Authored by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,

Germans are criticizing a government plan to ban oil and gas boilers and replace them with heat pumps, arguing it is happening too fast and is going to cost a lot of money.

Germany wants to become net-zero by 2045. To this end, the government recently announced it would ban boilers working with fossil fuels, effectively forcing people to switch to heat pumps as the only green enough option for people with no access to district heating.

The cost of the ban is estimated at over 9 billion euros, or $10 billion, annually until 2028. After that, according to the Scholz government, costs will drop by almost half thanks to a ramp-up in heat pump production and a scale-up of wind and solar capacity.

The government is offering financial help to households, to the tune of 30% of the cost of the switch but Germans appear to not be particularly enticed by that offer.

“People are outraged and furious,” Petra Uertz of the Residential Property Association told the Financial Times.

“They can’t understand why it has to happen so quickly.”

“This law affects 66mn Germans . . . and there is enormous disquiet,” according to Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, a senior MP from the liberal Free Democratic Party.

The FDP is one of the three parties in the coalition government led by Olaf Scholz and it is not a fan of the gas boiler ban.

“We shouldn’t be tying it to a particular date come hell or high water, there are things in it that must be changed first,” Strack-Zimmermann told German media, saying the Green Party’s insistence on passing the ban as law before the summer break was absurd.

The Green Party, by the way, is losing popular support faster than snow melts in May. According to the latest figures, as presented by the FT, it is now less popular than the right-wing Alternative for Germany, with a popularity rating of 14%.

What’s more, the ban has triggered a jump in demand for gas boilers: it would only come into effect as of January next year, so if people install boilers before this year’s end, they can keep using them.

It is perhaps only a matter of time given Britain has long been leading Western allies in taking more and more hawkish, escalatory stances against Moscow throughout the Ukraine conflict: Russia’s foreign ministry said in statements published Friday that it could sever diplomatic ties with the UK altogether.

In words given to Russia’s RT, the foreign ministry cited London’s significant involvement against Russia in arming and assisting Ukraine’s military, but still said severing of ties would be an “extreme measure” – but which apparently is being mulled nonetheless: 

The severing of diplomatic ties with the UK would be an “extreme measure,” but Moscow could end up taking the step considering London’s significant involvement in the Ukraine conflict, the Russian Foreign Ministry has warned.

RT had approached the foreign ministry over reports that first surfaced in The Wall Street Journal last week saying that “UK special forces from the British Army’s SAS and SRR regiments and the Navy’s SBS units are operating very close to the front lines” in Ukraine. 

The WSJ presented it as constituting a “split” in policy with Washington, given the White House has held back sending special forces to directly assist the Ukrainians on the front lines of fighting. However, there have long been significant rumors and reports of American operatives, including intelligence, directly supporting the war effort regardless.

Russia’s foreign ministry said that it is “well aware of consistent efforts by London aimed at providing military assistance to the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev.”

The British special forces are believed involved in assisting brazen cross-border sabotage and ‘terror’ operations seen for example days ago in the large-scale attacks on Belgorod. 

According to more of the official Russian FM statement, presented in English by state media: 

The UK’s support includes the supply of domestically produced and foreign military hardware to Ukraine, the training of Ukrainian troops in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, intelligence sharing, consulting support and “likely participation in the operational-tactical planning by the [Ukrainian] military, including sabotage, other operations, direct provision of cyber-security, [and] deployment of mercenaries,” the statement from the ministry read.

“We can’t rule out that the British participated in the planning, organization and support of terrorist attacks carried out by the Kiev regime on the territory of Russia, including through the provision of intelligence information,” it added.

The Russian government has previously summoned the UK ambassador to demand answers, yet the policy of confrontation on the Ukrainian battlefield which began under former prime minister Boris Johnson has remained in place, by all appearances.

Another clear evidence of #UK‘s involvement in the Ukrainian conflict⬇️ https://t.co/fRoJfVKoyU@WSJ: “British Special Forces from the Special Air Service, British Army Special Intelligence, and the Navy’s Special Aircraft Landing Service operate in close proximity to the front…

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) May 24, 2023

Johnson in the opening months of the war was reported to have actively thwarted peace talk initiatives which had seemed promising at the time. Johnson also personally lobbied President Zelensky on multiple occasions to not give an inch of compromise with the Russian side.

In the potential scenario of a total break in Russia-UK diplomatic relations, and the mutual closures of embassies and consulates, this would bring the world a big step closer to major war between Moscow and NATO, given the breakdown in communications which heightens risk of military confrontation.

By Russell Clark of Capital Flows and Asset Markets substack

The US led free world (Western Europe, Japan and Australia) during the cold war were offered a pretty good deal. Mutual economic access (to a degree) and US military protection. In return the US got to set the majority of the economic terms. This was a very good deal for all involved. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism, this deal was extended to more countries. Eastern Europe, rest of Asia, and most notable from 2000 onwards China. The problem is that the US is reneging on its part of the deal.

