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https://www.globalresearch.ca/members-roll-eyes-nato-demands-another-100-billion-neo-nazi-junta/5854045

Dangerous Crossroads: NATO Plans to Cross “All of Moscow’s Redlines”. Another $100 Billion in NATO Military Aid for the Neo-Nazi Regime?

When the political West launched the Ukrainian conflict over a decade ago, it hoped to snatch all of Ukraine without any major issues.

In hopes of keeping the peace, Russia has been warning against this for decades at that point, but leaked data shows that NATO planned to cross all of Moscow’s red lines and escalate the conflict to what we’re seeing now. Back in 2014, the Kremlin responded with a blistering action in Crimea, preventing the then newly installed Neo-Nazi junta that hijacked Ukraine from taking control of the peninsula. In doing so, Russia prevented yet another NATO-orchestrated bloodshed. Unfortunately, as its Kiev puppets attacked Russian-majority regions, precisely this happened in these areas, resulting in up to 15,000 casualties until Moscow was forced to launch its special military operation (SMO) over two years ago.

Even then, the Kremlin was ready for a peaceful settlement, but the political West sabotaged the already-signed deal in hopes of escalating the death and destruction. Ever since, every time the Russian military would obliterate any major attacking forces by the Neo-Nazi junta, NATO would suggest another “peaceful settlement” that would ensure it “cheaply gains” most of Ukraine. Although Moscow won’t fall for another trick of the so-called “rules-based world order“, the US-led belligerent power pole’s attempts clearly demonstrate in what way it sees former Ukraine. Namely, for them, the unfortunate country (or whatever’s left of it) is essentially a high ROI (return on investment) asset that’s supposed to be exploited to the maximum. In order to ensure the invested funds aren’t wasted, NATO needs to spend even more money.

However, there’s a lot of pushback, not just in many European member states that are supposed to ignore their own growing problems in order to help Western oligarchic elites (that hate them and see them as a resource) to become richer and more powerful, but also in America itself, where the pushback even has a political dimension, as the incumbent Biden administration is profiting directly from the conflict and wants to keep it going for as long as possible. In a recent report about the issue, Politico overtly dubbed it the “Trump-proofing” of the so-called “military aid” for the Kiev regime, just like the DNC-controlled Senate is trying to “Trump-proof” the United States itself in an attempt to secure stable funding for itself in the (by all accounts, extremely likely) case that the Democrats lose the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

During this week’s NATO meeting in Brussels, officials discussed moving the so-called Ukraine Defense Contact Group (UDCG) into the belligerent alliance’s control. The move would formally be finalized at the next summit in July. UDCG, launched two years ago by US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and former Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley, was used as the front for sending hundreds of billions of dollars in Western military gear to the Neo-Nazi junta. By placing the group under direct NATO control, the warmongers in Washington DC seek to cement the so-called “Ukraine aid” even if Donald Trump returns to the White House, a very likely outcome, despite incessant attempts by US federal institutions to prevent it. And yet, even that won’t be enough, as the belligerent alliance needs more money to sustain the Kiev regime.

Inaugural Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting on 26 April 2022 (From the Public Domain)

Namely, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg wants another $100 billion for the Neo-Nazi junta, a sum that all other members are supposed to give as US funding is drying up. The belligerent alliance wants 32 of its member states to contribute to the fund in the same proportion as they finance NATO’s shared budget. Stoltenberg thinks this would “take the politics and uncertainty out of military aid to Ukraine by setting up a five-year, €100 billion fund and having the alliance shoulder more of the weight in organizing arms for Kyiv”. In other words, the members (the vast majority of them effectively vassals and satellite states) would be left with no choice but to finance the deeply corrupt Kiev regime and its unwinnable war with the military superpower next door. In fact, Stoltenberg essentially said so during the meeting.

“We must ensure reliable and predictable security assistance to Ukraine for the long haul so that we rely less on voluntary contributions and more on NATO commitments. Less on short-term offers and more on multi-year pledges,” he stated.

However, the increasingly cash-strapped NATO members, particularly those in Europe, aren’t exactly thrilled about the idea, to put it mildly. As Politico writes, the reactions were mixed, with Poland, Turkey and Germany on board with the proposal, while the rest of the foreign ministers were either indifferent or opposed to it. According to the report, one diplomat said that some ministers rolled their eyes at the €100 billion number, wondering where it came from. Foreign Minister of Belgium Hadja Lahbib warned that it’s “dangerous to make promises that we cannot keep”, while other diplomats cautioned that “the discussion on financing remains at a very early stage”. On the other hand, perhaps the sole sovereigntist NATO and EU member Hungary is resolutely opposed to the idea, which is why Politico is accusing it of being supposedly “pro-Russian”.

