Reflections from news and commentary of the day
Subscribe To
Posts
All Comments
Monday, March 27, 2023
The BRICS Has Overtaken The G7 In Global GDP - Silk Road Briefing
The BRICS Has Overtaken The G7 In Global GDP - Silk Road Briefing: By Chris Devonshire-Ellis The India-based Megh Updates platform, one of the world’s largest online informational platforms in terms of views, has stated that BRICS countries have officially overtaken G7 in share of world PPP GDP, and that this trend can be expected to continue. The BRICS currently include Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa,[.....]
Sunday, March 26, 2023
What is Depleted Uranium - the new entrant in Russia-Ukraine conflict which is keeping world on edge
What is Depleted Uranium - the new entrant in Russia-Ukraine conflict which is keeping world on edge: Russia and the UK continue to engage in a new, bitter war of words over the British side's plan to supply Ukraine with armour-piercing shells with Depleted
PG&E faces time crunch on Diablo Canyon license renewal as California weighs nuclear plant’s future | Utility Dive
PG&E faces time crunch on Diablo Canyon license renewal as California weighs nuclear plant’s future | Utility Dive: Utility industry news and analysis for energy professionals.
Saturday, March 25, 2023
Rogue Economics
Rogue Economics
From The Middle Class…. To The Rich:
America’s LAST Wealth Transfer
A Strange Force (Not Inflation) Is Taking The U.S. By Storm: Transferring Wealth
From The Middle Class to The Rich… PhD Nomi Prins Uncovers What’s Happening
and Reveals Her “New American Era Blueprint” for Protecting & Profiting in 2023
Guest Post About Kohelet Policy Forum -
This is a letter I have sent to the Washington Post about their full page article about the right-wing Israeli think tank Kohelet.
To the editor,
Washington Post.
The Washington Post has performed a notable public service by publishing the important article, “The Secretive Israeli Think Tank Behind Netanyahu’s Judicial Overhaul.”
This think tank, Kohelet Policy Forum, has long advocated for annexation of the West Bank, gender segregation inside Israel, and a weaker Supreme Court. It has contempt for non-Orthodox streams of Judaism and for the rights not only of Palestinians but of the LGBTQ community and of women. It is largely financially supported by ultra-Orthodox Jewish Americans.
The policies of Israel’s far-right government have been rejected by the overwhelming majority of American Jews, including such traditional supporters of Israel as Abraham Foxman, the long-time leader of the Anti-Defamation League, Prof. Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, and the leaders of Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism.
When Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who called for the Palestinian village of Huwara to be “wiped out” and said, “there’s no such thing as Palestinians,” visited Washington earlier this month, no member of the Biden administration would meet with him. Neither would any of the major American Jewish organizations. William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations, called his statements “disgusting.”
Zionism itself is becoming a minority view within the Jewish community. Zionism proclaims that Israel is the “homeland” of all Jews and that Jews living outside of Israel are in “exile.” In fact, Judaism is a religion of universal values, not a nationality. The homeland of Jewish Americans is the United States. They are American by nationality and Jews by religion, just as other Americans are Protestant, Catholic or Muslim.
In 1841, in the dedication of America’s first Reform synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina, Rabbi Gustav Poznanski told the congregation, “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our temple.”
Israel would do well to confine its concerns to its own citizens. Almost all Jewish Americans believe in freedom of religion and separation of church and state. Israel, sadly, is a theocracy. Non-Orthodox rabbis cannot perform weddings, conduct funerals, or have their conversions recognized. In fact, Jews have less religious freedom in Israel than anyplace in the Western world.
Shira Rubin has performed a notable service with her article about Kohelet Policy Forum.
Sincerely,
Allan C. Brownfeld,
Editor of ISSUES,
The quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism
(www.ACJNA.org)
Friday, March 24, 2023
USA befürchten, durch den chinesischen Vorschlag in die Enge getrieben zu werden – Anti-Spiegel
USA befürchten, durch den chinesischen Vorschlag in die Enge getrieben zu werden –
Anti-Spiegel
https://www.anti-spiegel.ru/2023/usa-befuerchten-durch-den-chinesischen-vorschlag-in-die-enge-getrieben-zu-werden/
USA fears being cornered by the Chinese proposal
China's peace plan
While German media claim that the Chinese peace proposal for Ukraine is not taken seriously internationally, the truth is quite different.
24. March 2023
German media like to refer to the peace plan presented by China as an "alleged" peace plan and they have continuously claimed during the Chinese president's visit to Moscow that the plan is not to be taken seriously and "internationally controversial". This formulation is only partially true, because the fact that the plan is internationally controversial is mainly due to the fact that the West rejects it. However, this means that the West is quite alone internationally.
