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Debt Rattle February 27 2025

Feb 272025
 
 February 27, 2025  Posted by at 10:57 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  45 Responses »


El Greco La Pietà c1575

 

• US Relations With Russia Promise Rollback To Pre-Gorbachev Period (Krutikov)
• America as Republic, not as Empire (Alastair Crooke)
• US To Impose Blanket 25% Tariffs On EU – Trump (RT))
• US Can No Longer Subsidize NATO – Rubio (RT)
• Trump Says US Could Lift Russia Sanctions (RT)
• EU Trying To Block Ukraine Peace – Lavrov (RT)
• Lavrov Calls Out Europe’s Peacekeeper Plan As Ploy to Rearm Kiev (Sp.)
• Russian, US Diplomats To Meet In Istanbul On February 27 (TASS)
• Zelensky Now With Only The Dictatorship In London To Support Him (Jay)
• Ukraine Can Forget About NATO, Says Trump (ZH)
• Ukraine Should Get As Much Land ‘As Possible’ – Trump (RT)
• Most Ukrainians Abroad Won’t Come Home – Unity Minister (RT)
• Federal Government Can’t Comply With Judge’s Order To Unfreeze Funds (ET)
• Rubio Cancels EU’s Kallas At Last Minute (RT)
• NATO-Skeptic Romanian Presidential Candidate Arrested (RT)
• Tulsi Gabbard Labels CNN ‘Propaganda Arm’ Of Spies (RT)
• AG Pam Bondi Announces Thursday Release of Epstein Files (ZH)
• Trump Gaza VIDEO With Bearded Belly Dancers Sparks Outcry (RT)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1894796332206039412

Press

Paper ballot

Bongino

ComeyKash

Ron Paul

 

 

 

 

It’s been a busy first 5 weeks of the Trump team. But every single day it feels again like we are just beginning.

John Helmer posts a translation of a piece by Yevgeny Krutikov, which describes the US withdrawing its troops from Europe pretty much entirely, or at least from those parts added after 1997. Let Europe take care of Europe. Problem is, it can’t. It’s pretty much broke, and it’s hopelessly divided. It needs its own Trump and Musk, but none are in sight. I guess we must hope for Brusssels to implode sooner rather than later. But that might take pitchforks.

John Helmer: “An essay by Yevgeny Krutikov, published this week in Vzglyad, the Kremlin-funded security analysis platform, suggests senior officials at the Security Council believe in the possibility of arms withdrawal from the current battlefield and of military deconfliction with Russia – without attempting the impossible, the dismantling of the NATO membership to the 1997 cutoff. At its simplest, this would mean the withdrawal of American troops, long-range missiles and nuclear ordnance (bombs, missile warheads, targeting systems) to the lines of 1997. This would leave in place NATO security guarantees for the post-1997 member states and their territories, combined with Russian non-aggression guarantees.”

• US Relations With Russia Promise Rollback To Pre-Gorbachev Period (Krutikov)

The United States is preparing to eliminate its military presence in Europe, including Poland, the Baltic states and Kosovo, in order to normalize relations with Russia. At first, the news about this in the European media has looked like fakes, but now it appears too logical to ignore them. Is this a bluff or a real prospect of “detente”? Citing an intelligence source in an Eastern European country, Bild claims that the United States is preparing to withdraw troops from Europe. More precisely, from those bases and positions which appeared there after the expansion of NATO to the east. “According to our information, we are talking about the Russian president’s demand for 2021, that is, the withdrawal of American troops from all NATO countries that joined the alliance after 1990,” the German magazine writes. And it wants to believe this.

The facilities from which the Americans are not discussing withdrawal are the bases in Ramstein, Germany, and the United Kingdom, which existed before the collapse of the USSR. But the largest American base in Europe after Ramstein, the Kosovo Bondsteel, is allegedly preparing for liquidation, and the Italian command of the peacekeeping forces in Kosovo (KFOR) inherits its infrastructure. Currently, American military personnel (just over 600 people) in Bondsteel are not part of KFOR, this is a purely American position. In the near-sensational Bild article, it’s not so much the detail that matters as the message. This is the first (!) attempt to link President Trump’s rhetoric and plans with the creation of a new security configuration in Europe that would take into account Russia’s interests.


Map of US forces and their bases in Europe, Jan 2022

Trump himself has been talking about reducing the American military presence in Europe all the time – this has been one of his narratives since his inauguration, interspersed with demands for Europeans to “defend themselves on their own” — for example, to increase their own military spending and bring their armies to a combat-ready state. For now, threats to withdraw the United States from NATO should be regarded as deceitful and frivolous. However, events are developing at such a pace that everything seems possible. This includes the rollback of the US military presence in Europe to the “basic settings” of the pre-Gorbachev period. If the White House is really ready to discuss this with Moscow as part of the process of restoring normal relations between Russia and the United States, this is a truly revolutionary event for American foreign policy. In the light of such normalization, any other pales by comparison, including Trump’s decree that the United States now recognizes only two genders – male and female.

The simultaneous withdrawal of all American troops from Eastern Europe is a “horror story” that can be used for a variety of purposes: from attempts to influence the election campaign in Germany to fueling anti–Russian sentiment. And this “horror story” is being launched against the background of unprecedentedly harsh statements by the US authorities regarding Europe, of which the most memorable is the cavalier speech by Vice President J. D. Vance at the Munich Security Conference. In this context, it is easy to believe the panicky rumours that the United States is abandoning Europe to its fate. For the last month, Europeans have been living uncomfortably under the “American umbrella.” But the fact is that the Italian military in Kosovo are indeed showing strange activity around Bondsteel.


Left: the US Bondsteel base in Kosovo; right, red dot marks the base location on the map.

Serbian sources also confirm the possible transfer of the base under the control of KFOR, which automatically means that the Americans will leave there. The Serbs, of course, are happy; when they are happy, the information coming from them should also be treated with reasonable skepticism. That is, something is definitely afoot in Kosovo, but it is not yet clear what exactly, and in what broader context this idea should be assessed. It is noteworthy that the Bild source referred to a certain demand of Vladimir Putin from 2021. Most likely, this refers to the famous declaration of the Russian Foreign Ministry dated December 2021. No one has canceled or disavowed this document, and in theory it can indeed be on the negotiating table between the Russian Federation and the United States as a certain opening of Moscow’s diplomatic position.

Smolenskaya Square [location of the Russian Foreign Ministry comparable to Foggy Bottom for the US State Department] unequivocally claims that negotiations in Riyadh are underway not only around the Ukrainian issue, but also about the normalization or, if you want, reformatting of bilateral relations. This is not a “conference on Ukraine,” but Russian-American talks about everything. Specifically, the Istanbul agreements may become the basis for negotiations on Ukraine, but in a broader context, we really need to talk about creating a configuration of continental security that would take into account Russia’s interests. The main thing here is to take into account the threats posed to the Russian Federation by the current security organization in Europe, which has developed after the uncontrolled expansion of NATO to the east.

The problem is not only attempts to draw Ukraine or Georgia into the alliance – Trump himself calls this “involvement” a mistake which has worsened the situation on the continent. In a broader context, other examples of NATO expansion have posed a threat to the Russian Federation. The current borders and configuration of the alliance cannot be the basis for lasting peace for many years. Roughly speaking, no one feels safe right now, and the source of these worries was and remains NATO as an outdated and decaying system. In the Smolenskaya Square declaration of December 2021, the first paragraph states that the Russian Federation and the United States should act on the basis of the principles of “indivisible and equal security, without prejudice to each other’s security.” Further, this basic principle is specified in slightly less general terms, but, in fact, this is a proposal to take into account the security threats to the Russian Federation that stem from the expansion of NATO to the east.

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“Europe’s “sound and fury” after jaw-dropping pivots in U.S. policy..”

“..the ‘blitzkrieg’ was “exceptionally well-planned” and had been discussed in Trump circles since late 2020..”

“That the U.S. would in essence leave Europe to their own delusions would be a calamitous event for the Brussels technocracy.”

• America as Republic, not as Empire (Alastair Crooke)

The bits are falling into a distinct pattern – a pre-prepared pattern. Defence Secretary Hegseth at the Munich Security Conference gave us four ‘noes’: No to Ukraine in NATO; No to a return to pre-2014 borders; No to ‘Article 5’ peacekeeper backstops, and ‘No’ to U.S. troops in Ukraine. And in a final flourish, he added that U.S. troops in Europe are not ‘forever’ – and even placed a question mark over the continuity of NATO. Pretty plain speaking! The U.S. clearly is cutting away from Ukraine. And they intend to normalise relations with Russia. Then, Vice-President Vance threw his fire cracker amongst the gathered Euro-élites. He said that the élites had retreated from “shared” democratic values; they were overly reliant on repressing and censoring their peoples (prone to locking them up); and, above all, he excoriated the European Cordon Sanitaire (‘firewall’) by which European parties outside the Centre-Left are deemed non-grata politically: It’s a fake ‘threat’, he suggested.

Of what are you really so frightened? Have you so little confidence in your ‘democracy’? The U.S., he implied, will no longer support Europe if it continues to suppress political constituencies, arrest citizens for speech offenses, and particularly cancel elections as was done recently in Romania. “If you’re running in fear of your own voters”, Vance said, “there is nothing America can do for you”. Ouch! Vance had hit them where it hurts. It is difficult to say what specifically most triggered the catatonic European breakdown: Was it the fear of the U.S. and Russia joining together as a major power nexus – thus stripping Europe from ever again being able glide along on the back of American power, through the specious notion that any European state must have exceptional access to the Washington ‘ear’? Or was it the ending of the Ukraine/Zelensky cult which was so prized amongst the Euro-élite as the ‘glue’ around which a faux European unity and identity could be enforced? Both probably contributed to the fury.

That the U.S. would in essence leave Europe to their own delusions would be a calamitous event for the Brussels technocracy. Many may lazily assume that the U.S. double act at Munich was just another example of the well-known Trumpian fondness for dropping ‘wacky’ initiatives intended to both shock and kickover frozen paradigms. The Munich speeches did exactly that all right! Yet that does not make them accidental; but rather parts that fit into a bigger picture. It is clear now that the Trump blitzkrieg across the American Administrative State could not have been mounted unless carefully pre-planned and prepared over the last four years. Trump’s flurry of Presidential Executive Orders at the outset of his Presidency were not whimsical. Leading U.S. constitutional lawyer, Jonathan Turley, and other lawyers say that the Orders were well drafted legally and with the clear understanding that legal challenges would ensue. What’s more, that Trump Team welcome those challenges.

What is going on? The newly confirmed head of the Office of Budget Management (OBM), Russ Vought, says his Office will become the “on/off switch” for all Executive expenditure under the new Executive Orders. Vought calls the resulting whirlpool, the application of Constitutional radicalism. And Trump has now issued the Executive Order that reinstates the primacy of the Executive as the controlling mechanism of government. Vought, who was in OBM in Trump 01, is carefully selecting the ground for all-out financial war on the Deep State. It will be fought out firstly at the Supreme Court – which the Trump Team expect confidently to win (Trump has the 6-3 conservative majority). The new régime will then be applied across all agencies and departments of state. Expect shrieks of pain. The point here is that the Administrative State – aloof from executive control – has taken to itself prerogatives such as immunity to dismissal and the self-awarded authority to shape policy – creating a dual state system, run by unelected technocrats, which, when implanted in departments such as Justice and the Pentagon, have evolved into the American Deep State.

Article Two of the Constitution however, says very bluntly: Executive power shall be vested in the U.S. President (with no ifs or buts at all.) Trump intends for his Administration to recover that lost Executive power. It was, in fact, lost long ago. Trump is re-claiming too, the Executive’s right to dismiss ‘servants of the State’, and to ‘switch off’ wasteful expenditure at his discretion, as part of a unitary executive prerequisite. Of course, the Administrative State is fighting back. Turley’s article is headlined: They Are Taking Away Everything We Have: Democrats and Unions Launch Existential Fight. Their aim has been to cripple the Trump initiative through using politicised judges to issue restraint orders. Many mainstream lawyers believe Trump’s Unitary Executive claim to be illegal. The question is whether Congress can stand up Agencies designed to act independently of the President; and how does that square with the separation of powers and Article Two that vests unqualified executive power with one sole elected official – the U.S. President.

How did the Democrats not see this coming? Lawyer Robert Barnes essentially says that the ‘blitzkrieg’ was “exceptionally well-planned” and had been discussed in Trump circles since late 2020. The latter team had emerged from within a generational and cultural shift in the U.S.. This latter had given rise to a Libertarian/Populist wing with working class roots who often had served in the military, yet had come to despise the Neo-con lies (especially those of 9/11) that brought endless wars. They were animated more by the old John Adams adage that ‘America should not go abroad in search of monsters to slay’.

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“..asked [..] whether EU countries would retaliate in-kind to any US tariffs, Trump replied: “They can’t, I mean they can try, but they can’t.”

• US To Impose Blanket 25% Tariffs On EU – Trump (RT))

US President Donald Trump has claimed that the EU was designed to weaken America and has issued new threats of 25% tariffs on all imports from the bloc. Trump made the remarks on Wednesday at the White House during his first Cabinet meeting of his second term as president. The trade row between the US and the EU has been escalating since Trump announced plans to introduce a wide range of import duties in an effort to tackle what he describes as a trade imbalance. “Look, let’s be honest, the European Union was formed in order to screw the United States, that’s the purpose of it,” Trump told the meeting. “And they’ve done a good job of it. But now I’m president.” He reiterated that his administration plans to impose tariffs on EU imports “very soon.”

“It will be 25%, generally speaking, and that will be on cars and all other things,” Trump said, describing the EU as “a different case than Canada… they’ve really taken advantage of us in a different way.” The US and EU similarly found themselves locked in a trade dispute during Trump’s first term, when he introduced tariffs of 25% on European steel imports and 10% on aluminum, to which the EU responded with countermeasures. Trump also threatened tariffs on European cars, though those never came to pass. In total, the two sides exchanged duties on goods worth over $10 billion. As part of his current tariff push, Trump has imposed 25% duties on all steel and aluminum imports from the EU starting March 4, adding to existing tariffs. He has also directed Howard Lutnick, his nominee for US trade representative and commerce secretary, to propose new levies on a country-by-country basis by April 1 in a bid to rebalance trade.

Since taking office on January 20, Trump has slapped a 25% tariff on all imports from Mexico and Canada and an additional 10% on Chinese goods, citing concerns over illegal immigration and drug trafficking. However, following talks with the Mexican and Canadian leaders, those tariffs have been postponed for 30 days after both nations agreed to bolster border security. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen condemned the latest US tariffs, expressing “deep regret” over the decision. She said earlier this month that the levies on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered.” Asked on Wednesday, whether EU countries would retaliate in-kind to any US tariffs, Trump replied: “They can’t, I mean they can try, but they can’t.”

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Neither can Europe.

• US Can No Longer Subsidize NATO – Rubio (RT)

Washington can no longer allow its wealthy Western European NATO allies to take advantage of US taxpayers to fund their defense budgets, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News on Wednesday. The top US diplomat was responding to comments by Friedrich Merz, whose Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won last week’s elections in Germany. Merz claimed that the US-led military bloc is in “jeopardy” due to Washington’s “indifference” toward Europe’s security. “NATO is not in jeopardy,” Rubio said. “The only thing that puts NATO in jeopardy is the fact that we have NATO allies who barely have militaries or whose militaries are not very capable because they’ve spent 40 years not spending any money on it.” The current US administration considers it unfair that some wealthy Western European member states only spend 1% to 1.5% of their GDP on defense, Rubio added.

“We just can’t keep subsidizing that,” he stressed. “These are rich countries, especially in Western Europe. They have plenty of money. They should be investing that in their national security, and they’re not.” US President Donald Trump has argued that NATO’s current defense spending target of 2% of GDP per year – already a challenge for a number of member states – is too low and should be raised to 5%. During his reelection campaign, Trump said he would “absolutely” consider leaving the bloc if members do not “pay their bills.” The US allocates around 3.4% of GDP to military expenditures, according to a 2023 estimate by the World Bank. In contrast, European NATO members spend an average of 1.9%, less than 60% of the US’ spending, Reuters reported earlier this month, citing S&P Global.

Meeting Trump’s proposed 5% military spending goal would cause France and Germany’s budget deficits to rise to 4.6% and 8.9% in 2025, respectively, compared to the current projections of 1.7% and 6%, S&P estimated. Since 2022, the US and its allies have provided more than $258 billion in aid to Ukraine, including over $134 billion in military assistance, according to Germany’s Kiel Institute. Western nations have depleted their military stockpiles and struggled to increase arms production due to deindustrialization, offshore manufacturing, green policies, and sanctions on Russian energy.

Trump claims that Washington spent up to $350 billion on Ukraine under the administration of his predecessor, Joe Biden, and has vowed to recover this money. Moscow has warned that NATO’s military aid to Ukraine effectively makes member states parties to the conflict. Trump is the first and only Western leader to acknowledge that one of the root causes of the Ukraine conflict was “the previous administration’s ‘pushy’ policy of dragging Ukraine into NATO,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said last week.

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As Europe adopts new sanctions…

• Trump Says US Could Lift Russia Sanctions (RT)

The US could lift sanctions against Russia “at some point” during the Ukraine peace negotiations, President Donald Trump indicated on Tuesday. He noted, however, that no decision has been made so far. The US and other Western nations have placed an unprecedented number of economic restrictions on Russia since the Ukraine conflict escalated in 2022. Moscow considers the sanctions illegal and has consistently demanded their removal. “No, we haven’t lifted any sanctions on anybody… I guess it will be at some point, but right now we haven’t agreed to lift sanctions on anybody,” Trump said at a press briefing, responding to a question on whether the issue has been part of Russia-US discussions so far.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently suggested that Western nations will have to consider lifting sanctions on Russia in order to find an “enduring, sustainable” solution to the Ukraine conflict. Speaking after high-level talks between Moscow and Washington in Saudi Arabia last week, he indicated that in order to bring an end to the conflict, “there has to be concessions made by all sides,” including letting go of sanctions policies. Rubio noted, however, that the EU will have to be “at the table” to discuss sanctions relief as well, as it has also imposed restrictive measures targeting Russia. Brussels has indicated it is prepared to pursue an independent sanctions policy regardless of Washington’s stance. EU Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said last week that the bloc has no plans to lift sanctions against Moscow even if the US decides to do so.

Earlier this week, the EU adopted its 16th package of restrictions, largely targeting Russia’s military-industrial complex and energy projects. It also introduced additional measures against alleged sanctions circumvention, including dual-use export restrictions. Moscow has often noted that sanctions have failed to destabilize or isolate it while backfiring on the countries that imposed them. Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week that Western sanctions have inadvertently bolstered Russia’s development. Speaking at the Future Technologies Forum in Moscow, he stated that despite the challenges that Russia was forced to overcome due to the measures, they played a “stimulating role,” prompting closer collaboration between Russia’s domestic businesses and science and bolstering the country’s economic and technological sectors.

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“..Europe’s role in fomenting crises and its reputation in this area, which it has acquired over centuries, remains unchanged..”

• EU Trying To Block Ukraine Peace – Lavrov (RT)

The EU is seeking to derail the Ukraine peace process by pushing the country to continue fighting against Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. Speaking at a press conference in Qatar on Wednesday, Lavrov weighed in on a resolution drafted by the US calling for a “swift end” to the Ukraine conflict, which was approved by the UN Security Council on Monday. The document, which was supported by Russia and China, excluded strong language denouncing Moscow. The resolution also came after US President Donald Trump refused to condemn Russia over the Ukraine conflict while blaming Kiev for failing to prevent the hostilities. The Russian foreign minister said that as soon as the political landscape regarding the conflict began to shift, “Europe immediately tries to undermine this trend, announces new large packages of military aid to Kiev, incites it to continue military actions.”

Lavrov went on to state that “Europe’s role in fomenting crises and its reputation in this area, which it has acquired over centuries, remains unchanged,” adding that the EU’s approach to the conflict is “hopelessly outdated and failing.” Last week, Politico reported that the EU is preparing a military aid package worth at least €6 billion ($6.3 billion) for Ukraine, with the magazine’s sources claiming that it could potentially balloon to €10 billion as the bloc’s members “dig into their inventories to see what they can send.” Meanwhile, Trump said on Tuesday that the US is not currently supplying Ukraine with any defense assistance. Russia has condemned the Western arms shipments to Ukraine, warning that they only prolong the conflict without changing the outcome.

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Who’s going to volunteer to be a Russian target?

• Lavrov Calls Out Europe’s Peacekeeper Plan As Ploy to Rearm Kiev (Sp.)

For Russia, any course of action involving the deployment of European peacekeepers to Ukraine is out of the question, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday. “No, we cannot consider any such options,” Lavrov told reporters after talks in Doha. The approach being imposed by the Europeans, namely France and the UK, is aimed at further fueling the conflict and “pumping Kiev with weapons again”, Russia’s diplomacy chief added. US President Donald Trump stated that he believes the presence of peacekeeping forces in Ukraine is necessary in one form or another, but the format of this mission must be acceptable to all parties. Russia is not blocking negotiations on Ukraine, Lavrov said, emphasizing that the best way to resolve the conflict is to understand its root causes.

“We are waiting for our European colleagues to stop spreading lies that Russia is blocking the negotiations. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly responded to these false claims, pointing out that the Ukrainian leadership, instigated by Europe, refuses to negotiate,” Lavrov told reporters after his visit to Qatar. Lavrov noted that European politicians assert the conflict in Ukraine should be resolved through military means rather than through negotiations. “We believe that the best help from those who sincerely want to help resolve the conflict is to understand its root causes, as [US] President Trump did recently,” Lavrov added. An upcoming Russian-US meeting that will focus on normalizing the operation of embassies will be held on February 27 in Istanbul, Lavrov said.

“We announced that our high-level diplomats and experts, will meet and consider the systemic problems that have accumulated as a result of the previous administration’s illicit activities to create artificial obstacles to the functions of the Russian embassy, to which we naturally reciprocated and also created uncomfortable conditions for the work of the US Embassy in Moscow. Such a meeting will take place tomorrow in Istanbul,” Lavrov told reporters. Based on the outcome of the talks, it will be clear how fast and efficiently both countries can move, the top diplomat added. Israel’s presence in the south of Lebanon and the south of Syria requires constructive solutions which will not violate security of any party, Lavrov said.

“At present, the Israeli armed forces have entered the south of Syria, just as they decided to stay in the south of Lebanon. All this creates a new situation, which demands not simply understanding, but working out some kind of constructive steps, which take into account the security and development interests of all the countries of the region, including, of course, Israel. But these security problems must not be solved by violating the security and development of other [countries],” Russia’s diplomacy chief said at a press conference. Lavrov also said that Russia is deeply concerned about the fact that day by day the Israeli armed forces take steps that are not envisaged in the Hamas-Israel deals and create situations which contradict the agreements and the resolutions of the UN Security Council.

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No more time to wait or waste. There are major problems to be solved..

• Russian, US Diplomats To Meet In Istanbul On February 27 (TASS)

Russian and US diplomats will hold a meeting in Istanbul on February 27 to discuss issues related to the operation of the two countries’ embassies, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced. “Such a meeting will take place in Istanbul tomorrow,” the top Russian diplomat said at a press conference following his visit to Qatar. “We have announced that our diplomats and high-level experts will meet to address the systemic problems that have piled up as a result of the previous [US] administration’s illegitimate activities aimed at creating artificial obstacles for the work of the Russian embassy, to which we clearly responded in kind, also creating uncomfortable conditions for the operation of the US embassy in Moscow,” Lavrov noted.

According to him, the problem of Russia’s frozen assets “has nothing to do with the operation of embassies” because “the asset issue is a state-level one.” Lavrov expects that the Istanbul meeting “will make it clear how capable the parties are of moving forward quickly and effectively.” Earlier, the top Russian diplomat announced that Moscow and Washington had held two rounds of preliminary technical consultations on the issue. Russian and US delegations held talks in Riyadh on February 18, which lasted over four hours. Russia was represented by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Presidential Aide Yury Ushakov, and CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) Kirill Dmitriev. The US delegation consisted of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and Special Envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff.

According to Ushakov, the delegations held a serious talk on all the issues they wanted to discuss, including ways to bring Russian and US positions closer to each other and future consultations on Ukraine. Lavrov described the meeting with Washington officials as very useful. According to him, Russia and the US agreed to make sure that ambassadors to both countries are appointed as soon as possible. Rubio, in turn, said after the talks that the US and Russia had agreed to reestablish embassy staffing. Embassy staff cuts began in both countries after 2014, when Washington adopted a policy aimed at “systemic containment” of Russia.

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“Who could forget Sean Penn giving him his own Oscar, or Ben Stiller chilling with the Ukrainian leader and making small talk? Angelina Jolie is even reported to have been paid 20 million dollars to meet with him..”

• Zelensky Now With Only The Dictatorship In London To Support Him (Jay)

What is the definition of a ‘dictator’? In the days that followed Trump’s social media post calling President Zelensky one, British media seized upon the subject and ran with it for days. Various public figures were asked whether Trump was right to use the word and whether they believed Zelensky was actually one. Two figures from the right, Nigel Farage and Liz Truss both said they thought Trump was both wrong to call him one and that in fact he wasn’t one. This remarkable endearment for Zelensky is really the core of the problem in the west in particular the UK, where its leader Sir Keir Starmer declared that he would be ready to send British troops to Ukraine – a suggestion which was quickly shot down by the elites of Germany and France as preposterous. It’s rare that the giants of the EU put the British government in its place on world affairs but we are living in unprecedented times of sensational stupidity and perhaps ignorance from politicians which we have never seen before.

Farage’s views on the Middle East tell us he is both ignorant of what is happening there and doesn’t have any advisors covering the region. But his views on Ukraine are even more shockingly deranged. Zelensky is a leader who has shut down anything which resembles an ‘opposition’ both politically and media, he has conglomerated all TV stations into one state-owned entity so as to shut down even the slightest criticism or accountability of his own actions, he has had the few dissident voices arrested and thrown into prison, with some predicting that there are thousands of journalists and media workers. Add to that it is rapidly emerging that the level of corruption and embezzlement linked directly to Zelensky is on a scale that even hard line critics in the West could not have even imagined.

In my own investigation in October 2023, where a very angry Ben Wallace insulted me in a WhatsApp interview before blocking me, I outline how the original, more sensational claim that only about a third of all military equipment sent to Ukraine was actually making it to the battlefield was in fact realistic. This analogy was bandied about for some time and was dismissed by Wallace and others like Alecia Kearns MP as nonsense and yet turned out to be more than just realistic but likely. That is to say that 66 percent of what was being sent to Ukraine was being sold on the black market in Libya making Zelensky and his close circle billionaires.

In recent weeks now mainstream journalists and politicians are talking about the arms scandal and it is only a matter of time before we shall see the realities of this. The British government have always turned a blind eye to it, both in Ukraine and further afield. It would cost them nothing to do a study in the Sahel to evaluate how much of the equipment there funding terrorism is coming from the arms bazaars of Tripoli where all of this kit is ending up. I suggested to Wallace that his own government at the time should send some investigators there (Libya) to look at what’s available. I was more or less told to go there myself and do the job for them.

But Zelenksy support structure for so long has been that of a dictator, in particular media. The hundreds of media outlets in Ukraine which were receiving USAID funding is extensive, not to mention the hundreds of civil servants which support him being on the same payroll. If that doesn’t shock Farage and Truss, then consider the same slush fund which paid out around a 100 million dollars to movie stars to go and visit him and fake their adulation, all for the purposes of cheating the humble U.S. taxpayer by raising his profile.

Who could forget Sean Penn giving him his own Oscar, or Ben Stiller chilling with the Ukrainian leader and making small talk? Angelina Jolie is even reported to have been paid 20 million dollars to meet with him but didn’t even manage that and simply mooched about a but in the country before jetting back to the U.S. Of course, the celebrities all dismiss these claims, through the same left-wing woke press which is part of their extended political family. But the question we should be asking ourselves is simply this: if they were not paid, then why won’t they show up now and show support at the precise moment when Zelensky needs it the most? Given that these celebrities supported Biden and are Democrats, this would be the most logical thing for them to do. In reality, the wall of silence is what we see.

Dictators don’t stand over their hired killers and watch their victims in their final moments like Idi Amin did. In reality, they only indicate and hint to the thugs on their payroll what she should do to fix problems. Does Farage and Truss actually believe that dissidents are not rounded up and thrown into jail where they are tortured and in some cases murdered? Now that the vultures are circling over Zelensky and many are wondering how many days in office he has left, more reports are emerging with details of such cases. The story of Gonzalo Lira, the American Chilean blogger whose vlogs were often well-informed and threw a very poor spotlight on Zelensky is a very sad one as he was brutally tortured while in prison and finally died. If the Zelensky cabal can do this to an American citizen, perhaps Farage and Truss will not be too surprised when in the coming weeks we will have the same Damascus prison media moment where it transpires that there are certainly hundreds, possibly thousands of journalists, commentators and political rivals in Ukraine’s prisons.

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“The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States, that’s the purpose of it. And they’ve done a good job of it. But now I’m president.”

• Ukraine Can Forget About NATO, Says Trump (ZH)

Huge and unprecedented words issued by America’s Commander-in-Chief in a press briefing on Thursday… Trump says Ukraine can “forget about” joining NATO: “That is probably the reason why the whole thing started.” Of course, Vice President J.D. Vance earlier this month voiced this point of view of the administration while addressing a gathering of defense leaders in Brussels. But never before has a US president so forcefully voiced that a path to NATO membership simply won’t happen. This also marks the most directly Trump has ever said NATO expansion is a key reason for the tragic war, which has taken hundreds of thousands of lives, having started in the first place. Mainstream media fact-checkers have been out in force, decrying this perspective as ‘Russian propaganda’. But is this really the case?

The head of NATO itself in the recent past said the quiet part out loud and fully admitted that constant NATO expansion to Russia’s doorstep was a central driving factor: “From the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we’ve been told that the issue of NATO expansion is irrelevant to the war, and that anyone bringing it up is, at best, unwittingly parroting Kremlin propaganda, at worst, apologizing for or justifying the war. So it was curious to see NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg earlier this month say explicitly that Russian president Vladimir Putin launched his criminal war as a reaction to the possibility of NATO expanding into Ukraine, and the alliance’s refusal to swear it off — not once or twice, but three separate times.

“President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement,” Stoltenberg told a joint committee meeting of the European Parliament on September 7. “That was what he sent us. And [that] was a pre-condition for not invade [sic] Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.” “He went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite,” Stoltenberg reiterated, referring to the accession of Sweden and Finland into the alliance in response to Putin’s invasion. Their entry, he later insisted, “demonstrates that when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he’s getting the exact opposite.” How much clearer could the then NATO Secretary-General have said it (in the Sept. 2023 comments)?

https://twitter.com/i/status/1706173936025874767

How much clearer could the then NATO Secretary-General have said it (in the Sept. 2023 comments)?Trump also on Wednesday blasted the European Union… “The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States, that’s the purpose of it. And they’ve done a good job of it. But now I’m president.” Among other things, Europe has lately been accused of seeking to thwart Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine, even offering a rival rare earth minerals deal. The Europeans and Ukrainians have been cut out of direct negotiations with Moscow under Rubio.

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Aka very little.

• Ukraine Should Get As Much Land ‘As Possible’ – Trump (RT)

US President Donald Trump has said he wants Ukraine to regain as much territory “as possible” under a potential peace deal with Russia. He claimed that Moscow will have to make concessions, but that the agreement should ultimately represent the best possible outcome for both parties if finalized. Five formerly Ukrainian regions have voted to join Russia since 2014. While Kiev rejects the territorial changes, Moscow views them as final and non-negotiable. Following a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Trump was asked if a peace deal that involved Russia maintaining control over Ukrainian-claimed land could send a message to China detrimental to American interests. ”We’re going to do the best we can to make the best deal we can for both sides,” Trump responded, adding that for Kiev that means “they can get as much back as possible.”

Although an agreement is not guaranteed, Trump expressed hope that it would materialize “for the sake of humanity.” If a resolution is reached, Trump stressed that Ukraine “can forget about” joining NATO as this aspiration lies at the heart of the ongoing conflict. He asserted that Russia will “have to” make concessions as well. Earlier in the day, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov indicated that Moscow would reject a truce that merely freezes the conflict along the current front line, leaving parts of Russian territory under Ukrainian jurisdiction. ”Some propose maintaining the line of engagement – this section is Russian, that one is Ukrainian… That won’t happen, as we have a Constitution reflecting the will of the people,” Lavrov said, referencing the referendums held in the five former Ukrainian regions.

Trump’s approach marks a departure from his predecessor Joe Biden’s strategy of isolating Russia, as he seeks to normalize bilateral relations. Both Moscow and Washington suggest that this shift provides hope for a swift resolution to the Ukraine conflict. Additionally, the Trump administration aims to recover taxpayer funds spent during Biden’s tenure through a forthcoming minerals deal with Kiev, expected to be signed on Friday. The new US administration has declined to offer security guarantees to Ukraine, arguing that the country holds minimal interest for American priorities and that European nations should address the issue instead.

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There’s nothing left to come home to but a crazed dictator and some neo-nazis in a barren landscape.

• Most Ukrainians Abroad Won’t Come Home – Unity Minister (RT)

The majority of Ukrainians who left the country over the past three years will not return to their homeland even after the military conflict ends, Minister of National Unity Aleksey Chernyshov has said, according to local media reports. An estimated over 5 million Ukrainians are still living abroad, three years since the conflict escalated. Kiev wants them back as it seeks to address the country’s imploding demographics, boost conscription and generate human resources for the post-conflict reconstruction. The minister reportedly claimed on Tuesday that 30% of Ukrainians currently abroad are “seriously considering coming back” when the security situation stabilizes, according to Ekonomicheskaya Pravda. “We also clearly understand that a significant portion of Ukrainians will not return,” the national unity minister said. “They have decided to stay where they are. This is not a catastrophe, it must be acknowledged.”

Chernyshov said that Kiev is developing measures to encourage people to return and cited statistics indicating that Ukraine loses 300,000 people annually for reasons unrelated to the conflict. “For post-conflict recovery and doubling Ukraine’s GDP within 10 years, it will be necessary to attract between 3.1 to 4.2 million repatriates and immigrants,” he noted. A study by the Ukrainian think tank Center for Economic Strategy (CES) published last week found that around 5.2 million Ukrainian refugees remain abroad, of which 60% plan to settle outside their homeland. Meanwhile, the share of those considering returning home had dropped to 43% by the end of 2024, compared to 74% in December 2022. The exodus peaked in March 2022, when around 2.5 million people left the country within weeks. Since then, the outflow has slowed, with around 300,000 people departing Ukraine last year, the CES said.

The agency estimates that up to 2.7 million Ukrainians may choose to remain abroad permanently, even after the conflict ends. The majority of refugees are women and children, while Germany and Poland are the most popular destinations, a Eurostat report published earlier this month showed. The report also revealed that the share of adult men fleeing Ukraine has jumped by nearly 10% over the past year amid the massive mobilization campaign. This prolonged emigration could have devastating consequences for Ukraine’s economy. CES projects it could reduce the country’s annual GDP by 5.1% to 7.8%. According to the think tank, the primary reasons Ukrainians are not currently returning home include the ongoing security threats, destroyed housing, low living standards, and difficulties in securing employment in Ukraine.

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Remember Alastair Crooke: “..the Orders were well drafted legally and with the clear understanding that legal challenges would ensue..”

• Federal Government Can’t Comply With Judge’s Order To Unfreeze Funds (ET)

Federal officials told a U.S. judge on Feb. 25 that they could not comply with his order requiring the release of frozen foreign aid within two days. U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali’s order, which gave a deadline of Feb. 26 at 11:59 p.m. ET, would mean paying at least $1.5 billion across some 2,000 outstanding and newly created requests for payment to the U.S. Agency for International Development, the official serving as deputy administrator for the agency said in a court filing. It would also require paying at least $400 million to resolve outstanding payment requests to the State Department, Pete Marocco, the official, said. “These payments cannot be accomplished in the time allotted by the Court and would instead take multiple weeks,” he wrote.

Earlier on Tuesday, Ali, in a hearing with government lawyers and attorneys representing the groups that sued over the freeze, was told that the groups had not yet been paid despite his multiple previous orders, including one on Feb. 13, mandating that the Trump administration unfreeze the foreign assistance. “I’m not sure why I can’t get a straight answer from you on this: Are you aware of an unfreezing of the disbursement of funds for those contracts and agreements that were frozen before Feb. 13,” the Washington-based judge asked Indraneel Sur, the lawyer for the government, during the hearing. “Are you aware of steps taken to actually release those funds?” “I’m not in a position to answer that,” Sur said. It’s the second time a judge has found the Trump administration did not follow a court order. U.S. District Court Judge John McConnell in Rhode Island also found this month that the administration had not fully unfrozen federal grants and loans within the United States after he blocked sweeping plans for a pause on trillions of dollars in government spending.

In the Washington case, plaintiffs recently filed an emergency motion to enforce the judge’s temporary restraining order, saying they’re still owed millions of dollars and that their contracts terminated under Trump’s foreign assistance pause remain terminated. Ali granted the emergency motion during Tuesday’s hearing and ordered the government to comply by Thursday. Marocco’s declaration came with a motion from the government asking the judge to stay his order as a federal appeals court considers overturning it. “Defendants are likely to succeed on appeal from the Court’s order for several reasons,” government lawyers said in the filing. “To start, it is not possible for Defendants to comply,” they said, pointing to Marocco’s declaration. The government has appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

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A subtle hint.

• Rubio Cancels EU’s Kallas At Last Minute (RT)

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has cancelled a meeting with EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas at the last minute “due to scheduling issues,” Euronews reported on Wednesday. Kallas, who is on an official visit to Washington to discuss the Ukraine conflict and new dynamics in transatlantic relations, intends to meet with representatives from the US Congress and Senate, according to her spokesperson cited by the EU’s news network. The bloc’s top diplomat had been scheduled to meet with Rubio on Wednesday, and news agencies had expected images from the bilateral talks, Euronews wrote. However, a spokesperson for the US official told the outlet that the meeting had been cancelled “due to scheduling issues,” adding that Kallas and Rubio “last met during the Munich Security Conference” earlier in February. According to the report, Rubio’s public calendar for February 26 did not list Kallas as an agenda item.

Former Estonian prime minister Kallas has been critical of the new US administration’s handling of the Ukraine conflict, denouncing President Donald Trump’s call with Russian leader Vladimir Putin earlier this month as a form of “appeasement.” She has accused Washington of adopting a “Russian narrative” and argued that Brussels should “support Ukraine right now more than ever.” Kallas also claimed that Moscow emerged as the winner in the recent US-Russia meeting in Saudi Arabia, stressing that any peace deal concerning Ukraine must involve both Europeans and Ukrainians to be effective. Following the Riyadh talks on February 18, Kallas held a phone call with Rubio, later warning, “Russia will try to divide us. Let’s not walk into their traps.” On Monday, while announcing the now-cancelled meeting with Rubio, Kallas stated “I have been very clear that no deal without us, without Ukraine or without Europe will work in practice – and that is for the US, which also needs to work with us.”

An unnamed EU diplomat commented on the canceled meeting for Politico, saying it “seems that the Trump administration doesn’t miss a chance to show that for them the EU is not a player.” On Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry stated that the aggressive stance of Ukraine’s EU backers makes them unfit to participate in the peace process. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov further accused Brussels on Wednesday of attempting to derail peace efforts by encouraging Kiev to continue fighting against Russia. Kallas has recently suggested extending arms deliveries to Ukraine into 2025. The proposed package, worth €10 billion (over $10 billion), has faced resistance from some EU member states and is set for discussion at the March 6 summit of the bloc. Moscow has repeatedly warned against Western arms shipments to Ukraine, arguing that they only prolong the conflict without altering the outcome, while increasing the risk of a direct Russia-NATO confrontation.

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Europe is full of highly unpopular “leaders”. Who target the few that are actually loved.

• NATO-Skeptic Romanian Presidential Candidate Arrested (RT)

Romanian police have arrested Calin Georgescu, the front-runner in last year’s annulled presidential election, and conducted dozens of raids on his supporters and people tied to his campaign, local media reported on Wednesday. A critic of NATO and the EU and an opponent of sending aid to Ukraine, Georgescu made headlines in November last year when he unexpectedly garnered 23% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election in Romania. However, the Constitutional Court annulled the results shortly before the second round, citing intelligence documents alleging ‘irregularities’ in his campaign. Georgescu’s communications team has said on Facebook that he was arrested just as he was about to submit his new candidacy for the presidency.

”The system stopped him in traffic and he was pulled over for questioning at the Prosecutor General’s Office! Where is democracy, where are the partners who must defend democracy,” his team wrote. Prior to his arrest, Georgescu condemned the raids on his supporters in a post on Facebook. “The communist-Bolshevik system continues its odious abuses,” he wrote, accusing the Romanian authorities of trying to “invent evidence to justify the theft of the elections and to do anything to block my new candidacy for the presidency.” The Romanian Prosecutor General’s Office is reportedly investigating Georgescu over allegations of involvement “in a fascist organization and the promotion of controversial ideologies and historical figures in the public space,” G4Media outlet reported, citing sources close to the investigation. According to media reports, police found “weapons, live ammunition, and more than a million dollars hidden in a safe” during the raids.

Following the reports of Georgescu’s arrest, dozens of people gathered in front of the Prosecutor General’s office, chanting his name. The president of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) party, George Simion, said his MPs have also made their way to the Prosecutor General’s office to demand an explanation. Digi24 quoted Simion as saying that he maintains his support for Georgescu and that “until we see undeniable evidence, we suspect that this is political policing.” He added that so far, “not a single piece of evidence” has been presented. Georgescu’s surprise election victory last year and the subsequent annulment over unproven claims of Russian interference in the electoral process sparked controversy in the country. Both conservative and liberal parties have suggested that the establishment parties – the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the center-right National Liberal Party (PNL) – are trying to hold on to power by pulling strings within the Constitutional Court.

The canceled election over alleged ‘Russian meddling’ has also been criticized by US officials. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month, Vice President J.D. Vance suggested that “old entrenched interests” in Romania are “hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation” and “don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might… win an election.” Throughout his election campaign, Georgescu repeatedly insisted on Romania’s geopolitical non-alignment and highlighted national sovereignty and self-sufficiency. While expressing skepticism towards Western influence over the country’s policies and criticizing both NATO and the EU, he stated that Romania would respect its commitments to these organizations, but only “to the extent that they will respect theirs” toward Bucharest. He also vowed to halt Romania’s military aid to Ukraine if elected.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1894722137941749825

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Dismissed/disgruntled/disloyal spies.

• Tulsi Gabbard Labels CNN ‘Propaganda Arm’ Of Spies (RT)

Newly confirmed US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard has accused CNN of acting as a “propaganda arm” for disloyal intelligence agents, calling the network’s report on potential retaliation by dismissed spies an “indirect threat” to President Donald Trump’s administration. As part of Trump’s broader effort to downsize and restructure the federal government, the Central Intelligence Agency has recently offered so-called buyouts to its agents. In a report published on Monday, CNN, citing unnamed sources, claimed that some senior CIA officers were “quietly discussing” how the dismissals “risk creating a group of disgruntled former employees who might be motivated to take what they know to a foreign intelligence service.” “I am curious about how they think this is a good tactic to keep their job,” Gabbard told Fox News on Tuesday.

“They are exposing themselves, essentially, by making this indirect threat – using their propaganda arm, CNN, that they’ve used over and over again – to reveal their hand,” she continued. “Their loyalty is not to America, not to the American people or the Constitution; it is to themselves.” She stressed that these disgruntled employees are “exactly the kinds of people we need to root out, get rid of, so that the patriots who do work in this area, who are committed to our core mission, can actually focus on that.” Gabbard also claimed that many within the intelligence community had reached out to her personally, expressing support for Trump’s efforts to “clean house” and refocus on the core mission of serving the American people.

A former US congresswoman from Hawaii, Gabbard rose to national prominence in 2016 when she resigned as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to endorse Bernie Sanders for president. She later ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, advocating against US military interventions abroad, which she argued are harmful to service members like herself and detrimental to national interests. As tensions with the Democratic Party escalated, Gabbard left the party in 2022. After two years as an independent, she joined the Republican Party and endorsed Donald Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign.

Trump’s nomination of Gabbard for the top intelligence role in November sparked criticism from establishment figures, who labeled her a security risk. Despite the backlash, she was confirmed earlier this month by a 52-48 Senate vote, with only one Republican, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, opposing her appointment. In January, the Senate also confirmed another Trump nominee, John Ratcliffe, as director of the CIA in a 74-25 vote. Ratcliffe, a former Texas congressman and ex-director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, is known for his skepticism of intelligence agencies and his criticism of investigations into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.

CIA

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“..this will make you sick..”

We’ll see a lot of comments on redactions. Pam better be careful.

• AG Pam Bondi Announces Thursday Release of Epstein Files (ZH)

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on Wednesday evening that she’s going to release DOJ files on dead pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. “You said last week that you had the Epstein files on your desk. When can we see them?” asked Fox News’ Jesse Watters. “Jesse, there are well over – this will make you sick, 200 victims. Well over… over 250 actually. So we have to make sure that their identity is protected, and their personal information. But other than that, I think tomorrow Jesse – breaking news right now, you’re going to see some Epstein information being released by my office.” “What kind? Are we going to see who was on the flights? Are we going to see any evidence from what he recorded – because he had all of his homes wired with recording devices,” Watters asked. “What you’re going to see, hopefully tomorrow, is a lot of flight logs, a lot of names, a lot of information… it’s pretty sick what that man did,” Bondi continued.

Epstein, a financier and convicted sex offender was found dead in a New York jail cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. While his death was rules a suicide, he was also good friends with the Clintons and several other high-profile figures such as Bill Gates, Britain’s Prince Andrew, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, former Barclays CEO and ‘Disney princess’ aficionado Jes Staley, Larry Summers, Harvey Weinstein, and former Victoria’s Secret boss Les Wexner. Watters’ question about recordings stems from earlier reporting that the deceased sex trafficker’s homes were wired with recording devices. In late 2019, Jeffrey Epstein victim Maria Farmer alleged that the deceased pedophile had a “media room” on the first floor where high-profile johns were allegedly recorded having sex with women and children.

“So if you’re facing the house, there’s a window on the right that’s barred – that’s the room, the ‘media room’ is what he called it,” Farmer said. “And so there was a door that looked like an invisible door with all this limestone and everything and you push it and you go in and I saw all the cameras.” Maria said: “What it was – was like old televisions basically, like stacked.” “They were monitors inside this cabinet and there were men sitting here and I looked on the cameras and I saw toilet, toilet, bed, bed, toilet, bed. “And I was like I’m never going to use the restroom here and I am never going to sleep here.” -The Sun

The claim was supported in a 2024 lawsuit by two women – Danielle Bensky and Jane Doe 3, who said Epstein employed a sophisticated system involving constant CCTV surveillance within his New York mansion. Bondi’s appearance came hours after the DOJ appeared to give Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) the brush-off, telling her in a Wednesday letter that they are “reviewing your requests and look forward to engaging further to accommodate your oversight and legislative needs.” On the campaign trail, Donald Trump suggested that he would be open to releasing the Epstein list, while Bondi said in November that anyone named in the documents who are “still fighting to keep their names private, Sean, they have no legal basis to do so unless they’re a child, a victim or a cooperating defendant.”

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Opens in new tab/window. No comment needed.Note: Trump did not make this.

• Trump Gaza VIDEO With Bearded Belly Dancers Sparks Outcry (RT)

A video re-envisioning Gaza as a lavish resort complete with bearded belly dancers and dollar bills raining down posted on US President Donald Trump’s social media channel has elicited a backlash from users. The clip, which appears to be AI-generated and comes after the US leader recently suggested turning Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East,” appeared on Truth Social on Tuesday. The 30-second clip begins with what appear to be current scenes of destruction in Gaza, with barefoot children running between wrecked buildings. The wreckage then morphs into a futuristic-looking Gaza with skyscrapers reminiscent of Dubai, pristine beaches, casinos, and opulent hotels branded “Trump Gaza.” The video depicts an AI-rendered Trump enjoying the local attractions, including sunbathing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Elon Musk, also AI-rendered, is seen dining on the beach, surrounded by what appear to be bearded belly dancers. The video also features larger-than-life golden statues of Trump and kids frolicking under a shower of dollar bills.

The video is accompanied by a jingle with lyrics praising Trump’s supposed vision for Gaza:
“Donald is coming to set you free, bringing the light for all to see,
No more tunnels, no more fear, Trump Gaza is finally here.
Trump Gaza is shining bright, a golden future, a brand new light,
Feast and dance, the deed is done, Trump Gaza number one!”

Trump suggested earlier this month that the US was prepared to take control of Gaza and transform it into a resort. He has reiterated the idea several times since, claiming that because the enclave is unsafe to live in, it should be raised completely to the ground and rebuilt. While Israel applauded Trump’s initiative, other regional players and many global powers have strongly opposed it, particularly given that it would mean relocating Palestinians living in the enclave to neighboring countries. Trump’s video has so far drawn significant backlash over its tone and messaging, even from the US leader’s own supporters. Users on Truth Social described the clip as “horrible,” “creepy,” and “in poor taste.”

“I hate this. I love our president, but this is horrible,” one user wrote on Truth Social. “This feels all wrong and actually makes me sick,” another user stated. “I could not be a bigger supporter of President Trump but this particular video is in very poor taste!” another one wrote. Some suggested that the bearded belly dancers and golden statues were excessive, while others questioned whether the video had actually come from Trump’s team. “Something does not add up here??? Really does not feel that this is something Trump would post!! Wonder if someone is messing with his account??!! I surely hope so!! Very creepy!!” a user wrote. Several more suggested that Trump should “strongly re-evaluate” the communications team responsible for creating the video. Neither Trump nor his administration has commented on the video, nor was the clip accompanied by any explanation or caption.

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Catwalk
https://twitter.com/i/status/1894497772797141391

 

 

Owl

 

 

Donkey
https://twitter.com/i/status/1894819783696359446

 

 

Dachs

 

 

Trust

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle February 11 2025

Feb 112025
 
 February 11, 2025  Posted by at 10:41 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  50 Responses »


Robert Rauschenberg Buffalo II 1964

 

• Trump Orders 25 Percent Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum (ET)
• Trump: DOGE To Analyze Pentagon Spending After 7th Failed Audit (ZH)
• Trump Admin Urges Judge to Dissolve Order Blocking DOGE From Treasury (ET)
• The Making of Elon Musk: How the Left Makes Monsters of Us All (Turley)
• Sen. Mike Lee Floats Ron Paul For Fed Chairman, Musk Says ‘Amazing’ Idea (JTN)
• DOGE: FEMA Sent $59 Million Last Week To Luxury NYC Hotels For Illegals (ZH)
• Canada ‘Not Viable’ Without US Support – Trump (RT)
• The Fallout of Trump’s USAID Freeze (Ryumshin)
• Trump Wants Ukraine To Pay Back $500 Billion (RT)
• Ukraine Sells US Weapons To Mexican Drug Cartels – Tucker Carlson (RT)
• Danger of Deep Worldwide Recession in 2025 – Ed Dowd (USAW)
• Warfare on Lawfare (Kunstler)
• EU’s von der Leyen Calls For Alternative To NATO (RT)
• EU’s Right Calls For New ‘Reconquista’ Against ‘Islamist Advance’ (RT)
• Trump’s Gaza Plan ‘Futile’ – Erdogan (RT)
• Trump Threatens To ‘Let Hell Break Out’ In Gaza (RT)
• Musk And Altman Throw Punches Over Control Of OpenAI (ZH)
• Deepseek Compared To ChatGPT On The Ukraine War – Who Is Winning? (Helmer)

 

 

 

 

80/20

Andreessen

Trump Bret Baier

X

Musk AfD

 

 

 

 

“Steel and aluminum tariffs 2.0 will ensure that American producers can compete on a level playing field..”

• Trump Orders 25 Percent Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum (ET)

President Donald Trump on Feb. 10 imposed 25 percent tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One as he flew from Florida to New Orleans on Feb. 9 to attend the Super Bowl, Trump said he would announce a 25-percent levy on “any steel coming into the United States. Aluminum, too.” The president also said he would announce “reciprocal tariffs” soon. Under this plan, the United States would implement import duties on goods and services when another country imposes tariffs on U.S. products. “If they are charging us 130 percent, and we’re charging them nothing, it’s not going to stay that way,” Trump said. “If they charge us, we charge them.” The tariffs are set to take effect on March 4. Canada and Mexico are two of the largest aluminum and steel trading partners of the United States.

Although the president claimed that the U.S. trade deficit with Canada was $200 billion, the gap was $63.33 billion last year, according to Census Bureau data. A March 2023 study by the International Trade Commission found that the first Trump administration’s use of Section 232—tariffs imposed on imports considered vital for national security—raised steel and aluminum prices. However, the effect on economic growth and employment was minimal. Repealing Section 232 would ultimately lead to the creation of more than 4,000 jobs and a long-run gross domestic product growth of 0.02 percent, or $3.5 billion, according to Alex Durante, senior economist at the Tax Foundation. “Because tariffs are taxes on imports and raise the cost of production, we estimate that repealing the Section 232 tariffs would strengthen the U.S. economy and create jobs,” Durante said in a 2024 paper.

In a separate pre-taped interview with Fox News released on Feb. 9, Trump said he had not seen enough action from Canada and Mexico to avoid tariffs after agreeing to a 30-day pause. “No, it’s not good enough,” Trump told host Bret Baier. “Something has to happen. It’s not sustainable. And I’m changing it.” Last week, the president agreed to a 30-day extension on his initiative to apply a 25-percent levy on all goods from Canada and Mexico. Canadian oil, natural gas, and electricity imports would be taxed at a rate of 10 percent. Senior Canadian officials, including François-Philippe Champagne, minister of innovation, science, and industry, pledged to “stand up for Canada,” its workers, and its industries. Ontario Premier Doug Ford criticized Trump on social media platform X, writing that he is “shifting goalposts” and inciting “constant chaos.”

François Legault, premier of Quebec, a major aluminum supplier, said on X that it is critical to “begin to renegotiate” Canada’s free trade agreement with the United States “as soon as possible.” “Quebec exports 2.9 million tons of aluminum to them, or 60 percent of their needs. Do they prefer to get supplies from China?” he wrote. “We must put an end to this uncertainty.” Bea Bruske, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, said the tariffs are a “direct attack” on Canadian workers and the country’s economy. “These tariffs don’t protect jobs—they kill them. Canada cannot sit idly by while our workers are treated as bargaining chips in Trump’s trade war,” Bruske said. “Our government must respond with strong, immediate action to defend Canadian industries and the workers who keep them running.”

As part of his 2018 Section 232 national security tariff extensions to shield aluminum and steel makers, the president signed trade proclamations that increased tariffs on these products without exemptions or exclusions. Trump reinstated a 25-percent tariff on millions of steel imports that had previously entered the United States duty-free under exemptions, quota arrangements, and other exclusions. He also raised the levy tariff rate on aluminum imports to 25 percent from the previous 10 percent in 2018. “This is a big deal—making America rich again,” Trump told reporters. The latest tariffs are a response to policies that the Trump administration said have permitted various countries—namely Brazil, Canada, China, Russia, and Mexico—to “manipulate trade.” “Steel and aluminum tariffs 2.0 will ensure that American producers can compete on a level playing field,” a White House official said in a call with reporters.

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Bring on the lawsuits.

• Trump: DOGE To Analyze Pentagon Spending After 7th Failed Audit (ZH)

President Donald Trump has directed Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to audit the Pentagon, after the Defense Department failed its seventh audit in a row. During an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier set to air before the Super Bowl, Trump said he was directing DOGE to investigate both the Department of Education and the Pentagon. “We’re going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse,” Trump said.

On Friday, Trump said during a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba that he was directing DOGE to investigate “Pentgon, education, just about everything,” adding that he thinks Musk will find “a lot” of waste, fraud and abuse. “Sadly, you’ll find some things that are pretty bad, but I don’t think proportionally you’ll see anything like we just saw,” Trump said, referring to USAID – where the new administration has placed 97% of the staff on leave. Last week, Trump said that billions of dollars have been stolen by USAID. Reviewing the Pentagon will be no small task for an agency which sees roughly $800 billion flow through it, and has never managed to pass its own financial audits with the exception of the Marine Corps. The Pentagon employs nearly 3.3 million service members and civilians.

Musk, who has been appointed as a “special government employee,” is one of Trump’s key advisers, who has set a goal for DOGE to cut up to $2 trillion in federal expenses by July 2026. Last week, DOGE claimed that it had managed to save over $1 billion by slashing contracts related to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), through halting “the hiring of people into unnecessary positions, the deletion of DEI, and stopping improper payments to foreign organizations,” as The Burning Platform noted on Sunday.

