Jul 182024
 
 July 18, 2024  Posted by at 4:55 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


John French Sloan Spring rain 1912

 

It’s been a while since we saw Andrew Korybko here. But there he is.

 

 

Andrew Korybko:

 

In Defense Of JD Vance As Trump’s VP

Addressing The Top-Three Criticisms Head-On

Trump’s decision to pick freshman Ohio Senator JD Vance as his Vice President (VP) has riled some members of the Alt-Media Community (AMC), who claim that it represents a step backwards for the MAGA movement. They point to his history as a US Marine in Iraq, as a venture capitalist after that, and then finally as a former Never Trumper to claim that he’s a neocon, which his hawkish positions on China and Iran confirm in their minds.

The reality though is that Vance isn’t someone whose worldview can easily be pigeonholed. His history as a US Marine in Iraq taught him, in his own words, that “I had been lied to – that the promises of the foreign policy establishment were a complete joke.” As for his time as a venture capitalist, it led to close friendships with leading elites like Peter Thiel, who’ve been instrumental in turning some Silicon Valley power players against the Democrats. This could ultimately prove to be a game-changer in the election.

Likewise, the same can be said about him formerly being a Never Trumper, which can appeal to millions of on-the-fence voters who used to despise Trump until they were “red pilled” like he admits he was and are thus now seriously considering supporting him. He argued that “I said some bad things about Donald Trump 10 years ago. I can make a good case to the American people, people who may have been skeptical of the president back in 2016, who could be skeptical now, that we’ve seen the results.”

Vance’s hawkish positions on China and Iran are to be expected. The first is the US’ systemic rival while the second threatens its regional hegemony. Nevertheless, what he’s said about Russia and Ukraine proves that he’s not an ideologically driven warmonger, which suggests that he’ll pragmatically manage the US’ competition with them. He’s no doubt a hegemonist, but that comes with the territory, and he’ll never forget what he learned about the establishment during his time with the US Marines in Iraq.

Clarifying China & Russia’s Roles In The MAGA Worldview

His worldview is that the US should be selective with its engagements abroad, both militarily and in terms of foreign aid, and he’s a proponent of Trump’s reported plan for NATO. This would see the bloc become “dormant” as its European members are coerced to step up their involvement in containing Russia while the US “Pivots (back) to Asia” to contain China. Members of the AMC claim that this makes him a “sell-out”, but it’s unrealistic to expect a leading member of MAGA to not be hawkish on China.

After all, Trump was extremely tough on the People’s Republic, which he justified on the grounds of rebalancing their astronomical trade deficit that reached several hundred billion dollars a year before his election. His problem though was that he was too influenced by his son-in-law Jared Kushner during his first term and fell under the sway of neocons, but he’s since learned his lesson judging by how he reportedly took his son Don Jr’s, Steven Bannon’s, and Tucker Carlson’s advice to pick Vance as his VP.

Trump and Vance share the vision of redirecting the US’ containment focus away from Russia and towards China, with a view towards preventing the first’s potentially disproportionate dependence on the second that could turbocharge its superpower trajectory and thus seriously challenge the US. The resultant system of Sino-US bi-multipolarity would comparatively favor China since it would amount to them practically being equals on the world stage, hence why those two want to avoid this if possible.

The means to that end is to relieve some pressure upon Russia so that it can rely more on India and other Global South states, particularly those from its “Ummah Pivot”, as export markets for its natural resources instead of being forced by circumstances into funneling most of them towards China’s rise. From Russia’s perspective, any reduction of pressure would be welcome, especially if it results in some of its national security interests in Europe finally being respected through a compromise in Ukraine.

Russia’s Grand Strategic Interests

Preemptively averting potentially disproportionate dependence on China is also important, not for any politically Sinophobic reasons, but for simple pragmatism since no strategically autonomous country like Russia wants to be reliant on a single partner for the bulk of its foreign export earnings. This explains why it’s recently recalibrated its Asian balancing act from its hitherto Sino-centricity through Putin’s trips to North Korea and Vietnam as well as his hosting of Indian Prime Minister Modi.

The preceding five hyperlinked analyses explain this strategy in detail, the gist of which was just reflected in Valdai Club Program Director Timofei Bordachev’s article about how “Russia has redefined its Asia strategy”, which was released after those pieces and then republished by RT on their front page. This insight is relevant with regards to Trump’s decision to pick Vance as his VP since it strongly suggests that Russia would be receptive to those two’s envisaged endgame of swiftly resolving the Ukrainian Conflict.

Alt-Media’s Activist Problem

Despite recognizing how easily that proxy war could spiral out of control into World War III, and thus appreciating the need to bring about a diplomatic end to it as soon as possible exactly as Vance has promised that he’ll seek to do, some in the AMC are still displeased with him. A lot of these disgruntled folks are activists at heart, which makes them ideologues for the causes that they support, which in this case are world peace in general and less US pressure on China and Iran in particular.

They therefore can’t approve of Vance as VP because of his hawkish positions towards those two, hence why they’re now agitating against him by fearmongering that he’ll risk sparking World War III with them instead of with Russia like Biden and his team are dangerously flirting with by miscalculation. They’re entitled to their views, but observers should remember that they’re being shared by ideologues, no matter how well-intentioned they may be.

These people are purposely being hyperbolic for political reasons related to the causes that they passionately support. They’re also naïve if they truly thought that Trump wouldn’t pick someone who shares his worldview, which is pragmatic towards Russia but adversarial towards China and Iran. It’s possible to raise awareness of the risks that a theoretical Vance presidency could bring if something happens to Trump without going overboard by fearmongering about him and discrediting him.  

Exposing The Frauds

Some of these folks aren’t being sincere with their concerns, however, since they have ulterior motives. There are those who have a unique interpretation of what MAGA is, which is at variance with what it objectively is, and are thus very angry that Trump’s pick of Vance as VP shattered their expectations. The resultant cognitive dissonance explains some of their furious posts on social media after having previously supported the movement.

Then there are those who never truly supported MAGA, but sought to establish “alliances of convenience” on certain causes like those related to China and Iran, and are deliberately trying to discredit MAGA as revenge since it’s clear that Trump 2.0’s policies wouldn’t align with their views. This is especially true for hitherto seemingly MAGA-friendly foreigners who are now trying to manipulate voters’ perceptions about emotive issues like the ones that they support after Vance’s pick as VP.

These people can’t vote in US elections, yet they’re exploiting social media to have an outsized role in influencing those who can, with the common narrative being that they imply one way or another that this decision supposedly proves that Trump has betrayed MAGA. The truth though is that Trump is paving the way for a successor who’ll carry on what MAGA has always been about on the foreign policy front, and that’s being tough on the US’ top rivals in order to decelerate its declining unipolar hegemony.

MAGA’s Role In The Global Systemic Transition

To be sure, the way in which Trump and Vance envisage doing this is by first alleviating the risk of World War III with Russia, which is a net positive for peace and would bring humanity back from the brink if it’s successful. The global systemic transition to multipolarity has also unprecedentedly accelerated so much since the start of Russia’s special operation that restoring the 1990s-era unipolar system is now impossible, thus meaning that MAGA’s foreign policy is really about responsibly managing this moment.

The best that the US can now hope to achieve is to preserve its privileged position as long as possible through creative – and ideally peaceful – means. It’ll never enjoy the unparalleled dominance from the post-Old Cold War period, but it also won’t become a so-called “normal country” anytime soon either, let alone collapse in the near future like many in the AMC have predicted. A Trump-Vance presidency would be all about slowing the pace of its decline and regaining some ground wherever possible.  

The difference between them and Biden-Harris is that MAGA wants to improve socio-economic living standards at home while keeping World War III at bay abroad while the Democrats care less about Americans and more about their fellow liberalglobalist elite even at the expense of risking World War III. Few activists will ever be fully pleased with any presidential ticket, but comparatively speaking, the Trump-Vance one is much better for world peace as a whole than the Biden-Harris one.

 

 

 

 

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Feb 192024
 
 February 19, 2024  Posted by at 2:11 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  6 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Red Vineyards at Arles 1888

 

 

Interesting assessment fom Andrew, but I have my doubts. He sees Germany take a leading role in Europe, but I think it’s in no position to do that, neither militarily nor financially. How the mighty have fallen.

 

 

Andrew Korybko:

 

Russia finally captured the Ukrainian fortress town of Avdeevka following a protracted battle that ended in Kiev’s chaotic retreat and the abandonment of its wounded troops. The timing took place as the Western elite met in Germany for this year’s Munich Security Conference over the weekend, which conveniently enabled them to plan their next moves in this proxy war. No significant financial or military aid is expected, however, despite Ukraine’s newly clinched security pacts with Germany and France.

Rather, as was explained here earlier in the month when analyzing the latest Biden-Scholz Summit in DC, the West’s focus will be on the long-term containment of Russia in Europe beyond the borders of that former Soviet Republic. To that end, Germany’s role as the US’ preferred “Lead From Behind” partner in the EU will become more prominent, which will take the form of connecting the “military Schengen” with the revived Weimar Triangle in order to accelerate the construction of “Fortress Europe”.

The preceding three hyperlinked analyses explain these concepts more in depth as well as their relationship, but they can be summarized as Germany exploiting its comprehensive subordination of Poland to resume its long-lost superpower trajectory after a nearly eight-decade-long hiatus. The reason why the West’s attention will turn towards accelerating this geostrategic shift instead of clinging to its proxy war on Russia via Ukraine after Avdeevka is because it’s now clear that the latter is a lost cause.

Russia already won the “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with NATO that Secretary General Stoltenberg declared almost exactly one year ago as proven by the counteroffensive’s failure and the subsequent reversal of this conflict’s dynamics whereby Ukraine is now once again on the defensive. Former Command-in-Chief Zaluzhny’s replacement Syrsky explicitly admitted this last week before the disastrous retreat from Avdeevka, which is regarded as Kiev’s last major fortress in Donbass.  

The stage is now set for a forthcoming Russian offensive that could steamroll through the rest of this region in the best-case scenario from Moscow’s perspective and the worst-case one from the West’s. That’s not to say that this will indeed happen because the so-called “fog of war” makes it impossible to accurately discern Ukraine’s full defensive capabilities behind the Line of Contact (LOC), but it’s not without reason that the West is panicking and Zelensky decided to blame them for his latest defeat.

He complained that a so-called “artificial lack of weaponry” was responsible in an allusion to the congressional deadlock over more Ukraine aid, which Biden agreed with to pressure his political foes. Navalny’s unexpected death on Friday was taken advantage of by anti-Russian hawks to demand that the House pass the Senate’s proxy war funding bill when it resumes its session later this month, but even if it’s approved, the problem is that the US has already expended its stockpiles.

