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Debt Rattle September 22 2024

Sep 222024
 
 September 22, 2024  Posted by at 9:05 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  62 Responses »


René Magritte Golconda 1953

 

• An American Coup? (Neuburger)
• 72 Minutes (Scott Ritter)
• ‘It’s Over For Russia’ – Boris Johnson (RT)
• Has The EU Suddenly Realized How Much It Has Screwed Itself Over? (Marsden)
• EU Leadership Urges Europe To Be Ready To Fight Russia In 6-8 Years (ZH)
• The DEI Trojan Horse Has Undermined US Military (Sp.)
• TikTok Wipes Out Sputnik Accounts (Sp.)
• No One Is Safe: The Global Threat of Israel’s Weaponized Pagers (Sweidan)
• When Vladimir Putin Was Pootie-Poot (Adam Dick)
• All of Europe Does Business With Russia – Hungary (RT)
• Indian State Oil Refiners Seeking Long-term Deals With Russia – Media (RT)
• Harris ‘Too Busy’ To Talk To Media – Adviser (RT)
• Secret Service Allowed ‘Multiple Failures’ Before Trump Shooting – Report (RT)
• America’s Healthcare Dead Last in Rich Nation Rankings (Sp.)
• Words You Can’t Ignore (Max Jones)

 

 

 

 

Tucker Carmela excellent

 

 

RFK sued Trump

 

 

Ireland

 

 

Thiel

 

 

Dimon
https://twitter.com/i/status/1837245042056105994

 

 

Mars
https://twitter.com/i/status/1837626546074325240

 

 

India
https://twitter.com/i/status/1837643524600148279

 

 

Maher

 

 

 

 

Easily the prime article/video this weekend. Because it puts everything on its head.

Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell “and critic of America’s wars”, states that the Pentagon has taken over US foreign policy. And that is as stark as it sounds. Wilkerson says that Biden, Harris, Blinken and Jake Sullivan have all been sidelined because the Pentagon doesn’t want to go to war, not in Ukraine and not in Gaza. “No dice”. And they can’t do a thing without the Pentagon.

Judge Nap: “COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Can Ukraine Make It to Nov 5th?”

We have some transcript below, but do watch the whole interview.

• An American Coup? (Neuburger)

In a 30-minute interview with Judge Napolitano on September 18, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell and critic of America’s wars, described a recent event in which Pentagon chief Gen. Lloyd Austin told President Biden that, in Wilkerson’s words, “the Pentagon has taken over, essentially, diplomacy as well as any action, militarily speaking, with regard to both theaters of war,” meaning Ukraine and Israel. Wilkerson added, “And so they’re now in charge.” Austin, according to this telling, listened “to the people in the bowels of the Pentagon who know the truth” and forced the President to back down. Biden was furious, we’re told, but “took that advice.” Except, as Wilkerson tells it, it wasn’t advice, but instruction. “No dice,” as Wilkerson characterized the message, sounds pretty final. This is good news and bad news. The good, U.S. policy is now: To Netanyahu, if you invade Lebanon or attack Iran, you’re on your own. To Zelenskyy, no to long range missiles reaching deep into Russia.

So we and the world are safer, at least for a while. The bad: Is this a coup? Has the military stood up to the President, forced him to change policy? If the answers are yes, we’re on our way once more to revising the Constitution-as-practiced. Both political parties have already confirmed that the Fourth Amendment can be ignored. That’s now the “new normal.” So what’s this encroachment of the Pentagon into foreign policy, if not another “new normal”? Has MacArthur finally won?

Whatever the truth, you won’t see this reported in what people call the “news,” but I doubt Wilkerson’s sources are wrong. At any rate, we’ll know soon enough by the way Zelenskyy and Netanyahu act. Welcome to the future of U.S. foreign policy.

Wilkerson: I think what we’re seeing here is another attempt, because a 100-plane strike didn’t do it, by Netanyahu to provoke Hezbollah to some sort of action that he can then declare is warlike to the extent that he can do what he wants to do with them — even though I’m told with great confidence in the sources that the latest two visits by the Central Command Unified Commander were to tell him [Netanyahu] that we would not be with him in the event of his going to war with Hezbollah that he provoked. Nor will we be with him going to war with Iran that he provoked. And we made it quite clear that we would know if he provoked it.

Napolitano: You’re speaking of General Kurilla [CENTCOM commander since April 2022].

Wilkerson: Yes. Yes.

Napolitano: So Scott Ritter agrees with you, Doug Macgregor says he can’t imagine Austin and Blinkin letting General Kuralla do that. It’s very very interesting. … Is this speculation on your part or is it based on sources?

Wilkerson: It’s based on some pretty reliable sources. And here’s the bigger picture and I hope the others told you this too. Biden’s fury — and you could see it — he was seething when he met with the British Prime Minister.

Napolitano: Yes, yes, we have that clip. He was out of control with anger.

Wilkerson: And what he [had] just been told, apparently, was by the Pentagon, “No dice, Mr President. No dice on Ukraine and no dice on Gaza. We’re in charge now.”

Napolitano: No dice. You’re talking about no dice on the long range missiles reaching deep into Russia, even though Tony Blinkin had intimated all week in Kyiv with his British counterpart that this was happening. And Sir Keir Stormer, the British Prime Minister, had every reason to believe as he’s flying across the Atlantic that Joe Biden’s answer would be yes.

Wilkerson: He was embarrassed. He was embarrassed by the fact — he was pulling out his maps with target data and Biden told him, “Don’t even pull them out. We’re not going to talk about that.” I’ve been told, again by fairly reliable sources, that Blinkin and Sullivan — Blinkin primarily, but Sullivan too — have been sidetracked, and what’s happened is the Pentagon has taken over, essentially, diplomacy as well as any action, militarily speaking, with regard to both theaters of war. And so they’re now in charge. I have to change my evaluation of Secretary Austin if that’s the case, because it means he listened finally to the people in the bowels of the Pentagon who know the truth, and he’s reacting to that, and he’s told the President Biden that, and to Biden’s credit, even though he was furious, he finally took that advice.

Napolitano: Colonel, you once ran the State Department [as Secretary Colin Powell’s chief of staff under George Bush]. How does the Defense Department engage in diplomacy?

Wilkerson: They engage in diplomacy every day. Every day. There are four-stars in the various syncdoms, the regions that they control, the AORs [Areas of Responsibility] [who] are the true U.S. diplomats. And some of them are very good at it. I saw some of them. I worked with some of them who are very good at it, better than any Secretary of State. But it shouldn’t be that way. That’s a parenthetical remark. We shouldn’t have the military leading diplomacy. But we often do. And the Japanese prime minister once told me why to my face. He said, “Larry, when your East Asia and Pacific Assistant Secretary comes out here, he’s not got anything but his briefcase. When the man from Honolulu comes out here, from Camp Smith in Hawaii, he’s towing air wings, submarines, battle groups, Marine amphibious groups, Army divisions. I listened to him. This is the Prime Minister of Japan.

Napolitano: Who told General Kurilla to tell Prime Minister Netanyahu, “If you invade Lebanon, you’re on your own?”

Wilkerson: It was, I think, Austin. But that’s the chain of command. Austin conveyed that message to him [Kurilla]. But I think it was Austin that convinced Biden to give him that command so he could transmit it to Kurilla.

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“..everything you thought you lived your life for would be dead. And if you survived? To quote Nikita Khrushchev, “The survivors would envy the dead.”

• 72 Minutes (Scott Ritter)

Most Americans approached last weekend thinking about how they would spend the much-anticipated end of the work week with their friends and family. Few realize how close they came to actualizing the scenario so horrifyingly spelled out in Annie Jacobsen’s alarming must-read book, Nuclear War: A Scenario. 72 minutes. That is all it takes to end the world as we know it. That is less time than most movies playing at the local cinema. Most people could not drive to the local home improvement store to buy the materials needed to do the little repairs around the home that usually wait for the weekend. Walk the dogs? Play with the kids? Forget about it. 72 minutes. And everything you thought you lived your life for would be dead. And if you survived? To quote Nikita Khrushchev, “The survivors would envy the dead.”

Ukraine, together with many of its NATO allies, has been asking for permission from the United States, the United Kingdom, and France to be able to employ precision-guided long-range weapons systems provided by these countries against targets deep inside Russia. On Sept. 6, at a meeting of the Ramstein Contact Group, a forum where U.S.-NATO military support to Ukraine is coordinated, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky personally appealed to the group for more weapons support from its Western allies and called on allies to allow Ukraine to use the weapons they provided to strike deeper inside Russia. “We need to have this long-range capability,” Zelensky said, addressing the attendees, who included U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, “not only on the divided territory of Ukraine but also on Russian territory so that Russia is motivated to seek peace. We need to make Russian cities, and even Russian soldiers think about what they need: peace or Putin.”

Secretary Austin, in comments made afterwards, said he didn’t think the use of long-range missiles to strike inside Russia would help end the war, adding that he expected the conflict would be resolved through negotiations. Moreover, Austin noted, Ukraine had its own weapons capable of attacking targets well beyond the range of the British Storm Shadow cruise missile. Despite Austin’s pushback, President Joe Biden appeared to be on track to give Zelensky the green light he was looking for regarding the use of British-provided Storm Shadow cruise missiles and U.S.-provided long-range ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) missiles for strikes on Russian soil. On Sept. 11, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, accompanied by British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, visited Ukraine, where they held meetings with Zelensky and his newly appointed foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha.

Blinken and Lammy, however, failed to make the announcement the Ukrainians were waiting with bated breath to hear. Instead, Blinken and Lammy reiterated the full support of their respective nations to Ukraine’s victory, adding that they would adapt their support to meet Ukrainian needs. “The bottom line is this: We want Ukraine to win,” Blinken said after his meeting with Zelensky. The stage was now set for Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, to fly to Washington, D.C., last Friday, where he would meet with Biden and jointly agree to give Ukraine permission to use Storm Shadow and ATACMS against targets inside Russia. Russia has long made it clear that it would view any nation which authorized the use of its weapons to strike Russia as a direct party to the conflict. In comments to the media in Russia last Thursday — one day before the Biden-Starmer meeting at the White House — Russian President Vladimir Putin made it clear that any lifting of the restrictions on Ukrainian use of U.S.- and U.K.-provided long-range weapons would change “the very essence of the conflict.” He said:

“This will mean that NATO countries, the United States, European countries are fighting Russia. And if this is the case, then…we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, speaking after Putin’s announcement, noted that the Russian president’s words were “extremely clear” and that they had reached their intended audience — U.S. President Biden. Biden didn’t seem happy about the message. In responding to a question from reporters prior to his meeting with Prime Minister Starmer at the White House about what he thought about Putin’s warning, Biden snapped angrily, “I don’t think much about Vladimir Putin.” The evidence suggests otherwise.

Read more …

Update from another planet.

• ‘It’s Over For Russia’ – Boris Johnson (RT)

Russia must understand that “it’s over,” and that Ukraine will not concede any territory for peace, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has argued. For this goal to be achieved, however, Kiev will need long-range weapons, NATO membership, and half a trillion dollars, Johnson added. In an op-ed published in The Spectator on Saturday, Johnson argued that Ukrainian forces still have the “ability to win,” if only the West would cave to every single one of Kiev’s demands. These include, he wrote, permission to strike deep inside Russian territory with Storm Shadow and ATACMS missiles, and immediate invitation to NATO with Article 5 security guarantees, and “half a trillion dollars… or even a trillion.” Disregarding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent warning that enabling long-range strikes would place NATO in a state of war with Russia as “bluster and saber-rattling,” Johnson argued that these steps are necessary to “send the crucial message to the Kremlin.”

