The Russian ruble is sitting pretty right now, having regained its pre-sanctions value and set to become a major commodity currency.Photo Credit: The Cradle
Rublegas is the commodity currency du jour and it isn’t nearly as complicated as NATO pretends. If Europe wants gas, all it needs to do is send its Euros to a Russian account inside Russia.
Saddam, Gaddafi, Iran, Venezuela – they all tried but couldn’t do it. But Russia is on a different level altogether.
The beauty of the game-changing, gas-for-rubles, geoeconomic jujitsu applied by Moscow is its stark simplicity.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s presidential decree on new payment terms for energy products, predictably, was misunderstood by the collective west. The Russian government is not exactly demanding straightforward payment for gas in rubles. What Moscow wants is to be paid at Gazprombank in Russia, in its currency of choice, and not at a Gazprom account in any banking institution in western capitals.
That’s the essence of less-is-more sophistication. Gazprombank will sell the foreign currency – dollars or euros – deposited by their customers on the Moscow Stock Exchange and credit it to different accounts in rubles within Gazprombank.
What this means in practice is that foreign currency should be sent directly to Russia, and not accumulated in a foreign bank – where it can easily be held hostage, or frozen, for that matter.
All these transactions from now on should be transferred to a Russian jurisdiction – thus eliminating the risk of payments being interrupted or outright blocked.
It’s no wonder the subservient European Union (EU) apparatus – actively engaged in destroying their own national economies on behalf of Washington’s interests – is intellectually unequipped to understand the complex matter of exchanging euros into rubles.
Gazprom made things easier this Friday, sending official notifications to its counterparts in the west and Japan.
Putin himself was forced to explain in writing to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz how it all works.
Once again, very simple: Customers open an account with Gazprombank in Russia. Payments are made in foreign currency – dollars or euros – converted into rubles according to the current exchange rate, and transferred to different Gazprom accounts.
Thus it is 100 percent guaranteed that Gazprom will be paid.
That’s in stark contrast to what the United States was forcing the Europeans to do: pay for Russian gas in Gazprom accounts in Europe, which would then be instantly frozen. These accounts would only be unblocked with the end of Operation Z, Russia’s military ops in Ukraine.
Yet the Americans want the war to go on indefinitely, to “bog down” Moscow as if this was Afghanistan in the 1980s, and have strictly forbidden the Ukrainian Comedian in front of a green screen somewhere – certainly not Kiev – to accept any ceasefire or peace deal.
So Gazprom accounts in Europe would continue to be frozen.
As Scholz was still trying to understand the obvious, his economic minions went berserk, floating the idea of nationalizing Gazprom’s subsidiaries – Gazprom Germania and Wingas – in case Russia decides to halt the gas flow.
This is ridiculous. It’s as if Berlin functionaries believe that Gazprom subsidiaries produce natural gas in centrally heated offices across Germany.
The new rubles-for-gas mechanism does not in any way violate existing contracts. Yet, as Putin warned, existing contracts may indeed be stopped: “If such [ruble] payments are not made, we will consider this to be the buyers’ failure to perform commitments with all ensuing implications.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov was adamant that the mechanism will not be reversed under the current, dire circumstances. Still that does not mean that the gas flow would be instantly cut off. Payment in rubles will be expected from ‘The Unfriendlies’ – a list of hostile states that includes mostly the US, Canada, Japan and the EU – in the second half of April and early May.
For the overwhelming majority of the Global South, the overarching Big Picture is crystal clear: an Atlanticist oligarchy is refusing to buy the Russian gas essential to the wellbeing of the population of Europe, while fully engaged in the weaponization of toxic inflation rates against the same population.
Beyond Rublegas
This gas-for-rubles mechanism – call it Rublegas – is just the first concrete building block in the construction of an alternative financial/monetary system, in tandem with many other mechanisms: ruble-rupee trade; the Saudi petroyuan; the Iran-Russia SWIFT- bypassing mechanism; and the most important of all, the China-Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) design of a comprehensive financial/monetary system, with the first draft to be presented in the next few days.
After the predictable initial stages of denial, the EU – actually, Germany – must face reality. The EU depends on steady supplies of Russian gas (40 percent) and oil (25 percent). The sanction hysteria has already engineered certified blowback.
Natural gas accounts for 50 percent of the needs of Germany’s chemical and pharmaceutical industries. There’s no feasible replacement, be it from Algeria, Norway, Qatar or Turkmenistan. Germany is the EU’s industrial powerhouse. Only Russian gas is capable of keeping the German – and European – industrial base humming and at very affordable prices in case of long-term contracts.
Disrupt this set up and you have horrifying turbulence across the EU and beyond.
The inimitable Andrei Martyanov has summed it up this way: “Only two things define the world: the actual physical economy, and military power, which is its first derivative. Everything else are derivatives but you cannot live on derivatives.”
The American turbo-capitalist casino believes its own derivative “narrative” – which has nothing to do with the real economy. The EU will eventually be forced by reality to move from denial to acceptance. Meanwhile, the Global South will be fast adapting to the new paradigm: the Davos Great Reset has been shattered by the Russian Reset.
Perhaps the maxim of the Brazilian thinker José Luís Fiori that “expansionism and war are two essential parts of the machine that produces power and wealth in the interstate system” has never been so pertinent and seems to be confirmed at the exact historical moment we are witnessing.
The extraordinary events that resulted from the Russian intervention in Ukraine, which began on February 24, leave indelible marks and confirm some of the perceptions that have already been mentioned in other articles by us.
The western-led international order is clearly being questioned in its hierarchy of power, and the war in Ukraine is a clear symptom of this questioning.
What really causes astonishment, however, is the perception that this war aims at something much bigger than it might seem at first sight, because it would not be a regional war, but a war of global proportions: a hegemonic war.
The paradigm shift represented by the Russian intervention in Ukraine consolidates, therefore, the path of a new international system, more fragmented, and where Western power is weakened. In this scenario, the tectonic plates of the international system are slowly moving in the face of the new, and unprecedented, world that is unfolding.
Therefore, like it or not, the elites of countries like Brazil, so subservient to the security strategy of the United States, are being pushed towards a consensual solution in the direction of the Eurasian experience through the BRICS. In this way, the brazilian military, so reactionary and obedient to Washington, is facing a new world, apparently already understood by the diplomatic tradition of “Itamaraty”, and even by the powerful Brazilian agrobusiness lobby.
In the opposite direction, the blindness of the European elites causes astonishment by feeding a game that plunges Europe back into what it has always been: the great stage of military interstate competition of the last 500 years.
Therefore, taking this terrible premise into consideration, the armistice that made possible the creation of the European Union, as well as the common currency, would have been a mere interregnum of peace, until the next war.
Retaking its tragic place in the classical international system, Europe is once again the scene of the old theater of death, and the maxim that “peace is almost always a truce which lasts for the time imposed by the expansive compulsion of the winners, and the need for revenge of the losers,” has never been more apposite.
In this context, the german humiliation represented by the American veto of the Nord Stream II gas pipeline is paradigmatic. On February 7, in the middle of the White House, and even before the Russian intervention in Ukraine, Joe Biden publicly disavows the newly appointed german chancellor Olaf Scholz, stating categorically that the Nord Stream II pipeline would be stopped.
This attitude could be considered the trigger for Russian intervention and the opening of Pandora’s Box for the new world that is opening. Besides representing, in symbolic terms, the humiliation of Germany as a sovereign country, it consolidates the definitive “Coup d’Etat” in the European integration project.
With Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky being a kind of spokesman of a script written in Washington – or, who knows, Hollywood – the repeated attacks on European leaders who have worked so hard for the normalization of Russian-European Union relations, as is the case of the recent attack on former chancellor Angela Merkel, indicate that the instruments of fourth generation war, already used by the United States in other regions of the planet, are intensifying in the heart of the western alliance.
Not only the maintenance, but the deepening of the continuous and unlimited reproduction and expansion of the American military empire is a reality that became even clearer after the first Russian tank entered Ukrainian territory, even if this meant destabilizing, or even destroying, old and loyal allies.
In this sense, the old premise carried by many scholars of the “realist” school of International Relations, as well as by great thinkers of the World System, that the concentration of global power in a single state would be an essential condition for lasting world peace, falls to the ground.
The “Hyperpower Paradox” is confirmed as a slap in the face of the enormous theoretical consensus developed since the mid-1970s of the last century.
