Tag Archives: Joe Biden

Forecast 2023 — Get Out of the Way if You Can’t Lend a Hand

Posted on by
Reply

By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

“The powerful are panicking, and so they should. Their secrets are leaking.” —Miranda Devine

“It’s all just snake oil. We want to save the planet, and the life upon it, but we’re not willing to pay the price and bear the consequences. So we make up a narrative that feels good and run with it.” — Raul Ilargi Meier

“2023 could be a pivotal year for the USA if the pervasive lying can be exposed, digested, and believed. All that exposure has to happen amidst continuing boondoggles toward the Great Reset agenda.” – Truman Verdun

“More borrowing only ever makes sense if you are expecting a larger economy in the future.  All economic expansion is based on energy.  Countries with energy can expand, those without cannot.” —  Chris Martenson

“To be an enemy to America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” — Henry Kissinger

“The incorrect narrative provided by mainstream media (MSM) is that climate change is our worst problem. To lessen this problem, citizens need to move quickly away from fossil fuels and transition to renewables. The real narrative is that we are running short of fossil fuels that can be profitably extracted, and renewables are not adequate substitutes. However, this narrative is too worrisome for most people to handle.” — Ugo Bardi

It’s hard to contemplate 2023 without spiraling into nausea, tachycardia, and cold sweat. But it is an inescapable duty here to lay out the probabilities ahead. I’ve been doing this forecast thing for some years now, and, of course, I am often wrong, so take some solace in that and relax. Maybe the new year will be all unicorns, rainbows, talking gerbils, and candied violets.

   2022 sure was a cold shower. The long emergency I talk so much about finally got up to cruising speed, with the ectoplasmic “Joe Biden” revving our country into economic, political, and cultural collapse — a hat-trick of calamity — and he did it more swiftly and directly than any emperor managed in late-day Rome, with policies and actions 180-degrees contra to America’s public interest — cheered on by a thinking class that had obviously lost it consensual mind.

     Was the governing strategy simply to do the opposite of what the loathed and detested Mr. Trump would do? Could it be that simple or that automatic? The thinking class’s eyes have a zombified glaze these days. It’s obvious, you might agree, that “Joe Biden” is not in charge of anything, really. He’s an animatronic figure programmed to read a teleprompter and not much else. Half the time, he can’t even find his way off-stage after doing that one trick. The claque pulling his strings just may be the crew you see around him (you know, WYSIWYG): Susan Rice, Ron Klain, Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, and company. Ms. Rice has kept herself completely hidden backstage at the White House for two years. Nobody ever hears about her or sees her. Weird, a little bit, for the Director of the Domestic Policy Council.

      Or else, are there puppeteers deeper in the shadows, say, “JB’s” former boss Barack Obama, Der Schwabenklaus and his WEF retinue, Bill Gates and other tech billionaires, the “systemically important” bankers, George Soros…? Or some coven of super-elite warlocks we’d never heard of? The US leadership dynamic is truly mystifying and has been for two whole years. Will mysteries be revealed in 2023? Personally, I think so. Things are lining up in that direction, though who knows whether the damage can even be reversed at this point. And now onto the shape of things to come….

Economy

     All you can really say is that the folks running things have hijacked every module of our nation’s interests and tilted them down into decadence and ruin. They’ve tanked whatever’s left of the US economy with an array of surefire idiotic maneuvers. By spending trillions of dollars that don’t exist to buy votes, they’ve inflated away our money’s purchasing power — an Econ 101 level mistake. The “Green New Deal” is a swindle, an out-front, in-your-face nefarious operation to subvert Western Civ by the WEF, and its stooges — laid out explicitly in its house publications.

     There is no way we can run our society as currently outfitted on any combination of alt.energies. All the Greenies can really accomplish with this crusade is to destroy the complex systems we rely on faster than would happen in the normal course of things, foreclosing any chance of an orderly retreat to a plausibly downscaled arrangement for daily life. We are exiting the current system anyway, like it or not — the longstanding thesis of The Long Emergency.

      This gets to the heart of the conundrum we face. Ill-intentioned as the WEF and its allies may be, the world is heading toward a Great Re-set. The catch is, it won’t be the WEF’s version of it, their schematic techno-nirvana with a tiny comfortable elite lording over the bug-eating hoi-polloi. They somehow miss the glaring point that the energy required to run their precious transhuman tech won’t be there. By the way, the WEF’s core idea of central control by a coordinated world government is at odds with the core reality of the times ahead, which is that life is about to get much more local and downscaled — the exact opposite of centralized. Everything organized at the giant scale is veering into failure: empires, global corporations, hypertrophic cities, giant universities, giant farms, you name it. Their business models are broken. The activities these things represent have to get smaller, finer, and more regional. Depending on what we’re able to salvage and re-purpose from the fabricated leftovers of Modernity, we’ll be lucky to land back in life lived at the level of the early 1800s. Or else, if we really mess up, we’ll plunge haplessly into a dark age in a resource-stripped world.

      The “Green New Deal,” based on a combination of wishful thinking and self-destructive malice, includes the deliberate undermining of what’s left of America’s oil industry by cancelling pipelines, drilling licenses on public lands, draining the strategic petroleum reserve, and other efforts to sabotage what’s left. America still has a lot of oil in the ground, yet much of it is hard to get at and uneconomical to produce at the scale required. It’s a money-loser, and losing money consistently doesn’t pencil out for any real business.

     This hard reality is especially true of shale oil, which had a good run production-wise 2009 to 2022, though the producers could barely make a dime at it. The shale oil “miracle” was largely a byproduct of near-zero interest rates. Investors flocked to it after 2009 because they couldn’t get any yield from bonds. Shale oil was played-up as a sure thing. It took investors a decade, and over a hundred oil company bankruptcies, to catch on — and now shale oil can’t attract enough new investment to keep up the giant operations at scale. The main shale oil regions, the Permian Basin in Texas and the Bakken fields of North Dakota, have entered permanent decline as they run out of “sweet spots” to drill and frack. Considering the new era of capital scarcity ahead, money for shale oil companies will be even harder to get and we’ll get less shale oil every year, while conventional oil continues its own remorseless decline. The catch here is that oil prices are just as likely to go down as up because the foundering economy creates substantial demand destruction — meaning that customers drop out of the market.

      Natural gas involves similar dynamics. There seems to be a lot of it for now in the Marcellus formation spread over Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and into New York (where fracking has been prohibited for years). Natgas is very useful for electric generation, home heating, and some manufacturing, but not so much for transportation. Shale gas production is also based on “sweet spots” for drilling and there are fewer of them every year. The depletion curve for natgas is even more extreme than it is for oil: the flow stops all at once. The early shale gas plays in the southern US — Haynesville, Fayetteville, Barnett — have been in decline for years. As with shale oil, producing shale gas is expensive, with all the trucks ceaselessly delivering sand, water, and fracking chemicals to the drilling pads, and then transporting waste liquids off-site. Prediction: in 2023, we’ll hear the first rumblings about “nationalizing the oil industry,” which will be a giant step toward killing it altogether, given the all-around incompetence of government.

      The strategy of changing out oil-based cars and trucks for electric vehicles (EVs) is a loser on several counts beyond the disruption and instability facing US oil production. One, it’s premised on the fantasy that we can continue living in a suburban sprawl arrangement by other means. Two, the electric grid is too inadequate and fragile to support the charging of so many millions of EVs in addition to everything else we ask it to do. Three, the middle class is being decimated, so there are fewer credit-worthy customers for cars priced out of their shrinking budgets anyway. Four, far less capital will be available for consumer loans. The car industry itself may not survive the re-possession orgy coming in 2023 for defaulted auto loans. That shortfall will infect banking, too. The economy is already hurting. The “Green New Deal” will cut its wobbly legs off.

     Similarly, the new mandates against the use of nitrogenous fertilizers (made from natgas). European countries are already on-board with this WEF folly. The Netherlands, Europe’s leading food producer, is going so far as to forcibly shut down thousands of farms and limit fertilizer use on the remaining ones. Germany is likewise limiting fertilizers. Canada fell in line next. Prediction: in early 2023, “Joe Biden” will set in motion anti-fertilizer policies in the US. There will be plenty of squawking in the big farming states, rising to angry protests. The tractor convoys may invade Washington. The situation sets up a grim prospect for the US food supply: scarcity, high prices, and hunger ahead.