While it’s possible that it could dip into those reserves that it’s saved for meeting its national security needs and coerce its vassals into doing so as well, the fact of the matter is that the counteroffensive’s failure in spite of much larger aid given to Kiev up until then suggests that this won’t make a difference. Whatever might be sent would be used solely to hold the LOC as long as possible and prevent a Russian breakthrough in order to perpetuate the stalemate that Zaluzhny was the first to admit had set in by fall.

Truth be told, that description was inaccurate since the LOC continues gradually moving westward and the pace might speed up after Russia’s capture of Avdeevka. President Putin already signaled that he won’t stop until his security guarantee requests are met through military or diplomatic means after recently regretting that he hadn’t ordered the special operation to begin sooner and saying on Sunday after the fall of that Ukrainian fortress town that victory is “a matter of life and death” for Russia.

It remains unclear when and on what terms the conflict will end, but the writing is on the wall and it clearly reads that Russia’s security guarantee requests will be met to some extent or another, ergo why the West is now planning for a decades-long “confrontation” with Russia per Stoltenberg’s own words. Therein lies the significance of the geostrategic shift that was identified earlier in this analysis regarding Germany’s role as the US’ top “Lead From Behind” partner for containing Russia in Europe.

In furtherance of that goal, NATO’s continental-wide “Steadfast Defender 2024” drills – the largest since the end of the Old Cold War – will be aimed at optimizing the partial implementation of the “military Schengen” between Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands, which France is expected to soon join. The Baltics will likely also participate as well given that they require support for building their so-called “Baltic Defense Line”, which could extend up to the Arctic if Finland gets involved too as expected.

The revived Weimar Triangle comes into play since Germany requires French backing because Berlin can’t realistically do all of this on its own, which in turn necessitated Poland’s military subordination to its western neighbor via the abovementioned logistics pact between them. A military corridor from France to Estonia, which could reach Finland via Denmark-Sweden (the second of whom is a NATO aspirant and expected to join this new “Schengen”), is therefore taking shape before the world’s eyes.

Russia’s capture of Avdeevka will therefore reverberate across Europe by accelerating the implementation of these long-term containment plans seeing as how NATO’s proxy war on it through Ukraine is obviously a lost cause after the fall of that former Soviet Republic’s latest fortress town. It’s this geostrategic dynamic that observers should pay more attention to than anything else since the resumption of Germany’s long-lost superpower trajectory is a development of global significance. 

 

 

 

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Dec 282023
 


Edward Hopper Funnel of Trawler 1924

 

 

Good thing India didn’t join the sanctions, explains Andrew Korybko. Maybe there’s a lesson in there for more people and countries. Also, maybe it’s too late for some. Even if the deindustralization of Germany has barely started.

 

 

Andrew Korybko:

A representative of India’s Petroleum and Natural Gas Ministry told a department-related parliamentary standing committee that their country’s Russian oil imports helped stabilize the global energy market and prevent havoc from breaking out according to a recent report from The Indian Express. What follows are the excerpts that they cited from that event, which will then be analyzed so that the reader can fully appreciate India’s latest contribution to the world:

“If they (Indian refiners) had not imported Russian oil into India, which may be a big number of 1.95 million barrels per day, that deficiency would have created a havoc in the crude oil market and the prices would have shot up by about $30-40.

The crude oil market is such that in the market of 100 million barrels per day, if the OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) says that they are going to reduce it by one or two million barrels per day, prices increase by 10 to 20 per cent and reach up to $125-130.

If India does not absorb–I would call it absorption–1.95 million barrels per day, these prices would have reached $120-130. It would have created a havoc. Diplomatically, we are a sovereign country and could say that we have been doing what is good for the country as well as the world.”

This insight aligns with what was earlier shared in these five analyses from June 2022-March 2023:

* 14 June 2022: “Russian-Indian Energy Diplomacy Helps Delhi Balance Washington

* 30 November 2022: “Russia’s Energy Geopolitics With China & India

* 16 January 2023: “The US Discredited Its Own Sanctions By Buying Refined Russian Oil Products Via India

* 8 February 2023: “The West’s Anti-Russian Sanctions Made India Indispensable To The Global Energy Market

* 1 March 2023: “Russia Will Keep Up The Pace Of Oil Exports To India Despite Increased Chinese Demand

If India hadn’t resisted Western pressure, then the whole international community would have suffered.

To explain, many Global South states were already struggling to deal with COVID-connected debt problems prior to the West’s anti-Russian sanctions worsening their food insecurity, so an energy price crisis on top of that could have pushed them over the edge into an uncontrollable polycrisis. Not only could this have led to spiraling unrest that could have spread throughout this swath of the world, but the security and humanitarian consequences would have also destabilized the West as well.  

Those countries among that New Cold War bloc that are dependent on resources and markets there might have felt compelled to launch unilateral military interventions, while large-scale refugee flows could have crashed into their societies with all that entails for exacerbating preexisting tensions. This worst-case scenario was averted through India’s principled neutrality towards the Ukrainian Conflict, which saw this globally significant Great Power resist Western pressure to boycott Russian energy.

If Delhi had capitulated to their demands, then the abrupt removal of so much energy from the market would have plunged it into chaos. The remaining producers couldn’t have replaced Russia’s lost share, thus leading to a competition among the wealthiest countries (namely China and the EU) to purchase their remaining resources. All the while, the debt-beleaguered and newly food-insecure Global South would have been unable to maintain its minimum energy needs, thus setting the polycrisis into motion.

As the unnamed Indian official told parliament, “we have been doing what is good for the country as well as the world”, which highlighted the growing convergence between India’s national interests and those of the international community. This South Asian Great Power practices what can be described as a hyper-realist grand strategy wherein India not only prioritizes its national interests as policymakers conceive them to be, but candidly acknowledges this approach and also details those same interests.

By doing so, India removes all ambiguity about its interests, which therefore makes it the most predictable partner that anyone can have. This policy is premised on the trust that India has cultivated with everyone since they don’t have any reason to question its representatives’ sincerity whenever they speak about their national interests. Some might have different views and even dislike India’s policies, but nobody can credibly claim that those representatives are lying about what that they want and why.

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov praised this approach and the multialignment that it naturally led to during a press conference with his Indian counterpart on Wednesday when saying that “I believe this policy is not just important for Russia and all other countries around the world, but it is the only policy worth conducting that will ensure respect and reputation and be beneficial in India’s cooperation with other countries that show similar respect to all members of the international community.”

The West will never appreciate what India did for the world, but the Global South is beginning to realize that the polycrisis that many of their officials feared would unfold shortly after the anti-Russian sanctions were promulgated was largely averted through India’s drastically scaled imports of that country’s oil. This stabilized the market, which made it easier for them to manage their debt and food security problems, thus preventing this part of the world from slipping into full-scale instability to everyone’s detriment.

 

 

 

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Nov 032023
 
 November 3, 2023  Posted by at 6:01 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  11 Responses »


JMW Turner Lake Llanberis and Snowdon Color Study c.1800

 

 

There was the speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah today, who said “What is happening in Gaza today is not just another war; it is a decisive historical battle with consequences that will reshape the future..” That made me think of Joe Biden’s recent comments on a new world order, which were ridiculed away by Russia: “Yes, we’ll have a new world order, but you’re not going to be a -significant- part of it”.

Hamas is a formidable regional force in Gaza, but Hezbollah is of another order altogether. It controls the south of Lebanon, aka Israel’s northern border, it’s strongly related to Iran, and it’s armed to the teeth. But we’ll hear enough of Hezbollah soon enough. i wanted to talk about something else today.

Going through the news, as we do every day in our Debt Rattle aggregators, there’s a new pattern we see developing. That is, the end of the careers of both Volodymyr Zelensky as President of Ukraine, and of Benjamin Netanyahu as PM of Israel. They both appear to have a -very- limited time left in their jobs. Thanks – largely- to the US. Who propped them up in the first place.

Zelensky Will Be Ukraine’s Last President – Exiled Opposition Leader

Ex-Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk, now in exile in Russia, denounced Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in a column on Friday. The former politician said that the current Ukrainian head of state may well be the last, and Zelensky only has himself to blame. In his piece, Medvedchuk called Zelensky a merciless “professional traitor” whose pattern of stabbing everyone in the back for his own gain has ruined the country. After being elected president on a platform of peace with Russia and reconciliation with Donbass, Zelensky “ceded power to radical nationalists, adopting their rhetoric and behavior,” Medvedchuk wrote. In doing that, he betrayed the people who voted for him. “Zelensky simply got scared of becoming a peacemaker since it would require him to oppose aggressive forces inside and outside of the country,” he argued.

Funny thing is, that “ceded power to radical nationalists, adopting their rhetoric and behavior..” might just as well describe Bibi.

Netanyahu’s ‘Political Days Are Numbered’: White House

Joe Biden and top White House aides have discussed the likelihood that Benjamin Netanyahu’s “political days are numbered,” and are gauging potential successors as the popularity of the Israeli prime minister continues to plummet following last month’s successful Hamas attack on Israel, Politico reported on 2 November. The topic of Netanyahu’s anticipated fall from power has come up in recent White House meetings including following Biden’s most recent trip to Israel in which he met with Netanyahu following the surprise Hamas attack on 7 October, according to two senior administration officials. Biden has even suggested to Netanyahu that he should think about lessons he would share with his eventual successor, the two administration officials added. Separately, a current US official and a former US official both confirmed that the Biden administration believes Netanyahu will not remain in office for long.

So you might think this is just the US cutting its losses. But maybe there’s more to it. Maybe the US set up both for their fall. Just in case their “adventures” wouldn’t work out. This way, Washington can draw its hands off of it, blame its “partners”, and move on. We didn’t lose, our allies lost.

“Joe Biden”, just last week, demanded another $106 billion package for Israel and Ukraine, even as they know full well how limited the job prospects for both are. So why do it? ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern has an idea:

Biden Needs Israel and Ukraine Conflicts to Avoid Jail Time

Joe Biden is trying to twist the arms of House lawmakers to pass a hefty Ukraine aid package, while at the same time the White House is resisting efforts to impose a cease-fire in Gaza amid horrific civilian casualties. While his team member, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan are known for their neoconservative stance, Biden has long been considered a moderate and entered the White House with the goal of ending the “forever wars”. Now the US president has no scruples about pouring more gasoline on the flames of conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. What’s behind Joe’s “radicalization”? “Biden has a personal stake in this,” CIA veteran Ray McGovern told Sputnik. “What do I mean? If Biden loses in Ukraine, which is bound to happen in the next couple of months, it will be evident to everyone. It will be impossible to cover it up. If he loses in Ukraine, he’ll be afraid to lose the election and his fears will be well-founded. And if this is the election, what do you think he also fears? He also fears that he’ll end up in prison.”

