Forcing Mexican Compliance In An Era Of Changing GeoPolitics

mexiconewsdaily  |  Energy, immigration and trade will be the key issues under discussion at the North American Leaders Summit (NALS) held in Mexico City in January, according to an agenda presented by Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard.

Mexico will host the tenth edition of the summit between the leaders of Mexico, Canada and the United States — colloquially known as the “Tres Amigos” summit — at the National Palace from Jan. 9 to 11. U.S. President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will join President López Obrador to advance shared priorities among their three countries.

“The three nations will seek to continue the process of regional integration on the principles of respect, sovereignty and cooperation in good faith for mutual benefit, that is the objective,” Ebrard said, while presenting the agenda at AMLO’s morning press conference on Tuesday.

The summit will open with a bilateral meeting between AMLO and Biden on Jan. 9. This will focus on strengthening bilateral trade relations, accelerating border infrastructure projects, and enhancing cooperation on issues such as labor mobility, security, education and climate change.

The migration crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border will likely be a key shaper of the discussions, as U.S. courts battle over the future of Title 42, the pandemic-era legislation that allows undocumented migrants to be immediately expelled to Mexico.

Ebrard explained that another key topic would be the Sonora Plan — Mexico’s proposal for the U.S. to help finance renewable energy infrastructure in the lithium hub of Sonora. Energy policy has been a recent point of tension between the three countries, with the U.S. and Canada accusing Mexico of unfairly favoring state-owned companies over foreign clean energy suppliers.

AMLO’s meeting with Biden will be followed by a trilateral summit on Jan. 10, and a bilateral discussion between AMLO and Trudeau on Jan. 11 focused on government strategy towards Indigenous and historically marginalized communities.

The trilateral meeting will seek to tackle six issue areas: diversity and equality; environment; trade competitiveness; migration; health; and common security. Mexico also intends to use the summit to propose a plan for tackling worsening poverty and inequality in the Americas, called the Alliance for the Prosperity of American Peoples.

“The central objective [of the alliance] will be to achieve a more egalitarian distribution of resources in the Americas based on the strengthening of trade relations … to maintain North America as the main economic power at the global level, which would allow establishing new ties with the rest of the continent,” Ebrard said.

The tenth NALS comes one year after the three nations relaunched the summit in November 2021, after a hiatus of five years. The ninth NALS, held in Washington D.C., focused on addressing the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic and improving supply chain resilience. The latter issue is likely to be still more relevant this year, in light of the supply shocks created by the war in Ukraine.

 

Does It Strike You As Odd That The CIA Director Is Representing U.S. Foreign Policy?

rferl  |  U.S. President Joe Biden has hailed Ukraine's retaking of the city of Kherson as a "significant victory," raising confidence that Moscow will not occupy its neighbor as intended when it invaded in late February.

The liberation of Kherson over the weekend was one of Ukraine's biggest successes in nearly nine months since the start of the Russian invasion.

Biden commented on the development during a press conference after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Bali, Indonesia.

"I can do nothing but applaud the courage, determination, and capacity of the Ukrainian people," he said. "I think you are going to see things slow down a bit because of the winter months.... I think it remains to be seen exactly what the outcome will be."

Biden also raised Russia's "irresponsible threats of nuclear use," according to a White House readout on the meeting.

"President Biden and President Xi reiterated their agreement that a nuclear war should never be fought and can never be won and underscored their opposition to the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine," the statement said.

Separately, CIA Director Bill Burns met in Ankara, Turkey, on November 14 with Russian intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).

Burns underscored the consequences if Russia were to deploy a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, according to a White House National Security Council official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

"He is not conducting negotiations of any kind. He is not discussing settlement of the war in Ukraine," the White House official said. "He is conveying a message on the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons by Russia, and the risks of escalation to strategic stability."

Russian officials have alarmed Western governments by raising the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons after suffering massive setbacks in Ukraine.

 

Excess Deaths Soar To Higher Levels Than During The Panicdemic

telegraph  | Excess deaths in England and Wales are currently running higher than in the main pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, figures have shown.

Throughout October, there have been an average of 1,564 extra deaths per week, compared with a weekly average of just 315 in 2020 and 1,322 in 2021.

Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that in the week ending Oct 21, there were 1,714 excess deaths in England and Wales, of which only 469 were due to Covid - just 27 per cent of the total. 

It is 16.8 per cent higher than normal. Deaths are also running higher than the five-year pre-Covid October average from 2015 to 2019, figures showed.

Health experts have warned that some of the unexplained deaths are being caused by collateral damage from the pandemic, when operations and treatments were cancelled or delayed as the health service concentrated on Covid.

The Government’s “stay at home, protect the NHS” message also left many people who needed medical treatment unwilling to bother the health service, or afraid they would catch coronavirus if they went into hospital.

The NHS is also struggling from long-term staffing issues and current shortages because of coronavirus, leading to record waits for ambulances, treatment and surgery. 

Dr Charles Levinson, of the private GP service DoctorCall, which has seen a rise in patients presenting with advanced conditions, said: “What is driving the excess death crisis? In my view, delays in diagnosis/treatment now and throughout the pandemic. 

“The reasons behind this are clearly up for debate. I also believe that the Government needs to be far more open on this and tell us what they are doing to solve it.”

 

Who Are The Tribal Elders Who Put Blinken And Nudelmann In Charge In The First Place?

The Western “framing” of the current civil war in “Ukraine” is ahistorical, as much by ignorance as by design. The division of “Ukraine” and “Poland” by the Prussian, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empires between the Congress of Vienna and the collapse of the USSR has caused 200 years of horrific suffering and deeply-held grievance throughout the region that is incomprehensible to Western audiences.

