Month: September 2024

Authored by Conor Gallagher via NakedCapitalism.com,

The situation in Europe is getting so bad on so many different levels, the Brussels crowd had to bring in “Super” Mario Draghi to save the day — or at least write a report telling them what to do…

Draghi has spent time at Goldman Sachs, the European Central Bank (ECB) during the sovereign debt crisis, and as unelected prime minister of Italy during the early days of the Covid pandemic and runup to Project Ukraine. Depending on where you sit, he could be an odd choice to chart a path forward; while Draghi knows his way around a crisis control center, he’s also plenty experienced at creating them.

He was one of the chief architects of the EU’s disastrous economic war against Russia and he’s always been a grim reaper for working class citizens of his native country of Italy. No wonder that for months the neoliberal, war-loving spreadsheet crowd in Brussels has eagerly awaited the report as if it is manna from heaven that will help deliver them from the corner they have backed themselves into.

Curiously, his report was delayed by months, which only increased the anticipation, and it finally dropped last week, conveniently timed at another crisis point. Project Ukraine is quickly unraveling and pressure is coming from all directions for Berlin to give the go ahead for joint EU debt in order to make the EU “competitive” again and buy a bunch of weapons to do something (nobody is too sure of what exactly) about Russia. Indeed, Draghi’s report doesn’t say, nor does it ever consider making nice with Moscow.

That’s because the report, “EU Competitiveness: Looking Ahead” is a political document more than economic one intended to not only give cover to the bloc’s disastrous Russia policies, but continue to double down. And it is already being used as more ammunition for those in the Baltics, Poland, the media, US-funded think tanks in Europe, and more who are calling on Germany to support debt for an extended Cold War. Specifically, they wanted Super Mario to tell them how to get out of the predicament of their own making without changing course on Russia and a host of other issues, and Draghi delivered — as long as you don’t let reality get in the way. His answer? More money. Lots of it.

He calls for massive infusions of cash into multiple sectors: green, tech, energy, and of course defense. According to Draghi, the price tag is a minimum of 800 billion euros annually until 2030.

Asked if his message was “implement your report, or die?” he replied that “It’s ‘Do this, or it’s a slow agony.’”

The EU certainly needs an economic plan, but Draghi’s report never questions whether ongoing belligerence toward Moscow (and loss of pipeline Russian gas) is in the bloc’s best interest and it never mentions Brussels’ obsession with austerity, which is once again being forced on member countries. From a purely economic standpoint, the report is trash economics that reads like something out of the late-stage USSR, according to economist Philip Pilkington.

But it does plug nicely into the political economy of today’s EU, which is being subsumed under Washington and NATO. It is engaged in open economic war and an proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, both of which have hurt working class citizens across the bloc. The austerity-obsessed EU is once again forcing its member states to enact austerity budgets. Draghi’s report was requested by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is working to amass more power to her mostly unaccountable throne, and is one of many voices calling for a defense union and militarization and the ability to borrow and potentially levy taxes to pay for those debts.

Source: https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1454246494010318850

So while Draghi’s report is ostensibly about across-the-board bloc “competitiveness” (there’s plenty on weakening antitrust, for example), Russia still dominates the conversation in the halls of power. Von der Leyen wants to create an “air shield” against Russia. The EU’s new High Representative  for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy is proposing a €100 billion (to start) eurobond issue to pay for more weapons to be used against Russia.

And Poland, one of the biggest backers of the war against Russia, might also be getting additional input over a whole lot of EU money. Piotr Serafin, a Tusk confidant and Poland’s European commissioner in Brussels, looks likely to be in charge of the EU Commission budget portfolio, one of the most powerful positions as the bloc is set to sort out its seven-year spending plans.

What these people do with a blank check in the name of competitiveness?

The very same week Draghi’s report came down, so did another from Nicole Koenig, head of policy for the Munich Security Conference, commonly referred to as “Davos with guns.”  It is set to welcome in current NATO figurehead Jens Stoltenberg as its new chairman next year, and Koenig endorses the idea of a debt-based fund to fuel weapons purchases as part of a European defense union.

Despite all the buildup to Draghi’s report and it being accompanied by similar calls from the Munich Security Conference and every American plutocrat-funded think tank, the immediate response out of Germany was mostly nein. 

Germany’s Finance Minister Christian Lindner said plainly that “Germany will not agree to this.”

Lindner is part of the three party ruling coalition that would be unable to garner 33 percent of the vote if elections were held tomorrow. His fiscally conservative Free Democratic Party currently polls around 3-4 percent — not even enough to get them seats in the next Bundestag.

Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and current odd-on favorite to be the next chancellor of Germany, said the following: “I want to say this very clearly, now and in the future, I will do everything I can to prevent this European Union from spiraling into debt.”

The CDU currently polls around 31-33 percent nationally. The insurgent party on the left and right, the Alternative for Germany (17-19 percent) is anti-EU and would never support joint borrowing.  I haven’t seen a position from the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (7-10 percent), but would imagine its hyperfocus on German working class issues means it is also not in favor.

Robert Habeck, leader of the war mongering Greens (10-12 percent), is in support.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz is remaining silent on the issue, omitting any mention of it from his Wednesday speech to the Bundestag. While he has in the past made his opposition known, it’s worth knowing if his thinking has changed as it did repeatedly for nearly every step of escalation in Ukraine. Scholz’s government enjoys record unpopularity, and his Social Democratic Party is being decimated — in the European elections they were embarrassed, in recent state elections they were thrashed, and in national polling they have fallen from 26 percent of the vote in the 2021 election to 14 percent currently.

So yeah, the timing for Berlin to deal with such major European funding requests is not ideal. From another point of view, though, maybe there’s no better time to take advantage of the chaos and get the green light from the lame duck government in Berlin. There are once again rumblings that Scholz should step aside and clear the way for his pugnacious defense minister Boris Pistorius who has been pounding the table for endless military spending ever since he was plucked from the obscure position as the Saxony State Minister of the Interior and Sports.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III is greeted upon arrival to the Ministry of Defense in Berlin by German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and US Ambassador Amy Gutmann Jan 19, 2023. (DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Jack Sanders)

Any attempt to enact a joint borrowing scheme would require unanimity from the European Council, which is composed of all the bloc’s heads of state, but there is a belief that if Germany goes along others like the Netherlands can be persuaded.

