Last Call For Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

 A land-for-peace deal in Ukraine may not be that far off, or it could be in the next solar system, depending on which Ukrainian official you talk to.

Ukraine is willing to become neutral and compromise over the status of the eastern Donbass region as part of a peace deal, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday, even as another top Ukrainian official accused Russia of aiming to carve the country in two.

Zelenskiy took his message directly to Russian journalists in a video call that the Kremlin pre-emptively warned Russian media not to report, saying any agreement must be guaranteed by third parties and put to a referendum. read more

"Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are ready to go for it," he said, speaking in Russian.

But even as Turkey is set to host talks this week, Ukraine's head of military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, said Russian President Vladimir Putin was aiming to seize the eastern part of Ukraine.

"In fact, it is an attempt to create North and South Korea in Ukraine," he said, referring to the division of Korea after World War Two. Zelenskiy has urged the West to give Ukraine tanks, planes and missiles to help fend off Russian forces.

In a call with Putin on Sunday, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan agreed to hold talks this week in Istanbul and called for a ceasefire and better humanitarian conditions, his office said. Ukrainian and Russian negotiators confirmed that in-person talks would take place. read more

Top American officials sought on Sunday to clarify that the United States does not have a policy of regime change in Russia, after President Joe Biden said at the end of a speech in Poland on Saturday that Putin "cannot remain in power".

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Biden had simply meant Putin could not be "empowered to wage war" against Ukraine or anywhere else. read more

After more than four weeks of conflict, Russia has failed to seize any major Ukrainian city and signalled on Friday it was scaling back its ambitions to focus on securing the Donbass region, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting the Ukrainian army for the past eight years.

 

Ukraine's a mess, and back stateside, the American people are much more worried about paying the bills than pursuing peace in Ukraine.

Amid Europe’s largest land war since World War II, 7 in 10 Americans expressed low confidence in President Joe Biden’s ability to deal with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a new NBC News poll, and 8 in 10 voiced worry that the war will increase gas prices and possibly involve nuclear weapons.

And during the nation’s largest inflation spike in 40 years, overwhelming majorities said they believe the country is headed in the wrong direction and disapproved of the president’s handling of the economy.

Those are some of the major findings of the new national NBC News poll, which found that Biden’s overall job approval rating had declined to 40 percent, the lowest level of his presidency. The survey also found that Republicans enjoyed a 2-point lead in answer to which party should control Congress ahead of November’s midterm elections.

“What this poll says is that President Biden and Democrats are headed for a catastrophic election,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinions Strategy, who conducted this survey with Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates.

The poll was conducted between March 18-22, before the president's overseas trip, where he was to meet with NATO allies, visit with U.S. troops in Poland and deliver a major speech on Russia's war in Ukraine.

 

It's going to take some time for Fed measures to get inflation under control. It's time that Biden and the Democrats don't have, and Republicans continue to block Biden's Build Back Better plan.

 

Unfortunately, Sen. Joe Manchin continues to play games with the bill as well. One of those things has to change in the next few months, or November's going to get ugly.

 

If Ukraine takes a major turn for the worse and Putin decides he's going to go out with a bang, well, all bets are off too.

 

Robin Hood Meets The Merry Manchin

As much as I would love to see America's multi-millionaires and billionaires have to pay, this will never happen in your lifetime.

 

The White House will unveil a new minimum tax targeting billionaires as part of its 2023 budget Monday, proposing a tax on the richest 700 Americans for the first time, according to five people with knowledge of the matter and an administration document obtained by The Washington Post.

The “Billionaire Minimum Income Tax” plan under President Biden would establish a 20 percent minimum tax rate on all American households worth more than $100 million, the document says. The majority of new revenue raised by the tax would come from billionaires.

Biden has long favored higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans, but the White House has not introduced a tax plan specifically designed to hit billionaires until now. The plan comes amid signs that the administration’s negotiations with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) over stalled White House economic proposal may be reviving. But all previous efforts to tax billionaires have failed amid major political head winds, and it is unclear if Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) will go along with the plan.

Many billionaires can pay far lower tax rates than average Americans because the federal government does not tax the increase in the value of their stock holdings until those assets are sold. Billionaires are able to borrow against their accumulated gains without triggering taxes on capital gains, enabling huge accumulations of wealth to go virtually untaxed by the federal government.

