News Articles | February 27, 2022

February 27, 2022March 4, 2022 Robert Heston EPA, imperialism, NATO, Oil, Politics, pollution, propaganda, Putin, Russia, sanctions, Somalia, Ukraine, Uncategorized, War

*This essay, like my forthcoming CounterPunch+ review of Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective’s book White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism, was written before the news cycle was taken over by the imperial “Ukraine Crisis.” One of the functions of war hysteria is to create a giant atavistic and nationalist fog that erases public attention and consciousness regarding underlying social, political economic, and environmental oppression within and across nation states. The reigning oppression and exploitation structures – themselves the taproot of war, imperialism, and empire – of course do not actually go away amidst international conflict. They just get more lost in translation than usual. The racist police state war on Black America – cleverly labelled “Operation Ghetto Storm” by the Malcolm X Grassroots Committee years ago– will continue apace during and after the latest imperial drama.

“Almost Every City Has a George Floyd” – and a Milton Hall

I almost never cease to be stunned by the white racist violence of the U.S.-American criminal justice system. Last fall we learned from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) that police violence killed more than 30,000 people – two people per day on average – between 1980 and 2018. Horrible enough in and of itself, the police state’s body count was very disproportionately Black and nonwhite. The IHME found that: READ MORE

“Legitimate political discourse” is an interesting phrase. Three weeks ago the Republican National Committee (RNC) voted overwhelmingly to call the violent putschist Capitol Rioters of January 6, 2021 “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.” That was their phrase for fascist marauders who:

+ Said “we’re going to take out country back” as they headed to physically assault the legislative branch of the US government.

+ Screamed “Hang Mike Pence” while invading the US Capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power after the 2020 election.

+ Constructed gallows intended for the execution of Pence and other elected officials on the steps of the Capitol. READ MORE

The United States’ descent into pandemicist and neofascist Hell (something I have documenting for some time here at CounterPunch and recently in a new book titled This Happened Here) under the eco-cidal command of capital continues apace.

Stupid and Selective Censorship Concerns

The comments sections of mainstream US news Websites are abuzz with angry Amerikaners’ hatred of Neil Young. Young stands idiotically accused of “censorship” for making the personal moral and business decision to tell Spotify to take down his music if the company insisted on maintaining its contract with the racist podcaster and mediocre blowhard Joe “Planet of the Apes” Rogan, a self-described “moron” who has offered platforms to fascist propagandists (e.g. Andy Ngo and Gavin McInnes) while helping spread mass murderous anti-vax misinformation on Covid-19. READ MORE

Joe “Never Called me Boy” Biden is now poised to fulfill his campaign promise to “put a Black woman on the US Supreme Court.” Biden will do so with undeniable symbolic justice and the white nationalist right will wage neofascistic culture war against his nominee. It’ll be both disgusting and amusing to watch sexually anxious Amerikaner Republicans bitch and moan about the possibility that their top white male judicial preserve will be polluted and degraded by “affirmative action.”

Still, the neoliberal Democrats’ identitarian obsession with the color and gender of faces in high places has its own reactionary aspects. In and of itself, there’s something infantilizing about a pledge “to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court.” At the risk of stating the obvious, neither one’s race nor one’s gender make someone the kind of person decent citizens want sitting on the highest court in the land – or the kind of person who could be expected to take aim at racism and/or sexism, deeply (institutionally and societally) understood. READ MORE

In 2015 and 2017, the Watchdog Media Institute released a 22-part video series on Maidan and Kiev’s war on ethnic Russians. Watch the summary 25-minute film and the entire series here.

Produced and presented by the Watchdog Media Institute, here is a chronological archive of events in Ukraine from the beginning of the Euromaidan protests in November 2013 to the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014. Hundreds of various sources are presented without commentary and in context, allowing the viewer to adequately interpret the information themselves. Research & Editing by: Chris Nolan. Subtitles by: Angelina Siard & Ollie Richardson. This video series presents an invaluable background to the beginnings of the war in Ukraine that eventually led to the Russian intervention on Thursday, a war which Russian President Vladimir Putin said he wasn’t starting, but trying to end.

