A Fish Rots From The Head - Ours Stinks To High Heaven

responsiblestatecraft |   Biden’s problem is that the United States no longer enjoys the political or economic dominance that enabled it to dictate the terms of hemispheric relations, and Latin Americans are no longer willing to simply accept Washington’s priorities as their own. Rebuilding U.S. leadership in the Hemisphere will require that Washington confer with its neighbors and genuinely listen to them rather than dictating to them. Occasionally, it will require Washington to take the unfamiliar and uncomfortable step of deferring to them.

The Ninth Summit of the Americas, hosted by President Biden last week in Los Angeles, was in trouble even before it convened. Planning for it was erratic, with no clear theme or agenda in place until the last minute. Invitations went out just a few weeks before the event, delayed because of a very public controversy over whether Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela would be included. In the end, they were not.

Senior U.S. officials hinted early on that the Summit would be restricted to “democratically elected leaders.” That prompted pushback from a number of Latin Americans, foremost among them Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Although the host nation sends out the Summit invitations, some Latin Americans regarded the decision to exclude the three governments as an abuse of the host’s prerogatives.

To mollify López Obrador and others who voiced similar concerns, the White House toyed with the idea of inviting Cuba to send a lower level official, or participate as an observer. Not surprisingly, Cuba rejected this second-class citizenship even before it was offered. López-Obrador politely declined to attend the Summit, sending his foreign minister instead. The presidents of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador declined as well. At the Summit, other heads of state openly criticized Washington for not inviting all the nations of the Americas.

Irregular migration was a main focus of the Summit, but between them, the countries excluded and those whose presidents stayed home accounted for 69 percent of the migrants encountered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in April — nearly 180,000 people. Trying to formulate a strategy to stem irregular migration without engaging the governments of the migrants’ home countries is a recipe for failure.  

 

Truth Is Treason In An Empire Of Lies

caitlinjohnstone |  The empire has had mixed feelings about the internet since its creation. On one hand it allows for unprecedented surveillance and information gathering and the rapid distribution of propaganda, which it likes, but on the other it allows for the unprecedented democratization of information, which it doesn’t like.

Its answer to this quandary has been to come up with “fact checking” services and Silicon Valley censorship protocols for restricting “misinformation” (with “facts” and “information” defined as “whatever advances imperial interests”). That’s all we’re seeing with continually expanding online censorship policies, and with government-tied oligarchic narrative management operations like NewsGuard.

Twitter has imposed a weeklong suspension on the account of writer and political activist Danny Haiphong for a thread he made on the platform disputing the mainstream Tiananmen Square massacre narrative.

The notification Haiphong received informed him that Twitter had locked his account for “Violating our rules against abuse and harassment,” presumably in reference to a rule the platform put in place a year ago which prohibits “content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place, where we can verify that the event occured, and when the content is shared with abusive intent.”

“This may include references to such an event as a ‘hoax’ or claims that victims or survivors are fake or ‘actors,’” Twitter said of the new rule. “It includes, but is not limited to, events like the Holocaust, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters.”

That we are now seeing this rule applied to protect narratives which support the geostrategic interests of the US-centralized empire is not in the least bit surprising.

Haiphong is far from the first to dispute the mainstream western narrative about exactly what happened around Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 as the Soviet Union was crumbling and Washington’s temporary Cold War alignment with Beijing was losing its strategic usefulness. But we can expect more acts of online censorship like this as Silicon Valley continues to expand into its role as guardian of imperial historic records.

This idea that government-tied Silicon Valley institutions should act as arbiters of history on behalf of the public consumer is gaining steadily increasing acceptance in the artificially manufactured echo chamber of mainstream public opinion. We saw another example of this recently in Joe Lauria’s excellent refutation of accusations against Consortium News of historic inaccuracy by the imperial narrative management firm NewsGuard.

As journalists like Whitney Webb and Mnar Adley noted years ago, NewsGuard markets itself as a “news rating agency” designed to help people sort out good from bad sources of information online, but in reality functions as an empire-backed weapon against media who question imperial narratives about what’s happening in the world. The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal outlined the company’s many partnerships with imperial swamp monsters like former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and “chief propagandist” Richard Stengel as well as “imperialist cutouts like the German Marshall Fund” when its operatives contacted his outlet for comment on their accusations.

 

 

Psychological Tricks That ALWAYS Work On You Humans....,

freakonomics |  We like to think that we make up our own minds. That we make our own choices — about how we spend our time and money; what we watch and wear; how we think about the issues of the day. But the truth is, we’re influenced into these choices. In ways large and small — and often invisible. Some of this influence may be harmless, even fun; and some of it is not harmless at all.