As the War in Ukraine drags on, it’s increasingly clear that the US cannot guarantee security, a continuation of the problems in both Afghanistan and Iraq. As pointed out in the note on Australia, the US is now asking Australia to spend 50% of its defence budget for the next 30 years to supply the US with a nuclear submarine refuelling station in Perth. This has two negatives. Firstly it risks Australian access to the Chinese market, which is far larger than the US market for Australia. And it starves other parts of the Australian military of funds.

Secondly, the implication is that American defense spending, despite being larger than the next 10 nations combined, now requires its allies to spend more. That is the “implicit deal” for a country like Australia is getting worse. The biggest problem with this for me is that the basic assumption is that as an autocratic state, China is dangerous. That as President Xi is likely to be president for life, we need to build out military power for when, not if, China begins to take offensive military action.

The obvious problem with this logic, is that it is not applied to either Saudi Arabia or even Turkey, with the latter being a key member of NATO. Even India is beginning to show signs of single party domination with Modi, but the threat of China leads to this inconsistency to be overlooked. Close US allies, Japan and Singapore have had virtually single party rule since World War II. Even if the fear of Xi is correct – the appearance is that this is a China specific policy. That is even if China was democratic – US policy would still be focused on containment.

So the US is now asking allies to reduce exposure to China (the largest trading partner is most cases) and spend more on military to protect themselves from China. To compound the unattractive mess of the current US deal, the US has adopted industrial policy, offering heavy subsidies to attract new business to the US at the expense of its allies.

Why is the US treating its allies so badly? I have two reasons. With the advent of shale oil and gas, the US really does not need the rest of the world anymore. That is US policy can be completely geared to domestic needs, and ignore foreigners wishes with little negative consequences. The oil shocks of the 1970s showed the US it needs to pay more attention to the world, and to make the US dollar more attractive. With the US no long a net importer, there is no impetus to care about the rest of the world. If anything the pressure on China to reach out to other nations is rising.

The second reason is that income inequality is now so extreme in the US, domestic politics has become poisoned – and any concessions have become politicaly impossible. In essence US policy becomes “what can you do for me?” President Trump personifies this view, and is very popular with the US voting electorate. His chances of becoming President again have been rising lately.

The other way to look at US policy is that it is driven by corporate interests. US corporates love the access to Chinese markets, and to Chinese manufacturers, but are extremely uncomfortable with Chinese competition in leading industries. Hence Chinese tech needs to be disparaged as dangerous to stop it taking market share – see Huawei, TikTok, semiconductor investment etc. No doubt threats to the payment systems of Visa and Mastercard will portray WePay and AliPay as security threats. Or as BYD will be seen as a security risk if it begins to threaten Tesla’s position in the US. And yet the Chinese still run a large trade surplus with the US, as corporate America still needs the low cost manufacturing. Politically the US position makes no sense, but from a corporate profitability point of view it makes perfect sense.

The real problem that the US faces is that China is getting to a position where it could offer the deal that the US used to offer. Military protection, and access to a vast domestic market, but in return only asking to use a China based financial system, it at the very least, a non-US centric system. All the other pretenders to the US crown never had the military might to give security guarantees. Germany and Japan had the economic might in 1970s and 80s, but lacked the military might.

In this case the US seems to be helping the Chinese. The attractions of a non-US based system increases every time the possibility of US debt default rises. The problem is that the political logic of a debt default in the US is hard to escape. Republicans are committed to cutting taxes and spending, and Democrats are committed to raising spending. The main cost of the debt default would be born by foreigners, either by the US dollar falling or the value of debt falling.

Weirdly, if the US really wanted to damage China, a return to the tight monetary and fiscal policies of the 1980s and 1990s would probably be the best possible reaction to China’s rise. This policy combination led to the Asian Financial Crisis, as it destabilised the financial markets of Asia. But can US corporates bring themselves to endorse a policy that could see profits and valuations fall?

Iran and Belgium have conducted a deeply controversial prisoner swap with mediation by the country of Oman, which has led to the release of an aid worker and a diplomat.

Tehran was able to secure the release of Iranian diplomat Assadollah Assadi, who was serving 20 years in a Belgian prison after his 2021 conviction for plotting to bomb the exiled Iranian dissident group Mujahadin-e Khalq (MEK) in Paris.

On the other side of the swap, Belgium’s Prime Minister Alexander De Croo confirmed that aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele was en route to Belgium. 

It was only January that a secret Iranian court sentenced Vandecasteele to 40 years in prison and 74 lashes, as well as a fine of $1 million, after conviction for espionage. It’s widely believed that Iran holds Westerners on trump-ed spy allegations in order to use these cases for leverage with the West, and to conduct swaps. His family has condemned the espionage allegations as false.

“Olivier spent 455 days in prison in Tehran. In unbearable conditions. Innocent,” De Croo said.

