As US citizens become more concerned with their immediate survival concerns of food, shelter, and healthcare as the GOP tanks the economy, they will become less concerned with world affairs and more likely to agree with Trump that we should abandon NATO. FDR had a difficult time getting assistance to Europe against Hitler, likely due to the Great Depression, people's preoccupation with providing for their families, and their reluctance to fight another world war.
I peronally think our top priority NOW is national security.
Biden is still president and has the capacity to mitigate the threat or even cut it off.
Once Trump is inaugurated, we are lost, and we will be reduced to guerrilla type actions because if Trump becomes the unitary executive due to an emergency, he will be a totalitarian dictator.
Some of us have had counterinsurgency training. and lived the experience of war. The model is China -- where the public is exposed to "1984" in their daily lives. Gulags for heretics. Use of mind altering drugs for political purposes -
Gloria, Yes some of it will be "concern with their immediate survival concerns of food, shelter, and healthcare as the GOP tanks the economy".
But some of it will also be willful distraction, using entertainment as a diversion, and tuning out. We have to inform our friends, families, and neighbors those behaviors are cowardice.
Those unaware of the past are condemned to repeat it.
I tend to doubt that Donald Trump ever personally attended a college lecture in his life as so much of his worldview is incongruent with established facts. The history of tariffs and of national conflicts such as Russia vs Ukraine seems irrelevant to him. While Ukraine girds its loins for the loss of Trump's US support, Americans likewise are girding our loins for a Trump tariff-triggered recession. Both fears are reasonable given history - especially in light of his history of coincident canceling of taxes for US oligarchs and monopolies.
Trump is so arrogant that he consistently tosses his friends under the proverbial bus to suit his immediate challenges. That goes for US allied nations; not just MAGA minions. None of my EU friends are happy to see the onset of MAGA nationalism, and most fear trade wars with the US to boot. Of course, the EU fears extend to which country Putin will invade next.
Brilliant article this morning ☕ Thom, and looking forward to an indepth discussion on the Thom Hartmann program. Blessings for Ukraine 🇺🇦🙏 and will reStack ASAP 💯👍
I liked today's article about the Budapest agreement. However, there was no mention of NATO. It ds my understanding (which could be incorrect) that the US provoked the conflict by pushing Ukraine to join NATO. This was perceived as the last straw by Putin since Nato was crearly boxing in Russia on its European borders. While Ukraine has the autonomy to decide whether or not to join Nato or the EU or any other group of its choosing, NATO is primarily a military not economic organization, so obviously a threat to Russia. And why the necessity to push for NATO membership since the Budapest agreement assured Ukraine would be secure and defended if necessary? It would appear that the US not only acted in bad faith in this regard but then subsequently (along with the UN perhaps) betrayed Ukraine.
"the US provoked the conflict by pushing Ukraine to join NATO" --"pushing"? How? "Nato was clearly boxing in Russia on its European borders"- Your "boxing in" is what most refer to as buffering against- --"the Budapest agreement assured Ukraine would be secure and defended"- --the above article just told us that was false- --" NATO is primarily a military not economic organization"- --Yes, a DEFENSIVE one.
Right. Before 1991 the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact threat was the reason for NATO. But new members must uphold democracy, including tolerating diversity. --New members must be making progress toward a market economy. --Their military forces must be under firm civilian control. --They must be good neighbors and respect sovereignty outside their borders.
After the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, many Eastern European countries joined: Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
I agree Daniel. Evidently the Putin troll farm has decided to invest money in substack.
There are quite a few on Reich's substack, because you can post for free, maybe the St Petersburg troll farm has found a way to circumvent pay walls or subscriptions
There was no treaty agreement vis-a-vis NATO. The development of Russia into a representative and somewhat democratic society was expected in the 1980s, and perverted in the 1990s. And then Putin shows up. Things changed. NO treaty held that Ukraine or any of the former Soviet satellites could not join NATO.
Putin invaded Crimea, and the US and Great Britain did NOT honor the Budapest Memorandum -- you read the info from Thom, right, David?
Putin makes no secret of his desire to reconstitute the influence once concentrated in the Soviet Union. Ukraine and the US did NOT "push" him into Ukraine. He used that as an excuse, with little more than "conversation" in the 1980s to fall back on.
The Budapest Memorandum is more than a conversation, and respect for Ukraine's sovereign borders was integral to it.
Correct Pat, Putin also invaded north Georgia, and Georgia is now led by a Putin Asset, But the blame for giving Putin motivation to invade Georgia and Ukraine can be laid in the lap of , sorry to say, Obama who sat back and did nothing. Question is why? I really want to know, but also know that I never will, always the three C's.
Many are now realizing Obama really was a largely do-nothing president. We can say though that he was eloquent and smart, and he was a steady beacon when our right wing nightmare was picking up steam, before that freight train hit us head on exactly one month ago.
When Obama was editor of the Harvard Law Review he was known to be conservative. He was acculturated in a white society. I would guess that he acquired the black culture as a community organizer in Chicago. He tread in both worlds.
A valid criticism is that in 8 years he did nothing to advance the black strive for equality. An excuse is that he couldn't because he was black.
And there we are stuck with the one drop social mythology, that all it takes is one drop of blood in your genetics.
If that is the case there are a lot of KKK types, militia's and racists that are black.
One example is those with the surname Mozingo or Bass. Mozingo's are all descended from an African Warrior who was an indentured servant.
Obama was certainly a talker. However, I think he was not a particularly good negotiator. His biggest accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, could have been much better if he hadn’t always tried to meet the opposition halfway before negotiations began. I think your wife may not have as exalted opinion of Martin Luther King’s actions, as opposed to his words. That seems to ignore the great actions he undertook for both racial and labor causes. I would also think Obama would NOT be upset, but rather flattered, by her name for him. I had my problems with his presidency, but I think few of us would have handled his situation any better and most of not nearly as well.
Obama was president. In 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and intervened in Ukraine, Obama and other Western leaders imposed sanctions that contributed to a Russian financial crisis. Russia later intervened in the Syrian Civil War and was accused of interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which the Obama administration condemned.
