US Makes Clear Its Aim Is to ‘Weaken’ Russia

April 25, 2022

The United States on Monday gave away a bit more of its ultimate goals in Ukraine by saying for the first time that it aims to “weaken” Russia’s military capabilities as a result of the war.

“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree it cannot do the kind things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told a press conference in Poland after returning from an unannounced visit to Ukraine. “It has already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops, quite frankly, and we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”

Blinken then hinted that the U.S. goal is to remove Russian President Vladimir Putin from power.

He said: “The strategy that we’ve put in place — massive support for Ukraine, massive pressure against Russia,solidarity with more than 30 countries engaged in these efforts— is having real results. The bottom line is this: We don’t know how the rest of this war will unfold, but we do know that a sovereign independent Ukraine will be around a lot longer than Vladimir Putin is on the scene.”

What Russia Says

Russia says its aim was never to take control of Ukraine but to defend Russian-speakers in the eastern Donbass region who have fought an 8-year civil war of independence against Ukraine after it resisted the U.S.-backed unconstitutional change of government in 2014.

Moscow says it “demilitarizing” Ukraine and “de-nazifying” it of neo-fascist groups that took part in the overthrow of the elected government in 2014, and in the Donbass war. The West has been saying that Ukraine is winning the war since it began at the end of February. It claims that the Ukrainian forces defeated a Russian attempt to takeover Kiev.

But Russia says it never had any intention of taking the capital and had only parked its forces outside the city as a diversion to pin down Ukrainian forces while Russia fought to gain control of Mariopuol in the south. Russia says it withdraw its troops from near Kiev to join the battle for Donbass.

Bogging Down Russia

“What’s at stake here is much greater than Ukraine.”

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talks to CNN's @JimSciutto about Russia's invasion into Ukraine and the US' role in the conflict. pic.twitter.com/d0w0g7bCuG

— CNN (@CNN) April 26, 2022

Austin did not spell out how the U.S. would achieve the goal of “weakening” Russia’s “capability to very quickly reproduce that [military] capability” without a direct military confrontation with Russia. The Pentagon has been putting the brakes on rhetoric in the U.S. media and among some lawmakers about NATO directly intervening in the war, which could lead to a U.S.-Russia conflict that could escalate to the use of nuclear weapons. Western sanctions could inhibit Russia’s military industry as it appeared to depend on Western technology imports.

The U.S. plan seems to be to continue flooding Ukraine with weapons systems and ammunition, as well as foreign fighters, to prolong the war long enough to bleed Russia, giving it its “Vietnam” to bring down Putin.

Austin’s remarks are the clearest indication of U.S. goals for Russia via a proxy war in Ukraine since President Joe Biden said in Poland on March 26, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” referring to Putin. Biden also said on two occasions that the reason for the economic sanctions on Russia was never to prevent an invasion but to get the Russian people to rise up against its government.

In fact the U.S. needed the invasion to launch its economic and information warfare against Russia. It got the invasion by dismissing Russia’s treaty proposals to remove NATO troops and missiles from Eastern Europe, even though Russia threatened war. The U.S. ignored the Minsk accords to resolve the civil war in the Donbass and did not stop Ukraine from beginning an offensive there at the end of February, luring Russia to invade.

Prolonging the war as long as possible — Blinken said ten days ago it would last at least until the end of this year — is part of the trap the U.S. has set for Russia, similar to the one that former Carter national securityadviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admittedhe set for Moscow in Afghanistan to bring down the Soviet Union by giving it its “Vietnam,” much as the U.S. is aiming to topple Putin.

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/25/us-makes-it-clear-its-aim-is-to-weaken-russia/

US Imposes Flawed Food System on the World

April 23, 2022

Even before the war in Ukraine, the sanctions on Russia, and the shipping blockade of the Black Sea, farmers across the U.S. were getting ready for higher prices on seed, fertilizer, and crop chemicals.

