What Happened Today: April 27, 2022
Russia threatens nuclear war; Profiting off inflation; Our broken media
The Big Story
Days after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned of a “serious” risk of nuclear war over Ukraine, Vladimir Putin threatened to use nuclear weapons against anyone who “interferes” in his country’s strategic affairs—a clear reference to U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine. Putin’s remarks Wednesday, made before Russian legislators, come one week after Russia tested a Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The missile, which can reach the United States carrying a nuclear warhead, should “give thought to those who are trying to threaten Russia,” Putin said after the test. In between the ICBM test and the latest threats from Russia’s leaders, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv to promise more American military aid to Ukraine. Following that meeting, Austin said the U.S. goal for its involvement in the conflict is “to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” Shortly after those remarks, Lavrov gave a TV interview Monday night in which he accused NATO of “adding fuel to the fire” by arming a proxy to fight Russia. The danger of nuclear war, Lavrov said, is “serious, real. And we must not underestimate it.” The rhetoric from Russian leaders is clearly intended to dissuade outside countries from increasing support to Ukraine in a way that could alter the calculus of the war and threaten Moscow’s objectives. But those threats, far from hollow, are also consistent with established Russian military doctrine that calls for using “limited” tactical nuclear strikes as a method of “de-escalation” in conflicts where Russian conventional forces are outmatched.
Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10759651/Ukraine-war-Putin-suggest-use-nukes-necessary.html
In The Back Pages: Our Broken Media
The Rest
→ The story goes that basics like eggs and flour are getting more expensive because of inflation, and that’s true; but these essentials are also getting more expensive because companies are exploiting the “inflation narrative” of rising costs to further raise prices on consumer goods, bringing in record-breaking profits in the process. The Guardian analyzed Securities and Exchange Commission filings for 100 U.S. companies and found that “net profits [went] up by a median of 49%, and in one case by as much as 111,000%,” in their latest quarterly profits compared to two years prior. As profits were going up and prices were being increased, 90% of the companies “executed massive stock buyback programs or bumped dividends to enrich investors.” The Guardian also described earnings calls during which executives explicitly outlined how they’d passed inflation costs on to consumers—and then increased prices even further. Companies across industries and sectors, from Amazon to Chevron to Kroger to Nike to Steel Dynamics, are cashing in on this strategy, successfully making the most of the current fiscal crisis.
→ The ruble is rising. Russia’s currency hit a more than two-year high in trading against the euro on Wednesday, after Moscow backed Europe down by halting supplies of natural gas to Bulgaria and Poland because they initially refused to pay for their energy purchases in rubles. If you’re wondering how Russia’s currency could be doing so well in spite of what are supposed to be crushing sanctions, most of the answer is due to a global dependency on Russian energy exports that even the United States has been more than willing to continue buying while accusing Russia of genocide. The rest of the answer for the surprising resilience of the Russian economy is Moscow’s economic partnerships with China and India, which have partially offset the costs of becoming a pariah with the West.
Read it here: https://www.reuters.com/business/rouble-strengthens-moscow-russia-halts-gas-supplies-bulgaria-poland-2022-04-27/
And get the deeper background here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/why-america-only-pretends-to-compete-with-china
→ Russia’s war is threatening to spill beyond Ukraine, as several explosions have been reported in Transnistria, a sliver of a territory that formally belongs to Moldova but has been governed by Russian separatists since 1990. Since Monday, Transnistria’s state security headquarters, a Russian radio facility, and a Russian security unit were targeted in attacks that, according to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, were staged to look like a Ukrainian assault but were in fact the work of Russian special forces. “The goal is obvious,” Zelensky said in a statement released today. “[T]o destabilize the situation in the region, to threaten Moldova. They show that if Moldova supports Ukraine, there will be certain steps.” The statement follows a speech Zelensky gave on Tuesday in which he warned of Russia’s long-term goals in Europe. “There are almost no people left in the free world who do not understand that Russia's war against Ukraine is just the beginning,” he said.