Thom says: The memorandum doesn’t have specific language about exactly how the US, UK, and Russia would protect Ukraine and its borders in the event of an attack, but it was backed up by at least the appearance of the moral force of the United Nations.
If I had a month, I could research all of them, but note that stuff like the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons precede Ukranian sovereignity. We have issued sanctions several times for violations.
We didn't enter into a reciprocal treaty with Ukriane until Biden was elected, in 2021.
56 years ago, during the Christmas holidays, Humans first voyaged beyond the near proximity of the earth to the moon, an alien body orbiting the earth. At that time, I had been working on the launch pads of Cape Canaveral for 2 years and had witnessed some of the early attempts, The Gemini program, to launch humans into space. I had also become a fan of Joseph Campbells book “The Hero with A Thousand Faces” and the concept of the hero’s journey, the hero risking his life, venturing into the unknown, to bring back knowledge vital to the survival of his society. As I vicariously witnessed the voyage of Apollo 8 on its voyage around the moon I thought about the concept of the hero’s journey and how that coincided with the event I was witnessing. I remember it was Christmas Eve as Apollo 8 orbited the moon, sending pictures looking back at the earth from 240,000 miles away, the astronauts alluding to what they saw: the fragile beauty of our planet as a small blue and white marbled sphere in the vast blackness of space, that there were no national boundaries visible, only one earth and that we were all passengers on spaceship earth. Over 50 million people tuned in and it is true that that image and subsequent images sent back on ensuing Apollo missions did inspire and embolden environmental movements spawning organizations such as Greenpeace and generated the political impetus for the EPA. Many subsequent Apollo astronauts, including Edgar Mitchell, viewing the earth from afar had what could be called a spiritual awakening, changing how they viewed their place and humanities place in the universe in not only a miraculous but a much humbler way. The information and images they brought back showed us how insignificantly tiny our place in the universe really is, how beautifully fragile the earth is, how gossamer thin is the atmosphere on which our survival depends. Was this in a way a fulfillment of the hero’s journey to bring back to earth information vital to the survival of humanity?
Subsequent NASA scientific missions in the ensuing 56 years have amplified and clarified the message of those first astronauts and images, that we do indeed live in a beautiful Eden alone in the inconceivable vastness of a universe composed of hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars, that we are not separate from but dependent for our survival on an interconnected ecosystem that supplies our sustenance, maintains a habitable climate, atmosphere that sustains our survival as a species. We damage our ecosystem or atmosphere at our own peril. This is what all our discoveries over the past century and science emphatically tells us in no uncertain terms, that we are at a existential decision point; do we change our destruction of earth’s ecosystems, stop pumping hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere short circuiting earth’s carbon and climate cycles?
The question in the year 2025 that we now encounter is have we forgotten or chosen to ignore the knowledge that our highest faculties and achievements as a species tells us is true? Are our highest and most unique mental abilities as a species to be overridden with the dark recesses of our reptilian brains?
The recent election we just witnessed ignored these vital questions, even the winning candidate declaring climate change as a hoax, and instead regressed to the levels of alpha male power displays and visited the very dark recesses of racism, tribalism, resentment and hatreds. This is indeed a dark place to start a new year, but I think back to that time 56 years ago at the beginning of another new year when I was totally blown away with the great human achievements and events I was witnessing. We can only hope we can come back from this regression and that the very human forces of enlightenment, compassion and human intelligence will once again guide us through. JACK 12/4/2024
...Yes... Also, at that same time, Star Trek was about triumphing over, not regressing deeper into, the dark side of humanity. But by the late seventies, Star Trek was superseded by Star WARS. That name says it all! Also, the whole notion of "exploring space" ignored how unimaginably far apart the galaxies are from each other, and assumed hubristically that "man" would invent something to overcome the speed of light. So many unhealthy myths contributed to where we now are!
And Cape Canaveral, where we used to watch with so much pride and optimism launches from in our classrooms, is another illustration of how far EVERYTHING has fallen... Who is dominant there now? Elon Musk! Who is in charge of that once progressive state now? Ron DeSantis!
Not really on-topic, but this occurred to me. Putin has the same approach to the truth as does trump. Both of them use truth and falsehood interchangeably as best serves their purpose in the moment. XI, on the other hand, appears to be less cavalier. As I (imperfectly) read him, he lies all the time.
Too bad we couldn't talk to Neville Chamberlain. I feel for that man. He is maligned at selling out Czechoslovakia & that is true. But~~~we MUST remember why he would do what he did. Chamberlain & Europe has just gone through "The Great War", "The War to end all wars". The butchery of trench warfare was etched in blood in the soil of Europe & in the minds of all the people who lived through it. Trying to avoid a repeat of that tragedy should not be held against him. Was he naive? Yes, I'm sure he was but he was also desperate to avoid the bloodshed of another all-encompassing war. He died a few months after his decision. He had cancer, which undoubtedly was affected by the stress of the decision. He is not a hero but he is much maligned for trying so keep the world from plunging into another global conflict. Of course it didn't work but we view his decision with 2020 hindsight just like we are doing with Obama's decision. Obama should have stood up to Putin but if it brought us to the brink of war with another great nuclear power what would the experts be saying now? We can't relive the past or change it but we should be able to control to some extent, the present. And to do that we need to take all the Putin apologists & call them out in the online forums. It's obvious that a large majority of our electorate does not obtain information from mainstream media so ads & posts have got to be made showing what kissing up to autocrats means to the average individual. Will we do that? I don't know???
Biden needs to be the most unlame duck in lame duck history if we are to avert the looming era of organized crime posing as legitimate governmental authority.
There's still time to keep the perverse fusion that is Vladonald Trumputin from becoming an officially irreversible bond.
President Biden, please don't leave office too quietly.
I honestly don't think that Biden even makes his decisions. Just listening to him, I am of the opinion that he isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, and am reminded that when he was in the senate, he was known as the Senator from Wall Street, perhaps because Delaware, was the runner up in the charter wars, and has such favorable charter laws, that over 600 corporations, especially financial ones, are registered in Delaware.