Iran’s foreign ministry celebrated it as a victory, while MEK representatives condemned the swap. “The innocent diplomat of our country, who was illegally detained in Germany and Belgium for more than two years against international law, is now on his way back to his homeland,” Iranian FM Hossein Amirabdollahian wrote on Twitter.

Assadi’s case was much more serious. Belgian intelligence identified him as an undercover intelligence agent operating out of the Iranian embassy in Austria, and alleged that he plotted to bomb a political rally of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran in 2018 – which was thwarted. One source previously described that Assadi helped run a massive Iranian spy network across Europe:

Inside Assadi’s red Ford S-MAX, officers discovered a red notebook containing handwritten bomb-making and fieldwork instructions, as well as a 200-page green jotter recording trips to 289 locations across Europe to meet agents.

The journeys, made over a period of almost four years, generally avoided the scrutiny of capital cities and were accompanied by records of hotel reservations that Assadi made himself using Booking.com. On several occasions, the spy reserved rooms in two different hotels to avoid detection.

Investigators additionally recovered a wealth of documentation disclosing the workings of the espionage network, including receipts of expenses reimbursements, records of monthly and quarterly spy salaries, and details of computers issued to agents.

Also found were six mobile phones — four of which were used to contact spies and two to make travel bookings — a laptop, external hard drives and USB sticks containing intelligence training manuals, two GPS tracking and navigation devices and more than 30,000 Euros (£26,000) in cash.

The Iranian outlawed MEK has long had support from US and European political leaders, despite having been known for a history of covert assassination campaigns targeting officials of the Islamic Republic. It’s widely believed that Israeli intelligence also utilizes MEK assassins in brazen sabotage and assassination operations.

Glad to hear Olivier Vandecasteele has been released from #Iran. But more broadly the Islamic Republic has achieved a false equivalence between innocent aid workers and convicted terrorists in prisoner exchanges. That’s a bad precedent, Belgium.https://t.co/DJ0s7zoFfw

— Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) May 26, 2023

The MEK and National Council of Resistance of Iran is livid at the Belgian government for freeing Assadi, saying it payed a “shameful ransom”. 

“The release of the terrorist … is a shameful ransom to terrorism and hostage-taking. This will embolden the religious fascism ruling Iran to continue its crimes,” the group said.

Authored by Dave DeCamp via Antiwar.com,

The Journal spoke with men who were part of a small group that was sent into Bakhmut, which became known as the meat grinder, just a few days after being mobilized.

Out of 16 men in the group of draftees, 11 were either killed or captured. The Journal described them as “mostly poor men from villages in the northeastern Kharkiv region, many of them unemployed, doing odd jobs as handymen or shift work at factories in the regional capital.”

Some of the men had military training years or decades ago, but none had combat experience. A few of them threatened to refuse orders when they were told they were being sent to the frontlines on February 21, citing a lack of training, but they ultimately went.

One man, Vladyslav Yudin, told the Journal that he told a sergeant major that he had never fired or even held a gun before. “Bakhmut will teach you,” Yudin was told.

The men participated in brutal house-to-house combat in Bakhmut. Many of them are presumed dead, but their families are still holding out hope that they were captured by the Russians and are still alive.

The men’s accounts match what Ukrainians fighting on the frontlines had been telling the media while the battle was still raging. They told stories of troops being sent in with little support, training, or ammunition.

The Washington Post spoke to a Ukrainian battalion commander in March who said he was being sent fresh recruits who didn’t want to fire their guns because they were afraid of the sound.

Despite Kyiv’s Western backers advising against expending resources on Bakhmut, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tried to hold onto the city for as long as he could, but it was fully captured by the Wagner Group and Russian forces this past weekend.

Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin estimated that 50,000 Ukrainians lost their lives fighting for the city, but the number is not confirmed. Prigozhin also said that he recruited 50,000 people from prison to fight in Bakhmut and about 20% of them were killed.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic on Friday announced he put the Serbian army on a “higher state of alert” due to clashes between ethnic Serbs and Kosovar police in northern Kosovo. The border region has been restive for months over what Belgrade sees as yet more anti-Serb policies.

“An urgent movement (of troops) to the Kosovo border has been ordered,” Serbia’s defence minister Milos Vucevic said in a national broadcast. “It is clear that the terror against the Serb community in Kosovo is happening.”

Serbian leadership is also demanding that NATO peacekeeping forces immediately protect the Serbian community from Kosovo police, who have responded by saying they must crackdown on rioting and anti-police violence. 

This latest flare-up in violence is over boycotted elections. Kosovo’s Serb minority protested municipal elections in the north. They make up about 5% of the total population of 1.8 million. The Serbs have been demanding an association of Serbian municipalities previously promised by the local government. 

Ethnic Albanians have rejected to proposal out of fears it could give rise to a pro-Serbian statelet which could then break away to be absorbed back into Serbia. 

