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https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/30/patrick-lawrence-the-democrats-assault-on-diplomacy/

The Democrats’ Assault on Diplomacy

Actions speak louder than words and the Dems' "diplomacy first" approach has been all bark and no bite.  

It is only two years since Joe Biden, hitting the hustings in pursuit of the White House, had to promise big change on the foreign policy side. Americans were beyond weary of the forever wars. People were beginning to see that the Pentagon’s outlandish budget had everything to do with America’s miserable social welfare programs, collapsing infrastructure, poor public education, and so on.

“Diplomacy first” it was for Team Biden, resort to the military last. His main national security people—Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, William Burns—couldn’t stress the theme often enough. Lots of people—and I was not among them—thought it was terrif, a promising sign that the ship of state was at last changing course, that Burns, a former diplomat of ambassador rank, had been named director of the Central Intelligence Agency. No more covert ops and interventions.

Burns, I will remind readers, was among those who once upon a time counseled against advancing NATO eastward to Russia’s borders and provoking Moscow by arming the Ukrainians. 

“Time and time again, we’ve seen how over-reliance on military tools can lead us into policy quicksand,” Burns said in an interview with Foreign Policy in the spring of 2020. “Time and time again, we’ve fallen into the trap of overusing—or prematurely using—force. That tends to make diplomacy a distorted and underused afterthought.”

That was how the Biden people sounded back then. It was what many, many Americans wanted to hear. But the optimists didn’t quite understand that hearing it was all they were ever going to do. As soon as Biden won the November 2020 election and named the aforementioned to senior national security posts, all the talk of diplomacy went the way of “Build Back Better,” a higher minimum wage, no first use of nuclear weapons, and all the other promises Biden made and broke as quickly as you can say “No more support for the Yemen war.”

Burns—a second reminder—is now as hawkish as they come in support of the proxy war in Ukraine that lately has the whole world frightened of a nuclear exchange.

The recent fiasco following the “Dear Mr. President” letter the so-called progressive caucus published, modified, and outright retracted in 24 hours pushes our faces into many bitter truths. One of them is that diplomacy has not dropped from first resort to second or even last. It no longer rates consideration of any kind among the policy cliques and on Capitol Hill. A few years ago those of us who advocated a neo-détente with Russia wondered amid all the primitive attacks we endured whether our critics were criminalizing diplomacy. This is a pretty close call given the fallout since 29 of the 30 congresspeople who signed the infamous letter, which meekly proposed opening talks with Moscow, now cower pitifully in the corner.

Ro Khanna deserves mention here. The California Democrat is the sole signatory to stand by the letter amid the warmongers’ din, telling CNN last week that advocating a diplomatic channel between Washington and Moscow is nothing more than “common sense.” This is the case, open and shut, but common sense is plainly not welcome in the corridors of power anymore.  

I well recall thinking after Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and their “progressive” colleagues were elected to Congress in 2018 that all the fuss and fanfare was misplaced. I figured Washington would either eat them alive or force them to fold their cards and conform. We now have confirmation, if any were needed, that the latter of these has come to be. “The Squad,” whatever its members’ youthful altruism, is a pack of nebbishes in a heated competition with President Biden to see who can break more promises. Utterly useless.  

Lesson No. 2: For the moment, and it looks to be a long moment, it is impossible to present a case for an alternative foreign policy in this country. In the years before he died in 2020, Steve Cohen, the noted Russianist, used to say there was only one political party in America, the War Party. What I took then to be a clever figure of speech is now the grimmest of realities.

The letter that detonated a political explosion last week is the work of mice who forgot how to roar, if ever they knew. Its signatories took great care to protect their political flanks by opening with unreserved praise for Biden’s profligate military support for the Kyiv regime and an implicit condemnation of Russia. Only when these signals are sent does the letter suggest that the administration “pair the military and economic support the United States has provided to Ukraine with a proactive diplomatic push.”

For this the signers were called every name you can think of and some you probably cannot. Faced with a vociferous roomful of protestors who justly felt betrayed by her position on the war in Ukraine and the retracted letter, Ilhan Omar gave us the opening to another lesson. “I am sorry, you aren’t ‘antiwar protesters,’” she wrote on Twitter, “you are dangerous propagandists who are literally making a mockery of the antiwar movement. I have never had the pleasure of responding to [Russia’s] ridiculous internet disinformation in person before. Thank you for the opportunity.”

What a punk. And Omar’s punkery leads us to our next lesson.

Lesson No. 3: When the Democratic Party fingered Russia after Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing mail was leaked in 2016, it was soon evident that in the small cause of Clinton’s political reputation the Democratic elite was perfectly willing to set loose a wave of paranoiac Russophobia with vast geopolitical consequences. There is a straight line between that episode and the “diplomacy never” line now prevalent in Washington. The state of hysteria that grips the policy cliques on all things to do with Russia is in large measure Hillary Clinton’s legacy.

I have always detested the deplorable Clinton and her allies for this recklessness. And for another reason as she ran for president: Republicans are who they are and make few bones about it; Clinton and her liberal insincerities were scoring off the legitimate aspirations of ordinary Americans to sell them a late-imperial foreign policy diametrically opposed to their interests.

I put Omar and her colleagues in the same file now.

Which brings us to Lesson No. 3a: The utter fraud of “identity politics”—a blight upon us all—now has people of color selling Americans war in the name of peace, diversity, democracy, and an antiwar consciousness. They are every bit the charlatans Hillary Clinton has so frequently proven to be.

The administration has taken the occasion of the letter to confirm that the official line is that any question of negotiations toward a diplomatic settlement is for Kyiv’s to decide. This is a patently ridiculous dodge. So far as can be made out, Kyiv does nothing without Washington’s dispensation, excesses such as the regime’s call for NATO to strike Russia with a preemptive nuclear attack notwithstanding.

Lesson No. 4: The U.S. cannot speak straightly or honestly at this stage in its late-imperial decline. All is obfuscation. Those purporting to lead America have given themselves over to sheer force and force alone to defend a passing hegemony that is ultimately indefensible. They have nothing else left—a truth that cannot, of course, be acknowledged. We are left with the diplomacy of no diplomacy, as I have called this condition elsewhere.

Not to be missed in the shout fest we witnessed in Washington last week, there is a growing number of voices calling for a diplomatic opening between Washington and Moscow—this on both sides of the Atlantic. You can hear these voices in The National Interest, as noted in this space a few weeks ago, or in Newsweek or in the Financial Times. The Council on Foreign Relations weighed in on October 28, when Foreign Affairs, its august house organ, published a piece under the headline, “Don’t Rule Out Diplomacy in Ukraine.”

Nobody is howling at those radical screwballs on East 68^th Street. What is going on here?

Lesson No. 5 is to my mind one of the most frightening. In our unmapped, unprecedented condition—Mama never said there’d be days like this—the force of language itself, the most essential instrument in the exercise of dissent, is waning. This is surely among the morbid symptoms—Gramsci’s famous phrase—of a nation willing to destroy itself in the name of a lost primacy.  

It has been evident for some time that America’s political process is indifferent to the wishes of those who continue to participate in it. Now it is also evident the ruling elites have rendered themselves immune to the power of language, and they are immune to the power of language because they are immune to rational thought. We must ask: Does anything we say matter to those who exercise power most directly?

The answer here is other than bright and cheerful. It follows only—forgive the paradox—that those who hold to the imperative of reason and rational discourse must keep on saying and saying and saying, a little like Medieval monks scribbling manuscripts to preserve civilization from the barbarity all around them.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57313.htm

Putin: ‘The Situation Is, to a Certain Extent, Revolutionary’

In an all-encompassing address to the plenary session of the 19^th annual meeting of the Valdai Club, President Putin delivered no less than a devastating, multi-layered critique of unipolarity.

From Shakespeare to the assassination of Gen Soleimani; from musings on spirituality to the structure of the UN; from Eurasia as the cradle of human civilization to the interconnection of BRI, SCO and the INSTC; from nuclear dangers to that peripheral peninsula of Eurasia “blinded by the idea that Europeans are better than others”, the address painted a Brueghel-esque canvas of the “historical milestone” facing us, in the middle of “the most dangerous decade since the end of WWII.”

Putin even ventured that, in the words of the classics, “the situation is, to a certain extent, revolutionary” as “the upper classes cannot, and the lower classes do not want to live like this anymore”. So everything is in play, as “the future of the new world order is being shaped before our eyes.”

Way beyond a catchy slogan about the game the West is playing, “bloody, dangerous and dirty”, the address and Putin’s interventions at the subsequent Q&A should be analyzed as a coherent vision of past, present and future. Here we offer just a few of the highlights:

“The world is witnessing the degradation of world institutions, the erosion of the principle of collective security, the substitution of international law for ‘rules’”.

“Even at the height of the Cold War, nobody denied the existence of the culture and art of the Other. In the West, any alternative point of view is declared subversive.”

“The Nazis burned books. Now the Western fathers of ‘liberalism’ are banning Dostoevsky.”

“There are at least two ‘Wests’. The first is traditional, with a rich culture. The second is aggressive and colonial.”

“Russia has not and does not consider itself an enemy of the West.

Russia tried to build relations with the West and NATO – to live together in peace and harmony. Their response to all cooperation was simply ‘no’.”

“We do not need a nuclear strike on Ukraine, there is no point – neither political nor military.”

“In part” the situation between Russia and Ukraine can be considered a civil war: “When creating Ukraine, the Bolsheviks endowed it with primordially Russian territories – they gave it all of Little Russia, the entire Black Sea region, the entire Donbass. Ukraine evolved as an artificial state.”

“Ukrainians and Russians are one people – this is a historical fact. Ukraine has evolved as an artificial state. The only country that can guarantee its sovereignty is the country which created it – Russia.”

“The unipolar world is coming to an end. The West is incapable of single-handedly ruling the world. The world stands at a historical milestone ahead of the most dangerous and important decade since World War II.”

