The Ukraine War: Understanding And Resisting The Global Elite’s Deeper Agenda

Posted on April 7, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

In a televised address on 24 February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his decision to order Russian military forces to invade Ukraine in what he labeled a ‘special military operation’ to defend the recently declared self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and ‘to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine’. Watch President Putin’s speech here or read a transcript here.

Since the invasion started, there has been a huge amount of commentary on it from a vast range of authors with a remarkably diverse range of perspectives. Beyond this, the cascading impacts of the war along with the changes that have been precipitated at various levels, have already been far-reaching and will be increasingly devastating for humanity as a whole.

Here I will focus on some of the more obscure aspects of the deeper agenda that is driving this conflict to manifest in the way that it is occurring. This reflects my own long-standing interest in understanding how elite power manifests in the world.

As I have explained previously, since the dawn of human civilization 5,000 years ago, ‘ordinary’ people have been engaged in an ongoing struggle against elites, whether local, imperial, religious, economic, national or, now, global. See ‘Why Activists Fail’. But whatever the context, the elite intention is always the same: to kill undesired populations and/or control the lives of everyone else by depriving them of their fair share of political, economic, social and ecological resources.

Since about 1500CE, the intensity of this conflict has deepened considerably with elites intent on killing off a substantial proportion of the human population and enslaving those left alive. This has been done through imperial conquest precipitating genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples, wars, control of food supplies and other resources to generate mass starvation, medical technologies, the deployment of lethal technologies notably now including 5G and, most recently, an injectables program, ostensibly to protect against a ‘virus’. See ‘Killing Off Humanity: How the Global Elite Is Using Eugenics and Transhumanism to Shape Our Future’.

In essence, elite intention has never really wavered. To reiterate: Whatever ideology supposedly guided any elite in a particular context, the elite has usually wanted a substantial proportion of any local human population killed off and the bulk of those left alive reduced to slavery, in one form or another, while endlessly commandeering planetary resources for elite use.

The only differences between earlier eras and the present is that the assault on humanity is now genuinely global and it is in its final stage.

Unfortunately, too, this assault is happening in plain sight with the bulk of the population completely unaware of what is taking place and those who are at least concerned and resisting in some way focused on the ‘smoke and mirrors’ distraction presented by the ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ narrative and the antics of politicians.

Which means that the Elite’s kill and control agenda, being implemented through the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’, proceeds with minimal resistance. And those not killed by the various measures being used to depopulate humanity will be enslaved in a technological prison from which there will be no escape. After all, the absolutely minimum requirements for effective resistance are life, a mind with free will and food to eat, none of which can be taken for granted any longer.

So Where Does the War in Ukraine Fit into All This?

Well, at immediate and great personal cost to those soldiers and civilians killed or otherwise adversely impacted by the fighting, the war is being used as a smokescreen to obscure a highly orchestrated sequence of events that accelerate the Global Elite’s kill and control agenda, in just the same way that the Covid-19 narrative has done.

Using two wealthy members of the World Economic Forum – President Vladimir Putin of Russia (see ‘All Putin’s Men: Secret Records Reveal Money Network Tied to Russian Leader’) and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine (see ‘What Pandora Papers revealed about Zelensky offshore accounts and funding from Ukranian kleptocracy’) – backed by a supporting cast of key elite agents and unwitting accomplices throughout institutions such as NATO, the European Union, the US and other governments, the corporate media and elsewhere, the military conflict rages on in clear public view, with much debate about various measures being implemented as part of this conflict – such as sanctions by many countries on Russia – while several vitally important outcomes are obscured from general view or accepted as ‘unfortunate’ consequences of the war rather than planned measures of the elite to kill or control us all.

‘What outcomes are these?’ you might ask.

Well, while this war rages on, generating enormous emotion among those siding with either Russia or Ukraine – and thus, in extremely simplified terms, outraged by either NATO’s precipitating encroachment and military buildup over recent decades or Putin’s ‘unjustified’ aggression – here is a short, partial list of rapidly accelerated key outcomes, all compliments of this war, that bring you closer to death or technological slavery in the near term, wherever in the world that you live.

The war, by accident (given that other key elite agents are well aware of what is happening and probably won’t precipitate it deliberately), could ‘go nuclear’, and kill off a huge proportion of humanity and, depending on its severity, starve most or even all of those left alive. But, assuming this outcome is avoided, there are plenty of other unpalatable options to contemplate.
Russia and Ukraine supply 30% of the world’s wheat and significant percentages of other grains, sunflower oil, fertilizers, oil and gas, and strategic minerals (such as palladium and platinum), among other products. The war, as well as the sanctions imposed on Russia by many countries, has exacerbated the already seriously interrupted supply chains of these products, which either cannot be alternatively sourced or not as cheaply. And the previously generated supply chain collapses in all sectors, causing food (and other) shortages, price hikes and energy crises around the world, cannot be restored in any timeframe that is short. Millions will starve to death because of these supply chain collapses.

According to one recent report: ‘We believe we are at the onset of a global famine of historic proportions.’ See ‘Farmers on the Brink’.

To repeat: ‘we are at the onset of a global famine of historic proportions.’

And the thoughtful account by Riley Waggaman includes this comment from Anatoly Nesmiyan: ‘That is why the “special [military] operation” is a minor episode of little importance against the background of impending cataclysms…. The fact that Ukraine and Russia have been used as a tool speaks not so much about the mind of the West, but about the impenetrable stupidity of the direct participants in the current competition.’ See ‘Up next: Global food crisis?’

If you want to keep close track of the destruction of your food supply, now being dramatically accelerated by the war in Ukraine, check out the daily updates shared by the Ice Age Farmer (Christian Westbrook) on various channels.

Intended deaths from the injectable continue to climb rapidly, despite concerted efforts by elite agents such as the World Health Organization, politicians, official medical systems, the pharmaceutical industry and the corporate and government media to conceal these deaths from public view. For just two recent attempts to compile a list of reports, see ‘UPDATED: How Many People Are the Vaccines Killing?’ and ‘COVID-19 Vaccine Massacre: 68,000% Increase in Strokes, 44,000% Increase in Heart Disease, 6,800% Increase in Deaths Over Non-COVID Vaccines’.

Of course, many eminent experts, heavily suppressed by the corporate media, have long ago warned that these ‘death shots’ will ‘decimate humanity’. For a small sample, see ‘The Truth about the Covid-19 Vaccine’, ‘A Final Warning to Humanity’, ‘J’Accuse! The Gene-based “Vaccines” Are Killing People. Governments Worldwide Are Lying to You the People, to the Populations They Purportedly Serve’, ‘COVID Shots to “Decimate World Population,” Warns Dr. Bhakdi’ and ‘BREAKING – Over 150,000 people including 600 children have died due to the Covid-19 Vaccines in the USA’.

But a quick check reveals that the Russian and Ukrainian governments have both enthusiastically participated in the entire Covid-19 ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ scam imposing the familiar range of measures – mandatory vaccinations, QR codes… – implemented elsewhere to fulfil the elite’s kill and control agenda.

This includes elite Russian participation in the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) which, as noted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his recent book The Real Anthony Fauci is ‘the real-life authoritative collective for imposing rules during the… pandemic. This so-called “independent” monitoring and accountability body’s purpose was to validate the imposition of police state controls by global and local political leaders and technocrats…: subduing resistance, ruthlessly censoring dissent, isolating the healthy, collapsing economies, and compelling vaccination during a projected worldwide health crisis.’ See ‘I Believe We Are Facing an Evil That Has No Equal in Human History’ and ‘Sputnik V is a scam: “A socioeconomic experiment on the Russian population”’.

The government of Ukraine is no different, using coercive measures to force vaccination on its citizens despite an unusually high level awareness of the dangers of vaccines – leading to substantial resistance – among the general population. See ‘As COVID Surges, Protesters Hit Streets of Ukraine to Decry Vaccine Mandates’.

Are you keeping track of the ever-lengthening list of those who are injured or killed by the injection, which is taking place in the background of this war?