      The Ukraine bread-basket is out of the picture in 2023, unless military action ends well before planting season. Thanks to “Joe B’s” stupid sanctions policy, a more vulnerable Europe can’t depend on Russia, another world-leading grain producer. By summer, the projected harvests all over Western Civ will be inadequate to feed the existing populations. Routine grain exports to the poor nations of the “global south” will stop and a lot of people will starve in those countries. By then, it will be too late to fix anything. The price of food will soar throughout Western Civ, aggravating other economic crises that will amount to metastasizing poverty. Populations will get very restless. Governments will fall (candidates: France, Germany, UK, Australia, the USA). In some places they will not recover in their prior form.

     As a general proposition, Globalism is done. That got that underway in earnest with the Covid shut-downs. Now, geopolitical friction gets worse and trade relations deteriorate further. There will still be trade between nations, but much reduced. Global supply chains are already wrecked, especially for specialized mechanical replacement parts and electronic components. It will be harder to fix cars, trucks, turbines, really any sort of machine, including computers and things run by them. A lot of commercial activity will just stop.

     Europe has already blundered into buying its one-way ticket to Palookaville. Germany and the rest paid for that ticket by going along with feckless US policy to “weaken” Russia with sanctions (mission not accomplished). The coup de grace was the US wrecking the Nord Stream pipelines. So, Euroland has inadvertently decided to ditch its industrial base, which means they go medieval or worse. They have committed economic suicide. They’d better hope reincarnation is for-real. Anyway, they’re not coming back from this fiasco the way they went into it, that is, the way things were. When the shock of winter is over in early 2023, strife will be the new leitmotif in the Old World. People grow desperate in the six-weeks-wont of springtime. Nations crack up.

     America’s economy largely hinges on finance now that financialization replaced manufacturing as the basis for prosperity. Alas, financialized prosperity is false prosperity, since it consists mainly of borrowing ever greater amounts of money to keep up the mere appearance of prosperity. In real life, prosperity requires producing things of value, not just trading increasingly abstract financial instruments purporting to represent money. I’ve discussed this enough in books, prior blogs, and previous forecasts. Suffice it to say we’ve run out the string on this stunt. All we’re left with now is the debt markers, documents that purport to represent wealth. The collateral is all the stuff we produced previously that is still standing: buildings, developed properties, public works. A lot of this stuff is deteriorating quickly, losing its value — for instance the tens of millions of suburban houses built with shitty, short-lived materials like strand-board and vinyl… all the cars….

    Financialization led to the current inflation in our debt-based money system. More borrowing becomes more money going into existence, chasing a declining amount of goods as production falls off and supply lines choke. Services also suffer. People can’t afford to eat out, get acupuncture, visit hair-dressers. When the inflation is bad enough, say more than ten percent annually, it will cause enough economic damage to provoke a big contraction in activity, bringing on a deluge of loan defaults on mortgages, car payments, and corporate obligations. Loan defaults cause money to disappear from the system. This flips inflation into deflation. The bond-market is blowing up as this occurs, because bonds are debts and they’re not being serviced or paid-off. The imploding bond market infects the stock markets and they crash, too.

      Before long, nobody has money, except people who invested in gold and silver. Prediction: the change-over from inflation to deflation comes in summer of 2023 and gathers momentum into the fall. The implosion leads to economic conditions worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s because our social and family arrangements have disintegrated along with our towns and cities. Civil disorder ignites. The government attempts lockdowns, but this time without a disease to blame it on. It’s no longer safe to be a politician.

The Covid-19 Story Backfires Badly and Hell Breaks Loose

     Against the backdrop of a developing economic depression, the public can no longer avoid seeing the calamity that the mRNA vaccines have instigated. Early death is in the news daily now and from exactly the adverse effects that have been derided as “conspiracy theory” by public health experts since 2021: myocarditis, blood clots, organ damage, neurological illness, unusually aggressive cancers, damaged immune systems. Meanwhile, America’s public health aristocracy — Dr. Tony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, Francis Collins, Deborah Birx, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and many, many others will be compelled to testify under oath before newly re-constituted House committees and finally answer for all their dishonesty in the Covid-19 response saga. They lied about everything, especially the “vaccines?” It will go worse for them as public sentiment turns from submission to official bullshit to rage over a deadly fraud.

      By then, the past efforts of this gang to mislead the public on Twitter and other social media will be well-documented. The exposed slime-trail of money and corruption between Pharma and federal bureaucrats will finally make an impression on the long-bamboozled nation. The mainstream media will be dragged into this morass and the public will begin to understand how the newspaper editors and TV news producers, too, were bought off by Pharma and controlled by the national security state to pimp for the Democratic Party and globalist interests outside the USA. This exposure could be the end of the great legacy news organs, The New York Times and the rest of the gang. Their executives will have to testify along with everyone else. They might not be prosecuted — in a gesture of respect for the First Amendment — but rather will suffer badly from their loss of credibility.

     All of this will aggravate the animus against the government and the Democrat Party’s “Joe Biden” regime — which will be under assault from separate inquiries into the Hunter Biden laptop and its abundant evidence of bribery and treason, and hearings about the wide-open border, payments to Ukraine, and the gestapo-like behavior of the FBI.

    Here’s a scenario for you: The Justice Department will be drowning in criminal referrals. The FBI will be in a state of paralysis, unable to carry out more insults against US citizens as its systematic crimes are revealed. When the DOJ dithers about bringing action, the public will be even more enraged. The current Attorney General, Merrick Garland, gets dragged into Congress to answer for his misconduct and the resulting humiliation will run him out of office. “Joe Biden” may be forced to resign, drowned in a sea of troubles and scandals revealed. A deal will be made to let Veep Kamala Harris off the hook in exchange for her resignation.

      That will leave the Republican Speaker of the House, whoever it is, to become president. He will fire every political appointee in the executive branch and replace them with people who will follow the law. It will look like a promising return to decency and the rule of law. But the damage to America’s prestige will have been so gross by then that the federal government has lost legitimacy. The financial crisis, meanwhile, puts the government into something that smells like bankruptcy. The country is in a ferocious depression, the people have no money, but neither does the government. Real authority devolves to states and localities. The playing out of these dynamics also depends on what is happening outside the USA.

Europe in Macro 

    Don’t forget, Europe, the west end of the Eurasian landmass, used to be an important part of the world, with an aggregate GDP greater than even the USA’s or China’s. Europe is the birthplace of Western Civ, a division of the human project the past few thousand years that yielded tremendous advances in science, art, music, philosophy, and organized intelligence generally. Now it is on the rocks. Europe, in the aggregate, as represented, say, by the European Union, or NATO, made a grave error going along with the USA’s foolish Neocon project to make a heap trouble in Ukraine in order to “weaken” Russia.

     Russia was no longer a threat to the USA after 1991. Once the USSR was done as a political entity, and after Russia recovered from the daze of collapse, it wanted to be treated by the West as a normal European nation. Russia became a market economy, like all the others in Europe. It held elections like the others, had a legislature, a new body of property law, a private news media, regular banks, and all the other trappings of modern political normality. Russia even requested early-on to become a member of NATO. The USA and Europe refused NATO membership, but also refused to admit Russia into European normality. Instead, led by the USA, the West conducted an asset stripping operation which hampered Russia’s redevelopment.

     Otherwise, the West mostly ignored Russia, and in spite of all that Russia got back on its feet, got some industries going, especially oil-and-gas, and enjoyed two decades of relative stability. Russia eventually began reaching out in the world and made trade agreements with other countries. It built those Nord Stream gas pipelines. It organized a regional “customs union” among its Eurasian neighbors that functioned rather like the Eurozone.

     As that was all happening — pay attention — around 2010 then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat on a State Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) that threatened to block the sale of a Canadian company, Uranium One, to Rosatom, the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation, on the grounds that Uranium One’s assets included 20-percent of the USA’s uranium supply. Selling all that American uranium to Russia looked kind of bad, you’d think, and you’d be right. But then, suddenly, about $150-million dollars poured into the Clinton Foundation — much of it from Uranium One’s owner, one Frank Giustra — plus Bill Clinton happened to get a half-million dollar speaking gig in Russia, and… whaddaya know, CFIUS ended up approving the sale. The public hardly heard a peep about it. (Where was the US new media?)