⚡️Shots of replacing the Serbian flag with the “Republic of Kosovo” on the Zubin Potok municipality building

Earlier, the building was seized by armed members of the “Kosovo police” pic.twitter.com/OVDJK3ImIF

— War Monitor (@WarMonitors) May 26, 2023

Serbs staying out of the election, a boycott which also had the backing of the Serbian government, resulted in ethnic Albanian mayors moving in. The new clashes were sparked when Kosovo police tried to install the new mayors and Serbs blocked access to the buildings. 

According to an update on the situation in the BBC, “Ten people were injured in the violence after residents gathered outside state buildings in the Serb majority border town of Zvecan.” Further, “Police used tear gas to disperse the protesters, and gunshots and explosions could be heard in videos posted online.”

At least five police were reported injured, and multiple vehicles were damaged and set on fire.

On the day of the govt-sponsored rally in Belgrade, Serbia’s president @AVucic raises the combat readiness of the Serbian Army as clashes between Kosovo Serbs & @Kosovo_Police erupt in Zvecan, one of the Serb-majority municipalities in the north of Kosovo. pic.twitter.com/BqSYS70Nao

— Jakub Bielamowicz (@KubaBielamowicz) May 26, 2023

But the Biden administration issued a rare rebuke of Kosovo, which the US was largely responsible for recognizing as a “nation” under the Bush administration: 

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken criticised the use of force by Kosovan government, saying that it had taken action against the advice of the US and EU allies.

Mr Blinken said the move had “sharply and unnecessarily escalated tensions in the region” and had served to undermine efforts to “normalize relations between Kosovo and Serbia”.

Kosovan officials conformed that additional police and security services were sent to the contested regions “to assist mayors of the northern communes of Zvecan, Leposavic and Zubin Potok to exert their right of work at the official objects.”

But ethnic Albanian officials have blamed Serbia, saying it “bears full responsibility” – as quoted in regional reports.

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

All of us so-called geopolitical analysts owe a debt to Halford John Mackinder. His 1904 paper, “The Geographical Pivot of History” is the basis for nearly all strategic thinking in today’s policy rooms, think tanks, and military academies of the West.

We’ve all heard the first three rules of Mackinder:

Who rules Eastern Europe commands the Heartland…

Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island…

Who rules the World Island commands the world

Because of the dominance of Mackinder’s ideas and the policies erected to support it, the world has been subjected to endless conflict over his conception of the “World Island,” which is basically Eurasia.

And that’s why there can be no losing for the West in Ukraine. To the Mackinderists at the top of the power structures in London, Washington D.C. and Brussels, losing Ukraine means losing the entire world, because they have this very-outdated view of world geography.

Mackinder-ism in today’s world is a tautology, reducing to: We have to control the Heartland because we can’t lose the Heartland.

In this singular quest to win the Heartland the West has bankrupted itself — economically, morally, and most importantly, spiritually. This has led to a political crisis gnawing at the center of western society.

Alastair Crooke’s latest piece sums up the situation perfectly, “The EU Is Over-Invested in the Ukrainian War-Project.“

But it isn’t just the EU that has done this. So has the UK. So too the US.

The cost/benefit analysis of continuing the Ukraine project has reached the tipping point. The problem now is too many in power, like European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, still believe they have room to maneuver in a conflict looking increasingly stuck in the geopolitical mud of the Donbass.

After meeting in Hiroshima, the city of peace, we are moving forward together.

We agreed that:

Security in Europe and Asia is indivisible and UN principles must be upheld;

Climate action will be stepped up;

Partnerships should be win-win.

The @G7 is more united than ever. pic.twitter.com/UJ96Jf6OMg

— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) May 21, 2023

The optics at the G7 meeting couldn’t be more stark. Meeting in the one city that is the ultimate symbol of Western madness, Hiroshima, the symbolism was very clear. We are united in our self-righteousness and if you don’t like it, remember what happened to Japan.

We will destroy the planet in order to save it. Indivisible European/Asian security is a euphemism for global war.

No amount of failure seems to dissuade these people. Because failure is simply not an option.

The problem however, is that their myopia is predictable.

Bad Code

When you reduce all of your guiding principles to three lines of code, defeating that code becomes pretty easy, strategically. It doesn’t matter if Mackinder was right or not. He wasn’t. What matters is that the policy-makers think he was.

We’ve all spent too many words working through this. It’s very simple.

If you know your opponent will throw everything they have at a conflict then your strategy is a simple one; destroy everything they throw at it until they run out of money, men, and materiel to throw into it.

And this is exactly what Russia has done.

It is exactly what I expected them to do at the outset of the war (here, here, and here) failing a swift victory over Ukraine; continue their war of attrition across all theaters against the West until they either 1) sue for peace or 2) collapse under the weight of their own hubris.

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (Who else?), put the kibosh on any early negotiated settlement between Russia and Ukraine.

