Ukraine: sanctions will hurt the US the most

Gonzalo Lira writes:

The Americans sanctioned Russia as hard as they possibly could, openly trying to break the Russian economy. Most of America’s vassal states in the west followed suit.

India and China have not. So the Americans are now threatening India and China with sanctions of their own, unless they join the United States in punishing Russia.

Paradoxically, America’s bullying tactics against both countries will wind up making them the best of friends.

India has exceedingly good relationship with Russia for several decades — they will not jeopardize it because of the Americans. So in retaliation for not doing what they want, the Americans will sanction India. It will be what my friend Alexandra Mercouris calls “the sanctions escalator”: Little by little at first, random officials here and there, and then slowly targeting the entire Indian economy.

Insofar as China is concerned, America has started this “sanctions escalator “, and the Chinese are under no illusions. But for China, Russia is much more important than the United States. China has spent over 25 years deliberately and consciously deepening its relationship with Russia. China views Russia as a primary partner, and will under no circumstances jeopardize that relationship. That’s why China will never sanction Russia. So China will take on American sanctions — but China realizes something crucial:

The United States needs China much more than the other way around.

China and India have had long-standing border disputes. Because of this American pressure, the two countries are now quickly resolving these border issues, especially water rights issues. Both of them realize that, in order to resist American pressure, they must become allied.

So very quickly, a new super alliance will form between Russia, China and India. Iran, which has strong relationships with Russia and blossoming relationships with China, will inevitably join this partnership.

If these four countries decide to cut out the West, Europe will not have gas for electricity and heat, and no customers for its cars and product. And the Americans will discover that no one wants their dollars—so the American financial architecture will completely collapse, and the US will find itself in the biggest depression of its history. (Yes you read right.)

The Americans do not realize that the US needs China/Russia/India far FAR more than the other way around. America's hollowed out industrial base means that it does not produce anything. It needs products from Russia/China/India. And yet it is the United States which is busy alienating precisely those nations that it most needs. 

The Americans have broken with the Russians – there is now a sanctions moat between Russia and the West. If the US and Europe does this with China and India, the Westwill sink, their economy completely shattered. And this new Eurasian block will become the literal center of the earth. 

Through sheer incompetence, the United States is about to collapse. I am not being hyperbolic, this is what is happening right now. By the end of 2023, there will be catastrophic hyperinflation, over 50% unemployment, mass food shortages, and no gasoline in the United States of America.

Ketanji Brown Jackson

 https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/22/hawley-jackson-child-pornography-sentencing-record-00019481

Sen. Josh Hawley on Tuesday questioned Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s sentencing in a 2013 child pornography case where federal guidelines recommended a 10-year term and Jackson gave the defendant three months.

“I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it,” Hawley (R-Mo.) said to the Supreme Court nominee on the second day of her confirmation hearings. “We’re talking about 8-year-olds, 9-year-olds, 11-year-olds and 12-year-olds.”

In the 2013 case, United States v. Hawkins, Jackson sentenced 18-year-old Wesley Hawkins, who had been in possession of about two dozen child sexual abuse images and videos, to three months in prison, while the prosecution recommended at least two years and the PROTECT Act of 2003 recommended 97 to 121 months.

Ukraine: nationalinterest

 https://nationalinterest.org/article/the-dangers-of-expansive-realism-551

Between 1989 and 1991, a political miracle occurred. The Soviet regime, steeped in blood and obsessed with total control as it had been throughout most of its history, voluntarily gave up its Warsaw Pact empire, collapsed the Soviet system upon itself, and then acquiesced in its own demise--all with virtually no violence. 

Ukraine: Hunter Biden

 https://www.maciverinstitute.com/2022/03/the-hunter-biden-story-was-always-about-joes-corruption/

In April 2014, just two months after being discharged from the Navy for testing positive for cocaine, Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest oil and natural gas company even though he neither spoke Ukrainian nor had any experience in the oil and natural gas industry.

What he did have was a father who happened to be the Vice President of the United States as well as the Obama Administration’s point man on Ukraine. In a press release announcing Hunter’s hiring, Burisma noted that he would be in charge of the company’s “legal unit and will provide support for the company among international organizations.” This, presumably, would include the United States Government.

Almost immediately after Hunter joined the board, Vadym Pozharskyi, one of Burisma’s top executives, asked in in an email in May 2014 for “advice on how you could use your influence” to aid Burisma in its international relations. Hunter apparently got to work immediately and even arranged a meeting between his father and Pozharskyi.