If you have a strong constitution, read about the events of June-July 1941 in Lwòw (Lviv) where the retreating NKVD’s murder of thousands of ethnic Polish and German “Enemies of the State” was quickly followed by a Banderite pogrom in which Ukrainian civilians armed with sticks and clubs murdered thousands of Jewish men and women in the streets — the U.S. Holocaust Memorial has a fragment of a “home movie” shot by an SS-man of this savage barbarism conducted against the backdrop of a modern European city. It will shock you. The Nazis and the Red Army then conducted another decade of mass-murder and forced resettlement/ethnic cleansing that even make Pol Pot’s killing fields pale in comparison.

It is a tragedy that the U.S. State Department and Central Intelligence Agency have annointed no one except grievance-holding refugees from these Eastern European Killing Fields, like Kissinger, Brzezinski, and Albright (Korbelovà) and their descendants Kagan, Nudelmann, and Blinken, to be the “expert” arbiters of American policy toward the region. Their only interest appears to be in controlling a false and irrelevant narrative that demonizes Russia in order to facilitate the settling of old scores that have no bearing on American interests.

Some countries (Trump's "shitholes") are largely ignored by the U.S. because they are worthless lacking either natural resources or technology. Some countries, like most European ones, lack natural resources but have technology, so the U.S. wants them as vassals. Within that state of vassalage some countries have been allowed to have social-democratic and even semi-neutral governments - so long as they absolutely create no trouble for the master. That's the choice made by South Korea, Singapore, Ireland, Austria, etc.; it takes a degree of skill to enjoy a little autonomy as a U.S. vassal. 

The same is not true for resource-rich non-technological countries. These slave states are harshly ruled by compradore sellouts who pillage their own people on behalf of a U.S. master. Finally, there are natural enemy states. These are countries that are both technological and have significant natural resources (e.g. Iran, RF, PRC) Eventually, the U.S. will turn its baleful glare in this regard toward India as well. 

thedissenter | Helmut Kentler and the Pedagogical Center

At precisely the same time that CIA-directed psychological torment of Danish orphans was underway, authorities in West Berlin were dabbling with something even more diabolical - state-endorsed pedophilia.

Psychologist Helmut Kentler advocated in the 1960s  for placing vulnerable youths in the care of pedophiles—on the ostensible basis that “loving environments” would effectively integrate them into society.

An influential figure, Kentler used his extensive political connections to market his ideas directly to lawmakers and state institutions.

Kentler established the Pedagogical Center in February 1965 to conduct various tests and trials. The results were supposed to help educational authorities develop best practices for nurturing the nation’s youth.

Fully endorsed by the city’s Senate and Social Democratic Party (SPD) and West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt, the Center was granted a multi-million dollar budget, along with 37 staff. It was overseen by SPD Senator for Schools and Education Carl-Heinz Evers, who knew Kentler personally. (Brandt later served as West German chancellor 1969 - 1974.)

Children in West Berlin were sent to live with pedophilic foster parents at Kentler’s direction in 1969.

Kentler's ideas gained increased currency in the wake of incendiary student protests, which erupted across much of the Western world the previous year. These mass actions revitalized the writings of Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, in particular his early 1930s works The Sexual Struggle of Youth and The Mass Psychology of Fascism.

Reich’s thesis was suppression of sexuality went hand-in-hand with obedience to authoritarianism, as an individual’s perspectives and predispositions were formed during their formative years. The argument went that it was necessary for people of all ages to become sexualized, and embrace their sexuality.

The resurrection of Reich’s ideas was no doubt welcome to West Germany’s occupying powers. The notion Germans were psychologically and genetically disposed towards aggression and dictatorship—and that German society needed to be drastically reordered to blunt these tendencies—was widespread in the aftermath of World War II.

In fact, the U.K. and U.S. had long-pursued wide-ranging social engineering efforts to that end.

Why Can't You Be More Like Tulsi Gabbard?

zerohedge  |  Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was confronted by anti-war protesters during a Wednesday town hall event she hosted in the Bronx. The crowd at the sparsely attended event was dominated by her own progressive constituency, but who loudly voiced their anger and frustration over selling out on foreign policy, especially when it comes to her positions and votes on the Ukraine war, which has seen the US hand over an unprecedented tens of billions of dollars in weapons and aid. This has made her indistinguishable from her establishment colleagues on both sides of the aisle, including neocon Republicans and hawkish Dems. 

One protester loudly denounced her for policy positions that will lead to a "nuclear war" with Russia as seen in a now viral clip. Indeed an article in Unherd observed starting last Spring: The Squad nowhere to be seen as Ukraine package sails through - a trend which has only continued. Though AOC and Democratic party leadership under her friend and "mentor" Nancy Pelosi have worked hard to protect her image as a leading young Progressive, she stood helpless on the stage as the crowd turned against her, calling her out as a fraud.

While discussing ongoing escalation among nuclear-armed powers over Ukraine, a protester had enough, yelling back at AOC: "None of this matters unless there’s a nuclear war, which you voted to send arms and weapons to Ukraine."

He then called her out for her initial "outsider" views on the campaign trail, which are now anything but. She was accused of "playing with lives of American citizens" by stoking proxy war in Ukraine, leading to nuclear showdown with Russia: 

"You ran as an outsider, yet you’ve been voting to start this war in Ukraine. You’re voting to start a third nuclear war with Russia and China. Why are you playing with the lives of American citizens?"

