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“As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.”

-- Edward Abbey

News and Opinion

The Madness of the Resurgent US Cold War With Russia

The war in Ukraine has placed U.S. and NATO policy toward Russia under a spotlight, highlighting how the United States and its allies have expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders, backed a coup and now a proxy war in Ukraine, imposed waves of economic sanctions, and launched a debilitating trillion-dollar arms race. The explicit goal is to pressure, weaken and ultimately eliminate Russia, or a Russia-China partnership, as a strategic competitor to U.S. imperial power.

The United States and NATO have used similar forms of force and coercion against many countries. In every case they have been catastrophic for the people directly impacted, whether they achieved their political aims or not.

Wars and violent regime changes in Kosovo, Iraq, Haiti and Libya have left them mired in endless corruption, poverty, and chaos. Failed proxy wars in Somalia, Syria, and Yemen have spawned endless war and humanitarian disasters. U.S. sanctions against Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela have impoverished their people but failed to change their governments.

Meanwhile, U.S.-backed coups in Chile, Bolivia and Honduras have sooner or later been reversed by grassroots movements to restore democratic, socialist government. The Taliban are governing Afghanistan again after a 20-year war to expel a U.S. and NATO army of occupation, for which the sore losers are now starving millions of Afghans.

But the risks and consequences of the U.S. Cold War on Russia are of a different order. The purpose of any war is to defeat your enemy. But how can you defeat an enemy that is explicitly committed to respond to the prospect of existential defeat by destroying the whole world?

This is in fact part of the military doctrine of the United States and Russia, who together possess over 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons. If either of them faces existential defeat, they are prepared to destroy human civilization in a nuclear holocaust that will kill Americans, Russians, and neutrals alike.

In June 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree stating, “The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies… and also in the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is put under threat.”

U.S. nuclear weapons policy is no more reassuring. A decades-long campaign for a U.S. “no first use” nuclear weapons policy still falls on deaf ears in Washington.

The 2018 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) promised that the United States would not use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state. But in a war with another nuclear-armed country, it said, “The United States would only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.”

The 2018 NPR broadened the definition of “extreme circumstances” to cover “significant non-nuclear attacks,” which it said would “include, but are not limited to, attacks on the U.S., allies or partner civilian population or infrastructure, and attacks on U.S. or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warning and attack assessment.” The critical phrase, “but are not limited to,” removes any restriction at all on a U.S. nuclear first strike.

So, as the U.S. Cold War against Russia and China heats up, the only signal that the deliberately foggy threshold for the U.S. use of nuclear weapons has been crossed could be the first mushroom clouds exploding over Russia or China.

For our part in the West, Russia has explicitly warned us that it will use nuclear weapons if it believes the United States or NATO are threatening the existence of the Russian state. That is a threshold that the United States and NATO are already flirting with as they look for ways to increase their pressure on Russia over the war in Ukraine.

To make matters worse, the twelve-to-one imbalance between U.S. and Russian military spending has the effect, whether either side intends it or not, of increasing Russia’s reliance on the role of its nuclear arsenal when the chips are down in a crisis like this.

NATO countries, led by the United States and United Kingdom, are already supplying Ukraine with up to 17 plane-loads of weapons per day, training Ukrainian forces to use them and providing valuable and deadly satellite intelligence to Ukrainian military commanders. Hawkish voices in NATO countries are pushing hard for a no-fly zone or some other way to escalate the war and take advantage of Russia’s perceived weaknesses.

The danger that hawks in the State Department and Congress may convince President Biden to escalate the U.S. role in the war prompted the Pentagon to leak details of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) assessments of Russia’s conduct of the war to Newsweek’s William Arkin.

Senior DIA officers told Arkin that Russia has dropped fewer bombs and missiles on Ukraine in a month than U.S. forces dropped on Iraq in the first day of bombing in 2003, and that they see no evidence of Russia directly targeting civilians. Like U.S. “precision” weapons, Russian weapons are probably only about 80% accurate, so hundreds of stray bombs and missiles are killing and wounding civilians and hitting civilian infrastructure, as they do just as horrifically in every U.S. war.

The DIA analysts believe Russia is holding back from a more devastating war because what it really wants is not to destroy Ukrainian cities but to negotiate a diplomatic agreement to ensure a neutral, non-aligned Ukraine.