“The message is: that’s it. It’s over. You don’t have an empire any more. You don’t have a ‘near abroad’ or a ‘sphere of influence’. You don’t have the right to tell the Ukrainians what to do, any more than we British have the right to tell our former colonies what to do,” he asserted. “It is time for Putin to understand that Russia can have a happy and glorious future, but that like Rome and like Britain, the Russians have decisively joined the ranks of the post-imperial powers, and a good thing, too,” he continued. The West, Johnson argued, “must abandon any idea that the Ukrainians will do a deal” or “trade land for peace.” “We in the West would be mad to try to impose that outcome,” he added. Ironically, Russia and Ukraine reportedly agreed to a peace deal during talks in Istanbul in 2022. The agreement would have involved Ukraine declaring military neutrality, limiting its armed forces, and vowing not to discriminate against ethnic Russians. In return, Moscow would have joined other leading powers in offering Ukraine security guarantees.

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky withdrew from the talks at the last moment. According to Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia, former US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, and several Ukrainian media reports, Johnson was instrumental in convincing Zelensky to abandon negotiations. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and the deputy leader of Türkiye’s ruling party, Numan Kurtulmus, have also claimed that several Western states conspired to scupper the deal. Five months after the Istanbul talks, Russia assumed control of four former regions of Ukraine. According to the most recent figures from the Russian Defense Ministry, the Ukrainian military has lost nearly half a million men since February 2022, and the Pentagon concluded last year that Ukraine stands little chance of regaining its former territories.

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“..unscrewing everything they screwed up over the past two and a half years through self-inflicted idiocy in the interests of impressing their girlfriend Vladimir Zelensky (aka president of Ukraine).”

• Has The EU Suddenly Realized How Much It Has Screwed Itself Over? (Marsden)

The EU is having a full-blown existential crisis. Someone has really screwed up its economy, and the culprit is conspicuously absent from a new report outlining the carnage. Are there no mirrors in Brussels? Former European Central Bank president and Italian prime minister, Mario Draghi, has published a new “economic competitiveness” report after a year of work at the request of unelected ‘Queen’ Ursula von der Leyen’s ‘Royal’ European Commission. And it’s a real page-turner, one of the great mysteries of our times. One is left to breathlessly leaf through the 400-page document looking for a culprit responsible for the massive amount of economic carnage detailed by Draghi. “For the first time since the Cold War we must genuinely fear for our self-preservation,” he told reporters in Brussels. How about starting off by not actively self-sabotaging?

Draghi said that the bloc desperately needs to keep up with China and the US, but has been failing. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the EU readily jumped in to ride shotgun alongside Uncle Sam along regime change highway, but now finds itself kicking dirt on the roadside and wanting to make its own way. “Now conditions have changed,” Draghi said. “World trade is slowing. China is actually slowing very much, but it’s become much less open to us, and actually it’s competing with us in global markets on all accounts. We’ve lost our main supplier of cheap energy, Russia. And now we have to start for our defense again for the first time since the Second World War.” Apparently, the jokers ruling Europe from the big top tent in Brussels are shocked to discover that they’ve been victimized. Who could possibly have done such a thing?

Gotta love the use of the passive there. “Lost” their cheap energy from Russia. Like it just fell out of their pocket like a set of house keys on the way back from the store. Listening to Draghi, you’d also think that the EU hasn’t actually adopted “de-coupling” from China as a strategy, egged on by Washington, which wanted Europe all to itself, before EU officials rebranded it a “de-risking” when they realized how stupid a move it would be to fully alienate China as the bloc’s top trading partner and customer. And now, oh gee, the EU has to start thinking about its own defense again, Draghi said, rather than just using it to shake free some natural resources from all the places with fortuitously-located terrorist problems. The Ukraine conflict has been an equally convenient excuse to make more weapons at taxpayer expense for the EU’s own defense after emptying out the old junk from its closets.

Good thing, too, because making more weapons is about the only real easy answer for improving the economy right now, judging by the dire state of things outlined in this new report. Still, the EU can’t even do the military-industrial racket right. Draghi has pointed out that EU members are basically idiots for buying most of their weapons abroad, with nearly two-thirds coming from the US. Big mystery as to why Washington wants to keep the party going in Ukraine when it’s making bank by drumming up the need to ramp up weapons purchases for EU members under the guise that their former top economic lifeline and energy supplier (Russia) was suddenly a big threat to them. The bonus: making Europe more dependent on the US for pricier gas, too.

The whole report is just loaded with gems, like this one: “If Europe cannot become more productive, we will be forced to choose. We will not be able to become, at once, a leader in new technologies, a beacon of climate responsibility and an independent player on the world stage. We will not be able to finance our social model. We will have to scale back some, if not all, of our ambitions. This is an existential challenge…” Draghi’s going on about all these grand ambitions like leading new tech and being a climate and social icon, while European elites have been yelling at the plebs to turn down the heating and air conditioning to stick it to Putin and cheering mild winters like we’re living in the dark ages. Draghi also said that the EU needs another €800 billion ($890 billion), which is about 4.5% of the entire bloc’s GDP, just to be able to stay globally competitive. And that competitiveness can only be achieved by thoroughly unscrewing everything they screwed up over the past two and a half years through self-inflicted idiocy in the interests of impressing their girlfriend Vladimir Zelensky (aka president of Ukraine).

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They made some Baltic Lunatic the EU’s new defense commissioner.

• EU Leadership Urges Europe To Be Ready To Fight Russia In 6-8 Years (ZH)

NATO’s tiny Baltic states have continued to be among the most hawkish within the alliance when it comes to ‘confronting Russia’ and making war plans. One Lithuanian official is making headlines for saying that eventual NATO war with Russia is inevitable, and that Europe must begin preparing now. Andrius Kubilius, a former Lithuanian prime minister and the EU’s new defense commissioner, has told Reuters that Europe must prepare to go to war with Russia withing the next six to eight years. “Defense ministers and NATO generals agree that Vladimir Putin could be ready for confrontation with NATO and the EU in 6-8 years,” Kubilius said in his capacity as the European Union’s first-ever Defense Commissioner. “If we take these assessments seriously, then that is the time for us to properly prepare, and it is a short one. This means we have to take quick decisions, and ambitious decisions,” he added.

Kubilius’ appointment is seen as an indicator that the EU is getting more serious about war-spending as a bloc, though EU leadership has no decision-making capacity when it comes to NATO. Apparently he’s unconcerned with the dangers of nuclear-armed confrontation. Russia has said it would deploy nuclear weapons if its territory and population faces existential threat of annihilation. Kubilius described further in his statement, “The European Union won’t have defense plans or military leadership, like NATO does — but the European Union has instruments to get larger financing, which NATO doesn’t.” He has called for a total investment of a gargantuan sum: 500 billion euros in the coming years in order to ramp-up the readiness of European militaries.

European Parliament has recently passed a largely symbolic resolution approving the Zelensky government’s use of long-range weapons to attack inside Russia. The head of Russia’s State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, has responded by saying “What the European Parliament is calling for leads to a world war using nuclear weapons.” Thinks looking bleak: A newly-created EU leadership position and the very first directive issued relates to future war with Russia… Clearly peace is on the minds of few. The only way to avoid escalation leading to nuclear-armed showdown in the heart of Europe is the negotiating table, but both Moscow and Kiev have of late issued statements denying that they are even close to sitting down together to seek settlement or ceasefire.

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Better not get into a fight. Unwinnable.

• The DEI Trojan Horse Has Undermined US Military (Sp.)

The US military is facing what has been characterized as its worst recruitment, morale, and public trust crisis in modern history. Here’s what the Biden administration’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has to do with it. An analysis of a trove of internal documents by The Daily Caller has revealed that the US Air Force has been excluding white male applicants from its popular Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program in favor of minorities. Highlighting the Biden administration’s obsession with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), the prejudice reflects a broader push by Washington’s liberal establishment to turn Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote about not judging people “by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” on its head. Team Biden went to work on DEI and “equity” (not to be confused with “equality”) guidelines for the military immediately after stepping into office, firing off three key executive orders in January 2021, including:

EO 13985: “Advancing Racial Equality and Support for Undeserving Communities Through the Federal Government” (including the military). EO 13988: “Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender-Identity or Sexual Orientation.” EO 14004: “Enabling All Qualified Americans to Serve Their Country in Uniform” – aimed at easing transgender individuals’ ability to serve. Together with the June 2021 EO 14035 on “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce,” the trio of directives kicked off a fundamental transformation of the military, sparking a series of bizarre scandals and leading to an unprecedented drop in readiness and morale:

In 2021, the Air Force and Navy faced widespread derision after rolling out maternity flight suits, with Tucker Carlson calling the move a “mockery of the US military,” and highlighting the absurdity of having “pregnant women…fight[ing] our wars.” In June 2023, facing an outcry from conservative lawmakers, the military banned drag shows on base, deeming them “inconsistent with regulations regarding the use of resources,” with DoD spokespeople scrambling to assure that “the Department does not fund drag shows or drag activities.” In October 2023, the advocacy group which won a historic Supreme Court case against race-conscious admissions to US universities brought cases against West Point and the US Naval Academy on grounds of DEI-based bias. The Supreme Court binned the West Point case in February 2024, with the Naval Academy’s affirmative action trial kicking off this past week.

The staggering costs of Pentagon DEI initiatives has also garnered considerable attention and criticism, with spending jumping from $68 million in 2022, to $86.5 million in 2023, and $114.7 million in 2024. The funds provide for things like mandatory diversity training and the hiring of onsite “diversity officers” to ensure compliance with DEI regulations. The Biden Pentagon has been hailed as the most diverse in history, with racial and sexual minorities receiving a host of top jobs, from a proud lesbian tapped to serve as Air Force under secretary, to a transgender assistant secretary of defense, to Lloyd Austin – the Pentagon’s first black chief. But these DEI “milestones” have not exactly helped the military achieve its goals over the past four tumultuous years, with the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and the Navy’s impotence against the Houthis from January 2024 on showing that more diversity does not mean more won battles.

In fact, the DEI seems to have made things worse, with the military facing an unprecedented “crisis of recruitment, trust, and spending,” as a Newsweek piece recently put it, forcing some observers and lawmakers on Capitol Hill to consider returning the draft, or offering immigrants citizenship in exchange for service amid recruitment numbers dropping between 20-40%, public trust in the military plummeting from 73% in 2019 to 60% today, and morale and readiness described as being among the lowest since World War II. DEI, combined with other Biden policies aimed at the military, including mandatory COVID shots, have been blamed for the crisis.

Read more …

Only one opinion allowed.

• TikTok Wipes Out Sputnik Accounts (Sp.)

The US Department of the Treasury issued a statement on September 4 announcing sanctions against Sputnik’s parent media group Rossiya Segodnya, RIA Novosti, RT, Sputnik, and Ruptly. The sanctions also targeted Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of Rossiya Segodnya, and a number of other senior executives. On the morning of September 21, the video-sharing platform TikTok removed the Sputnik International account of the Sputnik news network, just days after the US announced new sanctions targeting Russian media. TikTok has not yet commented on the development.

TikTok, which is part of the Chinese company ByteDance, has been under intense pressure from US authorities in recent months. In April, US President Joe Biden signed into law a bill passed by Congress that would ban TikTok in the United States if it refuses to divest from its Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance. TikTok and ByteDance have since challenged the measure in court. Earlier this month, the US State Department tightened the operating conditions of Rossiya Segodnya and its subsidiaries, designating them as “foreign missions.”