Previously after the New York Democrat voted in favor of sending $40 billion in military and humanitarian aid in May, she's made multiple statements in favor of ramping up aid to the Ukrainians amid the Russian invasion. "As Ukraine fights against the Russian invasion, we have a moral obligation to assist any way we can," Ocasio-Cortez had said.

Ironically this is the very week former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has come under mainstream media fire and an avalanche of online denunciations and attacks for her stance on Russia-Ukraine which runs deeply counter to Washington orthodoxy. She announced this week she'll be leaving the Democratic Pary, "an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness" - as she described in her own blistering video commentary.

In the viral AOC town hall clip, a second protester can be seen loudly asking why she can't be more like Gabbard. "Tulsi Gabbard, she's left the Democratic Party because they are war hawks," he began.

"Tulsi Gabbard has shown guts where you’ve shown cowardice," the second protester said. "I believed in you, and you became the very thing you sought to fight against."

"That what you've become, you are the establishment! And you are the reason why everybody will end up in a nuclear war..."

Biden's High On Cornpop Lies - And - Valodya's The Wrong Nigga To Fuck With

antiwar  |   As a child growing up in Leningrad, Vladimir Putin lived in a run-down five-story building. He and his parents shared an apartment with two other families. The yard was filled with garbage, and the garbage was filled with rats.

"Putin and his friends used to chase after them with sticks, until one day a large rat, which he had cornered, turned and attacked him, giving him the fright of his life. The memory stayed with him, and years later he would draw the lesson: ‘No one should be cornered. No one should be put in a situation where they have no way out."

The story is recounted in Philip Short’s biography, Putin. Several lessons from childhood can be found in the biography that seem to have been formative for Putin. Three of them stand out.

No One Should be Cornered

Despite the repeated promises of the US, Germany, the UK and NATO that NATO would not move further east, NATO kept moving east. NATO kept encroaching, moving closer and closer to a Russia that had been explicitly left out of the European Union and now saw the US led military alliance devouring territory as it moved right up to its borders. Russia was being cornered.

As early as 2008, when NATO first announced at the Bucharest summit that Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO, the Russian leadership made clear that they saw this decision as an existential threat. Putin warned that NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine was "a direct threat" to Russian security. John Mearsheimer quotes a Russian journalist who reported that Putin "flew into a rage" and warned that "if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart."

Over a decade later, Putin was issuing the same plea to the US. On December 2, 2021, Putin asked the US for immediate negotiations and sent a proposal on mutual security guarantees. He asked the US for "reliable and long-term security guarantees" that “would exclude any further NATO moves eastward and the deployment of weapons systems that threaten us in close vicinity to Russian territory.”

The US declined and closed the door. Russia had no way out.

With NATO crowding Russia’s borders, Ukraine being flooded with lethal NATO weapons and tens of thousands of elite Ukrainian troops massing along the eastern border with Donbas, like that rat in Putin’s yard, Russia was cornered. With its warnings and pleas for immediate negotiations being ignored, Russia saw no way out.

That does not justify the invasion of Ukraine. But the next move had been learned by Putin in his childhood.

Never Bluff

There were many rules taught by the KGB that Putin had already learned as a child "scrapping with the other kids." One of them was "Don’t reach for a weapon unless you are prepared to use it . . . It was the same on the street. [There] relations were clarified with fists. You didn’t get involved unless you were prepared to see it through."

When Putin said in 2008 that "if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions," the West ignored him, thinking it was a bluff. But Putin learned as a child not to bluff. You don’t threaten action unless you are "prepared to see it through."

With the US becoming increasingly directly involved in the war, not only providing weapons, training and targeting intelligence, but even going so far as war-gaming with and advising the Ukrainian military, Russia set a new red line.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has asked the US to go beyond the HIMARS rocket systems with their 50 mile range and provide "a missile system with a range of 190 miles, which could reach far into Russian territory."

On September 15, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova declared that if the US agrees to supply those longer range missiles to the Ukrainian army, "it would cross the red line and become an actual party to the conflict." The Russian spokeswoman then added that "In such a scenario, we would have to come up with an adequate response." Russia, she reminded the West, "reserves the right to defend its territory using any means available."

A week later, on September 21, Putin repeated that warning himself. On top of the threat of longer range missiles, Putin said some leading NATO countries had talked about the possibility of using nuclear weapons against Russia and said, “I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. Putin then said, “This is not a bluff.”

As a child, Putin learned that you "Don’t reach for a weapon unless you are prepared to use it."

Recognizing that providing Ukraine with longer range guided missiles that could strike Russian territory "would likely be seen by Moscow as a major provocation," that that provocation could lead to World War III and that the benefits "during the next stage of the war" "would be minimal," Biden seems to be resisting Zelensky’s latest request.

Never Back Down

Putin is not spontaneous or rash. His ex-wife, Lyudmila, said that "Everything he did was always thought through." A Swedish diplomat who knew him said that "he sizes up his opponents coldly and soberly, and anticipates his own and others’ actions well before he makes the first chess move."

When you do make that move, you commit to the sequence of moves it sets off. "If something happens," Putin once said, "you should proceed from the fact that there is no retreat. It is necessary to carry it through to the end." The KGB taught that rule, but Putin says that he already knew it because he "learnt it much earlier, scrapping with kids."

Putin would repeat that "carry it through to the end" formulation. "If you want to win a fight," he said, "you have to carry it through to the end, as if it were the most decisive battle of your life."

Though the US and its NATO allies repeatedly commit to arming and aiding Ukraine for the duration, Putin has shown no sign of retreating or backing down. Having seemingly now concluded that Russia is fighting, not a regional war against Ukraine, but a protracted global war against "the entire Western military machine," on September 21, Putin ordered a partial mobilization of up to 300,000 reserves. The mobilization will include only military reservists "who served in the armed forces and have specific military occupational specialties and corresponding experience," representing about 1% of Russia’s full potential.