But the Pentagon appears to be so worried by the impact of highly effective Western and Ukrainian war propaganda that it has released secret intelligence to Newsweek to try to restore a measure of reality to the media’s portrayal of the war, before political pressure for NATO escalation leads to a nuclear war.

Since the United States and the U.S.S.R. blundered into their nuclear suicide pact in the 1950s, it has come to be known as Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. As the Cold War evolved, they cooperated to reduce the risk of mutual assured destruction through arms control treaties, a hotline between Moscow and Washington, and regular contacts between U.S. and Soviet officials.

But the United States has now withdrawn from many of those arms control treaties and safeguard mechanisms. The risk of nuclear war is as great today as it has ever been, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns year after year in its annual Doomsday Clock statement. The Bulletin has also published detailed analyses of how specific technological advances in U.S. nuclear weapons design and strategy are increasing the risk of nuclear war.

The world understandably breathed a collective sigh of relief when the Cold War appeared to end in the early 1990s. But within a decade, the peace dividend the world hoped for was trumped by a power dividend. U.S. officials did not use their unipolar moment to build a more peaceful world, but to capitalize on the lack of a military peer competitor to launch an era of U.S. and NATO military expansion and serial aggression against militarily weaker countries and their people.

As Michael Mandelbaum, the director of East-West Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, crowed in 1990, “For the first time in 40 years, we can conduct military operations in the Middle East without worrying about triggering World War III.” Thirty years later, people in that part of the world may be forgiven for thinking that the United States and its allies have in fact unleashed World War III, against them, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Pakistan, Gaza, Libya, Syria, Yemen and across West Africa.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin complained bitterly to President Clinton over plans for NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, but Russia was powerless to prevent it. Russia had already been invaded by an army of neoliberal Western economic advisers, whose “shock therapy” shrank its GDP by 65%, reduced male life expectancy from 65 to 58, and empowered a new class of oligarchs to loot its national resources and state-owned enterprises.

President Putin restored the power of the Russian state and improved the Russian people’s living standards, but he did not at first push back against U.S. and NATO military expansion and war-making. However, when NATO and its Arab monarchist allies overthrew the Gaddafi government in Libya and then launched an even bloodier proxy war against Russia’s ally Syria, Russia intervened militarily to prevent the overthrow of the Syrian government.

Russia worked with the United States to remove and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles, and helped to open negotiations with Iran that eventually led to the JCPOA nuclear agreement. But the U.S. role in the coup in Ukraine in 2014, Russia’s subsequent reintegration of Crimea and its support for anti-coup separatists in Donbass put paid to further cooperation between Obama and Putin, plunging U.S.-Russian relations into a downward spiral that has now led us to the brink of nuclear war.

It is the epitome of official insanity that U.S., NATO and Russian leaders have resurrected this Cold War, which the whole world celebrated the end of, allowing plans for mass suicide and human extinction to once again masquerade as responsible defense policy.

While Russia bears full responsibility for invading Ukraine and for all the death and destruction of this war, this crisis did not come out of nowhere. The United States and its allies must reexamine their own roles in resurrecting the Cold War that spawned this crisis, if we are ever to return to a safer world for people everywhere.

Tragically, instead of expiring on its sell-by date in the 1990s along with the Warsaw Pact, NATO has transformed itself into an aggressive global military alliance, a fig-leaf for U.S. imperialism, and a forum for dangerous, self-fulfilling threat analysis, to justify its continued existence, endless expansion and crimes of aggression on three continents, in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya.

If this insanity indeed drives us to mass extinction, it will be no consolation to the scattered and dying survivors that their leaders succeeded in destroying their enemies’ country too. They will simply curse leaders on all sides for their blindness and stupidity. The propaganda by which each side demonized the other will be only a cruel irony once its end result is seen to be the destruction of everything leaders on all sides claimed to be defending.

This reality is common to all sides in this resurgent Cold War. But, like the voices of peace activists in Russia today, our voices are more powerful when we hold our own leaders accountable and work to change our own country’s behavior.

If Americans just echo U.S. propaganda, deny our own country’s role in provoking this crisis and turn all our ire towards President Putin and Russia, it will only serve to fuel the escalating tensions and bring on the next phase of this conflict, whatever dangerous new form that may take.

But if we campaign to change our country’s policies, de-escalate conflicts and find common ground with our neighbors in Ukraine, Russia, China and the rest of the world, we can cooperate and solve our serious common challenges together.

