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Rick Herbst's avatar

Love the article, Wendy! Great work here. Also like the narrative style you used to cover so much territory. I’ve struggled as a writer with that one - maybe we can kibbitz on that sometime. Two comments I wanted to make, maybe 3 if I’m sure the third one will disappear into the mists of Substack fog and get no real attention…

- I wrote an entire piece I didn’t publish yesterday on the situation with Ukraine and the US. Long Lonnnng story short: I dived in both feet into the dumpster fire that is Trump’s relationship with Putin and came out needing a shower followed by a cleansing fresh acid bath followed by immersion in a douchewasher. Most of the data is disconnected, but I built the dots between 2010 and now and man, right around 2016 is when Putin+Trump became a bad, bad bad bad baaaaad scary thing. There is so much there, I can actually sympathize with Muller a bit more and the senators who just said “fuck it” to investigating Donny any more. It’s a black hole of incestuous shit.

My proposal was to get the fuck out of all matters between U and R and just build a framework of increasing penalties over time for both parties, then hand the actual negotiations over to Switzerland to get the peace deal done. If they failed (either side) to meet schedule/peace milestones our withdraw of aid on one side, plus escalating sanctions on the other, would just ratchet up. That would pressure them to get a deal worked out without US involvement directly. That’s the only way we don’t end up fucking ourselves, Ukraine, and ultimately Russia over. We should negotiate mineral rights deals separately and not tied to anything related to peace between the 2 countries.

Second, I didn’t publish a second piece about how much the states are getting screwed by the feds - but not the Medicaid side, the actual infrastructure and city and transportation sides. So much has been cut that nothing is going to happen in any city due to lack of funding - NY, Chicago, Atlanta (!), LA (of course), Seattle, and many more are literally cancelling huge projects already.

Third was about the Iron Bank of the East Coast and how everything right now is a very large, um, “laundry reminiscent” process of filtering debt of Some Big Country that Another Big Trade War Country owns over to a third Small Neutral Country all for pennies on the dollar at each stop in the process and then… tadaaa…. Back to the people who Have Always Had The Most Money On Earth Located in Country 1 of this explanation. Cleans the debt, clears the books, puts the West Coast Elite back in a hole because the Iron Bank never liked New Money and tells those New Money Fuckers to Fuck Right Off. Everything runs in a circle.

mysterious? I sure hope so. But if you get it, you get it. You just have to maybe think about it for a few secs.

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