On Saturday, Musk said that DOGE and the US Treasury Department have agreed to new anti-fraud measures aimed at preventing tens of billions of dollars in fraudulent government entitlement payments each year, including the following:
– Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible.
– All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!
– The DO-NOT-PAY list of entities known to be fraudulent or people who are dead or are probable fronts for terrorist organizations or do not match Congressional appropriations must actually be implemented and not ignored. Also, it can currently take up to a year to get on this list, which is far too long. This list should be updated at least weekly, if not daily.

The above super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees, not anyone from @DOGE. It is ridiculous that these changes didn’t exist already! Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious. When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!! This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently defended DOGE’s actions at Treasury – telling Bloomberg in an interview with Bloomberg that the DOGE team is made up of highly trained professionals and “not some roving band running around doing things,” possibly in reference to claims by critics that DOGE has embraced and is applying the adage “move fast and break things,” which is part of the Silicon Valley start-up culture of being innovative, nimble, and disruptive.

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Bizarro world.

• Trump Admin Urges Judge to Dissolve Order Blocking DOGE From Treasury (ET)

The Trump administration on Feb. 9 urged a federal judge to rescind an order that blocks Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) personnel and some other government workers from accessing U.S. Department of Treasury records. The order from U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer bars access to the payment records for all personnel apart from civil servants “with a need for access to perform their job duties.” “On its face, the Order could be read to cover all political leadership within Treasury—including even Secretary Bessent,” government lawyers said in an emergency motion to the court, referring to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. “This is a remarkable intrusion on the Executive Branch that is in direct conflict with Article II of the Constitution, and the unitary structure it provides.” Article II grants the president the power to appoint the heads of executive agencies and to seek their opinions on any subject relating to their duties.

“Basic democratic accountability requires that every executive agency’s work be supervised by politically accountable leadership, who ultimately answer to the President,” the government lawyers said on Sunday. “A federal court, consistent with the separation of powers, cannot insulate any portion of that work from the specter of political accountability. No court can issue an injunction that directly severs the clear line of supervision Article II requires. Because the Order on its face draws an impermissible and anti-constitutional distinction, it should be dissolved immediately.” If the order is not dissolved, the court should clarify or modify the order to make clear it does not cover top Treasury officials, according to the motion, and if the court is unwilling to grant relief, it should stay the order pending the outcome of an appeal.

U.S. District Judge Jeannette A. Vargas, who is overseeing the case, after receiving the motion ordered the parties to meet and confer regarding the motion “to determine if the parties can reach agreement on a stipulation that either resolves or narrows the issues presented in the Motion.” If the parties cannot reach an agreement, the plaintiffs are ordered to file a reply by 5 p.m. ET on Monday, with a response to the reply due from government lawyers six hours later. The case was brought by New York and 18 other states against President Donald Trump and Bessent. The states said that the government giving access to payment records to DOGE, which is headed by Elon Musk, posed cybersecurity risks and imperiled the privacy of state residents whose financial information and other personal data were stored in the files. The states asked for an order blocking the access and received the order early Saturday.

Pam Bondi

Long list of crap
https://twitter.com/i/status/1888766525454373049

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“They have made monsters of everyone who challenges the confines of their known world.”

• The Making of Elon Musk: How the Left Makes Monsters of Us All (Turley)

Across the Internet, politicians and pundits are in a monstrous mood. The same people who spent the last year declaring the imminent death of democracy if Donald Trump were elected are now insisting that the real threat is the “monster” he has unleashed upon the federal bureaucracy. It is the thing of legend, a Beltway monster that you told your children about around campfires late at night: An outsider who comes to town and lays waste to government waste, firing thousands and slashing budgets. Part Frankenstein, part Bigfoot, that creature never had a name, but would be beholden to no one and uninterested in the status quo. The monster now has a name, and it is Elon Musk. Democratic politicians are now claiming that reducing government is equivalent to destroying government. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) yelled dramatically to an outdoor crowd this week that Musk’s government efficiency efforts are “taking away everything we have.”

For decades, both Democratic and Republican presidents have run on reducing government and making it more efficient. But everyone knew that such campaign pledges would be quickly discarded after each election. What is so terrifying this time is that Musk means it. We know that because he has done it before. When Musk bought Twitter with the promise of dismantling its censorship system and culture, he started by firing virtually everyone. Critics immediately declared that he was a fool and did not understand how to run a social media company. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich said that Musk’s firings meant the death of Twitter and triumphantly declared, “You break it, you own it.” It did not exactly work out that way. Musk fired as much as 90 percent of his staff and the company survived. Liberals only grew more determined, seeking even to boycott his other companies and bar Space X from needed national security missions.

As liberal media and pundits raged, Musk stayed firm and survived. Now Amazon has increased advertising on X, which is now the sixth most popular social media site. It has reportedly hit 500 million subscribers and a reported 40-plus percent profit margin. It is set to make billions with a greatly reduced overhead due to the firings. Musk’s model has been watched — and to some degree replicated — by other companies. The only way to change a culture is sometimes to change the people. Take the U.S. Agency for International Development, where Musk led an effort to freeze operations at the agency and move it to within the State Department. Notably, they are not shutting down the agency, and Trump has said that he wants to continue foreign aid needed for core missions like clean water and disease prevention, for example.

There are good-faith reasons to be concerned that vital programs must not be abruptly ended. However, the complaint is that USAID is the ultimate example of a bloated agency with a high percentage of funding going to administrative costs over field operations. The State Department reportedly plans to reduce the USAID workforce from over 10,000 to less than 300. It is vintage Musk. It is easier to take the trauma upfront and then rehire the employees needed to fulfill the mission with a leaner workforce. That process is easier if you can get people to leave voluntarily. Part of it is performative like Musk showing up at Twitter with a sink — to let reality “sink in” for the thousands of employees. It appears to be working. Many employees are taking an offer to leave with a generous severance package. The idea is simple: If you throw a badger into a crowded car, people will get out. Musk is that badger.

As for Musk being a democracy-devouring Frankenstein, the rhetoric is again outstripping reality. The fact is that liberals rarely hunt monsters, they create their own monsters. The making of “Muskenstein” can be found in the cancel campaign launched against him as soon as he pledged to restore free speech on Twitter. An unprecedented alliance of government, corporations, media, and academia were arrayed against him. This same alliance has worked countless times to get corporations and CEOs to comply with its demands for censorship. But Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, was unbowed. Liberals correctly saw Musk’s defiance as an existential threat. For years, they had exercised virtual total control of social media, legacy media, and academia. Opposing views were denounced as dangerous disinformation.

The key to their system was that you maintain orthodoxy by coercing people into silence. During the COVID pandemic, scientists who challenged the enforced view of masks, COVID-19 origins, and other issues were banned or fired. Others remained silent as they watched colleagues exiled for expressing their opinions. Musk had to be destroyed, or others might start to believe that they could also defy the groupthink. The problem is that intolerance for opposing views creates thousands of renegades and outsiders. I was one of them. I was once associated with liberal academia, which frankly worked to my advantage in favorable media and academic opportunities. I then began to question the growing orthodoxy in academia over the loss of free speech and viewpoint diversity, including the purging of faculties of conservative and libertarian voices. I was quickly targeted for it.

But that campaign gave me an even greater understanding of the dangers of the anti-free speech movement from outside the system. On a much higher level, Musk seems to have felt the same liberating aspects of being declared persona non grata. They turned Musk into the very monster they feared. They are now doing the same thing with Mark Zuckerberg. After the head of Meta announced that he was going to end the robust censorship system on Facebook and other sites (as well as downsizing staff), the left went after him with the same unhinged hatred. Like Musk, Zuckerberg had been celebrated as an industry icon, but is now condemned as a grotesque abomination. Politicians such as Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) — who once threatened Zuckerberg not to restore free speech values like Musk — are now set against him. There is talk of boycotts as many liberals retreat into the safe space of BlueSky, a site that essentially protects liberals from opposing views.

BlueSky’s appeal is that it stays close to shore, where the waters are safe and shallow. The problem for many on the left is that more and more people want to venture beyond those navigational buoys. Like Musk, they want to consider new horizons and possibilities. In Pirates of the Caribbean, Captain Hector Barbossa warns Captain Jack Sparrow, “You’re off the edge of the map, mate! Here there be monsters!” For liberals, we are now off the map where creatures of mythological shapes dwell. They found them exactly where they thought they would be. After all, they created them. They have made monsters of everyone who challenges the confines of their known world.

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Ron Paul is 89. Not his job.

• Sen. Mike Lee Floats Ron Paul For Fed Chairman, Musk Says ‘Amazing’ Idea (JTN)

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, floated former GOP Rep. Ron Paul for Federal Reserve chairman and billionaire Elon Musk, who is leading the Department of Government Efficiency called the idea “amazing.” Musk initially wrote on X that it would be a “good idea” if DOGE allowed Paul to run a “Federal Reserve audit team.” Lee responded to that comment on X.”Raise your hand if you’d like to see @RonPaul as Federal Reserve chairman,” Lee wrote about Paul, 89, whose signature issue became calling for a full audit of the Federal Reserve . He was also a vocal opponent of the Iraq War before it began. The current chairman of the Federal Reserve if Jerome Powell. Paul’s son, Rand, is currently serving in the U.S. Senate representing Kentucky.

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“..a “clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.”

• DOGE: FEMA Sent $59 Million Last Week To Luxury NYC Hotels For Illegals (ZH)

Elon Musk’s team of mid-20s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) disruptors has once again found wasteful spending—this time focusing on a $59 million payment sent by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to luxury hotels across New York City housing illegal aliens. “The DOGE team just discovered that FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants,” Musk wrote on X early Monday morning. Musk explained, “Sending this money violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order,” adding, “That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!” Musk did not specify which luxury NYC hotels received FEMA funding for migrants last week but noted that a “clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.”

However, a December report revealed that NYC politicians spent $220 million in a sweetheart deal with Pakistan to lease the prestigious Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan for illegal alien housing. The most alarming issue was that NYC paid a foreign government to house illegals. “So let me get this straight; places like North Carolina and Maui get a pittance because FEMA says they lack funds, so we have to send our Military there to do work that could be put into the local economies. Meanwhile FEMA blows its budget on housing illegal immigrants?” one X user wrote in response to Musk’s report. While illegals have lived ‘the American Dream’ on the taxpayers’ dime, residents across Western North Carolina have only now begun receiving FEMA assistance amid the ongoing recovery from Hurricane Helene. Many of these folks in North Carolina had limited to no FEMA assistance under the Biden-Harris regime. That all changed after President Trump entered the White House on January 20.

WNC

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Trudeau fully aligned with the US Dems, woke and all, and against Trump. Now Canada will pay the price.

• Canada ‘Not Viable’ Without US Support – Trump (RT)

Canada is “not viable” as a country without continued economic support and military protection from the US, President Donald Trump has claimed. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday, Trump doubled down on his idea of Canada joining the US as the 51st state, which Ottawa strongly opposes. The president argued that Canada does not “pay very much for military, and the reason they don’t pay much is they assume that we’re going to protect them… they don’t pay their share of military in NATO.” “The other thing is, we subsidize them to the tune of about $200 billion a year. If we stopped doing that, if we stopped allowing them to make cars through tariffs and other things – cars, trucks, etc., what they make – they’re not viable as a country,” he added.

According to Trump, becoming the 51st state of the US would be “the greatest thing [Canada] could ever do.” “It would be unbelievable. It would be a cherished state,” the president said, suggesting that the current border between the two countries is “artificial” and was drawn with a ruler. In a separate interview with Fox News, Trump confirmed that he is serious about incorporating Canada into the US. Asked to comment on reports that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned the country’s business leaders that Trump’s plans are a “real thing,” the president replied: “Yeah, it is.”

In early February, Trump imposed 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico and additional 10% on imports from China, citing concerns over illegal immigration and drug trafficking. In response, Canada announced retaliatory tariffs of 25%, targeting a wide range of American-made goods. However, as the specter of a trade war loomed, Washington and Ottawa agreed to delay the implementation of the tariffs. On Sunday, Trump reiterated his stance on tit-for-tat tariffs and again teased plans for new 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports, which would again affect Canada and Mexico, without saying whether there would be exemptions.

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Let it die. Start something new.

• The Fallout of Trump’s USAID Freeze (Ryumshin)

If you’ve spent any time on social media recently, particularly X, you might have noticed a pattern. Media outlets, NGOs, and human rights groups with a liberal slant are posting about financial trouble. Some plead for public donations, while others announce layoffs and budget cuts. What’s causing this sudden turmoil? In many cases, it boils down to the suspension of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). For decades, this agency has been a lifeline for countless “grant seekers.” With the freeze in operations, many of these groups now find themselves at a breaking point. USAID is the largest source of official US financial aid abroad, with an annual budget running into the tens of billions of dollars. These funds fuel hundreds of projects worldwide.

While some initiatives address genuine concerns like poverty, hunger, and environmental protection, others have a more ambiguous purpose, such as “building civil society” or “developing democracy.” Often, these projects serve as vehicles for advancing US political interests, sometimes with covert ties to intelligence agencies. Between 2022 and 2024, USAID disbursed nearly $120 billion globally. The largest beneficiary was Ukraine, which received over $32 billion, funding everything from government operations to 90% of the country’s media outlets. Moldova was another major recipient, where USAID financed energy independence projects and media aligned with the government. Other countries in the post-Soviet space saw millions funneled into “democracy-building” efforts.

In 2024 alone, USAID poured over $40 million into Georgian civil society projects, $20 million into Armenia, and $11 million into Belarus. Even after officially ceasing operations in Russia in 2012, USAID quietly continued its activities, with $60 million earmarked for 11 programs in 2025-2026, including “Strengthening Local Governance in the North Caucasus” and “New Media” initiatives. In January 2025, everything changed. US President Donald Trump froze all foreign aid for 90 days. This was followed by a dramatic shake-up: USAID’s headquarters was raided by DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) agents, and Elon Musk declared the agency was effectively “shut down.” For decades, USAID’s funding had been a critical support system for pro-Western and opposition structures in Russia and beyond.

Now, many of these organizations find themselves adrift, their stable funding having evaporated overnight. Yet celebrating this development as a triumph may be premature. The USAID freeze isn’t about dismantling the agency entirely. Rather, it’s a restructuring to wrest control from the Democrats, who previously used it to push left-liberal values globally. Trump’s goal is to transform USAID into a tool for his administration’s conservative agenda. As he bluntly put it: “[it has] been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out,” while Musk called it “a criminal organization” and said it was “time for it to die.” Under Trump’s plan, USAID will be integrated into the State Department, now headed by Marco Rubio.

Funding will not disappear – it will be redirected. Instead of backing progressive initiatives, grants will support projects that align with traditional values, patriotism, and the revived “American Dream.” The beneficiaries will shift from liberal activists to conservative organizations promoting these ideals. Geographically, funding priorities may also change, focusing more on Europe and Latin America. Regardless of these shifts, the primary mission of advancing the US interests will remain intact. The suspension of USAID has created chaos among the vast network of Russian organizations reliant on its funding. But they won’t go down without a fight. Some will perform ideological backflips, rebranding themselves as Trump-aligned supporters to secure new funding streams.

Others will pivot to European donors or private backers like disgraced 1990s oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. A few will downsize, trimming staff and budgets, but continue to operate independently. The hardest hit will be the smallest and most ideologically rigid groups, unable or unwilling to adapt. They will likely disappear altogether, but these are the exceptions.

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“..they may make a deal, they may not make a deal, they may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday, but we’re gonna have all this money in there..”

• Trump Wants Ukraine To Pay Back $500 Billion (RT)

US President Donald Trump has said he wants to secure a deal with Kiev to ensure Washington gets its money back by trading aid for Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals – regardless of whether “they may be Russian someday.” In an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, Trump claimed that “the United States is in for more than $300 billion, probably 350” in various forms of aid to Ukraine, adding that it would be “stupid” for Washington to continue bankrolling Kiev without receiving anything in return. “I want to have our money secured because we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars,” the US leader said. “They have tremendously valuable land in terms of rare earth, in terms of oil and gas, in terms of other things.”

“I told them that I want the equivalent, like $500 billion worth of rare earths, and they’ve essentially agreed to do that,” Trump stated. “So at least we don’t feel stupid. Otherwise, we’re stupid. I said to them, we have to get something.” “You know, they may make a deal, they may not make a deal, they may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday, but we’re gonna have all this money in there, and I say, I want it back,” he added. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky confirmed last week that he would be open to reaching an agreement over Kiev’s deposits of lithium, titanium, and other heavy metals. However, he insisted that Ukraine’s Western backers must first help push Russian forces out of mineral-rich territories before they can invest in rare-earth resources.

Before the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, the country had Europe’s largest reserves of titanium and lithium. While not classified as rare-earth elements, these materials are critical for military industries, batteries, and capacitors. The list of rare-earth metals that can be found in Ukraine also includes beryllium, manganese, gallium, uranium, zirconium, graphite, apatite, fluorite, and nickel. According to Forbes, around $7 trillion of Ukraine’s total mineral wealth is located in its former Donbass regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, which declared independence from Ukraine in 2014 following the Western-backed Maidan coup in Kiev. Most of these territories came under Russian control after Donetsk and Lugansk voted to join Russia in 2022.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has cited the protection of people in Donbass as a key reason for launching the military operation in Ukraine. Resources in these territories are a major factor in NATO member states’ support for Kiev, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in October 2024. “Their discourse revolves around territory and resources that they require in America,” he said. “Our concern is not territories, but people.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1889101793751413120

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Carlson knows this, but Trump does not?

• Ukraine Sells US Weapons To Mexican Drug Cartels – Tucker Carlson (RT)

A significant portion of the weapons Washington has provided to Kiev as military aid in its conflict with Russia is ending up in the hands of America’s “actual enemies,” including Mexican drug cartels, US journalist Tucker Carlson has claimed. As much as half of all weapons sent by the US to Ukraine end up on international black markets, the former Fox News host said on Monday during an interview with retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel and Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Daniel Davis. “The Ukrainian military is selling a huge percentage – up to half – of the arms that we send them. I know this for a fact,” Carlson claimed. However, he did not disclose his sources or provide specific evidence to support his statement.

Carlson argued that Washington is supplying Kiev with “hundreds of billions of dollars” worth of arms, a significant portion of which are being “stolen and sold to our actual enemies,” including “drug cartels on our border.” He also claimed that weapons from Ukraine could be easily purchased online, describing the situation as a “crime” and a “nightmare.” Since 2022, the US Congress has authorized approximately $175 billion in aid for Ukraine. However, a large portion of that funding has reportedly been allocated to American industries and other US government activities related to the conflict. In January, US President Donald Trump claimed that Washington had spent “$200 billion more than the EU” on aid to Kiev.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky later stated that Kiev had received just over $75 billion in military and other forms of assistance from Washington, adding that he has no idea where Trump’s estimate of $200 billion originated or where it could have vanished. Moscow has repeatedly warned that the unchecked supply of Western weapons to Ukraine has led to a large number of arms falling into the hands of organized criminal groups and extremists worldwide. Western media and officials have also acknowledged that weapons supplied to Kiev’s backers have ended up in criminal hands. In April 2022, Europol reported that its investigations indicated weapons were being trafficked out of Ukraine and into the EU to supply organized crime groups.

In October 2022, Finnish authorities stated that weapons originally sent to Kiev had surfaced in the country and were acquired by local criminals. At the time, similar reports emerged from Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands. In June 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Western anti-tank weapons intended for Ukraine had been found on Israel’s border and were allegedly aimed at the Jewish state. In June 2024, Spanish media reported that criminal gangs in southern Spain had obtained modern military-grade weapons allegedly smuggled from Ukraine.

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Looking at his words, it seems he means a mini-recession. Because Trump.

• Danger of Deep Worldwide Recession in 2025 – Ed Dowd (USAW)

Former Wall Street money manager and financial analyst Ed Dowd of PhinanceTechnologies.com is back with a new report called “Danger of Deep Worldwide Recession in 2025.” The new report shows how a weak economy was propped up under the Biden Administration and how a crash, this year, is inevitable. Dowd says, “What we are going to have going forward is the reversal of deficit government spending, which was juicing the economy with illegals. Some of them got jobs, but a lot of them got benefits. They got housing accommodations. The NGO system was flush with money to facilitate this massive, purposeful logistical operation. People don’t understand that the net legal migration in the US is one million a year. That’s one million people a year.

The last four years, we brought in 10 million to 15 million people. That is a new economic variable, and it distorted the economy. It never got us into expansion territory, but it papered over a lot of the ills we were seeing. Trump’s policies are going to reverse that all out. . . . The velocity of money under Joe Biden really started to rise. . . . Illegal immigration is very inflationary. . . . In the fourth quarter, the velocity of money is already rolling over. The Trump effect began the moment he was elected. We’ve seen self-deportations. We have seen new tenant rents plunge, and that’s what has been holding up the housing market.”

How bad is the economy going to get? Dowd predicts, “We are seeing a recession in 2025. The rest of the globe is already starting to roll over. It’s going to be a worldwide recession. There is going to be a mini housing crisis. Housing has been stagnant for the better part of the year. There is no transaction volume, and nobody can afford homes. We are hitting the 18-year housing cycle. The last housing cycle was in 2007, and you add 18 years and you get 2025. . . . The economy for the middle-class is going down. . . . As time goes on, we are going to see GDP numbers go lower and lower and lower. . . . It’s kind of a perfect storm for the Trump Administration. There is no way to avoid the pain.”

When can we expect things to get better? Dowd says, “This is much like Ronald Reagan in his first term. He was elected with -2% real wages. This was the same phenomenon going into the 2024 Election. So, we are going to have a recession . . . Then, Trump gets his policies, and he has a very short window of opportunity to get all of his policies enacted. If he does, we will be booming on the other side of this.” Dowd still likes gold and thinks rates will begin going lower, which means locking in rates now will be a smart play for many. Dowd says, “Gold is good long term.” Dowd also thinks AI is over-bought and is in a bubble and points out, “There is no money on the other side,” of the AI boom. Dowd thinks AI tech will crash just like the internet bubble in early 2000. Dowd thinks, “AI prices are too expensive, and they will collapse at some point.”

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“The actual objective by the plaintiff in these cases (the Party of Chaos) is simply to delay any corrective action.”

• Warfare on Lawfare (Kunstler)

Speaking of metanarratives — and apart from the private vendettas on Planet Rap — a nice one is developing at center-stage of US political life: the Party of Chaos using federal judges to oppose the dismantling of their gigantic grift scaffold. In other words, more lawfare to obstruct any earnest effort to effectively reform the management of our country. So, last week, you get Judge Carl J. Nichols in the DC District arguing that the DOGE shutdown of USAID was unauthorized and potentially illegal, lacking congressional approval. Then, late Friday (when most citizens are checking out of the week’s struggles) Judge Paul Engelmayer out of the Southern District of New York blocked DOGE and other executive branch officials from accessing US Treasury records of expenditures.

The injunction, comically, prevents Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent from seeing what his agency doles out money for — that is, from managing anything his department does. The suit that prompted the ruling was brought by nineteen states’ Attorneys General led by NY AG Letitia James. So, you see how this works. You must also imagine that the White House was prepared for these lawfare shenanigans, though they haven’t shown their hand in response so far. This is a constitutional quarrel, of course, since it concerns who has authority between the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary over agency spending and, in particular, who gets to audit it. The actual objective by the plaintiff in these cases (the Party of Chaos) is simply to delay any corrective action.

The DOJ under Pam Bondi can designate the US Solicitor General to petition the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) for certiorari — to expedite the resolution of this constitutional issue as to whether Mr. Trump, as chief executive, and his bona fide appointees, can carry out executive functions. The arguments against that appear to be weak. It is the President’s duty to see that the laws are faithfully executed, meaning that the departments under him do their jobs correctly, which would give him inherent authority to audit and restructure agencies like USAID. Both judges Nichols and Engelmayer are arrogating executive and legislative functions on policy-making to themselves, triggering a separation-of-powers dispute that the SCOTUS must adjudicate promptly.

What matters most in these cases is that SCOTUS has an opportunity to put up new guardrails against the hijacking of the federal courts for the purpose of lawfare — that is, for political dirty-fighting under color-of-law. The law is slow-moving, arcane, and incomprehensible to most non-lawyer citizens and that is why the Party of Chaos has misused it so liberally. In any event, DOGE is moving ahead on many other fronts and the next battleground looks like the US Department of Education, an agency which, since its creation in 1979, has only presided over an epic degeneration in the academic performance of young people. The agency has grown since 1979 to 4,400 employees overseeing a $238-billion budget.

Otherwise, what it’s mainly accomplished is to enrich the various teachers’ unions and to raise the cost of college tuitions astronomically while degenerating the purpose and value of higher ed. The fifty states were arguably doing a better job on their own without any DOE on the scene. Meanwhile, it’s satisfying to see the security clearances revoked from Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Lisa Monaco, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Andrew Weissmann, Mark Zaid, and Norm Eisen. The reason: among other crimes, they all dabbled in election interference. And “Joe Biden” lost his, too, on account of being too feeble-minded to be trusted with classified information. Who knows what other legal complications lie in waiting up ahead for that whole gang? Lawfare giveth and lawfare taketh away. Or FAFO.

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Yeah, let’s start a second army. Does she represent anything other than the arms industry?

• EU’s von der Leyen Calls For Alternative To NATO (RT)

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has called for an alternative to NATO, arguing that Europe must take greater responsibility for its own security. Her remarks come amid growing US demands for increased defense spending among members of the US-led military bloc, uncertainty over future support for Ukraine, and fears of a potential shift in Washington’s commitment to European security. “NATO remains the foundation of our defense. But it is evident that we need a pan-European defense,” von der Leyen said in a press briefing in Lithuania on Sunday. “Modern warfare requires a scale, technology, and coordination too big for any one nation to handle alone,” she added, asking for more funding, “both public and private.” The strategy for the future of European defense will be presented to EU leaders by mid-March, she said.

Before the Ukraine conflict, French President Emmanuel Macron and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel were among the most vocal advocates for establishing an EU army. In 2019, Macron described NATO as “brain dead” and urged European leaders to pursue a policy of “strategic autonomy” from Washington, which has influenced security policy on the continent through NATO since the end of World War II. One of the suggestions was to create a “true, European army” to independently strengthen continental security. Though then-NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned that the move would “weaken the connection between North America and Europe,” Italy supported the idea. Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani has argued that the bloc cannot have a credible foreign policy without a joint military. However, the idea faced strong pushback in other European countries.

In 2024, then-top EU diplomat Josep Borrell suggested that while the bloc should aspire to boost the military capabilities of its members, this does not mean that it should create a common army. Several EU states, including Denmark and Poland, have also signaled that they want their security guaranteed within the existing NATO framework. Macron recently announced that France would double its military budget and urged other EU states to follow suit, citing the possibility of dwindling US interest in European security after Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Since February 2022, the US has provided over $65 billion in military aid to Ukraine. However, Trump has questioned this support, stating that Kiev has “had enough,” while advocating for a peace agreement with Russia.In 2022, after the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the EU significantly ramped up defense spending. Since then, Germany, France, and other EU states have pledged record increases in defense budgets.

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EU’s right organizes: “Make Europe Great Again.”

• EU’s Right Calls For New ‘Reconquista’ Against ‘Islamist Advance’ (RT)

Right-wing leaders from across Europe have called for a new “Reconquista” to defend the continent’s traditional values and cultural identity while criticizing the EU’s migration policies. On Saturday, the Patriots for Europe group, the third-largest political bloc in the EU parliament, gathered in Madrid for its first high-profile rally since the summer elections. Attendees included Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s conservative Vox party; Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban; Marine Le Pen of France’s National Rally party; and other high-profile conservative and right-wing leaders. The event was held under the slogan “Make Europe Great Again,” an explicit nod to US President Donald Trump’s campaign motto. The conference centered on the theme of battling Islam, EU bureaucracy, globalism and left-wing “woke policies” and diversity.

The term “Reconquista” echoed throughout the event, with Abascal comparing today’s political struggles to the centuries-long campaign by Christian kingdoms to free the territory of modern Spain from Muslim rule in the Middle Ages. “We Spaniards are proud to be known for that extraordinary feat of our ancestors. We are ready to be that again,” Abascal noted. “We are ready to be that wall of Europe once again in the face of Islamist advance,” he said, vowing to fight against “global dictatorship,” including the one imposed from Brussels. The idea of Reconquista was also mentioned by Martin Helme, the leader of Estonia’s Conservative People’s Party. “For Europe to be great again, we need to have a new Reconquista,” he said while accusing globalist elites of trying to “damage our Christian civilization and replace it with their sick satanic utopia.”

Orban, a consistent opponent of the EU’s lenient approach to migration, also weighed in, suggesting that “the replacement of the population of Europe is not a conspiracy theory, it is pure practice.” The Hungarian leader also said that liberal ideology had suffered a major defeat due to Trump’s victory in the US. “The Trump tornado, has changed the world in just a couple of weeks. An era has ended,” he said. The sentiment was echoed by Le Pen, who also called for “renaissance of Europe” which she said could be achieved by establishing dialogue among different right-wing forces. Right-wing parties across the EU have grown in popularity over the past decade, with their electoral gains fueled by public discontent over rising immigration, especially from Africa and the Middle East, as well as economic instability.

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“In May, Erdogan severed trade ties with the Jewish state in response to the war, which he has consistently compared to the Holocaust.”

• Trump’s Gaza Plan ‘Futile’ – Erdogan (RT)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has denounced US President Donald Trump’s proposal to take control of Gaza, calling it a meaningless plan pushed by the “Zionist lobby.” Trump floated the idea of the US owning the Palestinian enclave last week at a press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He reiterated his previous call to relocate the Palestinians outside Gaza, shifting the burden onto neighboring countries. Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Erdogan expressed Ankara’s firm opposition to any plan that would forcibly expel the Palestinian population from their homeland. “The proposals put forward by the new American administration regarding Gaza with the pressure of the Zionist lobby have nothing worth considering or discussing,” Erdogan told a news conference at Istanbul Airport before flying to Malaysia. Trump’s plan proposes transforming Gaza into what he describes as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Under the plan, displaced Palestinians would first relocate to Jordan, Egypt, and other Arab countries, with some eventually resettling in the newly developed area. Netanyahu has voiced support for the proposal, calling it the “first good idea” he has heard concerning the region’s future. Erdogan described the idea as “completely futile.” “No one has the power to remove the people of Gaza from their eternal homeland that has been around for thousands of years. Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem belong to the Palestinians,” he argued. Türkiye has been one of Israel’s most vocal critics throughout the Gaza conflict. In May, Erdogan severed trade ties with the Jewish state in response to the war, which he has consistently compared to the Holocaust. Trump’s initiative has been strongly opposed by key regional players, with Jordan, Egypt, the Arab League, and Hamas all rejecting it.

Global powers, including Germany, France, Brazil, Russia, and China, have also condemned the displacement proposal. Opponents of the plan argue that forced relocation would violate international law, with human rights groups calling it “ethnic cleansing.” Despite the criticism, Trump is reportedly pressing forward with diplomatic talks, seeking input from Arab leaders to refine his approach. Israeli President Isaac Herzog told Fox News on Sunday that the US president is set to meet with key Arab leaders, including the king of Jordan, the president of Egypt, and potentially the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, to negotiate the relocation of Palestinians. Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry earlier strongly rejected the proposal, arguing that Palestinians are the rightful owners of their land, not “intruders” or “immigrants” who can be expelled at the will of the “Israeli occupation.”

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Noon Saturday.

Hasn’t Gaza been hell already for months? Not enough?

• Trump Threatens To ‘Let Hell Break Out’ In Gaza (RT)

US President Donald Trump has issued an ultimatum to Hamas, demanding the release of all remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza by midday Saturday, and warning that failure to comply would result in “all hell” breaking out. On Monday, Hamas threatened to halt the release of additional hostages, accusing Israel of violating the terms of the fragile ceasefire agreement by preventing displaced Palestinians from returning to northern Gaza, restricting the delivery of humanitarian aid, and delaying negotiations for the second phase of the deal. In response, Israel alleged that Hamas’s actions constituted a complete breach of the agreement, under which the militant group pledged to initially release 33 hostages in several batches in exchange for 1,904 Palestinian prisoners held by Israeli authorities.

“I have instructed the IDF to prepare at the highest level of alert for any possible scenario in Gaza,” Defense Minister Israel Katz stated. Speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday, Trump said the future of the ceasefire would be “Israel’s decision.” “But as far as I’m concerned, if all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday at 12 o’clock – I think it’s an appropriate time – I would say cancel it, and all bets are off. Let hell break out,” Trump said. “We want them all back,” he added, insisting that the hostages should be released all at once, “not in dribs and drabs, not two and one and three and four and two.” Asked to clarify what punitive measures he envisions, Trump reiterated that “all hell is going to break out.”

“You’ll find out. And they’ll find out too. Hamas will find out what I mean. These are sick people,” he added. Last week, Trump floated the idea of the US taking control of the Palestinian enclave during a press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He proposed transforming Gaza – left in ruins after 15 months of war between Israel and Hamas – into what he described as “the Riviera of the Middle East.” As part of the plan, he suggested relocating Palestinians to neighboring Arab countries while the area is redeveloped. On Monday, he threatened to withhold aid to Jordan and Egypt if they refused to take Palestinian refugees. The move would amount to “ethnic cleansing” and a “crime against humanity,” Bassem Naim, head of Hamas’s political branch, told RT in an exclusive interview on Friday.

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“..it is vital that the charity be fairly compensated for what its leadership is taking away from it: control over the most transformative technology of our time..”

Altman claims “Musk previously supported turning OpenAI into a for-profit but walked away because he couldn’t get control of it.”

• Musk And Altman Throw Punches Over Control Of OpenAI (ZH)

Elon Musk is leading a group of investors in a $97.4 billion offer to purchase the nonprofit that controls OpenAI – the makers of ChatGPT, – and which Musk was an original investor in. On Monday, Musk’s attorney Marc Toberoff said he submitted the bid to OpenAI’s board of directors in an unsolicited offer that could upend OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s plans to convert it into a for-profit company, as well as plans to spend up to $500 billion on AI infrastructure through the so-called ‘Stargate’ joint venture, WSJ reports. “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement provided by Toberoff. “We will make sure that happens.” Altman and Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a charity. In 2019, after Musk left the company and Altman became chief executive, OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary that has served as a vehicle for it to raise money from Microsoft and other investors. Altman is in the process of turning the subsidiary into a traditional company and spinning out the nonprofit, which would own equity in the new for-profit.

One of the thorniest questions in the conversion has been how the nonprofit will be valued. Musk’s bid sets a high bar and may mean that he, or whoever runs the nonprofit, would end up with a large and possibly controlling stake in the new OpenAI. The bid is being backed by xAI – Musk’s own artificial intelligence company, which could end up merging with OpenAI following a deal. Other investors in the potential deal include; Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, Vy Capital and 8VC, a venture firm led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. And who else? Ari Emanuel – CEO of Hollywood company Endeavor (and the brother of Democrat operative Rahm Emanuel) – who was portrayed in Entourage. Altman responded to the offer with a “no thank you,” adding “but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.” [..]

Musk has filed several legal complaints against OpenAI, accusing the company of betraying its original mission as a nonprofit by creating the for-profit arm, as well as colluding with Microsoft, its biggest investor, to dominate AI development. On Jan. 7, Toberoff sent a letter to the attorneys general in California, where OpenAI is based, and Delaware, where it is incorporated, asking that they open up bidding for the company to determine the fair market value of its charitable assets. Musk and other critics have said they believe OpenAI may undervalue the nonprofit when they spin it out. OpenAI has called Musk’s legal claims baseless and overreaching and said the nonprofit will receive full value in its ownership stake of the for-profit. The company released documents in December that it said showed Musk previously supported turning OpenAI into a for-profit but walked away because he couldn’t get control of it. -WSJ

What’s more, Toberoff says Musk and team is prepared to match or exceed any bids higher than their own. “If Sam Altman and the present OpenAI Inc. Board of Directors are intent on becoming a fully for-profit corporation, it is vital that the charity be fairly compensated for what its leadership is taking away from it: control over the most transformative technology of our time,” he said. The move to buy OpenAI comes weeks after Altman appeared next to newly inaugurated President Donald Trump and other business leaders to announce a plan called “Stargate,” which would invest up to $500 billion over the next four years in US data centers – a plan which Musk talked mad shit about, claiming that the project’s backers didn’t have the cash for, and calling Altman “a swindler.”

According to the report, OpenAI was already facing several hurdles on their path to converting from a charity to a for-profit company, with rival firm Meta Platforms sending a letter to California’s attorney general in December expressing opposition to the plan, and OpenAI remaining stuck in negotiations with Microsoft and other stakeholders over how much equity should be allocated to whom. The original plan was to complete the transition by later 2026, with a $6.6 billion funding round in October which valued the company at $157 billion. Separately, the company has been in talks to raise up to $40 billion in new funding at a $300 billion valuation in a round led by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, which would invest between $15 and $25 billion itself

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Dr Fu Manchu.

• Deepseek Compared To ChatGPT On The Ukraine War – Who Is Winning? (Helmer)

The last Chinese as clever, as profiteering, and as popular in the imagination of millions as DeepSeek was Dr Fu Manchu. “Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan,” wrote his creator Sax Rohmer, the alias of an Englishman: “invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present …Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the Yellow Peril incarnate in one man.” Appearing first in 1912, educated at several western universities, the “Chinese devil’s” plots were aimed at combating fascism, communism, and the British empire. His methods included honey-trap girls, poisons, germs, spiders, and unspeakable tortures. He was a caricature of western fear of the superiority of the Chinese race.

DeepSeek is his new name; the racism is the same. According to a US government-backed report issued a few days ago, DeepSeek is “highly biased as well as highly vulnerable to generate insecure code, toxic, harmful and CBRN [Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear] content.” Open AI, the US government-connected company which owns the competing ChatGPT, has declared the Chinese villain is a thief. “DeepSeek may [sic] have inappropriately distilled our models…We take aggressive, proactive countermeasures to protect our technology and will continue working closely with the US government to protect the most capable models being built here.” Last December the New York Times launched court action against Open AI, accusing it of the same plagiarism on which Open AI is now relying in its attack on DeepSeek. “Independent journalism is vital to our democracy,” the newspaper claimed.

“For more than 170 years, The Times has given the world deeply reported, expert, independent journalism… Defendants’ unlawful use of The Times’s work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service. Defendants’ generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) tools rely on large-language models (“LLMs”) that were built by copying and using millions of The Times’s copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more…The law does not permit the kind of systematic and competitive infringement that Defendants have committed. This action seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe for the unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”

This is the first time in US federal court history that the reproduction of government deception operations and propaganda by newspaper reporters has been subjected to a test, not of the espionage statute as in the Ellsberg and Assange cases, but of the copyright laws. A month later, the New York Times attacked DeepSeek, not for plagiarising the Times, but for reproducing Chinese government propaganda. “If you’re among the millions of people who have downloaded DeepSeek, the free new chatbot from China powered by artificial intelligence, know this: The answers it gives you will largely reflect the worldview of the Chinese Communist Party. Since the tool made its debut this month, rattling stock markets and more established tech giants like Nvidia, researchers testing its capabilities have found that the answers it gives not only spread Chinese propaganda but also parrot disinformation campaigns that China has used to undercut its critics around the world.”

This is no more than one press pot calling another media kettle black. But with billions of dollars at stake in the stock market capitalisation of the American and Chinese companies producing Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, this is also a battle of the propaganda operations of the US government in the wars it is currently waging. For a test of this warfighting, DeepSeek has been questioned on issues of the Russian war in the Ukraine and the US war against Russia. Its answers, which follow verbatim, reveal no evidence (repeat no evidence) of Chinese backing for the Russian side. Instead, surprise (repeat surprise) – there is evidence that DeepSeek is no more capable than Chat GPT of distinguishing between propaganda and truth. So long as DeepSeek trains on the English language and answers questions from the current English-language database and large language model, this is inevitable. Resisting English-language dominance in AI is now Kremlin strategy.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

RFK Monsanto

 

 

Elon Rogan Mars
https://twitter.com/i/status/1888810863131263196

 

 

Coast guy

 

 

Street art

 

 

Family
https://twitter.com/i/status/1888849750385918222

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle February 2 2025

Feb 022025
 
 February 2, 2025  Posted by at 10:41 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  78 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 1907

 

• Musk Reveals Treasury Has Been Auto-Paying Everyone, ‘Even Known Terrorists’ (ZH)
• USAID Website and X Account Go Dark (RT)
• Trump’s Overhaul of Federal Bureaucracy Backed by Recent Survey Research (RCW)
• US Federal Workers Told To Remove Pronouns From Email Signatures (RT)
• NYT, NBC, NPR, Politico Evicted From Pentagon Press Offices (ZH)
• Chuck Schumer Is Now Under Federal Investigation (Margolis)
• Ric Grenell Scores Big Win For Trump In Venezuela (ZH)
• Border Encounters Plummet 94% Under Trump (ZH)
• Mexico Announces Retaliation Against US (RT)
• Canada Strikes Back With Tariffs (RT)
• Musk Sank $288 Million Into Trump Campaign – WaPo (RT)
• Can Trump Make A Peace Deal With Putin? (SCF)
• White House Wants Zelensky To Hold Elections – Trump Envoy (RT)
• The Chihuahua Energy Policy: It’s a Gas, Gas, Gas (Pepe Escobar)
• Russia and China Boost NVIDIA Performance 800-Fold (Sp.)
• Norway Clears Russian-Crewed Ship In Sabotage Probe (RT)
• Global Green Spending Is Falling Short of Net Zero Targets (OP)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1885410502513234140

https://twitter.com/i/status/1885451352819560698


https://twitter.com/i/status/1885447526746300753

AfD
https://twitter.com/i/status/1885741075509252315

 

 

 

 

What a story…: “..a handful of career officials within the Bureau of the Fiscal Service” … control “the US government’s payment system”, which includes Social Security, Medicare, federal salaries, payments to government contractors, tax refunds, grant recipients, and more. No payment is ever refused, and $6 trillion per year is disbursed this way. The Treasury Department’s highest-ranking career official flees the scene when Musk comes close.

I would take a good look at these guys’ bank accounts and other assets over the past 10 years. And it looks like DOGE can find a lot of savings here.

• Musk Reveals Treasury Has Been Auto-Paying Everyone, ‘Even Known Terrorists’ (ZH)

Update (0942ET): Well, well, well – DOGE moves into the Treasury, triggering their longest-serving, highest-ranked career official to quit in a huff, and they find that department has essentially been auto-paying everyone, according to Elon Musk. “The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups,” said Musk in a Friday night tweet. “They literally never denied a payment in their entire career.”

***
The Treasury Department’s highest-ranking career official quit after a clash with aides of Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to the Washington Post, citing (of course), three anonymous sources. David A. Lebryk, a decades-long Treasury official who President Trump named as acting secretary upon taking office last week, announced his retirement in a Friday email to colleagues. According to the report, Lebryk had a dispute with Musk surrogates over access to the US government’s payment system used to disburse trillions of dollars every year. [Imagine Musk and team uncover decades of improper payments and shady dealings?] The Musk surrogates are affiliated with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and have been asking since the election for access to the system, according to the report. The requests were reiterated after Trump’s inauguration.

After Trump pick Scott Bessent was confirmed as Treasury Secretary on Monday, Lebryk ceased to be acting agency head. The payment system in question is run by a handful of career officials within the Bureau of the Fiscal Service – which controls the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses, and other entities nationwide – and includes Social Security, Medicare, federal salaries, payments to government contractors, tax refunds, grant recipients, and more. The clash is the latest incident involving career ‘deep state’ bureaucrats vs. the Trump administration. And of course, WaPo, the CIA’s favorite tentacle, frames it as follows:

“The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy as the Trump administration nears the conclusion of its second week. Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages real estate. (Musk was seen on Thursday visiting GSA, according to two other people familiar with his whereabouts, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters. That visit was first reported by the New York Times.) His Department of Government Efficiency, originally conceived as a nongovernmental panel, has since replaced the U.S. Digital Service.”

Translation: “Unfortunately for the career bureaucrats, Trump signed an executive order instructing all agencies to ensure DOGE has “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” which appear to include the Treasury payment systems. Musk has previously slammed rising national debt as an existential threat to the country, while DOGE has already made progress in rooting out bullshit programs established by Democrat administrations.

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“About 98 percent of USAID grants pay for activities and not results..”

USAID operates like the typical NGO of today. A vehicle to ‘silently’ dole out money. Ukrainian media are fully dependent on such vehicles, to name an example.

• USAID Website and X Account Go Dark (RT)

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) website has gone offline following an executive order by President Donald Trump that pauses most American foreign aid programs for three months to reassess US overseas spending. The website became inaccessible on Saturday afternoon, displaying a message stating that the “server IP address could not be found.” Later that day, the agency’s X account also disappeared. The outage follows reports that the Trump administration is considering placing USAID under the control of the State Department. Last week, Trump signed an executive order freezing most US foreign aid for 90 days, citing the need for a comprehensive review of how funds are allocated.

The order states that “billions of taxpayer dollars flow to programs that do not serve American interests and, in many cases, actively work against them.” The White House has framed the move as part of Trump’s “America First” policy, aimed at cutting wasteful spending and redirecting resources toward domestic priorities. USAID, which oversees humanitarian and development programs abroad, has been significantly impacted. The agency spent over $60 billion on foreign assistance in 2023 alone. On Friday, Reuters reported that the Trump administration is planning to strip USAID of its independence and place it under the control of the State Department. According to sources familiar with the discussions, the National Security Council has hosted meetings on the issue, and legal options are being explored for Trump to issue an executive order formalizing the merger.

Some officials believe the order could be signed as early as this weekend. Photographs of USAID headquarters reviewed by Reuters showed that signs bearing the agency’s official seal had already been removed. Critics have condemned the proposed reorganization, with Senator Chris Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warning that such a move could face legal challenges. “A president cannot eliminate an appropriated federal agency by executive order. That’s what a despot – who wants to steal the taxpayers’ money to enrich his billionaire cabal – does,” Murphy wrote in a post on X on Friday. US-based billionaire Elon Musk, who is advising Trump on downsizing the federal government, reacted by saying: “Live by executive order, die by executive order.”

USAID was created in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy through an executive order, consolidating various foreign assistance programs under one agency. Its mission has been to promote economic growth, respond to humanitarian crises, and advance U.S. national security interests globally. However, the agency has faced growing criticism over its effectiveness, with experts questioning whether its assistance programs achieve their intended goals. “About 98 percent of USAID grants pay for activities and not results,” Walter Kerr, co-executive director of Unlock Aid, said earlier this month. “Less than 10 percent of our foreign assistance dollars flowing through USAID is actually reaching those communities.”

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“..just 45% of Federal Government Managers would follow a legal order from President Trump if they thought the order was bad policy, and instead would do what they thought was right.”

• Trump’s Overhaul of Federal Bureaucracy Backed by Recent Survey Research (RCW)

Since returning to office for a second term, President Trump has taken aggressive action to overhaul the federal bureaucracy. After a week in office some of Trump actions towards federal workers include: removing employment protections for civil servants, firing 17 inspectors general, reassigning career officials in the Department of Justice, sending home 160 staffers from the National Security Agency and firing the lawyers at the Department of Justice who prosecuted Trump under special counsel Jack Smith. Trump’s efforts have been met with hostility and criticism from the media and predictably from his political opposition. Opinionist Phillip Bump at the Washington Post writes Trump’s actions are “a sharp disruption of how the government works.” Bump laments that “Trump is clearly interested in…seeding loyalists throughout the executive branch.”

At Axios, Zachary Basu and Dave Lawler explain that Trump is “transform[ing] the federal bureaucracy into an army of loyalists.” Democratic Senator Tim Kaine, who represents 140,000 federal workers in Virginia, told reporters “This gleeful hatred of the federal workforce will lead to nothing good. “But are Trump’s efforts to transform the government workforce justified by a real concern that his policy platforms–which earned him a presidential victory–will be thwarted by anonymous bureaucrats? Recent survey research suggests Trump is right to be concerned. Napolitan Institute found that just 45% of Federal Government Managers would follow a legal order from President Trump if they thought the order was bad policy and instead would do what they thought was right.

Among managers who voted for Kamala Harris that figure jumps to nearly three-quarters (69%.) The survey also found a majority (52%) of the federal managerial class voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. Those current survey results are consistent with events that developed in the first Trump Administration, where we learned how bureaucratic opinions on “right” policy interfered with the power of the duly elected executive officer. Former diplomat Jim Jeffrey revealed that his team routinely mislead the Trump Administration after the president had ordered the withdrawal of troops from Syria. “What Syria withdrawal? There was never a Syria withdrawal,” Jeffrey said. “When the situation in northeast Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS, [Trump] was inclined to pull out. In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay. And we succeeded both times. That’s the story.”

“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said in an interview.While Jeffrey’s revelation came after Trump had left office from his first term, there was a real time revelation of a policy conflict between President Trump and the “interagency consensus” that would become foundation of the first Trump impeachment.The policy difference originated from a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when Trump requested Zelensky open an investigation into possible corruption at the Burisma energy company before receiving a military aid package. Trump’s 2020 election opponent Joe Biden’s son was on the board of Burisma. A central part of the subsequent impeachment case was testimony from Lt. Alexander Vindman (ret.), who had been detailed to the National Security Council and present for the phone call.

Vindman explained in his opening statement to the House impeachment committee he was concerned the president chose to wield his executive authority in a way that was at odds with the “interagency consensus.” Vindman testified “…a false narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency,” Vindman said in his opening statement. “This narrative was harmful to U.S. government policy. While my interagency colleagues and I were becoming increasingly optimistic on Ukraine’s prospects, this alternative narrative undermined U.S. government efforts to expand cooperation with Ukraine.” But Vindman and the “interagency consensus” have no authority to determine or execute their interpretation of U.S. government policy or in other words, “do what they thought was right.”

The New York Times editorial board supported and encouraged the usurpation of executive authority in favor of the “right” bureaucratic opinion by praising the government bureaucracy overriding or ignoring President Trump’s lawful authority. “…patriotic public servants — career diplomats, scientists, intelligence officers and others…have somehow remembered that their duty is to protect the interests, not of a particular leader, but of the American people.” There is no way to know exactly how extensive bureaucratic resistance interfered with Trump’s ability to govern in his first term, but we do know 46% of current Federal Government Managers would ignore the legal order of President Trump and instead do what was “right.” Trump is making the correct move to overhaul the federal bureaucracy in order to deliver on the campaign promises that got him back in office.

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How did we ever get here?

• US Federal Workers Told To Remove Pronouns From Email Signatures (RT)

Employees at US federal agencies have been ordered to remove pronouns from their email signatures, according to internal memos obtained by several media outlets. The directive reportedly cites two presidential executive orders seeking to curb diversity and equity programs across the government.On his first day back in office, US President Donald Trump repealed 78 executive orders signed by his predecessor, Joe Biden. They included several measures to protect transgender rights and promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The orders also set a 60-day timeframe for federal agencies and departments to cease DEI-related practices.The memos on removing pronouns from signatures reportedly set Friday afternoon as the deadline.

“Pronouns and any other information not permitted in the policy must be removed from CDC/ATSDR employee signatures by 5 p.m. ET on Friday,” ABC News cited one such message as saying. It was sent to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employees on Friday morning. The outlet reported that a similar notice urging the removal of DEI “language in Federal discourse, communications, and publications” had been received by federal employees with the Department of Energy and the Department of Transportation on Thursday.

Several federal government agency websites, including the Federal Aviation Administration and the Census Bureau, temporarily went down on Friday, according to The Guardian. Some pages displayed as blank before reappearing later that day. The British newspaper noted that the Bureau of Prisons had renamed a webpage called “inmate gender” to “inmate sex” and stopped displaying a list of trans inmates. Donald Trump declared in his inaugural address on January 1 that the US would officially recognize only two genders. ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’, one of the orders signed by the president later that day, states that “there are only two genders, male and female,” and orders agencies to update official documents such as passports and visas in accordingly.

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Legacy no more: “The Trump White House will speak to all media outlets and personalities, not just the legacy media that are seated in this room..”

• NYT, NBC, NPR, Politico Evicted From Pentagon Press Offices (ZH)

The innumerable consequences of the 2024 election keep gushing forth at a pace that’s hard to keep up with. Here’s a new gem: On Friday evening, the Department of Defense told The New York Times, NBC News, National Public Radio and Politico that they have two weeks to vacate their long-held and treasured offices inside the Pentagon. Three of their four replacements skew decidedly to the Trump-friendly sector of the political spectrum: the New York Post, One America News Network and Breitbart. Throwing a bone to leftists, HuffPost news snagged Politico’s old slot. The Pentagon Press Association said it was “greatly troubled by this unprecedented move by DOD to single out highly professional media.”

The short-notice evictions from the hallowed “Correspondents’ Corridor” spring from the launch of a “new annual media rotation program for [the] Pentagon Press Corps,” according to a memorandum sent by DOD spokesman John Ullyot on Friday and posted by CNN Pentagon correspondent Haley Britzky. The program seeks to “broaden access to the limited space…to outlets that have not previously enjoyed the privilege and journalist value of working from physical office space in the Pentagon,” said Ullyot. The booted outlets will retain their status as full members of the Pentagon Press Corps, entitled to attend briefings and be considered for travel with officials. “The only change will be giving up their physical workspaces in the building to allow new outlets to have their turn to become resident members of the Pentagon Press Corps,” wrote Ullyot.

Make no mistake: Those physical workspaces are a big deal. “Kicking out reporters HURTS coverage. If you can’t file your stories from inside the building you are disadvantaged. If you don’t have a work space you are disadvantaged,” wrote former Pentagon Press Corps VP Kevin Baron on X. That commentary was part of a thread condemning the development as “the erasure of journalism at the Pentagon.” The Pentagon Press Corps comprises more than two dozen outlets. The program calls for one outlet from each press medium to rotate from the premises every year. As if Breitbart’s invitation into the Pentagon weren’t enough to outrage establishment media types, the fact that it’s taking the “radio” slot from NPR only compounded the indignation. In a Friday night article, CNN’s Brian Stelter called foul:

“Breitbart – a well-known web site for pro-Trump coverage and commentary – barely has a radio operation of its own. The word ‘radio’ doesn’t appear on its home page at all. The media outlet has a distribution deal with SiriusXM and one big podcast, Breitbart News Daily. Its footprint pales in comparison to NPR, which provides news coverage for local stations all across the country.” In another hilarious, leftist-pummeling swap, One America News Network will be sliding into NBC’s slot. Expressing sympathetic disbelief, CNN’s Britzky emphasized that NBC “has an entire booth w/ cameras etc.” NBC News promised to soldier on, telling Reuters, “We’re disappointed by the decision to deny us access to a broadcasting booth at the Pentagon that we’ve used for many decades. Despite the significant obstacles this presents to our ability to gather and report news in the national public interest, we will continue to report with the same integrity and rigor NBC News always has.”

For the many Americans who are still angry about legacy media’s aggressive role in working to derail Trump’s 2020 re-election bid, Politico’s punishment is perhaps the most satisfying. The outlet took the lead in spreading the consequential, Deep State lie that Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” — first reported by the New York Post — was part of a Russian misinformation scheme. That lie helped ignite unprecedented censorship of the Post’s coverage. Fittingly, the Post — the country’s longest-running newspaper — is among the outlets graduating to space in the Pentagon.

“The National Press Club is deeply concerned by the Defense Department’s decision to remove certain media organizations from their dedicated spaces in the Pentagon,” club president Mike Balsamo said in a statement. “Any action that restricts the ability of journalists to report on the operations of the U.S. government should alarm all who value transparency and press freedom.” Balsamo pointed to the Pentagon press corps’ history of “diversity,” yet the announced swaps inarguably increase viewpoint diversity. The Pentagon’s shot across the bow of legacy media follows Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s announcement that the White House will significantly broaden media access, with an emphasis on alternative media. “The Trump White House will speak to all media outlets and personalities, not just the legacy media that are seated in this room,” she said in her first press conference. Never a dull moment in Trump II: The Revenge. What’s next?

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“I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price,” Schumer said to a chorus of cheers..

• Chuck Schumer Is Now Under Federal Investigation (Margolis)

Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Edward R. Martin, Jr. has made a bold move, dismissing about 30 federal prosecutors involved in the Capitol riot cases. This decision, announced on Friday, signals a significant housecleaning of the top prosecutor’s office in Washington, D.C., as Martin gears up to purge partisans who weaponized the Justice Department against Joe Biden’s political enemies, including Trump, pro-life activists, and others. But he’s also taken another bold step, effectively launching an investigation into Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer over comments he made back in March 2020 during a #MyRightMyDecision rally outside the Supreme Court. During the rally, Schumer blatantly threatened Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch over their potential votes in the first abortion case before the Supreme Court with the new conservative majority.

