Tag Archives: US Foreign Policy

U.S.-led Imperialism is the World’s Leading Purveyor of Chaos

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The western capitalist axis of domination is responsible for most of the world’s crises. The crisis of legitimacy extends from the UK to Japan, and U.S. imperialism is involved in every new catastrophe.

By Danny Haiphong

Source: Black Agenda Report

To say that the West, currently led by the dictates of U.S. imperialism, is in trouble would be an understatement. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned on July 7th amid an escalating political crisis of legitimacy . Three weeks before Johnson announced his departure, Emmanuel Macron’s so-called centrist alliance lost its parliamentary majority in France. U.S. President Joe Biden continues to face his own crisis of legitimacy in the form of declining favorability ratings and public humiliation from Democratic loyalists such as Debra Messing . For the West, political crisis is undergirded by an unprecedented level of system chaos which has given the vast majority of workers and oppressed people little confidence in the future.

That chaos was compounded by the murder of Japan’s former Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe on July 7th. Abe was an imperialist, a neoliberal, and the highest expression of what it means to be a puppet of the American Empire . Abe’s so-called Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was a literal creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Other detestable qualities of Abe include his worship of Japan’s fascist war criminals, his membership in the fascist cult Nippon Kaigi, and his unapologetic defense of Japan’s history of brutalizing and super exploiting “comfort women” from its colonies. Most important to the United States, however, was Abe’s unquestionable loyalty to the New Cold War and the military encirclement of China.

Abe’s murder and the attendant political crises in the West are a clear demonstration that U.S.-led imperialism is the world’s leading purveyor of chaos in the world. At the economic base, the U.S. and the E.U. continue to prolong their proxy war with Russia through massive arms transfers and sanctions that have boomeranged back to spur shortages and inflation. Inflation has come with political costs. Already unpopular capitalist regimes in the West are finding themselves increasingly exposed as incapable of addressing the rising cost of living. It doesn’t help matters that the so-called military superiority of the United States and its imperialist partners is also being challenged by Russia’s successful special military operation in Ukraine.

Thanks to the U.S. obsession with NATO expansion, the future is bleak for Ukraine’s U.S.-backed coup government established in 2014. Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine has made immense progress in the Donbass region. An already fragile and privatized vassal Ukrainian economy can only look forward to more pain once the U.S. and its junior partners in NATO come looking for repayment on its exorbitant aid packages. And Ukraine is just the beginning. The recent admission of Sweden and Finland into NATO is yet another declaration of war with Russia which opens the door to future conflicts even more destructive than the ongoing U.S. proxy war in Ukraine.

It is an undeniable fact that chaos follows U.S. imperialism wherever it goes. In Latin America, stability exists only where leftist governments have secured sufficient sovereignty . In Africa, the spread of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has led to widespread destabilization and political insecurity in the aftermath of the U.S.-NATO-AFRICOM invasion of Libya in 2011. In Asia, U.S. militarism has facilitated war in the West and attempted to organize a coalition of vassal states against China in the East. U.S. meddling in Taiwan has created a dumping ground for defense contractors and prompted Joe Biden to articulate on three occasions that the U.S. is willing to militarily intervene to “defend” the island , a guaranteed nuclear exchange scenario.

U.S. militarism is the principal barrier to political stability around the world which is a prerequisite to addressing global challenges such as climate change and poverty. U.S. and E.U. sanctions murder thousands of people in poorer, non-white countries. U.S.-sponsored color revolutions and “soft power” maneuvers are preludes to regime change. So-called U.S. “soft power” strengthens the most reactionary forces in the world. The far right and fascistic Contras in Latin and Central America , ISIS in West Asia, and the Azov Regiment in Ukraine are all outgrowths of U.S. interference disguised as “soft power.”

A dialectical relationship exists between the U.S.’s domestic and foreign policy. U.S. imperialism is an advanced stage in the system of capitalism predicated upon slavery, colonialism, and racism. Jayland Walker’s brutal murder at the hands of Akron police is a near daily occurrence in the United States. Black Americans and Indigenous peoples have been subject to the cruelest forms of racist violence for centuries. The U.S.’s endless wars are an expression of this violence turned toward imperialist ends.

The chickens of chaos have come home to roost. The Euro-American imperialist world order is suffering from terminal contradictions. Political instability reigns supreme. Another economic crisis is said to be looming but is more than likely already here. Imperialist wars no longer hold any prospect for any real “victory” without serious consequences for the war-maker.

While material conditions are pregnant with possibilities, there is no organized and independent left challenge to the supremacy of U.S. capital and its armed guards of the state. That is the task ahead of the people’s movement residing in the belly of the imperialist beast. In the face of the unprecedented chaos produced by its leading purveyor, the United States, this is no doubt the most difficult one that the working class and oppressed in the long and storied history of resistance. But such a task is not a choice. It is forced upon us by the weight of imperialism bearing down on our necks.

We must not rest until we get the boot off by any means necessary.

Danny Haiphong’s work can be followed on Twitter @SpiritofHo and Telegram at The Haiphong Press. You can support Danny on Patreon by clicking this link. You can contact him at haiphongpress@protonmail.com. 

The international political debacle proves that the unipolar system is crumbling

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By Guilherme Wilbert

Source: The Saker

With the recent political events involving such different parts of the world, but usually for the same reasons: popular dissatisfaction, rising prices, and the like. And these causes arise with the decision-making errors of Western leaders, who end up suppressing popular opinion, in what generates a kind of democratic government in the archetype but doesn’t really care about its people.

The most practical example arises when countries try to enter into military alliances without popular consultation as to whether the people agree with what is at stake. The Nordics in NATO were a very clear example of this.

The politicians who now manage the finances of powers within Europe were clearly not prepared for what is happening, mainly because in the global production chain, which involves Russia, now sanctioned, reflects much more on the sanctioning regional economy than on the sanctioned one. Plus it destroys on many economic fronts the Global South, which directly receives the reflections of these mistakes.

People who have been put through a bureaucracy because economic power has a lot of money and unfortunately are leading Europe into disaster, but without realizing it the entire Western world as we know it. With recent cases of foreign attempts to interfere in legitimately elected governments to try to stop the advance to the multipolar world, which at this point of the championship has no more brakes.

The recent death of Shinzo Abe, former prime minister of Japan (which until then was considered one of the safest countries in the world), proves that even a supposedly quiet and peaceful nation can be the target of serious terrorist attacks like the one mentioned, and this proves that the unipolarity system is disappearing, even if it takes some along the way, unfortunately.

The political debacle unfortunately caused by the cited mistakes of Western leaders such as the sanctions, has generated dissatisfaction to the extreme point of an assassination with a homemade artifact against a prominent leader of the Asian world (many may be wondering why in the reasoning Japan would be characterized as part of the “Western World” despite being in Asia and this is because Japanese diplomacy is strongly influenced by Washington, in which it functions as a kind of diplomacy semi-colonized by the Americans).

