Lord Alli Dressing for Government

An Allegory for Dandies’ Rule (of the Globe, unfortunately)

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer (whose main “policy” is to give away more of Britain’s diminishing wealth to the tool Zelenskiy, while Starmer’s widely despised government cuts heating subsidies for pensioners), and his wife are being dressed, literally, by British oligarch donor Lord Alli, and I believe the scandal is extending to other government ministers and family members.

Much still remains to be exposed and/or confirmed. Where better to read about this than in the Sky News propaganda outlet of the Murdoch empire, the very same mogul who brought Margaret Thatcher to power, corrupted the West with semi-pornographic pictures of young women in national newspapers, and has come close to ending the world? (But at least inspired a great educational streaming TV series, Succession).

“Sir Keir Starmer has come under scrutiny over the past week for the more than £100,000-worth of gifts he has accepted.

It started with controversy over his wife's clothes and has escalated since Sky News' Westminster Accounts project revealed he has been gifted more freebies and hospitality than any other MP since 2019 - a total worth £107,145”

Starmer has also accepted football tickets:

“The Premier League is one of the biggest donors of hospitality, and Sir Keir - a renowned Arsenal fan - has received almost £40,000 in tickets overall since December 2019.

He has declared £12,588 of gifts from the Premier League, numerous hospitality tickets to Arsenal matches costing well over £10,000 in total, plus two Euros finals tickets costing £1,628 and thousands of pounds' worth of tickets from other Premier League clubs”.

He appears to have breached parliamentary rules by failing to declare some of his wife's high-end clothes which were bought for her by his biggest personal donor, Lord Alli, the former chairman of online fashion retailer Asos, who paid for a personal shopper, clothes, and alterations for Lady Victoria Starmer both before and after the Labour leader became prime minister in July. Starmer says his “oversight” in declaring these gifts has been corrected.

What a relief!!

Starmer also received - and disclosed - other gifts from Lord Alli totalling £39,122.These donations included an unspecified donation of accommodation worth £20,437, "work clothing" worth £16,200, and multiple pairs of glasses equivalent to £2,485.

The Premier League is one of the biggest donors of hospitality, and Sir Keir - a renowned Arsenal fan - has received almost £40,000 in tickets overall since December 2019.

Starmer also accepted four tickets to a Taylor Swift concert totalling £4,000.

Did Lord Alli Also Dress Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian?

No, of course not, but I am beginning to wonder whether Pezeshkian is a Mossad/CIA/MI6 stooge in the way that Scott Ritter was talking about Volodymyr Zelenskiy a while back.

I mean: Iran has been f*****d around by Britain and the West (and, not to mention, in its day, Russia) for over a hundred years, not least as a result of a staged CIA/MI6 coup d’etat of a democratically elected President Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, who simply wanted a slightly more generous share of the pittance of profit allowed Iran as the price for sale of its own oil, by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.

And then the country was subjected to the barbaric rule of secret police on behalf of the Shah of Persia, on behalf of US Imperial Power in the Middle East, which didn’t need Israel until a popular revolution finally booted out the Shah in 1979.

So Pezeshkian, after several decades of his country being the target of preposterous Israeli and Western lies about how Iran, which had no nuclear weapon, not a single one (unlike Israel with 200+), and which was a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty (Israel is not), is now trying to offer an olive branch to the West.

This from the leader of an economy long battered and crippled by punishing Western sanctions and which, having tried to get along with its abusers through a tortuously agreed multinational treaty intended to restrict the enrichment level of Iranian uranium for its nuclear energy program, was egregiously humiliated when the agreement which was almost instantly slaughtered by the Trumpeting Trump.

Seriously? Now? When its allied militia, Hezbollah and Hamas (to which Iran contributes financially but which it does not control) face extermination on the battlefields of Gaza and Southern Lebanon, and when Iran has still not exerted its promised retribution for Israel’s murder of one of Hamas’ principal military leaders, Haniyeh, in Tehran, in July, on the day of Pezeshkian’s inauguration, and of Hezbollah leader Ibrahim Aqil in Beirut on September 20. Not to mention my suspicion of Mossad or other Western intelligence involvement in the helicopter crash that killed former President Raisi on May 20 (Iran’s own investigation says it was an accident, but there they ago again, pulling their punches).

