Tag: Economic Warfare

Inside the Trilateral Commission: Power elites grapple with China’s rise

Ms. CatLeave a comment

Inside the Trilateral Commission: Power elites grapple with China’s rise (original)

Each new candidate for Commission membership is carefully scrutinized before being allowed entry. As a rule, members who take up positions in their national governments — which is uncannily common — give up their Trilateral Commission membership while in public service. Those include U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.

This revolving door between the commission and senior government ranks has always been fodder for conspiracy theorists. Its first director in 1973, Zbigniew Brzezinski, later became U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser. The very existence of the commission, meanwhile, seems predicated on the question of whether governing should be left to the people. It is a question the commission itself has tackled head-on since 1975: Is democracy functioning? Or does someone need to guide it?

That year, three scholars — Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington and Joji Watanuki — wrote a report for The Trilateral Commission titled “The Crisis of Democracy.” In it, Huntington wrote that some of the problems of governance in the U.S. stem from an “excess of democracy.”

Related:

The Crisis of Democracy – Trilateral Commission – 1975

Advertisement

Venezuela’s Oil Output Stutters as ‘Irrational’ US Sanctions ‘Imbalance’ Global Market

Ms. Cat1 Comment

Venezuela’s Oil Output Stutters as ‘Irrational’ US Sanctions ‘Imbalance’ Global Market

However, in a recent address to the press, the US president clarified that resuming oil exports from Venezuela was only one of several options. “There’s a lot of alternatives. We haven’t made up our mind yet,” he told reporters after calling the OPEC+ decision a “disappointment.” Washington has demanded that the Maduro government re-engages in talks with the opposition as a precondition for any changes to its sanctions policy.

Related:

US Plans To Ease Venezuela Sanctions To Let Chevron Pump Oil There Again—Reports

NPR is Not Your Friend

Ms. Cat

NPR is a problem. Good and proper leftists who read Current Affairs may already realize this. “Of course. NPR (Neoliberal Propaganda Radio) is a bastion of establishment groupthink and orthodoxy that gives cover to imperialism and corporate capitalism.” By contrast, readers on the Right who find themselves consuming Current Affairs may have an equally disdainful but entirely different critique. “Of course. NPR is an elitist liberal propaganda cult that serves as a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, is openly hostile to any conservative voices, and ought to be defunded!”

NPR is Not Your Friend

U.S. ups the ante: are we indeed headed into WWIII and what can save us?

Ms. Cat1 Comment

Gilbert Doctorow, 9/9/22

The UK and Commonwealth may be mourning the passing of Queen Elizabeth II yesterday. I am in mourning as well, but for a very different reason: the gathering of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in the Ramstein air base in Germany yesterday reshuffled the deck on Western military and financial assistance to Ukraine, raising contributions to the ongoing holy crusade against Russia from still more nations and adding new, still more advanced precision strike weapons to the mix of deliveries to Kiev. It was an open summons to the Kremlin to escalate in turn, as were the test firing the same day of a new intercontinental rocket, the Minuteman III, from Vandenberg air base in California and the unannounced visit to Kiev yesterday of not only Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was featured in Western media accounts, but also other top officials of the Biden administration. The most notorious member of this delegation was surely Blinken’s deputy, Victoria Nuland, who had stage managed the February 2014 coup that put in power in Kiev the Russia-hating regime that Zelensky now heads.

Gilbert Doctorow: U.S. ups the ante: are we indeed headed into WWIII and what can save us?

Related:

A Former US Marine Corps Officer’s Analysis of the Ukraine War (archived, in case the original is removed)

H/T: Natylie’s Place: Understanding Russia

[2014] Stratfor CEO George Friedman on the root causes of the Ukrainian crisis

Ms. Cat

Stratfor [shadow CIA] CEO George Friedman on the root causes of the Ukrainian crisis

…

– What is the goal of US policy in the Ukrainian direction?

– The Americans have had a very consistent foreign policy for the past 100 years. Its main goal is to prevent any power from concentrating too much power in its hands in Europe. At first, the United States sought to prevent Germany from dominating Europe, then they prevented the strengthening of the influence of the USSR.

The essence of this policy is as follows: to maintain the balance of power in Europe for as long as possible, helping the weaker side, and if the balance is about to be significantly upset, to intervene at the very last moment. So the United States intervened in the First World War after the abdication of Nicholas II in 1917, preventing Germany from strengthening. And in World War II, the United States opened a second front only very late (in June 1944), after it became clear that the Russians were gaining the upper hand over the Germans.

At the same time, the United States considered the most dangerous potential alliance between Russia and Germany. It would be a union of German technology and capital with Russian natural and human resources.

…

The United States was interested in forming a pro-Western government in Ukraine. They saw that Russia was on the rise and sought to prevent it from consolidating its position in the post-Soviet space. The success of pro-Western forces in Ukraine would make it possible to contain Russia.

Russia calls the events of the beginning of the year a US-organized coup d’état. And it really was the most overt coup d’état in history.

…

– And what, from your point of view, is the meaning of American sanctions? Russian authorities say the US wants to bring about regime change.

“The purpose of the sanctions is to hurt Russia with minimal damage to the US and a little more damage to the EU so that it capitulates to American demands.

“The interests of the Russian Federation and the United States in relation to Ukraine are incompatible with each other”

UK’s New Prime Minister Makes No Apologies for Favoring the Wealthy

Ms. Cat

UK’s New Prime Minister Makes No Apologies for Favoring the Wealthy

Truss also went out of her way to channel Britain’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who remains as iconic among the Tory Party base as Ronald Reagan is for Republicans in the U.S. Truss has studied Thatcher’s body language, has adopted her dress style — as Twitter users were quick to point out — and has reached for many of the same rhetorical tools. Yet, style notwithstanding, she has nowhere near the ideological consistency or heft of a Thatcher.

…

It will take all of Truss’s shape-shifting talents, and then some, to turn around the election ship for the Conservatives over the coming two years, which is the time span that Truss has before the next general election must be called. In the meantime, as the U.K. grapples with a deepening economic crisis, all of the new prime minister’s public statements suggest that the country is going to be dragged ever-further rightward into a deregulated, anti-union, Brexit-hued future.

God Save The UK!