     During that same period, Hillary Clinton also helped facilitate the transfer of American bio-medical, nuclear, and Info technology to the high-tech consortium called Skolkovo, Russia’s version of Silicon Valley. Much of the tech at issue was dual-use, good for civilian and military applications. Again, tens of millions of dollars gushed into the Clinton Foundation from the corporate participants in the Skolkovo deal. Crickets from the news media again.

    In 2011, relations between the US and Russia soured when President Putin accused the US of fomenting protests in Russia over its parliamentary elections. And from there, our State Department decided that Russia and the USA could not even pretend to be friendly.

     Jump ahead to 2014: Neocons in the Obama administration figured it was time to cut Russia back down to size. That effort crystalized around the former Soviet province, Ukraine, and blossomed into the US-sponsored-and-organized Maidan Revolution, utilizing Ukraine’s sizeable Stepan Bandara legacy Nazi forces in the vanguard, to foment violence in Kiev’s main city square. The US shoved out elected Ukraine President Yanukovych — who angered America by pledging to join Russia’s Custom’s Union instead of the EU — and installed its own puppet Yatsenyuk, who was ultimately replaced by the candy tycoon, Poroshenko, replaced by the Ukrainian TV star, comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. Ha Ha. Who’s laughing now? (Nobody.)

     From 2014-on, Ukraine, with America’s backing, did everything possible to antagonize Russia, especially showering the eastern provinces of Ukraine, called the Donbas, with artillery, rockets, and bombs to harass the Russia-leaning population there. After eight years of that, and continued American insults (the Steele Dossier, 2016 election interference), and renewed threats to drag Ukraine into NATO, Mr. Putin had enough and launched his “Special Military Operation” to discipline Ukraine. Once that started, American Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated explicitly to the world that America’s general policy now was to “weaken Russia.”

     That declaration was accompanied by America’s policy to isolate Russia economically with ever more sanctions. Didn’t work. Russia just turned eastward to the enormous Asian market to sell its oil and gas and utilized an alternate electronic trade-clearance system to replace America’s SWIFT system. Sanctions also gave Russia a reason to aggressively pursue an import-replacement economic strategy — manufacturing stuff that they had been buying from the West, for instance, German machine tools critical for industry.

     Russia did sacrifice more than $50-billion in financial assets stranded in the US banking system — we just confiscated it — but, ultimately, that only harmed the US banking system’s reputation as a safe place to park money, and made foreign investors much more wary of stashing capital in American banks. Net effect: the value of the ruble increased and stabilized, and Russia found new ways to neutralize American economic bullying.

     Europe was the big loser in all that. For a while, Europe could pretend to go along with the US / NATO project, pouring arms and money into Ukraine, and at the same time depend on Russian oil and gas imports. Eight months into the Ukraine-Russia conflict, the US blew up the Nord Stream One and Two pipelines, and that was the end of Europe’s supply of affordable natgas, to heat homes and power industry. In a sane world, that sabotage would have been considered an act of war against Germany by the USA. But it only revealed the secret, humiliating state of vassalage that Europe was in. Europe had already made itself ridiculous buying into the hysteria over climate change and attempting to tailor its energy use to so-called “renewables” in history’s biggest virtue-signaling exercise. Germany, the engine of the EU’s economy, made one dumb mistake after another. It invested heavily in wind and solar installations, which fell so short of adequacy they were a joke, and it closed down its nuke-powered electric generation plants so as to appear ecologically correct.

    So now, Germany, and many other EU member states, teeter on the edge of leaving Modernity behind. They managed to scramble and fill their gas reserves sufficiently this fall to perhaps squeak through winter without freezing to death, but not without a lot of sacrifice, chopping down Europe’s forests, and wearing their coats indoors. Now, only a few days into Winter, it remains to be seen how that will work out. We’ll know more in March of the new year. France had been the exception in Europe, due to its large fleet of atomic energy plants. But many of them have now aged-out, some shut down altogether, and “green” politics stood in the way of replacing them, so France, too, will find itself increasingly subject to affordable energy shortages.

     Prediction: Europe’s industry will falter and close down by painful increments. The EU will not withstand the economic stress of de-industrialization. It will shatter and leave Europe once again a small continent of many small fractious nations with longstanding grudges. Some of these countries may break-up into smaller entities in turn, as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Russia did in the 1990s. Keep in mind, the macro trend world-wide will be downscaling and localization as affordable energy recedes for everyone. Since the end of World War Two, Europe was the world’s tourist theme park. Now it could go back to being a slaughterhouse. The Euro currency will have to be phased out as sovereign bankruptcies make the EU financial system untenable, and animosities and hostilities arise. Each country will have to return to its traditional money. Gold and silver will play a larger role in that.

     The USA poured over $100-billion into Ukraine in arms, goods, and cash in 2022. That largesse will not continue as America sinks into its Second Great Depression. In any case, much of that schwag was fobbed off with. The arms are spent, the launchers destroyed. A lot of weapons were trafficked around to other countries and non-state actors. Russia is going to prevail in Ukraine. The news emanating from American media about Ukraine’s military triumphs has been all propaganda. There was hardly ever any real doubt that Russia dominated the war zone strategically and tactically. Even its withdrawals from one city or another were tactically intelligent and worthwhile, sparing Russian lives. The Special Military Operation wasn’t a cakewalk because Russia wanted to avoid killing civilians and refrain from destroying infrastructure that would leave Ukraine a gutted, failed state. Over time, the USA proved itself to be negotiation-unworthy, and Ukraine’s president Zelensky refused to entertain rational terms for settling the crisis. So, now the gloves are off in Ukraine. As of December 29, Russia shut off the lights in Kiev and Lvov.

     The open questions: how much punishment does Ukraine seek to suffer before it capitulates? Will Zelensky survive? (Even if he runs off to Miami, he may not survive.) What exactly will be left of Ukraine? In 2023 Russia will decide the disposition of things on-the-ground. Failed states make terrible neighbors. One would imagine that Russia’s main goal is to set up a rump Ukraine that can function, but cease to be an annoying pawn of its antagonists. Ukraine will no longer enjoy access to the Black Sea; it will be landlocked. The best case would be for Ukraine to revert to the agricultural backwater it was for centuries before the mighty disruptions of the modern era. Perhaps Russia will take it over altogether and govern it as it had ever since the 1700s — except for Ukraine’s brief interlude post-USSR as one of the world’s most corrupt and mal-administered sovereign states.

     Bottom line: Ukraine is and always was within Russia’s sphere-of-influence, and will remain so. The USA has no business there and it will be best for all concerned when we bug out. Let’s hope that happens without America triggering a nuclear World War Three. (Yeah, “hope” is not a plan. Try prayer, then.) Mr. Putin’s challenge going into 2023 is to conclude the Ukraine hostilities without humiliating the USA to the degree that we do something really stupid.

     Asia

       The enormous region where most of the world’s people live is swirling with quickly changing dynamics. It’s hard to tell what kind of shape China is actually in at the close of 2022. The CCP capitulated on its extreme lockdown policy and now the country seems gripped by a new and severe outbreak of the Covid virus. It’s killing a lot of people, including quite a few higher-ups in the CCP. The world saw the beginning of a popular revolt in China through the fall of 2022 as demonstrations erupted. The political side remains opaque.

     The economic side, less so. China’s wealth since year 2000 has derived from its immense factory capacity and cheap labor force. Globalism is wobbling, and with that the world’s supply line network. If trade relations with the USA continue to sour, both China and the USA will suffer. China will find itself at over-capacity, even for the giant Asian market. And they are competing with several other quickly-industrialized nations in the south, plus India, plus the old stalwarts South Korea and Japan.

      The main problem for China, and indeed all the Pacific Rim nations on the Asian side: energy. China doesn’t have very much oil in the ground and is utterly dependent on imports. It has a lot of low-quality coal. It’s building coal and nuke plants like mad. Will that suffice? Electricity is great, but you need fossil fuels to run heavy industries. In the great shiftings of 2022, China made deals for getting more oil and gas from Russia. That might work for a while. But Russia’s energy resources are probably near peak production now. What happens on the way down from that peak? Maybe Russia will be less avid for sharing its fossil fuels with its neighbors. Maybe that will cause political friction. Maybe a desperate China will reach out and try to grab resources from Russia’s vast Siberian territories? Not next year, though….