Our Democratic leadership has done us no good to date, by slopping at the same trough as Democrats, conspiring and acting to neutralize progressives, Left wing populists, they have ceded the ground to right wing populists.
So, do I have this right? I'm trying to piece together the difficult history of relations between the US and Russia since the end of WWII. With Russia's expansion into the USSR after the war, Europe, Canada and the US entered into the NATO pact to counter any USSR ideas of further expansion. Russia stationed nukes in Ukraine to make clear they intended to defend their territory. Then, in 1994, when the USSR dissolved, Ukraine agreed to send its nukes back to Russia to be decommissioned in exchange for security assurances from the West and from Russia. Notice that they were "security assurances," not "security guarantees," and provided no details about just how secure such assurances would be. The memorandum specified no details. Because of this, the US has been able to avoid actually coming to Ukraine's direct defense. It should be noted that there have never been any nuclear warheads stationed directly on Russia's border. The closest was Turkey, but this was removed in exchange for Russia removing nukes from Cuba in order to resolve the Cuban Missle Crisis. Nevertheless, even though the US had not made any promises not to expand NATO eastward into the countries liberated by the breakdown of the USSR, Yeltsin might have thought that was implied by the policy of "friendship and partnership" that was entered into between Yeltsin and Bush in 1992, and Yeltsin might, therefore, have felt that the expansion of NATO into Poland was a betrayal. I don't get how he could have been so naïve. But then, how could we have been so naïve as to think that the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 in which Ukraine gave up its nukes in exchange for "security guarantees" would have deterred Putin from trying to annex Ukraine? But, I always like to remind us progressives that if we were to be honest, we would have to take some responsibility for creating this situation ourselves. We created the conditions in Russia that had the end result of installing Putin into power. We responded to Russia's request for guidance from the US for engineering the transition from a socialist to a capitalist economy by sending a group of U. of Chicago economists who recommended a cold turkey transformation. This resulted in such a dramatic and tragic breakdown of the economic and financial support systems that the Russian people were literally starving and willing to surrender their stocks in the old socialist economy for a pittance to what then because the oligarchs now supporting Putin. Putin came in and re-established an order and rescued the country from anarchical take-over by the Russian Mafia, and that is why they are still grateful and loyal to him. Essentially, it was our screwed up foreign policy that caused the conditions that brought Putin to power, and now we are faced with having to rescue poor Ukraine from the monster we created.
Shea, as I see the problem, Progressivism has been folded into Marxism, or vice versa, and Marxists have a lingering affection for Russia
There are leftists who are as Manichean as rightists. For leftists it is capitalism, evil, bad, socialism good.For rightists isocialism is evil bad, capitalism good.
And there are "leaders" spokesmen on all sides who have built careers, income, acclaim, fame, awards being apostles of their ideology.
Gorbachev, following a diktat of the Bank for International Settlements, deconstructs the USSR, opening it up to exploitation by capitalists, and Yeltsin sold off the trusts to KGB connected who became oligarchs, and Putin became President
One can be a progressive without being a Marxist (Marx was actually a proto libertarian)
but ideologies are exclusivist.
Religions are Ideologies. and Religions are exclusivist
Thanks William for your response. I totally agree. Having been “educated” by the far Left, I too see these entrenched “camps” as irrelevant, and self-defeating. I have no time for the “overthrow capitalism” crowd. Capitalism is the union of free enterprise and industrialization. Do we really want to eliminate those? No, capitalism can be bridled so that its natural tendency to funnel wealth towards the top is countered and wealth circulates for the benefit of all. I am in the process (as soon as I can master Substack’s system) of posting to Substack a fairly long piece containing memories and conclusions regarding the US Communist Party which you might find interesting. At least I’d be interested in your response.
Yes interested, you can contact me by clicking on my name and choosing Message.
In the meantime I am weary and wary of ideologues. Ideologues are believers.
Believers are thoughtless, they have abandoned their responsibility and ability (if they ever had such) for critical thinking. The live in a zero sum world
Ideologies are secular as well as sectarian. Christianity and Islam are secular ideologies, but ideologies just the same, only they call themselves religions, as a form of market segmentation.
Once, one adopts the premises of an ideology, as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, they are no longer their own person, they have become part of the Borg (recalling Star trek)
OH, for the luvva everything that is f**king holy!!! I remember when Ukraine got rid of its nukes, but I was not as heavily into knowing the details back then! I did not realize we had a defense commitment, based on denuclearizing and based on RESPECTING UKRAINIAN SOVEREIGNTY and TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY.
SO, all this holier-than-thou BS about the US making promises to Gorby that Ukraine would remain forever neutral vis-a-vis Europe or NATO -- promises that were NEVER written down or made official forty years ago! -- is so much crap, in the light of the Budapest Memorandum, an agreement that WAS written down, AND was signed, by the US and Great Britain and Ukraine AND RUSSIA.
Obama failing to come to Ukraine's assistance over Crimea was just Russia's first shot into the territory to see how it would fly, how it would land, how it would work!
EVERY BIT OF AID that the West as given Ukraine since Putin invaded the eastern provinces has been JUST WHAT WE PROMISED, and NOT EVEN ALL THAT WE PROMISED. Our support of Ukraine is not only justified, but demanded, by this Memorandum.
WHY are we not hading the apologists for Putin, who carry on about NATO, this information? Why don't we tell them to go sit in a corner and STFU? And, for sure, by Thom's telling, the fight is dragging on, our support has been a bit short, and we see how much is now hanging in the balance. especially with The Orange Disaster looming over us.
Great comment Pat. I am more than curious who has actually been the hand on the brake in the Biden Administration, that would not provide Ukraine the equipment it needed to effectively fight back. The fear of a Putins nuke is specious, and an excuse for public consumption, events have proven it to be false, as we have slowly stepped over Putins red line. As I said above, I doubt that Putins nukes will actually work.
It is, as far as I know, Jake Sullivan, who has had his hand on the brakes, and I have to ask why? Given that he should know that Russia's nukes are essentially duds.
I doubt that ours and Russia's thermonuclear bombs are operational. The Key element are plutonium pits, bowling ball sized, hollow spheres of plutonium, they degrade over time, and were last manufactured, in America, in 1989.