It was not avoidable, but it could be delayed

The multipolar world was going to emerge one way or another, but the mistakes of the Western leaders accelerated a process that would still take some years, and it can’t cope since it governs for less than 1 billion people (G7 population). And Operation Z in Ukraine was the trigger for a lack of diplomatic tact and will to war that even caused Ukraine’s allied leaders to fall, such as Boris Johnson.

The bankruptcy of Europe was also imminent, since the various economic dependencies, including on Russian gas, prove that the continent, despite being so-called First World, was unable to generate an economy based on a real production of resources. And all attempts to escape from this dependency would lead to at least 10 years of pipeline works and economic agreements-treaties between other countries and them.

So it’s not like it was easy either to have prevented what was predestined to happen, but it could have been delayed if there was the right diplomacy, since the war was avoidable. But how? Simple. I’ll explain.

What was Putin’s key argument? “Ukraine cannot join NATO!”

And what could the West have done? Generated a document in multilateral coordination with the appropriate entities recognizing that the security of Russia, a member of the UN Security Council, was an important issue and Ukraine would not join the Atlanticist military alliance. Or: they could put 50,000 or 100,000 troops inside Kiev to stand up to the Russians since Biden shortly before the Special Military Operation began, acknowledged that Putin would “invade Ukraine,” so they knew the risks. But they did neither.

They wanted this war but it is not going as planned because the political debacle is happening, with the leaders who support the Atlanticist platforms falling away little by little, leaving the enthusiasts of the multipolar world standing like Putin and Xi Jinping in their proper nuclear strongholds.

Moreover, it is interesting to note how parts of the Global South opposed the various diplomatic and economic sanctions on Russia, showing that they were unwilling to continue functioning as American semi-colonies in diplomatic and other matters.

It was inevitable that a totally new world would emerge out of the totally destroyed old world, because that is the natural way of what comes after destruction: reconstruction or new construction. And that is what is happening to the world at present, in that we see prominent leaders being murdered in the open or resignations due to inability of governance, clear signs of destruction.

And after the destruction will come the construction, of which we don’t know what it will look like yet, but the first bricks have already been laid.

The BRICS+ is the only economic bloc capable of guiding the birth of the multipolar world

The BRICS+ unlike any grouping of countries into an economic bloc, has no regional or cultural limitations. On the contrary, countries from all over the world that are so different are aligned in the same multipolar thinking there, in what is seen different if you consider the G7 or NAFTA, which are limiting organizations in their birth, since they don’t carry the discourse of multipolarism ingrained, besides using destabilizing agents such as NATO for a kind of stick to impose their policies on sovereign countries.

The ability to unite so many enthusiasts of the multipolar world will be the driving force of the industrial revolution that we will see happen, which will bring the world into a state of bonanza again because even war will end one day and sanctions will be seen as useless because integration has already begun to happen. Currency baskets are being considered within the BRICS+ to escape the American monetary hegemony, which is a BIG thing!

So, to close the reasoning, I conclude that the multipolar world was something that was inevitably going to happen, but it was accelerated because of the mistakes of its enemies.

Guilherme Wilbert is a law graduate interested in geopolitics and international law.

NATO — The Most Dangerous Military Alliance on the Planet

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Together We Are Wrong — by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the arms industry that depends on it for billions in profits, has become the most aggressive and dangerous military alliance on the planet. Created in 1949 to thwart Soviet expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, it has evolved into a global war machine in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia. 

NATO expanded its footprint, violating promises to Moscow, once the Cold War ended, to incorporate 14 countries in Eastern and Central Europe into the alliance. It will soon add Finland and Sweden. It bombed Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. It launched wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, resulting in close to a million deaths and some 38 million people driven from their homes. It is building a military footprint in Africa and Asia. It invited Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, the so-called “Asia Pacific Four,” to its recent summit in Madrid at the end of June. It has expanded its reach into the Southern Hemisphere, signing a military training partnership agreement with Colombia, in December 2021. It has backed Turkey, with NATO’s second largest military, which has illegally invaded and occupied parts of Syria as well as Iraq. Turkish-backed militias are engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds and other inhabitants of north and east Syria. The Turkish military has been accused of war crimes – including multiple airstrikes against a refugee camp andchemical weapons use – in northern Iraq. In exchange for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s permission for Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, the two Nordic countries have agreed to expand their domestic terror laws making it easier to crack down on Kurdish and other activists, lift their restrictions on selling arms to Turkey and deny support to the Kurdish-led movement for democratic autonomy in Syria.

It is quite a record for a military alliance that with the collapse of the Soviet Union was rendered obsolete and should have been dismantled. NATO and the militarists had no intention of embracing the “peace dividend,” fostering a world based on diplomacy, a respect of spheres of influence and mutual cooperation. It was determined to stay in business. Its business is war. That meant expanding its war machine far beyond the border of Europe and engaging in ceaseless antagonism toward China and Russia. 

NATO sees the future, as detailed in its “NATO 2030: Unified for a New Era,” as a battle for hegemony with rival states, especially China, and calls for the preparation of prolonged global conflict.

“China has an increasingly global strategic agenda, supported by its economic and military heft,” the NATO 2030 initiative warned. “It has proven its willingness to use force against its neighbors, as well as economic coercion and intimidatory diplomacy well beyond the Indo-Pacific region. Over the coming decade, China will likely also challenge NATO’s ability to build collective resilience, safeguard critical infrastructure, address new and emerging technologies such as 5G and protect sensitive sectors of the economy including supply chains. Longer term, China is increasingly likely to project military power globally, including potentially in the Euro-Atlantic area.”

The alliance has spurned the Cold War strategy that made sure Washington was closer to Moscow and Beijing than Moscow and Beijing were to each other. U.S. and NATO antagonism have turned Russia and China into close allies. Russia, rich in natural resources, including energy, minerals and grains, and China, a manufacturing and technological behemoth, are a potent combination. NATO no longer distinguishes between the two, announcing in its most recent mission statement that the “deepening strategic partnership” between Russian and China has resulted in “mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order that run counter to our values and interests.” 

On July 6, Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, and Ken McCallum, director general of Britain’s MI5, held a joint news conference in London to announce that China was the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security.” They accused China, like Russia, of interfering in U.S. and U.K. elections. Wray warned the business leaders they addressed that the Chinese government was “set on stealing your technology, whatever it is that makes your industry tick, and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.”

This inflammatory rhetoric presages an ominous future.

One cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The political and social turmoil in the U.S., coupled with its diminishing economic power, has led it to embrace NATO and its war machine as the antidote to its decline.

Washington and its European allies are terrified of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) meant to connect an economic bloc of roughly 70 nations outside U.S. control. The initiative includes the construction of rail lines, roads and gas pipelines that will be integrated with Russia. Beijing is expected to commit $1.3 trillion to the BRI by 2027. China, which is on track to become the world’s largest economy within a decade, has organized the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world’s largest trade pact of 15 East Asian and Pacific nations representing 30 percent of global trade. It already accounts for 28.7 percent of the Global Manufacturing Output, nearly double the 16.8 percent of the U.S. 

