• Scott Ritter: We are witnessing the bittersweet birth of a new Russia | VT Foreign Policy
    March 10, 2024
    VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

    $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
    Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.

    Tucker Carlson’s confused exasperation over Russian President Vladmir Putin’s extemporaneous history lesson at the start of their landmark February interview (which has been watched more than a billion times), underscored one realty. For a Western audience, the question of the historical bona fides of Russia’s claim of sovereign interest in territories located on the left (eastern) bank of the Dnieper River, currently claimed by Ukraine, is confusing to the point of incomprehension.

    Vladimir Putin, however, did not manufacture his history lesson from thin air. Anyone who has followed the speeches and writings of the Russian president over the years would have found his comments to Carlson quite familiar, echoing both in tone and content previous statements made concerning both the viability of the Ukrainian state from an historic perspective, and the historical ties between what Putin has called Novorossiya (New Russia) and the Russian nation.

    For example, on March 18, 2014, during his announcement regarding the annexation of Crimea, the president observed that “after the [Russian] Revolution [of 1917], for a number of reasons the Bolsheviks – let God judge them – added historical sections of the south of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. This was done with no consideration for the ethnic composition of the population, and these regions today form the south-east of Ukraine.”

    Later during a televised question-and-answer session, Putin declared that “what was called Novorossiya back in tsarist days – Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolayev and Odessa – were not part of Ukraine then. These territories were given to Ukraine in the 1920s by the Soviet Government. Why? Who knows? They were won by Potemkin and Catherine the Great in a series of well-known wars. The center of that territory was Novorossiysk, so the region is called Novorossiya. Russia lost these territories for various reasons, but the people remained.”

    Novorossiya isn’t just a construct of Vladimir Putin’s imagination, but rather a notion drawn from historic fact that resonated with the people who populated the territories it encompassed. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was an abortive effort by pro-Russia citizens of the new Ukrainian state to restore Novorossiya as an independent region.

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    While this effort failed, the concept of a greater Novorossiya confederation was revived in May 2014 by the newly proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. But this effort, too, was short-lived, being put on ice in 2015. This, however, did not mean the death of the idea of Novorossiya. On February 21, 2022, Putin delivered a lengthy address to the Russian nation on the eve of his decision to send Russian troops into Ukraine as part of what he termed a Special Military Operation. Those who watched Tucker Carlson’s February 9, 2024, interview with Putin would have been struck by the similarity between the two presentations.

    While he did not make a direct reference to Novorossiya, the president did outline fundamental historic and cultural linkages which serve as the foundation for any discussion about the viability and legitimacy of Novorossiya in the context of Russian-Ukrainian relations.

    “I would like to emphasize,” Putin said, “once again that Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an integral part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space. It is our friends, our relatives, not only colleagues, friends, and former work colleagues, but also our relatives and close family members. Since the oldest times,” Putin continued, “the inhabitants of the south-western historical territories of ancient Russia have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians. It was the same in the 17th century, when a part of these territories [i.e., Novorossiya] was reunited with the Russian state, and even after that.”

    The Russian president set forth his contention that the modern state of Ukraine was an invention of Vladimir Lenin, the founding father of the Soviet Union. “Soviet Ukraine is the result of the Bolsheviks’ policy,” Putin stated, “and can be rightfully called ‘Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine’. He was its creator and architect. This is fully and comprehensively corroborated by archival documents.”

    Putin went on to issue a threat which, when seen in the context of the present, proved ominously prescient. “And today the ’grateful progeny’ has overturned monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. They call it decommunization. You want decommunization? Very well, this suits us just fine. But why stop halfway? We are ready to show what real decommunizations would mean for Ukraine.”

    In September 2022 Putin followed through on this, ordering referendums in four territories (Kherson and Zaporozhye, and the newly independent Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics) to determine whether the populations residing there wished to join the Russian Federation. All four did so. Putin has since then referred to these new Russian territories as Novorossiya, perhaps nowhere more poignantly that in June 2023, when he praised the Russian soldiers “who fought and gave their lives to Novorossiya and for the unity of the Russian world.”

    The story of those who fought and gave their lives to Novorossiya is one that I have wanted to tell for some time now. I have borne witness here in the United States to the extremely one-sided coverage of the military aspects of Russia’s military operation. Like many of my fellow analysts, I had to undertake the extremely difficult task of trying to parse out fact from an overwhelmingly fictional narrative. Nor was I helped in any way in this regard by the Russian side, which was parsimonious in the release of information that reflected its side of reality.

    In preparing for my December 2023 visit to Russia, I had hoped to be able to visit the four new Russian territories to see for myself what the truth was when it came to the fighting between Russia and Ukraine. I also wanted to interview the Russian military and civilian leadership to get a broader perspective of the conflict. I had reached out to the Russian Foreign and Defense ministries through the Russian Embassy in the US, bending the ear of both the Ambassador, Anatoly Antonov, and the Defense Attache, Major-General Evgeny Bobkin, about my plans.

    While both men supported my project and wrote recommendations back to their respective ministries in this regard, the Russian Defense Ministry, which had the final say over what happened in the four new territories, vetoed the idea. This veto was not because they didn’t like the idea of me writing an in-depth analysis of the conflict from the Russian perspective, but rather that the project as I outlined it, which would have required sustained access to frontline units and personnel, was deemed too dangerous. In short, the Russian Defense Ministry did not relish the idea of me being killed on its watch.

    Under normal circumstances, I would have backed off. I had no desire to create any difficulty with the Russian government, and I was always cognizant of the reality that I was a guest in the country.

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    The last thing I wanted to be was a “war tourist,” where I put myself and others at risk for purely personal reasons. But I also felt strongly that if I were going to continue to provide so-called “expert analysis” about the military operation and the geopolitical realities of Novorossiya and Crimea, then I needed to see these places firsthand. I strongly believed that I had a professional obligation to see the new territories. Fortunately for me, Aleksandr Zyryanov, a Crimea native and director general of the Novosibirsk Region Development Corporation, agreed.

    It wasn’t going to be easy.

    We first tried to enter the new territories via Donetsk, driving west out of Rostov-on-Don. However, when we arrived at the checkpoint, we were told that the Ministry of Defense had not cleared us for entry. Not willing to take no for an answer, Aleksandr drove south, towards Krasnodar, and then – after making some phone calls – across the Crimean Bridge into Crimea. Once it became clear that we were planning on entering the new territories from Crimea, the Ministry of Defense yielded, granting permission for me to visit the four new Russian territories under one non-negotiable condition – I was not to go anywhere near the frontlines.

    We left Feodosia early on the morning of January 15, 2024. At Dzhankoy, in northern Crimea, we took highway 18 north toward the Tup-Dzhankoy Peninsula and the Chongar Strait, which separates the Sivash lagoon system that forms the border between Crimea and the mainland into eastern and western portions. It was here that Red Army forces, on the night of November 12, 1920, broke through the defenses of the White Army of General Wrangel, leading to the capture of the Crimean Peninsula by Soviet forces. And it was also here that the Russian Army, on February 24, 2022, crossed into the Kherson Region from Crimea.

    The Chongar Bridge is one of three highway crossings that connect Crimea with Kherson. It has been struck twice by Ukrainian forces seeking to disrupt Russian supply lines, once, in June 2023, when it was hit by British-made Storm Shadow missiles, and once again that August when it was hit by French-made SCALP missiles (a variant of the Storm Shadow.) In both instances, the bridge was temporarily shut down for repairs, evidence of which was clearly visible as we made our way across, and on to the Chongar checkpoint, where we were cleared by Russian soldiers for entry into the Kherson Region.

    At the checkpoint we picked up a vehicle carrying a bodyguard detachment from the reconnaissance company of the Sparta Battalion, a veteran military formation whose roots date back to the very beginning of the Donbass revolt against the Ukrainian nationalists who seized power in Kiev during the February 2014 Maidan coup. They would be our escort through the Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions – even though we were going to give the frontlines a wide berth, Ukrainian “deep reconnaissance groups”, or DRGs, were known to target traffic along the M18 highway. Aleksandr was driving an armored Chevrolet Suburban, and the Sparta detachment had their own armored SUV. If we were to come under attack, our response would be to try and drive through the ambush. If that failed, then the Sparta boys would have to go to work.

    Our first destination was the city of Genichesk, a port city along the Sea of Azov. Genichesk is the capital of the Genichesk District of the Kherson Region and, since November 9, 2022, when Russian forces withdrew from the city of Kherson, it has served as the temporary capital of the region. Aleksandr had been on his phone since morning, and his efforts had paid off – I was scheduled to meet with Vladimir Saldo, the local Governor.

    RT

    Genichesk is – literally – off the beaten path. When we reached the town of Novoalekseyevka, we got off the M18 highway and headed east along a two-lane road that took us toward the Sea of Azov. There were armed checkpoints all along the route, but the Sparta bodyguards were able to get us waved through without any issues. But the effect of these checkpoints was chilling – there was no doubt that one was in a region at war.

    To call Genichesk a ghost town would be misleading – it is populated, and the evidence of civilian life is everywhere you look. The problem was, there didn’t seem to be enough people present. The city, like the region, is in a general state of decay, a holdover from the neglect it had suffered at the hands of a Ukrainian government that largely ignored territories that had, since 2004, voted in favor of the Party of Regions, the party of former President Viktor Yanukovich, who was ousted in the February 2014 Maidan coup. Nearly two years of war had likewise contributed to the atmosphere of societal neglect, an impression which was magnified by the weather – overcast, cold, with a light sleet blowing in off the water.

    As we made our way into the building where the government of the Kherson Region had established its temporary offices, I couldn’t help but notice a statue of Lenin in the courtyard. Ukrainian nationalists had taken it down in July 2015, but the citizens of Genichesk had reinstalled it in April 2022, once the Russians had taken control of the city. Given Putin’s feeling about the role Lenin played in creating Ukraine, I found both the presence of this monument, and the role of the Russian citizens of Genichesk in restoring it, curiously ironic.

    Vladimir Saldo is a man imbued with enthusiasm for his work. A civil engineer by profession, with a PhD in economics, Saldo had served in senior management positions in the “Khersonbud” Project and Construction Company before moving on into politics, serving on the Kherson City Council, the Kherson Regional Administration, and two terms as the mayor of the city of Kherson. Saldo, as a member of the Party of Regions, moved to the opposition and was effectively subjected to political ostracism in 2014, when the Ukrainian nationalists who had seized power all but forced it out of politics.

    Aleksandr and I had the pleasure of meeting with Saldo in his office in the government building in downtown Genichesk. We talked about a wide range of issues, including his own path from a Ukrainian construction specialist to his current position as the governor of Kherson Oblast.

    We talked about the war.

    But Saldo’s passion was the economy, and how he could help revive the civilian economy of Kherson in a manner that best served the interests of its diminished population. On the eve of the military operation, back in early 2022, the population of the Kherson Region stood at just over a million, of which some 280,000 were residing in the city of Kherson. By November 2022, following the withdrawal of Russian forces from the right bank of the Dnieper River – including the city of Kherson – the population of the region had fallen below 400,000 and, with dismal economic prospects, the numbers kept falling. Many of those who left were Ukrainians who did not want to live under Russian rule. But others were Russians and Ukrainians who felt that they had no future in the war-torn region, and as such sought their fortunes elsewhere in Russia.

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    “My job is to give the people of Kherson hope for a better future,” Saldo told me. “And the time for this to happen is now, not when the war ends.”

    Restoration of Kherson’s once vibrant agricultural sector is a top priority, and Saldo has personally taken the lead in signing agreements for the provision of Kherson produce to Moscow supermarkets. Saldo has also turned the region into a special economic zone, where potential investors and entrepreneurs can receive preferential loans and financial support, as well as organizational and legal assistance for businesses willing to open shop there.

    The man responsible for making this vision a reality is Mikhail Panchenko, the Director of the Kherson Region Industry Development Fund. I met Mikhail in a restaurant located across the street from the governmental building which Saldo called home. Mikhail had come to Kherson in the summer of 2022, leaving a prominent position in Moscow in the process. “The Russian government was interested in rebuilding Kherson,” Mikhail told me, “and established the Industry Development Fund as a way of attracting businesses to the region.” Mikhail, who was born in 1968, was too old to enlist in the military. “When the opportunity came to direct the Industry Development Fund, I jumped at it as a way to do my patriotic duty.”

    The first year of the fund’s operation saw Mikhail hand out 300 million rubles (almost $3.3 million at the current rate) in loans and grants (some of which was used to open the very restaurant where we were meeting.) The second year saw the allotment grow to some 700 million rubles. One of the biggest projects was the opening of a concrete production line capable of producing 60 cubic meters of concrete per hour. Mikhail took Alexander and me on a tour of the plant, which had grown to three production lines generating some 180 cubic meters of concrete an hour. Mikhail had just approved funding for an additional four production lines, for a total concrete production rate of 420 cubic meters per hour.

    “That’s a lot of concrete,” I remarked to Mikhail.

    “We are making good use of it,” he replied. “We are rebuilding schools, hospitals, and government buildings that had been neglected over the years. Revitalizing the basic infrastructure a society needs if it is to nurture a growing population.”

    The problem Mikhail faces, however, is that most of the population growth being experienced in Kherson today comes from the military. The war can’t last forever, Mikhail noted. “Someday the army will leave, and we will need civilians. Right now, the people who left are not returning, and we’re having a hard time attracting newcomers. But we will keep building in anticipation of a time when the population of the Kherson region will grow from an impetus other than war. And for that,” he said, a twinkle in his eye, “we need concrete!”

    I thought long and hard about the words of Vladimir Saldo and Panchenko as Aleksandr drove back onto the M18 highway, heading northeast, toward Donetsk. The reconstruction efforts being undertaken are impressive. But the number that kept coming to mind was the precipitous decline in the population – more than 60% of the pre-war population has left the Kherson region since the Russian military operation began.

    According to statistics provided by the Russian Central Election Commission, some 571,000 voters took part in the referendum on joining Russia that was held in late September 2022. A little over 497,000, or some 87%, voted in favor, while slightly more than 68,800, or 12%, voted against. The turnout was almost 77%.

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    These numbers, if accurate, implied that there was a population of over 740,000 eligible voters at the time of the election. While the loss of the city of Kherson in November 2022 could account for a significant source of the population drop that took place between September 2022 and the time of my visit in January 2024, it could not account for all of it.

    The Russian population of Kherson in 2022 stood at approximately 20%, or around 200,000. One can safely say that the number of Russians who fled west to Kiev following the start of the military operation amounts to a negligible figure. If one assumes that the Russian population of the Kherson Region remained relatively stable, then most of the population decline came from the Ukrainian population.

    While Saldo did not admit to such, the Governor of the neighboring Zaporozhya Region, Yevgeny Balitsky, has acknowledged that many Ukrainian families deemed by the authorities to be anti-Russian were deported following the initiation of the military operation (Russians accounted for a little more than 25% of the pre-conflict Zaporozhye population.) Many others fled to Russia to escape the deprivations of war.

