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"Shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest?"

-- Mark Twain

News and Opinion

US 'Imperial Anxieties' Mount Over China-Brokered Iran-Saudi Arabia Diplomatic Deal

While advocates of peace and a multipolar world order welcomed Friday's China-brokered agreement reestablishing diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, U.S. press, pundits, and politicians expressed what one observer called "imperial anxieties" over the deal and growing Chinese influence in a region dominated by the United States for decades.

The deal struck between the two countries—which are fighting a proxy war in Yemen—to normalize relations after seven years of severance was hailed by Wang Yi, China's top diplomat, as "a victory of dialogue and peace."

The three nations said in a joint statement that the agreement is an "affirmation of the respect for the sovereignty of states and non-interference in internal affairs."

Iran and Saudi Arabia "also expressed their appreciation and gratitude to the leadership and government of the People's Republic of China for hosting and sponsoring the talks, and the efforts it placed towards its success," the statement said.

United Nations spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric thanked China for its role in the deal, asserting in a statement that "good neighborly relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia are essential for the stability of the Gulf region."

“Saudi and Iranian officials announced the agreement after talks hosted this week in China” https://t.co/0yWdZkLaSd

shows where the future of diplomacy is at, the US encourages war while China pushes the opposite

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) March 10, 2023

Amy Hawthorne, deputy director for research at the Project on Middle East Democracy, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group, told The New York Times that "China's prestigious accomplishment vaults it into a new league diplomatically and outshines anything the U.S. has been able to achieve in the region since [President Joe] Biden came to office."

Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., called the deal a sign of "a battle of narratives for the future of the international order."

CNN's Tamara Qiblawi called the agreement "the start of a new era, with China front and center."

Meanwhile, Ahmed Aboudouh, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, another D.C. think tank, wrote that "China just left the U.S. with a bloody nose in the Gulf."

At the Carnegie Endowment, yet another think tank located in the nation's capital, senior fellow Aaron David Miller tweeted that the deal "boosts Beijing and legitimizes Tehran. It's a middle finger to Biden and a practical calculation of Saudi interests"

Some observers compared U.S. and Chinese policies and actions in the Middle East.

"The U.S. is supporting one side and suppressing the other, while China is trying to make both parties move closer," Wu Xinbo, dean of international studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, told the Times. "It is a different diplomatic paradigm."

Murtaza Hussein, a reporter for The Intercept, tweeted that the fact that the agreement "was mediated by China as a trusted outside party shows shortcomings of belligerent U.S. approach to the region."

While cautiously welcoming the agreement, Biden administration officials expressed skepticism that Iran would live up to its end of the bargain.

"This is not a regime that typically does honor its word, so we hope that they do," White House National Security Council Strategic Coordinator John Kirby told reporters on Friday—apparently without any sense of irony over the fact that the United States unilaterally abrogated the Iran nuclear deal during the Trump administration.

Kirby added that the Biden administration would "like to see this war in Yemen end," but he did not acknowledge U.S. support for the Saudi-led intervention in a civil war that's directly or indirectly killed nearly 400,000 people since 2014, according to United Nations humanitarian officials.

U.S relations with Saudi Arabia have been strained during the tenure of President Joe Biden. While Biden—who once vowed to make the repressive kingdom a "pariah" over the gruesome murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi—has been willing to tolerate Saudi human rights abuses and war crimes, the president has expressed anger and frustration over the monarchy's decision to reduce oil production amid soaring U.S. gasoline prices and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Nevertheless, the Biden administration is currently trying to broker a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel following the Trump administration's mediation of the Abraham Accords, a series of diplomatic normalization agreements between Israel and erstwhile enemies the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

The United States, which played a key role in overthrowing Iran's progressive government in a 1953 coup, has not had diplomatic relations with Tehran since shortly after the current Islamist regime overthrew the U.S.-backed monarchy that ruled with a brutal hand for 25 years following the coup.

Jonathan Panikoff, director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative in the Middle East Programs for the Atlantic Council, urged the U.S. to maintain friendly relations with brutal dictatorships in the region in order to prevent Chinese hegemony there.

Panikoff wrote in an Atlantic Council analysis:

We may now be seeing the emergence of China's political role in the region and it should be a warning to U.S. policymakers: Leave the Middle East and abandon ties with sometimes frustrating, even barbarous, but long-standing allies, and you'll simply be leaving a vacuum for China to fill. And make no mistake, a China-dominated Middle East would fundamentally undermine U.S. commercial, energy, and national security.