They know what happens, but they can’t admit it. It would threaten their grip on power. They got themselves stuck with the dastardly duo of Joe and Kamala, and they have to ride this out unless one of the two dies. Do they have replacements lined up? We haven’t seen any.

In Ukraine and Israel, things might be a little different. Everyone will simply move on to the respective neo-nazi parties that support both Zelensky and Netanyahu to date. But whoever they pick, Ukraine will have to confront Russia, and we know how that went, whereas Israel faces the entire Arab world (+Russia?). Counting on US support that just ain’t there.

It’s hard to imagine that Blinken and Jake Sullivan and Nuland and Bolton had no idea this would happen. But that means the US is on a suicide mission. I’d rather not think of that. They have, what, 47 battle ships in the eastern Med, largest concentration since 1945?! As Russia, and who else(?!), have hypersonic Kinzhals to shoot them like fish in a barrel? Make peace, you fools. I’m going to have a beer outside on a terrace while I still can.

 

 

 

 

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Oct 252023
 
 October 25, 2023  Posted by at 8:40 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  47 Responses »


Roy Lichtenstein Woman With Flowered Hat 1963

 

Israel Considers Flooding Hamas Tunnels Before Ground Operation – Hersh (Sp.)
US Opposes Chinese Peace Mission in the Middle East (Tweedie)
Israel Unhappy With Russian Stance On Gaza War (RT)
The Palestinian Tragedy: Cui Bono? (Pepe Escobar)
Israel Failing in Global PR Campaign to Demonize Hamas – Scott Ritter (Sp.)
The Shit Show That Is The Israeli Army (Narwani)
What Biden’s ‘New World Order’ Really Means (RT)
Entire Global Arms Production ‘Not Enough’ For Ukraine – Minister (RT)
Russia’s External Debt-to-GDP Ratio at a Historic Low (Sp.)
OPEC-Russia’s Share in Oil Supply to Exceed 50% by 2050 – IEA (Sp.)
Sidney Powell’s Plea Bargain Sets Up Trump for Conviction (PCR)
Jenna Ellis Admits to Criminal False Statements, Ominous for Trump (Turley)
US Went ‘Overboard’ In Weaponizing Dollar – Musk (RT)

 

 

South Africa’s vaccine purchase agreement with Pfizer.

 

 

Churchill

 

 

 

 

Biden Serbia

 

 

Mike Johnson is the next designee for Speaker of the House

 

 

 

 

The Head of the Snake: Democide – Top Swiss banker Pascal Najadi

 

 

COVID VACCINES DO NOT SAVE LIVES. THEY HAVE CAUSED 17 MILLION DEATHS

 

 

 

 

“..many of whom have had only a few weeks of training in the maneuvers and coordination required for the invasion..”

Israel Considers Flooding Hamas Tunnels Before Ground Operation – Hersh (Sp.)

Israel is looking into flooding Hamas’ tunnel system before starting its ground operation in the Gaza Strip, US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said, citing sources. “A well-informed American official told me that the Israeli leadership is known to be considering flooding Hamas’s vast tunnel system before sending in its troops, many of whom have had only a few weeks of training in the maneuvers and coordination required for the invasion,” Hersh said in his column published on Substack. Hersh said Israel is in the process of turning Gaza City into rubble, via constant bombing, and is also planning to begin the ground invasion soon. Flooding the tunnels could mean that Israel was ready to “write off the hostages still in jeopardy,” Hersh said.

“Where the estimated 200-plus hostages are is an open question. Israel is only talking about the end of the Hamas regime and Hamas has so far released four hostages,” Hersh said.”The American official told me that the Israel leadership expects more to come soon.” Earlier on Tuesday, Israel’s Deputy Director General for Public Diplomacy Emmanuel Nahshon said that Israel is delaying the start of the ground invasion in Gaza due to possible “deadly traps.” The Israeli military is taking its time as it needs to prepare its soldiers for this unique situation, Nahshon added. Hersh further indicated the al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade joined the Qassam brigades – the military wing of Hamas – in the attack on Israeli kibbutzim and villages on October 7.

On the day of the attack on Israel, the Qassam brigades were not alone and were actually joined by al-Aqsa Martyrs brigades, a coalition of Palestinian armed groups that has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Israel, the European Union and others, the article said on Tuesday, citing a US official. “We know,” Hersch cited the official as saying, “that the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade participated.” The participation of outside groups on Hamas’ side in the attack on Israel was likely one of the reasons why secret talks about a larger release of Israeli hostages were never successful, according to Hersh.

Read more …

“The notion that somehow peace is nefarious, that China is being unprincipled in that it’s trying to work for peace..”

US Opposes Chinese Peace Mission in the Middle East (Tweedie)

The US has unmasked its true nature by blocking efforts by China and other nations to bring peace to the Middle East, says a peace activist. Chinese special envoy to the Middle East Zhai Jun said on Monday he had already visited Qatar and Egypt and would now travel to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries in the region “to further strengthen coordination with relevant parties to promote ceasefire, end violence and mitigate the situation.” More than 5,700 civilians have been killed and some 18,000 injured in the besieged Gaza Strip by Israeli Defence Forces bombing since the armed wing of the Hamas movement launched a surprise attack into southern Israel on October 7. The victims include 2,360 children, almost 1,300 women and 300 elderly people.

Last week the US blocked UN Security Council motions moved by Russia and Brazil calling for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian territories and for civilians to be protected. Washington has also sent two US Navy aircraft carrier strike groups and a seaborne assault flotilla to the region to back up Israel. Peace campaigner KJ Noh told Sputnik that Washington was directly opposed to Beijing’s attempts to broker a peace deal between Israel, Hamas and other states and movements in the region. “China is using its good offices, scrambling to do shuttle diplomacy to try and de-escalate and find a peaceful resolution,” Noh said. “And the United States is saying: ‘Don’t even dare talk about de-escalation. Nobody mention a ceasefire’.”

“It only wants to make sure that whatever Israel does, it does it with a minimum of PR blowback,” he added. “And so it’s trying to mitigate the PR damage rather than prevent the horrific war crimes and atrocities that are sure to happen and that are already happening.” The writer said this was a “mask-off moment” when the West’s true nature was exposed to the nations of the global south. “The US could plausibly mystify many countries by pretending to be something that it was not,” Noh argued. “But when it came out all in favor of Israel’s violence and was ignoring the ground realities as well as international law, then at that point you can’t keep up the pretence any more.”

“Even the quisling leaders of US allies have had to make a conscientious statement because the outrage on the street, the outrage globally is so extraordinary that they cannot but speak up against what the US and Israel are doing,” he stressed. Western media has tried to dismiss China’s peace initiatives as an attempt to position itself as a geopolitical rival to the US — a narrative which Noh called “extraordinary”. “The notion that somehow peace is nefarious, that China is being unprincipled in that it’s trying to work for peace — China is on the side of peace. That much is clear because that it stands to gain from peace,” he said. “Everybody benefits from peace. It just is because China’s model is win-win cooperation,” Noh said. “On the other hand, the empire benefits from war. The US is built on more genocide, primitive accumulation and geopolitical oppression and bullying.”

Read more …

Peace is bad.

Israel Unhappy With Russian Stance On Gaza War (RT)

The Israeli Foreign Ministry has conveyed to Russian diplomats their “displeasure” with Moscow’s position on the conflict with Hamas in Gaza, the public broadcaster Kan reported on Tuesday citing anonymous sources. “Russia’s conduct and the remarks against Israel don’t correspond with the severity of the situation Israel is in, which is a state of war,” Israeli diplomats reportedly told their Russian counterparts. West Jerusalem also expressed “displeasure with the role Russia is playing” in the war against Hamas and hope that Moscow will take “more balanced” positions, another ministry official told the Times of Israel newspaper. Moscow’s proposed resolution in the UN Security Council did not include “an explicit condemnation” of Hamas, and did not match President Vladimir Putin’s endorsement of Israel’s right to self-defense, according to the ministry.

Israel was subjected “to an attack that was unprecedented in its brutality, and it certainly has the right for defense, to ensure its peaceful existence,” the Russian leader said on October 13, just days after the Hamas incursion that resulted in more than 1,300 Israeli deaths. However, on the same occasion Putin noted that true peace can only be achieved when the Palestinians have a state of their own. He advised Israel not to react with “brutality,” noting that Gaza was home to around two million civilians, not all of whom supported Hamas, and argued that the proposed “total blockade” of the territory would be just as unacceptable as the siege of his home city during World War II. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has advocated for the immediate stop to the conflict, urging all parties to “respect international humanitarian law, prevent any terrorist actions and indiscriminate use of force.” He also called for the implementation of the UN-endorsed two-state solution to the conflict.

On Tuesday, Israeli diplomats called for the resignation of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, after he told the Security Council that the Hamas attack “did not happen in a vacuum” and noted that the Palestinians had been “subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, accused Guterres of expressing “an understanding for terrorism and murder” and “compassion for the most terrible atrocities committed against the citizens of Israel and the Jewish people.” Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen announced he would boycott meetings with Guterres again, adding that “after October 7th there is no room for a balanced approach. Hamas must be wiped out from the world!”

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“I cannot praise Xi Jinping because it would be as if I’m praising myself & that would be an embarrassing thing to do.”

The Palestinian Tragedy: Cui Bono? (Pepe Escobar)

By now it’s fully established who is profiting from the ghastly Palestine tragedy. As it stands we have 3 wins for the Hegemon and 1 win for its aircraft carrier nation in West Asia. First winner is the War Party Inc., a massive bilateral scam. The White House’s $106 billion supplemental request to Congress for “assistance” especially to Ukraine and Israel is manna from Heaven to the weaponizing tentacles of the MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex, in the legendary definition by Ray McGovern). The laundromat will be on a roll, including $61.4 billion for Ukraine (more weapons and replenishing of U.S. stocks) and $14.3 for Israel (mostly air and missile defense “support”).

Second winner is The Democratic Party engineering the unavoidable change of narrative from the spectacularly failing Project Ukraine; yet that will only postpone the upcoming humiliation of NATO in 2024, which will reduce the Afghan humiliation to the status of sandbox child playing. Third winner is setting West Asia on fire: the Straussian neocon psycho “strategy” conceived as a response to the upcoming BRICS 11, and everything in terms of Eurasia integration that was advanced at the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing last week (including nearly $100 billion in new infrastructure/development projects). Then there’s the vertiginous acceleration of the project sponsored by genocidal Zionist maniacs: a Final Solution to the Palestinian question, mixing razing Gaza to the ground; forcing an exodus to Egypt; the West Bank turned into a cage; and, at the most extreme, a “Judaification of Al-Aqsa” , complete with an eschatological destruction of the third holiest place in Islam, to be replaced by rebuilding the Third Jewish Temple.

