R.I.P. Henry Kissinger

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-30T05:40:22+00:00

Can't wait for Bernie to eulogize him as a great humanitarian.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-30T05:39:33+00:00

How about Dr. Strangelove - "Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!"

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-29T16:07:45+00:00

From 2018: What’s stored in your school Google Drive account? You might be surprised.:

WATCH THIS FOX 5 NEWS CLIP from Springfield, MO [no link to clip] . They show one teacher log into her school issued Google Drive account where her personal information, including 139 passwords and audio of voice to text messages and Siri searches were stored, allegedly unencrypted.If you or your child have a Google account through school, you are going to want to read this.

The Elys claim that the SPS Google Drive, given to all SPS employees and students, automatically begins to store information from any device the drive is accessed on. This includes browser history, but also personal information such as files and passwords. They add that even if you log out of the drive, it stays running and recording in the background.

"My voice to text was being stored as well as any search my kids did, and I could say ‘sure my daughter was searching on Google,’ but my phone uses Safari. When I used my texting app on my iPhone , it recorded my voice, as well as typing out the words and saving it on my Google Drive,” said Brette Hay, the Ely’s daughter and a teacher at Pershing Middle School.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-28T20:11:17+00:00

Any effort to undercount disabled people is alarming as the prevalence of disability is rising, not declining, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

That probably explains it.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-28T19:25:01+00:00

Unfortunately, a huge segment of the population wouldn't recognize a double standard if it bit them on the ass.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-28T19:22:45+00:00

Excerpt:

i had some tinfoil left over from thanksgiving, so i thought i might spread it around a bit and see if we could explore the interesting and oddly repetitive state of affairs where so many politicians seem fully corrupt and yet fully repercussion proof right up until they step out of line or become a liability at which instant it’s suddenly “scandal time” and they get run out of town on a rail.

...all that you really need to believe to accept these ideas is that power corrupts, that corrupt people are attracted to power, and that many will happily trade their ethics for patronage and position.

i doubt we’re really debating ideas like “does this happen?” rather, it’s a debate about “to what extent?” and “to what degree of deliberation and sophistication?” with perhaps a side order of “and how many actors are in the game and what ends are they pursuing?”

the solution is obvious: only elect people you can, at whim, destroy. if you do not have career and reputation ending dirt on them, don’t back them.

if there’s no dirt, demand they cross the line and produce some so that you can hold it over their heads or set folks upon them to indulge their vices and trap them.

there is a long mooted suspicion than many of the high powered secret societies (such as skull and bones which purportedly produces so many politicians) or the infamous lolita express to epstein island and honeypot parties full of bad mistakes to make (and more importantly be seen and documented making) are all bent around this basic purpose. it’s how you get big groups of high achievers in line and keep them in line and how a machine keeps control of large numbers of egotists, narcissists, sociopaths, and other cluster B denizens.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-28T18:27:34+00:00

Excerpt:

From the start, it's been clear a considerable no. of Ukrainians didn't fit the image we were sold of happy warriors who'd fight forever & pay any cost to win. Many Ukrainians, incl. leftists, backed negotiations. The pro-"agency" crowd simply pretended they didn't exist.

Most astoundingly, the ones simply ignoring all of these Ukrainian "voices" to instead hold up the most bellicose ones (i.e. the ones that agreed with their own pre-conceived views) then turned around and accused the pro-negotiation contingent of being arrogant, not listening etc

As one e.g. the "agency" crowd loves to cite public opinion for the foolish decision to get Ukr. into NATO. They mysteriously have nothing to say about how Ukrainians were actually against NATO when Bush got the ball rolling, that this has involved steamrolling Ukr. "agency".

Nor did they consider how their insistence on respecting Ukrainian "agency" by backing Kyiv's maximalist war aims clashed with the "agency" of the people Kyiv wanted to reconquer, many of whom opposed such a thing or favoured a quicker end to the war.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-28T00:19:11+00:00

There's another really interesting comment thread that starts off about Victoria Nuland and segues into Kosovo/Serbia; the first commenter, Norma Brown, was a US diplomat there and has some pretty scathing things to say about the whole thing in explaining why she retired shortly thereafter from the State Dept.:

https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-112523-major-avdeevka-breakthroughs/comment/44295368

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-27T17:33:29+00:00

Currently, US media reports have been alleging widespread antisemitism on X - and have sought to highlight Musk's own personal interaction with posts on the platform, resulting in some major advertisers to exit.

But Musk's invitation to Israel, where he's also slated to meet President Isaac Herzog later in the day, begs the question: if Musk is "antisemitic" - as his detractors and enemies claim - why would the Jewish state readily invite him for such a high-level visit where the prime minister takes him on a personal tour? As if admitting and underscoring the discrepancy and glaring contradiction, those same voices are now lashing out at the Israel government for hosting the official trip.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-27T16:01:15+00:00

Excerpt:

The lead foreign story for the BBC on 13 November should have been a no-brainer. As Israeli soldiers surrounded al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza, preparing to storm it, dozens of premature babies inside the facility had been removed from their incubators. The hospital no longer had any power to run the machines.

Israel had been repeatedly warned by the United Nations that this would be one of the terrible consequences of its collective punishment of Gaza’s population, denying the fuel needed to generate electricity. Israel simply ignored the warnings.

But editors at the BBC’s News at Six decided to lead the foreign coverage not with the babies being killed by Israel’s withholding of fuel but with a story from the other side of the divide. It must have been one of the most perverse news judgments on record.

Instead, the BBC led with the brother of a British-Israeli man who had been killed during Hamas’ attack on 7 October. The attack itself was by then more than a month old, which even the BBC seemed to understand could not justify demoting the dying babies from the top foreign news slot.

A better angle was needed. And it was this: the BBC reported that the brother was increasingly wondering whether it was safe for him to remain in Britain. This was a sentiment shared by many other Jews, according to the report.

The problem is not just that many British Jews assume the UK has an antisemitism problem based on a highly dubious interpretation of the chant’s meaning. It is that establishment media organisations are echoing that misunderstanding and treating it as more newsworthy than Israel killing Palestinian babies, with the UK government’s blessing.

It is just one illustration of a pattern of reporting by western media outlets skewing their news priorities in ways that reveal a racist hierarchy of concern. Jewish fears are of greater import than actual Palestinian deaths, even babies’ deaths.

Another unmentionable is that western war correspondents, so ready to risk their lives for a story in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, are keeping out of Gaza...

Their news outlets refuse to let them in because they know that Israel’s bombing campaign is so ruthless, so untargeted, so unpredictable, that there would be too much danger of their reporters being injured or killed.

That very fact ought to be part of the news story. But that would require turning upside down the narrative framework underpinning western reporting.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-27T03:38:26+00:00

More of tweet introducing clip:

This report is one of the most gut-wrenching documents I've seen of Israel's state terror

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-27T02:47:40+00:00

Excellent, thanks for posting this.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-27T01:28:34+00:00

Same mentality as "we have to destroy the village to save the village." These idiots need to sit down and let someone less sociopathic give it a shot.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-26T22:13:17+00:00

There's no such way to sugar coat this.

Many will try anyway.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-26T22:09:59+00:00

I'm shocked! /s

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-26T22:08:20+00:00

Funny that, how you can't prettify the real life effects of a genocidal campaign.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-26T21:48:29+00:00

Cross-posted from https://saidit.net/s/WayOfTheBern/comments/bv74/can_a_socialist_exmarine_fill_joe_manchins_seat/

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-26T21:41:32+00:00

Excerpt:

A United States court held an extraordinary hearing on November 16, where a judge carefully considered a lawsuit against the CIA and former CIA director Mike Pompeo for their alleged role in spying on American attorneys and journalists who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Judge John Koeltl of the Southern District of New York pushed back when Assistant U.S. Attorney Jean-David Barnea refused to confirm or deny that the CIA had targeted Americans without obtaining a warrant. He also invited attorneys for the Americans to update the lawsuit so that claims of privacy violations explicitly dealt with the government’s lack of a warrant.

In August 2022, four Americans sued the CIA and Pompeo: Margaret Ratner Kunstler, a civil rights activist and human rights attorney; Deborah Hrbek, a media lawyer who represented Assange or WikiLeaks; journalist John Goetz, who worked for Der Spiegel when the German media organization first partnered with WikiLeaks; and journalist Charles Glass, who wrote articles on Assange for The Intercept.

The lawsuit alleged that as visitors Glass, Goetz, Hrbek, and Kunstler were required to “surrender” their electronic devices to employees of a Spanish company called UC Global, which was contracted to provide security for the Ecuador embassy.

