Last week, on June 23, a United States government agency under the name Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, better known as the Helsinki Commission, held a Congressional briefing titled “Decolonizing Russia”. Democrat representative from Tennessee (D-TN) Steve Cohen opened up the presentation, during which he claimed that the Russians “have in essence colonized their own country,” arguing that Russia is “not a strict nation, in the sense that we’ve known in the past.” Casey Michel, who authored an opinion piece in The Atlantic last month, titled “Decolonize Russia”, was also present at the meeting. His op-ed seems to have been the impetus for the highly controversial briefing. According to Michel, “decolonizing Russia” is not solely about “partitioning” and “dismembering” the Russian Federation, but about an “authentic commitment to anti-imperialism.”
The panel discussion participants urged the US to give more support (clearly implying actual support currently exists already) to separatist movements inside Russia and in the diaspora, and specifically mentioned Chechnya, Tatarstan, Dagestan, and Circassia as the possible candidates for “decolonization”. Siberia was discussed separately and, according to the Commission, it is to be divided into several republics. During the (First) Cold War, the US, a premier imperialist power, sponsored numerous separatist groups inside the USSR. Thus, this is most certainly not the first time prominent figures in the political West have adopted a hard line towards the Russian Federation, seeking ways to dismantle the Eurasian giant, just as the political West did the same to Yugoslavia over 30 years ago.
What is significantly different nowadays is the blatantly open and public call to do so. Apart from being highly controversial and dangerous, as Russia isn’t yet another helpless country the political West can destroy and kill millions of its inhabitants with impunity, but a military superpower which can easily turn its rivals into a radioactive wasteland in minutes, to suggest Russia should be “decolonized” is exceptionally hypocritical, especially coming from the pillar of (neo)colonialism, the US itself. Since its unfortunate inception, the belligerent imperialist thalassocracy invaded and dismantled numerous countries, reducing them to rubble and turning them into almost perpetually failed states.
After the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the infamous Bush-era Vice President Dick Cheney was seeking to carve up Russia and divide it into several smaller states. In 1997, former Reagan-era US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski even published an article in the Foreign Affairs magazine, proposing to create a “loosely confederated Russia — composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic.” Thus, once again, this isn’t a new state of affairs. Prominent political figures from the US have been advocating this for decades. The issue is, while they’ve been doing it on a personal basis, not in their capacity as government officials, in this particular case, we have a US government commission openly calling for war, as their blatantly bellicose statements can only be interpreted as such.
Michel, the author whose op-ed inspired the panel discussion, stated that “Russia continues to oversee what is in many ways a traditional European empire, only that instead of colonizing nations and peoples overseas, it instead colonized nations and peoples over land”. He lamented the US failed to use the break-up of the USSR to dismantle Russia itself, complaining Western support for separatist movements in the Russian Federation “did not go far enough”.
“These are colonized nations that we consider to be part of Russia proper, even though, again, these are non-Russian nations themselves that remain colonized by, as we’ve seen yet again, another dictatorship in the Kremlin,” Michel said.
Once again, he insisted that the meeting was not simply about advocating for the “dismemberment and partition” of Russia, but was supposedly motivated by “genuine opposition to colonialism and imperialism”. The very idea Michel supports “genuine opposition to colonialism and imperialism” is deeply comical, as he has spent years smearing the anti-imperialist movement in the US, while ridiculing and (ab)using the term to demonize the governments of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, all of which have spent decades fighting off a very real US aggression. Still, Michel brazenly styles himself one of the world’s most vocal supporters of a unique form of “anti-imperialism” that just so happens to advance the interests of the genuinely imperialist political West, in particular the US.
Naturally, none of the participants mentioned anything about the fact the Russian population, although mainly composed of ethnic Russians, still has around 20% of numerous other ethnic (Tatars, Buryats, Kalmyks, Bashkirs, etc) and regional identity (Cossacks) groups, who have been living side-by-side for well over a millennium, that is, several times longer than the US has existed. Also, unlike the US, which occupies the land entirely conquered from numerous Native peoples, tens of millions of which have been slaughtered, precisely in order to steal their lands (with their descendants now living in reservations), Russia kept the indigenous populations it incorporated (usually peacefully, again, in stark contrast to the US) intact, with their lifestyle, religion and cultural heritage shielded by the government.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Moscow settled interest payments in rubles, after sanctions blocked it from foreign currency transactions
Samizdat | June 27, 2022
As the grace periods on two Russian eurobond coupons expired on Sunday night, multiple Western media outlets rushed to announce that Moscow was now in a state of default on its foreign currency-denominated debt for the first time in over a century.
Bloomberg called it a “a grim marker in the country’s rapid transformation into an economic, financial and political outcast,” while the BBC called it a “major blow to the nation’s prestige.”
The Wall Street Journal even invoked a spectre of the “Bolshevik Revolution when Vladimir Lenin, the newly installed communist leader, repudiated the debt of the Russian Empire.”
