adam Schiff was a Crook,” Trump continued. “Mortgage Fraud is very serious, and CROOKED Adam Schiff (now a Senator) needs to be brought to justice.” Schiff, of course, denies the allegations.

These aren’t wild allegations plucked from thin air; the evidence is pretty clear. According to records, Schiff claimed his main residence was a spacious 3,420 square foot home in Maryland, a move that conveniently secured him better mortgage rates — rates designed for people who actually reside in those homes as their principal dwelling. Simultaneously, he grabbed a homeowner’s exemption on a much smaller 650 square foot condo in Burbank, Calif., handing himself a tidy cut of about $7,000 off his tax bill by also insisting that the property was his “primary residence.” Two homes, both allegedly his principal residence, in two different states, reaping benefits from both ends. Is that some kind of bureaucratic miracle? Or a calculated abuse of the system he’s sworn to oversee?

Schiff’s own paperwork — mortgage forms, exemption claims, and that curious personal check he used to pay California property taxes (listing his Maryland address, no less) — tells a story of someone playing the system with both hands. Adding insult to injury, Schiff only made that personal check payment once, in 2017. The evidence is serious enough that a senior administration official confirmed to The New York Post that the Federal Housing Finance Agency, responsible for overseeing Fannie Mae, has submitted a criminal referral to the Justice Department, calling for a full investigation.

“It is extremely serious and [Schiff] is not taking it seriously,” the official told the Post. The source added that Schiff had a criminal count for each time he paid his monthly mortgage. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, under the leadership of Bill Pulte, has remained tight-lipped, declining to comment on the referral involving Schiff. But it was Pulte who, just a few months ago, referred another high-profile Trump adversary, New York Attorney General Letitia James, to the Justice Department over alleged mortgage fraud tied to properties in Brooklyn and Virginia.

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Whatever Macron says. What kind of court is that?

• EU General Court Orders Le Pen Family To Give EU €300k (RT)

The EU General Court in Luxembourg has ordered Marine Le Pen and her two sisters to repay more than €300,000 (over $350,000) to the EU. The funds were “considered to have been wrongly received” by their father, the late opposition leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, during his time as a member of the European Parliament, the court said in a statement on Wednesday. The legislative body claimed in 2024 that Le Pen “had improperly invoiced personal expenses” and demanded repayment. The latter, however, sought to appeal. Following Le Pen’s death in January, his daughters pursued the proceedings as his legal heirs.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was founder of the right-wing National Front and a longtime critic of EU integration. He served as an MEP from 1984 to 2019. His outspoken positions on national sovereignty and immigration challenged the French political establishment for decades. What were once dismissed as fringe positions have since become major issues in European politics. The ruling comes just months after his daughter, Marine Le Pen, former leader of the right-wing National Rally (RN) and three-time presidential candidate, was convicted of embezzling EU funds. Although she denied any wrongdoing, she received a prison sentence, was fined €100,000 ($116,000), and barred from holding public office for five years, a decision widely seen as eliminating a leading contender from the 2027 presidential race.

Le Pen has appealed the conviction. A verdict is expected in the summer of 2026 and will prove decisive in her bid for the presidency. The previous election in 2022 resulted in a run-off between Le Pen, who won over 42% of votes, and Emmanuel Macron, who secured 58%. Le Pen’s conviction triggered a wave of protests, with her supporters condemning the ruling as politically motivated and aimed at silencing dissent. US President Donald Trump accused the French political establishment of employing lawfare against the right-wing figure, urging Paris to “free” her.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/mickitiki/status/1945216878474912079

Oil

Damascus
https://twitter.com/DD_Geopolitics/status/1945464255148638586

No idea

Honda Rube

Don’t miss

 

 

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Debt Rattle December 12 2024

Dec 122024
 
 December 12, 2024  Posted by at 10:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  45 Responses »


Alfred Sisley A Village Street in Winter 1893

 

• Trump Wants ‘Day One’ Changes To US Policy (RT)
• Trump Told Zelensky He Wants ‘Immediate Ceasefire’ – Reuters (RT)
• Trump Likely To Leave Ukraine With Financial Black Hole – NYT (RT)
• FBI Director Chris Wray Resigns (ZH)
• Sheriff’s Assn. Embraces Kash Patel As FBI director: ‘He’s A Butt Kicker’ (JTN)
• RFK Jr. Wants To Prove CIA Killed His Uncle – Axios (RT)
• Trump Mocks ‘Bidenomics’ (RT)
• Tulsi Gabbard Goes On Offense With Trump’s Support As Assad Falls (JTN)
• Democrats Ignore Tulsi Gabbard’s Request To Meet (RCW)
• Giuliani Says Blanket Pardons From Biden Could End Up At Supreme Court (JTN)
• Russia Tells Citizens To Avoid Visiting US (RT)
• Euroclear Warns Of Risks If Russian Assets Seized (RT)
• US Loan To Ukraine ‘Theft’ Of Russian Money – Deputy FM (RT)
• Nothing Will Be Left Of Frozen Russian Funds – EU’s Kallas (RT)
• US Media ‘Can’t Calm Down’ Over Loss Of Influence – RT editor-in-chief (RT)
• Judge Rejects the Onion’s Purchase of Infowars in Bankruptcy Sale (ET)
• Liberal World Order Is Over – Orban (RT)
• Syria’s post-mortem: Terror, Occupation, and Palestine (Pepe Escobar)

 

 

 

 

NOTE: I noticed there are lots of RT articles today – again. I even looked for other pieces on the same topics. But I will leave in what RT covers better. It’s not propaganda, it’s a good news service, and Margarita Simonyan is an excellent Editor-in-Chief.

 

 

Kash
https://twitter.com/i/status/1866870168674062465

Waltz
https://twitter.com/i/status/1866650880868851891

Alina
https://twitter.com/i/status/1866592202211619003
https://twitter.com/i/status/1866559337172258879

Dershowitz

Stossel

 

 

 

 

“..plans to issue more than 25 executive orders on his first day in office..”

• Trump Wants ‘Day One’ Changes To US Policy (RT)

US President-elect Donald Trump plans to issue more than 25 executive orders on his first day in office, “dramatically” reshaping a number of government policies, Reuters has said. Executive orders are presidential directives instructing the US government what to do and how, within the boundaries of the constitution. Outgoing President Joe Biden began his term in 2021 by signing 17 such documents, mainly revoking policies Trump enacted during his first mandate. “The American people can bank on President Trump using his executive power on day one to deliver on the promises he made to them on the campaign trail,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told Reuters on Wednesday.

Trump has told his aides he wants to make a “big splash” and act with greater scale and speed than in the first term, two anonymous sources told the agency, revealing the number of anticipated presidential actions. More orders will be issued in the following days and weeks, the sources said. According to Reuters, some of the first executive orders will focus on immigration enforcement, including resuming the construction of the wall on the border with Mexico. While this could face some pushback from states governed by Democrats, under the Biden administration it was established in court that immigration was entirely within the purview of the federal government. One planned executive order would end birthright citizenship, which the US has been granting to anyone born in the country based on a particular interpretation of the 14th Amendment. Trump aides told Reuters that the incoming administration will be ready to defend this in court.

Other rumored executive orders would deal with reversing the Biden administration’s promotion of “equity,” including transgender rules and racial preferences, as well as mandatory “diversity training” for federal contractors. One source from the State Department transition team described an executive order that would review hiring decisions based on identity rather than merit. Stephen Miller, recently announced as Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, is reportedly coordinating the executive order effort. The measures are said to be based on drafts provided by think tanks such as the America First Policy Institute, the Conservative Partnership Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Many of Trump’s executive orders from the first term were challenged by Democrats in court. Even though most were eventually upheld, the delay meant they did not end up being implemented before Biden took over.

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“Trump “behaved in a friendly, respectful and open manner and appeared to be in listening mode.”

• Trump Told Zelensky He Wants ‘Immediate Ceasefire’ – Reuters (RT)

US President-elect Donald Trump has told Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky and French President Emmanuel Macron that he wants an end to hostilities between Moscow and Kiev as soon as possible, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing sources. The three met last week in Paris, where they held talks on the Ukraine crisis, despite Trump’s reported reluctance to attend the sit-down. Following the meeting, Trump claimed that Ukraine “would like to make a deal” to end the conflict with Russia. Zelensky, however, insisted that Kiev must first receive ironclad security guarantees while ruling out any territorial concessions. A Reuters source familiar with the matter said that during a 35-minute discussion that took place without advisers, Trump “behaved in a friendly, respectful and open manner and appeared to be in listening mode.”

Several sources also suggested that the president-elect appeared to be trying to build a personal rapport with his counterparts. According to four sources, the three leaders “did not discuss specific details of any vision for peace,” but Trump insisted that he “wanted an immediate ceasefire and negotiations to end the war quickly.” Neither the president-elect nor his team “have been forthcoming on how exactly they envisage a solution” to the conflict, the article added. However, a Ukrainian source told the agency that the issue of security guarantees to prevent a resumption of hostilities was raised during the meeting. Asked about Trump’s reaction, the source noted that “he’s thinking about all the details.” Trump vowed on the campaign trail that he would bring the Ukraine conflict to a swift end if reelected, even before he is sworn into office in January.

Last month, he announced that he would appoint retired Army General Keith Kellogg as a special envoy for Ukraine and Russia. Kellogg was reportedly one of the authors of a peace plan that would freeze the conflict along the current front line without recognizing Russia’s sovereignty over territories claimed by Ukraine while suspending Kiev’s NATO membership ambitions. Moscow has repeatedly ruled out freezing the conflict, stressing that all the goals of its military operation, including Ukraine’s neutrality, demilitarization and denazification, must be met. Russian President Vladimir Putin said this summer that Moscow would immediately declare a ceasefire and start peace talks once Kiev withdraws troops from all Russian territories, including the Donetsk and Lugansk republics, and Kherson and Zaporozhye regions.

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Ukraine IS the black hole.

• Trump Likely To Leave Ukraine With Financial Black Hole – NYT (RT)

US President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican Party are unlikely to provide Ukraine with the same level of financial support as the outgoing administration of President Joe Biden, the New York Times reported on Tuesday. Kiev has been heavily reliant on foreign aid throughout the conflict to keep its economy afloat. However, this support could be significantly reduced once Trump takes office in January, according to the outlet. The Republican has repeatedly signaled that he would “probably” reduce American spending on Ukraine and has instead been calling for an “immediate ceasefire” between Moscow and Kiev. Trump has also suggested that he would be able to resolve the conflict within 24 hours of taking office, although he has not provided concrete details about how he would achieve this.

Some believe he could use the threat of reduced US aid to force the Ukrainian leadership to begin negotiations with Moscow while simultaneously threatening to increase aid to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin into talks. The New York Times prediction comes after the Biden administration has been spending its last weeks seemingly trying to leave Kiev with something for when Trump takes over. On Tuesday, the White House approved the transfer of some $20 billion to Ukraine in the form of a loan to be repaid using the interest generated by Russia’s frozen central bank assets. The loan is part of a broader $50 billion deal devised earlier by the G7 countries, which also includes a $20 billion EU commitment and another $10 billion to be split by the UK, Japan, and Canada.

Last month, Biden also wrote off about $4.7 billion in taxpayer-funded loans to Kiev. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that the move is in the “national interest of the US and its EU, G7+ and NATO partners.” Trump, meanwhile, has insisted that any future aid to Kiev must be granted in the form of loans instead of taxpayer-funded gifts. The Ukrainian government is almost entirely reliant on Western aid to support its economy. As of October, Kiev’s public debt had exceeded $155 billion, according to the Ukrainian Finance Ministry, with over $111 billion represented by foreign liabilities. In September, Ukrainian MP Irina Gerashchenko reported that Kiev’s 2025 budget deficit is estimated to amount to some $37.6 billion, or nearly 20% of GDP. She stated that Ukraine expects to raise only $944 million from partners next year and stressed that without donor support the Ukrainian economy “will not survive.”

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Trump appointed Wray, who then directed the raid on Mar-a-Lago.

• FBI Director Chris Wray Resigns (ZH)

Before President-elect Donald Trump could say “You’re Fired!” – FBI Director Christopher Wray has resigned, and will leave his post at the end of President Joe Biden’s term. Wray’s decision comes weeks after Trump nominated Kash Patel as his replacement. Patel, a fierce critic of the FBI, has said he would seek to shrink the agency’s power, close its Washington headquarters, fire its top ranks, and prosecute corrupt agents. While Wray’s departure was always in the cards, the move comes two days after Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) wrote an 11-page letter to Wray asking him to step down, accusing him of mismanagement and “failure to take control of the FBI.” “These failures are serious enough and their pattern widespread enough to have shattered my confidence in your leadership and the confidence and hope many others in Congress placed in you,” wrote Grassley.

As the Epoch Times notes further, in November 2022, Grassley published FBI documents showing that higher-ranking officials were sometimes penalized less severely than subordinates. Wray had addressed this disparity, saying in a Bureau-wide email on Dec. 11, 2020, that the agency “has zero tolerance for any form of sexual harassment or sexual misconduct.” On March 4, 2022, FBI Deputy Director Abbate warned all FBI employees: “Regardless of your rank and title, every one of us has the responsibility to treat everyone with dignity, respect, and professionalism. … Harassment of any kind will not be tolerated.” Grassley also mentioned in his letter his inquiry about the vetting of refugees from Afghanistan through the Operation Allies Welcome program.

In February 2022, the Department of Justice (DOJ) reported that the Department of Homeland Security had not cross-checked these evacuees against data from the Department of Defense. As a result, 50 individuals who had been flagged as “potentially significant security concerns” by the National Ground Intelligence Center were allowed into the United States. Requests to the FBI for further information were ignored, Grassley said. Wray said “in a classified multi-agency briefing to congressional staff” that he was unsure of the location of other refugees who might pose a threat, Grassley wrote. “I can’t sit here right now and tell you that we know where all are located at any given time,” Grassley quoted Wray as saying. He pointed out that one potential terror threat had been foiled when the FBI arrested Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi on Oct. 7 of this year. Tawhedi was allegedly planning a terror attack to disrupt the U.S. election on Nov. 5.

Grassley also accused Wray and the FBI of exercising a double standard by refusing to investigate President Joe Biden’s or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information. President-elect Donald Trump appointed Wray in 2017 after firing the previous director, James Comey. In a recent interview with “Meet the Press,” Trump expressed displeasure over Wray’s performance. “He invaded my home,” Trump said, referring to the 2022 FBI raid on his Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago. Trump also cited Wray’s initial claim that his ear was struck by shrapnel instead of an assassin’s bullet, and waning public respect for the FBI as an institution. “I can’t say I’m thrilled,” he said.

