Right To Left

Kulaks? The landowning farmers ( 8 acres and higher) of the Russian Empire....how did they get here?

I see that you at least live up to your user name here!

Living in Canada means being attached to the US and stuck with whatever trade and foreign policy objectives come out of Washington. It's not a matter of love or hate, but taking a cold, hard look at reality: where we are headed and why today's political and economic systems have set us on a course to disaster at breakneck speed! If I'm a communist, the shit that's been happening for the past 30 years are the reasons why! I was just trying to go about my business until about 20 years ago when I started questioning what I was seeing and what was going on here and around the world. And that's how I became radicalized at an age when you're supposed to trend towards comfort and conservatism! If you want to just stay in a protective, self-affirming bubble, certainly today's social media platforms and other garbage give you lots of opportunities to only hear from the idiots you like and agree with and never consider a contrary point of view. But that is not my course in life, and I want the truth whether I like what I see, or not!

Another article I wanted to post is regarding Bill Gates and the threat he represents to the world.....and I don't mean the kind of idiocy that rightwinger conspiracy theorists spin up about the only billionaires they don't consider "job creators" - Gates, Buffet, Soros etc.. Instead, very few sources have been tracking Gates and other "charitable" trust funds established by billionaires (liberal, conservative alike) as tax shelters and slush funds to buy political influence, and in the case of Billy's sudden interest in medicine and 'serving humanity', it seems Gates Foundation's main goal is to backstop the monopoly power of big pharma behemoths which have suddenly taken an interest in creating vaccines...now that they have greater opportunities to slap patents on new research...like RNA vaccines, which they intend to last as permanent monopolies! So, why is Bill Gates so helpful to the cause of making sure that poor people in small, oppressed nations of the global south can't afford to buy the new covid vaccines for their populations? And my followup question would be: why is the US Government (through two administrations now) so determined to prevent other nations on their shit list from selling cheaper vaccines or even giving them away to poor countries. I'm referring to the continued threats to the WHO's COVAX Program if they buy Russian, Chinese or Cuban vaccines to give to the global south nations! How Bill Gates Impeded Global Access to Covid VaccinesThrough his hallowed foundation, the world’s de facto public health czar has been a stalwart defender of monopoly medicine. On February 11, 2020, public health and infectious disease experts gathered by the hundreds at the World Health Organization’s Geneva mothership. The official pronouncement of a pandemic was still a month out, but the agency’s international brain trust knew enough to be worried. Burdened by a sense of borrowed time, they spent two days furiously sketching an “R&D Blueprint” in preparation for a world upended by the virus then known as 2019-nCoV. The resulting document summarized the state of coronavirus research and proposed ways to accelerate the development of diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines. The underlying premise was that the world would unite against the virus. The global research community would maintain broad and open channels of communication, since collaboration and information-sharing minimize duplication and accelerate discovery. The group also drew up plans for global comparative trials overseen by the WHO, to assess the merits of treatments and vaccines. One issue not mentioned in the paper: intellectual property. If the worst came to pass, the experts and researchers assumed cooperation would define the global response, with the WHO playing a central role. That pharmaceutical companies and their allied governments would allow intellectual property concerns to slow things down—from research and development to manufacturing scale-up—does not seem to have occurred to them. They were wrong, but they weren’t alone. Battle-scarred veterans of the medicines-access and open-science movements hoped the immensity of the pandemic would override a global drug system based on proprietary science and market monopolies. By March, strange but welcome melodies could be heard from unexpected quarters. Anxious governments spoke of shared interests and global public goods; drug companies pledged “precompetitive” and “no-profit” approaches to development and pricing. The early days featured tantalizing glimpses of an open-science, cooperative pandemic response. In January and February 2020, a consortium led by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases collaborated to produce atomic-level maps of the key viral proteins in record time. “Work that would normally have taken months—or possibly even years—has been completed in weeks,” noted the editors of Nature. When the Financial Times editorialized on March 27 that “the world has an overwhelming interest in ensuring [Covid-19 drugs and vaccines] will be universally and cheaply available,” the paper expressed what felt like a hardening conventional wisdom. This sense of possibility emboldened forces working to extend the cooperative model. Grounding their efforts was a plan, started