“Dear Hunter,” Pozharskyi wrote him the following April, “Thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s really an honor and pleasure. As we spoke yesterday evening, would be great to meet today for a quick coffee. What do you think?”

Less than eight months after this meeting, Vice President Biden pressured then Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who just happened to be investigating Burisma for public corruption. If they wouldn’t, Biden promised, the U.S. would withhold a billion dollars in loan guarantees.

“I went over…to Kyiv and I was supposed to announce that there was another billion dollar loan guarantee and I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor and they didn’t,” Biden bragged during a 2018 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. “I said, ‘We’re not going to give you the billion dollars.’ They said, ‘You have no authority, you’re not the President.’

“I said, ‘Call him.’ I said, ‘I’m telling you, you’re not getting a billion dollars.’ I said, ‘You’re not getting a billion, I’m going to be leaving here and I think it was about six hours,’ and I look at him and say, ‘We’re leaving in six hours, if the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money.’

“Well son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

And that someone dropped the investigation into Burisma.

Ukraine: Carpenter

 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/28/nato-expansion-war-russia-ukraine

The Clinton administration proposed inviting Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to become members, and the US Senate approved adding those countries to the North Atlantic Treaty in 1998. It would be the first of several waves of membership expansion.

Even that first stage provoked Russian opposition and anger. In her memoir, Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state, concedes that “[Russian president Boris] Yeltsin and his countrymen were strongly opposed to enlargement, seeing it as a strategy for exploiting their vulnerability and moving Europe’s dividing line to the east, leaving them isolated.”

Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state, similarly described the Russian attitude. “Many Russians see Nato as a vestige of the cold war, inherently directed against their country. They point out that they have disbanded the Warsaw Pact, their military alliance, and ask why the west should not do the same.” It was an excellent question, and neither the Clinton administration nor its successors provided even a remotely convincing answer.

George Kennan, the intellectual father of America’s containment policy during the cold war, perceptively warned in a May 1998 New York Times interview about what the Senate’s ratification of Nato’s first round of expansion would set in motion. “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” Kennan stated. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.”

He was right, but US and Nato leaders proceeded with new rounds of expansion, including the provocative step of adding the three Baltic republics. Those countries not only had been part of the Soviet Union, but they had also been part of Russia’s empire during the Czarist era. That wave of expansion now had Nato perched on the border of the Russian Federation.

Moscow’s patience with Nato’s ever more intrusive behavior was wearing thin. The last reasonably friendly warning from Russia that the alliance needed to back off came in March 2007, when Putin addressed the annual Munich security conference. “Nato has put its frontline forces on our borders,” Putin complained. Nato expansion “represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”

activist-teachers

 https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/how-activist-teachers-recruit-kids?s=r

Last month, the California Teachers Association (CTA) held a conference advising teachers on best practices for subverting parents, conservative communities and school principals on issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. 

Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents.

what makes for a successful LGBTQ middle school club? What to do about meddlesome parents who don’t want their middle schoolers participating in such a club? What if parents ask a club leader—point blank—if their child is a member?

The advice to those who run middle school LGBTQ clubs is: keep no records, so you can plead ignorance of the membership with the members’ parents. In fact, middle school teacher Kelly Baraki can be heard in the same session describing having named her club “the Equity Club,” and then, “You be You,” rather than the more ubiquitous “GSA.”  

Middle school kids, apparently, did not have endless interest in sitting around with their teachers during lunch discussing their sexual orientations and gender identities. “So we started to brainstorm at the end of the 2020 school year, what are we going to do? We got to see some kids in-person at the end of last year, not many but a few. So we started to try and identify kids. When we were doing our virtual learning – we totally stalked what they were doing on Google, when they weren’t doing school work. One of them was googling ‘Trans Day of Visibility.’ 

And we’re like, ‘Check.’ We’re going to invite that kid when we get back on campus. Whenever they follow the Google Doodle links or whatever, right, we make note of those kids and the things that they bring up with each other in chats or email or whatever,” Baraki can be heard to say. Beyond electronic surveillance of kids’ internet use, “we use our observations of kids in the classroom—conversations that we hear—to personally invite students. Because that’s really the way we kinda get the bodies in the door. Right? They need sort of a little bit of an invitation,” Baraki says in the clip.

Bernie Sanders on Ukraine

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/08/we-must-do-everything-possible-avoid-enormously-destructive-war-ukraine

Tabletmag on Ukraine and buffer states

 https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraines-deadly-gamble

By tying itself to an American administration that had shown itself to be reckless and dangerous, the Ukrainians made a geopolitical blunder that statesmen will study for years to come: A buffer state had staked its future on a distant power that had simply seen it as an instrument to annoy its powerful neighbor with no attachment to any larger strategic concept that it was willing to support. 