“I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price,” Schumer said to a chorus of cheers. “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” According to 18 U.S. Code ß/ 115, whoever threatens a federal official, with intent to impede, intimidate, or interfere with such official, judge, or law enforcement officer while engaged in the performance of official duties, or with intent to retaliate against such official, judge, or law enforcement officer on account of the performance of official duties, shall be punished by a fine or imprisonment of as much as ten years. Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, has been calling on Schumer to be federally prosecuted for years. “Schumer should have been (and should be) criminally prosecuted for his threats targeting two Supreme Court justices,” Fitton wrote.

“If I had said that, I’d have two U.S. marshals in my office, or frankly, probably in my home in the least, questioning me, questioning my family, questioning everyone here at Judicial Watch,” he said back in 2022. “Anyone else I had talked to about that threat on the Supreme Court, Justice Roberts responded, rightly so, said that type of language is dangerous.” “We take threats against public officials very seriously. I look forward to your cooperation,” Martin wrote Schumer in a letter obtained by the Washington Post.

According to the Post, while Martin’s actions are “likely to be welcomed by Trump and allies, who assert they were unfairly targeted by the past administration,” but “career prosecutors who have served under presidents of both parties say Martin is politicizing the office and potentially breaking with 50 years of Justice Department policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations.” That’s cute. I wonder what those “career prosecutors” had to say about the various cases the Biden administration launched against Donald Trump.

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Grenell truly is a special envoy. When the going gets tough…

• Ric Grenell Scores Big Win For Trump In Venezuela (ZH)

Update (1815ET): The government of Venezuela has agreed not only to release six detained Americans, who arrived home Friday evening with Trump envoy Richard Grenell, the Maduro government has will take back tens of thousands of migrants, President Trump said on Saturday. “It is so good to have the Venezuela Hostages back home, and, very important to note, that Venezuela has agreed to receive, back into their Country, all Venezuela illegal aliens who were encamped in the U.S.,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social, adding that Venezuela would take back members of the Tren de Aragua transnational gang that has recently expanded into America from various Latin American countries. According to the WSJ, Maduro’s government will provide transport for its citizens to return.”This is good news for all who care about ensuring that Venezuelans with removal orders actually get sent home,” said Kevin Whitaker, a former U.S. ambassador to Colombia who also had served as deputy chief of mission in Venezuela.

* * *
More of the Trump effect: six imprisoned Americans have been freed by Venezuela after President Trump’s envoy Richard Grenell visited the country this week. They were released and flown home on a State Dept. aircraft on Friday. “Just been informed that we are bringing six hostages home from Venezuela,” Trump announced on social media. “Thank you to Ric Grenell and my entire staff. Great job!” This comes amid reports of some significant behind-the-scenes deal-making with Venezuela, as Washington demands the Latin American country receive back illegal migrants in the US.The six men were not named, but previously the White House had called on Venezuela to release what it dubbed “US hostages” or else suffer consequences. Grenell had reportedly met directly with President Maduro.

At least nine people with American citizenship or residency had been detained in Venezuela, after authorities accused them of planning to kill President Nicolás Maduro. According to the NY Times: Relatives of three detained U.S. citizens said they had gotten very little information from the American government and had not heard from their loved ones for months since they had disappeared. David Estrella, 64, who worked in quality control for pharmaceutical companies in New Jersey, was among those released, according to his family. “After such horrible moments that we and David have suffered unjustly, we look forward to welcoming him home and taking care of him until he fully recovers and leaves all this unfortunate incident behind him,” said Elvia Macias, Mr. Estrella’s former wife and close friend.

He had entered Venezuela from Colombia to visit friends, Ms. Macias said. Another reason this is such an unexpected positive development is that the United States has no diplomatic presence or embassy in Venezuela, and also has sanctions against the country and its top officials.As for what could be a factor in the release, Financial Times speculated that “a deal could involve an easing of US sanctions on Venezuela and dropping a US reward offered for Maduro’s capture in return for Caracas taking back thousands of [Venezuelan] migrants from the US, shipping more oil to American Gulf Coast refineries and releasing US nationals held in Caracas.” The jubilant freed Americans thanked President Trump in a phone call on the plane ride home:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1885535726973915381

The US State Department special envoy for Latin America, Mauricio Claver-Carone, has meanwhile said the discussions and this new initiative with Caracas will not change Washington’s overall Venezuela policy. “President Trump expects Nicolás Maduro to take back all of the Venezuelan criminals and gang members that have been exported to the US, and to do so unequivocally and without condition,” he said.

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Now add the threat of Guantanamo. It’s ugly, but it may work.

• Border Encounters Plummet 94% Under Trump (ZH)

Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, illegal alien encounters at the southern US border have plummeted an average of 94% during his first 9 days, compared to President Biden’s last 19 days in office. During Trump’s first 9 days in office, after new border measures were implemented, there were an average of 126 daily encounters at the border vs. 2,087 per day during the last 2.5 weeks of the Biden administration.

As Rasmussen’s Mark Mitchell put it last week, “It’s like a switch was flipped.” During his 2024 campaign, Trump vowed to crack down on illegal immigration by continuing construction on the border wall, conducting the largest mass deportation in US history, slapping tariffs on Canada and Mexico until they control the situation from their end, and increasing penalties for illegal aliens.

To that end, there were more than 3,500 illegal immigrants who were arrested during Trump’s first week in office, including over 1,100 in a single day. As American Greatness notes further, on Wednesday, shortly before signing the Laken Riley Act into law, the 45th and 47th President announced his intention to send 30,000 of the most dangerous criminal illegals to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Laken Riley Act, named after the 22-year-old Georgia nursing student who was murdered by a Venezuelan illegal, is the first bill signed into law during President Trump’s second term. It gives federal immigration authorities broader power to arrest illegals who commit dangerous crimes, including drunk driving and assaulting police officers.

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Pete Hegseth is talking about US military action against cartels inside Mexico.

• Mexico Announces Retaliation Against US (RT)

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has accused the United States of fueling cartel violence by allowing powerful firearms to flow south, pushing back against President Donald Trump’s claims that Mexico is failing to stop illegal migration and drug trafficking. Sheinbaum’s comments late Saturday came as she ordered retaliatory tariffs on US goods in response to Trump’s sweeping 25% duties on imports from Mexico and Canada. “We categorically reject the slander made by the White House against the Government of Mexico, accusing it of having alliances with criminal organizations,” Sheinbaum wrote in a fiery post on X. “If such an alliance exists anywhere, it is in the armories of the United States that sell high-powered weapons to these criminal groups – as demonstrated by the US Department of Justice itself.”

Her remarks apparetly referred to a recent report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which indicated that a significant number of military-grade firearms used by Mexican cartels originate in the United States. Sheinbaum also touted her administration’s anti-narcotics efforts, stating that in just four months, Mexican security forces have seized over 40 tons of drugs, including 20 million doses of fentanyl, and arrested more than 10,000 people linked to organized crime. She criticized the US government’s approach to the drug crisis, arguing that if Washington were serious about combating drug abuse, it would “start a massive campaign to prevent the consumption of these drugs and take care of its young people, as we have done in Mexico.”

Trump’s new tariffs, set to take effect on February 4, impose a 25% duty on goods from Mexico and Canada and a 10% duty on imports from China. The US administration justifies these measures by citing concerns over illegal immigration and drug trafficking, particularly fentanyl entering the United States. In response, Sheinbaum has instructed the Ministry of Economy to “implement the Plan B that we have been working on, which includes tariff and non-tariff measures in defense of Mexico’s interests.” While details have not been disclosed, sources indicate that Mexico aims to impose measures targeting key US industries, particularly agriculture, while seeking to avoid further escalation.

The Mexican leader called for bilateral cooperation to address the drug crisis but insisted on equal footing. ”If the United States truly wants to combat the criminal groups that traffic drugs and generate violence, we must work together comprehensively,” she said. “But always under the principles of shared responsibility, mutual trust, collaboration, and, above all, respect for sovereignty, which is non-negotiable.”

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Trudy is far too woke for Trump, and far too close to “Joe Biden”. That will never work.

• Canada Strikes Back With Tariffs (RT)

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced retaliatory 25% tariffs on American goods, hours after US President Donald Trump imposed sweeping trade restrictions on Canadian imports. “Tonight, I am announcing Canada will be responding to the US trade action with 25% trade tariffs against $155 billion worth of American goods,” Trudeau said at a news conference on Saturday. The first wave of tariffs, covering $30 billion worth of US goods, will take effect on Tuesday, with broader measures following in 21 days to allow Canadian companies to adjust.

“These tariffs will be far-reaching and include everyday items,” the Canadian leader said, listing alcohol, fruits, vegetables, clothing, and shoes. In addition to direct tariffs, Ottawa is exploring “several non-tariff measures,” which could include restrictions on critical minerals, energy procurement, and other trade partnerships. “We will stand strong for Canada,” Trudeau said. “We will stand strong to ensure our countries continue to be the best neighbors in the world,” he added, urging citizens to support domestic businesses.

Trump’s 25% tariffs on nearly all Canadian goods were announced earlier on Saturday, with the White House citing concerns over illegal drug trafficking and immigration. “The extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl, constitutes a national emergency,” a White House fact sheet read. “President Trump is taking bold action to hold Mexico, Canada, and China accountable to their promises of halting illegal immigration and stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country.”

The US president claimed that Canada has played “a central role” in America’s fentanyl crisis and failed to “devote sufficient attention and resources” to combat the flow of illicit drugs. In an effort to avert the tariffs, Ottawa introduced a $1.3 billion spending plan aimed at strengthening border surveillance and tackling drug trafficking. Trump said on Friday, however, that there is “nothing Canada can do right now” to avoid the new tariffs. Economists warn that the escalating trade dispute could lead to rising consumer prices and economic disruptions in both countries.

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Is that him, or the PAC?

• Musk Sank $288 Million Into Trump Campaign – WaPo (RT)

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk was “the biggest political donor” of the 2024 election cycle, contributing at least $288 million to Donald Trump’s presidential bid, the Washington Post has reported, citing an analysis of new Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings. Trump appointed Musk to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, which aims to cut federal spending and regulations. In an article published on Friday, the Washington Post said, “the staggering 2024 political spending by Musk” cemented his influence within Trump’s political network, with some critics calling him a “de facto, unelected co-president.”

Musk’s political spending largely flowed through America PAC, a super PAC he helped establish to support Trump by mobilizing low-turnout voters in key battleground states. The group raised $263 million, backed not only by Musk but also by his close allies, including Tesla board member Antonio Gracias, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and Sequoia Capital investor Shaun Maguire. According to the report covering the period from November 26 to the end of the year, Musk contributed $11.2 million on December 31, which was described as “petition incentives.”

The billionaire launched the initiative in October, pledging “$1M to someone in swing states who signed our petition to support free speech & the right to bear arms.” Those who signed the petition could also receive $47 for referring a registered voter in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. With earlier FEC filings showing an in-kind contribution of nearly $40.5 million, the total spending for petition incentives alone amounts to at least $52.7 million.

Musk’s “investment in the 2024 election has already paid off enormously,” the newspaper said, with his net worth surging by more than $200 billion since Trump’s victory on November 5. This is primarily attributed to the soaring stock price of Tesla. Shares of the electric vehicle manufacturer have risen approximately 70% since the election, significantly boosting Musk’s wealth. His fortune was estimated at around $442 billion as of mid-December. Musk, who previously positioned himself as politically neutral, publicly endorsed Trump shortly after the failed assassination attempt on the Republican nominee on July 13.

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“The U.S. is a party to this war, not a peace broker..”

• Can Trump Make A Peace Deal With Putin? (SCF)

U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he wants to open talks with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to end the war in Ukraine. Trump has spoken about the urgency of bringing the conflict to a peaceful conclusion. Fair enough. For his part, President Putin has magnanimously reciprocated, saying he is ready to engage in talks with Trump. So far, so good. At least the American side is no longer encumbered with the stupid intransigent, hostile mentality of the Biden administration, which refused to have any diplomatic contact with Russia. Russia, for its part, has always been willing to negotiate a genuine way to not just end the conflict but to avoid future conflict.

Before the war in Ukraine erupted three years ago in February 2022, Moscow put forward a comprehensive proposal for a security treaty in Europe in December 2021. The proposal stipulated that the U.S.-led NATO military alliance desist from aggressive expansion on Russia’s borders and, in particular, for Ukraine never to be a member of NATO. Those proposals were rejected out of hand by the U.S. and its European partners. At the earliest stage of the Ukraine conflict, in March 2022, Russia negotiated a potential peace settlement with the Kiev regime in Istanbul, only for that proposal to be rejected by Washington and its British surrogate. The result has been three years of bloodshed and destruction, with millions of Ukrainian casualties and refugees. Ukraine has been destroyed thanks to the intransigence of its NATO sponsors.

If diplomacy is the art of making politics work then anything is possible. Opening talks is at least a start to exchanging ideas and demands to bring the conflict to an end and stop it from spiraling into a catastrophic global war between nuclear powers. President Trump says he wants to end the conflict. But does he understand what the conflict is really about? If a problem is not correctly defined, then a solution is elusive.Trump has a showman style of doing politics. He bragged about ending the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of being elected. Now he is talking about ending it in 100 days. There are some positive indicators of good intentions. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban said this week that he believed the Trump administration is determined to do a peace deal.

Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told senators during confirmation hearings for the post that her “priority would be to support President Trump’s efforts to get Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table.” (She may not be confirmed, however.) U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in an interview this week, repeated his calls for the war in Ukraine to end. In a telling comment, Rubio said the onus was on Russia and Ukraine to make compromises. Here’s where the problems emerge. The Trump administration seems to think that a resolution is a matter for two sides – Russia and Ukraine – and that the U.S. is acting as a mere peace broker instead of being the instigator. This was reflected in Trump’s own recent comments when he boorishly and stupidly warned Russia that if it did not come to the negotiating table, he would impose crippling sanctions on the Russian economy.

Trump is delusional if he thinks he can bully Russia or threaten the Russian economy. Such a fatuous attitude is out of order and counterproductive. The fact is the American and European sanctions against Russia have already failed. Russia’s economy has strengthened by being more independent and developing new trade relations with the rest of the world. It is now ranked 4th in the world, above Germany and other European nations. More importantly, Russia is decisively winning the war in Ukraine despite the colossal arming of the Kiev regime by the U.S. and its NATO partners. Ukrainian military lines are crumbling amid mounting losses. Even the Western media are reporting on the disarray and mass desertion of Ukrainian soldiers. The notion that Russia can be pressured to the negotiating table by the Trump administration is a fallacy and a serious misconception about the nature of the conflict.

Furthermore, the two parties that need to negotiate are not the corrupt puppet regime in Kiev and Russia. It is the United States and Russia. The U.S. is a party to this war, not a peace broker. If Trump’s administration is serious about making a peace deal, then it will have to be understood that the United States must accept Russia’s terms. A mere ceasefire and freezing the hostilities in Ukraine, which is what Trump aides are touting, is far from adequate as a solution. As we pointed out in our editorial last week, the conflict in Ukraine has deep roots in the imperialist machinations of the U.S. and its NATO proxy toward Russia. The history of this goes back decades, not just a few years. Only by addressing the root causes of the conflict can an authentic peaceful resolution begin.

Russia’s terms have been adumbrated clearly for a long time. The United States and its NATO war machine need to respect Russia’s national security interests. The security treaty that Moscow proposed in December 2021 is a basis for negotiation. So too are the realities on the ground. Russia’s new territories of Donbass, Kherson, Zaporozhye, as well as Crimea – all historic lands of Russia – are not negotiable. Neither is Russia’s insistence that Ukraine can never be part of the NATO alliance.

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Get rid of Zelensky first, then hold elections.

• White House Wants Zelensky To Hold Elections – Trump Envoy (RT)

Washington wants Kiev to have presidential and parliamentary elections, potentially by this year’s end, Reuters reported on Saturday, citing President Donald Trump’s special envoy for the Ukraine conflict, Keith Kellogg. According to the report, Kellogg and other White House officials have discussed asking Kiev to hold the votes as part of a potential truce deal with Moscow. Speaking to the agency, Kellogg said that both the presidential and parliamentary elections “need to be done.”“Most democratic nations have elections in their time of war. I think it is important they do so,” the special envoy said. “I think it is good for democracy. That’s the beauty of a solid democracy, you have more than one person potentially running.”

Parliamentary and presidential elections in Ukraine scheduled for October 2023 and March 2024 were not held after Vladimir Zelensky announced in December 2023 that they would not take place while martial law imposed during the conflict with Russia remains in force. Martial law was declared after the escalation of hostilities between Kiev and Moscow in February 2022 and has been repeatedly extended ever since. In November 2024, it was prolonged once again and is now expected to continue at least until February 7, 2025. US President Doland Trump has repeatedly vowed to swiftly end the Ukraine conflict. On Friday, he claimed that the US was “having very serious discussions about that war” with Russia – something that Moscow has not confirmed so far.

The American president also stated on multiple occasions that he was ready to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin as soon as possible to negotiate an end to the fighting. Moscow has repeatedly stated it its ready for dialogue at any time, but has received no specific signals from the US. According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, no such talks are currently planned and all communications are being conducted at the embassy level. If the US plan eventually involves a temporary ceasefire deal prior to a more permanent agreement, the winner of the Ukrainian presidential election could be responsible for negotiating the terms of the final treaty, Reuters reported on Saturday, citing discussions in the White House.

Moscow has questioned Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s legitimacy and said that he is no longer qualified to sign international agreements on behalf of Ukraine as his presidential term officially expired in May 2024. Earlier this week, Putin said that although Zelensky could take part in any potential negotiations, he could not be part of a final deal. “It’s possible to negotiate with anyone,” the Russian leader said, adding that any agreement would be a “very serious question” and must “guarantee the security of both Ukraine and Russia” for a “serious” period of time.Putin had previously stated on multiple occasions that the Ukrainian constitution does not envisage any extensions of the president’s term, only authorizing this for the parliament. Moscow has also said it will not agree to a temporary truce and that a settlement must include “reliable, legally binding agreements eliminating the root causes of the conflict.”

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“..the European logic is completely different from the American logic: one is the logic of war and the other is the logic of peace.”

• Orban: US Now Seeks Peace In Ukraine, While EU Wants War To Continue (TASS)

The new US administration and the EU leadership have different approaches to the conflict in Ukraine: Washington now favors a peaceful settlement, while Brussels wants to continue the war, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said during a Kossuth radio broadcast. “The Europeans are saying that sanctions must be maintained and even tightened in order for the Ukrainians to win the war against Russia. Yesterday US Secretary of State [Marco Rubio] said in a big interview that it would be unfair to fool everyone by saying that the Ukrainians can win this war. Well, thank him for that interview, because it showed that the Americans want peace, not sanctions, and the Europeans want sanctions, not peace,” the prime minister said.

He emphasized that now “the European logic is completely different from the American logic: one is the logic of war and the other is the logic of peace.” Orban reiterated that the Hungarian government still favors a negotiated settlement of the Ukrainian conflict, and is counting on US President Donald Trump in this endeavor.

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The Chihuahua Strategic Victory Plan. For Pepe, Europeans are chihuahua’s.

• The Chihuahua Energy Policy: It’s a Gas, Gas, Gas (Pepe Escobar)

As highlighted before, the U.S. – via fracking – has enough gas for domestic consumption, but not enough to export en masse to the EU, because of liquification problems. That explains why even buying more American energy for exorbitant prices, the EU de facto remains largely dependent on Russian LNG – and non-U.S. sources – since the sabotage of the Nord Streams, unveiled in detail by Sy Hersh. Even at full capacity, the Empire of Chaos simply cannot deliver all the gas the EU needs; add to it virtually no investment in both badly needed extra exploration plus the infrastructure necessary to meet increased EU demand. On the domestic U.S. oil market, things do get positively Kafkaesque. U.S. trucking – a massive service industry – is dependent on imported Russian diesel, which needs to be mixed with Made in America oil in order to be suitable for trucks.

Now cut again to Davos, which came and went barely registering a blip. Toxic EC Medusa von der Leyen told Davos that Europe had “substantially reduced”, and “in record time”, its dependency on Russian fossil fuels. Nonsense. Europe’s energy reality is bleak. Russian LNG from Novatek is currently priced at around $4.5–$4.7 per MMBtu. That’s more expensive than pipeline gas but still much (italics mine) cheaper than American LNG. Every industry pro from the Persian Gulf to Antwerp knows that Europe is now importing Russian LNG like it never did before. That’s it – or a dry death. In parallel, Russia will triple its LNG supply capacity by 2035. End result: whatever those “energy commissioners” in Brussels may come up with, Russia will remain essential when it comes to European energy security.

There are no limits – even stratospheric – for Eurocracy stupidity, which corrodes the system like a plague. The Europeans not only have managed to shut off their own gas pipelines but are still “investigating” the Nord Stream de facto terror attack. End result: they are now importing more (italics mine) Russian gas, but by different means, from third-party suppliers, and paying a fortune. This is what can be described as the Chihuahua Strategic Victory Plan. Russia’s LNG exports hit a record high last year, growing by 4% – and delivering 33.6 million tons. The monthly record was 3.25 million tons in December 2024 – 13.7% more than November. The largest Russian exporter is Yamal LNG: 21.1 million tons, 6% more than in 2023. Now cut to proverbial American rumble, in the form of Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources Geoffrey Pyatt ordering the “full termination” of Russian gas exported to Europe.

To hell with what nations like Hungary, Austria and Slovakia may think – and do need. Pyatt told the Atlantic Council, “Today we are the largest LNG exporter in the world, and by the end of the Trump administration, we will have doubled what we’re doing today […] The decision has clearly been made in Brussels to get to zero [gas supplies from Russia] by 2027…and the United States strongly supports that goal.” Oh dear. Do these people even read the basic headlines? As reported by Politico, the EU is “devouring” Russian gas at unprecedented levels since the start of 2025, importing 837,300 metric tons of LNG just in the first two weeks of the year. The Ukraine transit deal was shut off for good – at least for now – starting on January 1st. The action now is on the maritime routes.

Enter the U.S. Treasury with a new – what else – sanctions package against Russian oil trade, targeting up to 5.8 million barrels a day shipped by sea. As it stands, the global oil market is experiencing a surplus of about 0.8 million barrels a day. Oil prices for 2025 should remain at around $71 for a barrel of Brent crude (as it stands, it’s $76.2). Not exactly what Mr. Disco Inferno wants. So let’s assume these 5.8 million barrels of Russian oil – under stiff sanctions – would vanish from the global market. In this case we would have oil prices skyrocketing to an average of $150 to $160 a barrel. Once again, not what Mr. Disco Inferno wants: he vociferously promised – and keeps promising – a MAGA oil superpower, while lowering oil prices to max $50 a barrel.

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“The algorithm allows gaming GPUs to be used for scientific computing..”

• Russia and China Boost NVIDIA Performance 800-Fold (Sp.)

Scientists from the two countries have developed a breakthrough algorithm using information from reverse engineering video card accelerators. The algorithm allows gaming GPUs to be used for scientific computing. The innovation was achieved by specialists from Shenzhen MSU-BIT University, co-founded by Lomonosov Moscow State University and Beijing Institute of Technology. This enables Russia and China to reduce their reliance on NVIDIA GPUs, weakening the impact of US sanctions.

It also means that Russia and China need to buy less NVIDIA GPUs, which likely led to the collapse of NVIDIA stock price, Russoft association President Valentin Makarov tells Sputnik. He believes ongoing research includes new machine learning algorithms and a next-gen GPU being developed in Russia. These advancements highlight Russia’s technological expertise, allowing collaboration with China and potential future partnerships with India.

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“It is quite absurd to continue to blame Russia for everything without any reason.”

• Norway Clears Russian-Crewed Ship In Sabotage Probe (RT)

Norwegian police have released a Russian-crewed vessel after finding no evidence linking it to recent damage to an undersea fiber optic cable connecting Latvia and Sweden. The Norwegian-owned Silver Dania, which operates between St. Petersburg and the northern Russian port of Murmansk, was detained on Thursday night following a request from Latvian authorities and a ruling from a local court. Norwegian police said that the ship, which was escorted to the northern port of Tromso, could have damaged a critical fiber optic link belonging to Latvia’s state broadcaster and connecting the Baltic nation and Sweden’s Gotland island. It added that the law enforcement is “conducting an operation on the ship to search, conduct interviews, and secure evidence.”

However, less than a day later, the police stated that Silver Dania “will be able to leave Tromso already on Friday evening.” They added that while the investigation will continue, “no findings have been made linking the ship to the act,” and the crew had been cooperative. The cable sabotage case is the latest in a string of incidents involving damage to critical infrastructure in the Baltic Sea, with speculation rife that Russia could have played a role. Short of any proof, however, Western officials have refrained from leveling direct accusations.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed allegations of Moscow’s involvement. “It is quite absurd to continue to blame Russia for everything without any reason.” The Washington Post, citing Western intelligence sources, reported earlier this month that the damage to Baltic Sea infrastructure likely stemmed from maritime accidents involving poorly maintained ships and inexperienced crews rather than deliberate sabotage. NATO has launched a mission dubbed “Baltic Sentry” to enhance surveillance and protection of critical undersea infrastructure in the area and address concerns about possible sabotage.

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The only thing that will reach net zero is the spending.

It’s all just a money grab delusion: “..the world needs to pour in $5.6 trillion each year..”

• Global Green Spending Is Falling Short of Net Zero Targets (OP)

Global investments in green energy solutions topped $2 trillion last year, for the first time ever, but the world needs to pour in $5.6 trillion each year into low-carbon energy to get on track for global net zero by 2050, in line with the Paris Agreement, BloombergNEF said in a new report on Thursday. Last year, green energy investments reached a record high globally, but the pace of growth has slowed from the 2021-2023 period, according to BNEF’s report Energy Transition Investment Trends 2025. The world invested a total of $2.1 trillion in low-carbon energy in 2024, up by 11% compared to 2023, the report found.

However, the pace of growth has slowed. In the years 2021 to 2023, global investment in clean energy jumped by between 24% and 29% each year, according to BNEF. Electrified transport continued to be the top segment for low-carbon energy investment, drawing in $757 billion in 2024. China remained the single biggest market with $818 billion of investment, up by 20% from 2023 and increasing investment in all sectors. China’s total investment last year was greater than the combined investment of the U.S., the EU, and the UK. However, investment was stagnant in the U.S., at $338 billion, and fell in both the EU and UK, hitting $381 billion and $65.3 billion, respectively, BNEF said.

The research provider also noted that energy transition investment will have to average $5.6 trillion each year from 2025 to 2030, in order to get on track for global net zero by 2050, in line with the Paris Agreement. The current investment level of $2.1 trillion implies that the world is only at 37% of what is required to get on track, BNEF said. “There is still much more that needs to be done, especially in emerging areas like industrial decarbonization, hydrogen and carbon capture, in order to reach global net-zero goals,” commented Albert Cheung, Deputy CEO of BNEF.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Bats

 

 

Orca
https://twitter.com/i/status/1885682013589414176

 

 

Elephant
https://twitter.com/i/status/1885538600085053571

 

 

Daddy
https://twitter.com/i/status/1885737803666825299

 

 

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Debt Rattle February 1 2025

Feb 012025
 
 February 1, 2025  Posted by at 10:35 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  73 Responses »


Edward Hopper New York movie 1938

 

• Replace the Income Tax With Tariffs? (Jeffrey Tucker)
• Trump Slaps 25% Tariffs On Canada & Mexico, 10% On China (ZH)
• Trump Vows To ‘Absolutely’ Impose Tariffs On EU (RT)
• Trump Says DC Black Hawk “Was Flying Too High… By A Lot” (ZH)
• Trump Confirms ‘Serious Discussions’ With Moscow Over Ukraine (RT)
• EU Divided Over Western Troops In Ukraine – Times (RT)
• Is The EU Finally Coming To Its Senses On Russian Energy? (Amar)
• EU Energy Policy Row Triggers Norway Government Collapse (RT)
• Hungary Calls For Lifting Russia Sanctions (RT)
• Merkel Joins Virtue-Signaling Outcry Over AfD (ZH)
• Tulsi Slams Deep State At Confirmation Hearing: I Refuse To Be Their Puppet (MN)
• The Arbitrary Hypocrisy of American “Justice” (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Six Ways From Sunday (Jim Kunstler)
• Trump is Not Going to Make US Into ‘Bitcoin Superpower’ (Sp.)
• Third World US Cannot Get Its Astronauts Home From Space (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Trump Wants To Revive ‘Star Wars’ – Zakharova (RT)
• The US is Turning Into a Crybaby Empire (Sp.)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1885084376242835534

Watters

Tariffs etc etc

Kash J6

 

 

 

 

Leavitt
https://twitter.com/i/status/1885402197027909925

Laken

Calley Means

Hawley

Tucker Piers

 

 

 

 

For sure an interesting topic. And it’s not B/W: you don’t have to switch from one to the other in one fell swoop. But you can gradually raise tariffs, and lower income tax “accordingly”. That would raise citizens’ prosperity. Combine it with DOGE, and you get somewhere.

• Replace the Income Tax With Tariffs? (Jeffrey Tucker)

There was a time, before 1913, when you could keep every penny you earned. You did not have to file with the federal government, telling them what you earned and giving the feds their cut. Your finances were your business and no one else’s. You had the right to earn, own, and keep property, and it was sacrosanct, guaranteed by U.S. law and tradition. There were no audits, investigations, account freezes, withholdings, or any other forms of payment. There was your productivity and you and that’s all. How was the government funded? It earned revenue through tariffs. These are paid directly by importers and indirectly by producers and consumers if the costs can be passed through. As strategies for gaining revenue, this approach is relatively noninvasive. It left the population alone.

Back in those days, however, the federal government barely existed as compared with today. More precisely, in real terms, the federal government in 1885 spent in inflation-adjusted dollars about 0.05 percent of what it spends today. Even then, people believed that it was too big and wanted it cut back to size. Donald Trump has recently been schooling people in the history of revenue strategies and he is teaching something that people have not known. He has explained how this period of American history saw the greatest amount of economic growth we’ve ever seen. He is correct about that and he is also correct that this was the period of the tariff. The cause and effect, however, is murky. The main themes of this period were freedom and sound money. The dollar was governed by the gold standard and there was no central bank.

The federal government itself had no presence in the life of the American family or typical American business. Those facts more than tariffs account for the difference between then and now. As an aside, I cannot remember another U.S. president having as clear an opinion on 19th-century economic history. Most comments by presidents have been limited to pieties about the Founding Fathers or Lincoln but skip over details concerning revenue sources or controversies concerning national banks and the like. Trump is clearly different, highly confident in these details of history that are lost even on most economists. Trump has explained that the income tax came along in 1913 as a replacement for the tariff. That is correct in design but the historical reality was slightly different.

Tariffs were not abolished entirely. The income tax just became a second and additional source of revenue. Then the Great War came, financed in large part by the central bank (the Federal Reserve) that was created the same year. The income tax and the Fed became the financial source of Leviathan power. Both came about in 1913, along with the direct election of Senators that blew up the bicameral structure of Congress and put the big cities in charge of America’s equivalent of the House of Lords. Trump’s history lesson opens up the opportunity to examine all of this more closely. In 19th-century terms, he seems to be siding with the Hamilton faction inherited by Henry Clay, the Senator from Virginia who advocated what came to be called “the American System.”

This was a policy of protective tariffs, a national bank, and federal subsidies for internal improvements to promote economic growth and national cohesion. That’s a pretty good summary of what seems to be Trump’s position. In historical terms, the Clay view contrasted with the Jeffersonian view, which favored a tiny government, free trade, no national bank, no industrial subsidies, and a society of small farmers to serve as the economic engine. These days, the debates between the Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians seem far less relevant to the current situation. Both Hamilton and Clay would be appalled by the size and scope of government power, and would happily link arms with Jefferson and John Randolph of Roanoke to cut the beast down to size. That seems to be the actual ambition of Trump, to be an agent of change that makes the federal government manageable again.

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“..we would expect to see USDCAD move decidedly higher come Monday..”

• Trump Slaps 25% Tariffs On Canada & Mexico, 10% On China (ZH)

Tomorrow, February 1, the Trump administration will slap 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and a 10% tariff on China, as announced during Friday’s press briefing by White House spox Karoline Leavitt, who denied reports of a delay to March 1. There will be no delay, selective targeting, or slow roll-out of phased-in tariffs as speculated by Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1885393819098898702

That said, there could be certain exemptions – such as for oil and gas, which Leavitt did not elaborate on. For now, all we have to go on is Trump’s most recent comments on oil: “It depends on what the price is. If the oil is properly priced, if they treat us properly — which they don’t,” he said Thursday while speaking with reporters. The United States imported nearly 4.6 million barrels of oil per day from Canada in October, and 563,000 barrels from Mexico. Daily US production over the same period averaged nearly 13.5 million barrels per day. So in this scenario – full tariffs with zero quarter given, “we would expect to see USDCAD move decidedly higher come Monday, challenging the 1.50 level and representing a more than 3% move higher in the cross relative to current spot. To be clear, Canada could retaliate with dollar-for-dollar tariffs in absolute terms since its trade relationship with the US is balanced, however, USDCAD will still be higher given that the US economy is more than 10x the size of its Canadian counterpart,” according to DB.

On Friday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that any tariffs would stoke an ‘immediate’ and ‘forceful’ response. “We’re ready with a response – a purposeful, forceful but reasonable, immediate response. It’s not what we want, but if he moves forward, we will also act,” said Trudeau, adding that all options were on the table. Canada sends 75% of its goods and services exports to the US, meaning that the tariffs will sting. “I won’t sugarcoat it – our nation could be facing difficult times in the coming days and weeks,” Trudeau continued. “I know Canadians might be anxious and worried, but I want them to know the federal government, and indeed, all orders of government, have their backs.” Ontario Premier Doug Ford has already vowed to slap back by pulling American alcohol off of store shelves (and into his pantry?) – as Canada is the world’s second largest market for America’s distilled spirits, behind the 27-nation EU.

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“Am I going to impose tariffs on the European Union? You want the truthful answer, or should I give you a political answer?”

• Trump Vows To ‘Absolutely’ Impose Tariffs On EU (RT)

US President Donald Trump has announced his intention to impose tariffs on the European Union, citing unfair treatment in trade practices. This follows the implementation of 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada, and 10% on Chinese goods, effective February 1. The European bloc has been bracing for possible trade restrictions under the new US administration for months after Trump issued multiple threats to impose tariffs on the EU unless specific conditions are met. In December, Trump demanded that the EU reduce its trade deficit with the US by significantly increasing purchases of American oil and gas. “Am I going to impose tariffs on the European Union? You want the truthful answer, or should I give you a political answer? Absolutely, absolutely,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday.

“The European Union has treated us so terribly,” the US leader added. He confirmed plans for “something substantial” against the EU but did not provide specific details regarding the targeted goods or the exact tariff rates. This is not the first instance of trade tensions between the US and the EU under Trump’s administration. In 2018, during his first term, Trump imposed a 25% tariff on steel and a 10% tariff on aluminum imports from the EU, Canada, and Mexico, citing national security concerns. In response, the EU implemented retaliatory tariffs on American products such as bourbon whiskey and motorcycles. The new tariffs on Mexico and Canada were justified by the Trump administration as measures to address issues like illegal immigration and the influx of fentanyl into the United States.

Despite warnings from economists about potential global economic repercussions, including increased inflation and disrupted supply chains, Trump has remained steadfast in his approach. On Thursday, Trump also threatened to impose 100% tariffs on BRICS nations if they attempt to undermine the “mighty US dollar” by creating an alternative currency. Members of the economic bloc have accelerated efforts to reduce reliance on third-party currencies in bilateral trade in recent years, especially after Western sanctions led to the freezing of Russia’s reserves held in dollars and euros, following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.

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Intentionally? Ceiling is 200 feet. Chopper was at 380.

• Trump Says DC Black Hawk “Was Flying Too High… By A Lot” (ZH)

While there are countless facts still left to be uncovered and scrutinized, there’s an early indication that the worst US air disaster since 9/11 may have resulted from a flight-path deviation by the Army helicopter that collided with a passenger jet landing at Washington’s Reagan National Airport. Remarkably, it appears an identical disaster may have been narrowly avoided just one day earlier, when an airline pilot chose to abort landing after deeming another helicopter was dangerously close. Control-tower staffing is also emerging as a major concern — including a decision to allow one controller to leave work early.

Based on a determination of the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter’s last location before colliding with American Airlines 5342 from Wichita, the Army chopper was flying above its authorized flight path, according to anonymous sources who spoke to the New York Times. The American CRJ300 stopped transmitting tracking data at 375 feet — suggesting impact occurred far above the 200-foot ceiling imposed on helicopters in that area. The Black Hawk was reportedly under the command of a female pilot with more than 500 hours of flight time. The male instructor pilot had more than 1,000 hours, while the crew chief is also said to have logged hundreds of hours. Given the shorter duration of helicopter flights, those hours are substantial, according to Jonathan Koziol, a retired Army chopper pilot who’s assigned to the Unified Command Post that’s been organized to coordinate the post-disaster efforts at the airport.

The Army has not released the names of the crew members, but the names of the two males aboard the Black Hawk have emerged via other channels: Staff Sgt. Ryan O’Hara and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Eaves. All were assigned to Bravo Company, 12th Combat Aviation Battalion, headquartered at nearby Fort Belvoir. While there are many social media posts purporting to identify the female pilot as a male-to-female trans National Guard member who on Tuesday publicized his transition, ZeroHedge cannot find authoritative confirmation of those claims as this article is being written. On Monday, President Trump issued an executive order barring transgender people from openly serving in the military. Update: The trans pilot in question, Jo Ellis, has released a video confirming he is still alive and was not piloting the Black Hawk.

The Army says the crew was conducting a routine nighttime qualification flight, with the focus on safely navigating helicopter routes in and around Washington. However, more specifically, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the crew was training for a “continuity of government mission.” That’s the name given for a response to an attack on the capital, or a major disaster that hits the city. In such an event, helicopters would be used to evacuate senior federal officials. The crashed helicopter was a standard UH-60; the battalion also flies the VH-60M variant: Distinguished by its gold top, it’s used for VIP transport.

Every day, more than a hundred helicopters buzz around Reagan National’s flight paths. Roughly 24 hours before Wednesday’s catastrophe, one of those helicopters alarmed the pilot of another commercial flight to the extent she aborted landing and went around. There are no reports on the type of helicopter. A female voice in the cockpit of Republic Airways Flight 4514 informed the tower of the problem at roughly 8:05 p.m. Tuesday, according to the audio recording of air traffic control traffic. The plane took a sharp turn to the west, made a loop to try to make a second approach, and safely landed at 8:16 p.m., flight tracking records indicate. — Washington Post. Meanwhile, concerning details have also emerged about the workloads assigned to the Reagan National air traffic controllers at the time of Wednesday night’s crash that killed all 67 aboard the two aircraft.

Staffing was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” according to a preliminary FAA document reviewed by the New York Times. Under normal staffing, one air traffic controller is responsible for helicopter traffic, while another guides landing and departing planes. However, on Wednesday night, one man was juggling both responsibilities. According to the Times, that’s because a supervisor allowed a different air traffic controller to leave before that individual’s shift had ended. There are several other factors that could have contributed to the accident. Among them: It’s not clear if the Black Hawk pilot was using night vision goggles, which can limit peripheral vision and depth perception, while also being problematic in an urban environment with its abundant lights.

Given the angles of the two flight paths, city lights may have camouflaged the lights of the American Airlines jet. “Going beak-to-beak at night, the lights of the [jet] tend to blend in with the city lights behind [it],” notes aviation YouTuber “blancolirio” in a detailed analysis of Wednesday’s scenario. “Another problem when you’re going head to head with each other is — if there’s no lateral movement in the windscreen — that light [of the other aircraft] is very hard to detect.” Potential miscommunication: While the tower asked the Black Hawk (“PAT25”) if it had the American Airlines “CRJ” (Canadair Regional Jet) in sight, some are speculating the Army pilots thought the controller was referring to a jet that was taking off to their right, rather than the doomed jet that was landing from their left. Others think they may have been looking at another jet on approach — behind American 5342.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1885116473217032426

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They’re waiting to meet until they can get tangible results.

• Trump Confirms ‘Serious Discussions’ With Moscow Over Ukraine (RT)

US President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday that he expects something “significant” to happen once he speaks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, confirming that serious discussions with Moscow are already underway. Trump, who took office last Monday, has repeatedly stated that he is ready to speak with his Russian counterpart as soon as possible to negotiate an end to the Ukraine conflict. The Kremlin previously said it was awaiting clear signals from the Trump administration. “We’ll be speaking, and I think we will, perhaps, do something that will be significant,” Trump said on Friday. “It’s just a senseless situation, and it’s got to stop. So whatever I can do to stop it… and we are having discussions, yes.”

When asked by a reporter whether that means he had already spoken with Putin or had a call scheduled, Trump responded, “I don’t want to say that.” Pressed on why he was withholding the information, he reiterated, “I just don’t want to say that.” “We’re having very serious discussions about that war, trying to get it ended,” he added, confirming that these talks are taking place “with Russia.” On Monday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov stated that a phone call between the two presidents was not currently planned, as no agreement or understanding had been reached on the matter. He noted that all communication is presently being conducted at the embassy level.

Trump has pledged to negotiate a resolution to the conflict between Moscow and Kiev and has reportedly given his Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, 100 days to hammer out such a settlement.Last week, the US president threatened to impose new sanctions if Moscow refused to accept an unspecified “deal” to end the conflict but maintained that he is “not looking to hurt Russia.” Russia has insisted that hostilities will only end if Ukraine commits to permanent neutrality, demilitarization and denazification, while also recognizing the territorial “realities on the ground.” Moscow has stated that it remains open to negotiations but insists that any agreement must include “reliable, legally binding agreements eliminating the root causes of the conflict.”

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Not the EU’s call. European parents don’t want their kids to be used for target practice.

• EU Divided Over Western Troops In Ukraine – Times (RT)

The European Union remains divided over the prospect of deploying a Western-led peacekeeping force to Ukraine if a ceasefire between Kiev and Moscow is reached, The Times reported on Friday, citing multiple military and diplomatic sources. Berlin opposes the idea, partly because it does not want to commit ahead of its February elections, according to the British newspaper. The Baltic states and Poland – among Kiev’s most vocal supporters throughout the conflict – are reportedly concerned that such a deployment would divert NATO’s attention and resources away from their own defense, leaving them “exposed.”

The UK, France, and the Nordic nations are the most vocal advocates for a Western peacekeeping mission. However, even among them, officials worry that the EU would not be able to carry out the operation without US involvement. A European diplomatic source told The Times that Washington’s participation would be necessary because “they have capabilities that all of Europe lacks,” including the “ability to retaliate at scale if needed.” US President Donald Trump has previously stated that Washington should not provide troops or funding for such a mission. Kiev’s European backers were also reportedly “irked” by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s recent demand for a “minimum” of 200,000 peacekeepers – a number the EU alone would struggle to provide.

Moscow has consistently rejected the idea of Western-led peacekeepers in Ukraine. Earlier this week, senior Russian diplomat Rodion Miroshnik warned that any military force entering Ukraine without Russia’s consent would be considered a legitimate military target. “If Russia does not buy the idea it is dead and if the US does not provide a hammer the idea is dead,” an unnamed senior Western military official admitted, according to The Times. The Kremlin could perceive a large-scale NATO troop deployment in Ukraine as a significant threat to Russia, potentially serious enough to trigger another mobilization wave, Aleksey Zhuravlev, First Deputy Chairman of the Russian State Duma Defense Committee, warned on Friday.

Some EU officials believe a non-Western UN peacekeeping force, composed of troops from more neutral countries such as India, Bangladesh, or China, would be a “wiser alternative.” This approach, they argue, would not require US participation and might be more acceptable to Moscow. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in December that any talk of deploying peacekeepers is moot at this point, given that Zelensky signed a law banning any talks with the current Russian leadership. Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service has warned that the West could use peacekeepers to “occupy” Ukraine and once again buy time for a new conflict with Moscow.

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aka will they admit they lost?!

• Is The EU Finally Coming To Its Senses On Russian Energy? (Amar)

All that is solid melts into air,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously proclaimed almost 180 years ago. Their Communist Manifesto was published against the backdrop of the European revolutions of 1848. But they should have seen 2025 – we are beginning to witness a mighty melting of what is un-solid about EU-NATO Europe. This time, the backdrop is not (yet) a typical revolution – street fighting, barricades, and all. But there are two historic events that, in their combined geopolitical impact, will be revolutionary, though they have been anything but unforeseeable. These are, in order of importance, Russia’s defeat of the West in Ukraine, and America’s doubling down on Trumpism. The two developments have made the sands on which the EU-NATO Europeans have built their rickety policy edifice not merely shift but cave in.

Relentless obedience to Washington has always been self-damaging, but now a reckoning is at hand with accumulating self-harm reaching a tipping point into self-destruction. It is true, on the surface, that EU-NATO Europe is still digging in its heels. The EU has just produced its umpteenth renewal of sweeping – and constantly increasing – sanctions against Russia. A faction of ten among its member countries are shouting for even more. A top energy official of the European Commission is in Washington to explore ways in which the Europeans can give in, again, to ever-increasing US pressure and buy even more ruinously expensive liquefied natural gas (LNG) from their great insatiable “ally.” Yet some, even among Europe’s current elites, are still capable of intuiting that things are so desperate that they must, finally, question even apparent axioms.

As the Financial Times has just reported, there are voices, including from EU heavyweight countries such as Germany, that dare think about the unthinkable, namely returning to openly buying inexpensive fossil fuel energy from Russia. In a less topsy-turvy world, the EU should, of course, never have stopped doing so. But as it is, one aspect of Western economic warfare against Russia was the EU’s declared – if non-binding, nota bene – intention to completely abandon its best source of cheap energy by 2027. Not that this plan has really worked. In reality, the results have been mixed. Yes, the EU has managed to make its energy supply more expensive, so that its industry is struggling to remain globally competitive, with gas costs “typically three to four times higher than in the US.”

But no, the EU has not, actually, been able to ween itself off Russian energy. Instead, Moscow, according to Bloomberg, remains one of the EU’s “top gas providers.” Indeed, 2024 has just seen record imports of LNG from Russia. It is, of course, more expensive that way than by pipeline. The (still) legal but oddly underhanded way of buying and consuming this LNG stokes tension inside the EU, but that’s apparently the way its elites prefer their commerce and politics – inconsistent, unusually dishonest, a tad absurd, and held together only by a thick glue made of foul compromises and bad blood all around. In a broader perspective, EU-NATO Europe’s current, self-inflicted energy fiasco is, of course, only one aspect of its fundamentally unsound (polite expression) decision to obediently and even fanatically join the American proxy war against Russia via Ukraine.

Since then, nothing has worked out as expected. The Ukrainian Army was beefed up with Western arms, training, intelligence, mercenaries, and “advisers” to become the West’s strongest anti-Russian proxy in history. In that shape, it was supposed to inflict a military defeat on Moscow. Yet it is Ukraine now that is struggling to survive on an increasingly desperate defensive, as even the Washington Post has recently admitted (while still, obstinately, calling for more war). Western economic warfare strategists, meanwhile, boasted that they would not just impede but ruin Russia. Yet now its economy (estimated GDP growth in 2024 of between 3.8% and 4%) is doing better than that of the EU heavyweights France (0.8%) and Germany (no growth, instead minus 0.2%), as well as the EU as a whole (0.9%).

Spain, it is true, is an outlier in Western Europe (with 3.2%) but this being an exception is the point. Its success, the Wall Street Journal reports, depends on mass tourism and the use of so much migrant labor that, without immigration, Spain’s population would be shrinking. Good luck, Germany (for instance), with replicating that recipe… In addition, Western international clout would, so Western elites made themselves believe just a few years ago, compel everyone else on Planet Earth to isolate Russia. Yet now it is the West that looks lonely. First, most of the world refused to freeze out Russia, and then the West’s ongoing massive complicity in Israel’s genocidal ethnic-cleansing attack on the Palestinians shredded the last sorry remnants of the West’s Orwellian claim to global leadership based on “value” and “rules” superiority.

As for Moscow, it’s doing just fine, quietly – and not so quietly – admired by the Global South for standing its ground against sanctions that have harmed the interests of nations of that region too, while building out Moscow’s multilateral relationships in associations such as BRICS and with partners such as North Korea and Iran, and deepening its de facto alliance with China.

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“What we were clear about all along is that beginning the process of linking ourselves more closely to the EU’s dysfunctional electricity market and energy policy is completely out of the question..”

• EU Energy Policy Row Triggers Norway Government Collapse (RT)

Norway’s coalition government collapsed on Thursday after the Euroskeptic Center Party rejected EU energy policy regulations advocated by Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store. The move would subject people to an electricity price hike, the party leader and finance minister, Trygve Slagsvold Vedum, warned. It leaves Store heading a minority Labor Party government. The cabinet can govern until the next elections, which are scheduled for September, but has lost its majority in the parliament and could struggle to pass legislation. At the heart of the dispute is the fourth EU energy package, which is also known as “clean energy for all Europeans.” Adopted in 2019, it introduced a set of policies with a focus on renewables and “energy efficiency,” including reduced CO2 emissions, as well as a “robust governance system” for energy in the bloc.

Norway, which is not a member of the EU, is still closely tied to the bloc through the European Economic Area (EEA) and normally has to adopt the bloc’s rules unless it invokes a right of reservation. The Nordic nation is also a major oil and gas producer and exporter. The Center Party has argued that the changes advocated by Store would erode the nation’s autonomy, and maintained that Oslo should instead reclaim its authority in the area of energy policy. Earlier this week, Verdum blamed previous Conservative governments for contributing to energy price hikes in Norway by allowing the construction of undersea power lines to Germany and the UK.

“When the Labor leadership, instead of solving the problem, chooses to make the problem even bigger by tying Norway even closer to the EU in electricity policy through the introduction of the EU’s fourth energy market package, the Center Party chooses to leave the government,” he said. “We believe it is wrong to become more closely linked to the EU’s energy policy,” Vedum told NRK broadcaster on Thursday. “What we were clear about all along is that beginning the process of linking ourselves more closely to the EU’s dysfunctional electricity market and energy policy is completely out of the question,” the Center Party leader told a press conference following the decision to leave the cabinet.

The development drew criticism from Brussels. “We are not happy with Norway. The sentiment is as bad as I have known it,” an EU ambassador to Oslo told the Financial Times on Thursday, calling the Nordic nation “selfish” for “trying to keep this electricity for itself,” and profiteering off the EU through its gas exports. It’s not the first time that Norway and the EU have clashed over energy issues. In August 2022, Oslo said it could ration its electricity exports to the EU and the UK against the backdrop of a heatwave affecting its hydroelectric power production and domestic electricity price hikes. The announcement was slammed by Germany as a thinly veiled threat to put pressure on the bloc.

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“..we just need to get on our heels and say: dear Ukrainian friends, we understand everything, but we need this. Let the Russian gas through.”

• Hungary Calls For Lifting Russia Sanctions (RT)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has renewed calls on the EU to lift its sanction on Russia in order to realign the bloc’s policies with the new US government. Budapest has long criticized Brussels’ approach to the Ukraine conflict as being incapable of ending hostilities and damaging to the bloc’s member states. On Monday, the EU extended its existing sanctions until the end of July. Hungary refrained from blocking the measure despite its declared opposition. In a weekly interview with state-owned Kossuth Radio, Orban said Budapest has to consider the positions of other members of the economic bloc who favor the restrictions, imposed on Russia in response to the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.

”The Hungarian interest is clear: we have lost 19.5 billion ($20bn) in three years,” Orban stressed, adding that Kiev’s behavior has become more “impudent” recently, referring to Ukraine’s refusal last year to extend a contract that had been allowing the supply of Russian natural gas to European consumers, including to Hungary. Budapest has been assured that the matter would be addressed, the prime minister explained, which contributed to its decision on Monday not to block the sanctions.Given Kiev’s total dependence on foreign aid, Orban said, “we just need to get on our heels and say: dear Ukrainian friends, we understand everything, but we need this. Let the Russian gas through.”

The Hungarian leader contrasted the EU’s approach with that of newly inaugurated US President Donald Trump. Washington is pursuing a policy of peace while Brussels opts for war, Orban pointed out. In a recent interview with journalist Megyn Kelly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that under President Joe Biden, the US had “somehow led people to believe” that Ukraine could achieve a military victory over Russia, resulting in a protracted stalemate that has regressed Ukraine’s development by a century. Slovakia, another consumer of Russian gas, has also criticized Ukraine’s shutdown of the transit pipeline through its territory. On Thursday, Prime Minister Robert Fico claimed that his pressure campaign against Kiev is yielding results, saying he perceived a shift in its position.

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Mutti saves the day one last time. Barely.

• Merkel Joins Virtue-Signaling Outcry Over AfD (ZH)

German mainstream politicians and media have presented that the real ‘threat’ the country is facing is not brutal terror rampages and attacks like those recently seen in Magdeburg and Aschaffenburg (both perpetrated by asylum-seeking migrants), but the fact that Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has been polling better than ever before and having serious national influence as Friedrich Merz – Merkel’s successor as leader of the country’s conservatives – seeks to push through tighter immigration controls. All of this has triggered former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s intervention, given the supposed ’embarrassment’ of witnessing the Christian Democrats currently relying on the AfD help to pass the new immigration bill.

The conservative CDU-CSU (Christian Democratic Union of Germany and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria) has broken the longstanding taboo of working with the AfD when on Wednesday they together passed a motion calling for a crackdown on new arrivals and strengthened border controls. Former Chancellor Merkel has blasted Merz. “I believe it is wrong,” she began in fresh comments. It marks an unprecedented intervention by the former leader since she stepped down from politics in December 2021. As is custom the former chancellor has been silent for years after leaving power. It appears the intervention worked as the conservatives on Friday have failed to pass the measure.

According to the vote and the latest:
• GERMAN CONSERVATIVES FAIL WITH FAR RIGHT-BACKED MIGRATION BILL
• GERMAN LOWER HOUSE REJECTS OPPOSITION’S DRAFT LAW ON TIGHTENING MIGRATION POLICY
• The breakdown: For: 338; Against: 350; Abstentions: 5
• Apart from Merz’s conservative CDU/CSU bloc, which submitted the immigration bill, three other opposition parties — the far-right AfD, the pro-business Free Democrats and the far-left BSW — had signaled their support. Together, they had 372 seats in parliament, more than the 367 required for a majority, and there’s a handful of independents who may also support it.
• BBG: After that result and a moment of shocked silence, the conservative leader Friedrich Merz left the chamber with sunken shoulders, his immigration bill having been unexpectedly defeated. The breakdown of the vote showing which lawmakers might have broken ranks will be an interesting read.
• Early reaction from Chancellor Scholz’s Social Democrats, a post on X from SPD Health Minister Karl Lauterbach: “What a disgrace. The whole maneuver was in vain and only damaged democracy.”

She had used the opportunity to ‘remind’ everyone there should never be any association whatsoever between the mainstream parties and the AfD. She wagged her finger at Merz for breaching the longstanding “firewall” against the AfD. They are supposed to be shunned politically… but no longer. “I think it is wrong to no longer feel bound to this proposal, thereby allowing a majority with the votes of the AfD in a vote in the German Bundestag for the first time on 29 January 2025,” she wrote on her website. The walls are closing in, and AfD party officials are grabbing the popcorn to enjoy the mainstream fallout and shrieking. Without doubt, panic is truly setting in, revealed also in how quickly anti-AfD politicians have been in invoking fears of a return to Nazis and the Holocaust:

Centre-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz charged that Merz’s tactical manoeuvre was a breach of his previous promises to shun the AfD and left him “open to the accusation that he is untrustworthy”. Scholz even raised the spectre of Merz, if he wins, one day allowing the AfD into a government — a scenario that horrifies the mainstream parties in the country still seeking to atone for the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. “Conservatives who are supporters of Nazis cannot become coalition partners,” said the co-leader of the Green Youth, Jakob Blasel. He described that this means under Merz, the “Greens must not enter a coalition with the CDU and CSU.” And Robert Habeck, the chancellor candidate for the Greens, dramatically declared it a “turning point” in Germany. “Friedrich Merz and the Union have abandoned the consensus of the political center of this house not to make common cause with the extremes,” wrote Habeck.

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“President Trump has reportedly indicated that if Republicans torpedo either Tulsi or RFK Jr., it will mean “war”.