Russia sees NATO encroachment and NATO presence in Ukraine as an existential threat. Putin learned as a child that "there is no retreat" and that "you have to carry it through to the end, as if it were the most decisive battle of your life."

Biden Spouting Disinformation, Misinformation And Malinformation About Inflation And The Economy

cbsnews  |  Scott Pelley: Mr. President, as you know, last Tuesday the annual inflation rate came in at 8.3%. The stock market nosedived. People are shocked by their grocery bills. What can you do better and faster?

President Joe Biden: Well, first of all, let's put this in perspective. Inflation rate month to month was just-- just an inch, hardly at all,

Scott Pelley: You're not arguing that 8.3% is good news.

President Joe Biden: No, I'm not saying it is good news. But it was 8.2% or-- 8.2% before. I mean, it's not-- you're ac-- we act-- make it sound like all of a sudden, "My god, it went to 8.2%." It's been--

Scott Pelley: It's the highest inflation rate, Mr. President, in 40 years.

President Joe Biden: I got that. But guess what we are. We're in a position where, for the last several months, it hasn't spiked. It has just barely-- it's been basically even. And in the meantime, we created all these jobs and-- and prices-- have-- have gone up, but they've come down for energy. The fact is that we've created 10 million new jobs. We're in-- since we came to office. We're in a situation where the-- the unemployment rate is about 3.7%. one of the lowest in history. We're in a situation where manufacturing is coming back to the United States in a big way. And look down the road, we have mas-- massive investments being made in computer chips and-- and employment. So, I-- look, this is a process. This is a process.

 

Scott Pelley: Is the economy going to get worse before it gets better?

President Joe Biden: No. I don't think so. We hope we can have what they say, "a soft landing," a transition to a place where we don't lose the gains that I ran to make in the first place for middle-class folks, being able to generate good-paying jobs and-- expansion. And at the same time-- make sure that we-- we are-- are able to continue to grow.

Scott Pelley: And you would tell the American people that inflation is going to continue to decline?

President Joe Biden: No, I'm telling the American people that we're gonna get control of inflation. And their prescription drug prices are gonna be a hell of a lotta lower. Their health care costs are gonna be a lot lower. Their basic costs for everybody, their energy prices are gonna be lower. They're gonna be in a situation where they begin to gain control again.  I'm-- more optimistic than I've been in a long time.

Scott Pelley: Sir, with the Federal Reserve rapidly raising interest rates, what can you do to prevent a recession?

President Joe Biden: Continue to grow the economy. And we're growing the economy. It's growing in-- in a way that it hasn't in years and years.

Scott Pelley: How so?

President Joe Biden: We're growing entire new industries. Six hundred and ninety-five, I think it is, or eighty-five thousand new manufacturing jobs just since I've become president in United States. Continue to grow the economy and continue to give hard-working people a break in terms of we pay the highest drug prices in the world of any industrialized nation. Making sure that Medicare can negotiate down those prices by the way, we've also reduced the debt and reduced the deficit by $350 billion my first year. This year, it's gonna be over $1.5 trillion reduced the debt. So, to continue to put people in a position to be able to make a decent living and grow, and grow, and increase their capacity to grow.

Medvedev Quotes Revelations 9:18

 RT |  Western “half-wits” from “stupid think tanks” are leading their countries down the road of nuclear armageddon with their hybrid war against Moscow, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote on his Telegram channel on Tuesday. Endlessly funneling weapons and support to Ukraine while pretending not to be directly involved in the conflict will not work, added the deputy chair of the Russian Security Council.

The “security guarantees” proposal unveiled by Kiev on Tuesday was “really a prologue to the Third World War,” said Medvedev, calling it a “hysterical appeal” to Western countries engaged in a proxy war against Russia.

If the West continues its “unrestrained pumping of the Kiev regime with the most dangerous types of weapons,” Russia’s military campaign will move to the next level, where “visible boundaries and potential predictability of actions by the parties to the conflict” will be erased and the conflict will take on a life of its own, as wars always do, Medvedev argued.

“And then the Western nations will not be able to sit in their clean homes, laughing at how they carefully weaken Russia by proxy. Everything will be on fire around them. Their people will harvest their grief in full. The land will be on fire and the concrete will melt,” Medvedev wrote, before citing a Bible verse from Revelations 9:18. 

“Yet still the narrow-minded politicians and their stupid think tanks, thoughtfully twirling a glass of wine in their hands, talk about how they can deal with us without entering into a direct war. Dull idiots with a classical education,” Medvedev wrote.

His comments were prompted by Kiev’s publication of a “security treaty” proposal, developed under the tutelage of former NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The draft envisions the US and its allies guaranteeing Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders with weapons, ammunition, financial assistance and training, as well as committing to maintain sanctions against Russia for as long as Kiev wants, and handing over any confiscated Russian property to Ukraine.

 

I Guess The CIA Twitter Didn't Like That...,

 @GonzaloLira1968 

Account suspended 

Twitter suspends accounts that violate the Twitter Rules. Learn more 

Gonzalo posted a video of happy American soldiers in Izium (the Izium sign was shown in the video).

#US and #UK mercenaries took a short video from the entrance of #Izyum #Kharkov after #Russian army retreated from the area.

