From Jeff Childers daily Substack: (which is amazing btw)

https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/bad-luck-friday-april-26-2024-c-and?r=dzrj0&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

AP Story:

https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/bad-luck-friday-april-26-2024-c-and?r=dzrj0&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

"The US is now allowed to seize Russian state assets. How would that work?"
I am starting to wonder whether the Ukraine aid dustup this week was actually a well-planned distraction. A less publicized part of Tuesday's Ukraine aid bill package included authority to the President of the United States to steal, I mean to seize and transfer, all Russian assets located anywhere in the world the United States can reach them.
Here's how the AP described the bill, which was titled the "Asset Seizure for Ukraine Reconstruction Act":

The new U.S. law requires the president and Treasury Department to start locating Russian assets in the U.S. within 90 days and to report back to Congress within 180 days. A month after that period, the president will be allowed to "seize, confiscate, transfer, or vest" any Russian state sovereign assets, including any interest, within U.S. jurisdictions.

The United States has never before confiscated the sovereign assets of another nation in the absence of a formally declared war. The asset seizure targeting Russian assets is unprecedented, historic, and utterly new. The risk of wildly unpredictable unanticipated results seems extremely, if not unacceptably, high.

The U.S. has never ever given the President such broad, unilateral authority to ban or force the sale of foreign-owned companies and assets in peacetime, outside of war and a declared national emergency.

Now let's look at that second headline. On Tuesday the same day Biden signed the Ukraine package into law, which included the Russian asset seizure powers CNBC ran this understated story: "JPMorgan Chase is caught in U.S-Russia sanctions war after overseas court orders $440 million seized from bank."
In short, JPMorgan complied with US sanctions requirements and froze some overseas Russia assets. Those Russian assets are now at risk under Biden's extraordinary new peacetime powers. Last week, a Russian company sued JPMorgan after JPMorgan smartly announced it intended to immediately pull its assets out of Russia.
I presume the Biden Administration had warned the bank.
But it was too late. On Tuesday, a Russian court ordered all JPMorgan's Russian assets, "moveable and immovable," to be seized.
Tit for tat.

This is all political theater for the election. Make Russia/Putin a villan, then beat Trump bc he is a "Putin puppet".

Biden sucks

BlueTaze said:

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This is all political theater for the election. Make Russia/Putin a villan, then beat Trump bc he is a "Putin puppet".

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Im afraid it's a lot more sinister than that....


Belligerent behavior like this never has consequences for the uniparty elitists....


The American middle class will receive the brunt of consequences for this idiotic decision



Oh well.... "Putin will be angry" or something so I guess our govt stealing is a great thing

Well, we should always reserve the right to seize foreign owned domestic assets like land and farms and natural resources.

But we're not at war with Russia. Well, not officially.

txwxman said:

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These Russian propaganda posts always make me laugh.

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How is this "Russian propaganda"? A simple Google search proves OP's assertions true (except the location of seizable assets); does TDS also inhibit one's ability to perform a simple internet search?!?!

Pathetic.

Directly from the AP:

"The US is now allowed to seize Russian state assets. How would that work?

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-treasury-sanctions-assets-congress-0a3bc97a2d6d77ce3650c767db6ea7ed?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=share

The big U.S. aid package for Ukraine and other allies that President Joe Biden signed Wednesday also allows the administration to seize Russian state assets located in the U.S. and use them for the benefit of Kyiv. "

All we had to do was keep Russia from running into China's arms. A million different strategies would've worked.

But the Neocons hold grudges against Russia going back to Trotsky, so here we are. I hope our next generation is ready to die for a made up Neocon reason.

Ag with kids said:

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jagvocate said:

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All we had to do was keep Russia from running into China's arms. A million different strategies would've worked.

But the Neocons hold grudges against Russia going back to Trotsky, so here we are. I hope our next generation is ready to die for a made up Neocon reason.

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This is just silly.