The Chinese peace plan is reasonable, because it also includes the history of the conflict, which must be resolved if there is to be a negotiated peace that ends the bloodshed. And as is well known, the West has played an important role in this history by ignoring Russia's security interests and arming Ukraine and advancing its accession to NATO. That was the main reason for the escalation of the war a year ago.
There are legally valid agreements between the West and Russia that state that no state may enforce its security interests at the expense of the security interests of another state. It is precisely this agreement that the West violated when it forced Ukraine's accession to NATO. China's peace plan provides, among other things, to establish this provision worldwide, which the US-led West does not like at all.
However, German media consumers do not know anything about it, because the German media conceal this and other details and backgrounds of the Chinese peace plan. But in the rest of the world, all this is known very well, which is why China's peace plan outside the West is not criticized, but is welcomed as quite reasonable.
This is also known in the USA, as Bloomberg has now reported. According to Bloomberg, the US government is very worried about the Chinese peace plan, because the rejection of the plan by the USA openly shows the rest of the world that the US is not interested in peace in Ukraine. I have translated the Bloomberg article so that German readers can get their own picture.
Start of the translation:
The USA fears that a war-tired world could accept China's peace offer for Ukraine
The USA is on the sidelines of the action, while the Chinese-Russian "Brother's Festival" strengthens relations
Some uncomfortable realities of Xi's visit to Putin in Moscow
Xi Jinping's meeting with Vladimir Putin in Moscow put the Biden administration in an unpleasant situation: she was on the sidelines when her two opponents discussed a peace proposal for Ukraine, which the USA considered unacceptable.
US officials have publicly expressed very skeptical about the Chinese idea and claimed that the demand for a ceasefire would reward Moscow's invasion by cementing its territorial gains. Secretly, however, the meetings and the proposal within the government have caused a feeling of discomfort, which in turn led to questions about the general attitude of the USA towards the two countries.
According to a government representative who does not want to be named because he talks about internal consultations, the USA fears being cornered by the Chinese proposal. Regardless of the reservations of the USA, if it rejects the proposal outright, China could give other nations that are tired of the war - and the economic damage it causes - the impression that Washington is not interested in peace.
If the US rejects the agreement, "China will probably increasingly spread the message that the US is against a ceasefire, that the US is against the end of the war," said Bonny Lin, Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who used to serve in the Pentagon. There will be many ways in which China will try to interpret the results of the meeting between China and Russia in such a way that the USA is presented in a negative light.
The debate on China's version of a peace plan is just one of the many unpleasant aspects of Xi's three-day visit to Moscow this week, at which the Chinese head of state was warmly welcomed by Putin. The two countries promised to deepen their partnership even further.
The Biden administration has tried to keep China on the sidelines since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, but the opposite seems to have happened. As Xi and Putin are getting closer and closer, China finds an open-minded audience for its broader diplomatic efforts around the globe.
At a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Senator Jeff Merkley asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken for a statement on what the Oregon Democrat described as a "three-day brother festival with Putin and Xi, who celebrate their authoritarian power." Blinken admitted that this was a continuation of the promise of the two nations shortly before the war to maintain a "partnership without borders".
"This is no surprise - both countries have completely different worldviews than we do," Blinken said. "They could find a common cause in opposing the worldview that we and so many other countries in the world are trying to defend and advance."
Blinken did not mention all the countries that refused to take sides despite the insistence of the USA.
China has disregarded the US sanctions because of the partnership of its companies with Russia, bought oil from the Iranian regime despite Western warnings and helped to bring about diplomatic détente between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Important global economic powers such as India and Brazil refuse to choose between China and the West because they do not want a new Cold War.
And a week ago, Honduras began to abandon its diplomatic relations with Taiwan in favor of economic relations with China.
The move was "a sign of my determination to fulfill the government plan and expand the borders in harmony with the nations of the world freely," President Xiomara Castro explained in a tweet.
Deteriorating bonds
All this is happening at a time when relations between the USA and China, which began to crumble with the trade war of former President Donald Trump, are further deteriorating. This was underlined by the excitement about the alleged Chinese spy balloon, which triggered a national outcry in the USA and angry accusations between Washington and Beijing.
This episode nullifies the attempt to stabilize relations at the end of last year through a personal summit between President Joe Biden and Xi in Indonesia. This led to a tense meeting between Foreign Minister Antony Blinken and the Chinese top diplomat Wang Yi in Munich, and Xi later warned against "comprehensive containment and oppression by Western countries under the leadership of the USA."
US officials argue that their sharp words have an effect on Beijing. They say that the public warnings from the US that China could provide deadly aid to Russia have prompted the Xi government to think twice about this idea. The USA continues to supply Ukraine with weapons - they announced new ammunition worth 325 million dollars this week - in coordination with European countries that are setting up new delivery schedules themselves.
The Biden administration has tried to get China to face the Ukraine crisis on the terms of the USA, but "Xi is now interfering on its terms," said Christopher K. Johnson, president of China Strategies Group, a political risk consulting firm. "And I think that this is likely to cause some confusion within the government."
Since Washington is constantly pursuing a hard line towards China, some analysts believe that China may have effectively given up an early improvement in relations with the US.
The less China sees the opportunity to work with the US, "the more likely it is to pursue these other paths and options," said Melanie Sisson, a foreign policy associate at the Brookings Institution. "And this will mean in many ways and in many places that they will try to shatter the US's relations with other countries."
End of translation
Thursday, March 23, 2023
Wednesday, March 22, 2023
Russian Orthodox head appeals against eviction of church from Kyiv | Reuters
Russian Orthodox head appeals against eviction of church from Kyiv | Reuters: Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, on Saturday asked Pope Francis and other religious leaders to persuade Ukraine to stop a crackdown against a historically Russian-aligned wing of the church.
16 Länder wollen der BRICS beitreten – Anti-Spiegel
16 Länder wollen der BRICS beitreten – Anti-Spiegel
https://www.anti-spiegel.ru/2023/16-laender-wollen-der-brics-beitreten/
March 22, 2023
BRICS.png
16 countries want to join the BRICS
The BRICS consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are de facto a competitive event to Western formats, such as the internationally less and less noticed G7. The BRICS represent far more people and they are also catching up economically. In 2021, their share of the global economy was already over 30 percent according to purchasing power-adjusted gross domestic product.
In addition, the BRICS have set up a competition with the US-dominated institutions World Bank and International Monetary Fund with the New Development Bank. Especially this bank, which does not tie its loans to political approval and other political conditions, as the organizations dominated by the USA do and promotes the development projects and the expansion of infrastructure, is met with great international interest.
In recent months, more and more states have expressed their interest in joining the BRICS, which makes alarm bells ring in the West, whose media usually silence the BRICS. A growing BRICS would push back the global influence of the West and offer many countries a long-awaited alternative to the US-dominated institutions.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov has now announced that the number of states interested in BRICS accession is constantly growing and that the BRICS is currently thinking about how the organization could be expanded. The Russian news agency TASS reported on this and I translated the TASS report.
Start of the translation:
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister declares that 16 countries have the desire to join the BRICS
Ryabkov said that the time when the BRICS will be more strongly represented on the different continents is near.
16 countries want to join the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and the number of those who want it literally increases every month. This was reported by the Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov on Tuesday on the television channel Perwy Kanal (First Channel).
When asked how many states are now on the list of those who want to join the BRICS, he said that "the numbers literally vary every month." "The number is growing, I would name 16 as a more realistic number," says the deputy minister.
"I do not want to make predictions about the time of admission of these or those members, this is another question that remains today by and large at the level of the discussions of the heads of state and government," added the deputy minister and was confident that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping paid "deem to this issue in their talks during the visit of the Chinese head of
At the same time, the diplomat noted that there was no basis for speculation about whether permanent or semi-permanent membership was possible. "If we use terminology that is more characteristic of the United Nations in connection with the discussions on the reform of the UN Security Council, I think we should talk about partnership formats, BRICS+ and full membership formats. These are clearer, more direct ways to ensure practical cooperation even before full membership," he explained. "And to the extent that the countries join the association, there are of course no restrictions on the location, format, quality and extent to which they participate in this cooperation, I just can't imagine that."
The possibilities for the further expansion of the BRICS
According to Rjabkov, the time is not far away when the organization will be more represented on different continents.
"I think the time is approaching when we will get a BRICS, which will be even more represented in one form or another on the different continents," said the Deputy Russian Foreign Minister.
"I don't want to hide it, we just haven't had any experience with so many applications so far. When the first and so far only expansion of the BRICS took place with the inclusion of the Republic of South Africa, everyone simply assumed the self-evidentness of this step," Rjabkow continued. "Now the list is quite long, and there are states that have shown particular interest in joining the New BRICS Development Bank and so on. There are a variety of formats here
Regional security
"We will examine how we can expand the issue of regional security in the BRICS format," said the Deputy Foreign Minister. "In fact, the recent agreements reached with the important role of the People's Republic of China and with our very significant contribution between Saudi Arabia and Iran have created a new context for regional work."
Ryabkov added that this is "an asset that will be estimated in the circle of the BRICS. And I hope that this will be reinforced by the development of political dialogue," stressed the diplomat.
End of translation
Fr. Pedro Zafra, a priest in Kyiv, says, “We give thanks every day for the gift of life”
Fr. Pedro Zafra, a priest in Kyiv, says, “We give thanks every day for the gift of life”: Many of those who go to the parish for help aren’t parishioners, but they have found God's peace and consolation there. Many of those who go to the parish for help aren’t parishioners, but they have found God's peace and consolation there.
THE COVER-UP - Seymour Hersh
THE COVER-UP - Seymour Hersh: The Biden Administration continues to conceal its responsibility for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines