Russia Claims Ukraine Standoff Is Over
The Russian government claimed on Tuesday that several military units have completed “scheduled drills” along border with Ukraine and will now return to their permanent bases, bringing their armor and artillery with them.
Russian officials taunted the Biden administration by claiming the redeployment “humiliated” Western war hysterics, while Ukrainian and NATO military officials said they did not see any immediate sign of Russian forces actually pulling back from the border.
Russia’s state-run Tass news agency quoted Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov’s claim that Russian troops were packing their gear and preparing to depart on Wednesday morning.
“As combat training measures are coming to a close, the troops, as is always the case, will conduct combined marches to their permanent garrisons. Units of the Southern and Western Military Districts that have accomplished their tasks have already begun loading personnel and equipment on railway and auto transport means and will today begin heading to their military garrisons,” Konashenkov stated.
The Defense Ministry statement implied that withdrawal could take some time because some of the units would be marching home on foot, in column formations, as part of their training.
Russia’s Southern Military District made a similar announcement on Tuesday that its troops were loading their “heavy tracked armor, such as tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and self-propelled artillery guns” onto trains and preparing to return from Crimea to bases in Dagestan and North Ossetia.
A view of the joint strategic exercise of the armed forces of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus Zapad-2021 at the Mulino training ground in the Nizhny Novgorod region, Russia, Sept. 11, 2021. (Vadim Savitskiy/Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP, File)
“The units of the Southern Military District that have completed accomplishing their tasks as part of scheduled tactical exercises at combined arms practice ranges on the Crimean Peninsula have begun returning to their permanent bases. The personnel of battalion tactical groups have conducted marches to the areas of railway stations where operations to load combat equipment on special platforms have been organized,” the district command stated.
The Ministry of Defense said some troops and naval units are still “training” in the neighborhood of Ukraine, and would begin a fresh round of drills on Tuesday.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Western powers had been “humiliated and destroyed without a single shot fired” because their warnings of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine were ostensibly rendered foolish by the withdrawal announcement.
“15 February, 2022, will go down in history as the day Western war propaganda failed,” Zakharova declared.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday said the alleged conclusion of scheduled drills along the Ukrainian border countered “information terrorism” emanating from the United States and Europe.
“As for drills that Russia conducts on its own territory and in accordance with its own plans – let me specially emphasize that again – they begin, are implemented and concluded as planned. We have repeatedly stated that,” Lavrov said after meeting with Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau in Moscow.
“And this refers to the drills in the country’s west, similar measures in the Far East or the joint Russian-Belarusian drills that are also developing and proceeding in strict compliance with the approved schedule,” Lavrov continued.
“This is done irrespective of who thinks what, who and how is hysterical about this, who and how unleashes this genuine information terrorism and I am not afraid to use this word. The caravan keeps going,” he said.
US service members based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, are preparing deploy to Europe as the crisis between Russia and Ukraine escalates. (Photo by ALLISON JOYCE/AFP via Getty Images)
Observers from Ukraine, its Eastern European neighbors, and NATO were skeptical, noting that the latest satellite photos showed more Russian troops and equipment moving toward the Ukrainian border, not pulling away from it. The overall Russian presence on the border has been estimated at roughly 130,000 troops.
Reuters on Tuesday quoted several dubious Western leaders:
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said “the intelligence that we’re seeing today is still not encouraging”, and Ukraine said the reported pullback needed to be seen to be believed.
“If we see a withdrawal, we will believe in a de-escalation,” Interfax Ukraine quoted Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba as saying.
NATO’s chief welcomed signals from Russia in the past two days that it may be looking for a diplomatic solution but urged Moscow to demonstrate its will to act.
British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss insisted a Russian attack on Ukraine could still be “imminent,” while France said it could not confirm any significant movement of Russian troops back to their home bases, and Polish defense consultant Konrad Muzyka said it would take days to determine if a serious drawdown of troops is truly underway.
“It should also be noted that new trains with equipment from Central Russia keep on arriving near the border and that Russian forces continue to move towards staging areas. The announcement stands in a direct opposition to what Russia has been doing for the past few days,” Muzyka said.
America Is Approaching Financial Doomsday
Since 1947, just two years after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have maintained what is known as a "Doomsday Clock." This clock is reset annually and is supposed to measure approximately how close the world is to the apocalypse due to a man-made catastrophe, with midnight representing the apocalypse and however many minutes before midnight representing how close mankind is to causing it.
Today, as I learn that the U.S. national debt has just eclipsed $30 trillion, it appears more and more likely by the day that our country is soon going to reach financial midnight. On top of that, the federal budget is closing in swiftly on $3 trillion.