UC Global and the company’s director David Morales “copied the information stored on the devices” and shared the information with the CIA. The agency even had access to live video and audio feeds from cameras in the embassy.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-26T20:13:13+00:00

What's especially astounding is the cluelessness with which they propose the type of concessions that no winning party in a conflict in the entirety of history has ever agreed to, because why would they?

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-26T20:07:38+00:00

Yep, that pretty much sums it up. And of course they showed their true colors when they rejected even considering Russia's reasonable proposal for a new security framework in 2021.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-26T20:06:10+00:00

I fear that will only happen if they ever manage to set aside their enormous (American) egos. "Top of the world, ma!!"

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-26T18:46:42+00:00

Excerpt:

Almost 10 years ago, I sat in a secure conference room at the Pentagon and explained to a group of U.S. national security officials from the military, CIA, Treasury and other agencies that the overuse of the U.S. dollar in financial warfare would eventually drive countries away from using dollars in international transactions for fear that they could become the next target of U.S. displeasure.

We’re destroying the dollar with the sanctions (and through other misguided policies). The U.S. is doing more to destroy the dollar than our enemies.

None of the sanctions would be effective or even possible without the use of the dollar and the dollar payments system.

Many others have pointed out the same weaknesses in the weaponization of the dollar. It seems the only parties who don’t see the danger to the dollar are the Wall Street cheerleaders and top U.S. government officials.

Right now, the U.S. holds about $300 billion of Russian assets that were frozen after the Ukraine war broke out in February 2022. Most of those assets... consist of U.S. Treasury securities.

Technically, those assets have not been converted to U.S. ownership; they have merely been frozen and still belong to Russia even though Russia cannot use them. Now [House Speaker] Johnson wants to convert those assets to U.S. ownership and use the proceeds to pay for the war in Ukraine.

Such an action would amount to a default on U.S. government debt since the securities were legally owned by Russia.

Nations around the world would take note and accelerate their dumping of Treasury securities and their flight from the U.S. dollar. This would increase interest rates in the U.S. and hurt everyone from homebuyers to everyday consumers.

It would make U.S. debt permanently more difficult to sell and less desirable to hold...At its worst, it could trigger a dollar panic and full-scale flight from the dollar.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-26T18:25:18+00:00

And as per usual, they're busily making their plans without even trying to take into consideration what Russia would agree to. Meanwhile, even amateur observers of the conflict (who aren't being paid to be stupid) know Russia most assuredly would not agree to the fantasy "resolution" the West is pimping.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-26T18:05:54+00:00

Excerpt:

Political movements derive cohesion from the momentum and energy they command. With the wind at their backs, adherents are willing to overlook their divergent interests and fight for a common cause. As these movements lose momentum and face hardening opposition, they suddenly find themselves rent by infighting and factionalism... In such situations, it is everyone for himself; there is a great scramble to leave the sinking ship, and it becomes convenient to blame erstwhile allies for failures.

This is happening in Germany right now. Signs of disarray are pervasive in the ranks of their street-level shock troops, the climate activists. For months now, Letzte Generation have had a particularly bad time. Extinction Rebellion, an important source of early inspiration and advice, has been distancing itself from the group...

All this is happening as that other great climate organisation in the Federal Republic, Luisa Neubauer’s Fridays for Future chapter, fights to distance itself from its child prophet, Greta Thunberg, and the pro-Palestinian stance she has taken since the start of the Gaza conflict on 7 October...nobody has fought so hard to make Thunberg the living saint of climate change as Neubauer and her gaggle of carbon dioxide hysterics.

The catastrophic overreach of the pandemic response, the energy crisis of 2021, the ensuing economic chaos and the decline of unipolar American hegemony have brought about an enduring sea change. The water now flows with growing momentum to the right, and not just in Germany.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-26T04:35:23+00:00

Military action against Poland (if that's what you're referring to) does sound preposterous for exactly the reason you give. What Korybko is talking about is a scenario where Poland becomes the new front against the "war with Russia" and German troops under the auspices of NATO being put there. Whether that's a reasonable reading of the "Military Schengen" proposal, I don't know. But NATO is obviously determined to keep this war going one way or another, and the decision-makers are stupid and petty enough that there's not much they could do that would surprise me. That includes further fueling existing spats between member states.

I've gotten the impression that Poland doesn't play well with its neighbors. They've definitely had their eye on their former territory in western Ukraine. I also seem to recall that they were demanding reparations from Germany in the last year, and also remember something about some demands they were making of whichever of their Scandinavian neighbors was going to fill some of the energy gap caused by the Russian sanctions, seems like it had to do with sharing the revenue.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-26T04:18:32+00:00

(public post on Patrick Lawrence's substack, letter to Biden from novelist Peter Dimock)

The White House, Washington. 22 November 2023

Dear President Biden,

Thank you for the kindness of your letter of November 15th in response to my plea to use all the power at your disposal to bring about a ceasefire in Israel’s U.S.–supported and –enabled genocide against the Palestine population of Gaza following Hamas’s attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.

I realize your intention was not to invite further correspondence from me. I am nevertheless compelled to trouble you further in the sincere hope that this letter will remind you of your obligations under international humanitarian law and the Genocide Convention, to which the U.S. is a signatory along with 148 other nations.

Under the Genocide Convention the United States government and its citizens are required to intervene to redress the commission of genocide as “the crime of crimes.” Signatories to the Genocide Convention are legally obligated to intervene to stop genocide and to prosecute its perpetrators to the full extent of the law as a matter of jus cogens, that is, the peremptory norm, in times of peace and in times of war, against “violent attacks with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.”

Current U.S. policy lends unqualified and unquestioning support—in word and deed—for what Israeli leaders have announced is their determination to slaughter unlimited numbers of Palestinian civilians. Under your leadership, American policy constitutes the absolute evil of the crime of genocide. Such evil should never be invoked in support a nation’s “right to defend itself.” Not to oppose the crime of genocide is to join in its commission. If genocide is not opposed now, it will forever become the norm in international relations. In retrospect, the logic of exterminist Nazi political ideology will have proven itself not to have been an aberration—the temporary and unrepeated suspension of humanity’s implicit universal valuing of every and all life—but the fulfillment of the depravity of political power’s assertion that the unlimited exercise of the violence of unanswerable force finally constitutes power’s only universally recognized relevant currency of self-justification.

In the present instance of genocide your administration’s policies enact a willingness to create—and then to exercise demented global leadership within—an unlivable world. I sense you do this in the name of an ill-advised claim to an entitlement to exercise, with unopposable legitimacy, unlimited “full spectrum dominance” in global affairs through American national militarized force.

Your and your administration’s active participation in the commission of genocide over the last forty-six days implicitly makes every American citizen complicit in that crime to the extent that we do not directly and actively oppose your policies. By refusing to investigate, prosecute, and intervene to prevent the genocide now unfolding in Gaza—as is required by law under the Genocide Convention—you force every American to participate in the unmaking of our moral and ethical selves and of our coherence as a democratic people dedicated to a universal pursuit of human emancipation and universal historical justice.

The complicity of every American with genocide implicit in your administration’s policies destroys our political, ethical, and moral world as a livable form of human solidarity and forces us all into a necessary consideration of first principles. I do not believe that anyone pursuing the policies you are now pursuing regarding Israel’s genocidal acts in Gaza can be elected President of the United States on November 5, 2024. At least I hope that is the case.

As I suspect you inwardly know, the inhumanity of your present conduct of American foreign policy will surely cost you the next election. I suspect you also inwardly know that by betraying your own humanity and compromising that of every American citizen, you are opening the doors to the unspeakable criminality represented by the full-blown fascism of Donald Trump.

For all our sakes, I beg you to change course in giving enabling support to the present Israeli government in perpetrating the crime of genocide in Gaza. It is not too late to do the right thing.

Thank you for considering this second request to do everything in your power to bring an end to the crime of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza by forcing upon the Israeli government an immediate and permanent ceasefire.

Sincerely,

Peter Dimock

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-26T01:44:14+00:00

More from Ivan:

I am crowdfunding to publish my book, entitled “From the Maidan to the Russia-Ukraine War,” as open access book: https://gofund.me/bce0a10d This book is already accepted for publication by a major Western academic press following very positive peer reviews. It is scheduled for publication in 2024. Publishing it as open access would make this book on the Russia-Ukraine war and its origins available for everyone to read, download, share, translate, and republish in whole or in part free of charge. The fundraiser goal is $16,850 or CAD$22,900.

