Tag: russia

Yellen Says the US Can Afford to Fund Wars in Gaza and Ukraine

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen insisted on Monday that the US could “certainly” afford to fund the war in Ukraine and Israel’s onslaught on Gaza as the White House is looking for more military aid for both conflicts.

Yellen’s comments came a day after President Biden said the US could fund both wars. “We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history — not in the world, in the history of the world. The history of the world. We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense,” he said on 60 Minutes.

Yellen said the House needs to elect a new speaker so the new funding could be authorized. “We do need to come up with funds, both for Israel and for Ukraine. This is a priority,” she said. “It’s really up to the House to find, seat a speaker and to put us in a position where legislation can be passed.”

The White House has also discussed the possibility of rolling funding to arm Taiwan into the potential spending package. But Yellen did not mention Taiwan, and other Biden administration officials have made clear this week that Ukraine and Israel are the priority.

“America can certainly afford to stand with Israel and to support Israel’s military needs and we also can and must support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia,” Yellen said.

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How Peter Thiel-Linked Tech is Fueling the Ukraine War

“A reluctance to grapple with the often grim reality of an ongoing geopolitical struggle for power poses its own danger. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

This is an arms race of a different kind, and it has begun.”– Alex Karp, Palantir CEO

These were the recent words of Palantir CEO Alex Karp, proclaiming in the New York Times that the world has entered a new era of warfare with the rapid acceleration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. Playing on the recent release of the “Oppenheimer” movie by comparing the dawn of AI with the development of the atomic bomb, Karp argued that the growing role of AI in weapons systems has become “our Oppenheimer moment.”

In his op-ed, Karp states bluntly that this era is a new kind of arms race where inaction equals defeat, positing that a “more intimate collaboration between the state and the technology sector, and a closer alignment of vision between the two” is required if the West is to maintain a long-term edge over its adversaries. 

Karp’s words are timely within the context of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, which – from the beginning – has been a tech-fueled war, as well as a catalyst for further blurring the lines between nation states and the companies that own and operate such technologies. From Microsoft “literally mov[ing] the government and much of the country of Ukraine from on-premises servers to [its] cloud,” to Boston Dynamics’ robot dog, Spot, sweeping mines on the battlefield, as I recently reported for Unlimited Hangout, “much of Ukraine’s war effort, save for the actual dying, has been usurped by the private sector.”

But, as Karp’s words suggest, the longer the conflict goes on, the more technologically advanced the weapons, and weapons operating systems and software behind them, will become. Indeed, the US Military is testing Large-Language Models’ (LLMs) capacity to perform military tasks and exercises, including completing once days-long information requests in minutes as well as  extensive crisis response planning. Ukrainian Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov, who commands Ukraine’s “Army of Drones” program in a made-for-film collaboration with Star Wars actor Mark Hamill, even recently proclaimed that the proliferation of fully autonomous, lethal drones are “a logical and inevitable next step” in warfare and weapons development. 

Indeed, AI tech and other major technologies are coming to the forefront of the war’s front lines. For instance, “kamikaze” naval drones equipped with explosives dealt heavy damage to the Crimean bridge in July, with the Washington Post also reporting that over 200 Ukrainian companies involved in drone production are working with Ukrainian military units to “tweak and augment drones to improve their ability to kill and spy on the enemy.”

As the conflict continues, corporations and controversial defense contractors, like data firm and effective CIA-front Palantir, defense contractor Anduril, and facial recognition service Clearview AI are taking advantage of the conflict to develop controversial AI-driven weapons systems and facial recognition technologies, perhaps transforming both warfare and AI forever.  

Critically, these organizations all receive support from PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, a prominent, yet controversial venture capitalist intimately involved in the start-up and expansion of a bevy of today’s prominent tech corporations and adjacent organizations whose work, often co-developed or otherwise advanced by governments and the intelligence community, includes bolstering the State’s mass surveillance and data-collection and -synthesis capacities despite his professed libertarian political beliefs.

As such, these Thiel-backed groups’ involvement in war serves to develop not only problematic and unpredictable weapons technologies and systems, but also apparently to advance and further interconnect a larger surveillance apparatus formed by Thiel and his elite allies’ collective efforts across the public and private sectors, which arguably amount to the entrenchment of a growing technocratic panopticon aimed at capturing public and private life. Within the context of Thiel’s growing domination over large swaths of the tech industry, apparent efforts to influence, bypass or otherwise undermine modern policymaking processes, and anti-democratic sentiments, Thiel-linked organizations’ activities in Ukraine can only signal a willingness to shape the course of current events and the affairs of sovereign nations alike. It also heralds the unsettling possibility that this tech, currently being honed in Ukraine’s battlefields, will later be implemented domestically.

In other words, a high-stakes conflict, where victory comes before ethical considerations, facilitates the perfect opportunity for Silicon Valley and the larger US military industrial complex to publicly deepen their relationship and strive towards shared goals in wartime and beyond.

