"NO DISSENT": Trump Asks "All Republicans" To "Give Us A Few Months" And Approve GOP Continuing Resolution
"NO DISSENT": Trump Asks "All Republicans" To "Give Us A Few Months" And Approve GOP Continuing Resolution
President Trump on Saturday implored 'All Republicans' to vote on a https://rules.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/rules.house.gov/files/documents/crfull_xml.pdf
that would keep the government funded through September, as a March 14 deadline approaches for the latest government shutdown threat.
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The bill largely maintains current spending levels, while an additional $8 billion would be included for defense programs, and $6 billion for veterans' healthcare.
Non-defense spending would drop by approximately $13 billion.
Johnson is setting up the bill for a vote on Tuesday, despite a lack of buy-in from Democrats - essentially daring them to vote against it and risk a shutdown. He's also betting that Republicans will be able to quash inner divisions over spending and force it through.
Trump Asks GOP To Come Together
"The House and Senate have put together, under the circumstances, a very good funding Bill ("CR")!" Trump wrote on Truth Social, aking all Republicans to (Please!) vote yes on it next week.
"I am asking you to give us a few months to get us through to September so we can continue to put the Country's "financial house" in order," the post continues.
"Democrats will do anything they can to shut down our Government, and we can't let that happen. We have to remain UNITED -- NO DISSENT -- Fight for another day when the timing is right. VERY IMPORTANT. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN."
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As Bloomberg notes, unlike previous shutdowns, this one would impact all discretionary spending since none of the 12 appropriations bills have been signed into law.
While key entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid would continue making payments, administrative delays could affect new enrollments. With a razor-thin Republican majority in the House and the need for bipartisan cooperation in the Senate, negotiations remain fraught, as both parties clash over budgetary provisions that could make or break a last-minute deal.
The economic consequences of a prolonged shutdown, according to Bloomberg Intelligence, would be immediate yet largely reversible. A month-long halt in government operations could shave 0.4 percentage points off GDP growth in the first quarter, though a rebound is expected once normal spending resumes. While federal workers may face furloughs, unemployment figures would not be affected in March but could rise by 0.5 percentage points in April if the impasse drags on. Inflation would see a temporary uptick because furloughed federal workers’ output wouldn’t be counted, even though they will eventually be paid.
More:
Economic Data Collection: The shutdown will delay crucial economic reports like the consumer price index (CPI), unemployment rate, and retail sales data.
Federal Agencies: Around 850,000 workers could be furloughed.
Impact on the Fed: The Federal Reserve, which operates independently, will continue normal operations, including the scheduled March 18-19 FOMC meeting.
As Bloomberg concludes:
In normal times, avoiding a shutdown would be a big priority – but now, amid the flurry of dramatic steps early in Trump’s term, it’s just one of many competing priorities. It’s not clear if the two sides can find common ground. Only twice before has the government been shuttered when one party controlled the White House, House of Representatives and Senate – and both were during the first Trump administration. Whether a third such episode can be avoided will depend on how the two sides assess the tactical risks of bringing the normal operations of government to a halt.
Meanwhile, US Sovereign Risk suggests people are getting nervous...
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Sat, 03/08/2025 - 14:00
Iran Rejects New Nuclear Negotiations, Denies Receiving Letter From Trump
Iran Rejects New Nuclear Negotiations, Denies Receiving Letter From Trump
President Trump announced Friday that the day prior he sent a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, seeking the reopening of new nuclear negotiations, while floating the potential that longtime sanctions could be dropped.
Tehran has responded by saying it never received a letter, and also by dismissing the possibility of opening new talks, after the US already years ago abandoned the Obama-brokered JCPOA nuclear deal. Lost in the mail?...
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Trump recently told US media outlets, "Hopefully we can have a peace deal, I’m not speaking out of strength or weakness. I’m just saying I’d rather see a peace deal, than the other. But, the other, will solve the problem."
However, Iran's Permanent Representative to the UN Amir Saeid Iravani rejected the overture. "Trump says he has sent a letter to Iran. We have not received any such letter," the representative https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2025/03/07/744078/Iran-recieved-no-letter-from-Trump-UN-mission
.
And Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250307-no-talks-with-us-under-maximum-pressure-policy-iran-fm-tells-afp
AFP on Friday, "If America wants to return to a new nuclear agreement with Iran, naturally it should observe the conditions of a fair and just negotiation, and we have proven that we will not answer the language of pressure and threat but will respond to the language of respect and dignity as we did in the past."
The Iranians also appear to be passing over in silence Trump's not so veiled military threats. For example the president said in a Friday interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo: "I’ve written them a letter saying I hope you negotiate, because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing for them."
The other alternative is you have to do something because Iran can't have a nuclear weapon," he followed with, echoing his prior message warning that Tehran can either sign a deal or potentially get bombed.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has described that the Islamic Republic's current stockpile of 60% enriched uranium - if enriched to 90% - would be enough to produce six nuclear bombs.
Trump has recently brought back 'maximum pressure' on Iran, and has even this week advanced the possibility of cracking down on sanctions-busting Iranian oil exports on the high seas, using naval intervention. Clearly this is part of the big stick package of actions meant to push Tehran to the table.
An earlier Fox News interview in February marked the point at which Trump https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/two-ways-stopping-iran-getting-nukes-bombs-or-written-piece-paper-trump-says
. "Everybody thinks Israel with our help or our approval will go in and bomb the hell out of them," Trump had said at the time while discussing potential Israeli military action against Tehran.
"I would prefer that not happen. I'd much rather see a deal with Iran where we can do a deal, supervise, check it, inspect it," the president continued.
That's when he made one of the more provocative and threatening comments: "There's two ways to stopping them: With bombs or a written piece of paper," he had previously https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/two-ways-stopping-iran-getting-nukes-bombs-or-written-piece-paper-trump-says
. But so far Tehran is viewing talks with the Trump admin as a dead end, and is clearly not moving toward the negotiating table.
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Sat, 03/08/2025 - 13:25
US Firm Maxar Disables Satellite Photos For Ukraine
US Firm Maxar Disables Satellite Photos For Ukraine
American aerospace firm Maxar Technologies announce Friday it has disabled the ability of the Ukrainian government to access its satellite imagery, in conformity to President Trump's announced suspension of intelligence sharing with Kiev.
"Each customer makes their own decisions on how they use and share that data," Maxar https://www.arabnews.com/node/2592826/world
of its US government contracts. The contract in question which is impacted by the intelligence-sharing suspension is GEGD (the Global Enhanced GEOINT Delivery program).
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The GEGD program provides access to commercial satellite imagery collected by the United States for partner nations and allies. Ukraine has apparently been blocked from further participation for the time being.
"The US government has decided to temporarily suspend Ukrainian accounts in GEGD," the Maxar statement said, referring reporters to the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for any further questions.
"We take our contractual commitments very seriously, and there is no change to other Maxar customer programs," Maxar explained.
The CIA had on Wednesday confirmed blockage of all intelligence-sharing with Ukraine. President Trump on Friday linked any further sharing on Ukraine's willingness to enter peace negotiations with Moscow.
"Ukraine has to get on the ball and get a job done," Trump said, adding that the US is "trying to help" get peace negotiations moving.
But he admitted to reporters at the White House that it's currently more difficult for Washington to deal with Ukraine than with Russia, which has "all the cards" in the war. Watch:
President Trump on Putin and the war in Ukraine:
"I think we're doing very well with Russia. But right now they're bombing the hell out of Ukraine. I'm finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine." https://t.co/NqjhLvrvEW
— The American Conservative (@amconmag) https://twitter.com/amconmag/status/1898087104371966120?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
In a fresh report in https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/03/07/pause-of-us-intelligence-sharing-with-ukraine-poses-unprecedented-challenges-for-allies_6738929_4.html
Ukrainian military expert Ievhen Dyky has described that "The total ban on intelligence sharing is effective, both directly from the US to [Ukraine], but it is also a ban on NATO allies transferring data received from the US to us." He specified that the ban "applies to all forms of intelligence."
Reportedly the ability of the Ukrainians to receive targeting information for strikes inside Russia has been taken away as well. There was likely no chance of Moscow coming to the negotiating table so long as this ultra-provocative program was in place.
https://cms.zerohedge.com/users/tyler-durden
Sat, 03/08/2025 - 07:35
NATO: The Case To Get Out Now
NATO: The Case To Get Out Now
Authored by David Stockman via https://www.davidstockmanscontracorner.com/
.
The case for getting out of NATO encompasses four fundamental propositions:
First, the Federal budget has become a self-fueling fiscal doomsday machine, even as the Fed has run out of capacity to monetize the skyrocketing public debt.
Second, the only viable starting point for fiscal salvation is slashing the nation’s elephantine Warfare State by at least $500 billion per year.
Third, the route to that end is a return to the “no entangling alliance” wisdom of the Founders, which means bringing the Empire Home, closing the 750 US bases abroad, scuttling much of the US Navy and Army and withdrawing from NATO and similar lesser commitments elsewhere.
Fourthly, jettisoning NATO requires debunking its Origins Story and the false claim that it brought peace and security to post-war America when what it actually did was transform Washington into the War Capital of the World, dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, neocon warmongers and a vast Warfare State nomenklatura.
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Part 1
As to the impending fiscal calamity, just recall this sequence. When Ronald Reagan attacked the soaring Federal deficits in 1980 the public debt was less than $1 trillion and about 30% of GDP. But it had erupted to $20 trillion by Donald Trump’s first election, now stands at $36 trillion and will be hitting $62 trillion and 163% of GDP by the mid-2030s.
Yet even that figure embodies CBO’s most recent Rosy Scenario fairy tale under which—-
Congress never again adopts a single new spending increase or tax cut.
The $5 trillion of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts are allowed to expire next year.
There are no recessions or other economic crises for the remainder of this decade and forever thereafter, world without end.
And despite 7% of GDP deficits and annual interest expense of $1.7 trillion by 2034 the average yield on the public debt clocks in at a minuscule 3.4%.
Yes, and if dogs could whistle the world would be a chorus! Boost the average debt yield by a minimally realistic 250 basis points, however, and now you have $3 trillion of annual interest expense and a $4.5 trillion deficit by 2034.
In short, there is a doom-loop building inside the fiscal equation under which soaring interest expense will ignite a veritable budgetary wildfire, powering the public debt upward to $150 trillion by mid-century, even under CBO’s cheerful baseline.
Of course, long before the debt actually hits this staggering figure, the whole system would implode. Every remnant of America as we now know it would go down the tubes.
So slashing the national security budget by $500 billion per year is especially urgent since there is no chance whatsoever of getting similar giant slices out of the other two fiscal biggies— Social Security and Medicare, which are surrounded by a veritable wall of political terrorists on the left.
Fortunately, slashing the Pentagon by 50% is fully warranted. Today’s bloated Empire-serving Warfare State is not remotely necessary for homeland security or the foreign policy of a peaceful Republic.
When you add-up the current year $927 billion for the national defense function, $66 billion for international operations and aid and $370 billion for veterans disability and health care—you get a comprehensive national security budget of nearly $1.4 trillion.
Moreover, three things stand out when this stupendous total is looked at in historic perspective. First, the disappearance of the heavily armed Soviet Empire into the dustbin of history in 1991 left no visible trace on national security spending.
In fact, at the peak of the Cold War in 1962 when JFK faced down Khrushchev in Cuba the comprehensive national security budget in today’s dollars stood at just $640 billion. That was barely 46% of the current level, and it was still only $810 billion by 1990 on the eve of the Soviet collapse.
So what transpired thereafter is astounding. An adversary armed to the teeth with upwards of 37,000 nukes and a 4 million man conventional armed force vanished from the face of the earth. And yet the national security budget kept rising skyward to the present $1.4 trillion without missing a beat.
The second point is that the largest military increases occurred not in the Cold War heat circa 1960, but during the Reagan era of the 1980s when the Soviet Union was already on its last leg economically and militarily. Still, the constant dollar US national security budget actually soared by +42%, from $570 billion to the aforementioned $810 billion.
There’s no mystery as to why. During the Reagan Era the neocons hijacked the Republican party and cast its historic fiscal prudence to the winds, claiming that massive defense increases were needed because the Soviets were on the verge of a nuclear first strike capacity.
That latter was an abject lie as proven by the fact that less than 10% of the Reagan defense build-up actually went to the strategic nuclear arsenal. Most of it was for conventional forces including the 600-ship Navy, massive air power increases, new tanks, expanded air and sealift and extensive new cruise missiles and electronics warfare capabilities.
All of these latter forces had but one purpose: Namely, overseas power projection and the conduct of wars of invasion and occupation in a world in which the US was not threatened in the slightest by any industrial power with expansive conventional warfare capabilities.
The real effect of the Reagan defense build-up, therefore, was to supply future administrations with the military wherewithal to launch serial adventures in Regime Change. That is, real defense spending should have been cut in half or by $400 billion (FY 2025 $) upon the Soviet demise but was actually increased by $600 billion, thereby enabling military interventions from the First Gulf War onward.
Thirdly, the Forever Wars have been a physical, medical and fiscal disaster. Currently 5 million wounded veterans receive disability compensation and 9 million receive health care benefits. That is, one out of every 30 adult Americans is a VA client.
Accordingly, the “deferred cost” of Empire has literally shot the moon. In today’s dollars, veterans benefits have risen from $57 billion in 1962, mainly representing WWII veterans, to $370 billion. This 6.5X rise represents the frightful human and fiscal tab for the Empire.
Part 2
So, how did a peaceful Republic secure behind the great Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats, which until 1949 eschewed permanent “entangling alliances” abroad, end up with an global Empire that it doesn’t need and can’t even remotely afford?
The answer, we believe, lies in three strategic mistakes made on the banks of the Potomac in 1917, 1949 and 1991, respectively, that have enabled the rise of a self-fueling Warfare State. This fiscal monster, to repeat, can only be eliminated by returning to Jefferson’s admonition that America should pursue—-
Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.
For most of its history, of course, America had adhered to this advice yet had been invasion-free owing to the great Atlantic and Pacific ocean moats. These blessings of Providence, in turn, enabled America to remain a peaceful Republic because its favorable geography precluded the need for a large standing military, heavy taxes, a powerful central government and, most especially, the need for entangling alliances with foreign nations.
In fact, an early treaty with France was canceled by Congress in 1797, meaning that the nation was free of permanent alliances for the next 152 years. Even as late as 1919 Congress prudently rejected the entanglements of the League of Nations Treaty after Wilson’s foolish crusade blatantly failed to make the world safe for democracy.
The inexorable slide toward Empire thus incepted only in 1949 when the Senate ratified the NATO Treaty. But, as we will argue, that was based on utterly false lessons from the world wars and a misguided theory of collective international security.
To be sure, Jefferson’s admonition had preiviously been the default position of American governance. This was demonstrated by the radical demobilization of military forces even after America had uncharacteristically elected to go to war on the world stage in both 1917 and 1941.
Thus, the US military budget on the eve of World War I was just $11 billion when expressed in present day dollars and amounted to a slim 0.9% of GDP. But after Wilson plunged American forces into the stalemated trenches on the Western Front, constant dollar military spending soared 18-fold to $194 billion by war’s end.
That amounted to nearly 15% of GDP at the wartime peak but immediately upon the armistice a sweeping demobilization began. By 1924, 100% of the troops were home and military spending bottomed out at just $12 billion. That amounted to a 93% reduction from the wartime peak and just 0.8% of GDP.
The pre-war status quo ante had thus been fully restored, implying that the lurch into a foreign war had amounted to a one-off venture, and a bad one at that.
Indeed, US intervention in the Great War had been a calamitous mistake. On the date Congress declared war (April 6, 1917) there was not even the slightest chance of a German attack on America. By then the German Fleet was quarantined in its Jutland home-port by the Royal Navy and all sides to the conflict were running out of draftable men, materiale, morale and fiscal resources.
Yet that Woodrow Wilson had plunged the US into the stalemated carnage of the old world for the vainglorious purpose of acquiring a powerful seat at the post–war peace conference is indisputable based on the testimony of his intimate alter ego, Colonel House. So doing, Wilson tipped the balance on the Western Front to a victory by the Entente powers led by England and France.
That is to say, the natural end to this pointless “world war” would have left all the sides exhausted, bankrupt and demoralized, and their respective domestic “war parties” subject to massive repudiation at the post-war polls. But the arrival of two million fresh American doughboys and massive armaments from Washington literally rechanneled history, enabling a vindictive peace of the victors at Versailles—a travesty that sowed the seeds for the even more calamitous second world war.
Yet it can’t be gainsaid that Wilson’s foolish intervention encouraged a last futile offensive by Russia in the summer of 1917, the failure of which soon gave birth to the bloody revolution of Lenin and Stalin. Likewise, the parceling out of the parts and pieces of Germany to France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium and others by the victors at Versailles fostered the stab-in-the-back myth and revanchist campaigns on which Hitler rode to power.
More importantly still, the alleged “lessons” of the interwar period and WWII were falsely played and replayed in the years after 1945. To wit, the Wilson–enabled rise of Hitler and Stalin did not happen, as claimed, because the good people of England and America slept through the 1920s and 1930s. These monsters of the 20th century were not resident in the DNA of nations nor do they continuously lurk among the lesser tinpots who rise from time to time to authoritarian tyranny among the far flung nations of the earth.
To the contrary, they were aberrations—freaks of historical happenstance. That means that even after the two catastrophic world wars there was no baseline case for Empire as a requisite of America’s homeland security. Washington and Jefferson were still correct even in 1946 and beyond.
For a brief moment after WWII ended, in fact, Jefferson’s admonition had prevailed yet again when another massive post-war demobilization occurred, laying the ground for a return to the pre–1914 status quo ante.
Accordingly, the war-weary Washington policy makers were absolutely correct when they brought America’s 12 million-man expeditionary force home, reducing it to 1.3 million by 1948, and also abruptly closed the fiscal sluice-gates to what had become America’s Brobdingnagian war budget.
When translated into present day dollars there’s no room for doubt: Military spending in FY 2025 dollars dropped form $1.7 trillion in 1945 to just $125 billion by 1948, marking another stunning 93% reduction in the post-war military budget.
And well it should have. At that point there was absolutely no military threat anywhere on the planet to the homeland security and liberty of America.