Everything is of course interlinked. Vast swathes of the U.S. Deep State in tandem with the neocon-run “Biden” combo can ride the new bonanza side by side with the Israeli Deep State – their bubble protected by a massive propaganda barrage demonizing all forms of support for the Palestinian plight. Yet there’s a problem. This “alliance” has just lost – perhaps irretrievably – the overwhelming majority of the Global South/Global Majority, which is viscerally Palestinian. Very well-educated Palestinians living in Gaza and suffering throughout the Unspeakable, fiercely denounce the ambiguous roles of Egypt, Jordan and the UAE while praising Russia, Iran and among Arab nations, Qatar, Algeria and Yemen. All of the above spells out a stark continuity since the end of the USSR. Washington refused to dissolve NATO in 1990 to protect the immense profits of the weaponized tentacles of the MICIMATT.

The logical consequence has been the Hegemon and NATO as a Global Robocop, in tandem, killing at least 4.5 million people in West Asia while displacing over 40 million, then killing, by proxy, at least half a million in Ukraine and displacing over 10 million. And counting. In sharp contrast to the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder, the Global South/Global Majority see the emergence of what a sophisticated Chinese scholar delightfully described as an “aristocratic bromance” at the center of the “present nexus of Universal History”. Exhibit A is provided by Vladimir Putin commenting, “I cannot praise Xi Jinping because it would be as if I’m praising myself & that would be an embarrassing thing to do.”

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“..any judge who heard a corruption case against Ben Netanyahu, who allowed it to go forward would be subjected to impeachment, removal. It makes Benjamin Netanyahu literally above the law.”

Israel Failing in Global PR Campaign to Demonize Hamas – Scott Ritter (Sp.)

The latest claim to emerge about Hamas’ deadly border raid on October 7, which killed more than 1,300 Israeli civilians in several towns near the Gaza Strip, is that the Hamas militants were carrying plans for chemical weapons during the attack. In a broadcast on Sunday, Israeli President Isaac Herzog held up a document he claimed had been found in one of the settlements, across the front of which it says Al-Qaeda in bold white lettering. However, social media users quickly dissected Herzog’s claim, pointing out that the document he is holding is a biography of Ramzi Youssef, an Al-Qaeda member who carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people, which was published by Al-Qaeda.

A former Al-Qaeda operative who turned coat and became a spy for MI6 told British media that one of the documents Herzog held up was a diagram of a simple bomb that was posted online by Al-Qaeda in 2009 and widely downloaded, but wasn’t instructions on how to make such a weapon. However, the Youssef biography doesn’t contain the image in question. Herzog’s claims follow rhetorical attempts by Israeli officials to link Hamas with terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda* and Daesh**, calling the October 7 attacks “Israel’s 9/11” and saying that if the US was justified in pursuing its War on Terror, then so is Israel justified in launching its all-out war on Gaza, which has killed more than 5,000 Palestinians as of Tuesday.

Former UN weapons inspector and weapons of mass destruction whistleblower Scott Ritter told Radio Sputnik’s The Backstory that in attempting to destroy Hamas, Israel has asked a question it is still unwilling to answer: “what is the ultimate cause of the violence on October 7?” Israel’s trying to undermine any claim to legitimacy that Hamas might have regarding why they carried out these attacks,’ Ritter said. “You know, Israel is not winning the PR campaign globally, primarily because of the heavy-handed manner in which they’ve responded to the attacks. And people, when they dig into the attacks, are trying to make the claim that you can’t cite self-defense when you’re the occupier. The occupier cannot ever claim a right of self-defense from the occupied. And there’s a larger debate going on right now about the history of Gaza, the history of the Israeli occupation, the history of abuse that’s transpired, etc.”

“So what they’re trying to do, the Israelis right now, is create a new aspect to this conversation, which is: Hamas is an extension of Al-Qaeda, because I believe the documents in question were Al-Qaeda documents, they weren’t original Hamas documents, but rather from an Al-Qaeda playbook. And so, again, as has happened before, they’re trying to make a nexus between – the United States did this – where we tried to link Al-Qaeda with [former Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein unsuccessfully because that was a lie. And now we have Israel tried to link Al-Qaeda and ISIS** with Hamas so that it will help, from their perspective, muddy the waters or anybody trying to say that Hamas had a legitimate right to attack Israel on October 7,” he explained. “Then, of course, the chemical weapons, let’s just be straight up on this here: anybody who knows anything about chemical weapons will tell you that somebody carrying a piece of paper from a handbook written by another agency in their pocket does not a chemical weapon make.”

“Remember, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, was teetering on the brink of political collapse prior to the Hamas action of October 7,” Ritter recalled. “He is a man who is under the shadow of some very serious corruption charges, charges which, again, you’re innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, but if there was a court of law of relevant jurisdiction who heard the case, he probably be found guilty – and he knows it, which is why he is collaborating with his party in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, to change the Israeli Basic Law so that there is no longer a separate-but-equal branch of government called the judiciary, but rather a judiciary that is subordinated to the Israeli parliament. And the Israeli parliament can basically veto any judge that they disagree with. They can impeach at will. So any judge who heard a corruption case against Ben Netanyahu, who allowed it to go forward would be subjected to impeachment, removal. It makes Benjamin Netanyahu literally above the law.”

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X thread

The Shit Show That Is The Israeli Army (Narwani)

Meanwhile in Israel, they’re like headless chickens running around. Here is retired General Yitzhak Brick on the shit show that is the Israeli army: “The current situation of the land forces is tragic, they are not ready for war. Emergency supplies are not available, exercises have stopped and the battalions have not trained in years. There is also no weapons training and education, and the army is not capable of carrying out an attack.” “We have lost the ability to field an effective army and have become a one-dimensional aerial power that cannot win a war on its own.”

“I know the army on the ground better than anyone. I have seen soldiers who do not take care of their weapons before leaving the base. No army in the world behaves like this. The soldiers carry their smartphones with them everywhere. Commands are sent via WhatsApp groups. These phones are being tracked by the enemy.” “Our system has lost all control. Have we gone crazy? I cannot sleep at night. Our ground forces and armored corps are not ready for war.”

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Lukewarm air is what it means.

What Biden’s ‘New World Order’ Really Means (RT)

We all have that one friend who can’t stop arranging things – whether it’s matchmaking, dinner parties, or vacation itineraries programmed down to the minute. They just can’t kick back and take things in stride. The world has to revolve around them, on their time and terms. The US has been that guy for the world for the past several decades. Everyone’s tired of it. But now it has a new invitation – to a new world order. “I think we have an opportunity to do things, if we’re bold enough and have enough confidence in ourselves, to unite the world in ways that it never has been,” US President Joe Biden said at a fundraiser this month. Washington’s boldness and confidence has led to unilateral regime-change bombings, the arming of jihadist proxies in Afghanistan against the Soviets and in Syria against President Bashar Assad, and Azov neo-Nazis in Ukraine. None of that has made the world a better place – just more chaotic. It’s not like any of these places end up better off as a result.

“We were in a post-war period for 50 years where it worked out pretty damn well, but that sort of run out of steam. It needs a new world order in a sense,” Biden said. “Worked out pretty damn well” for whom? Surely not for Latin America, subjected to constant intervention by Washington in its own interests. Same with the Middle East for all those decades when it served primarily as America’s gas station. Or even for the European Union, much of which has gone from being a collection of independent-minded allies to mostly a monolithic vassal for US interests at the expense of its own. The same could even be said of my native Canada, whose economic interests were hindered by Biden himself when he unilaterally cancelled a critical $9 billion pipeline project (Keystone XL) upon election. That should have been the very last time that Canada banked its economic interests on American good faith. It won’t be, though.

The EU had its own critical pipeline of Russian gas (Nord Stream) blown up just a few months after Biden said, right in front of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, that he’d find a way to “end” it if the Ukraine conflict popped off. Then, after Biden’s promises to help his European partners wean themselves off Russian cooperation in exchange for backing Washington’s strategy in Ukraine, reality is setting in for EU leaders that their own blind trust is going to cost them. Not only do they now suffer from an overdependence on American fuel that’s helping to drive inflation, but they’re also stuck with Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that even further disadvantages European industrial exports, already suffering from high energy costs, to the benefit of US manufacturers. And not even a pleading visit by French President Emmanuel Macron to the White House and Congress has managed to move the dial.

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Then why continue to support them?

Entire Global Arms Production ‘Not Enough’ For Ukraine – Minister (RT)

Western nations must be prepared to support Kiev against Moscow “for decades” and should build up their arms production accordingly, a Ukrainian minister has said, claiming that worldwide industrial capacity at its current levels was not sufficient. “The free world should be producing enough to protect itself,” Strategic Industries Minister Aleksandr Kamyshin told Politico on Monday, ahead of a planned announcement this week of a German-Ukrainian joint arms production deal. “If you get together all the worldwide capacities for weapons production, for ammunition production, that will be not enough for this war,” he added. Kamyshin was appointed to his job in March, as Kiev sought to secure the continued supply of arms and munitions to sustain its war effort.

At the time it was gearing up for a summer counteroffensive, for which the US and its allies provided tanks, armored vehicles and other military hardware. The push against Russian defensive lines has failed to produce any significant territorial gains, an outcome that some media have warned could undermine Kiev’s chances of receiving future assistance. With Israel now embroiled in a war with the Palestinian militant movement Hamas, competition for the dwindling reserves of Western arms has intensified. According to German media, Berlin intends to prioritize supplies to Israel over those meant for Ukraine. “What happens in Israel now shows and proves that the defense industry globally is a destination for investments for decades,” the Ukrainian minister argued. Kiev wants Western defense firms to open production lines on Ukrainian soil to ensure Ukrainian “self-sufficiency,” and has secured pledges from Germany and the UK to do so.

Moscow has warned that foreign-funded weapons factories in Ukraine would be considered legitimate targets for Russian missile strikes. Speaking in an interview in July, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky claimed that no amount of aid would be “enough” for his nation, “as long as the war continues.” Moscow has described the conflict as a US-led proxy war against Russia, in which Ukrainians are used as “cannon fodder”. Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin estimated Ukrainian materiel losses since early June as standing at “hundreds of tanks”and “almost 1,500 armored vehicles”. While the US government has pledged to keep arming Kiev, there is growing resistance against the policy in the opposition Republican party. Skeptics have cited the cost of the aid, as well as the lack of proper oversight, despite endemic corruption in Ukraine.

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What a difference.

Russia’s External Debt-to-GDP Ratio at a Historic Low (Sp.)