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“Israel’s actions signal a new level of risk to global trade, where civilian products may be tampered with for political or military advantage. What was once a matter of state-to-state conflict is now a threat to individual households.”

• No One Is Safe: The Global Threat of Israel’s Weaponized Pagers (Sweidan)

Israel’s coordinated attacks on Lebanon, marked by the near-simultaneous explosion of thousands of pager and walkie-talkie devices over two days, resulted in the deaths of at least 37 people, including children, and left thousands severely wounded. This brutal terrorist attack should serve as a dire warning to the world: a stark reminder that the occupation state’s criminal actions know no limits, indiscriminately targeting those who challenge its interests, or those of its western allies. In the wake of this aggression, who can guarantee that Israeli exports to other countries won’t be weaponized in future conflicts? The “pager attack” serves as yet more evidence that Israel poses a global threat, ushering in a dangerous, dystopian new era in which civilians are no longer safe, even in their own homes. When analyzing the pager detonations from a legal standpoint, it becomes clear that Israel’s killing spree in Lebanon this week lies somewhere between a war crime and an act of terrorism.

The legal classification depends on the current state of affairs between Lebanon and Israel. If Lebanon is considered to be at war with Israel, the targeting of civilians — non-combatants — through the bombing of pagers blatantly violates international laws of warfare, including the Geneva Conventions. Article 51 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (1949) strictly prohibits indiscriminate attacks on civilians, and Article 85 lists attacks on civilians as grave breaches that amount to war crimes. In this case, we must identify who qualifies as a “combatant” under international humanitarian law. A combatant is defined as someone under military command, wearing a distinguishable uniform and openly carrying weapons. Without these markers, those targeted in the pager attack are considered civilians under international law. Additionally, the attack violates the principles of distinction and proportionality, fundamental tenets of international humanitarian law.

The principle of distinction mandates that combatants must be differentiated from civilians — a rule clearly ignored in Israel’s attacks, evidenced by the deaths of children. The principle of proportionality prohibits attacks where the harm to civilians is excessive compared to the military advantage gained. In this instance, the minimal military impact pales in comparison to the devastating toll on civilians, including the psychological and moral damage inflicted. Therefore, Israel’s adoption of a strategy of indiscriminate violence during its recent aggression against Lebanon is a war crime. The Guardian notes that half a century after the Second World War, a global treaty — to which Israel is a signatory — came into force, which “prohibited in all circumstances to use booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects that are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material.”

However, if we consider that Lebanon is not in a formal state of war with Israel, the aggression falls under a different legal classification: terrorism. According to the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings (1997), Israel’s actions can be categorized as a “terrorist bombing.” The use of civilian devices, like pagers, in non-military zones with the intent to spread fear aligns with the convention’s definition of terrorism, which criminalizes the unlawful use of explosives to target civilians or infrastructure with the intent to intimidate populations or coerce governments.

The UN General Assembly Declaration on Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism (1994) defines terrorism as any act aimed at causing death or serious bodily harm to civilians for the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or international organization to act. Accordingly, the pager bombings were intended to intimidate the Lebanese and the resistance or force them to make concessions, which is consistent with the definition of terrorism under customary international law. Yesterday, Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Petra De Sutter condemned the “massive terrorist attack” in Lebanon and Syria, while Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote in a statement that the attack “violates international human rights law, and, to the extent applicable, international humanitarian law.”

Israel’s pager bombing has also sparked global concerns about the security of international supply chains. If Israel has indeed begun weaponizing civilian devices through third parties in other countries, this raises the terrifying prospect that supply chains once thought to be safe could be compromised at any time. In an interview with India Today TV, a technologist expressed concern that Israel’s actions could lead to similar risks in other countries, creating the possibility of booby-trapped electronics infiltrating homes worldwide. The implications are profound: Israel’s actions signal a new level of risk to global trade, where civilian products may be tampered with for political or military advantage. What was once a matter of state-to-state conflict is now a threat to individual households.

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In 1990, the CIA were sure Putin was -literally- their man.

• When Vladimir Putin Was Pootie-Poot (Adam Dick)

United Sates President Joe Biden has spent most of his presidency refusing to talk with Russia President Vladimir Putin. This is despite — or maybe because of — the fact that such discourse could have led to an agreement ending the US government’s proxy war against Russia. Instead of talking out a resolution to the fighting, Biden has kept pumping dollars, weapons, and intelligence to the Ukraine government, resulting in a rising death toll and expanding war. Also advanced has been the risk of drawing the US and Russia directly into a war against each other that could go nuclear. Still, Biden will not pick up the phone or fly on a plane to talk things over with the president of Russia. “I have no good reason to talk to Putin right now,” said Biden on July 11, 2024 in response to a reporter’s question at one of Biden’s rare press conferences.

We know Biden loves his vacation time, but, really, isn’t ending the Ukraine War and preventing its further escalation a good enough reason to start chatting with Putin? How about putting in a little effort to give peace a chance? Long, long ago, during the presidency of George W. Bush, a US president not only regularly talked with Putin, including in in-person meetings, he even had an affectionate nickname for the Russia president. For Bush, Putin was Pootie-Poot. How things have changed. Not every American president before Biden had a cute nickname for counterparts among the long line of Russia leaders, and Soviet leaders during the decades when Russia was subsumed in the Soviet Union.

Yet, they all were willing to talk. This includes Ronald Reagan who called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and pushed for increased US military spending to counter what he presented as a Soviet threat. Reagan met with and kept in regular contact with Soviet leader Michail Gorbachev, succeeding in putting in place arms control deals between the nations. Other US presidents, while directly and by proxy militarily countering the “red spread” and “Soviet expansion,” kept in communication with Soviet leaders. They wanted to be dedicated cold warriors while minimizing the risk of outright war between the US and Soviet Union. Biden should give Putin a call. And when Biden makes that call, why not give Putin a nice nickname too? Doing this may run counter to Biden’s nature, but it could be the first step down the path to peace. Unfortunately, there is little indication that seeking peace is even a small component of the Biden administration’s agenda.

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“The difference between us and the others in general is that we speak honestly and openly about this issue..”

• All of Europe Does Business With Russia – Hungary (RT)

A significant number of companies in the EU continue to discreetly do business with Russia despite the bloc’s sanctions, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has said. “Here I would like to disappoint the idealists, as the situation is that everyone in Europe is doing this,” Szijjarto said in Budapest on Friday.“ The difference between us and the others in general is that we speak honestly and openly about this issue. All of Europe does business with the Russians, but some deny this; we don’t need that.” Szijjarto added that Hungary does not agree with the sanctions, but since this is EU policy, Budapest respects them. Hungary typically vetoes specific EU proposals if they seriously harm national interests, he said, adding that developing economic cooperation with Russia is one of those interests.

The EU imposed sanctions on Moscow in 2014, and expanded them after the Ukraine conflict escalated in 2022. The main targets are high-value sectors of the Russian economy, including energy, finance, and trade. Hungary has long been at odds with the EU over its approach to the Ukraine conflict and its sanctions policy towards Moscow. This makes it difficult for the EU to agree on new restrictions, Euractiv reported in August, citing diplomatic sources. Many experts in both Russia and the West have warned that unilateral sanctions bring more harm to the countries that impose them than to Russia itself. EU officials have also acknowledged that Moscow has been successful in sidestepping the restrictions. In June, Finance Ministry data showed that Russian budget revenues from oil and gas soared by 73.5% in January-May this year, compared to the first five months of 2023.

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“Long-term deals are expected to help avoid price swings and provide India with steady access to Russian oil at a lower price..”

• Indian State Oil Refiners Seeking Long-term Deals With Russia – Media (RT)

India’s state-owned oil refiners are in talks with Russia about clinching long-term supply deals, the news outlet Business Standard reported this week, citing sources at the country’s Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. Agreements could reportedly be sealed as soon as next April when the new fiscal year starts. India, the world’s third-largest consumer of crude oil, depends on imports for up to 85% of its needs. Russia is India’s top oil supplier, and New Delhi has often noted that Moscow has been instrumental in ensuring the nation’s energy security. Nevertheless, while India’s private refiners already have annual deals for Russian oil supplies, the state companies have tended to buy it in the spot markets, reserving long-term contracts for sources from the Middle East. According to the ministry’s sources, however, the high volatility in spot prices has rendered this arrangement no longer attractive for the state refiners.

Long-term deals are expected to help avoid price swings and provide India with steady access to Russian oil at a lower price. India stepped up purchases of Russian crude in 2022 shortly after the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict and the first rounds of Western sanctions on Moscow. New Delhi has taken advantage of the discounts Moscow offered on its oil after the latter effectively lost its traditional buyers in the West. Last month, India even overtook China as the largest buyer of Russian crude. Ramping-up purchases of Russian oil not only helped India bolster its domestic energy security, but made it one of the leading exporters of petrochemicals to Europe. India’s exports of refined oil products to European countries jumped by 2,539 times since 2018, The Print reported earlier this month, citing data from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

Western states have been pressuring India to stop buying Russian oil, but New Delhi has remained adamant that it would continue to do so. Indian officials have also argued on more than one occasion that the decision to buy Russian oil has helped prevent a global energy crisis. In an interview with RT in July, India’s minister of petroleum and natural gas, Hardeep Singh Puri, stated that without Russian oil on the market, global prices would have hit $250-300 per barrel.

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Nobody seems to know what she is busy with.

• Harris ‘Too Busy’ To Talk To Media – Adviser (RT)

US Vice President Kamala Harris hasn’t given many media interviews because “she’s a very busy person,” one of her campaign advisers, Keisha Lance-Bottoms, has told CNN. Even liberal pundits have criticized Harris for dodging the spotlight. In the two months since she announced her presidential campaign, Harris and running mate Tim Walz have given a total of seven sit-down interviews, while former President Donald Trump and running mate J.D. Vance have given 70 interviews and press conferences, according to a tally compiled by Axios this week. When conversations with partisan allies – for instance Trump’s live chat with X owner Elon Musk – are counted, the former president pulls even further ahead of Harris, who has largely stuck to scripted rallies to reach voters. Asked why Harris is not doing more interviews, Lance-Bottoms told CNN on Friday that “we would love to see her sit down every single day with CNN and do interviews, but it’s that she’s a very busy person.”

“She’s the vice president as well as a candidate,” Lance-Bottoms continued, reiterating that Harris is simply “too busy” to match Trump’s media schedule. Harris has come under fire from the New York Times for avoiding unscripted appearances, while CNN commentator Scott Jennings hammered the vice president on Friday for deliberately avoiding “hostile media.” The night before, Harris spoke at length to TV host Oprah Winfrey, although the interview was friendly and featured a host of Harrris’ celebrity supporters, including Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Roberts, Chris Rock, and Ben Stiller. Harris’ campaign believes that “limiting interactions with the press is the right strategy – even if it frustrates reporters,” Axios reported, citing sources close to the campaign. According to a recent New York Times/Siena poll, 31% of voters feel that they don’t know enough about Harris, while only 12% are unsure who Trump is or where he stands on key issues.

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Too many failures to be failures.

• Secret Service Allowed ‘Multiple Failures’ Before Trump Shooting – Report (RT)

Multiple “operational and communications failures” by the US Secret Service allowed a gunman to open fire on former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally in July, an internal review has found. Trump narrowly avoided death while speaking to a crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, when a bullet fired from around 150m away grazed his ear. The gunman, a 21-year-old named Thomas Matthew Crooks, fired from a rooftop that had apparently been left unprotected by the Secret Service, killing one rally goer and injuring two others before he was shot dead by a sniper. In the aftermath of the incident, it emerged that local police had spotted Crooks using a range-finder an hour before he opened fire and passed a photo on to Secret Service agents. The agents noticed the gunman on the roof 20 minutes before the incident, but took no action until the first shots rang out.