in early March, to create a voluntary intellectual property pool inside the WHO. Instead of putting up proprietary walls around research and organizing it as a “race,” public and private actors would collect research and associated intellectual property in a global knowledge fund for the duration of the pandemic. The idea became real in late May with the launch of the WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool, or C-TAP. On May 29, Donald Trump announced U.S. withdrawal from the WHO. This was in response, he said, to China’s “total control” of the agency. The drug industry, meanwhile, was displeased with the WHO for entirely different reasons. The same day, the WHO director general had unveiled the C-TAP with a “Solidarity Call to Action” for governments and companies to share all intellectual property related to Covid-19 treatments and vaccines. The pharmaceutical companies didn’t attack the initiative directly. Instead, their global trade association, the IFPMA, preempted the announcement with a livestreamed media event on the evening of May 28. The event featured the heads of AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer, and Thomas Cueni. jumping ahead a bit: The evening’s sixth participant was the specter of Bill Gates. As anticipated, the questions submitted by journalists touched repeatedly on the much-anticipated launch of C-TAP the following morning, as well as related issues of intellectual property, vaccine access and equity, and debates over the extent and ways intellectual property posed barriers to ramping up production. Mostly, the executives evinced ignorance and surprise over the imminent launch of C-TAP; only Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla openly denounced the pooling of intellectual property as “dangerous” and “nonsense.” All of the executives, however, shared a playbook in which they quickly pivoted to affirmations of their support for Bill Gates and the ACT-Accelerator. The association with Gates was submitted as evidence of industry commitment to equity and access—as well as proof of the complete lack of need for overlapping or competing initiatives, such as the “dangerous” C-TAP. “We already have platforms,” Cueni said during the May 28 event. “The industry is already doing all the right things.” As the questions about C-TAP and intellectual property piled up, the industry’s Gates rap started to sound less like a shared P.R. script than a broken record. Confronted for the second time about intellectual property, GlaxoSmithKline CEO Emma Walmsley emitted an undigested stream of Gatesian word salad. “We are absolutely committed to this question of access,” she stammered, “and deeply welcome the formation of ACT, which is this multilateral organization that is going to be a mechanism with multiple stakeholders, whether it’s heads of state or organizations like [the Gates-funded] CEPI or the Gates and [the Gates-funded] Gavi and others and the WHO, of course, where we actually look at these principles of, uh, access and so clearly, we’re engaged in that as well.” Without the Gates and COVAX associations to lean on, the stammering would have been much worse. Pfizer’s Albert Bourla seemed to recognize this, at one point interrupting himself to express his industry’s gratitude and admiration. “I want to take the opportunity to emphasize the role that Bill Gates is playing,” he said. He went on to call him “an inspiration for all.” In April, Bill Gates launched a bold bid to manage the world’s scientific response to the pandemic. Gates’s Covid-19 ACT-Accelerator expressed a status quo vision for organizing the research, development, manufacture, and distribution of treatments and vaccines. Like other Gates-funded institutions in the public health arena, the Accelerator was a public-private partnership based on charity and industry enticements. Crucially, and in contrast to the C-TAP, the Accelerator enshrined Gates’s long-standing commitment to respecting exclusive intellectual property claims. Its implicit arguments—that intellectual property rights won’t present problems for meeting global demand or ensuring equitable access, and that they must be protected, even during a pandemic—carried the enormous weight of Gates’s reputation as a wise, beneficent, and prophetic leader. How he’s developed and wielded this influence over two decades is one of the more consequential and underappreciated shapers of the failed global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Entering year two, this response has been defined by a zero-sum vaccination battle that has left much of the world on the losing side. Gates’s marquee Covid-19 initiative started relatively small. Two days before the WHO declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced something called the Therapeutics Accelerator, a joint initiative with Mastercard and the charity group the Wellcome Trust to identify and develop potential treatments for the novel coronavirus. Doubling as a social branding exercise for a giant of global finance, the Accelerator reflected Gates’s familiar formula of corporate philanthropy, which he has applied to everything from malaria to malnutrition. In retrospect, it was a strong indicator that Gates’s dedication to monopoly medicine would survive the pandemic, even before he and his foundation’s officers began to say so publicly. This winter, while Gates assured the world that intellectual property was a red herring, a bloc of developing countries at the WTO explained the need for a waiver on certain intellectual property provisions by pointing to the “rather large gap [that] exists between what COVAX or ACT-A can deliver and what is required in developing and least developed countries.” The forceful statement continued: The model of donation and philanthropic expediency cannot solve the fundamental disconnect between the monopolistic model it underwrites and the very real desire of developing and least developed countries to produce for themselves.