The president-elect has already named Kash Patel the new FBI director, indicating that Wray’s time at the post is nearly over. However, Grassley wants Wray and Abbate to step down sooner. “For the good of the country, it’s time for you and your deputy to move on to the next chapter in your lives,” the letter says. The agency told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement: “The FBI has repeatedly demonstrated our commitment to responding to Congressional oversight and being transparent with the American people. “Director Wray and Deputy Director Abbate have taken strong actions toward achieving accountability in the areas mentioned in the letter and remain committed to sharing information about the continuously evolving threat environment facing our nation and the extraordinary work of the FBI.”

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“..the FBI is way too lawfare, way too weaponized and way too corrupt.”

• Sheriff’s Assn. Embraces Kash Patel As FBI director: ‘He’s A Butt Kicker’ (JTN)

A prominent leader of an influential sheriff association on Tuesday publicly embraced President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for FBI Director, Kash Patel, claiming he was a “butt kicker.” Trump nominated Patel to replace current FBI Director Christopher Wray last month. But Wray, who was selected by Trump in 2017, can legally remain in his position until 2027. Former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack, who founded and leads the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, said his group has already endorsed Patel and encouraged the nominee to pick a sheriff as his deputy director. “We already endorsed him publicly, and we love that he’s there. He’s a butt kicker. That’s exactly what we need,” Mack said on the “Just The News, No Noise” TV show.

“There’s a lot of good sheriffs that really could help him clean Washington, D.C., up, but the FBI is way too lawfare, way too weaponized and way too corrupt.” Mack said he has connections to the FBI through his father, who retired from the bureau, and a cousin who was deputy director, and still believes the bureau needs some “revamping.” “I’d like to see [Patel] completely redo the FBI, abolish it and then bring back a few to keep it going where they’re really needed,” the former law enforcement officer said. “But the sheriffs and local officials and state officials can do a lot of what they’ve been doing, and there’s duplicity all over the place … We really have too many bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., and this bureaucratic nightmare needs to end.”

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“Shortly after RFK Jr. endorsed him in August, Trump promised to declassify the last of the documents pertaining to the JFK assassination through a new presidential commission.”

• RFK Jr. Wants To Prove CIA Killed His Uncle – Axios (RT)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is lobbying for his daughter-in law to become deputy CIA director so she can get to the bottom of the assassination of his uncle, John F. Kennedy, the Washington outlet Axios has claimed. President Kennedy was fatally shot in Dallas, Texas in November 1963. The official investigation identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole suspect. Oswald himself was killed soon afterward by local resident Jack Ruby. RFK Jr. has long suspected the CIA of being behind the hit, however. “RFK believes that and wants to get to the bottom of it,” an anonymous Republican source told Axios on Wednesday, suggesting this rationale might be behind the proposal to nominate Amaryllis Fox Kennedy as deputy director of the CIA.

Fox Kennedy ran her father-in-law’s independent presidential campaign after the Democrats closed off their primaries. RFK Jr. ended up endorsing Republican Donald Trump, who won in November. The former Democrat has been nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services in the next administration, while former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has been tapped to head the CIA. According to Axios, RFK Jr. has been telling people that Fox Kennedy would help get to the truth about JFK. She has previous experience at the CIA, having been an undercover agent for almost a decade. Shortly after RFK Jr. endorsed him in August, Trump promised to declassify the last of the documents pertaining to the JFK assassination through a new presidential commission.

In an interview with Tucker Carlson in August 2023, RFK Jr. claimed that the CIA had the means, motive, and opportunity to murder his uncle and suggested the agency may have been behind the 1968 assassination of his father as well. According to RFK Jr., the commission that investigated the Dallas assassination and pinned it on Oswald was not really run by Justice Earl Warren but by Allen Dulles, the long-running CIA chief that JFK had sacked in November 1961. The CIA and Dulles had a personal vendetta against JFK because he had cracked down on their operations against Cuba after the 1962 missile crisis with the Soviet Union and threatened to purge the agency’s planning division, RFK Jr. has argued.

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“You pay taxes, I send it to Ukraine. They send it back to Hunter. Hunter gives it to me. Pardon Hunter.”

• Trump Mocks ‘Bidenomics’ (RT)

US President-elect Donald Trump has mocked his predecessor’s economic agenda, using a meme involving funding for Ukraine and the recently pardoned Hunter Biden. Earlier this month, President Joe Biden gave his son Hunter, a convicted felon who lied about his addiction to crack cocaine while applying for a gun license, a blanket pardon for anything he may have done between January 2014 and December 2024. Before pulling out of the US presidential race, Biden had insisted on multiple occasions that he would not pardon his son. Trump’s campaign slammed the decision as an example of how the current government has weaponized the justice system. On Tuesday evening, Trump shared a meme on his Truth Social platform, describing how ‘Bidenomics’ works in practice. It showed Biden standing beside a whiteboard with a list of items. “You pay taxes,” the list begins. “I send it to Ukraine. They send it back to Hunter. Hunter gives it to me. Pardon Hunter.”

Hunter Biden was paid millions of dollars to sit on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while his father was vice president of the US and lead on Washington’s relations with Kiev. According to the contents of a laptop the younger Biden forgot at a Delaware repair shop, 10% of all international contracts went to “the Big Guy,” widely assumed to be a reference to his father. Biden officially defeated Trump in 2020 and embarked on an ambitious plan to reinvent the US economy after the Covid-19 pandemic that his advisers dubbed ‘Bidenomics’. Vice President Kamala Harris, whom the Democrats put forth as their candidate this year, spent the campaign insisting that the economy was in great shape and that ‘Bidenomics’ was working. American voters apparently disagreed, handing Trump victories in the electoral college, popular vote, and all seven swing states.

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“The notion that we must just blindly accept and follow as truth, that which the government or those in power tells us is true goes against the very essence of our Constitution and Bill of Rights..”

• Tulsi Gabbard Goes On Offense With Trump’s Support As Assad Falls (JTN)

With the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, Director of National Intelligence-designate Tulsi Gabbard is doubling down on her anti-intervention stance with backing from President-elect Donald Trump as she faces a contentious confirmation battle. Gabbard, a former Hawaii representative and veteran who served in the Middle East, left the Democratic Party after unsuccessfully seeking the party nomination for president in 2020. She joined the GOP ahead of the 2024 election and has become something of a Republican fan favorite among those opposed to foreign interventions. Her positions have roiled Democrats and establishment Republicans alike, with some going as far as to baselessly smear her as a “Russian asset.” She had previously attracted ire over her opposition to intervention in Syria, even should that leave the Assad regime in power.

After her nomination, Tulsi was expected to be on defense over Assad, but the stunning collapse of his government over the course of mere days and the complete evaporation of the Syrian Arab Army in the face of a renewed offensive from rebel groups based in the country’s northwest has changed the script entirely. While President Joe Biden has supported U.S. involvement in the Syrian transition process, Trump has called for keeping the U.S. out of the conflict entirely and signaled that the Assad regime’s collapse should bring Russian President Vladimir Putin to the table to end the war in Ukraine as well. “There was never much of a benefit in Syria for Russia, other than to make Obama look really stupid. In any event, Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” Trump posted.

After Assad left Damascus, Trump opined that Russia had lost interest in protecting him due to Moscow’s focus on Ukraine and highlighted the estimated death tolls. “There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin. Too many lives are being so needlessly wasted, too many families destroyed, and if it keeps going, it can turn into something much bigger, and far worse,” Trump then posted. “I know Vladimir well. This is his time to act. China can help. The World is waiting!” Trump’s calls for non-involvement and de-escalation of global conflicts seem to have given Gabbard the ammunition she needed to fight back against perceptions of herself as a foreign policy radical and portray her stances as in line with the White House’s main stream. “I stand in full support and wholeheartedly agree with the statements that President Trump has made over these last few days with regards to the developments in Syria,” Gabbard said.

A stalwart champion of the First Amendment, Gabbard’s nomination has some conservative Republicans jubilant, despite her prior time as a member of the opposing party. In 2022, Gabbard ruffled feathers with her appearance at the Reagan Dinner, hosted by the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). In that event, Gabbard highlighted the importance of free speech and excoriated efforts to crack down on “misinformation”, saying “the latest strategy and tactic that they’re using is to try to undermine our free speech by taking it upon themselves to say they’ve got the responsibility to protect us from so called misinformation.” “The notion that we must just blindly accept and follow as truth, that which the government or those in power tells us is true goes against the very essence of our Constitution and Bill of Rights,” she added.

Several GOP heavyweights, particularly in the lower chamber, have expressed hope for reform on federal censorship and surveillance efforts with her in charge of the nation’s intelligence. Freedom Caucus lawmakers Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., for instance, have opined that her position in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence could pave the way for significant reform to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s (FISA) Section 702, which allows for warrantless surveillance in limited cases. The provision has attracted scrutiny from conservative hardliners over the prospect that such surveillance may acquire information on American citizens. “Yeah, I think this is one where we can, we can actually have a chance to get it through,” Biggs said of FISA reform in light of Gabbard’s nomination. He made the remarks in November on the “Just the News, No Noise” television show.

“So again, having Tulsi at ODNI. I mean, she’s a champion of the First Amendment,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, on the same program. “I mean having, this is what I love so much about President Trump’s elections, is he is putting people in these cabinet agencies, nominating people who have the attitude the American people elected, that American people voted for, which is we’re going to go serve the people, protect their liberties, make government actually more efficient smaller, working for the country and protecting their rights.”

“That, I think is great, and Tulsi believes in the First Amendment, free speech and freedom,” he added. “That’s why I’m hopeful. She’s going to be confirmed and be our next ODNI director.” Gabbard herself was placed on the Biden/Harris administration’s TSA’s terrorism watchlist, the “Quiet Skies” program, which monitors “elevated risks to aviation security.” Hawaii News Now reported that at least five agents and two explosive detection canine teams were following Gabbard and her husband in July.

Rand Paul
https://twitter.com/i/status/1866607629252112473

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“Trump remains unbothered by the meeting with Assad. Asked by NBC News if the meeting “compromises her,” the president-elect all but rolled his eyes.”

Individuals may sympathize with her, but the party as a whole -which she turned her back on- can not.

• Democrats Ignore Tulsi Gabbard’s Request To Meet (RCW)

The return of Tulsi Gabbard to Capitol Hill began with breakfast in the Senate dining room courtesy of Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, followed by back-to-back meetings with other Republicans, all of whom were happy to welcome the former Hawaii Democrat and discuss her nomination to lead the U.S. intelligence community. But members of her old political party, including one-time House colleagues, largely ignored her. It’s still early in the process, but Gabbard has been unable to schedule a single meeting with Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, outgoing chairman of the committee, has not responded to her requests for a meeting, according to a source directly familiar with Gabbard’s efforts. Others have replied to her outreach but remain hesitant about putting anything on the books. At least one Democrat scheduled a sit-down this week only to abruptly cancel.

The cold shoulder comes nearly a month after President-elect Donald Trump picked Gabbard to be his director of national intelligence, two years after she quit a Democratic Party that she called “an elitist cabal of warmongers,” and immediately after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Gabbard met with the now-deposed dictator twice in 2017 while on a “fact-finding mission” to the war-torn country. These meetings proved to be an impediment when she ran for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2020. “What do you say to Democratic voters who watched you go over there, and what do you say to military members who have been deployed repeatedly in Syria, pushing back against Assad?” Kasie Hunt asked two years later during an MSNBC interview. Gabbard replied that U.S. troops deployed there “without understanding what the clear mission or objective is.”

Gabbard added that Assad was “not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.” Hillary Clinton promptly accused Gabbard, then a major in the Hawaii National Guard, of being a “Russian asset.” The Republicans who will control the Senate next year do not see the meeting with Assad eight years ago as disqualifying or insurmountable. Despite the suggestion of Democrats such as Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who recently worried that Gabbard “couldn’t pass a background check,” Republicans point out that as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves, Gabbard already has a top-secret security clearance. More than 250 military veterans co-signed a letter published Monday endorsing her as “a warrior whose vote cannot be bought.” Trump remains unbothered by the meeting with Assad. Asked by NBC News if the meeting “compromises her,” the president-elect all but rolled his eyes.

“I met with Putin,” he said of the Russian president now sheltering the Syrian dictator. “I met with President Xi of China. I met with Kim Jong-un twice. Does that mean that I can’t be president?” Nonetheless, Gabbard will be grilled about her Syria meeting. Defense hawks, Republicans and Democrats alike, are expected to press her for details in committee and challenge her foreign policy views that some have described as “isolationist.” Allies of the president-elect prefer the term “America First.” And it is increasingly the new orthodoxy among a GOP base wary and weary of overseas entanglements. There is some evidence that skepticism of a muscular foreign policy has gained traction among younger Democrats and independents in the last four or five years. When Hillary Clinton questioned Gabbard’s logic and loyalty, Gabbard punched back.

In a series of tweets, she called the former secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee “the queen of warmongers” and “personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party.” Upstart presidential candidate Andrew Yang took Gabbard’s side. “Tulsi Gabbard deserves much more respect and thanks than this,” Yang tweeted. “She literally just got back from serving our country abroad.” As Gabbard made the rounds Monday, the nominee mostly ignored shouted questions from reporters. The only public statement Gabbard made was a reiteration of the Trump policy announced over the weekend that the U.S. would stay out of Syria.

“My own views and experiences have been shaped by my multiple deployments and seeing firsthand the cost of war and the threat of Islamist terrorism,” Gabbard said. “It’s one of the many reasons why I appreciate President Trump’s leadership and his election where he is fully committed, as he has said over and over, to bringing about an end to wars, demonstrating peace through strength and putting the national security interests and the safety, security and freedom of the American people, first and foremost.”

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Blanket pardon? “The King of England could only pardon what he knew about.”

• Giuliani Says Blanket Pardons From Biden Could End Up At Supreme Court (JTN)

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that if President Joe Biden issues blanket pardons, they could end up being challenged in the Supreme Court. “I think if he does it across the board….these blanket pardons of maybe eight to 10 people, then we’ll have a real Supreme Court test of whether the blanket pardon is unconstitutional,” Giuliani said on the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show. Biden earlier this month pardoned his son on gun and tax charges, as well as any other crimes committed in the last ten years, despite promising not to make such a move.