The bond holders themselves have yet to declare a default or start any proceedings, and the publications admitted that the label is “mostly symbolic for now” while the situation is “expected to pose unique legal challenges,” because “Russia has the money and intent to pay.”
Moscow repeatedly accused Washington of trying to engineer an artificial default in recent months, as the country has enough funds and willingness to pay its debts – but was intentionally cut off from foreign currency payment mechanisms. After the Russian central bank’s foreign reserves were frozen, Moscow continued to service its sovereign debt with new cash it receives from energy and other exports, so last month Washington ended a bond payments waiver.
Russia’s Finance Ministry announced on Thursday that it settled two issues of dollar-denominated Eurobonds maturing in 2027 and 2047 “in full” by sending 12.51 billion rubles ($234.5 million) in coupon payments to the National Settlement Depository, under a new mechanism.
Investors will now need to open a ruble account to receive the funds, and deal with any Western sanctions that might prevent them from moving the money out of Russia by themselves, the ministry explained. “Thus, obligations on servicing the state securities of the Russian Federation were fulfilled by the Finance Ministry in full,” the statement said.
President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on this temporary procedure for Eurobond payments on Wednesday. The document states that Moscow will now consider its obligations completed “if they are fulfilled in rubles in an amount equivalent to the value of obligations in foreign currency” at the exchange rate on the day the funds are transferred to the central depository (NSD), through which they will be paid to creditors.
ACCORDING TO the Cambridge Dictionary, a sanction is ‘a strong action taken in order to make people obey a law or rule, or a punishment given when they do not obey’. The purpose is pretty obvious, to try to deter an action that is not deemed by the sanctioner as acceptable.
A child thus may be sanctioned for poor behaviour with no sweets for a week. A country is equally sanctioned in some way deemed to harm the errant country and not those giving the sanction. Russia has been sanctioned by primarily the US, UK and EU in an unprecedented fashion due to the war in Ukraine. But who is it hurting?
This article is not about the morality of the situation in Ukraine. It is simply about whether the sanctions have been effective, or have they actually been counter-productive? At the most basic level, has applying sanctions made it more, or less likely, that UK policy goals will be achieved?
A third of a year into war, the only conclusion one can sanely draw so far is that the West’s sanctions have been an unmitigated disaster in self-harm undermining domestic prosperity while causing serious inflationary and monetary dislocation.
There is very little evidence that Western sanctions have materially harmed Russia’s ability to prosecute war or (as much as we can judge) diminish Russian domestic support for it. Far from Government’s expectations that it would cripple the Russian economy and perhaps lead to regime change, if anything it is Western economies that are in desperate trouble. It seems that US, UK and EU sanctions are proving to be a lose-lose trade.
A simple test – what currency traders would say
We were told sanctions were going to cripple the Russian economy and stop its war machine. For around two weeks, judging by the currency market’s reaction to a then collapsing rouble, that superficially seemed right.
Initially the rouble halved from a pre-war 75 to the USD to a low of 140 as the West confiscated over $300billion of Russia’s sovereign assets held in the West. This, coupled with a wholesale withdrawal of Western companies, from BP to McDonald’s, and a tightening of oil and gas sanctions, resulted in currency collapse.
Such a collapse, if prolonged, would have been very dangerous for Russia’s stability as it simply destroys its terms of trade, potentially resulting in material inflation as the cost of importing goods rises significantly.
But Western policy makers did not think through the second derivative which is coming back to bite. Economically Russia to an extent is the polar opposite of the West.
The West undoubtedly has significant technological and soft power advantage over Russia. However, most Western economies have growing and inefficient public sectors and weak central banking systems impeded by the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and particularly lockdowns, with substantial growing public debt and debased monetary systems through a new-found belief in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) – accompanied by all the associated Quantitative Easing over the last decade. Britain and the US also run substantial trade deficits.
Russia, on the other hand, is a commodity- and primary products-led export economy running a substantial trade surplus, with weak technology and service sector exports and soft power. Its public finances are very strong with low public debt, low taxes (14 per cent flat rate income tax) and substantial cash reserves even after half were sanctioned.
This asymmetry of strategic advantage between Russia and the West has profound implications if sanctions are applied. Thus quite quickly currency traders realised what extraordinarily almost none of our current crop of virtue signalling politicians dare to say – that the sanctions were potentially more of a threat to the West (UK and EU in particular) as the impact of ‘cancelling’ Russian carbon was highly inflationary.
There are no cheap short or medium term substitutes. Much of the West is dependent on Russian primary products, while only some Russians might be upset the Prada store in Moscow had closed (but the back door from China remained wide open). An inconvenience, sure; a game changer, probably not.
Thus the rouble strengthened materially and at the time of writing is 55 to the USD, almost 30 per cent stronger than before the conflict in Ukraine. If one compares the sterling- rouble exchange rate, sterling’s underperformance is even starker.
