Jan 032024
 


Joan Miro Dancer 1925

 

In Court Cases Facts Are Losing Their Relevancy (Paul Craig Roberts)
Maine Shows the Danger of Zealots in our Legal System (Turrley)
Trump Fights 2024 Maine Election Ban (RT)
New York City Council Members Reportedly Weighing Trump Ballot Ban (Sp.)
Karaganov: Russians Are The Real Europeans, The West Has Lost Its Way (RT)
What Will Be Left Out of the EU? (Barton)
Scholz Claims Putin to Blame for Germany’s Economic Woes (Sp.)
Ukraine and Palestine: A Double Threat To US Hegemony (Bhadrakumar)
US Rejects Gaza Ethnic Cleansing Proposal (RT)
2024: The Year Global Government Takes Shape (Kit Knightly)
2024 Is Going To Be ‘Even More Crazy’ – Elon Musk (RT)
Corruption, Chaos, Conflict – Fourth Turning Erupts In 2024 (Quinn)
Dollar’s Dip in 2023 Just the Start as BRICS Strives for Dedollarization (Sp.)
US Debt Hits A Record $34.001 Trillion (ZH)

 

 

 

 

The reveal has been postponed until the end of the month.

 

 

 

 

RFK

 

 

 

 

TCN

 

 

 

 

 

 

J6 Full

 

 

 

 

“..as They Have in News Reporting, Scholarship, and Science..”

In Court Cases Facts Are Losing Their Relevancy (Paul Craig Roberts)

Informed people understand that the indictments, civil charges, and judicial rulings against Trump all involve what is politely called “a stretch of the law.” But they do not seem to grasp that Trump’s defense against the charges is not based on the falseness of the charges but on whether he has presidential immunity. In other words, the phony charges stand, and the question is whether Trump has presidential immunity. Whether the charges are factual is not considered relevant. The advantage in Trump’s attorneys taking this approach is that if Trump has immunity, all the indictments are dismissed and trials over the disputed charges do not take place, a good thing as the biases of the Democrat prosecutors, judges, and jurors make fair trials for Trump impossible.

The disadvantage is that Trump’s enemies can claim that the charges are true but could not be brought to trial because of immunity. More seriously, it means that the lack of evidentiary basis for the charges will not be established. In other words, the Democrat prosecutors who weaponized law in order to intentionally concoct false indictments are protected from having their crimes revealed. Of course the Democrat juries and judges would validate the Democrat prosecutors cases despite the lack of evidence. In the US judicial system where truth is irrelevant, accusation alone serves as the basis for indictment and conviction. As no defendant or defendant’s lawyer trusts the American judicial system, 97% of all alleged felonies are resolved with plea bargains in which even innocent defendants agree to a lessor charge in order to avoid the risk of a longer sentence imposed by a trial.

Only the idealistically few expect a fair trial. By declining the Justice (sic) Department’s plea to fast-track an immunity decision, the Supreme Court has probably delayed any Trump trial until after the election. If the federal appeals court upholds Democrat district court judge Tanya Chutkan’s biased ruling against Trump, then the appeal goes to the Supreme Court. It lengthens the ordeal that Trump has to endure, but it likely frees him from campaigning with a false conviction hanging around his neck.

Read more …

“..pundits who warn that Democrats can no longer rely on the election process, given Trump’s soaring popularity.”

Maine Shows the Danger of Zealots in our Legal System (Turrley)

“You had me at hello.” That line from the movie “Jerry Maguire” came to mind this week after yet another Democratic secretary of state moved to prevent citizens from voting for former president Donald Trump. Maine’s Shenna Bellows issued a “decision” that declared Trump an “insurrectionist” and ineligible to be president. She joined an ignoble list of Democratic officials in states such as Colorado who claim to safeguard democracy by denying its exercise to millions of Americans. Yet the most striking aspect of this poorly crafted decision was not its litany of conclusory findings, but rather Bellow’s implausible suggestion that she struggled over the decision. Bellows was a natural choice for challengers, who have been searching for any officials or courts willing to embrace this dangerous theory under the Fourteenth Amendment that they can unilaterally bar candidates deemed rebellious or insurrectionalist.

Challengers knew that they had Bellows at hello. She was one of the first officials to declare the Jan. 6 riot to be an “insurrection” prompted by Trump’s speech. Bellows previously declared that “the Jan. 6 insurrection was an unlawful attempt to overthrow the results of a free and fair election…The insurrectionists failed, and democracy prevailed.” A year after the riot, Bellows was still denouncing the “violent insurrection.” Of course, in the 1996 movie, Jerry Maguire reminded Dorothy that ” we live in a cynical world — a cynical, cynical world — and we work in a business of tough competitors.” However, he added “you complete me.” In our cynical politics, Bellows and Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, among others, have become wildly popular for seeking to complete the effort to defeat Trump by removing him from the ballot. This cynicism is captured in statements from pundits who warn that Democrats can no longer rely on the election process, given Trump’s soaring popularity.

One columnist wrote that “Democrats may have to act radically to deny Donald Trump the 2024 Republican nomination. We cannot rely on Republicans to do it…Trump must be defeated. No matter what it takes.” Many Democratic jurists and officials have refused to participate in this cynical effort to win the election through the courts. Maine’s Democratic U.S. Rep. Jared Golden denounced Bellows decision. California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) warned Democrats against embracing this legal theory. His state’s secretary of state Shirley Weber (D) had refused to do what Bellows just did. Yet Democrats know that they need only to remove Trump from the ballots of a couple of key states to make him constitutionally incapable of becoming president, due to the electoral college. Thus, Trump could be the overwhelming choice of the voters but still be effectively barred from assuming office.

To achieve this end, advocates are willing to adopt the type of ballot-cleansing powers long associated with authoritarian countries such as Iran. That is why this theory of disqualification remains one of the most dangerous to arise in our nation’s history. The U.S. stands as the most successful and stable democratic system in history. In the blind quest to block Trump “at any cost,” these officials have introduced a destabilizing element to our system that could be replicated in tit-for-tat politics for years to come. It has already begun, with Republicans calling to bar President Joe Biden from ballots. The ballot-cleansing effort is only the latest example of what Justice Louis Brandeis identified as the true threat to our democracy — not the threat from other countries, but from within. “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding,” he said.

Read more …

Time for the Supreme Court to step in. Or Trump will have 20 of these cases.

Trump Fights 2024 Maine Election Ban (RT)

Former US President Donald Trump has begun a court fight to get himself back on this year’s election ballot in Maine, arguing in a legal filing that a state official had no authority to disqualify him from the race. Trump’s lawyers filed the appeal on Tuesday in Maine Superior Court, challenging last week’s decision by Secretary of State Shenna Bellows to bar the ex-president from the ballot because of his alleged role in the January 2021 US Capitol riot. The case is likely to ultimately be decided by the US Supreme Court, along with Trump’s disqualification from the ballot in Colorado, but Maine has required him to begin his challenge in the state court system.

The ruling making Trump ineligible in Maine “was the product of a process infected by bias and pervasive lack of due process,” Trump’s lawyers said in Tuesday’s filing. They added that Bellows has a documented history of being biased against Trump and gave him no opportunity to defend himself against her allegations. The Maine and Colorado disqualifications were based on interpretations of a constitutional amendment that banned people who engage in an “insurrection or rebellion” from holding public office in the US. The amendment was passed by lawmakers in 1866 to ensure citizenship and constitutional rights for former slaves and to block politicians who had taken part in the Confederate rebellion from returning to power.

Bellows and other Democrats have accused Trump of inciting the Capitol “insurrection,” where demonstrators sought to block the transfer of power after he lost to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. She has made public statements on social media calling Trump an “insurrectionist” and suggesting that he should have been removed from office after being impeached for his alleged role in the riot. Trump has repeatedly claimed that the election was rigged, but has denied any role in triggering the riot. Trump is polling as, far and away, the leading candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. However, his candidacy has been jeopardized by state efforts to disqualify him, as well as felony indictments in four separate criminal cases. He has called the legal actions a politically motivated “witch hunt” to block voters from being able to elect him again.

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There we go…

New York City Council Members Reportedly Weighing Trump Ballot Ban (Sp.)

New York City council members are urging the state’s Board of Elections to disqualify former President Donald Trump from the 2024 primary and general election ballots due to his alleged involvement in the events following the 2020 election, the National Review reported on Tuesday. “The Board of Elections must give effect to the Fourteenth Amendment and its safeguards to protect the integrity of New York’s electoral process, maintain the public’s faith in our democratic system, and respect the rule of law,” councilman Shekar Krishnan is quoted in the report as having written in an email this week to other council members.

Though the report cites several council members as having endorsed Krishnan’s letter, Democratic councilor Robert Holden is quoted in the report as saying that he found the idea of removing a candidate from the ballot without legal cause “troubling.” “This trend across the nation, including here in New York, is dangerous. If you are against a candidate, you work hard to beat them at the polls, not prevent them from participating in an election,” Holden is quoted as saying. Other council members are quoted in the report as agreeing with Holden, with some calling the letter a “waste” of the council’s time.

“My colleagues should instead be devoting their energy and efforts towards resolving the ongoing migrant crisis and bringing the budget back under control. New York City is facing some very real problems right now, and Donald Trump being on the ballot here is not one of them,” Council member Jane Ariola is quoted as saying in the report. Last month, both Maine and Colorado disqualified Trump from the 2024 primary ballot, citing the insurrectionist clause in 14th Amendment. Both bans are expected to be swiftly appealed in both the state courts and the US Supreme Court.

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Sergei Karaganov is Russia’s HSE University Dean of the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs. Very much worth a read.

“..without European inoculation, without European culture, we would not have become such a great power. We would not have had Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin or Blok.”

Karaganov: Russians Are The Real Europeans, The West Has Lost Its Way (RT)

The elites of Western Europe – and especially in Germany – are in a state of historical failure. The main basis of their 500-year domination [of the world] was military superiority, on which the economic, political and cultural dominance of the West was built. But this has been knocked out from under them. With the help of this advantage, they manipulated the world’s resources in their favor. First they plundered their colonies, and later they did the same, but with more sophisticated methods. Today’s Western elites are failing to address a range of growing problems in their societies. These include a shrinking middle class and rising inequality. Almost all their initiatives are failing. The European Union, as everyone knows, is slowly but surely sprawling out. That is why its ruling class has been hostile to Russia for about 15 years now.

They need an external enemy; Josep Borrell [the EU’s top foreign affairs official] called the world around the bloc a jungle last year. Indeed, in the past, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the sanctions adopted by the EU [against Russia] were necessary first and foremost to unite the European Union and prevent it from collapsing. The German and Western European elites have an inferiority complex in, what is for them, a now-monstrous situation, where their part of the world is being overtaken by everyone. Not only by the Chinese and the Americans, but also by many other countries. Thanks to Russia’s liberation of the world from the ‘Western yoke’, Western Europe is no longer lording it over the states of the Global South, or as I call them, the countries of the world majority.

The threat Western Europe now presents is that the Old World has lost its fear of armed conflict. And that is very dangerous. At the same time, the West of Europe, let me remind you, has been the source of the worst disasters in human history. Now in Ukraine there is a struggle not only for Russia’s interests, for the interests of its security, but also to prevent a new global confrontation. The threat is growing. This is also due to the West’s desperate attempts at counter-attacks to maintain its dominance. Today’s Western European elites are failing and losing influence in the world to a much greater extent than their American counterparts. Russia is fighting its own battle and fighting it successfully. We are acting confidently enough to sober up these Western elites, lest they unleash another world conflict in despair at their failures. We must not forget that these same people’s predecessors unleashed two world wars within one generation in the last century. Now, the quality of these elites is even lower than it was then.

[..] The West is now closing the Iron Curtain, first of all because we in Russia are the real Europeans. We remain healthy. And they want to exclude these healthy forces. Secondly, the West is closing this curtain, even more tightly than during the Cold War, in order to mobilize its population for hostilities. But we do not need a military confrontation with the West, so we will rely on a policy of containment to prevent the worst. Of course, we will not cancel anything, including our European story. Yes, we have completed our European journey [in terms of integration]. I think it has dragged on a bit, maybe for a century. But without European inoculation, without European culture, we would not have become such a great power. We would not have had Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin or Blok.

So we will keep European culture, which the West of our continent seems to be trying to abandon. But I hope that it will not destroy itself completely, in this regard. Because Western Europe is not only abandoning Russian culture, it is abandoning its own culture. It is cancelling a culture that is largely based on love and Christian values. It is cancelling its history, destroying its monuments. However, we will not reject our European roots. I have always been against looking at the West with mere squeamishness. You should not do that. Then we would be like them. And they are now sliding towards an inevitable march towards fascism. We do not need all the contagions that have been and are growing out of the west of Europe. Including, once again, the growing contagion of fascism.

Read more …

“..Europe is currently being prepared to hand its territory over to a new mixed, Islamised Europe..”

What Will Be Left Out of the EU? (Barton)

The first decisive attempt to flood Europe with mostly Muslim migrants took place in 2012. In January that year, the unelected, cosmopolitan EU leadership pushed ahead with its scheduled integration within EUROMED. First a Barcelona seminar under the telling slogan: War and Peace in XXI century. The Arab Spring a year later took place. During the seminar the EU Special Envoy, Bernardino Leon urged the EU to offer a ‘a new relationship’ to Arab countries that underwent the Arab Spring. This new relationship was to be based on equal treatment between the European Union and the Arab partners. In the presence of the former, High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy in Europe, Javier Solana, Leon assured Tunisia of being granted a relationship similar to other European countries outside the EU like Norway, Iceland and Switzerland.

This push was further reinforced in February 2012 by a Brussels Press Briefing. This took place to give information and significance to the meeting of the Prime Minister of Tunisia, Hamadi Jebali (the same one who announced to his countrymen that they possibly were in the Sixth Caliphate) and the President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso. The latter within his Press Briefing mentioned a number of priorities to be dealt with. Significantly, one of them involved the resumption of the dialogue on mobility and migration. Further developments related to influx of Muslim migrants to Europe are related to Chancellor Angela Merkel. Despite the fact that yet in 2010 she erupted in reference to multi-culti integration calling it an utter failure her decision to accept over a million refugees mainly from the Middle East marked a profound change in her policy.

Watching closely the 2015 migrant crisis billionaire financer George Soros welcomed her decision. The same cosmopolitan George Soros prepared his plan of bringing up to 1 million Muslims to Europe annually. The plan was among other things reported on 22 July 2017, in Tusnadfurdo, Romania, by the prime minister of Hungary, Victor Orban and vehemently opposed by him. A few words on the plan may give some insight into Soros’s thinking and the European Commission readiness to cooperate. The plan comprises of four points and the Soros Empire published it and began recruitment for implementation of it. The second point envisaged that upon arrival every Muslim migrant should be given an amount in euros equivalent to four and a half million forints which the author of the plan would be glad to finance.

The essence of the proposal is the so-called “pull factor” to maintain a continuous influx. After all, the received sum in euros by each migrant upon arrival would be higher than the Hungarian annual average wage. The third point of the plan stated that the migrants arriving in the EU would have to be distributed among the countries of Europe as part of a mandatory and permanent mechanism. And interestingly, the fourth point is about setting up a European immigration agency which would take all the decision-making powers related to migrant affairs away from the nation states and hand them over to Brussels. The opposition to massive migration and Soros-like proposals on part of Orban is loud and firm. His not very widely publicised statements clearly indicate what is at stake. I shall quote just three of them:

Over the next few decades the main question in Europe will be this: will Europe remain the continent of the Europeans? Will Hungary remain the country of the Hungarians? Will Germany remain the country of the Germans? Will France remain the country of the French? Or will Italy remain the country of the Italians? Who will live in Europe?’ Social democratic parties aren’t what they once used to be. They’ve married themselves to global business interests representing neoliberal economic policy, and now they have a single policy area, they’re concentrating on a single area: preservation of their influence over culture. This is the second important element in Europe today. And the third important thing is that Europe is currently being prepared to hand its territory over to a new mixed, Islamised Europe. If you are raped legally, forced to accept something you don’t like, how would you like to have a compromise and agreement? It’s impossible.

Read more …

“Spiraling energy costs in the EU have meant that the bloc has had to overpay more than $204 billion on energy over the past 20 months alone..”

Scholz Claims Putin to Blame for Germany’s Economic Woes (Sp.)

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took a page out of President Biden’s playbook in his New Year’s Eve address, blaming Putin, rather than his own government’s short-sighted policies, for unleashing a global security crisis and putting the German economy into a tailspin. “With COVID-19 barely receding, Russia began a merciless conflict in the center of Europe. Soon after that, the Russian president turned off the natural gas tap, and in the fall there was a brutal terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel,” Scholz said. “Our world has become a more unsettled and harsher place. It’s changing at an almost breathtaking speed,” the chancellor added. “The result is that we too are having to change. This is a worrying thing for many of us. For some, it is also causing discontent. I do take that to heart. But I also know this: We in Germany will get through it,” Scholz said.

Assuring that his government has done a good job in tackling inflation, raising wages, fighting unemployment and replenishing the country’s energy supplies since the cutoff of Russian gas, Scholz expressed confidence that Berlin has managed to hold back an “economic downturn” and to save energy collectively as a nation. Stressing that the key to German power lies in the “strength” of the European Union and its 400 million inhabitents, Scholz urged that “it is important for Europe to emerge unified and strengthened from the European elections in the coming year. After all, Russia’s war in the east of our continent is not over. Nor is the armed conflict in the Middle East. The year ahead will also bring presidential elections in the United States, which may have far-reaching consequences – including for us here in Europe.”

The chancellor’s comments blaming Russia for sky-high energy costs in Europe are nothing new, with Scholz, members of his cabinet and Germany’s allies both in Europe and across the Atlantic regularly repeating the mantra that it was Russia which “turned off the taps” of cheap and dependable gas supplies to the continent. Scholz and his colleagues traditionally leave out the fact that it was the United States which (allegedly) destroyed the Nord Stream Baltic Sea gas pipelines, and that Poland and Ukraine, not Russia, cut off gas flows to Europe via their overland pipelines, leaving TurkStream the only fully operational Russian infrastructure pumping gas to Europe. Spiraling energy costs in the EU have meant that the bloc has had to overpay more than $204 billion on energy over the past 20 months alone, with manufacturers flee the region for climes where energy costs are lower and tax breaks more plentiful (first and foremost the United States).

Meanwhile, ordinary Germans have been left facing higher fuel and utility costs and jacked up prices at supermarkets and big box stores. Curiously, Scholz didn’t mention the impact of the Biden administration’s Build Back Better Act on the German economy, even has hundreds of enterprises big and small packed up their bags and left for North America amid the energy crunch to take advantage of the US federal government’s generous subsidies for the production of so-called ‘green’ technologies. As for Vladimir Putin, the Russian president warned the Europeans over a year-and-a-half ago that if they made the short-sighted decision to stop the purchase of Russian energy, the EU’s economic competiveness would be shattered.

[..] Polling conducted last month found that some three quarters of respondents are dissatisfied with Chancellor Scholz’s ‘traffic light coalition’, with Scholz’s Social Democratic Party polling at just 17 percent support, the Greens at 13 percent, and the Free Democrats at 5 percent, for a total of 35 percent. The mainstream conservative Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union bloc and the populist right Alternative for Germany hit 24 and 17 percent support, respectively, while Linke and former Linke lawmaker Sahra Wagenknecht’s new populist left BSW party 2 and 14 percent support, respectively.

Read more …

“Russia has been rather explicit that during its 2024 chairmanship of BRICS, it will push for the creation of a currency to challenge the petrodollar..”

Ukraine and Palestine: A Double Threat To US Hegemony (Bhadrakumar)

Washington’s neck-deep involvement in the current phase of the West Asian crisis can turn into a quagmire, since it is also tangled up with domestic politics in a way that the Ukraine war never has been. But then, the outcome of the Ukraine war is already a foregone conclusion, and the US and its allies have realized that Russia cannot be defeated militarily; the endgame narrows down to an agreement to end the conflict on Russia’s terms. To be sure, the outcome of the Ukraine war and the denouement of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is at the root of the West Asian crisis, will have a profound impact on the new world order, and the two processes reinforce each other. Russia realizes this fully. President Vladimir Putin’s stunning ‘year-enders’ in the run-up to the New Year speak for themselves: daylong visits to Abu Dhabi and Riyadh (watched by a shell-shocked US President Joe Biden), followed by talks with Iran’s president and rounded off with a telephone conversation with the Egyptian president.

In the space of 48 hours or so, Putin touched base with his Emirati, Saudi, Iranian, and Egyptian colleagues who officially entered the portals of the BRICS on 1 January. The evolving US intervention in the West Asian crisis can be understood from a geopolitical perspective only by factoring in Biden’s visceral hostility toward Russia. BRICS is in Washington’s crosshairs. The US understands perfectly well that the extra large presence of West Asian and Arab nations in BRICS — four out of ten member states — is central to Putin’s grand project to re-structure the world order and bury US exceptionalism and hegemony. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Iran are major oil producing countries. Russia has been rather explicit that during its 2024 chairmanship of BRICS, it will push for the creation of a currency to challenge the petrodollar. Without doubt, the BRICS currency will be at the center stage of the grouping’s summit due to be hosted by Putin in Kazan, Russia in October.

In a special address on 1 January, marking the start of Russia’s BRICS Chairmanship, Putin stated his commitment to “enhancing the role of BRICS in the international monetary system, expanding both interbank cooperation and the use of national currencies in mutual trade.” If a BRICS currency is used instead of the dollar, there could be significant impact on several financial sectors of the US economy, such as energy and commodity markets, international trade and investment, capital markets, technology and fintech, consumer goods and retail, travel and tourism, and so on. The banking sector could take the first hit that might eventually spill over to the markets. And if Washington fails to fund its mammoth deficit, prices of all commodities could skyrocket or even reach hyperinflation triggering a crash of the US economy.

Read more …

The moral high ground.

US Rejects Gaza Ethnic Cleansing Proposal (RT)

The US State Department condemned Israeli proposals to remove the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza en masse in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller explicitly rejected recent comments from Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir supporting the mass deportation of Palestinians as “inflammatory and irresponsible.” Noting that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of his cabinet have denied that it was official government policy to resettle Gaza’s Palestinian inhabitants, Miller demanded the ministers back away from such rhetoric “immediately.” “Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land, with Hamas no longer in control of its future and no terror groups able to threaten Israel,” he continued.

On Monday, Ben Gvir described “encouraging the residents of Gaza to emigrate” outside the enclave as “the right, just, moral, and humane solution,” explaining that it would allow Israelis living in border communities to return home. He doubled down on his comments following Miller’s statement, writing in a post on Telegram, “I greatly appreciate the USA, but with all due respect…we will do what is good for the state of Israel.” Smotrich made similar comments in an interview with Army Radio on Sunday. “What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration,” he said. “If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after [the war] will be totally different.” While an official with Netanyahu’s office subsequently told the Associated Press that “contrary to false allegations, Israel does not seek to displace the population in Gaza,” instead merely looking to “enable those individuals who wish to leave to do so,” a government document leaked in November called for the mass relocation of all 2.3 million of the territory’s residents to Egypt’s Sinai peninsula – a plan that has alarmed Palestinians and Egyptians alike.

The US State Department has repeatedly called for Gaza to be run by the Palestinian Authority, which currently administers the West Bank and ran Gaza prior to Hamas’ 2007 election victory, as a prelude to full Palestinian statehood. Israel has openly opposed a two-state solution. At least 1.8 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants have been displaced since Israel began bombing the territory following Hamas’ October 7 cross-border attack, which left 1,200 Israelis dead. Many residential neighborhoods have been completely flattened, with vital civilian infrastructure such as the hospital system virtually destroyed. Over 21,800 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli bombs since the start of the war, according to the enclave’s health ministry, with upwards of 56,000 more seriously injured. Thousands more are reportedly missing beneath the rubble.

Read more …

“That’s a lesson they learned from Covid — putting a name and a face on globalism only foments collective resistance to it.”

2024: The Year Global Government Takes Shape (Kit Knightly)

Global government is the endgame. We know that. Total control of every aspect of life for every single person on the planet, that’s the goal. That’s been apparent to anyone paying attention for years, if not decades, and any tiny portion of remaining doubt was removed when Covid was rolled-out and members of the establishment started outright saying it. Covid marked an acceleration of the globalist agenda, a mad dash to the finish line that seems to have lost momentum short of victory, but the race is still going. The goal has not changed, even if the years since may have seen the agenda retreat slightly back into the shadows. We know what they want conceptually, but what does that mean practically? What does a potential “global government” actually look like?

First off, let’s talk about what we’re NOT going to see. 1 – They are not going to declare themselves. No, there will almost certainly never be an official “world government”, at least not for a long time yet. That’s a lesson they learned from Covid — putting a name and a face on globalism only foments collective resistance to it. 2 – They’re not going to abolish nationhood. You can be sure Klaus Schwab (or whoever) isn’t ever going to appear simulcast on every television in the world announcing that we’re all citizens of ze vurld now and that nation states no longer exist. In part because that is likely to focus resistance (see point 1), but mainly because tribalism and nationalism are just too useful to all would-be manipulators of public opinion. And, of course the continuing existence of nation states in no way precludes the existence of a supra-national control system, any more than the existence of Rhode Island, Florida or Texas precludes the existence of the Federal government.

3 – There will never be an overt declaration of a change of system. We will not be told we are united under a new model, instead the illusion of regionality & superficial variance will camouflage a lack of real choice across the political landscape. A thin polysystemic skin stretched tight over a monosystemic skeleton. Capitalism, communism, socialism, democracy, tyranny, monarchy…these words will steadily dilute in meaning, even more than they have already, but they will never be abandoned. What globalism will bring us – I suggest – is a collection of nation-states largely in name only, operating superficially different systems of government all built on the same underpinning assumptions and all answering to an unelected and undeclared higher authority. …and if that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s essentially what we have already.

