radiofree.asia

Author: Eric Zuesse

  • Why the Republican Party Is Trying to Cut Healthcare to the Poor

    On May 7, the AP headlined “House GOP backing off some Medicaid cuts as report shows millions of people would lose health care,” and reported:

    House Republicans appear to be backing off some, but not all, of the steep reductions to the Medicaid program as part of their big tax breaks bill, as they run into resistance from more centrist GOP lawmakers opposed to ending nearly-free health care coverage for their constituents back home.

    This is as a new report out Wednesday from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that millions of Americans would lose Medicaid coverage under the various proposals being circulated by Republicans as cost-saving measures. House Republicans are scrounging to come up with as much as $1.5 trillion in cuts across federal government health, food stamp and other programs, to offset the revenue lost for some $4.5 trillion in tax breaks.

    “Under each of those options, Medicaid enrollment would decrease and the number of people without health insurance would increase,” the CBO report said.

    The Republican President Donald Trump presented to Congress on May 2 his proposed federal budget for 2026.

    On May 2nd the U.S. White House — which has made clear that it’s beating the drums for war against China — headlined “Office of Management and Budget Releases the President’s Fiscal Year 2026 Skinny Budget” and reported that “The Budget, which reduces non-defense discretionary by $163 billion or 23 percent from the 2025 enacted level, guts a weaponized deep state while providing historic increases for defense and border security. … Defense spending would increase by 13 percent, and appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security would increase by nearly 65 percent, to ensure that our military and other agencies repelling the invasion of our border have the resources they need to complete the mission.” His budget “guts a weaponized deep state while providing historic increases for defense and border security,” and health care for the poor is part of that “weaponized deep state” he is referring to, which Republicans say must be cut in order to provide these “historic increases for defense and border security.”

    All of those increases would go towards paying the suppliers (such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, etc.) to the enormously militarized police-state, at the very same time that the health, education, and welfare, of the voters, will be reduced by $165 billion or 23% below the current level.

    Here are some more details regarding what that “weaponized deep state” (to use the White House’s phrase for it) consists of:

    The White House’s May 2 “Major Discretionary Funding Changes” says that:

    For Defense spending [ONLY the Defense Department, NOT including the approximately $700 billion yearly of annual U.S. military spending that is being paid out from OTHER federal Departments], the President proposes an increase of 13 percent to $1.01 trillion for FY 2026; for Homeland Security, the Budget commits a historic $175 billion investment to, at long last, fully secure our border. Under the proposal, a portion of these increases — at least $325 billion assumed in the budget resolution recently agreed to by the Congress — would be provided through reconciliation, to ensure that our military and other agencies repelling the invasion of our border have the resources needed to complete the mission. This mandatory supplement to discretionary spending would enable the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, among others, to clean up the mess President Trump inherited from the prior administration and harden the border and other defenses to protect America from foreign invasion.

    Therefore, approximately $1.7T of total military spending is being sought by Trump (including the 13% increase to the Defense Department), while he is proposing to cut all other discretionary spending (which had previously constituted the other 47% of all U.S. Government annually appropriated federal spending (and which was previously around $800B per year) to be cut down now by $165B to around $635B total, or about 37% of all annually appropriated federal spending. Only the +13% for the Pentagon, and the +65% for the Department of Homeland Security, are increased, while everything else is getting cut drastically in order to make those increases possible.

    So, while around $1.7T will be going to the military, only around $635B will be going to pay all of the other discretionary spending (including any non-military portion of the DHS). That will cut the percentage of the Government’s discretionary spending on non-military purposes down from its prior approximately 47% of the federal budget, down to approximately 37% of all of the Government’s discretionary spending.

    Medicaid — health care to the poor — is on their chopping block so that the Defense Department portion of that $1.7T military cost that the U.S. Government will be paying in 2026 will be increased by 13% (and so that any non-military portion of the 65% increase to the DHS will also be paid).

    Looking further at WHAT is being cut the most, the White House document shows that the only part of the Department of Education that will be increased — by $60 million — is “Charter Schools,” the part that privatizes public-school education, which is the part that billionaires want to increase (since their hedge funds etc. will be owning much of it). Meanwhile, Title 1 and K-12 federal spending will be reduced by $4.535 billion; and the program to incentivize colleges to “to engage with low-income students and increase access” will be cut by $1.579 B.

    The Department of Health and Human Services will cut $4.035 from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), $1.970B from the Refugee and Unaccompanied Alien Children Program, $1.732B from AIDS and financial-assistance health programs, $3.588B from CDC and Prevention programs, $17.965B from NIH, $1.065B from programs working with addicts to help them reduce their addictions.

    The Environmental Protection Agency will be cut $2.460B for Clean and Drinking Water State Revolving Loan Funds, and under a billion dollars each for such programs as the Hazardous Substance Superfund.

    The Department of Housing and Urban Development will be cut by $26.718B that goes to programs for the poor.

    The Treasury Department will be cut by $2.488B for the IRS.

    The National Science Foundation will be cut by $3.479B and by an additional $1.130B for “Broadening Participation.”

    Most of the other cuts will be below a billion dollars.

    Are these massive reallocations away from programs to the needy (and from some other areas such as scientific research), into instead the military and border security, reflections of the public’s will in a democracy?

    On February 26, I reported that:

    On February 14, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling,” and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (the five functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds.

    An important point to be made here is that both #s 4&5, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid, are “discretionary federal spending” (i.e., controlled by the annual appropriations that get voted into law each year), whereas #s 1&2 (Social Security and Medicare) are “mandatory federal spending” (i.e., NOT controlled by Congress and the President). So, Trump and the Republicans are going after the poor because they CAN; they can’t (at least as-of YET) reduce or eliminate Social Security and Medicare. However, by now, it is crystal clear that Trump’s Presidency will be an enormous boon to America’s billionaires, and an enormous bane to the nation’s poor. The aristocratic ideology has always been: to get rid of poverty, we must get rid of the poor — work them so hard they will go away (let them seek ‘refugee’ status SOMEWHERE ELSE).

    Trump is increasing the military and border security, and decreasing education, assistance to the poor, Medicaid, federal law enforcement, and even Social Security and Medicare (the latter two by laying off many of the people who staff those bureaucracies).

    Therefore, the Republicans’ effort to cut health care to the poor is merely a part of their overall effort to cut Governmental help to the nation’s poor; and all of this is being done in order to increase federal purchases of armaments from corporations such as Lockheed Martin, who make all or most of their profits only by selling to the U.S. Government and to its allied Governments.

    However, on many levels, the greatest amount of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” and sheer corruption, is actually in the only federal Department that has never been audited: the Defense Department. This means that Republicans are reallocating from the neediest to the greediest. (NOTE: I have equal contempt for both of America’s political Parties, but this reallocation is specifically a Republican specialty. So, this isn’t merely a matter of opinion. It is a historical fact.)

    The post Why the Republican Party Is Trying to Cut Healthcare to the Poor first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The US-UK-Israel Empire is a Police-State

    Here is the youtube in which Chris Hedges interviewed, on April 30, the journalist Richard Medhurst about Medhurst’s being punished-without-trial and threatened with up to five years of legal imprisonment of him under Section 12(1a) of the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000 because he had reported honestly about the wars in Syria, Lebanon, and Ukraine. Also because he refuses to tell the police whom his unidentified sources are or give them his passwords so that they could then use his computer, mobile phone, and the other devices that they had seized and impounded from his abode in August 2024 in order for police to then deal with those people in the same way they’ve been dealing with him since August last year. The U.S.-UK-Israel empire used their Austrian Government to seize him and charge Medhurst, who is a Christian, as being a member of Hamas, so that Medhurst is now under investigation in both the UK and Austria as aiding terrorists for no other reason than his reporting on Palestine and Lebanon. In addition, his criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza has made him a target who could potentially face up to 14 years imprisonment in the UK and another 10 years in Austria. Of course, he has not been convicted of anything, and he hasn’t even been charged with anything; and, so, actually throughout the U.S.-UK-Israel empire, a person can spend decades in prison without being convicted of anything at all.

    This exemplifies that there are many reasons why both journalists and social scientists might be inclined to deceive their audiences. Sometimes a presenter’s employer selected and hired its employees for them to deceive the public in certain ways; but, also, the targeted public is sometimes a specific culture or group of believers who are aiming to have their group’s prejudices confirmed, and who aren’t interested in learning any truth that contradicts what the group believes. On all three sides of that — the employers, the employees, and also the audiences — some audiences – and also some employers – might be disinclined to approve of, or to employ, presenters who report truths that contradict what that group wants to believe. Lying is often required in order to succeed. There are many motivations for ‘news’-media and social ‘scientists’ to mislead or deceive their public. And the public, in such a culture of fear pervading, might be inclined to “go along in order to get along.”

    On 19 October 2021, a Trump-supporter, “Liz Harrington” — through whom the former U.S. President Trump was then sending out tweets because of Jack Dorsey’s Twitter having cancelled and removed Trump’s account — issued, from Trump, a tweet, saying: “Isn’t it terrible that a Republican Congressman from Nebraska just got indicted for possibly telling some lies to investigators about campaign contributions, when half of the United States Congress lied about made up scams, and when Mark Zuckerberg, in my opinion a criminal, is allowed to spend $500 million and therefore able to change the course of a Presidential election, and nothing happens to them. Comey lied, Schiff lied, Crooked Hillary lied, McCabe lied, the two lovers, Peter and Lisa, lied. They all lied having to do with Russia, Russia, Russia, because they knew it was a SCAM — and they made up fairy tales about me knowing how badly it would hurt the U.S.A. — and nothing happens to them. Is there no justice in our country?” Perhaps all of what he said there was true — and, if so, then the U.S. Government is corrupt to so extreme an extent as to be entirely untrustworthy (no real democracy at all). In other words (and this has nothing to do with whether or not a person is or was a supporter of Trump): selective ‘justice’ is no real justice, at all; it is merely ‘justice’ that’s based upon at least one lie — and that is, instead, injustice. To apply justice — like to apply science — requires 100% truth, no compromises, no myths. This is the sound (scientific) reason why, in a U.S. trial, a witness is required to say, before testifying, that his/her testimony will be “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” and the testifier can subsequently be charged with having lied-under-oath if anything in that person’s testimony becomes subsequently proven to have been factually false, about what that person had actually seen or heard, and known at the time of that testimony. In science, the demand is 100% truth, and anything less than that is instead mere propaganda. Selective ‘justice’ is no justice, at all. This is true not only nationally but internationally. Any science demands 100% truth. That’s what it strives for. When the Government instead SUPPRESSES truth, it is a police-state.

    However, the master-lie — the post-1945 Big Lie that pervades ‘news’-reporting and ‘historical’ accounts — deserves to be identified and exposed first of all. This Big Lie is that the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel, are democracies. None of them actually is. All are rigid aristocracies, or “oligarchies.” Although the U.S., UK, and Israel declare themselves to be democracies, examples of their flouting international laws, and committing national atrocities, abound. On the level of international war crimes, the lie-based invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003 is one well-known example of that. Regarding a merely personal example, Julian Assange was in various forms of imprisonment by UK for over ten years without his ever having been convicted of anything except that in 2012 he was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for jumping bail (on sexual charges against him that even the alleged accusers themselves denied were true — the Government wanted them to lie in court, but they finally decided not to). And yet he went into solitary confinement (“23 hours a day locked in their cells”) in a super-max British prison, because the U.S. Government wouldn’t stop its demand that he be extradited to the U.S. (and killed here, instead of in Britain). His only ‘crime’ was his publishing only truths, especially truths that cut to the core of exposing the regime’s constant lying. So, this blatant and illegal injustice against an international hero (virtually everywhere except in the United States) is today one prominent disproof of the U.S. and UK lies to the effect that they are democracies. These and many other such examples in ‘the land of the free’, and in America’s and Britain’s ‘democracies’, during the post-1945 period, display the lie. On 26 September 2021, Yahoo News reported (based  largely on reporting in Madrid’s El Pais on 5 January 2021) that the Trump Administration felt so embarrassed by some information that had been Wikileaked, they drew up detailed plans to kidnap Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to “rendition” him for possible execution by America. The plans, including “meetings with authorities or approvals signed by the president,” were finally stopped at the National Security Council, as being too risky. “Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred ‘at the highest levels’ of the Trump administration”, even without any legal basis to try him in the United States. So: the Trump Administration prepared an indictment against Assange (to legalize their extradition-request), and the indictment became unsealed or made public on the same day, 11 April 2019, when Ecuador’s Government allowed UK’s Government (assisted by the Israeli and Amrican billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who was Donald Trump’s biggest single campaign donor) to drag Assange out into UK super-max solitary-confinement imprisonment, and this subsequently produced lie-based U.S. & UK tussles over how to prevent Assange from ever again being able to reach the public, either by continuing his solitary confinement, or else by, perhaps, poisoning him, or else convicting him of something and then executing him. On 4 January 2021, a British judge, Vanessa Baraitser, in a 132-page decision, nixed Assange’s defense case: “I reject the defence submissions concerning staying extradition [to U.S.] as an abuse of the process of this court.” That conclusion was reaffirmed on 10 December 2021 in a 27-page ruling by England’s Chief Justice, Ian Burnett, Baron of Maldon. The BBC bannered “Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules”. The lower court judge, and then the Chief Justice, in fact, arbitrarily abused Assange, by accepting at face value the promises by the Trump Administration not to drive Assange to suicide in the American prison-system (which British judges held to be barbaric compared to their own). Earlier, Judge Baraitser’s handling of Assange’s only ‘trial’, which was his extradition hearing (he never had a trial), was an absolute travesty, which would have been expected in Hitler’s courts, and which makes clear that UK’s courts can be just as bad as Nazi courts had been. However, the U.S. regime’s efforts to grab Assange continued on until 25 June 2024, when the Biden Addministration suddenly headlined “WikiLeaks Founder Pleads Guilty and Is Sentenced for Conspiring to Obtain and Disclose Classified National Defense Information”, and announced that they were setting Assange free, because Assange pled guilty (of what had actually been great journalism). The CNN news-report about that huge come-down from the Administration’s prior consistently hard-line policy against Assange indicated that the new, less-right-wing, Government in Australia (Assange being an Australian) was one of many factors that were giving Biden cold feet about the prospect of his feeding Assange to the U.S. intelligence community wolves who were hungry for him and might have made his destruction as bloody as possible. Perhaps Biden knew that the prior Trump Administration’s promises to treat Assange well were actually impossible for the ‘Justice’ Department and America’s spooks to fulfill on, and would thus end up making Biden himself look bad around the world. Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the overwhelmingly compliant U.S. Congress, all are to blame for that dictatorial regime’s pursuit against this champion of truth-telling; and the same blame applies to the leadership in UK. Blatantly, both America and England lie in order to refer to themselves as being democracies. In fact, America has the world’s highest percentage of its residents in prisons (but recently El Salvador has taken over that title). It’s the world’s #1 police-state — especially because America’s empire covers much of the world. Is this because Americans are worse than the people in other countries, or is it instead because the thousand or so individuals (America’s billionaires) who collectively control the nation’s Government are, themselves, especially psychopathic? America has been scientifically examined more than any other country has, in regards to whether it is an aristocracy, or instead a democracy, and the clear and consistent finding is that it’s an aristocracy. And it clearly is that at the federal level. (Here is a video summarizing the best single study of that, and it finds America to be an aristocracy, because it’s controlled by the richest few; and here is a much more popular video, declaring America to be a democracy, saying that this is so because it’s capitalist and because no capitalist nation can even possibly be a dictatorship. Oh, Hitler’s regime wasn’t capitalist? Hirohito’s wasn’t? Mussolini’s wasn’t? They ALL were. But it is the latter video — the false one — that is the more-popular one.) And even Norway’s aristocracy was part of this scandal against Assange.

    However, increasingly in recent times, people around the world have been coming to recognize these realities. Here are some examples of such findings from international pollings:

    In both 2013 and 2017, two separate international-polling organizations found that (as the first of them, Win/Gallup, put it), America is “The Greatest Threat To Peace In The World Today”. On 5 May 2021, a NATO-affiliated poll of 53 countries was introduced by NATO’s former chief, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, saying “Nearly half (44%) of respondents in the 53 countries surveyed are concerned that the US threatens democracy in their country; fear of Chinese influence is 38%, and fear of Russian influence is lowest at 28%.” On 1 November 2021, Pew’s “survey of 17 advanced economies” reported that “Just 17% say democracy in the U.S. is a good example for others to follow, while 57% think it used to be a good example but has not been in recent years. Another 23% do not believe it has ever been a good example.” On that same day, a different poll, the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist National Poll, bannered “Americans See a Serious Threat to Democracy; Trust Elections Largely on Partisan Basis”. Earlier polls among only Americans were also showing greatly increased disillusionment. People around the world who thought that their Government was a democracy but also thought that their Government was lousy, have been coming to view democracy itself with less and less favorability — and this provides encouragement to the aristocracy, who naturally hate democracy, because they want to control the Government. On 8 February 2021, the AP-NORC Poll bannered “Few in US say democracy is working very well” and reported: “Just 16% of Americans say democracy is working well or extremely well, a pessimism that spans the political spectrum. Nearly half of Americans, 45%, think democracy isn’t functioning properly, while another 38% say it’s working only somewhat well.” At year’s-end 2021, 71% of Republicans considered Biden’s Presidency “not legitimate”; 91% of Democrats considered it “legitimate.” In a billionaires-run country, partisanship — setting the Parties increasingly hostile against each other — is the best method to protect the actual rulers, because the public’s hatred of each other is preventing them from looking and seeing upward, toward the aristocrats who are actually pulling all those strings in this political puppet-show that’s happening down below. Thus, rampant and still increasing corruption took over America’s Government, and ever since 2014, life-expectancies in this nation have been going down. And the worse its regime gets, the more arrogantly it threatens or criticizes struggling and rising economic competitors.

    But, in any case (and even if the public don’t already recognize this fact): we cannot have truth in history, news-reporting, or any of the social-science fields, unless and until the reality that both the U.S. and UK (and, also Israel) are imperialistic dictatorships — aristocracies, instead of democracies — is publicly acknowledged, not hidden and lied-about (such as political ‘scientists’ and ‘journalists’ do), sometimes by philosophical debates about what the terms (“democracy” and “dictatorship”) even mean. That recognition within the social-science fields will be a prerequisite to those fields’ knowing historical truth, today. And knowing historical truth is the basis of all science. But in a police-state the truth is suppressed, instead of made public.

    NOTE: except for the first paragraph here, this article was taken from my America’s Empire of Evil book.

    The post The US-UK-Israel Empire is a Police-State first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump Posts Press Release with Fabrications

    On April 15th, President Trump posted as “News” on his White House website, “These Sick Criminals Are Who Democrats and the Legacy Media Are Defending”, and opened:

    Brutal killers and rapists — all taken off our streets in just the past week thanks to the tireless work of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

    If Democrats and the legacy media had their way, these sick criminals would still be roaming free.

    Here are just a few of the depraved criminal illegal immigrants ICE has arrested in the past several days:

    1. Luis Olmedo Quishpi-Poalasin, a 35-year-old citizen of Ecuador, was arrested by ICE New York City. Quishpi has convictions for forcible rape, sexual abuse contact by forcible compulsion, rape and anal sexual contact with a person incapable of consent, unlawful imprisonment, forcible touching of intimate parts of another person, sexual misconduct by vaginal sexual contact without consent, and subjecting another person to sexual contact without consent in Brooklyn, New York.

    2. Eduardo Garcia-Cortez, a 64-year-old, citizen of Honduras, was arrested by ICE Houston. Garcia has a conviction for murder in Los Angeles County, California.

    …

    There were 18 listed. Using two different web-browsers, I searched online to find those alleged convictions, because if that press release is authentic, then since the alleged crimes were sufficiently significant to have been covered at least by one local TV, radio, print, or other, news-medium, and there would also be a court-record of the case(s), at least one mention of the case(s) would almost certainly be somewhere else on the Web than merely that White House Press Release. But nothing came up on those two alleged criminals, other than this White House ‘news’-report.

    If the President’s office were seriously reporting this alleged news, then they would have provided some means — links to each one of the alleged 18 “criminals,” or some other means — by which a reader of it can seek to find whether or not the White House is fabricating this ‘news’; and, since the White House did not do that, any intelligent reader would assume that it is fabricated instead of being any authentic news.

    If the President did not authorize his office to post that alleged ‘news’-report, then he will announce this fact and fire whomever was responsible for it. Otherwise, he — and he alone — is entirely responsible for it.

    In any case, however, the responsibility to examine further into this incident rests with each one of America’s national news-media. Only in a dictatorship can a head-of-state make a public statement (and a Press Release is a public statement) and no news-medium investigate to determine whether or not it was a total fabrication, and how it came to be produced if it was a fabrication.

    The post Trump Posts Press Release with Fabrications first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Scandalous Evil of Donald Trump

    Some people think that U.S. President Trump does terrible things because he isn’t smart enough to know better, but I shall document here (via the links, including the links within linked-to articles), that it doesn’t take any sort of genius to know better than Trump what he is doing and saying.

    On April 8, Glenn Kessler, the ‘fact-checker’ for the Democratic Party billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, headlined “Vance’s whopper on alleged Social Security fraud: The vice president falsely claims that 40 percent of calls to a retirement program involve fraud.” And he documented there, via links, that it was, indeed, a “whopper” of a lie, for which any public official ought to be drawn and quartered. Kessler — whom I have in prior articles criticized for misrepresentation in his statements, didn’t do that in this instance, at all, because he didn’t even need to in order to make his point against the Party of Republican billionaires (and their deceived voters who support those people, just as in the Party of Democratic billionaires). Click onto that article by Kessler in order to see his evidences; judge it for yourself. I didn’t find even one misrepresented or misused source in ANY of his linked-to sources. He proved there that President Trump is trying to slash as much as he can from Social Security. At the same time, I might add, his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, speaking at NATO, on April 4, said that

    We’re going to have to spend more on national security, because we have a global footprint, and that’s the point that I think has been made and missed in a lot of places, okay. We’re going to have to increase defense spending in our country.

    Trump intends to take money out of Social Security so that he can spend more on ‘Defense’ which means Aggression (such as by invading Greenland?).

    On April 7, Fortune magazine bannered “Trump’s tariff formula used the wrong value in its calculations, conservative think tank says. ‘This whole thing was rigged’” and reported that “The formula the White House used to calculate its recent tariff is based on an error that roughly quadrupled the rates from what they should have been.” One of the economists said that “the administration hadn’t made a mistake so much as intentionally fudged the math to get the outcome officials wanted.

    ‘This whole thing was rigged, …It was a manipulated way to get very high tariffs because President Trump wanted to announce very high tariffs.’” Another of the economists said, “Our view is that the formula the administration relied on has no foundation in either economic theory or trade law.” Again, Trump was simply reckless.

    Furthermore, on April 6, CNN reported that,

    The 1,300-person National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, was established in 1970 to ensure “every man and woman in the Nation safe and healthful working conditions and to preserve our human resources.”

    On Tuesday, [April 1st] an estimated two-thirds of its staff was cut, or about 870 workers, as part of sweeping reductions across federal health agencies that wiped out entire divisions focused on the health and safety of miners, firefighters, health-care workers and others in one day.

    “It’s a small thing, but it’s massive in terms of its impact and its importance,” said John McDonough, professor of the practice of public health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “And they’ve just wiped it off the face of the Earth.