Robert CIALDINI: That’s right. 

Stephen DUBNER: You make a really provocative but resonant argument that a lot of behaviors are copycat behaviors, including workplace or school shootings, terrorist attacks, product tampering. What should media outlets do about those events? You may say their coverage is dangerous. They say it’s their duty to cover it intensely. Why are you more right than they are? 

CIALDINI: Because of that last word, “intensely.” They give us the news. They’re invaluable for that. The problem is when they sensationalize it for ratings. That bothers me because the actions described are contagious. We’re seeing it right now with shootings, just a cluster of them. One after another after another, because people are learning from the news what other disturbed people do to resolve their issues.  

Our guest today is among the world’s experts on the power of influence.

CIALDINI: My name is Robert Cialdini, I’m a behavioral scientist with a specialty in persuasion science.

Cialdini spent decades as a professor at Arizona State University, where he now enjoys an emeritus standing.

CIALDINI: I have become just as busy as I ever was. My wife says, how do you know that Cialdini has retired? He doesn’t have to deal with those pesky paychecks any longer.

Years and years and years ago, Cialdini realized that he was — as he puts it — “a patsy.” “For as long as I can recall,” he once wrote, “I’d been an easy mark for the pitches of peddlers, fundraisers, and operators of one sort or another.” And so, in the early 1980s, he embarked on a research project. He decided to learn the tricks of these salespeople and other influencers. Cialdini was already a professor by then, and this new research would certainly have academic value. But his primary goal was to help the rest of us — consumers, voters, regular tax-paying laypeople.

CIALDINI: Because through their taxes and contributions to universities, they had paid for me to do that research. I had found some things out, but I wasn’t communicating it to them. I always say that if experimental social psychology had been a business, it would have been famous for great research-and-development units. But it would not have had a shipping department.

But in this case, Cialdini did ship, in the form of a book he wrote about this research. It was called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. It was published in 1984; it sold only a few thousand copies. But word-of-mouth grew. After three years, it became a New York Times best-seller. And then it kept selling and kept selling and kept selling — compound influence. As of today: it’s sold roughly 5 million copies in 44 languages. Just last year, Cialdini says, the book sold nearly 300,000 copies. There is a good chance you have read Influence; if not, there’s a good chance you should. Among the readers are many regular people — consumers like Cialdini himself, who no longer want to be exploited. But the book also became a blueprint for profiteers and others who wish to exploit the powerful psychological effects he identified. Cialdini, like a character in some ancient fairy tale, has found himself advising both sides of the bargaining table. Now, he has released a new and aggressively expanded edition of his book. Here he is reading an excerpt:

CIALDINI: There are some people who know very well where the levers of automatic influence lie and who employ them regularly and expertly to get what they want. The secret to their effectiveness lies in the way they structure their requests, the way they arm themselves with one or another of the levers of influence that exist in the social environment. To do so may take no more than one correctly chosen word that engages a strong psychological principle and launches one of our automatic behavior programs.

*      *      *

DUBNER: I’m curious whether this edition is, to some degree, a mea culpa for having given unscrupulous users a bible to become even more unscrupulous. 

CIALDINI: I wouldn’t use “mea culpa.” All information can be used for good or ill, but if I were to limit myself only to the information that could not be used properly, there would be no information. 

DUBNER: One of the creators of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, was apparently tortured for most of his life about that ethical conundrum of needing to help invent this instrument of war to end World War II, while creating a new instrument of war that we are obviously still dealing with. My sense is, that’s not a good parallel to you, correct? 

CIALDINI: It’s a different level of unfortunate circumstances. 

DUBNER: We shouldn’t downgrade the level of influence that your book has had. I could imagine many despots and dictators have read it.

CIALDINI: So what I try to do is emphasize the ethical uses to make it difficult for people to try to use it in untoward ways.

The new edition of Influence does indeed emphasize the ethics of persuasion. It’s also 200 pages longer than the original, and includes a slew of recent findings from behavioral and social psychology. The original book explained what Cialdini called the six levers of influence — for instance, “social proof,” the idea that if you simply see a lot of people like yourself doing something, you’re more likely to do it too. That’s the idea we were discussing earlier, about the contagion of mass shootings; social proof may also dictate whether you’ll wear a face-mask, or listen to a given podcast. The new edition of Influence adds a seventh lever, which Cialdini calls unity. This idea is especially interesting at a moment in which the U.S., at least, seems less unified than it has in a long time. Meanwhile, the allegedly retired Cialdini still runs a consulting firm whose clients include Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and Pfizer. And so today, on this edition of The Freakonomics Radio Book Club, we are getting our own consultation, free of charge.