There was an alarm, after Putin waved his nuclear phallus, because, as as a result of the end of the cold war, we have lost the technology and equipment to rebuild these plutonium pits, and those that are on missiles need to be replaced
The Lawrence Livermore Lab in California's central valley, has been tasked with reinventing the process.
Russia is in worse shape, because of funding and corruption within the officer corps.
The end of the cold war provided the Russian military leadership with a bonus. Russia has always been corrupt, but with no cold war, the generals and admirals had every motivation for siphoning off maintenance funds, especially for their missiles and nuclear arsenal, and they had no over riding motivation to maintain production of plutonium pits.
This was such a great start on nuclear disarmament. But leaders change and minds change, and now the Budapest Memorandum is just a piece of paper. If it were to mean anything beyond its signing date, it would have to have been reaffirmed every year, perhaps even with additional commitments from the other signatories to reduce their nuclear arsenals to zero also.
I read an opinion a while ago that presented a hypothesis for Iran's dedicated intention to develop nuclear weapons. It laid out the following.
Bush 43 took office, faced a bellicose N. Korea issuing threats of violent destruction, and an attack in 2001 by al Qaeda. Bush decided to target extremist terrorists, and launched wars in Afghanistan, then Iraq. America attacked Iraq in defiance of its and the UN weapons inspector's assurances it had no nuclear weapons. No military response of any sort befell N. Korea.
The article posited that Iran's leadership saw only one major difference between the Muslim countries attacked and N. Korea: nukes. With that, they determined the only thing that could protect them from a US attack was nuclear strike capability. They saw it as attack insurance, and the Ukrainian experience recounted by Thom above might support their assumption.
Our nation failed Ukraine. Biden should have pulled out all the stops and given them everything they needed to oust Russia from their country quickly, including offensive capability, Putin's nuclear threats be damned. Ultimately, the trickle of weapons the Biden administration delivered each time, always at the last minute after bickering with Republicans, weren't enough to give Ukraine the advantage they needed to bolster their courageous and supremely effective military. The signatories to this memorandum failed first. Our nation failed further by wasting its unipolar superpower to dust off Russian aggression with speed. I can't decide if hubris or cowardice is more at fault.
Thank you to all those who took the time and effort to respond to my comment.
Mike Monett: I would hardly call NATO's intervention in the breakup of the Yugoslav civil war "defensive!" (At best, it was defending the Muslim population, perhaps, IF it had received UN authorization.) On the other hand, it was not a unified NATO action. It could be described as some NATO members "going rogue," acting out on their own under US influence without an agreed consensus, and certainly not within their remit or based on NATO principles of operation.
Pat: From what I read in your reply, it appears to me that you did not read my words carefully.
Daniel Solomon: Thanks for providing all that supplementary information. I'm sure I'd enjoy further discussion with you, but this forum doesn't seem the appropriate place or format.
William Farrar, et al: I agree Obama's terms in office were disappointing, but I have to acknowledge that in part his hands were tied by Congress (a glaring example being the attempt for universal healthcare - such as what Veterans receive as a group, i.e. socialised health care provided by the state - which is apparently what the majority of the population desire, as are some other needs denied by a so-called representative democratic government).
Daniel Solomon: I can assure you that I'm no fan of the Russian state! I don't recognize any "good" players among the principal actors in this Ukraine issue (or even most others, such as the Israeli-State/Palestine conflict).
As regular citizens, I'm not sure we'll ever know what's really going on in the background that we just don't know about. This may sound cynical, but history provides evidence, as when documents are finally declassified we find out that the US and UK governments (no matter the party in power) have been lying through their back teeth to their citizens decades prior to declassification of documents (so many examples, but just take the story the UK government gave for using taxpayer money to build the UK's first nuclear reactor for electricity supply). In the case of Ukraine, it appears to me I'm faced with a State-Oligarch form of capitalism in competition and surrogate war with the Corporate-Oligarch form of capitalism in the USofA for power, influence and territory to control, with the People's Republic of China watching on for now. It's all rather pathetic if the stakes for humanity were not so high.
I can't think of one major harm that the so-called "rogue" nations have committed that the USof A or the UK have not also perpetrated, or vice versa. The hypocrisy is just astounding. The talk of "democracy" is a complete farce at this point; the level of corruption disqualifies the USoA and UK (with which I have a little familiarity) from even consideration as quasi-democracies. So, with the Budapest Memorandum, it is not as though the US has a history of respecting or honouring treaties/agreements, and no doubt this goes for other nations also, if the terms don't suit the entrenched interests of those with power.
Gloria Maloney asks about what to do now. As an individual living with this massive systemic problem, I can feel pretty powerless at times. All I think I can do is struggle with others for forms of governance that nurture well-being for ourselves as individuals, for each other collectively, and for the planetary environment so future generations have a chance to survive until the collective will brings about a radically different society. As I learned as a child, war is total madness! and the nations referred to above are, in my opinion, just acting like primary school scraps (fights) mostly on the boys' playground side, only mega-times more violent though just as immature.
There is also the Strategic Partnership Accord between uS and Ukraine... Had the US put boots on the gorund in 2012 (darn it Obama!!) when putin started playing with insurgents in the East Ukraine, this war would never have started. Compare - putin started threats and troop movement against Baltic States - during trump - trump ignored, UK and Germany sent token troops - putin stopped because of UK and Germany.
As US citizens become more concerned with their immediate survival concerns of food, shelter, and healthcare as the GOP tanks the economy, they will become less concerned with world affairs and more likely to agree with Trump that we should abandon NATO. FDR had a difficult time getting assistance to Europe against Hitler, likely due to the Great Depression, people's preoccupation with providing for their families, and their reluctance to fight another world war.
I peronally think our top priority NOW is national security.
Biden is still president and has the capacity to mitigate the threat or even cut it off.
Once Trump is inaugurated, we are lost, and we will be reduced to guerrilla type actions because if Trump becomes the unitary executive due to an emergency, he will be a totalitarian dictator.
