Beating Russia by tapping computer keys

Russia, as it has been governed for the past few decades, is an enemy of America and America’s allies. It has a long history of aggression.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed with Russia’s aggressions in mind. Ukraine is only the latest in Russia’s many attempts to rule over its neighbors.

Two years ago, if anyone had said we dramatically could degrade Russia’s military capabilities without losing a single American soldier and without costing America’s taxpayers a single penny, the vast majority of Americans — including the Republican Party — would have been all in.

For the past 20 months, that is precisely what has happened. In February 2024, Russia invaded Ukraine, and to the world’s — especially Vladimir Putin’s — surprise, Ukraine fought back.

In the succeeding months, Ukraine has killed many of Russia’s best soldiers — and some not so “best” — and destroyed many of Russia’s military weaponry, including guns, bullets, tanks, planes, and even some ships.

The degradation is happening much faster than Russia’s ability to restock.

Not a single American soldier has been wounded or killed.

Perhaps more importantly, considering the current discourse, no tax dollars were taken from American pockets to accomplish this, which is this post’s central point.

WAR IN UKRAINE
Has aid for Ukraine peaked? Some fear what’s happening
By Steven Erlanger The New York Times

WARSAW, Poland — Clearly anxious, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine went in person last week to see NATO defense ministers in Brussels, worried that the war between Israel and Hamas will divert attention — and needed weapons — from Ukraine’s long and bloody struggle against the Russian invasion.

American and NATO officials moved to reassure Zelenskyy, pledging another $2 billion in immediate military aid.

But even before the war in the Mideast began, there was a strong sense in Europe, watching Washington, that the world had reached “peak Ukraine” — that support for Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion would never again be as high as it was a few months ago.

The new run for the White House by former President Donald Trump is shaking confidence that Washington will continue large-scale support for Ukraine. But the concern, Europeans say, is larger than Trump and extends to much of his Republican Party, which has made cutting support for Ukraine a litmus test of conservative credibility.

Even in Europe, Ukraine is an increasingly divisive issue.

Voters in Slovakia handed a victory to Robert Fico, a former prime minister sympathetic to Russia. A vicious election campaign in Poland, one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies, has emphasized strains with Ukraine. A far-right opposed to aiding Ukraine’s war effort has surged in Germany, where Chancellor Olaf Scholz is struggling to win voters over to his call for a stronger military.

“There’s less pushback against the anti-Ukrainian stuff already out there,” said Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the former president of Estonia, mentioning the Republican right wing and influential voices like Elon Musk.

“Europe cannot replace the United States,” he said, even as it proposes more aid. “Certainly, we can do more, but the United States is something indispensable for the support to Ukraine.”

That same day, President Vladimir Putin of Russia said that without Western aid, Ukraine could not survive more than a week.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials reported intense combat as Russian forces relentlessly assaulted the eastern Ukrainian city of Avdiivka for a fifth consecutive day Saturday. Around 1,600 civilians remain within the city, a stark contrast to its prewar population of about 31,000.

Why Republicans Oppose Aid to Ukraine

This is former GOP US Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s opinion:

The Trump effect.
The former president so dominates the party’s consciousness that his doubts about Ukraine aid have enormously affected Republicans.

Before Donald Trump, Republicans did not abandon a fight for a strategic partner’s democracy, handing a potential victory to Russian President Vladimir Putin. We were the warriors of the Cold War who brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

With Trump, who has embraced Putin, some Republicans are learning to let go of America’s role as the bulwark of democracy and freedom. These Republicans are choosing, instead, the tragic isolationism of those who opposed joining the fight against Hitler.

There are several theories about why Trump consistently has been Putin’s ally. Most have to do with finances, a potential Trump Tower Moscow, and/or incriminating evidence against Trump Putin may hold.

The notion that Trump followers, who use the word “communist” as an all-purpose insult, should follow a man who loves Putin (and Kim) can only be evidence of MAGA cultish insanity.

Back then, radio priest Charles Coughlin had a powerful voice among do-nothings. Today, they find comfort on Fox News.

Trump has framed his position in a way typical of his petty approach to policy. He said he would threaten to halt war funding to get documents from the federal investigation into the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

The US should “refuse to authorize a single additional shipment of our depleted weapons stockpiles,” Trump said last month, until “the FBI, DOJ, and IRS hand over” evidence in congressional Republicans’ Biden family investigation. He also has said the US should prioritize school safety over Ukraine aid.

The idea that, somehow, school safety and Hunter Biden should have anything to do with helping Ukraine is, on the surface, absurd.

But when faced with Trump’s absurd ideas, MAGAs mindlessly fall in line.

In July, 70 House Republicans voted to cut off Kyiv entirely.

This number is not enough to change things, but the opponents come from the party’s extreme right wing, which plays an outsized role in primaries. This power means candidates are being pressured to join the anti-aid crowd.

Gone is the party of Reagan, which was steadfast in its stand against tyranny. In its place is rising a GOP that seems immune to the world’s need for American leadership and uninterested in the suffering of a country we should aid until the fight ends.

Then there is another reason Republicans oppose aid for Ukraine

Why the GOP Extremists Oppose Ukraine
The budget fight was about vice signaling, not spending.
By Tom Nichols, The Atlantic

It’s Not About the Money
Some $6 billion of aid to Ukraine was removed from the budget, a temporary casualty of the near shutdown.

