Authored by Michael Clements via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A national gun rights organization is decrying the expansion of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) in President Joe Biden’s $6.8 trillion budget proposal for 2024.

“GOA is extremely concerned at the massive surge in ATF funding in recent years—doubling the size of the agency since the end of the Obama administration,” Aidan Johnston, Gun Owners of America’s director of federal affairs, wrote in an email to The Epoch Times.

Biden’s budget proposal contains $1.9 billion for the ATF. This is a 13.6 percent increase over 2022 and half a billion dollars more than the agency’s fiscal 2020 budget.

If passed as written, Biden’s budget would expand the ATF by 35.7 percent—an overall growth of more than 50 percent since the Obama administration.

According to Biden’s plan, the $1.9 billion would finance the expansion of multi-jurisdictional gun trafficking strike forces, increase firearms industry regulation, and implement the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

The proposal also calls for $51 million for the FBI to complete implementing the enhanced background check system that is part of the Act.

In a statement, GOA said the budget items are nothing more than incremental gun control that will make no one safer while denying law-abiding gun owners their constitutional rights.

The organization is especially alarmed at funding for “crisis intervention programs,” so-called “Red Flag Laws.”

GOA and other gun rights groups claim that Red Flag laws set the stage for authorities to confiscate firearms without due process. They say that language in the Act requiring due process is misleading.

Read more here…

This morning we published a note looking at “How This (Asset) Cycle Finally Ends” in which we explained why the imminent tightening in credit conditions – beyond the near-record tightness already observed in the most recent SLOOS…

…. resulting from small banks retrenching and conserving cash into reserve and curtailing new lending, would finally end the asset cycle and lead the US economy into a recession, but not before hammering stocks and further collapsing the velocity of money.

A few hours later, Morgan Stanley’s QDS team of derivatives experts, reiterated the same view, writing that while authorities quickly cut off the “left tail” by providing coverage for uninsured deposits and instituting a new liquidity facility, squeezing shorts in the process, “equities should come under renewed pressure from a tightening of credit conditions and reduced velocity of money, plus the increase in volatility and shock to correlation that stresses positions.”

They then shared a few thoughts on the recent market moves:

1. Cross market volatility suggests equities should be lower. Biggest move in the two year yield since 1987, biggest move in 2s30s since 9/11… plenty of cross market vol but equities aren’t reacting. Over the last year the SPX P/E multiple has had a -65% correlation to rates vol, which at current levels suggests P/E should be 15x – 2 turns lower or an SPX of ~3400. The last time rate vol was this high relative to equity vol (VIX) was the Taper Tantrum. Yes the Fed is further along in their hiking cycle – and rate vol will normalize after the shocks of the last few days. But QDS would also argue that  economic/earnings growth and financial risks are higher now than they were two weeks ago.

2. This wasn’t just a vol shock, it was a correlation shock. The change in focus from inflation and the Fed’s reaction function to concern about growth/recession and financial stability has flipped stock-bond correlation on its head, and  correlation shocks are particularly hard to deal with as traders need to run from one side of the boat to the other.

3. Change in trend + change in correlation + change in vol is bad for many investors, but CTAs in particular given current positioning. On QDS’s model, CTAs suffered the 7th worst two-day return since 2005 on Friday and Monday, as  they were long stocks but short bonds. Wrong-way volatility typically leads to derisking – today’s reversal will be dampen the impact, but on net QDS is forecasting equity for sale bonds to buy over the coming days.

4. Equity volatility is off sharply today, but not out of the woods as the technicals that contributed to its squeeze are still there. QDS estimates that dealers have roughly $60mm of vol to buy in a down 5% move in SPX and +5 point increase in VIX futures – the 90th %ile versus the last year. That is still only the 65th %ile since 2019 – volatility is not going to go crazy – but investors should not look at a VIX level of ~23 as an ‘all clear’.

5. Within equities high dispersion = both risk and opportunities. Dispersion rose sharply over the last 2 days given the big moves in Financials. Those wrong way likely have to derisk on a broader basis, while opportunities also arise – companies with weak balance sheets (MSXXCCC from the MS Thematic Investment Strategy team) should now come under pressure.

6. Selling pressure has come from both retail and institutions in the last week. The MS Futures Content team highlighted that Friday and Monday combined for the largest two-day increase in new shorts added in S&P 500 futures since March 2020 (rolls-adjusted), with an estimated $49bn of new shorts initiated. And on top of that, MarkIt data suggests 1 zScore short additions in ETFs and 2 zScore short additions in US single-names over the last week. On top of that, retail has been a small net seller of equities in the last week (<$2bn net sold), a -1.1 zScore event versus the last two years, based on QDS’s model based on public data. Some of these shorts are likely coming off today, and more could come off in the near-term – but those are short-term supports, not longer-term ones.

7. Conflicting policy goals. Up until a week ago, the Fed was balancing between growth and inflation. Now they also have to balance financial stability risks – and while they have plenty of tools to do that, at the end of the day these goals present a conflict. Inflation and growth argue for continued rate hikes and QT, while stress argues to slow or pause. Whatever is most acute usually wins… which may be good for stocks in the near-term, but longer-term the less tightening done now likely puts the economy and the Fed between a rock and a hard place.

8. Reduced velocity of money. The potential for a higher cost of bank capital and more expensive funding after recent events has the potential to slow the velocity of money and compound monetary liquidity / QT risks. Equities have now caught back down to the level of reserves in the system after a record gap opened up in late January, and recent TGA spend down (tax refunds) and money coming out of RRP as the system demands more reserves has helped as well. In the near-term that could continue as RRP is drained. But even if monetary liquidity doesn’t contract going forward, if the velocity of money falls then credit extension will be limited and the economy and the market should suffer.