The only major aspects missing are the mechanisms by which this rough model can be transformed into a flowing network, where all corners are eroded and all genuine sovereign powers become entirely vestigial. That’s where the three main pillars of global rule come in:
1/ Digital Money
2/ Digital ID
3/ “Climate Action”

Read more …

“..the pace of AI development, rising mortality among young people after mass vaccination against Covid-19, record-breaking illegal immigration to the US, and anti-white rhetoric from South African presidential hopeful Julius Malema.”

2024 Is Going To Be ‘Even More Crazy’ – Elon Musk (RT)

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has predicted that 2024 will be “even more crazy” than the preceding four years. Musk was responding to a follower wishing for “a normal year.” “Can we just have a normal year in 2024?” an anonymous pundit known as ‘Wall Street Silver’ tweeted on New Year’s Eve. “Don’t we deserve that after four years of crazy?” “2024 is gonna be even more crazy is my prediction,” Musk responded on Monday. Musk did not predict any “crazy” events that may happen, but in a series of follow-up tweets, the billionaire drew attention to the pace of AI development, rising mortality among young people after mass vaccination against Covid-19, record-breaking illegal immigration to the US, and anti-white rhetoric from South African presidential hopeful Julius Malema.

During 2023, Musk repeatedly warned that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine could spiral into a nuclear war between Russia and the US. The billionaire had been providing Ukraine with free access to SpaceX’ Starlink internet service, but has refused to enable the service in the vicinity of Crimea, for fear that Kiev would use Starlink to guide drones to Russian warships. This would have made his company “explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation,” he explained in September.

Hundreds of comments under Musk’s post suggested that much of this year’s “craziness” will be centered around the 2024 presidential election in the US. Musk has not backed a candidate in the race, but told an audience in November that he would “not vote for [President Joe] Biden.” Musk, who previously expressed support for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and described Vivek Ramaswamy as a “promising candidate,” added that his refusal to support Biden would not automatically translate into a vote for presumptive Republican contender Donald Trump.

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“..the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

Corruption, Chaos, Conflict – Fourth Turning Erupts In 2024 (Quinn)

“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” – Thomas Paine – The American Crisis

Thomas Paine wrote these words 247 years ago, in the most historic year in our history – 1776. That was during the first American Fourth Turning. It’s not a coincidence we are now in the midst of our fourth Crisis period in U.S. history, as they arrive like clockwork every 80 years or so, the length of a long human life. Paine’s American Crisis began in 1773, ignited by the Boston Tea Party and the British reaction to this revolutionary act of defiance. Our current Millennial Crisis was triggered by the Federal Reserve/Wall Street/Government created financial disaster in 2008 and subsequent outrageously desperate, totalitarian, un-Constitutional, extreme acts designed to keep the ruling class in power, while impoverishing and enslaving the masses in a surveillance state techno-gulag.

The polarization and fractures have become too deep to repair. The country, and the western world in general, are hurtling towards a darkening abyss of civil conflict, financial collapse, global war, societal chaos, and loss of life on a scale grander than WW2, the Civil War, and the American Revolution combined. Our technological advancements have outstripped our ability to intelligently, thoughtfully, and humanly, use this power for the benefit of future generations. The destructive deficiencies of human nature, such as: greed, desire for power, hatred, arrogance, resentment, and an unlimited supply of self-delusion, continue to plague our world, as only the most power-hungry psychopaths rise to the highest levels of government, business, religion, and finance.

The immense technological power in the hands of egocentric, megalomaniacal, sadistic, billionaires and their highly paid toadies, lackeys, and apparatchiks, inserted throughout the media, government, academia, banking, and corporations, has pushed the world to the brink of Armageddon. We are entering the sixteenth year of this Fourth Turning. Based on history, we can expect a climax of this Crisis in the 2030-to-2032-timeframe. The path to that climax is guaranteed to be violent and unforgiving.

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“The decline of the dollar is a long-term trend and phenomenon and we are only at the early inception phases of this process..”

Dollar’s Dip in 2023 Just the Start as BRICS Strives for Dedollarization (Sp.)

The dollar suffered a 2.7 percent decline against other major global currencies in 2023, battered by anticipation among speculators of a shift in Fed policy to cut interest rates and weaken global interest in dollar-denominated investments and debt as the US economy slows. The drop in the dollar’s value, the biggest of its kind since 2020, when the greenback declined 5.5 percent as Washington pumped trillions of new dollars into the economy, now comes amid the ongoing tectonic transformations in the contours of the global economy as the US attempts to use its currency as a means of economic pressure against geopolitical rivals.

The West’s economic war against Russia, waged via sanctions and trade restrictions, sparked realization even among many of the US’s traditional allies that their economic relationships and financial well-being were inextricably linked to American goodwill which could disappear at any moment. This realization helped motivate half a dozen countries to join the BRICS bloc last year (Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Argentina), and prompted BRICS+ and other countries to accelerate a search for safe alternatives to the de facto global reserve currency. “The decline of the dollar is a long-term trend and phenomenon and we are only at the early inception phases of this process,” Ashraf Patel, a research associate with the Institute for Global Dialogue, a Pretoria, South Africa-based think tank, told Sputnik.

“The expansion of BRICS and the multi-currency order and move towards a ‘BRICS currency’ is certainly one core factor as the world trade [and] economic investment patterns are diversifying,” Patel said, referring to the currency concept discussed extensively ahead of the BRICS summit in South Africa, and floated again ahead of the upcoming summit in Kazan, Russia later this year. Whether through another nation’s currency or in the form of a new BRICS monetary unit, the prospective benefits of a stable alternative to the dollar as the hegemon of world trade for Global South countries cannot be overstated, the researcher says.

Still, “advocates for dedollarization would need to show value such as cheaper trade costs and less volatility,” Patel stressed. “Dedollarization would of course mean less space for the US to use and abuse currencies of nations for political objectives, as has been their standard policy practice for decades,” he added, characterizing the process, which he estimates been underway since the global financial crisis of 2009, as one of “economic common sense” for other countries. “Lessons from when the Gold Standard was ended in the 1970s is instructive and can provide insights on the pace and velocity of such a process, but the gates of dedollarization have now opened and generally a new global financial-economic and trade diversification is the new norm,” Patel said.

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Surreal.

US Debt Hits A Record $34.001 Trillion (ZH)

The US Treasury has a morbid habit of revealing big, round numbers of debt around major calendar milestones, and the new 2024 year was no different because according to the latest Treasury Daily Statement published after the close today and reflecting the US Treasury’s financial statements as of Dec 29, 2023, total US debt as of the end of the year was – drumroll – just over $34 trillion for the first time ever, or $34,001,493,655,565.48 to be precise. Since this is a topic we have covered more or less daily for our 15 year existence, we don’t need to say much suffice to show a chart of total US debt since zerohedge launched in Jan 2009, when total US debt was only $10.6 trillion. We sure have gone a long way since then.

Some context: US debt increased by…
$1 trillion in the past 3 months
$2 trillion in the past 6 months
$4 trillion in the past 2 years
$11 trillion in the past 4 years
… and so on. You get the exponential picture. At this point everyone knows how this ends – certainly the CBO does… but since there is no way to reverse the catastrophic outcome, there is no point in even talking about it. At best, one may only prepare for the inevitable hyperinflationary outcome, which would be good news to what is now over $1 trillion in interest expense: after all, someone has to devalue the currency all that interest is payable in.

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Dog bus

 

 

Jelly

 

 

Chirps
https://twitter.com/i/status/1742275062579806658

 

 

Eclipse
https://twitter.com/i/status/1742119762405032261

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Dec 292023
 
 December 29, 2023  Posted by at 9:30 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  50 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Boulevard de Clichy, Paris 1887

 

How Yemen Changed Everything (Pepe Escobar)
There Are No Innocent Ships At Sea (Helmer)
Biden Needs To Come To Israel’s – And His Own – Rescue (MoA)
US, Europe Likely On Track to Become ‘Failed Economies’ – Michael Hudson (Sp.)
What Will Be Left Out of the USA? (Barton)
Russia Has Become Significantly Stronger Over Past Year – Lavrov (Sp.)
Ukrainian ‘Regime’ Must Be Removed – Medvedev (RT)
40 Million Ukrainians Must Fight – Regional Governor (RT)
Scott Ritter: Maryinka’s Liberation ‘Major Victory’ for Russia (Sp.)
‘Zelensky Regime’ Doesn’t Want Peace – Lavrov (RT)
US Sending ‘Bloody New Year’s Gift To Kiev’ – Moscow (RT)
Ukraine Warns Of Pension And Salary Delays (RT)
DOJ Threatens Lawsuit If Texas Enforces New Border Security Law (HC)
Democrat Secretary Of State Kicks Trump Off Maine Ballot (ZH)
Colorado Puts Trump Back On 2024 GOP Primary Ballot (NYP)
Trump Takes Credit For Success Of Home Alone 2 (RT)

 

 

 

 

Tucker

 

 

 

 

Daniel Levy

 

 

 

 

 

 

“..those eleven US aircraft carrier task forces, for all practical purposes, are essentially worthless.”

“..using the “nuclear” option or cutting off potentially at least 25 percent, and up, of the world oil supply. As one Persian Gulf analyst succinctly describes it, “that would irretrievably implode the international financial system.”

How Yemen Changed Everything (Pepe Escobar)

Yemen’s resistance movement, Ansarallah, has made it very clear that any Israel-affiliated or Israel-destined vessel will be intercepted. While the west bristles at this, and imagines itself a target, the rest of the world fully understands that all other shipping is free to pass. Russian tankers – as well as Chinese, Iranian, and Global South ships – continue to move undisturbed across the Bab al-Mandeb (narrowest point: 33 km) and the Red Sea. Only the Hegemon is disturbed by this challenge to its ‘rules-based order.’ It is outraged that western vessels delivering energy or goods to law-breaking Israel can be impeded, and that the supply chain has been severed and plunged into deep crisis. The pinpointed target is the Israeli economy, which is already bleeding heavily. A single Yemeni move proves to be more efficient than a torrent of imperial sanctions.

It is the tantalizing possibility of this single move turning into a paradigm shift – with no return – that is adding to the Hegemon’s apoplexy. Especially because imperial humiliation is deeply embedded in the paradigm shift. Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the record, is now sending an unmistakeable message: Forget the Suez Canal. The way to go is the Northern Sea Route – which the Chinese, in the framework of the Russia-China strategic partnership, call the Arctic Silk Road. For the dumbfounded Europeans, the Russians have detailed three options: First, sail 15,000 miles around the Cap of Good Hope. Second, use Russia’s cheaper and faster Northern Sea Route. Third, send the cargo via Russian Railways. Rosatom, which oversees the Northern Sea Route, has emphasized that non-ice-class ships are now able to sail throughout summer and autumn, and year-round navigation will soon be possible with the help of a fleet of nuclear icebreakers.

All that as direct consequences of the single Yemeni move. What next? Yemen entering BRICS+ at the summit in Kazan in late 2024, under the Russian presidency? The new architecture will be framed in West Asia The US-led Armada put together for Operation Genocide Protection, which collapsed even before birth, may have been set up to “warn Iran,” apart from giving Ansarallah a scare. Just as the Houthis, Tehran is hardly intimidated because, as West Asia analyst ace Alastair Crooke succinctly put it: “Sykes-Picot is dead.” This is a quantum shift on the chessboard. It means West Asian powers will frame the new regional architecture from now on, not US Navy “projection.” That carries an ineffable corollary: those eleven US aircraft carrier task forces, for all practical purposes, are essentially worthless.

Everyone across West Asia is well aware that Ansarallah’s missiles are capable of hitting Saudi and Emirati oil fields, and knocking them out of commission. So it is little wonder that Riyadh and Abu Dhabi would never accept becoming part of a US-led maritime force to challenge the Yemeni resistance. Add to it the role of underwater drones now in the possession of Russia and Iran. Think of fifty of these aimed at a US aircraft carrier: it has no defense. While the Americans still have very advanced submarines, they cannot keep the Bab al-Mandeb and Red Sea open to western operators. On the energy front, Moscow and Tehran don’t even need to think – at least not yet – about using the “nuclear” option or cutting off potentially at least 25 percent, and up, of the world oil supply. As one Persian Gulf analyst succinctly describes it, “that would irretrievably implode the international financial system.”

For those still determined to support the genocide in Gaza there have been warnings. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani has mentioned it explicitly. Tehran has already called for a total oil and gas embargo against nations that support Israel. A total naval blockade of Israel, meticulously engineered, remains a distinct possibility. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Commander Hossein Salami said Israel may “soon face the closure of the Mediterranean Sea, the Strait of Gibraltar, and other waterways.” Keep in mind we’re not yet even talking about a possible blockade of the Strait of Hormuz; we’re still on Red Sea/Bab al-Mandeb.