The rollout of 5G, essential to elite creation of their surveillance and control grid, gathers pace under cover of the ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ narrative and now the Russia/Ukraine war. Of course, the electromagnetic radiation will also kill vast numbers of people, both outright and via decimation of the insect population (thus further reducing global food supplies), and the surveillance and control grid it will make possible will trap you in your home and immediate neighborhood, with any semblance of human freedom and human rights consigned to memory. See ‘Sleepwalking into Hell: The Global Elite’s Technological Coup d’état Against Humanity’ and ‘Deadly Rainbow: Will 5G Precipitate The Extinction Of All Life On Earth?’
And, unless you have been ignoring the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’, you are well aware that the Global Elite plans to transform 200 areas of human life using technologies associated with the fourth industrial revolution and transhumanism (including 5G and 6G, military weapons, artificial intelligence [AI], big data, nanotechnology and biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things [IoT], and quantum computing). These technologies will subvert human identity, human freedom, human dignity, human volition and human privacy reducing those left alive to transhuman slavery in which you will have a digitized personal identity. This digitized identity will be connected to your banking, health, legal and other records to establish your personal ‘social credit score’, like that used in China, to determine what you can, and cannot, do while living in your ‘smart city’ eating food-like substances synthesized from trash and insects. See ‘The Great Reset’.

In Ukraine, the government is simply using the war to rapidly expand what was already ‘one of the most expansive government-run digital ID systems in the world’, making the country the ‘world leader’ in some aspects of digitization via their Diia app, with all that this portends for the human future. See ‘How Ukraine Government Is Converting Digital ID System Into Wartime Tool’. Of course, there will be no backtracking from this at war’s end.

Russia is equally committed to its digitization program, although it is also playing a key role in developing the elite-controlled banking system, complete with digitized currencies, that will supersede the current model. It is hosting the annual Cyber Polygon simulations. See ‘Taking Control by Destroying Cash: Beware Cyber Polygon as Part of the Elite Coup’.

If all of this sounds preposterous, here are two other geopolitical analysts who offer a similar conclusion based on their own analyses: ‘The Ukraine Crisis: What You Need to Know’ and ‘Ukraine-Russia: A Proxy-War, Advancing the Agenda of the Great Reset?’

What about the War in Ukraine?

Like many people, I am concerned about the war too. In drawing attention to the deeper elite program that is rapidly trapping humanity in a nightmarish future, I am not suggesting that the war does not matter.

But I also know from long experience that the anti-war movement remains devoid of the capacity to act to prevent or halt wars because it lacks the analysis, strategic orientation, tenacity and courage to do so. I wish it was otherwise.

Still, if you want to participate in a strategy to end this war, particularly given the possibility of it morphing into a longer term insurgency – see ‘Ukraine And The New Al Qaeda’ – you can read how to do so here: Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

And if you want to participate in a strategy to end all war, you can read how to do so here: Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

Having noted this, let me highlight that key aspects of these strategies are the need to recognize that violence is built deeply into human society by a parenting model that, in essence, is based on demanding obedience from a child, rather than nurturing the child’s Self-will. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

And this generates a society in which many people are so adversely impacted that they are rendered effectively insane. Unfortunately, some of these people end up in situations where they exercise extraordinarily levels of control. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

Hence, if you want to reduce violence and war in the future, consider making ‘My Promise to Children’.

So What Does All of this Mean?

Whatever your concerns about the war in Ukraine however, I encourage you to not let it distract you from acting powerfully to defeat the deeper elite agenda. If you get caught up in the war hysteria and fail to defend yourself and those you love, you will soon find that everything about the life you have known has been taken away, irrespective of the outcome of this war.

So What Can You Do?

Ideally, if you wish to strategically resist the elite agenda, your most powerful option is to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign.

The simplest version of this strategy is explained on the one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 15 languages (Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish & Slovak) with more in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘The 7 Days Campaign to Resist the Great Reset’.

Conclusion

The war in Ukraine is a tragedy for those immediately impacted but for all of us as well. Particularly if we do not recognise the threat it conceals and act powerfully in response to this deeper threat.

For 5,000 years elites have been pitting us against each other – at work, on the battlefield, in life generally – by drawing attention to, and magnifying, superficial differences (based on gender, race, religion, class, nationality….), exacerbating conflicts and convincing us that they are acting in our own best interests when we do what they tell us via their agents in government, the corporate media and elsewhere, and that human solidarity is worth nothing.

Well, one day very soon now, we would do well to realize that in the end only three things matter: Human solidarity is essential if we are to survive this existential crisis, our true enemy is not each other but the insane Global Elite, and we must act powerfully and nonviolently if we are to defeat it.

A human future worth living will be short otherwise.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘ . His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

World War III Has Already Started, And It’s An Economic War

Posted on March 28, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

In an article I published in April of 2018, titled World War III Will Be An Economic War, I outlined a number of factors that portend a large scale conflict between East and West and why this war would be mainly economic in nature. I investigated how this conflict would actually benefit globalists and globalist institutions seeking to bring down multiple nations’ economies while hiding the engineered crisis behind a wall of geopolitical chaos and noise.

The goal? To convince the masses that national sovereignty is a plague that only leads to widespread death, and that the “solution” is a one-world system – conveniently managed by the globalists, of course. That is to say, more centralization is always offered as the solution to every problem.

Furthermore, the war itself acts as cover for the inflationary collapse that our central bank and government has created. We are already seeing fraud propagandists like White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki attempting to mislead the public into believing all our current inflation problems stem from the Ukraine war. This claim requires some impressive mental gymnastics and an epic level of ignorance, but Psaki seems to have no shame about her role as a soulless Goebbels-like figure.

One issue which I used to get a lot of arguments over was the idea that countries like Russia and China would end up so closely aligned. People claimed there were too many disparities and that the countries would ultimately turn on each other in the middle of a financial crisis.

Well, it’s four years later and now we’re going to see if that is true or not. So far, it looks like I was correct.

My position has long been that certain nations have been preparing for a collapse of the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency (the primary currency used in the majority of trade around the world). My belief is that America’s top economic position is actually an incredible weakness; the dollar’s hegemony is not a strength, but an Achilles heel. If the dollar was to lose reserve status, the whole of the U.S. economy and parts of the global economy would implode, leaving behind only those who prepared – those who saw the writing on the wall and planned ahead.

The Dollar Crash Coalition

There are four nations that have been actively positioning for the crash of the dollar and they include: China, Russia, India, Brazil (five if you count the limited involvement of part South Africa). These countries are also known as the BRICS. The BRICS are rarely mentioned in the mainstream media anymore, but there was a time around a decade ago when they were discussed regularly.

My fascination with the BRICS back then was primarily due to their odd trade behaviors. Specifically, their bilateral agreements which cut out the dollar as the reserve currency, and the fact that they were stockpiling tons upon tons of gold.

It was as if they had some kind of inside information that an economic conflict or disaster was coming, and they were getting ready to decouple from the dollar and the global supply chain.

Today, as the Ukraine war rages, there is constant hype about the union of nations opposed to Russia’s invasion to the point that the narrative has become bizarre. There is an incredible level of cultism in the mainstream media right now encouraging a mindless mob response. They have been trying to drum up something very similar to a behavioral vortex that many of us in conservative circles have seen thousands of times in the past few years: Western media is weaponizing cancel culture against Russia.

It’s not just a general admonition of the Kremlin or of Putin, that would be normal. Rather, it’s an outright dismissal of anything remotely related to Russia, from bar owning dummies throwing away all their vodka (even though most of it is not made in Russia), to the International Cat Federation banning certain cats from competitions because they are Russian bred.

This is pure childish insanity, but again, we’ve seen this before with cancel culture in the US.

The thinking is utterly collectivist and goes a little something like this:

“We shall shun them from the hive and isolate them. We will erase their existence and rewrite their identity and history. Then we will punish them by taking away their ability to survive economically until they submit and conform to the directives of the gatekeepers, who shall remain nameless.”

That said, as most conservatives know, cancel culture is a failed strategy. Despite the international push to cancel Russia and media claims that Russia is now “completely isolated and alone,” the narrative is apparently designed more to con the masses, not intimidate the Kremlin. They are, in fact, not isolated at all. And, guess which countries are staunchly refusing to support actions and sanctions against the Ukraine invasion?

That’s right, the other members of the BRICS.

China has outright refused to accommodate any sanctions and is directly working with Russia to alleviate trade issues. As I’ve been pointing out for ten years, they’ve been preparing for this moment. Hell, if the rest of the world doesn’t want Russian exports and oil, China will certainly buy them.