All winter, major farm media was warning farmers to book supplies early as prices would be high and supplies would be short. The war in Ukraine has only amped up the concern among farmers, input suppliers, and those who erroneously proclaim that we, the U.S., must feed the world.

The farm media offers suggestions as to how farmers, despite relatively higher crop prices, might deal with the even steeper increase in input costs. Use less, get your old tillage equipment out or, heaven forbid, consider manually pulling weeds like farmers used to do — of course, years ago, farmers didn’t run thousands of acres.

While oil companies used the sanctions on Russian oil to steeply ramp up their prices, even though Russian oil continues to flow almost without interruption, corporate agribusiness also has a convenient smokescreen to ramp up input prices even further — nothing short of blatant corporate profiteering…..

Ignoring its obvious faults and clear failures, the industrial food system is touted as the only way forward. Our consolidated food system is immensely profitable for the multinationals that supply the inputs and for those that buy, process and distribute the crops and livestock into the global supply chain.For the farmers, not so much. They buy at retail, sell at wholesale, all while competing against each other in a rigged marketplace.

Here in the U.S., farmers are told they can and must feed the world by growing more corn, more soy and more livestock in confinement, even if that is not what the world wants or can afford to eat.

Industrial agriculture requires ever larger and more expensive equipment, larger farms, more fragile land put into production and it will continue the trend of depopulating rural America as small farms, rural communities, and local food systems are destroyed by corporate big ag.

Worse in Global South

And what of farmers in the rest of the world? In the Global South the situation is ever more dire and more unfair.Farmers are pressured by governments, the World Bank, and philanthropists like Bill Gates to follow the industrial model of the U.S., never mind its failures, never mind its cost.

Efforts like the Alliance for a Green Revolution (AGRA), despite billions of dollars spent and promises to double food production and increase farmer income, have proven to be a failure. Africa does not have better access to food, the farmers are poorer and are being driven off their land, victims of technology, the cost of inputs they cannot afford, and land grabs by foreign governments and corporations.

Perhaps if African countries were not at the mercy of international lending institutions and their farmers the victims of climate change and agri-colonialism, they might feed themselves?

There will always be food for those with money, energy for those with money, needed vaccines for those with money — the multi-national corporations will see to that, even as they continue to extract profit from countries least able to afford it. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres likened the ongoing and increasing crisis to “a Sword of Damocles now hanging over the global economy — especially the developing world.”

The failures of the system in the U.S. are easily seen — fragility of the supply chain, the emergence of herbicide-resistant “super weeds,” failure of the “promise” of Genetically Modified crops, loss of farms, unrestrained water use and pollution, staggering farm debt and climate change, driven in part by the agricultural system itself.

We don’t know who really said “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” but they had a point. We have a high-tech industrial food system that is in crisis and has over and over shown its flaws and failures, yet we carry on in denial.

We throw good money after bad, trying to push the same failing systems on Africa and countries across the Global South. We ignore the fact that efforts, like AGRA, have failed and we refuse to support and fund Agroecological solutions that will work.

Crisis should drive efforts for change. Why do we insist on more of the same?

Jim Goodman is a retired third-generation dairy farmer from Wonewoc, Wisconsin, and the president of the National Family Farm Coalition.

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/23/us-imposes-flawed-food-system-on-the-world/

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Prison Food

“Not for Human Consumption.” The author, who saw that label himself when he was incarcerated, calls out a widespread human rights violation being committed in U.S. prisons.

April 21, 2022

We’ve all been reading about inflation over the past several months. Food prices are up dramatically this year, and it’s putting the squeeze on a lot of American families. Many people are cutting back, eating less meat, and trying to conserve. But what happens when you’re in prison when food prices are spiking?

On my first day in prison in 2013, one of the other inmates said to me, “It’s Friday. Fish day.” I responded, “Oh. Ok. I like fish.” “Not this fish,” he said. “We call it sewer trout. Stay away from it.”

