Author: Eric Zuesse

  • On May 31st, Politico headlined “Biden secretly gave Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia with US weapons: It’s a major reversal that will help Ukraine to better defend its second-largest city.” It reported:

    The Biden administration has quietly given Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia — solely near the area of Kharkiv — using U.S.-provided weapons, three U.S. officials and two other people familiar with the move said Thursday, a major reversal that will help Ukraine to better defend its second-largest city.

    “The president recently directed his team to ensure that Ukraine is able to use U.S. weapons for counter-fire purposes in Kharkiv so Ukraine can hit back at Russian forces hitting them or preparing to hit them,” one of the U.S. officials said, adding that the policy of not allowing long-range strikes inside Russia “has not changed.”

    Ukraine asked the U.S. to make this policy change only after Russia’s offensive on Kharkiv began this month, the official added. All the people were granted anonymity to discuss internal decisions that haven’t been announced. …

    In effect, Ukraine can now use American-provided weapons, such as rockets and rocket launchers, to shoot down launched Russian missiles heading toward Kharkiv, at troops massing just over the Russian border near the city, or Russian bombers launching bombs toward Ukrainian territory. But the official said Ukraine cannot use those weapons to hit civilian infrastructure or launch long-range missiles, such as the Army Tactical Missile System, to hit military targets deep inside Russia.

    It’s a stunning shift the administration initially said would escalate the war by more directly involving the U.S. in the fight. But worsening conditions for Ukraine on the battlefield –– namely Russia’s advances and improved position in Kharkiv –– led the president to change his mind. …

    What this means is that if Volodmyr Zelensky (whose legal term of office as Ukraine’s President ended on May 20) decides that Ukraine should use American weapons and bombs to hit “military targets” that are in Russia and “near the area of Kharkiv,” then the U.S. Government will not object. The article does not say how the phrase “military targets” there is being defined, nor how “near the area of Kharkiv” is being defined.

    The U.S. Government has been, to a large extent if not fully, operating or in control over the operation of those U.S.-made weapons; and, therefore, one may reasonably presume that any decision as to whether to use those weapons and bombs in any given instance will have the prior approval of both the Ukrainian and the American Governments.

    One also may reasonably assume that if ever Ukraine would violate Biden’s order in this regard, then Biden would condemn Ukraine for having done so. Whether or not Russia’s Government would take that as being sincerely an expression that only Ukraine was to blame for that U.S.-and-Ukraine attack against Russia is impossible reasonably to predict in advance. Consequently, if the limitations upon what Ukraine’s government can do with America’s weapons and bombs are not yet already over the limits of what will precipitate a nuclear attack by Russia against the United States and its colonies (‘allies’), as having “crossed over Russia’s red lines” of what Russia considers to constitute an acceptable violation of Russia’s national security, then how Russia will respond in any case if Ukraine will violate Biden’s command and Biden will condemn Ukraine for that, is likewise impossible reasonably to predict in advance. However, if Russia will in such an instance unleash its estimated 5,580 nuclear weapons against the U.S. and its colonies, then there will be a debate among the immediate survivors of WW3 regarding whether the villain here was Biden or instead Putin, or both.

    If WW3 will happen before America’s November 5 elections, then if such elections will be held, either Donald Trump or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be the President starting in 2025. If WW3 will happen after such elections, then America’s voters today should know that on May 28, the Washington Post, headlined “Trump makes sweeping promises to donors on audacious fundraising tour”, and reported that at one fundraising event for billionaires and centi-millionaires (not for mere voters), “he suggested that he would have bombed Moscow and Beijing if Russia invaded Ukraine or China invaded Taiwan.” In other words: to him, regarding the current war in Ukraine, and regarding the long-sought-by-the-U.S.-Government war in Taiwan, those two wars and to-become wars, are not merely “other people’s wars,” but these are our wars — meaning those American billionaires’ and centi-millionaires’ wars — to which he, as the U.S. President, would respond immediately by bombing, respectively, Russia and China.

    Though the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia (which blacklists [blocks from linking to] sites that aren’t CIA-approved) says nothing about the former President of Ukraine Volodmyr Zelenskyy being no longer legally after 20 May 2024 Ukraine’s President, and he did announce that the 20 May 2024 elections would be cancelled, he still does serve as-if he is Ukraine’s President, and is not questioned about that in U.S.-and-allied media. No polling has been done regarding whom Ukrainians would vote for if they were allowed to vote. However, on 15 February 2024, Yahoo News headlined “New poll shows Zelenskyy’s approval dips 5 points in Ukraine after departure of General Zaluzhnyi” and buried in its news-report that the poll showed that as-of February 24, the level of “trust” in leading political figures by the Ukrainian public were: Valerii Zaluzhnyi – 94%; Kyrylo Budanov – 66%; Volodymyr Zelenskyy – 64%; Serhiy Prytula – 61%; and Oleksandr Syrskyi – 40%. Zaluzhnyi was appointed Ukraine’s Ambassador to UK on 7 March 2024, after having been fired by Zelenskyy as Ukraine’s top General. Zelenskyy replaced him with Oleksandr Syrskyi.

    In any case, Ukraine has been ruled by America’s President ever since February 2014, and Russians have long known that this is so.

    The post U.S. President Biden Now Authorizes Ukraine to Start WW3 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The newly elected leader of Taiwan, Lai Ching-te, said in his May 20 inaugural speech, that all of China is one country, which is ruled by the leader of Taiwan, himself. His argument for this was that when the forces of (the Truman-backed) Chiang Kai-shek, who were beaten by the forces of Mao Tse-tung, escaped to the Japanese-occupied island of Taiwan after Japan was defeated in WW2, they set up a Government there and proclaimed it to be the Government of China and created a ‘Constitution’ for it that asserted itself to be the Constitution for all of China.

    However, according to the “Constitution of the Republic of China (Taiwan)”, which was publicly announced on 1 January 1947, that narrative is simply not true: the escapees from mainland China who had set up that government in Taiwan, made no claim at that time alleging they controlled and ruled over anything but “Taiwan.” (On the other hand, the Truman Administration got Taiwan’s government appointed to the China-seats at the U.N. Security Council and General Assembly, and this remained in force until 25 October 1971 when mainland China received those seats instead.)

    Lai’s speech ignored this historical fact — that the Constitution alleged to pertain only to Taiwan — and stated the opposite, by using the following argument:

    We have a nation insofar as we have sovereignty. Right in the first chapter of our Constitution, it says that “The sovereignty of the Republic of China shall reside in the whole body of citizens,” and that “Persons possessing the nationality of the Republic of China shall be citizens of the Republic of China.” These two articles tell us clearly: The Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China are not subordinate to each other. All of the people of Taiwan must come together to safeguard our nation; all our political parties ought to oppose annexation and protect sovereignty; and no one should entertain the idea of giving up our national sovereignty in exchange for political power.

    The U.S.-empire propaganda vehicle, Britain’s Financial Times, grudgingly headlined on May 21, “China has a point about Taiwan’s new leader: Lai Ching-te’s language on sovereignty has already strayed from the path taken by his more cautious predecessor”, and reported:

    China is right to say that Lai is straying from the path of his predecessor Tsai Ing-wen — a leader whom China refused to engage but who managed to keep a delicate peace. And some question the wisdom of taking such a gamble at a time of high tension.

    “Lai’s stance is a step back towards more confrontation, undoing much of Tsai’s line,” says Chao Chun-shan, a Taiwan academic who advised Tsai and her three predecessors on China policy. He argues that it puts China’s leader Xi Jinping in a difficult spot. “Xi doesn’t want a showdown now, before the result of the US election is clear.”

    Lai ran for president with a pledge to follow Tsai’s China policy and preserve the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. …

    But critics say Lai deviated from his promises this week during an inaugural address that used conspicuously different language, while also spelling out some of the facts that most jar Beijing.

    They failed to identify what ‘facts’ they were referring to there, but said only:

    He cited the ROC constitution’s language that sovereignty resides with the people, who are of ROC nationality. “This tells us clearly: the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China are not subordinate to each other,” he concluded.

    While this textual analysis may verge on hair splitting, China policy experts say Lai is in danger of upending the ambiguity that has provided political space to allow Beijing’s territorial claim to sit alongside Taiwan’s de facto independence without sparking conflict.

    “He is raising the stakes by stressing a difference in sovereignty between the two countries,” says Tso Chen-dong, a professor at National Taiwan University who has advised the Kuomintang (KMT), the opposition party that embraces the notion of Taiwan being part of a greater Chinese nation. The KMT argues the ROC’s territory, under its constitution, still includes all of China; what divides it from Beijing is not a battle over sovereignty, but a question of jurisdiction.

    Even the pro U.S-empire “Course Hero” online site gets the history here right when it says:

    In 1949, China ended a long civil war. The victorious communist forces led by Mao Zedong established their capital in Beijing. About two million supporters of the losing side, known as the nationalists, retreated to Taiwan. China was divided between two governments, one on the mainland and one in Taiwan, that each considered itself China’s legitimate ruler. The government on the mainland never gave up its claim on Taiwan, and Taiwan never declared independence.

    Lai did in his inaugural speech go even beyond declaring Taiwan’s independence — he declared himself to be the ruler of all of China, including mainland China. He is demanding to reverse the fact that Mao won that civil war and that Chiang lost the civil war.

    By contrast, the Financial Times article said “Lai spoke of ‘China’ throughout. He also tackled the controversial issue of sovereignty head-on.”

    The tactics by which U.S.-and-allied propaganda-vehicles warp meanings, and warp realities, 180 degrees to their exact opposites, are instructive models for any of the sophistry professions.

    Also on May 21, the house-organ of the real China headlined “’Lai-style Taiwan independence’ agenda is a dead-end: Global Times editorial” and opened:

    On May 20, Lai Ching-te assumed the role of Taiwan region’s new leader and delivered his inaugural speech. Lai shamelessly stated in his speech that “the Republic of China Taiwan is a sovereign, independent nation” and “the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China are not subordinate to each other,” spewing various “Taiwan independence” fallacies and hostile provocations against the Chinese mainland, once again exposing his stubborn nature as “a worker for Taiwan independence.” This speech can be described as a blatant “Taiwan independence manifesto” and “a declaration of harm to Taiwan.” It is extremely dangerous, and the Taiwan compatriots should be particularly vigilant and united in opposition.

    We noticed that in this speech, the term “democracy” was mentioned 31 times, and “peace” 21 times, which precisely exposes the anxiety of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities – they are well aware that what they are doing now is pushing Taiwan into a dangerous pit of war and danger, hence desperately using “democracy” as a fig leaf and talisman to cover themselves. It is clear to all discerning eyes that the so-called “democracy” is nothing but inferior makeup smeared on the face of “Taiwan independence,” unable to conceal its true face of “seeking independence by relying on foreign support and by force.”

    In the positioning of cross-Straits relations, Lai boldly defines the two sides of the Straits as “two countries,” listing “Taiwan,” “Republic of China Taiwan,” and “Republic of China” as so-called “national names,” further advancing on the “one China, one Taiwan” path of “Taiwan independence.” This blatant “two states” theory cannot change the fact that Taiwan is only a part of China, nor can it stop the historical trend of reunification of the motherland. Its only effect is to exacerbate the tension in the Taiwan Straits and make Taiwan society pay a high price for the reckless gamble of “Taiwan independence.”

    While treating compatriots from the mainland as “foreigners,” Lai in his speech regards Western anti-China forces as “family members,” throughout the speech filled with servility and begging for mercy from Western anti-China forces, which is very shameful. In order to gain the support of Western anti-China forces, he claims that “the world greeting a new Taiwan,” Taiwan is “an important link in the global chain of democracies,” ” Taiwan is strategically positioned in the first island chain,” and so on. These remarks of selling out Taiwan treat the hard-earned social achievements and wealth accumulated by the Taiwan residents for decades as offerings to anti-China forces in the West, reducing Taiwan to a pawn of the US and giving it the appearance of “unworthy descendants.”

    Even more dangerous is the subtle manifestation of the arrogant ambition of “seeking independence by force” in his speech. On the one hand, Lai echoes the fallacies of certain Western countries, smearing the mainland as a “threat”; on the other hand, he attempts to indoctrinate the residents in Taiwan into cannon fodder for “Taiwan independence,” openly advocating for raising the citizens’ “defense awareness,” fully exposing the sinister intention of sacrificing innocent people on the island for the selfish desire of “Taiwan independence.” …

    The U.S. Government said, and signed with China’s Government, in 1972, the Shanghai Communique, including “The U.S. side declared: The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.” George W. Bush’s Administration tried unsuccessfully in 2007 to outlaw internationally the phrase “Taiwan is a part of China”; and, so, the Shanghai Communique has remained the official U.S. Government policy to this day. (It hopes to get China to invade Taiwan in order for the U.S. to have a supposed pretext to then ‘defend that independent nation’ ‘against China’s aggression’, by invading China.)

    On 19 July 2023, I headlined and documented “Biden Wants to Invade/Conquer China”. It opened:

    His plan is to arm Taiwan and entice it to announce its complete independence from China — that Taiwan is no mere province of China but instead an independent country — which announcement would then immediately force China either to invade China or else to accept Taiwan’s becoming a separate and independent country.

    Taiwan’s new leader has complied with that, even in his inaugural address. Will Biden go to war against China in the months leading up to the November 5 U.S. elections if China invades Taiwan in order to make clear to Taiwan’s voters that they had been suckered by U.S.-imperial propaganda to choose as their ‘President’ someone who would declare that Taiwan is not only independent of China but ruling over China? How much international backing would the U.S. regime have if it did that?

    Taiwan’s billionaires — like Taiwan’s public — are hardly unified about whether Taiwan should concede that it is a Province of China (as it long had been), On 7 August 2023, the Hong Kong based South China Morning Post headlined “Two titans of tech are offering two very different views of Taiwan” and reported that whereas Foxconn’s leader Terry Guo was opposed to the independence movement and thought it wouldn’t win power, “Morris Chang, founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) who is often called the godfather of the island’s tech industry, said he didn’t think there was likely to be a war across the Taiwan Strait,” and,

    We all hope he is right, but of course he would say that. After all, some Washington politicians have openly declared that at the first sign of conflict, the US military would blow up all of TSMC chip foundries to deny them to the mainland Chinese.

    These billionaires are aware that the independence movement threatens them, but do nothing about it. On the other hand, Radio Taiwan International headlined on 16 August 2022, “UMC Founder: KMT needs to give up ‘one China policy’” and opened:

    United Microelectronics (UMC) Founder Robert Tsao says the Kuomintang (KMT) party needs to give up its one China policy. He made the remarks in an interview with Radio Taiwan International on Tuesday.  The UMC is the world’s second-largest contract microchip maker.

    Tsao recently announced he is donating NT$3 billion (US$100 million) for Taiwan’s defense. As China has been elevating its military threat against Taiwan, he said the people of Taiwan need to be determined to strengthen the nation’s defense abilities to deter China from attacking Taiwan.

    He criticized the opposition KMT’s 1992 Consensus policy in which Taiwan and China agree to one China, but each side has its own interpretation. He said that’s because China has never accepted another interpretation.

    On 15 January 2024, Australia’s Financial Review bannered “Billionaire urges Taiwan to ‘prepare for the worst’”, and reported:

    Billionaire Robert Tsao warns that Taiwan’s 23 million people must be prepared for an eventual war with China, even though the risk of an invasion has eased while Xi Jinping fights economic challenges at home.

    The 76-year-old founder of one of Taiwan’s first semiconductor manufacturers has retired from big business to devote his life to what he believes is protecting the island nation’s interests from its aggressive neighbour.

    So, not only is he not doing nothing about it, but he is actually encouraging what America’s Government is encouraging (by its donating U.S. weapons to Taiwan): an open public declaration of Taiwan’s independence from China.

    The only difference from Lai’s policy is that the policy of Tsao and unofficially of the current U.S. Government is that Taiwan and China are two separate countries and are at war against each other.

    That policy, of course, is exactly what the world’s biggest armaments manufacturers, which are headquartered in the United States, would want and lobby for. Whether Tsao is receiving any behind-the-scenes financial benefits from the U.S. for this isn’t yet known.

    The post The Newly Elected Leader of Taiwan Says He’s the Only Legitimate Ruler over All of China first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • There was much concern, in international circles, about the the U.S. Government’s recent efforts to open a NATO office in Tokyo so as to extend its military alliance against Russia to become also a military alliance against China. When that initiative scared some other NATO members, it was stopped, and the fear temporarily subsided. But then suddenly, on April 8, it was announced that (despite some hurdles that would first need to be overcome) America’s new (2021) anti-China military alliance, AUKUS, is “considering” (meaning here intending) to, in effect, bring into that alliance Japan (which has 79 U.S. military bases). On April 10, U.S. President Joe Biden and Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida met at the White House to plan how this would be done. The next day, Defense News bannered “AUKUS allies float path for Japan to join tech sharing pact”. So, the U.S., which has 900 foreign military bases and actually spends around half of the entire planet’s military expenses, and therefore has no actual need for any military ‘allies’, but instead brings them in to serve as proxies for itself and to be able to say (for propaganda-purposes) “we” when referring to itself, so as to ‘justify’ its numerous invasions and to prevent any of its ‘allied’ (or colonial) countries from criticizing it, is now effectively displaying the reality to anyone who worries about such matters. This reality is: Yes, the U.S. Government is demanding to, and will, control China, too. The U.S. already has military bases against China in Australia, Guam, Japan, South Korea, Marshall Islands, Mariana Islands, Palau, Philippines, Samoa, Singapore, and Thailand; so, it can invade China almost instantly from plenty of bases to China’s south and east.

    Even some Australians (though hardly yet any Brits to my knowledge) are raising alarms at this accession of Japan into AUKUS. For example, the Australian commentator John Menadue, a former Cabinet Minister, published at his blog on April 16th, “Lest We Forget: Japan joining AUKUS a stark reminder of China’s Century of Humiliation”, by  Robert Macklin, which opened:

    With the addition of Japan, AUKUS ceases to be a device to supply nuclear powered submarines to Australia several decades in the future but a stark reminder of the oppressive powers that abused Chinese sovereignty in the 19th and 20th centuries.

    It was Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles who first suggested that the inclusion of Japan in the AUKUS group was a natural ‘evolution’ of the pact. As such it was risible, if understandable; Marles is not the sharpest knife in the Cabinet drawer.

    But when it was adopted by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese – and then the American president Joe Biden – there is cause for concern. With the addition of Japan, AUKUS ceases to be a device to supply nuclear powered submarines to Australia several decades in the future but a stark reminder of the oppressive powers that abused Chinese sovereignty in the 19th and 20th centuries.

    Japan’s membership could hardly be more provocative to a country that suffered the indignity of Japanese control of its Taiwan province for 50 years from 1895 and its invasion of the mainland throughout the second world war.

    The notorious Massacre of Nanking – where the atrocities included 200,000 murders and 20,000 rapes of the civilian population – was but one of hundreds of outrages visited upon the Chinese people. …

    When he referred there to America’s having created AUKUS as “a device to supply nuclear powered submarines to Australia several decades in the future,” he was referring to the shady excuses that it gave at the time for creating AUKUS, and which entailed an open affront to France — including coercion forcing France to cancel a lucrative contract France had with Australia’s Government, which affront France promised to (but never did) retaliate against the U.S. for. But, now, this bringing of the first non-Anglo member into America’s (initially pure-Anglo) military alliance against China, proves that its real target, and the real aim of AUKUS, is to conquer China — nothing less than that (just as NATO demands to win its war against Russia in the battlefield of Ukraine on Russia’s border).

    On April 15, Lin Congyi, of China’s Defense Ministry, headlined “AUKUS makes more mistakes by roping in Japan”, and he commented:

    Recently, the US, the UK, and Australia announced that Japan would join AUKUS, causing great concern among the international community. This is the first time that the three countries have announced a partner since the organization was established in September 2021. Japanese officials responded by saying that Japan “recognizes” the importance of AUKUS. Many Japanese citizens criticized AUKUS for promoting membership expansion regardless of concerns from all walks of life, which will intensify camp confrontation and the risks of nuclear proliferation, and undermine peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region.

    AUKUS is short for the Trilateral Security Partnership between Australia, the UK and the US, which has two main pillars. Pillar I focuses on the deployment of nuclear submarines in Australia and the joint research, development and construction of the next-generation nuclear submarines by the three countries. Cooperation in this area is “limited to the US, UK and Australia”. Pillar II focuses on the joint development and deployment of new technologies to enhance advanced combat capabilities.

    Why did they choose Japan in the first place? Analysts believe that there are two reasons. From a technical perspective, the US, the UK and Australia have their respective shortcomings in the field of high technology, while Japan, with advantages in the fields of hypersonic weapons, quantum technology, electronic warfare and artificial intelligence, can play a greater role in defense technology. On the part of Japan, it hopes to improve its defense capabilities and increase its military influence in the Asia-Pacific region by sharing sensitive military technologies with the US, the UK, Australia, and other countries.

    Strategically, these countries also have their own calculations. The US sees AUKUS as a key part of the implementation of the so-called “Indo-Pacific Strategy” and wants to attract more allies to join in order to achieve the goal of containing China. The UK is pushing ahead with the “Global Britain” strategy, and its security cooperation with Japan is becoming deeper. It hopes, in a bid to become more involved in Asia-Pacific affairs with the aid of Japan and expand its influence in the Asia-Pacific region.

    Australia, on the other hand, put high expectations on Pillar II due to the sluggish progress of Pillar I and thus supported the inclusion of Japan. As for Japan, it wants to use AUKUS as a new tool to carry out its military agenda in the Asia-Pacific region and contain China. …

    The U.S. Government, and its UK partner, are going for broke, in order to win an all-inclusive U.S.-UK empire — a U.S./UK global dictatorship that includes all of the world’s nations as its colonies (INCLUDING Russia and China). The idea here is nothing less than to terminate national sovereignty and replace it with an international global dictatorship by the U.S./UK partnership: all sovereignty being based in Washington and London, no longer under the internal control of any other individual nation. This is the contemporary U.S./UK vision for their Brave New World. Never has that vision been more clear than it now is: indisputable. (The links here document it.) If this effort to bring Japan into AUKUS succeeds, it will be a virtual declaration of war against China.

    As regards China’s alleged imperial ambitions, an April 16 article in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post headlined “China was never an imperialist state” and pointed out that “it could be highly problematic to map directly the Western experience of empire, such as when we talk about the Spanish, Portuguese, British, or even the American empires” because “The Chinese empire, through different dynasties, often functioned more like the opposite of an empire, and the oft-cited tribute system frequently worked in reverse,” meaning that what some Westerners have alleged to be or to have been ‘imperialism’ by China was actually dynastic feuds within China. China’s invasions were internal — as contrasted to the Western experience, which explored, exploited, and invaded, far away from the homeland, in order to conquer, control, and extract from, a distant culture. What America is now trying to do to China (make it become yet another U.S. colony), has no parallel to anything that China has ever done. It is pure foreign aggression — which since 1945 has been the U.S. specialty.

    The post America’s Now Evident Plan to Use AUKUS to Spark War With China first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Washington Post columnist, Catherine Rampell, headlined on April 5, “The Great Medicaid Purge was even worse than expected” and reported:

    It’s a tale of two countries: In some states, public officials are trying to make government work for their constituents. In others, they aren’t.

    This week marks one year since the Great Medicaid Purge (a.k.a. the “unwinding”) began. Early during the pandemic, in exchange for additional funds, Congress temporarily prohibited states from kicking anyone off Medicaid. But as of April 1, 2023, states were allowed to start disenrolling people.

    Some did so immediately. So far, at least 19.6 million people have lost Medicaid coverage. That’s higher than the initial forecast, 15 million, even though the process hasn’t yet finished.

    Some enrollees were kicked off because they were evaluated and found to be no longer eligible for the public health insurance program — maybe because (happily!) their incomes rose, or because they aged out of a program. But as data from KFF shows, the vast majority, nearly 70 percent, lost coverage because of paperwork issues. …

    These “paperwork issues” were added by self-alleged conservatives, or Republicans, in order to reduce the number of beneficiaries, supposedly in order to protect taxpayers against “waste, fraud or abuse,” by poor people, against taxpayers. Wikipedia’s article on Medicaid says:

    Medicaid is the largest source of funding for medical and health-related services for people with low income in the United States, providing free health insurance to 85 million low-income and disabled people as of 2022;[3] in 2019, the program paid for half of all U.S. births.[4] As of 2017, the total annual cost of Medicaid was just over $600 billion, of which the federal government contributed $375 billion and states an additional $230 billion.[4] States are not required to participate in the program, although all have since 1982. In general, Medicaid recipients must be U.S. citizens or qualified non-citizens, and may include low-income adults, their children, and people with certain disabilities.[5] As of 2022 45% of those receiving Medicaid or CHIP were children.[3]

    Medicaid also covers long-term services and supports, including both nursing home care and home- and community-based services, for those with low incomes and minimal assets; the exact qualifications vary by state. Medicaid spent $215 billion on such care in 2020, over half of the total $402 billion spent on such services.[6] Of the 7.7 million Americans who used long-term services and supports in 2020, about 5.6 million were covered by Medicaid, including 1.6 million of the 1.9 million in institutional settings.[7]

    Medicaid covers healthcare costs for people with low incomes, while Medicare is a universal program providing health coverage for the elderly.