Some of us have had counterinsurgency training. and lived the experience of war. The model is China -- where the public is exposed to "1984" in their daily lives. Gulags for heretics. Use of mind altering drugs for political purposes -
I agree Daniel, alas their are many surrender monkeys, who go into a dead faint when they hear nuclear, or war.
Gloria, Yes some of it will be "concern with their immediate survival concerns of food, shelter, and healthcare as the GOP tanks the economy".
But some of it will also be willful distraction, using entertainment as a diversion, and tuning out. We have to inform our friends, families, and neighbors those behaviors are cowardice.
Those unaware of the past are condemned to repeat it.
I tend to doubt that Donald Trump ever personally attended a college lecture in his life as so much of his worldview is incongruent with established facts. The history of tariffs and of national conflicts such as Russia vs Ukraine seems irrelevant to him. While Ukraine girds its loins for the loss of Trump's US support, Americans likewise are girding our loins for a Trump tariff-triggered recession. Both fears are reasonable given history - especially in light of his history of coincident canceling of taxes for US oligarchs and monopolies.
Trump is so arrogant that he consistently tosses his friends under the proverbial bus to suit his immediate challenges. That goes for US allied nations; not just MAGA minions. None of my EU friends are happy to see the onset of MAGA nationalism, and most fear trade wars with the US to boot. Of course, the EU fears extend to which country Putin will invade next.
Brilliant article this morning ☕ Thom, and looking forward to an indepth discussion on the Thom Hartmann program. Blessings for Ukraine 🇺🇦🙏 and will reStack ASAP 💯👍
I liked today's article about the Budapest agreement. However, there was no mention of NATO. It ds my understanding (which could be incorrect) that the US provoked the conflict by pushing Ukraine to join NATO. This was perceived as the last straw by Putin since Nato was crearly boxing in Russia on its European borders. While Ukraine has the autonomy to decide whether or not to join Nato or the EU or any other group of its choosing, NATO is primarily a military not economic organization, so obviously a threat to Russia. And why the necessity to push for NATO membership since the Budapest agreement assured Ukraine would be secure and defended if necessary? It would appear that the US not only acted in bad faith in this regard but then subsequently (along with the UN perhaps) betrayed Ukraine.
"the US provoked the conflict by pushing Ukraine to join NATO" --"pushing"? How? "Nato was clearly boxing in Russia on its European borders"- Your "boxing in" is what most refer to as buffering against- --"the Budapest agreement assured Ukraine would be secure and defended"- --the above article just told us that was false- --" NATO is primarily a military not economic organization"- --Yes, a DEFENSIVE one.
Right. Before 1991 the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact threat was the reason for NATO. But new members must uphold democracy, including tolerating diversity. --New members must be making progress toward a market economy. --Their military forces must be under firm civilian control. --They must be good neighbors and respect sovereignty outside their borders.
After the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, many Eastern European countries joined: Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
@David: Zounds like Russian disinformation!
I agree Daniel. Evidently the Putin troll farm has decided to invest money in substack.
There are quite a few on Reich's substack, because you can post for free, maybe the St Petersburg troll farm has found a way to circumvent pay walls or subscriptions
There was no treaty agreement vis-a-vis NATO. The development of Russia into a representative and somewhat democratic society was expected in the 1980s, and perverted in the 1990s. And then Putin shows up. Things changed. NO treaty held that Ukraine or any of the former Soviet satellites could not join NATO.
Putin invaded Crimea, and the US and Great Britain did NOT honor the Budapest Memorandum -- you read the info from Thom, right, David?
Putin makes no secret of his desire to reconstitute the influence once concentrated in the Soviet Union. Ukraine and the US did NOT "push" him into Ukraine. He used that as an excuse, with little more than "conversation" in the 1980s to fall back on.
The Budapest Memorandum is more than a conversation, and respect for Ukraine's sovereign borders was integral to it.
Correct Pat, Putin also invaded north Georgia, and Georgia is now led by a Putin Asset, But the blame for giving Putin motivation to invade Georgia and Ukraine can be laid in the lap of , sorry to say, Obama who sat back and did nothing. Question is why? I really want to know, but also know that I never will, always the three C's.
Cowardly, corrupt, complicit.
Many are now realizing Obama really was a largely do-nothing president. We can say though that he was eloquent and smart, and he was a steady beacon when our right wing nightmare was picking up steam, before that freight train hit us head on exactly one month ago.
When Obama was editor of the Harvard Law Review he was known to be conservative. He was acculturated in a white society. I would guess that he acquired the black culture as a community organizer in Chicago. He tread in both worlds.
A valid criticism is that in 8 years he did nothing to advance the black strive for equality. An excuse is that he couldn't because he was black.
And there we are stuck with the one drop social mythology, that all it takes is one drop of blood in your genetics.
If that is the case there are a lot of KKK types, militia's and racists that are black.
One example is those with the surname Mozingo or Bass. Mozingo's are all descended from an African Warrior who was an indentured servant.
https://www.amazon.com/Fiddler-Pantico-Run-African-Descendants/dp/1451627483 his descendants range from an Alabama Judge,Tony Mozingo, to proud members of the KKK and blackfamilies in North Carolina.
Agreed. My wife called him Martin Luther Obama. He talked a good talk but did little.
Obama was certainly a talker. However, I think he was not a particularly good negotiator. His biggest accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, could have been much better if he hadn’t always tried to meet the opposition halfway before negotiations began. I think your wife may not have as exalted opinion of Martin Luther King’s actions, as opposed to his words. That seems to ignore the great actions he undertook for both racial and labor causes. I would also think Obama would NOT be upset, but rather flattered, by her name for him. I had my problems with his presidency, but I think few of us would have handled his situation any better and most of not nearly as well.
It wasn’t meant as flattery but as recognition of his being all talk. MLK on the other hand backed up his words with action.
I had no idea that Thom's threads was populated by Putin assets.
Good point, David. But what should we do now? Some consistently profit from war, instigate it, and want to keep it going.
We recognized Ukraine in 1991, but didn't supply military aid until 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93United_States_relations#:~:text=After%201991,-U.S.%20President%20George&text=The%20United%20States%20enjoys%20cordially,with%20a%20flourishing%20market%20economy.