    Evidence of the war was everywhere to be seen. While the conflict in Kherson has stabilized along a line defined by the Dnieper River, Zaporozhye is very much a frontline region. Indeed, the main direction of attack of the summer 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive was from the Zaporozhye region village of Rabotino, toward the town of Tokmak, and on towards the temporary regional capital of Melitopol (the city of Zaporozhye has remained under Ukrainian control throughout the conflict to date.)

    I had petitioned to visit the frontlines near Rabotino but had been denied by the Russian Ministry of Defense. So, too, was my request to visit units deployed in the vicinity of Tokmak – too close to the front. The closest I would get would be the city of Melitopol, the ultimate objective of the Ukrainian counterattack. We drove past fields filled with the concrete “dragon’s teeth” and antitank ditches that marked the final layer of defenses that constituted the “Surovikin Line,” named after the Russian General, Sergey Surovikin, who had commanded the forces when the defenses were put in place.

    The Ukrainians had hoped to reach the city of Melitopol in a matter of days once their attack began; they never breached the first line of defense situated to the southeast of Rabotino.

    Melitopol, however, is not immune to the horrors of war, with Ukrainian artillery and rockets targeting it often to disrupt Russian military logistics. I kept this in mind as we drove through the streets of the city, past military checkpoints, and roving patrols. I was struck by the fact that the civilians I saw were going about their business, seemingly oblivious to the everyday reality of war that existed around them.

    As was the case in Kherson, the entirety of the Zaporozhye Region seemed strangely depopulated, as if one were driving through the French capital of Paris in August, when half the city is away on vacation. I had hoped to be able to talk with Balitsky about the reduced population and other questions I had about life in the region during wartime, but this time Aleksandr’s phone could not produce the desired result – Balitsky was away from the region and unavailable.

    If he had been available, I would have asked him the same question I had put to Saldo earlier in the day: given that Putin was apparently willing to return the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions to Ukraine as part of the peace deal negotiated in March 2022, how does the population of his region feel about being part of Russia today? Are they convinced that Russia is, in fact, there to stay? Do they feel like they are a genuine part of the Novorossiya that Putin speaks about?

    Saldo had talked in depth about the transition from being occupied by Russian forces, which lasted until April-May 2022 (about the time that Ukraine backed out of the ceasefire agreement), to being administered by Moscow. “There never was a doubt in my mind, or anyone else’s, that Kherson was historically a part of Russia,” Saldo said, “or that, once Russian troops arrived, that we would forever be Russian again.”

    But the declining population, and the admission of forced deportations on the part of Balitsky, suggests that there was a significant part of the population that had, in fact, taken umbrage at such a future.

    I would have liked to hear what Balitsky had to say about this question.

    Reality, however, doesn’t deal with hypotheticals, and the present reality is that both Kherson and Zaporozhye are today part of the Russian Federation, and that both regions are populated by people who had made the decision to remain there as citizens of Russia. We will never know what the fate of these two territories would have been had the Ukrainian government honored the ceasefire agreement negotiated in March 2022. What we do know is that today both Kherson and Zaporozhye are part of the “New Territories” – Novorossiya.

    Russia will for some time find its acquisition of the “new territories” challenged by nations who question the legitimacy of Russia’s military occupation and subsequent absorption of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions into the Russian Federation. The reticence of foreigners to recognize these regions as being part of Russia, however, is the least of Russia’s problems. As was the case with Crimea, the Russian government will proceed irrespective of any international opposition.

    The real challenge facing Russia is to convince Russians that the new territories are as integral to the Russian motherland as Crimea, a region reabsorbed by Russia in 2014 which has seen its economic fortunes and its population grow over the past decade. The diminished demographics of Kherson and Zaporozhye represent a litmus test of sorts for the Russian government, and for the governments of both Kherson and Zaporozhye. If the populations of these regions cannot regenerate, then these regions will wither on the vine. If, however, these new Russian lands can be transformed into places where Russians can envision themselves raising families in an environment free from want and fear, then Novorossiya will flourish.

    Novorossiya is a reality, and the people who live there are citizens by choice more than circumstances. They are well served by men like Saldo and Balitsky, who are dedicated to the giant task of making these regions part of the Russian Motherland in actuality, not just in name.

    Behind Saldo and Balitsky are men like Panchenko, people who left an easy life in Moscow or some other Russian city to come to the “New Territories” not for the purpose of seeking their fortunes, but rather to improve the lives of the new Russian citizens of Novorossiya.



    For this to happen, Russia must emerge victorious in its struggle against the Ukrainian nationalists ensconced in Kiev, and their Western allies. Thanks to the sacrifices of the Russian military, this victory is in the process of being accomplished.

    Then the real test begins – turning Novorossiya into a place Russians will want to call home.


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    https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/03/scott-ritter-we-are-witnessing-the-bittersweet-birth-of-a-new-russia/


    https://telegra.ph/Scott-Ritter-We-are-witnessing-the-bittersweet-birth-of-a-new-Russia--VT-Foreign-Policy-03-11
    Scott Ritter: We are witnessing the bittersweet birth of a new Russia | VT Foreign Policy March 10, 2024 VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State. Tucker Carlson’s confused exasperation over Russian President Vladmir Putin’s extemporaneous history lesson at the start of their landmark February interview (which has been watched more than a billion times), underscored one realty. For a Western audience, the question of the historical bona fides of Russia’s claim of sovereign interest in territories located on the left (eastern) bank of the Dnieper River, currently claimed by Ukraine, is confusing to the point of incomprehension. Vladimir Putin, however, did not manufacture his history lesson from thin air. Anyone who has followed the speeches and writings of the Russian president over the years would have found his comments to Carlson quite familiar, echoing both in tone and content previous statements made concerning both the viability of the Ukrainian state from an historic perspective, and the historical ties between what Putin has called Novorossiya (New Russia) and the Russian nation. For example, on March 18, 2014, during his announcement regarding the annexation of Crimea, the president observed that “after the [Russian] Revolution [of 1917], for a number of reasons the Bolsheviks – let God judge them – added historical sections of the south of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. This was done with no consideration for the ethnic composition of the population, and these regions today form the south-east of Ukraine.” Later during a televised question-and-answer session, Putin declared that “what was called Novorossiya back in tsarist days – Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolayev and Odessa – were not part of Ukraine then. These territories were given to Ukraine in the 1920s by the Soviet Government. Why? Who knows? They were won by Potemkin and Catherine the Great in a series of well-known wars. The center of that territory was Novorossiysk, so the region is called Novorossiya. Russia lost these territories for various reasons, but the people remained.” Novorossiya isn’t just a construct of Vladimir Putin’s imagination, but rather a notion drawn from historic fact that resonated with the people who populated the territories it encompassed. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was an abortive effort by pro-Russia citizens of the new Ukrainian state to restore Novorossiya as an independent region. Scott Ritter: Helping Crimea recover from decades of Ukrainian misrule is a tough but necessary challenge Read more Scott Ritter: Helping Crimea recover from decades of Ukrainian misrule is a tough but necessary challenge While this effort failed, the concept of a greater Novorossiya confederation was revived in May 2014 by the newly proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. But this effort, too, was short-lived, being put on ice in 2015. This, however, did not mean the death of the idea of Novorossiya. On February 21, 2022, Putin delivered a lengthy address to the Russian nation on the eve of his decision to send Russian troops into Ukraine as part of what he termed a Special Military Operation. Those who watched Tucker Carlson’s February 9, 2024, interview with Putin would have been struck by the similarity between the two presentations. While he did not make a direct reference to Novorossiya, the president did outline fundamental historic and cultural linkages which serve as the foundation for any discussion about the viability and legitimacy of Novorossiya in the context of Russian-Ukrainian relations. “I would like to emphasize,” Putin said, “once again that Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an integral part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space. It is our friends, our relatives, not only colleagues, friends, and former work colleagues, but also our relatives and close family members. Since the oldest times,” Putin continued, “the inhabitants of the south-western historical territories of ancient Russia have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians. It was the same in the 17th century, when a part of these territories [i.e., Novorossiya] was reunited with the Russian state, and even after that.” The Russian president set forth his contention that the modern state of Ukraine was an invention of Vladimir Lenin, the founding father of the Soviet Union. “Soviet Ukraine is the result of the Bolsheviks’ policy,” Putin stated, “and can be rightfully called ‘Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine’. He was its creator and architect. This is fully and comprehensively corroborated by archival documents.” Putin went on to issue a threat which, when seen in the context of the present, proved ominously prescient. “And today the ’grateful progeny’ has overturned monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. They call it decommunization. You want decommunization? Very well, this suits us just fine. But why stop halfway? We are ready to show what real decommunizations would mean for Ukraine.” In September 2022 Putin followed through on this, ordering referendums in four territories (Kherson and Zaporozhye, and the newly independent Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics) to determine whether the populations residing there wished to join the Russian Federation. All four did so. Putin has since then referred to these new Russian territories as Novorossiya, perhaps nowhere more poignantly that in June 2023, when he praised the Russian soldiers “who fought and gave their lives to Novorossiya and for the unity of the Russian world.” The story of those who fought and gave their lives to Novorossiya is one that I have wanted to tell for some time now. I have borne witness here in the United States to the extremely one-sided coverage of the military aspects of Russia’s military operation. Like many of my fellow analysts, I had to undertake the extremely difficult task of trying to parse out fact from an overwhelmingly fictional narrative. Nor was I helped in any way in this regard by the Russian side, which was parsimonious in the release of information that reflected its side of reality. In preparing for my December 2023 visit to Russia, I had hoped to be able to visit the four new Russian territories to see for myself what the truth was when it came to the fighting between Russia and Ukraine. I also wanted to interview the Russian military and civilian leadership to get a broader perspective of the conflict. I had reached out to the Russian Foreign and Defense ministries through the Russian Embassy in the US, bending the ear of both the Ambassador, Anatoly Antonov, and the Defense Attache, Major-General Evgeny Bobkin, about my plans. While both men supported my project and wrote recommendations back to their respective ministries in this regard, the Russian Defense Ministry, which had the final say over what happened in the four new territories, vetoed the idea. This veto was not because they didn’t like the idea of me writing an in-depth analysis of the conflict from the Russian perspective, but rather that the project as I outlined it, which would have required sustained access to frontline units and personnel, was deemed too dangerous. In short, the Russian Defense Ministry did not relish the idea of me being killed on its watch. Under normal circumstances, I would have backed off. I had no desire to create any difficulty with the Russian government, and I was always cognizant of the reality that I was a guest in the country. Western ‘expertise’ on the Ukraine conflict could lead the world to a nuclear disaster Read more Western ‘expertise’ on the Ukraine conflict could lead the world to a nuclear disaster The last thing I wanted to be was a “war tourist,” where I put myself and others at risk for purely personal reasons. But I also felt strongly that if I were going to continue to provide so-called “expert analysis” about the military operation and the geopolitical realities of Novorossiya and Crimea, then I needed to see these places firsthand. I strongly believed that I had a professional obligation to see the new territories. Fortunately for me, Aleksandr Zyryanov, a Crimea native and director general of the Novosibirsk Region Development Corporation, agreed. It wasn’t going to be easy. We first tried to enter the new territories via Donetsk, driving west out of Rostov-on-Don. However, when we arrived at the checkpoint, we were told that the Ministry of Defense had not cleared us for entry. Not willing to take no for an answer, Aleksandr drove south, towards Krasnodar, and then – after making some phone calls – across the Crimean Bridge into Crimea. Once it became clear that we were planning on entering the new territories from Crimea, the Ministry of Defense yielded, granting permission for me to visit the four new Russian territories under one non-negotiable condition – I was not to go anywhere near the frontlines. We left Feodosia early on the morning of January 15, 2024. At Dzhankoy, in northern Crimea, we took highway 18 north toward the Tup-Dzhankoy Peninsula and the Chongar Strait, which separates the Sivash lagoon system that forms the border between Crimea and the mainland into eastern and western portions. It was here that Red Army forces, on the night of November 12, 1920, broke through the defenses of the White Army of General Wrangel, leading to the capture of the Crimean Peninsula by Soviet forces. And it was also here that the Russian Army, on February 24, 2022, crossed into the Kherson Region from Crimea. The Chongar Bridge is one of three highway crossings that connect Crimea with Kherson. It has been struck twice by Ukrainian forces seeking to disrupt Russian supply lines, once, in June 2023, when it was hit by British-made Storm Shadow missiles, and once again that August when it was hit by French-made SCALP missiles (a variant of the Storm Shadow.) In both instances, the bridge was temporarily shut down for repairs, evidence of which was clearly visible as we made our way across, and on to the Chongar checkpoint, where we were cleared by Russian soldiers for entry into the Kherson Region. At the checkpoint we picked up a vehicle carrying a bodyguard detachment from the reconnaissance company of the Sparta Battalion, a veteran military formation whose roots date back to the very beginning of the Donbass revolt against the Ukrainian nationalists who seized power in Kiev during the February 2014 Maidan coup. They would be our escort through the Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions – even though we were going to give the frontlines a wide berth, Ukrainian “deep reconnaissance groups”, or DRGs, were known to target traffic along the M18 highway. Aleksandr was driving an armored Chevrolet Suburban, and the Sparta detachment had their own armored SUV. If we were to come under attack, our response would be to try and drive through the ambush. If that failed, then the Sparta boys would have to go to work. Our first destination was the city of Genichesk, a port city along the Sea of Azov. Genichesk is the capital of the Genichesk District of the Kherson Region and, since November 9, 2022, when Russian forces withdrew from the city of Kherson, it has served as the temporary capital of the region. Aleksandr had been on his phone since morning, and his efforts had paid off – I was scheduled to meet with Vladimir Saldo, the local Governor. RT Genichesk is – literally – off the beaten path. When we reached the town of Novoalekseyevka, we got off the M18 highway and headed east along a two-lane road that took us toward the Sea of Azov. There were armed checkpoints all along the route, but the Sparta bodyguards were able to get us waved through without any issues. But the effect of these checkpoints was chilling – there was no doubt that one was in a region at war. To call Genichesk a ghost town would be misleading – it is populated, and the evidence of civilian life is everywhere you look. The problem was, there didn’t seem to be enough people present. The city, like the region, is in a general state of decay, a holdover from the neglect it had suffered at the hands of a Ukrainian government that largely ignored territories that had, since 2004, voted in favor of the Party of Regions, the party of former President Viktor Yanukovich, who was ousted in the February 2014 Maidan coup. Nearly two years of war had likewise contributed to the atmosphere of societal neglect, an impression which was magnified by the weather – overcast, cold, with a light sleet blowing in off the water. As we made our way into the building where the government of the Kherson Region had established its temporary offices, I couldn’t help but notice a statue of Lenin in the courtyard. Ukrainian nationalists had taken it down in July 2015, but the citizens of Genichesk had reinstalled it in April 2022, once the Russians had taken control of the city. Given Putin’s feeling about the role Lenin played in creating Ukraine, I found both the presence of this monument, and the role of the Russian citizens of Genichesk in restoring it, curiously ironic. Vladimir Saldo is a man imbued with enthusiasm for his work. A civil engineer by profession, with a PhD in economics, Saldo had served in senior management positions in the “Khersonbud” Project and Construction Company before moving on into politics, serving on the Kherson City Council, the Kherson Regional Administration, and two terms as the mayor of the city of Kherson. Saldo, as a member of the Party of Regions, moved to the opposition and was effectively subjected to political ostracism in 2014, when the Ukrainian nationalists who had seized power all but forced it out of politics. Aleksandr and I had the pleasure of meeting with Saldo in his office in the government building in downtown Genichesk. We talked about a wide range of issues, including his own path from a Ukrainian construction specialist to his current position as the governor of Kherson Oblast. We talked about the war. But Saldo’s passion was the economy, and how he could help revive the civilian economy of Kherson in a manner that best served the interests of its diminished population. On the eve of the military operation, back in early 2022, the population of the Kherson Region stood at just over a million, of which some 280,000 were residing in the city of Kherson. By November 2022, following the withdrawal of Russian forces from the right bank of the Dnieper River – including the city of Kherson – the population of the region had fallen below 400,000 and, with dismal economic prospects, the numbers kept falling. Many of those who left were Ukrainians who did not want to live under Russian rule. But others were Russians and Ukrainians who felt that they had no future in the war-torn region, and as such sought their fortunes elsewhere in Russia. Fyodor Lukyanov: How does the Russia-Ukraine conflict end? Read more Fyodor Lukyanov: How does the Russia-Ukraine conflict end? “My job is to give the people of Kherson hope for a better future,” Saldo told me. “And the time for this to happen is now, not when the war ends.” Restoration of Kherson’s once vibrant agricultural sector is a top priority, and Saldo has personally taken the lead in signing agreements for the provision of Kherson produce to Moscow supermarkets. Saldo has also turned the region into a special economic zone, where potential investors and entrepreneurs can receive preferential loans and financial support, as well as organizational and legal assistance for businesses willing to open shop there. The man responsible for making this vision a reality is Mikhail Panchenko, the Director of the Kherson Region Industry Development Fund. I met Mikhail in a restaurant located across the street from the governmental building which Saldo called home. Mikhail had come to Kherson in the summer of 2022, leaving a prominent position in Moscow in the process. “The Russian government was interested in rebuilding Kherson,” Mikhail told me, “and established the Industry Development Fund as a way of attracting businesses to the region.” Mikhail, who was born in 1968, was too old to enlist in the military. “When the opportunity came to direct the Industry Development Fund, I jumped at it as a way to do my patriotic duty.” The first year of the fund’s operation saw Mikhail hand out 300 million rubles (almost $3.3 million at the current rate) in loans and grants (some of which was used to open the very restaurant where we were meeting.) The second year saw the allotment grow to some 700 million rubles. One of the biggest projects was the opening of a concrete production line capable of producing 60 cubic meters of concrete per hour. Mikhail took Alexander and me on a tour of the plant, which had grown to three production lines generating some 180 cubic meters of concrete an hour. Mikhail had just approved funding for an additional four production lines, for a total concrete production rate of 420 cubic meters per hour. “That’s a lot of concrete,” I remarked to Mikhail. “We are making good use of it,” he replied. “We are rebuilding schools, hospitals, and government buildings that had been neglected over the years. Revitalizing the basic infrastructure a society needs if it is to nurture a growing population.” The problem Mikhail faces, however, is that most of the population growth being experienced in Kherson today comes from the military. The war can’t last forever, Mikhail noted. “Someday the army will leave, and we will need civilians. Right now, the people who left are not returning, and we’re having a hard time attracting newcomers. But we will keep building in anticipation of a time when the population of the Kherson region will grow from an impetus other than war. And for that,” he said, a twinkle in his eye, “we need concrete!” I thought long and hard about the words of Vladimir Saldo and Panchenko as Aleksandr drove back onto the M18 highway, heading northeast, toward Donetsk. The reconstruction efforts being undertaken are impressive. But the number that kept coming to mind was the precipitous decline in the population – more than 60% of the pre-war population has left the Kherson region since the Russian military operation began. According to statistics provided by the Russian Central Election Commission, some 571,000 voters took part in the referendum on joining Russia that was held in late September 2022. A little over 497,000, or some 87%, voted in favor, while slightly more than 68,800, or 12%, voted against. The turnout was almost 77%. Sergey Poletaev: As the second anniversary of the Russia–Ukraine conflict approaches, who has the upper hand? Read more Sergey Poletaev: As the second anniversary of the Russia–Ukraine conflict approaches, who has the upper hand? These numbers, if accurate, implied that there was a population of over 740,000 eligible voters at the time of the election. While the loss of the city of Kherson in November 2022 could account for a significant source of the population drop that took place between September 2022 and the time of my visit in January 2024, it could not account for all of it. The Russian population of Kherson in 2022 stood at approximately 20%, or around 200,000. One can safely say that the number of Russians who fled west to Kiev following the start of the military operation amounts to a negligible figure. If one assumes that the Russian population of the Kherson Region remained relatively stable, then most of the population decline came from the Ukrainian population. While Saldo did not admit to such, the Governor of the neighboring Zaporozhya Region, Yevgeny Balitsky, has acknowledged that many Ukrainian families deemed by the authorities to be anti-Russian were deported following the initiation of the military operation (Russians accounted for a little more than 25% of the pre-conflict Zaporozhye population.) Many others fled to Russia to escape the deprivations of war. Evidence of the war was everywhere to be seen. While the conflict in Kherson has stabilized along a line defined by the Dnieper River, Zaporozhye is very much a frontline region. Indeed, the main direction of attack of the summer 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive was from the Zaporozhye region village of Rabotino, toward the town of Tokmak, and on towards the temporary regional capital of Melitopol (the city of Zaporozhye has remained under Ukrainian control throughout the conflict to date.) I had petitioned to visit the frontlines near Rabotino but had been denied by the Russian Ministry of Defense. So, too, was my request to visit units deployed in the vicinity of Tokmak – too close to the front. The closest I would get would be the city of Melitopol, the ultimate objective of the Ukrainian counterattack. We drove past fields filled with the concrete “dragon’s teeth” and antitank ditches that marked the final layer of defenses that constituted the “Surovikin Line,” named after the Russian General, Sergey Surovikin, who had commanded the forces when the defenses were put in place. The Ukrainians had hoped to reach the city of Melitopol in a matter of days once their attack began; they never breached the first line of defense situated to the southeast of Rabotino. Melitopol, however, is not immune to the horrors of war, with Ukrainian artillery and rockets targeting it often to disrupt Russian military logistics. I kept this in mind as we drove through the streets of the city, past military checkpoints, and roving patrols. I was struck by the fact that the civilians I saw were going about their business, seemingly oblivious to the everyday reality of war that existed around them. As was the case in Kherson, the entirety of the Zaporozhye Region seemed strangely depopulated, as if one were driving through the French capital of Paris in August, when half the city is away on vacation. I had hoped to be able to talk with Balitsky about the reduced population and other questions I had about life in the region during wartime, but this time Aleksandr’s phone could not produce the desired result – Balitsky was away from the region and unavailable. If he had been available, I would have asked him the same question I had put to Saldo earlier in the day: given that Putin was apparently willing to return the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions to Ukraine as part of the peace deal negotiated in March 2022, how does the population of his region feel about being part of Russia today? Are they convinced that Russia is, in fact, there to stay? Do they feel like they are a genuine part of the Novorossiya that Putin speaks about? Saldo had talked in depth about the transition from being occupied by Russian forces, which lasted until April-May 2022 (about the time that Ukraine backed out of the ceasefire agreement), to being administered by Moscow. “There never was a doubt in my mind, or anyone else’s, that Kherson was historically a part of Russia,” Saldo said, “or that, once Russian troops arrived, that we would forever be Russian again.” But the declining population, and the admission of forced deportations on the part of Balitsky, suggests that there was a significant part of the population that had, in fact, taken umbrage at such a future. I would have liked to hear what Balitsky had to say about this question. Reality, however, doesn’t deal with hypotheticals, and the present reality is that both Kherson and Zaporozhye are today part of the Russian Federation, and that both regions are populated by people who had made the decision to remain there as citizens of Russia. We will never know what the fate of these two territories would have been had the Ukrainian government honored the ceasefire agreement negotiated in March 2022. What we do know is that today both Kherson and Zaporozhye are part of the “New Territories” – Novorossiya. Russia will for some time find its acquisition of the “new territories” challenged by nations who question the legitimacy of Russia’s military occupation and subsequent absorption of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions into the Russian Federation. The reticence of foreigners to recognize these regions as being part of Russia, however, is the least of Russia’s problems. As was the case with Crimea, the Russian government will proceed irrespective of any international opposition. The real challenge facing Russia is to convince Russians that the new territories are as integral to the Russian motherland as Crimea, a region reabsorbed by Russia in 2014 which has seen its economic fortunes and its population grow over the past decade. The diminished demographics of Kherson and Zaporozhye represent a litmus test of sorts for the Russian government, and for the governments of both Kherson and Zaporozhye. If the populations of these regions cannot regenerate, then these regions will wither on the vine. If, however, these new Russian lands can be transformed into places where Russians can envision themselves raising families in an environment free from want and fear, then Novorossiya will flourish. Novorossiya is a reality, and the people who live there are citizens by choice more than circumstances. They are well served by men like Saldo and Balitsky, who are dedicated to the giant task of making these regions part of the Russian Motherland in actuality, not just in name. Behind Saldo and Balitsky are men like Panchenko, people who left an easy life in Moscow or some other Russian city to come to the “New Territories” not for the purpose of seeking their fortunes, but rather to improve the lives of the new Russian citizens of Novorossiya. For this to happen, Russia must emerge victorious in its struggle against the Ukrainian nationalists ensconced in Kiev, and their Western allies. Thanks to the sacrifices of the Russian military, this victory is in the process of being accomplished. Then the real test begins – turning Novorossiya into a place Russians will want to call home. ATTENTION READERS We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion. About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT. https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/03/scott-ritter-we-are-witnessing-the-bittersweet-birth-of-a-new-russia/ https://telegra.ph/Scott-Ritter-We-are-witnessing-the-bittersweet-birth-of-a-new-Russia--VT-Foreign-Policy-03-11
    WWW.VTFOREIGNPOLICY.COM
    Scott Ritter: We are witnessing the bittersweet birth of a new Russia
    Building Novorossiya back up after Ukrainian neglect and war is a monumental but unavoidable task
    Yay
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  • ‘Too big to fail’ was bad enough for the banks. Now we have ‘too many to fail.’
    Last Updated: Feb. 13, 2024 at 1:20 p.m. ET

    People line up outside of the shuttered Silicon Valley Bank headquarters on March 10, 2023, in Santa Clara, Calif.
    Getty Images
    Almost a year after the mini banking crisis in the United States, it is worth revisiting the episode. Was it just a tempest in a teacup? Was there really a systemic threat, or was it just a problem with a few banks? Should the interventions by the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury worry or comfort us?

    Recall that three mid-size U.S. banks suddenly failed around March 2023. The most prominent was Silicon Valley Bank, which became the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, after Washington Mutual in 2008. Roughly 90% of the deposits at SVB were uninsured, and uninsured deposits are prone to runs. Making matters worse, SVB had invested significant sums in long-term bonds, the market value of which fell as interest rates rose. When SVB sold some of these holdings to raise funds, the unrealized losses embedded in its bond portfolio started coming to light. A failed equity offering then triggered a classic bank run.

    It is convenient to think that these issues were confined to just a few rogue banks. But the problem was systemic.

    When the Fed engages in quantitative easing (QE), it buys bonds from financial institutions. Typically, those sellers then deposit the money in their bank, and this results in a large increase in uninsured deposits in the banking system. On the banks’ asset side, there is a corresponding increase in central-bank reserves. This is stable, since reserves are the most liquid asset on the planet and can be used to satisfy any impatient depositors who come for their money. Unfortunately, a number of smaller banks (with less than $50 billion in assets) moved away from this stable position as QE continued.

    Historically, smaller U.S. banks financed themselves conservatively, with uninsured demandable deposits accounting for only around 10% of their liabilities. Yet by the time the Fed was done with its pandemic-era QE, these banks’ uninsured demandable deposits exceeded 30% of liabilities. Though that level was still far below SVB’s, these institutions clearly had drunk from the same firehose.

    Smaller banks were also more conservative about liquidity in the past. At the outset of QE in late 2008, banks with less than $50 billion in assets had reserves (and other assets that could be used to borrow reserves) that exceeded the uninsured demandable deposits they had issued. By early 2023, however, they had issued runnable claims (in aggregate) that were one and a half times the size of their liquid assets. Instead of holding liquid reserves, their assets were now more weighted toward long-term securities and term lending, including a significant share of commercial real-estate (CRE) loans.

    Advertisement
    Thus, as the Fed raised interest rates, the economic value of these banks’ assets fell sharply. Some of the fall was hidden by accounting sleight of hand, but SVB’s sudden demise caused investors to scrutinize banks’ balance sheets more carefully. What they saw did not instill confidence. The KBW Nasdaq Bank Index duly fell by over 25%, and deposits started flowing out of a large number of banks, many of which lacked the liquidity to accommodate the sudden outflows. The risk of contagious runs across smaller banks was real, as was the possibly of the problem spreading more widely.

    The Treasury essentially took bank runs off the table, while the Fed provided banks the funds to accommodate the continuing — though no longer panicked — depositor outflows.

    Importantly, as private money flowed to large banks, very little flowed to small- and medium-size institutions. That is why the authorities had to come to the rescue. Soon after SVB’s demise, the Treasury signaled that no uninsured depositor in small banks would suffer losses in any further bank collapses.

    The Fed opened a generous new facility that lent money for up to one year to banks against the par, or face value, of the securities they held on their balance sheets, without adjusting for the erosion in the value of these securities from higher interest rates. And the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBanks) — effectively an arm of the U.S. government — increased its lending to stressed banks, with total advances to the banking system having already tripled between March 2022 and March 2023 amid the Fed’s policy tightening. Borrowing by small- and medium-size banks from these official sources skyrocketed.

    The Treasury essentially took bank runs off the table, while the Fed provided banks the funds to accommodate the continuing — though no longer panicked — depositor outflows. A potential banking crisis was converted into a slow-burning problem for banks as they recognized and absorbed the losses on their balance sheets.

    Just recently, New York Community Bancorp NYCB, -5.17%, which bought parts of one of the banks that failed in 2023, reminded us that this process is still underway when it announced large losses. With the Russell microcap index of small companies significantly underperforming the S&P 100 index OEX of the largest companies since March 2023, it appears that smaller banks’ troubles have weighed on their traditional clients: small- and medium-size companies.

