warning signs and words were ignored;

Americans love the phrase red line. They impose certain requirements on their opponents and if they are not fulfilled, Washington strikes. Recall Syria. It was something like that: one day President Obama said the United States would launch missiles if the Syrian rebels used gas and on the following day they did use gas, most likely to please the Americans and provide them with the pretext to attack. The leaders on the Potomac drew the red line and, seeing it crossed, reacted as they had promised. Moscow, too, had no other choice as to set down its own red line which was: Ukraine must not become a member-state of NATO or else. When Ukraine’s NATO membership did not cease to be constantly on the table, and when – to top it all – it began to be discussed whether Kiev should not be allowed to have its own nukes, Russia struck. Such are the rules of the game. If you lay down your red lines and then sit idly by watching the red line being crossed again and again, you become a political nonentity that nobody reckons with. By the way, the same is true of individuals, not only states. Adhering to American political language in which all US interventions are termed peaceful operations or operations aimed at preventing a humanitarian disaster, so did Russia label its intervention in Ukraine as a military operation aimed at the demilitarization and denazification of the country. If you do not see the parallelism, then you are unfairly prejudiced against Moscow.........read more........

 

 as you read and consider this presentation make sure you watch the fat banker video. a short one but a 'long' one at the same time;

A new report from the Bank of International Settlements estimates that up to 90% of national central banks are at least in the planning stages for launching a central bank digital currency (CBDC):

Nine out of 10 central banks are exploring central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and more than half are now developing them or running concrete experiments. In particular, work on retail CBDCs has moved to more advanced stages

This echoes a March report from the IMF, which claimed over one hundred nations are at least in the planning stages of releasing their own CBDC.

You can read the entire IMF report here, or a summary published by Bloomberg here. ........read and watch more......

 caitlin shows you how the empire could have prevented this ukraine situation from ever happening. and not only didn't but ramped up the level of aggravations;

As we hydroplane toward the brink of nuclear armageddon while Bono and the Edge play U2 songs in Kyiv, it’s probably worth taking a moment to highlight the fact that this entire war could have been avoided if the US had simply pledged military protection for Zelensky against the far right extremists who were threatening to lynch him if he enacted the peacemaking policies he was elected to enact.

To be clear, what we are indulging in here is entirely an act of fantasy. In imagining what would have happened if the US had pledged to protect the Ukrainian government from an undemocratic violent overthrow at the hands of fascists instead of waging a horrific proxy war, we are imagining a world in which the US government acts in the highest interest of all instead of working continuously to dominate the planet no matter how much madness and cruelty it needs to inflict upon humanity. A world in which the US hadn’t been taking steps toward the orchestration of this proxy war for many years.

With that out of the way, it’s just a simple fact that for a fraction of the military firepower the US is pouring into Ukraine right now, it could have prevented the entire war by simply protecting Ukrainian democracy from the undemocratic impulses of the worst people in that country...........read and watch more.........