It is quite simple. Cancel Russian oil (13 per cent global production) and India joyfully buys the discarded stock at a discount while the global price goes up as the West scrambles to find new supply. Worse, cancel Russian gas and the EU has a major crisis, as does the UK given the UK’s foolish decade-plus de-emphasising of carbon, including the closure of strategic gas storage facilities. The list goes on well beyond carbon – from titanium to fertiliser, from wheat to cod.
But it is oil and gas that are so critical as power is essential to the manufacture, to a greater or lesser extent, of most things. The irony is that as well as Saudi, Iran and Venezuela, the greatest beneficiary of soaring hydrocarbon prices is Russia. Putin’s Russia has run consistent trade surpluses but the current surplus is a record, as a direct result of sanctions, taking the spot price of oil from a pre-war $80 a barrel to $120 today.
While the rouble strengthens and the Russian trade surplus expands, the effect on Western economies has been devastating. In fairness the West had been severely undermining its own advantage for many years prior to the invasion of Ukraine, fuelled by Governmental policies based on a double fallacy: that monetary policy could solve all ills, and that centralised decision-making and excessive public spending could solve all ills.
Both fallacies are now coming with a substantial price, but to multiply that with an ill-thought-out sanctions regime that is achieving none of its underlying goals and is harming Western economies is frankly hard to fathom.
The West, particularly the EU and UK, is now in a pickle. This pickle has the potential to be calamitous as Governments remain in denial at the scale of the challenge they are facing.
We are in a situation where the inflationary surge, given supply chains, is in its embryo stage, not close to its conclusion. Sure, the price rise at the pumps is immediate, but domestic energy prices are set to increase by a further 40 per cent in September when the price cap comes off. As a warning, German producer price inflation (see chart below) is over 30 per cent, a rate not seen since post-war ruination in 1946.
I sincerely hope I am wrong but this has the potential to get very nasty. Rishi Sunak said on Wednesday: ‘We are using all the tools at our disposal to bring inflation down and combat rising prices. We can build a stronger economy through independent monetary policy, responsible fiscal policy which doesn’t add to inflationary pressures, and by boosting our long-term productivity and growth.’ That says to me he hasn’t a clue about the scale of the challenge or indeed the underlying causes.
The reality is unfortunately that both the Bank of England and the ECB are so far behind the curve as to make you weep. Interest rates of 1.25 per cent when RPI is 11 per cent are so far off-kilter while the ECB, with arguably an even greater inflation headache given German industrial reliance on Russian gas, is only now coming off negative rates.
Moreover, expanding a wantonly inefficient public sector to around half the entire economy coupled with an unprecedented regulatory stranglehold can only spell a productivity disaster. It is throwing money at the bad, paid for by the good.
Where this will end remains uncertain, so many unknowns are there. What we can predict is that this is the beginning not the end of the maelstrom. Governments do not like short-term pain as elections approach and we risk yet another debt-funded stimulus papering over the ever-wider cracks. How credible would that really be when inflation is 11 per cent? Would they dare print money again in such circumstance? I fear they would.
This country and indeed Europe generally is enduring enormous self-harm. Sanctions have backfired but the cocktail of sanctions, massive public sector expansion, delusional monetary policy and delusional energy policy risk an economic disaster of immense proportion.
There is no easy fix but unless we wish to become a northern version of Argentina, with a debased currency, constant crisis and missed opportunity, we need to understand the scale and multiple layers of our challenge.
It’s too late to avoid prolonged and meaningful inflation, and in time recession, but it’s not too late to start to rectify policy error. I can’t see the current crop of politicians analysing forensically the impact of sanctions but a great start would be to toss away the gateway drug to our delusions, the strange idea that Modern Monetary Theory works and governments can print and spend their way out of a crisis. Frankly they can’t and with that acceptance perhaps we can start the process of an appropriately balanced economy focused on private activity, not state direction. Government got us in this mess, only the people can free us from it.
According to a recent study by the World Bank, published in the journal Nature, lockdowns and the response to Covid-19 have pushed an additional 75 million people into extreme poverty, living on less than US $1.90 a day.
In the typical Walter Duranty style that’s become a kind of twisted journalistic norm since March 2020, the World Bank and Nature of course blame this on “the pandemic” rather than lockdowns. I remain baffled as to how seemingly well-meaning people are able to sleep at night repeating such nonsense—are they somehow blind to the role of their own sycophancy in perpetuating these policies?
Nonetheless, there are signs that the political mainstream is starting to realize lockdowns were a disaster. Today, the Wall Street Journal published an excellent piece titled The Revenge of the Locked-Down Voters, noting the growing political backlash against lockdown politicians from voters at the lower end of the income scale.
This comes shortly after the New York Timesquietly acknowledged a study showing that Covid lockdowns and mandates led to over 170,000 excess deaths among young Americans.
And, as in America, this comes shortly after the London Times, the UK’s centre-left newspaper of record, published a cautiously-introspective piece on its support for lockdowns.
These are promising indications that the political mainstream, especially on the right, is coming around to the fact that lockdowns were a policy catastrophe more quickly than some might have worried.
