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Are the U.S. and NATO as prepared for economic war as Russia, China, and India?

In the 2005 film, Cinderella Man, James J. Braddock’s fight with contender Art Lasky reaches a turning point when Lasky hits Braddock with his best punch. Braddock’s mouthpiece flies out and he is staggered, but he doesn’t go down. He recovers, smiles at Lasky, and goes on to win the fight.

A romanticized portrayal to be sure, taken to an even more ridiculous extreme in the climactic bout between Rocky Balboa and Clubber Lang in Rocky III, but it does beg a very relevant question for the U.S. and NATO today:

What if you hit your opponent with your best shot and he doesn’t go down?

U.S.-led NATO effectively did that when it locked Russia out of the SWIFT system, seized Russia’s FOREX assets, and demanded the rest of the world cease all economic relations with Russia. Washington believed this would cripple Russia permanently, possibly leading to a coup in Russia and Putin’s ouster.

It didn’t. That’s not to say it did no damage. The ruble initially plunged in value, causing the Russian central bank to raise interest rates to 20%, effectively freezing the prospects for any investment in growth for the besieged economy. But Russia is still there, as is Putin. The war in Ukraine continues, and Putin has responded.

“A number of countries have taken illegitimate decisions on the so-called freezing of Russian assets. This collective West has actually drawn a line under the reliability of its currencies, we have already spoken about this, it crossed out the trust in these currencies. I have decided to implement a set of measures to switch over payments, as soon as possible, let’s start with our natural gas, to switch over payments for our natural gas supplied to the so-called unfriendly countries into Russian rubles.”

That punch landed, and now it’s Washington’s turn to try to smile in its opponent’s face. The reliable U.S. media ran several stories citing U.S. economists trying to minimize the effectiveness of Russia’s response. Only in this case, life will more likely imitate reality than the arts. When a boxer smiles in a real prize fight, it almost always means he has been hurt.

That’s what prompted Biden to hurry to Brussels for an emergency meeting following Putin’s announcement. Strategies expected to be discussed include redirecting non-Russian supplies of natural gas towards Europe in hopes to lessen its dependency on Russian exports. Currently, Russia supplies about 45% of Europe’s natural gas imports.

Apart from the fact this will still make life more costly for Europeans – if it were not more expensive to purchase natural gas this way, Europe would have already been doing so – it is only one commodity. Russia and Ukraine also supply about 30 percent of the world supply of wheat. Russia is a major source of steel, palladium, and neon gas needed to make computer chips. It supplies 35 percent of the world’s uranium.

Together with Belarus, Russia supplies 40 percent of the world’s potash and large percentages of ammonia and monoammonium phosphate exports. Fertilizer prices had already risen 17 percent in 2021 and are expected to rise an additional 12 percent in 2022.

As it did for decades militarily before invading Ukraine, Russia has so far shown restraint in its economic response to NATO’s sanctions. It has by no means thrown its haymaker, such as simply cutting off Europe’s natural gas completely rather than merely demanding payment in rubles. Neither has it cut off exports of uranium to the United States, although it is publicly considering it.

Of course, these economic “nuclear options” would hurt Russia as much or more as it would the U.S. and Europe. But Russia is a relatively poor country that has been living within its means. It has low debt and a population accustomed to a lower standard of living than those in NATO countries. The U.S. and NATO are quite the opposite.

While the U.S. is still a highly productive country, it has been living well beyond its means, largely made possible by the U.S. dollar’s reserve currency status, which is now in jeopardy as Russia, China, and India – whose populations alone represent 37 percent of the world’s population – take steps to get off the dollar completely. Much of the “Global South” may choose to join them.

This economic world war will harm every country in the world. Mass starvation in poor countries is a real possibility. So is economic collapse in Europe.

President Biden has admitted it will have “a cost” to Americans as well. But his portrayal and average Americans’ understanding of that cost is grossly underestimated.

Russia, China, and India are all formerly socialist countries that have experienced exponential growth since pivoting to market economies. The living standards of most of their people have grown significantly but are still low compared to those of Americans or Europeans. Their older generations remember the grinding poverty they experienced under socialism.

In The Matrix Reloaded, Neo tells the architect he doesn’t believe the machines will destroy all of humanity, because their existence relies upon human energy supplies. The architect replies, “There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.”

Russia, China, India, and much of the world may be similarly prepared. Is the United States?