India is eerily silent on Ukraine, despite endless pressure from the U.S.

Both Brazil and South Africa have taken neutral stances on Ukraine and continue to trade with Russia. It would appear that the cancellation of Russia has already failed before it really began.

The narrative only serves a purpose in that it gives the western public two false impressions:

It makes the people think that cancel culture on an international scale is working and that Russia will soon fold when the opposite is true.
It tricks people into thinking that all the risk is on the Russian side when, in reality, most of the risk is on the western side. This will make the inevitable economic disaster all the more frightening when it occurs.

Personally, I don’t have any affinity for either side of the Ukraine conflict. I feel empathy for the Ukrainian people, but certainly not the Ukrainian government and their globalist partners. I also have no love for Putin and his many friends in the globalist World Economic Forum.

That said, even if you think one side is right and the other side is wrong, one cannot deny that the cancel culture mentality of the west is going to lead to an epic disaster. What people don’t seem to understand is that this calamity will hurt the U.S. and Europe just as much as it hurts Russia, if not more so.

The Economic Weaponry Of Fortress Asia

The close economic relationship between Russia and China is fast building towards a “Fortress Asia” which guarantees a certain amount of insulation from global instability.

Russia exports a surprising number of raw materials that many countries rely on, from fertilizers to industrial metals like nickel and aluminum. But, their biggest export by far is energy in the form of oil and natural gas. Europe in particular is utterly dependent on Russia for between 40% to 50% of its heating and electricity. Cuts to Russian energy exports would devastate Europe in a year’s time and it’s unlikely other exporters would be able to fill the void in the near term, at least not without huge price increases.

According to the IEA, Russia is the third largest oil producer in the world behind Saudi Arabia and the U.S. and it is the largest exporter to global markets. Sanctions on Russian oil would mean a massive shift in supply and multiple markets rushing to fill the gap.

Just the threat of cuts to Russian oil caused large overnight price spikes in gasoline in the U.S. and Europe. Brent crude prices skyrocketed from $90 a barrel to $130 a barrel in a matter of a couple weeks.

I don’t think it will stop there, either. I expect crude prices to climb into the $200 per barrel range and gas prices to jump to around $7 a gallon before increased U.S. shale pumping helps balance out the supply (and this is a best case scenario). Some of the price will be due to speculation, but ultimately without Russian oil prices will remain high even if the war in Ukraine ends.

And here is where we get to a key aspect of this scenario which I don’t think many people are taking into account. It does not matter if Russia pulls out of Ukraine, and it certainly doesn’t matter if Ukraine surrenders. The economic side of the war will continue, and it will only escalate.

Retaliation In Economic Warfare

Beyond oil and energy the combined influence of the BRICS has the power to dramatically disrupt the U.S. dollar’s world reserve status. China alone holds trillions in dollars and U.S. treasuries which it can dump on the market anytime it pleases. China is the world’s largest exporter and most nations including the U.S. rely on Chinese manufacturing. This is why China’s draconian Covid shutdowns have caused a constant strain on the global supply chain. Around 20% of imports to the US come from China, including over 97% of our antibiotics.

The BRICS in combination control a vast swath of the export and manufacturing markets. They don’t even need to dump the dollar in trade, all they have to do is say they prefer a basket of currencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s Special Drawing Rights. The dollar’s value would collapse, and that would be in the midst of already rising inflation.

Another interesting development from the economic war is the increasing calls for crypto and digital currency solutions. I would note that it’s not just the BRICS who are refusing to go against Russia; there is also the matter of globalist institutions like the IMF and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Not surprisingly, Russia’s membership in these world banking platforms remains secure. Russia continues to hold billions in IMF SDRs. Both institutions have been calling for the implementation of a global digital currency system (which obviously they would control).

If the world economic war continues at its current trajectory, it is only a matter of time before trade sanctions turn into currency attacks. This is where the U.S. will be hurt the most.

It is perhaps not so coincidental that the globalists have staged themselves to benefit. With no world reserve currency established and an inflationary crisis raging, they will attempt to swoop in to “save the day” and assert that they have the perfect solution: A global digital currency system based on blockchain technology but tied to the IMF’s SDR basket system and administered by them.

In other words, with all the inflation present in national currencies, the IMF will offer the public a digital currency or cryptocurrency that promises them more stability. The inflationary crisis in confidence will be used to push people into a digital system which has no privacy and can be used to control them by denying them access on a whim, much like how the Chinese social credit system operates.

Ukraine is only the first domino in a long chain that is meant to lead to a one-world economic system centralized into the hands of the money elites.

There are ways to disrupt it, and the plan may not succeed at all, but there’s no avoiding the economic pain that will be caused in the meantime. All that we can do is accept that World War III is upon us and the weapons will be economic rather than nuclear.

The American Empire self-destructs.

Posted on March 18, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Michael Hudson

Source: Michael-Hudson.com

But nobody thought that it would happen this fast.

Empires often follow the course of a Greek tragedy, bringing about precisely the fate that they sought to avoid. That certainly is the case with the American Empire as it dismantles itself in not-so-slow motion.

The basic assumption of economic and diplomatic forecasting is that every country will act in its own self-interest. Such reasoning is of no help in today’s world. Observers across the political spectrum are using phrases like “shooting themselves in their own foot” to describe U.S. diplomatic confrontation with Russia and allies alike.

For more than a generation the most prominent U.S. diplomats have warned about what they thought would represent the ultimate external threat: an alliance of Russia and China dominating Eurasia. America’s economic sanctions and military confrontation has driven them together, and is driving other countries into their emerging Eurasian orbit.

American economic and financial power was expected to avert this fate. During the half-century since the United States went off gold in 1971, the world’s central banks have operated on the Dollar Standard, holding their international monetary reserves in the form of U.S. Treasury securities, U.S. bank deposits and U.S. stocks and bonds. The resulting Treasury-bill Standard has enabled America to finance its foreign military spending and investment takeover of other countries simply by creating dollar IOUs. U.S. balance-of-payments deficits end up in the central banks of payments-surplus countries as their reserves, while Global South debtors need dollars to pay their bondholders and conduct their foreign trade.

This monetary privilege – dollar seignorage – has enabled U.S. diplomacy to impose neoliberal policies on the rest of the world, without having to use much military force of its own except to grab Near Eastern oil.

The recent escalation U.S. sanctions blocking Europe, Asia and other countries from trade and investment with Russia, Iran and China has imposed enormous opportunity costs – the cost of lost opportunities – on U.S. allies. And the recent confiscation of the gold and foreign reserves of Venezuela, Afghanistan and now Russia, along the targeted grabbing of bank accounts of wealthy foreigners (hoping to win their hearts and minds, along with recovery of their sequestered accounts), has ended the idea that dollar holdings or those in its sterling and euro NATO satellites are a safe investment haven when world economic conditions become shaky.

So I am somewhat chagrined as I watch the speed at which this U.S.-centered financialized system has de-dollarized over the span of just a year or two. The basic theme of my Super Imperialism has been how, for the past fifty years, the U.S. Treasury-bill standard has channeled foreign savings to U.S. financial markets and banks, giving Dollar Diplomacy a free ride. I thought that de-dollarization would be led by China and Russia moving to take control of their economies to avoid the kind of financial polarization that is imposing austerity on the United States. But U.S. officials are forcing them to overcome whatever hesitancy they had to de-dollarize.

I had expected that the end of the dollarized imperial economy would come about by other countries breaking away. But that is not what has happened. U.S. diplomats have chosen to end international dollarization themselves, while helping Russia build up its own means of self-reliant agricultural and industrial production. This global fracture process actually has been going on for some years now, starting with the sanctions blocking America’s NATO allies and other economic satellites from trading with Russia.For Russia, these sanctions had the same effect that protective tariffs would have had.

Russia had remained too enthralled by free-market ideology to take steps to protect its own agriculture or industry. The United States provided the help that was needed by imposing domestic self-reliance on Russia (via sanctions). When the Baltic states lost the Russian market for cheese and other farm products, Russia quickly created its own cheese and dairy sector – while becoming the world’s leading grain exporter.

Russia is discovering (or is on the verge of discovering) that it does not need U.S. dollars as backing for the ruble’s exchange rate. Its central bank can create the rubles needed to pay domestic wages and finance capital formation. The U.S. confiscations thus may finally lead Russia to end neoliberal monetary philosophy, as Sergei Glaziev has long been advocating in favor of MMT.

