https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/10/12/us-rejection-of-moscows-offer-for-peace-talks-is-utterly-inexcusable/
US Rejection Of Moscow’s Offer For Peace Talks Is Utterly Inexcusable
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that Moscow was open to talks with the the US or with Turkey on ending the war in Ukraine, claiming that US officials are lying when they say Russia has been refusing peace talks.
Reuters reports:
Lavrov said officials, including White House national security spokesman John Kirby, had said the United States was open to talks but that Russia had refused.
“This is a lie,” Lavrov said. “We have not received any serious offers to make contact.”
Lavrov’s claim was given more weight when US State Department spokesman Ned Price dismissed the offer for peace talks shortly after it was extended, citing Russia’s recent missile strikes on Kyiv.
“We see this as posturing,” Price said at a Tuesday press briefing. “We do not see this as a constructive, legitimate offer to engage in the dialogue and diplomacy that is absolutely necessary to see an end to this brutal war of aggression against the people and the state, the Government of Ukraine.”
This is inexcusable. At a time when our world is at its most perilous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis according to many experts as well as the president of the United States, the US government has no business making the decision not to sit down with Russian officials and work toward de-escalation and peace. They have no business making that call on behalf of every terrestrial organism on this planet whose life is being risked in these games of nuclear brinkmanship. The fact that this war has escalated with missile strikes on the Ukrainian capital makes peace talks more necessary, not less.
This rejection is made all the more outrageous by new information from The Washington Post that the US government does not believe Ukraine can win this war and refuses to encourage it to negotiate with Moscow.
“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,” WaPo reports. “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.”
These two points taken together lend even more credibility an argument I’ve been making from the very beginning of this war: that the US does not want peace in Ukraine, but rather seeks to create a costly military quagmire for Moscow just as US officials have confessed to trying to do in Afghanistan and in Syria. Which would explain why US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the US goal in Ukraine is actually to “weaken” Russia, and also why the empire appears to have actively torpedoed a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia in the early days of the conflict.
This proxy war has no exit strategy. And that is entirely by design.
Many have been calling for the US to abandon its policy of actively sustaining this war while avoiding peace talks.
“President Biden’s language, we’re about at the top of the language scale, if you will,” former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mike Mullen told ABC’s This Week on Sunday regarding the president’s recent remark that this conflict could lead to “Armageddon”.
“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,” Mullen said, adding, “As is typical in any war, it has got to end and usually there are negotiations associated with that. The sooner the better as far as I’m concerned.”
“One thing the United States can do is… drop the position, the official position, that the war must go on to weaken Russia severely, meaning no negotiations,” Noam Chomsky argued in a recent appearance on Democracy Now. “Would that open the way to negotiations, diplomacy? Can’t be sure. There’s only one way to find out. That’s to try. If you don’t try, of course it won’t happen.”
“It is time for the United States to supplement its military support for Ukraine with a diplomatic track to manage this crisis before it spirals out of control,” said the Quincy Institute’s George Beebe following the Monday missile strikes on Kyiv, calling it “a major escalation in the war” that was bound to “bring the world closer to a direct military collision between Russia and the United States.”
“The Americans have to come to an agreement with the Russians. And then the war will be over,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said at an event on Tuesday, adding that “anyone who thinks that this war will be concluded through Russian-Ukrainian negotiations is not living in this world.”
It’s absolutely insane that the world’s two nuclear superpowers are accelerating toward direct military confrontation and they aren’t even talking to each other, and it’s even crazier that anyone who says they should be gets called a Kremlin agent and a Chamberlain-like appeaser. Responsible Statecraft’s Harry Kazianis discusses this freakish dynamic in a recent article titled “Talking is not appeasement — it’s avoiding a nuclear armageddon“:
I have fought more than thirty combat simulations in wargames under my own direction for a private defense contract over the last several months, looking at various aspects of the Russia-Ukraine war, and one thing is clear: the chances of a nuclear war increase significantly every day that passes.
In every scenario I tested, the Biden Administration slowly gives Ukraine ever more advanced weapons like ATACMS, F-16s, and other platforms that Russia has consistently warned pose a direct military threat. While each scenario has postulated a different point at which Moscow decides to use a tactical nuclear weapon in order to counter conventional platforms it can’t easily defeat, the chances that Russia uses nukes grow as new and more powerful military capabilities are introduced into the battlefield by the West.
In fact, in 28 of the thirty scenarios I have run since the war began, some sort of nuclear exchange occurs.
The good news is there is a way out of this crisis — however imperfect it may be. In the two scenarios where nuclear war was averted, direct negotiations led to a ceasefire.