    Medicaid is means-tested (it’s for only poor people), whereas Medicare is not. President Lyndon Baines Johnson introduced Medicaid in 1965, and Medicare in 1966. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had introduced the federal taxation-based trust-funded Social Security retirement program in 1935; and both of those Presidents were Democrats, which used to be the Party that had some ideological commitment to workers, whereas the Republican Party, ever since a Confederate’s (pro-slavery) bullet assassinated the first (and the only progressive, or pro-democratic) Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, in 1865, has been, and is, committed only to investors, which is to say, only to the class of only rich individuals, the owners of businesses — managers instead of workers and consumers.

    There are just two basic philosophies of government: either it is democratic, meaning one-person-one-vote rule (rule equally by all residents), or else it is aristocratic (rule unequally by residents on the basis of each person’s wealth), meaning one-dollar-one-vote rule (which is the way that a corporation is run: the more shares a person owns, the more of a say in managing it the individual willl have). The Democratic Party used to believe in democracy (government rule as being a right that each resident has equally), and the Republican Party after Lincoln was shot has always believed in aristocracy (government rule as a privilege that only certain residents have, they generally being the rich ones, but also sometimes only Christians). Consequently, the Democratic Party was “populist,” and the Republican Party was “elitist.” (Republicans — after Lincoln — were the Party of “business,” meaning of the owners of corporations.)

    In America, as in all countries, there is also race as a political factor, and it’s traditionally categorized as being based upon either nationality or else religion of a person’s ancestors, or else (for instantaneous categorization) the individual’s appearance marks one’s ‘race’. But, whatever a ‘race’ is, racism or support for race being considered as a qualification for receiving a benefit from government or else as being a qualification for exclusion from receiving that benefit, can be supported both by populists and by elitists.

    However, whereas racism is intrinsic to aristocracy, it is not intrinsic to democracy. Aristocracy believes in hereditary right, such as to pass wealth on to one’s children, whereas democracy rejects that and can survive only where intergenerational transmission of privately acquired wealth is by law either severely limited or else totally prohibited. And that exclusionary right for an aristocrat, to pass on to the next generation the person’s private wealth, is what produces, after many successive generations, increasingly concentrated wealth, and increasingly widespread poverty, which then institutionalizes aristocratic government and rule by privilege, instead of rule by individuals’ work and merit. Consequently, any democrat (or populist) who tolerates aristocracy, is tolerating the end of democracy.

    For example, many of America’s Confederates considered themselves to be democrats but supported slavery of Blacks. Not only the Confederate aristocracy did. But — just as in Israel, there is no democracy, because only the Jews can vote there — the Confederacy was no democracy, because only the ‘Whites’ could vote there.

    Similarly, Germany’s Nazis weren’t only the aristocracy, but also many Germans who considered themselves to be populists, and Hitler exploited this widespread illogicality among the public, in order to create his extremely elitist-racist-imperialist (or ideologically nazi) nation.

    The theory behind the cutbacks in Medicaid is that the poor are to blame for their poverty. Any aristocrat believes it to at least some extent, despite its being stupid. It is stupid because any aristocrat knows that money is power: the power to hire people to do your will, and to fire ones who won’t or can’t. Any aristocrat experiences that reality all the time. The most-powerless individuals in any society are the poorest. Obviously, something causes a person to be poor, but heredity — being born poor and surrounded by only poor people — will always be the biggest portion of that cause. The people with the power are the aristocrats, the super-rich few who own the vast majority of the nation’s private wealth. They create — and, by means of their lobbyists and media and politicians, constantly impose — the system that produces, the ever-increasing concentration of wealth and so of power. The poor don’t, and can’t. And won’t. Consequently, any theory that the poor ought to be blamed for their poverty is an obvious lie, which benefits the richest. Of course, an individual also has some effect on his or her getting and staying out of poverty, but, in an aristocracy, the system itself has a much bigger effect on that.

    By contrast against the aristocratic view, an intelligent democrat acknowledges (not merely to oneself but also publicly) that money is power, and consequently blames the super-rich — the very few who possess most of it — for society’s problems. Not the poor. And not any ‘race’. This isn’t to say that there aren’t intergenerational factors that help to explain how wealthy a given individual is — of course, there are (and that is the problem). But whereas a democrat tries to reduce them, an aristocrat tries to enlarge them. And that’s the ideological difference between an aristocrat and a democrat.

    If America’s supposed effort to increase economic opportunity for poor people is to rely upon the poor ‘raising themselves up by their own bootstraps’, then it isn’t relying upon the billionaires to have the responsibility for solving this problem. But they, the super-rich, are the ones who actually caused the problem by their controlling not only their corporations but the press, and the lobbyists, and the politicians, who have so deceived and so controlled the public, as to have instituted this widely oppressive system, which the poorest suffer the most. It would not exist in an authentically one-person-one-vote government and nation and culture. It can exist only in an aristocracy (which is what post-WW2 America is).

    The most efficient way to minimize social inequality is to replace aristocracy with democracy. It’s that simple, and that difficult. Only the super-rich possess the means to do it, but none of them actually wants to. Are all of them psychopaths? They benefit from the system that they have imposed. They benefit not only in wealth but in their corporate protective immunity from having to go to prison for any corporate crimes they require their subordinates to do in order to generate their wealth. For example, on April 10, Good Jobs First headlined “The Trillion-Dollar Mark: Corporate Misconduct Cases Reach a Dubious Milestone,” and reported:

    Regulatory fines, criminal penalties, and class-action settlements paid by corporations in the United States since 2000 have now surpassed $1 trillion. Total payouts for corporate misconduct grew from around $7 billion per year in the early 2000s to more than $50 billion annually in recent years, according to a new report by Good Jobs First.

    This amounts to a seven-fold increase in current dollars — a 300% increase in constant dollars.

    These figures are derived from Violation Tracker, a wide-ranging database containing information on more than 600,000 cases from about 500 federal, state and local regulatory agencies and prosecutors as well as court data on major private lawsuits.

    The database shows that 127 large parent companies have each paid more than $1 billion in fines and settlements over the past quarter-century. The most penalized industries are financial services and pharmaceuticals, followed by oil and gas, motor vehicles, and utilities. …

    Among the findings:

    • Bank of America has by far the largest penalty total at $87 billion. It and other banks, both domestic and foreign, account for six of the 10 most penalized parent companies.

    • Other bad actors include BP (mainly because of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill), Volkswagen (because of its emissions software cheating scandal), Johnson & Johnson (largely because of big settlements in cases alleging its talcum powder causes cancer), and PG&E (due to cases accusing it of causing or contributing to wildfires in the West).

    • Recidivism is a major issue. Half a dozen parent companies—all banks—have each paid $1 million or more in over 100 different cases, led by Bank of America with 225. Two dozen parents have at least 50 of these cases on their record.

    • All of the top 10 and 95 of the 100 most penalized parent companies are publicly traded. The most penalized privately held company is Purdue Pharma, which is going out of business for its role in causing the opioid crisis.

    • In more than 500 of the cases involving criminal charges, the U.S. Justice Department offered the defendant a deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreement. …

    That’s $1T during the reported 23-year period, and these fines are mere wrist-slaps to those stockholders’ annual profits. But the victims lost vastly more than that, and this report made no mention of anyone having gone to prison for any of these corporate crimes, though at least two of them did — Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried, both of whom had robbed their fellow-investors. But, for example, the Purdue Pharma case had killed at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, and yet none of the Sackler family that owned it, and that drove their employees to perpetrate it, had even a possibility of going to prison for any of those deaths, nor for the vast other harms that their personal wealth-building had driven.

    In an aristocracy, the only super-rich who ever get imprisoned are ones who have harmed other corporate investors — never ones who have harmed or even killed vast multitudes of the middle and bottom economic classes.

    Remarkably, the corrupt Democratic Party President of the United States has taken to the hustings in his fake-‘populist’ re-election campaign by citing a 2021 White House economic study, which calculated that America’s billionaires are taxed at far lower rates of income than regular Americans are. It found that if the 400 richest (highest-wealth) Americans (all of whom were multi-billionaires, and not merely billionaires, and who donate collectively around 30% of all of the money that is expended in U.S. political campaigns) had been taxed including their “income” from the corporate stock that they own (which now and always has essentially never been taxed because there are so many ways to avoid ever being taxed on it), then they were collectively being taxed at only an 8.2% rate on all of their income. It was a sound study. However, the billionaires-controlled think tanks and media slammed it by deceiving their public about it. For example, PolitiFact rated Biden’s statement “False” because (and this displays its contempt for the intelligence of its readers): “Under the current tax code, the top 1% of taxpayers pay an effective tax rate of 25% on the income the government counts.” But that’s exactly what the White House economists had been criticizing! They were criticizing the current tax-laws in the U.S., which DON’T include as reported income those stock profits.  For once (while campaigning for re-election), Biden told the truth, even though it’s a truth that his billionaire backers want the public NOT to know. (And PolitiFact is funded by numerous billionaires, both Democratic Party ones such a Soros’s Open Society, and Republican ones such as the Charles Koch Institute.) Is it any wonder, then, why the U.S. wealth-distribution is becoming increasingly skewed to the billionaires, even though so much of their wealth is being hidden and not even reported to the Government?

    The post The Most Efficient Way to Minimize Social Inequality first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Rafah is the southwesternmost city in Gaza, and until now it had a population of around 28,000, but 1.4 million Gazans are now sheltering there after having evacuated from Israel’s bombing of them in the rest of Gaza; and, so, if Israel now extends its air force’s fully U.S.-armed bombing campaign into that city, then this might finish-off (complete the extermination of) the Gazan people (the residents in Gaza).

    A poll of Israelis was published by the Israel Democracy Institute on 10 March 2024, titled “War in Gaza Survey 12”, and here are its main findings:

    “How should Israel proceed with its military operations in Rafah? [to put it bluntly — which they don’t — whether to invade it, or not?]” (%[Yes]):

    74% of Israel’s Jews, 17% of Israel’s Arabs, 64.5% of all Israelis.

    In other words: 64.5% of all Israelis, 74% of Israel’s Jews, and 17% of Israel’s Arabs, want those Gazans — just like the other 900,000 Gazans — to be eliminated.

    “Israel’s Standing in the International Arena”

    47% of Israelis say yes, Israel is supported by the world; 52.5% say no, it’s not.

    On 3 March 2024, the Wall Street Journal headlined “U.S. Voter Sympathy for Palestinians Grows as Israel War Drags On, WSJ Poll Finds: Many Americans think Israel has gone too far; majority disapproves of Biden’s handling of the conflict”, and reported the following answers to their question “Do you think Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip in response to the October 7th attack by Hamas have gone too far [42%], not gone far enough [19%], or been about right [24%]/?”

    America is the only nation that has unconditionally backed Israel’s Government at the U.N. and has consistently done so even after Israel started on 17 October 2023 its bombing — and the great intensification of its longstanding siege against — the residents in Gaza, to drive them to starvation, if not immediately to death. U.S. President Joe Biden has announced that under no conditions would the U.S. Government ever place any conditions whatsoever on its supplying of weapons and of ammunition and of intelligence-assistance, to Israel’s Government — that what Israel’s Government does with this American assistance is Israel’s business, not America’s, and won’t be America’s concern, though he personally objects to unintentional bombing of civilians.

    According to the U.S. Government and its allies, the war in Gaza started with the attack in Israel by Hamas on 7 October 2023 (an attack which has been overwhelmingly misrepresented in the U.S.-and-allied press) and is aimed only at eliminating Hamas, but according to all other countries it started actually in 1948 with Zionist Jews’ operation of ethnic cleansing, starting then, to expel or exterminate Arabs from Palestine, what Arabs call the “Nakba” or “catastrophe,” which long preceded Hamas and has continued with varying levels of intensity ever since that time. So, now, Israel wants to finish-off at least the Gazan part of the job.

    The post Poll in Israel: 74% of Jews, 17% of Arabs, Endorse Completing the Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Holocaust-deniers say that the Holocaust didn’t exist even though, according to historian Hans Müller, Hitler proudly told the Pope’s representative, Archbishop Berning, on 26 April 1933, “I am doing what the Church has done for 1,500 years. I am simply finishing the job.” Furthermore, Hitler, in the privacy of his bunker (as transcribed there by the lawyer Heinrich Heim during Hitler’s Table-Talk), concluded, on 21 October 1941, a lengthy tirade against Jews, with: “By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.”

    So, too, and just as clearly, today’s Israelis and their supporters are in reality-denial by denying that Israel today perpetrates at least ethnic cleansing, if not outright genocide, to clear the Gazans from Gaza. South Africa’s legal case against Israel actually quotes many of Israel’s top leaders, including Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that the Gazans don’t belong in Gaza and won’t be allowed to stay there — that their being there is itself a crime against Israel. Netanyahu actually said, citing the Torah, that God Himself authorized this to be done; and, so, it must be done.

    The talk-show host and Washington Post columnist Hugh Hewitt headlined in that newspaper on 31 October 2023, “Does Israel have a right to exist?” and started by saying that he automatically excludes as guests on his show anyone who rejects the official account of 9/11 or else rejects the Republican position on the Cold War, and that he now will add to that list anyone who denies that Israel has a right to exist. He said:

    I’ve never even considered that I would ask someone, “Did the Holocaust happen?” I’ve never knowingly had a Holocaust denier on the air, just as I’ve never had on a proponent of white supremacy. It’s pretty easy to build walls against such pollutants entering the airwaves under my jurisdiction. But now I will have to add the basic question about Israel’s nationhood.

    He added that only anti-Semites — Jew-haters — deny Israel’s “right to exist”:

    In the past three weeks, it has become painfully clear that hundreds of thousands of Americans and Europeans marching in demonstrations across campuses and in the streets of major cities do not accept the state of Israel’s legitimacy. That view is radical and dangerous. And it can no longer be considered so marginal that it need not be discussed in polite society. Instead, the view is one that must be exposed and its believers obliged to explain themselves.

    And at that point he changed his tune to becoming: Now I want to expose those people, instead of to exclude them from speaking on my show: He went on to emphasize that to question Israel’s “right to exist” is unacceptable because Hamas denies Israel’s right to exist, and Hewitt assumed that whatever Hamas believes, has to be labelled as false, and that Israel is targeting for killing ONLY Hamas, and NOT the Gazans, but that any Gazans who die in this war are okay to be killed, because of Israel’s necessity to exterminate Hamas, which necessity justifies anything that Israel does in order to eliminate Hamas. In other words: the end justifies the means — ANY means.

    He closed by saying:

    We in the media should not silence the Israel deniers, but we would perform a public service if we invited them to reveal themselves. As with those who presume to address 9/11 without a basic grounding in the facts, or who deny the reach of Soviet espionage, when Israel deniers begin to spew, the audience deserves fair warning.

    So: he closed his defense of Israel’s right to exist, by saying that “the audience deserves fair warning” that a kook is a kook. And throughout his article he was aiming to make his appeal to Republicans, against Democrats.

    Throughout, Hewitt’s focus isn’t on verifying what is true and what is false, but instead on who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’. And he was equating Holocaust deniers with everyone who supports Palestinians against Israelis; and equating anti-Israel with anti-Jew — he was implying that only anti-Semites are against Israel: that to be against Israel is to be against Jews (as-if ALL Jews support or endorse Israel against the Palestinians).

    The way to reality-denial is to personalize — argue ad-hominem — INSTEAD of to present evidence — argue ad-rem. And that was Hewitt’s entire case for answering Yes to his titled question, “Does Israel have a right to exist?”

    I wrote on March 9 “Should Israel Exist?” as a logical analysis of this question, given the clear fact that Israel is either ethnically cleansing or else genociding the Gazans. As regards the broader HISTORICAL argument concerning that question, the case is open-and-shut that Israel should never have been created in 1948. So: to Hewitt’s question, of whether Israel has a right to exist, I would answer “No.” The historical record is clear and unequivocal that Israel had no such right, any more than that any thief has a right to the property that he or she has stolen.

    Historically speaking, the war between the Israelis and the Palestinians was started by that enormous theft of not only land but a hidden number of lives from the Palestinians. This war did not begin on 7 October of 2023 when Israelis say that their war against ‘Hamas’ (but really all Gazans) started, but instead back in 1948. However, like all thieves do, Israelis lie in order to ‘justify’ themselves. As regards the October 7 attack by Hamas, I have headlined on 11 March 2024 “What You Didn’t Know About Hamas’s October 7th Attack”, which introduces and links to a highly informed discussion about that attack. Apparently, Israel lies massively about that event, too, so as to ‘justify’ whatever they do to the Gazans. However, in any case, this war certainly didn’t start on 7 October 2023 like Israel alleges it did.

    The post The Awesome Reality-Denial by Israel and Its Supporters first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Alexander Mercouris has perhaps the best track-record of all prognosticators on the important international news-stories, and this very much includes on the important news stories regarding the Ukraine crisis, not only since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine started on 24 February 2022, but going all the way back to 2016 when he first reported. And, more generally, for example, compare his 10 October 2016 “U.S. Intelligence meddles in U.S. Presidential election: backs Hillary Clinton, tries to stop Donald Trump” to what the rest of the press were saying at the same time about the then-emerging manufactured ‘Russiagate’ story, such as the Democratic Party Time magazine’s Joe Klein headlining on 13 October 2016, “Why the Russian Hacks of Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Should Reassure Us All”, which fell for the U.S. Government’s lie that Russia was ‘hacking’ the U.S. Democratic Party’s emails and maybe, just maybe, colluding with Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign in order to win the 2016 election for Trump — none of which turned out to have been true (but loads of Democratic Party voters believed it to be true, at least as recently as 2019). Mercouris instead exposed that fraud right away — and it was a fraud by the Obama Administration and the Hillary Clinton campaign instead of by the Trump campaign and Russia’s Government. (The closing Durham Report, which issued on 17 May 2023, blamed only Obama’s FBI, as-if it were independent of Obama and of his ‘Justice’ Department — and thus John Durham himself participated in the cover-up so as to leave the public still believing the Democratic Party’s lies that Russia had hacked the 2016 election — a lie that Lockheed Martin and other ‘Defense’ contractors greatly profit from being spread and sustained because it fools the public to support increasing the ‘defense’ budget while cutting everything else.) Mercouris has this ability — which only extremely few people have — to see to the heart of major news-events almost in real time, and to report immediately with a penetration and depth of insight into current events that exceeds even what normally passes for ‘history’ about those same events years if not decades later. His historical knowledge and ability to bring it all immediately to bear upon current events is at the very highest level if not at the very top.

    And here is an example of that in regards to the emergency now in Ukraine concerning the power-struggle between Ukraine’s current President Volodmyr Zelensky versus Ukraine’s immediately preceding President Petro Poroshenko and which has caused Biden to send Victoria Nuland to Kiev, the person who had run Obama’s 2014 coup in Ukraine that replaced the democratically elected and neutralist Government of Ukraine by the current rabidly anti-Russian and illegitimate government on Russia’s doorstep only 317 miles away from being able to hit The Kremlin with possibly a U.S. missile:

    He reports that Nuland has decided that Zelensky will fire Ukraine’s current general Valerii Zaluzhnyi (who is backed by Poroshenko) and replace him probably with either General Oleksandr Syrsky or else the head of Ukraine’s CIA or the Main Directorate of Intelligence of Ukraine, Kyrylo Budanov. If this is true, then it would probably indicate that Nuland wants Zelensky to stay as being Ukraine’s President.

    The post “Victoria Nuland — she’s the real ruler of Ukraine” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Whereas the national corruption ratings of the various countries by the corrupt Transparency International organization, which was a spin-off from the U.S.-controlled World Bank in 1993 created by it so that countries whose leaders resist the demands by the U.S. Government will receive from TI poor corruption-ratings that scare away international investors and thereby starve their country of international capital and force up the interest-rates that those countries have to pay on their foreign debt, the people inside a given country — its own citizens there — have a much more realistic rating of their own country’s corruptness than do the hired outside ‘experts’ that TI selects to evaluate that in accord with TI’s vague criteria. Thus, the suite of Gallup polls that Gallup published on January 30th concerning Americans’ perceptions of “Honesty and Ethics” in America provides a far more accurate indication of the amount of corruptness in this country than TI’s score on this country does. So: here, I shall present the core from that Gallup article, and then will discuss it:

    Line Chart: Ethics ratings for five professions in the U.S., 1976-2023.

    Trust in U.S. Senators, and in what Gallup calls “Members of Congress” (which means members of both Houses, but sometimes “Congress” is misused to refer to only members of the U.S. House of Representatives) has declined precipitously since the year 2000, when, starting on 9 December 2000, the far-right U.S. Supreme Court ‘Justice’ Antonin Scalia abruptly violated the U.S. Constitution and stopped the vote-count in the Florida U.S. Presidential contest and declared that (his fellow far-right Republican) George W. Bush had won that election (against the moderate Democrat Al Gore). This decision, by the 5-to-4 Republican majority on that Court, who butchered the Equal Protection Clause in the U.S. Consititution (in its 14th Amendment) in order to ‘justify’ their treasonous act, led to 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq on the basis of lies, and the takeover of the U.S. Government by the military-industrial complex even more than had been the case before, and thrust America into what is virtually martial law in this country (including massive censorship for the Government) ever since that time, so that America now spends more than half of the entire world’s military costs and the U.S. armamants-manufacturers get half of all that money, which causes soaring U.S. federal debt and declining new federal spending on the health, welfare, and environment, of the American people.

    In today’s news, there is another stark example of what this increasing U.S. corruptness has led to, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean: On January 28, the Financial Times headlined “Brussels threatens to hit Hungary’s economy if Viktor Orbán vetoes Ukraine aid: EU strategy aims to spook investors by cutting off funding to Budapest in stand-off over €50bn package”, and reported that the effort by Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orban, to halt the financial bleeding of the people of his country and even of the entire people of the EU, which is pouring unprecedentedly high sums into paying for weapons, the EU is now threatening to blacklist Hungary and drive it into an economic ailspin unless he will relent and do as they demand and approve an additional $50 billion+ in armaments and other support for Ukraine’s war with Russia. No mention is made there that the U.S. Government initiated and created the EU as part of its “Cold War” against first the Soviet Union and then (after 1991) continued it secretly against Russia. Similarly, the February 2, 2024, issue of the U.S. edition of the British The Week magazine aims to fool Americans to support further increasing the ‘defense’ budget, by posting on its front cover along with a cartoon showing an evil-looking face of Putin, the headline “Giving up on Ukraine: Will Johnson and House Republicans block desperately needed aid for Kyiv?” The story inside it says nothing about Ukraine’s having become a U.S. colony by means of Obama’s February 2014 coup there (hidden behind Kiev’s Maidan anti-corruption demonstrations) that overthrew a neutralist Government and installed a rabidly anti-Russian one that Putin finally responded to by his invasion of Ukraine on 22 February 2022. (Trust in “journalists” is shown by Gallup there as being at a record low of only 19%.)

    The post Gallup Poll Confirms America’s Soaring Corruption first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • There were 17 judges ruling on this case, including one from South Africa and one from Israel. Both of those two judges were not regular members of the Court but were included only because this ‘International Court of Justice’ was treating this matter as-if not “justice” (in criminal law — which this case was supposed to be about) but instead equity (in civil law — which is irrelevant to this criminal case) were at-issue (and therefore needing to be ‘balanced’, instead of to be concerned only to determine in the case “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” as being the SOLE basis for valid judgment on the matter.

    Page 26 of the 29-page ruling has paragraph 85: “The Court deems it necessary to emphasize that all parties to the conflict in the Gaza Strip are bound by international humanitarian law. It is gravely concerned about the fate of the hostages abducted during the attack in Israel on 7 October 2023 and held since then by Hamas and other armed groups, and calls for their immediate and unconditional release.”

    The 84-page South African document that had brought criminal charges against Israel, titled “Applications Instituting Proceedings,” said in the opening paragraph of its Introduction:

    South Africa unequivocally condemns all violations of international law by all parties, including the direct targeting of Israeli civilians and other nationals and hostage-taking by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. No armed attack on a State’s territory no matter how serious — even an attack involving atrocity crimes — can, however, provide any possible justification for, or defence to, breaches of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (‘Genocide Convention’ or ‘Convention’),1 whether as a matter of law or morality. The acts and omissions by Israel complained of by South Africa are genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group, that being the part of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip (‘Palestinians in Gaza’).

    So: the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks against Israelis was not an issue or topic in the case that South Africa had brought to the Court.