Other observers also worried about China's rising power in the Middle East and beyond.

New York Times China correspondent David Pierson wrote Saturday that China's role in the Iran-Saudi Arabia rapprochement shows Chinese President Xi Jinping's "ambition of offering an alternative to a U.S.-led world order."

According to Pierson:

The vision Mr. Xi has laid out is one that wrests power from Washington in favor of multilateralism and so-called noninterference, a word that China uses to argue that nations should not meddle in each other's internal affairs, by criticizing human rights abuses, for example.

The Saudi-Iran agreement reflects this vision. China's engagement in the region has for years been rooted in delivering mutual economic benefits and shunning Western ideals of liberalism that have complicated Washington’s ability to expand its presence in the Gulf.

Pierson noted Xi's Global Security Initiative, which seeks to promote "peaceful coexistence" in a multipolar world that eschews "unilateralism, bloc confrontation, and hegemonism" like U.S. invasions and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

"Some analysts say the initiative is essentially a bid to advance Chinese interests by displacing Washington as the world's policeman," wrote Pierson. "The plan calls for respect of countries' 'indivisible security,' a Soviet term used to argue against U.S.-led alliances on China's periphery."

The U.S. has attacked, invaded, or occupied more than 20 countries since 1950. During that same period, China has invaded two countries—India and Vietnam.

New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker also published an article Saturday about how the "China-brokered deal upends Mideast diplomacy and challenges [the] U.S."

"The Americans, who have been the central actors in the Middle East for the past three-quarters of a century, almost always the ones in the room where it happened, now find themselves on the sidelines during a moment of significant change," fretted Baker. "The Chinese, who for years played only a secondary role in the region, have suddenly transformed themselves into the new power player."

Some experts asserted that more peace in the Middle East would be a good thing, no matter who brokers it.

"While many in Washington will view China's emerging role as mediator in the Middle East as a threat, the reality is that a more stable Middle East where the Iranians and Saudis aren't at each other's throats also benefits the United States," tweeted Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

"Unfortunately, the U.S. has adopted an approach to the region that has disabled it from becoming a credible mediator," he lamented. "Too often, Washington takes sides in conflicts and becomes a co-belligerent—as in Yemen—which then reduces its ability to play the role of peacemaker."

"Washington should avoid a scenario where regional players view America as an entrenched warmaker and China as a flexible peacemaker," Parsi cautioned.

China’s Middle East Deal: Iran & Saudi Arabia Reestablish Relations as U.S. Watches from Sidelines

Biden’s Iran policy makes no sense

Speaking at an event in Israel last week, U.S. ambassador to Israel Tom Nides made news again when he appeared to rule out negotiations with Iran as long as its government continued its crackdown against protesters and persisted in its delivery of military assistance to Russia.

As Washington Institute for Near East Policy senior fellow Henry Rome reported, Nides said, “Make no mistake, we’d like a diplomatic resolution. But as long as the Iranians are doing what they are doing — not only to their people in Iran but then producing drone technology and shipping it to Russia to go against Ukraine — we can’t have negotiations during those periods of time.”

If the ambassador’s comments reflect the administration’s position, and presumably they do, this means that the U.S. has absolutely written off negotiating with Iran for the foreseeable future. By tying negotiations to other issues that have nothing to do with the nuclear program, the U.S. is setting a virtually impossible standard for the resumption of negotiations. There will always be conduct by other states that our government finds unacceptable. If that requires refusing to negotiate on other issues, there is no real chance for making diplomatic progress on anything. ...

Nides’ comments on negotiations came just moments after he once again reassured the audience in Israel that the U.S. would not “tie Israel’s hands” with regard to Iran and would have “Israel’s back.” The ambassador reiterated practically unconditional backing for whatever action the Israeli government chooses to do, and then in the next breath pronounced negotiations with Iran dead and set unrealistic conditions for their revival. ...

If Washington can’t find a way to balance constructive diplomatic engagement on specific issues with criticism and opposition on others, it bodes ill for the ability of our government to manage relations with multiple adversarial states in the coming years. The Biden administration maintains that competition with China in some areas does not rule out cooperation in others, but in practice the former tends to crowd out the latter. If the U.S. can’t multitask in its dealings with Iran, what chance does it have of doing it with China?

Imperial Narrative Managers Always Try To Make Peace Seem Unnatural

I’ve been ranting all week about the shocking war-with-China propaganda escalation in Australian mainstream media, and I feel like I could easily scream about it for another month without running out of vitriol for the disgusting freaks who are pushing this filth into the consciousness of my countrymen. One really really can’t say enough unkind things about people who are openly trying to pave the way toward an Atomic Age world war; in a remotely sane world such monsters would be driven from human civilization and die cold and alone in the wilderness with nothing but their bloodlust to keep them company.