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Zelensky Bizarrely Blames The Israel-Gaza Conflict On Putin

Clearly, Ukraine’s war effort will suffer even further setback given that the attention of international media coverage has seemingly in an instant switched from the Russia-Ukraine war to the shocking scenes to have emerged from Israel. The world has pivoted from the battlefields of the Donbas to beholding scenes of southern Israel and the Gaza Strip.

On social media for example, masses of Americans have switched their Facebook profiles from Ukrainian flags to Israeli flags, or on the other side of it… to Palestinian flags. Perhaps trying to regain some of the lost spotlight and media focus, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has bizarrely laid blame on Russia for the outbreak of fresh conflict in the Middle East.

Zelensky said in Monday statements that Moscow stoke war in the region in an effort to weaken global unity and spread destabilization.

“Based on available information — very clear information — it is in Russia’s interests to inflame war in the Middle East to create a new source of pain and suffering that would weaken global unity, create divisions and help Russia in undermining freedom in Europe,” Zelensky said in a nightly video address.

Of course, he cited no evidence for the claims. The new talking point seems a desperate attempt to link ‘the current thing’ to the Russian invasion and the plight of Ukrainians. Zelensky in a series of messages has expressed solidarity with Israeli victims of Hamas terror.

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Biden Considering Huge $100 Billion Ukraine Spending Package: Telegraph

President Biden is considering asking Congress for a massive $100 billion spending package for the Ukraine war, The Telegraph reported on Saturday.

The idea of the huge spending package would be to fund the proxy war through the 2024 election without having to worry about the growing opposition to the policy in Congress, as the majority of the House and the Senate currently still support arming Ukraine.

“The ‘big package’ idea is firmly supported by many throughout the administration,” a source familiar with discussions on the matter told The Telegraph. “

Supporters of Ukraine want this to be a one-and-done big bill, and then not have to deal with it until after the next election.”

Defense News recently reported that multiple senators have also proposed passing a massive Ukraine aid package to get through a whole year. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) put the price tag at $70 billion.

An unnamed Biden administration official told The Telegraph that the White House is “not making any decisions about whether to do one big package or about how much it would be” until after a new House speaker is elected to replace Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), which is expected to happen on Wednesday.

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Not The Onion: Bernie Sanders’ Staffers Have Left-Wing Antiwar Activists Arrested Outside Office

A group of 50 activists and Vermont constituents staged a sit-in inside Senator Bernie Sanders’ office on Wednesday, demanding the senator to call for peace and diplomacy in Ukraine instead of more weapons and war. The sit-in resulted in the arrest of 11 activists, including an 89-year-old CODEPINK peace activist.

The group was joined by Green Party Presidential Candidate Dr. Cornel West in the Senate lobby for a prayer vigil before the sit-in. The prayer vigil and sit-in were part of a week of action that included an antiwar rally on Tuesday night featuring Dr. West, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary; Claudia de la Cruz, Co-Executive Director of The People’s Forum; Lee Camp, American comedian, writer, podcaster, news journalist; Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK and Global Exchange; and Eugene Puryear, American journalist, activist, and host on Breakthrough News.

“We need Bernie to provide leadership to put a stop to the US funding of the Ukraine war now. Use the money for healthcare, not warfare,” said Burlington resident James Marc Leas.

Crystal Zevon, an artist and CODEPINK peace activist from Barnet, VT, expressed her disappointment in Senator Sanders, who has voted for more weapons to Ukraine and even criticized Democrats who called for peace talks. “Yes, Bernie should condemn the Russian invasion, but he should also be calling for a negotiated end to this brutal war,” said Zevon.

The group carried signs in support of peace talks and negotiations, including one quote from the Senator himself in which he previously called for a diplomatic solution.

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Someone Wants ‘the War to Continue’

At times, Ukraine has been unwilling to negotiate an end to the ongoing war with Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has gone so far as to issue a decree banning negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

At other times, Russia has given up on negotiating. In a press conference at the United Nations, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov lamented, if you insist “’on the battlefield’—well, let it be on the battlefield.”

And at times, Ukraine and Russia have been willing to negotiate with each other. The United States, though, has at no time been willing to negotiate. Instead, an administration that promised the world “a new era of relentless diplomacy” has delivered an unhappy pattern of obstructing negotiations.

As early as December 17, 2021, months before their invasion, Russia presented the United States with a proposal on mutual security guarantees that demanded NATO not expand into Ukraine. The proposal demanded that “The United States of America shall take measures to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and deny accession to the Alliance to the former USSR republics.” A month later, on January 26, the United States rejected Russia’s central demand and formally declined to negotiate, insisting instead on “the right of other states to choose or change security arrangements.”