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“..whose prosperity is Operation Prosperity Guardian truly guarding?”

There Are No Innocent Ships At Sea (Helmer)

Since the start of Israel’s genocide of Gaza, it has been the claim of the Israelis, their lawyers, and allies that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, so they say that killing them all is neither a genocide nor a war crime. Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said it in India in October. US Congressman Brian Mast said it, following the Israeli lead. The US Navy analyst who spied for Israel and served half a life in US prison for his treason has declared it in print. A French-Israeli lawyer has argued the legality on French television. The reply the Arab militaries fighting against Israel have made is that there is no innocent oil tanker or container ship moving within missile or drone range of Israel, the Red Sea or the Indian Ocean unless it can prove it.

This answer by the Ansar Allah government of Yemen, aka the Houthi military, is that they will attack any vessel which they know to be owned or controlled by Israel through its shipping families, companies, and their cutouts. As a result, Houthi drone and missile attacks have exposed the elaborate scheme of corporate camouflage and false-flagging which Israel has been employing to conceal the vessel identities and movement of its international shipping operations. The Anglo-American maritime industry media, privy to these secrets, have not published them. The mainstream western press remains in the dark. In today’s Gorillla Radio podcast, this isn’t dark any longer. Not genocide in Gaza but money in shipowner pockets is blowing the gaff.

There is much more at stake. The effectiveness of the Houthi ship targeting campaign has so threatened the movement of vital cargoes into and out of Europe that shipping, port, and military officials in France, Italy, Spain, and Greece are now trying to avert a commercial disaster for themselves by arranging secret safe-passage deals with Yemen and Iran in exchange for which they are applying a blockade on Israel’s cargoes, vessels and ports. This is the secret which is torpedoing the Pentagon’s multinational Red Sea naval escort plan, called OPERATION PROSPERITY GUARDIAN. As the secrecy of Israeli shipping companies spills out, along with the secret dealmaking of the international shipowners with the Houthis, American shipowners are already complaining bitterly at being cut out of the profits. “If the main beneficiary of the operation,” editorializes gCaptain of California, a leading US maritime platform, “is one of the largest shipping corporations in the world [Denmark’s Maersk], then there is a question of whose prosperity is Operation Prosperity Guardian truly guarding?”

Just how accurate is Houthi targeting of concealed Israeli shipping connections? In the podcast I stumbled over the name of the MSC United VIII. According to its owner Mediterranean Shipping Company, “MSC confirms that on 26 December 2023 the container ship MSC UNITED VIII was attacked while transiting the Red Sea. The vessel informed a nearby coalition task force warship of the attack and as instructed engaged in evasive maneuvers. The incident occurred on 26 December 2023 at approximately 12:25 UTC while the MSC vessel was enroute from King Abdullah Port, Saudi Arabia to Karachi, Pakistan. Currently, all crew are safe with no reported injuries and a thorough assessment of the vessel is being conducted. Our first priority remains protecting the lives and safety of our seafarers, and until their safety can be ensured MSC will continue to reroute vessels booked for Suez transit via the Cape of Good Hope.”

In its concern for “the lives and safety of our seafarers”, MSC omitted to explain why the company management had decided to expose the vessel, the mariners, and the cargo by running the Red Sea gauntlet on behalf of the Israeli shipowners, Eyal and Idan Ofer; they are behind the vessel’s operation, and that was the reason for the Houthi attack. Here’s the full story. There’s more — MSC appears to be owned by an Italian family, the Apontes, who established the shipping line in Switzerland in 1970. In fact, Gianluigi Aponte, the MSC founder, is married to Rafaela Diamant, and she controls half the shares of the company. Diamant is Jewish and comes from Haifa. The Houthis know this; maritime reporters don’t.

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“..Hamas continues to fight back, even in rubble..”

Biden Needs To Come To Israel’s – And His Own – Rescue (MoA)

For now Israel seems to lose its war against the Palestinian resistance. The October 7 attempt to gain hostages by Hamas and Islamic Jihad was successful. Israeli outrage about it should have been directed against the Israeli government and its army for their chaotic response. They likely killed more Israelis than Hamas did. But outrage was instead instigated against the external enemy. In this case all Palestinians. A united Israel urged its government to wage revenge. The government’s announced aim is to remove Hamas. That however is impossible to do to a social movement with deep roots in its society. The real aim is to remove all Palestinians from Gaza, to either kill them or to dump them in some foreign land. This would be followed by an attempt to remove all Palestinians from the West Bank before capturing and annexing the south of Lebanon.

However no foreign country is likely to support such a genocide and to take up the burden of millions of unruly refugees. The Israeli government still wants to satisfy its people but has no way to achieve that. Meanwhile the resistance against Israel, which has been built by Iran over several decades, is increasing its response. It aims to press Israel into conceding defeat and to liberate the Palestinians from their Zionist occupiers. Changing a society’s mind requires a slow and long response. In the north Hezbullah is slowly escalating its tit-for tat war with the Israeli army. Some 100,000 Israeli civilians have fled from the border zone. The Ansar Islam movement in Yemen has blocked maritime traffic to Israel’s Eilat port. The U.S. attempt to counter that has failed:

“Despite the US calling the Red Sea tensions “an international challenge” requiring a united response, the initial coalition support was limited, with only 10 nations, including Bahrain as the sole Arab state. The Pentagon later announced that 20 countries had joined the coalition, with Greece and Australia among the new members. In a setback to the US, France, Spain, and Italy have declined their participation in the alliance ..”

Local resistances in Iraq and Syria are attacking U.S. troops deployed in those countries. As long as its troops are there the U.S. can to nothing to prevent that. There are also threats to Israel’s Mediterranean coast line. Hezbollah has the ability to close down Haifa and and other Israeli ports. Missiles, cruise missiles and drones from Gaza, from Lebanon, Yemen and from resistance fighters in Iraq and Syria continue to target Israel day by day. With more than 350,000 Israeli troops mobilized and Palestinian workers from the West Bank banned, Israel’s economy is, for lack of workers, in deep trouble. Its military forays into Palestinian cities in Gaza have so far achieved little results but incurred significant losses. All the army can do is to destroy those cities block by block. But Hamas continues to fight back, even in rubble.

The current plan is to make Palestinian life in Gaza so miserable that leaving it will be for them the only alternative to certain death. But leaving whereto when no one wants to take them? That is a question Israel and its U.S. backers fail to answer. With the war going into a prolonged, unsustainable phase the Israeli government needs to do something else, or fail.

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“Without German exports and earnings, there is a “pressure on the euro to go down against the [US] dollar, and the euro is becoming a sort of failed currency..”

US, Europe Likely On Track to Become ‘Failed Economies’ – Michael Hudson (Sp.)

The United States’ efforts to cripple the Russian economy through sanctions have backfired spectacularly not only against the US but also allies who joined the failed economic warfare tactics. Polls in the US show that 70-80% of Americans think their country’s economy “is getting worse and is being mismanaged,” says US economist and former Wall Street analyst Michael Hudson. During an interview with Sputnik, Hudson argued that the US’ gross domestic product growth occurs only for the 10% of the population, with the remaining 90% of Americans being left empty-handed. “So what you are having in the West is a bifurcated economy: it is very good to be a billionaire, it is very good to have stocks and even bonds; it is not good at all if you are a wage earner and have to pay for your housing and your food and your consumption out of what you’re earning,” he explained.

However, Hudson also indicated that across the pond, Europe is not faring any better as the “destruction of German heavy industry as a result of the Nord Stream blow-up and the sanctions against Russia have pushed Germany into a decline. The German economy’s woes, in turn, put the “entire euro’s exchange rate” at risk because of the significant role Germany’s export surplus played in the Eurozone balance and foreign exchange. Without German exports and earnings, there is a “pressure on the euro to go down against the [US] dollar, and the euro is becoming a sort of failed currency,” Hudson said. “So there is talk now in both Europe and America, ‘Is America a failed economy? Is Europe a failed economy?’ That’s really what we should be talking about, not simply whether the economy is growing or not,” he pointed out.

Hudson dismissed US President Joe Biden’s boasting about the American economy growing, with the American economist noting the growth is essentially a product of the US Federal Reserve “pumping money into the stock market and that is pushing up stocks.” “For Mr. Biden, the contributors to the Democratic Party are the financial sector, and for the financial sector, it is doing just fine. So Mr. Biden’s economy is thriving,” Hudson continued. “Unfortunately, the economy for the 90% is not thriving, that is not Mr. Biden’s economy and that is why Mr. Biden’s approval ratings have fallen to the lowest approval of any sitting president since World War II, since statistics began to be covered.” At this time, the United States faces a health crisis, housing crisis and a “general economic malaise,” he added. Hudson also weighed in on matters such as the ramifications of Western powers’ seizure of Russia’s foreign assets and the role of US dollar as an instrument of control wielded by Washington.

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“..the majority non-white population in the U.S. will become a reality. The Bureau says the change will occur in 2042..”

What Will Be Left Out of the USA? (Barton)

The most decisive latest turning point that was to affect the U.S. ethnic make-up then, now and in the future was introduced by President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In fact, it was signed by President Lyndon Johnson on October 3, 1965 and is known as The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 also known as the Hart–Celler Act. The most essential changes introduced by the act amounted to abolishing quotas based on national origin. That meant the end of preferences for northern and western Europeans and selecting immigrants on individual merit and not race or ethnic origin. Apart from President Johnson, the proponents of the bill were Ted Kennedy, along with Attorney General and Senator Robert Kennedy, in part to honor their brother, the late president Kennedy. They did a lot to confuse the public. The lead supporter of the act Ted Kennedy for instance, while debating it in the Senate stated the following:

‘The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.’ After signing the act an electoral backlash against Republicans ensued. Yet in 1960, one-third of “non-white” voters (the vast majority of them, black) supported Richard Nixon, the Republican Party candidate. It wasn’t so four years later. The Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, an arch-conservative who also voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and whose law-and-order message may have struck many observers as a thinly veiled appeal to white backlash scored about 6% of non-white vote. With the relentless inflow of Third World migrants exceeding one million a year in recent years it would be right to ask whether the 1965 Act had a decisive impact on the presidential election of 2016. Yes, it did have.

Donald Trump won 52% of the white vote on a platform that writer and professor Josh Zeitz rightly classified as uniquely unappealing to minority voters. Hillary Clinton grabbed only 40% of the white vote. But as minorities grow in numbers and proportion of the U.S. population, the impact of the Hart-Celler Act will gain much more in significance. Any Democrat that will be a presidential candidate in 2024 is likely to have even more minorities to vote for him, and Trump (if he will be allowed to run for presidency) will face the depleted white vote if his program remains unchanged. To gain more votes his electoral platform will have to become minority inclusive. In view of the above, what is held in store for the future elections and the USA in general?

It was for the first time in 2011 that non-Hispanic whites accounted for a minority of births in the U.S. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that minorities – defined as anyone who is not a single-race non-Hispanic white – made up 50.4% of the nation’s population younger than age 1 on 1 July, 2011. The growth, it was claimed, was fueled by immigration and births. One doesn’t have to strain his imagination to realize that once the old generations pass away the majority non-white population in the U.S. will become a reality. The Bureau says the change will occur in 2042. According to The Pew Research Center, whites in the U.S. will account for 47% of the population by 2050. Are the above forecast to satisfy power hungry democrats and liberals? Apparently not.

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“He betrayed his people. And not just one, he betrayed two of his nations,” Lavrov concluded.”

Russia Has Become Significantly Stronger Over Past Year – Lavrov (Sp.)

Russia has become significantly stronger over the past year, with the people opposing the West in the hybrid war it has unleashed, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Sputnik and the Rossiya 24 broadcaster. “As a result of this hybrid war of the entire collective West against Russia, which was unleashed by the hands, bodies and all other components of Ukrainian society against us … Russia has become significantly stronger this year, and the unity of our people has increased significantly,” Lavrov said. The top diplomat added that the West’s plan to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia had failed miserably. “The West is indeed changing its tactics, probably even thinking about restructuring its strategy. Even if we claim that the ‘strategic defeat of Russia’ was the strategy, forgive me for repeating, then the strategy has failed miserably,” Lavrov stated.

He stressed that since US has labelled Russia as its “enemy”, Moscow is ready for any course of events. These days, the advance of a fairer economic order cannot be stopped, said Sergey Lavrov. “The movement towards a fairer world order, economic world order, is, of course, unstoppable”. He recalled that developing countries and BRICS members have been demanding IMF and World Bank quotas that would reflect their real economic standing, but the West has been reluctant. Russia’s top diplomat stressed that this case is yet another example of how the US violates the principles of honest free market competition. Lavrov added that the world majority grew very tired of the US dollar as the main reserve currency, because it has turned into a tool of political pressure.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Sputnik and the Rossiya 24 broadcaster that he does not see any bright future for the European Union. “I do not see such a rosy future, or rather, I do not see a rosy future in a good sense for the European Union. In other senses, they have already defined this future for themselves,” Lavrov said. The top diplomat stressed that Russia plans to achieve all the goals of the special military operation in the wake of changes in Ukraine. “We are preparing to implement all the goals that were set. Demilitarization, denazification. You can’t escape it,” he said. Sergey Lavrov said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a traitor. He recalled that recently the Ukrainian leader said that he had forgotten the Russian language and his words looked as if they were parts of a play.

