AUKUS ‘JobGiver’: a non-recourse handout to overseas companies and workers

Pearls and Irritations, by Rex Patrick | Jun 17, 2024 

The Morrison Government encountered Opposition scorn for failing to include claw-back provisions in its JobKeeper program. Yet the Albanese Government is making the same mistake with its ‘JobGiver’ submarines program. Rex Patrick reports…………………………………………………………..

The money sinkhole

On 13 March 2023, Prime Minister Albanese announced in San Diego that the AUKUS submarine program would cost a mind-blowing $368 billion. That’s $13,850 per man, woman, and child in Australia. And that’s not including the cost of managing the spent nuclear fuel for 100,000 years.

At the time he offset the cost issue with a ‘jobs at home’ pitch. “The program will create around 20,000 direct jobs over the next 30 years across industry, the Defence Force and the Australian Public Service including trades workers, operators, technicians, engineers, scientists, submariners and project managers.

In early September 2023, it was revealed that, as part of the program, Australians were to gift almost $4.7B in taxpayer’s money to grow the US submarine industrial base to enable the transfer of US Virginia attack-class submarines to the Royal Australian Navy.

Along with a similar contribution to the UK, ‘JobGiver’ was born.

JobGiver

Shortly after the announcement, I FOI’ed the Submarine Agency for “The agreement between Australia and the United States that goes to Australia making significant financial contributions into the Submarine Special Activities Account”.

I was concerned about the T’s and C’s. How would the money be spent? When would the money be paid to the US? Was there a clawback provision?

The request was answered with a big fat “access denied”.

Access denied (Source: FOI)

The FOI matter is on appeal, but Senator David Shoebridge has been inquiring into the details at Senate Estimates. In an exchange with Vice Admiral Jonathon Mead, the head of the Australian Submarine Agency, he unhelpfully refused to confirm that the $4.7B would be returned to Australia if the US decided not to provide the Virginia submarines in 2035.

Most likely, in other words, there is no clawback, just like ‘JobKeeper’.

A real risk of default

“the risk the US will not deliver a submarine to Australia is high”

Whilst the US Congress passed into law, via the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, permission to transfer the first two of three to five Virginia class submarines to Australia, the approval contains a caveat.

Before any US submarine can be transferred to the Royal Australian Navy, the US President must certify to the Congress that he or she is of the view that the transfer is not inconsistent with US foreign policy and national security interests.

They’re ‘Humpty Dumpty’ words that will mean just what the President chooses them to mean – nothing more, nothing less. A future US President can kill the deal for subjective reasons at any time.

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The Morrison Government encountered Opposition scorn for failing to include claw-back provisions in its JobKeeper program. Yet the Albanese Government is making the same mistake with its ‘JobGiver’ submarines program. Rex Patrick reports.

On 23 November 2021, then-opposition Treasurer Jim Chalmers rose in the House of Representatives and delivered a fiery speech on the performance of the Liberal Coalition Government.

When he spoke about managing the economy, Chalmers mentioned ‘JobKeeper and declared it the “defining example” of Coalition economic mismanagement.

“JobKeeper was a great idea,” he said. “Frydenberg, the butterfingers of Australian politics, got his hands on it and he turned a good program into a program that wasted tens of billions of dollars, and that’s why the Financial Review wrote an article headlined ‘Frydenberg fires JobKeeper missile at himself’. If you look at that piece in the Financial Review, I think the key conclusion is that they describe the current Treasurer as ‘lighter than helium’.”

He went on to describe the economy as a piece of software: “Wasting money is not a bug in this government; it is a feature of this government.”

Three months later, opposition leader Anthony Albanese weighed in, describing to the House a Treasurer who had “not put in place appropriate protections for taxpayers’ interests when it comes to the JobKeeper program, resulting in

over $20 billion going to companies that were increasing their profits.

And that leads us to ‘JobGiver’.

The money sinkhole

On 13 March 2023, Prime Minister Albanese announced in San Diego that the AUKUS submarine program would cost a mind-blowing $368 billion. That’s $13,850 per man, woman, and child in Australia. And that’s not including the cost of managing the spent nuclear fuel for 100,000 years.

At the time he offset the cost issue with a ‘jobs at home’ pitch. “The program will create around 20,000 direct jobs over the next 30 years across industry, the Defence Force and the Australian Public Service including trades workers, operators, technicians, engineers, scientists, submariners and project managers.