In other words, since the first minute of the US bombing of Iraq in 1991, which followed the 48 military interventions of the 1990s, and the 24 interventions in the first two decades of the 21st century – which in turn culminated in 100,000 bombings around the globe – the International System is immersed in a somber process of permanent, or infinite, war, which contradicts the Kantian utopia of perpetual peace reflected in the idea of hegemonic stability.
Thus, it was a mistake to consider that the unipolar global power that emerged with the victory in the cold war could exercise its hegemony in the name of peace and global stability, assuming, therefore, a responsible leadership and in the name of a great global governance.
On the contrary, what we have witnessed over the last 30 years is the escalation of interstate competition, with the reaction of other states to the insane and inconsequential process of power expansion carried out by the American military empire.
As a result, we find ourselves before a world that seemed to belong only to the history books; where the national interests of the great powers return with the force that, as it turns out, they never stopped having, but were only dormant.
This new (old) geopolitics of nations, therefore, leaves its clearest mark with what Russia imposes in its intervention in Ukraine: contesting the primacy that only westerners have the legitimacy to impose their will through war.
This is the novelty that shakes the structures of the International System.
In the face of this imminent war of global proportions, resulting from the Russian challenge and the intensification of the arms race – with the alarming return of Germany and Japan to the game – we are inexorably heading for a deepening of the interstate systemic chaos, as well as the escalation of systemic social conflict, particularly in Europe.
As in other moments in the history of the World System, Europe is once again the nerve center of the global power struggle. And as in other tragic moments in history, the behavior of European leaders is once again irrational; in the midst of a negative-sum game. The Europeans lose.
Fabio Reis Vianna, lives in Rio de Janeiro, is a bachelor of laws (LL.B), MA student in International Relations at the University of Évora (Portugal), writer and geopolitical analyst. He currently maintains a column on international politics at the centennial Brazilian newspaper Monitor Mercantil.
“We are now speeding down the road of wasteful spending and debt, and unless we can escape we will be smashed in inflation.”—Herbert Hoover
This is financial tyranny.
The U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones who must foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity.
We’ve been sold a bill of goods by politicians promising to pay down the national debt, jumpstart the economy, rebuild our infrastructure, secure our borders, ensure our security, and make us all healthy, wealthy and happy.
None of that has come to pass, and yet we’re still being loaded down with debt not of our own making.
Now the Biden administration is proposing a $5.8 trillion spending budget that notably includes $813 billion for national defense, $30 billion to “fund the police,” and a plan to reduce the national deficit by roughly $1 trillion over 10 years through additional tax hikes.
The U.S. ranks as the 12th most indebted nation in the world, with much of that debt owed to the Federal Reserve, large investment funds and foreign governments, namely, Japan and China.
Essentially, the U.S. government is funding its very existence with a credit card.
In 2021, we paid more than $562 billion in interest on that public debt, which according to journalist Rob Garver, “is more than the annual budget of every individual federal agency except for the Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services (which manages the Medicare and Medicaid government health insurance programs), and the Department of Defense.”
According to the Committee for a Reasonable Federal Budget, the interest we’ve paid on this borrowed money is “nearly twice what the federal government will spend on transportation infrastructure, over four times as much as it will spend on K-12 education, almost four times what it will spend on housing, and over eight times what it will spend on science, space, and technology.”
Clearly, the national debt isn’t going away anytime soon, especially not with government spending on the rise and interest payments making up such a large chunk of the budget.
Still, the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its wanton spending.
Indeed, the national deficit (the difference between what the government spends and the revenue it takes in) remains at more than $1.5 trillion.
If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.
Despite the government propaganda being peddled by the politicians and news media, however, the government isn’t spending our tax dollars to make our lives better.
We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.
We’re not living the American dream. We’re living a financial nightmare.
In the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than pocketbooks waiting to be picked.
“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.
Consider: The government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. Government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. And the IRS insists on getting the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.
We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow.
We have no real say, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.
If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.
It didn’t take long, however—a hundred years, in fact—before the American government was laying claim to the citizenry’s property by levying taxes to pay for the Civil War. As the New York Times reports, “Widespread resistance led to its repeal in 1872.”
Determined to claim some of the citizenry’s wealth for its own uses, the government reinstituted the income tax in 1894. Charles Pollock challenged the tax as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor. Pollock’s victory was relatively short-lived. Members of Congress—united in their determination to tax the American people’s income—worked together to adopt a constitutional amendment to overrule the Pollock decision.
On the eve of World War I, in 1913, Congress instituted a permanent income tax by way of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution and the Revenue Act of 1913. Under the Revenue Act, individuals with income exceeding $3,000 could be taxed starting at 1% up to 7% for incomes exceeding $500,000.
It’s all gone downhill from there.
Unsurprisingly, the government has used its tax powers to advance its own imperialistic agendas and the courts have repeatedly upheld the government’s power to penalize or jail those who refused to pay their taxes.
While we’re struggling to get by, and making tough decisions about how to spend what little money actually makes it into our pockets after the federal, state and local governments take their share (this doesn’t include the stealth taxes imposed through tolls, fines and other fiscal penalties), the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.
To top it all off, all of those wars the U.S. is so eager to fight abroad are being waged with borrowed funds. As The Atlantic reports, “U.S. leaders are essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”
Of course, we’re the ones who will have to repay that borrowed debt.
For instance, American taxpayers have been forced to shell out more than $5.6 trillion since 9/11 for the military industrial complex’s costly, endless so-called “war on terrorism.” That translates to roughly $23,000 per taxpayer to wage wars abroad, occupy foreign countries, provide financial aid to foreign allies, and fill the pockets of defense contractors and grease the hands of corrupt foreign dignitaries.
Mind you, that staggering $6 trillion is only a portion of what the Pentagon spends on America’s military empire.
Most recently, in response to Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine, the Biden Administration approved $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine, with an additional $200 million for immediate military assistance.
As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in a 1953 speech, this is how the military industrial complex will continue to get richer, while the American taxpayer will be forced to pay for programs that do little to enhance our lives, ensure our happiness and well-being, or secure our freedoms.
This is no way of life.
Yet it’s not just the government’s endless wars that are bleeding us dry.
We’re also being forced to shell out money for surveillance systems to track our movements, money to further militarize our already militarized police, money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts, money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply, and on and on.
It’s tempting to say that there’s little we can do about it, except that’s not quite accurate.
There are a few things we can do (demand transparency, reject cronyism and graft, insist on fair pricing and honest accounting methods, call a halt to incentive-driven government programs that prioritize profits over people), but it will require that “we the people” stop playing politics and stand united against the politicians and corporate interests who have turned our government and economy into a pay-to-play exercise in fascism.
Unfortunately, we’ve become so invested in identity politics that pit us against one another and keep us powerless and divided that we’ve lost sight of the one label that unites us: we’re all Americans.
Trust me, we’re all in the same boat, folks, and there’s only one real life preserver: that’s the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The Constitution starts with those three powerful words: “We the people.”
There is power in our numbers.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that remains our greatest strength in the face of a governmental elite that continues to ride roughshod over the populace. It remains our greatest defense against a government that has claimed for itself unlimited power over the purse (taxpayer funds) and the sword (military might).
Where we lose out is when we fall for the big-talking politicians who spend big at our expense.
The United States is now insisting that Russian President Vladimir Putin should be put on trial for “war crimes” committed in Ukraine. As Putin is still insisting that he will attend the upcoming G20 summit in November on the island of Bali, Indonesia, it will be a great opportunity to have US Marshalls snatch him from the stage and whisk him off to a federal courthouse in Virginia for justice to be served. Or a form of justice anyway, since the United States has no actual jurisdiction over where Putin’s alleged crimes might have taken place and it will be impossible to prove that he actually ordered anyone to carry out so-called “crimes against humanity.” We’ll see how it all works out.
Indeed, there is no other phrase that has been more misunderstood and generally abused of late than “war crimes” or “war criminals.” It belongs with several other labels, including “weapons of mass destruction” and “crimes against humanity” that are used to indicate an adversary has crossed a red line and is so deplorable that anything that is done to him either during actual fighting or in the aftermath is completely acceptable. Going back to Greek and Roman times it has always been understood that even in wartime there are certain activities that are unacceptable, but the attempted definition and codification of “war crimes” as a concept is largely a twentieth century creation used to inflict additional punishment on the losers after the fighting is over. The Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War punished Germany far beyond what most would consider reasonable, largely because the victorious powers were able to do so without any consequences until the next war began. Likewise, the linked concepts of war crimes and crimes against humanity came largely out of the post-Second World War Nuremberg Trials, which shaped the legal arguments around alleged German behavior, not that of the allies.
