Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
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PAGE 74 of 479
Trump just dealt Russia a devastating blow (Will Trump Land the Punch on Putin's nose? Who Knows?)
By Marc A. Thiessen | Feb 27, 2025
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/27/minerals-deal-ukrai
ne-russia/
The minerals deal negotiated between the United States and Ukraine is a devastating development for Russia. Indeed, it is in some ways more important than any peace deal President Donald Trump might negotiate to end the fighting. Once implemented, it will mean that Russia has effectively lost the war.
Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to conquer his neighbor. Instead, the United States has just gone into business with Ukraine — entering into, as the agreement puts it, “a durable partnership” with Kyiv to jointly develop Ukraine’s untapped minerals and other natural resources and pledging “a long-term financial commitment to the development of a stable and economically prosperous Ukraine.”
With this deal, the United States is now invested — literally, not figuratively — in what the deal calls “a free, sovereign and secure Ukraine.” That means the United States now has a massive financial incentive to help safeguard Ukraine’s independence. If Ukraine survives, the United States will stand to gain hundreds of billions of dollars; if Ukraine falls, we get nothing. After all, does anyone think that if Putin conquers Ukraine, he is going to repay the United States for the weapons we gave Ukraine to fight his troops? Of course not.
The deal creates “a Reconstruction Investment Fund” that will be jointly owned and managed by the two countries. Ukraine will contribute 50 percent of all revenue earned from the “future monetization” of all government-owned natural resource assets, including “minerals, hydrocarbons, oil, natural gas, and other extractable materials.” The fund will use this revenue to “invest in projects in Ukraine and attract investments to increase the development” of its natural resources, as well as “infrastructure, ports, and state-owned enterprises.”
Those who say Ukraine failed to win security guarantees in exchange for the minerals deal are missing the point: The minerals deal is a security guarantee. Trump has made clear that he is not going to send American troops to Ukraine. But with this deal, he is going to send something better: American workers, bulldozers and earthmovers.
“It’s a great deal for Ukraine, too, because they get us over there,” Trump explained during his Cabinet meeting on Wednesday. “We’re going to be working over there. We’ll be on the land. And you know, that way it’s this sort of automatic security, because nobody’s going to be messing around with our people when we’re there.”
With the minerals deal done, Trump must now negotiate a peace deal that secures his investment by making sure the war ends — and never resumes. Ukraine’s minerals only have value to America if they are extracted from Ukrainian soil, processed and sold. If Ukraine does not have security, that won’t happen. U.S. businesses won’t be able to mine for minerals under fire from Russian forces and will not make long-term investment in Ukraine if they fear the fighting will resume. And if they don’t invest, American taxpayers won’t get paid.
Trump certainly knows that as soon as there is a peace agreement, China, Iran and North Korea will help Russia rearm — and that in time, Russia will reconstitute its forces and rebuild its defense-industrial base in preparation for a new offensive.
To stop that from happening, the United States needs to help Ukraine establish deterrence. And that will require allowing Ukraine to purchase the American weapons it needs to discourage Russia from ever restarting the conflict. The minerals deal creates a mechanism to repay the United States for the weapons we have given Ukraine over the past three years, but not for Ukraine to buy weapons in the future to defend our joint investments.
Jack Keane, a retired Army general, and I laid out a plan in these pag
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Nope. Only Warren Buffett was ever my billionaire.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
They were all your billionaires first, retard.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
They all worked for the Democratic Party / The NeoCons / The Establishment.
AKA: All of the people you've been blowing every day for the last 8 years.
SPOILER ALERT: Most of them still do, even if they're pretending for the moment not to.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
'American backlash' coming at Trump over signature policy: poll
By Brad Reed | February 27, 2025 1:38PM ET
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-tariffs-2671235645/
With inflation showing signs of heating back up, American voters are taking a dimmer view of of president Donald Trump's signature economic policy.
We had 4 years of rampant inflation under Joe Biden* and RawStory didn't report on it one single fucking time.
Nobody wants to hear out of RawStory today. In fact, 99% of people have never even heard of RawStory before.
It's only been 4 weeks. You spent the last 4 years blaming Trump for Joe Biden*'s terrible economy. Nobody is taking anything you say seriously today.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Climate Change is a Democratic Party Hoax according to Trumptards. Therefore the Democrats are being fired:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
They all worked for the Democratic Party / The NeoCons / The Establishment.
AKA: All of the people you've been blowing every day for the last 8 years.
SPOILER ALERT: Most of them still do, even if they're pretending for the moment not to.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is being dismantled by Trump
NOAA has the unfortunate status of being the government's lead scientific agency for climate change. Trump says climate change is a hoax. Today NOAA is paying the price:
Daniel Swain @weatherwest.bsky.social
I am now hearing from multiple folks in the past two hours (including some who have personally been fired) that mass firings have now commenced within NOAA--including, yes, at the National Weather Service.
