Wernher Von Braun's Assistant Dr. Carol Rosin Burst My Whole And Complete UAP Disclosure Bubble...,

sourcewatch  |  "The Founder for the Institute for Security and Cooperation in Outer Space, ISCOS. World Peace Ambassador, International Association of Educators for World Peace, IAEWP (NGO, UN-ECOSOC)

"An educator, international speaker, author, consultant to Space Age technology development projects, a space and missile defense consultant, future manufacturing technology forecasting consultant for sustainable living on earth and in space, Dr. Rosin advises decision makers and others about applications of technology and information services for human needs, environment, new energy, and peace and security, health and prosperity for all on earth and in space.

"Co-authored the Outer Space Security and Development Treaty draft with distinguished colleagues: Apollo Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell; Commander Will Miller, US Navy (Ret.); Dr, Abe Krieger, 37 year Boeing executive; Dr. C.B. Scott Jones, military/intelligence and Senior Advisor to Sen. Claiborne Pell; supported by the Hon. Paul Hellyer, former Minister of Defense of Canada. This Treaty is posted in several languages with bios on http://www.peaceinspace.com Dr. Rosin is Consultant to the Treaty Project that is A Project of P.E.A.C.E. Inc., the Peace and Emergency Action Coalition for Earth, a 501-C-3 founded by Dr. C.B. Scott Jones. Currently working to get this Treaty signed and ratified into law.

• First woman executive in an aerospace company, Corporate Manager of Fairchild Industries
• With the late Dr. Wernher von Braun, visionary and “father of rocketry,” founded the national award-winning “It’s Your Turn…” program...
• Spokesperson for the late rocket scientist Dr. Wernher von Braun, presenting his peace on earth and in space vision for local through global uses and applications of space age technology and information applied directly to solving urgent and potential challenges of human needs, the environment, and energy as humans evolve and learn from living, working, touring and traveling in space (without space-based weapons). First speech for von Braun was to 18,000 people at a National Education Association conference in 1974 demonstrating LIVE how satellites can be used as teaching tools worldwide
• Founder, Institute for Security and Cooperation in Outer Space, ISCOS, 1983-Present. The original Board included Honorary Chairman, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Dr. Issac Assimov, Dr. Buckminister (Bucky) Fuller, Attorney Daniel Sheehan, the late Dr. Rashmi Mayur, Advisory Board Chairman, Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell (sixth man on the moon), and many other respected experts. Brought over 100 people to the UN Second Special Session on the Peaceful Uses and Exploration of Outer Space in 1982 to stand for no space-based weapons. Started the movement to “Stop Star Wars,” the “Leaky Umbrella Campaign,” the “Save Outer Space, SOS Campaign,” involving approximately 50 million people
• Advisor to the New Energy Movement to encourage the research and development of new clean and safe alternative energy sources via project development and management in various countries
• Official Advisor to the Peoples Republic of China on alternatives to missile defense and on applications of space technology in China. China and Russia have proposed a ban on all space-based weapons
• Witness in the Disclosure Project at the National Press Club, May, 2001. Advisor to the Exopolitics Institute
• Started the global movement to prevent the weaponizaton of space, the Stop Star Wars, Leaky Umbrella Campaign, Campaign to Save Outer Space (SOS Campaign), which some estimate to have involved over 50 million people. Appeared on numerous speaking platforms and media productions with members of the military industrial complex discussing feasible alternative technology programs that can replace dangerous, too costly, polluting, destabilizing weapons programs including a new form of missile defense based on cooperative information and technology application sharing for sustainable healthy living on earth as humans evolve into the universes
• Initiated the first USSR-USA military-to-military meeting. Initiated the trip of the first NINE US Senators to the USSR
• Consultant and/or speaker to numerous organizations, industries and military and government agencies including TRW on the Time Management Money system for the Space Shuttle, MX missile and weather satellites, IBM Europe, Walt Disney Productions on the creation of Space and Future Worlds at Disneyworld, General Electric, World Future Society, National Space Institute, Central Intelligence Agency, the US Space Foundation, the US Space Command and many international audiences.
• Space and Conversion Advisor to Presidential Candidate Reverend Jesse Jackson who introduced Rosin’s Space Development Initiative, SDI, to replace the Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI. Advised and briefed other presidential candidates, members of Congress, and other international dignitaries
• Initiated the first legislation to stop anti-satellite (ASAT) testing with Congressman Les AuCoin, created the first legislation to ban all space-based weapons with Congressman Joe Moakley and Sen. Tom Harkin, and initiated the first bill that had a companion Treaty to ban space-based weapons with Congressman Dennis Kucinich and the Hon. Paul Hellyer, former Minister of Defense, in Canada
• Founder of the original World Entrepreneur Association to encourage integrity based new entrepreneurial businesses and training programs. Consults to businesses, government representatives, students, leaders and community organizations about possible new jobs and profits, products and services, technologies and information applied to better life in sustainable communities and regions
• Miscellaneous: Space Consultant to Buckminister Fuller’s World Game, entertainment producer for LeCarpentier Stuart Productions, General in the First Earth Battalion, ski instructor, skating champion
• As an example of a non-space-based weapons business in space, organized the launch into space of Dr. Leary’s cremated remains that flew from US Vandenberg Air Force Base to Madrid then to the Canary Islands, Spain to be launched into space by Celestis, Inc,, (with the ashes of friends: rocket scientist Dr. Kraft Ericke; space physicist Dr. Gerard O'Neill; founder of the International Space University Todd Hawley, and with cremated remains of Star Trek TV series creator Gene Roddenberry ^[1]

I Would Pay Good Money To See Zakharova Kick Ms. Lindsey's Punk Ass...,

SCMP  |  Russia’s interior ministry has put US Senator Lindsey Graham on a wanted list, Russian media reported on Monday, citing the ministry’s database.

In an edited video released by the Ukrainian president’s office of Graham’s meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday, Graham was shown saying “the Russians are dying” and then saying US support was the “best money we’ve ever spent”.

Russia MFA Spokeswoman ZAKHAROVA: "“The Russians are dying... it’s the best money we’ve ever spent,” US Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said with a pleased smirk during his meeting with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.

During the Nuremberg trials, Reichsminister… pic.twitter.com/b8VqBDuSJS

— COMBATE |🇵🇷 (@upholdreality) May 28, 2023

After Russia criticised the remarks, Ukraine released a full video of the meeting which showed the two remarks were not linked.

