Tag Archives: Russia

Sy Hersh and The Way We Live Now

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By Craig Murray

Source: Craig Murray Blog

It is a clear indicator of the disappearance of freedom from our so-called western democracies, that Sy Hersh, arguably the greatest living journalist, cannot get this monumental revelation on the front of the Washington Post or New York Times, but has to self-publish on the net.

Hersh tells the story of the US destruction of the Nordstream pipelines in forensic detail, giving dates, times, method and military units involved. He also outlines the importance of the Norwegian armed forces working alongside the US Navy in the operation.

One point Sy does not much stress, but it is worth saying more about, is that Norway and the USA are of course the two countries who have benefitted financially, to an enormous degree, from blowing up the pipeline.

Both not only have gained huge export surpluses from the jump in gas prices, but Norway has directly replaced Russian gas to the tune of some $40 billion per year. From 2023 the United States will appear in that list in second place behind Norway, following the opening in the last two months of two new Liquefied Natural Gas terminals in Germany, built to replace Russian gas with US and Qatari supplies.

So Russia lost out massively financially from the destruction of Nordstream and who benefited? The USA and Norway, the two countries who blew up the pipeline.

But of course, this war is nothing to do with money or hydrocarbons and is all about freedom and democracy…

To return to Hersh’s account, particularly interesting are the series of decisions taken to avoid classification of the operation in various ways which would require it to be reported to Congress. In terms of United States history, this ought to be a big deal.

For the Executive to commit what is an act of war without the approval of the Legislature is fundamentally unconstitutional. But that is one of those quaint remnants of democracy that the neo-liberal elite consensus can quietly sidestep nowadays.

Hersh sets out the well known background in compelling detail,  including the fact that, from Biden down, the Americans effectively announced what they were going to do, openly.

But what most worries me about the entire story is the unanimous complicity of the mainstream media in ignoring the completely obvious.

The media line, parroted here relentlessly by the BBC and corporate media, was  that the Russians had probably themselves blown up the pipeline on which they had expended such great resources and three decades of intense diplomatic activity, and which was to be the key to Russia’s single most valuable source of income for the next 40 years.

This was always quite literally incredible. You would have to be deranged to believe it.

It actually taught me not just that we truly are in the realm of totalitarianism and the Big Lie, but I learnt something very important about how the Big Lie works.

The secret is not that people genuinely believe an outrageous claim. The secret is that people do genuinely believe that they are in a battle of good against evil, and it is necessary to accept the narrative being promoted, in the interests of fighting evil.

Don’t question, just follow. If you do question, you are promoting evil.

I am sure that is how it works.

State and corporate stenographer journalists are actually intelligent individuals. If they thought about it, they would realise that the narrative that Russia blew up its own pipeline is obvious nonsense.

But they are convinced it is morally wrong to think about it.

Which is why none of them challenged the equally mad claims that Russia was repeatedly shelling its own forces occupying the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, and indeed is why none of them challenged the utterly risible official version of the Skripal story.

I previously told the anecdote from when I worked in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and asked a good friend if he really believed the misinformatioin on Iraqi WMD with which he was involved.

He replied by referring to the video game Championship Manager (now renamed Football Manager), which we used to play together. He said when he was in the game, it was immersive, he was manager of Liverpool, and it fully absorbed him.

Similarly, when he walked through the FCO gates, the world of the intelligence reports was immersive and Iraq did have these WMDs inside that world. He worked in the “reality” of the FCO. Once he left in the evening, he lived in a different reality, the world of us in the pub.

I do know of one or two journalists bright enough to detach their professional output from what they really think, in a similar way. (I once had a conversation along these lines with Jeremy Bowen in Tashkent.)

Most however don’t think like this. They simply think that all right thinking people support the historic struggle against the evil Russians, so it must be right to read out the propaganda without thinking too much about it.

Those of us critical of the aggressive promotion of war in Europe, are not only barred from all mainstream media and confined to corners of the internet, and even then heavily suppressed on social media (which is why Sy Hersh’s article does not have the scores of millions of readers it merits).

We can’t even obtain freedom of assembly.

Two established left wing venues have cancelled the No 2 Nato meeting I am addressing in London on 25 February. Conway Hall’s reasons for cancellation included threats to funding and fears for the safety of staff.

We are now reduced to a guerrilla meeting, the Central London venue for which will not be announced until the evening before.

Is this really a democracy, where it is not possible for dissidents to hold a public meeting without secrecy, subterfuge and hiding from supporters of the state?

I do urge you to come along on the day, whatever your views on the subject, to support the right to freedom of speech.

I have a different view from perhaps all of the other speakers, on the legitimacy of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which I oppose.

But I also oppose NATO expansion which is an underlying cause of the war, and indeed oppose the existence of NATO itself.

NATO is a war machine which sucks resources from working people to benefit the military industrial complex, and unleashes devastating destruction on developing states which do not make their natural resources available to western billionaire elites.

It is also a fundamental node of the propaganda apparatus which manipulates and controls our society, particularly as counter narrative and dissident thought is now rigorously and systematically excluded.

There is no longer an Overton window of permitted debate. It has narrowed and should be renamed the Overton letterbox.

One of those small difficult ones right down at the bottom of the door.  With a very fierce spring, and snarling dogs guarding it.

Did the US Blow Up Nord Stream If There is No Media to Report It?

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“The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow water a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island” (Image: Seymour Hersh Substack)

By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Black Agenda Report

A respected investigative journalist explains how the U.S. sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines. But corporate media working in service to the state ignore the story and endanger the world.

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The idea behind this old thought experiment should not be relegated to the realm of philosophy. Present day reality can be used in place of hypothetical falling trees. If the United States blows up the Nord Stream pipelines but the media ignores it, did the attack ever happen?

Seymour Hersh has all of the credentials that usually give one gravitas in the world of journalism. As a freelance reporter he exposed the U.S. army’s 1969 massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai and won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts. He later worked at the New York Times and reported on high profile stories such as the Watergate revelations, and the CIA coup against the government of Chile. In 2004 Hersh exposed torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison for The New Yorker.

None of these accomplishments helped Hersh when he recently provided evidence of what had long been obvious, that the Biden administration blew up the Nord Stream pipelines on September 26, 2022. In a 5,200 word article published on his Substack entitled How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline , Hersh utilized highly placed sources who presented as one might say the “receipts” of how the deed was done.

Joe Biden and his foreign policy team at the State Department, National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency first discussed the operation one year before carrying it out, and months before Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine began. The fear of deepening integration between Russia and Germany was the cause of alarm. They wanted to end Europe’s resource and financial connections to Russia, and decided that exploding the means of transporting natural gas was a good idea. According to Hersh’s source(s) the plot was carried out with help from Norway, a NATO member nation that made itself the sole source of natural gas in the region by helping in the attack. The current Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, was formerly a prime minister of Norway.

The U.S. had the motive, means, and opportunity and spent many months confessing to the plot and then to the crime after it took place. In February 2022 Biden pledged to stop the Nord Stream 2 project and added for good measure, “I promise you we’ll be able to do it.” After the explosion Secretary of State Antony Blinken said , “It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all end the dependence on Russian energy.” Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland smugly said at a Senate hearing, “Senator Cruz, like you I am and I think the administration is very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

Hersh’s article was a sensation online when it was published on February 8, 2023 but it has been ignored by major corporate media ever since. One has to ask if it really happened when the New York Times, Washington Post and television networks ignore what ought to be a huge news story.

It isn’t hard to understand why the same individuals and institutions who act as state mouthpieces would want to sweep Hersh’s reporting under the rug. For months they have acted as scribes instead of as journalists. The days when they would compete to break a scoop that a president wanted covered up are long gone. They now go along with establishment narratives, and promote imperialism as much as the people they are tasked with covering and confronting. Not one person asked about Hersh’s revelations at the daily white house press briefing the day after it was published.

Not only have the media ignored what Hersh reported but Republicans who claim to oppose Biden and the Democrats have also been silent. There are impeachable offenses committed in Hersh’s account but the people who should be asking questions have demurred. Republicans were as eager as Democrats to end Nord Stream’s existence. The word collusion which was bandied about so much in recent years is apropos here and that means the Hersh story is now at the bottom of the sea politically.

Biden is the fox in charge of the hen house, preparing to ask congress for the biggest defense budget in history, in large part to replenish the weapons used in Ukraine. The people who are asked to accept austerity for themselves are largely ignorant of how the conflict started and why their money is used for every purpose except for those that benefit them.

The Nord Stream sabotage is not the only news story which has been deep sized. The decision to sabotage Nord Stream was very reckless, and a sign that Biden and his team are willing to risk a wider war in order to do what they cannot, weaken Russia or get Vladimir Putin out of office, or destroy Russia economically. At the very moment that people in this country need to know the hard truth, it is being kept from them.

So complete is the indoctrination that Biden’s obvious instability is never discussed, even when the public see it for themselves unfiltered. At the State of the Union address he made this odd remark , “Name me a world leader who’d change places with Xi Jinping! Name me one! Name me one!” The strange outburst was never given the attention that it deserved.

The media are behaving in a manner that violates their own ethics and that may in fact be criminal. Lest anyone forget, the post-World War II Nuremberg trials charged the German press with committing “propaganda as an instrument of war.” Now in the nuclear age the media in what is known as the “collective west” are acting in a similar fashion, covering up crimes and repeating lies as truth in the name of making and continuing war.

The Biden administration did sabotage Nord Stream whether the media say so or not. Their lack of attention doesn’t change facts, but it does disappear them and that is incredibly dangerous to the entire world.

War Certainly Is A Racket

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By Iain Davis

Source: Off-Guardian

In 1935, Major General Smedley Butler’s seminal book “War Is A Racket” warned of the dangers of the US military-industrial complex, more than 25 years before the outgoing US President Eisenhower implored the world to “guard against” the same thing.

One of the most decorated soldiers in US military history, Butler knew what he was talking about, famously writing that war is “…conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.”

While he lamented the loss of his fallen comrades and despite the gongs he received for defending his country, Butler came to understand that he was actually a “high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers.” Later, the historian Antony C. Sutton proved that Butler was right.

When the US administration of George Bush passed its Foreign Operations Appropriation Law in 1991, it ended all US credit to the former, thriving socialist republic of Yugoslavia. At the time the perception on the Hill was that Yugoslavia was no longer required as a buffer zone between the NATO states and their former Warsaw Pact adversaries, so its independent socialism was no longer tolerated.

The US military industrial complex, that Butler and Eisenhower told everyone to tackle, effectively destabilised the entire Balkan region, destroyed hitherto relatively peaceful countries and then fuelled the resultant wars with its pet Islamist terrorists. Ably assisted by the World Bank and the IMF.

So-called “assistance,” via the Train and Equip Program, gave US taxpayers the opportunity to funnel $500M to private security contractors like DynCorp. DynCorp put taxpayer’s money to use, seemingly by training terrorists and child trafficking to paedophiles.

The US and its Western allies’ military industrial complex pulled off more or less the same trick in Iraq, Libya and nearly in Syria. In hindsight this doesn’t appear to have been a very good idea. That is, if you think wars are fought for the reasons we are told.

Having bombed Iraq into the stone age, to stop its regime producing the WMDs it didn’t have, the US then “rescued” the country, from the horrific violence and starvation sanctions the US government itself visited upon the Iraqi people, by establishing the US led coalition’s puppet Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) government. Once installed, the CPA did things like award US engineering firm Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) a ‘sole source contract’ to fix and operate all of Iraq’s oil wells.

That US Vice President Dick Cheney, who lied passionately about Iraqi WMD, was also in receipt of an annual $2M stipend from KBR was just a coincidence. As was the massive boost to the value of his Halliburton shareholdings as a direct result of the war he was instrumental in starting.

When the former UK Prime Minister Teresa May OK’d missile trikes upon Syrian civilians, the fact that her husband made millions out of it, as his investments in missile manufactures went through the roof, was also just a coincidence. In no way did she personally profit from killing children and the fact that her family continues to make a fortune by killing more children in Yemen does not undermine Theresa’s very public profile as a champion of good causes. Although, it appears, not killing children isn’t one of them.

So we shouldn’t be surprised when, once again, we discover that war, far from an impediment to business, actually improves operational margins, increases production, boosts markets and offers white collar criminal enterprises industrial scale profits.

