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"The nation no longer stands for the enlightenment tradition, but rather for military-political hegemony and the total commodification of life."

-- Morris Berman

News and Opinion

Marco Rubio Accidentally Makes A Great Argument Against US Dollar Hegemony

Some empire managers are so brash about wanting to rule the world that they’ll occasionally voice their position so directly it sounds like an anti-imperialist said it.

We saw just such an instance last Wednesday during a conversation between empire propagandist Sean Hannity and warmongering senator Marco Rubio on Fox News. So frenzied was Rubio in his vitriol about the rise of China on the world stage that he accidentally wound up providing a very good argument against the hegemony of the US dollar.

Rubio began with a rant about how the US is in a “conflict” with China in response to a question from Hannity about whether Xi Jinping is preparing for war with America.

“The bottom line is we’re in a conflict, and I think we have to start talking about it that way,” Rubio said. “I was very young, obviously, at the end of the Cold War, but it’s been about 30 years since there was another superpower on the earth that was in conflict with the United States. We are back in that place. We need to stop pretending like that’s not the case now.”

Hannity repeated the soundbyte he’s been pushing for the last few weeks saying that China, Russia and Iran are a “new Axis of Evil,” then Rubio made a very revealing comment about a recent deal that was struck between China and Brazil.

“Just today, Brazil, the largest country in the Western Hemisphere, cut a trade deal with China,” said Rubio. “They’re going to, from now on, do trade in their own currencies, get right around the dollar. They’re creating a secondary economy in the world totally independent of the United States. We won’t have to talk about sanctions in five years, because there’ll be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.”

Rubio is not the first US imperialist we’ve seen expressing concern about the US dollar losing its position as the dominant currency of the world, not just with regard to China and Brazil but between China and Russia, between China and Saudi Arabia, between China and India, and between India and Russia.

“The dollar is America’s superpower,” Fareed Zakaria writes for The Washington Post. “It gives Washington unrivaled economic and political muscle. The United States can slap sanctions on countries unilaterally, freezing them out of large parts of the world economy. And when Washington spends freely, it can be certain that its debt, usually in the form of T-bills, will be bought up by the rest of the world.”

“Now an increasing number of nations are eager to find alternative financial systems to insulate themselves from Washington’s willingness to use sanctions as political leverage,” writes Jamie Seidel for the Murdoch-owned News.com.au, quoting an Australian Strategic Policy Institute think tanker as saying, “Chinese authorities were shocked by the seizure of the Russian central bank’s foreign exchange reserves following the invasion of Ukraine. In the event of a Sino-American conflict, Chinese assets would similarly be vulnerable.”

The other day Pentagon insider and DC swamp monster Elbridge Colby spotlighted a concern on Twitter that the US might not be able to finance a war with China if the US dollar loses its status as the world’s reserve currency.

https://t.co/HETAVilL2V

— Elbridge Colby (@ElbridgeColby) March 27, 2023

The US has engaged in a tremendous amount of manipulation to secure the dollar’s position as the global reserve currency and all the power that comes with it, and has used it to fund a war machine of unprecedented might and to inflict starvation sanctions on disobedient nations around the world. It is a weapon, and US imperialists are bemoaning the looming loss of that weapon because they want to use it on many more people for the advancement of the interests of the empire.

Economic sanctions are somehow the only form of warfare where it’s considered acceptable to deliberately target civilian populations with deadly force, and the US empire makes liberal use of them. Starvation sanctions always hurt the weakest and most vulnerable members of a population by depriving them of access to medicine and adequate nutrition, and future generations (if there are future generations) will judge harshly those who used them.

It seems unlikely to me that the emergence of a multipolar world will in and of itself produce any kind of wonderful utopia, and as Professor Richard Wolff explains the dollar’s decline could potentially give rise to a lot of economic chaos and suffering. But at the very least the fall of US dollar hegemony would deprive one group of psychopaths a powerful weapon they should never have had, and could even end up impeding the empire’s ability to ramp up for a global conflict between major powers — a conflict which must never occur.

In any case humanity cannot continue along the trajectory it has been on, and any divergence from that trajectory opens up the possibility of real healthy change. Here’s hoping Marco Rubio is given a lot more to be upset about in the coming years.

Finland to join Nato on Tuesday as Russia sounds border warning

Russia has said it will bolster its defences near its 1,300km border with Finland after the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, announced that the Nordic country would formally join the transatlantic defence alliance on Tuesday.