    Where does that leave us? Although the situation could have been much worse if the Treasury and the Fed had not stepped in, the seeming ease with which the panic was arrested allowed public attention to move on. Apart from die-hard libertarians, no one seems to care much about the extent of the intervention that was needed to rescue the smaller banks, nor has there been any broad inquiry into the circumstances that led to the vulnerabilities.

    As a result, several questions remain unanswered. To what extent were the seeds of the 2023 banking stress sown by the pandemic-induced monetary stimulus and lax supervision of what banks did with the money? Did advances by the FHLBanks delay failed banks’ efforts to raise capital? Are banks that relied on official backstops after SVB’s failure keeping afloat distressed CRE borrowers, and therefore merely postponing an eventual reckoning?

    It is not good for capitalism when those who knowingly take risks — bankers and uninsured depositors, in this case — pay no price when a risk materializes. Despite sweeping banking reforms over the past 15 years, the authorities have once again shown that they are willing to bail out market players if enough of them have taken the same risk.

    “Too big to fail” was bad enough, but now we have “too many to fail.” The mini-crisis of March 2023 was much more than a footnote in banking history. We cannot afford to bury it.

    Raghuram G. Rajan, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, is professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author, most recently, of Monetary Policy and Its Unintended Consequences (The MIT Press, 2023). Viral V. Acharya, a former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India, is professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

    This commentary was published with the permission of Project Syndicate — The Danger of Forgetting the 2023 Banking Crisis.

    More: Regional-bank bondholders seem unworried by New York Community Bank’s problems

    Also read: Recession in 2024? A quarter of economists think it will happen.


    😎🇺🇸🦅 PAR-TY… 🎉. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/too-big-to-fail-was-bad-enough-for-the-banks-now-we-have-too-many-to-fail-d89dcdda
    ‘Too big to fail’ was bad enough for the banks. Now we have ‘too many to fail.’ Last Updated: Feb. 13, 2024 at 1:20 p.m. ET People line up outside of the shuttered Silicon Valley Bank headquarters on March 10, 2023, in Santa Clara, Calif. Getty Images Almost a year after the mini banking crisis in the United States, it is worth revisiting the episode. Was it just a tempest in a teacup? Was there really a systemic threat, or was it just a problem with a few banks? Should the interventions by the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury worry or comfort us? Recall that three mid-size U.S. banks suddenly failed around March 2023. The most prominent was Silicon Valley Bank, which became the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, after Washington Mutual in 2008. Roughly 90% of the deposits at SVB were uninsured, and uninsured deposits are prone to runs. Making matters worse, SVB had invested significant sums in long-term bonds, the market value of which fell as interest rates rose. When SVB sold some of these holdings to raise funds, the unrealized losses embedded in its bond portfolio started coming to light. A failed equity offering then triggered a classic bank run. It is convenient to think that these issues were confined to just a few rogue banks. But the problem was systemic. When the Fed engages in quantitative easing (QE), it buys bonds from financial institutions. Typically, those sellers then deposit the money in their bank, and this results in a large increase in uninsured deposits in the banking system. On the banks’ asset side, there is a corresponding increase in central-bank reserves. This is stable, since reserves are the most liquid asset on the planet and can be used to satisfy any impatient depositors who come for their money. Unfortunately, a number of smaller banks (with less than $50 billion in assets) moved away from this stable position as QE continued. Historically, smaller U.S. banks financed themselves conservatively, with uninsured demandable deposits accounting for only around 10% of their liabilities. Yet by the time the Fed was done with its pandemic-era QE, these banks’ uninsured demandable deposits exceeded 30% of liabilities. Though that level was still far below SVB’s, these institutions clearly had drunk from the same firehose. Smaller banks were also more conservative about liquidity in the past. At the outset of QE in late 2008, banks with less than $50 billion in assets had reserves (and other assets that could be used to borrow reserves) that exceeded the uninsured demandable deposits they had issued. By early 2023, however, they had issued runnable claims (in aggregate) that were one and a half times the size of their liquid assets. Instead of holding liquid reserves, their assets were now more weighted toward long-term securities and term lending, including a significant share of commercial real-estate (CRE) loans. Advertisement Thus, as the Fed raised interest rates, the economic value of these banks’ assets fell sharply. Some of the fall was hidden by accounting sleight of hand, but SVB’s sudden demise caused investors to scrutinize banks’ balance sheets more carefully. What they saw did not instill confidence. The KBW Nasdaq Bank Index duly fell by over 25%, and deposits started flowing out of a large number of banks, many of which lacked the liquidity to accommodate the sudden outflows. The risk of contagious runs across smaller banks was real, as was the possibly of the problem spreading more widely. The Treasury essentially took bank runs off the table, while the Fed provided banks the funds to accommodate the continuing — though no longer panicked — depositor outflows. Importantly, as private money flowed to large banks, very little flowed to small- and medium-size institutions. That is why the authorities had to come to the rescue. Soon after SVB’s demise, the Treasury signaled that no uninsured depositor in small banks would suffer losses in any further bank collapses. The Fed opened a generous new facility that lent money for up to one year to banks against the par, or face value, of the securities they held on their balance sheets, without adjusting for the erosion in the value of these securities from higher interest rates. And the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBanks) — effectively an arm of the U.S. government — increased its lending to stressed banks, with total advances to the banking system having already tripled between March 2022 and March 2023 amid the Fed’s policy tightening. Borrowing by small- and medium-size banks from these official sources skyrocketed. The Treasury essentially took bank runs off the table, while the Fed provided banks the funds to accommodate the continuing — though no longer panicked — depositor outflows. A potential banking crisis was converted into a slow-burning problem for banks as they recognized and absorbed the losses on their balance sheets. Just recently, New York Community Bancorp NYCB, -5.17%, which bought parts of one of the banks that failed in 2023, reminded us that this process is still underway when it announced large losses. With the Russell microcap index of small companies significantly underperforming the S&P 100 index OEX of the largest companies since March 2023, it appears that smaller banks’ troubles have weighed on their traditional clients: small- and medium-size companies. Where does that leave us? Although the situation could have been much worse if the Treasury and the Fed had not stepped in, the seeming ease with which the panic was arrested allowed public attention to move on. Apart from die-hard libertarians, no one seems to care much about the extent of the intervention that was needed to rescue the smaller banks, nor has there been any broad inquiry into the circumstances that led to the vulnerabilities. As a result, several questions remain unanswered. To what extent were the seeds of the 2023 banking stress sown by the pandemic-induced monetary stimulus and lax supervision of what banks did with the money? Did advances by the FHLBanks delay failed banks’ efforts to raise capital? Are banks that relied on official backstops after SVB’s failure keeping afloat distressed CRE borrowers, and therefore merely postponing an eventual reckoning? It is not good for capitalism when those who knowingly take risks — bankers and uninsured depositors, in this case — pay no price when a risk materializes. Despite sweeping banking reforms over the past 15 years, the authorities have once again shown that they are willing to bail out market players if enough of them have taken the same risk. “Too big to fail” was bad enough, but now we have “too many to fail.” The mini-crisis of March 2023 was much more than a footnote in banking history. We cannot afford to bury it. Raghuram G. Rajan, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, is professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author, most recently, of Monetary Policy and Its Unintended Consequences (The MIT Press, 2023). Viral V. Acharya, a former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India, is professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. This commentary was published with the permission of Project Syndicate — The Danger of Forgetting the 2023 Banking Crisis. More: Regional-bank bondholders seem unworried by New York Community Bank’s problems Also read: Recession in 2024? A quarter of economists think it will happen. 😎🇺🇸🦅 PAR-TY… 🎉. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/too-big-to-fail-was-bad-enough-for-the-banks-now-we-have-too-many-to-fail-d89dcdda
    WWW.MARKETWATCH.COM
    ‘Too big to fail’ was bad enough for the banks. Now we have ‘too many to fail.’
    The failures may have been confined to just a few rogue banks, but the problem is systemic.
    Angry
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  • WEF Speaker Claims Coffee is Environmentally Destructive
    During a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland last week, Swiss banker Hubert Keller said coffee production is bad for the environment and is exacerbating climate change.

    “The coffee that we all drink emits between 15 and 20 tons of CO2 per ton of coffee,” he said. “Every time we drink coffee, we are putting CO2 into the atmosphere.”

    This assessment came after another WEF speaker described fishing and farming as environmentally destructive activities. The same speaker advocated for destructive activities to be recognized as “ecocide” under new international laws that would punish crimes against nature in the same way genocide is prosecuted. The WEF has also advocated for plant-based diets, the widespread use of electric vehicles, and the introduction of “tiny homes” to replace traditional dwellings.

    Keller went on: “And one of the reasons is because most of the coffee plantation or most of the coffee is produced through monoculture and monoculture is also affected by climate change… The quality of these natural assets is deteriorating quite rapidly.”

    Learn the benefits of becoming a Valuetainment Member and subscribe today!

    Keller is a managing partner of global wealth management firm Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch, a bank deeply committed to Environmental, Social, and corporate Governenace (ESG) philosophy. But he is not the first person at the WEF to attribute climate change to coffee.

    In 2016, the WEF put out a blog post about the deleterious environmental effects of coffee cups, single-serve coffee pods, and other things related to coffee consumption. “Is your coffee addiction destroying the planet?” the WEF asked.

    Watch Keller’s statement below:


    Shane Devine is a writer covering politics, economics, and culture for Valuetainment. Follow Shane on X (Twitter).

    https://valuetainment.com/wef-speaker-claims-coffee-is-environmentally-destructive/
    WEF Speaker Claims Coffee is Environmentally Destructive During a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland last week, Swiss banker Hubert Keller said coffee production is bad for the environment and is exacerbating climate change. “The coffee that we all drink emits between 15 and 20 tons of CO2 per ton of coffee,” he said. “Every time we drink coffee, we are putting CO2 into the atmosphere.” This assessment came after another WEF speaker described fishing and farming as environmentally destructive activities. The same speaker advocated for destructive activities to be recognized as “ecocide” under new international laws that would punish crimes against nature in the same way genocide is prosecuted. The WEF has also advocated for plant-based diets, the widespread use of electric vehicles, and the introduction of “tiny homes” to replace traditional dwellings. Keller went on: “And one of the reasons is because most of the coffee plantation or most of the coffee is produced through monoculture and monoculture is also affected by climate change… The quality of these natural assets is deteriorating quite rapidly.” Learn the benefits of becoming a Valuetainment Member and subscribe today! Keller is a managing partner of global wealth management firm Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch, a bank deeply committed to Environmental, Social, and corporate Governenace (ESG) philosophy. But he is not the first person at the WEF to attribute climate change to coffee. In 2016, the WEF put out a blog post about the deleterious environmental effects of coffee cups, single-serve coffee pods, and other things related to coffee consumption. “Is your coffee addiction destroying the planet?” the WEF asked. Watch Keller’s statement below: Shane Devine is a writer covering politics, economics, and culture for Valuetainment. Follow Shane on X (Twitter). https://valuetainment.com/wef-speaker-claims-coffee-is-environmentally-destructive/
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    WEF Speaker Claims Coffee is Environmentally Destructive
    At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos Switzerland last week, a speaker said coffee production is bad for the environment and is exacerbating climate change
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  • The Cyber Threat Intelligence League
    Claudio RestaJanuary 18, 2024

    VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

    $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
    Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.

    There is a vast plan for global censorship by US and British military contractors:



    US military contractor Pablo Breuer (left), UK defense researcher Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp (center), and Chris Krebs, former director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (DHS-CISA)

    – Documents received by investigative journalists Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi from an anonymous but “highly credible” whistleblower reveal new details about how the US censorship industrial complex – a network of more than 100 government agencies, private companies, universities and organizations non-profit – seeks to control and criminalize “wrong thinking”.
    – The documents describe how modern digital censorship programs were created and the various roles of the military, US intelligence agencies, civil society organizations and commercial media.
    They also describe the methods and techniques used, such as the creation and use of “sock puppet” accounts to spy on and direct online discussions and propagate desired narratives, and the discrediting of dissidents “as a necessary prerequisite for requiring censorship in their comparisons.”
    – Documents show that the weaponization of the financial sector originated with the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), which specifically sought to get banks to “cut off financial services to individuals organizing gatherings or events.”
    – CTIL files also show that there was a clear intent to circumvent the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to the private, non-governmental sector. According to the informant, “the ethic was that if we get away with it, it’s legal.”

    Documents received by investigative journalists Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi from an anonymous but “highly credible” whistleblower reveal new details about how the US censorship industrial complex – a network of more than 100 government agencies, private companies, universities and non-profit organizations – regulates and criminalizes “wrong thinking”.


    as Ursula Van der Leyen, the president of European Commission since 2019,

    stated at the WEF in Davos on January 17th, 2023 similar censorship are the most urgent and necessary policies (!) and will be implemented everywhere

    They describe the activities of an “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, which officially began as a volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans, but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

    The CTI League documents provide missing answers to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files. Together, they offer a complete picture of the rise of the “anti-disinformation” industry, or what we have called the Censorship Industrial Complex.”

    The documents describe how modern digital censorship programs were created and the various roles of the military, US intelligence agencies, civil society organizations and commercial media.

    They also describe the methods and techniques used, such as the creation and use of “sock puppet” accounts to spy on and direct online discussions and propagate desired narratives, the discrediting of dissidents, and the deliberate weaponization of the financial industry against them .

    According to the whistleblower, the CTIL was also involved in the creation of a counter-disinformation project to “avoid a repeat of 2016”, a reference to Brexit and Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the elections, two situations in which the democratic processes have actually won.

    As Jimmy Dore noted, it wasn’t about preventing the circulation of false information.

    It was about ensuring that no political outsider could ever enter the Oval Office again.

    The instruction to prevent a repeat of 2016 was a direct call to undermine, if not eliminate, the process of free and fair elections.

    Importantly, the documents admit that censorship efforts against Americans must be carried out by private sector partners, because the government does not have “legal authority” to do so.

    The new series of documents and videos reveals that 2019 was a pivotal year for the censorship industrial complex. According to Public, it was then that “US and British military and intelligence contractors, led by a former British defense researcher, Sara-Jayne ‘SJ’ Terp, developed the blanket censorship framework.”



    These contractors became co-leaders of CTIL, whose original founders were a former Israeli intelligence official, Ohad Zaidenberg, the person responsible of Microsoft security Nate Warfield, Chris Mills, another Microsoft security official, and Marc Rogers, the head of security operations at the hacker convention DEF CON.

    According to media reports , these highly trained and in-demand professionals have made the altruistic decision to offer their services to help billion-dollar hospitals with their cybersecurity, for free and with no strings attached. It wasn’t a believable cover story then, and it certainly hasn’t gotten any better.

    Within a month of CTIL’s founding in March 2020, this supposedly entirely volunteer group had grown to 1,400 “invitation-only” members in 76 countries and entered into an official partnership with Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) of the United States Department of Homeland Security. As reported by Public:

    Parallel censorship agencies

    In spring 2020, CISA also created the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) – a consortium composed of the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic’s Digital Forensic Research Lab Council and from Graphika (a social media analytics company) – and outsourced what would otherwise have been illegal and unconstitutional censorship.

    During the 2020 election cycle, EIP and CISA worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the DHS-supported Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC) to influence and monitor political discussions online. EIP coordinated the removal of unwanted content using a real-time chat application shared by DHS, EIP, and social media companies.

    At the same time, CTIL monitored and reported anti-blockade views on social media. A “law enforcement” channel was created specifically to spy on and monitor social media users posting anti-lockdown hashtags. CTIL even kept a printout detailing their Twitter biographies.

    According to Public, the CTIL has also “engaged in offensive operations to influence public opinion, discussing ways to promote ‘counter-messaging,’ co-opting hashtags, diluting unfavorable messaging, creating sock puppet accounts, and infiltrating private groups by invitation.” In February 2021, the EIP was renamed the Virality Project, at which point its censorship focus shifted from elections to COVID-related issues.

    Government infiltration and takeover

    Although CTIL member Bonnie Smalley responded to a Public question by saying that CTIL has “nothing to do with the government,” the evidence shows otherwise. At least a dozen government employees working with DHS, the FBI, and CISA were also active members of CTIL.

    According to the whistleblower, CTIL’s goal “was to become part of the federal government.” Terp’s plan called for the creation of “MisinfoSec communities” that would include the federal sector, and documents show that this goal was achieved. In April 2020, Chris Krebs, then director of CISA, also publicly announced the agency’s partnership with CTIL.

    The audience continues:“The documents also show that Terp and his colleagues, through a group called the MisinfoSec Working Group, which included Renee DiResta, head of research at the Stanford Internet Observatory, created a censorship, influence and counter-disinformation strategy called

    Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques (AMITT).

    SJ on X: "AMITT (Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques) includes the left-of-boom misinformation activities that are often missed by other analyses, where ”left of boom” covers activity before an incident

    They wrote AMITT by adapting a cybersecurity framework developed by MITER… Terp then used AMITT to develop the DISARM framework, which the World Health Organization then used to “counter anti-vaccination campaigns across Europe.”

    A key component of Terp’s work through CTIL, MisinfoSec and AMITT has been to bring the concept of “cognitive security” to the fields of cybersecurity and information security…

    The ambitions of the 2020 pioneers of the censorship industrial complex went far beyond simply requiring Twitter to place a warning label on tweets or blacklist individuals.

    The AMITT framework calls for discrediting people as a necessary prerequisite for requiring censorship of them. Invite influencers to train to spread messages. And he invites us to try to convince banks to cut financial services to individuals who organize demonstrations or events.”

    The arming of the financial sector was born with the CTIL

    Now we know where this financial sector weapon comes from. It originated with the CTIL, which hspecifically sought to induce banks to “cut financial services to individuals who organize rallies or events”.

    Clearly, as my case and that of many others demonstrates, even banks and online payment processors have been tricked into cutting off services to people who simply expressed opposing views. It’s not just demonstration organizers who are being targeted.

    Under the cover of altruism

    Although CTIL officials have repeatedly stressed that the organization was founded on purely altruistic principles, the clear goal of its leaders was to “build support for censorship among national security and cybersecurity institutions,” writes Public, and they built that support by promoting Terp’s idea of “cognitive safety.”

    The choice of the term “cognitive safety” takes on a rather sinister flavor in light of Dr. Michael Nehls’ findings that over the past four years there has been what appears to be an intentional effort to destroy autobiographical memory function in the public’s brain , thus facilitating mass indoctrination and inhibiting personal will and critical thinking.vast plan for global censorship by US and British military contractors

    The Indoctrinated Brain - By Michael Nehls (hardcover) : Target

    He presents his thesis in the book “The Indoctrinated Brain: How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom”, published in mid-December 2023.

    The whistleblower material clearly reveals that sophisticated military tactics have been turned against the American public, powerful psychological tools – the same tools that, according to Nehls, can literally alter the biological functions of the brain.

    Public cites a MisinfoSec report in which “the authors called for placing censorship efforts within ‘cybersecurity,’ while acknowledging that ‘disinformation security’ is entirely different from cybersecurity. They wrote that the third pillar of the “information environment”, after physical and cyber security, should be the “cognitive dimension”.

    Indeed, your mind – your cognition, your very ability to think independently – is the battlefield of today’s war, as Nehls proposes in his book. The scary part is that the tools used have the power to reprogram who we are.

    We are indeed “hackable animals,” as proposed by Yuval Noah Harari, and the censorship industrial complex has already hacked the brain structure of billions of people over the past four years. Gutentag also talks about it in an article dated December 3, 2023:”What was once considered a “conspiracy theory”, according to which military and intelligence forces manipulated public opinion through inorganic interventions, has now been confirmed .

    Our study of the censorship industrial complex has exposed a far-reaching plan to subvert the democratic process and engage in activities that have a basis in military techniques and that amount to attempts at thought or mind control.”

    ”It’s legal if we can get away with it”

    The CTIL files also demonstrate that there was a clear intent to circumvent the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to the private, non-governmental sector.

    According to the informant:“The ethos was if we get away with it, it’s legal, and there were no First Amendment problems because we have a ‘public-private partnership’ – that’s the word they used to mask these problems. Private individuals can do things that public officials cannot do, and public officials can provide leadership and coordination.”

    Good news, bad news

    ”The good news is that more and more information is coming out about the U.S. government’s illegal outsourcing of censorship, and with it, legal challenges that pose roadblocks to this circumvention of the Constitution.

    The three activists also achieved other victories. In August 2022, DHS was forced to shut down the Disinformation Governance Board due to public backlash. CISA also deleted information about its national censorship work from its website and dismantled its Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation (MDM) subcommittee.

    The federal government’s Select Subcommittee on Armaments is also continuing its search for the truth and will (hopefully) use all the power at its disposal to put an end to the abuses. Its latest report, “The Weaponization of ‘Disinformation’ Pseudo-Experts and Bureaucrats: How the Federal Government Partnered with Universities to Censor Americans’ Political Speech” was released on November 6, 2023.

    Unfortunately, there is a global effort underway not only to normalize, but also to legalize this type of censorship by third parties.

    In short, they are trying to restructure the censorship industry “away from a top-down government-led model” to a “competitive brokerage model” in which “content management” (read censorship) is simply outsourced to third-party organizations.

    In this way, a “legal” market for disinformation compliance is created, while the government can claim to have nothing to do with controlling the information. In essence, we are witnessing the emergence of organized corporate censorship.

    There is no clear solution to this threat other than to continue to oppose all efforts to legalize, standardize and normalize censorship. Vocally oppose, refuse to use intermediaries like NewsGuard, and boycott any company or organization that uses intermediaries or engages in censorship of any kind.”

    Claudio Resta was born in Genoa, Italy in 1958, he is a citizen of the world (Spinoza), a maverick philosopher, and an interdisciplinary expert, oh, and an artist, too.

    Grew up in a family of scientists where many sciences were represented by philosophy to psychoanalysis, from economics to history, from mathematics to physics, and where these sciences were subject to public display by their subject experts family members, and all those who they were part of could participate in a public family dialogue/debate on these subjects if they so wished. Read Full Bio

    Latest Articles (2023-Present)
    Archived Articles (2019-2022)


    ATTENTION READERS

    We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed
    In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion.

    About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy
    Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT.

    https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/01/the-cyber-threat-intelligence-league/
    The Cyber Threat Intelligence League Claudio RestaJanuary 18, 2024 VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State. There is a vast plan for global censorship by US and British military contractors: US military contractor Pablo Breuer (left), UK defense researcher Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp (center), and Chris Krebs, former director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (DHS-CISA) – Documents received by investigative journalists Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi from an anonymous but “highly credible” whistleblower reveal new details about how the US censorship industrial complex – a network of more than 100 government agencies, private companies, universities and organizations non-profit – seeks to control and criminalize “wrong thinking”. – The documents describe how modern digital censorship programs were created and the various roles of the military, US intelligence agencies, civil society organizations and commercial media. They also describe the methods and techniques used, such as the creation and use of “sock puppet” accounts to spy on and direct online discussions and propagate desired narratives, and the discrediting of dissidents “as a necessary prerequisite for requiring censorship in their comparisons.” – Documents show that the weaponization of the financial sector originated with the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), which specifically sought to get banks to “cut off financial services to individuals organizing gatherings or events.” – CTIL files also show that there was a clear intent to circumvent the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to the private, non-governmental sector. According to the informant, “the ethic was that if we get away with it, it’s legal.” Documents received by investigative journalists Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi from an anonymous but “highly credible” whistleblower reveal new details about how the US censorship industrial complex – a network of more than 100 government agencies, private companies, universities and non-profit organizations – regulates and criminalizes “wrong thinking”. as Ursula Van der Leyen, the president of European Commission since 2019, stated at the WEF in Davos on January 17th, 2023 similar censorship are the most urgent and necessary policies (!) and will be implemented everywhere They describe the activities of an “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, which officially began as a volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans, but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The CTI League documents provide missing answers to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files. Together, they offer a complete picture of the rise of the “anti-disinformation” industry, or what we have called the Censorship Industrial Complex.” The documents describe how modern digital censorship programs were created and the various roles of the military, US intelligence agencies, civil society organizations and commercial media. They also describe the methods and techniques used, such as the creation and use of “sock puppet” accounts to spy on and direct online discussions and propagate desired narratives, the discrediting of dissidents, and the deliberate weaponization of the financial industry against them . According to the whistleblower, the CTIL was also involved in the creation of a counter-disinformation project to “avoid a repeat of 2016”, a reference to Brexit and Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the elections, two situations in which the democratic processes have actually won. As Jimmy Dore noted, it wasn’t about preventing the circulation of false information. It was about ensuring that no political outsider could ever enter the Oval Office again. The instruction to prevent a repeat of 2016 was a direct call to undermine, if not eliminate, the process of free and fair elections. Importantly, the documents admit that censorship efforts against Americans must be carried out by private sector partners, because the government does not have “legal authority” to do so. The new series of documents and videos reveals that 2019 was a pivotal year for the censorship industrial complex. According to Public, it was then that “US and British military and intelligence contractors, led by a former British defense researcher, Sara-Jayne ‘SJ’ Terp, developed the blanket censorship framework.” These contractors became co-leaders of CTIL, whose original founders were a former Israeli intelligence official, Ohad Zaidenberg, the person responsible of Microsoft security Nate Warfield, Chris Mills, another Microsoft security official, and Marc Rogers, the head of security operations at the hacker convention DEF CON. According to media reports , these highly trained and in-demand professionals have made the altruistic decision to offer their services to help billion-dollar hospitals with their cybersecurity, for free and with no strings attached. It wasn’t a believable cover story then, and it certainly hasn’t gotten any better. Within a month of CTIL’s founding in March 2020, this supposedly entirely volunteer group had grown to 1,400 “invitation-only” members in 76 countries and entered into an official partnership with Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) of the United States Department of Homeland Security. As reported by Public: Parallel censorship agencies In spring 2020, CISA also created the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) – a consortium composed of the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic’s Digital Forensic Research Lab Council and from Graphika (a social media analytics company) – and outsourced what would otherwise have been illegal and unconstitutional censorship. During the 2020 election cycle, EIP and CISA worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the DHS-supported Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC) to influence and monitor political discussions online. EIP coordinated the removal of unwanted content using a real-time chat application shared by DHS, EIP, and social media companies. At the same time, CTIL monitored and reported anti-blockade views on social media. A “law enforcement” channel was created specifically to spy on and monitor social media users posting anti-lockdown hashtags. CTIL even kept a printout detailing their Twitter biographies. According to Public, the CTIL has also “engaged in offensive operations to influence public opinion, discussing ways to promote ‘counter-messaging,’ co-opting hashtags, diluting unfavorable messaging, creating sock puppet accounts, and infiltrating private groups by invitation.” In February 2021, the EIP was renamed the Virality Project, at which point its censorship focus shifted from elections to COVID-related issues. Government infiltration and takeover Although CTIL member Bonnie Smalley responded to a Public question by saying that CTIL has “nothing to do with the government,” the evidence shows otherwise. At least a dozen government employees working with DHS, the FBI, and CISA were also active members of CTIL. According to the whistleblower, CTIL’s goal “was to become part of the federal government.” Terp’s plan called for the creation of “MisinfoSec communities” that would include the federal sector, and documents show that this goal was achieved. In April 2020, Chris Krebs, then director of CISA, also publicly announced the agency’s partnership with CTIL. The audience continues:“The documents also show that Terp and his colleagues, through a group called the MisinfoSec Working Group, which included [Renee] DiResta, head of research at the Stanford Internet Observatory, created a censorship, influence and counter-disinformation strategy called Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques (AMITT). SJ on X: "AMITT (Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques) includes the left-of-boom misinformation activities that are often missed by other analyses, where ”left of boom” covers activity before an incident They wrote AMITT by adapting a cybersecurity framework developed by MITER… Terp then used AMITT to develop the DISARM framework, which the World Health Organization then used to “counter anti-vaccination campaigns across Europe.” A key component of Terp’s work through CTIL, MisinfoSec and AMITT has been to bring the concept of “cognitive security” to the fields of cybersecurity and information security… The ambitions of the 2020 pioneers of the censorship industrial complex went far beyond simply requiring Twitter to place a warning label on tweets or blacklist individuals. The AMITT framework calls for discrediting people as a necessary prerequisite for requiring censorship of them. Invite influencers to train to spread messages. And he invites us to try to convince banks to cut financial services to individuals who organize demonstrations or events.” The arming of the financial sector was born with the CTIL Now we know where this financial sector weapon comes from. It originated with the CTIL, which hspecifically sought to induce banks to “cut financial services to individuals who organize rallies or events”. Clearly, as my case and that of many others demonstrates, even banks and online payment processors have been tricked into cutting off services to people who simply expressed opposing views. It’s not just demonstration organizers who are being targeted. Under the cover of altruism Although CTIL officials have repeatedly stressed that the organization was founded on purely altruistic principles, the clear goal of its leaders was to “build support for censorship among national security and cybersecurity institutions,” writes Public, and they built that support by promoting Terp’s idea of “cognitive safety.” The choice of the term “cognitive safety” takes on a rather sinister flavor in light of Dr. Michael Nehls’ findings that over the past four years there has been what appears to be an intentional effort to destroy autobiographical memory function in the public’s brain , thus facilitating mass indoctrination and inhibiting personal will and critical thinking.vast plan for global censorship by US and British military contractors The Indoctrinated Brain - By Michael Nehls (hardcover) : Target He presents his thesis in the book “The Indoctrinated Brain: How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom”, published in mid-December 2023. The whistleblower material clearly reveals that sophisticated military tactics have been turned against the American public, powerful psychological tools – the same tools that, according to Nehls, can literally alter the biological functions of the brain. Public cites a MisinfoSec report in which “the authors called for placing censorship efforts within ‘cybersecurity,’ while acknowledging that ‘disinformation security’ is entirely different from cybersecurity. They wrote that the third pillar of the “information environment”, after physical and cyber security, should be the “cognitive dimension”. Indeed, your mind – your cognition, your very ability to think independently – is the battlefield of today’s war, as Nehls proposes in his book. The scary part is that the tools used have the power to reprogram who we are. We are indeed “hackable animals,” as proposed by Yuval Noah Harari, and the censorship industrial complex has already hacked the brain structure of billions of people over the past four years. Gutentag also talks about it in an article dated December 3, 2023:”What was once considered a “conspiracy theory”, according to which military and intelligence forces manipulated public opinion through inorganic interventions, has now been confirmed . Our study of the censorship industrial complex has exposed a far-reaching plan to subvert the democratic process and engage in activities that have a basis in military techniques and that amount to attempts at thought or mind control.” ”It’s legal if we can get away with it” The CTIL files also demonstrate that there was a clear intent to circumvent the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to the private, non-governmental sector. According to the informant:“The ethos was if we get away with it, it’s legal, and there were no First Amendment problems because we have a ‘public-private partnership’ – that’s the word they used to mask these problems. Private individuals can do things that public officials cannot do, and public officials can provide leadership and coordination.” Good news, bad news ”The good news is that more and more information is coming out about the U.S. government’s illegal outsourcing of censorship, and with it, legal challenges that pose roadblocks to this circumvention of the Constitution. The three activists also achieved other victories. In August 2022, DHS was forced to shut down the Disinformation Governance Board due to public backlash. CISA also deleted information about its national censorship work from its website and dismantled its Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation (MDM) subcommittee. The federal government’s Select Subcommittee on Armaments is also continuing its search for the truth and will (hopefully) use all the power at its disposal to put an end to the abuses. Its latest report, “The Weaponization of ‘Disinformation’ Pseudo-Experts and Bureaucrats: How the Federal Government Partnered with Universities to Censor Americans’ Political Speech” was released on November 6, 2023. Unfortunately, there is a global effort underway not only to normalize, but also to legalize this type of censorship by third parties. In short, they are trying to restructure the censorship industry “away from a top-down government-led model” to a “competitive brokerage model” in which “content management” (read censorship) is simply outsourced to third-party organizations. In this way, a “legal” market for disinformation compliance is created, while the government can claim to have nothing to do with controlling the information. In essence, we are witnessing the emergence of organized corporate censorship. There is no clear solution to this threat other than to continue to oppose all efforts to legalize, standardize and normalize censorship. Vocally oppose, refuse to use intermediaries like NewsGuard, and boycott any company or organization that uses intermediaries or engages in censorship of any kind.” Claudio Resta was born in Genoa, Italy in 1958, he is a citizen of the world (Spinoza), a maverick philosopher, and an interdisciplinary expert, oh, and an artist, too. Grew up in a family of scientists where many sciences were represented by philosophy to psychoanalysis, from economics to history, from mathematics to physics, and where these sciences were subject to public display by their subject experts family members, and all those who they were part of could participate in a public family dialogue/debate on these subjects if they so wished. Read Full Bio Latest Articles (2023-Present) Archived Articles (2019-2022) ATTENTION READERS We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion. About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT. https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/01/the-cyber-threat-intelligence-league/
    WWW.VTFOREIGNPOLICY.COM
    The Cyber Threat Intelligence League
    There is a vast plan for global censorship by US and British military contractors: US military contractor Pablo Breuer (left), UK defense researcher Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp (center), and Chris Krebs, former director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (DHS-CISA) – Documents received by investigative journalists Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag...
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  • The Year that Expertise Collapsed
    Jeffrey A. Tucker
    Getting sick and getting well is part of the human experience at all times in all places. As with other phenomena of human existence, that suggests there is a great deal of embedded knowledge on the topic woven into the fabric of our lives. We aren’t born knowing but we come to know: from our moms and dads, experience of siblings and others, from our own experience, and from medical professionals who deal with the problem daily.

