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https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/05/04/the-neoconservatives-are-setting-up-the-world-for-nuclear-war/

The Neoconservatives Are Setting Up the World for Nuclear War

Oliver Stone on Facebook writes that rabid anti-Russian propaganda has set the stage for a false flag low-yield nuclear explosion in Ukraine that the world has been trained to interpret as Russia’s doing.  The success of Washington’s perception war and saturation of the CNN/Fox airwaves with condemnation of Russia could lead to hopes that a false flag nuclear event would bring down Putin’s government.  A new Yeltsin installed would return Russia to Washington’s control and leave China, alone, as the next target.  Such an event is not a fantasy.  It is an expression of Stone’s understanding of the neoconservatives commitment to Washington’s hegemony.  Biden officials have made it clear that they are at war with Russia, using Ukraine as a proxy, with the goal of exhausting Russia into weakness and disposing of Putin.  

A false flag event is not the only avenue to nuclear war.  The expansion of NATO to Finland and Sweden is another.  Washington is not only pressuring the governments to apply for NATO membership but also is bribing Swedish and Finnish government officials to do so.  

Think about this expansion of NATO for a minute.  One reason for Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is the stark refusal of Washington and NATO to take Russia’s security concerns seriously.  Ukraine’s membership in NATO is totally unacceptable to Russia, so why was it pushed?  With Western intervention in Ukraine threatening to spin the conflict out of control, why pour gasoline on the fire by bringing Sweden and Finland into NATO?  Currently Scandinavia and the Baltics are nuclear free.  Finland’s entry into NATO would bring more NATO to Russia’s border, a development that the Kremlin has declared as unacceptable. By piling on more provocations, Washington and NATO are intentionally widening a conflict that was deliberately provoked.

Clearly, it is irresponsible for Finland and Sweden to further destabilize the situation by joining NATO.  Dmitry Medvedev has made it clear that NATO membership would mean the end of the nuclear-free Baltic.  More NATO on Russia’s border creates an imbalance that Russia would have to correct with deployment of hypersonic nuclear missiles.  How can it be possible for the governments of Finland and Sweden to regard NATO membership as an increase in security when the result is to have their countries targeted with nuclear weapons? Finland and Sweden are in no danger of being attacked by Russia unless they join NATO.  No one in their right mind would see NATO membership for Finland and Sweden as anything but a reckless act of destabilization.  Like Switzerland, Finland and Sweden have benefitted from their neutrality.  It is nonsensical for them to turn themselves into nuclear targets.

Everyone needs to understand that the neoconservatives’ ideology of hegemony is an expansionist ideology like  original 20th century International Communism.  It is the American Empire that is expanding toward Russia, not Russia expanding into the West.  It is truly amazing how opposite from the truth the anti-Russian propaganda is.  Sooner or later the Kremlin will comprehend that Russia’s enemies are the American neoconservatives and that the pressure point on the neoconservatives is Israel.

As my audience knows, I have been concerned for years that Russia’s low-key response to provocations brings about more and more dangerous provocations that eventually will bring Armageddon upon us.  I saw recently that the Chinese government thinks similarly when a Chinese spokesman said that China can accept no provocation from Washington as the result would be more and worse provocations.

The Kremlin’s policy of relying on reason, negotiations, and good will has not been reciprocated by the West.  The Kremlin’s limited military operation in Ukraine was not of sufficient ferocity to convince the West to abandon its policy of provocation.  It seems Washington will continue its provocations until the fatal line is crossed.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/nancy-nazis/5779361

Nancy and the Nazis. Speaker of the House Arrived Unannounced in Ukraine

On April 30, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, arrived unannounced in Ukraine with a small congressional delegation. Pelosi met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and received the Order of Princess Olga (or Olha) award. It is an ideal award for a woman who celebrated the gruesome murder of Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi by Obama and his NATO assassins.

The Speaker said the illegal presence of the US in Syria is justified and it would be “dangerous” to withdraw troops. Pelosi and fellow Democrat powerbroker Chuck Schumer, however, flip-flopped on the use of troops abroad after Donald Trump became president. Pelosi pushed the widely debunked chemical attack in Syria supposedly “resulting in the deaths of more than 1,400 people, including hundreds of children,” she wrote in a letter to fellow Democrats.

In 2019, WikiLeaks published a report indicating there was vigorous dissent surrounding a bogus claim at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The OPCW files “show that serious concerns have been raised by members of the OPCW Fact Finding Mission (FFM) to Douma about evidence that was excluded from the final report in order to implicate Assad.”