The above doesn’t mean the floor will fall out of equities – policymakers have limited the financial contagion channel. But the real economy channel is still a risk. QE and fiscal stimulus put excess savings in consumers pockets and funded many unprofitable businesses, which has delayed the economic reckoning. But increased cross market volatility, reduced velocity of money, and higher cost of funds should erode those buffers more quickly than before, and it seems hard to frame a bull case for stocks after the last week. Particularly after short covering and hedge monetization on today’s rally, QDS thinks the view that equities need to reprice lower as earnings deteriorate plays out from here.

Authored by Chris Hedges via Scheerpost.com,

Proxy wars devour the countries they purport to defend. There will come a time when the Ukrainians will become expendable to the U.S. They will disappear, as many others before them, from U.S. national discourse and popular consciousness…

There are many ways for a state to project power and weaken adversaries, but proxy wars are one of the most cynical. Proxy wars devour the countries they purport to defend. They entice nations or insurgents to fight for geopolitical goals that are ultimately not in their interest.

The war in Ukraine has little to do with Ukrainian freedom and a lot to do with degrading the Russian military and weakening Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power. And when Ukraine looks headed for defeat, or the war reaches a stalemate, Ukraine will be sacrificed like many other states, in what one of the founding members of the C.I.A., Miles Copeland Jr., referred to as the “Game of Nations” and “the amorality of power politics.”

I covered proxy wars in my two decades as a foreign correspondent, including in Central America where the U.S. armed the military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala and Contra insurgents attempting to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. I reported on the insurgency in the Punjab, a proxy war fomented by Pakistan.

I covered the Kurds in northern Iraq, backed and then betrayed more than once by Iran and Washington. During my time in the Middle East, Iraq provided weapons and support to the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) to destabilize Iran. Belgrade, when I was in the former Yugoslavia, thought by arming Bosnian and Croatian Serbs, it could absorb Bosnia and parts of Croatia into a greater Serbia. 

Proxy wars are notoriously hard to control, especially when the aspirations of those doing the fighting and those sending the weapons diverge. They also have a bad habit of luring sponsors of proxy wars, as happened to the U.S. in Vietnam and Israel in Lebanon, directly into the conflict.

Proxy armies are given weaponry with little accountability, significant amounts of which end up on the black market or in the hands of warlords or terrorists. CBS News reported last year that around 30 percent of the weapons sent to Ukraine make it to the front lines, a report it chose to partially retract under heavy pressure from Kiev and Washington. The widespread diversion of donated military and medical equipment to the black market in Ukraine was also documented by U.S. journalist Lindsey Snell. Weapons in war zones are lucrative commodities. There were always large quantities for sale in the wars I covered.

Warlords, gangsters and thugs — Ukraine has long been considered one of the most corrupt countries in Europe — are transformed by sponsor states into heroic freedom fighters. Support for those fighting these proxy wars is a celebration of our supposed national virtue, especially seductive after two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East. Joe Biden, with dismal poll numbers, intends to run for a second term as a “wartime” president who stands with Ukraine, to which the U.S. has already committed $113 billion in military, economic and humanitarian assistance.

When Russia invaded Ukraine “[t]he whole world faced a test for the ages,” Biden said after a lightning visit to Kiev. “Europe was being tested. America was being tested. NATO was being tested. All democracies were being tested.” 

Similar Sentiments

I heard similar sentiments expressed to justify other proxy wars.

“They are our brothers, these freedom fighters, and we owe them our help,” Ronald Reagan said of the Contras, who pillaged, raped and slaughtered their way through Nicaragua. “They are the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance,” Reagan added. “We cannot turn away from them, for the struggle here is not right versus left, it is right versus wrong.” 

A group of Contras rest after a firefight, Jan. 1, 1987. (Tiomono, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

“I want to hear him say we’re going to arm the Free Syrian Army,” John McCain said of President Donald Trump. “We’re going to dedicate ourselves to the removal of Bashar al-Assad. We’re going to have the Russians pay a price for their engagement. All players here are going to have to pay a penalty and the United States of America is going to be on the side of the people who fight for freedom.”

Those feted as heroes of resistance, like President Volodymyr Zelensky or President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, are often problematic, especially as their egos and bank accounts inflate.  The flood of effusive encomiums directed towards proxies by their sponsors in public rarely matches what they say of them in private.

At the Dayton peace talks, where the Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic sold out the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs and the Bosnian Croats, he said of his proxies: “[they] are not my friends. They are not my colleagues…They are shit.”

Dec. 14, 1995: U.S. President Bill Clinton, right, talking with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in Paris with onlookers Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, General Wesley Clark.  (C.I.A., Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

“Dark money sloshed all around,” The Washington Post wrote after obtaining an internal report produced by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

“Afghanistan’s largest bank liquefied into a cesspool of fraud. Travelers lugged suitcases loaded with $1 million, or more, on flights leaving Kabul. Mansions known as ‘poppy palaces’ rose from the rubble to house opium kingpins. President Hamid Karzai won reelection after cronies stuffed thousands of ballot boxes. He later admitted the C.I.A. had delivered bags of cash to his office for years, calling it ‘nothing unusual.’”

“In public, as President Barack Obama escalated the war and Congress approved billions of additional dollars in support, the commander in chief and lawmakers promised to crack down on corruption and hold crooked Afghans accountable,” the paper reported. “In reality, U.S. officials backed off, looked away and let the thievery become more entrenched than ever, according to a trove of confidential government interviews obtained by The Washington Post.”

Those lionized as the bulwark against barbarism when the arms are flowing to them, are forgotten once the conflicts end, as in Afghanistan and Iraq. The former proxy fighters must flee the country or suffer the vendettas of those they fought, as happened to the abandoned Hmong tribesmen in Laos and the South Vietnamese.

