RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trudeau-government-moves-to-make-expanded-surveillance-powers-over-financial-transactions-permanent/

As all eyes were trained on the aggressive police sweep of the Ottawa trucker convoy this week, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s administration was quietly moving to implement a sweeping expansion of surveillance power at the federal level. 

The Trudeau government’s financial war against the truckers has been covered at length. But one underreported aspect of this broader assault on Canadian civil liberties is the effort to bring crowdfunding and payment service providers — two of the most prominent routes for financial transactions on the Internet — under the permanent control of a centralized government authority.

In a February 14 news conference, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said that the government was using the Emergencies Act to broaden “the scope of Canada’s anti-money-laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use.” That broadened power requires all forms of digital transactions, including cryptocurrencies, to be reported to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada. (I.e., “Fintrac”). “As of today, all crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with Fintrac, and they must report large and suspicious transactions to Fintrac,” Freeland said. She justified the move as a way to “mitigate the risk” of “illicit funds” and “increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by Fintrac and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement.” Trudeau, standing behind Freeland at the press conference, nodded his head in agreement.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-mercenary-power-play-emmanuel-macron-vladimir-putin-wagner-group-mali-11645211128?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

France said last week that it will withdraw military forces from Mali, where Paris has led a counterterrorism campaign for nearly a decade. This is a setback for the fight against Islamic extremism, but it is also a victory for a Russian power play in Africa.

“We cannot remain militarily engaged with de facto authorities whose strategy and hidden objectives we do not share,” French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday of the Malian government. He added that the pullout of some 2,400 French troops could take as long as six months as France considers where in the region to re-station forces fighting Islamic State and al Qaeda.

Mr. Macron acknowledged that Mali is free to choose its security partners but warned that Russian mercenaries with “predatory intentions” were arriving in the country. “The junta which is in power after two coups d’etats considers them to be the best partners they can find to protect their power, not to fight against terrorism,” he said.

Mr. Macron is referring to Russia’s guns-for-hire Wagner Group. U.S. Africa Command recently confirmed the presence of the Russians and American officials have suggested they would be paid $10 million a month, though Mali denies it. The mercenaries’ numbers and influence are likely to grow as France pulls out.

https://asiatimes.com/2022/02/why-russia-wont-invade-ukrainistan/

No one wants Ukrainistan, least of all Vladimir Putin.

Its GDP of $98 billion (in constant 2015 US dollars), down 43% since 1989, falls in between Ethiopia and Angola on the World Bank tables. Its population has shrunk to just 35 million according to the country’s National Academy of Science from 52 million in 1989, rather than the 48 million reported in the official census, because nearly half of the working-age population has left. Its corruption ranking stands at 112 out of 116 countries surveyed by Transparency International.

Ukraine has some gas reserves but Russia has roughly ten times more, far more than it can transport without massive investments in infrastructure. Otherwise, Ukraine has no natural resources of note apart from farmland – and Russia already is the world’s largest wheat exporter.

Seizing Ukraine, in short, would be vastly more trouble than it is worth to Russia. To compare Putin’s threats to Ukraine with Hitler’s march eastwards offends common sense: There is no “there” there in Ukraine, nothing Russia wants: no Lebensraum, no productive population, no oil fields or other assets to be acquired by conquest.

If Putin doesn’t want to conquer Ukraine, just what does he want?

He has three objectives.

The first is to thwart NATO expansion into Ukraine with the attendant threat of US missiles stationed on Russia’s border. As Jack Matlock, US envoy to Moscow 1987-1991, explained February 15 (“Is the Ukraine ‘crisis just another U.S. charade”), there is an analogy to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: The US put medium-range missiles in Turkey, so Russia retaliated by putting missiles in Cuba – and withdrew them in return for a US agreement to remove the missiles in Turkey.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18207/elite-capture

[Elite capture] is a crucial tool of [China’s] success. The idea is simple enough: by tempting another country’s elite with money, access and favors, you move them to see their interests and China’s interests as intertwined or even the same.

[Each] of the individuals we discuss would deny their role in helping China gain access to American capital markets, American military and surveillance technology, or American policy making. Each will say they are merely pursuing business opportunities that the Chinese market has offered them, as any goods capitalist should. They may argue the companies they run are truly international…

Ray Dalio, who wrote in his 2017 book, which bears the title Principles, of his “personal hero,” Wang Qishan. “Every time I speak with Wang,” Dalio swooned, “I feel like I get closer to cracking the unifying code that unlocks the laws of the universe.” Wang is the second most powerful man in the Chinese Communist Party and known as Xi’s enforcer. The Economist called him “the most feared man in China.” But not to Dalio. Readers learn, on the very next page of that book that at the same time Dalio was trying to start a new hedge fund in China.

Nor are they all as obsequious about it as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Almost everything [Apple] sells is manufactured in China, and the iPhone has more than 23 percent of the market for phones in China. Apple has repeatedly been accused of benefiting from the forced labor of Chinese Uyghurs, which the company denies.

As the muckraker and novelist Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

While researching how Americans having been getting rich by helping the Chinese Communist Party achieve its outspoken aim of replacing the US as the “world’s No.1 power,” I came across the phrase “elite capture” — their term to describe the actions of influential people in the US towards China.

“Elite capture” can refer to different things, but to the Chinese Communist Party, China’s intelligence apparatus, or those involved in quasi-private business ventures, it is a crucial tool of their success. The idea is simple enough: by tempting another country’s elite with money, access and favors, you move them to see their interests and China’s interests as intertwined or even the same.