ineteconomics | The roots of the neoliberal perspective sprung from a world shattered
by the collapse of empires and the chaos produced by the first World
War. Austrian economists and business advocates in the 1920s and ‘30s,
like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, working at the time in the
Vienna Chamber of Commerce, worried about how a rump nation like Austria
could get along in the new global landscape. The specter of socialism
and communism in Hungary, part of the old Habsburg Empire, which briefly
went red in 1919, added to their anxiety. They were also afraid of
rising nation-states calling the shots on economic matters by doing
things like raising tariffs – especially nations governed by democracies
that recognized the interests of regular people. The spread of
universal male voting rights set off alarm bells that power was
shifting.
How could capitalists survive without a vast network of colonies to
rely on for resources? How could they protect themselves from continuing
interference in business and seizures of private property? How might
they resist increasing democratic demands for more broadly shared
economic resources?
These were big questions, and neoliberal answers reflected their
fears. From their viewpoint, the political world looked frightening and
uncertain – a place where the masses were constantly agitating to
disrupt the realm of private enterprise by forming labor unions,
conducting protests, and making demands to reallocate resources.
What neoliberals wanted was a sacred space free from such turmoil – a
transcendent world economy where capital and goods could flow without
restraint. They imagined a place where capitalists were secure from
democratic processes and protected by carefully constructed institutions
and laws — and by force, if necessary. Neoliberals weren’t fully
opposed to democracies as long as they could be constrained to provide a
safe haven for capitalists, but if they didn’t, many thought that
authoritarianism would do just fine, too.
These early stirrings of neoliberalism were thus a kind of theology, a
utopian longing for an abstract, invisible world of numbers that humans
could not spoil. In this promised land, talk of social justice and
economic plans to enhance the public good was heresy. “Society” was a
realm which, at best, should be kept strictly separate from the economy.
At worst, it was the enemy of the global economy — the troublesome
domain of nonmarket values and popular concerns that got in the way of
capitalist transcendence.
After World War II, the neoliberals organized formally as the Mount
Pelerin Society, in which key figures like Hayek pushed the vision of a
“competitive order” where competition among producers, employers, and
consumers would keep the global economy humming along smoothly and
protect everybody from abuse (quite an idea, that). Protections like
social insurance and regulatory frameworks were unnecessary.
Basically, the market was God, and people were here to serve it – not the other way around.
For neoliberals, the twentieth century wasn’t about the Cold War,
which didn’t much interest them. It was about fighting against things
like Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and what they considered dangerous
totalitarian schemes of economic equality. As historian Quinn Slobodian
put it in his book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism,
they set their sights on the “development of a planet linked by money,
information, and goods where the signature achievement of the century
was not an international community, a global civil society, or the
deepening of democracy, but an ever-integrating object called the world
economy and the institutions designated to encase it.”
Neoliberals dedicated themselves to protecting unrestricted global
trade, crushing labor unions, deregulating business, and usurping
government’s role in providing for the common good with privatization
and austerity. While it’s true that most Western governments, as well as
powerful global institutions like the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund, are deeply influenced by neoliberalism today, it really
wasn’t until the 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis that most people had
even heard of the movement.
That’s because, for a long time, neoliberalism invaded our lives like a stealth virus.
gilbertdoctorow | As the USA and Europe have each day piled on new sanctions against
Russia, the awareness of a ‘total war’ situation has penetrated the
consciousness of Russia’s leadership and the tone of public discourse
about the war has hardened noticeably in recent days. Talk shows which I
follow regularly have changed course yet again from what I reported a
week ago. On the Vladimir Solovyov evening programs, the bearer of grim
expectations about war prospects, Mosfilm general director Karen
Shakhnazarov, has disappeared, his place taken by others who take the
conversation in a wholly different direction, including fierce
denunciations of unpatriotic personalities within Russia. Still other
newcomers are presenting their own half-baked speculations on how the
entire Russian economy and society has to be reorganized to respond to
the new realities of a total permanent break with the West. While the
Putin government remains resolutely pro-business and
pro-entrepreneurship, though with a heavy dose of state direction of the
economy, the new panelists in talk shows denounce free markets as just
one more manifestation of the West’s hijacking in the 1990s Russia’s
domestic political economy. Still other panelists on the Russian talk
shows are talking about purging the government and all public
institutions of Liberals, who are synonymous with Fifth Column traitors
and have no place in Russian society under conditions of a war for the
country’s survival.
As BBC and other Western journalists have remarked, Vladimir Putin
addressed the issue of the Fifth Column in a televised speech yesterday
that was otherwise dedicated to the increases in pensions and social
benefits that he just announced to counteract negative results of the
newly imposed Western sanctions. In the BBC interpretation, the scum and
traitors denounced by Putin are the oligarchs. These are the people who
live there, meaning in the West, either physically or just mentally,
while earning their money in Russia.
However, this identification with the oligarchs only shows how little
Western news organizations, Western think tanks and Western government
leaders know about Russia and about what makes it tick. No, oligarchs
were not in the sights of Vladimir Putin yesterday: it was the multitude
of little traitors to the country and its people who have in recent
weeks come out of the woodwork and taken flight in an attempt to avoid
having to publicly take sides in the conflict and so lose their fortunes
and/or their social standing.
The broad Russian public has been utterly shocked at the departure of
a good many stars in the entertainment industry, the kind of folks who
in the West are images on the covers of People magazine and of
the yellow press more generally. Veteran singer Alla Pugacheva and her
husband Galkin have been darlings of Russian television and music halls
across the country for decades. They are known to have quietly flown to
Israel, where so many of their friends from show business and from high
society have already found refuge earlier still. Then there is one of
the two leading television news presenters, Sergey Briullov, host of The
News of the Week on Saturday nights. Sergey carries a British as well
as Russian passport; his family is based in their home in England and
his children study there. About a week ago, Briullov disappeared from
Russia and eventually surfaced in Brazil, where he says he is doing a
film project about the Brazilian attitude to the Ukraine-Russia War. No
one is fooled for a moment about the fact that Briullov is just one
more traitor to his homeland, and comments on the Russian portals bear
this out daily.
No, Messrs BBC News, it is not oligarchs whose behavior if not their
very existence has embittered the middle and lower class Russians during
the current war. Those middle and lower classes constitute the 70% of
the population which backs Putin through thick and thin. It is the
smaller fish of Fifth Column populations who exist in much greater
numbers: as, for example, Russian lawyers who have homes near the
Champs Elysees and split their time between France and their law offices
in Moscow, whence the money from their servicing oligarchs comes. Then
there is the intelligentsia, the university dons, the occupants of often
important offices in government and private public institutions who
loathed Putin from his first election to the presidency in 2000 and have
never relented. Their contempt for the broad Russian public, which they
see as the great unwashed, as a herd of animals, was never well hidden,
and this contempt is now being reciprocated on Russian state television
and on the internet.