The top diplomat added that years earlier Zelensky had urged to “leave Russians alone” and pretended that Russian was his language and at the same time he was a citizen of Ukraine. Russia’s foreign policy chief lamented that Zelensky was unable to stick to this position. “He betrayed his people. And not just one, he betrayed two of his nations,” Lavrov concluded.

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“..The removal of the Western-backed government of Vladimir Zelensky is an undeclared but a “most important and inevitable goal” of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine..”

Ukrainian ‘Regime’ Must Be Removed – Medvedev (RT)

The removal of the Western-backed government of Vladimir Zelensky is an undeclared but a “most important and inevitable goal” of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine, former President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev has said. On Thursday, Medvedev, who now holds the position of deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, was asked by RIA-Novosti about the prospects of peace talks between Moscow and Kiev in 2024. The Russian military operation in Ukraine will continue next year with its goals remaining unchanged, he replied. According to the former president, those goals include “the disarmament of Ukrainian troops and the rejection of the ideology of neo-Nazism by the current Ukrainian state.” “The removal of the ruling Banderovite regime isn’t being openly declared, but it’s the most important and inevitable goal that must and will be achieved,” he said, referring to the Zelensky government.

‘Banderovite’ relates to Stepan Bandera (1909-1959), a Ukrainian nationalist leader who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and is now revered as a hero by authorities in Kiev. “Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Nikolaev, Kiev, they are Russian cities, like many others under temporary occupation [by Ukraine]. All of them are marked in yellow and blue on paper maps and electronic tablets, for now,” Medvedev said. About talks, they are “of course, possible,” he acknowledged, adding that “Russia never rejected them, unlike the insane Ukrainian authorities.” The former president stressed, however, that Moscow has no deadline for any negotiations and that these may proceed all the way until “the complete defeat and capitulation” of the NATO-backed Ukrainian forces.

On Wednesday, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the authorities in Moscow “identify a lack of drive for peace on the part of the Zelensky regime. His representatives think in terms of war and use very aggressive rhetoric.” The US and the EU remain committed to “containing Russia with the hands and bodies of Ukrainians” and realize that without aid from these sources the Kiev government “is doomed,” the minister said. He also recalled that, more than a year ago, Zelensky officially banned himself from negotiating with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. Instead, the Ukrainian leader has been promoting his so-called ten-point peace plan, which calls for Russia to withdraw from all territories claimed by Kiev, for Moscow to pay reparations, and for the formation of a war-crimes tribunal. Russian authorities instantly rejected the proposal as “unrealistic” and out-of-touch with the situation on the ground.

Arestovich
https://twitter.com/i/status/1740159924846694473

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Zelensky wants 500,000 new conscripts. He’ll be short: people, armory, uniforms, etc etc.

40 Million Ukrainians Must Fight – Regional Governor (RT)

Ukraine should mobilize its entire population to fight against Russia instead of the 500,000 recently proposed by President Vladimir Zelensky, the governor of the Nikolaev region, Vitaliy Kim, has said. Kim’s comments in a TV interview came after Zelensky stated last week that Ukraine’s military command had asked to conscript half a million men over the coming year. The secretary of Ukraine’s parliamentary national security committee, Roman Kostenko, explained that the mobilization drive is needed to cover casualties and form new units. Kim, however, argued that conscripting 500,000 people is “not enough” and that Ukraine needs to attract at least two million volunteers. Or better still, the governor suggested, Kiev should look to mobilize the country’s entire population of 40 million, claiming that the fight against Russia is similar to WWII.

In addition, Kim suggested that all enterprises in Ukraine should be mobilized and put on a war footing, regardless of the impact on profits. “The more we mobilize, the faster Putin will surrender,” the governor said. Zelensky’s proposal to mobilize 500 thousand people has raised eyebrows even in Kiev, with Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzny stating that he had never requested any specific numbers from Zelensky and has only demanded, as always, ammunition, weapons and human resources. Ukraine’s Finance Minister Sergey Marchenko has also seemingly been baffled by Zelensky’s proposal, stating that no concrete plans have yet been submitted to his ministry, and that it is unclear where Kiev would can get the money to fund the mobilization of half a million people, which would cost an estimate of 500 billion hryvnia ($13.2 billion).

However, some have suggested that Zelensky’s mobilization announcement may be an attempt to encourage the West to provide additional weapons and funds. According to former Ukrainian Prime Minister Nikolay Azarov, the Ukrainian leader could use the situation to tell Kiev’s partners: “see, we’re gathering an army of half a million. It must be equipped, it must be armed. These are huge costs and expenses.” While it is unclear when and how Kiev will conscript 500 thousand men, it has already started working on revising its mobilization laws, with lawmakers looking to reduce the conscription age from 27 to 25 and introduce electronic military summons. According to Russia’s estimates, an estimated 400,000 Ukrainian troops have been either killed or wounded since the start of the conflict in February 2022, including 125,000 during Kiev’s failed counteroffensive between early June and late November.

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“..part of the concerted effort being undertaken by the Russian military to create a situation for the civilians of Donetsk, where they can live in peace without the fear of daily bombardment..”

Scott Ritter: Maryinka’s Liberation ‘Major Victory’ for Russia (Sp.)

Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced that the Russian Armed Forces had liberated the town of Maryinka on Monday. Maryinka is a heavily fortified settlement situated on the outskirts of the city of Donetsk. “In the course of offensive operations, assault detachments from the Southern Group of Forces completely liberated Maryinka southwest of Donetsk,” Shoigu told Russian President Vladimir Putin during Monday’s briefing. Speaking to Sputnik, Scott Ritter, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector recalled that from Maryinka, a town of around 9,000 people, Ukrainian forces carried out “merciless shelling of the civilian population of Donetsk and the surrounding area. “Capturing Maryinka and eliminating the source of this artillery and mortar fire represents a major moral victory for the Russian forces,” Ritter pointed out.

He dubbed Maryinka’s liberation “part of the concerted effort being undertaken by the Russian military to create a situation for the civilians of Donetsk, where they can live in peace without the fear of daily bombardment that has killed so many innocent civilians, including children.” According to Ritter, Maryinka is just “one of the battles for the Russian forces” who are pushing the Ukrainians out of previously heavily defended cities, towns, and villages, which he said means that strategic initiative is in Russia’s hands. He recounted that the Russian defense industry “is in full gear” producing new military equipment in significant quantities for the Russian forces that are deployed in the Donbass and the new Russian territories of Kherson and Zaporozhye. “Right now, it looks like Russia will sustain and maintain the strategic advantage,” per Ritter.

The ex-US Marine Corps intelligence officer underlined that it remains to be seen whether Maryinka represents “the beginning of a new phase of aggressive offensive operations or whether Russia will continue to pick away at these heavily fortified Ukrainian defenses before going on the full-blown offensive.” In any case, he reiterated, “one thing is for certain: the fall of Maryinka is a major victory for Russia.” “Morally, it stops the source of the daily shelling of the innocent civilians of Donetsk. And two, it represents yet another victory of the Russian Armed Forces over not just the forces of Ukraine, but the collective West and NATO,” Ritter concluded.

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“..Washington feels compelled to trigger crises worldwide as it sees global power slipping from its hands..”

‘Zelensky Regime’ Doesn’t Want Peace – Lavrov (RT)

The US and its allies will continue sending arms to Kiev since its goal of hurting Russia while sacrificing Ukrainians remains unchanged, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with TASS published on Wednesday. The top diplomat was asked whether the Middle East crisis has affected the amount of Western military assistance provided to Ukraine, potentially nudging President Vladimir Zelensky into a negotiated resolution of the conflict with Russia. According to Lavrov, “inflicting ‘a strategic defeat of Russia on the battlefield’ remains a priority for most unfriendly governments.” Officials in Washington and Brussels, he said, remain committed to “containing Russia with the hands and bodies of Ukrainians” and realize that without aid, the Ukrainian government “is doomed.”

“We identify a lack of drive for peace on the part of the Zelensky regime. His representatives think in terms of war and use very aggressive rhetoric,” the diplomat noted. According to Lavrov, the fact that a legal ban remains in force in Ukraine on negotiating with Russia as long as President Vladimir Putin keeps his office is sufficient to make such conclusions. The minister believes that Washington feels compelled to trigger crises worldwide as it sees global power slipping from its hands. As long as this attitude persists, “no one is safe from its political machinations. And the world increasingly realizes this.” Western leaders have pledged to support Kiev for “as long as it takes” to defeat Russia. This year, Ukrainian forces attempted to use heavy weapons provided by foreign donors to breach through Russian defensive lines but failed to achieve significant territorial gains.

Moscow estimates Ukrainian losses in the so-called counteroffensive at over 159,000 troops and more than 383,000 in total since the hostilities began last year. As a result of these casualties, Kiev plans to ramp up forced conscription to replenish manpower. As a result of Kiev’s lackluster results on the battlefield, Republican opposition in the US Congress blocked a White House request to appropriate additional funds for Ukraine. The holdouts have demanded that Democrats approve a major immigration reform as a concession. Meanwhile, in the EU, Hungary vetoed Brussels’ plan for long-term Ukraine assistance. The proposed packages are measured in the tens of billions of dollars and euros, respectively.

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“..The Americans “are pushing the puppet regime to the abyss, dooming thousands of ordinary Ukrainians to certain death..”

US Sending ‘Bloody New Year’s Gift To Kiev’ – Moscow (RT)

The Russian ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, has criticized Washington for its recent arms package to Ukraine, stating that it reflects an intention to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian.” The diplomat’s remarks came in response to the $250 million worth of military assistance, including air defense munitions, rockets, artillery shells, and small-arms rounds, approved on Wednesday by the administration of US President Joe Biden. Antonov called the latest round of military aid a “bloody New Year’s gift to Kiev” in remarks published on social media. The Americans “are pushing the puppet regime to the abyss, dooming thousands of ordinary Ukrainians to certain death,” he warned.

On the other hand, the official emphasized Russia’s recent success in acquiring the town of Maryinka in the Donetsk People’s Republic, a strategic Ukrainian stronghold. According to Antonov, the US tends to ignore such developments and instead focuses on highlighting “Ukrainian fetish ‘victories.’” The diplomat predicted that any arms provided by NATO nations to Ukraine would be “burned and destroyed” without altering the situation on the ground. The White House could not appropriate more funding for Ukraine after Republican opposition in Congress blocked its request. The lawmakers have demanded major concessions on immigration reform and southern border security as a precondition for their approval of spending additional billions of taxpayers’ dollars on Ukraine support.

US officials have indicated that this latest package would be the last under the current spending allowance. US President Joe Biden has accused those lawmakers opposed to more Ukraine spending of jeopardizing national security by tying it to domestic policy issues. He suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin might attack a NATO member after dealing with Ukraine. Putin dismissed this remark as “absolute nonsense,” saying that Biden was using exacerbated rhetoric to cover up his administration’s foreign policy failures. Moscow maintains that preventing NATO expansion into Ukraine is a key objective in the conflict.

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“..Ukraine has to achieve a sustained economic recovery so that those who fled the country after the start of the Russian military operation will return..”

Ukraine Warns Of Pension And Salary Delays (RT)

The Ukrainian government could be forced to delay paying pensions and salaries to millions of citizens if the US and the EU do not provide more financial support, Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Sviridenko has warned. The country is facing a “huge risk of underfunding of certain social sectors” as it prioritizes defense and debt servicing amid the conflict with Russia, Sviridenko, who is also the economy minister, told the Financial Times on Wednesday. If Kiev does not receive more foreign aid, it may be forced to postpone salary payments to 500,000 civil servants and 1.4 million teachers, as well as delay benefits for 10 million pensioners, she added. The amount of Western assistance to Ukraine has reduced significantly in recent months.

US Republican lawmakers are resisting attempts by the administration of President Joe Biden to push through another $60 billion in aid for Kiev, while Hungary has vetoed the EU’s planned four-year, €50 billion ($55 billion) aid package for Ukraine. “The support of partners is extremely critical. We need it urgently,” Sviridenko said, estimating that Ukraine would require $37 billion in external assistance next year to function properly. The country’s economy, which according to the IMF saw 4.5% GDP growth this year, will be back in “survival” mode without more Western aid, she stated. Unnamed Western officials told the FT that Ukraine should be able to sustain itself for a few months by borrowing domestically or through monetary financing by its central bank. However, they warned that this could provoke a spike in inflation, undermine financial stability, and weaken the tax base, thus making the country even more dependent on foreign support.