China’s rate of growth last year was an impressive  8.1 percent, although slowing to around 5 percent this year.  By contrast, the U.S.’s growth rate in 2021 was 5.7 percent — its highest since 1984 — but is predicted to fall below 1 percent this year, by the New York Federal Reserve.

If China, Russia, Iran, India and other nations free themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network financial institutions use to send and receive information such as money transfer instructions, it will trigger a dramatic decline in the value of the dollar and a financial collapse in the U.S. The huge military expenditures, which have driven the U.S. debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the U.S.’s entire GDP, will become untenable. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military in 2021, $ 801 billion which amounted to 38 percent of total world expenditure on the military, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. The loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency will force the U.S. to slash spending, shutter many of its 800 military bases overseas and cope with the inevitable social and political upheavals triggered by economic collapse. It is darkly ironic that NATO has accelerated this possibility.

Russia, in the eyes of NATO and U.S. strategists, is the appetizer. Its military, NATO hopes, will get bogged down and degraded in Ukraine. Sanctions and diplomatic isolation, the plan goes, will thrust Vladimir Putin from power. A client regime that will do U.S. bidding will be installed in Moscow.

NATO has provided more than $8 billion in military aid to Ukraine, while the US has committed nearly $54 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to the country.

China, however, is the main course. Unable to compete economically, the U.S. and NATO have turned to the blunt instrument of war to cripple their global competitor. 

The provocation of China replicates the NATO baiting of Russia.

NATO expansion and the 2014 US-backed coup in Kyiv led Russia to first occupy Crimea, in eastern Ukraine, with its large ethnic Russian population, and then to invade all of Ukraine to thwart the country’s efforts to join NATO. 

The same dance of death is being played with China over Taiwan, which China considers part of Chinese territory, and with NATO expansion in the Asia Pacific. China flies warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense zone and the U.S. sends naval shipsthrough the Taiwan Strait which connects the South and East China seas. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May called China the most serious long-term challenge to the international order, citing its claims to Taiwan and efforts to dominate the South China Sea. Taiwan’s president, in a Zelensky-like publicity stunt, recently posed with an anti-tank rocket launcher in a government handout photo.

The conflict in Ukraine has been a bonanza for the arms industry, which, given the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, needed a new conflict. Lockheed Martin’s stock prices are up 12 percent. Northrop Grumman is up 20 percent. The war is being used by NATO to increase its military presence in Eastern and Central Europe. The U.S. is building a permanent military base in Poland. The 40,000-strong NATO reaction force is being expanded to 300,000 troops. Billions of dollars in weapons are pouring into the region.

The conflict with Russia, however, is already backfiring. The ruble has soared to a seven-year high against the dollar. Europe is barreling towards a recession because of rising oil and gas prices and the fear that Russia could terminate supplies completely. The loss of Russian wheat, fertilizer, gas and oil, due to Western sanctions, is creating havoc in world markets and a humanitarian crisis in Africa and the Middle East. Soaring food and energy prices, along with shortages and crippling inflation, bring with them not only deprivation and hunger, but social upheaval and political instability. The climate emergency, the real existential threat, is being ignored to appease the gods of war.

The war makers are frighteningly cavalier about the threat of nuclear war. Putin warned NATO countries that they “will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history” if they intervened directly in Ukraine and ordered Russian nuclear forces to be put on heightened alert status. The proximity to Russia of U.S. nuclear weapons based in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey mean that any nuclear conflict would obliterate much of Europe. Russia and the United States control about 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, with around 4,000 warheads each in their military stockpiles, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

President Joe Biden warned that the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be “completely unacceptable” and “entail severe consequences,” without spelling out what those consequences would be. This is what U.S. strategists refer to as “deliberate ambiguity.” 

The U.S. military, following its fiascos in the Middle East, has shifted its focus from fighting terrorism and asymmetrical warfare to confronting China and Russia. President Barack Obama’s national-security team in 2016 carried out a war game in which Russia invaded a NATO country in the Baltics and used a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon against NATO forces. Obama officials were split about how to respond. 

“The National Security Council’s so-called Principals Committee—including Cabinet officers and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—decided that the United States had no choice but to retaliate with nuclear weapons,” Eric Schlosser writes in The Atlantic. “Any other type of response, the committee argued, would show a lack of resolve, damage American credibility, and weaken the NATO alliance. Choosing a suitable nuclear target proved difficult, however. Hitting Russia’s invading force would kill innocent civilians in a NATO country. Striking targets inside Russia might escalate the conflict to an all-out nuclear war. In the end, the NSC Principals Committee recommended a nuclear attack on Belarus—a nation that had played no role whatsoever in the invasion of the NATO ally but had the misfortune of being a Russian ally.” 

The Biden administration has formed a Tiger Team of national security officials to run war games on what to do if Russia uses a nuclear weapon, according to The New York Times. The threat of nuclear war is minimized with discussions of “tactical nuclear weapons,” as if less powerful nuclear explosions are somehow more acceptable and won’t lead to the use of bigger bombs. 

At no time, including the Cuban missile crisis, have we stood closer to the precipice of nuclear war. 

“A simulation devised by experts at Princeton University starts with Moscow firing a nuclear warning shot; NATO responds with a small strike, and the ensuing war yieldsmore than 90 million casualties in its first few hours,” The New York Times reported.

The longer the war in Ukraine continues — and the U.S. and NATO seem determined to funnel billions of dollars of weapons into the conflict for months if not years — the more the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Flirting with Armageddon to profit the arms industry and carry out the futile quest to reclaim U.S. global hegemony is at best extremely reckless and at worst genocidal.

The agony of the West

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Like Rome, the Anglo-Saxon Empire is collapsing by its own decadence.

Sergey Lavrov used to compare the West to a wounded predator. According to him, it should not be provoked because it would be taken by madness and could break everything. It is better to accompany it to the graveyard. The West does not see it that way. Washington and London are leading a crusade against Moscow and Beijing. They roar and are ready for anything. But what can they really do?

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: VoltaireNet.org

The G7 summit in Bavaria and the Nato summit in Madrid were supposed to announce the West’s punishment of the Kremlin for its “special military operation in Ukraine”. But, if the image given was that of Western unity, the reality attests to their disconnection from reality, their loss of audience in the world and ultimately the end of their supremacy.

While the West is convinced that what is at stake is in Ukraine, the world sees it facing the “Thucydides trap” [1]. Will international relations continue to be organized around them or will they become multipolar? Will the peoples who have been subjugated until now break free and gain sovereignty? Will it be possible to think differently than in terms of global domination and to devote themselves to the development of each individual?

The West has devised a narrative of the Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine that overlooks their own actions since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. They have forgotten their signing of the Charter for European Security (also known as the OSCE Istanbul Declaration) and the way they violated it by making almost all the former members of the Warsaw Pact and some of the new post-Soviet states join one by one. They have forgotten the way they changed the Ukrainian government in 2004 and the coup d’état by which they put Banderist nationalists in power in Kiev in 2014. Having made a clean sweep of the past, they blame Russia for all the ills. They refuse to question their own actions and consider, at the time, they were forced into power. For them, their victories make the Law.