Sure, people, including children, die in huge numbers but so what? Where there’s muck there’s brass. War certainly is a racket.

It turns out that Ukraine has been buying Russian fuel from the EU member state Bulgaria throughout the Ukraine War. An odd oversight for alleged combatants in a war. It is similar to the Ukrainian government’s decision to allow the continuing transit of Russian gas from Gazprom to EU markets through its resident pipelines.

The Russian energy giant Lukoil, whose former CEO Ravil Maganov accidentally fell out of a window a few months ago—a common problem for the wrong Russian executives—has been shipping Russian oil to its refinery in the Bulgarian port city of Burgas. The Burgas refinery is the only one in Bulgaria and the largest in the Balkans. From there the refined gas-oil (red diesel) is exported to Russia’s supposed enemy, Ukraine.

This was all being done in secret, says the Russian MSM, although this is just perception management, pro-war propaganda. There has also been a lot of nonsense written by the Western MSM, alleging that Bulgaria has been illicitly circumnavigating EU “sanctions.” Regardless of the fact that this too is monumental tripe.

There isn’t anything “secret” about it. In truth, the door was left open for Russia and Bulgaria to continue this trade, at least until the end of 2024, because the EU inserted a loophole to ensure that they could. Presumably, the Russian government knew nothing about the massive oil shipments, which is why it remained a “secret,” according to Russian MSM.

Given that the “secrecy” narrative is total claptrap, why would both the Western and the Russian MSM want to peddle essentially the same disinformation? Let’s spend a moment to reflect upon the EU’s non-sanction sanctions shall we?

It means that third party non-EU trading nations, like Kazakhstan for instance, can ship Russian oil to the EU unhindered by the inconvenience of alleged sanctions. The sanctions are for reordering global energy flows, not ending them.

While the switch-over has plunged European citizens into an energy crisis, that’s OK. It is essential for the future of the planet that Europeans are convinced to accept ever increasing energy prices. Otherwise they might not welcome the transition to the “sustainable energy” that will make their lives much worse.

Red diesel in Ukraine is used for industrial and heavy machinery, in agriculture and manufacturing for example. It is also used for, oh I don’t know, fuelling tanks and armoured personnel carriers, mobile artillery units and stuff like that.

Stories from European news outlets that Bulgaria provides nearly 40% of Ukrainian military fuel are all nonsense because reasons. Officials have denied the evidence, such as confirmation from the former Bulgarian President, so it isn’t “officially approved” evidence. Consequently, it can safely be discounted by anyone gullible enough to do so.

Don’t forget, according to Western and Russian MSM outlets, it’s all a secret. Which may come as a relief to some, because otherwise the Russian government would have been colluding with the EU to ensure that the Ukrainian military could stay in the fight wouldn’t it?

Recently, despite apparently running out of weaponry, if you believe Western propaganda that is, Russia has launched a massive missile strike on Ukraine, targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. According to Russian MSM this is part of the Russian governments efforts to undermine Ukraine’s “military capabilities.”

The fact that it ensures that Ukraine will need to be rebuilt by borrowing enormous sums from international financiers, with the diligent assistance of Gazprom investors BlackRock, is not relevant. So ignore this too please.

Gazprom sells gas to Moldova which is now going to provide gas to Ukraine via the Ukrainian transit gas pipelines that Russian bombing has accidentally missed entirely. The Moldovan government is keen to stress that this is not the gas it buys from Gazprom but is rather the gas it buys from somewhere else it hasn’t specified despite admitting that it is completely reliant upon Russian energy.

If the energy and the fuel from countries like Moldova, Bulgaria and Kazakhstan is used by the Ukrainian government’s military, which it won’t under any official circumstances whatsoever, and Gazprom gas helps keep Ukrainian’s lights on, despite the missile strikes, it looks like the Russian government’s objective is to keep Ukraine at war while hobbling it just enough to ensure it can’t win.

This can’t be true because NATO appears to be doing exactly the same thing and Russia and NATO are enemies. Although NATO’s not quite enough assistance differs from the Russian governments not quite enough aggression, it essentially amounts to the same thing.

The piddly number of tanks offered to Ukraine by its NATO “partners,” the reluctance from NATO to give Ukraine military aircraft and the tepid reception for Ukraine’s more recent pleas to join NATO, appears to signal that NATO isn’t prepared to provide, or perhaps isn’t capable of providing, the military support Ukraine would need for victory. But it is seemingly willing to give it just enough old used scrap to keep it loosing.

This means Ukrainians, the new Russian populations in the Donbas, and troops on both sides, though primarily the Ukrainians, will continue to die while the geopolitical landscape continues to shift around them. Meanwhile the military industrial complex and the billionaires it enriches, such as Elon Musk, are making a fortune. When the conflict is concluded, multinational corporations on both sides will be awarded the contracts to rebuild the stuff their government partners have just destroyed.

Butler wrote:

Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted.

While some might think it wise to add politician’s to that list, for some unfathomable reason, far more people seem to think this is a good point but that it isn’t a serious proposal. Why not? Do they not get it, do they not understand what Butler, Eisenhower, Sutton and many more like them have been trying to tell them for nearly a century?

What is it about the military industrial complex that they assume to be inevitable? Why on Earth do they think it is a “necessary evil?”

It is only necessary because millions, perhaps billions, of us accept that war is the “failure” of foreign policy and diplomacy, instead of understanding the obvious fact that it is the extension of foreign policy. As we are seeing right now with the warmongering posturing of the West and China, war is the intended product of foreign policy and sledgehammer diplomacy.

Wars don’t just “happen” by accident. They are planned, engineered and delivered as required. Our’s and our children’s deaths mean nothing to the people who we allow to lead us into war. They don’t have skin in the game but they should and we have the power to make sure that they do. All we have to do is refuse to fight. It really isn’t rocket science. Obedience is not a virtue.

But we won’t because we continue to fall for the same old lies, time and time again. We continue to imagine, like amnesiac slaves, that we can only be led to a better future by following another bunch of parasitic criminals.

Around and around we go: blowing up and starving children to death, condemning pensioners to freezing fuel poverty and accepting that we might just have to sacrifice ourselves and our loved ones along the way.

