Puppet MastersS


Boat

The new 'challenge' to China's Belt and Road is a futile fantasy

US President Joe Biden, right, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi
© AP/Evelyn HocksteinUS President Joe Biden, right, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi attend Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment event on the day of the G20 summit in New Delhi, India, Sept. 9, 2023.
The West has tried to outshine Beijing's grand trade route multiple times, but can't muster the will to do it

On the sidelines of the G20 Summit at the weekend, the United States and India unveiled proposals for what has been termed the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) with the backing of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Jordan, as well as officials from the EU.

The project, billed as an alternative to China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), seeks to build a commercial route from India through to Europe via the Arabian Peninsula, Israel, and then the Mediterranean Sea. Unsurprisingly, the project's significance was inflated by the press as "historic" and a "blindside" challenge to Beijing that would doom China's own mega-infrastructure project.

But such conclusions are misleading, for many reasons. First, not every participant in this new initiative is squarely opposed to China and sees it, as the US does, as a zero-sum game. The Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan, are not anti-Beijing at all and are part of the BRI themselves. These countries, seeking to diversify their economies from dependency on oil revenue, are seeking new options to consolidate their wealth and thus courting large-scale foreign investments, including from China itself. They want to make themselves the "crossroads" of the world, they do not see such a project through the lens of containment or even geopolitical rivalry, but as creating more benefits for themselves. If Saudi Arabia can get Chinese and Indian cargo going through their country, that's a double win - it never had to be an "either-or" arrangement for Riyadh.

Propaganda

Ukraine's trans spokesperson issues death threats to Russian journalists

Sarah Ashton-Cirillo delivers her warning to “Russian propagandists”
© YouTube / @SarahAshtonLVSarah Ashton-Cirillo delivers her warning to “Russian propagandists”
English-language military official's warning may indicate an attempted assassination, Russia's human-rights chief believes

A threat to "hunt down" Russian "propagandists" which flagged an action "next week" and was made by a Ukrainian military spokesperson, should not be dismissed just because of its over-the-top presentation, a senior Russian official has argued.

On Wednesday, Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, who leads the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces' purported outreach to English-speaking audiences, made some ominous predictions regarding Russia.

Comment: See also:


Syringe

CDC recommends new Covid boosters to everyone over six months of age

Camille Kotton
While Europe has now largely confined Covid vaccination to older and vulnerable groups, the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has chosen a different path. Yesterday, it accepted the advice of an advisory panel and recommended the XBB.1.5 jabs to everyone six months and older. It insists that "the benefits of vaccination exceed the risks for everyone" and hope vaguely that this "universal recommendation" will "ease the rollout of the vaccine and improve access and equity".
"Let's keep America strong, healthy," said Dr. Camille Kotton, a panel member who voted in favour of the recommendation and who is an infectious disease specialist at Harvard Medical School. "Let's do away with COVID-19 as best we can by prevention of disease through vaccines. Let's make things clear."
The argument is not easy to parse. First, the vaccines are alleged to be universally beneficial, although no studies beyond a "CDC analysis" exist to support this broad claim. Second, the universal recommendation is necessary to ensure "equity" and "make things clear". In other words, more targeted recommendations would sow confusion and limit their uptake among those groups who would benefit from them. Finally, our Dr. Kotton still hopes that the vaccines can "do away with COVID-19". Either she knows better or she is lying, but once again, in the striving after an upside beyond benefits to the individual, we see an implicit acknowledgment that the vaccines aren't universally beneficial after all.

Green Light

NATO chief openly admits Russia invaded Ukraine because of NATO expansion

Stoltenberg
© UnknownNATO Secretary Gens Stoltenberg
During a speech at the EU Parliament's foreign affairs committee on Thursday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg clearly and repeatedly acknowledged that Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine because of fears of NATO expansionism.

His comments, initially flagged by journalist Thomas Fazi, read as follows:
The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn't sign that.

The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.

So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.

Arrow Up

In Vladivostok, the Russian Far East rises

In Vladivostok this week, the Russian Far East was inaugurated. Russia, China, India, and the Global South were there to contribute to this trade, investment, infrastructure, transportation, and institutional renaissance.
Putin in Vladivostok
© The Cradle
VLADIVOSTOK - Russian President Vladimir Putin opened and closed his quite detailed address to the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok with a resounding message: "The Far East is Russia's strategic priority for the entire 21st century."

And that's exactly the feeling one would have prior to the address, interacting with business executives mingling across the stunning forum grounds at the Far Eastern Federal University (opened only 11 years ago), with the backdrop of the more than four kilometer-long suspension bridge to Russky Island across the Eastern Bosphorus strait.