The accession marks the end of an accelerated process that began last May, when Finland and neighbouring Sweden abandoned decades of military nonalignment to seek security as Nato members after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Turkey last week became the last of the alliance’s 30 member states to ratify Finland’s application, but Turkey and Hungary continue to hold up Sweden’s bid. Stockholm said last week it was not sure it would join in time for a planned Nato summit in July. ...

In Moscow, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Alexander Grushko, responded to the news of Finland’s accession by saying Russia would increase its forces in its west and northwestern regions if necessary.

If the “forces and resources of other Nato members are deployed in Finland, we will take additional steps to reliably ensure Russia’s military security” by “strengthening our military potential in the west and in the northwest”, Grushko said.

Finland’s NATO membership prepares major escalation of war against Russia

On Friday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced that Finland would become the 31st member of the US-led NATO military alliance within days, following the passage of a ratification vote by Turkey, the last member of NATO required to approve the proposal. Stoltenberg boasted that it was “the fastest ratification process in NATO’s modern history” and that it will happen “within days.” The rapidity of Finland’s accession is not an accident. It is closely tied to US plans for a spring offensive in Ukraine, which will be accompanied by a major military buildup on Russia’s border.

The United States, Germany and other NATO members are surging tanks, armored vehicles and thousands of Ukrainian troops trained in NATO countries into the conflict, even as they make plans to deploy tens of thousands of NATO troops near the Russian border. Five NATO states currently border Russia: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Norway. NATO’s border will effectively be doubled once Finland joins. The country has the largest land border with Russia of any state in Europe, at 830 miles.

The Finnish border is only 100 miles from St. Petersburg, one of the most important economic and political centers in Russia. Finland controls vital sea lanes of communication used by Russia, and it plays a major role in the scramble for domination of the Baltic Sea and the Arctic. NATO’s expanded land border with Russia is being massively militarized. On March 18, Politico reported, “In the coming months, the alliance will accelerate efforts to stockpile equipment along the alliance’s eastern edge and designate tens of thousands of forces that can rush to allies’ aid on short notice.”

NATO’s “eastern flank” increasingly resembles the battle lines of the Eastern front in the Second World War, which stretched from Finland to Ukraine. The move to incorporate Finland into the NATO alliance has enormous historical significance, as the country was a key ally of Nazi Germany during the Second World War and played a critical role in the war of extermination against the Soviet Union, including the siege of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg.

The move to further expand NATO also undercut all the claims promoted by the Biden administration and the media of an “unprovoked war.” According to the White House’s well-worn narrative, the war in Ukraine is a “war of choice” launched by a single man in February 2022. Putin started the war, and only Putin can end it—by withdrawing Russian troops to where they were last year, the White House endlessly repeats. But while the conflict between the US/NATO and Russia erupted over the Ukrainian border, it is in fact the outcome of a decades-long drive by US imperialism to encircle, weaken and ultimately carve up and dismantle Russia, as part of the preparation for conflict with China.

Russia Controls 85% Bakhmut, Missile Strikes, Rumours Kiev Counterattack, MSM Ukraine Morale Falling

Russian police arrest woman over bombing that killed pro-war blogger

Russian police have arrested a woman suspected of delivering a bomb that killed a prominent pro-war Russian military blogger in a blast in a cafe in central St Petersburg on Sunday, as authorities blamed Ukraine for the attack.

Vladlen Tatarsky, whose real name was Maxim Fomin, was killed by a bomb blast as he was hosting a discussion with other pro-war commentators at a cafe on the banks of the Neva River in the historic heart of St Petersburg.

Police said they had identified a woman called Darya Trepova as the suspect and that she was arrested in an apartment in St Petersburg after a search on Monday morning. Authorities said she was a supporter of the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

In a statement, Russia’s national antiterrorism committee claimed the attack was “planned by the special services of Ukraine with the involvement of agents from those who had cooperated with the so-called Navalny Anti-Corruption Fund [Foundation]”.

Sources in the country’s interior ministry told the RBK news outlet that the attack was “carefully planned in advance by several people”.

'DON'T Talk About Nord Stream'? US Allies Would RATHER NOT Probe Who Blew Up Pipelines: Report

Ukrainian court puts an Orthodox leader under house arrest

A Kyiv court ordered a leading priest to be put under house arrest Saturday after Ukraine’s top security agency said he was suspected of justifying Russian aggression, a criminal offense. It was the latest move in a bitter dispute over a famed Orthodox monastery. Metropolitan Pavel is the abbot of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery, Ukraine’s most revered Orthodox site. He has denied the charges and resisted the authorities’ order to vacate the complex.

