Leaked RAND Report Suggests U.S. Is Crashing Europe's Economy On Purpose

"Protesters attend a demonstration against rising energy prices on Parliament Square in London on Feb. 12." Photo: CHRIS J. RATCLIFFE/GETTY IMAGES"  Source: Foreign Policy*

If you're like me you may have wondered if the U.S./NATO knew what they were setting in motion when they slapped sanctions on Russia and insisted their allies follow suit or else. Within six months Europe's fuel costs have skyrocketed, factories have shut down for lack of fuel, and citizens are rioting over their energy bills. The Euro is tanking, and the ruble is stronger than ever. With Nordstream 1 & 2 pipelines carrying gas from Russia to Germany fully shut down, a very cold winter is looming.

Was this crisis in Europe unexpected, or planned? 

You gotta love whistleblowers. One day they're pursuing a lucrative career in the service of empire, and the next they've had an attack of conscience and leaked information of historic importance. They often pay dearly for this. Let's hope the mole at the RAND corporation, or one of its many clients, escapes with his or her freedom and life intact.

Here in a series of screenshots is a leaked report published by Swedish news source Nya Dagbladet yesterday (you can read their article on the leaked info here):

Copyright page looks authentic but could of course be a forgery. How to evaluate its authenticity?

RAND denied authorship while throwing around a lot of neocon narrative management tropes like "truth decay" and "firehose of falsehood." Hmm...

One approach to deciding who is deploying the firehose might be to read some authenticated RAND reports and see if this one is consistent in terms of content, strategy, and tone. RAND is best known for being the architect of the first Cold War, and by its own reports in 2020 received more than 75% of its funding from the federal government.

So, for comparison purposes, here is the infamous and fully authenticated RAND study from 2019 planning for regime change in Russia. 

"Overextending And Unbalancing Russia: Assessing the Impact of Cost-imposing Options" is widely viewed as the blueprint for using Ukraine as a proxy for NATO to menace Russia. 

An excerpt:

Russia remains a powerful country that still manages to be a U.S. peer competitor in a few key domains. Recognizing that some level of competition with Russia is inevitable, RAND researchers conducted a qualitative assessment of “cost-imposing options” that could unbalance and overextend Russia. Such cost-imposing options could place new burdens on Russia, ideally heavier burdens than would be imposed on the United States for pursuing those options.

And here is RAND's 2016 report, "War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable." An excerpt:

the United States can prepare for a long and severe war by reducing its vulnerability to Chinese A2AD forces and developing plans to ensure that economic and international consequences would work to its advantage

Both these reports are well worth reading in their entirety especially if, as a U.S. taxpayer, you paid for them. As for the leaked report, the cynical manipulation of the German Green Party to support the war on Russia via Ukraine is foretold (or, if you doubt the report's veracity, reflected).

Which brings us to the most suspicious aspect of the leaked report on tanking Germany's economy: from the Executive Summary's opening paragraphs, it appears to have been prepared for the Democratic Party among other clients (see title page above listing "DNC"). Since the other recipients are governmental agencies, may we assume that this analysis and report was funded by U.S. taxpayers on behalf of Democrats? 

After citing fiscal policies under both the previous administration and the current one (so, both R and D), the report warns of a banking crisis a la 2008 in markets flooded by quantitative easing i.e. printing more dollars. Then, the report goes on to reveal a partisan bias which is unusual for RAND reports I have previously read.

Excerpt:

The continuing deterioration of the economic situation is highly likely to lead to a loss in the position of the Democratic Party in Congress and the Senate[sic] in the forthcoming elections to be held in November 2022. The impeachment of the President cannot be ruled out under these circumstances, which must be avoided at all costs.

So, keeping one of the two corporate parties in power is the driving force behind U.S. belligerence and trouble making in Europe? 

Cue the "dark Brandon" memes.

*Foreign Policy is a major source of narratives supporting U.S./UK/NATO ambitions. Since we know that some things are best understood in retrospect, here are a couple of current headlines from FP to ponder:

Information Into Action

Do you like to inform yourself but also feel the need to put information into action?

You could read this informative article from Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy, Why the Jobs Argument Against Military Cuts Is Bogus. In a nutshell: because military spending is lousy at generating jobs, and the path to full employment lies elsewhere.

Then, you could spring into action and register to participate in the Federal Budget Activity I will be leading at a "Military Industrial Complex at 50" conference in Charlottesville, VA Sep 17.

Then you might go on to write a letter to the editor, op-ed, blog post, share on facebook or otherwise communicate with the increasingly bewildered U.S. public. To make this even more fun, you could get PINK and show up with your message at a large public event -- such as we did yesterday in Maine at the Blue Angels Air Show protest organized by Tom Sturtevant of Veterans for Peace.

It was great to be in action with a Libyan-American family from Portland, and to hear about the connection between militarism and environmental harm from Beth Adams, who was headed to the Tar Sands action at the White House next. Here are some of the disturbing facts Beth shared about the Pentagon's recruiter-polluter footprint:

The Navy requires local sponsors to provide 48,600 gallons of fuel per weekend show. In FY10 the Blue Angels used 97,610 barrels, or 4.1 million gallons of fuel, emitting 88 million pounds of carbon dioxide. The Pentagon uses more petroleum than any other agency on the planet---$13-18 billion anually, more than 80 percent of the U.S. government's total.

Besides wasting clean air, flying jets around to show off wastes a lot of tax $$ too. A point made here by our friends from Food not Bombs, who came to feed us.

Of course if you're really feeling ambitious, you could contact all the public officials who claim to represent you and share some information with them. Maybe get a local war $$ home resolution passed, or at least discussed. You could model it on the US Conference of Mayors resolution, which resulted from a whole lot of activism on the part of a large coalition of people nationwide. Report on the backstory in In These Times: Turning Strategy Into Victory by Dana Balicki. Go team!