Russia never aligned with the west after the fall of the USSR. Yeltsin sort of tried, but once Putin got in power, they went back to their old ways.

And China was their only logical "big" ally.

Commies gonna commie.

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Your finishing platitude may have been an attempt to resolve an emotional unease, but I recommend you go read a book, specifically "No Place for Russia" by longtime American diplomat and Russia expert William Hill. No platitudes there, just grown-up facts.

Putin was the first leader to call GW Bush on 9/11; America and NATO started slapping Russia away 20+ years ago, our intel agencies running color revolutions on their border, and our self-righteous Neocons impeding Russia's Chechen (Islamic) clean-up activities while had our best and brightest running all over Afghanistan and Iraq.

Kraft Punk said:

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BlueTaze said:

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This is all political theater for the election. Make Russia/Putin a villan, then beat Trump bc he is a "Putin puppet".

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Im afraid it's a lot more sinister than that....


Belligerent behavior like this never has consequences for the uniparty elitists....


The American middle class will receive the brunt of consequences for this idiotic decision



Oh well.... "Putin will be angry" or something so I guess our govt stealing is a great thing

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Unfreezing Iran's frozen funds caused heart palpitations and outrage.

Western nations freezing Russian funds improvidently placed in their banks before the invasion and using same to offset the cost of the invasion hilariously does the same.

Politics.

So the administration that freaks out over words spoken are ok with taking property and assets. Let that scary thought sink in.

A. Not a fan of this move. We are not at war with Russia. After a war has been fought the winning side gets to do that as a part of the rebuild. You don't get to do that just because you don't like what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Why not Iran? There are many other conflicts around the world that we completely ignore. Why not those places?
B. This is how we get into an actual war with Russia.

It's mainly a terrible idea because disrupting norms is going to lead to retaliation and 'surprising' consequences, and we all know this administration is basically a nonstop show of bad decisions and blowback that they are 'surprised' by. Of course the Russians have already threatened to seize the assets of private American companies/investors in kind.

It will be blamed on republicans and Putin, of course, like every single other thing wrong in the world. Blinken supposedly threatened to sanction large Chinese banks over Ukraine bs too this week.

dmart90 said:

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A. Not a fan of this move. We are not at war with Russia. After a war has been fought the winning side gets to do that as a part of the rebuild. You don't get to do that just because you don't like what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Why not Iran? There are many other conflicts around the world that we completely ignore. Why not those places?
B. This is how we get into an actual war with Russia.

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We are very much at war with Russia just not formally. We are funding Ukraine to do our dirty work.

txwxman said:

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These Russian propaganda posts always make me laugh.

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Well, obvious Russian propaganda posts are obvious.

Little in the OP is accurate.

"Governments would have plenty of legal justification for moving ahead. On Nov. 14, 2022, the United Nations formally recognized that Russia must "bear the legal consequences of all of its internationally wrongful acts, including making reparation for the injury, including any damage, caused by such acts." The United Nations called for creation of an institution, now, to implement this compensation.

In the last such case, after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, using the same emergency powers that President Biden has invoked in this crisis, an October 1992 executive order "directed and compelled" every bank holding Iraqi state funds to transfer them in compliance with a U.N. resolution that called for compensation of the victims of that aggression. More than $50 billion of Iraqi state funds from around the world were eventually paid out to injured countries, widening the supportive coalition.

None of this required court action or the aggressor's permission."

Note the distinguished authors: JUSTIFIED

A war where everyone is the bad guy…just like most wars.

Quote:

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Lawrence H. Summers, a professor at and past president of Harvard University, was treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001 and an economic adviser to President Barack Obama from 2009 through 2010. Philip D. Zelikow, a lawyer and a history professor at the University of Virginia, held foreign-policy posts in five administrations. Robert B. Zoellick has served as president of the World Bank, U.S. trade representative and deputy secretary of state.

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"Distinguished authors?" LOL. I am sure Larry Summers has been right about something in the past 10 years, but I sure have no idea what it is.