The former sponsors, once lavish in military aid, ignore desperate pleas for economic and humanitarian assistance, as those displaced by war go hungry and die from lack of medical care. Afghanistan, for the second time around, is the poster child for this imperial callousness.

U.S. soldiers with Afghans boarding a C-17 Globemaster III at Hamid Karzai International Airport on Aug. 21 after the Taliban captured Kabul. (U.S. Air Force, Brennen Lege)

The collapse of civil society spawns sectarian violence and extremism, much of it inimical to the interests of those who fomented the proxy wars. Israel’s proxy militias in Lebanon, along with its military intervention in 1978 and 1982, were designed to dislodge the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from the country. This objective was achieved. But the removal of the PLO from Lebanon gave rise to Hezbollah, a far more militant and effective adversary, along with Syrian domination of Lebanon.

In September 1982, over three days, the Lebanese Kataeb Party, more commonly known as the Phalanges — backed by the Israeli military — massacred between 2,000 and 3,500 Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. It led to international condemnation and political unrest inside Israel. Critics called the protracted conflict “Lebanam,” conflating the words Vietnam and Lebanon. The Israeli film Waltz with Bashir documents the depravity and wanton killing of thousands of civilians by Israel and its proxies during the war in Lebanon.

Proxy wars, as Chalmers Johnson pointed out, engender unintended blowback. The backing of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan fighting the Soviets, which included arming groups such as those led by Osama bin Laden, gave rise to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It also spread reactionary jihadism throughout the Muslim world, increased terrorist attacks against western targets which culminated in the attacks of 9/11 and fueled two decades of U.S.-led military fiascos in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya and Yemen.

Jan. 1, 1987: Mujahideen in Kunar, Afghanistan. (erwinlux, Flickr, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Should Russia prevail in Ukraine, should Putin not be removed from power, the U.S. will have not only cemented into place a potent alliance between Russia and China, but ensured an antagonism with Russia that will come back to haunt us. The flood of billions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine, the use of U.S. intelligence to kill Russian generals and sink the battleship Moskva, the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines and the more than 2,500 U.S. sanctions targeting Russia, will not be forgotten by Moscow.  

“In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows,” Johnson writes, “Although people usually know what they have sown, our national experience of blowback is seldom imagined in such terms because so much of what the managers of the American empire have sown has been kept secret.”

Taliban fighters patrolling Kabul in a Humvee on Aug. 17, 2021. (Voice of America, Wikimedia Commons)

Those supported in proxy wars, including the Ukrainians, often have little chance of victory. Sophisticated weapons such as the M1 Abrams tanks are largely useless if those operating them have not spent months and years being trained. Prior to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, the Soviet bloc provided Palestinian fighters with heavy weapons, including tanks, anti-aircraft missiles and artillery. The lack of training made those weapons ineffective against Israeli air power, artillery and mechanized units. 

The U.S. knows time is running out for Ukraine. It knows that high-tech weapons will not be mastered in time to blunt a sustained Russian offensive. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned in January that Ukraine has “a window of opportunity here, between now and the spring.”

“That’s not a long time,” he added.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin taking questions at a press conference with Ukrainian Minister of Defense Andriy Taran, Kiev, Ukraine, Oct. 19, 2021. (DoD, Chad J. McNeeley)

Victory, however, is not the point. The point is maximum destruction. Even if Ukraine is forced in defeat to negotiate with Russia and concede territory for peace, as well as accept status as a neutral nation, Washington will have achieved its primary goal of weakening Russia’s military capacity and isolating Putin from Europe.  

Those who mount proxy wars are blinded by wishful illusions. There was little support for the Contras in Nicaragua or the MEK in Iran. The arming of so-called “moderate” rebels in Syria saw weapons flow into the hands of reactionary jihadists. 

The conclusion of proxy wars usually sees the nation or group fighting on behalf of the sponsor state betrayed. In 1972, the Nixon administration provided millions of dollars in weapons and ammunition to Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq to weaken the Iraqi government, which at the time was seen as too close to the Soviet Union. No one, least of all the U.S. and Iran, which delivered the weapons to Kurdish fighters, wanted the Kurds to create a state of their own. Iraq and Iran signed the 1975 Algiers Agreement in which the two countries settled disputes along their common border. The agreement also ended military support for the Kurds.

The Iraqi military soon launched a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Iraq. Thousands of Kurds, including women and children, were “disappeared” or killed. Kurdish villages were dynamited into rubble. The desperate plight of the Kurds was ignored, for, as Henry Kissinger said at the time, “covert action should not be confused with missionary work.” 

The Islamic government in Tehran resumed military aid to the Kurds during the war between Iran and Iraq from 1980 to 1988. On March 16, 1988, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein dropped mustard gas and the nerve agents sarin, tabun, and VX on the Kurdish town of Halabja. Some 5,000 people died within minutes and up to 10,000 were injured. The Reagan administration, which supported Iraq, minimized the war crimes committed against its former Kurdish allies. 

President Richard Nixon’s rapprochement towards China, in another example, included terminating covert assistance to Tibetan rebels. 

U.S. President Richard Nixon and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, Feb. 25, 1972. (White House/Wikimedia Commons)

Betrayal is the closing act in nearly all proxy wars.

The arming of Ukraine is not missionary work. It has nothing to do with liberty or freedom. It is about weakening Russia. Take Russia out of the equation and there would be little tangible support for Ukraine.

There are other occupied peoples, including the Palestinians, who have suffered as brutally and far longer than Ukranians. But NATO is not arming Palestinians to fight against their Israeli occupiers or holding them up as heroic freedom fighters. U.S. love of freedom does not extend to Palestinians or the people of Yemen currently being bombed with British and American weapons, or the Kurds, Yazidis and Arabs resisting Turkey, a longtime NATO member, in its occupation and drone war throughout the north and east of Syria.