Obama was president. In 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and intervened in Ukraine, Obama and other Western leaders imposed sanctions that contributed to a Russian financial crisis. Russia later intervened in the Syrian Civil War and was accused of interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which the Obama administration condemned.
Thom says: The memorandum doesn’t have specific language about exactly how the US, UK, and Russia would protect Ukraine and its borders in the event of an attack, but it was backed up by at least the appearance of the moral force of the United Nations.
Attached are all Ukrainian treaties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Treaties_of_Ukraine
If I had a month, I could research all of them, but note that stuff like the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons precede Ukranian sovereignity. We have issued sanctions several times for violations.
We didn't enter into a reciprocal treaty with Ukriane until Biden was elected, in 2021.
Thoughts for the New Year 2025
56 years ago, during the Christmas holidays, Humans first voyaged beyond the near proximity of the earth to the moon, an alien body orbiting the earth. At that time, I had been working on the launch pads of Cape Canaveral for 2 years and had witnessed some of the early attempts, The Gemini program, to launch humans into space. I had also become a fan of Joseph Campbells book “The Hero with A Thousand Faces” and the concept of the hero’s journey, the hero risking his life, venturing into the unknown, to bring back knowledge vital to the survival of his society. As I vicariously witnessed the voyage of Apollo 8 on its voyage around the moon I thought about the concept of the hero’s journey and how that coincided with the event I was witnessing. I remember it was Christmas Eve as Apollo 8 orbited the moon, sending pictures looking back at the earth from 240,000 miles away, the astronauts alluding to what they saw: the fragile beauty of our planet as a small blue and white marbled sphere in the vast blackness of space, that there were no national boundaries visible, only one earth and that we were all passengers on spaceship earth. Over 50 million people tuned in and it is true that that image and subsequent images sent back on ensuing Apollo missions did inspire and embolden environmental movements spawning organizations such as Greenpeace and generated the political impetus for the EPA. Many subsequent Apollo astronauts, including Edgar Mitchell, viewing the earth from afar had what could be called a spiritual awakening, changing how they viewed their place and humanities place in the universe in not only a miraculous but a much humbler way. The information and images they brought back showed us how insignificantly tiny our place in the universe really is, how beautifully fragile the earth is, how gossamer thin is the atmosphere on which our survival depends. Was this in a way a fulfillment of the hero’s journey to bring back to earth information vital to the survival of humanity?
Subsequent NASA scientific missions in the ensuing 56 years have amplified and clarified the message of those first astronauts and images, that we do indeed live in a beautiful Eden alone in the inconceivable vastness of a universe composed of hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars, that we are not separate from but dependent for our survival on an interconnected ecosystem that supplies our sustenance, maintains a habitable climate, atmosphere that sustains our survival as a species. We damage our ecosystem or atmosphere at our own peril. This is what all our discoveries over the past century and science emphatically tells us in no uncertain terms, that we are at a existential decision point; do we change our destruction of earth’s ecosystems, stop pumping hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere short circuiting earth’s carbon and climate cycles?
The question in the year 2025 that we now encounter is have we forgotten or chosen to ignore the knowledge that our highest faculties and achievements as a species tells us is true? Are our highest and most unique mental abilities as a species to be overridden with the dark recesses of our reptilian brains?
The recent election we just witnessed ignored these vital questions, even the winning candidate declaring climate change as a hoax, and instead regressed to the levels of alpha male power displays and visited the very dark recesses of racism, tribalism, resentment and hatreds. This is indeed a dark place to start a new year, but I think back to that time 56 years ago at the beginning of another new year when I was totally blown away with the great human achievements and events I was witnessing. We can only hope we can come back from this regression and that the very human forces of enlightenment, compassion and human intelligence will once again guide us through. JACK 12/4/2024
...Yes... Also, at that same time, Star Trek was about triumphing over, not regressing deeper into, the dark side of humanity. But by the late seventies, Star Trek was superseded by Star WARS. That name says it all! Also, the whole notion of "exploring space" ignored how unimaginably far apart the galaxies are from each other, and assumed hubristically that "man" would invent something to overcome the speed of light. So many unhealthy myths contributed to where we now are!
And Cape Canaveral, where we used to watch with so much pride and optimism launches from in our classrooms, is another illustration of how far EVERYTHING has fallen... Who is dominant there now? Elon Musk! Who is in charge of that once progressive state now? Ron DeSantis!
Not really on-topic, but this occurred to me. Putin has the same approach to the truth as does trump. Both of them use truth and falsehood interchangeably as best serves their purpose in the moment. XI, on the other hand, appears to be less cavalier. As I (imperfectly) read him, he lies all the time.
Too bad we couldn't talk to Neville Chamberlain. I feel for that man. He is maligned at selling out Czechoslovakia & that is true. But~~~we MUST remember why he would do what he did. Chamberlain & Europe has just gone through "The Great War", "The War to end all wars". The butchery of trench warfare was etched in blood in the soil of Europe & in the minds of all the people who lived through it. Trying to avoid a repeat of that tragedy should not be held against him. Was he naive? Yes, I'm sure he was but he was also desperate to avoid the bloodshed of another all-encompassing war. He died a few months after his decision. He had cancer, which undoubtedly was affected by the stress of the decision. He is not a hero but he is much maligned for trying so keep the world from plunging into another global conflict. Of course it didn't work but we view his decision with 2020 hindsight just like we are doing with Obama's decision. Obama should have stood up to Putin but if it brought us to the brink of war with another great nuclear power what would the experts be saying now? We can't relive the past or change it but we should be able to control to some extent, the present. And to do that we need to take all the Putin apologists & call them out in the online forums. It's obvious that a large majority of our electorate does not obtain information from mainstream media so ads & posts have got to be made showing what kissing up to autocrats means to the average individual. Will we do that? I don't know???
Joe is still Commander in Chief until Jan20..
Biden needs to be the most unlame duck in lame duck history if we are to avert the looming era of organized crime posing as legitimate governmental authority.
There's still time to keep the perverse fusion that is Vladonald Trumputin from becoming an officially irreversible bond.