They are all part of #Nazi #Ukraine army unit #KarpatskaSich

Mercenary Rob-roy Lane who is taking video thinks he is fighting Soviets. pic.twitter.com/e0ncESWzfd

— Luka (@Luka_zgd) September 11, 2022

Ranking Members Of The House And Senate Judiciary Committees Agree About Hunter Biden

nypost  |  The FBI and Justice Department have been accused by “highly credible whistleblowers” of burying “verified and verifiable” dirt on President Biden’s troubled son Hunter by incorrectly dismissing the intelligence as “disinformation,” according to Sen. Chuck Grassley.

The ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee made the explosive claims Monday in an official Senate letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

He insisted the allegations were so serious, they would prove — if confirmed — that both offices were “institutionally corrupted to their very core.”

The senator said that after his earlier concerns about Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings, his office “received a significant number of protected communications from highly credible whistleblowers.”

The info was about the “FBI’s receipt and use of derogatory information relating to Hunter Biden, and the FBI’s false portrayal of acquired evidence as disinformation,” he wrote.

“The volume and consistency of these allegations substantiate their credibility and necessitate this letter,” he said.

The whistleblowers “alleged that the FBI developed information in 2020 about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity,” Grassley wrote of the key run-up to Biden’s dad’s successful presidential election.

“Based on allegations, verified and verifiable derogatory information on Hunter Biden was falsely labeled as disinformation,” he wrote.

Such action continued until at least October 2020 — a month before the election — when info was dismissed as disinformation even though it was allegedly “either verified or verifiable via criminal search warrants,” he wrote.

The assistant special agent in charge then “allegedly ordered the matter closed without providing a valid reason” — and then “attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future,” he wrote.

As that information was falsely dismissed, efforts were made to “smear” those investigating Hunter as being tied to “foreign disinformation,” the senator wrote.

If these allegations are true and accurate, the Justice Department and FBI are — and have been — “institutionally corrupted to their very core to the point in which the United States Congress and the American people will have no confidence in the equal application of the law,” he wrote.

 

 

What Did You Tell Yourself To Pretend That What Happened Didn't In Fact Happen?

nzherald  |  Shocking new photos of Hunter Biden's drug-ravaged teeth and a raunchy scene with a woman have emerged days after the President's son released a "tell-all" memoir on his years as an addict.

Hunter, 51, described his years on crack and alcohol and numerous sexual encounters with women in his autobiography Beautiful Things, published this week.

The photos show his ruined teeth while sitting in a dentist's chair, and Biden grinning with new dental veneers as he pulls on the hair of a scantily clad woman.

The images reportedly were taken from his laptop which allegedly has more than 250,000 text messages, emails, photos and videos chronicling his controversial and troubled past.

Biden left the laptop at a computer repair shop in his father's home state of Delaware and never returned for it.

Another photo appears to show Hunter asleep in a bed with a crack pipe next to him, and another shows him on a bed with two naked women and a small fluffy dog.

The Nixon Piece Concrete-Specifically Completed The Jigsaw Puzzle Of Our Current Predicament

chrishedges |  The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.

The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $ 813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally, politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800 overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax Americana.

Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d'état of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the name of “national security.” The nearly $40 billion allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, is only the beginning. Military strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine. We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide.

There were three restraints to the avarice and bloodlust of the permanent war economy that no longer exist. The first was the old liberal wing of the Democratic Party, led by politicians such as Senator George McGovern, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Senator J. William Fulbright, who wrote The Pentagon Propaganda Machine. The self-identified progressives, a pitiful minority, in Congress today, from Barbara Lee, who was the single vote in the House and the Senate opposing a broad, open-ended authorization allowing the president to wage war in Afghanistan or anywhere else, to Ilhan Omar now dutifully line up to fund the latest proxy war. The second restraint was an independent media and academia, including journalists such as I.F Stone and Neil Sheehan along with scholars such as Seymour Melman, author of The Permanent War Economy and Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War. Third, and perhaps most important, was an organized anti-war movement, led by religious leaders such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Phil and Dan Berrigan as well as groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They understood that unchecked militarism was a fatal disease.

Woke Imperium: Identity Politics Co-opted By Neoconservatism To Justify Empire

 

peacediplomacy | The advocates of American primacy within the United States foreign policy establishment historically rely on prevailing ideological trends of the time to justify interventionism abroad. The new ‘woke’ face of American hegemony and projects of empire is designed to project the U.S. as an international moral police rather than a conventional great power—and the result is neo-imperialism with a moral face.

• This is an iterative and systemic process with an internal logic, not one controlled by a global cabal: when the older rationalizations for primacy, hegemony, and interventionism appear antiquated or are no longer persuasive, a new rationale that better reflects the ruling class norms of the era is adopted as a substitute. This is because the new schema is useful for the maintenance of the existing system of power.

• The rise of a ‘woke’ activist-driven, social justice-oriented politics—particularly among the members of academia, media, and the professional managerial class—has provided the latest ideological justification for interventionism, and it has become readily adopted by the U.S. foreign policy establishment. These groups now have an even greater level of symbiotic relationship with state actors.

• Professional selection and advancement under these conditions require elite signaling of loyalty to ‘progressive’ universalism as the trending state-sanctioned ideology, which further fuels the push towards interventionism. This combination of factors encourages a new institutional and elite consensus around trending shibboleths.

• The emerging hegemonic posture and its moral imperialism are at odds with a sober and realistic appraisal of U.S. interests on the world stage, as they create untenable, maximalist, and utopian goals that clash with the concrete realities on which U.S. grand strategy must be based.

• The liberal Atlanticist tendency to push moralism and social engineering globally has immense potential to create backlash in foreign, especially non-Western, societies that will come to identify the West as a whole with niche, late-modern progressive ideals—thus motivating new forms of anti-Westernism.

Read the full paper at the download link.