To Crooke’s point, the West’s investment in Ukraine was simply too big to give up that easily. Believing the ultimate sanctions package would overthrow Putin and destabilize Russia, both Davos and the Anglo-neocons bet too heavily on this working. As my dad used to say about pro athletes, “he spends too much time reading his press clippings…”

Two very Establishment Anglo-American media in the UK (in which U.S. Establishment messages often surface) finally – and bitterly – have admitted: ‘Sanctions on Russia failed’. The Telegraph laments: They “are a joke”; “Russia was meant to have collapsed by now”

Do they not remember their failure in 2014/15 when this whole Ukraine War project started? They threw Viktor Yanukovich out of power and Russia took Crimea from them. So, their ‘shock and awe’ then was to throw an epic temper tantrum crashing the price of oil from $125 to $25 per barrel.

This was the first instance of the “Ruble to Rubble” campaign. It didn’t work then. In fact, it set Russia and the world on the path it’s on today. There’s a direct throughline from 2014 to today, not just on the ground but in the financial markets and the politics of the rest of Eastern Europe — The Heartland.

So, while sanctions are a joke, the use of them will only increase as an excuse now to keep third-parties, like say Hungary, from getting out of lock-step with the plan.

Too bad for them that no amount of arm-twisting by German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock changed Hungary’s decision to block any further EU aid to Ukraine. The Heartland, it seems, is increasingly not down with the Commintern.

Failure Is Not an Option, It’s Just Inevitable

But this never seems to matter. No amount of failure has ever prompted these people to do a little second-guessing. Then again, when you can’t see yourself in a mirror self-reflection isn’t a dominant character trait.

Ukraine has always represented the apotheosis of the Neocon/Neoliberal world order. As Crooke points out, they are facing a very unpleasant choice:

The war is now, in this way, being projected as a binary choice: ‘End the war’ versus ‘Win the war’. Europe is tergiversating –standing at the cross-roads; hesitantly starting down one road, only to reverse, and indecisively take a few cautious steps down the other. The EU will both train Ukrainians to fly F-16s; and yet is coy about providing the planes. It smacks of tokenism; but tokenism is often the father to mission-creep.

Indeed it is. Because of the closed-mindedness of those in power in the West — their biases, racism, and arrogance — they will not stop in Ukraine until they are forced to by circumstances.

Those circumstances will likely be dictated by the revamped Russian military now configured to fight a longer and different kind of war than the one that began in February 2022.

Every day we see signs that Russia’s military-industrial capacity is increasing rapidly while the EU languishes. The US is rapidly trying to bring back onshore manufacturing lost to the ZIRP and Greenspan Eras, but this is a slow and painful process especially since it has run out of room on the balance sheet to deficit spend to accelerate things.

“Biden” and his merry band of vandals in D.C. are more than happy to burn the place to the ground more thoroughly than the British did in the War of 1812 if they can’t get their way on unlimited taxing and spending.

So, here we are. Bakhmut has fallen. The Ukrainian counter-offensive is non-existent. If anything it was already absorbed by Putin and Prigozhin. Zelenskyy will now get F-16s to attack Crimea and use that as some moral high ground for justifying NATO’s official involvement after Russia’s inevitable counter-attack.

Then the air will be thick with the smell of thermobarics in the morning.

But, regardless of any of that, there will be no truce in the Heartland. Russia will not back down. China will back them to the end, as will OPEC+ and the rest of Central Asia. But they will not escalate one inch further than they need to. Allowing the West to keep thinking they can win is the ultimate form of grinding out a superior opponent.

Mack-Ender’s Game

And even if Ukraine winds up being a decade-long meat grinder with no clear victor, it will serve everyday as a warning to the rest of Asia that there is no going back and their future is better served with their neighbors than accepting bribes to remain viceroys on the West’s payroll.

That’s why the fight for control over Pakistan is actually more important than Ukraine. Because Pakistan represents the East-West corridor tying the World Island together. While Ukraine is the key to breaking up Russia to destroy the North-South axis.

The Tragedy of Imran Khan in Pakistan is one of those side issues that’s actually more important than the main issue, Ukraine. The unprecedented intervention by the Pakistani military, always aligned with western forces, is a clear sign that Mackinderism is alive and well in central Asia.

There is a clear civil war incipient in Pakistan as the civilian government attempts to wrest real control of the country away from the military and its globalist order-givers. Khan’s support isn’t a product of his brilliance as a leader. Like Donald Trump, he is a flawed figure, beset on all sides by traitors undermining him.

He was ousted through the worst kind of backroom dealing, of the type and kind which Italian deep staters were looking at and saying, “Damn! Bravo.”

But, also like Trump, the people understand implicitly that he’s one of them. He’s on their side, despite his faults. So, while we see the most amateurish headlines and ‘analysis’ of what’s happening there from our quisling media, the Pakistani people are coming out by the millions to elevate Khan as their champion.

He doesn’t have to do anything more than survive and return to power to win the day in Pakistan.

While the West fights desperately to stave off defeat of the Heartland, it’s clear the rest of the World Island is making plans to leave them behind.