Recent economic studies have revealed that Russia’s gross public debt to GDP ratio is currently at its lowest level in the nation’s history. According to Sputnik calculations, based on the figures provided by the Central Bank of the Russian Federation (Bank of Russia), the second quarter of 2023 saw Russia’s foreign debt-to-GDP dip below 15%. The indicator has been on a steady decline in recent years. It fell to 31% in 2020, 26.2% at the end of 2021, and just 16.6% last year. The first quarter of 2023 saw a modest decline to 15.45%. “In the second quarter of 2023, debt obligations continued to decline, reaching a total of 14.96%,” the calculations show. At the end of June 2023, gross external financial debt, both government and corporate, was estimated at $343.4 billion. Bank of Russia has also published data on external debt per capita in the second quarter of 2023. According to estimates, the figure decreased by 4% down to $2,300. This is the best indicator since 2006, when it was $2,200.

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Rose colored glasses?

OPEC-Russia’s Share in Oil Supply to Exceed 50% by 2050 – IEA (Sp.)

Russia and OPEC petroleum exporting countries will continue to account for up to 48% of global oil supply until 2030 and exceed 50% by 2050, when Saudi Arabia boosts production, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Tuesday. “OPEC and Russia’s combined share of global oil supply remains between 45–48% to 2030 but it rises above 50% by 2050 as Saudi Arabia increases production,” the IEA said in a fresh World Energy Outlook. Total oil production by OPEC members is set to increase by 1 million barrels per day by 2030, given a decrease of about 1.5 million barrels per day by OPEC producers in Africa.

Russia’s output is projected to drop by 3.5 million barrels per day between 2022 and 2050, according to the report. OPEC+, the global alliance of oil producers led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, has been aggressively cutting crude supplies on the global market in recent months, citing uncertainties about demand. The Saudis have pledged to cut 1 million barrels per day until the end of the year, while Russia has said it will reduce daily supply by 300,000 barrels.

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She did go pretty crazy, along with Lin Wood. But is Trump to blame for having bad legal advice?

Sidney Powell’s Plea Bargain Sets Up Trump for Conviction (PCR)

[..] one of President Trump’s attorneys, Sidney Powell, “pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts of conspiring to interfere with election duties and accepted a sentence of six years’ probation and a $6,000 fine. She must also write a letter of apology to the state and its residents and testify against her co-defendants, including her former client.” I will explain to you what this means. Sidney Powell found herself at risk at the hands of a black prosecutor and a black jury in Atlanta, Georgia in a jury trial. Powell already knew that the prosecutor was biased against her and reasoned the same from the black jury. Plea bargaining, which is what Sidney Powell has done, arose because prosecutors are more interested in their conviction rate than they are in innocence or guilt, and judges are more interested in clearing their dockets than in trials.

To aid their conviction rate, prosecutors have gained the power to withhold exculpatory evidence from the defendant and to bribe other defendants with reduced sentences or with money to testify falsely against the target defendant. This is what Sidney Powell has done. What this means for Trump is that one of his own attorneys has admitted guilt rather than to undergo the ordeal and risks of trial and has agreed in exchange to testify against Trump. So Trump’s own lawyer provides the black prosecutor and black jury (or white Democrat) with evidence to convict Trump. As I explained in my book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions in 2000, in a plea bargain a fictional crime is created and it serves as a substitute for the alleged crime. The fictional crime is a lessor one compared to the indictment crime.

The defense attorney tells the defendant to accept the plea deal he has negotiated and not risk a jury trial that will annoy both the prosecutor and judge, with a corresponding higher punishment if found guilty. Plea bargaining results in defendants admitting to what did not happen in order to avoid the more severe charges in the indictment, often orchestrated in order to coerce a plea. Cleary, plea bargaining permits prosecutors to build cases on speculation rather than on evidence. As I wrote in 2000: “It is only a short step from creating a fictional crime out of a real one to creating a fictional crime out of thin air. The step isn’t taken all at once. When he option of plea bargaining first surfaces, it is considered by everyone involved as a way of meting out punishment in a timely way. But with the passage of time, several things happen. ”

As Plea Bargaining takes over from jury trials, as it has, the investigative work that is the basis for the indictment is not tested by judge and jury. This permits prosecutors to bring charges for which they have little or no evidence. The public presumes that the prosecutor has a case, and the prosecutor uses the media to create a presumption of guilt. Newspaper and television reports from anonymous leaks from the prosecutor’s office, preceded by the phrase “according to sources familiar with the investigation,” create a presumption of guilt, reducing the defendant’s chance of an objective jury. It would be unusual for a jury to find innocent a person already convicted in the media.

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“It is not clear if she would tie Trump to a conspiracy or racketeering.”

Jenna Ellis Admits to Criminal False Statements, Ominous for Trump (Turley)

The image most of us had of former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis was a remarkably cheerful mugshot after her arrest in the RICO case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Ellis made a very different appearance today in state court as she pleaded guilty to intentionally interfering in the election process in the state of Georgia. While the impact of earlier pleas by figures like Sidney Powell is hard to judge at this stage, this plea has more ominous implications for the former president. Ellis offered a sobbing apology for her role in challenging the 2020 election and stated that

“as an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all my dealings. … In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, I believed that challenging the results on behalf of President Trump should be pursued in a just and legal way. I endeavored to represent my client to the best of my ability…What I did not do, but I should, was make sure the facts that the other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true. In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the election in several states, including Georgia, I failed to do my due diligence.”

As with the other former Trump counsel, she will not face jail time and was charged with one charge of aiding and abetting false statements in writing. As part of the plea deal, Ellis will have to serve five years probation and pay $5,000 in restitution to the Georgia Secretary of State within 30 days. She will also have to complete 100 hours of community service, write an apology letter to voters in the state of Georgia and testify truthfully in future hearings regarding ongoing cases. Ellis is the type of plea that tends to concentrate the mind. Powell pleaded to relatively minor charges involving unauthorized access to voting machines and areas. Those charges tend to be easy to prove. It is not clear if she would tie Trump to a conspiracy or racketeering.

Ellis pleaded guilty to false statements that could conceivably implicate the President if she claims that he was aware of the falsity and facilitated the crime. Moreover, Ellis recently broke with Trump. She called him a “malignant narcissist” who cannot admit mistakes — and said that she would never vote for him again. The question is now whether Ellis will implicate Trump in this conspiracy. What is clear is that her plea will hold particular interest of Special Counsel Jack Smith in his parallel federal prosecution.

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“Countries like Brazil or India still want to transact with Russia. They can’t do it with dollars, so we’ve forced them to de-dollarize their transactions..”

US Went ‘Overboard’ In Weaponizing Dollar – Musk (RT)

The United States has “overplayed” its hand in “weaponizing” the dollar with sanctions, pushing more countries around the world to slash transactions using the currency, Elon Mask has warned. “You’re now seeing a lot of countries de-dollar their transactions because we’ve forced it. And this goes beyond even Russia, China, and Iran,” the owner of X (formerly Twitter) said during a Twitter Spaces session hosted by American entrepreneur David Sachs on Monday. Musk highlighted a shift to trade in national currencies, especially among the BRICS nations, adding that it was not a choice made by these countries, but rather a necessity forced upon them by Ukraine-related Western sanctions against Moscow.

“Countries like Brazil or India still want to transact with Russia. They can’t do it with dollars, so we’ve forced them to de-dollarize their transactions, thus weakening the strength of the dollar in the world,” he explained. The weaponization of the greenback has pushed many nations to look for alternatives, after sanctions effectively cut Russia off from the Western financial system. A large number of prominent economists have repeatedly warned that the dominance of dollar-based financial institutions and aggressive US economic policy would prompt more nations around the world to abandon dollar transactions and move to local currencies in trade.

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1986

 

 

Eyes of the tiger

 

 

Goat?
https://twitter.com/i/status/1717046487882887349

 

 

Squid

 

 

 

 

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Sep 242023
 


Otto Dix The Triumph of Death 1934

 

 

I don’t think we ever had a movie review before, and this is not really one either. Dr. D. sent me this yesterday, and now you can all go find out what it means. It feels to me like he has Keanu Reeves solve all of world politics. But then, I only saw some bits of John Wick 1, and I’m afraid I stopped there. So what do I know, really?

 

 

Dr. D. :

For a change of pace, let’s do a light off-the-cuff movie review of John Wick 4. Now being no expert, I don’t keep very close track of the plot or the names, but with a spoiler alert, here’s how this exciting and deadly action movie goes.

Johnny, a retired Mafia killer, has gotten into trouble in Wick 1, where his former Mafia boss’s idiot drug-addled son is so offensive that he has to come out of retirement to oppose them. After the many turns of Wick 2 and 3, and finds himself “Excummunicado”. That is, his bad behavior in taking just revenge means he is wanted dead by all the other mafias, headed by a mysterious “High Table”, a secret and untouchable collective of old European money.

In revenge for not bringing Johnny to heel and controlling or eliminating him, the designated authority of the High Table, the young Marquis, attacks downtown NY, leveling their prime location and casino there called “The Continental”, murdering the NY Concierge, and leaving the NY Manager alive as a warning to others.

The young Marquis of old Europe then enlists China, a blind assassin who is indifferent to the job, but capable of killing rebellious Johnny, but only through deadly blackmail of killing his progeny, his young and protected daughter.

Asked why he destroyed his own focus and financial center in NY, the Marquis says he must destroy the very “idea” of rebellion, by destroying everything it touches worldwide. He is advised by London, his agent and advisor, on the problems of destroying your own paying assets simply to make a point, but is dismissed.

Johnny then travels to Japan, where he has loyal friends willing to advise or even possibly help him. However, the very act of coordinating puts Japan under massive attack and they are also destroyed. As his last act, Japan authorizes Johnny to kill everyone involved without quarter. The hungry China is also there eating noodles and concludes the attack on Japan near a watery pool, but leaving Japan’s young daughter intact.

We also find that The Tracker, a beer-drinking American everyman and his dog, have been following Johnny’s every move and is biding his time for action. He is disregarded by Europe as an irrelevant Mr. Nobody, beyond consideration or engagement, a deplorable.

Johnny returns to hiding among the Street People, the Bowery King, and is contacted by NY who tells him he can end the persecution by toppling the High Table. If he kills the Marquis himself, he will merely be replaced by another. But if he can Topple the Table or force them to negotiate, he can make terms for lasting peace. This is done via a seldom-used direct war, in personal combat. The constant possibility and risk of such a direct and personal war is the only thing holding nation’s mafias in check. So Johnny must fight Old Europe directly, one-to-one.

However there is no premise for doing this. To get a basis for single combat, Europe vs Johnny, he needs a seat, a “ticket” from a nation’s mafia to make such a challenge. He cannot be on the outside, a stateless free agent. But there is such a one who wants to take revenge in Russia.

Johnny meets the Russian mafia in Germany, who immediately shoot and hang him out of revenge and distrust. She says she cannot forgive the killing of her father once, when she then had to bow subservience to Old Europe for years. Johnny argues they now have a common enemy and should take out the Marquis and the Table instead of each other. Russia reluctantly agrees but only if Johnny can prove himself. To do so, he must take out all Germany, and hand her his gold as token.