In a court hearing earlier in the day, the metropolitan said the claim by the Security Service of Ukraine, known as the SBU, that he condoned Russia’s invasion was politically driven and that he had “never been on the side of aggression.”

After the court’s ruling, a monitoring bracelet was placed around his ankle, despite his objections that he has diabetes and should not wear it. The house arrest was to last two months. “I am accepting this,” he said shortly before the bracelet was attached. “Christ was crucified on the cross, so why shouldn’t I accept this?”

Earlier in the week, he cursed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, threatening him with damnation.

Kamala Harris Gets SMACKED DOWN During Visit To Africa

Chinese balloon gathered intelligence from sensitive US military sites – report

A Chinese spy balloon gathered intelligence as it flew over sensitive military sites in the US, despite efforts by the Joe Biden White House to thwart its espionage mission, new reports suggest.

China succeeded in flying the massive balloon over some military bases on multiple occasions and sent the information back to Beijing in real time, NBC News reported on Monday, citing two current senior US officials and one former high-level administrator. The balloon, which was the size of three school buses, was occasionally flown in a figure-eight formation over at least some of those sensitive sites before it was shot down in early February.

“The intelligence China collected was mostly from electronic signals, which can be picked up from weapons systems or include communications from base personnel, rather than images,” NBC’s report cited the officials as saying. ...

The Pentagon said experts were still analyzing debris collected from the balloon after it was shot down on 4 February. “I could not confirm that there was real-time transmission from the balloon back to (China) at this time,” said Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh, adding, “that’s something we’re analyzing right now.”

Beijing officials have vehemently denied that the balloon was a government intelligence-gathering asset, claiming that the US overreacted to what was an unmanned civilian vessel that had accidentally strayed off course.

Rand Paul RIPS Republicans For Censoring TikTok!

BOMBSHELL REPORT: Fmr CIA Fellow Leads Effort To CENSOR Disfavored Speech By Gov't Officials

Starbucks fires Buffalo worker who founded union campaign

Two days after the Starbucks chairman and former CEO Howard Schultz was grilled during a Senate committee hearing on the company’s response to union organizing at its stores, Starbucks fired three union organizers and disciplined another organizer in the Buffalo, New York, area where the union campaign began.

Among those to lose their jobs was Lexi Rizzo, a shift supervisor for seven years in Buffalo at one of the first stores to unionize and a leading founder of the union campaign. The union has characterized the actions as retaliation.

“My store manager was sobbing her eyes out when she was firing me about how much she knew I loved and cared about my store and how she didn’t want to do this. I put everything I have into my store,” said Rizzo, who was fired on Friday 31 March. “It’s honestly, so far in my life, one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve had happen. Anyone that I work with, any of my partners would attest to how much I love and care for my store.”

Rizzo worked at one of the first two Starbucks stores to unionize in the US in Buffalo and has served on the organizing committee since the campaign first launched in August 2021. Starbucks denied the store manager sobbed when firing Rizzo.

“They cited two times when I was one minute late to work. Another time, I was four minutes late to work and another time, I was five minutes late to work,” said Rizzo. “The one minute late can be clocking into the iPads because these iPads used to clock in, they take forever to load. For those, that’s just absurd to me, and the other times I had called the store to let them know I was going to be running late due to weather,” argued Rizzo.

'Break Up Big Ag,' Says Sanders After Egg Giant Posts 718% Profit Increase

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders this weekend renewed his call to break up agricultural monopolies after the nation's largest egg producer reported that its quarterly profits soared more than 700%.

Cal-Maine Foods, which controls about 20% of the U.S. egg market, announced last week that its revenue for the quarter ending February 25 rose 109% to $997.5 million, while profit for the same period skyrocketed 718% to $323.2 million.

In a statement, Cal-Maine president and CEO Sherman Miller attributed the company's soaring profits to "the ongoing epidemic of highly pathogenic avian influenza which has significantly reduced the nation's egg-laying capacity."

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, "U.S. egg inventories were 29% lower in the final week of December 2022 than at the beginning of the year," while "more than 43 million egg-laying hens were lost to the disease itself or to depopulation since the outbreak began in February 2022."

Sanders (I-Vt.)—who took on agricultural monopolies while campaigning for president in 2016 and 2020—questioned Cal-Maine's narrative in a tweet arguing that "we must break up Big Ag and enact a windfall profits tax." ...

The advocacy group Farm Action earlier this year implored the Federal Trade Commission to investigate "apparent price gouging, price coordination, and other unfair or deceptive acts or practices by dominant producers of eggs such as Cal-Maine Foods."

Is America becoming Cop City?