To preserve this imaginary narrative, they have already silenced the Russian media at home.

No matter how much they claim to be “democrats”, it is better to censor dissenting voices before lying.

So they approach the Ukrainian conflict, without contradiction, by convincing themselves that they have the duty to judge alone, to condemn and sanction Russia. By blackmailing small states, they managed to obtain a text from the UN General Assembly that seems to prove them right. They now plan to dismantle Russia as they did in Yugoslavia and tried to do in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen (Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy).

To do this, they began to isolate Russia from world finance and trade. They cut off its access to the SWIFT system and Lloyds, preventing it from buying and selling as well as transferring goods. They thought this would cause its economic collapse. In fact, on June 27, 2022, Russia was unable to pay a debt of $100 million and the rating agency Mody’s declared it in default [2].

But this did not have the desired effect: everyone knows that the reserves of the Russian Central Bank are full of foreign currency and gold. The Kremlin paid the 100 million, but could not transfer it to the West because of Western sanctions. It has placed them in an escrow account where they await their debtors.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin, which is no longer paid by the West, has begun to sell its production, especially its hydrocarbons, to other buyers, particularly China. The exchanges that can no longer be made in dollars are made in other currencies. As a result, the dollars that their customers used to use are flowing back to the United States. This process had already begun several years ago. But Western unilateral sanctions have accelerated it sharply. The huge amount of dollars accumulating in the US is causing a massive price increase. The Federal Reserve is doing everything it can to share it with the eurozone. The price increase is spreading at high speed across the entire Western European continent.

The European Central Bank is not an economic development agency. Its main task is to manage inflation within the Union. it cannot slow down the sudden rise in prices at all, so it tries to use it to reduce its debt. The Member States of the Union are therefore invited to compensate for the drop in purchasing power of their “citizens” by lowering taxes and providing benefits. But this is a never-ending circle: by helping their citizens, they tie their hands and feet to the European Central Bank, they chain themselves a little more to the US debts and become even poorer.

There is no remedy for this inflation. This is the first time that the West has had to mop up the dollars that Washington has recklessly printed for years. The rise in prices in the West corresponds to the cost of imperial spending over the last thirty years. Today and only today is the West paying for its wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

Until now, the United States killed anyone who threatened the supremacy of the dollar. It hanged President Saddam Hussein for refusing it and looted the Iraqi Central Bank. They tortured and lynched the leader Muamar el-Gaddafi who was preparing a new pan-African currency and looted the Libyan Central Bank. The gigantic sums amassed by these oil states disappeared without a trace. The only thing we saw was GI’s taking tens of billions of dollars wrapped in large garbage bags. By excluding Russia from dollar trade, Washington itself has brought about what it so feared: the dollar is no longer the international reference currency.

The majority of the rest of the world is not blind. It has understood what is happening and has rushed to the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, then tried to register for the virtual Brics summit. They realize -a little late- that Russia launched the “Partnership of Greater Eurasia”, in 2016 and that its Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, had solemnly announced it at the UN General Assembly, in September 2018 [3]. During four years, quantities of roads and railroads were built to integrate Russia into the networks of the new “Silk Roads”, land and sea, imagined by China. It was thus possible to shift the flow of goods within a few months.

The fall in the value of the dollar and the shift in the flow of goods are causing an even greater rise in energy prices. Russia, which is one of the world’s leading exporters of hydrocarbons, has seen its revenues increase considerably. Its currency, the ruble, has never been in better shape. In response, the G7 has set a price ceiling for Russian oil and gas. It ordered the “international community” not to pay more.

But Russia is obviously not going to let the West set the prices of its products. Those who do not want to pay market prices will not be able to buy them, and no customer intends to go without to please the West.

The G7 tries to organize, at least intellectually, its supremacy [4].. This no longer works. The wind has changed. The four centuries of Western domination are over.

In desperation, the G7 has committed itself to solving the global food crisis that its policies have caused. The countries concerned know what the G7 commitments mean. They are still waiting for the great African development plan and other smoke and mirrors. They know that the West cannot produce nitrogen fertilizers and that they prevent Russia from selling theirs. The G7 aid is only a band-aid to keep them waiting and not to question the sacred principles of free trade.

The only possible option for the rescue of Western domination is war. Nato must succeed in destroying Russia militarily as Rome once razed Carthage. But it’s too late: the Russian army has much more sophisticated weapons than the West. It has already experimented with them since 2014 in Syria. It can crush its enemies at any time. President Vladimir Putin exposed the staggering progress of its arsenal to his parliamentarians in 2018 [5]

The Nato summit in Madrid was a nice communication operation [6]. But it was only a swan song. The 32 member states proclaimed their unity with the despair of those who fear to die. As if nothing had happened, they first adopted a strategy to dominate the world for the next ten years, naming China’s “growth” as a concern [7]. In doing so, they admitted that their goal is not to ensure their own security, but to dominate the world. They then opened the accession process for Sweden and Finland and considered approaching China with, as a first step, the possible accession of Japan.

The only incident, which was quickly brought under control, was the Turkish pressure that forced Finland and Sweden to condemn the PKK [8]. Unable to resist, the United States dropped its allies, the Kurdish mercenaries in Syria and their leaders abroad.

With this, they decided to increase the NATO Rapid Reaction Force from 40,000 to 300,000 men, 7.5 times, and station it on the Russian border. In doing so, they have once again violated their own signature, that of the Charter for Security in Europe, by directly threatening Russia. Russia has no possibility to defend its huge borders and can only ensure its security by ensuring that no foreign force sets up a military base on its borders (scorched earth strategy). Already, the Pentagon is circulating prospective maps of the dismantling of Russia that it hopes to implement.

The former Russian ambassador to NATO and current director of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, has responded by publishing on his Telegram account the coordinates of the NATO decision-making centers, including the Madrid summit room [9]. Russia has hypersonic launchers, for the moment impossible to intercept, which can carry a nuclear warhead in a few minutes to the NATO headquarters in Brussels and the Pentagon in Washington. To avoid any misunderstanding, Sergei Lavrov specified, alluding to the Straussians, that the martial decisions of the West were not taken by the military, but by the US State Department. It would be the first target.

So the question is: will the West play for all it’s worth? Will they take the risk of a Third World War, even though it has already been lost, just to avoid dying alone?

Translation
Roger Lagassé

The Empire Is Showing More And More Of Its True Face

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Genocide walrus John Bolton outright admitted to planning foreign coups with the US government in conversation with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday. That’s coups, plural.

While arguing that the Capitol riot on January 6th of last year was not an attempted coup but rather just Trump stumbling around trying to look after his own interests, Bolton hastened to pull authority on the matter when Tapper suggested that he might not be correct about how coups work.

“I disagree with that,” Bolton said. “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat — not here, but, you know, other places — it takes a lot of work, and that’s not what [Trump] did.”

Places. Plural.

Tapper just let Bolton’s remark slide like he didn’t just admit to something extraordinarily fiendish, but did eventually follow up with a request that the former National Security Advisor elaborate.

“I do want to ask a follow up,” Tapper said. “When we were talking about what is capable, or what you need to do to be able to plan a coup, and you cited your expertise having planned coups.”

“I’m not going to get into the specifics,” replied Bolton with a chuckle.

“Successful coups?” Tapper asked.

“Well, I wrote about Venezuela in the book,” Bolton answered. “And it turned out not to be successful – not that we had all that much to do with it, but I saw what it took for an opposition to try and overturn an illegally elected president, and they failed. The notion that Donald Trump was half as competent as the Venezuelan opposition is laughable.”

“I feel like there’s other stuff you’re not telling me, though,” Tapper responded.

“I’m sure there is,” Bolton said, grinning like he just finished boiling a puppy.

Tapper pursued the matter no further, because he is a propagandist first and a journalist second, and he would be acutely aware that Bolton was saying things that you are not supposed to admit to on television.

Bolton’s sole admission to coup plotting runs counter to his comments about the US government’s failed attempt to oust President Nicolas Maduro while he was facilitating that bizarre operation under the Trump administration, telling reporters in 2019 that the empire’s Venezuela shenanigans were “clearly not a coup.”

In other examples of the US empire just rearing its ugly head right out in broad daylight, an excellent new report by Alan MacLeod with Mintpress News shows that Facebook/Instagram parent company Meta has been hiring dozens of people who previously worked in the US intelligence cartel to help regulate what content gets seen on the social media giant’s platforms. Some were hired from straight out of the CIA or had (officially) left the agency very recently.

The CIA used to infiltrate the media. Now the CIA is the media. This trend of openly hiring US intelligence veterans to help teach the public what thoughts to think about the world began a few years ago in the legacy media, and now we’re seeing it in the new media as well.

This is part of a broader trend in which many of the ugly things the US empire used to do in secret it now does openly with the aid of propaganda spin. In addition to attempting coups right out in the open as we saw in Venezuela and just giving intelligence insiders positions of influence within both new and old media institutions, you’ve got things like the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which according to its own founding officials was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly.

We see NED’s fingerprints all over pretty much any situation where the western power alliance needs to manage public perception about a CIA-targeted government, from Ukraine to Russia to Hong Kong to Xinjiang, to the imperial propaganda firm known as Bellingcat. Rather than manipulate world narratives and foment discontent from behind the veil of hidden identities and cutouts as in CIA tactics of old, NED just manipulates them openly by pouring funds into narrative management operations which benefit the empire while framing it as promoting democracy and human rights.

Then you’ve got things like American officials telling the press that the US government has been circulating disinformation about Russia and Ukraine, Biden administration officials saying the proxy war in Ukraine is being used to “weaken” Russia and that they are fine with US brinkmanship with Russia causing global recession and hunger, and western officials telling the press that Ukraine is crawling with CIA personnel.

What the empire has found is that you don’t need to hide as much from public visibility as long as you can manipulate what people think they’re seeing. If the public is sufficiently propagandized and consent has been adequately manufactured, you can get away with just proclaiming some random guy the president of a foreign country and seeing if you can manipulate the rest of the world into playing along with you.

If your narrative control is strong enough, you can even keep the empire running smoothly when information gets out into the open that you’d rather stay hidden. Very often these days major stories about imperial malfeasance will come out that simply have no impact, either because the mainstream news media unite to ignore them or because they spin those revelations as coming from someone bad or not containing important information.

People tend to overrate the power of the US war machine and underrate the power of the US propaganda machine. While the US military finds itself losing a war to the Taliban, the awesome power of its propaganda engine has people marching in perfect alignment with the will of the oligarchic empire.

When I was in an abusive relationship, the more ground down and submitted I became the more my abuser would flaunt his abusiveness in the plain light of day. Toward the end he was just outright admitting he was a sociopath and a manipulator and openly telling me he was going to do monstrous things to me before he did them, because he was that confident that he had me wrapped around his finger.

Luckily, he was wrong. And hopefully the empire is wrong as it makes this same calculation with all of us.

Explain It to Me, Please

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If you want a war with Iran, Russia, China and Venezuela tell me why and how it would benefit Americans

By Philip Giraldi

Source: The Unz Review

So Honest Joe Biden is now going to give another $1.2 billion to the Ukrainians on top of the sixty or so billion that is already in the pipeline, but who’s counting, particularly as Congress refused to approve having an inspector general to monitor whose pockets will be lined. The money will be printed up without any collateral or “borrowed” and the American taxpayer will somehow have to bear the burden of this latest folly that is ipso facto driving much of the world into recession. And it will no doubt be blamed on Vladimir Putin, a process that is already well under way from president mumbles. But you have to wonder why no one has told Joe that the whole exercise in pushing much of the world towards a catastrophic war is a fool’s errand. But then again, the clowns that the president has surrounded himself with might not be very big on speaking the truth even if they know what that means.

Having followed the Ukraine problem since the United States and its poodles refused to negotiate seriously with Vladimir Putin in the real world, I have had to wonder what is wrong with Washington. We have had the ignorant and impulsive Donald Trump supported by a cast of characters that included the mentally unstable Mike Pompeo and John Bolton followed by Biden with the usual bunch of Democratic Party rejects. By that I mean deep thinkers about social issues who would not be able to run a hot dog stand if that were what they were forced to do to make a living. But they are real good at shouting “freedom” and “democracy” whenever questioned concerning their motives.

Indeed, opinion polls suggest that there is a great deal of unrest among middle and working class Americans who see a reversion to Jimmy Carter era financial instability, at that time caused by the oil embargo. Well, there is a new energy embargo in place brought about by the Biden Administration’s desire to wage proxy war to “weaken” Russia. Analysts predict that the costs for all forms of energy will double in the next several months and surging energy costs will impact the prices of other essentials, including food. Given all that, the fundamental issue plaguing both Democrats and Republicans is their inability to actually explain to the American people why the country’s foreign and national security policy always seems to be on the boil, searching for enemies and also creating them when they do not exist, even when the results are damaging to the interests of actual Americans.

That a serious discussion of why the United States needs to have a military that costs as much as the next nine nations in that ranking combined is long overdue and rarely addressed outside the alternative media. The 2023 military budget has been increased from this year’s, totaling $858 billion, and, if one includes the constantly growing largesse to Ukraine, approaching a hitherto unimaginable trillion dollars. The military budget has become a major driver of the country’s unsustainable deficits. The deaths of millions of people directly and indirectly in the wars started in 9/11 aside, the wars of choice have cost an estimated $8 trillion.

The Constitution of the United States makes it clear that a national army was only acceptable to the Founders when it was dedicated to defending the country from foreign threats. Do Americans really believe that bearing the burden of having something like 1,000 military bases scattered around the world really makes them safer? The recent rapid collapse of the security situation in Afghanistan suggests that having such bases turns soldiers and bureaucrats into potential hostages and is therefore a liability. One might also suggest that the insecurity currently prevailing in the country can in large part be attributed to the government’s depiction of numerous “threats” in order to justify both the commitment and the expense.