Is It The Food That's Causing Digestive Traffic Jams?

mashable |  In the last few years, corporations have been trying to capitalize on Pride month — usually by adorning rainbow logos and releasing rainbow merchandise. This year, however, Pride campaigns are cranking up the sexual innuendo (all while conservatives are calling us "groomers," but I digress). Burger King Austria, for example, released their "Pride Whopper" featuring burgers with either two "top" buns or two "bottom" buns.

How did we go from delivering dinner to anal sex??

— Love Right (@Blacktallbig) June 9, 2022

Food delivery app Postmates is now taking it a step further with Eat With Pride, a first-ever "bottom-friendly" menu. 

“Bottoming” pic.twitter.com/BM4TNJaUic

— Soya (@Soya112233) June 9, 2022

Postmates partnered with anal surgeon and sexual health and wellness expert Dr. Evan Goldstein to develop a menu for those who want to be penetrated during anal sex without mess.

"If you're a top, it seems like you can eat whatever you want," says the ad narrator, comedian Rob Anderson. "But if you're a bottom, you're expected to starve? Not this Pride!" The tops are portrayed as eggplants and bottoms as peaches, of course.

👋 pic.twitter.com/kH5xejvs3T

— GuessWho (@AmicaIncongnita) June 9, 2022

The ad goes on to list some foods that a bottom should avoid in the day before sex — like whole grains, cauliflower, and legumes — that contain insoluble fiber. This means they can't dissolve in water, and are harder to flush out...if you catch my drift. Instead, Postmates and Dr. Goldstein recommend foods with soluble fiber and protein, such as white rice, citrus, and fish, as these digest easily and slowly. The menu will offer "bottom-friendly" dishes from restaurants in New York and Los Angeles.

 

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.”

Felicia Sonmez Stirred Up A Wokestorm At The Bezos Post

vanityfair | The Post’s guild responded Tuesday to the disputes playing out online. “Guild leadership has tried hard to run our union in a way that centers kindness, respect, fairness, and empathy while holding people and institutions we care about accountable. It’s our hope that all Washington Post employees keep that in mind when one of us makes a mistake and we are tasked with being part of the accountability process,” Katie Mettler, who has been cochair of the Post Guild for more than three years, told me. “In the last few years, hundreds of guild members—often led by women and people of color—have worked relentlessly and thoughtfully together to advocate for more fair and inclusive systems at the Post.” She added, “We are doing the work to hold all our institutions and ourselves to a high standard, and we will keep doing that work in ways big and small, public and private.”

In the past, Sonmez has had widespread support in the newsroom; hundreds of colleagues signed a letter on her behalf in 2020, after Baron suspended her for tweeting an article detailing a rape allegation against NBA legend Kobe Bryant shortly after his death. (A “newsroom revolt” is how this publication described it at the time.) Soon after the paper’s guild sent that letter to management, she was reinstated. But since then, there have been multiple instances of Sonmez calling out the paper publicly—and she has done so internally in response to a staff email as well.

About two weeks ago, Gold, the National editor, sent out an email urging colleagues to “take time to assess how you are doing” and “seek help if you need to talk to someone” in the wake of the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde and the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. “Just a reminder that I was punished after I told an editor that I had to take a walk around the block after reading a difficult story,” Sonmez replied—to the entire National staff—according to emails reviewed by Vanity Fair. One reporter noted that Sonmez has said both publicly and privately that she’s still at the Post because she wants to help fix things. “Discouraging reporters at the Post from seeking help they need—that’s actively being part of the problem,” they told me. “This idea that she’s fighting for sexism and gender, while that might have felt true at some point, now just rings disingenuous, even for people who want to give her the benefit of the doubt.” 

On Thursday, after the initial publication of this article, Sonmez responded on Twitter: “I stand by what I wrote in that email. In 2018, I was punished after I told my editors I needed to take a walk around the block after reading a difficult story. Other colleagues have been punished for their trauma far more recently, but their stories aren’t mine to tell. I’m not ‘discouraging reporters at the Post from seeking help they need.’ Far from it. The Washington Post’s own actions are doing that. I care deeply about my colleagues, and I want this institution to provide support for all employees. Right now, the Post is a place where many of us fear our trauma will be used against us, based on the company’s past actions.”