All of these fissures in Russian society are being deepened and
discussed on Russian media as a result of the ongoing war for survival.
If Russia is becoming a much less free society, that is a direct result
of Western pressure. But there is nothing new under the sun. This was
precisely one of the key arguments in favor of détente as opposed to
confrontation during the 1990s.
yahoo | Daniil
Medvedev, the Russian player currently sitting at No. 1 in the ATP
rankings, may not be allowed to play at Wimbledon unless he denounces
Russian president Vladimir Putin.
That was the situation outlined
during a meeting at British Parliament on Tuesday, where sports minister
Nigel Huddleston confirmed discussions were taking place to prevent
supporters of Putin from entering the world's oldest tennis tournament
amid Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
Giving
evidence to the Digital, Culture, Media & Sport select committee,
Huddleston said: “It needs to go beyond that. We need some potential
assurance that they are not supporters of Vladimir Putin and we are
considering what requirements we may need to try and get some assurances
along those lines.”
Asked
whether individual Russian and Belarusian athletes wanting to come to
the UK would be required to “denounce” Putin’s invasion, Huddleston said
the details were still being discussed, including with other countries.
He added: “It would be better if we can decide some broad global consensus on this.”
Such
an action would affect Medvedev and any other Russian and Belarusian
tennis players, who are currently not allowed to play under their
national flags while the Ukrainian invasion continues. There are
currently four Russian players in the ATP top 30, while the WTA has three Russians and two Belarusians in its top 30.
The
world of sports has seen an overwhelming and potentially unprecedented
wave of bans against Russia's teams and athletes since the country's
military made its move across the Ukrainian border. That has included
suspensions from international competition in hockey, soccer, figure
skating and many more, as well organizations removing events and business from the country and governments freezing Putin allies' assets.
kremlin.ru | Taking part in our meeting are senior Government officials,
plenipotentiary presidential envoys in the federal districts and heads of Russian regions.
We
are meeting in a complicate period as our Armed Forces are conducting
a special military operation in Ukraine and Donbass. I would like
to remind you
that at the beginning, on the morning of February 24, I publicly
announced the reasons for and the main goal of Russia’s actions. It is
to help our people in Donbass, who have been subjected to real genocide
for nearly eight years in the most barbarous ways, that is, through
blockade, large-scale punitive
operations, terrorist attacks and constant artillery raids. Their only
guilt was
that they demanded basic human rights: to live according to their
forefathers’
laws and traditions, to speak their native language, and to bring up
their
children as they want.
During these years, the Kiev authorities
have ignored and sabotaged the implementation of the Minsk Package
of Measures for a peaceful settlement of the crisis and ultimately late
last year openly refused to implement it.
They also started to implement plans to join NATO. Moreover, the Kiev
authorities also announced their intention to have nuclear weapons and delivery
vehicles. This was a real threat. With foreign technical support, the pro-Nazi
Kiev regime would have obtained weapons of mass destruction in the foreseeable
future and, of course, would have targeted them against Russia.
There
was a network of dozens of laboratories in Ukraine, where military
biological programmes were conducted under the guidance and with
the financial
support of the Pentagon, including experiments with coronavirus strains,
anthrax, cholera, African swine fever and other deadly diseases. Frantic
attempts
are being made to conceal traces of these secret programmes. However, we
have
grounds to assume that components of biological weapons were being
created in direct proximity to Russia on the territory of Ukraine.
Our
numerous warnings that such developments posed a direct threat
to the security of Russia were rejected with open and cynical arrogance
by Ukraine
and its US and NATO patrons.
In other words, all our diplomatic efforts were fully in vain. We have
been left with no peaceful alternative to settle the problems that developed
through no fault of ours. In this situation, we were forced to begin this
special military operation.
The movement of Russian forces against
Kiev and other Ukrainian cities is
not connected with a desire to occupy that country. This is not our
goal, as I pointed out openly in my statement on February 24.
As for the combat tactics drafted by the Defence Ministry of Russia and the General Staff, this has fully justified itself.
Our fellows – soldiers and officers – are displaying courage and heroism and are
doing all they can to avoid civilian losses in Ukrainian cities.
This is what I would like to say for the first time: at the very start of the operation in Donbass, the Kiev authorities
were offered opportunities to avoid hostilities, via different channels, to simply
withdraw their troops from Donbass as an alternative to bloodshed. They did not
want to do this. Well, this was their decision; now they will understand what
is happening in reality, on the ground.
The operation is being carried out successfully,
in strict conformity with the approved plan.
I must note that,
encouraged by the United
States and other Western countries, Ukraine was purposefully preparing
for a scenario
of force, a massacre and an ethnic cleansing in Donbass. A massive
onslaught on Donbass and later Crimea was just a matter of time.
However, our Armed Forces have
shattered these plans.
Kiev was not just preparing for war,
for aggression against Russia – it was conducting it. There were endless attempts
to stage acts of subversion and organise a terrorist underground in Crimea.
Hostilities in Donbass and the shelling of peaceful residential areas have continued
all these years. Almost 14,000 civilians, including children have been killed
over this time.
As you know, there was a missile
strike at the centre of Donetsk on March 14. This was an overt bloody
act of terror
that took over 20 lives. Shelling has been ongoing during the past few
days.
They are striking randomly at squares with the fervor of fanatics
and the exasperation
of the doomed. They are acting like the Nazis did when they tried
to drag as many innocent victims as they could to their graves.
But what is shocking in its extreme cynicism
is not just Kiev’s blatant lies and statements that Russia allegedly launched this
missile at Donetsk (they have gone as far as this), but the attitude of the so-called
civilised world. The European and American press did not even notice this tragedy
in Donetsk, as if nothing happened.
This is how they have been
hypocritically looking the other way over the past eight years as mothers
buried their children in Donbass, as elderly people were killed. This is simply
moral degradation, complete de-humanisation.
It was no longer
possible to tolerate
this outrageous attitude towards the people of Donbass. To put an end
to this genocide,
Russia recognized the people’s republics of Donbass and signed treaties
of friendship and mutual aid with them. Based on these treaties,
the republics
appealed to Russia for military aid in rebuffing the aggression. We
rendered this
aid because we simply could not do otherwise. We had no right to act
otherwise.
I would like to emphasise this point
and draw your attention to it: if our troops had acted only within
the people's
republics and helped them liberate their territory, it would not have
been a final
solution, it would not have led to peace and would not have ultimately
removed the threat – to our country, this time to Russia.
