I've stayed away from the discussions on Ukraine here at the Cube because I know that passions run deep and on a personal level as well. During all of this, there have been accusations and evidence of Ukrainian government corruption. These accusations and the evidence go back to when 0bama was president. His VP, the current steward in the White House, even got an official fired in order to stop an investigation into his son's business dealings. We haven't forgotten that, have we?
The reason I've been quiet is because every time I have brought these issues up in conversations, I've been shouted down and accused of supporting Vladimir Putin. This is not the case, I know who and what Putin is and I believe his invasion to be wrong and a flagrant violation of international law. More importantly, it has caused a ton of human suffering and the deaths of many innocent people. But I've noticed that there have been no peace delegations sent and no attempt by the US and it's allies to broker some kind of a deal. That's highly unusual, don't you think?
As for the story of FTX and money laundering. I don't know if it's true, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were. The easiest way to launder money is through foreign investments. Once that money changes hands, it's difficult to track and almost impossible to audit. The party that has no issue killing the unborn, would have no scruples in this area. Oh, and I'm sure that many in the GOP have and do engage in these activities as well. It's become apparent to me that the only public a public servant serves is him or herself. That's why they get wealthy on a public servant's salary.
I support Ukraine in their struggle against Russian imperialism, but at this time, I'm more concerned with my country and it's future.
My penny and a half -- most sane people realize that Putin is an insane kleptokrat maniac. Also that Ukraine deserves its borders back to 1992 drawing.
Unfortunately it is impossible to know who is on the take and skimming the "aid". If it were that easy, I'd bet Putin's boys would be back home and scheming who will replace him, (because the aid would be more useful targeted to those who aren't on the take). Well, they're probably planning his replacement anyway.
I know I wish the carnage to end and the people of Ukraine the opportunity to return to peaceful, productive lives.
I would wait and see on this scandal. I'm not saying it can't happen, but this info and how it quickly spreads has a certain odor of Russian influence operation.
It's true that Ukraine has been plagued by corruption in its post-Soviet years. That was exactly why the 2014 Maidan revolution happened, and that was also why Putin was so hell-bent on stopping the Maidan. He had his tentacles sunk deep in that corruption, and he was using it to control Ukraine. That's why he tried to discredit the revolution as a CIA-orchestrated coup. And that's why he created the two cancerous tumors on the body of Ukraine, named Donetsk and Luhansk.
Unfortunately, the Obama-Biden administration filled Putin's place at the trough of corruption and started playing their own schemes. That only helped the Kremlin to use it as proof of US-controlled Ukraine.
Zelensky's government was only elected in 2019, and it's making an honest effort to fight the corruption. It seems that the Democrats are not helping. If the FTX scandal is true, it only means that the Dems have used Ukraine's desperate situation to their advantage. But then again, this may yet be much ado about nothing, inflamed by the Kremlin propaganda to extinguish American support for Ukraine.
To Dr. Chicago's point, peace negotiations is something that Putin is desperately seeking now that he is losing, and his propaganda is honed to promote just that, at this particular moment. At the same time, peace negotiations would be a defeat to Ukraine, who has just begun to kick the Russian troops out of its territory. To stop now would mean to concede losing territory and give Putin a necessary pause to regain strength, rearm, and attack again, with a greater force in a year or two. The only right way to win this war is to achieve a decisive victory over Russia, possibly with the change of its ruling regime. There are a lot of Russian expatriates in Europe now who are now designing plans for a new Russian government under a different leadership.
To anyone who is still unsure that Russia needs to change its regime, consider that your most paranoid suspicions about the damage the Kremlin's "active measures" have done and continue to do to America's economy, to America's mind, sanity, and the overall well-being, don't tell even one half of the story. No matter how bad you think Russia's involvement in all man-made disasters around the world is, it's really much worse.
To borrow Cato's words, Carthago delenda est. Furthermore, I consider that the Kremlin must be destroyed.
I used to have respect for the Gateway Pundit, but today it has turned into a laundromat for Putin's propaganda. I'm not exaggerating. Anything published under the name of Larry Johnson, for example, is barely disguised bullet points handed down to him by his Russian handlers.
It's quite possible that FTX has nothing to do with the military aid Ukraine has received in 2022. To wit, none of the aid has been sent as cash. It was all in equipment, ammo, medical supplies, and such. So any info implying that military aid has been stolen and transferred to other accounts is suspect of bias at best.
Of the notorious 40 billion "package to Ukraine" only about 7 billion was spent on the war effort, and even then most of that money went to US-based manufacturers and suppliers, and most of those products haven't even left the factories yet. The rest went to other countries, to compensate for their contributions to the war effort, as well as to Africa to boost their food programs in case Ukrainian grain fails to reach them this year - and the like.
Given the scope of the program, it's quite possible that some of that money has gone to the Democrats' pet projects, election funding schemes, etc. But it's not Ukraine's fault that the Dems won't "let a good crisis go to waste." If it's not Ukraine, they'll find another crisis to attach their suckers to, just like a pig will always find mud to wallow in.
The intellectuals perceive that we are going to change the economic and political regime. In recent years, many of them have become supporters of power, whether financial or political, and have abandoned their critical function.
American State employee’s have abandoned the critical function of their position to pursue something not based in truth. This is the critical rejection of America’s Christian foundation, into a morass of excusing the corruption of human nature as meritorious. Saul Alinsky’s Rules destroy those striving to rise above their base human nature as basis of the function the position held.