“Hungary will reject any proposal that would transform it into an offensive alliance as this would lead to the serious danger of escalation,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said before the meeting, adding: “This isn’t Hungary’s war and it isn’t NATO’s war either.”

In a normal world, this would be a sound argument that nobody could really deny. However, as the belligerent alliance has never really been a “defensive alliance”, it’s only logical that its political elites would want to formalize its true nature.

However, getting most of the members on board with this is easier said than done. Waging war even against largely helpless opponents has been “problematic” (to say the least) in recent years, with NATO humiliated in Afghanistan when the extremely low-tech Taliban defeated the world’s most aggressive military alliance. What’s more, even the Taliban, demonized for decades as some sort of “monsters”, proved to be far more humane than the political West. This also serves as a lesson to the entire world that NATO is a threat to global peace and security, bringing nothing but death and destruction.

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https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/06/glenn-greenwald-antony-blinken-vows-that-ukraine-will-join-nato/

Antony Blinken Vows That Ukraine Will Join NATO

Glenn Greenwald informs his audience of the material implications regarding Blinken's recent promise to Ukraine.  

17 minute video at article address

Comment to video

" As I recall the NATO Charter, says that an attack on any member state is an attack on all of NATO and requires NATO to respond in defense of any of its members.

So, if Ukraine is voted into NATO while the war continues NATO is obligated to defend, meaning to attack Russia. This will mean WWIII.

Or, what Blinken is signaling, if there is an end to the war and Ukraine then is admitted into NATO, Russia will be compelled to attack Ukraine again and this will trigger WWIII. Only under this scenario Russia will be seen as the aggressor.

In either case, American policy seems to be to continue to expand the war, this time with all NATO members as active combatants.

Tony Blinken has completely lost his mind.'

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https://scheerpost.com/2024/04/06/how-israel-weaponizes-water/

How Israel Weaponizes Water

Amid the intensifying water crisis that plagues billions of people across the world, Israel is using water as a weapon in its war against Palestinians by denying access and destroying infrastructure.  

By November 2023, it was already clear that the Israeli government had begun to deny Palestinians in Gaza access to water. 

“Every hour that passes with Israel preventing the provision of safe drinking water in the Gaza strip, in brazen breach of international law, puts Gazans at risk of dying of thirst and diseases related to the lack of safe drinking water’, said Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, U.N. special rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation.

“Israel,” he noted, “must stop using water as a weapon of war.” 

Before Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza, 97 percent of the water in Gaza’s only coastal aquifer was already unsafe for human consumption based on World Health Organisation standards. Over the course of its many attacks, Israel has all but destroyed Gaza’s water purification system and prevented the entry of materials and chemicals needed for repair.

In early October 2023, Israeli officials indicated that they would use their control over Gaza’s water systems as a means to perpetrate a genocide. As Israeli Major General Ghassan Alian, the head of the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), said on 10 October, “Human beasts are dealt with accordingly. Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza. No electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” 

On March 19, U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine Jamie McGoldrick noted that Gaza needed “spare parts for water and sanitation systems” as well as “chemicals to treat water,” since the “lack of these critical items is one of the key drivers of the malnutrition crisis.”

“Malnutrition crisis” is one way to talk about a famine.

The assault on Gaza – whose entire population is “currently facing high levels of acute food insecurity,” according to Oxfam and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification – has sharpened the contradictions that strike the world’s people with force. 

A U.N. report released on World Water Day (March 22) shows that, as of 2022, 2.2 billion people have no access to safely managed drinking water, that 4 in 5 people in rural areas lack basic drinking water, and that 3.5 billion people do not have sanitation systems. 

As a consequence, every day, over a thousand children under the age of 5 die from diseases linked to inadequate water, sanitation, and hygiene. These children are among the 1.4 million people who die every year due to these deficiencies.

The U.N. report notes that, since women and girls are the primary collectors of water, they spend more of their time finding water when water systems deteriorate due to inadequate or non-existent infrastructure or droughts exacerbated by climate change. This has resulted in higher dropout rates for girls in school.

