”Why is China stalling so badly economically? Why is Japan in trouble? Why is Russia in trouble? And India? Because they’re xenophobic. They don’t want immigrants,” he said.
POTUS
Washington is aiming to prolong the Ukraine conflict instead of supporting a peaceful resolution, the former Democratic congresswoman has said
https://www.rt.com/news/595405-gabbard-biden-destroy-russia
April 4, 2024
Former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) © Getty Images / Joe Raedle
The administration of US President Joe Biden has actively thwarted peace efforts in the Ukraine conflict and is trying to prolong the fighting in a bid to damage Russia, former Hawaii Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard has said.
Speaking to Lex Fridman in a podcast published on Wednesday, the former congresswoman insisted that in “an ideal world,” the US president would sit down with the leaders of Ukraine and Russia to find a peaceful solution to the hostilities.
She doubted, however, that Biden is the “right person” for the job, suggesting that “all the statements and comments that the [White House] has made from the beginning of this war essentially point to their objective being to basically destroy Russia.”
Gabbard stated that peace in Ukraine should be mediated by the most “effective, neutral broker that there is.” If the current US administration wants to fulfill that role, it should start actively encouraging Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to sit down and begin negotiations, she added.
In February, Gabbard publicly denounced her former party as enemies of democracy driven by an “insatiable hunger for power,” and officially endorsed Republican candidate Donald Trump for reelection this year.
NATO seeking to insulate Kiev from Trump pressure – media
During his campaign, the former US president has claimed that the Ukraine conflict would never have broken out on his watch, insisting that if voted back in, he would end the fighting “in 24 hours.”
Kiev, meanwhile, has continued to reject any peace talks with Moscow, after Zelensky legally banned negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government. Instead, the Ukrainian leadership has been rallying Western support for Zelensky’s ten-point “peace formula,” which demands the full withdrawal of Russian forces to Ukraine’s 1991 borders, including Crimea, as well as forcing Moscow to pay reparations and face an international tribunal.
Russia has stressed that it remains open to talks with Ukraine, but has demanded that Kiev accept the “reality on the ground.” President Vladimir Putin has insisted that Moscow is ready for “a serious conversation” and wishes to resolve the conflict through peaceful means. He has noted, however, that any talks must include security guarantees for Russia and cannot be used as a pause for Ukraine’s rearmament.
The emperor has no clothes…
A senior Russian security official has questioned the health of the leadership in Washington
https://www.rt.com/russia/592405-us-nuclear-command-snapped
Feb 14, 2024
First lady Jill Biden and President Joe Biden walk past Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin during a casualty return for US troops killed in Jordan, at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, February 2, 2024. © AP / Alex Brandon
A high-ranking official in Russia’s Security Council has voiced alarm over the risk of a nuclear “catastrophe” arising from the Pentagon chief’s health problems and the declining faculties of US President Joe Biden, warning of a possible “management mistake” by America’s leadership.
Speaking to the Izvestiya newspaper for an interview published on Wednesday, Russian Security Council Deputy Secretary Mikhail Popov said Washington’s political instability could trigger an accidental escalation.
”In the overall difficult and nervous internal political situation in the US that has emerged recently, the price of a management mistake, committed by the national leaders, either deliberately or involuntarily, has increased significantly,” he said. “And there won’t be much distance to a global catastrophe.”
READ MORE: EU needs own nukes – MEP
Popov stressed that he was not referring to “a banana republic,” but rather “a state that has nuclear weapons and constantly claims to be the world hegemon.” He added that US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s cancer diagnosis and Biden’s old age “have raised questions about the global security system” and the US chain of command, asking “How is the decision to use nuclear weapons generally made in the United States?”
“The secretary of defense is not there, and no one knows where he is or who is replacing him. The press writes that some of his responsibilities were assigned to Deputy Minister Kathleen Hicks. But she was on vacation in Puerto Rico at the time,” he said.
The official went on to observe an episode during the Cold War when a US Air Force major was dismissed for questioning how he could know whether a nuclear launch order “came from a sane president,” as the commander in chief is responsible for employing America’s nuclear arsenal.
Austin’s prostate cancer diagnosis came as a surprise not only to the US public but to Biden himself, with the Pentagon chief acknowledging that his team did not inform the White House of the news. He has since been re-hospitalized with a bladder issue, for which he was reportedly treated with undisclosed “non-surgical procedures.”