Germany is dealing with its biggest political upheaval since World War II, it’s deindustrializing, and it’s in a recession largely caused by structural problems and its own missteps. Standards of living are declining following years of record immigration, and it’s all combining to produce the most unpopular government in modern German history.

Despite all Germany’s problems, it is still the most powerful economy in Europe that drives the bloc, and any major EU changes must run through Berlin.

And everyone is pressing now.

Poland and the Baltics are haranguing for more. Southern Europe is on board. Countries like Italy and France have supported joint borrowing for years.

US-funded think tanks stateside and in Europe, which really act as plutocrat-funded shadow governments, are pumping out piece after piece about how Europe (Germany) must use joint debt to fund defense.

Here’s yet another recently-released report from the Council on Foreign Relations, “From the Ukraine Conflict to a Secure Europe.” It argues like so many others that the EU, as an auxiliary to NATO, must take the lead role in ensuring that Russia is bordered by unfriendly states:

A European pillar based on the EU would go a long way toward easing if not eliminating the continuing tension between NATO and the EU in the field of security. For all practical purposes, the EU would become a member of the alliance, and cooperation between the two entities should be seamless. Non-NATO EU members would thus enjoy an implicit Article 5 security guarantee, which would be extended to new members as the EU expanded to include non-NATO allies in the Balkans and the former Soviet space.

Unfortunately for Germany and the EU, that will also include propping up whatever is left of Ukraine and probably making sure its bondholders are made whole while still finding spare change to bring Armenia, Moldova, Georgia, and who knows, Kazakhstan(?) on board as well. How to pay for all the color revolution efforts, bribes, military hardware, state aid, and everything else required by the EU’s now-openly subservient role to US imperial ambitions? The CFR piece cites Macron’s big April speech at the Sorbonne as a blueprint, which of course requires common EU debt.

Yet Germany remains opposed.

The country is dealing with its own budget woes and is cutting almost everywhere except on the military. It has a constitutionally-enshrined cap on spending, known as the debt brake, which it tried to sneak around last year, but a court struck it down. And Berlin is even cutting contributions to the EU rather than looking to back bloc-wide debt.

At issue is how EU debt would be repaid. It would either be done through the creation of new EU budget resources, such as taxes levied by the bloc, or through an increase in member states’ contributions to the budget.

Following the release of Draghi’s report, German bond yields rose as investors placed bets on more spending and, therefore, more rate hikes. As I understand it, it would also make the currency stronger since the debt would be safer, and that would be about the final nail in the coffin of the German model as a stronger euro would be another strike against Germany’s export-oriented industry — or whatever is left of it.

At the same time that German yields rose, however, Italy’s borrowing costs fell. That’s because if the EU and its AAA rating covered the debt of poorer member states or borrowed directly to cover member states’ energy crisis needs and more military spending, countries like Italy would have an easier go of it.

Italy currently pays a little under five percent on its 10-year debt, while the EU pays just over three percent. That’s why countries across the EU south, which face higher borrowing costs, are in favor of EU-wide bonds. Countries like Italy in southern Europe have faced decades of privatizations, budget cuts, and wage suppression in efforts to appease the market gods all to no avail.

How fitting that it would be that joint debt might finally get the go-ahead, not to improve the lives of citizens, but to spend hundreds of billions on a bunch of  weapons that will leave them bankrupt and still outclassed by Russian firepower and manpower. Maybe there’s some hope for some military Keynesianism militarism effect, but at least to start with, it will likely be funding overpriced and ineffective American weapons.

One can read in Draghi’s plan or Macron’s Sorbonne speech about their concerns for the working man, European families, as well as the climate, and should a plan for joint debt go through there will no doubt be efforts to spin it that way (there already are) but it’s not hard to see where the priorities lie.

The release of his report comes at the same time that the EU is pushing more austerity on its members states. Brussels is then turning around and using those artificial budget shortages as a reason to borrow at the EU level to cover military expenses.

Bloomberg reported back in March that EU officials and investors are using the fiscal rules to push for an EU-wide bond program that would bring investors bigtime profits while allowing the bloc to ramp up military spending without individual nations incurring more debt. See? Win-win, except for the vast majority of Europeans who work for a living and will continue to see social services crumble while life gets more expensive.

This is not a plan to “save” Europe. It is part of the ongoing effort to recreate Europe as a neoliberal paradise for the financial sector and an anti-Russian servant to Washington.

No hundreds of billions in weapons purchases and streamlining will make a difference in Ukraine or in some hypothetical war agaisnt Russia, but it does take advantage of the self-inflicted crisis to shift more power to Brussels, reward investors, and punish workers holding back productivity. The report laments how the US is so much more “successful” in the realms of private equity and venture capital, and has such higher productivity in sectors like healthcare. Yes, who wouldn’t want to emulate the US healthcare system? Maybe all the military hardware will be useful in disciplining the local population in the name of competetiveness, however:

We should be moving to a four day work week, not a six day one. Forty percent or more of of jobs are either pointless or actively harmless. Get rid of them to start. https://t.co/Ubdr4Q5VCi

— Ian Welsh (@iwelsh) July 2, 2024

Think a lot more EU spending will benefit the bloc’s climate goals. There’s a good chance it could take money away from energy investment as Draghi’s report calls for Brussels to free up funding by modifying the European Investment Bank Group’s lending policies and the EU’s sustainable finance frameworks and environmental, social and governance rules to allow for defense investments instead. And let’s not forget that militaries and warfare are the biggest emitters around.

And as the EU cements its role as an underling to Washington and NATO, it will almost certainly need to proceed with further “de-risking” from China the same way it did with Russia. Yet, China dominates multiple stages of the green tech industry. From Draghi’s report:

Some believe that there is little chance that Draghi’s and all the others’ plans come to fruition. Personally, judging by how Project Ukraine has gone and the West’s overall vitriol directed at Russia, I think it’s safer to assume Europe is a long ways from spent and that the EU will continue to dig.

I guess we’ll see. It will certainly be clarifying to see if Germany has an ounce of sovereignty left or if it will give in on its sacred cow. As Ukraine continues to flounder and reaches the inevitable conclusion, it’s likely the calls on Germany to relent will only grow louder and more recriminating.