One of the most obnoxious things said during this latest propaganda push appeared in the joint statement provided by the five “experts” (read: empire-funded China hawks) recruited by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age to share their obscenely hawkish opinions in an official-looking media presentation. This paragraph has been rattling around in my head since I first read it:

“Australia must prepare itself. Most important of all is a psychological shift. Urgency must replace complacency. The recent decades of tranquillity were not the norm in human affairs but an aberration. Australia’s holiday from history is over. Australians should not feel afraid but be alert to the threats we face, the tough decisions we must make and know that they have agency. This mobilisation of mindset is the essential prerequisite to any successful confrontation of China.”

Do you see what they’re doing there? These professional China hawks are explicitly trying to frame peace as a strange “aberration”, and war as the status quo norm. They’re saying Australians require a “psychological shift” and a “mobilisation of mindset” from thinking peace is normal and healthy to thinking war is normal and healthy.

Returning to Australia is a shock. The elite salivates for a deeply racist war against China. Australia has no enemies but is led and influenced by little Americans and echoes of spooks who fill the papers with a deranged, almost satirical hysteria. Sad.https://t.co/s723vk8Zv8

— John Pilger (@johnpilger) March 9, 2023

Which is of course ass-backwards and shit-eating insane. Every normal, healthy person regards peace as the default position and violence as a rare and alarming aberration which must be avoided whenever possible.

We know this is true from our normal human experience of our own personal lives. None of us spend the majority of our time getting into fist fights, for example; anyone who spends most of their waking life physically assaulting people has probably been locked up a long time ago. If you have ever been in a fist fight you will recall that it was experienced as a rare and alarming occurrence, and everything in your body was screaming at you that this was a freakish and unnatural thing which must end as quickly as possible the entire time. In healthy people violence is experienced as abnormal, and its absence is experienced as normal.

This normal, baseline position is what imperial narrative managers spend their time trying to “psychologically shift” everyone away from, propagandizing us instead into accepting continuous conflict and danger as the norm. Such a shift is beneficial to the empire, to war profiteers, and to professional war propagandists, and is entirely destructive to everyone else. It causes us to accept material conditions which directly harm our own interests, and it makes us crazy and neurotic as a civilization.

You see it all the time though, like whenever there’s a push to withdraw imperial troops from some part of the Middle East they’ve been in for years, or the slightest discussion of maybe not raising the military budget this year, or skepticism that pouring weapons into a violence-ravaged part of the world is the wisest and most helpful thing to do.

Aww, did somebody get addicted to fueling endless war and division in the middle east? https://t.co/Abq31LLp0x pic.twitter.com/iJrlRasyec

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 11, 2023

Any time we see the slightest beginnings of the tiniest movement toward stepping away from the path of nonstop warmongering and militarism, pundits and politicians begin bleating words like “isolationism” and “appeasement” in an attempt to make calls for de-escalation, demilitarization, diplomacy and detente look freakish and abnormal in contrast to the sane, responsible status quo of hurtling toward nuclear armageddon at full tilt.

Their job is to abnormalize peace and normalize war, which means our job as healthy human beings is to do the exact opposite. We must help everyone understand the horrors of war and the unfathomable nightmares that can be unleashed by reckless brinkmanship, and help people to understand that peace is what’s healthy and to imagine a future where it is the norm.

The bad news is that we are pushing against a narrative-manufacturing apparatus that is backed by the might of a globe-spanning empire. The good news is that our vision is the one that’s based on truth, and deep down everyone can sense it. All we need to do to get people viewing peace as normal and war as abnormal is to remind people of what they already know inside.

US Director of National Intelligence confirms end of “strategic ambiguity” over Taiwan

Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee Thursday, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines confirmed that US President Joe Biden was stating the official position of the US government last year when he pledged to send US troops to war against China if it invaded Taiwan. During the hearing, Utah Republican Representative Chris Stewart said, “In the past, the President has said pretty clearly that we would respond with military action if China were to invade Taiwan. And then shortly after that the administration kind of walked back those comments, but it didn’t occur just once, it occurred several times.”

He asked Haines, “has there been a change in the administration’s policy regarding ambiguity?”

Haynes replied, “you are right in recognizing the president’s comments on this issue,” adding, “In this particular case, I think it is clear to the Chinese what our position is based on the president’s comments.”