     The Neocon-led US foreign policy establishment is insane for sure, but the CCP is only not-crazy during times of great stability. Throw in some popular dissent and some economic distress, and the CCP could go cuckoo. Uncle Xi shows very Mao-like tendencies for creative despotism. The party must have a long game for Taiwan, but a distressed and crazed CCP, and an agitated Uncle Xi, could turn that into a short game out of desperation — and then what? We’d have two really crazed governments, the USA and China, ginning up the Eastern theater of World War Three. The upshot of predicament depends to some extent on how delicately Mr. Putin can organize America’s exit from Ukraine.

     Prediction: For 2023 internal friction will preoccupy China as it attempts to square its operations with those pressing trends of our time: downscaling and relocalization. All this could easily lead to regional strife in China. For decades, the CCP has been the glue between its disparate peoples. It may prove to not be superglue.

     Japan remains as enigmatic as ever. It has drifted economically for nearly forty years. Now it looks like it’s drifting into a sovereign bankruptcy as it loses control of its deeply-gamed bond markets. I’ll stick to my old predication that Japan is en route to going medieval. Its pre-industrial culture was very charming and worked well for long periods of history. Industrial modernity demoralized them. Japan imports all its oil. Without it, you can’t even begin to run a modern war machine, so there won’t be a second reaching-out for resources as in the 20th century. The Japanese will not be alone in the new medievalism when this era completes itself.

The Deep State, an Appreciation

    America is at a crossroads, a threshold, a tipping point. Every vital institution in the land has been at least partially wrecked, most especially the ones in charge of the rule of law, which was the best thing we had going for us. The Deep State is for real — the weaponization of a national bureaucracy against the nation itself. Yet, it’s certainly not just an American thing; it’s happening across Western Civ. Is it some natural process of self-destruction? An auto-immune disorder of a giant cultural organism, with parts attacking the whole? The USA, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia took such special pride in being open societies and now they are consumed in censorious lunacy. Continental Europe had a sketchier history with liberty, the enlightened individualism of Everyman, though they actually birthed its principles. But now the whole works is infected and ailing, and by what? It’s as if some cosmic spike protein came among us all and got into our hearts.

     Most major religions feature some version of the idea of death-and-rebirth, and it’s a fact that we see ourselves embedded in cycles, especially seasons. Things turn and return, are born, develop, degenerate, pass away. This was the brilliant application of Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning theory to the study of history, and by those terms we are have entered a deep secular winter of the human project. One can appreciate how the onset of winter spooked our prehistoric ancestors. They developed their prayerful ceremonies for bringing back the sun, and warmth, and new growth, dancing around the fire in the skins of animals, often making blood sacrifices to the mysterious forces in charge of… everything. The modern way of reenacting all that seems to be industrial-strength warfare. Many of us are praying right now that we don’t have to go through that.

      More likely, I think, we’ll forego the nuclear fire and simply go through a collapse of the socioeconomic organization that our governance rests on, and the Deep State illness with it. It’ll come with plenty of hardship, but it will purge the poisons that have disordered us, and when we get through it, we’ll make new arrangements for daily life. For some years, I’ve been calling this process a long emergency, and now we seem to be right in the thick of it. I believe in the natural process called emergence. Systems transform themselves organically from one state to another when acted upon by the circumstances of time and place. The outcome is usually a surprise, and not all surprises are bad. So, adios 2022 and hello little baby 2023. Lead us where you will and let’s go forward into it bravely. As Bob said so many years ago, it’s all right, Ma. It’s life and life only….

America’s 2022 Allocations to Ukraine Total $112 Billion

Posted on by
2

By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

During this year, the U.S. Government has allocated $112 billion to Ukraine, in order to defeat Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine. Russia allocates normally $60 billion per year for its entire military, but this year has increased that 40% to $84 billion, because of its invasion of Ukraine. Russia invaded Ukraine because, on 17 December 2021, Russia had demanded that the U.S. Government and its NATO anti-Russian military alliance stop trying to place its missiles on and near Russia’s borders (especially in Ukraine, which is the nearest of all bordering nations to Moscow); and, on 7 January 2022 America and NATO said no. Russia then invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, in order to prevent Ukraine from becoming a launch-pad for U.S. missiles. That’s what the war in Ukraine is — and always has been — about, from the Russian viewpoint: not being faced with U.S. missiles that are only a five-minute missile-flight-time away from Russia’s central command in Moscow.

The war in Ukraine started in February 2014, by America’s coup there that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected neutralist Government and replaced it by a rabidly anti-Russian and pro-American one on Russia’s border, in order ultimately to become able to place just 317 miles away from the Kremlin U.S. missiles which would be only a five-minute flight-time away from nuking Russia’s central command — far too little time in order for Russia’s central command to be able to verify that launch and then to launch its own retaliatory missiles. It would be nuclear checkmate of Russia, by the U.S. (with the assistance of its NATO allies, which then would include Ukraine).

Whereas Russia’s objective is to not become nuclearly checkmated by America placing its missiles that close to Moscow, America’s objective is to nuclearly checkmate Russia in order to capture the world’s largest and most resource-rich country — to force Russia to capitulate and become another U.S. ‘ally’ (that is, vassal-nation).

President Biden had requested Congress to add $38 billion more this year for Ukraine than the $67 billion that was funded earlier in the year, but Congress decided to increase his requested amount by $7 billion (almost a 20% increase in his suggested increase), so that there will be a total of $45 billion added to the $67 billion previously allocated, for a total U.S. allocation to Ukraine this year of $112 billion. That amount is $28 billion more than Russia will have spent this year for all of its military — the vast majority of which Russian military expenditure isn’t being allocated to the war in Ukraine, but instead to other aspects of Russia’s defense against the threat to its national security from America and its allies. America alone has been spending annually  on its military around 20 times what Russia has been spending on its; and, in order to make America’s expenditure appear not to be so gargantuan as it actually is, large portions of it are being paid out from other federal Departments than the Defense (or Aggression) Department, but the total annual U.S. military expenditures have, for over a decade, been over a trillion dollars per year.

On November 16th, I headlined “U.S. Will Have Spent $100B on Ukraine This Year”, and now it’s clear that my prediction was on the conservative side, by $12 billion.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

BIDEN Has Handed America Over to the BIODEFENSE CARTEL

Posted on by
Reply

By Patrick Wood

Source: The 21st Century

On the heels of Biden’s September 12th Executive Order titled The National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative, I wrote two days later that it “is a complete capitulation of our government to Big Pharma, the biotechnology industry and the entire transhuman cabal that wants to create Humanity 2.0 by changing our genetic structure.”

The Initiative literally opens the floodgates of taxpayer resources and turns over government control to the biotech and Big Pharma industry. Some highlights include:

  • “We need to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers; unlock the power of biological data, including through computing tools and artificial intelligence; and advance the science of scale-up production while reducing the obstacles for commercialization so that innovative technologies and products can reach markets faster.”
  • “bolster and coordinate Federal investment in key research and development (R&D) areas of biotechnology and biomanufacturing in order to further societal goals”
  • “Building a Vibrant Domestic Biomanufacturing Ecosystem.”
  • “expand training and education opportunities for all Americans in biotechnology and biomanufacturing.”
  • “Federal investments in biological sciences, biotechnology, and biomanufacturing to enhance biosafety and biosecurity best practices throughout the bioeconomy R&D enterprise.”

In sum, our nation has become the vassal of the biodefense cartel to finance its R&D, build its manufacturing capacity and train workers to fill its factories. What’s wrong with this picture?

The Executive Order required a number of reports to be compiled and submitted to the President on how to implement the Order. Just one month later, the White House released the National Biodefense Strategy and Implementation Plan.

It dovetails perfectly with the Executive Order except that preparation started on the first day of Biden’s presidency. According to the American Economic Association (AEA),

Today, the Biden-Harris Administration fulfills a commitment that President Biden made on his first day in office: to review existing national biopreparedness policies and develop recommendations for how the Federal Government should update them, based on lessons learned from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and other biological threats our Nation faces.

Biden Signs Executive Order Designed to Unleash “Transhumanist Hell” on America and the World

Thus, we can see that this massive transfer of power actually started with Biden’s election and has been orchestrated for theater ever since.

Biodefense Enterprise

The National Biodefense Strategy reveals more details of this Transhuman and Technocratic takeover. One new term that appears 21 times in the document is “biodefense enterprise”.

Enterprise normally applies to a commercial business or corporation, but here it states “the United States will support an efficient and coordinated biodefense enterprise to protect the American People and its global interests.”

In Annex I: Definitions, we get a glimpse of what biodefense enterprise means:

Stakeholders with a role in the prevention, preparedness, detection, response, and recovery from bioincidents (e.g., Federal and SLTT governments, nongovernmental and private sector entities, and international partners).

Stakeholders? Nongovernmental and private sector entities? International partners?

This language clearly reveals that the “biodefense enterprise” is a massive Public Private Partnership where the managing partner is not the Federal Administration, but rather it is the biotech/Big Pharma industry itself!

Biosurveillance

This term shows up 13 times in the National Biodefense Strategy and is clearly linked to the “biodefense enterprise”:

Enhancing the national biodefense enterprise will help protect the United States and its partners abroad from biological incidents, whether naturally occurring, accidental, or deliberate in origin.

It will simultaneously build the U.S. innovation base for cutting-edge countermeasures,biosensors, diagnostics, and biosurveillance information technologies, and advance the biomedical and agricultural industries’ biodefense capabilities.

Again, the document offers a definition:

Biosurveillance: The process of gathering, integrating, interpreting, and communicating essential information and indications related to all-hazard threats or disease activity affecting human, animal, plant, and environmental health to achieve early detection and provide early warning, contribute to overall situational awareness of the health aspects of the incident, and enable better decision-making at all levels.

Thus, biosurveillance will dovetail perfectly into the industry’s already existing plan for digital surveillance, universal health id’s and digital vaccine passports.

If you think existing surveillance is intrusive and a threat to freedom and personal liberty, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Whole-of-Society

I have discussed the “whole-of-government” strategy where the entire structure of Federal agencies is harmonized to a common purpose and objective. This in itself is a dangerous precedent that permits the weaponization of the whole government toward a common objective.

The concept of whole-of-society is a close relative. Here all sectors of society are lined up for a common purpose. What sectors? Humans, animals, plants and ecosystems. Furthermore, it’s top-to-bottom from national all the way down to local enforcement.

Driving down to local communities is the only way to achieve Section 3.1 Domestic Health Capacity:

Increase vaccine uptake rates for all recommended vaccines to over 85% of American population.

A secondary goal is to expand the propaganda machine to reach 80% of the American public, “while also countering and mitigating the spread of disinformation and misinformation.”

Fast Track From Lab-to-Jab

All cautionary methodologies and testing are thrown to the wind. Vaccines will be created within 100 days of virus detection (i.e., a self-declared “pandemic”), mass produced within 130 days, distributed with military efficiency and speed, and injected into:

…at-risk human and impacted animal populations the necessary vaccine quantities to control a nationally or internationally significant biological incident, within one hundred days following authorization or approval.

Not Your Grandmother’s Vaccine

I know there are some readers who are thinking they would like to get vaccines faster to prevent disease.

However, none of this applies to old-school vaccines. Nope. None. This is all pointed toward an endless conveyor belt of mRNA and DNA injections designed to hack your human condition. – you and eighty-five percent of the population, in perpetuity. Biden cleared that up in his original Executive Order:

We need to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers.

Are you ready? Are you awake to what is taking place here?

I have addressed the whole picture in my new book. Solutions and resistance will not arise without understanding the nature of this evil beast that has come upon us.

The Evil Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism

Perhaps you can see why I used the word “Evil” in the title of my just-released book. Perhaps you can picture the golden skulls, all ornate and rich looking on the outside, but revealing death underneath.

Indeed, Technocracy and Transhumanism are promoting a future that only holds death and destruction for mankind.

Hunting the Twitter Files

Posted on by
Reply

Legacy Media Censor Details About Censorship

By Nolan Higdon

Source: Project Censored

More than two years since Big Tech made the historic decision to limit access to the New York Post’s story about President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, users are getting a glimpse into how Twitter came to that decision. However, delusional legacy and social media outlets are doing everything they can to misrepresent and bury the consequential details of the process.

An October 2020 New York Post story titled “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad” offered sensationalistic photos and details of Hunter’s addiction issues coupled with damning emails indicating that Hunter utilized his connection with his father to curry favor and economic opportunity in foreign countries. At the time, intelligence officials told members of the press that the story was Russian propaganda aimed at influencing that year’s election. As a result, Big Tech platforms limited access to the story including in direct messages which is usually done only in extreme cases such as child pornography.

On Friday, December 2, 2022, Elon Musk promised to release files related to the matter. Soon afterward, journalist Matt Taibbi published a report based on thousands of internal Twitter documents. Taibbi demonstrated that Twitter’s decision to remove the Hunter Biden story was influenced in part by Biden’s campaign. Indeed, as Taibbi described, Twitter’s staff regularly fields phone calls from powerful people in government and acts upon their requests to moderate content. And it’s is not just Twitter. During a 2022 interview with Joe Rogan, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook) Mark Zuckerberg admitted that his company’s decision to moderate content – including the 2020 Hunter story – is sometimes based on recommendations from the intelligence community. Similarly, The Intercept reported in 2022 that the Department of Homeland Security regularly informs Big Tech’s content moderation practices.

In any other country, the revelation that government and Big Tech collude to shape public discourse and democratic participation would make Americans irate, but the story has received little coverage. The coverage received by legacy media has been dismissive. CNN reduced the files as simply showing “how employees debated how to handle 2020 New York Post Hunter Biden story.” Variety echoed the same sentiments. Meanwhile, giving readers less than 24-hours to process what Taibbi reported, WAPO declared that Musk’s Twitter Files “haven’t changed minds.”

The lack of substantive coverage of the Twitter Files is rooted in the legacy media’s fears over the broader implications of the story. Since 2015, legacy media have been fostering a moral panic over fake news and blamed their competition – digital media – for its spread. They have practically begged Big Tech overlords to fix the country and restore faith in journalism by censoring problematic content, which they often refer to as misinformation or disinformation. Taibbi’s reporting demonstrates that the news media’s framing of Big Tech content moderation as a solution to anti-democratic practices, actually functioned as an anti-democratic position that enables the elite political class to shape public dialogue and manufacture consent of the electorate.

Adding to the news media’s inability to cover the story is their business model which depends on framing every story as an issue of left versus right, blue versus red, Democrat versus Republican. Indeed, whether it is cable news audiences or legacy newspaper subscribers, news outlets cater to audiences’ confirmation biases by villainizing a caricature of the “otherside.” This has reduced every story to a partisan issue, and fostered such high levels of hyper-partisanship vitriol that half of Americans cite “other Americans” as their number one fear, while 40% contend that a civil war will occur in their lifetime.

Although they still try, the legacy media has found it impossible to frame the Twitter Files as a hyper-partisan story because the political duopoly, not one party, utilizes Big Tech to manufacture the consent of the people. For example, Big Tech’s content moderation of was influenced by Biden’s Campaign in 2020 and leading Democrats after January 6th. Similarly, Donald Trump’s campaign spent $100 million to work with Facebook staff to amplify their campaign messages, and Trump met personally with Zuckerberg in secret meetings throughout his presidency. Furthermore, legacy news media outlets cannot villainize the “other side” for censorship when loyalists for both parties are complicit. Indeed, the feckless liberals who begged Big Tech overlords to censor content about elections and Covid-19 are equally complicit as the neocons who championed censorship of the press and individuals, and organizations during the War on Terror and Trump supporters who lauded his attacks on the free press and whistleblowers such as Julian Assange.

Anyone can, and will, argue that Hunter’s photos are not newsworthy, but that is for the citizens to decide when they encounter the story. That is how a free press in a democratic republic works. A democracy does not depend on Big Tech overlords acting at the behest of the political class to determine what content the public should see. The notion that censorship will erode hate, correct falsehoods, or solve national problems is a fallacy of utmost proportions.  The contemporary censorious crowd seems to be in such a state of delusion that they have come to believe that World War II and the Holocaust could have been avoided if Twitter was around to censor Nazis. It is ludicrous and the establishment news media deserve part of the blame for perpetuating this lunacy.

A truly independent press would privilege narratives that expose Silicon Valley propaganda, which has led users of all political ideologies to a delusional state of Stockholm Syndrome, where Big Tech exploits their labor, erodes their privacy, and manufactures their consent for the duopoly, but users still laud and entrust the industry with their democracy. To be clear, Big Tech commercialized tools that were developed by the military industrial complex during the Cold War (which was not so cold in much of the world) to surveil and exploit users. They advertised their platforms as transformative tools that strengthen democracy and inclusion. As whistleblower after whistleblower remind us, this is all nonsense: Big Tech’s oligarchs are rapacious capitalists who time and time again put profits over people. No entity should be moderating information in a democracy, and as the Twitter Files reveal, the unaccountable profiteers in Big Tech are no exception.

Related Video:

How Money Printing Made Supply Chain Disruptions Even Worse

Posted on by
2

By Nicholas Baum

Source: Activist Post

Over the last few years, an unwelcome phrase has grown to plague American consumers and producers alike: supply chain issues. The recurring term is frequently offered by mainstream economists as the go-to explanation for record inflation, while the Biden Administration has seemingly twisted it into a sign of economic recovery. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo states,

“What we have here is a demand issue. The economy is doing better… People have money in their pocket. They’re spending that money. Demand is through the roof… Supply has to catch up.”

Although Raimondo said this back in October 2021, inflation has only worsened from an annual rate of 6.2 percent to 7.7 percent more than twelve months later, leading one to wonder if the Secretary is right that inflation is a matter of supply chains adjusting to an increase in wealth. Yet as it turns out, in the words of the Mises Institute’s Ryan McMaken, “the administration’s defenders are right about consumer demand and spending – even if for the wrong reasons.”

That is, although we’re indeed witnessing a large spike in demand (which is perhaps best quantified by changes in nominal GDP), this increase in demand is a symptom of a larger problem: the massive expansion of the money supply under the watch of the Federal Reserve and the White House. The implications of this unprecedented expansion are two-fold, not only stirring this increase in “demand” but contributing to supply chain issues through the distortion of price signals.

With state governments responding to the rise of Covid-19 by imposing lockdowns and forcibly closing “non-essential businesses,” both the Fed and the Trump and Biden Administrations stepped in with an extraordinarily expansive monetary and fiscal policy, respectively.

M2 is a figure for the money supply, which surged by more than $6.2 trillion, a 40 percent increase, between February 2020 and February 2022. This is the result of a variety of initiatives, from the Fed’s quantitative easing and purchase of over $2 trillion in assets to new federal programs such as stimulus checks, PPP loans, and the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act.

Through these ventures that flooded the economy with new cash, Americans indeed had more money in their pockets. The problem is, obviously, that such money soon became worth a lot less. That’s because an increase in the money supply, without a corresponding increase in economic output, means an increase in prices, with more money chasing roughly the same quantity of goods.

This is where Raimondo serves to mislead viewers in her comments; just because Americans have more money, doesn’t mean they’re any wealthier. There certainly is a large spike in demand, but that doesn’t represent an increase in the real wealth of Americans, but an increase in the amount of money they have access to thanks to an unprecedented monetary expansion.

This is perhaps best represented by comparing nominal to real GDP per capita, which is a rough proxy for standard of living:

If you were to look only at nominal GDP per capita (the blue line) you would think that the average American’s wealth has increased greatly since the pandemic. This, however, is incredibly misleading, because it doesn’t take into account inflation and the decreasing value of the dollar.

The large demand increase noted by Raimondo and other economists does not reflect a growing economy and an increase in wealth but an increase in the money supply which has created upward pressure on prices. Yet just as the Biden Administration declares that “supply has to catch up,” the ability for producers to do so has been greatly strained by inflation (not to mention the aforementioned lockdowns).

That’s because of the role prices—which economist Alex Tabarrok refers to as “a signal wrapped up in an incentive” —play in coordinating economic activity. Changes in prices usually convey changes in the scarcity and demand for different goods, products, and resources. When the price of something in a company’s supply chain increases, this hurts the company’s profitability and incentivizes it to economize and find a more efficient alternative.

On a macro scale, economic growth (or recovery) comes through thousands, if not millions, of businesses and firms finding new ways to innovate and maximize profits, which is the result of comparing the prices of alternative inputs and production methods. Inflation, by raising the general price level of the economy and often affecting the price of each good differently, can cause economic discoordination and confusion because prices no longer reflect changing efficiencies and scarcities.

Even if inflation impacted all prices equally, we still wouldn’t know to what extent a rise in the price of a certain resource reflects actually important information about it, given that the rate of inflation is always changing and can only be measured in hindsight.

In the context of the last few years, this has meant that firms have essentially been blindfolded, piecing back together supply chains forcibly closed during the pandemic without the ability for prices to convey the efficiency of competing alternatives. This is exactly why “supply chain issues” has continued to be a lingering excuse for inflation and shortages, with Volkswagen chief executive Oliver Blume going so far as to say that, “Challenges to our supply chains will become the rule, not the exception.”

Nor is this a relatively recent phenomenon. Paul Volcker, the late Fed Chairman notable for remedying the United States’ last encounter with runaway inflation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, observed that, “The inflationary process itself brought so many dislocations, and stresses and strains that you were going to have a recession sooner or later.”

Given the fact that the United States technically entered a recession during the first half of 2022—at least according to a common definition of recession—Volcker’s words proved prescient. Not only has an unprecedented monetary expansion under the purview of the Fed and White House triggered a dangerous period of inflation; the inflation has also caused disruptions to the supply chain, which agencies (ironically) use as a scapegoat for inflation.

Now, with economic growth stagnant and inflation persisting at high levels, the fate of supply, demand, and the price signals that they convey rests in the hands of the problems’ culprits.

Goodbye G20, hello BRICS+

Posted on by
4

The increasingly irrelevant G20 Summit concluded with sure signs that BRICS+ will be the way forward for Global South cooperation.

By Pepe Escobar

Source: The Cradle

The redeeming quality of a tense G20 held in Bali – otherwise managed by laudable Indonesian graciousness – was to sharply define which way the geopolitical winds are blowing.

That was encapsulated in the Summit’s two highlights: the much anticipated China-US presidential meeting – representing the most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century – and the final G20 statement.

The 3-hour, 30-minute-long face-to-face meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Joe Biden – requested by the White House – took place at the Chinese delegation’s residence in Bali, and not at the G20 venue at the luxury Apurva Kempinski in Nusa Dua.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs concisely outlined what really mattered. Specifically, Xi told Biden that Taiwan independence is simply out of the question. Xi also expressed hope that NATO, the EU, and the US will engage in “comprehensive dialogue” with Russia. Instead of confrontation, the Chinese president chose to highlight the layers of common interest and cooperation.

Biden, according to the Chinese, made several points. The US does not seek a New Cold War; does not support “Taiwan independence;” does not support “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan”; does not seek “decoupling” from China; and does not want to contain Beijing.

However, the recent record shows Xi has few reasons to take Biden at face value.

The final G20 statement was an even fuzzier matter: the result of arduous compromise.

As much as the G20 is self-described as “the premier forum for global economic cooperation,” engaged to “address the world’s major economic challenges,” the G7 inside the G20 in Bali had the summit de facto hijacked by war. “War” gets almost double the number of mentions in the statement compared to “food” after all.

The collective west, including the Japanese vassal state, was bent on including the war in Ukraine and its “economic impacts” – especially the food and energy crisis – in the statement. Yet without offering even a shade of context, related to NATO expansion. What mattered was to blame Russia – for everything.

The Global South effect

It was up to this year’s G20 host Indonesia – and the next host, India – to exercise trademark Asian politeness and consensus building. Jakarta and New Delhi worked extremely hard to find wording that would be acceptable to both Moscow and Beijing. Call it the Global South effect.