Congressman Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., predicted that Biden would pardon his brother James. Giuliani said that many law professors wrote against President Gerald Ford pardoning President Richard Nixon, arguing it wasn’t constitutional. “You cannot give a pardon for a crime that may be committed because the pardon power derives from the power of the King of England,” he said. “The King of England could only pardon what he knew about.”

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“..weaponizing its justice system to detain and imprison Russians on trumped up and politically motivated charges.”

• Russia Tells Citizens To Avoid Visiting US (RT)

Russian nationals should avoid making non-essential trips to the US and allied countries, the Russian Foreign Ministry has said, warning that they could be “hunted down” by the American authorities for political reasons. Travelling to the US poses “serious risks” due to “the increasing confrontation in the Russian-American relations,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said during a regular press briefing on Wednesday. She stated that more Russian nationals were being “hunted down by American authorities, especially by secret services,” with Washington utilizing “fraudulent schemes” to lure Russians abroad in order to prosecute them for “political reasons.” “For the upcoming holidays and beyond, we strongly advise to avoid non-emergency visits to the US and allied countries, especially Canada and, with rare exception, the countries of the European Union,” Zakharova said.

“When staying abroad, you should avoid situations, in which you can become a victim of provocations and be detained under the pretense of supposedly violating local laws,” the spokeswoman added. Zakharova urged Russian citizens to consider potential “tragic incidents” on foreign soil when planning trips abroad, claiming that the US justice system “leaves no room for a fair trial.” The US has blacklisted multiple Russian nationals over the conflict in Ukraine, which led to the unprecedented level of tensions between the two countries. Even before the conflict broke out in February 2022, Moscow has frequently accused Washington of weaponizing its justice system to detain and imprison Russians on trumped up and politically motivated charges.

Famous cases include the prosecution of businessman Viktor Bout and pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, who were released during prisoner swaps in 2022. Another high-profile incident involved activist and journalist Maria Butina, who was convicted of failing to register as a foreign agent in the US and was deported to Russia in 2019, after spending nearly 120 days behind bars. Several Russian citizens who were part of the last major prisoner swap in August were originally extradited to the US from European countries. Vadim Konoshchenok was arrested in Estonia on a US warrant, while Vladislav Klyushin was extradited from Switzerland in 2021. The August exchange also included Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former US Marine Paul Whelan, both of whom were convicted of espionage in Russia.

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This will go awfully wrong.

• Euroclear Warns Of Risks If Russian Assets Seized (RT)

Belgian-based clearinghouse Euroclear, which holds the bulk of Russia’s frozen assets, has said it does not want to be held liable if the EU confiscates the funds and hands them over to Ukraine. Euroclear immobilized an estimated €197 billion ($213 billion) in assets belonging to the Russian central bank as part of Ukraine-related sanctions. The frozen assets generated €5.15 billion in interest in the first three quarters of this fiscal year. Earlier this year, the EU decided to give Ukraine a chunk of that interest but stopped short of tapping the assets themselves. The move prompted renewed accusations of theft from Russia. Euroclear CEO Valerie Urbain told Bloomberg on Tuesday that any plan to seize the assets should also transfer all of the liabilities.

“We cannot be in the situation whereby the assets have been seized, but, in a couple of years, Russia comes and knocks at the door and says, ‘I want to recoup my securities,’ while the securities assets would have been gone,” she said. “If there is a confiscation of assets, everything should move, liabilities included.” Euroclear recently revealed having made a first payment of about €1.55 billion ($1.63 billion) to the European Fund for Ukraine in July from the interest generated by the Russian assets. That month, the European Commission announced an allocation of €1.5 billion to Kiev as a first tranche of aid. In October, the European Parliament approved a loan of up to €35 billion to Ukraine to be repaid with future revenues generated by the Russian funds. The loan is the EU’s part of a package the G7 agreed in June to provide Kiev with up to $50 billion in financial support.

The government of outgoing US President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced a transfer of Washington’s portion of the loan, totaling $20 billion, to Kiev. The funds are “paid for by the windfall proceeds earned from Russia’s own immobilized assets,” the Treasury Department said in a statement. Because US President-elect Donald Trump has threatened to cut aid to Kiev, the idea of using the assets themselves is likely to resurface, noted Bloomberg. According to Urbain, however, taking this step would threaten the euro’s role as a reserve currency and pose risks to the broader stability of the bloc’s finances. A similar warning was issued earlier by the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde.

On Tuesday, a delegation from the European Parliament arrived in Kiev to discuss the bloc’s financial aid to Ukraine.The head of the delegation, Iratxe Garcia, said that he had asked High Representative Kaja Kallas to “put forward a legal proposal to use the €200 billion of frozen Russian state assets in order to arm and reconstruct Ukraine.” During the meeting, Zelensky reiterated Kiev’s call to use the immobilized Russian funds to cover the cost of weapons for Ukraine, stating that $30 billion would be enough to “fully cover our skies.”

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“..this act falls under the classification of robbery [on the part] of an organized group..”

• US Loan To Ukraine ‘Theft’ Of Russian Money – Deputy FM (RT)

The disbursement by the US of a $20 billion loan to Ukraine funded by Russia’s frozen central bank assets could be classified as theft, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov has said. The US loan is part of a broader $50 billion G7 loan deal, which includes a separate $20 billion commitment by the EU and $10 billion to be split by G7 members Great Britain, Japan, and Canada. On Tuesday, the US Treasury Department announced the money had been transferred to a World Bank fund that will send it on to Kiev. “I can say that this act falls under the classification of robbery [on the part] of an organized group, I mean [on the part] of the Group of Seven,” Ryabkov told journalists on Wednesday. The US and its allies froze an estimated $300 billion in assets belonging to the Russian central bank following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022.

In June, the G7 members pledged a $50 billion loan for Kiev, with the frozen Russian assets to be used as collateral, to help Kiev buy weapons and rebuild its infrastructure. The agreement was finalized in October. Ukraine theoretically is expected to repay the multibillion-dollar G7 loan over 40 years. According to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the loan transfer will provide Ukraine a “critical infusion of support.” The money covers around half of Kiev’s current deficit. The country’s state budget for next year, signed by Vladimir Zelensky into law last month, anticipates revenues of $49 billion and expenditures of $87 billion, putting the overall deficit at $38 billion. Zelensky said on Tuesday he was “deeply grateful” to Biden, Yellen, and lawmakers who supported using seized Russian assets to bolster Ukraine’s defense, describing their decision as a “powerful act of justice.”

A week earlier, the outgoing US president authorized a new $725 million military aid package for Ukraine and imposed additional economic sanctions on Russia. Moscow has repeatedly accused the West of “stealing” its money and warned that tapping these funds would be illegal and set a dangerous precedent. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov warned in October that Moscow would respond in kind to the West’s use of the income generated by its frozen central bank reserves. Last month, he said Russia would respond by using the income from the frozen assets of Western investors. The International Monetary Fund has also warned that any decisions regarding the seizure of frozen Russian assets should be backed with “sufficient legal support,” noting that without this, the move could undermine trust in the Western financial system.

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The EU needs diplomats, not warmongers.

• Nothing Will Be Left Of Frozen Russian Funds – EU’s Kallas (RT)

The European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, has expressed doubt that Russia will ever see its sovereign assets frozen by the bloc as part of Ukraine-related sanctions. In an interview with Politico on Tuesday, the EU’s new foreign policy chief admitted that Russia legally had a “legitimate claim” to the assets immobilized by the West since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. She added, however, that the bloc should use the cash to reconstruct Ukraine before handing back whatever remains. “But I doubt there is anything left over,” the former Estonian prime minister said. Kallas did not specify whether she was referring to the interest generated by Russian assets or to the assets themselves. Kallas took over the EU’s top diplomatic post from Josep Borrell on December 1. She has advocated for tougher sanctions on Russia and is known for her strident stance against Moscow.

The US and its allies have immobilized around $300 billion of assets belonging to the Russian central bank since 2022. The bulk of the funds, around €197 billion ($213 billion), is being held at the Brussels-based clearinghouse Euroclear, where they generated €5.15 billion ($5.55 billion) in interest in the first three-quarters of this fiscal year. Earlier this year, Brussels decided to give Ukraine a chunk of the interest. In July, the European Commission announced it would allocate €1.5 billion to Kiev, mainly for weapons, as the first tranche of aid. In a press release in October, Euroclear stated that it had made a first payment of about €1.55 billion ($1.63 billion) to the European Fund for Ukraine in July. The second tranche, expected to amount to €1.9 billion, could reportedly be disbursed next spring.

The G7 countries also agreed in June to give Kiev a $50 billion aid package financed by revenues from frozen Russian central bank assets. The EU and US both recently approved respective contributions of $35 billion and $20 billion to the package. Russia has repeatedly accused the West of “stealing” its money. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov on Tuesday described as “a robbery organized by the G7” the transfer of $20 billion to Kiev that was announced by the US Treasury the day before. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said last month that Russia would use income from the frozen assets of Western investors in response to the moves by the US and EU.

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“..the states that sanction Russian news outlets are violating their own principles of freedom of speech and freedom of the press..”

• US Media ‘Can’t Calm Down’ Over Loss Of Influence – RT editor-in-chief (RT)

The US media continues to be unsettled by a journalism course organized by the RT Academy in Africa, one month after its completion, RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan posted on Telegram on Wednesday. Her remarks came in response to a feature in the National Interest, a US-based bimonthly, titled ‘Combating Russia’s Global Disinformation Campaign’. The lengthy article, published earlier this week, warns Western media of the presumed dangers posed by Russian journalism, which is rapidly evolving and becoming influential in the countries of the Global South. According to the article, while Russia’s main tactic to compete with Western news media was previously to create alternative outlets such as RT and Sputnik, Moscow has recently changed course by introducing journalism training and fact-checking.

“Russia – with its eye particularly trained on the Global South – seems intent on advancing its own mirror image of Western journalism training, one in which Russian media practices are portrayed as the gold standard,” the article states. It names RT Academy, launched in February, as an example of such practices, recalling that it welcomed journalists from all over the world to train and had a course specifically for African participants in October. The article also claims Russia’s tactics “follow decades of effort by Moscow to ingratiate itself with journalists, especially in the Global South,” so as to challenge the Western narrative. The piece then offers Western news organizations advice on how to counter Russia’s growing influence, chiding them for overlooking the Global South and failing to provide enough of their own coverage there. Simonyan found the attention of Western press on RT Academy amusing.

“American media just can’t calm down. They are discussing our RT Academy course for journalists from Africa a month after its completion,” she stated in a Telegram post on Wednesday, adding a tongue-in-cheek: “You’re falling behind, comrades. We already have a course for journalists in Chinese in full swing.” Russian media, and RT in particular, has been repeatedly smeared and targeted in the West. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow last month claimed that US President-elect Donald Trump will try to turn the American media into an “American-accented version of RT,” suggesting that it would be the end of free press in the country.

BBC chief Tim Davie said in October that Russian media outlets were spreading “unchallenged propaganda” across the Global South. The US State Department has sanctioned a host of Russian news outlets over the past two years, including RT and its parent company, accusing the latter of acting as an extension of Russian intelligence. However, many experts, including some in the West, have criticized the incessant targeting of Russian media, noting that the states that sanction Russian news outlets are violating their own principles of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

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“This should have been opened back up, and it should have been opened back up for everybody..”

• Judge Rejects the Onion’s Purchase of Infowars in Bankruptcy Sale (ET)

A federal judge in Texas on Dec. 10 rejected the auction sale of Alex Jones’s Infowars website to satirical publication The Onion, ruling that the process did not result in the best possible bids and citing concerns about transparency in the auction. The Onion was named the winning bidder of Infowars’ assets during the Nov. 14 auction, part of a personal bankruptcy case Jones filed in late 2022 after he was ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion in several defamation lawsuits. The lawsuits were filed against Jones in Connecticut and Texas by relatives of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which Jones repeatedly claimed was staged as part of a government plot to increase gun control. A total of 20 children and six educators were killed in the shooting. Jones has since acknowledged that the shooting took place and was “100 percent real.”

He said that he attempted to correct the claims that he initially made, but that “[the media] won’t let me take it back.” Following a two-day hearing in Houston, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez said he would not approve the sale. He rejected claims by Jones that the bankruptcy auction was plagued with collusion and fraud but noted problems, not wrongdoing, with the auction process. The Onion’s bid of $1.75 million with additional incentives for Infowars’ assets was backed by the families of the massacre victims. The bid won despite a higher $3.5 million cash offer from First United American Companies, which runs a website in Jones’ name and sells nutritional supplements. The Connecticut-based Sandy Hook families, who are Jones’ largest creditors, augmented the Onion’s bid by agreeing to forgo $750,000 of the proceeds from the sale in favor of other creditors, providing the creditors with more money than First United’s higher cash offer.

That concession caused the bankruptcy trustee to value The Onion’s bid at $7 million overall. The judge said Christopher Murray, a court-appointed trustee who oversaw the auction made “a good-faith error” when he asked for final offers for Infowars instead of encouraging more back-and-forth bidding between The Onion and First United American Companies. “This should have been opened back up, and it should have been opened back up for everybody,” Lopez said. “It’s clear the trustee left the potential for a lot of money on the table.” Lopez also said the two offers for Infowars were just a fraction of the money that Jones has been ordered to pay in defamation lawsuits, and noted the extent of his debts. He left it up to the trustee to resolve the disputes between the creditors before making a new attempt to sell Infowars.

After winning the auction in November, The Onion said it planned to relaunch Infowars in January as a parody website alongside advertiser Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest gun violence prevention organization in the country. In a complaint filed in November, Jones urged the federal bankruptcy court in Texas to disqualify The Onion’s bid and instead recognize First United American Companies as the rightful winner of the auction. Lopez’s ruling puts The Onion’s plan to take possession of the Infowars website and its associated assets on hold. In a Dec. 11 social media statement, Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said the publication is “deeply disappointed” but will “continue to seek a resolution that helps the Sandy Hook families receive a positive outcome for the horror they endured.”

Collins said the company will also continue to “seek a path” towards purchasing Infowars in the coming weeks. “It is part of our larger mission to make a better, funnier internet, regardless of the outcome of this case,” Collins said. Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for the Sandy Hook families who sued Jones in Connecticut, also expressed disappointment over the judge’s ruling. “These families, who have already persevered through countless delays and roadblocks, remain resilient and determined as ever to hold Alex Jones and his corrupt businesses accountable for the harm he has caused,” Mattei said in a statement. “This decision doesn’t change the fact that, soon, Alex Jones will begin to pay his debt to these families and he will continue doing so for as long as it takes.”