When the warmongers next press gang our sons and daughters into dying for their ambitions, we will again say it is in a good cause: for the defence of our country, our culture or our way of life.

It isn’t, it never was and it never will be as long as we continue to go along with it.

Hegemon USA and Its Western Vassals: An Unparalleled Threat to Humanity

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: Stephen Lendman Blog

From inception, hegemon USA has been a warrior state, an aggressor abhorrent of peace and stability.

In its near-250-year history, it’s been at peace during only 21 of those years — at war against one or more invented enemies over 90% of the time.

Throughout the post-WW II period, it’s been at war by hot and/or other means against dozens of nations threatening no one.

Far and away more than any other countries in world history, the empire of lies and mass deception shuns peace in favor of perpetual war-making against nations unwilling to be subservient to a higher power in Washington.

Currently at war on Russia by use of Nazified Ukrainian foot soldiers, hegemon USA wants it waged perpetually, no matter the human cost.

During a Security Council session last week, Russia’s UN envoy, Vassily Nebenzia, slammed hegemon USA and its Western vassals for shunning conflict resolution in Ukraine in favor of perpetual war.

Peace is an anathema notion for their ruling regimes at a time when Germany’s militant Russophobic foreign minister, Baerbock, expressed support for US-dominated NATO’s preemptive war on Russia.

US/Western merchants of death and human misery rely on war-making for maximum revenue and profiteering.

Billions of US dollars for Ukrainian Nazis go directly to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamic, Northrup Grumman and other merchants of death and mass destruction.

War-making is big business. According to Nebenzia:

US-dominated NATO regimes want it waged perpetually against invented enemy Russia — no matter UAF losses of manpower, arms and equipment.

Hegemon USA and its Western vassals long ago abandoned the rule of law and whatever scant morality their ruling regimes once had.

Using expendable Ukrainian foot soldiers as cannon fodder they don’t give a damn about, they want forever war waged on Russia to the last involuntary conscript.

US/Western regimes are arming them with chemical and other banned weapons, encouraging their use against Russian forces.

They picked a fight with an adversary able to retaliate against aggression with overwhelming force.

Russia is committed to assure “that no threat to (the Motherland), our allies, culture or language ever again comes from Ukrainian territory,” Nebenzia stressed, adding:

“And we will see to it that (the US-installed regime) never again glorifies Hitler’s accomplices who exterminated hundreds of thousands of Jews, Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians.”

Invited by Russia to speak truth to power at the Security Council, activist Pink Floyd founder, Roger Waters, said the following in part:

“We do not willingly raise our sons and daughters to provide fodder for your cannons.”

“The only sensible course of action today is an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine.”

“No if’s, no but’s, no and’s.”

Waters called for the fake Biden, US-installed puppet Zelensky and preeminent world leader, Vladimir Putin, to “change course (by) agree(ing) to a ceasefire now.”

Puppet Zelensky, the US, NATO regimes, Russia, the EU — “all of you, please change course now.

“Agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine today,” Waters stressed.

At age-79, he passionately supports peace and stability over endless wars of aggression against invented enemies.

The Russian Federation and Vladimir Putin personally are on the right side of history — US-dominated NATO regimes on the wrong side by waging perpetual wars of aggression against nonthreatening nations.

“Anyone with half a brain can see that the conflict in Ukraine was provoked” by the Nazi-infested regime as directed by its US master. 

On a related issue, Waters compared apartheid Israel to Nazi Germany.

Mincing no words, he stressed what’s indisputable, saying:

“The Israelis are committing (slow-motion) genocide (against Palestinians) like Great Britain did during our colonial period.”

The difference between Israel and hegemon USA if that the former operates with way in the Middle East compared to what the empire of lies does worldwide.

No nation may legally circumvent international law in pursuit of its geopolitical aims.

Hegemon USA, its Western vassals, Nazi-infested Ukraine and apartheid Israel operate exclusively this way.

Based on all things Russia and Ukraine over the past year and during the run-up to what’s ongoing, I believe that WW III already began.

What’s unknown is whether the empire of lies will use nuclear weapons against Russia in a futile attempt to transform certain defeat in Ukraine to triumph — forcing Russia to retaliate with these WMDs in self-defense.

If what’s unthinkable happens, what Einstein feared may become reality.

Saying he didn’t know what weapons would be used if WW III occurs, he added:

“World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Eminent philosopher Bertrand Russell once stressed:

“Shall we put an end to the human race, or shall mankind renounce war.” 

The alternative is mutually assured destruction.

“If we don’t end war(s), (they’ll) end us,” HG Wells stressed.

And most likely, they’ll end with a bang, not a whimper.

The Big Stiff: Russia-Iran dump the dollar and bust US sanctions

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News of Russian banks connecting to Iran’s financial messaging system strengthens the resistance against US-imposed sanctions on both countries and accelerates global de-dollarization.  

By Pepe Escobar

Source: The Cradle

The agreement between the Central Banks of Russia and Iran formally signed on 29 January connecting their interbank transfer systems is a game-changer in more ways than one.

Technically, from now on 52 Iranian banks already using SEPAM, Iran’s interbank telecom system, are connecting with 106 banks using SPFS, Russia’s equivalent to the western banking messaging system SWIFT.

Less than a week before the deal, State Duma Chairman Vyachslav Volodin was in Tehran overseeing the last-minute details, part of a meeting of the Russia-Iran Inter-Parliamentary Commission on Cooperation: he was adamant both nations should quickly increase trade in their own currencies.

Ruble-rial trade

Confirming that the share of ruble and rial in mutual settlements already exceeds 60 percent, Volodin ratified the success of “joint use of the Mir and Shetab national payment systems.” Not only does this bypass western sanctions, but it is able to “solve issues related to mutually beneficial cooperation, and increasing trade.”

It is quite possible that the ruble will eventually become the main currency in bilateral trade, according to Iran’s ambassador in Moscow, Kazem Jalali: “Now more than 40 percent of trade between our countries is in rubles.”

Jalali also confirmed, crucially, that Tehran is in favor of the ruble as the main currency in all regional integration mechanisms. He was referring particularly to the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), with which Iran is clinching a free trade deal.