… The artificial shortage of vaccines is primarily caused by the inappropriate use of intellectual property rights. Another statement by a different bloc of countries added, “COVID19 reveals the deep structural inequality in access to medicines globally, and a root cause is IP that sustains and dominates industry’s interests at the cost of lives.” Gates is certain he knows better. But his failure to anticipate a crisis of supply, and his refusal to engage those who predicted it, have complicated the carefully maintained image of an all-knowing, saintly mega-philanthropist. COVAX presents a high-stakes demonstration of Gates’s deepest ideological commitments, not just to intellectual property rights but also to the conflation of these rights with an imaginary free market in pharmaceuticals—an industry dominated by companies whose power derives from politically constructed and politically imposed monopolies. Gates has been tacitly and explicitly defending the legitimacy of knowledge monopolies since his first Gerald Ford–era missives against open-source software hobbyists. He was on the side of these monopolies during the miserable depths of the 1990s African AIDS crisis. He’s still there today, defending the status quo and running effective interference for those profiting by the billions from their control of Covid-19 vaccines. His latest move is to institutionalize the ACT-Accelerator as the central organizing institution in future pandemics. The shortages have made this effort a little awkward, however, and Gates is now forced to reckon with the question of technology transfer. This is an aspect of the equitable access debate that doesn’t concern intellectual property as commonly perceived—as a simple matter of patents and licenses—but access to the components and technical knowledge related to practical manufacture, including biological material and other areas otherwise protected under the category of intellectual property known as trade secrets. The global south and civil society groups have been calling for tech transfer for months—either mandatory tech transfer that could have been written into contracts or through a voluntary mechanism associated with C-TAP—but Gates has predictably arrived on the scene with a more familiar plan in hand. In early March, senior Gates staff joined pharma executives for a “Global C19 Vaccine Supply Chain and Manufacturing Summit” convened by Chatham House in London. The main agenda item: plans for a new arm within the ACT-Accelerator, the Covid Vaccine Capacity Connector, that seeks to address the tech-transfer question within the usual frame of monopoly rights and bilateral licensing. “The tech transfer debate is being decisively seized and shaped by those who want to set the terms and conditions under which knowledge can be transferred,” writes Priti Patnaik in her Geneva Health Files newsletter. A Gates-directed tech-transfer mechanism without meaningful input from WHO members states, she writes, would be a “body blow” to C-TAP and similar future initiatives that promote open licensing and knowledge sharing to maximize production and access. There are signs of overdue scrutiny of Gates’s role in public health and lifelong commitment to exclusive intellectual property rights. But so far these are blips. More common is the deference on display in a March 21 New York Times article about the U.S. government’s role in developing the mRNA vaccines now under the monopoly control of Moderna and Pfizer. When the piece turned to Gates’s inevitable cameo, the Times reporter was hovering right over the target—and somehow managed to miss wide by a mile. Instead of probing Gates’s central role in preserving this paradigm, the paper linked to gentle boilerplate about pricing and access found on the Gates Foundation website. In response to a request for comment, a Gates Foundation spokesperson pointed me to a piece by its CEO, Mark Suzman, arguing that “IP fundamentally underpins innovation, including the work that has helped create vaccines so quickly.” Any change in media coverage of Gates’s second career may produce a delayed echo within the world he has come to dominate. Here Gates not only controls the narratives, he controls most of the payroll. This may sound conspiratorial or overblown to outsiders but not to campaigners who have witnessed Gates’s ability to shift gravity on major issues. “If you said to an ordinary person, ‘We’re in a pandemic. Let’s figure out everyone who can make vaccines and give them everything they need to get online as fast as possible,’ it would be a no-brainer,” says James Love. “But Gates won’t go there. Neither will the people dependent on his funding. He has immense power. He can get you fired from a U.N. job. He knows that if you want to work in global public health, you’d better not make an enemy of the Gates Foundation by questioning its positions on I.P. and monopolies. And there are a lot of advantages to being on his team. It’s a sweet, comfortable ride for a lot of people.”

