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Current Thing Chaos: Biden Sanctions Collapse, as Ukraine Piles up Losses & Hemorrhages Cash
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Current Thing Chaos: Biden Sanctions Collapse as Ukraine Piles up Losses & Hemorrhages Cash7/12/2022
What was once the Current Thing has become a massive liability. Europe is staring down the potential for a continental “Dark Winter,” and as each month passes, fewer countries aligned with the Biden Administration seem willing to maintain the appetite for perpetual warfare over who gets to control Ukraine. This ruling class squabble has devastated the lives of hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens, but that didn’t change the trajectory of the conflict. It was only when the war effort... Read the rest of the story by clicking on the Title link, below... Current Thing Chaos: Biden Sanctions Collapse, as Ukraine Piles up Losses & Hemorrhages Cash Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute
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As the saying goes, if you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The West has the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a self-declared “defensive” military alliance – so any country that refuses its dictates must, by definition, be an offensive military threat. That is part of the reason why NATO issued a new “strategic concept” document last week at its summit in Madrid, declaring for the first time that China poses a “systemic challenge” to the alliance, alongside a... Read the rest of the story by clicking on the Title link, below... NATO: By Making China the Enemy, the Alliance Is Threatening World Peace Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute
I wanted to turn your attention to a revealing interview conducted with Dr Fauci this week. It shines a light on his faith-based approach to the mRNA “miracle,” and his overall lack of a data-based thought process regarding his own bout with the virus. In the interview, Fauci credited getting quad vaxxed with keeping him from having a “much more serious” bout with COVID-19. A visibly ill Fauci told the interviewer: I’m really fortunate that I’ve done very well, and I keep telling people …... Read the rest of the story by clicking on the Title link, below... After Month-Long COVID Bout, Fauci Claims Quad Vaxxed Status Prevented ‘Severe’ Disease Click on the headline to read the full story from Ron Paul Institute Nearly a year ago, former New York Times Journalist Alex Berenson was permanently banned from Twitter for writing the following lines about the Covid shot: “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it - at best - as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.” From the beginning of the Covid hysteria, we followed and cited Berenson many times on the Ron Paul Liberty Report. Berenson took government and mainstream media rhetoric about the pandemic the way journalists used to take it: with a heavy dose of skepticism. And not long after he was banned for saying so, even the CDC Director admitted what he wrote is true. But at the time, he was a danger to the government narrative on Covid, and the “private” social media company Twitter silenced him. They did not only silence one reporter who was a thorn in their side, however. They preemptively silenced anyone else who might might question the narrative. The message was clear to all the would-be Alex Berensons out there: do you want to follow him to the digital gulag? So not only was Berenson’s free speech under attack – free speech itself was under attack. Many, especially libertarians, might respond that Twitter as a private company has the right to do business with anyone they wish. That is true, but only to the extent that Twitter is actually acting as a private entity. The real question is to what degree has Twitter and the other social media companies been directly doing the bidding of government? After nearly a year-long legal battle with Twitter over the ban, Berenson settled with Twitter and was reinstated earlier this month. Writing about his reinstatement, he hinted at something very ominous: “The settlement does not end my investigation into the pressures that the government may have placed on Twitter to suspend my account. I will have more to say on that issue in the near future.” Elon Musk, who had been in a deal to purchase Twitter until a few days ago, responded to Berenson on Twitter: “Can you say more about this: ‘… pressures that the government may have placed on Twitter …’” Berenson replied, “I wish I could, but the settlement with Twitter prevents me from doing so. However, in the near future I hope and expect to have more to report.” Questions about the vaccine were silenced just as were questions about the origins of the virus. Was it possible that the outbreak originated in a Chinese lab that just happened to be funded by the US government? And if so, how far would powerful people in the government wish to suppress any discussion or investigation into this possibility? At a critical time – just as authoritarians were locking the country down and threatening anyone who refused the shot – all public discussion about the matters was shut down by “private” companies that just happened to have very close ties with the US government. This raises fundamental questions about the First Amendment that hopefully might be explored by Congress after the November elections. The American people deserve to know who is trying to shut them up…and why. How Much Did the US Government Pressure Twitter to Ban Alex Berenson? Click on the headline to read the full story from What explains America’s hyper-ideological response to the Ukraine crisis? Less than a year