On four separate occasions, US President Joe Biden said that the United States would go to war with China over Taiwan. In September, Biden was asked during an interview, “so unlike Ukraine, US forces, US men and women, would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion?” Biden replied, “yes.” After this and each of the previous statements, the White House issued a clarification, saying that Biden’s remarks did not reflect the official policy of the United States.

Asked to clarify Biden’s remarks in September, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that Biden was answering a “hypothetical” question, adding, “When the President of the United States wants to announce a policy change, he will do so. He has not done so.”

Haines’ statement makes clear that Biden’s remarks were in fact the official policy of the United States, and the policy of “strategic ambiguity” has been ended. Previously, the US was deliberately ambiguous as to whether it would join Taiwan in a war with China—a policy that sought to rein in Taipei as well as Beijing.

‘China is not our enemy’: US House protesters reflect rising impatience with bipartisan rhetoric

Viewers tuning in to last week’s carefully choreographed hearing of the US select committee on the Chinese Communist Party got a jolt when two protesters interrupted an almost unbroken stream of tough-on-Beijing rhetoric, a disruption all the more striking given recent bipartisan cooperation on China in Washington.

The highly anticipated evening event convened by the newly formed House panel, itself a reflection of alarm within the American government about China’s rise, was but one of about a dozen congressional hearings this year devoted wholly or in large part to the threat posed by Beijing.

Less than half an hour after committee chair Mike Gallagher framed the US struggle with China as “existential”, a woman dressed in pink held up a sign bearing the words “China is not our enemy”.

“I hate to interrupt,” she interjected as star witness and former US national security adviser Lieutenant General HR McMaster spoke. Most of her words were drowned out by McMaster’s remarks, but phrases like “we need cooperation, not competition” made it through to the prime-time audience.

Seconds after law enforcement ushered her out of the room, a man stood up holding a “Stop Asian hate” sign. “This committee is about sabre-rattling,” the protester declared. “It’s not about peace. We need cooperation.”

As the second protester was led away, McMaster said the outbursts showed “the effect that the United Front Work Department has had”, referring to the Chinese Communist Party group responsible for liaising with non-party entities. They signalled a “curriculum of self-loathing”, he stated, reinforcing “the idea that America is the problem in the world and only if America disengages, or in this case, becomes more passive, things will get better”.

Russia Controls Bakhmut Roads Closes on Avdeevka; Ukraine HQ Destroyed, China Appoints Defence Chief

Worth a click and a full read. Bluesters will know in their bones everything Hedges says, but he constructs it well.

Chris Hedges: Ukraine’s Death by Proxy

There are many ways for a state to project power and weaken adversaries, but proxy wars are one of the most cynical. Proxy wars devour the countries they purport to defend. They entice nations or insurgents to fight for geopolitical goals that are ultimately not in their interest. The war in Ukraine has little to do with Ukrainian freedom and a lot to do with degrading the Russian military and weakening Vladimir Putin’s grip on power. And when Ukraine looks headed for defeat, or the war reaches a stalemate, Ukraine will be sacrificed like many other states, in what one of the founding members of the CIA, Miles Copeland Jr., referred to as the “Game of Nations” and “the amorality of power politics.” ...

Should Russia prevail in Ukraine, should Putin not be removed from power, the U.S. will have not only cemented into place a potent alliance between Russia and China, but ensured an antagonism with Russia that will come back to haunt us. The flood of billions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine, the use of U.S. intelligence to kill Russian generals and sink the battleship Moskva, the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines and the more than 2,500 U.S. sanctions targeting Russia, will not be forgotten by Moscow. ...

Those supported in proxy wars, including the Ukrainians, often have little chance of victory. Sophisticated weapons such as the M1 Abrams tanks are largely useless if those operating them have not spent months and years being trained. Prior to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, the Soviet bloc provided Palestinian fighters with heavy weapons, including tanks, anti-aircraft missiles and artillery. The lack of training made those weapons ineffective against Israeli air power, artillery and mechanized units.

The U.S. knows time is running out for Ukraine. It knows that high-tech weapons will not be mastered in time to blunt a sustained Russian offensive. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned in January that Ukraine has “a window of opportunity here, between now and the spring.” “That’s not a long time,” he added.

Victory, however, is not the point. The point is maximum destruction. Even if Ukraine is forced in defeat to negotiate with Russia and concede territory for peace, as well as accept status as a neutral nation, Washington will have achieved its primary goal of weakening Russia’s military capacity and isolating Putin from Europe. ...

