Peter Myers Digest: US sought to turn Russia’s Crimean naval base into a NATO fortress

(0) Trotskyoid Jewish Left is behind the Ukraine war, race war in France, and LGBT movement
(1) Michael Hudson: US sought to turn Russia’s Crimean naval base into a NATO fortress
(2) Banks close anti-LGBT accounts
(3) NYC Pride marchers June 23 chant “we’re coming for your children”
(4) Former WHO Adviser Sounds The Alarm On Pandemic Treaty Proposals

(0) Trotskyoid Jewish Left is behind the Ukraine war, race war in France, and LGBT movement

by Peter Myers

Michael Hudson never mentions the Jewish lobby. He says (item 1) that NATO wanted to seize control of Russia’s Crimean naval base; that was the goal of arming Ukraine.

But Philip Giraldi disclosed that the top level of the State Dept is “completely staffed by Jewish Americans who are politically-speaking neocons with close ties to Israel”.

The same Trotskyoid Jewish Left is behind the race wars in France; and backs the LGBT movement.

It looks as if they run the world, for now. Whether they get overthrown, remains to be seen.

https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/is-a-change-of-course-at-state-department-coming/

Is a Change of Course at State Department Coming?
Some senior officers are retiring but who and what will replace them?
PHILIP GIRALDI
JUNE 6, 2023

It should be noted that the State Department top level is completely staffed by Jewish Americans who are politically-speaking neocons with close ties to Israel who also believe that the maintenance of total military dominance by the United States is good both for them and good for the Jewish state. All of them are Russo-phobes for various reasons often related to the history of Jews in Russia.

(1) Michael Hudson: US sought to turn Russia’s Crimean naval base into a NATO fortress

https://www.unz.com/mhudson/america-has-just-destroyed-a-great-empire/

America Has Just Destroyed a Great Empire

Michael Hudson

• JUNE 29, 2023

• 1,500 WORDS

Herodotus (History, Book 1.53) tells the story of Croesus, king of Lydia c. 585-546 BC in what is now Western Turkey and the Ionian shore of the Mediterranean. Croesus conquered Ephesus, Miletus and neighboring Greek-speaking realms, obtaining tribute and booty that made him one of the richest rulers of his time. But these victories and wealth led to arrogance and hubris. Croesus turned his eyes eastward, ambitious to conquer Persia, ruled by Cyrus the Great.

Having endowed the region’s cosmopolitan Temple of Delphi with substantial silver and gold, Croesus asked its Oracle whether he would be successful in the conquest that he had planned. The Pythia priestess answered: “If you go to war against Persia, you will destroy a great empire.”

Croesus therefore set out to attack Persia c. 547 BC. Marching eastward, he attacked Persia’s vassal-state Phrygia. Cyrus mounted a Special Military Operation to drive Croesus back, defeating Croesus’s army, capturing him and taking the opportunity to seize Lydia’s gold to introduce his own Persian gold coinage. So Croesus did indeed destroy a great empire, but it was his own.

Fast-forward to today’s drive by the Biden administration to extend American military power against Russia and, behind it, China. The president asked for advice from today’s analogue to antiquity’s Delphi oracle: the CIA and its allied think tanks. Instead of warning against hubris, they encouraged the neocon dream that attacking Russia and China would consolidate U.S. control of the world economy, achieving the End of History.

Having organized a coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014, the United States sent its NATO proxy army eastward, giving weapons to Ukraine to fight an ethnic war against its Russian-speaking population and turn Russia’s Crimean naval base into a NATO fortress. This Croesus-level ambition aimed at drawing Russia into combat and depleting its ability to defend itself, wrecking its economy in the process and destroying its ability to provide military support to China and other countries targeted for seeking self-dependency as an alternative to U.S. hegemony.

After eight years of provocation, a new military attack on Russian-speaking Ukrainians was conspicuously prepared, ready to drive toward the Russian border in February 2022. Russia protected its fellow Russian-speakers from further ethnic violence by mounting its own Special Military Operation. The United States and its NATO allies immediately seized Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves held in Europe and North America, and demanded that all countries impose sanctions against importing Russian energy and grain, hoping that this would crash the ruble’s exchange rate. The Delphic State Department expected that this would cause Russian consumers to revolt and overthrow Vladimir Putin’s government, enabling U.S. maneuvering to install a client oligarchy like the one it had nurtured in the 1990s under President Yeltsin.

A byproduct of this confrontation with Russia has been to lock in America’s control over its Western European satellites. The aim of this intra-NATO jockeying was to foreclose Europe’s dream of profiting from closer trade and investment relations with Russia by exchanging its industrial manufactures for Russian raw materials. The United States derailed that prospect by blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines, cutting off Germany and other countries from access to low-priced Russian gas. That left Europe’s leading economy dependent on higher-cost U.S. Liquified Natural Gas (LNG).