    In addition, on April 8, the anonymous “Moon of Alabama” blogger, who is one of the most universally respected commentators on U.S. Governmental policies (and I have never found him to have misrepresented or falsely used any of his linked-to sources) headlined “An Economic Advisor’s Weird Theory,” and exposed the outright stupidity of statements in an April 7 White House speech by the chief of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors, Steve Miran, who, as MoA accurately summarized and commented upon Miran’s argument, “Miran says the U.S. military ensures the ‘financial stability and the credibility’ of U.S. borrowing. It does so only in that it destroys small countries which are trying to turn away from trading in dollars. Iraq and Libya are prime examples of this.” Miran even had alleged there that other countries — and Miran cited especially both China and Brazil, both of which nations are, in fact, phasing-out their acceptance of U.S. dollars in their international commerce — can engage in international commerce only “because they can transact in U.S. dollars backed by U.S. Treasuries,” and so “they are able to trade freely with each other and prosper.” Miran was arguing that countries such as China and Brazil can prosper ONLY because of the existence of the U.S. dollar. (It’s yet another of Amercia’s indispensable gifts to the world.) The Trump Administration is American exceptionalism that goes so far into the Twilight Zone of lies and myth as to be insane, if it is not plain idiotic. But, in either case, it is so irresponsible, so reckless, so unconcerned with the public’s welfare, as to pose an enormous threat to the entire world, especially because all of the Trump foreign policies equate international economic competition with international war; and, therefore, this Administration transcends mere stupidity: it is outright evil. Using the military for what are actually purposes of economic competition is plain evil, and equates the U.S. Government internationally as being a gangster, an international pirate nation. Moreover, it’s a sanctimonious one. Trump’s international policies falsely presume that America is being aggressed-against, economically exploited, by every other nation on Earth, which should instead bow down to what virtually the entire world considers to be “The Biggest Threat to World Peace.” Yes, under Trump, America is feared, because it constantly is threatening other nations. This won’t end well for anybody — except, perhaps, for America’s billionaires. (But, now, even Republican ones are being shocked at Trump’s recklessness.)

    The post The Scandalous Evil of Donald Trump first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • NATO is Breaking apart

    On April 2, Reuters headlined “US officials object to European push to buy weapons locally,” which means that Trump’s demand for Europe to increase greatly its ‘defense’ spending is, indeed, part of his plan to keep the boom in the U.S. stock markets going. This needs to be understood in the relevant context:

    Though none of the mainstream press reported the fact in 2017, Trump started his Presidency in 2017 by making the biggest armaments-sale in history: $400 billion in U.S.-made weapons to Saudi Arabia over the next ten years, which would keep the by-far-most profitable segment of the U.S. stock markets — the ‘defense’ sector — booming, and therefore keep American billionaires (whom those corporations benefit enormously in every possible way) continuing to grow their personal fortunes at a much faster clip than the U.S. economy itself grows (which has been quite sluggish — below the global average for all countries); and, this way, the fortunes of billionaires will continue to thrive even if the U.S. economy doesn’t (as has been the case now for at least the past 25 years).

    Right now, Trump is promising to stop America’s apparently ceaseless creation of, and participation (such as in Ukraine) in, foreign wars, but he isn’t reducing — and is instead actually increasing — America’s ‘defense’ (aggression) expenditures while cutting virtually everything else (the federal expenditures that don’t help billionaires); and, in order to do this beyond the 2027 end-date of his $400 billion weapons-sale to the Sauds, he is trying to get America’s colonies (‘allies’), such as Europe, Japan, South Korea, etc., to increase their armaments-purchases from American firms such as Lockheed Martin — the firms whose sales-volumes are especially important to America’s billionaires, the people who control the U.S. Government. This is why he doesn’t want Europeans to grow their own ‘defense’ industries.

    If a European nation will allow foreign (especially American) billionaires to benefit from its sharp increase in armaments-purchases, this won’t hurt ONLY their own domestic billionaires, but it will ALSO be sending those manufacturing jobs to America and thereby boost America’s economy at the expense of the local economy. For Trump to be requesting them to do that is to insult not only that country’s billionaires but also its residents.

    This is not the only reason why NATO might soon break apart. For example: Trump is determined to take Greenland for the U.S. Government — to expand the U.S. to include Greenland. However, polls show that around 85% of Greenlanders are opposed to that, and Trump is also saying that if they won’t willingly comply, then he will do it militarily. Greenland is a Danish colony, and Denmark is a part of NATO. If the U.S. invades Greenland, then how will other countries in NATO feel about that? It would present the U.S. blatantly as aggressor against a NATO member-nation — the very nation that had previously been supposedly their chief protector. What would this do to NATO?

    The U.S. Congress is, according to the U.S. Constitution, supposed to be the ultimate determinant of whether or not U.S. military forces invade another country; but, so far, there has been prevailing silence from Congress about Trump’s threat against Greenlanders and even Danes — not the outrage that would prevail if America were still governed under its Constitution.

    We are entering the twilight zone. Will it turn out to be the end of the U.S. empire — the end of the largest empire in all of world history? It could — especially if Congress remains silent about what has been happening. The longer this silence continues, the deeper into it we are getting.

    This is certainly a weird moment in world history. Of course, ultimately, NATO will end, but the question is when and how. NATO had started on 25 July 1945 as a sentiment and resulting decision by Truman, and was then born in 1949, but is probably near its end now, and the public don’t know it because lots of ‘history’ that has been told in The West is false.

    The post NATO is Breaking apart first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Public Way Underestimate How Much “Their” Government Lies

    In America, lying by the Government is routine because the Government represents not the public but only the wealthiest billionaires who provide most of the money that funds political campaigns. Any candidate who doesn’t represent the megadonor won’t get their money and will therefore be defeated by one who DOES represent the billionaires and NOT the public. Consequently, the winningest political candidates are the best liars, who (get all lof the billionaire money that they need in order to) deceive the most voters the most — and who fulfill on their public campaign promises to the voters the least, and fulfill on their private promises to their billionaire donors the most. This fully explains what the U.S. Government actually does, which is corruption, NOT democracy.

    Though some of the billionaires are Republicans, and some are Democrats, the most important political issues aren’t actually the Republicans-versus-Democrats issues, but instead are the-billionaires-versus-the-public issues, such as is demonstrated in these examples:

    On February 14, the AP had headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling,” and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (the five functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds.

    On March 5, the Jeff-Bezos-owned Washington Post headlined “GOP must cut Medicaid or Medicare to achieve budget goals, CBO finds: The nonpartisan bookkeeper said there’s no other way to cut $1.5 trillion from the budget over the next decade.” Though the CBO is ‘nonpartisan’ as between the Democratic and Republican Parties, it is (since both are) entirely beholden to America’s billionaires; and, so, that term there is deceptive. What that ‘news’-report is reporting is that the sense of Congress (even including Democrats there) is that a way needs to be found to cut $1.5T from ‘Medicare or Medicaid” (which, since only Medicaid, health care to the poor, is ‘discretionary’, Medicare is not) means cutting Medicaid over the next ten years.

    On March 8, ABC News and Yahoo News headlined “DOGE is searching through Social Security payments looking for fraud.”

    On March 31st, Business Insider and Yahoo News headlined “5 takeaways from Elon Musk’s 100-minute town hall about DOGE and America: ‘It’s costing me a lot to be in this job’,” and reported:

    Elon Musk spoke for roughly 100 minutes on Sunday at a town hall in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he was campaigning for Brad Schimel, a conservative judge running in the state’s upcoming Supreme Court election.

    The session evolved into a freewheeling discussion on Musk’s thoughts about the future of the US and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, as he fielded questions from supporters and bashed Democratic leaders.

    Musk said little about concrete plans for DOGE but gave attendees a glimpse at what he thinks should be cut.

    Here are the top five takeaways from Musk’s town hall.

    Musk gave two attendees $1 million for their support

    Musk said the checks would be made to “spokespersons” at the event, amid concerns that his $1 million lottery would violate Wisconsin state law.

    Musk, who started the event wearing a cheesehead hat, kicked off the talk by handing giant $1 million checks to two supporters.

    Musk had originally offered Wisconsin voters $100 each to sign a petition opposing “activist judges,” and they’d be entered to win a $1 million lottery prize.

    But amid concerns the giveaway would violate state law, Musk later said the payment would be compensation for the winners to be spokespeople at the event.

    Wisconsin’s Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul, tried to block the $1 million lottery, but the state’s Supreme Court declined on Sunday to hear his case.

    Musk’s high-profile campaign stop underscores the importance of the judicial election, set for April 1, for Republicans.

    Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has a 4-3 liberal majority, and one of its left-leaning judges, Ann Walsh Bradley, is set to retire — paving the way for a realignment of the state’s ideological future. The vote is also being hyped as a litmus test for sentiment on the Trump administration’s actions in the last few months.

    On April 2, the New York Times headlined “Liberal Wins Wisconsin Court Race, Despite Musk’s Millions,” and reported that “Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate for a pivotal seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, overcame $25 million in spending from Elon Musk to defeat her conservative opponent. … With over 70 percent of the vote counted on Tuesday evening, Judge Crawford held a lead of roughly 10 points.” So, the candidate of Democratic Party billionaires (such as George Soros) defeated the candidate of Reublican Party billionaires (such as Elon Musk).

    The billionaires control corporate America, and — via their corporations, both profit and nonprofit — they own, and advertise in their media, their corporations; and hire, to write their ‘news’ stories, the reporters that are the best ones to get their candidates elected to public offices. (Other reporters won’t be able to stay long in their media — they’ll fail, just like the candidates the billionaires don’t like will fail.)

    The inevitable result is that because the candidates are constantly lying to the public, the public are constantly being disappointed in the Government. And, since the public aren’t intelligent enough to recognize that the source of all this constant corruption and lying is the billionaires-control over the Government and the press, the public don’t blame the billionaires but instead “the Republicans” or “the Democrats” or “the minorities” or “the immigrants” or whatever. So, they never learn, but instead just stick with whatever their prejudices happen to be. And, of course, the Government officials, and the billionaires who made them so, are publicly calling this “democracy” and privately laughing at it, because they’re in perfect positions to know that it’s just another lie. The problem isn’t that they don’t respect the public, but that they don’t serve the public. In a democracy, the public officials serve the public even if they don’t respect them. It’s their job — regardless of what they think of the public. But in an aristocracy or other kind of dictatorship, serving the public isn’t a Government official’s job. And that’s the way it is in this country — and they need to lie about that, too.

    The post The Public Way Underestimate How Much “Their” Government Lies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump-Witkoff: “We can’t accept any democracy in Gaza.” #2

    This is a continuation of my article yesterday “Trump/Witkoff: ‘We can’t accept any democracy in Gaza.‘”

    In order to keep that article brief, I didn’t there go into the lies about history that Trump/Witkoff expressed, which they got from their Zionist (racist-fascist-imperialist-pro-Jewish, or “nazi”-Jewish for short) friends and acquaintances, which includes many of Trump’s political megadonors to whom Trump owes his 2014 electoral victory, and so Trump/Witkoff share those mega-billionaires’ values, which are Biblical values and therefore support Israel against the Palestinians and so make impossible any successful negotiation by them of the disagreements between Israel and Palestine. This continuation of the article will deal specifically with those historical lies, which Trump/Witkoff believe to be truths and show no interest whatsoever in re-examining the falsehoods that they believe from the Bible and from Israeli propaganda:

    Today (March 23rd) Larry C. Johnson addressed those historical falsehoods that Trump/Witkoff and other Zionists think to be true, and here is the opening of that article, which does such a good job of pointing them out so that there’s no need for me to do so, and I shall therefore merely comment here about it, after presenting its opening:

    *****

    Tucker Carlson’s Interview with Steve Witkoff Reveals Surprising Ignorance

    23 March 2025 by Larry C. Johnson

    I have recorded a video for Counter Currents on Tucker’s blockbuster interview with Trump’s “peace” emissary, Steve Witkoff. My editor is in a different time zone, so it may not go up until Monday. However, I do have some comments about what we have learned about Mr. Witkoff. For starters, he comes across as a descent, honorable guy. And, I am sure he is a smart lawyer who knows the real estate business in New York City and is a strong supporter of Donald Trump.

    However, he revealed a surprising depth of ignorance about the situation in Gaza and the war in Ukraine. I was shocked. One of the first bombshells to drop was his confession that he has not met with or talked to anyone from Hamas. All of his “diplomacy” with the Palestinians is via a Qatari cutout. If you are not talking to both sides and trying to establish your credibility, you cannot be an honest broker.

    Witkoff also admits that he was shown a Zionist propaganda film about October 7, which he claims shows evidence of multiple rapes of Israeli women by Hamas. We know, thanks to Max Blumenthal and the folks at the GreyZone, that there is no evidence to support this claim. [Actually, Wikipedia’s article “Hamas baby beheading hoax” is far better-documented and more informative about that “hoax” Trump/Witkoff still don’t even know is a hoax, though Alice Speri of “The Intercept” had first raised serious doubts as to its veracity on 12 October 2023, the day after the Israeli lie was asserted by Netanyahu and seconded by Biden; so, is Tulsi Gabbard actually failing at her job of writing and presenting the Daily Intelligence Brief to President Trump? How could Trump/Witkoff NOT know it was a hoax?] Witkoff makes no effort to hide his disdain for Hamas and accuses them falsely of using children as suicide bombers. Let me remind you of my earlier article, The Hard Facts About Palestinian Terrorism Debunk the Western Narrative. Here are some key highlights:

    While Israel and the West repeatedly and incessantly insist that Hamas is nothing more than one of the most deadly, formidable terrorist groups in the world, the data collected and published by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs debunks that narrative. The claim against Hamas is false. You don’t have to take my word for it, I am going to show you the data. The following tables and spreadsheets contain data collected by Israel between 27 September 2000 and 26 April 2024. [Israel continues to update the figures at the website linked above.]

    As an aside, Israel does not include the casualties suffered as a result of the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas. Israel calls it, Swords of Iron. In contrast to the meticulous list of the name of every dead Israeli and foreign victim, who allegedly died at the hands of Palestinians, the Swords of Iron data does not name the victims, especially the 40 children that Israeli officials insist were killed by Hamas. I find that curious, to say the least.

    *****

    Larry Johnson’s closing paragraph opens with “Steve Witkoff is an intelligent man and is capable of learning new facts. But I fear that he is blinded by his own Zionist prejudices and will convince Trump to continue to support Israel’s campaign of genocide.” But how can “an intelligent man” believe the garbage he does? Especially if “he is blinded by his own Zionist prejudices” — which he so obviously IS? He CERTAINLY is NOT a person who ought to be negotiating between Israel (which he loves) and Hamas (which he hates). He is CLEARLY an ADVOCATE for Israel, AGAINST Hamas.

    Not only is Witkoff obviously stupid, but so too is Trump, for hiring such people in the first place. Their level of intelligence is scandalously low. That is dangerous for America, and for the entire world. The billionaires’ corruption of the U.S. Government has reached  such a nadir, so that everyone has good and sound reason to be afraid. America’s billionaire-ocracy (or aristocracy) have handed the White House off from one corrupt fool, Biden, to another corrupt fool, Trump.

    The post Trump-Witkoff: “We can’t accept any democracy in Gaza.” #2 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How Miriam Adelson Exemplifies the Supreme Court’s Rulings that Political Corruption Is Protected by the 1st Amendment

    Here is a case that so richly displays the thorough-going corruptness of the U.S. Government so that to document it in its structural details — as will be done here — is to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the U.S. is, in fact, a dictatorship (controlled by a Deep State consisting not of its bureaucracy but of its billionaires), not at all a democracy, regardless of what the U.S. Constitution says; and it also displays how flagrantly our Constitution is routinely being violated by this Government, which, consequently, now must be seriously doubted as to this Government’s very legitimacy:

    Donald Trump as President is doing the work of his third-biggest political donor the Israeli-American thirty-billionaire Miriam Adelson, who demands Governmental punishment of students who protest against — or even just privately oppose — the Israel-U.S. ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

    While Israel provides the troops, America (under both Biden and now Trump) provides the weapons, ammunition, and satellite intelligence, that together are producing the slaughter in, and ethnic cleansing of, Gaza; and Adelson wants it to continue so as to eliminate completely (via extermination and/or expulsion) the people who live there. Students in America who have joined public demonstrations against this ethnic-cleansing are called by Adelson and her hired agent, Trump, “anti-Semites” and supporters of “terrorists” for opposing it. Here’s how this is playing out today:

    On March 19, the Wall Street Journal headlined “Columbia Is Nearing Agreement to Give Trump What He Wants: The school faces a deadline to yield to administration demands in negotiations over federal funding,” and reported that, in order to get Trump “to restore $400 million in federal funding,” Columbia University will punish enough the students who opposed the ethnic-cleansing of Gaza.

    The U.S. Government’s poster-boy of this ‘anti-Semitism’ and support of ‘terrorists’ is the Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, whom Adelson-Trump and their Administration, have in detention awaiting forced expulsion from the United States. On March 11, CNN headlined “Who is Mahmoud Khalil? Palestinian activist detained by ICE over Columbia University protests” and reported that, “‘As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other,’ he told CNN last spring when he was one of the negotiators representing student demonstrators during talks with Columbia University’s administration.” Here is the 2-minute video of him being arrested while his wife cries “I don’t know what to do!” and the federal agents refuse to identify themselves, as they drive her husband away in an unmarked car. Trump wants Khalil to be flown out of the country as soon as possible.

    Also on March 19, City Journal, of the right-wing, rabidly “corporationist” (as Mussolini proudly described himself) Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which had been set up and maintained by Ronald Reagan’s CIA chief Bill Casey and some billionaires, headlined “Who Are the Shadowy Figures Defending Mahmoud Khalil? The accused Hamas sympathizer is shrouded in mystery—and so are his supporters.” In the fascist world, not merely freedom of speech and of the press cannot be tolerated, but also freedom-of-association (which the Supreme Court accepts as being protected in order for the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment to be meaningful — even billionaires need freedom-of-association) cannot be tolerated — and this is today’s U.S.A. Whereas during the long period of U.S. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and of the Senator Joseph R. McCarthy witch-hunts against communists, freedom-of-association did not exist in the United States, it started to exist in order to protect businessmen, in Roberts v. United States Jaycees (1984), and then further in order to protect discrimination against homosexuals, in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000). But now, freedom-of-association likewise might, yet again, no longer exist in the U.S.

    Also on March 19, Politico made public another case, which, in some ways, is even more extreme than that of Khalil, especially against freedom-of-association. It headlined “Badar Khan Suri, a fellow at Georgetown, says he is being punished because of the suspected views of his wife, a U.S. citizen with Palestinian heritage. Masked immigration agents arrested a Georgetown University fellow and told him his visa had been revoked, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.” The Departments of State and of Homeland Security were involved in this action. The article says that Dr. Suri has no criminal record, and that “Suri is a postdoctoral fellow at the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, which is part of the [Georgetown] university’s School of Foreign Service. According to his court petition and a university directory, he is teaching a class this semester on ‘Majoritarianism and Minority Rights in South Asia.’ Suri has a Ph.D. in peace and conflict studies from a university in India.” Suri has been removed from his home and his wife in Virginia, and — en-route to a detention facility in Texas — is reported to be at “an Immigration and Customs Enforcement ‘staging’ center at the Alexandria, Louisiana, airport,” ultimately to be flown back to India. This is like, if the totalitarian-minded long-time and founding chief of the ‘Justice’ Department’s FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, were now the President of the United States (which, fortunately, he never was) — he, too, routinely violated the Constitution and broke the law that he was supposedly enforcing.

    Here is how the U.S. Supreme Court itself has produced these and other such results — blatant and increasingly routine violations of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment (among others) (as a therefore treasonous — anti-U.S.-Constitution — Supreme Court):

    The Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo ruling said that the existing political-campaign-expenditure ceiling imposed “direct and substantial restraints on the quantity of political speech” and so the Court invalidated three expenditure limitations as violating the First Amendment. In other words: they said that money is “speech” — the more spending of it in politics, the better (although the First Amendment says nothing about the “quantity” of “political speech” — the Supreme Court there invented that concern, though the Founders never expressed it) — and so any limitations on campaign-spending would violate the First Amendment’s free-speech clause. (The Court’s ruling even included the brazenly stupid falsehood: “The quantity of communication by the contributor does not increase perceptibly with the size of his contribution, since the expression rests solely on the undifferentiated, symbolic act of contributing.” So, a million-dollar contribution is merely “symbolic.”) The overall limitations on expenditures by federal candidates and their committees were therefore struck down by the Court, as being inconsistent with (their lie-based interpretation of) freedom-of-speech. Thus (despite their lie that all of this is merely “symbolic” — which they knew wasn’t at all true), people who donate more to politicians should have a bigger say in who wins office than people who can’t. This ruling — granting the rich person a bigger say in ‘our’ government than the poor person has — is widely considered to have opened the floodgates for corruption to control the U.S. Government.

    The Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling said that the anti-corruption interest is not sufficient to displace the speech in question from Citizens United, and that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” This ruling — based on that blatant lie by the U.S. Supreme Court — is widely considered to be the death-knell for any hope of democracy in the United States, because it opened the floodgates for corruption to rule the U.S. Government at the other end — this time, not at the candidates-end (like Buckley) but at the donors-end (the Citizens United donors-group), by the ruling’s alleging that a “corporation” is a “person,” whose free-speech right can be expressed by its political-campaign donations, without any legal limit (the more that corporations donate to political campaigns, the better, according to the U.S. Supreme Court).

    This leaves American politics in a perfectly libertarian (or “neoliberal”) condition, such that property (a person’s net worth — wealth) reigns (on a one-dollar-one-vote basis); persons (one-person-one-vote) really don’t rule in America, because the super-rich need only to donate enough to the most-corrupt candidates so as to defeat any honest political competitor (i.e., any candidate who actually intends to fulfill on his/her public campaign-promises to the voters). Only the campaign-promises (usually made in private) to the mega-donors will be actuated as governmental policies once the winner is in office. And the scientific findings unanimously CONFIRM that at least ever since 1980, this is the way it is, in the United States.

    And once this is the way it is, the public (the voters, the consumers, the workers — the public, as opposed to the OWNERS of corporations — and especially the billionaires who control the corporations) are, in any situation that involves their personal rights as against the corporate owners, actually powerless, because the super-rich now control the Government and can always far outspend (on lawyers and anything else) any one of them (any non-rich person). This is NOT “equal justice under law.” Or, as one of the mega-billionaires himself said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (There are only around a thousand billionaires in the U.S., and they rule over the entire population of 340 million.) That statement, made in 2006, is by now, very clearly an understatement: the billionaires have already won. The U.S. Constitution already means only what America’s super-rich WANT it to mean. If you want it to mean something else than what they want it to mean, then you will need to be able to outspend them to achieve that in the actual Government. (And the billionaires control almost all of the ‘nonprofits’ that advertise they represent “the public interest”; so, if what you want is inconsistent with what the billionaires want, then you won’t get any help from them to make that case.) This is the present reality, and only a Second American Revolution might be able to restore some democracy here, because, right now, we don’t have any — none, at all, in the United States of America. This is a proven fact — proven many times over. Anyone who continues to refer to the U.S. as being a “democracy” is either a fool or a liar. And America isn’t a dictatorship by “the bureaucrats,” nor by “the Democrats,” nor by “the Republicans” — it is being done by the billionaires, ones such as Adelson on the Republican Party side, and ones such as Soros on the Democratic Party side, who are collectively puppet-masters for the entire corrupt political show, which show elicits anger from the public against the puppets, instead of against the puppeteers, who fund and run the show.

    On March 19, Dawn News in Pakistan headlined “Mahmoud Khalil Wins Legal Battle Over Deportation” and reported that a judge ruled that Khalil’s case must be heard by a court, not result in his immediate deportation, and that a court in New Jersey must consider whether his rights of free speech and due proces have been violated by Trump. No timeline was set for a ruling, and so Khalil might continue in prison in Louisiana for a long time while his appeal moves forward in the courts.

    On the night of March 20, ABC News headlined “Judge blocks deportation of Georgetown fellow detained by immigration authorities” and reported that Badar Khan Suri’s lawyers had filed suit against the U.S. by saying that “the Trump administration appeared to be targeting the Georgetown University fellow due to his wife’s identity as a Palestinian and her constitutionally protected speech.” So, now, the judge is requiring Trump’s people to justify their action.