The Second World War certainly included atrocities of various kinds on both sides, but the Anglo-American deliberate bombing of German cities has to stand out as particularly disproportionate. Forty-two thousand mostly civilians died in Hamburg in the 1943 firebombing and the bombing of Dresden in 1945, at a point when Germany was on the verge of defeat, was remarkable in that the city was not a military target and was full of refugees from the east. At least 200,000 civilians died. Judge Andrew Napolitano has suggested that the greatest war crime in history, if one makes a case based on unnecessary human suffering, was President Harry Truman’s nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which almost certainly killed more than 200,000 mostly civilians, when Japan was preparing to surrender. As Truman was on the side that won the war and controlled the prosecution process, there were no legal consequences or punishment relating to his decision, though critics since 1945 have sometimes decried the first use of nuclear weapons.
If killing civilians unnecessarily is the standard definition of a war crime, then America’s most recent five presidents have been war criminals. In other words, historically speaking, accusations of war crimes, which have no real meaning in law and are both infinitely elastic and subject to interpretation, have often depended on which side of the fence one is standing on when the war ends. And it gets more complicated than that, given the politics of what is sometimes referred to as the rules based international order, which in theory arose from the ashes of World War Two. The new world order was US-centric from the start, with the United Nations (UN) situated in New York City, the World Bank in Washington, and the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. At the UN, American primacy was reinforced through the creation of a Security Council, which alone has the power to authorize military action against a rogue state. The Security Council had five permanent members, each of whom was armed with a veto, meaning that no effective action against them could ever take place no matter what they had done. And so it has played out, with the US plus China, Russia, Britain and France being effectively immune from censure authorizing military action by the United Nations.
It is of particular interest to observe that the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague was set up to deal with “war crimes and crimes against humanity” that were otherwise ignored. Neither the US, nor the Russians nor the Israelis recognize the authority of the court and the US has stated that no ICC investigator will be allowed entry into the United States. Given that, it becomes possible to witness how the whole farce of war crimes and other violations of the new world order have played out in practice.
Currently the US and its allies are waging economic warfare on Russia without an actual declaration of war, to include an avalanche of sanctions plus completely illegal confiscations of the property of Russian citizens. It is also blocking Moscow from the use of the international monetary conventions and systems that it has had access to. The clearly stated intention is to destroy the Russian economy due to Russia having been charged by the US government with the commission of what it is calling war crimes in its invasion of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin argues in turn that Ukraine’s apparent intention to join NATO, which is a hostile military alliance directed against Russia, is a direct threat to his country and is already manifesting itself in military action undertaken against breakaway parts of Ukraine which are largely inhabited by Russian speakers and ethnics.
There are other issues, but those are the most important. It should also be noted that the issues themselves were at least somewhat negotiable prior to the outbreak of fighting, which Putin sought to do but Joe Biden and NATO were not interested. So ultimately the war, from a third-party point of view, is pitting a Russian vital interest against what really amounts to no genuine interest at all for NATO and the US, apart from goading the Russian bear and removing its government as a way to prevent against any change in the international order.
Since objective reality has no place in United States foreign policy, it is interesting to look at how the US sees itself and how it regards other countries that are doing what Russia is doing or worse. When it comes to its own self-perception, America’s so-called leaders believe that their global leadership role is one by right and they can do no wrong by virtue of a quality referred to as “American exceptionalism.” That is of course a mythical attribute created to permit the United States to get away with mass murder and regime change without any consequences.
A principal beneficiary of American financial and political largesse is, of course, Israel, which consists not only of people “chosen” by Yahweh but also by the media, the United States Senate, House of Representatives and the White House. A comparison of what Russia is doing that is being condemned by Washington versus what both what the US and Israel have been able to get away with might be considered to be in order.
Russia has invaded Ukraine after months of warnings that the status quo was untenable in national security terms, largely due to intentionally fruitless negotiations with stonewalling United States representatives and NATO. Israel, widely acknowledged to be an apartheid state, is currently bombing Syria on an almost daily basis, unnoticed by the US media and the Biden Administration. It in the past has attacked all its neighbors, including the renowned Seven Days War in June 1967 which was a surprise attack staged against Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Subsequent to that war, Israel occupied nearly all of what had been Palestine. It also seized the Golan Heights belonging to Syria and has recently received consent from Washington to illegally annex Arab East Jerusalem as a part of Israel, making the whole of the city Israel’s capital. The Golan Heights have also recently been annexed with Washington’s approval and there are 700,000 heavily armed and violent Jewish settlers now sitting in 261 settlements on stolen Palestinian land on the West Bank.
And what has the United States and its allies done to dissuade Israel? Well, nothing. One rule for Israel and the US and another quite different Washington dictated “rules based” system for everyone else, most particularly if one is Russian. In fact, the more belligerently Israel behaves, the more it gets in terms of US taxpayer money and made-in-USA weapons. Israel has also been the favored destination for traveling congress-critters of late because it is an election year and Jewish donors are being hotly pursued. Recently, a large group of Democrats was departing just before former Vice President Mike Pence arrived in Tel Aviv on Miriam Adelson’s private jet so he could kiss Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s ring and also spend some quality time with Benjamin Netanyahu.
Ironically, while Joe Biden was turning the screws on Russia, the Congress was showering gifts on Israel above and beyond the billions of dollars in “aid” that the wealthy Jewish state already receives. Alison Weir of IfAmericansKnewhas examined the recently signed pork laden 2022 federal government spending bill and has identified numerous line-item instances of money going directly to Israel or in support of causes that benefit Israel in some fashion. She estimates that Israel’s economy, which is able to support both free medical care and higher education, now benefits to the tune of $22 million per day from the United States taxpayer, for a total of $8 billion per year, and the number might actually be much higher. And there are other sources of income indirectly funded by the US Treasury, most notably the ability of Israel-focused charities to contribute tax exempt money to Israeli foundations and groups. Many of the “charities” are essentially fraudulent, funding the illegal settlements, domestic terrorism and other anti-Palestinian activities. Every artifice is used by some Jewish groups and billionaire donors to keep the US dollars flowing to Israel while no one of any significance in the federal government complains about the double standard when one compares Israel to Russia. And the Zionist controlled media are completely silent.
The hypocrisy that pervades United States foreign policy is difficult to ignore, but Washington has successfully manipulated its financial instruments to keep its remaining friends and allies in line. Whether that will survive the inevitable pushback coming from Russia, China and a number of non-aligned nations remains to be seen. At a minimum, the Cold War alignment that was broken in 1991 and which seems to again be taking shape around the Ukraine issue appears to have exceeded its expiry date. Ukraine might indeed wind up doing severe damage to the Russian economy, but it seems plausible that it will also bring with it the long overdue demise of American hegemonistic fantasies and NATO.
The stunning spectacle of the European Union (EU) committing slow motion hara-kiri is something for the ages. Like a cheap Kurosawa remake, the movie is actually about the US-detonated demolition of the EU, complete with the rerouting of some key Russian commodities exports to the US at the expense of Europeans.
It helps to have a 5th columnist actress strategically placed – in this case astonishingly incompetent European Commission head Ursula von der Lugen – with her vociferous announcement of a crushing new sanctions package: Russian ships banned from EU ports; road transportation companies from Russia and Belarus prohibited from entering the EU; no more coal imports (over 4.4 billion euros a year).
In practice, that translates into Washington shaking down its wealthiest western clients/puppets. Russia, of course, is too powerful to directly challenge militarily, and the US badly needs some of its key exports, especially minerals. So, the Americans will instead nudge the EU into imposing ever-increasing sanctions that will willfully collapse their national economies, while allowing the US to scoop everything up.
Cue to the coming catastrophic economic consequences felt by Europeans in their daily life (but not by the wealthiest five percent): inflation devouring salaries and savings; next winter energy bills packing a mean punch; products disappearing from supermarkets; holiday bookings almost frozen. France’s Le Petit Roi Emmanuel Macron – perhaps facing a nasty electoral surprise – has even announced: “food stamps like in WWII are possible.”
We have Germany facing the returning ghost of Weimar hyperinflation. BlackRock President Rob Kapito said, in Texas,“for the first time, this generation is going to go into a store and not be able to get what they want.” African farmers are unable to afford fertilizer at all this year, reducing agricultural production by an amount capable of feeding 100 million people.