Florida closes in on six-week abortion ban while also allowing no-permit gun carry

Florida took another step to the right on Monday when the state senate approved a bill to ban abortions after six weeks, a measure supported by Republican governor and expected presidential candidate Ron DeSantis – who on the same day signed into law a bill allowing the public to carry concealed guns without a permit.

The latest proposal to restrict reproductive rights must still be approved by the house in the state legislature before it reaches the governor’s desk. Florida currently prohibits abortions after 15 weeks.

A six-week ban would more closely align Florida with the abortion restrictions of other Republican-controlled states and give DeSantis a political win on an issue important with GOP primary voters ahead of his potential White House run.

The bill would have larger implications for abortion access throughout the south, as the nearby states of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi prohibit the procedure at all stages of pregnancy and Georgia bans it after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, which is around six weeks.

Meanwhile, the new weapons law will allow anyone who can legally own a gun in Florida to carry one without a permit. It means training and a background check will not be needed for people to carry concealed guns in public. The state now has nearly 3 million permit holders.

Chaos Outside Manhattan Court Where Trump Is Set To Be Arraigned

Trump arrives in New York City ahead of Tuesday court appearance

Donald Trump arrived in New York City on Monday, a day before he is due for a hotly anticipated court appearance where he’ll respond to the first ever criminal indictment filed against a former American president.

At about 2.15pm ET on Tuesday, he will appear at the courthouse where a grand jury convened by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg handed down its indictment last week, to learn the exact details of which laws he is alleged to have broken. At his arraignment, he is expected to be photographed and fingerprinted, but will not be handcuffed per an agreement his legal team reached with Bragg, Trump’s attorney Joe Tacopina said last week. ...

Important details of the case could be revealed before Trump sets foot in a courtroom. Media organizations including the Washington Post, the New York Times and CNN have petitioned Judge Juan Merchan to make public Bragg’s indictment, which reportedly contains upwards of 30 charges and at least one felony related to the hush money payment he facilitated to adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election.

The same group of news organizations is also asking Merchan to allow cameras in the courtroom. However he rules, the former president’s appearance in New York will receive the maximum amount of publicity possible. On Monday morning, local television networks in Florida broadcast Trump’s arrival at his golf club in West Palm Beach, and had cameras stationed at the airport from where he departed.

The horde of reporters that has camped outside the Manhattan criminal court where the charges were handed down will likely swell on Tuesday, when Trump makes his appearance under heavy security. The day after the indictment became public last week, the New York police department told all of its 35,000 officers to show up in uniform, and the US Capitol police in Washington DC have reportedly warned lawmakers of the potential for protests nationwide.

Juan González on Chicago Mayoral Race: Can a Progressive, Multiracial Coalition Win?

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'Incredibly Disturbing' Docs Reveal Oil Giant Shell Knew About Climate Impacts Even Earlier

Reporting on a cache of documents published over the weekend shows Shell knew about the impact of fossil fuel even earlier than previously revealed, potentially bolstering legal efforts to hold Big Oil accountable for the global climate emergency.

The reporting from DeSmog and Follow the Money is based on Dirty Pearls: Exposing Shell's hidden legacy of climate change accountability, 1970-1990, a project for which researcher Vatan Hüzeir compiled 201 books, correspondence, documents, scholarship, and other materials.

Hüzeir—a climate activist, Erasmus University Rotterdam Ph.D. candidate, and founder and director of the Dutch think tank Changerism—collected the documents from former Shell staff, people close to the company, and private and public archives from January 2017 and October 2022.

Following explosive revelations about what ExxonMobil knew about fossil fuels driving global heating, investigations in 2017 and 2018 uncovered that Shell's scientists privately warned about the impact of its products in the 1980s.

However, as Follow the Money detailed, the newly unveiled records show that "Shell already began collecting knowledge about climate change in the 1960s. The company not only kept well abreast of climate science, but also funded research. As a result, Shell already knew in the 1970s that burning fossil fuels could lead to alarming climate change."

Faced with a global oil crisis, rather than using its climate information to publicly sound the alarm and shift to cleaner practices, the company "focused instead on a nonsustainable profit model," launching Shell Coal International in 1974.

The following year, a study Shell was involved with warned that "increases in the CO2 content of the atmosphere could lead to the so-called greenhouse effect... which would be enough to induce major climatic changes." Three years later, another report warned that "the continued burning of fossil fuels will lead to a manifold increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration."