Vladimir Putin remarked “that fundamental Russian concerns were ignored.” In the official Russian response on February 17, 2022, Russia said that the United States and NATO offered “no constructive answer” to Russia’s key demands. Four days later, on February 21, Sergey Lavrov said, “The assessment of this response shows that our Western colleagues are not prepared to take up our major proposals, primarily those on NATO’s eastward non-expansion. This demand was rejected with reference to the bloc’s so-called open-door policy and the freedom of each state to choose its own way of ensuring security.” Highlighting American stubbornness about negotiating, the veteran diplomat added the important detail that, “Neither the United States, nor the North Atlantic Alliance proposed an alternative to this key provision.”

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2 Very Ominous Events That Are Going To Happen This Week

You only practice for something if you think that there is a decent chance that it will actually happen.  This week, two “tests” will be conducted that sound rather ominous.  The first of these “tests” will happen in Russia on Tuesday.  Vladimir Putin has ordered the very first “nationwide nuclear attack exercise” in the entire history of his country, and that is making headlines all over the globe…

Russia will stage its first nationwide nuclear attack exercise across 11 time zones in preparation for potential nuclear war.

It is scheduled to take place on October 3 and will see Vladimir Putin’s regime present the West as a nuclear aggressor.

If Vladimir Putin was entirely convinced that there is zero chance that a nuclear war will happen, he would not have ordered these drills.

Obviously he believes that there is at least a remote possibility that the conflict in Ukraine could spark a nuclear war.

It is being reported that this exercise will assume “that martial law has been introduced in Russia” and that a nuclear attack by the Western powers would destroy “up to 70% of Russian housing”…

The one-day nuclear attack exercise, which has only ever been done region by region, will include preparation for the destruction of up to 70% of Russian housing stock and life support facilities.

It will assume the scenario that martial law has been introduced in Russia and that is has gone through full mobilisation.

But that doesn’t mean that most of the Russian population would die during such an attack.

Russia has more than 16,000 nuclear shelters, and some of them can hold vast numbers of people.

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The Mad Propaganda Push To Normalize War-Profiteering In Ukraine

There’s been an astonishingly brazen propaganda push to normalize war profiteering in Ukraine as Kyiv coordinates with the arms industry and western governments to convert the war-ravaged nation into a major domestic weapons manufacturer, thereby turning Ukrainians into proxies of the military industrial complex as well as the Pentagon.

At an event in Kyiv which hosted 250 “defense” industry corporations from 30 different countries on Friday, President Zelensky gave a speech urging war profiteers to open factories in Ukraine to cut out the middleman of securing and delivering so many weapons from abroad. This is an investment that the arms industry would ostensibly have plenty of time to set up, given that western officials are now going out of their way to communicate to the public that this war will stretch on for many more years to come.

Zelensky’s speech twice made use of the phrase “defense-industrial complex”, and used the phrase “arsenal of the free world” no fewer than three times.

“Ukraine is developing a special economic regime for the defense-industrial complex,” Zelensky said. “To give all the opportunities to realize their potential to every company that works for the sake of defense — in Ukraine and with Ukraine or that wants to come to Ukraine.”

“Right now, the most powerful military-industrial complexes are being determined, as are their priorities and the global standard of defense. All of this is being determined in Ukraine,” Zelensky tweeted with photos from the event.

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Bipartisan House Amendment To Ban US Cluster Bomb Exports Fails

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday rejected a bipartisan amendment to the 2024 military spending bill that would have prohibited the transfer of cluster munitions – which are banned under a treaty ratified by more than 100 nations but not the United States – to any country.

The House voted 160-269 on the amendment to next year’s National Defense Authorization Act co-sponsored by Reps. Sarah Jacobs (D-Calif.), Matt Gaetz (R-Fl.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Jim McGovern (D-Mass.). Seventy-five Democrats voted for the measure, while 137 voted “no”; 85 GOP lawmakers approved the amendment while 132 opposed it.

The vote took place less than a week after U.S. President Joe Biden said the United States would send more cluster munitions to Ukraine.

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‘I was afraid of it’: the Ukrainians dodging conscription and fleeing the country

In Ukraine, Russia’s invasion triggered a patriotic impulse, but some Ukrainians are refusing to fight despite societal pressures and warnings from authorities cracking down on draft evaders amid a difficult counteroffensive.

Ivan Ishchenko volunteered to fight against invading Russian troops, but after a month of combat, he was willing to pay thousands of euros and risk prison to flee the front.

“Before I went to war, I thought I was a superhero. But all heroism ends when people see [war] with their own eyes and realise that they don’t belong there,” Ishchenko said.

“I saw someone being shot near his spleen; the pain was crazy. Then I saw a severed head. It all built up… I didn’t want to see anything else.”

So, one day Ishchenko abandoned his position without warning anyone except his mother and fled Ukraine. 

He managed to leave the country despite a ban on the departure of all men aged between 18 and 60.

The 30-year-old paid €4,600 ($5000) for a government-plated car to escort him to a forest on the border with Hungary.

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