“Humanity has two options – either we continue accumulating the burden of problems that is certain to crush all of us, or we can work together to find solutions.”

What do we do after the orgy?

Amidst a series of absorbing discussions, the heart of the matter at Valdai is its 2022 report, “A World Without Superpowers”.

The report’s central thesis – eminently correct – is that “the United States and its allies, in fact, no longer enjoy the status of dominant superpower, but the global infrastructure that serves it is still in place.”

Of course all major interconnected issues at the current crossroads were precipitated because” Russia became the first major power which, guided by its own ideas of security and fairness, chose to discard the benefits of ‘global peace’ created by the only superpower.”

Well, not exactly “global peace”; rather a Mafia-enforced ethos of “our way or the highway”. The report quite diplomatically characterizes the freezing of Russia’s gold and foreign currency reserves and the “mop up” of Russia’s property abroad as “Western jurisdictions”, “if necessary”, being “guided by political expediency rather than the law”.

That’s in fact outright theft, under the shadow of the “rules-based international order”.

The report – optimistically – foresees the advent of a sort of normalized “cold peace” as “the best available solution today” – acknowledging at least this is far from guaranteed, and “will not halt the fundamental rebuilding of the international system on new foundations.”

The foundation for evolving multipolarity has in fact been presented

by the Russia-China strategic partnership only three weeks before imperially-ordered provocations forced Russia to launch the Special Military Operation (SMO).

In parallel, the financial lineaments of multipolarity had been proposed since at least July 2021, in a paper co-written by Professor Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai.

The Valdai report duly acknowledges the role of Global South medium-sized powers that “exemplify the democratization of international politics” and may “act as shock absorbers during periods of upheaval.” That’s a direct reference to the role of BRICS+ as key protagonists.

On the Big Picture across the chessboard, the analysis tends to get more realistic when it considers that “the triumph of ‘the only true idea’ makes effective dialogue and agreement with supporters of different views and values impossible by definition.”

Putin alluded to it several times in his address. There’s no evidence whatsoever the Empire and its vassals will be deviating from their normative, imposed, value-laden unilateralism.

As for world politics beginning to “rapidly return to a state of anarchy built on force”, that’s self-evident: only the Empire of Chaos wants to impose anarchy, as it completely ran out of geopolitical and geoeconomic tools to control rebel nations, apart from the sanctions tsunami.

So the report is correct when it identifies that the childish neo-Hegelian “end of history” wet dream in the end hit the wall of History: we’re back to the pattern of large scale conflicts between centers of power.

And it’s also a fact that “simply changing the ‘operator’ as it happened in earlier centuries” (as in the U.S. taking over from Britain) “just won’t work.”

China might harbor a desire to become the new sheriff, but the Beijing leadership definitely is not interested. And even if that happened the Hegemon would fiercely prevented it, as “the entire system” remains “under its control (primarily finance and the economy).”

So the only way out, once again, is multipolarity – which the report characterizes, rather vaguely, as “a world without superpowers”, still in need of “a system of self-regulation, which implies much greater freedom of action and responsibility for such actions.”

Stranger things have happened in History. As it stands, we are plunged deep into the maelstrom of complete collapse. Putin in fact did nail where we are: on the edge of a Revolution.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/world-war-iii-already-begun-but-truth-being-withheld-from-public-until-very-last-moment/5794660

World War III Has Already Begun, but the Truth Is Being Withheld from the Public Until the Very Last Moment

World War III has already begun. You simply aren’t being told this because your government and dishonest media outlets are dedicated to keeping you in the dark. After all, they want to use the remaining time to stockpile food, ammunition, medical supplies and precious metals for themselves, and this can only be accomplished by withholding the truth about the situation for as long as possible.

The President of Serbia may be an exception to this, as he is now publicly warning that the world is about to experience a “great world conflict” that will likely begin in the next two months.

“Aleksandar Vucic made the alarming comments during the first day of the UN General Assembly session in New York,” reports Paul Joseph Watson at Summit.news. The full quote from Vucic is:

I assume that we’re leaving the phase of the special military operation and approaching a major armed conflict, and now the question becomes where is the line, and whether after a certain time – maybe a month or two, even – we will enter a great world conflict not seen since the Second World War.

NATO is already at war with Russia, and Putin is gearing up for a continental battle

What’s happening is that psychopathic western nations have been — the real aggressors in this war — have unleashed not just “suicide sanctions” against Russia, but are also running Ukraine’s military operations against Russia. This means NATO is already in the war, even if NATO won’t admit it yet. Worse yet, NATO leaders are openly demanding the complete destruction of Russia and the occupation / exploitation of Russia’s natural resources, which is of course the entire model of global exploitation and pillaging typically carried out by the west. (Disrupt, pillage, control. That’s the CIA model that has been unleashed against other nations for decades…)

Conditions are already long past the point of negotiation or de-escalation between Russia and the west. The psychopathic leaders of the west (Victoria Nuland comes to mind) are russo-phobic Russia haters who are determined to carry out genocide against the Russian people, even if it means destroying their own economies and agricultural supply chains in the process. These psychopaths, Putin has come to realize, can’t be reasoned with or trusted to abide by any agreements whatsoever. Russia realizes it must fight or die. That’s where we are right now.

Unfortunately, the insanity of western nations has escalated this conflict to a condition where whoever launches nukes first has the advantage. This is a very dangerous dynamic, obviously, and it stems from the fact that the west has repeatedly signaled it will not allow the existence of Russia in its “New World Order” vision of planet Earth. With friends like Victoria Nuland calling the shots, who needs enemies?

Russia has a 30+ year advantage over the west in terms of nuclear weapons and anti-air defenses

An important realization in all this is that NATO’s nuclear arsenal is ancient — mostly running on designed originally engineered in the 1970s — while Russia’s nuclear capabilities are at least two generations ahead, modernized with hyperglide reentry vehicles, evasive maneuver capabilities for ICBMs, hypersonic cruise missiles which are nuclear capable, and highly advanced anti-air defense systems that can even intercept and take down incoming ICBMs. In addition, Russia possesses secret “doomsday” weapons — far beyond their thermobaric bombs — that the world hasn’t even seen yet. On the current trajectory, those weapons are going to be introduced to the west without any warning whatsoever, resulting in the complete annihilation of Western European governments, currencies and industry.

I have no doubt whatsoever that Russia has already designated the targets of its first strike, and that those targets include London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, US naval fleets and virtually all military bases across Western Europe. We are now just one launch away from a civilization-ending event.

The USA and NATO have deluded themselves into thinking they can win a nuclear exchange with Russia, but this is just as delusional as thinking “men can get pregnant” or that money printing doesn’t cause inflation (notably, the brain dead Biden regime insists that both of these absurdities are absolutely true). Over the past two decades — and more recently led by the insanity of wokeism — the west has become fully invested in delusional thinking and fairy tale narratives that have no connection with reality. While the west has been waging a propaganda narrative war, Russia has been engineering the world’s most advanced nuclear weapons. Once the nuclear exchange begins, there’s no question whatsoever about its outcome. Russia will lose a few million people — far less than what they lost in World War II — but they will annihilate Germany, Poland, France and the United Kingdom. Western Europe will be plunged into a generation of despair and darkness, while the U.S. suffers a cascading financial collapse due to exposure to European banks, currencies and debt markets.

Washington Is Driving the World to Nuclear War

Western journalists and kleptocrats are incapable of seeing this reality, and they are similarly incapable of acting to stop it. They are caught in their own delusional world of self-inflicted brainwashing and propaganda, believing (somehow) that they can bully Russia into capitulating to the west’s insane demands. But Russia is no Third World nation. Russia can’t be economically dismantled with western sanctions, and Russia has its own domestic supply chain for literally everything it needs to feed its people, build more weapons and earn a fortune in exports of energy and commodities to willing trade partners like India, China, Turkey and Iran.

Finally, Putin will not back down, and Putin is far more intelligent than any of the cognitively-challenged lunatics running the USA, UK or NATO countries. In a chess match between Putin and Biden, you’d probably see Joe Biden augmented with remote controlled vibrating diapers to send him chess move signals through his rectum, and he still wouldn’t understand the meaning of chess notations anyway. The leaders of western nations are so utterly incompetent that they don’t even qualify as “clowns,” since good clowns are actually intelligent, capable communicators who can make people laugh. Biden, Blinken, and Nuland just make us all want to puke.

The West has already grossly miscalculated with “suicide sanctions” but still won’t admit to their catastrophic errors

As proof of the incompetence of western nations, consider the fact that their “suicide sanctions” against Russia — originally implemented to try to force Russia into a currency collapse — has had the opposite effect. The sanctions are destroying the Euro, not the Ruble, and now all of Western Europe faces a winter of darkness, famine and freezing to death. That’s on top of the “permanent deindustrialization” of European industry that is already well under way, with about 70% of metals smelting and ammonia production already offline. Fertilizer production has ground to a halt, the Nord Stream 1 pipeline has been halted, and to add insult to injury, Belgium is proudly announcing the shutting down of a nuclear power plant, right as Belgium faces an energy scarcity catastrophe.

Germany, meanwhile, is putting another $8 billion into bailing out Uniper, a major natural gas provider, and that’s on top of $15 billion already spent trying to prevent Uniper’s collapse. Germany’s industrial base is being wiped out at astonishing speed, and nobody in the German government is telling the German people they won’t have jobs as industry collapses.

Putin must be astonished at the speed of which Western Europe — and Germany in particular — is destroying itself. Recall that Germany destroyed Western Europe twice already: World War I and World War II. Now, Germany (still largely run by Nazis) is leading the way to the total destruction of Europe yet again. At one level, Putin need not launch any nukes at all… he merely needs to wait for winter to kick in and for the laws of thermodynamics and economics to do the rest.

