War on Middle Manning Gangsters: Why Russia Had To Attack Ukraine
And why we should support them cleaning the mobbed up oligarchs out
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a welcome strike against the transnational criminal syndicate that currently runs much of Eastern Europe and Ukraine in particular.
I support this attack, so long as it is directed against the Ukrainian mobsters, and so long as it is a limited incursion that results in the annexation of the Russian territories. I might even support toppling the “government” of Volodymyr Zelensky whose agents and mobsters have warped American politics for far too long.
The Intercept explains it:
Firms working for Ukrainian interests have inundated congressional offices, think tanks, and journalists with more than 10,000 messages and meetings in 2021, according to an analysis of Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, filings for a forthcoming report from the Quincy Institute. To put this extraordinary campaign into perspective, the Saudi lobby — known for being one of the largest foreign lobbies in D.C. — reported 2,834 contacts, barely a quarter of what Ukraine’s agents have done.
As Americans we have a right to be unmolested in our dealings.
We have a right not to have our politicians bought off. We have a right not to be subject to the whims of foreign billionaires who were essentially gifted assets when the Chinese helped collapse the Soviet Union.
"Nowhere in Emerging Europe, where countries have adopted the Westernising approach, are oligarchs as dominant as in Ukraine," says Timothy Ash, a strategist for Bluebay Asset Management. "Sure, you have a few, but they do not absolutely dominate the economy as in Ukraine."
Any American politician who takes cash from lobbyists taking cash from Ukrainian oligarchs is an enemy of the American people. Unfortunately, that’s starting to include Senator Ted Cruz who parrots Ukrainian talking points.
Putin is right. President Zelensky is a puppet — a literal clown — placed in power by Ukrainian-Israeli-Cypriot billionaire Ihor Kolomoyskyi. Kolomoyskyi’s multiple passports reveal the reality: he belongs to no one but himself. Zelensky belongs to Kolomoyskyi and there are reports of a $40m business deal between the head of state and the mobster.
Let’s be under no illusions about Kolomoyskyi. He is a murderer who orders hits on rivals.
This report is worth reading in its entirety:
Ihor Kolomoisky is regarded as the main leader of the Ukrainian mafia. He ranks as the second or third wealthiest man in the country (after Rinat Akhmetov and/or Viktor Pinchuk). He owns the metal industry, Privat Bank and, in 2011, he took over the gas sector.
Ihor Kolomoisky chairs the United Jewish Community of Ukraine and the European Jewish Union. He founded the European Jewish Parliament (branded as a sham by the CRIF, an umbrella organization of French Jewish organizations) with the support of Bahrain. He is the co-owner of the Jewish News One international network (currently broadcasting as Ukraine News One).
Until recently Kolomoyskyi owned a major chunk of Cleveland. (Say isn’t Josh Mandel from there? And isn’t he backed by China?)
He is backed by China, too, of course, and he has purchased factories deep in America’s heartland, eroding our industrial base.
We let a Ukrainian mobster own Middle America. Is this not a form of invasion?
Like an animal who has evolved in a swamp, the oligarchs are now fleeing Ukraine.
They’ll be easier to monitor when they land, and after they’ve paid the tax.
A common refrain you’ll hear me say is that there are only three real countries in the world — AUKUS, China, and Russia — and that everyone else crews up accordingly if they wish to survive.
There are some countries and billionaires — Elon Musk, anyone? — who middle man between the powers. Here I am thinking of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Emiratis, and so forth.
These middle manning players have to play an artful game. Their smartest people ultimately end up going into politics and economics and they are some of the shrewdest oligarchs around because they have to be.
This works for a time. Netanyahu survived, in part, by helping the Chinese loot Africa of resources. (The recent coup attempts in the Democratic Republic of Congo by the Chinese proxy, Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame, gives you a sense of it.)
The Emiratis, along with the Saudis, plotted coups against the Qataris and Jordanians while laundering money from Africa and Afghanistan. They deposited this money into Silicon Valley funds, like those of Joe Lonsdale, or into the real estate investing arm of Tom Barrack. This money invariably finds its way into politics so Lonsdale is a major backer of Kevin McCarthy, whose son Connor worked for Lonsdale and now is at a company backed by the Kochs. Trump donor Tom Barrack, you already know, and he’s in trouble for attacking as an agent of UAE.
Alas, sometimes the people in the middle of the road get run over. In the United Arab Emirates case they want F-35s (and Predators). To get them Blinken and Biden told the Emirates to quit the misbehavior of their hard and soft power assets around the world. The Emirates will jettison these operations, just as the Russians have been winding down their ops in the United States. That is, until there’s another mobbed up American president and the looting and thieving will continue apace. There’s a natural cycle and order to these things.
