I wrote: “Armenia has long been a Russian client state. They will remain one for the foreseeable future. Georgia is divided. When Georgia attacked Russian positions in South Ossetia in 2008 both Russian forces in and around South Ossetia and jointly with Abkhazian forces, Russia occupied Zugdidi, Gori, Poti and Senaki and the Abkhaz captured the Kodori Gorge. Through these actions Russia effectively split Georgia into three parts and there will be no Georgian admission into NATO. In fact, my buddy Mamuka who lives in Tbilisi, Georgia told me earlier this year, “we just have to make our peace with our giant neighbor to the north, like Mexico has made its peace with the USA.” He’s not wrong.”
Artin DerSimonian echoes, albeit much more eloquently and with more convincing evidence and arguments, exactly what I said: “While Georgia has condemned Russia’s actions in Ukraine at international fora and has provided humanitarian aid to Kyiv, Tbilisi has also reopened direct flights with Russia, refused to adopt European sanctions (though generally restricting sanctions-busting trade) or supply arms to Ukraine, and increased its bilateral trade turnover. While some have been understanding of Georgia’s uniquely challenging position amid the war in Ukraine, others have been less forgiving and more circumspect of the underlying motivations of the ruling party’s actions.”
You can read his full article here. It is an outstanding piece of analysis, reminiscent of the arguments I had with Georgians when I visited the country in 2003. It was as clear as a window pane that Georgia must inevitably find an accomodation with its giant neighbor to the North, just as Mexico has done with the United States. Right or wrong, a giant neighbor next door is an ugly reality that must be faced honestly.
As DerSimonian writes, “If that initial strategy falls short of achieving our desired outcomes, then our next step ought to be adjusting our existing policies to fit the realities that develop beyond our borders without unnecessarily alienating those whom we seek to influence.”
It’s wonderful to see at least one nation in the post-Soviet space acting with some strategic and diplomatic maturity. That it is the Georgians is even better. I hope they prosper and solve their dreadful seperatist issues.
A few weeks ago a friend of mine from Nicaragua visited. One aspect of American culture he admired was our lack of corruption.
“Oh dear, Marlon,” I replied. “We are a deeply corrupt nation. The difference between our two nations is that in Nicaragua you have both ‘corruption of the poor,’ such as bribes to police officers, bribes to health inspectors, home inspectors, low level bureaucrats and the like and ‘corruption of the rich’ which is usually institutionalized, a part of the legislative process, includes the corrupt purchase of large scale national rents collection, and is unambiguously unethical. Everyone, in Nicaragua, wets their beak, whereas only the rich and powerful in America participate.”
“RTX (formerly Raytheon) has agreed to pay nearly $1 billion in fines, which is one of the highest figures ever for corruption in the arms sector. To incur these fines, RTX participated in price gouging on Pentagon contracts, bribing officials in Qatar, and sharing sensitive information with China.”
Price gouging? Of course. Bribery in Qatar? No surprise. But sharing sensitive information with China meets my definition of treason. Plus, a billion dollars in fines is much more than the cost of doing business. That’s a penalty that hurts the bottom line.
What makes me sickest is that this is a company that profits off of patriotism, and the demonization of foreign groups, like civilians in Yemen, Gaza and the Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russia has rebuilt its defense industry to serve the Russian national interest, not corporate titans. If, heaven forbid, we get into an all out war, and cannot “win” (loosely defined) within six weeks, we’re toast. Our defense industry is simply not tooled up for that kind of capacity and we’ve undergone far too much de-industrialization to keep up with our peer competitors manufacturing capacity. That’s a sobering thought.
We’ve raised something over $5,400 since the fundraiser started, meaning we’ve reached the first goal of $4K and our $2,500 out from $7,000 tier, at which point I’ll do 3 reviews of important books. At 10K, which is $4,600 out, I’ll write an article on:
…the fundamental process which keeps society together, how it fails and renews and under what conditions it fails to renew.
And at $13,000, I’ll write:
an article on the weaknesses of North American style police, and how a determined and ruthless opponent could take advantage of those weaknesses to rip them a new one.
