Category: Uncategorized Page 5 of 94

Sharing Kushner’s tweet in full because it has to be seen in toto to be believed and it’s important to remember he will no doubt once again be the architect of Trump’s ME policy should Trump retake office.

And also because of this observation from Mohammad Alsaafin of AJ+:

It’s darkly funny that every stupid thing Kushner is saying here reflects the actual strategy and position of the Biden administration.

Ok, here’s Kushner’s victory lap:

Jared Kushner@jaredkushner

September 27th is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough.

I have spent countless hours studying Hezbollah and there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade them was possible.

This is significant because Iran is now fully exposed. The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defense systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel.

Iran spent the last forty years building this capability as its deterrent. President Trump would often say, “Iran has never won a war but never lost a negotiation.”

The Islamic Republic’s regime is much tougher when risking Hamas, Hezbollah, Syrian and Houthi lives than when risking their own. Their foolish efforts to assassinate President Trump and hack his campaign reek of desperation and are hardening a large coalition against them.

Iranian leadership is stuck in the old Middle East, while their neighbors in the GCC are sprinting toward the future by investing in their populations and infrastructure. They are becoming dynamic magnets for talent and investment while Iran falls further behind.

As the Iranian proxies and threats dissipate, regional security and prosperity will rise for Christians, Muslims and Jews alike. Israel now finds itself with the threat from Gaza mostly neutralized and the opportunity to neutralize Hezbollah in the north.

It’s unfortunate how we got here but maybe there can be a silver lining in the end.

Anyone who has been calling for a ceasefire in the North is wrong.

There is no going back for Israel.

They cannot afford now to not finish the job and completely dismantle the arsenal that has been aimed at them. They will never get another chance. After the brilliant, rapid-fire tactical successes of the pagers, radios, and targeting of leadership, Hezbollah’s massive weapon cache is unguarded and unmanned.

Most of Hezbollah fighters are hiding in their tunnels. Anyone still around was not important enough to carry a pager or be invited to a leadership meeting. Iran is reeling, as well, insecure and unsure how deeply its own intelligence has been penetrated.

Failing to take full advantage of this opportunity to neutralize the threat is irresponsible.

I have been hearing some amazing stories about how Israel has been collecting intelligence over the past 10 months with some brilliant technology and crowdsourcing initiatives.

But today, with the confirmed killing of Nasrallah and at least 16 top commanders eliminated in just nine days, was the first day I started thinking about a Middle East without Iran’s fully loaded arsenal aimed at Israel. So many more positive outcomes are possible.

This is a moment to stand behind the peace-seeking nation of Israel and the large portion of the Lebanese who have been plagued by Hezbollah and who want to return to the times when their country was thriving, and Beirut a cosmopolitan city.

The main issue between Lebanon and Israel is Iran; otherwise there is a lot of benefit for the people of both countries from working together. The right move now for America would be to tell Israel to finish the job.

It’s long overdue. And it’s not only Israel’s fight. More than 40 years ago, Hezbollah killed 241 US military personnel, including 220 Marines. That remains the single deadliest day for the U.S. Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima.

Later that same day, Hezbollah killed 58 French paratroopers. And now, over the past six weeks or so, Israel has eliminated as many terrorists on the US list of wanted terrorists as the US has done in the last 20 years. Including Ibrahim Aqil, the leader of Hezbollah’s Islamic Jihad Organization who masterminded the 1983 killing of those Marines.

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

What is the deep state? (YouTube video)

(Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, YouTube, via Thomas Neuburger, God’s Spies, 09-20-2024]

This video segment is taken from a symposium at which Sach and Mearsheimer offered their views on U.S. foreign policy. The whole thing is worth a listen, but I’ve cued this to start at the point where the question, “What is the deep state?” is asked and answered.

Note: The answer relates to foreign policy only, not the broader question of “Does the Establishment State try to influence domestic politics?”