Still, there’s much more to be done. Currently, the mainstream left and right are starting to realize lockdowns were a big mistake, while many career bureaucrats are still stuck pretending lockdowns were the greatest medical breakthrough since penicillin. There really needs to be a bipartisan consensus that lockdowns were an unprecedented policy catastrophe before we can start to see justice and have undue foreign and financial influence taken seriously.
The retreat of Ukrainian troops from Severodonetsk city in the Luhansk Oblast of the country is a pivotal moment in the ongoing conflict. The Russian forces are now almost in total control over the Luhansk region. The latest reports from front lines say Russian forces entered the last remaining city of Lysychansk in Luhansk on June 25.
In a briefing today, the Russian Ministry of Defence announced in Moscow: “On June 25, the cities of Severodonetsk and Borovskoye, the settlements of Voronovo and Sirotino passed under control of the Lugansk People’s Republic. The localities liberated… are inhabited by about 108,000 people. Total area of the liberated territory is about 145 square kilometres.
“Success of the Russian army… considerably diminishes the morale and psychological condition of the Ukrainian army personnel. In 30th Mechanised Brigade deployed near Artyomovsk, there are mass cases of alcohol abuse, drug use and unauthorised abandonment of combat positions.”
However, peace is a long way off — several months away, perhaps. In the speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin last week at the SPIEF in St. Petersburg, he made no references to peace negotiations. Putin hardly referred to the fighting.
Meanwhile, three highly provocative moves by the opposing side within the past week are significant markers indicating that the conflict may aggravate. If the missile strike at a Russian oil rig in the Black Sea has been an act of provocation, the US supply of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), a powerful long-range weapon system is intended as a potential game changer that can help Kiev turn the tide of the conflict, and, third, the bizarre move by Lithuania to block Russia’s rail transit to Kaliningrad is a reckless escalation of tensions.
On the arrival of the HIMARS, Ukraine Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov ecstatically wrote wrote on Twitter on Thursday, “HIMARS have arrived to Ukraine. Thank you to my colleague and friend @SecDef Lloyd J. Austin III for these powerful tools! Summer will be hot for russian occupiers. And the last one for some of them.”
Washington claims it has received assurances from Kiev that HIMARS would not be used to attack Russian territory. Moscow has warned it will attack targets in Ukraine that it has “not yet been hitting” if the West supplies longer-range missiles to Ukraine for use in high-precision mobile rocket systems.
The Lithuanian move is a blatant violation of international law and Vilnius would only have acted on the basis of prior consultation with the US and NATO to test the Russian reaction. Kaliningrad is a major Russian base with nuclear missiles, where its Baltic Fleet is headquartered, apart being the only Russian port on the Baltic that is ice-free throughout the year. Evidently, there are some insane fellows in the NATO camp who are itching to climb the escalatory ladder.
For Russia too, there is “unfinished business” ahead insofar as it holds roughly the same amount of territory in Donetsk only as the separatists controlled in February before the special military operation began. Now, seizing the administrative territories of the Donbass is only Moscow’s minimal goal. There is going to be a sprawling battlefield in the next phase, stretching from Kharkiv in the northeast to Mykolaiv and Odessa in the southwest. Much fighting lies ahead.
The New York Times reported that “Pentagon officials expect that the arrival of more long-range artillery systems will change the battlefield in Donetsk.” Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff told reporters recently, “If they (Kiev) use it properly, practically, then they’re going to have very, very good effects on the battlefield.”
The Russian military approach doctrinally is centred on attrition warfare, which aims to grind the way toward incremental territorial gains. Therefore, the advantage goes to the side which has greater staying power on the battlefield. In a sustained war of attrition, one military is ultimately going to be depleting the capability of the other. This is where the fault lines in the western unity come into play if the current traces of “war fatigue” in Europe turns into “solidarity fatigue.”
Ukraine’s ability to shift the military balance depends critically on sustained military support from the US and other European countries. That, of course, hinges on political will and cohesiveness of the western allies. As for Russia, it is not only committed to a protracted war but also has the capacity to sustain it.
Unlike the case with Ukraine, Russia is not dependent on any other country for boosting its military capability or training and advising its military. Also, historically speaking, a defining characteristic of the Russian military is its incredible endurance and ability to sustain prolonged attrition.
The US is still betting that the Russian economy cannot hold out for a long time, since the full impact of sanctions and export controls is yet to be felt. In this calculus, the rebound of the ruble currency is seen as largely due to the strict government controls on capital flows and plummeting imports into Russia. Equally, the US has convinced itself that the restrictions on technology exports to Russia will gradually stunt the growth of its industries. Thus, the focus of the G7 summit in Germany currently under way (June 26-28) is on new plans to further “tighten the screws” on Russia’s economy.
But not much Russian budget data is available to make such daring assumptions and it is even harder to quantify how much Moscow is spending on the war in Ukraine. Certainly, there is no evidence to suggest that the Kremlin’s ability to finance the war effort is coming under pressure from sanctions.