In early September 2023, it was revealed that, as part of the program, Australians were to gift almost $4.7B in taxpayer’s money to grow the US submarine industrial base to enable the transfer of US Virginia attack-class submarines to the Royal Australian Navy.

Along with a similar contribution to the UK, ‘JobGiver’ was born.

JobGiver

Shortly after the announcement, I FOI’ed the Submarine Agency for “The agreement between Australia and the United States that goes to Australia making significant financial contributions into the Submarine Special Activities Account”.

I was concerned about the T’s and C’s. How would the money be spent? When would the money be paid to the US? Was there a clawback provision?

The request was answered with a big fat “access denied”.

Access denied (Source: FOI)

The FOI matter is on appeal, but Senator David Shoebridge has been inquiring into the details at Senate Estimates. In an exchange with Vice Admiral Jonathon Mead, the head of the Australian Submarine Agency, he unhelpfully refused to confirm that the $4.7B would be returned to Australia if the US decided not to provide the Virginia submarines in 2035.

Most likely, in other words, there is no clawback, just like ‘JobKeeper’.

https://michaelwest.com.au/aukus-submarines-risk-too-high/embed/#?secret=25f6A060s5#?secret=12z9UZCCZV

A real risk of default

The clawback matters, because

the risk the US will not deliver a submarine to Australia is high.

Whilst the US Congress passed into law, via the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, permission to transfer the first two of three to five Virginia class submarines to Australia, the approval contains a caveat.

Before any US submarine can be transferred to the Royal Australian Navy, the US President must certify to the Congress that he or she is of the view that the transfer is not inconsistent with US foreign policy and national security interests.

They’re ‘Humpty Dumpty’ words that will mean just what the President chooses them to mean – nothing more, nothing less. A future US President can kill the deal for subjective reasons at any time.

But there’s a more objective threat. The US industrial base is not building enough submarines for its own needs, let alone ours. The magic build rate requirement for the US is 2.3 submarines per annum (to meet its attack and ballistic submarine needs, as well as Australia’s). Right now, the build rate is only 1.4, and with issues also plaguing their maintenance shipyards, there’s not a lot of optimism that it’s going to get anywhere near the 2.3 needed (apart from the blind optimism inside the Australian Submarine Agency and the Defence Minister Marles’ office).

But wait. there’s more.

Of course, there are also risks in the UK ‘JobGiver’ payment we will make, again without a claw back. They’re unlikely to walk away from us on account of the perilous state of their submarine  industry,

“but they reliably deliver submarines that are late and over budget.”

The UK needs our money to assist them deal with their own moribund state. But their moribund state is exactly the reason they should not be our partner.

When fending off his ‘JobKeeper’ fiducial failure, Frydenberg was at least able to say that the wasted taxpayers largely went back into the Australian economy. Chalmers won’t be able to say that of the ‘JobGiver’ money that’s going to the US.

I say Chalmers, because Albanese’s unlikely to be around when the US say “sorry” to us. But there’s some chance that Chalmers will be Prime Minister in 2034/5. Whoever is shadow Treasurer at that time won’t be calling Chalmers ‘Helium Man’, like he labelled Frydenberg – rather it will be ‘Hydrogen Man’, on account of the fact that hydrogen is even lighter than helium.   https://michaelwest.com.au/aukus-handout-to-companies-and-workers-elsewhere/

June 17, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Nuclear options: New research on SMRs raises questions over Australia’s energy debate

June 13, 2024, David Schlissel and Dennis Wamsted,  https://ieefa.org/resources/nuclear-options-new-research-smrs-raises-questions-over-australias-energy-debate

 Key Findings

Following the recent publication of CSIRO research showing that large-scale nuclear would be costly and slow to implement in Australia, a new report from IEEFA shows that similar challenges exist for small modular reactors (SMRs).

SMRs remain a relatively new, unproven technology that are too expensive, would take too long to build, and would present too many risks to play a significant role in Australia’s energy transition.

IEEFA’s research also raises questions over claims SMRs would be a complementary resource for electric grids dominated by renewables, as they are best placed to provide continuous generation with a high capacity factor.