“MUST WATCH. Take your time, watch it carefully, keep it for reference.” – Pepe Escobar

“Incredible documentary of US overthrow of democracy in Ukraine.” – Cynthia McKinney

WATCH

I was in Eastern Europe in 1989 reporting on the revolutions that overthrew the ossified communist dictatorships that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a time of hope. NATO, with the breakup of the Soviet empire, became obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev reached out to Washington and Europe to build a new security pact that would include Russia. Secretary of State James Baker in the Reagan administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured the Soviet leader that if Germany was unified NATO would not be extended beyond the new borders. The commitment not to expand NATO, also made by Great Britain and France, appeared to herald a new global order. We saw the peace dividend dangled before us, the promise that the massive expenditures on weapons that characterized the Cold War would be converted into expenditures on social programs and infrastructures that had long been neglected to feed the insatiable appetite of the military. READ MORE

“How many divisions does the Pope have?”

—Joseph Stalin

Despite the impressive TikTok feeds showing the Russian phalanx heading in formations across the Ukrainian frontier and the missile extravaganza across the country, the success of the Russian army as an instrument of foreign policy is little better than average (perhaps not unlike the American army, which itself hasn’t won a war in seventy-seven years).

For all that the Russian President Vladimir Putin is staking his faith (if not his political survival) on the efficacy of his military’s combined arms to carry out his Soviet risorgimento, a recounting of Russia’s battles and wars in the last two hundred years would suggest that many of its campaigns have ended in ways not projected when earlier tsars and commissars unleashed the dogs of war.

The 1904 Russo-Japanese War

Take, for example, the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War that was intended to establish Russia as a Far Eastern power—with its Trans-Siberian railway reaching its terminus in the warm waters of Port Arthur on the far end of the Liaotung Peninsula. READ MORE

Unlike many observers, I am not surprised at Russia’s military actions in Ukraine. Without being sympathetic to the regime in Moscow, it is fair and reasonable to write that Washington’s determined refusal to reject the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine pretty much determined the course Moscow would take. As Washington has proved over and over in the post-World War II era, superpowers turn to military action when their patience runs thin. In Washington’s case, that patience has usually been much shorter than that of Moscow.

Moscow’s military intervention is wrong. Unlike its interventions, while it was the capital of the Soviet Union—interventions which were often in support of anti-colonial struggles for national liberation—this intervention in Ukraine is just twenty-first-century imperialism. Like Washington’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and its insinuation into dozens of nations around the world under the guise of a war on terror, Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine is a forceful attempt to impose its will on a government it has no use for, but whose land and resources it hopes to control. READ MORE

War has begun in Ukraine and where it heads next is uncertain. Leading up to the Russian recognition of the break away regions of Ukraine one heard repeated assertions by US President Joe Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken that diplomacy was still possible. Such an assertion was premised upon a false set of beliefs or assumptions that the US has about Europe and the world which it assumes Russia accepts but does not.

What does the US believe and in turn, not understand about the world? The answer is a lot. Nearly 50 years ago David Halberstram’s Best and the Brightest and Frances Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake described the myopic view of US foreign policy. It was a vision that was built on a set of assumptions about the world that began in 1945. READ MORE

After Russian President Vladimir Putin directed Russian military forces to attack Ukraine, US President Joe Biden condemned the Russian attack as an act of “premeditated war.” Biden’s condemnation seems hollow when one recalls the history of “premeditated” US support for aggression and violence.

Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arberry, Daunte Wright, Philando Castille, Alton Sterling, Rekia Boyd, and many other Black people were slaughtered by government agents in the United States.

No US president – including former president Barack Obama – condemned that systemic pattern of “premeditated war.”

The United States invaded Iraq on March 3, 2003. For the next nine (9) years, over a million US military personnel occupied that nation. More than 4500 US military personnel were killed. More than 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed.

The war in Iraq was “premeditated.” READ MORE

Republicans, conservative pundits and Big Oil took less than 24 hours after Russia invaded Ukraine to begin advocating for more oil drilling and fracking in the name of supposed energy independence.

As climate journalists Amy Westervelt and Kate Aronoff pointed out on Thursday, news outlets like Bloomberg and conservative commentators like The Atlantic’s David Frum are calling for expanding oil production and fracking in response to the conflict, even though the U.S. is currently already producing near its limit.