Goodness. A set of 3 bigger political clowns I couldn't assemble.

nortex97 said:

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Quote:

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Lawrence H. Summers, a professor at and past president of Harvard University, was treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001 and an economic adviser to President Barack Obama from 2009 through 2010. Philip D. Zelikow, a lawyer and a history professor at the University of Virginia, held foreign-policy posts in five administrations. Robert B. Zoellick has served as president of the World Bank, U.S. trade representative and deputy secretary of state.

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"Distinguished authors?" LOL. I am sure Larry Summers has been right about something in the past 10 years, but I sure have no idea what it is.

Goodness. A set of 3 bigger political clowns I couldn't assemble.

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Classic ad hominem. If you can't refute the facts, attack the authors. Few would agree with you.

74OA said:

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nortex97 said:

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Quote:

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Lawrence H. Summers, a professor at and past president of Harvard University, was treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001 and an economic adviser to President Barack Obama from 2009 through 2010. Philip D. Zelikow, a lawyer and a history professor at the University of Virginia, held foreign-policy posts in five administrations. Robert B. Zoellick has served as president of the World Bank, U.S. trade representative and deputy secretary of state.

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"Distinguished authors?" LOL. I am sure Larry Summers has been right about something in the past 10 years, but I sure have no idea what it is.

Goodness. A set of 3 bigger political clowns I couldn't assemble.

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Classic ad hominem. If you can't refute the facts, attack the authors. Few would agree with you.

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It's not an ad hom, it's a sourced rebuttal to one of your more outlandish claims of late, that Larry Summers of all people is a distinguished policy advisor whose opinions should be treated seriously/respectfully. Here is a definition for you as you seem confused by the Latin term.

And once social media is regulated, so there is no anonymity, it will then be further socialized elsewhere, including here, and no not just NPR;

New York is rolling out its plan to take a vested interest in legacy corporate media. Democrats in NY plan to have all media in the city become ‘state-sponsored’. What will they ask in return for giving taxpayer funds to publicly traded media companies? pic.twitter.com/LFWcrnGWBA

— @amuse (@amuse) April 27, 2024

All media will be forced to support the narrative, whether it is about trade, taxes, war, healthcare/pandemics, 'climate', whatever. Asset seizures of a nation state are insane, especially for one we are again not at war with. It will take extreme measures to get folks to take such actions seriously.

jagvocate said:

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Ag with kids said:

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jagvocate said:

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All we had to do was keep Russia from running into China's arms. A million different strategies would've worked.

But the Neocons hold grudges against Russia going back to Trotsky, so here we are. I hope our next generation is ready to die for a made up Neocon reason.

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This is just silly.

Russia never aligned with the west after the fall of the USSR. Yeltsin sort of tried, but once Putin got in power, they went back to their old ways.

And China was their only logical "big" ally.

Commies gonna commie.

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Your finishing platitude may have been an attempt to resolve an emotional unease, but I recommend you go read a book, specifically "No Place for Russia" by longtime American diplomat and Russia expert William Hill. No platitudes there, just grown-up facts.

Putin was the first leader to call GW Bush on 9/11; America and NATO started slapping Russia away 20+ years ago, our intel agencies running color revolutions on their border, and our self-righteous Neocons impeding Russia's Chechen (Islamic) clean-up activities while had our best and brightest running all over Afghanistan and Iraq.

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I notice you leave out all the illegal RUSSIAN influence in those border countries...How dare those countries try to have independence from Russia.

Can't place any blame on Russia. They're just a perpetual victim.

nortex97 said:

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Quote:

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Lawrence H. Summers, a professor at and past president of Harvard University, was treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001 and an economic adviser to President Barack Obama from 2009 through 2010. Philip D. Zelikow, a lawyer and a history professor at the University of Virginia, held foreign-policy posts in five administrations. Robert B. Zoellick has served as president of the World Bank, U.S. trade representative and deputy secretary of state.