Feb 27, 2025 at 3:17 PM
https://bsky.app/profile/weatherwest.bsky.social/post/3lj6svxjtus27
The Hill confirms this:
The cuts, which are said to affect between 560 and 1,830 workers at the agency, were planned for at least a week, contingent upon the confirmation of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who oversees the agency. NOAA reported a permanent workforce of 11,758 in fiscal 2023, meaning the cuts could affect more than 10 percent of employees.
....Staffers from the Elon Musk-affiliated Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reportedly entered NOAA offices earlier this month, before Lutnick’s confirmation. Lutnick denied any plans to dismantle the agency as Commerce secretary, but Project 2025, the sweeping conservative governance blueprint, calls for privatizing and reassigning nearly all of its functions.
It was nice knowin' you, NOAA.
https://jabberwocking.com/noaa-is-being-dismantled/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Awesome. Let France worry about it.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:Chaos Is Bad for Business
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Awesome. Let France worry about it.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Imagine yourself as the CEO of a U.S. company considering a range of possible investments, whose likely profitability depends on future federal policy. So which investments will you make? A likely answer is, “None of them.”
Early this month Donald Trump announced that he was about to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Then he put them on pause for 30 days. So are they on again next week? Yesterday he insisted that they are. But will they really happen? Nobody knows.
Trump is also threatening a trade war with the European Union, which he says “was formed to screw the United States.” Will he follow through on his threat? Nobody knows.
The legislation currently providing the federal government with the money it needs to stay open will expire on March 14, and it’s by no means clear that Republicans have the votes to continue that funding. So will the U.S. government shut down? Nobody knows (although betting markets say that there’s a better than even chance that it will.)
The real possibility of a general shutdown aside, will DOGE’s efforts to fire large numbers of federal workers — half the staff of the Social Security Administration! — cripple essential government services? Nobody knows.
Most alarming of all, if it’s real: People within the administration appear to be floating the idea of restructuring U.S. debt via a “Mar-a-Lago Accord” that would force investors holding Treasury bills — short-term debt — to exchange them for 100-year bonds. This would effectively be a default on U.S. debt. Since the whole world financial system rests on the perceived safety of U.S. Treasuries, which are universally accepted as collateral for many transactions, such a move would threaten global economic chaos. But is the administration serious about this idea? Nobody knows.
You should know that none of this will show up in “hard” economic data any time soon. Next week we’ll be getting employment numbers for February, but these data actually reflect the “employer pay period that includes the 12th of the month” — that is, they will be data from early February, just a few weeks into Trump’s presidency, far too soon to show any effects of his policies. There are some indications that consumers are already pulling back, but we won’t see the effects of businesses cutting back on investments for at least a few months.
More at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/surprise-chaos-is-bad-for-business
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump has reduced US safeguards against corruption and white-collar crime
President Trump is scaling back enforcement efforts against white-collar crimes. Could that become an invitation to corruption and tax evasion?
By Henry Gass Staff | Feb. 28, 2025, 5:30 a.m. ET
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2025/0228/white-collar-crime-jus
tice-bondi
As the Trump administration signals its intention to crack down on certain crimes, it’s also signaling a major ambivalence toward others.
Criminal prosecutions of white-collar offenses have been declining for decades under both Republican and Democratic presidents. But amid sweeping policy and personnel changes at the Justice Department, that downward trend seems poised to accelerate under President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The new policies, along with the departure of senior career officials, signal a new – and possibly more relaxed – approach to public corruption, tax evasion, and other white-collar crimes. While incoming presidents are entitled to set new DOJ priorities, these new priorities appear more sweeping than usual. They also appear to be shifting resources away from types of investigations that have troubled Mr. Trump and his allies in the past.
How these changes will play out over the coming years is uncertain, but a softened stance can invite foul play, experts say.
The most serious white-collar crime cases are complex and “dependent on proactively policing,” says Henry Pontell, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine. “When investigation is impossible due to both a lack of resources and political will, they are simply relegated to the status of ‘nonissues.’”
Memos from the attorney general
Ms. Bondi’s first day in office played out much like the first days of the president who appointed her. On Feb. 5, the new attorney general issued over a dozen memos outlining new directives and priorities for the Justice Department.
In one memo, Ms. Bondi announced “shifting resources” in the agency’s national security division from foreign interference investigations to cross-border crimes. Specifically, she announced that she would disband a task force set up in 2017 to police foreign-run political influence campaigns. Investigations of Americans lobbying on behalf of foreign governments would also be limited to conduct resembling “traditional espionage.” Enforcement of a law regulating domestic lobbyists for foreign governments, meanwhile, would now be limited to conduct “similar to more traditional espionage.”
Prosecutors in the disbanded Foreign Influence Task Force should now focus on “the total elimination” of cartels and transnational criminal organizations, Ms. Bondi wrote. A separate unit, previously tasked with investigating U.S. companies that bribe foreign officials, must now prioritize investigations of cartels, she wrote in another memo.