As the oldest president in US history at 81, Biden’s fitness is among the most pressing issues for American voters as they look ahead to the 2024 election. In a recent NBC News poll, 76% of respondents voiced major or moderate concerns over the president’s “mental and physical health,” while even special counsel Robert Hur – who was tapped to probe alleged mishandling of classified documents by Biden – concluded that the president has “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
Who the heck is running the US? Obviously, it’s not this man.
The Russian president was reflecting on the contested 2020 US presidential vote while discussing domestic referendums
https://www.rt.com/news/590761-us-election-russia/
Russian President Vladimir Putin © Sputnik / Sergei Savostyanov
Public votes held in Russia’s new regions were honest and transparent because people showed up to cast their ballots in person, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday. He went on to contrast the process with voting by mail in the US.
Speaking at a meeting with municipal educators in Moscow, the Russian president brought up the 2020 American presidential election as an example of what democracy should not look like.
“It’s probably possible to falsify anything. Just like the previous elections in the US were falsified through voting by mail. Well, it’s clear what voting by mail is. They bought ballots for $10, wrote them in, and without any supervision from observers, tossed them into mailboxes. And there you go,” Putin said.
His observation came in response to a question about the voting in Kherson and Zaporozhye regions and the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, four formerly Ukrainian territories that joined Russia in 2022. No one forced people there to show up at the polls, or barred them from doing so – they simply voted with their feet, Putin said.
“What is this, if not democracy? Democracy is when people express their will,” the Russian president said.
Biden accepts he will likely face Trump
Multiple US states changed their election rules in 2020 to allow voting via mail-in ballots, citing the Covid-19 pandemic. The final official results showed Democrat Joe Biden winning 81 million votes, the most ever in US history, over the incumbent, Republican Donald Trump.
Trump has challenged the election as “rigged,” pointing to various irregularities in half a dozen states as well as the mail-in ballots that were impossible to audit. The Democrats and most US media have denounced anyone questioning the 2020 vote as an “election denier” and insisted that everything was perfectly legitimate.
According to a February 2021 account in Time magazine, Biden became president because of a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” who were “fortifying” the election by “working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
On one side of the table, a Global South leader at the top of his game. On the other side, a mummy selling the illusion he’s the “leader of the free world.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/escobar-xi-outmaneuvers-biden-san-francisco
Nov 17, 2023
On one side of the table, a Global South leader at the top of his game. On the other side, a mummy selling the illusion he’s the “leader of the free world.”
That was bound for a cliffhanger – before, during or after the crucial bilateral involving the world’s top two powers. Already during the introductory remarks, US Secretary of State Tony Blinken, sitting on the right side of the mummy, was as terrified as James Stewart afraid of heights in Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” – sensing doom would dawn at any second.
Then it did – at the final presser. Joe Biden, the actor playing The Mummy, following a proverbial smirk, said Chinese President Xi Jinping is “a dictator”. Because he is the leader of a communist country.
All those previous elaborate plans unravelled, in a flash. A tentatively rosy scenario turned into a film noir. The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s response was as sharp as a Dashiell Hammett one-liner – and contextualized: this was not only “extremely wrong” but “an irresponsible political manipulation”.
All of the above of course assumed The Mummy knew where he was and what he was talking about, “off the cuff”, and not dictated by his ubiquitous earpiece.
The White House gives away the plot
The Xi-Biden drama, lasting a little over two hours, was not exactly a remake of “Vertigo”. Washington and Beijing seemed quite cozy jointly promising the proverbial promotion and strengthening of “dialogue and cooperation in various fields”; an intergovernmental dialogue on AI; drug control cooperation; back to high-level military-to-military talking; a “maritime security consultation mechanism”; significantly increasing flights by early 2024; and “expanding exchanges” in education, international students, culture, sports, and business circles.
The Hegemon was far from having a priceless Maltese Falcon (“the stuff dreams are made of”) to offer Beijing. China is already solidified as the world’s top trading economy by PPP. China is advancing at breakneck speed on the tech race even under nasty US sanctions. China’s soft power across the Global South/Global Majority increases by the day. China is co-organizing with Russia the concerted drive towards multipolarity.
The White House readout , as bland as it might seem, actually gives away the key part of the plot.
Biden – actually his earpiece – underscored “support for a free and open Indo-Pacific”; the defense of “our Indo-Pacific allies”; the “commitment to freedom of navigation and overflight”; “adherence to international law”; “maintaining peace and stability in the South China Sea and East China Sea”; “support to “Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression”; and “support for Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism”.