The conclusion of proxy wars usually sees the nation or group fighting on behalf of the sponsor state betrayed. In 1972, the Nixon administration provided millions of dollars in weapons and ammunition to Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq to weaken the Iraqi government, which at the time was seen as too close to the Soviet Union. No one, least of all the U.S. and Iran, which delivered the weapons to Kurdish fighters, wanted the Kurds to create a state of their own. Iraq and Iran signed the 1975 Algiers Agreement in which the two countries settled disputes along their common border. The agreement also ended military support for the Kurds. The Iraqi military soon launched a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Iraq. Thousands of Kurds, including women and children, were “disappeared” or killed. Kurdish villages were dynamited into rubble. The desperate plight of the Kurds was ignored, for, as Henry Kissinger said at the time, “covert action should not be confused with missionary work.” ...

Betrayal is the closing act in nearly all proxy wars. ...

There will come a time when the Ukrainians, like the Kurds, will become expendable. They will disappear, as many others before them have, from our national discourse and our consciousness. They will nurse for generations their betrayal and suffering. The American empire will move on to use others, perhaps the “heroic” people of Taiwan, to further its futile quest for global hegemony. China is the big prize for our Dr. Strangeloves. They will pile up even more corpses and flirt with nuclear war to curtail China’s growing economic and military power. This is an old and predictable game. It leaves in its wake nations in ruins and millions of people dead and displaced. It fuels the hubris and self-delusion of the mandarins in Washington who refuse to accept the emergence of a multipolar world. If left unchecked, this “game of nations” may get us all killed.

Worth a click and a full read:

‘Rigorous’ Maidan massacre exposé suppressed by top academic journal

The massacre by snipers of anti-government activists and police officers in Kiev’s Maidan Square in late February 2014 was a defining moment in the US-orchestrated overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government. The death of 70 protesters triggered an avalanche of international outrage that made President Viktor Yanukovych’s downfall a fait accompli. Yet today these killings remain unsolved.

Enter Ivan Katchanovski, a Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist at the University of Ottawa. For years, he marshaled overwhelming evidence demonstrating that the snipers were not affiliated with Yanukovych’s government, but pro-Maidan operatives firing from protester-occupied buildings.

Though Katchanovski’s groundbreaking has been studiously ignored by the mainstream media, a scrupulous study he presented on the slaughter in September 2015 and August 2021 and published in 2016 and in 2020 has been cited on over 100 occasions by scholars and experts. As a result of this paper and other pieces of research, he has among the world’s most-referenced political scientists specializing in Ukrainian matters.

In the final months of 2022, Katchanovski submitted a new investigation on the Maidan massacre to a prominent social sciences journal. Initially accepted with minor revisions after extensive peer review, the publication’s editor effusively praised the work in a lengthy private note. They said the paper was “exceptional in many ways,” and offered “solid” evidence in support of its conclusions. The reviewers concurred with this judgment.

However, the paper was not published, a decision Katchanovski firmly believes to have been “political.” He filed an appeal, but to no avail. ...

Katchanovski declined to name the journal in question, but described it as “top-tier” in the field of social sciences. He believes its refusal to publish his study is “extraordinary,” but nonetheless emblematic of a “far bigger problem in academic publishing and academia.”

“The editor who accepted my article only learned it would not be published from my tweets on the subject. This reversal was highly irregular and political. There is growing political censorship concerning Ukraine in academia, and also self-censorship,” Katchanovski told The Grayzone. “Many scholars are afraid to conduct evidence-based research that runs contrary to established Western narratives on Maidan, the Russia-Ukraine war, and other issues related to the conflicts in Ukraine Kiev following the 2014 coup.”

By contrast, the scholar said, those willing to “blatantly and uncritically parrot Western narratives,” even when their fables run “contrary to evidence,” are rewarded, and encounter no resistance to publishing their work. Katchanovski is well-positioned to comment on academic censorship related to Ukraine: three other journals that accepted his papers after successful “expert” peer-review processes also ultimately refused to publish.

FALSE FLAG? Germany IMMEDIATELY Dismisses NYT's Nord Stream Report Blaming 'Pro-Ukraine' Group

US approves Smotrich visa despite his calls for Palestinian town to be 'wiped out'

The US has approved the "diplomatic visa" request for far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich despite pressure from rights groups to deny him entry into the country, according to the Israeli minister's office.

Smotrich is set to visit Washington on Sunday and will speak at the Israel Bonds conference. Several outlets, including Axios, The Times of Israel, and Haaretz reported the approval of the visa, citing Smotrich's office.