So where does all the money go? And what are the threats? Starting with a war that the United States is de facto though not de jure involved in, Ukraine, what was the Russian threat that demanded Washington’s intervention? Well, if one discards the nonsense of a “rules based international order” or a plucky little democracy Ukraine fighting valiantly against the Russian bear, Moscow did not threaten the United States in any way before the missiles starting flying. Putin sought to negotiate a settlement with Ukraine based on a number of perceived existential Russian national security interests, all of which were negotiable, but the US and its friends were uninterested in compromise while also plying the corrupt Zelensky regime with weapons, money and political support. The final result is a conflict that will likely only end when the last Ukrainian is dead and it includes the possibility that a misstep by the United States and Russia could lead to a nuclear holocaust. To put it succinctly, what is going on does not enhance US national security, nor does it benefit Americans economically.

And then there is China. Biden let the cat out of the bag on his recent trip to the Far East. He stated that the United States would defend Taiwan if China were to attempt to annex it. In saying that, Biden demonstrated that he does not understand the strategic ambiguity that the US and the Chinese have preferred over the past fifty years as an alternative to war. The White House for its part quickly issued a correction to the Biden statement, explaining that it was not true that Washington is obligated to defend Taiwan. Some uber hawkish congressmen have apparently found the Biden gaffe appealing and are promoting a firm US commitment to defend Taiwan, coupled with a $4.5 billion military assistance package, of course.

At the same time, some officials in the Pentagon and the usual gaggle of congressmen also keep warning about the over the horizon threat from China as an excuse to boost defense spending. Most recently, there was alarm over Chinese participation in a meeting in May in Fiji to consider a China-Pacific Islands free trade pact! In reality, the only serious current threat from China is as an economic competitor. A trade war with China would be a disaster for the US economy, which is heavily dependent on Chinese manufactured goods, but Beijing, with its relatively small military budget, does not pose a physical threat to the United States.

And let’s not ignore Iran which has been hammered by economic sanctions and also through the covert killing of its officials and scientists. The US/Israeli war on Iran has also spilled over into neighboring Syria, where Washington actually has troops on the ground occupying the country’s oil producing region and stealing the oil. Iran’s possible expansion of its nuclear program to produce a weapon was effectively impeded through monitoring connected to a multilateral 2015 agreement called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) but Donald Trump, unwisely and acting against actual American interests, withdrew from it. Joe Biden has been warned by Israel not to re-enter the agreement, so he will no doubt comply with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s determination to have Washington continue to apply “extreme pressure” on the Islamic Republic. Does either Iran or its ally Syria threaten the United States in any way? No. Their crime is that they are in the same neighborhood as the Jewish state, which finds the US government easy to manipulate into acting against its own interests.

Finally, in America’s own hemisphere there is Venezuela, which has been elevated to the status of Washington’s most hated nation in the region. Venezuelans have been subjected to increasingly punitive US sanctions, including some new ones just last week, which hurt the poorer citizens disproportionately but have not brought about regime change. Why the animosity? Because the country’s leader Nicolas Maduro is still in power in spite of a US assertion that the country’s opposition leader Juan Guaido should rightfully and legitimately be in charge after a possibly fraudulent election in 2018. The latest therapy applied by the United States on Caracas consisted of blocking the country as well as Nicaragua and Cuba from participating in the recent meeting of the Ninth Summit of the Americas which was held in Los Angeles. A State Department spokesman explained that the move was due to the three countries “lacking democratic governances.” Mexican President Lopez Obrador protested against the move and removed himself from his country’s delegation, saying “There can’t be a Summit of the Americas if not all countries of the American continent are taking part.” The despicable US Senator Robert Menendez of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee then felt compelled to add his two cents, criticizing the Mexican president and warning that his “decision to stand with dictators and despots” would hurt US-Mexico relations. So where was the threat from Venezuela (and Cuba and Nicaragua) and why is the US involved at all? Beats me.

What all of this means is that there is absolutely no standard of genuine national security that motivates the US’s completely illegal aggression in many parts of the world. What occurs may be linked to a desire to dominate or a madness sometimes described as “exceptionalism” and/or “leadership of the free world,” neither of which has anything to do with actual security. And the American people are paying the price both in terms of decline in standards of living due to the upheaval created in Ukraine and elsewhere as well as a completely understandable loss of faith in the US system of government. By all means, let us shrink the US military until it is responsive to actual identifiable threats. Let’s elect a president who will follow the sage advice of President John Quincy Adams, who declared that “Americans should not go abroad to slay dragons they do not understand in the name of spreading democracy.” At this point, one can only imagine an America that is at peace with itself and with what it represents while also being considered a friend to the rest of the world.

Assange Is Doing His Most Important Work Yet

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

British Home Secretary Priti Patel has authorized the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States to be tried under the Espionage Act in a case which seeks to set a legal precedent for the prosecution of any publisher or journalist, anywhere in the world, who reports inconvenient truths about the US empire.

Assange’s legal team will appeal the decision, reportedly with arguments that will include the fact that the CIA spied on him and plotted his assassination.

“It will likely be a few days before the (14-day appeal) deadline and the appeal will include new information that we weren’t able to bring before the courts previously. Information on how Julian lawyers were spied on, and how there were plots to kidnap and kill Julian from within the CIA,” Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton told Reuters on Friday.

And thank goodness. Assange’s willingness to resist Washington’s extradition attempts benefit us all, from his taking political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012 until British police forcibly dragged him out in 2019, to his fighting US prosecutors in the courtroom tooth and claw during his incarceration in Belmarsh Prison.

Assange’s fight against US extradition benefits us not just because the empire’s war against truth harms our entire species and not just because he cannot receive a fair trial under the Espionage Act, but because his refusal to bow down and submit forces the empire to overextend itself into the light and show us all what it’s really made of.

Washington, London and Canberra are colluding to imprison a journalist for telling the truth: the first with its active extradition attempts, the second with its loyal facilitation of those attempts, and the third with its silent complicity in allowing an Australian journalist to be locked up and persecuted for engaging in the practice of journalism. By refusing to lie down and forcing them to come after him, Assange has exposed some harsh realities of which the public has largely been kept unaware.

The fact that London and Canberra are complying so obsequiously with Washington’s agendas, even while their own mainstream media outlets decry the extradition and even while all major human rights and press freedom watchdog groups in the western world say Assange must go free, shows that these are not separate sovereign nations but member states of a single globe-spanning empire centralized around the US government. Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, more attention is being brought to this reality.

By standing his ground and fighting them, Assange has also exposed the lie that the so-called free democracies of the western world support the free press and defend human rights. The US, UK and Australia are colluding to extradite a journalist for exposing the truth even as they claim to oppose tyranny and autocracy, even as they claim to support world press freedoms, and even as they loudly decry the dangers of government-sponsored disinformation.

