What's Going On Behind The Scenes? World War Edition

One of the first things I noticed this morning was this:

Ukraine Battle Map @ukraine_map

The US Republican House vote on aid to Ukraine that was supposed to take place on April 9 may not happen for weeks or more, reports Bloomberg.

The only path to passing Ukraine aid is likely a discharge petition which has 191 of 218, as aid continues to be delayed for months.

4:49 AM · Apr 4, 2024

Well, that’s certainly good news—the sooner this terrible war ends the better—and Simplicius was yucking it up over the angst among Ukro-Nazis. But still there’s the question: What happened? This looks like a major flip flop. There has to be a reason for Johnson’s volte face, and an important reason at that.

Did Johnson simply read the polling that shows that pouring more billions down the Ukraine rat hole is a losing proposition, electorally speaking—no matter what his Neocon masters may say?

Or did MTG somehow get through to Johnson, in her chat with Tucker Carlson—convincing him to take a stand on … something?

KanekoaTheGreat @KanekoaTheGreat

NEW: Marjorie Taylor Greene Speculates Speaker Johnson Is "Being Blackmailed" — "What Do They Have On Him?"

GREENE: But now Mike Johnson has made a complete departure of who he is and what he stands for, and to the point where people are literally asking, is he blackmailed? What is wrong with him because he’s completely disconnected with what we want?

CARLSON: Do you think he is being blackmailed?

GREENE: I have no idea. I can’t comprehend, Tucker, what radically changes a man. I mean, if we break down the the second part of basically an omnibus. Let’s break that down. So Mike Johnson is pro-life. And the second part of the omnibus, just less than two weeks ago, he funded full-term abortion clinics, full-term abortion clinics. He funded the trans agenda on children. I mean, how does that even happen from a Christian conservative Republican speaker?

He did nothing for the southern border and did nothing to secure the border. And this comes on the heels of Laken Riley being brutally murdered. This came on the heels of a video that was running on loop on social media, where illegal aliens had rushed our border, ran over Texas National Guard, ran over Border Patrol agents in order to invade our country. These were military-age men, by the way. He did nothing to secure our border. It’s the number one issue in the world.

He completely changed who he was, funded the FBI, gave them a brand new building, fully funded the Department of Justice that is persecuting everyone on the right and actually targeting a presidential candidate for election this year. Literally trying to put him in jail for the rest of his life. We don’t know who Mike Johnson is anymore."

1:00 / 3:46

6:38 PM · Apr 3, 2024

Or is it all more complicated than any of that, as Tom Luongo maintains?

Tom Luongo (Head Sneetch) @TFL1728

So much to say here:

1) Johnson is doing the job he was put in place to do... slow/stop the roll towards WWIII by stopping aid to Ukraine.

2) He has a steadily weakening position as his majority in the House has eroded from 4 seats to 1, through lawfare and resignations.

3) @RepMTG is fronting for her boyfriend McCarthy and the Neocon lobby by going after Johnson on the budget. She's scum.

4) Until they can end run Johnson and force a vote, nothing happens. Hence, why MTG called for a vacate vote on his Speakership.

5) Expect even more intensity on this as we push towards the convention. The goal is to leave Trump with no options but war if he makes it to the WH in 2025.

6) Rick Wilson and company are now openly calling for Trump to be assassinated lest he stop the march to war per @StrongEconomics

https://armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/politics/neocon-super-pac-urges-trumps-assassination/

You read that right:

“The donor class can’t just sit back on the sidelines and say, oh, this will all just work itself out. They’re still going to have to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump. And that’s a fact,” Rick Wilson from The Lincoln Project stated on MSNBC broadcasting.

Any way you slice that, it’s a remarkably reprehensible statement. No one can get away with making statements remotely like that unless the Ruling Class has his back. And the people who could make that happen know that, too.

Luongo is certainly correct in saying that a move is on to “leave Trump with no options but war if he makes it to the WH in 2025.” Is MTG part of that move? I’ll have to defer to Luongo when it comes to understanding MTG’s game. Obviously her critique of Johnson will resonate with many conservatives—as will most of her known political positions. Those positions don’t appear to be the positions of a “scum,” from my standpoint (and prescinding totally from her personal life). Significantly, she has a well established track record of opposition to the US war on Russia. My understanding of Luongo’s defense of Johnson is that Johnson is a Speaker with one hand tied behind his back—the slimmest of majorities, and one that includes plenty enough RINOs that principled stands could end up backfiring majorly.