The SEPAM-SPFS agreement starts with a pilot program supervised by Iran’s Shahr Bank and Russia’s VTB Bank. Other lenders will step in once the pilot program gets rid of any possible bugs.

The key advantage is that SEPAM and SPFS are immune to the US and western sanctions ruthlessly imposed on Tehran and Moscow. Once the full deal is up and running, all Iranian and Russian banks can be interconnected.

It is no wonder the Global South is paying very close attention. This is likely to become a landmark case in bypassing Belgium-based SWIFT – which is essentially controlled by Washington, and on a minor scale, the EU. The success of SEPAM-SPFS will certainly encourage other bilateral or even multilateral deals between states.

It’s all about the INSTC

The Central Banks of Iran and Russia are also working to establish a stable coin for foreign trade, replacing the US dollar, the ruble, and the rial. This would be a digital currency backed by gold, to be used mostly in the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of Astrakhan, in the Caspian Sea, already very busy moving plenty of Iranian cargo.

Astrakhan happens to be the key Russian hub of the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), a vast network of ship, rail, and road routes which will drastically increase trade from Russia – but also parts of Europe – across Iran to West Asia and South Asia, and vice-versa.

And that reflects the full geoconomic dimension of the SEPAM-SPFS deal. The Russian Central Bank moved early to set up SPFS in 2014, when Washington began threatening Moscow with expulsion from SWIFT. Merging it with the Iranian SEPAM opens up a whole new horizon, especially given Iran’s ratification as a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and now a leading candidate to join the extended BRICS+ club.

Already three months before the SEPAM-SPFS agreement, the Russian Trade Representative in Iran, Rustam Zhiganshin, was hinting that the decision “to create an analog of the SWIFT system” was a done deal.

Tehran had been preparing the infrastructure to join Russia’s Mir payment system since last summer. But after Moscow was hit with extremely harsh western sanctions and Russian banks were cut off from SWIFT, Tehran and Moscow decided, strategically, to focus on creating their own non-SWIFT for cross-border payments.

All that relates to the immensely strategic geoeconomic role of the INSTC, which is a much cheaper and faster trade corridor than the old Suez Canal route.

Russia is Iran’s largest foreign investor

Moreover, Russia has become Iran’s largest foreign investor, according to Iranian Deputy Finance Minister Ali Fekri: this includes “$2.7 billion worth of investment to two petroleum projects in Iran’s western province of Ilam in the past 15 months.” That’s about 45 percent of the total foreign investment in Iran over the October 2021 – January 2023 period.

Of course the whole process is in its initial stages – as Russia-Iran bilateral trade amounts to only US$3 billion annually. But a boom is inevitable, due to the accumulated effect of SEPAM-SPFS, INSTC, and EAEU interactions, and especially further moves to develop Iran’s energy capacity, logistics, and transport networks, via the INSTC.

Russian projects in Iran are multi-faceted: energy, railways, auto manufacturing, and agriculture. In parallel, Iran supplies Russia with food and automotive products.

Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, is fond of reminding anyone that Russia and Iran “play complementary roles in global energy and cargo transit.” The Iran-EAEU free agreement (FTA) is nearly finalized – including zero tariffs for over 7,500 commodities.

In 2022, the EAEU traded more than $800 billion worth of goods. Iran’s full access to the EAEU will be inestimable in terms of providing a market gateway to large swathes of Eurasia – and bypassing US sanctions as a sweet perk. A realistic projection is that Tehran can expect $15 billion annual trade with the five members of the EAEU in five years, as soon as Iran becomes the sixth member.

The legacy of Samarkand

Everything we are tracking now is in many ways a direct consequence of the SCO summit in Samarkand last September, when Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, in person, placed their bet on strengthening the multipolar world as Iran signed a memorandum to join the SCO.

Putin’s private talks with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in Samarkand were all about deep strategy.

The INSTC is absolutely crucial in this overall equation. Both Russia and Iran are investing at least $25 billion to boost its capabilities.

Ships sailing the Don and Volga Rivers have always traded energy and agricultural commodities. Now Iran’s Maritime News Agency has confirmed that Russia will grant their ships the right of passage along the inland waterways on the Don and Volga.

Meanwhile, Iran is already established as the third largest importer of Russian grain. From now on, trade on turbines, polymers, medical supplies, and automotive parts will be on a roll.

Tehran and Moscow have signed a contract to build a large cargo vessel for Iran to be used at the Caspian port of Solyanka. And RZD logistics, a subsidiary of Russian railway RZD, operates container cargo trains regularly from Moscow to Iran. The Russian Journal for Economics predicts that just the freight traffic on INTSC could reach 25 million tons by 2030 – no less than a 20-fold increase compared to 2022.

Inside Iran, new terminals are nearly ready for cargo to be rolled off ships to railroads crisscrossing the country from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf. Sergey Katrin, head of Russia’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, is confident that once the FTA with the EAEU is on, bilateral trade can soon reach $40 billion a year.

Tehran’s plans are extremely ambitious, inserted in an “Eastern Axis” framework that privileges regional states Russia, China, India, and Central Asia.

Geostrategically and geoeconomically, that implies a seamless interconnection of INSTC, EAEU, SCO, and BRICS+. And all of this is coordinated by the one Quad that really matters: Russia, China, India, and Iran.

Of course there will be problems. The intractable Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict might be able to derail the INSTC: but note that Russia-Iran connections via the Caspian can easily bypass Baku if the need arises.

BRICS+ will cement the dollar’s descent

Apart from Russia and Iran, Russia and China have also been trying to interface their banking messaging systems for years now. The Chinese CBIBPS (Cross-Border Inter-Bank Payments System) is considered top class. The problem is that Washington has directly threatened to expel Chinese banks from SWIFT if they interconnect with Russian banks.

The success of SEPAM-SPFS may allow Beijing to go for broke – especially now, after the extremely harsh semiconductor war and the appalling balloon farce. In terms of sovereignty, it is clear that China will not accept US restrictions on how to move its own funds.

In parallel, the BRICS in 2023 will delve deeper into developing their mutual financial payments system and their own reserve currency. There are no less than 13 confirmed candidates eager to join BRICS+ – including Asian middle powers like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia.