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, it will always reek of hypocrisy when US presidents like Joe Biden say things like, “The free press is not the enemy of the people — far from it. At your best, you’re guardians of the truth.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, people will always know British prime ministers like Boris Johnson are lying when they say things like, “Media organisations should feel free to bring important facts into the public domain.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, more of us will understand that they are being deceived and manipulated when Australian prime ministers like Anthony Albanese say things like “We need to protect press freedom in law and ensure every Australian can have their voice heard,” and “Don’t prosecute journalists for just doing their jobs.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, US secretaries of state like Antony Blinken will have a much harder time selling their schtick when they say things like “On World Press Freedom Day, the United States continues to advocate for press freedom, the safety of journalists worldwide, and access to information on and offline. A free and independent press ensures the public has access to information. Knowledge is power.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, UK home secretaries like Priti Patel will be seen for the frauds they are when they say things like “The safety of journalists is fundamental to our democracy.”

Extraditing a foreign journalist for exposing your war crimes is as tyrannical an agenda as you could possibly come up with. The US, UK and Australia colluding toward this end shows us that these are member states of a single empire whose only values are domination and control, and that all its posturing about human rights is pure facade. Assange keeps exposing the true face of power.

There is in fact a strong argument to be made that even all these years after the 2010 leaks for which he is currently being prosecuted, Assange is doing his most important work yet. As important as his WikiLeaks publications were and are, none of them exposed the depravity of the empire as much as forcing them to look us in the eye and tell us they’ll extradite a journalist for telling the truth.

Assange accomplished this by planting his feet and saying “No,” even when every other possible option would have been easier and more pleasant. Even when it was hard. Even when it was terrifying. Even when it meant being locked away, silenced, smeared, hated, unable to fight back against his detractors, unable to live a normal life, unable to hold his children, unable even to feel sunlight on his face.

His very life casts light on all the areas where it is most sorely needed. We all owe this man a tremendous debt. The least we can do is try our best to get him free.

The War in Ukraine Marks the End of the American Century. “What’s Left is a Steaming Pile of Dollar Denominated Debt”

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By Mike Whitney

Source: Global Research

“The ferocity of the confrontation in Ukraine shows that we’re talking about much more than the fate of the regime in Kiev. The architecture of the entire world order is at stake.” Sergei Naryshkin, Director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence.

***

Here’s your ‘reserve currency’ thought for the day: Every US dollar is a check written on an account that is overdrawn by 30 trillion dollars.

It’s true. The “full faith and credit” of the US Treasury is largely a myth held together by an institutional framework that rests on a foundation of pure sand. In fact, the USD is not worth the paper it is printed on; it is an IOU flailing in an ocean of red ink.

The only thing keeping the USD from vanishing into the ether, is the trust of credulous people who continue to accept it as legal tender.

But why do people remain confident in the dollar when its flaws are known to all? After all, America’s $30 trillion National Debt is hardly a secret, nor is the additional $9 trillion that’s piled up on the Fed’s balance sheet. That is a stealth debt of which the American people are completely unaware, but they are responsible for all the same.

In order to answer that question, we need to look at how the system actually works and how the dollar is propped up by the numerous institutions that were created following WW2. These institutions provide an environment for conducting history’s longest and most flagrant swindle, the exchange of high-ticket manufactured goods, raw materials and hard-labor for slips of green paper with dead presidents on them.

One can only marvel at the genius of the elites who concocted this scam and then imposed it wholesale on the masses without a peep of protest. Of course, the system is accompanied by various enforcement mechanisms that swiftly remove anyone who tries to either break free from the dollar or, God help us, create an alternate system altogether. (Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi come to mind.) But the fact is– aside from the institutional framework and the ruthless extermination of dollar opponents– there’s no reason why humanity should remain yoked to a currency that is buried beneath a mountain of debt and whose real value is virtually unknowable.

It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when the dollar was the strongest currency in the world and deserved its spot at the top of the heap. Following WW1, the US was “the owner of the majority of the world’s gold” which was why an international delegation “decided that the world’s currencies would no longer be linked to gold but could be pegged to the U.S. dollar, “because the greenback was, itself, linked to gold.” Here’s more from an article at Investopedia:

“The arrangement came to be known as the Bretton Woods Agreement. It established the authority of central banks, which would maintain fixed exchange rates between their currencies and the dollar. In turn, the United States would redeem U.S. dollars for gold on demand….

The U.S dollar was officially crowned the world’s reserve currency and was backed by the world’s largest gold reserves thanks to the Bretton Woods Agreement. Instead of gold reserves, other countries accumulated reserves of U.S. dollars. Needing a place to store their dollars, countries began buying U.S. Treasury securities, which they considered to be a safe store of money.

The demand for Treasury securities, coupled with the deficit spending needed to finance the Vietnam War and the Great Society domestic programs, caused the United States to flood the market with paper money….

The demand for gold was such that President Richard Nixon was forced to intervene and de-link the dollar from gold, which led to the floating exchange rates that exist today. Although there have been periods of stagflation, which is defined as high inflation and high unemployment, the U.S. dollar has remained the world’s reserve currency.” (“How the U.S. Dollar Became the World’s Reserve Currency”, Investopedia)

But now the gold is gone and what’s left is a steaming pile of debt. So, how on earth has the dollar managed to preserve its status as the world’s preeminent currency?

Proponents of the dollar system, will tell you it has something to do with “the size and strength of the U.S. economy and the dominance of the U.S. financial markets.” But that’s nonsense.

The truth is, reserve currency status has nothing to do with “the size and strength” of America’s post-industrial, service-oriented, bubble-driven, third-world-sh**hole economy. Nor does it have anything to do with the alleged safety of US Treasuries” which– next to the dollar– is the biggest Ponzi flim-flam of all time.

The real reason the dollar has remained the world’s premier currency is because of the cartelization of Central Banking.

The Western Central Banks are a de facto monopoly run by a small cabal of inter-breeding bottom-feeders who coordinate and collude on monetary policy in order to preserve their maniacal death-grip on the financial markets and the global economy. It’s a Monetary Mafia and– as George Carlin famously said: “You and I are not in it. You and I are not in the big club.” Bottom line: It is the relentless manipulation of interest rates, forward guidance and Quantitative Easing (QE) that has kept the dollar in its lofty but undeserved spot.

But all that is about to change due entirely to Biden’s reckless foreign policy which is forcing critical players in the global economy to create their own rival system. This is a real tragedy for the West that has enjoyed a century of nonstop wealth extraction from the developing world.

Now– due to the economic sanctions on Russia– an entirely new order is emerging in which the dollar will be substituted for national currencies (processed through an independent financial settlement system) in bilateral trade deals until– later this year– Russia launches an exchange-traded commodities-backed currency that will be used by trading partners in Asia and Africa.

Washington’s theft of Russia’s foreign reserves in April turbo-charged the current process which was further accelerated by banning of Russia from foreign markets. In short, US economic sanctions and boycotts have expanded the non-dollar zone by many orders of magnitude and forced the creation of a new monetary order.