before Vladimir Putin launched his invasion, Washington had wrapped up two decades of lousy regime-change wars, waged in the name of planting “freedom” in that region’s inhospitable soil. There was, or seemed to be, broad agreement that liberal moralism in foreign policy stood discredited: It had destabilized whole swaths of the Middle East and North Africa and bogged down America and its allies in the region’s bloody and intricate enmities—and to what end? Yet now, a few months later, the United States and its NATO allies are once again on an escalatory path, handing billions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated weaponry to Kyiv, deploying covert operatives to assist the Ukrainians, and mounting massive (if so far useless) economic sanctions against Russia. This is a proxy war against Moscow in which Western or Ukrainian victory is an utter fantasy. And yet Washington, it seems, is prepared to fight the Kremlin down to the last Ukrainian. And all this has been done, once again, to win, as President Biden tweeted, “a great battle for freedom. A battle between democracy and autocracy. Between liberty and repression.” “In persisting in this way, as the last ideological empire, the US-led Western bloc will ensure its own demise.” This Manichaean framing has done the job so far. That is, the foreign-policy Blob has appeared largely successful in using the crisis to breathe new life into the liberal imperium and marshal support for its faltering institutions, not least the Western Alliance. Appearances can be misleading, however. When all is said and done, the war (and the reaction of Western governments) will likely be seen as the liberal ruling class’s collective swan song for the post-1945, ideological world order. As other powers abandon ideology in favor of reasserting national and civilizational claims, the United States and its various clients and satraps remain committed to ideological struggle, to bolstering liberalism—the one modern ideology that survived the previous century’s clash of ideologies. In persisting in this way, as the last ideological empire, the US-led Western bloc will ensure its own demise, and the swan song will give way to a self-composed elegy. Defending Ukraine has become the latest holy war for a generation of elites that largely came of age during the Cold War, one that internalized that era’s evangelical binaries and symbolic crusades and is forever seeking the next apocalyptic event to signal its virtue. A Russian victory in the war wouldn’t be merely Ukraine’s loss, according to the dominant account of the conflict in the West, but also the effective fall of the so-called liberal international order, whose rules Washington and its North Atlantic allies laid down in the wake of World War II. The various instruments of that order—from the United Nations to the Swift intra-bank transfer system, from NATO to Hollywood—went into action in response to the Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine rather than tolerate its absorption into the liberal imperium. Massive German remilitarization was suddenly celebrated as an unalloyed good. Poland’s right-wing government won a strange new respect in the councils of Europe for its rabidly pro-escalation stance. Kyiv asked (for weapons and funds), and it received. Ukraine-flag emojis became de rigueur for journalists and celebrities. And so on. Liberal interventionism seemed to have regained all the glory it lost to the Iraqi and Afghan debacles and the “Arab Spring.” Yet in the third decade of the 21st century, the world looks altogether different than it did in 1991 or even 2001. Ukraine is no Kuwait. Nuclear giant Russia is not Iraq. And a United States that has carried out two decades of costly wars and failed nation-building projects in the Middle East, all while China ascended, isn’t the self-assured hegemon it was when the Twin Towers came down. It is wishful thinking to believe that the shift to multipolarity—with the rise of China and multiple regional centers of power ending America’s global dominance as the sole hegemon—could be stopped militarily. Nor can the process be reversed by NATO acting as the Global Police Department of the Free World, protecting those select few nations that qualify as “democracies” by fickle Western standards from the barbaric despotism of an older world. “As one form of universalism—liberalism—eliminated its competition for world domination, it paradoxically lifted the mental fog of ideology.” Fact is, despite much bluster and rhetorical posturing reminiscent of the Bush era, Washington is far weaker today than it was then: It is over-extended, deeply polarized, low on morale, and facing an unprecedented spike in energy prices and a wider inflation crisis. Reality matters. But the foreign-policy establishment and its media organs show no sign of rethinking, let alone stepping down the escalation ladder. Liberalism, it seems, can’t live without aggressive universalism—the insistence that the whole world must operate according to “norms” perfected in the West and imposed on panta ta ethnē (all the nations), and that achieving global cultural homogeneity justifies all forms of interventionism, using nongovernmental organizations or drones as the need may be. But now, that universalist impulse is running up against the limits of a changing world. Astute critics of liberal order saw this coming. In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, just as Francis Fukuyama was declaring the permanent triumph of liberalism and the “end of history,” the Marxist scholar Immanuel Wallerstein wrote prophetically and counterintuitively of the decline of the liberal imperium. In an essay published in 1991, Wallerstein homed in on what he saw as the liberal