Japan’s leading cities had been fried alive by horrendous nuclear and conventional bombing assaults and Germany’s industry had been laid waste by nightly bomber storms for months on end
That’s to say nothing, of course, of the prostate corpus of Stalinist Russia, which had suffered 27 million military and civilian deaths due to bombs, bullets, starvation, disease, pestilence, atrocities and other barely imaginable inhuman afflictions. And that was atop the destruction of 32,000 industrial enterprises and upwards of 70,000 towns and villages—all leaving tens of millions of Soviet citizens destitute.
In some kind of ghoulish absolution, therefore, the slate had been wiped clean. There wasn’t even a scant reason for American expeditionary forces to remain outside the homeland after 1945—nor for bases, alliances and commitments to intervene anywhere abroad that would put American servicemen in harms’ way.
Part 3
And yet Washington’s incipient “War Party” of military contractors and globe-trotting officialdom gestated in the heat of World War II was not about to go quietly into the good night. Instead, the Cold War was midwifed on the banks of the Potomac when President Truman fell under the spell of war-hawks like Secretary James Byrnes, Dean Acheson, James Forrestal and the Dulles brothers, who were loath to go back to their mundane lives as civilian bankers, politicians or peacetime diplomats.
So exactly 11 months after Hitlers’ demise at his own hand in his bunker and a mere eight months after Armageddon had been visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the out-of-power but inveterate war-mongering Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton Missouri.
That opening call to the Cold War was powerfully seconded barely 10 months latter when the US president delivered his “Truman Doctrine” speech to the Congress. That latter was a belligerent oration which laid the planking for the post-1947 web of entangling alliances and the budget-crushing American Empire it fostered.
It can be well and truly said, however, that the ruckus in Greece and Turkey caused by local communist parties, which was the basis for Truman’s declaration, didn’t amount to a hill-of-beans with respect to the homeland security of America.
Yes, Stalin wanted a port on the Turkish Dardanelles, as had all the Russian Czars for generations before him. But so what?
Likewise, after a decade of brutal political and economic oppression by both a homegrown dictatorship and the Nazi occupiers, the Greek people were seeking more relief than could be delivered by the sickly King George II. So they were understandably lured by the false promises of the communist left.
But, again, so what?
The population of Greece at the time was a mere 7.3 million and even in today’s dollars its GDP was just $50 billion and $7,000 per capita, meaning that Greece was a museum piece of western history that had dwindled to an economic cipher. Had the local communist party come to power that misfortune for the Greek people would have had no bearing on America’s homeland security 5,000 miles away on the far side of the Atlantic moat.
As it happened, the author of the Truman Doctrine was Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, who was a pompous Yale-trained international lawyer from Washington’s elite Covington & Burling. He’d had been a New Dealer during the early 1930s. but then came back to the State Department in 1941, where he had designed the American/British/Dutch embargo against Japan.
In thereby paving the way to Pearl Harbor he actually became the “trigger man” for America’s entry into World War II by unilaterally shutting-off 100% of Japan’s oil while FDR was away meeting with Churchill at the famous “Atlantic Charter” confab in Newfoundland in August 1941.
Acheson was also an inveterate anglophile who apparently suffered from “empire-envy”. He thus imagined that America should step into Great Britain’s imperial shoes when it emerged economically crippled from WWII and could no longer provide aid to Greece and Turkey.
So upon such advice from the Brits in February 1947, Acheson had sprung into action. In a pivotal meeting shortly thereafter with Congressional leaders, Acheson articulated what would later become known as the “domino theory.”
He stated that more was at stake than Greece and Turkey, for if they should fall communism would likely spread south to Iran and as far east as India. Acheson reportedly concluded that “not since the days of Rome and Carthage” had such a polarization of power existed.
That was utter poppycock. Should the people of Iran and India have made the stupid mistake of voting in their small but noisy communist parties, it would have posed no material threat whatsoever to the military security of Americans.
The Greek-Turkey aid gambit of March 1947, of course, was just the opening salvo. Soon the baleful idea that communist political gains anywhere in democratic Europe were to be viewed as cause for national security alarums gathered momentum on the banks of the Potomac.
Consequently, the modest aid to Greece and Turkey quickly ballooned into the Marshall plan announced in June 1947. Again, in today’s dollars the Marshall plan provided upwards of $175 billion to Western European countries between 1948 and 1951.
Needless to say, by virtue of doling out such tremendous sums of money Washington was soon knee-deep in the domestic politics, economics and inter-country intrigues of post-war Europe.
But why? There was not a snowballs’ chance in the hot place that a communist France or red Luxembourg would have been a military threat to the US. Or even that in league with Soviet Russia they would have posed a conventional military challenge on the New Jersey shores 4,000 miles to the further side of the Atlantic moat.
Indeed, the US had left WWII with the greatest assemblage of naval power in human history—including 28 aircraft carriers, 23 battleships, 72 cruisers, 377 destroyers, and hundreds of auxiliary vessels. Altogether this amounted to 10 million tons of naval vessel capacity or more than six times the 1.5 million tons of the Soviet Navy, whose fleets consisted of far fewer and far less lethal warships.
Needless to say, therefore, neither the Truman Doctrine nor the Marshall plan advanced America’s military security in any material manner. The requisite muscle to defend the American shorelines and airspace had already been bought and paid for during WWII.
But these politico-economic programs did grease the slippery slope to NATO and entangling alliances and interventions stretching to all four corners of the planet. And they did most definitely set off alarm bells in the Kremlin, where the hyper-paranoid Joseph Stalin everywhere and always expected treachery from friend and foe alike.
That was a given—considering the blood-soaked path by which he had climbed to absolute power in the Soviet Union itself and the treachery of Hitler’s double-cross after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 and the subsequent devastating invasion of Russia by the Nazi.
So it is not surprising that Stalin soon suspected that his wartime allies—especially with FDR and Churchill gone—were laying the groundwork for the isolation and encirclement of Soviet Russia, exactly as the allied powers had attempted after WWI.
To be sure, Stalin was among the most wretched rulers ever to oppress a decent-sized chunk of mankind, and would have remained a blight on his own countrymen and ogre before the world during the remaining six years of his despicable life. But he was no threat to the American homeland as the now open archives of the old Soviet Union prove in spades.
These documents, in fact, amount to the national security dog which didn’t bark. Dig, scour, search and forage thru them as you might. Yet they will fail to reveal any Soviet plan or capability to militarily conquer western Europe.
They show, therefore, that Washington’s standing up of NATO was a giant historical mistake. It was not needed to contain Soviet military aggression, but it did foster a half-century of hegemonic folly in Washington and a fiscally crushing Warfare State.
It is in the nature of human history, it seems, that a wrong path taken like Wilson’s 1917 error frequently begets another baleful turn. The slippery slope here had further materialized when Britain and America had needed to ally with the vile red tyrants of Moscow to rid the world of the Hitlerian nightmare that rose up from the ashes of Versailles.
Indeed, this wartime alliance with the devil seemed so urgent to both Churchill and FDR that they more or less ceded the nations of eastern Europe to the then advancing Red Army at the Yalta Conference in February 1945.
In return for Stalin’s continued march toward Berlin, the Big Three principals reached an understanding that the Soviet Union would exert significant influence over Eastern Europe from Poland down to Yugoslavia.
Of course, free elections and democratic governments were to arise in areas occupied by the Red Army, but neither Churchill nor FDR provided any enforcement mechanism. It was a case of saying Eastern Europe is in your sphere of influence, Uncle Joe—by wink from the cynical Churchill and by nod from the doddering Roosevelt.
For his part, of course, Stalin was then in the business of rescuing his bloody regime from the near extinction event that had accompanied the Nazi invasion. His aim, therefore, was not about the ideological project of extending communism westward.
Instead, it was focused on driving the remnants of the Wehrmacht from his own country and establishing an invincible “cordon sanitaire” from the Baltic to the Adriatic, as Churchill himself later charged. Never again would marauding armies from Europe plunder the Russian motherland.
Needless to say, the arrival of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO— within 25 months between March 1947 and April 1949–sent Stalin’s wartime understandings into a tailspin. Slowly at first and then aggressively he developed a paranoid certainty that his capitalist allies were once again in the business of attempting to encircle and destroy the Soviet Union.
This Soviet departure from the cooperative modus operandi of the wartime alliance thus arose from yet another unforced error in Washington. We are referring to the latter’s badly misplaced fears that deteriorating economic conditions in Western Europe could lead to the aforementioned communist parties coming to political power in France, Italy and elsewhere.
To be sure, communist governments in Western Europe would have been a misfortune for any electorate which stupidly put them in power. But that would have been a domestic governance problem over there, not a threat to the American homeland over here.
Nevertheless, Washington’s gratuitous antidote for what was essentially an internal political problem in western Europe was a sweeping course of economic and military interventions that were clinically described as “containment” measures designed only to keep the Soviet Union in its Yalta lane.
They were not meant to be the prelude to an attack on eastern Europe or Moscow itself, but if you examine a thousand random documents from the archives of the Soviet foreign ministry or even the correspondence of Stalin himself it is readily apparent that these initiatives were viewed in Moscow as anything but a polite message to stay in lane.
To the contrary, they were seen on the Soviet side as an incipient assault on the Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe that Stalin believed he had won on the blood-soaked battlefields against the Nazi.
To be sure, writing off this string of what came to be called “captive nations” would have amounted to an embrace of realpolitik that would have made moralists and anti-communist ideologues bristle. But abandonment of Eastern Europe per the Yalta zones of influence scheme was exactly what became Washington’s de facto policy until the very end of the Cold War in 1991, anyway.
That is to say, the uprisings against the Soviet hegemon in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981 generated no response from the West beyond empty speeches and hortatory resolutions from western parliaments. The whole policy of “containment”, therefore, was actually just a large-scale effort by Washington to steer European politics away from the communist Left.
But why in the hell was thwarting the foolishness of communism in Europe America’s business at all?
That is, NATO was essentially an instrument of political control on the European side of the Atlantic, not a military shield that added any incremental security for the citizens domiciled on the North American side of the pond.
So the question recurs as to exactly why was America’s fully warranted post-war demobilization reversed after 1947 for no good reason of homeland military security?
Part of the answer is embedded in the popular Keynesian theorem which held that post-war demobilization would result in a devastating collapse of so-called “aggregate demand” and a resulting spiral into depression unless treated with aggressive counter-cyclical fiscal stabilization measures.
Since most of post-war Europe was fiscally incapacitated, economic aid proffered by Washington through the Marshall plan, therefore, amounted to a surrogate form of Keynesian stabilization against a depressionary relapse.
Needless to say, the hive mind on the Potomac had it all wrong, and the evidence was right in its own backyard.
During the very first year of demobilization the US private sector economy came bounding out of the starting gates after being freed from wartime controls. Real private GDP grew by nearly 27% in 1946 over prior year and never looked back, expanding by 50% through 1950.
And it did so with no fiscal stabilization help from Washington, which was blocked by a Republican Congress, even as the American economy never came close to tumbling into the feared Keynesian abyss.
That the prevailing Keynesian theorem was just plain wrong was also well illustrated by the contemporaneous economic rebound in the western zone of Germany. The latter’s economy took off well before the Marshall Plan aid made any substantial impact owing to Ludwig Erhard’s famous turn to currency reform and free market policies.
In short, Washington’s Soviet “containment” policies were unnecessary as a matter of America’s homeland military security. Yet based on fuzzy thinking about economics and the taste for international power politics that had been acquired by Washington’s ruling class during WWII the US stumbled into the very entangling alliances that Washington and Jefferson had forsworn.
Part 4
The Soviet Union’s acquisition of the A-bomb in 1949 did not change the equation or gainsay the case that the entanglements of the Marshall Plan and NATO were a mistake. Crucially, neither did it create a military requirement for US air bases in Europe or alliances with European countries.
Instead, home territories and the open oceans and skies turned out to be more than adequate for basing the nuclear arsenals of both sides.
Indeed, once both sides had the A-bomb the age of nuclear deterrence or MAD (mutual assured destruction) commenced. Notwithstanding the fringe views of the likes of Herman Khan, nuclear war was soon deemed to be unwinnable and the focus shifted to the ability to reliably deliver a devastating second strike in response to a potential nuclear provocation.
This “assured” destruction was itself the defense against nuclear attack. But to be an effective deterrent the opposing side had to believe that its opponent’s ability to deliver was operationally full-proof and highly certain to happen.
In this respect, during the strategic bomber age of the 1950s the US established such deterrence early on—with the introduction of the Boeing B-52 in 1955 removing any doubt.
The B-52 had a range of nearly 9,000 miles without aerial refueling, even as it carried a payload of A-bombs far heavier than any previous aircraft, was powered by far more reliable engines and could attain altitudes beyond the reach of Soviet interdiction.
As it happened, the Soviets were late to the strategic bomber game, even after they detonated a serviceable nuke in August 1949. At the time and for several years to follow the Soviets relied upon a reverse-engineered copy of America’s earlier, far less capable B-29 to deliver their A-bombs. Soviet bombers thus faced significant range and payload capacity challenges, which made it difficult to deliver a meaningful number of nukes to the U.S. without risking detection and interception.
The Soviets soon learned the deterrence game, however, when they were the first to demonstrate a successful ICBM in mid-1957. Yet not withstanding the vaunted “missile gap” charge by JFK during the 1960 campaign, the Soviet Union had only deployed four ICBMs by 196o.
The United States’ own first successful ICBM tests didn’t occur until October 1959. But by the end of the following year it had deployed approximately 20 Atlas ICBMs, which figure grew to 129 ICBMs by the peak of the liquid fueled rocket era in 1962. The missile gap, alas, was massively in the US’ favor.
As the 1960s unfolded, both sides developed far larger numbers of more powerful, reliable and securely-protected, solid-fuel ICBMs, but neither the logic nor logistics of nuclear deterrence ever changed. To wit, the core national security policy of both sides remained based on the certainty of a devastating second strike retaliation against the cities and industries of a foe, delivered by ICBMs securely based in hardened underground silos in their home territories.
As technology evolved the same logic was extended to submarine based missiles, which were not only hidden even more securely in the deep ocean bottoms, but also required no allied partners to operate.
In short, by the time the Cold War reached it peak in the mid-1960s, two thing had been established. First, strategic nuclear deterrence was the heart of national security for both sides and was operated unilaterally from bases in the home country of each. In America’s case, therefore, the technological advances of the 20th century in no way negated the wisdom of the Founders’ 18th century admonition to eschew entangling alliances.
Secondly, throughout the entirety of the Cold War the Soviet Union never presented a meaningful threat of conventional military attack on the USA.
In fact, even at its military peak in the 1980s the Soviet Navy had but a single Nimitz class aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, and only a handful of amphibious ships and troop transports capable of reaching America. This rudimentary sealift capacity would have faced, in any event, insuperable challenges landing troops on the New Jersey coast owing to lack of air cover, antisubmarine protection and sufficient refueling logistics.
Thus, even in the second half of the 20th century, NATO was not any kind of militarily necessary defense asset for the US.
To the contrary, from the very get-go NATO was a make-work project for the State Department and foreign affairs officialdom including wartime spooks who were out of business after August 1945; and, at length, it became a taxpayer-funded marketing organization for the US military-industrial complex and its congressional pork barrel champions.
NATO was thus not about homeland military security but was actually a globalist project of international politics that eventually transformed Washington into a menace and the War Capital of the World. Accordingly, NATO and the whole string of entangling alliances it begat elsewhere on the planet, functioned to actually diminish America’s homeland security, even as it added mightily to its fiscal cost.
That’s because the nearly 300,000 US servicemen remaining in Europe during the Cold War and the scores of bases and facilities which supported them were stationed there as “trip wires”.
Their purpose was to bring the US to the fight immediately upon a Soviet incursion in western Europe. While the latter was an exceedingly low-probability contingency, it should have been addressed, in any case, by Europe’s own military capabilities from its own fiscal resources. After all these years, Donald Trump is absolutely correct on that matter.
As the great Senator Robert Taft held at the time, the modest threat to homeland security presented by the war-ravaged corpus of the Soviet Union and the collectivist disaster imposed on China by Mao could have been readily handled with a invincible nuclear deterrent and fortress defense of America’s airspace and shorelines. As he said in his speech against ratification of the NATO Treaty,
… If we undertake to arm all the nations around Russia from Norway on the north to Turkey on the south, and Russia sees itself ringed about gradually by so-called defensive arms from Norway and Denmark to Turkey and Greece, it may form a different opinion…. how would we feel if Russia undertook to arm a country on our border; Mexico, for instance?
For want of doubt, just consider that every single war fought after the 1949 NATO Treaty ratification was unecessary and a blatant waste of American treasure and blood—to say nothing of the millions of foreigners who have been killed and maimed by these military operations.
That is to say, how in the world was America’s homeland security enhanced by the pointless bloodbath on the Korean peninsula just one year after NATO’s birth? Had China and the regime in Pyongyang prevailed would Seoul today actually look that much different than Shanghai or would it matter?
Likewise, what was accomplished by the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953? Since that paved the way for restoration of the brutal thievery of the Shah and the even more benighted rule of the mullahs who replaced him, exactly what was the point? Denying the Soviets a Persian Gulf port for a blue water Navy that it never actually had?
Soon came the 1954 partition of Vietnam, its own civil war and an utterly heinous Washington intervention that brought death to 58,000 American soldiers along with 300,000 wounded and 75,000 severely disabled for life. And that’s to say nothing of 3.4 million Vietnamese—60% of whom were civilians—whose lives were snuffed out and for what?
Well, apparently so that this “domino” would not fall into the laps of the Chicoms, which were allegedly doing the bidding of the Kremlin? Yet what in the world did this slaughter contribute to America’s homeland security then, and most especially now?
After all, three decades after the Soviets passed into the dustbin of history and 52 years after Nixon went to Beijing and was feted by Mao, Vietnam remains an “unfallen” domino. Rather than being under the thumb of Beijing, in fact, the red capitalists of Vietnam are now exporting even cheaper shoes and shirts to America, thereby taking away market share on Walmart shelves from the red capitalists of China.
Indeed, in the light of history all of the Forever Wars and interventions that flowed from the Empire which was built upon the false foundation of NATO were not just pointless; they were tantamount to criminal undertakings—given their historical pointlessness.
And yet and yet. The list of interventions goes on and on—almost always on the grounds that these disasters are necessary to support local “allies” or bolster regional stability—with the middle east iterations of this canard being especially loathsome.
The first Gulf War, for instance, amounted to a spat between Saddam Hussein and the Emir of Kuwait over directional drilling in the Rumaila oilfield that straddled their border. But so frickin’ what!