    Nonetheless — and appealing to public sentiments instead of to the actual case that was supposed to be at hand — paragraph 85 of its decision on the case pandered by essentially accepting as true there what both South Africa and Israel agree upon — as-if it were even pertinent (relevant) to this case (which it is not). One isn’t supposed to bring up in a criminal trial — or any trial — a matter about which both the prosecution and the defense are in agreement. It distracts from the case-at-hand and can serve only to distort judgments.

    So: right there, in the paragraph that comes immediately before the Court’s judgment in the case, which is paragraph 86, the Court makes clear that the decision isn’t entirely excluding pandering. That is pandering to Israel’s side of this dispute. But South Africa had already accepted that detail of Israel’s side. It was irrelevant and was brought up by the judges purely pandering to public opinion — in Israel’s favor. It had nothing to do with whether or not Israel is, in fact, genociding Gazans.

    To what extent did the ruling pander, and was it fairly balanced in its (irrelevant but popular — among supporters of Israel) panderings?

    The next paragraph (86) is the one that everybody talks about, and so it is merely linked-to here as being on pages 26-29 of the pdf if you want to read it.

    As is indicated there, the two dissenting ‘Justices’ in the Court’s 6-part order to Israel were Julia Sebutinde (Uganda) and Aharon Barak (Israel), and Sebutinde dissented on all 6 whereas Barak dissented only on 3 out of those 6. In each of those two instances, the jurist summarized up-front in the decision what the supposed ‘reasoning’ for the dissent was. Here both of those two summaries are shown:

    DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGE SEBUTINDE

    [T]he dispute between the State of Israel and the people of Palestine is essentially and historically a political one, calling for a diplomatic or negotiated settlement, and for the implementation in good faith of all relevant Security Council resolutions by all parties concerned, with a view to finding a permanent solution whereby the Israeli and Palestinian peoples can peacefully coexist — It is not a legal dispute susceptible of judicial settlement by the Court — Some of the preconditions for the indication of provisional measures have not been met — South Africa has not demonstrated, even on a prima facie basis, that the acts allegedly committed by Israel and of which the Applicant complains, were committed with the necessary genocidal intent, and that as a result, they are capable of falling within the scope of the Genocide Convention — Similarly, since the acts allegedly committed by Israel were not accompanied by a genocidal intent, the  Applicant has not demonstrated that the rights it asserts and for which it seeks protection through the indication of  provisional measures are plausible under the Genocide Convention — The provisional measures indicated by the Court in this Order are not warranted.

    SEPARATE OPINION OF JUDGE AD HOC BARAK

    1. South Africa came to the Court seeking the immediate suspension of the military operations in the Gaza Strip. It has wrongly sought to impute the crime of Cain to Abel. The Court rejected South Africa’s main contention and, instead, adopted measures that recall Israel’s existing obligations under the Genocide Convention. The Court has reaffirmed Israel’s right to defend its citizens and emphasized the importance of providing humanitarian aid to the population of Gaza. The provisional measures indicated by the Court are thus of a significantly narrower scope than those requested by South Africa.

    2. Notably, the Court has emphasized that “all parties to the conflict in the Gaza Strip are bound by international humanitarian law”, which certainly includes Hamas.

    Sebutinde was treating this matter as-if it were a civil trial over something such as whether an international contract had been fulfilled according to its terms by both sides, only one side, or no side. Is that type of reasoning appropriate in a case that had been brought by a third party against one party in a war against the other party in that war — specifically by South Africa against Israel as allegedly perpetrating genocide against (not “Palestinians” but instead) the residents in Gaza? If not, then Sebutinde is a dangerously unqualified person to be sitting on this Court. Furthermore: her factual allegations (such as “the acts allegedly committed by Israel were not accompanied by a genocidal intent”) are either demonstrably false or almost certainly false, such as by this evidence cited in South Africa’s case, which evidence she entirely ignored:

    The Israeli Prime Minister also returned to the theme in his ‘Christmas message’, stating: “we’re facing monsters, monsters who murdered children in front of their parents … This is a battle not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilization against barbarism”.445 On 28 October 2023, as Israeli forces prepared their land invasion of Gaza, the Prime Minister invoked the Biblical story of the total destruction of Amalek by the Israelites, stating: “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember”.446 The Prime Minister referred again to Amalek in the letter sent on 3 November 2023 to Israeli soldiers and officers.447 The relevant biblical passage reads as follows: “Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxens and sheep, camels and asses”.448

    — President of Israel: On 12 October 2023, President Isaac Herzog made clear that Israel was not distinguishing between militants and civilians in Gaza, stating in a press conference to foreign media — in relation Palestinians in Gaza, over one million of whom are children: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware not involved. It’s absolutely not true. … and we will fight until we break their backbone.”449 On 15 October 2023, echoing the words of Prime Minister Netanyahu, the President told foreign media that “we will uproot evil so that there will be good for the entire region and the world.”450 The Israeli President is one of many Israelis to have handwritten ‘messages’ on bombs to be dropped on Gaza.451

    — Israeli Minister of Defence: On 9 October 2023, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant in an Israeli Army ‘situation update’ advised that Israel was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”452 He also informed troops on the Gaza border that he had released all the restraints”,453 stating in terms that “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.”454 …:

    — Israeli Minister for National Security: On 10 November 2023, Itamar Ben-Gvir clarified the government’s position in a televised address, stating: “[t]o be clear, when we say that Hamas should be destroyed, it also means … those who support … — they’re all terrorists, and they should also be destroyed.”456

    — Israeli Minister of Energy and Infrastructure: ‘Tweeting’ on 13 October 2023, Israel Katz stated: “All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”457 On 12 October 2023, he ‘tweeted’: “Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home. … And no one will preach us morality.”458

    — Israeli Minister of Finance: On 8 October 2023, Bezalel Smotrich stated at a meeting of the Israeli Cabinet that “[w]e need to deal a blow that hasn’t been seen in 50 years and take down Gaza.”459

    — Israeli Minister of Heritage: On 1 November 2023, Amichai Eliyahu posted on Facebook: “The north of the Gaza Strip, more beautiful than ever. Everything is blown up and flattened, simply a pleasure for the eyes … We must talk about the day after. In my mind, we will hand over lots to all those who fought for Gaza over the years and to those evicted from Gush Katif” [a former Israeli settlement].460 He later argued against humanitarian aid as “[w]e wouldn’t hand the Nazis humanitarian aid”, and “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza”.461 He also posited a nuclear attack on the Gaza Strip.462

    — Israeli Minister of Agriculture: On 11 November 2023, Avi Dichter in a television interview recalled the Nakba of 1948, in which over 80 percent of the Palestinian population of the new Israeli State was forced from or fled their homes, stating that “[w]e are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba”.463

    She ignored every one of those quotations — yet each one of them was core to South Africa’s case. It was core to the motivation for this genocide that is occurring in Gaza.

    And the case isn’t merely about intention; it is very much also about what Israel is actually doing. For example: see this on that, which displays not the intent but instead the results of that genocidal intent.

    Barak’s reasoning was different but almost as scandalously bad: blaming South Africa for having even brought the case. Furthermore: since this ‘judge’ in the trial was actually serving instead as a defense attorney for his country Israel, he can be expected to have been serving atrociously as a judge — the ICJ had brought in as judges both a South African and an Israeli jurist so as to get a ‘balanced’ instead of a fair verdict in it. They were, at least to a large extent, treating this criminal case as-if it were instead a civil one.

    By contrast to Barack: Sebutinde, who is one of the 15 regular judges on that Court, is so scandalously inadequate that she ought to be fired post-haste. But clearly, the Court itself, from the top on down, simply cannot rationally be trusted. Its problems are deep and severe. The genocide case against Israel will drag on for years and yet even at its outset, South Africa had presented a more trustworthy verdict (its case) regarding Israel than the ICJ ever will be able to, unless the entire institution becomes radically changed so as to become decent.

    The post The Reasonings by the 2 Dissenting Judges on the ICJ’s Genocide Case by South Africa against Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The U.S. regime carries out its oppression by coercion, and by delay and outright suppression of news-reporting about the key facts of the case. It does this both in domestic matters and in international ones, as will here be exemplified first by the example of an innocent man who was framed by the U.S. regime and given a life sentence in a murder-case, and then by the example of the deeply corrupted Ukrainian nation which was grabbed by the U.S. regime in a February 2014 U.S. coup that the U.S. regime hid behind popular 2013-2014 anti-corruption demonstrations on the Maidan square in Kiev and so turned that nation into a battering-ram against the U.S. regime’s top target for conquest, which is Russia right next door to Ukraine.

    In both examples — both domestic and foreign — the U.S. regime’s motivation was to increase and to intensify the power of its owners, whom it serves and who are never satisfied with the immense power that they already have but always crave to acquire yet more.

    How It Does Domestic Oppression

    On 4 May 2020, Jordan Smith headlined “MISSOURI’S ATTORNEY GENERAL IS FIGHTING FOR THE RIGHT TO KEEP AN INNOCENT MAN IN PRISON: Despite ample evidence that Lamar Johnson was wrongfully convicted, Eric Schmitt is sparing no effort to keep him locked up as the coronavirus spreads”, and reported that:

    The police had nothing concrete to go on. But by the time they finally interviewed Elking, they had already latched onto a suspect: 20-year-old Lamar Johnson.

    Johnson would soon be arrested and tried for the October 1994 murder on thin and troubling evidence. …

    In 1995, Johnson was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Still, he has long maintained his innocence — and now has a powerful ally in his corner: Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, chief prosecutor for the city of St. Louis.

    Gardner ran on a reform agenda and in 2016 became the first black elected prosecutor in the city’s history. She won federal funding to start a conviction integrity unit and in 2018, at the behest of the Midwest Innocence Project, began investigating Johnson’s case. A year later, she concluded that he was innocent.

    In July 2019, Gardner filed a motion with Circuit Court Judge Elizabeth Hogan conceding that Johnson was wrongfully convicted. She asked the judge to grant a hearing on the matter and, ultimately, a new trial for Johnson. “When a prosecutor becomes aware of clear and convincing evidence establishing that a defendant in the prosecutor’s jurisdiction was convicted of a crime that the defendant did not commit — the position in which the circuit attorney now finds herself — the prosecutor is obligated to seek to remedy the conviction,” Gardner wrote in the court filing.

    But [Judge] Hogan balked, questioning whether Gardner had the power to challenge the conviction. She called in Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt to see what he had to say about it. Schmitt argued that not only did Gardner lack that authority, but the court couldn’t even entertain the matter. Hogan aligned herself with Schmitt and dismissed the case without considering the evidence Gardner had uncovered.

    Hogan’s decision sparked a unique legal battle that, on April 14, culminated in a video conference hearing before the Missouri Supreme Court. The question before the judges, who are working remotely amid the coronavirus crisis, is whether a prosecutor has any power to right a wrongful conviction. …

    Gardner’s yearlong inquiry revealed that Johnson’s conviction had been marred by extensive police and prosecutorial misconduct. She found that police had fabricated witness statements in an effort to frame Johnson (the witnesses said they’d never told police the things that had been attributed to them) and had pressured Elking into making an identification after he’d repeatedly told them he did not know who had attacked Boyd that night. Elking said that a detective told him who to pick out of the lineup.

    Elking said that a detective told him who to pick out of the lineup.

    Gardner learned that Elking had been paid more than $4,000 in exchange for his testimony and that prosecutors had also fixed a string of traffic tickets for him. None of this information was turned over to Johnson’s defense. … The state also failed to tell the defense that the jailhouse informant, Mock, had an epic criminal history (some 200 pages long) and a history of testifying for the state. … There was also the fact that Johnson had an alibi: He was with his girlfriend, child, and two friends several miles away at the time of the shooting.. … On top of it all, Gardner learned that not long after Johnson was convicted, two men, Phillip Campbell and James Howard, had each separately confessed to killing [Markus] Boyd. Both insisted that Johnson had nothing to do with it. … Given the breadth of the misconduct, Gardner felt she had to find a way to make things right — after all, it was her office that was responsible for Johnson’s conviction.  …

    Not everyone agrees with that position. Schmitt’s office has since doubled down in opposition to Gardner with a mind-numbing array of arguments. …

    No prosecutor in the state of Missouri has the power to undo a wrongful conviction, sys the attorney general. … Schmitt says that Johnson can vindicate his rights by following regular post-conviction procedure: File a challenge based on the evidence Gardner has supplied and let the legal system work its ordinary, slogging magic. …

    Even if Johnson’s appeal were to survive a procedural challenge, the process would only draw out his already wrongful incarceration. …

    Unless the Missouri Supreme Court steps in, prosecutors in the state may remain hobbled, which is essentially what Schmitt is advocating: Keep the power to vet these claims in his hands and dismiss from the process elected prosecutors like Gardner, who vowed on the campaign trail to work toward a more equitable criminal justice system. …

    Reform prosecutors across the country have faced varying degrees of backlash from the entrenched power structures they’ve challenged, and they’ve repeatedly had their discretion questioned as they’ve sought changes that upset the old guard. …

    On 15 February 2023, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch bannered “Judge frees Lamar Johnson after 28 years in prison: Original murder case was ‘suspect at best’”, and reported:

    Lamar Johnson walked out of the downtown courthouse Tuesday afternoon, a free man for the first time in decades.

    Just hours earlier, a St. Louis Circuit judge vacated Johnson’s murder conviction, ruling he was wrongly imprisoned nearly 30 years ago and that there is clear and convincing evidence of his innocence.

    The ruling by 22nd Circuit Court Judge David Mason comes roughly two months after a weeklong hearing in December during which another man confessed to the 1994 killing of Marcus Boyd — the crime that sent Johnson to prison with a life sentence.

    Cheers erupted in the courtroom as Mason read his decision. …

    The ruling ends Johnson’s decadeslong fight to prove his innocence. After years of being turned down on appeals and habeas corpus petitions, Johnson’s case attracted national attention in 2019 when Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s Conviction Integrity Unit reported misconduct by the investigation’s lead detective and other constitutional errors in the 1995 trial. …

    Much of Mason’s decision centered on the main witness in Johnson’s 1995 trial, Greg Elking, who said at the December hearing that police coerced his original identification of Johnson as the man who wore a ski mask and shot Boyd. Mason described that identification as “suspect at best.”

    ”All Elking witnessed was the assailant’s eye, giving a new meaning to the phrase ‘eye witness,’” Mason said, describing it as “yet another serious weakness in the case against Johnson.”

    Without Elking’s identification, there was no case. …

    Photos: Wrongfully convicted inmate Lamar Johnson set free after serving 28 years for murder he did not commit. …

    Once Lamar Johnson was freed, the national press reported the case, as being an example showing that though ‘mistakes’ can happen in American ‘justice’, they can be rectified: in this ‘democracy’, such mistakes can be rectified — the Government isn’t set up so as to produce these ‘mistakes’; it’s not set up that way so as to produce the world’s highest percentage of its population (almost all of which are poor people) being in prisons. It’s only mistakes. So, the public don’t know that it’s NOT mistakes — that it’s the way ‘our’ Government functions.

    On 8 November 2022, Eric Schmitt won Missouri’s election to the U.S. Senate, and became appointed to the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he joins the other key Senators that represent the interests of U.S. armaments contractors (America’s most profitable industry), such as Boeing Corporation, which is the largest manufacturer in the state and is seeking tax-breaks from people such as Schmitt.

    How It Does Foreign Oppression

    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 rabid anti-Russian to impose in regions that rejected the new anti-Russian U.S.-controlled government 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 war in Ukraine started in 2014, as both NATO’s Stoltenberg and Ukraine’s Zelensky have said; but 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 become beheaded by America’s nuclear strike.

    However, even after at least $360 billion in support to Ukraine’s war against Russia after Russia’s invasion, from the U.S. and its colonies and their IMF, Ukraine’s prospects of winning against Russia have been declining not increasing throughout the course of the war and are now close to nil.

    So: how did the U.S. regime carry out this oppression of the Ukrainian people? It was done by the same means as it had been done in the Lamar Johnson case: coercion, including coercion against the mind, which is deceit, and including coercion against public officials who might otherwise try to do the right thing in order to serve the public instead of to serve their masters who have been funding their political careers.

    On 17 June 2015, I headlined “The Who’s Who at the Top of the Coup” in Ukraine, and focused upon Dmitriy Yarosh, whom Obama’s Victoria Nuland chose to run the Maidan demonstration in Kiev that provided cover for the Obama-Nuland-organized February 2014 coup in Ukraine; and, on 1 February 2015, I headlined “The Ideology of the New Ukraine”, and focused upon Andrei Biletsky (or Beletsky), who organized and ran the openly nazi Ukrainiani Azov Battalion and, unlike Yarosh, Biletsky didn’t equivocate about his being a Ukrainian Social Nationalist or (National Socialist) in the Hitler vein, but he aimed “to create a Third Empire [a Ukrainian Third Reich],” instead of Hitler’s German “Third Reich.” Then, on 20 March 2022, I headlined “How The Western Press Handles The Ukrainian Government’s Nazism” and presented a universally hidden-in-The-West photo of Biletsky leading his men in salute to what had been Nazi Germany’s Wolfsangel insignia.

    On 27 May 2019, the OBOZREVATEL online Ukrainian news site headlined (as translated into English) “Yarosh: if Zelensky betrays Ukraine, he will lose not his position, but his life” , the transcript of their interview with Yarosh, right after Zelensky had won the Presidential election against Poroshenko, and, in that interview, Yarosh made unambiguously clear that if as President, Zelensky were to negotiate seriously with Russia,”he will lose not his position, but his life.” Yarosh — the agent of the regime in Washington DC — was sending the new Ukrainian President the very clear message, that even if the U.S. wouldn’t get rid of such a Ukrainian President, Ukraine’s nazis would. So: Zelensky (like Poroshenko before him) was being controlled not only from above, the empire’s imperial regime in Washington, but also from below, the U.S.-empowered nazis whom the U.S. regime had used in order to take over Ukraine during February 2014.

    Conclusion

    The U.S. Establishment (called “neocons” in foreign policy, and “neoliberals” or “libertarians” in domestic policy, but, in any case, America’s under-1,000 billionaires and their numerous employees and other agents) work via threats, not only against heads-of-state abroad such as Zelensky, but ALSO  against domestic public officials such as the Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, to turn the screws upon those down below (such as in plea-bargains to lie in court cases) in order to keep those billionaires on top, and everyone else down below; and this is the empire’s social and political and even international, “rules-based order.” Whereas Lamar Johnson, as an extremely lucky exception to the rule (or “rules-based order”) managed finally to get free in 2023 after entering prison in 1995 for a frame-up against him by the regime that he and other Americans are forced to fund with their taxes, few others are and will be so lucky, but America’s ‘news’-media won’t and don’t report this fact. For example: there is nothing to indicate that Lamar Johnson sees what happened to him as being a frame-up by the regime instead of just a bunch of tragic mistakes that the U.S. Government had made. Even the victims usually remain ignorant of the reality. — the ‘news’-media cover it up. But the whole operation — like that of any other empire — is based ultimately upon requiring the public officials to impose by raw coercion if necessary, their masters’ rule, in this “rules-based order.” It’s the way that any empire functions. And, in the world of today, the only empire that remains is the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’).

    The post How the U.S. Carries out Its Oppression first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • NATO’s having won Finland as a member is the worst blow to Russia’s national security in decades, and it wouldn’t have happened if Putin had played his cards right. This fact will be explained here:

    No one is perfect; and, as I’ve explained elsewhere (such as here) I believe that Putin’s track-record during his now nearly 23 years of being the leader of Russia is vastly superior to that of any leader of any U.S.-and-allied country during any portion of that 23-year period. However, I shall explain here why I believe that Putin’s public-relations errors regarding his handling of Ukraine constitute a major flaw in his leadership-record and produced Finland’s becoming a NATO member — and potentially the most dangerous one to Russia in all of Europe.

    The most crucial thing to understand is why did Russia actually need to invade Ukraine? The answer is very simple (far simpler than Putin’s many and confusing statements about that). Putin’s many explanations never made clear the core reason: The U.S. Government has been planning to win a WW III by blitz-nuking The Kremlin so fast that Russia’s central command wouldn’t have enough time to press the button to launch its retaliatory missiles and bombers; and therefore immediately after that blitz-nuclear first-strike decapitation of Russia, the U.S. regime would be able entirely on its own schedule to then knock out virtually all of Russia’s retaliatory weaponry and so to win WW III with perhaps only a few million dead on its side and thus, finally, at long last, possessing (at a small enough cost in American lives so as to be attractive to the few individuals who actually control the U.S. Government) full control over Russia, which is the world’s most-natural-resources-rich country — which is why the U.S. regime was so set, for so long a time, on winning Ukraine as a NATO member. And this is also the reason why Obama finally grabbed Ukraine in 2014.

    The ideal place from which to launch that blitz attack against Russia would be Ukraine, because it has the nearest border to Russia’s central command in The Kremlin, which is only 317 miles (511 km) away from Ukraine — a mere five minutes of missile-flying time away — from Shostka in Ukraine, to Moscow in Russia. A mere five minutes away from decapitating Russia’s central command. That is the real answer to the crucial question of why did Russia actually need to invade Ukraine? Putin never clearly stated it, and never focused on it; and, so, in both Finland and Sweden (and throughout Europe), Russia’s essential defensive invasion of Ukraine was instead widely viewed as being aggressive not defensive: aggression against Ukraine, instead of defensive against America (which has controlled Ukraine ever since America’s February 2014 coup there). Thus, both Finland and Sweden (on the basis of that false impression) joined NATO, and American troops and weapons will be pouring into Finland even closer to The Kremlin than had previously been the case — almost as close as-if Ukraine DID join NATO. Maybe Ukraine will be kept out of NATO, but Finland, which is around 500 miles from The Kremlin, joined NATO largely because of Putin’s PR failure regarding his invasion of Ukraine.

    Just like in chess, the way to win the game is to capture the king, in war-strategy the way to win is to decapitate the opposite side’s leadership by capturing or disabling its Commander-in-Chief. The U.S. regime had started by no later than 2006 to plan for winning a WW III instead of to use its nuclear weapons only in order to work alongside Russia to PREVENT there being any WW III. During the George W. Bush Administration, neoconservatism became — and has remained since — bipartisan in both of America’s two political Parties. The only way that this “Nuclear Primacy” strategy can even conceivably be achieved would be via a blitz-nuclear attack beheading ’the enemy’.

    Russia has in place a “dead-hand” system to release, automatically-and-instantaneously after being beheaded, its entire arsenal against the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’), but the system can’t be tested before it’s used; and, so, whether it would function (which would require all parts of the system to function as planned) can only be a huge question-mark. Moreover: even if it would work, Russia’s central command would already have been eliminated; and, so, the dead-hand system is a dooms-day system in any case: it wouldn’t protect Russia. At best, it will result in M.A.D.: Mutually Assured Destruction. And if it fails, then Russia would lose WW III.

    America’s capturing Ukraine, which it did in 2014 by Obama’s brilliantly successful coup that he hid behind anti-corruption demonstrations on Kiev’s Maidan Square, was intended to make it possible for America to checkmate Russia by positioning a missile in or near Shostka. This was why Putin had established as being a red line that America must not cross, Ukraine’s possibly becoming a NATO member.

    On 17 December 2021, Putin buried in two proposed treaties — one delivered to Biden and the other to NATO — his demand for America and its colonies never to allow Ukraine into NATO, and he did this as quietly as possible and failed to explain to the public why Russia could never tolerate a possibility that Ukraine would join NATO. His proposed two treaties buried the entire matter of Ukraine, and mentioned “Ukraine” only once, in the propsal to NATO, by saying, “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.” He gave no hint of why Ukraine was the only nation that was singled-out to be named. Both of the proposed treaties were intended to be understood only by the recipients, not by any nation’s public. They weren’t written so as to make clear to the public what the motivation behind them was — though both of them could have been. Neither Biden nor NATO were willing to negotiate about anything in those two documents. There was just silence for three weeks, and neither of the two documents was published or discussed in the ‘news’-media. The Kremlin did nothing to facilitate access to the documents even to the press. Putin himself wanted it that way; he handled this as strictly a matter of private diplomacy, not at all of public relations, much less of helping the public to understand the Russian Government’s motivation behind the documents.

    Then, suddenly, and little reported or commented upon, on 7 January 2022, the AP headlined “US, NATO rule out halt to expansion, reject Russian demands” — every one of his demands. Putin now had no other option than to invade Ukraine to take it militarily so as to prevent any U.S. nuclear missile possibly becoming placed there — to do it BEFORE Ukraine would be already seriously on the road to NATO membership, because if he were to wait any longer, then it might already be too late — and there would then be zero chance once Ukraine would already be a NATO member.

    He invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

    He had done no public relations in order to help the publics in The West to understand WHY he invaded. His explanations seemed to have been intended to resonate ONLY to his fellow-Russians, NOT to any international audience.