As the hysteria over Europe’s “agonizing death” reaches a fever pitch it’s worth remembering that there’s one option that always goes unmentioned by the likes of Draghi, Macron, and company.

The Failed Logic Behind the Draghi Report (and All the Others Like It) 

Let’s take a step back and really look at what Super Mario is saying in his 400-page screed.

It’s all about EU competitiveness. Well, there are plenty of issues, but one of the biggest reasons the EU’s slow decline became a full-blown crisis is energy. What happened? Here’s Draghi’s story:

Europe has abruptly lost its most important supplier of energy, Russia. All the while, geopolitical stability is waning, and our dependencies have turned out to be vulnerabilities…EU companies still face electricity prices that are 2-3 times those in the US. Natural gas prices paid are 4-5 times higher. Europe was able to satisfy its demand for imported energy by procuring ample pipeline gas, which accounted for around 45% of the EU’s natural gas imports in 2021. But this source of relatively cheap energy has now disappeared at huge cost to Europe. The EU has lost more than a year of GDP growth while having to re-direct massive fiscal resources to energy subsidies and building new infrastructure for importing liquefied natural gas.

There’s more:

High energy costs in Europe are an obstacle to growth, while lack of generation and grid capacity could impede the spread of digital tech and transport electrification. Commission estimates suggest that high energy prices in recent years have taken a toll on potential growth in Europe. Energy prices also continue to affect corporate investment sentiment much more than in other major economies. Around half of European companies see energy costs as a major impediment to investment – 30 percentage points higher than US companiesii. Energy-intensive industries (EIIs) have been hit hardest: production has fallen 10-15% since 2021 and the composition of European industry is changing, with increasing imports from countries with lower energy costs. Energy prices have also become more volatile, increasing the price of hedging and adding uncertainty to investment decisions.

Notice the lack of agency in Draghi’s telling? It’s as if a natural disaster swept down from the heavens, destroyed all the pipelines transporting Russian gas to the EU, and now prevents them from ever being repaired. In reality, the decision is wholly that of the Scholzs, Macrons, and von der Leyens of Europe (and their benefactors). Notice in the following graphs that prices were a little higher than the US, but where does the divergence really start to take off?

Draghi doesn’t investigate further. But as Russian President Vladimir Putin recently put it for the hundredth time at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok:

It is very strange, and I cannot get my head around it. They up and blew up the gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea. They blew up both Nord Stream 1 pipelines and one Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The second one is fully functional, though. What stops the German government from pressing the button, coming to terms with us and turning it on? How much is it? 25 billion cubic metres through one pipeline?…It was the Poles who shut down the Yamal-Western Europe pipeline. Now Ukraine is closing [transit through Ukraine], and the Nord Stream 2 route along the Baltic Sea bed is not turned on. Well, if they don’t want to, they don’t have to. It will be a loss for them. For us, there will be a certain reduction in revenues, but it’s no big deal.

The EU’s self-imposed lack of competitiveness now requires hundreds of billions to rectify. Since reports are the theme of the week, here’s one more: the German business association BDI released a study claiming that 20 percent of industrial value creation in the country is under threat. At the top of the list of causes is high energy prices and it says Germany needs about $1.55 trillion of investment by 2030.

That’s not all, of course. Not only did the EU harm itself by refusing pipelined gas from its neighbor, it now must spend billions arming itself to supposedly protect against that very same neighbor it launched a proxy war against.

Maybe instead of harming oneself economically, antagonizing your neighbor, continuing to run around like headless chickens warning that the Russians are about to overrun Europe if you don’t spend billions attempting to militarize, you could just not do any of that.

The EU could just stop all this now. The goal was clearly to cause a collapse of the Putin government, install a puppet friendly to the West, and exploit Russia. It failed.

Time to go hat in hand and start begging and maybe in time regain some of what has been lost. Russia has no designs to conquer Europe. So there’s no need to drop hundreds of billions on weapons that, at best, would help escalate to a nuclear war.

Instead get 400 pages of smart-sounding economic nonsense in line with all the think tank fantasies about the EU taking the Russia baton from the Americans who will turn their attention toward China.

Or in Draghi-speak:

With the return of war in the EU’s immediate neighborhood, the emergence of new types of hybrid threats, and a possible shift of geographic focus and the defense needs of the US, the EU will have to take growing responsibility for its own defense and security. The EU’s defense industrial base is facing structural challenges in terms of capacity, know-how and technological edge. As a result, the EU is not keeping pace with its global competitors.

He adds that Brussels must encourage mergers in the defense industry, and companies should have no restrictions on accessing EU funding. Currently, bureacrats are forced to concoct schemes to get around the ban on the EU budget funding defense purchases as EU law stipulates that such funds go to boring old items like agriculture and regional development. But who needs stuff like that when you can point long-range missiles at Moscow and be targeted in return?

Will open-ended spending on defense do what all the weapons to the Ukraine proxy war and unprecedented sanctions couldn’t do?

I guess we’ll see. Draghi’s smart-sounding report is a good companion peace to the recent argument that they just need to keep up the pressure until…Putin dies of old age. That’s the thinking from former senior CIA analyst and Principal Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council Peter Schroeder, writing at Foreign Affairs that, “what is certain is that, at some point, he will die.” More:

The evidence suggests that on Ukraine, Putin simply is not persuadable; he is all in. For him, preventing Ukraine from becoming a bastion that the West can use to threaten Russia is a strategic necessity. He has taken personal responsibility for achieving that outcome and likely judges it as worth nearly any cost. Trying to coerce him into giving up is a fruitless exercise that just wastes lives and resources.

Did it really takes hundreds of thousands of lives lost and hundreds of billions spent for brain geniuses like Schroeder to understand what Russia had been telling them along? Well, if we read on we get to this:

If Putin is unwilling to halt his assault on Ukraine, then the war can end in only one of two ways: either because Russia has lost the ability to continue its campaign or because Putin is no longer in power.

We’ll see how that works out. If it doesn’t, well, hopefully Draghi is still kicking so he can get to work on another report.

How many Earths would we need if the entire global population lived like one country?

In this graphic, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu visualized data from the Global Footprint Network to see the number Earths required to sustain a world population that lived like Americans, Germans, and more.

Data and Methodology

The data we used to create this graphic is listed in the table below. Figures were published in 2022 (with data as of 2018).

These estimates are based on each country’s ecological footprint, which is measured in global hectares (gha).