How does that apply to the current invasion of Ukraine ongoing?
Think of it as an international deep state war on the middle manning oligarchs.
Vladimir Putin, like Xi Jinping, is the boss of bosses in his respective country. Neither Russia nor China has a strong state — though that’s changing — and so they rely on oligarchs who often serve as governors or administrators. It’s corrupt but it is orderly in its way. There are good oligarchs and bad oligarchs just as there are good knights and bad knights, good kings and bad kings, and so on. To be a good oligarch you serve your nation’s deep state. Some oligarchs even serve as a kind of ambassador between deep states.
Putin worked his way up from the intelligence services and dealt with the looting, thieving types — Blavatnik, Khordokovsky, Berezovsky, Browder, etc. — by exiling, jailing, killing, or controlling them. This is ultimately why the Russian people support Putin despite all the protestations to the contrary. They remember what it was like living under these cretins and they don’t want to go back to it.
Of course many of the lobbyists for Ukraine and other Eastern European countries wanted to push sanctions against Russians. I myself was targeted by a lobbyist for Moldova. Many nonprofits in the United States act as laundries for these influence operations. That’s why the Biden administration is forcing nonprofits to disclose the money they receive from foreigners under FARA.
Many (though not all) of the bad oligarchs were Jews and they are not happy about what happened and so they oftentimes pervert our politics by turning Putin into Hitler and the like. It’s sad and it recalls some of the ugliest history from that part of the world.
Ultimately this behavior harms comity between nations and harms their fellow Jews, who often wrongly get tarred with that brush. This is why both Churchill and Henry Ford warned about the “International Jew” but had no problem whatsoever with assimilated Jews. My views are much the same. Everyone has to pick a team. Personally I don’t really care what it is but then you have to live your values. There’s nothing more tiresome than reading a Ukrainian-Jewish college kid living in Austin, Texas lecture the United States about what it must do. Spare us.
Worse yet, some of these agents of influence in the United States want the West to sanction the Russians to push them into the arms of the Chinese. This cannot happen. We cannot have the world’s largest energy and medal producer aligning so closely with China.
The alternative Is to engage Russia as an equal partner in checking Chinese aggression. We want a stronger Russia, not a weaker one.
Or Russia will be dominated by China.
We’ve hitherto explored that there are lots of constructs running around in the world and that’s especially true in weaker states, or what I’ll call neighboring weak states.
The reason, for example, that Russian-Israeli spy Jeffrey Epstein operated out of the U.S. Virgin Islands was because it was both within the U.S. financial system but also far enough away to avoid attention. There are plenty of Russians running around in the Caribbean. The Chinese are all over Canada and Mexico. In fact the Chinese have all but taken over the Mexican cartel, in much the same way that they’ve taken over the domestic mobs here. Boston, where I’m from, is now run by the Chinese mob, not the Irish or Italian one. I suspect if you talk to your local mobster they’ll tell you much the same thing.
History, apparently, is quite alive.
In fact there’s an alternative history to much of the sanctions literature. Pushing sanctions is strengthening China and weakening America.
In much the same way that the Likud government supported sanctioning Iran while Iranian oil flowed to China and Chinese money flowed through Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn to Netanyahu and Likud, so too, do the Chinese hope to pry Russia from Europe and the U.S. dollar.
Nor will sanctioning the billionaires do much good. They’ll just pay bribes and maneuver around them.
Ultimately the solution is to force the billionaires to behave.
The SEC can fine billionaires all they like but those fines ultimately don’t address the underlying problem.
You need to take the money and press it into service of the state.
You must make it so that they face justice.
You must make your oligarchs loyal. You must bring them to heel. You can give them options of public-private partnerships for them to back.
As in China, with Jack Ma of Alibaba, as in Greater Russia with the Ukrainian-Jewish mob, so, too with domestic billionaires in the west.
Why, we might even call that group the PayPal mafia.
Say, isn’t Max Levchin from Ukraine? Isn’t David Sacks of Ukrainian heritage?
What was really going on with all that “buy now pay later” scamming? Where did Sacks’s portfolio company Bird get all those rare earths for their batteries?
And why did Levchin’s company Glow — which helps American women get pregnant — have its operations in China when the US government has repeatedly warned about sending American genetic data abroad?
It’s time for America’s oligarchs to be brought to heel, too, and to be reminded that they are welcome here only to the extent that they do good for this country.
Wow, what an enlightening deep dive into the context of the relations between Ukraine and Russia...thank you!