• Tulsi Slams Deep State At Confirmation Hearing: I Refuse To Be Their Puppet (MN)

During her confirmation hearing to become President Trump’s head of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard hit back at Democrats and RINO ‘conservatives’ who have spent months smearing her as a Russian asset or a threat to national security. During opening remarks, Gabbard cited examples of how the intelligence community agencies have been politicised against Trump and his supporters, asserting “this must end.” Gabbard urged that Trump’s massive victory serves as a mandate from Americans to overhaul the intelligence apparatus which has been infested and weaponised by deep state operatives. Gabbard emphasized that the reason she has been so vilified and even placed on a terror watchlist is because she refuses to act as just another puppet.

“Those who oppose my nomination imply that I am loyal to something or someone other than God, my own conscience, and the Constitution of the United States—accusing me of being Trump’s puppet, Putin’s puppet, Assad’s puppet, a guru’s puppet, and Modi’s puppet—without recognizing the absurdity of simultaneously being the puppet of five different puppet masters,” Gabbard stated. She added, “The same tactic was used against President Trump and failed. The American people elected President Trump with a decisive victory and a mandate for change. The fact is, what truly unsettles my political opponents is that I refuse to be their puppet.” In a Fox News interview following the hearing, GOP Senator Josh Hawley warned Gabbard’s confirmation could be in jeopardy because of Republicans bowing to the deep state.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1885142057309921590

President Trump has reportedly indicated that if Republicans torpedo either Tulsi or RFK Jr., it will mean “war”.

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Bob Menendez gets 11 years for accepting bribes from Egypt. Bernie and Pocahontas get to keep their Senate seats despite millions from big Pharma.. “How does this differ from the $1,417,811 bribe that Big Pharma pays in campaign contributions to Senator Bernie Sanders or the $821,941 campaign contribution Big Pharma pays to Senator Elizabeth Warren?”

• The Arbitrary Hypocrisy of American “Justice” (Paul Craig Roberts)

US Democrat Senator Bob Menendez, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was sentenced to eleven years in prison by federal district judge Sidney Stein for acting as an illegal agent for Egypt and accepting cash and gold bars as payment. How does this differ from the $1,417,811 bribe that Big Pharma pays in campaign contributions to Senator Bernie Sanders or the $821,941 campaign contribution Big Pharma pays to Senator Elizabeth Warren? If you think these sums don’t make Sanders and Warren agents of Big Pharma, you are out of your mind. Warren is doing her Big Pharma assigned job by trying to block Robert Kennedy’s confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Congress is up for sale, and it is purchased with campaign contributions. Everyone in Washington knows that members are purchased by lobby groups, such as Big Pharma, the military/security complex, agribusiness, energy, the Israel Lobby, and so on.

A corrupt or stupid Supreme Court legalized the purchase of the US government by lobby groups. This is the reason that Congress does not represent the people who elect Congress. You can blame your lack of representation squarely on the US Supreme Court. One can’t help but wonder if there were under the table payoffs. An uninformed person might answer that Menendez was paid personally, whereas campaign contributions are not personal money. But, in fact, retiring members are entitled to take their election war fund with them. Those planning to retire pay attention to building up their re-election funds. An uninformed person might say that Menendez’s payments came from a foreign government, whereas campaign contributions are coming from American interests.

But what about the vast sums that Israel pours into purchasing the US government? What is the difference between Egypt and Israel? The difference is that AIPAC is not required to register as foreign agent and is treated as an American lobby group. All efforts to have AIPAC register as a foreign agent have been blocked. Many Zionist neoconservatives have gotten away with accepting money from Israel without having to register as representing a foreign agent. Consider also that every year the Congress appropriates billions of dollars to Israel which Israel uses to purchase the US government with campaign contributions. Our own money is used to enslave us to Israel and Jewish interests. You can see how complete Israel’s ownership of the US government is by Congress’ invitation to Genocide Netanyahu to address the US Congress and award him 53 standing ovations while he conducts genocide against Palestine.

Generally speaking, when a senator or representative is prosecuted by the Justice (sic) Department it means someone wants him out of the way. It is unclear why Menendez was in the way. He was essential on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in getting the sanctions on Russia in place. It is unclear what he could have done for Egypt that would harm any of Washington’s interests. The sanctimonious judge Stein said: “The public cannot be led to the belief that you can get away with bribery, fraud, and betrayal.” The judge doesn’t know what he is talking about. Lobbies get away with bribing every member of the House and Senate every day. How can Trump make America Great Again when lobbies own the government?

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“Behind these histrionics by the big gators and peccaries of the collapsing Democratic Party is pure scintillating fear.”

• Six Ways From Sunday (Jim Kunstler)

Was it the miasma of cognitive dissonance blackening the air-space over the DC swamp that caused the deadly collision of AA Flight 5342 and a Blackhawk Helicopter this week — an impenetrable fog arising from the fetid exhalations of so many hyperventilating swamp creatures brooding between the urges of fight-or-flight as Mr. Trump deploys his chosen pest-controllers across the Potomac Basin? Altogether, these many parasitical swamp creatures make up the greater DC blob, and the blob convulsing and fibrillating is what you witness in these committee hearings with Bobby, Tulsi, and Kash. For instance, fake “progressive” Bernie Sanders (D-VT) faced with the reveal that he leads his colleagues in pharma “contributions” (just under $2-million) . . . or fake Cherokee Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in a fugue state over the perceived threat of Mr. Kennedy to pharma profits . . . or presidential pardon recipient Adam Schiff (D-CA) lecturing Mr. Patel on ethical behavior. . . or Ms. Gabbard enduring the meltdown of Senate Intel Committee tool Michael Bennet (D-CO).

Behind these histrionics by the big gators and peccaries of the collapsing Democratic Party is pure scintillating fear. They are afraid that all of their hoaxes and lies of recent years will be exposed in the months ahead. And they fear that such exposure might lead eventually to legal complications for them. All of that implies loss-of-power, the single element that demonically drives their careers. The fact is they have already lost their grip on the levers of power and, for the moment, that is all that matters. They especially no longer control the Department of Justice, its subsidiary, the FBI, the many public health agencies under Health and Human Services, and the many-footed intel “community,” as it styles itself. These agencies are where the truth about our national affairs has been locked up.

Now, the citizens will either see what’s there, or find out what has been deliberately destroyed — such as the internal agency email correspondence over RussiaGate, the Covid-19 operation (and the deadly vaxx campaign), the J-6 affair (and the pipe-bomb sideshow), the weird, documented irregularities of the 2020 election, the Ukraine War money-laundering shenanigans, the manifold janky DOJ prosecutions of Mr. Trump, and much more. Every day now since January 20, heads explode all over DC as the executive orders roll out and the insanity of whatever lurked behind “Joe Biden” gets systematically expunged from the order of things. And as this happens, the more plainly deranged the past four years looks. Did they really believe that men dressing-up as women would improve the US military? Or was it a traitorous effort to weaken and demoralize our armed forces? Was DEI a public ethics exercise or a massive jobs program for incompetents?

In what way did “Joe Biden’s” Department of Homeland Security imagine that funneling known criminals, certified lunatics, and saboteurs across the border squared with their duty to protect and defend the country? And how did it happen that US taxpayers’ money got shelled out to fake “religious” NGOs in Mexico minting debit cards for border-jumpers, handing them wads of cash, cell phones, airplane tickets, fully-equipped backpacks, and apps for evading arrest? In effect these NGOs took over the exact job description of “coyote” formerly performed by the criminal cartels — leaving the cartels free for the more lucrative rackets of dealing fentanyl and trafficking women and children.

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Leave Bitcoin to the people.

• Trump is Not Going to Make US Into ‘Bitcoin Superpower’ (Sp.)

The 46th POTUS’ boasts about making the United States a global cryptocurrency powerhouse are likely just that, boasts, veteran financial analyst Paul Goncharoff tells Sputnik. The fact is that Trump is the president of the United States, “which governs the trust in, use, and control of the US dollar and not a trustless cryptocurrency like BTC, XRP, USDT, or USDC.” The US government establishing a “100% ownership and control” of a cryptocurrency, on the other hand, would simply “defeat the purpose of trustless crypto,” so the odds of a US dollar CBDC emerging anytime soon are pretty low. That said, there are no obstacles for the US government to hold crypto assets as part of its reserves – all it needs it proper legislation and congressional approval.

The loosening of crypto regulations expected under Trump, however, carries certain risks as “the clarity of what will be regulated is still missing” and “markets dislike uncertainty; it makes them jittery.” There is also “every chance” that, just like “with any other investable that comes under the influence of hype, reality, and again hype,” Trump’s actions would lead to a crypto bubble. For example, some crypto could be hyped as “the crypto of choice for classic institutional investors” and experience mass investment, only for the ensuing bubble to burst when “sobering fact of reality and the complex interaction of politics and finance make themselves known.”

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“..President Trump [..] has asked Elon Musk “to go get our astronauts stranded in orbit.” Musk responded: “will do.” Most likely it will be at his own expense..”

• Third World US Cannot Get Its Astronauts Home From Space (Paul Craig Roberts)

US Corporations, Universities, and government have driven America so deep into third world existence that Washington is incapable of rescuing its astronauts trapped in space for 200 days. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams made what was supposed to be an eight day trip to the International Space Station and have been suck there for seven months because the United States is no longer sufficiently competent to bring them home. It was 55 years ago that Americans walked on the moon. In the years since, DEI universities have graduated ignorance instead of competence, US corporations have offshored American manufacturing and industrial capability, and a corrupt government has favored wars in behalf of Israel over everything else.

So the great, hegemonic, “superpower” cannot bring its astronauts home. Biden was too embarrassed to ask Putin to rescue the Americans. So President Trump, acknowledging America’s incapacity as a government, has asked Elon Musk “to go get our astronauts stranded in orbit.” Musk responded: “will do.” Most likely it will be at his own expense as Washington has spent its money financing Israel’s wars against Arabs and NATO’s war against Russia. To make America Great Again, a country run deep into the ground by scum Democrats, scum RINOs, scum presstitutes, and scum Woke leftwing sub-creatures, Trump has a huge task, one that scum Democrat and RINO Republican judges will try to block at every turn.” It is a fight to the death. If MAGA Americans are not prepared to fight to the death, they will lose.

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“..legally binding instruments for preventing an arms race in outer space, including tools to prohibit the deployment of space-based weapons..”

• Trump Wants To Revive ‘Star Wars’ – Zakharova (RT)

US President Donald Trump’s directive to create an American ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense system is a destabilizing step towards the weaponization of space, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said. Trump’s executive order to develop advanced missile defenses, issued earlier this week, authorizes the creation of “space-based interceptors,” among other things, the diplomat told reporters on Friday. “We see this as yet another confirmation of the US focus on turning space into an arena for armed confrontation, warfare, and the deployment of weapons,” Zakharova said.

This would “completely discredit” the previous US administration’s initiative to develop “certain norms, rules and principles” of behavior in space, and would violate the ban on testing direct-ascent and satellite-killer missiles, she added. Trump’s decisions “indicate Washington’s intention to actively develop and expand deeply destabilizing military programs,” Zakharova said, noting that it would expand missile defenses “to a scale comparable to Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’.” President Ronald Reagan had envisioned a missile shield as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a Cold War program nicknamed ‘Star Wars’ at the time. Reagan’s proposal touched off an arms race between the US and the Soviet Union.

The US never managed to develop the space-based weapons Reagan wanted, however, and the tensions eventually waned with the signing of several arms-control treaties. Washington has since abrogated almost all of them, including the ABM treaty banning strategic missile defenses to the INF treaty limiting short- and intermediate-range missiles in Europe. Trump’s program is “openly aimed” at devaluing the Russian and Chinese strategic deterrent, which “will not contribute to reducing tensions or improving the situation in the strategic sphere, including creating a basis for a fruitful dialogue on strategic armaments,” Zakharova said on Friday. Such dangerous ideas reinforce the importance of Russia’s proposals to create legally binding instruments for preventing an arms race in outer space, including tools to prohibit the deployment of space-based weapons, she added.

The January 27 executive order instructs the Pentagon to create a plan for protecting the US territory from “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries” using a multi-layered missile shield. Such an “Iron Dome” – a name borrowed from Israel’s short-range missile defense – would include the “development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors,” capable of shooting down incoming ballistic missiles during their boost phase, as well as unspecified “capabilities to defeat missile attacks prior to launch,” according to the text of the order.

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Who is stealing from whom?

• The US is Turning Into a Crybaby Empire (Sp.)

Washington seems to have developed a new habit — throwing tantrums whenever it falls behind. When did “American greatness” turn into nonstop whining?

‘Hostile’ BRICS dares to challenge ‘mighty US dollar’ US President Donald Trump has once again threatened BRICS countries with 100% tariffs if they dare to create a new currency — despite Russian President Vladimir Putin already clarifying that a unified BRICS currency isn’t even on the table.

DeepSeek: the latest ‘stolen’ US tech scandal Trump declared that the Chinese DeepSeek platform’s market success “should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win.” (Jan 28). His commerce secretary nominee, Howard Lutnick, immediately jumped in to claim that China’s powerful AI model was built on “stolen” US technology and advanced semiconductors. (Jan 29)

Hypersonic weapons: Russia ‘stole’ those too? Trump alleged — without evidence — that Russia “stole” US hypersonic missile designs during the Obama administration. (Jan 23) He made the same claim in 2020, again in 2023, and now, yet again in 2024. Moscow has consistently shredded and mocked these accusations.

China ‘stole’ American jobs Trump has repeatedly blamed China for “stealing” American manufacturing jobs. However, it was American companies that eagerly rushed to China in the 1980s after its economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping.

TikTok is bad… because it calls the shots “Essentially, with TikTok, I have the right to sell it or close it,” Trump declared on Jan 20. Washington has repeatedly tried to ban the popular Chinese social media app — which is used by at least one-third of US adults — and twist China’s arm to force the sale of TikTok’s US operations.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

DeepSeek

 

 

Hornbill

 

 

Tape
https://twitter.com/i/status/1885071149702287721

 

 

Duck support
https://twitter.com/i/status/1885140945395765688

 

 

Herds
https://twitter.com/i/status/1884996373067472967

 

 

ATGB
https://twitter.com/i/status/1885069255374147648

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle January 27 2025

Jan 272025
 
 January 27, 2025  Posted by at 10:35 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  76 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Weaver 1884

 

• Trade War Ends In Less Than 10 Hours After Colombia Agrees To Trump’s Terms (ZH)
• Trump Suggests ‘Cleaning Out’ Gaza (RT)
• LA Will Reopen Pacific Palisades To Residents Starting Monday (ZH)
• Trump Floats Eliminating Federal Income Tax ‘If The Tariffs Work Out’ (JTN)
• Which Country Could Buy Greenland? (Sp.)
• Iran War Hawks Getting Wrecked In Trump Personnel Fight (Ryan Grim)
• Are Trump and His Supporters Ready for a Fight to the Death? (PCR)
• Trump Fires ‘Virtually Worthless’ Inspectors General, Warren Freaks Out (ZH)
• US Officials Pushing To Unfreeze Aid For Ukraine – FT (RT)
• How Ukraine Lost Trillions-Worth of West-Coveted Natural Wealth (Sp.)
• Unauthorized Peacekeepers In Ukraine Will Be Targeted – Russian Diplomat (RT)
• Belarusian Peacekeepers ‘Best Option’ For Ukraine – Lukashenko (RT)
• China Drops Powerful AI Model That’s Free, Fast and Better for Humanity (Sp.)
• America’s Fiscal Doomsday Machine Must Be Stopped (David Stockman)
• No Evidence Closing Schools Materially Reduced Covid Transmission (Turley)
• The Great American Show (Pacini)

 

 

 

 

Young

CNN

CIA

Mearsheimer

 

 

 

 

It was over when President Gustavo Petro sent his own plane to pick up the migrants.

• Trade War Ends In Less Than 10 Hours After Colombia Agrees To Trump’s Terms (ZH)

Update (10:26pm ET): Just after 10pm ET, and just under 10 hours after Trump lobbed the first shot in the first trade war of his second admin, the White House announced that Colombia had agreed to all of Trump’s terms, “including the unrestricted acceptance of all illegal aliens from Colombia returned from the United States, including on U.S. military aircraft, without limitation or delay.” Based on this agreement, the White House notes, the hastily drafted tariffs and sanctions “will be held in reserve, and not signed, unless Colombia fails to honor this agreement.” The visa sanctions issued by the State Department, and enhanced inspections from Customs and Border Protection, will remain in effect until the first planeload of Colombian deportees is successfully returned.

The statement concludes by noting that President Trump “will continue to fiercely protect our nation’s sovereignty, and he expects all other nations of the world to fully cooperate in accepting the deportation of their citizens illegally present in the United States.” And just like that, Trump wins, in a victory so complete even the president of Colombia reposted his own loss. The only problem: the next trade wars – and there will be many – won’t be nearly as easy to win…

* * *
Update (6:50pm ET): Despite appearing to cave earlier when he ordered the use of the presidential plane to repatriate illegal aliens from the US, late on Sunday Colombia President Gustavo Petro ordered an increase of import tariffs on goods from the United States in retaliation to President Trump’s tariffs and sanctions. Petro, in a post on the social platform X, said he ordered the “foreign trade minister to raise import tariffs from the U.S. by 25%.” “American products whose price will rise within the national economy must be replaced by national production, and the government will help in this regard,” the post continued. Then in a meandering post in Spanish, the president also issued several empty threats to Trump.

Meanwhile, as Bloomberg notes, Colombian assets are set for a rout after US President Donald Trump said he’d implement a spate of tariffs and sanctions on the South American nation. The announcement of an emergency 25% tariff on all Colombian goods coming into the US, made by Trump on social media on Sunday, caught traders off guard — most of the focus so far has been on levies on Mexico, Canada and China. The move will likely spark a slump that will reverberate across local bond, currency and equity markets when trading opens Monday. Daniel Velandia, chief economist at Credicorp Capital Colombia, said the peso will weaken against the dollar Monday morning, adding that the economy could inch toward a recession in an “extreme scenario.”

“This is completely unexpected and unpredictable,” Velandia said. “We need to see how far Trump goes and how Colombia’s government will respond, hoping that diplomacy will be used to prevent adverse effects.” And it’s not just Colombia: the Mexican peso is also tumbling more than 1% in late Sunday trading amid concerns that the southern US neighbor will be next to suffer Trump’s wrath.

Jennings
https://twitter.com/i/status/1883668666853593325

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Only for Israel to take it over? Be very careful.

• Trump Suggests ‘Cleaning Out’ Gaza (RT)

US President Donald Trump has suggested that neighboring Arab countries should take in Palestinian refugees and “clean out” the embattled Gaza. Speaking to journalists aboard Air Force One on Saturday, Trump said he spoke to King Abdullah II of Jordan about the war and was planning to speak with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on Sunday. “I’d like Egypt to take people, and I’d like Jordan to take people,” Trump said. “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, we just clean out that whole thing. It’s a real mess.” “It’s literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything’s demolished, and people are dying there,” he added. “So, I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations, and build housing in a different location, where they can maybe live in peace for a change,” Trump told reporters.

Both Egypt and Jordan have rejected the idea of displacing Palestinians from Gaza. Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi affirmed on Sunday that the kingdom’s position against displacing Palestinians remains “irreversible and unchanged.” On Sunday, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry also stressed its commitment to defending the rights of the Palestinians and its opposition to uprooting Gaza’s population. The Palestinian Authority released a statement saying it would reject any plans of displacement. “We emphasize that the Palestinian people will never abandon their land or their holy sites,” it said. Around 1.9 million people – more than 90% of Gaza’s population – have been displaced since the war between Israel and Hamas broke out in October 2023, according to the UN.

Although the sides agreed to a ceasefire on January 15, Israel has since accused Hamas of violating a prisoner swap arrangement and halted the return of Gazans to their home in the northern part of the enclave. Both sides have also accused each other of ceasefire violations. On Saturday, Hamas handed over four female Israeli soldiers in exchange for the release of 200 Palestinian prisoners. The Israeli government said Hamas had initially promised to release a different hostage. Hamas took around 250 hostages and killed around 1,200 people in a surprise attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. More than 47,00 Palestinians have since been killed in Gaza, according to the local authorities.

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Mayor Karen Bass epitomizes everything that’s wrong with California. That round table with Trump was a cringe fest.

• LA Will Reopen Pacific Palisades To Residents Starting Monday (ZH)

Two days after President Trump scolded Los Angeles for refusing to allow residents affected by the recent fires to return to their homes, Mayor Karen Bass announced that Pacific Palisades will be completely reopened to residents during daylight hours, starting Monday, Jan. 27. During a Friday roundtable, Bass told Trump that it was unsafe for residents to return. After residents at the meeting decried the slow response, Bass compromised – saying they could return “within a week.” Trump replied: “That’s a long time, a week. I’ll be honest, to me, everyone standing in front of their house, they want to go to work and they’re not allowed to do it. … They’re safe. They’re safe. You know what? They’re not safe. They’re not safe now. They’re going to be much safer. A week, a week is actually a long time the way I look at it.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1882963981695955143

Residents of the Palisades began trying to their homes and lots on Saturday – some of whom were able to talk their way past police, according to Breitbart’s Joel Pollak, a Palisades resident whose house was spared. Pollak has been reporting from the ground since the fires began. The county’s decision to allow residents to return on Monday came with a caveat; weather permitting, and only until 5:00 p.m., which will allow people to sift through the rubble for belongings, or grieve and make peace with their loss.

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Confusing but interesting.

• Trump Floats Eliminating Federal Income Tax ‘If The Tariffs Work Out’ (JTN)

President Trump said the U.S. could possibly eliminate the federal income tax if his tariff plans work out as intended. “If the tariffs work out like I think, a thing like that could happen, if you want to know the truth,” he said. “Years ago, 1870 to 1913, we didn’t have an income tax. What we had is tariffs.” Trump also said the additional IRS agents the Biden administration hired could potentially move to the border. “I think we’re going to move them to the border. You know, they’re allowed to carry guns,” he said. Trump touted his decision to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. “Biden didn’t want to do that,” he said. “Biden didn’t know he was alive. He didn’t want to do it.”

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UK.

• Which Country Could Buy Greenland? (Sp.)

Under the terms of an agreement made over a century ago, Denmark would have to give the UK the right of first refusal if it ever decided to sell Greenland, noted Tom Hoyem, former Danish minister for Greenland (1982-1987), as cited by The Sunday Times. “If Trump tried to buy Greenland, he would have to ask London first,” Hoyem explained, adding: “The United Kingdom demanded in 1917 that if Greenland were to be sold, the UK would have the first right to buy it.”

Why is this the case?
1.Canada, a British dominion at the time, is just a few miles from Greenland, across the Nares Strait, Hoyem explained. Since 2022, Canada has even shared a land border with Greenland on the tiny island of Hans.
2.The 1917 agreement stemmed from negotiations surrounding the purchase of the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands) by the United States.
3.The US bought the islands from Denmark for $25 million.
4.As part of the deal, Denmark required the US to sign a letter stating that Greenland “is and will forever be Danish.” President Woodrow Wilson agreed.

Then-incoming US President Donald Trump said on January 7 that Greenland should become part of the US and emphasized its strategic importance for national security and protecting the “free world,” including from China and Russia. Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede said the island was not for sale. At the same time, Trump declined to pledge not to use military force to establish control over Greenland.

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“Trump, on Truth Social, said that his Presidential Personnel Office is actively in the process of identifying and removing over a thousand Presidential Appointees from the previous Administration..”

• Iran War Hawks Getting Wrecked In Trump Personnel Fight (Ryan Grim)

A major whisper campaign is underway, led by neoconservatives in Washington panicked at President Donald Trump’s elevation of a string of foreign policy advisers who have spoken out against war with Iran. The first whack to the wounded war-hawk wing came when Mike Pompeo was blocked from a position in the White House, followed yesterday by the stripping of his security detail. That followed similar snubs to John Bolton and Iran hawk Brian Hook, both of which lost their security and have been kept out of the administration. Hook’s firing was a comical display of Trumpian humiliation. Trump, on Truth Social, said that his Presidential Personnel Office is actively in the process of identifying and removing over a thousand Presidential Appointees from the previous Administration, who are not aligned with our vision to Make America Great Again.

Jose Andres from the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition, Mark Milley from the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, Brian Hook from the Wilson Center for Scholars, and Keisha Lance Bottoms from the President’s Export Council—YOU’RE FIRED! What’s so amusing about Trump’s description of Hook as a member of the “previous Administration,” and his being lumped in with Democrats and a hated figure like Milley, is that Hook was named by Trump in November to chair the State Department transition. Anti-war Republicans vowed at the time to make sure he never got a job himself in the second Trump administration and sources tell me that Trump fired him after learning about his long record of criticizing Trump and his bellicose war rhetoric. Now he’s out, and is privately leading the rearguard fight against Trump’s nominees.

Much of that fight is leaking out into the pages of the magazine Jewish Insider. If you followed the effort by AIPAC to shape Democratic primaries in 2022 and 2024 by blocking critics of Israel, you already know that JI was the place to go to learn where AIPAC would be spending money. Articles warned that pro-Israel groups were “alarmed” at the rise of this or that candidate, often for entirely innocuous statements—or sometimes for just being related to somebody they didn’t like.

The same playbook is being rolled out against Trump’s nominees. In an article headlined, “Rumored for a Trump posting, Elbridge Colby’s dovish views on Iran stand out,” JI warned that Colby “has notably opposed direct military action against Iran.” He got the posting anyway, and is now one of the top officials at the Pentagon. This week, Trump rolled out more than a dozen more top appointments, without a single neocon in the list, raising the alarm in JI again. JI panicked about Michael DiMino, who previously worked for the CIA and the Pentagon, and was named to be deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East. “Last year, [DiMino] dismissed Iran’s second ballistic missile attack on Israel as a ‘fairly moderate’ response and urged against bombing the Houthis in Yemen, instead calling for U.S. pressure on Israel to tamp down regional conflict,” JI warned.

The paper also expressed concern that Dan Caldwell, another conservative veteran skeptical of war with Iran, seemed to be playing a role in getting like-minded people into the Pentagon: “A leading opponent of traditional Republican foreign policy who advocates for a vastly reduced U.S. presence in the Middle East has been quietly involved in the transition process at the Defense Department, according to four people familiar with the matter, underscoring a distinct ideological shift in the Pentagon as President Donald Trump builds his new administration.”

The fight over Trump’s nominees is directly connected to the potential strength of the “ceasefire” in Gaza. Trump is expected to tap his Mideast envoy and real estate buddy Steve Witkoff, who browbeat Netanyahu into agreeing to the ceasefire, to negotiate with Iran. In order to get Saudi-Israel normalization and a nuclear deal with Iran, Trump needs the genocide in Gaza to end, which connects the three issues, and is why Israel is deeply hostile to Witkoff’s expanding portfolio. Trump created confusion about Witkoff’s growing role in comments to the press that JI eagerly but inaccurately reported as a rebuke of Witkoff.

Meanwhile, 11 Americans on a medical mission are being blocked by Israel from leaving northern Gaza despite having completed their scheduled mission. “This is not just about us–it’s about accountability,” Shehzad Batliwala, an ophthalmologist based in Dallas, told me. “The principle at stake is whether the Israeli military can arbitrarily detain U.S. citizens engaged in humanitarian work without even as much as giving a legitimate reason.” Two senior Trump officials, including Witkoff, have raised the issue with the Israeli government, according to sources involved. The team is on a mission with Rahma Worldwide, Dr. Batliwala said. “Many of us have critical responsibilities back home, including U.S. patients awaiting urgent care. For example, I have over 40 cataract surgeries scheduled next week.”

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“..if Trump 2 fails, “the American experiment will come to an end: bureaucratic rule will devour the constitutional order.”

• Are Trump and His Supporters Ready for a Fight to the Death? (PCR)

In recent articles I have emphasized that President Trump and his supporters are in a life and death fight with cultural marxists who are dedicated to America’s destruction and who are institutionalized in every American institution—media, universities, law schools, Democrat Party, feminists, DEI contractors and corporations, Wall Street as epitomized by Blackrock, and the bureaucracies of every cabinet department and every federal agency. Essentially, it is President Trump and a few appointees at war with the entirety of the US government and educational and media establishments. Trump has arrived at the fight late in the game when the long march through the institutions is essentially complete.

In an article in the current issue of the City Journal, “Counterrevolution Blueprint,” Christopher F. Rufo, describes the extent to which the US government is in the hands of the enemy. In the 2020 presidential election employees of the Justice (sic) Department, gave 86 percent of their political contributions to Democrats. Labor Department employees gave 88 percent to Democrats. Health and Human Services 92 percent, and Education Department employees gave 97 percent. Rufo reports that these one-sided political donations are mirrored by tech companies and universities, bastions of left-wing ideologies and activism.

To give you an idea of just how bad the situation is, the Treasury Department, the task of which is economic policy, financing the debt and raising revenue, during the Obama regime added a new bureaucracy, “The office for Minority and Women Inclusion,” that is totally outside the Treasury’s responsibilities. This office continued under Trump’s first term, Rufo reports, and proselytized “critical race theory as an operating ideology, hiring consultants to conduct training programs teaching Treasury employees that America is a nation of systemic racism with a 400-year history of racial terrorism” that continues today.

During the Biden regime another activist left-wing bureaucracy was created in the Treasury, an Equity Hub with a Counselor for Racial Equity. Janet Yellen, the Jewish Secretary of the Treasury, and Kamala Harris, the black Vice President, quickly announced a $8.7 billion fund for lending only to minority-owned businesses, a blatantly discriminatory policy in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. You can imagine how many “minority-owned” firms were quickly created so that “deserving” people could be made millionaires by the US taxpayers. And you can rest assured that neither Yellen nor Harris were held accountable for violating law and the Constitution.

Not even this was enough. The Treasury forced federal contractors to implement DEI and monitored tax returns to make sure that tax-exempt donations to charities were racially balanced. Rufo describes the efforts of Nixon, Reagan, and Trump 1 to get the bureaucracy in compliance with the President’s policy. All failed. Nevertheless, Rufo has hope for Trump 2, and he sets out the necessary elements for taking back the President’s and the people’s power from a hostile civil service that is united against American values and are substituting the values of cultural marxism in their place. Rufo makes it clear that if Trump 2 fails, “the American experiment will come to an end: bureaucratic rule will devour the constitutional order.”

I certainly agree, having made many of these points myself. The question is: How realistic is it that Trump and a few appointees can subdue millions of people whose far-left ideology is guiding the US government and who not only despise Trump’s view of America but also hate Trump personally. It is impossible for Trump to achieve unity with ideologues supported by the Democrat Party who are totally opposed to his view of America. The competence and objectivity of the civil service, long under liberal attack, was finished off when the Clinton regime pushed the white male senior civil service into early retirement in order to “make room” for blacks and females. It was part of “affirmative action.” The DEI legions have been growing for decades. They are firm in their belief that white heterosexuals are racist, and they intend to finish the process started with discriminatory “affirmative action” to make normal white Americans second class citizens in law and position.

Insouciant whites have enabled their own suppression by turning over positions of power to their enemies. It remains to be seen whether this was a fatal mistake that has doomed a merit-based color-blind society. Where among critical race theorists and denouncers of Western–which means white–Civilization is there good will to which Trump can appeal? Democrat judges and a number of insouciant Republican ones will act to block Trump’s efforts. Trump has to be prepared to ride roughshod over them, their rulings be damned, just as they have ridden roughshod over the American people for decades. Trump cannot accept the rulings as anything but weaponized judicial statements no different than the weaponized law used against him, the January 6 protesters, and the right-to-life protesters.

Karl Marx said that good will was not an operative principle because each class acted only in its own interest. So what mediates between classes? Marx said that violence was the only effective force in history. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot relied on violence. Formerly I disputed this view of the efficacy of violence, but just as we did not deal with Hitler based on good will, we cannot rely on goodwill when dealing with internal enemies who intend to destroy America with open borders and legal privileges based on race, gender, and sexual preference. As I am convinced that good will has played a role in effecting reforms, today perhaps I would modify Marx’s claim. I would substitute “effective” in place of “only.” Violence is an effective force in history. It seems that real change is impossible without it as the American Revolution exemplifies.

Today the clash is no longer between economic classes based on material interest. The clash is ideological. The America-is-evil forces are intent on replacing a color-blind merit-based society with a society based on race, gender, and sexual preference privilege. It is an ideological struggle like the one Lenin and Mao launched on Russian and Chinese societies. It is truly a fight to the death. If Trump loses, America loses as Rufo said.

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Shake it up.

• Trump Fires ‘Virtually Worthless’ Inspectors General, Warren Freaks Out (ZH)

President Donald Trump fired at least a dozen ‘independent’ watchdogs known as inspectors general, who oversee government agencies – prompting immediate shrieking from the usual suspects who insist that the move is illegal. The ousters are likely to be one of Trump’s first major court battles since taking office – with at least one of the fired inspectors general, Cardell Richardson Sr. of the State Department – telling staff he’ll ignore Trump and show up to work on Monday, arguing that the firings are illegal, Politico reports, citing an anonymous source. Other fired inspectors general include those at State, Agriculture, Interior, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Labor and Defense, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The inspectors general at the Department of Justice, Office of Personnel Management, the Federal Communications Commission, the Export-Import Bank and the Department of Homeland Security remain in place, according to the person. The inspectors general were dismissed via emails from the White House Presidential Personnel Office, with no notice sent to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who have pledged bipartisan support for the watchdogs, in advance of the firings, the person said. The emails gave no substantive explanation for the dismissals, with at least one citing “changing priorities” for the move, the person added. -Politico. Speaking Saturday night aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters that he didn’t know the inspectors general who were fired, but that “some people thought that some were unfair, or some were not doing the job,” and that the firings were “a very common thing to do.”

When he was asked if he planned to install loyalists in their place, Trump said he didn’t “know anybody that would do that,” adding “We’ll put people in there that will be very good.”As the Epoch Times notes further, Hannibal Ware, the inspector general for the Small Business Administration (SBA) and chairperson of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), said in a Jan. 24 letter sent to Sergio Gor, director of presidential personnel at the White House, objecting to a series of dismissal emails Gor had sent to a number of inspector generals—including to Ware. “I am writing in response to your email sent to me and other Inspectors General earlier this evening wherein you informed each of us that ‘due to changing priorities, your position as Inspector General … is terminated, effective immediately,’” Ware wrote in the letter to Gor.

“At this point, we do not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient to dismiss Presidentially Appointed, Senate Confirmed Inspectors General,” Ware wrote. Ware said that the Inspector General Act of 1978 requires the president to notify Congress at least 30 days in advance of dismissal of an inspector general and that “substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons” for such terminations must be provided. Ware was confirmed to his role by the Senate in 2018. In 2024, President Joe Biden appointed Ware to also lead the Office of the Inspector General for the Social Security Administration. Ware’s eligibility to serve in the latter acting role, sans Senate confirmation, expired on Jan. 24. It’s unclear which inspectors general were told by the White House they are being fired.

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“..USAID in Ukraine has generally chosen to defy Rubio’s decree to issue “stop work” orders until it receives more clarification from Washington..”

• US Officials Pushing To Unfreeze Aid For Ukraine – FT (RT)

Several US diplomats have urged the State Department to make an exception for Ukraine-related programs after President Donald Trump ordered a sweeping suspension on foreign aid, the Financial Times reported on Saturday. Trump’s order potentially jeopardizes support for Ukrainian schools, hospitals, and infrastructure development, although military aid remains intact, according to the newspaper. Acting on behalf of the US president, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued instructions on Friday to suspend any new foreign aid expenditure for 90 days. Contracting and grant officers from the State Department and USAID were directed to “immediately issue stop-work orders… until such time as the secretary shall determine, following a review,” according to a leaked cable cited by the FT.

The newspaper claimed that by Saturday evening, several organizations in Ukraine had received orders to stop their operations until further notice. However, USAID in Ukraine has generally chosen to defy Rubio’s decree to issue “stop work” orders until it receives more clarification from Washington, the FT claimed. American diplomats campaigning for aid to Kiev to be unfrozen reportedly hope that they will be able to win Rubio over. “We do not know at this time whether this request will be approved — in whole or in part — but there are positive signals thus far out of Washington,” an email sent to USAID staff in Ukraine on Saturday said, according to the newspaper. The outlet claims that Rubio’s order endangers support for the development of Ukrainian infrastructure, energy, and economy projects, while not affecting American military assistance. The FT quotes an unnamed Ukrainian government official as saying that “military aid to Ukraine is intact. At least as of now, and it is certainly not part of this 90-day freeze.”

The pause in US foreign development aid was announced by President Trump on Monday, just hours after his inauguration. The freeze aims to review the effectiveness and alignment of aid with US foreign policy objectives. The only exceptions are military financing for Israel and Egypt, as well as foreign emergency food aid. Ukraine was not part of the list of exceptions. Since February 2022, the US has provided over $65 billion in military aid to Kiev, according to the State Department. However, Trump has been skeptical of the assistance, saying Ukraine has “had enough” and that it is time for a peace agreement to be reached with Russia. His team is reportedly aiming to end the conflict between Kiev and Moscow in 100 days, threatening Russia with more sanctions if it does not agree to negotiate. While Moscow remains skeptical about the timeline, it has signaled a willingness to engage in talks.

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Quite the loot.

• How Ukraine Lost Trillions-Worth of West-Coveted Natural Wealth (Sp.)

Senator Lindsey Graham revealed the true purpose of NATO’s proxy war against Russia last year, stating that the US “cannot afford” to let Moscow win in Ukraine, a country that is “sitting on $10-12 trillion worth of critical minerals.” The West’s hopes of getting its hands on Ukraine’s stocks of natural resources are fast dwindling. Besides lithium (LINK) , the corrupt Kiev regime has lost control over reserves of coal, gas, oil, and rare earth metals worth a total of about $12 trillion.

Rare Earth Elements in Ukraine:
Lithium: Critical for batteries in electric vehicles and renewable energy storage.
Gallium: Vital for semiconductors and photovoltaic cells in solar panels.
Zirconium: Used in nuclear reactors, ceramics, and electronics.
Beryllium: Essential for aerospace, defense, and telecommunications.
Titanium: Used in aircraft construction, medical devices, and military applications.
Manganese: Necessary for steel production and batteries.
Scandium: Found in lightweight aluminum alloys, particularly for aerospace.

Key Deposits & Lost Control
• Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR): Rich in beryllium, manganese, titanium, other rare metals. Ukraine was cut off from these resources when the DPR and LPR joined Russia in 2022 after status referendums.
• Crimea: The peninsula holds deposits of iron ore, scandium, zirconium, gallium, and titanium. Crimea rejoined Russia after a referendum in March 2014.
• Zaporozhye & Kherson Regions: Host deposits of lithium, titanium, beryllium, uranium, manganese and tantalum. Both regions joined Russia in 2022.

Coal/Gas/Oil
• Coal: Essential for power generation and industrial processes like steelmaking, Ukraine has lost 80% of its reserves, including all high-grade anthracite, a key resource now under Russian control in the DPR and LPR.
• Gas: Critical for powering industries and heating systems, 20% of Ukraine’s natural gas deposits are now controlled by
• Oil: Used to generate energy as well as produce gasoline and diesel fuel, 11% of rich oil reserves (DPR, LPR) are now on Russian soil.

Foreign Players Still In The Game In Ukraine
• Canada’s Black Iron Inc., engaged in iron ore mining at the Shymanovskoye deposit, is reportedly seeking a $1.1 billion investment agreement with Kiev.
• NEQSOL Holding, a global investment company with operations across 11 countries, acquired Ukraine’s United Mining and Chemical Company (UMCC) in 2024.
• Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron have longstanding production-sharing agreements with Ukraine for shale gas exploration.

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“Any contingent entering the territory of Ukraine without the consent and permission of Russia is a military target..”

• Unauthorized Peacekeepers In Ukraine Will Be Targeted – Russian Diplomat (RT)

Any Western peacekeepers deployed to Ukraine without Moscow’s approval would become legitimate military targets, senior Russian diplomat Rodion Miroshnik has said. The statement was made in response to EU Military Committee Chairman Robert Brieger’s interview on Saturday with Die Welt, in which the general suggested that a ceasefire in the Ukraine conflict could be enforced by EU and international peacekeepers under a UN mandate. “Any contingent entering the territory of Ukraine without the consent and permission of Russia is a military target with quite understandable consequences,” Miroshnik wrote on Telegram on Sunday. “Why pretend? The attempts to invent ‘peacekeepers’ are not at all for establishing peace, but only attempts to use pseudo-humane methods to save [Ukrainian leader Vladimir] Zelensky’s Kiev regime from defeat?!” he said.

Zelensky insists that at least 200,000 European soldiers would need to be deployed to enforce a ceasefire between Kiev and Moscow. “From all the Europeans? 200,000, it’s a minimum. It’s a minimum, otherwise it’s nothing,” he said last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In addition, Zelensky ruled out acquiescing to one of Moscow’s key demands, cutting the country’s military to a fifth of its current strength. The subject of a Western peacekeeping force in Ukraine has resurfaced in recent weeks, as US President Donald Trump has vowed to push for a swift end to the conflict. Earlier in January, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer both made statements about potentially putting boots on the ground in Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping force.

In January, Zelensky said he discussed the possibility with French President Emmanuel Macron, who floated the possibility of sending Western troops almost a year ago, prompting an outcry from other leaders. Moscow has rejected the idea of Western peacekeepers in Ukraine. Russia is “not satisfied” with proposals to postpone Ukraine’s NATO accession or “to introduce a peacekeeping contingent of ‘British and European forces’ into Ukraine,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said late last month. While Moscow is ready to resume peace talks with Kiev, it has stated that it will not allow a temporary freeze to the conflict, which would only serve to provide Ukraine breathing room to rearm.Any peace deal would have to be backed by “strong, legally binding agreements” addressing the root causes of the conflict, with mechanisms preventing violations of the agreements, Lavrov said. Moscow has insisted that Kiev must give up its ambitions to join NATO, demilitarize, denazify, and abandon plans to obtain nuclear weapons.

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“..there are no other [options]. All the rest will tilt the [situation] towards the West or the East. That is why they can only agree to Belarusian peacekeepers.”

• Belarusian Peacekeepers ‘Best Option’ For Ukraine – Lukashenko (RT)

The Belarusian military is best suited for potential peacekeeping duties in Ukraine, President Alexander Lukashenko told journalists on Sunday. Other nations could attempt to use the mandate to their own advantage, he has said at a press conference in Minsk. Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky stated earlier that at least 200,000 “European peacekeepers” would be needed to uphold a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia. Lukashenko argued that Belarusians would be the best fit. “If [it comes to that] in the name of trust and fairness, they don’t have anyone except the Belarusian army,” the president said.

“It doesn’t mean that I would deploy my army – 70,000 men – as peacekeepers,” Lukashenko said. “But there are no other [options]. All the rest will tilt the [the situation] towards the West or the East. That is why they can only agree to Belarusian peacekeepers.” Only Belarusians are capable of “securing normal relations” between Russia and Ukraine, Lukashenko claimed. He stressed, however, that he has no immediate plans of donating troops for a peacekeeping mission. Lukashenko acknowledged that there would be “serious debates” about the composition of the force, and it would be unlikely that Ukraine and its Western backers would agree to the participation of Belarus.

According to media reports, France and the UK are considering sending peacekeepers if a ceasefire is reached. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kestutis Budrys said earlier this month that he had “no doubt” his country would donate troops. In December, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that a peacekeeping mission could be discussed if negotiations are resumed. Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service has warned that the West could use peacekeepers to “occupy” Ukraine and buy time for a new conflict with Russia. Lukashenko was reelected for his seventh term in office on Sunday, receiving more than 80% of the vote, according to the Electoral Commission.

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“..humanity could be saved from a privatized, weaponized, and monopolized AI wiping us out.”

• China Drops Powerful AI Model That’s Free, Fast and Better for Humanity (Sp.)

The US and China are in an all-important race for AI supremacy, with America’s outspending of the PRC multiple times over and restrictions on the Asian nation’s ability to obtain sophisticated computing hardware seemingly having little impact.Advanced large language model DeepSeek R1 is taking users by storm, wowing reviewers and earning praise from AI-phobes. The Hangzhou-based tech startup’s new model beats OpenAI’s o1 on math and reasoning benchmarks, and blows Meta’s* Llama 3.1 and OpenAI’s GPT-40 out of the water in coding and complex problem-solving.The model is free to run locally, with access to its API priced at a fraction of competitors’ rates.The setup reportedly cost $5.6 million to train (vs $78 million for GPT-40), and uses performance-capped chips due to US restrictions, which also saw the use ban the delivery of more powerful processers to China.

Instead, DeepSeek R1 harnesses its power from superior compute efficiency. “We should take the developments out of China very, very seriously,” Microsoft CEO Stya Nadella said at the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos this week, days after DeepSeek’s latest model dropped. Piquing users’ curiosity is the way in which the tool generates responses, in a process nature.com dubbed “analogous to human reasoning,” and thus “more adept than earlier language models at solving scientific problems.” That’s great news for scientists engaged in data analysis, pattern recognition and predictive modeling across a broad array of fields, from astronomy and medicine to the earth sciences.

Best of All? It’s Actually ‘Open’. Unlike other commercially available models, which experts have dubbed “essentially black boxes,” DeepSeek R1 is open source, allowing users fearful of AI turning into Skynet on them to study how it works and even build on it. DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng told Chinese media last year that “research and technological innovation,” not profit, was the company’s priority, and that his ultimate goal is artificial general intelligence. If the mission succeeds and an open-source AGI is born, humanity could be saved from a privatized, weaponized, and monopolized AI wiping us out.

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Dizzying numbers.

• America’s Fiscal Doomsday Machine Must Be Stopped (David Stockman)

The following is Chapter One of David Stockman’s latest book, How To Cut $2 Trillion: A Blueprint From Ronald Reagan’s Budget Cutter To Musk, Ramaswamy and The DOGE Team. We encourage you to buy copies for your Senators and members of Congress and to share the Amazon link with as many influential voices as you can.

The DOGE $2 trillion budget savings goal is crucial to the very future of constitutional democracy and capitalist prosperity in America. In fact, the soaring public debt is now so out of control that the Federal budget threatens to become a self-fueling financial doomsday machine. Recall this sequence. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 on a call to bring the nation’s inflationary budget under control, the public debt was $930 billion and about 30% of GDP. By the time Donald Trump was elected the first time it had erupted to $20 trillion, which has now become $36 trillion and 125% of GDP. Moreover, by the end of this decade the Federal fiscal equation will be going supercritical without sweeping budget reductions at the level of the DOGE target. Thus, by FY 2034 the annual baseline deficit according to CBO will total $2.9 trillion and 7% of GDP.

Yet even these enormous figures are based on a Rosy Scenario fairy tale. Namely, that Congress will never again adopt another spending increase or tax cut, including the impending $5 trillion extension of the expiring 2017 Trump tax cuts. It also conveniently assumes there will be no recessions, no inflation recurrence, no interest rate flare-ups nor any other economic crises for the remainder of this decade and forever thereafter. Furthermore, it presumes that these surging red ink totals and soaring debt service expenses would be copacetic in the bond pits just the same. That is, CBO inexplicably projects that 7% of GDP deficits and annual interest expense of $1.7 trillion or 4.1% of GDP by 2034 would be compatible with a weighted average yield on nearly $60 trillion of public debt of just 3.4%.

Yes, and if dogs could whistle the world would be a chorus! Give the average yield just another 250 basis points, however, and now you have $3.1 trillion of annual debt service expense and a $4 trillion annual deficit by 2034. In short, there is a doom-loop building inside the Federal fiscal equation and nothing short of the DOGE target of $2 trillion of annual budget savings by the end of this decade can reverse its explosive materialization in the years beyond. If sweeping budget retrenchment does not occur soon, in fact, soaring interest expense will ignite a veritable fiscal wildfire. On paper, the public debt would power upward unabated to $150 trillion or 166% of GDP by mid-century (2054) under CBO’s current Rosy Scenario projections. Of course, long before the debt actually hits this staggering figure, the whole system would implode. Every remnant of America as we now know it would go down the tubes.

So we need to be clear that the DOGE team of Musk and Ramaswamy must focus on savings of $2 trillion per year commencing relatively soon. That’s because the nation’s fiscal doomsday machine will be accumulating interest expense so fast as to make $2 trillion of savings spread over a longer period–such as a decade–little more than a rounding error. To wit, Federal interest expense has already passed the $1 trillion per year mark, will exceed $2 trillion per year in the early 2030s and would top $7.5 trillion per year at minimum by our calculations by mid-century. Stated differently, if something drastic is not done now – like a $2 trillion annual budget savings by the end of Donald Trump’s second term – America will be paying more interest on the public debt within 25 years than the entirety of today’s Federal budget.

That’s right: Debt service will exceed current outlays for Social Security, defense, Medicare, education, highways, the national parks, Head Start, interest, and the Washington Monument, too.Obviously, the sprawling Federal government and its prodigious expanse of spending and debt literally defies easy comprehension and graspable solutions. After all, the current annual budget of $7 trillion amounts to Federal spending of nearly $20 billion per day and $830 million per hour. And when you talk about the 10-year budget outlook, comprehension literally fades away completely: The current CBO spending baseline for 2025-2034 amounts to $85 trillion or just shy of the annual GDP of the entirety of planet Earth this year.

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Start handing out compensations.

• No Evidence Closing Schools Materially Reduced Covid Transmission (Turley)

For years, scientists and commentators who questioned COVID policies were censored, blacklisted, and canceled across the country. Many of these dissenting views have since been vindicated from the lab origins theory to the lack of efficacy of surgical masks to the opposition to the closure of schools. Now, a new study in the Journal of Infection further undermines the once orthodox views of the pandemic, concluding that “reopening schools did not change the existing trajectory of COVID-19 rates.” In other words, we shut down our schools, without any demonstrable benefit to the country. We did, however, succeed in reducing free speech in the name of combating “disinformation.”

The report is based on one of the comprehensive studies to date on the pandemic: “Data were extracted from government websites. Cases and COVID-19 hospitalization and death incidence rates were calculated during the Delta and early Omicron periods in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland and the United Kingdom, for two weeks preceding and six weeks after schools reopened. We summarized stringency of public health measures (GRI), COVID-19 vaccination rates by age and SARS-CoV-2 testing rates.” In comparing these different countries, the scientists found no significant differences in reported cases: “No consistent patterns in cases, hospitalizations or deaths despite school re-openings or changes to public health measures,” The suppression of the lab theory and the targeting of dissenting scientists show the true cost of censorship and viewpoint intolerance.

The very figures claiming to battle “disinformation” were suppressing opposing views that have now been vindicated as credible. It was not only the lab theory. In my recent book, I discuss how signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration were fired or disciplined by their schools or associations for questioning COVID-19 policies. Some experts questioned the efficacy of surgical masks, the scientific support for the six-foot rule and the necessity of shutting down schools. The government has now admitted that many of these objections were valid and that it did not have hard science to support some of the policies. While other allies in the West did not shut down their schools, we never had any substantive debate due to the efforts of this alliance of academic, media and government figures.

Not only did millions die from the pandemic, but the United States is still struggling with the educational and mental health consequences of shutting down all our public schools. That is the true cost of censorship when the government works with the media to stifle scientific debate and public disclosures. Many still hope that Congress and the incoming Trump administration will conduct a long-needed investigation into the origins to allow for a more credible and open debate. That hope was increased by the nomination of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the organizers of the Great Barrington Declaration, to be the next head of the National Institutes of Health. One of the most lasting costs was born by our children who have shown both educational and psychological harm from the shutting down of schools. The study confirms what dissenters said all along: there is no evidence that this was necessary or had any benefit to society:

“Our findings show that there were no consistent patterns to case, hospitalisation or death rates in each country or jurisdiction, irrespective of whether schools were open for onsite learning or changes to PHSM. School closures were adopted by many countries as part of a suite of PHSM but in the future should only be implemented where there is strong evidence of effectiveness. Predesigned and approved study protocols, along with scenario-based planning for schools are needed to prepare for the next pandemic. The negative consequences on child health and development are profound, so understanding the role of schools in SARS-CoV-2 transmission should be a priority for pandemic preparedness and response.”

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Not the biggest US fan.

• The Great American Show (Pacini)

We did it. The world has passed another American presidential inauguration. We are all still alive, protocol was carried out to perfection, and the people received their 12 hours of glory. Panem et circenses, as the ancient Latins teach, never fails. Only those who are necessary and useful are invited to Trump’s inauguration, while those who were not strictly necessary were left out.

There was the elite of the new Big Tech, those who have revamped American liberal-capitalism by taking it to a new level, trendier and more glamorous, but above all more popular, reshaping the cultural profiles of at least two generations; there were the tycoons of the big U.S. corporations and beyond, the most unrestrained tycoons, those who have no problem calling themselves “philanthropists” while giving starvation salaries to their employees whose jobs they cut with an AI while they are comfortably at the beach on their yacht; there were the leaders of the most bizarre religions (or something like that), who devoutly renewed their vote to the politician with the biggest wallet, except for the rabbis who are the only ones who received devotion from both outgoing Joe Biden and incoming Donald Trump; there were the women who paraded and released smiles to the press, those women who are considered great and important because they stand next to a powerful man; there were even guests from abroad, not to be missed.

A full day-long ceremony, just about as long as it takes to brainwash Americans four years. Everyone tries to understand the rationale for inviting people to the ceremony or, conversely, the lack thereof. And indeed there were curious presences and even more significant absences. There was no Paladin Zelensky, who pretends that he himself decided not to go, but will have to deal with Trump’s repeated statements about de-powering the war campaign in Ukraine. Also absent was German Chancellor Scholz, who said he thought it was normal not to be invited to the inauguration because the ambassadors were there anyway. The British Crown was not there, a signal we will have to remember very soon.

But at the same time, there were people like maid Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the Woman of the Year, awarded by the Atlantic Council directly from Elon Musk. She is in charge of guaranteeing the U.S. a new war economy, raising military spending to 2 percent of GDP, guaranteeing money and weapons to the Ukrainian front and, soon, men to be slaughtered in the trenches. She is in charge of securing access to the Mediterranean, for trade from the Middle East and Africa, as well as militarily controlling the expansion of Russia and China in the great southern continent. She is also the one who is to be the guarantor in the restructuring of Europe politically, ready to serve Washington as her predecessors taught her, from Giorgio Almirante onward. If she does her job well, she will stay where she is; if something goes wrong, her chair will jump.

There was also the insane Argentine President Javier Miley, who no doubt is in line with Trump both in terms of dastardly tax and labor policies and the Zionist struggle. That Miley who will be crucial to U.S. expansionist aims in South America, perhaps even more so than Lula, who, on the other hand, is too much of a free hitter for American tastes. Even the Chinese were there, from that China that Trump does not like but is comfortable doing business with and cannot be missed if the dollar is to survive, with Chinese Vice President Han Zheng in attendance. Symbolically, the Ceo of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, was also present, because the U.S. knows how to use the infowarfare game, especially when elections in various countries are in sight. There were the FANG overlords – Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google – with all their boundless wealth of global control and manipulation, ready to change their corporate policies upon the arrival of the Potus. The logic of the whole process is simple: only those who are necessary and can be useful to the United States were invited.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wuhan

 

 

Seal

 

 

Cheetah

 

 

Prom
https://twitter.com/i/status/1883464234430087591

 

 

Rhino
https://twitter.com/i/status/1883420888210735152

 

 

Snake

 

 

Voila

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle December 30 2024

Dec 302024
 
 December 30, 2024  Posted by at 11:12 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  60 Responses »


René Magritte The key to the fields 1936

 

• How Trump Reacted to Jimmy Carter’s Passing (TH)
• Trump To Battle Federal Employee Unions As He Seeks To Shrink Government (JTN)
• Trump’s Tariff Threats Cast Shadow Over European Auto Industry (RFGE/RL)
• Lefty Legal Experts Call on Congress to Disqualify Trump (Heine)
• Musk Appears to Soften Pro-Foreign Worker, H-1B Visa Stance (ET)
• Musk’s Big Bet: Could Germans Kick Out Their Liberal Elites? (Romanenko)
• Musk Pens Pro-AfD Op-Ed In Major German Paper; Editor Resigns (ZH)
• Sugar Juice & Fraud Propped Up Failing Biden Economy – Ed Dowd (USAW)
• No Longer Sustained by Education, Western Humanity Is in Death Throes (PCR)
• The Moral Bankruptcy of the West (John Mearsheimer)
• Most, But Not All, Republicans Lining Up To Support Speaker Of The House (JTN)
• New Strategy For DNC: Younger Candidates Launching Bids To Run Party (JTN)
• Ukraine Could Agree To Non-NATO Security Guarantees – Envoy (RT)
• Zelensky Charges Slovakia’s Fico With Opening “Second Energy Front” (ZH)
• EU States Seek To Protect Russian Gas Flow Despite Ukrainian Threat (RT)
• Georgia’s New President ‘Hardline Critic of the West’ (Sp.)

 

 

 

 

1987

1992

Andreessen


https://twitter.com/i/status/1873099800801099847

Dore

X
https://twitter.com/i/status/1873410603941048825

Munro

200
https://twitter.com/i/status/1873449375092916283

 

 

 

 

A full life. The presidency was not his brightest moment.

• How Trump Reacted to Jimmy Carter’s Passing (TH)

Jimmy Carter passed away on Sunday at the age of 100. It was the longest post-presidencies in American history. Carter was also the oldest former president to ever live in American history. A few lived into their 90s; Carter’s predecessor, Gerald R. Ford, died at 93 in 2006. While not a successful presidency, Carter’s philanthropic activities and other forms of civil engagement is his real legacy. He lived a remarkable life (via NYT): “Jimmy Carter, who rose from Georgia farmland to become the 39th president of the United States on a promise of national healing after the wounds of Watergate and Vietnam, then lost the White House in a cauldron of economic turmoil at home and crisis in Iran, died on Sunday at his home in Plains, Ga. He was 100. The Carter Center in Atlanta announced his death, which came nearly three months after Mr. Carter, already the longest-living president in American history, became the first former commander in chief to reach the century mark. Mr. Carter went into hospice care 22 months ago, but held on longer than even his family expected.

Tributes poured in from presidents, world leaders and many everyday people from around the world who admired not only Mr. Carter’s service during four years in the White House but his four decades of efforts since leaving office to fight disease, broker peace and provide for the poor. President Biden ordered a state funeral to be held and was expected to deliver a eulogy. “To all of the young people in this nation and for anyone in search of what it means to live a life of purpose and meaning — the good life — study Jimmy Carter, a man of principle, faith and humility,” Mr. Biden, the first Democratic senator to endorse Mr. Carter’s long-shot 1976 bid for the presidency, said in a statement. “He showed that we are great nation because we are a good people.”

Trump issued two statements on Mr. Carter’s passing: “I just heard of the news about the passing of President Jimmy Carter. Those of us who have been fortunate to have served as President understand this is a very exclusive club, and only we can relate to the enormous responsibility of leading the Greatest Nation in History. The challenges Jimmy faced as President came at a pivotal time for our country and he did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans. For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude. Melania and I are thinking warmly of the Carter Family and their loved ones during this difficult time. We urge everyone to keep them in their hearts and prayers.” And the second:

Read more …

Big fight.

• Trump To Battle Federal Employee Unions As He Seeks To Shrink Government (JTN)

President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to drastically cut government and clean out inefficiencies, but he faces an entrenched power in Washington, D.C. that may throw a wrench in his plans: federal government public employee unions. “For president-elect Trump to succeed at making the federal bureaucracy more efficient and accountable to the American people, he’ll have to once again do battle with federal unions,” Max Nelsen, a labor policy expert at the Freedom Foundation, told The Center Square. Trump has tapped top businessmen Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency effort. Musk has claimed he can cut $2 trillion in federal spending. In a November joint editorial in the Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy pledged “mass head-count reductions” in the federal government.

Firing federal workers is notoriously rare and difficult, but Ramaswamy has publicly said that mass, indiscriminate firings may allow for circumventing the usual bureaucratic holdups for firing a federal employee. Trump himself recently pledged to cut “hundreds of billions” in federal spending. “Government unions are hands down the single most significant defenders of the administrative state,” Nelsen said. “Their interests are always served by bigger, more expensive, less accountable government, and their partisan allegiance to the radical Left leads them to both overtly and covertly undermine conservative policy changes across the federal government…” The first battle with unions in the DOGE war may be federal work from home policies, where unions have already threatened legal action to protect their pre-arranged deals with the Biden administration.

Trump threatened to fire federal employees who are not willing to report to the office, a clear shot at federal work-from-home policies, something Musk has also blasted in recent weeks. “If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed,” Trump told reporters during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago. The largest federal employee union quickly shot back after Trump made the comments and threatened legal action. Trump’s comments are likely at least in part reacting to a Biden administration official negotiating a deal with a union that extends until 2029, after Trump is scheduled to leave office. As The Center Square previously reported, Social Security Administrator Martin O’Malley negotiated a deal with union leaders to codify work-from-home policies, keeping telework in place for his 42,000 employees until 2029.

Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, pointed out that these contracts are legally binding. “Collective bargaining agreements entered into by the federal government are binding and enforceable under the law,” Kelley said. “We trust the incoming administration will abide by their obligations to honor lawful union contracts. If they fail to do so, we will be prepared to enforce our rights.” Trump’s backers may have an ace in the hole, though, in the form of new Supreme Court precedent. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year in a landmark case to overturn Chevron deference, the longstanding legal practice of giving federal agencies broad power to interpret and practically change and expand federal laws as they deemed fit, citing their expertise.

Now, Musk and Ramaswamy will likely have more leeway in cutting rules from the books and workers from the payroll. Nelsen said Trump should limit the amount of federal dollars that go toward unions, and that he should increase union transparency. “Additionally, President Trump will need a cadre of energetic appointees at the Office of Personnel Management, the Federal Labor Relations Authority, and in labor relations departments government wide to aggressively implement his directives,” Nelsen said. “Finally, to truly have a long-term impact, President Trump will need a successor in four years committed to continuing the fight.”

Read more …

Make a deal.

• Trump’s Tariff Threats Cast Shadow Over European Auto Industry (RFGE/RL)

As Donald Trump prepares to take office on January 20, Europe’s already battered car industry is bracing for additional headwinds amid the threat of new tariffs from the incoming U.S. president. Trump has pledged to impose steep new tariffs on goods coming from China, Canada, and Mexico in one of his first acts in office, a promise that could ignite trade wars. That is bad news for European automakers who have already seen sales and manufacturing decline in top markets like the United States and China. The potential tariffs would be felt hard not only by leading European car brands like Volkswagen, Volvo, and Stellantis — the conglomerate that produces Fiat, Chrysler, and Citroen — but also for the Central and Eastern European countries whose economies rely heavily on making them.

Toma Savic, a former director at Zastava, a Serbian international car manufacturer that was shuttered in 2008, said the tariffs would be a particularly hard blow for operations in the Balkan country. “This inevitably would lead to the shrinking of production in Europe and mass layoffs,” he said. Zastava later became Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Serbia, which is owned by Stellantis. Based in Kragujevac in central Serbia, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Serbia has already been struggling to recuperate its foothold in the European auto industry prior to the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s when it assembled 200,000 cars annually and exported them to 26 countries. Germany’s auto industry is also likely to be highly vulnerable to Trump’s promised tariffs, especially given that Europe’s biggest economy is by far the region’s largest exporter of passenger cars to the United States.

European and American carmakers could lose up to 17 percent of their combined annual core profits if the United States imposes import tariffs on Europe, Mexico, and Canada, according to some estimates. While Europe was not specifically mentioned in Trump’s first tariff announcement in late November, he took aim at the European Union while on the campaign trail earlier this year and accused European partners of unfair trade practices and stealing American manufacturing jobs. “They don’t take our cars, they don’t take our farm products, don’t take anything,” Trump said on the campaign trail in October. “They are going to have to pay a big price.” The U.S. market is the main destination for European passenger cars. Exports amounted to 42.5 billion dollars in 2023, according to Statista, a German online platform that specializes in data gathering and visualization.

In comparison, the value of U.S. vehicles imported to the EU was around 7.8 billion dollars during the same period. Trump said on the campaign trail in September that he wants German automakers to become “American car companies” and “build their plants here.” He added that he was prepared to offer low taxes and energy costs to draw more companies to set up manufacturing inside the United States. In 2016, German carmakers avoided 35 percent tariffs floated by Trump by investing in more production in the United States. But Trump’s new proposed tariffs could make it more costly for European automakers to set up U.S.-based factories. The threat of new tariffs will add to already growing pressures facing the European auto industry as it looks to compete for the future electric vehicle (EV) market that is dominated by Chinese manufacturers.

Earlier this year, the EU imposed duties of up to 35 percent for EVs from China saying that the “unfairly subsidized” cars have given them a market foothold. Added to this, car sales for EVs across the EU have dipped downward and some governments have repealed subsidies meant to incentivize consumers to buy the cars. The rise of Chinese companies, such as EV-leader BYD, has also seen Western car brands lose market share inside China at a steady rate, with Volkswagen in particular grappling with declining sales. Between tougher competition from China, declining sales at home, and new pressure from Trump, many European automakers are facing a bleak outlook.

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You lost. Go away.

• Lefty Legal Experts Call on Congress to Disqualify Trump (Heine)

Two Democrat legal experts are calling on Congress to take immediate action to prevent President-elect Donald Trump from taking office, citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Evan A. Davis, the former editor in chief of the Columbia Law Review and David M. Schulte, the former editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal, called for Trump’s disqualification in an opinion piece for The Hill, citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Davis is a New York City attorney and a former president of the New York City Bar Association. He worked on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee impeachment inquiry staff during the impeachment process against Richard Nixon. Schulte is an investment banker and good friend of Barack Obama. He owns the oceanfront Martha’s Vineyard home where the Obama and his family used to vacation when he was in office.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars individuals who have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or given aid or comfort to its enemies from holding “any office, civil or military.” In a unanimous decision last March, the Supreme Court tossed out a Colorado court decision that barred Donald Trump from appearing on the state’s Republican presidential primary ballot. The lower court had based its decision on 14th Amendment provision. In their 9-0 ruling, the Supremes concluded that “states have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency.” But Davis and Schulte argue that evidence of Donald Trump engaging in “insurrection” is “overwhelming” and that Congress has the authority to block Trump from being inaugurated under the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act of 2022.

The act, which was intended to prevent another January 6 scenario, added certain procedures for the counting of electoral votes following a presidential election. In January 2021, the then-Democrat controlled House of Representatives impeached Trump for “incitement of insurrection” following the January 6 Capitol riot, but the Senate acquitted him, falling short of the two-thirds majority needed for conviction. The Democrat lawyers argue that the majority (57-43) vote in the Senate supports their case for disqualification under the 14th Amendment. They say that any votes cast for Trump should be deemed “not regularly given” due to his alleged disqualification.

“Democrats need to take a stand against Electoral College votes for a person disqualified by the Constitution from holding office unless and until this disability is removed,” the Davis and Schulte wrote. “No less is required by their oath to support and defend the Constitution.” Most legal experts however agree that the notion of Republican lawmakers supporting a move that could elevate Kamala Harris to the presidency is highly improbable and at the moment, Democrats just don’t have the stomach for such a fight. “Republicans and Democrats seem to agree they’ll give Trump the smooth, drama-free transfer of power he denied Democrats in 2020,” Politico reported Thursday, adding “top Democrats say they have no plans to stand in the way of Trump’s victory — and they’re not even sure their rank-and-file colleagues will make the token objections they’ve lodged in years past.”

Read more …

None of it sounds terribly smart.

• Musk Appears to Soften Pro-Foreign Worker, H-1B Visa Stance (ET)

Tesla billionaire and X owner Elon Musk appeared to soften his stance on H-1B visas on Saturday night after saying he’d “go to war” for the visas, amid an ongoing online spat over immigration and the tech industry. Tensions erupted between wealthy members of the tech world, including Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and their call for what they describe as highly skilled workers in their industry by using H-1B visas, and Trump supporters who have long championed more stringent immigration policies to give priority to American workers. On Saturday night, Musk responded to a mega-thread on social media platform X that criticized how H-1B visas are being used. “Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H-1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically,” he wrote.

“I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform.” Musk was responding to a remark from investor Robert Sterling, who said that: “America needs to be a destination for the world’s most elite talent. But the H-1B program isn’t the way to do that.” The H-1B visa program allows up to 65,000 highly skilled foreign workers annually, plus 20,000 foreigners who obtained an advanced degree from a U.S. institution, to fill specialized roles in the U.S. workforce. Separately, Musk has been accused of censorship from conservatives after multiple prominent accounts that criticized his views on immigration and H-1B visas lost access to premium features. Laura Loomer, a conservative activist and independent journalist who has long backed President-elect Donald Trump, wrote on X in multiple posts over the weekend that the social platform demonetized her account of more than 1.4 million followers.

Her account appears to now lack a verified blue check mark. Loomer said that it was because she posted comments that were critical of Musk and his allies’ views on immigration as well as H-1B visas. “Why are X users who pay for @premium having their posts listed as ‘probable spam’ on my posts @elonmusk?” she wrote late on Saturday. “This is censorship. I understand you don’t like me, but this is nothing but retaliatory censorship?” Last Tuesday, Loomer criticized tech billionaires for descending “upon Palm Beach” as Trump works on his transition team at Mar-a-Lago. Two days later, Musk responded by saying: “Loomer is trolling for attention. Ignore.” Later that week, she said that her account lost access to premium features.

Others who also said their accounts lost premium access include InfoWars host and Jan. 6 defendant Owen Shroyer, New York Young Republican Club president Gavin Wax, and the ConservativePAC, which all have hundreds of thousands of followers apiece. “My verification badge is now under review. Weird! Didn’t change anything,” wrote Wax, who also spoke out against H-1B visas. As of Sunday, however, Wax appears to have had his verification badge restored. “All of our influencers have now lost verification status, as well as our own page,” the Trump-supporting ConservativePAC wrote. “Our brand did nothing. We spoke out against HB1 visas and it appears that @elonmusk intentionally shut us down? Is this the new status quo from America’s ‘most free’ social media platform?” So far, Musk has not publicly responded to the recent accusations of censorship on X. The Epoch Times contacted the platform for comment but received no response as of Sunday.

Musk and Ramaswamy, who were tapped to head the Trump-backed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), engaged in X infighting over whether immigrants who come to work at U.S. tech companies on H-1B visas or Americans would be better tech workers. Ramaswamy, in particular, drew ire for a lengthy post the day after Christmas that appeared to criticize a caricature of American culture. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” Ramaswamy wrote. “A culture that venerates Cory from ‘Boy Meets World,’ or Zach & Slater over Screech in ‘Saved by the Bell,’ or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in ‘Family Matters,’ will not produce the best engineers.”

Musk appeared to echo his sentiments, writing in a post that the “number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.” A number of pro-Trump accounts took umbrage with Musk’s and Ramaswamy’s comments. On Saturday, meanwhile, Trump weighed in on the controversy and appeared to back Musk and Ramaswamy, telling the New York Post that he supports the H-1B program. “I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” said Trump, although the president-elect had restricted access to such visas during his first term in office.

Read more …

“..the odds of a return to centrist predictability appear slimmer by the day.”

• Musk’s Big Bet: Could Germans Kick Out Their Liberal Elites? (Romanenko)

Donald Trump will soon return to the White House, and Elon Musk – the tech billionaire and serial disruptor – regularly weighs in on European politics from across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, in Germany, public dissatisfaction with the political establishment has reached fever pitch. As Europe’s largest economy grapples with inflation, high energy costs, and a general sense that “liberal elites” have grown out of touch, more radical parties on both the right and left are seizing the moment. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is gaining ground almost daily, wooing voters who feel abandoned by the mainstream, while Sahra Wagenknecht, a controversial leftist, is forming a new party that could siphon off working-class support from traditional parties. With these developments, Germany – once the epitome of stability – now stands on the verge of a political earthquake whose tremors may be felt throughout the European Union.

A major factor behind this upheaval is Germany’s stuttering economy. After decades of relying on relatively cheap Russian gas to fuel its industries and heat its homes, the sudden cut-off has left the country scrambling. Energy bills have skyrocketed, hitting vulnerable households the hardest, and making everyday life more expensive for everyone. Inflation, partially exacerbated by global trends, has eroded purchasing power and confidence in the traditional parties that were expected to safeguard economic prosperity. As factory orders dip and small businesses struggle to stay afloat, voters are growing frustrated – and the AfD has proven adept at channeling that frustration into votes.

But the AfD is not the only beneficiary of this climate of discontent. Wagenknecht, who made her name in the Left Party (Die Linke) before breaking away, is set on pulling disillusioned voters from across the political spectrum. Fiercely critical of deregulated markets and neoliberal orthodoxies, she accuses Germany’s mainstream leaders of abandoning true social justice in favor of what she sees as global corporate interests. For some on the left, who feel the Social Democrats and the Greens have lost touch with working-class realities, her new party offers a tantalizing alternative. By merging left-populist rhetoric with sharp critiques of rising living costs, Wagenknecht might peel away the very voters that kept the center-left afloat for years.

Friedrich Merz, who leads the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and is often seen as Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s principal rival, faces headwinds from unexpected quarters. Musk’s criticism of Merz has drawn attention to a rift between conventional conservatism and the disruptive style championed by a new generation of influential voices. Worse for Merz, Trump’s return to the presidency in the United States signals that a more populist brand of politics may gain transatlantic support. During his first term, Trump’s ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, made headlines by engaging openly with right-leaning German politicians, including members of the AfD. Now, with a second Trump administration, Washington could well encourage a similar or even more robust alignment with populist forces in Berlin.

This newfound enthusiasm for anti-establishment politics also points to a broader pattern across Europe, where trust in traditional parties has been waning. For years, Germany seemed immune to the populist waves that buffeted Italy, France, and other EU states. No longer. Should the AfD continue its ascent – and if Wagenknecht’s party gains real traction – a once-placid two- or three-party system might fracture, making future coalitions messy at best. Already, local and regional elections have hinted at the extent of voter dissatisfaction. On the national stage, that frustration could crystalize into a governing challenge the likes of which Berlin hasn’t seen in decades.

Nor can any of this be separated from Germany’s broader role in Europe. As the bloc’s central economic engine, Germany largely sets the tone for EU policy. A dramatic rightward shift, or even a strong left-populist surge, would ripple through Brussels. Questions of migration, defense policy, and EU fiscal rules might be renegotiated under a less europhile coalition. Countries that share more conservative or nationalist leanings could feel emboldened, while those favoring greater integration or progressive reforms might be sidelined.

In short, Germany’s political shift is a wake-up call to all of Europe: ignoring the grievances of voters on both ends of the spectrum comes at a price. If mainstream elites continue to champion broad liberal agendas without addressing concrete problems – such as ballooning energy bills and the loss of stable employment—more radical alternatives will claim their slice of the political pie. Whether that slice comes from the right, the left, or a combination of both, the result is likely to be a more fragmented, unpredictable Germany. And with Trump soon to be in the White House again and Musk’s disruptive influence seeping into every corner of public discourse, the odds of a return to centrist predictability appear slimmer by the day.

Read more …

“The Last Spark Of Hope” For Germany..

“The portrayal of the AfD as rightwing extremist is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you?”

• Musk Pens Pro-AfD Op-Ed In Major German Paper; Editor Resigns (ZH)

Amid ongoing efforts by the establishment to ban the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party from the upcoming German elections (in the name of democracy?), Billionaire Elon Musk has waded deeper into the politics of this declining nation, in an effort to protect his “significant investments”. A week after he stated on X that “only the AfD can save Germany”, he has penned a supportive op-ed for the country’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper… prompting the resignation of the paper’s editor. The initial six word post on X was enough to prompt much wailing and gnashing of teeth among Europe’s cognoscenti, but this op-ed appears to have ratcheted up the panic to ’11’. First things first, this is not a direct op-ed as one might comprehend it as it’s title clearly highlights: “Why Elon Musk is betting on the AfD – and why he is wrong”.

Welt editor-in-chief Jan Philipp Burgard is careful to remind readers (multiple times) that: “The AfD is in parts xenophobic and anti-Semitic. That is why it is a danger to Germany.” Musk makes short work of the farcical “far-right extremist” accusation: “The portrayal of the AfD as rightwing extremist is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Please!” AfD co-leader Alice Weidel SLAMS Angela Merkel and the CDU party, says she destroyed Germany in powerful 13-minute speech. The Tesla CEO is undeterred as he covers a variety of topics that Germany needs to address as it near an “economic and cultural collapse,” adding that he has the “right” to address the country’s political climate as he has “made significant investments” in Germany’s technological and industrial sectors.

In the op-ed, Musk argued that Germany’s economy is handicapped by regulatory overreach and bureaucracy. “The AfD has understood that economic freedom is not just desirable, but necessary. Its approach of reducing government over-regulation, cutting taxes and deregulating the market reflects the principles that made Tesla and SpaceX successful,” Musk wrote, according to a rough translation. “If Germany wants to regain its industrial strength, it needs a party that doesn’t just talk about growth, but also takes policy action to create an environment where companies can thrive without heavy government intervention,” he added. While the globalist elites panic over Musk’s six word X statement (and now the op-ed), he points out this is not some marginalized political party:

“The AfD, even though it is described as far-right, represents a political realism that resonates with many Germans who feel that their concerns are ignored by the establishment. It addresses the problems of the moment – without the political correctness that often obscures the truth,” the tech billionaire continued. Musk also said the AfD was “committed to a controlled immigration policy that gives priority to integration and the preservation of German culture and security. This is not about xenophobia, but about ensuring that Germany does not lose its identity in the pursuit of globalization.” Musk concluded that AfD was the “last spark of hope” for the country.

Following the op-ed’s publication, the paper’s opinion section editor, Eva Marie Kogel, announced her resignation on X. “I always enjoyed heading the opinion section of WELT and WAMS. Today an article by Elon Musk appeared in Welt am Sonntag. I handed in my resignation yesterday after it went to print.” Elections in Germany are set for Feb. 23 following the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government. The AfD is now running second in opinion polls with around 19% support, behind the conservative CDU/CSU alliance with more than 30%. However, Germany’s mainstream parties have all ruled out working with AfD at the national level….all of which rings a very loud bell from what we just witnessed in Paris.

Read more …

“..everybody’s prices are going up. Health insurance is going to become unaffordable for most people.”

• Sugar Juice & Fraud Propped Up Failing Biden Economy – Ed Dowd (USAW)

Former Wall Street money manager and financial analyst Ed Dowd of phinancetechnologies.com is back with more data on how the Biden Administration propped up a failing economy during the 2024 election year. Dowd contends “crisis level spending” was being administered, along with some bigtime “fraud.” Dowd says, “We had 10% deficit to GDP during the Great Financial Crisis (2008 – 2009) when we actually had a crisis. We had 8% deficit to GDP during this election year. You have to ask yourself, what was the crisis?” “The crisis was to get the Biden Administration (and Kamala) re-elected. So, they went on binge spending. They borrowed from the future to try to ensure they won. They did it two ways: They hired massive amounts of government personnel to float the economy, and they also did illegal immigration.

We are thinking it was 10 million to 15 million illegal immigrants that came in the last four years. The majority of the illegal immigrants came in the last two years. That stimulated the economy and raised the velocity of money as those people were given money. All the NGO’s that facilitated the illegal immigration also got money, and that stimulated the economy. This deficit added $2 trillion, and that was unproductive assets. So, we borrowed from the future to create more government jobs and imported unprecedented amounts of illegal immigrants that don’t add to the economy. That’s what we have, and President Trump’s policies are going to reverse all that sugar juice. There are going to be mass deportations and reduced government spending. That short term juice is going away, and it was not sustainable anyway. The bond markets are revolting, and that could not have gone on much longer.”

But it was not just massive money printing and debt creation that hid how bad the real economy was, it was very crooked data. Dowd says, “We also had bureaucratic incompetence or fraud or whatever you want to call it. They were padding the non-farm payroll numbers to the tune of 1.25 million jobs… If you look at the chart, which we don’t have here, it’s insane. It’s one of the biggest misses between reality and estimates we have ever seen. It’s a seven-sigma event. It’s 1.25 million jobs. It’s already started downward revisions… The 3rd quarter GDP of 3% will be revised down, and when we get . . . the data in February, there will be more GDP economic revisions down. . . . The capital markets made bad decisions on this data. The Fed made bad decisions on this data, and corporations made bad decisions on this data. The price tag is coming due in 2025. Not only that, but we have a slowing economy across the globe…

The amount of foreign assets in our stock market has never been higher, and this is all going to reverse. The price will be paid in 2025. . . .What’s coming is coming. It’s how low do we go, and when do the animal spirits kick in? So, there is pain coming, and it’s up to the Trump Administration to get all their policies enacted. Then we have a hope and a prayer coming out the other side that we will be way better off. The bottom line is there is pain coming regardless. The question is how fast can we restart with Trump’s policies?” Dowd likes gold as part of a portfolio, and he is suggesting people get some cash in hand. Dowd says the war in Syria is going to intensify, and you will be hearing much more negative news from that area in 2025.

Dowd, who wrote the popular book “Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021, 2022 and 2023,” says the epidemic caused by the CV19 injections will be with us for the rest of our lives. Dowd released new data that added 800,000 people to the 4 million disabled we already had since the CV19 mRNA vax began. Dowd says, “The other thing that is going on is the increase in cancers. Science is following up . . . There is cancer causing agents in the mRNA vaccines, and we are seeing cancers on the rise. . . . There are new (medical insurance) claims among young workers, especially cancer claims. . . . Insurance rates are going up across the board. The answer to what is going on is to raise prices. They are not differentiating between the vaxed and unvaxed. So, everybody’s prices are going up. Health insurance is going to become unaffordable for most people.”

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Paul Craig Roberts

“The disassembly of our civilization has left a barbaric people who would not be able to understand Shakespeare if they were to read him.”

• No Longer Sustained by Education, Western Humanity Is in Death Throes (PCR)

Universities no longer produce educated people, and educated people are ceasing to exist. It is an interesting question, not to be discussed here, whether the disappearance of educated people is cause or result of the rise in barbarity that is engulfing the world. Wherever one looks one sees degeneration. From Bach, Mozart, Beethoven to four-letter rap. Literature has ceased to be written as well as read. Art has become scribbles attesting to meaningless. Both the inclination and ability to read are declining. Fewer people can use their language. University students’ essays are written by insentient AI. People no longer understand the metaphors and allusions used in language, because they have been denied literature. Great literature explores the human condition and prepares people for an aware life. It protects against naïveté. It teaches the richness and usefulness of language, enhances communication skills, essential skills lost to today’s technical training and “customer service” AI.

Communication today is nonverbal, shorthand text messages. The digital revolution, artificial intelligence, and transhumanism are eliminating human communication. Increasingly humans are forced by “customer service” to communicate with an unthinking programmed voice that cannot recognize any question, an answer for which it has not been programmed. Just think how difficult it is to deal with a service provider. What once was a matter of a three minute telephone call answered by the third ring, can now be a multi-hour and even multi-day enterprise. The lack of Internet security means that even if a human is reached, no decision or solution can be made. It has to go up a level as fewer and fewer employees are trusted to make a judgment. The digital revolution has brought an explosion in crime and scams. Florida, for example, has so many that they don’t want you to report another one.

The digital revolution was sold to businesses as a way to drop cost by replacing customer service representatives with AI. But AI is not sentient and cannot deal with anything for which it is not programmed. The main purpose of AI “customer relations” is to make it too expensive in time to correct an incorrect bill. It is cheaper just to pay the overstated one. There are fewer and fewer service companies where you can contact a human with the ability to correct a problem without an investment of hours of time. My favorite is when the Internet is down and you call the service supplier and are told to contact their chat on their website.

Years ago Shakespeare was accused by the Israel Lobby of being anti-semitic. Shakespeare lived during 1564 and 1616. The term anti-semite did not exist and there was no Israel Lobby. This did not prevent Shakespeare from being labeled an anti-semite in the 20th century and removed from high school and university literature courses. Consequently, the most remarkable use of the English language has been denied to students who have been deprived of understanding portions of their own language because of Jewish objections to Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s literature, of course, is not a literature of anti-semitism. But here and there he says a few things about Jews that everyone then believed and many today still do. In literature the same thing happens to every ethnicity, but it is only Jews who complain.

The World Economic Forum, an evil institution to which Western politicians and corporate executives long to belong, has a transhumanist operative who says that AI has made human life unnecessary and inconvenient. The need to dispose of superfluous humans has led to discussions of a legislated lifetime. I predicted many years ago that abortion would lead to enforced euthanasia. Ask yourself whose hand is driving geeks to make humans superfluous. Why is it more important to have AI answer a phone than a human? If humans are to be disposed of, who is to purchase the products of robots? Don’t you think it is extraordinary that the AI advocates have never asked themselves this question? How does it advance humanity to forever find new ways to transfer the human function to a robot? How did it come to be that the main agenda of science is to make humans irrelevant?

Over the course of my life I have watched a dark age gradually engulf the world. Trump says he is going to make America great again, but how is he going to do that when the building materials no longer exist? What is Trump’s definition of great? The disassembly of our civilization has left a barbaric people who would not be able to understand Shakespeare if they were to read him.

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“One wonders what people in the West who have either supported Israel’s genocide or remained silent tell themselves to justify their behavior and sleep at night. History will not treat them kindly.“

• The Moral Bankruptcy of the West (John Mearsheimer)

On 19 December 2024, Human Rights Watch issued a 179-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. On 5 December 2024, Amnesty International issued a 296-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. On 21 November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes. On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice found that a plausible case can be made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Given the West’s presumed commitment to human rights and especially to preventing genocide, one would have expected countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany, to have stopped the Israeli genocide in its tracks.

Instead, the governments in those three countries, especially the United States, have supported Israel’s unimaginable behavior in Gaza at every turn. Indeed, those three countries are complicit in this genocide. Moreover, almost all of the many human rights advocates in those countries, and in the West more generally, have stayed silent while Israel executed its genocide. The mainstream media has made hardly any effort to expose and challenge what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. Indeed some key outlets have staunchly supported Israel’s actions. One wonders what people in the West who have either supported Israel’s genocide or remained silent tell themselves to justify their behavior and sleep at night. History will not treat them kindly.

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“Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, is doing an extraordinary job. I tell everybody, I was a pretty effective Speaker. I could never do his job. He has no margins. Any two or three members can rebel at any moment..”

• Most, But Not All, Republicans Lining Up To Support Speaker Of The House (JTN)

Weekend talk shows have featured considerable discussion about the vote in the House on Friday, January 3, for speaker, a position currently held by Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana. The potential for chaos is very real. As Republicans face an uncertain and precarious series of critical deadlines, party members are weighing in on what they believe should happen. The key dates in January are the 3rd, the 6th and the 20th. January 3rd is the day Congress reconvenes, at noon ET. At a little after 1 p.m. ET is when the vote to elect the Speaker of the House commences, according to Fox News. No other business can occur until that happens, and the number in the Republican conference is what has Republicans nervous. January 6 is supposed to be the counting of the electoral votes for president. January 20 is supposed to be President-elect Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day.

Neither of those can happen, at least theoretically, until the House chooses a speaker. This is the breakdown when the new Congress starts: 219 Republicans to 215 Democrats. While the number is usually 435, this time it is 434, as Matt Gaetz resigned after winning reelection in November, then being nominated for Attorney General, from which he later withdrew. He then resigned from Congress thinking that would end the House Ethics Committee’s plans to release their report on him, which it didn’t. Two other recently reelected Republicans have been nominated or named by Trump for key posts in his administration, but they remain in the House for now. Those two are Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida, picked as Trump’s national security adviser, and Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, nominated as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

To become speaker, the candidate “must win an outright majority of all members casting ballots for someone by name.” Needing 218 votes, there is little room for losing members. So far there is only one member who has said he will not be voting for Speaker Johnson, and that is Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. At least four others have refused to commit to vote for Johnson. If he loses one more, he does not get to the necessary 218 votes. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich spoke out, praising Johnson for the job he has done in his role as top Republican in the House. “Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, is doing an extraordinary job. I tell everybody, I was a pretty effective Speaker. I could never do his job. He has no margins. Any two or three members can rebel at any moment,” Gingrich told John Catsimatidis on his show “Cats Roundtable” on WABC 770 AM, according to The Hill.

Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., was on “Sunday Morning Futures” on Fox News. He called on President-elect Trump to call all of the members who have not yet committed to support Johnson and urge them to do so. The party and country could be moving into uncharted water if the vote for speaker drags on. Last time, two years ago, it took 15 rounds of votes over five days to get there, when then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy failed to get a majority. Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., was on ABC’s “This Week.” When asked by host Jonathan Karl whether Johnson would and should be reelected as Speaker, “Yes, and yes,” he replied. “The fact is that Mike Johnson inherited a disaster.”

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The old guard is still there, the people who gave you Biden and Kamala. This will take a long time.

• New Strategy For DNC: Younger Candidates Launching Bids To Run Party (JTN)

Following the Democrats’ 2024 sweeping election loss, younger candidates are stepping up to run for Democratic National Convention leadership positions as the midterm elections approach. Some of the candidates that have thrown their hat in the ring include gun control activist David Hogg, 24, who is running for DNC vice chairman and New York State Sen. James Skoufis, 37, who is running for chairman. “Moving forward, we must have a renewed focus on our youth outreach in all states and territories to rebuild our coalition after the massive shift to the right among young voters this election,” Hogg said in a statement, according to NBC News. Skoufis said last month that the Democratic Party needs to have a “fresh” perspective for the future and getting new voters. “I think I bring a healthy mix of a track record of knowing how to win over the past 12 years but also being that younger, fresher perspective,” he said.

The Democratic National Committee is scheduled to hold its election for chairperson on Feb. 1, 2025. Current DNC Chairman Jamie Harrison, who has had the position since 2021, announced he wouldn’t run again after his party this past election cycle lost the White House and Senate. “The DNC is committed to running a transparent, equitable, and impartial election for the next generation of leadership to guide the party forward,” he said. Others running for DNC chairman include former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, DNC vice chair Ken Martin, Ambassador to Japan and former mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, and Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler, according to The Hill. New Age author and former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson announced Thursday she’s running to lead the Democratic National Committee, according to CNN.

“This year, the party faces a more critical problem than we have ever faced before,” Williamson wrote on her Substack. “The MAGA phenomenon now challenges the very way that politics are done in America, and the traditional tool kit of party organizing will not be enough to meet the moment.” During the 2024 election, both Vice President Kamala Harris and President-elect Donald Trump made efforts to get younger voters through influencers and podcasts. During the campaign, Trump went on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” comedian Theo Von’s podcast and popular podcaster and scientist Lex Fridman’s podcast, each of which have male-dominated audiences. Rogan’s podcast has 14.5 million listeners and is the most popular podcast in the world.

Harris went on a popular podcast called “Call Her Daddy,” had celebrity endorsements of Beyonce and Oprah Winfrey and had singer Gracie Abrams sing at one of her campaign rallies. The Harris campaign paid Winfrey’s production company more than $1 million to stage the endorsement event, and paid Beyoncé’s production company $165,000 for her appearance. However, with the Democrats’ most recent loss, the party is looking to re-strategize with how to win over voters in the 2026 midterm elections and the 2028 presidential election. Hogg, a who gained fame as a survivor of the Parkland school shooting in Florida, had come out prior to the election and said the Democratic Party had to do a better job about reaching the male demographic.

According to The Trace, he co-founded Leaders We Deserve, a political action committee formed in 2023 that has raised nearly $8.5 million in the past year to elect Gen Z and millennial progressives to state and national office. “I hope I’m wrong but if we lose in November I think the main reason why will be the number of young men of all races that are no longer Democrats,” Hogg wrote on X in a September post. “There’s been a taboo about talking about this because we understandably are hesitant to make men a main point of conversation (given we have been for thousands of years) but we have a real problem to deal with.” “Long-term, we have a lot of work to do to provide positive examples of what actual masculinity looks like that is not defined by putting down women or other people, but by lifting others up and being a true leader,” his post concluded. The Democrats have two years to come up with a winning strategy for 2026 with the midterm elections and less than two months to elect leadership to execute their plan.

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“The envoy infamously branded Chancellor Olaf Scholz an “offended liver sausage” over his unwillingness to travel to Kiev personally.”

• Ukraine Could Agree To Non-NATO Security Guarantees – Envoy (RT)

Kiev’s main goal at present is to obtain meaningful security guarantees, which are not necessarily tied to the country’s NATO membership, Ukraine’s newly-appointed ambassador to the UN Andrey Melnik has said. The diplomat made the remarks in an interview published by Germany’s Berliner Morgenpost on Friday. Since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022, the leadership in Kiev has consistently named accession to the US-led military bloc as one of its top priorities. Russia has, in turn, singled out the threat of NATO military infrastructure appearing on its Western border as one of the reasons it initiated its special operation against the neighboring nation. “NATO membership remains on the table for Ukraine,” Melnik said. He went on to clarify that “nevertheless, the question of security guarantees as an interim solution is central to us.”

The diplomat stressed that any such arrangements must go beyond mere political pledges akin to the ones given to Kiev under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Under the accord, Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees provided by the US, the UK and Russia. The Ukrainian ambassador noted that “our partners must meticulously write down what military assistance they would rush to the rescue to defend Ukraine, should it be attacked by Russia again.” Melnik told the newspaper that both bilateral and multilateral agreements could be considered, as long as they are binding under international law. “These could also be part of a potential large peace treaty with Russia,” the Ukrainian diplomat added.

He also brushed aside predictions that US President-elect Donald Trump could drastically reduce or terminate Washington’s aid to Kiev altogether. Melnik concurred with the Republican, however, that European NATO member states should come to the fore in terms of their own defense and military assistance to Ukraine. The ambassador expressed hope that the leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union party, Friedrich Merz, billed by many observers as the future chancellor, would heed Trump’s advice. The Ukrainian diplomat insisted that European NATO member states are affluent enough, and can afford to spend a lot more on defense.

Speaking of Germany, where he served as Ukraine’s ambassador between 2014 and 2022, Melnik expressed indignation at the fact that funds allocated for defense aid to Kiev in the budget of the Federal Republic for next year had been slashed from eight to four billion euros. He also reiterated his country’s demands for German long-range Taurus missiles and expressed hope that Berlin’s new coalition government would “put military aid to Ukraine on a stable basis.” German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier ordered the dissolution of the federal parliament on Friday, following the collapse of the country’s ruling coalition, with a snap election scheduled for February 23. During his time as Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Melnik repeatedly used undiplomatic language when speaking about the country’s leadership. The envoy infamously branded Chancellor Olaf Scholz an “offended liver sausage” over his unwillingness to travel to Kiev personally.

Speaking of Germany, where he served as Ukraine’s ambassador between 2014 and 2022, Melnik expressed indignation at the fact that funds allocated for defense aid to Kiev in the budget of the Federal Republic for next year had been slashed from eight to four billion euros. He also reiterated his country’s demands for German long-range Taurus missiles and expressed hope that Berlin’s new coalition government would “put military aid to Ukraine on a stable basis.” German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier ordered the dissolution of the federal parliament on Friday, following the collapse of the country’s ruling coalition, with a snap election scheduled for February 23. During his time as Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Melnik repeatedly used undiplomatic language when speaking about the country’s leadership. The envoy infamously branded Chancellor Olaf Scholz an “offended liver sausage” over his unwillingness to travel to Kiev personally.

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“But who cares about Slovakia, right, Mr. Zelenskyy? But when you need something to keep you from freezing in the winter, you scream in frustration..”

• Zelensky Charges Slovakia’s Fico With Opening “Second Energy Front” (ZH)

Slovakia has threatened to cut off electricity to Ukraine if the Russian gas transit route halts at the end of the year, as we detailed earlier. Slovakia is greatly dependent on Russian gas, and Ukraine is not expected to renew a major energy transit contract with Russian state suppliers. With just a few days away from the start of the new year, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico escalated the standoff by saying he can leverage electricity supplies to Ukraine. “After Jan. 1, we will consider the situation and the possibility of reciprocal measures against Ukraine,” Fico said in a video released Friday. “If it is unavoidable, we will stop the supply of electricity, which Ukraine urgently needs in the event of grid failures,” he said. The war of words and threats is ratcheting by the day. Given that Fico just controversially met with Putin in Moscow, the electricity threat is going to add insult to injury at a moment Russian aerial forces have been pummeling Ukraine’s power grid this past week.

Fico lashed out in the most charged statement directed at Kiev to date: “But who cares about Slovakia, right, Mr. Zelenskyy? But when you need something to keep you from freezing in the winter, you scream in frustration,” Fico said. Zelensky responded Saturday by accusing Slovakia, which is a NATO and EU member state, of opening a “second energy front” against Ukraine on orders from Moscow. “It appears that Putin gave Fico the order to open the second energy front against Ukraine at the expense of the Slovak people’s interests,” Zelensky wrote on X. “Fico’s threats to cut off Ukraine’s emergency power supply this winter while Russia attacks our power plants and energy grid can only be explained by this,” he emphasized. He charged that Putin is “dragging Slovakia into Russia’s attempts to cause more suffering for Ukrainians.”

As Russia’s aerial assaults on Ukraine’s energy grid have grown worse, Ukraine has relied more and more on electricity imports from neighboring and outside countries to survive. Zelensky has indicated the Slovakia accounts for 19% of Ukraine’s power imports, which is a significant portion, and outsized given Slovakia’s small geographic size. Clearly, Fico does have serious leverage at his disposal. “Slovakia is part of the single European energy market and Fico must respect common European rules,” the Ukrainian leader further said Saturday. Fico has long been target of vitriol from Kiev officials, given he has consistently and loudly opposed Ukraine’s entry into NATO, in common with Hungary’s Viktor Orban. “As long as I am the prime minister of the Slovak Republic, as long as I lead the deputies, whom I, as the party chairman, have under political control, I will never agree to Ukraine’s membership in NATO,” Fico declared this past October.

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Sure, cut off the gas in the middle of winter…

• EU States Seek To Protect Russian Gas Flow Despite Ukrainian Threat (RT)

Countries in central and southern Europe are exploring solutions to ensure the continued flow of Russian natural gas, as a key transit agreement between Russia and Ukraine is set to expire on December 31, Bloomberg has reported, citing sources. Kiev has refused to extend the agreement, citing ongoing tensions and unresolved disputes with Moscow. Slovakia, Hungary, Austria and Italy are reportedly pursuing alternative strategies to avoid disruptions to their gas supplies. Among the options considered is a commercial agreement that bypasses the need for a renewed intergovernmental deal between Kiev and Moscow, Bloomberg wrote in a report on Saturday. This could involve Slovakia and other Central European countries striking direct contracts with Russian energy giant Gazprom, ensuring uninterrupted gas flows despite Ukraine’s objections.

Slovakia’s state gas utility, SPP, is also in discussions with Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company SOCAR. According to reports, one potential solution could involve a gas swap between SOCAR and Gazprom, where the Azeri company would purchase equivalent volumes of Russian gas to supply European buyers. Azerbaijan’s gas exports already reach several EU countries through the Southern Gas Corridor, an infrastructure project designed to reduce dependence on Russian gas. The strategy was adopted by the EU following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has also proposed moving the location of Russian gas sales to the physical border between Russia and Ukraine, which would transfer gas ownership to European buyers and oblige Kiev to ensure transit under its free-trade agreement with the EU, Bloomberg wrote, citing persons familiar with the matter. Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged that various proposals have been discussed, involving Hungary, Slovakia, Türkiye, or Azerbaijan. He noted, however, that any such arrangement would be difficult to enact because of Gazprom’s long-term contracts. Ukraine is punishing Europe by banning the transit of Russian gas, which will become more expensive, the Russian leader argued. Moscow has also insisted that it’s ready to continue supplying natural gas to the EU.

Although only about 5% of the EU’s total gas supply now transits through Ukraine, the route remains vital for landlocked countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Since the start of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, the EU has sought to reduce its reliance on Russian gas, shifting toward alternatives such as liquefied natural gas (LNG) and increased imports from Azerbaijan via the Southern Gas Corridor. Before February 2022, Russia was the bloc’s top gas supplier, accounting for more than 40% of its imports. Last year, Russian gas made up around 8% of EU imports.

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EU loses big.

• Georgia’s New President ‘Hardline Critic of the West’ (Sp.)

Mikheil Kavelashvili took his oath on the Bible and the Georgian constitution, swearing to serve the country’s national interests amid a political standoff. On December 29, Mikheil Kavelashvili was sworn in as Georgia’s new president in an inauguration at parliament that was attended by members of the ruling Georgian Dream party and its founder Bidzina Ivanishvili. Who is Georgia’s new president and how does the US meddle in internal affairs of the former Soviet republic? A former Dinamo Tbilisi and Manchester City football player, Kavelashvili was appointed president by the parliament during the December 14 elections, in which 224 out of 225 members of Georgia’s electoral college voted for the only candidate on the ballot.

The 53-year-old is a founder of the People’s Power party, allied with the Georgian Dream and known for being the main voice for anti-Western sentiments in Georgia. The Guardian recently called him “a pro-Russia, hardline critic of the West.” Kavelashvili has repeatedly said that Western intelligence agencies are seeking to drive Georgia into war with Russia. He accused opposition parties of acting as a “fifth column” directed from abroad, slamming outgoing President Salome Zourabichvili as a “chief agent”. The new president accused her of violating the constitution and declared that he would “restore the presidency to its constitutional framework.” The footballer-turned-politician insisted that Georgian society is divided,” and that “radicalization and polarization” in the country are being fueled from abroad. He pledged to do his best to unite the society “around the idea of Georgia’s identity and independence.”

Earlier this week, the US did not think twice before sanctioning Georgian Dream party’s founder Bidzina Ivanishvili for allegedly “undermining the democratic and Euro-Atlantic future of Georgia for the benefit of the Russian Federation,” according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. In September, the US cited the aforementioned allegations as it slapped sanctions on Zviad Kharazishvili, head of the Department for Special Assignments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and his deputy Mileri Lagazauri. Georgian Dream spokesman Givi Mikanadze denounced the sanctions as “interference in the pre-election processes and an attempt to influence the will of voters.”

The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), in turn, said in a statement in July that Moscow has data that indicates Washington’s determination to seek a change of power in Georgia following the results of the parliamentary elections in the small Caucasian nation on October 26, which was finally won by the Georgian Dream. According to the SVR, the US instructors have already given the command to the opposition forces in Georgia to start planning protests in the country timed to coincide with the elections. The October 26 elections saw Georgian Dream obtain 54.2% of the votes, with the four opposition parties together gaining 37.33%. The remaining political forces failed to overcome the 5% ceiling needed to make it to the parliament.

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Back at it

Husky

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle December 1 2024

Dec 012024
 
 December 1, 2024  Posted by at 9:40 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  47 Responses »


Caravaggio Adoration of the Shepherds 1609

 

• Trump Nominates Kash Patel For FBI Director (ZH)
• Pam Bondi To Visit Capitol Hill Next Week, Joining Musk, Ramaswamy (JTN)
• A Top Priority for DOGE: Decentralizing the Federal Government (AmG)
• Schedule F – Trump’s Plan A for Emptying the Swamp (Donner)
• Mexico, Canada Cozy Up To Trump Amid Tariff Threats, China Goes It Alone (JTN)
• Trump Threatens BRICS (RT)
• Democrat Mayors Say They Will Use Police To Obstruct Trump’s Deportations (ZH)
• CNN Contributor Scott Jennings Joins Los Angeles Times Editorial Board (JTN)
• Mass Desertions Crippling Ukrainian Army – AP (RT)
• Russia and China Are Rewiring Greek Mythology (Pepe Escobar)
• Elon, Are You Musk or Mask? (Pacini)
• European Elites Are Destroying Europe – Again (SCF)
• ‘I Won’t Claim That Milan Is A Safe City’ – Mayor (RMX)
• Joe Rogan: ‘Greatest Media Psy-Op In History’ Was Waged Against Trump (NYP)

 

 

 

 

Alex Jones

Border patrol
https://twitter.com/i/status/1862978593497718833

Trump academy
https://twitter.com/i/status/1862997542725644733

Comer

Sachs
https://twitter.com/i/status/1862934557332304075

 

 

A big threat to many. Epstein list, DIddy list, Russia Russia Russia, etc etc.

• Trump Nominates Kash Patel For FBI Director (ZH)

After weeks of speculation, President-elect Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he’s picked Kash Patel to replace Christopher Wray as the head of the FBI. Patel has been a longtime critic of the bureau who has called for shutting down the agency’s Washington headquarters, cleaning house when it comes to top leadership, and bringing the nation’s law enforcement agencies “to heel.” According to a Saturday post to Truth Social, Trump called Patel a “brilliant lawyer, investigator, and “America First” fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People.” “He played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability, and the Constitution,” Trump continued.

“Patel has been open about what kind of changes he’d pursue if given the chance. His various proposals include reducing the FBI’s footprint in Washington and “dramatically” limiting its authority. He hopes to curb the power of the Justice Department’s Civil Division and jettison a Pentagon office that produces classified assessments of long-term trends and risks, arguing it is just a tool of the “deep state.” Patel has said he also intends to aggressively hunt down government officials who leak information to reporters, and change the law to make it easier to sue journalists. During an interview with Steve Bannon in December, Patel said he and others “will go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media.” -AP

Patel has served as both a federal prosecutor and a public defender, and filled a number of administrative roles at the tail end of Trump’s first term, including on the National Security Council and in the Pentagon. And in a sign this is a good move – in 2021 when Trump floated Patel for deputy director of the CIA or the FBI, former AG William Barr said that would happen “over my dead body.” Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said that no part of the FBI would be “safe” with Patel in a leadership position.

In response, Patel told the Washington Post: “Those calling me a danger, let’s just ask them for a proof, a piece of evidence that actually shows I’ve committed any constitutional violations or any ethical quandaries, and I’d love to hear their response to this.” Current FBI Director Christopher Wray will now either have to resign or be fired, assuming Patel makes it through Senate confirmation. And as noted above, Patel has vowed to investigate and possibly prosecute regime-puppet journalists. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you,” Patel said last year. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1863016245328756913

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Bondi must be confirmed by the Senate, Musk and Ramaswamy don’t.

• Pam Bondi To Visit Capitol Hill Next Week, Joining Musk, Ramaswamy (JTN)

Attorney General-nominee Pam Bondi will travel to Capitol Hill next week to meet with Senate Republicans as a start to her confirmation process. The presidential transition team for GOP President-elect Donald Trump confirmed Bondi’s visit Friday with The Washington Examiner. She will join Trump appointees Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are expected to meet with Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate. Trump nominated Bondi, a former Florida GOP attorney general, after former Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration last week. Trump appointed Musk and Ramaswamy to head his new Department of Government Efficiency. They are expected on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. Their appointments do not require Senate confirmation.

Bondi is expected to meet Monday with Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley, who will be the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the upcoming congressional session, also according to The Examiner. The Judiciary committee will hold the confirmation hearings for Bondi. “Attorney General Nominee Bondi is looking forward to the confirmation process and answering any questions senators might have,” Trump’s presidential transition spokesman Alex Pfeiffer told the news outlet. “Attorney General Nominee Bondi’s life has been dedicated to keeping Americans safe. She looks forward to continuing that work at the Department of Justice.” GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday the meetings with entrepreneurs Musk and Ramaswamy will focus on “major reform ideas to achieve regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions, and cost savings—& revive the principle of limited government.”

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“..nearly 90% of federal government office space in Washington is vacant because most federal workers began working from home during the COVID pandemic and never returned to their offices.”

• A Top Priority for DOGE: Decentralizing the Federal Government (AmG)

One of the best ideas I heard from Donald Trump for his second term is to move as many as 100,000 federal employees to “new locations outside the Washington Swamp” to places “filled with patriots who love America.” This initiative will save tax dollars and help depoliticize federal agencies. There also are important security and fairness reasons to relocate these agencies across the United States. I speak from experience. In the early 1990s, the late Senator Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia) drafted legislation to move thousands of CIA employees to West Virginia. Byrd proposed closing 21 CIA offices in Washington, DC, and its Virginia and Maryland suburbs and moving them to large campuses in Jefferson County, West Virginia. My wife and I were CIA employees at the time, and we were thrilled about the potential move of our office out of the DC area.

We were unable to afford a house without a lengthy commute on our federal salaries because the large presence of federal workers and contractors had driven housing prices through the roof. (Five of the seven wealthiest U.S. counties are in the DC suburbs.) We also disliked the liberal culture and high taxes of the DC area. Unfortunately, the Washington establishment, including many well-paid senior CIA officers and contractors, blocked Senator Byrd’s attempt to relocate CIA offices to West Virginia. As a result, when my wife could no longer work full-time because of the disability of one of our children, we ended up buying a house 50 miles from DC with a roundtrip commute of 2.5 to 3 hours per day. Moving federal agencies out of the DC area to areas with affordable housing and reasonable commutes are two good reasons why the Trump administration should decentralize the federal government.

The current practice of locating these agencies within a few miles of the White House and Congress reflects a bygone era before telephones, email, and video conferences. Most federal employees rarely interact with members of Congress and the White House and can do their jobs more efficiently and economically in more affordable and less congested areas of the country. There’s also the issue of fairness. DC, Maryland, and Virginia receive huge tax revenues from federal employees’ salaries and retirement checks. They also benefit from large federal expenditures like the DC Metro, DC airports, free federal museums, etc. Since technological advances have made it unnecessary for these agencies to be located near our nation’s capital, it is time to share the wealth of federal agencies by spreading them across the United States. There is no reason why this government spending and jobs should continue to be concentrated in one part of the country.

Many of these moves would make these agencies more effective and accountable to the American people. For example, relocating the Agriculture Department headquarters to a farming state would move the agency closer to the Americans it was created to serve. Agriculture employees could interact with farmers and ranchers on a daily basis. The Agriculture Department could also hire many employees who actually live on farms and ranches. The same would be true for moving the headquarters of the Transportation Department to Detroit or the Interior Department to Utah or Wyoming. Other possibilities: move the Department of Health and Human Services to North Carolina’s Research Triangle, move the FBI headquarters to the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, move the Energy Department headquarters to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and move the Environmental Protection Agency headquarters to Florida.

Large portions of the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, Department of Homeland Security, IRS, and other agencies should also be moved to locations across the U.S. There are two other crucial reasons for decentralizing U.S. government agencies away from the Washington, DC area. The most important is security. Given growing threats from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons; drones; and violent demonstrations by radical groups, keeping large numbers of federal agencies and employees in the Washington, DC, area is a significant and avoidable threat to national security and the continuity of government. Spreading federal agencies across the United States would make it harder for a U.S. adversary to deal a devastating blow to the federal government with a single attack. Decentralizing federal agencies also would help depoliticize them and fight the so-called “deep state.”

The resistance by federal employees to the president’s constitutional authority as the head of the federal government is driven by a self-serving Washington, DC, culture consisting of entrenched employees, former employees, federal contractors, think tanks, and the mainstream media. Many of these employees do little work and are extremely hard to fire. Even worse, nearly 90% of federal government office space in Washington is vacant because most federal workers began working from home during the COVID pandemic and never returned to their offices.

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“Everyday Americans have complained about federal bureaucratic hegemony for as long as we can remember, but now they will finally have a president in place with specific plans to do something about it.”

• Schedule F – Trump’s Plan A for Emptying the Swamp (Donner)

Ever since Election Day, much talk has focused on President-elect Donald Trump’s appointments – in record time – of his Cabinet, advisors, and agency directors. This new administration is a diverse mix, but they all have one thing in common: The returning president sees them as loyal to him and his outsized agenda. But what about all the other, more entrenched denizens of DC? Enter Schedule F – Trump’s bold plan to “drain the Swamp.” Washington is abuzz with the extraordinary diversity of beliefs among the new designees. This is far from typical for incoming presidents, who ordinarily populate their administrations with political veterans in lockstep with their ideology.

But after assembling a largely forgettable team upon his arrival in DC as a novice in 2017, the road-tested 47th president has broken the mold, as is his wont, by selecting Republicans and Democrats, hawks and doves, neoconservatives and populists, corporatists and unionists, insiders and outsiders. Trump’s most famously ambitious objective, however, is to drain and ultimately empty the DC swamp of its unelected, unaccountable, and obstructionist bureaucrats who can thwart the will of the president, as they did so often during his first administration. The arrogance of these supercilious apparatchiks is due to the iron-clad protections they enjoy as civil servants. They cannot be fired no matter their behavior, except in the rarest of circumstances. Presidents come and go, they tell themselves, but we will outlast them all and can act accordingly.

You may recall the so-called “all-of-government” approach to the DEI agenda during the current administration, where the goal of equity must be embraced and adopted not only in social planning and policies but across all agencies and cabinet departments. Well, the incoming president will employ that same broad, sweeping approach to weeding out the most unproductive and recalcitrant employees among the federal government’s 2.2 million-strong civilian workforce. And while DOGE – the newly formed non-governmental Department of Government Efficiency to be headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – has been the talk of Washington, it faces severe limits in its attempts to affect systemic reform. No less than 60% of the government’s $6.8 trillion budget is “non-discretionary” and largely untouchable because it is devoted to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the exploding national debt, now more than $36 trillion. Another 13% is devoted to defense, which Trump has pledged to increase. Thus, Musk’s stated goal of cutting $2 trillion in unnecessary federal spending will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

However, taking an axe to the bloated budget ultimately figures to have less permanent impact than Trump’s audacious plans to alter the federal government’s modus operandi and its entrenched culture. The linchpin for his game-changing reforms is reinstating the innocuous-sounding Schedule F, instituted by Trump in the waning days of his first term but immediately reversed by Joe Biden upon taking office. It will empower massive changes in the bureaucracy, re-classifying thousands of careerists as political appointees. It refers to a section of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, exempting some federal employees from civil service protections, specifically those “whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character.” Under Trump’s plan, the number of such employees would jump from roughly 4,000 to about 50,000, signaling a sea change in the way Washington does business.