While President Biden boasted in March that sanctions were “crushing the Russian economy” and that “the ruble is reduced to rubble,” the exact opposite has happened. Russian oil revenues have set new records and the ruble hit a 7-year high this week against the dollar. Expert opinion is also that Russia’s financial system is back to business as usual after a few weeks of severe bank runs.
Going forward, Biden must retain control over the Congress in the midterm elections in which Republicans are sure to capitalise on the rising cost of living. As for Europe, cooler temperatures in the coming months will raise alarms about energy shortages as Moscow has cutdown natural gas supplies to Europe, which would aggravate the economic pressure they now are experiencing.
Therefore, the big question is, whether the desire to resist Russia will be sustainable as the war itself grinds away. The matrix has changed. After all, Biden uttered the following about Putin as recently as in end-March: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” But in 3 months’ time, today, Biden only says he is striving to help Ukraine negotiate optimally with Russia for a settlement. Here too, Biden needs to make sure Russia is losing ground, while also constantlyweighing that new weapons do not escalate the conflict too fast.
Admittedly, Biden is under little political pressure at home to back away. And the crack in western unity is, arguably, not to be construed as amounting to anything like a rift in the fundamental strategy towards Russia and the Ukraine conflict. That said, the bottom line is that this is also a perilous moment for the global economy.
Post-pandemic economic recovery, supply-chain disruptions, rapid price increases, infrastructure investment, trade practices, global oil prices, world’s food supply, recession — these issues surely impact the western leaders’ standing in the polls. It means economic and political pain is coalescing.
In recent weeks, I have received a number of complimentary emails from readers of my essays who took note of what they consider my even-handed approach to the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian military conflict which is at variance with the fired-up Russophile and Russophobe positions that we find daily in alternative and mainstream media respectively. Some have gone on to say that they have profited from my reporting on the content and changing views aired on Russian political talk shows these past few months, all of which is rarely featured in mainstream Western news and analysis. My intent in such reporting was to ensure that at least some people here understand what Ukraine and its Western backers are up against, so as to better understand the course of the fighting on the ground and who may be winning.
In this context, I announce with sadness that the job of even-handed reporting has just become much more difficult as a result of Eutelsat’s implementation yesterday of a policy decision announced just over a month ago, but which went unnoticed by most everyone, myself included.
I quote from Google Search:
“Eutelsat to remove banned Russian channels. Eutelsat ready to immediately stop the rebroadcasting of the Russian channels RTR Planeta and Rossiya 24 on its satellites on June 25. 13 May 2022”
Indeed, the main state news channels of the Russian Federation can now no longer be received via satellite antennas here in Belgium or elsewhere on the Continent. They are partially and sporadically accessible on the internet via www.smotrim.ru but the level of interference from Western censors makes such viewing a dismal exercise. “Freezing” of frames seems to be most common with respect to the talk shows “Sixty Minutes” and “Evening with Solovyov,” two programs which I had been following and reporting on most regularly. However, it also is applied against Russian shows which might be characterized as being simply entertainment, such as the currently running historical serial about the life and times of the 18th century tsarina Elizabeth. I dare anyone to get more than a minute or two into the broadcast before the curtain comes down, so to speak.
The curtain in question is an updated Iron Curtain, which this time has been dropped on our heads by the powers that be in Washington. After all, it is Washington that pressured the French controlled Eutelsat rebroadcaster of television channels that dominates the European and other global markets to throw out the Russians.
The argument behind that demand was to exclude “Russian propaganda” from the airwaves.
In the spirit of fairmindedness with which I opened this essay, I agree that Russian state television is practicing propagandistic methods insofar as it withholds certain information from viewers while promoting other information favorable to its paymasters. For example, on Russian state television news you will not find a word about the civilian casualties and damage to residential buildings of Russian artillery and rocket attacks on Kharkov. You are shown only the civilian casualties and damage to residential buildings in Donetsk and towns of the Donbas caused by Ukrainian artillery and rocket strikes.
On the other hand, however, European and U.S. newscasts feature the damage caused by Russian strikes on Ukrainian towns while saying not a word about the sufferings of the Donbas population from military assaults by Ukrainian forces. Just as they have been entirely silent about such suffering and death among the Donbas population that Kiev has inflicted on them for the past eight years, since the outbreak of the civil war in 2014.
Each side in the Ukrainian conflict accuses the other side of using cluster bombs and other internationally prohibited weapons against civilian populations. These accusations are put on air by Russian and Western news programs only as they are set out by their favored respective side.
My point is very simple: by silencing the so-called Russian propagandists, Western propagandists have the field to themselves here in Belgium, in the broader European Union and in North America. The possibilities for the public to form an independent view of what is going on are choked off, and with that there is no basis for informed policy discussion in the expert community. As The Washington Post so nicely puts it: democracy dies in darkness.