Over the past seventy years, the United States has attempted to use economic sanctions to remove world leaders it deemed unworthy in Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and other countries. Populations in the target countries, perceiving aggression by an outside threat, have instead rallied around those leaders, preferring even despotic rule by one of their own to the U.S. empire’s meddling in their politics.

Fat, dumb, happy, and untouched by the foreign wars its government has prosecuted all over the world, the U.S. population may not be so willing to accept the “levels of survival” necessary to survive this economic war. And unlike Cuba, Iran, Russia, etc., it will not be a foreign government imposing the sanctions but its own.

How will the U.S. population react when economic reality finally comes to its door?

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Putin is Not at War with Ukraine

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Yes, Vladimir Putin has ordered his military to invade Ukraine. His troops have captured key cities and are methodically surrounding the rest. But he’s not at war with the Ukrainian people. He’s at war with the D.C. empire and its puppet president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Contrary to the propaganda put out by the usual suspects, it is not going badly for the Russians. They are conducting the operation patiently and methodically, reflecting the disposition of their leader. And they’re killing far less civilians and destroying far less civilian infrastructure than the U.S. does during a typical war crime.

Oh, was that unpatriotic? Sorry, not sorry.

The power of the propaganda machine is impressive. Suddenly, everyone has amnesia. Putin has attacked Ukraine “for no reason.” It is an “unprovoked attack” serving only Putin’s imperial wish to reconstitute the Soviet empire or perhaps preserve his own power within Russia.

How can anyone believe this?

For the record, Putin gave two speeches which spell out his reasons for going to war. They are lengthy and full of historical context. For those interested, links are below.

Vladimir Putin: Full Text of February 21, 2022 Speech

Full Transcript of Putin address February 24, 2022

Putin’s argument generally aligns with the story I’ve been writing about for many years. Back in 1991, when Gorbachev agreed to pull his troops out of East Germany and allow reunification of the nation that had invaded his country four decades earlier, killing tens of millions of Russians, U.S. President George H.W. Bush and a host of other NATO leaders promised Gorbachev that NATO “would not move one inch eastward.”

The U.S. government spent years denying this promise was made until declassified documents proved it clearly was. Now, the official story is that since there wasn’t a formal “treaty,” the promise could be broken. But it doesn’t change the fact that the U.S. government lied about this for decades, to the Russians, who knew they were lying, and to U.S. citizens, who didn’t.

If there wasn’t something wrong with what they were doing, why did they lie?

U.S.-led NATO spent the next 30 years admitting country after country into an alliance whose sole purpose is to make war on Russia. This map shows the progress over time.

During the George W. Bush administration, the U.S. government declared an intention to admit Georgia and Ukraine, instigating color revolutions in both countries for that purpose. The coup in Georgia sparked renewed hostilities between Georgia and the breakaway province of South Ossetia. Putin briefly invaded Georgia in defense of South Ossetia and Russia eventually recognized the independence of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, drawing a rebuke from President Bush and other western leaders but no more.

What else could Bush do? As I wrote in 2014, conventional war between nuclear powers is not a possibility. That makes the gargantuan U.S. military a giant rip off of American taxpayers, since it can never be used to fight a major power, but that’s a subject for another day.

The D.C. empire backed off for a few years, but they basically ran the same drill in Ukraine in 2014. Democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych was deposed with John McCain literally on the streets of Kiev encouraging the revolution Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland had been caught planning on a leaked phone call.

That’s when Crimea and the eastern provinces of Ukraine, populated almost exclusively with ethnic Russians, broke away. Note this was a reaction to the U.S. interfering in Ukraine’s elections so overtly that no two-year investigation was necessary. We have firsthand video and audio evidence.

For the next eight years, three successive U.S. presidents have sent arms to Ukraine, ostensibly to put down an internal rebellion and aid Ukraine in its defense against Russian invasion, but in reality to ethnically cleanse Ukraine’s population of its Russian population. The smaller the Russian population within Ukraine, the more unified it is as an anti-Russian state.

As Putin said accurately in his speech, Ukraine has behaved as a de facto member of NATO over the past eight years, with NATO conducting military exercises within Ukraine’s borders.

On Russia’s borders.

Now, we can wax philosophical about what constitutes aggression all we want. Everyone knows if Russia or China tried anything remotely similar in Mexico or Canada, we’d be bombing them before the day was over.

Putin made a last ditch effort appeal for a diplomatic solution via a proposed treaty that amounted to two very reasonable requests: 1) a guarantee Ukraine is never admitted to NATO and 2) stop deploying troops and weapons (including missiles that could carry nukes) in areas of eastern Europe where they could be a threat to Russia’s national security.