I repeat again that it is absolutely pants-on-head gibbering insanity that these direct negotiations are not already presently underway. Let us petition any and all higher powers we have faith in that this changes very soon. Let us also petition the leaders of our individual nations around the world to exert whatever kind of pressure they can muster upon Washington for these talks to commence. This brinkmanship threatens us all, and the managers of the US empire have no business playing these games with our lives.
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https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/11/patrick-lawrence-our-shared-addiction-to-empire/
Our Shared Addiction to Empire
"If the Columbus myth has been thoroughly discounted, what is it that causes us to continue closing the banks, stopping the mail, and marching in parades on a Monday around October 12 each year?"
Columbus Day: I wasn’t sure America even marked the Italian explorer’s arrival in the New World 530 years ago, given that our republic’s past is a field of battle now. But there it was last Monday: The mail didn’t come, the banks were closed, and my neighbors here in Norfolk didn’t go to work. I ought to pay closer attention to these things.
I took the occasion to look again at a book that has long sat on a shelf opposite my desk. I stare at the spine of Empire as a Way of Life as a matter of daily routine, as if it is a picture on the wall that is always where it is supposed to be. It was William Appleman Williams’ last book, published in the autumn of 1980. It seemed a good moment to think again about what App, as he is known in this household, had to say five years after the rise of Saigon ended our Southeast Asian adventures.
It was not among the books that made the noted historian’s name. That goes to The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, The Roots of the Modern American Empire, and other such volumes App published as a leading figure—the leading figure, I’ll suggest—in the University of Wisconsin’s famously excellent history department. Empire as a Way of Life was more in the way of late-career reflections, like Blowback and the other books Chalmers Johnson published once the rigors of academia were behind him.
I still remember that chill October evening on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, when Williams marked Empire’s publication at a gathering organized by the then-young Radical History Review. We were all there to honor a very great man. We all listened intently as he considered aloud what was next for a nation whose imperial ambitions had recently proven so dreadfully destructive of so much. The book’s subtitle gives an idea of what App had to say that night: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts About an Alternative.
I took App’s book down from its shelf last Monday for what I thought was a good reason. I wondered, with Empire as a Way of Life opened before me, what it is we celebrate when we mark the day a 15th century Italian made landfall on a Bahamian island inhabitants called Guanahani but which Columbus immediately renamed San Salvador? The explorer wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella, the Spanish king and queen who bankrolled him, as follows a few months later:
I discovered many islands, thickly peopled, of which I took possession without resistance in the name of our most illustrious Monarch, by public proclamation and with unfurled banners.
It seems a clue. It was about possession, proclamation, and the representation of authority by way of heraldry as much as it was about discovery. This seems right, though he could not have known what we know now and could not have thought as we think now.
Descendants of settlers and immigrants across the Atlantic recognize Native Americans as people now, even if this is mostly on paper. Too many still live on desolate reservations, medicating themselves with alcohol—and, as the physician Gabor Maté would say, their resort to it at least serves to assuage the pain of centuries of trauma. These were first people and are no longer called “Indians.” This is our collective acknowledgment. Not nearly enough has otherwise changed.
There was a seaside settlement of Vikings we now call L’Anse aux Meadows along the Newfoundland coast half a millennium before Columbus docked in the Bahamas. Tree rings, one way these things can be reckoned, indicate that these settlers were chopping trees by 1021, 1,001 years ago. We have not known this for long, 60 or so years, but that is enough time to think about who from across the Atlantic “discovered” America on Oct. 12, 1492.
If the Columbus myth has been thoroughly discounted, what is it that causes us to continue closing the banks, stopping the mail, and marching in parades on a Monday around October 12 each year? This seems to me a good question.
App Williams helped me along last Monday. When we celebrate Cristoforo Colombo, Cristóbal Colón to the Spaniards, we unfurl the banners, just as he did, of empire. What else did he do other than bring the European Age of Empire, then in its Spanish and Portuguese phases, across the Atlantic? I cannot think of a single thing that otherwise distinguishes his accomplishment.
We had better come to terms with this, just as Williams urged us: However many of us don’t care to own up to it, empire is our way of life just as it was for the Iberians half a millennium ago. Back then it was about gold, slaves, and dominion. For us it is about oil, numerous other commodities, cheap labor, favorable terms of trade, our projection of neoliberal orthodoxy, and, of course, profit.
I have just offered a very brief précis, I hope not too inadequate, of Williams’ core thesis: It is America’s voracious pursuit of its economic interests that drives what he called, in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, “the liberal policy of informal empire, or free trade imperialism.” Williams was a student of, among others, Charles Beard, who earlier put economics and class conflict at the center of the American story in Some Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy and An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.