Investing in SMRs would risk derailing the transition away from fossil fuels, potentially delaying it significantly. Policymakers, utilities and investors should embrace the reality that renewables, storage and DER offer the near-term solution to Australia’s energy transition.

After CSIRO released modelling in May showing that large-scale nuclear is highly costly and would take a long time to implement, some might conclude this puts the other nuclear option – small modular reactors (SMRs) – back on the table.

Well… perhaps not.

Nuclear power is now a debated topic in Australia, with the opposition Coalition flagging it as a cornerstone of its energy policy. Although details remain scarce, news reports suggest it may entail building nuclear reactors on the sites of decommissioned coal power stations. The Coalition was originally focused on installation of SMRs, but later changed focus to large-scale nuclear.

However, questions were raised on 22 May with the release of the 2023-24 annual GenCost report by Australia’s national science agency. For this year’s report, CSIRO included large-scale nuclear power for the first time. It concluded that large-scale nuclear would be more expensive than renewables, and would require at least 15 years to develop, including construction.

The opposition has disputed the report’s findings and asked CSIRO to rerun its modelling. However, given the numerous political, regulatory, financial and logistical challenges that nuclear generation projects routinely encounter, as well as the absence of any large-scale nuclear industry in Australia, it seems reasonable to assume that – at the very least – the timeline for such a plan would carry a high degree of uncertainty.

So, with the prospects for large-scale generation somewhat diminished, perhaps the focus may turn to SMRs. SMRs have long been touted to be quicker and cheaper to construct than we’ve seen previously with more conventional nuclear plants.

However, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) is this week releasing new research that suggests SMRs do not represent any more credible an option than large-scale nuclear plants. IEEFA’s report, SMRs: Still Too Expensive, Too Slow and Too Risky, reinforces previous research by IEEFA, showing that SMRs are too costly, they would take too long to build, and they would present too many risks to play a significant role in Australia’s energy transition away from fossil fuels.

The nuclear industry remains beset by frequent cost overruns and schedule delays, and SMRs have not been exempt from these problems. SMRs remain a relatively new, unproven technology. Drawing on the experiences of operating and proposed SMRs, our researchers found the reactors would continue to take much longer to build than their advocates claim, and at a much higher costs.

SMR construction cost estimates keep rising

SMRs in operation or under construction in China, Russia and Argentina have seen their costs increase three- to seven-fold since their original cost estimate. Cost estimates for US SMRs have also multiplied by between two and four in recent years. In addition to the cost issues, long delays have been the norm, not the exception, with projected schedules of three to four years at the start of construction stretching to 12-13 years.

The report also raises questions regarding claims that SMRs would be complementary resources for electric grids dominated by renewables – as is increasingly the case in Australia. SMRs are best placed to provide continuous generation with a high capacity factor. The less they run, the more their cost per megawatt-hour (MWh) increases. With a utilisation factor of 25%, the cost for an American SMR would be US$400/MWh, or about A$600/MWh.

Importantly, investing in SMRs would risk derailing the transition away from fossil fuels, potentially delaying it significantly. It would divert funding and resources away from the carbon-free alternative technologies like renewable energy generation and battery storage, the costs of which have plunged in recent years with further reductions to come.

These are technologies that can have a meaningful impact on Australia’s energy transition in the coming 10 years. IEEFA research has highlighted a wealth of opportunities to accelerate the transition through the likes of large-scale renewables and storage, distributed energy resources (DER), electrification of households, optimising large-scale energy storage, and smart demand-side measures. All of these are proven, low-cost options that are ready to be deployed now.

Policymakers, utilities and investors should embrace the reality that it is renewables, storage and DER, not SMRs, that offer the near-term solution to Australia’s energy transition.

June 16, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Why the AFR economics editor is wrong on GenCost, nuclear and “always on” power

RenewEconomy, David Leitch, Jun 14, 2024

It’s great to see that John Kehoe, economics editor at the AFR now wants to write about the CSIRO Gencost report.

Kehoe implies or states that the CSIRO report is biased and makes incorrect assumptions. Specifically, he quotes others as saying that coal generation is cheaper than renewable generation and that the CSIRO report underplays the advantages of always on dispatchable power.

In my opinion the article gets quite a few things wrong, probably most importantly the assumption that always on-power is somehow “better” than power that is not always on, and that this should be allowed for in the Gencost report. In my opinion this reflects the usual naive biases of someone that hasn’t put much work into the topic.

