Author: M Barbu

How American Duplicity on NATO Expansion Ultimately Led to Today’s Crisis

The U.S. Empire has its iron rules, and you cannot expect that it doesn’t use its power to pursue its interests. But the means can vary a lot.

European media are fanning the flame of war in Ukraine, apparently unaware that it would happen in their courtyard. As with the Euro missiles crisis at the end of ’70, Washington is always delighted to sacrifice Europe, playing it against Russia. Informed to dead by too much news, the people are often unable to check the accuracy, especially when blatant propaganda depicts the sources as trustable by default.

Global Sanctions Dashboard: Sanctions alone won’t stop the Wagner Group

Despite sanctions and efforts to curtail the Wagner Group’s illicit activity, the group has successfully evaded financial sanctions through a series of facilitators and front companies around the world.

$5 billion: That’s how much the Wagner Group has made since 2017 mainly from mining, illicit gold trade, and forestry business in Africa, as well as funding from the Russian state.

Why Key Global Players Are Turning Their Focus On Africa – Analysis

With geopolitical confrontation and tensions deepening, the key global players are swiftly turning their focus on Africa. In practical terms, African leaders are also making strategic choices based on their development paradigms. These leaders are forced to work on their election campaign promises, especially those relating to economic development and set comprehensive targets for improving performance. After the presidential terms, it is necessary to show success and achievements to the electorate as a guarantee for holding the high-political positions.

From Rebellion To Anarchy: How Prigozhin’s Rebellion Exposed Russia’s Legal Decay – OpEd

Opponents of the Kremlin, as well as independent political scientists, have rightfully emphasized the enduring ramifications of the Prigozhin’s rebellion, an event that has captivated attention in June 2023.

While experts believe that its impact will be enduring, the failed uprising has already provided a revealing glimpse into the evolving landscape of the legal framework in Russia. It has become evident that the once formidable criminal laws, often weaponized against perceived “enemies of the state,” are now nothing more than a facade. Today, the anti-terrorist statutes within the Criminal Code have proven ineffective against the rebel faction. In the near future, they will similarly fail to withstand the actions of ordinary activists who bravely display banners advocating for change in close proximity to the Kremlin.

The Middle of the Road Leads to Socialism

The fundamental dogma of all brands of socialism and communism is that the market economy or capitalism is a system that hurts the vital interests of the immense majority of people for the sole benefit of a small minority of rugged individualists. It condemns the masses to progressing impoverishment. It brings about misery, slavery, oppression, degradation and exploitation of the working men, while it enriches a class of idle and useless parasites.

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Modern Socialism Is Forced Socialization – OpEd

My article “The Education of the Modern Socialist” deserves a follow-up. The first part showed that a change has occurred in the definition of “socialism”—a necessary change in view of the failures of this ideology during the last century. Socialism today is based on the ideology of “statism”—the conviction that the state must play a fundamental role in society. Ludwig von Mises’s wider definition of socialism as state intervention implies a modern social state that is involved in most if not all of the activities of society, whether commercial or not.

The Education of the Modern Socialist

Libertarians often wonder why socialism continues to be so popular, even though it has proved to be such a failure as a political ideology and as an economic system. Though a public education system and a biased mainstream media are key reasons for this, the stubborn resiliency of socialism is also somewhat fictitious since socialism has evolved: the socialist of yesteryear is not the socialist of today. This distinction is important to remember when setting the themes for a libertarian education.

Cantillon Effects: Why Inflation Helps Some and Hurts Others

We now turn our attention to what happens with an increase in the money supply, rather than an increase in savings. This is critically important. The mercantilist idea that increasing the money supply increases prosperity was exposed as an error centuries ago by Richard Cantillon.1 However, modern mainstream economists, including the monetarists, Keynesians of various sorts, and the now-fashionable market monetarists, fully embrace the idea that printing money is necessary for prosperity.

UN expert decries practice of taking boys from their mothers at camps in Syria

A U.N.-backed human rights advocate says hundreds of boys — some as young as 11 — held in detention camps run by U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led forces in northeastern Syria have been wrongly separated from their mothers on the “unproven” belief that they pose a security risk.

Fionnuala Ni Aolain, an independent U.N. rapporteur on the protection of rights while countering terrorism, aired concerns Friday about lingering “mass arbitrary detention” in the infamous al-Hol camp and others like it that she saw during her trip to the region this week — billed as the first visit of its kind by an independent human rights expert, Associated Press reported.