All eyes will be on whether – and how – the $30 trillion-plus indebted US will threaten to expel BRICS+ from SWIFT.

It’s enlightening to remember that Russia’s debt to GDP ratio stands at only 17 percent. China’s is 77 percent. The current BRICS without Russia are at 78 percent. BRICS+ including Russia may average only 55 percent. Strong productivity ahead will come from a BRICS+ supported by a gold and/or commodities-backed currency and a different payment system that bypasses the US dollar. Strong productivity definitely will not come from the collective west whose economies are entering recessionary times.

Amid so many intertwined developments, and so many challenges, one thing is certain. The SEPAM-SPFS deal between Russia and Iran may be just the first sign of the tectonic plates movement in global banking and payment systems.

Welcome to one, two, one thousand payment messaging systems. And welcome to their unification in a global network. Of course that will take time. But this high-speed financial train has already left the station.

A Star is Born!

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By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com


“Everything that can be engineered is being engineered dishonestly.” —Truman Verdun

If you think the reasons behind the First World War were incomprehensible, imagine what historians of the future — pan-fraying peccary loins over their camp fires — will think about World War Three. Some people started something in Ukraine… and then the USA blew up the main energy supply line of its NATO ally, Germany… say, what…?!?

    Weird, a little bit.  A sane person in a sane world would call sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines an act-of-war against a friendly nation, since the result was to virtually destroy the basis of Germany’s industry, not to mention the domestic comfort of German citizens. Now, thanks to 85-year-old Seymour Hersh, the independent investigator who uncovered the My Lai Massacre in 1969 and reported on the depraved antics of American jailers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004, we have a pretty good idea how the Nord Stream caper went down.

     For a year before the op, “Joe Biden” and Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland — architect of the 2014 Maidan Coup in Ukraine, which kicked-off the present fiasco there — blabbed about “ending” the Nord Streams. Curiously, the Germans said nothing. Meanwhile, the US made a deal to beef up military bases in Norway, an original NATO signatory (1949), for staging the Nord Stream sabotage op. Of course, Norway, being Western Europe’s remaining sole oil-and-gas exporter, had an interest in eliminating its competition.

    In June of 2022, under cover of an annual NATO naval exercise in the Baltic Sea, US Navy divers attached mines to the Nord Stream pipelines. The mines had triggers that could be activated remotely at any time of choosing, and that moment came on September 26… kaboom. Ms. Nuland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken gloated publicly. Naturally, the US blamed Russia. America’s news media — catamite of the Intel Community — amplified the charge, despite the absurdity of Russia blowing up its most lucrative source of export revenue. The New York Times has so far made no mention of Mr. Hersh’s recent update of the Nord Stream sabotage.

     Germany, too, hardly made a peep, nor did the rest of Western Europe, which now faces a future that looks, energy-wise, like a return to the Fourteenth Century. Maybe they’re all jaded with modern life, all that tiresome bathing and malingering in the brightly-lit cafes. Under the sagacious guidance of the WEF they were all going “green,” anyway — but was that green like the heart-shaped leaves of the linden tree or green like the moldy veins in Roquefort cheese? I guess they’ll find out.

     Luckily, America had the Chinese balloon to distract them, and then “Joe B’s” State-of-the-Union extravaganza where the nation learned that we are living in the most extraordinary economic boom since the days of Babe Ruth and Charlie Chaplin. The perpetually-vacationing Leader of the Free World has apparently made America great again, despite the dastardly plots and ongoing insurrections of his far-right, white supremacist adversaries. Did the annual SOTU smell a little bit like a reelection pitch, though? I hope so.

     Speaking of insurrection, the House commenced hearings this past week, debuting with the Oversight Committee’s witness panel of Twitter execs who carried out a years-long censorship campaign against the First Amendment in cahoots with the FBI, CIA, DOD, DOJ, DOS, DHS… well you get the picture. A more arrogant crew of dedicated fascists would be hard to find in any other corner of the world today, except perhaps Canada, than the likes of Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth, Anika Collier Navaroli, and James Baker, former chief counsel of the FBI. They “moderated” speech on the chat app for the good of the American people, you understand, lest the public succumb to “misinformation” — otherwise known as reality.

     One reality being that the sedulously-repressed news of Hunter Biden’s crime-stuffed laptop represented interference in the 2020 election. James Baker told the committee he could not recall at the time (October 2020) whether he spoke to anyone back in his old haunts at the FBI about the matter — though there is no question that, as chief counsel, he knew the agency had possession of the laptop since 2019, and what was in it. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) warned the four former Twitter employees that “this is the investigation part, later comes the arrest part.” Let’s hope so on that one, too.

     Meanwhile, the House Special Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held a lively colloquy with four “experts” including former FBI agents Nicole Parker and Thomas Baker, GWU Law Professor Jonathan Turley, and one Elliot Williams, former DOJ Assistant AG and currently shill for DC Lawfare tank the Raban Group. The theme, generally, was the change-in-mission in the FBI-DOJ nexus from law enforcement to harassment of US citizens who oppose Democratic Party policy.

     Most instructive in Thursday’s session, though, was the political debut of Rep. Danial Sachs Goldman (real name), newly elected member for New York’s Tenth District (which encompasses Wall Street). Among other distinctions, Mr. Goldman is an heir to the Levi-Strauss blue jeans fortune, and was lead counsel during the 2019 impeachment hearings against Donald Trump in the House Intelligence Committee. This vicious prick, an apt replacement for the inveterate liar and seditionist, Rep. Adam Schiff (CA), put on a florid demonstration of hectoring witnesses, cutting them off, and re-directing the committee’s attention at every opportunity to the so-called “insurrection” at the Capitol of 1/6/20.

      Mr. Goldman is a man to watch, especially as the House actually does give its complete attention later this year to the 1/6/20 matter and the true facts behind the FBI’s engineering of the event, including the nefarious actions of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Capitol Police. When it comes, I can’t wait to watch Mr. Goldman unwind like one of those cheap counterfeit Rolex watchers that peddlers hawk on Wall Street’s sidewalk.

Quake Delivers Earth-Shattering Blow to U.S.-Led NATO Hypocrisy

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By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

When a real-world emergency happens, all of NATO’s pious and self-regarding talk implodes in a pile of dust.