U.S. love of freedom only extends to people who serve its “national interest.”

There will come a time when the Ukrainians, like the Kurds, will become expendable. They will disappear, as many others before them have, from our national discourse and our consciousness. They will nurse for generations their betrayal and suffering. The American empire will move on to use others, perhaps the “heroic” people of Taiwan, to further its futile quest for global hegemony.

China is the big prize for our Dr. Strangeloves. They will pile up even more corpses and flirt with nuclear war to curtail China’s growing economic and military power. This is an old and predictable game. It leaves in its wake nations in ruins and millions of people dead and displaced. It fuels the hubris and self-delusion of the mandarins in Washington who refuse to accept the emergence of a multipolar world. If left unchecked, this “game of nations” may get us all killed.

*  *  *

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR.  He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”

Author’s Note to Readers: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waiver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”

Multimillionaire California Governor Gavin Newsom failed to disclose his ties to Silicon Valley Bank while lobbying the White House and the Treasury Department over a pending bailout, The Intercept reported on Tuesday.

The White House “acted swiftly and decisively to protect the American economy and strengthen public confidence in our banking system,” Newsom said in a statement. What Newsom didn’t mention is that it also protected his own companies if they held over $250,000 in deposits.

CADE, Odette, and PlumpJack, three wineries owned by Newsom, are listed as clients of SVB on the bank’s website. Newsom also maintained personal accounts at SVB for years, according to a longtime former employee of Newsom’s who handled his finances, and who requested anonymity to avoid professional reprisal.

Newsom also failed to mention his wife’s professional ties to the bank. In 2021, SVB gave $100,000 to a charity founded by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the California Partners Project, at the request of Newsom. SVB Capital President, John China, sits on the Board of Directors of the charity.

On Monday, Newsom said that he had “been in touch with the highest levels of leadership at the White House and Treasury.”

“Governor Newsom’s business and financial holdings are held and managed by a blind trust, as they have been since he was first elected governor in 2018,” said Newsom spokesman Nathan Click.

Of note, when asked during his 2018 campaign whether he would divest from his companies which might pose an ‘ethics challenge,’ Newsom reportedly replied: “These are my babies, my life, my family. I can’t do that. I can’t sell them.”

Instead, he announced the blind trust, which would be controlled by family friend and attorney, Shyla Hendrickson – an arrangement under which Newsom’s sister, Hillary Newsom, would retain her role as president of PlumpJack Group – a Newsom owned company which includes hotels, restaurants, wineries, bars and liquor stores.

Authored by Walt Zlotow via AntiWar.com,

The Russo-Ukraine war has brought up a concept sorely lacking in the American vocabulary: Proxy War. Most folks are familiar with the word proxy. Ask and they might respond “Oh yes, like when I sign over my right to vote stock shares to another who votes as my proxy.” But throw in “war” after “proxy” and you’ll likely get an eye roll.

Given how prevalent US reliance on proxy war has become in foreign policy, ignorance of proxy war has a debilitating effect on an informed electorate crucial to fostering a peaceful world.

OK, for the uninformed, Webster advises: Proxy War. Noun. A war instigated by a major power which does not itself become involved. “The end of the Cold War brought an end to many of the proxy wars thru which the two sides struggled to exert their influence.”

Today the US is involved in two devastating proxy wars that have taken over half a million lives. One is our proxy war against imagined US enemy Iran. Though the targeted enemy, not a death has occurred on Iranian soil. Over are 400,000 dead, mainly in Yemen, inflicted by neighboring Saudi Arabia since 2015. The Saudis intervened in the Yemeni civil war to prevent the Houthi faction from controlling Yemen. We’re been supplying much of the air power, bombs, maintenance, logistics and moral support for Saudi Arabia to kill all those Houthis. Why? We view the Houthis as proxies for Iran to extend its influence in the Middle East. We deem that an existential threat to US national security interests. Regardless of how delusional and senseless, the US has been fueling this proxy war against Iran for 8 years now.

The other US proxy war is infinitely worse: our 8 year long proxy war against Russia that provoked their invasion of neighboring Ukraine 13 months ago. At that point the proxy war clueless respond incredulously, “Are you crazy? Putin woke up one morning and decided to reestablish the old Soviet Empire, starting with Ukraine. Once he takes Kyiv, he’ march westward into Western Europe. I know, read it in the NY Times and Washington Post.”

That is the problem. In the US national security state and its compliant media, proxy war is the term that dare not speak its name.

The information is out there but one must dig to get it. Try exploring the US supported coup of 2014 that deposed elected Ukrainian President Yanukovych to prevent Ukraine from partnering economically and politically with Russia. Check out the murderous civil war the coup started resulting in thousands of dead Russian leaning Ukrainians in Donbas. Learn how hundreds of millions in US weapons helped the US picked Ukrainian post-coup government kill those hapless Ukrainians. Investigate the 2015 Minsk II Agreement that was designed to give the Donbas independence under nominal Ukraine sovereignty, but free from further Ukraine government violence. One will find that France, Germany and the US neither supported nor intended Minsk II from providing Donbas independence. That would have been viewed as a Russian “win”, totally unacceptable to the US proxy war agenda.

Why is the US proxy war against Russia infinitely worse than our proxy war against Iran in Yemen? The former could pivot from proxy war to nuclear war in a heartbeat. It could take just one mistake, one miscalculation, one deranged “Dr. Strangelove” military renegade to trigger an unstoppable nuclear onslaught.