Russia then lopped off half of the Donbas region on its border and subjected Ukraine to a grinding, eight-year-long war, intended in large part to underline Russian capacity and Ukrainian and American impotence.

Also:

https://popularresistance.org/ukraine-intensifies-shelling-of-donbass-as-western-media-are-silent/

How to make an entire army attack you.

 https://twitter.com/SpencerGuard/status/1497583307504046087

Russia-Ukraine Crisis article by John J. Mearsheimer

telegraph version

https://telegra.ph/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is-the-Wests-Fault-02-28

pdf version with roundtable afterwards

https://www.natur.cuni.cz/geografie/socialni-geografie-a-regionalni-rozvoj/studium/doktorske-studium/kolokvium/kolokvium-2013-2014-materialy/ukrajina-a-rusko-mearsheimer-souleimanov.pdf

MEARSHEIMER: Well, the key point here is to remember that it's really what the Russians think. It's not so much what we did or what we think. I mean, again, to go back to Mike McFaul, Mike McFaul's point is that the Russians should have understood that NATO expansion was not directed at them. And my response to that is that what Mike McFaul thinks is largely irrelevant. It's what the Russians think.

The Russians thought that NATO expansion into Ukraine and into Georgia was going to happen, maybe not right away, but over the long term, and they were deeply concerned about that.

Now, there's no question that in 2008, at April 2008, as I said, the Germans and the French were a brake on NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia at the Bucharest summit. That's clearly the case. But the Americans were pushing very hard, and that's why, in the final communique from the Bucharest conference, it was said that NATO and -- that Georgia and Ukraine will eventually become part of NATO. That's what the final declaration said.

And the Russians reacted immediately to that. That declaration was never taken off the table. Nobody ever said that NATO expansion was not going to happen. So the Russians had good reason to believe that it would eventually happen. And, by the way, Ukraine has just said -- this happened on August 29th -- that it was going to move to change its non-aligned status and request membership in NATO. And then the NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said that if Ukraine did that and it met the requirements for NATO admission, then Ukraine could become part of NATO. This was just last month.

This is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. So the idea that NATO -- that Ukraine and Georgia becoming part of NATO is not a serious issue is not the way the Russians see it. And if I were a Russian, I would see it the same way. The mere fact that the United States of America remains committed to NATO expansion would scare me greatly.

Eric Coomer, Dominion officer

Eric Coomer, director of product strategy and security for Dominion Voting Systems, 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/magazine/eric-coomer-dominion-election.html

Oltmann said that in his research he found that Coomer had written “vile” anti-Trump Facebook posts. Oltmann proceeded to read from one of those posts, from July 2016, which characterized Donald Trump as “autocratic,” “narcissistic” and a “fascist,” among other, more vulgar insults. “I don’t give a damn if you’re friend, family or random acquaintance,” Oltmann read. Anyone who decided to “pull the lever, mark an oval, touch the screen for that carnival barker ... UNFRIEND ME NOW.” Oltmann displayed a screenshot of the post, which said that the author’s opinions “are not necessarily the thoughts of my employer, though if not, I should probably find another job. Who wants to work for complete morons?”

As Coomer watched the video, though, he felt a second strong emotion: a powerful sense of regret — because the Facebook posts were, in fact, authentic. Why, he thought, hadn’t he just deleted them? Coomer could imagine how his words would sound to just about any Republican, let alone someone already hearing on Fox News that Dominion was switching votes for Biden. He told me that he believed every word of what he said on Facebook, but when colleagues later asked him what he was thinking, he was frank: He had screwed up. At a time when well-​funded efforts to sow mistrust in the election were already underway, Coomer had given conspiracy theorists a valuable resource, a grain of sand they could transform into something that had the feel — the false promise — of proof.

On Friday, Nov. 13, the right-wing news outlet the Gateway Pundit, picking up on Oltmann’s podcast, ran a story that mentioned Coomer by name in the headline, included links to videos in which Coomer was talking about election security, and ran a full reprint of the open letter about antifa that he had reposted on Facebook. 

While most of that letter was uncontroversial — “Antifa supports and defends the right of all people to live free from oppressive abuse of power” — one line concluded that while nonviolent protest was preferable, “we cannot and will not take responsibility for telling people how they are allowed to be righteously outraged.”