“Sachs: My experience … is that there’s a deeply entrained foreign policy. It has been in place in my interpretation for many decades. But arguably a variant of it has been in place since 1992. I got to watch some of it early on because I was an adviser to Gorbachev and I was an adviser to Yeltsin, and so I saw early makings of this though I didn’t fully understand it except in retrospect.

“But that policy has been mostly in place pretty consistently for 30 years, and it didn’t really matter whether it was Bush Senior, whether it was Clinton, whether it was Bush Jr., whether it was Obama, whether it was Trump.

“After all, who did Trump hire? He hired John Bolton. Well, duh, pretty deep state. That was the end of … they told, you know, he [Bolton] explained this is the way it is. And by the way, Bolton explained also in his memoirs, when Trump didn’t agree we figured out ways to trick him basically.”

….

“MEARSHEIMER: When we talk about the ‘Deep State,’ we’re really talking about the Administrative State. It is very important to understand that starting in the late 19th and early 20th century, given developments in the American economy, it was imperative that we develop — and this is true of all Western countries — a very powerful central state that could ‘run the country.’ And over time, that state has grown in power.

“Since World War Two, the United States has been involved in every nook and cranny of the world, fighting wars here, there, and everywhere. And to do that, you need a very powerful administrative state that can help manage that foreign policy. But in the process, what happens is you get all of these high-level, middle-level, and low-level bureaucrats who become established in positions in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence community — you name it. And they end up having a vested interest in pursuing a particular foreign policy.

“That particular foreign policy that they like to pursue is the one the Democrats and the Republicans are pushing. That’s why we talk about tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum with regard to the two parties. You could throw in the deep state as being on the same page as those other two institutions….”

[TW: This is an important glimpse into the thinking of USA ruling elites. But just as important as what was said, is what was not said. There was no discussion of cooperation between nations on solving global problems, in line with what I have identified as a core principle of civic republicanism: one major role of government is to encourage people to do good by increasing humanity’s power over nature. There was no mention whatsoever of climate change, which absolutely will require global cooperation, probably on an unprecedented level. How about an international effort to help Mexico build a second Panama Canal? Or a crossing of the straits of Gibraltar, now considered an insurmountable engineering challenge. Wouldn’t it be much better to focus energies and resources on such projects?

[Increasing humanity’s power over nature: that’s what sewer systems and water distribution systems did — projects which are probably the single largest factor in tripling average human life expectancy in the past three centuries. Sewer systems and water distribution systems are primary examples of increasing humanity’s power over nature. Not just power over flows of water, but power over the spread of bacteria and viruses.

[The “realism” discussed by Sachs and Mearsheimer emphasizes competition — just like neoliberal “free market” economics. The real way to avoid nuclear war is to emphasize the cooperation of the human family in solving the problems we call face. The old paradigms of thought must be banished and replaced. For example, the idea that economics is about how “society allocates scarce resources” (taught in all “classical economics” texts and courses in the West), must be replaced by the understanding of civic republican political economy that the foremost economic task of any society is to overcome scarcity and provide abundance by increasing the power of humanity to understand and prudently control natural resources, then to distribute that abundance equitably to all of humanity. One major international cooperative project that cries out for attention and support is to build sewer systems and water distribution systems throughout the entire world, most especially areas in Africa and South American which do not now have them. There should not be any people anywhere on the globe who are forced to spend large parts of their day filling the basic need of securing enough clean water to drink, bathe, and cook.

[Eight years ago, China proposed an international $50 trillion project to build an electric power grid to bring solar and wind generated electricity from the polar and equatorial regions of the world, to the more populated regions that use the electricity. It is a great strategic mistake to ignore such proposals. ]

Global power shift

China leads world in 57 of 64 critical technologies; up from 3 just 20 years ago 

[Hacker News, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2024]

ASPI’s two-decade Critical Technology Tracker 

[ASPI, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2024]

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. No vax/anti-vax.

by Tony Wikrent

Russia / Ukraine

Russia will be ‘at war’ with NATO if Ukraine long-range missile restrictions lifted, Putin warns

Avery Schmitz and Michael Conte, September 13, 2024 [CNN]

Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned NATO alliance leaders that a move to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of longer-range Western missiles to strike deep inside his country would be considered an act of war.