And what about the Russian side? Are they also cut off and ignorant as my remarks on coverage of casualties above might suggest? I commented on this question in my travel report on my six week stay in Petersburg that began in May: Western news channels have been removed from the cable television distributors in the city. For this I blame not Russian government prohibitions but the commercial decisions of Western content providers who terminated their contracts with Russian distributors just as did the Hollywood studios. Meanwhile, Western stations remain accessible on the internet without interference and they remain accessible on satellite television.
At my dacha, I had no difficulty receiving the BBC and Bloomberg for free courtesy of my parabolic antenna. How long this will be the case given the tit-for-tat nature of the relationship between the West and Russia generally I cannot say. But if someone does pull the plug on Western ‘propaganda’ in Russia, it will be in response to the West’s dropping the Iron Curtain on Russia, not the other way around.
It is sad that Western leaders are destroying with their own hands the underpinnings of democracy at home through this censorship. The only likely result will be total shock and surprise throughout the Western world when the Russians complete their liberation of Donbas, take the Ukrainian Black Sea coast including Odessa and declare victory over what will by then be an utterly destroyed Ukrainian army.
In the meantime, under greatly constrained conditions, I will try my best to follow the Russian side of the story on talk shows, on news reports of Russian war correspondents embedded with their forces on the front lines, and to share with readers what appears to be afoot on the other side of the barricades.
The Liberals are intent on funneling ever more of our collective resources to bolster the US Empire, spending lavishly to “modernize” Canada’s chief bi-national military accord.
On Monday Defence Minister Anita Anand announced the government would spend $4.9 billion to upgrade the North American Aerospace Defense Command. The federal government said it will devote $40 billion to NORAD over 20 years, but it may be far more than that noted David Pugliese in a story headlined: “Cost to modernize NORAD set at $40 billion, but will final tally be higher?”
The media and government framed the announcement as strengthening Canada’s defences. According to the Globe and Mail report, “the Canadian government has pledged $4.9-billion over six years to help upgrade North America’s air defences, addressing the growing threat posed by hypersonic missiles and advanced cruise missile technology developed by Russia and China.”
But it’s absurd to present NORAD as a defensive arrangement. Its lead actor has 1,000 international bases and special forces deployed in 149 countries. Rather than protect Canada and the US, NORAD supports violent missions led by other US commands. In 1965 NORAD’s mandate was expanded to include surveillance and assessment sharing for US commands stationed worldwide (United States European Command, United States Pacific Command, United States Africa Command, etc.).
The Pentagon has put satellites into space to enable first strike ballistic missile defence (BMD). While Paul Martin’s Liberals claimed to oppose BMD, they granted “full cooperation by NORAD in missile-defence work”, explained Richard Sanders in a Press for Conversion report on the subject. In 2004 Ottawa formally permitted the US BMD system to use data from NORAD’s “Integrated Tactical Warning/Attack Assessment”.
It’s called “missile defence” because it’s designed to defend US missile sites after they launch offensive operations. US-installed missile defence systems in Romania and Korea, for instance, are designed primarily to stop opponents’ missiles following a US first strike.
US space-based missile defence interceptors able to eliminate Russia’s early warning satellites without warning puts that country on edge. This ratchets up the arms race and the likelihood of nuclear war.
NORAD has also drawn Canada into US belligerence in other ways. During the July 1958 US invasion of Lebanon NORAD was placed on “increased readiness” while US troops checked secular Arab nationalism after Iraqis toppled a Western-backed king (at the same time British troops invaded Jordan to prop up the monarchy there).
In a higher profile incident, Canadian NORAD personnel were put on high alert when the US illegally blockaded Cuba in October 1962. This transpired even though Prime Minister John Diefenbaker hesitated in supporting US actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
During the 1973 Ramadan/Yom Kippur/Arab–Israeli War NORAD was placed on heightened alert. Washington wanted to deter the USSR from intervening on Egypt’s behalf.
NORAD systems offered surveillance and communications support to the 1991 war on Iraq. It monitored the region and provided information to launch US Patriot surface-to-air missiles. NORAD ballistic missile warnings were also sent to Ottawa and Canadian units in Bahrain.
NORAD also supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The same can be said for US bombing in Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, etc.
Thousands of Canadian military personnel assist NORAD’s operations. One hundred and fifty Canadians are stationed at NORAD’s central collection and coordination facility near Colorado Springs, Colorado. Hundreds more work at regional NORAD outposts across the US and Canada and many pilots are devoted to the Command.
A Royal Canadian Airforce general is the vice commander of NORAD and runs the entire command when the US commander is absent. In discussing the two countries’ most significant bilateral military accord, Ann Griffiths explains,“NORAD brings the Canadian military more deeply within the US defense establishment than any other ally. The United States quite simply, would not entrust such responsibilities to the military of any other close ally, not even Britain.”
NORAD makes Canada a junior partner to US militarism and imperialism. If Canada was truly a force for good in the world, a peacekeeper and adherent of a rules based international order, Ottawa would withdraw from NORAD, rather than spend billions more strengthening it.
Congressman Louie Gohmert discusses his recent comments at the FDA’s VRBPAC meeting demanding answers about the safety of Covid vaccines as well as legislation he’s working on to put liability back on vaccine manufacturers.