I really appreciate everyone who’s given. Donations and subscriptions from readers which have kept this blog alive and running. Times are hard, since Covid each fundraiser has become more difficult, because people are hurting, in particular from inflation.
I think this is a place where we tell the truth as we know it and where we try to make educated guesses about what the future holds. Every year it seems there are fewer places like this left.
If you’re in trouble financially, if food or shelter or medicine is an issue, please don’t give.
But if you can afford it, and you like my writing, I’d appreciate it if you did.
By the way, if you want to understand Putin, you read Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, not MeinKampf to suggest otherwise is an abdication of being intelligent.
Nota bene: Crime and Punishment is the best novel ever written. Just saying.
By 2010, the master planners had firmly gained the upper hand. Their victory in Citizens United allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, giving business interests unprecedented power in politics. But the master planners’ onslaught wasn’t quite over. In this episode, we show how they embarked on a bold heist to crack the vault protecting democracy itself. It’s the heist story of the century, in three acts.
First, the schemers needed to take out the security cameras: The disclosure laws that in some instances still required the names of big-money donors to be reported. In a perverse act of mental gymnastics, petrochemical tycoon Charles Koch’s Americans for Prosperity sought to eliminate these laws by weaponizing a 1950s ruling that had protected civil rights activists in the Jim Crow South.
In the second part of the heist, the schemers went after the last remaining cops on the beat. They manufactured a scandal at the IRS, the country’s last remaining campaign finance regulators, over the targeting of so-called “social welfare” nonprofits — many of which were fronts for dark money groups.
Finally, the master planners needed a getaway plan, a way to prevent prosecutors from coming after them as they made off with the loot. They found their opportunity with the appointments of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.
As high-profile bribery and corruption convictions fell, the message was clear: The system is rigged, and political officials are ready to play for pay.
Key findings referenced in this episode include:
See the evidence from the case in which a Virginia jury convicted former Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife Maureen for accepting $175,000 in gifts and loans from a businessman — including a $10,000 white leather coat, shopping sprees, use of a Ferrari, and a $6,500 Rolex.
In the 2016 case McDonnell v. United States, a wave of amicus briefs flooded the Supreme Court attacking the legality of the anti-bribery laws used to convict the former Virginia governor. Chief Justice John Roberts cited these briefs as evidence of “bipartisanship,” but they mostly came from influential figures in the money and politics sphere, including corporate lobbyists and Federalist Society members like John Ashcroft and Ted Olson. Other notable supporters filing briefs included Christian Right attorney Jay Sekulow and Citizens United mastermind James Bopp Jr. Even Justice Lewis F. Powell’s former corporate law firm joined in, representing a coalition of elite business owners.
Indicted New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ lawyers recently filed their first motion to dismiss the bribery and fraud charges lodged against him, heavily relying on Supreme Court rulings that have weakened anti-corruption laws. The motion points to overturned convictions in corruption cases discussed in this episode, including those of McDonnell, former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, small-town mayor James Snyder, and New York power broker Sheldon Silver.
Read law professor Zephyr Teachout’s article on how both liberal and conservative justices on the Supreme Court have expressed skepticism about anti-corruption law, narrowing the definition of corruption and limiting public power.
Germany honored U.S. President Joe Biden for his contribution to trans-Atlantic relations on Friday, ahead of his meetings with European allies on Russia’s war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East.
Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms
The sheer delight the pathetic “Traffic Light” coalition government takes in abasing itself before the US hegemon is pornographic in its shameless indecency. Especially the same week that the Danes reported this:
Just days before the Nord Stream gas pipeline attack in September 2022, warships belonging to the U.S. Navy were on the scene and ordered nearby officials to keep away.
That is according to John Anker Nielsen, who is harbour master at Christiansø, the easternmost part of Denmark in the Baltic Sea, northeast of the island of Bornholm and close to the sites of the Nord Stream explosions.
Map showing the route of Nord Stream 1 and 2 in the southern Baltic Sea and location of the leaks. AWZ=Exclusive Economic Zone
Map: AFP / Nadine EHRENBERG, adapted
Nielsen late last month told a reporter at Politiken, a major Danish daily, that he went out with a rescue team four or five days before the blast to check on nearby ships with switched-off radios, suspecting there might have been an accident, only to find U.S. warships, whose staff ordered the team to turn back immediately.
