Vital Articles

This is what you should read this week.

BLOODLINING WORDS

The Commandeering of the U.S. Department of Commerce

President-Elect Donald Trump announced that Howard Lutnick would be his nominee for Commerce Secretary. Lutnick’s company Cantor Fitzgerald and its subsidiaries are multinational in scope, promote the implementation of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, and are even directly partnered with foreign state-owned firms that recently came under scrutiny following the release of the contents of the laptop of the current (and recently pardoned) First Son, Hunter Biden... Lutnick sits on Satellogic’s board, as does former Treasury Secretary from the previous Trump administration, Steve Mnuchin, and former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, General Joe Dunford. Mnuchin and Dunford invested heavily in Satellogic through the private equity they now work for, Liberty Strategic Capital. Mnuchin has led that firm since its founding. Liberty Strategic Capital’s first investment was in a controversial Israeli intelligence-linked cybersecurity firm called Cybereason. Cybereason’s co-founder and CEO Lior Div has described Cybereason as a continuation of his work in Israeli intelligence outfit Unit 8200, where Div worked on offensive cyber attacks targeting foreign nations... Lutnick himself has significant ties to Israel and is a well-known billionaire mega-donor to Israeli and Zionist causes (discussed in detail later in this article)..."

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We haven’t seen a pardon as sweeping as Hunter Biden’s in generations

“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues. The president’s pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which [Hunter Biden] has committed or may have committed or taken part in” from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024. The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board..."

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'Neocons Try Again in Syria' by Ray McGovern

"After doing an interview in Washington on CNN International, I opened the studio door and almost knocked over a small fellow named Paul Wolfowitz, President George W. Bush’s former under-secretary of defense who in 2002-2003 had helped craft the fraudulent case for invading Iraq. And there standing next to him was former Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut neocon who was a leading advocate for the Iraq War and pretty much every other potential war in the Middle East. On the tube earlier, Anderson Cooper sought counsel from Ari Fleischer, former spokesman for Bush, and David Gergen, long-time White House PR guru.

Fleischer and Gergen were alternately downright furious over the Russian initiative to give peace a chance and disconsolate at seeing the prospect for U.S. military involvement in Syria disappear when we were oh so close..."

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DOGE’s Best First Target: the National Endowment for Democracy

Why should the government be funding a CIA cut-out to meddle in politics abroad and at home?

"It was NED-funded groups that led the Maidan revolution that bitterly divided the country and led to the toppling of its elected president, setting both Ukraine and the world on the course that’s led to this current crisis. The fact that Elliott Abrams (convicted in the Contra affair) was on its board for years and that its current president and CEO (Damon Wilson) is a longtime NATO-enlargement enthusiast who backed Ukrainian ‘democratization’ and U.S. military entanglement in the country tells you a lot..."

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Economic Inequality Is Even Worse Than You Think

In country after country, the top one in one hundred households owns around a third of whatever there is to own. Even more consistently, the bottom 50 percent has between 3 percent and minus 3 percent of national wealth — in other words, “nothing,” to use a sophisticated economics concept..."

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BONUS: TRAINED TO FAIL

Here’s a fascinating criticism of France’s deadly training program for Ukrainian soldiers.