In this note I seek to show that LCOE capacity factor assumptions can be done on a number of bases and that there is no single right or wrong answer.

As with all modelling the suitability of the assumptions comes down to the question that is being answered. Gencost style LCOE modelling does not suit my own taste because it tries to go beyond the individual asset into the system cost, a task far better left to the Integrated System Plan (ISP).

However, even in the stricter view of LCOE that I espouse there is an inescapable need to choose between technical and economic capacity factor assumptions for dispatchable plant. At the least within the context of what I see as a “potshot” article Kehoe could have acknowledged the issue.

……………………………………Historically Kehoe’s research has been balanced and reasonable, even enjoyable. This article, it seems to me, is not balanced.

Kehoe writes:

“GenCost bizarrely assumes coal is more expensive than renewables”

That statement is both biased and flat out incorrect. An outcome of the Gencost process is to find that a new coal plant built under the Gencost assumptions has a higher LCOE than a wind or solar plant. That, of course, is even ignoring the carbon cost. There is no “bizarre assumption” it’s an outcome of the model assumptions. By all means have a go at the modelling assumptions, but please avoid assuming the conclusion.

Kehoe then quotes Aidan Morrison (from the Centre of Independent Studies) with seeming approval:

“Renewables are definitely not cheaper than coal”.

In fact, numerous studies find renewables to be cheaper than coal. Kehoe does absolutely nothing in the article to check the validity or otherwise of that statement.

I might add I do my own modelling, but I’m not shy of checking my numbers against those that others use.

Globally, in my opinion, there are at least two publishers of LCOE that are a source of authority. The first is Lazard who published Version 17.0 of the their annual Gencost study just recently. The numbers are for the US in $US

Every estimate of LCOE has several assumptions. Here, I draw attention to Lazard’s use of: 60% debt at 8% and 40% equity at 12% and the assumption that a nuclear plant operates at 97% capacity utilisation for 80 years.

The other major source is BNEF. BNEF almost certainly have the industry’s largest global team of full time energy related analysts. However, most of their work is highly paywalled reflecting the value added.

To summarise, no global analyst would be in the least bit surprised to find a report stating that in Australia the LCOE of wind and solar is less than coal. To be honest I’d have been very surprised at anything else. It’s been that way for years and even if wind costs are much higher then it’s likely that new coal generation costs have risen as much.

What is LCOE and should we care?

I’ve been calculating LCOEs for 30 years and more, and I am here to tell you there is no definitive “right” answer. No two people doing the sums will use the same assumptions. Also, unsurprisingly, the assumptions going into an LCOE calculation can generally be changed to to give a different answer.

I doubt that people in the industry really spend a lot of time on published LCOEs. Personally, I have never paid any more attention to Gencost numbers than to Lazard numbers.

Every financial analyst there has ever been is basically fine calculating their own NPV estimates of a generation asset and it takes only the slightest amount of rearranging to turn that NPV calculation into an LCOE.

As such, why use someone else’s numbers when you can use your own. Where the skill comes is understanding the assumptions and why you would choose one and not another and how sensitive the result is to an assumption choice.

It’s also important to appreciate that costs change in the real world as well as in the spreadsheet. A few years ago onshore wind LCOEs could be calculated in the A$40/MWh area. Today the numbers are double that.

LCOE = Levelised Cost of Energy essentially represents the price required for an electricity plant to exactly earn its cost of capital over its life. The origin of the term is unclear but it appears to have been first used in the 1980s. I understand it to be the same as Long Run Marginal Cost (LRMC) in the microeconomics lexicon.

To calculate the LCOE an analyst is required to forecast all costs of an asset over its life and then find a price for the annual output that will recover the present value of those costs.

To calculate the present value we make use of the time value of money. That is for example $1 to be received in one year’s time is worth less than $1 received today.

In short to calculate the LRMC:

• A discount rate must be chosen. In strict theory, and in practice not all technologies “should” have the same discount rate because some technolgies have riskier cash flows than others. For instance a gas generator may be subject to the market price of gas. In general higher discount rates will more heavily penalise technologies with longer term cash flows compared to those getting their cash back more quickly.