“This will mean that NATO countries – the United States and European countries – are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us,” Putin told reporters on Thursday.

 

Putin says NATO will be “in the war” if U.S. or allies let Ukraine fire long-range missiles at Russia

Haley Ott,  September 13, 2024 [CBS News]

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Thursday that a decision by the U.S. or its NATO allies to allow Ukraine to use Western-supplied long-range missiles to hit targets deep inside Russia would be viewed as NATO’s direct participation in the war, which he said would significantly change “the very nature of the conflict.”

“Flight assignments for these missile systems can, in fact, only be entered by military personnel from NATO countries. Ukrainian servicemen cannot do this. And therefore, it is not a question of allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons or not. It is a question of making a decision whether NATO countries directly participate in the military conflict or not,” Putin said in response to a question on Thursday.

“If this decision is made, it will mean nothing less than the direct participation of NATO countries, the United States, and European countries, in the war in Ukraine,” the Russian leader added.

Strategic Political Economy

Master Plan, Ep 5: How Corporations Became People

David Sirota and The Lever staff, September 10, 2024 [The Lever]

In Master Plan’s fifth episode, we explore how an unlikely catalyst — Robert Kennedy’s 1968 assassination — created an opportunity for his Senate replacement to manufacture the first and perhaps most important blow against America’s new campaign finance laws: Buckley v. Valeo. With a supporting cast including James Buckley, John Bolton, Charles Koch, and Robert Bork, this U.S. Supreme Court case was the first to frame the fight against campaign finance regulations as a crusade for free speech and third-party rights.

The master planners were just getting started. While Buckley v. Valeo blew the lid off limits to certain kinds of campaign expenditures, Big Business also wanted to ensure that corporations could spend as freely as their human counterparts. This is where the master planners’ sleeper agent on the Court, Justice Lewis Powell, would work behind the scenes to deliver an expansive ruling that created the foundation for Citizens United.

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Justice Alito reports German princess gave him $900 concert tickets

Associated Press, September 06, 2024 [via DailyKos]

Justice Samuel Alito reported Friday that he accepted $900 worth of concert tickets from a German princess, but disclosed no trips paid for by other people, according to a new financial disclosure form.

The required annual filing, for which Alito has often sought an extension, doesn’t include details of the event tickets gifted by socialite Gloria von Thurn und Taxis of Germany….

[TW: I begin with seemingly innocuous news item because it bears directly on today’s condition of  political culture in USA. The rest of the Associated Press story lists a number of other gifts and courtesies Justice Alito has accepted, and sees nothing else peculiar in the gift by Gloria von Thurn und Taxis.

[Now, Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

[I am not going to write anything more on this Section other than to note its obvious importance as part of the Constitution of a republic in a world dominated and mostly ruled by monarchies and oligarchies. What I want to draw attention to are some of the comments in the DailyKos story:

Sep 06, 2024 at 06:36:03 PM  — WTF is a German Princess?

Sep 06, 2024 at 06:40:10 PM —Germany hasn’t been a monarchy for more than 100 years….

Sep 06, 2024 at 06:46:09 PM — Germany still has princesses?

[Ganesh Sitaraman makes the very astute observation in his 2017 book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens our Republic that Americans’ historic dislike of monarchies began to disappear after World War Two, when nazism, fascism, and communism came to be perceived as greater threats than oligarchy, and USA elites embraced a “special relationship” with the United Kingdom. To this day, the largest embassy by far in Washington DC is the British.

[But the threats of oligarchy and monarchy did not actually recede; they merely disappeared in the shadows cast by the Cold War. Very few people wondered what had become of the vast fortunes controlled by the former oligarchs of Europe. Perhaps people did not want to ask such potentially embarrassing questions of our new-found anti-communist allies.