At the very time when Iran most needs to project strength and resolve, Pezeshkisan presents himself and his country as the proverbial abused wife prepared to put up with any amount of further abuse. This is the country that has no nuclear weapons yet whose leader somehow finds it reasonable to offer itself up to the West for yet another unnecessary round of nuclear negotiations in the pitiful hope that it can remove at least some of the sanctions that the West will likely keep in place forever on behalf of Israel. He wants to make this offer, basically, to the same country, the US, that has already once signed such an agreement and then immediately reneged on it.

Pezeshkian has reportedly referred to Russian aggression in Ukraine (a report denied by the Iranian Foreign Ministry but not, it seems, by Pezeshkian) which, if true, sounds very strange for a country that is supposedly close to signing a controversial mutual security agreement with Russia. Such claims may in fact be the result of Western disinformation meddling, but I have my doubts.

That Pezeshkian’s room for manouver is said to be greatly constrained by the Supreme Leader, and by Iran’s revolutionary guards, does not offer quite enough reassurance. Like many countries of the Global South, including, until recently, Russia and China, sections of the country’s most privileged communities have for a long time regarded their interests as lying more safely with the West than at home, and have been seduced by the false fantasies of Western culture that Western mainstream media circulate about the West’s cleverness, sexiness and general goodness. These delusions were fully exploded first by the history of Western imperialism and now in their most ugly nakedness of its war of false pretext against Russia over Dictator Zelenskiy’s Ukraine, and by the genocide of Palestinians and Arabs in Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon.

Nuclear Posture Just Posing?

Meanwhile, in the real world where there really are powers that do provoke nuclear war and threaten nuclear war we have a report by Andre Damon of the World Socialist Web Site. Russia keeps talking about things nuclear, and while I have every sympathy for Russia’s position on the SMO and its interpretation of how we got to that point, I am not so sanguine as to the efficacy of any of this nuclear talk, wondering whether it may distract from the possibly greater danger, as others like Scott Ritter and Ted Postol have argued, of a Western pre-emptive nuclear strike.

Such a strike doesn’t preempt anything of course, since we all die, regardless.

Russian President Vladimir Putin outlined Wednesday a proposed update to Russia’s nuclear policy document that would expand the conditions under which Moscow would use nuclear weapons.

“The updated version of the document proposes that aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear-weapon state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear-weapon state, should be considered as a joint attack on the Russian Federation.”

Putin said that the conditions for launching a nuclear strike would include “reliable information about a massive launch of aerospace attack means their crossing of our state border.”

He added, “We reserve the right to use nuclear weapons in the event of aggression against Russia and Belarus.”

The territory of Belarus, for the purposes of Russia’s new doctrine governing the use of nuclear weapons, is considered the same as the territory as the Russian Federation. Russia’s nuclear umbrella, in effect, now covers Belarus, a country whose invasion NATO powers have frequently canvassed.

Should that happen and Belarus be placed in jeopardy, Russia might very well use nuclear weapons according to the new doctrine.

Russia does not distingish as does the US - and this is a factor that may enhance the possibility of an escalation spiral spinning out of control - between tactical medium-range nuclear weapons designed for specific use on the battlefield; intermediate nuclear weapons that cannot reach across the Atlantic; and intercontinental ballisic nuclear missiles.

All this in the context of Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s “victory plan,” which will include a public call for allowing Ukraine to attack Russia with long-range NATO weapons, as well as a call for Ukraine to join NATO. The Biden administration is expected to remove limits on Ukraine’s use of Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) to strike deep into Russia

Biden is proposing to spend another $8 billion of US wealth on the US armaments corporations to supply “aid to Ukraine.” The United States has provided more than $175 billion for the war in Ukraine since early 2022. The armaments industry has profited handsomly.

Brazil is today expected to announce in New York its own peace plan for Ukraine, supposedly backed by China. It calls for an immediate ceasefire along present combat lines as a prelude to negotiations, a proposal to which Russia, making significant advances in the eastern Donbass, is opposed. The proposal may represent a further insipid attempt by Lulu to establish what he considers a more secure balance between Brazil, Washington and Russia. Ukraine, not so much, as Zelenskiy continues to be very scathing of any peace process that Brazil and China propose.