President Biden responded with a lukewarm verbal assurance Ukraine wouldn’t be admitted to NATO within the next ten years. Given the history of U.S. promises outlined above, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that wouldn’t be good enough, especially coming from the U.S. Vice President put in charge of Ukraine by the Obama administration when it carried out the 2014 coup.

That was confirmed on February 24, 2022 when Putin invaded Ukraine. He has now gone to war against Washington, D.C. in the country Washington weaponized against him, casting the Ukrainian people as unfortunate pawns.

President Biden has said consistently throughout the current crisis that the United States would not go to war to defend Ukraine. Yet, he has repeatedly ratcheted up the tension and has been dismissive of Putin’s very reasonable proposal to end the conflict diplomatically. One can only assume Biden and NATO just couldn’t conceive that Putin might do what the “exceptional nation” has claimed prerogative to do with far less (or any) justification over the past several decades.

So, we’re now in a situation where Biden and Europe are desperate to keep people from figuring out what Putin’s invasion means: the empire has no clothes. Multiple narratives are being put out in desperation.

One of the more striking is the image of Zelenskyy as the rugged comedian-turned-military hero, bravely standing his post in Kiev. Russian sources say Zelensky left Kiev on February 23, the day before the invasion, and the photos and videos of him in military garb were all taken in advance.

That sounds more likely to be true, but it doesn’t really matter. What is really interesting is the empire’s portrayal of Zelensky as compared to Bashar Al-Assad. It has literally made mirror images of them after running essentially the same operations in their respective countries.

The U.S. ran regime-change operations in both Syria and Ukraine at roughly the same time during the early to mid-2010s. Both countries have economic importance in terms of planned pipelines. Each is home to one of Russia’s only two warm water ports besides Vladivostok, which is on the Sea of Japan.

In Ukraine the regime change was successful; in Syria, it was not. The leaders of both countries spent the next several years fighting civil wars, meaning they necessarily had to make war upon portions of their own populations.

Assad is condemned as a brutal dictator for doing so. Americans are asked to accept that portrayal unconditionally and they mostly do. Anyone who questions it can expect to be assailed by their fellow citizens who are so emotionally attached to this narrative they are unable even to consider evidence to the contrary.

This after no less than General James Mattis admitted there was no evidence Assad perpetrated the alleged chemical attacks that inspired multiple U.S. airstrikes on Syria.

The amnesiac effect of propaganda is at least as impressive as its emotional effect.

Forgotten also is that until February 24, Zelensky was doing precisely the same thing Assad had been vilified for: making war against his own population. In addition, he tried to arrest his political opponent, who is still facing charges, and shut down opposition news media. He has been at least the dictator Assad is accused of being and his abuses are not disputed by anyone.

Yet, upon Putin’s invasion, all of this is forgotten. He is now and presumably forever the gallant hero in military fatigues, on the side of all that is good and just, against a dictator attacking his country “for no reason.”

Americans are asked to believe all this without question by a government that has lied to them over the past several years on a scale that would make Goebbels blush. They are asked to accept as genuine the manufactured, uniform opinions flooding news and social media. They are asked to reject all nuance, all dissent, and to completely forget well-document facts from recent history that flatly contradict the empire’s narrative.

What do you believe?

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Washington’s stance on Ukraine is as divorced from reality as its Covid Regime

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Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

From, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I was a fourteen-year-old freshman at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute in Kenmore, N.Y. when I was assigned my first term paper for Mr. Chaya’s World History class. The list of topics included the Charge of the Light Brigade. That’s the one I picked.

Like any boy that age, I still retained a belief in the glory of war, something Tennyson seems never to have outgrown. This despite being trained in grammar school to scurry from my desk and duck against the wall under the classroom window when the air raid siren sounded.

The possibility of being nuked by the Soviet Union at any moment had been a fact of life for all of my life at that point and would be for twelve more years.

The term paper assignment was the first time I was asked to research a historical event, rather than just read a textbook summary about it. By the time I finished, I had my first inkling that “military intelligence” might just be an oxymoron and perhaps war wasn’t the glorious affair Tennyson had cracked it up to be.

To this day, when I hear the lyrics, “a good old-fashioned, bullet-headed, Saxon mother’s son” in the Beatles song “Bungalow Bill,” I think of James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, who led the aforementioned six hundred light cavalrymen into the teeth of Russian artillery.

The Charge of the Light Brigade occurred during the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War (1853-56). Despite the Light Brigade disaster, the port city finally fell to the British and French allies, but not before the Russian Empire sank its entire Black Sea fleet in the harbor to prevent if from falling into enemy hands.

