Puppet MastersS


Gold Bar

Swiss banks confirm stance on frozen Russian assets - no confiscation permitted


RT
Sun, 26 Feb 2023 21:10 UTC
swiss national bank
© REUTERS/Denis BalibouseSwiss National Bank (SNB) headquarters in Bern, Switzerland
The country will not confiscate blocked funds despite pressure from Western allies, an official said

Swiss banks have no legal right to use Russian money frozen in the country under sanctions for their own purposes, a spokesperson for the country's State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), Fabian Maienfisch, told the RIA Novosti news agency this week.

Any action that allows the management or use of frozen assets is prohibited except for routine administrative actions performed by financial institutions such as accounting for interest rates or banking charges on the account, he noted.

Comment: Take that, Ursula van der Crazy! But they still managed to make off with plenty of Russia's money. Confiscation can cut both ways:

Russian response to sanctions: Law drafted to enable seizure of foreign assets on Russian territory

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SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: NewsReal: Enter The Dragon: China Sides With Russia Against America


Sott.net
Sun, 26 Feb 2023 23:25 UTC
biden zelensky putin newsreal
© Sott.net
It's been a busy week for the Chinese foreign ministry, proposing a peace plan for Ukraine while fending off Western accusations that it instead plans to supply weapons to Russia, then publishing a series of reports on the negative impact of American hegemony on world order. Up until now, we've just heard such condemnation of US foreign policy in Putin's speeches, but are we now seeing China announce its alliance with Russia against America?

Meanwhile, in an apparent move to 'steal Vlad's thunder', Biden's handlers sent him to Kiev and Warsaw for 'attaboys', which they hoped would distract Westerners from Putin's 'state of the nation' speech. Judging by popular reaction, especially from conservatives and nationalists, their scheme failed - all the more so because Trump came to the aid of residents of East Palestine, Ohio, the scene of a strange (and potentially deadly) 'industrial accident', which Biden refused to do.


Running Time: 01:41:46

Download: MP3 — 69.9 MB

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Light Saber

DeSantis redux: Madrid president vows to turn city into 'Florida of Europe' as she wages war on the Left

James Crisp
The Telegraph
Sun, 26 Feb 2023 20:05 UTC
Ms Díaz Ayuso
© Clara Molden for The TelegraphMs Isabel Díaz Ayuso made Madrid the first Spanish region free from lockdown and has boosted its economy by cutting taxes and slashing red tape
The move is part of Isabel Díaz Ayuso's campaign to topple the socialist-communist coalition government and become Spain's first female PM

Fresh from freeing Madrid from lockdown, Isabel Díaz Ayuso is waging a war on woke and seeking to turn Madrid into the "Florida of Europe" in a campaign that could ultimately lead to her becoming Spain's first female prime minister.

With two crunch elections on the horizon, Madrid's president is ready for the political fight of her life: to topple the socialist-communist coalition government of Pedro Sánchez, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party.

"It is not a government; it is a machinery of power," she told The Telegraph during a visit to London. "They are trying to change Spain through the back door."

Comment: Is common sense slowly creeping back into Europe?

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Yoda

Joe Lauria vindicated: More evidence emerges that US wanted Russia to invade

Joe Lauria
Consortium News
Sun, 26 Feb 2023 19:08 UTC
biden visit poland 2023
© White HousePresident Biden departs Brussels en route to Poland early Friday morning.
In the past year, additional proof has emerged proving the West's provocation of Russia to give it its "Vietnam" in Ukraine.

Consortium News on Feb. 4, 2022 warned that the U.S. was setting a trap for Russia in Ukraine, as it had in Afghanistan in 1979 and Iraq in 1990, to provoke Russia to invade Ukraine to provide the pretext to launch an economic, information and proxy war designed to weaken Russia and bring down its government — in other words, to give Russia its "Vietnam." Twenty days later Russia invaded.

One month later, President Joe Biden confirmed that a trap had indeed been set, as reported by Consortium News on March 27, 2022, republished here today. The evidence that the U.S. wanted and needed Russia to invade as cause to launch its economic, information and proxy wars was clear:
  • The U.S. backed a coup in 2014, installing an anti-Russian government in Kiev and supporting a war against coup resisters in Donbass.
  • The 2015 Minsk Accords to end the Ukrainian civil war were never implemented.
  • On the day of the Feb. 24, 2022 invasion Biden told reporters that economic sanctions were never intended to deter Russia, but to show the Russian people who Russian President Vladimir Putin was. In other words the U.S. was not trying to stop the invasion but to overthrow Putin, as Biden confirmed a month later in Warsaw, in order to restore the dominance over Russia the U.S. enjoyed in the 1990s.
  • The United States and NATO rejected Russian treaty proposals to create a new security architecture in Europe, taking Russia's security concerns into account. Despite a Russian warning of a technical/military response if the draft treaties were rejected. The U.S. and NATO rejected them nonetheless, knowing and welcoming the consequences. Rather than withdrawing NATO forces from Eastern Europe as the treaty proposals called for, NATO sent more troops.
  • For 30 years, NATO continued expanding towards Russia, despite promises to the contrary, routinely holding exercises near its border, despite fully understanding Russia's objections, from Boris Yeltsin to Putin, and knowing it would provoke a hostile reaction. Sen. Joe Biden said as much in 1997.
  • The fake Russiagate scandal helped prepare the U.S. population for hostilities against Russia and launched sanctions based on a lie that have never been lifted.
  • Despite 100,000 Russian troops on the Russian side of the border, the OSCE reported an increase of shelling by Ukraine of Donbass at the end of February 2022 indicating an impending offensive against ethnic Russian civilians who had suffered eight years for resisting an unconstitutional change of government in 2014. It was tantamount to baiting those Russian forces to cross the border.

Comment: A year on, it's clear NATO and the West badly miscaculated. Putin has shown the rest of the world his repeated attempts for a negotiated settlement and who now see the perfidy of the U.S. in stark relief. The Russian economy is stronger today than anyone expected (including the Russians!) and Russia's citizens are solidly behind him in the war to protect their brothers in Ukraine. The war itself is going according to plan, as Russia slowly but methodically destroys the arms and aid being sent to Ukraine, and brings more and more territy under its control.

It is the West being bled dry of arms and treasure. How long before its citizens rise up and overthrow their leaders?

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Clipboard

The plan to wreck America

Mike Whitney
The Unz Review
Thu, 23 Feb 2023 00:00 UTC
Schwabship
© UnknownWEFT's Klaus Schwab and the Titanic
In America, we have an oligarch problem, and it's much bigger than the oligarch problem that Putin faced when he became president in 2000. The entire West is now in the grips of billionaire elites who have a stranglehold on the media, the political establishment and all of our important institutions. In recent years we have seen these oligarchs expand their influence from markets, finance and trade to politics, social issues and even public health. The impact this group has had on these other areas of interest, has been nothing short of breathtaking.

Establishment elites and their media not only stood foursquare behind Russiagate, the Trump impeachment, the BLM riots and the January 6 fiasco, they also had a hand in the Covid hysteria and the host of repressive measures that were imposed in the name of public health. What we'd like to know is to what extent this group is actively involved in the shaping of other events that are aimed at transforming the American Republic into a more authoritarian system?

In other words, are the mandated injections, the forced lockdowns, the aggressive government-implemented censorship, the dubious presidential elections, the burning of food processing plants, the derailing of trains, the attacks on the power grid, the BLM-Antifa riots, the drag queen shows for schoolchildren, the maniacal focus on gender issues, and glitzy public show-trials merely random incidents occurring spontaneously during a period of great social change or are they, in fact, evidence of a stealthily orchestrated operation conducted by agents of the state acting on behalf of their elite benefactors?
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Arrow Up

Key Fed inflation measure rose 0.6% in January, more than expected

Jeff Cox
CNBC
Fri, 24 Feb 2023 08:32 UTC
Powell
© cnn.comFederal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell
A measure the Federal Reserve watches closely to gauge inflation rose more than expected in January, indicating the central bank has more work to do to bring down prices.

The personal consumption expenditures price index excluding food and energy increased 0.6% for the month, and was up 4.7% from a year ago, the Commerce Department reported Friday. Wall Street had been expecting respective readings of 0.5% and 4.4%. The core PCE gains were 0.4% and 4.6% in December.

Including the volatile food and energy components, headline inflation increased 0.6% and 5.4% respectively, compared to 0.2% and 5.3% in December.

Markets fell following the report, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average off around 500 points in morning trading.

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USA

The ontological incoherence of American imperial exceptionalism

William Schryver
imetatronink
Thu, 23 Feb 2023 01:00 UTC
Nuland
© UnknownVictoria Nuland, High Priestess of the Empire at All Costs Cult
Jingoism by any other name still smells the same... Jingoism originated during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, when many British citizens were hostile toward Russia and felt Britain should intervene in the conflict. Supporters of the cause expressed their sentiments in a music-hall ditty with this refrain:

We don't want to fight, yet by jingo if we do, we've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money, too!

Someone holding the attitude implied in the song became known as a jingo or jingoist, and the attitude itself was dubbed jingoism.

Lost Cause

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." Nor does it require an aspiring think-tank geopolitical "expert" to inform one at this juncture that the gambit to use Ukraine as a kamikaze bomber to mortally wound Russia has failed abysmally in every fundamental geostrategic respect.

Indeed, it has backfired in multiple largely unforeseen and now irreversible ways.

More on that below.

Comment: Some seek truth; others validate themselves. Some good points made here in contrast.

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Pistol

Best of the Web: Clinton body count: NYC billionaire financier Thomas H. Lee, friend of the Clintons and Epstein, found dead of 'self-inflicted gunshot wound'

Cristina Laila
The Gateway Pundit
Thu, 23 Feb 2023 20:00 UTC
thomas h lee
Billionaire investor Thomas H. Lee, 78, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his swanky NYC office on Thursday morning, according to the New York Post.

"The family is extremely saddened by Tom's death. While the world knew him as one of the pioneers in the private equity business and a successful businessman, we knew him as a devoted husband, father, grandfather, sibling, friend and philanthropist who always put others' needs before his own," Lee family friend and spokesperson Michael Sitrick said in a statement.

"Our hearts are broken. We ask that our privacy be respected and that we be allowed to grieve."

Comment: More from Ryan Dawson:
James R. Burritt who worked for Thomas H Lee also assisted Jeffery Epstein's Liquid Funding which took commercial mortgages and investment-grade residential mortgages bundled into complex securities.

A lender would give a borrower cash in exchange for securities that the borrower will buy back at an agreed upon date for a fixed price, usually at the 1st of the next month. It was a way to shift debts off the ledger temporarily to get a high rating but then buy them back again.
...

All while the body is barely cold on this one:

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Mr. Potato

Oopsie! WH comms in hot water after sharing tweet from account named 'Biden Showered With His Daughter'

Nicole Silvero
Daily Caller
Thu, 23 Feb 2023 19:32 UTC
whitehouse
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates found himself in hot water Wednesday after sharing a video from an account mocking President Joe Biden.

Bates shared a video of White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre that had been posted by Greg Price, the senior digital strategist at XStrategies LLC and a former Daily Caller social media coordinator. Before Bates shared the clip, Price had temporarily changed his account name to "Joe Biden Showered With His Daughter," causing the moniker to show up under Bates' post.

Bates also retweeted Price's original tweet containing the video, apparently without noticing Price's account name.

Comment: See also: Project Veritas caught up in probe of Biden daughter's stolen diary: report

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Eye 1

How the Powerful Captured the Public in a Pandemic

Dr. Joseph Mercola
articles.mercola.com
Sat, 25 Feb 2023 07:53 UTC
Kim Iversen and Robert F. Kennedy Jr
  • Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks the truth about the authoritarian pandemic response that continues to threaten democracy and liberty as we know it
  • In an interview with journalist Kim Iversen, Kennedy explains how the military industrial complex uses mind control techniques and fear to exert control over the population
  • Fear is the enemy, as it allows totalitarian systems to take control of people, destroying democracy in the process
  • While democracy is resilient, we now have the technology available to control human behavior at a large scale
  • Democracy is dependent on the free flow of information, while censorship leads to totalitarianism
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks the truth about the authoritarian pandemic response that continues to threaten democracy and liberty as we know it. It's cost him friendships and 40 years of political contacts, not to mention the loss of income and business relationships.

But the threats to his reputation and credibility, as the media have attacked him and his message, don't feel like a sacrifice, Kennedy says, as he feels called upon to advocate for this issue.

In an interview with journalist Kim Iversen, Kennedy explains, "I look at it as a gift. I was raised in a milieu, in a family, where we assume that our lives would be consumed in some controversy, and that it would be a privilege if we were able to take some meaningful role in that."1

Comment: See also:

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