On the contrary, a new frontline
would have been extended around Donbass and its borders, and shelling
and provocations would have continued. In other words, this armed
conflict would
have continued indefinitely. It would have been fuelled
by the revanchist
hysteria of the Kiev regime, as NATO deployed its military
infrastructure faster
and more aggressively. In this case, we would have been faced with
the fact
that the attack, the offensive weapons of the alliance were already
at our
borders.
I will repeat – we had no alternative
for self-defence, for ensuring Russia's security, to this special military
operation. We will reach the goals we set. We will certainly ensure the security
of Russia and our people and will never allow Ukraine to be a bridgehead for aggressive
actions against our country.
We remain ready to discuss matters
of fundamental importance to Russia’s future during the talks. This includes Ukraine’s
status as a neutral country, and demilitarisation and denazification. Our
country has done everything it could to organise and hold these talks realising
that it is important to use every opportunity to save people and their lives.
But
time and time again we see that
the Kiev regime, which its Western handlers have charged with the task
of creating
an aggressive “anti-Russia” stance, does not care about the future
of the people of Ukraine. They do not care that people are dying, that
hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people had to flee their
homes, and that a horrendous
humanitarian disaster is unfolding in the cities controlled
by the neo-Nazis
and armed criminals who were cut loose.
Clearly, Kiev’s Western patrons are just
pushing them to continue the bloodshed. They incessantly supply Kiev with
weapons and intelligence, as well as other types of assistance, including
military advisers and mercenaries.
They are using economic,
financial,
trade and other sanctions against Russia as weapons, but these sanctions
have
backfired in Europe and in the United States where prices of gasoline,
energy and food have shot up, and jobs in the industries associated with
the Russian
market have been cut. So, do not shift the blame on us and do not accuse
our
country of everything that goes wrong in your countries.
I want
ordinary Western people hear
me, too. You are being persistently told that your current difficulties
are the result of Russia’s hostile actions and that you have to pay
for the efforts to counter
the alleged Russian threat from your own pockets. All of that is a lie.
The truth
is that the problems faced
by millions of people in the West are the result of many years
of actions by the ruling elite of your respective countries, their
mistakes, and short-sighted
policies and ambitions. This elite is not thinking about how to improve
the lives
of their citizens in Western countries. They are obsessed with their own
self-serving
interests and super profits.
This can be seen in the data provided
by international organisations, which clearly show that social problems, even
in the leading Western countries, have exacerbated in recent years, that
inequality and the gap between the rich and the poor is widening, and racial
and ethnic conflicts are making themselves felt. The myth of the Western
welfare society, the so-called golden billion, is crumbling.
To reiterate, the whole planet is
now paying for the West’s ambitions and the West’s attempts to maintain its elusive
dominance by any means possible.
antiwar | CIA paramilitaries had been training Ukrainian forces on the
frontlines of the Donbas war against Russian-backed separatists since
2014 and were only pulled out by the Biden administration last month, Yahoo News reported on Wednesday, citing former US officials.
The CIA first sent a small number of paramilitaries to eastern
Ukraine when the war started in 2014, which was sparked by a US-backed
coup in Kyiv and the Donbas separatists declaring independence from the
post-coup government.
As part of the training, CIA paramilitaries taught Ukrainian forces
sniper techniques, how to operate US-provided Javelin anti-tank
missiles, and how to avoid being tracked on the battlefield by using
covert communications and other means. The former officials said at
first the CIA was surprised at the capability of Russia and the
separatists compared with US adversaries in the Middle East.
The US military held similar training programs for Ukrainian forces
in western Ukraine that have been publicly acknowledged. In January, Yahoo News revealed that the CIA had
also been holding a US-based training program for Ukrainian forces. A
former CIA official said the US-based program was training “an
insurgency” and taught Ukrainians how to “kill Russians.”
The secret CIA program in eastern Ukraine was much more provocative
than the other training programs since it essentially meant the US was
involved in a proxy war on Russia’s border. The former officials told Yahoo News
that During the first year of the Trump administration, National
Security Officials reviewed the program, which had begun under the Obama
administration.
The CIA paramilitaries were directed to advise and train but not
participate in combat. Trump administration officials feared the
authorities were too broad and that the mission was too ambiguous. One
former official said questions that were asked included: “How far can
you go with existing covert action authorities? If, God forbid, they’ve
shot some Russians, is that a problem? Do you need special authorities
for that?”
The former official said that the Trump administration discussed what
Russia’s redlines could be and determined the US support for Ukrainian
forces fell within historically acceptable bounds. “There was a school
of thought that the Russians spoke the good old language of proxy war,”
the official said.
Despite the concerns, the secret program continued for years until
February. The former officials said that when a Russian invasion became
“increasingly acute,” the Biden administration pulled all CIA personnel
out of Ukraine, including the paramilitaries. One former official said
the Biden administration was “terrified of even clandestine folks being
on the frontline.”
Although it’s hard to know what the military situation looks like in
Ukraine, the US claims Ukraine is putting up a much fiercer resistance
than Russia expected. The former officials who spoke with Yahoo News
suggested the resistance was in part thanks to the CIA training
program. The US continues to fuel the fighting as President Biden has
already pledged over $1 billion in new military aid for Ukraine since the invasion started.
businessinsider | A top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised US President Joe Biden on Thursday.
"Grateful to [the US], our reliable partner," the aide, Andriy Yermak, wrote in a tweet. "The @POTUS does more for [Ukraine] than any of his predecessors."
Biden's predecessor, former President Donald Trump, was impeached in
2019 and charged with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The
impeachment focused on Trump's efforts to strongarm Zelenskyy into
launching political investigations into the Bidens by withholding nearly
$400 million in military aid to Ukraine and dangling a White House
meeting.
The hold on the security assistance was lifted after Politico reported on Trump's actions and House Democrats launched an investigation into the matter.
At the center of the impeachment was a July 2019 phone call between
Trump and Zelenskyy, in which Trump pressured the Ukrainian president to
open investigations into purported corruption by Biden and his son,
Hunter, ahead of the 2020 US election.
Trump also asked Zelenskyy
to investigate the nonsense conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in
the 2016 election, and that Ukraine is in possession of a secret
Democratic email server.
Yermak, as a senior advisor to Zelenskyy,
was privy to Trump's and his aides' efforts to force Ukraine to
investigate the Bidens.
Trump, for his part, has insisted that Russia's invasion of Ukraine would not have happened if he was still in office.
"If I were in Office, this deadly Ukraine situation would never have happened!" he said in a statement last month.