DOWNLOAD PDF

 

American Negroes Got Massively Suckered By Celebrities Into The Crypto Dip...,

FT  |    “We do not like to get left behind when it comes to new technology,” she said. 

The promise of cryptocurrencies as a wealth builder has been supercharged by celebrity endorsements, sponsorships and advertising. Prominent black Americans including the musicians Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg, the boxer Floyd Mayweather, the actor Jamie Foxx and the film-maker Spike Lee have promoted crypto to their communities. 

Lee appeared in commercials for crypto ATM operator Coin Cloud last year, saying that “old money is not going to pick us up; it pushes us down” and “systematically oppresses”, whereas digital assets are “positive, inclusive”. Last month, Jay-Z announced a partnership with former Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey to launch a “Bitcoin Academy” literacy programme in the Brooklyn public housing complex where he grew up. 

Such celebrity endorsers have faced heavy criticism for getting paid to sell high-risk investments to people who may not have the resources to weather crypto’s volatility. “Ninety-eight per cent of these cryptocurrencies were not designed to do anything other than extract money from people’s bank accounts,” said Najah Roberts, a former financial adviser and the founder of cryptocurrency education centre Crypto Blockchain Plug. “This is not ‘get rich quick’,’’ Roberts added. “There are massive targeting ads that are targeting our community.”

Bellanton said it is not adverts but the prospect of financial freedom, a lack of the investment minimums common for mutual funds, and a feeling that the blockchain distributed ledger is more transparent than big banks that draws in first-time investors. 

“The reason that minorities at a higher rate than others are adopting crypto is precisely because if you’re not already rich, it’s way cheaper to send [USD Coin, a stablecoin asset] than to send a wire,” said Brian Brooks, chief executive of blockchain company Bitfury, at the Aspen Ideas Festival last month. “It’s just cheaper. 

The entire system is cheaper and faster. It doesn’t have all these entry barriers where you can only get it if you’re already rich.” Despite the risk of losses, many black investors are staying invested in the market. Dennis McKinley, 41, has been buying the dip against the advice of his financial adviser. He said his crypto coins now constitute roughly 30 per cent of his overall portfolio, held alongside equities. 

“Young black America is just now getting to a point where we have the amount of freedom to have the opportunity to invest in alternative strategies besides just real estate,” said McKinley, a small-business owner in Atlanta. “I think that it’s important to learn and get out there.”

Long Before The Crypto Catastrophe "I Told You So!!!"

Bitshit: BUY! BUY! BYE!

ibankcoin |  Crypto currency Bitconnect (BCC) plunged from $321 to a tad over $35 today, a drop of more than 86% after regulators from state authorities issued cease and desist letters for unauthorized sale of securities. That’s right. Just because your shit is on the blockchain, that doesn’t mean you get to solicit your fucking Ponzi scheme to people in America. State regulators will have something to say about that.

Via the company’s website, as per the reasons for shutting down.

The reason for halt of lending and exchange platform has many reasons as follow:
The continuous bad press has made community members uneasy and created a lack of confidence in the platform.
We have received two Cease and Desist letters, one from the Texas State Securities Board, and one from the North Carolina Secretary of State Securities Division. These actions have become a hindrance for the legal continuation of the platform.
Outside forces have performed DDos attacks on platform several times and have made it clear that these will continue. These interruptions in service have made the platform unstable and have created more panic inside the community.

Price action.

What did Bitconnect do? They quite literally ran a Ponzi scheme. Look at one of their brochures, promising investors 40% returns, PER MONTH.

Via Tech Crunch:

Many in the cryptocurrency community have openly accused Bitconnnect of running a Ponzi scheme, including Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.
The platform was powered by a token called BCC (not to be confused with BCH, or Bitcoin Cash), which is essentially useless now that the trading platform has shut down. In the last The token has plummeted more than 80% to about $37, down from over $200 just a few hours ago.
If you aren’t familiar with the platform, Bitconnect was an anonymously-run site where users could loan their cryptocurrency to the company in exchange for outsized returns depending on how long the loan was for. For example, a $10,000 loan for 180 days would purportedly give you ~40% returns each month, with a .20% daily bonus.
Bitconnect also had a thriving multi-level referral feature, which also made it somewhat akin to a pyramid scheme with thousands of social media users trying to drive signups using their referral code.
The platform said it generated returns for users using Bitconnnect’s trading bot and “volatility trading software”, which usually averaged around 1% per day.
Of course profiting from market fluctuations and volatility is a legitimate trading strategy, and one used by many hedge funds and institutional traders. But Bitconnect’s promise (and payment) of outsized and guaranteed returns led many to believe it was a ponzi scheme that was paying out existing loan interest with newly pledged loans.
The requirement of having BCC to participate in the lending program led to a natural spike in demand (and price) of BCC. In less than a year the currency went from being worth less than a dollar (with a market cap in the millions) to a all-time high of ~$430.00 with a market cap above $2.6B.

Lenders into the Bitconnect Exchange have revealed the company is closing out accounts, issuing BCC in exchange for their dollars — which is causing the price to plummet.

Bitconnect is officially closing up. They sent me 33 BCC for my $11k+ in loans. Worth $6600 and dropping by the second. Their exchange is down so the only option is to send the BCC to an external exchange.