A 2023 study by U.N. Women describes the perils of the water crisis for women and girls:

“Inequalities in access to safe drinking water and sanitation do not affect everyone equally. The greater need for privacy during menstruation, for example, means women and girls and other people who menstruate may access shared sanitation facilities less frequently than people who do not, which increases the likelihood of urinary and reproductive tract infections. Where safe and secure facilities are not available, choices to use facilities are often limited to dawn and dusk, which exposes at-risk groups to violence.”

The lack of access to public toilets is by itself a serious danger to women in cities across the world, such as Dhaka, Bangladesh, where there is one public toilet for every 200,000 people.

Access to drinking water is being further constricted by the climate catastrophe. For instance, a warming ocean means glacier melt, which lifts the sea levels and allows salt water to contaminate underground aquifers more easily. Meanwhile, with less snowfall, there is less water in reservoirs, which means less water to drink and use for agriculture. 

Already, as the U.N. Water report shows, we are seeing increased droughts that now impact at least 1.4 billion people directly.

According to the United Nations, half of the world’s population experiences severe water scarcity for at least part of the year, while one quarter faces “extremely high” levels of water stress. “Climate change is projected to increase the frequency and severity of these phenomena, with acute risks for social stability,” the U.N. notes. The issue of social stability is key, since droughts have been forcing tens of millions of people into flight and starvation.

Climate change is certainly a major driver of the water crisis, but so is the rules-based international order. 

Capitalist governments must not be allowed to point to an ahistorical notion of climate change as an excuse to shirk their responsibility in creating the water crisis. 

For instance, over the past several decades, governments across the world have neglected to upgrade wastewater treatment facilities. Consequently, 42 percent of household wastewater is not treated properly, which damages ecosystems and aquifers. Even more damning is the fact that only 11 percent of domestic and industrial wastewater is being reused.

Increased investment in wastewater treatment would reduce the amount of pollution that enters water sources and allow for better harnessing of the freshwater available to us on the planet.

There are several sensible policies that could be adopted to immediately address the water crisis, such as those proposed by U.N. Water to protect coastal mangroves and wetlands; harvest rainwater; reuse wastewater; and protect groundwater. But these are precisely the kinds of policies that are opposed by capitalist firms, whose profit line is improved by the destruction of nature.

In March 2018, we launched our second dossier, “Cities Without Water.” It is worthwhile to reflect on what we showed then, six years ago:

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Technical Paper VI (IPCC, June 2008) is on climate change and water. The scientific consensus in this document is that the changes in weather patterns — induced by carbon-intensive capitalism — have a negative effect on the water cycle.

Areas where there will be higher rainfall might not see more groundwater due to the velocity of the rain, which will create a rapid movement of water to the oceans. Such high velocity rainfall neither refills aquifers (natural water sources), nor does it allow water to be stored by humans.

The scientists also predict higher rates of drought in regions such as the Mediterranean and Southern Africa. It is this technical report that put forward the number that over a billion people will suffer from water scarcity.

For the past decade, the United Nations Environmental Programme has warned about the growth of water-intensive lifestyles and of water pollution. Both of these — lifestyles and pollution — are consequences of the spread of capitalist social relations and capitalist productive mechanisms across the planet. 

In terms of lifestyle use, the average resident in the United States consumes between 300 and 600 litres of water per day. 

This is a misleading figure. It does not mean that individuals consume such high amounts of water. Much of this water is used by water-intensive agriculture and by water-intensive industrial production, including energy production. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends per person usage of 20 litres of water per day for basic hygiene and food preparation.

The gap between the two is not accidental. It is about a water-intensive lifestyle — use of washing machines and dishwashers, washing of cars and watering of gardens, as well as the use of water by factories and factory farms.

Water pollution is a serious problem. In Esquel, Argentina, the people saw that the contaminants from corporate gold mining were ruining their drinking water. ‘Water is worth more than gold’ (El agua vale más que el oro), they said. Ruthless techniques of extraction by mining corporations (by use of cyanide) and of cultivation by agribusiness (by use of fertilisers and pesticides) have ruined reservoirs of clean water.

Their blue gold, say the people of Esquel, is more important than real gold. They held a public assembly in 2003 that asserted their right to their water against the interests of the private corporations.

It is worth pointing out that the amount of water it would take to support 4.7 billion people at the WHO daily minimum would be 9.5 billion litres – the exact amount used every day to water the world’s golf courses. The water used by 60,000 villages in Thailand, for instance, is used to water one golf course in Thailand. These are the priorities of our current system.”

In other words, watering golf courses is more important than providing piped water to the thousand of children under the age of five who die every day due to water deprivation. Those are the values of the capitalist system.