The greens must be proud: Entire forests are being clear cut for firewood

Yesterday I spoke with war correspondent Michael Yon who had just traveled through Germany (my interview with him will post tomorrow on Brighteon.com). He told me the forests were being clear-cut everywhere across Germany (at least that he could see) in a desperate effort by the people to stockpile firewood for the coming winter. This is the new “green” agenda on parade: Clear-cutting forests that will take decades to grow back. Will the greenies celebrate all the dead forests because at least Germany didn’t burn fossil fuels? Does anybody realize that a 19th century economy can’t support a 21st century population? Famine is a mathematical certainty.

To stop this crisis, all Germany has to do is apologize to Russia, drop the economic sanctions and beg Gazprom to turn the gas back on, but no, they won’t dare do that, even if hundreds of thousands of German citizens starve to death and die of exposure. In exactly the same way Adolf Hitler threw starving, freezing German soldiers into Russia’s defensive lines at Stalingrad in 1943, today’s German leaders are sacrificing the lives of their own citizens in a desperate bid to try to economically harm Russia … and it isn’t even accomplishing that! In the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviet Union surrounded and defeated Germany’s Sixth Army, which surrendered more than 220,000 soldiers to the Russians. Today, Germany is willing to sacrifice millions of its own citizens if necessary, proving that Nazi-style suicide maneuvers remain alive and well in Berlin, even generations after the catastrophic outcome of World War II.

You can beat the Nazis out of Russia, but you can’t beat the Nazi tendencies out of the German political leaders.

Russia, meanwhile, is sitting on massive quantities of low-cost energy, minerals, steel manufacturing, fertilizer production, successful food crops, electronics manufacturing and everything else needed to keep civilization on its feet. Yet to this very day, there isn’t one Western European politician who will admit the truth of where things stand. Too bad propaganda can’t heat homes, or the western media would be the ultimate renewable energy source for the entire planet.

The upshot of all this? Anyone living in Western Europe should prepare for economic collapse, famine and nuclear war.

Those living in North America should prepare for economic collapse and worldwide nuclear fallout that will disrupt crops for years to come.

Those who don’t store food will end up eating radioactive food, if they can find any at all.

Prepare accordingly.

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http://endoftheamericandream.com/the-global-food-crisis-just-got-a-whole-lot-worse/

The Global Food Crisis Just Got A Whole Lot Worse

It appears that the global food crisis that started in 2022 is going to go to an entirely new level in 2023.  As I have been documenting on my websites, worldwide supplies of food have been getting tighter and tighter for months.  Historic droughts have been crippling food production all over the northern hemisphere, much less fertilizer is being used in poorer countries because of how insanely expensive it has become, and the war in Ukraine has restricted the flow of agricultural exports out of one of the most important breadbaskets on the entire planet.  Thankfully, a deal that was signed in July had allowed hundreds of ships loaded with precious grain to travel through the war zone successfully.  But now that deal is completely dead and the Russians have resumed their blockade of Ukrainian ports…

Russia resumed its blockade of Ukrainian ports on Sunday, cutting off urgently needed grain exports to hungry parts of the world in what President Biden called a “really outrageous” act.

Biden — speaking in Wilmington, Del. — warned that global hunger could increase because of Russia’s suspension of a U.N.-brokered deal to allow safe passage of ships carrying grain from Ukraine, one of the world’s breadbaskets.

“It’s really outrageous,” Biden said Saturday. “There’s no merit to what they’re doing. The U.N. negotiated that deal and that should be the end of it.”

So why did the Russians do this?

Is it just because they decided to be mean?

No, it is because the Ukrainians (with help from their western allies) stupidly decided to attack Russia’s Black Sea fleet with a bunch of drones…

Hours later, a statement by the foreign ministry in Moscow said: “The Russian side cannot guarantee the safety of civilian dry cargo ships participating in the ‘Black Sea Initiative’, and suspends its implementation from today for an indefinite period.”

It said the move was “in connection with the actions of the Ukrainian armed forces, which were led by British specialists” and that these actions “were directed… against Russian ships that ensured the functioning of the said humanitarian corridor”.

What did they think was going to happen?

Did they actually believe that the Russians were just going to stand aside and allow the Ukrainians to sell their grain to the rest of the world after their ships had been attacked?

That is not how the real world works.

Since the deal was originally signed in July, over 9 million tons of grain had safely left Ukrainian ports.

Now that deal is dead, and this is going to make our rapidly growing food crisis even worse.

Even now, there are tens of millions of people in poor countries around the world that are on the brink of starvation…

Indeed, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that the ongoing war in Ukraine has brought 70 million people to the brink of starvation. In addition, the war also affected the food supply of another 345 million people. The Executive Director of the UN World Food Program, David Beasley, recently said, “It is incredibly troubling that 50 million of those people in 45 countries are suffering from very acute malnutrition…” Since Russia invaded its neighbor on Feb. 24, Beasley said, soaring food, fuel, and fertilizer costs have driven 70 million people closer to starvation.

As shortages intensify and food prices soar, unrest is inevitably going to erupt all over the planet.

For example, just check out what has already been happening in Tunisia…

Tunisians have been hit with soaring food prices and shortages of basic staples in recent weeks, threatening to turn simmering discontent in the North African country – the cradle of the Arab Spring protests – into larger turmoil.

Sugar, vegetable oil, rice, and even bottled water periodically disappear from supermarkets and grocery stores. People stand in line for hours for these food essentials that have long been subsidized and are now increasingly available in rations only. When they do appear on the shelves, many people cannot afford to pay the staggering price for them.

Sadly, this is just the beginning.

Here in the United States, conditions are certainly a whole lot better than they are in Tunisia, but there are several factors which could cause our situation to deteriorate significantly in the months ahead.

First of all, almost 75 percent of the areas where winter wheat is grown in the U.S. are currently suffering at least some level of drought…

La Niña has returned for the third consecutive winter, allowing for drier-than-average conditions across America’s crop belt. Some farmers told Bloomberg that conditions are so dry that “fertilizer is evaporating from the soil, and plants are struggling to emerge from the ground.” 

The odds are stacking up that this winter’s growing season in the Midwest is going to be a bad one. The latest government data shows drought is intensifying across the western half of the US.

As for winter wheat, nearly 75% of the crop areas are in a drought, the highest level in decades.

Secondly, a potential rail strike threatens to cause severe supply chain problems all across America starting next month.

Let us hope that the strike does not materialize, because it would really disrupt the flow of goods across the country for as long as it lasts.

Thirdly, it appears that the entire western world may be wrestling with temporary shortages of diesel fuel in the months ahead.  For much more on this, please see my recent article entitled “A Crippling Shortage Of Diesel Fuel Threatens To Devastate Western Economies In 2023“.

These latest issues just add to the growing list of problems that the food industry has been experiencing.  According to Kraft Heinz CEO Miguel Patricio, higher prices and supply chain headaches are likely to continue to be with us for the foreseeable future…

Kraft Heinz CEO Miguel Patricio says higher inflation and supply issues are coursing through the food industry, forcing companies to adopt new strategies for everything from production to promotion to packaging.

And he doesn’t see an end to either issue anytime soon.

“We’ve already increased the prices that we were expecting this year, but I’m predicting that next year, inflation will continue, and as a consequence [we] will have other rounds of price increases,” Patricio said in an interview with CNN Business.

But while we are dealing with significantly higher prices and occasional shortages, people in poor countries on the other side of the planet will literally be trying to figure out where to get enough food to feed their families.

The UN has already warned us that “multiple famines” are likely in 2023, and with each passing day the number of people living on the brink of starvation just keeps getting larger.

This is a global crisis that isn’t going away, and thanks to new developments in Ukraine it just got even worse.

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https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/schrodingers-bomb-false-flags-over

Schrödinger's Bomb: False Flags Over Ukraine

Remember way back in January of this year when I predicted that geopolitical strife—"the element of the global calculation that has been excluded from the equation" during the scamdemic—would "come back with a vengeance" in 2022?

Well, if the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February and the ramping up of tensions with China over Taiwan this past summer didn't convince you that the struggle for control of the grand (3D) chessboard has indeed "come back with a vengeance" this year, the events of this past week should be more than enough to dispel your doubts.

First we had the news that Russia is ringing the alarm over a false flag dirty bomb attack that (they assert) the Ukrainians are planning to stage in Ukraine in order to blame Russia. Then we had the US counter-warning that it's actually Russia who's planning to release nukes in Ukraine and the Kremlin's false flag warning is a trick to make everyone believe that the Ukrainians are going to do it.

Is your head spinning yet? Mine, too. In fact, I think that's the point.

Accusation. Counter-accusation. Bluffs and double-bluffs in an ever-crazier game of nuclear chicken. What the hell is going on here? And—regardless of what results from this latest kerfuffle—what does the normalization of false flag accusations portend for the future of geopolitics?

Let's find out.

THE BLAME GAME GOES NUCLEAR

It passed through the newswires so quickly that you may have missed it at the time, but back in January the US intelligence community revealed itself to be populated by a bunch of tinfoil hat-wearing conspiraloons.

Specifically, as the AP reported on January 15:

US intelligence officials have determined a Russian effort is underway to create a pretext for its troops to further invade Ukraine, and Moscow has already prepositioned operatives to conduct “a false-flag operation” in eastern Ukraine, according to the White House.

The theory, in a nutshell, was that Russia—in seeking an excuse to kick off its invasion of Ukraine—had "dispatched operatives trained in urban warfare" who could "use explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russia’s own proxy forces" in the country. These attacks would then be blamed on the Ukrainian government, thus giving Putin an apparent casus belli to justify the decision to send Russian forces into Ukraine.

Now, you'd think it would be pretty big news that the US government was openly promoting the very type of false flag conspiracy theory that it has so long denigrated as bark-raving lunacy, wouldn't you? Well, if you did think that, you'd be wrong.

As I say, you may have never even heard that startling accusation when it was first made, and you'd be forgiven for having forgotten about it even if you did hear it at the time. After all, the theory proved groundless; no spectacular terror attack occurred to justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

But that wasn't the end of the story. Rather, the US government's very public accusation that the Kremlin was plotting a nefarious false flag conspiracy was in fact just the beginning of a new era of geopolitics.

With false flag conspiracy theorizing having successfully transitioned from a topic entertained only by mentally disturbed kooks to a matter that can be solemnly discussed by level-headed paragons of mental acuity like unnamed "US intelligence officials," the floodgate had been opened. It was only a matter of time before other nations began bandying false flag allegations about on the world stage.

And so it was that earlier this week the Russians began frantically warning anyone who would listen that the Ukrainians are preparing a false flag provocation of their own.

According to a report from Russia's state-owned news agency, TASS, "[t]wo Ukrainian organizations have received concrete instructions to create a ‘dirty bomb’, and work on the bomb is nearing completion." In a briefing to journalists last Monday, Russia's Chemical and Biological Protection Troops Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov did not specify which Ukrainian "organizations" are alleged to be involved in this plan. He did, however, reiterate that those organizations "have concrete instructions to create a so-called dirty bomb"—a weapon that combines conventional explosives and radioactive material and which, when detonated, leaves behind an area of deadly radioactive fallout.

Kirillov further asserted that "[w]ork [on the bomb] is at the final stage" and that "[t]he Russian Defense Ministry has data on contacts of the Ukrainian presidential office with the UK on the issue of potentially obtaining these nuclear technologies."

Kirillov's press conference came hot on the heels of a flurry of phone calls that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made to his counterparts in Britain, France, Turkey and the US last Sunday to warn them of the plot. Unsurprisingly, Shoigu was rebuffed by those officials, who immediately went on the record to dismiss Russia's false flag concerns as an "absolute and quite predictable absurdity."

This has not dissuaded Russia from pursuing the matter. In fact, Russia's Permanent Representative to the United Nations even raised the allegation at a closed door session of the UN Security Council on Thursday. Although that session didn't result in any Security Council action on the alleged plot, it did convince the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency to send inspectors to Ukraine in the coming days "to detect any possible undeclared nuclear activities and material."

Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), the threat of a dirty bomb being used as a provocation in any situation is disturbing enough.

The threat of a dirty bomb in a false flag provocation designed to dupe the international community into hasty action against an innocent target is even more troubling.

The threat of a dirty bomb false flag operation being used in the middle of an ongoing military conflict is yet more dangerous.

The threat of a dirty bomb false flag operation taking place in Ukraine specifically—where one wrong move could send the world tumbling into all-out war between Russia and the US—is profoundly worrying.

But the prospect of such a scenario playing out in Ukraine right now—right in the midst of nuclear war games being played simultaneously by Russia and NATO, when both sides are already preparing for a full-scale nuclear war and the Pentagon is announcing that it will no longer rule out a nuclear first use strategy—is the most sinister scenario of all.

And if you thought this game of nuclear Russian roulette was crazy, just you wait. It gets even worse!

THE FALSE FLAG FALSE FLAG

Given the situation in Ukraine and given the state of NATO/Russian relations, it is no surprise whatsoever that the West has been quick to denounce Russia's dirty bomb false flag accusation as disinformation. Nor is it surprising that the dinosaur media have taken it upon themselves to "fact check" Russia's allegations.

No, none of that is surprising.

What is surprising is that the US State Department and its friends around the world are not simply denouncing the Russians as wild-eyed conspiracy cranks for daring to suggest that false flag operations exist. No. They're going one step further.

US State Department spokesman Ned Price, for one, has used the affair to remind Moscow "about the severe consequences that would result from nuclear use" in Ukraine, warning that there "would be consequences for Russia whether it uses a dirty bomb or a nuclear bomb."

Wait. Stop. Re-read that.

Do you see what's happening? The US is now implying that Russia's warning about a planned Ukrainian false flag operation is itself a false flag operation. In the State Department's narrative, it is Russia that is thinking of deploying a dirty bomb, and Russia's talk of a Ukrainian dirty bomb is part of a false flag deception to convince the world that any nuclear device going off in Ukraine is the work of Kiev, not Moscow.

As we see, the US has gone a level deeper! It's suggesting a False Flag False Flag—a false flag operation to create the impression of a false flag operation!

Now that's some Christopher Nolan-level, Inception-type, 5D backgammon thinking right there. I thought I'd seen some crazy conspiracy theories in my day, but apparently the online crazies have nothing on the State Department crazies.

Of course, if we were to take this idea seriously even for a moment, the most cursory analysis would instantly reveal this particular False Flag False Flag narrative to be cartoon-level nonsense.

Why would Russia go to the trouble of ginning up a fake false flag accusation in order to cover up its use of a dirty bomb—an incredibly ineffective weapon that serves no military purpose in an active combat situation? What conceivable Russian military objective would be advanced by perpetrating such an elaborate and strategically useless plot? Would they use the dirty bomb and its aftermath to justify . . . continuing their military operation in Ukraine? But they're already there. It just makes no sense.

But to examine the False Flag False Flag plot rationally would be to miss the point. These accusations and counter-accusations are not about a sincere attempt to understand and accurately convey the truth about what is happening in the world. They are about something else entirely: weaponizing information itself in the ongoing, never-ending, ever-intensifying fifth-generation war on us.

And the ultimate goal of this weapon is to obliterate the concept of truth altogether.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

I have often remarked that one of the "wins" of the 9/11 Truth Movement is that the truthers have succeeded in educating the public about the existence of false flag attacks.

Two decades ago, most people would react to the suggestion that 9/11 was an inside job with genuine bewilderment: "Why would the government attack itself?" But today, the vast majority of the public understands the utility of staging spectacular terror attacks in order to blame those attacks on their enemies—thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts of those valiant conspiracy realists who have worked to inform the public about the history of such operations.

But now that false flag accusations have become so much a part of political discourse that they're being bandied back and forth at the international level, a critical shift has taken place. Henceforth, no event of any significance will ever be taken at face value.

Think about it this way: if a dirty bomb were to go off in Ukraine next week, it would instantly become Schrödinger's bomb.

If you think Russia Good/NATO Bad, then when the dirty bomb goes off it will be obvious to you that it was a Ukrainian false flag. Every fact about the incident that gets reported to you (via the media, naturally) will confirm your suspicions. Even if the evidence suggests that the Russians were responsible, you'll know that the evidence isn't trustworthy. It's a psyop! It's fake news! It's a deep fake video! It's not real!

And if you think NATO Good/Russia Bad, then when the dirty bomb goes off it will be obvious to you that it was a Russian attack. Every fact about the incident that gets reported to you (via the media, naturally) will confirm your suspicions. Even if the evidence suggests that the Ukrainians were responsible, you'll know that the evidence isn't trustworthy. It's a psyop! It's fake news! It's a deep fake video! It's not real!

In the house of mirrors that is the False Flag False Flag psyop, whatever happens will only ever enforce our existing beliefs.

And it isn't hard to imagine how things could get even more insane. What if the Russians were to point to the US State Department's False Flag False Flag theory as a False Flag False Flag False Flag—an attempt to cover up a false flag operation by portraying the enemy's warnings about your false flag operation as a false flag operation? 

And then we could have a False Flag False Flag False Flag False Flag and a False Flag False Flag False Flag False Flag False Flag and . . . etc., etc., ad infinitum.

Yes, this is it, folks. Pandora's box has been opened. We have truly entered the "post-truth world" that the elitists have been warning us about. But as it turns out, their warning about the post-truth world wasn't a warning at all; it was a promise.

In a world of deep fakes and false flags and fake whistleblowers and completely mediated "reality," what is truth, anyway?

That, my friends, is a question for another day. All I know is that the False Flag False Flag hypothesis and the uncorking of the bottle that it entails is, in a sense, even more dangerous than a mere nuclear conflagration.

After all, in the event of global thermonuclear war, the worst-case scenario is that we get bombed back to the Stone Age and have to start human civilization from scratch. But hey, at least in that case the Fourth Industrial Revolution would have to be postponed a millennium or two!

But when Schrödinger's bomb goes off, we run the risk of losing our ability to ascertain truth itself.

Buckle up, everyone. Regardless of what happens in Ukraine in the coming weeks, we have just started our descent into a new geopolitical era, and it's going to be a much wilder ride than even the most battle-hardened conspiracy realists can imagine.

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https://stephenlendman.org/2022/10/28/nothing-to-offer-but-hegemony/

Nothing to Offer But Hegemony

In stark contrast to duplicitous US/Western officials — ones never to be trusted — preeminent world leader, Vladimir Putin, says what he means, means what he says, is a man of his word, and long ago proved his trustworthiness.

If the world community of nations had leadership like Putin, peace, equity and justice would reign supreme over perpetual US/Western wars on humanity and governance of, by and for the privileged few at the expense of all others.

During his Thursday Valdai Discussion Club 42-minute-long  address in Moscow — followed by a three-hour Q & A session with no crib notes, teleprompter or other aids — Vladimir Putin addressed the issue of “A Post-Hegemonic World: Justice and Security for Everyone.”

Scores of representatives from 47 nations were present to hear his remarks.

A new multilateral world order is replaceing the US-dominated West’s unipolar moment, Putin stressed.

And there’s no going back to how things were throughout most of the post-WW II period.

It’s gone, Putin noting:

“(A)ggressive, neo-colonial” officials throughout the US/West are mortal enemies of world peace, equity, justice and vast majority of everyone everywhere.

The US-dominated West has “nothing to offer the world except the preservation of dominance” — nothing but the scourge of “hegemony.”

“We are standing on a historic frontier,” Putin stressed, adding:

“Ahead is probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and, at the same time, important decade since the end of World War II.”

Humanity is threatened by the US-dominated West’s “dangerous, bloody and dirty” geopolitical aim to dominate the world community of nations by brute force and every dirty trick imaginable.

No one can “sit this one out.”

“Whoever sows the wind will reap the storm.”

“The (made-in-the-USA) crisis has taken on a truly global magnitude.”

“It affects everyone, and we should not entertain any illusions otherwise.”

In 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn said “the West has a blindness of superiority.”