Russia’s Investigative Committee said on Sunday that it was opening a criminal probe into Graham’s comments. It did not specify what crime he was suspected of.

In Russia, the comments caused a swell of outrage. Before the criminal proceedings were initiated, the Russian leadership had already verbally criticised Graham.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov spoke of a “disgrace” that such senators represented the United States. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova declared that US investments had caused World War II and the Holocaust.

Now the US was funding “the neo-Nazi Kiev regime,” Zakharova added, reprising the Russian position that its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year was necessary to defeat Nazism.

Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev called Graham, a 67-year-old Republican, an old fool.

“The old fool Senator Lindsey Graham said that the United States has never spent money so successfully as on the murder of Russians,” Medvedev said. “He shouldn’t have done that.”

 Graham disputed Russian criticism of his support for Ukraine on Sunday, saying he had simply praised the spirit of Ukrainians in resisting a Russian invasion with assistance provided by Washington.

“As usual the Russia propaganda machine is hard at work,” Graham told Reuters in an emailed statement on Sunday, referring to Medvedev’s comments about his Kyiv visit, which he had used to urge Washington to send more weapons to Ukraine.

Graham said he had mentioned to Zelensky “that Ukraine has adopted the American mantra, ‘Live Free or Die”. It has been a good investment by the United States to help liberate Ukraine from Russian war criminals”.

What Divides Americans Is INFINITELY STRONGER Than What "Unites" Us....,

azerbaycan  |  With the House of Representatives controlling the “power of the purse” (the budget) of the US, it has become the norm in these politically divisive days when the House is controlled by the party opposing the president, to try to humiliate him by creating a crisis.

That being said, there has been an ever-growing chorus of US politicians and officials who have called for the debt ceiling to be raised, saying if they don’t do it, it will “help China,” or sometimes even Russia. These claims are bizarre. Are they truly suggesting that the only reason to maintain basic political unity and compromise in the US is Beijing? And that this is the reason they should comply to keep the mountain of US debt and spending going? Such a statement says a lot about US politics, both past and present. First, it tells us that beyond exerting aggression and fear of foreign adversaries, there is very little to keep US politics together these days and its environment is essentially toxic. Secondly, it also tells us how the US system sustains its power as a whole.

The US is a vast and diverse nation. It has a population of over 300 million people across a territorial expanse which is the third largest in the world by some definitions. Across its 50 states, a variety of different ethnic and social backgrounds can be found. Your Baptist pastor from Alabama has nothing in common with your ambitious young middle-class banker living in New York City, and even less with your struggling African-American family in the same city. In incorporating such diversity, the political system of the US is also by constitution decentralized, delegating power into multiple branches of government dispersed across federal, state and local levels.

It is no surprise that this has produced a political system which is beset by often bitter division and intense ideological and value-based conflicts. This has been enough, as history demonstrates, to plunge the country into a civil war. The development of mass media and social networks has only made it worse. Thus, starting in the 20th century, the American elite structure has sought to maintain control over its nation by vesting itself in the politics of fear mongering, which forces a continual emphasis on “American values,” namely democracy and liberty, in the bid to maintain a basic consensus for the justification of the state itself.

When analyzed through this lens, if the US runs out of adversaries and threats, politicians genuinely might have difficulty justifying the existence or unity of the nation altogether in its current form. The US centralizes itself through fear and hysteria, because if not for those things constantly looming, Americans wouldn’t have a whole lot to agree on, be it guns, abortion, LGBTQ rights, immigration, or anything else.

Did You See The Patriot Missile Battery Get Destroyed By A Single Kinzhal Hypersonic Missile?

Harpers  | To what degree would Washington even be interested in a negotiated resolution to the war in Ukraine?

Russian MoD about destroyed AD Patriot in Kiev. pic.twitter.com/KxbUqA5MD6

— Spriter (@Spriter99880) May 16, 2023

After all, a good deal of evidence suggests that the administration’s real—if only semi-acknowledged—objective is to topple Russia’s government. The draconian sanctions that the United States imposed on Russia were designed to crash its economy. As the New York Times reported, these sanctions have

ignited questions in Washington and in European capitals over whether cascading events in Russia could lead to “regime change,” or rulership collapse, which President Biden and European leaders are careful to avoid mentioning.

By repeatedly labeling Putin a “war criminal” and a murderous dictator, President Biden (using the same febrile rhetoric that his predecessors deployed against Noriega, Milošević, Qaddafi, and Saddam Hussein) has circumscribed Washington’s diplomatic options, rendering regime change the war’s only acceptable outcome.

I counted 30 Patriot PAC-3 MSE launches here.

The FY2024 costs of these per missile is about $$5,275,000

That was $158,250,000 fired in about two minutes. And as we see, the battery or something else likely got blown up. So it failed in its mission. pic.twitter.com/9rwPnHkNGu

— Fennec_Radar (@RadarFennec) May 16, 2023

Diplomacy requires an understanding of an adversary’s interests and motives and an ability to make judicious compromises. But by assuming a Manichaean view of world politics, as has become Washington’s reflexive posture, “compromise, the virtue of the old diplomacy, becomes the treason of the new,” as the foreign policy scholar Hans Morgenthau put it, “for the mutual accommodation of conflicting claims . . . amounts to surrender when the moral standards themselves are the stakes of the conflict.”

Still from the video showing the explosion pic.twitter.com/mcpI3ptpEn

— Tony (@Cyberspec1) May 16, 2023

Washington, then, will not entertain an end to the conflict until Russia is handed a decisive defeat. Echoing previous comments by Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared in April 2022 that the goal is to weaken Russia militarily. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has repeatedly dismissed the idea of negotiating, insisting that Moscow is not serious about peace. For its part, Kyiv has indicated that it will settle for nothing less than the return of all Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia, including Crimea. Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba has endorsed the strategy of applying enough military pressure on Russia to induce its political collapse.

Of course, the same momentum pushing toward a war in pursuit of overweening ends catapults Washington into pursuing a war employing unlimited means, an impulse encapsulated in the formula, endlessly invoked by Washington policymakers and politicians: “Whatever it takes, for as long as it takes.” As the United States and its NATO allies pour ever more sophisticated weapons onto the battlefield, Moscow will likely be compelled (from military necessity, if not from popular domestic pressure) to interdict the lines of communication that convey these weapons shipments to Ukraine’s forces, which could lead to a direct clash with NATO forces. More importantly, as Russian casualties inevitably mount, animosity toward the West will intensify. A strategy guided by “whatever it takes, for as long as it takes” vastly increases the risk of accidents and escalation.

The proxy war embraced by Washington today would have been shunned by the Washington of the Cold War. And some of the very misapprehensions that have contributed to the start of this war make it far more dangerous than Washington acknowledges. America’s NATO expansion strategy and its pursuit of nuclear primacy both emerge from its self-appointed role as “the indispensable nation.” The menace Russia perceives in that role—and therefore what it sees as being at stake in this war—further multiply the danger. Meanwhile, nuclear deterrence—which demands careful, cool, and even cooperative monitoring and adjustment between potential adversaries—has been rendered wobbly both by U.S. strategy and by the hostility and suspicion created by this heated proxy war. Rarely have what Morgenthau praised as the virtues of the old diplomacy been more needed; rarely have they been more abjured.

Neither Moscow nor Kyiv appears capable of attaining its stated war aims in full. Notwithstanding its proclaimed annexation of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson administrative districts, Moscow is unlikely to establish complete control over them. Ukraine is similarly unlikely to recapture all of its pre-2014 territory lost to Moscow. Barring either side’s complete collapse, the war can end only with compromise.

Reaching such an accord would be extremely difficult. Russia would need to disgorge its post-invasion gains in the Donbas and contribute significantly to an international fund to reconstruct Ukraine. For its part, Ukraine would need to accept the loss of some territory in Luhansk and Donetsk and perhaps submit to an arrangement, possibly supervised by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, that would grant a degree of cultural and local political autonomy to additional Russian-speaking areas of the Donbas. More painfully, Kyiv would need to concede Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea while ceding territory for a land bridge between the peninsula and Russia. A peace settlement would need to permit Ukraine simultaneously to conduct close economic relations with the Eurasian Economic Union and with the European Union (to allow for this arrangement, Brussels would need to adjust its rules). Most important of all—given that the specter of Ukraine’s NATO membership was the precipitating cause of the war—Kyiv would need to forswear membership and accept permanent neutrality.

Washington’s endorsement of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s goal of recovering the “entire territory” occupied by Russia since 2014, and Washington’s pledge, held now for more than fifteen years, that Ukraine will become a NATO member, are major impediments to ending the war. Make no mistake, such an accord would need to make allowances for Russia’s security interests in what it has long called its “near-abroad” (that is, its sphere of influence)—and, in so doing, would require the imposition of limits on Kyiv’s freedom of action in its foreign and defense policies (that is, on its sovereignty).

Such a compromise, guided by the ethos of the old diplomacy, would be anathema to Washington’s ambitions and professed values. Here, again, the lessons, real and otherwise, of the Cuban Missile Crisis apply. To enhance his reputation for toughness, Kennedy and his closest advisers spread the story that they forced Moscow to back down and unilaterally withdraw its missiles in the face of steely American resolve. In fact, Kennedy—shaken by the apocalyptic potentialities of the crisis that he had largely provoked—secretly acceded to Moscow’s offer to withdraw its missiles from Cuba in exchange for Washington’s withdrawing its missiles from Turkey and Italy. The Cuban Missile Crisis was therefore resolved not by steadfastness but by compromise.

But because that quid pro quo was successfully hidden from a generation of foreign policy makers and strategists, from the American public, and even from Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s own vice president, JFK and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the face of what the United States construes as aggression, together with the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering that aggression, define a successful national security strategy. These false lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis were one of the main reasons that Johnson was impelled to confront supposed Communist aggression in Vietnam, regardless of the costs and risks. The same false lessons have informed a host of Washington’s interventions and regime-change wars ever since—and now help frame the dichotomy of “appeasement” and “resistance” that defines Washington’s response to the war in Ukraine—a response that, in its embrace of Wilsonian belligerence, eschews compromise and discrimination based on power, interest, and circumstance.

Even more repellent to Washington’s self-styling as the world’s sole superpower would be the conditions required to reach a comprehensive European settlement in the aftermath of the Ukraine war. That settlement, also guided by the old diplomacy, would need to resemble the vision, thwarted by Washington, that Genscher, Mitterrand, and Gorbachev sought to ratify at the end of the Cold War. It would need to resemble Gorbachev’s notion of a “common European home” and Charles de Gaulle’s vision of a European community “from the Atlantic to the Urals.” And it would have to recognize NATO for what it is (and for what de Gaulle labeled it): an instrument to further the primacy of a superpower across the Atlantic.

Elderly Black LARP's Make The Empire Even More Ridiculous

justice |  A federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida, returned a superseding indictment charging four U.S. citizens and three Russian nationals with working on behalf of the Russian government and in conjunction with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to conduct a multi-year foreign malign influence campaign in the United States. Among other conduct, the superseding indictment alleges that the Russian defendants recruited, funded and directed U.S. political groups to act as unregistered illegal agents of the Russian government and sow discord and spread pro-Russian propaganda; the indicted intelligence officers, in particular, participated in covertly funding and directing candidates for local office within the United States.

This is an absolutely remarkable - and chilling - indictment. Several American black leftist groups and activists are being charged with felonies for posting memes and other political content against the war in Ukraine, protesting racial injustice: allegedly on behalf of Russia: https://t.co/SQ1K1VZG1v

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 19, 2023

Additionally, in a separate case out of the District of Columbia, a criminal complaint was unsealed charging Russian national Natalia Burlinova with conspiring with an FSB officer to act as an illegal agent of Russia in the United States.

“Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights – freedoms Russia denies its own citizens – to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “The department will not hesitate to expose and prosecute those who sow discord and corrupt U.S. elections in service of hostile foreign interests, regardless of whether the culprits are U.S. citizens or foreign individuals abroad.”

“Efforts by the Russian government to secretly influence U.S. elections will not be tolerated,” said Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite, Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “As today’s announcement demonstrates, the Criminal Division is committed to eradicating foreign malign influence from the U.S. political system and helping ensure the integrity of our elections.”

“Today’s announcement paints a harrowing picture of Russian government actions and the lengths to which the FSB will go to interfere with our elections, sow discord in our nation and ultimately recruit U.S citizens to their efforts,” said Acting Assistant Director Kurt Ronnow of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. “All Americans should be deeply concerned by the tactics employed by the FSB and remain vigilant to any attempt to undermine our democracy. The FBI remains committed to confronting this egregious behavior and ultimately disrupting our adversaries and those who act on their behalf.”