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Hungary is “the westernmost Eastern and the easternmost Western nation..”

• Liberal World Order Is Over – Orban (RT)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has claimed that his country’s refusal to conform to liberal ideology will yield considerable benefits in the future. “The liberal world order is over,” he declared during a speech in Budapest on Tuesday. The conservative nationalist politician has been in power since 2010, winning successive elections on a platform of defying what he considers to be authoritarian rule by Brussels. EU leaders have accused Orban of undermining democracy in Hungary and harming the economic bloc’s solidarity on the Ukraine conflict. He has argued that Brussels’ policies have been disastrous for EU member states.

“As the changes come, only those nations can be winners that can bring the most out of themselves,” Orban told a gathering of university students, as quoted by his office. “Those who assimilate, fall into line, are unable to show their own values or discover the strength inherent in their national character will soon become irrelevant,” he added. Hungary is “the westernmost Eastern and the easternmost Western nation,” and it seeks to “connect to all the economic powerhouses of the world,” Orban said.

Budapest claims that the West’s response to the Ukraine conflict, including its attempts to punish Russia with economic sanctions, has caused a decline in living standards and other problems in Europe. Unlike other national leaders, who intend to support Kiev “for as long as it takes” to defeat Moscow, Orban has refused to send any military assistance and has attempted to mediate peace talks. Earlier this year, the prime minister made visits to Ukraine, Russia, China and the US during what he called a peace tour in a bid to facilitate negotiations. Orban expects US President-elect Donald Trump, whom he supports, to bring about radical changes on Ukraine after he is inaugurated in January.

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“After Aleppo fell, it became clear that Assad had no real intentions of staying in power, so we started to engage in diplomatic talks..”

• Syria’s post-mortem: Terror, Occupation, and Palestine (Pepe Escobar)

The short headline defining the abrupt, swift end of Syria as we knew it would be: Eretz Israel meets new-Ottomanism. The subtitle? A win-win for the west, and a lethal blow against the Axis of Resistance. But to quote still-pervasive American pop culture, perhaps the owls are not what they seem. Let’s start with former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s surrender. Qatari diplomats, off the record, maintain that Assad tried to negotiate a transfer of power with the armed opposition that had launched a major military offensive in the days prior, starting with Aleppo, then swiftly headed southward toward Hama, Homs, aiming for Damascus. That’s what was discussed in detail between Russia, Iran, and Turkiye behind closed doors in Doha this past weekend, during the last sigh of the moribund “Astana process” to demilitarize Syria.

The transfer of power negotiation failed. Hence, Assad was offered asylum by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. That explains why both Iran and Russia instantly changed the terminology while still in Doha, and began to refer to the “legitimate opposition” in a bid to distinguish non-militant reformists from the armed extremists cutting a swathe across the state. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov – his body language telling everything about his anger – literally said, “Assad must negotiate with the legitimate opposition, which is on the UN list.” Very important: Lavrov did not mean Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Salafi-jihadi, or Rent-a-Jihadi mob financed by the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT) with weapons funded by Qatar, and fully supported by NATO and Tel Aviv.

What happened after the funeral in Doha was quite murky, suggesting a western intel remote-controlled coup, developing as fast as lightning, complete with reports of domestic betrayals. The original Astana idea was to keep Damascus safe and to have Ankara manage HTS. Yet Assad had already committed a serious strategic blunder, believing in lofty promises by NATO messaged through his newfound Arab leader friends in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. To his own astonishment, according to Syrian and regional officials, Assad finally realized how fragile his own position was, having turned down military assistance from his stalwart regional allies, Iran and Hezbollah, believing that his new Arab allies might keep him safe. The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) was in shambles after 13 years of war and ruthless US sanctions. Logistics were prey to deplorable corruption. The rot was systemic.

But importantly, while many were prepared to fight the foreign-backed terror groups once again, insiders say Assad never fully deployed his army to counterattack the onslaught. Tehran and Moscow tried everything – up to the last minute. In fact, Assad was already in deep trouble since his visit to Moscow on 29 November that reaped no tangible results. The Damascus establishment thus regarded Russia’s insistence that Assad must abandon his previous red lines on negotiating a political settlement as a de facto signal pointing to the end. Apart from doing nothing to prevent the increasing atrophy and collapse of the SAA, Assad did nothing to rein in Israel, which has been bombing Syria non-stop for years. Until the very last moment, Tehran was willing to help: two brigades were ready to get into Syria, but it would take at least two weeks to deploy them.

The Fars News Agency explained the mechanism in detail – from the Syrian leadership’s inexorable lack of motivation to fight the terror brigades to Assad ignoring serious warnings from Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei since June, all the way to two months ago, with other Iranian officials warning that HTS and its foreign backers were preparing a blitzkrieg. According to the Iranians: “After Aleppo fell, it became clear that Assad had no real intentions of staying in power, so we started to engage in diplomatic talks with the opposition, and arranged the safe exit of our troops from Syria. If the SAA does not fight, neither will we risk our soldiers’ lives. Russia and the UAE had managed to convince him to step down, so there was nothing we could do.”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Colossus

 

 

Box
https://twitter.com/i/status/1866861978154607060

 

 

Tractor
https://twitter.com/i/status/1866922481891807454

 

 

Overreact
https://twitter.com/i/status/1866527187026776325

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle June 23 2024

Jun 232024
 
 June 23, 2024  Posted by at 9:14 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  49 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Weeping woman 1883

 

• Biden May Decline Nomination If He Does Poorly in June 27 Debate – Hersh (Sp.)
• A New Multipolar Security System Based On ‘Pax Rossiya’ (SCF)
• Is Washington Trying To Dump The Ukraine War Into The EU’s Lap? (Jay)
• The Only Way to End Confrontation Between Russia and the West (Lukyanov)
• The Ukrainian Border War Folly (David Stockman)
• Tens of Thousands of Ukrainians Hiding From Draft Officers – NYT (TASS)
• Belgium Warns Against Seizing Russian Money (RT)
• White Christians Being Replaced In Europe – Orban (RT)
• Sunak Accuses Farage Of Appeasing Putin (BBC)
• Wikipedia’s Political Bias Spreading To AI (RT)
• The Supreme Court Swatted Down Hunter Biden’s Hail Mary Pass (Turley)
• Common Sense And Memes Are Viruses To The New World Order (Lynn)
• Bibi Is Needy (DeMartino)
• UK Invents Phantom Skripals To Refuse To Testify In Novichok Inquiry (Helmer)

 

 

 

 

Cuomo Maher
https://twitter.com/i/status/1804499826546983385

 

 

Comer
https://twitter.com/i/status/1804207426297561197

 

 

Tucker J6

Jan 6
https://twitter.com/i/status/1804376332077535479

 

 

Judge Judy

 

 

Tesla

 

 

 

 

 

 

“..Biden is going to need to match the intensity he demonstrated at his State of the Union address in March if he wants to stay in the race, Hersh said..”

• Biden May Decline Nomination If He Does Poorly in June 27 Debate – Hersh (Sp.)

Democrats are discussing plans to have President Joe Biden decline the Democratic presidential nomination if he has a bad showing at the upcoming presidential debate on June 27, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported on Friday, citing a longtime friend of the US president. Hersh reported that there is a serious concern among the Democratic Party leadership and major Democratic donors about Biden’s ability to defeat former President Donald Trump in the November election. “One extreme possibility in the case of a very bad showing Thursday night, I have been told, is to obtain agreement from Biden and his family advisers for the president to come to the Democratic convention in Chicago in August and accept the accolades of a first-round delegate victory; then he would decline the nomination and throw the nominating process open to all,” Hersh said.

California Governor Gavin Newsom and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker could be favorites to replace Biden, Hersh said. Next week, Biden is going to need to match the intensity he demonstrated at his State of the Union address in March if he wants to stay in the race, Hersh said. An aggregation of national polls by RealClearPolitics shows that Trump holds a half-a-point lead over Biden and leads him in all seven swing US states.

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“The U.S. and its Western partners – a global minority – have come to be seen by most people of the world as rogue states that have trashed international law..”

• A New Multipolar Security System Based On ‘Pax Rossiya’ (SCF)

For several years now, Russia, China and other members of the expanding BRICS alliance have been formulating progressive trade and financial relations of the emerging multipolar world order. That order is based on mutual respect and partnership grounded in international law and the UN Charter. The BRICS concept is rightly the zeitgeist of our time. It is rallying more nations to its fold especially those of the so-called Global South which for decades have been subjected to the unilateralism of Western hegemony. The trouble is that for a new world order based on equality and fairness to succeed in practice, it needs to be secure from arbitrary military aggression and imperialist tyranny. In other words, a new security architecture is required to underpin the development of a multipolar world. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been advocating for a new indivisible international security system. This week saw the plan for a new security arrangement put into action.

The Russian leader embarked on state visits to North Korea and Vietnam during which he signed new strategic partnership and defense accords. Ahead of his trip to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Putin outlined the integrated vision thus: “We are also ready for close cooperation to make international relations more democratic and stable… To do this, we will develop alternative mechanisms of trade and mutual settlements that are not controlled by the West, and jointly resist illegitimate unilateral restrictions. And at the same time – to build an architecture of equal and indivisible security in Eurasia.” The concept of indivisible security is by no means limited to Eurasia. Russia has signaled the same principles apply to Latin America, Africa and indeed every other corner of the world. During Putin’s meetings with Chairman Kim Jong Un of the DPRK and President Lo Tam of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the strategic partnerships agreed were not merely about military defense and security.

They involved comprehensive partnerships for the development of trade, transport, technology, education, science and medicine. Nevertheless, it was clear that the commitment to strategic partnership was underpinned by new mutual defense accords. This was most explicit in the treaty signed with the DPRK which furnished “mutual assistance in the event of aggression against one of the parties”. This is a game-changer. It totally upends the geopolitical calculations of the United States and its NATO partners who have been unilaterally expanding military force and provocations in Eurasia and elsewhere. U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has ramped up aggression in the Asia-Pacific against China and North Korea with impunity. Under his watch, the US has increasingly moved nuclear forces into the region to intimidate not only Beijing and Pyongyang but also Moscow. The Biden administration has been assiduous in forming hostile military formations in the region with its NATO partners, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea.

Year after year, the United States has built up weapon systems in Taiwan to provoke China and on the Korean Peninsula to threaten North Korea. This unilateral aggression and “might is right” arrogance underpin the notion of Pax Americana that prevailed for decades after the Second World War. That notion was always a cruel euphemism for American imperialist violence to impose its economic and political interests. The Korean and Vietnam Wars in which millions of civilians were annihilated were the real-world grim translations of Pax Americana and its fraudulent “rules-based order”. Geopolitical perceptions have dramatically changed in a few short years. The U.S. and its Western partners – a global minority – have come to be seen by most people of the world as rogue states that have trashed international law through illegal wars and unilateral bullying with economic sanctions. The U.S. dollar and Washington’s relentless debt spending are seen as instruments of imperialist looting.

The BRICS multipolar world order is a welcome alternative to the mayhem of the Western-dominated system. The principles of fairness and cooperation are laudable and necessary to implement. But such principles must be reinforced with military defense and security for all. This is far from the one-sided “defense and security” of the United States and its NATO partners, which in reality is an Orwellian cover for aggression. The defense commitments given by Russia to the DPRK this week can be seen as long overdue. One may wonder how the U.S. and its allies got away with threatening the people of North Korea for so long and denying Pyongyang the sovereign right to self-defense. Admittedly, Russia did previously support UN sanctions on North Korea over its missile program. That’s over.

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“America wants to hand over the responsibility of Ukraine to the Europeans and shed responsibility for the mess that it has created..”

• Is Washington Trying To Dump The Ukraine War Into The EU’s Lap? (Jay)

With just a mere matter of weeks now before the U.S. presidential election some experts are wondering if Joe Biden is preparing, at the last minute, to wriggle free of the Ukrainian curse and tell voters that in the next term, if he were to be President, Ukraine funding will be reduced dramatically. This would, after all, be a cunning move to outfox Trump who has told reporters on numerous occasions that he would end the war once in office simply through cutting U.S. financial support.Either scenario places EU countries – and the EU itself in Brussels – in a quandary as their worst nightmare is coming true: America wants to hand over the responsibility of Ukraine to the Europeans and shed responsibility for the mess that it has created. One could even argue that relations now between the U.S. and EU countries are on a collision course given one recent offer Washington made to the EU in the form of a loan which the EU would guarantee but U.S. companies would benefit from.

As Hungary prepares to take the helm of the EU’s six month rotating presidency on July 1st, western elites are fretting over whether this time Budapest will veto outright the sanctions which are in place, which need to be signed off every six months. America in particular wants a quick fix solution but is indicating that it wants to hand over all the risk to Europe. It argues that those who hold Russian assets should be the ones to offer the guarantees against default – through interest on Russian cash held by them – and that U.S. Congress anyway is unlikely to sign off another batch of military aid, even in the form of a loan, at such short notice. Following a massive body blow from European elections, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will tell President Joe Biden they reject the American proposal for Europe to act as sole guarantors for the loan, according to conversations with six senior diplomats and officials.

The offer was structured in such a way that EU countries would pay the interest, accept the risk and allow most of what was a 50bn dollar loan to benefit U.S. companies. Remarkable sting for the EU governments when it shows that the relationship between them and the Biden administration just sinks lower and lower each week. Of course, there is a great deal of anger from the EU side as many EU leaders feel as though the U.S. has cleaned up quite nicely from the whole business of war which has profited the U.S. on so many levels but has drained EU economies, explaining why Poland recently held a pole which claimed that a majority of those asked wanted funding for the Ukraine war to end. Europe has really been left holding the baby over the Ukraine war and the palpable resentment against the U.S. is certainly growing. The deal the U.S. pushed of course was never going to be a runner but more likely a new European Commission in September will borrow a new 50bn euro tranche from its seven year 1.2 trillion euro budget for Ukraine.

Even in this scenario, the EU is scraping the barrel and reaching new lows in throwing cash into the fire just as an ephemeral last-ditch effort to stay warm. But both the U.S. and EU realise that time is running out for whoever wants to pour more money into the black hole of Ukraine. Time is running out because while Ukraine desperately needs the money, there’s no certainty that a Donald Trump presidency would back any loan initiatives. A final agreement will now be delayed until at least in autumn with just a matter of few weeks before November 5 election. Relations between the U.S. and EU have never been so tipped in Washington’s favour. And that’s before Trump even gets into the White House.