It represents the amount of biologically productive land and water a population requires to produce all of the resources it consumes and to absorb the waste it generates, using prevailing technologies.

Key Takeaways From This Data

The data shown in this graphic sheds light on how different countries impact the planet.

Countries that exceed their respective biocapacity are known as biocapacity debtors. This means that the country is net-importing biocapacity through trade, liquidating national ecological assets or emitting more carbon dioxide waste into the atmosphere than its own ecosystems absorb.

Countries that have an ecological surplus, on the other hand, are known as biocapacity creditors. If everyone on the planet lived like these countries, we would need fewer Earths rather than more Earths.

Earth Overshoot Day

Another interesting concept is Earth Overshoot Day, which marks when humanity’s demand for ecological resources in a given year exceeds what the planet can regenerate in that year. For 2024, overshoot day fell on Aug. 1.

If you enjoyed this post, check out The Countries With No Earth Overshoot Day, from featured creator Statista.

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A military court in Congo sentenced three U.S. citizens to death on Sept. 13 for their alleged involvement in a failed coup attempt targeting the government of Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi.

Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun, 36, Marcel Malanga, 21, and Tyler Thompson, 21, were among 37 individuals who received the death penalty on Friday after being convicted on charges of conspiracy, terrorism, and attempted coup.

The verdict was handed down in an open-air court session in the yard of a military prison on the outskirts of Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo, on Friday, and read out on live TV.

Most of the defendants were Congolese but, besides the three Americans, there was also a Briton, a Belgian, and a Canadian. The defendants, who wore blue and yellow prison-issued tops as they sat before the judge, were given five days to appeal their sentences.

Richard Bondo, a lawyer who defended the six foreigners, argued that the investigation was flawed because his clients were given inadequate interpreters. He vowed to appeal the verdict.

The coup attempt, led by Christian Malanga, a U.S.-based Congolese politician, unfolded on May 19, 2023, when armed men briefly occupied a presidential office. The Congolese military quickly intervened, and Malanga was killed while resisting arrest. Five others also died in the botched takeover attempt.

Malanga’s son, Marcel Malanga, is one of the three Americans sentenced to death. He previously told the court that his father had threatened to kill him unless he took part in the coup attempt. His mother, Brittany Sawyer, maintains that her son was innocent and was simply following his father, who considered himself to be president of a shadow Congolese government in exile.

Thompson, who was Marcel’s friend and played high school football with him in Utah, had traveled to Congo on vacation to explore the world, according to his family, who maintain he had no knowledge of the elder Malanga’s coup plans. The Thompsons’ lawyer in Utah, Skye Lazaro, told The Associated Press that the family is heartbroken over the verdict.

Zalman-Polun, the third American to receive the death penalty, was a business associate of Christian Malanga.

In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said at a press briefing on Sept. 13 that embassy staff had attended the proceedings and will continue to monitor the situation closely.

“We understand that the legal process in the DRC allows for defendants to appeal the court’s decision,” he said.

Asked if he believes the proceedings involving the three Americans have been fair, Miller said he didn’t want to pass judgment yet but that the department will be following developments closely as the appeals process plays out.

Utah Sens. Mitt Romney and Mike Lee, both Republicans, expressed sympathy for the families of the three Americans but they have not publicly called on the U.S. government to push for their release.

“My thoughts are with the families during this difficult time,” Lee said on Friday. “We will continue to work with the State Department to receive updates on this case.”

Romney spokesperson Dilan Maxfield called it “an extremely difficult and frightening situation for the families involved,“ adding that Romney’s office has ”consistently engaged with the State Department and will continue to do so.”

Some 50 people were charged in connection with the botched coup, with around two dozen acquitted and the remaining 37 sentenced to death.

Congo reinstated the death penalty earlier this year, ending a more than two-decade moratorium. Under the country’s penal code, the president determines the method of execution. In the past, militants have been executed by firing squad.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

For the third time since the Ukraine war began in February 2022, President Putin has approved an expansion of Russia’s military, on Monday signing a decree to boost the number of soldiers by 180,000.

This means Russia’s armed forces will include 1.5 million active servicemen going into winter. It is also a clear signal that Russia doesn’t plan on reducing the intensity of the fight in the Donbass anytime soon. This will bring the overall number of military personnel within Russia’s army, including all reserve forces, to over 2,300,000. 

Putin had previously sign-off on two prior expansion waves: an increase of 137,000 in August 2022 and another expanse of 170,000 in December 2023.

In the fall of 2022, when Ukraine’s much-hyped counteroffensive was in full swing, Putin had called up some 300,000 reservists to join the fight.

With this latest troop increase, Putin could also be signaling NATO that Russia will not back down, at a moment the US and UK are mulling approving Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles to attack inside Russian territory.

The Associated Press summarizes of current estimated battlefield numbers:

The most capable Russian troops have been pressing an offensive in eastern Ukraine, where they have made incremental but steady gains in the past few months.

In June, Putin put the number of troops involved in what the Kremlin calls the “special military operation” in Ukraine at nearly 700,000.

And Reuters has highlighted that this makes Russia’s army second in manpower size only to China’s PLA military:

President Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered the regular size of the Russian army to be increased by 180,000 troops to 1.5 million active servicemen in a move that would make it the second largest in the world after China’s.

In a decree published on the Kremlin’s website, Putin ordered the overall size of the armed forces to be increased to 2.38 million people, of which he said 1.5 million should be active servicemen.

The Russian army will become the second largest army in the world after Putin’s decree.

According to statistics, the top three in terms of military personnel today were China, India and the United States. Now only the PLA will be larger than the Russian army in terms of numbers.… pic.twitter.com/Usz97R7SNM

— S p r i n t e r (@SprinterFamily) September 16, 2024

This new expanse might also be the result of Ukraine’s Kursk offensive. Kiev officials hoped that the invasion of southern Russia might force the relocation of regular troops from Donetsk to defend and take back villages on Russian soil.

But so far that calculation appears to have failed. Moscow has denied that it was forced to relocate significant amounts of troops. A Russian counteroffensive is underway, confirmed to be intensifying starting days ago, while at the same time Russian troops in Ukraine’s east are making steady gains.