— LifeByAdam (@LifeByAdam1) January 16, 2018

Mobile Money In Africa Has Unleashed A Plague Of Gambling Addiction

TechnologyReview |  Sports betting in Africa is not an entirely digital phenomenon: dingy betting parlors filled with underemployed youth have long been fixtures of the urban landscape. Increasingly, though, gambling has moved online, aided by the rapid spread of technologies like smartphones, high-speed internet, and mobile money platforms, which enable payments via phones without a bank account. Today, gambling happens almost anywhere: on college campuses, in far-flung villages, or even, as Kirwa admits with a hint of embarrassment, behind the wheel while driving. Experts say this ease of access is driving up participation and making betting more addictive across Africa—in economic powerhouses like Nigeria and South Africa; in poorer, more fragile states like the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and in soccer meccas such as Senegal, home to the 2021 Africa Cup of Nations champions, where online betting got a late start but is now growing by 50% each year. 

Nowhere, though, is the craze as acute as it is in Kenya, the country that gave birth to the continent’s first mobile money service, M-Pesa, and is often called Africa’s “Silicon Savannah” for its status as a regional tech powerhouse. While the country’s mobile money revolution has played a well-documented role in encouraging savings and democratizing access to finance, M-Pesa’s role in betting presents something of a paradox. Today, it’s easier than ever for those in fragile economic circumstances to squander everything. Although estimates on the prevalence of gambling vary, a December 2021 survey by the US research firm GeoPoll found that 84% of Kenyan youth polled had tried betting, and one-third of those reported betting on at least a daily basis. The vast majority, like Kirwa, do so on their smartphones using mobile money.

“Most people who bet in Kenya are not doing it for recreation—they’re doing it because they want to make money,” says Fabio Ogachi, a professor of psychology at Nairobi’s Kenyatta University. Ogachi says a significant proportion of Kenyans who bet show signs of gambling addiction—behaviors that include betting to recover lost funds, staking increasing amounts, and lying about one’s habit. Technology, he adds, has been a major driver of the sports-betting phenomenon: “We’ve been using mobile money for so many years, it’s become part and parcel of how we conduct business. When online betting came along, it found this ideal system was in place.”

When financial inclusion isn’t enough

That mobile money would become so ubiquitous in Africa—let alone fuel a betting epidemic—is in many ways an accident of history. The technology has its roots in a 2006 experiment, conducted by the telecom firms Vodafone of the UK, and Safaricom of Kenya, that sought ways to increase access to finance among those who’d previously been excluded from traditional banking.

 

Bye Felicia!

WaPo  |  Felicia Sonmez, a reporter on the national staff at The Washington Post whose criticism of colleagues and the newspaper on social media in recent days drew widespread attention, was dismissed by the paper Thursday, according to a termination letter.

Kris Coratti Kelly, a Post spokesperson, declined to comment, saying, “We do not discuss personnel matters.” Executive Editor Sally Buzbee also declined to comment on the termination, which was first reported by the Daily Beast.

Reached by phone, Sonmez said, “I have no comment at this time.”

Sonmez, who worked for The Post from 2010 to 2013 before rejoining the newspaper in 2018, was scheduled to play a key role Thursday night in reporting on the House select committee’s televised hearing on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to a Post editor involved with the coverage.

But in a Thursday afternoon termination letter first reported by the New York Times and viewed by a Post reporter, The Post told Sonmez that she was fired “for misconduct that includes insubordination, maligning your co-workers online and violating The Post’s standards on workplace collegiality and inclusivity.”

Sonmez on Friday used her Twitter account to call attention to a colleague, David Weigel, for retweeting a sexist joke.

“Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!” Sonmez tweeted in response.

She also complained about Weigel’s retweet on an internal message board.

Weigel apologized for the retweet and deleted it from his account. The Post subsequently suspended him without pay for a month for violating its social media policies. (The Post did not confirm Weigel’s suspension, citing the privacy applied to personnel decisions.) In the ensuing days, Sonmez continued to use her Twitter account to focus on the incident, retweeting criticism of Weigel and contending that Post management enforces social media policies inequitably.

Over the weekend, Jose A. Del Real, another Post reporter, asked Sonmez to cease her criticisms, tweeting, “Felicia, we all mess up from time to time. Engaging in repeated and targeted public harassment of a colleague is neither a good look nor is it particularly effective. It turns the language of inclusivity into clout chasing and bullying.”

NATO/WEF In A Public/Private Partnership To Push Famine And Depopulation Of The Global South

michael-hudson |  Is the proxy war in Ukraine turning out to be only a lead-up to something larger, involving world famine and a foreign-exchange crisis for food- and oil-deficit countries?

Many more people are likely to die of famine and economic disruption than on the Ukrainian battlefield. It thus is appropriate to ask whether what appeared to be the Ukraine proxy war is part of a larger strategy to lock in U.S. control over international trade and payments. We are seeing a financially weaponized power grab by the U.S. Dollar Area over the Global South as well as over Western Europe. Without dollar credit from the United States and its IMF subsidiary, how can countries stay afloat? How hard will the U.S. act to block them from de-dollarizing, opting out of the U.S. economic orbit?

U.S. Cold War strategy is not alone in thinking how to benefit from provoking a famine, oil and balance-of-payments crisis. Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum worries that the world is overpopulated – at least with the “wrong kind” of people. As Microsoft philanthropist (the customary euphemism for rentier monopolist) Bill Gates has explained: “Population growth in Africa is a challenge.” His lobbying foundation’s 2018 “Goalkeepers” report warned: “According to U.N. data, Africa is expected to account for more than half of the world’s population growth between 2015 and 2050. Its population is projected to double by 2050,” with “more than 40 percent of world’s extremely poor people … in just two countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria.”

Gates advocates cutting this projected population increase by 30 percent by improving access to birth control and expanding education to “enable more girls and women to stay in school longer, have children later.” But how can that be afforded with this summer’s looming food and oil squeeze on government budgets?