The useful life of the technology must be assumed. However, it is very widespread practice to calculate the net present value of a project for a finite life. Typically one of 20, 25 or 30 years is chosen. Due to the magic of discounting the value today of a life longer than 30 years is a small part of the total value. For instance at a discount rate of 10% years 30-60 add 6% to the value of a project and years 60-90 add nothing to the present value today.

So making a nuclear plant 80 years instead of 30 changes the answer by 6-13%. Not trivial but not all that big. Equally if you are going to do that for one technology you have to do it for every technology. Pumped hydro developers are always complaining that analysts don’t give them enough credit for long life.

• Of course, these discount calculations take no account of the technology and uncertainty that the future bring, just the time value calculation.

The capacity factor needs to be estimated. Capacity factor is expected output/output if operated every hour of the year. Solar plants have a low capacity factor, they only operate in daylight hours. The industry even has a term for plants that are dispatchable but only expected to operate occasionally, and that’s “peakers”. In fact the entire concept of the “merit order” presupposes that capital intensive plant will need a higher capacity factor than capital light but higher operating cost plant.

• Kehoe is on safer ground than in most places in his article when he observes that cost and value are not the same. Consumers every where will be grateful for this epiphany.

Capital cost needs to be estimated. In the case where lots of a technology is being built capital costs are not that hard. For technologies like coal and nuclear capital cost estimates in Australia are pretty much a guess. Another associated assumption is generally that the piece of kit can be built “overnight”. That is a nuclear plant can be built in the same time as a solar plant or coal plant or offshore wind plant.

I am reasonably confident that if the construction time was factored into a nuclear plant then from an NPV estimate it would likely take care of the continuing life assumption. If we factored in carbon costs between now and 2030 this overnight cost assumption would look like a bigger miss than the continuing value.

• Fuel costs need to be estimated. It should be obvious that thermal fuel costs, including perhaps future carbon costs are uncertain in some cases. For some coal generation you can assume an owned or “captive” coal mine in other cases less so. In the end someone has to take the risk around the cost of the fuel, either the generator or further upstream.

System cost v technology cost, the true weakness of Gencost

1. In the past exercises such as Gencost or LAZARD 17, LCOE estimates served a limited purpose of calculating the price required to justify the investment in one piece of kit.

It was never the case that a piece of kit can operate in isolation from a system. A coal plant or a nuclear plant needs transmission as much as a wind or a solar plant. And it’s a matter of historical record that the pumped hydro industry in the US was developed to back up nuclear plants.

1. However, in the past no-one cared that the LCOE of a coal plant was only part of the total system cost. And in my opinion the preferred view should be that LCOE estimates, Gencost included, should in general confine them selves to the price required for the individual asset.

It’s the job of system builders, the job of the ISP designers, to put the bits of kit together and create a system and estimate the system LCOE. That is the cost required to build and operate a system, such as the NEM.

1. The ISP uses a complex modelling methodology, orders of magnitude above what can be provided in any LCOE individual asset analysis.

• The ISP has its own strengths and weaknesses like any other model, but the point here is that within its assumptions it builds the lowest cost system capable of keeping the lights on and meeting policy objectives. Certainly, the ISP takes account of capacity factors.

 Dispatchable power capacity factors require a viewpoint

• Capacity factors were briefly discussed above. Even for wind and solar plant capacity factor is not as simple in the real world as is sometimes assumed in the spreadsheet. For instance should “spillage” be allowed for, should capacity factor be before or after an MLF assumption? For single axis solar there is an assumption about the DC:AC ratio.

Where the question becomes a double or nothing kind of thing is for dispatchable power. Specifically gas, coal and nuclear. The question is whether to use technical or economic capacity factor. It’s not a question that I’ve worried much about in the past, but it’s a legitimate question.

• It’s most obvious to think about this in the context of open cycle gas. I imagine that an open cycle gas plant is technically capable of operating at about a 70% capacity factor. Maybe more.

That is even allowing for blade maintenance if there was enough gas, noone cared about carbon emissions and the price was right you could run it about 70% of all the hours in the year.

I don’t really know what the technical capacity factor is because generally open cycle gas plants are not run like that. They are run to provide peak capacity and because of the prices they receive can sometimes earn their cost of capital on capacity factors less than 10%.

• From the point of LCOE if you assumed a capacity factor of 70% the gas plant would require a much lower price than if you assume a capacity factor of 10%.