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

Compliance would amount to damaging its own soft power and grand strategic interests…

The Hindu cited unnamed government sources to report that “U.S. officials have spoken to the Ministry of External Affairs about joining their actions against what they call ‘Russian disinformation’, by revoking accreditations and designating their journalists under the ‘Foreign Missions Act’. However, while the Ministry has been silent on the issue, government officials said that the debate on sanctions is not relevant to India.” The US should have known that India wouldn’t ever capitulate to its demands.

The decades-long Russian-Indian Strategic Partnership has been rejuvenated over the past two and a half years since the special operation began after India stepped up to preemptively avert Russia’s potentially disproportionate dependence on China. Time and again, India has responded to American pressure to distance itself from Russia by redoubling their relations, which is predicated on accelerating tri-multipolarity processes with a view towards jointly midwifing complex multipolarity (“multiplexity”).

On the soft power front, a survey carried out by India’s prestigious Observer Research Foundation in late 2022 showed that their country’s youth regarded Russia as their most reliable partner. Meanwhile, a US-based global business intel company confirmed two months later that adults view Russia as the country most allied to their own. This backdrop explains why so many were confused over the summer when it was discovered that RT and Sputnik had shared inconsistent depictions of India’s territorial integrity.

That scandal was analyzed here, which drew attention to how both publicly financed international media flagships are editorially autonomous but were influenced in those examples by what can be described as Russia’s pro-BRI policymaking faction. This incident discredits the US’ subsequent allegation that those two operate as instruments of Russian intelligence since Moscow would never order them to doubt its Indian strategic partner’s territorial integrity and had nothing to do with those inconsistent depictions.

Prime Minister Modi’s trip to Moscow soon thereafter presumably addressed this “rogue” activity and will likely ensure that it’s not repeated now that Russian officials are probably aware of this scandal. RT and Sputnik are publicly financed, after all, and must therefore abide by their patron’s guidelines. This doesn’t mean that they’re “state-run”, let alone intelligence fronts, but just that they have an obligation to ensure that this doesn’t happen again considering that they’re supposed to advance state interests.

About those, not only do they concern full support for the entirety of India’s territorial claims, but they also involve analyzing and articulating a multipolar perspective on International Relations. It was explained here in spring 2022 that this worldview isn’t the product of “Russian propaganda” since the Global Majority’s interests align naturally align with it. This includes India’s, which appreciates the role that RT and Sputnik play in promoting their country’s geostrategic balancing act (“multi–alignment”).

Banning their national hubs like the US demanded would therefore have amounted to damaging its own interests, both in the soft power realm as was explained as well as in the grand strategic one by backstabbing Russia and thus forcing it more into China’s arms at India’s possible expense. As the self-declared Voice of the Global South, the world’s most populous country, and its fifth-largest economy, India is now a trendsetter, so others might be emboldened by its defiance of the US to follow its lead.

Authored by Cecilie Jilkova via The Brownstone Institute,

The UN committee approved the text of the Convention on Combating Cybercrime. Human rights organizations and information technology experts have called it a threat to democracy and the free world.

“One of the world’s most dangerous surveillance treaties was approved with a standing ovation,” wrote Austrian digital rights group Epicenter Works.

The UN General Assembly is now due to vote on the adoption of the Convention in September.

“It can be assumed that the treaty will be accepted without difficulty at the UN General Assembly in September, and will thus be officially considered a UN convention. After that, it will be available for signature and subsequently it can be ratified,” said political advisor Tanja Fachathalerová.

“It can be assumed that it will not be a big problem to achieve the necessary forty ratifications, which are necessary for the treaty to enter into force.”

Legitimization of Repression against Journalists and Opponents

The proposed international treaty aims to combat cybercrime and improve international cooperation between law enforcement agencies. However, more than a hundred human and civil rights organizations around the world have warned of a serious threat to human rights and criticized the fact that the text of the treaty lacks adequate safeguards. According to them, the planned agreement would oblige UN member states to introduce comprehensive measures for the supervision of a wide range of crimes.

“The contract is really a surveillance agreement with too few provisions on data protection and human rights. In practice, it legitimizes the more repressive measures against political opponents or journalists that we now see in authoritarian states,” writes the netzpolitik.org server.

China and Russia Stood at the Beginning of the Convention

It all started with a UN resolution initiated in 2019 by Russia, China, and other countries (such as Iran, Egypt, Sudan, and Uzbekistan) with 88 votes in favor, 58 against, and 34 abstentions.

European states have proposed changes, but according to experts, the resulting compromise does not even meet the conditions necessary to preserve privacy and protect human rights.

“Unfortunately, a data access treaty has been drawn up that will allow governments around the world to exchange citizens’ personal information in perpetual secrecy in the event of any crime the two governments agree is ‘serious.’ This would include eavesdropping on location and real-time communications around the world, and force IT workers to divulge passwords or other access keys that would compromise the security of global systems that billions of people rely on every day. And it’s not just private sector systems – government systems are also at risk,” said Nick Ashton-Hart, Digital Economy Policy Director at APCO, who is also leading the Cybersecurity Tech Accord delegation to the Convention negotiations.

The Threat of Criminal Prosecution of Journalists and White Hackers

The Ashton-Hart treaty also puts journalists and whistleblowers at risk of prosecution. The International Press Institute was so concerned about this risk that it placed a full-page ad in the Washington Post. Independent security experts around the world also warned in February that they could face criminal prosecution for their work protecting IT systems from cybercriminals under the draft Convention.

Governments Could Prosecute Children for Sexting

“Incredibly, the text expressly allows governments to prosecute children for “sexting” in the same article (14) that is supposed to protect them from sexual predators. The article also puts people working in charities who help bring predators to justice at risk of prosecution because they need access to material created by predators as part of their work. Civil society advocates have repeatedly pointed out this obvious deficiency, but to no avail,” Ashton-Hart said.

Concerns about Freedom of Expression

According to experts, companies that operate internationally will also be exposed to increased legal and reputational risk after the arrest of employees. The private data of individuals and vulnerable communities can be accessed by law enforcement agencies around the world, even in cases where the perpetrators’ actions are not criminal in their place of residence or in cases that raise significant concerns about freedom of expression.

Cooperation between authorities and states can be kept secret without transparency about how governments use the treaty, or without provisions that allow companies to challenge law enforcement requests, even if they are illegal.

Criticizing Leaders as a Crime?