    Therefore, even if these and other similar cases might produce ultimate wins for the victims, their cases could produce long terms in prison while the courts consider them. If, at the end of these cases, Trump loses, there is still the question of whether Trump will do what judges order him to do. Of course, if he won’t, then congressional Democrats might try to impeach and remove him. At that point, it will be again Democratic Party billionaires versus Republican Party billionaires. What could be more serious would be if the result would be a Constitutional crisis: a contest of wills between the Executive and the Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. That would be a much better, more substantive, outcome. It could produce the necessary Second American Revolution, if the American public decide to make it so. Leaving such matters only to the billionaires to settle, needs to stop at some point, because, otherwise, America will simply continue to rot. The more that the billionaires continue to succeed against the public, the more that the country itself will continue to rot.

    The post How Miriam Adelson Exemplifies the Supreme Court’s Rulings that Political Corruption Is Protected by the 1st Amendment first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US and EU Supported al-Qaeda in Syria

    The key decision was when Barack Obama finally decided in December 2012 to arm al-Qaeda in Syria so as to bring down Syria’s Government. That culminated a U.S. policy since 1949, which was aimed against Russia and against Palestinians.

    It is an established fact that U.S. President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Hagel, and the rest of Obama’s Administration, were seeking to replace the non-sectarian Assad Government in Syria, by a government that would please the fundamentalist-Sunni, or “Salafist,” Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia. Throughout the U.S.-and-allied media, the only problem in Syria was Bashar al-Assad, who led that country, and therefore regime-change was supposed to be the solution for Syria, though the only Syrians who supported overthrowing Assad were a small minority, jihadists led by Syria’s al-Qaeda, and in Syria’s northeast, separatist Kurds also supported overthrowing Assad, because they wanted to create a Kurdistan, which would be the first Kurdish nation. The press throughout the U.S. empire hid from the public the fact that the U.S. was supporting al-Qaeda in Syria. For example, on 13 January 2017, the BBC, one of the U.S. Government’s most reliable propaganda agencies (though not from the U.S. Government), headlined “Obama’s Syria legacy: Measured diplomacy, strategic explosion“, and opened:

    How did a man who took office espousing a new era of engagement with the world end up a spectator to this century’s greatest humanitarian catastrophe? …

    Despite the pressing moral imperative, Obama remained convinced a military intervention would be a costly failure.

    He believed there was no way the US could help win the war [a civil war there, which he himself had helped to produce] and keep the peace without a commitment of tens of thousands of troops. The battlefield was too complex: fragmented into dozens of armed groups and supported by competing regional and international powers.

    However, on 12 August 2012, Obama was warned by the Defense Intelligence Agency that “THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION [to Syria’s Government] WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE [actually replace] THE SYRIAN REGIME.” Then in December 2012, Obama settled upon his policy of arming the jihadists in Syria under al-Qaeda’s leadership, and using circuitous ways of getting to the jihadists weapons from around the world, so as to hide America’s involvement as the chief coordinator and funder. The world’s largest Embassy, America’s in Iraq, was running this operation. Each year, the main decisions for this operation were being made not only by Obama but at the annual private Bilderberg conferences, which bring together over a hundred top aristocrats from each NATO country so as to provide the coming year’s guidance to NATO’s Secretary General. Although some of the attendees there were currently holding a public office in their country, many did not but instead were multibillionaires or otherwise top consultants to billionaires; so, the Bilderberg conferences are officially private, not at all public; and, in the United States and its allied countries, there is nothing illegal about major decisions concerning war and peace and other major Governmental policies being determined entirely in secret and off-the-record, in these ‘democracies’. From a policy-standpoint in the collective West — this bastion of ‘democracies’ against ‘tyrannies’ — the U.S.-and-allied countries have developed a very efficient system that essentially no longer needs the public, who are no longer real participants to be informed but have become instead mere subjects to be deceived and pay taxes so as to fund these Governments to do the work that those masters (U.S.-and-allied billionaires) want to be done (even if for ONLY private reasons).

    On March 11, I headlined “America won in Syria and continues to win there; the massacres are now accelerating.” Because Obama-Biden-Trump got their Syrian al-Qaeda proxy-army to final victory and it is doing there what al-Qaeda does, this is an American-Government success-story that America’s Government DON’T want to brag about nor even to acknowledge publicly. We slaughtered madly in Korea and in Vietnam and in Iraq and in Afghanistan and in Libya, and by using coups and proxy-armies in Ukraine and in so many other countries; but America’s victory in Syria is one that ‘our’ ‘news’-media are NOT reporting, because they don’t want us to know about it.

    The post US and EU Supported al-Qaeda in Syria first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump’s Main Targets to be Cut

    Trump’s Presidency thus far exhibits the most extreme example that I have ever found of a national leader who not only represents ONLY the extremely rich but who especially despises the poor — it’s a value-system that a person’s moral value is his/her net worth: a person’s value is his/her wealth, neither more nor less than that. The four main federal expenditures that Trump and Musk are investigating for “waste, fraud, and abuse” are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Assistance to the poor. Whereas Social Security and Medicare are relatively safe against being cut, since those are not annually appropriated by Congress, Medicare and assistance to the poor (both of which serve ONLY the poor) ARE appropriated annually by Congress, and signed into law by the President; and, so, those two will likely be cut the most. (They are in what our Government calls “discretionary spending.” You know: they’re things such as yachts.)

    The federal Department that the Trump Administration is the least seeking for cuts is the by-far costliest federal Department (at roughly $900 billion per year), which is the only federal Department that has never been audited and that consequently is the most corrupt and wasteful, the Defense Department (Pentagon), which Department is the basic or even only market for the products of firms such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Northrup Grumman, etc., which firms (except for Boeing) don’t even have any significant consumer markets — their profits depend totally or almost totally on sales to the U.S. Government itself and to its allied Governments; and, so, they need to control the U.S. Government in order to control their markets, which they consequently do, by means of America’s furiously revolving-door between the public sector and the private sector, so that becoming a part of this “military-industrial complex” is the surest way to become and remain a billionaire in today’s America, regardless of whether or not the U.S. economy is doing well from the standpoint of consumers (the general public — which includes lots of ‘worthless’ people, individuals who owe more than they own).

    Trump’s first major achievement as America’s President was to arrange the largest single armaments sale in all of history, which was $404 billion to the Saud family in 2017 (“Made In America” of course, by companies that are in his debt.)

    All other federal Departments (the ones that serve the public instead of serve mainly the billionaires who own controlling interests in ‘defense’-related corporations) are being subjected by the Trump Administration to heavy pressure to cut all other Departments, this pressure coming from President Trump and from America’s wealthiest individual Elon Musk (Trump’s biggest-of-all campaign contibutor at over $270 million (“SpaceX”), whose fortune was built upon $38 billion in investments from the Pentagon but also from some other (‘defense’-related) federal agencies. You know, he is one of America’s ‘self-made billionaires’. (Trump, who is himself a billionaire, was born to Fred Trump, the NYC real-estate tycoon.)

    As I headlined and explained on March 5, “Only the US Defense Department’s Budget Will NOT be Cut.” That is exactly the opposite of what the American people want, as I shall now document:

    On February 14, the AP had headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling,” and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (the five functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds.

    On March 5, the Jeff-Bezos-owned Washington Post headlined “GOP must cut Medicaid or Medicare to achieve budget goals, CBO finds: The nonpartisan bookkeeper said there’s no other way to cut $1.5 trillion from the budget over the next decade.” Though the CBO is ‘nonpartisan’ as between the Democratic and Republican Parties, it is (since both are) entirely beholden to America’s billionaires; and, so, that term there is deceptive. What that ‘news’-report is reporting is that the sense of Congress (even including Democrats there) is that a way needs to be found to cut $1.5T from ‘Medicare or Medicaid” (which, since only Medicare, health care to the poor, is ‘discretionary’, Medicare is not) over the next ten years.

    On March 8, ABC News and Yahoo News headlined “DOGE is searching through Social Security payments looking for fraud,” and reported that “The Department of Government Efficiency is sifting through $1.6 trillion worth of Social Security payments — records that include a person’s name, birth date and how much they earn — in an anti-fraud effort that has advocates worried the Trump administration could start denying payments to vulnerable older Americans.” It reported the lies by the Trump Administration to ‘justify’ what they are doing, but the matter will be settled in court, by politically-appointed judges; and, so, mere truth and falsity won’t necessarily deterrrmine the ruling, especially not if a billionaire is worth a thousand mere millionaires (and paupers are worth nothing).

    Heck, the U.S. Government spends around $1.6 trillion per year on its military ($900 billion of it paid by the Pentagon, and $700 billion of it out of other federal Departments), and yet still has only the world’s second-best military (Russia’s, costing a tenth of that, being #1); and the amount of corrution there is astronomical; so, if Trump/Musk REALLY wanted to cut what’s euphemistically called “waste, fraud, and abuse” (but is overwhelmingly corruption) ALL of the cuts would be coming from there.

    What is supposed to happen when a Government represents ONLY an aristocracy? In 1776, the answer was Revolution. We are there again — or else we never will be again, and will instead continue to accept the continued systematic looting of the American people, this time by DOMESTIC (instead of English) billionaires. It’s not a conflict between Democrats versus Republicans; that’s merely the method to distract us. It is a conflict between the billionaires versus the public.

    As the liberal (Democratic Party) wing of America’s aristocracy said, in the person of its Warren Buffett, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (He told this to the conservative Ben Stein reporting in the aristocracy’s New York Times, under the headline “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning,” on 26 November 2006, but that newspaper won’t let readers access the article online, and instead prefer to charge anyone who seeks to see whether or not the quotation is authentic — it is. And the statement is true. But the 31 March 2019 issue of Forbes headlined “Reimagining Capitalism: How The Greatest System Ever Conceived (And Its Billionaires) Need To Change,” and reported: “‘America works, and it works now better than it ever worked,’ Buffett says.” Better for himself and other billionaires, that is. But not for the bottom 90%, and it worked lousy for the bottom 50%, and still worse — economic decline — for the bottom 25%. But to the liberal Buffett, that’s still “better than it ever worked.”

    Liberal versus conservative makes little real difference nowadays, but is more of a difference in style, so as to distract the public from the REAL conflict. They do it all the time.

    The post Trump’s Main Targets to be Cut first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why America, the EU, and Ukraine, Should Lose to Russia in Ukraine’s War

    The war in Ukraine is, but in reverse, the same situation that America’s President JFK had faced with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev wouldn’t agree to a mutually acceptable settlement — which he did, and so WW3 was averted on that occasion. But whereas Khrushchev was reasonable; Obama, Biden, and Trump, are not; and, so, we again stand at the brink of a WW3, but this time with a truly evil head-of-state (Obama, then Biden, and now Trump), who might even be willing to go beyond that brink — into WW3 — in order to become able to achieve world-conquest. This is as-if Khrushchev had said no to JFK’s proposal in 1962 — but, thankfully, he didn’t; so, WW3 was averted, on that occasion.

    How often have you heard or seen the situation in the matter of Cuba being near to the White House (near to America’s central command) being analogized to Ukraine’s being near  — far nearer, in fact — to The Kremlin (Russia’s central command)? No, you probably haven’t encountered this historical context before, because it’s not being published — at least not in America and its allied countries. It’s being hidden.

    The Ukrainian war actually started after the democratically elected President of Ukraine (an infamously corrupt country), who was committed to keeping his country internationally neutral (not allied with either Russia or the United States), met privately with both the U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010, shortly following that Ukrainian President’s election earlier in 2010; and, on both occasions, he rejected their urgings for Ukraine to become allied with the United States against his adjoining country Russia. This was being urged upon him so that America could position its nuclear missiles at the Russian border with Ukraine, less than a five-minute striking-distance away from hitting the Kremlin in Moscow.

    The war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said (NOT in 2022 as is alleged in the U.S.-controlled nations). This war was started in February 2014 by a U.S. coup which replaced the democratically elected and neutralist Ukrainian President, with a U.S. selected and rabidly anti-Russian leader, who immediately imposed an ethnic-cleansing program to get rid of the residents in the regions that had voted overwhelmingly for the overthrown President. Russia responded militarily on 24 February 2022, in order to prevent Ukraine from allowing the U.S. to place a missile there a mere 317 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from The Kremlin and thus too brief for Russia to respond before its central command would already be beheaded by America’s nuclear strike. (As I headlined on 28 October 2022, “NATO Wants To Place Nuclear Missiles On Finland’s Russian Border — Finland Says Yes”. The U.S. had demanded this, especially because it will place American nuclear missiles far nearer to The Kremlin than at present, only 507 miles away — not as close as Ukraine, but the closest yet.)

    Ukraine was neutral between Russia and America until Obama’s brilliantly executed Ukrainian coup, which his Administration started planning by no later than June 2011, culminated successfully in February 2014 and promptly appointed a anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled goverment an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” to kill protesters, and, ultimately, to terrorize the residents in those regions in order to kill as many of them as possible and to force the others to flee into Russia so that when elections would be held, pro-Russian voters would no longer be in the electorate.

    The U.S. Government had engaged the Gallup polling organization, both  before  and  after  the  coup,  in order to poll Ukrainians, and especially ones who lived in its Crimean independent republic (where Russia has had its main naval base ever since 1783), regarding their views on U.S., Russia, NATO, and the EU; and, generally, Ukrainians were far more pro-Russia than pro-U.S., pro-NATO, or pro-EU, but this was especially the case in Crimea; so, America’s Government knew that Crimeans would be especially resistant. However, this was not really new information. During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukrainians had wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” However, afterward, the support averaged around 45% — still over twice as high as had been the case prior to the coup.

    In other words: what Obama did was generally successful: it grabbed Ukraine, or most of it, and it changed Ukrainians’ minds regarding America and Russia. But only after the subsequent passage of time did the American billionaires’ neoconservative heart become successfully grafted into the Ukrainian nation so as to make Ukraine a viable place to position U.S. nuclear missiles against Moscow (which is the U.S. Government’s goal there). Furthermore: America’s rulers also needed to do some work upon U.S. public opinion. Not until February of 2014 — the time of Obama’s coup — did more than 15% of the American public have a “very unfavorable” view of Russia. (Right before Russia invaded Ukraine, that figure had already risen to 42%. America’s press — and academia or public-policy ‘experts’ — have been very effective at managing public opinion, for the benefit of America’s billionaires.)

    Then came the Minsk Agreements (#1 & #2, with #2 being the final version, which is shown here, as a U.N. Security Council Resolution), between Ukraine and the separatist region in its far east, and which the U.S. Government refused to participate in, but the U.S.-installed Ukrainian government (then under the oligarch Petro Poroshenko) signed it in order to have a chance of Ukraine’s gaining EU membership, but never complied with any of it; and, so, the war continued); and, then, finally, as the Ukrainian government (now under Volodmyr Zelensky) was greatly intensifying its shelling of the break-away far-eastern region, Russia presented, to both the U.S. Government and its NATO military alliance against Russia, two proposed agreements for negotiation (one to U.S., the other to NATO), but neither the U.S. nor its NATO agreed to negotiate. The key portions of the two 17 December 2021 proposed Agreements, with both the U.S. and with its NATO, were, in regards to NATO:

    Article 1

    The Parties shall guide in their relations by the principles of cooperation, equal and indivisible security. They shall not strengthen their security individually, within international organizations, military alliances or coalitions at the expense of the security of other Parties. …

    Article 4

    The Russian Federation and all the Parties that were member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as of 27 May 1997, respectively, shall not deploy military forces and weaponry on the territory of any of the other States in Europe in addition to the forces stationed on that territory as of 27 May 1997. With the consent of all the Parties such deployments can take place in exceptional cases to eliminate a threat to security of one or more Parties.

    Article 5

    The Parties shall not deploy land-based intermediate- and short-range missiles in areas allowing them to reach the territory of the other Parties.

    Article 6

    All member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization commit themselves to refrain from any further enlargement of NATO, including the accession of Ukraine as well as other States.

    And, in regards to the U.S.:

    Article 2

    The Parties shall seek to ensure that all international organizations, military alliances and coalitions in which at least one of the Parties is taking part adhere to the principles contained in the Charter of the United Nations.

    Article 3

    The Parties shall not use the territories of other States with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party or other actions affecting core security interests of the other Party.

    Article 4

    The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

    The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them.

    Any reader here can easily click onto the respective link to either proposed Agreement, in order to read that entire document, so as to evaluate whether or not all of its proposed provisions are acceptable and reasonable. What was proposed by Russia in each of the two was only a proposal, and the other side (the U.S. side) in each of the two instances, was therefore able to pick and choose amongst those proposed provisions, which ones were accepted, and to negotiate regarding any of the others; but, instead, the U.S. side simply rejected all of them.

    On 7 January 2022, the Associated Press (AP) headlined “US, NATO rule out halt to expansion, reject Russian demands”, and reported:

    Washington and NATO have formally rejected Russia’s key demands for assurances that the US-led military bloc will not expand closer towards its borders, leaked correspondence reportedly shows.

    According to documents seen by Spanish daily El Pais and published on Wednesday morning, Moscow’s calls for a written guarantee that Ukraine will not be admitted as a member of NATO were dismissed following several rounds of talks between Russian and Western diplomats. …

    The US-led bloc denied that it posed a threat to Russia. …

    The US similarly rejected the demand that NATO does not expand even closer to Russia’s borders. “The United States continues to firmly support NATO’s Open Door Policy.”

    NATO-U.S. was by now clearly determined to get Ukraine into NATO and to place its nukes so near to The Kremlin as to constitute, like a checkmate in chess, a forced defeat of Russia, a capture of its central command. This was, but in reverse, the situation that America’s President JFK had faced with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. would have invaded Cuba if Khrushchev wouldn’t agree to a mutually acceptable settlement — which he did agree to, and so WW3 was averted on that occasion. But whereas Khrushchev was reasonable, America’s recent Presidents are not; and, so, we again stand at the brink of WW3, but this time with a truly evil head-of-state (America’s recent Presidents), who might even be willing to go beyond that brink in order to become able to achieve world-conquest.

    Russia did what it had to do: it invaded Ukraine, on 24 February 2022. If Khrushchev had said no to JFK’s proposal in 1962, then the U.S. would have invaded and taken over Cuba, because the only other alternative would have been to skip that step and go directly to invade the Soviet Union itself — directly to WW3. Under existing international law, either response — against Cuba, or against the U.S.S.R. — would have been undecidable, because Truman’s U.N. Charter refused to allow “aggression” to be defined (Truman, even at the time of the San Francisco Conference, 25 April to 26 June 1945, that drew up the U.N. Charter, was considering for the U.S. to maybe take over the entire world). Would the aggression in such an instance have been by Khrushchev (and by Eisenhower for having similarly placed U.S. missiles too close to Moscow in 1959), or instead by JFK for responding to that threat? International law needs to be revised so as to prohibit ANY nation that is “too near” to a superpower’s central command, from allying itself with a different superpower so as to enable that other superpower to place its strategic forces so close to that adjoining or nearby superpower as to present a mortal threat against its national security. But, in any case, 317 miles from The Kremlin would easily be far “too close”; and, so, Russia must do everything possible to prevent that from becoming possible. America and its colonies (‘allies’) are CLEARLY in the wrong on this one. (And I think that JFK was likewise correct in the 1962 case — though to a lesser extent because the distance was four times larger in that case — America was the defender and NOT the aggressor in that matter.)

    If this finding appears to you to be too contradictory to what you have read and heard in the past for you to be able to believe it, then my article earlier today (March 4), “The Extent of Lying in the U.S. Press” presents also five other widespread-in-The-West lies, so that you will be able to see that there is nothing particularly unusual about this one, other than that this case could very possibly produce a world-ending nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. People in the mainstream news-business are beholden to the billionaires who control the people who control (hire and fire) themselves, and owe their jobs to that — NOT really to the audience. This is the basic reality. To ignore it is to remain deceived. But you can consider yourself fortunate to be reading this, because none of the mainstream news-sites is allowed to publish articles such as this. None of the mainstream will. They instead deceived you. It’s what they are hired (by their owners and advertisers) to do, so as to continue ruling the Government (by getting you to vote for their candidates).

    Furthermore, I received today from the great investigative journalist Lucy Komisar, who has done many breakthrough news-reports exposing the con-man whom U.S. billionaires have assisted — back even before Obama started imposing sanctions against Russia in 2012 (Bill Browder) — to provide the ‘evidence’ on the basis of which Obama started imposing anti-Russian sanctions, in 2012 (the Magnitsky Act sanctions), recent articles from her, regarding how intentional the press’s refusals to allow the truth to be reported, actually are: on 28 February 2025, her “20 fake US media articles on the Browder Magnitsky hoax and one honest reporter from Cyprus”, and on 4 December 2024, her “MSNBC killed reporter Ken Dilanian’s exposé of the Wm Browder-Magnitsky hoax. State Department knew about it.”

    This isn’t to say, however, that ALL mainstream news-reports in the U.S. empire are false. For example, the Democratic Party site Common Dreams, headlined authentic news against the Republican Party, on March 4, “Trump Threatens Campus Protesters With Imprisonment: ‘Trump here is referring to pro-Palestine protests so you won’t hear a peep from conservatives or even pro-Israel liberals,’ said one journalist”, by Julia Conley; and so did the Republican site N.Y. Post, headlining on 15 October 2020, against the Democratic Party (which Democratic Party media similarly ignored), “Emails reveal how Hunter Biden tried to cash in big on behalf of family with Chinese firm.” However, NONE of the empire’s mainstream media publish reports against the U.S. Government or against its empire; so, the lies that have been covered here are virtually universal — go unchallenged — throughout the empire.

    The post Why America, the EU, and Ukraine, Should Lose to Russia in Ukraine’s War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Only the US Defense Department’s Budget Will NOT be Cut

    All U.S. federal Departments except the Defense Department will have their budgets reduced this year.

    60% of U.S. military expenses get paid out from the Defense Department (the Pentagon), which is the only U.S. federal Department that has never passed an audit — never been audited — and is also the only federal Department that pays America’s military-weapons manufacturers, such as Lockheed Martin — the companies that depend mainly or even entirely on purchases by the federal Government. The Trump Administration has decided not to cut that Department’s budget, and might even increase it. The details, so far as they are yet known, were first published, on February 28, by In These Times magazine, in an article by Stephen Semler and Sarah Lazare, titled “As Trump and Musk slash social spending, military spending is set to soar.” An excellent article explaining this in a broader context than merely that Department’s budget was then published on March 2nd by the Naked Capitalism site, and headlined “The Empire Rebrands,” by Conor Gallagher.

    Already, U.S. military expenses (including from all federal Departments) amount to 65% of the entire world’s military expenses; and yet, as-of 24 October 2024, the most-respected international ranking of nations’ militaries, the one in U.S. News & World Report, rated the top three in order, as: #1. Russia, #2. U.S., and #3. China. A lower-regarded ranking, by  “Global Firepower,” ranked: #1. U.S., #2. Russia, and #3. China. The site “Military Empires: A Visual Guide to Foreign Bases,” as-of 30 October 2024, showed the nations with the largest number of foreign military bases, as being #1. U.S., with 917 foreign military bases; #2. Turkiye, with 128; #3. UK, with 117; and #4. Russia, with 58. China was #10, with 6. (Numbers 5-9 were: India, Iran, France, and UAE.) However, the U.S. is overwhelmingly the most powerful empire, because right after FDR’s death on 12 April 1945, when Truman took over, the U.S. — which had entered WW2 the last of the major world powers and therefore suffered the lowest casualties and least destruction from it — was the only nation that had the assets by which to establish the post-WW2 international order, and did that for his imperialistic purposes, exactly contrary to FDR’s plan, as a consequence of which, the U.S. Government still controls the IMF, World Bank, and many other international institutions, and dominates even the U.N. (which FDR invented and was developing his plan for, but Truman mainly controled the writing of the U.N.’s Charter). So, most of America’s power doesn’t come from its military — which is America’s most-corrupt federal Department. The main purpose of the U.S. Government today is to boost its stock-markets, which are overwhelmingly controlled by its billionaires, and “93% of U.S. households’ stock market wealth (not 93% of the stock market) is held by the wealthiest 10% of those households.” So, this Government’s top concern is to pay-off the political high-donors and especially the mega-donors (all of whom are billionaires). It is a sophisticated type of bribery-operation. And by far the most lucrative segement of the U.S. stock markets is its “Defense and Aerospace” segment (that being the segment which sells to the Government instead of to the public — so, the U.S. Government is the main benefctor to America’s billionaires, and they know this). (For example: Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post headlined on February 26, “Elon Musk’s business empire is built on $38 billion in government funding: Government infusions at key moments helped Tesla and SpaceX flourish, boosting Musk’s wealth.” And on 25 March 2018, I reported that “since 2014, Amazon Web Services has supplied to the U.S. Government (CIA, Pentagon, NSA, etc.) its cloud-computing services, which has since produced virtually all of Amazon’s profits (also see “Cloud Business Drives Amazon’s Profits”), though Amazon doesn’t even so much as show up on that list of 100 top contractors to the U.S. Government; so, this extremely profitable business is more important to Jeff Bezos (the owner also of the Washington Post) than all the rest of his investments put together are.” This is called “neo-liberalism” or “libertarianism” but by any name means “Let the wealth rule, NOT the people rule.” It is the reigning principle in the U.S. empire.

    On February 25, I reported that:

    On February 14th, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling”, and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (the five functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds.

    An important point to be made here is that both #s 4&5, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid, are “discretionary federal spending” (i.e., controlled by the annual appropriations that get voted into law each year), whereas #s 1&2 (Social Security and Medicare) are “mandatory federal spending” (i.e., NOT controlled by Congress and the President). So, Trump and the Republicans are going after the poor because they CAN; they can’t (at least as-of YET) reduce or eliminate Social Security and Medicare. However, by now, it is crystal clear that Trump’s Presidency will be an enormous boon to America’s billionaires, and an enormous bane to the nation’s poor. The aristocratic ideology has always been: to get rid of poverty, we must get rid of the poor — work them so hard they will go away (let them seek ‘refugee’ status SOMEWHERE ELSE).

    This is an excellent example of a libertarian (or neo-liberal) Government.

    The post Only the US Defense Department’s Budget Will NOT be Cut first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Only the US Defense Department’s Budget Will NOT be Cut

    All U.S. federal Departments except the Defense Department will have their budgets reduced this year.

    60% of U.S. military expenses get paid out from the Defense Department (the Pentagon), which is the only U.S. federal Department that has never passed an audit — never been audited — and is also the only federal Department that pays America’s military-weapons manufacturers, such as Lockheed Martin — the companies that depend mainly or even entirely on purchases by the federal Government. The Trump Administration has decided not to cut that Department’s budget, and might even increase it. The details, so far as they are yet known, were first published, on February 28, by In These Times magazine, in an article by Stephen Semler and Sarah Lazare, titled “As Trump and Musk slash social spending, military spending is set to soar.” An excellent article explaining this in a broader context than merely that Department’s budget was then published on March 2nd by the Naked Capitalism site, and headlined “The Empire Rebrands,” by Conor Gallagher.

    Already, U.S. military expenses (including from all federal Departments) amount to 65% of the entire world’s military expenses; and yet, as-of 24 October 2024, the most-respected international ranking of nations’ militaries, the one in U.S. News & World Report, rated the top three in order, as: #1. Russia, #2. U.S., and #3. China. A lower-regarded ranking, by  “Global Firepower,” ranked: #1. U.S., #2. Russia, and #3. China. The site “Military Empires: A Visual Guide to Foreign Bases,” as-of 30 October 2024, showed the nations with the largest number of foreign military bases, as being #1. U.S., with 917 foreign military bases; #2. Turkiye, with 128; #3. UK, with 117; and #4. Russia, with 58. China was #10, with 6. (Numbers 5-9 were: India, Iran, France, and UAE.) However, the U.S. is overwhelmingly the most powerful empire, because right after FDR’s death on 12 April 1945, when Truman took over, the U.S. — which had entered WW2 the last of the major world powers and therefore suffered the lowest casualties and least destruction from it — was the only nation that had the assets by which to establish the post-WW2 international order, and did that for his imperialistic purposes, exactly contrary to FDR’s plan, as a consequence of which, the U.S. Government still controls the IMF, World Bank, and many other international institutions, and dominates even the U.N. (which FDR invented and was developing his plan for, but Truman mainly controled the writing of the U.N.’s Charter). So, most of America’s power doesn’t come from its military — which is America’s most-corrupt federal Department. The main purpose of the U.S. Government today is to boost its stock-markets, which are overwhelmingly controlled by its billionaires, and “93% of U.S. households’ stock market wealth (not 93% of the stock market) is held by the wealthiest 10% of those households.” So, this Government’s top concern is to pay-off the political high-donors and especially the mega-donors (all of whom are billionaires). It is a sophisticated type of bribery-operation. And by far the most lucrative segement of the U.S. stock markets is its “Defense and Aerospace” segment (that being the segment which sells to the Government instead of to the public — so, the U.S. Government is the main benefctor to America’s billionaires, and they know this). (For example: Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post headlined on February 26, “Elon Musk’s business empire is built on $38 billion in government funding: Government infusions at key moments helped Tesla and SpaceX flourish, boosting Musk’s wealth.” And on 25 March 2018, I reported that “since 2014, Amazon Web Services has supplied to the U.S. Government (CIA, Pentagon, NSA, etc.) its cloud-computing services, which has since produced virtually all of Amazon’s profits (also see “Cloud Business Drives Amazon’s Profits”), though Amazon doesn’t even so much as show up on that list of 100 top contractors to the U.S. Government; so, this extremely profitable business is more important to Jeff Bezos (the owner also of the Washington Post) than all the rest of his investments put together are.” This is called “neo-liberalism” or “libertarianism” but by any name means “Let the wealth rule, NOT the people rule.” It is the reigning principle in the U.S. empire.

    On February 25, I reported that:

    On February 14th, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling”, and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (the five functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds.

    An important point to be made here is that both #s 4&5, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid, are “discretionary federal spending” (i.e., controlled by the annual appropriations that get voted into law each year), whereas #s 1&2 (Social Security and Medicare) are “mandatory federal spending” (i.e., NOT controlled by Congress and the President). So, Trump and the Republicans are going after the poor because they CAN; they can’t (at least as-of YET) reduce or eliminate Social Security and Medicare. However, by now, it is crystal clear that Trump’s Presidency will be an enormous boon to America’s billionaires, and an enormous bane to the nation’s poor. The aristocratic ideology has always been: to get rid of poverty, we must get rid of the poor — work them so hard they will go away (let them seek ‘refugee’ status SOMEWHERE ELSE).

    This is an excellent example of a libertarian (or neo-liberal) Government.

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  • The Need to Confront the Evilness in Evil Leaders

    When America’s Founders declared on 4 July 1776 their willingness to risk “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,” in order to establish justice in their land — our land — they were throwing down the gauntlet to the evil acts that their exploiters had perpetrated upon them, and against their evil perpetrators who had carried it out. They did this not by calling them evil, but by categorizing and providing an itemized list of their “usurpations,” such that “a candid world” would recognize these acts as being the evils that they were. And it would not have succeeded if those evils had not been itemized on the basis of facts that then were well known (especially to their own countrymen).

    There is a limit to what victims can bear, before they will risk their lives in revolt. America is not there yet, but it is getting close — close to a Second Revolution.

    On February 25, I posted “It’s time to fire President Trump” and presented reasons in domestic policy why Trump is even more brazen than his recent predecessors have been at stripping the American public in order to further enrich America’s billionaires — the economic inequality in this country isn’t high enough for him as it already is, and I documented there that his priorities for where federal spending needs to be cut are the public’s priorities for where federal spending needs to be increased — his priorities are exactly opposite to those the American citizenry hold, so, he is ruling like a dictator, against the public will, regardless of his campaign promises; this is a dictatorship.

    Like all U.S. Presidents, and virtually all members of the U.S. Congress, so far in this century, he has been rabidly hostile against the courageous individuals who have blown the whistle on their Government’s illegal, and even unConstitutional, actions — a Government like this can only be called a tyranny, which Britain’s also was at America’s founding.

    America’s Declaration of Independence, as I said, listed usurpations extending over a long time and not merely in the present, and likewise Trump’s violations of his promises and of the public’s priorities are merely more of— even if they might be worse than — those that were practiced by his recent predecessors; and, for documenting this, I shall focus here not on domestic policies (like I did on February 25) but instead on foreign polices, and will be showing here that the evilness is not ONLY Trump’s, but is climaxing under his Presidency, and so is actually institutional and therefore needs now to end entirely. This is a slightly expanded list from Brian Berletic’s list provided on February 18th:

    1994: Clinton co-signs Budapest Memorandum enshrining Ukrainian neutrality;
    2001: Bush withdraws from Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia;
    2003: Bush oversees overthrow of the Georgian government;
    2003: Bush 2008: US begins arming and training Georgian forces;
    2008: Bush in April invites Ukraine to join NATO in violation of the Budapest Memorandum;
    2008: Bush In August — Georgian forces attack Russian peacekeepers triggering Russian-Georgian war;
    2009: Obama Under the Obama administration — Secretary Clinton organizes a “reset” with Russia;
    2010: Obama & Hillary meet privately w. Yanukovych, fail to get him to back NATO membership
    2011: Obama — Following the US-engineered “Arab Spring,” US Senator McCain claims Russia is next;
    2014: Obama’s coup replaces Ukraine’s government, installs rabidly anti-Russian one;
    2014-2019: Obama-Biden US trains Ukrainian forces;
    2019: Trump withdraws from the INF Treaty with Russia;
    2019: Trump begins arming Ukrainian military;
    2022: Biden — US trained and armed Ukrainian troops begin intensifying operations in the Donbass along Russia’s border followed by the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine;
    2022-2025: Biden — US exhausts arms/ammunition in proxy war against Russia;
    2025: Trump seeks “reset” with Russia, while proposing Western troops enter Ukraine to freeze conflict as the West expands arms/ammunition production.

    And that doesn’t even include Trump’s continuing Biden’s policy of unlimited arming and ammunition of Israel so that Israel can exterminate the Gazans and expel or exterminate the Palestinians in the West Bank.

    Nor does it include the fact that on February 26, Trump agreed with Ukraine’s Zelensky that U.S. taxpayers will continue to fund Ukraine’s war against Russia, and that if Putin won’t accept the deal that Trump has made with Zelensky, then America’s war against Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine and of Russia, will continue; but, in any case, there will be NOT EVEN A CEASEFIRE — it will be a continuing war to the end, between America and Russia. The beneficiaries will be the U.S. armaments companies whose weapons will continue to be supplied by U.S. taxpayers to Ukraine, and also the U.S. billionaires who will receive ownership shares in Ukraine’s oil, gas, and rare earth elements, if America wins the war.

    NONE of these things, either, reflect the priorities of the American people (no more than Trump/Musk’s taking a “chainsaw” approach to the U.S. federal Government’s domestic policies does), and each of these extremely aggressive U.S. Governmental policies — especially the foreign policies violating international law — brings Americans (as a nation) into international disrepute, which Americans likewise do not want. It drives Americans to feel ashamed of being Americans. This is what we are to get from his “MAGA”?

    Here is how this situation is getting worse day-by-day:

    On February 14, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling,” and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (the five functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds.

    On February 25, Huffington Post headlined “White House Finally Comes Up With An Official Answer For Who Is Running DOGE: An Obama Honoree,” and reported that “The White House on Tuesday provided an answer to a weeks-old mystery — who is actually running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency — but is immediately facing new questions about the apparent obfuscation of the precise role of billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk.” The White House was finally legally forced to reply to questions about whom the actual person was at Musk’s “DOGE” who was issuing the orders that have fired thousands of federal workers, and the White House alleged that it was “Amy Gleason, a nurse-turned-technology expert who was once honored by former President Barack Obama and who then worked in Trump’s White House during his first term and also in the first year of President Joe Biden’s term.” Furthermore, Weijia Jiang, CBS News Senior White House correspondent, reported that, “Gleason told my colleague [Michael Kaplan, CBS News Investigative Producer] that she was (vacationing) in Mexico when he reached her by phone” earlier that same day. The HufPo article made clear that because neither Gleason nor Musk has been confirmed yet by the Senate, the firing-orders from DOGE — whomever wrote them — are illegal: “Lawyers say the reason administration officials refuse to admit that Musk is the de facto DOGE administrator is simple: To do so would guarantee losing those lawsuits filed in recent weeks that challenge DOGE’s authority.” Unfortunately, that article failed to explain how or why they are “illegal,” and why Gleason was falsely identified as the Administrator in order to reduce the likelihood that courts would rule them to be illegal. However, regardless of what the answers to those questions might be, the clear inference from HufPo’s poor reporting there, is that this IS illegal, and that the White House is lying about whom DOGE’s Administrator is, in order to increase the likelihood of getting some court to say that what DOGE is doing IS legal.

    Also on February 25, HufPo headlined “House Adopts Republican Budget That Calls For Medicaid Cuts: Lobbying by President Donald Trump himself helped sway Republican holdouts.”, and reported that “The budget resolution [just passed in the House] calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and $1.5 trillion in spending cuts,” and that “Democrats all voted against the budget, denouncing its 11% reduction in Medicaid spending over 10 years and its 20% cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.” So: Trump’s enormous tax-cuts for billionaires would be partially paid for by cutting Medicaid to the nation’s poor. However, the Republican argument (as is always the case regarding their efforts to punish the poor) is that “We can eliminate all these fraudulent payments and achieve a lot of savings.” The “fraudulent payments” hadn’t been documented but estimated by Elon Musk’s DOGE, Musk being, of course, not only the wealthiest of America’s billionaires but also by far the biggest donor ($279 million) to Trump’s re-election campaign (as well as a large and rapidly growing seller or “contractor” of Starlink and other weapons and services to the only U.S. federal Department that has never yet been audited, the ‘Defense’ Department). The article said that, “President Donald Trump personally lobbied some of the holdouts with phone calls on Tuesday, including Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), who withheld his vote until it was already clear the House would adopt the measure without him.” So: Trump’s DOGE cuts funding of healthcare for the nation’s poor, while his lobbying gets the thing to pass in the House though all Democrats voted against it.

    So: whereas the American public wanted increases in federal spending, and decreases in federal spending, to be ranked as (INCREASE) 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military (DECREASE) — Trump and his Republican Congress are passing into law cuts in numbers 4 and 5 (Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid) the two priorities that are specifically for the poor; and they will presumably be increasing the most: 8. The Military; 7. Federal law enforcement (mainly against poor people); and 6. Border security (which includes Trump’s demand to eliminate ALL refugee-admissions into the U.S.). These are extraordinarily ‘libertarian’ (or “neoliberal”) policies, but they definitely are NOT the priorities of the American public. To THEM, this is a hostile country.

    An important point to be made here is that both #s 4&5, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid, are “discretionary federal spending” (i.e., controlled by the annual appropriations that get voted into law each year), whereas #s 1&2 (Social Security and Medicare) are “mandatory federal spending” (i.e., NOT controlled by Congress and the President). So, Trump and the Republicans are going after the poor because they CAN; they can’t (at least as-of YET) reduce or eliminate Social Security and Medicare. However, by now, it is crystal clear that Trump’s Presidency will be an enormous boon to America’s billionaires, and an enormous bane to the nation’s poor. The aristocratic ideology has always been: to get rid of poverty, we must get rid of the poor — work them so hard they will go away (let them seek ‘refugee’ status SOMEWHERE ELSE).

    THEREFORE: if any nation needs to be regime-changed, it is right here at home; and our now blatantly evil leaders (and the former ones, such as Bush, Obama, and Biden) ought to be driven out, just like happened during America’s First Revolution. The longer that this is delayed, the worse that things will get — this is, by now, clear in every day’s headlines. America is declining; it has been happening for a long time now (see this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, for examples), and our desperate leaders do only the bidding of their campaign megadonors — which means more war, and more economic inequality. This is NOT democracy. To accept it as-of it were, is to accept a regime of lies that is based on lies about what it is. And it’s getting deeper all the time — until it ends. The longer we wait, the worse it will get.

    (This article, and its conclusion that America is now perilously close to a Second American Revolution, might shock some people; so, here is a reader-response — comment — from a reader of a closely related article I posted February 23 to my Substack, and showing also my response to it. I acknowledged there that though I believe that we are already in an authentically Revolutionary moment, we might not yet have reached the stage of the public’s knowledge of this, and that — if I may say so here — the public before the First American Revolution were aware of it when Thomas Paine published his Revolutionary Common Sense on 10 January 1776. So, in that sense, this article might be premature. However, premature does not, at all, mean false. I invite anyone here who doubts what I have said, to click onto the link at any point where you disagree, so that you can see and evaluate the evidence on your own.)

    The post The Need to Confront the Evilness in Evil Leaders first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • How the U.S./UK Empire Works — as in the Middle East

    It’s shown with remarkable clarity, in the first 14 minutes of this video from Vanessa Beeley, on February 6. It is titled “Trump in Gaza, Jolani self-proclaimed president, south Lebanon and Russia to pay reparations, not Israel: My reports for UK Column yesterday”.

    Whereas all of its first 14 minutes — the entirety of Beeley’s report — is extremely insightful into what’s now happening in the Middle East (especially Israel, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. regime that has been running the show there ever since at least the 1970s), the following from me expands upon what I consider to be the most stunning portion of it:

    Richard Dearlove, head of Britain’s MI6 in 1999, said in 2014, at the empire’s Royal United Services Institute, this (see him saying it at 10:55 to 11:30 in the video), “The second Saudi incident predates 9/11 and comes from a conversation with Prince Bandar [(bin Sultan al-Saud), who then had been Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to the U.S. and working with his buddy Georga W. Bush to set up 9/11, and having the active participation of FBI Directors Robert W. Mueller, James Comey, and Louis Freeh for that operation] I believe at the moment the head of GID [General Directorate of Investigation] in Saudi Arabia, and that was, ‘The time is not far off, Richard, in the Middle East, when it will be literally GOD HELP THE SHIA [the Iran-led Muslim sect] — more than a billion Sunnis [the Saud-led Muslim sect] have simply had enough of them.’” Basically, whereas Sunni Islam accepts hereditary monarchies (such as the ones in Arabia), Shia Islam doesn’t — and thus is viewed by Islamic monarchs (including the Arab ones) as being a mortal threat to their continued rule. The U.S. and Israeli regimes therefore work with Arab monarchies against Shiism — and ESPECIALLY against Iran, and has been very actively doing so ever since the U.S. regime (which had won control over Iran in a 1953 U.S. CIA coup — go to page 116 there to see a description of it) lost Iran in 1979 (when the U.S.-imposed tyrant became overthrown in an authentic revolution). And this is the reason why the U.S. regime constantly touts the blatant lie that “Iran is the chief state-sponsor of terrorism [jihadism],” despite the demonstrable fact that virtually 100% of jihadist attacks are perpetrated by SUNNI fundamentalists, NOT by Shia.

    The Palestinians are overwhelmingly Sunnis, but they are anti-imperialists because they have experienced the worst of imperialism themselves; and, so, the only predominantly Muslim Governments that have been supporting them against Israel — which is America’s biggest colony in the Middle East — have been Shia-led countries, especially Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. And this is why, whereas Israel has been contributing the troops to ethnically cleanse or else exterminate the Gazans, the United States has been donating the weapons and the bombs to do that.

    On January 31, Craig Murray headlined a video “Israel Slaughters and Destroys in Southern Lebanon,” showing him traveling around the ruins from the Israel-U.S. bombings of that area; and at 3:00 he enters what had been the beautiful home of Dr. Julia Ali, including her destroyed concert piano; then, at 4:00 he plays a clip of her performing on it at home. Here is an instagram I found of her at home playing the piano and then Israeli troops occupying her house and destroying her piano. This is another instagram, in which she comments upon the beautiful world that now was gone from her. And here she is shown working at the hospital before the bombings. At 11:50 in Murray’s video, he shows land that Israel has taken, and points out that “they’ve taken more land during the cease-fire than they ever took during the fighting.”

    As regards the question of whether or not what Israel and the U.S. are doing to the Gazans constitutes “ethnic cleansing” or even “genocide,” the best logical analysis that I have encountered on this question was youtubed on 4 January 2024, titled “Is Gaza REALLY Gone? Norman Finkelstein Answers.” I seriously doubt that anyone who claims it’s NOT this will attempt a counter-argument to it.

    The reason why the obvious attempt by Jews and Christians (such as Trump’s new U.N. Ambassador) in the American empire to exterminate all Palestinians is NOT condemned inside the American empire as being what it so obviously is, is the same as the reason why the hidden attempt by Christians in the German empire to exterminate all Jews was NOT condemned inside the German empire.

    Merely for a country to CLAIM to be a “democracy” doesn’t mean that it IS any sort of democracy at all.

    The social ‘sciences’ in such dictatorships hide — not expose — such realities there. And this is why the ‘news’-media there can get away with LIKEWISE hiding it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not so. It instead exemplifies that it IS so.

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  • America’s Gangster-Empire Destroying the U.N.

    Virtually all of the U.S. Government’s economic sanctions violate the U.N.’s Charter — and do it with impunity.

    No legal case exists justifying America’s hundreds of economic sanctions laws that have been passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by the U.S. President but not authorized by the U.N. — which latter entity is the sole organization that writes and issues international laws. The U.S. International Trade Commission’s August 1998 “Overview and Analysis of Current U.S. Unilateral Economic Sanctions” lists, on its “Table ES-1” 51 such sanctions-laws imposed by the U.S. Government during 1987-1998, which legally have validity only in the United States but which that Government enforces as-if these are international laws, though its doing so constitutes international aggression, which likewise violates international law — from the U.N. (which has no enforcement-power; Harry Truman made it that way). Among the countries that are named there to be controlled or punished are Palestine, Burma (Myanmar), Cuba, Afghanistan, Cambodia, India, Laos, North Korea, Pakistan, Tibet, China, Serbia, Montenegro, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and others. Russia wasn’t added to the list until 2012, but, after that time, there have been so many anti-Russia sanctions laws passed by the U.S. Government so that when the Global Investigations Review issued on 13 November 2024 a study “Sanctions: the US Perspective”, they ignored the 2012 one, the Magnitsky Act, and started their list against Russia with Exec. Order 13662 issued by Obama on 20 March 2014, just a month after the U.S. coup that had installed a rabidly anti-Russian government in Ukraine, which started the long list of anti-Russia U.S. sanctions laws since.

    On December 16th, RT News headlined “Serbia announces talks with US and Russia on sanctions against oil major: The country’s president says the key goal of the upcoming talks will be to ensure energy security for his people”, and reported that,

    Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has announced plans to hold talks with the US and Russia this week to dispute Washington’s proposed sanctions against his country’s main oil and gas company, Naftne Industrije Srbije (NIS).

    NIS is predominantly owned by Russian state energy major Gazprom. In an interview with Serbian broadcaster Informer TV on Saturday, Vucic revealed that the US was set to slap sanctions on NIS due to its Russian ownership. He said Belgrade had received confirmation of these plans from Washington, and that the measures could take effect as of January 1, 2025.

    In a video address posted on Instagram on Sunday, Vucic reiterated that such plans exist, and said the matter had already been discussed with BIA, Serbia’s national security service.

    “We discussed what we managed to obtain as official information that sanctions will be imposed on NIS by the US and some other countries. We discussed how to act in this situation, how to react, and how to ensure the safety of Serbian citizens,” he stated, adding that the Serbian authorities plan to “initiate negotiations with the Americans, Russians and everyone else” as early as Monday. …

    This is typical of the aggressions that the U.S. Government carries out by means of illegal international sanctions instead of by illegal coups or by illegal invasions — all of which this regime does with impunity. This means that the U.N. — the only legitimate source of international war — is publicly exposed as being merely a talking-forum, no government at all that’s behind its ‘laws’ (which are meaningless as regards being applied to the U.S. Government). This is a gangster world-order now.

    The 271-page academic book Economic Sanctions in International Law and Practice, published in 2020, opens with a Preface, which says

    Part I is focused on generic legal considerations. Chapter 1 (Masahiko Asada) discusses the definition and legal justifications of economic sanctions. As exemplified by the ICJ suit recently brought by Iran against the United States, economic sanctions may possibly “violate” rules of international law applicable to their authors and targets. The chapter examines how the authors can legally justify their per se illegal sanctions. … Chapter 4 (Mirko Sossai) discusses the difficult question of legality of extraterritorial application of sanctions. Unlike UN sanctions, the imposition of autonomous

    sanctions may cause legal problems not only between the author and the target

    States but also between the author and third States. Controversy has centered on

    the legality of secondary sanctions applied by the United States on entities in

    other counties that have transactions with the entities under primary sanctions.

    The Introduction to Chapter 4 says:

    The application of secondary sanctions, targeting activities of non-US persons with no connection to the US, has proven highly controversial. Insofar as they constitute exercise of jurisdiction on an extraterritorial basis, they raise concerns from the viewpoint of international law, as they may violate, inter alia, the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other States.6

    The European refusal to recognize the effects of this type of sanction is not a new phenomenon: the Blocking Regulation was originally approved in 1996-7 to counteract the effects of certain extraterritorial sanctions adopted by the US vis-à-vis Cuba, Libya, and Iran. At that time, similar initiatives were undertaken by Canada and Mexico.8 The purpose of this chapter is to offer an overview of the different generations of the US “extraterritorial sanctions,” with a focus on the different positions concerning their legality from an international law viewpoint.

    The Chapter proper says:

    If autonomous sanctions – either adopted by individual states or by regional organizations – coexist with UN sanctions, then a key question arises as to whether the former should be qualified as enforcement measures on the basis of UN sanctions or, rather, as additional measures, whose legality needs to be appreciated under general international law. In this second scenario, autonomous sanctions may be regarded as acts of retorsion if they constitute “unfriendly” conduct not inconsistent with any international obligation; if unlawful, they can be justified as countermeasures.

    Notice that it doesn’t place that word “justified” in skeptical form, as ‘justified’, but instead it presumes that the U.S. Government definitely ISN’T violating international law with these “autonomous [i.e., NOT authorized in international law] sanctions.” (This DESPITE the book’s Preface’s having acknowledged that these are “per se illegal sanctions”.) (FURTHERMORE, if “The chapter examines how the authors can legally justify their per se illegal sanctions,” then where does it do that? It doesn’t — it doesn’t even TRY to.)

    The Chapter focuses not on the U.S. Government’s sanctions against Russia, but mainly on President Trump’s withdrawal from Obama’s Iran nuclear deal or  JCPOA and his re-institution of anti-Iran sanctions, and it never gets around to, as the book’s Preface promised that it would, “discusses the difficult question of legality of extraterritorial application of sanctions. Unlike UN sanctions, …” The entire 271-page book ignores that question (‘the difficult question of legality of extraterritorial application of sanctions’). (And what’s ‘diffiicult’ about it is that since these are NOT U.N.-authorized sanctions they’re referring to, they’re per se illegal; and, so, this task isn’t “difficult” — it is logically IMPOSSIBLE.)

    They don’t want to deal with it, because they serve the U.S. regime. However, when the book uses in its Preface the phrase, referring to Chapter 1, “The chapter examines how the authors can legally justify their per se illegal sanctions,” it is already acknowledging that America’s sanctions that DON’T have U.N. authorization ARE, in fact (they call it “per se,” meaning, “in themselves”) ILLEGAL under international law. It’s the unspoken — and unspeakable — reality. Why does the book ignore this? For the same reason why the U.S. regime gets away with doing it: this is a mono-polar world order, NOT under the U.N. as being that “pole” (as FDR had been planning for the U.N. to be) but instead under the U.S. regime as being that “pole” (as Truman made it to be). And, so, of course, it is actually a world in which the enemy is, from the U.S. standpoint, the entire rest of the world, and, from the rest of the world’s standpoint, it is the U.S. Government itself. Every other Government must accommodate itself to the demands that are being made by the U.S. Government. The ones that don’t, become thereby targeted for “regime-change.” This is an international-gangster regime. It insists upon making every other country “a deal it cannot refuse.”

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  • Trump Heads for War Against Some Nations, Alienation Against Others

    U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump is heading America towards very hot wars against China, Russia, and Iran, and for rather cold wars against Mexico, Canada, Europe, and Japan. The difference from Biden-Harris is unclear with regard to the hot wars — Trump has picked a team who overall are as neoconservative as the existing team — but is clearly turning America’s colonies and former colonies (the group that collectively together is commonly refered to as ‘allies’) hostile, because of Trump’s demands regarding tariffs and regarding immigration.

    For example, on November 28, CNN headlined “Mexico’s president denies Trump’s claim that she agreed to shut down the US-Mexico border,” and reported that though Trump had said on November 27, that he:

    Just had a wonderful conversation with the new President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo. She has agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border. We also talked about what can be done to stop the massive drug inflow into the United States, and also, U.S. consumption of these drugs. It was a very productive conversation!

    Sheinbaum promptly responded that same day,

    In our conversation with President Trump, I explained to him the comprehensive strategy that Mexico has followed to address the migration phenomenon, respecting human rights. … Thanks to this, migrants and caravans are assisted before they arrive at the border. We reiterate that Mexico’s position is not to close borders but to build bridges between governments and between peoples.

    So: Trump had lied. And Mexico’s President went public about it, because for her not to have done so would have elicited contempt from Mexico’s own voters, who would have been outraged at Trump’s dictatorial position regarding their country. So, Sheinbaum was doing what she had to do.

    Trump’s dictatorial attitude toward other countries contrasts with Biden’s, which (like Obama’s) had been entirely private — far more ‘diplomatic’ and dishonest (not like Trump’s, playing to only the stupidest of his own voters, his “voting base”, without the sugar-coating of hypocrisy that’s popularly called “liberalism”).

    This replay of The Trump Show could get even lower ratings by foreign countries than his first Administration did.

    For example, yesterday, on November 30, Trump appointed his brother-in-law, who is a major Trump campaign donor, Charles Kushner, a convicted felon, to be America’s next Ambassador to France. Irrespective of anything else, this appointment will be negatively viewed by, and perceived as an insult to, the French people, and will therefore make even harder than would otherwise have been the case, for Trump to win his way with the French Government.

    This doesn’t necessarily mean that Trump will be even worse a President than Biden-Harris, or Obama-Biden, or Bush-Cheney, were, but only that the billionaires who have placed Trump into office, and who are approving his nominees for federal offices, take a more simplistic approach toward their governing, than do the Democratic Party’s billionaires. Whereas the latter group rely far more upon deception-about-deception — or “hypocrisy” — in order to rule, the former group rely more upon brute force, as “Might makes right” dictatorships typically do. The American tradition, ever since whatever democracy there was in America, became ended here, and America became a Two-Party dictatorship by the billionaires, in 1968 — consisting 100% of representatives of billionaires occupying the U.S. White House — has been, in both Parties, ‘justified’ by ideological fraud, instead of by “Might makes right” rule.

    The best example of this brute-force ethic on display by our rulers, was on 24 July 2020, when Tesla corporation’s founder, Elon Musk, tweeted back in response to a tweet from “Armani” which criticized “the U.S. government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there.” Musk replied “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” That’s Trump’s style, too. Naturally, Musk donated at least $118,557,604 to Trump’s campaign. He was the second-largest: the big three were Timothy Mellon $150,000,000; Musk’s Space x $118,557,604; and Miriam Adelson’s Adelson Clinic for Drug Abuse Treatment & Research $100,000,000. The fourth-biggest was only $21,256,643, but all of the major donors to his campaign have fascist if not outright racist-fascist-imperialistic agendas; and, so, that is what Trump actually represents (just click onto each one of those big-three donors, to find what Trump’s real commitments are), and it is what foreign countries will be dealing with in his second term.

    Like I said, the Democratic Party’s billionaires aren’t any better. According to opensecrets, no individual who was responsible for having donated $100 million or more to Kamala Harris’s campaign is publicly known, but “Future Forward USA Action” is listed for $136,459,651. According to InfluenceWatch, in 2023, “several nonprofit organizations managed by billionaire and foreign national Hansjorg Wyss had donated roughly $475 million to several left-leaning nonprofit organizations,” and the affiliated Future Forward PAC (FF PAC) “has been criticized by the left-leaning Center for Responsive Politics for being funded by ‘dark money.’2’,” so that there is a possibility for individual billionaires to have gotten control of the White House on the Democratic Party side if Trump had lost. It’s not that one Party is controlled by billionaires and the other isn’t. So, the problem in today’s America isn’t only that individual billionaires, even foreign ones such as Wyss (who has relocated to Wyoming), control this Government far more than the mere voters (who become fooled by them) do, but that the very idea (touted in their propaganda) that a multi-Party Government is more democratic than a single-Party one is, is false if all of the major Parties are controlled by the billionaires, which is the case in this country — and is so now in the transition to Trump2 just as it has been ever since at least 1980. So, the only way to rectify such a situation would be a Second American Revolution. Nothing short of that will have any possibility to succeed.

    Since the disappointment that will set in — not only within the United States but globally — regarding Trump’s second term, will almost certainly be even more intense than has been the case regarding the other American Presidents so far this Century, the likelihood of success for a Second American Revolution will probably be significantly higher than it has ever been before, but it will need to be appropriately organized in order for it to have a chance to succeed, against the billionaires and their agencies, who control this country now. It needs to be done, and it needs to be done right — like the First American Revolution was.

    The post Trump Heads for War Against Some Nations, Alienation Against Others first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Dying — and Constantly Lying — U.S. Empire

    On 25 July 1945, U.S. President Harry Truman accepted the advices from both his personal hero General Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill, to 100% reverse his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s carefully designed plan to prevent a WW3 by creating a fully armed democratic federal government of the world to create adjudicate and enforce international laws and NO national laws, and to outlaw and end the cause that had produced both World Wars, which was imperialism and the contests between them, and so he created the basis for what he named “the United Nations” to do that, but his immediate successor Truman’s version of the U.N. was/is instead a mere talking forum, with no such powers. This would allow him and Eisenhower to create the military-industrial complex to take over the entire world starting with Russia and all of its neighbors. His plan failed, but nonetheless then the Soviet Union itself failed, because of its Marxian economics and dictatorship; and, on 24 February 1990, Truman’s successor President GHW Bush started secretly to inform America’s European colonies that though the Soviet Union and its communism and its military alliance against America’s NATO, the Warsaw Pact, would likely all soon end, the U.S. side of the Cold War would secretly continue on until Russia itself will be defeated, because, as Bush said to Helmut Kohl, “We prevailed, they didn’t!” In other words, he was telling them to continue on until Russia itself becomes just another U.S. colony like they were, because “we” can do it. He was telling them that “we” will do it, because we can. And none of them objected, because they all would be cut in on the take. But all of this was in blatant violation of repeatedly made verbal promises that the U.S. regime and its agents had made to the Soviet leader Gorbachev that NATO wouldn’t be expanded and take in Warsaw Pact nations if the Soviet Union would break up.

    Fast-forward a few more decades, and the U.S. regime invaded a nation that was friendly toward Russia, Iraq, on 20 March 2003, and destroyed it.

    On 5 January 2020, Iraq’s Government ordered the U.S. out of Iraq. The Trump regime refused. A reporter for CNN, Manu Raju, tweeted from the Air Force 1 press pool, “Trump … tells pool he will slap Iraq with ‘very big sanctions’ if they force US troops to leave. ‘We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s there. It cost billions of dollars to build. Long before my time. We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it.’ Trump added: ‘If they do ask us to leave, if we don’t do it in a very friendly basis, we will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.’”

    The next day, on January 6, Sajad Jiyad of The Century Foundation blogged from Baghdad, “On the issue of US bases, Iraqi sovereignty and sanctions” and reported and presented the legal documents proving that (quoting now from the contract that both Iraq and U.S. had signed) “Iraq owns all the buildings and installations, the nontransferable structures on the ground that are located in the areas and installations agreed upon, including those the U.S. utilizes, constructs, changes or improves.” Furthermore, he noted that, “The US troops that are currently in Iraq are part of a request for assistance to combat ISIS that was sent in 2014. These troops are meant to advise, train and assist Iraqi troops. This request was sent by the Iraqi government and can be revoked at any time.”

    On 7 January 2020, Time magazine headlined “Iraq’s Outgoing Prime Minister Says U.S. Troops Must Leave.” Trump responded that only the U.S. Government will decide when to leave Iraq.

    On January 24, “The Chief of Police in Baghdad just estimated the number of Iraqis protesting against the US’ presence in Iraq today to be in excess of one million people.” The march in Baghdad was 5 miles long.

    On 17 February 2020, I headlined “Trump plans to keep US troops permanently in Iraq under NATO command.” On 24 November 2020, NATO headlined “Denmark assumes command of NATO Mission Iraq.” But Iraqis don’t want any alien military force occupying their country. On 24 February 2021, NATO headlined “NATO Mission in Iraq” and reported, based only upon Iraq’s having requested and received in October 2018 additional training so as to defeat ISIS — that temporary request for training became NATO’s excuse to extend permanently America’s occupation. That NATO report ignored the demand by Iraq’s parliament in January 2020 for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq immediately and ignored the millions of Iraqis who subsequently demonstrated against the U.S. and who demanded the U.S. to leave immediately. (Trump responded to that Iraqi demand by threatening to destroy Iraq if Iraq’s Government would continue its demand.)

    And, of course, America’s invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2023 was based totally on lies which the U.S.-and-allied press refused to expose at the time — or even now — to be lies, but instead trumpeted those lies to the public stenographically from the regime’s mouthpieces as being ‘news’. And, likewise, the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media hide from their public that the overthrow of Ukraine’s Government during 20-27 February 2014 was a U.S. coup intead of the ‘democratic’ ‘revolution’ they all trumpeted it as being. On 3 July 2023, I headlined “Comparing Two U.S.-Government Catastrophes: Bush’s 2003 Invasion of Iraq, and Obama’s 2014 Coup in Ukraine.”

    So: all of this is old news, which is never reported in the U.S.-and-allied press, which instead starts from assumptions that are false about both the Iraq and the Ukraine matters. And the U.S.-and-allied media never apologize to the public about their having lied, because they say that they make only mistakes, no lies. That’s a lie about their lying.

    The post The Dying — and Constantly Lying — U.S. Empire first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • How & Why the Washington Post‘s Former Owner Now Pushes Biden to Go Nuclear Against Russia

    Ever since the November 5 defeat of the so-called ‘Democratic’ Party and of its unanimous neoconservative obsession to defeat Russia with the help of Ukrainians (claiming all the time that doing this is necessary in order to protect Americans and America’s ‘democracy’), the Bilderburg member Donald Graham, who at the 2013 Bilderburg meeting met privately with Jeff Bezos and agreed to sell him the Washington Post, has been instead using his Foreign Policy magazine in order to increase the pressure upon President Joe Biden to escalate the U.S. Government’s proxy-war in Ukraine against Russia up to and including World War Three (WW3).

    On November 5, the magazine headlined “The Biden Administration Now Has an Expiration Date — and a To-Do List,” and reported:

    As of late October, the Biden administration still had $5.5 billion it could throw into Ukraine’s war chest. In the past, that has come in the form of air-defense batteries, battle tanks, and long-rage U.S. firepower that can help Ukraine balance the playing field against a larger neighbor with seemingly inexhaustible manpower and ample assistance from allies in Asia. …

    With no reason to worry about spiking oil and gasoline prices, the United States may be more amenable not only to Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil infrastructure, but also to the unsheathing of additional sanctions on miscreant oil producers such as Iran and Venezuela, which skated clear of sanctions all year thanks to U.S. worries about the domestic impact of an energy war.

    On November 7, it headlined “Ukraine Now Faces a Nuclear Decision: Under a new Trump administration, Ukraine’s government can’t avoid considering a nuclear weapon,” and reported:

    Last month, with little fanfare, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made the stakes of the ongoing war in Ukraine as clear as possible…. “Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons and that will be our protection or we should have some sort of alliance,” he said. “Apart from NATO, today we do not know any effective alliances.”

    It was the first time the Ukrainian president had revealed an outcome that has become, for the war’s observers, increasingly inescapable. In this war for Ukraine’s survival, with Kyiv facing both declining men and materiel, the only surefire way of preventing Ukraine’s ongoing destruction is NATO membership—a reality that has gained more supporters since the war’s beginning but still remains years away. Barring such an outcome, as Zelensky outlined, only one option remains: developing Ukraine’s own nuclear arsenal and returning it to the role of a nuclear power that it gave up some three decades ago. …

    Putin, after all, has only grown increasingly messianic and monomaniacal in his efforts to shatter Ukraine. Previous designs on simply toppling Kyiv have given way to outright efforts to “destroy Ukrainian statehood,” especially following Ukraine’s successful occupation in Russia’s Kursk region [“Kyiv has secured a substantial political victory in Kursk whether it stays or decides to withdraw from this territory in the coming months. It has called Putin’s bluff and made a mockery of his stated “red lines” and nuclear bluster.”], as the Moscow Times recently reported. With Ukrainian statehood — and even Ukrainian identity, given Russia’s genocidal efforts — at stake, any nation would understandably pursue any option available for survival. …

    This reality has been made blindingly clear by recent archival work from a number of scholars, poring through overlooked U.S. and Ukrainian documents. For instance, Columbia University’s George Bogden has recently published extensively on the internal debates in both the United States and Ukraine surrounding Kyiv’s post-Soviet arsenal…

    In both the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations, U.S. officials placed continued emphasis on reassuring Russia that Moscow could have regional primacy — and that the United States was not trying to take advantage of the power vacuum emerging in the Soviet rubble…

    The reason why the GHW Bush Administration agreed to this demand by Gorbachev was that during WW2, many Ukrainians in western Ukraine sided with Germany against Russia and participated eagerly not only in wiping out Jews but in assisting the Germans and Nazi-supporters such as the anti-Russian FInns to kill Russian troops. If Bush would have gone along with what Graham’s propaganda-magazine says he should have done, then Gorbachev would never have allowed the break-up of the Soviet Union, because it would quickly have meant war against Ukraine.

    Basically, Graham is propagandizing for Biden to cross all of Russia’s (or ‘Putin’s’ — as-if Putin doesn’t really represent the Russian people) national-security red lines. Graham’s basic argument is that though the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’) have their national security to protect, Russia (China, and other countries that America’s billionaires demand to control) don’t. This gives the U.S. regime carte blanche to subterfuge, coup, sanction, and/or outright invade, wherever and whenever they want to; or like Elon Musk famously said, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”  (Britain’s Guardian featured an article on 25 November 2023, “‘We will coup whoever we want!’: the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros. Challenging each other to cage fights, building apocalypse bunkers – the behaviour of today’s mega-moguls is becoming increasingly outlandish and imperial”. However, it’s not ONLY “the billionaire tech bros.” but ALL of U.S.-and-allied billionaires who control the U.S. Government and tolerate, if not outright demand, further expansion of the U.S. empire, regardless of the national-security needs of other countries.)

    On 4 June 2024, the internationally well-known geostategic analyst Pepe Escobar headlined at youtube “Putin and China Issue a GRAVE Warning: Tensions Near Breaking Point”, and he reported that WW3 is wanted by Bilderberg=NATO because the billionaires who control Western Governments want to nullify Governments’ debts (such as America’s $36 trillion); they’re now desperate, and EU/NATO breakup will likely come soon. So: these post-Kamala-Harris articles from Donald Graham’s propaganda-mill Foreign Policy are clearly in line with that scenario by Escobar on June 4th, not because they are truthful or even realistic, but because they clearly display this desperation by the billionaires, to retain control over international institutions, and even their willingness to risk destroying the world in order to achieve it.

    I don’t know whether Escobar is correct that cancellation of debts is an objective — much less a main objective — in this, but the reality of the rest of his analysis is hard to refute; and, on 18 October 2024, I headlined an article documenting this, “The Collapsing U.S. Empire.” It opened:

    The neoconservative dream, ever since neoconservatism started on 25 July 1945, has been for the U.S. Government to take over the entire world, but this 79-year-old dream for them (nightmare for everyone else) has now practically ended, because after having played nuclear chicken against Russia ever since that date, the U.S. Government has finally — as-of 9 October 2024 (Biden’s cancellation then of his planned October 12th Ukraine-war victory summit at America’s Rammstein Air Force Base in Germany) — come to the painful realization that their plan (ever since at least 2006) to win a nuclear war against Russia, is unrealistic, and would only leave this planet virtually uninhabitable, a lose-lose war for both sides, instead of to produce the neocons’ ardently hoped-for win-lose war (in which, of course — as the neocons have imagined — the U.S. regime emerges victorious) against Russia.

    The neoconservative chorus (singing to the music of America’s billionaires) are trying to persuade the U.S. public to support what is, effectively, all-out U.S.-and-‘allied’ aggression against Russia. All of this is based upon the lie that Russia started Ukraine’s war on 24 February 2022, America didn’t start it on 20 February 2014.

    On October 10, I headlined “Biden’s plan calls for WW3 to start after Election Day.” People such as Donald Graham evidently want it to turn out to be true — notwithstanding that America’s Government — NOT Russia’s, had started this war. I still have some hope that it won’t. But if it won’t, then Biden will lose his most ardent supporters, neocons (which include virtually all U.S. billionaires — even the ones who prefer Trump). They will feel that he betrayed them. And, in that case, it will have been so — he did.

    However, in either case, a deluge will come soon. Because the collapse of the American empire will not be able to go smoothly. I agree with Escobar on that.

    The post How & Why the Washington Post‘s Former Owner Now Pushes Biden to Go Nuclear Against Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Substack De-Platformed Me With No Explanation

    I posted articles at Substack during April 11 to October 12 of 2024, a total of 202 news-reports and commentaries, during those 184 days, but then Substack removed my password and would not enable me to create a new one. When a reader-comment is posted to one of my articles, I’m no longer able to reply to it if I want — I am blocked from doing that. I can’t post any comment there, even to my own article. I’ve received no explanation from Substack, and they provide me no way that I can contact anyone there.

    During that 184-day period, my number of page-views per article during an article’s first week rose from an average of about 10 to an average of about 150. However, I no longer have access even to those counts.

    Perhaps Substack will eliminate the 202 articles that I posted there (like ModernDiplomacy.eu did when an agent of the Deep State threatened that site’s owner to do that and to never again publish anything from me, and he complied). Here they are, so that you can see what they were (while Substack continues to keep them on their site):

    Ever since 6 June 2016, all of my articles are and have been directly posted by me as I do them (and still can be seen) The Duran.

    Before that, I was posting directly each one of my articles at two sites that various powers-that-be, such as the U.S. Treasury Department, FBI, Google, NewsGuard, and others, used various means to shut down entirely, washingtonsblog.com and rinf.com:

    http://web.archive.org/web/20141015000000*/https://washingtonsblog.com

    https://web.archive.org/web/20200802213732/http://rinf.com/alt-news/

    At various times, more than 40 other sites accepted at least some of my submissions, but the same organizations that terminated washingtonsblog and rinf managed to induce all but a few of those 40+ other publishers to cease publishing anything from me.

    Currently, the only sites that sometimes do publish my submissions to them are:

    lewrockwell.com zuesse

    dehai.org zuesse

    zuesse dissidentvoice

    https://orientalreview.su/author/ez/

    https://robscholtemuseum.nl/category/zuesse/

    https://www.greanvillepost.com/author/historicus/

    zuesse theinteldrop.org

    zuesse southfront

    The post Substack De-Platformed Me With No Explanation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The U.S.-Israel Plan for the Gazans

    Dan Cohen, an American Jew whose family in Lithuania had been wiped out by Hitler’s forces, is one of the great investigative journalists on Israel-Palestinian affairs, and he headlined on October 21, “US authorizes CIA mercenaries to run biometric concentration camps in Gaza Strip.” He opened:

    The Biden administration has approved the deployment of 1,000 CIA-trained private mercenaries as part of a joint U.S.-Israeli plan to turn Gaza’s apocalyptic rubblescape into a high-tech dystopia.

    Starting with Al-Atatra, a village in the northwestern Gaza Strip, the plan calls to build what the Israeli daily Ynet calls “humanitarian bubbles” – turning the remains of villages and neighborhoods into tiny concentration camps cut off from their environs and surrounded and controlled by mercenaries.

    These mercenaries will be hired by the CIA. “The plan, approved by White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, calls for the Israeli military to clear out pockets of Palestinian resistance. … 48 hours after stamping out resistance, they plan to erect separation walls around the neighborhood, forcing its residents, and no one else, to enter and exit using biometric identification under the CIA contractors’ control. Those who do not accept the biometric regime would be refused humanitarian aid.” In other words: they will starve to death. The Gazans who do accept “the biometric regime” won’t be starved to death. Biometrics includes fingerprinting but also other physical — and also behavioral — measurements of an individual who is being kept under surveillance.

    The company at the forefront of this plan is called Global Development Company, described in its promotional materials as an “Uber for war zones.” Israeli-American businessman Moti Kahana owns it and employs several top Israeli and American military intelligence officials, including retired U.S. Navy Captain Michael Durnan, retired U.S. Special Forces captain Justin Sapp, former Israeli military intelligence division head Yossi Kuperwasser, and former Israeli military chief intelligence officer David Tzur.

    [That is GDC’s promotional video, “GDC- Global Delivery Company.”]

    Kahana has played a key role in the dirty war against Syria in the 2010s and worked with the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army [the “FSA,” which the U.S. Government under Obama hired to help overthrow and replace the Russia-and-Iran-supported President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad; and Dan Cohen’s FSA link is to an article in Britain’s Independent heroizing Kahana, headlining him as “Israeli man starts ‘Good Samaritan’ charity to get injured Syrian women and children to Israel for medical help.” That article opens with a video in which he speaks as a “philanthropist.”]

    … GDC has also been involved in Ukraine, where it collaborated with the Zionist organization, the American Joint Distribution Committee, to operate a refugee camp in Romania near its border with Ukraine. …

    Kahana’s Gaza plan has been in the works since at least February 2024. He presented the plan to establish these electronic cantons – what Jewish News referred to as “gated communities” – to the White House, State Department, and Defense Department, as well as Netanyahu. U.S. officials did not respond. While the Israeli military had agreed, the Israeli prime minister shot it down. “What’s the rush?” he quipped. …

    However, as Hamas has maintained its civil control throughout Gaza and Israel has failed to defeat armed resistance groups, the Netanyahu government is relying on the U.S. to do its bidding. …

    While the [original version of the] proposal called for the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, or Saudi Arabia to assume civilian control over the Gaza Strip, that has failed to materialize, prompting the United States to approve deployment of CIA contractors.

    In other words: finally, Netanyahu, too, approved the plan.

    The Jewish News article that Cohen refers to was dated 4 April 2024, and praises Kahana’s plan for Gaza, calls it “humanitarian,” and says:

    The meticulous plan, seen by Jewish News, envisages the creation of “gated communities” in a safe space in the Strip and biometric recognition put in place for civilian recipients of aid. Those who did not pass the biometric tests would not have received aid. The gated communities are described as a Secure Humanitarian Logistics Corridor which, the plan states, “once established, can process and securely deliver humanitarian assistance from other sources across Gaza”.

    In other words: the plan is as Cohen describes it, but employs euphemistic phrasings to deceive fools into believing that Kahana, his GDC, and his concentration camps for cooperative Gazan survivors, are “humanitarian,” and “gated communities,” such as that phrase is used in America to refer to protected oases of peace amidst a surrounding environment of war — like saying, “We’ll protect you Gazans.”

    Cohen’s article didn’t mention the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department’s Defense Forensics & Biometrics Agency (DFBA), but this federal Agency (which he does link to without mentioning it) was, in fact, established by President Obama in 2012, and is crucially involved in what Kahana’s GDC is doing in Gaza. In 2016, DFBA’s “Overview” stated: “Biometrics and forensics are critical to identifying known and unknown individuals by matching them with automated records (such as for access control) or with anonymous samples (such as crime scene investigations).” In other words: the surviving Gazans will be tracked not by a number that is tattoed onto their arms like was done at Auschwitz to prisoners who weren’t immediately sent to their deaths, but instead tracked by the person’s “biometrics.” So: Israel’s Jews use Hitler’s — the original form of  — nazism, but against different people, and with modern technology.

    Furthermore: their propaganda is far more sophisticated than Joseph Goebbels’s was.

    The link that Cohen provides to DFBA is to its current promotional video, their latest “Overview.”

    It makes clear that DFBA is being used by the federal Government not ONLY in order to control the surviving Gazans, but ALSO in order to control the American people, as well as to extend the American empire throughout the world.

    In other words: Yesterday it was the Jews who were the target; today it is the surviving Gazans who are, and also an increasing percentage of Americans are (targeted by our own Government); and, in the future, this system is to become expanded to everyone.

    Cohen’s article also (at the word “worked”) linked to (but unfortunately out of context) a self-promotional youtube by and for Kahana himself, that appears to have been intended by him to promote himself to both Russians and Syrians, as being a magnanimous israeli philanthropist who rescues victims of his hated Assad, because he cares so much about the Syrian people.

    We are already well beyond George Orwell’s prophetic novel 1984. This is the reality of today’s U.S. empire.

    On October 24 was posted to X an exposé by James Li, of the top people at the U.S. magazine the Atlantic, which opens, “Jeffrey Goldberg, Atlantic‘s Editor-in-Chief who compared Trump to Hitler, was an IDF prison guard at a facility known for torture and sex abuse. He also pushed the false Saddam-Al-Qaeda link that led to the Iraq War and keeps pushing for war in the Middle East.” And the magazine’s owner is Steve Jobs’s deeply neoconservative widow, and she pitches her propaganda to Democratic Party voters, to keep them backing her candidates.

    On October 15, ZeroHedge headlined “US Threatens Israel With Arms Embargo As Evidence Of War Crimes Becomes Impossible to Deny.” This is how successful U.S. politicians win votes from their suckers. Biden publicly threatens Israel at the same time as he privately authorizes — and arms to the teeth — what it is doing that he publicly condemns. Both of America’s political Parties are fully complicit in this deceit — this genocide.

    The post The U.S.-Israel Plan for the Gazans first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Biden-Harris Killed the 2022 Ukraine-War Peace Deal

    Early after Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Turkey, which is a NATO member but not as subservient to the U.S. Government as almost all of its European members are, broke with the U.S. Government’s opposition to there being any negotiations to settle the Ukraine war; and peace talks, negotiations to end the conflict, were held in Istanbul. As Wikipedia notes regarding those negotiations:

    In a surprise visit to Ukraine on 9 April [2022], British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said “Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with,” and that the collective West was not willing to make a deal with Putin. Three days after Johnson left Kyiv, Putin stated publicly that talks with Ukraine “had turned into a dead end”. Naftali Bennett said in 2023 that both sides had wanted a ceasefire, the odds of the deal holding had been 50-50, and that the Western powers backing Ukraine had stopped the deal.[79]

    Mr. Johnson had received U.S. President Joe Biden’s authorization to do that — to go to  Ukraine’s President Volodmyr Zelensky to inform him that The West (the U.S. empire, including NATO) would cease supporting Ukraine’s Government if Ukraine would sign the till-then-agreed-upon but not-yet-signed peace treaty with Russia, which entailed Russia’s ceasing its invasion in return for Ukraine’s returning to its neutral status which had prevailed prior to the US. Government’s take-over of Ukraine on 20 February 2014, and Ukraine’s ceasing its efforts to restore to Ukraine the 22% of the former Ukraine’s territory that Russia then was occupying. Biden insisted upon the Ukrainian Government’s pursuing an all-or-nothing strategy to defeat Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine — or else Ukraine would lose Western support in its war against Russia. (The reason for this policy from Biden is that though such a peace treaty would have been far better for Ukraine, since the million-or-so deaths, that continuing the war entails, would have been prevented, such a treaty would have totally ended America’s ownership of Ukraine, which was won by the Obama-Biden Administration’s stunningly successful coup in February 2014, which grabbed control of Ukraine away from the people of Ukraine. The U.S. Government wants to continue controlling Ukraine’s Government.)

    Publicly, the U.S. Government continues to insist upon a total defeat of Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine. However, it also states that, “as we have been consistently saying, it’s going to be up to President Zelenskyy, if and when he wants to negotiate an end to this war. Certainly, a negotiated end is the most likely outcome here. But when that happens, and under what conditions and circumstances, that’s going to be up to President Zelenskyy.” In other words: if Ukraine’s Government will lose the war against Russia, and Russia will win the war against Ukraine, then (according to the Biden Administration) only Ukraine’s Government will have lost it; the U.S. Government and its NATO military alliance won’t also have lost it. This is the message from the White House, two-and-a-half years after it had ordered Ukraine’s Government to continue this war until Russia will have been defeated.

    All U.S. regime media are trying to either blame Ukraine’s Government, or else blame the Government (i.e., the U.S. Government) that has, in fact, been controlling Ukraine’s Government, for Ukraine’s losing this war. Domestically within the United States, the Biden Administration and its Vice President Kamala Harris would rather that Ukraine’s defeat be held off till after the November 5 elections, so that their Party will win on November 5. But, if the defeat comes after she has won the election, then there will be total pressure upon Zelensky to quit before she becomes inaugurated on January 20th, so that this loss won’t be blamed upon her — won’t occur during her Presidency.

    On September 30, The Atlantic magazine, which is owned by the Democratic Party billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, the intensely neoconservative widow and heir of Steve Jobs, headlined “The Abandonment of Ukraine: The American strategy in Ukraine is slowly bleeding the nation, and its people, to death.” It argued against “the most unsettling thing we saw [in Ukraine] was the American strategy in Ukraine, one that gives the Ukrainian people just enough military aid not to lose their war but not enough to win it. This strategy is slowly bleeding Ukraine, and its people, to death.” And it closed:

    The war in Ukraine is at risk of being lost — not because the Russians are winning but because Ukraine’s allies have not allowed them to win. If we encourage the Ukrainians to fight while failing to give them the tools they need for victory, history will surely conclude that the Russians weren’t the only ones who committed crimes against Ukraine.

    How can this be “not because the Russians are winning”? How not only definitionally false, but outright stupid, is that statement? 925,872 people in the deceived U.S. empire are paying subscription fees for such neocon propaganda, basically pushing for WW3. What Ms. Jobs’s agents are arguing for there is to escalate this war to being a direct war between the U.S. Government (and all of its ‘allies’ or colonies) versus Russia’s Government and Russia’s people. How many Americans really even want that — WW3 — in order to continue the U.S. Government’s control over what still remains of Ukrainian territory? Is Ukraine necessary for protecting U.S. national security? Of course not. But if you are a rabidly neocon Democrat, then you want the Biden-Harris Administration to go at least to the brink of WW3, if necessary, in order to prevent the loss of Ukraine.

    What the Democratic Party half of America’s Deep State — and Ms. Jobs is part of that — are doing is to try to force the Democratic Party officials to go all the way up to WW3 if that’s what it takes in order to ‘win’ against Russia in Ukraine. This is what’s called a “proxy war.” It has, all along, been part of the U.S. regime’s long war to conquer Russia. Russian citizens have been well informed about this, but the subjects in the U.S. empire have not.

    On 2 October 2024, EurAsia Daily headlined the video of a former adviser to the head of the office of the President of Ukraine, Alexei Arestovich, who had advised President Zelensky at the Istanbul peace negotiations in 2022, “The Ukrainian front is collapsing, the loss of Coal is only the beginning of a catastrophe — Arestovich,” and presented him saying, “The training system has failed, there is no basic motivation in the troops, but there is an understanding that the stated goal of the war — reaching the borders of 1991 — is unrealistic in these specific circumstances. In addition, there is no motivation due to domestic politics, where every day those in power put forward new proposals on restrictions on citizens – from cultural and language bans to economic ones, new corruption scandals open almost every day and the mess in the management of the army and the state intensifies.”

    A “DavidZ” posted also on October 2nd lengthier quotations from Arestovich’s video:

    “In two to three months, well, three to four, the front, which is currently crumbling in two directions, and slowly retreating in three, will begin to crumble in six or seven. This flow will become uncontrollable. This means a collapse of the front,” he said.

    He stated that in this case, the Russian army will shift the war to maneuver warfare, leading to “the collapse of the front as such.”

    “When all these 700,000 with automatic weapons and artillery cannot hold the front line, the enemy will start to rapidly advance inward, cutting off Kharkov and reaching Poltava, Dnepr, and Zaporozhye. This will lead to the loss of key industrial centers of Ukraine,” the former presidential office advisor noted.

    Arestovych identified the main reason for what is happening as the lack of a reserve of motivated infantry.

    “No drones can help reach the borders of any year if infantry soldiers do not walk this path under enemy fire… The training system has failed, there is a lack of basic motivation in the troops, but there is an understanding that the declared goal of the war – reaching the borders of 1991 – is unrealistic under these specific circumstances,” he explained.

    “Moreover, motivation is lacking due to internal politics, where every day new proposals are put forward by the powerful to limit citizens’ rights: from cultural and language bans to economic restrictions. Almost every day, new corruption scandals emerge, and the chaos in the management of the army and the state intensifies,” added the former presidential office advisor.

    Arestovych believes that “now the only way out is to sober up, stop the war, and begin a complete reorganization of the state system.”

    On 26 October 2024, the widely respected military-affairs blogger “Simplicius,” headlined  “SITREP 10/5/24: Post-Ugledar Landscape Unfurls into Dark Ukrainian Future,” and reported, from numerous reliable sources on both sides of the conflict in Ukraine, the end closing-in on the existing Government of Ukraine. One in Ukraine headlined on October 2nd, (translated) “’We Simply Had No One and Nothing Left to Fight with’ — A Rpresentative of the 72nd Brigade Battalion Headquarters on Leaving Vuhledar.” It reported:

    After two years of defense of Vuhledar, the Ukrainian military withdrew from the city. Today, the Khortytsia operational and strategic grouping of troops officially announced this: ‘Having suffered numerous losses as a result of prolonged fighting, the enemy did not give up trying to capture Vuhledar. In an attempt to take control of the town at any cost, they managed to send reserves to conduct flanking attacks that exhausted the defenses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. As a result of the enemy’s actions, the city was threatened with encirclement. The Higher Command gave permission for a maneuver to withdraw units from Vuhledar in order to save personnel and military equipment, and to take up a position for further actions.’

    That was a long and strategically crucial battle.

    Also on October 6, Russia’s RT News headlined “Russian ambassador to US returns home: Anatoly Antonov has left Washington, during a period of fractured ties between the two countries,” and reported that, “‘The Russian ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, has ended his service in Washington and is on his way to Moscow,’ the Foreign Ministry said in a brief statement carried by Russian news agencies. The ministry did not provide any additional details and has so far not named his successor.” This is normally the sort of thing that happens shortly before a war breaks out between two countries, in order to protect their diplomats from dangers where they are, such as becoming hit by their own country’s weapons.

    Both of the two U.S. Presidential nominees have been saying nothing about whether, as the President, they would go all the way to WW3 in order to prevent Russia from winning in Ukraine. And none of the ‘news’ media have asked about that. The only possible exception is that on September 17, Donald Trump co-authored with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at The Hill, “Negotiate with Moscow to end the Ukraine war and prevent nuclear devastation,” which contradicts not only what Kamala Harris has said, but some of the things that Trump has said. It is entirely consistent, however, with what RFK Jr. has been saying. On the other hand, even Mr. Kennedy has not addressed specifically the question of whether, as the President, he would go all the way to WW3 in order to prevent Russia from winning in Ukraine. So: there has been no public discussion of such a question. Perhaps the American pubic don’t even care about it. Would most people be interested in a candidate’s position on it? If not, then is this a democracy? And if so, then is this a democracy? In fact, wouldn’t a democracy be focused upon this issue above any other? Americans aren’t focusing upon it at all. Nor are the publics in any of the U.S. Government’s colonies.

    The post Biden-Harris Killed the 2022 Ukraine-War Peace Deal first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Kamala Harris Backed by Hundreds of Millions of Dark-Money Dollars

    On 17 March 2021, OpenSecrets.org headlined “‘Dark money’ topped $1 billion in 2020, largely boosting Democrats” and reported that,

    The 2020 election saw more than $1 billion in ‘dark money’ pending at the federal level, a massive sum driven by an explosion of secret donations boosting Democrats in a historically expensive cycle. That’s according to an estimate from OpenSecrets. The billion-dollar sum includes a whopping $660 million in donations from opaque political nonprofits and shell companies to outside groups.

    In many prior years, most of the dark money had been going to Republicans, but now this has apparently switched. Most of the billionaires now favor the Democrtic Party.

    The current U.S. Presidential election is expected to cost well over two billion dollars just in recognized paid promotions, not even counting such things as billionaires using the news-media that they own, in such ways as to present the nominee that they favor, in a more favorable light to the public than the one they want to lose the election. And, for yet another example of this uncounted political money, think tanks and other nonprofits that hire and employ their staff in order to sway public opinion in the directions that their founders and biggest donors want the public to believe, are, likewise, not counted as being political donations. That’s at least as dark money as the official type of dark-money political spending is. Adding all of it together, it probably constitutes over half of all of the dollars that are being donated to U.S. political campaigns directly and indirectly. And this fact explains why it is that all of the political science analyses of whether the legislation that gets passed into law in the United States reflects the policy-preferences and priorities of the American public or instead the preferences and priorities of America’s super-rich and basically of only America’s billionaires, have found that the latter is the reality: the U.S. Government represents ONLY the billionaires. America is a democracy-in-name-only (a DINO). It is an aristocracy-in-reality (an AIR). (DINO=AIR.)

    Since Kamala Harris now appears likely to win the current U.S. Presidential contest, this article will be focusing on her campaign. It’s significant that the PAC dollars which had been donated to the Biden campaign up until Biden left the contest to be carried on by his Vice President Kamala Harris, her campaign became the inheritor of all of those funds, which promptly then were announced as reflecting her enormous popularity among the general public. Her campaign consequently built upon Biden’s. In fact, though Harris had more than 25 days before the Platform of the Democratic National Convention, for it to be revised from the one that Biden’s campaign team had produced, she didn’t change even a word of it. She is running on Biden’s platform 100%. If she wins, she will start her Presidency as a super-energized version of President Biden, not weighed down with his low approval-ratings, and therefore far more likely than he would be in his second term to get Congress to pass everything that he was hoping to get passed in his first term. She would therefore be likely to be a much more effective version of what Biden was when he was President.

    Biden was already beholden to lots of dark money. On 21 May 2024, the “Sludge” investigative-news site on political money headlined “More ‘Dark Money’ for President Biden,” and reported that, “A new FEC disclosure shows the president’s main super PAC continues to rely on dark money for the majority of its funding. … Dark money donors provided the majority of the $16.2 million that Future Forward reported.”

    InfluenceWatch.org reports that,

    Future Forward USA PAC (also known as “FF PAC”) is a Democratic Party-aligned super PAC based in Palo Alto, California. FF PAC reportedly spent $108 million in a “blitz” of spending during the last five weeks of the 2020 election to support President Joe Biden’s campaign by attacking then-President Donald Trump on his COVID-19 policies. 1 FF PAC has been criticized by the left-leaning Center for Responsive Politics for being funded by “dark money.” 2

    History

    FF PAC was created in 2018 by Future Forward USA Action, a left-of-center advocacy group. 3 Chauncey McLean is the president of  FF PAC. McLean was previously the director of media tracking for the Democratic Party in 2012. 4

    Donors

    INDIVIDUAL DONORS

    In 2020, FF PAC received several contributions from high-profile Democratic donors include Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz ($91,780,000), former Google CEO Eric Schmidt ($775,000), liberal mega-donor Kathryn Murdoch ($540,000), cryptocurrency exchange founder Samuel Bankman-Fried ($10,000,000), Jeffrey Lawson of Twilio ($5,500,000) and his wife Erica Lawson ($5,500,000), and Netflix founder Reed Hastings’ wife Patty Quillin ($2,000,000). 5  By October 23, 2020 Future Forward USA Action, the parent organization of the FF PAC, had reportedly contributed $29 million to the PAC. 6

    In 2020, FF PAC received a large portion of its contributions from the CEOs and presidents of California- and New York-based technology companies, venture capital firms, and wealth management companies. These include Judith Estren of JLABS ($15,000), David Elenowitz of Zero Carbon Partners ($15,000), Amy Rao of HillSpire ($25,000), Andrew McCollum of Philo ($50,000), George Hume of Basic American Foods ($50,000), Ronald Conway of SV Angel LLC ($100,000), Joshua Bekenstein of Bain Capital ($500,000), Vincent Ryan of Schooner Capital ($250,000), Even Williams of Medium ($250,000), Molly Gochman of Stardust ($500,000), Nishad Singh of Almeda Foundation ($1,000,000), and Gregory Johnson of Bridgewater Associates ($2,000,000). 7

    INSTITUTIONAL DONORS

    In 2020, FF PAC also received funding from left-of-center grant making organizations and labor unions. The organizations that contributed to FF PAC have supported increased government spending on entitlement programs and increased taxpayer-subsidized intervention in energy markets. 8 9 Several organizations that contributed to FF PAC also contributed to the Trusted Elections Fund, a project of the New Venture Fund to prepare for and respond to alleged “crises” that the Fund claimed would take place during the 2020 presidential election. 10

    …

    Spending

    For most of the 2020 presidential election, FF PAC was a little-known super PAC. The organization made national news when it went on a “blitz” of spending on television advertisements in support of President Biden during the last five weeks of the election. 14

    The Super PAC received further attention after making more political expenditures in support of President Biden than any other independent organization, behind only the Democratic Party-aligned Senate Majority PAC and the Biden campaign committee. 15 16 FF PAC was reported to be on pace to have spent $108 million dollars on television advertisements in support of President Biden by the end of October 2020. 17 Other outlets have reported that the FF PAC spent closer to $141.6 million over the course of the 2020 election cycle, after accounting for non-presidential races. 18

    On 23 July 2024, CBS headlined “Kamala Harris wins enough delegate support for Democratic presidential nomination after Biden drops out,” and reported:

    The campaign says it’s taken in more than $100 million between Sunday afternoon, when President Biden announced he’s bowing out of the race, and Monday evening.

    Democrats moved Monday moved to consolidate behind Harris for the party’s nomination, capping a dramatic 24 hours after Mr. Biden’s shocking announcement that he was exiting the race and, a short time later, endorsing Harris for the nomination.

    CBS News estimates Harris has received the endorsement of a majority of Democratic delegates. If the total holds, she would become the Democratic nominee for president after the virtual roll-call vote expected in early August.  …

    A Democratic political action group, Future Forward PAC, announced Monday that it had raised $150 million, a staggering amount, given the lag in Democrats’ fundraising since Mr. Biden’s disastrous debate against Trump last month.

    So, about 40% of that was dark money (contributed by nominally Future Forward).

    And these reports are basically of the political investments that these donors had made in Harris up till around the time when the face of the Democratic Party switched from being Biden’s face and became instead Harris’s face.

    The post Kamala Harris Backed by Hundreds of Millions of Dark-Money Dollars first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Denmark’s Prime Minister Calls to Ignore Red Lines Against Russia

    Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in a September 20th Bloomberg TV interview aired in Copehagen on the morning of September 23rd, that NATO nations must remove all restrictions on the use of their weapons against Russia by Ukraine, because Russia’s President Vladimir Putin aims to conquer NATO: “This thinking that if we allow him to take Ukraine or parts of Ukraine, then he will be satisfied, I disagree.” In other words: even for Russia to retain the parts of Ukraine that it currently occupies in Ukraine is entirely unacceptable, and so Russia must be simply conquered, or else Putin’s forces will conquer not only Ukraine but all of NATO and all of the world.

    During America’s invasion of Vietnam, the U.S. Government argued that if Vietnam would be taken over by communists, then all non-communist nations would become “falling dominoes”; and, so, America had to prevent that. Denmark’s Prime Minister is presenting her own “falling dominoes” theory against not communism, but instead Russia.