It's not at this link but I read elsewhere that all the research into the Maidan snipers was done on his own time and his own dime, and as Mark Sleboda said, his work was cited extensively throughout the trial. I'm not rolling in cash so I donate sparingly but I decided that this one qualifies, not only for what he's already put into it but because there will be a version published in e-book format available for free to anyone who wants it.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-26T01:41:03+00:00

Twitter thread by Ivan Katchanovski:

My open access peer-reviewed journal article: https://tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311886.2023.2269685 "This study analyzes which party of the conflict was involved in the 2014 Maidan massacre in Ukraine. The massacre of Maidan protesters and the police on 20 February 2014 was a turning point in Ukrainian politics. This mass killing led to the overthrow of the Ukrainian government and spiraled into a civil war in Donbas, Russian military intervention in Crimea and Donbas, the Russian annexation of Crimea, and conflicts between Ukraine and Russia and between the West and Russia...

Content analysis of synchronized videos, testimonies by several hundred witnesses, confessions by 14 self-admitted members of Maidan sniper groups, and bullet hole locations show that both the police and protesters were massacred by Maidan snipers located in Maidan-controlled buildings and areas. Content analysis of synchronized videos revealed that the specific time and direction of shooting by Berkut policemen, who were charged with the massacre, did not coincide with the killing of specific protesters. Testimonies by the absolute majority of wounded protesters and some 100 witnesses and forensic examinations by ballistic and medical experts for the Maidan massacre trial and investigation in Ukraine corroborate this. The article shows that the false-flag massacre was rationally organized and carried out with the involvement of oligarchic and far-right elements of the Maidan opposition to overthrow the incumbent government in Ukraine."

Mark Sleboda talks about the verdict here, starting about 1:36:

There is a Canadian professor of Ukrainian origin, Ivan Katchanovski, whose research was actually cited extensively because he interviewed all the people who were shot; he interviewed the Berkut, the security police of Ukraine; he did angles of the hotels; an unassailable body of research. He tweeted out about the verdict a few weeks ago and he's resuscitating it today as von der Leyen is celebrating "ten years of dignity."

But the Maidan massacre trial confirms that snipers in far right-controlled Hotel Ukraina and other Maidan-controlled locations massacred many Maidan activists and shot at BBC and ARD TV journalists. It confirms there were no massacre orders from Yanukovych or his minister. Verdict then states that Euromaidan was not a peaceful protest but an armed rebellion which involved massacre of Berkut security forces and other police.

The trial verdict has been ignored because it bucks the narrative that has been used to justify everything that has happened in Ukraine from 2014 until Russia intervened in 2022 as a result of the overthow of the government. No one wants to report on something that calls into question the whole narrative and the $100 billion plus taxpayer dollars that have gone to arm and fund the regime just since Russia's intervention.

And then other unreported things at the time: the pro-Maidan, then American-owned Kiev Post reported on multiple polls taken in Ukraine while the Maidan was occurring that more Ukrainians disapproved of the Euronmaidan protests than approved of them. Obviously, it was not an exercise in democracy on the square or in any way for the country.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-25T20:55:37+00:00

You may be right but I always appreciate Korybko's analyses and try to share them. He writes prolifically on numerous geopolitical events but especially what's happening in Eastern Europe and Eurasia.

From all my reading and listening, my impression is that the government that was just voted out is very reactionary, and their support for their farmers and for Poles concerned about being overrun by immigrants was the result of political pressure, especially as the elections loomed. Their primary agenda as I'm sure you know has been to become the hub for US military power in NATO and simultaneously using that power to further its aspirations with regard to western Ukraine. Korbyko has done a number of pieces over the past months about the mostly behind-the-scenes between Poland and Ukraine and Poland and Germany. The latter, by most accounts I've seen, despise Poland though whether that's reserved to the current government or to the country in general I don't know. And there's no question that Germany has become increasingly militaristic in its rhetoric and its actions, like upping its military spending and jockeying for position as the NATO state most committed to the proxy war in Ukraine.

It's open to question whether Korybko is reading more into recent events than is there but as is usually the case, the timing of certain events that seem connected loosely if at all, is well worth paying attention to as we've had reason to understand watching the global clusterf*ck that has emerged over the past few years.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-25T18:49:52+00:00

They consistently nail it!

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-25T17:12:33+00:00

NATO logistics chief Lieutenant-General Alexander Sollfrank suggested the creation of a so-called “military Schengen” for optimizing the movement of such equipment across the EU... It’s not just this proposal’s substance that’s significant, however, but also its timing.

The liberal-globalist opposition coalition’s victory in last month’s Polish elections, which its Foreign Minister earlier accused Germany of meddling in, will likely result in former Prime Minister and European Council President Donald Tusk’s return to the premiership. In that event, this German-aligned politician could voluntarily subordinate his country to Berlin, thus resulting in Poland ceding its envisaged regional sphere of influence to that country and becoming its largest-ever vassal indefinitely.

Tusk’s plans to improve ties with the de facto German-controlled EU are regarded by conservative-nationalists as a means to that end, particularly due to that body’s efforts to further erode Polish sovereignty.

If Tusk improves ties with the EU like he promised, complies with any EU Treaty changes despite unconvincingly claiming to oppose them, and the “military Schengen” is imposed upon his country, then German forces could return to Poland en masse on the pretext of defending the EU from Russia. This doesn’t contradict the de-escalation trends pertaining to the NATO-Russian proxy war, but complements them since it could be spun as compensating for the lack of Article 5-like guarantees to Ukraine.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-25T17:05:32+00:00

Excerpt:

Poland is poised to become Germany’s largest-ever vassal state upon former Prime Minister and European Commission President Donald Tusk’s likely return to the premiership following the liberal-globalist opposition coalition’s victory in last month’s elections. Those who are interested in learning more about how this is expected to unfold should review this analysis here, which focuses on how the interplay between EU, German, and NATO policies will likely lead to this geopolitical outcome.

Since that fateful vote took place, Polish truckers now even farmers have imposed a de facto blockade against Ukraine that the outgoing government hasn’t broken, which can be regarded as that party’s last power play aimed at giving their country a fighting chance at preserving some of its sovereignty.

To elaborate, the worst-case scenario for Poland is that it becomes Germany’s largest-ever vassal state and then plays second fiddle to Ukraine in Berlin’s envisaged “Mitteleuropa”, which would run the risk of Berlin rewarding Kiev for forthcoming preferential reconstruction contracts with influence over Warsaw. This could in practice take the form of forcing Poland to accept even more Ukrainian migrants than it already has, all with the intent of them then becoming citizens and forming their own voting bloc.

If these “Weapons of Mass Migration” concentrate along the border region that the briefly lived post-WWI Ukrainian state at one time claimed as its own, then these newfound demographic realities and the creation of a powerful German-backed voting bloc could one day threaten Poland’s territorial integrity.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-25T08:32:49+00:00

I did not know that, larn sumthin' new ever' day.

The one that sometimes puzzles me is British English, especially place names; you look at the word and think "how in the hell did they come up with that pronunciation?" I mean, we have silent letters, too, but we tend to spread them around instead of stuffing a bunch of them into a single word.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-25T08:27:00+00:00

She's inherited your sense of humor, I see.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-25T04:47:36+00:00

Just shows what petty assholes these museum curators, etc. are. No one should be allowed to change the name of a piece of art they didn't themselves create.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-25T02:51:26+00:00

Because ethnic Russians or those sympathetic to Russia living in those countries couldn't possibly have agency to act on their own, they must have had direct orders from Putin! /s

The disdain and contempt these governments have shown toward all things Russian has just been more blatant lately but I doubt Russophiles living in those places were under any illusions before then about what they thought.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-25T01:47:44+00:00

Good description. I remember a presenter at a conference saying the scarf she wore that everyone was admiring came from Targét.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-25T01:14:13+00:00

Naw, that was pretty hilarious.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-25T01:12:51+00:00

Excerpt:

The US/Qatar-brokered “truce,” which is supposed to go into effect this week, is not a ceasefire. It is a PR move to soften Israel's genocide and boost its morale by securing the release of a few dozen captives. Moreover, the record shows that Israel never respects ceasefires.

The South African government has paved the path, globally, for the proper reaction to an unfolding genocide: parliament voted to shutter the Israeli embassy, expel the Israeli ambassador, and cut diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv. South Africans do know a thing or two about apartheid.

This Gaza Contact Group, uniting Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Palestine, made their first stop in Beijing, meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and then on to Moscow, meeting with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. That was definitely an instance of BRICS 11 already in action – even before they started business on January 1st, 2024, under the Russian presidency.

The meeting with Lavrov in Moscow was held simultaneously with an extraordinary online BRICS session on Palestine, called by the current South African presidency.

...while Gaza's gas is indeed a crucial vector, Gaza, the territory, is a nuisance. What really matters for Tel Aviv is to confiscate all Palestinian gas reserves and allot them to future preferential clients: the EU.

Enter the India-Middle East Corridor(IMEC) - actually the EU-Israel-Saudi Arabia-Emirates-India Corridor - conceived by Washington as the perfect vehicle for Israel to become an energy crossroads power. It fancifully imagines a US-Israel energy partnership trading in US dollars – simultaneously replacing Russian energy to the EU and halting a possible export increase of Iran's energy to Europe.

We return to the 21st century's main chessboard here: the Hegemon vs. BRICS.

This analysis by Eric Li is all one needs to know about what lies ahead. Beijing has mapped out all relevant tech roads to follow in successive five-year plans, all the way to 2035. Under this framework, BRI should be considered a sort of geoeconomics UN without the G7. If you’re outside of BRI – and that concerns, to a large extent, old comprador systems and elites - you’re self-isolating from the Global South/Global Majority.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-25T00:16:07+00:00

The American people, however, if not the Washington establishment, should set another priority: establishing responsibility for the failed proxy war. No doubt, much blame should fall on the Biden administration, which refused to seriously negotiate with Moscow before the war, undermined talks between Ukraine and Russia, and steadily expanded a proxy war with a nuclear-armed power over stakes far more important to it than to the U.S.

Members of the bipartisan war party share the blame. Many, including most Republican leaders, have been even more reckless than the administration. The GOP paladins often pressed extreme and dangerous approaches, such as the Mississippian Sen. Roger Wicker’s mad plan for ground and nuclear war with Moscow. (The ever-irresponsible Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina had previously suggested nuclear conflict against North Korea with equal nonchalance.) Why worry about the possibility of a few score million deaths?

Moreover, both Republican and Democratic administrations have helped turn Moscow hostile with an aggressive, expansionist military policy. Washington treated the Soviet Union and then Russia as defeated foes with the expansion of NATO, despite multiple assurances to the contrary. The U.S. also inverted the Monroe Doctrine, insisting that everything up to Russia’s border was in America’s sphere of interest, and promoted “color revolutions” and street uprisings within Moscow’s neighbors.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-24T23:36:46+00:00

I'd say it was accurate though since culinary means "Of or relating to a kitchen or to cookery." Cuisine basically means the same thing ("A characteristic manner or style of preparing food") but it always sounds more highbrow in French. Or maybe just sexier; there was a so-so movie with Dick Banjamin married to Jessica Lange where she drove him into a lustful frenzy by talking French to him.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-24T18:08:20+00:00

This is really interesting, thanks for posting it.

It occurred to me as I was reading it that what the author says about the imperial US and sub-imperial Australia et al. not fitting into the paradigm of states prioritizing their own survival and security over everything else is also a good way to describe the globalist mentality so pervasive among Western leaders that drives them to destroy their own economies and harm their own populations.

Maybe it's not one or the other but rather complementary goals that dovetail: centralized power; the effective erasure of national sovereignty as governments subordinate national interests to universalist goals; immigration policies that diffuse national identity and make national borders meaningless. Right now the US is the placeholder at the top of the heap because it's the one country with both the will and the means to be there, but as US political leaders whittle away at the domestic foundations that give it military and economic dominance globally, that will no doubt change.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-24T01:58:28+00:00

The rules-based order: we make the rules and give the orders.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-24T01:57:12+00:00

You're so punny.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-24T00:15:43+00:00

Excerpt:

After sharp increases year-over-year in 2021 and 2022, the total price of Thanksgiving Dinner is down 4.5% in 2023, according to the annual Thanksgiving marketbasket survey of the American Farm Bureau Federation.

The full meal is still 25% higher than the 2019 cost, but this year’s decrease is a good sign not just that inflation is cooling, but that efforts to crack down on corporate profiteering, or “greedflation,” are starting to work.

For the past two years, mounting evidence has suggested that corporations have used inflation as cover for coordinating price increases across the economy. Back in December 2021, BIG was one of the first outlets to push back on the argument that high inflation was the result of government spending and a tight labor market, instead suggesting that corporate profits were driving as much as 60% of inflation increases.

In short time, further studies showed that greedflation was more than a myth. A 2022 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found that increased concentration across the US economy since 2005 had caused a 25% increase in pass-through costs to consumers...The conventional wisdom is that concentrated industries are more susceptible to illegal coordination among rivals, but sophisticated data exchanges are now facilitating coordination in less concentrated industries.

...the Justice Department is enforcing against illegal coordination and price fixing by Agri Stats, which operates a data exchange among processors of 90% of domestic turkey sales.

...a federal jury in Illinois cracked the egg cartel involving major egg producers Cal-Maine and Rose Acre Farms and facilitated by trade groups like the United Egg Producers (UEP). The lawsuit alleged that Cal-Maine and Rose Acre, among others, conspired to artificially suppress the supply of eggs and inflate the cost of eggs for major food retailers.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-23T23:51:46+00:00

Excerpt:

With a trail of evidence lifted from official published records, they have documented the brief life and premature demise of the Government’s expert group of moral and ethical advisors known as MEAG. Two former members of MEAG agreed to be interviewed and quoted about what happened, provided they were not named.

At the outset of the pandemic MEAG, the Moral and Ethical Advisory Group of approximately 20 experts selected as leaders in their fields of medicine, ethics, law, social science and religion, was tasked with advising Ministers and senior officials on the challenging ethical aspects to decisions that would need to be taken. The DHSC was to convene weekly meetings of that group.

The three years of MEAG’s official existence coincided with a complex pandemic response which included lockdowns, mass school closures, mass population testing, the Covid vaccine roll-out and related passports, and the vaccination of children. Each of these policies involved weighty ethical considerations, so one might have expected the Government’s advisory group on ethical issues to play a central role during this period; and for it to have been vocal, and instrumental in setting ethical guardrails for legally and ethically robust policy decisions.

Yet after having first felt to be “in demand”, according to one of our sources, by September 2020 MEAG members appeared disillusioned by a lack of engagement from the Government and so resolved in one of their meetings to “reach out proactively to senior civil servants in key policy areas” including the vaccination programme, mass testing and the impact of the pandemic on cancer screenings. Just a fortnight later, the DHSC appears to have clipped MEAGs wings by directing that it should shift its focus “to response work, acting as a constructive sounding board…”. ‘Speak when spoken to, and be more constructive’ appears to have been the message.

Following its final meeting of the year in December 2020, during which the public record shows that MEAG raised serious ethical concerns about the Government’s plans to launch a Covid status certificate or pass, the group reconvened in January to find that Chris Whitty, the CMO, had reportedly spoken with one of the Co-Chairs of MEAG and “counselled against producing documentation that offered recommendations, given the political aspect of decision making” (bold in original).

We do not know whether Whitty gave this instruction on his own initiative or as a messenger, but this is all the more surprising in light of Professor Whitty’s oral evidence to the Covid Inquiry this week about the imperative for SAGE to conduct its business with formally minuted discussions...

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-23T23:05:39+00:00

“F**k the EU,” she demanded. And, well, they sure did exactly that.

And it was no one-night stand, either. Instead, it has turned into a marathon, sadistic orgy on the EU people who are endlessly getting the shaft in this whole mess while the bloc’s chief whip-cracker, unelected Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, tells Western Europeans to bend over and take the pain for Ukraine as she and her pals blow up their own economies with endless sanctions against Russia. Not to mention that her fellow Germans just sat there like a bunch of masochists while their own cheap energy supply got blown up.

Meanwhile, speaking of masochists, Germany is currently panicking over money problems, largely as a result of selling out its own industry to the US-led agenda for Ukraine. “The house is in flames,” one member of the ruling coalition told Bloomberg.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-23T22:48:00+00:00

You like weird pizza toppings, 'nuff said.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-23T22:15:17+00:00

Didn't Biden tell young people to quit whining when he was campaigning?

These people are so clueless.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-23T21:50:20+00:00

Maniak was clearly a changeling, he's said he doesn't like what I consider the most exquisite of French culinary offerings.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-23T21:11:20+00:00

“NATO’s Proxy War On Russia Through Ukraine Appears To Be Winding Down”, and the latest argument in support of this observation concerns Bloomberg’s report about the EU’s proposed security guarantees to Ukraine, which will certainly disappoint Zelensky and his clique. The outlet claims that it’s seen the draft agreement on this subject that’s poised to be discussed by the bloc’s leaders next month. Here are the exact points mentioned in their report, which will then be analyzed throughout the rest of this piece:

<snip>

Each of these proposed security guarantees is already in effect, thus meaning that the draft agreement will simply seek to enshrine everything into international law. What’s conspicuously missing, however, is any reference to mutual defense obligations along the lines of NATO’s Article 5. Kiev has been desperately seeking this since prior to the start of Russia’s special operation, and it was the pursuit of this goal that greatly contributed to the latest phase of this nearly decade-long conflict.