United States v. Ionov, et al.

According to the superseding indictment returned in the Middle District of Florida, Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, a resident of Moscow, was the founder and president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR), an organization headquartered in Moscow, Russia, and funded by the Russian government. Ionov allegedly utilized AGMR to carry out Russia’s malign influence campaign. Ionov’s influence efforts were allegedly directed and supervised by Moscow-based FSB officers, including indicted defendants Aleksey Borisovich Sukhodolov and Yegor Sergeyevich Popov.

“The prosecution of this criminal conduct is essential to protecting the American public when foreign governments seek to inject themselves into the American political process,” said U.S. Attorney Roger B. Handberg for the Middle District of Florida. “We thank our partners at the FBI for their tireless investigation of these events and their commitment to ensure justice is done.”

Among other illegal activities, the superseding indictment alleges that Ionov, Sukhodolov and Popov conspired to directly and substantially influence democratic elections in the United States by clandestinely funding and directing the political campaign of a particular candidate for local office in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2019. For instance, the superseding indictment alleges that Popov expressly referred to this effort on behalf of the FSB as “our election campaign,” and Ionov referring to the candidate as the “candidate whom we supervise.” Ionov and Popov allegedly intended that this election interference plot would extend beyond the 2019 local election cycle in St. Petersburg, and subsequently discussed that the “USA Presidential election” was the FSB’s “main topic of the year.”

Moreover, from at least November 2014 until July 2022, Ionov allegedly engaged in a years-long foreign malign influence campaign targeting the United States. As a part of the campaign, Ionov allegedly recruited members of political groups within the United States, including the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement (collectively, the APSP) in Florida, Black Hammer in Georgia and a political group in California (referred to in the superseding indictment as U.S. Political Group 3), to participate in the influence campaign and act as agents of Russia in the United States, including the following indicted defendants:

• Omali Yeshitela, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as the chairman and founder of the APSP;
• Penny Joanne Hess, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as the leader of a component of the APSP;
• Jesse Nevel, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as a member of a component of the APSP; and
• Augustus C. Romain Jr., aka Gazi Kodzo, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Atlanta, who served as a leader of the APSP and a founder of Black Hammer in Georgia.

One focus of Ionov’s alleged influence operation was to create the appearance of American popular support for Russia’s annexation of territories in Ukraine. For example, in May 2020, Ionov allegedly sent a request he stated was from “Russia, the Donetsk People’s Republic” – an apparent reference to a Russian-occupied region in eastern Ukraine – to Yeshitela and members of other U.S. political groups to make statements in support of the independence of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, a Russian-backed breakaway state in eastern Ukraine. Ionov later allegedly touted to the FSB that Yeshitela’s video-recorded statement of support was the first time that “American nonprofit organizations congratulated citizens” of the occupied region.

The Establishment Playbook For Maligning Leakers And Ignoring What's Leaked...,

greenwald  |  On a virtually daily basis, one can find authorized leaks in The New York Times, The Washington Post, on CNN and NBC News: meaning stories dressed up as leaks from anonymous sources that are, in fact, nothing more than messaging assertions that the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security and the Pentagon have instructed these subservient media corporations to disseminate. When that happens, the leaker is never found or punished: even when the leaks are designated as the most serious crimes under the U.S. criminal code, such as when The Washington Post's long-time CIA spokesman David Ignatius in early 2017 published the contents of the intercepted phone calls between Trump's incomcing National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Most of Russiagate was constructed based on authorized leaks, a generous way of describing official propaganda from the U.S. Security State launedered in the American corporate press.

But when it comes to unauthorized leaks -- which result in the disclsoure of secret evidence showing that the U.S. Security State lied, acted corruptly, or broke laws -- that is when the full weight of establishment power comes crashing down on the head of the leaker. They are found and arrested. Their character is destroyed. And now -- in a new and genuinely shocking esclation -- it is the largest media corporations themselves, such as the Times and the Post, that actually do the FBI's work by hunting down the leaker, exposing him, and ensuring his arrest. 

This playback is always used in such cases and is easily recognized. The point is to shift attention from the substance of the embarrassing and incriminating disclosures onto the personal traits of the person who exposed them, so as to make the public forget about what they learned and come to see the leaker as so unlikeable that they want nothing to do with the disclosures themselves. Thus:

When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers – showing the US Government was lying to the American public that it believed it could win the war in Vietnam – FBI and CIA agents broke into the office of his psychoanalyst to try to expose his psychosexual secrets to discredit him and distract from the substance of the disclosures.

When Chelsea Manning leaked massive evidence of hidden US war crimes to WikiLeaks, long-time anti-LGBT bigot Joy Ann Reid of MSNBC and others said the overarching motive was mental illness over gender identity.

When it became clear that Julian Assange had created a powerful and formidible instrument for holding the U.S. Security State accountable and exposing their lies and crimes -- WikiLeaks -- corporate outlets began puking up a deluge of personal attacks against him, ones designed to make people conclude he is so repellent that the disclosures he enabled should be ignored because he was just too personally distasteful. The then-editor-in-chief of The New York Times Bill Keller even stooped to demeaning his personal hygiene, publishing this 2011 paragraph that he said he received from one of his reporters:

“He was alert but disheveled, like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.”

When Edward Snowden furnished to myself and Laura Poitras the previously secret evidence that Obama national security official James Clapper lied to the public when denying that the NSA spied en masse on millions of Americans --  reporting that ended up winning every major journalism prize in the West and that caused an appellate court to rule that Obama's NSA had acted both unconstituitonally and illegally in infringing the privacy rights of millions of Americans -- CNN, NYT. NBC and The New Yorkier's Jeffrey Toobin labeled him a "narcissist" for believing he knew better than everyone else, and numerous outlets dug through his old blog comments to prove he had bad politics as a teenager.

Now, when doing the FBI's work by outing Jack Teixeira, both the Washington Post and CNN are emphasizing transgressive comments he made about race and anti-Semitism in a teenagers' gaming room to distract attention from the lies these docs reveal about, among other things, Biden's role in Ukraine.