Americans do not like to read about themselves in terms such as these. This is why Williams was counted a “revisionist” historian and had many critics. Revisionists are historians who set aside all the exceptionalist nonsense and Wilsonian excuse-making—providential missions, “humanitarian” interventions, selflessly bringing democracy to the uncivilized—in favor of accounts of America’s past and present-day conduct grounded in perfectly discernible motivations, interests, and realities.
“The words empire and imperialism enjoy no easy hospitality in the minds and hearts of most contemporary Americans,” Williams wrote very delicately in the book on my desk this week. “This essay,” he continued as he set out, “is a blunt attempt to help us understand and accept our past as an imperial people who must now ‘order’ ourselves rather than policing and saving the world…. Our future is here and now, a community to be created among ourselves so that we can be citizens—not imperial overlords—of the world.”
In his final book Williams holds to those theses that distinguished him during his most productive academic years: There is a good review of “the imperial logic,” as he titles one chapter; all the selfish economic drives that shaped America’s conduct from its earliest days are reprised in a graceful, conversational prose. But what interests me most about this little book is something else.
Here Williams is also concerned with a consciousness—with an addiction to empire shared by all Americans, even those among us who think they have adequately covered themselves by way of their denunciations of the imperial project. There is no discrimination in this book between conservatives and liberals or either of these and progressives—which was a serious term in Williams’ time, believe it or not. Let us know ourselves as who we truly are, he says. We are all living it: Empire is our “way of life.”
We would do well to think about this the next time we fill the car with gasoline, obsess on this or that gadget, eat bananas, or—sit down, please—hang a blue-and-yellow flag off the front porch. We are dependent on empire in a thousand ways we flinch from. The majority of us also cheer on empire like good Wilsonians pretending it is all about democracy. This is what passes for progressive politics today, and I imagine it has App, a classic Midwestern populist who died in 1990 at 68, spinning.
It is a material addiction, empire, but it is also an addiction to the projection of American power. It is altogether a pathology that engages our psyches and consciences because we must find ways to live with these dependencies and still look in our mirrors and think ourselves good.
There is some heartbreak in thinking back to that October evening long ago, either side of Columbus Day 1980. There were hundreds of us there, and we all saw some good use in looking forward with the prospect of doing things differently in our post–Vietnam circumstances. The heartbreak derives from how very far we are now—atomized, apathetic, acquiescent, still living the long “me decade”—from any such idea of purpose, of acting creatively, of cutting a new path out front for ourselves.
This part of App’s book and presentation stirred us, I vividly recall. He saw “the empire at bay” at that moment. And he titled his concluding chapter “Notes on Freedom Without Empire.” It was with these thoughts he concluded his very informal lecture. As he saw it—an equation I have long stood by—the choice was between empire abroad or democracy at home: We can have one or the other but not both
App the populist loved common people and quoted an Australian rancher deep in the Outback: “You aren’t lost until you don’t know where you’ve been.” Let us begin by knowing how we got here, and then we can go on differently: How very excellent a thought is this?
From there he urged us to consider our limits. “The first thing to note is the imperial confusion between an economically defined standard of living and a culturally defined quality of life.” He meant that we must “provide the cost-accounting to tell us what we pay for our largesse.” And what others pay, I would add.
“And so we return to oil, the classic example of the benefits and terrors of empire as a way of life,” App continued. “It is a slow and painful way to learn, this imperial burning of finger after finger to find out that the stove is hot. Let us save our thumbs to grasp a non-imperial future.”
Columbus Day is no longer celebrated as it used to be. This may be a sign of our progress, but I don’t think it is anything monumentally important. We seem no less addicted to the empire the Italian explorer stood for; we seem simply deeper into denial. The long campaign to bring Russia to its knees, the constant provocation of China: It is in our time that empire seems to be playing its cards in shoot-the-moon fashion. It is a terrible thought, but most of us appear to be so frightened as to prefer empire to democracy.
I simply cannot imagine a large auditorium filled with the kind of people who went to see App Williams 42 years ago this month. To steal the phrase and put it to good purpose for once, to gather again as we did then is how we will have to build back better.
....
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/even-the-banksters-are-being-forced-to-admit-that-the-u-s-economy-is-really-starting-to-come-apart-at-the-seams/
Even The Banksters Are Being Forced To Admit That The U.S. Economy Is Really Starting To Come Apart At The Seams
It’s wake up time. For months, there has been a tremendous amount of denial out there. So many of the “experts” assumed that the Federal Reserve and other central banks had everything under control and that things would “return to normal” before too long. But that hasn’t happened. Instead, the wheels seem to be coming off the bus and nobody seems to know what to do. The Fed appears to be determined to keep raising interest rates in a desperate attempt to fight inflation, and this has forced other central banks all over the globe to raise rates as well in order to keep their currencies from absolutely tanking. But all of these interest rate hikes are taking us into a major global economic downturn, and central bankers in Europe are literally screaming at the Fed to end the madness.
