:lol:

Talk about passive aggressiveness.

The new term is to escalate things by laying out de-escalation demands.

President Vladimir Putin used some of his most direct language to date on Tuesday in his escalating standoff with the U.S. and its European allies. The Russian leader warned that if the U.S. and NATO do not halt what Moscow considers aggressive actions along the country's border with Ukraine, Russia would respond in a "retaliatory military" manner.

"If the obviously aggressive line of our Western colleagues continues, we will take adequate, retaliatory military-technical measures [and] react toughly to unfriendly steps," Putin told senior military officials during a meeting in remarks carried by Russian state TV. "I want to emphasize that we have every right to do so."

Putin had previously spoken of his "red lines" on Ukraine — first and foremost his demand that the U.S. block Ukraine's bid to become a NATO member. He had accused the West of crossing his red lines already, but the stern warning in Tuesday's speech marked the first time he had personally warned of potential military action.

It would be hilarious, if it wouldn't be so bad. I assume as there's no Olympic Games going on, Russia will wait the US and NATO countries go off to the holidays when it declares that it's last red line has been walked over and has "absolutely no other solution than a military one".

Pre-emptive strike. That's what escalatory attack is called.

Wonder how the Biden administration will reply to this.

Vice President Kamala Harris reiterated the Biden administration's support for Ukraine and warned that the U.S. and its allies were prepared to respond to any Russian incursion with harsh sanctions. The Biden administration has not ruled anything out in the standoff, but has not thus far said explicitly what level of assistance Ukraine could expect from Washington if Putin does attack.

Refreshing.

B-b-but Jan 6! Our "democracy" was uNdEr AtTaCK!!

Even after the US withdrawal, the US is going to kill more Afghanis than the Taliban:

While limited humanitarian exceptions for trade have been carved out in recent weeks, the World Health Organization has already warned that up to 1 million Afghan children may die as a result of malnutrition over this winter if drastic steps are not taken. Children are already bearing the brunt of the humanitarian catastrophe, punctuated by horrifying stories of kids being sold to pay for food. And the country’s notoriously harsh winter is already taking a toll: Afghans are freezing to death as they flee the country with their families.

U.S. sanctions policy is directly to blame, pushing Afghans over the edge as they already struggle to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic and the political upheaval created by the collapse of the central government. As Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote this December, after returning from a trip to Afghanistan on behalf of the WHO, “I can clearly state that if the United States and other Western governments do not change their Afghanistan sanction policies, more Afghans will die from sanctions than at the hands of the Taliban.

The deaths will be brought about as a result of deliberate policy decisions made in the U.S. Alongside new sanctions imposed after the Taliban takeover, the U.S. froze nearly $10 billion of Afghanistan’s central bank holdings here. The Biden administration refuses to release the funds despite ongoing public protests by Afghans.”

https://theintercept.com/2022/01/09/afghanistan-sanctions-human-rights-hawks/

Whose the terrorist state exactly?

Afghanistan is getting their pound of flesh. Their heroin is destroying people all over the world.

Funny you mention that. Just before the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban had basically all but eliminated the poppy trade in the country. This was after, of course, the CIA had encouraged poppy production to help fund the Mujahideen - the same American allies who would fly planes into American buildings a couple of decades later. And after the invasion, guess what made a triumphant return? And what a total coincidence that the American opioid crisis began precisely in the wake of that invasion! It almost like American pharmaceutical companies - which source almost all their opiates from Afghanistan - took advantage of a devastated country in order to profit off killing desperate Americans back home. It's almost like dead Americans are the results of American war profiteering and policy. Actually, it just is that. Cool, right? Pounds of flesh everywhere.

Can't get to the article. But yeah, I know the US government has a history of feeding drugs to its population to quell revolt. But I said heroin, not fentanyl. The world is a big cartoon to you.

Oh dear I should have known that you don't know what fentanyl - or opioids - are made out of. My mistake I should not presume basic competence, very silly of me.

Oh dear I should have known that you don't know what Fentanyl - or opioids - are made out of. My mistake I should not presume basic competence. — StreetlightX

See what I mean? Your just like NOS.

See what I mean? Your just like NOS. — frank

What? Able to spell words correctly?

We'll, you said "Whose a terrorist state". when it's actually "Who's a terrorist state.". :lol:

Ah, fare enough.