The thrust of Sonmez’s critique over the past few days has been about how the Post holds different journalists to different standards, and what message that sends about the Post’s values. Sonmez tweeted Sunday that Del Real had “publicly attacked” her for highlighting Weigel’s sexist retweet, writing, “When women stand up for themselves, some people respond with even more vitriol.” In another tweet in the thread, she dismissed the idea that objecting to sexism was “clout chasing”—Del Real’s words—and tagged Buzbee and Gold to ask if the paper agreed with her. On Monday and Tuesday, she was once again urging management, via Twitter, to intervene. 

“Working at a huge news organization—the Post, The New York Times, CNN—is like living in a big city where there are always emergencies,” one staffer said. An embarrassing correction for the Styles desk might be a fire; a story the Times beats the Post on, a flood. “As a colleague, you probably should be trying to help fund the fire department or city services and make it a better place to live; at worst, you’re not paying your taxes,” they continued. “And then you have Felicia, who is essentially pouring gasoline on every fire and inviting people to watch.”

Sonmez responded Thursday on Twitter: “To borrow an analogy, working at a big news organization is like living in a big city. Emergencies like corrections come up every day. That’s normal. Are sexist or racist tweets ‘normal’ emergencies? Is the denigration of a class of people a ‘normal’ emergency? Or are those things a sign of deeper problems within a newsroom rife with unequal treatment?”

How Will American Oligarchs Keep Control Of You Increasingly Taxed And Put Upon Piss-ants?

neuburger |  But note in the first quote above the even larger problem Hudson identifies: How can the West maintain living standards while also de-industrializing and impoverishing the 99%?

He answers it, indirectly, by talking about how the inflow of money from Europe and other U.S.-dominated countries like Japan keeps the rich in cash:

European economic shortages are a huge benefit to the United States, which is making enormous profits on more expensive oil (which is controlled largely by U.S. companies, followed by British and French oil companies). Europe’s replenishment of the arms that it donated to Ukraine also is a boon to the U.S. military-industrial complex, whose profits are soaring.

But the United States is not recycling these economic gains to Europe, which is looking like the big loser.

None of those profits is going to the people. Only the living standards of the “One Percent” are propped up. (By “One Percent” I mean the upper 10%, a group that comprises our actual oligarchs, plus all those well-paid souls who keep that ship afloat and its engines running.)

Which leaves us with the original question: How will our wealthy keep control if they keep impoverish voters? Hudson’s answer, implicit in a piece written earlier is stark:

“The alternative to democracy is oligarchy. As Aristotle noted already in the 4th century BC, oligarchies turn themselves into hereditary aristocracies. This is the path to serfdom.”

In the same piece he adds, “All this sounds like Rome at the end of the Republic in the 1st century BC.”

People make facile comparisons of modern America to the end of the Roman Republic — without fully realizing that at the end of the Roman Republic, the Republic did end.

So how will our oligarchs do it — maintain control while impoverishing the governed? There’s really only one answer — by ending the republic, both its fact and pretense.

There may be other ways, but I can’t think of them.

Not Even Middle East Garrison States Can Be Bothered With Brandon....,

thecradle  |  It appears that the US has effectively lost most of the Gulf states (with the exception of Qatar) in favor of the new, more wily Russian ally. This loss was reflected in the recent decision of OPEC to increase oil production by only 200,000 barrels per day, significantly below the one million barrels per day. the US has sought.

Will the US administration accept this defeat easily and raise a white flag? The answer is ‘no,’ as Biden will cleave to long-established Beltway policy for West Asia, the most important aspect of which is the US military bases in the Persian Gulf.

Contrary to what local populations are encouraged to think, the US military bases were not established to protect the host states, but rather to ensure – even force – their government commitment to US interests and to submit to Washington’s diktats.

With regards to the current US pre-occupation with Ukraine, the war is tilting in Russia’s favor, both in the military and economic realms, with an almost complete failure of western-imposed economic sanctions.

The longer Biden delays his West Asia tour because of ‘non-ideal conditions’ in the host countries, the more those conditions are likely to evolve against US interests. Neither Saudi Arabia nor what’s left of the Israeli coalition government are waiting around for Biden – especially when nothing is delaying frequent trips by the Russians, Chinese, and other multipolar actors from filling that American gap.

Brandon Done FUBAR'd Relations With Both Brazil's Left And Right Wings...,

reuters |  Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday cast doubt on the 2020 election victory of U.S. President Joe Biden, just two days before they are due to meet for the first time during the Summit of the Americas.