The outgoing Biden administration, deeply fearful of Trump’s bold plans to upend the DC establishment, is working overtime to “Trump-proof” (as much as possible) the federal government, hoping to minimize the damage to its familiar and comfortable way of life. The danger inherent in Schedule F is the likelihood that the next Democratic president could use the same expanded executive control over the bureaucracy to reverse course from Trump and bring in committed progressives who could do even more damage than the present embedded bureaucrats. So, to make these plans stick beyond Trump’s next term, his administration might attempt to move one or more executive agencies out of Washington. This would wrench thousands of civil servants out of their comfort zone, likely leading to a significant number of resignations by those accustomed to life inside the DC beltway.

Despite setting a risky precedent that could backfire on Republicans in the years ahead, Trump is focused on the here and now, believing the addition of Schedule F will force permanent structural change on what has effectively become a fourth branch of government, namely, the administrative state. Everyday Americans have complained about federal bureaucratic hegemony for as long as we can remember, but now they will finally have a president in place with specific plans to do something about it.

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“On January 20th [..] I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders..”

• Mexico, Canada Cozy Up To Trump Amid Tariff Threats, China Goes It Alone (JTN)

The United States’ neighbors seem eager to avoid a major trade-and-tariff standoff with Washington as Donald Trump returns to the White House, but Beijing is readying for round two after trading blows with the Republican president during his first administration. Though Trump has long expressed support for tariffs, he set off an international firestorm this week with his Day One plans to shake up trade relations with key economic partners. “On January 20th, as one of my many first Executive Orders, I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders,” Trump announced this week. Trump overthrew Republican free trade orthodoxy during the 2016 primary, criticizing foreign trade practices for which he blamed the outsourcing of American jobs. [..]

Mexico
While there appears to be some disagreement between Trump and his Mexican counterpart over the state of their negotiations, both have deemed their recent talks as productive and indicated that they were prepared to work closely with one another. Despite Trump’s support for strict immigration and tariff policies during his first term, he generally enjoyed a strong relationship with former Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Current Mexican leader Claudia Sheinbaum, however, initially expressed skepticism about Trump’s tariffs plans and suggested they would lead to a direct trade war. “One tariff would be followed by another in response, and so on until we put at risk common businesses,” she said earlier this week. But the pair spoke privately within days and both suggested there was room for discussion.

Trump posted Thursday on Truth Social: “Just had a wonderful conversation with the new President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo. She has agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border. We also talked about what can be done to stop the massive drug inflow into the United States, and also, U.S. consumption of these drugs. It was a very productive conversation!” Sheinbaum disputed that she had made any material commitments but that the pair had discussed immigration and drug trafficking and that tariffs had come up in that context. “It was a good conversation and we are going to keep having conversations,” she said. “Mexico’s stance is not to close borders, but to build bridges between governments and their peoples.”

Canada
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday night unexpectedly flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort home in Florida to talk with him, amid the tariff threat. On Tuesday, Trudeau quickly called Trump after the tariff post to discuss his plans. Trudeau’s government has faced abysmal polling numbers amid widespread economic discontent and frustration over his immigration policies. Some surveys have suggested his Liberal Party faces an electoral wipeout when voters go to the polls and a trade war with the United States could see its prospects fade even further. “We obviously talked about laying out the facts, talking about how the intense and effective connections between our two countries flow back and forth,” Trudeau said Tuesday.

Though not typically viewed as a major factor in the United States’ immigration surge, Canada shares with America the largest undefended border in the world. Ottawa’s own lax immigration policies have contributed, moreover, not just to Trudeau’s low polling numbers, but the security situation for the U.S. During fiscal 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported a record 198,929 encounters with and apprehensions of illegal border crossers along the Canadian frontier. Among those apprehended were individuals from 97 different countries. Though border security is a significant factor in Washington’s relationship with Ottawa, Canada’s economy is not without some industrial weight of its own and Trump’s primary concern with tariffs seems to be foreign imports.[..]

China
While Canada and Mexico appear at least willing to engage with Trump on his trade and border initiatives, China, the main object of Trump’s ire, is evidently adopting a more bellicose approach to the Republican’s return. “Imposing arbitrary tariffs on trading partners will not solve America’s own problems,” Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesperson He Yadong told reporters. China is already subject to some import tariffs, as Trump’s trade policy pivot carried over to the Biden administration to a degree. In announcing the tariffs this week, Trump further singled out Beijing for additional scrutiny if it did not crack down on the export of fentanyl and other drugs. “Until such time as they stop, we will be charging China an additional 10% Tariff, above any additional Tariffs, on all of their many products coming into the United States of America,” Trump declared, observing that his move followed failed discussions with China to convince them to crack down.

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Trying to save the dollar. Too late.

• Trump Threatens BRICS (RT)

The BRICS nations will be hit with 100% tariffs on their goods if they try to introduce a reserve currency to rival the dollar, US President-elect Donald Trump has warned. Trump has repeatedly threatened to use tariffs to achieve his geopolitical goals. ”The idea that the BRICS Countries are trying to move away from the Dollar while we stand by and watch is OVER,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Saturday. Trump went on to say that he would ask the BRICS nations to promise not to create a common currency, “nor back any other currency to replace the mighty US dollar,” or they will face 100% tariffs. ”They can go find another ‘sucker!’” he continued. “There is no chance that the BRICS will replace the US Dollar in International Trade, and any Country that tries should wave goodbye to America.”

BRICS previously comprised Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and was expanded in January to include Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates. Around 30 other nations have expressed interest in joining the group of emerging economies. Russia, which currently holds the group’s rotating presidency, floated the idea of introducing a BRICS currency in 2022. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva echoed Moscow’s proposal last year, arguing that having the option of trading in another reserve currency would reduce the BRICS countries’ “vulnerability” to fluctuations in the dollar’s exchange rate.

BRICS leaders stopped short of announcing plans for such a currency at their summit in the Russian city of Kazan last month. Instead, the group pledged to set up a cross-border payment system to function alongside the Western SWIFT network, and to increase their use of local currencies in international trade. ”Cooperation within BRICS is not directed against anyone or anything – neither against the dollar nor against other currencies,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated in October. “It pursues the main goal of ensuring the interests of those countries that participate in this format.”

Using local currencies to settle bilateral trade bills “helps to keep economic development free from politics,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the time. Trump has vowed to use tariffs to settle US trade deficits, force offshore manufacturers to return, and achieve a range of geopolitical goals. In addition to proposing a blanket tariff of 20% on all incoming goods, Trump has threatened Canada and Mexico with additional 25% tariffs if they fail to reduce the flow of migrants and drugs into the US. Trump also declared this week that “we will be charging China an additional 10% tariff, above any additional tariffs,” until Beijing “follows through” on punishing the producers and smugglers of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid.

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Homan: “But, look, me and the Denver mayor, we agree on one thing. He’s willing to go to jail, I’m willing to put him in jail.”

• Democrat Mayors Say They Will Use Police To Obstruct Trump’s Deportations (ZH)

There are only two issues that Democrats might care more about than the national legalization of abortion: Blocking the passage of voter ID laws, and, blocking the mass deportation of illegal immigrants. The reason should be relatively obvious – Keeping the border open and illegal immigrants flowing into the US is the key to election victory for progressives in the long run. If leftists are going to exterminate millions of future voters in the womb, then their only other option to fill ballot boxes is to import people from the third world and give them as much free stuff as possible so they’re sure to vote blue. Democrats have been pushing for a sweeping amnesty for illegals for years. If they had won the 2024 election by a comfortable margin it’s a certainty that an amnesty would be at the top of their priority list.

The open border policies and sanctuary actions of the political left are in direct violation of US immigration law, but Democrats act as if these laws are a suggestion rather than the rule. Without federal enforcement squarely in their corner blue cities and states only have one option left – Pretend they have the moral high ground and drum up as much civil unrest as possible. This might work in deep blue sanctuary cities, but the Trump Administration won the election in a landslide which included the popular vote. The majority of Americans want deportations and these cities do not have significant national backing. Despite this fact, some Democrat mayors are threatening to utilize local police forces to obstruct Trump’s mass deportation efforts. Denver Mayor Mike Johnston claims the deportation of illegals is “unconstitutional” and he initially threatened to use local law enforcement to block federal agencies from entering the city to carry out migrant arrests.

He ultimately walked these comments back, but only to a point, saying he’s ‘willing to go to jail’ to prevent deportations. For leftists the standard procedure is to wait and see how effectively they can use activist groups as a shield and then they change their rhetoric accordingly. If they can get the mob to show up on the doorsteps of DHS and ICE officials like they did with Supreme Court judges in 2023 then they may feel emboldened to escalate. Johnston seemed to tone down his chest puffing theatrics after incoming Border Czar Tom Homan gave him a reality check. “You are absolutely breaking the law. All he has to do is look at Arizona v. U.S. and he would see he’s breaking the law, Homan said flatly. “But, look, me and the Denver mayor, we agree on one thing. He’s willing to go to jail, I’m willing to put him in jail.”

Democrats don’t have the testicular fortitude to go into any fight alone, but the deportation debate is within their favorite wheelhouse, which is “resistance against the man”. For the past four years progressives have had the support of every government institution, almost every corporation and every NGO in the US and abroad, yet, they still tried to pretend they were the underdog fighting a rebellion against an oppressor. Now they truly are the underdog and they will certainly try to play to that image using the deportation drama as a background. The Mayor of Tuscon, Regina Romero, has also threatened the use of local police to obstruct deportation arrests. Her messaging is once again centered on the claim that deportations of illegals are a violation of higher moral standards. The law and the will of the voters must therefore take a back seat to the superior virtues of the progressive ideology.

It should be noted that members of the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua have been intercepted in Denver County and in Cochise County just east of Tuscon. They are specifically organizing in sanctuary cities with lax immigration standards, and they often recruit from illegal migrant shelters already in these areas. Multiple blue cites have stated publicly that they intend to refuse help to immigration agents during deportations. This includes the catch and release of violent criminals in order to prevent their arrest by ICE. In other words, Democrats would rather see rapists and murders back on the streets than hand them over to Trump. The thought process here seems utterly insane, but again, it makes perfect sense when one realizes how much time and energy Democrats have invested in their amnesty model. Without a massive third world voting block bought off with US tax dollars, it’s unlikely that progressives will win another election for a very long time.

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There goes their final bit of credibility.

• CNN Contributor Scott Jennings Joins Los Angeles Times Editorial Board (JTN)

Conservative CNN commentator Scott Jennings confirmed Fridayt that he is joining the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times, after the owner’s paper said he intended to hire more conservative voices. LA Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong earlier this month said he was hoping to balance out the editorial section of his newspaper by hiring more Republicans, and floated Jennings as one of the voices he wanted to bring on board. Soon-Shiong previously noted that the editorial boards of newspapers are responsible for what stories are assigned, which can be skewed based on the editor’s personal biases. Jennings praised Soon-Siong for his “important and groundbreaking” mission in returning neutrality and balance to the iconic newspaper, and said he has contributed to the paper over the past few years.

“I’ve written columns for the paper over the last few years and was honored to do so under such a storied and important masthead,” Jennings posted on X. “I love newspapers and believe in strong journalism and strong opinion pages that represent a wide array of views. I approach my commentary jobs by starting with the truth and then providing my honest opinion based on my conservative values and experience.” Jennings was a standout during this election cycle as a paid contributor on the CNN cable news network, frequently the lone conservative among more liberal counterparts in spirited panel discussions on politics. Jennings said that the shakeup at the newspaper, the largest daily in liberal-leaning California, followed management’s decision to withhold an endorsement in the presidential election – a big step in fixing the problems facing legacy media.

“Roughly half (or more) of the country often feels like legacy media doesn’t care what it thinks and has little interest in fairly representing its views and values,” Jennings said. “I plan to represent those Americans who believe they are often ignored or even ridiculed in legacy media and applaud Dr Soon-Shiong’s move to bring balance to the editorial board.” Other news outlets, including the Washington Post, have also tried to bring neutrality and balance back to their publications. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos highlighted the public’s distrust in the news media in an op-ed last month. “Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world?” Bezos wrote. “To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions … None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it.”

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When’s the revolt?

• Mass Desertions Crippling Ukrainian Army – AP (RT)

Mass desertion is “starving” the Ukrainian Army and “crippling” Kiev’s battleplans, as troops flee in their tens of thousands, the Associated Press reported on Friday, citing two soldiers who went AWOL, as well as lawyers and a dozen officials, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity. “We have already squeezed the maximum out of our people,” an officer with the 72nd Brigade told the American news agency, explaining why the problem became so acute. The Prosecutor General’s office lists more than 100,000 soldiers who have been charged over desertion, nearly half of whom quit this year alone, but the actual number is likely significantly higher, AP said. It may be as high as 200,000, one MP told the agency. In some cases, entire units have fled their frontline positions, it was told.

“If there’s no end term [to military service], it turns into a prison – it becomes psychologically hard to find reasons to defend this country,” said one of the deserters, who was named by AP. He was charged shortly after being interviewed. Earlier this year, Kiev adopted sweeping military service reform, hoping it would bolster the rate of mandatory conscription. The US is now reportedly pushing the Ukrainian government to lower the minimum draft age to 18, down from 25. Conscription is being brutally enforced by officers and their civilian helpers. One such official said handling his targets is like “dealing with a cornered rat,” The Telegraph newspaper reported earlier this week. Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky signed a bill into law this week, which waives criminal responsibility for first-time deserters if they volunteer to go back and fight.

In July 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that a shortage of manpower was the biggest problem facing the Ukrainian military, after a failed “counteroffensive” conducted against Russia earlier that year. “Ukrainian units have suffered huge losses in their suicidal attacks. Tens of thousands of casualties,” he said during a Russian Security Council meeting. “Despite constant raids, the never-ending waves of total mobilization in Ukrainian cities and villages, the current regime is finding that sending reinforcements to the front line becomes increasingly difficult,” he added. “The country’s mobilization reserve is being depleted.” Zelensky has been consistently blaming a shortage of Western-donated weapons for Ukrainian setbacks on the battlefield. Meanwhile Russian officials have accused him of waging a war “to the last Ukrainian” on behalf of the US.

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“As far as the production of relevant missile systems and relevant equipment is concerned, Russia has 10 times more of them than the combined output of all NATO countries..”

• Russia and China Are Rewiring Greek Mythology (Pepe Escobar)

Oh, the wonders chips from dishwashers are able to unleash. How come Zeus, King of the Gods, could not have foreseen it? Especially when his divine intuition was aware that in the future his thunderbolts would be replicated in Russia via Oreshnik – a seemingly harmless hazelnut tree. Mythology prefigures post-everything reality. Now let’s go back to Newton for a bit. Based on his formulas, a one meter long uranium projectile flying at very high speed is capable of perforating 6 meters of hard rock (to the sound of Deep Purple’s Highway Star?) A warhead traveling at 1,200 meters per second is capable of perforating 46 meters of concrete. Now imagine impact velocity greater than the speed of sound; the impact depth, of course, is exponentially fiercer. Impact shock, at very high velocity, turns whatever is ahead into gas. A – kinetic – shock wave pops up as deep as 50 meters, swarming the deep underground and crushing, destroying – actually imploding – everything in its wake.

That’s what happened deep underground at the Yuzhmash plant in Dnepropetrovsk – as Oreshnik was conceived by improving these physical principles. And Russia only used blanks for this first Oreshnik test – instead of warheads. Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back. Now cut to Russia and Kazakhstan’s Presidents Vladimir Putin and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev deepening their strategic partnership face to face in Astana – including a renewed drive for strengthening cooperation within the CSTO. Additionally, Kazakhstan was officially invited to become a BRICS partner. Putin answered quite a few press questions on Oreshnik and the wider NATO proxy war. But arguably what was most intriguing was his speech at a restricted attendance meeting of the CSTO Collective Security Council. Some of it deserves to be quoted at length – not least because of the President quipping about “customer satisfaction”:

“The Russian Iskander missile system and its modifications represent the Russian analogue of all three ATACMS missile modifications. The warhead weight in TNT equivalent is about the same, but Iskander has a longer range. The new U.S.-made PrSM missile is not superior to its Russian counterparts in any specification. The Storm Shadow air-launched missile, the French SCALP, and the German Taurus have a warhead weighing between 450 and 480 kilogrammes in TNT equivalent and a range of 500 to 650 kilometres. The German Taurus missile has a 650- kilometre range. The Kh-101 air-launched missile is the Russian analogue of these systems which is comparable in terms of power warhead, but significantly exceeds each of the European-made systems in terms of range. The new U.S.-made PrSM missiles, as I mentioned earlier, as well as the JASSM, are inferior to their Russian counterparts in terms of technical specifications.

“Without a doubt, we are aware of the number of the relevant weapons systems that are in service of our potential adversaries. We know how many of them are kept in storage facilities. We know their exact location, how many weapons have been supplied to Ukraine, and how many more are planned to be supplied. As far as the production of relevant missile systems and relevant equipment is concerned, Russia has 10 times more of them than the combined output of all NATO countries. Next year, we will increase the production by another 25 to 30 percent. We can see that the Kiev regime ringleaders are begging their masters for military equipment of a different kind. Let no one forget about the Kalibr, Kinzhal and Zirkon hypersonic missile systems, which are unmatched around the world in terms of their technical specifications. Their production is also being ramped up and is going at full speed. More such products may show up shortly on our menu of the products of this class, if I may put it that way. As they say, customer satisfaction is guaranteed.”

Putin compared an Oreshnik strike with the impact from a collision with a meteorite: “We know from history what meteorites fell where, and what the consequences were. Sometimes it was enough to form entire lakes.” Even as he stressed that “publicity is inappropriate when dealing with new weapons”. That was exactly the case with Oreshnik: “We waited until the moment when we conducted the test and, in fact, saw a result. And then we made an announcement.” That sets the context for what Mikhail Kovalchuk, the actual creator of these seemingly innocent hazelnuts, the post-everything replica of the thunderbolts of Zeus, told Izvestia on the sidelines of the IV Congress of Young Scientists in the federal territory of Sirius. Kovalchuk is the president of the Kurchatov Institute National Research Center. Essentially, he remarked how “the materials that Russia has that can withstand ultra-high temperatures made it possible to create the Oreshnik system and will make it possible to create other types of hypersonic weapons.”

The whole planet may be asking how did Russia manage to overtake everyone else: “Because we are one of the five world leaders (…) We have created hypersonic weapons in a short period of time. And these are materials that used to work at 1,500 degrees, then at 1,800, and these at 2,000, and we did it, while others did not.” And there’s more: Kovalchuk said, “other materials that can withstand high temperatures will make it possible to create even more advanced weapons. The next step should be materials that can withstand 2,500-3,000 degrees.” That would make possible, for instance, missiles flying at very low altitudes at Mach 15 or even Mach 20 creating even more utterly devastating impact – including plasma shock – than the already tested Oreshnik. Putin, for his part, also said – almost casually – that the Ministry of Defense is currently “picking targets” for more strikes by Oreshnik, including Ukrainian “decision making centers”, industrial production sites and military facilities. Is NATO listening? Obviously not.

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“X has been elected as the preferred political communication space, becoming the common square in which to share and find information, but also a laboratory for sociological analysis of political mutations.”

• Elon, Are You Musk or Mask? (Pacini)

Let’s not focus on cars, which are a small percentage of Musk’s industries: what is of interest is technological research, which is also favoured by the saturation of market sectors. We have also seen examples of this in the SMO in the Ukraine, when photos and videos of the Tesla Tank Cybertruck used in conflict zones surfaced, and even Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya, has his own, apparently remotely disabled from Tesla HQ. There are strategic geometries that are redefined through the cover of a well-fed collective imagination. It sometimes happens that the most precious and delicate things are hidden… by putting them out in the open for all to see, but no one notices. Musk’s transhumanist aims are neither a secret nor new. He is the man who made brain chips, human-machine connections, humanoid robots, etc. ‘pop’. If previously these topics were for a few insiders or enthusiasts, with Musk they have become a media product to be consumed.

On 30 January 2024, Musk announced the first Neuralink brain implant on a human being. The American billionaire then added another post, writing: ‘Neuralink’s first product is called TELEPATIA. It will allow you to control your phone or computer and, through them, almost any device, simply by thinking. The initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs. Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a typist. That is the goal’. The next step is to make these chips communicate with artificial intelligence. And here we are in the era of transhumanism. As Stephen Hawking himself wrote, ‘Artificial intelligence could develop a will of its own. And it will be extremely good at achieving its goals. If these are not aligned with ours, we will be in trouble. You’re probably not an ant-hater who stomps on these insects out of malice, but if you’re in charge of a hydroelectric project and there’s an ant hill in the region that you have to flood, it’s going to end badly for the ants.

Let’s try not to put humanity in the position of ants. AI could either be the best thing that ever happened to humanity, or the worst. Far from demonising AI tout court, what is interesting to understand is the broad scope of this type of research and its political as well as strategic effect. Projects like this completely redefine the criteria of democracy, of political participation of free will, of the definition of being human or not. You don’t put a man like Musk in government by pure chance. Beyond the ‘pro-life’ electoral proclamations, so to speak, made by Trump, one has to wonder what a man who is pro-life is doing inside the entourage of the new American president. They will get over it, or not, the ‘right-wing’ voters from the Catholic world, especially on the East Coast, who have faced numerous battles on bioethics and bio-law, not only on the issues of gender, abortion and euthanasia, but also on experimental medical research, of which Musk is a passionate philanthropist.

It is probable to believe that the research carried out by his laboratories will not stop in the face of some protest. Michael Foucault’s Lectures on Biopolitics come to mind, when in the Paris years he predicted that the introduction of total control over the living body would not necessarily take place by force, but would pass through the subtle ploy of gradual approval by citizens, who would come to legitimise and even justify any ethical violation, without realising it, in the name of ‘science’. Let’s face it: Trump, with business, has a way with it.

Getting Musk on the electoral victory bandwagon was a real businessman’s move. In one fell swoop, and probably with an agreement that had already been made beforehand, Trump has guaranteed himself control of a good slice of strategic sectors that are undergoing a strong development phase. Especially when it comes to the domains of cyberspace and outer space, Musk is an undisputed leader. And, as such, in September 2023 he transferred part of the control of Starlink to the Pentagon, a move that became crucial for the success of some of the attacks by Ukraine in the Donbass during the SMO. The same Musk who a few months earlier, in early 2023, had offered himself as a mediator for the conflict, even inviting the Pentagon to foot the bill for the satellite internet terminals he had donated to Kiev.

Musk is the man who has taken social networking to a more refined level of hybrid warfare, surpassing Mark Zuckerberg in style and numbers. The purchase of Twitter, renamed X, worth a whopping $45 billion, became a so-called ‘free’ social network, changing the rules of the community, with less censorship of content. This aspect proved to be a winning move. X has been elected as the preferred political communication space, becoming the common square in which to share and find information, but also a laboratory for sociological analysis of political mutations.

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“These charlatan leaders are shameless in their Russophobia and surrogacy for U.S.-led Western imperialism – even to the point of killing their own people..”

• European Elites Are Destroying Europe – Again (SCF)

Instead of pushing for a diplomatic solution to the worst conflict on the European continent since World War Two, European political elites are slavishly going along with Washington’s criminal proxy war against Russia, which is in danger of spiraling into a nuclear Armageddon. This week the buffoonish former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson openly admitted that the conflict in Ukraine was a proxy war against Russia. But that didn’t give Johnson pause for thought or shame. He urged the Europeans to send more weapons to Ukraine. Nor did his crass candidness elicit any outcry or condemnation. Johnson, the imbecile, was, in effect, confirming what Russia has been warning is the essence of the conflict in Ukraine – a U.S.-led war using Ukrainian cannon fodder.

Then, we had the chief of Britain’s intelligence agency MI6, “Sir” Richard Moore, holding forth to an audience in Paris that Russia’s Putin was causing “staggeringly reckless sabotage” across Europe. The British spymaster claimed that Russia was threatening the continent with nuclear weapons to weaken NATO support for Ukraine. He omitted the glaring fact that the U.S., Britain, and France have dramatically escalated the conflict by supplying a NeoNazi regime in Ukraine with long-range missiles to strike Russia. Meanwhile, the governments in Germany and Nordic countries are issuing dire public warnings for people to “get ready for war” by building bomb shelters in their homes and stocking up on non-perishable foods. You could hardly make this insanity up except in the dystopian novels of George Orwell. The continent is being led by the nose to disaster by politicians and corporate-controlled media who have lost their minds.

They long ago lost any self-respect or independence and are simply acting as the most pathetic surrogates for U.S.-led imperialism. Even without the ultimate catastrophe of war, Europe has been brought to ruination by elitist politicians who have unquestioningly followed the American agenda of trying to strategically defeat Russia through a proxy war. Central to this U.S. strategic objective is vanquishing decades of mutually beneficial energy trade between Europe and Russia. The sanctions imposed on the Nord Stream gas pipelines by Trump during his first administration, followed by the blowing up of the pipes by the Biden administration in September 2022, are testimony to that bigger picture. None of the European governments or their news media properly investigated that huge crime of state-sponsored terrorism. The proxy war and sanctions on Russian energy that the European leaders happily went along with have caused the European economies to implode.

Critical commentators talk about the deindustrialization of Europe. Even the Financial Times, in a recent in-depth report on Germany’s “broken economy”, sounded aghast at “the most pronounced downturn in Germany’s postwar history.” The report surveys auto, chemical and engineering sectors crucial to the German economy and cites “high energy costs” as the detrimental factor. However, the Western media, even in supposed “in-depth reports” like the Financial Times, are careful not to spell out the obvious cause of Europe’s economic collapse: the U.S.-led proxy war in Ukraine and the consequent damage in Europe’s relations with Russia. Media reports deplore a “jobs massacre” in Germany’s industrial giants like Volkswagen and Thyssenkrupp without explaining the cause as if the calamity is somehow random misfortune. As if that is not bad enough, the incoming Trump administration is lining up heavy tariffs on exports from Europe as well as China, Canada, and Mexico. That will be a coup de grâce for the European economies delivered by its American ally.

Europe is in this appalling predicament – facing economic ruin amid a potential military conflagration – all because it has been misled by people like Ursula von der Leyen, Josep Borrell, France’s Macron, Germany’s Scholz (and Angela Merkel before him), and Netherlands former premier Mark Rutte, who is now the gung-ho head of NATO calling for more European weapons to Ukraine. Many others can be named from the Nordic countries, Poland, and the Baltic states. Rather fittingly, the European elitist political class has a long and vile history of Russophobia, going back to collaboration with Nazi Germany in its genocidal aggression against the Soviet Union. The tragedy of Europe is not something mysterious or ill-fated. It is the direct result of elitist rulers who have assiduously conducted policies that harm European citizens. These charlatan leaders are shameless in their Russophobia and surrogacy for U.S.-led Western imperialism – even to the point of killing their own people through economic devastation or worse – world war.

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Not sure urban planning is the main issue. Being overrun is.

• ‘I Won’t Claim That Milan Is A Safe City’ – Mayor (RMX)

Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi has announced the deployment of 600 additional police officers to Milan, citing concerns over integration challenges and rising crime rates, particularly in areas with significant immigrant populations. The announcement follows recent unrest in the Corvetto district, where a 19-year-old Egyptian resident, Ramy Elgaml, died in a road accident after a police chase, sparking mass protests by the considerable immigrant population. During a meeting on security with Milan’s prefect Claudio Sgaraglia and Police Chief Vittorio Pisani, Piantedosi confirmed that the reinforcements, planned before the Corvetto unrest, will enhance territorial control and improve public safety.

He offered damning statistics on the disproportionate involvement immigrants have in committing crime, noting that 65 percent of all offenses in the city are committed by foreign nationals despite representing 20 percent of all residents. “These figures highlight integration challenges that must be addressed to reduce marginalization and its consequences,” Piantedosi stated. He denied comparisons to the recent Parisian suburban riots, calling them “very exaggerated,” but acknowledged that the Corvetto unrest signals issues requiring attention. The Italian minister criticized the reliance on issuing residence permits as a solution to integration issues, pointing out the need for more comprehensive measures. He highlighted efforts already underway, noting over 40 high-impact operations and 162 arrests in Corvetto this year, but accepted that much more needed to be done.

“The second-most important city in Italy after Rome deserves all the attention it can get,” he added. Milan’s left-wing mayor Beppe Sala echoed the need for investments in public housing and community centers to foster integration and accepted that the Italian city can no longer be considered a safe place to live. “I won’t claim Milan is a safe city, but it is making an effort to address challenges faced by all international cities,” he said. Sala claimed that migrant crime was a result of shortcomings in creating spaces for young immigrants to engage positively within their communities, linking the lack of such centers to increased alienation in the suburbs.

With over 60,000 public housing units out of Milan’s 800,000 apartments, Sala described the distribution as “disproportionate,” emphasizing the importance of equitable urban planning. Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, whose League party first made its name in the northern Italian city and the surrounding area, remarked on the meeting in a post on X. “Minister Piantedosi’s data are crystal clear. Yet for the left, it is a non-problem, they seek justifications to the point of falsifying reality,” he wrote. “Woe to anyone who criticizes the dogma of indiscriminate reception at all costs, woe to anyone who criticizes environments in which foreign crime thrives in our cities, woe to anyone who wants to harshly apply the law to intervene in an increasingly unsustainable situation,” he quipped.

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Rogan has put the media world upside down. He has become the topic that they talk about. Last week it was RT, now the New York Post and Just the News, both on the same day.

• Joe Rogan: ‘Greatest Media Psy-Op In History’ Was Waged Against Trump (NYP)

Joe Rogan argued that the establishment media that once was friendly to President-elect Donald Trump has since been engaged in a years-long “psy-op” to convince Americans he is dangerous. “The Joe Rogan Experience” is one of the world’s most popular podcasts, and Rogan is seen as having been one of the key players in the 2024 election, for interviewing Trump and then endorsing his bid for the presidency in the 11th hour. The podcaster has since mocked the media for losing their credibility with voters and alienating lifelong liberals like himself. On Thursday’s episode, with comedians Shane Gillis, Mark Normand, and Ari Shaffir, Rogan recalled how friendly people in entertainment and the media once were to Trump, playing clips from his 2012 appearance on “The View” where he was cheered, as well as when he went on Oprah in and she asked him about running for president.

Since then, “The View” has become a frequent source for apocalyptic takes about Trump, and Oprah shredded him while campaigning with Vice President Kamala Harris. Rogan argued that the abrupt shift in tone toward Trump has been shocking in retrospect, “What we saw is the greatest media psy-op in history.” The podcast host continued to hammer legacy media. “What you’re seeing with Trump, regardless of his flaws, is a massive concentrated psy-op,” Rogan said. “They’ve distorted who he is to the point where most people think that way. Most people think that way. They’ve had narratives.” “What is a psy-op? I keep hearing that,” Normand said.

“Psychological operation,” Rogan explained. “Where they’ve decided to distort people’s perceptions of things.” Shaffir replied that older liberals are shocked to hear that former President Obama oversaw more deportations than Trump. “They go, ‘That doesn’t make sense.’ And you go, ‘Right, focus on what’s giving you the reality of the world,’” he said. Rogan then turned to his producer, Jamie, and asked him to show a “wild” quote from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from 2008 where she was “saying some wild MAGA-type s—” about “illegal immigrants.” Clinton could be heard in the recording declaring, “I think we got to have tough conditions. Tell people to come out of the shadows. If they’ve committed a crime, deport them, no questions asked.” “She’s a Republican,” Shaffir joked.

In the recording, Clinton continued, “If they’ve been working and are law-abiding, we should say, ‘Here are the conditions for you staying. You have to pay a stiff fine because you came here illegally. You have to pay back taxes and you have to try to learn English. And you have to wait in line.’” The guests expressed their shock at Clinton’s past comments. “’You have to wait in line,’ And everybody’s cheering,” Rogan said. “2008. Hillary Clinton was more MAGA than Trump. But how about that? More MAGA than Trump. It’s all a f—ing illusion. It’s all a f—ing illusion. All of them, when convenient, have said the exact same things.” Rogan argued that this election shows that the tide has turned, however. “They had control of the media up until now. This election was the first time they didn’t really have control of the media anymore,” Rogan argued. When asked why this is, the podcaster replied, “Because of us, because of podcasts. Because of social media, because of X.”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Fenbendazole
https://twitter.com/i/status/1862727748189401143

 

 

Urso

 

 

Vaccine
https://twitter.com/i/status/1862616283738501504

 

 

Lynx

 

 

Dive

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle November 22 2024

Nov 222024
 
 November 22, 2024  Posted by at 9:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  59 Responses »


Giovanni Bellini Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist and Female Saint 1500-04

 

• Trump Nominates Pam Bondi For Attorney General After Gaetz Withdraws (ZH)
• Biden Is Trying To Throw Trump Under The Ukrainian Bus (Lukyanov)
• This Is The Most Evil Thing I’ve Seen In My Lifetime – Tucker Carlson (MN)
• Ukraine ‘Global War’ After Western Long-Range Weapons Used – Putin (ZH)
• Ukraine Sends Its Own Skilled Workforce To The Front Lines (SCF)
• In The Beginning Was The Pax Americana (Pacini)
• Trump May Not Need to Pull Trigger on Tariffs (ET)
• DOGE Wants To Cut $1.9 Trillion In Government Spending (Duro)
• Musk, Ramaswamy Reveal DOGE Blueprint To Cut Government Waste (ZH)
• The Prospects for Trump’s Agenda (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Trump Opposes Israel Annexation Of West Bank, Republican Sources Say (MEMO)
• ICC Issues Arrest Warrants For Netanyahu, Gallant (Sobczak)
• Former Green Beret: Trump Can “Turn Loose Delta Force” On The Cartels (MN)
• US Played ‘Substantial’ Role In Causing Covid Pandemic – ex-CDC Chief (RT)
• US Government Funded Creation of the Coronavirus (Paul Craig Roberts)
• UK School Removes All Christmas References to Make Children Feel “Safe” (MN)
• French Establishment Desperate To Stop Rise Of Conservatives (ZH)

 

 

 

 

Peace

https://twitter.com/i/status/1859328265644802352

Naomi Alex

Legal immigration

O’Reilly
https://twitter.com/i/status/1859433139568844906

750

Homan

Gore Limbaugh

 

 

 

 

That was fast. Did they feed him to the wolves to keep the others safe(r)?

• Trump Nominates Pam Bondi For Attorney General After Gaetz Withdraws (ZH)

Update: Donald Trump said he is nominating former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and his personal trial lawyer, to run the US Department of Justice, after his first pick, former Representative Matt Gaetz, withdrew his name from consideration. “Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again. I have known Pam for many years — She is smart and tough, and is an AMERICA FIRST Fighter, who will do a terrific job as Attorney General!,” Trump said in a statement on his Truth Social platform on Thursday evening.

Bondi, age 59, is an American attorney, lobbyist, and politician. A Republican, she served as the 37th Florida attorney general from 2011 to 2019. She is the first woman elected to the office. In 2020, Bondi was one of longtime ally President Donald Trump’s defense lawyers during his first impeachment trial. By 2024 she led the legal arm of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. Trump initially picked Gaetz, as his AG but the former US representative from Florida said he would no longer seek the post after intense scrutiny over a House Ethics Committee investigation into allegations that he engaged in sexual misconduct, including having sex with a minor.


—
Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has withdrawn his name for consideration for attorney general amid growing controversy over sexual misconduct allegations. “While the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” Gaetz wrote on X. “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1.”

President-Elect Trump acknowledged Gaetz’ efforts in a statement on Truth Social: I greatly appreciate the recent efforts of Matt Gaetz in seeking approval to be Attorney General. He was doing very well but, at the same time, did not want to be a distraction for the Administration, for which he has much respect. Matt has a wonderful future, and I look forward to watching all of the great things he will do! It’s unclear what’s next for Gaetz, as he resigned from Congress after Trump picked him for consideration. Rubio’s Senate seat?

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“The final days of Democrat rule in Washington promise to be risky.”

• Biden Is Trying To Throw Trump Under The Ukrainian Bus (Lukyanov)

We’ve seen an uproar since it’s become apparent that the US has given Ukraine permission to launch long-range strikes deep inside Russia. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, Moscow’s unequivocal warnings that such a move would be seen as NATO’s direct entry into the war. And secondly the fallout from the dramatic change in the political situation in the US. Of course, in foreign policy terms, it’s on the Ukrainian issue that the differences between the outgoing and incoming American administrations is most visible. And Kiev is engaged in a feverish search for ways to reverse a situation that is becoming increasingly unfavourable for its interests. Finally, there is the turmoil in Western Europe, where elites are simply unable to comprehend the magnitude of the impending change. The news, which clearly resembles a fateful turning point, was quickly downplayed, if not denied.

The French and the British were quick to distance themselves from speculation that they too had immediately issued such authorizations – at an official level they repeated that they were only considering the possibility. Meanwhile, American sources close to the current ruling circles clarified the area of hypothetical use – only where hostilities are currently taking place. Most importantly, the range of reactions in Western countries was extremely wide. From the unbridled jubilation of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters among liberal NGO lobbyists, the EU’s hardline Josep Borrell and the governments of the most militant countries of Eastern Europe, to the sharp criticism of representatives of the future Donald Trump-led American administration and officials from certain European countries. To sum up, the picture is roughly as follows: the use of the weapons under discussion may complicate Russia’s actions, but will not change the overall nature of the campaign.

Nevertheless, they present significant potential for escalation, the limit of which is unclear. A frequently asked question is: why has this decision, which Kiev has been seeking all year, being taken now? Again, there are several purely speculative answers. Officially, the last straw was supposedly the data on the presence of North Korean units in the area of the armed conflict. For which there is no evidence. The White House, it is said, wants to send a signal to Pyongyang that it should stop cooperating with Moscow by authorizing strikes on their alleged bases. There is no point in speculating on the veracity of these claims. But two points are worth noting. First, it is not entirely clear why the possible involvement of the North Koreans has caused such a stir. Second, why would Pyongyang’s leader Kim Jong-un, seen in Washington as a ruthless totalitarian ruler, would suddenly be frightened by such a signal and rush to reconsider his previous alleged decisions. If indeed it even happened in the first place.

Another version is that the US administration understands that negotiations to end the conflict are inevitable and that Ukraine is approaching them from an increasingly unfavorable position. Accordingly, it is necessary to assist Kiev in improving its bargaining position, and the best way is to hold a bridgehead in the Kursk border area for further bartering. Whether proponents of this theory are right are wrong, we can’t say – but strangers things have happened. Finally, let’s look at what is in fact the generally accepted opinion of most commentators, both in the West and Russia. The Biden administration is trying to secure its historical legacy and make it as difficult as possible for Trump’s new team to get out of the Ukraine quagmire. In terms of legacy, of course, the situation is far from black and white – it all started with an attempt to strategically defeat Russia and reaffirm American/Western hegemony in the world.

Now the task is to ensure that the conflict is prolonged in the hope of some positive changes for Ukraine and vice versa for Russia. What will come out of this is unpredictable. Some Trump associates have been very negative, accusing Biden of trying to provoke World War III. Indeed, if Trump inherits a confrontation at its peak, the responsibility will be enormous and the room to maneuver will be limited. There is, however, a view that this may be convenient for the Trumpists. After all, the new president has the right to turn American policy on its head as soon as he takes office, citing the real threat of dragging the country into direct war.

This is conceivable, but it remains unclear which way Trump will turn. His approach to governing is still rooted in business, hence the endless references to the deals he will make. Trump’s first term failed to prove that business techniques can automatically transfer to international relations. And the members of his team who will influence policymaking are extremely diverse, ranging from market disruptor Elon Musk to more traditional Republican strongmen in positions in the State Department and national security apparatus. Finding a balance won’t easy. Meanwhile, everyone is entering a dangerous phase in which the chances of descending into unmanageable confrontation are greater than before. The final days of Democrat rule in Washington promise to be risky.

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“The US has become a fascist state under the administration of President Joe Biden..”

• This Is The Most Evil Thing I’ve Seen In My Lifetime – Tucker Carlson (MN)

During a discussion with president-elect Trump’s former Office of Management and Budget Director, Russ Vought, Tucker Carlson posited that the outgoing administration is attempting to saddle Trump with a global conflict. “If you doubt how serious the opposition is to the public, not just to Trump, but to the majority of the country that voted for him, They’re trying to leave him with World War III on the way out,” Carlson urged. Russia is furious about the Biden administration lifting restrictions on use of US developed long range missiles, and Putin has repeatedly stated that such a move would mean NATO countries are at war with Russia. Carlson continued, “I can’t imagine a more desperate or evil thing for Tony Blinken, who I think is desperate and evil, in my view, to do. Leave him with a war?”

“A lame-duck president trying to start a war with the world’s largest nuclear power, Russia. What do you make of that?” Carlson asked Vought. Vought responded, “It’s incredibly insidious, and then add to the fact that he can’t put two sentences together and he is largely not in control of his own government,” referring to Joe Biden. “You have almost an unelected president with individuals behind the scenes doing this,” he continued, further asserting “It doesn’t surprise me, though. I mean, these are the same people that have weaponized the Department of Justice and the lawfare.” “I have a colleague, Jeff Clark, who they’re trying to disbar because of the care he showed on behalf of the president in dealing with voter integrity and election fraud after 2020,” Vought further noted.

“The system has thrown everything at the warriors who are on the field. You’re seeing that with Tulsi, you’re seeing that with Matt Gaetz,” he pointed out, adding “Why is all of this stuff being thrown at him slanderously?” Carlson also discussed the spiralling escalation in Ukraine with journalist Glenn Greenwald, noting that the decision to escalate the conflict with ATACMS missiles is “the most evil thing I’ve seen in my lifetime.” Greenwald also pointed out that Ukraine doesn’t have the expertise to use the guidance system for the weapons and therefore NATO countries and the US would be actively involved in launching them at targets inside Russia. As we highlighted yesterday, NATO member state Sweden is sending out pamphlets advising citizens how they should prepare for nuclear war in the wake of the escalation.

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“..the weapon appeared to be an intermediate-range ballistic missile, adding, “But it is a new type we have been tracking.”

• Ukraine ‘Global War’ After Western Long-Range Weapons Used – Putin (ZH)

On Thursday President Vladimir Putin issued a stern warning in the wake of Ukraine launching long-range strikes on Russia’s territory utilizing newly approved US and UK long-range missiles. “Kiev has launched a long-range missile strike against military facilities located within internationally-recognized Russian territory,” began his televised address by saying. He confirmed British-made Storm Shadow missiles and US-made HIMARS were fired targets located in Bryansk and Kursk Regions. He said this action threatens to turn the Ukraine conflict into a global war. “A regional Ukraine conflict instigated by the West has acquired elements of a global one,” Putin spelled out, and noted that these systems cannot be used without the direct operational involvement of Western military specialists.

But he went on to claim that the inbound Western rockets were intercepted by Russian defenses. “The goals that have apparently been set by the enemy have not been achieved.” He suggested injuries among some personnel at a command center in Kursk, but noted it continues full operations. He also asserted that no Western systems can counter Russia’s new missiles, on display earlier in the day. “The use of such weapons by the enemy cannot affect the course of the situation in the Special Military Operation zone,” Putin stressed. He also said it was a big mistake for the US to pull out of the the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019. Can things cool prior to Trump taking office, or will Zelensky and the West risk bigger confrontation, to likely trigger Russian hypersonic missiles or even a tactical nuke? This is indeed an ultra-dangerous slide.

* * *

Update(1057ET): Ukraine’s earlier claim that its territory had been struck by an intercontinental ballistic missile fired by Russia is being hotly disputed, hours after widespread reports first appeared. US officials are saying it appears to be a new intermediate-range ballistic missile and not an ICBM which targeted the central city of Dnipro The NY Times has reported in follow-up of the attack that “several Western officials said that the weapon was not an ICBM and instead was likely an intermediate-range missile that flies shorter distances.” Zelensky himself had claimed Russia used a new class of missile. “All the parameters — speed, altitude — match those of an intercontinental ballistic missile,” he said. “All expert evaluations are underway.” But US defense officials are contradicting this:

A senior U.S. official said the weapon appeared to be an intermediate-range ballistic missile, adding, “But it is a new type we have been tracking.” US officials have also called it an “experimental” missile. There’s also been some quibbling among experts are how to characterize the projectiles which were observed hitting Ukraine at incredibly high rates of speed, in terms of rocket size and distance. Assuming Washington is correct, and that it wasn’t an ICBM, this suggests Zelensky’s hasty verdict is all about threat inflation coming at a time he’s desperately trying to get the West’s attention, arguing in favor of greater NATO military intervention against Russia.

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They’re supposed to keep the country running.

• Ukraine Sends Its Own Skilled Workforce To The Front Lines (SCF)

The situation in Ukraine is deteriorating rapidly, reflecting a reality that the leaders of the Kiev regime have long tried to hide behind empty promises of Western support. As the conflict prolongs, the shortage of human resources at the front has become one of the country’s greatest weaknesses, forcing the authorities to reverse their policies of exemptions from mobilization. Now, those who were previously tasked with maintaining the country’s military infrastructure, such as Ukrspecexport’s and other key defense companies’ workers, are being called to serve on the front lines. The conscription of these professionals, who were previously responsible for maintaining Soviet, Russian and Ukrainian aircraft and systems in various parts of the world, reflects the imminent collapse of Kiev’s military capabilities. Their call-up is not only a desperate measure, but clear evidence that Ukraine, in its attempt to resist, is sabotaging itself by dismantling its own skilled workforce.

For years, Ukraine has relied on its expertise in Soviet-era military technology, providing maintenance services and exporting repairs to countries that still use Soviet equipment. This industry was, for a time, one of the country’s main sources of revenue and influence, allowing Kiev to remain relevant on the geopolitical arena. However, as Russian offensives intensified, Ukraine’s industrial facilities were systematically destroyed, making it impossible for Ukraine to maintain its mask of military power. Russian attacks have strategically destroyed the industrial base that supported Kiev’s armed forces, irreversibly weakening its critical and defense infrastructure. This is evidenced by Ukraine’s increasing inability to repair and maintain its own equipment, a situation that is now directly reflected in the shortage of specialists to repair what remains of its military machinery.

The impact of this situation is really deep. Not only has Ukraine lost the ability to maintain its combat systems, but it is also now forced to call up its best technicians and engineers to serve in the trenches, rather than maintaining what is still functioning in its defense industrial base. If even the most qualified professionals, who are responsible for ensuring the operation of aircraft and other sophisticated systems, are being sent to the battlefield, this points to a complete structural collapse of the Ukrainian military apparatus. It is no longer a question of simply fighting, but of ensuring the survival of the armed forces with extremely limited resources. The country is literally exhausting its ability to maintain the war, leading to its own unavoidable defeat.

This forced mobilization of specialists shows not only a failure in the military field, but also a broader fiasco in the country’s governance. The decision to send its best professionals to the front lines is a direct echo of the exhaustion of the Ukrainian political system. In addition to being a clear sign that Ukraine can no longer maintain effective mobilization, this measure puts vital sectors of society at risk. Soon, other professionals in essential fields, such as doctors, professors, and scientists, may be called up, further weakening the country’s social and economic structure. What remains of Ukraine’s infrastructure is being eroded by a war that Kiev clearly cannot win, and its desperate mobilization only accelerates its collapse.

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“..Huntington, wrote The Clash of Civilizations, in which he predicted that the world would be fragmented into distinct cultural blocs based on civil, religious and economic identities..”

• In The Beginning Was The Pax Americana (Pacini)

We often speak of the collective West, Hegemon, Seapower and Civilization of the Sea in relation to the United States of America. It is necessary to understand well what is the origin of this geopolitically determinant power for the world order. He who wins the war, dictates the rules Let us make clear at once an empirically incontrovertible factual truth: He who wins the war, dictates the rules of the post-war order. Whoever wins, writes history. Whether we like it or not, the defeated never had much decision-making power (which is not to say that they could not organize well to retaliate and return to power – but that is another matter). World War II ended with the victory of the United States of America as the first, undefeated and predominant power. From there followed an expansion of U.S. influence toto orbe terrarum in all respects (cultural, economic, military, political).

The twentieth century was the “American century.” Almost the whole world took the shape the U.S. wanted to give it. The second half of the century was marked by the low-tension conflict of the Cold War, which ended-if it really did-with the collapse of the Soviet political system in the USSR and the beginning of the unipolar phase of American global domination. That period aroused much optimism in the West for a new world order, marking the end of the military and ideological rivalry of the 20th century. Two possibilities were on the horizon: a system based on balance of power and egalitarian sovereignty, or a U.S.-led liberal hegemony based on the values of democracy. The first approach evoked perpetual conflict, while the second promised lasting peace and global stability. U.S. hegemony, already dominant in the transatlantic region after World War II, was seen as a model of peace and prosperity.

However, the collapse of the Soviet Union removed the justification for a world order built on the balance of power, pushing the United States toward a mission of recognized hegemony to prevent the rise of new rivals. American supremacy, as declared by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, was deemed “indispensable to ensure global stability.” This was the Pax Americana: the U.S. would ensure a period of prosperity and global peace – as early as the end of WWII – by extending control over the entire world. A peace for America was equivalent to a peace for the globe; a war for America would mean war for the entire globe. The stated goal of building a peaceful world often justified imperialistic approaches, revealing the contradictions of the hegemonic project. Set this paradigm as an axiom of reasoning in international relations and geopolitical programming, lo and behold, everything acquired new meaning.

The world had been formatted and the “control room” was now in Washington. It was the time of ideologies. In the “short century” everything had changed rapidly. The great world chessboard was constantly being shaken and reshuffled. The clash between the Western bloc and the Eastern – or Soviet – bloc characterized all concepts of each country’s politics in an extremely powerful way. In the 1990s, two visions dominated the debate on world order: that of Francis Fukuyama and that of Samuel Huntington. Fukuyama in his famous book The End of History, envisioned a future in which liberal democracy and capitalism would triumph universally, leading to perpetual peace under the leadership of the United States: he argued that economic interdependence, democratic reforms, and shared institutions would unite the world around common values, which were, of course, American values.

Any other model of civilization would have been beside the point, because History was finished, there would be nothing left to write about. In contrast, Huntington, wrote The Clash of Civilizations, in which he predicted that the world would be fragmented into distinct cultural blocs based on civil, religious and economic identities. Individualism and human rights, according to him, were peculiar to the West and not universal. His theorizing assumed a future marked by conflicts between civilizations, fueled by the decline of Western hegemony and the emergence of alternative powers, particularly in Confucian and Islamic societies.

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“These offers will be in the form of, ‘We promise to buy more natural gas from the U.S. … We promise to move more production to the U.S.’”

• Trump May Not Need to Pull Trigger on Tariffs (ET)

Economists near-universally warn that President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to impose “across-the-board” 20-percent tariffs on imports will trigger inflation, disrupt domestic industries, and spur global trade wars.
Despite overwhelming critical consensus, Trump calls tariffs “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” and hasn’t backed down since his Nov. 5 reelection. But the threats may be a “negotiating tactic” to give the United States leverage in mediating trade pacts, Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) President Adam Posen said during a Nov. 14 virtual event. And it may be working already. Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Canada, “and maybe some others, are likely lining up offers,” he said. “These offers will be in the form of, ‘We promise to buy more natural gas from the U.S. … We promise to move more production to the U.S.’”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen suggested on Nov. 8 that European Union (EU) nations can buy more liquified natural gas (LNG) from the United States to avoid tariffs. Speaking to reporters after congratulating the president-elect on his reelection, von der Leyen said Trump appeared eager to sustain what the Congressional Research Service calls “the world’s largest trade and investment relationship,” which accounts for 46 percent of global GDP. About 48 percent of LNG used by EU nations is imported from the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Noting that EU nations import up to 16 percent of LNG from Russia, von der Leyen said there’s room for a deal. “Why not replace it by American LNG, which is cheaper for us and brings down our energy prices?” she asked.Posen said this is exactly what Trump’s team wants to achieve.

“The ideal outcome for the Trump administration is they’ve made this threat, a set of threats, but they don’t actually have to implement them, and they get these goodies,” he said. In the short term, Posen said, some nations may acquiesce. “They’ll say: ‘Okay, we don’t want to be on the bad side of the U.S. We don’t want a bad side of a President Trump.’ But in [the] medium-term, two to four or five years out, I think the reverberations could be quite large.” Responses from “like-minded U.S. allies” will differ from those from China, Mexico, and nonaligned nations, such as India and Indonesia, he said. Allies are “probably just going to try to make nice with Trump: ‘We’re going to be aligned with the U.S. on national security and, therefore, against China,’” Posen said. “We should just … try to be on the inside of a ‘Fortress America economy’ and grow with them.”

There are at least two problems with this scenario, he said. “Getting these goodies is really not necessarily going to solve a bunch of problems. A number of people close to the president-elect believe trade deficits are really a big deal. “These measures are likely to actually increase U.S. trade deficits because they’ll drive up the dollar, drive up inflation.” Posen said the second problem is that “this is not a one-round game,“ adding that ”once this happens … the question is, how do economies adapt and how do they cope?” “Maybe in that sense … people start building the U.S. out. That’s something we’re going to watch,” he said. Without an effort to renegotiate trade deals before imposing “across-the-board” tariffs, which also would slap a 25-to-100 percent fee on imports from Mexico, “I think the Trump administration is underestimating how other countries might react,” he said.

A 60-percent tariff on imports from China will spur “asymmetric trade warfare,” Posen said. “If the U.S. says, ‘Well, we don’t want steel, we don’t want batteries, we don’t want EVs from China’ … then the Chinese can say, ‘Well, we don’t want Hollywood movies, we don’t want American video games, we don’t want American accounting firms,’” he said.

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“..a “ranking of the most crazy expenses funded by your taxes.”

• DOGE Wants To Cut $1.9 Trillion In Government Spending (Duro)

Expectations were high when Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy took the lead in creating the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but those smiles quickly faded following their first announcements. While Musk, owner of the social network X, promised to cut government spending by $1.9 trillion, Ramaswamy revealed plans to eliminate entire agencies as part of the overhaul they are preparing. Government spending currently stands at $6.75 trillion annually, and cutting it as much as possible is a top priority for Trump. However, Musk and Ramaswamy will have just over a year and a half to implement their reforms, as the president-elect has set an expiration date for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — July 4, 2026. On that date, as part of the 250th anniversary celebrations of the Declaration of Independence, the tycoon aims to make the current government bureaucracy a thing of the past.

“Massive waste, fraud and abuse”
Both businessmen emphasized that much of the current government spending stems from what the former Republican primary contender called “massive waste, fraud, and abuse” within the administration. Ramaswamy further warned on Fox News that suppliers wouldn’t escape the cuts either, stating, “We expect massive reductions from all federal contractors and others who overbill the government.” Before beginning their official duties, both Musk and Ramaswamy have already pointed out several questionable expenses, such as sponsored drag shows in Ecuador, that will be featured in what Musk has promised will be a “ranking of the most crazy expenses funded by your taxes.” This is part of his commitment to transparency in the process. Ramaswamy also announced that ‘entire agencies’ will be shut down as part of the planned cuts. “We expect mass reductions. We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright. We expect mass reductions in force in areas of the federal government that are bloated. We expect massive cuts in federal contractors and others that are overbilling the federal government. So, yes, we expect all of the above.”

From Starbucks coffee makers to overpriced soap at the Pentagon
During his time as a Republican pre-candidate, Ramaswamy identified several agencies for elimination or significant restructuring, both in terms of functions and size. These include the FBI, the Department of Education, the Internal Revenue Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Also under scrutiny is the Pentagon’s waste, especially following its failure in the most recent audit of its massive $824 billion budget. Among the questionable expenses uncovered were $192,952 spent on Starbucks espresso machines for the U.S. Navy between 2017 and 2021, as well as nearly $1 million the Air Force paid Boeing for overpriced C-17 cargo plane parts as part of a 20-year contract. Perhaps most shocking to analysts, however, was the Defense Department’s purchase of soap dispensers at an eye-popping markup of 7,943%.

Trans monkeys and alcoholic mice to be studied by NIH
On the other hand, animal experimentation, particularly those conducted for ‘woke’ purposes, will also be under review. For instance, a Florida lab received $477,000 to study “transgender” monkeys, injecting male monkeys with female hormones to observe changes in behavior. In a similar vein, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) allocated $33 million to a company managing around 3,000 primates, funding studies on gambling and methamphetamine addiction without changing the animals involved. In addiction research, it was also reported that the NIH spent an additional $3 million of taxpayer dollars on injecting hamsters with steroids to “assess whether current drugs for aggressive juveniles can suppress steroid-induced aggression.” The NIH also allocated $2.3 million to inject cocaine into six-month-old beagle puppies and $1.1 million to train mice to drink large amounts of alcohol.