The same dynamic undercutting ostensible U.S aims has occurred with U.S. sanctions against the leading Russian billionaires. The neoliberal shock therapy and privatizations of the 1990s left Russian kleptocrats with only one way to cash out on the assets they had grabbed from the public domain. That was to incorporate their takings and sell their shares in London and New York. Domestic savings had been wiped out, and U.S. advisors persuaded Russia’s central bank not to create its own ruble money.

The result was that Russia’s national oil, gas and mineral patrimony was not used to finance a rationalization of Russian industry and housing. Instead of the revenue from privatization being invested to create new Russian means of protection, it was burned up on nouveau-riche acquisitions of luxury British real estate, yachts and other global flight-capital assets. But the effect of making the Russian dollar, sterling and euro holdings hostage has been to make the City of London too risky a venue in which to hold their assets. By imposing sanctions on the richest Russians closest to Putin, U.S. officials hoped to induce them to oppose his breakaway from the West, and thus to serve effectively as NATO agents-of-influence. But for Russian billionaires, their own country is starting to look safest.

For many decades now, the Federal Reserve and Treasury have fought against gold recovering its role in international reserves. But how will India and Saudi Arabia view their dollar holdings as Biden and Blinken try to strong-arm them into following the U.S. “rules-based order” instead of their own national self-interest? The recent U.S. dictates have left little alternative but to start protecting their own political autonomy by converting dollar and euro holdings into gold as an asset free of political liability of being held hostage to the increasingly costly and disruptive U.S. demands.

U.S. diplomacy has rubbed Europe’s nose in its abject subservience by telling its governments to have their companies dump the Russian assets for pennies on the dollar after Russia’s foreign reserves were blocked and the ruble’s exchange rate plunged. Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and other U.S. investors moved quickly to buy up what Shell Oil and other foreign companies were unloading.

Nobody thought that the postwar 1945-2020 world order would give way this fast. A truly new international economic order is emerging, although it is not yet clear just what form it will take. But “prodding the Bear” with the U.S./NATO confrontation with Russia has passed critical-mass level. It no longer is just about Ukraine. That is merely the trigger, a catalyst for driving much of the world away from the US/NATO orbit.

The next showdown may come within Europe itself. Nationalist politicians could seek to lead a break-away from the over-reaching U.S. power-grab over its European and other Allies, trying in vain to keep them dependent on U.S.-based trade and investment. The price of their continuing obedience is to impose cost-inflation on their industry while relinquishing their democratic electoral politics in subordination to America’s NATO proconsuls.

These consequences cannot really be deemed “unintended.” Too many observers have pointed out exactly what would happen – headed by President Putin and Foreign Secretary Lavrov explaining just what their response would be if NATO insisted in backing them into a corner while attacking Eastern Ukrainian Russian-speakers and moving heavy weaponry to Russia’s Western border. The consequences were anticipated. The neocons in control of U.S. foreign policy simply didn’t care. Recognizing its concerns was deemed to make one a Putinversteher.

European officials did not feel uncomfortable in telling the world about their worries that Donald Trump was crazy and upsetting the apple cart of international diplomacy. But they seem to have been blindsided at the Biden Administration’s resurgence of visceral Russia-hatred by Secretary of State Blinken and Victoria Nuland-Kagan. Trump’s mode of expression and mannerisms may have been uncouth, but America’s neocon gang has much more globally threatening confrontation obsessions. For them, it was a question of whose reality would emerge victorious: the “reality” that they believed they could make, or economic reality outside of U.S. control.

What foreign countries have not done for themselves – replacing the IMF, World Bank and other arms of U.S. diplomacy – American politicians are forcing them to do. Instead of European, Near Eastern and Global South countries breaking away out of their own calculation of their long-term economic interests, America is driving them away, as it has done with Russia and China. More politicians are seeking voter support by asking whether they would be better served by new monetary arrangements to replace dollarized trade, investment and even foreign debt service.

The energy and food price squeeze is hitting Global South countries especially hard, coinciding with their own Covid-19 problems and the looming dollarized debt service coming due. Something must give. How long will these countries impose austerity to pay foreign bondholders?

How will the U.S. and European economies cope in the face of their sanctions against imports of Russian gas and oil, cobalt, aluminum, palladium and other basic materials? American diplomats have made a list of raw materials that their economy desperately needs and which therefore are exempt from the trade sanctions being imposed. This provides Mr. Putin a handy list of pressure points to use in reshaping world diplomacy, in the process helping European and other countries break away from the Iron Curtain that America has imposed to lock its satellites into dependence on high-priced U.S. supplies.

But the final breakaway from NATO’s adventurism must come from within the United States itself. As this year’s midterm elections approach, politicians will find a fertile ground in showing U.S. voters that the price inflation led by gasoline and energy is a policy byproduct of the Biden administration blocking Russian oil and gas exports. Gas is needed not only for heating and energy production, but to make fertilizer, of which there already is a world shortage. This is exacerbated by blocking Russian and Ukrainian grain exports, sending U.S. and European food prices soaring.

Trying to force Russia to respond militarily and thereby looking bad to the rest of the world is turning out to be a stunt aimed simply at demonstrating Europe’s need to contribute more to NATO, buy more U.S. military hardware and lock itself deeper into trade and monetary dependence on the United States. The instability that this has caused is turning out to have the effect of making the United States look as threatening as Russia.

Follow the Money – How Russia Will Bypass Western Economic Warfare

Posted on March 10, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Pepe Escobar

Source: OpEdNews.com

So a congregation of NATO’s top brass ensconced in their echo chambers target the Russian Central Bank with sanctions and expect what? Cookies?

What they got instead was Russia’s deterrence forces bumped up to “a special regime of duty” – which means the Northern and Pacific fleets, the Long-Range Aviation Command, strategic bombers, and the entire Russian nuclear apparatus on maximum alert.

One Pentagon general very quickly did the basic math on that, and mere minutes later, a Ukrainian delegation was dispatched to conduct negotiations with Russia in an undisclosed location in Gomel, Belarus.

Meanwhile, in the vassal realms, the German government was busy “setting limits to warmongers like Putin” – quite a rich undertaking considering that Berlin never set any such limits for western warmongers who bombed Yugoslavia, invaded Iraq, or destroyed Libya, in complete violation of international law.

While openly proclaiming their desire to “stop the development of Russian industry,” damage its economy, and “ruin Russia” – echoing American edicts on Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Cuba, Venezuela and others in the Global South – the Germans could not possibly recognize a new categorical imperative.

They were finally liberated from their WWII culpability complex by none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin. Germany is finally free to support and weaponize neo-Nazis out in the open all over again – now of the Ukrainian Azov battalion variety.

To get the hang of how these NATO sanctions will “ruin Russia,” I asked for the succinct analysis of one of the most competent economic minds on the planet, Michael Hudson, author, among others, of a revised edition of the must-read Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.

Hudson remarked how he is “simply numbed over the near-atomic escalation of the US.” On the confiscation of Russian foreign reserves and cut-off from SWIFT, the main point is “it will take some time for Russia to put in a new system with China. The result will end dollarization for good, as countries threatened with ‘democracy’ or displaying diplomatic independence will be afraid to use US banks.”

This, Hudson says, leads us to “the great question – whether Europe and the Dollar Bloc can buy Russian raw materials – cobalt, palladium, etc, and whether China will join Russia in a minerals boycott.”

Hudson is adamant that “Russia’s Central Bank, of course, has foreign bank assets in order to intervene in exchange markets to defend its currency from fluctuations. The ruble has plunged. There will be new exchange rates. Yet it’s up to Russia to decide whether to sell its wheat to West Asia, that needs it; or to stop selling gas to Europe via Ukraine, now that the US can grab it.”

About the possible introduction of a new Russia-China payment system – bypassing SWIFT and combining the Russian SPFS (System for Transfer of Financial Messages) with the Chinese CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payment System) – Hudson has no doubts, “the Russian-China system will be implemented. The Global South will seek to join and at the same time keep SWIFT – moving their reserves into the new system.”

I’m going to de-dollarize myself

So the US itself, in another massive strategic blunder, will speed up de-dollarization. As the managing director of Bocom International Hong Hao told the Global Times, with energy trade between Europe and Russia de-dollarized, “that will be the beginning of the disintegration of dollar hegemony.”