Russia would obviously prefer for no such guarantees to be extended to that country in the first place, but it’s seemingly willing to accept the EU enshrining its existing aid to Ukraine into international law via a bilateral agreement between those two. Likewise, no policymaker in the West would prefer to freeze the conflict and thus tacitly accept the status quo whereby Russia’s control over Ukraine’s pre-2014 territory has more than doubled, but they’re seemingly willing to do so as a quid pro quo.

In the event that the abovementioned exchange becomes the basis for an armistice of some sort, then America might agree to it in order to then have a “face-saving” exit from this geostrategically counterproductive conflict that only hastened its hegemonic decline instead of reversed it as planned.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-23T18:31:14+00:00

Darren Beattie 2:38

There's been a severe reluctance on the part of the mainstream media and the regime to allow the public to see any direct footage of January 6th that could complicate or contradict the official narrative that's been shoved down our throats every day for years now. And that narrative is that January 6th is some sort of horrific, unique event of domestic terror that exceeds even 9/11 and I think Biden said at one point exceeds the Civil War in terms of the trauma it inflicted on the country.

They've invested a tremendous amount of money and resources and intention in crystallizing that narrative because it's used as a pretext to further the weaponization of the national security state against the American people. [this is what the broader public, no matter their political affiliation, needs to understand]

So there's a lot riding on it and anything that challenges that narrative - certainly I've experienced it directly because Revolver News was at the forefront of challenging various aspects of that official narrative - and so this footage is in that vein. I think anyone who's paid close attention to the issue already knew that the Capitol Police provoked the crowd gratuitously with flashbangs and so forth. Anyone paying attention would have already known that the Capitol Police in many instances opened the doors to the crowd and so forth.

But developments such as this, where the footage becomes more widely available on that scale like the full range of footage, it's very important because it reinforces the understanding that's already been out there by some of the researchers like we've been doing, like Julie Kelly and others...

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-23T16:25:41+00:00

This guy is unreal.

https://twitter.com/sospunjab/status/1727719889723412877

Stuart Seldowitz, recently got arrested for repeatedly harassing an Egyptian street vendor for being Muslim and supporting Palestine. Another video has emerged of him, this time harassing Russian diplomats.

“Are you one of Putin’s prostitutes?”

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-22T02:14:43+00:00

Comparing the two twitter feeds, this one definitely seems more up my alley in terms of my capacity to understand WTH he's talking about. Thanks!!

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-21T22:08:31+00:00

Excerpt of comment from Ishkabibble on latest Larry Johnson piece:

In order to keep running, the US must continue to sell well over a trillion USD worth of treasury bonds year after year after year, from here to eternity. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the following Treasury web site : https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-deficit/

From the above (my emphasis):

“In FY 2022, the federal government spent $6.27 trillion and collected $4.90 trillion in revenue, resulting in a deficit. The amount by which spending exceeds revenue, $1.38 trillion in 2022, is referred to as deficit spending.

and

“To pay for a deficit, the federal government borrows money by selling Treasury bonds, bills, and other securities.”

So here is the inconvenient truth that Yellen and all the rest of the US VIPs will never say in public. If the US/NATO/EU lose their war against Russia, just exactly NOBODY is going to continue to buy US treasury paper that, ever since Nixon closed the gold window, has been “backed up” only by an MIC that has just failed to defeat and subjugate Russia! And that means that the only investors in US Treasury paper will probably be idiots and The Federal Reserve.

This is also why interest on US treasury bonds has to remain high, and get only higher, until the US’s war is won. The high interest rate has nothing to do with “curbing inflation”...The fact that the US MIC has not yet defeated and subjugated Russia is the most important factor in “the bond market” demanding higher and higher rates of return on increasingly “risky” US treasuries.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-21T15:51:41+00:00

I hope so, too.

The AP article sounds like Joy Behar on The View saying how great the economy was. She makes something like $8 million a year so baseball been berry, berry good to her.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-21T05:29:31+00:00

Thanks much. And as you've probably noticed or will when you watch the rest of it, this is abridged, but hopefully it catches the most important stuff.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-21T02:59:45+00:00

There was a brief, tangential reference to Britain's Corn Laws which were repealed in the 1840s and I found this at Wikipedia:

Cobden and the rest of the Anti-Corn Law League believed that cheap food meant greater real wages and Cobden praised a speech by a working man who said:

When provisions are high, the people have so much to pay for them that they have little or nothing left to buy clothes with; and when they have little to buy clothes with, there are few clothes sold; and when there are few clothes sold, there are too many to sell, they are very cheap; and when they are very cheap, there cannot be much paid for making them: and that, consequently, the manufacturing working man's wages are reduced, the mills are shut up, business is ruined, and general distress is spread through the country. But when, as now, the working man has the said 25s left in his pocket, he buys more clothing with it (ay, and other articles of comfort too), and that increases the demand for them, and the greater the demand ... makes them rise in price, and the rising price enables the working man to get higher wages and the masters better profits. This, therefore, is the way I prove that high provisions make lower wages, and cheap provisions make higher wages.

I think this guy has a better understanding of how economies actually work than the so-called experts do.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-21T02:06:40+00:00

(between SaidIt's "verify you're human" and its character limits for comments....what a PITA)

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-21T02:04:39+00:00

You said the magic word: rent. What Adam Smith, Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and Marx and the others were all talking about with value and price theory. They defined the excess of price over the intrisic cost value of the product as economic rent. The objective of Smith and Ricardo was to say "rent is unearned, it's a special privilege, it's a carryover from feudalism, and a historical task of industrial capitalism is to free society from economic rent.

That's why the concept of exploitation in the form of rent culminated in Marx. The fight against Marxism is a fight against Adam Smith and Ricardo. What Marx did is push Smith, Ricardo, Malthus and John Stuart Mill to its logical conclusion. Marx showed how all of this was moving toward socialism, meaning a rent-free economy [in the context "rent" is being used here] where everybody earned what they produced and there was no free lunch.

What happened is that the rent-seekers fought back. In the 1890s you had the Austrian school in Austria that became the von Miseans and the Hayek people. In America you had John Bates Clark saying "there's no difference betwen price and value, economic rent doesn't exist, everyone earns whatever they get no matter how they earn it."

That's become the basis of national income accounting. If you look at GNP, at GDP accounts of the US and Europe, they count economic rent as if it's an addition to product, to GDP. Interest charges, late charges are an addition to GDP. The rise in rents people pay for their housing as rents go up is included in GDP. They've erased the entire thrust of classical economics, distinguishing between earned and unearned income, and of course that is exactly what Russia, China and the rest of the world want to distinguish. They want to have an economy where people are productive, not where fortunes are made by being parasitic rent-seekers making money in their sleep as John Stuart Mill defined landlord rent and landlord capital gains.

What is needed is a set of economic statistics that will tell how much we're producing in actual product and how much is overhead. The Western GDP and post-classical theory denies that there's any such thing as economic overhead, that monopoly pricing is not an overhead, that higher rents are not an overhead. That's the one thing in ad hoc fashion that Russia and China are trying to minimize.

(Glenn, 1:11:49): If you look at the policies in which large industrial economies have emerged, they've hardly ever been completely unfettered free markets, you have to provide temporary subsidies or tariffs to build up your infant industries vis-a-vis the mature industries in the international market. Look at the Chinese chip industry. America cut off their access to chips and now the Chinese in record time were able to provide all the funding and subsidies and move this whole industry that was dependent on the US under total Chinese control so they have techological sovereignty over it. You see the same in Russia, their agricultural products, their cheeses, their digital ecosystems, their banks, trading in their own currency. This might have taken 10-20 years but was pushed down into 2 to accelerate the process simply out of necessity.

(AM, 1:14:30): Just a last question, both Glenn and I have noticed that in Russia they've just re-discovered Friedrich List. Is he someone who might provide some of the framework (of an economic policy)?

List was the first generation of American protectionists. The second generation of protectionists, in the 1840s and 1850s in the US, went way beyond List. They translated his book and said he didn't really spell out how you develop an industrial system based on high-wage labor. You need to raise labor productivity by raising its wages, making it healthier, better clothed, better housed and all that. So List was only Stage One of the protectionists; I wrote a book, "America's Protectionist Tradeoff" and talked about List and his followers.

About what Glenn said: The US never takes into account that other countries may have a reaction to what the US does. They've missed the boat every time, they never dreamed that Russia or China would have an alternative. That's because in the US they don't think of an economy as a system; for them a market exists without government playing any role at all, without policy playing any role at all, and if you don't have a market there isn't a system, there's just a free-for-all. And yet economics in the 19th century was a system, that's what Marxism is about, it's an economic, social and political system. That's why the British (economists) called their works "political economy", e.g., Ricardo's "Principles of Political Economy", not "market economy."