Quoting him, Putin stressed that “(a)lmost half a century later, the blindness (he) spoke of…has become simply ugly, especially after the (post-WW II) emergence of the so-called unipolar world.”

Operating by its “rules-based order” — in flagrant breach of international and its own constitutional law — the empire of lies and forever wars on invented enemies demands world community subservience to its diabolical aims.

Obey or we’ll smash you is official hegemon USA policy.

So is “cancel culture.” i

In similar fashion to how Nazi Germany burned books, the US/West banned all things Russian.

Their ruling regimes seek to eliminate “the creative potential (and) development of other civilizations,” Putin explained.

Dissolution of Soviet Russia in 1991 was the origin of today’s growing crisis.

It “destroyed the balance of political forces.”

“The (collective) West felt like a winner and proclaimed a unipolar world order in which only its will, its culture, its interests had the right to exist.”

In pursuit of their diabolical aims, (US/Western regimes) provoke and escalate one conflict after another.

They wage perpetual preemptive wars by hot and/or other means against invented enemies.

Notably they’re ongoing on what relates to Russia and Ukraine, as well as to China and Taiwan.

US “provocations (include) destabiliz(ation) (of) the world food and energy markets,” said Putin, adding:

Self-styled US/Western “infallibility” is a “very dangerous” delusion.

“The self-conceit of (their ruling regimes) is off the charts.”

And this Putin reality check, saying:

“Americanophobia, Anglophobia, Francophobia, Germanophobia are forms of racism, just like Russophobia and Anti-Semitism or any manifestation of xenophobia.”

The world community of nations is at a crossroads — “either to continue to accumulate the burden of problems which will inevitably crush us all, or try to find solutions…which may not be ideal, but which work, and which are capable of making our world more stable and safer.”

Following the Cold War’s end, Russia’s “let’s all get along” message to the US-dominated West was ignored.

On the likely made-in-the-USA Kiev plot to detonate a dirty bomb with falsely blaming Russia in mind, Putin welcomed a probe of Kiev’s nuclear capabilities “as quickly as possible,” adding:

“We know (that the US-controlled regime is) everything possible to cover up traces of (its) preparations.”

In sharp contrast to the US drive for hegemony by virtually every dirty trick in the book, Russia prioritizes world peace, stability and cooperative relations with other nations, according to the rule of law.

The US-dominated West is a mortal enemy of ordinary people everywhere.

Russia is their ally, Putin saying:

“The future world order is being formed before our eyes.”

“And in this world order, we must listen to everyone, take into account every point of view, every nation, society, culture, every system of worldviews, ideas and religious beliefs, without imposing a single truth on anyone, and only on this basis, understanding our responsibility for the fate of our peoples and the planet, to build a symphony of human civilization.”

If the collective West embraced the above vision, imagine how different things would be instead of today’s dismal state of things.

Imagine a world safe and fit to live in instead of the other way around because of pure evil infesting the collective West and unwillingness of their ruling regimes to change.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/endless-proxy-war-by-design/5797364

The Endless Proxy War, by Design. “Direct Conflict and Then Go Nuclear”

While privately conceding that its ally Ukraine is not "capable of winning the war," the Biden administration keeps fueling it.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has presented the White House with a geopolitical crisis that it played a critical role in creating. In February 2014, Victoria Nuland, a current senior State Department official and former Dick Cheney advisor, was caught on tape plotting the installation of a new Ukrainian government – a plan, she stressed, that would involve Biden and his then-top aide, and current National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan. Weeks later, the democratically elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted and replaced by Washington-backed leaders – including a prime minister selected by Nuland.

The regime change in Kiev made Biden the most influential US political figure in Ukraine, as underscored by the lucrative Burisma board seat gifted to his son Hunter. While the Biden family and other well-connected players profited, Ukraine fell into civil war.

In the eastern Donbas region, Kremlin-backed Ukrainian rebels took up arms against a fascist-infused coup government that cracked down on Russian culture and countenanced murderous assaults on dissidents. Rather than promote the 2015 Minsk II accords — the agreed-upon formula for ending the Donbas conflict – the US fueled the fight with a weapons and training program that turned Ukraine into a NATO proxy. Influential US politicians left no doubt about their intentions. As the Donbas war raged, lawmakers declared that they were using Ukraine to “fight Russia over there” (Adam Schiff) and vowed to “make Russia pay a heavier price,” (John McCain). In February of this year, Russia invaded to bring the eight-year fight to an end, leaving Ukraine to pay the heaviest price of all.

The Biden administration shunned multiple opportunities to prevent the Russian assault. When Russia submitted draft peace treaties in December 2021, the White House refused to even discuss the Kremlin’s core demands: a pledge of neutrality for Ukraine, and the rollback of NATO military forces in post-1997 member states that neighbor Russia. At the final round of talks on implementing Minsk II in early February, the “key obstacle,” the Washington Post reported, “was Kyiv’s opposition to negotiating with the pro-Russian separatists.” Siding with Ukraine’s far-right, which had threatened to overthrow Volodymyr Zelensky if he signed a peace deal, the US made no effort to encourage diplomacy. Emboldened to escalate its war on the Donbas, the Ukrainian government then massively increased shelling on rebel-held areas in the days immediately preceding Russa’s February 24th invasion.

Looking back at the pre-invasion period, Jack Matlock, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union under Bush I, now concludes that “if Ukraine had been willing to abide by the Minsk agreement, recognize the Donbas as an autonomous entity within Ukraine, avoid NATO military advisors, and pledge not to enter NATO,” then Russia’s war “probably would have been prevented.”

For Washington, preventing the war would have interfered with longstanding objectives. As US policymakers have openly recognized, Ukraine’s historical, geographical, and cultural links to Russia could be used as a tool to achieve regime change in Moscow, or, at minimum, leave it “weakened.”

As Ukraine enters another winter of war, this time facing an intensified Russian assault, the Biden administration is apparently in no mood to end a crisis that it helped start.

The Growing Chorus for Peace in Ukraine

In an interview with CNN, President Biden declared that he has “no intention” of meeting with Vladimir Putin at the upcoming G20 summit. “I’m not about to, nor is anyone else prepared to negotiate with Russia,” Biden said.

A recent account in the Washington Post details the White House’s prevailing mindset:

Privately, U.S. officials say neither Russia nor Ukraine is capable of winning the war outright, but they have ruled out the idea of pushing or even nudging Ukraine to the negotiating table. They say they do not know what the end of the war looks like, or how it might end or when, insisting that is up to Kyiv.

“That’s a decision for the Ukrainians to make,” a senior State Department official said. “Our job now is to help them be in absolutely the best position militarily on the battlefield … for that day when they do choose to go to the diplomatic table.”

If the US knows that its ally Ukraine is not “capable of winning the war”, why would it choose to prolong it? The stated aim to put Kiev “in absolutely the best position militarily on the battlefield,” has been offered for months. Yet during this time Russia has held on to about 20% of Ukrainian territory and positioned itself for a major escalation. The Russian army is preparing to deploy some 300,000 reservists, and has recently conducted its most ferocious missile barrages to date, causing serious damage to Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, as US officials had predicted.

While Ukraine has scored some battlefield successes, there is no indication that its strategic position has significantly improved. The counter-offensive in Kharkiv reportedly came at the cost of high Ukrainian casualties, a type of victory that is unsustainable. The Russian pullback, a Western official told Reuters, was more likely a “withdrawal, ordered and sanctioned by the general staff, rather than an outright collapse… the Russians have made some good decisions in terms of shortening their lines and making them more defensible, and sacrificing territory in order to do so.” The most audacious of Ukraine’s counter-attacks – the bombing of the Kerch bridge – “did not appear to have done permanent damage to the bridge — or to Russia’s war effort,” the New York Times reported. Instead, it only triggered a far more destructive Russian retaliation.

The stated White House position of treating diplomacy as “a decision for the Ukrainians to make” is also based on a false premise. For one, when Ukraine previously did “choose to go to the diplomatic table,” with Russia and even made significant progress, its Western backers in London and Washington sabotaged it, according to multiple accounts.

And whether Ukraine wants to negotiate, the US is not obligated to supply the weaponry and intelligence that sustains the fight. The US role as a co-belligerent in the US conflict is a political choice, not a law of nature. And given that US officials privately admit that Ukraine is not “capable of winning the war,” that would seemingly obligate them all the more to use their considerable leverage to bring this un-winnable war to a speedy end.

Yet another imperative for resolving the conflict is the nuclear threat that it continues to fuel. According to Leon Panetta, the former CIA director and defense secretary, “intelligence analysts now believe that the probability of the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine has risen from 1-5 percent at the start of the war to 20-25 percent today.” In this “proxy war between Washington and Moscow,” former State Department official Jeremy Shapiro warns, both sides “are locked in an escalatory cycle that, along current trends, will eventually bring them into direct conflict and then go nuclear, killing millions of people and destroying much of the world.” Even if these warnings are overblown, the very fact that they are even being articulated by well-placed former US officials should obligate all parties to demonstrate an effort for peace.

In both the US and Russia, the only apparent response to the threat of terminal conflict is to fuel it. This week, NATO has kicked off its annual nuclear exercises, featuring a fleet of aircraft including U.S. long-range B-52 bombers. Russia is slated to hold its own maneuvers as well.

Meanwhile, rather than negotiating, the US and its partners are devoted to global arms dealing. To procure the Russian-style weapons that Ukrainian soldiers are trained to use, “the United States and other allies have been scouring the globe,” the New York Times reports. Relieved of any need to attempt diplomacy, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has visited Asia, Africa, and Latin America “in a painstaking, behind-the-scenes diplomatic campaign to countries that have demonstrated support for Ukraine but are still reluctant to supply lethal aid.” Over the long-term, a senior NATO official told Politico, the Western goal is “to get Ukraine fully interoperable with NATO.”

Lost in this “painstaking” scramble to find weapons for the Ukraine proxy war is the question of whether there will be any of Ukraine left behind. “[T]he longer the war continues,” Matlock, the former US ambassador to the USSR, writes, “the harder it is going to be to avoid the utter destruction of Ukraine.” A prolonged war also threatens a “winter of de-industrialization” in Europe, along with increased hunger and impoverishment around the globe.

Despite his experience as a US diplomat who helped negotiate an end to the Cold War, Matlock’s opposition to the current cold war has left him banished from establishment US media outlets. In this militaristic climate, it is only on rare occasions that voices of restraint can break the sound barrier.

Speaking recently to ABC News, retired Admiral Mike Mullen, the nation’s top military officer under both Bush II and Obama, urged the White House to find an off-ramp. Of Biden’s warning of a nuclear “Armageddon,” Mullen said: “I think we need to back off that a little bit and do everything we possibly can to try to get to the table to resolve this thing… The sooner the better as far as I’m concerned.”

The Biden administration has taken the inverse position: for their proxy war against Russia, the longer the better, no matter how many more lives in Ukraine are sacrificed by policies designed in Washington.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/everybody-wants-hop-brics-express/5797355

Everybody Wants to Hop on the BRICS Express, “Bypassing the US Dollar”

Eurasia is about to get a whole lot larger as countries line up to join the Chinese and Russian-led BRICS and SCO, to the detriment of the west

Let’s start with what is in fact a tale of Global South trade between two members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). At its heart is the already notorious Shahed-136 drone – or Geranium-2, in its Russian denomination: the AK-47 of postmodern aerial warfare.

The US, in yet another trademark hysteria fit rife with irony, accused Tehran of weaponizing the Russian Armed Forces. For both Tehran and Moscow, the superstar, value-for-money, and terribly efficient drone let loose in the Ukrainian battlefield is a state secret: its deployment prompted a flurry of denials from both sides. Whether these are made in Iran drones, or the design was bought and manufacturing takes place in Russia (the realistic option), is immaterial.

The record shows that the US weaponizes Ukraine to the hilt against Russia. The Empire is a de facto war combatant via an array of “consultants,” advisers, trainers, mercenaries, heavy weapons, munitions, satellite intel, and electronic warfare. And yet imperial functionaries swear they are not part of the war. They are, once again, lying.

Welcome to yet another graphic instance of the “rules-based international order” at work. The Hegemon always decides which rules apply, and when. Anyone opposing it is an enemy of “freedom,” “democracy,” or whatever platitude du jour, and should be – what else – punished by arbitrary sanctions.

In the case of sanctioned-to-oblivion Iran, for decades now, the result has been predictably another round of sanctions. That’s irrelevant. What matters is that, according to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), no less than 22 nations – and counting – are joining the queue because they also want to get into the Shahed groove.

Even Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gleefully joined the fray, commenting on how the Shahed-136 is no photoshop.

The race towards BRICS+

What the new sanctions package against Iran really “accomplished” is to deliver an additional blow to the increasingly problematic signing of the revived nuclear deal in Vienna. More Iranian oil on the market would actually relieve Washington’s predicament after the recent epic snub by OPEC+.

A categorical imperative though remains. Iranophobia – just like Russophobia – always prevails for the Straussians/neo-con war advocates in charge of US foreign policy and their European vassals.

So here we have yet another hostile escalation in both Iran-US and Iran-EU relations, as the unelected junta in Brussels also sanctioned manufacturer Shahed Aviation Industries and three Iranian generals.

Now compare this with the fate of the Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drone – which unlike the “flowers in the sky” (Russia’s Geraniums) has performed miserably in the battlefield.

Kiev tried to convince the Turks to use a Motor Sich weapons factory in Ukraine or come up with a new company in Transcarpathia/Lviv to build Bayraktars. Motor Sich’s oligarch President Vyacheslav Boguslayev, aged 84, has been charged with treason because of his links to Russia, and may be exchanged for Ukrainian prisoners of war.

In the end, the deal fizzled out because of Ankara’s exceptional enthusiasm in working to establish a new gas hub in Turkey – a personal suggestion from Russian President Vladimir Putin to his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

And that bring us to the advancing interconnection between BRICS and the 9-member SCO – to which this Russia-Iran instance of military trade is inextricably linked.

The SCO, led by China and Russia, is a pan-Eurasian institution originally focused on counter-terrorism but now increasingly geared towards geoeconomic – and geopolitical – cooperation. BRICS, led by the triad of Russia, India, and China overlaps with the SCO agenda geoeconomically and geopoliticallly, expanding it to Africa, Latin America and beyond: that’s the concept of BRICS+, analyzed in detail in a recent Valdai Club report, and fully embraced by the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Russia Is Primed for a Persian Gulf Security ‘Makeover’. The Multi-trillion Dollar Chalous Gas Field in the Caspian Sea.

The report weighs the pros and cons of three scenarios involving possible, upcoming BRICS+ candidates:

First, nations that were invited by Beijing to be part of the 2017 BRICS summit (Egypt, Kenya, Mexico, Thailand, Tajikistan).

Second, nations that were part of the BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting in May this year (Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Thailand).

Third, key G20 economies (Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye).

And then there’s Iran, which has already already shown interest in joining BRICS.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has recently confirmed that “several countries” are absolutely dying to join BRICS. Among them, a crucial West Asia player: Saudi Arabia.

What makes it even more astonishing is that only three years ago, under former US President Donald Trump’s administration, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MbS) – the kingdom’s de fact ruler – was dead set on joining a sort of Arab NATO as a privileged imperial ally.

Diplomatic sources confirm that the day after the US pulled out of Afghanistan, MbS’s envoys started seriously negotiating with both Moscow and Beijing.

Assuming BRICS approves Riyadh’s candidacy in 2023 by the necessary consensus, one can barely imagine its earth-shattering consequences for the petrodollar. At the same time, it is important not to underestimate the capacity of US foreign policy controllers to wreak havoc.

The only reason Washington tolerates Riyadh’s regime is the petrodollar. The Saudis cannot be allowed to pursue an independent, truly sovereign foreign policy. If that happens, the geopolitical realignment will concern not only Saudi Arabia but the entire Persian Gulf.

Yet that’s increasingly likely after OPEC+ de facto chose the BRICS/SCO path led by Russia-China – in what can be interpreted as a “soft” preamble for the end of the petrodollar.

The Riyadh-Tehran-Ankara triad

Iran made known its interest to join BRICS even before Saudi Arabia. According to Persian Gulf diplomatic sources, they are already engaged in a somewhat secret channel via Iraq trying to get their act together. Turkey will soon follow – certainly on BRICS and possibly the SCO, where Ankara currently carries the status of extremely interested observer.

Now imagine this triad – Riyadh, Tehran, Ankara – closely joined with Russia, India, China (the actual core of the BRICS), and eventually in the SCO, where Iran is as yet the only West Asian nation to be inducted as a full member.

The strategic blow to the Empire will go off the charts. The discussions leading to BRICS+ are focusing on the challenging path towards a commodity-backed global currency capable of bypassing US dollar primacy.

Several interconnected steps point towards increasing symbiosis between BRICS+ and SCO. The latter’s members states have already agreed on a road map for gradually increasing trade in national currencies in mutual settlements.

The State Bank of India – the nation’s top lender – is opening special rupee accounts for Russia-related trade.

Russian natural gas to Turkey will be paid 25 percent in rubles and Turkish lira, complete with a 25 percent discount Erdogan personally asked of Putin.

Russian bank VTB has launched money transfers to China in yuan, bypassing SWIFT, while Sberbank has started lending out money in yuan. Russian energy behemoth Gazprom agreed with China that gas supply payments should shift to rubles and yuan, split evenly.

Iran and Russia are unifying their banking systems for trade in rubles/rial.

Egypt’s Central Bank is moving to establish an index for the pound – through a group of currencies plus gold – to move the national currency away from the US dollar.

And then there’s the TurkStream saga.

That gas hub gift

Ankara for years has been trying to position itself as a privileged East-West gas hub. After the sabotage of the Nord Streams, Putin has handed it on a plate by offering Turkey the possibility to increase Russian gas supplies to the EU via such a hub. The Turkish Energy Ministry stated that Ankara and Moscow have already reached an agreement in principle.

This will mean in practice Turkey controlling the gas flow to Europe not only from Russia but also Azerbaijan and a great deal of West Asia, perhaps even including Iran, as well as Libya in northeast Africa. LNG terminals in Egypt, Greece and Turkiye itself may complete the network.

Russian gas travels via the TurkStream and Blue Stream pipelines. The total capacity of Russian pipelines is 39 billion cubic meters a year.

TurkStream was initially projected as a four-strand pipeline, with a nominal capacity of 63 million cubic meters a year. As it stands, only two strands – with a total capacity of 31,5 billion cubic meters – have been built.

So an extension in theory is more than feasible – with all the equipment made in Russia. The problem, once again, is laying the pipes. The necessary vessels belong to the Swiss Allseas Group – and Switzerland is part of the sanctions craze. In the Baltic Sea, Russian vessels were used to finish building Nord Stream 2. But for a TurkStream extension, they would need to operate much deeper in the ocean.

TurkStream would not be able to completely replace Nord Stream; it carries much smaller volumes. The upside for Russia is not being canceled from the EU market. Evidently Gazprom would only tackle the substantial investment on an extension if there are ironclad guarantees about its security. And there’s the additional drawback that the extension would also carry gas from Russia’s competitors.

Whatever happens, the fact remains that the US-UK combo still exerts a lot of influence in Turkey – and BP, Exxon Mobil, and Shell, for instance, are actors in virtually every oil extraction project across West Asia. So they would certainly interfere on the way the Turkish gas hub functions, as well on determining the gas price. Moscow has to weigh all these variables before committing to such a project.

NATO, of course, will be livid. But never underestimate hedging bet specialist Sultan Erdogan. His love story with both the BRICS and the SCO is just beginning.