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Talk.

• The Only Way to End Confrontation Between Russia and the West (Lukyanov)

The concept adopted at the end of the Cold War stated that NATO ensured European security, and a bigger NATO meant a more secure continent. As a first step towards this, everyone (including Moscow) agreed that a reunited Germany would remain a member of the bloc instead of receiving neutral status, as some had suggested earlier. Further, it was implied that each country had the right to choose whether or not to join any alliances. Theoretically, that is what sovereignty implies. But in practice, the geopolitical balance of power had always imposed restrictions that forced alliances to consider the reaction of non-member countries. However, the triumphalism that reigned in the West following the Cold War significantly reduced the willingness to take such reactions into account. In other words, NATO felt like it could do anything and no reply would follow.

The situation could have changed dramatically if Russia had considered the possibility of joining NATO, and if the bloc itself had considered such a scenario. Then the principle of the indivisibility of security, proclaimed in the 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe, would have been respected within the framework of the bloc. However, it was impossible for Russia to join NATO, since, even at its weakest, Russia remained one of the world’s largest military powers and possessed the largest nuclear arsenal. The hypothetical accession of such a state to NATO would mean the emergence of a second force within the club that would be on a par with the US, and therefore, would not obey it on the same level as other allies. This would change the very essence of the organization, and alter its principles of Atlanticism (simply because of Russia’s geographical location). No one was prepared for this. The qualitative transformation of NATO was never on the agenda.

As a result, NATO’s expansion, which in a sense became automated, pushed Russia further and further to the east. Moscow’s attempts to regulate this process – first through participation in joint institutions (such as the NATO-Russia Council of 2002, which was an expansion of the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997) and then through growing opposition (starting with Putin’s Munich Speech in 2007) – did not bring the desired results. In addition to the inertia of the West’s initial approach (which implied that the bloc’s very existence is security in itself), the West believed that Moscow didn’t have the right to set conditions and must only follow the rules set by the stronger and more successful Western community. This is how the EU eventually got involved in the current Ukraine war. Could relations between NATO and Russia have developed in a different way? The West believes that the persistence of Russia, which continued to consider NATO a threat to its security, led to the current military crisis. And, in fact, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. But even assuming that this was true, the speed and ease with which NATO returned to a strong confrontation with Russia shows that it had been prepared for this.

Russia’s memorandum of December 2021 and the 2022 military operation in Ukraine were designed to put an end to the idea of NATO’s uncontested expansion as the only means of ensuring European security. Two-and-a-half years later, we see that the scale of the conflict has exceeded all initial expectations. Judging by Moscow’s statements, the confrontation may only come to an end when the principles on which European security is based are fundamentally reconsidered. This is not a territorial conflict, but a conflict which may only end when NATO abandons its main goal and function. So far, there is no compromise on the horizon. The Western side is not willing to agree that the results of the Cold War must be reconsidered, and the Russian side is not ready to retreat without this assurance. Thirty years after the signing of the Partnership for Peace program, there’s still no partnership or peace between Russia and NATO. And neither is there a clear understanding of why the two sides were unable to achieve it.

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Not one country. Never was.

• The Ukrainian Border War Folly (David Stockman)

once the iron-hand of totalitarian rule ended in 1991, the deep and historically rooted conflict between Ukrainian nationalism, language and politics of the central and western regions of the country and the Russian language and historical religious and political affinities of the Donbas and south came rushing to the surface. So-called democracy barely survived these contests until February 2014 when one of Washington’s “color revolutions” finally “succeeded”. That is to say, the Washington fomented and financed nationalist-led coupe d état ended the fragile post-communist equilibrium.

That’s the true meaning of the Maidan coup. It ended the tenuous cohesion that kept the artificial state of Ukraine intact for barely two decades after the Soviet demise. So save for Washington’s destructive intervention, the partition of a communist-confected state that had never been built to last would have eventually materialized. The evidence that the Maidan coup was the coup ‘d grace for the makeshift Ukrainian state is apparent in the maps below. These maps below tell you all you need to know about why this is a civil war, not an invasion of one neighbor by another. The first map is from the 2004 presidential election, which was won by the Ukrainian nationalist candidate, Yushchenko. The latter predominated in the orange areas of the map, over the pro-Russian Yanukovych, who swept the blue regions in the east and south.

2004 Ukraine Election Results—National Divorce In The Making

The second map is from the 2010 election, showing the same stark regional split, but this time the pro-Russian candidate, Yanukovych, won. In the map below, the dark blue parts to the far east (Donbas) indicate an 80% or better vote for Viktor Yanukovych 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-Yanukovych 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 lands of old eastern Galicia and Poland) 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. Yet it was one which still produced a sufficient victory margin (3.6 percentage points) for Yanukovych – so as to be reluctantly 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 Yanukovych’s “Regions Party” was based on the pro-Russian parts (blue areas) of the Ukrainian electorate. But when Washington essentially put the anti-Russian regions in charge of Ukraine’s government by orchestrating, funding and immediately recognizing the Maidan coup, everything changed on a dime. That was especially the case when the new, illegal government enshrined in its constitution a requirement to join NATO at the earliest possible opportunity.

In effect, Washington’s 2014 Maidan coup was the equivalent of Khrushchev’s emplacement of missiles in Cuba during 1962. Even had Putin been as erudite and civilized as JFK, rather than the ruffian he actually is, he would have had little choice except to insist that NATO missiles 30 minutes from Moscow cannot stand. In a word, there has been no unprovoked “invasion” by Moscow of the transitory artifact known as the Ukrainian state. The latter effectively began and ended with the Soviet Union.Moreover, with respect to the actual underlying reason for intervention in Ukraine—NATO’s proxy war against Russia– a simple question recurs: Besides restocking the NATO arsenals depleted by the demolition derby in what remains of Ukraine, what’s the reason for NATO’s war? Alas, the question answers itself. The War Capital of the World on the Potomac insists upon it, and its vassals in Europe like Ursula von der Leyen nod, jawohl!

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“..hundreds of thousands more Ukrainians to be called up into the army..”

• Tens of Thousands of Ukrainians Hiding From Draft Officers – NYT (TASS)

Tens of thousands of Ukrainian men have gone into hiding as they avoid conscription for fear of dying in the conflict involving “bloody trench warfare,” The New York Times reported on Friday. While it is not clear how many men are hiding from authorities, in big cities like Kiev and Lvov, social media groups alerting members to mobilization include tens of thousands of people, the newspaper wrote. Ukrainian men expressed fear of dying in the conflict, the NYT continued. According to the newspaper, Kiev has been sending troops without “sufficient training” to the front to replace combat losses.

Military analysts agree that a lack of adequate training makes it difficult for Kiev to hold its lines, the newspaper concluded. Ukraine announced a general mobilization in February 2022, which it has extended periodically ever since, with the country’s authorities doing their utmost to prevent men of conscription age from dodging the draft, including a ban on male residents of Ukraine from leaving the country. On May 18, a law tightening mobilization rules came into force in Ukraine, allowing hundreds of thousands more Ukrainians to be called up into the army.

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In a video I posted June 18, Jim Rickards says: “..Russia will retaliate by putting a lien on $40 trillion at the Euroclear custodian..” That’s not Russian money, but the total of what Euroclear processes. A recipe for absolute chaos.

• Belgium Warns Against Seizing Russian Money (RT)

Belgium does not support the seizure of Russian assets that have been frozen by the EU as part of Ukraine-related sanctions, the country’s Finance Minister Vincent Van Peteghem said on Friday, highlighting the mounting risks related to the move. The West froze nearly $300 billion in assets belonging to the Central Bank of Russia following the launch of Moscow’s military campaign against Ukraine in February 2022, a move denounced by Moscow as “theft.” Around $280 billion of this sum is held in the EU, primarily in the Belgium-based depositary and clearing house Euroclear. “First of all, for our country there are two elements that are important: we did not touch the assets themselves, as the ownership title change would yield consequences both on the legal side and financial side that are unknown,” Van Peteghem said during a press conference after the bloc’s ECOFIN meeting in Luxembourg.

“And second, of course, risk sharing, that I think is important in the rollout of the instruments and is a crucial element of all discussion,” the minister added. Earlier this month, the G7 nations announced that they had reached an agreement on using interest from frozen Russian assets to finance a $50 billion loan to help Kiev buy weapons and rebuild damaged infrastructure. At the time, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said that the confiscation of the assets was not on the table. In April, Van Peteghem stated that the bloc was close to reaching a political agreement on seizing the profits generated by Russia’s central bank reserves, stressing that the first tax collection could take place as early as July 1.

The idea of seizing the frozen Russian assets has been debated by EU lawmakers and the bloc’s allies for about two years. While the US and UK have called for the outright confiscation of the funds, multiple reports suggest that EU member states remain cautious regarding the move, citing the lack of a legal basis for such a measure as well as fears that Russia will take retaliatory steps. Some top officials have reportedly warned that the drastic move could undermine investors’ confidence in the EU’s financial system. The Kremlin has denounced the push to use its immobilized funds to provide support for Ukraine. Earlier this week, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Moscow has a “wide arsenal” of political and economic countermeasures it can use to respond to the potential confiscation of its sovereign assets.

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Sounds familiar.

• White Christians Being Replaced In Europe – Orban (RT)

A “militant” faction of pro-migration politicians is overseeing the “replacement” of white European Christians with Muslim immigrants, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has declared. “In Europe there is an exchange of populations, the number of white, Christian, traditional – let’s say European – people is decreasing, the number of migrants being imported and the number of people belonging to the Muslim community born here is radically increasing,” Orban told Kossuth Radio on Friday. German politician Manfred Weber, who leads the centrist European People’s Party (EPP) in the European Parliament, is the “beelzebub” responsible for this alleged scheme, Orban continued, adding that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is Weber’s “little servant girl” responsible for its implementation.

The EPP remained the largest faction in the European Parliament after last month’s elections. However, the decline of the Greens and a surge in support for right-wing parties has left the EPP with fewer allies with whom to pass legislation. Hours after he spoke to Kossuth Radio, Orban flew to Berlin to meet with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz ahead of Hungary assuming the EU Council’s rotating presidency next month. The Hungarian PM claimed that Germany has suffered greatly as a result of immigration, and “no longer looks like it did ten years ago.” “This Germany is no longer the Germany that our parents and grandparents held up to us as an example,” he said, adding that the country is now a “colorful, changed multicultural world” in which migrants are “no longer guests.”

Hungary’s stance on immigration has placed the country at odds with Brussels in recent years. Earlier this month, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ordered Budapest to pay €200 million ($216 million) for failing to comply with EU asylum law, and imposed a fine of €1 million per day until Hungary fully implements the legislation. According to the court, Budapest has limited migrants’ access to asylum procedures since 2020, making the process of filing applications “virtually impossible.” “It seems that illegal migrants are more important to the Brussels bureaucrats than their own European citizens,” Orban responded, vowing to “figure out a way, so [the ruling] hurts Brussels more than it hurts us.”

Orban was criticized in the German media for his comments on Friday, with Munich’s Merkur newspaper accusing him of spreading “conspiracy myths” about immigration. The idea of a so-called ‘Great Replacement’ is often written off by liberals as a racist conspiracy theory. However, the population share of white Europeans has been decreasing across the continent since the mid-20th century, and European leaders sometimes admit that they intend to use non-European immigration to replace the aging native workforce. Speaking in Athens earlier this year, European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson stated that “legal migration should grow by more or less 1 million per year” to achieve this goal.

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“..the ever-eastward expansion of Nato and the European Union was giving this man a reason to his Russian people to say, ‘They’re coming for us again’ and to go to war”.

• Sunak Accuses Farage Of Appeasing Putin (BBC)

Nigel Farage’s claim the West provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “completely wrong and only plays into Putin’s hands,” Rishi Sunak has said. The prime minister accused the Reform UK leader of “appeasement” that was “dangerous for Britain’s security”. In a BBC Panorama interview, Mr Farage said that “of course” the war was President Vladimir Putin’s fault. But he added that the expansion of the EU and Nato gave Mr Putin a “reason” to tell the Russian people “they’re coming for us again”. His remarks have prompted criticism from across the political spectrum. Labour’s shadow defence secretary John Healey said they made the Reform UK leader “unfit for any political office in our country, let alone leading a serious party in Parliament.” Former Conservative defence secretary Ben Wallace described Mr Farage as “pub bore”, who did not understand the “real world” of politics.

Speaking on an election campaign visit in London, Mr Sunak said: “What he (Mr Farage) said was completely wrong and only plays into Putin’s hands.”He added: “This is a man (Mr Putin) who deployed nerve agent on the streets of Britain, who is doing deals with countries like North Korea, and this kind of appeasement is dangerous for Britain’s security, the security of our allies that rely on us, and only emboldens Putin further.” In his Panorama interview, the former UKIP and Brexit Party leader was asked by Nick Robinson about his past comments on Mr Putin. “I said I disliked him as a person, but I admired him as a political operator because he’s managed to take control of running Russia,” he replied. He said it had been “obvious” to him for many years “that the ever-eastward expansion of Nato and the European Union was giving this man a reason to his Russian people to say, ‘They’re coming for us again’ and to go to war”.

Pressed further, he added: “We provoked this war. It’s, you know, of course it’s his fault – he’s used what we’ve done as an excuse.” After the interview aired on Friday, Mr Farage, a former member of the European Parliament, said on X that he was “one of the few figures that have been consistent and honest about the war with Russia”.Alongside the new statement, he reposted a speech in the European Parliament from 2014 in which he called for the West to “stop playing war games with Putin. “The Ukrainian presidency has told the BBC it will not be putting out an official statement on Mr Farage’s comments. But a source in the presidential office warned about the “virus of Putinism and the rise of war propaganda”, adding: “The task of civilized humanity is to fight this virus in the bud.”

Reform UK has been gaining ground on the Conservatives in the opinion polls since Mr Farage announced he was returning to front-line politics as the party’s leader shortly after the general election campaign got under way.
He has said his aim is for Reform to replace the Conservatives as the official opposition to Labour, which he says is certain to gain power on 4 July, although polling suggests the party may win only handful of seats at this election.

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“..its co-founder, Larry Sanger, saying last year that the website had become an instrument of “control” used by the US intelligence agencies to wage information warfare..”