“Facilitating collusion in any ‘serious’ crime opens the door to ‘crimes’ such as criticizing leaders or persecuting minorities,” writes Ashton-Hart in his analysis.

On August 13, the International Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest and most representative representative of the private sector, openly called on the UN not to adopt the convention at the General Assembly in September.

“If governments fail again to protect the international human rights legal framework they so often vociferously support, then new, dangerous norms created in international law will haunt us for decades to come,” Ashton-Hart said.

*  *  *

Republished from the author’s Substack

Authored by Mike Scanlon via RealClearDefense.com,

An ability to win hearts and minds has long been seen by America’s leadership as essential to domestic and international politics and security.  For much of the Pax Americana, our government and intelligentsia have poured time, effort, and money into studying how to persuade everyone from allies to enemies and, conversely, how to counter an opponent’s influence campaigns. 

But something essential has changed since the rise of President Donald Trump as a political force. 

During the Cold War, President Dwight Eisenhower spoke up against censorship and for lay readers in the wake of an attempt by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s henchmen to eradicate communist books from libraries:

Don’t join the book burners.  Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.  Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book . . . .

How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it?  . . .

And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people.  They are part of America.  And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn’t America.

These days, America’s most educated have grown distrustful of non-experts and their ability to process dangerous ideas. 

Our elites have launched a campaign to protect the undereducated from themselves. 

• The credentialed class pressures book retailers to stop selling “uncritical” translations of sinister foreign texts, meaning those lacking an accepted authority’s “soberly critical framing, complete with detailed footnotes, contextual commentary, or other forms of annotation.”  

• Journalists writing about controversial topics do not link directly to primary sources but instead filter such news “through multiple layers of condemnation by a shrinking pool of academics trusted to read raw material.” 

• Our best and brightest unabashedly seek to silence individuals who disagree with their betters and to regulate (or outright suppress) social media sites that allow free (or free-ish) debate about unsafe thoughts. 

• Opinion makers cheer on activists seeking to deplatform or shout down an ever-growing list of enemies, including those who refused to toe the party line on Russia’s war in the Ukraine. 

• Self-proclaimed defenders of press freedom are rallying to safeguard the right of social media companies to collaborate with state actors to squelch wrongheaded arguments and to wall the incorrigible off from the marketplace of ideas. 

• The Biden Administration tried to establish a governance board to combat disinformation. 

That crusade is not going well. 

As Martin Gurri has pointed out time and time again, America’s thought leaders and information curators are on the ropes.  Academics, think tankers, pundits, and policymakers no longer can hide the fact that they often either have no clue what they are doing or are all too willing to oversell their case—and will purposefully obfuscate or outright lie from time to time to get their way.  

Yet most experts are more than happy to pretend as if nothing were wrong as they claw their way up the professional ladder.  Some insist on singing paeans to themselves while demanding ever-greater protection from open competition and even outside criticism.

Take, for instance, the authorities advocating a muscular foreign policy or demanding robust countermeasures against domestic extremism.  The Global War on Terror was not America’s finest hour.  We lost Afghanistan.  It would be difficult to claim victory in Iraq.  The great hopes of the Arab Spring came to naught. 

But repeated failures did not cause self-doubt to creep into the minds of credentialed militarists of any stripe.  Most continued to insist that the next war would go our way.  Some have even been trying to expand their territory, such as the counterinsurgency specialists who tout their experience in (wildly unsuccessful) campaigns against international extremism and propaganda when marketing themselves as would-be, should-be leaders of the war against domestic extremism and disinformation. 

There was never any reason to assume that the pro-war clique would fare any better if provided yet another opportunity.  And failures have piled on missed opportunities in the Ukraine to the point where security specialists are, once again, scrambling to protect the foreign policy establishment by blaming its most recent fiasco on a lack of American commitment to winning what may always have been an unwinnable war.   

The crisis afflicting much of America’s expert class is less that the internet has made it easier for the public to push back, and more that the elite’s preferred models just don’t work.  For instance, many disinformation experts justify censorship with a model positing that malevolent information drives malevolent acts.  Similarly, some domestic terrorism experts justify increased surveillance with a model positing that terrorists broadcast their “terrorist intent” before engaging in acts of terrorism. 

But, even if most people who commit violent acts were exposed to disinformation or made some announcement of terrorist intent, notably lacking is substantial evidence that a significant percentage of the people exposed to disinformation or of the individuals articulating terrorist intent go on to commit violent acts.  In other words, many of our leading domestic security experts seem unwilling or unable to differentiate between a hypothesis and a theory.  This is suboptimal. 

Worse, the smarter-than-thou crowd continues to push for surveillance and censorship despite the glaring problems with their firmly held beliefs about causality and causation.  The proposition that bad ideas lead to bad acts has been “disproven over and over again.”  And even many of the authorities seeking to elevate their profiles by fearmongering about “stochastic terrorism” must admit that the hateful speech in the establishment’s targets is unregulatable under American law.  Unlike “a call to lynch someone when a mob has gathered nearby,” the “use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable” just isn’t “advocacy . . .  directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and . . . likely to incite or produce such action.”  It can’t meet the standard required for the government to forbid or punish inflammatory speech.

To the extent that America still cares about freedom of speech or other civil liberties, the surveil–and–censor hacks should be laughed off the stage.  Yet the grandees of the so-called “Censorship-Industrial Complex” are overplaying an incredibly weak hand based on what appears to be little more than blind faith that the public isn’t qualified to question the elite.  This is silly; the emperor has no clothes. 

The collected academic expertise of the anti-disinformation movement proved itself worthless in the real world because disinformation specialists were incapable of preventing the Biden Administration’s Disinformation Governance Board from falling victim to—of all things—a disinformation campaign.  Given the anti-disinformation crowd’s admitted inability to effectively contest disinformation with speech and counter-speech in open competition, the public has every right to question whether the Biden Administration’s “Ministry of Truth” was meant to institute a de facto censorship regime where progressive- or establishment-led media and social media companies would collude with like-minded state actors to suppress populist voices.  

The disinformation that touched off the anti-disinformation crusade—propaganda propounded by the Russian government during the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections—either appears far too ham-handed to be persuasive or seems all but indistinguishable from arguments and assertions made by America’s most highly esteemed progressive identitarians.  Given the anti-disinformation cult’s penchant for announcing causation rather than proving it, the public has every right to question whether disinformation specialists operate in a fantasy world of just-so stories where fancy academic degrees and enviable job titles can magically transform an “and” (the Russian government tried to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, and Donald Trump won) into a “so” (the Russian government tried to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, so Donald Trump won). 