The White House Office of Management and Budget and Council of Economic Advisers estimated this fall that 400 billionaire families paid an average federal tax rate of just over 8 percent of their income between 2010 and 2018. That rate is lower than the rate paid by millions of Americans.

The White House plan would mandate billionaires to pay a tax rate of at least 20 percent on their full income, or the combination of traditional forms of wage income and whatever they may have made in unrealized gains, such as higher stock prices.

Billionaires paying a rate below that will have to pay the difference between what they pay now and the 20 percent rate. Billionaires already paying more than 20 percent would not owe additional taxes. The taxes paid toward the minimum tax would count toward whatever billionaires owe once they have to pay ordinary capital gains taxes.

“The Billionaire Minimum Income Tax will ensure that the very wealthiest Americans pay a tax rate of at least 20 percent on their full income,” the White House document says. “This minimum tax would make sure that the wealthiest Americans no longer pay a tax rate lower than teachers and firefighters.”

White House officials estimate the tax would raise roughly $360 billion in new revenue over the next 10 years if enacted, according to the document. The proposal was developed by Biden aides at the Office of Management and Budget, the Treasury Department and the White House National Economic Council.

The White House is expected to release a budget Monday that includes increases in defense and nondefense spending, with a focus on mental health, child care, other social programs, and reducing the deficit, two other people familiar with the matter said. These people, like the others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect planning not yet made public.

Biden’s budget proposal will also cut the federal deficit by more than $1 trillion over the next decade, according to a White House document. News of the deficit reduction was first reported by the Associated Press.

 

Manchin will have killed this plan on the Sunday shows by next weekend at the latest. 

 

I don't even think the Democrats have the votes to pass something like this in the House, let alone get the 50 votes needed for budget reconciliation, if the Senate Parliamentarian even allowed it, let alone the Roberts Court declaring it a unconstitutional bill of attainder., let alone the reality of the wealthiest 700 Americans simply buying the votes they need to kill this plan.

It's cute, but in this case, Robin Hood Biden is facing down a storm of arrows fired by his own Merry Men, with longbows, crossbows, and probably a few ballistas paid for by Prince John.

Sunday Long Read: The War Correspondent

 This week's Sunday Long Read comes to us from the Associated Press and their team in Maripol, Ukraine. The true story of how Mstyslav Chernov and his colleague, photographer Evgeniy Maloletka got out of the city after three weeks of covering the siege from the inside is a hell of a read.

The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in.

We were the only international journalists left in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, and we had been documenting its siege by Russian troops for more than two weeks. We were reporting inside the hospital when gunmen began stalking the corridors. Surgeons gave us white scrubs to wear as camouflage.

Suddenly at dawn, a dozen soldiers burst in: “Where are the journalists, for fuck’s sake?”

I looked at their armbands, blue for Ukraine, and tried to calculate the odds that they were Russians in disguise. I stepped forward to identify myself. “We’re here to get you out,” they said.

The walls of the surgery shook from artillery and machine gun fire outside, and it seemed safer to stay inside. But the Ukrainian soldiers were under orders to take us with them.

We ran into the street, abandoning the doctors who had sheltered us, the pregnant women who had been shelled and the people who slept in the hallways because they had nowhere else to go. I felt terrible leaving them all behind.

Nine minutes, maybe 10, an eternity through roads and bombed-out apartment buildings. As shells crashed nearby, we dropped to the ground. Time was measured from one shell to the next, our bodies tense and breath held. Shockwave after shockwave jolted my chest, and my hands went cold.

We reached an entryway, and armored cars whisked us to a darkened basement. Only then did we learn from a policeman why the Ukrainians had risked the lives of soldiers to extract us from the hospital.

“If they catch you, they will get you on camera and they will make you say that everything you filmed is a lie,” he said. “All your efforts and everything you have done in Mariupol will be in vain.”

 The officer, who had once begged us to show the world his dying city, now pleaded with us to go. He nudged us toward the thousands of battered cars preparing to leave Mariupol.

It was March 15. We had no idea if we would make it out alive.

 

A warning, some of the photos and the account itself may be disturbing, but then again war is not a pretty thing, and we're only weeks into the first major European war of my lifetime, if not a much larger one in the future.