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-21T02:04:13+00:00

The irony is that what helped China develop so much was none other than the great destroyer of American capitalism, Milton Friedman and the Chicago school. The Shanghai people had Friedman come over and the one thing he and the Chicago boys convinced China of was to let there be innovation, let people try to make money everywhere and if they succeed, let them succeed and get wealthy up to a point and then you decide who to help and subsidize, how to join in but you become the financiers, not private financing.

That actually worked, it was Deng [Xiaoping]'s policy, "black cat, white cat, as long as they catch mice, that's the important thing." The central committee made good judgments about what industries to support, but I think the next step is for them to say here's why it's worked out, here are the basic principles that we want to have as an economic platform. They should really tie it into the new economic system for Russia, China, Eurasia and the whole Global South.

And I think it will be very much like what happened in the 19th century in British classic political economy, a distinction between profits vs. rents, earned vs. unearned income, productive vs. unproductive labor, public vs. private finance. I think all of this is about to be codified and I think it would be helpful for people to look at - all of it has been discussed for a century in the 19th century.

In America, they've dropped the whole history of economic thought from the economics curriculum because as Margaret Thatcher said, "there is no alternative" and the way you make sure there is no alternative is you don't let knowledge that there was an alternative, that used to be industrial capitalism, that people can develop.

Classic political economy (Glenn, 1:00:53): The industrial capitalism we had seems to have been hijacked by the ideology these days because when we discuss capitalism now, we're only served one version of it, the one of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. And often people will use the examples of Adam Smith or David Ricardo to suggest this is the ideological foundation of capitalism. Ricardo said that with every technological innovation, the return of the investment will concentrate in the hands of capital, upsetting the balance with labor so he did recognize this. The same with Adam Smith; he recognized that the "hidden hand" or a maximum flexible economy is very efficient for increasing the revenue but that once the economy grows, reforms to capitalism are needed to support and help the poorest so you don't have this uneven distribution. If I'm not mistaken, Smith was also cautious about rent-seekers in the economy, someone who can not just take profits away from production but thereby make production less competitive. This is the problem we see in the US today, an oligarchy siphoning off wealth and in the process making the entire economy less productive.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-21T02:03:26+00:00

China has the option - a financial atom bomb - to let the banks that made this dollar debt go broke; they do have deposit insurance that could cover 90% of all the deposits by Chinese families, workers and businesses but let the debt go under and start all over with a clean slate. That is what I think logically is being discussed right now in China and you can just imagine what that will do to the dollar-holders; to me this is the ultimate de-dollarization and you can imagine where it will lead not only the US but the other countries that have tried to hold the wealth of their 1% and their domestic client oligarchies in dollars.

Russia: (Alexander): Coming back to another country, Russia in the 1990s went in the diametric opposite direction of China, they privatized everything and opened up their economy every conceivable way. They allowed private banks to be established, they made their currency entirely convertible, they privatized their housing stock which up till then had been publicly owned. By the time Putin became president, there was a small group of people who were immensely rich and also extracting rents from the Russian economy. Because the ruble was convertible and the government was propping up the price of the ruble using the oil rents that it was getting, they were able to convert their rubles into dollars at very preferential rates and they were investing that money in the London housing market and NY, buying bonds and also taking out loans in the West. Can you say something about the direction Russia took?

(40:41) The Russian kleptocracy made its money from economic rent, basically natural resource rent. The US promised the Russians that if they pursued the policies the US was pushing, nature would take its course and Russia would be led by the invisible hand to act just like the US did. But actually that's the exact opposite of all the ways the US got rich.

In 1994, 1995, there was a scheme put into Russia's hands to privatize all of the nickel and raw materials and the oil companies, so the government borrowed money from the banks. The banks would write a check to the government for say $5 billion, the government would pledge as collateral the holdings in Norilsk Nickel and oil and others, and the government deposited this $5 billion back into the bank that wrote the check - so the banks created free money, that's what banks do, they create it on the balance sheet.

Sure enough Russia ended up giving all its natural resource rent to the kleptocrats. You mentioned that the kleptocrats wanted to get dollars, how do they do that? Here they have the stock in Norilsk Nickel and Yukos Oil and the only way they can get money for it is to sell it abroad in England and America because the Russian savings were wiped out with hyperinflation. So Russia didn't have the ability to buy their own rent-yielding natural resources, only foreigners did.

If you look at the last 2000 years of history, almost all the fortunes in every country in every century have been made by getting money through privatization of what was previously in the public sector, by insiders giving it to themselves. The modus operandi of the Russian kleptocracy was as a rentier, a rent-seeking economy that the neoliberals advised them to do instead of a profit-making economy where industries would hire labor to produce more goods and services. As you know, the factories stopped paying the labor.

I think that's why when you read today's speeches by President Putin and Secretary Lavrov you hear the disgust they feel for themselves for having ever been suckered into this neoliberal plan and I think it spurred them to say, we have to turn east, not west, the US and Europe are turning into a rentier economy and we've seen what that did to us. That's what has set Russia's mind so much on creating an alternative; where there's the will, there's a way and now there's the will. And that's been the precondition for creating a much sounder basis for growth in Russia, China and the rest of the global majority.

China and Russia economic policy: (Glenn, 47:03): Do you see Russia following the same path as China? At the start I mentioned the American system because it sometimes seems like this is the model China and to a large extent Russia is following. They're in the same situation now that the Americans were in in the early 19th century when the Americans said, we can't be dependent on British manufacturing, its infrastructure - ports and such - and national banks and later on, currency. So they began to develop their own system through protectionist policies, and at the end of the 19th century you had people like Simon Patten who viewed the building of infrastructure as an imperative investment for the government to make because it has a dual effect: it makes industries more competitive but it also elevates the standard of living for the average citizen.

Both the Russian and Chinese economies are operating on an ad hoc basis. There is no economic theory or doctrine that either country has developed to explain what they're doing. In fact, China is still sending its economic students to the US where they're taught neoliberal financial policy and my students have told me that the American-educated students get priority in hiring over domestic students.

I guess you could say what President Putin is doing is jaw-boning the kleptocrats, the wealthy class, saying "okay, you can keep your money but you have to invest it in ways that we agree will help the Russian economy become self-sufficient, independent, productive and more prosperous." It's all done on an ad hoc basis.

One of the problems was that Russia in the 1990s was probably the only country in the world that had no background in Marxism. Largely this was the result of Stalin's popularization of Volume 1 of "Das Kapital" that said "capital is the exploitation of workers by their employers." But Marx wrote Volumes 2 and 3 about financialization and rent-seeking, and Russia did not see this coming in the 1990s - simply using the banks as a means of creating and backing monopolies as their source of income in a non-industrial way, what Marx would call "pre-industrial" way.

What is going to emerge is a kind of consciousness about how to make the economy more productive and more efficient and use the economic surplus to raise living standards instead of to create a rent-seeking financial class of monopolists that you're seeing in Europe and the US.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-21T02:02:31+00:00

The US says that's autocratic, the democratic way to do things is the government will borrow from the private sector. That leads banks to tell the government, we will only give you money if you do what we want to do. So what the US calls democracy is what Aristotle and others called an oligarchy. The irony is that China is turning out to be the most democratic country by not having an oligarchy but by having a central committee, it's not a one-man rule at all. It's a very definite idea of "what do we want to provide as the core of the economy at the lowest price possible?" You've seen what they've done with transportation; that's a public utility that used to be in England and everywhere except the US, to make sure the cost of transport is as low as possible. Communications and education are public utilities. In the US it now costs $40,000 to get an education. In other countries, it's free. So in the US now, if you don't inherit money, a trust fund, from the 10% to pay for your college, then you have to take on student debt that's so large that once you graduate you won't be able to afford to buy a house because the banks will say you're paying to much on student debt to afford a mortgage.

The one problem is that China hasn't made housing a public utility and the reason is partly because the theory 20 or 30 years ago was to let every city develop its own means of financing. Given the cost of building infrastructure, almost all the cities and small towns had to finance themselves by selling off land to real estate developers, so there was an enormous bias for financialized housing just as was occurring in the US. This financialization of real estate is the one area where China has not freed itself from the Western model.

Normally that wouldn't be a problem for China because it is itself the money and debt creator so China is able to do something the US isn't. If an industrial company has a problem, as it had with Covid, and can't pay its debts, it's not sold off and forced to close down and fire its labor. China just writes down the debt; it's very easy for a government to write down debt when the debt is owed to itself.