A top priority must be to dismantle the nuclear Doomsday machine we have inadvertently collaborated to build and maintain for 70 years, along with the obsolete and dangerous NATO military alliance. We cannot let the “unwarranted influence” and “misplaced power” of the Military-Industrial Complex keep leading us into ever more dangerous military crises until one of them spins out of control and destroys us all.

Poland's Covert War on Ukraine w/Michael Tracey

Biden’s new “forever war”

On Saturday, US President Joe Biden ended his week-long tour of Europe to mobilize NATO for conflict with Russia with a belligerent rant in Warsaw, Poland. Media coverage of Biden’s speech was focused on its final passage, apparently ad-libbed, in which the American president said that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.” But an even more important aspect of the speech went largely undiscussed: Biden’s declaration of a “commitment” by the United States to “decades” of war.

Against the backdrop of the largest land war in Europe since World War II, Biden declared, “We must commit now to be in this fight for the long haul. We must remain unified today and tomorrow and the day after and for the years and decades to come.”

To what “fight” is Biden committing the United States? Just nine months ago, when Biden announced the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, he said, “We’ve been a nation too long at war. If you’re 20 years old today, you have never known an America at peace.” He declared, “It’s time to end the forever war.” Now, Biden is committing the American population to a new perpetual war—one that he said will have immense “costs” and “will not be easy.” In his speech, Biden declared that the decades-long “fight” the US is initiating is a “great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” ...

Despite the efforts by the White House to walk back Biden’s statement, Biden’s ad-libbed declaration was the inescapable conclusion of the entire speech. Biden’s statements clearly reflect the actual US policy, the aim of which is the military isolation and economic ruination of Russia, the ouster of its government and the installation of a puppet regime that would turn it into a rump state. Biden’s declaration of a new, decades-long commitment comes just days after his proclamation before leaving for Europe, that “there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it.” ...

The events of this week make one thing abundantly clear. The US’s plans for “great-power conflict” with Russia and China are leaving the planning stage and are being put into practice. Having instigated the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States is seizing upon it to carry out plans, decades in the making, to assert US hegemony through military means against nuclear-armed adversaries.

Poll: Majority of Americans Fear Nuclear War

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has left Americans on edge, according to a recent poll which found a majority of people in the U.S. are worried that the war has made the impending use of nuclear weapons more likely. Nearly three-quarters of respondents told the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research that the invasion has increased the likelihood that nuclear weapons will be used anywhere in the world.

Eighty-five percent of people surveyed said they were concerned that the U.S. could be drawn into the conflict, including 47 percent of people who said they were “extremely or very concerned” about this scenario, which would amount to a conflict between the two countries with the world’s largest nuclear stockpiles. ...

Eighty-seven percent of respondents to the AP poll said they were at least “somewhat concerned” that Putin could use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, and 75 percent were concerned that the U.S. could be targeted.

Since the invasion, anti-war and arms control groups have intensified calls for Biden to commit to a no “first-use” policy, affirming that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is only a deterrent and will never be used in an offensive strike. The Wall Street Journal reported last week, however, that the president has abandoned his campaign pledge to establish an official policy to that effect.

Biden DEFIANT: DEFENDS Call For Putin Regime Change

Fresh off The Guardian's propaganda catapult:

Ukraine and Russia likely to begin face-to-face talks on Tuesday

Ukraine’s neutrality and the status of contested areas in the east could be on the table in ceasefire talks due to start on Tuesday, but with Russia’s invasion largely stalled, Kyiv will make no concessions on territorial integrity, officials have said.

As negotiators arrived in Istanbul for their first face-to-face peace talks in more than two weeks, both sides played down the chances of a major breakthrough and a senior US official said Vladimir Putin did not appear ready to compromise. In the view of Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, a ceasefire was the most his country could hope for from the talks. “We are not trading people, land or sovereignty,” he said.

But the fact that the two sides were meeting at all was seen as a sign the dynamics may be shifting, amid suggestions from Kyiv that Moscow may be more flexible after failing to encircle the Ukrainian capital and force the government’s early capitulation. ...

The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said Moscow would not be commenting on the talks because it would “only hurt the negotiation process”, but added that the fact they were continuing to take place in person was, “of course, important”.

Peskov described comments on Saturday by Joe Biden, in which the US president called Putin a “butcher”, who “cannot remain in power”, as alarming. Biden denied on Monday that he calling for regime change in Russia, saying he was expressing only his personal “moral outrage” at the “brutality” of Putin’s assault.