A senior US official told Axios that during the discussions at the State Department, it was understood that there is a "very high bar" for denying a diplomatic visa for a minister of an American ally.

Earlier this month, he called for the Palestinian village of Huwwara to be "wiped out", comments that coincided with hundreds of Israeli settlers violently rampaging through the streets of Huwwara, killing one person, injuring hundreds of others, and burning dozens of cars. The settler riot, or what many are calling a pogrom, came after a shooting that killed two Israelis in the town of Huwwara earlier that day.

The US quickly condemned Smotrich's remarks. US State Department spokesman Ned Price said: “These comments were irresponsible. They were repugnant. They were disgusting”. A myriad of rights groups, ranging from Palestinian advocacy groups to pro-Israel organisations, called for the far-right minister to be denied entry into the US.

Macron’s pension reforms pass French senate vote

France’s senate has voted to approve a deeply unpopular reform to pensions, hours after demonstrators took to the streets again to oppose the cornerstone policy of Emmanuel Macron’s second presidential term.

Senators passed the reforms by 195 votes to 112, bringing the package another step closer to becoming law. A committee will hammer out a final draft, to be submitted to the senate and national assembly for a final vote.

“An important step was taken this evening with a broad vote on the pension reform text in the Senate,” the French prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, said after the vote, adding that she believed the government had a parliamentary majority to get the reforms passed into law.

Should Macron’s government fail to assemble the necessary majority, however, Borne could deploy a rarely used and highly controversial constitutional tool, known as article 49/3, to push the legislation through without a vote. ...

This week, Macron twice turned down urgent calls by unions to meet with him in a last-ditch attempt to get him to change his mind. The snub made unions “very angry”, said Philippe Martinez, boss of the hard-left CGT union. “When there are millions of people in the streets, when there are strikes and all we get from the other side is silence, people wonder: What more do we need to do to be heard?” he said, calling for a referendum on the pensions reform.

How The WEF Makes TOTAL CONTROL Appealing!

‘Global greedflation’: big firms ‘driving shopping bills to record highs’

Large corporations have fuelled inflation with price increases that go beyond rising costs of raw materials and wages, pushing shopping bills to record highs, according to an analysis of hundreds of company accounts.

Highlighting a trend dubbed “greedflation”, the research indicates that supermarkets, food manufacturers and shipping companies are among hundreds of major firms who have improved their profits and protected shareholder dividends, giving an extra lift to prices, while the cost of living crisis has meant workers face the biggest fall in living standards in a century.

Analysis of the top 350 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange by a team of researchers at Unite, the UK’s largest private sector trade union, showed that average profit margins – a company’s revenue above the cost of sales – rose from 5.7% in the first half of 2019 to 10.7% in the first half of 2022.

“This means the average profit margin of firms in the FTSE 350 jumped 89% in the first half of 2022 compared with the first half of 2019,” the report said.

Higher profits margins are the result of “tacit collusion” by large companies, adding to the prices of hundreds of goods and services that were already under pressure after the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the report said.

MASSIVE SVB Bailout Props Up ENTIRE Banking Sector

US rolls out emergency measures after Silicon Valley Bank collapse

US financial regulators rolled out emergency measures Sunday night to stem potential contagion from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. The measures include ensuring that depositors with the failed bank would have access to all their money on Monday morning.

Regulators announced the measure in a joint statement from the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) chair, Martin Gruenberg.

“Depositors will have access to all of their money starting Monday, March 13. No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer,” they said in a statement. The announcement came as Signature Bank was closed on Sunday by regulators, the second to fail in a week. Depositors in Signature would also be made whole, the statement said.

“Rationally, this should be enough to stop any contagion from spreading and taking down more banks, which can happen in the blink of an eye in the digital age,” said Capital Economics analyst Paul Ashworth. “But contagion has always been more about irrational fear, so we would stress that there is no guarantee this will work.”

The interventions came after Yellen, said on Sunday there would be no bailout for Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed this week, raising fears of a crisis, but also said the Biden administration was working with regulators to help depositors hit by the fall of SVB.

Biden DENIES That He's Giving Silicon Valley Bank A BAILOUT; Matt Stoller: Yes, It's A Bailout

Worth a click and a full read:

SVB Chief Pressed Lawmakers To Weaken Bank Risk Regs

Eight years before the second-largest bank failure in American history occurred this week, the bank’s president personally pressed Congress to reduce scrutiny of his financial institution, citing the “low risk profile of our activities and business model,” according to federal records reviewed by The Lever.