It’s a refrain the US administration was quietly hearing last week from some of its own largest multinational banks, including notables like JPMorgan and Citigroup.

A Bloomberg article sums up their collective fears:

“Booting Russia from the critical global system – which handles 42 million messages a day and serves as a lifeline to some of the world’s biggest financial institutions – could backfire, sending inflation higher, pushing Russia closer to China, and shielding financial transactions from scrutiny by the west. It might also encourage the development of a SWIFT alternative that could eventually damage the supremacy of the US dollar.”

Those with IQs over 50 in the European Union (EU) must have understood that Russia simply could not be totally excluded from SWIFT, but maybe only a few of its banks: after all, European traders depend on Russian energy.

From Moscow’s point of view, that’s a minor issue. A number of Russian banks are already connected to China’s CIPS system. For instance, if someone wants to buy Russian oil and gas with CIPS, payment must be in the Chinese yuan currency. CIPS is independent of SWIFT.

Additionally, Moscow already linked its SPFS payment system not only to China but also to India and member nations of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). SPFS already links to approximately 400 banks.

With more Russian companies using SPFS and CIPS, even before they merge, and other maneuvers to bypass SWIFT, such as barter trade – largely used by sanctioned Iran – and agent banks, Russia could make up for at least 50 percent in trade losses.

The key fact is that the flight from the US-dominated western financial system is now irreversible across Eurasia and that will proceed in tandem with the internationalization of the yuan.

Russia has its own bag of tricks

Meanwhile, we’re not even talking yet about Russian retaliation for these sanctions. Former President Dmitry Medvedev already gave a hint – everything, from exiting all nuclear arms deals with the US, to freezing the assets of western companies in Russia, is on the table.

So what does the “Empire of Lies” want? – Putin terminology, on Monday’s meeting in Moscow to discuss the response to sanctions.

In an essay published this morning, deliciously titled America Defeats Germany for the Third Time in a Century: the MIC, OGAM and FIRE conquer NATO, Michael Hudson makes a series of crucial points, starting with how “NATO has become Europe’s foreign policy-making body, even to the point of dominating domestic economic interests.”

He outlines the three oligarchies in control of US foreign policy:

First is the military-industrial complex, which Ray McGovern memorably coined as MICIMATT (military industrial Congressional intelligence media academia think tank).

Hudson defines their economy base as “monopoly rent, obtained above all from its arms sales to NATO, to West Asian oil exporters, and to other countries with a balance-of-payments surplus.”

Second is the oil and gas sector, joined by mining (OGAM). Their aim is “to maximize the price of energy and raw materials so as to maximize natural resource rent.

Monopolizing the Dollar Area’s oil market and isolating it from Russian oil and gas has been a major US priority for over a year now, as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany threatened to link the western European and Russian economies together.”

Third is the “symbiotic” Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, which Hudson defines as “the counterpart to Europe’s old post-feudal landed aristocracy living by land rents.”

As he describes these three rentier sectors that completely dominate post-industrial finance capitalism at the heart of the western system, Hudson notes how “Wall Street always has been closely merged with the oil and gas industry namely, the Citigroup, and Chase Manhattan banking conglomerates.”

Hudson shows how “the most pressing US strategic aim of NATO confrontation with Russia is soaring oil and gas prices. In addition to creating profits and stock market gains for US companies, higher energy prices will take much of the steam out of the German economy.”

He warns how food prices will rise “headed by wheat” – Russia and Ukraine account for 25 percent of world wheat exports. From a Global South perspective, that’s a disaster: “This will squeeze many West Asian and Global South food-deficient countries, worsening their balance of payments, and threatening foreign debt defaults.”

As for blocking Russian raw materials exports, “this threatens to cause breaks in supply chains for key materials, including cobalt, palladium, nickel, aluminum.”

And that leads us, once again, to the heart of the matter – “The long-term dream of the US new Cold Warriors is to break up Russia, or at least to restore its managerial kleptocracy seeking to cash in their privatizations in western stock markets.”

That’s not going to happen. Hudson clearly sees how “the most enormous unintended consequence of US foreign policy has been to drive Russia and China together, along with Iran, Central Asia, and countries along the Belt and Road initiative.”

Let’s confiscate some technology

Now compare all of the above with the perspective of a central European business tycoon with vast interests, east and west, and who treasures his discretion.

In an email exchange, the business tycoon posed serious questions about the Russian Central Bank support for its national currency, the ruble, “which according to US planning is being destroyed by the west through sanctions and currency wolf packs who are exposing themselves by selling rubles short. There is really almost no amount of money that can beat the dollar manipulators against the ruble. A 20 percent interest rate will kill the Russian economy unnecessarily.”

The businessman argues that the chief effect of the rate hike “would be to support imports that should not be imported. The fall of the ruble is thus favorable to Russia in terms of self-sufficiency. As import prices rise, these goods should start to be produced domestically. I would just let the ruble fall to find its own level which will for a while be lower than natural forces would permit as the US will be driving it lower through sanctions and short selling manipulation in this form of economic war against Russia.”

But that seems to tell only part of the story. Arguably, the lethal weapon in Russia’s arsenal of responses has been identified by the head of the Center for Economic Research of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (IGSO), Vasily Koltashov – the key is to confiscate technology – as in Russia ceasing to recognize US rights to patents.

In what he qualifies as “liberating American intellectual property,” Koltashov calls for passing a Russian law on “friendly and unfriendly states. If a country turns out to be on the unfriendly list, then we can start copying its technologies in pharmaceuticals, industry, manufacturing, electronics, medicine. It can be anything – from simple details to chemical compositions.” This would require amendments to the Russian constitution.

Koltashov maintains that “one of the foundations of success of American industry was copying of foreign patents for inventions.” Now, Russia could use “China’s extensive know-how with its latest technological production processes for copying western products: the release of American intellectual property will cause damage to the United States to the amount of $10 trillion, only in the first stage. It will be a disaster for them.”

As it stands, the strategic stupidity of the EU beggars belief. China is ready to grab all Russian natural resources with Europe left as a pitiful hostage of the oceans and of wild speculators.

It looks like a total EU-Russia split is ahead – with little trade left and zero diplomacy.

Now listen to the sound of champagne popping all across the MICIMATT.

Our Financial System Is Optimized for Sociopaths and Exploitation

Posted on March 2, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

We live in a peculiar juncture of history in which truth has been banished as a threat to the maximization of private gain, i.e. the hyper-pursuit of self-interest. Evidence that supports a causal chain has been replaced by cherry-picked data that supports a self-serving narrative: both the evidence and narrative are manufactured to serve the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

In this juncture of history, evidence is easily disputed because the process of manufacturing self-serving evidence has been perfected. Indeed, self-serving evidence is now a commodity which can be purchased wholesale: rig the sample size, massage the data statistically, conjure up a context that serves to frame the evidence in a slippery self-interested fashion, omit disinterested evidence and contexts, top with arcane math and voila, evidence and narrative are presented as “facts” rather than what they really are, an elaborate, well-staged con designed to maximize the private gains of the few by exploiting the many.

Organizing the entire system to serve the pathological greed of the few is best served by devaluing truth to mere opinion and causal chains to mere narratives. In this juncture of history, truth has been revealed as a chimera; there is only opinion, and all opinions are equal. Opinions are beliefs, and all beliefs are equal. All narratives are equal. All questions boil down to values: values are all equally detached, free-floating and of the same value: zero.

This con has reached perfection in our financial system, which is now optimized for exploitation and sociopaths. As Nassim Taleb has explained (referencing Adam Smith), markets only function if there are rules which are imposed equally on all participants. In our financial system, there are two sets of rules: one which we can summarize as anything goes for the super-wealthy and the well-connected, and another set for everyone else.

Shear the sheep of billions, pay a modest fine–and if all your bets go bad, get bailed out because you’re too important to fail. Sneak a few thousand out of the credit union, go to prison. Sell a financial product that’s designed to go bust as low-risk, oh well, buyer beware, haha, that’s just the free market at work. Sell a nickel bag of drugs, get a tenner in the Gulag.

Two sets of rules: one simulacrum of rules for the rich–just another con, really–and punitive rules for everyone else.