West’s false consciousness in response to the fall of the Soviet Union. “The collapse of Leninism,” he warned, “is being interpreted as the triumph of Wilsonian liberalism, whereas, in fact, 1989 represents the demise not of Leninism alone, but of both ends of the great ideological antinomy of the 20th century, [that of] the Wilsonian versus the Leninist eschatologies.” For Wallerstein, the two competing ideologies of the 20th century, which had triumphed jointly against a third, Nazism, were caught in a relationship of dialectical dependence. Given the interdependence of the global political and economic system, removing Leninism from the picture meant that various other dominos from the old Cold War bi-polar world would also fall, with the “triumphant” West incapable of stopping the process. One needn’t share Wallerstein’s Marxist priors to see that he had plainly predicted the shape of events to come with profound clarity. A realist—that is, fundamentally tragic—worldview could have led one to the same conclusions: that the absolutism and totalizing worldviews of modern ideologies made conflict between them inevitable. The process created a convenient Manichaean framing of the world as a zero-sum struggle between the forces of evil and righteousness, which also provided a rationale for globalism and crusades of world domination. The demise of the Soviet Union eliminated one of the faces of the modern Janus that was the postwar ideological international order. Unipolarity made the ideological Manichaeism on which post-Enlightenment modernity functions much harder to sustain. As one form of universalism—liberalism—eliminated its competition for world domination, it paradoxically lifted the mental fog of ideology, permitting the return of particularity—rootedness, locality, community, and civilization. Hence, the conditions unleashed by unipolarity proved salutary for concrete instantiations of life in the world’s most prominent cultures and civilizations, allowing these culture-complexes space to reanimate and revive themselves in their particular spheres. This process has been at work for decades, recasting politics around the world and revivifying traditions, peoples, and different forms of life. Only in America and within its liberal imperial domain, the ruling class has continued to resist these shifts, using its vast resources to insist on old utopian ideals and demanding still more globalism and homogeneity. Just as Russia was co-opted by the Leninist ideology, so has America been reduced into a vessel for liberalism and devolved into a propositional state. America has ideologized itself into a universal category—as yet another “ism”: “Americanism”—that is but a euphemism for liberalism, disembodying the nation into the bargain. In so doing, the world’s last ideological empire has united the non-Western civilizations in resistance. A new global fault line has thereby emerged: that of ideology vs. civilization. Read the whole article here. America: The Last Ideological Empire Click on the headline to read the full story from Former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo gave a speech at the Hudson Institute last week that’s probably worth taking a look at just because of how much it reveals about the nature of the US empire and the corrupt institutions which influence its policies. Pompeo is serving as a “Distinguished Fellow” at the Hudson Institute while he waits for the revolving door of the DC swamp to rotate him back into a federal government position. The Hudson Institute is a neoconservative think tank which has a high degree of overlap with the infamous Project for the New American Century and its lineup of Iraq war architects, and spends a lot of its time manufacturing Beltway support for hawkish agendas against Iran. It was founded in 1961 with the help of a cold warrior named Herman Kahn, whose enthusiastic support for the idea that the US can win a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was reportedly an inspiration for the movie Dr Strangelove. A think tank is an institution where academics are paid by the worst people in the world to come up with explanations for why it would be good and smart to do something evil and stupid, which are then pitched at key points of influence in the media and the government. “Think tank” is a good and accurate label for these institutions, because they are dedicated to controlling what people think, and because they are artificial enclosures for slimy creatures. Mike Pompeo’s Revealing Hudson Institute Speech Click on the headline to read the full story from President Joe Biden declared Tuesday at Twitter: “Due to the pandemic, kids are behind in math and reading.” This is yet another example of politicians’ blame shifting we have seen throughout the coronavirus scare. Kids in America have fallen behind in their educations during the coronavirus scare, but not because of coronavirus. They have fallen behind because of coronavirus crackdown actions supported by Biden and many other politicians in the name of protecting students, teachers, and staff at schools from coronavirus that did not improve safety but did interfere with students’ ability to learn. Since early on in the coronavirus scare it was known that children tended to be in miniscule danger from serious sickness or death from coronavirus. It was also known that, at schools, teachers and other adults tended not to get coronavirus from students. Yet, most American politicians with control over education policy did not say that “for the children” schools would be kept open and continue operating normally, something that was done in other countries and a few places in America without problems. Instead, as politicians are apt to do, they used the “for the children” plea as an excuse to wreak havoc. They shut down schools, then replaced them to some extent with dysfunctional attempts at virtual education, and ultimately reopened the schools in an absurd and menacing manner. Many schools, when they finally reopened, had all kinds of mandates that made the schools insufferable. The mandates, while failing to protect people from coronavirus, did carry health dangers of their own. Mask mandates, obsessive disinfecting of surfaces at schools and even of children’s hands, enforcement of “social distancing,” the presence of ubiquitous plastic barriers separating people, coronavirus testing, and pressure or even mandates for students to take experimental coronavirus “vaccine” shots were among the nasty changes confronting students at their “new normal” schools. Students found themselves trudging through a real life version of a dystopian novel. No wonder students’ learning suffered through the coronavirus scare. Learning was not high on the priority list of many politicians rushing to exercise their new powers. And, due to government pressure and bad choices by people in charge, the situation was similarly awful at many private schools as at government schools. Fortunately, this dark cloud of politicians harming student’s educations in the name of countering coronavirus does have a silver lining, though only for a small subset of students. “Enough is enough,” decided some parents along the way of witnessing the school closures, the dysfunctional virtual learning efforts implemented to replace regular school, and the dystopian “new normal” schools that ultimately came into being. These parents took their children’s educations into their own hands, moving their children to homeschooling. The result is that many more children now than before the coronavirus scare are free from the politicians’ harmful meddling, whether undertaken in the name of protecting children from phantom coronavirus danger or accomplishing other objectives at variance with advancing the math and reading skills Biden mentioned at Twitter. It is a safe bet that most these new homeschooling parents will do a much better job than the schools they left behind at making sure their children’s educations serve their children’s needs and interests. Joe Biden and Other Politicians, not Coronavirus, Caused Children’s Educations to Suffer Click on the headline to read the full story from After more than a decade, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) updated its Strategic Concept to name China as a chief global security threat to our "values." In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian accused the alliance of promoting "conflict and confrontation." "It is filled with the Cold War mentality and ideological prejudices," Lijian said. He's right, and NATO's prejudices extend to the very people who NATO claims to represent: China is a threat to the US-led alliance—but so is everyone, everywhere, who does not share its ideology. And contrary to what NATO claims, its ideology is little more than a universalist commitment to subordinating nations to international bodies and reducing people to mere populations to be managed and controlled. The US originally spearheaded NATO against the global hegemony sought by the Soviet Union, which, much like NATO, promoted "conflict and confrontation" with every government that did not share its ideology. The historical irony is that the US emerged from the ashes of the Cold War as an ideological nation itself with the same zeal to remake the world. Indeed, reckless NATO expansionism led by Washington contributed to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War—which then provided NATO expanders an excuse to invite Finland and Sweden into its ranks. Though the alliance's advocates say these countries are joining of their own volition to seek security from Russia, this war was in no small part provoked by NATO becoming a tool of ideological imperialism, which in turn required creating "monsters abroad" to destroy. In reality what this means is that everyday Americans are subsidizing the empire's enlargement while European members continue their dependency on the US for their security like satrapies. This is not to say Russia or China are blameless, but rather to highlight a hitherto overlooked paradox: Even as NATO condemns Chinese communism and Russian authoritarianism, under US leadership, NATO has become exactly what it was established to fight: an apparatus stewarded by elites as fervently committed to forced global homogeneity as the most devoted Leninist—or Jacobin, for that matter. Not unlike our ideologues, the Jacobins sought to forge an international order around a new "polarity between the free and the 'enslaved' nations." To the Jacobins, every nation that had not experienced a Rousseauan revolution around the "the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen," as historian Simon Schama put it, was enslaved by tyranny and despotism. In practice, that meant military crusades no less imbued with religious fervor than those launched by the Latin Church. It also gave rise to the infamous Reign of Terror; French elites decided that treasonous domestic conspiracies were to blame for battlefield defeats, and within a month of the establishment of a special Revolutionary Tribunal to try and execute suspected counter-revolutionaries, the Committee of Public Safety was created and endowed with broad wartime powers. It became the engine of the murderous Terror that oversaw a series of massacres and public executions, killing tens of thousands. Our politics, too, echo with Jacobin accusations lobbed against the critics of US foreign policy and its vehicle, NATO. To critique these policies is to conspire