They then arrange this ruse that Johnny shall be delivered as prisoner and slave to massive, muscular Germany. On arrival in his office, they find China already knows and is waiting. The Tracker is also there, and so we have all three sitting down together in Germany, all wanting to kill rebel Johnny, either for threats, or or money, or for German dominance and credibility. Germany then reveals he deals off the bottom of the deck and cheats at everything.

In the ensuing battle, Johnny attacks Germany in a way he doesn’t expect, cutting at his arteries, and after an endless and pounding exchange, he delivers Germany’s gold teeth to Russia.

Johnny is then authorized as an agent and alliance with Russia, to then attack Old Europe in single combat.

NY delivers the challenge to the hotheaded young Marquis, however encouraging him that if he should kill Johnny, the young Marquis would most certainly be lauded as master and take over everything. Also should Johnny win this combat, then NY will be rebuilt and reinstated at Europe’s expense, thus NY’s interest in the matter. If Europe wins, however, NY will be killed. This is agreed as they depart under the painting of the “Liberty Guiding” by Eugène Delacroix and comment Sic Semper Tyrannis.

In the meeting of terms under the London moderator and arbiter, they arrange combat with pistols at dawn at Sacré-Cœur, the Sacred Heart. Instead of fighting Johnny himself, however, Europe nominates China instead, who again is forced to agree, but likes it even less.

Europe’s Eurotrash soldier then warns the Marquis that in the bodyguard’s opinion, this is a bad idea, as to be seen not fighting for yourself makes you appear weak, is a greater risk, and even winning may not transfer power to him. The Marquis clearly seems to feel he cannot beat Johnny in open combat and continues on the smart and clever route, as it will all be over soon anyway, with the rebellious Johnny erased.

The Marquis then continues to cheat, increasing the money paid for Johnny to amazing heights of $26M. This brings out every scoundrel and hit man worldwide, who then attack Johnny in the public square, under the Arc de Triomphe in France. Hour after hour they attempt to take him out, before and so the direct combat cannot occur. Man after man, attempt after attempt, they fail.

However, the American Everyman is interfering indifferently, saving Johnny’s life repeatedly as he wants the prize for himself: peace and a decent retirement. At the same time, and at the last minute, China then arranges to insure the combat of Old Europe vs the newly authorized Johnny – agent of the Russian Mafia – occurs as agreed, all overseen by London as referee. They climb the last 222 steps of the Rue Foyatier, taking out the last Eurotrash soldier in the process.

Everyman, while intending to kill rebel Johnny, was not offered enough by Europe, repaid a quid pro quo, and was too much delayed to kill Johnny before the open combat and therefore opens a beer and is a mere spectator to the duel from a nearby bench, his exhausting work complete.

At last the open combat of Europe vs rebel Johnny begins, pistols at down at last, with China as his proxy. They shoot each other mercilessly, but no one falls, and they proceed to the third round at 10 paces, impossible to miss. As they are both shot a third time, Johnny falls and Europe interferes to make the coup de grace on the “idea of rebellion” himself. Johnny however, although shot has only been appearing weak. He had arranged with China and not shot his pistol at all, having ammunition in reserve. With the help of NY distractions, he shoots and kills Europe, ending the matter and bringing the situation back to peace.

London concurs and frees both NY and China from their obligations. Russia is victorious and the High Table is brought to heel.

However as a soldier and a killer, Johnny is no longer needed and dies on the steps nearby, thinking of his Lady, and is buried in the last scene as “Faithful Husband.”

So, highly stylized and pretty cool movie, eh? Well, we now return to our regularly scheduled program that’s filled with boring finance and geopolitical wrangling instead.

 

 

 

 

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Apr 262023
 
 April 26, 2023  Posted by at 5:00 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  10 Responses »


Mark Chagall I and the village 1911

 

 

My good friend Wayne brings up some interesting questions about weapons, in the view of the current Ukraine conflict. Are nuclear weapons the most terrifying ones we know? Or have hypersonic precision weapons taken that “crown”? The answer is not all that obvious.

There is a persistent rumor that sometime in March, Russia hit a secret NATO base deep underground near Kiev with a hypersonic Kinzhal missile and took out some 300 people, including a bunch of high-placed NATO commanders. I have neither seen this confirmed nor, perhaps more importantly, denied. But Russia has no reason to boast about it, and the US has even less reason to acknowledge it happened.

What we do know is that US/NATO (or even China) doesn’t have these weapons, and Russia does. And that, from what I’ve read, partly has to do with the fact that since the missiles move at speeds of up to Mach 15 (15x speed of sound), they need a special heat resistant coating that only Russia has been able to develop. Moreover, these hypersonic missiles are not just much faster than any other missile, they are also far better at hitting precision targets. Try hitting a bunker 60 meters or more underground.

Here’s Wayne for some philosophy:

 

 

Wayne Hall:

The 1980s were the decade of the Non-aligned Anti-Nuclear Weapons Movement. The Non-aligned movement’s political line differed from that of the Communist-Party controlled anti-nuclear movements, which took their lead from Soviet diplomacy. The Non-aligned current had some party-political cover from Eurocommunist parties. It said “there are no good and bad nuclear weapons”. Implication: Soviet nuclear weapons are bad. To be consistent the movement should have called for Soviet nuclear disarmament when the USSR disintegrated, particularly because it was not clear at first whether Yeltsin would be better or worse than Gorbachev. Some of us did indeed call for unilateral Soviet nuclear disarmament.

NATO policy was for removal of Soviet nuclear weapons from Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine. But not from Russia. Why not from Russia? Well, for a start, that would mean abolition of the Russian nuclear bogy. What justification could there then be for NATO’s nuclear weapons? The Non-Aligned Anti-Nuclear Weapons Movement was clearly confused. Why were they not raising the demand for nuclear disarmament of Russia? They had spent the nineteen eighties ridiculing ideas of “nuclear deterrence”.

Yeltsin turned out to be (or at least to appear) even more open to ideas of nuclear disarmament of Russia than Gorbachev had been. The Non-Aligned Anti-Nuclear Weapons Movement called out NATO for fraud. Even official spokespersons acknowledged that nuclear weapons were “more of political than of military utility”. In other words they were useless, except for politicians (and journalists). The Swedes had recognized the uselessness when the nuclear hawk Olof Palme changed his stripes and became an anti-nuclear activist, presiding over unilateral nuclear disarmament of Sweden.

A demand for unilateral nuclear disarmament of Russia would have been a brilliant poke in the eye for the Tory smartypants who were always jeering: “If you want unilateral nuclear disarmament, recommend it to the Soviets!” Instead of raising the demand, some anti-nuclear activists simply started pointing out to each other that the Cold War is over and this should be recognized. Others didn’t do even that.

Since March 2023, the unnecessary character of Russian nuclear weapons has been confirmed. In March a provocation was staged inside Russia (by Ukraine? By NATO?) with civilians including children being killed and injured. Putin declared that there would be retaliation, and indeed, there was, within days. A command bunker in Ukraine four hundred feet underground (too deep then for run-of-the-mill bunker-busting technology) was hit by a Russian hypersonic Kinzhal missile and hundreds of dignitaries and high-ranking NATO personnel were allegedly killed. The media were pretty silent about it. And pretty soon the gaslighting started.

If this Kinzhal strike typifies the code of ethics that Russia intends to follow in its war making, the superfluous character of Russian nuclear weapons is confirmed. Attacks on civilians are punished by attacks on the top leadership of the side that resorts to them. The media propaganda machine is now bending over backwards to scream that the Kinzhals are “nuclear capable”. So what? Is a nuclear weapon needed to wipe out political leadership in a bunker? It is said that the United States has begun testing its own hypersonic missiles but the tests so far have failed. Will this failure be the prelude to a new arms race, or to abandonment of the 20th century mode of conducting wars particularly from 1914 onwards? The twentieth century mode of mass politics and mass slaughter of civilians?

When one studies the ideas of Hitler apologists it is easy to come to the conclusion that Hitler’s key intellectual mistake was to assume that the category “white people” includes Germans. The Boers had to learn the same lesson in South Africa, I suppose. Given this and given the assumptions of “nuclear deterrence”, which is an acceptable doctrine for the white people of NATO but not for the white people of Russia unless they face the “fact” that they too require to be “deterred” from destroying all life on planet earth, WOKE notions that “only white people can be racist” become comprehensible and the Hitlerian misreadings of the Coudenhove-Kalergi prediction/recommendation(?) of a world of mulattos following the extinction of “white people”, elevatable into a praiseworthy program for the future of this world.

If racism cannot be overcome intellectually there is obviously no alternative to overcoming it, or “trying to”, biologically. Is there? It seems to me that the logic of Russia’s development of hypersonic missiles, particularly given the way they appear to be using them, is the opposite of the motives according to which nuclear weapons were initially developed: i.e. elaboration of a mass “shock and awe” effect. Hypersonic missiles apparently aim at introducing military precision: graduated retaliation, which so far has been used to retaliate for attacks on the civilians of one’s own side. But the retaliation has been strikingly disproportionate, suggesting that one is planning to really stigmatize cowardly attacks on unarmed civilians. In effect stigmatize modern mass destruction warfare.

If it is true that “the West” is behind in this hypersonic missiles technology, how is it going to respond? Through embarking on a hypersonic missiles arms race? If it does to Russia what Russia has just done to it in Ukraine, there is a widespread view that this will trigger generalized nuclear war, which “the West” claims not to want. So what would be the purpose of getting ahead in hypersonic missiles technology? Public relations? Being first for the sake of being able to say that one is first?

It is said that nuclear weapons serve political more than military purposes, but those political purposes have to do with the “shock and awe” effect, not the ability to launch a precision strike at the nerve centre of the enemy (and so trigger the nuclear war one supposedly seeks to avoid). Will “the West” think this through or will it just go ahead anyway and “try to catch up and overtake”? Is “the West” thinking coherently about nuclear weapons?

 

 

 

 

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Apr 262023
 


Mark Chagall Peace window, UN 1967

 
 
 

Andrew Korybko:

 

The US’ Weaponization Of Anti-Russian Fake News Against Germany

The Washington Post (WaPo) pushed several conspiracy theories in their recent piece alleging that “Kremlin tries to build antiwar coalition in Germany, documents show”. Citing what they claim to be “a trove of sensitive Russian documents largely dated from July to November that were obtained by a European intelligence service”, WaPo reported that elements within Germany’s left-aligned Die Linke and its right-leaning AfD are cooperating due to some shadowy Kremlin plot.