But the Fed is not going to end the madness, and so things are going to get really bad.
In fact, Bank of America is now projecting that the U.S. economy will lose 175,000 jobs a month during the first quarter of 2023…
As pressure from the Fed’s war on inflation builds, nonfarm payrolls will begin shrinking early next year, translating to a loss of about 175,000 jobs a month during the first quarter, the bank said. Charts published by Bank of America suggest job losses will continue through much of 2023.
“The premise is a harder landing rather than a softer one,” Michael Gapen, head of US economics at Bank of America, told CNN in a phone interview Monday.
In my opinion, if our job losses are that small during the first three months of next year I think that will be a huge win.
Another bankster, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, is also deeply concerned about the future of the U.S. economy…
“But you can’t talk about the economy without talking about stuff in the future – and this is serious stuff,” Dimon said, citing inflation, quantitative easing, and Russia’s war with Ukraine.
“These are very, very serious things which I think are likely to push the U.S. and the world – I mean, Europe is already in recession, and they’re likely to put the U.S. in some kind of recession six to nine months from now,” he said.
Actually, the U.S. economy is in a recession right now.
But I agree that things will soon get a whole lot worse.
At this point, even the most optimistic woman on Wall Street is warning of disaster.
Ark Investment Management’s Cathie Wood says that what the Fed is doing has the potential to create a “deflationary bust” in this country…
Could it be that the unprecedented 13-fold increase in interest rates during the last six months––likely 16-fold come November 2––has shocked not just the US but the world and raised the risks of a deflationary bust?
The Fed giveth and the Fed taketh away.
Cathie should understand that very well by now.
She looked like a genius on the way up, but the ride down is going to be very painful for her and for everyone else that was swimming in piles of cash during the boom years.
Under normal conditions, I am sure that the Fed would love to ride to Wall Street’s rescue.
But that isn’t going to happen because Fed officials are scared to death of the inflation monster that they played a major role in creating.
All over America, consumers and businesses are being absolutely devastated by rapidly rising prices.
Until inflation is under control, the Fed is going to continue to raise rates.
And that might take quite a while.
So for now, stocks and bonds are just going to keep going lower and lower. On Monday, the Nasdaq actually hit the lowest level in two years…
and AMD. The S&P 500 also fell 0.75% to 3,612.39, dragged down by semi stocks and dips in major tech names like MicrosoftStocks closed lower on Monday with the Nasdaq Composite index falling to the lowest level in two years as tech shares continue to be the hardest hit in this bear market because of spiking interest rates.
The Nasdaq Composite closed 1.04% lower at 10,542.10, hitting its lowest close since July 2020, weighed down by a slump in semiconductor stocks such as Nvidia
, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 93.91 points, or 0.32%, to close at 29,202.88.
The amount of financial wealth that has already been wiped out is truly frightening, but much worse could be on the horizon.
If stocks and bonds continue to plunge, eventually we will see forced selling by pensions and other large investors, and at that point we truly will be in the midst of a very bitter nightmare…
Indeed, pensions don’t even need to have a near-death experience like in the UK: if the value of underlying assets drops enough, the forced selling will begin sooner or later. And once the capitulation really kicks in – as even formerly bullish Goldman strategists warn – followed closely by mass layoffs, only then will we find just how determined Powell is to pull a Volcker 2.0 and blow up the US economy and markets before he is fired by the president as his parting gift for unleashing the worst recession since the global financial crisis.
I couldn’t have said it any better myself.
But at least we are still in better shape than Europe.
A U.S. Army Special Forces veteran named Michael Yon recently told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily what he believes conditions in Europe will soon be like…
Yon said some people “talk about energy as if everything’s interchangeable, as if solar panels and windmills and nuclear plants can replace natural gas, which [they] simply cannot.”
He noted that of the 26 major plants in Europe that produce nitrogen-based fertilizers, all are either closed down or on the verge of closing.
“This will lead to famine. It’s just mathematics at this point,” he said.
The loss of the Nord Stream pipeline already has driven people in Germany and other European nations to cut down trees to heat their homes.
“People are going to literally freeze to death in Germany,” Yon said. “They’re going to freeze, and then they’re going to starve.”
Personally, I believe that the winter that begins in 2023 will be much worse than this upcoming winter for Europe.
At least the Europeans had the luxury of storing up Russian natural gas ahead of time for this winter.
Next winter, they will not have that opportunity.
And that is when things will get really insane.
But what everyone should be able to agree on is the fact that we are heading into a truly historic crisis.
We will soon see things happen that once would have been unimaginable for most people.
I would very much much encourage you to do what you can to get prepared in advance, because the road ahead of us is going to be incredibly challenging.
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