President Biden, please don't leave office too quietly.
I honestly don't think that Biden even makes his decisions. Just listening to him, I am of the opinion that he isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, and am reminded that when he was in the senate, he was known as the Senator from Wall Street, perhaps because Delaware, was the runner up in the charter wars, and has such favorable charter laws, that over 600 corporations, especially financial ones, are registered in Delaware.
Our Democratic leadership has done us no good to date, by slopping at the same trough as Democrats, conspiring and acting to neutralize progressives, Left wing populists, they have ceded the ground to right wing populists.
So, do I have this right? I'm trying to piece together the difficult history of relations between the US and Russia since the end of WWII. With Russia's expansion into the USSR after the war, Europe, Canada and the US entered into the NATO pact to counter any USSR ideas of further expansion. Russia stationed nukes in Ukraine to make clear they intended to defend their territory. Then, in 1994, when the USSR dissolved, Ukraine agreed to send its nukes back to Russia to be decommissioned in exchange for security assurances from the West and from Russia. Notice that they were "security assurances," not "security guarantees," and provided no details about just how secure such assurances would be. The memorandum specified no details. Because of this, the US has been able to avoid actually coming to Ukraine's direct defense. It should be noted that there have never been any nuclear warheads stationed directly on Russia's border. The closest was Turkey, but this was removed in exchange for Russia removing nukes from Cuba in order to resolve the Cuban Missle Crisis. Nevertheless, even though the US had not made any promises not to expand NATO eastward into the countries liberated by the breakdown of the USSR, Yeltsin might have thought that was implied by the policy of "friendship and partnership" that was entered into between Yeltsin and Bush in 1992, and Yeltsin might, therefore, have felt that the expansion of NATO into Poland was a betrayal. I don't get how he could have been so naïve. But then, how could we have been so naïve as to think that the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 in which Ukraine gave up its nukes in exchange for "security guarantees" would have deterred Putin from trying to annex Ukraine? But, I always like to remind us progressives that if we were to be honest, we would have to take some responsibility for creating this situation ourselves. We created the conditions in Russia that had the end result of installing Putin into power. We responded to Russia's request for guidance from the US for engineering the transition from a socialist to a capitalist economy by sending a group of U. of Chicago economists who recommended a cold turkey transformation. This resulted in such a dramatic and tragic breakdown of the economic and financial support systems that the Russian people were literally starving and willing to surrender their stocks in the old socialist economy for a pittance to what then because the oligarchs now supporting Putin. Putin came in and re-established an order and rescued the country from anarchical take-over by the Russian Mafia, and that is why they are still grateful and loyal to him. Essentially, it was our screwed up foreign policy that caused the conditions that brought Putin to power, and now we are faced with having to rescue poor Ukraine from the monster we created.
Shea, as I see the problem, Progressivism has been folded into Marxism, or vice versa, and Marxists have a lingering affection for Russia
There are leftists who are as Manichean as rightists. For leftists it is capitalism, evil, bad, socialism good.For rightists isocialism is evil bad, capitalism good.
And there are "leaders" spokesmen on all sides who have built careers, income, acclaim, fame, awards being apostles of their ideology.
Gorbachev, following a diktat of the Bank for International Settlements, deconstructs the USSR, opening it up to exploitation by capitalists, and Yeltsin sold off the trusts to KGB connected who became oligarchs, and Putin became President
One can be a progressive without being a Marxist (Marx was actually a proto libertarian)
but ideologies are exclusivist.
Religions are Ideologies. and Religions are exclusivist
Thanks William for your response. I totally agree. Having been “educated” by the far Left, I too see these entrenched “camps” as irrelevant, and self-defeating. I have no time for the “overthrow capitalism” crowd. Capitalism is the union of free enterprise and industrialization. Do we really want to eliminate those? No, capitalism can be bridled so that its natural tendency to funnel wealth towards the top is countered and wealth circulates for the benefit of all. I am in the process (as soon as I can master Substack’s system) of posting to Substack a fairly long piece containing memories and conclusions regarding the US Communist Party which you might find interesting. At least I’d be interested in your response.
Yes interested, you can contact me by clicking on my name and choosing Message.
In the meantime I am weary and wary of ideologues. Ideologues are believers.
Believers are thoughtless, they have abandoned their responsibility and ability (if they ever had such) for critical thinking. The live in a zero sum world
Ideologies are secular as well as sectarian. Christianity and Islam are secular ideologies, but ideologies just the same, only they call themselves religions, as a form of market segmentation.
Once, one adopts the premises of an ideology, as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, they are no longer their own person, they have become part of the Borg (recalling Star trek)
OH, for the luvva everything that is f**king holy!!! I remember when Ukraine got rid of its nukes, but I was not as heavily into knowing the details back then! I did not realize we had a defense commitment, based on denuclearizing and based on RESPECTING UKRAINIAN SOVEREIGNTY and TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY.
SO, all this holier-than-thou BS about the US making promises to Gorby that Ukraine would remain forever neutral vis-a-vis Europe or NATO -- promises that were NEVER written down or made official forty years ago! -- is so much crap, in the light of the Budapest Memorandum, an agreement that WAS written down, AND was signed, by the US and Great Britain and Ukraine AND RUSSIA.
Obama failing to come to Ukraine's assistance over Crimea was just Russia's first shot into the territory to see how it would fly, how it would land, how it would work!
EVERY BIT OF AID that the West as given Ukraine since Putin invaded the eastern provinces has been JUST WHAT WE PROMISED, and NOT EVEN ALL THAT WE PROMISED. Our support of Ukraine is not only justified, but demanded, by this Memorandum.
WHY are we not hading the apologists for Putin, who carry on about NATO, this information? Why don't we tell them to go sit in a corner and STFU? And, for sure, by Thom's telling, the fight is dragging on, our support has been a bit short, and we see how much is now hanging in the balance. especially with The Orange Disaster looming over us.
Gad!
Great comment Pat. I am more than curious who has actually been the hand on the brake in the Biden Administration, that would not provide Ukraine the equipment it needed to effectively fight back. The fear of a Putins nuke is specious, and an excuse for public consumption, events have proven it to be false, as we have slowly stepped over Putins red line. As I said above, I doubt that Putins nukes will actually work.