Some of these laws have only been lightly enforced. That may not change. What is clear, however, is that the Justice Department is signaling a more relaxed approach to certain white-collar crimes.
The new directives “invite more foreign interference in American affairs,” says Aaron Zelinsky, a former federal prosecutor specializing in fraud, public corruption, and national security cases.
“Administrations are entitled to set enforcement priorities,” he adds. But these changes are “different [from] figuring out where to allocate manpower. They’re changes in nature rather than changes in kind.”
Public corruption in the news
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment on its new priorities. But the agency’s latest focus has been evident not just in the policy and resource decisions described in Ms. Bondi’s memos, but also in some of its actions.
A stated goal of the Trump administration is to end political “weaponization” of the justice system. This is the reason DOJ officials have given for seeking to drop a public corruption prosecution against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Mr. Adams is pleading not guilty to cha
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The Putinization of America
Trump’s deference to the Russian dictator has become full-blown imitation.
By Garry Kasparov | February 28, 2025, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/02/putinization
-america/681837/
We are barely a month into the second presidential term of Donald Trump and he has made his top priorities clear: the destruction of America’s government and influence and the preservation of Russia’s.
Unleashing Elon Musk and his DOGE cadres on the federal government, menacing Canada and European allies, and embracing Vladimir Putin’s wish list for Ukraine and beyond are not unrelated. These moves are all strategic elements of a plan that is familiar to any student of the rise and fall of democracies, especially the “fall” part.
The sequence is painfully familiar to me personally, because I marched in the streets as it played out in Russia at the start of the 21st century. With ruthless consistency, and the tacit approval of Western leaders, Putin and his oligarch supporters used his fair-ishly elected power to make sure that elections in Russia would never matter again.
Of course, American institutions and traditions are far stronger than Russia’s fragile post-Soviet democracy was when Putin took over from Boris Yeltsin, who had already done his share of damage before anointing the former KGB lieutenant colonel to be his successor in 1999. But those who dismissed my warnings that yes, it can happen here at the start of Trump’s first term, in 2017, got quieter after the insurrection on January 6, 2021, and are almost silent now.
Trump’s personal affinity for dictators was apparent early on. His praise for Putin and other elected leaders turned strongmen, such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, was tinged with undisguised envy. No feisty parliament to wrangle. The free press turned into a propaganda machine for the administration. The justice system unleashed against the opposition. Elections staged only for show. What’s not to like?
Putin and Russia always held a special place in Trump world, however. Russian intelligence and propaganda worked full-time to promote Trump once he won the Republican nomination to face Hillary Clinton in 2016. WikiLeaks, long in the service of Russian intelligence but still nurturing its old whistleblower image, fed hacked documents to a naively cooperative American media. The Mueller Report makes the degree of cooperation between various Russian assets and the Trump campaign clear—damningly so, despite years of MAGA crying “Russia hoax” because Special Counsel Robert Mueller decided not to prosecute.
Trump made Paul Manafort his campaign chair in May 2016, turning the Russia alarm bells into air-raid sirens for anyone paying attention. Manafort was a former fixer for Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovich, who attempted to thwart Ukrainians’ desire to join Europe only to be deposed by the Maidan Revolution of Dignity and forced to flee to Moscow in 2014.
Manafort’s recent expertise was mostly in money and reputation laundering. Adding him to the campaign when Trump’s oddly pro-Putin rhetoric (“strong leader,” “loves his country,” “you think our country is so innocent?”) was already drawing attention seemed a little too on the nose: Why double down? From affinity, the campaign tilted into deeply suspicious fealty toward the Kremlin. Manafort’s subsequent plea of guilty for conspiracy to defraud the United States, and Trump’s later pardon, only threw more wood on the raging collusion fire.
Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, during President Barack Obama’s second term. It annexed Crimea and entered eastern Ukraine, offering up feeble pretexts about protecting Russian speakers (whom it bombed indiscriminately), Nazis in Ukraine (also, naturally, the Jews running Ukraine), NATO expansion, and so-called Ukrainian separatists. Russia launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, in the second year of Joe Biden’s presidency, attempting to take Kyiv in what the Kremlin famously pla
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You still don't realize that you are making things worse for yourselves.
You've been warned.
Keep it up.
One of these days you're going to realize that I've been right about everything all along and that you've actively played a role in the demise of the Democratic Party.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Hey comrade, you didn't answer my question. So, comrade SIGNYM a question from me. What justification does Russia have for going into Ukraine? Both times comrade. First time in 2014 I think it was. It is obvious the Ukrainians don't want them there. I predict you will say elections were held and they want Russia there. Which would explain why they are killing Russians as quick as they can.
THUGR: Come on Signym. Answer the damn question.
My answer is:
First time, Russia didn't invade. I've made that point over and over.
No need to repost the rest. Your answer, starting with the words, "Russia didn't invade" is bullshit. And it was followed by nothing but more bullshit. Which is why for a long time now, you've been known as comrade here
T
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