China could write down the debt that the huge builders and developers have run up except that, I think at the insistence of the Shanghai neoliberals, the Chinese government has guaranteed the dollar debt for these companies. There's no reason for the banks to have issued dollar debt in the first place because most of the Chinese money was spent at home except for what it had to import for steel and cement and other building material.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-21T02:02:01+00:00

It can't be done, so the US doesn't really have a cure. It's given up on the global majority and decided the one part of the world it can still gain support from is Europe. That's why it cut the Nord Stream pipeline, it wanted to make Europe completely dependent on American energy, to make it into the kind of colony that England and the Dutch tried to do in centuries past. So it turns out the post-industrial economy is a lapse back into the old imperial feudal economy and it's just not going to work as long as other countries have a role to play in their own development.

China (Alexander, 27:57): It seems to me that China never let itself become part of this system and the Chinese put together policies that I think are now being looked at by many people around the world as potential alternatives. According to the Chinese readout (of the recent summit in San Francisco) Xi Jinping actually alluded to this, saying "We do not want to supplant or surpass or become like the US. We are seeking to rejuvenate through a process of modernization ourselves." Do you want to talk about China? Because it seems to be not just different but in ways opposite to the way the US has developed, at least in the post-war period.

Words are important and we're dealing with a kind of Orwellian vocabulary here in the US. Again and again, President Biden has said "the US is a democracy and China is an autocracy." Just yesterday at the end of his meeting with Xi, Biden said on TV, "I've just been dealing with a dictator."

What makes China an autocracy? It's doing exactly what the US, England, Germany and every other country does; it has public infrastructure investment, it hasn't privatized its infrastructure. The most important thing China has done is keep money creation and credit as a public utility so China doesn't have to borrow from a wealthy class of bondholders, it can simply print the money to finance its economic growth.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-21T02:01:29+00:00

The US can't really compete, given the way it's structured, its medical care, its housing and its finance. 18% of American GDP is on medical spending. If American wage-earners got all their goods for nothing - transportation, food, clothing - they still couldn't compete given they have to pay (on average) about $20,000 a year just for medical insurance. Rents in the US now absorb about 40% of the income of wage earners; here in NY the average rent is $4500 a month, so $60,000 a year just for rent. How can the US finance its trade and investment when the cost of living and the cost of doing business is so overpriced?

Employers have to pay a large portion of medical care for their employees and they want it that way, they want a high medical expense for their labor because that means workers are suffering from what Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, called "the traumatized worker syndrome." If a worker goes on strike, they don't get their medical care without having to pay enormous amounts for it. They can't make their credit card payments and in the US most wage earners have a negative credit card balance which is 19% flat (interest) but if you miss a payment the interest rate goes up to 30-31%.

If you're paying that much money on what you owe and your debt is going up and up, you're not going to have enough money to buy goods and services. So how can America roll back the machine and become the industrial economy it was before if it can't sell to its own population because its wage earners spend their money on health care, debt service and housing.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-21T02:00:52+00:00

Now that the US has taken a very belligerent position in the world, this system has split the world into two opposing camps. That's what is changing the whole world economy today.

I think the driving force isn't so much other countries pushing back, it's America pushing them away, leaving them no alternative but to protect themselves from sanctions and from the US simply grabbing their foreign exchange - it's grabbed Russia's money, Iran's money, Venezuela's gold from the Bank of England - there's an awareness that the world needs to have an alternative to the US dollar standard. The creation of an alternative means not only not using the dollar but creating a different kind of international monetary fund to finance balance of payment and trade obligations among the rest of the world, the global majority. It requires an alternative to the World Bank, not based on privatization of infrastructure but on public financing of infrastructure to make its prices low, not high and not a profit opportunity. It means a whole alternative financial system and trade system and probably an alternative to the United Nations which you see paralyzed these days.

(Glenn, 21:03): Thirty years later we can see it didn't go very well because all those people working in manufacturing didn't go to high skill-high wage jobs, most went into retail, i.e., low skill-low wage jobs, further polarizing between the super rich and now super poor. This was what happened domestically but even internationally it wasn't able to hold onto this top tier because the Chinese were climbing up global value chains and as you pointed out, the response has been to double down, continuing the financial economy and pushing away the rest of the world - blocking Chinese chip technologies, seizing the money of the Russian central bank, proving to them they can't live in this US-dominated system anymore. So they're doing everything wrong; my question is what would be the right thing for them to do?

Sorry to disappoint you but there is no right thing the US can do, they're in a trap. They're in what economists call an optimum position; mathemeticians say it's optimum because whatever you do is going to make things worse. The US has painted itself into a corner and the only way it can get out is to be a different kind of economy.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-21T02:00:12+00:00

In this clip, Glenn Diesen and Alexander Mercouris pose questions to economist Michael Hudson about what seems to be a decline in Western economies and rise in the economies of China and Russia and related topics (approximate time stamps included). Speaker is Michael Hudson except as noted.

US transition from an industrial economy to a financial economy: You said the US had lost its competitiveness but the US decided it didn't want to compete. The objective of the Clinton administration and the Democratic Party was basically a class war against labor: how do we lower the wages of labor so as to increase profitability.

The idea of economic growth from the 90s on was, instead of producing manufactured goods, we'll develop intellectual property monopolies, especially in information technology, in pharmaceuticals; So economic growth and GDP not by making profits to employ labor to produce more and more goods and services, but through monopoly rents for our pharmaceuticals, so we can make pills for 10 cents each and sell them for $500 each. We can make computer programs for AI and computer chips and all the information technology we have at enormous markups. And we can live off our economic rents, we don't have to have blue collar jobs, everyone can work in an office and make money that way.

A "post-industrial economy" turns out to be a financial economy. Right now the GDP seems to show things are going well but every poll shows people aren't doing well at all. When you look at what the GDP is, almost all of it is growth in financial benefits for the 1%, maybe the 10%.

A financial economy has savings on the asset side of the balance sheet and debt on the liability side, but the savings on the asset side are held mainly by the 1% and the debt on the liability side is owed by the 99%. When Nobel prize winning economists say, you don't have to look at debt because we owe it to ourselves, the "we" who owe it are the 99%, and we owe it to the 1%.

Empires don't pay. Britain in the 1930s was solidifying its empire but all the money it made from its empire ended up being used to pay the US because of its trade deficit with the US.

The US is now going through what England did. It started in 1950 when 75% of the world's gold was held in the US. The Korean War pushed the US into chronic balance of payment deficits. I've done the statistics, the entire balance of payment deficits was military spending abroad to protect the empire and you see that accelerating today.

The military spending in Vietnam and Southeast Asia forced the US off the gold standard in 1971, and what were foreign banks going to do with all the dollars flowing in? All they could do was to invest their money in securities, buy US Treasury securities. So all the money the US spent abroad militarily was sent back to the US by the central banks of Europe, etc. to finance the balance of payments deficit for the war. In effect the whole international monetary system was based on IOUs for America's military spending across the world.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-20T21:51:51+00:00

Maybe the German Greens can figure out a way to build an alternative energy source using the computer chips from people's washing machines.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-20T21:46:46+00:00

Reality in general has escaped the notice of the neocons, they're equal opportunity delusionists.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-20T20:22:54+00:00

One embarrassing incident after another showing Biden's dementia in full view of the entire world. It begs the question of who's actually making the disastrous foreign and domestic policy decisions we see but you don't even have to go that far: Biden looks like a loser in a world notorious for liking winners and having contempt for losers.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-20T20:17:25+00:00

I'm guessing the Banderites thought they could manipulate and control the situation, use the West for its own purposes. But the saying you quote still applies and the one from Einstein about getting shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-20T17:28:12+00:00

And as Ukrainian military leaders have pointed out, they were pushed into a "combined arms" offensive that no NATO country would have conducted given the lack of air superiority and adequate air defense. Because Western leaders and military commanders advising Ukraine don't care about a bunch of dead Ukrainians.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-20T05:38:06+00:00

Then, there is the vexed question, which neither side would dare discuss publicly — namely, China has begun to sell its vast holdings of US Treasury bonds. The damage a Chinese selloff could do to financial markets, to Washington’s finances, and to the economy generally needs no explanation. For decades, the US was a major consumer but since Americans were running a trade deficit, they needed to borrow to support the purchase of Chinese imports and Beijing advanced that loan indirectly through its purchases of US Treasury bonds. But the matrix has changed.

As it is, the demand for US bonds is not high, by any means — in fact, one of the most enthusiastic buyers of US bonds is the US Federal Reserve. This has been compared to something like having your own bakery and buying up most of your unsold bread at the end of the day so that a negative opinion of your sales does not form. The fact that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen appeared in the front and centre of US-China relations is a signpost.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-19T16:52:34+00:00

The West rose because it pushed science and technology since the Industrial Revolution, what former Economist editor Bill Emmott called the balance between two ideals of “openness” and “equality.” His thesis in his book “The Fate of the West” is that “we are in our current trouble because too many of us have lost that balance.” Perhaps the balance has been lost because of the recent cancel culture, in which those who disagree with the “politically correct” views are excommunicated, ostracized, or canceled. We are losing the right to have open debate and ability to disagree.