You, more than anyone else here needs to read the article first before shooting off your mouth!

Ever since I bought my first computer about 20 years ago and set up the 6 month trial subscription of AOL to go online during the simpler internet era of banner ads, slow-loading pages and frequent disconnections, I've been a regular reader of TomDispatch - a news commentary site featuring articles written by Tom Englehart, a Vietnam veteran turned harsh critic of America's forever wars, ever-increasing military budgets, and especially the use of military and spy agencies for political and economic purposes. Other writers have contributed to his group blog, which even in today's high speed internet era has made few changes to the site....very little graphics, no popup ads, no paywalls and other assorted moneymaking crap now, it's just about presenting a case, supporting it with evidence and what I find most valuable - is that Englehardt and his contributors over the years still try to delve deeper than most analysts, and get to root causes of problems. In his latest piece: SLAUGHTER CENTRAL - The United States as a Mass-Killing Machine Tom Englehardt doesn't divide America's domestic violence (shootings, massacres, world's highest prison populations etc. from the wars, blockades, arms sales, 800 US military bases around the world that are involved in almost continual bombings and drone killings, as Englehardt sees it, America's killing and displacing of so many abroad, cannot and should not be separated from the increasing violence that goes on in America on the home front. But, next time there's another mass shooting, a police execution video, and blowback of some sort against the thousands of US forces stationed abroad or possibly even more 9-11 types of attacks in the US itself, I am already expecting all of the rightwingers....libertarians to conservatives, along with the even more loathesome 'cruise missile liberals' to be looking for foreign nations and foreign scapegoats to point fingers at and hyperventilate even louder in vain attempts to try to put the blame on others! God knows, we certainly have a very helpful mass media for that cause. But getting to the real truth and putting it out there unvarnished and without pretense is even harder today than it was when TomDispatch.com and other independent sites started 20 years ago! Slaughter Central The United States as a Mass-Killing Machine BY TOM ENGELHARDT By the time you read this piece, SNIP Copyright 2021 Tom Engelhardt

You started this thread as a Trump-inspired rightwing screed downplaying the Sars Cov-2 threat to the world (including us) and now you rightwingers have repositioned yourselves presenting Covid-19 as a Chinese government conspiracy to poison and weaken the west and presumably the rest of the world. It still stands that the only great significance of Wuhan is that over a year ago, that was the first place that a new species-jumping coronavirus began to turn into a pandemic and after several weeks of being considered another possible strain of flu virus, it was finally identified as a unique new species of coronavirus. And the microbiology lab in Wuhan that first decoded the virus is subject of conspiracy theories and speculations by US Government sources, who never mention or acknowledge that the institute is an international research institute that has hosted scientists from many other countries, including the US! A infectious disease institute in Galveston affiliated with University of Texas for one! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology AND if you and every other Rebel Media following loon wants to blame China for causing Covid-19 for whatever reasons, you need to acknowledge that China was first in line dealing with a new, unknown disease, and had to learn about its characteristics and how to stop its spread. The DNA sequence of coronavirus was provided open source free of charge for everyone who wanted to learn about it and develop treatments and vaccines to fight it. But, China also demonstrated that the most effective way to fight the spread of a highly contagious viral disease is with establishing strict lockdowns early, and not allowing loopholes you could drive a truck through....like our idiot Premier here in Ontario! After I'm retired two weeks from now, me and my wife will stay home as much as possible and refrain from venturing outside until its over, which means until the last of the deniers have caught it already.

Yes, that's liberalism to be be correct on terminology here. Aside from the last remaining rightwing white church lunatics, who else is motivated by the Red Scare today? I will not only welcome, but I will do my part to support and fight for communism! I just wish more than a small minority actually understood what communism is, means and that the great existential threat today is the capitalist hive mind we are all stuck inside today.

Well, you explain these away and then we'll talk about stuff that the American Capitalist Empire isn't to blame for!

Like America does, and has been doing for the past 100 years? Here's a map of all the countries the US has bombed 28 countries since the Vietnam War, killing more than 15 million people: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ey3EdxSWYAwbCKs?format=jpg&name=smalll Notice the region where most of those countries are located, then tell me again about who is the warmonger...and let's discuss what religion they belong to!

All that to say: WHO is at fault for the "Islamic Threat" to the west today? If the Middle East was left alone for the past century, the wars, the refugee migrations and ethnic cleansings etc. would not have occurred! Same with all the crap said about Mexico and Latin America today, but that's another topic.