In a preliminary report released on Friday, the Secret Service stressed that local police were responsible for securing the roof in question. However, the report stated, the officers covering this building had no contact with the Secret Service. Some information about the shooter relayed by local law enforcement never made it to the Secret Service, the report stated, blaming a lack of radio communication between the various agencies working at the rally site. As a result, information about Crooks’ appearance and movements had to be relayed by chains of phone calls and text messages, it claimed. Shortly before the rally began, Crooks was able to fly a camera-equipped drone over the site without being stopped or questioned. The Secret Service report stated that while the agency deployed a counter-drone team to the site, “there were some technical difficulties” with their equipment.

Regarding the choice of venue, the report stated that a Secret Service team had visited the site beforehand and noted that the line of sight between the rooftop and the stage where Trump spoke could pose a “challenge.” However, “the security measures to alleviate these concerns were not carried out.” The internal investigation is still ongoing, and a final report is expected in the coming weeks. While much of Friday’s summary appeared to pass blame on to local law enforcement, Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe told reporters that the agency nevertheless needs “a shift in paradigm in how we conduct our protective operations.” Rowe’s predecessor, Kimberly Cheatle, resigned ten days after the shooting. Several other high-ranking agents were placed on leave during the investigation.

Trump survived another attempt on his life earlier this month, when a pro-Ukraine activist aimed a rifle at the former president at one of his golf courses in Florida. Secret Service agents fired several shots at the man and arrested him after he fled the scene. Republican Representative Matt Gaetz claimed earlier this week that some GOP lawmakers believe there is a “mole inside the Secret Service providing information about points of vulnerability” to would-be assassins.

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“Recent surveys indicate that healthcare is among the top priorities for voters in the November presidential election..”

• America’s Healthcare Dead Last in Rich Nation Rankings (Sp.)

The percentage of Americans able to access quality healthcare hit a new low of 55% in 2024, according to the West Health-Gallup Healthcare Affordability Index. Affordability of healthcare has become one of the top issues ahead of the 2024 US presidential election. The US healthcare system continues to lag far behind other high-income countries, an analysis by the Commonwealth Fund shows. It has retained its dismal ranking since 2004, when the nonprofit launched its surveys. Ten nations, including Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US, were compared on healthcare system aspects such as access, care process, administrative efficiency, equity, and health outcomes. The US showed the worst overall performance despite spending more per capita on healthcare than any other nation (16% of its GDP in 2022).

It ranked lowest in both accessibility and healthcare outcomes, with 26 million Americans having no insurance, and a quarter of the working age population underinsured. As inflation fuels costs, over 40% of Americans spent at least $1,000 on healthcare out-of-pocket last year, per the survey. At 77.5 years, US life expectancy is over four years below the 10-country average (the same as sanction-riddled Iran). The US has the highest rates of preventable and treatable deaths for all ages. Over 107,000 people died from overdoses in 2023 amid a raging substance abuse crisis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were 43,000 gun-related deaths in 2023, according to a report by the National Institute of Health Care Management. Recent surveys indicate that healthcare is among the top priorities for voters in the November presidential election.

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“..children are meant to play, to be loved, to be accepted and protected..”

• Words You Can’t Ignore (Max Jones)

A frightened little girl trembles and screams “in terror after mistaking thunder for an Israeli airstrike.” – Times of Gaza. Most of the people — and especially the children — who survive this genocidal slaughter will forever be traumatized. Children are meant to play, to be loved, to be accepted and protected. The children of Gaza will never get to be children. Most will never get to be adults either. Like this little girl, they will be stuck in the past, unable to experience something as simple as rainfall and thunder. When the rain falls and the thunder booms, their scars will take them back to their terror — the only thing that once separated them from the explosions destroying their homes, the blood and gore of their friends and relatives, and the reality that at any moment they might be killed. I urge you to not look away from this poor girl — look openly enough and you will see yourself. The times you were afraid and no one was there. The times you needed someone to assure you that things would be ok, and no one did. The times you needed to be accepted.

A four-year old girl, Rahaf Ziad Abu Suweirih, died the other day in Gaza when Israeli bombs shelled her home — but the bombs did not kill her. Her little heart stopped, incapable of handling the horrors imposed upon her by Israel’s genocide. As I said above, children are meant to play, to be loved, to be accepted and protected. The children of Gaza will never get to be children. Rahaf Ziad Abu Suweirih’s body knew this so well — and thus, knew that Rahaf should never have experienced the terror, violence, and abandonment that Israel’s genocide forced her to endure — that her tiny heart spared her. Her loved ones will mourn her death. They will try to make sense of the pain they feel, and how anyone could weaponize such hatred against something so innocent. The scars her death left them will remain tender for the rest of their lives. A story true for all the survivors of Gaza. But death is not merely an inducer of pain. It is also a protectorate; a unifier. It reaches up from the deepest depths of the soul to hug the broken human when no one else can.

It takes all the fragments that the tribulations of life shatter and pieces them back together. It is death that can lift a blanket over the abandoned child, or the terrorized adult, and give them permission to rest when the world cannot. This is especially evident in Gaza, where children cannot be children. They have to be survivors. Fighters. Being a child in Gaza only makes easy prey for the hunters playing blood sport. For a child, who again, is only meant to play, to be loved, accepted and protected, this creates a living hell that they have to believe is traversable, either by themselves or the adults they look to for guidance. Of course, no one can navigate the constant and unpredictable patterns of bombs, death and terror. But for the child, what choice do they have between believing the lie that they can control something, or succumbing to death itself? The reality is that Israel creates an uninhabitable space for Gazans, a “labyrinth of death,” that no one could ever survive without the chance of luck.

[..] But protecting one’s self, and one’s children, from the bombs of genocide means denying reality and believing, in one way or another, that you still possess some control of your own fate. To survive, the victims cannot accept that they are effectively “mice in a trap.” They must create different versions of reality in which they can prevail. In other words, they must become multiple people living different fantasies — all to protect their physical self. While these different realities may protect the survivors from death, they will not cease to exist once the war is over. This will send them scrambling in search of the unity that they were forced to abandon. In fleeting moments, they will find places of refuge that unite their broken spirits. These places will tend to the wounds that their traumas left them with “treatments” of comfort and solace.

Yet in time, these places will obscure the unity they at first grant. Whether the survivor finds shelter in the fuzzy feeling of a white opiate, in a bottle of liquor, in a toxic relationship, or any other pathology that detaches them from the pain of reality, the survivor will end up mistakenly believing that they are only complete with the help of the “treatment” that temporarily soothes their pain. This lie will lead them into a new trap: one much harder to see but just as real as the “mice trap” of Gaza. Without realizing it, they will never stop searching for the person that they were never allowed to be, and they will cling to the places that offer the illusion of fulfillment.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

No. 1

 

 

GROK

 

 

Cats

 

 

Blondie
https://twitter.com/i/status/1837430585117045144

 

 

Jenga

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle September 6 2024

Sep 062024
 
 September 6, 2024  Posted by at 8:16 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  68 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Two naked figures 1908

 

• Putin Quips That He Prefers Harris To Trump (ZH)
• Trump Reacts To Putin Rooting For Harris (RT)
• Trump Pulling Ahead Of Harris – Nate Silver (RT)
• ABC Debate: ‘I’m Gonna Let Her Talk’ – Trump (ET)
• Trump Will Adopt Elon Musk’s Proposal For Gov’t Efficiency Commission (ZH)
• Ukrainian Army Facing Collapse – Putin (RT)
• Prosecutors Urge Hunter Biden Judge To Reject Plea Deal (ZH)
• Scott Ritter Says Ending Cooperation With RT, Sputnik Due to US Sanctions (Sp.)
• ‘A Unique Kind of Fascism’: US Continues Clampdown on Alt Media (Miles)
• DoJ Clampdown on Russian Media Proving US Empire Has No Clothes (Sp.)
• Whistleblowers Reveal US Secret Service Blunders (Sp.)
• Pavel Durov Warns French Crackdown Will Prompt Serious Tech Setbacks (Sp.)
• Macron Pushes Through PM Pick After 60 Days (Manley)
• Germany Reeling in the Wake of AfD Election Victories (SCF)

 

 

 

 

Trump lead CNN

 

 

RT

 

 

Kamala CNN

 

 

Tulsi

 

 

Benny

 

 

Liz Cheney Kamala

 

 

Tucker

 

 

9 times cheaper

 

 

Chris M Butler
https://twitter.com/i/status/1831722765335806020

 

 

Rogan

 

 

 

 

“Putin said Harris “laughs so contagiously and expressively, it shows she’s doing well.”

• Putin Quips That He Prefers Harris To Trump (ZH)

Russian President Vladimir Putin said during an interview at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok that Russia now wants Vice President Kamala Harris to win in November since they had previously supported Joe Biden – and Biden has endorsed Harris. “I told you, our favorite, if I may say so, was the current president, Mr. Biden,” said Putin, smirking. “He was removed from the race, but he advised all his supporters to support Ms. Harris. So we will do it as well, we will root for her,” he continued. Putin said Harris “laughs so contagiously and expressively, it shows she’s doing well.” “And if she is doing well, then … Trump introduced so many restrictions and sanctions against Russia, like no other president had ever introduced before him. And if Ms. Harris is doing well, perhaps she will refrain from doing anything like that,” he continued.

As modernity.news continues, Putin’s comments are likely to be dismissed as a joke by the Harris campaign, while Trump will probably use them to deflect long-standing claims by Democrats that his campaign is supported by Russia. According to Sky News’ Moscow correspondent Ivor Bennett, “Vladimir Putin is having a little chuckle himself here. His comments are almost certainly more mischief-making than a statement of fact because, as we know, Russia’s president doesn’t always say what he thinks.” As we highlighted earlier this week, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked by pro-Russia TV reporter Pavel Zarubin, “Then who is our candidate now?” “We have no candidate. But, of course, the Democrats are more predictable. And what Putin said about Biden’s predictability applies to almost all Democrats, including Ms. Harris,” responded Peskov. The Kremlin spokesman was also dismissive towards Trump’s claim that he could end the war with Ukraine within 24 hours.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1831723835101499393

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” I don’t know exactly what to say about it. I don’t know if I’m insulted or he did me a favor..”

• Trump Reacts To Putin Rooting For Harris (RT)

US Republican candidate Donald Trump said on Thursday that he doesn’t know how to feel about Russian President Vladimir Putin stating that he preferred his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris. The Russian leader said earlier in the day at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok that Moscow would rather see Harris win the US presidential election in November. Putin told the audience that he admired the Democratic Party candidate’s “infectious laugh” and that he respected current President Joe Biden’s choice to endorse her as his successor. “He [Putin] endorsed Kamala, and I didn’t know if I was supposed to call him up and say, ‘Thank you very much’ … I don’t know exactly what to say about it. I don’t know if I’m insulted or he did me a favor,” Trump claimed during an event at the Economic Club of New York. US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby reacted by stating that the Russian president should refrain from discussing the US presidential election.

Putin’s remarks came in response to a question at the forum on whether he had a preferred candidate in the US election now that Joe Biden, for whom he previously expressed a preference, has dropped out. Putin replied by saying that it was not Russia’s job to choose a “favorite” in the election, which is up to American voters. Moscow has repeatedly dismissed Washington’s allegations about attempts to interfere in the US elections. Speaking about Harris, the Russian president suggested that her positive disposition could mean she would refrain from imposing as many sanctions on Russia as Trump did, who Putin said had introduced more restrictions on Moscow than any other president in American history at the time. “In the end, the choice is up to the American people, and we will treat their eventual decision with respect,” Putin said.