Now, most fiscal conservatives are not surprised that the left-wing imbeciles in the White House and the Capitol Building are running up massive quantities of debt and burdening the American taxpayer excessively with the government's bills. I mean, hell, more than $2.5 trillion was spent on just four acts of Congress by October of 2020. And let's not forget the Biden administration's fool's gold, the bipartisan infrastructure bill of 2021, which, apparently, none of the 17 Republican senators who voted for its passage bothered to read. If these sell-outs had bothered to read the contents of the bill, they would find a smorgasbord of pork, like the "Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program," which was allocated $500 million literally to demolish perfectly good infrastructure and completely redesign the layout of entire communities to make access to them more "equitable." (This is the whole "racist roads" hogwash.) They would also find that the bill contained an allotment of $7.5 billion for the construction of a network of half a million electric vehicle chargers nationwide, even though, by the Transportation Department's own admission, electric vehicles accounted for only 2.3% of car sales in 2020, or one third of China's E.V. car sales (because the moron in the Oval Office thinks everything is better in China, just ask Hunter).
But no, 17 members of the Senate who were supposed to be fiscally responsible decided to obsequiously bow down to Caesar Biden's demands.
But then, are they actually fiscally responsible? In the past few years, Republicans have become nearly as fiscally reckless as Democrats. Donald Trump, in just four years, added $8 trillion to the national debt. Barack Obama, who added more to the debt than all of his predecessors combined, added only $9 trillion in eight! And Jeff Van Drew, who made headlines when he switched political parties from Democrat to Republican shortly after he was elected to Congress, and who also happens to be the representative of the district I live in in New Jersey, voted in favor of the bill in the House — and this man claims to be a fiscal conservative.
Trump wasn't the only fiscally reckless Republican spender in recent memory. According to a 2019 report by the New York Times, the war in Afghanistan, initiated under the aegis of George W. Bush, cost the United States, up to that point, $2 trillion. The two-decade conflict, which resulted in the tragic loss of 2,400 American soldiers, was financed largely by borrowed money, and the American taxpayer will be shelling out tax dollars through the end of next year to pay $500 billion in interest alone.
So, as bad as Democrats are on and for the economy, and they are disastrous enough by themselves, Republicans, since the turn of the 21st century, haven't been much better. That fact must be acknowledged before we can hope to turn back time on the fiscal doomsday clock.
The Republican Party used to be the natural antidote to the poison that the Democrats introduced to the economy. We are talking about a party that used to be for low taxes, balanced budgets, and limited government spending, and that used to be hawks on the debt, dive-bombing any Democrat who dared introduce an asinine bill with a ludicrous price tag.
The Republican Party should start taking its cues on financial issues from libertarian fiscal responsibility champions among their ranks, like Rand Paul, one of the few voices of sanity and truth remaining on Capitol Hill. Caesar Biden and his legion of progressive cretins have already crossed the economic Rubicon. If you don't want to join him, you must make sure you elect fiscally responsible Republicans who are not willing to wade into those waters for their own political gain or their own personal avarice. This means you will have to audit every political candidate you vote for henceforth to ensure that all of them are faithful to the principle of fiscal responsibility.
According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Biden administration's discretionary budget request for fiscal year 2022 is already up to $1.5 trillion, a sum 8.6% higher than last year's budget. The worst part is that if this ghastly number is approved by Congress, it won't even be enough to cover one piece of legislation on Biden's wish list (Build Back Better), which was projected to be more than $2 trillion and could reach up to $6 trillion over a few years. Inevitably, a number of "Republican" congressmen will cave to Biden's budget request, just as they did to the Infrastructure Bill. Why more people are not concerned about this mystifies me, but then I remember that Caesar Biden has made it possible that being on unemployment and collecting stimulus checks is more lucrative than actually working and earning money. This may be why there isn't more of an uproar — because the lazy degenerates who would rather live off entitlement programs (that they are not entitled to at all) than work for a living would throw a huge temper tantrum.
One way or another, this fiscal insanity will come to an end, and the final act can end in one of two ways: either a strong force of fiscally responsible politicians are elected in the midterms and replace the creatures from the Black Lagoon there right now, and put an end to Biden's insane tax-and-spend policies, or the establishment continues with its "let them eat cake," attitude, pushes the economy off the cliff, and plunges the nation into an economic crisis unparalleled since the Great Depression, essentially putting future generations of Americans in debtors' prisons from birth.
You choose. The clock is ticking.
Joe Biden’s Economic Strategy Explodes Public Opposition to Migration
President Joe Biden’s open-doors immigration policy has caused a huge 22-point shift in public opinion on preferred immigration levels, a Gallup poll released Monday reveals.
Only nine percent of Americans want more immigration, while 35 percent want less immigration, says the Gallup poll of 811 adults.
That is a dramatic 22-point shift since the end of President Donald Trump’s term on January 20, 2021, when 19 percent wanted less migration and 15 percent wanted more migration.
After just one year of Biden’s border welcome, 69 percent of Republicans wanted immigration reduced, almost double the 40 percent who wanted a reduction in early January 2021.
The share of independents who wanted less immigration has jumped from 19 percent in 2021 up to 32 percent in 2022.
Before Biden’s inauguration, only 2 percent of Democrats wanted more migrants. One year later, 11 percent of Democrats say they want lower migration.
And Biden’s deputies are still digging him deeper into the hole.