The plant is technically capable of 70% but in use won’t run more than 10% of the time. What capacity factor should the modeller use? I am going to suggest that a modeller that uses 70% won’t be taken all that seriously.

Nuclear capacity factor in Australia

1. In summary: Nuclear is very expensive even when modelled at full capacity factor. Using the latest recently published Lazard estimate for the USA which itself employees a capacity factor of 97% its around US$190/MWh or A$280/MWh.

However, even though nuclear is technically capable of being ramped up and down it ruins the economics.

1. Consider the changing look of coal generation in the NEM.

Coal generation NEM wide

This is a year long average by time of day and why I used 2023 rather than 2024.

In another 5 years there will be at least another 10 GW of solar, and actually counting behind the meter and utility very likely there will be another 15 GW of solar. All that will reduce demand for any other source of generation to zero in the middle of the day.

It’s hard to see why any rational policy maker would want to run a nuclear plant in the middle of the day, let alone 5-10 of them. It’s an utter waste of resources.

Generation technology choices do not live in isolation from the system in which they operate. For those not already tired of the debate around small, modular reactors (SMR) the fact is that they are not a technology designed to deal with the reality of a system that has lots of renewables and specifically lots of solar.

It is a fact that a nuclear plant built in Australia that sold its electricity into the spot market would, for the foreseeable future, get pretty much zero for that electricity during daylight hours. Rationally it would be turned off, or alternatively like wind and solar plants operating at the same time the energy can be spilled.

Although apparently not appreciated by John Kehoe, this was explained by Steve Hamilton and Luke Heeney in the SMH back on 18 March. It would be tedious for readers for me to repeat the discussion but the whole reason that coal plants are going away is because they lose money in the middle of the day, more than they can recover in the evening. Consultants have been writing reports about this for years.

As Hamilton and Feeney write:

“The trouble is that nuclear is a terrible companion to renewables. The defining characteristic of being “compatible” with renewables is the ability to scale up and down as needed to “firm” renewables. Countries like France can only make nuclear work by exporting large amounts of energy when it’s surplus to demand. ”

This then is the problem that the CSIRO faces when thinking about a new coal or nuclear plant, what is the appropriate capacity factor to use?

In short there is nothing wrong with using 97% as the capacity factor for a nuclear plant, but if you are looking at it from an economic viability point of view neither is there anything wrong with using say 50%. And if you use 50% you end up with far higher cost.

More to the point, nuclear has two advantages for Australia. First it is carbon free, second to some extent it can make use of existing transmission.

Against that it has massive disadvantages. It’s incredibly expensive, the potential construction delay risk is totally unacceptable and the technology is fundamentally unsuited to Australia’s generation mix.

[EXCELLENT GRAPHS HERE on original]………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

To summarise, no global analyst would be in the least bit surprised to find a report stating that in Australia the LCOE of wind and solar is less than coal. To be honest I’d have been very suprised at anything else. It’s been that way for years and even if wind costs are much higher then it’s likely that new coal generation costs have risen as much https://reneweconomy.com.au/why-the-afr-economics-editor-is-wrong-on-gencost-nuclear-and-always-on-power/

June 15, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

TODAY. UK and other mainstream media -oblivious of the suicidal danger of attacking Russia

Once again, I am grateful to the extraordinary Dominic Cummings, for expressing this so eloquently:

“If you want to see the rot of the old system consider this.

A week ago (5/6/24), Putin called in the international media. He told them: NATO has given Ukraine long range missiles to strike deep in Russia, why don’t we have the right to give weapons to other regimes to do the same to NATO, we are considering such options…

And what media coverage do you see?

The old UK media almost entirely censored the event. Although widely discussed globally, it is a non-event in the UK. I’d bet >95% of MPs don’t know it happened.

Not only is our Idiocracy escalating a disastrous war they’ve blundered into they’re censoring statements from the world’s biggest nuclear power directly threatening us with reprisals for our actions, shoving celebrity gossip onto the BBC website rather than translating Putin’s words (then they claim ‘trust the BBC not disinformation’!). And funding Ukraine which is drone-striking Russian early-warning radars for nuclear weapons, of no relevance to the UKR war.

The gap between the self-perception of our elite media and the reality has not been starker since I started watching them.”

Strange – in 1963 U.S. President John F Kennedy gave a similar warning his American University speech:

“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

June 13, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment