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The Antiwar Movement Roars Back to Life

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On February 19th, the National Mall in Washington, DC saw its largest antiwar rally in 20 years. The speakers list included four former US presidential candidates and a broad and diverse collection of antiwar activists from beyond the left and right.
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US Military Aid To Ukraine Exceeds The Costs Of Afghanistan

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Ukraine receives the most military aid from the United States: Since the beginning of the war and as of Jan. 15, 2023, $46.6 billion in financial aid for military purposes has flowed to the country now at war with Russia.

When calculating the average annual costs (in 2022 prices) of previous wars in which the United States has been involved in, the true magnitude of the country's Ukraine aid expenditure can be seen.

As Statista's Martin Armstrong shows in the infographic below, the payments to Ukraine have already exceeded the annual military expenditure of the US in the war in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2010. The US military costs in the Vietnam War, the Iraq War and the Korean War were significantly higher - according to calculations by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy as part of its Ukraine Support Tracker.
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The Lesson of East Palestine

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The lesson learned, and largely ignored, is that the government Americans vote for every two and four years does not “represent” them.

East Palestine is the lesson du jour. So long as it remains in the corporate media’s “news cycle,” coverage will downplay the federal government’s decision to ignore the poisoning of thousands of people, not only in East Palestine but across Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Joe Biden does not believe this disaster warrants a reaction. He has not traveled to East Palestine. Biden’s transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, waited more than two weeks to travel there, and only to shore up the government’s image as responsive and caring, which it is not.

The fact of the matter is, the government does not care about your welfare or protecting you from psychopathic profit-centric corporations. It has nothing but contempt for those, not of the billionaire class, the bankers, CEOs of transnational corporations, and attached lobbyists passing out fiat dollars to keep the crony capitalist game moving along—until it falls off a cliff, as it will soon enough.

The residents of East Palestine are outraged that Biden refused to send FEMA in response to a corporate-caused crime against humanity. As a comparison, consider FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
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The Ontological Incoherence of American Imperial Exceptionalism

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This is ostensibly a critical review of Arta Moeini’s recent essay published at UnHerd: Is the West escalating the Ukraine war? Nevertheless, its purview extends far beyond Moeini’s isolated expression of the pervasive fallacies my critique addresses.

Moeini’s article emerges from the milieu of the past several weeks, during which time we have observed a pronounced rhetorical revolution in the popular western narratives regarding the NATO/Russia war in Ukraine.

“Lost cause” is in the air. Many who have privately known this to be the case for some time have finally been sufficiently emboldened to publicly embrace the obvious – albeit reluctantly, and often with a good measure of rationalization and lingering misinformation in tow.

To be clear, I found Moeini’s essay a worthwhile read; thought-provoking on multiple levels – although not always in the way I suspect he intended. And I more or less agree with the majority of his observations of matters as they currently stand.

But as the poet well-noted, “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
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Biden Goes All in on Proxy War Against Russia

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No, Joe, that’s not Hunter you’re sniffing. But Zelensky is a pretty good substitute – every bit as corrupt, drugged-up and delusional as the First Son.

So hug away. You have already proven (repeatedly) that there is no betrayal of America’s true homeland security you will not eagerly embrace.

And, yes, unlike the manifold images on Hunter’s laptop, this picture of the purported hero of the free world snorting cocaine was probably photo-shopped. But so what?

How would our addle-brained President tell the difference!

After all, he apparently can’t even tell the difference between friend and foe. That’s surely the implication of the great Seymour Hersh’s latest bombshell about the pipeline bombings.

According to Hersh’s Deep State sources, the guy shuffling around the Oval Office is so befuddled that he actually ordered the bombing of the $25 billion and strategically crucial Nord Stream pipelines. The latter, of course, are half-owned by Germany, which is by far Washington’s most important and powerful European ally, and have been the economic conduit for cheap Russian gas that has fueled the German industrial economy.
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Microsoft Company Pushes Discredited GDI Blacklist Targeting Conservative and Libertarian Sites

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I have been writing about the controversial funding of the Global Disinformation Index by the congressionally-creating and federal funded National Endowment for Democracy. I recently disclosed that, after my Hill column ran, NED contacted me to say that it was stopping any further funding of the GDI. However, major questions still remain on the NED’s funding of this highly flawed scoring system that targeted conservative and libertarian sites. 

This is an effort to deter advertisers from supporting these sites while listing highly liberal sites like Huffington Post as some of the most reliable sources. It appears that a Microsoft company is supporting this effort. According to the Washington Examiner, Microsoft’s Xandr  is running a blacklist based on the discredited GDI listing. However, it includes additional sites popular with conservatives, libertarians, and independents beyond the ten most dangerous sites flagged by GDI.

It now appears that NED is not the only federally funded group supporting GDI. The State Department also supports the Global Engagement Center, which gave GDI funds for this blacklisting effort. It also includes sites like the Drudge Report, the Washington Examiner, the Washington Times, and sites associates with individual figures like Sean Hannity and Mike Huckabee.
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Dictators Bent on Building Military Empires: The Cost of the Nation’s Endless Wars

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"Autocrats only understand one word: no, no, no. No you will not take my country, no you will not take my freedom, no you will not take my future… A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free.”—President Biden

Oh, the hypocrisy.

To hear President Biden talk about the Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, you might imagine that Putin is the only dictator bent on expanding his military empire through the use of occupation, aggression and oppression.

Yet the United States is no better, having spent much of the past half-century policing the globe, occupying other countries, and waging endless wars.
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Russia And China Draw 'Red Lines' On Their Borders; US Draws Them On The Other Side Of The Planet

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Reacting to China's announcement that it will be putting forward a proposal for a political settlement to end the war in Ukraine, the US ambassador to the United Nations said that if China begins arming Russia in that conflict this will be a "red line" for the United States.

“We welcome the Chinese announcement that they want peace because that’s what we always want to pursue in situations like this. But we also have to be clear that if there are any thoughts and efforts by the Chinese and others to provide lethal support to the Russians in their brutal attack against Ukraine, that that is unacceptable,” Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told CNN on Sunday.

“That would be a red line,” she said.

The ambassador's comments pertained to an unsubstantiated claim made by Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday that China is "considering providing lethal support to Russia in the war against Ukraine," according to US intelligence.
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America the Feckless

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One would think that the United States military staging an unprovoked “plausibly deniable” covert attack on a nation with which it is not at war would be at least considered newsworthy. That the attack did grave damage to a country with which the US is closely allied would seem to make the aggression even more unthinkable. And, perhaps worst of all, that the attack was set up by the nation’s chief executive using a political bypass that avoided congressional oversight and adherence to the war powers act which might be most reprehensible of all as it cuts to the heart of the nation’s constitutional balance of powers. It is clearly an impeachable offense. And “Yes,” for those who are still wondering, Joe Biden and his team of terrorist emulators have done all that and more, and have capped their performance with a series of flat out lies and evasions to make it appear that they had done nothing wrong.

And the mainstream America media, in its worst performance since the invasion of Iraq, has served as an echo chamber for everything the White House chooses to leak to it. Given all of that, it was perhaps completely predictable that the government-subservient press and TV news would almost completely ignore the devastating report released by top investigative journalist Seymour Hersh on February 8th. Hersh’s article was entitled “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline” with a secondary headline reading “The New York Times called it a ‘mystery,’ but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now.” The article, which Hersh self-published on the internet, describes in considerable detail the preparations and execution by the US Navy Diving and Salvage Center and Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Maritime Branch, coordinated and directed by the White House, to sabotage and destroy Russia’s four Baltic Sea Nord Stream gas pipelines, a war crime and terroristic action that moves the United States much closer to direct armed conflict with Russia.
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The Inflation and Tax Assault on the American People

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According to the January report of the Consumer Price Index, price inflation increased by 0.5 percent last month. This follows a 0.1 percent increase in December. The total increase over the last 12 months is 6.4 percent. The official government statistics, which are manipulated to understate the true rate of price inflation, show even greater increases in some costs. Over the last 12 months, food prices increased by 10.1 percent, energy prices increased by 8.7 percent, and shelter costs rose by 7.9 percent.
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