    This was tragic because not only was Ukraine the MOST dangerous nation to be admitted into NATO, but the second-most dangerous nation to become a NATO member is Finland, which at Kotka is only 507 miles or 815 km. away from blitz-nuking Moscow (and that would be a 7-minute missile-flight-time away); and whereas Putin had done nothing in order to explain to their public that Ukraine was a unique and special case and that Russia at that time actually had no national-security worries about Finland, Finland’s public couldn’t see why he wouldn’t want to take their country too, now that Russia had invaded ‘democratic Ukraine’.

    As is normal for the U.S. regime and its agents, they had long been working upon the Finnish public in order to stir them to fear Russia; and polling is always one of the tools that it uses in order to manipulate public opinion in such a target-country. On 28 January 2022, Helsinki’s MTV News headlined (as autotranslated) “MTV Uutisten survey: Support for NATO membership has risen to 30 percent, opposition has clearly decreased – ‘It would be safer with the West’,” and reported:

    Opposition to NATO membership has decreased, while the position of more and more people is uncertain, according to a recent survey by MTV Uutisten. If Finland’s top management supported joining NATO, half of the Finns would already be on the side of NATO membership.

    Based on a survey conducted by MTV Uutisten, 30 percent of Finns support Finland’s application for NATO membership. 43 percent of those who responded to the survey oppose applying for membership, and 27 percent are unsure of their position. …

    The National Defense Information Planning Board (MTS) analyzed the support for NATO membership at the end of 2021. At that time, 24 percent of respondents supported applying for membership. More than half, or 51 percent, opposed applying for NATO membership.

    Since then, Russia has presented a list of demands to the West, which included, among other things, NATO’s commitment not to expand to the east. The concern for Europe’s security has been increased by the heavy military equipment that Russia has moved near the Ukrainian border.

    According to everyone, Russia’s actions are not yet so burdensome that they should apply to NATO. …

    In recent years, in NATO polls, support has typically been close to 20 percent and opposition over 50 percent.

    Based on the survey conducted now, the opposition is no longer as strong as before. In addition to the supporters of NATO membership, the number of undecideds has also increased. The difficulty of forming an accurate opinion is also evident in the comments. …

    In addition to the current NATO position, the respondents were asked whether Finland should apply for NATO membership if the top government was in favor of it.

    In this case, support for NATO membership rose from 30 percent to as much as  [NO — TO EXACTLY] 50 percent [saying that on this question they’d trust that the Government’s leaders would make the best decision on this matter]. 33 percent of the respondents chose not to answer, and 18 percent could not form their opinion.

    The majority of respondents would follow the government if it decided to join NATO.

    That was before Russia invaded Ukraine — a country that Finnish ‘news’-media had already long presented favorably against Russia and as being a victim of Russia’s opposing Ukraine’s ‘democratic revolution’ at the Maidan Square in February 2014. No Finnish news-medium existed that indicated this ‘democratic revolution’ to have been actually a U.S. coup. Finnish ‘news’-media had censored-out all of that actual history. When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Finns were therefore terrified, and the Finnish Government — right along with Sweden’s, which had similarly been worked on for decades by U.S. and its NATO agents — promptly requested NATO membership. On 16 September 2022, Gallup’s polling reported that 81% of Finns and 74% of Swedes approved of their country’s joining the NATO anti-Russian military alliance. Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, the figures had been almost the exact reverse.

    Presidential elections are expected to be held in Finland on Sunday, 28 January 2024, with a possible second round on Sunday, 11 February 2024. The leading candidate now is Alexander Stubb, who is one of Finland’s top CIA assets. In a 28 October 2023 campaign speech he said, “If I am elected president of the republic, I promise that Finland will support Ukraine as long as necessary. Ukraine is fighting for the whole civilized and free world – against oppression and tyranny. And that war it will win, has already won. Slava Ukraine! … Fortunately, Finland has now chosen its place. We are part of the alliance of Western democracies. The next president of the republic will literally be the international NATO president. … Our NATO path began to open with the Russian war of aggression. … I consider Russia’s attack on Ukraine to be the time of a new turning point in world politics.” (Actually, Obama’s 2014 coup in Ukraine was that.)

    But already, on 18 December 2023, Finland and the U.S. signed a Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA) enabling Washington to send troops there and store weapons and ammunition, up to and including nuclear weapons, at 15 locations in Finland. Drago Bosnik at South Front headlined “FINLAND’S NEW ‘DEFENSE’ DEAL WITH US EERILY REMINDS OF SIMILAR ONE WITH NAZI GERMANY”, and he wrote: “For Russia, this is particularly concerning, as Finland and Estonia, now both NATO members, are in close proximity to St. Petersburg, its second most important city.” However, St. Petersburgh isn’t actually a concern here any more than Miami was a concern when America in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis wouldn’t allow Soviet missiles to be posted in Cuba — Washington DC was the concern, and it was nearly a thousand miles farther away from Cuba than Moscow is from Ukraine. Similarly to JFK then, Russia’s worry now is how close Finland is to Moscow — not to St. Petersberg. And whereas Cuba was 1,131 miles away from DC, Finland is only 507 miles from Moscow. Putin never made clear that his concern regarding American nukes in Ukraine was the same as JFK’s was regarding Soviet nukes in Cuba — but twice as much so. If Putin had made that point clearly and often, then demagogues such as Stubb wouldn’t have been able to get the impact they did from phrases such as “Our NATO path began to open with the Russian war of aggression. … I consider Russia’s attack on Ukraine to be the time of a new turning point in world politics.” America has been the aggressor here — against Russia; Russia was by then forced, by America and by its NATO, to respond militarily, since all diplomatic efforts by Russia had been ignored by the aggressors. Just like JFK was not the aggressor in 1962, Putin was not the aggressor in 2022. Putin could easily have made that point, but he never did — he buried it in with a mess that in Western countries seemed like merely a blur. He handed the Russia-the-aggressor argument to America’s agents in Finland, and they ran with it and thereby easily succeeded to present Russia as the bogeyman, against which NATO represented safety. This was a major blunder by Putin — not just in Finland, but throughout The West.

    One might blame the Finnish (and Swedish) people for having fallen for what was actually the U.S. empire’s narrative on the Ukraine situation; but to do so would confuse the liars with their victims — the deceived public. For example: I personally submitted to all of Finland’s major ‘news’-media right after Finland’s Government expressed the intention to seek admission into NATO, arguing that to enter NATO would increase — NOT decrease — the danger to Finland’s national security, by causing Finland to thereby become targeted by Russia’s missiles (which had previously NOT been aimed at them); and all of those media refused even to reply — no questions or editorial suggestions, but simply refused to respond to or contemplate presenting a counter-argument. The Finnish public were never presented such an argument. Is that a ‘democracy’?

    Moreover: the same situation, of a widely deceived public falling into the grip of the U.S. empire and believing its lies, is widespread, not only within this or that nation. For example, on December 19th, the Danish peace-researcher and professor at Sweden’s Lund University, Jan Oberg, headlined at Dissident Voice, “How Much Longer Can Danes Snore While Their Security and Democracy are Being Stripped away and Danish Politics Increase the Risk of World War III?,” and he reported the very same trap being fallen-into by the Danes that Finns are falling into. Blaming this phenomenon on the victims, the public, instead of on the billionaires who have engineered and provided the trap (and who enormously profit from it), is simply more of the standard blame-the-victim morality.

    By this time, Putin ought to be well aware that it was a huge blunder. As I noted with concern on 28 October 2022, “NATO Wants To Place Nuclear Missiles On Finland’s Russian Border — Finland Says Yes”. His blunder was blatantly clear by that time. And I already had outlined, on 13 May 2022, “Russia’s Weak Response to Finland’s Joining NATO” and presented there a strategy to replace that weak response with a much stronger and entirely diplomatic strategy for Russia to terminate the NATO alliance. I am surprised that Putin still, even to the present day, has failed to initiate some such policy. His passivity in that regard is stunning.

    However, on 5 April 2023, since that proposed strategy wasn’t being even mentioned in the press by anyone but myself, I concluded that the time had come to lay out an alternative strategy, “Russia’s only safe response to Finland in NATO is to move Russia’s capital to Novosibirsk.” Whereas Finland (Kotka) is only 507 miles or 816 kilometers from Moscow, it is 2,032 miles or 3,271 kilometers from Novosibirsk.

    Furthermore: Novosibirsk is 2,716 miles or 4,372 kilometers from Japan (Hokkaido). And it is 2,371 miles or 3,815 kilometers from South Korea (Seoul). Placing Russia’s central command in Novosibirsk would eliminate the danger from the U.S. regime and its colonies.

    Obviously, if Russia’s capital city becomes relocated to Novosibirsk, then the Cold War (the danger that the U.S. empire poses to Russia) will effectively be ended. But Putin has initiated no new approach to addressing the problem that his own continuing blunder has largely assisted to cause to Russia’s national security.

    The post How Putin’s Explanation of Why Russia Invaded Ukraine Facilitated or Even Caused NATO to Win 2 New Members: Finland and Sweden first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • On October 28, Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva (and I here, in boldface, add a few links for documentation of some of his assertions):

    This will be my last official communication to you. …

    The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions, are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms [against Arabs] are accompanied by Israeli military units.

    Across the land, Apartheid rules.

    This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, [Jewish] settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations “to ensure respect” for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities. …

    We must begin now or surrender to unspeakable horror. I see ten essential points: 1. Legitimate action: First, we in the UN must abandon the failed (and largely disingenuous) Oslo paradigm, its illusory two-state solution, its impotent and complicit Quartet, and its subjugation of international law to the dictates of presumed political expediency. Our positions must be unapologetically based on international human rights and international law. 2. Clarity of Vision: We must stop the pretense that this is simply a conflict over land or religion between two warring parties and admit the reality of the situation in which a disproportionately powerful state is colonizing, persecuting, and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity. 3. One State based on human rights: We must support the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land. …

    Israelis learned well from Hitler: they elected governments that did (or else condoned doing) to the non-Jewish natives in their land (who before 1948 were 61% Muslim, 30% Jewish, and 8% Christian), what Hitler had done to Jews in Christian Europe — and now they are being supported by the U.S. and its allies to deliver Israel’s final solution to the Palestinian problem: extermination.

    The self-defense by Israel and its apologists, for this reality that drove Mokhiber to quit and to condemn them, is for them to ignore all of that reality, and to focus instead upon the responses to it by the Palestinians. The self-defense, in other words, is to condemn not the side that started this war (themselves) beginning in 1948, but the side that then, and even earlier (in the late 1930s), were trying to prevent or avoid it (the Palestinians). The evil in this deception by the perpetrators — by the Israelis and their apologists — is obvious, and here is how it is driving a surge in anti-Semitism:

    Israel and its apologists say that anti-Israelism is the same thing as anti-Semitism (so that to condemn Israel is to condemn all Jews), but here they lie yet again because outside of Israel are many Jews who loathe what Israel has been doing in their names. The very idea that all Jews are Israelis, or even support the Israelis and oppose the Palestinians in this war between the aggressor (Israelis) and the defender (the Palestinians), is stupid. That idea simply is not the case; but yet many Jews are being targeted by AUTHENTIC anti-Semites as-if it WERE the case.

    Comments by many readers and viewers online are rife with such anti-Semitism, and the global community of that authentic anti-Semitism grows ever-larger, the closer that Israel and the U.S. get to delivering their final solution to the Palestinian problem. A great many of these anti-Semitic comments are coming from individuals who condemn all Jews on the basis of anti-Semitic lines from the New Testament (such as John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, and the earliest-written one of them all, 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 — all of which lines I have discussed here). However, many come instead from the Old Testament, which historians consider to be mythical but theologians and preachers believe instead to be “the Word of God”; and, so, scholars cannot agree with one-another on what is history and what in the Old Testament is instead merely myth (religious propaganda, for spreading the Jewish faith).

    According to Wikipedia’s article on the “Kingdom of Judah“:

    Centered in the highlands of Judea, the kingdom’s capital was Jerusalem.[3] Jews are named after Judah and are primarily descended from it.[4][5] The Hebrew Bible depicts the Kingdom of Judah as a successor to the United Kingdom of Israel, a term denoting the united monarchy under biblical kings Saul, David and Solomon and covering the territory of Judah and Israel. However, during the 1980s, some biblical scholars began to argue that the archaeological evidence for an extensive kingdom before the late-8th century BCE is too weak, and that the methodology used to obtain the evidence is flawed.[6][7] In the 10th and early 9th centuries BCE, the territory of Judah appears to have been sparsely populated, limited to small rural settlements, most of them unfortified.[8]

    and Wikipedia’s “Davidic line” says that,

    as for David and his immediate descendants themselves, the position of some scholars, as described by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, authors of The Bible Unearthed, espouses that David and Solomon may well be based on “certain historical kernels”, and probably did exist in their own right, but their historical counterparts simply could not have ruled over a wealthy lavish empire as described in the Bible, and were more likely chieftains of a comparatively modest Israelite society in Judah and not regents over a kingdom proper.[27]

    If the actual historical nation of Israel was ONLY what is shown on the map as constituting the Kingdom of Judah, then neither Gaza nor the northern two-thirds of the West Bank had ever been in any ancient Israel; and, so, anyone who says that the Jews in 1948 were ‘coming home’ to ‘Israel’ is historically wrong. However, those Jews were ethnically cleansing the land. It’s well-documented, such as here, here, here, and here. And even if ancient Israel had included all of the land that now is Israel, it wasn’t so at all in recent centuries, when virtually all of the residents there were Muslims and Christians — though Jews were demanding to control it while being only a tiny percentage of the population there. Their supremacism was clearly not only fascist but racist; it was Jewish Nazism. Furthermore, during the 1930s, Zionists considered themselves to be fascists; and fascists in both Germany and Italy considered Zionists to be Jewish fascists, ideological brothers of both Italy’s and Germany’s fascists (Christianity’s fascists). And Albert Einstein and other prominent progressive Jews in the U.S. after World War II described as “fascists” Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom subsequently became elected by Israel’s Jews to lead Israel. And yet the U.S. Government backed them, not only when Begin and Shamir were leading massacres of Arab villages in the 1940s, but when both men became Israel’s leaders in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s — and afterward, under their political follower Benjamin Netanyahu: clearly, a racist-supremacist apartheid regime ever since its founding, a regime which defines the supreme group, “Jew,” not only by religion, but by descent; that is, racially. Under U.S. President Harry S. Truman, the America and the world that his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who was against the formation of a Jewish state and even resisted his aides who backed Churchill’s strong support for the creation of Israel, and who also was opposed to Winston Churchill’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s urgings for a war against the Soviet Union) had sought and carefully planned — the world that FDR had been intensively working to build — abruptly ended. And, more than anything else, this is the reason why, on 28 October 2023, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva, to resign his post. He resigned his post because now the final solution to the Palestinian problem — the problem that Truman and his successors enabled fascist Jews to create — is about to come to a head. And decent Jews everywhere will be experiencing the backlash from what the indecent ones — who are the majority in Israel — are doing. The decent Jews will be getting the backlash for what the indecent ones are doing, but the blame really should go ONLY to the Israelis, and to the UK and U.S. billionaires (and their politicians and ‘news’-media) who have been constantly propagandizing for them.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • On October 28, Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva (and I here, in boldface, add a few links for documentation of some of his assertions):

    This will be my last official communication to you. …

    The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions, are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms [against Arabs] are accompanied by Israeli military units.

    Across the land, Apartheid rules.

    This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, [Jewish] settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations “to ensure respect” for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities. …

    We must begin now or surrender to unspeakable horror. I see ten essential points: 1. Legitimate action: First, we in the UN must abandon the failed (and largely disingenuous) Oslo paradigm, its illusory two-state solution, its impotent and complicit Quartet, and its subjugation of international law to the dictates of presumed political expediency. Our positions must be unapologetically based on international human rights and international law. 2. Clarity of Vision: We must stop the pretense that this is simply a conflict over land or religion between two warring parties and admit the reality of the situation in which a disproportionately powerful state is colonizing, persecuting, and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity. 3. One State based on human rights: We must support the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land. …

    Israelis learned well from Hitler: they elected governments that did (or else condoned doing) to the non-Jewish natives in their land (who before 1948 were 61% Muslim, 30% Jewish, and 8% Christian), what Hitler had done to Jews in Christian Europe — and now they are being supported by the U.S. and its allies to deliver Israel’s final solution to the Palestinian problem: extermination.

    The self-defense by Israel and its apologists, for this reality that drove Mokhiber to quit and to condemn them, is for them to ignore all of that reality, and to focus instead upon the responses to it by the Palestinians. The self-defense, in other words, is to condemn not the side that started this war (themselves) beginning in 1948, but the side that then, and even earlier (in the late 1930s), were trying to prevent or avoid it (the Palestinians). The evil in this deception by the perpetrators — by the Israelis and their apologists — is obvious, and here is how it is driving a surge in anti-Semitism:

    Israel and its apologists say that anti-Israelism is the same thing as anti-Semitism (so that to condemn Israel is to condemn all Jews), but here they lie yet again because outside of Israel are many Jews who loathe what Israel has been doing in their names. The very idea that all Jews are Israelis, or even support the Israelis and oppose the Palestinians in this war between the aggressor (Israelis) and the defender (the Palestinians), is stupid. That idea simply is not the case; but yet many Jews are being targeted by AUTHENTIC anti-Semites as-if it WERE the case.

    Comments by many readers and viewers online are rife with such anti-Semitism, and the global community of that authentic anti-Semitism grows ever-larger, the closer that Israel and the U.S. get to delivering their final solution to the Palestinian problem. A great many of these anti-Semitic comments are coming from individuals who condemn all Jews on the basis of anti-Semitic lines from the New Testament (such as John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, and the earliest-written one of them all, 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 — all of which lines I have discussed here). However, many come instead from the Old Testament, which historians consider to be mythical but theologians and preachers believe instead to be “the Word of God”; and, so, scholars cannot agree with one-another on what is history and what in the Old Testament is instead merely myth (religious propaganda, for spreading the Jewish faith).

    According to Wikipedia’s article on the “Kingdom of Judah“:

    Centered in the highlands of Judea, the kingdom’s capital was Jerusalem.[3] Jews are named after Judah and are primarily descended from it.[4][5] The Hebrew Bible depicts the Kingdom of Judah as a successor to the United Kingdom of Israel, a term denoting the united monarchy under biblical kings Saul, David and Solomon and covering the territory of Judah and Israel. However, during the 1980s, some biblical scholars began to argue that the archaeological evidence for an extensive kingdom before the late-8th century BCE is too weak, and that the methodology used to obtain the evidence is flawed.[6][7] In the 10th and early 9th centuries BCE, the territory of Judah appears to have been sparsely populated, limited to small rural settlements, most of them unfortified.[8]

    and Wikipedia’s “Davidic line” says that,

    as for David and his immediate descendants themselves, the position of some scholars, as described by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, authors of The Bible Unearthed, espouses that David and Solomon may well be based on “certain historical kernels”, and probably did exist in their own right, but their historical counterparts simply could not have ruled over a wealthy lavish empire as described in the Bible, and were more likely chieftains of a comparatively modest Israelite society in Judah and not regents over a kingdom proper.[27]

    If the actual historical nation of Israel was ONLY what is shown on the map as constituting the Kingdom of Judah, then neither Gaza nor the northern two-thirds of the West Bank had ever been in any ancient Israel; and, so, anyone who says that the Jews in 1948 were ‘coming home’ to ‘Israel’ is historically wrong. However, those Jews were ethnically cleansing the land. It’s well-documented, such as here, here, here, and here. And even if ancient Israel had included all of the land that now is Israel, it wasn’t so at all in recent centuries, when virtually all of the residents there were Muslims and Christians — though Jews were demanding to control it while being only a tiny percentage of the population there. Their supremacism was clearly not only fascist but racist; it was Jewish Nazism. Furthermore, during the 1930s, Zionists considered themselves to be fascists; and fascists in both Germany and Italy considered Zionists to be Jewish fascists, ideological brothers of both Italy’s and Germany’s fascists (Christianity’s fascists). And Albert Einstein and other prominent progressive Jews in the U.S. after World War II described as “fascists” Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom subsequently became elected by Israel’s Jews to lead Israel. And yet the U.S. Government backed them, not only when Begin and Shamir were leading massacres of Arab villages in the 1940s, but when both men became Israel’s leaders in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s — and afterward, under their political follower Benjamin Netanyahu: clearly, a racist-supremacist apartheid regime ever since its founding, a regime which defines the supreme group, “Jew,” not only by religion, but by descent; that is, racially. Under U.S. President Harry S. Truman, the America and the world that his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who was against the formation of a Jewish state and even resisted his aides who backed Churchill’s strong support for the creation of Israel, and who also was opposed to Winston Churchill’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s urgings for a war against the Soviet Union) had sought and carefully planned — the world that FDR had been intensively working to build — abruptly ended. And, more than anything else, this is the reason why, on 28 October 2023, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva, to resign his post. He resigned his post because now the final solution to the Palestinian problem — the problem that Truman and his successors enabled fascist Jews to create — is about to come to a head. And decent Jews everywhere will be experiencing the backlash from what the indecent ones — who are the majority in Israel — are doing. The decent Jews will be getting the backlash for what the indecent ones are doing, but the blame really should go ONLY to the Israelis, and to the UK and U.S. billionaires (and their politicians and ‘news’-media) who have been constantly propagandizing for them.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Instead of there being the U.S.-Government-promised ‘peace dividend’ after the Soviet Union ended in 1991, there has been soaring militarism by the U.S., and also soaring profits for the American producers of war-weapons. Both the profits on this, and the escalation in America’s aggressiveness following after 1991, have been stunning. Whereas there were 53 “Instances of United States Use of Armed Forces Abroad” (U.S. invasions) during the 46 years of 1945-1991, there were 244 such instances during the 31 years of 1991-2022, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service. From a rate of 1.15 U.S. invasions per year during Cold War One (1945-1991), it rose to 7.87 per year during Cold War Two (1991-2022).

    Furthermore: the U.S. Government began in 1948 its many dozens of coups (starting with Thailand in that year) to overthrow the leaders of its targeted-for-takeover countries, and its replacement of those by U.S.-chosen dictators. Ever since 25 July 1945, the U.S. Government has been aiming to take control over the entire world — to create the world’s first-ever all-encompassing global empire.

    Cold War Two is the years when Russia had ended its side of the Cold War in 1991 while the U.S. secretly has continued its side of the Cold War. This deceit by America was done during the start of Russia’s Yeltsin years, when the G.H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton Administrations sent the Harvard economics department into Russia to teach Yeltsin’s people how to become capitalists by partnering U.S. billionaires with whomever Russia would privatize its assets to, and so created an incredibly corrupt economy there, which would be dependent upon decisions by America’s billionaires — Russia was then in the process of becoming the U.S. Government’s biggest colony or ‘ally’ after it would be trapped fully in the thrall of America’s billionaires, which was the U.S. regime’s objective. Then, while getting its claws into Russia’s Government that way, Clinton lowered the boom against Russia, by blatantly violating the promises that Bush’s team had made (but which violation by Bush’s successors had been planned by Bush — Bush secretly told his stooges (Kohl, Mitterand, etc.) that the promises he had told them to make to Gorbachev, that NATO wouldn’t expand toward Russia, were to be lies) to Gorbachev, and that NATO actually would expand toward Russia and would exclude Russia from ever being considered as a possible NATO member-nation (i.e., Russia wasn’t to be another vassal nation, but instead a conquered nation, to be exploited by the entire U.S. empire). The expansion of America’s NATO toward Russia was begun by Clinton — on 12 March 1999 near the end of his Presidency — bringing Czechia, Hungary, and Poland, into NATO, blatantly in violation of what Bush’s team had promised to Gorbachev’s team.

    Russia’s top leadership now knew that America’s top leadership intended to conquer Russia, not merely for Russia to become yet another vassal-nation in the U.S. empire; and, so, Yeltsin resigned as President on 31 December 1999, and passed the nation’s leadership (and Russia’s then seemingly insuperable problems from it) to Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who promptly began to clean house and to inform Russia’s billionaires that either they would do what he asks them to do, or else he would make sure that Russia would pursue whatever legal means were then available in order to get them into compliance with Russia’s tax-laws and other laws, so as for them not to continue to rip-off the Russian nation (as they had been doing). Even the post-2012 solidly neoconservative British newspaper Guardian headlined on 6 March 2022 “How London became the place to be for Putin’s oligarchs” and touched upon the surface of the escape of “Russian oligarchs” to London (and elsewhere in America’s EU-NATO portion of the U.S. empire), but their article didn’t mention the worst cases, such as Mikhail Khordorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, and Vladimir Gusinsky. Each of these were individuals who had absconded with billions in Russia’s wealth. (I previously posted to the Web my “Private Investigations Find America’s Magnitsky Act to Be Based on Frauds”, presenting in-depth the case of the American-in-Russia financial operator Bill Browder’s theft of $232 million from Russia, and documenting Browder’s lies on the basis of which President Obama got passed in the U.S. Congress the Magnitsky Act protecting Browder and sanctioning Russia on fake charges that were cooked up by Browder and by the billionaire George Soros’s ’non-profits’. Not all of the American skimmers from Russia were billionaires; some, such as Browder, weren’t that big. But their shared target was to win control over Russia; and this was the U.S. Government’s objective, too.)