Since evidence, causal chains and values have all been devalued, there is no longer any recognition that the desire for gain–greed–can be either exploitive or beneficial to the many. If your greed drives you to make a product that is faster, better, cheaper, more durable and efficient than what’s currently available, your gain is the result of an advance that serves the interests of the many.

If your desire for gain leads you to misrepresent a shoddy product designed to fail (subprime mortgages, Landfill Economy products) or you raise the price because you can, your greed serves your interests at the expense of the many. This is the acme of exploitation. Kleptocrats and sociopaths, rejoice!

This system is optimized for exploitation, as the exploiters can exploit the many without the many even recognizing they’ve been stripmined. We no longer have the means to differentiate fraud from fact or exploitation from rules-based markets.

This landscape of wide-open exploitation and debauchery is Heaven on Earth for sociopaths who not only do not see any difference between gains skimmed at others’ expense and gains earned by providing a superior product / service, they revel in exploiting the system and every participant: employees, partners, suppliers, depositors, borrowers and customers.

But in this desert of exploitation and the supremacy of self-interest, some things remain true and others remain false. Some truths remain self-evident. As I have shown here many times, we can look at the hourly wages and cost of essentials in 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010 and the present and calculate how many hours of labor it took to pay for essentials such as rent, property taxes, healthcare, childcare, taxes, education, etc. These calculations reveal that the purchasing power of wages has declined for decades. This evidence cannot be made to vanish by declaring it opinion, belief or a “different set of values”–it is fact.

If we measure prosperity by how much labor can buy, all but the top few wage earners are less prosperous today. The evidence and causal chain are self-evident. The self-interested few who have reaped the vast majority of the economy’s gains can hire shills to argue that since TVs now require fewer hours of labor to buy, we’re all better off, but these obfuscations are nothing more than distractions designed to divert our attention from the mechanisms of exploitation that are operating 24/7 beneath the ceaseless churn of “news” and “market action.”

Let’s call this financial system what it really is: the MetaPerverse, a conjured world of self-serving cons that is optimized for exploitation, the perversion of justice, infinite inequality and the stripmining of the many to the benefit of the few, all securely protected by a cloud of confusion in which everything is equally valueless and truth no longer exists. All that remains is a babble of competing cons.

How Empires Die

Posted on February 17, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

From a systems perspective, nation-states and empires arise when they are superior solutions to security compared to whatever arrangement they replace: feudalism, warlords, tribal confederations, etc.

States and empires fail when they are no longer the solution, they are the problem. As the book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization explains, when the dissolution of the state / empire becomes the pain-reducing solution, the inhabitants withdraw their support and the empire loses its grip and expires.

As I explain in my new book, Global Crisis, National Renewal, states and markets are problem-solving structures. These structures solve problems by optimizing adaptability and beneficial synergies that reinforce one another as evolutionary advances.

The rise of the middle class is an example of beneficial synergies: as this new class gains access to credit, expertise, trade, enterprise and pricing power for their labor, they have the means to transform their labor into capital by saving earnings and investing the capital in assets, new enterprises, etc. which then generate income from capital which fuels synergistic increases in credit, expertise, assets and income from investments.

States / empires fail and expire when they elevate the fatal synergies created by self-serving elites. Rather than encourage the dynamics of adaptation–competition, transparency, accountability, experimentation and dissent– the elites suppresses these forces as threats to their monopolies, cartels and wealth.

Stripped of adaptability and beneficial synergies, the state / empire is no longer able to solve problems. It becomes the problem which cannot be resolved.

A key dynamic fueling fatal synergies is the hubristic confidence that low-cost abundance is a birthright bestowed by the state /empire, so resources can be endlessly squandered on excess and extremes of consumption and waste. The state / empire no longer focuses on securing the material sources of security (food, energy, etc.) or the accountability, competition, dissent and transparency required to solve systemic problems.

Instead, the state / empire dissolves into divisive camps seeking to protect their petty fiefdoms and expanding their wealth at the expense of the populace. The super-wealthy build $500 million yachts and palaces, politicians trade on their positions to accumulate fortunes, and corruption replaces governance.

Markets spiral into fatal synergies as low quality products and services, speculative excess, extremes of grotesque consumption and blood-soaked entertainment become “growth industries” while blackouts dim electrical grids and store shelves empty of essentials.

The market solution to everyone already owning everything is to engineer planned obsolescence into every product and form service-sector cartels that then strip services to the bone to juice profits, a.k.a. the crapification of all goods and services.

The state / empire also fails to maintain basic security and functions such as tax collection and a fair enforcement. Petty crimes are exploited by those in power (civil forfeiture) while resistance to the state is severely punished. There are two legal systems, one for the commoners and another for the elite.

The state / empire protects those profiting from the status quo and then calls this profiteering a “solution.” But this profiteering doesn’t solve any problems; it is the problem, as self-serving profiteering protects its privileges by corrupting the state, finance and the economy.

For its part, the market seeks to maximize profits in excesses of consumption, predatory lending (student loans), the wholesale destruction of quality by monopolies and cartels and extremes of speculation.Maximizing profits by any means available has no moral foundation; predatory student loans are profitable, obscure medical billing is profitable, selling products designed to fail is profitable, declaring software outdated is profitable, deceiving consumers is profitable, and so on, in an endless array of shoddy, unhealthy products, rapacious services, fraudulent overcharges, etc.

Since problems go unresolved, things fall apart and the masses veer into extremes of derangement and magical thinking: fanaticism is substituted for friendship, cults abound, common ground vanishes and all the failures of the system are papered over with Bread and Circuses, free money, gaudy entertainments and lifeless displays of conspicuous consumption that reveal the decay and degradation.

Protecting the few stripmining the system at the expense of the many is not problem-solving. It adds a layer of problems that the state /empire is incapable of resolving. Ossified, sclerotic, self-serving, corrupt, focused on virtue-signaling and the appearance of tackling problems rather than actually solving problems because some sacred cow would lose its privileges and income stream, the state / empire is the problem, not the solution.

When the state / empire loses the ability to recognize and solve core problems of security and fairness, it will be replaced by another arrangement that is more adaptable and adept at solving problems. Artifice, fantasy, magical thinking, excuses and absurd cover stories are not part of problem-solving. Problems can only be solved if reality is faced directly.

When reality is unacceptable because it negatively impacts those stripmining the system for private gain, the state / empire is already on its fatal spiral to collapse.

Can a Nation Prosper as its Institutions Fail?

Posted on February 8, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Economists focus on what can be easily measured: sales, profits, prices, tax revenues, etc. Since the decay and failure of institutions isn’t easily quantified, this decay doesn’t register in the realm of economics. Since it isn’t measured, it doesn’t exist.

But institutional decay and failure is all too real, and it begs the question: how can a society and economy thrive if its core institutions fail? The short answer is they cannot thrive, as institutions are the foundations of the social and economic orders.

As I explain in my new book, Global Crisis, National Renewal, the conventional view has a naive faith that “great leaders” can reverse institutional rot. This faith overlooks the systemic sources of institutional decay and failure which are outlined in the graphic below, The Lifecycle of Bureaucracy, a.k.a. institutions.

Leaders are constrained by the nature of centralized organizations and the incentive structure that slowly shifts from rewarding efforts to further the institution’s core mission to self-service and protecting an ossified, failing institution from outside scrutiny and reform.

As Samo Burja explains in his insightful essay, Why Civilizations Collapse, those inside institutions are by design so compartmentalized that few (if any) even recognize the institution is failing. As long as everything is glued together in each little compartment, no one grasps the entire institution has lost its way. And since no one recognizes it, no one attempts to save it.

Institutions end up advancing caretaker managers who excel at the political game of rising to the top of a sprawling institution. When the decay (or budget cuts) finally trigger a crisis, the institution has been stripped of visionaries with a bold grasp of what’s needed to restore the focus on the core mission and institute new incentives. The bold leaders quit in disgust or were sent to bureaucratic Siberia as potential threats to the status quo.

The problem is institutions fail by the very nature of their centralized design. The organization is centralized so directives flow down the chain of command, and every branch is compartmentalized to limit the power of each department and employee to disrupt the orderly flow of top-down directives.

Within this compartmentalized, top-down structure, the incentives are to follow procedures rather than get results. The rewards go to those who dutifully follow procedures rather than to those who raise the alarm about the loss of transparency, effectiveness and focus on fulfilling the mission.