Jewish Extremists Give No Phuggs About Being An Openly Ethnotheocratic Apartheid State

socialistworker  |  For most of Israel’s history the state’s fundamental contradiction didn’t much trouble its governments. The claim of democracy gave them a veneer of legitimacy. It even allowed them to justify their occupation of Palestine, their obsessive military spending funded by the US, and the wars it carries out on the US’s behalf.

But as Israel’s grip on Palestinian land has tightened, it’s been faced with an existential dilemma. Accepting the Palestinians who live there as equal citizens would threaten Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. That’s something that the “liberal” and “left” parties who once dominated Israeli politics could never accept. But they have no solution to the problem of the occupation.

They’re not willing to end the occupation of east Jerusalem and the West Bank. Nor will they give up the settlements there where hundreds of thousands of their citizens now live. But neither are they willing to abandon the pretence of being a democracy. And they cling to the false promise of a two-state solution—the lie that they will one day give Palestinians a state of their own.

The Israeli right does have a solution—but it means casting off Israel’s democratic facade. The Israeli right is much better suited to maintaining Israel’s apartheid system. They’re much more open and determined in their desire to seize all Palestinian land, and in their hatred of Palestinian people.

So as the problem of the occupation grew over the years, so too has the popularity of the Israeli right. Binyamin Netanyahu has become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister by riding that tide. In 2015, he won re-election by warning of the “threat” posed by Arab voters voting “in droves”.

Having done that, he went on in 2018 to pass a new “basic law”—fundamental legislation that acts as Israel’s constitution. This said openly that only Jewish people have “an exclusive right to self determination” there. It was designed to entrench into law the apartheid system that had for decades been an unspoken reality. 

But it also meant admitting openly, for the first time, that Israel was not a democracy for Palestinians. Now, propped up by parties even further to his right, Netanyahu’s government wants to go further. What the US, Israel’s “centrists,” and the soldiers refusing to serve really fear is that in doing so, they’ll cast off the “democratic” identity. 

With it goes the cloak of legitimacy for the apartheid system. The alternative is a single, secular state in all of Palestine, with equal democratic rights for all of its citizens. But Israel’s defenders of “democracy” would rather envisage civil war before they countenance that.

Any Man Who Must Say "I Am The King" Is No True King...,

caityjohnstone  |  The illusory truth effect is a cognitive bias which causes people to mistake something they have heard many times for an established fact, because the way the human brain receives and interprets information tends to draw little or no distinction between repetition and truth. Propagandists and empire managers often take advantage of this glitch in our wetware, which is what’s happening when you see them repeating key phrases over and over again that they want people to believe.

John Kirby really wants everyone to know that America is in charge of the world. This is from one single press conference. pic.twitter.com/HeE9uGEwrW

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 21, 2023

We saw another repetition of this line recently at an online conference hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce, in which the US ambassador to China asserted that Beijing must accept the US as the “leader” of the region China happens to occupy.

US empire managers are of course getting very assertive about the narrative that they are the world’s “leader” because that self-appointed “leadership” is being challenged by China, and the nations which support it with increasing openness like Russia. Most of the major international news stories of our day are either directly or indirectly related to this dynamic, wherein the US is struggling to secure unipolar planetary domination by thwarting China’s rise and undermining its partners.

The message they’re putting out is, “This is our world. We’re in charge. Anyone who claims otherwise is freakish and abnormal, and must be opposed.”

"They claim ownership over the entire planet while pretending that they do not seek confrontation with the nations they try to subjugate, and interpret any refusal to be subjugated as an unprovoked act of aggression."https://t.co/J7H09Q8PsD

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 2, 2023

Why do they say the US is the “leader” of the world instead of its “ruler”, anyway? I’m unclear on the difference as practically applied. Is it meant to give us the impression that the US rules the world by democratic vote? That this is something the rest of the world consented to? Because I sure as hell don’t remember voting for it, and we’ve all seen what happens to governments which don’t comply with US “leadership”.

I’m not one of those who believe a multipolar world will be a wonderful thing, I just recognize that it beats the hell out of the alternative, that being increasingly reckless nuclear brinkmanship to maintain global control. The US has been in charge long enough to make it clear that the world order it dominates can only be maintained by nonstop violence and aggression, with more and more of that violence and aggression being directed toward major nuclear-armed powers. The facts are in and the case is closed: US unipolar hegemony is unsustainable.

The problem is that the US empire itself does not know this. This horrifying trajectory we’re on toward an Atomic Age world war is the result of the empire’s doctrine that it must maintain unipolar control at all costs crashing into the rise of a multipolar world order.

 

The U.S. Business Model Is Collapsing

dailyreckoning  |  The trouble, of course, is that the government doesn’t have the means to bail out every bank. Its only resort is to ask the Federal Reserve to summon new money from a magic ether where the illusion of wealth is conjured to paper over ever greater fissures in the splintering matrix of racketeering that America has become.

That will quickly translate into U.S. dollars losing value, that is, accelerating inflation, which is how nature punishes you when your government lies and pretends that it has a bad situation well in hand.

The practice in situations such as this (say, as in 2008-09) is for the governing authorities — who supposedly rule over the banking world like gods — to rush to rescue these outfits with “liquidity,” money (or representations of it) as required to re-balance things or maybe provide the impression of re-balancing until something else can be figured out.

The Jupiter and Minerva of American banking, Jay Powell and Janet Yellen, were faced with just that sort of call for divine intervention over the weekend as fear seeped into every nook and crevice of the money world that wealth was flaring away in the long-feared-of conflagration out of the dumpster banking had become.

Sunday morning, Ms. Yellen told CBS News “bailouts, no way” but by the afternoon Mr. Powell cried “bailouts, way,” and they had to get their story straight. They offered up $25 billion to bail out depositors for a smoldering system that will arguably require a trillion dollars or more of liquidity to quench the spreading fires.

One thing looks for sure: The interest rate hikes that Mr. Powell spoke of so confidently only days ago just got stashed into his folder labeled “Fuggeddabowdit.” So the campaign to control inflation must now yield to the urgent need to create a whole lot of money to spray over those fires.

You may have noticed that the value of your money has been slip-sliding away the past year or so. Peanut butter at five bucks a jar, and all. The situation at hand kind of guarantees that we’ll be seeing a whole lot more of that.

And then the gods of money will have lost control of the interest rate console altogether.

No more tweaking the broken knobs. More inflation will prompt U.S. Treasury paper holders to dump what they can while there’s still some value to retrieve. But the U.S. has to issue more debt for all the bailouts and theoretical buyers of new debt will perforce bid up the rates to keep up with inflation… and yet the U.S. can’t possibly bear the burden of paying higher interest on its debt.

