Kid Berwyn
Kid Berwyn's Journal
Who's Enabling Putin's Enablers?
A: The Carlyle Group and Friends.
Who’s Enabling Putin’s Enablers?
BY SAM PIZZIGATI
CounterPunch, March 29, 2022
Where would Vladimir Putin be without the Russian oligarchy? Without Russia’s oligarchs, political leaders of the Western world have concluded, Putin would be tottering. Western leaders have made squeezing Russia’s richest a central piece of their strategy to end Putin’s Ukraine cross-border assault.
These same Western leaders, unfortunately, have failed to take seriously what ought to be an equally pressing question: Where would Russia’s oligarchs be without the West, without the Wall Streeters, wealth managers, and assorted other high-finance riff-raff “paid millions,” as Institute for Policy Studies analyst Chuck Collins puts it, “to help billionaires sequester trillions”?
Western leaders have essentially been ignoring this question almost ever since the old Soviet Union collapsed. And now we’re paying the price. Those Ukraine sanctions against Russia’s oligarchs? They come with a huge loophole. The Western world’s opaque web of tax havens and anonymous corporations is essentially rendering much of those sanctions ineffective.
Snippe…
The U.S. wealth defense industry, we need to remember, hasn’t just been helping Russian oligarchs hide their fortunes. America’s money-handlers have for years been helping them pile up ever grander fortunes. They’ve steered the illicit funds of Russian oligarchs into U.S. real estate, investment funds, and “even factories,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jake Bernstein, a senior reporter on the 2016 bombshell “Panama Papers” tax avoidance exposé.
The Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has used “a network of banks, law firms and advisers in multiple countries,” the New York Times just reported, to invest “billions in American hedge funds.” Along the way, he tapped the expertise and contacts of U.S. high-finance giants ranging from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to BlackRock and the Carlyle Group.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/29/whos-enabling-putins-enablers/
++ plus a trazillion.
Not only can we do it, we’ve done it before.
We will accomplish the impossible again.
Send them Borges.
The Library of Babelhttps://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Borges-The-Library-of-Babel.pdf
It’s clear poets truly are the unrecognized legislators of the multiverse.
BREXIT Boris
Did Russia Influence Brexit?Center for Strategic and International Studies, July 21, 2020
Contributor: Rachel Ellehuus
According to the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, the UK government does not know and—incredibly—did not try to find out.
This was the question at the heart of the long-awaited “Russia Report,” the 9-month delayed, 55-page assessment of Russia’s malign interference in UK politics. Produced by an independent committee of nine members of parliament from several political parties, including the ruling Conservatives, the report became highly controversial because Boris Johnson’s government tried to block its publication.
The report is damning. It says that the government, along with its intelligence and security services, “underestimated the response required to the Russian threat and are still playing catch up.” It asserts that “Russian influence in the UK is the new normal […] the UK is clearly a target for Russian disinformation.”
If Russia did have a role in tipping the 2016 Brexit referendum, the report asserts that it was not through direct involvement in the voting process, which, in the United Kingdom, is done entirely with paper and considered very hard to corrupt.
But the report leaves open the possibility that Moscow-based information operations, especially through social media and Russian state-funded broadcasters like Sputnik and RT—and backed up by targeted support to influential voices within UK politics—may well have been a significant factor.
Continues…
https://www.csis.org/blogs/brexit-bits-bobs-and-blogs/did-russia-influence-brexit
Disinformation is a dish best served weaponized.
Greg Palast: How Billionaires Picked Putin as "Russia's Pinochet"
How Billionaires Picked Putin as "Russia’s Pinochet"
By Greg Palast
BuzzFlash, March 16, 2022
Vladimir Putin did not arrive from outer space on an abalone shell.
Putin went from the virtually unknown Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg to Russia’s President and potentate by winning a weird competition organized by Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky who sought a "Russian Pinochet" to succeed Boris Yeltsin as President.
The competition, dubbed "Operation Successor," went so far as to send Russia’s "Larry King," Mikhail Leontyev, to interview General Pinochet for Russian TV while Pinochet was under indictment in Chile on murder charges. Russians were treated to the old dictator’s advice on choosing a leader who could imitate Pinochet’s "strong hand," a police state, while promoting a hyper-capitalist economy.
And Putin fit the Pinochet profile.
Continues…
https://www.gregpalast.com/how-billionaires-picked-putin-as-russias-pinochet/
"At least he was a Democrat." On DOA hit-and-run GOP AG victim.
Victor Nemec and Nick Nemec (on the right) in the photo.
Republican AG Told ‘at Least the Guy Was a Democrat’ After He Killed a Man With His Car
‘AT LEAST THE GUY WAS A DEMOCRAT’
The family of a man run over and killed by South Dakota’s Republican attorney general have expressed outrage at a vile text message sent after his death.
Tom Lawrence
The Daily Beast, Mar. 10, 2022
Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg ran down and killed a pedestrian on Sept. 12, 2020. This week, South Dakota Department of Public Safety Secretary Craig Price said Ravnsborg received a text message from an unnamed political consultant less than two days after the crash that commented on the political party of Joe Boever, the 55-year-old man that Ravnsborg, a first-term Republican, had killed.
“Well, at least the guy was a Democrat,” the message read.
SNIP…
Boever was a cousin of Nick Nemec, a Democrat and former state legislator who ran for the state Public Utilities Commission in 2012. Nemec, who has served as a family spokesman since the crash, said the comments about Boever were upsetting.
SNip…
He said Boever was a registered Democrat but was not active in politics.
“He was just a voter,” Nemec said.
Continues…
https://www.thedailybeast.com/south-dakota-attorney-general-jason-ravnsborg-got-vile-text-about-joe-boever-days-after-he-was-killed/
Amazingly unaware of himself, his words and his actions.
Not even worth a dime. Made entirely from pennies and nickels.
The Face of Money (2017)
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/after-vladimir-putin-in-bullets-exiled-ukrainian-artists-coin-donald-trump-1807887
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Member since: Mon May 6, 2019, 07:01 PMNumber of posts: 18,147