Nina Jankowicz was presented as a young researcher, specialist in “Russian disinformation”. In reality, she was an employee of Madeleine Albright’s National Democratic Institute, responsible for defending the interests of the Bidens in Ukraine.
This charming lady worked in the team of the candidate Volodymyr Zelensky, the current president of Ukraine [3] . She was previously, in the midst of the civil war, in the service of Pavlo Klimkin, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of President Petro Poroshenko. She then opposed the Minsk agreements, although they had been endorsed by the United Nations Security Council. During this long stay in Ukraine, she developed a theory on Russian disinformation to which she devoted a book: “How to lose the information war: Russia, fake news and the future of the conflict” ( How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict). Unaware of the reality of the civil war and its 20,000 dead, she exposed all the current clichés about the bad Russians who wanted to extend their empire to Donbass by lying to the Europeans.
During this period, Nina Jankowicz used the Ukrainian association StopFake, subsidized by the National Endowment for Democracy (in other words by the CIA), the British government and George Soros, to make believe that the Maidan coup was a popular revolution. [4] .
Preserving personal power as though the same as national interest via their position in State employment is the Alinsky Rule of government service defining the Deep State Swamp. Truth becomes heresy through such machinations.
Making others suffer through the tyrannical dissolution of truth is the ultimate goal in preserving the Alinskyites’s position of power. If they can defend US labs in Ukraine to cook up a more deadly anthrax, under humanitarian auspices, without being laughed off their moral high ground, everyone suffers. Simply denying Hunter Biden’s laptop’s existence as Russian Disinformation can work if the liar can keep a poker face when lying. Alinsky Rules keeps the onus on the one resisting the lie to preserve his moral character before the judgement of society.
I am ashamed of what has been done in the guise of American interest since the Berlin Wall came down. It is no different than the destruction of the US happening before our eyes. Example: If we don’t know the actual function of a Secretary of Transportation, accepting ‘whatever’ because of the authority associated with the position, as the normal function of the Commerce Clause, then interstate supply chain break down is inevitable.
Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression is defense of fixed truth. It’s their lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness to be secured by their elected government at stake. That’s not disinformation, that’s the Truth.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) scrubbed FTX from its partners list.
Here's a screenshot from The Wayback Machine of the partners list before the scandal broke:
I did some research this morning. It appears that...
in March, 2022 (soon after the war began on 2/24/2022), Ukrainian government decided to set up a way to collect donations in cryptocurrency.
FTX offered its services, and the cooperation began.
The donations were coming from private individuals - NOT TAXPAYER MONEY
FTX collapsed due to bad business practices unrelated to this activity
About $200 million had been collected for Ukraine and then part of that money vanished.
As a result...
it was Ukraine that was robbed of privately donated money.
Private donors had been bamboozled.
Then, it appears, someone with an agenda decided to embellish this scandal with guilt by association. Unproven details were added...
that the money coming from the US Government being transferred to FTX in a corrupt scheme
that the same money was then donated to the Democrats.
(the latter was added because some Republicans had been found to be perceptive to such influence operations)
so that further to split Americans on the issue of Ukraine and stall any aid, be it private or public.
Try it yourself.
Suppose you hate your neighbor named Oleg. Oleg collects donations through PayPal. PayPal gets implicated in some unrelated financial scheme and Oleg loses his account. You then tell your other neighbors that Oleg was part of a scheme whereby PayPal gave him cash back on credit card purchases, which Oleg invested back in PayPal, which spent that money on political donations. Technically it's true, because PayPal does use cashbacks, and PayPal CEO and other employees do make political donations (some to the GOP, but mostly to the Dems, I would guess).
If your neighbors are Democrats, you say that Oleg was involved in a corrupt PayPal scheme to fund Trump and the Republicans - and, as proof, show them news stories that PayPal was embroiled in a financial scandal.
If your neighbors are Republicans, you say that Oleg was involved in a corrupt PayPal scheme to fund the Democrats - and, as proof, show them news stories that PayPal was embroiled in a financial scandal.
=========
For further research, take all the news stories about the FTX collapse and separate them into two groups. You will find that the allegations about "Ukraine, FTX and Democrats" only appear in fringe and radical sources, or on the sites of which you have never heard before. All the others will write about how FTX collapsed due to unsound practices without making any unproven allegations.
Then think about how it's even possible to convert foreign aid into cryptocurrency and see it disappear.
Then think of who would benefit from you believing in all the above.
I just spoke with some national security experts I know. And I'm now 100% sure this story is just as fake as the Ukrainian biolabs, or the Ukrainian dirty bomb, or the Ukrainian Nazis, and many other Kremlin-generated fake stories. Putin spends $6 billion a year on propaganda in foreign countries, and we're now seeing it at work.
Notice that the FTX allegation is being spread by the same people who in the past told us about the Ukrainian biolabs, or the Ukrainian dirty bomb, or the Ukrainian Nazis. That should tell you something.
The story is still emerging about FTX and WEF and the Dems, but Ukraine has been stitched to it with a cobbler's hook.
Ukraine never invested money in FTX, that's a lie. It only used FTX services to convert crypto donations into fiat, to buy supplies for the soldiers. FTX was the largest such provider in the world, so it's only natural Ukraine used them.
The allegation is based on this logic: if you buy things at Wal-Mart, you are a baby murderer because Wal-Mart gave money to Planned Parenthood.
The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology. ~ Ayn Rand
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