A 7.8. magnitude earthquake hits Europe’s southern neighbors Türkiye and Syria – and the NATO alliance does next to nothing in response. What sort of security organization is that?

Rather, it seems to be too busy trying to start World War Three by undertaking an unprecedented mobilization of resources and equipment in Ukraine against Russia. A mobilization that is completely unwarranted and indeed is an audacious gaslighting charade played on the Western public.

The United States-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization has an annual military budget that exceeds well over $1 trillion spread over its 30 member nations. One of those members is Türkiye.

What sort of priorities has NATO? Not rhetorical, theoretical, or presumed priorities, but real-life practical, demonstrable priorities.

On Monday morning this week, southern Türkiye and neighboring Syria were devastated by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake and multiple huge aftershocks. The death toll in both countries has risen to over 11,000 with tens of thousands injured and made homeless. With thousands of missing people trapped under rubble, the casualties will increase over the coming days.

Many countries were quick to send emergency rescue teams to the zone of havoc that straddles the border between Türkiye and Syria. Russia and Iran – experienced in such natural disasters – were among the first neighboring countries to send in aid and salvage crews.

By contrast, the apathetic response from the U.S.-led NATO bloc has been abject. What’s even more incredible, Türkiye is a long-time prominent member of the organization and is considered a vital partner for the European Union.

NATO bills itself as a “collective security organization”. Its remit is not just about military security. It touts itself as protecting the Euro-Atlantic hemisphere from all security threats including from natural disasters. Its lackluster response to the earthquake this week on the very doorstep of Europe is like that of a big shiny red fire engine parked lazily near a building ablaze – and doing diddly-squat about it.

All one has to do is compare the massive mobilization of military and financial aid that the U.S. and NATO mounted for Ukraine. The proxy war in that country against Russia has been fueled with over $100 billion in “emergency” spending by the United States and its European allies. No expense has been spared by Western governments who have signed off a blizzard of cheques funded by their taxpaying citizens to prop up a corrupt regime in Kiev to fight against Russia. (If you don’t know about the farcical Zelensky cabal and its teeming corruption then you have been reading too much Western media and getting your geopolitical views from Hollywood celebs.)

NATO has been bragging about showing “unity” and “resolve” in support of Ukraine where Ukrainian foot-soldiers are being slaughtered in what is a proxy confrontation for Washington against Russia.

The United Nations estimates that civilian deaths in Ukraine’s year-long war are around 7,000. That’s relatively low compared with the military casualties which amount to perhaps 200,000. Up to 10 million Ukrainians have been displaced by the violence and most of them are being sheltered in Russia. About four million Ukrainians who fled their country are being put up in hotels across the European Union, given visa-free status and generous comforts funded by taxpayers.

In a matter of hours, however, the earthquake to have hit Türkiye and Syria resulted in civilian casualties far surpassing the year-long war in Ukraine.

Why aren’t the United States and NATO members mobilizing tens of billions of dollars in aid and rescue crews for the quake victims? What are all those airplanes, ships, tanks and engineering equipment for if they can’t be deployed with efficient timing and logistics to save lives? Where is the will to move heaven and earth to dig people out of crushing debris?

Of course, the answer is that NATO is not a “security organization” in the normal meaning of the word. It is a war machine that serves U.S. imperialist objectives. It’s a relic from the Cold War that has now been redeployed to fight Russia and China, and in doing so push the world to the abyss of global nuclear war – the ultimate “insecurity”.

If practical security concerns had anything to do with NATO, the disaster this week in Türkiye and Syria demonstrates beyond doubt that the organization is nothing but a monstrous hypocritical front.

This week U.S. President Joe Biden gave his State of the Union speech before Congress. He was speaking less than 24 hours after the earthquake wrought devastation. He did not even mention the calamity during an hour and a half of cloying self-admiration about the virtues of the “unique nation”. Preposterously, he insisted in his nationwide address that the war in Ukraine is “a test of our age” for American leadership.

Biden claimed that the ever-so-chivalrous U.S. was “defending a stronger Europe” and “defending democracy” in Ukraine from “Russian aggression”. How’s that? By installing and weaponizing a Neo-Nazi regime in Kiev from a CIA-backed coup in 2014 and which is up to its eyeballs in corruption? Joe Biden is deceiving himself and the American public with narcissistic fairytales. No wonder the United States and its Western minions are in such a mess economically, socially and morally when unabashed delusion is aired nationwide on primetime TV.

The truth is far more ugly and bloody. And the truth is that the earthquake has inflicted such horrendous damage this week because of the decade-long U.S. and NATO proxy war in Syria. That failed war from 2011 for regime change in Damascus (using Islamist terror gangs as NATO foot-soldiers) caused millions of refugees and weakened infrastructure in the afflicted border area. A humanitarian crisis was already in place before the quake struck – a humanitarian crisis that Washington and its crime syndicate NATO organization have created from their criminal intrigues for regime change.

Adding ignominy to grievous injury, the international response to the earthquake is being hampered by U.S. and European Union sanctions against the Syrian state. Washington heartlessly said this week it was not going to lift its sanctions off Damascus in the aftermath of the quake.

All the grand vanity and deception of Washington and its NATO minions gets buried in an instant by a sudden movement in tectonic plates.

The United States and its lackey Western “powers” talk endlessly – and nauseatingly – about democracy, humanitarianism and security. Then when a real-world emergency happens, all the pious and self-regarding talk implodes in a pile of dust. And when the dust settles and the heartrending cries of children fade, all that’s left of Western claims is earth-shattered hypocrisy.

Worst Ever State of the Union in US History

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: The Stephen Lendman Blog

With lines scripted for him to recite via teleprompter, crib notes, and an earpiece for instructions, the fake Biden mumbled and bumbled through the regime’s Tuesday state of the union (SOTU) address for 72 painful-to-hear minutes.

It came at a time when undemocratic Dems are waging war at home on Americans targeted for elimination by kill shots and abroad against militarily, morally and ethically superior Russia — what risks humanity-destroying nuclear war if push things too far.

The fake Biden is an embarrassment to what leadership is supposed to be, what’s absent with undemocratic Dems in charge — especially with an imposter, a detached from reality buffoon in the White House.