The path of least resistance is to protect the existing structure and add more compartments, i.e. “mission creep.” Rather than focus on the dissipation of resources and the decline of the core mission, leaders add “feel good” missions and PR promotions of phony reforms and initiatives that bleed more resources from the core mission.

Consider the institution of democracy, which has been corrupted into an invitation-only auction of state favors and rentier skims. Democracies have another fatal flaw: politicians win re-election by promising virtually everyone something for nothing: more benefits and entitlements and lower taxes. The gap between higher costs and declining revenues will be filled by government borrowing.

All this additional borrowing will supposedly be paid by the magic of “growth”, which will expand tax revenues at a rate that exceeds the cost of borrowing.

But demographics, resource depletion and the diminishing returns of a consumer economy fueled by rapidly expanding public and private debt have sapped “growth” in fundamental ways. Ironically, borrowing and spending more to spur “growth” only hastens the diminishing returns of increasing debt to fund consumption today.

Democracies are thus optimized for rapid “growth” and are ill-suited to transition to DeGrowth, i.e. less of everything for the vast majority of the citizenry as resources become scarce and debt eats the economy alive. (DeGrowth could work to everyone’s benefit, which is the point of Global Crisis, National Renewal.)

Central banking is another failing institution. When faced with fiscal crises, central states/banks inevitably succumb to the temptation to print/borrow currency in whatever sums are needed to fill the shortfall of the moment, i.e. political expediency. This profligate creation of currency seems to be magic at first; everyone accepts the “new money” at the current value. But eventually gravity takes hold and the currency’s purchasing power declines, as the real economy (the production of goods and services) grows at rates far below the expansion of credit and currency.

Even the greatest empires in human history have been unable to resist the “easy” solution of devaluing currency as the means of fulfilling all the promises that were made in more prosperous times.

The progression of centralized power slowly but surely replaces the self-organizing, resilient, decentralized structures of civil society with tightly bound hierarchical centralized structures that are increasingly ineffective, increasingly costly and increasingly fragile, i.e. increasingly prone to failure or collapse.

The irony of institutional decay and failure is everyone inside is so busy following procedures that nobody notices the decay until the whole worm-eaten structure collapses. Look no farther than financialized asset bubbles, healthcare and education for examples of institutions in run-to-failure decline.

We are in effect so busy arranging the beach umbrellas per our instructions that we don’t notice the approaching tsunami. Can a nation prosper as its institutions decay and collapse? Only in the fantasies and magical thinking of the delusional.

The Global Elite’s “Kill and Control” Agenda: Destroying Our Food Security

Posted on February 4, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

Governments around the world continue to impose an expanding sequence of measures to curtail rights and freedoms ostensibly to tackle a ‘virus’. In response, public demonstrations against these government measures are also ongoing and expanding with truck convoys the latest manifestation of this form of protest.

Unfortunately, while activists mistake these popular mobilizations for effective resistance, the Global Elite’s coup d’état against humanity gathers pace.

Concealed beneath the ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ narrative, and marketed by the World Economic Forum as the ‘Great Reset’, this coup is designed to utterly transform human society and even human life. This is because the detail outlined in the ‘Great Reset’ documentation, which anyone can investigate for themselves, clearly identifies intended changes to some 200 areas of human activity, essentially characterized as part of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’.

Beyond that, however, as a lengthening list of doctors, scientists and scholars have been warning us for some time, although their efforts are invariably heavily censored by corporate media, the injectables program is decimating the human population – see ‘Killing Off Humanity: How t he Global Elite is using Eugenics and Transhumanism to Shap e Our Future’ – while ensuring that those who submit to it and survive will only do so as transhuman slaves. See ‘Beware the Transhumanists: How “Being Human” is being Re-engineered by t he Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’.

Even beyond the injectables, however, the Global Elite is using a vast range of other measures to implement its ‘kill and control’ agenda.

One means of doing this has been to exploit the ‘pandemic’ (and its control measures such as lockdowns) to engineer the greatest redistribution of wealth from poor to rich in human history, thus starving to death vast numbers of people in Africa, Asia and Central/South America in the process – as the Director of the World Food Program had no trouble predicting in April 2020: see ‘WFP chief warns of “hunger pandemic” as Global Food Crises Report launched’ – while impoverishing (and often rendering homeless) substantial numbers in industrialized economies as confidently predicted by geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar, also in April 2020. See ‘Who Profits From the Pandemic?’

Have these predictions been realized? As Oxfam has recently noted: ‘A new billionaire has been created every 26 hours since the pandemic began. The world’s 10 richest men have doubled their fortunes, while over 160 million people are projected to have been pushed into poverty.’ See ‘Inequality Kills: The unparalleled action needed to combat unprecedented inequality in the wake of COVID-19’.

But notable among the Elite’s other measures, including ongoing deployment of 5G which continues to devastate life generally – see ‘Deadly Rainbow: Will 5G Precipitate the Extinction of All Life on Earth?’ – are its ongoing efforts to destroy global supply chains, including those in relation to food, so that starvation functions to kill off far more than just marginalized populations but also to ensure that those left alive are compliant as the price of being ‘entitled’ to eat.

In essence, this component of their plan (which is now being rapidly implemented) is to disconnect humans from nature, herd us into ‘smart cities’ and destroy our sense of natural food; that is, destroy human culture.

Hence, using a combination of 5G, AI and blockchain technologies, the intention is to take complete control of food supply chains and get rid of natural food by creating lab-grown meat, synthetic foods and even ‘3D printed food’. Watch ‘Architecting the Beast System’ and ‘DARPA funds Soylent Green as Empty Shelves in USA – #BareShelvesBiden Trends’ and see ‘Don’t Be Fooled: Lab-Grown Meat Is a Disaster in the Making’.

If you have not been following the progressive destruction of small farmers, the consolidation of agricultural land, the relentless promotion of genetically-mutilated organisms (GMOs), the destruction of food supply chains, the hoarding of food and even the destruction of food supplies, as well as the ongoing efforts to feed you a combination of synthesized trash and insect-based food substitutes, let me briefly outline the evidence below and tell you how Mohandas K. Gandhi would respond.

Control of Food Historically
Since the neolithic revolution (the transition from hunting/gathering to farming) began unfolding 60,000 years ago – see The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia and Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture – humans have farmed open-pollinated seeds that simply allow a farmer to keep some seed harvested in one season to plant in the next. But that natural round has been progressively eroded over recent decades.

Among those who have spent considerable time drawing attention to what the Global Elite has been doing and plans for us in relation to food generally, Dr. Vandana Shiva is certainly an outstanding figure. In a series of articles and interviews over many years, Shiva and the organization she founded, Navdanya International, have pointed out how ownership of the genetic diversity of our food crops as well as agricultural land is being increasingly consolidated in the hands of fewer corporations owned by fewer individuals and how control of the food industry (from production to processing to distribution) is also being increasingly consolidated in the hands of fewer corporations and individuals.

Beyond this, Shiva has highlighted how capital and chemical intensive monoculture-based industrial agriculture is the biggest driver of species extinctions, including systematically wiping out the diversity of crops we grow and eat, and this has been transforming the very nature of the food we consume, not just by progressively eliminating this food diversity but also by aggressively introducing toxins and poisons in various forms as well as genetically-mutilated and, ultimately, synthetic foods. See ‘Gates to a Global Empire over Seed, Food, Health, Knowledge… and the Earth ’ and ‘The Poison Cartel is Poisoning the World, Driving Species to Extinction, and Contributing to Hunger ’.

As Shiva has pointed out, just one of the many outcomes of the aggressive marketing of genetically-mutilated seeds has been an epidemic of farmer suicides in India. See ‘How Monsanto’s GMO Creations Caused 291,000 Suicides in India’.

Another prominent figure who has drawn attention to the many dramatic reverses in the ownership, control and diversity of food and food production is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But to highlight just one of the myriad points made by Kennedy, he draws attention to a report highlighting that Bill Gates ‘has quietly made himself the largest owner of farmland in the United States.’ See ‘Bill Gates and Neo-Feudalism: A Closer Look at Farmer Bill ’ and ‘Bill Gates: America’s Top Farmland Owner’.