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https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2022-10-27/cheerleaders-us-imperialism/

How the left became cheerleaders for US imperialism

Figureheads like the Guardian’s George Monbiot have wrecked the left’s ability to think critically, encouraging an analysis of power politics more suited to the playground

One of the biggest problems for the left, as it confronts what seems like humanity’s ever-more precarious relationship with the planet – from the climate emergency to a potential nuclear exchange – is that siren voices keeping luring it towards the rocks of political confusion and self-harm.

And one of the loudest sirens on the British left is the environmental activist George Monbiot. 

Monbiot has carved out for himself a figurehead role on the mainstream British left because he is the only big-picture thinker allowed a regular platform in the establishment media: in his case, the liberal Guardian newspaper. It is a spot he covets and one that seems to have come with a big price tag: he is allowed to criticize the corporate elite’s capture of British domestic politics – he occasionally concedes that our political life has been stripped of all democratic content – but only, it seems, because he has become ever less willing to extend that same critique to British foreign policy. 

As a result, Monbiot holds as a cherished piety what should be two entirely inconsistent positions: that British and Western elites are pillaging the planet for corporate gain, immune to the catastrophe they are wreaking on the environment and oblivious to the lives they are destroying at home and abroad; and that these same elites are fighting good, humanitarian wars to protect the interests of poor and oppressed peoples overseas, from Syria and Libya to Ukraine, peoples who coincidentally just happen to live in areas of geostrategic significance.

Because of the vice-like corporate hold on Britain’s political priorities, Monbiot avers, nothing the corporate media tells us should be believed – except when those priorities relate to protecting peoples facing down ruthless foreign dictators, from Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Then the media should be believed absolutely. 

Monbiot’s embrace of the narratives justifying Washington’s “humanitarian” interventions abroad has been incremental. Back in the late 1990s, while generally supporting the aims of NATO’s war on the former Yugoslavia, he called out its bombing of Serbia as a “dirty war”, highlighting the ecological and economic destruction it entailed. He would also sound the alarm – if ambivalently – over the Iraq war in 2003, and later become a leading proponent of jailing former UK prime minister Tony Blair as a war criminal for his involvement. 

But as the ripples from the Iraq war spread to other parts of the Middle East and beyond, often in complicated ways, Monbiot took the good will he had earned among the anti-imperialist left and weaponized it to Washington’s advantage. 

By 2007, he was swallowing wholesale the evidence-free narrative crafted in Washington and Tel Aviv that Iran was trying to acquire a nuclear bomb and needed to be stopped. In 2011, he was a reluctant supporter of the West’s campaign to violently depose Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, turning the country into a failed state of slave markets. 

In 2017, he legitimized President Trump’s grounds for bombing Syria and minimized the significance of those air strikes, which were a gross violation of international law. Washington’s rationalizations for the attack – based on a claim that President Assad had gassed his own people – started to unravel when whistleblowers from the United Nations’ chemical weapons inspections agency, the OPCW, came forward. They revealed that US intimidation of the OPCW had led to the inspectors’ findings being distorted for political reasons: to put Assad in the frame rather than the more likely culprits of jihadists, who hoped a false-flag gas attack would pressure the West into removing the Syrian leader on their behalf.

Monbiot has staunchly refused to address the testimony of these OPCW whistleblowers, while at the same time implicitly maligning them as being responsible for feeding “conspiracy theories”.

In the case of the Ukraine war, Monbiot has insisted on adherence to the NATO narrative, decrying any dissent as “Westplaining”. Throughout this shift ever more firmly into the imperial NATO camp, Monbiot has besmirched prominent anti-war leftists, from the famed linguist Noam Chomsky to the journalist John Pilger, as “genocide deniers and belittlers”.

First shockwaves

If this characterization of his position sounds unfair, watch this short video he recently made for Double Down News. According to Monbiot, the left’s slogan is a simple one: “Whatever the situation around the world is, you side against the oppressor, and with the oppressed. That is the fundamental guiding principle of justice, and that is the principle we on the left should stick with, regardless of the identity of the oppressor and the oppressed.” 

As an abstract principle, this one is sound enough. But no one characterizing themselves as speaking for the anti-imperialist left should be using a simple rule of thumb to analyze and dictate foreign policy positions in the highly interconnected, complex and duplicitous world we currently inhabit. 

As Monbiot knows only too well, we live in a world – one pillaged by a colonial West to generate unprecedented, short-term economic growth for some, and mire others in permanent poverty – where global resources are rapidly being exhausted, beginning the gradual erosion of Western privilege. 

We live in a world where intelligence agencies have developed new technologies to spy on populations on an unprecedented scale, to meddle in other states’ politics, and to subject their own populations to ever more sophisticated propaganda narratives to conceal realities that might undermine their credibility or legitimacy. 

We live in a world where transnational corporations – dependent for their success on continued resource plunder – effectively own leading politicians, even governments, through political funding, through control of the think-tanks that develop policy proposals, and through their ownership of the mass media. Here is a recent article by Monbiot explaining just that. 

We live in a world where those same corporations are deeply entwined with state institutions in the very war and security industries that, first, sustain and rationalize the plunder and then “protect” our borders from any backlash from those whose resources are being plundered.

And we live in a world where the first shockwaves of climate collapse, combined with these resource wars, are fomenting mass migrations – and an ever greater urgency in Western states to turn themselves into fortresses to defend against a feared stampede. 

Zealot for war

Monbiot knows this world only too well because he writes about it in such detail. He has won the hearts of many on the left because he describes so eloquently the capture of domestic politics by a shadowy cabal of Western corporations, politicians and media moguls. But he then concludes that this same psychopathic, planet-destroying cabal can be trusted when it explains – via its reliable mouthpieces in the right-wing press, the BBC and his own Guardian newspaper – what it is doing in Syria, Libya or Ukraine. 

And worse, Monbiot lashes out at anyone who dissents, calling them apologists for dictators, or war crimes. And he brings many on the left with him, helping to divide and weaken the anti-war movement.

One might have assumed Monbiot would have entertained a little more doubt in his foreign policy prescriptions over the past decade, if only because they have so squarely chimed with United States and NATO narratives amplified by the establishment media. But not a bit of it. He is a zealot for the West’s wars when they can be presented either as humanitarian or as battling Russian imperialism. (For examples, see here, here and here.)

The problem with Monbiot, as it is with much of the British left, is that he treats the various modern, great-power imperialisms – American, Russian and Chinese – as though they operate in parallel to each other rather than, as they do, constantly intersect and conflict. 

To see the world as one in which the US “does imperialism” in Afghanistan and Iraq, while Russia separately “does imperialism” in Syria and Ukraine may be satisfying to anyone with a desperate need to appear even-handed. But it does nothing to advance our understanding of world events.

The interests of great powers inevitably clash. They are fighting over the same finite resources to grow their economies; they are competing over the same key states to turn them into allies; they are waging conflicting narrative battles over the same events. And they are trying – always trying – to diminish or subvert their rivals. 

To claim that the war in Ukraine somehow stands outside these great-power intrigues – and that the only justified response is a simple one of cheerleading the oppressed and reviling the oppressor, as Monbiot requires – is beyond preposterous. 

Economies decimated

To imagine that the UK and wider West are somehow on Ukraine’s side, are sending untold billions in arms even as recession bites, are opposed even to testing the seriousness of Russian offers of peace talks, and are blocking Russian oil even though the results are decimating European economies – and all because it is the right thing to do, or because Putin is a madman bent on world conquest – is to be entirely detached from joined-up thinking. 

It is entirely possible, if we engage our critical faculties, to consider far more complex scenarios for which there are no good guys and no easy solutions. 

It might – just might – be that Russia is both sinner in Ukraine and sinned against. Or that Ukrainian civilians are victims both of Russian militarism and of more covert US and NATO intrigues. Or that in a country like Ukraine, where a civil war has been raging for at least eight years between far-right (some of them exterminationist) Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and ethnic Russian communities, we would be better jettisoning our narrative premises of a single “Ukraine” or a single Ukrainian will. This kind of simple-mindedness may be obscuring far more than it illuminates. 

Pointing this out does not make one a Putin apologist. It simply recognizes the lessons of history: that world events are rarely explicable through one narrative alone; that states have different, conflicting interests and that understanding the nature of those conflicts is the key to resolving them; and that what great powers say they are doing isn’t necessarily what they are actually doing. 

And further, that elites – whether Russian, Ukrainian, European or American – usually have their own class-serving set of interests that have little to do with the ordinary populations they supposedly represent.

In such circumstances, Monbiot’s dictum that we must “side against the oppressor, and with the oppressed” starts to sound like nothing more than unhelpful sloganeering. It makes a complex situation that needs complex thinking and sophisticated problem-solving harder to understand and all but impossible to resolve. 

Throw nuclear weapons into the mix, and Monbiot the environmentalist is playing games not only with the lives of Ukrainians, but the destruction of conditions for most life on Earth.

Covert meddling

Western solipsism of the kind indulged by Monbiot ignores Russian concerns or, worse, subsumes them into a fanciful narrative that a Russian army that is struggling to subjugate Ukraine (assuming that is actually what it is trying to do) intends next to rampage across the rest of Europe. 

In truth, Russia has good reasons not only to take an especial interest in what happens in neighboring Ukraine, but to see events there as posing a potential existential threat to it. 

Historically, the lands that today we call Ukraine have been the gateway through which invading armies have attacked Russia. Long efforts by Washington, through NATO, to recruit Ukraine into its military fold were never likely to be viewed dispassionately in Moscow. 

That was all the more so because Washington has been exploiting Russian vulnerabilities – economic and military – since the collapse of its empire, the Soviet Union, in 1991. The US has done so both by converting former Soviet states into a massively enlarged, unified bloc of NATO members on Russia’s doorstep and by brashly excluding Russia from European security arrangements. 

The US moves looked overtly aggressive to Moscow, whether that was the way they were intended or not.