against "democracy" and commit treason, as Mitt Romney, the Republican Senator from Utah, has suggested. Even more absurd is the adoption of social justice rhetoric to justify interventionism. "What does a Pride parade have to do with NATO?" asked the Brookings Institution. "More than you might think." A new paper published by the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy notes that the injection of "woke" activism into foreign policy "legitimizes any form of military and diplomatic action that is nominally undertaken in its service while delegitimizing criticism of such policies." It leads to "not merely political restructuring in targeted countries but total cultural submission." The result, in other words, is a less safe and stable world. The effects are already being felt at home in America. Read the whole article here. NATO Has Become the Very Thing It Was Created to Fight Click on the headline to read the full story from After more than a decade, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) updated its Strategic Concept to name China as a chief global security threat to our "values." In response, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian accused the alliance of promoting "conflict and confrontation." "It is filled with the Cold War mentality and ideological prejudices," Lijian said. He's right, and NATO's prejudices extend to the very people who NATO claims to represent: China is a threat to the US-led alliance—but so is everyone, everywhere, who does not share its ideology. And contrary to what NATO claims, its ideology is little more than a universalist commitment to subordinating nations to international bodies and reducing people to mere populations to be managed and controlled. The US originally spearheaded NATO against the global hegemony sought by the Soviet Union, which, much like NATO, promoted "conflict and confrontation" with every government that did not share its ideology. The historical irony is that the US emerged from the ashes of the Cold War as an ideological nation itself with the same zeal to remake the world. Indeed, reckless NATO expansionism led by Washington contributed to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War—which then provided NATO expanders an excuse to invite Finland and Sweden into its ranks. Though the alliance's advocates say these countries are joining of their own volition to seek security from Russia, this war was in no small part provoked by NATO becoming a tool of ideological imperialism, which in turn required creating "monsters abroad" to destroy. In reality what this means is that everyday Americans are subsidizing the empire's enlargement while European members continue their dependency on the US for their security like satrapies. This is not to say Russia or China are blameless, but rather to highlight a hitherto overlooked paradox: Even as NATO condemns Chinese communism and Russian authoritarianism, under US leadership, NATO has become exactly what it was established to fight: an apparatus stewarded by elites as fervently committed to forced global homogeneity as the most devoted Leninist—or Jacobin, for that matter. Not unlike our ideologues, the Jacobins sought to forge an international order around a new "polarity between the free and the 'enslaved' nations." To the Jacobins, every nation that had not experienced a Rousseauan revolution around the "the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen," as historian Simon Schama put it, was enslaved by tyranny and despotism. In practice, that meant military crusades no less imbued with religious fervor than those launched by the Latin Church. It also gave rise to the infamous Reign of Terror; French elites decided that treasonous domestic conspiracies were to blame for battlefield defeats, and within a month of the establishment of a special Revolutionary Tribunal to try and execute suspected counter-revolutionaries, the Committee of Public Safety was created and endowed with broad wartime powers. It became the engine of the murderous Terror that oversaw a series of massacres and public executions, killing tens of thousands. Our politics, too, echo with Jacobin accusations lobbed against the critics of US foreign policy and its vehicle, NATO. To critique these policies is to conspire against "democracy" and commit treason, as Mitt Romney, the Republican Senator from Utah, has suggested. Even more absurd is the adoption of social justice rhetoric to justify interventionism. "What does a Pride parade have to do with NATO?" asked the Brookings Institution. "More than you might think." A new paper published by the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy notes that the injection of "woke" activism into foreign policy "legitimizes any form of military and diplomatic action that is nominally undertaken in its service while delegitimizing criticism of such policies." It leads to "not merely political restructuring in targeted countries but total cultural submission." The result, in other words, is a less safe and stable world. The effects are already being felt at home in America. Read the whole article here. NATO Has Become the Very Thing It Was Created to Fight Click on the headline to read the full story from The annual Ukraine Reform Conference has, since 2017, brought together Western officials and their local 'civil society' foot soldiers to discuss ways that Ukraine can reduce its rampant corruption. But this year, before getting underway this week in Lugano, Switzerland, it underwent a name change to the Ukraine Recovery Conference. Perhaps drawing attention to the existence of the country’s endemic corruption isn’t convenient for those looking to avoid heavy criminal penalties set up to explicitly prevent