Events in Gaza and Ukraine have put the West on the dock. The Rest is now thinking for themselves because the West is no longer thinking for everyone. Once the moral standing is no longer in place, then the West is no better than any other barbarians at the gate. At best, just another barbarian claiming to be civilized; at worst, a West that seeks only to hold onto its golden past of colonialism and mental superiority.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-19T03:00:10+00:00

The EU accession talks that have been approved between the EU and Ukraine, Moldova, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Georgia aren't going to help the EU's economic situation. Moldova has a territorial dispute and should be disqualified from entering the EU according to the latter's requirements; same with Ukraine with a war on, despite Ursula von der Leyen's claim they had fulfilled 90% of the reforms that were required.

There was a report issued by the Scientific Committee of the Bundestag, the German parliament, in August that's been given almost no attention. It says the EU economy has been in bad shape for a long time now; growth has been low when there's been any; Italy's economy has been stagnating for almost a quarter century - IOW, ever since the euro was introduced. And that's basically the story right across the EU and the eurozone.

To the extent there has been any growth driver, it's been Germany. The entire German model was predicated on manufacturing exports made competitive through cheap energy imports from Russia. With the cheap energy option closed off, that's increasing domestic internal costs relative to Germany's trade rivals and losing its competitive position. The report goes on to say the German government is trying to counter this loss of competitiveness by providing subsidies and increasing spending but that's deteriorating Germany's fiscal position and will lead over time to higher taxes, problems in the bond markets, etc. and reinforce a trend of long-term loss of competitiveness and de-industrialization.

Meanwhile the EU is intensifying the sanctions war against Russia, they're going to impose their sanctions on diamonds next week, their 12th or 13th sanctions package.

What we have in Europe is reinforced Merkelism without Merkel to run it. Merkel created a system in Europe where everything is run bureaucratically, she ran things like a kind of Metternich but was sufficiently grounded in reality to keep all the balls in the air at the same time and keep the show on the road. The people running things are basically left over from Merkel's system, and they're just continuing to do the thing she encouraged them to do but without anyone to hold them in check.

The real problem for Europe is that this stagnation and de-industrialization is becoming institutionalized and there's no end in sight to it. Eventually it will all crash but at the center there is no alternative, no discussion, no debate allowed. And Merkel and Hollande who created this aren't speaking out against the spending and the subsidies and the new accessions.

While Merkel is discredited personally, the system she created endures. And whatever she thinks about what the EU is now doing, she may fear that speaking out will land her where her predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder, ended up - his pension was taken away, he lost all the positions he was entitled to have as a former German Chancellor, his won party (the SPD) repudiated him. The system is ruthless against any kind of dissent.

Bloomberg ran an article yesterday about the EU proposing an alternative funding plan for Ukraine that bypasses Hungary, which is blocking the €50 billion to Ukraine, and would involve national guarantees from member states to raise funding in the markets. So the EU is wanting member states to take out loans for money that goes to Ukraine and then guarantee those loans. Ultimately it will be the people of Europe that foot the bill.

The whole system was not supposed to result in Eurobonds, which circumvent sovereign states and are a clear violation of the treaty, but that's what this ultimately is. The European Commission can't address the problems in the system so they just keep pressing forward with expansion while things within the EU continue to get worse.

Britain is in the exact same situation, it's gotten worse since it left the EU because all the dissidents who navigated through the Brexit referendum - Corbyn, Farage et al. - have been neutralized and banished to the margins and the Merkel types are in control. But there was just a report from the Bank of England saying that Britain is now a high-tax, stagnating economy. That's because Britain is essentially pursuing the same type of policies as the EU - it's obsessed with Ukraine, imposing one set of sanctions after another and cutting itself off from the raw materials, cheap energy and cheap food Russia could provide that might mean lower taxes, lower prices, etc.

The main engine for all these policies is the bureaucracy in Brussels, which is ultimately unaccountable. It's not elected and they're essentially able to play one member government off another. They want to increase their size and power, which is what bureaucracies do if you leave them unchecked. The EU has member states over the barrel because they control the flow of euros. There is no discussion or debate or democracy, which is why they've recently announced the CBDC and the European ID bundled into one, it's about more authoritarianism and control.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-19T00:47:49+00:00

That's great news, thanks!

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-18T20:01:35+00:00

From his piece on the subject:

Colorado Judge Sarah Wallace has become the latest jurist to reject the effort to bar former president Donald Trump from the ballot under the novel 14th Amendment theory. I have long been a vocal critic of the theory, which I view as historically and legally unfounded. I also view it as arguably the most dangerous theory to arise in decades.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — the “disqualification clause” — was written after the 39th Congress convened in December 1865 and many members were shocked to see Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president, waiting to take a seat with an array of other former Confederate senators and military officers. That was a real rebellion in which hundreds of thousands died.

While Judge Wallace reached the right result, I have major qualms with her analysis. She states as a fact that Trump was guilty of incitement, a charge that no prosecutor has ever brought against him. That includes the D.C. Attorney General who announced his intention to pursue such charges. It also includes Special Counsel Jack Smith who threw every other possible criminal charge against Trump.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-18T19:56:12+00:00

The other point about that section of the 14th amendment is that it gives sole authority for enforcing it to the US Congress, nowhere does it leave room for state governments to pull ballot access stunts like this.

Jonathan Turley tweeted this:

...While Judge Wallace reached the right conclusion, she committed, in my view, fundamental errors in her analysis on the free speech elements of the case...

...As it stands, we will have to wait to see if Secretary Griswald has the confidence of her convictions to appeal. I hope that she does. We need to put this insidious legal theory to rest with the finality and clarity of a Supreme Court decision.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-18T19:37:11+00:00

Did you see the brief clip by @MANinUNITED? He's saying what you've been saying about zionism not being the same as Judaism but using Judaism to push its nationalistic agenda forward.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-18T19:27:10+00:00

I think we're seeing what Alastair Crooke describes, as excerpted in this post from karlof1:

The other (more profound) dilemma is that international pressures for a ceasefire (and hostage release) are accumulating. Time is short, and the military operation may be required to cease. The issue for the Netanyahu Cabinet is -- once stopped -- will it be possible to resume the massacres of civilians and the Gaza Nakba pressures?

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-18T18:35:29+00:00

But that’s only half the story: an American drone costs something like $32m to purchase; the Iranian-produced missile that took it out, by contrast, probably had a cost measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. The military attrition thus masks an even deeper problem: economic attrition, as US weapon systems get both older and more expensive, while the tools used to challenge (waning) American supremacy are becoming both cheaper and more widely available.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-18T18:33:20+00:00

While Israel’s bombardment of Gaza dominates the world’s attention, the crisis has already ignited a second, more significant conflict: there is now a “shadow war” in the region, one that is being waged against the United States itself.

The reason the US wants to hide and deny this shadow war is that changing military realities on the ground have left it far weaker in the region than it used to be... Thirty years ago, drone technology was nascent, and rockets weren’t nearly as ubiquitous as they are now...The American military was much larger, and its weapons were, in relative terms, more advanced than they are today...

The US is increasingly caught in a bind. Its enemies are stronger and more numerous than they were two decades ago, when the US was mostly fighting poorly armed insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan. Today, Iraqi militant groups are battle-hardened after a decade-long struggle against Islamic State, and they have access to modern stand-off weaponry: suicide drones, ballistic missiles, short-range Burkan (“Volcano”) rockets with explosive warheads weighing hundreds of pounds each, and even modern anti-air missiles, exported from Iran or Russia. Even Hezbollah in Lebanon presents a serious threat against the US Navy because it now boasts hardware such as the modern Russian Yakhont anti-ship cruise missiles. The result of these geopolitical, economic and military shifts in the balance of power has been to seriously undermine US dominance in the region.

penelopepnortney · 2023-11-18T18:19:00+00:00

In the US, some central bankers, including Neel Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and Michelle Bowman, a Federal Reserve governor, have even questioned the need for a CBDC altogether. Fed supervision chief Randal Quarles went further, describing CBDCs as an embarrassing fad, comparable to the parachute pants made famous in the 1980s by rapper MC Hammer. US lawmakers, including the House of Representatives’ Majority Whip Tom Emmer, are also trying to preemptively prevent the Federal Reserve from issuing a CBDC that would enable the authorities to monitor and track the financial activities of Americans.

Encouraging but no doubt this way of looking at it won't prevail.

penelopepnortney

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