It is, as far as I know, Jake Sullivan, who has had his hand on the brakes, and I have to ask why? Given that he should know that Russia's nukes are essentially duds.
I doubt that ours and Russia's thermonuclear bombs are operational. The Key element are plutonium pits, bowling ball sized, hollow spheres of plutonium, they degrade over time, and were last manufactured, in America, in 1989.
There was an alarm, after Putin waved his nuclear phallus, because, as as a result of the end of the cold war, we have lost the technology and equipment to rebuild these plutonium pits, and those that are on missiles need to be replaced
The Lawrence Livermore Lab in California's central valley, has been tasked with reinventing the process.
Russia is in worse shape, because of funding and corruption within the officer corps.
The end of the cold war provided the Russian military leadership with a bonus. Russia has always been corrupt, but with no cold war, the generals and admirals had every motivation for siphoning off maintenance funds, especially for their missiles and nuclear arsenal, and they had no over riding motivation to maintain production of plutonium pits.
For those interested and doubt me try this pdf. https://armscontrolcenter.org/fact-sheet-u-s-plutonium-pit-production/
Also google plutonium pits.
This was such a great start on nuclear disarmament. But leaders change and minds change, and now the Budapest Memorandum is just a piece of paper. If it were to mean anything beyond its signing date, it would have to have been reaffirmed every year, perhaps even with additional commitments from the other signatories to reduce their nuclear arsenals to zero also.
Are none of the signing Countries , to be held accountable for this breach.
So much for the truth .
So much for the future.
I read an opinion a while ago that presented a hypothesis for Iran's dedicated intention to develop nuclear weapons. It laid out the following.
Bush 43 took office, faced a bellicose N. Korea issuing threats of violent destruction, and an attack in 2001 by al Qaeda. Bush decided to target extremist terrorists, and launched wars in Afghanistan, then Iraq. America attacked Iraq in defiance of its and the UN weapons inspector's assurances it had no nuclear weapons. No military response of any sort befell N. Korea.
The article posited that Iran's leadership saw only one major difference between the Muslim countries attacked and N. Korea: nukes. With that, they determined the only thing that could protect them from a US attack was nuclear strike capability. They saw it as attack insurance, and the Ukrainian experience recounted by Thom above might support their assumption.
Our nation failed Ukraine. Biden should have pulled out all the stops and given them everything they needed to oust Russia from their country quickly, including offensive capability, Putin's nuclear threats be damned. Ultimately, the trickle of weapons the Biden administration delivered each time, always at the last minute after bickering with Republicans, weren't enough to give Ukraine the advantage they needed to bolster their courageous and supremely effective military. The signatories to this memorandum failed first. Our nation failed further by wasting its unipolar superpower to dust off Russian aggression with speed. I can't decide if hubris or cowardice is more at fault.
Thank you to all those who took the time and effort to respond to my comment.
Mike Monett: I would hardly call NATO's intervention in the breakup of the Yugoslav civil war "defensive!" (At best, it was defending the Muslim population, perhaps, IF it had received UN authorization.) On the other hand, it was not a unified NATO action. It could be described as some NATO members "going rogue," acting out on their own under US influence without an agreed consensus, and certainly not within their remit or based on NATO principles of operation.
Pat: From what I read in your reply, it appears to me that you did not read my words carefully.
Daniel Solomon: Thanks for providing all that supplementary information. I'm sure I'd enjoy further discussion with you, but this forum doesn't seem the appropriate place or format.
William Farrar, et al: I agree Obama's terms in office were disappointing, but I have to acknowledge that in part his hands were tied by Congress (a glaring example being the attempt for universal healthcare - such as what Veterans receive as a group, i.e. socialised health care provided by the state - which is apparently what the majority of the population desire, as are some other needs denied by a so-called representative democratic government).
Daniel Solomon: I can assure you that I'm no fan of the Russian state! I don't recognize any "good" players among the principal actors in this Ukraine issue (or even most others, such as the Israeli-State/Palestine conflict).
As regular citizens, I'm not sure we'll ever know what's really going on in the background that we just don't know about. This may sound cynical, but history provides evidence, as when documents are finally declassified we find out that the US and UK governments (no matter the party in power) have been lying through their back teeth to their citizens decades prior to declassification of documents (so many examples, but just take the story the UK government gave for using taxpayer money to build the UK's first nuclear reactor for electricity supply). In the case of Ukraine, it appears to me I'm faced with a State-Oligarch form of capitalism in competition and surrogate war with the Corporate-Oligarch form of capitalism in the USofA for power, influence and territory to control, with the People's Republic of China watching on for now. It's all rather pathetic if the stakes for humanity were not so high.
I can't think of one major harm that the so-called "rogue" nations have committed that the USof A or the UK have not also perpetrated, or vice versa. The hypocrisy is just astounding. The talk of "democracy" is a complete farce at this point; the level of corruption disqualifies the USoA and UK (with which I have a little familiarity) from even consideration as quasi-democracies. So, with the Budapest Memorandum, it is not as though the US has a history of respecting or honouring treaties/agreements, and no doubt this goes for other nations also, if the terms don't suit the entrenched interests of those with power.
Gloria Maloney asks about what to do now. As an individual living with this massive systemic problem, I can feel pretty powerless at times. All I think I can do is struggle with others for forms of governance that nurture well-being for ourselves as individuals, for each other collectively, and for the planetary environment so future generations have a chance to survive until the collective will brings about a radically different society. As I learned as a child, war is total madness! and the nations referred to above are, in my opinion, just acting like primary school scraps (fights) mostly on the boys' playground side, only mega-times more violent though just as immature.
There is also the Strategic Partnership Accord between uS and Ukraine... Had the US put boots on the gorund in 2012 (darn it Obama!!) when putin started playing with insurgents in the East Ukraine, this war would never have started. Compare - putin started threats and troop movement against Baltic States - during trump - trump ignored, UK and Germany sent token troops - putin stopped because of UK and Germany.