For the love of God you people need to read this interview:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/01/michael-hudson-what-is-causing-so-much-inflation.html

BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah, it’s pretty interesting, Professor Hudson, because if you listen to Fox News, or a lot of right-wing analysis, they say that the problem behind the inflation is that the Biden administration is just spending so much money, and he’s a socialist, and he’s funding all of these programs, and Build Back Better. And it’s hilarious because, meanwhile, his own party won’t even approve the watered down version of Build Back Better, which is like every few weeks there’s a trillion dollars less, and then less spending, and less spending. .... So while the right wing is freaking out and claiming that Biden is a socialist, spending all this money on social programs, in fact that money is going toward increasing the military budget, and not going to social programs. I don’t know if you wanted to comment on that.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Sure, I think that Schumer has a great influence over the Republican Party, and I think Schumer and Pelosi meet with their counterparts at the Republicans and say, “Please call us a socialist. We’re not going to disagree with you.” Because they know that 85% of Americans like the word socialism. And the more that Republicans call them socialist, that helps them solidify the base that really wants socialism, so that the Democratic Party can throw cold water on that and prevent socialism. It’s a great scam.

BENJAMIN NORTON: That’s an interesting point; it’s an interesting idea.

MICHAEL HUDSON: But actually, the Biden administration, they haven’t spend money into the economy. Spending money into the FIRE sector – the finance, insurance, and real estate sector – isn’t spending money into the economy; it’s spending money into the overhead that is preventing the economy from growing. Just the opposite. And to be fair to Biden, he hasn’t followed through on any of his other campaign promises, either. He hasn’t cut back student debt like he promised. He hasn’t raised the minimum wage like he promised.So it would be unfair to single out just the infrastructure. He has universally repudiated every campaign promise that he made, because his clientele are the campaign contributors, not the voters.

...

MICHAEL HUDSON: Quantitative easing is a significant factor because it has been a huge subsidy to the financial sector. It’s a bad term. It was supposed to be – what quantity is easing? Not the money supply, because all this is occurring on the Fed’s balance sheet. It means that the Fed is letting banks pledge their junk mortgages, their bonds, and their stocks in exchange for Federal Reserve deposits that they can use to increase their lending base. And the official original reason in 2009 was the Fed said, we’ve got to have higher housing prices.

Americans are only spending maybe 35% of their rent of their income on rent and housing. We’ve got to increase that to 43%. So if we can lower the interest rates, people can take out larger and larger mortgages, and there will be a huge flood of lending into the mortgage market, and Americans will have to pay more for their housing. And that will make the banks richer, the insurance companies richer, and our clients in the financial sector richer. So quantitative easing was designed to increase the price of housing to Americans, and then it was to create a huge stock market boom.

...The Fed’s aim is inflation. But it doesn’t want to inflate the economy, real prices, it wants to inflate stock and bond and real estate prices, for the 1%. So essentially, this is part of the war of the 1% against the 99%. They’ve got almost all the growth in wealth since the pandemic began. There has been about, I think, $1 trillion growth, more than that, in the private wealth. All of this wealth that has been created has been basically taken by the 1%, who have made it financially, through financial capital gains, rising prices for their stocks, bonds, and real estate, not by the economy at large.

The economy at large, the 99%, have had to go further and further into debt during the pandemic. And once the moratorium on rent and mortgage payments expires in a month or so, there is going to be a huge wave of evictions, not only of renters, but even of homeowners that couldn’t afford to make their mortgage payments. And there’s going to be just a huge explosion.

Also there's a whole thing about how the Fed has probably illegally loaned $4.5 tillion dollars to JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup, and probably has journalists under gag orders from reporting it, but that's like small fry stuff.

I couldn't open the article for some reason, but this is the same thing:

:up:

The financial crisis of 2008 never actually was solved, just pushed forward by reflating the asset bubble.

Because the financial crisis of 2008 wasn't a financial crisis but an general crisis of capitalism that just so happened to begin in financial markets. The only reason there is so much money sloshing around in finance is because the real economy is at its least profitable in decades and capitalists have to seek refuge in finance.

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/cstch/papers/BrennerCrisisTodayOctober2009.pdf

"The fundamental source of today’s crisis is the steadily declining vitality of the advanced capitalist economies over three decades, business-cycle by business-cycle, right into the present. The long term weakening of capital accumulation and of aggregate demand has been rooted in a profound system-wide decline and failure to recover of the rate of return on capital, resulting largely—though not only--from a persistent tendency to over-capacity, i.e. oversupply, in global manufacturing industries. From the start of the long downturn in 1973, economic authorities staved off the kind of crises that had historically plagued the capitalist system by resort to ever greater borrowing, public and private, subsidizing demand. But they secured a modicum of stability only at the cost of deepening stagnation, as the ever greater buildup of debt and the failure to disperse overcapacity left the economy ever less responsive to stimulus".

American democracy, Chinese style.

In my view the situation with Russia and Ukraine looks very bad.

What makes it dangerous is that both sides cannot basically back down form their positions, so the discussions cannot go anywhere (as they didn't). Russia just assumes it has a sphere of influence of the Soviet Empire and the West upholds basically Westphalian ideals. (Renewed and increasing discussion of NATO membership here and also in Sweden. Even the Green Party here is having a serious discussion about joining NATO.)