Ukraine government investigates video alleged to show torture of Russian PoWs

Video footage purporting to show the torture of Russian prisoners of war is being investigated by the Ukrainian government. The film, which has not been verified, appears to show Ukrainian soldiers removing three hooded Russians from a van before shooting them in the legs.

The Ukrainian military commander Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi accused Russia of staging the videos. “The enemy produces and shares videos with the inhuman treatment of alleged ‘Russian prisoners’ by ‘Ukrainian soldiers’ in order to discredit the Ukrainian defence forces,” Zaluzhnyi said.

However, the government in Kyiv said they were taking the allegations of mistreatment “very seriously” and that there would be an immediate investigation. Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said: “We are a European army, and we do not mock our prisoners. If this turns out to be real, this is absolutely unacceptable behaviour.”

Biden's Dangerous Call for Regime Change in Russia

Ever since Joe Biden ended his speech in Poland on Saturday night by making one of the most dangerous statements ever uttered by a U.S. president in the nuclear age, efforts to clean up after him have been profuse. Administration officials scurried to assert that Biden didn't mean what he said. Yet no amount of trying to "walk back" his unhinged comment at the end of his speech in front of Warsaw's Royal Castle can change the fact that Biden had called for regime change in Russia.

They were nine words about Russian President Vladimir Putin that shook the world: "For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power."

With a reckless genie out of the bottle, no amount of damage control from the president's top underlings could stuff it back in. "We do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else, for that matter," Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on Sunday. Such words might plausibly have less than full weight; Blinken was chief of staff at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when, in mid-2002, then-Senator Biden wielded the gavel at crucial hearings that completely stacked the witness deck in support of the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq, with the explicit goal of regime change.

The USA's commander in chief, brandishing the power to launch one of the world's two biggest nuclear arsenals, would be out of his mind to consciously announce a goal of dethroning the leader of the world's other nuclear superpower. Worst case would be that he was blurting out his government's actual secret goal, which would not speak well of impulse control.

But it's not much more reassuring to think that the president simply got carried away with his emotions. The day after, that was part of the messaging from Biden's cleanup detail. "Administration officials and Democratic lawmakers said Sunday the off-the-cuff remark was an emotional response to the president's interactions in Warsaw with [Ukrainian] refugees," the Wall Street Journal reported.

However—before the cosmetics began to cover Biden's unscripted statement—the New York Times provided a quick news analysis under the headline "Biden's Barbed Remark About Putin: A Slip or a Veiled Threat?" The piece, by seasoned establishment reporters David Sanger and Michael Shear, noted that Biden's off-script close to his speech came with "his cadence slowing for emphasis." And they added: "On its face, he appeared to be calling for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to be ousted for his brutal invasion of Ukraine."

Mainstream journalists have avoided putting a fine point on the likelihood that World War III just got closer thanks to Biden's words, whether or not they were "a slip" or "a veiled threat." In fact, it might never be possible to know which it was. But that ambiguity underscores that his slip and/or threat was mind-blowingly irresponsible, endangering the survival of humanity on this planet.

Outrage is the appropriate response. And a special onus is on Democrats in Congress, who should be willing to put humanity above party and condemn Biden's extreme irresponsibility. But prospects for such condemnation look bleak.

Biden's impromptu nine words underscore that we must not take anything for granted about his rationality. Russia's murderous war in Ukraine does not give Biden any valid excuse to make a horrendous situation worse. On the contrary, the U.S. government should be determined to promote and pursue negotiations that could end the killing and find long-term compromise solutions. Biden has now made it even more difficult to pursue diplomacy with Putin.

Activists have a special role to play—by emphatically insisting that members of Congress and the Biden administration must focus on finding solutions that will save Ukrainian lives as well as put a stop to the slide toward military escalation and global nuclear annihilation.

To even hint that the U.S. is seeking regime change in Russia—and to leave the world wondering whether the president is slipping or threatening—is a form of imperial insanity in the nuclear era that we must not tolerate.

"I'm addressing the people in the United States," former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said during an interview on Democracy Now just one day before Biden's speech in Poland. "How many times have an attempt by the American government to effect regime change anywhere in the world worked out well? Ask the women of Afghanistan. Ask the people of Iraq. How did that liberal imperialism work out for them? Not very well. Do they really propose to try this out with a nuclear power?"

Overall, in recent weeks, President Biden has jettisoned all but the flimsiest pretenses of seeking a diplomatic solution to end the horrors of the war in Ukraine. Instead, his administration keeps ratcheting up the self-righteous rhetoric while moving the world closer to ultimate catastrophe.

Re-Visiting Russiagate In Light Of The Ukraine War

It’s hard to believe that the last president spent his term pouring weapons into Ukraine, shredding treaties with Russia and ramping up cold war escalations against Moscow which helped lead us directly to the extraordinarily dangerous situation we now find ourselves in, and yet mainstream liberals spent his entire administration screaming that he was a Kremlin puppet.

A lot of anti-empire commentary is rightly going into criticizing how the Obama administration paved the way to this conflict in Ukraine with its role in the 2014 coup and support for Kyiv’s war against Donbass separatists. But what’s getting lost in all this, largely because Trumpites have been using their mainstream numbers to loudly amplify criticisms of the role of the Obama and Biden administrations in this mess, is what happened between those two presidencies which was just as crucial in getting us here.

Though it’s been scrubbed from mainstream liberal history, it was actually the Trump administration that began the US policy of arming Ukraine in the first place. Obama had refused forceful demands from neocons and liberal hawks to do so because he feared it would provoke an attack by Russia.

In a 2015 article titled “Defying Obama, Many in Congress Press to Arm Ukraine“, The New York Times reported that “So far, the Obama administration has refused to provide lethal aid, fearing that it would only escalate the bloodshed and give President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a pretext for further incursions.”

It wasn’t until the Trump presidency that those weapons began pouring into Ukraine, and boy howdy are we looking at some “further incursions” now. This change occurred either because Trump was a fully willing participant in the agenda to ramp up aggressions against Moscow, or because he was politically pressured into playing along with that agenda by the collusion narrative which had its origins at every step in the US intelligence cartel, or because of some combination of the two.

In all the world-shaping news stories we’ve been experiencing lately, it’s easy to forget how the narrative that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government dominated news coverage and political discourse for years on end. But in light of the fact that today’s major headlines now revolve around that exact same foreign government, this fact is probably worth revisiting.

The most important thing to understand about the Trump-Russia collusion narrative is that it began with western intelligence agencies, was sustained by western intelligence agencies, and in the end resulted in cold war escalations against a government long targeted by western intelligence agencies. It was the US intelligence cartel who initiated the still completely unproven and severely plot hole-riddled claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump. It was a “former” MI6 operative who produced the notorious and completely discredited Steele Dossier which birthed the narrative that Trump colluded with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election. It was the FBI who spied on the Trump campaign claiming it was investigating possible ties to Russia. It was the US intelligence cartel which produced, and then later walked back, the narrative that Russia was paying Taliban-linked fighters to kill allied occupiers in Afghanistan which was leveraged by Democrats to demand Trump escalate further against Putin. It was even a CIA officer who just so happened to be in the right place at the right time that kicked off the flimsy impeachment narrative that Trump had suspended arms deliveries to Ukraine.

Every step of the way the mass media was fed reports by intelligence operatives and by elected officials sharing pieces of information they’d been told by intelligence operatives about potential indications of a conspiracy between Trump’s circle and the Russian government, which often faceplanted in the most humiliating ways as subsequent revelations debunked them. Day after day some new “BOMBSHELL” media report would surface tying some obscure Trump underling so some Russian oligarch in some way, the outlet which published it would be rewarded with millions of clicks, only to have it fizzle into a flat nothing pizza within a few days.

Day after day mainstream liberals were promised major revelations which would lead to the entire Trump family being dragged from the White House in chains, and day after day those promises failed to deliver. But what did happen during that time was a mountain of US cold war escalations against Moscow, a very good illustration of the immense difference between narrative and fact.

Trump supporters like to believe that the Deep State tried to remove their president because he was such a brave populist warrior leading a people’s revolution against their Satanic globalist agendas, and surely there were some individual goons within their ranks who would have loved to see him gone. But in reality the major decision makers in the US intelligence cartel never intended to remove Trump from office. They’d have known from their own intel that the Mueller investigation wouldn’t turn up any evidence of a conspiracy with the Russian government, and they’d have known impeachment wouldn’t remove him because they know how to count Senate seats. Russiagate was never about removing Trump, it was about making sure Trump played along with their regime change plans for Moscow and manufacturing mainstream consent for the escalations we’re seeing today.

And now here we are. Joe Lauria has an excellent new article out for Consortium News titled “Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War” which lays out the evidence that the Ukraine invasion was deliberately provoked to facilitate the longstanding agenda to oust Putin and “ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow.” The US could easily have prevented this war with a little bit of diplomacy and a few low-cost concessions, but instead it chose to provoke a war that could then be used to manufacture international consensus for unprecedented acts of economic warfare against Russia with the goal of effecting regime change.

Lauria writes:

The U.S. got its war in Ukraine. Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead an insurgency to bleed Russia, all part of an attempt to bring down its government. Joe Biden has now left no doubt that it’s true.

The president of the United States has confirmed what Consortium News and others have been reporting since the beginnings of Russsiagate in 2016, that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday at the Royal Castle in Warsaw.

This was all planned years in advance. Long before Biden’s presidency, and long before Trump’s. It is not a coincidence that we spent years being bombarded with anti-Russia propaganda in the lead-up to a massive confrontation with that same government. There’s no connection between the discredited allegation that Trump was a secret Kremlin agent and Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, yet the mainstream anti-Russia hysteria manufactured by the former is flowing seamlessly into mainstream opposition of the latter.

This is because this was all planned well in advance. We’re where we’re at now because the US empire brought us here intentionally.

Ukraine: The Economic Fallout

Sanders Criticizes Biden's $813 Billion Military Budget

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday criticized President Joe Biden's request for an $813.3 billion military budget in the next fiscal year as excessive, noting that the United States already spends more on national security than "the next 11 countries combined."

"We do not need a massive increase in the defense budget," Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said in a statement. "Now that the president has done his job, it is up to Congress to review it, pass the proposals that make sense, and improve upon it."

Part of a sprawling budget blueprint that the White House unveiled on Monday, Biden's military spending request for Fiscal Year 2023 represents a $31 billion increase over the current level of $782 billion, which is already unprecedented.

William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, noted in a statement that Biden's proposed budget is "substantially more—adjusted for inflation—than spending at the height of the Korean or Vietnam wars, and over $100 billion more than peak spending during the Cold War."

"The Pentagon's FY 2023 budget will be a boon to defense contractors," Hartung continued, "with a proposed $276 billion for weapons procurement and R&D combined, over $30 billion more than the department's FY 2022 proposal."

If approved by Congress, Biden's latest budget would put the U.S. on track to spend more than $8 trillion on its military over the next decade. In addition to providing $773 billion for the Pentagon alone, the White House's new proposal would also provide the Department of Energy with billions in funding to "modernize" the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

By contrast, Biden is asking Congress for just $44.9 billion in total funding to fight the climate emergency in Fiscal Year 2023.

Biden Floats BILLIONS More In Defense Budget

Biden Pushes BILLIONAIRE Tax For Deficit Reduction

Much more detail at the link:

Wall Street May Reap Billions From New York Dem’s Reversal

As the Biden Administration warns that workers’ retirement funds may be getting fleeced by hedge funds and private equity firms, a top Democrat is reversing his own criticism of such investments and requesting authority to funnel billions of dollars of retiree savings to the private equity moguls. If that happens, it could mean a half-billion dollars of additional annual fees for a private equity industry that has produced some of the wealthiest people on the planet.

The push from New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, which is tied to the state budget’s impending April 1 deadline, comes as the pension system’s existing alternative investments have delivered what critics say are subpar returns for retirees.

It also comes as a recent report from LittleSis.org and the Private Equity Stakeholder Project shows that eight of the big private equity firms in which New York City’s pension fund has stakes are deeply invested in the fossil fuel sector — a sector that Lander has pledged to specifically divest from in his role as custodian of all five New York City pension funds.

Bloomberg reported last year that “Lander said he recently sat down with BlackRock Inc. Vice Chairman Matt Mallow to talk about how three of the city’s pension funds can actively divest from fossil fuels in both public funds as well as private equity and hedge fund investments.” But now, Lander seems to be doing the opposite — frustrating those who believed the city’s pension funds had been moving in the right direction in terms of responsible investments.

Police shoot man being held for mental health at Florida hospital

A 29-year-old man being held for his mental health in a Florida hospital was fatally shot after he grabbed a pair of scissors and threatened to stab sheriff’s deputies. The man was among a number of people being held in the hospital despite threatening to harm themselves or others because there were no beds at the local mental health facility, said the Indian River county sheriff, Eric Flowers. ...

The man’s family brought him to the emergency department of the Cleveland Clinic Indian River in Vero Beach on Friday after he tried to hang himself, Flowers told reporters on Sunday.

Ginni & Clarence Thomas vs. Democracy: He Sided with Trump in Court While She Backed Coup Attempt

Judge says Trump ‘likely’ committed crimes in bid to block Biden victory

Donald Trump appears to have committed multiple felonies as he sought to return himself to power on 6 January, a judge said in a Monday ruling that ordered the Trump lawyer John Eastman to turn over hundreds of emails to the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack.

The extraordinary ruling marks a breakthrough and paves the way for the select committee to obtain some of Eastman’s most sensitive emails concerning his illegal scheme to overturn the 2020 election, which he had attempted to shield from the inquiry.

“Based on the evidence the court finds that it is more likely than not that President Trump and Dr Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the joint session of Congress on January 6 2021,” ruled Judge David Carter.

Trump and Eastman launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election in a strategy that was unprecedented in American history, Carter said, describing their scheme as a “coup in search of a legal theory” and directly spurred the Capitol attack.

The judge’s order is perhaps the first time ever that a federal court has found a president may have committed a crime while in office – and raises the stakes for the justice department, which has vowed to pursue January 6 criminal cases at any level.

Kyle Kondik: GOP Poised for LANDSLIDE As Biden Sinks

Worth a read:

‘Ready to fight’: how a Russian uranium ban would threaten Native American tribes

Sacred Native American sites such as the Grand Canyon and Bears Ears may seem a long way from the devastation unfolding in Ukraine. But as the US mulls a ban on Russian uranium, part of economic levers to stop Putin’s war, Indigenous communities living near US mines could pay the price. John Barrasso, a senator from Wyoming, recently introduced a bill that calls for a ban on all forms of uranium imported from Russia. Uranium fuels America’s nuclear power plants, and about 20% of that comes from Russia, while close to another 30% is imported from the Russian allies of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Such a ban would shift American uranium production into overdrive. In an editorial in the Casper Star Tribune, Barrasso pointed out that the US has “vast uranium resources”, including in Wyoming, but 90% of the uranium used in nuclear power plants is imported. “Rather than letting our uranium sit in the ground, we ought to use it,” he wrote. A longtime advocate of the uranium industry, Barrasso also wrote that continuing to buy Russian uranium was funding “Putin’s killing machine”.

Mining companies now stand at the ready, with the possibility to ramp up production at sites near the Grand Canyon, Bears Ears national monument in Utah and at multiple locations in Barrasso’s home state of Wyoming. Many of the operations pose environmental and spiritual threats to Indigenous communities who live near the mines and have fought their existence for decades. Amber Reimondo, the energy director of the not-for-profit Grand Canyon Trust, says the Senate’s proposal risks “perpetuating environmental injustices on our own soil”.

“If this ban is aimed at saving lives, the answer can’t just be to ramp up US uranium production,” Reimondo says. “The answer has to involve truly respecting and listening to communities on the frontlines of uranium production, especially Indigenous communities … Otherwise, this is not about protecting human life. It is about protecting profits.”

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Hedges: On Being Disappeared

Rand Report Prescribed US Provocations Against Russia and Predicted Russia Might Retaliate In Ukraine

Ukraine - Smoke And Mirrors Around Poisonous Peace Talks

Reorienting About How Well Russia Is Doing In Ukraine

Biden Slips: Calls Openly for Removal of Putin

Rationing Looms As Diesel Crisis Goes Global

New York Times’ Fear of Ordinary People Talking Back

Media Ignores Hunter's INSANE Oligarch Tax Fraud

$5.8 TRILLION 2023 Budget: BILLIONS For Defense, NO Money For Covid

Kim Iversen: Gavin Newsom’s New IDIOTIC Gas Plan Siphons From The POOR And Gives To The RICH

Ukraine To Launch War Crimes Probe, Russian POWs Tortured On Camera

A Little Night Music

John Primer & Bob Corritore - I Feel So Good

John Primer & Bob Corritore - Knockin' at Your Door

John Primer - Leaning Tree

John Primer & Bob Corritore - Poor Man Blues

John Primer & Bob Corritore - Keep A-Driving

John Primer - I Held My Baby Last Night

John Primer - I Be's Troubled

John Primer & The Real Deal Blues Band - Going Back To Mississippi

John Primer & The Real Deal - I'm A Man

John Primer - Moanin' At Midnight

John Primer & The Real Deal Blues Band - Live at Rosa's Lounge