Looks like the business model for running the USA is breaking down before our eyes.

Luckily, Cap’n “Joe Biden” is at the helm of this steaming garbage barge. His conference room full of geniuses is ready with the solution to our predicament: the long-mythologized central bank digital currency — a dream-come-true for would be tyrants… the Godzilla of unicorns whinnying atop the biggest rainbow of all: the promise of endless magic money for everybody, forever.

All you have to do to get it is: Surrender your decision-making power over your own life. The government will amalgamate your few remaining assets in a CBDC account, tell you exactly what to spend it on and shut off your little card if you show any contrary impulses.

Well, they can try it. I doubt it will work. Instead, the government will melt down in its own rancid puddle of insolvency, the meta-grift will grind to an end and it will be everyone for his/her/they self in the broke-down Palace of Chaos for a while… until things emergently reconstruct.

But I get a little ahead of myself. It’s not even ten o’clock on Monday morning. Oh, and then there’s Ukraine…

Nice Little Country You've Got There AMLO, Shame If Something Happened To It....,

NC  |  “We will not allow any foreign government to intervene in our territory, much less with armed forces,” AMLO told US neocons. 

Relations between US and Mexican lawmakers plumbed new lows this week, as a coterie of Republican senators, congressmen and a former attorney general called for direct US military intervention against Mexico’s drug cartels. They included Lindsey Graham, who has lent his support to every single US military intervention and regime change operation since becoming senator in 2003. Together with John McCain, he helped lay some of the ground work for the NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine, famously telling Ukrainian soldiers: “your fight is our fight”.

Setting the Stage for US Military Intervention

Now, Graham wants to introduce legislation to “set the stage” for U.S. military force in Mexico, saying it is time to “get tough” on the southern neighbour’s drug cartels and prevent them from bringing fentanyl across the border. The senator’s intervention came just days after four US citizens were kidnapped in the northern Mexican city of Matamoros, two of whom were killed. It is not yet clear why the kidnapping took place, but all four of the victims had lengthy rap sheets, including for drug offences. Whether that has any bearing on the crime has not been confirmed.

Graham added he would “introduce legislation to make certain Mexican drug cartels foreign terrorist organizations under U.S. law and set the stage to use military force if necessary.” Graham escalated tensions on Thursday by describing Mexico as a “narcostate”. His  words elicited a furious response from Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador (AMLO for short), who said (translated by yours truly):

Once and for all, let’s set our position straight. We will not allow any foreign government to intervene in our territory, much less with armed forces. And from today we will begin an information campaign for Mexicans and Hispanics that live and work in the United States to inform them of what we are doing in Mexico and how this initiative of the Republicans, besides being irresponsible, is an insult to the Mexican people and a lack of respect to our independence and sovereignty. And if they do not change their attitude and continue using Mexico for electoral propaganda… we are going to recommend not voting for this party.

This would be no small matter, given that 34.5 million Hispanic Americans were eligible to vote in 2022’s mid-terms, making Latinos the fastest-growing racial and ethnic group in the U.S. electorate. According to Pew Research, the number of Hispanic eligible voters increased by 4.7 million between 2018 and 2022, accounting for 62% of the total growth in U.S. eligible voters during that time. And AMLO has significant influence over this demographic. But that is unlikely to have much of an effect on the Republican neocons pushing for direct US intervention against Mexican drug cartels.

They include, all too predictably, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Also on board are Reps. Dan Crenshaw and Stephen Walts, who in January presented a joint resolution in Congress seeking authorisation for the “use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for trafficking fentanyl or a fentanyl-related substance into the United States or carrying out other related activities that cause regional destabilization in the Western Hemisphere.”

Mexico’s “Narco-Terrorists”

Also along for the ride is former Attorney General (under both George HW Bush and Donald Trump), whom the late New York Times columnist William Safire used to refer to as “Coverup-General Barr” for his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s role in “Iraqgate” and “Iron-Contra.” In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Barr likened Mexico’s “narco-terrorists” to Isis and calls Reps. Crenshaw and Waltz’s joint resolution a “necessary step”:

What will it take to defeat the Mexican cartels? First, a far more aggressive American effort inside Mexico than ever before, including a significant U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence presence, as well as select military capabilities. Optimally, the Mexican government will support and participate in this effort, and it is likely to do so once they understand that the U.S. is committed to do whatever is necessary to cripple the cartels, whether or not the Mexican government participates.

Barr called AMLO the cartel’s “chief enabler” for refusing to wage war against the cartels with quite the same zeal as his predecessors:

“In reality, AMLO is unwilling to take action that would seriously challenge the cartels. He shields them by consistently invoking Mexico’s sovereignty to block the U.S. from taking effective action.”

Bizarrely, Barr makes this claim even as the US and Mexico are quietly intensifying their military cooperation. As the investigative journalism website Contralinea reports, one of the millions of documents leaked in a massive cyberattack on the Mexican Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena), in October revealed the extent to which the US and Mexican armed forces are deepening their collaboration on “shared security challenges” such as combating organised crime, arms, drugs and people trafficking.

According to the leaked GANSEG document, the objective going forward of the Armed Forces of Mexico and the United States is to interact (emphasis my own) “closely, efficiently and in an orderly manner to strengthen bilateral military cooperation in matters of protection and regional security, evaluating existing bilateral mechanisms in order to work with a common strategic vision.”

The tactical-strategic bilateral military cooperation framework will also involve trilateral meetings between the defence ministers of Mexico, the United States and Canada. But that apparently isn’t enough for certain Republican neocons, who want the US government and military to take matters into their own hands.

While the growing influence of Mexico’s drug cartels is clearly a matter of vital import, not just for Mexico and the US but for the entire American continent, direct, overt US intervention on Mexican soil will make things a darn sight worse. If US citizens are worried about migrants amassing at the border, just wait until the US army begins ramping up the chaos and bloodshed in Mexico.

Also, conspicuously (albeit not surprisingly) absent from the debate in Washington is the central role US arms manufacturers and dealers play in facilitating a large part of the drugs-related violence on both sides of the border. Nor, of course, is their any reckoning with the now-indisputable failure of the US War on Drugs in stemming the flow of narcotics to the US. Even the NY Times recently ran an op-ed declaring that the global war on drugs had been a “staggering failure”.