In 2021, for example, Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s pro-migration border security chief, helped roughly 1.5 million economic migrants cross the southern border. Mayorkas also relaxed rules to help companies import more foreign graduates for jobs needed by U.S. graduates, and announced plans to expand asylum-based migration into Americans’ jobs and communities.
The extraction-migration economic strategy was outlined on January 21 by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellon in a speech to ‘Virtual Davos Agenda’ which was organized by the globalist World Economic Forum.
The administration’s economic policy is a “modern supply side approach” that boosts economic growth with more imported workers, productivity gains, and tax reforms, she said:
My thanks to Klaus [Schwab] and to the World Economic Forum for hosting me.
[…]
Labor supply has been a concern in the United States even before the pandemic, in part due to an aging population and in part due to a labor force participation rate that has trended downward over the past 20 years. Now COVID and declining immigration have further reduced the workforce …
A second focus of the Biden agenda is to enhance productivity. Over the last decade, U.S. labor productivity growth averaged a mere 1.1 percent—roughly half that during the previous fifty years. This has contributed to slow growth in wages and compensation, with especially slow historical gains for workers at the bottom of the wage distribution.
But these goals are contradictory. The immigration of more labor actually reduces per-person wages and minimizes investors’ incentives to raise productivity, even as it also expands the overall size of the economy.
Biden’s pro-migration deputies are already reinflating the cheap-labor bubble that existed from the 1990s until it was popped by the combination of Trump’s lower-immigration policies and China’s coronavirus crash. The labor bubble encouraged Wall Street investors to create many low-wage jobs, to reduce investment in high-wage jobs and productivity-boosting machinery, and to bet on a consumer economy that is inflated by deficit spending and extraction migration.
The contradictory policies are likely caused by differences within Biden’s political coalition and help drive public disappointment in his approach.
Biden and many of his east coast allies — such as unions — seem to want a high-wage, high-tech economy.
But many of his deputies — including his chief of staff, Ron Klain — are entwined with the coastal investors who want to expand the nation’s consumer economy with more cheap workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The investors’ extraction-migration strategy is hidden within the Build Back Better legislation, which has stalled because of deep and growing public and GOP opposition. It is also buried in the House Democrats’ anti-China legislation. and is strongly supported by the party’s investor-funded woke progressives who want to gain political power by breaking America’s populist culture into a chaotic multicultural empire.
Politicians recognize that Americans want migration policy to help Americans, not investors, foreigners, and progressives.
“Members of Congress must prioritize our own citizens,” David McCormick, a contender in the GOP Senate primary in Pennsylvania, told Breitbart News. He continued:
I support President Trump’s pro-worker immigration reforms to include preventing corporate visa abuse, raising national security standards, establishing responsible asylum and refugee controls, implementing the Hire American program, and promoting a merit-based system. It is neither in the interest of today’s citizens, nor tomorrow’s immigrants, to admit numbers that erode living conditions, strain healthcare, and make it difficult for low-income workers to rise out of poverty. Washington needs to ensure an immigration system committed to the well-being of our people, from all places and backgrounds, who are already lawfully living here today.
If Congress seeks to import workers, “we need to do it smartly, in order to once again ensure that those new workers aren’t competing with our existing workers for jobs, competing for wages and salaries,” Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) told Punchbowl’s Anna Palmer in a January 25 interview. “This is how we’ll build majority support for immigration reform,” said Young, who is up for election this year.
However, many GOP legislators try to evade debate on the pocketbook damage of illegal migration and legal migration by loudly denouncing border chaos, illegal-migrant crime, and the drug-smuggling cartels. So far, the denunciations have not been combined into a useful or realistic pro-American platform for GOP legislation in 2023.
But the Gallup poll 22-point shift since January 2021 is another reminder that the public — including Latino voters — strongly opposes migration, especially labor migration.
The Gallup poll’s summary also understates public opposition by downplaying the fervor of the respondents. For example, the details of the poll showed that only 7 percent of all respondents report being “very satisfied” with Biden’s policies, while 41 percent say they are “very dissatisfied.”
The Gallup poll also shows that 34 percent of respondents were “very” or “somewhat” satisfied with immigration levels — even though very Americans actually know the real numbers. The Gallup statement did not say if the pollsters asked Americans what immigration numbers they prefer.
Other polls show that Democrats are far less likely to vote on immigration questions in the 2022 midterms. For example, just 33 percent of Democrats — down from near 50 percent in 2019 — say migration is a critical issue, according to the results released February 3 report by the Public Religion Research Institute. In contrast, 64 percent of Republicans — or two out of three — say immigration is a critical issue.
A YouGov poll also shows the shift in public opinion against migration.
Migration moves money, and since at least 1990, the federal government has tried to extract people from poor countries so they can serve U.S. investors as cheap workers, government-aided consumers, and high-density renters in the U.S. economy.
That economic strategy has no stopping point, and it is harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities and their wages while it also raises their housing costs.
Extraction migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ Heartland states.
An economy built on extraction migration also radicalizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture and allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
Unsurprisingly, a wide variety of little-publicized polls do show deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to each other.
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