Beijing understands in detail the context and the geopolitical overtones of each of these pledges.
What the readout does not say is that Biden’s handlers also tried to convince the Chinese to stop buying oil from their strategic partner Iran.
That’s not gonna happen. China imported an average of 1.05 million barrels of oil a day from Iran over the first 10 months of 2023 – and rising.
US Think Tankland, always excelling in misinformation and disinformation, believed in their own childish projection of Xi playing tough guy against the US in Asia, knowing that Washington can’t afford a third love affair, sorry, war front on top of Ukraine and Israel/Palestine.
The fact is Xi knows all there is to know about imperial, rotating Hybrid War fronts, plus others that can be powered on at the flick of a switch. The Hegemon continues to provoke disturbance not only in Taiwan but in the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, India, and continues to flirt with possible color revolutions in Central Asia.
There has been no direct US-China confrontation yet thanks to millenary Chinese diplomatic expertise and long-term vision. Beijing knows in detail how Washington is simultaneously in Full Hybrid War mode against BRI (the Belt and Road Initiative) and BRICS – soon to become BRICS 11.
Only two options for China and the US
A Sino-American reporter, after the introductory remarks, asked Xi, in Mandarin, if he trusted Biden. The Chinese President perfectly understood the question, looked at her, and did not answer.
That’s a key plot twist. After all, Xi knew from the beginning he was talking to the handlers controlling an earpiece. Moreover, he was fully aware of Biden, actually, his handlers, qualifying Beijing as a threat to the “rules based international order,” not to mention relentless accusations of “Xinjiang genocide” plus the containment tsunami.
Not by accident, last March, in a speech to Communist Party notables, Xi explicitly stated that the US is engaged in “comprehensive containment, encirclement and suppression against us.”
Shanghai-based scholar Chen Dongxiao suggests that China and US should engage in “ambitious pragmatism”. That happened to be exactly the tone of Xi’s key takeaway in San Francisco:
“There are two options for China and the US in the era of global transformations unseen in a century: One is to enhance solidarity and cooperation and join hands to meet global challenges and promote global security and prosperity; and the other is to cling to the zero-sum mentality, provoke rivalry and confrontation, and drive the world towards turmoil and division. The two choices point to two different directions that will decide the future of humanity and Planet Earth.”
That is as serious as it gets. Xi added context. China is not engaged in colonial plunder; is not interested in ideological confrontation; it does not export ideology; and it has no plans to surpass or replace the US. So the US should not attempt to suppress or contain China.
Biden’s handlers may have told Xi that Washington still follows the One China policy – even as it continues to weaponize Taiwan under the twisted logic that Beijing might “invade”. Xi, once again, provided the concise clincher: “China will eventually, inevitably be reunified” with Taiwan.
$40,000 for dinner with Xi
Amid all the barely concealed tension, relief in San Francisco came in the form of business. Everyone and his corporate neighbor – Microsoft, Citigroup, ExxonMobil, Apple – was dying to meet with leaders from several APEC nations. And especially from China.
APEC after all accounts for nearly 40% of the global population and nearly 50% of global trade. This is all about Asia-Pacific – not “Indo-Pacific”, an empty “rules-based international order” gambit that no one knows anything about, much less uses anywhere across Asia. Asia-Pacific will account for at least two-thirds of global growth in 2023 – and counting.
Hence the sterling success of a business dinner at the Hyatt Regency, with tickets costing between $2,000 and $40,000, hosted by the National Committee on United States-China Relations (NCUSCR) and the US-China Business Council (USCBC). Xi, inevitably, was the star of the show.
Corporate honchos well knew in advance that the US opted out of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP); and that the new trade gambit, the so-called Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) is basically D.O.A. IPEF may deal with supply chain issues but it does not hit the heart of the matter: lower tariffs and wide market access.
So Xi was there to “sell” to investors not only China but a great deal of Asia-Pacific as well.
One day after San Francisco, the heart of the action moved to Shanghai and a high-level Russia-China conference; that’s the kind of meeting where the strategic partnership formulates paths ahead in the Long March to Multipolarity.
In San Francisco, Xi made a point to stress that China respects the “historical, cultural and geographical position” of the US while hoping that the US would respect the “path of socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
And here’s where the film noir plot approaches the final shootout. What Xi hopes will never happen with Straussian neocon psychos running US foreign policy. And that was starkly confirmed by The Mummy, a.k.a. Joe “Dictator” Biden.