While Twitter has suspended and permanently blocked numerous individuals for posting so-called “misinformation” concerning COVID-19 vaccines, it has not done so to “health” authorities – those who arguably should be held to an even higher standard – when they blatantly share inaccurate information.
On June 18, 2022, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky posted a tweet with a video of herself discussing the CDC’s recent recommendation of the COVID-19 shots for children under 5. In the video, Dr. Walensky made the following two claims:
“We now know based on rigorous scientific review that the vaccines available here in the United States can be used safely and effectively in children under 5.”
“We have taken another important step together on our fight against COVID-19 by making safe and effectivevaccines available for our little ones.”
But as Dr. Walensky should certainly be aware, in issuing Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs), the FDA has not(under its ridiculously low standards) made a finding that these vaccines are “safe and effective.” Instead, the grant of an EUA means only that the FDA has determined “it is reasonable to believe that [each vaccine] may be effective” and that “it is reasonable to conclude, based on the totality of scientific evidence available, that the known and potential benefits of [each vaccine] outweigh the known and potential risks of the vaccine.”
By claiming – two separate times – that these vaccines are “safe and effective,” Dr. Walensky is misleading the public by suggesting these vaccines have met the legal standard required for licensure.
Worse yet, because her tweet is “descriptive printed matter” that is both advertising and promoting Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines, the tweet itself is in violation of both EUAs issued to these companies because it does not “clearly and conspicuously” contain the required disclaimer that these products have not yet been licensed as safe and effective by the FDA.
ICAN, through its attorneys, has sent Dr. Walensky a formal letter demanding that she immediately remove the misleading tweet and we will keep you posted on the CDC’s response.
leaders do not, mostly, lead. they follow the public mood. and as that mood is shifting, it’s becoming OK to ask the pointy questions and start getting to the bottom of things.
debbie had a tough outing here and gets pinned on a simple and vital issue:
when public health officials and agencies stridently told america that the covid vaccines would be a “dead end for the virus” and stop infection and spread, upon what did they base that claim and how did they get it so wrong?
once jordan gets a hold of her, this is like a tuna filled piñata in a tiger cage.
jj: was the government lying when they said this?
db: i don’t know. i was not part of the taskforce discussions
strong start. non-denial denial, offers up others for the trip under the bus. both evasive and self-protective. politics 101.
she then speaks of her family still using “layered protection” because she knew that vaccine immunity would wane like natural immunity. this is both inaccurate and deeply dishonest. if she and her compatriots “knew” that, they certainly were not saying it in public.
and boy oh boy do we have the receipts on that one…
jj: when the government told us the vaccinated could not transmit it (covid), was that a lie or a guess?
db: “i think it was hope”
see, now that seems like a pretty poor pretext for pushing vaccination as social duty, mandating jabs, and endless campaigns of vilification, othering and claims to be on the “side of science.”
“we did it cuz hope.”
digging further into this is going to get really good. it’s clear these people are neither smart nor informed. they hipshot and hoped. and all the carnage and calamity it drove is going to land on them.
it’s clear they lack basic justification for their towering, condescending certitude.
this fallback to “and that’s why i think scientists and public health leaders always have to be at the table being very clear what we know and don’t know” is awe inspiring in its manipulative mendacity.
sure, the statement is true, but could anyone produce a standard that less describes what was actually done?
they expressed as iron bar certainty that which they now admit was “a hope.”
they attacked viciously anyone who dared call their narrative into question.
i seriously cannot believe she just said that.
that she did not actually burst into flame getting that out is near certain proof that she’s wearing asbestos underpants.
jordan ends on a wonderful high note:
“i’m just struck with the irony. we’ve got government agencies guessing, hoping, or lying with the information they’re presenting to the american people and this is the same administration that wants to set up the disinformation governance board and want to talk about misinformation. they are the biggest purveyor of misinformation, false information, hopeful information, but not accurate and true information…”
take that, scary poppins!
this is, of course, 100% correct.
and just who the liars and suppressors of science here were is going to keep coming out.
trust in government is dropping like tropical sunset: slowly at first then suddenly, darkness.
No longer are we presumed innocent. Now we’re presumed guilty unless we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so.
Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head.
Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government.
Consider all the ways in which “we the people” are now treated as criminals, found guilty of violating the police state’s abundance of laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights.
Red flag gun confiscation laws: Gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats. These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, will put a target on the back of every American whether or not they own a weapon.
Government watch lists. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.
Thought crimes. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. It’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted.
Security checkpoints and fusion centers. By treating an entire populace as suspect, the government has justified wide-ranging security checkpoints that subject travelers to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes. Fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.
Surveillance, precrime programs. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts.
Threat assessments and AI algorithms. The government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.
Militarized police. America is overrun with militarized cops who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.” This is how we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat “we the people” like suspects and criminals.
Constitution-free zones. Merely living within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States is now enough to make you a suspect, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.
Asset forfeiture schemes. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have been associated with some criminal scheme.
