Tag: ukraine

Commodity Prices Debunk The “Blame Ukraine” Excuse For Inflation

Most politicians have used the “Ukraine invasion card” to justify the massive inflationary burst in 2021-2023.

It does not matter if inflation was already elevated prior to the war.

Supply chain disruptions, demand recovery, wage growth… Many excuses were used to justify inflation, except the only one that can make aggregate prices rise in unison, which is the creation of more units of currency well above demand.

Inflationists will blame inflation on anything and everything except the only thing that makes all prices, which are measured in monetary units, rise at the same: Money supply growth rising faster than real economic output.

Supply chain disruption and commodity inflation are caused by monetary expansion: More units of currency going to relatively scarce assets. Profits, wages, or commodities are not causes of inflation, but consequences. The unit used to measure prices is weakened by massive increase of its supply. It is as if I sell apples measured in glasses of milk, and suddenly the issuer of milk puts hundreds of gallons more in the market. My apples will cost more glasses of milk to adjust to the reality of the new unit of measure.

Long-term inflation expectations have risen to 3%, the highest level in twelve years. Furthermore, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in April the Consumer Price Index increased 0.4 percent, seasonally adjusted (SA), and rose 4.9 percent over the past 12 months, not seasonally adjusted (NSA). The index for all items less food and energy increased 0.4 percent in April (SA); up 5.5 percent over the year (NSA). However, commodities have plummeted in the past year.

Crude oil (WTI) is down 38% in the past year, trading below pre-Ukraine invasion level. Gasoil (-44%), gasoline (-40%), heating oil (-44%), natural gas (Henry Hub -74% and NBP -65%) have all plummeted to pre-war levels.

Even wheat is down 30% from a year before June 4th, 2023. The FAO Food Price Index has also corrected to a two-year low in May.

Why do commodities plummet in the middle of the China recovery and elevated demand growth and tight supply? Monetary factors again. The massive rate hikes and the subsequent monetary contraction have impacted the internationally quoted prices of goods all over the world. It is more expensive to purchase storage, finance margin calls, hire tankers and start long positions.

If commodities and the Ukraine war were to blame for inflation, why is the consumer price index remain so elevated? Money supply growth is plummeting but not enough to revert the price expansion of 2020-2023 and, in fact, global money supply has not fallen lower than $101 trillion, according to Bloomberg. That is a significant drop in money supply from its highs, and one that justifies the rapid decline in headline inflation, but not enough to revert the price increases for consumers.

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Germany Fines Woman For Saying Russia Isn’t ‘Aggressor’ And Invasion Of Ukraine Was ‘Necessary’

A Ukrainian national living in the western German city of Cologne has been ordered to pay a fine of around $964 (€900) for making comments in support of Russia’s brazen invasion of Ukraine.

Elena Kolbasnikova — a prominent face among people who support Russian President Vladimir Putin in Germany — “posed a threat to public peace” by delivering a speech at a pro-Russian protest, a court in Cologne said Tuesday while issuing the verdict.

During a protest held last year, Kolbasnikova reportedly said the invasion of Ukraine was “necessary” and also told a television channel that “Russia is not an aggressor,” German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported.

A judge ruled that these comments by the 48-year-old woman were enough evidence to show that she had violated German laws. The woman “endorsed and supported” the Russian war “in a way that was perceptible to others,” the judge said, according to The Telegraph.

Kolbasnikova, nicknamed “Putin‘s fangirl” by German media, was facing a possible prison sentence of up to three years in Germany or a heavy fine. However, the judge only issued the fine after considering the fact that the mother-of-two was unemployed.

The state broadcaster called the fine lenient.

After the sentencing, Kolbasnikova said she was “innocent.”

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RUSSIAN NEO-NAZI FIGHTING PUTIN TAUGHT AT FAR-RIGHT CAMP IN UK

The leader of an anti-Putin militia has disturbing links to an extreme-right wing movement banned in Britain, Declassified has found.

Denis Kapustin, who also uses the names Denis Nikitin and ‘White Rex’, was an instructor at a far-right camp in Wales in 2014.

His presence was noted by a Sunday Mirror investigation that year.

More recently, the White Rex has been in the news for leading the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK).

They are a group of armed dissidents launching raids into Russia from their base in Ukraine since March.

At least two civilians and a child have been killed in their attacks so far, with another 13 wounded.

While the RDK’s far-right ideology was belatedly noted in media reports, the fact its leader spent time teaching neo-Nazis in Britain has so far been forgotten.

He taught at the Sigurd Culture Camp in the Brecon Beacons in August 2014, which was designed to “enthuse them with a sense of racial pride, and to awaken the ‘Spirit Warrior’ within”.