Three years later — after the bank spent more than half a million dollars on federal lobbying — lawmakers obliged.

On Friday, California regulators shut down the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a top lender to venture capital firms and tech startups, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation took it over, following a bank run by its customers. The bank reportedly did not have a chief risk officer in the months leading up to the collapse, while more than 90 percent of its deposits were not insured.

In 2015, SVB President Greg Becker submitted a statement to a Senate panel pushing legislators to exempt more banks — including his own — from new regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Despite warnings from some senators, Becker’s lobbying effort was ultimately successful.

Touting “SVB’s deep understanding of the markets it serves, our strong risk management practices,” Becker argued that his bank would soon reach $50 billion in assets, which under the law would trigger “enhanced prudential standards,” including more stringent regulations, stress tests, and capital requirements for his and other similarly sized banks.

Becker insisted that $250 billion was a more appropriate threshold. ...

A press release Friday from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation noted that as of December 2022, SVB had $209 billion in assets under management — keeping it below the $250 billion threshold for which the bank had lobbied.

SVB is the biggest bank to collapse since Washington Mutual failed in 2008 during the financial crisis, and the second-biggest bank failure in U.S. history.

SVB’s Lobby Groups Fought Proposal To Bolster Deposit Insurance

In the months before Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, the bank’s lobbying groups fought a proposal requiring financial institutions to increase payments into the Deposit Insurance Fund that protects depositors from bank failures, according to federal records reviewed by The Lever.

As lawmakers now face calls to expand deposit insurance to stave off a wider bank run, the battle shows why that insurance has remained limited — and why any new initiative to require banks to pay for more such insurance could face obstacles in Washington. Put simply: Powerful banking interests and their allies in Congress have made clear they oppose measures that would force banks to pay higher premiums in order to fund depositors’ insurance.

On Sunday, federal regulators announced an emergency action that “fully protects all depositors” at the bank, and they pledged that “any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks.”

Last year, bank lobbying groups mobilized against the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) proposal to raise banks’ insurance premiums to shore up that deposit fund’s reserves, which had fallen below the minimum required by law. Lobbying groups representing Silicon Valley Bank, or SVB, argued that risk of bank failures is low and insisted that requiring banks to pay more into the fund would harm financial institutions’ bottom lines.

East Palestine Toxic Train Crash Shows Plastics Industry Toll on Planet

‘Poster child for nimbyism’: California sues city over lack of affordable housing

California officials are suing Huntington Beach, a wealthy coastal city lambasted by the state’s governor as the “poster child for nimbyism”, in an attempt to force it to build more affordable housing. Defiant Huntington Beach officials have filed their own lawsuit in response, pledging to fight any attempt by the state to “urbanize” their affluent, majority-white community. ...

Huntington Beach is required by state law to approve more affordable housing and to build more than 13,000 new homes over the next eight years, state officials said. Instead, officials accused the Huntington Beach city council of “unlawful and willful attempts to flout state housing law”, including considering a new local ordinance that would attempt to exempt the city from certain state housing requirements.

The lawsuit filed by the state attorney general, Rob Bonta, in Orange county superior court, asks a judge to order the city to comply with the law and to impose a fine. A state law, passed in 2019, says a state judge can impose fines starting at $10,000 per month for cities that refuse to comply. The law also says the court can appoint someone “with all the powers necessary” to force the city into compliance.

Hours later, city officials announced their own lawsuit, asking a federal judge to block the state from forcing them to build a wave of new homes they said would transform their suburban community. “Their goal is to urbanize quiet, private property-owning communities,” Huntington Beach mayor Tony Strickland said at a news conference announcing the city’s lawsuit, the Los Angeles Times reported. The mayor claimed that “neither the state or Gavin Newsom are serious about actually producing more housing”.

Jim Jordan HUMILIATES Trust Fund Dem In Twitter Files Hearing

McCarthy: January 6 tapes to be ‘slowly’ rolled out to networks besides Fox News

The Republican speaker of the US House, Kevin McCarthy, said on Sunday he would “slowly roll out” to networks other than Fox News more than 40,000 hours of security footage from the January 6 attack on Congress.

“We will slowly roll out to every individual news agency,” McCarthy told Sunday Morning Futures, a show broadcast by Fox News. “They can come see the tapes as well. Let everyone see them to bring their own judgment.”

McCarthy has only let Fox News see the tapes so far, giving access to the primetime host Tucker Carlson.

The move was blasted by Democrats in Congress and Republican critics of Donald Trump – who incited the Capitol attack in an attempt to overturn his election defeat – even before Carlson showed his first excerpts this week.