Making Snow Black: When We Act - We Create Our Own Reality

strategic-culture |  The infamous Carl Rove (we shall not bother with an explanatory note, whoever remembers this cowboy and is still interested may look him up) twenty and some years ago articulated the gist of the empire’s swaggering ideology:

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Students of “empire” must wonder indeed how this foolish man, if he is still around, would now comment his erstwhile utterance. The empire in whose name Rove arrogantly spoke a quarter of a century ago lies in shambles; its reality-producing powers seem notably diminished. If the pretentious nincompoop Rove had any notion of history, he would probably acknowledge that the lifespan of his empire had been even shorter than Assyria’s, its ephemeral prototype from antiquity.

The crude vulgarity of Rove’s boasting should not, however, obscure the fact that a similar disdain for reality was articulated before him by Lord Bertrand Russell, by any measure a genuinely substantial figure. In his 1953 treatise “The Impact of Science on Society,” the sophisticated intellectual Russell wrote up a much more polished and cynical version of Rove’s plebeian ranting:

“The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of schoolchildren on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black” (Page 33).

The effort to invert reality and produce just such an unshakable conviction is in full operation in the terminally sick community of nations Dostoevsky charitably referred to as “the precious graveyard,” now known also as the Collective West.

The West’s newest ideological fad is reality inversion. Another way of putting it is that the most compelling expression of fealty to the West’s values consists of vociferously denying the evidence of one’s senses.

Proof abounds. The dogma propagated in February of this year at an “educational” workshop sponsored by Oklahoma State University was that the biological fact that chromosomes determine an individual’s gender is of no significance. It was expected that on, the contrary, the participants should embrace the unshakable conviction that gender, besides being multiple, was also a matter of arbitrary self-determination. Ideology “cancels” facts. Members of the scientific community and students of biology who, in order to pass their exams, until recently considered it advantageous to affirm empirical facts about the role of chromosomes, are henceforth required to recalibrate scientific knowledge, making it conform to ideological criteria. Who can blame readers who used to be citizens of another empire, denounced not long ago as “evil,” if they find such abrupt reversals of officially approved reality uncomfortable, or even traumatising?

The pandemonium triggered at Portland State University when a biologist contended that there were “explicitly anatomical and biological” differences between men and women, and that taking offense at that constitutes “rejection of reality,” richly illustrates the depth of the madness to which the West has descended.

To summarise, the party line now is that it is not objective factors such as chromosomes that determine gender but “one’s internal sense of being male, female, neither of these, both, or another gender(s) … for transgender people, their sex assigned at birth and their own internal sense of gender identity are not the same. Female, woman, and girl and male, man, and boy are also not necessarily linked to each other but are just six common gender identities.” In other words, one “is” the way one “feels” and the feeling need not be anchored in external reality. (See here.)

Nordstream War Crime: The Lack Of Media And Congressional Attention Is Mind-Boggling

BAR  |  Hersh’s article was a sensation online when it was published on February 8, 2023 but it has been ignored by major corporate media ever since. One has to ask if it really happened when the New York Times, Washington Post and television networks ignore what ought to be a huge news story.

It isn’t hard to understand why the same individuals and institutions who act as state mouthpieces would want to sweep Hersh’s reporting under the rug. For months they have acted as scribes instead of as journalists. The days when they would compete to break a scoop that a president wanted covered up are long gone. They now go along with establishment narratives, and promote imperialism as much as the people they are tasked with covering and confronting. Not one person asked about Hersh’s revelations at the daily white house press briefing the day after it was published.

Not only have the media ignored what Hersh reported but Republicans who claim to oppose Biden and the Democrats have also been silent. There are impeachable offenses committed in Hersh’s account but the people who should be asking questions have demurred. Republicans were as eager as Democrats to end Nord Stream’s existence. The word collusion which was bandied about so much in recent years is apropos here and that means the Hersh story is now at the bottom of the sea politically.

Biden is the fox in charge of the hen house, preparing to ask congress for the biggest defense budget in history, in large part to replenish the weapons used in Ukraine. The people who are asked to accept austerity for themselves are largely ignorant of how the conflict started and why their money is used for every purpose except for those that benefit them.

The Nord Stream sabotage is not the only news story which has been deep sized. The decision to sabotage Nord Stream was very reckless, and a sign that Biden and his team are willing to risk a wider war in order to do what they cannot, weaken Russia or get Vladimir Putin out of office, or destroy Russia economically. At the very moment that people in this country need to know the hard truth, it is being kept from them.

So complete is the indoctrination that Biden’s obvious instability is never discussed, even when the public see it for themselves unfiltered. At the State of the Union address he made this odd remark , “Name me a world leader who'd change places with Xi Jinping! Name me one! Name me one!" The strange outburst was never given the attention that it deserved.

The media are behaving in a manner that violates their own ethics and that may in fact be criminal. Lest anyone forget, the post-World War II Nuremberg trials charged the German press with committing “propaganda as an instrument of war.” Now in the nuclear age the media in what is known as the “collective west” are acting in a similar fashion, covering up crimes and repeating lies as truth in the name of making and continuing war.

The Biden administration did sabotage Nord Stream whether the media say so or not. Their lack of attention doesn’t change facts, but it does disappear them and that is incredibly dangerous to the entire world.

The Plan To Takedown Russia Via A Zombie Ukraine Was Hatched 30 Years Ago...,

thepostil  |  “We are fighting a war against Russia and not against each other,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Strasbourg, January 24, 2023.

(For an unauthorised biography of Baerbock, see here).

On July 27, 1993, the US Department of Defense (DoD) and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (MoD) signed a Memorandum of Understanding and Cooperation on Defense and Military Relations, establishing a programme of defence cooperation at the Department-Ministry-level, with “substantive activities” between those offices being launched in July 1994 (Cf. Lt. Col. Frank Morgese, US-Ukraine Security Cooperation 1993-2001: A Case History). Since that date, the Ukraine has teemed with US military advisors of every stripe.

The Morgese case study is a blow-by-blow review of the US military activity in the Ukraine between 1993 and 2001, designed to set up the Ukraine for her destruction. So detailed a review, that it would swamp the layman. Accordingly, we propose another document dating from 1994, readable by the laymen amongst us, and which spells out thirty years in advance, the full-blown War Plan for a zombie Ukraine.