The development possibilities of what is in effect Russian Asia, and one of the key nodes of Asia-Pacific, are literally mind-boggling. Data from the Ministry for the Development of the Russian Far East and the Arctic - confirmed by several of the most eye-catching panels during the Forum - list a whopping 2,800 investment projects underway, 646 of which are already up and running, complete with the creation of several international Advanced Special Economic Zones (ASEZ) and the expansion of the Free Port of Vladivostok, home to several hundred small and midsize enterprises (SMEs).

All that goes way beyond Russia's "pivot to the East" which was announced by Putin in 2012, two years before the Maidan events in Kiev. For the rest of the planet, not to mention the collective west, it is impossible to understand the Russian Far East magic without being on the spot - starting with Vladivostok, the charming, unofficial capital of the Far East, with its gorgeous hills, striking architecture, verdant islands, sandy bays and of course the terminal of the legendary Trans-Siberian Railway.

What Global South visitors did experience - the collective west was virtually absent from the Forum - was a work in progress in sustainable development: a sovereign state setting the tone in terms of integrating large swathes of its territory to the new, emerging, polycentric geoeconomic era. Delegations from ASEAN (Laos, Myanmar, Philippines) and the Arab world, not to mention India and China, totally understood the picture.

Bad Guys

US-backed militants fight each other in Syria. Who is to blame?

machine gun, Syria
© Bekir Kasim/Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesOperations against the PKK and YPG carried out by Arab tribes in Deir ez-Zor continue in rural areas of Manbij, in Syria, on September 06, 2023.
Rival US-backed militants went to battle in northeastern Syria in a conflict originally sparked by ethnic tensions. However, as the situation matured, efforts were made to shift the blame onto Russia, Iran and the Syrian government, despite years of mismanagement and abuses by the American-aligned forces there. While the opposing US-backed militants duke it out for control and Arab tribes stand their ground, Washington is attempting to spin the crisis into a justification for its occupation of the territory.

At least 90 people were killed in clashes between the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and local Arab militias following the arrests of tribal leaders in the region last week. The conflict had been sparked by a perceived attempt by the US-backed SDF to assert Kurdish ethnic supremacy in the Deir ez-Zor province. The SDF, which is headed by Kurds, also includes a large number of Arabs in its ranks, including in the Arab-majority Deir ez-Zor Military Council militia, headed by commander Ahmed al-Khubayl (Abu Khawla). Al-Khubayl, as well as being a militia commander, is also the emir of the Bakir tribe and his arrest in late August is what initiated the current conflict.

For days, the fighting was limited to the Deir ez-Zor area, where clansmen from the Bakir tribe had taken up arms against the Kurdish-led SDF in retaliation for the arrest of Abu Khawla. After allegations emerged that US-trained SDF fighters had murdered Arab civilians in their homes during door-to-door raids, however, the uprising began to spread. In the village of Daman, where Kurdish special forces had entered and besieged the area, reports indicated that Kurdish fighters had tortured four family members to death in their home in retaliation for the killing of a number of their compatriots. Stories like these, which spread on social media, contributed to a general Arab uprising along the Euphrates river area against SDF rule.

It is important to keep in mind that the SDF essentially works as a proxy force of the US military, enabling it to occupy a third of Syrian territory with a limited number of American ground forces needed. According to the US government, only 900 American soldiers are deployed inside Syria, alongside an unspecified number of private military contractors. This third of Syria is regarded as the nation's breadbasket, home to the vast majority of the country's oil wealth and its most fertile agricultural lands. US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Dana Stroul openly admits that holding hostage this third of Syria's land from the government based in Damascus works to give the White House leverage over the Syrian state.

Comment: Round two: The West appears to be preparing another regime change 'uprising' in Syria


Light Sabers

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announces formal impeachment inquiry against President Biden

Kevin McCarthy
© Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP via Getty ImagesKevin McCarthy, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, attends the 21st G7 Speakers' Meeting in Tokyo on September 8, 2023.
McCarthy listed allegations of 'abuse of power, obstruction and corruption' by House panels

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday said House Republicans have "uncovered serious and credible allegations into President Biden's conduct" that will serve as the basis of an impeachment inquiry.

"Today, I am directing our House committees to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe," McCarthy announced in a statement at the Capitol Tuesday. "This logical next step will give our committees the full power to gather all the facts and answers for the American public."

The speaker said House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., will lead the inquiry in coordination with House Oversight Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Ways & Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo.

Comment: The New York Post reports:
[...]

Comer and Jordan will give a presentation Thursday to House Republicans outlining the case against President Biden, including his links to the dealings of Hunter and James Biden in countries such as China and Ukraine and the Biden administration's alleged stonewalling of requests for information, two sources told The Post.

