US to announce another $3 billion in military aid for its “forever war” in Ukraine
One day before the six-month anniversary of the imperialist-provoked Russian invasion of Ukraine, US officials told the Associated Press that the White House is about to announce another $3 billion in spending to aid and train Ukraine’s military. This comes on top of $10.6 billion in direct military funding provided by the Pentagon since the beginning of the war, as well as over $17 billion for US weapons manufacturing for Ukraine.
Based on anonymous US officials, the AP reported Tuesday that the new package is intended to provide weapons and ammunitions that may not arrive in Ukraine for a year or two. In other words, it is designed to fund the new “forever war” by US imperialism in Ukraine, which has already killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and thousands of civilians, while displacing over a fourth of the country’s population.
Speaking in a similar vain, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated on Tuesday, “Winter is coming, and it will be hard, and what we see now is a grinding war of attrition. This is a battle of wills, and a battle of logistics. Therefore we must sustain our support for Ukraine for the long term.”
Stoltenberg made these remarks at the second online Crimea conference organized by the Ukrainian government of Volodymyr Zelensky. The event was attended by leading imperialist backers of the proxy war against Russia, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
It was held within the framework of the “Crimean Platform” initiative, launched by Zelensky in March 2021 as part of Kiev’s official military strategy to “recover Crimea.” The campaign to “take back” the Black Sea peninsula is one of the most important provocations that prompted Russia’s invasion in February.
At the conference on Tuesday, Zelensky insisted again that “retaking” Crimea was the principal military aim of Ukraine. He said, “I know that Crimea is with Ukraine, is waiting for us to return. I want all of you to know that we will return. We need to win the fight against Russian aggression. Therefore, we need to free Crimea from occupation.”
Zelensky then stated, “Ukraine’s restoration of control of Crimea will be a historic anti-war step in Europe,” adding that he was “sure” that Crimea, like the rest of Ukraine, would one day become part of the European Union. In fact, what Zelensky describes as a “historic anti-war step in Europe” is widely seen by military experts as the potential trigger for a nuclear conflict with Russia. In July, Russia’s former president and deputy head of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, warned that an attack on Crimea by Ukraine would result in a “judgement day” response by Moscow.
The aggressive remarks by Zelensky were clearly intended to further fuel the war with Russia and herald major attacks on Crimea by Ukraine. In a deliberate effort to escalate the war with Russia, since August 9 Ukraine has already launched a series of strikes on Crimea, including on Russia’s Saki airbase, where at least 7 Russian fighter jets were destroyed, as well as a major ammunition depot in the north of the Black Sea peninsula. The headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea’s capital, was the subject of a failed drone attack on Saturday.
While carried out by Ukrainian forces, the attacks bear the unmistakable imprint “made in Washington.” Since the imperialist-orchestrated coup in Kiev in February 2014, which ousted a pro-Russian government and prompted the Russian annexation of Crimea, the US has spent tens of billions of dollars on arming and training Ukraine’s military and paramilitary forces for a war against Russia.
So far, the extraordinarily provocative strikes have failed to obtain the desired retaliatory response by the Kremlin. Indeed, the official statements from Moscow, despite earlier threats by leading Russian officials to respond to attacks on Crimea, including with nuclear weapons, have been markedly muted. The Russian press has clearly tried to downplay the significance of the strikes.
Far from easing tensions, however, the refusal by the Kremlin to be goaded into a further escalation of the war has only led Washington to engage in evermore overt provocations. On Saturday evening, Daria Dugina, daughter of the far-right ideologue Alexander Dugina and herself a right-wing Russian nationalist journalist, was assassinated in a car bomb in central Moscow. Her father was supposed to be in the car with her but had decided to take a different vehicle at the last minute.
While Kiev and Washington have denied their involvement in the assassination, it bears all the hallmarks of the murder squads of the CIA and its far-right allies in Ukraine. Dugina is both a prominent supporter of the war and an influential figure in far-right Russian politics. His daughter was known for sharing his views and assisting him in much of his work.
The aim of the assassination clearly was to pressure the Kremlin into a military response that would provide the imperialist powers with the necessary justification to further broaden and escalate their war against Russia.
The Washington Post, a mouthpiece for America’s super-rich and the CIA, gleefully noted on Monday that “the killing immediately heightened a sense of vulnerability among Russia’s most elite and visible promoters of the war in Ukraine, who now realize that they might be targets and that the government is potentially unable to protect them.” The paper added that the assassination “also raised the prospect of a serious escalation in the war as Putin comes under increased pressure, including from Dugina’s grieving father, to hit Ukraine hard.”
Without openly blaming Kiev, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin expressed his condolences to Dugina’s family and posthumously awarded her a medal for her “courage” and “patriotism.” Some of Russia’s best known oligarchs, state television anchors and politicians attended Dugina’s memorial in Moscow on Tuesday, and they openly accused Kiev for the attack. Dugina said that his daughter had died a martyr for Russia and that “this ultimate sacrifice, the highest price we pay, can be justified only by victory.”
In a message to the memorial, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the attack a “vile and inhumane crime.” At a press conference later that day, Lavrov said “there can be no mercy for those who organised, ordered and carried out [the bombing].”
The Russian secret service (FSB) claims to have identified Natalya Vovk, a 43-year-old Ukrainian journalist who served in the fascist Azov Battalion, as the killer of Dugina. According to the FSB, the woman came to Russia in July, along with her child, moved into the same building as Dugina, and had planned to kill both her and her father in the attack. The FSB claims that Vovk is now in hiding in Estonia.
Talinn dismissed these claims, with Urmas Reinsalu, Estonia’s foreign minister, stating, “We regard this as one instance of provocation in a very long line of provocations by the Russian Federation, and we have nothing more to say about it at the moment.” Estonia, like Lithuania, is now in the process of destroying decades-old Soviet monuments to the victory of the Soviet people against Nazi Germany in World War II.