There is not the slightest case that this intervention on behalf of a purported “ally” in Kuwait that we didn’t need in the first place had any benefit to the homeland security of America. It simply provided occasion for a CNN reality TV show about tank battles in the desert.
The same can be said of the shock and awe campaign a decade later that finally suspended Saddam from the end of a rope—only to open Iraq to anti-American chaos led by the dominant vengeance-seeking Shiite population. Ditto for Libya, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Lebanon—all victims of Washington conducted or supplied military assaults that had absolutely nothing to do with the military defense of the North American continent.
Indeed, the interventions box-score since Washington abandoned the Founders’ wisdom regarding foreign entanglements is approximately 0 wins, 12 losses. Every single one of these significant interventions in behalf of entangling alliances and Washington’s global Empire have been a failure.
Part 5
That surely has profound implications. It must perforce mean that the predicate on which they were based was deeply flawed.
In fact, the case for a true America First policy—that is, returning to the pre-1948 status quo ante and a proper Fortress America military posture—has powerfully strengthened during the last three decades.
That’s because in the world of 2025 the only theoretical military threat to America’s homeland security is the possibility of nuclear attack or blackmail in the form of a First Strike capacity so overwhelming, lethal and effective that an adversary could simply call out checkmate and demand Washington’s surrender.
Fortunately, there is no nation on earth that has anything close to the Nuclear First Strike force that would be needed to totally overwhelm America’s triad nuclear deterrent and thereby avoid a retaliatory annihilation of its own country and people if it attempted to strike first.
After all, the US has 3,700 active nuclear warheads, of which about 1,800 are operational at any point in time. In turn, these are spread under the seven seas, in hardened silos and among a fleet of 66 strategic bombers—all beyond the detection or reach of any other nuclear power.
For instance, the Ohio class nuclear submarines each have 20 missile tubes, with each missile carrying an average of four-to-five warheads. That’s 90 independently targetable warheads per boat. At any given time 12 of the 14 Ohio class nuclear subs are actively deployed, and spread around the oceans of the planet within a firing range of 4,000 miles.
So at the point of attack that’s 1,080 deep-sea nuclear warheads cruising along the ocean bottoms that would need to be identified, located and neutralized before any would be nuclear attacker or blackmailer even gets started. Even Russia’s vaunted hypersonic missiles couldn’t find and take out by surprise the US sea-based deterrent.
And then there are the roughly 300 nukes aboard the 66 strategic bombers, which also are not sitting on a single airfield Pearl Harbor style waiting to be obliterated either, but are constantly rotating in the air and on the move.
Likewise, the 400 Minutemen III missiles are spread out in extremely hardened silos deep underground across a broad swath of the upper Midwest. Each missile currently carries one nuclear warhead in compliance with the Start Treaty but could be MIRV’d in response to a severe threat, creating upwards of a thousand more retaliatory warheads.
Needless to say, there is no way that America’s nuclear deterrent can be neutralized by a blackmailer. And that gets us to the heart of the case for drastically downsizing America’s military muscle. To wit, according to the most recent CBO estimates the nuclear triad will cost only about $75 billion per year to maintain over the next decade, including allowances for periodic weapons upgrades.
That’s right. The core component of America’s military security requires only 7% of today’s massive military budget. Moreover, the sea-based ballistic missile force is estimated to cost just $188 billion over the entire next decade or only 1.9% of the $10 trillion CBO defense baseline.
So after setting aside $75 billion per year for the strategic nuclear triad, how much of the remaining $900 billion+ DOD budget would needed in a post-NATO world shorn of America’s entangling alliances, foreign bases and foolish overseas commitments—such as the utter folly of decreeing which Chinese political faction is permitted to rule Taiwan.
And please don’t say because semiconductors. Beijing actually practices the reverse of Lenin’s aphorism. That is to say, to keep their subjects fat and happy Beijing’s rulers will sell us shirts, shoes, solar panels, semiconductors and even the rope to hang them with if they should ever foolishly attack the American homeland.
So the question recurs: In addition to an invincible nuclear deterrent what would be the cost of a conventional Fortress America defense of the continental shorelines and airspace?
The starting point is that a conventional invasion by an adversary would require a massive military armada many times the size of current US forces, huge air and sealift resources and humongous supply lines and logistics capacities.
You also need an initial GDP of say $50 trillion to sustain what would be the most colossal mobilization of weaponry and materiale in human history. And that’s to say nothing of needing to be ruled by suicidal leaders willing to risk the nuclear destruction of their own countries in order to accomplish, what? Occupy Denver?
Obviously, no nation has the GDP or military heft to successful execute an invasion of the American homeland. Russia’s GDP is a scant $2 trillion, not the $50 trillion that would needed for it to put invasionary forces on the New Jersey shores. And its ordinary defense budget apart from the SMO is $75 billion, which amounts to about four weeks of waste in the Pentagon’s $950 billion monster.
As for China, it doesn’t have the sustainable economic heft to even think about landing on the California shores because it has accumulated in excess of $50 trillion of debt in barely two decades!
Rather than growing organically in the historic capitalist mode, it printed, borrowed, spent and built like there was no tomorrow. The resulting simulacrum of prosperity would not last six months if China’s $3.6 trillion global export market—-the source of the hard cash that keeps its Ponzi upright—were to crash, which is exactly what would happen if it tried to invade America.
Indeed, when it comes to the threat of a conventional military invasion the vast Atlantic and Pacific moats are even greater barriers to foreign military assault in the 21st century than they so successfully proved to be in the 19th century. That’s because today’s advanced surveillance technology and anti-ship missiles would consign an enemy naval armada to Davy Jones’ Locker nearly as soon as it steamed out of its own territorial waters. With today’s military technologies there can be no Pearl Harbor redux.
Indeed, America’s ostensible “enemies” actually have no invasionary capacity at all. Russia has only one aircraft carrier—the aforementioned 1980s era relic which has been in dry-dock for repairs since 2017 and is equipped with neither a phalanx of escort ships and suite of attack and fighter aircraft nor even an active crew.
Likewise, China has just three aircraft carriers—two of which are refurbished rust buckets purchased from the remnants of the old Soviet Union (actually Ukraine!).
In short, neither China nor Russia will be steaming their tiny 3 and 1 carrier battle groups toward the US shores any time soon. An invasionary force that had any chance at all of surviving dense flocks of US cruise missiles, drones, jet fighters, attack submarines and electronics warfare, we’d dare say, need to be 100X larger.
Again, there is also no GDP in the world—$2 trillion for Russia or $18 trillion for China—that is even remotely close in size to the $50 trillion, or even $100 trillion, that would be needed to support such an invasionary force without capsizing the adversary’s home economy.
Still, Washington maintains a globe-spanning conventional war-fighting capability driven by NATO and other foreign entanglements fully one-third of a century after the Soviet Empire collapsed and China went the Red Capitalist route of deep global economic integration.
We are referring, of course, to the 173,000 US troops in 159 countries and the network of 750 bases in 80 countries. This includes —
19 bases and nearly 34,000 troops in Germany.
44 bases and 12,250 troops in Italy.
120 bases and 53,700 troops in Japan.
73 bases and 26,400 troops in South Korea
All told, Washington equips, trains and deploys an armed force of 2.86 million not for purposes of homeland defense but overwhelmingly for missions of overseas offense, invasion and occupation all over the planet. So if Washington withdrew from NATO and its clones, conventional military requirements would shrink drastically.
For instance, a post-NATO military posture would eliminate most of the nearly one-million man standing US Army. The latter would have no uses abroad because there would be no cause for wars of foreign invasion and occupation, while the odds of any foreign battalions and divisions reaching America for hand-to-hand combat with the US Army in, say North Carolina, are virtually non-existent.
With a proper coastline garrison of missiles, attack submarines and jet fighters any invading army would become shark bait long before it saw the shores of California or New Jersey.
Yet the 462,000 active-duty army soldiers at $112,000 per year each have an annual budget cost of $55 billion, while the 506,000 army reserve costs upwards of $16 billion. And on top of this force structure, of course, you have $77 billion for operations and maintenance and $53 billion for procurement, RDT&E and everything else (based on the FY 2025 budget request).
In all, the current Army budget totals nearly $200 billion, and virtually all of that massive expenditure–nearly 3X the total defense budget of Russia—is deployed in the service of NATO and Empire, not homeland defense. It could readily be cut by 70% or $140 billion.
Likewise, the US Navy and Marine Corps spends $59 billion annually on 515,000 active-duty forces and 88,000 reserves. Yet if you look at the core requirements of a Fortress America defense posture, these forces and expenses are way over the top, as well.
By core missions were refer to the Navy component of the strategic nuclear triad and the Navy’s large force of attack and cruise missile submarines. As it happens, the direct manpower requirements for the 14 Ohio-class Strategic Nuclear Subs is about is about 10,000 military personal when Admirals, overhead, support and woke compliance is included (or not).
Likewise, the 50 or so attack and cruise missile subs have two crews of 132 officers and enlisted men for each boat, for a direct requirement of 13,000 and an overall total of 20,000 including Admirals and overhead.
In short, the core Navy missions of a Fortress America defense involve about 30,000 servicemen or less than 6% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps.
On the other hand, the totally unnecessary carrier battle groups, which operate exclusively in the service of Empire, have crews of 8,000 each when you count the escort ships and suites of aircraft, meaning that the 11 carrier battle groups and their infrastructure require 88,000 direct military personnel and 140,000 overall when you include the usual support and overhead.
Finally, the active-duty force of the Marine Corps is 175,000, and that’s entirely an instrument of invasion and occupation. It’s totally unnecessary for a homeland defense because the latter encompasses neither the halls of Montezuma nor the shores of Tripoli.
In short, fully 315,000 or 60% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps functions in the service of Empire. So, if you redefine the Navy’s missions to focus on strategic nuclear deterrence and coastal defense, it is evident that more than half of the Navy’s force structure is unnecessary muscle.
Instead, it functions in the service of global power projection, policing of the sea-lanes from the Red Sea to the East China Sea and platforming for wars of invasion and occupation.
Overall, the current Navy/Marine Corps budget stands at about $236 billion when you include $59 billion for military personnel, $81 billion for O&M, and $97 billion for procurement, RDT&E and others. A $96 billion or 40% cut, therefore, would still leave $140 billion for the core missions of a Fortress America defense.
Among the services, the $246 billion contained in the Air Force budget is considerably more heavily oriented to a post-NATO Fortress America versus Empire-based national security posture. Both the Minuteman land-based leg of the strategic triad and the strategic bomber forces are funded in this section of the defense budget.
And while a significant fraction of the budget for the manning, operations and procurement of conventional aircraft and missile forces is currently devoted to overseas missions, only the airlift and foreign base component of those outlays inherently function in the service of Empire.
Under a post-NATO Fortress America defense, therefore, a substantial part of the conventional air power, which includes upwards of 4,000 fixed wing and rotary aircraft, would be re-purposed to homeland defense missions, which would insure North American airspace was defended in depth. Accordingly, upwards of 75% or $180 billion of the current Air Force budget would remain in place, limiting the savings to $65 billion.
Finally, an especially sharp knife could be brought down upon the $181 billion component of the current defense budget which is for the Pentagon and DOD-wide overhead operations. Fully $110 billion or 61% of that huge sum could be cut because it actually funds the hordes of DOD civilian employees and DC/Virginia based contractors which feast upon the Warfare State. Immerwahr, Daniel Best Price: $15.69 Buy New $17.24 (as of 11:50 UTC – Details)
Most of these overhead expenditures are counter-productive. They actually fund the beltway think tanks, consultants, lobbyists and influence-peddling racketeers that keep the Empire defended and fully funded on Capitol Hill.
Overall, therefore, re-sizing the DOD portion of the national security budget to a post-NATO world would generate $410 billion of savings on a FY 2025 basis. Another $50 billion in savings could also be obtained from eliminating most funding for the UN, other international agencies, security assistance and economic aid—all of which service alliances and the Empire, not homeland security.
Adjusted for inflation through the end of the second Trump term in FY 2029 the total savings would come to $500 billion per year.
At the end of the day, Bush the Elder should have parachuted into NATO’s Ramstein air base in Germany and declared “mission accomplished” 34 years ago when the Cold War officially ended—even after 42 years of an unnecessary and largely counter-productive existence.
But now the time to bring the Empire home is surely long, long overdue. The $1.4 trillion annual cost of the Warfare State is no longer even remotely affordable as it fuels a spiraling public debt that menaces the very future of constitutional liberty and capitalist prosperity in the American Republic.
https://cms.zerohedge.com/users/tyler-durden
Sat, 03/08/2025 - 07:00
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/nato-case-get-out-now
De-Dollarization Was Always More Of A Political Slogan Than A Pecuniary Fact
De-Dollarization Was Always More Of A Political Slogan Than A Pecuniary Fact
https://korybko.substack.com/p/de-dollarization-was-always-more
respectively, with the outcome of the aforesaid conflict determining which camp will most powerfully shape the global systemic transition. This paradigm predisposed observers to imagine that BRICS, which represents the World Majority, is actively coordinating de-dollarization policies in order to decouple themselves from the West’s financial clutches.
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That perception persists to this day despite last October’s BRICS Summit achieving https://thealtworld.com/andrew_korybko/did-the-latest-brics-summit-achieve-anything-of-tangible-significance-at-all
”, the international community wasn’t as divided over the past three years as many multipolar enthusiasts thought.
https://korybko.substack.com/p/whys-russia-re-engaging-with-the
.”
He also said that “I don’t think there is a unified BRICS position on [de-dollarization]. I think BRICS members, and now that we have more members, have very diverse positions on this matter. So, the suggestion or the assumption that somewhere there is a united BRICS position against the dollar, I think, is not borne out by facts.”
The reason why it’s important to draw attention to his latest words is because of the global context within which they were shared as regards the nascent Russian-US “New Détente”.
Putin’s https://tass.com/politics/1918503
that it was forced by sanctions into doing and thus wouldn’t have ordinarily happened on its own.
A thaw in their tensions brought about by the US brokering an end to their proxy war in a way that meets most of Russia’s interests would therefore naturally see Russia using the dollar yet again. To be sure, it’ll still support the creation of platforms like BRICS Bridge, BRICS Clear, and BRICS Pay, but these would be aimed at preventing dependence on the dollar more so than advancing de-dollarization per se. The ruble will also continue to be used as Russia’s preferred currency in conducting international trade.
Nevertheless, any breakthrough in Russian-US relations would inevitably disappoint those multipolar enthusiasts who bought into the most ideologically dogmatic narratives of the https://korybko.substack.com/p/towards-tri-multipolarity-the-golden
and consequently believed that Russia would forever eschew the dollar out of principle. Those who previously criticized India’s pragmatic approach towards this currency, particularly Jaishankar’s comments from mid-November, would then eat crow if Russia ultimately ends up following its lead.
Even if Russia is just partially returned to the dollar’s global ecosystem through the lifting of US sanctions on that currency’s use for facilitating the strategic resource deals that Putin just proposed, then it would likely result in the rest of BRICS moderating their de-dollarization policies as well, if they even had them. China alone might continue making the most progress in this regard, but even it too has been hesitant to go all-out, also due to its complex interdependencies with the West (https://www.barrons.com/articles/treasury-purchases-china-japan-trump-07fafc5a
).
These observations about Russia, India, and China’s diverse views towards the dollar show that de-dollarization was always more of a political slogan than a pecuniary fact, one that only Russia made tangible progress on but only because it was forced to, though it might soon rebalance as explained. They collectively form RIC, the core of BRICS, so whatever they say or do will influence comparatively smaller countries. There’s nothing wrong with that though, neither in general nor in this context.
Comparatively smaller countries can’t make major impacts on the global economic or financial systems on their own, and in this particular context, almost all of them with few exceptions still have close trading ties with the US that necessitate them remaining within the dollar’s global ecosystem. They couldn’t realistically de-dollarize in the way that the most dogmatic ideologues imagined without immense cost to themselves or replacing their dependence on the US/dollar with China/the yuan.
The most pragmatic approach has always been the one pioneered by India whereby countries strive to use their national currencies more in trade while diversifying their foreign currency baskets in order to avert dependence on any single one. This enables them to strengthen their sovereignty in a meaningful and realistic way without risking the ire of major players by actively dropping their currency and/or actively adopting their rival’s. It’s this balance that will come to define financial multipolarity processes.
* * *
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.
https://cms.zerohedge.com/users/tyler-durden
Fri, 03/07/2025 - 23:25
Classified X-37B Spaceplane Returns To Earth
Classified X-37B Spaceplane Returns To Earth
About two weeks after the Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs https://www.zerohedge.com/military/first-orbit-image-released-classified-x-37-spaceplane
the first-ever in-orbit image captured by Boeing's X-37 spaceplane, the US Space Force revealed early Friday that the top-secret spaceplane has returned to Earth.
Space Force https://x.com/SpaceForceDoD/status/1898001843499794897
the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle-7 (OTV-7) "successfully deorbited and landed" at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, on early Friday around 0222 local time.
Images posted on X by the space agency show military personnel in laboratory protective suits, like NBC and/or BSL-4 suits, approaching the X-37 after touchdown at Vandenberg.
?itok=6K0AMMkv
More images were posted on X of the X-37B, which concluded its seventh mission in orbit.
?itok=r3ENruI-
This time, X-37B remained in space for 434 days.
?itok=R-NU5nwe
"While on orbit, Mission 7 accomplished a range of test and experimentation objectives intended to demonstrate the X-37 B's robust maneuver capability while helping characterize the space domain through the testing of space domain awareness technology experiments," Space Force wrote in a statement.
USAF Public Affairs posted this image from X-37B late last month during a series of "https://www.zerohedge.com/military/first-orbit-image-released-classified-x-37-spaceplane
."
?itok=SSiOzz07
With each successive top-secret mission, the X-37B spends long and longer time in orbit:
OTV-1: launched on Apr. 22, 2010 and landed on Dec. 3, 2010, spending over 224 days in orbit.
OTV-2: launched on Mar. 5, 2011 and landed on Jun. 16, 2012, spending over 468 days in orbit.
OTV-3: launched on Dec. 11, 2012 and landed on Oct. 17, 2014, spending over 674 days in orbit.
OTV-4: launched on May 20, 2015 and landed on May 7, 2015, spending nearly 718 days in orbit.