“The international community must respond to this atrocity with strength and unity, and a thorough investigation.  Putin must be held accountable for his cynical support of Assad, and for enabling these war crimes,” Pelosi added on her official government web page.

So, of course, it is all about the “New Hitler,” Vladimir Putin. Not mentioned by Pelosi are two indisputable facts: first, Russia was invited by Syria to help defeat US-spawned Islamic terrorists, and second, the US received no such invitation and is in the country illegally, stealing oil and establishing military bases.

Pelosi, wearing one her trademark pantsuits, said her visit is intended to “send an unmistakable and resounding message to the entire world: America stands firmly with Ukraine.”

In other words, Pelosi, Biden, the Democrats, and no shortage of Republicans, stand firmly behind a government run in large part by avowed racist nationalists responsible for overthrowing an elected government in 2014 (a feat engineered by Obama’s State Department) and turning a blind eye to the organized mass murder of ethnic Russians in the Donbas and elsewhere in Ukraine.

Actually, awarding the Order of Princess Olga medal to Pelosi is appropriate. The myth states that Grand Prince Ihor of the Kyivan Rus was killed during a war with the Drevlians, a tribe of Early East Slavs who refused to pay tribute to the prince, and as a result his wife, Olha, avenged his murder “in an extremely harsh manner, killing Drevlian ambassadors and nobility, burning their capital of Iskorosten to the ground and leveling other towns,” the Euromaidan Press explains.

In short, Pelosi received a  medal celebrating ethnic cleansing, the sort of behavior the nationalist right in Ukraine is attempting to inflict on ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers in the Donbas and southern Ukraine, including Crimea.

It is an irony lost on the American people. If recent polls can be believed, an overwhelming number of Americans believe the US should continue sending billions of dollars worth of military hardware to the Zelenskyy government and his neo-Nazi goons, although, now that Russia has invaded, all mention of the extremist nature of the Azov Battalion, Right Sector, Svoboda, the National Corps, Carpathian Sich, Democratic Ax, White Hammer, Trizub, and other far-right political groups and paramilitaries are assiduously avoided by the narrative-following corporate media.

On April 30, headlines should have read, “Zelenskyy Makes Deal with Nazis,” but instead there was primarily silence.

Zelenskyy is pushing to have Serhiy Sternenko head up Ukraine’s security service, SBU. Sternenko, a rightwing activist in his late 20s, commanded the Odesa regional branch of the Right Sector (Pravy Sektor), an organization at the forefront of the US State Department orchestrated color revolution in 2014.

Right Sector was formed a year prior to the coup and its original confederation consisted of street fighting soccer hooligans and skinheads, a modern version of a loosely organized Freikorps paramilitaries and brownshirts during the Weimer Republic in Germany following WWI.

Sternenko was convicted of “illegal deprivation of liberty” in the kidnapping of Serhiy Shcherbych, a member of the Kominternivske District Council of the Odesa region. “Serhii Sternenko was sentenced to 7 years and 3 months of imprisonment with confiscation of half of his property. Another subject of the case Ruslan Demchuk received the same sentence,” Zmina reported in February 2021.

Despite this conviction—ruled to be political intimidation, not robbery—Sternenko may soon be calling the shots at the highest state security service in a notoriously corrupt Ukraine. In 2015, Dmytro Yarosh, the former leader of Right Sector, was appointed an advisor to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, thus signaling a further integration of neo-nazism and racist ideology at the highest levels of the government.

Far-right or ultra-nationalist “shock troops” played an instrumental role in the 2014 coup.

It was “openly supported by the imperial powers in the United States and Europe, relied on far-right shock troops such as the fascist organization Right Sector and the ultranationalist Svoboda Party to overthrow the elected government of Viktor Yanukovych,” reports MRonline. “Three members of Svoboda were installed as members of the first post-coup government, and the co-founder of Svoboda, Andriy Paruby, was parliamentary speaker for five years.”

Considering the sort of lickspittles the state hires to report the “news” (manufactured “big lie” narratives), it is not surprising we hear so little about the real face of the government in Ukraine. The propaganda wranglers understand very well the average American cannot recall history past the last 72 hours or so. They know John and Jane Q. Public will respond appropriately if the “news” shows relentless images of dead civilians, bombed out cities, and scads of refugees, especially the children, and attributes all the misery, destruction, and death, minus any credible evidence, on Russia. Minus Big Lies and fabrications, and presented with objective facts on both sides of a story, the average person would undoubtedly arrive at a far different conclusion than the one they have now accepted. More than a quarter of Americans actually believe war against Russia is feasible and winnable. Delusions have turned pathological.

Sorry to say, I am not hopeful. Nancy Pelosi’s photo op in Ukraine and the muster of Democrats and Republicans to do something more than merely ship expensive arms (that are now being targeted by Russia) to Ukraine. Of course, Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin don’t have a problem with this.

The stock market casino rollercoaster is teetering, inflation is moving into double digits, the supply line snafus are multiplying in number and consequence as the price of the diesel fuel that essentially runs modern civilization is now well over five dollars a gallon. It won’t be long before people begin complaining, even reticent Americans. It won’t be long before political violence flares up in earnest.

The ruling financial elite believe they can divert our attention away from the above problems with a good old-fashion war—and slip in a worldwide tyrannical new Bretton Woods “Great Reset” in the aftermath.

Such cavalier recklessness with thermonuclear weapons and other WMDs—including biowarfare labs in Ukraine—have put humanity in supreme danger. It’s not an exaggeration to say we are a minute or less before midnight on the Doomsday Clock.

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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogapr22/not-1970s4-22.html

Not the 1970s or the 1920s: We're in Uncharted Territory

The awakening of inflation after decades of slumber has triggered a flurry of comparisons to the 1970s accompanied by a chorus of projections for 1970s-type stagflation, defined as inflation plus economic stagnation-- limited or negative growth and high unemployment.

A less popular comparison is with the 1920s: a massive expansion of debt, an equally massive speculative bubble in assets and extreme wealth-income inequality, all against a backdrop of slowing growth and debt saturation.

Each of these eras shares certain characteristics with the present, but beneath the surface there are consequential systemic differences. Let's start with the 1970s.

The oil shock that fueled inflation had two sources: 1) the oil-exporting nations took control of their hydrocarbon resources and repriced them in the context of 2) declining reserves and production in the West, particularly the U.S., which had been the Saudi Arabia of the world through the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

A second, much less understood dynamic was the immense investment required to clean up the U.S. industrial base. Pollution in the U.S. was out of control by the early 1970s, with toxic rivers catching fire and high levels of air pollution. The oil shock prompted federal regulations on pollution and improvements in the basic efficiency of appliances, vehicles, etc.

This was a major sea change for the entire industrial sector, and it required immense investments of capital and a painful learning curve. This diversion of capital depressed profits and acted as an economy-wide tax on the system. In today's money, the overall cost of this transition was in the trillions of dollars.

The debt levels in the 1970s were by today's standards absurdly modest. The cultural values of frugality and avoidance of debt still held, and there was resistance to heavy public-private borrowing that has completely vanished.

The demographics of the 1970s was also completely different from today. The 65-million strong Baby Boom generation was entering the workforce and starting families and enterprises. The demographic double-whammy was the mass entry of women into the workforce as opportunities and ambitions expanded.

Meanwhile, the energy picture was brightening under the radar as the development of newly discovered super-giant oil fields in Alaska, the North Sea and Africa began. It took many years to bring these new hydrocarbon sources online, but by the mid 1980s, the price of oil had fallen to lows that slashed the income of oil exporting nations, including the Soviet Union.

None of these conditions are present today. Much of America's domestic production was offshored in the past 20 years, the demographics are no longer as favorable (soaring population of elderly and flatlined workforce) and the production from the super-giant fields brought online in the 1970s is declining. There are no new super-giant fields in the global pipeline to replace those in the depletion phase of declining production.

As for the 1920s: the parallels are debt saturation and speculative excess against a backdrop of an economy that feasted on debt-fueled spending and speculation while absorbing new technologies.

The differences are the U.S. still had immense natural resources and relatively limited infrastructure in the 1920a. While private debt was through the roof--$100 in a stock market account leveraged $900 in stock purchases due to the 10% cash margin requirement--federal debt was still modest compared to modern levels.

This set the stage for massive expansions of federal debt in World War II that funded sustained investments in infrastructure through the 1940s, 50s and 60s.

In the present, we have all the fragilities of the 1920s and few of the strengths. We have all the debt saturation and speculative bubble excesses but our resources have been heavily tapped and every sector of the economy is heavily indebted.

All of these similarities and differences are setting up a sea-change revaluation of capital, resources and labor that will be on the same scale as the tumultuous transformations of the 1920s and 1970s.

We're in uncharted territory. More on these revaluations next week.