But Russia had good grounds to interpret these actions as hostile: because Washington has been not-so-covertly meddling in Ukraine over the past decade. That included its concealed role in fomenting protests in 2014 that overthrew an elected government in Kyiv sympathetic to Moscow, and its clandestine military role afterwards, in training the Ukrainian army under President Obama and arming it under President Trump, that readied Ukraine for a coming war with Moscow that Washington appeared to be doing everything in its power to make happen. 

Then there was the problem of the Crimean Peninsula, hosting Moscow’s only warm-water naval port and viewed as critically important to Russia’s defenses. It had been Russian territory until the 1950s when the then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gifted it to Ukraine, at a time when national borders had been made largely redundant within the Soviet empire. The gift was supposed to symbolize the unbreakable bond between Russia and Ukraine. Khrushchev presumably never imagined that Ukraine might one day seek to become a forward base for a NATO openly hostile to Russia.

And of course, Ukraine is not simply a gateway for invaders. It is also Russia’s natural corridor into Europe. It is through Ukraine that Moscow has traditionally exported goods and its energy resources to the rest of Europe. Russia’s opening of the Nord Stream gas pipelines direct to Germany through the Baltic Sea, circumventing Ukraine, was a clear signal that Moscow saw a Kyiv under Washington’s spell as a threat to its vital energy interests.

Notably, those same Nord Stream pipelines were blown up last month after a long series of threats from Washington officials, from President Biden down, that the US would find a way to end Russian gas supplies to Germany. 

Russia has been excluded by Germany, Sweden and Denmark – all US allies – from participation in the investigation into those explosions on its energy infrastructure. Even more suspiciously, Sweden is citing “national security” – code for avoiding embarrassing a key ally? – as grounds for refusing to publish findings from the investigations. 

Lethal power

So where does all this leave Monbiot’s rule: “Whatever the situation around the world is, you side against the oppressor, and with the oppressed”? 

Not only does his axiom fail to acknowledge the complex nature of global conflicts, especially between great powers, in which defining who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed may be no simple matter, but, worse, it disfigures our understanding of international power politics. 

Russia and China may be great powers, but they are not – at least, not yet – close to being equal to the US super-power.

Neither can match the many hundreds of US military bases around the world – more than 800 of them. The US outspends both of its rivals many times over on its annual military budget. That means Washington can project lethal power around the globe on a scale unmatched by either Russia or China. The only deterrence either has against the military might of the US is a last-resort nuclear arsenal.

Overwhelming US military supremacy means that, unlike China or Russia, Washington does not need to win over allies with carrots. It can simply threaten, bully or bludgeon – directly or through proxies – any state that refuses to submit to its dictates. That way, it has gained control over most of the planet’s key resources, especially over its fossil fuels. 

Similarly, the US enjoys the manifold benefits of having the world’s principal reserve currency, pegging prices – most importantly energy prices – to the dollar. That does not just help reduce the costs of international trade for the US and allow it to borrow money cheaply. It also makes other states and their currencies dependent on the stability of the dollar, as the UK has just found out when the value of the pound plunged against the dollar, threatening to decimate the business sector. 

But there are other advantages for the US in dominating global trade and currency markets. Washington is well positioned to impose economic sanctions to isolate and immiserate states that oppose it, as it is doing to Afghanistan and Iran. And its control of the world’s main financial institutions, such as the IMF and World Bank, means they act as little more than enforcers of Washington foreign policy priorities before agreeing to lend money. 

Shadow cast

Both militarily and economically, the United States molds the world we live in. For those in the West, its grip on our material wellbeing and on our ideological horizons is almost complete. But the American shadow extends much further. All states, including Russia and China, operate within the framework of power relations, global institutions, state interests, and access to resources shaped by the US. 

What distinguishes the status of Russia and China as great powers from the status of the US as a solitary super-power is the fact that their role on the international stage is necessarily more reactive and defensive. Neither can afford to antagonize the American behemoth unnecessarily. They must protect their interests, rather than project them as Washington does. 

That means neither is likely to start invading neighbors that wish to ally with the US unless they feel existentially important state interests are being threatened by such an alliance. That is why Western narratives claiming to explain Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have to take as their starting points two improbable assumptions: that President Putin is solely responsible for launching the Ukraine war, over the heads of the Russian military; and that Putin himself is mad, evil or a megalomaniac. 

To make such a case – the premise of all Western coverage of events in Ukraine – is already to concede that the only rational explanation for Russia invading Ukraine would be its perception that vital Russian interests were at stake – interests so vital that Moscow was prepared to defend them even if it meant incurring the wrath of the mighty American empire. 

Instead, Monbiot and much of the left are throwing in their hand with the racist prescriptions of the apologists of US empire: that Washington’s great-power rivals act in ways decried by the US solely because they are irrational and evil. 

This is a power-politics analysis of the playground. And yet it passes for neutral reporting and informed commentary in all establishment Western media. Catastrophically, Monbiot has played a crucial part in seeding these destructive ideas – ones that can only lead to intensified conflict and undermine peacemaking – into the anti-war movement. 

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http://edwardcurtin.com/the-most-dangerous-thing-is-the-insouciance-of-people-as-to-what-is-going-on/

The Most Dangerous Thing is the Insouciance of People as to What is Going On

Ed Curtin discusses the precarious global geopolitical situation teetering on World War 3 and how in the current Cuban Missile Crisis Redux we do not have a global leadership that can use reason to solve the problem. The most dangerous thing is the insouciance of most people to what is going on, the populace is focused on trivial pursuits, and has been tranquilized. He wouldn’t be surprised if we wake up one day soon and we see news that nukes have gone off. Putin is doing what any sane leader would do, defending his country from surrounding NATO forces. It’s quite obvious that the U.S. is the leading rogue nation in the world. A multipolar world is slowly coming into view.

42 minute audio interview at artcicle

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https://stephenlendman.org/2022/10/27/the-biden-regime-wants-you-dead/

The Biden Regime Wants You Dead

Flu/covid mass-jabbing is all about destroying health, not protecting and preserving it as falsely claimed by the fabricated official narrative.

Not satisfied with countless millions of mass-casualties from toxic kill shots so far, the illegitimate Biden regime announced a so-called VaxUpAmerica Tour to eliminate greater numbers than already — including maximum numbers of the nation’s elderly.

Consider the diabolical benefits. 

Mass-elimination of elderly Americans will free up billions of dollars from lower Social Security and Medicare payouts — using the windfall for greater corporate handouts and war-making on invented enemies.

Around 60 million poor Americans receive about $1.5 trillion in welfare benefits.

Greatly reducing their numbers will free up billions more dollars — why this segment of society is targeted.

So are infants and young children to prevent them from becoming adults and having their own children.

Women of child-bearing age are another prime target.

Virtually everyone besides the privileged few is vulnerable to the scourge of toxic mass-jabbing — the above segments of society more than others.

According to the White House with the worst of diabolical aims in mind:

The Pharma-controlled HHS “is launching a VaxUpAmerica Family Vaccine Tour (sic).”

The health-destroying scheme is “a new push to encourage families to” self-inflict harm more than already from kill shots designed for this purpose.

“HHS will work with national and community-based organizations and others to reach (maximum numbers of) families.” 

Begun on Wednesday, HHS is conducting its propaganda blitzkrieg to produce greater mass-extermination of unwanted Americans than already. 

“The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is doubling down on its efforts to reach older Americans” — killing them off its intention.

Corporate America is involved along with MSM co-conspirators.

In response to the latest White House campaign to destroy public health more than already, Children’s Health Defense founder, Robert F. Kennedy, said the following:

“It’s troubling that Biden and the regime he nominally heads is so captive of a false and discredited narrative that he continues to aggressively promote a high-risk, zero-liability, experimental medical intervention with a product that doesn’t work as advertised and is causing horrendous health problems in Americans.”

“It’s even more dismaying that he(’s) recruit(ing) America’s corporations (to support) a racketeering enterprise.”

And this from UK-based scholar/physician, Dr. Vernon Coleman:

Calling flu/covid jabs “a fraud and a scandal,” he added:

“There is no evidence proving that mass(-jabbing is) safe or effective.”

“But there is plenty of evidence proving that (it’s) ineffective and dangerous.”

Covid is “flu rebranded.”

MSM throughout the US/West ad elsewhere were bribed with big bucks “to suppress the truth and hide the facts.”

Everyone jabbed one or more times risks contraction of one or more serious diseases.

The vast majority of deaths and adverse events attributed to flu/covid is from kill shots, not the viral illness.

In 2020 before mass-jabbing began, Coleman “warned that those who allowed themselves to be given one of the experimental injections would be immunologically compromised and vulnerable to a wide range of infections.”

“While government scientists and media doctors on television were accusing the un-jabbed of endangering those around them, (he) warned that it would be the other way around.”

“The jabbed would endanger the un-jabbed.”

“That turned out to be true, too.”

We’re still “in the early stages of the world’s largest, most unethical and most unjustifiable experiment.”

Yet indisputable facts proved that the mother of all state-sponsored scams is already “a medical disaster.”

Looking ahead, a greater “epidemic of serious illnesses” and deaths from kill shots than already is virtually certain.

It’s because their toxins “mortally damage” the human immune system.

What began “as a hoax…became a fraud and (is) now (an unparalleled) scandal,” Coleman stressed. 

The diabolical state-sponsored scheme is all about eliminating maximum numbers of unwanted people throughout the US/West and worldwide.

And truth-telling activists like Coleman, RFK, Jr. and many others are vilified instead of praised.

Will criminalizing what exposes and debunks the fabricated official narrative be another shoe to drop ahead?

A Final Comment

Noted UK-based cardiologist, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, called for an immediate halt to mass-jabbing — because of significantly vast and irrefutable harm they’ve caused.

Continuing to administer them will be a “global scandal” of epic proportions, he stressed, adding:

It’s “very hard to believe” that Pharma and public health authorities didn’t know about the hazards of mass-jabbing before the scheme was rolled out.

Of course they knew because toxic jabs are all about eliminating maximum numbers of unwanted people worldwide.