But days earlier, he praised Russian President Vladimir Putin's justification to launch the war as "genius" and "savvy."
His
comments stood in contrast to those of US officials, who warned that
Putin's recognition of two Kremlin-backed separatist regions in Ukraine
was part of an effort to create a false pretext and invade the country.
Trump
was repeatedly criticized throughout his presidency for making public
statements and policy decisions that benefited Russia and hurt Ukraine.
greenwald |One of the most successful disinformation campaigns
in modern American electoral history occurred in the weeks prior to the
2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks
before Americans were set to vote — the nation's oldest newspaper, The New York Post, began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden
and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President,
wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would
again if elected president.
The backlash against this reporting
was immediate and intense, leading to suppression of the story by U.S.
corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies.
The disinformation campaign against this reporting was led by the CIA's
all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”
These "former intel officials" did not actually say that the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo." Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence
to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do
them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this "suspicion" based on
their experience:
We want to emphasize that we
do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President
Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we
do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.
But
a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump's defeat had
no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former
officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an
election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were "Russian
disinformation” — meaning that they were fake and that Russia
manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.'s justifiably despised class of media employees.
Very
few even included the crucial caveat that the intelligence officials
themselves stressed: namely, that they had no evidence at all to
corroborate this claim. Instead, as I noted last September, “virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count
— began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead
spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of
Russian disinformation.” The Huffington Post even published a must-be-seen-to-be-believed campaign ad for Joe Biden, masquerading as “reporting,” that spread this lie that the emails were "Russian disinformation.”
johnhelmer | The summit meeting of East European leaders, hosted in Kiev by
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky on March 15 was fabricated by the
Polish government, with Polish secret service agents playing the part of
journalists, and fake photographs of the meeting, press briefing, and
train journey prepared by Zelensky’s press office.
The operation was designed by the Poles to promote their role in
support of the Ukraine, the Ukrainian refugees, and in defence of Europe
against Russia, and seek new European, American, and NATO alliance
funds and military equipment.
A according to the Ukrainian publicity, the operation was designed to
promote the appearance that Zelensky’s regime is in control of Kiev,
and to accelerate their application for admission to the European Union
(EU).
The Anglo-American media have reported
the meeting, as announced by Petr Fiala, the Czech prime minister,
with “the aim…to express the European Union’s unequivocal support for
Ukraine and its freedom and independence,”
The result of the summit meeting, according to the Financial Times in
London, was “a show of European solidarity even as Russian shelling
continued on residential neighbourhoods in the Ukrainian capital. The
trip by the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia
is the most high-profile visit to Kyiv since Russia invaded the country
on February 24.”
“It is here, in war-torn Kyiv, that history is being made,” the
Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced. “It is here that
freedom fights against the world of tyranny. It is here that the future
of us all hangs in the balance.”
Morawiecki and the western press were lying – there was no meeting in
Kiev. Instead, the meeting was staged at the Polish rail junction town
of Przemysl, 95 kilometres west of Lvov (Lviv), and 20 kms inside the
Polish frontier with the Ukraine.
In a report published
by the Associated Press (AP) bureau in Warsaw, “the long journey over
land from Poland to Kyiv by Morawiecki, Poland’s deputy Prime Minister
Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Prime Ministers Petr Fiala of the Czech Republic
and Janez Jansa of Slovenia sent the message that most of Ukraine still
remains in Ukrainian hands.”
The evidence gathered from sources in Warsaw and from analysis of the
videos and photographs published on the meeting proves there was no
“long journey”; no meeting in Kiev or in Lvov, the Galician region
capital, which is the operating headquarters of the Ukrainian
government. From the evidence provided by the Poles and also by the
Zelensky’s publicity staff, it is now clear that only a small part of
western Ukraine remains in Ukrainian hands. Zelensky himself is now in
Polish hands.
undark |In 2004, an
activist named Edward Hammond fired up his fax machine and sent out
letters to 390 institutional biosafety committees across the country.
His request was simple: Show me your minutes.
Few people at the time had heard of these committees, known as IBCs,
and even today, the typical American is likely unaware that they even
exist. But they’re a ubiquitous — and, experts say, crucial — tool for
overseeing potentially risky research in the United States. Since 1976,
if a scientist wants to tweak the DNA of a lab organism, and their
institution receives funding from the National Institutes of Health,
they generally need to get express safety approval from the collection
of scientists, biosafety experts, and interested community members who
sit on the relevant IBC. Given the long reach of the $46-billion NIH budget,
virtually every research university in the U.S. is required to have
such a board, as are plenty of biotechnology companies and hospitals.
The committees “are the cornerstone of institutional oversight of
recombinant DNA research,” according to the NIH, and at many institutions, their purview includes high-security labs and research on deadly pathogens.
The agency also requires these committees to maintain detailed meeting
minutes, and to supply them upon request to members of the public. But
when Hammond started requesting those minutes, he found something else.
Not only were many universities declining to share their minutes, but
some didn’t seem to have active IBCs at all. “The committees weren’t
functioning,” Hammond told Undark. “It was just an absolute joke.”
The issue has gained fresh urgency amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Many
scientists, along with U.S. intelligence agencies, say it’s possible
that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, emerged accidentally
from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV — a
coronavirus research hub in China that received
grant funding from the NIH through a New York-based environmental
health nonprofit. Overseas entities receiving NIH funding are required
to form institutional biosafety committees, and while grant proposals to
the NIH obtained by
The Intercept mention an IBC at the Wuhan institution, it remains
unclear what role such a committee played there, or whether one was ever
really convened.
An NIH spokesperson, Amanda Fine, did not answer questions about
whether the Wuhan institute has had a committee registered with the
agency in the past. In an email, she referred to a roster
of currently active IBCs, which does not list WIV. Other efforts by
Undark to obtain details about meetings of the Wuhan lab’s IBC were
unsuccessful. But so, too, were initial efforts to obtain meeting
minutes from several IBCs conducting what is supposed to be both routine
and publicly transparent business on U.S. soil. Undark recently
contacted a sample of eight New York City-area institutions with
requests for copies of IBC meeting minutes and permission to attend
upcoming meetings. Most did not respond to initial queries. It took
nearly two months for any of the eight institutions to furnish minutes,
and some did not provide minutes at all, suggesting that in many cases,
the IBC system may be as opaque and inconsistently structured as when
Hammond, who eventually testified before Congress on the issue in 2007,
first began investigating.
