Day: December 23, 2023
Israeli airstrike has reportedly killed 76 members of a single family in Gaza, marking one of the deadliest strikes in the ongoing conflict. The casualties include a United Nations agency employee, adding to the grim toll of civilian losses in the region.
Israel blatantly committing war crimes under the world silence. Despite enough proof of ethnic cleanings and massacres, the silence of the ICC is condemnable and under question mark.
The targeted airstrike occurred in two homes in Gaza turning residential buildings into rubble and leaving scores dead and wounded. Rescue operations are underway as emergency services strive to retrieve survivors from the debris.
Among the victims was a 56-year-old staff member with the UN Development Program (UNDP), Issam al-Mughrabi, as well as his wife and five children. He had been working to provide humanitarian aid to the conflict-affected population. The loss of a humanitarian worker has underscored the vulnerability of civilians and aid workers amid the escalating violence.
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NPR News: 12-23-2023 9PM EST
By George Ford Smith
We think of thieves as conducting their work when no one is looking, such as breaking into a house while the owners are away. But the most successful thieves have done their stealing in plain sight, on a grand scale, while the owners were home and often with their tacit approval, though with sleights of hand that few are able to detect. Such a theft occurred when Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law on December 23, 1913.
A central bank such as the Fed has a remarkable character. According to establishment boilerplate, its purpose is to stabilize the economy and ensure prosperity and “full employment.” The decision makers at the Fed are of necessity selected for their superhuman brilliance and neutrality of judgment, thus qualifying them to adjust the amount of money available to the banks so that they may in turn serve the interests of a public numbering some 330 million people.
If for some reason certain members of the public don’t reap the benefits of this policy—or worse, end up losing their jobs, their savings, their businesses, and their homes—it’s not because the Fed itself is a bad idea. How could it be? Without the Fed as an emergency lender, bankers threw the economy into panics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
But there’s another side to the Fed’s character that is somewhat less wholesome than its public image and is best revealed by the way it was founded.
The Bankers’ Dream
Before the Fed’s founding, bankers in general and Wall Street in particular complained about US currency’s lack of “elasticity.” “Elasticity” in this context is one of the great euphemisms of human history. According to lore, this missing feature of “hard” money, such as gold or silver, was responsible for the panics of 1873, 1884, 1893, and 1907. The supply of the coins that were behind the paper banknotes couldn’t be increased when needed. Gold and silver were therefore said to be inelastic. Because of this inelasticity, the legend persisted that banks were having trouble meeting the demand for farm loans at harvest time, as G. Edward Griffin explains in The Creature from Jekyll Island:
To supply those funds, the country banks had to draw down their cash reserves which generally were deposited with the larger city banks. This thinned out the reserves held in the cities, and the whole system became more vulnerable. Actually, that part of the legend is true, but apparently no one is expected to ask questions about the rest of the story.
Several of them come to mind. Why wasn’t there a panic every Autumn instead of just every eleven years or so? Why didn’t all banks—country or city—maintain adequate reserves to cover their depositor demands? And why didn’t they do this in all seasons of the year? Why would merely saying no to some loan applicants cause hundreds of banks to fail?
The Morgan and Rockefeller bankers on Wall Street dreamed of having a central bank that could supply money when needed, as a “lender of last resort.” A central bank would also control the banks’ inflation rate. If bank reserves could be maintained at a central bank and a common reserve ratio established, then no single bank could expand credit more than its rivals, and therefore there would be no bankruptcies caused by currency’s draining from overly inflationary banks. All banks would inflate in harmony, and there would be tranquility and profits for all.
The bankers who traveled a thousand miles to meet on Jekyll Island in November 1910 understood they needed a cartel to bring their dream to life. And they needed the threat of state violence for the cartel to work.
Thus, included in their secret meeting were two politicians serving as the bankers’ advocates in Washington. The bankers planned to establish their cartel over the Christmas holidays, while the American public was distracted, though for political reasons it was delayed until 1913.