In addition to having to subsidize domestic European gas to prevent widespread insolvency, a large proportion of German Leopard tanks, U.S. Patriot missiles and other NATO “wonder weapons” are being destroyed in combat against the Russian army. It has become clear that the U.S. strategy is not simply to “fight to the last Ukrainian,” but to fight to the last tank, missile and other weapon being deleted from NATO stocks.

This depletion of NATO’s arms was expected to create a vast replacement market to enrich America’s military-industrial complex. Its NATO customers are being told to increase their military spending to 3 or even 4 percent of GDP. But the weak performance of U.S. and German arms on the Ukrainian battlefield may have crashed this dream, while Europe’s economies are sinking into depression. And with Germany’s industrial economy deranged by the severing of its trade with Russia, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner told the Die Welt newspaper on June 16, 2023 that his country cannot afford to pay more money into the European Union budget, to which it has long been the largest contributor.

Without German exports supporting the euro’s exchange rate, the currency will come under pressure against the dollar as Europe buys LNG and NATO replenishes its depleted weaponry stocks by buying new arms from America. A lower exchange rate will squeeze the purchasing power of European labor, while lowering social spending to pay for rearmament and provide gas subsidies is plunging the continent into a depression.

A nationalist reaction against U.S. dominance is rising throughout European politics, and instead of America locking in its control over European policy, the United States may end up losing – not only in Europe but most crucially throughout the Global South. Instead of turning Russia’s “ruble to rubble” as President Biden promised, Russia’s balance of trade has soared and its gold supply has increased. So have the gold holdings of other countries whose governments are now aiming to de-dollarize their economies.

It is American diplomacy that is driving Eurasia and the Global South out of the U.S. orbit. America’s hubristic drive for unipolar world dominance could only have been dismantled so rapidly from within. The Biden-Blinken-Nuland administration has done what neither Vladimir Putin nor Chinese President Xi could have hoped to achieve in so short a period. Neither was prepared to throw down the gauntlet and create an alternative to the U.S.-centered world order. But U.S. sanctions against Russia, Iran, Venezuela and China have had the effect of protective tariff barriers to force self-sufficiency in what EU diplomat Josep Borrell calls the world “jungle” outside of the US/NATO “garden.”

Although the Global South and other countries have been complaining about U.S. dominance ever since the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, they have lacked a critical mass to create a viable alternative. But their attention has now been focused by the U.S. confiscation of Russia’s official dollar reserves in NATO countries. That dispelled the thought of the dollar as a safe vehicle in which to hold international savings. The Bank of England’s earlier seizure of Venezuela’s gold reserves kept in London – promising to donate them to whatever unelected opponents of its socialist regime U.S. diplomats designate – shows how sterling and the euro as well as the dollar have been weaponized. And by the way, what ever happened to Libya’s gold reserves?

American diplomats avoid thinking about this scenario. They rely to the one unique advantage the United States has to offer. It may refrain from bombing them, from staging a color revolution to “Pinochet” them by the National Endowment for Democracy, or install a new “Yeltsin” giving the economy away to a client oligarchy.

But refraining from such behavior is all that America can offer. It has de-industrialized its own economy, and its idea of foreign investment is to carve out monopoly-rent seeking opportunities by concentrating technological monopolies and control of oil and grain trade in U.S. hands, as if this is economic efficiency, not rent-seeking.

What has occurred is a change in consciousness. We are seeing the Global Majority trying to create an independent and peacefully negotiated choice as to just what kind of an international order they want. Their aim is not merely to create alternatives to the use of dollars, but an entire new set of institutional alternatives to the IMF and World Bank, the SWIFT bank clearing system, the International Criminal Court and the entire array of institutions that U.S. diplomats have hijacked from the United Nations.

The upshot will be civilizational in scope. We are seeing not the End of History but a fresh alternative to U.S.-centered neoliberal finance capitalism and its junk economics of privatization, class war against labor, and the idea that money and credit should be privatized in the hands of a narrow financial class instead of being a public utility to finance economic needs and rising living standards.

The irony is that America’s historical role has been that although it itself was not able to lead the world forward along these lines, its attempts to lock the world into an antithetical imperial system by conquering Russia on the plains of Ukraine and trying to isolate China’s technology from breaking the U.S. attempt at IT monopoly have been the great catalysts pushing the global majority along these lines.

(2) Banks close anti-LGBT accounts

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/03/most-high-street-banks-signed-up-stonewall-diversity/

Most high street banks are signed up to Stonewall diversity schemes

Lenders facing questions over links to charity amid backlash over closing accounts of some people with gender-critical views

ByNeil Johnston, Dominic Penna, POLITICAL REPORTER Simon Foy3 July 2023 • 10:15pm

The majority of High Street banks are members of diversity schemes run by the controversial charity Stonewall, The Telegraph can reveal.

Lenders are facing questions over their links to the charity amid <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/07/02/banks-warned-uphold-free-speech-accounts-blacklisted/> a backlash over closing the bank accounts of some people with gender-critical views.

A vicar who questioned his building society’s Pride branding had his account closed, while a Scottish blogger believes action was taken by his bank over his stance on gender issues.

Stonewall’s <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/12/16/stonewall-advising-fifth-ftse-100-companies-despite-concerns/> Diversity Champions scheme includes guidance to employers on gender-neutral spaces and the use of pronouns. The company also runs a top 100 index that measures employers on diversity and inclusion.

HSBC, which allows customers to register as gender-neutral, is the top ranking bank in Stonewall’s annual Equality Index, and Natwest, which is still one-third <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/03/28/taxpayer-finally-cedes-control-natwest-14-years/> owned by the Government, is linked to the charity.

Barclays, which offers private medical cover for employees transitioning, and Nationwide, which encourages staff to use pronouns in email signatures, are also among Stonewall’s top 100 employers. Santander is a member of the index, while TSB is a member of the Diversity Champions Scheme.

Lloyds Banking Group, which runs its own branches as well as Halifax and Bank of Scotland, was the only major lender to fail to respond to queries about the scheme, but was previously named as the country’s top employer by Stonewall.

A number of high-profile organisations including <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/11/10/bbc-leaves-stonewall-diversity-scheme-impartiality-concerns/> the BBC, Channel 4, the Cabinet Office, and <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/11/02/department-health-withdrew-stonewall-scheme-single-sex-wards/> the Department of Health have stopped working with Stonewall amid concerns over its schemes.

Guidance has included describing mothers as a “<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/03/stonewall-advises-organisations-use-parent-has-given-birth-help/> parent who has given birth”, to remove gendered language and to allow those who self-identify as women to use female toilets and changing rooms.

The Information Commissioner has previously found that the index and the Diversity Champions scheme allowed Stonewall to exercise “a significant degree of influence over the policies that participating members operate”.

Last week Nigel Farage, the former Brexit Party leader, revealed that <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/06/29/nigel-farage-says-may-have-to-leave-uk-bank-closes-accounts/> his bank had closed his account, and two former Brexit Party MEPs revealed that their accounts were also closed.

Since then, members of the public have accused banks of shutting down their accounts. Among them was Rev Richard Fothergill, a customer of Yorkshire Building Society for 17 years, whose account was closed days after he wrote to the bank to complain about its public messaging during Pride month.

Stuart Campbell, who runs the pro-independence Wings Over Scotland blog, had his accounts shut by First Direct, owned by HSBC, which he believes was over his stance on gender issues.

Barclays recently had to pay out £21,500 in compensation <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/01/brexiteers-and-gender-critical-vicar-bank-accounts-pulled/> to the Core Issues Trust, a Christian ministry, after shutting its account over its stance on gender identity.

The establishment are trying to force me out of the UK by closing my bank accounts.

I have been given no explanation or recourse as to why this is happening to me.

This is serious political persecution at the very highest level of our system.

If they can do it to me, they… <https://t.co/O4xQ1h79ub> pic.twitter.com/O4xQ1h79ub

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) <https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1674357026921623552?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw> June 29, 2023

Banks are facing pressure from the Government to explain account closures, and <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/07/02/banks-warned-uphold-free-speech-accounts-blacklisted/> Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, has ordered an investigation.

However, UK Finance, the industry trade body, defended the rights of banks to shut accounts as they see fit, arguing that lenders only do so after conducting an “extensive review”.

Tide, an online business bank, became the latest to face questions on Monday as the hosts of Triggernometary, a free speech YouTube show and podcast, said they would take it to the Financial Ombudsman after their account was closed.

Konstantin Kisin, one of the hosts, said he had been told the issue was because of the podcast, which has more than half a million subscribers, receiving donations, but added that this “doesn’t seem to be a very credible explanation”.

“We can’t possibly be the only organisation that’s a business and accepts donations,” he said.

Tide said any decisions on account closures had “no connection whatsoever to a member’s beliefs” and that it was “categorically false” to suggest otherwise.

Craig Mackinlay, the Tory MP for South Thanet, said he was concerned that decisions were being made by “activist banking staff” and lenders were hurting those who “dared air a view”.

“With most banks signed up to Stonewall, one wonders if too much discretionary power now sits with some activist banking staff,” he said. “Diversity, inclusion and equality works both ways including the right to a variety of opinions in a free society.”

On Monday, Mr Farage said there was “no coincidence” about banks signing up for Stonewall membership and shutting down the accounts of those who were gender critical.

A spokesman for Stonewall said that it did not pressure banks on operational decisions, adding: “There are no requirements in the Diversity Champions programme over how members engage with any customers, and we do not seek to influence operational decisions for any Diversity Champion on matters such as these.

“Our Diversity Champions programme simply provides resources and guidance to support member organisations to include and support LGBTQ+ colleagues at work.”

(3) NYC Pride marchers June 23 chant “we’re coming for your children”

NYC Drag Marchers chant “we’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children”