South Americans and some Asian countries are subject to the same jump in import prices resulting from NATO’s demands to isolate Russia. JPMorgan Chase head Jamie Dimon recently warned attendees at a Wall Street investor conference that the sanctions will cause a global “economic hurricane.” He echoed the warning by IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva in April that, “To put it simply: we are facing a crisis on top of a crisis.” Pointing out that the Covid pandemic has been capped by inflation as the war in Ukraine has made matters “much worse, and threatens to further increase inequality” she concluded that: “The economic consequences from the war spread fast and far, to neighbors and beyond, hitting hardest the world’s most vulnerable people. Hundreds of millions of families were already struggling with lower incomes and higher energy and food prices.”

The Biden administration blames Russia for “unprovoked aggression.” But it is his administration’s pressure on NATO and other Dollar Area satellites that has blocked Russian exports of grain, oil and gas. But many oil- and food-deficit countries see themselves as the primary victims of “collateral damage” caused by US/NATO pressure.

Is world famine and balance-of-payments crisis a deliberate US/NATO policy?

On June 3, African Union Chairperson Macky Sall, President of Senegal, went to Moscow to plan how to avoid a disruption in Africa’s food and oil trade by refusing to become pawns in the US/NATO sanctions. So far in 2022, President Putin noted: “Our trade is growing. In the first months of this year it grew by 34 percent.” But Senegal’s President Sall worried that: “Anti-Russia sanctions have made this situation worse and now we do not have access to grain from Russia, primarily to wheat. And, most importantly, we do not have access to fertilizer.”

U.S. diplomats are forcing countries to choose whether, in George W. Bush’s words, “you are either for us or against us.” The litmus test is whether they are willing to force their populations to starve and shut down their economies for lack of food and oil by stopping trade with the world’s Eurasian core of China, Russia, India, Iran and their neighbors.

The Simple Truth Behind Inequality Without Any Glib Post Hoc Bullschidt...,

 

NYTimes  |  If you look at historical data on the U.S. economy, you often notice that something changed in the late 1970s or early ’80s. Incomes started growing more slowly for most workers, and inequality surged.

David Gelles — a Times reporter who has been interviewing C.E.O.s for years — argues that corporate America helped cause these trends. Specifically, David points to Jack Welch, the leader of General Electric who became the model for many other executives. I spoke to David about these ideas, which are central to his new book on Welch (and to a Times story based on it).

How do you think corporate America has changed since the 1980s in ways that helped cause incomes to grow so slowly?

For decades after World War II, big American companies bent over backward to distribute their profits widely. In General Electric’s 1953 annual report, the company proudly talked about how much it was paying its workers, how its suppliers were benefiting and even how much it paid the government in taxes.

That changed with the ascendance of men like Jack Welch, who took over as chief executive of G.E. in 1981 and ran the company for the next two decades. Under Welch, G.E. unleashed a wave of mass layoffs and factory closures that other companies followed. The trend helped destabilize the American middle class. Profits began flowing not back to workers in the form of higher wages, but to big investors in the form of stock buybacks. And G.E. began doing everything it could to pay as little in taxes as possible.

You make clear that many other C.E.O.s came to see Welch as a model and emulated him. So why wasn’t there already a Jack Welch before Jack Welch, given the wealth and fame that flowed to him as a result of his tenure?

This was one of those moments when an exceptional individual at a critical moment really goes on to shape the world.

Welch was ferociously ambitious and competitive, with a ruthlessness that corporate America just hadn’t seen. In G.E., he had control of a large conglomerate with a history of setting the standards by which other companies operated. And Welch arrived at the moment that there was a reassessment of the role of business underway. The shift in thinking was captured by the economist Milton Friedman, who wrote in The Times Magazine that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”

Was Welch’s approach good for corporate profits and bad for workers — or ultimately bad for the company, too? You lean toward the second answer, based on G.E.’s post-Welch struggles. Some other writers point out that many companies have thrived with Welch-like strategies. I’m left wondering whether Welchism is a zero-sum gain for shareholders or bad for everyone.

Welch transformed G.E. from an industrial company with a loyal employee base into a corporation that made much of its money from its finance division and had a much more transactional relationship with its workers. That served him well during his run as C.E.O., and G.E. did become the most valuable company in the world for a time.

But in the long run, that approach doomed G.E. to failure. The company underinvested in research and development, got hooked on buying other companies to fuel its growth, and its finance division was badly exposed when the financial crisis hit. Things began to unravel almost as soon as Welch retired, and G.E. announced last year it would break itself up.

Similar stories played out at dozens of other companies where Welch disciples tried to replicate his playbook, such as Home Depot and Albertsons. So while Welchism can increase profits in the short-term, the long-term consequences are almost always disastrous for workers, investors and the company itself.

Welch was responding to real problems at G.E. and the American economy in the 1970s and early ’80s. If his cure created even bigger problems, what might be a better alternative?

An important first step is rebalancing the distribution of the wealth that our biggest companies create. For the past 40-plus years we’ve been living in this era of shareholder primacy that Friedman and Welch unleashed. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage remained low and is still just $7.25, and the gap between worker pay and productivity kept growing wider.

There are some tentative signs of change. The labor crisis and pressure from activists has led many companies to increase pay for frontline workers. Some companies, such as PayPal, are handing out stock to everyday employees.

But it’s going to take more than a few magnanimous C.E.O.s to fix these problems. And though I know it’s risky to place our faith in the government these days, there is a role for policy here: finding ways to get companies to pay a living wage, invest in their people and stop this race to the bottom with corporate taxes.

American companies can be competitive and profitable while also taking great care of their workers. They’ve been that way before, and I believe they can be that way again.