[Thurn und Taxis is one of the oldest and nastiest of the European “black nobility.” In the 15th through 18th centuries, the family became one of the richest in the world by operating the postal service used by Europe’s royal families to communicate with each other. In 2017, the family’s net worth was estimated at around $ 2.5 billion,  “including the largest privately owned forests in Europe.” Gloria married into the family by wedding Johannes. Their son, Albert, was, at age eight, one of the youngest people ever recorded as a billionaire when Johannes died, leaving Albert sole designated heir of a $3 billion fortune.

[The nephew of Johannes was Max Thurn. He was a major power in the Mont Pelerin Society, serving as secretary from 1976 to 1988. This is the period in which the Mont Pelerin Society’s economic “neoliberalism” became entrenched in power under Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in USA. The past half century of economic “neoliberalism” has pauperized the working class, destroyed the middle class, and enriched only elites, creating the social conditions in which right wing reactionaries thrive.

[It is a tragedy that the USA public and media are largely ignorant of the bloody history of European oligarchs, and fail to make the connection between inherited wealth, the continued existence of oligarchs like Thurn und Taxis, and the collapse of representative democracies around the world. The corruption of US Supreme Court Justice Alito is just a recent case in point.

[The social milieu Justice Alito is apparently comfortable in should certainly be of great public interest, and even, I strongly suggest, of concern to any intelligence agency that seriously understands the importance of maintaining the United States as a republic.  Another comment from the DailyKos story:

Sep 07, 2024 at 01:09:34 PM — Back in the 1980’s I spent the afternoon with the “Kiser Apparent” of Germany while working as an archaeologist for the “very rich”. The “Prince” owned catfish farm in Texas. The rich kissed his ass.

[Theorists of civic republicanism warned about the corrupting influence of wealth and luxury. That’s one reason why Section 9 was written. Now consider Donald Trump and who is mentor was:

Aside From The Ones Living In Miami, Brooklyn and WeHo, Will Russians Get To See “The Apprentice?”

Howie Klein, September 07, 2024  [downwithtyranny.com]

Before Trump barged his way into the national consciousness, Roy Cohn was one of the worst villains of any American in our lifetimes— right up there with J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Joseph McCarthy… and on a par with historical miscreants like Jefferson Davis, Andrew Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest… A real master of corruption, Cohn built his hideous career by exploiting power, weaponizing fear and perverting the law. From his role as McCarthy’s right-hand man during the Red Scare— ruining countless lives through baseless accusations of communism— to his later years as a ruthless Mafia lawyer, Cohn epitomized everything vile about American greed and runaway ambition. With the exception of a small handful of delusional Republicans, his career is universally seen as a showcase of sociopathic disregard for ethics, and he is seen as a man who thrived on manipulation, blackmail… destruction. Most damning of all, Cohn mentored The Donald, passing along his amoral playbook to a demon who went on to wreak even more havoc on the country. So Cohn’s poisonous influence didn’t end with his death; it metastasized into the very heart of modern American politics.

And now there’s a film! Nick Schager’s preview for the Daily Beast noted that it’s the movie Señor T doesn’t want you to see— and for good reason… a damning film about the making of a monster… “a bona fide supervillain origin story.”

As you probably know by now, it’s “an incisive primer on the relationship with Roy Cohn that made the 45th President of the United States who he is today. Which is to say, it lays out the gory details regarding the source of his egomania, greed, ambition, vanity, sociopathy, and heartless rapey-ness, the last of which comes to the fore in a brutal assault of his first wife Ivana.”

When they first met, Cohn recognizes him “as a dreamer determined to do whatever it takes to be Rockefeller-grade rich, as well as something of an empty vessel into which he can pour all his evil. Pour he does, gradually taking Trump under his wing and indoctrinating him in the ways of unabashed cutthroat nastiness. To succeed, Cohn instructs, Trump must follow three surefire rules: attack, attack, attack; deny everything and admit nothing; and never acknowledge defeat and always claim victory….

‘The Apprentice’ Review: Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong Are Superb in Chilling Account of the Unholy Alliance That Birthed Donald Trump

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