That leaves us with the idea that Johnson is cleverly playing for time with his “now we vote now we don’t” tactics. I’d love to know who the people behind him are—the people who “put [Johnson] in place to ... slow/stop the roll towards WWIII by stopping aid to Ukraine.” As far as I can tell, much of the Big Money seems to remain behind continuation of the war in the hope that they’ll be able to rape Ukraine for its resources—if only the Russians can somehow be stopped short of taking over most of Ukraine’s ultra valuable agricultural land. The other side of the coin is that Johnson must have a powerful incentive to keep delaying the vote, given that he’s bucking both the GOPe as well as, arguably, much of the Ruling Class, Deep State, and Big Money conglomerate.

In the meantime, just as it seemed that the US was backing out of Ukraine and trying to lure Russia into giving up, we keep getting countervailing signals. For example, unbelievably but true, Blinken has openly repeated the patently false proposition that Ukraine will join NATO—not the kind of statement that would be calculated to soften up Putin just as the American Empire is looking for the off ramp. Doug Macgregor, David Sacks, and Don Trump Jr. all lined up to denounce the statement as madness.

Martin Armstrong—regarding whom I’m basically an agnostic, since I’m not a regular follower—is also talking up the threat of a major escalation of the war between the American Empire and Russia. For example, he takes note of the way that central banks are buying gold. Thesee massive gold purchases are not, he argues, about a flight from the dollar—global money continues to seek a safe haven in US equities at the same time that central banks are buying gold. Rather,

The West has become extremely aggressive in its geopolitics. You simply do not buy the debt of your enemy. Central banks are buying gold because the USD is political.

…

We are not going back to a Bretton Woods type situation and that is not the issue.

You must understand that gold is neutral. Central banks are buying gold because the Neocons have weaponized the dollar.

Russia was removed from the SWIFT system, and private citizens’ assets were confiscated.

When Russian assets were removed from SWIFT, a threat to the world was issued to say, “Hey, if you don’t do what we tell you to do, we will take you out of SWIFT.”

At a guess, that sounds like central bankers are really concerned that the $300 billion of Russian reserves that were seized/frozen may actually be used to support Ukraine. Or, at the least, they central banks are hedging that risk. This looks like a signal that runs counter to what I wrote above about the Big Money supporting war. Or does it?

Armstrong also argues—in a recent interview—that war in a big way is coming, possibly in September:

Biden 8% Approval Means Panic & War – Martin Armstrong

Armstrong says, “[Zhou’s approval] is basically hovering around 7.5% to 8% at this stage. I know this goes against the mainstream media, but if you look at Google, it is really politically motivated. . . . The other number you need to look at is the confidence in government, and it is at 28%. . . . This number is unheard of since World War II. …

You will never see Biden’s real numbers on the Lying Legacy Media (LLM), but everybody at the top of the D.C. swamp knows how weak Biden really is.

What does this record low Biden approval rating mean? Armstrong explains, “What you have to be concerned about is our computer is showing a massive panic cycle in September. This is very curious because the Democrat convention is August 19th. . . . At that convention, they can just draft somebody. That has been the rumor for quite some time. They know Biden is really quite pathetic. The Neocons like him because they can do whatever they want. The climate change people are doing the same thing. . . . The President is supposed to act as a referee in the cabinet, and he’s not even there 40% of the time. The collapse in government is because all these agencies are just doing the wrong thing, and nobody is standing in-between. You’ve got the State Department threatening World War III. . . .The problem is a government will fail when you can’t sell the new debt to pay off the old. That’s when a default comes. . . . That’s how a default takes place. You have these Neocons in the State Department constantly trying to create WWIII. Why would you buy a 10-year bond in the face of war? Interest rates always go up in wartime. We don’t have a President running as referee between all these agencies.”

Armstrong says, “Everything is pointing towards war.”

So, in other words, Armstrong is arguing that the Ruling Class could gin up a major war scare 1) to maintain their control over the levers of power (i.e., “put a bullet into Trump”), and 2) to shore up the nation’s finances.

The bottom line seems to be that the American Empire is mired in an unprecedented crisis—political, military, and economic/financial. It seems logical that a crisis of this magnitude should lead to turmoil in the Ruling Class/Deep State. That would explain the contradictory signals we’re seeing—for every signal that war is on the horizon there are also signals that the US is trying to back out of war. However, given that the American Empire’s war has both foreign and domestic fronts—yes, we are the enemy—the complexity of it all means that the future is both unstable and unpredictable.