How dumb is that? For decades the US has been running a scam in which it exchanges its fishwrap currency for things of genuine value. (oil, manufactured goods and labor) But now the Biden troupe has scrapped that system altogether and divided the world into warring camps.

But, why?

To punish Russia, is that it?

Yes, that’s it.

But, if that’s the case, then shouldn’t we try to figure out whether the sanctions actually work or not before we recklessly change the system?

Too late for that. The war on Russia has begun and the early results are already pouring in. Just look at the way we’ve destroyed Russia’s currency, the ruble. It’s shocking! Here’s the scoop from an article at CBS:

“The Russian ruble is the best-performing currency in the world this year….

Two months after the ruble’s value fell to less than a U.S. penny amid the swiftest, toughest economic sanctions in modern history, Russia’s currency has mounted a stunning turnaround. The ruble has jumped 40% against the dollar since January.

Normally, a country facing international sanctions and a major military conflict would see investors fleeing and a steady outflow of capital, causing its currency to drop….

The ruble’s resiliency means that Russia is partly insulated from the punishing economic penalties imposed by Western nations after its invasion of Ukraine…” (“Russia’s ruble is the strongest currency in the world this year“, CBS News)

Huh? You mean the attack on the ruble didn’t work after all?

Sure looks that way. But that doesn’t mean the sanctions are a failure. Oh, no. Just at look at the effect they’ve had on Russian commodities. Export receipts are way-down, right? Here’s more from CBS:

“Commodity prices are currently sky-high, and even though there is a drop in the volume of Russian exports due to embargoes and sanctioning, the increase in commodity prices more than compensates for these drops,” said Tatiana Orlova, lead emerging markets economist at Oxford Economics.

Russia is pulling in nearly $20 billion a month from energy exports. Since the end of March, many foreign buyers have complied with a demand to pay for energy in rubles, pushing up the currency’s value.” (“Russia’s ruble is the strongest currency in the world this year“, CBS News)

You’re kidding me? You mean the ruble is surging and Putin is raking in more dough on commodities than ever before?

Yep, and it’s the same deal with Russia’s trade surplus. Take a look at this excerpt from an article in The Economist:

“Russia’s exports… have held up surprisingly well, including those directed to the West. Sanctions permit the sale of oil and gas to most of the world to continue uninterrupted. And a spike in energy prices has boosted revenues further.

As a result, analysts expect Russia’s trade surplus to hit record highs in the coming months. The IIF reckons that in 2022 the current-account surplus, which includes trade and some financial flows, could come in at $250bn (15% of last year’s GDP), more than double the $120bn recorded in 2021. That sanctions have boosted Russia’s trade surplus, and thus helped finance the war, is disappointing, says Mr Vistesen. Ms Ribakova reckons that the efficacy of financial sanctions may have reached its limits. A decision to tighten trade sanctions must come next.

But such measures could take time to take effect. Even if the EU enacts its proposal to ban Russian oil, the embargo would be phased in so slowly that the bloc’s oil imports from Russia would fall by just 19% this year, says Liam Peach of Capital Economics, a consultancy. The full impact of these sanctions would be felt only at the start of 2023—by which point Mr Putin will have amassed billions to fund his war.” ( “Russia is on track for a record trade surplus”, The Economist)

Let me get this straight: The sanctions are actually hurting the US and helping Russia, so the experts think we should impose more sanctions? Is that it?

Precisely. Now that we have shot ourselves in the foot, the experts think it would be wise to shoot the other one too.

Am I the only one who is struck by the insanity of this policy? Check out this clip from an article at RT:

“Russia could earn a record $100 billion from gas sales to European countries in 2022 due to the sharp rise in energy prices, French newspaper Les Echos reported this week, citing Citibank analysts.

According to the paper, the projected income from gas sales will be almost twice as much as last year. The analysis does not take into account profits from the sale of other Russian commodities, such as oil, coal, and other minerals.

Les Echos reports that, despite sanctions and warnings of a sweeping embargo on Russian energy, the 27 EU countries continue to send roughly $200 million per day to Gazprom.”(“Russian gas revenues projected to hit new highs”, RT)

So the revenues from gas and oil sales are literally flooding Moscow’s coffers like never before. Meanwhile, energy prices in the EU and America have skyrocketed to 40-year highs.

Can you see how counterproductive this policy is?

The EU is sinking into recession, supply lines have been severely disrupted, food shortages are steadily emerging, and gas and oil prices are through-the-roof. By every objective standard, the sanctions have not only failed, but backfired spectacularly. Can’t the Biden people see the damage they’re doing? Are they completely divorced from reality?

Imagine if the Ukrainians use Biden’s new artillery battery (HIMARS) to shell cities in Russia? Then what?

Then Putin takes off the gloves and shuts off the flow of hydrocarbons to Europe immediately. That’s what’s going to happen if Washington continues to escalate. You can bet on it. If Russia’s “Special Military Operation” suddenly becomes a war, the lights across Europe will go dark, homes will begin to freeze, factories will go silent, and the continent will slide headlong into a protracted and painful depression.

Does anyone in Washington think about these things or are they all so drunk on their own press clippings they’ve completely lost touch with reality?

Here’s more from an article at RT:

“Even as the collective West continues to insist – against all observable reality – that the conflict in Ukraine is going well for Kiev, major media outlets are becoming increasingly uneasy with the situation on the economic front. More and more observers are admitting that the embargoes imposed by the US and its allies aren’t crushing the Russian economy, as originally intended, but rather their own.…

“Russia is winning the economic war,” the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott declared on Thursday. “It is now three months since the west launched its economic war against Russia, and it is not going according to plan. On the contrary, things are going very badly indeed,” he wrote…

In a May 30 essay, Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins also said that the embargo had failed…

As Jenkins points out, the sanctions have actually raised the price of Russian exports such as oil and grain – thus enriching, rather than impoverishing, Moscow while leaving Europeans short of gas and Africans running out of food.” (“As sanctions fail to work and Russia’s advance continues, Western media changes its tune on Ukraine”, RT)

Did you catch that part about “Russia winning the economic war”? What do you think that means in practical terms?

Does it mean that Washington’s failed attempt to maintain its global hegemony by “weakening” Russia is actually putting enormous strains on the Transatlantic Alliance and NATO that will trigger a re-calibration of relations leading to a defiant rejection of the “rules-based system.”

Is that what it means? Is Europe going to split with Washington and leave America to sink beneath its $30 trillion ocean of red ink?

Yes, that’s exactly what it means.

Uncle Sam’s 30 Year Bender

Proponents of Washington’s proxy-war have no idea of the magnitude of their mistake or how much damage they are inflicting on their own country. The Ukraine debacle is the culmination of 30 years of bloody interventions that have brought us to a tipping point where the nation’s fortunes are about to take a dramatic turn-for-the-worse. As the dollar-zone shrinks, standards of living will plunge, unemployment will soar, and the economy will go into a downward-death spiral.

Washington has greatly underestimated its vulnerability to catastrophic geopolitical blowback that is about to bring the New American Century to a swift and excruciating end.

A wise leader would do everything in his power to pull us back from the brink.