All three parties denied this accusation, which builds upon Reuters’ similarly conspiratorial report from early January alleging that “Pro-Putin operatives in Germany work to turn Berlin against Ukraine”. Taken together, these two articles can be interpreted as part of a wider information warfare offensive aimed at discrediting the natural trend of political forces pragmatically putting aside their differences on specific issues in order to cooperate on shared ones like ending NATO’s proxy war on Russia through Ukraine.

Three Interconnected Conspiracy Theories

This development was first observed over the last decade, during which time three interconnected conspiracy theories were invented by those gatekeepers with a self-interested stake in perpetuating traditional partisan divisions. They claimed that this is all due to the mischievous work of Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, who supposedly weaponized the so-called “horseshoe theory” in order to assemble what’s been smeared as the “red-brown alliance”.

The first-mentioned forms the basis of countless conspiracy theories due to the false claim that he’s “Putin’s brain”, which preconditioned targeted audiences to extend credence to the wildest claims about him and his work. The second concept, meanwhile, refers to the theory that the far left and far right are secretly aligned. As for the third, those previously mentioned gatekeepers throw this term around in order to discredit all instances of left-right cooperation as supposedly being due to Dugin’s meddling.

Unipolar Liberal-Globalism vs. Multipolar Conservative-Sovereigntism

In reality, the global systemic transition has shattered the previous polarization between the left and right by giving birth to two different diametrically opposed concepts: unipolar liberal-globalism (ULG) and multipolar conservative-sovereigntism (MCS). This analysis here explains the differences between them more at length, but the present piece will now summarize them for the reader’s convenience due to its relevance in debunking the conspiracy theories pushed by Reuters and WaPo.

ULG believe in the “hegemonic stability theory” (unipolarity), are against any restrictions on socio-cultural issues like the aggressive imposition of LGBT+ propaganda onto children (liberalism), and want to force everyone to follow their models (globalism). By contrast, MCS believe in decentralizing International Relations (multipolarity), restricting some socio-cultural issues like the aforesaid example (conservatism), and respect every society’s right to choose their own models (sovereigntism).

The Real Reason For Growing Left-Right Cooperation In Germany

The genuine left and right, and not those ULG gatekeepers who masquerade as either (but mostly as leftists), generally embrace MCS. Even if they differ on economic and socio-cultural issues, they’re united in opposing unipolarity and globalism since those two concepts represent an existential threat to their respective ideological interests. Accordingly, they’re increasingly cooperating on shared MCS interests such as bringing an end to NATO’s proxy war on Russia through Ukraine as soon as possible.

This explains the latest trend in Germany that Reuters and WaPo are trying to discredit through their tacit weaponization of those three earlier described interconnected conspiracy theories. Both US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) outlets are ULG to the core, which is why they’re waging their information warfare campaign against Germans’ embrace of MCS, especially since its emerging manifestation there could have far-reaching strategic consequences if it fully matures.

The electoral rise of any MCS movement in that country could lead to them recalibrating its foreign policy in a much more strategically autonomous direction exactly of the sort that French President Macron regularly suggests and most recently talked about after his latest trip to China. The consequence of the EU’s de facto leader doing such a thing is that American hegemony over Europe would be immensely weakened if Germany finally began putting its own interests and the continent’s over the US’.

The Patriotic Motivations Driving The Latest Trend

By failing to do so over the past year, Chancellor Scholz and Foreign Minister Baerbock – both of whom are diehard ULG – inflicted crippling damage to their country’s economic model that was responsible for its astronomical rise in the first place. Germany no longer receives affordable energy from Russia, which in turn raises the costs of doing business in all respects, thus eroding its global competitiveness. Die Linke and the AfD are patriotic parties that keenly understand this, unlike the ruling ULG in berlin.

Elements within them are increasingly cooperating precisely because ending NATO’s proxy war on Russia through Ukraine holds the chance of reviving Germany’s prior energy cooperation with Russia and thus restoring its global economic competitiveness. Viewed from this perspective, their motivations are therefore purely patriotic and not due to any shadowy Kremlin plot or so-called “Duginist meddling”. The only people who push those conspiracy theories are ULG gatekeepers in the media and among the left.

Exposing The “Compatible Left”

Regarding the latter, the reader should be informed of the CIA’s decades-long attempt to manufacture a so-called “compatible left”, which is envisaged as doing the US’ bidding in a “plausibly deniable” way by serving as a “controlled opposition”. This mission has made enormous progress over the years and especially since 2016 after Trump’s election. “Sleeper cells” within the left awoke at that time and began actively allying their movements with the US Democrats, who are the standard-bearers of ULG.

This explains why the three interconnected conspiracy theories regarding “horseshoes”, the “red-brown alliance”, and “Duginism” all emerged from superficially leftist figures who are really bonafide ULG in disguise. They receive media approval and sometimes even tangible privileges like academic tenures and book deals from their ideological overlords for pushing Russophobia while simultaneously securing their status as faux leftist gatekeepers by manipulating the dogma of their movements’ members.

Debunking The “Compatible Left’s” McCarthyist Witch Hunt Narratives

To that second-mentioned end, they regularly carry out McCarthyist witch hunts against those genuine leftists who express any foreign policy views similar to those shared by someone who influential figures in their movement earlier smeared as “fascist”. Those gatekeepers “justify” these never-ending purges, which have the effect of pressuring people into self-censoring their views out of fear that they’ll become the next target of their toxic ad hominem attacks, on the basis of ensuring “ideological integrity”.

According to them, “no true leftist would ever have any idea in common with anyone who isn’t an official member of a (ULG gatekeeper-approved) leftist movement”, thus making those who do supposedly “fake leftists” at best or (“Duginist”) “fascist infiltrators” at worst. In reality, most traditional leftist movements (especially in the West) were hijacked by ULG “sleeper cells” after Trump’s election and turned into “compatible leftist” ones, thus dealing unprecedented damage to the genuinely leftist cause.

Germany Might Be Pioneering The Next Pan-Continental Political Trend

Elements within Die Linke realized this and are therefore doing their utmost to liberate the German left from US-controlled ULG for patriotic reasons related to ultimately restoring their country’s strategic autonomy after its current rulers crippled it by capitulating to America’s demands over the past year. For that to happen, however, they must pragmatically cooperate with likeminded MCS elements from movements like the AfD in order to eventually have a chance of changing Germany’s relevant policies.

This isn’t due to the “horseshoe theory”, which is discredited upon reconceptualizing the New Cold War’s ideological dichotomy as being between ULG and MCS instead of left and right like during the Old Cold War, nor is it attributable to the “red-brown alliance” and “Duginist” conspiracy theories either. It’s simple patriotic pragmatism that’s driving those two’s increasing cooperation on issues of shared interests, which is setting a powerful example that might soon be emulated all throughout Europe.

 

 

 

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Apr 212023
 
 April 21, 2023  Posted by at 6:57 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  3 Responses »


Keith Haring Untitled 1983

 

 

 

Andrew Korybko:

 

Debunking The Latest Fake News Narrative

CNN published an exclusive piece on Thursday alleging that “Evidence emerges of Russia’s Wagner arming militia leader battling Sudan’s army”. They claim that satellite imagery shows increased Russian military transport activity between Libya and Syria in the run-up to Sudan’s “deep state” war. According to CNN, this confirms rumors that General Haftar is supplying Rapid Support Forces’ (RSF) leader General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hamedti”) with surface-to-air missiles (SAM) on behalf of Wagner.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published their own exclusive piece the day prior on Wednesday alleging that “Libyan Militia and Egypt’s Military Back Opposite Sides in Sudan Conflict”, so these two stories complement one another. Both Hamedti and Wagner have denied these claims, however. The Sudanese Ambassador to Russia also confirmed that “Russia is a friendly country to us so we have been in direct contact with [the] Russian Foreign Ministry since the very beginning of those events last Saturday.”

That diplomat’s reaffirmation of Sudan’s close ties with Russia is especially important since he represents the government that’s internationally recognized as being led by Chief General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, who commands the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and is one of the two figures vying for power. At present, Khartoum therefore doesn’t extend credence to the emerging US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) narrative that Russia is arming the RSF via Haftar-Wagner, but that could soon change.

Preconditioning The Public For Another Proxy War

Unless the present three-day Eid ceasefire holds and leads to the start of peace talks that ultimately end this “deep state” war, which is unlikely since both sides made clear their intent to completely destroy the other, then this conflict is expected to resume in the near future. Should the SAF fail to defeat the RSF and possibly even be placed on the backfoot, then Burhan might gamble that it’s in his best interests to parrot the MSM’s anti-Russian accusations in an attempt to receive direct Western military support.

That scenario isn’t all that far-fetched either considering that the Associated Press and Politico both cited unnamed officials on Thursday to report that the US is assembling additional troops in nearby Djibouti to prepare for the possible evacuation of Americans from Sudan. This pretext could easily be exploited to arm the SAF and/or attack the RSF, especially if the Pentagon claims that the latter tried stopping its operation by building upon last week’s claim that its forces shot at an armored US diplomatic vehicle.

In the event that Burhan repeats the MSM’s emerging anti-Russian narrative and promises to rubbish Sudan’s naval base deal with Moscow upon defeating the RSF, then the Biden Administration can “justify” its military intervention on the basis of “defending Sudanese democracy from a Kremlin coup”. The public would then be told that the latest conflict was sparked by Russia’s support for the “insurgent” RSF, which the MSM would attribute to its interests in defending Wagner’s mining operations there.

American Meddling In Russian-Egyptian Relations

This would predictably precede an unprecedented but preplanned information warfare campaign painting Russia as a “destabilizing” force in Africa, which would be aimed at counteracting its hitherto highly successful efforts at presenting itself as a force of stability in support of legitimate governments. The purpose of this aforesaid operation would be to erode Russia’s newfound “Democratic Security” appeal across the continent with a view towards reversing the decline of Western influence there.

Furthermore, Burhan’s potentially opportunistic piggybacking on the earlier described emerging anti-Russian narrative could have serous implications for Moscow’s ties with Cairo due to the perception of them backing opposite sides in Sudan’s “deep state” war. Russian-Egyptian relations have recently been beset by scandal upon the latest Pentagon leaks alleging that Cairo abandoned its supposedly secret plan to supply rockets to Moscow under pressure from Washington and agreed to arm Kiev instead.

Considering this context, the scenario of Egyptian-backed Burhan blaming Russia for sparking the latest conflict could therefore lead to the rapid deterioration of Russian-Egyptian ties, especially if Cairo decides to indirectly retaliate against Moscow by curtailing its investment rights in Port Said. Those two signed an additional agreement on this industrial zone last month, which was first approved in 2018 and is supposed to help Russia expand its economic engagement with the broader region.