Pentagon complains the manner in which a Russian fighter downed a U.S. drone was “environmentally unsound” as if that matters. This after the U.S. blew up the Nord Stream pipelines and filled the Baltic Sea with natural gas. We really have lost our minds.https://t.co/vk3Go30Pkt

— Jim Rickards (@JamesGRickards) March 14, 2023

The forces of ignorance have won the narrative. Every media report on the war begins with “Russia’s unproved attack on Ukraine.” The term proxy war never has and never will appear.

Might be too late but time for grammar and high school curriculums to add a chapter, maybe even a semester, on proxy war in US foreign policy history and current events classes. After horrendous debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq, killing 6,879 Americans, the US only does proxy wars. No Americans die in proxy wars, only proxies in designated countries like Yemen and Ukraine. Maybe the next generation will gain enough wisdom to recognize a proxy war when it occurs, and possibly push back to keep it from devolving from proxy to nuclear.

At a moment it’s widely understood that Russian forces have the upper hand in Bakhmut, with the eastern city nearly surrounded, a new bipartisan push is on among Congressional hawks to pressure the administration into approving sending F-16 jets to Ukraine. 

Politico reports this week on a letter written by a group of bipartisan senators and sent to President Biden: “The fresh push came in a letter Tuesday to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin from eight senators, and obtained by POLITICO, as top administration officials from President Joe Biden on down have poured cold water on bipartisan calls to send U.S.-made fighters into the fight for now.”

The senators argue that F-16s are badly needed at this “critical juncture” to give the Ukrainians the edge they need. “After speaking with U.S., Ukrainian, and foreign leaders working to support Ukraine at the Munich Security Conference last month, we believe the U.S. needs to take a hard look at providing F-16 aircraft to Ukraine,” the senators wrote, while claiming it would be a “game changer on the battlefield.”

The initiative was led by Democratic Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona. The senators are also pressing the Pentagon for more information on what kind of timetable and resources it would take to get Ukrainian pilots up to speed on effectively flying the F-16s. Politico notes:

Also signing onto the letter were Democrats Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and Jacky Rosen of Nevada as well as Republicans Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Ted Budd of North Carolina.

But Biden administration and defense officials have recently testified to Congress that it’s anti-air defense systems, artillery and ammunition that currently rank among Ukraine’s highest priorities and requests.

In other corners of the Senate, Republican hawks like Tom Cotton and Lindsay Graham are also making noise about “doing more”…

This isn’t a video game https://t.co/TqnmeAeC9T

— No Bailouts Poso 🚫💰 (@JackPosobiec) March 15, 2023

Sen. Cotton recently characterized the White House approach as based on “half measures”. Cotton has a whole litany of escalatory measures he would like to see the US adopt when it comes to Ukraine.

And Graham too has been advocating for the US to be ready and willing to shoot Russian planes out of the sky…

Lindsey Graham on the encounter between a US drone and Russian planes: “What would Ronald Reagan do right now? He would start shooting Russian planes down if they were threatening our assets.” pic.twitter.com/rmO4Vl6dd8

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 15, 2023

But the fact that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed in a Wednesday afternoon press briefing that he spoke with his Russian counterpart Defense Secretary Sergei Shoigu – in the first such phone call since October -is a good sign that the two sides aren’t ready to enter a shooting war yet, and that perhaps for now saner minds are prevailing.

Authored by John and Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

– Senator Frank Church on Meet The Press, 1975

If you give the government an inch, it will always take a mile.

This is how the slippery slope to all-out persecution starts.

Martin Niemöller’s warning about the widening net that ensnares us all, a warning issued in response to the threat posed by Nazi Germany’s fascist regime, still applies.

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

This particular slippery slope has to do with the government’s use of geofence technology, which uses cell phone location data to identify people who are in a particular area at any given time.

First, police began using geofence warrants to carry out dragnet sweeps of individuals near a crime scene.

Then the FBI used geofence warrants to identify individuals who were in the vicinity of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

It wasn’t long before government officials in California used cell phone and geofence data to track the number and movements of churchgoers on church grounds during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

If we’ve already reached the point where people praying and gathering on church grounds merits this level of government scrutiny and sanctions, we’re not too far from free-falling into a total surveillance state.

Dragnet geofence surveillance sweeps can and eventually will be used to target as a suspect every person in any given place at any given time and sweep them up into a never-ending virtual line-up in the hopes of matching a criminal to every crime.

There really can be no overstating the danger.

The government’s efforts to round up those who took part in the Jan. 6 Capitol protests provided a glimpse of exactly how vulnerable we all are to the menace of a surveillance state that aspires to a God-like awareness of our lives.

Relying on selfies, social media posts, location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing, government agents compiled a massive data trove on anyone and everyone who may have been anywhere in the vicinity of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Included in that data roundup were individuals who may have had nothing to do with the protests but whose cell phone location data identified them as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

You didn’t even have to be involved in the Capitol protests to qualify for a visit from the FBI: investigators reportedly tracked—and questioned—anyone whose cell phones connected to wi-fi or pinged cell phone towers near the Capitol.

One man, who had gone out for a walk with his daughters only to end up stranded near the Capitol crowds, actually had FBI agents show up at his door days later. Using Google Maps, agents were able to pinpoint exactly where they were standing and for how long.

The massive amount of surveillance data available to the government is staggering.

As investigative journalists Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson explain, “This [surveillance] data…provide[s] an intimate record of people whether they were visiting drug treatment centers, strip clubs, casinos, abortion clinics or places of worship.”

In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted.

Forget about being innocent until proven guilty.

Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head.

Now, thanks to the digital trails and digital footprints we all leave behind, you start off guilty and have to prove your innocence.

In an age of overcriminalization, when the average American unknowingly commits at least three crimes a day, there is no one who would be spared.