“Fracking may be America’s most powerful weapon against Russian aggression,” read an op-ed from a Bloomberg columnist who formerly led a Standard Oil and Koch family funded think tank. READ MORE

Since mid-2020, inflation has been rising, with the level of average prices going up at a faster rate than it has since the early 1980s. In January 2022, prices had increased by 7.5 percent compared to prices in January 2021, and it now looks like the U.S. may be stuck with higher inflation in 2022 and even beyond.

Why are prices rising so dramatically? Are we heading toward double-digit inflation? Can anything be done to curb inflation? How does inflation impact growth and unemployment? Renowned progressive economist Robert Pollin provides comprehensive responses to these questions in the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows. Pollin is distinguished professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. READ MORE

"Changing the name doesn't change the fact that the Direct Contracting program is backdoor privatization of Medicare," said one progressive advocate.

Rejecting pressure to terminate the program in its entirety, the Biden administration on Thursday announced it is redesigning a Trump-era experiment that physicians and progressive lawmakers have criticized as a scheme to fully privatize Medicare.

Instead of ending what's known as the Direct Contracting model, which the Trump administration officially launched in 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) gave the program a new name: ACO REACH, which stands for Accountable Care Organization Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health.

In addition to the name change and fresh veneer—a step in line with the healthcare industry's call for a "rebranding"—CMS said the program will now span four years instead of eight and will include requirements aimed at ensuring "transparency" and "equity." READ MORE

"We are defending the country, the land of our future children," said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. "Kyiv and key cities around the capital are controlled precisely by our army."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy implored people in the capital of Kyiv to brace for an all-out Russian assault overnight, and as a result of intense resistance from the Ukrainian military and civilians alike, they were able to fend off the invading army, though fighting continues throughout the country on Saturday morning.

Just after midnight, Zelenskyy warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces would storm Kyiv in "vile, cruel, and inhuman" fashion, according to a translation by Max Seddon, the Moscow bureau chief at Financial Times.

"We have to persevere tonight," said Zelenskyy. "The fate of Ukraine is being decided right now. The night will be hard, very hard, but there will be a morning."

After another excruciating night spent in bomb shelters, basements, and subway stations, the residents of Kyiv awoke with the city still in the hands of mayor Vitali Klitschko and the Ukrainian government still under Zelenskyy's control. READ MORE

"You do not, in fact, have to choose between American and Russian imperialisms," wrote one anti-war reporter. "The correct choice is to detest and resist both."

Just before Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale military assault on Ukraine, which has drawn accusations of potential war crimes and received global condemnation, the United States hit Somalia with the latest drone attack in its 15-year war against the impoverished nation.

In a statement released Wednesday, the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) said its Tuesday airstrike targeted suspected al-Shabab militants "after they attacked partner forces in a remote location near Duduble."

The first known U.S. airstrike in Somalia in 2022 was the fifth since the start of President Joe Biden's tenure in the White House.

"Before him, Donald Trump escalated the U.S. war in Somalia like no one else had, bombing the country more in the first two years of his presidency than Barack Obama had in eight, all the way up to January 19, 2021," journalist and author Spencer Ackerman wrote Thursday on his Forever Wars blog. "George W. Bush plunged the U.S. into conflict in Somalia in the first place in 2006." READ MORE

Community groups call for fenceline monitoring, removal of unlawful pollution loopholes.

WASHINGTON -

This week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) agreed to update pollution rules for some of the most hazardous chemical manufacturers, including facilities that emit the potent carcinogen ethylene oxide. The decision stems from a lawsuit filed by seven community and advocacy groups in December of 2020. A federal court in D.C. this week entered a consent decree that binds EPA to begin this new rulemaking in 2022 and issue a new final rule no later than spring 2024.

EPA will update the rules for more than 200 facilities in the Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturing Industry, or SOCMI, a category of plants that include some of the biggest known emitters of ethylene oxide, chloroprene, and other harmful air toxics. SOCMI plants are especially concentrated in Texas and Louisiana. They disproportionately affect Black, Latino, and low-income communities. Other states with SOCMI facilities include West Virginia, Illinois, and Ohio. READ MORE

The Ukraine crisis has plunged Germany into an intense debate about how it will heat its homes and power its industry in future, summed up in the short question: cCn Europe’s largest economy function without Vladimir Putin’s gas?

The Green federal economics minister, Robert Habeck, answered with a decisive “yes, it can,” a day after the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, announced the suspension of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was meant to deliver from Russia as much as 70 percent of Germany’s gas requirements. There are considerable doubts as to whether the $11 billion project will ever now go ahead.

But even before Russian troops invaded Ukraine on Thursday morning, NS2 was just a small part of the wider discussion some say Germany has been far too slow to have. At stake is nothing less than the future of German—and by extension European—energy security. READ MORE

WATCH: CN Live! — ‘Russia Hits Back’

The program looks at Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, its causes, its aims, and its likely aftermaths with Alexander Mercouris, Mark Sleboda, Scott Ritter and Tony Kevin.

After 30 years of NATO expansion towards its borders, and eight-years of a coup regime’s attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine, Russia has taken military action to “demilitarize” and “de-nazify” the country.

The world has rallied against Moscow, seeking to destroy its economy. It seems like that was the plan along. Russian President Vladimir Putin fully explained the reasons for Russia’s military intervention, which has been totally ignored by the corporate media. Instead it portrays him as a madman hellbent on conquering Europe. If you disagree with that assessment, of course, you are his puppet.

To discuss the unfolding developments and their historical backgrounds we are joined from Moscow by political analyst Mark Sleboda; also from Moscow by Tony Kevin, a former Australian ambassador to Poland and Cambodia, who was posted to the embassy in Moscow in the last days of the Soviet Union; from London by political analyst and Duran editor, Alexander Mercouris; and from upstate New York by military analyst, former counterintelligence officer and U.N. weapons inspector, Scott Ritter.

Putin has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the goal of which he claims is not to occupy the country but to “demilitarize” and “de-Nazify” it. We’ve no reason to put blind faith in any of those claims. Only time will tell.

As of this writing dozens have reportedly been killed so far. All war is horrific. We can only hope that this one winds up being the least horrific a war can be.

Some thoughts:

1. This whole thing could very easily have been avoided with a little bit of diplomacy. The only reason that didn’t happen was it would have meant the US empire taking a teensy, weensy step back from its agenda of total planetary domination.

I’ve seen people call it “sad” or “unfortunate” that western powers didn’t make basic low-cost, high-yield concessions like guaranteeing no NATO membership for Ukraine and having Kyiv honor the Minsk agreement, but it’s not sad, and it’s not unfortunate. It’s enraging. That they did this deserves nothing but pure, unadulterated, white hot rage. READ MORE or LISTEN

Bear baiting was long ago banned as inhumane. Yet today, a version is being practiced every day against whole nations on a gigantic international scale.

In the time of the first Queen Elizabeth, British royal circles enjoyed watching fierce dogs torment a captive bear for the fun of it. The bear had done no harm to anyone, but the dogs were trained to provoke the imprisoned beast and goad it into fighting back. Blood flowing from the excited animals delighted the spectators.

This cruel practice has long since been banned as inhumane.

And yet today, a version of bear baiting is being practiced every day against whole nations on a gigantic international scale. It is called United States foreign policy. It has become the regular practice of the absurd international sports club called NATO.

United States leaders, secure in their arrogance as “the indispensable nation,” have no more respect for other countries than the Elizabethans had for the animals they tormented. The list is long of targets of U.S. bear baiting, but Russia stands out as prime example of constant harassment. And this is no accident. The baiting is deliberately and elaborately planned. READ MORE

The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in August last year has caused the country to implode. It was already on life support after more than 40 years of war but the swift removal of most foreign aid has led to millions of Afghans being on the brink of starvation.

Women’s rights are highly reduced. The United Nations says that only 2 percent of the population is getting enough to eat. Tens of millions of people can’t support themselves or their families. The harshest drought in 30 years is worsening an already disastrous winter.

However, the humanitarian crisis is just one of the disturbing elements of this long-running catastrophe.

A Declassified UK and Declassified Australia investigation has found that British and Australian resource companies tried to access the war-torn nation’s estimated $3 trillion of untapped minerals in the years after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. READ MORE

A new study finds PFAS in private and public drinking water wells in 16 U.S. states.

If you get your drinking water from an underground well, it may be contaminated with toxic forever chemicals.

A new study from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) found at least one perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS) in 20 percent of private wells and 60 percent of public wells in 16 states in the Eastern U.S.