Zoltan Poszar, former NY Fed and US Treasury guru, current Credit Suisse grand vizir, has been on a streak, stressing how commodity reserves – and, here, Russia is unrivaled – will be an essential feature of what he calls Bretton Woods III (although, what’s being designed by Russia, China, Iran and the Eurasia Economic Union is a post-Bretton Woods).
Poszar remarks that wars, historically, are won by those who have more food and energy supplies, in the past to power horses and soldiers; today to feed soldiers and fuel tanks and fighter jets. China, incidentally, has amassed large stocks of virtually everything.
Poszar notes how our current Bretton Woods II system has a deflationary impulse (globalization, open trade, just-in-time supply chains) while Bretton Woods 3 will provide an inflationary impulse (de-globalization, autarky, hoarding of raw materials) of supply chains and extra military spending to be able to protect what will remain of seaborne trade.
The implications are of course overwhelming. What’s implicit, ominously, is that this state of affairs may even lead to WWIII.
Rublegas or American LNG?
The Russian roundtable Valdai Club has conducted an essential expert discussion on what we at The Cradle have defined as Rublegas – the real geoeconomic game-changer at the heart of the post-petrodollar era. Alexander Losev, a member of the Russian Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, offered the contours of the Big Picture. But it was up to Alexey Gromov, Chief Energy Director of the Institute of Energy and Finance, to come up with crucial nitty-gritty.
Russia, so far, was selling 155 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe each year. The EU rhetorically promises to get rid of it by 2027, and reduce supply by the end of 2022 by 100 billion cubic meters. Gromov asked “how,” and remarked, “any expert has no answer. Most of Russia’s natural gas is shipped over pipelines. This cannot simply be replaced by Liquified Natural Gas (LNG).”
The risible European answer has been “start saving,” as in “prepare to be worse off” and “reduce the temperature in households.” Gromov noted how, in Russia, “22 to 25 degrees in winter is the norm. Europe is promoting 16 degrees as ‘healthy’, and wearing sweaters at night.”
The EU won’t be able to get the gas it needs from Norway or Algeria (which is privileging domestic consumption). Azerbaijan would be able to provide at best 10 billion cubic meters a year, but “that will take 2 or 3 years” to happen.
Gromov stressed how “there’s no surplus in the market today for US and Qatar LNG,” and how prices for Asian customers are always higher. The bottom line is that “by the end of 2022, Europe won’t be able to significantly reduce” what it buys from Russia: “they might cut by 50 billion cubic meters, maximum.” And prices in the spot market will be higher – at least $1,300 per cubic meter.
An important development is that “Russia changed the logistical supply chains to Asia already.” That applies for gas and oil as well: “You can impose sanctions if there’s a surplus in the market. Now there’s a shortage of at least 1.5 million barrels of oil a day. We’ll be sending our supplies to Asia – with a discount.” As it stands, Asia is already paying a premium, from 3 to 5 dollars more per barrel of oil.
On oil shipments, Gromov also commented on the key issue of insurance: “Insurance premiums are higher. Before Ukraine, it was all based on the Free on Board (FOB) system. Now buyers are saying ‘we don’t want to take the risk of taking your cargo to our ports.’ So they are applying the Cost, Insurance and Freight (CIF) system, where the seller has to insure and transport the cargo. That of course impacts revenues.”
An absolutely key issue for Russia is how to make the transition to China as its key gas customer. It’s all about the Power of Siberia 2, a new 2600-km pipeline originating in the Russian Bovanenkovo and Kharasavey gas fields in Yamal, in northwest Siberia – which will reach full capacity only in 2024. And, first, the interconnector through Mongolia must be built – “we need 3 years to build this pipeline” – so everything will be in place only around 2025.
On the Yamal pipeline, “most of the gas goes to Asia. If the Europeans don’t buy anymore we can redirect.” And then there’s the Arctic LNG 2 project – which is even larger than Yamal: “the first phase should be finished soon, it’s 80 percent ready.” An extra problem may be posed by the Russian “Unfriendlies” in Asia: Japan and South Korea. LNG infrastructure produced in Russia still depends on foreign technologies.
That’s what leads Gromov to note that, “the model of mobilization-based economy is not so good.” But that’s what Russia needs to deal with at least in the short to medium term.
The positives are that the new paradigm will allow “more cooperation within the BRICS (the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa that have been meeting annually since 2009);” the expansion of the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC); and more interaction and integration with “Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Iran.”
Only in terms of Iran and Russia, swaps in the Caspian Sea are already in the works, as Iran produces more than it needs, and is set to increase cooperation with Russia in the framework of their strengthened strategic partnership.
Hypersonic geoeconomics
It was up to Chinese energy expert Fu Chengyu to offer a concise explanation of why the EU drive of replacing Russian gas with American LNG is, well, a pipe dream. Essentially the US offer is “too limited and too costly.”
Fu Chengyu showed how a lengthy, tricky process depends on four contracts: between the gas developer and the LNG company; between the LNG company and the buyer company; between the LNG buyer and the cargo company (which builds vessels); and between the buyer and the end user.
“Each contract,” he pointed out, “takes a long time to finish. Without all these signed contracts, no party will invest – be it investment on infrastructure or gas field development.” So actual delivery of American LNG to Europe assumes all these interconnected resources are available – and moving like clockwork.
Fu Chengyu’s verdict is stark: this EU obsession on ditching Russian gas will provoke “an impact on global economic growth, and recession. They are pushing their own people – and the world. In the energy sector, we will all be harmed.”
It was quite enlightening to juxtapose the coming geoeconomic turbulence – the EU obsession in bypassing Russian gas and the onset of Rublegas – with the real reasons behind Operation Z in Ukraine, completely obscured by western media and analysts.
A US Deep State old pro, now retired, and quite familiar with the inner workings of the old OSS, the CIA precursor, all the way to the neocon dementia of today, provided some sobering insights:
“The whole Ukraine issue is over hypersonic missiles that can reach Moscow in less than four minutes. The US wants them there, in Poland, Romania, Baltic States, Sweden, Finland. This is in direct violation of the agreements in 1991 that NATO will not expand in Eastern Europe. The US does not have hypersonic missiles now but should – in a year or two. This is an existential threat to Russia. So they had to go into the Ukraine to stop this. Next will be Poland and Romania where launchers have been built in Romania and are being built in Poland.”
From a completely different geopolitical perspective, what’s really telling is that his analysis happens to dovetail with Zoltan Poszar’s geoeconomics: “The US and NATO are totally belligerent. This presents a real danger to Russia. The idea that nuclear war is unthinkable is a myth. If you look at the firebombing of Tokyo against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more people died in Tokyo than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These cities were rebuilt. The radiation goes away and life can restart. The difference between firebombing and nuclear bombing is only efficiency. NATO provocations are so extreme, Russia had to place their nuclear missiles on standby alert. This is a gravely serious matter. But the US ignored it.”
U.S. liberals are the worst perpetrators of Russophobic behavior. They are most likely to follow the dictates of corporate media and the democratic party and proudly take part in discriminatory acts. But foolish bans of anything Russian are just the most visible indication that war propaganda is at the root of the hysteria.
The city of Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts prohibit discrimination based upon race, color, gender, disability, religion, and national origin. Such discrimination is prohibited by most cities, states, and the federal government as well. But one wouldn’t know that due to a plethora of discriminatory acts carried out against Russian nationals. The latest perpetrator is the Boston Athletic Association (BAA) , which announced that citizens of Russia and Belarus who reside in those countries will be barred from participating in the Boston marathon taking place on April 18, 2022. The war in Ukraine, years of Russiagate hysteria, and corporate media demonization of Vladimir Putin and all Russians have led to this moment of dubious distinction.
The weaknesses of what passes for a left wing movement have been fully exposed ever since Russian troops entered Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Of course many people who are called leftists and even those who consider themselves as such are in fact just liberals. They do not stand against imperialism as any leftist ought to do. The eight-year long U.S./NATO scheme to use Ukraine as a weapon against Russia should be universally condemned by anyone claiming to be in that cohort. Leftists can have principled disagreement about Putin’s decision, but they should not ignore the culpability of the U.S. and NATO and their support for the 2014 coup which overturned an election and put neo-Nazi groups in power.