The social media-based disinformation campaigns initiated by America’s enemies during the ongoing Trump era seem to be as ineffective as the failed social media-based information campaigns launched by America during the Global War on Terror.  Given how disproportionate the elite’s highly publicized panic over disinformation is to the actual threat from disinformation, the public has every right to question whether our leadership is conjuring up sham crises to exert tighter control over a nation that has grown largely unimpressed by even the shiniest of shiny credentials.

Although the stage has been set for a complete collapse of expert rule, it will be difficult for the current crop of experts to save themselves from—of all things—themselves.  The traditional authority system is almost uniquely unfit to deal with the very public failure of conventional models. 

The incentive structure of America’s credential-granting institutions is out of whack.  Expert careers are advanced by appealing to recognized authorities and representatives of wealthy benefactors  or powerful state actors in a more-or-less closed system, which the establishment zealously protects from outside interference. 

• Freedom from open competition allows diplomas and job titles to trump the substance of arguments and the abilities of individuals in the cloistered world of experts.  Authorities can take the ostrich defense or declare victory when faced with a threat to their position, so experts often decry dissent while studiously avoiding anything resembling critical engagement with critiques of their work advanced by deplorables or members of the great unwashed. 

• The need to appeal to recognized authorities stifles innovation.  Up-and-comers are best advised to avoid heterodox approaches, which are liable to offend a patron, and to adopt whatever orthodox approach happens to be favored by their most powerful backer, regardless of the merit of that approach.  Established experts can use the failed experiment that is peer review to prop up their favorite disproved theory, to advance a fashionable narrative, or to snuff out groundbreaking work capable of challenging the orthodoxies upon which their reputations rest.  

• The authority system even incents experts to exaggerate.  To draw attention in crowded fields or obtain grant money from activist sources, specialists commonly conflate advocacy with analysis, make overly dire predictions, then demand radical measures to avert the impending crises.  And very rarely are experts punished for getting things wrong.  It is therefore reasonable for specialists to stake out the most aggressive position possible, rather than the most accurate or defensible one. 

The expert system has broken down and requires structural reform.  For example, it is as if academia—the crown jewel of the authority system—were designed to be as unfair and inefficient as possible.

• Despite our knowledge that the “Next Big Thing” tends to be hit upon by someone who is young or new to a discipline and often languishes until the then-dominant cohort of scholars loses control over the field, the tenure system concentrates power and authority in exactly the wrong hands—those of established professors. 

• The deference afforded to tenured faculty within the American academy not only makes our colleges and universities incredibly hostile environments for truly innovative ideas, but also creates ideal conditions for alpha-sycophants valiant enough to kowtow their way to the top. 

• Protecting academic authorities from the consequences of their actions over-incents “brave stands” (by rendering them bravery-free) and allows indefensible arguments to overrun the academy and occasionally leak into the wider world—often to the detriment of the very non-elites whom the scholarly elite purports to represent.

In short, despite all the exhortations by the Spencerians in the mainstream media and other establishment outlets about the need for academics to remain a self-regulating profession, the greatest threats to the advance of learning and to academic freedom come from within the academy and are, at minimum, exacerbated by a system that permits faculty self-governance. 

It’s high time for a round of creative destruction.  The non-experts who oversee or fund America’s colleges and universities should consider doing away with tenure and exposing academics to the crucible of competition.  After all, pretty much everyone outside the Ivory Tower realizes that the fairest and most efficient way to deal with the replication crisis in the social sciences is an employment crisis among social scientists. 

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

Ukraine is still pushing for the US to support long-range strikes inside Russian territory after a meeting between President Biden and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer ended with no announcements about the issue.

Biden and Starmer held talks at the White House on Friday, a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that if the US allowed and supported long-range strikes inside Russia, it would mean NATO is at war with Russia.

Ahead of the meeting, the White House said the US hasn’t changed its policy regarding long-range strikes. “There is no change to our view on the provision of long-range strike capabilities for Ukraine to use inside of Russia,” said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby. “I would not expect any major announcement in that regard.”

The UK wants the US to sign off on Ukraine’s use of British-provided Storm Shadow missiles, which have a range of about 155 miles, inside Russian territory. But there’s no sign that Biden gave that permission during the meeting with Starmer, and according to The New York Times, the US is more concerned about the risk of escalation than the UK.

On Saturday, a high-level NATO official expressed support for long-range Ukrainian strikes inside Russia. “Every nation that is attacked has the right to defend itself. And that right doesn’t stop at the border of your own nation,” said Adm. Rob Bauer, the chair of NATO’s Military Committee.

In the days leading up to the Starmer-Biden meeting, multiple media reports said the US was preparing to expand the area where Ukraine could use US and other NATO missiles. Some reports said Biden was ready to lift restrictions on the Storm Shadows, while other reports suggested he would also support the use of US weapons in long-range strikes in Russia, including the Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), US-provided missiles with a range of about 190 miles.

The Guardian reported last week that a decision to lift the restrictions on Ukraine’s use of the weapons had already been made in private. British government sources told the outlet that it would not be made public in the near future, and that an announcement was not expected after the Biden-Starmer meeting.

Previous escalatory steps that the US has taken in the Ukraine proxy war were not announced publicly. For example, when President Biden gave Ukraine the greenlight to use US-provided weapons in Russian border regions, it was first revealed by media reports and later acknowledged by the administration.

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

Maryland parents have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to restore their right to opt their young children out of having storybooks that promote LGBT lifestyles read to them.

The petition in Mahmoud v. Taylor was filed after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit turned away the parents’ request for an injunction to halt the Montgomery County Board of Education’s policy of promoting the books.

The petition was filed with the Supreme Court on Sept. 12, according to the parents’ attorneys at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit public interest law firm.

The case goes back to November 2022, when the board mandated new “LGBTQ-inclusive” storybooks for elementary school students that promote gender transitions, Pride parades, and same-sex romance between young children.

The board directed employees responsible for choosing the books to use an “LGBTQ+ Lens” and to question whether “cisnormativity,” “stereotypes,” and “power hierarchies” are “reinforced or disrupted,” according to the petition.