On the battlefields, meanwhile, Russia is achieving significant advances in Zapporizhzhia, and is now posing a direct threat to the city of Zapporizhzhia itself. Having surrounded the city of Vuhledar in southwest Donbass, Russia is likely to take the city itself within days. Likewise, the Russian move on Pakrovsk, which is now subect to ever more intense Russian shelling and bombing, continues to advance every day. There have been significant advances in recent weeks in Toretsk, Chasiv Yar, Siversk and Kupyansk, while in Kharkiv, where Russia bombs the oblast’s capital, Russian forces are withdrawing from the industrial area of northern Vovchansk. The situation in Kursk continues to be mixed, but pro-Russian commentators see the possibility that Ukrainian forces in Kursk are gradually being encircled.

Roll-Over Patsies: Germany for Nuclear Annihilation

Anatol Lieven for Responsible Statecraft (Lieven) reports an agreement between Washington and Berlin at the NATO anniversary summit in July whereby Germany agreed to the stationing of three types of U.S. missiles (under U.S. command) on its territory, starting in 2026:

“The Tomahawk Block 4 cruise missile, with a range of just over 1,000 miles; the Standard Missile-6 (SM-6), with a range of 230 miles, and intended chiefly for an air-defense role; and a Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHP) which is still under development, and will have a range of more than 1,800 miles.

Two of these missiles will be able to strike deep into Russia, and both will be able to hit Moscow. They are conventionally armed, but nuclear-capable, though to convert them to this role would require a new agreement. This agreement however said nothing about whether Germany will have any control over the missiles on its soil”.

The agreement was made without any prior discussion in the German parliament, the Bundestag, or any prior national debate. It has excited national controversy, adding to the popularity of the AfD and the BSW, and splitting the Social Democrats.

Lieven speculates, without a great deal of optimism, that the only sensible purpose of allowing the deployment of Tomahawks and hypersonic missiles in Germany is to offer to give them up again, as part of a new nuclear arms reduction agreement with Russia. Further, he notes that Erurope is now altogether without missile limitation agreements at a time when not merely is war raging in Ukraine, but Washington is considering acceding to Ukrainian and British pressure to allow British Storm Shadow cruise missiles (guided by U.S. targeting) to be fired into Russia.

“The deployment of U.S. missiles in Germany therefore involves the following propositions: Washington is actively considering helping to fire U.S.-manufactured Ukrainian missiles into Russia; U.S. intermediate missiles in Germany will be able to strike deep into Russia; Russian intermediate missiles can strike Germany but not the U.S.; Germany will have no control over the U.S. missiles on its soil. It is hardly surprising that this combination makes many Germans extremely nervous”.

The BRICS: Our Only Hope and a Damp Squib?

One of the most important expectations of the BRICS is that it will engineer the de-dollarization of the economy. Yet the BRICS has hardly yet established itself as an institution with a cogent structure, consensual mission goals, rules of procedure, and the rest of it. Its promises of pluri-centrality are undermined by its fear of any real talk of social progressivism and absence of commitment to the brisk elimination of the obscene inequalities that subject the interests of over 99% of the world’s population to the greed, self-delusions, and hedonistic pervisions of a handful of billionaire plutocrats and the governments they buy and drive.

Ideas of de-dollarization originally centered on the notion of a new international currency that might supplant the dollar. The most practical possibility would be the Chinese renminbi (opposed, not surprisingly, by India) which might just suggest the replacement of one very bad deal with a future equally bad deal. Besides:

“China is unwilling to assume the burden of a reserve currency issuer, which is running sustained trade deficits to get its currency widely held outside its borders. That is tantamount to exporting demand, as in jobs, one of the last things China wants.”

Wiser counsel has come from those who insist that the furthest we can go right now is to find more ways of facilitating bilateral trade in local currencies, though even that option comes with problems. Here is Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism who reports that Indian foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar recently put paid to the idea that a BRICS currency is coming soon, if ever.

A common currency would require a very substantial legal and systems architecture that might actually reduce the sovereignty of a group that says its wants to increase national sovereignty. This in turn does raise the awkward question of how the BRICS, if it is whole-heartedly in favor of sovereignty, can hope that forms of global regulatory structures such as the BRICS can hope to have any influence at all.

Bilateral currency deals work well enough, but many countries are likely to wind up with sustained trade deficits relative to particular trade partners. This has already occurred as a result of Russia’s supply of oil and gas to India which India pays in rupees but which Russia does not know what to do with.