At some point there are simply too many people and too much pressure to keep pushing the world towards a conclusion it doesn’t want to go.

And that’s when everything changes, literally overnight. Until then, it will be another day, another escalation, another pointless political knife fight and thousands of people dying needlessly.

When he published that paper in 1904 all Mackinder did was formalize British imperial thinking into an easily-digested thesis for morons.

Today we are being gaslit by these morons into believing our lives depend on fighting for ‘freedom’ in central Ukraine.

It was written as the British empire’s grip on power was beginning to wane. World War I would put the capper on that.

It was a reflection of the growing anxiety bubbling up as the fringes of the empire rebelled. If we can’t hold onto south Africa (The Boer War), for example, at least we should make sure no one controls the World Island as we retreat.

That’s why Sykes-Picot left us with a Middle East in tribal conflict. Israel only made things there worse. Pakistan was created as anti-India and Ukraine was split off from the USSR in such a way as to ensure we would be exactly where we are today.

All because some imperial-minded Europeans can’t bring themselves to share the world with brown people.

*  *  *

Join my Patreon if you have a heart

The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with an 94-year-old Minnesota grandmother who was wronged when her county forced the sale of her condominium over unpaid taxes, and kept the proceeds that far exceeded the taxes she owed – the latest “home equity theft” to make headlines.

The case followed a report late last year by the Pacific Legal Foundation which found that 12 states and DC allow local governments and private investors to seize far more than what is owed from homeowners who fall behind on property tax payments.

Writing this opinion was Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote in Tyler v. Hennepin County that “The taxpayer must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but no more.”

Christina Martin, an attorney for homeowner Geraldine Tyler, told the court during April 26 oral arguments that local governments shouldn’t be able to seize and keep the full value of a home as payment for much smaller property tax debts.

Minnesota law allows counties to retain windfalls at the expense of property owners – which between 2014 and 2020 applied to around 1,200 Minnesota residents who lost their homes and all the equity in them, for debts that averaged just 8% of the home’s value, according to PLF.

Tyler owned a modest one-bedroom condominium in Hennepin County, but after she was harassed and frightened near her home, she moved to a new apartment in a safer neighborhood. The rent on her new apartment stretched her resources and she fell into arrears on her condo’s property tax bills, accumulating about $2,300 in taxes owed, along with $12,700 in penalties, interest, and costs.

The county seized Tyler’s condo, valued at $93,000, and sold it for just $40,000. Instead of keeping the $15,000 it was owed, the county retained the full $40,000, amounting to a windfall of $25,000, according to PLF. -Epoch Times

Tyler sued, arguing that her Fifth Amendment rights were violated when the government breached the ‘Takings Clause.’ Her lawsuit was originally rejected by the courts, including the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, which found the seizure legal.

The Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that the principle that Tyler’s right not to have her her property seized goes back to English law, and as far back as the Magna Carta of 1215.

“The Takings Clause ‘was designed to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole,’” wrote Roberts.

“A taxpayer who loses her $40,000 house to the State to fulfill a $15,000 tax debt has made a far greater contribution to the public fisc than she owed.”

“[I]f a bank forecloses on a home because the homeowner fails to pay the mortgage, the homeowner is entitled to the surplus from the sale.”

In collecting all other taxes, “Minnesota protects the taxpayer’s right to surplus.” So if a taxpayer falls behind on income tax and the state confiscates and sells the property, state law provides that any surplus must be returned to the owner. The same rule is followed regarding arrears of personal property tax—such as for a car—and real property tax.

In Tyler’s case, the “State now makes an exception only for itself, and only for taxes on real property. But ‘property rights cannot be so easily manipulated,’” Roberts wrote, citing Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, a 2021 Supreme Court decision that pitted the property rights of an employer against labor organizing rights. –Epoch Times

“Minnesota may not extinguish a property interest that it recognizes everywhere else to avoid paying just compensation when it is the one doing the taking,” Roberts wrote.

Dan Rogin, Hennepin County assistant administrator and auditor told the Times in an email: “Based on today’s decision which found Minnesota’s law unconstitutional, Minnesota’s property tax forfeiture laws must be revised. Hennepin County will work closely with the Minnesota Legislature to create a process that is consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision.”

Authored by Nick Corbishley via NakedCapitalism.com,

The ostensible goal of the operation is to provide “support and assistance to the Special Operations of the Joint Command of the Armed Forces and National Police of Peru,” including in regions recently engulfed in violence. 

Unbeknown, it seems, to most people in Peru and the US (considering the paucity of media coverage in both countries), US military personnel will soon be landing in Peru. The plenary session of Peru’s Congress last Thursday (May 18) authorised the entry of US troops onto Peruvian soil with the ostensible purpose of carrying out “cooperation activities” with Peru’s armed forces and national police. Passed with 70 votes in favour, 33 against and four abstentions, resolution 4766 stipulates that the troops are welcome to stay any time between June 1 and December 31, 2023.