    In a healthy and functioning society, the path toward maintaining personal and public health becomes embedded in the cultural firmament, just like manners, belief systems, and value preferences. It’s not necessary that we think about it constantly; instead it becomes a habit, with much of the knowledge tacit; that is, deployed daily but rarely with full cognizance.

    We could know for certain that there had been a change in the matrix in March 2020 because, seemingly out of nowhere, all of this knowledge was deemed wrong. A new gaggle of experts was in charge, one day to the next. Suddenly, they were everywhere. They were on TV, quoted by all the newspapers, amplified on social media, and on the phone constantly with local officials instructing them on how they must shut down the schools, businesses, playgrounds, churches, and civic gatherings.

    The message was always the same. This time is completely different from anything in our experience or in any previous experience. This time we must adopt a totally new and completely untested paradigm. It comes from models that high-level scientists have deemed correct. It comes from labs. It comes from “germ games” of which none of us are part. If we dare to reject the new teachings for the old, we are doing it wrong. We are the malicious ones. We deserve ridicule, cancellation, silencing, exclusion, and worse.

    It felt like a coup d’etat of sorts. It certainly was an intellectual coup. All wisdom of the past, even that known by public health only months earlier, was deleted from public spaces. Dissent was silenced. Corporate media was absolutely united in celebrating the greatness of people like Fauci, who spoke in strangely circuitous ways that contradicted everything we thought we knew.

    It was exceedingly strange because the people we thought might have stood up to the flash imposition of tyranny somehow vanished. We could hardly meet with others at all, if only to share intuitions that something was wrong. “Social distancing” was more than a method to “slow the spread;” it amounted to comprehensive control of the public mind too.

    The experts instructing us spoke with astonishing certainty about precisely how society should be managed in a pandemic. There were scientific papers, tens of thousands of them, and the storm of credentials was everywhere and out of control. Unless you had a university or lab affiliation and unless you had multiple high-level degrees attached to your name, you could not get a hearing. Folk wisdom was out of the question, even basic things like “sun and outdoors are good for respiratory infections.” Even popular understanding of natural immunity came in for hard ridicule.

    Later it turned out that even top credentialed experts would not be taken seriously if they had the wrong views. This is when the racket became incredibly obvious. It was never really about genuine knowledge. It was about compliance and echoing the approved line. It’s astonishing how many people went along, even with the stupidest of the mandates, such as the distancing stickers everywhere, the ubiquity of Plexiglas, and the dirty masks on every face which were somehow believed to keep people healthy.

    Once the contrary studies started coming out, we would share them and get shouted down. The comment sections of the studies started to be raided by partisan experts who would hone in on small issues and problems and demand and obtain takedowns. Then the contrarian expert would get doxxed, his dean notified, and the faculty turned against the person, lest the department risk funding from Big Pharma or Fauci in the future.

    All the while, we kept thinking that there must be some rationale behind all this madness. It never emerged. It was all intimidation and belligerence and nothing more – arbitrary diktat by big shots who were pretending the entire time.

    The lockdowners and shot mandators were never intellectually serious people. They never much thought about the implications or ramifications of what they were doing. They were just wrecking things mostly for pecuniary gain, job protection, and career advancement, plus it was fun to be in charge. It’s not much more complicated than that.

    In other words, we’ve gradually come to realize that our worst fears were true. All these experts were and are fakes. There have been some hints along the way, such as when North Carolina Health Director Mandy Cohen (now head of the CDC) reported that she and her colleagues were burning up the phone lines to decide whether people should be allowed to participate in sports.

    “She was like, are you gonna let them have professional football?” she said. “And I was like, no. And she’s like, OK neither are we.”

    Another candid moment came five months ago, only recently unearthed by X, when NIH head Francis Collins admitted that he and his colleagues attached “zero value” to whether and to what extent they were disrupting lives, wrecking the economy, and destroying education for kids. He actually said this.

    As it turns out, these experts who ruled our lives, and still do to a great extent, were never what they claimed to be, and never actually possessed knowledge that was superior to what existed within the cultural firmament of society. Instead, all they really had was power and a grand opportunity to play dictator.

    It’s astonishing, truly, and worthy of deep study, when you consider the extent to which and for how long this class of people were able to maintain the illusion of consensus within their ranks. They bamboozled the media all over the world. They tricked vast swaths of the population. They bent all social media algorithms to reflect their views and priorities.

    One explanation comes down to the money trail. That’s a powerful explanation. But it is not the whole of it. Behind the illusion was a terrifying intellectual isolation in which all these people found themselves. They never really encountered people who disagreed. Indeed, part of the way these people had come to conceive of their jobs was to master the art of knowing what to think and when and how. It’s part of the job training to enter the class of experts: mastering the skill of echoing the opinions of others.

    Discovering this to be true is alarming for anyone who holds to older ideals of how intellectual society should conduct itself. We like to imagine that there is a constant clash of ideas, a burning desire to get to the truth, a love of knowledge and data, a passion for gaining a better understanding. That requires, above all else, an openness of mind and a willingness to listen. All of this was overtly and explicitly shut down in March 2020 but it was made easier because all the mechanisms were already in place.

    One of the best books of our time is Tom Harrington’s The Treason of the Experts, published by Brownstone. There is simply not in the present era a more insightful investigation and deconstruction of the sociological sickness of the expert class. Every page is on fire with insight and observation about the intellectual juntas that attempt to rule the public mind in today’s world. It’s a terrifying look at how wildly wrong everything has gone in the world of ideas. A great followup volume is Ramesh Thakur’s Our Enemy, the Government, which reveals all the ways in which the new scientists who were ruling the world weren’t scientific at all.

    Brownstone was born in the midst of the worst of this world. We set out to create something different, not a bubble of ideological/partisan attachment or an enforcement organ of the proper way to think about all issues. Instead, we sought to become a genuine society of thinkers united in a principled attachment to freedom but hugely diverse in specialization and philosophical outlook. It’s one of the few centers where there is genuine interdisciplinary engagement and openness to new perspectives and outlook. All of this is essential to the life of the mind and yet nearly absent in academia, media, and government today.

    We’ve put together a fascinating model for retreats. We choose a comfortable venue where the food and drink are provided and the living quarters are excellent, and bring together 40 or so top experts to present a set of ideas to the whole group. Each speaker gets 15 minutes and that is followed by 15 minutes of engagement from everyone present. Then we go to the next speaker. This goes on all day and the evenings are spent in casual conversation. As the organizer, Brownstone does not pick topics or speakers but rather allows the flow of ideas to emerge organically. This goes on for two and a half days. There is no set agenda, no mandated takeaways, no required action items. There is only unconstrained idea generation and sharing.

    There is a reason why there is such a clamor to attend. It’s the creation of something that all these wonderful people – each person a dissident in his own field – had hoped to encounter in professional life but the reality was always elusive. It’s only three days so hardly Ancient Greece or Vienna in the interwar years but it is an excellent start, and hugely productive and uplifting. It’s amazing what can happen when you combine intelligence, erudition, open minds, and sincere sharing of ideas. From the point of view of government, huge corporations, academia, and all the architects of today’s world of ideas, this is precisely what they do not want.

    The difference between 2023 and, say, five years ago, is that the expertise racket is now out in the open. Vast swaths of society decided to trust the experts for a time. They deployed every power of the state, along with all affiliated institutions in the pseudo-private sector, to browbeat and manipulate the people into panicked compliance with preposterous antics that never had any hope of mitigating disease.

    Look where that got us. The experts have been fully discredited. Is it any wonder that ever more people are skeptical of the same gang’s claims about climate change, diversity, immigration, inflation, education, gender transitions, or anything else pushed today by elite minds? Mass compliance has been replaced by mass incredulity. Trust will not likely return in our lifetimes.

    There is, further, a reason why hardly anyone is surprised that the president of Harvard stands accused of rampant plagiarism or that election officials are deploying sneaky forms of lawfare to keep political renegades off the ballot or that money launderers for the administrative state are getting away with rampant fraud. Graft, kickbacks, bribery, misappropriation, nepotism, favoritism, and outright corruption rule the day in all elite circles.

    In a few weeks, we are going to hear from Anthony Fauci, who will be grilled by a House of Representatives committee on exactly how he claimed to be so sure that there was no lab leak stemming from gain-of-function research being done at a US-baked lab in Wuhan. We’ll see how much attention this testimony gets but, truly, does anyone really believe that he is going to be honest and forthcoming? It is pretty much a consensus these days that he has been up to no good. If he is “the science,” science itself is in grave trouble.

    What a contrast to just a few years ago when Fauci-themed shirts and coffee mugs were big-selling items. He claimed to be the science, and science did rally behind him as if he had all the answers, even though what he advocated contradicted every bit of common wisdom that has always been practiced in every civilized society.

    Three years ago, the expert class went out on the farthest limb one can imagine, daring to replace all social knowledge and embedded cultural experience with their off-the-cuff rationalism and scientistic razzmatazz that ended up serving the industrial interests of large-scale exploiters in tech, media, and pharma. We live in the midst of the rubble they created. It’s no wonder they have been completely discredited.

    To replace them – and this is a long-term strategy and one that unfolds gradually with bold efforts such as that undertaken by Brownstone Institute – we need a new and serious effort to rebuild serious thought based on honesty, sincere engagement across ideological lines, and a genuine commitment to truth and freedom. We have that opportunity right now, and we dare not decline to take up the task with every sense of urgency and passion. As always, your support of our work is greatly appreciated.

    Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
    For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.