Their confusion on Russia and Ukraine is emblematic of their confusion about so many other issues. The faux left are a highly problematic group, making common cause with the democratic party wing of the war party, and ignoring the war crimes committed by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and now Joe Biden. Not only do they fail to ask, “What about?,” but they have no critique of the U.S. role which instigated this crisis. They say nothing about the U.S. and its NATO allies refusing to engage in negotiations which might end the suffering of the Ukrainian people they claim to care about so much.
So deep is the rot that they say nothing about increasingly blatant and bizarre examples of Russophobia. Russian cats cannot enter international cat shows, a Russian singer was fired from the Metropolitan Opera when she refused to denounce her government, an orchestra canceled a festival featuring the music of Russian composer Tchaikovsky, and a tribute to space exploration removed the name of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin from the program.
It is tempting to snicker about the denial of recognition to Russian cats, but the lack of opposition to the Boston marathon action is shameful indeed. People who see themselves as enlightened, and even intellectually and morally superior to others are silent in the face of an obviously unfair and illegal act.
The BAA is typical of U.S. elite organizations. It makes a big show of proving itself diverse and equitable by establishing a Boston Runners Collaborative whose mission is “… expanding access to running and walking in Boston with a focus on communities of color.” The outreach was in part motivated by the murder of Ahmaud Arbery , whose memory is not certainly not honored by phony shows of racial solidarity. So the BAA used the cold blooded murder of a Black man to jump on a superficial liberal bandwagon and illegally banned people who live in a country their government is telling them to hate.
Of course the BAA is not alone. Politicians, pundits and corporate media all tell us to “stand with Ukraine” and to call Putin a war criminal. American presidents are never connected to war crimes, even when they invade Iraq and kill thousands of people, destroy Libya and kill thousands of people, or enact sanctions and steal government assets that kill thousands of people. The war criminal category is only deemed appropriate for leaders the U.S. doesn’t like.
U.S. liberal elites are as much in the thrall of the dictates of their leadership as the members of January 6th mob who attacked the capital. Their critical thinking skills are practically non-existent, or they go along to get along, or silence themselves due to cowardice. The end result is much worse than a Russian missing a race.
The blue and yellow flags and whipping up of hysteria have a very important and dangerous aim. The goal of the propagandists is to get the country in the mood for war. When the slippery slope gets steeper and the public are convinced that the use of “tactical nukes” or other such nonsense is acceptable, the entire world will be at risk.
Perhaps the plight of Russian and Belarusian athletes isn’t viewed as an important human rights issue. Of course world leaders do much worse to millions more people. But every acceptance of what may seem to be a minor slight can lead to major implications. Liberalism itself is a great danger. The censoring of left voices in media and the conscious effort to disappear all but the state narrative are liberal led efforts and lead to dehumanizing whomever the president and his friends in corporate media may choose to target.
So let the Russians run. Acquiescing to this misguided effort will lead to greater dangers in the future.
Two days after Russia attacked Ukraine and the day before Vladimir Putin put Russia on nuclear alert, I wrote a little article whose first sentence was: “Not wanting to sound hyperbolic, but I am starting to conclude that the nuclear madmen running the U.S./NATO New Cold War they started decades ago are itching to start a nuclear war with Russia.”
It was an intuition based on my knowledge of U.S./Russia history, including the U.S engineered coup in Ukraine in 2014, and a reading of current events. I refer to it as intuition, yet it is based on a lifetime’s study and teaching of political sociology and writing against war. I am not a Russian scholar, simply a writer with a sociological, historical, and artistic imagination, although my first graduate academic study in the late 1960s was a thesis on nuclear weapons and why they might be someday used again.
It no longer sounds hyperbolic to me that madmen in the declining U.S. Empire might resort, like rats in a sinking ship, to first strike use of nuclear weapons, which is official U.S. policy. My stomach is churning at the thought, despite what most experts say: that the chances of a nuclear war are slight. And despite what others say about the Ukraine war: that it is an intentional diversion from the Covid propaganda and the Great Reset (although I agree it achieves that goal).
My gut tells me no; it is very real, sui generis, and very, very dangerous now.
The eminent scholar Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research agrees that we are very close to the unthinkable. In a recent historical analysis of U.S.-Russia relations and nuclear weapons, he writes the following before quoting Vladimir Putin’s recent statement on the matter. “Vladimir Putin’s statement on February 21st, 2022 was a response to U.S. threats to use nuclear weapons on a preemptive basis against Russia, despite Joe Biden’s “reassurance” that the U.S. would not be resorting to ‘A first strike’ nuclear attack against an enemy of America”:
Let me [Putin] explain that U.S. strategic planning documents contain the possibility of a so-called preemptive strike against enemy missile systems. And who is the main enemy for the U.S. and NATO? We know that too. It’s Russia. In NATO documents, our country is officially and directly declared the main threat to North Atlantic security. And Ukraine will serve as a forward springboard for the strike.” (Putin Speech, February 21, 2022, emphasis added)
Putin is absolutely correct. It is why he put Russia’s nuclear forces on full alert. Only those ignorant of history, which sadly includes most U.S. Americans, don’t know this.
I believe that today we are in the greatest danger of a nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, something I vividly remember as a teenager. The same feelings return. Dread. Anxiety. Breathlessness. I do not think these feelings are misplaced nor they are simply an emotional response. I try to continue writing on other projects that I have started but feel stymied. The possibility of nuclear war, whether intentional or accidental, obsesses me.
In order to grasp this stomach-churning possibility within the context of Ukraine, we need to put aside all talk of morality, rights, international law, and think in terms of great power politics, as John Mearsheimer has so clearly articulated. As he says, when a great power feels its existence is threatened, might makes right. You simply can’t understand world politics without thinking at this level. Doing so does not mean justifying the use of might; it is a means of clarifying the causes of wars, which start long before the first shots are fired.
In the present crisis over Ukraine, Russia clearly feels existentially threatened by U.S./NATO military moves in Ukraine and in eastern Europe where they have positioned missiles that can be very quickly converted to nuclear and are within a few minutes range of Russia. (And of course there are U.S./NATO nuclear missiles throughout western and southern Europe.) Vladimir Putin has been talking about this for many years and is factually correct. He has reiterated that this is unacceptable to Russia and must stop. He has pushed for negotiations to end this situation.
The United States, despite its own Monroe Doctrine that prohibits another great power from putting weapons or military forces close to its borders, has blocked its ears and kept upping the ante, provoking Russian fears. This fact is not in dispute but is shrugged off by U.S./NATO as of little consequence. Such an attitude is pure provocation as anyone with a smidgeon of historical awareness knows.
The world was very lucky sixty years ago this October when JFK and Nikita Khrushchev negotiated the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis before the world was incinerated. Kennedy, of course, was intensely pressured by the military and CIA to bomb Cuba, but he resisted. He also rejected the insane military desire to nuke the Soviet Union, calling such people crazy; at a National Security Council meeting on September 12, 1963, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a report about a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union which they wanted for that fall, he said, “Preemption is not possible for us.”
Such leadership, together with the nuclear test ban treaty he negotiated with the USSR that month, inter alia (such treaties have now been abrogated by the U.S. government), assured his assassination organized by the CIA. These days, the U.S. is led by deluded men who espouse a nuclear first strike policy, which tells one all one needs to know about the danger the world is in. The U.S. has been very sick with Russia hatred for a long time.
After the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, many more people took the threat of nuclear war seriously. Today very few do. It has receded into the ”unimaginable.” In 1962, however, as James W. Douglass writes in JFK and the Unspeakable:
Kennedy saw that, at least outside Washington, D.C., people were living with a deeper awareness of the ultimate choice they faced. Nuclear weapons were real. So, too, was the prospect of peace. Shocked by the Cuban Missile Crisis into recognizing a real choice, people preferred peace to annihilation.
Today the reality of nuclear annihilation has receded into unconsciousness. This despite the recent statements by U.S. generals and the U.S. Ukrainian puppet Zelensky about nuclear weapons and their use that have extremely inflamed Russia’s fears, which clearly is intentional. The game is to have some officials say it and then deny it while having a policy that contradicts your denial. Keep pushing the envelope is U.S. policy. Obama-Biden reigned over the U.S. 2014 coup in Ukraine, Trump increased weapon sales to Ukraine in 2017, and Biden has picked up the baton from his partner (not his enemy) in this most deadly game. It is a bi-partisan Cold War 2, getting very hot. And it is the reason why Russia, its back to the wall, attacked Ukraine. It is obvious that this is exactly what the U.S. wanted or it would have acted very differently in the leadup to this tragedy. All the current ringing of hands is pure hypocrisy, the nihilism of a nuclear power never for one moment threatened but whose designs were calculated to threaten Russia at its borders.