Bolsonaro, an outspoken admirer of former President Donald Trump, said in a TV interview that he still harbors suspicions about Biden's victory and he again praised Trump's government.

In 2020, the Brazilian leader voiced allegations of U.S. election fraud as he backed Trump. Bolsonaro was also one of the last world leaders to recognize Biden's win.

"The American people are the ones who talk about it (election fraud). I will not discuss the sovereignty of another country. But Trump was doing really well," Bolsonaro said.

"We don't want that to happen in Brazil," he added.

Bolsonaro, who currently trails former leftist president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in opinion polls ahead of an election in October, has frequently questioned the legitimacy of Brazil's electronic voting system.

The right wing leader is scheduled to meet Biden on Thursday at the U.S.-hosted summit in Los Angeles.

According to the White House, their first formal talks will cover a range of issues, including food insecurity, climate change and COVID-19 pandemic recovery. read more

Bolsonaro said in the interview he does not believe that Biden will try to "impose anything" on what he should do to reduce deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, which has increased during his tenure.

 

 

As Predicted, Brandon's Summit Of The Americas Is An Epic Failure

mronline  |  The U.S. government’s Summit of the Americas started on June 6 in Los Angeles, California. And the event proved to be a major diplomatic failure for the Joe Biden administration.

Washington refused to invite the socialist governments of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

So to protest this exclusion, the presidents of Mexico, Bolivia, and Honduras boycotted the summit. Guatemala’s president also chose to skip the conference.

This means heads of state representing Latin American countries with a total population of more than 200 million people–a significant percentage of the Americas–refused to attend Washington’s Summit of the Americas.

The most significant absence was Mexico’s left-wing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known popularly by the acronym AMLO.

“I am not going to the summit because not all of the countries of the Americas were invited,” AMLO explained in his morning press conference on June 6.

“I believe in the need to change the policy that has been imposed for centuries, the exclusion, the desire to dominate, the lack of respect for the sovereignty of the countries and the independence of every country,” the Mexican president explained.

“There cannot be a Summit of the Americas if all of the countries of the American continent do not participate,” López Obrador continued.

We consider that to be the old policy of interventionism, of a lack of respect for nations and their peoples.

AMLO criticized the U.S. Republican Party for its “extremist” positions against Cuba and racist policies against immigrants. But he also pointed out that some prominent figures in the Democratic Party, such as New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, have also contributed to “hate” against Cuba and hawkish meddling in Latin America’s sovereign affairs.

“I don’t accept hegemonies,” AMLO added.

 

China OTOH DOES Have An Economic Strategy For The Americas

reuters  |  BUENOS AIRES/LIMA/LOS ANGELES, June 8 (Reuters) - China has widened the gap on the United States in trade terms in large swathes of Latin America since U.S. President Joe Biden came into office early last year, data show, underscoring how Washington is being pushed onto the back foot in the region.

An exclusive Reuters analysis of U.N. trade data from 2015-2021 shows that outside of Mexico, the top U.S. trade partner, China has overtaken the United States in Latin America and widened the gap last year.

The trend, driven by countries in resource-rich South America, hammers home how the United States has lost ground in a region long seen as its backyard, even as Biden aims to reset ties at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles this week.

Mexico and the United States have had a free trade deal since the 1990s and the amount of commerce between the two next-door neighbors alone overshadows Washington's commerce with the rest of Latin America.

But the trade gap with the United States in the rest of the region, which first opened up under former U.S. President Donald Trump in 2018, has grown since Biden took office in January last year, despite a pledge to restore Washington's role as a global leader and to refocus attention on Latin America after years of what he once called "neglect".

On the groundcurrent and former officials told Reuters that the United States had been slow to take concrete action and that China, a major buyer of grains and metals, simply offered more to the region in terms of trade and investment.

Juan Carlos Capunay, Peru's former ambassador to China, said that Mexico aside, "the most important commercial, economic and technological ties for Latin America are definitely with China, which is the top trade partner for the region, well above the United States."

He added though that politically the region still was more aligned with the United States.

When excluding Mexico, total trade flows - imports and exports - between Latin America and China hit nearly $247 billion last year, according to the latest available data, well above the $174 billion with the United States. The 2021 data lacks trade numbers from some regional countries but those balance each other out in terms of U.S.-China bias.

 

STAHP PLAYING!!! Brandon Ain't Got No Economic Strategy For The Asia-Pacific Region...,

foreignpolicy |  Months after U.S. President Joe Biden first indicated that his administration would launch a new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) that would signal strengthened U.S. engagement with Asian economies, the president, together with the leaders of a dozen countries from across Asia, announced the launch of the IPEF in Tokyo on May 23.