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“..Trump now stands a 58.2% chance of winning the election, compared to Harris’ 41.6%..”

• Trump Pulling Ahead Of Harris – Nate Silver (RT)

Influential American election analyst Nate Silver has put Republican candidate Donald Trump’s chances of defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in this November’s election higher than at any point since Harris announced her candidacy in July. Despite polling consistently showing Harris with a slight lead over Trump, Silver claimed on Wednesday that the Democrat has underperformed in recent surveys, and that Trump now stands a 58.2% chance of winning the election, compared to Harris’ 41.6%. This time last week, Silver’s model gave Trump a 52.4% chance of winning, and put Harris’ chances at 47.3%. Silver’s predictions are regularly cited by American media outlets, and are considered among the more influential election forecasts in the country. His methodology samples polling, economic data, likely turnout, and other factors – including the post-convention “bounce” that typically boosts a candidate for several weeks after the official nomination.

Democrats confirmed Harris as their party’s nominee at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago three weeks ago. However, Harris didn’t receive the “bounce” that most candidates normally do, Silver explained. CNN polls conducted after the convention showed Harris and Trump tied in three out of six battleground states and leading by around five points in three more, while a YouGov survey showed the Democrat leading by two points nationwide. With these polls taken so soon after the convention, Harris should have held a wider lead, Silver argued. Silver’s predictions are contradicted by other pollsters. FiveThirtyEight, an analytics organization founded by Silver, maintains that if the election were held today, Harris stands a 55% chance of winning, with Trump’s likelihood of victory standing at 44%. While FiveThirtyEight and Silver use the same methodology, FiveThirtyEight places more emphasis on polling as election day draws closer.

Individual polls can be misleading, however. A New York Times poll last month showed Harris beating Trump by 50% to 46% in the swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. However, the poll oversampled Democrats, and when adjusted showed Harris and Trump in a statistical dead heat in all three states. For both Harris and Trump, winning either Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes, or Michigan and Wisconsin’s combined 25 votes, will be essential to winning the election. Silver’s model shows Trump winning in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina, with the two candidates tied in Michigan and Harris with a slight lead in Wisconsin. “Needless to say, stranger things have happened than a candidate who was behind in the polls winning,” Silver cautioned. “And in America’s polarized political climate, most elections are close and a candidate is rarely out of the running.”

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“Everybody has a plan until they get ‘punched in the face..”

• ABC Debate: ‘I’m Gonna Let Her Talk’ – Trump (ET)

After Hannity asked what the former president was doing to get ready for next week’s debate with Harris, Trump replied: “I think I’ve been practicing all my life for this stuff. It’ll be an interesting evening.” The former president said debates are unpredictable, so a candidate needs to be nimble. Many before him have prepped extensively, only to fail miserably in the heat of debate. “Everybody has a plan until they get ‘punched in the face,’” Trump said, quoting Mike Tyson. “A lot depends on ABC. … I hope they’re going to be fair,” he said, adding that a contract bars the network from providing questions to either candidate in advance of the showdown. The Trump and Harris camps had proposed different ground rules for the debate; they disagreed over whether the candidates should be seated or standing, and over whether microphones should be muted while the opposing candidate is speaking.

Trump’s strategy? “I’m gonna let her talk,” he said. That is what he did on June 27 in Atlanta, where CNN hosted a debate between him and President Joe Biden. The incumbent was widely seen to have struggled during that face-off. Biden withdrew from the race less than a month later and endorsed Harris as his preferred successor. Noting that many thousands of Pennsylvanians depend on fracking for their livelihoods, Trump told the audience, “You have no choice; you’ve gotta vote for me.” Hannity played multiple video clips of Harris making past statements opposing fracking. Trump said he disbelieves her recent statement that she won’t ban the procedure that is used to help extract gas or oil from the ground. He said Democrats’ policies have directly hurt the industry even without an outright ban. “You have to have fracking. … It’s a massive business for Pennsylvania, and you can’t take a chance” that Harris would eliminate it, Trump said.

Hannity noted the town hall came at a time when Trump was trending upward in some of the polls. Those include a Trafalgar Group poll showing Trump ahead of Harris in Pennsylvania by 2 percentage points. The host said the latest numbers seem to suggest that Harris’s “long-lived honeymoon phase now finally, finally appears to be over.” In the RealClearPolitics average of opinion polls, Harris was holding a 1.9 percent national lead against Trump on Sept. 4. But a few very recent polls were detecting a shift in momentum. In Rasmussen Reports’ Daily Presidential Tracking Poll on Sept. 4, Trump opened a six-point lead over Harris nationally. But in Rasmussen’s five-day average, he was only 2 percent ahead of her. Many other polls still show Harris with an edge over Trump nationally, but still within the margin of error, which runs at 3 percent or more for most polls. An online prediction and betting site, Polymarket.com, on Sept. 4 showed Trump with a 52-percent chance of winning the Nov. 5 election; Harris had a 47-percent chance.

Hannity noted that Harris has given no solo news conferences since she became the apparent Democratic nominee 45 days prior to the Fox town hall. She and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, participated in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Aug. 29 but disclosed no new policy specifics. And, as of Sept. 4, no policy platform was yet listed on Harris’s website. Hannity contrasted this with the dozens of news conferences and interviews Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), have given since Biden dropped out of the race. After Trump passed the 16-minute, 30-second mark into the program, Hannity thanked him for going longer than Harris’s CNN interview; the audience laughed.

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“No pay, no title, no recognition is needed.”

• Trump Will Adopt Elon Musk’s Proposal For Gov’t Efficiency Commission (ZH)

Former President Trump plans to adopt Elon Musk’s proposed new commission, the Department of Government Efficiency abbreviated as ‘DOGE.’ According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump could unveil the new government efficiency commission as early as today. Trump plans to unveil the government efficiency commission before he delivers a speech at the Economic Club of New York. He will tell reporters that the commission would conduct “a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make “recommendations for drastic reform.” The commission’s primary goal is to identify ways to eliminate fraud and improper payments, according to portions of the speech viewed by journos at WSJ.

Trump’s upcoming speech and proposed commission to address the failures of Biden-Harris’ Bidenomics, which sparked an inflation storm and financially crushed mid—and low-tier consumers, also aims at deregulation. Trump has actively championed deregulation to make the economy great again. Musk endorsed Trump on X shortly after the failed assassination attempt on July 13. He pledged millions of dollars to a super PAC supporting causes on the right. Speaking with Reuters last week, the former president said he would offer Musk a position if he were seriously interested. ” He’s a very smart guy. I certainly would—if he would do it, I certainly would,” the former president said. “He’s a brilliant guy.” Musk and Trump first publicly discussed a government efficiency commission during a two-hour conversation on X on August 13. The conversation has received 60.4 million views so far.

Musk shared an AI picture last month of himself standing at a platform that read “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) and wrote on X, “I am willing to serve.” Earlier this week, Musk reiterated, “I can’t wait. There is a lot of waste and needless regulation in government that needs to go.” On X this morning, Musk responded to one user’s post about WSJ’s story. He said, “I look forward to serving America if the opportunity arises. No pay, no title, no recognition is needed.” Trump also plans to say, “This election will decide whether we reward Kamala Harris with re-election and four more years of economic calamity—or whether we change direction.” Let’s not forget that the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion to fraud annually, or about $4,000 per American household, as per The Hill.

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Meanwhile…

• Ukrainian Army Facing Collapse – Putin (RT)

High casualties incurred by the Ukrainian military since Kiev launched its incursion in Russia’s Kursk Region could render its armed forces useless, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. The Russian leader shared his assessment of the frontline situation on Thursday during a panel discussion at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. He said the Ukrainian attempt to disrupt the Russian military with the massive attack across the border last month had backfired. ”Our military has stabilized the situation and is now gradually pushing the opponent from the border territories. More importantly, there is no resistance to our advancement [in Donbass],” he explained. “The opponent has weakened itself on the key axis by moving those relatively strong and well-trained units to the border areas.” Ukrainian officials expected Moscow to redeploy some of its forces from the east to repel the incursion in the north.

However, the gamble has not paid off, Aleksandr Syrsky, Kiev’s top general, acknowledged last week. Putin said Russian troops had been securing more land in Donbass, which is a priority for Moscow, at a pace unseen in a long time. Meanwhile, Ukrainian troops are “suffering very high losses in manpower and hardware.” “Because of that, [Kiev] risks a collapse of the front line on the most important axis. The casualties may result in a loss of fighting capability of the entire armed forces, which is what we are looking to achieve,” the president added. On Wednesday, the Russian Defense Ministry estimated that Ukrainian casualties in the Kursk operation had surpassed 9,700 troops. Kiev also lost 81 tanks, dozens of other armored vehicles, hundreds of cars, and multiple heavy weapons, the military said. Putin confirmed the statistics, telling the audience that the intelligence had been confirmed by multiple sources.

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Alford plea: you don’t say you did it, but you accept the punishment.

Does there need to be a conviction before he can be pardoned?

• Prosecutors Urge Hunter Biden Judge To Reject Plea Deal (ZH)

It would appear that Hunter Biden doesn’t have a nicely arranged plea deal with the DOJ after all – as prosecutors have urged the judge in the case to reject his proposal to plead guilty. Of note, Hunter is attempting to plead guilty via an “Alford plea,” which would have to be approved by the prosecution and higher-ups at the DOJ. It appears they were caught off guard.

* * *

Hunter Biden’s lawyers announced on Thursday that the first son will plead guilty in his $1.4 million tax evasion case. “Mr. Biden intends to change his plea this morning,” Hunter’s lawyer Abbe Lowell told the judge in a Los Angeles federal courtroom, with the younger Biden facing trial on nine federal charges for failing to pay federal taxes from 2016 – 2019. If convicted, Hunter faced up to 17 years behind bars. He currently faces up to 25 years behind bars when he’s sentenced in November for a conviction on gun charges.

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“I am deeply grateful for the professionalism of all of my Russian colleagues over the past several years, and am proud to have made their acquaintance..”

• Scott Ritter Says Ending Cooperation With RT, Sputnik Due to US Sanctions (Sp.)

The US Department of the Treasury issued a statement on Wednesday to announce sanctions against the Rossiya Segodnya media group, RIA Novosti, RT, Sputnik and Ruptly. The sanctions affected Rossiya Segodnya and RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan and a number of other senior executives. “The actions by the Department of the Treasury in levying new sanctions against RT, Sputnik, and other Russian media organizations has made it impossible for me to continue my work as an outside contributor for RT and Sputnik, as well as participating in interviews and other collaborations with other Russian media,” Ritter said on X. He said his work with Russian media organizations was legitimate journalism.

“I reject the notion that the work I have done over the past years with the newly sanctioned Russian media organizations has been anything other than legitimate journalism, the content of which has been factually correct and analytically sound, and always of my own creation,” Ritter said. However, he said, he is committed to obeying US laws. “Nonetheless, I am fully committed to obeying US law, and as such will be terminating all contractual relationships with both RT and Sputnik effective immediately, as well as suspending my participation in any and all media interaction with sanctioned individuals and organizations until which time it is deemed lawful to do so by US authorities,” Ritter said. He said he will continue to exercise his free speech rights.