The ramifications of empowering the government to sidestep fundamental due process safeguards are so chilling and so far-reaching as to put a target on the back of anyone who happens to be in the same place where a crime takes place.

As Warzel and Thompson warn:

“To think that the information will be used against individuals only if they’ve broken the law is naïve; such data is collected and remains vulnerable to use and abuse whether people gather in support of an insurrection or they justly protest police violence… This collection will only grow more sophisticated… It gets easier by the day… it does not discriminate. It harvests from the phones of MAGA rioters, police officers, lawmakers and passers-by. There is no evidence, from the past or current day, that the power this data collection offers will be used only to good ends. There is no evidence that if we allow it to continue to happen, the country will be safer or fairer.”

Saint or sinner, it doesn’t matter because we’re all being swept up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

Case in point: consider what happened to Calvary Chapel during COVID-19.

Government officials in Santa Clara County, Calif., issued a shelter-in-place order in March 2020, dictating whom residents could see, where they could go, what they could do, and under what circumstances.

County officials imposed even harsher restrictions on churches, accompanied by the threat of crippling fines for those that did not comply with the lockdown orders.

Then Santa Clara officials reportedly used geofence surveillance technology to monitor the concentrations of congregants at Calvary Chapel during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, using their findings to justify levying nearly $3 million in public health fines against the church for violating the county’s strict pandemic restrictions.

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that similar restrictions unconstitutionally singled out houses of worship for especially harsh treatment and “struck “at the very heart of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty,” county officials have sought to collect millions of dollars in fines levied against churches, including Calvary Chapel, for violating the county’s mandates.

At a minimum, the use of geofence surveillance to monitor church attendees constitutes an egregious violation of the churchgoers’ Fourth Amendment rights and an attempt to undermine protected First Amendment activities relating to the freedom of speech, the free exercise of religion, and the right of the people peaceably to assemble.

Still, the government’s use of geofence surveillance goes way beyond its impact on church members and anyone in the vicinity of the Jan. 6 protests.

The ramifications for all of us are far-reaching.

Mass surveillance has been shown to chill lawful First Amendment activities, and historically has been used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, and harass marginalized communities.

A study conducted by Roger Clarke, the famed Australian specialist in data surveillance and privacy, indicates that the costs resulting from the erosion of personal privacy are so significant that they essentially threaten the very foundation of a democratic society.

Some of the most serious harms include:

• A prevailing climate of suspicion and adversarial relationships

• Inequitable application of the law

• Stultification of originality

• Weakening of society’s moral fiber and cohesion

• Repressive potential for a totalitarian government

• Blacklisting

• Ex-ante discrimination and guilt prediction

• Inversion of the onus of proof.

In other words, the chilling effects of pervasive surveillance give rise to a constant, justifiable fear in even the most compliant, law-abiding citizen.

Of course, that’s the point.

The government wants us muzzled, complacent and compliant.

So far, it’s working.

Americans are increasingly self-censoring and marching in lockstep with the government’s (and corporate America’s) dictates, whether out of fear or indoctrination, or a combination.

In the meantime, the use of geofence warrants continues to be debated in the legislatures and challenged in the courts. For instance, while a California court found that a broad geofence search warrant violated the Fourth Amendment, a federal district judge for the District of Columbia upheld the use of geofence warrants by police in connection with the events of Jan. 6.

No matter how the courts rule, however, one thing is clear: these dragnet geofence searches are well on their way to becoming the eyes and ears of a police state that views each and every one of us as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how technologies purportedly adopted to rout out dangerous criminals in our midst are used to conquer a free people.

The student body at one of the country’s most prestigious women’s colleges has approved a referendum urging the school to open admission to all nonbinary and transgender people —  including trans men.  

Tuesday’s vote at Wellesley College in suburban Boston isn’t binding. After the vote, the 2,500-student school –which counts blood-drenched foreign interventionists Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright among its alumnae — declared it had “no plan to revisit its mission as a women’s college or its admissions policy.” 

However, the school has already bent to gender activism. Since 2015, Wellesley has offered admission to anyone “who lives as a woman and consistently identifies as a woman.” That includes trans women — biological men who call themselves women. 

That’s not enough for a majority of students voting in Tuesday’s referendum: They also want biological women who seek to live their lives as men to be admitted to a college for women.   

That’s eyebrow-raising enough, but note the referendum also gives a green light to “all nonbinary” people. That would open Wellesley to biological men who position themselves elsewhere across the bewildering, ever-growing taxonomy of gender identities…including, for example, those who claim to have a “fluctuating gender.”

Earlier this month, Wellesley President Paula Johnson posted a message articulating the school’s devotion to remaining a women’s college, albeit one that approaches that definition flexibly: “Wellesley is a women’s college that admits cis, trans, and nonbinary students—all who consistently identify as women.”

Naturally, there was a backlash, including an ongoing sit-in in the administration building. The student newspaper published an editorial disapproving of Johnson’s message, and “remind[ing] the Wellesley community that President Johnson is the spokesperson for the Board of Trustees, which must be held equally responsible for the College’s transphobic rhetoric.”   

I’ve lost the plot. Students at left-wing Wellesley, a women’s college, have voted to admit trans men — who, according to identitarian orthodoxy, are fully men. What, then, is the remaining argument against just admitting students of both sexes/all gender identities? https://t.co/82FSnKBYmL

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) March 15, 2023

Per an odd policy, the college does not publish the actual vote tallies of its referendums. However, Tuesday’s result was widely expected. 

Senior student Elizabeth Um told The New York Times that while she opposed the referendum, she didn’t pursue any activism against it because its passage seemed inevitable and publicly resisting it would have been “social suicide.” 