A confidential study from 1989 states that if the global temperature rises more than 1.5°C—the target of the Paris climate agreement that came decades later—then "the potential refugee problem... could be unprecedented. Africans would push into Europe, Chinese into the Soviet Union, Latins into the United States, Indonesians into Australia. Boundaries would count for little—overwhelmed by the numbers. Conflicts would abound. Civilization could prove a fragile thing."

Duncan Meisel, executive director of the campaign Clean Creatives, which targets advertising and public relations firms that work for fossil fuel companies, declared Monday that "what these new documents show is incredibly disturbing."

"In the 1980s, Shell scientists laid out two pathways for the planet: one where energy companies undertook a smooth transition to clean energy and one where fossil fuel demand continued to rise, creating 'more storms, more droughts, more deluges,'" he summarized. "Since the publication of that forecast, Shell has pushed at every turn to create more fossil fuel demand, creating exactly the devastating outcomes they predicted."

The Center for Climate Integrity said the records provide the world "more damning evidence" that the company knew its business model was having disastrous impacts on the world and its people. As the group put it: "They knew. They lied. They need to pay."

Along with the two initial media reports, some of the Shell materials have been published by the Climate Files database.

"Although these first articles refer to only 38 of the many more documents amassed for Dirty Pearls, they tell the story of Shell having engaged in what I call 'climate change uncertaintism' and 'climate change negligence,'" Hüzeir said in a statement. "The former points to Shell's keen willingness to emphasize scientific uncertainty about the potential of global warming in its public reporting, even though scholarly consensus on the future reality of a warmer world was already forming at the time."

"The latter points to Shell's negligence of its own in-house knowledge of potential global warming in public reporting, although express consideration of that knowledge was to be reasonably expected," he added. "Both treatments were political in the sense that they served to push for fossil fuels and especially coal, over renewables, as the culturally preferred sources of energy for the foreseeable future. This is despite Shell's awareness of possibly dangerous climate change associated with unabated fossil fuel combustion. Both treatments were strategic because, by extension, they protected Shell's hydrocarbon-based business model."

CDC Officials Get Sick In East Palestine, Gov't STILL Says Residents Are SAFE: Report

Scientists find deepest fish ever recorded at 8,300 metres underwater near Japan

Scientists have captured footage of a fish swimming more than 8km underwater, setting a new record for the deepest fish ever recorded.

The animal, an unknown snailfish species belonging to the genus Pseudoliparis, was filmed at a depth of 8,336 metres in the Izu-Ogasawara trench, south-east of Japan.

The footage was captured from an autonomous deep ocean vessel as part of a two-month expedition that began last year.

A few days after the snailfish was filmed, scientists caught two other snailfish, of the species Pseudoliparis belyaevi, in the Japan trench from a depth of 8,022 metres.

The team said these are the first fish to have ever been collected from a depth greater than 8,000 metres.

Drought-ravaged California sees one of the largest snowpacks on record

California’s winter of extreme storms has brought the drought-ravaged state one of the largest snowpacks on record, with officials saying on Monday that they expect it could be the greatest documented in 70 years.

As of Monday the state’s snowpack stands at 237% of the annual average, the department of water resources (DWR) announced at a press conference.

“It’s looking like this year’s statewide snowpack will probably most likely be either the first or second biggest snowpack on record dating back to 1950,” said Sean de Guzman with DWR, who described it as the deepest snowpack he had ever measured.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

The Tragedy of US Diplomacy Pushing for War, But Never Peace

Centrist DC think tank: US should threaten war, regime change in Iran

“Legitimate target” — Bellingcat defends terror attack at St. Petersburg cafe

Row Breaks Out Over Assange in Australian Senate

Using Tik-Tok as a Trojan Horse, the RESTRICT Act Would Create an Internet Censorship Star Chamber

Russia protests 'provocative actions' by US forces in Syria

‘Significant Portion’ of UK Lethal Aid for Ukraine Stays Secret

French Governments Have a History of Bypassing Parliament

Amnesty Accuses El Salvador of 'Systematic' Human Rights Abuses After Emergency Declaration

Mount of Olives becomes latest target in fight for control of Jerusalem

Kamala Harris Serves up Crumbs in Africa as US Continues to Offer Little in Comparison to China

Debate: Will Finland's Addition to NATO Make Direct Conflict with Russia More Likely?

A Little Night Music

The Trends - The Soul Clap

The Trends - Thanks For A Little Loving

The Trends - That's How I Like It

The Trends - Dance With Me Baby

The Trends - Check My Tears

Trends - Not Too Old To Cry

The Trends - You Sure Know How To Hurt A Guy

The Trends - (To Be) Happy Enough

The Trends - Gonna have to show you