    The U.S. regime also changed its entire strategy for expanding its empire (its list of colonies or ‘allies’ — vassal-nations) after 1991, in a number of significant ways, such as by creating front-organizations, an example being Transparency International, to downgrade creditworthiness of the U.S. regime’s targeted countries (so as to force up their borrowing-costs, and thus weaken the targeted nation’s Government), and there were also a wide range of other ‘non-profits’, some of which took over (privatized) much of the preparatory work for the U.S. regime’s “regime-change” operations (coups) that formerly had been done by the by-now-infamous CIA.

    One of these ‘non-profits’, for example, is CANVAS, Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, which “was founded in 2004 by Srđa Popović, and the CEO of Orion Telecom, Slobodan Đinović.” Just about all that is online about Đinović is this, this, this, this and this. It’s not much, for allegedly the 50% donor to CANVAS. Actually, that organization’s major funding is entirely secret, and is almost certainly from the U.S. Government or conduits therefrom (including U.S. billionaires such as Soros), since CANVAS is always aiding the overthrow of Governments that the U.S. regime aims to overthrow.

    Both Popović and Đinović had earlier, since 1998, been among the leading members of another U.S. astroturf ‘revolution for democracy’ organization, Otpor! (“Resistance!”), which had helped to overthrow Milosevic and break up Yugoslavia. Otpor! ended successfully in 2004, at which time Popović and Đinović founded their own CANVAS, which they designed to institutionalize and spread to Ukraine and other countries the techniques that Otpor! had used and which had been taught to Otpor! by the U.S. regime under Bill Clinton. These were techniques which had been formalized by the American political scientist Gene Sharp.

    Even well before Popovic and Dinovic had joined in 1998 (during the U.S-NATO’s prior overthrow-Milosevic campaign to break up the former Yugoslavia) the Otpor student movement to overthrow Yugoslavia’s President Slobodan Milošević, the American Gene Sharp had created the detailed program to do this. Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute published and promoted Sharp’s books advocating pacifism as the best way to force a ‘dictatorship’ (i.e., any Government that the U.S. regime wants to overthrow) to be overthrown. Sharp presented himself as being an advocate of ’non-violent resistance’ as practiced by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other actual anti-imperialists, but Sharp himself was no anti-imperialist (quite the contrary!); he was instead purely a pacifist, and not at all anti-imperialist. Einstein, like Gandhi, had been no pacifist, but didn’t know that Sharp, whom Einstein never met, accepted imperialism, which Sharp’s claimed hero, Gandhi, detested. So, Einstein unfortunately accepted the cunning Sharp’s request to write a Foreword for Sharp’s first book praising Gandhi, Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power, and Sharp then used that Foreword as ‘proof’ that Sharp was a follower of Einstein (even naming his Institute after the by-then deceased physicist) — which was as false as Sharp’s claimed advocacy of Gandhi’s philosophy was. Sharp was a master self-publicist and deceiver. Einstein’s 321-word, 1.3-page-long, Foreword praised the work and its young author, but he might just have cursorily skimmed the manuscript. He probably would have have been appalled at what followed from Sharp.

    Sharp, thus, carefully avoided clarifying that, for example, he would have been a pacifist if he had been in America during the U.S. Revolutionary War, or even perhaps if he had been a northerner during the Civil War, or else been an anti-Nazi partisan during WW II (a pacifist ‘anti-Nazi’). Sharp’s recommendations are useful for the U.S. regime’s coups, because Sharp’s recommendations provide a way to make as difficult as possible for a head-of-state that the U.S. regime has targeted for removal, to remain in office. Sharp’s recommendations are for such a head-of-state to need to employ so much — and ever-increasing — violence against so many of his domestic opponents (fooled non-violent resistors — ‘martyrs’), as to become forced to resign, simply in order not to become himself a casualty of the resultant soaring backlash against himself as being viewed by his own public as simply a ruthless tyrannical dictator, for imprisoning or even killing those ‘democracy protesters’ who had been fooled by agents of the U.S. empire. So: Sharp’s methods are ideal to use so as to increase the public’s support for what is actually a U.S. coup. And that’s their real purpose: to facilitate coups, instead of to create any actual revolution. (As the commentator at the opening there noted, “Missing from Gene Sharp’s list are ‘Constructive actions’ – actions you take to build the alternative society you hope to create.” Sharp’s entire system is for destroying a Government — nothing to create a new one except that it should be ‘democratic’ — whatever that supposedly meant to his fools.) And, then, the coup itself is carried out, by the U.S. professionals at that, once the targeted head-of-state has become hated by a majority of his population. That’s the Sharp method, for coups.

    This is an alternative to what had been the U.S. regime’s method during 1945-1991, which was simply CIA-run coups, which relied mainly upon bribing local officials and oligarchs, and hiring rent-a-mobs so as to show photographic ‘mass-support’ for overthrowing a ruler, in order to replace the local ruler with one that the U.S. regime has selected (like this).

    On 12 November 2012, the pacifist John Horgan headlined at Scientific American, “Should Scientists and Engineers Resist Taking Military Money?,” and he wrote:

    Defense-funded research has led to advances in civilian health care, transportation, communication and other industries that have improved our lives. My favorite example of well-spent Pentagon money was a 1968 Darpa grant to the political scientist Gene Sharp. That money helped Sharp research and write the first of a series of books on how nonviolent activism can bring about political change.

    Sharp’s writings have reportedly inspired nonviolent opposition movements around the world, including ones that toppled corrupt regimes in Serbia, Ukraine [he was referring here to the 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’, but Sharp’s methods were also used in the 2014 ‘Maidan Revolution’], Georgia–and, more recently, Tunisia and Egypt [the ‘Arab Spring’]. Sharp, who has not received any federal support since 1968, has defended his acceptance of Darpa funds. In the preface of his classic 1972 work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, he argued that “governments and defense departments — as well as other groups — should finance and conduct research into alternatives to violence in politics.” I couldn’t agree more.

    So: Sharp’s pacifists are the opposite of anti-imperialists; they are neocons: agents to expand the U.S. empire, by means of (i.e., now preferring) coups instead of military invasions.

    On 11 December 2000, the Washington Post headlined “U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition,” and reported:

    The lead role was taken by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government’s foreign assistance agency, which channeled the funds through commercial contractors and nonprofit groups such as NDI and its Republican counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI).

    While NDI worked closely with Serbian opposition parties, IRI focused its attention on Otpor, which served as the revolution’s ideological and organizational backbone. In March, IRI paid for two dozen Otpor leaders to attend a seminar on nonviolent resistance at the Hilton Hotel in Budapest, a few hundreds yards along the Danube from the NDI-favored Marriott.

    During the seminar, the Serbian students received training in such matters as how to organize a strike, how to communicate with symbols, how to overcome fear and how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime. The principal lecturer was retired U.S. Army Col. Robert Helvey, who has made a study of nonviolent resistance methods around the world, including those used in modern-day Burma and the civil rights struggle in the American South.

    “What was most amazing to us was to discover that what we were trying to do spontaneously in Serbia was supported by a whole nonviolent system that we knew nothing about,” said Srdja Popovic, a former biology student. “This was the first time we thought about this in a systematic, scientific way. We said to ourselves, ‘We will go back and apply this.’ ”

    Helvey, who served two tours in Vietnam, introduced the Otpor activists to the ideas of American theoretician Gene Sharpe, whom he describes as “the Clausewitz of the nonviolence movement,” referring to the renowned Prussian military strategist. Six months later, Popovic can recite Helvey’s lectures almost word for word, beginning with the dictum, “Removing the authority of the ruler is the most important element in nonviolent struggle.”

    “Those Serbs really impressed me,” Helvey said in an interview from his West Virginia home. “They were very bright, very committed.”

    Back in Serbia, Otpor activists set about undermining Milosevic’s authority by all means available. Rather than simply daubing slogans on walls, they used a wide range of sophisticated public relations techniques, including polling, leafleting and paid advertising. “The poll results were very important,” recalled Ivo Andric, a marketing student at Belgrade University. “At every moment, we knew what to say to the people.”

    The poll results pointed to a paradox that went to the heart of Milosevic’s grip on power. On one hand, the Yugoslav president was detested by 70 percent of the electorate. On the other, a majority of Serbs believed he would continue to remain in power, even after an election. To topple Milosevic, opposition leaders first had to convince their fellow Serbs that he could be overthrown.

    At a brainstorming session last July, Otpor activist Srdjan Milivojevic murmured the words “Gotov je,” or “He’s finished.”

    “We realized immediately that it summed up our entire campaign,” said Dejan Randjic, who ran the Otpor marketing operation. “It was very simple, very powerful. It focused on Milosevic, but did not even mention him by name.”

    Over the next three months, millions of “Gotov je” stickers were printed on 80 tons of imported adhesive paper–paid for by USAID and delivered by the Washington-based Ronco Consulting Corp.–and plastered all over Serbia on walls, inside elevators and across Milosevic’s campaign posters. Printed in black and white and accompanied by Otpor’s clenched-fist emblem, they became the symbol of the revolution.

    However, a WikiLeaked email from Jake Sullivan to Hillary Clinton on 26 July 2011, about the Subject “Gene Sharp,” discussed Egypt’s “April 6 movement,” which had overthrown Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. Sullivan told her that “In order to assess … the role of Gene Sharp’s ideas in the January 25 revolution, several members of the Policy Planning Staff (S/P) looked into the issue during a recent fact-finding trip to Egypt. They met with representatives of a wide range of protest groups — including the April 6 movement — major civil society organizations, and political parties.” And Sullivan concluded that “ the earlier reporting on these purported ties to Gene Sharp now seems somewhat overblown. …  Most other analysts … credit this to the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Sullivan wrote from ignorance. On 3 March 2018, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper headlined “The Resistance Guide That Inspired Jewish Settlers and Muslim Brothers Alike: Opponents of Israel’s 2005 Gaza withdrawal, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and anti-government protesters in Iran have adopted the civil disobedience principles of the late Prof. Gene Sharp,” and recounted that, “Participants in the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 also owe many of their achievements to Sharp’s ideas. In Egypt it’s known that at least four groups of activists were influenced by them. Even the Muslim Brotherhood [the group that Sullivan said was NOT influenced by Sharp’s ideas], whose tradition of violence struck fear into the hearts of many, viewed Sharp’s book as a manual and posted it in Arabic translation on its website.” And, for example, even Wikipedia, in its article on the “April 6 Youth Movement,” says: “The April 6 movement is using the same raised fist symbol as the Otpor! movement from Serbia, that helped bring down the regime of Slobodan Milošević and whose nonviolent tactics were later used in Ukraine and Georgia. Mohammed Adel, a leader in the April 6 movement, studied at the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, an organization founded by former Otpor! members.”

    Jake Sullivan was stunningly ignorant — not merely arrogant. The U.S. intelligence community has intimately cooperated with Otpor, CANVAS, and other such astroturf ‘revolution’-generators for American billionaires. For example, Ruaridh Arrow, the writer and director of a eulogistic biopic on Gene Sharp, “How to Start a Revolution,” headlined “Did Gene Sharp work for the CIA? Correcting the Conspiracies.” He wrote: “Funds were provided by the NED and IRI to activists for Albert Einstein Institution projects, for example in Burma, but the Institution was never able to fund groups in its own right.” (And what is that “but”-clause supposed to mean?) However, Arrow also wrote there: “Gene Sharp never worked for the CIA, in fact he was highly critical of them and advised activists not to take money from intelligence services. He argued that reliance on outsiders could weaken their movement and make them reliant on a foreign state which could suddenly cut off money and support, causing serious damage to their cause. It’s one thing to deny involvement with the CIA, it’s quite another to go around the world giving convincing arguments NOT to take money from them. … See below for a video of Gene Sharp telling people NOT to take money from the CIA.”

    Sharp’s operation, and that of the other ’non-profits’ such as CANVAS that adhere to it, don’t need money from the CIA, because they can get plenty of money from the billionaires who benefit from America’s coups. On 26 January 2001, David Holley in the Los Angeles Times headlined “The Seed Money for Democracy: Financier George Soros has put out $2.8 billion since 1990 to promote a global open society. His efforts include funding the student movement that helped oust Milosevic in Yugoslavia.” He wrote:

    Yugoslavia was a case where everything democrats had worried about–extreme nationalism, ethnic conflict, corruption, media controls and bickering among opposition political parties–were at their worst. Yet, just as Soros had calculated, it was a grass-roots surge by strong citizen organizations that won the battle for democracy.

    Soros’ branch in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, was among the earliest backers of Otpor, which grew under young and decentralized leadership to strengthen the fractured opposition to Milosevic. “We gave them their first grant back in 1998, when they appeared as a student organization,” said Ivan Vejvoda, executive director of the Fund for an Open Society-Yugoslavia, the network’s branch here.

    Foreign financial support helped Otpor surreptitiously print about 60 tons of posters and leaflets in the months before the Sept. 24 election that led to Milosevic’s ouster, said Miljana Jovanovic, a student who is one of the movement’s leaders. …

    The vast majority of groups funded by Soros are not nearly as powerful as Otpor, nor do they play for such huge stakes.

    More typical are efforts such as “horse-riding therapy” for disabled children, funded by the network’s Polish branch, the Stefan Batory Foundation.

    I found that article only recently. On 18 April 2022, I had headlined “History of the Ukrainian War” and here was a passage in it that included the Stafan Battory Foundation, but I didn’t know, at the time, that this organization was actually Soros’s Open Society Foundation in Poland. Here is the relevant portion from that history of the Ukrainian war:

    *****

    On 1 March 2013 inside America’s Embassy to Ukraine in Kiev, a series of “Tech Camps” started to be held, in order to train those Ukrainian nazis for their leadership of Ukraine’s ‘anti-corruption’ organizing. Simultaneously, under Polish Government authorization, the CIA was training in Poland the military Right Sector leaders how to lead the coming U.S. coup in neighboring Ukraine. As the independent Polish investigative journalist Marek Miszczuk headlined for the Polish magazine NIE (“meaning “NO”) (the original article being in Polish): “Maidan secret state secret: Polish training camp for Ukrainians.” The article was published 14 April 2014. Excerpts:

    An informant who introduced himself as Wowa called the “NIE” editorial office with the information that the Maidan rebels in Wrocław are neo-fascists … [with] tattooed swastikas, swords, eagles and crosses with unambiguous meaning. … Wowa pleadingly announced that photos of members of the Right Sector must not appear in the press. … 86 fighters from the then prepared Euromaidan flew over the Vistula River in September 2013 at the invitation of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The pretext was to start cooperation between the Warsaw University of Technology and the National University of Technology in Kiev. But they were in Poland to receive special training to overthrow Ukraine’s government. … Day 3 and 4 – theoretical classes: crowd management, target selection, tactics and leadership. Day 5 – training in behavior in stressful situations. Day 6 – free without leaving the center. Day 7 – pre-medical help. Day 8 – protection against irritating gases. Day 9 – building barricades. And so on and on for almost 25 days. The program includes … classes at the shooting range (including three times with sniper rifles!), tactical and practical training in the assault on buildings. …

    Excited by the importance of the information that was presented to me, I started to verify it.

    The Office of the Press Spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to answer the questions about the student exchange without giving any reason. It did not want to disclose whether it had actually invited dozens of neo-fascists to Poland to teach them how to overthrow the legal Ukrainian authorities. …

    Let us summarize: in September 2013, according to the information presented to me, several dozen Ukrainian students of the Polytechnic University will come to Poland, at the invitation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In fact, they are members of the Right Sector, an extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz – he declined to comment on his visit to Legionowo.

    Poland’s ‘fact-checking’ organization is (appropriately) titled demagog dot org (Demagog Association), and it is funded by the Stefan Batory Foundation. Demagog’s article about that NIE news-report rated it “NIEWERYFIKOWALNE” or “ NOT VERIFIABLE”. The sole reason given was: “The Ministry [of Foreign Affairs] strongly opposes such news, emphasizing that the weekly (magazine) has violated not only the principles of good taste, but also raison d’etat (reasons of state).” No facts that were alleged in Miszczuk’s article were even mentioned, much less disproven. How can his article be “unverifiable” if the evidence that it refers to isn’t so much as even being checked?

    Miszczuk’s article’s mention of “the Right Sector, an extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz” referred to the key person (Dmitriy Yarosh) and the key group (his Right Sector paramilitary organization and political party) that has actually been running Ukraine behind the scenes ever since the coup, and they also were the key people who had led the snipers who were firing down from tall buildings upon the Ukrainian Government’s police and upon the anti-Government demonstrators at Kiev’s Maidan Square — the violence simultaneously against both sides — that the newly installed post-coup government immediately blamed against the just-ousted democratically elected President, so that the new top officials were all blaming the ones that they had replaced.

    *****

    On 4 October 2017, the historian F. William Engdahl, who unfortunately leaves many of his allegations not linked to his alleged sources, wrote:

    Goldman Sachs and Stratfor

    Even more interesting details recently came to light on the intimate links between the US “intelligence consultancy”, Stratfor — known as the ”Shadow CIA” for its corporate clients which include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and U.S. government agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

    It was revealed in a huge release of internal memos from Stratfor in 2012, some five million emails provided them by the hacker community Anonymous, that Popović, after creating CANVAS also cultivated very close relations with Stratfor. According to the Stratfor internal emails, Popović worked for Stratfor to spy on opposition groups. So intimate was the relationship between Popović and Stratfor that he got his wife a job with the company and invited several Stratfor people to his Belgrade wedding.

    Revealed in the same Stratfor emails by Wikileaks was the intriguing information that one of the “golden geese” funders of the mysterious CANVAS was a Wall Street bank named Goldman Sachs. Satter Muneer, a Goldman Sachs partner, is cited by Stratfor’s then-Eurasia Analyst Marko Papic. Papic, asked by a Stratfor colleague whether Muneer was the “golden goose” money behind CANVAS, writes back, “They have several golden gooses I believe. He is for sure one of them.”

    Now the very remarkable Mr Popović brings his dishonest career to Hungary where, not a dictator, but a very popular true democrat who offers his voters choices, is the target for Popović’ peculiar brand of US State Department fake democracy. This will not at all be as easy as toppling Milošević, even if he has the help of student activists being trained at Soros’ Central European University in Budapest.

    If he had linked to those WikiLeaks documents, then copies of his article that were made before the U.S. regime removed some WikiLeaks files from the Web would have archived those files, but that didn’t happen; and, so, today, a Web-search for the 3-word string

    Stratfor Popović wikileaks

    produces finds such as

    https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/17/1773778_meeting-canvas-stratfor-.html

    https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/17/1792423_information-on-canvas-.html

    of which no copies were saved at any of the Web archives.

    However, a prior article, by Carl Gibson and Steve Horn of Occuy.com, on 2 December 2013, was headlined “Exposed: Globally Renowned Activist Collaborated with Intelligence Firm Stratfor,” and it has links to the WikiLeaks documents. From all of this, it’s clear that the obscure Srđa Popović and Slobodan Đinović, are each well-connected to wealth, if not themselves quite wealthy, from their business, of fomenting coups for the U.S. regime, in the names of ‘peace’ and of ‘democracy’.

    Apparently, CANVAS remains quite active today:

    On 6 October 2023, Kit Klarenberg, at The Grayzone, headlined “A Maidan 2.0 color revolution looms in Georgia,” and reported that:

    The arrest of US regime change operatives in Tbilisi suggests a coup against Georgia’s government could be in the works. As Ukraine’s counteroffensive fails, the West appears eager to open a new front in its proxy war.

    On September 29, in a disclosure ignored by the entire Western media, the US government-run Radio Free Europe’s Russian-language portal Slobodna Evropa revealed that three foreign operatives had been summoned for questioning by the Georgian Security Service, for allegedly assisting opposition elements prepare a Maidan-style regime change scenario in Tbilisi.

    The operatives were staffers of the Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies. …

    The ruling Georgian dream [NO — it’s the Georgian Dream Party] has been portrayed in the west as a pro-Kremlin government. In reality, it’s simply reverted to a longstanding policy of balancing between East and West. For the neoconservative establishment, its true sin is being insufficiently supportive of the Ukraine proxy war. Thus Ukrainian elements are set to be involved in a possible color revolution. If such an operation succeeds, it would open a second front in that war on Russia’s Western flank.

    The development seemingly confirms warnings from local security officials earlier this September. They cautioned “a coup a la Euromaidan is being prepared in Georgia,” referring to the 2014 US-backed color revolution which toppled Ukraine’s elected president and ushered in a pro-NATO government. The purported lead plotters are ethnic Georgians working for the Ukrainian government: Giorgi Lortkipanidze, Kiev’s deputy military intelligence chief; Mikhail Baturin, the bodyguard of former President Mikheil Saakashvili; and Mamuka Mamulashvili, commander of the notorious Georgian Legion.

    September 6 investigation by The Grayzone revealed that Georgian Legion chief Mamulashvili is centrally implicated in a false flag massacre of Maidan protesters, which was pivotal in unseating elected President Viktor Yanukovych. He apparently brought the shooters to Maidan Square to “sow some chaos” by opening fire on crowds, and provided sniper rifles for the purpose.

    Georgian officials say that now they’ve uncovered evidence that young anti-government activists are undergoing training near Ukraine’s border with Poland to enact a similar scheme, which would feature a deadly bombing during planned riots meant to take place in Tbilisi between October and December, when the European Commission is expected to rule on whether Georgia can formally become an EU candidate country.

    The Wikipedia article “Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies” says:

    CANVAS’ training and methodology has been successfully applied by groups in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), Lebanon (2005), The Maldives (2008)?, Egypt (2011)?, Syria (2011)? and Ukraine (2014). It works only in response to requests for assistance.

    However: anyone who participates in such ‘Revolutions’ is placing oneself at severe personal risk, in order to facilitate a coup by the U.S. Government and its controlling owners, who are billionaires. People such as Sharp, Popović, and Đinović, are merely well-paid and maintained servants to America’s billionaires.

    Here’s how they market their operation, to peaceniks:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20230521063855/https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/CANVAS-Core-Curriculum_EN4.pdf

    https://canvasopedia.org/2023/01/05/examining-non-state-stakeholders-role-in-modern-nonviolent-conflict-2/

    https://web.archive.org/web/20231025015004/https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/canvas_presentation.pdf

    They open by paying homage to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This is mocking them — aping their influence, not spreading it.

    And here is how the neoconservative Tina Rosenberg, in the neoconservative Donald Graham’s Foreign Policy magazine, promotes CANVAS, as being “Revolution U“:

    As nonviolent revolutions have swept long-ruling regimes from power in Tunisia and Egypt and threaten the rulers of nearby Algeria, Bahrain, and Yemen, the world’s attention has been drawn to the causes — generations of repressive rule — and tools — social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter — animating the wave of revolt. But as the members of the April 6 movement learned, these elements alone do not a revolution make. What does? In the past, the discontented availed themselves of the sweeping forces of geopolitics: the fall of regimes in Latin America and the former Soviet bloc was largely a product of the withdrawal of superpower support for dictatorships and the consolidation of liberal democracy as a global ideal. But the global clash of ideologies is over, and plenty of dictators remain — so what do we do?

    The answer, for democratic activists in an ever-growing list of countries, is to turn to CANVAS. Better than other democracy groups, CANVAS has built a durable blueprint for  nonviolent revolution: what to do to grow from a vanload of people into a mass movement and then use those masses to topple a dictator. CANVAS has figured out how to turn a cynical, passive, and fearful public into activists. It stresses unity, discipline, and planning — tactics that are basic to any military campaign, but are usually ignored by nonviolent revolutionaries. There will be many moments during a dictatorship that galvanize public anger: a hike in the price of oil, the assassination of an opposition leader, corrupt indifference to a natural disaster, or simply the confiscation by the police of a produce cart. In most cases, anger is not enough — it simply flares out. Only a prepared opponent will be able to use such moments to bring down a government.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives secretly voted on Friday October 20 to prevent Donald Trump’s choice to become the leader of Republicans in the House, Rep. Jim Jordan, from leading Republicans in the House. The vote to block Trump’s choice was 122 to 86 against Jordan. The voting was held in secret so that the 122 against Jordan will not be known by their own electorate to have voted now so as to increase Biden’s chances to win in 2024. Here is why this vote was crucial, and what it means for a possible Trump-v.-Biden contest in 2024:

    Jim Jordan leads the House Judiciary Committee, and co-authored with the head of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence a 20 April 2023 letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanding that Blinken supply to them by no later than 4 May 2023 certain documents relating to false statements that were made by U.S. intelligence officials in the Obama-Biden Administration (when Blinken was Deputy National Security Advisor and a close friend of Joe Biden): “On October 19, 2020, 51 former intelligence officials released a public statement attempting to discredit the contents of the New York Post’s reporting about Hunter Biden, stating that the story ‘has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation’,” which statement by those officials had caused mainstream U.S. news-media not to report on the Hunter Biden laptop computer contents until after the 2020 election. This might have helped elect Joe Biden to become the U.S. President. Hiding that information might actually have made Biden President.

