Euro

Leaked RAND Report Suggests U.S. Is Crashing Europe’s Economy On Purpose

/ went2thebridge / 1 Comment
“Protesters attend a demonstration against rising energy prices on Parliament Square in London on Feb. 12.” Photo: CHRIS J. RATCLIFFE/GETTY IMAGES”  Source: Foreign Policy*

If you’re like me you may have wondered if the U.S./NATO knew what they were setting in motion when they slapped sanctions on Russia and insisted their allies follow suit or else. Within six months Europe’s fuel costs have skyrocketed, factories have shut down for lack of fuel, and citizens are rioting over their energy bills. The Euro is tanking, and the ruble is stronger than ever. With Nordstream 1 & 2 pipelines carrying gas from Russia to Germany fully shut down, a very cold winter is looming.

Was this crisis in Europe unexpected, or planned? 

You gotta love whistleblowers. One day they’re pursuing a lucrative career in the service of empire, and the next they’ve had an attack of conscience and leaked information of historic importance. They often pay dearly for this. Let’s hope the mole at the RAND corporation, or one of its many clients, escapes with his or her freedom and life intact.

Here in a series of screenshots is a leaked report published by Swedish news source Nya Dagbladet yesterday (you can read their article on the leaked info here):

Copyright page looks authentic but could of course be a forgery. How to evaluate its authenticity?

RAND denied authorship while throwing around a lot of neocon narrative management tropes like “truth decay” and “firehose of falsehood.” Hmm…

One approach to deciding who is deploying the firehose might be to read some authenticated RAND reports and see if this one is consistent in terms of content, strategy, and tone. RAND is best known for being the architect of the first Cold War, and by its own reports in 2020 received more than 75% of its funding from the federal government.

So, for comparison purposes, here is the infamous and fully authenticated RAND study from 2019 planning for regime change in Russia. 

“Overextending And Unbalancing Russia: Assessing the Impact of Cost-imposing Options” is widely viewed as the blueprint for using Ukraine as a proxy for NATO to menace Russia. 

An excerpt:

Russia remains a powerful country that still manages to be a U.S. peer competitor in a few key domains. Recognizing that some level of competition with Russia is inevitable, RAND researchers conducted a qualitative assessment of “cost-imposing options” that could unbalance and overextend Russia. Such cost-imposing options could place new burdens on Russia, ideally heavier burdens than would be imposed on the United States for pursuing those options.

And here is RAND’s 2016 report, “War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable.” An excerpt:

the United States can prepare for a long and severe war by reducing its vulnerability to Chinese A2AD forces and developing plans to ensure that economic and international consequences would work to its advantage

Both these reports are well worth reading in their entirety especially if, as a U.S. taxpayer, you paid for them. As for the leaked report, the cynical manipulation of the German Green Party to support the war on Russia via Ukraine is foretold (or, if you doubt the report’s veracity, reflected).

Which brings us to the most suspicious aspect of the leaked report on tanking Germany’s economy: from the Executive Summary’s opening paragraphs, it appears to have been prepared for the Democratic Party among other clients (see title page above listing “DNC”). Since the other recipients are governmental agencies, may we assume that this analysis and report was funded by U.S. taxpayers on behalf of Democrats? 

After citing fiscal policies under both the previous administration and the current one (so, both R and D), the report warns of a banking crisis in markets flooded by quantitative easing i.e. printing more dollars. Then, the report goes on to reveal a partisan bias which is unusual for RAND reports I have previously read.

Excerpt:

The continuing deterioration of the economic situation is highly likely to lead to a loss in the position of the Democratic Party in Congress and the Senate[sic] in the forthcoming elections to be held in November 2022. The impeachment of the President cannot be ruled out under these circumstances, which must be avoided at all costs.

So, keeping one of the two corporate parties in power is the driving force behind U.S. belligerence and trouble making in Europe? 

Cue the “dark Brandon” memes.

*Foreign Policy is a major source of narratives supporting U.S./UK/NATO ambitions. Since we know that some things are best understood in retrospect, here are a couple of current headlines from FP to ponder:

Proxy War In Ukraine Has Unintended Consequences Corporate Press Are Hiding

/ went2thebridge / 2 Comments

Censored mural by Peter Seaton in Melbourne was immediately attacked by Ukranian officials in Australia for its message of shared humanity and the longing for peace. It used to depict Russian and Ukranian soldiers hugging, but has now been painted over.

I’ve written previously about the intense narrative control that is a key feature of the U.S./NATO proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. As the military becomes an increasingly undesirable option for young people in the U.S. (currently only 9% would consider enlisting, according to Pentagon researchers) the pressure is on to make sure Ukrainians are the ones fighting and dying in the imperial war to topple Russia.

This necessitates:

Lying about the progress of the war and repeatedly claiming Ukraine is “winning” when it is doing no such thing (former U.N. military expert Jacques Baud’s current analysis of this is worth a read).

Promoting false claims about the Russian military shelling its own POW camp or the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

Current headlines on Cold War propaganda outlet Radio Free Europe‘s website

Mischaracterizing the combatants, as Yale professor Timothy Snyder did recently in Foreign Affairs: “Russia, an aging tyranny, seeks to destroy Ukraine, a defiant democracy.” (Actually, Ukraine is resolutely undemocratic at this point in its history and maintains a “hit list” of everyone, including international rock stars, who doesn’t support the official narrative — while Putin’s approval rating among Russians last month was over 80%.)

Coordinating messaging in corporate media internationally so that specific key words e.g. “unprovoked” are repeated ad nauseum without examination of copious evidence to the contrary.

Source: TeleSUR “In Prague, 70,000 people took to the streets on Saturday [Sep 3] to protest against the sharp rise in energy prices and to demand a neutral position on the war in Ukraine. Photo: Twitter @oriolsabata”

Suppressing narratives in the alternative press and on social media (and, apparently, the sides of buildings) by canceling accounts, deleting archives, unleashing trolls, and shadow banning./

Blaming Russia for the fact Europe is reeling from the effects of economic sanctions that cut off much of Europe’s fuel supply — for home heating, among other uses.

At a time when Russian pipeline gas supplies have been in free fall, the EU had no choice but to ramp up imports from the US at all costs, generating unprecedented profits for US gas suppliers, Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, told the Global Times on Saturday.

Pushing the false claim that the Russian economy is in trouble after six months of war in Ukraine. In fact, the ruble has never been stronger while the nations of the world are abandoning the petrodollar like rats fleeing a sinking ship. And as of this week the € is trading below the US$, a two-decade low for that currency.

What’s a U.S. taxpayer to do? 

Find some sources of reliable information (you can use many of the links above for that purpose), grow your own food, and diversify your heating fuels. Note that false narratives enrich weapons manufacturers, but will do little to keep you warm and fed this winter.