Still, China wanted changes in the wording. This was opposed by western states, while Russia did not review the last-minute wording because Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had already departed.

On point 3 out of 52, the statement “expresses its deepest regret over the aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine and demands the complete and unconditional withdrawal of armed forces from the territory of Ukraine.”

“Russian aggression” is the standard NATO mantra – not shared by virtually the whole Global South.

The statement draws a direct correlation between the war and a non-contextualized “aggravation of pressing problems in the global economy – slowing economic growth, rising inflation, disruption of supply chains, worsening energy, and food security, increased risks to financial stability.”

As for this passage, it could not be more self-evident: “The use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is inadmissible. The peaceful resolution of conflicts, efforts to address crises, as well as diplomacy and dialogue, are vital. Today’s era must not be of war.”

This is ironic given that NATO and its public relations department, the EU, “represented” by the unelected eurocrats of the European Commission, don’t do “diplomacy and dialogue.”

Fixated with war

Instead the US, which controls NATO, has been weaponizing Ukraine, since March, by a whopping $91.3 billion, including the latest presidential request, this month, of $37.7 billion. That happens to be 33 percent more than Russia’s total (italics mine) military spending for 2022.

Extra evidence of the Bali Summit being hijacked by “war” was provided by the emergency meeting, called by the US, to debate what ended up being a Ukrainian S-300 missile falling on a Polish farm, and not the start of WWIII like some tabloids hysterically suggested.

Tellingly, there was absolutely no one from the Global South in the meeting – the sole Asian nation being the Japanese vassal, part of the G7.

Compounding the picture, we had the sinister Davos master Klaus Schwab once again impersonating a Bond villain at the B20 business forum, selling his Great Reset agenda of “rebuilding the world” through pandemics, famines, climate change, cyber attacks, and – of course – wars.

As if this was not ominous enough, Davos and its World Economic Forum are now ordering Africa – completely excluded from the G20 – to pay $2.8 trillion to “meet its obligations” under the Paris Agreement to minimize greenhouse gas emissions.

The demise of the G20 as we know it

The serious fracture between Global North and Global South, so evident in Bali, had already been suggested in Phnom Penh, as Cambodia hosted the East Asia Summit this past weekend.

The 10 members of ASEAN had made it very clear they remain unwilling to follow the US and the G7 in their collective demonization of Russia and in many aspects China.

The Southeast Asians are also not exactly excited by the US-concocted IPEF (Indo-Pacific Economic Framework), which will be irrelevant in terms of slowing down China’s extensive trade and connectivity across Southeast Asia.

And it gets worse. The self-described “leader of the free world” is shunning the extremely important APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit in Bangkok at the end of this week.

For very sensitive and sophisticated Asian cultures, this is seen as an affront. APEC, established way back in 1990s to promote trade across the Pacific Rim, is about serious Asia-Pacific business, not Americanized “Indo-Pacific” militarization.

The snub follows Biden’s latest blunder when he erroneously addressed Cambodia’s Hun Sen as “prime minister of Colombia” at the summit in Phnom Penh.

Lining up to join BRICS

It is safe to say that the G20 may have plunged into an irretrievable path toward irrelevancy. Even before the current Southeast Asian summit wave – in Phnom Penh, Bali and Bangkok – Lavrov had already signaled what comes next when he noted that “over a dozen countries” have applied to join BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa).

Iran, Argentina, and Algeria have formally applied: Iran, alongside Russia, India, and China, is already part of the Eurasian Quad that really matters.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Afghanistan are extremely interested in becoming members. Indonesia just applied, in Bali. And then there’s the next wave: Kazakhstan, UAE, Thailand (possibly applying this weekend in Bangkok), Nigeria, Senegal, and Nicaragua.

It’s crucial to note that all of the above sent their Finance Ministers to a BRICS Expansion dialogue in May. A short but serious appraisal of the candidates reveals an astonishing unity in diversity.

Lavrov himself noted that it will take time for the current five BRICS to analyze the immense geopolitical and geoeconomic implications of expanding to the point of virtually reaching the size of the G20 – and without the collective west.

What unites the candidates above all is the possession of massive natural resources: oil and gas, precious metals, rare earths, rare minerals, coal, solar power, timber, agricultural land, fisheries, and fresh water. That’s the imperative when it comes to designing a new resource-based reserve currency to bypass the US dollar.

Let’s assume that it may take up to 2025 to have this new BRICS+ configuration up and running. That would represent roughly 45 percent of confirmed global oil reserves and over 60 percent of confirmed global gas reserves (and that will balloon if gas republic Turkmenistan later joins the group).

The combined GDP – in today’s figures – would be roughly $29.35 trillion; much larger than the US ($23 trillion) and at least double the EU ($14.5 trillion, and falling).

As it stands, BRICS account for 40 percent of the global population and 25 percent of GDP. BRICS+ would congregate 4.257 billion people: over 50 percent of the total global population as it stands.

BRI embraces BRICS+

BRICS+ will be striving towards interconnection with a maze of institutions: the most important are the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), itself featuring a list of players itching to become full members; strategic OPEC+, de facto led by Russia and Saudi Arabia; and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s overarching trade and foreign policy framework for the 21st century. It is worth pointing out that early all crucial Asian players have joined the BRI.

Then there are the close links of BRICS with a plethora of regional trade blocs: ASEAN, Mercosur, GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council), Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), Arab Trade Zone, African Continental Free Trade Area, ALBA, SAARC, and last but not least the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the largest trade deal on the planet, which includes a majority of BRI partners.

BRICS+ and BRI is a match everywhere you look at it – from West Asia and Central Asia to the Southeast Asians (especially Indonesia and Thailand). The multiplier effect will be key – as BRI members will be inevitably attracting more candidates for BRICS+.

This will inevitably lead to a second wave of BRICS+ hopefuls including, most certainly, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, three more Central Asians (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and gas republic Turkmenistan), Pakistan, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka, and in Latin America, a hefty contingent featuring Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Venezuela.

Meanwhile, the role of the BRICS’s New Development Bank (NDB) as well as the China-led Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will be enhanced – coordinating infrastructure loans across the spectrum, as BRICS+ will be increasingly shunning dictates imposed by the US-dominated IMF and the World Bank.

All of the above barely sketches the width and depth of the geopolitical and geoeconomic realignments further on down the road – affecting every nook and cranny of global trade and supply chain networks. The G7’s obsession in isolating and/or containing the top Eurasian players is turning on itself in the framework of the G20. In the end, it’s the G7 that may be isolated by the BRICS+ irresistible force.

Zelensky, media lackeys caught in most dangerous lie yet

Posted on by
1

By Alexander Rubinstein

Source: The Grayzone

With Kiev exposed for a lie that could have triggered a third world war, it is time to examine past deceptions that Western media promoted.

A missile that exploded on Polish soil on November 15 killed two civilians and destroyed farm equipment. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Western corporate media rushed to blame the explosion on Russia in apparent hopes of triggering NATO’s Article 5, which requires NATO states to defend one another militarily when attacked by a hostile force.

Polish and NATO members including US President Joseph Biden have since confirmed the missile that struck Poland was, in fact, a Ukrainian S-300 anti-aircraft missile. Yet Zelensky is sticking to his line, blaming Russia for the strike, while NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg still insists that “Russia bears ultimate responsibility.” Meanwhile, the media outlets that reflexively pointed the finger at Russia have been forced to take a step back from their initial reporting.

“Russian missiles hit Poland, the territory of our friendly country. People died,” Zelensky insisted on November 15, the night of the attack. “The longer Russia feels impunity, the more threats there will be to anyone within reach of Russian missiles. To fire missiles at NATO territory! This is a Russian missile attack on collective security! This is a very significant escalation. We must act.”

Zelensky held firm the following day, despite mounting evidence that his own country’s air defenses were responsible, declaring “I have no doubt that this is not our missile… I believe that this was a Russian missile, based on our military reports.” By this time, most analysts rejected the Ukrainian president’s assessment, including the founder of the US government-sponsored intelligence cutout Bellingcat, who wrote “At this point I think it’s fair anyone saying that a Russian missile hit Poland based on the current evidence is being irresponsible.”