    Author

    Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

    View all posts
    Your financial backing of Brownstone Institute goes to support writers, lawyers, scientists, economists, and other people of courage who have been professionally purged and displaced during the upheaval of our times. You can help get the truth out through their ongoing work.

    https://brownstone.org/articles/the-year-that-expertise-collapsed/
    The Year that Expertise Collapsed Jeffrey A. Tucker Getting sick and getting well is part of the human experience at all times in all places. As with other phenomena of human existence, that suggests there is a great deal of embedded knowledge on the topic woven into the fabric of our lives. We aren’t born knowing but we come to know: from our moms and dads, experience of siblings and others, from our own experience, and from medical professionals who deal with the problem daily. In a healthy and functioning society, the path toward maintaining personal and public health becomes embedded in the cultural firmament, just like manners, belief systems, and value preferences. It’s not necessary that we think about it constantly; instead it becomes a habit, with much of the knowledge tacit; that is, deployed daily but rarely with full cognizance. We could know for certain that there had been a change in the matrix in March 2020 because, seemingly out of nowhere, all of this knowledge was deemed wrong. A new gaggle of experts was in charge, one day to the next. Suddenly, they were everywhere. They were on TV, quoted by all the newspapers, amplified on social media, and on the phone constantly with local officials instructing them on how they must shut down the schools, businesses, playgrounds, churches, and civic gatherings. The message was always the same. This time is completely different from anything in our experience or in any previous experience. This time we must adopt a totally new and completely untested paradigm. It comes from models that high-level scientists have deemed correct. It comes from labs. It comes from “germ games” of which none of us are part. If we dare to reject the new teachings for the old, we are doing it wrong. We are the malicious ones. We deserve ridicule, cancellation, silencing, exclusion, and worse. It felt like a coup d’etat of sorts. It certainly was an intellectual coup. All wisdom of the past, even that known by public health only months earlier, was deleted from public spaces. Dissent was silenced. Corporate media was absolutely united in celebrating the greatness of people like Fauci, who spoke in strangely circuitous ways that contradicted everything we thought we knew. It was exceedingly strange because the people we thought might have stood up to the flash imposition of tyranny somehow vanished. We could hardly meet with others at all, if only to share intuitions that something was wrong. “Social distancing” was more than a method to “slow the spread;” it amounted to comprehensive control of the public mind too. The experts instructing us spoke with astonishing certainty about precisely how society should be managed in a pandemic. There were scientific papers, tens of thousands of them, and the storm of credentials was everywhere and out of control. Unless you had a university or lab affiliation and unless you had multiple high-level degrees attached to your name, you could not get a hearing. Folk wisdom was out of the question, even basic things like “sun and outdoors are good for respiratory infections.” Even popular understanding of natural immunity came in for hard ridicule. Later it turned out that even top credentialed experts would not be taken seriously if they had the wrong views. This is when the racket became incredibly obvious. It was never really about genuine knowledge. It was about compliance and echoing the approved line. It’s astonishing how many people went along, even with the stupidest of the mandates, such as the distancing stickers everywhere, the ubiquity of Plexiglas, and the dirty masks on every face which were somehow believed to keep people healthy. Once the contrary studies started coming out, we would share them and get shouted down. The comment sections of the studies started to be raided by partisan experts who would hone in on small issues and problems and demand and obtain takedowns. Then the contrarian expert would get doxxed, his dean notified, and the faculty turned against the person, lest the department risk funding from Big Pharma or Fauci in the future. All the while, we kept thinking that there must be some rationale behind all this madness. It never emerged. It was all intimidation and belligerence and nothing more – arbitrary diktat by big shots who were pretending the entire time. The lockdowners and shot mandators were never intellectually serious people. They never much thought about the implications or ramifications of what they were doing. They were just wrecking things mostly for pecuniary gain, job protection, and career advancement, plus it was fun to be in charge. It’s not much more complicated than that. In other words, we’ve gradually come to realize that our worst fears were true. All these experts were and are fakes. There have been some hints along the way, such as when North Carolina Health Director Mandy Cohen (now head of the CDC) reported that she and her colleagues were burning up the phone lines to decide whether people should be allowed to participate in sports. “She was like, are you gonna let them have professional football?” she said. “And I was like, no. And she’s like, OK neither are we.” Another candid moment came five months ago, only recently unearthed by X, when NIH head Francis Collins admitted that he and his colleagues attached “zero value” to whether and to what extent they were disrupting lives, wrecking the economy, and destroying education for kids. He actually said this. As it turns out, these experts who ruled our lives, and still do to a great extent, were never what they claimed to be, and never actually possessed knowledge that was superior to what existed within the cultural firmament of society. Instead, all they really had was power and a grand opportunity to play dictator. It’s astonishing, truly, and worthy of deep study, when you consider the extent to which and for how long this class of people were able to maintain the illusion of consensus within their ranks. They bamboozled the media all over the world. They tricked vast swaths of the population. They bent all social media algorithms to reflect their views and priorities. One explanation comes down to the money trail. That’s a powerful explanation. But it is not the whole of it. Behind the illusion was a terrifying intellectual isolation in which all these people found themselves. They never really encountered people who disagreed. Indeed, part of the way these people had come to conceive of their jobs was to master the art of knowing what to think and when and how. It’s part of the job training to enter the class of experts: mastering the skill of echoing the opinions of others. Discovering this to be true is alarming for anyone who holds to older ideals of how intellectual society should conduct itself. We like to imagine that there is a constant clash of ideas, a burning desire to get to the truth, a love of knowledge and data, a passion for gaining a better understanding. That requires, above all else, an openness of mind and a willingness to listen. All of this was overtly and explicitly shut down in March 2020 but it was made easier because all the mechanisms were already in place. One of the best books of our time is Tom Harrington’s The Treason of the Experts, published by Brownstone. There is simply not in the present era a more insightful investigation and deconstruction of the sociological sickness of the expert class. Every page is on fire with insight and observation about the intellectual juntas that attempt to rule the public mind in today’s world. It’s a terrifying look at how wildly wrong everything has gone in the world of ideas. A great followup volume is Ramesh Thakur’s Our Enemy, the Government, which reveals all the ways in which the new scientists who were ruling the world weren’t scientific at all. Brownstone was born in the midst of the worst of this world. We set out to create something different, not a bubble of ideological/partisan attachment or an enforcement organ of the proper way to think about all issues. Instead, we sought to become a genuine society of thinkers united in a principled attachment to freedom but hugely diverse in specialization and philosophical outlook. It’s one of the few centers where there is genuine interdisciplinary engagement and openness to new perspectives and outlook. All of this is essential to the life of the mind and yet nearly absent in academia, media, and government today. We’ve put together a fascinating model for retreats. We choose a comfortable venue where the food and drink are provided and the living quarters are excellent, and bring together 40 or so top experts to present a set of ideas to the whole group. Each speaker gets 15 minutes and that is followed by 15 minutes of engagement from everyone present. Then we go to the next speaker. This goes on all day and the evenings are spent in casual conversation. As the organizer, Brownstone does not pick topics or speakers but rather allows the flow of ideas to emerge organically. This goes on for two and a half days. There is no set agenda, no mandated takeaways, no required action items. There is only unconstrained idea generation and sharing. There is a reason why there is such a clamor to attend. It’s the creation of something that all these wonderful people – each person a dissident in his own field – had hoped to encounter in professional life but the reality was always elusive. It’s only three days so hardly Ancient Greece or Vienna in the interwar years but it is an excellent start, and hugely productive and uplifting. It’s amazing what can happen when you combine intelligence, erudition, open minds, and sincere sharing of ideas. From the point of view of government, huge corporations, academia, and all the architects of today’s world of ideas, this is precisely what they do not want. The difference between 2023 and, say, five years ago, is that the expertise racket is now out in the open. Vast swaths of society decided to trust the experts for a time. They deployed every power of the state, along with all affiliated institutions in the pseudo-private sector, to browbeat and manipulate the people into panicked compliance with preposterous antics that never had any hope of mitigating disease. Look where that got us. The experts have been fully discredited. Is it any wonder that ever more people are skeptical of the same gang’s claims about climate change, diversity, immigration, inflation, education, gender transitions, or anything else pushed today by elite minds? Mass compliance has been replaced by mass incredulity. Trust will not likely return in our lifetimes. There is, further, a reason why hardly anyone is surprised that the president of Harvard stands accused of rampant plagiarism or that election officials are deploying sneaky forms of lawfare to keep political renegades off the ballot or that money launderers for the administrative state are getting away with rampant fraud. Graft, kickbacks, bribery, misappropriation, nepotism, favoritism, and outright corruption rule the day in all elite circles. In a few weeks, we are going to hear from Anthony Fauci, who will be grilled by a House of Representatives committee on exactly how he claimed to be so sure that there was no lab leak stemming from gain-of-function research being done at a US-baked lab in Wuhan. We’ll see how much attention this testimony gets but, truly, does anyone really believe that he is going to be honest and forthcoming? It is pretty much a consensus these days that he has been up to no good. If he is “the science,” science itself is in grave trouble. What a contrast to just a few years ago when Fauci-themed shirts and coffee mugs were big-selling items. He claimed to be the science, and science did rally behind him as if he had all the answers, even though what he advocated contradicted every bit of common wisdom that has always been practiced in every civilized society. Three years ago, the expert class went out on the farthest limb one can imagine, daring to replace all social knowledge and embedded cultural experience with their off-the-cuff rationalism and scientistic razzmatazz that ended up serving the industrial interests of large-scale exploiters in tech, media, and pharma. We live in the midst of the rubble they created. It’s no wonder they have been completely discredited. To replace them – and this is a long-term strategy and one that unfolds gradually with bold efforts such as that undertaken by Brownstone Institute – we need a new and serious effort to rebuild serious thought based on honesty, sincere engagement across ideological lines, and a genuine commitment to truth and freedom. We have that opportunity right now, and we dare not decline to take up the task with every sense of urgency and passion. As always, your support of our work is greatly appreciated. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author. Author Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. View all posts Your financial backing of Brownstone Institute goes to support writers, lawyers, scientists, economists, and other people of courage who have been professionally purged and displaced during the upheaval of our times. You can help get the truth out through their ongoing work. https://brownstone.org/articles/the-year-that-expertise-collapsed/
    BROWNSTONE.ORG
    The Year that Expertise Collapsed ⋆ Brownstone Institute
    To replace the expert class, we need a new and serious effort to rebuild serious thought based on honesty, sincere engagement across ideological lines, and a genuine commitment to truth and freedom. We have that opportunity right now, and we dare not decline to take up the task with every sense of urgency and passion. As always, your support of our work is greatly appreciated.
    1 التعليقات 0 المشاركات 23184 مشاهدة
  • BRICS Expansion Could End Us Dollar Dominance in Oil Trade: US Financial Experts Warn of Dangers Ahead

    With the BRICS emerging as a major trading bloc with its expansion of six more countries, including Saudi Arabia, since the last South African meet, question bothering many traders in the US is, whether it will end the era of petrodollars particularly in the oil business.While there is no such currency as a Petrodollar, the US currency, the dollar or the greenback is the medium in which most global trade is conducted among nations around the world. The world buys oil from the Middle East in dollars and that's how the word petrodollar stuck for the earnings of the Arab countries from sale of crude and POL (Petroleum, Oil and Lubricants).

    The concept of the petrodollar has been a central element in global economics and geopolitics for decades. It refers to the practice of trading oil in US dollars, which has provided the US with significant economic and political advantages. However, in recent years, there has been speculation about the decline of the petrodollar and the rise of new alternatives, US financial analysts say.

    🔗Source: Investing.com

    (https://in.investing.com/news/brics-expansion-could-end-us-dollar-dominance-in-oil-trade-us-financial-experts-warn-of-dangers-ahead-3850506)
    BRICS Expansion Could End Us Dollar Dominance in Oil Trade: US Financial Experts Warn of Dangers Ahead With the BRICS emerging as a major trading bloc with its expansion of six more countries, including Saudi Arabia, since the last South African meet, question bothering many traders in the US is, whether it will end the era of petrodollars particularly in the oil business.While there is no such currency as a Petrodollar, the US currency, the dollar or the greenback is the medium in which most global trade is conducted among nations around the world. The world buys oil from the Middle East in dollars and that's how the word petrodollar stuck for the earnings of the Arab countries from sale of crude and POL (Petroleum, Oil and Lubricants). The concept of the petrodollar has been a central element in global economics and geopolitics for decades. It refers to the practice of trading oil in US dollars, which has provided the US with significant economic and political advantages. However, in recent years, there has been speculation about the decline of the petrodollar and the rise of new alternatives, US financial analysts say. 🔗Source: Investing.com (https://in.investing.com/news/brics-expansion-could-end-us-dollar-dominance-in-oil-trade-us-financial-experts-warn-of-dangers-ahead-3850506)
    BRICS Doubles Share of Global Oil Production In Welcoming Six New Members at BRICS Summit in S. Africa

    The highly-anticipated BRICS Summit has come to an end, and the petrodollar isn’t far behind it.

    https://themcgwire.substack.com/p/brics-doubles-share-of-global-oil

    In a HISTORIC move, BRICS has added 6 countries to the group — Egypt, Ethiopia, Argentina, UAE, Iran, and Saudi Arabia/

    It was initially spread throughout today that with the new members, BRICS now controls 80% of the global oil market in terms of production.

    This is wrong. I am not sure where this figure originated from, but in the process of writing this article, and trying to verify it, I have discovered all the large accounts promoting the figure do not source this claim, and the Telesurenglish article that threw that figure out was doing so by embedding one of these accounts on twitter

    (https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Arab-League-Congratulates-Arab-Countries-for-BRICS-Membrecy-20230824-0012.html)

    To put it bluntly, it seems someone pulled it out of their ass and it was amplified and boosted without people verifying.

    Sprinter’s tweet (https://twitter.com/Sprinter99800/status/1694702478359445960) along with many other racked up millions of views, which claimed BRICS now controls 80% of global oil production, and 30% of the GDP.

    So what does the real data say?

    Well, the 30% GDP was true before the 6 members were added. Just the BRICS core members accounted for 32% of global GDP. Now, according to President Lula, BRICS accounts for 37% of global GDP, and 46% of the global population.

    BRICS went from controlling 20% of global oil production, to 42% of global oil production - as reported (and actually sourced) by THINK in “BRICS Expansion: The Saudi Surprise Adds Momentum to the De-dollarisation Debate”,

    (https://themcgwire.substack.com/p/brics-doubles-share-of-global-oil)That is still a very large leap, 20 to 42%,, and a very large chunk of the global oil trade...

    A twitter user pointed out that according to 2022 data, the new BRICS members now account for over 50% of global oil exports(as opposed to production).

    Of course, this expansion of BRICS control over the oil market directly threatens the petrodollar, and thus, the US dollar.

    All the while, de-dollarization marches on, as BRICS leaders announced that the focus over the next year for finance ministers would be to “consider the issues of local currencies, payment instruments and platforms”.

    .... If the reader of this article does not realize why this rally around BRICS is happening, why allies are turning away from us towards Russia and China, I refer you to my article from a year and a half ago that predicted the rise of BRICS
    (https://themcgwire.substack.com/p/us-hegemony-threatened-as-saudis-uae-india-ignore-threats-of-sanctions-turn-to-russia-china-9473f26a6342).

    ????Source: TheMcgWire

    https://themcgwire.substack.com/p/brics-doubles-share-of-global-oil
    #BRICS #BRICSSummit #News #politics #Geopolitics #economy #Currency #Brazil #Russia #India #China #South Africa
    0 التعليقات 0 المشاركات 4124 مشاهدة
  • Today i will be exposing the Virgin Anarcho Capitalist VS the Chad Anarcho Communist Meme here: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1331942-virgin-vs-chad.

    Lets start with the Virgin Anarcho Capitalist.

    #1. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist wants Corporations deregulated according to the Marxist that wrote this.

    Answer: Corporations are Organs of the state and are collectively owned not individually owned. Corporations are Syndicates, and as I've mentioned before the Soviet Union called them Syndicates and the Italian Fascist called their Syndicates Corporations. Corporations are Marxist Fascist Socialist Organization. They have nothing at all to do with Capitalism nor a free market.

    #2. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist comes from an incredibly wealthy family according to the Marxist that wrote this.