“I am deeply grateful for the professionalism of all of my Russian colleagues over the past several years, and am proud to have made their acquaintance. I regret the actions of my government in silencing legitimate journalistic outlets, and look forward to the day when freedom of speech and a free press is not constrained by a dubious ‘Russian exception’ that is violative of Constitutional norms and values,” Ritter said. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, commenting on the US sanctions imposed against the Rossiya Segodnya media group, told Sputnik that attacks on Russian media are the result of operations by Western security services to “sterilize” the information space.

Read more …

“..a recent survey found that almost half of Amercans believe there is “not enough democracy” in the United States while 57% of people polled said the US government only serves a minority of its population..”

• ‘A Unique Kind of Fascism’: US Continues Clampdown on Alt Media (Miles)

The Biden administration signaled that it would continue to clamp down on alternative media Wednesday with the announcement of several measures against figures connected to Russian outlets. “Today, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated ten individuals and two entities as part of a coordinated US government response to Moscow’s malign influence efforts targeting the 2024 US presidential election,” read a statement released Wednesday morning. US Attorney General Merrick Garland claimed individuals connected to Russian media outlets were involved in a campaign to spread “disinformation” in the months leading up to November’s election, a favored talking point the Biden administration has repeatedly used to justify its heavy-handed tactics in regulating social media.

The account for RT on the video sharing giant YouTube was removed in 2022 and Biden signed legislation earlier this year likely to result in the social media app TikTok becoming unavailable in the United States after this fall’s election.Writer and historian Dr. Gerald Horne joined Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program Wednesday to discuss the surprising development, which he attributed to the United States’ concern over the rise of Russia, China and Iran and the emergence of an increasingly multipolar world. “It’s difficult to judge what you just described without judging simultaneously what’s unfolding in the Tampa, St. Petersburg area of Florida, where Chairman Omali and his comrades and the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru movement are now facing trial in the halls of injustice for reasons eerily similar to these charges,” said Horne, referring to the Biden administration’s ongoing persecution of Black radical groups.

“Certainly, we should not forget what has befallen Scott Ritter, the former arms inspector, now viewed widely as a dissident who has been a frequent guest on numerous platforms including your own, as I understand it, rebuking and reprimanding US foreign policy, particularly as it relates to the escapade in Ukraine,” he continued. “Not to mention the funding and financing an army of the radical regime in Israel. We are also aware of what has befallen Richard Medhurst who is a frequent speaker on issues related to Iran in particular. He was detained in London summarily just a few days ago in a blatant violation of civil rights and civil liberties, causing some commentators to suggest that England, Great Britain is moving towards a unique kind of fascism.” Horne claimed a “hysteria” is gripping the US political class over an emerging counterhegemonic bloc of countries increasingly able to challenge the political and economic might of the United States.

Former US Army officer Gen. Wesley Clark reflected the anxieties of Washington officialdom in an editorial in USA Today recently, casting Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping as enemies of “democracy.” But a recent survey found that almost half of Amercans believe there is “not enough democracy” in the United States while 57% of people polled said the US government only serves a minority of its population. Russia and China ranked higher than the United States on most questions regarding their citizens’ self-perception of their country’s democracy, with Chinese people being among the most likely in the world to consider their country democratic. Clark drew attention to improving relations between Beijing and Moscow, something the United States worked to undermine throughout the Cold War.

Read more …

“$10 million would barely influence a US Senate race. The amount is hardly a drop in the bucket for a presidential race.”

• DoJ Clampdown on Russian Media Proving US Empire Has No Clothes (Sp.)

The US Justice Department’s sweeping crackdown on Russian media on Wednesday to the thunderous applause of the legacy media will leave Americans a little less informed, less safe and a lot less free, observers including long-time Sputnik contributors say. “It looks like the US Department of Justice is producing another election year spectacular. Sixty days before the election we are invited to suspend our disbelief and embrace ‘Russia, Russia, Russia: The Sequel.’ And once again the DOJ is rounding up the usual suspects: Trump, Russia and Democracy,” political commentator and Newsmax columnist Michael Shannon told Sputnik, commenting on the DoJ’s unprecedented crackdown on Russian media Wednesday over alleged “disinformation” and an election-related “malign influence operation.”

“I predict the audience for this lame sequel will be the remaining mask wearers, Clot Shot booster advocates, Trump haters, consonant crusaders and government employees. Anyone else with simple common sense will see it for what it is: The DOJ’s attempt to influence the election,” Shannon stressed. The figures being alleged by the Justice Department are also laughable, according to the observer. “Let’s put alleged Russian influence buying in perspective. The indictment says Tenent Media was given $10 million to ‘influence the election.’ I’ve got news for you. $10 million would barely influence a US Senate race. The amount is hardly a drop in the bucket for a presidential race. Donald Trump and Joe Biden combined spent $1.85 BILLION in 2020,” Shannon emphasized.

“I regret the actions of my government in silencing legitimate journalistic outlets, and look forward to the day when freedom of speech and a free press is not constrained by a dubious ‘Russian exception’ that is violative of Constitutional norms and values,” former US Marine intelligence officer, UN weapons inspector and commentator Scott Ritter wrote in a social media post. Ritter, who has already suffered a campaign of blatant intimidation by the FBI, including a raid on his family home and the confiscation of his passport, announced the termination of his work for Sputnik and other Russian media after the DoJ and Treasury’s new restrictions were announced, fearing he would be further targeted.

Former CIA analyst-turned whistleblower and author Larry Johnson highlighted the DoJ crackdown’s off the charts “hypocrisy that is staggering in its magnitude and its foulness,” telling Sputnik that the claims of Russian media attempts to “meddle” in the upcoming US presidential election are simply laughable when considering that the US government has allocated “almost $4 billion to interfere or meddle in the political affairs of other countries” in 2024 alone. Popular independent media personality Jackson Hinkle says Americans looking for alternative perspectives and sources of information will the most to suffer from the DoJ’s move. “We can topple governments. We can kill sovereign presidents of sovereign countries. But for a media company to be reporting on the facts…about what’s actually going on in the world, and then for the United States to sanction them, it’s absolutely insane,” Hinkle said. “I think millions of Americans want to hear that truth, and that’s why they’re going after companies like Sputnik so hard right now.”

Read more …

“It’s a matter of an intent to expose him to potential assassination..”

• Whistleblowers Reveal US Secret Service Blunders (Sp.)

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has claimed that most agents who were present during the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump in July were not US Secret Service (USSS) agents, but were in fact Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents. The US politician told Fox News that the only training the agents received was a “2-hour online webinar” training. Citing claims made by whistleblowers, he added that the agents who were protecting the former president that day had no prior experience in security detail. Hawley wrote the whistleblowers’ allegations in a letter to Ronald Rowe, the acting director of the USSS, and attached the letter to an X post. Tyler Nixon, an attorney, media relations specialist and political analyst, joined Rachel Blevins on The Backstory on Wednesday, and presented a rundown of the agency’s long-standing failings.

“Well, there’s no question that the Secret Service (USSS) is a very troubled agency and it has been varyingly for many years,” Nixon said. “…the agency has had serious problems with … racial discrimination. There was a lawsuit that became a class action that dragged on for nearly 17 years of Black agents from the ‘80s and ‘90s who were held back, discriminated against, suppressed in terms of promotions. They won and the Secret Service fought that tooth and nail.” The lawyer disclosed that he represents the first Black Secret Service agent who served on presidential protection, who has threatened to be a whistleblower to the “Warren Commission concerning the laxity, drinking and other things that the agents had perpetrated or done on the President John F. Kennedy detail,” he said, adding that “many argue [the laxity] contributed to their slow reactions [of JFK’s assassination].”

“[USSS] has to, I think, if they were talking about it, it’s well over a billion-dollar budget. I think it might have been $1.4 billion, if I’m not mistaken. But whatever it is, it is absolutely enough that they should have the best equipment, the best agents and the best operations. And I think it’s just proof that, generally speaking, you can throw as much money as you want at a government agency to address a problem if there’s institutional incompetence and institutional issues and just the fact that the government operates the way it does without accountability,” Nixon explained.

“And one of the other things was, which really stands out in the Trump affair was that they were assigning […] based on apparently the status, let’s just say, of the protectee, meaning Trump’s not the president. He’s a candidate, a former president. Versus what [American conservative commentator Dan Bongino] noted should be the criteria for assigning the resources, which is the threat profile,” he added. “In Butler, there was what I would view as it wasn’t simply incompetence. There was actually active security stripping, which is very, very troubling because that’s not just a matter of people not doing their jobs properly. It’s a matter of an intent to expose him to potential assassination or assassination, and that is, that’s corruption that is so – I mean, it would be criminal, obviously, that level of corruption,” he continued. “So, major reforms need to happen with that agency, if not a total reckoning.”

Read more …

“..Telegram has an official representative in the EU that both “accepts and replies to EU requests.”

• Pavel Durov Warns French Crackdown Will Prompt Serious Tech Setbacks (Sp.)

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov spoke out on Thursday against the crackdown against his platform by French authorities, warning that the spate of charges could mark the start of serious setbacks for the tech industry as a whole. In a post shared on Telegram, Durov detailed that he had been questioned by French authorities over a period of four days, and that he had been informed he would be held “personally responsible” for criminal actions that occur on the platform due to past notifications that had gone answered. “This,” Durov went onto emphasis, “was surprising for several reasons.” Not least of which was the fact that Telegram has an official representative in the EU that both “accepts and replies to EU requests.” “Its email address has been publicly available for anyone in the EU who googles ‘Telegram EU address for law enforcement,'” he pointed out, adding that authorities could have easily contacted him via the French consulate in Dubai.

“A while ago, when asked, I personally helped them establish a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France.” “Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach,” he said. “Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools.” Rather than pursuing criminal charges, French authorities should have instead opted for the “established practice” of filing legal action against an internet service to start proceedings. Durov underscored that Telegram would not be abandoning its principles on ensuring users’ privacy and security, but that it was and will continue to hold open lines of communications with country regulators.

However, if no balance can be made in any one nation, the company will opt to “leave.” The CEO further rejected reports that painted Telegram as “some sort of anarchic paradise” and slammed them as “absolutely untrue.” However, while the platform’s user count has soared upwards of 950 million, he acknowledged the spike “made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform.” Durov revealed that new internal measures were being implemented, and that such steps would be made public at a later time. The Russian-born tech entrepreneur was detained at a Paris airport on August 24 on charges related to criminal uses of his messaging app, including terrorism, child pornography, drug trafficking, money laundering and fraud. He was released on August 28 on a 5-million-euro ($5.5 million) bail and is barred from leaving France.

Read more …

Both France and Germany are in deep political trouble.

“It’s like a husband and wife debating over which electrician to hire to redo the wiring in your house not being able to come to an agreement and hiring a plumber..”

• Macron Pushes Through PM Pick After 60 Days (Manley)

President Emmanuel Macron has appointed Michel Barnier, 73, a veteran right-wing politician who served twice as European Commissioner and played a major role in the 2016 Brexit Task Force, as the new prime minister of France as of Thursday. Macron is trying to break through a political impasse that has gripped France following the country’s snap legislative elections held in July. The French presidency said in a statement that Macron is entrusting Barnier with “the task of forming a unity government to serve the country and the French people”, the New York Times reported. Barnier will take over the role from Gabriel Attal, France’s youngest ever prime minister who has held the position for the last eight months. Phil Kelly, a Belfast-based political commentator and socialist activist, joined Sputnik’s Political Misfits Thursday to discuss Macron’s continued rejection of the French public’s desires.