Camp organiser Craig Fraser wanted to recreate Hitler’s SS by drilling his men into shape – and even planned to show footage from ISIS training in Syria at the next session.

The Sunday Mirror said a “key trainer at the event…was Denis Nitikin [sic], the owner and organiser of White Rex, a Russian martial arts and cage fighting club.”

Yesterday immigration minister Robert Jenrick refused to tell parliament what information the Home Office holds on Kapustin’s visit to the UK in 2014 or whether he had since been banned from entering the country, claiming not to comment on individual cases.

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Pentagon Readies New $2B Military Aid Package for Ukraine

The Pentagon is set to announce another military aid package for Ukraine valued at more than $2 billion, according to a report.

The new package would come about a week after the Pentagon announced a $300 million package for Ukraine on May 31.

Bloomberg News reported Friday morning that the Pentagon could announce as early as Friday that the package would include air defense munitions.

The package will reportedly be awarded under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which funds new purchases of weapons, versus using presidential drawdown authority, which has been used to authorize the transfer of U.S. military equipment to Ukraine.

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Schrödinger’s War… And Orwell’s

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 tried to explain the (consequences of the) uncertainty principle, defined by Werner Heisenberg as a core theme of Albert Einstein’s view of quantum mechanics, to … Albert Einstein. The latter must have been thrilled. Even though he did not like the uncertainty principle (God does not play dice). The thought experiment became known as “Schrödinger’s cat”. Since you cannot know both a particle’s position and its speed -and that’s just one example-, you have to assume all possible outcomes are valid (superposition). Only when you “look” does one particular outcome become the “reality”. It’s all part of the subatomic “world”

Wikipedia: “In Schrödinger’s original formulation, a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor (e.g. a Geiger counter) detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation implies that, after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality resolves into one possibility or the other.”

As I’m trying to explain this, I very much have to wonder if I get it right.

And I always thought that follows the uncertainty principle too: I can understand it and not understand it both at the same time.

A physicist might fare a bit better, but it won’t come easy…

This is what I was thinking of with regards to the war in Ukraine.

Before the fighting started, all possible outcomes seemed equally possible. If you did not look too closely at numbers of soldiers and weaponry, that is.

But once it did start (when Schrödinger’s box was opened), it became clear very rapidly that Ukraine had no chance of winning.

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Defense Contractor Funded Think Tanks Dominate Ukraine Debate

Think tanks in the United States are a go–to resource for media outlets seeking expert opinions on pressing public policy issues. But think tanks often have entrenched stances; a growing body of research has shown that their funders can influence their analysis and commentary. This influence can include censorship — both self-censorship and more direct censoring of work unfavorable to a funder — and outright pay–for–research agreements with funders. The result is an environment where the interests of the most generous funders can dominate think tank policy debates.

One such debate concerns the appropriate level of U.S. military involvement in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since Vladimir Putin’s illegal and disastrous decision to launch a full–scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States has approved approximately $48.7 billion in military spending.1 Despite the very real risk that escalations could lead to direct U.S. military involvement in the war, few think tanks have critically scrutinized this record setting amount of U.S. military assistance.

Within the context of public debate about U.S. military involvement in the Ukraine war, this brief investigates Department of Defense (DoD) and DoD contractor funding of think tanks, those organizations advocacy efforts for policies that would benefit those funders, and the media’s predominant reliance on think tanks funded by the defense sector. The analysis finds that the vast majority of media mentions of think tanks in articles about U.S. arms and the Ukraine war are from think tanks whose funders profit from U.S. military spending, arms sales and, in many cases, directly from U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war. These think tanks also regularly offer support for public policy solutions that would financially benefit their funders without disclosing these apparent conflicts of interest. While this brief did not seek to establish a direct causality between think–tank policy recommendations and their arms industry funding in the case of the Ukraine war, we find a clear correlation between the two. We also found that media outlets disproportionately rely on commentary from defense sector funded think tanks.

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FBI helps Ukraine censor Twitter users and obtain their info, including journalists

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has aided a Ukrainian intelligence effort to censor social media users and obtain their personal information, leaked emails reveal.

In March 2022, an FBI Special Agent sent Twitter a list of accounts on behalf of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Ukraine’s main intelligence agency. The accounts, the FBI wrote, “are suspected by the SBU in spreading fear and disinformation.” In an attached memo, the SBU asked Twitter to remove the accounts and hand over their user data.

The Ukrainian government’s FBI-enabled targets extend to members of the media. The SBU list that the FBI provided to Twitter included my name and Twitter profile. In its response to the FBI, Twitter agreed to review the accounts for “inauthenticity” but raised concerns about the inclusion of myself and other “American and Canadian journalists.”

The FBI’s attempt to ban Twitter accounts at the request of Ukrainian intelligence is among the most overt requests for censorship revealed to date in the Twitter Files, a cache of leaked communications from the social media giant.