The media propaganda against Russia and Putin is the most extreme and extensive propaganda in my lifetime. Patrick Lawrence has astutely examined this in a recent essay, where he writes the same is true for him:
Many people of many different ages have remarked in recent days that they cannot recall in their lifetimes a more pervasive, suffocating barrage of propaganda than what has engulfed us since the months that preceded Russia’s intervention. In my case it has come to supersede the worst of what I remember from the Cold War decades.
Engulfed is an appropriate word. Lawrence rightly points to this propaganda as cognitive warfare directed at the U.S. population (and the rest of the world) and notes its connection to the January 2021 final draft of a “diabolic” NATO study called “Cognitive Warfare.” He quotes it thus: “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” . . . “Humans are the contested domain. Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”
This cognitive warfare, however, has a longer history in cutting edge science. For each successive decade beginning with the 1990s and a declaration from President (and ex-Director of the CIA) George H. W. Bush that the 1990s would be the Decade of Brain Research, presidents have announced additional decades long projects involving the brain, with 2000-2010 being the Decade of Behavior Project, followed by mapping of the brain, artificial intelligence, etc. all organized and funded through the Office of Science and Technology Project (OSTP) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This medical, military, and scientific research has been part of a long range plan to extend MK-Ultra’s mind control to the population at large under the cover of medical science, and it has been simultaneously connected to the development and funding of the pharmaceutical industries research and development of new brain-altering drugs. RFK, Jr. has documented the CIA’s extensive connection to germ and mind research and promotion in his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. It is why his book is banned from the mainstream media, who do the prime work of cognitive warfare for the government. To put it clearly: these media are the CIA. And the issue of U.S. bio-weapons research and development is central to these many matters, including in Ukraine.
In other words, the cognitive warfare we are now being subjected to has many tentacles connected to much more than today’s fanatical anti-Russian propaganda over Ukraine. All the U.S. wars of aggression have been promoted under its aegis, as have the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the economic warfare by the elites, the COVID crisis, etc. It’s one piece.
Take, for example, a book written in 2010 by David Ray Griffin, a renown theologian who has written more than a dozen books about 9/11. The book is Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory. It is a critique of law professor Cass Sunstein, appointed by Obama to be the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein had written an article with a plan for the government to prevent the spread of anti-government “conspiracy theories” in which he promoted the use of anonymous government agents to use secret “cognitive infiltration” of these groups in order to break them up; to use media plants to disparage their arguments. He was particularly referring to those who questioned the official 9/11 narrative but his point obviously extended much further. He was working in the tradition of the great propagandists. Griffin took a scalpel to this call for cognitive warfare and was of course a victim of it as well. Sunstein has since worked for the World Health Organization (WHO) on COVID psychological responses and other COVID committees. It’s all one piece.
Sunstein’s wife is Samantha Power, Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations and war hawk extraordinaire. She gleefully promoted the U.S. destruction of Libya under the appellation of the “responsibility to protect,” a “humane” cover for imperialism. Now she is Biden’s Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an arm of the CIA throughout the world. It’s all one piece.
The merry-go-round goes round and round.
I have gone off on this slight tangent to emphasize how vast and interconnected are the players and groups on Team Cognitive Warfare. They have been leading the league for quite some time and are hoping their game plan against Team Russia will keep them there. So far they are winning, as Patrick Lawrence says:
Look at what has become of us. Most Americans seem to approve of these things, or at least are unstirred to object. We have lost all sense of decency, of ordinary morality, of proportion. Can anyone listen to the din of the past couple of weeks without wondering if we have made of ourselves a nation of grotesques?
It is common to observe that in war the enemy is always dehumanized. We are now face to face with another reality: Those who dehumanize others dehumanize themselves more profoundly.
Perhaps people are too ignorant to see through the propaganda. To have some group to hate is always “uplifting.” But we are all responsible for the consequences of our actions, even when those actions are just buying the propaganda and hating those one is told to hate. It is very hard to accept that the leaders of your own country commit and contemplate unspeakable evil deeds and that they wish to control your mind. To contemplate that they might once again use nuclear weapons is unspeakable but necessary if we are to prevent it.
I hope my fears are unfounded. I agree with Gilbert Doctorow that the Ukraine-Russia war separates the sheep from the goats, that there is no middle ground. This is not to celebrate war and the death of innocent people, but it does demand placing the blame squarely where it belongs and not trying to have it both ways. People like him, John Mearsheimer, the late badly missed Stephen Cohen, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, Pepe Escobar, Patrick Lawrence, Jack Matlock, Ted Postol, et al. are all cutting through the propaganda and delivering truth in opposition to all the lies. They go gentile with fears of nuclear war, however, as if it is somewhat possible but highly unlikely, as if their deepest thoughts are unspeakable, for to utter them would be an act of despondency.
The consensus of the experts tends to be that the U.S. wishes to draw the Russians into a long protracted guerrilla war along the lines of its secret use of mujahideen in Afghanistan in 1979 and after. There is evidence that this is already happening. But I think the U.S. strategists know that the Russians are too smart for that; that they have learned their lesson; and that they will withdraw once they feel they have accomplished their goals. Therefore, from the U.S./NATO perspective, time is reasonably short and they must act quickly, perhaps by doing a false flag operation that will justify a drastic response, or upping the tempo in some other way that would seem to justify the use of nuclear weapons, perhaps tactical at first.
I appreciate the input of the Russia experts I mentioned above. Their expertise dwarfs mine, but I disagree. Perhaps I am an excitable sort; perhaps I am one of those Patrick Lawrence refers to, quoting Carl Jung, as too emotional and therefore incapable of clear thinking. (I will leave the issue of this long held but erroneous western philosophical belief in the division of emotions and thoughts for another day.) Perhaps I can’t see the obvious that a nuclear war will profit no one and therefore it cannot happen. Yet Ted Postol, MIT professor of technology and international security, while perhaps agreeing that an intentional nuclear war is very unlikely, has been warning of an accidental one for many years. He is surely right on that score and well worth listening to.
But either way, I am sorry to say, perhaps because my perspective is that of a generalist, not an expert, and my thinking is informed by art as much as social science and history, my antennae pick up a very disturbing message. A voice tells me that the danger is very, very real today. It says:
Speaking at a White House business convention on 21st March 2022 the US President, Joe Biden, said:
We are at an inflection point, I believe, in the world economy [. . .] it occurs every three of four generations. [. . .] Now is a time when things are shifting, there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it and we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.
This caused a bit of a storm because Biden, once again, used the term “New World Order” (NWO). We are told that there is no identifiable globalist project called the NWO. Apparently, the only people who think such a project exists are “conspiracy theorists.” These people are all antesemites, can’t be trusted and absolutely must not be heard, or something like that.
In his 1992 article for the Wall Street Journal titled, How I Learned To Love The New World Order, Biden spoke about “America’s proper role in the new world order.” His latest statement indicates that his concern lingers, on this occasion with good reason. The US position as nominal leaders of the NWO is under threat from Russia and China.
Politicians, oligarchs and other alleged “leading voices” keep talking about the NWO. Every time they mention it the mainstream media (MSM) immediately spring into action, eager to “dispel the myths” or “set the record straight”, defining the term for us. Why do they feel the need to keep doing this? Why are the establishment and their media so sensitive about the term “new world order?”
The NWO Is Not an Antisemitic Trope
The “new world order” is a phrase that gets flung around by all sorts of people for a variety of reasons. It is occasionally expressed in distinctly antisemitic terms.
Some people believe that the NWO is a “Jewish plot to enslave humanity.” Very few people, who have researched and studied the NWO, share this view. It is not supported by the evidence.
Nonetheless, the false allegations of antisemitism applied to anyone who talks about the NWO provides a very useful canard which “debunkers” consistently deploy. As the historian Prof. Antony C. Sutton pointed out in his exploration of Wall Street and The Bolshevik Revolution:
The persistence with which the Jewish-conspiracy myth has been pushed suggests that it may well be a deliberate device to divert attention from the real issues and the real causes. [. . .] What better way to divert attention from the real operators than by the medieval bogeyman of anti-Semitism?
The mainstream media (MSM) role is to confuse and mislead the public. They do not want the people to know what the NWO really is. They hide its history and generally deny its existence, but if that fails they will exploit the Holocaust to bolster their disinformation.