The Biden administration is convinced that the new framework is an opportunity to showcase what senior U.S. officials have described as a “foreign policy for the middle class,” an initiative that fulfills a strategic need while delivering results for U.S. workers and businesses.

In a discussion with the press before the IPEF’s launch, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan stated that “expanding U.S. economic leadership in the Indo-Pacific through vehicles like IPEF is good for America.” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, whose department is responsible for negotiating three of the framework’s four pillars, described it as “an important turning point in restoring U.S. economic leadership in the region and presenting Indo-Pacific countries an alternative to China’s approach,” And U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai called it an opportunity to “tackle 21st-century challenges and promote fair and resilient trade for years to come.”

However, while Japan and other U.S. partners in Asia have wanted Washington to reinvigorate economic cooperation with the region ever since former U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2017, there is some unease about the IPEF. After all, Asia-Pacific governments have been clear that they would prefer that the United States rejoin the TPP—now rechristened as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP)—to any alternative.

The slow process of determining what will be in the four “pillars” of the IPEF, how negotiations will be handled due to a division of labor between the U.S. trade representative and the commerce secretary, and uncertainty about which governments would sign up have deepened the ambivalence.

As a result of this ambivalence, the joint statement launching the framework referred to “collective discussions toward future negotiations,” indicating that there is more work to do to flesh out the initiative.

Asian governments are not wrong to have mixed feelings about the IPEF. U.S. trade officials plan to seek higher labor and environmental performances from negotiating partners, but they have also indicated that they are not prepared to offer access to the U.S. market—let alone pursue a TPP-style free trade agreement. Tai, the U.S. trade representative, has described such conventional agreements, which provide broad market access in exchange for pledges to improve labor and environmental standards that critics contend will likely have little practical impact on real-world conditions, as a “20th-century tool.” She wants to show that it is possible to pursue an international economic policy that delivers for working- and middle-class Americans.

The Secret Ukrainian Military Programs

voltairenet  |  In 2016, the United States committed to arming Ukraine to fight and win a war against Russia. Subsequently, the US Department of Defense organized a biological research program in Ukraine, and then huge amounts of nuclear fuel were secretly transferred to the country. These data change the interpretation of this war: it was not wanted and prepared by Moscow, but by Washington.

Throughout this series of articles, which began a month and a half before the war in Ukraine, I have been developing the idea that the Straussians, the small group of Leo Strauss followers in the US administration, were planning a confrontation against Russia and China. However, in the tenth episode of this series, I related how the Azov regiment became the paramilitary pillar of the Ukrainian Banderists by referring to the visit of Senator John McCain to it in 2016 [1]. However, the latter is not a Straussian, but was advised by Robert Kagan during his presidential election campaign in 2008, a central thinker among the Straussians [2], even though he has always cautiously denied his membership in this sect.

The planning of the war against Russia

A video, filmed during John McCain’s visit to Ukraine in 2016, has resurfaced. It shows the senator accompanied by his colleague and friend, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The two Americans are traveling on a Senate mission. But McCain is also the president of the IRI (International Republican Institute), the Republican branch of the NED (National Endowment for Democracy). It is known that the IRI has conducted about 100 seminars for the leaders of Ukrainian political parties classified as right-wing, including for the Banderists. The senators are addressing officers of the Azov regiment, the main Banderist paramilitary formation. This should come as no surprise. John McCain has always maintained that the United States should rely on the enemies of its enemies, whoever they may be. Thus, he has publicly claimed responsibility for his contacts with Daesh against the Syrian Arab Republic [3]

In this video, Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain assure that the United States will give all the weapons necessary for them to succeed in defeating Russia.

This video, I repeat, was recorded six years before the Russian army entered Ukraine. The two senators are investing their interlocutors with a mission. They do not see them as mercenaries who are paid, but as proxies who will fight for the unipolar world to the death.

Shortly afterwards, President Poroshenko, who had attended the meeting in battle dress, changed the badge of his secret service, the SBU. It is now an owl holding a sword directed against Russia with the motto "The wise will rule over the stars". It is clear that the Ukrainian state apparatus was preparing for war against Russia on behalf of the United States.

Three years later, on September 5, 2019, the Rand Corporation organized a meeting in the US House of Representatives to explain its plan: to weaken Russia by forcing it to deploy in Kazakhstan, then in Ukraine and as far as Transnistria [4].