When I got to the cafeteria, I saw boxes stacked up behind the serving line. They were all clearly marked: “Alaskan Cod. Product of China. Not for Human Consumption. Feed Use Only.” I never ate the fish.

There are two ways that prisons are able to save money. They cut food costs and they cut medication costs. In many prisons and jails at the state and local level, any budget surplus goes into the warden’s or sheriff’s pocket.

Check out this article, which documents how an Alabama sheriff legally took home as personal profitmore than $750,000 that had been budgeted to feed prisonersand used it to pay cash for a beach house. The prisoners ended up eating scraps not meant for human beings.

Saving Money

It’s not at all unusual to feed prisoners animal-grade food to save money. It happens all across the country every single day.

In one Arizona women’s prison, current and former prisoners complained that they saw the “Not for Human Consumption” label on boxes of chicken legs and thighs and on lunch meat.

One former prisoner, who spent 12 years in the facility, said that she asked multiple times why animal-grade food was being served to prisoners, but she “never got a straight answer.” Eventually, the prison stopped serving the chicken — the lunch meat is still being served — but not until enough prisoners complained about it. The food service company,Trinity Services Group, also served prisoners maggot-infested food and “potatoes laced with crunchy dirt.” Trinity was also accused of serving prisoners rotten meat that caused dozens of H. pylori infections. Trinity’s response? “That happened in the past.”

To give you an idea of how seriously, or not, “corrections professionals” take the allegations, one must only look at what they say to each other when they think nobody else can hear them. The Phoenix New Times reported that a private Facebook group of Arizona prison guards mocked the animal-grade food and the prisoners who had to eat it. One guard wrote, “That was true haha working in the kitchen I read it.” Another said, “As a kitchen officer, I plead the fifth.” Still another wrote, “This isn’t news lol.”

‘It’s All Bad’

Aramark, the big food service company, says that it is dedicated to “culinary excellence” in prisons. But after winning a contract to provide food in the Colorado prison system, their quest for culinary excellence didn’t stop them from serving prisoners “rotten food crawling with maggots or food that had been thrown in the trash, and (Aramark) gave inmates cake that had been partially eaten by rodents.” The same thing happened at prisons Aramark supplied in Mississippi, in Oregon, Alabama and elsewhere.

If these details don’t make you angry, maybe this will: According to a lawsuit filed against Oregon prison officials, prison administrators — in anticipation of state health inspections — directed inmates to clean up kitchens and remove “not for human consumption” food and to move green and moldy, spoiled food to the a mobile refrigerator and freezer trucks, only to return the spoiled food to the kitchen after the inspection was completed. One of the prisoners filing the suit said she was ordered to serve “not for human consumption bait fish and spoiled meats, milk and produce” to fellow inmates.

The fix here is easy: STOP DOING IT. Where is the humanity? I understand that when you run a prison, you want to balance a budget. But the budget can’t be balanced while ignoring basic human rights. I have no idea if it’s even illegal to serve people animal-grade food. It wouldn’t even occur to me that such a thing would need to be legislated. But if it is legal, it needs to be made illegal. And people who do it should be prosecuted. Maybe one of the reasons that we have some of the societal problems that we do is that we don’t treat the less fortunate among us with respect and dignity.

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/21/john-kiriakou-prison-food/

PEPE ESCOBAR –Big Tech’s ‘Cancel Culture’ Love Affair

April 21, 2022

This month, several of us – Scott Ritter, myself, ASB Military News, among others – were canceled from Twitter. The – unstated – reason: we were debunking the officially approved narrative of the Russia/NATO/Ukraine war.

I lasted only seven months on Twitter. And that was long enough.Contacts in California had told me I was on their radar because the account grew too fast, and had enormous reach, especially after the start of Operation Z.…

Cancel culture is inbuilt in the techno-feudalist project: conform to the hegemonic narrative, or else. In my own case regarding Twitter and Facebook – two of the guardians of the internet, alongside Google — I knew a day of reckoning was inevitable, because like other countless users I had previously been dispatched to those notorious “jails”.

Conform, or Else

At the time, I discussed the matter with several Western analysts. As one of them succinctly put it, “You were ridiculing the U.S. president while pointing out the positives of Russia, China and Iran. That’s a deadly combination”….

A banking source that usually places my columns on the desks of selected Masters of the Universe put it New York-style:“You severely p****d the Atlantic Council”. No question: the specimen who oversaw the canceling of my account was a former Atlantic Council hack.

The “censorship trend” is a fact – for quite a while now. __Take this U.S. State Department 2020 report identifying “pillars of Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.”

State Dept. Directive

Thelate Pompeo-era report demonizes “fringe or conspiracy-minded” websites who happen to be extremely critical of U.S. foreign policy. They include Moscow-based Strategic Culture Foundation – where I’m a columnist – and Canada-based Global Research, which republishes most of my columns (but so does Consortium News, ZeroHedge and many other U.S. websites). I’m cited in the report by name, along with quite a few top columnists.

The report’s “research” states that Strategic Culture – which is blocked by Facebook and Twitter – is directed by the SVR, Russian foreign intel.

So the directive comes straight from the State Department – and that has not changed under Biden-Harris…

Couple it with the partnership between Facebook and the Atlantic Council – which is a de facto NATO think tank – and now we have a real powerful ecosystem.

Every silicon fragment in the valley connects Facebook as a direct extension of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s LifeLog project, a Pentagon attempt to “build a database tracking a person’s entire existence.” Facebook launched its website exactly on the same day – Feb. 4, 2004 – that DARPA and the Pentagon shuttered LifeLog.

No explanation by DARPA was ever provided. The MIT’s David Karger, at the time, remarked, “I am sure that such research will continue to be funded under some other title. I can’t imagine DARPA ‘dropping out’ of such a key research area.”

Of course a smokin’ gun directly connecting Facebook to DARPA will never be allowed to surface. But occasionally some key players speak out, such as Douglas Gage, none other than LifeLog’s conceptualizer: “Facebook is the real face of pseudo-LifeLog at this point (…) We have ended up providing the same kind of detailed personal information to advertisers and data brokers and without arousing the kind of opposition that LifeLog provoked.”

So Facebook has absolutely nothing to do with journalism… Facebook is an “ecosystem” built to sell private data at a huge profit, offering a public service as a private enterprise, but most of all sharing the accumulated data of its billions of users with the U.S. national security state.

The resulting algorithmic stupidity, also shared by Twitter – incapable of recognizing nuance, metaphor, irony, critical thinking – is perfectly integrated into what former C.I.A. analyst Ray McGovern brilliantly coined as the MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex).

In the U.S., at least the odd expert on monopoly power identified this neo-Orwellian push as accelerating “the collapse of journalism and democracy.”

I received quite a few messages stating that being canceled by Facebook – and now by Twitter – is a badge of honor. So being deleted – twice – by an algorithm qualifies at best as a cosmic joke.

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/21/pepe-escobar-big-techs-cancel-culture-love-affair/

>>16165376

We have very evil people in Gov. and they would willingly kill the people of two countries to take down the guy that knows what they did! That's their problem with Putin. (He must have a lot of dirt on Blinken)

>>16165465

I didn't even know she died, Twitter news was more important, except our country is freed from an evil war criminal and the karma she caused by killing millions of children and humans WW

>>16165493

so you think prisoners should be fed rotten poisonous food? You do know that at least 20% are in there for minor crimes, so for dealing or have pot. Some because their were framed. Kirakou was sent to jail by the president for whistle blowing on the government and he was finally released.

Do not be deluded thinking anyone sent to prison actually committed a horrific crime.

Hans Mahncke@HansMahncke

The worst part of it is that after five years of obstruction and obfuscation, Baker still didn't own up, even after Sussmann was indicted in Sep 2021.It took Baker another six months to finally come clean and give the smoking gun text message to Durham.

So James Baker held that text back from Durham and he has immunity.

https://twitter.com/HansMahncke/status/1519366646254772228?s=20&t=x1msuYxisDykuETYy6VzMw

$17 million a year, the crybaby enabler makes that much a year from Twitter. Unbelievable! So she calls WAPO to go on the at Musk

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1519328811451564036?s=20&t=x1msuYxisDykuETYy6VzMw

>>16165877

It's freakin unbelievable these cult nazis are getting paid that much, and you enables whiner and crying for twitter employees that are highly paid. WTF

I'm not surprised they have no ethics, what I am surprised about James Baker almost fucked up Durham's prosecution of Sussman; when Baker was immunized at the time.

https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1519183704089714688?s=20&t=x1msuYxisDykuETYy6VzMw

Christian Drosten, Karl Lauterbach try to block the work of a Health Ministry committee set to evaluate the effectiveness of lockdowns, other containment measures

These are the actions of people with total confidence that all the crazy stuff we've been doing is super effective

In March 2021, the German Bundestag ordered the Ministry of Health to set up an expert committee to evaluate the effectiveness of containment measures in Germany, from lockdowns to masks. They required this committee to complete their evaluation by 30 June 2022, and to publish a report before the end of September.

The committee finally convened on 22 April via video conference, delayed apparently because communicating with Karl Lauterbach’s ministry has been a huge problem. In the hours after that meeting, the committee chair notified its members that he had finally heard from Lauterbach. The health minister had raised the idea of extending the evaluation deadline to 31 December, and suggested that the committee mandate might end up being redefined.

As Welt explains, Christian Drosten had previously voiced staunch opposition to the project of investigating the efficacy of containment measures:

…[A]n internal virtual meeting in March, Charité virologist Christian Drosten argued against individually evaluating the containment measures. In a nine-minute speech, he said there was too little data, it was too early for such a study, and one could end up “in hot water,” according to WELT information. In view of this intervention from Drosten, who has been one of the most important advisers to political decision-makers since the start of the pandemic, the committee turned to the Ministry of Health for further instructions.

Nothing came of that meeting; the committee had a mandate from the Bundestag, the legal force of which does not rest upon Drosten’s feelings.

When Welt asked the health ministry to comment on the latest delays, a Lauterbach spokesman said the experts don’t have sufficient data, and that the ministry is in discussions with the Bundestag about how to handle this. He even denied that there would be any delay in the committee’s work, which is plainly a lie, because Welt has documents and off-the-record statements from committee members to the opposite effect. One such member even complained to their reporter that “It shows great disrespect to try to withdraw our mandate to evaluate containment measures after so many hours of work.”

We are asked to believe that containment measures have been super successful in the past, and that they remain an important tool for future waves. Lauterbach himself has promised the return of containment in the Fall, because he did not get his vaccine mandate. At the same time, nobody must be permitted to evaluate the efficacy of these allegedly crucial measures. We can’t be allowed to know which ones work and which ones don’t. That would be dangerous somehow, even for an expert committee. In fact it would be so dangerous, that Christian Drosten, the public face of mass containment in Germany, felt compelled to deliver a secret lecture warning against any such evaluative process.

What’s really galling about all this, isn’t that they’re lying, but that they’re terrible at it.

(These fuckers are all going to jail! Now do Fauci and Gates)

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/christian-drosten-karl-lauterbach?s=r

https://twitter.com/MartinKulldorff/status/1519238672306126849?s=20&t=x1msuYxisDykuETYy6VzMw

Max Abrahms

@MaxAbrahms

·

16h

It would be nice if our highest-ranking military officer wasn’t such a dimwit.kek and true

12:46 AM · Apr 27, 2022·Twitter for iPhone

https://twitter.com/MaxAbrahms/status/1519176045752197126?s=20&t=x1msuYxisDykuETYy6VzMw