Antisemitism means “hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people.” That hostility and prejudice led to the Holocaust. Falsely accusing people of antisemitism, simply to undermine their arguments, dilutes its true meaning. Doing so shows a lack of respect for the victims of the Holocaust and a casual disregard for Jewish people and their history.
The MSM insist that when US Presidents talk about the NWO they are simply referring to changes in the behavioural norms, regulations and laws that broadly shape international relations. This may be the case, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the NWO has a precise historical meaning.
Given that it is a heavily charged term, is it likely that senior politicians, foreign policy strategists and national leaders would routinely use it unwittingly, without understanding what it means? Perhaps so in some cases but not in all. It is clear than many presidents, prime ministers and geoplitical experts have referred to the NWO in its proper context.
The Term “New World Order” As Propaganda
In a typical example of MSM disinformation, the UK’s Independent newspaper attempted to cover up Biden’s slip by trotting-out the usual denials and obfuscations. They claimed that Biden was simply referring to the “shifting sands of geopolitical relations.”
The Independent did not divulge the reality of the NWO to their readers. Instead it relied upon the tired slurs and allegations traditionally used to discredit those who discuss the NWO. The Independent alleged:
[P]ost-war paranoia tapped into much more ancient social anxieties about the possibility of shadowy secret covens engaging in evil [. . .] The Illuminati, the model for all subsequent sinister behind-closed-doors cabals feared by conspiracy theorist [. . .] traces its origins to the German Enlightenment of the 18th century. Belief in such a group plotting insurrection to realise its “new world order” first gained real prominence in the US among anti-government extremists in the 1990s. [. . .] The movement brings together American right-wing militant instincts with Christian fundamentalist doom prophecies [. . .] and has exploded over the last three decades in tandem with the growth of the internet. [. . .] Conspiracy theories have now become a form of mass entertainment on social media. [. . .] [Z]ealots, bored in lockdown during the pandemic, blended ancient anti-Semitic smears with quest narrative mythologies and pop cultural borrowings to worrying ends.
The so-called “newspaper” followed all of the state approved propaganda to the letter. Mixing genuine history—yes, the Illuminati really did exist—with total gibberish—there is no “movement” of NWO-exposing “extremists”—the Independent managed to fuse “conspiracy theory” with “right-wing” extremism and antisemitism. This is the standard approach to NWO denialism.
By linking the whole hodgepodge together, in a word-salad of misdirection and innuendo, the Independent were able to deliver their essential message: people who talk about the NWO do not trust government and questioning government can only lead to “worrying ends.”
The Independent didn’t offer any evidence to substantiate its conclusion, but informing readers wasn’t the point of the article. Claiming that NWO investigators are all antisemites who believe in “lizard men” allows the reader to safely discount the historians and geopolitical analysts, who have published NWO research, as crazy people.
According to the Independent, no one would even bother talking about the NWO were it not for the Internet. By claiming that questioning government policy online is “extremism,” the Independent offered its support for the government’s proposed censorship of the Internet.
Ironically, the best NWO historians published their work long before the Internet was invented. As pointed out, in one of the many contradictions in the Independent’s article, the NWO was a hot topic of conversation decades before we took to our keyboards and devices.
Introducing The New World Order
Contrary to the opinions of propagandists and debunkers, the NWO is a defined globalist project. The objective is to establish global governance. It was inaugurated more than 100 years ago and it has undergone numerous changes over subsequent generations.
While it wields immense political influence it is not “all powerful.” The NWO is tyrannical and oppressive by nature, hence the need for subterfuge and concealment. Its architects cannot simply enforce their dictatorship and expect to get away with it. We would resist, and if we did so in sufficient numbers there’s not much the NWO could do about it.
Therefore we need to be controlled by other means. Education, society, culture, economics, party politics, finance, applied psychology, behaviour modification, censorship, propaganda, war and crisis management are all used to manoeuvre us into accepting the NWO’s policy agendas. We persistently fall into this trap because we imagine our “elected” leaders are making the ‘big’ decisions: they’re not.
The New World Order (NWO) is an idea that was first proposed by Cecil Rhodes’ Round Table Movement. It was envisaged as a secret system of global governance led by an anglo trans-Atlantic alliance. It didn’t stay “secret” for very long.
Not only have politicians and the leaders of industry, commerce and finance frequently spoken about it, it has also been thoroughly exposed by historians and researchers. Perhaps most notably by Professors Carroll Quigley and Antony C. Sutton.
Even in the early 20th Century, when it was first devised, the concept of the NWO wasn’t a particularly novel idea. It was simply an attempt, by a Western hegemonic power-bloc, to establish global dominion. It is an extension of the age-old game of empires.
Rhodes’ NWO project was itself built upon pre-existing global power structures. The Venetian bankers and the other private enterprises, such as the British East India Company, had already surpassed nation states in terms of their resources, wealth and global political control. Rhodes’ vision was to convert this private financial power, which he possessed in abundance, into one, cohesive system of global rule.
The NWO model, which emerged after Rhodes’ death in 1902, immediately came unstuck. Rhodes was a British imperialist who, alongside his fellow Brits, bemoaned the loss of “their” American colony. The NWO was supposed to re-assert British control in the US, with the city of London ruling Wall Street. This is not how the US contingent viewed the burgeoning trans-Atlantic alliance and it is they who would soon come to the fore. Internecine struggles have been a consistent feature of the NWO throughout its history.
It was led from the centre by “the Society of the Elect” who would oversee, and be protected, by the first ring of power called “the Association of Helpers.” Consecutive rings were then established, affording NWO control of financial institutions, multinational corporations, governments, intelligence agencies and militaries, etc.
Only the members of the “Society” and the “Association” had a full grasp of the entire NWO project. Conceptualisation of the whole system, among the members of each subsequent ring, progressively diminished as their positions moved away from the centre of power. NWO controlled assets, placed in key administrative, academic, military, media or political roles, only knew enough to be able to perform their required tasks and report accurately back to their handlers.
There’s Nothing “New” about the NWO
Tyrants have always sought to impose their authority upon as many people as possible. Just like Sumerian kings or Roman emperors, the leaders of the NWO sought exactly the same despotism, though on a grander scale. As technology has advanced the goal of centralised authority over a global governance structure has become more attainable.
While the manipulation and control techniques have advanced, the goal hasn’t changed. This ambition is as old as civilisation itself. There have always been people who wish to rule and many more who are content to be ruled.
Our collective obedience to authority guarantees tyranny. The NWO is by no means the first kleptocracy to have cultivated and exploited our compliance.
Like all the empires that preceded it, from its inception the proposed NWO was designed to take the form of a public-private partnership between government and an immensely wealthy “Superclass.” Often these individuals and family dynasties came from the world of international finance or banking, but leading industrialists and media moguls were also prominent.
They formed the hand behind the throne. As Prof. Quigley noted in 1966:
There really is a “world system of financial control in private hands” that is “able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world.” [. . .] They now control every major international institution, every major multinational and transnational corporation both public and private, every major domestic and international banking institution, every central bank, every nation-state on earth, the natural resources on every continent and the people around the world through complicated inter-locking networks that resemble giant spider webs. [. . .] They were responsible for World War I, World War II, [. . .] They have created periods of inflation and deflation in order to confiscate and consolidate the wealth of the world. [. . .] This wealth is now being used to construct and maintain the World Empire that is in the last stages of development. [. . .] The chief architects of this new World Empire are planning another war—World War III—to eliminate any vestiges of political, economic or religious freedom from the face of the earth. They will then completely control the earth and its natural resources.
Elected politicians, and the governments they formed, were always the junior partners in this network. Many were hand picked for their malleability, predisposition to corruption or loyalty to the NWO project. With the intelligence and security agencies thoroughly co-opted, the deep state—the “state within the state” or “shadow state”—flourished.
The Party Political system was permitted because it ensured that electorates could never derail the NWO project. They could be placated with a misplaced sense of democratic oversight. Party politics also kept the masses occupied and distracted, leaving the NWO to get on with business unhindered .
Policy agendas were set and then political puppets were installed to sell the desired policies to the people, no matter who they voted for. Quigley explained the NWO’s approach to party based, representative democracy:
The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is [. . .] a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.
The Leaders of the New World Order
The self-proclaimed leaders of the NWO are drawn from the so-called “Superclass.” Their only distinguishing attributes are immense private wealth, a ruthless willingness to act and an unshakeable belief in their divine right to rule.