Um, who’s president of a Wellesley anti-abortion group, did dare to share with theTimes her exasperation over the proposal to open her women’s college to women who identify as men, and men who call themselves nonbinary: 

“If you don’t think you can fit in here, then you have your pick of thousands of other coed colleges…We’re a women’s college. That’s the core identity of the school, and we can’t start watering that down.”

College president Johnson told the Times that students and faculty contacted her to say they feared ostracism if they went public with their opposition. “I’ve been personally booed at public gatherings where I’ve referred to Wellesley as a women’s college, which it is,” she said.

Supporters of the referendum say their proposal would be consistent with women’s colleges acting as havens for those who face gender discrimination. Retired Wellesley English professor Lawrence Rosenwald told the Times that the college has always been a home for those “not in positions of power in a patriarchal society.”

Founded in 1870, Wellesley bills itself as an institution for “women who will make a difference in the world.”

Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

Last Friday saw the total failure of the Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th biggest bank in the United States. The biggest bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis.

By Sunday, the Silvergate Bank and Signature Bank had joined SVB in full collapse. All three are now safely under Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) control.

The FDIC has taken the unusual step of fully guaranteeing all deposits kept with the SVB – meaning the federal government will give taxpayer money out to compensate every SVB customer.

But the damage didn’t stop there. Naturally, this put pressure on other regional banks, with two more – First Republic Bank and PacWest Bank – coming close to collapsing themselves, following mini-runs.

The weekend saw Wall Street’s 4 biggest banks lose over 55 billion dollars in value. Bank stocks around the world are sliding in value.

As of this morning Credit Suisse’s stock is at an all-time low, sparking a sell-off of stocks all over the world.

In short, the financial situation is teetering on the edge of a major crisis. But is it accidental? And if not, what is the agenda behind it?

Well, firstly, no it’s not accidental. Let’s get that out of the way.

Does that mean the collapses were planned and engineered to the last detail? Maybe, maybe not.

Certainly, there was at least some warning for people in the know.

SVB’s CEO and CFO dumped a combined 4 million dollars of stock in the two weeks before the crash, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund withdrew all their funds from SVB the Thursday before the collapse.

That is despite the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation finding that SVB was a “sound financial institution” as late as March 9th, and that it only entered insolvency after investors caused a run.

Obviously, that’s not proof of an intentional collapse, but it’s something to make a note of nonetheless.

Anybody with some kind of foreknowledge could have made a fortune in put options over the weekend. It will be interesting if any spike in such deals was recorded.

But all of that is irrelevant, really, because we know they have been deliberately tanking the economy for three years as a response to “the pandemic”.

They inflated the cost of food and energy and destroyed the value of our currency by “printing” billions upon billions of dollars, pounds and euros.

So, even if there was no specific micro-managed set-up with these specific banks, bank failures were the inevitable result of this economic vandalism – inevitable, and desired.

The more important questions are “why?” and ”what happens now?”

Well, one aspect will be tighter regulation – specifically of cryptocurrency. It’s likely no accident that two of the failed banks – Silvergate and Signature – are major investors in crypto, and SVB is known to have links to crypto too.

The narrative will likely come about that “unregulated crypto investment poses a danger to the financial system” or that “unregulated crypto is makes our financial institutes vulnerable to economic warfare” or something similar

We’re already seeing articles along those lines, as well as dire warnings of the same from last fall.

The next phase will likely be arguing that small, regional, private banks cannot guarantee the security of their customer’s money, and it would be safer for individuals to bank with either giant international banks or directly with the central bank.

It’s already being reported that Bank of America has seen a huge boost in deposits since the SVB crash. This process of consolidation in the major banks is likely to continue.

Logically, there’s only one place this two-pronged propaganda is headed (for anyone who’s been paying even the smallest bit of attention): Central Bank Digital Currency.

The narrative fits too well for it to be anything else.

Going forward, CBDCs can be pitched as more secure than traditional banking, and more regulated than “traditional” crypto. Further, since the FDIC is now fully guaranteeing deposits in failed banks, you’re practically banking with the Fed anyway. Why not just cut out the middle man?

We know they’re going to make these arguments because they already started making them.

In January this year, the World Economic Forum published a paper titled:

Can central bank digital currencies help stabilize global financial markets?

It’s clear what the sales pitch is going to be.

But more than that, it’s possible bank runs will actually be encouraged in future, because they could increase the uptake of digital currency.

According to a report from the Bank of International Settlements [emphasis added]:

Another set of studies focus on the risk that a CBDC may increase depositors’ sensitivity to system-wide banking crises by facilitating the transfer of deposits. The availability of CBDC might not have a large impact on individual bank runs as it is already possible to digitally and instantly transfer money between a weak and a strong bank (Kumhof and Noone (2018) and Carstens (2019)).

However, during a systemic banking crisis, transfers from bank deposits into CBDC would face lower transaction costs than those associated with cash withdrawals (such as going to the ATM, waiting in line, etc.), and would provide a safe-haven destination in the form of the central bank.

The lower costs of running to CBDC compared to cash imply that more depositors would quickly withdraw at a lower perceived probability of a system-wide bank solvency crisis.

They argue that since any hypothetical CBDC will be more secure than traditional bank deposits, and easier to get than cash, people would opt to use it in the event of a run on the bank, and that bank runs would therefore be more likely and more common.

Do you see the implication here?

Once CBDCs are out there – optional at first, of course – the central banks could theoretically increase uptake by artificially engineering financial instability and causing regional banks to collapse.

They won’t make it mandatory, they’ll just make it “safe”.

Another report, published in 2022 by the UK’s House of Lords, described CBDCs as “A Solution in Search of a Problem”.

It looks like they just found their problem. And problems are just like everything else – the bests are the ones you make yourself.