    She said that “My suggestion is, let us end the discussion about red lines [of Russia]. … It has been a mistake during this war to have a public discussion about red lines,” which are “simply giving the Russians too good a card in their hands.” In other words: Russia’s enemies must ignore the warnings that Russia has issued against any NATO country that will allow its long-range missiles to be fired from Ukraine into the Kremlin (Russia’s central command) or other sites that are crucial for Russia’s national security against NATO. She said simply “I think that the restrictions on the use of weapons should be lifted.” In other words: ignore Russia’s national-security concerns altogether. (What precisely she meant by saying “It has been a mistake during this war to have a public discussion about red lines,” was not clarified: Should that “discussion” be only private, and the public not be allowed to know anything about it; or should there simply not be any consideration given by U.S.-and-allied Governments to Russia’s national-security needs. When she said that for NATO to consider Russia’s red lines would be “simply giving the Russians too good a card in their hands,” she was indicating the latter, which would mean that even private discussions about that matter among NATO nations would be “a mistake.” In other words: she was saying that she is an absolutist against considering Russia’s national-security needs — even privately within NATO.)

    She turned on its head Russia’s statements of what the U.S. and its allies call “Putin’s red lines”: The “most important red line has been crossed already. And that was when the Russians entered Ukraine [on 24 February 2022]. So I will not accept this premise, and I will never allow anyone from Russia to decide what is the right thing to do in NATO, in Europe or in Ukraine.” So: NATO must never negotiate with Russia. Russia must simply accept what NATO does. (Her statement that the war in Ukraine started on 24 February 2022 instead of on 20 February 2014, has been contradicted both by Ukraine’s President Zelensky and by NATO’s Secretary General Stoltenberg.)

    She also broadened her unconcern about the national-security needs of Russia, so as to encompass as being enemies also countries that do not stand with NATO against Russia: “What we see now is a Russia that is getting closer to North Korea and to Iran. And I don’t think that Russia would be able to have a full-scale war inside Europe without help from China, unfortunately. So this is not a European conflict, this is a global conflict.”

    When the Bloomberg interviewer asked her about whether the U.S. Government shares the views that she was expressing about allowing Ukraine to fire deep into Russia the weapons that NATO countries are supplying to Ukraine, she refused to answer: “Frederiksen declined to comment on what the US position was on, for instance, the use of the 19 F-16 fighter jets given by Denmark.” (I have covered elsewhere what U.S. President Biden’s position on this is.)

    Bloomberg News pointed out that, “Frederiksen, 46, is leader of the Social Democrats and has been prime minister since 2019.”

    Shakespeare at around the year 1600 originated the phrase “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

    The post Denmark’s Prime Minister Calls to Ignore Red Lines Against Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • 64 U.S. Coups During 1947-1989

    This is the list of U.S. coups during the Cold War that’s presented in the highly regarded 2018 academic book Covert Regime Change, by Lindsey O’Rourke.

    (Only the start-date for each coup is shown here, but some of these coups went on for years; 39% succeeded at Government-overthrow, 61% did not. This list is taken from “Table 1.1: U.S.-backed regime change attempts during the Cold War (1947-1989)”):

    France 1947
    Italy 1947
    Albania 1949
    Belarus 1949
    Bulgaria 1949
    Czechoslovakia 1949
    East Germany 1949
    Estonia 1949
    Latvia 1949
    Lithuania 1949
    Poland 1949
    Romania 1949
    Hungary 1949
    Russia 1949
    Ukraine 1949
    North Korea 1950
    Guatemala 1952
    Iran 1952
    Japan 1952
    Indonesia 1954
    Syria 1955
    Lebanon 1957
    Tibet 1958
    Laos 1959
    Dominican Republic 1960
    Congo 1960
    Guyana 1961
    Dominican Republic 1961
    North Vietnam 1961
    Cuba 1961
    Chile 1962
    Haiti 1963
    Bolivia 1963
    Angola 1964
    Mozambique 1964
    Somalia 1964
    Brazil 1964
    Dominican Republic 1965
    Haiti 1965
    Thailand 1965
    South Vietnam 1967
    Bolivia 1971
    Iraq 1971
    Italy 1972
    Portugal 1974
    Angola 1975
    Afghanistan 1979
    South Yemen 1979
    Grenada 1979
    Nicaragua 1979
    Nicaragua 1980
    Chad 1981
    Ethiopia 1981
    Poland 1981
    Cambodia 1982
    Suriname 1982
    Libya 1982
    Liberia 1983
    Chile 1964
    Philippines 1984
    Angola 1985
    Haiti 1986
    Panama 1987

    That list is incomplete. For two examples: it omits Thailand 1948 when the CIA cut itself in on the profits from the international opium trade, and Indonesia 1965 when President Johnson helped organize the extermination of at least 500,000 land-reform proponents there and helped to install General Suharto (who then embezzled $15-35 billion from the country). Including just those two additional cases, they total to 64 U.S. coups during those 42 years 1947-1989. Also not included are coups that the author felt were only supported by the U.S. Government but not planned by the U.S. Government, such as allegedly “the 1967 Greek coup or the 1976 Argentine coup.” The author recognized that there might have been coups she didn’t know about. Furthermore, she was explicit that her study was aimed at supporting “a theory regarding the security motives driving America’s Cold War interventions.” That is clearly a false theory (that America’s foreign coups were done in order to protect U.S. national security — which was virtually never the case). Two examples showing it to be false were the two I mentioned that she had excluded: the 1948 CIA Thai coup to install a regime that would cut the CIA in for off-the-books funding of the CIA from the drug underworld (kickbacks, basically protection-money aid to the CIA), and the 1965 Indonesian coup to benefit U.S. owners of rubber plantations there. Routinely, scholars are willing to start with false assumptions in order to support an unrealistically favorable view of their Government. It’s myth-preserving scholarship, not science; and it is common; it’s routine in the social ‘sciences’.

    A realistic presumption would be that ever since Truman became President in 1945 and started (in 1947, the year he started the CIA) America’s coups outside the Western hemisphere (O’Rourke also mentions that there had been U.S. coups in “Nicaragua (1909, 1910, and 1926), Honduras (1911, the Dominican Republic (1912, 1914, and 1916), Mexico (1914), Haiti (1915), and Costa Rica (1919)”), there have been around 80 of them since Truman came into office in 1945. During that same period, there have been at least 130 U.S. military invasions, plus countless illegal sanctions, in order to conquer countries it covets adding to its empire. After WW2, the vast majority of the world’s international aggressions — coups, invasions, subversions, and sanctions — have come from, or been initiated by, the U.S. Government. Rather than policing the world to maintain peace such as it claims, the U.S. has been the world’s biggest organized-criminal operation and source of wars, with no close second.

    O’Rourke’s book studiously ignores that the post-1944 U.S. Government that has been mega-imperialistic and is driven by greed for evermore power and wealth by America’s billionaires, who benefit from these coups, wars, etc., which expand their mega-corporate empire.

    The post 64 U.S. Coups During 1947-1989 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Why George Clooney, Peter Welch, and the New York Times, Are Dangerous


    I opposed the invasion of Iraq by Bush in 2003 — which destroyed that country — even before it was perpetrated. George Clooney, Peter Welch, the New York Times, and other liars or fools of liars, did not.

    I opposed the bombing of Libya by Obama in 2011 — which destroyed that country — even before it was perpetrated. George Clooney, Peter Welch, the New York Times, and other liars or fools of liars, did not.

    I opposed the U.S. arming of Al Qaeda in Syria in order to overthrow Assad in 2012 by Obama — which destroyed that country — even before it was perpetrated. George Clooney, Peter Welch, the New York Times, and other liars or fools of liars, did not.

    I opposed the U.S. coup that was perpetrated in 2014 by Obama, Clinton, and Biden, against Ukraine in order to place U.S. missiles there to blitz-nuke The Kremlin — which destroyed Ukraine — even before it was perpetrated. George Clooney, Peter Welch, the New York Times, and other liars or fools of liars, did not.

    The Democratic Party is as flamingly neoconservative, pro-MIC, hawkish and pro-U.S.-imperialism, as is the Republican Party; and, so, only a Second American Revolution that recognizes all Americans’ enemy as being right here at home — the super-rich who control all of the major ‘news’-media and the Government (both of its Parties) — and which Revolution removes them from the power they have to deceive the majority of the public and destroy nation after nation while the MIC-owners grow ever fatter feasting upon the blood and misery of others in other lands and upon the despair of the poor in our own, can be constructive in the present era when the U.S. behemoth is craving feverishly to control the entire world and to increase the annual aggression(‘defense’)-budget so high it will leave nothing left to spend for the public.

    George Clooney says of our present neoconservative-in-chief, “I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals.” I do not, and I would never sink so low as to say such a thing as that.

    Peter Welch says of our present neoconservative-in-chief, “I have great respect for President Biden. He saved our country from a tyrant. He is a man of uncommon decency. He cares deeply about our democracy. He has been one of the best presidents of our time.” (He thinks that Obama was the best.) I do not, and I would never sink so low as to say such a thing as that.

    The New York Times says that we must vote for Biden because Trump is supposedly even worse: “HE IS DANGEROUS IN WORD, DEED AND ACTION: DONALD TRUMP IS UNFIT TO LEAD”. Instead, they want us to vote for the most corrupt President in all of U.S. history.

    But the candidate who is chosen by representatives of Democratic Party billionaires, is no less evil than and no better than the candidate who is chosen by representatives of Republican Party billionaires; and to allege to the contrary is not only to be ludicrous but to be vile, because it’s by now obvious that both sides of the U.S. aristocracy are equally evil and equally dangerous to the entire world. Only a Second American Revolution can now save us all.

    The post Why George Clooney, Peter Welch, and the New York Times, Are Dangerous first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • U.S. SecDef Lloyd Austin’s NATO Speech Lies

    In an enthusiastically received speech on July 10 to the Washington DC 75th Anniversary NATO Summit, U.S. Secretary of Defense and ‘former’ Raytheon Corporation board member Lloyd Austin strung together lies by the U.S. empire in order to reverse the imperialistic guilt of the U.S. Government for starting the Cold War in order to conquer and take over the entire world, and to pretend that instead the Cold War was and remains an ideological communist-versus-capitalist war in which the Soviet Union was the aggressor, but has now become after 2000 a war between nations that Austin calls “democracies” (which today’s America clearly is not), on the one hand, and nations that he simply assumes are not, on the other.

    Appropriately for his lying ‘history’ of this war since 25 July 1945, he twice referred to its creator on 25 July 1945, U.S. President Truman, whose 4 April 1949 “Address on the Occasion of Signing the North Atlantic Treaty” (the NATO Treaty), stated:

    Twice in recent years, nations have felt the sickening blow of unprovoked aggression. Our peoples, to whom our governments are responsible, demand that these things shall not happen again.

    We are determined that they shall not happen again.

    In taking steps to prevent aggression against our own peoples, we have no purpose of aggression against other peoples. To suggest the contrary is to slander our institutions and defame our ideals and our aspirations.

    According to the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia (which blacklists (blocks from linking to) sites that aren’t CIA-approved), in its article “List of wars involving the Soviet Union”, during the entire time-span between “1944-1960s”, that list includes only these wars:

    Anti-communist insurgencies in Central and Eastern Europe[citation needed]

    Guerrilla war in Ukraine (Part of World War II from 1944 to 1945)

    Guerrilla war in the Baltic states

    Anti-communist resistance in Poland (1944–1953)

    Listed as the aggressors in them were:

    Soviet Union
    East Germany
    Polish People’s Republic
    Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
    Hungarian People’s Republic
    Socialist Republic of Romania
    People’s Republic of Bulgaria
    Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

    Those were the nations that the Soviet Union had liberated from Hitler.

    Listed as the defenders (not the aggressors) in these wars were:

    Ukrainian Insurgents
    Polish Insurgents
    Estonian Insurgents
    Latvian Insurgents
    Lithuanian Insurgents
    Bulgarian Insurgents

    Those ‘insurgents’ (or ‘guerillas’) were predominantly — and in some nations almost entirely — the forces that were fighting on Hitler’s side in his Operation Barbarossa to conquer the Soviet Union.

    When Truman, in his 4 April 1949 “Address on the Occasion of Signing the North Atlantic Treaty”, asserted that “Twice in recent years, nations have felt the sickening blow of unprovoked aggression,” he never made clear which of those wars by the Soviet Union defending itself against Hitler’s Operation Barbaross invasion constituted those “Twice in recent years, nations have felt the sickening blow of unprovoked aggression.” It wasn’t Hitler who had done the “unprovoked aggression.” That was America’s President right after the passionate opponent of Hitler, FDR, died.

    Already at the founding of NATO, this creation by the Nazi Truman was an extension from Operation Barbarossa by Truman’s United States Government, in order to take over the world, starting with taking over the Soviet Union, which had been America’s most important ally during WW2 under President FDR.

    Both FDR and Churchill acknowledged that the coming victory against Hitler was more by the Soviet Union than it was by even the entirety of The West. Near the beginning of FDR’s lengthy fireside chat to the nation on 28 April 1942, he said:

    On the European front the most important development of the past year has been without question the crushing counteroffensive on the part of the great armies of Russia against the powerful German Army. These Russian forces have destroyed and are destroying more armed power of our enemies — troops, planes, tanks, and guns — than all the other United Nations [by which he at that time was referring only to the U.S. and the UK’s empire, because he hadn’t yet even met Stalin] put together. (NOTE: He was already using the phrase “United Nations” with the objective in mind for all of the world’s nations to view themselves as having been saved by the U.N. that FDR was intending ultimately to replace all empires and to be the sole source of international laws.)

    Near the War’s end, on 19 September 1944, Churchill telegrammed to Stalin “that it is the Russian army that tore the guts out of the German military machine and is at the present moment holding by far the larger portion of the enemy on its front.” As the History Channel’s article “Operation Barbarossa” summed-up: “On 22 June 1941, German forces began their invasion of the Soviet Union, … the most powerful invasion force in history, … 80% of the German army … [plus] 30 divisions of Finnish and Romanian troops. … By the time Germany officially surrendered to the Allies on 8 May 1945, 80% of its casualties during WW2 had come on the Eastern Front [the Soviet Union].” Even Wikipedia’s “Operation Barbarossa” said “The failure of Operation Barbarossa reversed the fortunes of the Third Reich.[30]” However, on 8 May 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted “On May 8, 1945, America and Great Britain had victory over the Nazis! America’s spirit will always win. In the end, that’s what happens.” So goes the myth (which is cited by both Democratic and Republican politicians), but certainly not  the history.

    Furthermore: what was Truman referring to by his “Twice in recent years, nations have felt the sickening blow of unprovoked aggression”? He never said, but why did he call the Soviet Union’s victories against Hitler “unprovoked aggression”? It had been Hitler — and not Stalin — who invaded in Operation Barbarossa, and Stalin — not Hitler — who were defending there. This is how much of an American Nazi Mr. Truman had become so soon after he had made the decision on 25 July 1945 for the U.S. Government to take over the entire world. If anything is “sickening” in that statement by him, it is Truman himself.

    On that date, 25 July 1945, Truman told the Soviet Union’s leader Joseph Stalin that the U.S. Government would not recognize the legitimacy of its control over the countries that it had conquered from Hitler unless the U.S. Government is granted veto-power over the Soviet Union’s decisions regarding those Governments (both their internal and external affairs); and, in Truman’s letter that night to his wife, Bess, he even gloated over this, by saying:

    Russia and Poland have gobbled up a big hunk of Germany and want Britain and us to agree. I have flatly refused. We have unalterably opposed the recognition of police governments in the Germany Axis countries. I told Stalin that until we had free access to those countries and our nationals had their property rights restored, so far as we were concerned there’d never be recognition. He seems to like it when I hit him with a hammer.

    Suddenly, the amicable relationship between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., which had prevailed throughout FDR’s three terms in office, and which had won WW2 for the Allies, and which FDR had been planning to continue afterward under the U.N. that FDR had been carefully planning during August 1941 till his death on 12 April 1945, ended in a crash of mutual hostility, because Stalin couldn’t accept Truman’s demand, any more than Truman would have accepted a similar demand from Stalin about the nations that America and its colonies such as the UK had conquered in Europe. Stalin (like FDR would have done if he had survived) made no such demand upon Truman or anyone else, and from that date forward Stalin recognized that unless he could change Truman’s mind on this (which never happened), the U.S. Government would be at war against the Soviet Government. It turned out to be (on the American side at least) a war not actually between capitalism versus communism (as Truman propagandized it to be) but instead between the U.S. against the entire world — to take all of it — as was made clear when U.S. President GHW Bush started, on 24 February 1990, secretly instructing his stooge leaders, such as Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterrand, that their war against the soon-no-longer-communist Russia would secretly continue until it too becomes a part of the U.S. empire.

    Furthermore: whereas there was lots of friction between FDR and Churchill because FDR was an impassioned anti-imperialist and Churchill was an equally impassioned imperialist, FDR’s relationship with Stalin was superb, because both of them were equally impassioned anti-imperialists — about which fact Truman and his followers have been lying constantly.

    The current war inside Ukraine — about which Mr. Austin’s speech largely focuses — started with U.S. President Barack Obama’s coup there in 2014, but had been in preparation ever since the Truman Administration. I detailed that fact here.

    Austin’s speech was loaded with lies, but I will stop here, because that’s enough to demonstrate his propagandistic intent.

    The post U.S. SecDef Lloyd Austin’s NATO Speech Lies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Reuters Reveals Secret U.S. Government Anti-China Operation to Increase Covid-19 Deaths in East Asia and Pacific

    On June 14, Reuters headlined: “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic: The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.”

    A June 15 Google-search of the headline “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic” produced virtually no publication of that Reuters news-report anywhere within the U.S. empire — U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, etc. The news-report was not published, for example, in the New York Times, Washington Post, London Times, Guardian, Telegraph, and Daily Mail, nor CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR, PBS, Deutsche Welle, etc. That headline did briefly run on the websites of USA Today and Fox News, but never the news-report itself on that given site, and the link to the story no longer works at either USA Today or Fox News. There had been a link to that headlined story, but that news-report had not been published on either site. The only mainstream site in the U.S. empire that posted not only the headline but that also at their site the actual news-report, was Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on June 15. A Google-search of that headline four hours later on June 15 showed no better results. So, this extraordinarily important news-report remains as being news even the day after Reuters had published it on their news-feed. Suppression of a major news-story from a U.S. empire news-agency such as Reuters is highly extraordinary.

    That suppressed news-report — which should immediately have been splashed everywhere, because it was among the biggest news-stories anywhere on June 14 — opened:

    At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

    The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

    Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.

    This post, identified by Reuters, matched the messaging, timeframe and design of the U.S. military’s anti-vax propaganda campaign in the Philippines, former and current military officials say. Social media platform X also identified the account as fake and removed it.

    TRANSLATION FROM TAGALOG

    #ChinaIsTheVirus

    Do you want that? COVID came from China and vaccines came from China

    (Beneath the message is a picture of then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte saying: “China! Prioritize us first please. I’ll give you more islands, POGO and black sand.” POGO refers to Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators, online gambling companies that boomed during Duterte’s administration. Black sand refers to a type of mining.)

    “COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”

    RELATED

    Podcast: Pentagon’s anti-vax campaign

    After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

    The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.

    The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review, Reuters found.

    “I don’t think it’s defensible. I’m extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that.”

    Daniel Lucey, infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine.

    The news-report also said:

    Then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte pleaded with citizens to get the COVID vaccine. “You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed,” a masked Duterte said in this televised address in June 2021.

    When he addressed the vaccination issue, the Philippines had among the worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia. Only 2.1 million of its 114 million citizens were fully vaccinated – far short of the government’s target of 70 million. By the time Duterte spoke, COVID cases exceeded 1.3 million, and almost 24,000 Filipinos had died from the virus. The difficulty in vaccinating the population contributed to the worst death rate in the region.

    COVID-19 deaths in the Philippines

    The pandemic hit the Philippines especially hard, and by November 2021, COVID had claimed the lives of 48,361 people there. …

    To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.

    “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.” …

    In 2019, before COVID surfaced in full force, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper signed a secret order that later paved the way for the launch of the U.S. military propaganda campaign. The order elevated the Pentagon’s competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat, enabling commanders to sidestep the State Department when conducting psyops against those adversaries. The Pentagon spending bill passed by Congress that year also explicitly authorized the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, even “outside of areas of active hostilities.”

    Esper, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. A State Department spokesperson referred questions to the Pentagon.

    The statement — “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.” — means that the U.S. Government was placing a higher priority upon “dragging China through the mud” than on keeping covid-19 deaths down in the Assia-Pacific region. Especially in the Phillipines, which under Duarte’s Presidency was neutralist in the conflict between the U.S. Government and the Chinese Government, adding to the death-rate there was not a practical concern for the U.S. Government. In other words: the U.S. Government treats neutralist nations as-if they’re instead among its enemy-nations, to such an extent that even civilian deaths there that are caused by the U.S. Government, are of no practical (much less of ethical) concern. This operation by the U.S. Government was expected to increase deaths in that region (because the U.S. Government believed that vaccinations would reduce covid-19 deaths in its own and allied territories), but they were not concerned about that. They were interested only in “how we could drag China through the mud.” The possibily that deaths would increase deaths in and around Asia as a result of what they were doing, was of no concern to them. The extent to which the post-1945 U.S. Government is significantly different than was Hitler’s Government in Germany, is therefore an appropriate matter for public debate, though it’s not being debated anywhere in today’s U.S. empire. The major importance of this news-report from Reuters is that it importantly contributes to that debate; and, now, the further fact of its virtually complete black-out within the U.S. empire, displays the extent to which the U.S. empire will not tolerate the existence of any such public debate. Perhaps this fact is even more important than that extraordinary report from Reuters itself was.

    A reasonable conclusion from all of this is that America’s Government treats neutral countries as-if they are enemy countries. An associated aspect of this fact is that starting on June 11th the U.S. Government increased its secondary sanctions against Russia — the sanctions against businesses that trade with Russia — so as to punish them for that and thereby to limit such firms’ choices as to which countries they will be allowed by the U.S. Government to have commerce with. Secondary sanctions present non-U.S. targets (neutral countries and firms) with a choice: do business with the United States or with the sanctioned target, but not both. This is erecting a new “iron curtain,” of a specifically economic type, between the American empire — “The West” — and “The East.”

    The U.S. Government is, in effect, betting that to force neutrals to choose between “The West” and “the East,” “The West” will expand, instead of reduce, its empire. Whether, or the extent to which, the reverse might happen, was so much as even considered by “The West,” is not, as-of yet, publicly known.

    However, specifically as regards what was the topic in that Reuters news-report: to be concerned not at all about how the death-rates in the east-Asian region would be affected, but ONLY about “how we could drag China through the mud,” was — given the fact that the U.S. Government thought that to increase the vaccination-rates in that region would reduce the death-rates there — for the U.S. Government to intend to increase covid-19 deaths in the East-Asia & Pacific region. It was their intent, regardless of whether, or the extent to which, it was the result of what the U.S. Government did there.

    The post Reuters Reveals Secret U.S. Government Anti-China Operation to Increase Covid-19 Deaths in East Asia and Pacific first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Obama’s Guilt for Ukraine’s War

    It was well-encapsulated in this 10-minute compilation video from 12 March 2014, “Ukraine Crisis – What You’re Not Being Told” (also archived here and here).

    That 10-minute documentary’s only error is at 22 seconds in, where its narrator said the year “two thousand thirteen” when he obviously meant to say “two thousand fourteen”; but, other than that, I have verified the authenticity and correctness of each one of its many sources and allegations, and find that it is the best (most comprehensive, brief, and accurate) single history of the 20-26 February 2014 coup in Ukraine, which has yet been done.

    It shows Victoria Nuland, whom Obama had selected to plan, organize, oversee, and direct, the coup in Ukraine, instructing America’s Ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, whom to get to become appointed to take over control of Ukraine’s government after the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, will be overthrown. That phone call from Nuland occurred on 27 January 2014, a month before Obama’s coup there was completed, and the person whom she selected to run Obama’s government of Ukraine was the rabidly anti-Russian Arseniy Yatsenyuk, or “Yats” as she sometimes referred to him in this video — and he did get the appointment a month later.