→ Cried actual tears! Twitter’s “moral authority”—a senior executive named Vijaya Gadde who oversees content moderation on Twitter and was central in the platform’s decision to ban former president Trump and censor the New York Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop right before the 2020 election—got weepy on Monday while addressing her team about the implications of Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the company. According to Politico, Gadde grew emotional as she “spoke at length about how she is proud of the work her team has done and offered employees encouragement, urging them to keep striving to do good work at the company.” Musk responded on Twitter by pointing out that “[s]uspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.” Musk has promised to do away with Twitter’s content moderation altogether, saying that the company will only remove posts that are in violation of the law—a move that has inspired “mass deactivations,” according to Twitter. Musk’s policy changes may also suggest that the company’s “moral authority” might soon be packing up her office, though this won’t be too teary of an ordeal; Gadde, who “played a leading role in negotiating the deal between Twitter and Musk,” stands to make $12.5 million if Musk lays her off.
→ A single paragraph buried in Politico’s Playbook, the industry trade journal for Washington, D.C., politicos, announced on Wednesday morning that the Department of Homeland Security is “standing up a new Disinformation Governance Board to coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia.” The government’s latest office of truth and narrative regulation will be headed by Nina Jankowicz, a “disinformation expert” who previously helped run interference in the great “Hunter Biden laptop” episode. Jankowicz helped to spread the false claim that reporting based on the laptop was “Russian disinformation,” which was used to justify censoring it in the media and online but has been conclusively disproved, most recently by The New York Times and The Washington Post, which both quietly admitted in recent weeks that information taken from the laptops concerning Biden’s business deals is authentic.
→ Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Hashoah, began at sundown on Wednesday and will end at sundown on Thursday. A report released Wednesday by the Israeli government’s Social Equality Ministry estimates that 161,400 survivors are living in Israel, a figure that includes anyone who suffered from antisemitism during the Holocaust, and out of which 31% “survived camps or ghettos, lived under false names or went into hiding, or worked in forced labor,” according to The Times of Israel. An average of 42 survivors, at an average age of 85.5, die every day.
→ Republican House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy is defending himself against attacks from conservatives after leaked audiotapes first reported on by The New York Times showed him criticizing Donald Trump and fellow Republican members of Congress in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. On a Jan. 10 phone call with other Republican leaders, McCarthy accused two pro-Trump Republican representatives, Matt Gaetz of Florida and Mo Brooks of Alabama, of endangering other members of Congress and the Capitol complex. Following the calls, “McCarthy did not follow through on the sterner steps that some Republicans encouraged him to take,” according to the Times. On Wednesday, McCarthy told fellow House Republicans that the tapes had been deceptively edited, suggested he might support Trump if he runs again in 2024, and called for party unity ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
Jacob Siegel on Our Broken Media
A new trove of emails released by special counsel John Durham, who is investigating the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion claims, reveals a pattern of close coordination between prominent journalists and the opposition research firm working with the Hillary Clinton campaign. The emails make many journalists look bad, but no one comes across worse than Franklin Foer, the former editor of The New Republic who previously worked for Slate and now writes for The Atlantic.
The emails show a number of reporters at ABC News, The Washington Post, and Slate coordinating their coverage of the Trump campaign with Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm—essentially a private intelligence operation—working for Clinton and responsible for commissioning and then disseminating the hugely influential and utterly debunked Steele dossier.
In emails uncovered by the lawyer and Substack writer known as Techno Fog, Foer sends the full draft of a yet-to-be-published article—one of many he would write in an attempt to convert the Trump-Russia collusion claim created by a rival political campaign into an “objective” news story—to the members of Fusion GPS so they could look it over.
“I have no idea what my editor will say. But can you guys scan it for omissions and errors?” Foer wrote. I never went to journalism school—the closest I ever got was writing a single letter to my college newspaper—but I’m pretty sure they’d kick out any student who handed over editing duties to story subjects.
As Techno Fog put it in his initial write-up on the emails, “This is the press you don’t see: groveling to opposition researchers, begging for their assistance with ‘omissions and errors,’ and pleading that his draft not be distributed to the competition.”
* The Scroll reached out to Foer for comment but had not heard back by the time the newsletter was published. We will provide an update if we hear back.
Read more:
Wow, the first sentence of “The Big Story” is only partly true and fits right in with “Our Broken Media” article. Putin never threatened nuclear war as stated. Siegel may need to brush up on his language interpretation skills and revisit Putin’s comments for a more comprehensive understanding of the Russian threats.
Glad to see reference to Techno Fog/The Reactionary here.