OTV-7: launched on Dec. 29, 2023 https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/watch-live-spacex-launches-mysterious-x-37b-spaceplane-orbit
. . .
https://cms.zerohedge.com/users/tyler-durden
Fri, 03/07/2025 - 23:00
https://www.zerohedge.com/military/classified-x-37-spaceplane-returns-earth
Trump v. Atlanticism: Understanding Russiagate
Trump v. Atlanticism: Understanding Russiagate
https://oneleggedparrot.com/f/trump-v-atlanticism-understanding-russiagate
,
Last month, President Trump bypassed Europe, NATO, and the entire postwar order and opened a conversation directly with Russia. In doing so, he defied Washington’s established foreign policy paradigm that had been in place since the 1940s.
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“They” always feared he would go there, and “they” tried to prevent it by a never-ending string of investigations, prosecutions, and impeachments.
The “they” Trump defied is called on X “the Deep State” which is a colorful nickname. It has a real name, too: “Atlanticism,” after the Atlantic Charter entered by Roosevelt and Churchill. It is the “A” in “North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”
In high-toned treatises, Atlanticism described a form of empire built upon American hegemony. The moral justification was ostensibly based on American benevolence, a projection of virtue that relied on propaganda. It’s closest historical analog, though, was colonialism.
The lands occupied by Atlanticist ideology traded in American currency. NATO existed to deter the Soviet threat. But it was also an occupying army. There were not colonial governments. There was, instead, strict control of information, puppet governments, and election interference.
When Trump questioned the continuing need for NATO in 2016, institutions with a financial stake in Atlanticism performed a Cold War soft power operation against him. Western intelligence agencies mobilized to connect Trump to Russia, leading to a series of political dirty tricks.
Russiagate was not merely bureaucratic haplessness masquerading as foreign intrigue. It was, instead, the sclerotic postwar spy apparatus targeting an American presidential candidate and then president.
In 2024, Trump won the presidency again, in part out of the electorate’s disgust over the dirty tricks. Upon returning to the Oval Office, he deliberately refocused foreign policy on the American hemisphere.
He Truth Socialed aggressively about Canada, Mexico, Greenland, and Panama, sending his new Secretary of State on his first diplomatic mission to negotiate better rates on passage through the Panama Canal after threatening to take it back by force.
President Trump was steering the ship of state back to the foreign policy of The Monroe Doctrine, in which America’s focus was on problems in its own hemisphere – and not on “democracy” movements abroad.
The new Trump administration made clear that Ukraine would not be invited into NATO, which would have obligated the United States to send troops half a world away to fight Russia. There is credible reporting that President Trump has also started to deny the NATO proxy warriors in Ukraine encryption codes needed to attack Russia with drones and missiles.
With no American cavalry coming to save the day and President Trump cultivating an independent diplomatic relationship with Russia, the most rational path in Ukraine is to negotiate a ceasefire.
Whatever its intentions – and they were arguably altruistic – Atlanticism became a Frankenstein monster that took its initial design to its rational conclusion that threatened existence.
We scratched the surface of what that means in USAID, Soft Power, And How Solzhenitsyn Predicted This Crisis. The following is based on a compilation of essays written between 2016-2020 connecting Russiagate to Atlanticism. It includes links to original sources and some updates.
To understand the malevolence of Atlanticism, it is essential to grasp the wild details of the putsch it attempted in President Trump’s first term. Following is the craziest story ever told in the history of American politics. Now that President Trump has closed the circle by embarking on a new foreign policy, it is relevant to revisit the story from beginning to end with the benefit of additional context.
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In the 1950s, the Cold War was waged on the premise of the domino theory. Russia was thought to be intent on spreading communist ideology by armed insurrection throughout the world. The Red Menace had to be stopped with blood and treasure in places like Vietnam and El Salvador.
The logic of the domino theory committed America to an unprecedented peacetime military build-up. In addition, the West created an intricate spy bureaucracy to discern Russia’s evil designs. The Five Eyes agreement was a postwar alliance among the United States, the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to share intelligence. Under its terms, the Brits could spy on Americans suspected of helping Russia, and report their findings back to the CIA.
The CIA could not do anything with the information because it was not permitted, generally, to conduct investigations on American soil. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI closed the legal loophole by expanding its mission to gather intelligence against Americans who might be Russian agents, under the auspices of “law enforcement.” Now, the Brits could spy on Americans, share the information with the CIA, and the FBI could be brought in to finish the job.
There were spectacular abuses. Hoover kept secret files on Martin Luther King, Jr., Hollywood stars, and politicians who were rivals to his power. The FBI’s domestic intelligence gathering function caused understandable discomfort on the political left.
In response, liberal Idaho (before those words were an oxymoron) Senator Frank Church set up a commission to investigate domestic surveillance abuses. Technology, by then, permitted federal agencies to capture huge amounts of wire communications without disclosing the eavesdropping to Americans who were being surveilled.
Senator Church stated his concerns on an episode of Meet the Press:
If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny [against those who] combine together in resistance to the government.
The result of Senator Church’s work was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA). Under the new law, the FBI could not use its technological capacity to secretly gather intelligence against any American without first going to court with credible evidence that the citizen was a spy.
In the early 1990s, the Soviet Union disbanded, leaving an entire apparatus in the West built to fend off Soviet expansion. None of it was dismantled. Instead, intrusive devices meant to prevent World War III wound up in the hands of European bureaucrats and wannabee sophisticates of the American spy ranks. Together, they set out to find Russian intrigue of the sort that let them keep using their cool gadgets.
Prominent among them was a British spy by the name of Christopher Steele. He built a distinguished life for himself by blaming Russia for bad things. It was Steele, as a member of MI6, who determined that Alexander Litvinenko’s poisoning was a Russian state hit. Nobody has seen the evidence that proves Russia poisoned Litvinenko because that would reveal sources and methods. We have to rely on Steele. But, not to worry, Steele would never just make stuff up, right?
By such shadowy machinations, “Putin is a thug” replaced the domino theory as the raison d’etre of the lucrative Western spy apparatus. How Putin poisoning political enemies justified complex intelligence gathering and expensive military bases originally designed to prevent Soviet incursions into Western Europe is not something you were supposed to ask. A priori, “Putin is a thug” meant he wants to annex France.
Think tanks like the Atlantic Council and the Brookings Institution gave the “Putin-is-a-thug” mantra an official, silk-stocking, “former generals, major corporations, Senators, friendly foreign governments, and top academics agree” stature. It worked mostly because Democrats and Republicans were looking for a reason to hate Putin anyway, but for different reasons.
Putin’s anti-immigrant, anti-liberal, Christianity-sourced populism was anathema to Democrats. He roiled some of progressivism’s most strictly enforced pieties, speaking freely of his own baptism, his beliefs, and the positive role Christianity played in Russian history. He put a girl rock band, Pussy Riot, in prison for desecrating an altar, a crime that had not been prosecuted since the pope crowned heads of state.
In 2013, the Kremlin imposed a ban on the advocacy of the homosexual lifestyle in the presence of children, strictly limited advertisements for abortions, and prohibited elective abortions later than 12 weeks after conception. The Sochi Olympics closing ceremonies in 2014 featured a tribute to Russian writers, including communism’s most eloquent critic, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose books are required reading in Russian schools.
President Obama personally boycotted the Sochi Olympics and sent in his place a delegation of gay athletes, to protest Russia’s laws against gay advocacy. It was a diplomatic breach of the sort that was carefully avoided during the Beijing Olympics, even though China has a far worse record on human rights.
On the social issues alone, Putin would seem to be a natural ally for the American right, but it does not work that way. Instead, when discussing Putin, Republicans are quick to evoke images of Stalin and gulags. That is partly because the Cold War is ingrained in the Republican identity. They are the paunchy vets who always don their bad-fitting uniforms for the parade.
Mostly, though, it is because the funding pipeline that makes Washington, D.C. the wealthiest region in America feeds mostly on military spending. Politico reported in 2015, “the United States still maintains nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad…. Britain, France and Russia, by contrast, have about 30 foreign bases combined.” Republicans have been feeding at that trough for 75 years.
Smack dab in the middle of the foreign entanglements debated by this bipartisan mix of Putin-hatred is the country of Ukraine, which sits geographically between Europe and Russia.
The Cold War view was that Ukraine was the geographical key to the Soviet empire. Since the 1990s, Ukraine has bounced back and forth between alignment with Russia and the West. Like a child in a bitter divorce, it has become a proxy in the battle between two mismatched parents: the parochial, nationalistic, religious preferences of Putin’s Russia; and the globalism of the West.
In 2010, Russia-sympathetic candidate Viktor Yanukovych was elected as president of Ukraine, in part due to the services of an American political consultant, Paul Manafort. In 2014, Yanukovych would make the mistake of not signing an association agreement with the European Union. John McCain flew to Kiev to rally support for the EU.
McCain reported back to the Atlantic Council about his trip. There followed a successful coup d’état, that replaced the Russia-sympathetic government with a Western puppet.
President Obama later told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that he had “brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine.” The word “brokered” suggests that the Obama administration successfully replaced a government half a world away at the behest of Washington’s smart people. There was also a leaked phone call in which Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland participated in choosing the new government.
In 2015, the fledgling Donald Trump campaign gained unlikely traction among the Republican rank-and-file by questioning Washington’s Putin hatred. Several times in that summer – after his June announcement that he would run for president – Trump cited his experience with the Miss Universe Pageant in Russia as providing foreign policy bona fides and, in the same interviews, he spoke highly of Vladimir Putin.
Such bombast enraged the huffy foreign policy establishment, but regular people got a kick out of it, partly because of the rage it caused among the self-important. Candidate Trump did not know it, but he was thumbing his nose at the West’s most powerful syndicate – Atlanticism – and there would be hell to pay.
In September 2015, Putin made a speech at the UN in New York harshly critical of NATO expansion and Western meddling on Russia’s borders, citing “the bloc thinking of the times of the Cold War” that was having devastating effects in places like Ukraine. For Trump, it must have seemed a gift when a world leader like Putin provided such a harsh critique of President Obama’s foreign policy just a short cab ride away from his campaign headquarters in Trump Tower.
Trump gave Putin’s speech a stellar review. He would appear on The O’Reilly Factor on FOX the next day and say, “I will tell you that I think in terms of leadership, [Putin] is getting an ‘A,’ and our president is not doing so well. They did not look good together.”
Trump spent the next few months distinguishing himself from all other Republican candidates by lavishing praise on Putin, even daring to question the Russian president’s role in the Litvinenko poisoning: “In all fairness to Putin, you're saying he killed people. I haven't seen that. I don't know that he has. Have you been able to prove that?”
Christopher Steele could not have been pleased. Republicans, too, did not appreciate the Putin heresy. Around the time of Putin’s UN speech, the strategic intelligence firm Fusion GPS put out a feeler to Republican interests, offering to find dirt on Trump. The Washington Free Beacon, a neoconservative website funded by the hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer, hired Fusion GPS. At the time, Singer was backing Marco Rubio for the Republican nomination.
Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American operative, also began doing opposition research for the DNC about Trump and Russia in late 2015. The Ukrainian embassy representing the new Ukrainian government whose power President Obama had “brokered” worked closely with Chalupa. Suddenly, lots of powerful Washingtonians were trying to connect Trump to Russia.
On January 16, 2016, The Atlantic Council issued a dispatch under the banner headline: “US Intelligence Agencies to Investigate Russia’s Infiltration of European Political Parties.” The lede was concise: “American intelligence agencies are to conduct a major investigation into how the Kremlin is infiltrating political parties in Europe, it can be revealed.”
There followed a series of pull quotes from an article that appeared in the The Telegraph, including one stating that, “James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence” was investigating whether right wing political movements in Europe were sourced in “Russian meddling.”
The dispatch spoke of “A dossier” that revealed “Russian influence operations” in Europe. This was the first time trippy words like “Russian meddling” and “dossier” would appear together in official sources.
Senator Frank Church would have been rolling over in his grave. A progressive Democratic president was spying on European political parties to uncover connections to Russia. This meant, almost necessarily under the Five Eyes Agreement, that foreign agents were returning the favor and spying on the Trump campaign and sharing their “intelligence” with John Brennan at the CIA, who was shucking it off to James Comey at the FBI.
One of the international men of mystery spying on European political parties was none other than the ubiquitous Christopher Steele. A March 5, 2018 piece in The New Yorker about Steele described the connection:
Even before Steele became involved in the U.S. Presidential campaign, he was convinced that the Kremlin was interfering in Western elections. In April of 2016, not long before he took on the Fusion assignment, he finished a secret investigation, which he called Project Charlemagne, for a private client. It involved a survey of Russian interference in the politics of four members of the European Union—France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Germany—along with Turkey, a candidate for membership. The report chronicles persistent, aggressive political interference by the Kremlin: social-media warfare aimed at inflaming fear and prejudice, and “opaque financial support” given to favored politicians in the form of bank loans, gifts, and other kinds of support. The report…. suggests that Russian aid was likely given to lesser-known right-wing nationalists in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The Kremlin’s long-term aim, the report concludes, was to boost extremist groups and politicians at the expense of Europe’s liberal democracies. The more immediate goal was to “destroy” the E.U., in order to end the punishing economic sanctions that the E.U. and the U.S. had imposed on Russia after its 2014 political and military interference in Ukraine.
At roughly the same time Steele worked on Project Charlemagne, he hired Fusion GPS to do research on Paul Manafort. Glenn Simpson detailed this in his book: “Weeks before Trump tapped Manafort to run his campaign, Christopher Steele had hired Fusion for help investigating Manafort.” Manafort was then working as an advisor to Trump’s campaign, and he had not yet ascended to campaign manager. His one-time business partner, Rick Davis, had managed John McCain’s campaign, and Manafort was tapped as a level-headed insider who could possibly bring some ballast to Trump.
The perfect storm that became Russiagate looked like this in March 2016:
Steele was investigating Putin’s influence in European politics. Manafort had been helpful in electing a Russian-sympathetic candidate in Ukraine, and he started to work for Trump. Steele hired Fusion GPS to investigate Manafort. Then Fusion GPS hired Steele to help them. Cozy, huh? Oblivious to it all, Trump continued to poke the bear, wondering out loud about NATO’s continued relevance and questioning America’s foreign policy in Ukraine. The Atlantic Council was on high alert, defending NATO against Trump’s heresy.
There were whispers of “Putin’s candidate”, but they were only whispers. It probably would have remained innuendo parroted occasionally on the campaign trail. But then something extraordinary happened.
On March 19, 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, surrendered his emails to an unknown entity in a “spear phishing” scam. This has been called a “hack,” but it was not. Instead, it was the sort of flim-flam hustle that happens to gullible dupes on the internet. The content of the emails was beyond embarrassing. They showed election fraud and coordination with the media against the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. The DNC and the Clinton campaign needed a cover story.
Blaming Russia would be a convenient way to deal with the Podesta emails. There was already an existing Russia operation around Trump that could easily be retrofitted for this purpose. The problem was that it was nearly impossible to identify the perpetrator of a phishing scheme using computer forensic tools. The only way to associate Putin with the emails was circumstantially.
The DNC retained a company called “CrowdStrike” to help. CrowdStrike’s chief technology officer and co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, was an anti-Putin Russian expat and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. With the Atlantic Council in 2016, all roads led to Ukraine.
The Atlantic Council’s list of significant contributors included Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk. The Ukrainian energy company that was paying millions to Hunter Biden as a member of its board of directors, Burisma, also appears prominently on the Atlantic Council’s donor list. Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the Western puppet installed in Ukraine, visited the Atlantic Council’s Washington offices to make a speech weeks after the coup.
Pinchuk was a big donor (between $10 million and $20 million) to the Clinton Foundation. Back in ’15, the Wall Street Journal published an investigative piece, “Clinton Charity Tapped Foreign Friends.” The piece was about how Ukraine was attempting to influence Clinton by making huge donations through Pinchuk. Similarly, in 2014, the New York Times saw fit to print a story, “Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks.” The article identified both the Atlantic Council and the Brookings Institution as think tanks being paid by foreign governments for lobbying efforts, noting that the arrangements, “opened a whole new window into an aspect of the influence-buying in Washington that has not previously been exposed.”
On June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced: “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton . . . We have emails pending publication.” Two days later, CrowdStrike fed the Washington Post a story, headlined, “Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump.” The improbable tale was that the Russians had hacked the DNC computer servers and got away with some opposition research on Trump. The article quoted Alperovitch.
The next day, a new blog – Guccifer 2.0 – appeared on the internet and made an improbable confession:
Worldwide known cyber security company CrowdStrike announced that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers had been hacked by “sophisticated” hacker groups.
I’m very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly))) But in fact, it was easy, very easy.
Guccifer may have been the first one who penetrated Hillary Clinton’s and other Democrats’ mail servers. But he certainly wasn’t the last. No wonder any other hacker could easily get access to the DNC’s servers.
Shame on CrowdStrike: Do you think I’ve been in the DNC’s networks for almost a year and saved only 2 documents? Do you really believe it?
Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into DNC’s network.
Guccifer 2.0 posted hundreds of pages of Trump opposition research allegedly hacked from the DNC and emailed copies to Gawker and The Smoking Gun. In raw form, the opposition research were documents obtained in the Podesta emails, with a notable difference: It was widely reported the documents now contained “Russian fingerprints.”
The document had been cut and pasted into a separate Russian Word template that yielded an abundance of Russian “error “messages. The document’s metadata included the name of the Russian secret police founder, Felix Dzerzhinsky, written in the Russian language.
The three-parenthesis formulation from the original post “)))” is the Russian version of a smiley face used commonly on social media. In addition, the blog’s author deliberately used a Russian VPN service visible in its emails even though there would have been many options to hide national affiliation.
Under the circumstances, the FBI should have analyzed the DNC computers to confirm the Guccifer hack. Incredibly, though, the inspection was done by CrowdStrike, the same Atlantic Council-connected private contractor paid by the DNC that had already concluded in The Washington Post that there had been a hack and Putin was behind it.
CrowdStrike would declare the “hack” to be the work of sophisticated Russian spies. Alperovitch described it as, “skilled operational tradecraft.” There is nothing skilled, though, in ham-handedly disclosing a Russian identity on the internet when trying to hide it. The more reasonable inference is that this was a set-up. It certainly looks like Guccifer 2.0 suddenly appeared as a cover story for the Podesta email leak in coordination with the Washington Post’s article that appeared the previous day.