Yawn! This crap keeps getting recycled every time Muslim despots stop following orders from their American Empire overlords! Let's take a look at who the US/NATO allies itself with in the Middle East and who it sanctions and has declared war on! Saudi Arabia! The Islamic feudal dictatorship established 100 years ago when warlord - Ibn Saud proclaimed himself King of Arabia, and was only able to carry out his takeover after Arab armies that had forced out the Ottoman Turks, were well supplied with heavy guns and automatic weapons when the British Empire and the US gave them lots of surplus gear from the First World War. While the Arab sheik - Hussein was double-crossed by the British ( the classic movie "Lawrence of Arabia" includes the story near the end) and given Jordan as a consolation prize for his invaluable work on behalf of the British. Same shit throughout the Emirates and Persian Gulf feudal oil potentates. All multi-billionaires today while the majority of their people get little or nothing from all the oil revenues. So the Sauds and Emir's families....who measure in the thousands because the rich benefit from polygamy, tell all the young men from poor families who will never have a chance to get married, to go out and do battle against the 'infidels' ........ who just happen to be the secularists running multi-religious states like Syria and Iraq. If we go back 30 to 40 years ago, a young, enterprising engineer from the Saud-connected Bin Laden family named Osama, answered the call to wage jihad against the evil secularist socialist government of Afghanistan, that was being supported by the Soviet Union. Neocon hack - Zbig Brzinski (don't ask me how to spell it!) was able to convince supposed peacenik president - Jimmy Carter to engage a clandestine war in Afghanistan, using the thousands of "Mujahideen" heroes sent in by US ally - Pakistan to overthrow the Government. Zbig reasoned that the Soviets would be forced to widen the war and send in their own troops to keep the government alive. AND the Soviets would end up with their own 'Vietnam' quagmire....which also happened. Great tactics, but the strategy goes straight line to Bin Laden and other jihadi warriors moving on to the next campaign in Sudan and back to Afghanistan to put the Taleban in power, and bring the war home to America by flying planes into buildings in New York and Washington! His mistake was thinking that Americans had some sense of how they were connected to all the wars their government wages on their behalf. Instead, most Americans are barely aware of what goes on outside their borders...and have little or no interest in finding out! So, here we are, almost 20 years after 9-11, and most Americans are still too dumb to understand how their empire (yes, empire!) oppresses the rest of the world, economically and militarily when necessary. Most of the ignorance is deliberately created by government with corporate assistance. And this is certainly made worse in our time with most people addicted to social media monopolies. It was reported five years ago that 60% of Canadians get their news from their Facebook feeds! I'm glad that, after briefly trying it out, I decommissioned my Facebook account about 10 years ago. Nevertheless, corporate consolidation of news media and these social media sock puppets are making it harder and harder to keep independent news and analysis functioning, as Youtube demonetizes their videos, Twitter bans them, and Facebook bans them or just deletes their pages. I wish independent forums and blogs were still as popular and busy as they were 10 to 20 years ago, but as long as it's possible to find a few sources available, that's the best I expect from our so called "Open" internet!

According to Arthur C. Clark (2001 A Space Odyssey), in the early 1950's, the then struggling science fiction writer - Ron Hubbard made a bet with him in a bar one night that he could create his own religion and have more than a million followers by the end of the decade. I think Hubbard won that bet. But scientology could not hold on to most new members because it demanded so much money from them, while selfish, narcissistic rich bastards could easily afford it. Scientology would have disappeared, like so many other new cults that took off in the early 50's as an always threatening Cold War was established between the US and the Soviet Union after WWII. The advances in science....especially rocketry, led to many flying saucer cults that inserted aliens for angels, and would take the faithful off to a better planet after man/or God destroyed Earth in a nuclear inferno. So if scientology hadn't attracted a clique of Hollywood celebrities long before Cruise arrived, it would have died out along with all of the other flying saucer and new age cults of the 50's and 60's. It seems that scientology's capacity and willingness to indulge the sense of self-importance of wealthy elites really strikes a chord with Hollywood royalty. So Tom Cruise shouldn't be viewed as surprising, except that he seems to be among the dumbest celebs out there!

I'm prone to conspiracy theories! Because government and corporate institutions today control the news cycle and use it to try to control what people think, feel and believe about a range of subjects. For example, at one time I had close to complete trust in what the CBC produced and reported on. BUT, that was a long time ago! Before they turned into the similar advocacy journalism as every US and European narrative manager. I may investigate a bit and decide there is no substance to a 'sugar conspiracy' story, but I won't dismiss anything out of hand now, cause I haven't forgot past conspiracies - like "Saddam will use his WMD's if we don't invade and destroy Iraq first!