Passing the REINS Act, a priority for DOGE
Along with the cuts, part of Musk and Ramaswamy’s task will be to shine a light on excessive or redundant legislation that burdens taxpayers. In this regard, the India-born entrepreneur has called for the swift passage of the REINS Act, which would give Congress greater control over executive spending resulting from presidential executive orders.

DOGECast

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“We are entrepreneurs, not politicians. “We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.”

• Musk, Ramaswamy Reveal DOGE Blueprint To Cut Government Waste (ZH)

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have laid out their vision for the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). According to a new WSJ op-ed, the pair writes that “Our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run the government. That isn’t how America functions today. Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but “rules and regulations” promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year.” They call government bloat “antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders’ vision,’ as it “imposes massive direct and indirect costs on taxpayers.” President Trump has asked the two of us to lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut the federal government down to size. The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long. That’s why we’re doing things differently. We are entrepreneurs, not politicians. “We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.”

As the Epoch Times notes, the urgency for downsizing the federal government is due to the ballooning costs of paying interest on our ginormous national debt. I and others have been writing about the debt problem for decades, but now the national debt has reached a critical stage. According to usdebtclock.org, the federal debt passed $36 trillion last week. There is nothing inherently significant about the number $36 trillion, but as you can see from the accompanying chart published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the annual cost of the federal debt has exploded from under $600 billion in 2020 to over $1 trillion now. Here’s the plan:

1. Regulatory Rescissions: Rolling Back Illegitimate Regulations
The most immediate and significant action DOGE will take is targeting the tens of thousands of regulations imposed by federal agencies, many of which exceed the constitutional authority granted to these agencies.

• Using Supreme Court Rulings as a Guide: Following the rulings in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022) and Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), DOGE will work to identify regulations that overstep the bounds of the authority Congress has granted. These rulings clarify that agencies cannot enact major economic or policy decisions without explicit congressional approval. DOGE will compile a list of regulations that should be nullified and present them to President Trump for executive action.

• Immediate Suspension and Review of Regulations: Through executive orders, the president will pause enforcement of these overreaching regulations and initiate a full review process for rescission. This action will prevent regulations that were never approved by Congress from continuing to harm businesses and individuals.

• Creating a System to Prevent Reviving Illegitimate Regulations: Once regulations are rescinded, DOGE will ensure that future administrations cannot simply reinstate them. Any reactivation of these regulations would require a new act of Congress, ensuring that regulatory power is returned to the people’s elected representatives.

2. Administrative Reductions: Streamlining Federal Agencies
Alongside regulatory rescissions, a drastic reduction in the size of the federal bureaucracy will be necessary. DOGE will target specific reforms to reduce the number of federal employees, streamline agency operations, and focus government efforts on its core constitutional responsibilities.

• Identifying Minimum Staffing Needs: DOGE will collaborate with agency leaders to identify the minimum number of employees required to carry out essential functions. With fewer regulations to enforce, many agencies will require significantly fewer staff. As regulations are rescinded, the corresponding workforce reductions will follow.

• Cost-effective Employee Transitions: For those whose positions are eliminated, DOGE will support their transition into the private sector, providing incentives for early retirement or voluntary severance. Programs designed to make these exits as seamless as possible will be implemented, ensuring a smooth process for both employees and taxpayers.

• Leveraging Executive Authority to Limit Bureaucratic Growth: President Trump will use his authority to amend civil-service rules to curtail administrative overgrowth. This could include actions like large-scale firings or moving federal agencies out of Washington, D.C., to reduce costs and decentralize power.

• Restoring Accountability in Federal Agencies: Agencies will be required to return to in-person work, ending the COVID-era trend of remote work. This will incentivize employees who are unwilling to meet this expectation to voluntarily exit, reducing the overall headcount.

3. Cost Savings: Tackling Waste, Fraud, and Abuse
Beyond reducing the size of government and eliminating unnecessary regulations, DOGE will focus on eliminating wasteful spending and ensuring that taxpayer dollars are used efficiently.

• Ending Unauthorized Expenditures: A significant portion of federal spending, over $500 billion annually, is either unauthorized by Congress or used for purposes Congress never intended. DOGE will work with the administration to end these wasteful programs, including unnecessary funding to international organizations and progressive groups, while scrutinizing expenditures like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

• Overhauling Federal Procurement: The government’s procurement system is notorious for waste and inefficiency. DOGE will conduct large-scale audits of federal contracts, suspending payments where necessary to identify and eliminate inefficiencies. This will be especially critical for agencies like the Department of Defense, which has failed repeated audits, indicating a lack of oversight over how taxpayer money is spent.

• Targeting the Deficit and Overspending: While entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid are often the focus of budgetary discussions, DOGE will tackle the more immediate waste, fraud, and abuse that plagues most federal agencies. Through targeted executive actions, DOGE will curb these excesses without the need for new legislation.

A Historic Opportunity
With a mandate for change and a supportive legal framework, DOGE has the opportunity to make meaningful strides in reducing the size and scope of the federal government. Through regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions, and targeted cost savings, this initiative aims to eliminate wasteful spending and restore accountability in Washington. The ultimate goal of DOGE is to make its own existence obsolete by July 4, 2026 – the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. By then, it is hoped that a leaner, more efficient government will be in place, one that is more responsive to the needs of the people and more in line with the vision of the Founders. If successful, this reform effort will be a gift to the nation, ensuring that future generations inherit a government that is both effective and accountable.

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“Trump is going to need intelligent cool hands to keep enthusiasm focused on where it is needed, so that hot heads don’t rush us into wider war..”

• The Prospects for Trump’s Agenda (Paul Craig Roberts)

Cities and states controlled by left-wing Woke anti-American Democrats are busy at work organizing to oppose the will of the American people as expressed in the presidential election. In Pennsylvania the corrupt Democrat authorities are openly defying the ruling of the State Supreme Court and counting invalid ballots in their effort to overturn the election of the Republican US senator. In Massachusetts, Illinois, and California, corrupt anti-American Democrat governors and legislators are prohibiting any cooperation with federal authorities in identifying and deporting illegal aliens. Most Democrat jurisdictions have taken the side of immigrant invaders and criminal gangs against the American people. The Democrat authorities speak of those who have illegally entered the US as “our people” to be protected from deportation. Badly ruled Democrat cities have joined the organized Democrat effort to prevent President Trump from protecting America’s border.

They are proud to be standing for foreign aliens against America. This shows that the Democrat Party is nothing but a collection of far left ideologues who hate the United States and are doing their best to destroy it. Americans have no greater enemy than the Democrat Party. Do Trump, his government, and his supporters have the will and determination to arrest, indict, and imprison elected Democrats who refuse to obey US law? In other words, are the Trump forces as determined to rescue America as Democrats are to destroy it with open borders, critical race theory, and transgender indoctrination? The Democrats had no compunction about trying to destroy Trump with false indictments devoid of evidence. In contrast, Republicans have the evidence. Do they have the strength to act on it? Trump can achieve nothing without a firebrand Attorney General. The sorry excuses he appointed his first term are the reasons he failed. Matt Gaetz is surely a disrupter, a firebrand.

He has the personality and determination to clean up the two most corrupt areas of the US government–the Justice (sic) Department and the FBI. Both are anti-American institutions who commit taxpayer resources to framing up American patriots, while criminals like Hunter Biden and Hillary walk. The question is: can Gaetz be confirmed? Is the corrupt American Establishment going to permit a person who would indict them to be Attorney General? Perhaps Gaetz is a stalking horse whose rejection by the Senate would make it difficult for the Senate to reject Trump’s second nomination. Who should that be? The Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is, like Gaetz, strong, and he has years of experience as an attorney general. Moreover, he has filed 100 lawsuits against the federal government, and he knows how corrupt the FBI is from the interference and harassment he has experienced from this corrupt federal agency. Of all of Trump’s appointments Bobby Kennedy will be the most difficult to be confirmed.

Kennedy has the goods on the adverse health effects we suffer from Big Pharma and from the adulterated foods agri-business feeds us. Both Big Pharma and the corporate food business make profits by destroying our health. How can Trump get Kennedy confirmed given the enormous power campaign contributions give Big Pharma and agri-business over US Senators? Recently, Trump has been giving a series of short speeches that put malefactors on the spot. He can do the same to Big Pharma and agri-business. Prior to inauguration, Trump can say that Big Pharma and agri-business will try to stop me from providing you with safe medicines and safe food. You must write to your senators and demand that they confirm Bobby Kennedy. Any senator who votes against Kennedy, Trump should identify for all to see and brand him a corrupt hireling of Big Pharma and agri-business and ask the electorate why they put him in office.

On the war front the corrupt Biden regime has tried to prevent Trump from peacefully resolving the conflict in Ukraine by giving the go-ahead to the US and NATO launching missiles into Russia. The initial attempt failed, but there will be others. One possible target is the nuclear power station in Kursk, an area permissible to be targeted. A hit on the nuclear facility would release nuclear fallout into Russia. Putin could not rationalize away such a disaster and would, finally, be deprived of an excuse to do nothing in response. What might his response be? Given the extreme superiority of Russian nuclear forces over those of the US, Putin could knock out all US nuclear weapon sites and Washington, and dictate the peace terms to the Americans and Europeans. Would he do this? Not unless he has no other alternative. Putin wants peace, not war. Thinking of the dangerous situation into which Putin has got himself with his limited military operation reminded me of a passage I recently read in Louis L’Amour’s short story, ”West of the Tularosas”:

“Of late she had refused to admit there might be occasions when fighting could not be avoided. She had yet to learn that in order to have peace both sides must want it equally. One side cannot make peace; they can only surrender.” I wonder if Putin understands that neither Washington nor Israel desire peace. Their intention is hegemony. Putin has done nothing to make Washington desire peace. Neither has China. Neither has Iran. It is the American Neoconservatives who have dominated American foreign policy since the Soviet collapse who want war. Trump needs to disempower these dangerous warmongers with one of his short speeches.

On the Middle Eastern war front my confidence in Trump fades. He is in Israel’s pocket, as is the entirety of his war cabinet. Russia and China cannot permit a US/Israeli attack on Iran. China, perhaps, is useless, as China, which has survived for 5,000 years, relies on time, not war, to dispose of enemies. For Russia, the situation is different. If Iran falls, the CIA has an entrance through which to send anti-Russian Muslim activists to disrupt the Russian Federation. Attacked from the West and East and also perhaps from a Maidan Revolution in Georgia, Putin might realize that he has waited far too long to fight, and all hell could break loose. To handle these challenges, Trump is going to need intelligent cool hands to keep enthusiasm focused on where it is needed, so that hot heads don’t rush us into wider war. Does Trump have such people? Who are they? What authority do they have? His war cabinet are people lined up with Israel against Iran. Where is the promise in this?

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“..a normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia – a key priority for the incoming Trump administration..”

• Trump Opposes Israel Annexation Of West Bank, Republican Sources Say (MEMO)

Newly-elected United States’ President, Donald Trump, is in opposition to Israel’s reported plans to annex the Occupied West Bank, sources from his Republican Party have revealed. According to Israeli outlet, Ynet News, a senior Republican Senator close to the President-elect has said that “Trump will not approve annexation” of the West Bank. Such a move is reportedly seen by the new President as one that would be “a mistake for Israel” which would worsen its international standing – already severely damaged after over a year of the Occupation’s bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip.

Trump is also apparently primarily concerned that any official annexation could further disrupt and severely derail efforts to finally reach a normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia – a key priority for the incoming Trump administration, with Republican Senator, Lindsey Graham, particularly working on that goal. The reported comments by the unnamed sources follow increased speculation in recent weeks over Trump’s appointments of controversial figures in his incoming administration, with many of the relevant roles being filled by radically pro-Israel figures who favour annexation of the West Bank.

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EU countries have said they will arrest them.

• ICC Issues Arrest Warrants For Netanyahu, Gallant (Sobczak)

On Thursday the International Court of Justice (ICC) issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as a member of Hamas leadership. The warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant were for charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes. The court unanimously agreed that the prime minister and former defense minister “each bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” “The Chamber considered that there are reasonable grounds to believe that both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity, from at least 8 October 2023 to 20 May 2024,” the court detailed in its allegations.

The ICC also charged Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri for mass killings during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, including rape and hostage taking. A plan suggested by former IDF general, Giora Eiland, called for the explicit emptying out of northern Gaza and the labeling of all remaining civilians as military targets, as well as the purposeful blockage of humanitarian aid. Netanyahu reportedly did not agree to the plan, but evidence points to aspects of the plan being enacted. “The ICC decision shows once more how out of sync Biden’s Gaza policy is with both American and international law,” says the Quincy Institute’s Executive Vice President Trita Parsi. “Biden has sacrificed America’s international standing to arm and protect leaders who the international courts have deemed to be war criminals.” The ICC’s move comes just one day after unprecedented votes in the U.S. Senate to end the sale of certain offensive weapons to Israel. The measures ultimately failed, with the White House telling senators that they would be supporting Iran and Hamas should they vote to curb weapons sales to Israel.

Because of the ICC warrants, Netanyahu or Gallant could be arrested upon entering a nation that has recognized the ICC and its rulings. However, Israel is among dozens of other countries, including the United States, that do not recognize the court’s jurisdiction. After warrants were requested in October, Israel reacted by challenging the jurisdiction of the ICC in the matter, but that challenge has been rejected. “Israel’s reaction — that no other democracy has been treated this way by the ICC — is indicative of how perverted certain approaches to international law have become,” said Parsi. “Israel essentially argues that because it defines itself as a democracy, it should be above the law. That war-crimes, apartheid, and genocide are ok as long as the perpetrator identifies as democratic. This approach — creating different sets of laws and standards for different countries — is a recipe for global instability and a threat to American security.”

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“..if they turn loose Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 on cartels and pedophiles, we could just kind of like erase the problem in about two years. It’d be gone..”

• Former Green Beret: Trump Can “Turn Loose Delta Force” On The Cartels (MN)

During a discussion with Joe Rogan, former Green Beret Evan Hafer, noted that if president-elect Trump decides to go to war with the cartels he could opt to use US Special Forces to destroy them. Hafer noted “if we declare war on the cartel, these dudes are not going to understand what the fuck is going on,” “They are in for a world of ultra violence they’ve never actually felt before because you know, obviously this is a very capable violent organization,” Hafer added. He continued, “They have fucking no clue if we organize these tier one units against them this is gonna be — what I would be doing if I was down there… I’d be getting ready to retire right now,” “That’s what I would be doing. Because if Delta Force is hunting me bro, I would be so terrified,” Hafer further urged.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1858851449725153571

“I thought about this for a long time where I’m like if they turn loose Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 on cartels and pedophiles, we could just kind of like erase the problem in about two years. It’d be gone,” Hafer, the founder of Black Rifle Coffee Company, emphasised. Trump has repeatedly said that this option is on the table. His incoming border czar Tom Homan also recently stated that Trump intends to “use the full might of the United States Special Operations to take ’em out,” and “ take ’em off the face of Earth.”

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“I think there is a real possibility that the virus’s birthplace was Chapel Hill.”

• US Played ‘Substantial’ Role In Causing Covid Pandemic – ex-CDC Chief (RT)

Robert Redfield, a former director of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), has claimed that Covid-19 was artificially developed, and that the US played a “substantial” role in starting the pandemic. Redfield, who led the agency under the administration of US President Donald Trump, made the claim in an interview that was released on November 14, but only drew media attention this week. Speaking to author and podcaster Dana Parish, he suggested that the virus was “intentionally engineered as a part of a biodefense program.” “When you look at the accountability for China, their accountability is not in the lab work and the creation of the virus,” but in their failure to quickly report the incident to health authorities worldwide including the CDC, when they realized the virus was on the loose, he said.

However, the US “role was substantial,” he added. “They funded the research, both from NIH [National Institutes of Health], the State Department’s USAID and the Defense Department.” According to the former CDC chief, the “scientific mastermind behind the research” was Dr. Ralph Baric, widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on coronaviruses. Redfield suggested that the professor, who works at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was “very involved in this research.” “I think he probably helped create some of the original viral line”, Redfield said, admitting he did not have any proof. “I think there is a real possibility that the virus’s birthplace was Chapel Hill.”

Redfield previously said the Covid-19 pandemic, which killed more than seven million people worldwide and caused a global economic downturn, most likely started with a lab leak in Wuhan, China, and suggested that the debate on the virus’s origins was “squashed.” He has also criticized the World Health Organization (WHO) for failing to hold Beijing accountable. One of the prevailing theories of the origin of the Covid pandemic is that the virus was transmitted to humans from an animal, possibly a bat, at a food market. China has maintained that the virus is of natural origin, and has dismissed the laboratory leak theory as an attempt to smear the country for political reasons.

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“Millions of letters must pour into the Senate promising to drive the senators from office if they continue to protect Big Pharma’s assault on Americans’ lives and health..”

• US Government Funded Creation of the Coronavirus (Paul Craig Roberts)

Robert Redfield, former Director of the Centers for Disease Control, has revealed that US government agencies funded the creation of the Coronavirus. “They funded the research, both from NIH [National Institutes of Health], the State Department’s USAID and the Defense Department.” According to the former CDC chief, the “scientific mastermind behind the research” was Dr. Ralph Baric, widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on coronaviruses. Redfield said that the virus was “intentionally engineered as a part of a biodefense program.” I am convinced that the “vaccine” was intentionally designed to reduce the world’s population via early death and infertility. This was the agenda behind the pressure to vaccinate the Earth’s entire population. The vile despicable American media and the corrupt Big Pharma-dominated US medical system continue to deceive Americans with their lies that Covid came from bats and the Covid “vaccine,” which is not a vaccine, is safe and effective.

Big Pharma uses campaign contributions to keep the US Congress silent. Murder and injury larger in scale than Israel’s genocide of Palestine has been covered up by the whore American media and cowardly US Congress. How can Trump make rot this huge great again? If Trump is to get Bobby Kennedy confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services, he must begin his speeches now putting the Senate and the American people on notice that Big Pharma will purchase from the Senate a non-confirmation vote. Millions of letters must pour into the Senate promising to drive the senators from office if they continue to protect Big Pharma’s assault on Americans’ lives and health. Can Trump do this when his chief of staff is a former Big Pharma lobbyist? The great danger of the Trump presidency is that he will achieve nothing, and the disappointment will demoralize the American people who have put their faith in him. Once Americans give up, tyranny will have its way with them.

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Gone. Hopeless.

• UK School Removes All Christmas References to Make Children Feel “Safe” (MN)

A school in the UK announced to parents that it was removing all Christmas references from a panto in order to make children feel “safe”. Yes, really. The head teacher of Wherwell Primary School in Andover, Hampshire, banned any reference to the festive season from a Jack and The Beanstalk show so as not to offend any non-Christians who were attending. Mandy Ovenden said the embargo was necessary in order to make children feel “safe” and “valued”. “When we chose to invite the travelling pantomime to Wherwell, our request was a practical step to ensure all children at the school would be able to attend and enjoy the show,” said the school. “Our aim, as always, is to foster inclusivity in our school community, and be a place where children and their families feel safe, welcomed and valued.”

Ovenden said the school had requested the company putting on the play “that the show contain no reference to Christmas.” According to a report by the Telegraph, parents were outraged, asserting that the decision “shouldn’t be allowed” in order to merely ensure that “a few people will not be offended.” In order to ensure a “fully inclusive event,” the head teacher asked that all Christmas references be eradicated because, “We have a number of families who either do not celebrate Christmas or do so in a different way.” Chaplins, the company behind the Jack and The Beanstalk play, said it normally included references to Christmas at this time of year. Because God forbid children in a supposedly Christian country be exposed to anything related in any way to Christmas during Christmastime.

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“..prosecutors were “only interested” in preventing her from running for president in 2027. “I understood that well,” she said.”

• French Establishment Desperate To Stop Rise Of Conservatives (ZH)

EU elites and globalists with extensive political influence have been on the war-path the past several years as it has become increasingly evident that the European populace is shifting more conservative with each new election. In Germany, leftist officials are attempting an outright ban of the conservative AFD Party, primarily because they stand against mass immigration (a position which progressives claim is “xenophobic”). The AFD is currently the second most popular political party in Germany and is expected to gain substantial influence in the 2025 federal elections, unless their candidates are blocked from participation. In Austria, the conservative Freedom Party won a parliamentary election victory in September, though left wing and centrist parties are seeking to cement a coalition to nullify the FP’s ability to govern.

The European media has consistently compared the success of the Freedom Party to the rise of the Third Reich – The only fallback of failing leftists is to claim their opponents are “literally Hitler.” A similar coalition coup was exploited in France under Emmanuel Macron in order to stop Marine Le Pen’s National Rally Party. The coalition is a fragmented mess but it served its purpose of disrupting the will of French voters seeking smaller government and secure borders. Keep in mind, the same people that constantly howl about “threats to democracy” are now trying to silence some of the largest political parties in Europe because they won’t submit to progressive ideologies. For example, if the AFD is banned, who is going to represent the will of millions of conservative German voters? The leftist establishment does not care about those voters or their concerns, nor do they care about fair elections. Their vision of democracy is a sham.

There is, in fact, a coordinated effort by the leftist regime in Europe to shut down any and all public dissent, starting with opposition movements and their access to the ballot box. Recent news from France highlights this reality, as efforts are now underway under the French government to pursue legal actions against Marine Le Pen. Le Pen has been accused by Paris prosecutors of using money intended for EU parliamentary aides to instead pay staff who worked for the party between 2009 and 2016. One problem is that the law Le Pen is being charged with was not created until 2016. Furthermore, Le Pen argues that National Rally employees can also work within the EU parliament and that the two roles often overlap. She assert that no laws were broken and no one received EU funds that were not already owed to them.

If convicted Le Pen could receive up to 5 years in prison (3 suspended) and extensive fines of €300,000, but the real kicker is that she could also be banned from participating in elections for five years even if she files an appeal. Government officials admit that Le Pen might not spend any time in jail (she might become a conservative martyr if that happened), but her inability to run for office would effectively end the chances of the National Rally in the 2027 elections. It’s an election which many analysts suggest could catapult the NR to power in France. “It’s no surprise,” Le Pen told reporters after the prosecution’s closing arguments. “I note that the prosecutors’ claims are extremely outrageous.” Le Pen said she felt prosecutors were “only interested” in preventing her from running for president in 2027. “I understood that well,” she said. The case is set to conclude in early 2025.

Establishment media outlets accuse Le Pen of using “Trump-style rhetoric” to distract from her charges. The Guardian claims: “Yet just as January 6 did not stop Trump from being able to move back into the White House, Le Pen’s strategy may well work in her favour. The longer her claims of a political trial get airtime without proper contextualisation, the more likely the French public may think there is some truth to it – it chimes with the widespread anti-elite sentiment among French voters…” This constitutes considerable gaslighting on the part of The Guardian. The “contextualization” is that Le Pen is innocent until proven guilty, and there has been a clear and observable pattern of persecution of right-leaning political figures across the western world in order to stop their constituents from having a say in the governmental process. Trump is just one example of lawfare being used to create accusations of criminality from the thinnest of threads. The American public was savvy enough to see through the smoke and noise.

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Friedman pencil

 

 

Rome

YMCA

 

 

Linda
https://twitter.com/i/status/1859583936201994524

 

 

Elephants

 

 

Only girls
https://twitter.com/i/status/1859616060061737365

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle November 3 2024

Nov 032024
 
 November 3, 2024  Posted by at 9:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  86 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Field with Flowers near Arles 1888

 

• “The American System” Made America Great (Rickards)
• Elon Musk Asks Ron Paul To Join Department Of Gov’t Efficiency (ZH)
• House Speaker ‘Really Bullish’ Washington Will Be All-GOP Town In January (JTN)
• House Speaker Plan: Moving Bureaucrats From DC To Reshape Government (JTN)
• Candidates’ Final Tours: A Flustered Harris, And A Joyful Trump (Whedon)
• People Aren’t Garbage. Partisan Politics Is (Matt Taibbi)
• Trump, Vance Take Aim At Renewable Energy, Many Communities Already Did (JTN)
• Polymarket’s Trump-Bullish Whale: “Absolutely No Political Agenda” (ZH)
• Leftists Predict Hysterical Dystopian Future (ZH)
• Kiev Officials ‘Ready’ For Potential Trump Presidency – WaPo (RT)
• West’s Rules-Based Order To Collapse Soon – Medvedev
• West Sees Red Over Failed Second Color Revolution In Georgia (SCF)
• Novichok: UK Government Sedated The Skripals To Stop Them Talking (Helmer)
• Brutally Murdered 13 Years Ago, Gaddafi Is Only Growing More Beloved (Fetouri)

 

 

 

 

Maher
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852565201515630859

In the bag

Tucker

Fulton County

RFK

Dec. 5?
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852539432395845815

Tulsi
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852686204921426042

Baris

Jesse

 

 

Tucker Grand Finale With President Donald Trump in Glendale, AZ (start at 1.12?!, Trump at 1.38)

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Donald Trump recently did an interview with John Micklethwait, Bloomberg’s top editor and a former editor of The Economist. Micklethwait made the tired point that Trump’s tariffs would raise prices and be bad for Americans.”

• “The American System” Made America Great (Rickards)

Most of us have been taught that free trade is good and that tariffs are bad. And on the surface it certainly seems true. The theory of free trade based on comparative advantage was advocated by British economist David Ricardo in the early 19th century. Ricardo’s theory said that trading nations are endowed with attributes that give them a relative advantage in producing certain goods versus others. These attributes could consist of natural resources, climate, population, river systems, education, ports, financial capacity or any other factor of production. Nations should produce those goods as to which they have a natural advantage and trade with other nations for goods where the advantage was not so great. Countries should specialize in what they do best, and let others also specialize in what they do best. Then countries could simply trade the goods they make for the goods made by others.

All sides would be better off because prices would be lower as a result of specialization in those goods where you have a natural advantage. It’s a nice theory often summed up in the idea that Tom Brady shouldn’t mow his own lawn because it makes more sense to pay a landscaper while he practices football. For example, if the U.K. had an advantage in textile production and Portugal had an advantage in wine production, then the U.K. and Portugal should trade wool for wine. But if the theory of comparative advantage were true, Japan would still be exporting tuna fish instead of cars, computers, TVs, steel and much more. The same can be said of the globalists’ view that capital should flow freely across borders. That might be advantageous in theory but market manipulation by central banks and rogue actors like Goldman Sachs and big hedge funds make it a treacherous proposition.

The problem with this theory of comparative advantage is that the factors of production are not permanent and they are not immobile. If labor moves from the countryside to the city in China, then suddenly China has a comparative advantage in cheap labor. If finance capital moves from New York banks to direct foreign investment in Chinese factories, then China has the comparative advantage in capital also. Trump understands this, Micklethwait doesn’t. Trump didn’t just make polite conversation in the interview. He called out Micklethwait by saying, “It must be hard for you to spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you’re totally wrong.” Ouch! Micklethwait certainly isn’t alone. Listening to hysterical commentary from the mainstream media about Trump’s tariffs, one would think his policies were in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Nothing could be further from the truth. By advocating tariffs, Trump actually wants to return to what made America great in the first place. In fact, tariffs are as American as apple pie. From 1790–1962, the United States pursued high tariff policies under a program known as the American System. It was created by George Washington’s secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who drafted a report to Congress called the Report on Manufactures presented in 1791. Hamilton proposed that in order to have a strong country, America needed a strong manufacturing base with jobs that taught skills and offered income security. To achieve this, Hamilton proposed subsidies to U.S. businesses so they could compete successfully against more established U.K. and European businesses. These subsidies might include grants of government land or rights of way, purchase orders from the government itself or outright payments. This was a mercantilist system that encouraged a trade surplus and the accumulation of gold reserves.

Hamilton’s plan was later proposed on a broader scale by Kentucky Sen. Henry Clay. This new plan began with the Tariff of 1816. Later on, Abraham Lincoln adopted the American System as his platform in the election of 1860, and it became a bedrock principle of the new Republican Party. It was affirmed by William McKinley at the end of the 19th century and by Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s. The 19th and early 20th centuries were a heyday of the American System. This period was characterized by enormous economic growth and population expansion by the U.S. The American System was also accompanied mostly by low inflation or even deflation (which increases the purchasing power of everyday citizens) despite occasional financial panics and some inflation during the Civil War. The key takeaway is that America grew rich and powerful from 1787–1962, a period of 175 years, using tariffs, subsidies and other barriers to trade to nurture domestic industry and protect high-paying manufacturing jobs.

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Ron Paul was made for this.

• Elon Musk Asks Ron Paul To Join Department Of Gov’t Efficiency (ZH)

With just two days left before the presidential election, Libertarians are waking up Saturday to a bunch of buzz on X about a potential “Ron Paul Revolution” in the White House—only possible if Donald Trump wins next week. On Friday evening, AFpost wrote on X, “Ron Paul says he wants to join Elon Musk to cut government waste in second Trump administration.” Musk chimed in on X: “It would be great to have Ron Paul as part of the Department of Government Efficiency!” Ron Paul responded: “I’d be happy to talk with you about it, Elon.” X users instantly went bananas on the prospect that Musk would give Ron Paul a role in the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, only if Trump wins. For months, Musk and Trump have been discussing DOGE, which the billionaire would serve as “Secretary of Cost-Cutting” – a government agency that doesn’t exist yet…

Musk would basically take his skills as a successful manager – in which he slashed 80% of the Twitter workforce a few years ago to make the ‘free speech’ social media platform operate more efficiently. In August, Musk said the goal of DOGE was to cut wasteful spending by the federal government and roll back massive regulations that stifle the economy. Musk recently said DOGE could identify “at least $2 trillion in cuts” as part of a formal review of federal agencies. This would also mean tens of thousands of job cuts—if not more—across the federal government. Just imagine if Trump wins, Musk and Ron Paul would wind down unneeded federal agencies like a scene from Argentina’s Javier Milei.

You hear that, Libertarian… Deal of a lifetime. And Libertarians, even Trump’s VP JD Vance, is coming around to Ron Paul’s argument on the Federal Reserve. Ron Paul had fun on X in the overnight hours. Delayed over the years … but now entirely possible. For decades, Ron Paul has proposed a smaller government by eliminating several wasteful federal agencies, ending foreign wars, eliminating taxes on capital gains and dividends, eliminating the estate tax, and—everyone’s favorite—abolishing the Federal Reserve. This has become true over the years. The only problem is when federal government spending accounts for 22.7% of the US GDP (in fiscal year 2023), reducing this spending could spark a recession. However, if Trump wins, DOGE could be messaged to the American people as a way to curb sky-high inflation sparked by disastrous ‘Bidenomics.’

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“..Hispanics are no longer a Democrat bloc, that they have become free agent voters..”

• House Speaker ‘Really Bullish’ Washington Will Be All-GOP Town In January (JTN)

House Speaker Mike Johnson told Just the News on Thursday he is increasingly confident that Republicans will sweep control of Congress and the White House in next Tuesday’s election, saying Hispanics, Blacks, Jews, union workers and other Democrat-leaning constituencies are switching parties over frustration the country is moving in the wrong direction. “I feel really bullish,” Johnson said in a wide-ranging interview with the John Solomon Reports podcast when asked about the GOP’s chances for a clean sweep of Washington D.C. “….I believe we’re going to win unified government with Republicans back in the White House and controlling the Senate, and we grow the House majority.” Johnson said the election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris presented a rare moment in U.S. history where voters could choose between two White House holders – a former president and a current vice president – based on their records and not just their promises.

“I genuinely believe we’re going to have an historic demographic shift in this election,” he said. “I think when all the analysis is done on the other side of this, they will see that we had a record number of Hispanic and Latino voters, for example, coming into the Republican Party, a record number of Black and African-American voters, Jewish voters, union workers. I mean, people who have not traditionally been in our camp are coming now. “And the reason is because they’re desperate for change, and they know the unique thing about this presidential contest is that both of these persons have had an administration. This isn’t theoretical…. They know what life is like under Harris and Biden, and they know what it was like under Trump, and I think that has a big effect across the board and all the way down the ballot,” he said.

Johnson’s comments follow several recent polls noting demographic shifts toward Trump by several Democratic constituencies even as Harris holds a commanding leading with female voters. The Speaker also reacted to comments the new CEO of the Spanish-language TV network Univision, Daniel Alegre, made on the John Solomon Reports podcast on Wednesday that Hispanics are no longer a Democrat bloc, that they have become free agent voters driven by issues and are shifting this election toward Trump and the GOP.

“Hispanic and Latino voters are just like everybody else, and they they’re so fed up and fired up about the cost of living and rising crime rates in all their communities.,” Johnson said, adding that border security has become another compelling concern for Latino voters. “And then also, on top of that, remember that Hispanic and Latino voters are very family oriented,” he added. “Many of them have deep religious traditions and beliefs, and they see the Democratic Party abandoning all of these sort of foundational principles. And they’ve had enough, and I think they have the same frustration everybody else does. I think that’s why they’re coming into our camp.”

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” I just think there’s almost unlimited potential in front of us, and we’ve got to seize that moment..”

• House Speaker Plan: Moving Bureaucrats From DC To Reshape Government (JTN)

House Speaker Mike Johnson says Republicans have an ambitious plan to reshape and shrink federal government if they win the election. That vision includes a plan to deport tens of thousands of federal bureaucrats from Washington and relocate them to middle America. In a wide-ranging interview this week with Just the News, Johnson said he and other GOP leaders wants to move federal agency offices, personnel and assets from the nation’s capital to bring them closer to the people they serve and farther from the monied special interests that often hijack policy and spending. “There’s a lot of talk about uprooting, you know, these entrenched bureaucracies and putting them out elsewhere around the country,” Johnson told the John Solomon Reports podcast.

He explained such a re-invention of the monstrous federal bureaucracy with more than 2 million federal workers and contractors would integrate with former President Donald Trump’s plan to name billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to lead a government efficiency office and also tie to fiscal conservatives’ vision to eliminate federal bureaucracies and send monies to the states in the form of block grants. The Louisiana Republican said the deportation of Washington bureaucrats would also create a natural shrinkage in the size and cost of government, “That accomplishes a lot of important goals but the first would be that you don’t have all these career civil service law protected bureaucrats,” he said. “Some of them have been camped out of these agencies for decades. They’re nameless, faceless. We don’t know who to hold accountable,” he said.

Johnson continued, saying “The idea is, if you move the agency to, you know, northern Kansas or southwest New Mexico, or wherever it is around the country, then some of the swamp dwellers they will not desire to follow the job to the new, less desirable location,” he added. “They love the swamp. You know they want to stay. They’ll turn them into lobbyist or something to stay in D.C.” The mass transfer and departure of bureaucrats then leads to a “business reorganization proposition” for federal government, he said. “You’ve got agencies that you can scale down because you have empty cubicles and … almost all the agencies are bloated and inefficient,” he said. “So you can scale that down. And then in the cubicles that you do need to fill, we’ve had America First Policy Institute and some of our other think tanks that have been working to develop a notebook full of highly qualified, previously vetted, limited government conservatives who have expertise in these areas.”

Johnson’s comments were the most sweeping he’s made about a congressional vision for shrinking the budget and reshaping the budget. He said the process would take a “blowtorch” to the regulatory state and align government agencies in the aftermath of a historic Supreme Court ruling this summer that reversed a decades old “Chevron doctrine.” Under the new ruling, federal bureaucrats can’t make up or interpret their own regulations and simply must enforce those authorized by Congress. “We have a once in a lifetime, yeah, once in a lifetime opportunity to really claw back article one authority to the legislative branch under the Constitution and have an administration that is in tune with that whole agenda. So look, I just think there’s almost unlimited potential in front of us, and we’ve got to seize that moment,” Johnson said.

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“We’ve done something that’s unprecedented, and we’ve had fun, but now we have to get, hopefully, to work.”

• Candidates’ Final Tours: A Flustered Harris, And A Joyful Trump (Whedon)

With the election just days away, both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are in the final stretch of their campaign tours, but the tones of each couldn’t contrast more, with Trump on offense and on message and Harris playing defense against the political far-left at her own rallies. Though Harris initially attempted to portray her campaign as one of “joy”, Trump has taken on an almost jovial tone as polling and betting odds increasingly paint him as the favorite. His recent Madison Square Garden rally, moreover, was an offensive play in the heart of Democratic territory and saw tens of thousands of people gather in the Big Apple for what he later deemed a “love fest.” Polling data shows a tight contest, with Trump holding a 0.3% lead in the RealClearPolitics average. That outlet currently projects Trump to win 287 electoral votes to Harris’s 251. Polymarket betting odds also favor Trump to win with a 61.1% chance to Harris’s 39.0%.

Though the race remains in tossup territory, the Trump campaign is quite optimistic. Campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio, this week, released a memo highlighting the difference in polling between this election and 2020. The key point was that, in every swing state, Trump is polling better than in 2020 by a significant margin. “I point this out NOT to stoke overconfidence or complacency, but to illustrate just how close this election is and that victory is within our reach,” he wrote. “It is crucial we do not get distracted by the media noise and remain focused on our closing message, persuading the few remaining undecided voters and turning out our base.” The Trump campaign appears to have taken his words to heart. Kicking off the week with his blowout rally at Madison Square Garden, Trump proceeded to hold event after event all across all the key battlegrounds, often doing two rallies per day.

Election weekend will see him go beyond that and hold three rallies each on Saturday and Sunday, with four more scheduled for Monday. While two are set for North Carolina, Trump plans to appear in Salem, Va., as the Old Dominion appears competitive. His Saturday events come off of Friday rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin. His Sunday will feature rallies in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia while his Monday will see him hold four more, two in Pennsylvania and one each in North Carolina and Michigan. Trump opened his Michigan rally, by applauding the crowd sizes and positive energy of his events, including stunts such as driving a garbage truck after President Biden called his supporters “garbage.” “They’ll never be anything like what we’ve done,” he said of Democratic rallies. “We’ve done something that’s unprecedented, and we’ve had fun, but now we have to get, hopefully, to work.”

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“It’s the people who define us by votes who are garbage, not the other way around.”

• People Aren’t Garbage. Partisan Politics Is (Matt Taibbi)

The cycle was the usual nonsense. At a Donald Trump rally in Manhattan a comic called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” Joe Biden emerged from his crypt to croak, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.” The Internet exploded. Reporters were dispatched around the country to gauge how much more pissed off everyone was now. ABC’s take interviewing Harris supporters in Pennsylvania was, “Voters view one another across partisan divide with increasing animosity.” They quoted humans-in-the-street, who all felt strongly. “I would say that some of them are garbage,” said Samantha Leister, 32, while Shawn Vanderheyden, 44, opined, “I just think they are uneducated, and they believe all the lies.” ABC summed up the cultural divide: “Interviews with voters in battleground states reveal that it’s only growing deeper and more insurmountable.”

Surely people know it, but this is all a trick. First, campaign writers only talk to people at campaign events, so the pool of quotes is automatically pared to holders of Very Strong Political Opinions. Second, the odd “Who cares?” answer is instinctively culled by campaign writers as commercially/politically unhelpful. Non-voters or even just people who care more about other things than Harris/Trump — UFOs, knitting, the girl in biology class — ruin the suspension of disbelief. You end up reading copy that hugely over-represents that strange subset of people who define themselves by their votes. When I was first sent to cover campaigns in 2004, a year in which 40% of eligible voters didn’t bother, I was troubled by the absence of non-voters in coverage.

A Rolling Stone editor with whom I rarely worked rolled eyes and said, “We don’t cover them because they’re not part of the fucking story,” which I instantly knew wasn’t true, but I was new and to my shame I didn’t say anything. The numbers of non-voters exposed how inconsequential presidential politics was for most people. It measured the number of people left behind or out, and leaving the non-enthused out of the shot was journalism’s way of covering the holes in the charade. Two years later I was embedded with a group of Oklahoma reservists sent to work as MPs in Iraq. Sgt. Stephen Wilkerson was the team commander. He wore a tattoo on his foot with an arrow pointing to his big toe that read, TAG GOES HERE. His nickname was “Stretch-Nuts” because it was said he could balance a Heineken bottle on his ball-skin. On my first day he asked what I do. I cover presidential elections, I said. He made a jerk-off gesture. That was the last mention of politics on the trip.

In the roughly twenty years since the act of not voting, or even just not really really caring about presidential politics, has been villainized. Now the emotionally healthy person, the one who has a life and isn’t consumed with fears about the Next Hitler, is assumed to harbor secret sympathies, as bad as the worst MAGAT. This is different from the old scam. Now the person who shrugs and says “Who cares?” is called a liar. Everyone must care the way they do, and if you don’t care in that right way — every waking minute, with chewed nails and a carefully weeded social circle to match the correct vote and attitude set — you’re garbage. Many of us have seen in recent years what this hounding has done even to friends or relatives, turning them to Flatland characters, two-dimensional nerve cases scanning everyone for signs of unsuitability. Whatever happens next week, I don’t ever want to be that. It’s the people who define us by votes who are garbage, not the other way around.

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“In 2014, one wind project was canceled. Since then, the total number has grown to 464 wind projects shot down, as well as 281 solar projects.”

• Trump, Vance Take Aim At Renewable Energy, Many Communities Already Did (JTN)

While it’s been difficult for voters to determine exactly where Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris truly stands on energy, former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, each discussed their views at length on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. Vance, who appeared on the podcast Thursday, spent several minutes discussing energy with host Joe Rogan. Vance said he and his wife took a road trip through Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas and for miles all they could see were wind farms. “This is beautiful American countryside that used to be green rolling hills, and now you have these disgusting, dystopian wind turbines. I’m sorry. They are ugly. I will die on this hill. They’re ugly. I don’t want them in American society,” Vance said. The wind energy industry is running up against more and more opposition. Much of it comes from grassroots efforts at the local level.

Energy watchdog Robert Bryce maintains a database of renewable energy projects that have been scrapped, most often because of community opposition. In 2014, one wind project was canceled. Since then, the total number has grown to 464 wind projects shot down, as well as 281 solar projects. The wind industry doesn’t appear to believe these community concerns are valid. The Associated Press reported on comments wind energy lobbyists made at a conference in Atlantic City, New Jersey Tuesday, claiming that concerns about wind projects are driven by “misinformation.” The industry is vowing to fight against it. Paulina O’Connor, executive director of the New Jersey Offshore Wind Alliance, told the Associated Press that she has trouble predicting “what crazy thing they’re [wind energy opponents] going to come next.” Bryce told Just the News that, while lobbyists the Associated Press quoted are dismissive of communities’ concerns, developers are going to find it harder and harder to get a welcoming response.

“The public acceptance of wind energy is exhausted. People don’t want to live near these massive turbines, and they are expressing that in many [places] across the country, from Maine to Hawaii,” Bryce said. Among the concerns that wind lobbyists described as “misinformation” was the claims that offshore wind is killing whales. During his appearance on the Rogan podcast, Trump commented on these concerns. “I wanna be a whale psychiatrist. It drives the whales fricking crazy. And something happens with them, but for whatever reason, they’re getting washed up onshore and you know, they’re ignored by these environmentalists. But they don’t talk about it.” Trump said. The Associated Press, which has received millions of dollars from political advocacy groups that promote the wind and solar industry, reported that these claims are “unsubstantiated” based on the fact that federal agencies tasked with carrying out the Biden-Harris goal of building 30 gigawatts of offshore wind have denied any connections between offshore wind and whale deaths.

While it’s true that wind turbines aren’t directly killing whales, whale advocates argue that the noise of the construction causes harm that results in the animals swimming into vessel traffic. Robert Rand, founder of the acoustics consultancy company Rand Acoustics, has surveyed noise levels from pile driving and sonar survey vessels. Both studies found that the incidental harassment authorizations — permits that offshore wind developers are required to obtain to conduct activities that may adversely affect marine animals — don’t impose sufficient mitigation requirements to protect marine animals. Rutgers professor Apostolos Gerasoulis performed a statistical analysis and found a strong correlation between where whales are dying and offshore wind development.

Besides growing opposition to offshore wind, especially after a blade broke off a wind turbine near Nantucket and scattered debris across multiple beaches, the offshore wind industry is struggling financially. An offshore lease sale in the Gulf of Maine netted only 4 bidders on 439,096 acres that were offered, and the bids came in at $50 per acre. A 2022 auction for a lease area off the coast of New York and New Jersey sold 6 leases on 488,000 acres for $8,955 per acre. The sale may be the last for at least a year, as a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act prohibits offshore wind lease sales without offering up oil and gas lease sales. The Department of Interior’s five-year offshore oil and gas lease shale program offers the fewest leases in the program’s history.

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“..leftist major media outlets are setting America up for post-election social unrest by perpetuating a fiction that the race is a close one.”

Be that as it may, there have been some major shifts at Polymarket. Overnight, Trump has fallen from 67% to 55%. Wisconsin and Michigan are now Harris. The House has gone Democrat.

• Polymarket’s Trump-Bullish Whale: “Absolutely No Political Agenda” (ZH)

While still guarding his anonymity, the mysterious man who’s bet more than $30 million on a Trump election victory via the Polymarket prediction marketplace has come forward to assert that his wagers aren’t intended to sway the election, but simply to profit from an outcome he’s highly confident in. “My intent is just making money,” said the man who describes himself as a Frenchman and former US resident who was a trader for American banks. In an exclusive interview with the Wall Street Journal via Zoom, he used the pseudonym “Théo,” saying he wanted to remain anonymous out of a desire to conceal the extent of his assets from his children and friends. The Journal said he was “sport[ing] a short, neatly trimmed beard” and spoke English with a small accent. Here’s how the Journal described the precipitation of the interview, and the paper’s process to ensure it wasn’t talking to an imposter:

“Théo emailed the Journal after the publication of an Oct. 18 article about his wagers. To prove that he was behind the Polymarket wagers, the Journal asked him to place a bet on whether Taylor Swift would announce that she is pregnant in 2024—one of the many small, nonpolitical wagers available on the platform. Minutes later, Polymarket’s website showed that one of the four accounts, Theo4, had placed a small bet on Swift’s pregnancy. ” In that original Oct. 18 article, the Journal gave some credit to the idea that the concentrated bets may represent some form of intentional narrative-control scheme meant to benefit Trump. Théo emailed the Journal to refute that theory, writing, “I have absolutely no political agenda.” In his subsequent interview, Théo told the Journal he’s a veteran trader with a history of risking tens of millions of dollars when he discovers a high-confidence trade — and said that’s what he sees in the chance to wager on a Trump victory.

When news broke of the whale’s huge wagers on Trump, Polymarket engaged outside experts to scrutinize transactions in presidential election betting, an unnamed source told the Journal at the time. Last week, Polymarket said it had contacted the whale and confirmed it was a French citizen with an extensive financial services and trading background. “Based on the investigation, we understand that this individual is taking a directional position based on personal views of the election,” the firm said. Théo said his conviction on a Trump victory rests on pollsters’ failure to capture the full extent of Trump’s support in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, and his belief that the “shy Trump voter effect” still endures in 2024. “I know a lot of Americans who would vote for Trump without telling you that,” he said, while also scoffing at the possibility that pollsters have improved their methodologies this time around. Having been previously accused of trying to shape the election, Théo dished out an accusation of his own, saying leftist major media outlets are setting America up for post-election social unrest by perpetuating a fiction that the race is a close one.

Théo thinks Trump is poised to rout Harris, which is why he has more than $30 million on Trump reaching 270 electoral votes, with the potential to receive $80 million if he’s right. He says his $30 million on Trump represents most of his liquid assets. Théo also has bets on a Trump popular-vote victory, along with bets on various swing-state wins. He also gave some insights into how he’s been trading: He started quietly in August by betting several million dollars on Trump, using an account with the username Fredi9999. At the time, Trump and Harris had roughly even chances on Polymarket. Théo spread out his wagers over multiple days and weeks to avoid causing a price spike. Still, as his bets grew, Théo noticed other traders were backing away from quoting prices when Fredi9999 was buying. That made it harder for Théo to get attractive prices. He created the other three accounts in September and October to obscure his purchasing, Théo said.

Single-handedly accounting for 25% of the contracts on a Trump electoral college win and 40% of the bids on a popular vote victory, Théo would have a hard time pulling money off the table without pushing the value of his contracts down. Speaking of which, the electoral college version of a Trump win peaked on Wednesday at 76 cents (with a dollar payoff if Trump wins). However they’ve taken a big dive since — plunging to 57.5 cents as this is written in the wee hours of Saturday morning. [..] If you’re itching to buy the dip, note that Americans are officially barred from Polymarket. You can thank your all-powerful, all-knowing, Constitution-violating federal government for protecting you from yourself: The Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined the platform in 2022 for allegedly providing illegal trading services, prompting Polymarket to bar Americans going forward.

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“JD Vance as dictator for life? Conservatives banning contraception? Elon Musk as an immortal techno god who spies on the masses using X and AI?”

• Leftists Predict Hysterical Dystopian Future (ZH)

The secret to understanding the average progressive mind is to first realize that everything they do revolves around a deeply ingrained fantasy world in which they are rebels; righteous underdogs fighting against “the system” or “the patriarchy.” Leftists cannot function within their collectivist ideology without first creating a fascist bogeyman to revolt against. If they were to ever realize that they are, in fact, the establishment and the authoritarians, their entire world view would collapse. This is why you will continue to see content like the election propaganda video below, no matter how ridiculous the premise might be. Leftist activists create these narratives, not because they are necessarily convincing to most people, but because they need to convince themselves that they are still the good guys.

JD Vance as dictator for life? Conservatives banning contraception? Elon Musk as an immortal techno god who spies on the masses using X and AI? Global warming destroying the planet and creating a Mad Max future in which the homeless are forced into concentration camps? The only thing missing is the forced birthing ceremonies from The Handmaid’s Tale. The video credits cite a handful of progressive NGOs as references for donations (including Vote.org) but little on who specifically made it. The relevant issue is the insight this gives into the insanity of left activists. They cling to so many assumptions they have been proven wrong about time after time (global warming), and they also imagine a world in which conservatives are the elites searching for immortality. They seem to be projecting the habits and hobbies of the very globalists that fund leftist groups today.

One could argue that perhaps this is gaslighting – They’re accusing conservatives of scheming to rule the world when they are the people that actually want control. That could be, but the conspiracy theories surrounding “Project 2025” suggest a Q-Anon level of delusion going on that feeds directly into bizarre narratives like those in the video. Leftists have to believe they’re fighting the good fight, even though they’re actually useful idiots for the establishment. This desperate need to take on the role of “freedom fighter” doesn’t mesh very well with reality. Keep in mind, for nearly two decades progressives have enjoyed expanding political and social power, with nearly every western government, every major NGO, every corporation, every legacy media outlet and every Big Tech platform dominated by woke ideology. From ESG to DEI to LGBTQ+ and beyond, Americans and much of the west have been endlessly bombarded from every angle by leftist propaganda.

Their war on conservative principles and individual freedom nearly came to a crescendo during the covid pandemic when they claimed the power to take away people’s access to the economy if they refused to accept an experimental vaccine and follow the mandates to the letter. Surveys showed a disturbing number of Democrats supported the outright destruction of constitutional freedoms in the name of forcing people to adhere to medical mandates based entirely on lies. Leftists also supported the widespread censorship of conservative voices on everything from the covid vaccine, to the lockdowns, to climate change, to Hunter Biden’s laptop. This censorship was spearheaded by the Biden Administration acting in violation of the constitution as they worked closely with Big Tech companies to shut down dissent. They aren’t fighting “the man”, they are the man. Ridiculous AI generated political videos like the one above are not going to change that.

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“There is optimism in Zelensky’s office that he could forge a personal bond with Trump..”

• Kiev Officials ‘Ready’ For Potential Trump Presidency – WaPo (RT)

Officials in Kiev reject the notion that an election victory for Donald Trump would spell disaster for Ukraine, despite his criticisms of US aid to Kiev and pledges to quickly end the conflict with Moscow, the Washington Post reported on Friday. Two unnamed members of Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s team told the paper that the Republican presidential candidate’s “negative” messaging on Ukraine was “just campaign rhetoric” that will not necessarily correlate with his actions if he wins the election on November 5. There is a belief in the Kiev government that Trump would not want to look weak on the global stage by turning his back on Ukraine and, as a result, might make more decisive moves to support Kiev, WaPo said.

“With Russia advancing on the battlefield for the past year,” the Ukrainian officials believe that the status quo, which is likely to be maintained if Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris prevails in the race for the White House, is “not working,” the report read. Because of this, they suggested that “a drastic change” in US policy towards Ukraine could actually “be good” for Kiev. There is optimism in Zelensky’s office that he could forge a personal bond with Trump and eventually turn him into a supporter of Kiev, WaPo said. However, some Ukrainian officials, who talked to the paper, acknowledged that there is a “higher potential for a downside” if Trump wins a second term, and expressed concern that he would pressure Ukraine to make territorial concessions to Russia in exchange for peace.

Last month, Trump said on the PBD Podcast that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine was “a loser” and that Zelensky “should never have let that war start.” He described the Ukrainian leader as “one of the greatest salesmen I have ever seen,” referring to his ability to persuade the Biden administration to provide him with more military aid every time he comes to Washington. The Republican presidential candidate also reiterated his claim that he “will settle the Russia-Ukraine [conflict], while I am president-elect,” but did not reveal how he might achieve this. Back in June, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov commented on media reports of that Trump’s team was developing a roadmap for settling the Ukraine conflict, and stressed that “the value of any plan lies in the details and whether it takes into account the situation on the battlefield.” Peskov reiterated that Moscow remains ready for negotiations, but only if Ukraine recognises the realities on the ground.

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“.. the rules-based order is actually what that the West believes “is right”, adding that “once you are out of this order, you’re a perpetrator.”

• West’s Rules-Based Order To Collapse Soon – Medvedev

The so-called rules-based order imposed by the US and its allies on the global scene is an unstable structure, which is about to fall apart, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said in an exclusive interview with RT. Creating crises such as the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in various places is how the US is trying to rule the world, Medvedev, who now serves as the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, told the broadcaster on Saturday. “So, the more crises they create, the better, they think, the situation is for America… It makes money from weapons, supplies, and by allocating money to its defense industry,” he said. “The Americans are getting what they want at the price of more blood and casualties. This is why the Americans are engaging in feeding the war. But that system is coming to an end,” the former president warned.

The authorities in Washington “feel the world is falling out from under their feet and they are resisting it in every way possible,” he said.This is why the Americans see BRICS and other unions currently being created around the globe, in which the US has no say, as “hostile,” Medvedev explained. Washington and its allies accuse the members of those groups of “violating the rules-based order,” but, at same time, cannot explain what this order is,” he said. “I have carefully picked through the legal text and studied it: it is incomprehensible. It is not clear what the order is and who approved it. It is really just an idea of the US and its allies, while mostly in NATO, of how best to do business in the world,” the former president stressed. According to Medvedev, the rules-based order is actually what that the West believes “is right”, adding that “once you are out of this order, you’re a perpetrator.”

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“Western media reported that “Western pollsters” claimed that there were voting irregularities. What were Western pollsters doing in Georgia in the first place?”

• West Sees Red Over Failed Second Color Revolution In Georgia (SCF)

The United States and European Union are threatening consequences for Georgia after its citizens voted “the wrong way” – for peaceful relations with Russia and traditional moral values. Farcically, this is while the U.S. heads into presidential elections that are mired in chaos and recriminations over vote rigging and buying of votes by oligarchs and big businesses. Welcome to Western-style democracy where if you vote the way the powers-that-be want, it’s a fair election. If you vote the wrong way, it’s a rigged, flawed result that should be ignored or, worse, overturned. Such was the heated reaction from Western states to the electoral victory of the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party last weekend in the South Caucasus nation. The party campaigned on a strong, clear platform for pursuing peaceful neighborly relations with Russia.

GD also declared support for traditional social and moral values, rejecting the Western pseudo-liberal agenda of promoting gender-bender LGBTQ+ identities, which was espoused by the Western-backed Georgian opposition parties. At the end of the day, Georgian Dream won a stunning victory, taking nearly 54 percent of the vote, translating into obtaining 90 out of a total of 150 parliamentary seats. Four opposition parties, which touted closer integration ties with NATO and the EU and acclaiming LGBTQ+ rights, won less than 38 percent of the vote. The Georgian people are to be commended for asserting their democratic rights in the face of massive Western interference in the election. Western money and NGOs amplified the opposition parties. If they had won, the new pro-Western administration would have turned Georgia into a second war front against Russia in conjunction with the NATO-backed Ukrainian regime.