One senior Republican aide told The Post that the existence of a formal inquiry will be particularly helpful if the House needs to go to court to enforce subpoenas for records held by the executive branch, as detailed in a 2019 report by the Congressional Research Service.

Federal agencies including the Justice Department have repeatedly balked at or ignored House deadlines and many recent congressional requests set mid- to late-September deadlines for voluntary compliance.

Two sources close to the developments said that it's unclear when or whether McCarthy would call a vote on the House floor to give retroactive assent to launching the inquiry.

McCarthy committed this month to such a floor vote, but some House Republicans urged focus to remain on pushing for spending cuts ahead of a government funding deadline on Sept. 30.

The speaker's prior pledge to hold a floor vote led to initial confusion about the meaning of his remarks, but GOP aides clarified that the inquiry launched Tuesday and that a floor vote authorizing the move could still come sometime this fall.

White House spokesman Ian Sams slammed McCarthy's statement as "[e]xtreme politics at its worst."

Sams claimed in a tweet that "House Republicans have been investigating the President for 9 months, and they've turned up no evidence of wrongdoing."

"He vowed to hold a vote to open impeachment, now he flip flopped because he doesn't have support," Sams wrote.

A House leadership aide fired back, "Is that a criticism of how [former House Speaker] Pelosi handled impeachment?"

The 80-year-old president, who is seeking a second term in next year's election, had no public events scheduled Tuesday after returning late Monday from a trip to Asia.

Biden would be the fourth president to be impeached — after Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998 and Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021 — but barring explosive new findings, he'd likely be acquitted by the Democrat-held Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required to convict a president and remove them from office.

An impeachment inquiry doesn't necessarily mean that Biden will be impeached, especially due to Republicans holding a mere 10-vote majority, but it's widely expected that articles of impeachment will be drafted and considered.

President John Tyler was the first president subjected to an impeachment inquiry in the 1840s during a power struggle with fellow Whigs over vetoed bills. Tyler was thrown out of his own party but wasn't impeached.

President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 when it became clear that even Republicans would vote to impeach him after the court-ordered emergence of smoking-gun tapes showing he was involved in covering up the Watergate break-in of Democratic Party offices.

House Republicans have turned up extensive evidence that Joe Biden was involved in Hunter and James Biden's foreign dealings, though Democrats emphasize they have yet to establish whether he personally profited.

Hunter wrote in records retrieved from his abandoned laptop that he had to give "half" of his income to his dad and Comer in May described nine Biden family members who allegedly received foreign income.

McCarthy last month suggested Biden "give us his bank statements" to settle questions about whether he profited — an idea the president laughed off in late August when asked about it by The Post.

Devon Archer, formerly a close Hunter Biden associate, testified to the Oversight Committee on July 31 that then-Vice President Joe Biden was on speaker phone for about 20 business meetings with his son's associates and that he attended dinners in 2014 and 2015 with Hunter's Kazakhstani, Russian and Ukrainian partners.

Hunter and two executives from Burisma — owner Mykola Zlochevsky and board advisor Vadym Pozharskyi — stepped away from a December 2015 meeting in Dubai to call the elder Biden, Archer said.

"Where's the money?" the president told The Post in June when questioned about an FBI informant's claim that Zlochevsky said in 2016 he was "coerced" into paying $10 million in bribes to Joe and Hunter Biden in exchange for the elder Biden's help pushing out Ukraine's prosecutor-general Vikor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma.

House Republicans have requested an array of records from the Biden administration. Comer on Monday demanded from the State Department records showing the evolution of US appraisals of Shokin ahead of his ouster in March 2016, which Biden has publicly claimed credit for forcing.

Although Biden defenders say he was advancing established US policy, internal alleged Obama-Biden administration emails published last month by Just the News indicate officials were surprised that Biden was pushing for Shokin's ouster as a condition of granting $1 billion in US loan guarantees.

"Yikes. I don't recall this coming up in our meeting with them on Tuesday," National Security Council aide Eric Ciamarella alleged wrote in a Jan. 21, 2016, email, adding that "we were super impressed with the group" from Shokin's office that visited DC.

Comer is also seeking access to Air Force Two flight manifests that would document Hunter and his business associates traveling with Joe Biden to countries including China and Mexico while courting business associates.

Hunter traveled aboard Air Force Two with his dad on an official trip to Beijing in 2013 as he set up a Chinese state-backed investment fund called BHR Partners. Hunter introduced Joe Biden to incoming CEO Jonathan Li and Joe Biden later wrote college recommendation letters for Li's children.