I have explained at length in two previous articles [5] that at the end of the Second World War the United States and the United Kingdom took over many Nazi leaders and Ukrainian Banderists to turn them against the USSR. They mothered these fanatics as soon as the USSR disappeared and used them against Russia. It remained to explore how they armed them.

 

 

 

Who And What Was Taught By NATO Military Instructors In Ukraine?

sputnik  |  Access to high-tech weapons and Western military master classes was not only available to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but also to fighters of the nationalist battalions. According to Scott Ritter, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, US and British military instructors began training Ukrainian soldiers from the Azov Battalion in 2015. Ritter said that the goal of Western specialists was to create nationalist detachments in Ukraine, which is why the Americans and Britons got in touch with the Azov Battalion.

In an interview with an unnamed website on 18 March 2016, Roman Zvarich, the head of the headquarters of the Azov Civil Corps, said that “last summer”, they had organised an officer school with Azov’s “Georgian brother”. According to Zvarich, the tutors were four former American officers and one Canadian.

 

He also said that 32 Azov officers had graduated from the school and that they were “ready to carry out tactical tasks according to the procedures adopted in NATO countries, and they know better than Ukrainian generals”. Zvarich argued that a new military headquarters had been built in Azov in full line with NATO standards – “probably the only such headquarters in the system of the Ukrainian Armed Forces”.

 

In 2018, American journalist and blogger Max Blumenthal published a study on the contacts of the Azov Battalion with US military personnel. According to the author, in November 2017, overseas military inspectors visited the Azov Battalion, “known as a bastion of neo-Nazism in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine”, to discuss “logistics and deepening cooperation”. An unnamed Azov fighter quoted by Blumenthal told American journalists that US instructors and volunteers worked closely with his battalion. American officers met with Azov commanders for two months for “training and other assistance”.

 

The leadership of Azov, Blumenthal argued, managed to establish warm relations with the US military. A photograph posted on the Azov website shows a US officer shaking hands with the Azov commander (and the American is not at all embarrassed by the Nazi symbols on the uniform of his Ukrainian counterpart). These photos confirm the secret ties between Ukrainian nationalists and US military personnel, according to the journalist.

 

Blumenthal drew a parallel between Washington's billion-dollar programme to train Syrian “moderate rebels” and the US military’s ties to Ukrainian nationalists, claiming that there are clear similarities between the two projects. Previously, heavy weapons allegedly designed for the Free Syrian Army fell directly into the hands of Daesh*, and now US arms go directly to Azov extremists, Blumenthal concludes.

 

 

 

What Happens To Europe When Russia Wins?

thesaker  |  If the unprecedented tidal wave of sanctions which the West had sent toward Russia had produced some sort of tangible effect during the first two or three months of Russia’s special operation in the Ukraine, then this strategy would have been quite enough to ease suffering Western masses through the shock of the unfolding crisis (although the crisis would continue to unfold even if the Russian economy had collapsed). But over the longer term this strategy stops working. First, the “blame Putin” narrative is rather monotonous and gets old quickly. Second, and far more importantly, at the level of mass subconscious, it creates the impression that Putin is a god: super-powerful, super-influential and able to influence processes both global and local through subtle and invisible means. Moreover, Putin the god is Zeus-like and has powerful atomic thunderbolts at his disposal, adding terrifying appeal to his already frightful image.

Sooner or later the Western mass subconscious will form a simple and perfectly logical thought: if Putin is all-powerful and super-influential, and if we with our feeble “sanctions from Hell” can do nothing to weaken or dislodge him over three, then five, then seven months, then, obviously, we must come to terms with him and accede to his demands before things get any worse for us! And while it would be demeaning for the Western mass subconscious to negotiate with a petty tyrant or a mad despot, negotiating with an all-powerful demigod who holds the fate of humanity in his hands is not shameful at all but a necessary, unavoidable, eminently reasonable measure. Moreover, it should be possible to portray such a compromise in flattering terms: as a magnanimous gift from the community of civilized nations offered in good faith in order to save the world from nuclear armageddon about to be unleashed by an angry, all-powerful demigod.