“This should set off alarm bells for anyone relying on private well water,” Environmental Working Group (EWG) vice-president of government affairs Scott Faber told The Guardian. “One out of five people getting their water from wells could be drinking PFAS – that’s a big number.”

The research was published in Environmental Science & Technology early this month. In 2019, the USGS collected 254 samples from five aquifer systems used as drinking water. The water was then tested for 24 different PFAS, 14 of which were detected. READ MORE

And, aside from the impotent imposing of economic sanctions on Russia and on its leaders and oligarch supporters, the U.S. has admitted there is nothing it or its NATO puppet states can do.

The Western nations and especially the United States awoke today to a new world.

After decades of hearing U.S. politicians boastingly describe the U.S. as the “exceptional nation,” justifying its repeated violation of international law with invasions of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, El Salvador, and “regime change interventions in a host of other countries, because it could. All the while Washington has been telling the rest of the nations of the world that they must strictly obey the “rules-based order” of international relations, that countries do not invade or violate the borders of other countries, suddenly there is another nation that has decided it is “exceptional.”

Vladimir Putin’s Russia has now simply flaunted international law and launched an all-out war on Ukraine, a nation (the largest in Europe geographically) bordering it in eastern Europe. READ MORE

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked Russian President Vladimir Putin for negotiations to “stop the dying” as Russian forces strike the country’s capital city of Kyiv. “Let us sit down at the negotiating table in order to stop the dying,” he said in a video address on Friday, according to a translation from the New York Times.

Zelensky added: “I want to turn again to the president of the Russian Federation… Fighting is taking place across the entire territory of Ukraine.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday that Putin is ready to send officials to the Belarusian capital of Minsk for discussions, according to Russian news agencies translated by the Wall Street Journal.
In response to Zelensky’s offer, Vladimir Putin is ready to send to Minsk a Russian delegation,” Peskov told reporters, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Peskov officials from the defense and foreign ministries and the president’s office would be part of the delegation, the Wall Street Journal reported. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called overnight strikes on Kyiv “horrific,” and compared the situation to attacks from Nazi Germany in 1941. READ MORE

With so much news about Ukraine, inflation, massive government spending and exploding deficits, it’s easy to overlook the ongoing war on cash. That’s a mistake because it has serious implications not only for your money, but for your privacy and personal freedom, as you’ll see today.

The war on cash is a global effort being waged on many fronts. My view is that the war on cash is dangerous in terms of lost privacy and the risk of government confiscation of wealth.

Governments always use money laundering, drug dealing and terrorism as excuses to keep tabs on honest citizens and deprive them of the ability to use money alternatives such as physical cash, gold and, these days, cryptocurrencies.

The real burden of the war on cash falls on honest citizens who are made vulnerable to wealth confiscation through negative interest rates, loss of privacy, account freezes and limits on cash withdrawals or transfers.

The enemies of cash promote the ease and convenience of digital payments. Of course, there’s no denying that digital payments are certainly convenient. I use them myself in the forms of credit and debit cards, wire transfers, automatic deposits and bill payments. I’m sure you do too. READ MORE

Now we are being told that we are all going to “have costs” for the crisis in Ukraine. More specifically, the global energy crisis just took a dramatic turn for the worse, and so that means that all of us will soon be hit by dramatically higher energy prices. It is going to be much more expensive to fill up your vehicle, it is going to be much more expensive to heat your home, and increasing costs to transport the goods that we buy will make the overall rate of inflation even worse. Up to this point, a large chunk of the U.S. population really didn’t have much interest in following the conflict in Ukraine, but now it is going to have a huge impact on every single one of us.

In response to the Russians moving forces into Donetsk and Luhansk on Monday, the Germans decided on Tuesday to put the Nord Stream 2 pipeline on hold indefinitely… READ MORE

Yes, you probably already know that the American CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) has been reporting more instances of Covid shot adverse reactions and deaths than all previously recorded adverse reactions combined. But did you know that data from all over the world pertaining to Covid shot adverse reactions has been compiled and made public? Data from the Canadian government, the European Union, and the World Health Organization corroborates the American VAERS data and illustrates what will most probably be remembered as the biggest mass murder in history. This is EXACTLY the type of stuff that gets one banned from YouTube and have you seen the mainstream media cover this story in an appropriate fashion? Let’s look at the facts, shall we? WATCH

Pouring more weapons into Ukraine is not how you save lives; you save lives by negotiating a ceasefire. Pouring more weapons into Ukraine is how you create a long and expensive military quagmire for Russia at the cost of many thousands of lives to advance US strategic interests. While making a vast fortune for the arms industry.