FBI Director James Comey confirmed in testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2017 that the FBI’s failure to inspect the computers was unusual. “We’d always prefer to have access hands-on ourselves if that’s possible,” he said. But the DNC rebuffed the FBI’s request to inspect the hardware. Comey added that the DNC’s hand-picked investigator, CrowdStrike, is “a highly respected private company.”
What Comey did not reveal was that CrowdStrike never corroborated a hack by forensic analysis. In testimony released in 2019, it was revealed that CrowdStrike admitted to Congressional investigators as early as 2017 that it had no direct evidence of Russian hacking.
CrowdStrike’s president Shawn Henry testified, “There’s not evidence that [documents and emails] were actually exfiltrated [from the DNC servers]. There’s circumstantial evidence but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.” The circumstantial evidence was Guccifer 2.0; i.e., the uncorroborated cover story.
This was a crucial revelation because the thousand ships of Russiagate launched upon the positive assertion that CrowdStrike had definitely found a Russian hack. The testimony that there was no direct evidence of a hack was kept from the American public for nearly three years.
The reasonable inference is that the DNC was trying to frame Russia, and the FBI and intelligence agencies were going along with the scheme because of political pressure. Lending weight to the frame-up theory: at the same time CrowdStrike was raising a false Russian flag over the hack, the DNC also hired Fusion GPS to create Russian dirt on Trump. The law firm, Perkins Coie, was used as a cut out to hire both CrowdStrike and Fusion GPS, so that the DNC’s involvement would not be immediately visible.
There were massive conflicts of interest.
To give the hit job a veneer of credibility, Fusion GPS recruited its client, Steele, for whom it was investigating Paul Manafort. But Steele at the time had already investigated Putin’s supposed involvement in European politics, in Project Charlemagne. Finding that Russia colluded with Trump would at least be an act of confirmation bias.
Steele couldn’t tap anyone actually connected to Putin to provide Trump kompromat. Instead, he dipped into Washington’s ready pool of earnest role players and got the Putin dirt from low level policy researcher with connections to the Brookings Institution, Igor Danchenko.
Danchenko drafted what has famously come to be called “the Steele dossier,” a facially absurd document that claimed Putin possessed videotape of Trump paying two prostitutes to pee on a bed the Obamas had used while in Russia. The theory was that Putin was using that video (kompromat) to control Trump’s candidacy, injecting it with the sort of anti-immigrant, anti-liberal, Christianity-sourced populism that was working so well for him in Russia.
Therein lies the chewy tootsie roll center of Russiagate: Atlanticists have a condescending view of the hoi polloi who vote against their globalist projects, regarding the huddled masses as easily manipulated, Pygmalion-like, by smarter people. They project that Putin is playing Professor Henry Higgins to the flower girls who reject their ideas, because that is how they see the world. This simple prejudice makes Russian collusion a first principle with no need for supporting evidence.
In his master’s thesis at the University of Louisville, Danchenko had thanked Fiona Hill, who would help him graduate to the position of senior researcher at Brookings, and co-author a paper with her about how Russian ambitions in Europe and Asia are bolstered by its energy exports. Hill is the British-American academic and self-confessed Russia-hawk who was Adam Schiff’s key impeachment witness against President Trump.
Danchenko would disclaim the substance of the dossier to the FBI in 2017 – a fact the FBI did not disclose until 2020. Disclaiming the substance of the dossier in his FBI interview was a stunning admission by the so-called primary sub-source that somehow did not stop Trump’s own Justice Department from using the dossier to ratchet up the inquiry and appoint a special council.
While CrowdStrike and Fusion GPS were creating false Russian flags over the Trump campaign, the CIA managed to get the FBI to open its own domestic spy investigation. John Brennan was asked in his February 4, 2018 appearance on Meet the Press about the role of the Five Eyes Agreement in investigating the Trump campaign, and he made a blunt admission:
Now I’m not going to get into details about how it was acquired. But the FBI has a very close relationship with its British counterparts. And so the FBI had visibility into a number of things that were going on involving some individuals who may have had some affiliation with the Trump campaign. And so the intelligence that we collected was pulsed against that. And I thought it would have been derelict if the FBI did not pull the threads, investigative threads, on American persons who might have been involved with Russia and working on their behalf either wittingly or unwittingly.
There is no way to read his answer except to infer that Brennan prodded the FBI investigation into Trump with the help of “British counterparts”, and he’s proud of it.
At the time the CIA was pushing the FBI to investigate, Trump had made an unlikely and inexplicable run at the Republican nomination on a populist agenda. The Brits were dealing with their own unlikely and inexplicable political event. Tens of millions of working-class voters had done the unthinkable: reject rule by the EU.
It was the time of the Brexit vote and a wave of populism was sweeping the UK. On July 13, 2016, British academic Dr. Andrew Foxall penned an op-ed in the New York Times, “Why Putin Loves Brexit.” Foxall blamed Russia for the previous month’s Brexit vote, adding in a little-noted aside that spies were looking into it:
The United States is so concerned over Moscow’s determination to exploit European disunity that in January, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, began a review of Russia’s clandestine funding of European parties.
Whatever their motivation, British intelligence agencies were imagining Putin under mattresses, and they were in full spy-mode about it. Minor members of the Trump campaign, including Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, were invited to London to talk to Cambridge professor Stefan Halper, who burrowed in on Trump and Russia. Unless U.S. intelligence agencies were freestyling in Great Britain, MI6 was spying on the Trump campaign.
Halper is inferentially a British spy or at least a double agent. The alternative is that he was an American spy conducting rogue operations from England. At the time, Halper was an FBI confidential human source being paid by American tax dollars.
After Papadopoulos hooked on as a minor underling in the Trump campaign, he ran into a person by the name of Josef Mifsud while traveling in Europe. Mifsud either did or didn’t bring up something about Hillary Clinton emails, depending on who you believe: Papadopoulos or Andrew Downer, an Australian diplomat connected to the Clinton Foundation who gratuitously inserted himself into these events right as the FBI was looking for a pretext to start and official investigation. Downer himself would later retreat from the claim that Papadopoulos mentioned emails.
James Comey has called Mifsud a Russian agent. But Mifsud has documented connections to British spy agencies. He traveled to the United States in early February 2017 as a guest of the State Department, an accommodation not ordinarily made to Russian operatives who just stole an election. Joseph Mifsud walked, quacked, and acted like a Western asset. The alternative is that he somehow showed up in the middle of a honeypot operation against George Papadopoulos as a real Russian spy to play the part of a Russian spy.
The FBI would officially launch its investigation into the Trump campaign, Crossfire Hurricane, on July 31, 2016. A few days later, the agent who opened the investigation – Peter Strzok – would text his lover, “We’ll stop” Trump. By then, the DNC, its paid contractors CrowdStrike and Fusion GPS, the CIA, foreign intelligence services, and the FBI were engaging in a joint operation to stop Trump that was being run out of Washington’s silk-stocking think tanks.
Together, this powerful junta successfully dealt with the release of the Podesta emails. The contents were beyond embarrassing. The emails show Clinton and the Democratic Party fixing the primaries against Bernie Sanders. The chair of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was forced to resign on the eve of the democratic convention in late July for her role in the dirty tricks.
The Podesta emails were the sort of political dirt Woodward and Bernstein got from Deep Throat in that parking garage. You would think the media would have celebrated the emails leak for speaking truth to power. This time, though, The Washington Post intervened firmly on the side of the cover-up. By August, the media was running with the Clinton campaign’s Russia smear operation: The damaging emails showed Putin was behind Trump was now the story.
It made no sense, but Trump was placed on the defensive for email leaks that showed his opponent fixing the primaries. Paul Manafort, who was by then Trump’s campaign manager, resigned because a fake ledger suddenly appeared out of Ukraine connecting him to Russia. In September, the CIA briefed President Obama that the Russians believed the Clinton campaign was conducting a false flag operation to connect Trump to Russia. This briefing was not declassified until 2020, and the necessary inference is that President Obama had full knowledge of the dirty tricks.
Trump protested by stating the obvious: the federal government has “no idea” who was behind the hacks. The FBI and CIA called him a liar, issuing a “Joint Statement” that cited Guccifer 2.0, suggesting 17 intelligence agencies agree that it was the Russians. Hillary Clinton took advantage of this “intelligence assessment” in the October debate to portray Trump as Putin’s stooge” She said:
“We have 17, 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber-attacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin. And they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.”
The media’s fact checkers excoriated Trump for lying. It has since been learned that the “17 intelligence agencies” claptrap was always false. Somehow, Trump won anyway. Then, immediately after the election, elements of the scheme began to unravel.
On Dec. 22, 2016, CrowdStrike caused an international stir when it claimed to have uncovered evidence that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery computer app to help pro-Russian separatists. Voice of America later determined the claim was false, and CrowdStrike retracted its finding.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense was forced to eat crow and admit that the hacking never happened. It was suddenly obvious to anyone paying attention that if you wanted a computer testing firm to fabricate a Russian hack for political reasons in 2016, CrowdStrike was who you went out and hired.
In a piece first published on January 11, 2017, headlined “Ukrainian Efforts to Sabotage Trump Backfire,” Politico reported that Ukraine tried to help Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election: “The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia.” Ukraine later apologized and admitted its interference.
The conspirators probably should have exited the scheme there and played dumb but instead they doubled down. The Washington insiders who had together orchestrated the Russia hoax switched into a cover-up, hide-the-evidence, continue-to-harm-Trump operation.
Trump had promised that he would appoint General Michael Flynn as his National Security Advisor. Flynn publicly favored rapprochement with Russia and was somewhat of an Atlanticist iconoclast. Once behind the desk with access to the government’s top-secret files, Flynn possibly would have figured out that the FBI and CIA combined with the DNC and members of the Obama administration to play political dirty tricks against Trump. The plotters’ first order of business was to sideline Flynn.
In their meeting two days after the election, President Obama forcefully told Trump not to give Flynn a role in his administration. Trump was taken aback but he did not listen and made General Flynn his National Security Advisor. The Obama Administration needed a Plan B: Invent an international incident to entrap Flynn.
On December 27, 2016, the Obama administration expelled 35 Russian diplomats—including gardeners and chauffeurs—for interfering in the election. Flynn had a conversation with the Russian ambassador the next day and the plotters listened in via wiretap. The Obama administration wanted to see if Flynn signaled to the Russians that the Trump administration would have a different approach to foreign policy.
Under American law, it is perfectly okay for an incoming administration to communicate its foreign policy preferences during a transition even if they differ from the lame duck administration. That is one of the purposes of a presidential transition. Flynn could have said, “President-elect Trump believes this Russian interference thing is a fantasy, and these sanctions will be lifted on his first day in office.”
Given the soupy mix of conspiracy theories at the time, it is unlikely the Trump administration would have survived such an act of diplomatic common sense. The conspirators were hoping to get Flynn on tape making that sort of accommodation to the Russians. The promise to lift the sanctions would then be cited to suggest a quid pro quo that proved the nonexistent collusion. But Flynn was noncommittal in his wiretapped conversation. Drat!
The plotters did have a transcript of what he said. This is where the outrageous behavior of the FBI is fully displayed. James Comey invited Flynn to be interviewed by the FBI, supposedly about Russian collusion to steal the election. Flynn was eager to tell the FBI that Russian collusion was ridiculous. What Flynn did not know was that the purpose of the interview had nothing to do with the election. It was a trick.
Comey did not need to ask Flynn what was said in the conversation with the ambassador—he had a transcript. The only reason to ask Flynn about it was to cross him up. It would be a test pitting Flynn’s memory against the transcript. The inescapable conclusion is that the FBI set a trap for the incoming national security advisor to disrupt the foreign policy of the newly elected president.
Flynn was not completely clear about what he had discussed with the ambassador, but most of it was none of the FBI’s business. In his defense, he did not believe he was sitting there to tell the FBI how the Trump administration was dealing with Russia going forward. The conversation was supposed to be about the election. He certainly did not think the FBI would unmask his comments and compare them to his answers. That would be illegal.
Flynn was forced to resign. The conspirators had successfully eliminated the one person with the experience and gumption to discover their dirty tricks and go after them for it. Once Flynn had been successfully sidelined, insiders combined with the media to invent a phony Russia narrative that called into question Trump’s legitimacy.
Republicans played leading roles ginning up Russia hysteria during the transition. Trump appointed Exxon chairman Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state. He had received the Order of Friendship from Vladimir Putin in 2013, for his work on the Arctic Exploration Pact with Russia’s state-owned oil company, Rosneft. Tillerson drew the ire of Marco Rubio, a prominent Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who tweeted, “Being a ‘friend of Vladimir’ is not an attribute I am hoping for from a #SecretaryOfState – MR.”
Sen. John McCain expressed opposition to Tillerson’s appointment. McCain went on TV to declare that “Vladimir Putin is a thug, and a murderer, and a killer….and a KGB agent.” Trump’s attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, ridiculously recused himself from the Russia probe because he had recently seen the Russian ambassador in a reviewing line at the Senate, which somehow placed him under investigation for collusion.
Both sides in Washington – Republicans and Democrats – were now playing the same Russia game. Everyone knew their role. Buzzfeed released the Steele Dossier to much fanfare on January 10, 2017, and it caused a feeding frenzy in the media. A new wave of reporting ensued, using smears and innuendo to question whether Trump was controlled by Russia. In 2021, Axios offered a muffled after-the-fact apology calling the reporting, “one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history….”
FBI Director James Comey attended a meeting before Trump’s inauguration, during which President Obama posited that “we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia” with the new president. Comey had an obligation to say, “Mr. President, with due respect, the FBI gathers intelligence for the president, and once you’re out the door and the new guy is in here, I have an obligation to share everything with him, even embarrassing facts that show we were using the FBI to improperly surveil his campaign.” Instead, Comey – who was up to his neck in the political operation at this point – saluted and said, “Yes sir.”
Moments after the inauguration, while she still had access to her computer – in a clumsy attempt to paper the record – Susan Rice sent a CYA email stating President Obama had said during the earlier meeting that they should do everything by-the-book. Ambassador Rice wrote:
President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book’. The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.
Early in his administration, President Trump met with Comey on several occasions and asked him to make public what he had told the president privately: that the president was not a target of the Russia investigation. Comey refused, and Trump fired him.
Comey then leaked notes of his meetings with Trump, he claimed under oath, to get a special counsel appointed. He did not say what he knew behind the scenes about the inner workings of Washington that convinced him his notes would yield that result.
Because of the Sessions recusal, the special counsel decision devolved to the second in command at the Justice Department, Rod Rosenstein, a Washington insider who had been recommended to Trump by Republican leaders. Without any evidence that showed a possible crime, Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller to investigate, “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.”
Mueller had been Obama’s director of the FBI until 2013. He had previously explored Paul Manafort’s advocacy on behalf of Yanukovych in Ukraine. Manafort may or may not have violated tax and banking laws in 2010. Given the twisted and arcane nature of those laws, who knows? What is known is that Manafort first was investigated for breaking those laws way back then. A discretionary decision was made not to prosecute.
Nevertheless, in 2017, the Office of Special Counsel in the Russia probe indicted Manafort for hiding income that he received in 2010 from Ukraine. Mueller essentially dusted off some old files from when he ran the FBI and indicted Trump’s one-time campaign manager on a stale tax charge.
Mueller also indicted underlings in the Trump campaign for process crimes, inanities like – in the case of George Papadopoulos – not correctly stating the date when he officially joined the campaign, which the media then portrayed as “an indictment for lying to the FBI in the Russia probe.” They also indicted Flynn for lying to the FBI in an interview that was itself a set-up.
The Roger Stone prosecution was emblematic of the through-the-looking-glass world of the Mueller probe. Stone had been a Trump-friend and confidante for years. He claimed in 2016 that he had a connection to Wikileaks and therefore could speculate with credibility about Clinton email contents and their drop date.
When questioned after the election as part of a Congressional investigation, he said his backchannel to WikiLeaks was comedian and radio talk show host Randy Credico. Credico admitted that at the time he was leading Stone to believe he had an in with Julian Assange, who had been on his radio show. He wrote an email to Stone on September 18, 2016: “that batch probably coming out in the next drop… I can’t ask them favors every other day. I asked one of his lawyers… they have major legal headaches riggt [sic] now… relax.”
Stone did not tell investigators that when he failed to get insider knowledge from Credico, he had a colleague, Jerome Corsi, try to contact Wikileaks. Corsi was unsuccessful in those attempts. In America, apparently, if your name is not James Comey or John Brennan, failure to disclose to Congress something you consider immaterial gets you indicted for perjury.
Any unbiased investigator would have looked at the Roger Stone facts and said, “Who cares?” Stone certainly had reason to believe Credico was a backchannel, and he had email evidence to prove it. Moreover, if Trump’s people really needed a backchannel to contact Wikileaks to inquire when the emails were being released, that means they did not have direct contact when the emails were obtained.
Once the Mueller team found out that Trump confidantes could not even get hold of Assange, it was time to end the inquiry over whether Trump conspired with Assange.
Stone emailed Credico after talking to investigators and said, basically, you better not lie to them like you lied to me or I’ll kill your therapy dog. That sort of bluster was not unusual in their relationship. Stone had once joked on social media that Credico had died of a drug overdose.
For his gag about killing the dog, Stone was also prosecuted for witness tampering, even though Credico himself admitted that he never felt threatened and considered it a joke. The prosecution of Roger Stone (before a tainted jury) was a misuse of the legal process for political ends. It was designed to generate a month’s worth of misleading headlines, each some variant of “Trump Advisor Found Guilty of Lying About Wikileaks.”
Stone was convicted and President Trump was forced, by the rules of fairness, to commute his sentence and incur unneeded controversy in an election year among voters who were purposely conned by the ridiculous prosecution.
The only actual Russians Mueller indicted were associated with an internet troll farm that, the indictment suggested, Putin had used to influence the 2016 election for Trump. The troll farm, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), had purchased $100,000 worth of Facebook ads, more than half of them after the election, and only a small percentage having anything to do with the candidates themselves.
The Mueller Report concluded that “[t]he Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” They did it by “a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.”
The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee commissioned two reports, from the University of Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Research Project and the firm New Knowledge, that also concluded that the IRA had influenced the election by social media posts.
The posts uncovered by the Senate and the Special Counsel, though, were beyond strange. Most had nothing to do with the election. Hilariously, Mueller tried to prove his case against the troll farm in court. The IRA unexpectedly hired lawyers to mount a defense instead of suffering an empty, unenforceable conviction by default. Turns out, nobody could connect even the minor trolling to Putin.