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"Distinguished authors?" LOL. I am sure Larry Summers has been right about something in the past 10 years, but I sure have no idea what it is.

Goodness. A set of 3 bigger political clowns I couldn't assemble.

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True...

He's no Armchair Warlord, Lord Bebo, or Simplicius...

Absolutely Russia should pay for wrecking Ukraine. EU is also considering this with US. Pro this idea.

Pumpkinhead said:

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Absolutely Russia should pay for wrecking Ukraine. EU is also considering this with US. Pro this idea.

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Yep. "The approach is an elegant one. Income earned on Russia's foreign holdings can be seized in a manner that is both legal and practical. Many of the country's bonds have already matured. Cash from redemption of bonds is held by the depository in which it currently sits until it is withdrawn, paying no interest to the owner as per the depository's usual terms and conditions. Any interest earned thus belongs to the depositoryunless, that is, the state decides to tax it at a rate close to 100%."

EUROPE

Ag with kids said:

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nortex97 said:

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Quote:

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Lawrence H. Summers, a professor at and past president of Harvard University, was treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001 and an economic adviser to President Barack Obama from 2009 through 2010. Philip D. Zelikow, a lawyer and a history professor at the University of Virginia, held foreign-policy posts in five administrations. Robert B. Zoellick has served as president of the World Bank, U.S. trade representative and deputy secretary of state.

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"Distinguished authors?" LOL. I am sure Larry Summers has been right about something in the past 10 years, but I sure have no idea what it is.

Goodness. A set of 3 bigger political clowns I couldn't assemble.

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True...

He's no Armchair Warlord, Lord Bebo, or Simplicius...

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Don't forget Catturd or actual Russian government sources. Clearly very high standards.

74OA said:

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Pumpkinhead said:

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Absolutely Russia should pay for wrecking Ukraine. EU is also considering this with US. Pro this idea.

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Yep. "The approach is an elegant one. Income earned on Russia's foreign holdings can be seized in a manner that is both legal and practical. Many of the country's bonds have already matured. Cash from redemption of bonds is held by the depository in which it currently sits until it is withdrawn, paying no interest to the owner as per the depository's usual terms and conditions. Any interest earned thus belongs to the depositoryunless, that is, the state decides to tax it at a rate close to 100%."

EUROPE

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Break it you buy it.

"I notice you leave out all the illegal RUSSIAN influence in those border countries...How dare those countries try to have independence from Russia.

Can't place any blame on Russia. They're just a perpetual victim."

Hello Captain Strawman. No one has argued for what you're trying to set up. The premise that made you erupt was simply, "All America had to do was keep from driving Russia into the arms of China."

No one is defending Russia. But America's neocon-hijacked foreign policy has been a bag of piss.

nortex97 said:

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Quote:

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Lawrence H. Summers, a professor at and past president of Harvard University, was treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001 and an economic adviser to President Barack Obama from 2009 through 2010. Philip D. Zelikow, a lawyer and a history professor at the University of Virginia, held foreign-policy posts in five administrations. Robert B. Zoellick has served as president of the World Bank, U.S. trade representative and deputy secretary of state.

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"Distinguished authors?" LOL. I am sure Larry Summers has been right about something in the past 10 years, but I sure have no idea what it is.

Goodness. A set of 3 bigger political clowns I couldn't assemble.

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But Hersh is credible as long as he says things that Russia likes

No clue what your argument is, and don't want to engage in a derail, respectfully.

jagvocate said:

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"I notice you leave out all the illegal RUSSIAN influence in those border countries...How dare those countries try to have independence from Russia.

Can't place any blame on Russia. They're just a perpetual victim."

Hello Captain Strawman. No one has argued for what you're trying to set up. The premise that made you erupt was simply, "All America had to do was keep from driving Russia into the arms of China."

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A) I didn't "erupt".
2) America didn't drive Russia into the arms of China
iii) You detailed what the US had done while conveniently leaving out what Russia had done