    Weeks later, on 20 July 2023, Jordan sent to Biden’s FBI Director Christopher Wray a letter informing Wray that on July 17, Jordan’s Committee had learned that the FBI had been lying to the press that the FBI possessed evidence indicating that the N.Y. Post’s article was based upon ‘Russian disinformation’. Simultaneously, both his Committee and the chief Republicans on the Senate’s Oversight Committee, made public evidence on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and from a whistleblower, which made clear that U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden were each paid by the Ukrainian gas firm which had hired Hunter Biden onto its board, $5 million, $10 million in total, in order to get V.P. Joe Biden to force Ukraine’s government to fire Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the gas firm on whose board sat Hunter Biden. Promptly, that Ukrainian investigator was fired. Finally, impeachment hearings on President Biden started in the House; and the next day, on September 29th, Rep. James Comer in the House released a “Mountain of Evidence [that] Reveals Joe Biden Abused his Public Office for his Family’s Financial Gain.”

    Biden and other Democrats are prosecuting Trump, but not on bribery-charges, only lesser ones. Most of the Democrats’ prosecutions against him have already failed to result in any conviction against Trump. Furthermore, whereas Biden has pushed invasions of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and arming of Ukraine on Russia’s border, and of Taiwan to get it to break away from China, Trump had merely continued the wars that Obama and Biden had started. Maybe if Trump beats Biden the Democrats’ wars will be ended by him, not continued as he formerly did. A major reason why Jim Jordan wants to become House Speaker is to end the forever wars that the Democrats have started and aime to continue.

    The Republicans in Name Only, or “RINOs,” are nowadays congressional Republicans who want to continue the wars that Obama and Biden started. The easy way to tell which of the House Republicans were among the 122 who on Friday secretly voted against Jordan is to look at the House member’s voting record and see how that person has voted on appropriations to continue wars that the Democratic Party started. The Republicans that want to continue Democratic Party wars are the ones that want Biden to be re-elected.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • On September 29, the very pro-Biden Mediaite site headlined and reported with hostility toward RFK Jr., “EXCLUSIVE: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Planning to Announce Independent Run”. Then, on October 4, RFK Jr.’s Presidential campaign announced that on October 9 he “will make a historic announcement in Philadelphia, where he will share a vision of a profound realignment of American politics.” On many occasions recently, Kennedy has stated that the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) are running one campaign — the DNC is effectively being run by Biden — and are blocking him from even a possibility of winning the Democratic Party’s nomination, such as by their changing the Party’s rules so that in Georgia, for example, every vote for Kennedy will instead be counted as being a vote for Biden.

    However, the most detailed explanation of what’s happening has been posted by the People’s Party, which is gearing up to assist the campaign of RFK Jr., and which had headlined on September 28, “Majority of Americans Support RFK Jr. Running as an Independent”. They reported there the results of an Ipsos poll of 1,000 Americans during September 15-18 which found that “If the 2024 presidential election was held today between these candidates, who would you vote for?” was answered 39% for Trump, 38% for Biden, and 17% for RFK Jr. if he runs as an independent. 17% is exceptionally strong for any candidate other than a current or former U.S. President at so early a time in the campaign-season. The People’s Party noted that “Polling at 17% would qualify him to participate in the general election debates if the major parties used the traditional 15% threshold.” Furthermore: if the 2024 final election will instead be only between Trump and Biden, then the result would be 45% Trump and 44% Biden; so, Trump was 1% ahead of Biden in each of those two hypothetical situations. The People’s Party also reported there that:

    The Democratic Party is a dead end for Kennedy’s campaign. An incumbent president has never lost a party primary. In 2017, the DNC stated in court that its presidential primaries are a charade and that it picks the nominees. It stated that, as a private corporation, it is under no obligation to be impartial or follow its own rules. The court upheld this argument.

    Furthermore, the DNC and the Biden campaign are essentially the same entity. Biden appointed DNC Chair Jamie Harrison, who is shutting down debates and rearranging the primary schedule according to Biden’s wishes. In February, the entire DNC unanimously endorsed Biden. The president’s campaign dictates the rules of the primary and can change them at will. At the convention, the party can even choose a nominee who didn’t run in the primary, as it did in 1968. This means that even if Biden dropped out, the DNC would still install someone like Gavin Newsom [i.e., a Biden-clone].

    The Biden campaign is also the biggest donor to the DNC. Donations to the Biden Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee with the DNC, financially sustain the party. It brings in hundreds of millions of dollars from big donors that flow to the DNC, all fifty state party organizations, and their vast array of staff, consulting firms, and vendors. The entire party ecosystem and everyone who profits from it would collapse if the party nominated Kennedy. This is why the party rigged the election against Bernie twice and why it will never choose RFK Jr. The party would rather lose with an establishment candidate who keeps the corporate money flowing than win with a populist.

    RFK Jr. is the only current or possible U.S. Presidential candidate who even conceivably could win the U.S. Presidency on the basis of his personal brand instead of on the basis of one of the two Parties’ brand.

    Likely the biggest challenge that RFK Jr., will face will be obtaining ballot access in each of the 50 states for his name to be appearing as one of the options that will be presented to voters on the ballot’s Presidential line.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • If Joe Biden will become the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Presidency, then almost any Republican nominee would likely beat him because he had committed America’s Government to victory in Ukraine — done it is such a way that there can be no going back on it that won’t strip him of the public’s respect for him on account of America’s loss in that war:

    21 February 2023: “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. Never. (Applause.)”

    13 July 2023: “We will not waver … for as long as it takes”.

    24 August 2023 “Our commitment to Ukraine’s independence is unwavering and enduring.”

    21 September 2023 “Mr. President [Zelensky], we’re — we’re with you, and we’re staying with you.”

    If Kamala Harris will become the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Presidency, then she will never be able to disassociate herself from having been his #2.

    On the other hand: If RFK Jr. will be the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Presidency, then he will surely win the Presidency (unless he becomes assassinated) because he has been saying, all along, that Biden’s refusal for Ukraine to negotiate with Russia was serving only to increase the bloodshed in that war — which has been proven to have been correct. He not only criticized what Biden was doing but said that Biden’s saying that if Russia wins the war, then America loses the war, and that if America wins the war, then Russia loses the war, casts that war as being of existential importance to both countries, which is blatantly false because Ukraine has nothing to do with America’s national security. It’s thousands of miles away and poses no threat to America, but it is only 300 miles away from the Kremlin. It is, therefore, even closer to Russia’s central command than Cuba was to America’s central command in Washington DC in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. American missiles in Ukraine would pose an even bigger threat to Russia than Soviet missiles in Cuba would have posed to America. RFK Jr. has strongly opposed Biden’s Ukraine policy, which was Obama’s Ukraine policy — the policy aimed at conquering Russia — but Trump never did anything to reverse the Obama-Biden Ukraine policy. So, if America loses the war in Ukraine, then RFK Jr. would trounce Trump, but Trump would trounce Biden.

    If Trump becomes the Republican nominee, then he would easily beat Biden as the opposite Party’s nominee but would lose to Kennedy as that Party’s nominee, because Trump, while he still was in office, did nothing to reverse the horror that Obama had done to Ukraine by grabbing it in his 2014 Maidan U.S. coup and installing there a rabidly anti-Russian government which produced the war in Ukraine, which started soon after that coup.

    Biden was carrying out Obama’s Ukraine-policy against Russia, but Trump did nothing to reverse it and to end the war there that Obama had started by grabbing Ukraine.

    Therefore, if Russia wins the war in Ukraine, then virtually any Republican would beat Biden as the Democratic nominee, but RFK Jr. would beat any Republican nominee. RFK Jr. has none of the taint of the Obama-Biden Ukraine policy, but Obama and Biden couldn’t have carried out that policy if it didn’t have virtually unanimous support from congressional Republicans. Whereas RFK Jr. can free the Democratic Party of the taint of the Obama-Biden Ukraine policy, there is no Republican who can free the Republican Party from the taint of that policy.

    If Russia wins in Ukraine, then only RFK Jr. could beat any Republican nominee.

    However, if America wins in Ukraine (which Russia won’t allow, because that would pose a severe existential threat to Russia’s national security; it would mean the end of Russia as an independent sovereign nation), then Biden (or another neoconservative Democrat) will (tragically for the entire world) win in 2024.

    Of course: if Ukraine’s war drags on for as long as Biden is hoping it will, then the likelihood is high that he will win the nomination; and, then, he would stand a reasonably strong chance of again winning the Presidency. This is the reason why I’m expecting Russia to win the war on its terms and within the next few months (this year) — not allow it to drag on until the 2024 voting starts in America.

  • World Wars I and II were contests between empires, and so America’s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was determined that after WW II, all empires would be outlawed and all international relations (between nations) would be controlled only by a global all-inclusive federation of nations, which in 1941 he referred to would be called “the United Nations” and which would exclusively possess the Executive, Legislative, and Juridical, powers and authorities  — to make and enforce the international laws that would be created by that international Legislature of all nations, subject to that Supreme Court which would interpret that Legislature’s constitution or “Charter” for this global government between nations, and which would be enforced by that international Executive. All strategic weaponry would be owned and under the control of that Executive and none other. This was FDR’s plan to replace empires and world wars, by creating the world’s first democratic federation of all nations, which would supersede and replace any and all empires.

    On 25 July 1945, FDR’s immediate successor Harry Truman, became convinced by two imperialists whom he deeply respected, Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, to reject that plan by FDR, which plan Truman didn’t even know about but only inferred might have existed and been FDR’s plan. In any case, Truman secretly despised FDR, and replaced his entire Cabinet within two years, so that he (instead of FDR) would shape the post-WW-II world.

    The first-ever military alliance was created by Truman (under the guidance of Eisenhower, Churchill, James Byrnes and others) in order to carry out his plan for ultimate global conquest. A “military alliance” is a military contract between nations that is legally binding between them by a provision in it that says an invasion against any one of them will be an invasion against all of them and will automatically place each one of them into a state of war against that invader. It is unlike all prior empires because it is by contract instead of by exigency. Unlike in World Wars One and Two, in neither of which, the empires or coalition of empires that were waging war against each other were subject to any overriding pre-signed contract amongst them, the U.S. Government in 1949 created the world’s very first military alliance by contract, NATO, and many of the signatories to or members of that contract didn’t know when they signed it that they were thereby committing their nation to relying upon the U.S. Government to determine their foreign policies, which would be enforced by the U.S. military — they didn’t know that they were thereby becoming vassal-nations or colonies of an entirely new TYPE of empire: a military alliance by contract, instead of merely by exigency (such as had been the case in WW I & WW II).

    This was an entirely new phenomenon in world affairs, and it is increasingly forcing the world’s nations to either comply with whatever the demands by the U.S. Government are, or else to potentially become victimized by the U.S. and its ‘allies’, such as Germany did when the U.S. Government arranged for the Russo-German-owned Nord Stream fuel pipelines from Russia to Germany and the rest of the EU, to become blown-up and destroyed (which was an act of war by the U.S. Government against both Russia and Germany, Germany being itself a member-nation in NATO and therefore having no recourse against it).

    When the Nord Stream pipelines were blown-up, Germany could not rely upon the NATO Treaty to protect itself against that invader because the invader in that instance was the U.S. Government, the virtual owner of NATO; and, furthermore, the U.S. Government has 231 military bases in Germany; so, Germany’s Government was powerless to resist in any way — verbally or otherwise.

    The world’s second military alliance was the Warsaw Pact, which was created on 14 May 1955 by the Soviet Union in direct response to the U.S. Government’s contemptuous rejection of the Soviet Union’s secret request on 22 April 1954 to Eisenhower, to be considered for possible admission into NATO. That rejection was the moment when Khrushchev recognized to a certainty that the U.S. Government was determined to conquer the Soviet Union, no matter what concessions the Soviet Union might make. Whereas in the NATO treaty, its Article 5 is the core, the core in the Warsaw Pact treaty is its Article 4, which is equivalent to it. Whereas the Warsaw Pact agreement became terminated in 1991 on the basis of verbal promises not to expand the alliance, which the U.S. Government and its allies had made in 1990 to the Soviet Government, all of which turned out all to have been lies that were controlled by U.S. President GHW Bush, the NATO agreement remained in force and even doubled its membership after the Warsaw Pact ended.

    The world’s third military alliance is the AUKUS Treaty, this being a secret treaty (thus even worse than the NATO Treaty, which was not a secret agreement) by which the U.S. and its UK partner created a new military alliance, between Australia, UK, and U.S., but this time against China, instead of against Russia. There have been efforts by the U.S. Government to get its NATO military alliance to include the leading nations in the areas of the Pacific and Indian Oceans to join NATO, but NATO’s France has thus-far blocked that. Apparently, if the U.S. Government is determined to force WW III to start in Asia-Pacific, then the military alliance will have to be based on the secret AUKUS agreement, not on the public NATO agreement.

    In order for AUKUS to avoid being criticized on account of the non-publication of the treaty, a Web-search for such phrases as “AUKUS text” produces subsidiary documents such as this, instead of the actual document, and this is done in order to deceive researchers to think that it’s not even a military alliance at all (and in that linked-to example, it’s only an agreement about technological cooperation, which doesn’t even mention “China” nor have any mutual-‘defense’ clause in it). They’re treating researchers as fools.

    Consequently, there now are two military alliances, NATO against Russia, and AUKUS against China, and both of them are intended ultimately to conquer the entire world with the participation of America’s ‘allies’ or colonies.

    To the extent that either of these military alliances succeeds, there will be a Third World War; and, so, now, all nations of the world are implicitly being challenged, either to join the U.S. to conquer Russia and China; or, else, to say no to the U.S. Government, and to demand that it reverse what it did and for it to participate with other nations to institute the changes that must be made to the U.N.’s Charter in order to transform that into what FDR had been intending; or, else, for all decent nations to create together a replacement of Truman’s U.N., so that the U.S. Government will become isolated in its aim to win a WW III, and there will instead become the type of world that FDR had been hoping would follow after WW II — a world that would NOT produce another World War..

    Conceptually, the issue here is between the Truman-installed win-lose plan for the future (which is no basic change from the past), versus a win-win plan for the future, which is what FDR and the Governments in both Russia and China have been advocating for but no one is doing anything to help actually bring about. Ironically, the Truman plan would actually be lose-lose, because any WW III would destroy this entire planet. But it’s the direction we are heading toward.

    It’s important to understand that though FDR invented and came up with the fundamental principles for his planned “United Nations,” it was Truman right after FDR’s 12 April 1945 death who basically controlled the San Francisco Conference, during 25 April to 26 June 1945 and the text that it wrote for the U.N.’s Charter. We got Truman’s U.N. — not FDR’s.

    Also ironically, the Truman pathway we are on, toward that result, is the opposite of “democracy” though is claimed to epitomize democracy. For example: just consider the ridiculousness of the AUKUS contract being a SECRET treaty among self-proclaimed ‘democracies’. Then add to this the fact that the secret treaty is a preparation for a WW III that would start in Asia against China instead of in Europe (which had been the main battleground in both of the first two World Wars) and against Russia. So: its presumption is that the world’s publics will quietly be shepherded into WW II on the basis of — among other lies — a secret treaty, the one that created the world’s second military alliance and that isn’t even criticized for its being a secret (and extremely dangerous) treaty among ‘democracies’. Lies can kill the world.

    These are the reasons why both NATO and AUKUS must be disbanded, just like the Warsaw Pact was. Either that, or else we’ll have WW III.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • In virtually every country that’s allied with the U.S. Government against Russia and against China, there is a low public job-approval-rating for its head-of-state and for its Government, and a rating that is far lower than is the public job-approval for the leaders of the countries that the U.S. gang are trying to regime-change. If a given nation’s leader’s net public job-approval rating (% who approve, minus the % who disapprove) is above 0%, or positive, then that is an indication the nation’s Government is a democracy, because then that leader is satisfying his public (including his political opposition — not merely his own voters) more than dissatisfying it — that leader actually DOES represent his nation. However, if the net job-approval rating is below 0%, or negative, it’s likelier a dictatorship than a democracy (and then the question is: whom does that leader actually serve?).

    Every week the Morning Consult polling organization scientifically samples public opinion in 22 countries regarding Approve/Disapprove on the given nation’s leader, including all of the U.S. Government’s allies plus five nations that are on friendly terms with the U.S. Government but not lockstep followers of it: the latter 5 being India, Switzerland, Mexico, Australia, and Brazil. All of the other 17 Governments (which includes America’s own Government) are rabidly hostile toward both of the U.S.-designated top enemy nations, which are China and Russia. So: the Morning Consult pollings include the 17 U.S.-and-allied countries, plus 5 nations that are in some way on the fence between the U.S. Government and its designated top enemies — i.e., America’s targets to be conquered.

    Here is the complete rank-order list of the 22 sampled countries along with the net job-performance rating of its leader by its public as per the 29 June 2023 posting:

    Global Leader Approval Rating Tracker

    Narendra Modi (India) +58%
    Alain Berset (Switzerland) +35%
    Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Mexico) +24%
    Anthony Albanese (Australia) +19%
    Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Brazil) +9%
    Giorgia Meloni (Italy) +5%
    Alexander De Croo (Belgium) -9%
    Pedro Sánchez (Spain) -10%
    Justin Trudeau (Canada) -12%
    Joe Biden (U.S.) -13%
    Leo Varadkar (Ireland) -18%
    Mateusz Morawiecki (Poland) -26%
    Rishi Sunak (U.K.) -28%
    Ulf Kristersson (Sweden) -28%
    Jonas Gahr Støre(Norway) -30%
    Karl Nehammer (Austria) -33%
    Olaf Scholz (Germany) -34%
    Fumio Kishida (Japan) -34%
    Mark Rutte (Netherlands) -41%
    Emmanuel Macron (France) -43%
    Yoon Seok-youl (South Korea) -49%
    Petr Fiala (Czech Republic) -54%

    If the top 5, which are not fully U.S.-allied countries (i.e., not fully committed to conquer both Russia and China), are included, then the net job-approval of all 22 leaders collectively is -312%/22=-14.2%. The average performance on the entire list is -14.2%.

    If those 5 are excluded and ONLY the 17 fully committed U.S.-and-allied nations are included, then, the net job-approval of those 17 leaders is -467%/17=-28.5%. The average performance of the 17 U.S.-and-allied countries is -28.5%.

    In order to determine the net job-approval of the leaders of the two countries that the U.S. Government is especially determined to conquer, China and Russia:

    Just as, in the U.S., the Gallup polling organization is the standard one that has tracked approve-disapprove for U.S. Presidents over decades; in Russia, the Levada polling organization has done the same, and it has periodically polled Russians about Putin. Ever since he became Russia’s leader on 1 January 2000, his average Approve is 70% and Disapprove is 25% for a net +35% over that 23-year period, but recently it is instead 80% Approve and 15% Disapprove, for a net +70%, which is even higher than Modi’s +58% in India.

    I’ve not found any polling-results on China’s President Xi, but two polls are relevant: On 22 August 2022, I headlined “NATO-Affiliated Poll in 53 Countries Finds Chinese the Most Think Their Country Is a Democracy” and reported that, “A poll in 53 countries by the NATO-affiliated “Alliance of Democracies” found that 83% of Chinese think that China is a democracy. That’s the highest percentage amongst all of the 53 countries surveyed.” And, the “U.S. was worse than average, and was tied at #s 40&41, out of the 53 nations, with Colombia, at 49%” — barely less than half of Americans think they live in a democracy. Furthermore: the Edelman Trust Barometer polls in 28 countries, and some of its questions are likewise relevant. On 24 March 2023, I headlined “How Nations’ Citizens Rate Their Own Government” and reported that of all 28 nations surveyed by the Edelman organization, the trust in the Government was the highest in China, at 91%, while only 39% of Americans trust their Government. Only 37% of Russians do, and Russians have distrusted their Government ever since there has been polling on that — the disparity between how Russians rate their Government versus how they rate Putin is enormous and has no parallel in any other country that I know of. Perhaps local governments are lousy there. It’s a disparity that ought to be examined scientifically. But, also, U.S. President Biden’s saying, of Putin, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” is plain evil, just like his calling Xi a “dictator” is. For Biden, with a net job-approval of -13%, to be saying such things about national leaders who have served their nations vastly better than Biden has been serving his, is hateful, closed-minded, petty, and extremely dangerous both to his own country and to all countries; it is despicable, and clearly marks him as a leader who needs to be regime-changed as soon as possible (but not replaced by anyone in his Administration, since he has surrounded himself with individuals who are just as dangerous as he himself is).

    Anyhow: the way that America’s super-rich, who provide most of the funding to U.S. political campaigns, keep supplying the country with abysmal Presidents virtually nonstop ever since the end of WW II (and, so, ever since 1945, the U.S. Government has perpetrated 297 invasions and at least 60 coups) is by selecting to fund in each Party only politicians who will serve their bidding and not the public’s needs. It’s the same in all U.S.-and-allied countries. Just look at the “Global Leader Approval Rating Tracker” to see how it has been playing out in each one of the 17 U.S.-and-allied countries. None of them is a democracy (one-person-one-vote); each of them is an aristocracy (one-dollar-one-vote, just like a corporation is). Each one of them is pay-to-play. And that is why each of these nations is a game that the public always loses.

    So: in the U.S.-and-allied world, the publics constantly hear and read that their own country is a “democracy” but that China and Russia are “dictatorships,” and this hate-machine is nonstop. It’s an upside-down ‘reality’, which produces “manufactured consent” (but NOT democracy). It produces wars. It produces invasions, coups, and sanctions. And profits for the owners.

    IMPORTANT UPDATE: This was called to the attention of the reporter (me) after I wrote the above, but it is highly relevant even though it’s “old news” that I had not previously known of: On 9 July 2020, the Harvard Gazette headlined “Taking China’s Pulse”. That reported on a Harvard study, “Understanding CCP Resilence: Surveying Chinese Public Opinion Through Time”, which contained the findings from their team’s surveys which had been conducted in eight waves from 2003 through 2016, from 32,000 scientifically sampled residents in China, and which found that — as the “policy brief” itself put it — “Chinese citizen satisfaction with government has increased virtually across the board. From the impact of broad national policies to the conduct of local town officials, Chinese citizens rate the government as more capable and effective than ever before. Interestingly, more marginalized groups in poorer, inland regions are actually comparatively more likely to report increases in satisfaction. Second, the attitudes of Chinese citizens appear to respond (both positively and negatively) to real changes in their material well-being, which suggests that support could be undermined by the twin challenges of declining economic growth and a deteriorating natural environment.” This statement suggests that this “policy brief” was done for the U.S. Government in order to find ways to “undermine” China’s Government. (It was here implicitly recommending for the U.S. Government to do what it can to produce in China “declining economic growth and a deteriorating natural environment.”) In fact, the document’s ”Introduction: On Authoritarian Resilience” states: “The goal of this research brief, and of the longitudinal survey that informs it, is to address the question of government legitimacy in China using the most objective and quantitative methods currently available.” But, anyway, what it found was that the legitimacy of China’s Governemt was actually higher than of American’s Government: “Even in 2003, the central government received a strong level of satisfaction, with 86.1% expressing approval and 8.9% disapproving. This high level of satisfaction increased even further by 2016, but such increases were minimal because public satisfaction was already high to begin with. By contrast, in 2003, township-level governments had quite negative satisfaction rates, with 44% expressing approval and 52% disapproving. However, by 2016, these numbers had flipped with 70% approving and only 26% disapproving.” So: the Chinese Government’s possessing higher legitimacy than any other in the world goes back at least as far as 2003 (or 2016 as regards local government) and has been increasing ever since. As “Taking China’s Pulse” phrased the matter: “The survey team found that compared to public opinion patterns in the U.S., in China there was very high satisfaction with the central government. In 2016, the last year the survey was conducted, 95.5 percent of respondents were either ‘relatively satisfied’ or ‘highly satisfied’ with Beijing. In contrast to these findings, Gallup reported in January of this year that their latest polling on U.S. citizen satisfaction with the American federal government revealed only 38 percent of respondents were satisfied with the federal government.” Though Harvard knew they were working for a Government that was far more “Autharitarian” or a dictatorship than was China’s, they wrote using the term “Authoritarian” for China, but not for America. To place that Harvard study into the perspective of the present article’s headline, “How the Billionaires Control U.S.-and-Allied Governments”: Wikipedia says that “The Harvard University endowment (valued at $53.2 billion as of June 2021)[1] is the largest academic endowment in the world.[2][3]

  • On June 23, Jamison Cocklin headlined at Natural Gas Intelligence, “Venture Global Set to Become Germany’s Biggest Long-Term LNG Supplier” and reported: “Venture Global LNG Inc. has agreed to supply a state-owned German company with the super-chilled fuel for two decades as European offtakers continue to line up deals to replace Russian natural gas imports.” Upstream Energy simply bannered “Venture Global set to become Germany’s largest LNG supplier”. It’s a very big deal.