The number of US soldiers involved has not been officially disclosed, at least as far as I can tell, though a recent statement by Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador, who is currently person non grata in Peru, suggests it could be around 700. The cooperation and training activities will take place across a wide swathe of territory including Lima, Callao, Loreto, San Martín, Huánuco, Ucayali, Pasco, Junín, Huancavelica, Iquitos, Pucusana, Apurímac, Cusco and Ayacucho.

The last three regions, in the south of Peru, together with Arequipa and Puno, were the epicentre of huge political protests, strikes and road blocks from December to February after Peru’s elected President Pedro Castillo was toppled, imprisoned and replaced by his vice-president Dina Boluarte. The protesters’ demands included:

• The release of Castillo

• New elections

• A national referendum on forming a Constitutional Assembly to replace Peru’s current constitution, which was imposed by former dictator Alberto Fujimori following his self-imposed coup of 1992

Brutal Crackdown on Protests

Needless to say, none of these demands have been met. Instead, Peru’s security forces, including 140,000 mobilised soldiers, unleashed a brutal crackdown that culminated in the deaths of approximately 70 people. A report released by international human rights organization Amnesty International in February drew the following assessment:

“Since the beginning of the massive protests in different areas of the country in December 2022, the Army and National Police of Peru (PNP) have unlawfully fired lethal weapons and used other less lethal weapons indiscriminately against the population, especially against Indigenous people and campesinos (rural farmworkers) during the repression of protests, constituting widespread attacks.”

As soon as possibly next week, an indeterminate number of US military personnel could be joining the fracas. According to the news website La Lupa, the purported goal of their visit is to provide “support and assistance to the Special Operations of the Joint Command of the Armed Forces and National Police of Peru” during two periods spanning a total of seven months: from June 1 to September 30, and from October 1 to December 30, 2023.

The secretary of the Commission for National Defence, Internal Order, Alternative Development and the Fight Against Drugs, Alfredo Azurín, was at pains to stress that there are no plans for the US to set up a military base in Peru and that the entry of US forces “will not affect national sovereignty.” Some opposition congressmen and women begged to differ, arguing that the entry of foreign forces does indeed pose a threat to national sovereignty. They also lambasted the government for passing the resolution without prior debate or consultation with the indigenous communities.

The de facto Boluarte government and Congress are treating the arrival of US troops as a perfectly routine event. And it is true that the US military has long held a presence in Peru. For example, in 2017, U.S. personnel took part in military exercises held jointly with Colombia, Peru and Brazil in the “triple borderland” of the Amazon region. Also, the US Navy operates a biosafety-level 3 biomedical research laboratory close to Lima as well as two other (biosafety-level 2) laboratories in Puerto Maldonado.

But the timing of the operation raising serious questions. After all, Peru is currently under the control of an unelected government that is heavily supported by Washington but overwhelmingly rejected by the Peruvian people. The crackdown on protests in the south of the Peru by the country’s security forces — the same security forces that US military personnel will soon be joining — has led to dozens of deaths. Peru’s Congress is refusing to call new elections in total defiance of public opinion. Just a few days ago, the country’s Supreme Court issued a ruling that some legal scholars have interpreted as essentially criminalising political protest.

As Peru’s civilian institutions fight among themselves, Peru’s armed forces — the last remaining “backbone” in the country, according to Mexican geopolitical analyst Alfredo Jalife — has taken firm control. And lest we forget, Peru is home to some of the very same minerals that the US military has identified as strategically important to US national security interests, including lithium. Also, as I noted in my June 22, 2021 piece, Is Another Military Coup Brewing in Peru, After Historic Electoral Victory for Leftist Candidate?, while Peru’s largest trading partner is China, its political institutions — like those of Colombia and Chile — remain tethered to US policy interests:

Together with Chile, it’s the only country in South America that was invited to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was later renamed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership after Donald Trump withdrew US participation.

Given as much, the rumours of another coup in Peru should hardly come as a surprise. Nor should the Biden administration’s recent appointment of a CIA veteran as US ambassador to Peru, as recently reported by Vijay Prashad and José Carlos Llerena Robles:

Her name is Lisa Kenna, a former adviser to former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a nine-year veteran at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and a US secretary of state official in Iraq. Just before the election, Ambassador Kenna released a video, in which she spoke of the close ties between the United States and Peru and of the need for a peaceful transition from one president to another.

It seems more than likely that Kenna played a direct role in the not-so-peaceful transition from President Castillo to de facto President Boluarte, having met with Peru’s then-Defence Minister Gustavo Bobbio Rosas on December 6, the day before Pedro Castillo was ousted, to tackle “issues of bilateral interest”.

On a Knife’s Edge

After decades of stumbling from crisis to crisis and government to government, Peru rests on a knife’s edge. When Castillo, a virtual nobody from an Andean backwater who had played an important role in the teachers’ strikes of 2017, rode to power on a crest of popular anger at Peru’s hyper-corrupt establishment parties in June 2021, Peru’s legions of poor and marginalised hoped that positive changes would follow. But it was not to be.