    Answer: I would actually argue that Those of the Public Sector State Hierarchy Controlling the means of production are the extremely wealthy socialist group. There aren't to many rich Capitalist as those of the Private Sector are having their wealth siphoned away by the State. But not only that, they are also having their businesses crushed by the State and considered none essential as what happened with the Covid lie. The State, through the Covid lie attempted to crush competition, thus they attempted to crush Capitalism which is private individual control of his/her own economy. Through Taxations our wealth is being redistributed to the Giant Corporations which are funded by the State giving these Corporation a huge advantage over Private Individually owned businesses. With all of the Government funding Corporations receive, they have no problem paying employees 20 dollars per hour minimum wage. Price control and minimum wage only affect the small privately owned businesses, not the Giants the Public Sector State Hierarchy supports.

    #3. The Anarcho Capitalist Virgin always wears suits with bow ties according to the Marxist that wrote this.

    Answer: Actually, it is the Socialist thugs of the Mainstream Media and those that have collective shareholder ownership of the of the means of production in the Stock Exchange Socialist Market who wear suits with bow ties.

    #4. According to this Marxist, the Anarcho Capitalist Virgin is a big believer in Traditionalist gender roles.

    Answer: You don't have to be a Capitalist to be a Traditionalist in Gender Roles. The differences is when one has individual control of his/her own economy, He/She doesn't care about controlling anybody else's life. Individual control of your own economy is freedom. I would however argue that it is Socialism that brings about the crisis and wars amongst the genders putting males against females and females against males, Whites against Blacks and Blacks against Whites, Employers against Workers and Workers against their Employers, Aryan Germans against Jews and Jews against Germans. All of these crisis are caused by collective control of the means of production, not private individual control of the means of production.

    #5. The Anarcho Virgin Capitalist according to the Marxist author, Thinks the 50's and 60's America were the best.

    Response: I have no idea how this belief defines someone as Capitalist

    #6. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist somehow believes in both individualism and tribulism.

    Answer: The above is Oxymoronic, as you cannot have both Invidualism and Tribulism. This contradiction is explicitly evident in Hitler's writings, who was a Socialist by the way. Hitler says in Mein Kampf that National Socialism also promotes individual worth.. Hitler however could never solve the contradiction this brought about. As if he really promoted individual worth as he said, then there was no way he could Nationalize the Masses or Socialize the people as he also said he would do. If there was individual worth, then the Germans couldn't be working for the betterment of their race, and there was no way for Hitler to Socialize the Aryan Race, as they would be competing with each other. Capitalism is strictly about the Private Individual and has nothing to do with groups or tribes who's effort is to strip the individual of his individuality. It is Socialism who promotes Tribalism and Collectivism. What the Marxist that created this Meme has proven is that the Virgin Anarcho Capitalist is actually a Socialist. I would however agree that he is not a Marxist Socialist. But by definiton he is a Socialist!

    #7. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist according to the Marxist that created this Meme, is scared of black and brown people and wants to create his own ethnostate.

    Answer: As we already know that it is collective control of the means of production that brings about the clash between racial groups (Race Socialism), not individual control of the means of production. It is therefore easy to decipher that the Marxist author of this trash Meme is lying. Coupled with the fact that the Virgin Anarcho Capitalist wants a (White Enthnostate), which proves he is not a Capitalist but a Socialist, as State Control of the Economy is Socialism. Capitalism is Anti-State. Capitalism is the Antithesis of Socialism and therefore cannot be Socialism at the same time. There is no State in an economy that is controlled by individuals.

    #8. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist thinks Liberals are Left according to the Marxist Author.

    Answer: Actually this is more proof that the Virgin Anarcho Capitalist is actually a leftist Socialist, very possibly a National Socialist. Classic Liberals are on the Right for the most part and are libertarians.

    #9. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist is a useful idiot to Fascists according to the Marxist author.

    Answer: The author doesn't even understand the definiton of Fascism and is resorting to pseudo definitons as is common with Collectivist, that is, if the author even knows a pseudo definiton to the Term Fascist at all. As is common with most Marxist Fascist, they can't even define what Fascism is. Or else, they would understand that they are indeed the Fascist Trade Unionist. As Fascism in its simplist definition is Trade Unionism. The Soviet Union was Marxist Fascist. It is literally in the name, Soviet Union. Italian Fascism was Trade Unionism. All you have to do is read the writings of Gentile the creator of Fascism and Mussolini. They make explicitly clear what Fascism is, and what their political ideology was, which is contrary to what Marxist Historians and Sympathizers on Wikipedia are saying.

    #10. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist has no praxis, just whines about liberals on the internet.

    Response: This sounds more like a National Socialist. Classic Liberals are on the Right not the Left.

    Meaning of classic liberalism: Classical liberalism is a political tradition and a branch of liberalism that advocates free market and laissez-faire economics; civil liberties under the rule of law with special emphasis on individual autonomy, limited government, economic freedom, political freedom and freedom of speech.

    #11. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist uses Statist and Collectivist as insults.

    Answer: As i have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist according to how this Marxist describes him, is not an Anarcho Capitalist but a Utopian Socialist. He is indeed a collectivist no different than the Marxists and is living in a world of Contradictions and pseudo definition of terms identically to the Marxist.

    #12. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist believes in Hierarchies according to the Marxist author.

    Answer: And Hierarchies are Public not Private. The Marxist has literally spelled out here that the Virgin Anarcho Capitalist is really a Socialist. You can't have a Hierarchy when every individual is fending for themselves. Only collectivism brings about Hierarchies.

    #13. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist says Richard Spencer's ideas could work according to the Marxist author.

    Answer: Richard Spencer is a leftist Race Socialist lol. Richard Spencer is so on the left that he voted for Biden. He made his voting registration public on twitter for everyone to see.

    #14. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist Invested in Bitcoin according to the Marxist Author.

    Answer: Many Socialists are invested in Bitcoin as well. I don't see how this indicates that all who invest in Bitcoin must be Capitalist.

    #15. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist believes in White Genocide according to the Marxist author.

    Answer: The reason why the Virgin Anarcho Capitalist believes in White Genocide is because he is a Socialist lol.

    Done with the Virgin Anarcho Capitalist who should actually be renamed the Virgin National Socialist instead.

    Later on when i have more time, i will refute the Chad Anarcho Communist part of the Meme as well.
    Today i will be exposing the Virgin Anarcho Capitalist VS the Chad Anarcho Communist Meme here: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1331942-virgin-vs-chad. Lets start with the Virgin Anarcho Capitalist. #1. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist wants Corporations deregulated according to the Marxist that wrote this. Answer: Corporations are Organs of the state and are collectively owned not individually owned. Corporations are Syndicates, and as I've mentioned before the Soviet Union called them Syndicates and the Italian Fascist called their Syndicates Corporations. Corporations are Marxist Fascist Socialist Organization. They have nothing at all to do with Capitalism nor a free market. #2. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist comes from an incredibly wealthy family according to the Marxist that wrote this. Answer: I would actually argue that Those of the Public Sector State Hierarchy Controlling the means of production are the extremely wealthy socialist group. There aren't to many rich Capitalist as those of the Private Sector are having their wealth siphoned away by the State. But not only that, they are also having their businesses crushed by the State and considered none essential as what happened with the Covid lie. The State, through the Covid lie attempted to crush competition, thus they attempted to crush Capitalism which is private individual control of his/her own economy. Through Taxations our wealth is being redistributed to the Giant Corporations which are funded by the State giving these Corporation a huge advantage over Private Individually owned businesses. With all of the Government funding Corporations receive, they have no problem paying employees 20 dollars per hour minimum wage. Price control and minimum wage only affect the small privately owned businesses, not the Giants the Public Sector State Hierarchy supports. #3. The Anarcho Capitalist Virgin always wears suits with bow ties according to the Marxist that wrote this. Answer: Actually, it is the Socialist thugs of the Mainstream Media and those that have collective shareholder ownership of the of the means of production in the Stock Exchange Socialist Market who wear suits with bow ties. #4. According to this Marxist, the Anarcho Capitalist Virgin is a big believer in Traditionalist gender roles. Answer: You don't have to be a Capitalist to be a Traditionalist in Gender Roles. The differences is when one has individual control of his/her own economy, He/She doesn't care about controlling anybody else's life. Individual control of your own economy is freedom. I would however argue that it is Socialism that brings about the crisis and wars amongst the genders putting males against females and females against males, Whites against Blacks and Blacks against Whites, Employers against Workers and Workers against their Employers, Aryan Germans against Jews and Jews against Germans. All of these crisis are caused by collective control of the means of production, not private individual control of the means of production. #5. The Anarcho Virgin Capitalist according to the Marxist author, Thinks the 50's and 60's America were the best. Response: I have no idea how this belief defines someone as Capitalist #6. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist somehow believes in both individualism and tribulism. Answer: The above is Oxymoronic, as you cannot have both Invidualism and Tribulism. This contradiction is explicitly evident in Hitler's writings, who was a Socialist by the way. Hitler says in Mein Kampf that National Socialism also promotes individual worth.. Hitler however could never solve the contradiction this brought about. As if he really promoted individual worth as he said, then there was no way he could Nationalize the Masses or Socialize the people as he also said he would do. If there was individual worth, then the Germans couldn't be working for the betterment of their race, and there was no way for Hitler to Socialize the Aryan Race, as they would be competing with each other. Capitalism is strictly about the Private Individual and has nothing to do with groups or tribes who's effort is to strip the individual of his individuality. It is Socialism who promotes Tribalism and Collectivism. What the Marxist that created this Meme has proven is that the Virgin Anarcho Capitalist is actually a Socialist. I would however agree that he is not a Marxist Socialist. But by definiton he is a Socialist! #7. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist according to the Marxist that created this Meme, is scared of black and brown people and wants to create his own ethnostate. Answer: As we already know that it is collective control of the means of production that brings about the clash between racial groups (Race Socialism), not individual control of the means of production. It is therefore easy to decipher that the Marxist author of this trash Meme is lying. Coupled with the fact that the Virgin Anarcho Capitalist wants a (White Enthnostate), which proves he is not a Capitalist but a Socialist, as State Control of the Economy is Socialism. Capitalism is Anti-State. Capitalism is the Antithesis of Socialism and therefore cannot be Socialism at the same time. There is no State in an economy that is controlled by individuals. #8. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist thinks Liberals are Left according to the Marxist Author. Answer: Actually this is more proof that the Virgin Anarcho Capitalist is actually a leftist Socialist, very possibly a National Socialist. Classic Liberals are on the Right for the most part and are libertarians. #9. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist is a useful idiot to Fascists according to the Marxist author. Answer: The author doesn't even understand the definiton of Fascism and is resorting to pseudo definitons as is common with Collectivist, that is, if the author even knows a pseudo definiton to the Term Fascist at all. As is common with most Marxist Fascist, they can't even define what Fascism is. Or else, they would understand that they are indeed the Fascist Trade Unionist. As Fascism in its simplist definition is Trade Unionism. The Soviet Union was Marxist Fascist. It is literally in the name, Soviet Union. Italian Fascism was Trade Unionism. All you have to do is read the writings of Gentile the creator of Fascism and Mussolini. They make explicitly clear what Fascism is, and what their political ideology was, which is contrary to what Marxist Historians and Sympathizers on Wikipedia are saying. #10. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist has no praxis, just whines about liberals on the internet. Response: This sounds more like a National Socialist. Classic Liberals are on the Right not the Left. Meaning of classic liberalism: Classical liberalism is a political tradition and a branch of liberalism that advocates free market and laissez-faire economics; civil liberties under the rule of law with special emphasis on individual autonomy, limited government, economic freedom, political freedom and freedom of speech. #11. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist uses Statist and Collectivist as insults. Answer: As i have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist according to how this Marxist describes him, is not an Anarcho Capitalist but a Utopian Socialist. He is indeed a collectivist no different than the Marxists and is living in a world of Contradictions and pseudo definition of terms identically to the Marxist. #12. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist believes in Hierarchies according to the Marxist author. Answer: And Hierarchies are Public not Private. The Marxist has literally spelled out here that the Virgin Anarcho Capitalist is really a Socialist. You can't have a Hierarchy when every individual is fending for themselves. Only collectivism brings about Hierarchies. #13. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist says Richard Spencer's ideas could work according to the Marxist author. Answer: Richard Spencer is a leftist Race Socialist lol. Richard Spencer is so on the left that he voted for Biden. He made his voting registration public on twitter for everyone to see. #14. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist Invested in Bitcoin according to the Marxist Author. Answer: Many Socialists are invested in Bitcoin as well. I don't see how this indicates that all who invest in Bitcoin must be Capitalist. #15. The Virgin Anarcho Capitalist believes in White Genocide according to the Marxist author. Answer: The reason why the Virgin Anarcho Capitalist believes in White Genocide is because he is a Socialist lol. Done with the Virgin Anarcho Capitalist who should actually be renamed the Virgin National Socialist instead. Later on when i have more time, i will refute the Chad Anarcho Communist part of the Meme as well.
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  • It was an honour to deliver a keynote speech here in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the prestigious Panmure House, the home of the father of modern economics Adam Smith.

    We reiterated our message on the importance of education as the best investment and the best equalizer in any society. We encouraged partnerships between Scotland and Zambia, particularly in education, health, technology, renewable energy, and private sector skills development.

    In our engagement with the Scottish First Minister, Humza Yousaf, we called for enhanced trade and investment support from the Scottish government to encourage joint ventures between our citizens and international investors to create long-lasting partnerships.

    We will continue on our mission of economic diplomacy to encourage investment, stabilize our country's financial position, and create more opportunities for our people.

    We have since concluded our engagements in Scotland and left for France.

    Hakainde Hichilema
    President of the Republic of Zambia
    #meme #liketu #someeofficial #waivio
    It was an honour to deliver a keynote speech here in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the prestigious Panmure House, the home of the father of modern economics Adam Smith. We reiterated our message on the importance of education as the best investment and the best equalizer in any society. We encouraged partnerships between Scotland and Zambia, particularly in education, health, technology, renewable energy, and private sector skills development. In our engagement with the Scottish First Minister, Humza Yousaf, we called for enhanced trade and investment support from the Scottish government to encourage joint ventures between our citizens and international investors to create long-lasting partnerships. We will continue on our mission of economic diplomacy to encourage investment, stabilize our country's financial position, and create more opportunities for our people. We have since concluded our engagements in Scotland and left for France. Hakainde Hichilema President of the Republic of Zambia #meme #liketu #someeofficial #waivio
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  • Ray Dalio Gold Portfolio
    https://www.prioritygold.com/ray-dalio-dont-gold-know-neither-history-economics/
    Ray Dalio Gold Portfolio https://www.prioritygold.com/ray-dalio-dont-gold-know-neither-history-economics/
    WWW.PRIORITYGOLD.COM
    Ray Dalio: “If You Don’t Own Gold, You Know Neither History Nor Economics”
    Ray Dalio - Gold Assets By Tyler Durden Bridgewater's Ray Dalio explains in under 120 seconds why everyone should allocate some of their portfolio to gold: If you don't own gold...there is no sensible reason other than you don't know history or you don't know the economics of it.
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