That desperate act should provide a warning to Washington.

The Russians had to fight for Crimea again during the Russian Civil War following the Bolshevik revolution. It fell to the Germans during WWII after a bitter 250-day siege, only to be regained by the Red Army in 1944.

I never dreamed I’d be writing about the same port city thirty-six years after that first term paper. In 2016, the new global empire, the United States, having successfully orchestrated a color revolution to oust Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, was in a stare down with Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin over his annexation Crimea.

Yanukovich had been falsely portrayed as “pro-Russian” by NATO in its haste to bring Ukraine into the European Union. The coup was the last straw for Putin after watching the U.S. break its promise to Gorbachev not to advance NATO “one inch eastward” in exchange for Gorbachev’s agreement to the 1990 reunification of Germany.

A look at a map of NATO in the ensuing 30 years since that promise puts a somewhat different light on Russia’s troop buildup on the Ukrainian border and at least calls into question just who is the aggressor in this situation.

As I wrote back in 2016, Sevastopol is one of the few reliable Russian ports that remain ice-free all winter. Syria is home to another. If that doesn’t inspire skepticism regarding Washington, D.C.’s humanitarian motives for orchestrating regime change operations in both countries – while remaining bosom buddies with the brutal regime in Saudi Arabia – then, as my friends in the American southeast would say, “bless your heart.”

President Biden told Reuters on New Year’s Eve that he had warned Putin, “if he goes into Ukraine, we will have severe sanctions. We will increase our presence in Europe, with our NATO allies, and there will be a heavy price to pay for it.”

Sanctions don’t sound too ominous if one has zero historical perspective, including, say, the “sanctions” against the Japanese Empire in 1941. It doesn’t really matter who was right or wrong. Sanctions eventually lead to war if their consequences become dire enough.

It doesn’t matter so much who is right or wrong on the matter of Ukraine, either. The reality is this: The Russians are never going to give up that port. They’ve bled for it in the past far more than any American army has ever bled for anything. It is an existential matter for them.

In 1856, they sank their entire Black Sea navy before giving up Sevastopol. What would they be willing to do today?

Meanwhile, it would make not one iota of difference to Americans living in the United States if Russia annexed all of Ukraine, much less Crimea. Washington’s interests in the region are purely imperial and contrary to those of most U.S. citizens. It is also questionable that the U.S. could win a limited conflict in the region against Russia, given the logistics.

It is equally unrealistic that Russia could win a full-scale conventional war against NATO. The U.S. alone had a military budget in 2020 more than ten times that of Russia. That would leave Russia with only one alternative before surrender.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington has thought of itself as the “shining city on the hill” leading a “new world order” of democracy and peace. Considering its recent exploits in the Middle East and Ukraine, in 2021 it more resembles a drunk bully stumbling around the world slurring its words (literally) and picking fights with smaller opponents.

That Russia can be treated likewise is as divorced from reality as Washington’s belief it can stop the spread of a respiratory virus with lockdowns and vaccine mandates. But as damaging as the Covid Regime has been to American society, Washington’s delusions about bringing Russia to its knees could result in far worse.

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, S tupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Will the federal courts stumble into a good decision on vaccine mandates?

Congress isn’t just a “better way” to legislate; it’s the only way

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Biden-pen-signing-Fox-5-DC-1200x630 Kudos to the Editorial Board of the New York Times for putting aside the likely preferences of most of their readership and charging President Biden to, “Ease Up on the Executive Actions, Joe.” The piece argues, on constitutional and practical grounds, that presidents must work with Congress to establish legislation to carry out their agendas, rather than seeking to do so through executive actions.

While well-intentioned, the piece is flawed and self-contradictory, beginning with its subtitle, which asserts Biden, “is right to not let his agenda be held hostage.”

No, he isn’t.

The premise underpinning this statement, shared by much of the public, is that a new president’s policy agenda should be enacted by Congress based solely on the president’s election. This is backwards. The idea Congress is merely a rubber stamp for the will the executive is straight out of Hobbes’ Leviathan and foreign to the U.S. Constitution. Rather, the Constitution presumes legislation originates in Congress, exercising only those powers granted it, with the president’s role to either assent and execute, or veto.

While politicians love to throw around Rousseauian language like “will of the people,” the founders clearly rejected Rousseau’s vision of “the total alienation of each associate, together with all of his rights” to some “general will.” Our system is based upon the idea most natural rights are inalienable, no matter how large a majority seeks to infringe them.