Carlson claimed the tapes showed “mostly peaceful chaos”, Trump supporters acting like tourists, and that many of more than 1,000 people arrested, some convicted of crimes including seditious conspiracy, had been unjustly targeted.

Climate & Indigenous Activists Decry Reports Biden Will Approve Willow Oil Drilling Arctic Project

Biden to protect 16m acres in Alaska and Arctic Ocean from oil drilling

Joe Biden will prevent or limit oil drilling in 16m acres in Alaska and the Arctic Ocean, an administration official said on Sunday. The announcement, which was expected formally as soon as Sunday evening, came as regulators prepare to announce a final decision on the Willow project, a controversial oil drilling plan pushed by ConocoPhillips. ...

The plan has two parts. First, the official said, Biden will bar drilling in nearly 3m acres of the Arctic Ocean, closing off the rest of its federal waters from oil exploration.

Second, the administration will develop new rules for more than 13m acres in a vast swath of land known as the National Petroleum Reserve – Alaska. The official said the area includes the Teshekpuk Lake, Utukok Uplands, Colville River, Kasegaluk Lagoon and Peard Bay special areas.

Scientists warn of ‘phosphogeddon’ as critical fertiliser shortages loom

Our planet faces “phosphogeddon”, scientists have warned. They fear our misuse of phosphorus could lead to deadly shortages of fertilisers that would disrupt global food production. At the same time, phosphate fertiliser washed from fields – together with sewage inputs into rivers, lakes and seas – is giving rise to widespread algal blooms and creating aquatic dead zones that threaten fish stocks.

In addition, overuse of the element is increasing releases of methane across the planet, adding to global heating and the climate crisis caused by carbon emissions, researchers have warned. “We have reached a critical turning point,” said Prof Phil Haygarth of Lancaster University. “We might be able to turn back but we have really got to pull ourselves together and be an awful lot smarter in the way we use phosphorus. If we don’t, we face a calamity that we have termed ‘phosphogeddon’.” ...

The element’s global importance lies in its use to help crop growth. About 50m tonnes of phosphate fertiliser are sold around the world every year, and these supplies play a crucial role in feeding the planet’s 8 billion inhabitants.

However, significant deposits of phosphorus are found in only a few countries: Morocco and western Sahara have the largest amount, China the second biggest deposit and Algeria the third. In contrast, reserves in the US are down to 1% of previous levels, while Britain has always had to rely on imports. “Traditional rock phosphate reserves are relatively rare and have become depleted in line with their extraction for fertiliser production,” added Prof Penny Johnes of Bristol University.

This growing strain on stocks has raised fears the world will reach “peak phosphorus” in a few years. Supplies will then decline, leaving many nations struggling to obtain enough to feed their people. The prospect concerns many analysts, who worry that a few cartels could soon control most of the world’s supplies and leave the west highly vulnerable to soaring prices.

Another ‘atmospheric river’ threatens to hit California as state reels from storms

Another “atmospheric river” storm was expected to hit California on Monday, after thousands of residents were left without power following a weekend of heavy rainfall, powerful floods and deadly destruction. ...

According to the US National Weather Service (NWS), another atmospheric river is set to sweep across California on Monday, a storm expected to produce “very heavy rainfall”, particularly for northern and central parts of the state.

Heavy mountain snowfall and strong winds are also expected, with the worst of the conditions likely “occurring late during the day Monday, continuing through the day on Tuesday when the heaviest rainfall amounts are likely”.

“Creeks and streams may rise out of their banks,” the NWS said in a flash flood watch warning on Sunday, adding: “Extensive street flooding and flooding of creeks and rivers is likely.”

As the state reeled from a weekend of destruction and flooding, more than 12,700 Californians were without electricity as of noon on Sunday, according to PowerOutage.com. The majority were customers of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. The outages were a result of storms that largely struck the northern and central parts of the state.

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A Little Night Music

Texas Alexander - Frisco Train Blues

Texas Alexander - Lonesome Blues

Texas Alexander - Range In My Kitchen Blues

Texas Alexander acc. by Lonnie Johnson & Eddie Lang - Boe Hog Blues

Alger "Texas" Alexander & 'Little Hat' Jones - Someday, Baby, Your Troubles Is Gonna Be Like Mine

Texas Alexander - Blue Devil Blues

Texas Alexander - Easy Rider Blues

Texas Alexander - Levee Camp Moan Blues

Alger "Texas" Alexander-The Risin' Sun

Texas Alexander & Lonnie Johnson - Corn Bread Blues