“This is far from democracy. This is an absurdity,” said Kelly. “It’s like a husband and wife debating over which electrician to hire to redo the wiring in your house not being able to come to an agreement and hiring a plumber. It’s an affront, an absolute affront to the democratic will of the people.” “What Macron is doing is he’s investing heavily in creating future problems because France is a powder keg. It is divided. The breakthrough for the left was good to see, but let’s hope it’s not a pyrrhic victory because what acts like this are doing is it just erodes faith that people have in their democratic institutions,” he added. “It’s a further sign that France is in dissent and chaos, that its establishment is flailing, that Macron is just trying to hold the door against change,” the analyst suggested. “But that change will come to France and I hope it’s a positive change, but there’s no guarantee there will be. The country’s in a dark way.”

In March of last year France’s Senate passed a controversial reform bill to raise the retirement age for French citizens by two years. The Senate passed the bill by 195 votes to 112. Macron’s decision to push through a bill that is extremely unpopular among voters for the alleged sake of the economy clearly went unforgiven during July’s election. Business-friendly think tanks such as the pro-Macron Institut Montaigne claim Macron’s pension plan is more cost-effective than other proposals, but a majority of French voters reject the ploy. “A country that is able to send billions of euros to the Kiev regime while its own citizens are offered a diet of, ‘we make you work longer for less’… and it’s a bit like from his gilded palace in Paris. He’s a bit like Macron Antoinette,” Kelly said.

“Macron [is] a guy who’s deeply unpopular, who, at one point, was talking up the advantage of World War III to the French people, now clinging on desperately to power, trying to make the guy who lost who came forth the leader of the country and all, as you say, to cling on to his own power for a little bit longer and to try and push through a policy that is so deeply unpopular.” In January, Macron claimed during a speech at the Swedish Defense Academy that the future security architecture of the continent could no longer be settled simply by the United States and that Europe should determine its own future. In April, the French president said he would be willing to discuss using French nuclear warheads as a “credible European defense” against a supposed Russian threat. The French president previously hinted at the use of France’s nuclear weapons in 2020 and again in 2022. In March the leader alarmed other EU member states when he announced his openness to ground operations in Ukraine, saying it might be required “at some point”.

“It’s not, unfortunately, only France that has this kind of political class,” Kelly added. “[There was] one of the ministers in the German government who’s a member of the Green Party saying — I’m sure you remember this — ‘I don’t care about German voters, I’ll do whatever it takes to support Ukraine.’” “This is why Europe is in decline. Much like your country where the political establishment has [nothing to] offer, it has no vision of how to move things forward, it only has ‘how can we trick the electorate in the next election and then just do the same [thing],’” he explained.

Read more …

“The government in Berlin should ask itself if it can even continue to govern..”

• Germany Reeling in the Wake of AfD Election Victories (SCF)

The German residents of Saxony and Thuringia awoke on Monday to a radical new political landscape as the Alternative for Germany, or Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), received more than double as many votes as the three parties which make up the federal coalition government — the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), environmentalist Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) — combined. This marks the first in any German state since Nazi rule. The results represent a major setback to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s struggling coalition government and demonstrate the increasing breakup of the political landscape and surge in popularity of anti-establishment parties across the continent. Scholz labelled the losses for his government “bitter” and called upon mainstream parties to build governments without “right-wing extremists”.

The AfD, which, as an “extremist” group, falls under the official surveillance of the German domestic intelligence agency, was founded in 2013 as an offshoot of the CDU. It advertises itself as a right-wing movement that is critical of the European Union’s policies but supportive of German membership. Since its founding, the party has moved further to the political right and shifted its attention to immigration and Islam. The party is most powerful in the formerly communist east Germany, which is less wealthy than the country’s west. Björn Höcke, 52, the leader of Thuringia, has been convicted of knowingly using a Nazi slogan at political events, a conviction he is appealing. A court in the eastern city of Halle fined the history teacher turned politician for using the prohibited phrase “Everything for Germany”, or “Alles für Deutschland” in German. The slogan was etched on weapons used by Nazi paramilitary officers. Germany has harsh laws against the use of phrases and symbols linked to the Nazi party.

In the last nationwide election, for the European Parliament in June, the AfD attracted 16 percent of the vote. In other words, not exactly a nationwide nationalist takeover. Moreover, with just over 2 million people out of a national population of more than 80 million, Thuringia ranks as one of the smallest of Germany’s 16 states. At the same time, Saxony’s population stands at just 4 million. Nevertheless, it is rather astonishing, and worrisome, that about one in three voters in these two states cast their vote for a party that the states’ own intelligence agencies have declared to be ‘extremist’. Factors that have led to support for the AfD in eastern Germany include deep dissatisfaction with the national government, anti-immigration sentiment and opposition to any further German military aid for Ukraine. And despite the government’s rapid reaction to the deadly knife attack in Solingen, in western Germany, shortly before the elections failed to result in a change of opinion. Four out of five German voters have expressed discontent with the work of the federal government, a sentiment that has lasted a long time.

The AfD rightly views itself as having established a deep support base. The state elections brought “historic” success for their party, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel said on Sunday, calling for the federal government to stand down. “It is also a punishment for the federal government, it is a requiem for this coalition,” she said. “The government in Berlin should ask itself if it can even continue to govern. This question of fresh elections should be posed at least following the [upcoming] election in Brandenburg, because things cannot carry on like this.” Now the government of Olaf Scholz is attempting to recalibrate its positions, moving further to the right to counter the AfD’s respectable gains. Looking down the road to the immigration debate during the electoral campaigns, the federal government last week announced harsher migration and security policies, and made an unexpected move to deport 28 asylum-seekers who had committed criminal offenses to Afghanistan.

Now, all eyes are now focused on the eastern German state of Brandenburg, where elections are scheduled for September 22. The coalition of the SPD, Greens and FDP are nervously anticipating this vote as the German population is increasingly demanding new blood in the halls of power. If early nationwide elections were to be held today, current polling shows they would no longer get a majority. The victors would be their competitors the AfD and the Conservative Union of the Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian counterparts, the Christian Social Union (CSU). The Union, which comprises the largest opposition bloc in the Bundestag, has long called for the government to step down. Therefore, the SPD will be campaigning extra hard leading up to election day, because the vote will be crucial for them. The party has led the government in Brandenburg since 1990.

“I expect that everyone will make even more of an effort than ever before,” said SPD co-leader Lars Klingbeil on Sunday evening in Berlin. The party needed to work together to win back votes, he said. “Everyone now needs to play their part so that things improve.” In the event that Brandenburg’s state premier of 11 years, Dietmar Woidke, fails to be reelected, this could set in motion some serious power moves in the country. There is even the possibility that Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who polls higher than Scholz among Germans, could become the chancellor candidate for the federal election in September 2025. Will the coalition government last that long? That’s a question many Germans are anxiously pondering today amid the rise of far-right ideology, which is beginning to reverberate across the country. Whether that will turn into a political earthquake remains to be seen.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

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Vaccines for Guinea Pigs

Nov 252020
 
 November 25, 2020  Posted by at 6:41 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  17 Responses »


Willem de Kooning Door to the river 1960

 

 

While I’m trying to read my way into the world of vaccines, not my field at all, I think the logical/philosophical implications should be clear: the model for doing medicine in a global pandemic must of necessity be global cooperation. But we apparently are not capable of that (anymore). Because the pandemic must be mined for profit.

Not so much for the AstraZenaca/Oxford vaccine, which is produced in a not-for-profit capacity, or the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, but certainly for the Pfizer and Moderna ones. We should just refuse those, but we’re -told we are- desperate, and they know it.

So it’s politics and profit that determine the world of vaccines. What a sorrowful state of affairs. And that’s not even the worst of it. Far from it. With vaccines -that we know of- being developed in Cuba (4x), China, Russia (2x), West (multiple), etc., maybe we can have the luxury of choosing the ones that do the least harm?

Well, there’s a trap door hidden somewhere in there. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines use a whole new (revolutionary!) technique to produce vaccines. Some people even refuse to call them vaccines because of this. Vaccines as we -used to- know them were based on taking a harmless strand of a virus/bacteria and using it to urge your immune system to produce antibodies.

mRNA (messengerRNA) is very different. Here, it’s a synthetic, artificial entity designed to be injected into your cells to provoke certain reactions. And in the case of the Pfizer/Moderna vaccines, it’s basically entirely untested.

They intend to ship out billions of doses of their vaccines, which would essentially create billions of human guinea pigs. The risk is not so much short term, the only thing they would have to provide evidence for, it’s long term, for which they do not. What is that risk? We don’t know, it’s never been tested.

The problem seems obvious: once more people begin to understand this, more people will refuse to be inoculated with these “vaccines”. But then “authorities” will demand you take them to fly/move/just go outside? I don’t see it. What I see is human guinea pigs. And why, if there are other non-mRNA vaccines about to come forward? Money will cure the pandemic? The South China Morning Post had this today:

Pfizer-BioNTech Says Final Analysis Shows Vaccine 95% Effective

A major milestone in the race for a vaccine to counter Covid-19 was reached on Wednesday, when the first vaccine developers to complete phase 3 trials announced results in what has been the fastest vaccine development in history.[..]

Getting enough doses out to the world will take time, coordination and infrastructure. Pfizer and BioNTech have said they could produce 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021. Several hundred million doses are already booked by major economies like the US and EU. Each immunisation requires two doses and there is an additional hurdle – they need to be transported and stored at minus 70 degrees Celsius (minus 94 Fahrenheit). All told, leading vaccine makers have projected that some 16 billion doses could be made next year..

Pfizer and BioNTech announced results after their trial reached a planned end point of 170 infections of Covid-19 among their nearly 44,000 participants. Of the cases, 162 were observed in the placebo group, while there were eight cases among those who had received the vaccine candidate, BNT162b2. The efficacy rate of 95 per cent was consistent across age, gender, race and ethnicity demographics, the companies said. Notably, the observed efficacy for adults over 65 years of age was over 94 per cent, an important marker for a group whose Covid-19 mortality rate far exceeds younger age groups.

But that makes no mention of the development method, or the risks involved. Which could be huge. I mean, it’s fine to say we need a lot of vaccine doses, and fast, but with AstraZeneca promising 2 billion in 2021, and Russia 1 billion, and China 1 billion or so as well, what exactly is the risk/reward ratio here? Why splurge into mRNA vaccines if you don’t have to? Is it just profit driven? When so many people are dying?

 

Here’s a bit from an Automatic Earth comments section yesterday. Commenter “upstateNYer” said:

I’m not yet clear on how “the scientists” made sure this mRNA hijacker will quit forcing my cells to produce stuff once its demands are met. Does anyone here with medical knowledge understand how it’s guaranteed that the mRNA strands don’t get just a bit power hungry and take over more than initially agreed upon?

In reaction to which, commenter Doc Robinson cited a Jerusalem Post article from November 17:

Could mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines Be Dangerous In The Long Term?

[..] the fact remains that if Pfizer succeeds – or Moderna, with whom Israel also has a contract – these will be the first-ever messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines brought to market for human patients. In order to receive Food and Drug Administration approval, the companies will have to prove there are no immediate or short-term negative health effects from taking the vaccines. But when the world begins inoculating itself with these completely new and revolutionary vaccines, it will know virtually nothing about their long-term effects.


When Moderna was just finishing its Phase I trial, The Independent wrote about the vaccine and described it this way: “It uses a sequence of genetic RNA material produced in a lab that, when injected into your body, must invade your cells and hijack your cells’ protein-making machinery called ribosomes to produce the viral components that subsequently train your immune system to fight the virus.”