investment that fuels corruption? Simply changing the marketing of the conference does nothing to alter the reality. If anything, it’s counterproductive for Ukraine itself and serves to enable and perpetuate serious systemic problems that prevent the country from progressing. “The authorities are delaying the fulfillment of many important anti-corruption promises,” according to Andrey Borovik, executive director of the Ukraine office of Transparency International, an organization funded by Western governments and multinationals. As for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, “corruption just doesn’t seem to worry Mr. Zelensky much – at least when those implicated are close to him,” claimed Kyiv Independent (another Western funded outfit) editor Olga Rudenko in a guest piece for the New York Times in February, right before the Russian military operation started. Not exactly the kind of guy you’d want overseeing massive investment projects, one would think. These days, tackling corruption is taking a rhetorical backseat to the Western push to frame Ukraine as just your typical European country. “For the last two years, we have been discussing large European values, mostly a theoretical debate,” Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa has said. “Then, suddenly, we realised that those fundamental European values actually exist. And that they are threatened. And that Europeans are defending them. With their lives. In Ukraine.” Despite acknowledging that Ukraine would have to enact “a number of important reforms,” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that “Ukraine has clearly shown commitment to live up to European values and standards. And embarked, before the war, on its way towards the EU.” In reality, the only thing that has actually changed is that Western officials saw an opening to exploit current public sympathy, if not ignorance, to gain acceptance for an idea that normally would be a much tougher sell to the average EU citizen. That is, the notion that Ukraine would be a net benefit to the bloc rather than an Achilles heel rife with problems that has no business being included in a zone that allows for free movement of people and goods among member states. EU leaders are leading their citizens straight into catastrophe in every imaginable sense through their knee-jerk handling of the conflict itself and now their push to turn the focus to reconstruction even as the bullets are still flying and the corruption rages. Western weapons supplied to Ukraine – and now apparently sold on dark-web marketplaces – are an example of the potentially deadly consequences of ineptitude. Meanwhile, the head of Interpol, Jurgen Stock, has warned EU nations in particular that “the wide availability of weapons during the current conflict will lead to the proliferation of illicit weapons in the post-conflict phase.” Neglecting to place Ukraine’s corruption problem uncompromisingly front and center in order to better peddle the premature public narrative of the need for investment under the guise of ‘reconstruction’ represents a threat to the EU – and one that Western officials are only too happy to facilitate, apparently. One has to wonder why that is. It’s hardly a secret that Western nations have historically leveraged foreign aid to gain economic and political footholds within other countries, either through state-backed programs, civil society funding, or corporate opportunities. But there’s also another catch. Current Western laws such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in the US, the UK Bribery Act, or the Loi Sapin II in France all create an obligation for any entity or individual investing in foreign countries to ensure a corruption-free transaction. If Western investment in Ukrainian reconstruction ends up in the wrong hands, then board members, employees, and managers could all end up facing criminal charges with penalties of prison. The prosecution of such cases tends to be highly selective, of course. How often do you hear of US entities being prosecuted for dealings in corruption-rife Nigeria, for example? You don’t. Because that is Washington’s stomping ground. The American law has often been used as a tool of selective prosecution against European companies for competitive reasons. This is why other countries have created their own similar rules, largely in the interests of having the legal tools available to jump in to prosecute their own in order to short-circuit American pursuits of foreign competitors. Western entities have an economic interest in portraying Ukraine as a safe place to invest. Otherwise, they’re easy pickings for the authorities of other foreign countries who might choose to use corrupt investment dealings in Ukraine as a means of taking a competitor off the playing field. The first interest of such Western enterprises has always been to sideline Russia as a trading partner for Ukraine and then treat the country like the latest iteration of the Wild West. They aim to get taxpayers back home to fund the venture risk, all the while harboring plans to subsequently compete among themselves for any treasure they find – with the added competitive bonus for Washington of having also weakened the EU by isolating it from Russia. But to get the green light, and to convince the average taxpayer to accept funding the risk, everyone has to make the venture sound benevolent – hence the Marshall Plan comparisons – and reduce any references to corruption to a minor detail. Reprinted with permission from RT. Ukraine’s Endemic Corruption Problems are Suddenly Forgotten as Hungry Western Investors Smell ‘Reconstruction’ Profits Click on the headline to read the full story from |
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