A Russian attack on NATO member Poland could have triggered Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization which compels its member states to consider “an attack against one Ally” to be “an attack against all Allies.” Such a mobilization would have amounted to World War III.

Despite the clear risk of such a catastrophic escalation – or perhaps because of it – Western corporate media immediately blamed Russia for the strike, never even posing the question of why Russia would consider Polish farmland such an important military target that it would be willing to risk a full-scale war with the 30-member NATO alliance. 

Initially, the Associated Press ran with the headline “Russian missiles cross into Poland during strike on Ukraine.” The article cited a “senior US intelligence official,” and later, “a second person.” 

On November 16, AP began redirecting the link to its original article to a correction that stated, “The Associated Press reported erroneously, based on information from a senior American intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity, that Russian missiles had crossed into Poland and killed two people. Subsequent reporting showed that the missiles were Russian-made and most likely fired by Ukraine in defense against a Russian attack.”

Time Magazine ran with the headline, “Russian Missiles Cross Into Poland During Strike, Killing Two,” and cited the AP report.

Fox News similarly announced, “Russian missiles cross into NATO member Poland, kill 2: senior US intelligence official, citing the Associated Press. MSNBC also blamed a “Russian missile” for the strike in its headline.

Then there was CNN, which reported, “Poland says Russian-made missile killed two, will consider invoking NATO Article 4.” NATO Article 4 deals with the meetings between NATO states that are to take place in the event one of them is “threatened” and would theoretically precede any invocation of Article 5. Like CNN, Reuters cited the Polish Foreign Ministry and ran the headline, “Poland says Russian rocket hit its territory as NATO weighs response.”

The New York Times stated in the second sentence of its report on the missile strike that “the blast came as Russia fired roughly 90 missiles into Ukraine.” Two lines later, the Times stated “local media suggests a Russian missile strike.” Readers of the paper of record would have to scroll down several times to even read that Russian officials denied responsibility.

Earlier in the war, in an article on “Ukraine’s online propaganda,” the New York Times sought to downplay the Ukrainian government’s penchant for pushing fake news, arguing that Kiev’s information war merely “dramatize[s] tales of Ukrainian fortitude and Russian aggression.” The article quoted an unnamed Twitter user, who wrote, “Why can’t we just let people believe some things? … If the Russians believe it, it brings fear. If the Ukrainians believe it, it gives them hope.”

The US media’s support for Ukraine’s propaganda efforts meant that it covered some of the most suspicious events without a hint of skepticism, and thereby encouraged more. 

These questionable incidents included the following:

  • On March 8, Western media reported that a Mariupol maternity hospital was attacked by Russian aircraft. Zelensky claimed the attack was evidence of Russian “genocide” against Ukraine. However, a key witness – a pregnant woman in the hospital photographed by AP – stated that no such airstrike occurred, and that nearby explosions were caused by Ukrainian artillery shells.

On March 16, the Ukrainian government blamed a targeted Russian airstrike for destroying the Mariupol Dramatic Theater and causing anywhere from 300 to 600 deaths. Western corporate media promoted the Ukrainian narrative of the event despite a total absence of footage showing a missile strike, no images or evidence of large numbers of dead civilians inside, no images or evidence of any attempted rescue, and testimony by Mariupol locals asserting the Azov Battalion fighters that controlled the theater’s grounds staged the explosion to provoke NATO military intervention. Photographic evidence showed that Azov fighters removed all vehicles from the theater’s parking lot one day before the explosion.

The Kramatorsk train station bombing that was blamed on Russia despite the fact the Tochka-U missile responsible for the blast contained a serial number matching others in Ukraine’s arsenal and originated from Ukrainian-controlled territory.

As the war grinds on, elements in the Biden administration appear to be growing impatient with the tall tales of their Ukrainian clients. “This is getting ridiculous,” an unnamed NATO official told the Financial Times on November 16. “The Ukrainians are destroying our confidence and they are openly lying. This is more destructive than the missile.”

A Smoldering Fuse

Posted on by
1

By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

We have pretty much burned our bridges at this point. Unless you’re prepared to mindfuck yourself, and gaslight yourself, and confess, and convert, there’s no going back to “normal” society (which we couldn’t go back to anyway, on account of how it doesn’t exist anymore) — CJ Hopkins

Thirty-seven billion more dollars for Ukraine? (That’s thirty-seven thousand millions of dollars, by the way.) Bringing the total this year to a click-or-two over ninety billion (ninety-thousand millions), on top of whatever Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX company funneled through that sad-sack international money laundromat — soon to be the darkest backwater of a European failed state since Field Marshal Melchior von Hatzfeldt of Westphalia left Bohemia a corpse-strewn wasteland after the Battle of Jankau (1645).

    It really doesn’t matter how much more money we pound down that rat-hole, you understand, because by the time various parties — the weapons-makers, Volodymyr Zelensky, sundry members of the US House of Representatives, The Biden family, the World Economic Forum — are finished creaming off their fair shares, poor Ukraine won’t have enough cash-on-hand to replace six fuse-boxes in Zaporizhzhia.

    Against this backdrop, the USA enters a holiday season near-death spiral as unspooling scandals battle a collapsing economy for supremacy of the alt news sites. Case-in-point: the aforementioned FTX monkey business, a metastasizing tumor of the body politic. This complex fraud will smolder for a few weeks before it explodes into an extinction-grade event for the Democratic Party. The usual suspects among the mainstream media are trying to ignore it for the moment, but the shreds of this exploding money-borg are already sticking to guilty parties far and wide across the political landscape.

      FTX commander-in-chief Sam Bankman-Fried remains at large after steering the crypto-currency trading platform into a bankruptcy so hideously tangled that the assigned liquidator in court proceedings, one John Ray III, who oversaw the Enron aftermath years ago, was boggled by what he’s found so far (and it’s early in the game): Namely, a company run by a handful of twenty-something drug freaks with no idea what they were doing, no record-keeping, and a slime trail of misappropriated investor’s funds leading to Kiev and Geneva through various crooked American political action committees, and the halls of Congress — with echos in ballot harvesting shenanigans which shaped the outcome of this month’s US elections.

     Mr. Bankman-Fried is still scheduled as a main speaker for Accenture’s Nov. 30 DealBook Conference in New York ($2,499 for a ticket), along with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Odds on him showing up? Or even being alive elsewhere on this planet then?

     The extended family Bankman-Fried is the quintessence of Woke aristocracy. Dad Joe Bankman and mom Barbara Fried are both law professors at Stanford. She also acted as a money-bundler for the Democratic Party and ran two non-profit “voter registration” orgs (against the IRS laws which only permit non-partisan organized voter registration). Brother Gabe Bankman-Fried headed a non-profit named Guarding Against Pandemics (funded by Sam), which lobbies Congress to construct new platforms for medical tyranny. Aunt Linda Fried is Dean of the Columbia U’s Public Health school, and is associated with Johns Hopkins, which ran the October 2019 Event 201 pandemic drill (sponsored by the Gates Foundation) months before the Covid-19 outbreak.

Sam’s girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, ran the Alameda Investments arm of the FTX empire (that is, FTX’s own money laundromat). Her dad, Glenn Ellison is chair of MIT’s Econ School. His former colleague on the MIT Econ faculty, Gary Gensler, who specialized in blockchains there, is now head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, an agency that Sam Bankman Fried was attempting to rope into a regulation scheme to eliminate FTX’s crypto-currency competitors. Caroline’s mom, Sara Fisher Ellison is an MIT econ prof specializing in the pharmaceutical industry (fancy that!). Caroline Ellison is currently on-the-run.

     The sum total of all this professional and academic accomplishment is also the quintessence of Woke-Jacobin turpitude in service to a political faction that seeks maximum moneygrubbing while acting to overthrow every norm of behavior in the conduct of elections, and perhaps in American life generally. That’s some accomplishment. It’s also a lesson in why the managerial elite of our country are no longer trustworthy. They have gotten away with crimes against the nation for years, which has only made them bolder and more reckless.

     Wait for the FTX bankruptcy to unwind, along with all the political ramifications it entails, not to mention the financial afterburn in the whole crypto market, very likely extending into and befouling the rest of the banking system. This is going to be a clusterfuck for the ages, and will propel the USA into a depression with no visible horizon.