    Here is that complete phone-conversation, which is merely excerpted in the 10-minute documentary. And here is my transcript of it, along with my explanations of what she was referring to and why.

    This recorded phone-conversation is the most “smoking gun” evidence that I know of for any coup that has ever taken place; and for this reason and also on the basis of all of the other evidences on this coup, I agree with what the founder and head of the Stratfor ‘private CIA’ corporate advisory firm said about the matter, that it was “the most blatant coup in history”. (But then, a year later, at the Website of a former convicted Wall-Street trader, he posted an opinion-article to which he slipped in, as-if it were an aside, mention that though on “the internet and Twitter, … you will find me saying the United States staged the most blatant coup in history,” and he went on to misrepresent what he had actually said, and he then alleged that he hadn’t said that, and then he said that “It was no coup,” it was nothing more than “a systematic campaign to saturate the internet, the Russians fed the quote back into some major Russian print publications, then back onto the internet, until it resonated and fed back on itself,” and, so, he alleged that it was just a nothingburger, which “the Russians” had cooked up. He needed to retain his mega-corporate customers.)

    On 4 November 2019, I headlined “The Obama Regime’s Plan to Seize the Russian Naval Base in Crimea,” and provided my latest summary of, and links to, the evidences regarding the planning of Obama’s coup in Ukraine, and of the Obama regime’s extensive pollings of Ukrainians, and especially of Crimeans, both before the coup and after the coup, and noted the polls’ findings, which confirmed and made clear that the U.S. Government couldn’t go public with their poll-findings, because those findings were entirely consistent with the 16 March 2014 Russian-managed pebiscite in Crimea, which had found that 95.6% of Crimea’s voters had marked the option of “Join the Russia Federation as Federal subject of Russia.” Although that percentage was slightly higher than the pollings that the U.S. regime had commissioned, which were closer to 90%, any public challenging of that plebiscite on the basis of these poll-findings would have required the U.S. regime to acknowledge that both the U.S. polls and the Russian plebiscite could simultaneously be right; and, so, there was no U.S.-and-allied publicity given to those polls.

    Furthermore: any such allegation (challenging the Crimean plebiscite’s 95.6% figure) by the U.S. regime might also cause to become dredged up Obama’s plan, as part of the coup, for Russia’s main naval base, which since 1783 has been in Crimea, to become replaced by yet another U.S. naval base (the only part of Obama’s plan that had failed — perhaps because Crimeans overwhelmingly despised the U.S. Government, by a margin of 76.2% “negative” to 2.8% “positive,” which is 96.3% negative to 3.7% positive, in the U.S. regime’s April 2014 poll of Crimeans — so, it would have been a hopeless cause for Obama to continue with that part of his plan, and to challenge that 95.6% plebiscite).

    My 4 November 2019 article also documented Obama’s (Nuland’s, Yatsenyuk’s) plan to kill enough residents in the far-eastern region of Ukraine, which had voted over 90% for Yanukovych, for the population there to become either exterminated or else terrorized by the U.S.-imposed regime, so that enough of Yanukovych’s supporters would be culled from Ukraine’s electorate (around a million of them fled to Russia), so as to virtually assure that subsequently elected national leaders of Ukraine would likewise be rabidly anti-Russian, pro-U.S. regime. This ethnic cleansing by the U.S.-imposed Ukrainian regime, was likewise documented in that article.

    So: this is how the war in Ukraine actually started. It started in 2014, by Obama, not by Putin (such as the U.S. regime and its colonies allege).

    Even NATO’s leader Jens Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s leader Volodmyr Zelensky deny the U.S. Government’s lie that the war in Ukraine started on 24 February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, and acknowledge that it started eight years before that, in 2014; Stoltenberg said, about this, “The war didn’t start in 2022. The war started in 2014.” Zelensky said about it, “I made a point that the war in Ukraine has been lasting for eight years. It’s not just some special military operation.” So, the U.S. Government’s lie, such as U.S. ‘Defense’ (Offense) Secretary Lloyd Austin expressed it, on 1 June 2024, is rabidly false, that:

    “In February of 2022, Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine shocked the world — and this region [Singapore]. And since then, Putin’s war of aggression has provided us all with a preview of a world that none of us would want. It’s a glimpse of a world where tyrants trample sovereign borders, a world where peaceful states live in fear of their neighbors, and a world where chaos and conquest replace rules and rights.

    But Russia’s lawless invasion also reminds us that free countries can rally together to help the victims of aggression.“

    That’s a baldfaced lie, which blames Putin, not Obama, for the war in Ukraine.

    Similar lies are common in U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media, such as:

    “When Russian President Vladimir Putin started the war in Ukraine, he tried to shift the blame to NATO, calling it the instigator. He argued that Russia had no choice but to defensively launch the invasion to prevent NATO from surrounding Russia from all sides. Reality, of course, was different. NATO was a defense alliance in retirement, collecting its “peace dividend” from the breakup of the Soviet Union. Most of its members maintained their defense spending below their shared commitment.” (Note that that commentator calls this “NATO … collecting its ‘peace dividend’ from the breakup of the Soviet Union” — as-if all that matters is peace for the U.S. regime, and that Russia’s authentic national-security concerns to protect Russia’s citizens against a possible U.S.-NATO invasion, should just be ignored — and that it says “NATO was a defense alliance in retirement … from the breakup of the Soviet Union,” though, in fact, that military alliance secretly continued on the American side after the USSR’s Warsaw Pact military alliance ended in 1991 — didn’t ever go into any ‘retirement’ when the Cold War on Russia’s side DID end. So: that’s not actually a “defense alliance” — it is very clearly an aggression alliance, against Russia itself.)

    and,

    “Putin started the war in Ukraine.”

    and,

    “In 2014, Putin started the war in Ukraine by annexing the Crimea.”

    and,

    “Putin started the war in Ukraine and has said negotiations have reached an impasse, without slamming the door on them. But before the war started, Putin presented the West with a list of demands including, most notably, a halt to NATO enlargement.”

    Though the second of the two sentences in that last one is true, nothing was wrong with Putin’s having presented those demands at that time, on 17 December 2021, as his requirements for a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine issue. Ukraine is the only country whose border is a mere 317 miles — five minutes of a nuclear missile’s flying-time — away from hitting The Kremlin and so decapitating Russia’s central command. That is the reason why the U.S. regime has wanted Ukraine so much as to risk WW3 over winning it (as they did) and keeping it (as they won’t): because the U.S. regime demands to ‘win’ WW3, not to merely avoid it. If they can’t be #1 over the whole world, they don’t want anything; they don’t have any “plan B,” yet, unless it’s WW3 itself. On 29 December 2016, I headlined about “America’s Secret Planned Conquest of Russia,” tracking that plan (now called “Nuclear Primacy”) back to at least 2006 as constituting the new mainstream view in the U.S. Government; and, on 19 April 2023, I headlined “U.S. Nuclear-War Strategy”, tracking even farther back, to 1981, when Nuclear Primacy, the goal of winning WW3, first was proposed to replace the pre-existing (but still dominant in Russia and China) “Mutually Assured Destruction” or “M.A.D.” view, that nuclear weapons exist only in order to prevent a WW3, not in order to win a WW3 (via attaining and using “Nuclear Primacy”).

    If Obama had not wanted the war in Ukraine, then he wouldn’t have started it. He wouldn’t have hired people such as Victoria Nuland to get it done. (Maybe he had gotten a good laugh privately when he had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 before he had achieved anything in his Presidency.) He, and not Putin, started the war in Ukraine. Under international law, “the aggressor” is supposed to be the side that STARTED the war, not the side which was mortally endangered by that aggressor and needed to respond in the way it considered existentially necessary in order to respond effectively to and divert that threat, that danger, to one’s nation’s very existence.

    In this case, it is clear that the U.S. regime’s #1 objective is to control the entire world, all countries, including Russia and China, and Iran, and Venezuela, and North Korea, and any other hold-outs. In Russia’s case, this demand by the U.S. regime is so extreme that it placed a requirement upon Finland for Finland to allow the U.S. to position its nuclear weapons in Finland in order for Finland to be allowed to become a NATO member. Finland isn’t as close to Moscow as Ukraine is (it’s 507 miles instead of Ukraine’s 317 miles away from the Kremlin); and, so, it demanded Finland to allow its nuclear missiles, and Finland said yes. That proves how psychopathic the U.S. regime actually is.

    And one should not forget the longstanding post-1991 lies by NATO about what it is: “NATO is not a threat to Russia.”  /   “NATO has tried to build a partnership with Russia, developing dialogue and practical cooperation in areas of common interest. Practical cooperation has been suspended since 2014 in response to Russia’s illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea, Ukraine, which NATO will never recognise.”  /  “NATO is not at war with Russia.”

    But the actual fact is, and has been since NATO’s very start in 1949: NATO has always been the post-WW2 U.S. regime’s main military alliance to conquer Russia. For it to have continued after the Soviet Union ended in 1991, is, and should be punished as, an immense international-war crime. It is simply WW3 pushing to happen. Why, then, are not the world’s other nations demanding that NATO end —  demanding: End NATO Now! NATO has terrorized all decent countries. They are too afraid to condemn it publicly. (Similarly, for a different example” “Israel can get away with mass-murder because the world’s super power, USA, defends and excuses them of accountability.“)

    The 14 November 2014 ARD German Government TV network broadcast interview of Putin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdlXqyZHB9k became removed by ARD when Germany’s Government decided that it wants to go to war against Russia, again (reprising Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa); and so broadcasting this interview had been a mistake. Therefore, ever since at least 12 March 2016, “This video is private.” has resulted from that URL. However, up until at least 14 September 2015, it had been public, and was therefore foertunately being archived by some of its viewers online; so, here it is, from an archived copy, of this hostile, pro-U.S. regime, anti-Russia-Government, interview of Putin, about these matters:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20150914075634/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdlXqyZHB9k

    “English: Exclusive ARD interview with Russian President Putin” | Günther Jauch | ARD. 17.Nov.2014

    10:55: JAUCH: For the West, this [Russia’s annexation of Crimea] was a clear breach of international law. PUTIN: What’s the question? JAUCH: The question is, did you underestimate the reaction of the West? … PUTIN: We find this reaction absolutely disproportionate. … When we’re confronted with the accusations that Russia has violated international law, I can hardly feel anything but astonishment. What is international law? First and foremost, it’s the charter of the United Nations. … A vivid and fresh precedent was set in Kosovo. JAUCH: You mean the judgment of the International Criminal Court, with respect to Kosovo, which said that Kosovo had the right to self-determination, and that the people of Kosovo could vote on whether they wanted to have their own state or not? PUTIN: Exactly so, but there’s more to it than that. The most important thing mentioned there was that in terms of self-determination, people populating a certain area are not obliged to ask the opinion of the central authorities of the state where they are resident. There’s no need to have permission from the central governmental authorities, in order to take the necessary steps to self-determination. This is the most crucial point, and nothing that transpired in Crimea was any different from that which happened in Kosovo. I am deeply convinced that Russia has not violated any international laws. I am very open about this. It’s a fact, and we’ve never concealed it. … Besides, what is democracy? You and I know very well, what does demos mean, it means people. Democracy means the rule by the people. In our case, it’s the people’s right to be independent.

    — earlier in it was:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20150914075634/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdlXqyZHB9k

    8:32: JAUCH: There was an agreement [between the national Government and the Maidan demonstrators, on 20 February 2014] which called for national conciliation and a national government. This agreement lasted about 24 hours and then was dead. You followed the events of the 21st of February very closely. Did you talk with President Obama or Chancellor Merkel at the time? PUTIN: Yes. Indeed, on the 21st of February, it was not only the German Minister of Foreign Affairs who came to the Ukraine, to Kiev, but also the ministers of Foreign Affairs of Poland and France. They acted as guarantors [along with the EU’s representative] for the agreement between the then President Yanukovych and the opposition. They were agreed that the process should be carried out peacefully. They signed this document, this agreement between the authorities and the opposition as guarantors, and the authorities actually thought that it would be executed accordingly. And indeed, I had a phone conversation with the President of the United States on the same evening [February 21st], and we discussed this problem in exactly this manner. However, the next day, a coup took place, despite the guarantees given by the Western powers [Obama’s Polish and French, and EU Minister of Foreign Affairs, stooges], the buildings of the Presidential Administration and the Government were taken over. In this context, I would like to stress the following: [10:00:] Either the European Minister of Foreign Affairs [Lord Catherine Ashton, recorded here in a private 26 February 2014 phone call about this matter] shouldn’t have signed the paper and guaranteed the execution of the agreement, or, having done so they should have insisted on its execution. Instead, they distanced themselves from it. Moreover, they seem to prefer not to remember the agreement, as-if it had never existed. I think it’s completely wrong; and even more so, it’s counterproductive. [10:38]

    The U.S.-and-allied line on why Yanukovych was overthrown was that he had turned down the EU’s offer on 20 November 2013. But actually, that was a set-up deal, set up to be rejected in order for Nuland’s plan then to go directly into action. As I headlined on 27 March 2015, “The $160 Billion Cost: Why Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych Spurned EU’s Offer, on 20 Nov. 2013”. Even earlier than that, Putin had explained this to the Russian people, though without mentioning the $160 billion bottom-line price tag for Ukraine to enter the EU:

    On 5 June 2014, less than a half year after Obama had grabbled Ukraine and started the war there, Putin did an interview about the Ukraine war, on Russia’s Voice of Russia channel. It was broadcast the next day, headlining “Russia never annexed Crimea, no plans to intervene in Ukraine, it’s a Western delusion – Putin”. Here are highlights:

    On what happened in Ukraine:

    Vladimir Putin: There was a conflict and that conflict arose because the former Ukrainian president refused to sign an association agreement with the EU. Russia had a certain stance on this issue. We believed it was indeed unreasonable to sign that agreement because it would have a grave impact on the economy, including the Russian economy. We have 390 economic agreements with Ukraine and Ukraine is a member of the free trade zone within the CIS. And we wouldn’t be able to continue this economic relationship with Ukraine as a member of the free trade zone [with the EU]. We discussed this with our European partners. Instead of continuing the debates by legitimate and diplomatic means, our European friends and our friends from the United States supported the anti-constitutional armed coup. This is what happened. We did not cause this crisis to happen. We were against this course of events.

    The point is no one should be brought to power through an armed anti-constitutional coup, and this is especially true in post-Soviet space where government institutions are not fully mature. When it happened, some people accepted the regime and were happy about it, while other people, say, in eastern and southern Ukraine, just won’t accept it. And it is vital to talk with the people who didn’t accept this change of power instead of sending tanks, as you said yourself, instead of firing missiles at civilians from the air and bombing non-military targets.

    On Russian troops in Ukraine:

    The interviewer told the Russian President that the United States claimed they had evidence that Russia had intervened in the conflict by sending troops and weapons.

    Vladimir Putin: Proof? Why don’t they show it? The entire world remembers the US Secretary of State demonstrating the evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, waving around some test tube with washing powder in the UN Security Council. Eventually, the US troops invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein was hanged and later it turned out there had never been any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq [ever since 1998]. You know, it’s one thing to say things and another to actually have evidence. I will tell you again: no Russian troops…

    There are no armed forces, no Russian ‘instructors’ in southeastern Ukraine, and there never were any.

    On whether Russia wanted to annex Ukraine and tried to destabilize the situation there:

    Vladimir Putin: We never did that. The Ukrainian government must now sit down and talk with their own people instead of using weapons, tanks, planes and helicopters. …

    On Crimea:

    Vladimir Putin: It’s a delusion that Russian troops annexed Crimea. Russian troops did nothing of the kind.

    Russian troops were in Crimea under an international treaty on the deployment of the Russian military base. It’s true that Russian troops helped Crimeans hold a referendum on their (a) independence and (b) desire to join the Russian Federation. No one can prevent these people from exercising a right that is stipulated in Article 1 of the UN Charter, the right of nations to self-determination.

    In accordance with the expression of the will of people who live there, Crimea is part of the Russian Federation and its constituent entity.

    I want everyone to understand this clearly. We conducted an exclusively diplomatic and peaceful dialogue – I want to stress this – with our partners in Europe and the United States. In response to our attempts to hold such a dialogue and to negotiate an acceptable solution, they supported the anti-constitutional state coup in Ukraine, and following that we could not be sure that Ukraine would not become part of the North Atlantic military bloc. In that situation, we could not allow a historical part of the Russian territory with a predominantly ethnic Russian population to be incorporated into an international military alliance, especially because Crimeans wanted to be part of Russia. I am sorry, but we couldn’t act differently. …

    There are basically no Russian troops abroad while US troops are everywhere. There are US military bases everywhere around the world and they are always involved in the fates of other countries even though they are thousands of kilometers away from US borders. …

    On the collapse of the Soviet Union:

    Vladimir Putin: We will not promote Russian nationalism [patriotism yes, nationalism no], and we do not intend to revive the Russian Empire. What did I mean when I said that the Soviet Union’s collapse was one of the largest humanitarian – above all humanitarian – disasters of the 20th century? I meant that all the citizens of the Soviet Union lived in a union state irrespective of their ethnicity, and after its collapse 25 million Russians suddenly became foreign citizens. It was a huge humanitarian disaster. Not a political or ideological disaster, but a purely humanitarian upheaval. Families were divided; people lost their jobs and means of subsistence, and had no means to communicate with each other normally. This was the problem.

    Practically everything that The West alleges about the war in Ukraine is false. It’s intentionally that way, not due to any mere negligence.

    The Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama deserves to be tried at the International Criminal Court for the international war crime of aggression. The biggest problem in this regard is that no sensible definition of “aggression” yet exists in international law. (At the end of that article linked-to there, I proposed a new definition of the term. One of my longer articles explained the history behind that immense collective failure.) For another example of that failure: How is perpetrating an international coup — which in reality is an international war-crime; and it was that against Iran in 1953, Chile in 1973, Ukraine in 2014, and so many others — being addressed in current international law? It’s not; it is instead ignored. The International Criminal Court was designed by victor countries against victim countries. It wasn’t designed to sustain peace and prevent war. It’s a bad joke. However, historians nonetheless have an obligation to 100% truth, never to falsify. In the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’), they shirk that obligation, because 100% truth can cripple their careers. This is the reality, no matter how much historians in some countries (the countries that have dominated the world for far too long) might publicly deny it. Academic scholarship is profoundly corrupted by this reality.

    The latest version of YouGov’s “World’s Most Admired” pollings around the world is the “World’s most admired 2021” version; and it is headlined: “The Obamas remain the world’s most admired man and woman”.

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    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • America’s Chief Deceit Against Russia That Has Led the World to the Brink of WW3

    This is about the U.S. Government’s lie to the naive Gorbachev, which fooled him to accept the U.S. empire’s proposal that East Germany become a part of West Germany, and that the Soviet Union and its one-Party rule end, and that its Warsaw Pact military alliance end while America’s NATO military alliance wouldn’t. In other words: it’s about how the Cold War on America’s side continued secretly (and now again brings America and Russia to the very brink of WW3), after the Cold War on Russia’s side ended in 1991 — ended on the basis of America’s lie and Russia’s trust in that lie:

    On 10 September 2015, I documented this lie because so many U.S.-and-allied ‘historians’ were alleging it not to have happened but to be mere ‘Russian propaganda’ (and, after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, some have even alleged that “European security has in fact benefited significantly from NATO’s enlargement” — a lie on top of the basic one). I also quoted there ‘historians’ who denied this basic lie, so that a reader could see not only the truth but the regime’s agents’ lies denying that it (the West’s Big Lie) had actually happened or that it was important. But then, on 12 December 2017, the U.S. National Security Archives at George Washington University released even fuller documentation of the lie that had occurred by the U.S. Government, and here are highlights from their documentation of it, so that this continuing Big Lie will be recognized by every sane person as being what it is, the Big Lie that might end up producing World War Three:

    Memorandum of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker in Moscow.

    Memcon from 2/9/90 meeting w/USSR Prem. Gorbachev & FM Shevardnaze, Moscow, USSR

    Repeating what Bush said at the Malta summit in December 1989, Baker tells Gorbachev: “The President and I have made clear that we seek no unilateral advantage in this process” of inevitable German unification. Baker goes on to say, “We understand the need for assurances to the countries in the East. If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.” Later in the conversation, Baker poses the same position as a question, “would you prefer a united Germany outside of NATO that is independent and has no US forces or would you prefer a united Germany with ties to NATO and assurances that there would be no extension of NATO’s current jurisdiction eastward?” The declassifiers of this memcon actually redacted Gorbachev’s response that indeed such an expansion would be “unacceptable” – but Baker’s letter to Kohl the next day, published in 1998 by the Germans, gives the quote.

    Source: U.S. Department of State, FOIA 199504567 (National Security Archive Flashpoints Collection, Box 38).

    *****

    Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner

    Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).

    The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels. …

    The conversations before Kohl’s assurance involved explicit discussion of NATO expansion, the Central and East European countries, and how to convince the Soviets to accept unification. For example, on February 6, 1990, when Genscher met with British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, the British record showed Genscher saying, “The Russians must have some assurance that if, for example, the Polish Government left the Warsaw Pact one day, they would not join NATO the next.” (See Document 2)

    *****

    In addition, there is this: On 11 August 2014, Mary Elise Sarotte headlined at the U.S. empire’s own Foreign Affairs journal, “A Broken Promise?” as-if there still had been any doubt that it was that, and so an honest title for her article would have been “A Broken Promise” or even “A Broken Promise!” Because there’s no question about it. She reported not only that it definitely was a lie, and one by the U.S. Government itself; and that U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush told America’s stooge leaders, starting on 24 February 1990, that it was going to be a broken promise because “‘TO HELL WITH THAT! [promise]’ HE [Bush] SAID. ‘WE PREVAILED, THEY DIDN’T.’” In other words: on the night of 24 February 1990, Bush started secretly ordering his vassals to continue forward with the intention for the U.S. alliance ultimately to swallow-up not only the rest of the USSR but all of the Warsaw Pact and finally Russia itself. And this has been precisely what the U.S. regime and its colonies have been doing, up until 24 February 2022, when Russia finally put its foot down, to stop NATO’s coming within around a mere 300 miles of The Kremlin.

    Consequently, even if NATO served a constructive purpose during 1945-1991, it has afterward only endangered the world — including especially Europe, making Europe be again the main battlefield if another World War occurs — and thus its continuance after 1991 can reasonably be considered a massive international crime by the U.S. Government.

    NATO is an extension of the will of the U.S. Government, and this is so blatant a fact so that Article 13, which is the only portion of NATO’s charter, the North Atlantic Treaty, that says anything about how a member-nation may either quit NATO or be expelled from NATO, places the U.S. Government in charge of processing a “denunciation” (voluntary withdrawal) — the Charter’s term for resigning from NATO. This term “denunciation” (instead of “withdrawal”) clearly means that if any member does quit, then that will be interpreted by NATO as constituting a hostile act, which will have consequences (the resigning member will be placed onto NATO’s unspoken list of enemies). NATO’s charter has no provision by which a member can be expelled. Moreover, it fails to include any provision by which the charter can be amended or changed in any manner. No charter or constitution that fails to include a provision by which it may be amended can reasonably be acceptable to a democracy: it is so rigid as to be 100% brittle, impossible to adapt to changing challenges. The NATO charter itself is a dictatorial never a democratic document. It takes up, for the U.S. regime after 1945, the function that the Nazi Party had held prior to that in and for Germany: after Hitler died, America took up and has held high his torch for global dictatorship. In fact, “the Government of the United States of America” is also stated in Article 10 as the entity to process applications to join NATO, and, in Article 11, as being the processor of “ratifications” of applications to join.

    This Treaty is an imperial document, of the U.S. empire, none other. And, after 1991, its continuation is based only on lies, including the one that now is coming to a head in Ukraine, which is not a NATO member, though Biden said it is — he said recently of Ukraine, that “they are part of NATO.” Tyrants imagine that what they want can simply be willed into existence, and they don’t care about the essential needs of others. Such individuals are driven by their own hatreds. That is what stands at the very top of NATO.

    And this is why we are now at the nuclear brink, because of an organization that ought to have ended in 1991.

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