So much for realpolitik practitioner Joseph “soft power” Nye, one of the few realists that believe China and the US, like James Stewart and Kim Novak in “Vertigo”, need each other, and should not be separated.
Well, unfortunately, in “Vertigo” the heroine plunges into the void and dies.
https://x.com/caitoz/status/1703026491104309254?s=20
The Twitter account of America’s 44th president just casually shared some links to organizations providing relief to the victims of the terrible flooding in Libya, which as of this writing has already killed thousands of people.
And that would of course be a fine and normal thing for America’s 44th president to do — had America’s 44th president not personally played a massive role in paving the way to the devastation we’re seeing in Libya today.
“If you’re looking to help people impacted by the floods in Libya, check out these organizations providing relief,” Obama tweeted.
Uhh, excuse me? Sir? You know you’re literally Barack Obama, right?
In 2010 the oil-rich Libya ranked higher on the UN Human Development Index than any other nation in Africa, with much better national infrastructure to protect itself from floods and other natural disasters. Today Libya is a chaotic humanitarian disaster where UN-backed investigators now say literal crimes against humanity have been taking place, including women being forced into sexual slavery.
What changed? If you’re reading this, you probably already know what changed.
In 2011, US, French and British forces helped rebels with extensive links to Al Qaeda kill Libya’s longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi, which immediately plunged the nation into violence, chaos, extremism and instability which persists to this day. It was later revealed that NATO powers knew they were backing murderous Al Qaeda-linked jihadists at the time.
Falsely branded a “humanitarian intervention” designed to prevent alleged plans for genocide and Viagra-fueled mass rapes against peaceful protesters by Gaddafi’s troops, the NATO attack on Libya quickly morphed into a regime change operation which saw Gaddafi brutally lynched in the streets and dying after being stabbed in the anus with a bayonet. Years later in 2016 a UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee found that the narratives used to justify the intervention in Libya were “not supported by the available evidence.
” “We have seen no evidence that the UK Government carried out a proper analysis of the nature of the rebellion in Libya,” the report reads. “UK strategy was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the evidence.”
This confirmed concerns voiced by Amnesty International and a UN human rights investigator months before Gaddafi’s death that the evidence for the alleged atrocities the intervention was meant to prevent simply wasn’t there to be found. Because no policy changes were made after the Iraq invasion and nobody was ever punished for inflicting that horror upon our world, no lessons were learned, and it happened again. The West was deceived into yet another disastrous military intervention, which continues to have severe consequences for people in the region to this day.
In an article published earlier this month in Responsible Statecraft about the crisis in Niger, Branko Marcetic made the interesting observation that the Nigerien junta which ousted the previous government has explicitly stated that the coup was necessary because of the “continuous deterioration of the security situation” which Niger and other countries in the Sahel have been suffering from for over a decade due to “the negative socioeconomic, security, political and humanitarian consequences of NATO’s hazardous adventure in Libya.” Marcetic also notes that the regime change intervention in Libya was meant to segue into a regime change intervention in Syria by the same means:
“Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and John Kerry (D-Mass.) all called for a no-fly zone. ‘I love the military … but they always seem to find reasons why you can’t do something rather than why you can,’ complained McCain. The American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka said it would be ‘an important humanitarian step.’ The now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) think tank gathered a who’s who of neoconservatives to repeatedly urge the same. In a letter to then-President Barack Obama, they quoted back Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech in which he argued that ‘inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.’
“Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reportedly instrumental in persuading Obama to act, was herself swayed by similar arguments. Friend and unofficial adviser Sidney Blumenthal assured her that, once Gaddafi fell, ‘limited but targeted military support from the West combined with an identifiable rebellion’ could become a new model for toppling Middle Eastern dictators. Pointing to the similar, deteriorating situation in Syria, Blumenthal claimed that ‘the most important event that could alter the Syrian equation would be the fall of Gaddafi, providing an example of a successful rebellion.’
” And that’s exactly what the Obama administration set out to do: pouring weapons into Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, once again on the side of Al Qaeda-linked fighters. Had Russia not intervened in 2015 to prevent Damascus from being toppled, Syria would likely have suffered the same fate as Libya.