Issuing a guarantee that you would never add a nation to NATO who you don’t plan on adding anyway is a no-brainer when the alternative is mass military butchery.

I mean, unless your goal was to provoke mass military butchery.

If the Kremlin wanted to kill large numbers of people it should have done so with starvation sanctions and proxy militias like a civilized government.

Fashion has moved on since the early 2000s, you savages. READ MORE or LISTEN

Chris Hedges introduces his latest article for Scheer Post, titled “Chronicle of a War Foretold“, with the following:

“After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a near universal understanding among political leaders that NATO expansion would be a foolish provocation against Russia. How naive we were to think the military-industrial complex would allow such sanity to prevail.”

Imperial narrative managers have been falling all over themselves working to dismiss and discredit the abundantly evidenced idea that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was due largely to Moscow’s fear of NATO expansion and the refusal of Washington and Kyiv to solidify a policy that Ukraine would not be added to the alliance. READ MORE or LISTEN

Who is to Blame?

Now that war has come, the question of who to blame must be fairly addressed; for to answer it is to suggest the contours of a possible resolution.

First of all, Russia has made a grave and deadly misstep. The invasion occurred at the very moment when it appeared to have attracted maximum attention to its legitimate grievances against NATO and the U.S., and when several Western European states were suing for peace. French president Emmanuel Macron’s shuttle diplomacy – conducted it appears, without U.S. sanction – was creating momentum for a settlement that might forever (or nearly so) deny Ukraine membership in NATO (a key Russian demand), plus provide added security guarantees. Other countries too were pressing for resolution of the conflict in order to protect their national, economic interests. READ MORE

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” — James Madison

War is the enemy of freedom.

As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse, “we the people” will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.

It’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.

This latest crisis—America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine—has conveniently followed on the heels of a long line of other crises, manufactured or otherwise, which have occurred like clockwork in order to keep Americans distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the government’s steady encroachments on our freedoms.

And so it continues in its Orwellian fashion. READ MORE

Commentary

The Party of Chaos Blows Its Cover

The Ukraine blow-up is more a humiliation for “Joe Biden” and his faction than for the US per se, for the truth is that we have scant interest in that corner of the world and what goes on there is none of our business, and never was….

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It is fair to say that the “Joe Biden” government dearly wanted a Russian invasion of Ukraine in order to divert attention from the “Joe Biden” government’s war on its own people in the United States. The table was nicely laid for it over many years, including, by the way, Mr. Trump’s vaunted gift of weaponry to Ukraine, which enabled and emboldened the Kiev regime to harass the Russian-speaking population of Donbas without relent. And the situation was aggravated by the deliberate negotiation-unworthiness (Russian term) of “Joe Biden” and Company, who refused to discuss the chief issue between the US and Russia, namely, the dishonest effort, in violation of written agreements dating from 1990, to enlist Ukraine in NATO, and thereby to place missiles on Russia’s border. The US disallowed something very similar in 1962, when the old USSR tried to put missiles in Cuba.

You are also seeing payback for the Maidan color revolution of 2014, engineered by John Kerry’s State Department and John Brennan’s CIA. We have been managing Ukraine backstage since then and, alas for that poor country, quite deceitfully. If you bother to read the recent statements of both “Joe Biden” and Mr. Putin, you will see exactly why and how the situation developed. You will also see an appalling difference in the quality of public utterance — as, say, the difference between Zippy the Pinhead and a Metternich.

I’ll get back to all that presently, but first let’s be clear about what “Joe Biden” & Co. seek to divert public attention from: the complete implosion of all the narratives that support the “Joe Biden” regime — and the campaign against Western Civ more generally by the sinister likes of Klaus Schwab and his global gang of Great Re-setters, including Bill Gates, George Soros, and many actors in America’s own Deep State.