The Constitution presumes there is no “agenda” to be pursued by either Congress or the president, but rather a narrow list of powers to be exercised by Congress in legislation and the president in execution. Whether the government should be involved in new areas is beyond the powers granted to either branch. They are reserved to the amendment process, which is difficult by design.

It has become routine for presidential candidates to promise sweeping changes they have no power to deliver. This has led the people to increasingly believe merely electing the presidential candidate of their choice should result in those changes. When it doesn’t, they blame Congress for “not getting anything done.” This is also backwards.

When a bill is proposed in Congress and voted down, Congress is indeed “getting something done.” If there were anything at all to the idea of a will of the people, that will would be found in the diverse opinions of the Congress, not the unitary will of the executive. The rejection of legislation suggested by the president is as representative of the people as its passing.

To comprehend the reason for the bitter divisiveness in American politics and its increasing propensity for violence, one should not only look to the vast expansion of centralized power over the peoples of vastly different cultures within the American federation, but to the relentless migration of power from the legislative branch to the executive. When one’s whole way of life could turn on the election of one man or woman to the presidency, that election takes on an outsized importance even to those normally disinclined to politics. The legal instability inherent in executive supremacy only adds fuel to the fire.

No, Congress is not a “better” way to legislate. It’s the only way. And for all the talk of defending democracy, a true belief in our republican system would respect the nay votes equally to the yeas.

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

Impeachment Hearings: The elephant in the room Republicans and Democrats won’t acknowledge

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Ukraine_0 “Republicans Try to Shift Focus to Hunter Biden During Debate on Trump Charges” complains the New York Times, as if the younger Biden’s conduct is completely immaterial to the impeachment case against President Trump. It seems having a father running for president is an absolute defense against…well, anything.

Judge: “On the charge of murder in the first degree, how does the defendant plead?”

Defense Attorney: “Your honor, his father is running for president.”

Judge: “Case dismissed. Next on the docket?”

But even more bizarre than the Democrats exasperation at examining Biden’s conduct related to Trump’s request for an investigation by the Ukrainian government is the complete silence of all involved on the real elephant in the room: Washington, D.C.’s involvement in creating that government in the first place.

In case you’ve forgotten, Washington employs regime-change-by-mass-protest far more often than the clumsy bombing/invasion method (although they’ve done plenty of that, too). Wars cost money, lives and international goodwill. Better to work through “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) – a.k.a. CIA front groups – to foment unrest, riots, or open rebellion. The Obama administration elevated it to an art form, using it throughout the Middle East’s “Arab Spring,” and perfected it in Ukraine, according to Consortium News.

By the way, if you don’t think that’s what is going on in Hong Kong today, then I have a really nice bridge to sell you. Granted, the empire’s goals are more modest there. They certainly couldn’t achieve separating Hong Kong from China; but they managed to get a slew of “pro-democracy” candidates elected in local races. The Chinese aren’t stupid; they know what’s going on.

Well, back in 2014, that’s exactly what went on in Ukraine. Democratically-elected president Victor Yanukovych dragged his heels on a trade deal with the European Union which would have affected Ukraine’s relationship with Russia, its largest trading partner. Since keeping Russia on its knees has been the goal of the U.S. and it’s so-called NATO allies since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, no resistance to the trade deal or absorption of Ukraine into NATO would be tolerated.

So, the Obama administration did in Ukraine what it had been doing throughout the Middle East. It ran the regime-change-by-protest program. We know this because Obama administration officials were recorded talking about it, the recording later leaked to the public. Yanukovych fled the country, new elections were held, and a pro-EU, pro-NATO U.S. puppet was elected. All this happened just before Hunter Biden joined the board of Ukrainian gas company, Burisma Holdings Ltd.

So, Washington overthrows an elected government, installs a NATO puppet, and begins sending said puppet foreign aid to resist “Russian aggression.” Some of that foreign aid flows to Burisma, which is paying then-Vice President Biden’s son $50,000 per month for his complete lack of knowledge of or experience in the fossil fuels industry.

Nothing to see here, folks.

Now, that is a story the public would find compelling, especially because it’s true. If the Republicans really wanted to see Deep State heads roll; if they really wanted to “drain the Swamp,” this is the story they’d tell. But they won’t and neither will the national media.

The Republicans, Democrats, and the national media are all agents of and apologists for the rotting, bankrupt American empire. And they’ll take us all down with it when it falls, rather than speak against it, even when doing so could help their team.