Its author, Barry R. Posen (Rand, CFR, MIT, Woodrow Wilson Foundation), belongs to the leather-armchair school of strategy the US so excels in: arranging for others to die for the US living standard.

For obvious reasons, only Posen’s assessment of Russian military strength is dated. The remainder of his study predicts with such ghastly exactitude both events in the Ukraine over the last 20 years and the expected, indeed hoped for, Russian response, that one readily perceives that this is no prediction, but rather a fully-formed proposal for War—complete with Posen’s dismay, very faintly-veiled, at Operation Barbarossa’s failure, and his pleasure at the “high cost” Barbarossa exacted on Russia.

To give our readers the flavour of Posen’s text, we have selected a few, notable paragraphs from this Must-Read, one which Russia surely cannot have missed. All quotations are so marked and in italics.

ALL Our Little Latinex Minions Getting WAAAAY Out Of Pocket!!!

LATimes |  A proposal floated by the leaders of Brazil and Argentina to launch a common currency is being met with deep skepticism by analysts, who say neither country is positioned to tackle such a complicated undertaking or instill confidence in the idea with global markets.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told reporters Monday, though, that a common currency would reduce a harmful dependence on the U.S. dollar.

“I think this will happen with time, and it is necessary because there are countries that sometimes have difficulty acquiring dollars,” Lula said in Buenos Aires after meeting his Argentine counterpart, Alberto Fernández. “We must not in the 21st century continue doing the same as what was done in the 20th century.”

The currency would initially be shared between Argentina and Brazil for trade and transactions between the two countries and later be adopted by fellow members of the Mercosur trade bloc, Lula explained. Details remained fuzzy a day after Lula and Fernández announced the outlines in a joint statement published Sunday in the Argentine newspaper Perfil.

Speaking in Buenos Aires on Monday afternoon, Brazil’s Finance Minister Fernando Haddad clarified that the proposal would not entail the adoption of a sole currency to replace the Brazilian real and the Argentine peso.

Economists had immediately questioned the logic of the plan between the South American neighbors. Economic conditions are deteriorating in Argentina, where nearly four in 10 people live in poverty. The nation has one of the world’s highest inflation rates — 95% in 2022 — and its peso has been steadily depreciating for over a decade. Its multiple foreign exchange rates include an illegal one employed in backrooms by money-changers — a practice so entrenched that this so-called “blue dollar” rate is published daily in newspapers.

Brazil, Latin America’s largest nation, sits in an objectively better place economically, but it is hardly a beacon of success. Its inflation in 2022 exceeded the ceiling of the central bank’s target range for a second straight year. And the real has shed half its value against the dollar since 2014, just before the nation plunged into its deepest recession in a century. The nation’s growth prospects remain subdued, and it hasn’t recorded a primary budget surplus since 2013.

“Neither country has the initial conditions to make this succeed and attract others,” Mohamed A. El-Erian, former chief executive of Pimco, one of the world’s premier fixed-income investment managers, tweeted on Sunday. “The best this initiative can hope for is that talk creates some political cover for much-needed economic reforms.”

Fernández said neither he nor his Brazilian counterpart knows how a currency could function between their two countries or in the region. But he said they agree that depending on foreign currencies for trade is harmful. The greenback’s recent strength has complicated the repayment of dollar-denominated debt for developing nations around the world, including Argentina. Its central bank uses its precious dollar reserves to pay down its foreign debt and to intervene in the currency market to stem depreciation, and so it is loath to sell greenbacks to importers for trade.

Both countries’ economic teams will present proposals for trade and bilateral transactions, with a currency created after “much debate and meetings,” Lula said.

The proposal isn’t original, nor has it come only from the left.

Leftist Latinex Leadership Talm'bout Throwing Out The OAS In Favor Of CELAC

NC  |  The invasion of the capital has also, however briefly, united almost all of the governments of Latin America against right-wing authoritarianism. Just about every head of state in the region, with the notable exception, I believe, of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Guatemala’s Alejandro Giammattei, has expressed support for Lula’s government and condemnation of the events of Sunday, Jan 8. They include the heads of state of Uruguay, Ecuador, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Again, this would have been unthinkable just a few days ago.

The reason why this is important is that one of the key foreign policy goals of Lula’s new government is to open a new chapter of regional cooperation and integration in Latin America — something that has been tried many times before and largely failed.

One of Lula’s first actions since taking office was to confirm the return of Brazil to CELAC (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States), an intergovernmental mechanism for dialogue and political agreements. It was set up in Caracas in 2011 with the implicit goal of deepening Latin American integration and reducing the influence of the United States on the politics and economics of Latin America. Lula will officially ratify his decision to rejoin at CELAC’s seventh summit, to be held in Buenos Aires on Jan 24.

As readers may recall, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador (aka AMLO) proposed using CELAC as a vehicle to create in Latin America something similar to the European Economic Community, the six-member economic association formed in 1957 that would eventually evolve into today’s 27-member European Union. But he also emphasised “the need to respect national sovereignty and adhere to non-interventionist and pro-development policies” as well as ensure that any resulting structure is “in accordance with our history, our reality, and our identities.”

In his speech at the sixth CELAC summit, held in September 2021, AMLO reiterated his hopes that CELAC would eventually supplant the widely reviled Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS) as the main institution for intra-regional relations. He also invited Mexico’s North American trade partners, the US and Canada, to join. Both are already observer states, as too is China.

However, as I noted at the time, it’s virtually impossible to even imagine senior representatives of the US and Canadian governments sitting around a table with leaders of countries such as Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, let alone debating regional policy with them. Lest we forget, just last summer the Biden Administration scored a major diplomatic own goal by refusing to invite the same three countries to the 9th Summit of the Americas, in Los Angeles, which resulted in a number of other heads of state refusing to attend.

Now, the Biden administration will have to contend with the diplomatic blowback from the arrival of Bolsonaro and his lackey Torres in Florida just days before Sunday’s insurrection. A number of members of the progressive caucus, including AOC, have already called for Bolsonaro not be allowed refuge on US soil.

This places the Biden administration in a bit of a bind, since the US has always served as a refuge for US-aligned heads of state and coup plotters in Latin America. Plus, lest we forget, the US Justice Department had an important hand in the now-disgraced Operation Car Wash in Brazil, which led to the downfall of Dilma Rousseff’s government, the imprisonment of Lula just as he was preparing to run for office again, and the eventual election of Bolsonaro.