Georgian and Ukraine have been at the center of the Western policy of expanding NATO around Russia’s borders. Both countries were declared future members of the military bloc as far back as 2008, although NATO membership is a red line for Russia. Fortunately, Georgian voters were aware of the geopolitical stakes and rallied to the cause of prioritizing peaceful regional relations and rejecting the notional security privileges of NATO. Western recriminations were fast and furious after the result. Western media reported that “Western pollsters” claimed that there were voting irregularities. What were Western pollsters doing in Georgia in the first place? Such entities sound more like a plant to stir post-election trouble.

As it turns out, there were indeed incidents of vote buying, ballot stuffing, and intimidation at polling stations. But videos showed that the incidents were agitprops organized by the Western-sponsored opposition parties. However, thankfully, such malfeasance was relatively minor and did not invalidate the overall final result. Georgia’s Central Election Committee declared the process to be free and fair. The authorized election invigilating body has given its verdict, and that should be the end of it.

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“As a result of having communicated with Yulia Skripal I was interviewed by the police and my statement recorded.”

• Novichok: UK Government Sedated The Skripals To Stop Them Talking (Helmer)

The British Government was exposed in the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry this week as keeping Sergei and Yulia Skripal unconscious to silence them. That was six years ago, when they were in Salisbury District Hospital in March 2018. Now, prevented from testifying in public at the public inquiry under way in London, they are still incommunicado, either in prison or dead. The evidence revealed in the published witness statements and transcript of testimony in four days of hearings at the Sturgess Inquiry October 28-31 shows that British Government officials have lied in public and lied on oath in the courts to conceal what they have been doing to accuse Russia of Novichok poisonings in the Salisbury area in 2018. The Inquiry records show that the chairman and judge, Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley), and the lawyers working for him are actively working to protect the lies and prevent contradicting evidence from becoming public. .

Surprise testimony by Dr Stephen Cockroft, the doctor who cared for Sergei and Yulia Skripal on their admission to Salisbury District Hospital (SDH) on March 4, 2018, has revealed that the British Government kept them heavily sedated in order to tell the courts and media that they were unconscious and unresponsive when they had revived. Government officials ordered the hospital to punish Cockroft from talking directly to Yulia Skripal when she came out of her coma on March 8, 2018. Cockroft’s evidence of March 8, 2018, directly contradicts the evidence given on oath in the High Court in London on March 20-22, 2018, by state officials and an SDH “treating consultant” – the name was kept secret in the published court report — that “Mr Skripal is heavily sedated following injury by a nerve agent. Ms Skripal is heavily sedated following injury by a nerve agent. Mr Skripal is unable to communicate in any way. Ms Skripal is unable to communicate in any meaningful way.”

Cockroft’s disclosures also contradict the script which Yulia Skripal read out at a MI6-supervised and Reuters-filmed appearance for two minutes at a US bomber base in the UK in May of 2018. Skripal claimed then “after 20 days in a coma I woke to the news that we had both been poisoned.” In fact, Yulia woke from her coma after four (4) days. On July 18, 2024, Cockroft told the Inquiry which questioned him for a second witness statement: “An untoward event took place on Thursday 8 March 2018. A colleague (Dr James Haslam) had ordered all sedation to be discontinued temporarily to Yulia Skripal. This is quite a common practice on Intensive Care Units (ICU) and we refer to it as a ‘sedation hold’ and would normally be planned and discussed with the team. Unfortunately, having ordered the sedation hold, Dr Haslam left the ICU without advising me. I was present on the ICU treating another patient. As a consequence, Yulia Skripal regained consciousness very quickly and was confused, frightened, trying to get out of bed and was pulling at her various vascular access lines and breathing tube.

Cockroft then revealed that because the sedation had been stopped and Yulia was no longer comatose, Cockroft was punished by Blanshard, the hospital’s chief doctor. “I tried to feedback my concerns to Dr Haslam, but he was of the opinion that nothing untoward had occurred, but when these events were reported back to the Medical Director (Christine Blanshard) she had a very different opinion and I was summoned to a meeting with her on Monday 12 March to discuss my management of the incident. There is no formal record of that meeting [sic], however I was suspended from working on the ICU with immediate effect until Yulia and Sergei had either been discharged or died. Apparently by having had a conversation with Yulia Skripal I had been unprofessional and should have left such a conversation to the security services. I was warned by Dr Blanshard that I should not discuss any aspect of the poisonings with colleagues or other individuals and advised that any such discussion would be treated as serious misconduct. As a result of having communicated with Yulia Skripal I was interviewed by the police and my statement recorded.”

The Salisbury hospital official who collaborated with government officials and police to conceal the condition of the Skripals in hospital; to threaten and sanction the medical staff; and to intervene in the treatment of the Skripals, was the SDH medical director, Dr Christine Blanshard. By enforcing sedation on the two patients for the government’s political purpose, without their consent when they were conscious, out of coma, and capable of communicating, Blanshard violated her Hippocratic Oath.

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“..the strongest military alliance in human history had just launched its first war in North Africa since France was defeated in Algeria in 1962..”

• Brutally Murdered 13 Years Ago, Gaddafi Is Only Growing More Beloved (Fetouri)

October marked 13 years since Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was brutally murdered by a NATO-supported mob of rebels in circumstances still buried under a barrage of deliberate disinformation. Yet 13 years on, Gaddafi is probably the most popular figure in the North African country. Is it just nostalgia that makes the general public yearn for a man who has long been dead, or is there something else that goes beyond mere nostalgia as a human emotion? On September 23, 2009, in his first and only speech before the United Nations General Assembly, Muammar Gaddafi described the UN Security Council as council of “horror.” He explained that the council, by the UN charter, is responsible for peace in the world but has only brought “more wars and sanctions.” What he did not know at the time was that the same UN organ would, less than two years later, authorize his removal and ultimately his murder by adopting resolution 1973, which gave the green light to all UN member states to interfere in Libya as long they notified the UN Secretary General of their intention to do so.

Resolution 1973, adopted on March 17, 2011, was the UNSC response to public demonstrations that engulfed parts of Libya in the previous month, in which people demanded better living conditions, housing, and jobs. By the time the issue was deliberated at the UN, what had been peaceful and legitimate public demonstrations had turned into an armed revolt led by various stakeholders, including Islamists and former terrorists, against the legitimate government. The wave of public discontent in Libya was part of wider public awakenings that began in neighboring Tunisia before moving to Egypt. In both countries, the West attempted to save President Ben Ali in Tunisia and later his Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak, but failed. There were no calls for military intervention to “protect” civilians in either country. With Libya, it was a completely different matter.

Faced with armed groups seeking to destabilize the country, the Gaddafi government responded, just like any other respected government would do, by using force against the armed rebellion. Under Gaddafi, Libya had seen similar events in the previous four decades, where Western-supported attempts were made not only to kill Gaddafi but also to bring about regime change by force. The government used force to contain the demonstration, but specifically targeting the armed groups that had sprung up among the peaceful demonstrators. In this chaos, many innocent people were killed and wounded, but nowhere near the inflated figures reported in Western media and publically talked about by Western politicians in their quest to widen the rift between the Libyan authorities and its citizens and to sow discord among the Libyans who were divided between supporters of Gaddafi and supporters of what became known as the February 17 Revolution.

William Hague, the UK’s foreign minister at the time, for example, told the world’s media that Gaddafi had already fled the country and was on his way to Venezuela, when in fact Gaddafi never left Tripoli – so Hague misled public opinion, which further inflamed the situation. Under pressure from veto-wielding permanent superpower members, the UNSC passed resolution 1973 under the pretext of the ‘Right to Protect’ (R2P) doctrine that, controversially, allows the UN to use military force to protect civilians when their government fails to do so. Paragraph 4 of the resolution called on all world countries to “take all necessary measures” to protect civilians in Libya, impose a no fly zone, and urged all UN member states to tighten the embargo already imposed on the country by UNSC resolution 1970, passed on February 26, 2011, referring the situation in Libya to the International Criminal Court (ICC), to investigate the alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly being committed on a large scale in Libya on the orders of Gaddafi himself, who was one of three officials indicated by the court.

Resolution 1970 was not passed based on concrete independent investigative reports of facts but, mainly, based on biased media reports. Neither the UN nor any of its relevant institutions investigated events on the ground to be able to lay blame, and the first official UN mission arrived in Libya in March and reported to the UNSC in April 2011. This means the UNSC adopted its two resolutions, 1970 and 1973, based on unverified media reports, unreliable witness statements and biased civil organizations accounts. By the time the UNSC adopted resolution 1973, Libya was already in a full-swing civil war between the armed rebels and government forces that, in being dehumanized by biased Western media, were called “Gaddafi brigades.” The rebels were actually a mix of terror organizations and locals who chose to fight the government.

They included groups such as Al-Qaeda, Ansar Al-Sharia, Al-Qa’ida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and remnants of other groups and Afghan war veterans who infiltrated the country. By mid-March 2011, Libya was consumed by internal violent strife, its government boycotted by most countries, its voice drowned under the barrage of media lies and fake news, its officials banned from travel, and its leader being hunted day and night. The rebels fighting the government were being supplied, financed, armed, trained, and directed by the West and several Arab countries such as Qatar, Jordan, and United Arab Emirates. The stage was set for NATO to take over the military intervention. In fact, France, the US, and UK had already started bombing Libya by launching the first wave of missile strikes on Libyan air defense sites and radars in order to prepare the ground for imposing a no-fly zone. Even civil security forces, manning checkpoints around Tripoli, were bombed.

By the end of March 2011, Libya has become a “theatre of operations” and NATO launched “Operation Unified Protector” with an around-the-clock bombardment. That meant that the strongest military alliance in human history had just launched its first war in North Africa since France was defeated in Algeria in 1962. By the end of its operation, NATO had killed hundreds of Libyan women and children, destroyed private properties and infrastructure, all in the name of reinforcing international law and protecting civilian while the real agenda was far more sinister. The scenes of chaos, destruction, displacements, and killings continued from March to October, in which the Libyan army managed to hold back the rebels on the ground while facing NATO air bombardments. On October 20, 2011, Gaddafi was murdered in gruesome scenes and his body, alongside the bodies of his son and his defense minister, displayed for the horrified public to see.

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Rogan Fetterman

 

 

Eva
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852419256232636518

 

 

Dog fight

 

 

Dog kitten
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852392683748372979

 

 

Awesome

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle October 29 2024

Oct 292024
 
 October 29, 2024  Posted by at 9:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  82 Responses »


Jules Adler Panorama de Paris vu du Sacré Coeur 1935

 

• Will Donald Trump Get His Revenge? (Susan Quinn)
• Leftists Are Terrified About What Will Happen To Them If Trump Wins (ZH)
• Worst. Nazi. Rally. Ever. (Margolis)
• Kamala Is Just A Vessel; We Are Running Against Something Far Bigger (MN)
• Speaking of Abortion (James Howard Kunstler)
• Trump’s 19th-Century Solution to Fiscal Disaster (David Stockman)
• Trump Campaign Slams Harris Over Beyonce ‘Lies’ (RT)
• Trump To Make Ukraine The EU’s Problem – FT (RT)
• I Don’t Want War With Russia – Vance (RT)
• University Professors Approaching Near Unanimity as a Democratic Lock (Turley)
• Bezos Explains Why WaPo Dropped Presidential Endorsements (RT)
• Steve Bannon To Be Released From Prison One Week Ahead Of Election (JTN)
• How America Was Destroyed (Paul Craig Roberts)
• The Enormous Constraints Faced By Netanyahu (Juan Cole)
• BRICS Make History – Can They Keep the Momentum? (Pepe Escobar)
• Slovak PM Fico Warns Of Continued Attempts On His Life (RT)
• Volkswagen Planning Mass Layoffs – Workers’ Council Chief (RT)

 

 

 

 

ABC

MSG


https://twitter.com/i/status/1850691657303519451
https://twitter.com/i/status/1850654136293024210
https://twitter.com/i/status/1850744962377510999

Elon

Stossel

 

 

 

 

Trump is not looking for revenge. He and his X-men team have bigger fish to fry. Trump’s “revenge” will be that what happened to him since 2015 -lawfare- can never happen again.

“…the changes he will make will be in the way government operates, not mere petty payback to individual miscreants…”

• Will Donald Trump Get His Revenge? (Susan Quinn)

There’s almost nothing that Donald Trump likes better than throwing his adversaries off their game; he likes to be unpredictable, confusing and in charge. It gives him an edge in achieving his goals. He’s kept his adversaries guessing to the extent that he will pay them back for their lawfare and deep-state machinations, and not surprisingly, they expect the worst. Yet he has said repeatedly that victory in the election will be his revenge. They don’t know what to make of it. A Trump senior advisor made the following observation: “President Trump has made clear that success will be the best revenge,’ Trump senior adviser Brian Hughes said. ‘When others have weaponized government and legal institutions against him for political interference, he will return these institutions to their constitutional purpose of protecting Americans’ liberty and creating a safe and prosperous nation again.

But since the political Left almost always chooses to see deceit in Trump’s comments, they don’t believe he is sincere. He made it even more unpredictable for them with this: “Look when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them,” Trump said. “And it’s easy because it’s Joe Biden, and you see all the criminality, all of the money that’s going into the family and him, all of this money from China, from Russia, from Ukraine.” And then Trump underscored it again, wanting to be sure there was no doubt in the minds of the Left that he could act against them: When asked during a Fox News interview on Wednesday if he plans to use the justice system to punish his political opponents, Trump said: “When this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them.” Note that in both of the previous quotations, Trump commented on what he could do, not on what he would do.

Given the incidents of lawfare that Trump has had to endure, the hyperbole spouted by the mainstream media and the political Left, it’s no wonder that Trump would want to take revenge against those who have relentlessly criticized and attacked him. Jonathan Turley, law professor at Georgetown University, has commented several times on the pathetic and weak lawfare attacks that have been launched against Trump from various attorneys and district attorneys. He made this comment a few months ago about Alvin Bragg, Manhattan District Attorney, who twisted the facts of a Trump misdemeanor to transform them into a felony: Like his predecessor, Bragg previously scoffed at the case. However, two prosecutors, Carey R. Dunne and Mark F. Pomerantz, then resigned and started a public pressure campaign to get New Yorkers to demand prosecution.

Pomerantz shocked many of us by publishing a book on the case against Trump — who was still under investigation and not charged, let alone convicted, of any crime. He did so despite objections from his former colleague that such a book was grossly improper. Nevertheless, it worked. Bragg brought a Rube Goldberg case that is so convoluted and counterintuitive that even liberal legal analysts criticized it. It’s no wonder that Trump is relishing the discomfort and fear that he is eliciting in his opponents. They have spent years trying to ruin his reputation, insulting him, discrediting him and trying to humiliate him. Meanwhile, in reflecting on the 2016 election, Trump said the following about Hillary Clinton:

“I could have gone after Hillary. I could have gotten Hillary Clinton very easily. And when they say lock her up, whenever they said ‘lock her,’ you know, they’d start, 30,000 people, ‘lock her up, lock her up.’ What did I do? I always say take it easy, just relax. We’re winning. Take it easy. Take it easy.” He added: “I could have had her put in jail. And I decided I didn’t want to do that. I thought it would look terrible. You had the wife of the president of the United States going to jail. I thought it would be very bad if we did that. And I made sure that didn’t happen, OK? I thought it would be bad.” But now he has reached the point where striking fear in the hearts of his enemies seems righteous. Yet the changes he will make will be in the way government operates, not mere petty payback to individual miscreants. That will be devastating to the Leftist cause. It will also serve as his retribution.

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“They lament the undeniable shift of global politics to the conservative right while refusing to ask why it’s happening?”

• Leftists Are Terrified About What Will Happen To Them If Trump Wins (ZH)

After being indoctrinated for almost a decade to believe that their political opponents are secret Nazis ready to install a fascist regime, it’s not surprising that Democrats are freaking out over recent polls indicating a potential Trump win in the November elections. Convinced that America 2024 is going to be a repeat of Germany 1933, ignorant leftists are scrambling to determine whether or not to leave the US or “start a revolution.” The anxiety is palpable. The New Yorker recently asserted in an arduous and rambling article spanning centuries of political history and every rhetorical cliche imaginable that, essentially, Trump is likely to win. The outlet describes Kamala Harris as “virtuous” (which is laughable), but they suggest this trait is not respected enough within the American political sphere. They lament the undeniable shift of global politics to the conservative right while refusing to ask why it’s happening?

They simply default to the old low-IQ and low effort accusations of “racism” and “xenophobia”. The New Yorker argues: “Even when it is utterly self-destructive – as in Britain, where the xenophobia of Brexit cut the U.K. off from traditional allies while increasing immigration from the Global South—the apprehension that “we” are being flooded by frightening foreigners works its malign magic. It’s an old but persistent delusion that far-right nationalism is not rooted in the emotional needs of far-right nationalists but arises, instead, from the injustices of neoliberalism…” The mass immigration from the third world continues in Britain because the same progressive elitists are still in charge despite the Brexit vote. That’s why the country is spiraling into a pit of criminality, mass stabbings and a rape epidemic. It’s the reason why the British voted for Brexit in the first place.

Brexit and the end of mass immigration is the will of the majority of the people, just as it’s the will of the majority of people in many parts if Europe and the US. Yet, leftists who pontificate endlessly about the virtues of democracy dismiss the majority when it suits them. It is this arrogance of the political left that has led directly to the rise of the right wing movement that so utterly terrifies them. The problem is, leftists never take responsibility because they see this as an expression of weakness, and also because their moral relativism allows them to rationalize any behavior as necessary “for the greater good.” Their main character syndrome spurs them to believe they are the ultimate good in the world, and if they are the ultimate good then anyone who dares oppose them must be the ultimate evil. This is why they have a tendency to demonize their political opposition in extreme ways. The New Yorker describes Trump as singularly dangerous, comparing him to mobsters, tyrants and even cancer:

“Trumpism is a cancerous phenomenon. Treated with surgery once, it now threatens to come back in a more aggressive form, subject neither to the radiation of “guardrails” nor to the chemo of “constraints.” It may well rage out of control and kill its host…” And this kind of rhetoric is exactly why there have been at least two assassination attempts on Trump’s life; attempts which the leftist media then shamelessly blamed on Trump. It’s also gaslighting, considering the level of tyranny Democrats have engaged in under Biden and the contempt they have displayed for American ideals over the past decade. The fantasy world of the left is rife with paranoia built on a foundation of emotional sand rather than evidence. They see a new Trump term as the end of everything:

“Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences. He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents…” “When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate? Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies…”

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Which was worse? 1939 or 2024?

• Worst. Nazi. Rally. Ever. (Margolis)

When Donald Trump’s campaign announced plans for a rally at Madison Square Garden, Democrats and their media allies knew they had a problem. Trump was going to pack the house on their turf. So they wasted no time pushing the tired Hitler narrative and claimed that the choice of venue was an homage to a pro-Nazi rally held there in 1939. It wasn’t just liberals in the media pushing this narrative, either. Hillary Clinton accused Trump of “actually re-enacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939.” “President Franklin Roosevelt was appalled that neo-Nazis, fascists in America were lining up to essentially pledge their support for the kind of government that they were seeing in Germany. So I don’t think we can ignore it,” Hillary added. Then she doubled down.

“Now, it may be a leap for some people and a lot of others may think, ‘I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to say that.’ “But please open your eyes to the danger that this man poses to our country, because I think it is clear and present for anybody paying attention.” Even the Harris-Walz campaign joined in on the rhetoric. “Donald Trump’s got this big rally going at Madison Square Garden,” Kamala’s running mate Tim Walz said at a campaign event in Henderson, Nevada. “There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden.” Walz added, “And don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there.”

Well, the rally took place Sunday night, and boy, talk about the worst Nazi rally ever! In addition to the diverse speakers at the event, a black woman sang the national anthem.

And clearly, Jews didn’t get the memo that this was a “Nazi rally.”

The only Nazi symbols you saw at all came courtesy of the Democrats.

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“I’m asking you to be excited about the future..”

• Kamala Is Just A Vessel; We Are Running Against Something Far Bigger (MN)

During a historic rally Sunday at Madison Square Garden, president Trump urged that Kamala Harris is purely “a vessel” and in reality the MAGA movement is fighting against “something far more powerful.” Trump told the crowd, “We are not just running against Kamala — She means nothing. She is purely a vessel — We are running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala and more powerful than them, which is a massive, vicious, crooked, radical left machine that runs today’s Democrat Party.” Trump further asserted that Biden and Harris are “perfect vessels because they’ll never give them a hard time. They’ll do whatever they want.” He continued, “I know many of them. It’s just an amorphous group of people. But they’re smart and they’re vicious, and we have to defeat them. And when I say the ‘enemy from within,’ the other side go crazy.”

Trump added that these people “are doing such harm to our country with their open border policies, record-setting inflation, ‘Green New Scam,’ and everything else they are doing. But we’re not going to let it happen any longer. We’re going to have the biggest victory in the history of our country on November 5 … We’re going to make America great again.” Elsewhere during his speech, Trump urged that his party is one of real unity and inclusion, while the other side is intent on fomenting hatred and division. “We bleed the same blood. We share the same home and we salute the same great American Flag. We are one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God,” Trump declared.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1850696878469337233

Trump vowed to make America stronger than ever before and to bring back the American Dream. Trump told the crowd “I’m asking you to be excited about the future,” further urging “this will be America’s new golden age.” The MSG event was a roaring success, despite deranged leftists demanding it be shut down claiming it was a literal ‘Nazi rally’.

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“You have not seen such a vivid demonstration of slowly-and-then-all-at-once since the implosion of Lehman Brothers as the collapse of the Democratic Party this fateful October..”

• Speaking of Abortion (James Howard Kunstler)

What were they thinking after they shoved “Joe Biden” into the abyss, like an old refrigerator over the edge of the landfill, and afterward settled — instantly it appears, with no process at all — on Kamala Harris to lead the party to victory in the fall election? I will tell you: they were not thinking at all. The collective mind of the Democrat elite was a vast vacuum devoid of thought, mass, or light, like a corner of deepest space, lacking even a particle of cosmic debris to evoke the existence of existence. Such mindlessness was the consummate expression of a party that for eight years worked every angle of political mental illness toward the loss of its mind, driven by whatever dark energy seeks escape from truth, life, and God — whatever is opposite of creation and being. What you are witnessing is a colossal act of being un-born. The party put out a call to the universe and the universe ordered. . . an abortion of the Democratic Party! You are reminded again: be careful of what you wish for.

And so do things stand one week before the election. You have not seen such a vivid demonstration of slowly-and-then-all-at-once since the implosion of Lehman Brothers as the collapse of the Democratic Party this fateful October. Poor Kamala is just collateral damage at this point. She goes out before some manufactured audience and seven-minutes onstage delivering a door-dash order of precooked blather is all she can stand before being overwhelmed by the emptiness and futility of her task. . . and then she flees back to the waiting limousine (and the chardonnay bottle). Meanwhile, her allies — that is, the Democratic Party’s allies — play their own roles in this political abortion. The LA Times and the WashPo declined their usual proforma endorsements, two kisses of death. Those actions last week provoked nervous breakdowns in both newsrooms, cries of anguish, resignations, professional suicides.

The news media find themselves in a peculiar position, having gone along for years with the gathering mental illness of the Democratic Party, like incompetent parents in a large dysfunctional family, offering unconditional support for their kids’ intolerable and unacceptable behavior. They are flying to pieces now on the CNN chat panels. James Carville, the party’s shriveled Gollum, has gone to IV infusions of Jim Beam, seems like. Jake Tapper gets Sunday schooled by JD Vance and turns into a mewling cat-lady right before your eyes. Anderson Cooper goes all waxy and mute. Joy Reid surrenders to echolalia as her MSNBC fans are subjected to the guest list of P. Diddy’s “freak-offs,” ranting about Hitler. Lawrence O’Donnell is looking more and more like Vincent Price in Return of the Fly. Reality-optional hardly suffices to describe cable news these days.

You’ve got to ask: can they just let it be? Can they just let go of their insane Jacobin rebellion now and let it fade into history? Then, kick back, recuperate, get their minds right, put their house and family in order, and move on as a legit political faction in a functioning republic? Or, do they burn the asylum down? The signals are troubling. They are chattering about Mr. Trump “using the military” against them in the months to come — as if the Abrams tanks were going to roll up to DNC headquarters and blast away. By now, you know that such thoughts expressed by Democratic pols and news pals are always projections of their own wishes. The New York Times published just such a classic paranoid projection exercise last week “. . . telling Americans that if he [Trump] wins, he plans to bend, if not break, our democracy.”

Surely it is too late, with early voting well underway, to stop any ballot harvesting and other election shenanigans as engineered by master fraudster Marc Elias. In fact, frauds are already being discovered (e.g., Lancaster County, PA.) Not a good look. It is exactly what a conspiracy (to commit election fraud) means in law, and the actual people who cooked the ballots and transported them are going to rat-out those who instructed them to do it. Wait for that, and wait for it to pop up elsewhere around the country. This time, watchers are watching, much more carefully.

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Stockman knows his numbers. Take the following, and then remember (you too, David) that Elon Musk says he can save $2 trillion on spending.

“Trumpian revenue tariffs would generate about $9 trillion over the next decade, or nearly 80% of the $11.5 trillion revenue loss from drastically shrinking the income tax coverage..”

• Trump’s 19th-Century Solution to Fiscal Disaster (David Stockman)

In the last weeks of the campaign, Donald Trump is slicing and dicing the Federal income tax nearly as fast as he served up fries at the McDonald’s drive-thru window last weekend. So far, he has proposed to extend the lower rates, family tax credits, and investment incentives of the 2017 Tax Act after they expire in 2025 and to also exempt tips, Social Security benefits, and overtime wages from the Federal income tax. Those items alone would generate a revenue loss of $9 trillion over the next decade, but he has recently proposed to also exempt firefighters, police officers, military personnel, and veterans from the Federal income tax as well. We estimate the latter would cost another $2.5 trillion in revenue loss over 10 years. As it happens, there are 370,000 firemen, 708,000 policemen, 2.86 million uniformed military personnel, and 18.0 million veterans in the US.

These 22 million citizens have an estimated average income of $82,000 per year, which translates to about $60,000 each of AGI (adjusted gross income). At an average income tax rate of 14.7% these exclusions would generate $250 billion per year of reduced income tax payments. In all, Trump has thus tossed out promises to cut income taxes by $11.5 trillion over the next 10-year budget window. In turn, these sweeping reductions would amount to upwards of 34% of CBO’s estimated baseline income tax revenue of $33.7 trillion over the period. Alas, even in the halcyon days of Reagan supply-side tax cutting no one really dreamed of eliminating fully one-third of the so-called crime of 1913 (the 16th Amendment which enabled the income tax).

10-Year Revenue Loss:
Extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts: $5.350 trillion.
Exempt overtime income: $2.000 trillion.
End Taxation of Social Security benefits: $1.300 trillion.
Exempt Tip income: $300 billion.
Exempt Income of Firemen, Policemen, Military and Veterans: $2.500 trillion.
Trump Total Revenue Loss: $11.500 trillion.
CBO Income Tax Baseline Revenue: $33.700 trillion.
Trump Revenue Loss As % of Baseline: 34%.

Then again, Trump may have something virtually epic in mind. To wit, scrapping the income tax entirely in favor of taxing consumption via levies on imported goods and merchandise. “In the old days when we were smart, when we were a smart country, in the 1890s and all, this is when the country was relatively the richest it ever was. It had all tariffs. It didn’t have an income tax,” Trump said at a sit-down with voters in New York on Friday for Fox & Friends. “Now we have income taxes, and we have people that are dying.” The New York Times is deeply alarmed: “The former president has repeatedly praised a period in American history when there was no income tax, and the country relied on tariffs to fund the government.” Actually, however, 19th-century America was even smarter than Trump realizes.

In 1900 total Federal spending amounted to just 3.5% of GDP because back then America was still a peaceful republic and had no Warfare State or even significant standing army at all. And save for the most advanced precincts of Europe, the Welfare State hadn’t yet been invented, either. So, yes, the so-called “revenue tariffs” of the 19th century did meet the income needs of the Federal government to the point of actually balancing the budget year after year between 1870 and 1900. Indeed, the actual annual surpluses were large enough to pay down most of the Civil War debt, to boot. Today, of course, the Warfare State, Welfare State, and the Washington pork barrels account for 25% of GDP. So Trump may be directionally correct in wanting to tax consumption rather than income, but, as usual, he’s off by about seven orders of magnitude when it comes to the size of the Federal budget that needs to be financed.

Still, Trump has stepped up to the plate when it comes to a 21st-century version of the revenue tariff. He has pledged to impose a 20% universal tariff on all imports from all countries with a specific 60% rate for Chinese imports. Based on current US import levels of $3.5 trillion per year from worldwide sources and $450 billion from China, Trump’s tariffs would generate about $900 billion of receipts per annum. To be sure, Trump’s claim that these giant tariffs would be paid for by Chinamen, Mexicans, and European socialists is just more of his standard baloney. Tariffs are paid for by consumers, but that’s actually the hidden virtue of the Tariff Man’s favorite word. The truth is, government should be paid for via taxation on current citizens, not fobbed off in the form of giant debts on future citizens, born and unborn.

So if we are going to have Big Government at 25% of GDP rather than a 19th-century government at 3.5% of GDP, and Trump is a Big Government Man if there ever was one, better that the burden be placed on consumption, not production, income, and investment. After all, today the “makers” get hit good and hard by the current exceedingly lopsided income tax system. Thus, the top 1% pays 46% of income taxes, while the top 5% pays 66% and the top 10% pays 76% of all income taxes. On the other end, by contrast, the bottom 50% pays just 2.3% of individual income taxes, while 40% of all families pay no income tax at all. In any event, the math works out such that the proposed Trumpian revenue tariffs would generate about $9 trillion over the next decade, or nearly 80% of the $11.5 trillion revenue loss from drastically shrinking the income tax coverage and collection rate. So that’s a big step in the direction of fiscal solvency rather than more UniParty free lunches.

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“They have to use people to get people to come, and then they send buses..”

• Trump Campaign Slams Harris Over Beyonce ‘Lies’ (RT)

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has accused Democratic rival Kamala Harris of misleading voters by attracting them to a rally in the belief that they would see a performance by pop superstar Beyonce. Over 30,000 people turned up at the Democratic event on Friday in Houston, Texas, with some expecting a free concert after it was announced that Beyonce would be present. MSNBC and the Washington Post reported ahead of the rally that the superstar singer would appear with Harris during the event, while NBC cited a source as saying that Beyonce was “also expected to perform.” Beyonce earlier approved the use of her song ‘Freedom’ as a soundtrack for the Harris campaign. The 43-year-old Houston native did take to the stage at the event with her former Destiny’s Child bandmate Kelly Rowland, before announcing that she was there as a mother and not as an entertainer.

In a speech that lasted less than five minutes, Beyonce urged rallygoers to support abortion rights, after Harris called on voters to “mobilize” on November 5 in support of reproductive freedom. “It’s time for America to sing a new song,” Beyonce added. “Our voices sing a chorus of unity. They sing a song of dignity and opportunity. Are y’all ready to add your voice to the new American song,” the singer said, welcoming Harris onto the stage. Speaking at a Michigan rally on Saturday, Trump hit out at the apparent failure of the Harris campaign to meet supporters’ expectations. “Beyonce went up and spoke for a couple of minutes and then left, and the place went crazy,” Trump stated, adding that “they booed the hell out of everybody.”

“They thought she was going to perform… it’s crazy. They have to use people to get people to come, and then they send buses. We don’t send buses. Everybody comes. We’re just going to make America great again. It’s very simple,” the former president added. Tim Murtaugh, a senior adviser to Trump, claimed that organizers of the Democratic rally had “lied to build a crowd.” While the front rows at the rally appeared supportive as Harris proceeded with her speech after seeing Beyonce off the stage, clips on social media indicated booing and heckling at the back, with some apparently leaving the venue in disappointment. The vice president has been backed by American pop sensation Taylor Swift as well as Usher, Eminem, and Cardi B, while Trump has received endorsements from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, rapper 50 Cent, and popular journalist Tucker Carlson.

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“Russia gets a guarantee of neutrality from Ukraine,” while Germany and other EU countries foot the bill for Ukraine’s reconstruction..”

• Trump To Make Ukraine The EU’s Problem – FT (RT)

Donald Trump will leave the enforcement of any peace deal between Russia and Ukraine to European powers, one of the former US president’s advisers has told the Financial Times. The plan is one of several floated by Trump’s advisers and allies, all of which involve the US refusing to deal with the aftermath of the conflict. Trump has promised to bring a rapid end to the ongoing conflict if he is elected president in November. However, he has offered few specifics as to how he would do this, save for pressing Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Zelensky into peace talks with US aid to Kiev as leverage. In the absence of any concrete peace plan, a host of Trump’s current and former advisers have outlined how they think the former president could achieve this goal.

One unnamed “long-term Trump adviser” told the Financial Times on Monday that the Republican candidate could resolve the conflict with “a reimagining of the failed Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015,” under which Kiev agreed to grant some autonomy to the majority Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Lugansk. This time around, the adviser said, the deal would be enforced by EU peacekeepers. “There are two things America will insist on,” he said. “We will not have any men or women in the enforcement mechanism. We’re not paying for it. Europe is paying for it.” Reviving the Minsk agreements would likely present several major challenges.

After multiple European leaders admitted that they never intended to abide by the 2014 and 2015 agreements, Moscow does not believe that the EU can play the role of honest broker, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said earlier this month. Furthermore, Donetsk and Lugansk – along with Kherson and Zaporozhye – have since joined the Russian Federation, and any peace deal must take into account this “territorial reality,” the Kremlin has said. Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst who served in Trump’s White House, told the British newspaper that the US could “freeze the conflict” along the current front line, and negotiate a lasting settlement with Russia at a later date. Ukraine would not give up its territorial claims in the meantime, Fleitz said, explaining that this plan counts on delaying a final agreement until “Putin leaves the stage.”

However, Fleitz conceded that he does not speak for Trump and does not know the former president’s foreign policy plans. The most detailed proposal has been put forward by Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. Speaking to former US Navy SEAL and podcast host Shawn Ryan last month, Vance said that the current frontline could be demilitarized and fortified, ensuring that “Russia doesn’t invade again.” In exchange, “Russia gets a guarantee of neutrality from Ukraine,” while Germany and other EU countries foot the bill for Ukraine’s reconstruction. The current American policy of “throw[ing] money at this problem, [and] hope[ing] the Ukrainians are able to achieve a military victory” is “stupid,” Vance told Ryan.

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“I think that we should try to pursue avenues of peace.”

• I Don’t Want War With Russia – Vance (RT)

The US is not at war with Russia and should not seek one, Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance has said, when asked whether he would brand President Vladimir Putin an “enemy” of America. The senator from Ohio was asked during his appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday whether he saw the Russian leader “as an ally or an enemy.” Putin is “clearly an adversary, he is a competitor,” but Washington needs to be “smart about diplomacy too,” Vance responded. ”Just because we don’t like somebody doesn’t mean that we can’t occasionally engage in conversations with them,” he suggested. Host Kristen Welker pushed him further on whether he would directly refer to Putin as an enemy. ”We are not at war with him. And I don’t want to be at war with Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” the senator said. “I think that we should try to pursue avenues of peace.”

The same logic applies to China, Vance said, adding that he perceives it as a greater threat to American interests than Russia. The US may not like having to talk to its rivals, but in the case of the Ukraine conflict, resolving it will require negotiations, the senator pointed out. When asked whether former President Donald Trump would take the US out of NATO, Vance assured that he wouldn’t. If his running mate returns to office, the country will honor its commitment to the organization, but the bloc “is not just a welfare client, it should be a real alliance,” he said. Vance was referring to Trump’s criticism of insufficient defense spending by its European members.

Moscow has identified NATO’s enlargement in Europe as a threat to its national security and a key reason for the deterioration of relations with the West. The organization’s increasing involvement in Ukraine since the 2014 armed coup in Kiev and promise to bring Ukraine into the fold have contributed in a major way to setting off the ongoing hostilities, Russian officials have said. The current Democratic administration has pledged to stand by Kiev “for as long as it takes” to defeat Russia and has pushed other nations to do the same. Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on Ukraine aid, Kiev’s troops are currently retreating along many parts of the front. Trump has claimed while campaigning that he would end the hostilities in 24 hours, if elected.

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“..he and others continue to saw feverishly on the branch upon which we all sit in higher education..”

• University Professors Approaching Near Unanimity as a Democratic Lock (Turley)

The 2024 presidential election is shaping up to be the single most divisive election in our history. The public is split right down the middle with almost every group splintering between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. There is, however, one group that seems almost unanimous: professors. A new survey of more than 1,000 professors shows that seventy-eight percent will vote for Harris and only eight percent will vote for Trump. Other than a poll of the Democratic National Committee, there are few groups that are more reliably Democratic or liberal. For anyone in higher education, the result is hardly surprising. The poll tracks what we already know about the gradual purging of departments around the country of conservative, libertarian, and dissenting professors.

Indeed, the lack of political and intellectual diversity may be turning some donors and even applicants from higher education. With failing revenue and applications, universities are starting to re-embrace commitments to neutrality on political issues. Some, however, are doubling down on advocacy and orthodoxy. In an op-ed this week, Wesleyan University President Michael Roth called on universities to reject “institutional neutrality” and officially support Kamala Harris. Calling neutrality “a retreat,” Roth compared Trump’s election to the rise of the Nazis and insisted that schools should “give up the popular pastime of criticizing the woke and call out instead the overt racism.” He added, without a hint of self-awareness or irony, that “we should not be silenced because of fears of appearing partisan.”

In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss the intolerance in higher education and surveys showing that many departments no longer have a single Republican as faculties replicate their own views and values. So not only are professors voting en mass for Harris, Roth would have the schools themselves work openly for her election. That ideological echo chamber is hardly an enticement for many who are facing rising high tuition costs with relatively little hope of being taught by faculty with opposing views. There are obviously many reasons why faculty may reject Trump specifically, but this poll also tracks more generally the self-identification and contributions of faculty. A Georgetown study recently found that only nine percent of law school professors identify as conservative at the top 50 law schools — almost identical to the percentage of Trump voters found in the new poll.

Notably, Roth acknowledged that the current lack of intellectual diversity in higher education had become so extreme that there might be a need for “an affirmative action program for conservatives.” However, he and others continue to saw feverishly on the branch upon which we all sit in higher education in calling for even greater political advocacy. There is little evidence that faculty members have any interest in changing this culture or creating greater diversity at schools. In places like North Carolina State University a study found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans 20 to 1.

Recently, I had a debate at Harvard Law School with Professor Randall Kennedy on whether Harvard protects free speech and intellectual diversity. This year, Harvard found itself in a familiar spot on the annual ranking of Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE): dead last among 251 universities and colleges. Harvard has long dismissed calls for greater free speech protections or intellectual diversity. It shows.

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University professors are not the only group with such an outsized bias. MSM editors and writers have it just as much. And Bezos will not solve that by withholding an endorsement. His hiring practices need to change. Or his paper is toast.

• Bezos Explains Why WaPo Dropped Presidential Endorsements (RT)

The Washington Post has abandoned its decades-long tradition of endorsing a US presidential candidate to earn back the trust of the American public, the newspaper’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, has said. He explained his reasoning in an op-ed published by the Post on Monday after facing intense backlash from current and former staff. The newspaper has been endorsing candidates since 1976, but announced the suspension of the practice on Friday, prompting several editors to resign. The Post’s editorial board endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. According to CNN, the Post’s staffers had drafted an endorsement of the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, which was ultimately not approved by the management. Bezos began his Monday’s op-ed by citing a recent Gallup poll, which found that nearly 70% of Americans have little or no trust in the media.

“Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working,” the entrepreneur wrote, adding that “most people believe the media is biased.” “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” he continued. “What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.” The founder of Amazon and aerospace manufacturer Blue Origin admitted that the decision to drop endorsements so close to Election Day on November 5 was the result of “inadequate planning.” At the same time, he insisted that neither campaign had affected his decision-making, and that the move to abandon endorsements was not connected to last week’s meeting between Republican presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump, and Blue Origin top executives in Austin, Texas.

A total of 21 of the Post’s opinion columnists signed a statement, describing the non-endorsement as “a terrible mistake.” They argued that “this isn’t the right moment, when one candidate is advocating positions that directly threaten freedom of the press and the values of the Constitution.” Three of the newspaper’s 10-person editorial board have since stepped down. More than 200,000 people – or about 8% of the Post’s paid subscribers – had canceled their digital subscription by midday on Monday, according to NPR. The decision to end endorsements was criticized by many prominent journalists, including the Post’s former longtime executive editor Marty Baron.

Last month, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, announced that the newspaper would also not be making presidential endorsements. The move faced similar backlash, with editorials editor Mariel Garza resigning in protest. Throughout his campaign, Trump has blasted “the lying media” for what he said was a long history of unfair coverage of him and his time in office. The Harris campaign and allies have similarly accused pro-Trump media outlets of amplifying “desinformation.”

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“The Trump ally is expected to hold a press conference on Tuesday afternoon in Manhattan, just hours after his release.”

• Steve Bannon To Be Released From Prison One Week Ahead Of Election (JTN)

Former President Donald Trump’s ally Steve Bannon will be released from prison on Tuesday, exactly one week ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison at a federal facility in Danbury, Connecticut, in 2022 after he was convicted by a jury on two Contempt of Congress charges for not complying with a congressional subpoena. A judge had allowed Bannon, who was a first-time offender, to delay his sentence while he appealed the convictions but was eventually ordered to report to prison in July. The Trump ally is expected to hold a press conference on Tuesday afternoon in Manhattan, just hours after his release.

Sam Mangel, Bannon’s prison consultant, told ABC News on Monday that Bannon taught U.S. history and government to other inmates while he was behind bars, and that he was respected by other inmates. “I’m sure he’s quite glad to put it behind him and move on with his life,” Mangel said. “From what I’m told, he feels he’s got a lot left to accomplish now.” Although Bannon will be released from the Connecticut prison, he still faces criminal charges related to an alleged scheme to defraud donors over the construction of a border wall on the United States southern border. That trial is scheduled for December, and he has pleaded not guilty to all charges, including conspiracy, fraud, and money laundering.

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“..the US military is there to use lethal force to suppress those who object. If Trump’s win is too lopsided to be subject to theft, there can be a cybersecurity attack that prevents a vote count..”

• How America Was Destroyed (Paul Craig Roberts)

Those who control the Democrat Party are concerned about Kamala’s election chances. Little wonder. She represents the most anti-American, anti-Constitution, anti-white, anti-peace regime in US history. Top Democrats are concerned that Trump will not only take the swing states, despite the multiple theft mechanisms Democrats have in place, but also some blue states. Polls are revealing that a majority of men of color see Trump as a leader of America and Kamala as a destroyer of America. Those who control the Democrat party, most certainly not the people, are also disturbed by reports of the heavy early voting by Trump supporters. Trump encouraged early voting, because in 2020 Democrats managed to prevent many Trump supporters from voting on election day.

The downside to early voting by Trump supporters is it gives Democrats an idea how many votes they have to steal in order to “win.” It is a no-win situation for Trump supporters. If you wait until election day, voting machine failure, closed precincts, and other excuses can be used to keep you from voting. But if you vote early, you signal to the Democrats how many votes they have to steal. They are well set up to steal them. The Democrats in two swing states have already said that it will be days before they will have the vote count. These days are the time they need to produce the fraud that wins for them. A Democrat and a free election are mutually exclusionary. Arizona officials, for example, say it will take 2 weeks to tabulate the vote count. The Democrats in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin say they are unable to declare election results for several days after the election.

Until 2020–the Big Steal–the US has not had a problem of producing a vote count on time. Why do Americans accept the election theft implied by a delayed vote count with ballot boxes coming in by the truck loads long after voting is closed? On October 14, I reported on this website that the Biden regime had issued one month before the presidential election a military directive 5240.01. The directive says the US military can be used to come to the aid of civilian police to quell domestic disturbance and can use lethal force against US citizens. I provided a link to the directive. Fourteen days later I have seen no mention of this directive in the presstitute media.

Now ask yourself where the authority comes from for an executive branch cabinet department to overturn an act of Congress. Where did the Biden regime Department of Defense get the authority to overturn American tradition and the Posse Comitatus Act? That there has been no protest against this illegal and unconstitutional Defense Department directive indicates how close the US is to a tyranny. As we learned from the hoax “Jan 6 Insurrection,” it is a simple matter for those in authority to declare “insurrections.” They can do it again. It has now been admitted that 200 federal agents were at work on January 6 trying to orchestrate an insurrection. Next time there will be 2,000. As the Democrats are in power, they can create an “insurrection” prior to the vote count.

[..] So, some of the swing states have said that election results will not be timely reported. When the results are misreported, the US military is there to use lethal force to suppress those who object. If Trump’s win is too lopsided to be subject to theft, there can be a cybersecurity attack that prevents a vote count. Putin and Trump can be blamed for an insurrection orchestrated by the FBI, and the Democrats will be declared by the American whore media as the winner. This sounds far-fetched, but it isn’t.

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“Israel could not gain overflight permissions from Turkey, Iraq or any of the Gulf Cooperation Council states (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman). Sean Matthews at Middle East Eye points out that as a result, the Israelis would have had to fly down the Red Sea, go west across the Gulf of Aden, and approach Iran from the Arabian Sea. It is a long way around.”

• The Enormous Constraints Faced By Netanyahu (Juan Cole)

The limited strikes on Iran carried out by Israeli fighter-jets early on Saturday morning Tehran time above all demonstrated the constraints under which even this extremist Israeli government has to operate. The bombings are said to have been limited to military targets, including missile manufacturing facilities.The first constraint Israel faced was logistical. The Netanyahu government could not have its fighter jets fly straight to Iran, which would have allowed a more extensive set of attacks. Israel could not gain overflight permissions from Turkey, Iraq or any of the Gulf Cooperation Council states (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman). Sean Matthews at Middle East Eye points out that as a result, the Israelis would have had to fly down the Red Sea, go west across the Gulf of Aden, and approach Iran from the Arabian Sea. It is a long way around. They would have had to bring along large hulking refueling planes. This long, clumsy flight path limited what the Israelis could accomplish.

Extremist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier not ruled out hitting Iran’s nuclear facilities or its oil fields. Iran, however, essentially held the GCC countries hostage, warning that if US-backed Israel hit Iranian oil fields, Tehran would retaliate against US-backed Arab oil monarchies in the Gulf such as Saudi Arabia. The Biden administration is trying to woo those countries into recognizing Israel, and having a berserker Israeli government draw them into hostilities with Iran would instead make these Arab countries flee both the US and the possible Israeli embrace. For some diplomatic purposes, as with detente with Iran, Saudi Arabia has already gone to China instead. According to Middle East Eye, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, had announced Tuesday that Iran had been promised by the Gulf Arabs that they would not allow their air space or soil to be used for Israeli attacks on Iran. At the same time, Joe Biden pressured Israel not to attack Iranian nuclear facilities or oil fields.

I view Netanyahu as an adventurer who has been attempting to widen the war so as to force the Biden administration to support him. Although Iran backs Hamas, the CIA assessed that the ayatollahs had no idea Hamas was planning to carry out the October 7 attacks, and, indeed, that the Iranian leadership had declined to support Hamas during the past year precisely because they were furious that Yahya Sinwar had tried to drag them into a war without so much as consulting them. Iran also put pressure on Hezbollah not to provoke a war with Israel. That is, though Iran certainly supports anti-Israel guerrilla groups in the region and enjoys harassing the Israelis through them and their rockets and drones, it doesn’t appear to have acted aggressively given the ferocity of Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza.

Netanyahu struck the Iranian embassy in Damascus last spring in an obvious attempt to bring Iran into the war, and Iran replied with a missile barrage that the US shot down. Then this summer Netanyahu assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the civilian head of the Hamas Party politburo (which is not the same as the al-Qassam Brigades paramilitary). The assassination was carried out in Tehran, in a clear attempt to get Iran’s goat. Likewise, Netanyahu’s creepy pager booby trap attack on Hezbollah personnel (and some Iranians, such as the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon) and his assassination of Hassan Nasrallah in September were in part aimed at humiliating Iran. Iran’s October 1 missile barrage at Israel was mostly shot down by the US, but some missiles got through and one hit an Israeli military base. This attack was revenge for the killings of Haniyeh and Nasrallah.

Israel’s riposte was so limited that it might well not elicit any response from Iran, drawing a line under this phase of the Israel-Iran conflict. But Netanyahu was forced into a limited response by the Arab Gulf states (two of which –Bahrain and the Emirates– recognize Israel) and by the Biden administration. The refusal of overflight permissions by the GCC states also limited what Israel could accomplished with its F-35s. I view Iran’s missile program as largely defensive. They have used it against Israel twice this year, and both came in response to Israeli provocations (provocations that I believe to be deliberate on Netanyahu’s part). Israel has made the point that its jets can now reach Iran with extensive refueling. Iran has made the point that a swarm of missile attacks can penetrate Israel’s missile defenses and hit an Israeli military base.

Each side is seeking some form of deterrence against the other, a deterrence that has broken down this year because of Israel’s aggression in Gaza and Lebanon and its anti-missile defenses. I think Iran will be satisfied if it feels that a restoration of deterrence has been achieved. I don’t think Netanyahu is defending; I think he is attacking and attempting to expand his influence in the region. For that reason, it will be difficult to reestablish deterrence between the two countries. For the moment, however, all-out war seems to have been averted.

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“..BRICS China crisscrossing Eurasia from east to west while BRICS Russia/Iran/India crisscross it from north to south..”

• BRICS Make History – Can They Keep the Momentum? (Pepe Escobar)

The not so simple twists of fate always allow certain cities to make their mark in History in ineffable ways. Yalta. Bretton Woods. Bandung – a 1955 de-colonization staple. And now Kazan. The BRICS summit in Kazan, capital of Tatarstan, under the Russian presidency was historic in more ways than one – followed with riveting attention by the whole Global Majority and with perplexity by a great deal of the declining Western order. It did not change the world – not yet. But Kazan should be seen as the departing station of a high-speed train journey towards the emerging multi-nodal new order. The metaphor was also spatial: the pavilions at the Kazan Expo center “station” holding the summit simultaneously connected to the airport and to the aero-express train to the city. The rippling effects of BRICS 2024 in Kazan will be perceived for weeks, months and years ahead. Let’s start with the breakthroughs.

The Kazan Manifesto
1.The Kazan Declaration. That is no less than a detailed diplomatic manifesto. Yet because BRICS is not a revolutionary agent – as its members do not share an ideology – arguably the next best strategy is to propose real reform, from the UN Agenda 2030 to the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, the WHO and the G20 (whose summit is next month in Rio). The kernel of the Kazan Declaration – which had been debated for months – is to move in practice towards in-depth institutional changes and to reject Hegemony. The Declaration will be presented to the UN Security Council. There’s no doubt the Hegemon will reject it. This paragraph sums up the reform drive: “We condemn the attempts to subject development to discriminatory politically motivated practices, including but not limited to unilateral coercive measures that are incompatible with the 5 principles of the UN Charter, explicit or implied political conditionality of development assistance, activities, aiming at compromising the multiplicity of international development assistance providers.”

2. The BRICS Outreach session. That was Bandung 1955 on macro-steroids: a microcosm of how the new, really de-colonized, non-unilateral world is being born. President Putin opened and handed the floor to the leaders and heads of delegations of other 35 nations, most at the highest level, including Palestine, plus the UN Secretary General. Quite a few speeches were nothing short of epic. The session lasted 3h25. It will be circulating all across the Global Majority for years. The session tied up with the announcement of the new 13 BRICS partners: Algeria, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkiye, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Vietnam. A strategic tour de force including 4 Southeast Asian powerhouses; the top two Central Asian “stans”; 3 Africans; 2 Latin Americans, and NATO member Turkiye.

3. The Russian BRICS presidency itself. Arguably no other nation would have been able to pull off such a complex and impeccably organized summit, held after over 200 BRICS-related meetings throughout the year across Russia conducted by unnamed sherpas, members of working groups and the BRICs Business Council. Security was massive – for obvious reasons, considering the odds of a false flag/terrorist attack.

4. Connectivity corridors. That is the main geoeconomic theme of Eurasia integration, and Afro-Eurasia integration as well. Putin explicitly named, more than once, the new growth drivers of the near future: Southeast Asia and Africa. Both happen to be key partners of several high-profile Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects. Additionally, Putin named the top two connectivity corridors of the future: the Northern Sea Route – which the Chinese describe as the Arctic Silk Road – and the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), where the three drivers are BRICS members Russia, Iran and India. So that translates as BRICS China crisscrossing Eurasia from east to west while BRICS Russia/Iran/India crisscross it from north to south, with ramifications in all latitudes. And with all the energy add-ons, with Iran positioning itself as a crucial energy hub, opening the finally feasible possibility of building the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, one of the unfinished sagas of what I described in the early 2000s as Pipelineistan.

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“..because of his “attitudes towards Ukraine.”

• Slovak PM Fico Warns Of Continued Attempts On His Life (RT)

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who survived an assassination attempt in May, has revealed that he faced a potential second attempt on his life, due to his stance on the Ukraine conflict. Fico was shot at close range by an activist who opposed the PM’s views on relations with Kiev. An armed man was detained at an event commemorating a World War II battle in eastern Slovakia in early October, the prime minister revealed in an interview to Bratislava-based internet outlet Standard on Sunday. Fico said the man “hates” him because of his “attitudes towards Ukraine.” According to the prime minister, “a fully loaded weapon” was found on the suspect when he passed through a metal detector. The event in question was held on October 6 to mark the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Dukla Pass between German and Soviet forces on the border with Poland. The celebrations were attended by Fico, Slovak President Peter Pellegrini, and members of the government and parliament.

Fico has been an outspoken critic of the EU’s policy of providing lethal aid to Ukraine in its fight with Russia, calling instead for a diplomatic solution to the conflict. In May, Fico was shot four times at close range by a man who, according to Slovakia’s Special Criminal Court, was largely motivated by the decision by the prime minister and his government not to send arms to Ukraine. “I was lucky,” Fico told Standard, commenting on the shooting. He went on to describe the alleged shooter, Juraj Cintula, as a political activist who had attended Fico’s public meetings while “probably” planning the attack. Following the shooting, Fico argued that the assassination attempt emanated from foreign-backed politicians who refuse to accept his government’s policies that prioritize Slovakia’s interests over the agendas of major Western powers.

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“Throughout its almost 90-year history, the carmaker has never closed a plant in its home country..”

• Volkswagen Planning Mass Layoffs – Workers’ Council Chief (RT)

Volkswagen is looking to significantly reduce its workforce in Germany and shut down several factories in the country, amid a major overhaul aimed at lowering costs and increasing return on sales, the head of the carmaker’s Works Council has announced. Daniela Cavallo explained to employees in Wolfsburg on Monday that Volkswagen management is “absolutely serious” about the plans and that the move is “not saber-rattling in the collective bargaining round,” Reuters reported. Throughout its almost 90-year history, the carmaker has never closed a plant in its home country. The last time it shut down any of its facilities was in 1988 in the US. “It is a firm intention to let the locations’ regions bleed dry and the clear intention to send tens of thousands of Volkswagen employees into mass unemployment,” Cavallo said.

Her comments come as the automotive giant has been negotiating for several weeks with unions over plans to overhaul its business in order to remain competitive in light of weaker demand from China and Europe. She did not specify which of the ten Volkswagen plants operating in Germany would be shut down or exactly how many of its roughly 300,000 workers in the country would be laid off, but noted that all remaining facilities would be affected by the changes and that “none of them are safe.” Cavallo also stated that Volkswagen management is demanding a 10% pay cut and no pay raises for the next two years. Cavallo stressed, however, that the German government must urgently come up with a plan to ensure that the country’s economy does not “go down the drain.”

She noted that Volkswagen and other European companies are in agreement as to the nature of the problems they are facing, such as slower-than-expected electric transition as well as fierce competition from Chinese automotive brands entering Europe. “We are not far apart when it comes to analyzing the problems. But we are miles apart on the answers to them,” Cavallo said. Earlier this month, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported that the German economy is expected to contract for a second year in a row as it struggles to keep up with soaring energy costs after cutting itself off from Russian gas. Over the past year, the German government has noted a 5.3% drop in the country’s industrial output as orders for domestic-made goods have also plummeted. Experts at the Berlin-based Forum for a New Economy have warned that Germany’s failures are expected to turn the 2020s into a “lost decade” for the country as it suffers “the worst economic downturn since World War II.”

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Oxi
https://twitter.com/i/status/1850729272089924043

 

 

Makary

 

 

RFK
https://twitter.com/i/status/1850974386528166152

 

 

Crow
https://twitter.com/i/status/1850822295465369739

 

 

Peggy and Molly
https://twitter.com/i/status/1850930525021823087

 

 

Squid

 

 

Good old days

 

 

 

 

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