Biden's threat of economic sanctions doesn't actually matter as security policy is far more important to the Kremlin as an economic issues. It simply isn't a credible threat.

And the situation is looking just going to be worse:

(the Independent) White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that the Kremlin was laying the groundwork for an attack through a social media disinformation campaign framing Kiev as the aggressor.

Speaking on Friday, Tobias Ellwood, chairman of the Commons defence committee, said: “I am afraid an invasion by Russian forces is inevitable and imminent and we have allowed this to happen.

“We had the opportunity to place sufficient military hardware and personnel in Ukraine to make president Putin think twice about invading but we failed to do so.”

The buildup continues:

(Bloomberg, Jan 16th, 2002) In the last 24 hours, Russian-armed militants have deployed 275 military vehicles in the parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that have been under their control since 2014, Ukraine’s military press-office said. Those include tanks, self-propelled guns and howitzers.

Have a feeling that this can be the next thing, just like Afghanistan, that will explode in Joe Biden's lap. And I'm afraid that the domestic situation between the two dominant parties in the US is so bad, that if the thing explodes, it will lead just to political bickering. Republicans have insisted on the US to give more military aid to Ukraine before anything happens.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Lead Republican Michael McCaul (R-TX)

“Diplomacy has little chance of success unless approached from a position of strength – yet the Biden Administration has been much too slow in sending additional military assistance to Ukraine and has capitulated on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline,” said Rep. McCaul. “This legislation firmly rejects this pattern of weakness that has dangerously emboldened Putin by immediately providing Ukraine with the support it needs to ensure the Kremlin understands a further invasion of Ukraine would come at a terrible cost. Vladimir Putin must take note that Congress will not stand for the reconstitution of Russia’s sphere of influence nor the abandonment of Ukraine and our other NATO allies and partners in Central and Eastern Europe.”

Let's hope that the war isn't further enflamed by an invasion.

I don't think the US has enough interest in Ukraine to engage beyond sanctions.

If they try to take Poland, I guess things would heat up. Just for old times sake?

That would mean WW3.

Invading further Ukraine doesn't mean WW3. But it could mean at worst that NATO goes to the dustbin of history, just like CENTO or SEATO and be a weak inefficient or compromised organization. You see, Putin doesn't have to invade Poland, if he gets Poland to act like, well, neutral Finland or Sweden, he has succeeded! What do you do with a NATO that would have members basically taking a neutral stand on any issue?

What Putin wants is for the Americans go away from Europe, just like they went away from Afghanistan (or the Central Asian states) and Russia could face Western countries purely on the bilateral level as one to one. Hence he's against the EU too.

And he can always "escalate to de-escalate" as the Russian armed forces have trained in their large exercises. Use a tactical nuclear weapon and everyone in the West would shit their pants and cry angrily for the cessation of any hostilities... and likely blame Biden. Because, a use of tactical nuke will obviously lead to an all out nuclear war and Armageddon. Or that's how it will be interpreted...and that's why the "escalate to de-escalate" doctrine is so dangerous. It could genuinely work. (I think even a nuclear weapon test could do it even)

Of course getting entangled even more into Ukraine would be counterproductive. But this isn't the issue Putin cares anything about. After all, in the start of the 2000's guess who was the most popular politician in Ukraine? Putin, actually. Nope, he doesn't worry that feelings toward him have obviously changed. He is a man on a mission.

Worth treating the whole Ukraine thing with a giant tub of salt.

The US government has substantiated these incendiary claims [about Russian intentions in the Ukraine] with the usual amount of evidence, by which I of course mean jack dick nothingballs. The mass media have not been dissuaded from reporting on this issue by the complete absence of any evidence that this Kremlin false flag plot is in fact a real thing that actually happened, their journalistic standards completely satisfied by the fact that their government instructed them to report it. Countless articles and news segments containing the phrase "false flag" have been blaring throughout all the most influential news outlets in the western world without the slightest hint of skepticism.

...None of this is to say that every theory about any false flag operation is true; many are not. But the way the mass media will instantly embrace an idea to which they've heretofore been consistently hostile just because their government told them to to do it says so much about the state of the so-called free press today, and the fact that the rank-and-file public simply accepts this and marches along with it as though talking about false flags has always been normal says so much about the level of Orwellian doublethink that people have been trained to perform in today's information ecosystem.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/false-flags-suddenly-no-longer-a

And from the Michael Hudson interview linked above:

But the Americans already have troops in Ukraine. Their special operation forces, they’re in Ukraine. The U.S. has already hired I guess what used to be Blackwater troops, mercenaries; they put them in Ukraine. So the U.S. is fighting on the side of the Ukrainian Nazis against Russia. Russia said two weeks ago that the U.S. special forces were planning a false flag chemical attack, and it said the city and the time. And it said, if you do that, we’re just going to come in and bomb.

So Russia found out about it and it stopped the false flag attack. But the U.S. has forces there. They thought that somehow they could provoke Russia into actually invading. I can guarantee you. I’m willing to lose my reputation if Russia actually invades Ukraine. It would be crazy. It doesn’t have the money to do it. It doesn’t have the troops.

And who needs Ukraine? Russia has no need for Ukraine. And it’s a basket case. It has the lowest living standards in Europe. And on every U.S. international report, it’s the most corrupt country in Europe. Nothing can be done to help at all.Russia doesn’t have to attack it. All it has to do is let it – if somebody is committing suicide, you don’t stop it.Russia did say that if there is a military attack on the Donbass, we are going to respond with missiles, and the missiles will not necessarily be linked to Ukraine. We may bomb, for instance, Romania, where NATO has missile launchers.

And Russia has made it clear you’re not going to go anymore with these salami tactics of moving NATO bit by bit. As far as Russia is concerned when America put special forces and troops there, when America gives Ukraine offensive weapons, as the Biden administration does, that is literally backing Ukraine, absorbing it into NATO informally.Whether it has signed the contract or not, it is working for; it is a satellite basically of the State Department.

Looked into the Ukrainian Nazi thing. It's good stuff. Because of course the US is materially supporting literal Nazis.

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/01/cia-neo-nazi-training-ukraine-russia-putin-biden-nato/

According to a recent Yahoo! News report, since 2015, the CIA has been secretly training forces in Ukraine to serve as “insurgent leaders,” in the words of one former intelligence official, in case Russia ends up invading the country. Current officials are claiming the training is purely for intelligence collection, but the former officials Yahoo! spoke to said the program involved training in firearms, “cover and move,” and camouflage, among other things. Given the facts, there’s a good chance that the CIA is training actual, literal Nazis as part of this effort.

...Adding to the absurdity here is that the reason Washington has been giving Ukrainian Nazis its assistance is so they can serve as a bulwark against Russia, which war hawks liken, as they always do, to Adolph Hitler’s regime and its expansion through Europe in the 1930s. While Vladimir Putin’s Russia may be a malevolent actor on a number of fronts, Putin’s recent incursions into neighboring states like Ukraine are driven largely by the expansion of the NATO military alliance up to his borders and the security implications that come with it.

In other words, to stop what US hawks classify as the next Hitler and Nazi Germany, Washington has been backing literal neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine, who are in turn communicating with and training homegrown white supremacists, which Washington in turn is ramping up a menacing repressive bureaucracy at home to counter.

Meanwhile Americans scream themselves blue over the world-wide threat of Putin. Any wonder it was the US and Ukraine that were literally the only two countries to vote against an anti-Nazi measure at the UN. Because they're fans of fucking Nazis, when they're not being some themselves. Fuck the US.

Boy we'll hear Michael Hudson even more on RT.

So the U.S. is fighting on the side of the Ukrainian Nazis against Russia.

Of course. Ukrainians are Nazis (because there were few right-wing volunteers, so obviously it's a Nazi regime. The comedian President has to be a Nazi).

Soon Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Finns and Swedes will be Nazis I guess. Because why would US help Nazis!

And Russia has made it clear you’re not going to go anymore with these salami tactics of moving NATO bit by bit.

How about the fact that NATO is a voluntary organization that the states have opted to join? Do note that the US allies that didn't voluntarily become allies, Iraq and Afghanistan. Aren't in good terms with the US (and oh wait, one isn't even anymore an ally).

Just like the Monroe doctrine: it works well when the US has good relations with the countries. But when the US is a bully, the states regimes can truly feel threatened, the end result is like with Cuba, Venezuela or now actually with Nicaragua.

Because why would US help Nazis! — ssu

Because the US likes helping Nazis when it suits them.

Because the US has never had any issue supporting genocide, when not conducting it itself.

You really think Ukrainians are Nazis?

Or is this an historical remark?

I think the Ukrainians that the Americans are supporting are Nazis, even if not exclusively.

It helps of course that Americans also support Nazis domestically, ever more often.

Or at the UN. Just like, wherever they tend to be, it turns out.

I think the Ukrainians that the Americans are supporting are Nazis. — StreetlightX

Yeah, that's the way!

Well, for me Oleh Tyahnybok (and his Svoboda-party) were the "Nazis" if you could say the ultra-right party was like that in 2014. Right, they have now one seat in the Parliament. Yet President Zelensky's 'Servant of the People' party claims to be centrist, which has 254 seats in the Parliament.

Yes, a party that says it promotes "Ukrainian centrism" with an ideology that "denies political extremes and radicalism", but is for "creative centrism" and has roots in libertarianism and is said to be "centrist, big-tent, anti-corruption, pro-Europeanism) is obviously pure Nazi talk according @StreetlightX.

(Just waiting if we get comments from someone that Ukraine is actually an artificial country...)