Beyond this, researcher ‘Sam Parker’ has offered a history of the use of food as an instrument of control for the past 4,000 years beginning with the ominous words ‘The control of food for use as a weapon is an ancient practice.’ He nominates the major food conglomerates (Cargill, Continental Grain, Louis Drefuss, Bunge & Born, Andre, Archer Daniels Midland/Topfer, ConAgra, IBP, Nestle, Unilever, Philip Morris) and offers an explanation of how this food cartel, along with another three dozen food corporations, control the world’s food supply noting that, today, ‘food warfare is firmly under the control of London and New York’ and that the cartel is ‘prepared to apply a tourniquet to food production and export supplies, not only to poor nations, but to advanced sector nations as well’. See ‘The BA Cartel Part 2 (of a 3 Part Series)’.

So for those still unconcerned as humanity rapidly loses the little control it still has left of its food supply, it might be worthwhile to recall that infamous comment of Henry Kissinger: ‘Who controls the food supply controls the people.’

But whatever the threats to the food supply that have been accelerating and accumulating over recent decades, they have been dramatically compounded in the past two years.

Control of Food in the ‘Pandemic’ Era

Since the beginning of the so-called pandemic, global supply chains of goods, including food, have been severely disrupted with the intention of forcing them to collapse. This plan has been executed using a careful combination of restrictions implemented by governments, supposedly to contain spread of the non-existent virus. Primarily, it has included forcing workers out of their role in the production, transport and distribution of food supplies.

Hence, farmers have grappled with restrictions impeding their capacity to plant, tend and harvest crops or care for livestock, workers have been prevented from staffing canning and processing factories as well as abattoirs – see ‘Staff shortages due to COVID-19 taking a toll across all industries in NSW’ – truckers have been unavailable to transport foodstocks – see ‘COVID-19 vaccines still mandatory for Canadian cross-border truckers, feds say’ – wharf labourers have been unavailable to load shipping containers of food onto ships – see ‘The supply chain crisis is a jobs crisis’ – and supermarket shelves are empty as stores struggle with product and staff shortages, which is particularly challenging for those in remote communities with limited food retail outlets. See ‘Grocery store closures loom amid labour, product shortages’.

None of this has happened because a virus will kill us, because the virus does not exist. For just two of the myriad demonstrations of this point, see ‘COVID-19: The virus does not exist – it is confirmed!’ and ‘Statement On Virus Isolation (SOVI)’. And for an account of researcher Christine Massey’s fruitless search over the course of more than a year to find evidence of an isolated virus, via Freedom of Information requests to health/science institutions all over the world, see ‘164 health/science institutions globally all failed to cite even 1 record of “SARS-COV-2” purification, by anyone, anywhere, ever’.

Beyond restrictions supposedly imposed in response to the ‘virus’ threat, some natural disasters have disrupted food production and supply chains, such as when ‘unfavourable weather conditions’ reduced the expected potato harvest in Russia – see ‘Russia – 2021 saw potato production drop’ – drought was a key factor is Syria’s lowest wheat production in 50 years – see ‘Syria’s wheat production “lowest in 50 years” with fears of mass starvation: UN’ – and a flood shut down Vancouver, the largest port in Canada: ‘The floods temporarily shut down much of the movement of wheat and canola from Canada, one of the world’s biggest grain exporters’. See ‘Floods cut rail access to Canada’s Vancouver port, disrupting goods shipments’.

Moreover, some food supplies, notably including grain among other products, are being hoarded. ‘Less than 20% of the world’s population has managed to stockpile more than half of the globe’s maize and other grains, leading to steep price increases across the planet and dropping more countries into famine. The hoarding is taking place in China…. Over the past five years, China’s soybean, maize and wheat imports soared two- to twelvefold on aggressive purchases from the U.S., Brazil and other supplier nations. Imports of beef, pork, dairy and fruit jumped two- to fivefold.’ The food, including grains to be fed to farm animals, is being stored in massive food-stockpiling bases but also in container ships anchored in the port at Dalian waiting to be unloaded. See ‘China hoards over half the world’s grain, pushing up global prices’.

Other countries that traditionally supply food products just turned off the export tap early in the ‘pandemic’ to keep food supplies for domestic consumption. See ‘Countries Are Starting to Hoard Food, Threatening Global Trade’.

And food stocks are being destroyed as, for example, the ongoing worker shortages continue to serve the insidious ‘kill and control’ agenda of the elite – see ‘30,000 pigs culled on farms [in UK] as backlog remains “dire”’ – and the periodic ‘apocalyptic bird flu’ nonsense – see ‘Scientists say an apocalyptic bird flu could wipe out half of humanity’ and ‘UK: “Apocalyptic Bird Flu” Jumps to Humans as Authorities Cull Millions of Birds ’ – gets yet another run and, as just one example, was used to ‘justify’ the slaughter of a million egg-laying hens in Israel. See ‘Massive New Bird Flu Outbreak Could Be 2022’s Deadly Pandemic’.

More simply, perhaps, it is easy to prevent unvaccinated farmers from delivering crops to grain silos, as happened in Australia, for example. Watch ‘Farmers, Truckers STOPPED as Food Supply Collapses’.

Beyond these problems, however, it is happening because of the interrelated nature of supply chains, including when they collapse. Farmers have been having increasing problems growing food because of the difficulties of obtaining vital inputs, ranging from fertilizers for which ‘supply chain logistics are a mess’ – see ‘Supply chain problems contribute to fertilizer worries’ – and pesticides – see ‘Pesticide industry battling supply chain challenges, working to ensure 2022 availability ’ – to machine parts and other inputs – see ‘Supply chain issues hitting all segments of ag’ – as supply chains in other sectors have been shut down too.

Sometimes, there are simply no available empty containers on which to load the produce. See ‘Why there will be no end to the global container crisis anytime soon’.

And even the deployment of 5G, catastrophic for other reasons as noted above, is now exacerbating supply chain problems as it is introduced. See ‘Airlines warn of “catastrophic” crisis when new 5G service is deployed ’ and ‘Why 5G Is Dangerous for Planes — and People’.

Is all of this a total surprise?
Not if you are aware of the script of the 2015 Center for American Progress simulation ‘Food Chain Reaction: A Global Food Security Game’, or have followed the progressive destruction of the food supply chain in recent years. Watch ‘Farmers Panic, Can’t Get Supplies to Grow Food’.

What Can You Do?
Fortunately, a great deal. But I gently encourage you to get on with it!

As Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was assassinated 74 years ago on 30 January 1948, was teaching more than 100 years ago, self-reliance is still the safest option, particularly when it comes to food. Whether grown in your own backyard or a community garden, and perhaps participating in a local trading scheme and/or possibly a local farmers market, individual, family and community self-reliance in food-growing is the only viable option for the near-term future if survival is among your desired personal outcomes.

If you want to grow your own food with the intention of becoming self-sufficient and you are starting from scratch, watch this recent webinar by Marjory Wildcraft, coordinator of the Grow Food Network: ‘You Can Grow Food’.

There is high quality information on growing food for vegans and vegetarians in John Jeavons’ book How to Grow More Vegetables.

In this video, the Ice Age Farmer, Christian Westbrook, interviews Marjory Wildcraft about working with the local community to establish and maintain a community food garden: ‘Building Food Security through Community – Marjory Wildcraft’.

And David Holmgren, co-originator of permaculture, offers excellent resources explaining how to create a permaculture food garden for your backyard and community at his website Holmgren Design.

But don’t forget, if you are not resisting the elite agenda overall, it won’t matter how self-reliant in food production you have become, you will be killed or enslaved by another component of the multifaceted nature of the elite plan.

Information on strategically resisting the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ is explained on the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ website and the simplest form of this strategic resistance is outlined on the one-page flyers, now available in 1 5 languages (Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish & Slovak) with more in the pipeline.

If strategically resisting the ‘Great Reset’ appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group as well.

Conclusion

The global food supply chain is being systematically destroyed. This is happening as part of the overall elite agenda to kill off a substantial proportion of the human population and enslave those left alive. Any reading of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ program and its related eugenicist and transhumanist agendas makes this clear even if, occasionally, one needs to read between the lines.

While resisting this entire agenda is an absolute necessity if humanity is to survive in the form we have existed for the past 200,000 years, our sustained resistance is going to depend on people being able to eat.

So getting organized to defend yourself and your family by growing your own food and working with like-minded people in your local community are essential elements of our survival even if, in itself, self-reliance in food production is not enough.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

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