In turn, if Western politicians are, as one might expect, reluctant to negotiate with Putin and to compromise, suffering Western masses will blame them for any delay. If Putin is all-powerful and super-influential, then why aren’t they negotiating and seeking compromise? What are they waiting for? What’s wrong with them? The better-informed element among the Western masses might even be able to vaguely guess at a seldom-discussed but rather obvious fact: what Putin wants is not at all unreasonable. He just wants some of Ukraine (not necessarily even all of it—just the enthusiastically, patriotically Russian bits) and he also wants NATO the hell away from Russia’s borders. “What do we want this Ukraine for anyway?” this enlightened element might inquire. After all, most people in the West lived many happy years not knowing that the Ukraine even existed. What’s more, their recent discovery of its existence has coincided with the onset of a very nasty crisis—and they still can’t find the damned place on a map! And now they have to suffer with sky-high gas prices, with unaffordable food, galloping inflation, shortages of baby formula—all because some idiot politicians are refusing to give Putin this fucking Ukraine which nobody else wants anyway? (Well, Poland does, but who the heck is Poland?) Come on! Be reasonable! Get rid of this stupid Hunter Biden playground and let’s get on with it!

That is the new narrative that is inevitably forming in the mass subconscious of the West, and as time passes, energy prices continue to increase, shortages of all sorts of things become commonplace… and meanwhile the ruble strengthens and Russia gets richer and richer in spite of “sanctions from Hell,” unhurriedly moving its fabled wall of artillery fire westward across the Ukrainian landscape, this narrative will become stronger and stronger and will eventually become dominant. At that point, any attempt to “blame Putin” will be met with boos, hisses and a volley of rotten vegetables. What should we expect Western politicians to do under such circumstances? We should not expect any surprises; they will do what they have always done: they will try to suppress the new, competing narrative. They will “cancel” anyone who tries to articulate it within the media space. (Tucker Carlson beware!)

In doing so, the West will neatly echo what’s happened within the Ukraine itself—a symptom of a creeping Ukrainization of the West. In the Ukraine, for every single disastrous, catastrophic failure that had occurred in 2014 and 2015, the Kiev regime blamed it squarely on Putin personally. Over time it has succeeded in forming a sort of quasi-cult of Putin as an all-powerful evil deity hell-bent on destroying poor, sore-beset little cuddly Ukraine. As a result, by 2018 give or take a year, in the Ukrainian mass subconscious there formed a new narrative: “What do we need this Russian-infested Crimea or this ornery Donbass for? Why can’t we just give them to Putin, so that he leaves us alone and lets us develop as a European-oriented country?”

What did the Kiev regime do about this new narrative? It did whatever it could to suppress it. This wasn’t any sort of independent initiative on its part; it is, after all, a colonial administration run from Washington. And since Washington was busy architecting a Ukrainian war against Russia, any narrative that involved making peace with Russia was simply not allowed. That’s why all Ukrainian opposition political parties were banned, all non-government-controlled television channels were shut down and anyone who ventured to guess that giving de facto independent territories a chance to decide their own fate might be a good idea were charged with separatism and imprisoned or killed. As a result, the West got what it wanted: a Ukrainian war with Russia.

But then something went horribly wrong. Putin pre-empted the Ukrainian attack and lit a backfire by sending in tank columns into territory previously controlled by the Kiev regime, scrambling its logistics throwing its battle plans into ghastly disarray. Then he set about methodically blowing up the Ukraine’s warmaking capacity using standoff weapons. According to schedule, it will be all gone later this month, Western military aid notwithstanding. And then it turned out that Russia was ready for “sanctions from Hell,” having spent eight years preparing for them, and was able to sustain the blow, which then bounced back onto the West and started smashing it to bits. The West reflexively continued to follow the Ukrainian pattern and blame it all on Putin. By now the alternative narrative of an all-powerful Lord Putin is fully formed and we should expect to hear more and more voices clamoring for negotiation and compromise with him.

The aforementioned Tucker Carlson is one of these voices, and his influence on his vast audience sets the tone for a significant chunk of electorate in the US—not that their vote counts for much. Much more surprisingly, the same opinion was voiced at Davos by none other than that talking fossil Henry Kissinger! In response, the Ukrainians added Kissinger to their… terrorist database. Various Kiev regime mouthpieces positively choked from fury. How could he? Doesn’t he know that negotiating with Putin is strictly verboten? That narrative must be suppressed—in the Ukraine and in the West!

The strategy of blaming it all on Putin has backfired grandly in both the Ukraine and in the West and will continue backfiring, eating away at the social fabric and demoralizing the population. But that’s not all! This strategy is also immensely helpful to Russia. Ignoring the obvious thought that anything that is detrimental to the West is automatically beneficial for Russia, there is another, much more significant benefit that this strategy provides to Russia directly: it works to raise Russia’s, and Putin’s, prestige in the rest of the world, which is already much more important to Russia than the West will ever be again.

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.