    This is the culmination of an agreement that was signed just a year earlier. As Cocklin had bannered on 6 October 2022, “Germany’s EnBW to Buy More Venture Global LNG in Ongoing Shift from Russia”. At that time, he reported that, “Venture Global LNG Inc. said Thursday German utility EnBW AG would expand the amount of LNG it would take under a 20-year sales and purchase agreement (SPA) signed in June.” So: the basic agreement had been signed in June 2022.

    Here is what is now known about the price that will be paid for that “amount of LNG”: Nothing. However, something is known about the history of this deal:

    On 22 June 2023, Venture Global headlined “Venture Global and SEFE Announce 20-year LNG Sales and Purchase Agreement. Venture Global set to become Germany’s largest LNG supplier, with a combined 4.25MTPA of 20-year offtake agreements signed. Approximately half of CP2 20MTPA nameplate capacity has been sold, with 1/3 of the contracted capacity committed to German customers. Construction expected to begin in 2023.”

    As-of yet, no one has indicated what the delivered price of product to Germany will be under this contract, nor what the price to Germany had been of the Russian pipelined gas that it will now be replacing. Of course, only on that basis can the net annual added cost to Germany, that will end up being paid by Germans, under this historic contract, be calculated.

    Whatever it will turn out to be, the June 22 announcement gives good indication that the biggest payoff from blowing up the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines from Russia to Germany will end up in American hands.

    Venture Global Partners was founded on 30 July 2008, by Robert Pender and Mike Sabel. In 2010, they established Venture Capital Partners, and then they announced in 2013, that their “development strategy is to be a long-term, low cost producer of LNG Working with a global LNG technology vendor.” They received venture-capital funding of $125M in 2015, then in February 2021 $500M debt-funding from Morgan Stanley, Mizuho Capital, Bank of America, and JP Morgan, and then in January 2023, an additional loan of $1B from an unspecified source.

    The losers in all of this are, of course, the people of Germany — and also of other European countries that had been buying the extra-cheap Russian pipelined gas — who will now be paying Americans a much higher price than previously they had been paying Russians. Not only will Germans and other Europeans now be paying for the super-chilled canned and cross-Atlantic shipped gas that previously was simply pipelined, but Europeans will now have lost what little sovereign independence they had formerly had when the U.S. Government allowed them to buy their gas and oil from Russia.

    Perhaps they will be learning the hard way that it’s no fun to be a vassal nation.

    For example: slide 2 of the 9 November 2017 “US LNG vs Russian pipe gas: impact on prices”, by Dr. Thierry Bros of the Oxford University Institute for Energy Studies, states that Russian gas is the least costly, US LNG can’t compete with it on price, Nord Stream 1 (NS 2 hadn’t yet been approved) is cheaper than gas piped through Ukraine, and Nord Stream 2 (once operational) will be cheaper than gas piped through Ukraine.

    Slide 6 shows that the ”Full cost of US LNG” is more than twice the “Henry Hub” (or “HH”) gas price.

    A CSIS (Pentagon think tank) blog post on 5 July 2019 was headlined “How Much Does U.S. LNG Cost in Europe?” and asked the “familiar question: Can U.S. LNG compete with Russian gas in Europe?” but conspicuously refused to answer it.

    A 25 March 2021 German study concluded that Russia outcompeted America even on LNG supplied in Europe: “LNG exports from Qatar and Russia are relatively competitive in Western Europe,” and even under the best of circumstances, “U.S. LNG only displaces small volumes from other LNG suppliers in Western Europe.”

    Germans will be paying the extra price for this, for at least 20 years.

    If America still is a successful country, then this is the way it will be happening. The wealth will be coming from their colonies. It won’t just be trickle-down (as has been the case domestically in America ever since at least 1980) but also trickle-in (from the colonies). Uncle Sam has been getting hungrier, and is grabbing now from across the Atlantic.

    At least there are some Americans who benefit from what Biden has been doing.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.


  • The  Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll taken during 14-15 June 2023, shows the following net approval rating (“Favorable” minus “Unfavorable”) for all of the listed possible candidates:

    +21% Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
    +9% Elon Musk
    +9% Tim Scott
    +8% Vivek Ramaswamy
    +5% Ron DeSantis
    +4% Nikki Haley
    -1% Bernie Sanders
    -3% Donald Trump, Doug Bergum, Ted Cruz
    -6% Maryanne Williamson
    -7% Kevin McCarthy, Mike Pence, Asa Hutchinson
    -8% Chuck Schumer
    -10% Kamala Harris, Joe Manchin, Gavin Newsom
    -11% Joe Biden
    -12% Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
    -16% Chris Christie
    -17% Hillary Clinton
    -24% Mitch McConnell

    Kennedy is tied with Trump for “Favorable” at 45% for each, but whereas Trump has a 48% “Unfavorable” rating, Kennedy’s “Unfavorable” is only 25%; so, if Party-affiliation were not a factor (which was the intention of America’s Founders), then Kennedy would at the present time be the most preferred person to become President.

    Musk ties with them on “Favorable” at 45%, and his “Unfavorable” is 36%; so, he’s currently the second-most-preferred next President.

    DeSantis’s “Favorable” is 43%, while his “Unfavorable” is 37%; but the closest whole number reflecting the difference (his “Net Favorable”) is +5% not +6%.

    Sanders’s “Favorable” is 42%, while his “Unfavorable” is 43%; so, his “Net Favorable” is -1%.

    Though Scott is tied with Musk at +9% “Net Favorable,” Scott’s “Favorable” is 10% less than Musk’s, at 35% “Favorable.” Scott’s “Unfavorable” is 25%, as compared to Musk’s 36% “Unfavorable.” (Scott isn’t as well-known as is Musk.)

    Ramaswamy’s “Favorable” is 27%, and his “Unfavorable” is 18%; so, he’s even less-well-known than is Scott.

    The most-well-known possible candidates are Trump and Biden tied at 93% known. Clinton is 90% known. Harris is 88% known. Sanders is 85% known.

    Kennedy is only 70% known. That’s 30% unknown; so, though he is currently by far the leading candidate, he also is the major prospective candidate who can fall the farthest.

    By contrast, Clinton is deeply disliked, at 53% “Unfavorable.”

    Biden too is deeply disliked, at 52% “Unfavorable.”

    Harris and McConnell are tied as both at 49% “Unfavorable.”

    The fifth-most disliked is Trump at 48% “Unfavorable.”

    The most-detested person on the list is McConnell at 49% “Unfavorable” and 26% “Favorable.”

    *****

    Since America’s Founders failed to avoid there being political Parties, here are the answers to the Party-primary questions:

    “If the Democratic presidential primary for the 2024 election was held today, who would you vote for? (Dem Voters)”: Biden 62%, Kennedy 15%, Someone else 8%, Williamson 4%, Unsure 12%.

    Trump gets 77% against Scott, and 67% against DeSantis.

    “TRUMP WINS A HYPOTHETICAL HORSERACE AGAINST BIDEN BY SIX POINTS, AGAINST HARRIS BY SEVEN” (The polling organization failed to indicate whether RFK Jr. would today win against Trump, because the expectation is that he would but the megadonors who control U.S. “elections” are terrified of him and so the DNC can’t stand him. However, the pollster did publish that 69% of Democrats say they’d be disappointed if the two-Party contest ends up being Biden versus Trump. BY CONTRAST: The polling organization avoided asking a comparable question of Republicans; but, of the questions they did ask, Republicans seemed to be less-dissatisfied to have Trump be their nominee than Democrats clearly indicated that they would be if Biden turns out to be their nominee. Again: the pollster seems to have tried to avoid drawing favorable attention to RFK Jr. as possibly being the nominee.)

    *****

    57% of voters think “JOE BIDEN TOOK A $5 MILLION BRIBE WHEN HE WAS VICE PRESIDENT.” (No Party-breakdown on that: Presumably, most of those 57% are Republican voters anyway.)

    *****

    The pollsters avoided asking respondents’ race, probably because South Carolina was the earliest Democratic Party primary that Biden won, and he won by a huge margin, over two-to-one, against Sanders, especially among black voters, who dominate that state’s Democratic Party; so, the DNC has now made that the first primary in the 2024 contest, since Biden was enormously popular among that state’s Democratic Party voters. The expectation is that RFK Jr. will get crushed in the S.C. primary, the first primary, on 3 February 2024. Next up will be February 6 with both NH and NV — two states that Sanders had won. Then February 13 with Georgia (another SC) expected to go overwhelmingly for Biden; then February 27th with Michigan being a crucial wild card. Then a slew of southern states, because it was the black voters who made Biden become the Party’s nominee. So: Blacks will again end up choosing the Democratic Party’s nominee, and Whites will end up again determining the Republican Party’s nominee, and the billionaires won’t need to worry about anything, because the public will see themselves as racially divided, instead of as being class-divided (billionaires versus the public), and things will therefore go on as they have been.

    *****

    By far the most-favorably-viewed “Institution” of the eleven that are listed is “U.S. Military.” “Police” are #2. “FBI” is #3. #11 is “MAGA Republicans.” #10 is “CNN.” Tied as #s 7, 8, & 9, are MSNBC, BLM, and Fox News. In the middle are the Justice Department and U.S. Supreme Court.

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

  • Though Western ‘news’ media have gotten their ‘explanation’ of this event from Ukraine’s Government, it never made sense that Russia would have wanted to flood, harm, and weaken, the entire western half of the territory that Russia now controls in the former Ukraine, including in Crimea (which was getting its water-supply from that dam).

    The anonymous author of the “Moon of Alabama” website has a long and almost flawless record of accurately exposing realities that mainstream U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media had been hiding, and the latest such is his June 13 “Did Russia Destroy The Nova Kakhovka Dam?” His report there turns upside-down and inside-out the Ukrainian Government’s ‘explanation’ that the dam had been bombed not by a missile, but by an explosive device which had been placed there by saboteurs whom Ukraine’s Government assumes were from Russia. U.S.-Government-approved ‘news’-media accept and amplify that assumption, but “MoA” does not.

    First, he quotes the New York Times and other U.S. Government mouthpieces presenting the Ukrainian Government’s ‘explanation’ of the blow-up; and then he rips it apart by noting the extremely relevant (but in U.S.-and-occupied lands ignored) fact, that on May 12, Britain had supplied to Ukraine its “Storm Shadow” missiles that are designed to have a two-stage bombing-operation: first, a normal surface bomb, but then after it a fuse-ignited ground-penetrating bomb to explode deeper inside even a fortified and hardened underground target such as that dam was apparently blown up.

    The British-supplied Storm Shadow weapon is perfect for this type of destruction — exploding from deep underground, instead of from the surface. And whereas Russia doesn’t have any Storm Shadows, Ukraine definitely does — ever since May 12.

    The present news-report about U.S.-and-allied lies is being simultaneously submitted for publication by all of the standard U.S.-Government mouthpiece propaganda-media, just in case any of them might finally want to go beyond their standard U.S.-Government-approved sources.

    Ever since at least late 2022, Russia has been warning that Ukraine’s government wants to blow up that dam. For example, on 1 November 2022, Reuters headlined “Russia announces wider evacuation of occupied southern Ukraine,” and reported that,

    “Due to the possibility of the use of prohibited methods of war by the Ukrainian regime, as well as information that Kyiv is preparing a massive missile strike on the Kakhovka hydroelectric station, there is an immediate danger of the Kherson region being flooded,” Vladimir Saldo, Russian-installed head of occupied Kherson province, said in a video message.

    “Given the situation, I have decided to expand the evacuation zone by 15 km from the Dnipro,” he said. “The decision will make it possible to create a layered defence in order to repel Ukrainian attacks and protect civilians.”

    Moscow has accused Kyiv of planning to use a so-called “dirty bomb” to spread radiation, or to blow up a dam to flood towns and villages in Kherson province. Kyiv says accusations it would use such tactics on its own territory are absurd, but that Russia might be planning such actions itself to blame Ukraine. …

    Saldo, the Russian-imposed occupation leader for the province, identified seven towns on the east bank that would now be evacuated, comprising the main populated settlements along that stretch of the river.

    Even U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media occasionally report relevant facts when they find them useful to mention in a ‘news’-report that has an anti-Russian “spin.”

    So: we know that Russia’s Government was trying to protect the residents in that region against this attack, but U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media have unquestioningly accepted the Ukrainian government’s accusation that Russia’s Government did it. And, now, an extremely likely explanation has finally been provided, which implicates both Ukraine’s government and UK’s Government as having done it.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Alan J. Russo opened the “Conclusions” section of his extraordinary (extraordinarily fine) 1970 Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review article, “Equal Protection from the Law: The Substantive Requirements for a Showing of Discriminatory Law Enforcement,” by saying:

    In order to be acquitted in a penal proceeding on grounds of discriminatory enforcement, a defendant generally has been required to show that enforcement authorities have purposefully singled him out, while not acting against others for similar violations. The mere fact that an impartial law has been applied unequally does not establish a denial of fourteenth amendment rights. This requirement of purposeful discrimination is justified as to most penal laws insofar as universal enforcement is a practical impossibility.

    Rarely have such clear exemplars of discriminatory law enforcement been provided as Barack Obama’s decision not to prosecute his Secretary of State and chosen successor Hillary Clinton versus Joe Biden’s decision to prosecute his chief political competitor Donald Trump.

    The Biden indictment of Trump, by Biden’s agent Merrick Garland (who as President Biden’s agent, possesses the full Constitutional and legal authority and power to fire, at will), includes 8 charges, of which the majority, 5, were at least as applicable to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but which Obama (through his agent James Comey) refused to even present to a grand jury for an indictment against her.

    This is not to say that these 5 federal U.S. criminal statutes don’t clearly describe what Trump did or what Clinton did — they clearly do, in both cases — but it is to say that either they are being discriminatorily applied against Trump, or else they were discriminatorily not applied against Clinton, or that in both instances the law was being discriminatorily applied or not applied (and for blatantly clear motivations, in each of the two cases); and, so, the U.S. federal Government is being displayed here to be a dictatorship, not a democracy — it is not a “government of laws and not of men,” but is instead a government of men and not of laws.

    The 5 criminal-law statutes that apply to both Clinton and Trump but were cited ONLY against Trump, are (as I first detailed them on 5 July 2016 regarding Clinton):

    the following six [which include five of the eight that now are charged against Trump] U.S. criminal laws, each of which undeniably describes very well what she [and he] did:

    18 U.S. Code § 1512 — Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant

    (c) Whoever corruptly

    (1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or

    (2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,

    shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

    18 U.S. Code § 1519 — Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy

    Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

    18 U.S. Code § 793 — Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information …

    (f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer —  

    Shall be fined not more than $10, 000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both. (g) If two or more persons conspire to violate any of the foregoing provisions of this section, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each of the parties to such conspiracy, shall be subject to the punishment provided for the offense which is the object of such conspiracy.

    Those laws are consequently null and void, by Executive action

    Specifically with regard to the Trump case, the alleged crimes are violations of:

    18 U.S.C. 793(e) Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it

    18 U.S.C. 1512(k) Whoever conspires to commit any offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties as those prescribed for the offense the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.

    18 U.S.C. 1512(b)(2)(A) withhold testimony, or withhold a record, document, or other object, from an official proceeding

    18 U.S.C. 1512 (c)(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding;

    18 U.S.C. 1519 Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy. Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

    Meanwhile, Biden’s agent Merrick Garland has not yet decided whether or not to bring to a grand jury the similar charges that have been discussed in the ‘news’ media regarding his boss, Joe Biden himself.

    The Democratic Party newspaper Washington Post headlined on June 8 “Trump indictment: A moment of reckoning for the former president,” and reported,

    The decision to indict also carries some risks for Justice Department and the administration of President Biden, given that the defendant is the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. Special counsel Jack Smith, who led the investigation, and Attorney General Merrick Garland, who allowed the indictment to go forward, had to weigh the rule of law against the potential political backlash from Trump’s allies, but it was Trump himself who helped force the prosecutor’s hand.

    Donald Trump has been charged in the classified documents case, the second time he’s been indicted since March. Get live updates.

    Donald Trump is facing historic legal scrutiny for a former president, under investigation by the Justice Department, district attorneys in Manhattan and Fulton County, Ga., and a state attorney general. He denies wrongdoing.

    If ever the very concept of equal protection of the laws (and its corollary of equal application of the laws) has ever applied to anything, then this is the case, and it then must be compared with the way that these laws are and have been applied — or not — to not ONLY Trump, and Clinton, and Biden, but to all other individuals who have been alleged to (and especially to those who have convicted to) have mishandled confidential U.S. Government documents. The more that this is done, the more that injustice will be found to be routine in the U.S. Government. And this is why I don’t expect it ever to be done.

    Biden has thus opened here a can of worms, if only the U.S. press will look inside this can (which I have no expectation that any of America’s ‘news’-media will do). If all of them will not do it, then will that be proof-positive that the U.S. regime is, itself, totalitarian? What other conclusion could one then come to?

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Moldovan Stanislav Pavlovschi, a former judge at the European Court of Human Rights, whom the current Government of Moldova then appointed as Minister of Justice, quit that post two weeks later and joined the newly formed Dignity and Truth Platform Party. At the time of his resignation from the Justice Ministry in 2019, he said, “I identified several personal incompatibilities, which, unfortunately, according to the Constitution of the Republic of Moldova make my activity impossible as a Member of the Government. … I remain committed to the democratic and pro-European values, promoted by the Dignity and Truth Platform, and I will continue to promote them in the position of the deputy chairman of the Political Party Dignity and Truth Platform.” Of course, that was in 2019.

    Now, in a news-report by Kit Klarenberg at The Gray Zone, Mr. Pavlovschi is quoted as saying: “Moldova now is governed by the US Ambassador. … He is practically governing Moldova at this particular stage. You have hundreds of consultants for the EU … working for each and every ministry here in Moldova. So it is under very, very strict control on the part of the EU.”

    There is extensive history behind this. And it explains why the U.S. Government sub-contracts to the EU the political control over Moldova. (Ukraine had been treated the same way.) Richard J. Aldrich’s 2003 The Hidden Hand says, on page 366, about the CIA’s American Committee for a United Europe:

    ACUE, more than any other American front organization of the Cold War, was a direct creature of the leading lights of the CIA. Indeed, it was so replete with famous CIA figures that its ‘front’ was very thin. Its early years seemed to have formed something of a laboratory for figures such as [Bill] Donovan, [Allen] Dulles, [Walter] Bedell Smith and [Tom] Braden, before they moved on to other projects in the mid-1950s. Over its first three years of operations, 1949-51, ACUE received $384,650, the majority being dispersed to Europe. This was a large sum, but from 1952 ACUE began to spend such sums annually. The total budget for the period 1949-60 amounted to approximately $4 million. As the quantity of money flowing across the Atlantic began to increase, ACUE opened a local Paris office to monitor more closely groups that had received grants. By 1956, the flood of increased funding was prompting fears among the Directors of ACUE that its work would be publicly exposed. …

    The emerging European Economic Community (EEC) and the growing Western intelligence community overlapped to a considerable degree. This is underlined by the creation of the Bilderberg Group, an informal and secretive transatlantic council of key decision-makers [representatives of the billionaires who controlled U.S. and U.S.-allied international corporations]. Bilderberg was founded by Joseph Retinger and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1952 in response to the rise of anti-Americanism in Europe. … Retinger secured support from Averell Harriman, David Rockefeller and Walter Bedell Smith. The formation of the American wing of Bilderberg was entrusted to Eisenhower’s psychological warfare chief, C.D. Jackson, and the funding for the first meeting, held at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Holland in 1954, was provided by the CIA.

    Funds for these CIA operations came not only from the U.S. Treasury but from private sources, America’s super-rich, and, also from organized gangsters, as was revealed in the 1998 classic by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. This off-the-books funding comes from narcotics kingpins throughout the world, as protection-money, which is essential to keep them in business. So, the EU was financially fueled from all of these sources, and, basically, was a bribing-operation (to end up getting the ‘right’ people into the EU’s Parliament, etc.), in addition to be receiving funds from what might be considered idealistic philanthropic donors (because the dream of a united Europe had long preceded the grubby version of it that the CIA created for Europeans).

    The EU was a Cold War operation, from its very start. It remains that to the present day.

    Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of UK’s Telegraph newspaper issued two important articles about this, the first being his 19 September 2000 “Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs”:

    DECLASSIFIED American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement. … One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.

    The documents were found by Joshua Paul, a researcher at Georgetown University in Washington. They include files released by the US National Archives. Washington’s main tool for shaping the European agenda was the American Committee for a United Europe, created in 1948. The chairman was Donovan, ostensibly a private lawyer by then.

    The vice-chairman was Allen Dulles, the CIA director in the Fifties. The board included Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA’s first director, and a roster of ex-OSS figures and officials who moved in and out of the CIA. The documents show that ACUE financed the European Movement, the most important federalist organisation in the post-war years. In 1958, for example, it provided 53.5 per cent of the movement’s funds.

    The European Youth Campaign, an arm of the European Movement, was wholly funded and controlled by Washington. The Belgian director, Baron Boel, received monthly payments into a special account. When the head of the European Movement, Polish-born Joseph Retinger, bridled at this degree of American control and tried to raise money in Europe, he was quickly reprimanded.

    The leaders of the European Movement — Retinger, the visionary Robert Schuman and the former Belgian prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak — were all treated as hired hands by their American sponsors. The US role was handled as a covert operation. ACUE’s funding came from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations as well as business groups with close ties to the US government.

    Then, on 27 April 2016, he bannered “The European Union always was a CIA project, as Brexiteers discover” and reported:

    It was Washington that drove European integration in the late 1940s, and funded it covertly under the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. … The US has relied on the EU ever since as the anchor to American regional interests alongside NATO. … It is odd that this magisterial 1000-page study found only a French-language publisher. [Roussel’s Jean Monnet. The French Wikipedia’s article on Roussel says “En 1995, il écrit une biographie consacrée à Jean Monnet2 qui reçoit le prix de l’Essai de l’Académie française, le prix Guizot, et le prix européen de l’histoire.” Despite all of those awards, the work is little-known, even in France.] Nor are many aware of declassified documents from the State Department archives showing that US intelligence funded the European movement secretly for decades, and worked aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into the project. …

    [The CIA] treated some of the EU’s ‘founding fathers’ as hired hands, and actively prevented them finding alternative funding that would have broken reliance on Washington. … The American ‘deep state’ was in up to its neck. …

    Since that newspaper (like all major news-media in the U.S. and in its vassal-nations are) is both neoliberal and neoconservative, the neoconservative Pritchard approved of all this. He did it by saying: “There is nothing particularly wicked about this. The US acted astutely in the context of the Cold War. The political reconstruction of Europe was a roaring success.” However, obviously, no authentic democracy can exist in a nation that’s governed by means of deceiving its public; nor can any democracy be an empire, either the imperialistic nation itself, or one of its vassal-nations, because that’s merely “Deep State” rule, behind the scenes, by its billionaires — an aristocracy, and not a democracy, which reigns there. Though all of the country’s major news-media will support the aristocracy — since they’ll all be owned by the aristocracy — anyone who calls it a ‘democracy’ is transparently a fool or a liar, because it’s an aristocracy, which is the opposite. In fact, the CIA built today’s Europe on the basis of hiring ‘ex’-Nazis and ‘ex’-Fascists there.

    Nowadays, some of America’s billionaires are bypassing the taxpayer-funded CIA, State Department, etc., in order to control European nations — and even the EU itself — directly, by hiring consultants to rate and evaluate each of the members of the European Parliament, in order to determine which ones need to be replaced and which ones need to receive increased campaign-funding. For example, one of these reports for George Soros, that leaked online, was the 119-page study, “Reliable allies in the European Parliament (2014 – 2019)”, which described and listed each one of them. And, too, there was the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, who on 27 January 2014, received by phone the instructions from Obama’s planner of the coup in Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, on how to complete the coup and make it “stick”, and whom to place at the head of Ukraine’s government when it would be completed (“Yats” or “Yatsenyuk”) which did become successfully completed exactly a month later.

    Unlike in former eras, when the billionaires were the large land-owners and got from the Monarch formal titles of Nobility and were quite open about the supremacist character of their Government, and the public were called “subjects” instead of “citizens,” the terminology has changed, though the reality has not. Nowadays they don’t even publicly declare their international dictatorship to be an “Empire,” and rule itself is entirely behind-the scenes by the billionaires by means of their millions of hired agents whose performance is being constantly monitored by or on behalf of their patrons, the groups of billionaires that are funding their careers. And so the aristocracy continues, but the terminology has changed in order to fool the public that they live in a “democracy.”

    So: what Pavlovschi now is saying is that the corruption comes from the U.S. Government, by way of the EU.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • In 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama met privately in the White House with the newly elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, to get him to end Ukraine’s neutralist position ever since 1991 and join the U.S. Government’s EU and NATO alliances against Ukraine’s next-door neighbor Russia, but Yanukovych said no. And, then, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travelled in 2010 to Kiev to give this another try, and again Yanukovych said no. By the time of June 2011, the Obama Administration started planning the coup to replace Ukraine’s Government with one that the U.S. would select. This plan started being implemented by no later than 1 March 2013 inside America’s Embassy in Ukraine, to train Ukraine’s racist-fascist, or ideologically Nazi, haters of Russians, how to use the internet in order to organize ‘anti-corruption’ demonstrations against — and to overthrow and replace — the neutralist Yanukovych by a Ukrainian regime that would be committed against Russia. On 27 January 2014, Obama’s agent overseeing the U.S. coup told the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev that Arseniy Yatsenyuk should be placed in charge when the coup would be completed, and this was done on 27 February 2014. Obama’s plan to turn Ukraine rabidly anti-Russia succeeded. (The only part of it that failed was Obama’s plan to grab Russia’s largest naval base, in Crimea, and turn that into yet another U.S. naval base.) It also succeeded in turning Ukrainian public opinion vastly more against Russia than it had been before.

    The objective of all this was ultimately to achieve a 1962 Cuban-Missile-Crisis in reverse, by which the U.S. will ultimately place at least one nuclear missile only about 300 miles away from Moscow and then demand Russia’s capitulation. If Russia says no, then within only five minutes from America’s firing its knockout missile, Moscow can be annihilated, Russia’s central command beheaded, and that is too fast for Russia to be able to recognize that it had been done and then to launch its retaliatory weapons against America. So, there might be a reasonable chance for America to eliminate Russia by a blitz-nuclear attack from Ukraine — or at least there are influential people in the U.S. Government and academe who think so (including virtually the entire Biden Administration, just like in Obama’s and Trump’s).

    Ever since at least 2006, the idea had become mainstream in American geostrategic planning circles for America to abandon the prior nuclear meta-strategy — “Mutually Assured Destruction” or MAD — of using nuclear weapons in order to avert a nuclear war, to becoming instead “Nuclear Primacy,” to use nuclear weapons in order to win a nuclear war. Biden pushed it almost beyond the point of no return until Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022 so as to push back Ukraine’s nearest border from its present roughly 300 miles away from Moscow to perhaps a thousand miles away. However, even that would be nearer to Moscow than the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis standard, which was Cuba being 1,331 miles away from Washington DC. And now Finland, which aims to join NATO, might move that to only 507 miles; so, America’s goal of conquering Russia is still very much a national-security threat to the people in Russia. In fact, by 2017, America already had become frighteningly near to being able to perpetrate a ‘victorious’ blitz-nuclear attack against Russia.

    By contrast, Russia has never tried to place its ground-based nuclear missiles that near to Washington DC. Cuba was the last opportunity to do that, and it was during the time of the Soviet Union, and it was instead 1,331 miles away from DC. Russia, today — now that NATO has grown to surround it (especially in Ukraine, which has the nearest border to Moscow) — is in enormous danger from this. On 17 December 2021, Russia formally presented separately to America, and to NATO, Russia’s fundamental national-security concerns, and on 7 January 2022 both America and its NATO said no to all of them — not even for negotiation. Russia’s only remaining option then was to invade and conquer Ukraine. America has no national-security interest in Russia’s nearest neighbor, Ukraine, but Russia certainly does and must win this war or else capitulate to the U.S. regime. Russia doesn’t have the option of allowing this Ukraine to serve as an American nuclear launching-pad against The Kremlin. Whether it will allow Finland (the second-nearest) to become that is not yet clear.

    If Russia’s Government were like America’s Government, then Russia might now be considering to turn Mexico against America like America has turned Ukraine against Russia. On March 21st, Ben Norton headlined “‘Mexico is not a US colony!’: AMLO condemns invasion threats, celebrates nationalization of oil, lithium” and quoted from recent speeches by Mexico’s President, who has made clear the depths of the mutual hostility on both sides of that border. The current Mexican President has transformed his country’s international policies into a clear condemnation of the arrogance and psychopathic greed of America’s billionaires and their Government. What is remarkable is that Russia has given no sign of trying to turn Mexico into a Russian launching-pad against America as America is now straining to bring to culmination Obama’s plan for Ukraine to become America’s launching-pad against Russia.

    Clearly, Russia’s Government is fundamentally different from America’s, vastly less aggressive. It’s obvious to any rational person. For Russia to lose the war in Ukraine would be disastrous, whereas for America to lose it would be just another defeat for America, like Vietnam was, and Afghanistan was, and Iraq was, and Syria was, and Libya was, and so many others have been — and none of those defeats after 1945 has even nicked the U.S. regime’s ability to dictate to the rest of the world like it demands to do. Maybe this one would, but that would be all to the good, for the entire world — if America doesn’t resort to nuclear war in order to try to assert its supremacy. What’s at stake for Russia in this matter is its very existence as an independent country. What’s at stake for America in it — this war on Russia’s border, not on ours — is whatever America’s billionaires will choose it to be. And if they choose to lose, then everyone (including especially in Europe) will be better off as a result. But if America’s billionaires choose to ‘win’ (if they’re that power-crazed), then the world won’t survive this. So, yes: since 1945, there’s a huge difference between Russia’s Government, and ours.

    The post A Huge Difference Between America’s and Russia’s Governments first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • In 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama met privately in the White House with the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, to get him to end Ukraine’s neutralist position ever since 1991 and join the U.S. Government’s EU and NATO alliances against Ukraine’s next-door neighbor Russia, but Yanukovych said no. And, then, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travelled in 2010 to Kiev to give this another try, and again Yanukovych said no. By the time of June 2011, the Obama Administration started planning the coup to replace Ukraine’s Government with one that the U.S. would select. This plan started being implemented by no later than 1 March 2013 inside America’s Embassy in Ukraine, to train Ukraine’s racist-fascist, or ideologically Nazi, haters of Russians, how to use the internet in order to organize ‘anti-corruption’ demonstrations against — and to overthrow and replace — the neutralist Yanukovych by a Ukrainian regime that would be committed against Russia. On 27 January 2014, Obama’s agent overseeing the U.S. coup told the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev that Arseniy Yatsenyuk should be placed in charge when the coup would be completed, and this was done on 27 February 2014. Obama’s plan to turn Ukraine rabidly anti-Russia succeeded. (The only part of it that failed was Obama’s plan to grab Russia’s largest naval base, in Crimea, and turn that into yet another U.S. naval base.) It also succeeded in turning Ukrainian public opinion vastly more against Russia than it had been before.

    The objective of all this was ultimately to achieve a 1962 Cuban-Missile-Crisis in reverse, by which the U.S. will ultimately place at least one nuclear missile only about 300 miles away from Moscow and then demand Russia’s capitulation. If Russia says no, then within only five minutes from America’s firing its knockout missile, Moscow can be annihilated, Russia’s central command beheaded, and that is too fast for Russia to be able to recognize that it had been done and then to launch its retaliatory weapons against America. So, there might be a reasonable chance for America to eliminate Russia by a blitz-nuclear attack from Ukraine — or at least there are influential people in the U.S. Government and academe who think so (including virtually the entire Biden Administration, just like in Obama’s and Trump’s).

    Ever since at least 2006, the idea had become mainstream in American geostrategic planning circles for America to abandon the prior nuclear meta-strategy — “Mutually Assured Destruction” or MAD — of using nuclear weapons in order to avert a nuclear war, to becoming instead “Nuclear Primacy,” to use nuclear weapons in order to win a nuclear war. Biden pushed it almost beyond the point of no return until Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022 so as to push back Ukraine’s nearest border from its present roughly 300 miles away from Moscow to perhaps a thousand miles away. However, even that would be nearer to Moscow than the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis standard, which was Cuba being 1,331 miles away from Washington DC. And now Finland, which aims to join NATO, might move that to only 507 miles; so, America’s goal of conquering Russia is still very much a national-security threat to the people in Russia. In fact, by 2017, America already had become frighteningly near to being able to perpetrate a ‘victorious’ blitz-nuclear attack against Russia.

    By contrast, Russia has never tried to place its ground-based nuclear missiles that near to Washington DC. Cuba was the last opportunity to do that, and it was during the time of the Soviet Union, and it was instead 1,331 miles away from DC. Russia, today — now that NATO has grown to surround it (especially in Ukraine, which has the nearest border to Moscow) — is in enormous danger from this. On 17 December 2021, Russia formally presented separately to America, and to NATO, Russia’s fundamental national-security concerns, and on 7 January 2022 both America and its NATO said no to all of them — not even for negotiation. Russia’s only remaining option then was to invade and conquer Ukraine. America has no national-security interest in Russia’s nearest neighbor, Ukraine, but Russia certainly does and must win this war or else capitulate to the U.S. regime. Russia doesn’t have the option of allowing this Ukraine to serve as an American nuclear launching-pad against The Kremlin. Whether it will allow Finland (the second-nearest) to become that is not yet clear.

    If Russia’s Government were like America’s Government, then Russia might now be considering to turn Mexico against America like America has turned Ukraine against Russia. On March 21st, Ben Norton headlined “‘Mexico is not a US colony!’: AMLO condemns invasion threats, celebrates nationalization of oil, lithium” and quoted from recent speeches by Mexico’s President, who has made clear the depths of the mutual hostility on both sides of that border. The current Mexican President has transformed his country’s international policies into a clear condemnation of the arrogance and psychopathic greed of America’s billionaires and their Government. What is remarkable is that Russia has given no sign of trying to turn Mexico into a Russian launching-pad against America as America is now straining to bring to culmination Obama’s plan for Ukraine to become America’s launching-pad against Russia.

    Clearly, Russia’s Government is fundamentally different from America’s, vastly less aggressive. It’s obvious to any rational person. For Russia to lose the war in Ukraine would be disastrous, whereas for America to lose it would be just another defeat for America, like Vietnam was, and Afghanistan was, and Iraq was, and Syria was, and Libya was, and so many others have been — and none of those defeats after 1945 has even nicked the U.S. regime’s ability to dictate to the rest of the world like it demands to do. Maybe this one would, but that would be all to the good, for the entire world — if America doesn’t resort to nuclear war in order to try to assert its supremacy. What’s at stake for Russia in this matter is its very existence as an independent country. What’s at stake for America in it — this war on Russia’s border, not on ours — is whatever America’s billionaires will choose it to be. And if they choose to lose, then everyone (including especially in Europe) will be better off as a result. But if America’s billionaires choose to ‘win’ (if they’re that power-crazed), then the world won’t survive this. So, yes: since 1945, there’s a huge difference between Russia’s Government, and ours.

  • On March 20, Russia’s RT News reported, “The US Department of Defense announced on Monday that it will send Ukraine another $350 million worth of military aid. The further supplies come as Ukraine reportedly gears up for a spring offensive, despite suffering heavy losses in Donbass. The package is the 34th tranche of military aid doled out to Ukraine by the US since August 2021. … The US has given Ukraine more than $32.5 billion in military aid since last February, out of more than $110 billion allocated by the administration of US President Joe Biden for military and economic assistance to Kiev.”

    Some reader-comments there were against Russia’s Government, such as “Trish: What a disaster for Russia, the sooner Putin goes the better.” But others were instead against America’s Government, such as “TBTB: And the US says it is not party [to] the war? It instigated it with NATO expansion to Russia’s borders, a coup in Ukraine to install a neo-Nazi proxy regime, arming it, training it, financing it, providing it with war plans and intelligence, plus mercenaries and diplomatic support. If this is not being party to the conflict, at minimum, then when Russia hits back no one should be surprised. It is self-defense. It has already knocked out a US sophisticated spying drone that was collecting intelligence on live combat and passing it to its neo-Nazis to kill Russians.”

    Whereas the comment from “Trish” is similar to many that I have read at U.S. news-sites, the one from “TBTB” is so fundamentally different from that American norm so that it raises the question as to whether it is reflecting information that appears on Russian news-sites but not on American ones. If that is the case, then why would that be so? Is it because the comment reflects realities that are hidden in U.S. news-media, or instead because it reflects non-realities that are prohibited to be published in the U.S.?

    If it reflects realities that are hidden in U.S. news-media, then why would ANY realities be hidden in U.S. news-media? Should they be?

    If it instead reflects non-realities that are prohibited to be published in the U.S., then who is doing this censorship and who ought to be legally authorized to make such censorship-decisions in the U.S.? Is there a severe need in the U.S. for new legislation which will delineate how news-censorship in the U.S. is to be done? Would it be best to continue the current legal standard in America that censorship in America is ONLY a private right of publishers, and NOT a right that America’s Government has? Since 95%+ of the news that Americans receive is from organizations that are controlled by America’s fewer-than-a-thousand billionaires, is almost all of the censorship in America being done on behalf of those fewer-than-a-thousand billionaires? If so, then how is that affecting U.S. politics and the Government itself?

    America’s Founders, who wrote the U.S. Constitution including its First Amendment, gave no indication that when they wrote and the states passed into law the First Amendment, the objective was to give America’s richest one-hundred-thousandth of the U.S. population in the future the exclusive ultimate power to censor the news that the American public will be receiving.

    Of course, this is an enormous problem in America if the reader-comment is entirely true that “The US … is not party the war? It instigated it with NATO expansion to Russia’s borders, a coup in Ukraine to install a neo-Nazi proxy regime, arming it, training it, financing it, providing it with war plans and intelligence, plus mercenaries and diplomatic support. If this is not being party to the conflict, at minimum, then when Russia hits back no one should be surprised. It is self-defense. It has already knocked out a US sophisticated spying drone that was collecting intelligence on live combat and passing it to its neo-Nazis to kill Russians.” That would then be a deeply and dangerously dysfunctional U.S. Government. Would it be an authentically Constitutional U.S. Government?

    However, if that reader-comment is false, then why has no evidence been presented to the American public that each one of that comment’s clauses and assumptions is false? Would not even that indicate a very deep dysfunctionality to today’s American press? If the comment is false, why have all U.S. news-media not, in regard to each of its clauses, disclosed evidence that it is false?

    Either way, have not America’s news-media failed? And, if the news-media have failed, then isn’t America’s Government even worse — and constantly violating its Constitution? Or: Did America’s Founders WANT there to be a widely deceived American public?

    The post Reader-Comments at Russia’s RT News and Censorship in America first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • On 10 March, Canada’s National Post headlined “Regime change in Moscow ‘definitely’ the goal, Joly says,” and reported that “Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly raises the possibility of regime change in Moscow. … ‘The goal is definitely to do that, is to weaken Russia’s ability to launch very difficult attacks against Ukraine. We want also to make sure that Putin and his enablers are held to account,’ she said. ‘I always make a difference between the regime and the people of a given country, which is fundamental.’”

    On 26 March 2022, Bloomberg News bannered “Joe Biden Calls for Regime Change in Moscow as He Likens Invasion to Ww2 Horrors,” and reported that, “Joe Biden directly appealed to the Russian people with comparisons between the invasion of Ukraine and the horrors of the Second World War as he called for Vladimir Putin to go. ‘For God’s sake this man cannot remain in power,’ the US president said, calling for regime change in Moscow during a speech from Poland on Saturday. He told Russians they are not ‘our enemy’.”

    Why were there not calls, within the United States and its allies, for “regime-change in America” when U.S. President George W. Bush blatantly lied Americans into invading and destroyed a country that posed no threat to America, Iraq (which — by contrast — Ukraine definitely did and does constitute to Russia)?

    Contrary to U.S.-and-allied propagandists, that war in Ukraine wasn’t started on 24 February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, but back in February 2014 when U.S. President Barack Obama’s Administration had started by no later than June of 2011 to plan, and by no later than 1 March 2013 inside the U.S.’s Ukrainian Embassy to execute the plan, and then on 20 February 2014 to culminate the U.S. coup that overthrew and replaced Ukraine’s democratically elected neutralist President, and replaced him and his Government with the U.S. selected leaders of the new, and rabidly Russia-hating, U.S.-controlled, Ukrainian regime.

    And, now, on 17 March 2023, NBC News headlines “International Criminal Court issues arrest warrant for Putin over alleged Ukraine war crimes”  and reports that the U.S.-and-allied regimes are starting a case in the International Criminal Court — which has no jurisdiction over Russia and over Ukraine and over the United States, all three of which nations refused to ratify and therefore are not subject to that Court’s jurisdiction (since it’s not a “Universal” court like the U.N.’s  International Court of Justice is) — initiating this purely propaganda case against Russia. Why did they not do that against America and the UK, when those regimes invaded and destroyed Iraq on the basis only of lies (which Russia certainly did not do in the case of the now U.S.-controlled Ukraine)?

    Wikipedia makes this elementary fact about that Court quite clear, by saying:

    It lacks universal territorial jurisdiction and may only investigate and prosecute crimes committed within member states, crimes committed by nationals of member states, or crimes in situations referred to the Court by the United Nations Security Council.

    The U.S. and its allies are bringing this case as a propaganda-vehicle, but the Court itself, by ‘investigating’ this case that falls outside its jurisdiction, is destroying whatever pitiful international credibility that it had. Any court that ever serves a purely-propaganda function cannot ever again be taken seriously by any serious person. It is groveling to someone. It is simply embarrassing itself. The U.S. and its allies are contemptuous not only of the public but of this Court, to do this.

    Furthermore: the U.S.-and-allied allegations that regime-change is being sought only against a country’s leadership, and not against the country’s people, is ludicrous, because those aggressor-countries’ long histories of imposed regime-changes against Governments they wanted to topple — such as Chile, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and all the rest — have always been from bad to worse against the targeted countries’ publics. Moreover, the U.S. regime has repeatedly made explicitly clear that, though all of the devastation that its invasion and continued occupation and massive thefts from Syria have brought hell upon its people, the U.S. Government absolutely refuses to allow any reconstruction to occur in Syria unless the U.S. is controlling that country.

    Although the U.S. and its allies demand regime-change in both Russia and China, the leaders of those two countries have long had far higher approval-ratings by their citizens than the leaders in U.S.-and allied countries have by theirs; the regime-changes should rather be done in the U.S.-and-allied countries than in their targeted countries.

    The U.S., and its allies, lie pathologically, such as they do as NATO:

    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.”

    How can anyone respect such Governments?

    The post U.S. and Allies Seek Regime-Change in Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Before the MH17 passenger plane was shot down over the civil-war zone in Ukraine on 17 July 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama needed to persuade 9 EU countries that were opposed to adding more sanctions against Russia — needed to force them to approve adding those sanctions. He needed to supply them with ‘evidence’ that Russia was doing heinous things in Ukraine’s civil war. On 15 July 2014, Russia’s RT headlined “9 EU countries ready to block economic sanctions against Russia,” and reported that:

    France, Germany, and Italy are among EU members who don’t want to follow the US lead and impose trade sanctions on Russia. US sanctions are seen as a push to promote its own multibillion free-trade pact with Europe.

    “France, Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, and EU President Italy see no reason in the current environment for the introduction of sectorial trade and economic sanctions against Russia and at the summit, will block the measure,” a diplomatic source told ITAR-TASS.

    In order for a new wave of sanctions to pass, all 28 EU members must unanimously vote in favor. EU ministers plan to discuss new sanctions against Russia at their summit in Brussels on Wednesday, July 16. Even if only one country vetoed, sanctions would not be imposed. With heavyweights like France and Germany opposed to more sanctions the measure will likely again be stalled, the source said.

    After the plane was shot down, America, UK, and Ukraine immediately said that Russia and Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine did it, and then, within just a few weeks, all 9 of the EU hold-outs switched to approve the added anti-Russian sanctions that Obama wanted.

    On 5 March 2023, the independent investigative journalist Kit Klarenberg headlined “Meet the British intelligence-linked firm that warped MH17 news coverage,” and he reported how coordinated and pre-planned by British intelligence (which worked hand-in-glove with both Ukrainian and American Governments on this) the MH17 operation had been set up not just to shoot down the plane but to be backed up with faked ‘evidence’ that it had been done by Russia. (In his report, he uses undefined the acronym “JIT”: that refers to the official “Joint Investigative Team” on the downing of MH17.)

    On 7 October 2019, I had already headlined “Update on the MH17 case” and documented that Netherland’s Government had signed an “8 August 2014 agreement [never made public] with Ukraine, to find Ukraine not to have perpetrated the downing. But the families [of the 196 Dutch who had been murdered by the shoot-down] don’t know this,” and the Dutch court that was hearing the MH17 case refused to consider any other evidence, especially not from Russia, and refused to consider those families’ urgings for that court to consider any evidence that was being offered on the case — including from Russia, which the Dutch Government pre-emptively was alleging had done the shoot-down. That secret agreement was among the four members of the “Joint Investigative Team,” all four of which were ‘allies’ (vassal-nations) of the U.S. Government: “Netherlands, Ukraine, Belgium, and Australia.” They all agreed that the case would be tried in the Netherlands, because 196 of the 298 corpses came from there. My article links down to the evidence that Russia was wanting to present but was barred from presenting, and it also links down to evidence from the Government of Malaysia and the black boxes it had, and the MH17 pilots’ corpses that Malaysia had, all of which was likewise clear that the MH17 was shot down not by any BUK missile from Russia, but instead by a Ukrainian air force warplane that fired straight at the pilot, whose corpse was riddled with bullets. The Ukrainian warplane pilot, from whose plane those bullets were being fired, was under the command of the Ukrainian government that Obama had installed. In other words: Obama was the Commander-in-Chief of the entire operation. And it obtained its objective: on 31 July 2014, the 9 recalcitrant EU members all switched to approve the new sanctions against Russia.

    The post How and Why Obama Downed the MH17 Passenger Plane on 17 July 2014 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • On Saturday, March 4, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, at the G20 meeting in Delhi, announced that because the EU has refused to comply with its side of the U.N.-brokered 27 July 2022 “Grain [and fertilizer] Deal” that the U.N. brokered in Istanbul on 27 July 2022, Russia will likewise not comply with it, starting on March 18.

    On February 8, Reuters had headlined “Russia: EU not fulfilling promises on grain deal,” and reported that the deal was in jeopardy because of the EU’s continued violations of it that were supplying super-inexpensive food to the EU while continuing to block food going to Africa — for which latter purpose the deal had been mainly designed.

    Then, on Saturday March 4, Russia’s Tsargrad news site headlined “The Rejection of the Grain Deal Will Force Russia to Resolve the Issue of Odessa. And This is a Significant Event.” By implication, it was interpreting Lavrov’s statement to reflect that Ukraine’s main Black Sea port of Odessa (which has historically been overwhelmingly pro-Russian), which is the port through which Ukraine’s agricultural exports are shipped, might soon be taken over by Russia because the EU is using it to provide economic benefits to the EU and to Ukraine while starving and/or soaring food-cost inflation in Africa, will no longer continue to be tolerated by Russia. In other words: Africa and Russia were being cheated by the EU and Ukraine, and Russia will cease that starting March 18.

    On March 3, Tsargrad had bannered “Ammonia Instead of Wheat. What Will Russia Gain by Breaking the ‘Grain Deal’,” and it explained that:

    The grain deal, about the need for which “our Western partners” spoke so much, can be terminated without any possibility of renewal in the near future. If this happens, then Ukraine will lose the opportunity to earn money on dumped wheat exports, Turkey will lose a fair amount of profits from participating in the transit of this grain and a fair amount of political influence as an intermediary between Russia and its opponents. The European Union will lose a significant part of the grain in its market – the very one that it had promised the poorest African countries would be the deal’s primary beneficiaries, but which turned out to be much more necessary for EU bakers and confectioners, instead of gto Africans who need bread and fertilizers.

    In general, it will be bad for everyone. Except Russia. Russia will not lose anything, because it didn’t gain anything from the deal.

    If Russia takes over Odessa, then Ukraine could very well become an entirely land-locked country, without its only sea-access, which now is via Odessa. The EU and Ukraine would have — by their refusals to comply with the grain deal — considerably increased that likelihood (which would harm the longer-term interests both of Ukraine and the EU).

    In any case, the status of Odessa is now going to be a far more important issue in this war that it had been until now. It will no longer be an issue for Africa, because the July 27 deal didn’t benefit Africa at all (which it had been promised to do). Odessa will instead be purely an issue between Ukraine and Russia.

    The post EU Fails to Comply with Grain-Export Deal first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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