The “old money” dynasties, sometimes referred to as the Black Nobility, have maintained their financial and monetary control for nearly a thousand years. They have been joined, in recent centuries, by banking families, industrialists and latterly the “new money” from the post WWII entrepreneurial, billionaire set.
The notion of a “Superclass” was proposed by Prof. David Rothkopf. As a member of the deep state think-tanks the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), among others, Rothkopf was well positioned to be personally acquainted with the robber barons he eulogised:
We’re not looking at just the wealthy; we’re looking at power. And so, the definition that we used was people who influence the lives of millions across borders on a regular basis. [. . .] It’s a tiny, tiny fraction of the people of the planet Earth. [. . .] [T]he really defining characteristics of this group is the nature of the networks, that networking is the force multiplier in any kind of power structure[.]
The “people who influence the lives of millions across borders on a regular basis” have gone by many names. “The Rhodes Crowd,” “All Souls Group,” “the Cliveden set,” “the Pilgrims” and many more. Today we often refer to them as oligarchs, thought leaders or stakeholders. No one elected Rothkopf’s “Superclass” to power.
Their wealth is often inherited from their forefathers’ war profits, often it’s the product of nepotism or profits accrued from more recent military interventions. Others have enriched themsleves from the exploitation of slave labour, rigged markets, resource theft, the drug trade, financial crime or usury, etc. The “parasite class” is a more accurate description.
The New World Order Today
It isn’t clear if the “Society of the Elect” or the “Association of Helpers” still remain. What can be said is that the current global management network is a compartmentalised, authoritarian structures. Everything first proposed by Rhodes’ pilgrims remains on track and appears to be nearing completion.
The NWO has been through several iterations and has been re-marketed in different forms. The COVID-19 pseudopandemic has seen the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset come to public attention. This is simply a new brand for the NWO as the WEF makes its bid to be the central pillar of the Global Public-Private-Partnership (G3P). The G3P represents the current management structure of the NWO.
The proposed operating system for NWO global governance is Technocracy. There are a number of key elements which, once installed, will end the last vestiges of human freedom and place the world’s population under the totalitarian control of the technocrats. In turn, the technocrats will serve the interests of the parasite class, not humanity.
Democracy will continue in name only, reassuring the masses for a while, in the form of a communitarian “civil society.” Government, working in partnership with private corporations, will encourage civil society groups to “debate” policies. Every single one of those policies will be pre-selected by the technocratic state (Technate). The apparent political choice will remain an illusion.
The global economy is currently being transformed as new markets are created. As outlined in the 1992 UN Agenda 21 document (section 8.41), the “basis for action” has already been established. A global accountancy system for all business will use stakeholder capitalism metrics to rate assets, ensuring “the integration of sustainability into economic management.”
The rating mechanisms, such as environmental, social and governance ratings (ESG’s), will enable centralised global economic planning. It will determine which ventures receive or do not receive investment. Favoured corporate partners within the G3P will do very well, as long as they promote G3P goals. Those who don’t will go bankrupt without question.
The ratings system provides a “better measurement of the crucial role of the environment as a source of natural capital.” Natural Asset Companies will transform forests into ‘carbon sequestration services’ and natural water sources into ‘human settlement resource services,’ or some such thing.
By claiming that they own nature, the G3P will create new markets worth a projected $4 quadrillion. Thereby removing oil, as the base commodity of value, and replacing it with nature (natural assets). This transformation is called “sustainable development.” It has nothing to do with environmentalism or combatting “climate change.”
The notion of uniting all of humanity to work together to solve the “climate crisis” is a contrivance to facilitate global governance. It was fabricated in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s by the globalist think-tanks that set the world’s policy agendas.
The Club of Rome, the think-tank which greatly influenced the nascent WEF, took credit for imagining the perfect global crisis. In their 1991 publications The First Global Revolution, on page 75 under the heading “the common enemy of humanity is Man,” the Club of Rome wrote:
In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. [. . .] All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.
This statement expresses two of the parasite class’ core beliefs. The assumed legitimacy of their claim to rule, which enables them to imagine they have the right to “designate” a global enemy, and their shared commitment to population control. They herd us like cattle, as they decide how to change our attitudes and behaviour to suit their objectives.
The International Monetary and Financial System (IMFS) has also undergone a transformation. With the introduction of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) it will be revolutionised. CBDC currency will be issued by central banks as their liability. They are solely responsible for that liability. CBDC will always be their money.
CBDC is electronic money, it is therefore programmable money. This means the central banks will have complete control over every unit of CBDC currency. Whether it is in your wallet or not, it is the central bank’s money and they will permit or deny every transaction you make with it.
For example, the decisions you currently make about where you travel have already been restricted by the global policy response to a fake pandemic. If CBDC is fully adopted, you will no longer have any choice at all.
CBDC will enable your central bank’s AI algorithm to decide where you can go and when. If CBDC becomes the only form of currency available to us, none of us, no matter how much money we think we have, will have any financial freedom.
In order for Technocracy to operate, every citizen must be continually surveilled and controlled by the state (Technate). The technology capable of doing this is already being distributed globally as part of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (4ID).
The Internet of Things (IoT) will see every device that we use report that use back to the Technate’s data centres. The Internet of Bodies (IoB) will enhance the Technates ability to monitor us in real time. Combined with the Digital-ID, that every nation is rushing towards, the surveillance and control of every individual “global citizen” will be centrally managed at the global governance level.
The New World Order, under the current management structure of the Global Public-Private Partnership, is nearing completion. It is a truly global system of governance. There are no leading governments anywhere on Earth opposed to it. All are racing ahead to adopt it with equal enthusiasm.
The Way Forward For The NWO
With Russia’s recent military operation in Ukraine, it has been suggested by some that the Russian and Chinese governments are not prepared to accept the imposition of the NWO. We can only be guided by their major policy statements and their actions. If these are anything to go by, both governments are fully on-board with the NWO agenda.
Both Russia and China are absolutely committed to sustainable development, Digital ID, 4ID, COVID biosecurity and vaccine-passports. Russia is ahead of most Western nations with regards to CBDC and China has surpassed Russia, having already started to use CBDC on a significant scale.
On 4th February Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping issued a joint statement on the future relationship between Russia and China. It read, in part:
Today, the world is going through momentous changes, and humanity is entering a new era of rapid development and profound transformation. [. . .] of the global governance architecture and world order. [. . .] The ongoing pandemic of the new coronavirus infection poses a serious challenge to the fulfilment of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. [. . .] In order to accelerate the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the sides call on the international community to take practical steps in key areas of cooperation such as poverty reduction, food security, vaccines and epidemics control, financing for development, climate change, sustainable development, including green development, industrialization, digital economy, and infrastructure connectivity. [. . .] [We] will further increase cooperation in the development and manufacture of vaccines. [. . .] Russia and China intend to encourage interaction in the fields of public health, digital economy, science, innovation and technology, including artificial intelligence technologies [. . .] Particular emphasis will be placed on the fight against the novel coronavirus infection pandemic and economic recovery, digitalization of a wide range of different spheres of life.
There is no evidence to suggest that either Russia or China wish to derail the objectives of the WEF’s Great Reset. On the contrary, the evidence points towards Russia and China as perhaps the most enthusiastic and aggressive advocates for the NWO agenda. China is the world’s first Technate and Russia is a major WEF partner, most notably on cybersecurity.
Much has been made of the WEF’s decision to distance itself from Russia and sanctioned individuals. Notably this is a “temporary” freeze and smacks more of political expediency and PR, rather than any genuine severance.
There is no aspect of the NWO, G3P managed agenda that either Russia or China stand against. Their joint statement read like a Great Reset checklist.
Perhaps this is all a cunning deception. Part of a “secret plot” by Russia and China to fight the NWO. However, it looks far more like a pact between two powers bidding for political leadership of the NWO.
There is no doubt that the NWO was conceived as a project of Western based oligarchs. In the post WWII era it has bared its teeth on the geopolitical stage as the “international rules-based order.” This unipolar order, centred around the G7 group of nations, with the US led NATO alliance providing the muscle, has been dominant within the Global Public-Private Partnership (G3P).
Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, and the G7/NATO alliance response to it, appears to be a watershed moment. Together, Russia and China are challenging the G7 clique with a BRICS based, G20 focused, multipolar model. It seems they are determined to seize primacy within the G3P management structure.
As a paid spokesperson for the G7 rules-based order, Joe Biden anxiously observed “there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it.” The US-led alliance’s problem is that Russia and China, in league with their BRICS partners, are pursuing exactly the same objective.
After the Crash 