While the Western press and Ukrainian government now breathlessly warn of an escalation of Russian attacks, including on Kiev on August 24 and 25, whatever escalation of the war may now occur will be the result of their deliberate efforts to provoke a military response by the Kremlin.
Biden’s Border Patrol Chief: ‘We’re Doing Very Well’ amid Invasion
The chief of President Joe Biden’s border patrol force says “we’re doing very well,” as more than 2 million wage-lowering migrants flood across the border.
But the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency can also deliver yet more migrants into American workplaces, CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus told CBS on August 18.
“I think we have the ability, and we’ve already shown it, to deal with even large numbers of migrants in an orderly, compassionate and effective manner,” he said, without making any commitment to deport or block any migrants.
“People keep calling the Biden border policy a failure when in reality this is exactly what Biden wants,” said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration lawyer who works with the Center for Immigration Studies.
A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden’s migration is an “invasion,” according to a poll commissioned by the left-of-center, taxpayer-supported National Public Radio (NPR). That majority includes 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, 40 percent of Democrats, and 47 percent of Hispanics.
Magnus suggested that he is not trying to keep the world’s migrants out of the United States. “Our goal certainly is to be able to process all vulnerable populations in a fair and equitable way,” he said.
He lamented the return of any migrants to Mexico:
One of the things that I think can’t be denied is that conditions are very, very difficult for the individuals who are returned to Mexico … We know that some of the shelters, some of the other places where migrants find themselves waiting, are not great for families and children.
When asked if the inflow numbers will decline in the next year, Magnus evaded. “I’m not sure we’ll know for sure. But we’ll see over time,” he said.
Magnus congratulated himself for “doing very well” on August 18, just as an Ipsos poll was released showing that most Americans say the country is being invaded on Magnus’ watch.
Since January 21, 2022, Magnus and his boss — the Cuban-born, pro-migration zealot Alejandro Mayorkas — have welcome roughly 2.6 million migrants into the United States. The migrant inflow should hit 3 million by November.
That total includes roughly 900,000 migrants who sneaked across the border while Biden’s border agents were forced to process migrants for release into the U.S. Thousand of migrants have died on their way to Biden’s welcome.
Those migrants are coming for jobs, so provide employers and “sanctuary” cities with imported populations of cheap, compliant, and powerless workers in a process that gradually replaces better-paid, outspoken, and influential American families.
The inflow is so huge that it has added roughly one migrant for every two Americans who turned 18.
Magnus indicated that he, Biden, and Mayorkas simply do not want to stop the flow of wage-cutting foreign workers into Americans’ workplaces:
I think all of us in law enforcement would like to see more legal pathways put in place for persons who are seeking to come into the country. We know there are people that are seeking employment. Actually, we have many jobs that are unfilled in this country. There certainly seems like there ought to be ways to put policy and law into place that would allow orderly processes for people who have been vetted and determined not to be a risk to come into the country to work, or under other appropriate circumstances. I think that’s something we strongly support.
“We’d like to see people come legally through ports of entry — and we hope that there’ll be more opportunities” for migrants, he added.
Extraction Migration
It is easier for government officials to grow the economy by immigration than to grow exports, productivity, or the birth rate.
So the officials deliberately extract millions of migrants from poor countries and use them as workers, consumers, and renters.
This extraction migration policy grows and skews the national economy. It shifts vast wealth from ordinary people to investors, billionaires, and Wall Street. It makes it difficult for ordinary Americans to advance in their careers, get married, raise families, or buy homes.
Extraction migration slows innovation and shrinks Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to boost stock prices by using stoop labor and disposable workers instead of productivity-boosting technology.
This migration policy also reduces exports by minimizing shareholder pressure on U.S. companies to build up beneficial and complementary trade with people in poor countries.
Migration undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.
An economy fueled by extraction migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites, alienates young people, and radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
This economic strategy is enthusiastically pushed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into a progressive-directed empire of competitive, resentful identity groups. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … We will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.
But the progressives’ colonialism-like economic strategy kills many migrants. It exploits the poverty of migrants and splits foreign families as it extracts human resources from poor home countries to serve wealthy U.S. investors.
Progressives hide this extraction migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding explanations and theatrical border security programs. Progressives claim the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that migration helps migrants, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.
Similarly, establishment Republicans, media businesses, and major GOP donors hide the skew towards investors by ignoring the pocketbook impact and by touting border chaos, welfare spending, migrant crime, and drug smuggling.
Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration. But the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs needed by young U.S. graduates.
This “Third Rail” opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.
NBC’s Chuck Todd: Americans Are Angry, Disappointed, 74% Say Country on Wrong Track
NBC anchor Chuck Todd said Sunday on “Meet the Press” that a new NBC News poll finds “Americans are angry” with a graphic showing 74% of those polled say the country is on the wrong track.
Todd said, “We are less than three months before the Midterms and our brand new NBC News poll paints a pretty bleak picture. Americans are angry. They are disappointed, and they are worried about the future of this country.”
He continued, “Just 21% of adults say we are headed in the right direction. Once again three out of four Out of 4 Americans say we are on the wrong track. In fact, this number never before in this poll has this wrong track number been over 70% for this long. It’s been nearly a year now. 58% say America’s best years are behind us. That’s an all-time high in our polls.”
Todd added, “So what is behind this rise in pessimism about our country’s future? Well, it starts with this., Americans don’t like either party and they don’t like anyone in power. Take a look at this, both parties are very unpopular, one slightly over the other. It is a similar story with the both current and former presidents. The former president’s negative rising a bit faster than we have seen since our last poll.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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