The public would be a hard sell. Americans were profoundly suspicious of Wall Street and cartels. They distrusted anything big in business or government. A central bank operating for the benefit of the big banks had no chance of becoming law, unless it was promoted as shackling Wall Street itself. This could be accomplished, it was widely believed, through a government bureaucracy of overseers.
The Pujo Committee
Frequent speeches by Wisconsin senator Robert LaFollette and Minnesota congressman Charles Lindbergh brought public outrage over the “money trust” to a boil. LaFollette charged that the entire country was under the control of just fifty men; Morgan partner George Baker disputed the allegation, claiming it was no more than eight men. Lindbergh pointed out that bankers had controlled all financial legislation since the Civil War through committee memberships.
Government, acting as the sword of justice, decided to act, with most people oblivious to the fact that the executioner and the accused were one and the same. In response to the accusations, it formed a new subcommittee, which held hearings from May 1912 until January 1913.
The Pujo Committee was headed by Louisiana congressman Arsène Pujo, then roundly considered to be a spokesman for the “oil trust.” The hearings followed the usual pattern, bringing forth immense quantities of statistics and testimonies from bankers themselves. Though the hearings were conducted largely because of the charges brought forth by LaFollette and Lindbergh, neither man was allowed to testify.
Under the direction of Paul Warburg, the principal author of the Jekyll Island plan that in its essentials became the Federal Reserve Act, the banks provided 100 percent financing for something called the National Citizens League, the purpose of which was to create the illusion of grassroots support for Warburg’s brainchild.
University of Chicago economics professor J. Laurence Laughlin was put in charge of the league’s propaganda, ostensibly to bring a measure of objectivity to the discussions. John D. Rockefeller, whose representatives at Jekyll were Senator Nelson Aldrich and bank president Frank Vanderlip, had endowed the university with $50 million.
Woodrow Wilson was an outspoken critic of the money trust in his 1912 presidential campaign, all the while receiving funding from the very trust he was condemning. Wilson said:
I have seen men squeezed by [the money trust]; I have seen men who, as they themselves expressed it, were put “out of business by Wall Street,” because Wall Street found them inconvenient and didn’t want their competition.
Benjamin Strong Runs the Show
When the Fed began operations in late 1914, the man in charge of the system was Morgan banker Benjamin Strong Jr., one of the Jekyll Island attendees. Strong served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from its inception until his death on October 16, 1928. Strong, in the Morgan tradition, was an anglophile who inflated the US money supply from 1925–28 to keep Britain from losing gold to the US. Details of Strong’s reign and the precrash conditions he created can be found in Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression:
The long-run tendency of the free market economy, unhampered by monetary expansion, is a gently falling price level, falling as the productivity and output of goods and services continually increase. The Austrian policy of refraining always from monetary inflation would allow this tendency of the free market its head and thereby remove the disruptions of the business cycle.
The Chicago goal of a constant price level, which can be achieved only by a continual expansion of money and credit, would, as in [Benjamin Strong’s policy of the] 1920s, unwittingly generate the cycle of boom and bust that has proved so destructive for the past two centuries.
- About the author: George Ford is a former mainframe and PC programmer and technology instructor and the author of eight books and welcomes speaking engagements.
- Source: This article was published by the Mises Institute
In a plea earlier this month to Republicans not to block further military aid to Ukraine, US President Joe Biden warned that if Russia is victorious, then President Vladimir Putin will not stop and will attack a NATO country. Biden’s remark has drawn a sharp rebuke from Putin when he said, “This is absolutely absurd. I believe that President Biden is aware of this, this is merely a figure of speech to support his incorrect strategy against Russia.”
Putin added that Russia has no interest in fighting with NATO countries, as they “have no territorial claims against each other” and Russia does not want to “sour relations with them.” Moscow senses that a new US narrative is struggling to be born out of the debris of the old narrative on Ukraine war.