This year’s SOTU came at a time of hegemon USA’s war against invented enemy Russia, a must-win conflict it’s losing to a superior foe.

Throughout the post-WW II period, the empire of lies and mass-deception always picked fights with militarily inferior nations free from its control — until overstepping by challenging Russia belligerently in support of Nazi-infested Ukraine, a major strategic blunder for which it’s paying dearly. 

Separately in response to international community calls for the Biden regime to aid rescue work in earthquake-devastated northern Syria by lifting illegally imposed sanctions, interventionist Blinken’s so-called spokesman, Price, showed contempt for its people in need by the following perversion of reality remarks, saying:

“It would be…counterproductive for us to reach out to a government” on the US target list for regime change for not subordinating its sovereignty and rights of its people to a higher power in Washington.

And this perversion of reality from Price, falsely claiming that the empire of lies and forever wars on invented enemies provided “more humanitarian assistance to the people of Syria than any other country (sic)” — a bald-faced Big Lie by a regime waging all-out war on nations free from its diabolical control.

Following Obama/Biden regime aggression against Syria in 2011, the empire of lies continued waging war on the country and its people by hot and other means.

At this time, hegemon USA illegally controls about one-third of Syrian territory, including its oil-rich areas and most fertile agricultural land.

Hegemon USA’s so-called 2020 Caesar Act is all about wanting 17 million Syrians starved into submission for failure of Damascus to bend to the will of the empire of lies and forever wars.

At the time of its enactment into US law, Syrian envoy to Russia, Riyad Haddad, explained that threatened US sanctions under the measure “not only target Syria, they directly or indirectly jeopardize all its allies and are also aimed against Persian Gulf countries, so that none of these countries dares to invest in” the Syrian Arab Republic.

“And each party that will say it wants to invest, must get permission from the US.”

The measure is similar to US state terror and illegal sanctions war on Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries free from its control, what aims to inflict enormous harm on their people.

At this time, US hostility toward sovereign independent nations is a sideshow compared to its aggression against Russia, what poses an ominous risk of humanity-destroying nuclear war.

As in virtually all his public remarks, the fake Biden’s SOTU trampled on truth by a litany of pre-scripted bald-faced Big Lies.

It’s how the empire of lies operates on the world stage, treating truth and full disclosure of major issues as mortal enemies. 

On March 11, 2022, the fake Biden called tanks to Nazi-infested Ukraine “WW III.”

Launched preemptively by the empire of lies against nonthreatening Russia, it’s been raging long before the fake Biden “announc(ed) that (hegemon USA) will be sending ‘Abram’ tanks to Ukrain(ian)” Nazis days earlier.

Will F-16 or other US warplanes follow — for Russia to target and destroy in flight?

The Russian Federation controls Ukrainian airspace and offshore waters.

Its high-precision hypersonic missiles can target and destroy anything threatening its security.

Sounding detached from reality and delusional, the fake Biden ignored reality about more monster than nation-state USA.

He ignored how Russia is outgunning, outmaneuvering, outwitting and defeating Nazi-infested Ukraine and the empire of lies at the same time.

And at a time of perpetual wars by hot and/or other means on invented enemies, soaring inflation and deepening economic weakness, the fake Biden pretended that Americans never had things better than since undemocratic Dems usurped power in 2020 by brazen election rigging.

And once again he ignored that what’s called covid is seasonal flu renamed, that kill shots are designed to destroy health, that democracy in the US/West exists in fantasy form alone — the real thing not tolerated at home or abroad.

What he called “the great American story” is a humanity-destroying monster.

Tucker Carlson is an exception to dominant fourth estate rubbish.

Commenting on the fake Biden’s Tuesday night SOTU before delivered, he said:

“(I)t would take a lot of brass to stand up on live television and claim that the (empire of lies and forever wars) is better off than it was when you took over” when reality is worlds apart different.

As long as undemocratic Dems run things, the ominous risk of nuclear war will threaten humanity’s survival.

Carlson correctly expected not “a single honest word” from the White House imposter in his SOTU address.

Instead of truth and full disclosure, he recited a litany of bald-faced Big Lies about all things domestic and geopolitical.

He didn’t run for president.

He was installed unelected to serve wealth, power and privileged interests exclusively at the expense of peace and beneficial social change.

At the same time, the regime he represents is waging war on Russia and losing badly to its military and tactical superiority.

On the home front, real inflation as calculated pre-1990 is 16.2%.

Most jobs created are rotten part-time ones paying poverty or sub-poverty wages with few or no benefits.

What the fake Biden called “near record low unemployment for Black and Hispanic workers” is pure fiction.

At a time when the nation’s industrial base operates in low-wage countries, he lied claiming that the empire of lies “created 800,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs, the fastest growth in 40 years (sic).”

He compounded his Big Lie by falsely claiming that “we’re exporting American products and creating American jobs (sic).”

He turned truth on its head and trampled on it by falsely blaming Russia for made-in-the-USA inflation, a fake pandemic and perpetual war-making on invented enemies.

Virtually every positive claim he made was a bald-faced Big Lie — reflecting his detachment from reality.

The empire of lies and perpetual wars on invented enemies is declining because of its imperial arrogance, its endless wars against invented enemies, and unwillingness to change its wicked ways.

The fake Biden is symbolic of hegemon USA’s nonexistent exceptionalism, its illusory moral superiority and fantasy military supremacy.

It’s the same dynamic that doomed other empires in world history.

The long ago founded US republic no longer exists, replaced by the imperial state and ruinous military Keynesianism while vital homeland needs go begging.

China, Russia and other independent nations are rising in preeminence on the world stage at a time of hegemon USA’s fall from grace with no prospect of turning things around.

The nation I grew up in long ago no longer exists.

A humanity-destroying monster replaced it.

If not effectively challenged and changed, US-launched nuclear war may kill us all.

A Final Comment

The fake Biden lied and mass-deceived by pretending to represent “all Americans.”

He was installed unelected to wage perpetual wars by hot and/or other means on invented enemies to serve wealth, power and privileged interests exclusively.

The regime he represents is an unparalleled menace to humanity at home and worldwide.

As long as it’s empowered, we’re more greatly endangered than ever before in world history because of its contempt for peace in favor of perpetual war-making on invented enemies.