The Covid-19 story is blowing up, and in a very ugly way for the American people. The news is finally wriggling free of our combined news media / social media censorship machine and that news is as follows: Covid-19 was a trip laid on the world to get rid of the irascible Mr. Trump and usher-in a system of digital social controls. The mRNA “vaccines” were all patented and ready to go before the virus even took off. The mRNA “vaccines” turned out to be ineffective and arguably more damaging than the Covid-19 virus. That last bit of news is now coming out in reports from the life insurance and funeral industries, which are showing an alarming increase in all-causes death, especially in people under 60 years of age.

It is also coming out that the CDC has wildly and recklessly falsified its own data throughout the Covid crisis, and that the “vaccine” safety trials were a complete fraud — which has led to the prospect of Moderna and Pfizer losing their liability shields, and, recently, to the crash of their share prices. The public is also learning that they were cruelly denied early treatments with well-proven off-label drugs that might have saved millions of lives. And yet, knowing all this, “Joe Biden” and his Democratic Party are to this day urging Americans to “go out and get vaccinated, get boosted,” in the words last week of the US president. You can’t be faulted if you suspect that they are deliberately trying to kill a lot of people.

The blow-up of the Covid-19 story will come to horrify even those Americans hypnotically locked into mass formation, and will lead to countless lawsuits and prosecutions. But in the meantime, we will be preoccupied with the blow-up of the financial system and the economy it is supposed to serve. The inflation horses are out of the barn and running wild. The Federal Reserve has finally succeeded in destroying the value of the dollar and, consequently, destroying the little that is left of middle-class life in the USA. At the same time, they have unleashed forces that will also destroy the fortunes of many upper-class people, too, as the stock and bond markets go south. Financial collapse is at hand, and “Joe Biden” doesn’t want you to pay attention to it. The Ukraine melodrama is a compelling distraction.

The John Durham special counsel operation gains more disturbing visibility each week. The public has been informed by his court filings that there is no longer any question as to who set the Russian Collusion game in motion (Hillary Clinton), how the FBI, DOJ, and the news media were enlisted to play their roles in it, and how the whole thing amounted to a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the chief executive. It is extremely serious stuff, the worst scandal and the grossest institutional failure in our history. There will be prosecutions and punishments, and half of America will have to process their own guilt in swallowing the story and going along with it.

Then there is the 2020 election narrative: that it was the fairest and most error-free contest in our history. The evidence that the opposite is true waits in several states, hidden in cardboard boxes, thumb-drives, routers, and stacks of depositions. At this late date, it can’t be corrected, but there is a fair chance that the public will realize it was played on that, too, and if we are very lucky, future elections will be held without dastardly Dominion vote tabulation machines or anything like them.

The Party of Chaos, “Joe Biden’s” Party, doesn’t want you to pay attention to any of that, or to a thousand other political insults they have inflicted on the country from BLM / Antifa riots to their dirty deals with social media, to their perversion of law enforcement, to their surveillance and persecution of loyal citizens as “domestic terrorists,” to the gender disorders in schools and sports… and on and on. And so, they invited with open arms the Russian operation against Ukraine to put an end to reckless provocations emanating from there. “Joe Biden” didn’t have to do anything, really, except pretend in bad faith to take part in a diplomatic solution, and then he stopped doing even that. The sanctions he imposed amount to the flimsiest window-dressing.

And now here is what I think is happening and will happen in Ukraine. The Russian aim is to neutralize Ukraine’s military capability — the means for harassing the eastern provinces known as the Donbas. That has been accomplished. Ukraine no longer has an air force, a navy, or a whole lot of weapons and munitions. It is surely in Russia’s interest to complete this operation in as few days as possible to minimize harm to civilian lives and property. The Ukrainians appear to understand that, too. The politicians and NGO organizations groomed by American sponsorship in Ukraine will be deactivated, relieved of their responsibilities, and put out of business. If Mr. Putin is prudent, he will not murder or persecute them. A regime friendly to Russia will eventually be installed. Keep in mind, Ukraine had been a province of Russia one way or another for more than two hundred years — except for the calamitous past thirty years — and Ukraine doesn’t really represent much more than an administrative and fiscal challenge. Russia’s ultimate interest in this matter is to stabilize its border.