Punishing The Emirates For Its Close Relations With Russia

That goal could be jeopardized if Egypt decides to punish Russia through these means in response to Burhan opportunistically piggybacking on the MSM narrative in an attempt to obtain direct Western military support against the RSF. Furthermore, the UAE’s ties with Egypt and the US could also become much more complicated in that event too since Abu Dhabi is accused of backing reportedly RSF-allied Haftar, being favorable disposed to that armed Sudanese group, and secretly allying with Russia.

The last-mentioned accusation was brought to the public’s attentions as a result of the previously mentioned Pentagon leaks, which were denied by the UAE but coincided with the weakening of its ties with Washington that are partially over that Gulf country’s growing ones with Moscow. There are more factors at play than just the Russian-Emirati relationship, but the point is that the UAE’s problems with the US could be amplified by the MSM if Burhan accuses Russia of arming the RSF via Haftar-Wagner.

It also deserves mentioning that America’s other ulterior interest in its incipient propaganda campaign against Russia in Sudan is to complicate its geopolitical opponent’s logistical connections with the Central African Republic (CAR), which owes its continued existence as a state to Moscow’s military support. The Kremlin largely relies on transit across Sudan in order to supply its forces and its ally’s there, but this could be cut off if Burhan jumps on the anti-Russian bandwagon and revokes Moscow’s privileges.

The Chadian Connection

Lastly, another strategic factor behind this latest information warfare offensive against Russia is that it could ruin that country’s surprisingly solid relations with regional military heavyweight Chad. As explained in this recent analysis here, N’Djamena ended up expelling the German Ambassador earlier this month for meddling instead of the Russian one despite the US telling its counterparts in late February that Moscow is using Wagner in the CAR and Libya to arm anti-government rebels against it.

The Associated Press cited an African analyst from a Western risk assessment firm in their article on Thursday about 320 SAF troops fleeing to Chad to claim that this development could prompt N’Djamena into taking those forces’ side in Sudan’s “deep state” war. According to Benjamin Hunter, “N’Djamena is likely to oppose (Dagalo) due to fears that RSF dominance in Darfur could empower Chadian Arabs to unseat the (president’s) regime. Many within (Dagalo’s) Rizeigat tribe live across the border in Chad.”

If Chad becomes embroiled in Sudan’s “deep state” war on Burhan’s side, then it might be susceptible to Western suggestions that jumping on the anti-Russian bandwagon like he would have already done in this scenario could lead to them suspending their regime change campaign against N’Djamena. Should that happen, then this regional military heavyweight might also support any potentially forthcoming rebel/terrorist offensive that its historical French partner could soon plot against Russia in the CAR.

Concluding Thoughts

Putting everything together, the US plans to achieve the following strategic objectives by introducing the narrative that Russia is arming the RSF:

  1. Entice Burhan to extend credence to these claims in exchange for US military support;
  1. Demand that he also rescinds Russia’s naval base rights and cuts off its overflight access to the CAR;
  1. Consider direct support to the SAF on the pretext of commencing an “evacuation operation” in Sudan;
  1. Discredit Russia and the UAE’s African engagement policies by framing both as “destabilizing forces”;
  1. Attempt to provoke a crisis in Russia’s relations with Sudan’s Chadian and Egyptian neighbors;
  1. Exploit the above scenario to assemble a regional coalition for pushing back against Russia in Africa;
  1. Encourage Chad to support a French-backed rebel/terrorist offensive in the Russian-allied CAR;
  1. Plot a copycat proxy war in Russian-allied Mali in order to crush the Kremlin’s influence in the Sahel;
  1. Perfect this new Hybrid War method prior to employing it all across the continent;
  1. And thus turn Africa into the top proxy war battleground of the New Cold War.

The US therefore has many reasons to push this fake news campaign, though it’s unclear whether it’ll ultimately achieve any of its envisaged objectives or not.

 

 

 

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Apr 042023
 
 April 4, 2023  Posted by at 10:54 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  8 Responses »


Georgia O’Keeffe Red poppy No. VI 1928

 

Andrew Korybko:

 

The Old Cold War Paradigm Is Irrelevant In The New Cold War”, which Indian Professor of International Relations Rajesh Rajagopalan just discovered, but it’s important for everyone else to be aware of this as well. Unlike during the Old Cold War where the US and USSR competed to promote their capitalist and communist worldviews correspondingly, the New Cold War is being fought over whether the global systemic transition continues evolving towards multipolarity or retains most of unipolarity’s trappings.

Multipolar conservative-sovereigntists (MCS) respect every country’s sovereign right to develop according to whichever models they’d like while unipolar liberal-globalists (ULG) want to force everyone to apply Western models. For the most part, the Sino-Russo Entente and the Global South embrace MCS while the US-led West’s Golden Billion and its vassals promote ULG. There are a few notable exceptions, but this insight represents the simplified geopolitical-ideational fault lines of the New Cold War.

Intrepid readers can learn more about the dynamics of this competition in the following analyses:

* 15 May 2022: “What’s Dishonestly Smeared As ‘Russian Propaganda’ Is Just The Multipolar Worldview

* 5 August 2022: “The Russian Foreign Ministry Comprehensively Explained The Global Systemic Transition

* 29 October 2022: “The Importance Of Properly Framing The New Cold War

* 9 March 2023: “Towards Tri-Multipolarity: The Golden Billion, The Sino-Russo Entente, & The Global South

* 21 March 2023: “China’s Global Civilization Initiative Is Its Response To The West’s Liberal-Globalism

The abovementioned analyses add context to Russia’s new foreign policy concept that can be read here.

The present piece focuses on the 58th paragraph and its four subclauses concerning Russia’s relations with Latin America, which are of relevance to the Western Hemispheric dimension of its grand strategy as articulated in the preceding hyperlinked document from 31 March. For everyone’s convenience, this part of that detailed policy paper will now be shared in full below prior to analyzing its importance in the larger context:

“58. Given the progressive strengthening of the sovereignty and multifaceted potential of Latin American and Caribbean states, the Russian Federation intends to develop relations with them on a pragmatic, de ideologized and mutually beneficial basis, giving priority attention to:

1) supporting interested Latin American states under pressure from the United States and its allies in securing sovereignty and independence, including through the promotion and expansion of security, military and military-technical cooperation;

2) strengthening friendship, mutual understanding and deepening multifaceted mutually beneficial partnership with the Federative Republic of Brazil, the Republic of Cuba, the Republic of Nicaragua, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, developing relations with other Latin American states, taking into account the degree of independence and constructiveness of their policy towards the Russian Federation;

3) increasing mutual trade and investment with Latin American and Caribbean States, including through cooperation with the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the Common Market of the South. The Central American Integration System, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of the Americas, the Pacific Alliance, and the Caribbean Community;

4) expanding cultural, scientific, educational, sports, tourism and other humanitarian ties with the states of the region.”
 
Immediate attention should be drawn to the open sentence about the “pragmatic, de ideologized and mutually beneficial basis” of Russia’s envisaged relations with Latin America. This approach perfectly aligns with the precepts of MCS, particularly Moscow’s respect for its partners’ right to develop according to whichever models they’d like. In practice, this means that Russia’s comparatively more right-wing socio-cultural policies at home aren’t an impediment to expanding ties with left-wing states.

That explains why it’s extremely close with Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, all three of which have either abstained from or voted against anti-Russian Resolutions at the UNGA since the start of Moscow’s special operation. It also signals Russia’s intent to continue exploring the expansion of mutually beneficial economically driven relations with Brazil in spite of their increasingly diverging worldviews under Lula’s third term as explained in detail citing official sources in these analyses here and here.

Unlike the US’ ULG, Russia’s MCS policymakers don’t care how their country’s partners organize their economic, political, and/or socio-cultural systems, hence why they’re extending an offer of support to strengthen their sovereignty via military-technical and other means despite their different models. All that’s important for the Kremlin is that its partners remain reliable and continue respecting Russia’s legitimate interests without criticizing them or meddling in its related affairs.

Should they continue to do so and this pragmatic worldview expands further throughout the region, then the geopolitical-ideational basis will be more solidly established for comprehensively advancing Russia’s relations with those regional integration platforms mentioned in the third clause above. The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) is the most promising of them all, however, and Venezuelan President Maduro’s expectations of its future global role complement Russian interests.

The final clause regarding people-to-people ties is important for sustaining both sides’ mutually beneficial cooperation in the New Era, the present decade of which can also be described as the Age of Complexity. Ideologically driven disinformation agents are already at work trying to brainwash Latin Americans into thinking that Russia’s comparatively more right-wing socio-cultural policies at home preclude the possibility of any left-wing governments ever pragmatically cooperating with it.

According to this information warfare narrative, it would allegedly be a “betrayal” of their movements’ beliefs to work together with any country that holds polar opposite ones in some respects, the notion of which is weaponized by the US’ ruling liberalglobalists to divide-and-rule Russia and Latin America. The so-called “New Left” that’s rising in the region differs from the “Old Left” in the sense that the former are largely insincere in their working-class rhetoric and care more about fighting “culture wars”.

Their obsession with so-called “critical race theory” and aggressive propagation of non-traditional sexual relations onto all members of society (including children) take precedence over tangibly improving the living conditions of the population whose economic interests they purport to represent. These causes are the same as those that are being imposed by the US’ Democrats onto their own people and aggressively propagated across the world, hence these movements’ informal alliance with one another.

Upon falling under the influence of the US’ liberal-globalists, the Latin American “New Left” (which the Workers’ Party’s elite during Lula’s third term can also be characterized as per the prior analyses earlier shared in this piece) gradually began to align with their ally’s foreign policy. This explains why the Brazilian leader became the first BRICS one to personally condemn Russia in his joint statement with Biden from February and decided to continue Bolsonaro’s policy of voting against it at the UNGA.

At the same time, however, the “Old Left” that’s represented by Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and also Bolivia (which for whatever reason wasn’t mentioned by name in Russia’s new foreign policy concept despite being a reliable partner) continues setting a positive geopolitical-ideational example. They’re more focused on tangibly improving their people’s living conditions than on fighting “culture wars”, hence why they remain resistant to the US Democrats’ influence, unlike the Workers’ Party’s elite.

Accordingly, they haven’t voted against Russia at the UNGA either, once again unlike Lula’s Brazil. The emerging challenge across Latin America will therefore be for the “Old Left” to positively influence the “New Left” at least in the geopolitical sense of appreciating the mutually beneficial importance of pragmatically expanding ties with Russia despite pressure from their newfound US ideological ally to distance themselves from it and vote against Moscow at the UNGA.

It’s with this imperative in mind that Russia’s official de-ideologization of its relations with Latin America deserves maximum attention. Those “New Left” movements that continue falling under the US Democrats’ pernicious geopolitical influence due to their overlapping ideational interests will ultimately end up doing some of that declining unipolar hegemon’s bidding in the New Cold War. The failure to stop and reverse this Hybrid War trend could ultimately doom all of Latin America to US vassalhood.

 

 

 

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