Castillo was always an outsider in Lima and was out of his depth from day one. He had zero control over Congress and failed miserably to overcome rabid right-wing opposition to his government. Even in his first year in office he faced two impeachment attempts. As Manolo De Los Santos wrote in People’s Dispatch, Peru’s largely Lima-based political and business elite could never accept that a former schoolteacher and farmer from the high Andean plains could become president.

On December 7, they finally got what they wanted: Castillo’s impeachment. Just hours before a third impeachment hearing, he declared on national television that he was dissolving Congress and launching an “exceptional emergency government” and the convening of a Constituent Assembly. It was a preemptive act of total desperation from a man who held no sway with the military or judiciary, had zero control over Congress, and had even lost the support of his own party. Hours later, he was impeached, arrested by his own security detail and taken to jail, where he remains to this day.

Castillo may be out of the picture but political instability continues to reign in Peru. The de facto Boluarte government and Congress are broadly despised by the Peruvian people. According to the latest poll by the Institute of Peruvian Studies (IEP), 78% of Peruvians disapprove of Boluarte’s presidency while only 15% approve. Congress is even less popular, with a public disapproval rate of 91%. Forty-one percent believe that the protests will increase while 26% believe they will remain the same. In the meantime, Peru’s Congress continues to block general elections.

Peru’s “Strategic” Resources 

As regular readers know, EU and US interest in Latin America is rising rapidly as the race for lithium, copper, cobalt and other elements essential for the so-called “clean” energy transition heats up. It is a race that China has been winning pretty handily up until now.

Peru is not only one of China’s biggest trade partners in Latin America; it is home to the only port in Latin America that is managed entirely by Chinese capital. And while Peru may not form part of the Lithium Triangle (Bolivia, Argentina and Chile), it does boast significant deposits of the white metal. By one estimate, it is home to the sixth largest deposits of hard-rock lithium in the world. It is also the world’s second largest producer of copper, zinc and silver, three metals that are also expected to play a major role in supporting renewable energy technologies.

In other words, there is a huge amount at stake in how Peru evolves politically as well as the economic and geopolitical alliances it forms. Also, its direct neighbour to the north, Ecuador, is undergoing a major political crisis that is likely to spell the end of the US-aligned Guillermo Lasso government and a handover of power to Rafael Correa’s party and its allies.

And the US government and military have made no secret of their interest in the mineral deposits that countries like Peru hold in their subsoil. In an address to the Washington-based Atlantic Council on Jan 19, Gen. Laura Richardson, head of the U.S. Southern Command, spoke gushingly of Latin America’s rich deposits of “rare earth elements,” “the lithium triangle — Argentina, Bolivia, Chile,” the “largest oil reserves [and] light, sweet crude discovered off Guyana,” Venezuela’s “oil, copper, gold” and the fact that Latin America is home to “31% of the world’s fresh water in this region.”

She also detailed how Washington, together with US Southern Command, is actively negotiating the sale of lithium in the lithium triangle to US companies through its web of embassies, with the goal of “box[ing] out” US adversaries (i.e. China and Russia), concluding with the ominous words: “This region matters. It has a lot to do with national security. And we need to step up our game.”

Which begs the question: is this the first step of the US government and military’s stepping-up-the-game process?

The former president of Bolivia Evo Morales, who knows a thing or two about US interventions in the region, having been on the sharp end of a US-backed right-wing coup in 2019, certainly seems to think so. A few days ago, he tweeted the following message:

The Peruvian Congress’ authorisation for the entry and stationing of US troops for 7 months confirms that Peru is governed from Washington, under the tutelage of the Southern Command.

The Peruvian people are subject to powerful foreign interests mediated by illegitimate powers lacking popular representation.

The greatest challenge for working people and indigenous peoples is to recover their self-determination, their sovereignty and their natural resources.

With this authorization from the Peruvian right, we warn that the criminalization of protest and the occupation of US military forces will consolidate a repressive state that will affect sovereignty and regional peace in Latin America.

Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador, who refuses to acknowledge Boluarte (whom he calls the “great usurper”) as Peru’s president and has recently faced threats of direct US military intervention in Mexico’s drug wars from US Republican lawmakers, had a message for the US government this week:  “[Sending soldiers to Peru] merely maintains an interventionist policy that does not help at all in building fraternal bonds among the peoples of the American continent.”

Unfortunately, the US government does not seem interested, if indeed it ever has been, in building fraternal bonds with the peoples of the American continent. Instead, it is set on upgrading the Monroe Doctrine for the 21st century. Its strategic rivals this time around are not Western European nations, which are now little more than US vassals (as a recent paper by the European Council of Foreign Relations, titled “The Art of Vassalisation”, all but admitted), but rather China and Russia.