So that’s two countries Obama and his cohorts tossed in the incinerator back-to-back, in much the same way the previous administration torched Afghanistan and Iraq. It was done a bit more slyly and subtly than the overt Hulk Smash ground invasions of the Bush era, but the death, suffering and destabilization caused by Obama’s depravity have been just as real.
This is as clear as day, and yet we still get imperial propaganda outlets like The Washington Post telling us that “everyone” is to blame for Libya’s current troubles. WaPo has a new article out titled “Libya’s catastrophe is everyone’s fault,” which is a bit like Charles Manson saying the Manson Family killings were everyone’s fault. The article’s author Ishaan Tharoor lays the blame for Libya’s inability to adequately protect its people from the flood on “Libya’s feuding factions and fractured polity” as well as other nations in the region before conceding that NATO’s toppling of Gaddafi would have also played some role.
Another Washington Post article titled “How a decade of conflict and division put Libya in peril of disaster” lays zero blame at all on Obama and NATO powers for the nation’s suffering, saying only that Gaddafi was a brutal dictator who “was killed by rebel forces during a NATO-backed Arab Spring uprising.” But it does acknowledge that Libyans are now dying because the nation’s infrastructure has been in a state of decay since 2011:
“The country, with terrain ranging across desert and coastal communities, is highly vulnerable to human-induced climate change. But improvements to and maintenance of basic services and infrastructure, such as the country’s networks of dams, has been deprioritized, said Mary Fitzgerald, a Libya expert at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank.
“‘Between 2011 and 2014, there were already concerns about the state of Libyan infrastructure,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘And then Libya went through a six-year civil conflict from 2014 to 2020 and a lot of infrastructure was damaged during that conflict. In the three years since, you have a situation of rival government, which has yet again complicated political dynamics.’
” This nation has been in a continuous state of strife, violence and suffering since the United States spearheaded a NATO campaign to smash it to pieces. And yet you’ll still get empire simps telling you that NATO is a “defensive alliance”, and you’ll still get liberals saying that Obama’s worst scandal was wearing a tan suit one time.
Barack Obama belongs in a fucking cage. His crimes are utterly unforgivable, and if the law existed to punish the world’s worst criminals instead of to protect them he would be rotting in a maximum security prison cell.
It’s all well and good that people are sending Libya aid and that the call to do so is being amplified by influential voices. But the fact that the 44th president of the United States can just come out and pretend to support a nation he personally helped destroy without being called out and excoriated by the mass media shows that we live in a world which is dominated by lies and propaganda.
The US president was cut off by his own press secretary as he discussed a meeting with a top Chinese official
https://www.rt.com/news/582722-biden-confused-press-conference/
Sept 11, 2023
Joe Biden addresses a press conference, in Hanoi, Vietnam, September 10, 2023 (AP © AP / Evan Vucci
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre abruptly ended a news conference by US President Joe Biden on Sunday, cutting the president off mid-sentence as he rambled about “the third world” and his conversation with Chinese Premier Li Qiang.
Biden took a number of scheduled questions from the press while on a visit to the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, before telling reporters that he was “going to bed.” However, Biden kept answering additional questions, including on his talk with Li at the G20 summit in India on Saturday.
“It wasn’t confrontational at all,” Biden said. “We talked about making sure that the third world…the, uh, the, uh, the southern hemisphere has access to changing…”
As Biden continued to mumble, Jean-Pierre announced that “this ends the current press conference.” After attempting to answer another question, Biden turned around and walked off stage.
Biden’s press conferences are typically tightly managed by his aides, with the president handed cue cards and told which journalists to turn to for questions. Nevertheless, Biden still occasionally leaves the stage mid-sentence, often visibly confused and guided by his staff.
READ MORE: A country for old men: Is it time to slap term limits on America’s aging elite?
According to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, 73% of all voters think that the 80-year-old Biden is too old to serve as president, while 60% believe he lacks the mental capacity for the position. While Republicans have repeatedly hammered Biden over his apparent cognitive decline, Democrats are increasingly concerned about the president’s health too. According to an NBC News survey in June, 43% of Democrats said that they had moderate to major concerns about Biden’s health, up from 21% in 2020.
Biden’s trip to Vietnam came as the US attempts to strengthen its ties with more Asian nations in a bid to counter Chinese influence in the region. On Sunday, Biden and Vietnamese General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong announced a bilateral trade and investment deal, which included measures to boost semiconductor manufacturing and research in Vietnam.