Ukraine has to achieve a sustained economic recovery so that those who fled the country after the start of the Russian military operation will return, Sviridenko insisted. Unemployment is currently almost 19%, although at the same time numerous sectors are suffering labor shortages, the deputy prime minister said. Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov suggested on Wednesday that there is “discord” in the West regarding further support for Ukraine, considering that funds go “to a regime that uses it with unknown efficiency and for unclear purposes.” The US and the EU are “already well aware of the level of corruption [in Ukraine]. They understand that a large part of this money is simply being stolen,” he claimed. The shift in the public opinion in the US regarding the issue has been reflected by FT-Michigan Ross poll earlier this month, which revealed that 48% of Americans thought that Washington was spending “too much” on helping Kiev.

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The Texas governor can’t protect Texas from Washington.

DOJ Threatens Lawsuit If Texas Enforces New Border Security Law (HC)

The Department of Justice is warning Gov. Greg Abbott that it will sue if Texas moves forward with legislation empowering state officials to remove people from the U.S. who they suspect of being in the country illegally. The new legislation, which Abbott signed into law earlier this month, is unconstitutional and will disrupt the federal government’s immigration enforcement operations, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton wrote in a letter to the governor obtained by Hearst Newspapers. The letter says that if Abbott does not confirm the state will forgo enforcement of the law by Wednesday, “the United States will pursue all appropriate legal remedies to ensure that Texas does not interfere with the functions of the federal government.”

The law, set to take effect in March, would allow any law enforcement officer in Texas to arrest migrants accused of unlawfully entering the state from Mexico and empower judges to order their removal. It is a major escalation of Abbott’s border security initiative, Operation Lone Star, and has been cast by the governor and other Texas Republicans as an invitation for the Supreme Court to revisit longstanding precedent leaving immigration enforcement solely to the federal government. El Paso County and two immigrant rights groups earlier this month sued to stop what they called the “patently illegal” legislation. The American Civil Liberties Union is representing them in the case. The Mexican government, which would have to accept immigrants ordered removed by state officials, has also said it will not go along with the law and has threatened to take action to stop it, as well.

Abbott, a former Texas attorney general, has said he believes the law was crafted in a way that “can and should be upheld in the courts on its own.” He has said the law is necessary to stem the record number of border crossings under the Biden administration and has accused President Joe Biden of failing to secure the border. The DOJ letter says the U.S. Constitution tasks the federal government with regulating immigration and controlling the international borders. The law “therefore intrudes into a field that is occupied by the federal government and is preempted,” the letter says. The Justice Department points to a landmark Supreme Court ruling from 2012 that held that only the federal government has the power to enforce immigration laws.

Abbott has cast the law as an opening for the high court to reconsider that ruling. In that case, the high court struck down portions of an Arizona law that authorized police to arrest anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. Then-Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that the federal government has “broad discretion” in setting immigration policy and that the state could not pursue policies that “undermine federal law.” “Indeed, the Supreme Court has confirmed that ‘the removal process’ must be ‘entrusted to the discretion of the Federal Government’ because a ‘decision on removability’ touches ‘on foreign relations and must be made with one voice,’” the letter says.

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She’s unelected, with unusual powers.

“She immediately suspended her decision. Meaning Trump stays on the ballot in Maine. This is just for show.”

Democrat Secretary Of State Kicks Trump Off Maine Ballot (ZH)

A day after former president Trump’s lawyers demanded the Maine secretary of state recuse herself from her upcoming decision on the former president’s ballot eligibility under the 14th Amendment – citing her past statements about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot; Shenna Bellows – a Democrat – has kicked Trump off the state’s primary ballot. The letter from Trump’s lawyers seeking Bellows’ recusal cites two social media posts Bellows issued the day Trump was acquitted in his second impeachment trial, which concerned the Capitol riot. “The Jan 6 insurrection was an unlawful attempt to overthrow the results of a free and fair election. Today 57 Senators including King & Collins found Trump guilty. That’s short of impeachment but nevertheless an indictment. The insurrectionists failed, and democracy prevailed,” Bellows wrote on Twitter, the platform now known as X.

The letter also takes aim at a post Bellows issued on the one-year anniversary of Jan. 6, in which she reposted a news report highlighting Bellows’s efforts to protect election workers. “One year after the violent insurrection, it’s important to do all we can to safeguard our elections,” Bellows wrote. Thus, the lawyers argued, Bellows “has already passed judgment” on Trump’s “core assumptions.” But, as The Hill reports, unlike other states, where plaintiffs have sued over Trump’s eligibility in court, Maine’s system first allows the secretary of state to weigh in – unilaterally, Judge Dredd-style. As she explains, ‘she is the law!’ Challengers can then appeal in state court. Bellows determined that the former president could not run for office due to his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. She argued his actions violated the 14th Amendment.

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“..it has done so based on a subjective claim of insurrection the state lacks any constitutional authority to make.”

Colorado Puts Trump Back On 2024 GOP Primary Ballot (NYP)

Colorado’s secretary of state said Thursday that former President Donald Trump will remain on the 2024 primary ballot for certification next week, as the state Republican Party appeals a court ruling that had found him ineligible for office earlier this month. “With the appeal filed, Donald Trump will be included as a candidate on Colorado’s 2024 Presidential Primary Ballot when certification occurs on January 5, 2024, unless the US Supreme Court declines to take the case or otherwise affirms the Colorado Supreme Court ruling,” Jena Griswold’s office said in a press release. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled 4-3 on Dec. 19 that the former president could not receive the Republican nomination because he had unconstitutionally participated in an “insurrection” against the US government on Jan. 6, 2021.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment includes a clause that bars those who have taken an oath of office from being elected again to govern if they have violated the Constitution by having “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” “Donald Trump engaged in insurrection and was disqualified under the Constitution from the Colorado Ballot. The Colorado Supreme Court got it right. This decision is now being appealed,” Griswold said in a separate statement. “I urge the US Supreme Court to act quickly given the upcoming presidential primary election.” On Wednesday, the Colorado Republican Party asked the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling from their state’s high court, saying the party “has been irreparably harmed by the decision” to disqualify the 77-year-old ex-president.

“The state has interfered in the primary election by unreasonably restricting the Party’s ability to select its candidates,” states the 45-page petition from the Colorado GOP and the nonprofit American Center for Law and Justice. “As a natural and inevitable result, the state has interfered with the Party’s ability to place on the general election ballot the candidate of its choice. And it has done so based on a subjective claim of insurrection the state lacks any constitutional authority to make.” The high court has yet to make a decision on the ruling, which would need to occur before a Jan. 5 deadline for candidate names to be certified by both parties for the Colorado ballot.

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For 2 seconds?

“I was very busy, and didn’t want to do it. They were very nice, but above all, persistent.”

“..another Hollywood guy from the past looking for a quick fix of Trump publicity for himself.”

Trump Takes Credit For Success Of Home Alone 2 (RT)

Donald Trump has rejected a claim by movie director Chris Columbus that he “bullied” his way into his brief appearance in the 1992 hit movie ‘Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.’ He argued that the scene with him helped to make the iconic Christmas film a success. Writing on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday, Trump insisted that the sequel producers at the time were “begging me to make a cameo appearance.” In the film, a sequel to the 1990 classic ‘Home Alone,’ Trump is briefly seen speaking to central character Kevin McAllister in a scene, who was played by the then-eleven-year-old Macaulay Culkin. “They rented the Plaza hotel in New York, which I owned at the time,” Trump wrote. “I was very busy, and didn’t want to do it. They were very nice, but above all, persistent.”

But once an agreement was struck, “that little cameo took off like a rocket and the movie was a big success,” he stated. In his 2020 interview with Business Insider, Columbus said that Trump’s brief appearance came about as a condition demanded by him to permit the production team to use the Plaza’s lobby for a scene in the film. Trump owned the iconic New York hotel between 1987 and 1995. “He did bully his way into the movie,” Columbus recalled, paraphrasing Trump as having stipulated: “The only way you can use the Plaza is if I’m in the movie.” “Nothing could be further from the truth,” Trump insisted on Truth Social. “That cameo helped make the movie a success, but if they felt bullied, or didn’t want me, why did they put me in, and keep me there, for over 30 years?” Trump added that Columbus’ contradiction is an example of “another Hollywood guy from the past looking for a quick fix of Trump publicity for himself.”

Trump’s cameo has been a source of several headlines in recent years. In 2019, he claimed that an edited-for-TV version of the film for Canadian audiences removed Trump’s bit part at the behest of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. A spokesperson for the CBC television network said at the time that the scene, along with several others, were removed due to time constraints because it was “not integral to the plot.” Meanwhile, in 2021 the star of the Home Alone films Macaulay Culkin, who is now 43, said he was “sold” on the idea of Trump’s cameo being digitally removed from all future versions of the film. In the Home Alone films, Culkin plays a young boy who is accidentally separated from his family during the Christmas holidays, and who fights off a pair of thieves played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. The film made $359 million at the box office and was 1992’s third highest-grossing movie.

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Audrey

 

 

Too cool

 

 

Can’t stop
https://twitter.com/i/status/1740484270731518062

 

 

Wild animals

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Jul 012017
 


Fred Lyon Terrific Street, Barbary Coast, San Francisco 1947

 

Bill To Remove Trump From Office Picks Up Democratic Support (DM)
Bank of America: The Fed Is Preparing To Make The Rich Poorer (ZH)
Debt Is the Third Benjamin Franklin Certainty (Stockman)
UK Household Incomes Fall Most In 40 Years, Savings Rates Crash (Ind.)
China’s Opening Of Bond Market May Spark ‘Massive Demand’ From Foreigners (CNBC)
Judge Orders Illinois To Pay Billions More Toward Medicaid (CT)
Maine Governor Won’t Sign Latest Budget Proposal, Will Allow A Shutdown (BDN)
Connecticut Social Service Agencies Brace for Deep Cuts With No Budget (AP)
America’s Pension Bomb: Illinois Is Just the Start (BBG)
An Awful Lot Of Americans Are A Walking Illinois Now (Jim Kunstler)
US Says Its Warning Appears To Have Averted Syrian Chemical Attack (R.)
Make No Mistake, We Are Already at War in Syria (Giraldi)
Qatar Crisis: Armed Conflict And Protracted Dispute Grow More Likely (CNBC)
Oliver Stone: Edward Snowden Is The “Most American Of Patriots” (ZH)
Billionaires And Aristocrats Biggest Beneficiaries Of EU Farm Subsidies (TLE)
Juncker: EU To Discuss More Migrant Help For Greece And Italy (R.)

 

 

I thought they were kidding, Daily Mail after all. But there are more reports on this. In a nutshell: the people who support this are much less capable of doing THEIR jobs than Trump is of doing his. They’re 100% delusional. And they lack a very essential respect for the American system and the Office of the President.

But it’ll all just keep coming. This is on the same day that both the NYT and AP feel forced finally to state that their Russiagate/hacking reporting has been based on nothing at all.

Bill To Remove Trump From Office Picks Up Democratic Support (DM)

A Democratic congressman has proposed convening a special committee of psychiatrists and other doctors whose job would be to determine if President Donald Trump is fit to serve in the Oval Office. Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who also teaches constitutional law at American University, has predictably failed to attract any Republicans to his banner. But the U.S. Constitution’s 25th Amendment does allow for a majority of the president’s cabinet, or ‘such other body as Congress may by law provide,’ to decide if an Oval Office occupant is unable to carry out his duties – and then to put it to a full congressional vote. Vice President Mike Pence would also have to agree, which could slow down the process – or speed it up if he wanted the levers of power for himself.

The 25th Amendment has been around since shortly after the John F. Kennedy assassination, but Congress has never formed its own committee in case it’s needed to judge a president’s mental health. Raskin’s bill would allow the four Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate to each choose a psychiatrist and another doctor. Then each party would add a former statesman – like a retired president or vice president. The final group of 10 would meet and choose an 11th member, who would become the committee’s chairman. Once the group is officially seated, the House and Senate could direct it through a joint resolution to conduct an actual examination of the president ‘to determine whether the president is incapacitated, either mentally or physically,’ according to the Raskin bill.

And if the president refuses to participate, the bill dictates, that ‘shall be taken into consideration by the commission in reaching a conclusion.’ Under the 25th Amendment, such a committee – or the president’s cabinet – can notify Congress in writing that a sitting president is unfit. In either case the vice president must concur, and he would immediately become ‘acting president.’ Presidents have voluntarily transferred their powers to vice presidents in the past, including when they are put under anesthesia for medical procedures. In the case of Raskin’s plan, the Constitution holds that both houses of Congress would hold a vote within three weeks. If two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate agreed that the president couldn’t discharge his duties, he would be dismissed.

Raskin’s plan could have a fatal flaw, however: Legal scholars tend to agree that when the Constitution’s framers first provided for the replacement of a president with an ‘inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the Office,’ they weren’t talking about mere eccentricities. And when the 25th Amendment was sent to the states for ratification in 1965, the Senate agreed that ‘inability’ meant that a president was ‘unable to make or communicate his decisions’ and suffered from a ‘mental debility’ rendering him ‘unable or unwilling to make any rational decision.’ So far two dozen members of the House, all Democrats, have signed on to cosponsor the bill. Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a far-left liberal Democrat, claimed Friday in a Fox Business Channel interview that Congress can remove ‘incompetent’ presidents. ‘The 25th Amendment is utilized when a president is perceived to be incompetent or unable to do his or her job,’ she said.

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Interesting idea, but how valid?:“Fed/ECB are now tightening to make Wall St poorer” because it is “no longer politically acceptable to stoke Wall St bubble.”

Bank of America: The Fed Is Preparing To Make The Rich Poorer (ZH)

Remember when – for years and years after the grand, global QE experiment started – any suggestion that central bankers are the primary cause behind global wealth inequality, and thus directly responsible for such political outcomes as Brexit and Trump – was branded as a conspiracy theory by bloggers living in their parents’ basement? We do, because we were accused over and over of just that (our position on the Fed and other central banks should be familiar to all by now). Well, as of this morning, none other than the chief investment strategist at BofA, Michael Hartnett, is a basement dwelling, tinfoil hatter because in his latest Flow Show report, writes that “central banks have exacerbated inequality via Wall St inflation & Main St deflation.”

Of course we knew that, you knew that, and pretty much everyone else knew that, but those whose jobs depended on not admitting it, kept their mouths shut terrified of pointing out that the central banking emperor is not only naked, but an idiot. Well, the seal has been broken, and even the biggest cowards from within the financial establishment, most of whom can be found on financial twitter for some inexplicable reason, can speak up now. However, it’s what Hartnett said next that was more notable, namely that the “massive outperformance of deflation assets versus inflation assets shows central bank failure in War on Deflation…they have failed to boost wage expectations, inflation expectation, “animal spirits” on Main St.”

And, according to the Bank of American, now that central banks are in full reverse mode, there are “two ways to cure inequality…you can make the poor richer…or you can make the rich poorer…” So for anyone still confused, about what is taking place right now, the “Fed/ECB are now tightening to make Wall St poorer” because it is “no longer politically acceptable to stoke Wall St bubble.” Sooner or later the market will get it, and when it does, those who sell first will be happy. Everyone else will be stuck with a market that is locked limited down, with no position sales possible indefinitely, maybe in perpetuity.

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“..the nation effectively performed a leveraged buyout (LBO) on itself during the last forty years. And that did temporarily add to the appearance of prosperity.”

Debt Is the Third Benjamin Franklin Certainty (Stockman)

Once upon a time people used to have mortgage burning ceremonies when later in their working years the balance on the one-time loan they took out in their 30s to buy their castle was finally reduced to zero. And there was no such thing as student loans, and not only because students are inherently not credit worthy. College was paid for with family savings, summer jobs, work study and an austere life of four to a dorm room. No more. The essence of debt in the present era is that it is perpetually increased and rolled-over. It’s never reduced and paid-off. To be sure, much of mainstream opinion considers that reality unremarkable — even evidence of economic progress and enlightenment. Keynesians, Washington politicians and Wall Street gamblers would have it no other way because their entire modus operandi is based not just on ever more debt, but more importantly, on ever higher leverage.

The chart below not only proves the latter point, but documents that over the last four decades rising leverage has been insinuated into every nook and cranny of the U.S. economy. Nominal GDP (dark blue) grew by 6X from $3 trillion to $18 trillion, whereas total credit outstanding (light blue) soared by 13X from $5 trillion to $64 trillion. Consequently, the national leverage ratio rose from 1.5X in 1980 to 3.5X today. My point today is not to moralize, but to discuss the practical implications of the nation’s debt-topia for Ben Franklin’s other two certainties — death and (especially) taxes. There’s no doubt that the modus operandi of the American economy has been transformed by the trends displayed in the below chart. It so happened that the 1.5X ratio of total debt-to-income (GDP) at the beginning of the chart was not an aberration.

It had actually been a constant for 100 years — except for a couple of unusual years during the Great Depression. It was also linked with the greatest period of capitalist prosperity, economic growth and rising living standards in recorded history. By contrast, today’s 3.5X debt-to-income ratio has two clear implications. First, the nation effectively performed a leveraged buyout (LBO) on itself during the last forty years. And that did temporarily add to the appearance of prosperity. But it also means that the U.S. economy is now lugging two turns of extra debt compared to the historic norm. Mainstream opinion, of course, says “so what?” The U.S. economy is lugging $35 trillion of extra debt, that’s what. That’s right. In the absence of the 40-year leverage aberration since the late 1970s, the chart below would show about $29 trillion of credit market debt (public and private) outstanding, not $64 trillion.

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Just don’t blame this on Brexit. It’s a much longer trajectory. Britain has been living above its weight for a long time, and austerity has made that much worse.

UK Household Incomes Fall Most In 40 Years, Savings Rates Crash (Ind.)

The aggregate real disposable income of UK households has fallen for three quarters in a row for the first time since the 1970s, according to the Office for National Statistics. The ONS said that the inflation-adjusted compensation of the household sector fell 1.4% in the first three months of 2017, reflecting spiking inflation and weak pay growth. It was the biggest decline since the first quarter of 2013 and followed a 0.4% fall in Q4 2016 and a 0.3% slip in Q3 2016. Three consecutive quarters of contraction is the worst run for the series since 1976-77. The ONS also said that the aggregate household savings rate collapsed to just 1.7%, down from 3.3% in the final quarter of 2016, and the lowest on record, although it said one-off tax payment factors might have distorted the latest reading.

Nevertheless, weak pay growth means that households have had to resort to running down their savings and borrowing to support consumption, which has almost single-handedly powered the overall economy since last June’s Brexit vote. “This is not sustainable and fuels the belief that weakened consumer spending is likely to hold back the economy over the coming months,” said Howard Archer of the EY Item Club. “With consumer confidence declining and banks reporting that they intend to restrict the supply of secured credit, the saving rate is more likely to rise than fall ahead,” said Samuel Tombs of Pantheon.

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Those foreigners would have to sell somthing first, we presume. There goes the S&P?!

China’s Opening Of Bond Market May Spark ‘Massive Demand’ From Foreigners (CNBC)

China’s move to open up its fixed income market to foreign investors will eventually unleash “massive” demand for the mainland’s bonds, the chief executive of the company that operates Hong Kong’s stock exchange, told CNBC on Friday. In May, regulators in Hong Kong and on the mainland approved a “bond connect” program to allow investors operating in Hong Kong to trade Chinese bonds, called a “northbound” flow, with a “southbound” flow of Chinese investment into Hong Kong to be considered later. Authorities also won’t cap the amount that foreigners can invest in China. “I think this is a huge breakthrough,” HKEx CEO Charles Li told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on the anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China.

Li said that while large investors are already able to access the mainland fixed income market though existing programs, the bond connect would be fundamentally different. “People are now finally able to do it and able to do it in a way that is familiar, that is similar to the way we trade U.S. dollar Treasurys or other international treasury fixed income instruments,” he said. “That is something so new. That the demand, underlying demand, the potent demand are massive.” He noted that with China’s yuan being included in the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket in November 2015, some investors must include at least some renminbi assets on their balance sheets. Inclusion in the SDR means the renminbi is now officially recognized as a reserve currency. “That will require massive reallocation of capital but over quite a long period of time,” Li said, saying foreign investment into Chinese bonds was “at the beginning of the beginning.”

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Not all of this will come out as bad as it may look tomorrow morning, but down the line it’s all a toxic swamp. In the short term, deep cuts to social programs.

Judge Orders Illinois To Pay Billions More Toward Medicaid (CT)

A federal judge on Friday ordered Illinois to start paying $293 million in state money toward Medicaid bills every month and an additional $1 billion over the course of the next year, worsening a cash-flow problem caused by two years of budget-free spending by state government. U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow’s ruling came after lawyers representing Medicaid patients and attorneys for the state were unable to agree on a plan to deal with bills and pay down a $3 billion backlog owed to health care providers. The ruling requires the state to start promptly paying all new Medicaid bills, which is estimated at about $586 million per month, and to pay down $2 billion of its bill backlog in payments spread out over the course of the coming fiscal year. The federal government pays half of those costs, so the bottom line for the state will be $293 million per month and $1 billion in backlogged bill payments over the next year.

Comptroller Susana Mendoza’s office earlier in the week had offered to pay an additional $150 million per month, but the plaintiffs rejected it, saying it wasn’t enough. The $150 million would have only cost the state $75 million because of the federal match, and Mendoza’s office said that was all the state could spare while meeting other demands. Now, Mendoza said Friday’s ruling would cause her to likely have to cut payments to the state’s pension funds, state payroll or payments to local governments. Payments to bond holders won’t be interrupted, she said. “As if the governor and legislators needed any more reason to compromise and settle on a comprehensive budget plan immediately, Friday’s ruling by the U.S. District Court takes the state’s finances from horrific to catastrophic,” Mendoza said in a statement. “A comprehensive budget plan must be passed immediately.”

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Maine beat Illinois to it! Partial shutdown started today.

Maine Governor Won’t Sign Latest Budget Proposal, Will Allow A Shutdown (BDN)

Gov. Paul LePage said Friday that he won’t sign a state budget package endorsed Thursday night by a special panel, ensuring a partial shutdown of state government at midnight. The Republican governor’s opposition to the budget deal would force Maine’s first state government shutdown since 1991, which could stretch 10 days if LePage holds a budget bill for the full time the Constitution allows before he must act. A budget would go to him tonight if the Legislature can muster two-thirds votes in both chambers, but even that was a big “if” on Friday. LePage hosted House Republicans for a Friday morning meeting where he reportedly implored them to oppose the budget deal negotiated by Senate President Mike Thibodeau, R-Winterport, and House Speaker Sara Gideon, D-Freeport.

LePage told reporters his major objections were the overall cost of the budget package – around $7.1 billion – and that it proposes raising the state’s lodging tax from 9% to 10.5% without income tax cuts. However, the budget package currently under consideration contains an income tax cut of 3% because it eliminates the surtax on income above $200,000 per year for education which was approved by voters last year. LePage said “on June 30” – the deadline for Maine’s next fiscal year – “they’re trying to put a gun to the governor’s head,” but it won’t work. “This budget they have has no prayer, and if they’re hell-bent on bringing this budget down, we will shut down at midnight tonight and we will talk to them in 10 days,” LePage said.

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Whack-a-state.

Connecticut Social Service Agencies Brace for Deep Cuts With No Budget (AP)

Nonprofit social service agencies prepared Friday to cut programs, close facilities and lay off staff after Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed an order that slashes funding to maintain essential state services after lawmakers couldn’t come to terms on a budget before the end of the fiscal year. Barry Simon, president and CEO of Oak Hill, said his Hartford-based agency which serves people with developmental disabilities has decided to close four group homes and consolidate two others. Oak Hill was already losing money on those programs and anticipated the problem would be acerbated by the additional state reimbursement cuts in Malloy’s executive order. “Because of this situation, we’re pulling the trigger because it’s only going to get worse,” he said. Simon said 26 individuals live at the six affected group homes, some as long as 20 years. Most are being moved into other facilities.

Meanwhile, Oak Hill is scaling back day programs and employment services for people currently receiving services. And Simon said his agency cut off new admissions two months ago, in anticipation of the state budget impasse. Malloy called it “regrettable” he had to sign the executive order. When it became clear an agreement wasn’t possible on a new, two-year state budget before the fiscal year ended, the Democrat urged the General Assembly to pass a three-month “mini budget” he created. Malloy said it would be less draconian than the executive order and give lawmakers more time to reach a budget deal. While Democratic and Republican state Senate leaders supported Malloy’s mini budget, House leaders did not. Democratic House officials instead offered an eleventh-hour, two-year budget they said can be ready for a vote July 18. Malloy, however, was unenthusiastic about the proposal.

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A healthy pension fund today should really be over 100% funded- because of future demographic expectations. Only South Dakota’s complies.

America’s Pension Bomb: Illinois Is Just the Start (BBG)

We’ve been hearing it for years: America’s public pensions are a ticking time bomb. Well, at long last, the state of Illinois is about to expose just how big this blowup could be. As of the 2015 fiscal year, Illinois had promised its employees $199 billion in retirement benefits. Right now, it’s $119.1 billion short. That gap lies at the center of a years-in-the-making fiscal mess that’s threatening to drop the state’s credit rating to junk-bond status. But Illinois is hardly alone. Connecticut and New Jersey—states that, to most of the world, seem like oases of prosperity—are under growing financial strain, too. We’ve ranked the states by the size of their funding gap. The lower the funding ratio, the more money the state has to come up with to meet its pension obligations.

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“The American people, by and large, have no more idea how false and fragile the financial arrangements of the nation are than the average eight-year-old has about why the re-po squad is towing away Daddy’s Ford-F150.”

An Awful Lot Of Americans Are A Walking Illinois Now (Jim Kunstler)

The preview of coming attractions is currently playing out in Illinois — soon to be joined by Connecticut, California, Kentucky, and many other bankrupt states. Illinois is dead broke. It can’t pay the contractors who fix things like roads and storm drains, and supply food to its prisons. It’s over $200-billion deep in pension obligations that will never be honored. Its Medicaid system is a shambles. It doesn’t even have the cash-on-hand to pay lottery winners (what happened to all the cash paid into the lottery by the suckers who didn’t win, which is supposed to pay off the winners?). The state legislature hasn’t passed a budget in three years. The governor and the mayor of Chicago and everybody else nominally in charge have no idea what they’re going to do about it. Think the federal government is going to just step in and save the day there?

They’d have to bail out every other foundering state and that’s just not going to happen, especially with that same federal government about to run out of cash money itself, with no resolution of the debt ceiling controversy that might allow it to even pretend to borrow more money by issuing treasury bonds that are instantly bought by the Federal Reserve — which, of course, is not an official government agency but a private banking consortium contracted to manage the nation’s money. Do you begin to see the outlines of the clusterfuck rising like a bad moon over the harvest season of 2017? The American people, by and large, have no more idea how false and fragile the financial arrangements of the nation are than the average eight-year-old has about why the re-po squad is towing away Daddy’s Ford-F150.

We’re just doing what we always do: gittin’ our summer on. Breaking out the potato salad and the Bud Lites – at least those who have enough mojo left in their MasterCards to charge the party supplies. An awful lot of Americans must be maxed out, though, people who actually used to work at things and get paid for it. Each one of them is a walking Illinois now, facing each dawning day with a bigger load of problems, more things they can’t pay for, and moving closer to the dreadful day when everything is gone, every chattel, every knickknack, the very roof over their head, and most particularly the belief that they live in a fair and decent society.

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Absurd theater 2017. Because: “The intelligence that prompted the administration’s warning to Syria this week was “far from conclusive,” said a U.S. official familiar with it. “It did not come close to saying that a chemical weapons attack was coming,” the official said.”

But Nikki Haley says: “I would like to think that the president saved many innocent men, women and children.”

US Says Its Warning Appears To Have Averted Syrian Chemical Attack (R.)

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Wednesday that the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad appeared so far to have heeded a warning this week from Washington not to carry out a chemical weapons attack. Russia, the Syrian government’s main backer in the country’s civil war, warned that it would respond proportionately if the United States took pre-emptive measures against Syrian forces to stop what the White House says could be a planned chemical attack. The White House said on Monday it appeared the Syrian military was preparing to conduct a chemical weapons attack and said that Assad and his forces would “pay a heavy price” if it did so. The warning was based on intelligence that indicated preparations for such a strike were under way at Syria’s Shayrat airfield, U.S. officials said.

“It appears that they took the warning seriously,” Mattis said. “They didn’t do it,” he told reporters flying with him to Brussels for a meeting of NATO defense ministers. He offered no evidence other than the fact that an attack had not taken place. Asked whether he believed Assad’s forces had called off any such strike completely, Mattis said: “I think you better ask Assad about that.” Washington accused Syrian forces of using the Shayrat airfield for a chemical weapons attack in April. Syria denies this. The intelligence that prompted the administration’s warning to Syria this week was “far from conclusive,” said a U.S. official familiar with it. “It did not come close to saying that a chemical weapons attack was coming,” the official said.

[..] Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday that Moscow will respond if the United States takes measures against Syrian government forces. “We will react with dignity, in proportion to the real situation that may take place,” he said at a news conference in the city of Krasnodar. Lavrov said he hoped the United States was not preparing to use its intelligence assessments about the Syrian government’s intentions as a pretext to mount a “provocation” in Syria. [..] In Washington, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, credited Trump with saving Syrian lives. “Due to the president’s actions, we did not see an incident,” Haley told U.S. lawmakers. “I would like to think that the president saved many innocent men, women and children.”

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Suggestion: look at this through Russian eyes. They don’t think Trump is crazy, they think all of America is.

Make No Mistake, We Are Already at War in Syria (Giraldi)

Donald Trump has been in office for five months and it would appear that at least some of the outlines of his foreign policy are beginning to take shape, though that may be exaggeration as no one seems to be in charge. The “America First” slogan seemingly does not apply to what is developing, as actual U.S. interests do not appear to be driving what takes place, and there does not seem to be any overriding principle that shapes the responses to the many challenges confronting Washington worldwide. The two most important observations that one might make are both quite negative. First, lamentably, the promised détente with Russia has actually gone into reverse, with the relationship between the two countries at the lowest point since the time of the late, lamented Hillary Rodham Clinton as Secretary of State.

Second, we are already at war with Syria even though the media and Congress seem blissfully unaware of that fact. We are also making aggressive moves intended to create a casus belli for going to war with Iran, and are doubling down in Afghanistan with more troops on the way, so Donald Trump’s pledge to avoid pointless wars and nation-building were apparently little more than glib talking points intended to make Barack Obama look bad. The situation with Russia can be repaired as Vladimir Putin is a realist head of state of a country that is vulnerable and willing to work with Washington, but it will require an end to the constant vituperation being directed against Moscow by the media and the Democratic Party. That process could easily spin out for another year with all parties now agreeing that Russia intervened in our election even though no one has yet presented any evidence that Russia did anything at all.

Syria is more complicated. Senators Tim Kaine and Rand Paul have raised the alarm over American involvement in that country, declaring the U.S. military intervention to be illegal. Indeed it is, as it is a violation of the United Nations Charter and the American Constitution. No one has argued that Syria in any way threatens the United States, and the current policy is also an affront to common sense: like it or not Syria is a sovereign country in which we Americans have set up military bases and are supporting “rebels” (including jihadis and terrorists) who are seeking to overthrow the legitimate government. We have also established a so-called “de-confliction” zone in the southeast of the country to protect our proxies without the consent of the government in Damascus. All of that adds up to what is unambiguously unprovoked aggression, an act of war.

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Expect Russia to react to this too, and soon.

Qatar Crisis: Armed Conflict And Protracted Dispute Grow More Likely (CNBC)

A diplomatic crisis on the Arabian Peninsula is turning into a protracted standoff, and some analysts now say the risk of armed conflict is emerging. The dispute between Qatar, a major natural gas exporter, and its neighbors is now entering its fifth week. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and implemented a partial blockade on June 5 in a bid to bring the tiny Persian Gulf monarchy in line with Saudi-dominated foreign policy. Some analysts initially thought the parties would seek a resolution by the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, but last week, the anti-Qatar alliance issued a series of harsh demands. “It’s escalated to a stage where it’s very difficult for both sides to back down,” Firas Modad, analyst at IHS Markit, told CNBC this week.

The demands include non-starters such as shutting down Al Jazeera news and closing a Turkish military base. The coalition also calls on Qatar to end its alleged ties to terrorist groups and political opposition figures in Gulf nations and Egypt. It demanded Qatar pay reparations and submit to compliance reviews going forward. Qatar has rejected the demands. That is likely to trigger a series of additional economic and political sanctions against the government in Doha, causing the impasse to stretch out for months, risk consultancy Eurasia Group concluded in a briefing this week. “The crisis will continue to escalate before the Qatari leadership ultimately adjusts its policy positions, or in a slightly less likely scenario, opts to cement an alliance with Turkey and closer ties with Iran,” Eurasia Group said.

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Or the Most Patriotic of Americans?

Oliver Stone: Edward Snowden Is The “Most American Of Patriots” (ZH)

Director Oliver Stone, who’s recently released series “The Putin Interviews” stirred up controversy among liberals who accused him of being a Russian propagandist, appeared on the Liberty Report with former Texas Congressman Ron Paul to discuss the documentary, his views about former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and why the US’s aggressive approach to containing the purported threat posed by Russia has led to a breakdown in relations between the two powers. Stone said he’s been “interested” in Russia since being raised as a conservative in New York City, claiming that his father instilled a “fear” of Communism and Russians in him at a young age. In the early 1980s, Stone visited the country for the first time as a screenwriter with the idea of interviewing several dissidents. He has returned several times since.

In particular, Stone has become interested in the case of Snowden, whom he praised as “the most American of patriots.” “I was interested in Russia – I went back into the 2000s. The Snowden story occupied me. And of course, it’s so ironic that he the most American of patriots is living in Moscow because he has to. It’s the only country in the world that would give him asylum – in other words it’s the only country in the word that can deny the US what it wants which is Snowden.” “[Putin] explained to me that Russians wanted an extradition treaty with the US for years, but nothing doing, because there are a lot of Russian criminals in America who stole money from Russia. He did nothing wrong in Russian terms so they gave him asylum – now its 3 years 5 years whatever its going to be. I wish Ed well I really do.”

Stone also shared a story about watching the movie “Dr. Strangelove” with Putin, who he said was greatly moved. “I showed him the movie Dr. Strangelove…and he watched it very serious about it. He said this movie was very accurate of that time and it’s still accurate today.” Circling back to the issue of nuclear deterrents, Stone said he’s worried that rising tensions around the world could trigger a “nuclear confrontation.” “I’m saying I have reached that age when I am not really concerned about what happens to me but… it’s not just about the US, but about the whole planet and I feel a nuclear confrontation, an accident, could happen tomorrow. But you put ABMs in Poland and Romania – that’s a gigantic mistake.”

“An ABM can be converted overnight from a defensive missile to an offensive missile. They’re surrounded from the North the East and the West by US missiles and we don’t seem to realize it.” Stone says he’s “scared for America,” explaining that many US citizens prefer to blindly accept media spin that’s favorable to the US establishment, without questioning it, or trying to understand Russia’s point of view. “It’s a good thing I went through JFK when I was younger…there’s been a lot of controversy around my movies. I’m scared not for myself because I’m at that age, they can’t destroy me anymore, but I’m scared for America, I’m afraid they’ve lost their sense. I’m afraid there’s a lack of foresight and leadership.”

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EU farm budget is about €1 trillion. While Greece’s health care system and social programs are being murdered underpressure from the same EU.

Billionaires And Aristocrats Biggest Beneficiaries Of EU Farm Subsidies (TLE)

20% of the 100 largest payments under the European Union’s “direct” subsidy system now go to people or families on the Sunday Times Rich List. According to a new investigation by Energydesk billionaires and aristocrats last year scooped up an even greater proportion of the UK’s biggest farm subsidy payouts, with “basic payments” to the Top 100’s Rich List recipients totalling £11.2 million in 2016 – up from £10.6 million the previous year. Direct EU subsidies – now known as “basic payments” – have attracted criticism for largely rewarding landowners simply for owning land, rather than paying farmers to invest in environmental or other “public goods”. The National Trust – which itself received £1.6m in basic payments last year – said the system needed fundamental reform, even if it meant the trust getting less income for its land.

Richard Hebditch, the trust’s external affairs director, said: “Rather than being paid for how much land you happen to farm, a new model which delivers clear public benefit from the money being spent is within reach after Brexit. “Farmers should receive a fair market price for safe and sustainable supplies of food, with public funding paying for the crucial role of protecting vulnerable natural resources, caring for our heritage and landscape and helping address issues like flooding and climate change.” Ironically, the farm business owned by prominent Brexit-backing billionaire inventor Sir James Dyson is now the biggest for-profit recipient of direct EU farm subsidies in the UK. Beeswax Dyson Farming netted £1.6 million under the basic payment scheme last year – up from £1.4 million in 2015. According to the Rich List, Sir James and family are worth £7.8 billion, and he is a bigger landowner than the Queen, with holdings of around 25,000 acres.

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Nobody takes Juncker serious anymore.

Juncker: EU To Discuss More Migrant Help For Greece And Italy (R.)

The EU executive will discuss further measures with Italy and Greece in the coming week to help the Mediterranean states deal with irregular migrants, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Friday. Asked at a news conference what, in particular, the Commission might do to help Italy, where arrivals from Libya are up a third on a year ago, Juncker said: “I will see with the Italian prime minister, with the Greek prime minister, during the coming week what further efforts the Commission can line up to relieve Italy and Greece in their difficult struggles.” He recalled that he had described both countries as “heroic” and said he had discussed the issue on Thursday at a meeting in Berlin with Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni and leaders of other big EU states which are members of the global G20.

“I said Italy and Greece … cannot be left alone in this refugee crises,’ Juncker told reporters in Tallinn, where he was meeting the Estonian government as it takes on the six-month presidency of European Union ministerial councils. He rejected any suggestion the Union had failed to help the countries where most refugees and migrants are arriving, noting EU funds allocated to Italy and Greece and border guard and other personnel sent to help process those arriving. The Commission on Thursday threw its weight behind a plea by Italy for fellow EU states to allow rescue boats carrying migrants to dock in their ports.

EU diplomats said they were looking at Italian concerns over how private charities are picking up people just off the Libyan coast. Some see that as encouraging more to take to the sea. The rescue organisations complain of unfair criticism. About 10,000 people have been rescued over the past three days. Italy has taken in 82,000 people so far this year. Voters dealt a blow to the ruling party in local elections last week, opting for groups promising a tougher line on immigration. The Commission has signalled readiness to give Italy more cash to help with increased arrivals, though officials and diplomats in Brussels are sceptical there would be any swift agreement for other EU states to take in the private boats.

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