Authored by Gary Bai via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Defendants in the ongoing Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Breach trial suffered a defeat on Monday, as the court ordered that the defendants may not cross-examine an FBI agent for most of the defense attorneys’ allegations that spawned from internal FBI messages inadvertently leaked in court.

Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump-appointed judge, on Monday addressed allegations made by attorneys of the Jan. 6 defendants that targeted leaked internal FBI messages, which were revealed in court when Nick Smith, a defense attorney representing Ethan Nordean, cross-examined FBI Special Agent Nicole Miller on Thursday last week.

The judge denied all but one of the defendant’s arguments about the leaked messages. That leaves a narrowed space for the defendants to maneuver should they wish to upend the trial based on these messages alone.

Leaked Messages in the Crosshair

The leaked messages emerged when Smith showed in court hidden rows in an Excel spreadsheet provided to him by the DOJ, which contained thousands of lines of correspondence among FBI agents—mostly addressed to Agent Miller—in the agency’s Lync system. The files were “hidden” via a “filter” function in Excel, according to a Thursday filing by Nordean.

These messages include a directive from FBI personnel to Miller to “destroy” 338 pieces of evidence and another directive to Miller to “edit out” an FBI agent from a Confidential Human Source (CHS) informant report, the filing read.

Since last Thursday, these internal messages were the focus of defense attorneys, who alleged that the messages showed that the DOJ altered evidence, violated due process, and intruded on the defendants’ rights to counsel by monitoring the defendants’ communications with their counsel.

Based on these allegations, the defendants’ attorneys made a range of requests to the court, including the appointment of a special counsel to review the messages, further cross-examination of Agent Miller about these messages, and dismissal of the case altogether.

Cross-examination refers to the defense lawyer’s questioning of the plaintiff’s witness—Agent Miller, in this case—and comes after the plaintiff questions the witness in direct examinations. The scope of cross-examinations usually limits to that touched by the line of questioning by the plaintiff in direct examinations for the purpose of checking the witness’s testimony, knowledge, or credibility.

The defense attorneys, in this case, requested to further cross-examine Agent Miller on the leaked FBI communications, which is extraneous information to the plaintiff’s original line of questioning. The DOJ sought to stop all further questioning about these leaked messages and push defense attorneys back to the DOJ’s original line of questioning in direct examination, according to its court filings over the weekend.

The judge rejected all but one of the defendants’ allegations since the revealing of the FBI messages last Thursday.

‘Editing’ of Informant Reports

The judge allowed only one request from the defendants, which was a request from Nordean’s attorney to cross-examine Agent Miller regarding the “editing” of an FBI personnel out of a CHS informant report.

In a Sunday filing, the DOJ said the editing request in the disputed message was sent by another FBI personnel who is trying to remove his name from correspondence with a confidential source he was no longer handling. The DOJ maintained that the FBI personnel instructed Miller to edit out the agent’s name in pursuant to FBI policy and characterized the message as a “routine clerical matter” unrelated to the Proud Boys.

In response, the defense said the DOJ’s words could not be assumed true and required further investigation.

“Nordean does not deny that those facts could be true. However, the government’s summary presentation of facts in a brief—accompanied by no sworn declaration and without even an identified source for the information—cannot eliminate Nordean’s rule-based right to cross-examine the witness about an exchange that, on its face, does not appear benign,” Nordean’s attorney wrote in a filing on Sunday, adding that the defense should be able to cross-examine Agent Miller for this reason.

In an order issued at the beginning of the trial, Kelly agreed with Nordean that cross-examination of Agent Miller on the message containing the CHS report would be appropriate and found the messages, at least at face value, that show it is plausible that the agent may have provided a CHS report that was inaccurate or incomplete.

Nordean’s attorney cross-examined Miller on the CHS report. As of Monday, the judge has not found that the witness contradicted her own testimony on record.

Monitoring of Attorney-Client Communications

Another allegation, one that spurred heated exchanges in court, which Kelly ruled void, was the defendants’ claim that the DOJ monitored attorney-client communications and crafted a trial strategy around the said communications.

“An agent involved in the investigation states to Miller, ‘this one email [definitely] indicates that [Defendant Rehl and his attorney] want to go to trial,’” wrote Nordean in a filing on Sunday, citing an FBI email message. “The agent says that one of the lead prosecutors on this matter should not be alerted, ‘yet.’”

Attorneys acting for Jan. 6 defendants Dominic Pezzola and Nordean said in court filings over the weekend that the messages violate the defendants’ right to counsel, as the FBI allegedly monitored communications between a co-defendant, Zachary Rehl, and his attorney. The message thus violated the Sixth Amendment, the defense stated, which prohibits invasion of the right to counsel (Matter of Fusco v. Moses).

But the DOJ said that because Rehl and his attorney communicated over a monitored prison system, they had waived the right to attorney-client privileges.

“The government has not obtained any privileged communications between defendant Rehl and Moseley,” the government wrote in response to Roots’s contentions in a filing on Sunday. “Rehl and Moseley made a fully informed choice to communicate with one another over a monitored jail email system. In doing so, they waived any privilege.”

Kelly, during trial on Monday, ruled in favor of the government and affirmed its stance that because the messages were made in a prison communications system, the defense’s claim that the FBI’s monitoring constitutes a Sixth Amendment violation is void. Therefore, Kelly said, the defendants may not cross-examine Agent Miller on this point.

Destruction of Evidence

Furthermore, Kelly ruled on Monday that the defendants may not cross-examine Miller on a leaked message that appeared to direct Agent Miller to “destroy” 338 pieces of evidence.

Kelly affirmed the government’s stance that the defense had not shown sufficient evidence to connect the said evidence to the case.

Read more here…