The FBI’s censorship request was relayed in a March 27th, 2022 email from FBI Special Agent Aleksandr Kobzanets, the Assistant Legal Attaché at the US Embassy in Kyiv, to two Twitter executives. Four FBI colleagues were copied on the exchange.

“Thank you very much for your time to discuss the assistance to Ukraine,” Kobzanets wrote. “I am including a list of accounts I received over a couple of weeks from the Security Service of Ukraine. These accounts are suspected by the SBU in spreading fear and disinformation. For your review and consideration.”

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Journalists Are Asking Ukrainian Soldiers To Hide Their Nazi Patches, NYT Admits

The New York Times has been forced to very, very belatedly deal with something which had long been obvious and known to many independent analysts and media outlets, but which has been carefully shielded from the mainstream masses in the West for obvious reasons. 

The surprising Monday Times headline said that “Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History.” This acknowledgement comes after literally years of primarily indy journalists and geopolitical commentators pointing out that yes indeed… Ukraine’s military and paramilitary groups, especially those operating in the east since at least 2014, have a serious Nazi ideology problem. This has been exhaustively documented, again, going back years. But the report, which merely tries to downplay it as a “thorny issue” of Ukraine’s “unique” “History” – suggests that the real problem for Western PR is fundamentally that it’s being displayed so openly. Ukrainian troops are being asked to cover those Nazi symbols please!–as Matt Taibbi sarcastically quipped in commenting on the report.

The authors of the NYT report begin by expressing frustration over the optics of Nazi symbols being displayed so proudly on many Ukrainian soldiers’ uniforms. Suggesting that many journalistic photographs which have in some cases been featured in newspapers and media outlets worldwide (typically coupled with generally positive articles on Ukraine’s military) are merely ‘unfortunate’ or misleading, the NYT report says, “In each photograph, Ukrainians in uniform wore patches featuring symbols that were made notorious by Nazi Germany and have since become part of the iconography of far-right hate groups.”

The report admits this has led to controversy wherein news rooms actually must delete some photos of Ukrainian soldiers and militants. “The photographs, and their deletions, highlight the Ukrainian military’s complicated relationship with Nazi imagery, a relationship forged under both Soviet and German occupation during World War II,” continues the report. 

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Rep. Jamal Bowman supports military aid for Ukraine but is unfamiliar with the Donbas and Crimea

A congressional Squad star seems to have no idea how or why the Ukraine proxy war started. But he he says he’s voting for military aid to Kiev anyway.

On Monday, the New York Democratic congressman and star member of the progressive Squad Jamal Bowman told The Grayzone that he continues to support the U.S. providing aid for the Ukraine war because Russian President Vladimir Putin is “a madman.” Just moments before, however, Bowman admitted that he did not know what Crimea or the Donbas region were.

Readers of The Grayzone are likely familiar with the history of these regions as flash-points of the Ukrainian conflict. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 in response to the US-backed ousting of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his replacement with a nationalist government. For the next 8 years, meanwhile, the eastern Donbas region became mired in a civil war, as its ethnically Russian majority resisted the government in Kiev.

When told in a followup discussion that events within the history of these regions were pivotal to understanding the Ukrainian conflict and the stated motives behind Russia’s invasion, Bowman expressed doubt. “That’s what you’re saying. I gotta dig in to see,” he said.

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Kiev’s Long-Term “Last Resort” Plan To Blow-Up The Kakhova Dam Exposed

A day after Ukraine’s much-heralded counter-offensive appears to have failed, almost before it had even begun, a major dam in the Russian-occupied region of Kherson is suddenly bombed, prompting mass evacuations as floods spread across the region.

As we detailed earlier, both sides accuse each other of the attack that puts tens of thousands of homes at risk and might even threaten the safety of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.

However, as Raul Ilargi Meijer writes, twice last year (here and here), Ukrainian officials discussed Kiev’s plans to blow up the dam.

Andrew Korybko lays out the real narrative here:

The partial destruction of the Kakhovka Dam on early Tuesday morning saw Kiev and Moscow exchange accusations about who’s to blame, but a report from the Washington Post (WaPo) in late December extends credence to the Kremlin’s version of events.

Titled “Inside the Ukrainian counteroffensive that shocked Putin and reshaped the war”, its journalists quoted former commander of November’s Kherson Counteroffensive Major General Andrey Kovalchuk who shockingly admitted to planning this war crime:

“Kovalchuk considered flooding the river. The Ukrainians, he said, even conducted a test strike with a HIMARS launcher on one of the floodgates at the Nova Kakhovka dam, making three holes in the metal to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages. The test was a success, Kovalchuk said, but the step remained a last resort. He held off.”

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