• Wikipedia’s Political Bias Spreading To AI (RT)

Wikipedia’s tendency to negatively portray right-wing political figures is feeding into AI large language models (LLMs) that harvest data from the online encyclopedia, a US-based conservative think-tank has claimed. A report released on Thursday by the Manhattan Institute looked at evidence of political bias in English-language articles on Wikipedia, by correlating the names of Western leaders and prominent politicians with emotion-laden words. The study found “prevailing associations of negative emotions (e.g., anger and disgust) with right-leaning public figures; and positive emotions (e.g., joy) with left-leaning public figures,” suggesting “evidence of political bias embedded in Wikipedia articles.” “We find some of the aforementioned political associations embedded in Wikipedia articles popping up in OpenAI’s language models,” the report concluded.

The researchers noted that Wikipedia articles are likely a prominent part of OpenAI’s “secret corpus of data” used to train ChatGPT. The report acknowledges, however, that this pattern is not universal, and is more common in articles about US political figures, while there was no evidence of Wikipedia bias in entries on British politicians or US-based think tanks. For example, in references to recent US presidents, Donald Trump – now the Republican presidential frontrunner – was portrayed with the most negative sentiment, while Barack Obama was listed as having the most positive references. The report concluded that Wikipedia “is not living up to its stated neutral-point-of-view policy.”

The policy referred to, which Wikipedia describes as one of the pillars of the encyclopedia, stipulates that articles must exclude personal opinions and interpretations of the editor, be based on reliable sources, and explore multiple points of view when dealing with a controversial topic. Wikipedia has been repeatedly criticized for its supposedly biased takes on hot-button political issues, with its co-founder, Larry Sanger, saying last year that the website had become an instrument of “control” used by the US intelligence agencies to wage information warfare.

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“What is now left for Hunter are sentencing guidelines that strongly support jail time and a judge who has imposed such jail time in past cases..”

• The Supreme Court Swatted Down Hunter Biden’s Hail Mary Pass (Turley)

While the result in Washington was not as bad as the unanimous decision in Delaware, it may well have sealed his fate on appeal. U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika did not leave him much for appeal in overseeing a fair and textbook trial. The Biden legal team had been counting on Hail Mary passes since a Special Counsel was appointed. It almost worked. Special Counsel David Weiss seemed to work hard to avoid any felony charges against the president’s son. The Justice Department not only allowed the statute of limitations to run on major crimes, but sought to finalize an obscene plea agreement with no jail time for Hunter. In the hearing to accept the plea, Judge Noreika decided to ask a couple of cursory questions of the prosecutor, particularly about a sweeping immunity provision covering any and all crimes committed by Hunter.

The prosecutor admitted that he had never seen an agreement this generous for a defendant. The plea fell apart and the Biden team seemed unwilling to accept anything but a single throw victory. They told the prosecutor in court “just rip it up.” The Biden legal team then blundered in taking the case to trial with a jury nullification strategy. Some of us wrote that Hunter needed to plead guilty to avoid jail time. Instead, they hoped that a Delaware jury in Bidentown could never convict a Biden. They were wrong. That left the last pass to the Supreme Court, which just seemed to land in the stadium seats. In reality, it was never a strong throw. After all, Hunter was convicted for lying on gun forms, something that the Court was never likely to excuse.

What is now left for Hunter are sentencing guidelines that strongly support jail time and a judge who has imposed such jail time in past cases. The other group of people that may be even more upset with this ruling may be many in the media and Congress. Once again, the Court has shattered the false narrative that this is a hopelessly divided Court along ideological lines. This month the Court has continued to rule unanimously or nearly unanimously, including in cases like Rahimi in controversial constitutional claims. Instead, the Court rendered a reasonable, balanced accommodation for public safety under the Second Amendment. It is not clear who is more disappointed: Hunter or the Court critics.

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The New World Order can’t meme anymore than the left..

• Common Sense And Memes Are Viruses To The New World Order (Lynn)

Relativism, undeniably, trends in modernity. And Orwell was right: “The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.” Orwell, George, ”1984”: part 2, chapter 9. So whether by Marxism or any other form of secular utopianism: The goals are always out with the “old” and in with the “new”. Order out of chaos. Dissolve and coagulate. Also like Orwell’s “1984”: The world’s global societal power structure is stratified into concentric rings of power. The Inner Party functions to continuously preserve and enrich itself; as the Outer Party (i.e. those following orders) and the Proles are utilized and cannibalized when necessary.

The circles of power have become increasingly interconnected in modernity; and technology allows the Inner Party to launch policies that are enforced by the Outer Party and unto the Proles. This process is also called “history”. The Outer Party depends upon the Inner Party for survival and it always remains a difficult challenge to convince the Proles of something they can’t, or won’t, see. As a result, history unwinds in inevitable, cyclical waves. Yet, the Inner Party has survived for generations – even before the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 and its unleashing of the modern Fractional Reserve Banking monster. Slavery is rooted in economics; and so the Inner Party uses debt to implement and expand its various wars. The rich get richer as the poor suffer, starve, and die. While driving the other day, I listened to an “expert” on AM radio discussing the vast increase of carbon in Earth’s atmosphere and the conclusion was this: “Climate Change is real!” The radio voice seemed very confident in its conclusions and, by implication, it was ready to do everything necessary to stop what it perceived as a genuine threat. Always the same dialectics, again and again.

Is America having seizures? Or postmortem convulsions? At this point in time, I am convinced it’s the latter. While in communication with a retired retarded professor, she expressed exasperation at those who still plan to vote for Trump. After all, he was convicted by a jury of his peers and is now a convicted felon. In response, and from memory, I typed out a meme I saw on the internet: “He lived over 70 years without a criminal record. But when he ran for president he was charged with over 90 crimes! How can you explain that?” Silence. But… oops! Did you notice what I did there? Did you see how the Inner Party’s phony dialectics had me defending the proud promoter of Operation Warp Speed®?

When it was revealed that U.S. Senate ratification was required for the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Pandemic “Treaty”, it was, instead, transitioned into an “agreement”. Except that strategy went down in flames, too, at the WHO’s 77th World Health Assembly. In response, Team Biden, China, and other unelected WHO totalitarians stealthily passed new International Health Regulations (IHR) behind closed doors. This was done on June 1, 2024 in Geneva, Switzerland. The Ethiopian Communist, and WHO Director, Tedros Ghebreyesus, violated the IHR’s Article 55.2 eligibility requirements and with less than the required quorum of member states voting. This power grab was completely illegal and unlawfully elevated the WHO “from a global advisory-only body to an international enforcer of its mandates.” So we all better get the word out, before it’s too late. Especially now that it’s another election year so flu season is almost here.

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“Turning on a practically endless faucet of cash for a friend and then being criticized because it wasn’t endless enough..”

• Bibi Is Needy (DeMartino)

On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu released a video complaining about a short-lived pause of one weapon shipment from the United States. In the video, he directly criticized the administration of US President Joe Biden. “It is inconceivable that in the past few months, the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunitions to Israel,” The Israeli Prime Minister said, despite the United States being the largest provider of weapons to Israel and its most stalwart defender on the international stage. The White House canceled a meeting with high-ranking Israeli officials in response and attempted to assure the public that it had not stopped sending weapons to a country that has been accused of genocide by several nations. The decision to delay one shipment of weapons was in response to Israel’s decision to go forward with its Rafah invasion, despite pressure from the United States to hold off.

Biden has been dealing with protests over the US supplying weapons to Israel, but the pause on one shipment seemingly did nothing to slow Israel’s campaign. More than 6% of the Gaza population has been killed, seriously injured or remains missing. Turning on a practically endless faucet of cash for a friend and then being criticized because it wasn’t endless enough must be a familiar experience for Biden. Ukraine’s illegitimate President Volodymyr Zelensky complained earlier this year that aid from the US, which he had already received well over $110 billion worth, was arriving too slowly. But, considering who his family is, he is probably used to it. Last year, texts between Biden and his son Hunter were revealed that showed the younger Biden– despite earning millions allegedly on the back of his father’s name– complaining about being broke and asking his uncle James Biden for money.

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“The British have presented no evidence of Novichok on the Skripal home door handle; in the blood, skin, and urine testing of the Skripals in hospital; or in subsequent inquest and court proceedings..”

• UK Invents Phantom Skripals To Refuse To Testify In Novichok Inquiry (Helmer)

A new lawyer appeared in a London court on Friday claiming to represent Sergei and Yulia Skripal. Jack Holborn, a barrister specializing in what he calls human rights, told Lord Anthony Hughes, who is conducting a public inquiry into the alleged Novichok death of Dawn Sturgess in 2018, that the Skripals should not be called to give evidence or testify in the case. Holborn claimed the Skripals are fearful for their security. “No security measures are perfect”, he said. Holborn has not been in contact with the Skripals, however. He refuses to answer questions put to him on what visual contact or other communications he has had with either Sergei or Yulia Skripal. Instead, he was told what to say at the hearing by the law firm of Kingsley Napley which the British government is paying to show that the Skripals are participating in the Novichok case. The spokesman for Hughes and the inquiry was asked to explain Holborn’s presence in court for the first time on Friday. She was also asked what authority the Skripals had given Holborn to represent them.

The spokesman answered: “Kingsley Napley has been designated as the recognised legal representative of the Skripals under r[ule] 6 of the Inquiry Rules 2006. By rule 8, the recognised legal representative may appoint a team to assist them and Kingsley Napley have accordingly instructed counsel to appear on their clients’ behalf.”. In other words, there has been no contact between the lawyers who say they represent the Skripals, and the Skripals themselves. The judge and government are refusing to give evidence that Sergei Skripal is alive, and that Yulia Skripal is not in prison. The problem for the British Government is that if the Skripals are allowed to give live evidence at the Hughes inquiry, there is no telling what they may say to contradict or discredit the six-year official narrative of the Russian Novichok attack in England. The lawyer for the inquiry, Andrew O’Connor KC, told Hughes on Friday morning this was a “difficult question as to whether either or both of Sergei and Julia Skripal should give oral evidence.”

He also acknowledged there was the same problem in revealing what the Skripals have already said. “In the case of the Skripals, the transcripts of their police interviews have not yet been provided to CPs [Concerned Parties] but will be very shortly.” In fact, the Skripal transcripts will be so redacted, the officials and lawyers admitted in court, it is uncertain what the Skripals believe had happened to them, and why. Release of the redacted Skripal transcripts from March of 2018 risks being contradicted by fresh written statements to the Hughes inquiry from the Skripals, so that form of testimony is also being barred. Since March 4, 2018, when the Skripals slumped unconscious on a Salisbury town bench and were kept in hospital under police guard, three British prime ministers — Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Rishi Sunak — have continued the story that three Russian military officers attacked the Skripals with a Novichok nerve agent they had brought by plane into England, and sprayed on to the door handle of Sergei Skripal’s home; that was several hours before he and his daughter showed symptoms and collapsed.

The British have presented no evidence of Novichok on the Skripal home door handle; in the blood, skin, and urine testing of the Skripals in hospital; or in subsequent inquest and court proceedings. The alleged Russian attack weapon – a perfume bottle atomiser – did not materialize for months until July 2018, when police claim to have found it on a kitchen bench in the home of another alleged victim, Dawn Sturgess, ten days – repeat ten days — after exhaustive police searches of the house had failed to find it. Sergei Skripal has not been seen in public since the day of the alleged Novichok attack, March 4, 2018. He has not been heard on the telephone by family members in Russia since June 26, 2019. Yulia Skripal was last seen in a government-directed interview at a US bomber base in England in May 2018; her last telephone call to Russia was heard on November 20, 2020. The Skripals have not been seen or heard from since.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Off-switch
https://twitter.com/i/status/1804219814627471641

 

 

Aurus

 

 

Only men

 

 

Brahmaputra
https://twitter.com/i/status/1804372316085981370

 

 

Coral
https://twitter.com/i/status/1804467986520002771

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle June 18 2024

Jun 182024
 
 June 18, 2024  Posted by at 8:54 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  55 Responses »


Pablo Picasso The blue room 1901

 

• Next Stage – The General Staff’s Targets After Putin’s Feint (Helmer)
• NYT Docs: Putin Was Willing To Compromise To End War in 2022 (Antiwar)
• US Must Be Saved From WWIII – Trump (RT)
• If Putin Ukraine Peace Offer Rejected, Next To Be Tougher – Intel Chief (TASS)
• NATO In Talks To Put More Nuclear Weapons On Standby – Stoltenberg (RT)
• Kremlin Views NATO’s Rhetoric On Putting Nukes On Alert As Escalation (TASS)
• Netanyahu Disbands War Cabinet (RT)
• The Unites States of Go Figure (Kunstler)
• Schumer Plans Vote on Bill to Ban Bump Stocks After Supreme Court Ruling (ET)
• British Conservatives Annihilated In Pre-Election Polls (RT)
• Elon Musk Slams “Extinctionist Movement” Who See Humans As A “Plague” (MN)
• Brain Chips To Replace Cell Phones In Future – Musk (RT)
• Tesla Begins Testing Full Self-Driving On Chinese Roadways Ahead Of Rollout (ZH)
• Horrors Of Biden’s Lost 85,000 Migrant Children In America (ZH)

 

 

 

 

Jim Rickards @JamesGRickards My latest interview with Steve Bannon on The War Room covers the G7 theft of Russian assets and how Russia will retaliate by putting a lien on $40 trillion at the Euroclear custodian. U.S. can’t think one move ahead. Financial chaos will result.

 

 

Black voters

 

 

Tucker Alex

 

 

 

 

Watters

 

 

 

 

“To think anyone on the other side is trustworthy, or capable of agreement, after all Putin recounted of US aggression, lying, double-dealing, and Ukrainian Nazism, is impossible.”

• Next Stage – The General Staff’s Targets After Putin’s Feint (Helmer)

“[Putin’s terms] will obviously not be accepted by the West and their Ukrainian puppets,” wrote Rozhin. “Against the background of the ‘world summit’ [the Burgenstock, Switzerland, meeting on June 15-16] this will indicate that in fact the West is prolonging the war, so these statements [of Putin] are another torpedo in the summit. Russia is thus showing the countries of the Global South that it has offered a world that will be rejected by those who are broadcasting about ‘peaceful summits’…The war will continue. The goals of the SVO [Special Military Operation] will be achieved by military means.” The distinction in the last line is between Kremlin political strategy and General Staff military strategy – this is a distinction which published Russian analyses of the president’s speech and the state propaganda organs avoid identifying. The semi-official Vzglyad quoted Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, as characterizing the reaction from the West as “of an unconstructive nature”. No Russian official will say as little as this for the record.

Instead, Vzglyad has mobilized its official sources to patch over the differences between Kremlin strategy and General Staff strategy by emphasizing that Putin is following the latter. “According to [Putin], the West has received a specific condition – either Ukraine will be outside the NATO bloc, or there will be a bold and sharp onslaught that will leave no chance for the enemies. Putin is confident of victory not only over Ukraine, but also over the entire collective West. The proposal was made in order to recall this initiative after the defeat of Ukraine. But Western leaders did not understand Putin, and then they themselves will say that they want peace… But there will be no mercy, tougher conditions will be put forward.” In a second report from academics on the Kremlin-financed Valdai Club roster, Vzglyad claims “the essence of the Russian president’s speech is that the European security system no longer exists and will not be based on the same principles.”

“In addition, the Russian president managed to change the agenda of the Swiss summit…the president’s initiative is capable of transforming the security structures not only of Eurasia, but also in the perspective of the entire planet. In addition, Russia already has really working international institutions in this space: the CIS, SCO, EAEU, CSTO, BRICS, the Union State of Russia and Belarus. All these tools have proven their reliability and suitability in modern conditions.” The Kremlin’s American camp followers have repeated the semi-official line by scratching the difference between tactics and strategy, between feint and purpose. “Notice he’s [Putin] not making a demand about Odessa,” said one. “So Odessa is still off the table…So this is a prelude to the next ramp-up in Russian military operations.”

Russian skeptics, as well as non-Russian military analysts, point out that Putin has repeatedly refused to follow the General Staff’s advice, restricting their proposed military operations to an extent that there is open questioning about his reasons. One source says Putin’s June 14 exposition is “only half-right in blaming the Western ‘globalist liberal elites’ [Putin’s speech] for the current ‘extremely dangerous state of affairs’ [Putin’s speech]. Ultimately, the ideology of liberalism, inferiority complex, and corruption which dominate the oligarch-backed elite in Moscow has played a major role.” This is a reference to the role Putin invited the oil and minerals oligarch Roman Abramovich to play in the negotiations of March-April 2022 in Istanbul; in the negotiations with the Ukrainian delegation, Abramovich was Putin’s personal delegate and he outranked the official Russian negotiators.

There was strong domestic military and political opposition to this at the time in Moscow; there remains suspicion of an attempt to repeat by Putin’s Kremlin staff, represented by Peskov, even now. “He [Putin] cannot be so influenced still as to think the war against Russia via the Kiev regime will stop under the conditions he laid out, nor can he think there are any terms which the US and NATO can be trusted by the Russians to sign. That’s why the Russian Foreign Ministry tabled the terms of a non-aggression and security in Europe requiring the roll-back of NATO’s borders to 1997. That was in December 2021. To think anyone on the other side is trustworthy, or capable of agreement, after all Putin recounted of US aggression, lying, double-dealing, and Ukrainian Nazism, is impossible.”

Read more …

Much better deal than available now, and 500,000 Ukrainians still alive.

• NYT Docs: Putin Was Willing To Compromise To End War in 2022 (Antiwar)

In April 2022, Ukraine and Russia were on the brink of signing a deal to end the war just weeks after it began. The New York Times published documents showing President Vladimir Putin was willing to make concessions to get an agreement signed. According to the documents, Putin initially sought to have Kiev recognize Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. However, a draft agreement from April 15, 2022, suggests both parties were prepared to set aside the issue to end the conflict. “Paragraph 1 of Article 2 and Articles 4, 5, and 11 of this Treaty shall not apply to Crimea and Sevastopol,” the document says. In December, Ukrainian negotiator Oleksandr Chalyi explained that an agreement was reached in the spring of 2022, stating the two sides “managed to find a very real compromise. We were very close in the middle of April, in the end of April, to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement.”

Kiev was also willing to accept neutrality with regards to NATO, according to the NYT. Ukraine’s negotiation team proposed a peace deal that would say the country “does not join any military alliances” and “does not deploy foreign military bases and contingents.” The draft deal would have allowed Kiev to sign bilateral agreements with NATO states, as well as become a member of the European Union, but would have required Ukraine’s security partners to lift sanctions on Russia. The Kremlin also sought to protect the rights of millions of Russian speakers living in Ukraine by forcing Kiev to repeal restrictions on the Russian language, and to bar the state from erecting monuments glorifying neo-Nazis and WWII-era Nazi collaborators. As the talks were ongoing, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was pushed by his Western backers to forgo diplomacy and attempt to forcibly expel Russian troops from his country.

Then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson made an infamous trip to Kiev to pressure Zelensky to abandon any peace negotiations, while Washington repeatedly vowed to supply unlimited military aid. The NYT report added details about US pressure on Ukraine to ditch the talks. According to a senior American official familiar with the negotiations, Washington “quietly said, ‘You understand this is unilateral disarmament, right?’” Additionally, the NYT noted that Polish leaders believed the French and German governments might have endorsed the peace agreement and pushed Ukraine to accept it. During a meeting in late March 2022, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda pressured other NATO leaders not to allow Ukraine to sign the Russian proposal.

Some US officials cautioned Ukraine not to trust Russia and warned the talks were merely a military ploy. However, two out of three Ukrainian negotiators who spoke with the NYT believed the Russian proposal was genuine, and one explained Putin had “reduced his demands” over the course of the discussions. Ultimately, decision-makers in Kiev listened to their supporters in Warsaw, London, and Washington and elected to break off the negotiations. More than two years later, the conflict drags on, with Russian forces steadily advancing on major Ukrainian cities despite renewed Western military aid. On Friday, the Russian president extended a public peace offer to Ukraine that is similar to the one nearly agreed to in 2022. However, along with Kiev agreeing never to join NATO and the West lifting sanctions on Russia, the Kremlin is now demanding that Ukraine recognize Moscow’s sovereignty over Crimea and four other Ukrainian oblasts that have been annexed by Russia throughout the two-and-a-half-year-long war.

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“..he has done more damage to the country than the ten worst presidents in US history combined..”

• US Must Be Saved From WWIII – Trump (RT)

Former US President Donald Trump has warned of the possibility of a third world war breaking out under the current leadership in Washington, saying that if elected he would reverse course. Speaking at a Turning Point USA campaign event in Detroit, Trump emphasized that he had not started any new conflict during his 2017-2021 presidency, and vowed to work towards restoring peace, particularly in Ukraine, if he wins a second term. Trump claimed that Joe Biden’s “weakness and failure” were putting the US in “grave danger” and “dragging us towards World War III,” suggesting that he has done more damage to the country than the ten worst presidents in US history combined. “We have a lot of problems in this country, on top of that, we could end up in World War III because we have an incompetent leader that should never have been there,” he stressed.

Earlier this month, the Republican also warned that the world could be plunged into a devastating nuclear war due to Biden’s alleged mental decline. Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump suggested that unlike the leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea, Biden is “not at the top of his game” and had never been “the brightest bulb” among US politicians. Trump warned that a nuclear exchange could lead to “world obliteration” and emphasized that the US currently has a leader that is “incapable of even discussing” the issue. During his speech in Detroit, the presidential candidate also criticized the Biden administration for “wasting money at levels never seen before,” particularly when it comes to continued financial support for Ukraine, and called Vladimir Zelensky “the greatest salesman that has ever lived.”

“Every time he comes to our country, he walks away with $60 billion dollars,” Trump said, adding that every time Zelensky receives money, he immediately asks for more. “It never ends,” he stressed, and vowed to have the issue “settled” before he takes office again as president. Previously, Trump has stated that the Ukraine conflict “never would have happened” if he had been president at the time and has said that he would be able to end it “in 24 hours” if he gets another term in November. He has not, however, offered any details as to how he would accomplish that goal.

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Obviously.

• If Putin Ukraine Peace Offer Rejected, Next To Be Tougher – Intel Chief (TASS)

The conditions of the next peace proposal for Ukraine if the current one is rejected will be more complex and harsh, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Director Sergey Naryshkin said in an interview with TASS. “The conditions on which peace can be achieved and some sort of a peace agreement may be signed will become more complex and tough for Ukraine,” he said, replying to a question as to what will happen if Ukraine refuses Russian President Vladimir Putin’s peace proposal. Earlier, Putin presented new peace proposals on settling the Ukraine conflict, providing for the recognition of Crimea, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions as parts of Russia, the establishment of Ukraine’s non-aligned and non-nuclear status as well as its demilitarization and denazification and the lifting of anti-Russian sanctions. The Kiev regime has rejected this initiative.

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“..the only scenario in which they might resort to a nuclear option is if Russia’s very existence is at stake..”

• NATO In Talks To Put More Nuclear Weapons On Standby – Stoltenberg (RT)

NATO members are debating putting more of their nuclear weapons on standby mode amid tensions with Russia and China, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph on Sunday, Stoltenberg stated that NATO is in talks about taking nuclear assets out of storage and making them ready to use, since the US-led military bloc must clearly convey to the outside world that it has a strong deterrent potential. ”I won’t go into operational details about how many nuclear warheads should be operational and which should be stored, but we need to consult on these issues,” he said, adding that deliberations are already underway. The NATO chief stressed that while the bloc’s ultimate goal is a world without nukes, “as long as nuclear weapons exist, we will remain a nuclear alliance, because a world where Russia, China and North Korea have nuclear weapons, and NATO does not, is a more dangerous world.”

He voiced particular concern about what he called China’s growing nuclear capabilities, adding that NATO could soon face “something that it has never faced before, and that is two nuclear-powered potential adversaries” – Beijing and Moscow. According to Stoltenberg, the US is also modernizing its nuclear gravity bombs deployed in Europe, and its allies on the continent are also upgrading the aircraft that carry them. This came after Pranay Vaddi, Special Assistant to the US President and Senior Director for Arms Control, said earlier this month that “absent a change in the trajectory of adversary arsenals,” the US would soon reach a point where it would have to increase the number of deployed nuclear weapons.

Western media and officials have repeatedly accused Russia of nuclear saber-rattling amid the Ukraine conflict. However, officials in Moscow have repeatedly said that they have no plans to use nukes against the neighboring country, stressing that the only scenario in which they might resort to a nuclear option is if Russia’s very existence is at stake. At the same time, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov warned last week that Moscow could potentially alter its nuclear doctrine in view of a growing threat caused by “unacceptable and escalatory actions of the US and its NATO allies.”

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“..the Russian president never talks nukes “at his own initiative as he takes the issue seriously..”

• Kremlin Views NATO’s Rhetoric On Putting Nukes On Alert As Escalation (TASS)

The recent remark by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg that the bloc’s allied members are discussing putting their nuclear arsenals on alert is another bout of tensions, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “This is nothing else but an escalation,” Peskov said. Unlike Western officials, the Russian president never talks nukes “at his own initiative as he takes the issue seriously,” the Kremlin spokesman said. “Whenever President [Vladimir] Putin comments on the issue of nuclear arms, he does so, taking someone’s questions or questions from reporters, including foreign ones,” he explained.

Also, the NATO chief’s statement runs counter to the declaration issued following last weekend’s conference on Ukraine in Switzerland, Peskov added. The communique, he said, ruled out such rhetoric as inadmissible. Stoltenberg told The Daily Telegraph in an interview that NATO allies had started consultations on the need to put nuclear weapons on alert, including against the background of China’s plans to increase the number of its nuclear warheads.

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Nothing changes.

• Netanyahu Disbands War Cabinet (RT)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dissolved the war cabinet overseeing the conflict in Gaza after a key member, retired general Benny Gantz, resigned from the emergency government, according to media reports. The prime minister reportedly announced the move to ministers at a meeting of the cabinet on Sunday. Gantz, a former defense minister without portfolio who entered the war cabinet shortly after the beginning of the conflict with the Palestinian militant group Hamas last October, announced his resignation earlier this month, citing disagreement with Netanyahu’s policies. ”The cabinet was in the coalition agreement with [National Unity MK Benny] Gantz at his request. As soon as Gantz left – there is no need for a cabinet anymore,” Netanyahu said, as cited by local media.

The prime minister is now expected to hold consultations on the Gaza conflict with a small group of ministers, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, who had been in the war cabinet. Shortly after Gantz’s resignation, another minister without portfolio, former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, also resigned from the cabinet, where he served as one of three observers. Another observer, Knesset member Yechiel Tropper, made the same announcement. Both Gantz and Eisenkot said they resigned due to Netanyahu’s failure to form a strategy for the war in Gaza.

During the government meeting on Sunday, Netanyahu reportedly said, “in order to reach the goal of eliminating the capabilities of Hamas, [I] made decisions that were not always acceptable to the military echelon,” adding, “we have a country with an army and not an army with a country.” The war cabinet was established on October 11, just days after the Israeli-Hamas war broke out following the Palestinian militant group’s surprise attack on southern Israel, in which over 1,000 people were killed and around 250 were taken hostage. The cabinet was chaired by Netanyahu, and included Gantz and Gallant, along with three observers – Dermer, Eisenkot, and Shas party leader Aryeh Deri.

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“Pretend is what actors actually do, you see. They’re really good at it, and your job is to play along, suspend your disbelief. That’s the essence of showbiz.”

• The Unites States of Go Figure (Kunstler)

You realize, don’t you, that everything going on around the Ukraine fiasco on the NATO side is completely insane? The folks running the US government — Barack Obama and his witches’ coven — started the whole thing over there in concert with a gang of corporate players (BlackRock, sundry oil-and-gas companies, Haliburton types, arms-makers, bunch of big banks), plus the dastardly WEF for “guidance” (ha!), looking to grab the mineral wealth of Ukraine and, ultimately, of Russia itself. Nice try. Didn’t work out. Tons of money pounded down a rat hole. Now, the chatter is that we (NATO) “can’t afford to lose.” Yeah? But we’re losing. Russia will hold the eastern Ukraine provinces and what’s left in the rest of Ukraine will be a failed state drained of men under sixty able to work at anything, bankrupt, broken. It will take a century, if ever, for Ukraine to recover from all that and the West will have gained nothing.

Anyway, that’s the true prospect. And so, the West’s “solution” to that humiliating quandary appears to be: start a bigger war, right up to and including nukes. That’s good thinking there, Butch, said Sundance. Why the European members of NATO wanted to go along with this nickel-plated clusterfuck is an abiding puzzle of history now, like who exactly bumped off JFK in 1963. Germany, the Euro club’s biggest economy, stood by listlessly while America blew up its supply of affordable natgas (the Nord Stream pipelines), which was an act of war by us against Germany. Apparently, Olaf Scholz went to our CIA station in Berlin for a haircut one day and came out with a lobotomy, staring blankly through the whole affair like a Hinterwälder steer on the killing floor. Meanwhile, goodbye industrial economy! Nice knowing you. Looks like it’s back to the fourteenth century, living on rough black bread, sleeping with the cattle under your house for heat in winter, fighting jihadis inside your town walls. . . .