To jog memory, on 24 February, during a White House press conference on the first day of Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, Biden said western sanctions were designed not to prevent invasion but to punish Russia after invading “so the people of Russia know what he (Putin) has brought on them. That is what this is all about.”
A month later, on 26 March Biden, speaking in Warsaw, blurted out, “For God’s sake, this man (Putin) cannot remain in power.” These and similar remarks that followed, especially from Britain, reflected a US strategy for regime change in Moscow, with Ukraine as the pivot.
This strategy dates back to the 1990s and was actually at the core of the expansion of NATO along Russia’s borders, from the Baltics to Bulgaria. The Syrian conflict and covert activities of US NGOs to foment unrest in Russia were offshoots of the strategy. At least since 2015 after the coup in Kiev, CIA was overseeing a secret intensive training programme for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel. Succinctly put, the US set a trap for Russia to get it bogged down in a long insurgency, the presumption being the longer the Ukrainians can sustain the insurgency and keep Russian military bogged down, the more likely is the end of the Putin regime.
The crux of the matter today is that Russia defeated the US strategy and not only seized the initiative in the war but also rubbished the sanctions regime. The dilemma in the Beltway narrows down to how to keep Russia as an external enemy so that the West’s often fractious member states will continue to rally under US leadership.
What comes to mind is a sardonic remark by Soviet Academician Georgy Arbatov who was advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev, to an elite group of senior US officials even as the curtain was coming down on the Cold War in 1987: “We are going to do a terrible thing to you -– we are going to deprive you of an enemy.”
Unless black humour in this cardinal truth is properly understood, the entire US strategy since the 1990s to rebuff the efforts of Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and early Putin to establish non-adversarial relations with the West cannot be grasped.
Put differently, if the US’ post-cold war Russia strategy has not worked, it is because of a fundamental contradiction: on the one hand, Washington needs Russia as an enemy to provide internal unity within the western alliance, while on the other hand, it also needs Russia as a cooperative, subservient junior partner in the struggle against China.
The US hopes to draw down in Ukraine and stave off defeat by leaving behind a “frozen conflict” which it’s free to revisit later at a time of its choice, but in the meanwhile, is increasingly eyeing the Arctic lately as the new theatre to entrap Russia in a quagmire. The induction of Finland as into NATO (and Sweden to follow) means that the unfinished business of Ukraine’s membership, which Russia thwarted, can be fulfilled by other means.
After meeting Biden at the White House last Tuesday, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky headed for Oslo on October 13 on a fateful visit to forge his country’s partnership in NATO projects to counter Russia in the Arctic. In Oslo, Zelensky participated in a summit of the 5 Nordic countries to discuss “issues of cooperation in the field of defence and security.” The summit took place against the backdrop of the US reaching agreements with Finland and Sweden on the use of their military infrastructure by the Pentagon.
The big picture is that the US is encouraging Nordic countries to get Ukraine to participate in strengthening NATO’s Arctic borders. One may wonder what is the “additionality” that a decrepit military like Ukraine’s can bring into the NATO. Herein hangs a tale. Simply put, although Ukraine has no direct access to the Arctic, it can potentially bring in an impressive capability to undertake subversive activities inside Russian territory in a hybrid war against Russia.
In a strange coincidence, Pentagon recently prepared the Starlink satellite system for use in the Arctic, which was used by Ukrainian military for staging attacks on the Crimean Bridge, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and strategic assets on Russian territory. The US’ agreement with Finland and Sweden would give Pentagon access to a string of naval and air bases and airfields as well as training and testing grounds along the Russian border.
Several hundred thousand Ukrainian citizens are presently domiciled in the Nordic countries who are open to recruitment for “an entire army of saboteurs like the one that Germany collected during the war between Finland and the USSR in 1939-1940 on the islands of Lake Ladoga,” as a Russian military expert told Nezavisimaya Gazeta recently.
Russia’s naval chief Admiral Nikolai Evmenov also pointed out recently that “the strengthening of the military presence of the united NATO armed forces in the Arctic is already an established fact, which indicates the bloc’s transition to practical actions to form military force instruments to deter Russia in the region.” In fact, Russia’s Northern Fleet is forming a marine brigade tasked with the fight against saboteurs to ensure the safety of the new Northern Sea Route, coastal military and industrial infrastructure in the Arctic.
Suffice to say, no matter Ukraine’s defeat in the US’ proxy war with Russia, Zelensky’s use for the US’ geo-strategy remains. From Oslo, Zelensky made an unannounced visit on December 14 to a US Army base in Germany. Analysts who see Zelensky as a spent force had better revise their opinion — that is, unless the power struggle in Kiev exacerbates and Zelensky gets overthrown in a coup or a colour revolution, which seems improbable so long as Biden is in the White House and Hunter Biden is on trial.
The bottom line is that Biden’s new narrative demonising Russia for planning an attack on NATO can be seen from multiple angles. At the most obvious level, it aims to hustle the Congress on the pending bill for $61 billion military aid to Ukraine. Of course, it also distracts attention from the defeat in the war. But, most important, the new narrative is intended to rally the US’ transatlantic allies who are increasingly disillusioned with the outcome of the war and nervous that US involvement in Europe may dwindle as it turns to Indo-Pacific.
When Putin reacts harshly that Biden’s new narrative is “absurd”, he is absolutely right insofar as Russia’s focus is on things far more important than waging a senseless continental war in Europe. After all, it was one of the founding fathers of the USA, James Monroe who said that a king without power is an absurdity.
This article was published at Indian Punchline
The current deterioration of relations between Moscow and Yerevan is not the result of bad personal relations between Putin and Pashinyan, Sergey Markedonov says, but rather reflects fundamental changes in each, including most prominently Russia’s dependence on Azerbaijan and Turkey and a generational shift in Armenia.
The changes in Armenia are more immediately striking, but the changes in Russia may ultimately prove more important, according to the Russian specialist on the Caucasus now at MGIMO (profile.ru/abroad/iz-za-chego-v-otnosheniyah-moskvy-i-erevana-nachalsya-krizis-i-kak-daleko-on-zajdet-1431698/).
Not only has Armenia lost Karabakh and the role that disputed territory played in defining Yerevan’s politics at home and abroad – the new leadership in Yerevan came to power on issues not related to that one — Markedonov says; but an entirely new generation of Armenian leaders has come to power, one whose members have little memory of Soviet times.
In 1991, the current Armenian prime minister was 16, his foreign minister was 12, his Security Council secretary eight, the head of the Armenian parliament was 11, and the mayor of Yerevan only two. And thus it is indicative that “Pashinyan became the first leader of post-Soviet Armenia for whom Russian wasn’t a native language but a learned one!”
Consequently, this new ruling group was prepared to move away from Moscow and seek expanded ties elsewhere. Their predecessors had already distanced themselves from Russia but had not moved toward the divorce that the Pashinyan government appears to be heading, Markedonov continues.
At the same time, he says, Russia had its own reasons for shifting away from Armenia, reasons that are “often forgotten in Yerevan.” Putin’s “special military operation” not only meant that Moscow was focusing primarily on Ukraine but was reevaluating relations with other countries in terms of that conflict.
“For Russia today, it is more important to preserve the Turkish and Azerbaijani ‘windows’ to the outside world and to avoid the opening of ‘a second front’ in the Trans-Caucasus than to struggle for the preservation there of the former status quo,” Markedonov argues.
For that reason and because it is “difficult to be more Armenian than Armenia” as far as Karabakh is concerned, Moscow has distanced itself from Yerevan at least for the present – although Markedonov expresses the hope that the situation could change once again just as it did a century ago.