Doc Robinson on the potential risks:

1. the bio-distribution and persistence of the induced immunogen expression
[spreading throughout the body and lasting longer than intended]

2. possible development of auto-reactive antibodies
[potentially leading to auto-immune conditions]

3. toxic effects of any non-native nucleotides and delivery system components.
[such as from nanoparticles and potential allergens like polyethylene glycol (PEG)]

“There is a race to get the public vaccinated, so we are willing to take more risks… But he acknowledged that there are unique and unknown risks to messenger RNA vaccines, including local and systemic inflammatory responses that could lead to autoimmune conditions.


An article published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a division of the National Institutes of Health, said other risks include the bio-distribution and persistence of the induced immunogen expression; possible development of auto-reactive antibodies; and toxic effects of any non-native nucleotides and delivery system components.

And then there was this Reuters article from October 29:

Doc Robinson:

The vaccines being developed by Russia, J&J and CanSino use a human adenovirus platform, which is a proven technology used in Ebola vaccines and cancer treatments. The other frontrunners are “based on new, largely unproven technology platforms designed to produce vaccines at speed.” Other vaccine candidates using more conventional approaches won’t have late-stage trial results until sometime in 2021. I am going to avoid mRNA vaccines like the plague, and wait and see whether the conventional approaches produce anything with a good track record and minimal risk.

Next Crop of COVID-19 Vaccine Developers Take More Traditional Route

Many leading candidates now in final-stage testing are based on new, largely unproven technology platforms designed to produce vaccines at speed. They include messenger RNA (mRNA) technology used by Moderna Inc and Pfizer Inc with partner BioNTech SE, and inactivated cold virus platforms used by Oxford University/AstraZeneca Plc, Johnson & Johnson and CanSino Biologics, whose vaccine has been approved for military use in China.

Merck & Co in September started testing a COVID-19 vaccine based on a weakened measles virus that delivers genes from the new coronavirus into the body to stimulate an immune response to the coronavirus. Of these, only the technology offered by J&J and CanSino that use [human] cold viruses as vectors to deliver coronavirus genetic material have ever produced a licensed vaccine – for Ebola. [The Russian vaccine also uses this technology.]

The next set of candidates – with late-stage trial results expected in the first half of 2021 – are heavily skewed toward approaches that have produced successful vaccines. Conventional methods include using a killed or inactivated version of the pathogen that causes a disease to provoke an immune response, such as those used to make flu, polio and rabies vaccines. Also more common are protein-based vaccines that use purified pieces of the virus to spur an immune response. Vaccines against whooping cough, or pertussis, and shingles employ this approach.

I don’t know about you, but this scares the heebees out of me. If given the choice, I’d much rather not be a guinea pig for some Big Pharma experiment. There have been in our past very succesful vaccines, and I would maybe list penicilline in that list, but certainly Jonas Salk’s 1955 polio vaccine, off which nobody got rich, and it feels just completely crazy to now exploit a pandemic for profit. It’s just wrong.

Maybe COVID19 is not our biggest problem? Maybe our own mindset is? If we can no longer work with Russia and China on global issues, but we instead turn to large corporations to solve them for us for profit, we have already conceded defeat? Our own defeat?!

I don’t like the smell of this. Be careful out there. Don’t volunteer to be a human guinea pig just so you can fly a plane, or walk outside.

 

 

 

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Obama Has A Big Fat Greek Finger

May 192015
 
 May 19, 2015  Posted by at 7:38 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Harris&Ewing Horse and Motor Oil, Washington, DC 1918

Will this Greek stuff ever stop? Probably, but don’t hold your breath. I was reading up on China, but that will have to wait till tomorrow. A friend just sent me a Sputnik story -they’re a Russian news channel, so they can’t be trusted, right?!- that adds more juice to the Syriza vs troika tale. And whaddaya know, the king of Greece leaks, Paul Mason at Channel 4, is involved once again.

Let’s do Mason first. He’s in Athens and, wait for it, he scored another leak. But not a direct leak to Mason; this one concerns a European Commission document leaked to Greek newspaper To Vima. There are some useful numbers here. Mason:

Greece: Europe’s Last-Ditch Effort To Keep It In Euro?

According to To Vima, the EU commission boss (Juncker, ed.) has offered Greece a deal that delays the harshest austerity for two years, and releases €5bn of bailout money to help fill the gaps in the Greek budget. To get the money Greece has to:

• Run a primary surplus of 0.75% of GDP – much lower than the previous demands from the ECB and IMF. And a surplus of 2% of GDP in 2016.

• This rises to 3.5% for both of the next years, but would have to be seen as notional – as committing to anything in 2018 barely matters when you are three weeks from default.

• Greece has to raise VAT to 18% – with 15% for card transactions. This cleverly forces tax evaders into the formal economy by setting a relatively low rate.

I was wondering why I saw two different numbers being reported, but this makes sense. As much as I am suspicious of the war on cash issue as well, we must be aware that using cash to avoid taxes is a huge issue in Greece, and Syriza has do to something about that. I’m guessing there’s a similar difference for the lower VAT rate, 6.5% vs 9.5%.

• Greece gets its way on labour market reform, which will be done using “ILO best practice”. But it has to keep an unpopular property tax called ENFIA and it has to reduce pension entitlements for public sector workers.

This may jeopardize the whole thing no matter how much water Juncker is putting into the wine. But Tsipras may find a way, provided any changes are pushed far enough into the future.

The obvious sticking point is the IMF. As I reported on Saturday, the IMF – one of Greece’s major creditors – has rules that prevent the sign-off of a “quick and dirty” settlement, such as the one Jean-Claude Juncker is offering. The debt has to be judged sustainable – yet the Juncker proposal puts off a long-term deal until October.

Greek government insiders were already worried that the IMF was going to walk away – asking the EU to take over the next bailout of Greece. The Juncker document acknowledges this problem and hints that the Greek debt will have to be taken over solely under the EFSF fund.

I don’t know that Syriza was worried about the IMF leaving the table, as long as the EU is still there.

It may still be too austere for Syriza’s left to accept – meaning Alexis Tsipras’ government could not get it through parliament, and that there may have to be new elections.

That is a possibility. The Syriza meeting I wrote about last night is happening as I write this, 3pm EDT. But the left side will also want to keep its powder dry if Tsipras can convince them he’s really close.

Beyond the usual left wingers, people I’ve found rigidly loyal to the party’s line were saying “if we surrender I am leaving”. But the leaked offer at the same time is way more generous than any proposal previously considered by the ECB and the German Finance Minister Schauble. If the Germans veto it, then it leaves Alexis Tsipras with nothing palatable to sell his own voters. A German veto would, if it came to a euro exit referendum, probably play well for those advocating a “controlled exit”. Greeks would no longer be seen as walking away from the euro, since the commission had offered them a compromise – but from a Europe where the commission has no power, and only the voters of Germany get their way.

Mason obviously gets confused in that last bit, but that’s alright. German veto, controlled exit, German voters, that’s all just opinion making. And not all reporters are equally good at opinions.

But this is just the warm up. The juice comes from the Sputnik piece. Turns out, the US has gotten involved. And they want peace and quiet in their own back yard while they’re wreaking havoc anywhere from Kiev to Ramadi to Aden. Yes, it’s about “Greece’s geopolitical value as a NATO outpost”. And Greek ports frequented by US oil tankers.

US Pressures EU via IMF Over Greece’s Permanence in the Euro

The EU is under increasing American pressure via the IMF to bail out Greece, as Grexit has become anathema to Washington, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (DWN) reports. DWN quoted a recent article in the New York Times stating that: “Even as Greece’s European neighbors are focused on the country’s ability to repay its debts, the United States is intent on addressing Greece’s geopolitical value as a NATO outpost at the southern tip of the Balkans and as an important gateway for energy from Central Asia.” Hence the dispute is not between Greece and the EU, but between the EU and the US, added DWN. It all started with a memo dated May 14 that the IMF leaked to Paul Mason of Channel Four.

The memo was apparently leaked to put pressure on the EU in the run-up to the gathering of European leaders in Riga for the Eastern Partnership Summit on 21-22 May. Either a deal is reached then, or Greece will default a couple of weeks later. [..] Hidden in the IMF memo, however, is a nasty surprise for the still unaware European, and especially German, taxpayer. According to DWN, the US-dominated IMF is trying to pass on its credit risks to the EU via the rescue mechanism ESM (European Stability Mechanism).

Here is the IMF memo again: “While staff emphasized they are not pushing the European partners to consider debt relief, at the same time staff noted the numbers need to add up. In particular, it was noted there is an inverse relationship between reforms and sustainability.”

I forgot to ask the question yesterday in The IMF Leaks Greece, but now I see it again, I’m still puzzled. “..an inverse relationship between reforms and sustainability”, does that mean the more reforms, the less sustainability? Fewer reforms, more sustainability? It would be way less funny if it didn’t ring so true.

According to Paul Mason of Channel Four: “This translates as: the more austerity the Europeans demand, the bigger the chance that Greece defaults on its debts.” Indeed the IMF is not content with so-called “quick and dirty” solutions favored by the EU. Which is sensible enough, giving the EU’s attitude to just buy time and delay real solutions. The problem is who foots the bill. We are talking of IMF own credit risks with Greece, after all. And yet, the IMF memo mentioned “debt relief” in connection to “the European partners”. So, just as with sanctions on Russia, the US decides, the EU pays.

That’s not a bad find at all.

Yesterday, the EU hit back by leaking its own – strictly confidential, of course – memo to the Greek newspaper Vima. The EU memo contains the European Commission’s proposal to keep Greece afloat — and in the Eurozone. Clearly the US have succeeded in persuading the EU that Grexit is a no-go. The show must go on and here is how — the harshest austerity measures will be delayed for two years, and $5.6 billion (€5bn) of bailout money provided to help finance the Greek budget.

In case you weren’t paying attention, that’s just about exactly what Syriza has been asking for.

As the NYT has written: “European and international lenders continue to hold back on releasing $8.1 billion (€7.2bn) in funds from a bailout program, demanding economic overhauls in Greece that the Tsipras government has so far been reluctant to carry out.” Now the EU has been persuaded to put up at least $5.6 billion (€5bn). “To get the money,” – explains again Mason, quoting Vima – “Greece has to run a primary surplus of 0.75% of GDP – much lower than the previous demands from the ECB and IMF. And a surplus of 2% of GDP in 2016. “This rises to 3.5% for both of the next years, but would have to be seen as notional — as committing to anything in 2018 barely matters when you are three weeks from default.”

Varoufakis exonerated indeed.

As for the labor market, a contentious point between the IMF and Greece, the EU will demand no reforms. But public sector workers’ pensions, another contentious point, will have to be reduced. What the above plan amounts to, however, is precisely what the IMF calls “quick and dirty solutions”.

But who controls the IMF?

The EU memo hence, is hardly the latest chapter of the “save Greece saga”, but by now we can be confident that, one way or the other, quick and dirty or with EU-footed “debt relief”, Greece will be offered to remain in the Eurozone. Will it accept? It is not just a financial decision. It is a highly political, almost civilization one. To remain in the Eurozone means to stay under Brussels and Washington. To exit, might open up other opportunities. Greece has indeed been invited by Russia to join the New Development Bank (NDB). Whether Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will want, or even be able to, sell the EU deal to his voters and backbenches remains to be seen.

Amen.

In a veritable, last minute flinger flick, Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis said last night that the referendum will be on Grexit, not on any deal, be they IMF or EU sponsored. As for Washington’s stance, DWN quoted sources in the financial scene: “The USA will not want to hear any discussions about a Grexit nor will any hard negotiations between EU-creditors and Greece be allowed.” So, it really is up to the people of Greece.

Amen again. We all got the picture now?