What is the purpose, you ask yourself, of this new world war we’re itching to start? And why now, exactly? The stupid answers may be the correct ones. To furnish an emergency pretext allowing “Joe Biden” (Barack Obama & Co.) to “postpone” the election? If so, I guess they want a hot civil war even more than WWIII, because that’s what they’ll get. Or is it just to complete the destruction of the USA, turning us into a failed state run by a tranny Mamluk-ocracy? Or is it, as Ed Dowd has averred, to cover up the imminent implosion of the US / Euroland debt debacle? To provide cover for all that, the West held a fake peace conference at a five-star resort in Switzerland last week — flutes of Louis Roederer Cristal Brut with langoustine mousse in puff pastry boats . . . to die for! (and you just might) — and you know how serious the USA was because we sent our ace problem-solver Veep Kamala Harris, who cackled and hee-hawed her way through a session or two and then. . . just. . . split the scene, mysteriously. Russia, was conspicuously not invited, by the way. Whose idea was that?

Mr. Putin marked the occasion by issuing a sane proposal to commence peace negotiations so plain, simple, and straightforward that even “Joe Biden” might have gotten the drift: 1) withdraw Ukrainian troops from Donbas territory that has joined the Russian Federation, and 2) agree that Ukraine not join NATO. The US and NATO instantly rejected it, on grounds unspecified. According to The New York Times own search engine this very morning (June 17), the newspaper hasn’t published a news story on the Ukraine War for the past five days. Go figure . . . . While Veep Kamala Harris was yukking it up over the peace hilarity in Switzerland, “Joe Biden” went to the far more important celebrity fundraiser out in Hollywood, headlined by the likes of actors George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and late-nite snarkist Jimmy Kimmel, that is, certified experts on geopolitical conflict, united in the cause of “saving our democracy” from “the dictator Trump.”

“Joe Biden” declared that Donald Trump was bent on “retribution. . . he’s gonna get back at the people.” Roger that. But I think he meant that Mr. Trump might open some inquiries into how come the Democratic Party and its Intel blob ran one debilitating lawless hoax after another on our country for the past eight years while bankrupting it and destroying the medical system, the legal system, the currency, higher education, and the US military, not to mention jailing thousands on fake criminal charges and letting ten billion alien mutts into the country, many of them jihadis with dubious intentions.But never mind all that. $30-million got raised in Hollywood to continue the game of pretend that “JB” is running for reelection. Pretend is what actors actually do, you see. They’re really good at it, and your job is to play along, suspend your disbelief. That’s the essence of showbiz.

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“.. the high court found that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) exceeded its authority..”

How is that a “disgraceful decision”?

• Schumer Plans Vote on Bill to Ban Bump Stocks After Supreme Court Ruling (ET)

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he will bring a vote this week on legislation to outlaw bump stocks after the Supreme Court on June 14 struck down a Trump-era ban on the gun accessory. Mr. Schumer, at a June 16 news conference shared by CBS News, said he would bring the bill up for unanimous consent, meaning that only one senator has the power to block the measure. It is almost certain that a Republican senator would move to block the measure. “We’ll see just what Republican MAGAs do: Will they allow it to go forward, or will they cower to MAGA and hurt the American people?” Mr. Schumer said. A 6–3 opinion by the high court found that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) exceeded its authority when it interpreted a federal firearms statute to outlaw the use of bump stocks.

Bump stocks are attached to the butt end of a rifle, to take advantage of a semiautomatic gun’s recoil to fire more rapidly. “As I warned the Trump administration at the time, the only way to permanently close this loophole is through legislation. Senate Democrats are ready to pass legislation to ban bump stocks, but we will need votes from Senate Republicans,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement on June 14 after the ruling. The ATF in 2018, with the support of President Donald Trump, reversed its earlier position and declared bump stocks illegal in response to the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, in which a gunman used firearms equipped with bump stocks to fire multiple guns more rapidly, killing 60 and leaving hundreds wounded.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito filed a concurrence on June 14 that emphasized Congress’s role. “There is a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machineguns,” he said. “Congress can amend the law—and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation. Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act.” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the Supreme Court decision “deeply disappointing.” “Today’s ruling renews a call for Congress to enact further gun safety legislation,” he wrote on social media platform X. Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.) echoed that, writing on X that the ruling was a “disgraceful decision” that “will result in the death of more Americans, especially children.” Some Republicans saw the ruling as a victory for Second Amendment rights. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said on June 16 that any legislation to ban bump stocks might violate the Second Amendment.

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“Winning just 72 seats would be the party’s worst result in its 200-year history..”

• British Conservatives Annihilated In Pre-Election Polls (RT)

The UK’s ruling Conservative Party is heading for “electoral extinction,” according to multiple polls published in British media over the weekend. Amid Sunak’s record unpopularity, two polls showed Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party surging to third place. According to an Opinium poll published in The Observer on Saturday, 40% of likely voters said they would choose the Labour Party when they cast their votes on July 4. Another 23% said they would vote Conservative, while 14% said they would back Reform UK candidates, a better result for the anti-immigration party than for the Greens (7%) and Liberal Democrats (12%). A Telegraph poll published the same day showed even more dismal results for Sunak’s party, with 46% of likely voters choosing Labour, 21% Conservative, and 13% opting for Reform UK.

It marks the poorest showing for the Conservatives in a Telegraph poll in five years, while Labour’s 25-point lead is the party’s largest since October 2022, when Conservative Prime MInister Liz Truss stepped down after unveiling a widely-reviled mini-budget. Reform’s share in both polls is its largest since the party’s creation in 2021. A more detailed poll carried out by Survation for the Times showed Labour winning 456 out of 650 parliamentary seats, and the Conservatives hanging on to only 72. By contrast, the Conservatives won 365 seats in 2019, a majority of 80 and at the time their best result since 1987. Winning just 72 seats would be the party’s worst result in its 200-year history. The Conservatives’ previous low point came in 1906, when under the leadership of Arthur Balfour it won 156 seats to the Liberal party’s 397.

Sunak called the election last month, before the publication of economic data showing that inflation was unlikely to fall to his government’s target. Like Truss and Boris Johnson before him, Sunak has presided over an historic decline in British living standards and a rise in energy costs and inflation, both of which soared after the UK cut itself off from Russian fossil fuels in 2022. With three weeks to go until the election, some Conservatives have accused Reform UK and its leader, Nigel Farage, of splitting the right-wing vote. “The only wasted vote is a Conservative vote,” Farage shot back last week, after a separate poll showed Reform as the country’s second-largest party. “We’re heading north and the Tories are heading south,” he continued, declaring that “the people’s revolt is just gathering momentum.”

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“..If humans go extinct or civilisation collapses, whatever policies we may have are irrelevant..”

• Elon Musk Slams “Extinctionist Movement” Who See Humans As A “Plague” (MN)

In a recent interview, Elon Musk warned that those who wish to see humanity thrive are in a fight against those with an “extinctionist” philosophy, environmental extremists who see humans as a “plague on the Earth.” Musk was speaking to the Cato Institute about the “implosion of the birth rate,” noting that we should be “very concerned” because it is “accelerating in most countries.” “If there are no humans, there’s no humanity,” Musk simplified, adding “we need to make them somehow.” The Space X owner continued, “In the sort of extreme form of the environmentalist movement, people start to view humans as a plague on the surface of the earth, as a fundamentally bad thing, and with the implication that if all humans disappeared, somehow earth would be better off.”

Musk labeled it “The Extinctionist Movement,” urging that “I think at a fundamental level, you can think of things as a fight between expansionist and extinctionist philosophies.” “That’s what really matters. If humans go extinct or civilisation collapses, whatever policies we may have are irrelevant,” he further asserted. Musk further stressed that civilisation and consciousness will end and everything will be left to robots unless we “have an expansionist philosophy.” “We must seek to go beyond what we’ve done in the past to increase the number of humans,” Musk declared, adding “one way or another, this must happen.” His final message to the world was “Go forth and multiply.” It is a warning Musk has been repeating for some time now.

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He mentions so much, and the author picks out the cell phone? How about “revolutionary treatments for people suffering from various physical disabilities such as paralysis and blindness, as well as illnesses like obesity, autism, depression, and schizophrenia..”?

• Brain Chips To Replace Cell Phones In Future – Musk (RT)

Cell phones will become obsolete in the future, being replaced by chips that are implanted directly in the human brain, billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has predicted. His Neuralink biotech company implanted a brain chip for the first time in 30-year-old quadriplegic Noland Arbaugh back in January. The surgical procedure involved placing the computer chip – which is about the size of a coin – in the region of the brain which controls the intention to move. The chip is then used to “record and transmit brain signals wirelessly to an app that decodes movement intention.” Musk shared his latest prediction in response to a post published on X (formerly Twitter) by a parody account named Not Elon Musk on Sunday. The original message read: “Would you install a Neuralink interface on your brain to allow you to control your new X phone by thinking?”

Musk replied by claiming that “in the future, there will be no phones, just Neuralinks.” In its press release last year, Neuralink said its Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface (PRIME) program aims at developing a “fully implantable, wireless brain-computer interface” that would at first grant people the ability to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts. It would later pave the way for revolutionary treatments for people suffering from various physical disabilities such as paralysis and blindness, as well as illnesses like obesity, autism, depression, and schizophrenia. In an interview with Joe Rogan in 2018, Musk suggested that Neuralink could also one day allow humans to communicate without using words, and possibly also achieve a state of “symbiosis” with artificial intelligence.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted approval for the first chip implantation trial last May. Several weeks after the procedure in late January, Musk reported that the man had made a “full recovery with no ill effects that we are aware of,” and was capable of moving a computer mouse around the screen “by just thinking.” However, in May, Neuralink acknowledged that it had encountered certain issues after tiny wires implanted in the brain were dislodged out of position. Nevertheless, the FDA gave the green light for a second human trial, the Wall Street Journal reported last month. The next experiment, which is reportedly slated for June, will feature a modified procedure, whereby a chip will be implanted deeper into the brain to prevent it from retracting. According to the media outlet, another eight people are expected to take part in further trials by the end of the year.

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Wow. That’s fast.

• Tesla Begins Testing Full Self-Driving On Chinese Roadways Ahead Of Rollout (ZH)

Beijing recently ‘greenlighted’ Tesla the ability to roll out its driver-assistance system, known as “Full Self-Driving,” or FSD. A new report suggests Tesla is testing vehicles equipped with FSD on city streets and highways in the world’s largest car market. Reuters cited a report from the government-backed Shanghai Observer that said ten Tesla vehicles with FSD are being tested ahead of what could be a much larger planned rollout later this year. Elon Musk has been strategically paving the way for an FSD rollout in China in recent months. His surprise visit to China on April 28, where he met with top Chinese officials, including Premier Li Qiang, clearly indicated Tesla’s deepening ties with China.

One day later, on April 29, news broke in US corporate media that Tesla would partner with Chinese tech giant Baidu for mapping and navigation software to support FSD, including satisfying regulators about data security and privacy requirements. Other reports said top Chinese officials gave Musk the greenlight to roll out FSD in some limited capacity. In May, Reuters reported that Tesla was preparing to register FSD with Chinese authorities for a planned rollout later this year. Chinese state media also stated that Tesla had begun building a Megapack factory in Shanghai. The larger rollout of FSD in China will be a golden opportunity for Tesla to expand revenue streams amid the worldwide slump in EV sales. Also, this allows them to better compete with local rivals in China.

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“If this happened under former President Trump, CBS, ABC, NBC, and other media outlets would be running 24/7 specials about the horrific situation..”

• Horrors Of Biden’s Lost 85,000 Migrant Children In America (ZH)

One of Muckraker.com’s journalists has taken to X, revealing an upcoming report set to expose the shocking reality behind some of the 85,000 migrant children who vanished under the Biden administration’s first term. Muckraker wrote on X that one government insider has supplied them with a “list of addresses where some of the 85,000 missing alien children have been delivered under the Biden administration.” In the video, a Muckraker journalist stood outside an abandoned Amityville, New York house. He said this is one of the thousands of addresses the government insider has provided them, adding this home with boarded-up windows allegedly had two migrant children delivered to a sponsor living at the house. “Our upcoming report will expose the horrors of the Biden administration’s unaccompanied children program,” Muckraker wrote on X.

Leftist corporate media outlets have barely covered that the Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement has lost more than 85,000 migrant children in Biden’s first term. If this happened under former President Trump, CBS, ABC, NBC, and other media outlets would be running 24/7 specials about the horrific situation. All the American people hear are crickets from leftist corporate media outlets, more focused on rainbow June month than actually caring about missing children. It is disappointing and another reason why distrust in leftist corporate media is soaring as ratings implode. In recent weeks, “Fox and Friends Weekend” co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy asked Trump in an interview about the missing migrant children situation and what he would do if reelected.

“So in just this year, fiscal year 2024, there’s been 74,000 unaccompanied children that have come across the border. In 2023, get this number, 137,275. You know, you’ve seen the images of these children … and the Joe Biden administration has lost 80,000 of them. No one can track, no one knows where they’re at … Will you commit, will the Trump administration commit to finding these children, to finding them and returning them to their families? To their countries? Because many of them have been lost into sex trafficking. It’s heartbreaking. Will you commit to that?” Campos-Duffy asked the former president.

Trump responded: “Yeah, I would do that. Sure, adding, “I haven’t been asked that question, but the answer is yes. It’s a simple answer. Many of them are dead. They have done such a bad job.” Trump also spoke with Dr. Phil about the situation, in which he said, “Can you imagine if that were Trump that had 88,000 missing children…” What Trump is referring to is corporate leftist media would be railing against him if he were president right now for the missing children. Muckraker did not provide a release date on the report: “Stay tuned, you do not want to miss what’s next.” If the climate cultists and woke zombies across the West redirected their wasted energy from rainbow parades to actually addressing human trafficking, perhaps real progress in tackling this crisis could be made.

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Kansas AG Pfizer

 

 

Turandot
https://twitter.com/i/status/1802646620015579338

 

 

Whenever I see Optimus, I just keep thinking: Joe Biden moves very energy efficient.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1802678186611777681

 

 

Horse

 

 

Baby turtle

 

 

Baby rhino

 

 

Elephants

 

 

Pride
https://twitter.com/i/status/1802658014249328657

 

 

 

 

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