Archer told Congress that the then-VP had coffee with Li in Beijing — rather than a mere handshake as previously reported — and later greeted him on speaker phone during a subsequent visit to China by Hunter, who held a 10% state in BHR through at least part of his dad's presidency. The terms of his alleged divestment remain murky.

As part of a later Chinese business venture with government-linked CEFC China Energy, Hunter and James Biden's associates in May 2017 penciled in a 10% cut for Joe Biden months after he left office as vice president.

IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, who supervised the Hunter BIden tax fraud investigation for more than three years, provided Congress with a text message further implicating Joe Biden in the CEFC deal — in which Hunter wrote to a Chinese government-linked businessman on July 30, 2017, that he was "sitting here with my father" and warned of consequences if a deal was aborted.

Within 10 days of that threatening text message, $5.1 million flowed from CEFC to Biden-linked bank accounts — on top of $1 million that flowed from the same company to the Biden family earlier in 2017 weeks after Joe Biden left office as vice president. The CEFC partnership appears to have begun as early as 2015, congressional Republicans say.

Shapley and another IRS whistleblower, Joseph Ziegler, who worked on the Hunter Biden investigation for about five years, said that Biden-appointed US attorneys in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, refused to charge the president's son with tax crimes, resulting in a probation-only plea deal that collapsed in July under scrutiny by a federal judge.

Hunter now faces a potential gun-charge trial in Delaware and possible tax cases in DC and Los Angeles following the elevation of Delaware US Attorney David Weiss to the status of a special counsel in August.

House Republicans are deeply skeptical of Weiss, noting that Shapley and Ziegler say that his office repeatedly steered them away from analyzing Joe Biden's role in his son's enterprises, even when communications implicated him.

They also note it's unclear what if anything Weiss' office did to investigate the $10 million bribery allegation, which was referred to them in 2020.

Republicans also are seeking, among other documents, emails involving Joe Biden's use of the pseudonyms "Robert L. Peters" and "Robin Ware," of which nearly 5,400 reportedly exist. Some of the messages cc-ed Hunter.

After his father took office as president, the first son launched a new career as an artist.

He has earned at least $1.3 million by selling his novice works, including to a presidential commission appointee who visited his father in the West Wing.



Bizarro Earth

G20 announces plan to impose digital currencies and IDs worldwide

Modi G20
© Dan Kitwood/Getty imagesIndian Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcomes leaders during opening session of the G20 Leaders' Summit in New Delhi, on Sept. 9, 2023
The Group of 20 leaders have agreed to a plan to eventually impose digital currencies and digital IDs on their respective populations, despite fears that governments will use them to monitor their peoples' spending and crush dissent.

The G20, which is currently under India's presidency, adopted a final declaration on the subject over the weekend in New Delhi.

The meeting, which included the world's leading economies, announced last week that they had agreed to build the necessary infrastructure to implement digital currencies and IDs.

The group said that discussions were already underway to create international regulations for cryptocurrencies, but claimed that there was "no talk of banning cryptocurrency" at the summit.

Many critics are concerned that governments and central banks will eventually regulate cryptocurrencies and then immediately replace them with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), which lack similar privacy and security.

Eagle

Homeland Security awards $20 million to police, mental health networks, universities, churches and school districts to identify Americans as potential 'extremists'

homeland security
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced on September 6 that $20 million in federal grants (your tax dollars) will be handed out to 34 organizations to "prevent targeted violence and terrorism."

Since today is the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, you might think these 34 organizations will be focused on al-Qaeda, ISIS or the Iranian Republican Guard Corps. But you would be wrong. They are focused on Americans who dissent from the prevailing narratives coming out of the federal government and its collaborating partners in the corporate media and major social media platforms.

Whether it's Covid and vaccines, the war in Ukraine, immigration, the Second Amendment, LGBTQ ideology and child-gender confusion, the integrity of our elections, or the issue of protecting life in the womb, you are no longer allowed to hold dissenting opinions and voice them publicly in America. If you do, your own government will take note and consider you a potential "violent extremist" and terrorist.

Arrow Up

EU state sharply increases import share of Russian oil

oil pipelines
© Stephen Spillman / Reuters
The Czech Republic's imports of Russian oil surged sharply in the first half of this year despite the EU country's plans to wean itself off supply from Russia, state oil pipeline operator Mero revealed on Monday.

Russian oil made up 65% of the Czech Republic's total oil imports in the first six months of 2023, sharply up from 56% for the entire year in 2022 and 49% in 2021.

Even with the EU's sweeping sanctions on Russia, the Czech Republic recorded its highest intake of Russian oil since 2012, importing crude via the Druzhba (Friendship) pipeline, according to Mero's spokesperson, Barbora Putzova.