Republicans are trying to cloak their opposition to military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine in a lot of codswallop about oversight and budget discipline. But the opposition to aid for Ukraine among Republican extremists on the Hill is not about money.

Most congressional Republicans are in favor of helping Ukraine.

The extremists warned Joe Biden last month that they would oppose additional assistance to Kyiv. The list is a roster of shame, including the new America Firsters in the Senate (J. D. Vance, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Tommy Tuberville among them) and the grotesque caucus-within-a-caucus of some of the most unhinged and weirdest members of the House, including Clay Higgins, Harriet Hageman, Andy Biggs, Anna Paulina Luna, and that titan of probity and prudence, Paul Gosar.

And let us not forget the battling ladies, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, who only agree on one issue: Allowing Ukraine to die under the Russian bear’s claws.

The drumbeat of propaganda from these members and their “amen” chorus in the right-wing media is having an effect: For the first time, most Republicans now support aid reductions. Fortunately, Americans overall are still holding firm in their support for Ukraine in its fight against Russian imperialism.

First, foreign aid is always an easy hot button for the know-nothing right to push. Most Americans have no idea how much the United States spends on foreign aid, and they grossly overestimate how much goes to such programs.

Most Americans think it’s about 25 percent of the U.S. budget and want it reduced to about 10 percent. Their wish is already granted: It’s about 1 percent.

They also do not understand that most foreign assistance is not a cash handout: Money is spent to buy weapons, food, and other products made in America, which we then ship to other nations.

Instead, many Americans think of assistance—mistakenly—as bags of untraceable money handed to foreigners to do with as they will, which is why opportunists such as Ron DeSantis (who once supported aid to Ukraine) try to exploit provocative terms such as blank check to describe helping Ukraine. DeSantis knows better; so do other Republican leaders.

What the American public doesn’t know, and what the politicians don’t want them to know, is that federal spending costs taxpayers nothing.

Tax dollars do not fund federal spending. Our government is Monetarily Sovereign, meaning it has the infinite ability to create its sovereign currency, the U.S. dollar. The U.S. government never unintentionally can run short of dollars. Never.

The real purpose of federal taxes is not to provide spending funds to the government. Rather, taxes help the government control the economy by taxing what the government wishes to discourage and by giving tax breaks to what the government wishes to reward.

Unlike taxes paid to monetarily non-sovereign state and local governments, dollars paid to the federal government are destroyed upon receipt.

Those tax payment checks you write come from what is known as the M1 money supply measure. But the instant they reach the U.S. Treasury, they cease to be part of any money supply measure. (There is no measure for Treasury money because of that infinite ability to create dollars.) They simply disappear from any measure.

To pay its bills, the government creates all new dollars ad hoc. No tax dollars were used. Even if the government collected $0 in taxes, it could continue supporting Ukraine and every other federal project forever.

Most Americans recognize the immense threat that Russia’s war of conquest poses to our allies, global peace, and the security of the United States.

Republicans once stood at the forefront of opposition to Kremlin aggression—Ronald Reagan’s steadfast opposition to Moscow was one of the reasons I was a young GOP voter in the 1980s—but now the party is saddled with a group of shortsighted appeasers, buttressed by a squad of right-wing cranks, who would doom tens of millions of innocent people to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s butchery just to own the libs.

Also, we should not ignore a nauseating truth about the extremist caucus within the GOP: Some genuinely admire Putin and what he has created in Russia.

Tucker Carlson, after all, didn’t get taken off the air for supporting Putin in ways that would have made Cold War Soviet propagandists blush; he got canned only after a defamation lawsuit from an election machine company.

These GOP extremists have swallowed the gargantuan lie that Putin is a godly defender of white Christian Europe against the decadent West and its legions of militant drag queens. 

Finally, some Republicans oppose aid to Ukraine because of the more general and bizarre countercultural obsession that has seized the American right: Whatever most of their fellow citizens approve of, they must oppose, or else they risk losing their precious claims to being an embattled minority.

If they were to support aid to Ukraine, how would they be different from everyone else, and especially from Biden?

How would they mark their tribal loyalty if they crossed party lines to oppose a dictator—while supporting a wannabe dictator of their own?

 As a commenter on social media said to me today, if liberals were opposed to aiding the Ukrainian war effort, “the GOP would shut down the government to ensure aid, and you’d see Ukrainian flags waving on the back of pickups.”

SUMMARY

The famously anti-communist MAGAs refuse to continue helping Ukraine against communist Russia because Putin-loving Trump tells them to refuse.

As their excuse, they falsely claim the money can be used elsewhere even though:

1. The U.S. has infinite dollars.
2. Ukraine spending costs taxpayers nothing.
3. The vast majority of aid is spent right here in America, helping American industry and military readiness.

This is another example of how Donald Trump, a liar and traitor to America, by every measure liars and traitors are measured, has damaged and continues to harm our nation.

Yet, all the blame cannot be put on his shoulders. Much should be shared by the ignorance and bigotry of Trump’s MAGA-lemming followers who will believe any damn-fool thing he says, no matter how crazy and damaging.

These people think that waving a flag makes them patriots and hatred keeps them safe. They are the same senseless organisms who claim anti-abortion is “pro-life” while they vote against aid to impoverished mothers and children.

But if Russia takes over Ukraine and then begins to move on Norway (its next target), and our weakness emboldens China to act militarily, and American soldiers are sent overseas to die, the right-wing finger-pointing and bleating will blame the “libs.”

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty

Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

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