New COVID variants have changed the game, and vaccines will not be enough. We need global ‘maximum suppression’ At the end of 2020, there was a strong hope that high levels of vaccination would see humanity finally gain the upper hand over SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. In an ideal scenario, the virus would then be contained at very low levels without further societal disruption or significant numbers of deaths. But since then, new “variants of concern” have emerged and spread worldwide, putting current pandemic control efforts, including vaccination, at risk of being derailed. Put simply, the game has changed, and a successful global rollout of current vaccines by itself is no longer a guarantee of victory. No one is truly safe from COVID-19 until everyone is safe. We are in a race against time to get global transmission rates low enough to prevent the emergence and spread of new variants. The danger is that variants will arise that can overcome the immunity conferred by vaccinations or prior infection. Now, a liberal, institutional website like The Conversation is not going to touch the third rail and examine reasons why in our era of great science and technology, there is such an unequal distribution of vaccines, antiviral drugs and even PPE supplies to poor countries in the world revealed by this new global pandemic. And of course, neither is any corporate or state-sponsored news organ in the west! They won't mention that US policy from the beginning has been to maintain and even ratchet up sanctions against their disfavored nations like Yemen, Venezuela and Iran. The WHO has called such policies 'genocide' war against defenseless civilian populations....but that part of the WHO addresses is omitted from NY Times and other coverage. And when it comes to distribution of vaccines, the US (and allies) have been trying to stop nations in their trading zone to not buy cheaper Russian and Chinese vaccines or face trade retribution! The message should have been from the start that vaccines only work if widely available and used, and in an age of global trade and migrations, the genie cannot be kept in the bottle for long if the new variant viruses are allowed to fester in large populations by design or by neglect...same thing! Back to the article: As members of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission Taskforce on Public Health, we call for urgent action in response to the new variants. These new variants mean we cannot rely on the vaccines alone to provide protection but must maintain strong public health measures to reduce the risk from these variants. At the same time, we need to accelerate the vaccine program in all countries in an equitable way. Together, these strategies will deliver “maximum suppression” of the virus. What are ‘variants of concern’? Genetic mutations of viruses like SARS-CoV-2 emerge frequently, but some variants are labelled “variants of concern”, because they can reinfect people who have had a previous infection or vaccination, or are more transmissible or can lead to more severe disease. https://theconversation.com/new-covid-variants-have-changed-the-game-and-vaccines-will-not-be-enough-we-need-global-maximum-suppression-157870

Hmmm, what would Hollywood conservative - Vince Vaughn have to say about this!

Ukraine today, yes that Ukraine given $billions in new weapons to fight an aggressive shooting war to either take back its rebellious eastern provinces or drive the Russian and Russian-speaking Ukrainians across the border into Russia and stake new claims (ethnic cleansing by any other name) also happens to be the poorest nation in Europe! So, those of us who don't speak either Russian or the Ukraine dialect have only paid attention to the breakup because of its potential to ignite the long feared full scale war between the US and Russia, which judging from the stupid, parroted official propaganda at New York Times et al. (top Pentagon sources tell us etc.) are trying to build the hysterical media campaign needed for the next big war! All of these bullshit stories coming at us this weekend about "Russian tanks and Russian troop movements along the border" miss the part that they haven't crossed any borders into Ukrainian territory. Though Russian officials have made it clear that the increased shelling of Donbass territories will bring a Russian response if the eastern militias are unable to answer back and defend themselves from these attacks. Latvia? Poland? I know one thing about Poland.... like most of eastern Europe, young people have to move west to find work, and their remittances support their parents and keep local economies functioning. Also, Poland is ruinously in debt to foreign creditors. Though that may not matter for much longer as the US Federal Government has just cleared the bar at $28 Trillion national debt! How high can it go? We may find out before Joe gets hauled out of the White House and off to the nursing home!

This all depends on who's Canada you're talking about here! I say that Canada is just an adjunct imperial state to the US today and is just as despicable and disgusting as the US policymakers on its own, more limited scale. For example, Haiti. Canada plays a major role in maintaining the hated, despotic corrupt government that is hated by 80% of the people on the Island and being fought on a continual basis (though ignored by our bullshit MSM news that can only cover Hong Kong, Myanmar and other US-approved rebellions). And that's just one example, but a good reason why other nations don't share our starry eyed impression of Canada as a "good nation that promotes world peace." People living in the global south know that is total bullshit. The Canada I respected, ended at least 40 years ago.