Biden: If Russia invades uh that means tanks or troops crossing the uh the border of Ukraine again then uh there will be uh we there will be no longer a Nordstream 2. We will bring an end to it.
Reporter: What? How would you how will you do that exactly since the project and control of the project is within Germany’s control?
Biden: We will. I promise you we’ll be able to do it.
and Nuland did it too. This video is still up on the State Department’s official Facebook page because they’re proud of it:
“If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
And Never forget what Nuland said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on January 26, 2023:
“I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you [Ted Cruz] like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
“…ultimately this is also a tremendous opportunity. It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come…”
German industry increasingly struggles to compete on the world stage. Particularly hard hit are its mighty chemical and heavy industry sectors, which are now in rapid decline. One of the main drivers is policies that have made energy costs skyrocket, and there Germany serves as a canary in the coal mine for other leading industrial nations.
It’s kind of grimly amusing that Forbes’ use of the euphemism “policies that have made energy costs skyrocket” rather than say “self-defeating sanctions on cheap Russian gas combined with the biggest act of industrial sabotage in modern history” and it also doesn’t mention that it’s been America’s policies that have deindustrialized Germany.
It’s also so humiliating as an American that the neo-conservative cabal of psychopathic nitwits has been in sole control of US foreign policy since the Clinton administration and now they have a lock on US corporate media as well.
In the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, the far-right AfD received more than double as many votes as the three parties which make up the federal coalition government — the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), environmentalist Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) — combined. These parties’ results are each in the single digits. The Greens in Thuringia and the FDP in both states even failed to meet the 5% threshold to be represented in the state parliaments.
“Biden received the highest class of Germany’s Order of Merit, which was also bestowed on former U.S. President George H.W. Bush for his support of German reunification.”
Kind of fitting that the era of American unipolarity is framed this way. Bush at the beginning. Biden at the end. The Germans footing the bill for American foreign policy.
Politico has a long article on it, and it’s hilarious. A border wall longer than Trump and Biden’s. “Return centers” in other countries, because they’re too gutless to say deportation, and so on. Complaining about Russia and Belarus’s immigration warfare (letting refugees thru Russia to get to Europe. Including, er, Afghan refugees.)
Let’s cut thru the bullshit.
The EU is in economic decline and can no longer afford refugees they can’t monetize.
Europe is also responsible for much of the refugee crisis, having enabled the destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq (Poland, one biggest criers, was part of the “coalition of the willing.”) Europe, with some honorable exceptions like Ireland and Spain, is behind the Israelis, who are about to institute a flood of Lebanese refugees. Europe, thru the world bank, IMF and various post-colonial policies has worked hard to keep third world nations in poverty, increasing refugee flows.
They have helped destroy or impoverish entire nations, then whine about how migrants come to them begging for safety or a decent life.
In humanitarian terms, and international law terms, what the EU is doing is wrong, but the simple truth is that they can’t afford immigration any more, and that mass immigration has exacerbated the right wing turn. Not that it had to, but if you have large numbers of immigrants into a bad economy, who are competing for jobs and housing and social welfare with the desperate, they will naturally blame the immigrants instead of purging the incompetent and corrupt elites who are managing the economy with eye only to benefit themselves.
(I’m running my annual fundraiser. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating. Your donations really do keep this place running.)
The Ukraine war has made this particularly bad, not just because of all the Ukrainian migrants, but because it has increased the de-industrialization of Europe’s industrial heart, Germany.
This is, again, a self-inflicted wound. If Europe had kept the Minsk accords, or, more long term, treated Russia and its security concerns seriously, there wouldn’t have been a war. If Europe did not insist on being subordinate to America, none of this would have happened.
But Euro elites can’t imagine taking actual responsibility for their own countries and telling the US to bugger off, then following something other than neoliberal politics and economic policies.
Reducing immigration makes some sense, even if it’s inhumane, but it’s very much a “treat the symptoms, not the problems” situation.
Europe’s decline will continue until they decide to take responsibility for themselves and to overthrow an ideology which prioritizes the rich and financial games over the entire population and the real economy.