Indeed, recent interviews with biosafety experts, scientists, and
public officials suggest that IBC oversight still varies from
institution to institution, creating a biosafety system that’s uneven,
resistant to public scrutiny, and subject to minimal enforcement from
the NIH. Hammond and other critics say these problems are baked into the
system itself: As the country’s flagship funder of biomedical research,
the NIH, these critics say, shouldn’t also be charged with overseeing
its safety.
RT | The Russian Defense Ministry said on Thursday it will soon release
additional documents pertaining to the operation of Pentagon-funded
biolabs in Ukraine. Moscow believes they have been involved in
bioweapons research.
Russian military specialists in weapons of
mass destruction are analyzing documents obtained from staff members of
the Ukrainian labs, ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a daily
briefing. He claimed they detailed “implementation by the US in Ukraine of a secret project to study the ways humans can be infected from bats,” which was done in Kharkov.
The
official said the same Institute of Experimental and Clinical
Veterinary Medicine in the Ukrainian city worked for years to study
under which conditions wild birds carrying flu could cause an epidemic
in humans and to assess the damage that would result.
Konashenkov didn’t explain why such research should be considered military in nature, as assessed by the defense ministry.
The
spokesman further said more Ukrainian documents will soon be released
on the transfer of human samples from Ukraine to the UK and other
European nations. The materials will be accompanied by Russian military
assessments of the work they detail, he said.
The Pentagon
sponsors dozens of labs around the world under the Defense Threat
Reduction Agency (DTRA). The work they do, the US government claims, is
benign and is meant to monitor emergence of new dangerous infections.
Countries like Russia and China believe they may be more sinister in
nature.
US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland
said under oath that labs in Ukraine have been destroying research
materials to prevent Russia from seizing them. It was not clear why
Washington saw the scenario as dangerous. US officials claimed that the
pathogens in question were remnants of Soviet bioweapons programs, which
Moscow would presumably already have access to.
Some American
public figures, such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former
Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, were attacked for asking questions about
the Ukrainian labs, which supposedly amounts to repeating “Russian propaganda.”
Utah Senator Mitt Romney accused Gabbard of spreading “treasonous lies”
with her concerns about the safety of pathogen samples in Ukraine. The
hosts of The View television show suggested people asking such questions
should be arrested and investigated as possible Russian agents.
thesaker | The Russian Defence Ministry continues to study materials on the
implementation of military biological programs of the United States and
its NATO allies on the territory of Ukraine.
The information received from various sources confirms the leading
role of the US Defence Threat Reduction Agency in financing and
conducting military biological research on the territory of Ukraine.
Details of the UP-4 project became known, which was implemented with
the participation of laboratories in Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa and was
designed for the period up to 2020.
Its purpose was to study the possibility of the spread of
particularly dangerous infections through migrating birds, including
highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza, the mortality rate of which reaches 50
percent for humans, as well as Newcastle disease.
Due to the fact that Ukraine has a unique geographical location where
transcontinental migration routes intersect, 145 biological species
were studied within the framework of this project. At the same time, at
least two species of migratory birds were identified, whose routes pass
mainly through the territory of Russia. At the same time, information
about migration routes passing through the countries of Eastern Europe
was summarized.
Of all the methods developed in the United States to destabilize the
epidemiological situation, this is one of the most reckless and
irresponsible, since it does not allow to control the further
development of the situation. This is confirmed by the course of the
pandemic of a new coronavirus infection, the occurrence and features of
which raise many questions.
In addition, the R-781 project is interesting, where bats are considered as carriers of potential biological weapons agents.
Among the priorities identified are the study of bacterial and viral
pathogens that can be transmitted from bats to humans: pathogens of
plague, leptospirosis, brucellosis, as well as coronaviruses and
filoviruses.
It is noteworthy that the research is carried out in close proximity to
the borders of Russia – in the areas of the Black Sea coast and the
Caucasus.
The project is being implemented with the involvement of not only
Ukrainian, but also Georgian biological laboratories controlled by the
Pentagon in cooperation with the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the
US Geological Survey.
The analyzed materials on the UP-8 project, aimed at studying the
Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever virus and hantaviruses in Ukraine,
clearly refute the US public statement that only Ukrainian scientists
work in the Pentagon biolabs in Ukraine without the intervention of
American biologists. One of the documents confirms that all serious
high-risk studies are conducted under the direct supervision of
specialists from the United States.
The payroll of Ukrainian contractors clearly demonstrates how they
are financed. It has been confirmed that the US Department of Defence
paid the money for research participation directly, without the
involvement of intermediaries. The extremely modest pay, by US
standards, is noteworthy. This indicates a low estimation of the
professionalism of Ukrainian specialists and the neglect of their
American colleagues.
In addition, the studied materials contain proposals for the
expansion of the US military-biological program in Ukraine. Thus, there
was evidence of the continuation of completed biological projects UP-2,
UP-9, UP-10, aimed at studying the pathogens of anthrax and African
swine fever.
The Pentagon is also interested in insect vectors capable of
spreading dangerous infectious diseases. The analysis of the obtained
materials confirms the transfer of more than 140 containers with
ectoparasites of bats – fleas and ticks from the biolab in Kharkov
abroad.
dilyana | The US Embassy to Tbilisi transports
frozen human blood and pathogens as diplomatic cargo for a secret US
military program. Internal documents, implicating US diplomats in the
transportation of and experimenting on pathogens under diplomatic cover
were leaked to me by Georgian insiders. According to these documents,
Pentagon scientists have been deployed to the Republic of Georgia and
have been given diplomatic immunity to research deadly diseases and
biting insects at the Lugar Center – the Pentagon biolaboratory in
Georgia’s capital Tbilisi.
The
Pentagon biolaboratory is heavily guarded. All passers-by within a
radius of 100 m are filmed although the military biolaboratory is
located within a residential area.
dilyana |While the US is planning to increase its
military presence in Eastern Europe to “protect its allies against
Russia”, internal documents show what American “protection” in practical
terms means.
The Pentagon has conducted biological
experiments with a potentially lethal outcome on 4,400 soldiers in
Ukraine and 1,000 soldiers in Georgia. According to leaked documents,
all volunteer deaths should be reported within 24 h (in Ukraine) and 48 h
(in Georgia).
Both countries are considered the most
loyal US partners in the region with a number of Pentagon programs being
implemented in their territory. One of them is the $2.5 billion
Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Biological engagement program
which includes research on bio agents, deadly viruses and
antibiotic-resistant bacteria being studied on the local population.
Project GG-21: “All volunteer deaths will be promptly reported”
The Pentagon has launched a 5-year long
project with a possible extension of up to 3 years code-named GG-21:
“Arthropod-borne and zoonotic infections among military personnel in
Georgia”. According to the project’s description, blood samples will be
obtained from 1,000 military recruits at the time of their military
registration physical exam at the Georgian military hospital located in
Gori.
unz |But
the largest feather in Kholomoisky’s cap is no doubt President Zelensky
himself. Kholomoisky’s channel created and ran the “Servant of the
People” show that featured Zelensky as an honest and intrepid President
of Ukraine dedicated to fighting corruption and defending the Ukrainian
people. When the elections came around, Kholomoisky’s people and his
media resources went all out in campaigning for their man. My personal
favorite play was when they bribed Facebook fortune-tellers to spin
prophecies about the coming of the president-that-was-promised and
thereby secured the superstitious peasant granny vote. If any Western
politicians are reading this, put down Sun Tzu and try some of this
Kholomoisky fellow’s stratagems during the next election cycle instead.
Now,
Russia has declared that they are planning to do a thorough
“denazification” campaign, which almost certainly means a thorough purge
of the Galician faction from the positions that they have taken since
Yushenko let them into the government. As for what will happen to the
oligarchs who bankrolled this whole operation, well, that’s still
somewhat up in the air. It’s worth point out that Russia used to have
dealings with them right up until the events of Euromaidan. The
arrangement was simple: Russia paid them to behave and not ally against
Russia with the West. As we can see looking back, this was clearly a
catastrophic strategy, and what’s worse, I can only shake my head at how
uncreative and uninspired it was—a cardinal sin in my book. The worst
possible outcome for Ukraine at this point is if Russia comes to a
compromise with some element of the existing power structure in Ukraine
once they wrap up the military operation. We now know that no
negotiations with the Galician faction are possible, so we can cross
them off the list. That leaves the Eastern Mafia. Rumors of
Kholomoisky’s imminent surrender aside, I can’t help but hope that his
chutzpah has finally crossed the line and that he will be forced to
spend the rest of his days exiled in Israel along with his puppet
Zelensky. As for the rest of the oligarchs, well, both Petro Poroshenko
and Yulia Timoshenko held photo-ops in Kiev with Kalashnikovs in their
hands, so we can cross them off the list as well. Further than that and
we enter the realm of pure speculation.
Clearly,
the best outcome would be for a military man from Russia with no
history of doing politics or business in Ukraine to come in and take the
reins as a vizier or military governor of sorts for a time. This
solution may offend committed ideologists and apologists for Liberal
Democracy (read: Oligarchy), but the hard truth of the situation that
Ukraine finds itself in is one in which literally no one who was
anywhere near the reins of power in that country for the last three
decades has his hands clean. These people all looted, collaborated and
murdered with near impunity for 30 years. With Russia now performing a
political prison break from Liberal Oligarchic Occupation Government
right before our very eyes, we can only hope that Ukraine will be able
to follow suit and break free from the shackles as well.
mintpressnews |The Mega Group — a secretive group of
billionaires to which Lauder belongs — was formed in 1991 by Charles
Bronfman and Leslie Wexner, the latter of whom has received considerable
media scrutiny following the July arrest of his former protege Jeffrey
Epstein. Media profiles of
the group paint it as “a loosely organized club of 20 of the nation’s
wealthiest and most influential Jewish businessmen” focused on
“philanthropy and Jewishness,” with membership dues upwards of $30,000
per year. Yet several of its most prominent members have ties to
organized crime.
Mega Group members founded and/or are
closely associated with some of the most well-known pro-Israel
organizations. For instance, members Charles Bronfman and Michael
Steinhardt formed
Birthright Taglit with the backing of then- and current Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu. Steinhardt, an atheist, has stated that his
motivation in helping to found the group was to advance his own belief that devotion to and faith in the state of Israel should serve as “a substitute for [Jewish] theology.”
Other well-known groups associated
with the Mega Group include the World Jewish Congress — whose past
president, Edgar Bronfman, and current president, Ronald Lauder, are
both Mega Group members — and B’nai B’rith, particularly its spin-off
known as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The Bronfman brothers were
major donors to the ADL, with Edgar Bronfman serving as the ADL’s honorary national vice-chair for several years.
When Edgar Bronfman died in 2013, long-time ADL Director Abe Foxman said,
“Edgar was for many years Chair of our Liquor Industry Division, Chair
of our New York Appeal, and one of our most significant benefactors.”
Other Mega Group members that are donors and major supporters of the ADL
include Ronald Lauder, Michael Steinhardt and the late Max Fisher.
As previously mentioned, Roy Cohn’s father was a long-time leader of
B’nai B’rith’s influential New England-New York chapter and Cohn was
later a celebrated member of its banking and finance lodge.
In addition, Mega Group members have
also been key players in the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. For
instance, Max Fisher of the Mega Group founded the National Jewish Coalition, now known as the Republican Jewish Coalition — the main pro-Israel neoconservative political lobbying group,
known for its support of hawkish policies, and whose current chief
patrons, Sheldon Adelson and Bernard Marcus, are among Donald Trump’s
top donors.
Though the Mega Group has officially
existed only since 1991, the use of “philanthropy” to provide cover for
more unscrupulous lobbying or business activities was pioneered decades
earlier by Sam Bronfman, the father of Mega Group members Edgar and
Charles Bronfman. While other North American elites like J.D.
Rockefeller had previously used philanthropic giving as a means of
laundering their reputations, Bronfman’s approach to philanthropy was
unique because it was focused on giving specifically to other members of
his own ethno-religious background.
Sam Bronfman, as was detailed in Part I
of this series, had long-standing deep ties to organized crime,
specifically Meyer Lanksy’s organized crime syndicate. Yet, Bronfman’s
private ambition, according to those close to him, was to become a
respected member of high society. As a consequence, Bronfman worked hard
to remove the stain that his mob associations had left on his public
reputation in Canada and abroad. He accomplished this by becoming a
leader in Canada’s Zionist movement and, by the end of the 1930s, he was head of the Canadian Jewish Congress and had begun to make a name for himself as a philanthropist for Jewish causes.
Yet even some of Bronfman’s activism
and philanthropy had hints of the mobster-like reputation he tried so
hard to shake. For instance, Bronfman was actively involved in the
illegal shipping of arms to Zionist paramilitaries in Palestine prior to
1948, specifically as a co-founder of the National Conference for Israeli and Jewish Rehabilitation that smuggled weapons to the paramilitary group Haganah.
At the same time Bronfman was
abetting the illegal smuggling of weapons to the Haganah, his associates
in the criminal underworld were doing the same. After World War II,
close aides of David Ben-Gurion, who would later become the first prime
minister of Israel and was instrumental in the founding of Mossad, forged tight-knit relationships
with Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Mickey Cohen and other
Jewish gangsters of the period. They used their clandestine networks to
establish a vast arms smuggling network between the United States and
Zionist settlements in Palestine, arming both the Haganah and the Irgun
paramilitary groups. As noted in Part I of this report, at the same time
these gangsters were aiding the illegal arming of ZIonsit
paramilitaries, they were strengthening their ties to U.S. intelligence
that had first been formally (though covertly) established in World War
II.
After Israel was founded, Sam Bronfmanworked with
future Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres to negotiate the sale of
Canadian armaments at half-price to Israel and the bargain weapons
purchase was paid for entirely by a fundraising dinner hosted by
Bronfman and his wife. Many years later, Peres would go onto introduce another future prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, to Jeffrey Epstein.
The rest of the Bronfman family’s
march on “the road to respectability” was undertaken by Bronfman’s
children, who married into aristocratic families such as the European Rothschilds and the Wall Street “royalty” of the Lehmans and the Loebs.
The Bronfmans’ newfound
respectability did not mean that their association with the Lansky-led
criminal empire had dissolved. Indeed, prominent members of the Seagrams
dynasty came under fire in the 1960s and 1970s for their close association
with Willie “Obie” Obront, a major figure in Canadian organized crime,
whom Canadian professor Stephen Schneider has referred to as the Meyer
Lansky of Canada.
However, Edgar and Charles Bronfman
were hardly the only members of the Mega Group with deep and
long-standing ties to the Lansky-led National Crime Syndicate. Indeed,
one of the group’s prominent members, hedge fund manager Michael
Steinhardt, opened up about his own family ties to Lansky in his
autobiography No Bull: My Life in and out the Markets, where he noted that his father, Sol “Red McGee” Steinhardt, was Lansky’s jewel fence of choice and a major player
in New York’s criminal underworld. Sol Steinhardt was also his son’s
first client on Wall Street and helped him jumpstart his career in
finance.
The ties between the Mega Group and
the National Crime Syndicate don’t stop there. Another prominent member
of the Mega Group with ties to this same criminal network is Max Fisher,
who has been described as Wexner’s mentor and is also alleged to have worked
with Detroit’s “Purple Gang” during Prohibition and beyond. The Purple
Gang were part of the network that smuggled Bronfman liquor from Canada
into the United State during Prohibition, and one of its founders, Abe
Bernstein, was a close associate of both Meyer Lansky and Moe Dalitz. Fisher was a key adviser to several U.S. presidents, beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as to
unz |What
makes Browder so powerful? He invests in politicians. This is probably a
uniquely Jewish quality: Jews outspend everybody in contributions to
political figures. The Arabs will spend more on horses and jets, the
Russians prefer real estate, the Jews like politicians. The Russian NTV
channel reported that Browder lavishly financed the US lawmakers. Here
they present alleged evidence of money transfers: some hundred thousand
dollars was given by Browder’s structures officially to the senators
and congressmen in order to promote the Magnitsky Act.
Much
bigger sums were transferred via good services of Brothers Ziff,
mega-rich Jewish American businessmen, said the researchers in two
articles published on the Veteran News Network and in The Huffington Post.
These
two articles were taken off the sites very fast under pressure of
Browder’s lawyers, but they are available in the cache. They disclose
the chief beneficiary of Browder’s generosity. This is Senator Ben
Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland. He was the engine behind Magnitsky Act
legislation to such an extent that the Act has been often called the Cardin List.
Cardin is a fervent supporter of Hillary Clinton, also a cold warrior
of good standing. More to a point, Cardin is a prominent member of
Israel Lobby.
LinkBookmarkBrowder affair is a heady upper-class Jewish cocktail of money, spies, politicians and international crime.
Almost all involved figures appear to be Jewish, not only Browder,
Brothers Ziff and Ben Cardin. Even his enemy, the beneficiary of the
scam that (according to Browder) took over his Russian assets is another
Jewish businessman Dennis Katsiv (he had been partly exonerated by a New York court as is well described in this thoughtful piece).
Browder
began his way to riches under the patronage of a very rich and very
crooked Robert Maxwell, a Czech-born Jewish businessman who assumed a
Scots name. Maxwell stole a few million dollars from his company pension
fund before dying in mysterious circumstances on board of his yacht in
the Atlantic. It was claimed by a member of Israeli Military
Intelligence, Ari Ben Menashe, that Maxwell had been a Mossad agent for
years, and he also said Maxwell tipped the Israelis about Israeli
whistle-blower Mordecai Vanunu. Vanunu was kidnapped and spent many
years in Israeli jails.
Geoffrey Goodman
wrote Maxwell “was almost certainly being used as – and using himself
as – a two-way intelligence conduit [between East and West]. This
arrangement included passing intelligence to the Israeli secret forces
with whom he became increasingly involved towards the end of his life.”
After
Maxwell, Browder switched allegiance to Edmond Safra, a very rich
Jewish banker of Lebanese origin, who also played East vs West. Safra
provided him with working capital for his investment fund. Safra’s bank
has been the unlikely place where the IMF loan of four billion dollars
to Russia had been transferred—and disappeared. The Russian authorities
say that Browder has been involved in this “crime of the century,” next
to Safra. The banker’s name has been connected to Mossad: increasingly
fearful for his life, Safra surrounded himself by Mossad-trained gunmen.
This did not help him: he died a horrible death in his bathroom when
his villa was torched by one of the guards.
The
third Jewish oligarch on Browder’s way was Boris Berezovsky, the
king-maker of Yeltsin’s Russia. He also died in his bathroom (which
seems to be a constant feature); apparently he committed suicide.
Berezovsky had been a politically active man; he supported every
anti-Putin force in Russia. However, a few months before his death, he
asked for permission to return to Russia, and some negotiations went on
between him and Russian authorities.
His
chief of security Sergey Sokolov came to Russia and purportedly brought
with him some documents his late master prepared for his return. These
documents allege that Browder had been an agent of Western intelligence
services, of the CIA to begin with, and of MI6 in following years. He
was given a code name Solomon, as he worked for Salomon Brothers. His
financial activity was just a cover for his true intentions, that is to
collect political and economic data on Russia, and to carry out economic
war on Russia. This revelation has been made in the Russia-1 TV channel
documentary Browder Effect,
(broadcasted 13.04.2016), asserting that Browder was not after money at
all, and his activities in Russia, beside being very profitable, had a
political angle.
The documents had been doubted for some linguistic reasons discussed by Gilbert Doctorow
who comes to a reasonable conclusion: “Bill Browder[‘s]… intensity and
the time he was devoting to anti-Russian sanctions in Europe was in no
way comparable to the behaviour of a top level international
businessman. It was clear to me that some other game was in play. But at
the time, no one could stand up and suggest the man was a fraud, an
operative of the intelligence agencies. Whatever the final verdict may
be on the documents presented by the film “The Browder Effect,” it
raises questions about Browder that should have been asked years ago in
mainstream Western media if journalists were paying attention. Yevgeny
Popov deserves credit for highlighting those questions, even if his
documents demand further investigation before we come to definitive
answers”.
We
do not know whether Browder is, or had been, a spy. This should not
surprise us, as he was closely connected to Maxwell, Safra and
Berezovsky, the financiers with strong ties in the intelligence
community.
Perhaps
he outlived his usefulness, Mr Browder did. He started the Cold war,
now is the time to keep it in its healthy limits and to avoid a nuclear
disaster or rapid armaments race. This is the task we may hope will be
entertained by the next US President, Mr Donald Trump.
chesno | The financial statements from the Servant of the People indicate that the party collected 226 million hryvnias (~$8 million USD) in donations while Zelenskyy and his associates’ election accounts collected 200 million hryvnias (~$7 million USD).
These numbers themselves seem relatively unremarkable, but the sources and types of donations are much more interesting.
Chesno reported that from September 2018 to September 2019 only 94 people donated to Servant of the People. Of the 94 people, most of these were entrepreneurs or sole proprietors. Most of the donations came from Kyiv, followed by donations from Odessa and Dnipro.
Chesno also found that 44 legal entities donated to the Servant of the People and Zelenskyy, with 34 of these entities donating 3 million hryvnias ($105,000 USD), which is just under the 3.3 million hryvnia ($120,000) limit placed on donations. The majority of these donations came from either Kyiv or Odessa.
More than 99% of all donations were more than 100,000 hryvnias ($3,500 USD); only two donations of less than 10,000 hryvnias ($350) were received in this time period.
To contextualize these figures, the minimum wage in Ukraine is 6,000 hryvnias per month ($220 USD) and the median salary in Ukraine is around 21,000 hryvnias ($775 USD).
This means that the majority of donations received by Zelenskyy and Servant of the People were more than what most Ukrainians make over five or six months of full-time work.
Chesno also found that some of the 94 personal donations came from questionable sources. Chesno interviewed Tetyana Staneva, who lives in a village in Odessa and has no business registered in her name. She donated 1.5 million hryvnias ($52,000 USD) to the Servant of the People party, telling Chesno, “It’s not just my money, I just sent it. This is a group of like-minded people, we did it together.” It should be noted that this is against Ukrainian law, which says that individual citizen must make financial contributions to political groups personally, and not as a collective.
Investigators identified one of the 44 entities that donated as Yaroslava Reklama, LLC, registered to a 22-year old cook named Yaroslav Kuzka who works at one of Kyiv’s restaurants. Yaroslava Reklama LLC, transferred the maximum donation of 3.3 million hryvnias ($120,000 USD) to Servant of the People. Upon investigating the address to which Yaroslava Reklama LLC was registered, journalists found that tenants in the area had never heard of the company.
Another company, Prom Import LLC, was registered to a woman named Juliana Kuku. She complained on her social media accounts that business was “not going well”, but at roughly the same time, made a 500,000 hryvnia ($16,000 USD) donation to Servant of the People.
Chesno also found that of the 44 entities that donated to Servant of the People, four of them changed their addresses within two days of one another in December 2018, leading investigators to conclude that many of the donors were likely linked.
It is perhaps remarkable to consider that although only 94 persons and 44 legal entities donated to Servant of the People, that it grew to controlling 254 of 450 seats in the Verkhovna Rada despite not existing less than six months before.
Will the matrix allow me to peak behind the curtains of a manufactured and manipulated world staged event?
The Journey begins…
On the 3/3 I took a flight from Luton, England to Krakow, Poland.
Via Poland seemed the easiest way into the Ukraine.
Note: all the 33’s.
Evan tho unvaxxed, I entered Poland with ease on the condition I left within 24 hours.
So I wasted no time, and took a train from Krakow to Przemysl.
The only sign of WAR was the name of the cafe’
Lights, Camera….ACTION!!!
Przemysl Train Station (the Refugee movie set)
A well planned stage managed route ensures the Ukrainians arriving are
bottled necked and compressed into the ticket hall so the media can
create the illusion of ‘hell on Earth’.
Visual effects are key!
Outside the Refugee train station, police vehicles leave the lights flashing.
Every 20 minutes, the sirens turn on and vehicle does a loop around the block.
Stage Management …
The ‘Video Village’ of Przemysl.
Here we find the director and producer of the refugee movie.
All staged photos need good lighting.
I am unable to find a hostel or hotel,
full of refugees you ask?
No! All the hotels in this town are taken up by the press
Whilst these scumbags sleep in luxury, poor Ukrainians are left to sleep at the railway station.
dailybeast | Intimations of pressure on Israel to provide Ukraine military support, including from the Israeli public,
which largely identifies with Ukraine, are met with explanations about
Israel’s unique situation vis-à-vis Russia, and the blank wall of
realpolitik.
“Israel is stuck between its interest in ongoing
military coordination with Russia, and, on the other side, Israel is
small nation allied with the West, particularly with the United States,
to whom we owe a lot,” Professor Gideon Rahat, a Hebrew University
expert on Israeli politics and public opinion, told The Daily Beast.
“Israeli
leaders have to maneuver between those two. Of course, public opinion
is untethered from these interests. With ex-Ukrainians pretty dominant
in the public sphere, worried for their families, and when you see how
the dictator Putin is about to take over another country, most of Israel
see themselves as part of what we used to call, in Cold War days, the
free world.”
Bennett was accompanied to Moscow by Ze’ev Elkin, his Ukrainian-born minister of housing and infrastructure, whose brother fled their native city of Kharkiv,
under Russian bombardment, at the same moment the Israeli and Russian
leaders sat in Moscow discussing the war, with Elkin translating.
Israel
has also demurred from imposing sanctions on Russian oligarchs, some of
whom are dual citizens. After praising Israel's willingness to help
mediation efforts, a U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem said on Wednesday that "we would like to see our allies and partners imposing strong sanctions, Israel falls into the category of our allies and partners."
“We
didn’t invite Putin into this region,” said Yaakov Amidror, a retired
Israeli army major general who served as former prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu's national security adviser, alluding to the collapse of then-President Barack Obama’s
“red line” regarding the use of chemical weapons in Syria, just across
Israel’s border. Israel, Amidror said, in an interview, is as vulnerable
as Ukraine is, to no less tenacious an enemy than Putin— Iran, whose
leaders regularly promise to eliminate Israel.
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