We in the USA perhaps can’t appreciate that because our current government shows no interest in stabilizing our own border. (We will in the future, when the Party of Chaos is swept out of power.) I’ll refrain from speculating much on the broader geopolitical repercussions of Russia’s Ukraine operation, since it’s not over and there is still a chance for much to go awry. The general proposition that it represents a milestone in America’s loss of global power and credibility is probably correct. We have spent the last thirty years since the fall of the USSR invading and harassing one country after another, not always with altogether bad intentions, but always with disastrous results. It looks like we will have to take a break from that activity.

We have too much to look after and clean up with our own act. The Ukraine blow-up is more a humiliation for “Joe Biden” and his faction than for the US per se, for the truth is that we have scant interest in that corner of the world and what goes on there is none of our business, and never was, until we started meddling in it in 2014.

In the awakening underway here and now, Americans will see how so many of the ills and derangements of recent years are products of our own Deep State aligned with a perfidious party of the Left and other global actors. We have harmed ourselves terribly and can’t seem to stop — and we must stop it, beginning with calling off the Covid-19 “vaccine” crusade. That will come any day, I predict, and then the people who brought all of this grief on are going to have to answer for it.

James Howard Kunstler | kunstler.com/writings/clusterfuck-nation/

Having worked inside mainstream U.S. media during the beginning of the “War on Terror” and run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the differences in today’s war coverage are dizzying to me.

Civilians

While covering Russia’s horrific aggression in Ukraine, there is a real focus — as there always should be — on civilian victims of war. Today, the focus on that essential aspect of the Russian invasion is prominent and continuous — from civilian deaths to the trauma felt by civilians as missiles strike nearby.

Unfortunately, there was virtually no focus on civilian death and agony when it was the U.S. military launching the invasions. After the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 on false pretenses — made possible by U.S. mainstream media complicity that I witnessed firsthand — civilian deaths were largely ignored and undercounted through the years. READ MORE

Russia’s actions in Ukraine are to a great extent the culmination of the numerous humiliations that the West has inflicted on Russia over the past 30 years, writes Michael Brenner.

The Mafia is not known for its creative use of language beyond terms like “hitman,” “go to the mattresses,” “living with the fishes” and suchlike. There are, though, a few pithy sayings that carry enduring wisdom. One concerns honor and revenge: “If you are going to humiliate someone publicly in a really crass manner, make sure that he doesn’t survive to take his inevitable revenge.” Violate it at your peril.

That enduring truth has been demonstrated by Russia’s actions in the Ukraine which, to a great extent, are the culmination of the numerous humiliations that the West, under American instigation, has inflicted on Russia’s rulers and the country as a whole over the past 30 years.

They have been treated as a sinner sentenced to accept the role of a penitent who, clad in sackcloth, marked with ashes, is expected to appear among the nations with head bowed forever. No right to have its own interests, its own security concerns or even its own opinions. READ MORE

Preemptive war, whether in Iraq or Ukraine, is a war crime. It does not matter if the war is launched on the basis of lies and fabrications, as was the case in Iraq, or because of the breaking of a series of agreements with Russia, including the promise by Washington not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, not to deploy thousands of NATO troops in Eastern Europe, not to meddle in the internal affairs of nations on the Russia’s border and the refusal to implement the Minsk II peace agreement.

The invasion of Ukraine would, I expect, never have happened if these promises had been kept. Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed, and angry. But to understand is not to condone. The invasion of Ukraine, under post-Nuremberg laws, is a criminal war of aggression.

[Ed.: Russia says it intervened in the eight-year civil war in Ukraine to stop the massacre of ethnic Russians in Donbass led in part by openly neo-Nazi units.] READ MORE

Kremlin-backed media outlets have been banned throughout the European Union, both on television and on apps and online platforms. RT has lost its Sky TV slot in the UK, where the outlet is also blocked on YouTube. Australian TV providers SBS and Foxtel have dropped RT, and the federal government is putting pressure on social media platforms to block Russian media in Australia.

In the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Latvia, speaking in support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine will get you years in prison.

Twitter, historically the last of the major online platforms to jump on any new internet censorship escalation, is now actively minimizing the number of people who see Russian media content, saying that it is “reducing the content’s visibility” and “taking steps to significantly reduce the circulation of this content on Twitter”. This censorship-by-algorithm tactic is exactly what I speculated might emerge after former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey resigned back in November, due to previous comments supportive of that practice by his successor Parag Agrawal. READ MORE or LISTEN

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