US District Judge Dabney Friedrich, who presided over the trial, noted the indictment in the case “does not link the [IRA] to the Russian government” and alleged “only private conduct by private actors.” The judge prohibited prosecutors from publicly claiming that the troll farm was sponsored by the Russian government, because there was no evidence of that.
The Justice Department was forced to dismiss the indictment.
As a final, desperation play, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report that defied the findings of the Mueller probe and suggested that Trump colluded with Putin during the 2016 election when Paul Manafort sent some polling data to Ukrainian Konstantin Kilimnik. There is no evidence that Kilimnik was a Russian agent or that the otherwise available polling data could possibly be used to influence an election.
Instead, by all accounts (even Mueller’s), Manafort was just trying to impress a possible consulting client who had previously worked closely with the Obama administration (far more closely than with the Trump campaign). That the U.S. Senate was willing to engineer the Russian interference virus into a strain that even Mueller rejected shows how much Washington wanted the phony political operation to continue.
At the end of it all, after tens of millions of dollars in investigations, and countless words spilled in the media alluding to a Russian conspiracy to steal the 2016 election, there was nothing there.
Attorney General William Barr eventually dispatched U.S. Attorney John Durham to investigate the origins of the Russia probe. Durham obtained one guilty plea. Turns out, FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith fabricated evidence to get a FISA warrant on Carter page. Otherwise, the Russiagate conspirators escaped. Once the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee conceded that Vladimir Putin meddled in the election, it gave the bad guys an airtight alibi.
John Brennan, James Comey, James Clapper et al. could say that whatever they did to stop the Red Menace from interfering in our democracy makes them American heroes. When he was interviewed, Brennan probably told U.S. Attorney John Durham that President Obama became concerned about Russian interference way back in 2015 and instructed the CIA to use all intelligence tools at its disposal to get to the bottom of it.
Guaranteed, that caused Durham to tug at his beard and ask, “How do you indict high ranking officials for protecting America?”
Durham never took the next logical step to call this operation what it was: a Washington power grab against an outsider using false Russian flags. He would have to cross lots of powerful Republicans and Democrats to take his investigation to its natural conclusion. That is unfortunate, because his failure has continued to vector American foreign policy in the direction of war.
“Putin is a thug” is a mantra that funds think tanks and embellishes the hero’s journey of many of Washington’s most notable Republicans. It is sourced less in fact than in constant repetition. How is Russia worse than Saudi Arabia, to whom the United States supplies F-15s and military training?
When President Trump finally met with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July 2018, he expressed skepticism about the Putin-did-it racket. At a joint press conference with the Russian president, Trump was asked about allegations of Russian election meddling and he responded, “President Putin says it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be.”
He added, “I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics,” signaling that he believed Russian interference was primarily an invention of his political enemies.
Trump even dared to bring up the FBI’s failure to test the DNC servers: “You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server — haven’t they taken the server.... Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee?”
The Western media predictably went nuts. But the frenzy scuttled upon the rocks of public opinion, as usually happened with Trump. The Washington Post could not figure out the polling numbers Trump received after publicly rejecting the fake Russia meddled in the election narrative:
[P]ublic reaction nationally [to the Helsinki summit] appears more muted than in Washington, where Trump faced withering bipartisan criticism for appearing to side with Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies at a July 16 news conference in Helsinki.
The lesson? Standing against swamp politics to reestablish friendly relations with an armed nuclear state is not something that upsets ordinary Americans.
It is possible to admire the pure audacity of the plotters and their friends in the media for pulling this one off. For the first two and a half years of Trump’s presidency, they constructed a diabolical trap: if he denied that Russia interfered in the election it meant he himself was colluding in the conspiracy.
Republicans stupidly insisted on conceding phony Russian intrigue, which allowed the plotters to say they were justified to investigate it. Russian collusion was a hoax. It is time to finally admit that there was no Russian interference either.
The Republican establishment’s slavish acceptance of Washington’s Putin-did-it lie perfectly illustrates why it regularly loses political battles. Gifted in 2016 with undeserved victory in a generational realignment that they were dragged to kicking and screaming, they proceeded to question its source and validity.
Because if Trump was a product of KGB-esque intrigue, then Hillary was a victim of meddling. Trump was at least a hapless beneficiary. The basket of deplorables were not only racist losers, they were also Putin’s unwitting stooges.
There was always a basic logical contradiction in Russiagate: If the Steele dossier tapped Russian sources to reveal a Putin plot to harm Hillary, why did it primarily include crazy stuff that hurt Trump? And if it was created to smear Trump, why did the intelligence community rely on it to conclude that Putin was out to get Hillary?
Read closely, the dossier tells you who fabricated it beginning on its first page:
Source B asserted that the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN. Its aim was to sow discord and disunity within the US itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance which was viewed as inimical to Russia’s interests. Source C, a senior Russian financial official said that the TRUMP operation should be seen in terms of PUTIN’s desire to return to Nineteenth Century ‘Great Power’ politics anchored upon countries’ interests rather than ideals-based international order established after World War Two. S/he had heard PUTIN talking in this way to close associates on several occasions.
The key is the use of the descriptor trans-“Atlantic” in describing Putin’s ambitions. That is a Washington insider word. It is the “A” in NATO. It is the “Atlantic” in Atlantic Council. Unless Vladimir Putin goes around the Kremlin talking like a NATO lobbyist, he never said any of those things.
An ideals-based Transatlantic alliance that defies the rabble who prefer governance based on national interest is, instead, the postwar foreign policy paradigm called Atlanticism.
In the end, the political class wanted Russian interference to be true because of Atlanticism’s continuing hold over the American soul. The evil geniuses behind this operation baited the hook with a Putin lure knowing that the Republican establishment (see, e.g. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, NeverTrump) would not be able to resist.
“Russia v. America the Rematch” would make America 1985 again, and Republican insiders threatened by Trump’s insurgency would reclaim their petty thrones and dominions.
If there were not places like the Brookings Institution and the Atlantic Council funded by foreign governments with pecuniary interests in keeping NATO bases in their countries, this operation never would have gotten off the ground.
The Russia hysteria proves, more than anything, that America is not a democracy. It is an insider-ocracy run by lobbyists and think tanks even against the choices of American voters. Eisenhower said to beware the military industrial complex, and that remains a fair description of the great amorphous beast.
Trump’s first term was crippled by Atlanticism. In his second term, he has turned spectacularly on the beast, driving a stake into its still beating heart. The true facts of Russiagate are especially important as the Trump administration proceeds to transform the foreign policy establishment. The above telling is the full story of the worst scandal in American political history.
https://cms.zerohedge.com/users/tyler-durden
Fri, 03/07/2025 - 18:25
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trump-v-atlanticism-understanding-russiagate
The Risk Of A Recession Isn't Zero
The Risk Of A Recession Isn't Zero
https://realinvestmentadvice.com/resources/blog/the-risk-of-a-recession-isnt-zero/
The risk of a recession in the U.S. is not zero. This is particularly true as the current Administration tackles Government bloat and implements tariffs. However, before we discuss why the risk of a recession could increase, it is crucial to remember the 2022 experience. At that time, most economists were convinced a “recession was imminent.” As discussed in early 2023, it was the most anticipated recession ever.
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The economy printed very weak quarterly reports in early 2022. Therefore, it was just a function of time before the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) announced it.
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Yet, it never occurred.
As we penned at the time, there were two reasons for this. The first was the signal from the financial markets.
“While the “recession alerts” from various sources suggest a forthcoming recession, the market continues to trade more bullishly. The market is often said to be a leading indicator of the economy. Therefore, market participants suggest an economic recovery is at hand. A case can be made that data has become so negative that even economic stabilization may start turning sentiment-based surveys more optimistic.”
Those signals turned out correct, as economic surveys turned more optimistic and earnings growth expanded as the economy accelerated.
As the NBER later noted, the second reason is that employment never fell to recessionary levels. Despite recessionary indicators like inverted yield curves and the Leading Economic Index suggesting a recession was forthcoming. The hopes of a “soft landing” scenario were squarely pinned on the consistently strong employment reports.
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Notably, the NBER was correct in not calling a recession based on two-quarters of very weak GDP prints. Employment is the backbone of a consumption-driven economy. Therefore, the consistently strong employment reports suggested the economy would likely begin to accelerate, which it did.
However, the risk of a recession may now increase as the Trump Administration attacks the three previous economic supports.
Spending, Immigration & Employment
As noted, while many indicators suggested a recession was imminent in 2023, we said three factors kept the economy from declining.
Massive federal spending via the Inflation Reduction and CHIPs acts
Accelerated immigration provides companies with cheaper labor
Massive expansion in Government hiring.
The amount of federal spending injected into the economy was enormous. Therefore, the economy’s strength was unsurprising, given the ongoing financial stimulus from the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act and a surge in deficit spending. https://realinvestmentadvice.com/deficit-spending-keeping-the-economy-out-of-recession/
keeps the economy out of recession.
“As noted, the problem remains on how the economy has avoided a recession despite the Fed’s aggressive rate hiking campaign. Numerous indicators, from the leading economic index to the yield curve, suggest a high probability of an economic recession, but one has yet to occur. One explanation for this has been the surge in Federal expenditures since the end of 2022 stemming from the Inflation Reduction and CHIPs Acts. The second reason is that GDP was so grossly elevated from the $5 Trillion in previous fiscal policies that the lag effect is taking longer than historical norms to resolve.”
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That surge in spending has a relatively long “lag effect,” as it takes time from the passage of the fiscal spending bills to distribution to economic utilization. Billions of dollars remain in those bills, seeping into the economy. However, budgetary support for the economy is declining as the amount of M2 as a percentage of GDP reverses.
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Secondly, two primary drivers were behind the “consistently strong” employment reports. The first was the massive influx of immigration into the U.S., which led to a surge of “cheaper” employees for companies to boost profit margins. Since 2019, foreign-born employment has increased by 4.38 million jobs, while native-born employment has dropped by 513 thousand.
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Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell noted that point in a https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/powell-tells-60-minutes-fed-not-likely-cut-march
To wit:
“SCOTT PELLEY: Why was immigration important?
FED CHAIR POWELL: Because, you know, immigrants come in, and they tend to work at a rate that is at or above that for non-immigrants. Immigrants who come to the country tend to be in the workforce at a slightly higher level than native Americans. But that’s primarily because of the age difference. They tend to skew younger.“
As shown below, hiring unauthorized immigrants has been significant in recent years.
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If Jerome Powell is correct, hiring unauthorized immigrants has helped suppress wages. When combined with increased productivity, it reduces the amount of required labor improving corporate profitability.
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Lastly, a significant chunk of the “stronger than expected” employment reports also came from Government hiring. As shown, post-pandemic, Government hires comprised a large portion of the monthly net employment change, particularly in 2022 and 2023.
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However, the current Administration is now keenly focused on reducing immigration, cutting the size of government, and reducing the deficit.
The Risk Of A Recession Is Not Zero
As noted, since the beginning of the year, immigration flows into the U.S. have dropped dramatically as U.S. policy toward immigration has tightened significantly. While the full impact of these changes has yet to be felt, they will most likely appear in areas primarily exposed to cheaper labor, such as restaurants, leisure and healthcare, construction, and manufacturing-related industries. Those areas have provided substantial employment gains over the last few years, so any reversal will not go unnoticed.
Secondly, with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) working to streamline government expenditures, reducing Government spending will also negatively impact economic growth. The chart below shows the budget deficit as a percentage of GDP (inverted) versus the annual rate of change in GDP. What should be noted is that when the budget deficit increases, so does the economy. This is because increased government spending eventually finds its way into the economy. Therefore, if DOGE is successful in its endeavors to reduce Government spending and, more notably, Government employment, it will reduce the deficit by extracting capital from the economy.
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What is crucial to understand is that the surge in monetary support acted as an “adrenaline” boost to the economy. Yes, many economic data series still suggest the risk of recession is elevated. However, the surge in government spending has kept the economy afloat, defying economists‘ “recession predictions” in recent years.
The crucial point to understand, and what eludes most economists, is that the economy will slow as that “adrenaline” boost fades. Had the economy been growing at 5% nominal, as in 2019, the decline from the post-pandemic peak would already register a recession. However, given that nominal growth neared 18%, it has taken much longer than normal for growth to revert below zero. To show this, we looked at the number of quarters between peak economic activity and the entrance into a recession. Using that historical analysis, we can estimate the reversion of economic growth into a recession could take roughly 22 quarters. Such would time the next downturn in late 2025 to mid-2026.
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Many things could certainly happen to lengthen or shorten that estimated time frame. However, it is essential to note that a reversal of growth from elevated growth rates has taken much longer than usual, making mainstream economists comfortable claiming victory of the “soft landing” in the economy.
Yes, there are very few indications of recessionary risk today. However, with the current Administration’s focus on reducing government spending and immigration while imposing tariffs on our trading partners, the risk of a recession later this year or next is likely not zero.
For more in-depth analysis and actionable investment strategies, visit https://realinvestmentadvice.com/
. Stay ahead of the markets with expert insights tailored to help you achieve your financial goals.
https://cms.zerohedge.com/users/tyler-durden
Fri, 03/07/2025 - 14:05
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/risk-recession-isnt-zero
DHS Ends TSA Collective Bargaining After Bombshell Finding Of 'More Full-Time Union Workers' Than Airport Screeners
DHS Ends TSA Collective Bargaining After Bombshell Finding Of 'More Full-Time Union Workers' Than Airport Screeners
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is ending collective bargaining for Transportation Security Officers with the TSA, Fox News reports, citing a release obtained by Fox Business.
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According to the report, The TSA has more people doing "full-time union work" vs. performing actual screening functions at 86% of US airports. Put another way, 374 out of 432 federalized airports have fewer than 200 TSA Officers to perform screening functions, while the rest are paid by the government but work "full-time on union matters" and do not retain certification to perform screening.
What's more, DHS cited a recent TSA employee survey which found that over 60% of "poor performers" are allowed to stay employed and "not surprisingly, continue to not perform."
(Also, maybe get rid of the nut-grabbers in the TSA patdown area when we don't want to submit to those Total Recall scanners made by Leidos - formerly SAIC).
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According to DHS, eliminating collective bargaining will make airports more efficient by eliminating "bureaucratic hurdles that will enhance productivity, and lower passengers' wait times in security lines."
DHS says that TSA Officers will now be promoted based on performance vs. tenure or union membership.
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"Thanks to [DHS] Secretary Noem’s action, Transportation Security Officers will no longer lose their hard-earned dollars to a union that does not represent them. The Trump Administration is committed to returning to merit-based hiring and firing policies," a DHS spokesperson said in a statement, adding "This action will ensure Americans will have a more effective and modernized [workforce] across the nation’s transportation networks—meaning shorter airport security wait times. TSA is renewing its commitment to providing a quick and secure travel process for Americans."
https://cms.zerohedge.com/users/tyler-durden
Fri, 03/07/2025 - 13:20
CNN Retracts Fact-Check Over Trump's Transgender Mice Claim
CNN Retracts Fact-Check Over Trump's Transgender Mice Claim
https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/06/cnn-retracts-fact-check-over-trumps-transgender-mice-claim/
Following President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, CNN attempted to issue a fact-check on his claim of government spending on experimentation with transgender mice; the network was subsequently forced to make a retraction.
As the https://dailycaller.com/2025/03/05/donald-trump-cnn-fact-checking-transgender-mice-address/
reports, President Trump revealed during the speech – his first address to Congress as the 47th President – that his administration had uncovered $8.2 million in funding at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to use “gender-affirming” treatments on mice.
CNN’s Deidre McPhillips tried to claim this was false, and that only about $500,000 was spent on these experiments.
“Trump falsely claimed that the Department of Government Efficiency identified government spending of ‘$8 million for making mice transgender,’” said CNN’s original statement.
The White House responded by issuing a statement confirming that the original amount of $8.2 million was accurate.
“Last night, President Donald J. Trump highlighted many of the egregious examples of waste, fraud and abuse funded by the American taxpayers, including $8 million spent by the Biden Administration ‘for making mice transgender,’” the statement from the White House declared.
“The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual).”
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The statement included a full list of all NIH grants that provided funding for such experimentation on mice.
This included $3.1 million to study the role of hormones in mediating sex influences in asthma,
$2.5 million on studying the reproductive effects of hormone therapy,
and $1.2 million on studies regarding “androgen effects on the reproductive neuroendocrine axis.”
Smaller amounts included $735,113 on studies analyzing the impact of hormone therapy on mouse microbiomes,
$455,000 to study “gender-affirming hormone therapy on HIV-vaccine induced immune responses,”
and $299,940 on studying the risks of breast cancer in testosterone therapy.
All experiments were conducted on mice.
After the White House rebuttal, CNN updated its fact-check statement by changing the summary from “Trump falsely claimed” to “This claim needs context.”
https://cms.zerohedge.com/users/tyler-durden
Fri, 03/07/2025 - 13:00
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/cnn-retracts-fact-check-over-trumps-transgender-mice-claim
Trump: Everybody Should Get Rid Of Their Nuclear Weapons
Trump: Everybody Should Get Rid Of Their Nuclear Weapons
https://libertarianinstitute.org/news/trump-everybody-should-get-rid-of-their-nuclear-weapons/
President Donald Trump https://x.com/amconmag/status/1897744596605530253
his desire to abolish nuclear weapons during a White House presser on Thursday. "It would be great if everybody would get rid of their nuclear weapons. [I know] Russia and us have by far the most," the president told reporters in the Oval Office.
"China will have an equal amount within four to five years. It would be great if we could all de-nuclearize because the power of nuclear weapons is crazy," the president emphasized.
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Currently, nine countries – the US, UK, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel – possess nuclear weapons. With global tensions on the rise, several nations, including the US, are adding to their strategic capability.
to the Defense Intelligence Agency, Beijing is working to ramp up its production of nuclear weapons. Last year, the agency predicted that China could have over 1,000 nuclear weapons. However, that would still give Beijing a far smaller arsenal than Washington and Moscow, which each have around 1,500 deployed nuclear weapons and thousands more in storage.
Shortly after returning to the White House in January, Trump said he https://news.antiwar.com/2025/01/23/trump-says-he-wants-to-work-with-china-and-russia-on-denuclearization/
during his first term, and that the Russian leader was receptive to the idea. "We were talking about denuclearization of our two countries, and China would have come along. China right now has a much smaller nuclear armament than us, or field, than us, but they’re going to be catching [up] at some point," Trump said.
"I will tell you that President Putin really liked the idea of cutting back on nuclear, and I think the rest of the world, we would have gotten them to follow, and China would have come along too. China also liked it," he added. "Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about. It’s too depressing."
Trump has also discussed negotiating a deal with Moscow and Beijing that would see all three countries https://news.antiwar.com/2025/02/13/trump-says-military-spending-could-be-cut-in-half-and-that-theres-no-reason-to-build-new-nukes/
spending.
However, while Trump has at times voiced support for demilitarization and denuclearization, during his first term in office he https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/dangerous-game-how-the-wreckage-of-russiagate-ignited-a-new-cold-war/
, the Open Skies and the Intermediate Range Nuclear Force treaties.
President Trump:
"It would be great if everybody would get rid of their nuclear weapons. I know Russia and us have by far the most. China will have an equal amount within 4-5 years. It would be great if we could all de-nuclearize because the power of nuclear weapons is crazy." https://t.co/Mv2GAyXlTn
— The American Conservative (@amconmag) https://twitter.com/amconmag/status/1897744596605530253?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Additionally, Trump refused to engage in bilateral discussions with Russia on extending the last nuclear arms control agreement between the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals, the New Start Treaty. He insisted that Moscow must pressure Beijing to make it a trilateral deal, a demand that almost led to the downfall of the landmark deal.
Though President Joe Biden was able to reach an agreement with Putin to extend the treaty for five more years in 2021, it is set to expire next year without another extension.
https://cms.zerohedge.com/users/tyler-durden
Fri, 03/07/2025 - 09:05
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/trump-everybody-should-get-rid-their-nuclear-weapons
Busy Week For America's Space Industry. Here's What Happened...
Busy Week For America's Space Industry. Here's What Happened...
Thursday was an eventful day for America's space industry.
Intuitive Machines' six-legged Athena lander failed to land upright, marking its second unsuccessful landing.
Meanwhile, SpaceX's Starship mega-rocket ended in a fiery demise (Test Flight 8) over the Caribbean. However, there were some bright spots —Starship's Super Heavy first-stage booster returned to Earth as planned and was successfully caught mid-air by massive "chopsticks."
Earlier in the week, Firefly Aerospace's "Blue Ghost" lander became the first private spacecraft to land on the Moon successfully.
Let's begin with Intuitive Machines. Shares of the Houston-based spacecraft startup plunged 20% on Thursday, extending losses to as much as 34% in premarket trading after the Athena spacecraft landed on its side, complicating power generation from its solar panels and rendering the mission "off-nominal."
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Canaccord Genuity analyst Austin Moeller noted that Intuitive Machines had received roughly 90% of its $120 million contract for the landing. However, some milestone payments depend on the operation of payloads, including a drill to check for water or ice below the lunar surface and the first data center and cellular network on the Moon.
Intuitive Machines says its second moon lander fell on its side for the second time. The company is one of many primed by NASA to return the United States to the moon https://t.co/Y9uUwzibKD
— Reuters (@Reuters) https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1897952866670706834?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
This is Intuitive Machines' second moon landing attempt. The previous attempt did not go as planned; the IM-1 spacecraft tipped over on its side during a hard landing last year.
Separately, SpaceX's Starship mega-rocket exploded in low Earth orbit during a test flight, marking its second consecutive failure this year.
Just saw Starship 8 blow up from our flight https://twitter.com/elonmusk?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
— DegenZee (@Degen_Zee) https://twitter.com/Degen_Zee/status/1897808441814794740?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
However, the Super Heavy first-stage booster successfully returned to Earth as planned and was caught in mid-air by SpaceX's chopsticks crane.
Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster! https://t.co/JFeJSdnQ5x
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1897794546781532408?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
"Unfortunately, this happened last time too, so we've got some practice now," SpaceX spokesperson Dan Huot said on the live stream.
SpaceX provided color on what went wrong with Starship.
During Starship's ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost. Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses.
We will review the data from today's flight test to better…
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1897803612098900131?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
And will correct it for the next flight.
With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability. We will conduct a thorough investigation, in coordination with the FAA, and implement corrective actions to make improvements on future Starship flight tests… https://t.co/3ThPm0Yzky
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1897841723851645064?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Last Sunday, Firefly Aerospace's "Blue Ghost" lander became the first private spacecraft to land on the Moon successfully.
Blue Ghost’s shadow seen on the Moon’s surface! We’ll continue to share images and updates throughout our surface operations. https://twitter.com/hashtag/BGM1?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
— Firefly Aerospace (@Firefly_Space) https://twitter.com/Firefly_Space/status/1896158394295390367?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
America's private space industry is heating up.
Let's not forget: The https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/spacex-rockets-launched-86-all-upmass-space-q3
last month).
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The US plans to send astronauts to the lunar surface in a series of crewed missions by the end of the decade. Musk recently https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/elon-musk-says-first-starship-mars-mission-two-years-make-america-healthy-again-ensure
that the first Starship mission to Mars would be in two years.
What's the vibe these days? Well... Make Space Great Again.
https://cms.zerohedge.com/users/tyler-durden
Fri, 03/07/2025 - 07:45
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/busy-week-americas-space-industry-heres-what-happened
'Civil War Is Now Official' - Syria Erupts Into Worst Bloodshed Since Assad's Fall
'Civil War Is Now Official' - Syria Erupts Into Worst Bloodshed Since Assad's Fall
Any lingering delusions that Syria could emerge from its Western-imposed, regime-change victimhood and enter an era of peace and stability were obliterated on Thursday, as 48 people were killed in battles between supporters of the deposed Bashar al Assad government and the country's new radical Islamist regime. As all-out civil war looms, increasingly disturbing sectarian violence has an important minority sect asking for Russian intervention to safeguard their lives.
Insane videos coming out of Syria after the announcement of an uprising against Jolani's regime https://t.co/sizIupxiSf
— COMBATE |🇵🇷 (@upholdreality) https://twitter.com/upholdreality/status/1897837521498746904?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
In the town of Jableh, which lies in Syria's coastal Latakia province, https://www.dw.com/en/syria-sees-worst-day-of-violence-since-ouster-of-assad/a-71852125
.
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The ambush was well-executed, according to a security official in Latakia. "[In] a well-planned and premeditated attack, several groups of Assad militia remnants attacked our positions and checkpoints, targeting many of our patrols in the Jableh area," Mustafa Kneifati told German news outlet https://www.dw.com/en/syria-sees-worst-day-of-violence-since-ouster-of-assad/a-71852125
. Those pro-Assad forces are said to have included soldiers loyal to former Syrian army General Suheil al-Hassan, though it's unknown whether Hassan himself participated in the battles. The fighting spanned over a period of hours, with regime security forces responding to the ambush with helicopter gunships and artillery.
Alawites in Jableh countryside defend themselves after Al-Jolani gangs attack their villages https://twitter.com/hashtag/BREAKING?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
— Al-Julani gangs (@AlJulanigangs) https://twitter.com/AlJulanigangs/status/1897660187730681874?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Thursday's fighting may be just a precursor to something far more intense: There are https://x.com/DD_Geopolitics/status/1897874674769396171
moving toward the Syrian coastal region.
The combat comes alongside rising sectarian violence, with Sunni militants victimizing Alawites who had long enjoyed peace as the Alawite Assad family ruled the country from 1971 until December 2024, when https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/jihadists-reach-outskirts-damascus-amid-likely-transition-power-deal-assads-fate
fled as Sunni extremists took over. While the new government repeatedly warns against sectarian reprisals against Alawites, citizens say security forces themselves have engaged in executions, kidnappings and home seizures.
Videos are circulating on social media which purportedly show the horrors being visited on the Alawites. From a grisly video that's said to show https://x.com/DanLinnaeus/status/1897799318125285657
, to another that's described as capturing Sunnis shooting at the residences of Alawites in Homs province:
So America, Turkey and Israel helped Osama bin Laden's guys take over Syria – what's the worst that could happen, right?
Okay, I know you're remembering that time Obama and Brennan created the ISIS Caliphate 10 years ago and then Iraq War III to destroy it again. Fair point. https://t.co/LvOD8Qvb1C
— Scott Horton (@scotthortonshow) https://twitter.com/scotthortonshow/status/1897775914278154310?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
...while another is said to shows an Alawite's body being dragged behind an SUV...
HTS is dragging the bodies of Alawites behind cars in Latakia. Utterly horrific. https://t.co/vE46ze7e9y
— Lindsey Snell (@LindseySnell) https://twitter.com/LindseySnell/status/1897791503503872376?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
...and this video is described as depicting civilians "armed by the Syrian government" menacing Alawite towns with loyalties to the fallen Assad government:
Civilians 'armed by Syrian govt' rampage 'to the Alawite towns' tied to Assad — alleged social media video https://t.co/MMMLG0apAv
— RT (@RT_com) https://twitter.com/RT_com/status/1897879538530423101?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
In addition to the Alawite ambush against regime forces, protests against the new Sunni regime erupted in several cities, including Latakia City and Tartous, with demonstrators demanding that regime forces withdraw from the area. Russia's https://x.com/RT_com/status/1897894770858504343
reports that Alawites are begging for Russia, the United Nations and the international community to protect them from attacks at the hands of regime forces and allies, whom they accuse of entering the coastal region "under the pretext of pursuing remnants of the [Assad] regime -- while in reality, aiming to terrorize and kill the Syrian people in general and the Alawite community in particular."
One of their own is saying it, The New Syrian Government is Handing weapons out to Sunnis like candy in Hama to go kill alawites in the Coast ( Lattakia and Tartous ) https://t.co/YlVJo7NWcy
— Rūm ☦︎ن (@Syrian_Rumm) https://twitter.com/Syrian_Rumm/status/1897816097992188222?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
More significantly, RT said "civil war is now official," pointing to a public declaration that establishes a new "Military Council for the Liberation of Syria." Among the group's goals:
"Liberating all Syrian terrirtory from all occupying and terrorist forces"
"Rebuilding strong institutions on national and democratic foundations"
"Protecting the lives and property of Syrian citizens"
"We call on all Syrians, from different sects, regions and ethnicities, to join our ranks and stand with us in this historical stage," the new group https://x.com/RT_com/status/1897817090242793775
.
https://twitter.com/hashtag/Breaking?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
— Babak Taghvaee - The Crisis Watch (@BabakTaghvaee1) https://twitter.com/BabakTaghvaee1/status/1897766326824767923?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Meanwhile, to the extent that https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/why-israel-wants-syria-become-failed-state
, there are smiles aplenty in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as the chaos and bloodshed mount...
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https://cms.zerohedge.com/users/tyler-durden
Fri, 03/07/2025 - 06:55
France Steps Up Its Military Intelligence To Ukraine After US Halt
France Steps Up Its Military Intelligence To Ukraine After US Halt
France is reportedly stepping up its intelligence assistance to Kiev after the Trump-ordered pause in all US intelligence-sharing this week, which was triggered by President Zelensky's resistance to signing a minerals deal, as well as last Friday's row involving the Ukrainian leader.
French defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu confirmed efforts to fill the gap, https://www.euronews.com/2025/03/06/france-to-continue-sharing-military-intelligence-with-ukraine-after-us-freeze
, "Our intelligence is sovereign" and that "We have intelligence that we allow Ukraine to benefit from."
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Lecornu revealed that French President Emmanuel Macron asked him to "accelerate the various French aid packages" to make up for the halt in American assistance.
As we highlighted https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/planes-carrying-arms-ukraine-were-turned-around-midflight
:
After the order was given, all U.S. weapons shipments to Ukraine came to a stop, as of 6 p.m. on Monday evening, according to a defense official. Planes carrying supplies en route to Ukraine would have had to turn around, the official said.
French defense chief Lecornu also in his comments confirmed that shipments of Ukraine-bound aid departing from Poland had been suspended, and offered as an aside that "Ukrainians, unfortunately, have learned to fight this war for three years now and know how to stockpile."
As for intelligence-sharing, it's also expected that other European agencies will step up help in the wake of the American withdrawal.
The US had for years helped Ukraine's military with tracking and targeting Russian troop movements and major targets. However, the Kremlin warned the whole time of its 'red lines' - especially Western assistance to long-range missile strikes on Russian territory.
The suspension of U.S. intelligence sharing with Ukraine is “selective” – Kyiv has been denied data needed for deep strikes deep inside Russia.
Source: Sky News https://t.co/Vei4mNAHe8
— Clash Report (@clashreport) https://twitter.com/clashreport/status/1897277383771914667?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
On Wednesday a source speaking with Sky News said that in the beginning US intelligence was still trickling to Kiev on a selective bases, but later https://news.sky.com/story/us-stops-sharing-all-intelligence-with-ukraine-source-tells-sky-news-13322070
, "A few hours ago, the exchange of all information was stopped."
CIA director John Ratcliffe called the suspension a "pause" - while national security adviser Mike Waltz said Washington had "taken a step back" regarding this close relationship with Kiev. But yesterday in a televised speech Macron https://www.google.com/search?q=macron+anti-russia+zero+hedge&oq=macron+anti-russia+zero+hedge&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRiPAtIBCTEwNjQyajBqN6gCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
, claiming that Putin threatens all of Europe and that France is mulling extending its nuclear umbrella across the European continent.
https://cms.zerohedge.com/users/tyler-durden
Fri, 03/07/2025 - 04:15
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/france-steps-military-intelligence-ukraine-after-us-halt
"$1 Trillion Labyrinth": Canada's Brookfield Investigated By FT For Self-Dealing, Complex Financials
"$1 Trillion Labyrinth": Canada's Brookfield Investigated By FT For Self-Dealing, Complex Financials
Dan McCrum, best known for his investigative journalism that exposed the Wirecard scandal, one of the biggest financial frauds in European history, is starting to ask critical questions of another company. This time it's Canada's Brookfield, an investment manager with nearly $1 trillion in assets.
McCrum's latest longform piece notes that Brookfield has drawn scrutiny for its complex financial practices, including internal transactions that bolster its reported earnings.
He notes that the company sells property to itself, potentially inflating earnings, and has recycled $2.8 billion into its real estate arm, obscuring financial health. Its insurers hold $7.7 billion in affiliated assets, including loans to Brookfield’s businesses and a stake in a music royalty firm—which the report indicates is unusual for an insurer.
Property valuations remain high despite market declines, and American National’s surplus has shrunk from $4 billion to $2.3 billion, raising fears that Brookfield is prioritizing its own stability over policyholders.
Last year, the company used $1.4 billion from its insurance arm to buy and sell properties within its own portfolio, boosting its "distributable earnings"—a key profit metric underpinning its $90 billion valuation, https://www.ft.com/content/6e070b14-74cc-4ade-bd80-7bd3900c6a82?emailId=716f16c9-e078-4496-abab-d2d4d37ac524&segmentId=ce31c7f5-c2de-09db-abdc-f2fd624da608
.
?itok=clFe4-6t
Critics, including Veritas Investment Research’s Dimitry Khmelnitsky, argue Brookfield is using its insurance businesses to offload assets at inflated prices during a challenging market. The company denies wrongdoing, insisting its transactions are transparent and regulators approve its deals.
notes that Brookfield owns an extensive but lossmaking real estate portfolio, including London's Canary Wharf and New York’s One Liberty Plaza.
While it tells investors its real estate empire is in good health, filings from its property unit reveal significant losses, the report says, with $2 billion in red ink last year and some mortgages in default. The company also injected $1.4 billion in equity into its real estate arm—more than the earnings reported from the sector.
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Some analysts see this as financial engineering. Independent analyst Keith Dalrymple calls Brookfield’s reporting “very deceptive,” arguing cash inflows are clearly stated while outflows require deep digging. The company rejects these claims, calling them “willfully mischaracterized.”
Further scrutiny comes as former Brookfield chairman Mark Carney runs to replace Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Meanwhile, billionaire investor Bill Ackman has heavily bet on Brookfield, seeing insurance as a key growth driver.
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Concerns also surround how Brookfield uses its Texas and Iowa life insurers, which hold billions in investments linked to other Brookfield businesses. American National, one of its insurers, has seen its capital shrink from $4 billion to $2.3 billion while its liabilities surged. Critics warn this setup shifts risks onto policyholders.
says Brookfield insists its insurance operations are well-capitalized and transparent. However, its opaque structure, spanning thousands of entities controlling $1 trillion in assets, leaves investors questioning whether the company prioritizes stability over clarity, the report alludes.
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Morgan Stanley analyst Michael Cyprys defended the company, however, saying: “Given the diversity of earnings streams that [it] unlocks by leveraging internal balance sheet capital as well as client capital, we see this translating into much larger earnings relative to fee-bearing capital, as compared to peers that lack balance sheet resources."
As a journalist for the Financial Times, McCrum spent years uncovering fraudulent activities at Wirecard, a German payments company once valued at over $24 billion.
His reporting then revealed that Wirecard had fabricated profits and engaged in widespread financial misconduct, ultimately leading to the company’s collapse in 2020. His work faced intense pushback, including legal threats and surveillance, but was later vindicated when Wirecard's CEO was arrested.
Read the entire longform Brookfield piece in the Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/6e070b14-74cc-4ade-bd80-7bd3900c6a82?emailId=716f16c9-e078-4496-abab-d2d4d37ac524&segmentId=ce31c7f5-c2de-09db-abdc-f2fd624da608
.
https://cms.zerohedge.com/users/tyler-durden
Fri, 03/07/2025 - 02:45
France, Germany, & Poland Are Competing For Leadership Of Post-Conflict Europe
France, Germany, & Poland Are Competing For Leadership Of Post-Conflict Europe
https://korybko.substack.com/p/france-germany-and-poland-are-competing
French President Macron’s https://apnews.com/article/french-president-macron-tariffs-nuclear-206478d8bd7ccb20eb79b60c30af018b
”, which refers to the German-led attempt to lead Europe’s containment of Russia.
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This concept requires Poland https://korybko.substack.com/p/poland-is-poised-to-play-an-important
”.
Poland’s economy is the https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/poland#:~:text=Poland%20is%20the%20largest%20economy%20in%20Central%20Europe.
. If these trends remain on track, Poland could prevent France or Germany from leading post-conflict Europe by carving out a US-backed sphere of influence in Central Europe, but it would have a shot at leadership in its own right if conservatives or populists come to power.