Parents were initially told they could opt out on behalf of their children when the storybooks were read, but in March 2023, the board changed its policy. Starting with the 2023–2024 academic year, the opt-out policy would no longer be in effect.

“If parents did not like what was taught to their elementary school kids, their only choice was to send them to private school or to homeschool,” the petition said.

Hundreds of parents, largely Eastern Orthodox Christians and Muslims, attended board meetings, according to the petition, and provided testimony that their religion required that young children not be exposed to instruction on gender and sexuality that was inconsistent with their religion.

“The parents emphasized how impressionable young children are and how they lack independent judgment to process such complex and sensitive issues,” the petition said.

Board members responded by accusing parents of promoting “hate” and likening them to “white supremacists” and “xenophobes,” according to the petition.

The parents filed a lawsuit after the board declined to accommodate them, arguing they enjoyed a constitutional right to keep the opt-out policy in place.

U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman denied the parents’ request for an injunction to halt the cancellation of the opt-out policy on Aug. 24, 2023.

A divided Fourth Circuit panel upheld the decision on May 15 this year, ruling that the parents had failed to demonstrate that an injunction was justified. The panel added that it took no view as to whether the parents would be able to produce enough evidence later in the proceeding to succeed in their case.

The panel also found there was no evidence that the policy change burdened the parents’ right to free exercise of religion.

Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund, said the Supreme Court should grant the parents’ appeal.

“Parents shouldn’t have to take a back seat to anyone when it comes to introducing their children to complex and sensitive issues around gender and sexuality,” Baxter said in a statement.

“Nearly every state requires parental consent before high schoolers can attend sex-ed. Parents should have the right to excuse their elementary school children when related instruction is introduced during story hour.”

The Epoch Times reached out to the school board for comment but did not receive a reply by publication time.

It is unclear when the Supreme Court will consider the petition.

While Americans were hyper-fixated on the 20,000 Haitians the Biden-Harris administration dumped into Springfield, Ohio, through an expanded Temporary Protected Status program for migrants from the collapsed Caribbean nation, former President Trump shifted the conversation during a campaign rally last week to Charleroi, Pennsylvania. 

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “The small 4,000 person town of Charleroi, Pennsylvania has experienced a 2,000% increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris — the schools are scrambling to hire translators for the influx of students who don’t speak English, costing local… pic.twitter.com/jvlP19ANL0

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 12, 2024

Ahead of Trump spotlighting the Haitian surge in the tiny blue-collar town of Charleroi during a rally last week in Arizona, we cited the think tank America 2100, which first revealed that the town’s population of Haitian migrants exploded by 2,000% over the past two years.

It isn’t just Springfield. It’s happening everywhere.

In Charleroi, Pennsylvania—a low-income town of just 4,000—the immigrant population has increased by 2,000% over the past two years. And it’s almost all Haitians.

Here’s what one Charleroi councilman told us today: pic.twitter.com/Wkwv56Tnw5

— America 2100 (@America_2100) September 11, 2024

Several downtown residents spoke with us about the ongoing migrant surge. They said when the national media began covering the situation in Springfield — they thought, “Wait a minute”—the same migrant influx orchestrated by the Biden-Harris administration was happening across their town. 

We spoke with one employee at a local shop, and we will keep his name anonymous for fear of retribution by local officials or the federal government. He provided us with helpful insight into the Haitian crisis in Charleroi. 

He said at least half of the town’s population is now Haitian, noting the influx began to become noticeable under the Biden-Harris’ first term, adding there was just a recent surge in new Haitians. Many of these migrants are beneficiaries of Temporary Protected Status. 

As far as what is visible by residents, they explained the primary reason the Haitians were dumped into the town was because of Fourth Street Foods, a food manufacturer that produces quality frozen food products for the processed foods industrial complex. These foods end up being sold in major retail stores throughout the US. 

Let’s remind readers in March, we penned a note titled “How Shadowy Network Of NGOs Supplies Mega-Corporations With Migrants To Exploit Cheap Labor,” which is possibly how this entire scheme is being operated. The federal government alone can’t possibly plan shelter and transportation arrangements for the migrants. 

The consequence of importing third-world migrants to replace blue-collar workers in the town crushes native households. Many residents complained that rents are out of control because the migrants exacerbated a housing shortage. Some have left the town for cheaper housing outside city limits.

The picture being painted in Charleroi is part of a much broader labor theme:

• Great Replacement Job Shock: 1.3 Million Native-Born Americans Just Lost Their Jobs, Replaced By 635,000 Immigrants

How is this not the biggest political talking point right now: since October 2019, native-born US workers have lost 1.4 million jobs; over the same period foreign-born workers have gained 3 million jobs. pic.twitter.com/Z5HVWmQ24C

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 15, 2024

The individual said Haitians are being shuttled to and from the food packaging plants via a complex network of vans. There must be dozens and dozens of these vans, easily spotted while driving down city streets. Several of the vans had a logo with a sign that read  ‘The Wellington Agency,’ a staffing company. 

Several times during the ride-along with the individual, Haitian drivers nearly hit the vehicle. He noted that one local DMV worker posted on the town’s Facebook page about licenses being handed out to migrants like candy. He said migrants are sparking accidents all over town, which has led to a surge in insurance rates. 

One of the biggest takeaways is that open southern borders and other ways to import migrants from third-world countries have not just been done for election purposes that favor Democrats but as a source of low-cost labor to mega-corporations as the great replacement of native-born workers with foreign-born workers plays out. Basically, the federal gov’t and corporate America are selling out blue-collar workers for cheap migrants.

Residents of Charleroi had no say in their beloved town, sold out by local, state, and federal politicians and possibly a network of taxpayer-funded NGOs who facilitated the migrant invasion. Corporate profits are certainly being prioritized over the native residents. 

There was no mention of the Haitians eating dogs and cats, but there were numerous sightings of goat carcasses on a backroad that many in the town joked in a Facebook group: “Hide your goats.” 

Here’s what the Charleroi residents are talking about on their private Facebook group:

The ride-along in Charleroi occurred on Sunday while factories were shuttered and the town was quiet. 

The biggest takeaway is that great replacement is ravaging American blue-collar households while the federal gov’t and their corporate overlords import the third world to the first world just to make more profits.