Bodily integrity. The government’s presumptions about our so-called guilt or innocence have extended down to our very cellular level. The groundwork being laid is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.
The Security-Industrial Complex. Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn. As a result, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and killed.
These programs push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
The ramifications of empowering the government to sidestep fundamental due process safeguards are so chilling and so far-reaching as to put a target on the back of anyone who happens to be in the same place where a crime takes place.
The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.
A few hours ago the Supreme Court of United States (SCOTUS) confirmed their ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, the case which set the precedent for abortion as a human right in the US back in the 1970s.
As soon as this decision was first “leaked” a few months ago it became the trending topic all across the US and to a certain extent the rest of the anglosphere. Since it was confirmed this afternoon, the already supercharged dialogue has reached new heights.
Pro-choice pundits, politicians and celebrities have been flooding the cyber public square with comparisons to the Handmaid’s Tale and other forced memes. They argue abortion-on-demand is a fundamental right, and take up the rather unsettling position that having an abortion is a point of pride.
On the other side of the divide Christians, traditionalists and republican politicians argue for the sanctity of all life, regardless of context or complication.
Both sides are entrenched to the point of hysteria, and not really looking like budging.
As with most things, the reasonable ground is somewhere in the middle.
Regardless of the law, women will sometimes seek out abortions, and it’s probably best they have access to safe, clean places to do so. That said, the use of abortions as a form of contraception is both obscene and impractical, and aborting viable mid or late term babies is revolting – both in concept, and in practice.
None of that really matters though, because the Roe v Wade finding isn’t even about abortion, it’s about Federal overreach. The Justices made that clear.
Though it has gotten lost in 250 years of ever-expanding centralization, the USA originated as a loose federation of quasi-independent states, with the central federal government having strictly limited powers to overrule local legislation.
Simply put, the Constitution lays out all the powers of the federal government, and anything not specifically mentioned therein is de facto a matter for states on an individual basis.
For decades federal governments used SCOTUS decisions to get around these limitations, relying on precedents rather than actual legislation in order to control state laws from Washington DC.
Roe v Wade is a classic example of this, and reversing it changes only one thing: abortion law will revert to a state-level matter, not a federal one.
… but is it even really just about that?
On a deeper level, there seems to be a prolonged campaign in place to violently divide the United States, perhaps to the point of outright civil war.
From Black Lives Matter to January 6th, the 2nd amendment to Roe v Wade, there is an increasing supply of hot-button issues accompanied by a deluge of divisive rhetoric.
Both sides are being encouraged to take to the streets, protest, mock, yell and scream without any search for common ground.
The office of the Presidency is degraded more every term, with a crass blowhard followed by a jittering dementia patient.
At the end of the Cold War, Russia was economically raped and globally humiliated. It came within inches of shattering into a dozen or more failed states. As the big money players head East, and the hegemonic powers turn from the US Empire to a new globalist powerbase, you have to wonder if the US is destined for the same fate.
Just as the USSR had to fail, and be seen to fail pour encourager les autres, perhaps the US – with its history of individualism and personal liberty – is considered surplus to requirements in the new age of faux collectivism.
Whatever America became at its Imperial zenith, its constitutional foundation has always arguably been the most egalitarian on Earth. Could it be that those ideas enshrined in the Bill of Rights are considered an impediment to the “progressive” New World Order?
The US falling into failed statehood could even act as a moral lesson to the rest of the world, and be held up as a warning about what can happen when “liberty is taken too far”, or when people are allowed to “selfishly put their own rights ahead of the public good”.
Perhaps the US being torn apart – or encouraged to tear itself apart – is key to bringing about the next stage of the great reset.
One thing is for sure, no matter the endgame, US politics are dry tinder piled high, waiting for a spark.
Silver was medicine. Not alternative medicine. Not folk medicine. Medicine. In surgery. In obstetrics. In the burn ward. In water treatment. In the household medicine chest. Every physician before 1938 knew this.
By the 1870s, silver nitrate was standard in surgical wound care across the leading hospitals of Britain, Germany, and the United States. Colloidal silver preparations — Collargol, Argyrol, Protargol — entered European and American practice through the 1890s and early 1900s and became standard antiseptics in military field medicine. By the time Fleming grew his first penicillin mould in 1928, silver was the first-line antimicrobial of the Western pharmacopoeia. The Lancet and the British Medical Journal carried the clinical reports in volume. The practice ran continuously through the Victorian era, the Edwardian era, the First World War, the interwar period. By 1980, almost all of it was gone.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a four-thousand-year clinical record disappeared from mainstream medicine within four decades of the Flexner Report — and what the honest account of silver looks like once that record is reassembled.
Colloidal Silver reconstructs the pre-1938 record from The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and the primary literature of the era; recovers Robert Becker’s bioelectric framework from the regeneration research the pharmaceutical model buried; and places silver inside a practical terrain-paradigm guide to its current place — in water, on the body, inside the body, and in the chronic conditions where antibiotics have failed. … continue
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