The sequence of events that would have to unfold begins with either of them winning the presidency, and this either pushing the liberal-globalists more in their direction ahead of fall 2027’s parliamentary elections or early elections being held on whatever pretext and then won by conservatives or populists. Poland’s former conservative government was very imperfect, but their country served as a bastion of EuroRealists (usually described by the Mainstream Media as Euroskeptics) during those eight years.
Should it reassume that role upon the return of conservative rule in parliament, perhaps in a coalition with populists, then this would perfectly align with Trump’s vision and could result in Poland either leading similar domestic political processes across the continent or at least in its own region. Even if only the second-mentioned scenario materializes, it would most effectively prevent liberal-globalist France or Germany from leading Europe as a whole by bifurcating it into ideologically competing halves.
France’s nuclear weapons are the ace up its sleeve though that it might play for keeping some conservative/populist-inclined societies under liberal-globalist sway by extending its umbrella over those countries which fear that Russia will invade but that they’ll then be abandoned by the US. That might help reshape some of their voters’ views if they come to feel dependent on France and thus decide to show fealty to it by keeping their ideologically aligned governments in power instead of change them.
This doesn’t mean that France will succeed, but what was explained above accounts for Macron’s unprecedented proposal in the context of his country’s Great Power ambitions at this historic moment. A lot in this regard will likely depend on the outcome of Romania’s domestic political crisis, which readers can learn more about https://thealtworld.com/andrew_korybko/romania-is-at-the-center-of-the-struggle-between-liberal-globalists-populist-nationalists
, since the liberal-globalist coup against the populist-nationalist frontrunner in May’s election redux could further entrench French influence in this geostrategic frontline state.
Few are aware, but France already has https://web.archive.org/web/20230127094814/https:/www.reuters.com/world/europe/with-troops-romania-france-seeks-capitalise-military-ties-2023-01-27/
for conventionally intervening in Ukraine if it so chooses, whether before or after the end of hostilities, and suggests that Macron will focus on this region for expanding French influence.
Should progress be made, then three other scenarios would be possible.
The first is that Poland and France compete in Central Europe, with the first eventually extending its sway over the Baltics while the second does the same over Southeastern Europe (within which Moldova is included in this context due to its close ties with Romania), thus trifurcating Europe between them and Germany. In this scenario, Germany would also have some influence over each Central Europe region, but it wouldn’t predominate.
The second scenario is that Poland and France, which have been historical partners since the early 1800s, cooperate in Central Europe by informally dividing the Baltics and Southeastern Europe between them in order to asymmetrically bifurcate Europe into imperfectly German and Polish-Franco halves. The Polish part would either remain under partial US influence if Poland continues aligning with the US even under liberal-globalist rule or the liberal-globalists might pivot towards France and away from the US.
The final scenario is that all three employ their https://korybko.substack.com/p/polands-revival-of-the-weimar-triangle
format to coordinate tripartite rule over Europe, but this is dependent on the liberal-globalists capturing the Polish presidency in May and then aligning with Berlin/Brussels over Washington. It’s therefore the least likely, especially since the liberal-globalists might pivot towards France instead of Germany/EU as a compromise between their ideological, electoral, and geopolitical interests ahead of fall 2027’s parliamentary elections.
Regardless of what ends up transpiring, the “https://katehon.com/en/article/natos-military-schengen
will likely continue incorporating more EU members in order facilitate these three aspiring leaders’ interests. Germany needs this for its “Fortress Europe” plans, Poland needs its allies to swiftly come to its aid in a hypothetical war with Russia, while France needs this to entrench its influence in Southeastern Europe.
What’s ultimately being determined through the interplay of France, Germany, and Poland’s competing leadership plans for post-conflict Europe is the continent’s future security architecture, which will also be influenced to varying degrees by Russia and the US, be it jointly through their “https://korybko.substack.com/p/russia-and-the-us-diplomatic-choreography
” and/or independently. There are too many uncertainties at present to confidently predict what this emerging order will look like, but the dynamics described in this analysis account for the most likely scenarios.
https://cms.zerohedge.com/users/tyler-durden
Fri, 03/07/2025 - 02:00
As Globalism Breaks, Nations Must Produce Their Own Survival Necessities
As Globalism Breaks, Nations Must Produce Their Own Survival Necessities
https://alt-market.us/as-globalism-breaks-nations-must-produce-their-own-survival-necessities/
The term “protectionism” is generally treated as a pejorative in the economic world, akin to “isolationism” and “populism”. In an era where globalism is treated as the end-all-be-all of social and geopolitical evolution, the idea of taking a step back and reconsidering the notion of independence and self reliance is abhorrent. Globalists and progressives argue that there can be no going back and that only they know the way forward.
It’s rather convenient that they’ve become the self designated prophets of correct economic policy, is it not?
I don’t know who voted for these financial elites to take on such a role; as far as I can tell no one did. But they certainly have assumed the authority to dictate the path of international trade, currency methodology and even debt creation. Central bankers and their globalist counterparts control every fiscal policy that determines if you or I live a life of plenty or a life of peasantry, and, with the flip of a switch, they can send the whole of the global system crashing down.
The globalists have this power because there are no fail safes – There are no redundancies and there is no Plan B. The more the populace needs the system the more they need the globalists, and the more they need the globalists the more power the globalists enjoy.
The international trade network is designed like an intricate Jenga tower with a foundation of just a few wooden pieces holding up a vast and seemingly infinite cathedral. However, pull just one of those base pieces and the entire edifice collapses. Globalism relies on forced interdependency between nations, so that every country needs something from every other country in order to survive. No single nation is allowed to rely on its own resources and production – As noted, that’s what they call “protectionism”. It’s the great taboo; a violation of the will of the tiny globalist gods.
But what happens when the globalists create international division and sow seeds of instability? What happens when they create multiple wars? Or when people get fed up with the imbalances, leading to sanctions and tariffs and trade disputes?
Today, there are at least three regions of the world in which World War III could spark off, including Ukraine, Iran/Israel and Taiwan. Sanctions between NATO countries and Russia have greatly affected Europe’s energy security and the EU has been sabotaging itself with climate change regulations that are destroying their ability to build more power plants and produce more food.
The BRICS nations are actively pursuing a new currency exchange system to cut out the US dollar as the world reserve and they are supported by global banking institutions like the BIS and IMF which are getting ready to introduce CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) as the new framework for banking exchange.
In the meantime, Donald Trump is engaging in wider tariffs, which could bring the US economy back from the brink of debt disaster, but only if he is able to somehow accelerate domestic production at the same time. If he is unsuccessful, the US consumer will be left with mostly foreign-made goods and all those goods will be more expensive.
The globalists have created a scenario in which globalism is an exponential detriment. I believe that their original plan was to create enough chaos to force nations into even deeper centralization (a one world currency system, cashless society, wealth redistribution, rationing and Universal Basic Income). But what if some countries go in a different direction? What happens when nations stop participating in the dependency game and walk away?
Well, you get a worldwide economic crisis, but also a great rush by nation states to juice their domestic production. You get a rush to localism. If countries hope to survive what is coming, they’re going to have to start manufacturing their own survival goods. Otherwise, they will face civil unrest and internal collapse.
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Such a crisis environment comes with a host of problems, primarily in the supply chain. Shifting away from globalism after so many decades of addiction will be a difficult process. In the case of the US, a large number of non-necessities are made overseas rather than produced domestically, but there are quite a few essentials as well.
The US is lucky enough to have considerable natural resources including untapped mineral wealth and oil (America has https://www.aogr.com/web-exclusives/exclusive-story/u.s.-holds-most-recoverable-oil-reserves
than any other country on the planet). The problem is that we don’t utilize them, at least not in an efficient way. The concern, of course, is environmental decay if America ever tapped into these resources on a large scale.
The EPA and far-left environmental doomers tend to exaggerate the risks of resource development. The technology to prevent pollution is well in hand, though it’s true that prices rise the more companies have to spend on preventing contamination.
It’s also true that most Americans regardless of politics don’t want to live in a country that’s production wealthy if that means it is also health poor. In other words, when America does shift into a domestic production model, it will have to do so with much greater expense than developing nations like China that don’t care about their own environment.
A much bigger concern, though, is the safety of national energy supplies and food supplies. As noted, Europe is screwed. The EU is actively trying to sabotage any remaining structures of independent energy and food production and the British government is following their lead with a crushing inheritance tax on farmland and an obsession with inefficient green energy projects.
It’s not that these officials have forgotten where their food comes from, they know full well. They WANT to destroy domestic production. They want the western world to be crippled by food dependency.
In the US agriculture is strong but the on-time freight system is not and using food factories as middlemen instead of local farm goods going directly to markets creates a barrier for localization. Factory farming allows major conglomerates to haggle supermarkets into accepting lower price brackets which small farms can’t compete with. Lower prices are nice, however, this model makes every community food dependent.
Changing the current system of food distribution could take years, with corrupt politicians and corporations fighting reforms every step of the way. But, smaller communities can and should look into programs for local food growing and security. If neighborhood markets sourced half of their produce and meat from nearby small farms this could help to protect towns from a supply chain crisis. Governments could incentivize small farms to sell their goods direct to the public (at a lower price) by giving tax credits for any farms with a store on their land.
What concerns me most is that far too many countries and communities will do nothing about domestic production until they are hit hard with a supply crunch. In America there is a very large contingent of preppers (at least https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisdorsey/2024/01/04/when-it-comes-to-end-times-survival-viewers-cant-get-enough/
according to surveys), and this could help to avoid a complete collapse. That said, a sudden national leap into “protectionism” and away from globalism might require years of adaptation.
This should be an expected development. Just look at how hostile our “allies” have been to the notion of dealing with tariffs while using the US consumer as a cash cow for decades? It’s been a one-way street for so long and they have no concept of fair play in the markets. A lot of these countries are talking about “hurting” the US however they can as reciprocal tariffs are introduced. America must be ready to provide its own necessities on demand to prevent damage from retaliation.
On the individual level, this means people need to have a solid supply of necessities including stored foods just to give themselves time for domestic production to adjust. While this is happening, expect shortages and high prices on a number of goods. The whole point of globalism is to punish nations for acting independently; US effort to become more self reliant will not happen without some pain.
Position yourself as a producer if you can, or a person that can repair existing goods. For the majority of westerners used to ultra-convenient supply chains and same-day delivery, this idea might sound ridiculous. Don’t get caught up in the normalcy bias. Our economic situation can change at the drop of a hat; be sure you have a backup plan.
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Thu, 03/06/2025 - 23:25
Could A Bombshell Discovery Render All of Biden's Presidential Actions 'Null and Void'?
Could A Bombshell Discovery Render All of Biden's Presidential Actions 'Null and Void'?
,
The Biden presidency might have been the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the American people. A shocking investigation by the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project has revealed that virtually every document bearing Joe Biden's signature during his presidency was signed by an autopen — except for one.
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What makes this revelation particularly damning is that the only document confirmed to have Biden's actual signature was his letter announcing his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race. Let that sink in for a moment.
Remember when House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) revealed his discussion with Biden when Biden https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/01/18/speaker-johnson-reveals-when-he-knew-biden-wasnt-in-charge-anymore-n4936119
signing the executive order halting LNG exports? Now we know why — he probably didn't. The real question is: Who did? Who was running the country while Biden was not all there?
🚨WHOEVER CONTROLLED THE AUTOPEN CONTROLLED THE PRESIDENCY🚨
We gathered every document we could find with Biden's signature over the course of his presidency.
All used the same autopen signature except for the the announcement that the former President was dropping out of the… https://t.co/CC3oJUkNr4
— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) https://twitter.com/OversightPR/status/1897726502156091716?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The use of the presidential autopen dates back to the 1950s, and https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2011/08/the-constitutional-quibble-with-the-autopen-it-s-not-what-you-think-it-is.html
. He was vacationing in Hawaii at the time. His office relied on a 30-page memo from President George W. Bush's legal team asserting that the president's presence was not required as long as said president had authorized the signature.
What's not clear, in the case of Biden, is who was running the autopen and whether Biden was aware it was happening.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is demanding that the Department of Justice investigate whether Biden's obvious cognitive decline allowed unelected bureaucrats to essentially run the government without presidential oversight. If this is true — and let's be honest, all signs point to yes — every executive order, every pardon, and every official action taken under Biden's name could be constitutionally void.
Bailey's https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1897396689193058626
to Michael E. Horowitz, the inspector general of the Department of Justice, spells it out perfectly.
I write to request that you conduct a full investigation into President Biden's mental capacity in his final days in office. By now, Biden's mental decline is famous. Under the 25th Amendment, his inability to make decisions should have meant a succession of power. Instead, it appears staffers and officers in the Biden administration may have exploited Biden's incapacity so they could issue orders without an accountable President of sound mind approving them. That would explain why the Biden administration's orders were aggressively much farther to the left than any previous President. If in fact Biden's staffers were exploiting his mental decline, those orders are null and void.
The evidence is overwhelming. We know that Biden's handlers desperately tried to prevent anyone from meeting with him one-on-one. Even Democratic insiders admit the truth. DNC fundraiser Lindy Li recently https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/02/08/now-we-know-who-was-running-the-country-for-joe-biden-n4936803
and acknowledged that Biden wasn't running the show; his staff, his wife, and Hunter were.
Thanks to the Heritage Foundation's investigation, we now have proof that Biden's signature was automated throughout his presidency — which raises serious questions about whether he was aware of what was being signed in his name at all. The Oversight Project rightfully points out that since Biden revoked Trump's executive privilege, we can easily determine who controlled the autopen and what safeguards, if any, were in place.
The implications are staggering. We essentially had a presidency by proxy, with unelected staffers wielding presidential power while the man himself was barely cognizant enough to read a teleprompter. This isn't just a scandal; it's potentially the biggest constitutional crisis in American history.
The American people deserve to know who was really calling the shots during the Biden administration. If these allegations prove true, every single action taken under Biden's name needs to be scrutinized and potentially nullified. The truth must come out, and those responsible must be held accountable.
Do you think the mainstream media will cover this explosive autopen scandal? Don't count on it, but PJ Media won't back down from exposing the truth about who was really running the Biden White House.
Join https://pjmedia.com/subscribe?tpcc=60salemm030625&promo_code=FIGHT
and help us continue exposing what the mainstream media wants to keep hidden. Sign up now and support real journalism that dares to tell the truth!
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Thu, 03/06/2025 - 23:00
"Absolutely Factual": Stranded Astronauts Confirm Musk's Pre-Election Rescue Offer Was Snubbed
"Absolutely Factual": Stranded Astronauts Confirm Musk's Pre-Election Rescue Offer Was Snubbed
Elon Musk revealed on a recent Joe Rogan podcast that SpaceX offered to rescue the stranded Boeing Starliner astronauts on the International Space Station last year, but the Biden administration rejected the offer "for political reasons." Musk claimed, "There is no way they're going to make anyone supporting Trump look good" ahead of the November presidential elections.
"We offered to bring them back early - this offer was rejected by the Biden administration"0
Joe: "Why?"
Elon: "Political reasons. There is no way they're going to make someone supporting Trump look good."https://t.co/QXVbpDPgKr
— Donna Marie (@sabback) https://twitter.com/sabback/status/1897492963426488644?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Fast forward to Tuesday, a Washington Post journalist asked the stranded astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, if the Biden administration rejected Musk's space rescue offer ahead of the election.
Wilmore responded: "I can only say that Mr. Musk, what he says is absolutely factual…" He noted that the exact reasons behind the offer being rejected were unknown to him or Williams.
... and the WaPo journalist was crushed by Wilmore's response, validating Musk's claims.
NEW: Astronaut says Elon Musk is “absolutely factual” after a WaPo reporter asked him about how Musk said his rescue efforts were denied for political reasons.
Musk was condemned by the media for making the comment but it appears the astronauts agree.
Reporter: “Elon Musk has… https://t.co/Qeb8sF8gnT
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) https://twitter.com/CollinRugg/status/1897470032612851893?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The big revelation by Wilmore, plus Musk's comments, paints the Biden-Harris administration as reckless for jeopardizing the lives of two of America's top astronauts.
Musk commented about this on X:
The astronauts were only supposed to be up there for 8 days and now have been there for 8 months. SpaceX could have sent up another Dragon and brought them home 6 months ago, but the Biden White House (not NASA) refused to allow it. President Trump asked to bring them back as soon as possible and we are doing so.
The astronauts were only supposed to be up there for 8 days and now have been there for 8 months.
SpaceX could have sent up another Dragon and brought them home 6 months ago, but the Biden White House (not NASA) refused to allow it.
President Trump asked to bring them back as… https://t.co/BVsHRn2Ocf
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1897420509966688555?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1897478694672695637
in on the conversation:
So not only did Biden not invite @elonmusk to the White House EV summit, Biden would not let Elon retrieve the astronauts from the Space Station. When a president puts our astronauts at risk for his own political benefit, we have reached a new low point in presidential history.
Once again, the Biden-Harris regime stands accused of prioritizing a corrupt political party first over national well-being, this time at the expense of two astronauts who have remained in space for 7.5 months longer than initially anticipated.
We could see this playing out a mile away. https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/nasa-head-considers-elon-musks-spacex-save-stranded-boeing-starliner-crew-iss
: "Additionally, it's an election year for the Biden administration, which has been on a crusade against Trump and his supporters, but also is very anti-Musk. Any rescue mission by SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft is undesirable news flow for Democrats."
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Thu, 03/06/2025 - 14:00
Intuitive Machines Shares Tumble As Moon Lander Athena's Fate Unclear
Intuitive Machines Shares Tumble As Moon Lander Athena's Fate Unclear
Shares of Houston-based Intuitive Machines plunged 22%, the most in a year, as uncertainty remained over the confirmation of the company's second moon landing.
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Intuitive Machines' Kam Ghaffarian said: "We have landed, we have indication they have power, and we're trying to figure out the rest of it."
Latest headlines (courtesy of Bloomberg):
LUNR said while the Athena lander appears to be on the moon's surface, its status remained unclear as of about 12:55 p.m. New York time
The livestream that had been showing the control room for the landing ended
The Athena spacecraft was on landing approach around 1230 ET.
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This is Intuitive Machines' second moon landing attempt. The previous attempt did not go as planned; the IM-1 spacecraft tipped over on its side during a hard landing.
Meanwhile, four days ago, Firefly Aerospace's "https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/texas-company-lands-moon-first-successful-commercial-landing
" lander made the first successful landing of a private spacecraft on the lunar surface.
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Thu, 03/06/2025 - 13:20