Are today's hedge funds and commercial investment banks and just about every damn stock that's listed on the market indexes NOT "casino capitalism?" And exactly who is it who has fought the longrunning battle against taxes and market regulation? The loudest voices are still promoting notions that "markets regulate themselves," and that taxes must be as low as possible or they will kill jobs. From an anti-capitalist perspective, creating these subgroups of bad capitalists is contrived and serves no purpose, since they are just doing what capitalists are trained to do: maximize profits. As soon as any new restrictions and market reforms are announced after the latest example of largest, most monopolistic banks bankrupting themselves and demanding government bailouts or they'll take the whole system down in some implied suicide pact, they get the bailouts, the reforms are promised and never fully delivered on, and everything is back in turmoil 10 or 15 years later! Only difference this time, is we are at a time when capitalism as an economic force has grown and consumed so much potential wealth from nature, working people's earnings and the major new industry of the 21st century - destroying poor nations by economic and outright military power that either leaves a virtual slave state that can be harnessed for its final profit potential, OR even if the people are too unruly, angry and uncooperative - left as a failed state.... like Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and soon to join - Syria and Afghanistan. Even if these nations are permanently destroyed and left with only the old and sick who can't escape, the foreign capitalists who profit from US/ Nato foreign policy still find are able to pull profits from the ashes!

Well, one clear difference then between Neocons and Neolibs is that the former talk about military power and projecting the use of force for reasons that can include economic issues...but not necessarily, while the neoliberal just talks about deregulating capital markets and removing tariffs and duties by joining trade pacts. There was not actually much of substance distinguishing Bush from Clinton, largely because of the large internal military and security state bureaucracies that carry on doing what they want regardless of what any politicians have to say. Trump found this out when he wanted to take US troops out of Syria and Afghanistan, and discovered months later that his orders were ignored and not forwarded down the chain of command! As for Neoliberalism....supposedly when the Reaganites made "free trade" the buzz word of the 80's and 90's, all this shit like FTA which quickly morphed into NAFTA would benefit everyone and that's why there was a growing consensus of leaders around the world who joined the GATT and let's not forget the most obvious bullshit fraud of that time: "nations which trade openly with each other, don't go to war against each other." Good thing it all worked out so well!

One place you won't find modern concepts like democracy written about is in the Bible! I suppose because 'man is a sinner,' we're supposed to just obey and follow orders from our masters, and act in as Christ-like a manner as possible. So, fundamentalist Christians should still be feudalists by this logic. And that's how the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings survived so long.

I'm not sure what you're arguing here, unless you're arguing for the sake of arguing! Whoever listened to anything Michael Ignatieff ever had to say? Here or in the US! I would say that hideous red-haired scrag - Samantha Power had a hell of a lot more influence on the drive for "humanitarian intervention" when she was a CNN pundit in the 90's with close ties with everybody in the Clinton White House. Anyway, the massive bombing campaign against Serbia in the 90's, was justified by the Clinton Admin and Blairites in London by false claims that Serbians were carrying out a genocide in Kosovo. They may have been ethnic cleansing...since they were forcing Kosovars out of the northern part of the mostly Albanian territory where Serbs were a majority and the Government was under pressure to protect orthodox churches and other holy sites from a Muslim extremist KLA. AND most of the deaths in that war were caused by NATO....because Billy didn't want to risk casualties by putting American boots on the ground, and went with Clark's plan of "Just bomb the shit out of them until they give up and surrender!" Some of the fascinating factoids from the Air War were just how ineffective continuous aerial bombing campaigns are against determined adversaries who will just hide expensive hardware (like tanks and fighter jets) until the bombing campaign is over. The end result was making Serbia and other Orthodox eastern nations besides Russia enemies of the US and Europe, because of the death and destruction they caused for such little gain. Although the US got the One thing they wanted out of the war: a giant Air Force and Army base in Kosovo -- Camp Bondsteel. Who needs Germany anyway! By now, everyone who is honest and paying attention should fully realize that R2P was never more than a contrivance to justify foreign invasions and occupations. There was no "Arab Spring uprisings" in Libya, which regardless of what everyone here thought of Gadaffi, was properly distributing oil export profits to his own people, making Libya the wealthiest per capita nation on the African continent. And what landed with me after the large, bipartisan drumbeat of D's and R's and media concern trolls kept droning on "what are we going to do about Gadaffi?" was that after NATO destroyed the capital - Tripoli and sent in Muslim mercenaries to kill and terrorize the people, everyone and I mean absolutely everyone packed up and moved on and never talked about Libya again......except "oops, it's turned into a failed state, and more people are dying trying to flee across the Mediterranean to Europe." And that killing of a fake ambassador at the fake embassy in the eastern city of Benghazi, when some deal fell through between various murderous "freedom fighters" regarding handing back heavy weapons and moving on to the next regime change operation in Syria. For me, the silence by the so called "left" of that time( even so called 'independent left'), who had been so loud about "Bush's wars" really added to my cynicism levels and realizing that the leading voices on the bought-off left were just out there to get paid and try to steer followers in directions that their paymasters want from them. But, before I forget, Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism are two schools of thought that aren't even involving the same subject areas. The modern leaders can be neoliberal (extreme capitalist) on economics and neoconservative foreign policy because of the overlap. Main difference between the two is that Neocon is close to fascism in its desires to use military to project power and enforce its economic doctrines...especially on trade terms. While the neoliberal is mostly concerned with having a fire sale in government functions and responsibilities. Our fat, dopey Premier of Ontario is doing this right now with his plan to dish out billions to build a new highway, and the proposed route just happens to run across property owned by several of his fellow millionaire friends and supporters.

The outstanding question is how much of R2P was developed by Clinton's team back in the 90's and was later put in operation by Bush and fully rolled out with ideological justifications for invading Libya and overthrowing Gadaffi and setting up the endless quagmire that somehow western leaders considered better than when Gadaffi was in charge, and Libya was the wealthiest per capita nation in Africa! Some years back now, on the Pacifica Public Radio Network flagship news show - Democracy Now, former 5 star general - Wesley Clark said this to host- Amy Goodman: So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” -- meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office -- “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!” https://genius.com/General-wesley-clark-seven-countries-in-five-years-annotated 7 countries in five years, indicates that...according to Clark, premeditated regime change plans were already well under way at least as far back as just after the Afghanistan Invasion. The planners were intending to reorder the Middle East to their liking, and by their leftovers it would indicate that they didn't really care about what was left behind in the aftermath!

One point I'd quibble with here is: "no such thing as a fair market ANY MORE." I can't accept that there ever was a "fair market" for many reasons, including the one so many backward looking liberals have adopted about the golden age of America in the post-WWII era up till some time in the 70's, when the wheels started creaking during a time of high oil prices. That prosperity post-WWII was built at a time when America (including northern province- Canada) had a virtual manufacturing monopoly and trade surpluses with all of the nations devastated by fighting the War on their home turf. That and the fact that people stop believing in natural cycles and start thinking every trend that carries on more than two years will keep increasing and last forever. So, nobody or at least very few people foresaw that the slack, liberal capitalism of the post-war era was just a blip on the radar, and that as soon as earnings became a little harder to come by, the captains of industry, banking and commerce would all collaborate together on cutting costs to maximize their profits: investing a little money in propaganda mills (politely known as policy research institutes) and training new generations of politicians, economists and judges in proper neoliberal capitalist ideology that has the gall to try to make moral and ethical arguments for impoverishing working class people and kicking all the money up to the top...just like the Mafia and Hell's Angels! Organized crime should be kicking themselves now for never having the foresight to build this kind of racket that has so many willing slaves out spouting the latest propaganda from Musk, Bezos, Gates and other high priests of capitalism on Twitter and other social media today! We've been heading back into the 'older normal' for at least 10 years, maybe 20 years even...since New World Order was being planned out even before 9-11 and the invasion of Iraq, that led off with a do-nothing strategy of allowing bloody genocides in Rwanda and to a lesser extent in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Krajina and Kosovo, before Clinton Admin policy advisers crafted a "Responsibility To Protect" doctrine, and declared that since the UN Security Council was always divided, NATO had the "responsibility" to step in and carry out the R2P agenda wherever needed in the world...sovereign nations be damned! Deliberately destroying nations and forcing entire populations into exile (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and more) risking their lives and the survival of their children in vain attempts to cross the Mediterranean to get to Europe, or cross the Rio Grande, fences, walls and deserts to Amerika and in both places, live the rest of their lives as sweatshop laborers at best, is an extremely ruthless, immoral -- but still highly profitable enterprise for many of the top players: arms merchants and weapons makers, the private-for profit prison industries (legalized slavery), and all of the sweatshops in America and Europe that want large numbers of undocumented workers for the cheapest jobs and just as important: to act as a counterweight against work actions by employees for higher wages and better working conditions. In other words, "market" capitalism is just reverting back to its old habits in our modern era of desperation and depleted wealth.